re-examining the definition of community psychology practice david a. julian, tom wolff, brian bishop, kyrah brown, josé ornelas1, megan renner and victoria scott keywords: community psychology, practice, action author biographies: david a. julian, is a program director and a translational research scientist at the center on education and training for employment (cete) in the college of education and human ecology at the ohio state university. recommended citation: julian, d.a., wolff, t., bishop, b., brown, k., ornelas, j., renner, m., & scott, v. (2023). re-examining the definition of community psychology practice. global journal of community psychology practice, 14(1), 1-4. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: david a. julian, center on education and training for employment, 1900 kenny road, columbus, oh 43210. email: julian.3@osu.edu 1 appsyci/ispa – instituto universitário, lisboa – portugal http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:julian.3@osu.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 re-examining the definition of community psychology practice abstract throughout the early and mid-2000s, community psychology practitioners worked with the society for community research and action (scra) executive committee (ec) to revisit relevant organizational goals and objectives. these conversations resulted in the recognition of the need to more fully operationalize the “action” component of scra. ultimately, a draft statement was brought to the first international community psychology conference in puerto rico. through a highly participative process, a group of conference attendees emerged with a definition of community psychology practice: the aim of community psychology practice is to strengthen the capacity of communities to meet the needs of constituents and help them to realize their dreams in order to promote well-being, social justice, economic equity and selfdetermination through systems, organizational and/or individual change. since the definition was developed over a decade ago, much has changed. this special issue was conceived as a means for the field to consider the definition of community psychology practice in light of these and other advances in our thinking. the special issue editorial team invites the field to ponder proposed changes and new definitions of community psychology practice. throughout the early and mid-2000s, community psychology practitioners worked with the society for community research and action (scra) executive committee (ec) to revisit relevant organizational goals and objectives. these conversations resulted in the recognition of the need to more fully operationalize the “action” component of scra. a few years later the community psychology practice interest group (which later became the community psychology practice council or cppc) organized the first day-long retreat focused on community psychology practice. this session drew over 100 academics, practitioners, and planted the seeds for the beginning of the global journal of community psychology practice (gjcpp) and resulted in the formation of a group convened to define competencies associated with community psychology practice. ultimately, a draft statement was brought to the first international community psychology conference in puerto rico. through a highly participative process, a group of conference attendees emerged with a definition of community psychology practice (julian, 2006, p.68): the aim of community psychology practice is to strengthen the capacity of communities to meet the needs of constituents and help them to realize their dreams in order to promote wellbeing, social justice, economic equity and self-determination through systems, organizational and/or individual change. since the definition was developed 13 years ago, much has changed. the cppc, in collaboration with the council on education (coe), developed and published the competencies for community psychology http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 practice inspiring much reflection from the field. as the editorial team sees it, five key concepts have emerged or re-emerged that might have some bearing on our efforts to revisit the original definition of community psychology practice and associated competencies: 1. continued exploration of community psychology practice competencies and methodologies 2. reinvigoration of the attention to systems and policy change especially as it relates to public health and systemic racism 3. reaffirmation of social justice and health promotion values including efforts to address structural racism and decolonization 4. developments in theoretical perspectives related to community engagement and community power 5. elaboration of the science to practice process, including efforts to define “evidence” as it relates to practice this special issue was conceived as a means for the field to consider the definition of community psychology practice in light of these and other advances in our thinking. the special issue consists of six papers. robinson describes the potential of community psychology practice and community psychology, more generally, to address a vast array of contemporary issues. this narrative calls us to action and forces us to confront the very values that define our field. ciafola and watkins provide an overarching view of the colonial context in which community psychology practitioners operate the world over. ciafalo and watkins also point to the challenges our colonial history present to community psychologists intent on meaningful community change. fernandez and silva pick up on this point and provide clear examples of how community psychologists operate vis-à-vis the constituencies they serve. svartman, filho, massoal, cordiero and de oliveira dos santos extend these perspectives and illustrate a series of interventions in specific communities in brazil. evans is firm in his belief that practice must ultimately address social and racial justice. finally, jimenez, mingo, viola, olsen and balthazar reinforce the perspectives presented by other authors and argue for a continuum of practice that ranges from basic scientific discovery to action based on indigenous knowledge. the special issue completed by wolff and henderson’s “call to action.” the special issue editorial team invites the field to ponder proposed changes and new definitions of community psychology practice. potential changes center on a long list of prominent themes. from the editorial team’s perspective, three of these themes deserve special consideration. the first theme focuses on action. action, in the context of community psychology practice, clearly centers on the production of concrete outcomes resulting in efforts to enhance health and wellbeing and address other critical issues such as racism and colonialism. the second theme focuses on engagement of relevant communities in efforts to address local issues. this theme is addressed by each of the special issue authors and is of critical importance. finally, each of the papers in the special issue focuses considerable attention on the values that guide our field. some critical values include an emphasis on social and racial justice, equity and acknowledging and remediating long-standing colonial practices at all levels of society. it would appear new definitions of community psychology practice are in the offing. however, as robinson suggests, it is imperative that the field examine potential options that result in a practice that positions human dignity, civil society, civic discourse, the salience of collective efficacy and community wellbeing at the heart of community psychology. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 references julian, d. a. (2006). defining community psychology practice. the community psychologist, 39(4), 66-69. http://www.gjcpp.org/ introduction to volume two of the special issue: developing undergraduate community psychology pedagogy and research practice jen wallin-ruschman, lauren f. lichty & eylin palamaro-munsell welcome to the second volume of the special issue centering community psychology (cp) teaching and research within primarily undergraduate institutions. this special issue seeks to provide a much needed platform for developing and disseminating undergraduate-focused pedagogical and research-related practices. the introduction to volume one describes in detail how this project emerged: https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue =31&article=188. in volume two of the special issue, we are pleased to continue featuring the work of undergraduate students and undergraduatefocused faculty colleagues. given the differences inherent in research, publishing, teaching, and service expectations for academics working within primarily undergraduate settings, this issue reflects an opportunity to highlight voices and work often overlooked or unseen in traditional cp publications. special issue authors, many writing from community colleges, liberal arts colleges, or regional universities developed these articles while teaching course loads ranging from five to ten classes a year, mentoring students, carrying intense oncampus service loads, and conducting meaningful and relevant community-engaged scholarship to develop future cp practitioners. the faculty authors represented in this special issue bring cp methods and values to their undergraduate teaching and research. they have developed and adapted their practice approaches to work with limited resources, condensed time frames, high stakeholder turnover, and with populations who may have little understanding of cp. we are pleased to offer the second of two volumes dedicated to this important work. the articles in this volume present information and practical tools for other undergraduate faculty. they also provide insights to strengthen our field as a whole. these two volumes are but a sample of the work being done in undergraduate settings. we reiterate our call to the field from volume one to provide more opportunities to learn from our undergraduate focused colleagues. we hope that these seven articles, in combination with the continued efforts of the community psychology practice in undergraduate settings interest group, will lay the groundwork for continued growth, visibility, and valuing of undergraduatefocused community psychologists. observations from this collection the cp values of collaboration, participatory research, and critical reflection come alive through the practices described in the current volume. the articles included in this volume weave together multiple sources of evidence to understand the impact of cp skills, methods, and values in undergraduate focused settings. as community-based researchers, the authors conduct powerful teaching and research aimed at transforming the very institutions in which they reside. volume two highlights the range of settings undergraduate focused community psychologists work (i.e., a hispanic serving https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=31&article=188 https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=31&article=188 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 institution community college, regional public universities, a public liberal arts college, and undergraduate programs that also train graduate students in cp). this issue explores the design, implementation, and impact of cp programs and courses through a variety of methodologies. amie r. mckibban and crystal n. steltenpohl focus on research from three semester long case studies of community engaged learning projects that occurred in a cp class at a regional university in a rural, politically conservative area. taking a reflective approach, michèle schlehofer and juliet vapsva present first-person instructor and student narratives of the impact of a cp course taught from a feminist pedagogical framework. using student evaluations and personal reflections, chanté d. deloach explores the potential of a cp course implemented at a hispanic-serving institution community college to impact the discipline and uphold the values of cp. rachel m. hershberg and former undergraduates olivia andringa, katheryn camm, halimatu hill, joshua little, rebecca smith, and sarah wilkinson describe the use of photovoice, a participatory action research method, in an undergraduate course as a tool for gaining applied, setting-specific, cp research experience. this work also highlights the ways in which this methodology might help students connect more deeply to cp principles, values, and practices. moving outside the classroom, danielle chiaramonte, jake quarles, rachael goodman-williams, trevor strzyzykowski, rachel weber, kelli broessel and timothy thompson present a mixed methods investigation of the impact of students involved in cp research teams and explore the influence of these experiences. ashlee lien and a team of former and current undergraduate students including alicia fyne, juliet devito, oluwadara ogunbo, rhayna prado and julissa chaparro present findings from a systematic reflection on experiences attending and presenting at the national biennial cp conference. they provide explicit guidance to mentors and conference planners for supporting meaningful undergraduate participation. finally, christopher keys, olya glantsman, susan mcmahon, and leonard jason step back even further from single classroom experiences to consider the life of an undergraduate program and the decade long challenges and successes of developing and implementing an undergraduate cp concentration program at a large private university. many of the articles in both volumes of the special issue make specific calls to action we encourage the field to support. combining these with our experiences working on undergraduate issues within institutions and scra and editing these two volumes we offer insights for action, outlined in volume one, next we highlight the movement made on those calls. avenues for action in the introduction to the first volume of this special issue, we outlined a call to action for the field of cp to value and support faculty working at primarily undergraduate institutions and their students. in summary, we asked scra and the broader field of cp to: ● include social justice teaching as a valued cp practice competency. ● identify scholarship of teaching and learning as relevant to our field and provide dedicated, ongoing journal space. ● recognize and respond to the discrepancies in non-research workload demands and access to resources between colleagues at primarily research institutions and teaching institutions. ● integrate train-the-teacher institutes for undergraduate education. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 ● encourage and provide support for collaborating and publishing with undergraduates. in the months following publication of volume one, we worked with scra leadership, including current president brad olson and the council on education, and community psychology practice in undergraduate settings interest members to begin moving forward on these issues. initial conversations focused on making the upcoming scra biennial more inclusive for undergraduate students and undergraduatefocused cp practitioners. these efforts resulted in the implementation of two events designed specifically for undergraduates and undergraduate mentors at the biennial. first, an orientation session will be held during the first day of the conference. this event, organized by ashlee lien, amber kraft, and sheree bielecki, aims to prepare undergraduate students and other first time conference attendees for what to expect from a professional academic conference and tips for navigating the environment (see lien et al’s piece in this volume for more recommendations on supporting positive undergraduate conference experiences). elizabeth thomas, adele malpert, and katy morgan are organizing an undergraduate student and mentor networking lunch session to connect undergraduate students with potential mentors, engage in discussion, and build support systems. we appreciate the responsiveness of the conference planning committee and all involved. there is much work to do, however. results of a member survey, indicated that cost is a major barrier to undergraduate student attendance at the biennial conference. conversations are underway with the scra national student representative (erin godleyreynolds) and other scra leadership to explore funding options, including the development of travel grants specifically geared for undergraduate students so that they are not competing with graduate students for these essential travel dollars. we hope the shifts made at the 2019 biennial will only be the beginning of efforts to create specific spaces for our undergraduate colleagues and their faculty mentors. in addition to biennial-focused development, conversations with members of the council on education to explore mechanisms, spaces, and opportunities for publishing cp pedagogy and scholarship of teaching and learning are underway. we call to cp journals to make room for publishing work in this context. while cp training in collaborative and participatory processes helps to envision how students can be co-authors and co-producers of research, getting this work published can be a challenge. we believe these two volumes illustrate the impact undergraduate cp practitioners have on their students and the field. community psychology’s unique methods and values mean encountering distinct challenges in both teaching cp and evaluating those efforts. disseminating pedagogical practice and evaluation strategies and successes would benefit cp educators while joining existing discussions of social justice pedagogy. based on our experience editing this special issue, structuring and formatting the scholarly presentation of this work is challenging. graduate education in our field does not include training on how to write about pedagogy or how to conduct research on teaching and learning. we worry that in addition to the barriers of heavy teaching and service loads, more cp pedagogy work does not get published because of the lack of dedicated space or guidance on format for this unique form of scholarly contribution. the standardized format for presenting social science research does not align with teaching practice. a shared, recommended structure for documenting and disseminating teaching theory, lesson plans, and assessments of impact would support the development of a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 coherent body of cp scholarship of teaching and learning. we are thankful for the global journal of community psychology practice for supporting two volumes on this subject. we hope that we can continue to develop spaces with journal editors to highlight and disseminate this work, as teaching practice ultimately makes us all better educators and expands and strengthens our field. finally, we re-invite community psychologists to exam the mental models of what constitutes legitimate cp professional practice. undergraduate cp education should be a valued career within the field, one that is viewed as an intentional career path, not as a fallback or backup to more ‘prestigious’ research-oriented positions. as we suggested in our first volume introduction, cp competencies should reference and include teaching practice. moreover, graduate programs should develop more support for cp teaching and pedagogy development. offering avenues for cp graduate students to pursue careers in teaching would help expand the field of cp-trained psychology majors and potentially enhance the pipeline into cp graduate programs. if you are interested in connecting to these efforts, we invite you to join the scra interest groupcommunity psychology practice in undergraduate settings. http://www.gjcpp.org/ the makings of you: racial justice in praxis conference, chicago, 2017 rochele royster keywords: racial justice, decolonization, power systems author biographies: rochele royster, ph.d, atr-bc is an assistant professor of art therapy in the department of creative arts therapy. prior to joining syracuse university, royster was a learning behavior specialist in chicago public schools (cps) and lecturer in the department of art therapy and counseling at the school of the art institute of chicago, depaul university (department of education), and adler school of psychology (clinical psychology department doctoral program). royster has worked for the last 20 years integrating art therapy into the educational setting and has worked with youth, adolescents, and young adults with various learning differences such as autism, traumatic brain disorders, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. using a trans-disciplinary approach, she is interested in community and school-based art therapy; race, power and policy in education; multi-sensory methods in reading and literacy; trauma-informed classrooms; environmental justice; black disability; and special education as it relates to decolonization of pedagogy and practice in institutional and public settings. royster’s dissertation developed as a grassroots approach to arts-based social change and addresses gun violence, death, and grief through memorials of resistance. she assisted in creating transformative art-based social justice curriculum for cities of peace/jane addams hull house, the teacher institute/ museum of contemporary art, and the office of arts and education at cps and has conducted workshop series for chicago park district teaching artists. she has also worked with sexual, domestic violence, and human trafficking survivors and cambodian youth refugees. global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 in 2017, royster completed a ph.d. in community psychology at national louis university in chicago and also holds master’s degrees in special education (2000) from virginia state university and art therapy (2002) from the school of the art institute of chicago as well as a b.f.a. in studio arts (1998) from virginia state university. royster serves on the steering committee of psychologists for social responsibility and is a board director for the american art therapy association. recommended citation: royster, r. (2022). the makings of you: racial justice in praxis conference, chicago, 2017. global journal of community psychology practice, 13(1), 1 5. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: rochele royster, syracuse university, syracuse, ny; email: raroyste@syr.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:raroyste@syr.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the makings of you: racial justice in praxis conference, chicago, 2017 the racial justice in praxis conference 2017 was an intentional journey to create an academic conference accessible to all including academics, activists, and community members. by breaking down power structures, centering creative resistance, and honoring the voices of the community the conference became a transformative space for growth, connection, and radical joy. the conference was an eclectic gumbo that included research, dialogue, art, music, and culture. this is a written reflection of the process of planning that conference, centering the voice of community, and liberating institutional academic spaces. add a little sugar, honeysuckle and a great big expression of happiness it was a cold snowy day in chicago. as i made my way to the university, large fluffy white snowflakes swirled around my head. it was the kind of snow that makes you want to tilt your head back and stick out your tongue to catch a snowflake or two and delight in it melting on your tongue. that wintery weekend, a group of people came together to build. i cannot speak for others in the group but my sole purpose was to “do conferences” differently. i had attended conferences in the past and never felt that i belonged as a young black community centered art therapist and teacher. at times, i felt like a voyeur, staring into other black and brown communities and being schooled on ‘the flaw, the cure, and the savior’ by my fellow white academics. my communities were always the ones that were being fixed. when given the opportunity to co-chair this conference, i asked myself, how do we gather as indigenous, black, people of color as conscious practitioners and researchers to share knowledge and still break down the barriers of colonization in academia? how could we gather differently within institutions and find solace amongst the storm? how can we reclaim our voices, space and home? the righteous way to go little one would know as with any conference, there was struggle. it was a shifting of power and control dynamics within the group. the elders were releasing the reins and looking to the new blood to lead. as with any change or power struggle, conflict will manifest. dissension if handled appropriately can push a group or organization forward. how do you respect what has happened before and still create something new and different? how can we center black and brown liberatory research and expression within historically white dominated spaces? the joy of children laughing around you these are the makings of you and then there were the children. as a mother of 3, it was natural to involve and bring the children. we created a space where children were welcome. i had never been to a conference that allowed this type of participation. it challenged the space and institution. the university has a safety policy in place that prohibits children from campus, ironically put in place as a way to protect children from inappropriate supervision. the policy was restrictive and refused to stretch its definition to consider “the village” during general public events. the village encompasses parents and guardians’ ability to responsibly accompany and provide supervision to minors in their care. its overgeneralization and exclusion was the epitome of white male hierarchy. getting http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 special permission we challenged the policy and brought the children and offered childcare to participants. the children brought radical joy, music, laughter and play. currently, across college campuses, this policy is being challenged and redefined to be more inclusive to children in communal university spaces. i've tried to recite they're close but not quite almost impossible to do reciting the makings of you the conference started and ended with a symbolic ritual of music, drumming and dance. paying homage to our indigenous ancestors it seemed natural to mark the occasion with this type of ceremony. within the participatory music and dance performances and workshops, we celebrated and centered black and brown creative resistance. from the dance fight of capoeira, a brazilian martial art that combines elements of dance, acrobatics, and music practiced by enslaved africans in brazil at the beginning of the 16th century as a way to disguise defense training. to the sounds of revolution from the chicano band from east los angeles, las cafeteras. a band that uses spoken word and folk music, with traditional son jarocho, afromexican music and zapateado dancing to create songs that inspire positive change with themes and references that range from the civil rights movement, united farm workers, dream act, immigration reform to female homicides in ciudad juárez. ending the conference with the healing drum workshop led by the band funkadesi. an eclectic mix of musicians that blends indian music (bhangra, bollywood, folk) with reggae, funk, and afrocaribbean grooves. we were intentional about including creative art expression and held space for spoken art, performance art, and quilting by conference participants and local artists. this creative art expression has always been essential to our ability to connect, survive and thrive as black and brown people. it was important that this was central to the conference. an art show was included within the conference space, a focal point that displayed artwork that addressed social justice issues. artist and activist rachel wallis brought her project, gone but not forgotten, a collaborative quilting project creating a memorial quilt for individuals killed by the chicago police department invited conference participants to engage in a sewing circle encouraging participants to engage in radical empathy, remembering that victims of police killings. community art action and radical play was the core and foundation of the conference. these are the makings of you it is true, the makings of you the gathering at the beginning of the conference left a profound impression on me. we intentionally started the beginning of the conference by giving everyone space to introduce themselves by name and home. giving participants a moment to orient themselves in space and time. we all sat knee to knee, toe to toe and defined and brought our safe, controllable, secure ideas of home to the conference. by just bringing our ideas of home to the space we started to dismantle the institutional space with memories of our food, our spices, our songs, our people. it was a framing of space and time and culture that is not often appreciated in a conference space. each person brought themselves to that space along with their ancestors and broader concepts of home. it was a beautiful space that was given permission to happen. we took time to pay allegiance to ourselves, our homes and the baggage we tote. i’ve used the song, the makings of you by curtis mayfield to frame my writing about this conference. this song is part of a larger album that speaks of justice, love, and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 community within the restraints of capitalism and white domination. it accompanied the movie, claudine. a movie about a young black woman and mother trapped in multiple systems of social welfare and control. ultimately, choosing love over capitalism. revolution over subservience. this conference laid down a similar path of mutual aid. in the event that our institutions fail us and do not meet our needs, then we must as a people meet our ownthrough community and collective doing. that is where true liberation beginsin the small, which will eventually reflect the larger greater experience. they're close but not quite almost impossible to do and in fact the conference was like building a canoe. at the end of the conference the canoe had been successfully constructed using a blueprint collaboratively designed by the collective with much give and take, trial and tribulations. out of the labor of this conference many existential questions were birthed. how do we forge ahead as a group and conference? who will sail the canoe? where is the destination? and will it find home? http://www.gjcpp.org/ surf therapy practice, research, and coalition building: future directions guest editors kristen h. walter1,gregor v. sarkisian2, giovanni martínez3, and philip b. ward4 author biographies: kristen h. walter, is a clinical research psychologist at the naval health research center in san diego, california, where she investigates the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd) and conditions that commonly co-occur with ptsd, such as major depressive disorder (mdd), and traumatic brain injury. dr. walter explores both evidence-based treatments for ptsd and cooccurring conditions, as well as complementary and alternative approaches. she is an investigator on several department of defense-funded trials, including randomized controlled trials comparing evidence-based psychotherapies for cooccurring ptsd/mdd and another comparing two activity-based interventions (surf and hike therapy) for mdd. she is also a privileged clinical provider at naval medical center san diego and a licensed psychologist in the states of california and ohio. gregor v. sarkisian, professor, has taught in the applied community psychology specialization within the m.a. clinical psychology program at antioch university los angeles since 2005. dr. sarkisian began working with the jimmy miller memorial foundation (jmmf) in 2015 where he has served as a volunteer surf instructor and more recently as the director of research and evaluation for jmmf to better understand the benefits of surf therapy for youth at-promise and u.s. veterans. since 2018, dr. sarkisian has been a member of the international surf 1 naval health research center, san diego, ca, usa 2 antioch university, los angeles, ca, usa 3 founder, surf4dem, aguadilla, pr 4 university of new south wales, sydney, au global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 therapy organization (isto) and he is actively engaged in coalition building, the dissemination of research on surf therapy and serves as a technical consultant to programs interested in developing surf therapy program evaluations. giovanni martínez, is a licensed clinical psychologist in puerto rico, the founder/executive director of the 501(c)3 non-profit organization, surf4dem, inc., and advisor to the board of directors of the international surf therapy organization (isto). surf4dem offers children and families affected by autism spectrum disorder an environment of support to connect and share by creating opportunities and enjoying the therapeutic benefits of surf therapy. as a clinician dr. martinez has vast experience working with neurodevelopmental disorders in particular asd, in relation to the clinical evaluation, training and program development. his background on research comes as an adjunct professor at the medical sciences campus university of puerto rico, his research focus on aspects of public health and development of alternatives methods of intervention for children with asd. philip b. ward, is a clinical neuroscientist and unsw sydney professor of psychiatry who has always loved body surfing. phil is a passionate advocate for building the evidence base for surf therapy and is inspired by the positive vibe that surrounds surf therapy and the people who support it. he is a founding partner of the international surf therapy organization, and a board director of the waves of wellness foundation. recommended citation: walter, k. h., sarkisian, g. v., martínez, g., & ward, p. b. (2020). surf therapy practice, research, and coalition building: future directions. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(2), 1 – 11. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 surf therapy practice, research, and coalition building: future directions abstract articles in this special issue of the global journal of community psychology practice on surf therapy around the globe have focused on theory development, practice considerations, empirical research, and coalition building in order to advance the field of surf therapy. in this concluding article, the guest editors highlight the ways in which the collective work in this special issue expands on the current literature in terms of theory, as well as processes and outcomes for different programs across a variety of populations across the globe. suggestions for conducting future studies on surf therapy are provided in order to build an even stronger knowledge base in this area. finally, initiatives set forth by the international surf therapy organization are presented in order to foster coalition building, participant inclusion, social justice, research and evaluation, and public advocacy. collectively, this article aims to summarize the work highlighted in this special issue and pave a path for surf therapy practice and research going forward. this special issue of the global journal of community psychology practice on surf therapy around the globe explored the current state of theory development, coalition building, program development, evaluation and empirical research on surf therapy. the collection of research in this special issue adds to the literature and science of surf therapy and represents the most comprehensive collection of research on surf therapy to date. while the practice of surf therapy varies greatly between programs, benefits have been observed for a variety of populations, and research using grounded theory has identified common characteristics across programs with differing interventions and populations. there is a growing body of research on the benefits of surf therapy and a need to engage in more rigorous approaches, from observational designs to studies utilizing comparison groups and randomized controlled trials. the global coalition efforts auspiced by the international surf therapy organization have enhanced the growth of surf therapy practice and research over the three years since its foundation. research highlighting components of surf therapy that might play an important role in its effects include processes such as empowerment and respite. psychological empowerment, while only explicitly mentioned in one evaluation study (gomes et al., 2020), is a central process at play in most surf therapy programs. through engaging in the physical activity of surfing in an unpredictable but fun ocean environment, participants must focus attention on each moment while learning to ride a wave. the focus of mind and body required by the ocean environment simultaneously brings respite, a break from trauma symptoms, or from being stigmatized due to being part of a disenfranchised group. respite could be a catalyst to changing one’s perspective on where they stand in their sociopolitical environment. additionally, through accomplishing the challenge of riding a wave in a socially supportive group, one could view this experience as a small win that could be applied to different challenges (weick, 1986). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 surf therapy practice and implications of grounded theory research marshall et al. (2020) developed a grounded theory based on the experience of u.s. veterans that articulates empowering processes of surf therapy and reflects the programming and evaluation findings presented in this special issue. at their core, most surf therapy programs provide participants with the opportunity to take on the challenge of learning to surf at one’s own pace and to experience surfing in a nonjudgmental and socially supportive group. as a result, many participants experience respite through the focus required by the activity of surfing, social connectedness to fellowsurfers, and a sense of accomplishment that is transferrable to other activities. outcomes include improved psycho-social wellbeing, decreased isolation and symptom reduction (marshall et al., 2020). in previous research, marshall et al. (2019) developed a similar grounded theory based on the experiences of vulnerable youth in the u.k. while both studies involved different programs serving different populations, the processes and outcomes experienced by participants were very similar (marshall et al. 2019; marshall et al., 2020). how can surfing bring similar benefits to people experiencing different challenges – vulnerable youth and veterans with combat-related ptsd? the complexity of the above question increases when one explores the variation in surf therapy program delivery on at least five dimensions: (1) population(s) served, (2) surf instructor preparation and methodology of instruction, (3) dosage (i.e., session frequency, duration and program length) of surf therapy, (4) additional program activities apart from surfing and (5) outcomes measured. despite this, marshall et al.’s (2019; 2020) grounded theory research provides a starting point to conceptualize the common elements of surf therapy programs along these dimensions. in addition to advances in understanding the theoretical foundations of surf therapy practice, this special issue included two articles that have broadened opportunities to promote better modes of direct communication among youth with disabilities, who may be more comfortable communicating through the integration of visual techniques (britton et al., 2020; van der merwe & yarrow, 2020). britton et al. (2020) used body mapping, integrating visual representations of the body-mind environment, to facilitate increased communication about complex emotions. van der merwe and yarrow (2020) utilized makaton symbols, six visual symbols representing emotions, to better communicate with participants during surf therapy sessions. van der merwe and yarrow (2020) identified four areas in which program adaptations were made from meeting the needs of a neuro-typical to a neuro-diverse population which were consistent with the structure of the more established surf project program described by van ewijk et al. (2020) – integrating visual communication, incorporating routine and structure into regular operations, maintaining a low surfer-surf-instructor ratio, and, training for surf therapy program staff on positively interacting with youth with disabilities. for programs serving vulnerable youth, there is variation in how vulnerable youth are defined as a population, program dosage ranges from one day to three years, and there are a wide variety of program activities outside of surfing (sarkisian et al., 2020; devine-wright & godfrey, 2020; gomes et al., 2020). yet, the common threads of surf therapy programming which emerged in marshall et al.’s (2020) grounded theory findings (emergent categories of surf therapy intervention) are embedded in the practice of all six programs serving youth with disabilities and vulnerable youth – tackling a challenge at one’s own pace and being part of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 a social environment that provides a familial, non-judgmental safe space for participants. surf therapy program evaluation and empirical research over the past ten years, there has been a growing body of program evaluation on the benefits of surf therapy. in a scoping review of the research evidence on surf therapy, benninger and colleagues (2020) conducted a search of peer-review journals, books/chapters, theses and dissertations which yielded 29 studies. table 1 presents the characteristics of the 8 additional studies on surf therapy included in this special issue, bringing the total number of studies to 37. with the exception of one study (snelling, 2015), all programs that have published results reported benefits to participants. these benefits have been measured primarily through observational pretest-posttest designs on outcomes such as wellbeing and health although there have been two studies that utilized a randomized controlled trial design (snelling, 2015; walter, et al., 2019a). while the observational pretest-posttest design is an accepted practice among community-based organizations, and serves as a means of reporting to funders critical to program sustainability it does not offer sufficient rigor to clearly provide causal inference for changes in outcomes. a roadblock to conducting more rigorous research such as quasi-experimental or experimental designs is the research capacity of surf therapy programs which is often limited by funding, research expertise, or both of these elements. recommendations for future program evaluation and research due to a dearth of surf therapy studies that use experimental designs in the current literature, it is difficult to fully evaluate the impact of surf therapy. although several studies in this special issue promote the science of surf therapy with more stringent study methodology, there are ways that future research could further advance the field. specifically, including comparison groups, establishing common metrics and assessment tools, identifying the optimal dosage and duration of effects, determining how surf therapy is best used (e.g., as a standalone or adjunctive intervention), and distinguishing the components of surf therapy that provide the greatest benefit are ways to improve our understanding of the impact of surf therapy. few studies to date in the surf therapy literature (otis et al., 2020; rosenberg, 2014; snelling, 2015 for exceptions) included a comparison group, let alone use more rigorous methods, such as randomized controlled trial (rct) designs. rcts – a design where each participant is equally likely to be assigned to an intervention/group within a study – provide rigorous evidence for intervention efficacy. although rcts have been used in the field of surf therapy (e.g., snelling, 2015; walter et al., 2019a), these trials may not be feasible in some surf therapy programs due to practical, ethical, or resource limitations. to date, the majority of surf therapy research has focused on program evaluation that measures changes in participants over the course of a surf therapy program. program evaluation can serve as an initial step, but does not shed light on whether reported changes are due to surf therapy, time, concurrent interventions, or other factors. if more stringent program designs are not feasible and program evaluation offers limited utility, surf therapy should at least incorporate a comparison group. for example, studies could compare one surf therapy program to another or include different samples in the same program (e.g., children with primary physical or psychological concerns; veterans compared to civilians). a comparison group allows examination of differences in effects due to different factors for each group (e.g., http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 sample, program, duration, etc.) and thus whether the outcomes are more generalized or circumscribed. future research should use the most rigorous methodology that is feasible in a given setting to advance surf therapy research. table 1 characteristics of studies on surf therapy included in the 2020 special issue on surf therapy around the globe author(s) population(s) focus of therapy research design sample size measures britton et al., 2020 youth with asd selfdevelopment, interpersonal skills & wellbeing participatory community research 12, 10 body mapping, semi-structured interviews devinewright & godfrey, 2020 vulnerable youth health & wellbeing observational pretestposttest, mixed methods 155, 10, 347 stirling children’s wellbeing scale, warwickedinburgh mental wellbeing scale, rosenberg selfesteem scale, interviews, focus group gomes et al., 2020 vulnerable youth selfdevelopment, interpersonal skills & wellbeing observational pretestposttest 69 strength and difficulties questionnaire marshall et al., 2020 veterans with ptsd psychological & mental health grounded theory 18 semi-structured interviews otis et al., 2020 active duty service members with ptsd, mdd or both psychological & mental health repeated measures longitudinal design 47 ptsd checklist for dsm-5, patient health questionnaire, generalized anxiety disorder scale, positive and negative affect schedule, positive affect schedule sarkisian et al., 2020 vulnerable youth mental health & wellbeing observational pretestposttest, mixed methods 152 children’s hope scale, participant drawings and related text van der merwe & youth with asd selfdevelopment, interpersonal case study 45 focus groups, makaton symbols http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 yarrow, 2020 skills and wellbeing van ewijk et al., 2020 youth with disabilities selfdevelopment, interpersonal skills and wellbeing observational pretestposttest 84, 149 kidscreen-27, evaluation questionnaire another avenue for the field of surf therapy is to establish a common set of metrics and assessment tools to be used among populations and outcomes. among published surf therapy studies, there is a wide array of assessment instruments used to measure outcomes, including many measuring similar constructs (see benninger et al., 2020 for a thorough review). it is critically important to identify well-established assessment tools that are validated for the subpopulations in which they are used and that can be used across programs. for constructs in which established and validated measures do not exist, care should be exercised in developing and empirically evaluating new measures. furthermore, standardized measures and approaches should be established for both qualitative and quantitative research, which address different research questions, but when jointly deployed greatly enhance our knowledge about surf therapy. establishing common assessment instruments is crucial as it allows for comparison between studies, populations, and outcomes, which ultimately serves to build a global research base for surf therapy. an important goal for future surf therapy research is to identify the optimal dose of surf therapy programs in terms of session frequency, duration, and program length. similar to other medical or psychological treatments, determining the length of each surf therapy session and how many sessions are needed to yield a given physical, psychological, or functional outcome is vitally important. not only does distinguishing the sufficient dose allow for greater benefit for participants, it also assists with efficient utilization of resources. furthermore, identifying the duration and sufficient number of surf therapy sessions will improve the accuracy of surf therapy research in that outcomes can be better evaluated in the context of whether or not the person received an adequate dose of surf therapy to produce a given benefit. in addition, it is essential that future surf therapy studies include repeated and follow-up assessment time points to determine not only the immediate outcomes of surf therapy, but also how long any benefits are maintained. this will provide important knowledge about the benefits and limitations of surf therapy programs and how they can best be utilized for the benefit of participants. future research studies should analyze outcome data by sessions attended and the duration of sessions so that optimal dosage can be ascertained, as well as frequently assess outcomes during surf therapy programs and after programs have been completed so that the duration of effects can be established. a critical consideration in surf therapy research is whether surf therapy provides the greatest benefit as an adjunctive or standalone intervention, and for which populations or conditions. very few surf therapy studies acknowledge the use of other interventions by participants or report these data (see walter et al., 2019b for an exception), which is necessary for understanding the independent effects of surf therapy. surf http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 therapy may enhance benefits from other interventions and be most appropriate as an adjunctive intervention, which is the most suitable recommendation based on the current data available. it is also possible that surf therapy could serve as a stand-alone intervention producing significant benefits to participants, but there is limited data to suggest that surf therapy alone can yield sufficient benefits to participants for a given condition. adequately assessing and reporting on the use of other interventions by surf therapy participants and determining outcomes for those receiving surf therapy as an adjunctive intervention versus surf therapy alone will help to address this in future research. finally, research has begun to explore an array of outcomes associated with surf therapy – many highlighted in this special issue. even though more outcome research is needed in the field of surf therapy, future research efforts should start to determine which components of surf therapy programs account for the greatest amount of change in outcomes (i.e., dismantling designs). for example, a study could compare a surf therapy program delivered with only the surfing component to the surfing component combined with a psychosocial intervention. this research would elucidate whether the psychosocial component accounts for change in outcomes and if so, how much. additionally, marshall and colleagues (2019) present elements of surf therapy programs such as surfing activity, ocean environment, participants, surf instructors, peer mentors, and equipment that can ultimately affect program outcomes, whether directly or indirectly. furthermore, exploring how surf therapy facilitates changes in symptoms and functioning, such as providing a respite from concerns, creating a safe physical and emotional space, offering opportunities for social connection, and fostering experiences that are challenging, but approached through self-selected pacing (marshall et al., 2019; caddick et al., 2015) can provide insight as to the unique aspects of surf therapy that affect change. identifying the ‘active ingredients’ of surf therapy and the processes by which they work is fundamental for the future development and implementation of surf therapy programs. taken together, surf therapy research has largely focused on program evaluation, which has provided initial support for its effects on various health and psychosocial outcomes. however, the current state of surf therapy research should be enhanced in order to expand our understanding of its use and application. future research should incorporate more rigorous research design elements, standardized assessment measures, and identify the optimal frequency and duration of programs. the role of the international surf therapy organization (isto) in coalition building the international surf therapy organization (isto) is a collective of surf therapy programs, researchers and influencers working to collaborate on research, share best practices and advocate the benefits of surf therapy (http://www.intlsurftherapy.org). isto held its third conference in november, 2019 and has grown from eight to more than sixty contributing member surf therapy organizations in three years. utilizing the collective impact model as coalition building framework (kania & kramer, 2011), some elements of the collective impact model were helpful (i.e., shared leadership, common agenda, reinforcing activities, and continuous communication) and others more challenging (i.e., the approach feeling top-down, difficulty agreeing on a common agenda, shared measurement, and uneven contribution and follow-through from programs) in moving coalition efforts forward (mattila, 2020). participant inclusion and social justice http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 moving forward, isto has an opportunity to address some of the inherent challenges of the collective impact model (wolff, 2016) through broadening its efforts at participant inclusion and social justice. for instance, many of the program directors of surf therapy programs have direct relationships to participants as family members, such as a veteran with ptsd running a program for veterans with ptsd or a psychologist with a family member with asd who runs a program for youth and families with asd. with coalition members who already have a connection and personal investment in the wellbeing of populations being served by surf therapy programs, it is likely there will be widespread support for more participantinclusive and social justice-oriented coalition practices. isto plans to develop additional opportunities for participants to be included in the coalition as well as to develop a social justice working group within the coalition that would include participants from surf therapy programs (mattila, 2020). through greater inclusion of participants in program development and coalition building activities, the greater the likelihood that the diverse experiences and skills of participants will allow for collaborations that address gaps in the field and expand opportunities for participant-driven, social justice focused initiatives. research isto has an important role in fostering research by facilitating collaborative relationships, advocating for empirical evaluation and supporting research initiatives that will push the knowledge on benefits to surf therapy forward. one area in which this has already begun is through collaborations that developed from isto conferences. isto could support more formal research mentoring initiatives to develop a network that matches surf therapy programs with a researcher’s skillset, by region, language, and population served. for example, the third author of this article has provided mentorship to surf therapy programs in latin america (where spanish is the primary language) and the target population is children with asd or other neurodevelopmental disorders. these relationships were initiated and fostered at the isto conferences and via related social networks (e.g., the isto web page, http://www.intlsurftherapy.org) through experienced researchers mentoring other surf therapy programs where those delivering the program had less research experience, programs can enhance their empirical research capacity in an efficient and informed manner. isto has also developed a shared research tool kit that includes the measures used by contributing organizations. future goals include establishing core sets of recommended assessments for different populations, and developing populationspecific research groups among contributing organizations to support multi-site research using common measures. policy advocacy one of istos stated goals is to develop an evidence base to support health funding agencies to include surf therapy as a standard form of healthcare. the more rigorous forms of research and evaluation methods that were outlined previously will be crucial in providing a compelling evidence base to support funding proposals for surf therapy. if surf therapy research expands to utilize such research designs, funding of programs could potentially occur on par with other evidencebased therapeutic approaches. as editors, we are confident this special issue will provide the impetus for further development of surf therapy programs, and more rigorous research to elucidate the many benefits of surf therapy that improve the well-being of program participants. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 references benninger, e., curtis, c., sarkisian, g.v., rogers, c., bender, k., & comer, m. (2020). surf therapy: a scoping review of the qualitative and quantitative research evidence. special issue of global journal of community psychology practice on surf therapy. britton, e., kindermann, g., carlin, c. (2020). surfing and the senses. using body mapping to understand the embodied and therapeutic experiences of young surfers with autism. special issue of global journal of community psychology practice on surf therapy. caddick, n., smith, b., & phoenix, c. (2015). the effects of surfing and the natural environment on the well-being of combat veterans. qualitative health research, 25, 76–86. https://doi.org/10.1177/104973231 4549477. devine-wright, h. & godfrey, c. (2020). the wave project: evidencing surf therapy for young people in the uk. special issue of global journal of community psychology practice on surf therapy. gomes, p., fazenda, n., gomez-baya, d., rauktis, m.e., & provost, g. (2020). surf.art in portugal: daring, accomplishing and transforming portuguese youth and their communities. special issue of global journal of community psychology practice on surf therapy. kania, j. & kramer, m. (2011). collective impact. stanford social innovation review, retrieved from http://www.ssir.org/articles/entry/c ollective_impact marshall, j., ferrier, b., ward, p., & martindale, r. (2020). “when i was surfing with those guys i was surfing with family.” a grounded exploration of program theory within the jimmy miller memorial foundation surf therapy intervention. special issue of global journal of community psychology practice on surf therapy. marshall, j., kelly, p., & niven, a. (2019). “when i go there, i feel like i can be myself.” exploring programme theory within the wave project surf therapy intervention. international journal of environmental research and public health, 16(12), 2159. mattila, m. (2020). coalition building in surf therapy: a case study on collective impact. special issue of global journal of community psychology practice on surf therapy. olive, l., parker, r., dober, m., drake, c., keith, m., & telford, r. (2020). intervention mapping: using theory and evidence to inform the ocean mind surf therapy program for improving youth mental health. special issue of global journal of community psychology practice on surf therapy. otis, n. p., walter, k. h., glassman, l. h., ray, t. n., michalewicz-kragh, b., & thomsen, c. j. (2020). effects of ptsd and mdd comorbidity on psychological changes during surf therapy sessions for active duty service members. special issue of global journal of community psychology practice on surf therapy. rosenberg, r. s., lange, w., zebrack, b., moulton, s., & kosslyn, s. m. (2014). an outdoor adventure program for young adults with cancer: positive effects on body image and http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732314549477 https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732314549477 http://www.ssir.org/articles/entry/collective_impact http://www.ssir.org/articles/entry/collective_impact global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 psychosocial functioning. journal of psychosocial oncology, 32(5), 622– 636. https://electra.lmu.edu:2070/10.108 0/07347332.2014.936652 sarkisian, g.v., curtis, c., & rogers, c.m. (2020). emerging hope: outcomes of a one-day surf therapy program with at-promise youth. special issue of global journal of community psychology practice on surf therapy. snelling, m. (2015). breaking cycles of violence, one wave at a time: a formative evaluation of the waves for change surf therapy programme (master's thesis). university of cape town, cape town south africa. van der merwe, n. & yarrow, p. (2020). more than surfing: inclusive surf therapy informed by the voices of south african children with autism spectrum disorder. special issue of global journal of community psychology practice on surf therapy. van ewijk, h., wansink-lokerman, m., lamerz, a., & van den broek, s. (2020). positive effects of surfing on psychological wellbeing for children with developmental difficulties. special issue of global journal of community psychology practice on surf therapy. walter, k. h., otis, n. p., glassman, l. h., ray, t. n., michalewicz-kragh, b., elliott, k. t., & thomsen, c. j. (2019a). comparison of surf and hike therapy for active duty service members with major depressive disorder: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial of novel interventions in a naturalistic setting. contemporary clinical trials communications. doi:10.1016/j.conctc.2019.100435 walter, k. h., otis, n. p., ray, t. n., powell, a. l., glassman, l. h., michalewiczkragh, b., & thomsen, c. j. (2019b). breaking the surface: psychological outcomes among u.s. active duty service members following a surf therapy program. psychology of sport and exercise. doi:10.1016/j.psychsport.2019.10155 1 weick. k. (1986). small wins: redefining the scale of social issues. in e. seidman & j. rappaport (eds.), redefining social problems (pp. 29-48). new york: plenum press. wolff, t. (2016). ten places where collective impact gets it wrong. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(1), 1-11. retrieved from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). disclaimer khw is an employee of the u.s. government. this work was prepared as part of her official duties. title 17, u.s.c. §105 provides that copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the u.s. government. title 17, u.s.c. §101 defines a u.s. government work as work prepared by a military service member or employee of the u.s. government as part of that person’s official duties. the views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the department of the navy, department of defense, nor the u.s. government. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://electra.lmu.edu:2070/10.1080/07347332.2014.936652 https://electra.lmu.edu:2070/10.1080/07347332.2014.936652 http://www.gjcpp.org/ celebrating 10 years of the global journal of community psychology practice over the last 10 years the global journal of community psychology practice (gjcpp) has worked to provide high quality and practical information on community practice with the commitment to engage and expand the practice community and its broader social impact. the gjcpp offers community practitioners of a variety of backgrounds and professional affiliations a new opportunity for collaborative development, to increase skills, and to exchange information, ideas and resources. during the past 10 years the gjcpp has had over 30k users from across the world take advantage of the resources and content published. to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the gjcpp we are proud to highlight a compilation of the 10 most popular1 articles, editorials, tools and issues from 2010 2020: 1. theories in the field of community psychology author(s): leonard a. jason, ed stevens, daphna ram, steven a. miller, christopher r. beasley, and kristen d. gleason. abstract: in this article, we review some of the key attributes of useful theories and assess whether these attributes are present in several prominent community psychology theories. the field of community psychology often deals with complex systems and attempts to create change through the use of multiple mechanisms. it has provided researchers new ways of thinking about contextual factors and how participants could be more involved in research efforts. however, this field has encountered significant challenges in testing and evaluating theories that involve system-level environmental change. it has struggled to establish consensus when operationally defining criteria and when creating reliable instruments for measuring theoretical constructs. we conclude that community psychology theories have tended to function as frameworks, which indicate important elements to examine, but do not specify relationships that can be used for explanation and are, therefore, too broad to make the types of predictions characteristic of science. because community psychology theories have often served as orienting frameworks, there needs to be more discussion about their usefulness, and whether community psychologists can develop more rigorous and specific theories. this has implications for formulating various practices and for discussions about how future research can better inform theory recommended citation: jason, l.a., stevens, e., ram, d., miller, s.a., beasley, c.r., gleason, k. (2016). theories in the field of community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(2), 1 – 27. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). to read more visit: https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=22&article=125 1 "most popular" content derived from google analytics data provided for the gjcpp.org website. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=22&article=125 global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 2. using social media as a tool to complement advocacy efforts author(s): j. taylor scott and j’vonnah maryman abstract: community practitioners must leverage a variety of tools in order to promote and advocate for social change. social media are relatively innovative tools for informing and mobilizing communities in an advocacy effort. as part of a coordinated effort, social media align well with the principles of community psychology by enabling individuals to contribute to participatory dialogue about social issues, collaborate on change efforts, and establish a sense of community. these tools can enhance supporters’ advocacy engagement and can help sustain efforts in the midst of inevitable challenges. however, social media alone are not sufficient for promoting social change, but should be used to enhance traditional organizing strategies. in addition to synthesizing literature across empirical and practitioner (e.g., communication consultants) sources, real-world examples are provided to illustrate how social media can enhance advocacy efforts. this article presents findings from an extensive literature review to serve as a resource for community practitioners on ways to enhance advocacy efforts with social media. recommended citation: scott, j.t., & maryman, j. (2016)/ using social media as a tool to complement advocacy efforts. global journal of community psychology practice, 7 (1s), 1 – 22. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). to read more visit: https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=21&article=121 3. phenomenon of interest, framework, or theory? building better explanations in community psychology. author(s): jennifer watling neal abstract: theories are a fundamental part of research. they provide guidance for the development of research questions and testable hypotheses as well as inform study methods and designs. however, in this issue, jason, stevens, ram, miller, beasley, and gleason (2016) raise important questions including: are prominent “theories” in community psychology really theories? how useful are these “theories” for developing specific predictions and testable hypotheses? and, how can the field continue to develop and test theories that promote its agenda of social change? to answer these questions, jason et al. (2016) identify and evaluate three “prominent theories” in community psychology – the ecological perspective (kelly, 1968), psychological sense of community theory (sarason, 1974), and empowerment (rappaport, 1981). based on their evaluation, they “conclude that community psychology theories have tended to function as frameworks” (p. 2). that is, these “theories” provide general guidance for what elements to study but fall short of offering specific predictions about the relationships between these elements. jason et al (2016) conclude that the lack of predictive and explanatory theories in community psychology hinders progress in both the research development of explanatory mechanisms of social change as well as practice initiatives to promote social change. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=21&article=121 global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 recommended citation: neal, j.w. (2016). phenomenon of interest, framework, or theory? building better explanations in community psychology. global journal of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 community psychology practice, 7(2), 1 – 6. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). to read more visit: https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=22&article=132 4. tearless logic model author(s): ashlee d. lien, justin p. greenleaf, michael k. lemke, sharon m. hakim, nathan p. swink, rosemary wright and greg meissen abstract: even among people who know and have seen the value of logic models, the term can “strike fear into the hearts” of experienced community psychologists and veteran nonprofit staff and board members alike. add the phrase “outcome-based planning” and you are likely to energize those you are working with to run as fast as possible for the door. such technical terms may confuse and intimidate community members and grassroots partners who are the foundation of the practice of community psychology. at the same time, organizations can benefit from time spent on outcome-based planning, especially in developing a well-conceived logic model. recommended citation: lien, a.d., greenleaf, j.p., lemke, m.k., hakim, s.m., swink, n.p., wright, r., & meissen, g. (2011). tearless logic model. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(2), 1 – 12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). to read more visit: https://www.gjcpp.org/en/tool.php?issue=7&tool=9 5. ten places where collective impact gets it wrong (editorial) author(s): tom wolff abstract: in this article, i articulate ten important issues and concerns which collective impact fails to adequately acknowledge, understand, and address. these failings have serious consequences for the engaged communities. i welcome the community of activists and scholars who are engaged in coalitions, partnerships, and collaboratives to react, disagree and/or to add to the list of concerns. recommended citation: wolff, t. (2016). ten places where collective impact gets it wrong. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(1), 1 – 11. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). to read more visit: https://www.gjcpp.org/en/resource.php?issue=21&resource=200 6. the living room, a community crisis respite program: offering people in crisis an alternative to emergency departments author(s): michelle heyland, courtney emery, and mona shattell abstract: objective: to describe the living room, a community crisis respite center that offers individuals in crisis an alternative to obtaining services in an emergency department (ed). methods: this article describes the problems individuals in a mental http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=22&article=132 http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/en/tool.php?issue=7&tool=9 http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/en/resource.php?issue=21&resource=200 global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 health crisis may http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 encounter in traditional eds and explains how the living room addresses these problems. the living room’s development, setting, staffing and procedures are described in order to promote increased use of this type of program. results: in its first year of operation, the living room hosted 228 visits by 87 distinct individuals (termed “guests”). guests were deflected from eds on 213 of those visits – a 93% deflection rate. these deflections represent a savings of approximately $550,000 to the state of illinois since guests of the living room are overwhelmingly individuals with medicaid or no insurance of any kind. on 84% (n=192) of the occurrences in which guests were deflected from eds, they alleviated their crises sufficiently to decide to leave the living room and return to the community. these guests reported an average decrease of 2.13 points on the subjective units of distress scale. conclusions: community crisis respite centers such as the living room represent an important alternative to eds by remedying many criticisms of traditional eds made by individuals in crisis. outcomes from the living room’s first year of operation suggest that community crisis respite centers are cost-effective, effective in helping many individuals alleviate crises, and have the potential to decrease the use of eds for mental health crisis. recommended citation: heyland, m., emery, c., & shattell, m. (2013). the living room, a community crisis respite program: offering people in crisis an alternative to emergency departments. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(3), 1 – 8. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). to read more visit: https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=15&article=74 7. academic performance in middle school: friendship influences author(s): lisette t. jacobson and charles a. burdsal abstract: the results of the peer/performance relationship study build on previous research findings demonstrating relational significance of peer influences to academic performance during adolescence. whereas family, teachers, and friends play a significant role in a student’s academic career, extant literature about the relational dynamics between peers and academic achievement remains scarce. this study evaluated social support and negative interchanges in relation to self-reported grades in reading, mathematics, social studies, and science. additionally, students’ gender, race, and perception of a friend’s level of school interest were measured. the sample consisted of 321 participants in the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade from three medium-sized suburban, public middle schools in the midwest. social support and negative interchanges were measured by scales of the network of relationships inventory. academic performance was measured as a grade point average of the scores for the four academic subjects. results support the hypothesis that adolescents’ relationships with peers influence academic performance. specifically, the study’s outcome demonstrates that social support was significantly and positively related to academic performance. negative interchanges were not significantly related to academic performance. a positive correlation was found between level of school interest and academic performance. furthermore, gender differences were found among social support, negative interchanges, and academic http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=15&article=74 global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 performance. there were no statistical differences for race. altogether, these results are consistent with previous research findings and provide evidence for the importance of adolescent friendships and their impact on academic performance. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 recommended citation: jacobson, l.t., & brudsal, c.a. (2012). academic performance in middle school: friendship influences. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(3), 1 – 12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). to read more visit: https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=8&article=31 8. the community tool box, a comprehensive toll and a sample of what you will find there: community assessment methods – conducting a swot analysis (tools of the trade) author(s): christina holt and tom wolff abstract: the community tool box, http://ctb.ku.edu, is a free, online resource for those working to build healthier communities and bring about social change, offering thousands of pages of tips and tools for taking action in communities. the vision behind the community tool box is that people — locally and globally — are better prepared to work together to change conditions that affect their lives. the community tool box covers core competencies for community practice such as community assessment, planning, intervention, evaluation, and advocacy. under continuous development since 1994, the community tool box is widely used in teaching, training, and technical support. the team’s aspiration is to make it easier and more likely that people bring about change and improvement and further social justice. recommended citation: holt, c., & wolff, t. (2015). the community tool box, a comprehensive toll and a sample of what you will find there: community assessment methods – conducting a swot analysis. global journal of community psychology practice, 6(1), 1 – 12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). to read more visit: https://www.gjcpp.org/en/tool.php?issue=19&tool=13 9. global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 topic: seeking a sense of community editor: scott wituk editor’s note: perhaps in 2000, many readers thought that robert putnam’s bowling alone was overly dramatic, describing his observed loss of sense of community and warning of the consequences of that loss. however, those warning now appear prescient, 17 years later, as we mourn the division currently wracking the world harder than ever to bridge widening gaps in beliefs, policies, identities. community psychologists, and those practicing community psychology, have always emphasized the importance sense of community has on development, well-being, mutual support/recovery, and other dimensions of health. there is no other time in human history when people have more ability to connect to others, and yet the general social survey and other research continues to see declines in people behaving in connected ways like spending time with neighbors. our latest issue looks at the different ways sense of community http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=8&article=31 http://ctb.ku.edu/ http://gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/en/tool.php?issue=19&tool=13 global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 continues to be a keystone to community well-being (or the lack of it). first, badali, grande, and kassabian look at how community affects refugees resettling in canada. they note that peer support helps build sense of community for those who have been displaced from their native communities by violence, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 assisting in their resettlement. next, ojeda and gonzalez describe how art therapy in a community in mexico may be used to build sense of community as a way to reconnect with their families and the others in their neighborhood. the third article by julian walks through the importance of leadership in fostering effective community collaboration and problem solving. the relationship between collaboration and sense of community (both between collaboration and within the community the collaborative has been established to assist) weaves thematically through this exploration. finally, suarez, turnbull, lomnitz, and polanco explore the varied interpretations of community and family support for mothers surviving in a marginalized section of mexico city, mexico. the dynamic is complicated, and the consequences of exclusion are difficult. in addition to the fantastic article here, we bring you more thoughts and stories from the field in our sidebars, so be sure to look there for inspiration and thought-provoking programs. the power of and need for a sense of community in a number of ecological contexts (from the family unit to our national and global politics) is stronger than ever. we hope you find something to take with you in these articles, and, as always, we invite you to let us know what you think here on the site, on facebook, or whatever you feel most comfortable. to read more visit: https://www.gjcpp.org/en/index.php?issue=26 10. global journal of community psychology practice – volume 7, issue 2 topic: theories in community psychology guest editor: leonard a. jason editor’s note: in the spring of 2015, lenny jason, daphna ram, and ed stevens posted this note on the society for community research and action listserv: dear scra members: according to popper (1968), good theories need to offer clear predictions that can be rigorously tested and falsified. in a sense, as you know, theories allow data to be organized, systematized, and interpreted. a group of us at depaul university are thinking about which theories are central to the field of community psychology. we would be interested in learning whether you use theories explicitly, and if you do use theories explicitly, what theories you use, and do you borrow them from other disciplines or are they from the field of community psychology. we were very gratified by the responses, and many privately asked us if we would be willing to share the responses with the larger scra community. after sharing the responses, a group of us began writing a paper that grew to about 50 pages over time. we are so thankful to scott wituk and the global journal for giving us a forum to publish our initial piece, as well as the 10 authors who wrote reaction articles to our papers. we certainly hope that this is just the beginning of the dialogue on this topic that we feel is so needed in our field. there are many methods to keep this discussion alive, including direct comments on each article, facebook, and other forums on which you http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/en/index.php?issue=26 global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 may wish to share this issue. the dialogue that occurs should be widely available to our field, using http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 various modalities including social media, so that we may continue to critically think through the very important work of community psychology. to read more visit: https://www.gjcpp.org/en/index.php?issue=22 http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/en/index.php?issue=22 catalytic framework: intersectional analysis for community engagement maryam khan1, mehek ali2, qadeer baig2, aneeta pasha2, and kausar s. khan2 keywords: intersectionality, community engagement, community psychology, catalyst, community stakeholders, global south author biographies: maryam khan began her career in development as a program associate for resource development at the community engagement centre (cec) in 2018. she holds a bsc (hons) in psychology and is presently a chevening scholar at the university of edinburgh pursuing an msc in psychological research. her research interests are grounded in understanding the impact of social class and poverty across a range of behaviours including health-seeking behaviour and inter-group interaction in the global south. she endeavours to decolonise the bridge between academic theory and community-centred research and is passionate about bringing subjects like community and social psychology to young minds in pakistan. you can find her on twitter: @maryamali_khan. mehek ali is a program manager for resource development at the community engagement centre (cec) of indus hospital & health network (ihhn). she has worked in education, mental health, and community-based innovations in pakistan since 2012. she has led the design and implementation of several community projects focusing on adolescent wellbeing, womxn empowerment, community engagement, and learning paradigms. qadeer baig is the director of the national deworming program and the youth engagement program at ird pakistan. he is overseeing the roll out of programs that provide services to youth and simultaneously leverage their social networks to improve health access. he is working to adapt and expand upon rutgers’ kiran program to integrate with ird and indus health network health services. the program is also being piloted this year in other large urban centers 1 global health directorate – indus hospital & health network, pakistan 2 interactive research and development, pakistan global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 in pakistan, and among special populations including prison inmates and transgenders. qadeer has actively contributed to research and the national discourse on ngo governance and management, sexual and reproductive health and rights (srhr) for youth, and gender violence. he has represented civil society at the un commission on population & development, mdgs and sdgs. he has served on the board of the hashoo foundation. he serves as chair of the board of family education services foundation, pakistan, and ceo of the re-established and rejuvenated ngo resource centre, karachi. aneeta pasha is the country director of ird pakistan. she is a fulbright scholar, with a ma in social sciences from the university of chicago with a concentration in anthropology. she is a development professional with over 16 years of programmatic and research experience working in the development sector in pakistan in the areas of sexual and reproductive health, and mental health. in 2014, aneeta established ird’s mental health program that aims to increase access to mental health services at the community level by increasing demand for services through awareness raising and community engagement, capacity building for a task-sharing approach that uses community health workers to deliver mental health interventions and finally, wide scale service delivery in low-income communities and health facilities. in addition, aneeta is also co-founder of the community engagement center and a member of the who – civil society task force on tb. kausar s khan serves as co-director at ird pakistan and technical advisor for several community-based projects including sujaag and pieces. she has over 20 years’ experience in community-based work with urban and rural poor, with focus on child malnutrition, womxn empowerment and community participation. her areas of research include health equity, promotion, health disparities and inequality, public health education and communication and healthcare quality. recommended citation: khan, m., ali, m., baig, q., pasha, a., & khan, k.s. (2022). catalytic framework: intersectional analysis for community engagement. global journal of community psychology practice, 13(2), 1-15. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: maryam khan, email: maryam.10.khan@gmail.com http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:maryam.10.khan@gmail.com global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 catalytic framework: intersectional analysis for community engagement abstract the community engagement centre (cec) has been active across a range of diverse urban and rural populations throughout pakistan and works closely with marginalised communities. the collective nature of pakistani culture and its social inequities has required the cec to recognize the intersections that shape contexts and situations, to promote local ownership, empower communities to identify and utilize existing resources for sustainable change, and improve health outcomes. through an immersive community engagement (ce) strategy, cec utilises participatory tools to collect stories from communities to understand their lived experiences, barriers and enablers to access, and the dynamics of power that influence these. to understand this complex relationship, a catalytic framework that examined the intersections within communities’ narratives was developed. preliminary review of community narratives collected as part of programmatic operations yielded four significant elements: (1) unique, individual circumstances, (2) aspects of identity, (3) types of discrimination (if present), and (4) larger structures that reinforce exclusion (or enforce inclusion). a unique feature identified within the process of ce was the role of ‘catalysts’ – one or many people who may have transformative potential at any of these levels due to their influence, active facilitation, or agency. this novel framework enables an understanding of the threads of experience and identifying the elements and structures that impact lives of pakistan’s diverse population. it works by recognizing the visible intersections of class, identity, gender, and power, as well as questioning what remains unarticulated, and thus promotes meaningful community engagement across different cultures and fields. introduction one of the greatest challenges to development work – be it for education, health, or other programmes – lies in gaining an intrinsic understanding of the relevant populations’ stakeholders and their unique perspectives. by attempting to construct the reality of these groups through basic demographics and limited statistics, programmes risk ‘symptomizing’ them, i.e., over-simplifying their situation, stereotyping, and minimizing their traits onto a negative or hopeless spectrum; for example, symptomizing the poor as ‘non-agentic,’ ‘lazy,’ and ‘un-resourceful’ (toro & yoshikawa, 2016). the norm is to organise findings from communities into digestible statistics, which may reduce rich and valuable information into a number that does not expand upon the contexts or the circumstances it represents. this epistemological privilege granted to empirical science and data has contributed to the suppression of non-scientific knowledge http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 and consequently, the groups whose practices and cultures were formed by such knowledge (de sousa santos, 2015). statistics, although valuable, typically do not answer fundamental questions about the nature of communities’ experiences or social dynamics which inform development work. deductions made from statistical data without the inclusion of, or unsupported by non-scientific knowledge or qualitative data, can perpetuate reductionist approaches, creating the illusion that programmes can ‘save’ communities by providing an intervention or product that is ‘much needed.’ as a methodology, community engagement aims to counter this by building equitable partnerships between organizations and local communities to facilitate shared goals, such as community representation in research, feedback in service provision mechanisms, or ensuring smooth operations (pratt, cheah, & marsh, 2020). it does so by applying the values of community psychology, which takes a multi-level ecological perspective and recognizes the need to concentrate on individuals, their communities, and their relationships (fox, prilleltensky, & austin, 2009). the community engagement centre (cec) – a joint-venture of interactive research and development (ird), pakistan and the indus hospital & health network’s global health directorate (ghd-ihhn) – has collaborated with and engaged communities across several districts in pakistan since 2017. it worked closely with low-resourced communities (identified as any populations that are systematically neglected) where ihhn’s health facilities provide services and ird’s public health programs operate. historically, public health has taken a prescriptive approach towards working in communities, whereby community stakeholders are considered ‘target populations’ that are to be intervened upon to ‘save’ them from poor health outcomes, especially in impoverished settings. this perspective strips local communities of their agency and power and reinforces structures of reliance on external funding or intervention, disabling sustainable solutions. the cec was conceived on the grounds that community engagement could remediate this ‘symptomisation’ of communities by encouraging a communitydriven and context-dependent approach to collaboratively designing and coimplementing health systems and programs with the populations involved. it was hoped that through this, organisations could gain an enriched and immersive understanding of the unique ecologies of communities they seek to serve and thus collaborate with them, moving away from conceptions of ‘target populations’ towards a more patientor communitycentered ethos. the cec worked to bridge necessary public health programmes with the nuanced contexts and existing resources in communities of interest, which can help inform strategies for implementation, innovation, and meaningful engagement that places local needs at the heart of all endeavours; i.e., to work with, rather than on, those affected and with lived experiences of adverse health conditions. the cec enabled this through identifying local agents for change who may act as catalysts, such as community members and residents, community health workers, mental health lay-counsellors, and student advocate community engagement in development, as an approach, borrows and aims to put into practice the valuable considerations of community psychology; “to solve problems for and with” communities, and create a ‘conscious strengthening’ (montero, 2012). it explores specific ecological contexts of problems that emerge through oppressive social conditions at different levels of analysis and interventions, and how change occurs over time (prilleltensky, 2001). conversely, it also explores ecological contexts that enable positive change through inclusive and equitable practices. in addition to considering http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 links between communities and wider social structures, it also aims to examine the relationships within communities experiencing injustices or promoting resourcefulness and cohesion. the cec acknowledges that true community engagement has transformative potential; attention to context and transcending of positivist epistemologies can provide us a pathway to understand how social injustice or cohesion is manifested and whether and how existing systems, including that of scientific research, may perpetuate inequality. the foundation of its operations are grounded in a belief similar to boaventura’s (2015) idea of social emancipation; that by granting equal opportunity to the different kinds of knowledge that exist and maximising their contributions, knowledge and conceptions of power can be decolonised. researchers, academics, and concerned organizations can utilize this understanding to engage in second-order change: change of the system’s values, structures, power arrangements, and allocation of resources. however, one potent criticism of research in community psychology that could carry over to community engagement work, has been that it operates under a positivist epistemology, and that consequently quantitative research and experimental designs are privileged over other forms of enquiry. this can be amended by learning about communities through participatory engagement, utilising research approaches that are critical in their epistemic, ontological, and methodological underpinning that can oppose the enduring hegemony of positivism (prilleltensky, 2001; breen & darlaston-jones, 2010).these values are what immersive community engagement attempts to reinforce in practice. all social practices involve knowledge, and the production of knowledge is a social practice (de sousa santos, 2015). considering this, our knowledge of lowresourced communities, if taken purely from statistical data and inferences formed from these, would be incomplete and flawed. to remedy this, cec has historically utilised participatory research tools and activities, collecting qualitative data in the form of narratives and stories to co-create and understand the social experience of communities. however, interpreting these experiences has been a challenge, particularly in ensuring that the knowledge gained from their interpretations of the social experience of any given community is reflective of the reality and includes the storytellers as part of the analytical and reflexive process. as part of this work, the cec discovered a need for a unique framework that could: (i) help community workers and program teams arrive at a contextualised understanding of engagement with low-resourced communities and inequalities, and (ii) explain the manifestation of action amidst the multiple, intersecting identities of a collective experience. we identified that a potent way to do this rather than viewing differing experiences as deviating from norms based on dominant groups is by incorporating an intersectional methodology into qualitative analysis. applying intersectionality to community engagement intersectionality was originally developed to describe analytic approaches that considered the meaning and consequences of multiple categories of social group membership (cole, 2009). as a ‘travelling concept’, it has taken on new meanings in different contexts. the original debate was characterized by a strong emphasis on power relations; “a matrix of domination” which explored intersecting patterns of the different structures of power and position (christensen & jensen, 2012). it was coined originally by kimberlé crenshaw, who used the metaphor of ‘intersecting roads’ to describe the ways in which racial and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 gender discrimination compounded each other (dhamoon, 2010). early articulations focused on the experiences of groups holding multiple disadvantaged statuses. in doing so, they highlighted the ways that analyses considering categories independently (such as race, gender) may be limited because in reality, power positions associated with these categories are experienced simultaneously. a corollary to this is that some members belonging to disadvantaged groups may also hold privileged identities within that group (cole, 2009); for example, men in poor households having more power than women in those households. traditional quantitative approaches in psychology that use just one identity lens may result in hypotheses about group dynamics that reinforce the hierarchies that intersectionality seeks to disrupt, reinforcing the process of ‘symptomizing’ marginalised groups, such as women of colour, who deviate from the norm (toro & yoshikawa, 2016). by challenging the long-standing value that the best theory and explanations for phenomena are those that are most parsimonious, the concept of intersectionality goes beyond reducing group experiences to a single dimension. intersectionality can also dispel misconceptions about marginalised populations perpetuated by the use of quantitative measures originally developed with mainstream samples and highly specified research focuses, with the potential for misrepresentation that this brings (stein & makowski, 2004). it can inform strategies for engagement and service provision by recognizing the multiple identity categories occupied by every individual (cole, 2009) and how intersecting identities shape relationships and outcomes (warner, settles, & shields, 2016). this is congruent with the interests of community engagement, as intersectionality can help us arrive at a contextualized understanding of social representations, such as how people live and work in organic social groups. this enables communities, researchers and other development workers to adapt approaches to innovate in contexts based on these specific dynamics. in order to construct a framework that takes into consideration (i) the existence and interdependence of social categories, (ii) their ecological value and influence, (iii) the existence of injustices and inequalities in said ecology, and (iv) the presence of a penetrating force (‘catalyst’) across multiple identities, we propose a catalytic framework for intersectional analysis, grown from the context of our community engagement efforts in pakistan that can further add to the field of community psychology. creating a catalytic framework for intersectional analysis from a social constructionist perspective, reality varies for individuals with different identities and intersectionality thus challenges the psychologist’s ability to derive a single, parsimonious theory or explanation. it requires researchers to consider the social context and the role of power and social structural factors. this, aptly described, as the “noise of interlocking identities and social structures”, is an important and interesting aspect of the intersectionality approach (warner, settles, & shields, 2016). through this, one can expose structures of inequality; for example, by demonstrating how consensual versions of reality maintain the status quo while there is evidence of discord in suppressed experiences. one of the cec’s prime concerns was to examine the reality of the contexts in which individuals exist and their influence on the construction of social experience, especially in the context of low-resourced communities. the researchers propose four elements, any combination of which can be found in a given http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 social experience: (1) unique, individual circumstances, (2) aspects of identity, (3) types of discrimination, and (4) larger structures that reinforce exclusion (or enforce inclusion). furthermore, we suggest that the presence of a ‘catalyst’ at any of these levels can transform the social experience (see figure 1). figure 1. the four intersecting areas of social experience through the intersectional catalytic framework. concerned with the construction of social experience, christensen and jensen (2012) highlight that the analysis of life stories is important in intersectionality research because it is through narratives that people draw on different categories in reflecting on their lives. narratives are where people ‘play lead roles and write the script’, thereby signifying the important characteristics and identifiers of their lives (christensen & jensen, 2012; bruner, 1990). identity is therefore a sum of which stories humans tell of themselves in relation to social categories such as gender, class, and ethnicity; intersectionality is ultimately related to belonging – as people’s life stories are based on belonging to and identifying with such categories (marková, 2007; howarth, 2006). the concept of the “dialogical self”, the theoretical understanding that identity emphasizes that individuals speak from different “i”-positions throughout their narrative, also offers potential in the studies of intersectionality (linell, 2009; christensen & jensen, 2012; mead, 1934; gillespie, 2012). using the dialogical approach, intersectionality can be explored in narratives by examining how people stress their different affiliations in their life stories. the cec has turned to the narratives and stories created by communities and collected by community health workers to understand these aspects in the development of the catalytic framework. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 the catalytic framework in steps step 1: frame the research question the first step towards an intersectional catalytic analysis is the formulation of a clear research question (drisko, 2005). as the cec works closely with low-resourced communities and engages them to be agentic and take action to improve their lives, the main question asked is: “what challenges do we (low-resourced communities) experience in our aspirations towards change?” the secondary question is: “to what extent do certain social categories enable agency more than others?” the term ‘low resource’ is relative; in the face of a challenge presented within a community, there may be characteristics or resources that community members possess to tackle said challenges, though perhaps not all of these are available at a given time. this is where the identification of existing resources amongst diverse community members can foster localized solutions via active collaboration. this consideration is compatible with the catalytic framework as various intersections across categories can enable successful resolution of a challenge. step 2: intersectional analysis of narrative the second step involves applying the framework to qualitative data; in this case, narratives. the narratives are first read and sorted into the categories as outlined in table 1. a. type of narrative. first, the narrative must be identified as a story that is either groupbased – involving multiple parties – or individual, wherein a unique person’s social experience is described. b. type of experience. utilizing the dialogical approach, the social experience can be discerned on two levels on which the narrator(s)’s “i”-positions would differ; as an “i” or a “we”: 1. the collective experience (“we”). a story that is shared, retold by either multiple stakeholders belonging to a collective identity or a specific individual who identifies as belonging to the collective group. this can aid in understanding who is really telling the story. 2. the individual experience (“i”). an individuals’ experience with a narrative, which could be group-based or unique to a specific person who is part of that group. this can aid in understanding the impact of a shared narrative at an individual level. identifying the type of experience (‘i’ or ‘we’) occurring is the next part of analysing the narrative. c. is there a catalyst? if narratives are where individuals play the ‘lead role and write the script’, the catalyst is the ‘plot-twist’. this concept came about after cec practitioners made observations that communities and individuals are often catalysed into action, by either other community members, community health workers, or by themselves through self-reflection or circumstantial shift. we thus hypothesize that these catalysts begin actions that may take place across one, multiple, or all intersections of the narrative. we anticipate that the extent of a catalyst’s effect depends largely on the power differentials, positionality, typology of action, and receptiveness of the community. hence, the catalysed action is impacted by the intersecting aspects that are enabling or disabling in the narrative. d. which areas of social experience are influenced? the final categorisation requires identifying the ecological areas in the narrative. this includes investigating the preexisting experiences or structures that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 table 1. elements of the narratives in the intersectional catalytic framework. influence the narrative, as well as whether action takes place in one area or intersects over multiple areas of social experience (see appendix a for a short example). any combination of the four aspects of social experience can thus be present (see figure 1). step 3: the “other” question the third step in our methodology is asking mary mastuda’s famous “other question” (lutz, 2015): “when i see something that looks racist, i ask ‘where is the patriarchy in this?’ when i see something sexist, i ask ‘where is the heterosexism in this?’ when i see something that looks homophobic, i ask ‘where is the class interest in this?’” matsuda’s question means that one needs to avoid: (1) the narrow focus on one social category and related source of (dis)advantage, and (2) the mentioning of multiple differences without taking them into account in the analysis of the social experience at hand. this comes after the elements of the story have been identified and helps to unpack the different pieces of the story, including those that have been silenced or concealed in the narrative. these can be brought to light by reflecting on the story alongside community members and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 with researchers’ context-enriched understanding. step 4: narrator’s insight. the fourth step is to pay particular attention to categories that the narrators highlight themselves (for instance, identity, structural forces, circumstances). this does not mean that the highlighted category is the most important; instead, it might reveal the facet through which the individual feels most marginalized and is therefore most defended (lutz, 2015). conversely, one could look for facets that foster strength and efficacy within experiences, such as one’s role in a community (as a community health worker, parent, or elder), infrastructural availability(such as proximity to facilities or access to public transport) or the circumstances surrounding the event (including having personal connections or resources). this can inform analysis by highlighting the individual’s or collective’s source of power. discussion the proposed framework for an intersectional approach to qualitative analysis of experiences in low-resource contexts is a much-needed development for community engagement. it is one that attempts to dissect and understand the lived social experience in its true ecological sense; it challenges the researcher’s ability to derive a single, universally-applicable theory of human behaviour, and to consider instead the particularities of a social context and the role of power and social factors at play in it we argue that an integral way to do this would be to include communities in the interpretations of their stories and experiences to generate knowledge. the catalytic framework accepts and acknowledges that individuals and communities do not exist in isolation from one another, and neither exists without the multitude of social experiences and structures of the social world surrounding them (dhamoon, 2010; christensen & jensen, 2012). the framework is intended to aid in building an ecology of knowledge, which plays a key role in granting equal opportunities to different kinds of knowledge and experience (de sousa santos, 2015). knowledge can be housed in a myriad of ways and take different shapes community participation ensures that it is molded into its truest essence. thus, inclusion through an intersectional approach can transcend representation; it can repair misconceptions engendered by the erasure of minority groups and the subgroups within them by highlighting contexts unique to them (cole, 2009). findings on groups’ or individuals’ experiences through this methodology will expectedly depart from the norms of dominant groups. the aim is to provide an understanding even of the most marginalized experiences such as those of low socioeconomic groups and ethnic, religious, linguistic, and gender minorities (cole, 2009). if community psychology endorses that context is everything, then community engagement as a methodology can only increase appreciation for how culture, context, and community shape human behaviour and can provide the reference point for efforts to learn about and be useful to the local communities that health and development workers seek to serve. embodying such knowledge allows the voices of those traditionally silenced and erased to be celebrated, and by viewing the “matrix of domination” critically, a better and more nuanced understanding of privilege can be developed (christensen & jensen, 2012). in light of this, the inclusion of the element of a ‘catalyst’ is novel to this framework as it http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 links with the vision and goals of community engagement. earlier identified as the ‘plot twist’, untangling the threads of narratives and identifying the typologies in which the catalyst acts – whether successfully or not – can shed light on the efficacy of development workers’ engagement efforts, as well as the strength and agency of communities themselves. the catalyst allows researchers and community members alike to track change overtime by identifying gradual shifts, allowing for knowledge exchange, replication, and/or adaptation for future successful endeavors. as an approach that roots itself in community psychology, it is not static or frozen, and is instead a means of understanding and knowledge building that is constantly being transformed and re-built depending on the shifts in context (montero, 2012). developments in the use of such critical and postmodern methodologies can provide a roadmap for informing interventions in a community that enable second-order change (campbell, 2014; campbell & scott, 2012; campbell & burgess, 2012). by understanding the role of identity in shaping experiences and the meaning we derive from them, social groups and collective relationships can be better understood helping to bridge psychological with sociological and political levels of analysis (campbell & jovchelovitch, 2000). this aids in the design and deployment of appropriate innovations in development work that move away from ‘saviour’ modalities, and rather advance agency and justice for those occupying multiple identities and experiencing various forms of (dis)advantage. the catalytic framework has been developed by exploring narratives collected by the cec’s community health workers who work in public health across pakistan, emphasizing an implementation-based approach that can be relevant for other development sectors. the advantage of taking an outcome harvesting approach towards developing the catalytic framework is that it emphasizes true context rather than presumptions about the efficacy of community engagement. since the cec’s scope was informed by the presence of ird or ihhn services across specific districts in pakistan, it is possible that the stories and narratives shared were influenced by community health worker representation in the area. however, since health workers were recruited and hired from within local contexts, it is likely that there was no bias in story collection or consolidation. moreover, several stories also showcased unsuccessful outcomes, emphasizing that the catalytic framework can be applied regardless of result achieved and serves to inductively identify enablers and disablers of social cohesion. as such, the framework aims to be both inclusive and flexible. additionally, our expectation is that other collectivist cultures, similar to pakistan’s, would benefit from application of such an analytical methodology. while we refrain from making assumptions, we can expect cultures which are less collectivist are still likely to face the same areas of social experience and structural challenges, albeit more as individuals than as a collective. furthermore, due to certain nuances in pakistani culture and tradition from which this framework was involved and to prevent our work from being restricted, we attempted to keep the four areas of social experience broad in the range of experiences they can capture (such as those of people with varying gender and sexual identities or displaced populations). further testing of this framework in diverse development sectors such as education, social change, and economic empowerment, as well as other cultures would prove useful to gauge its efficacy and replicability. as an implementation framework, this may serve to inform development sector practitioners about the typology of innovations most appropriate for their specific context, as well as the potential role and impact of agents for change. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 references bruner, j. (1990). autobiography and self. in j. bruner, acts of meaning (pp. 99-138). cambridge, ma: harvard university press. campbell, c. (2014). community mobilisation in the 21st century: updating our theory of social change. journal of health psychology, 19(1), 46-59. campbell, c., & burgess, r. (2012). the role of communities in advancing the goals of the movement for global mental health. transcultural psychiatry, 49(3-4), 379395. campbell, c., & jovchelovitch, s. (2000). health, community and development: towards a social psychology of participation. journal of community & applied social psychology, 10(4), 255270. campbell, c., & scott, k. (2012). community health and social mobilisation. in r. obregon, & s. waisbord, handbook of global health communication. london: wiley-blackwell. christensen, a.-d., & jensen, s. q. (2012). doing intersectional analysis: methodological implications for qualitative research. nordic journal of feminist and gender research, 20(2), 109-125. doi:10.1080/08038740.2012.673505 cole, e. r. (2009). intersectionality and research in psychology. american psychologist, 64(3), 170-180. doi:10.1037/a0014564 de sousa santos, b. (2015). epistemologies of the south: justice against epistemicide (1st edition ed.). new york: routledge. dhamoon, r. k. (2010). considerations on mainstreaming intersectionality. political research quarterly, 1(14). drisko, j. (2005). writing up qualitative research. families in society: the journal of contemporary human services, 86(4). fox, d., prilleltensky, i., & austin, s. (2009). critical psychology: an introduction (second edition ed.). sage. gillespie, a. (2012). position exchange: the social development of agency. new ideas in psychology, 30, 32-46. gillespie, a., howarth, c. s., & cornish, f. (2012). four problems for researchers using social categories. culture & pyschology, 18(3), 391-402. doi:10.1177/1354067x12446236 howarth, c. (2006). a social representation is not a quiet thing: exploring the critical potential of social representations theory. british journal of social psychology, 45(1), 65-68. linell, p. (2009). rethinking language, mind and world dialogically. iap. lutz, h. (2015). intersectionality as method. journal of diversity and gender studies, 2(1-2), 39-44. marková, i. (2007). social identities and social representations. in i. marková, social representations and identity (pp. 215236). new york: palgrave macmillan. mead, g. h. (1934). mind, self and society: from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. chicago: university of chicago press. montero, m. (2012). from complexity and social justice to consciousness: ideas that have built a community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice, 3(1), 1-13. pratt, b., cheah, p. y., & marsh, v. (2020). solidarity and community engagement in global health research. the american journal of bioethics, 20(5), 43-56. prilleltensky, i. (2001). value-based praxis in community psychology: moving towards social justice and social action. american journal of community psychology, 29(5), 747-778. stein, c. h., & makowski, e. s. (2004). asking, witnessing, interpreting, knowing: conducting qualitative research in community psychology. american journal of community psychology, 33(1/2). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 toro, j. d., & yoshikawa, h. (2016). invited reflection: intersectionality in quantitative and qualitative research. psychology of women quarterly, 40(3), 347-350. warner, l. r., settles, i. h., & shields, s. a. (2016). invited reflection: intersectionality as an epistemological challenge to psychology. psychology of women quarterly, 40(2), 171-176. doi:10.1177/0361684316641384 witteloostuijn, o. v. (n.d.). applying intersectionality as a method. utrecht university, gender studies. utrecht university. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 appendix a duba lashari, gurmani, punjab the story was written in third-person by a chw from gurmani. it was translated into english and summarized for the purpose of this appendix. consent was taken from the community to share their experience in public forums. all italic quotes are dialog that has been translated to english. duba lashari was one of 24 communities that the chws visited over a period of time in gurmani. the community welcomed them and shared their life experiences, along with the desire to collaborate closely with the chws. the community showed the chws that there was no clean drinking water in their area; they filled a bottle of water from a tap and asked the chws to hold on to it for some time to ‘watch what happens’. in a few hours, the chws witnessed the water turning a murky yellow-brown shade. one of the chws sampled it and found that it also tasted strange. the community then elaborated on how this water was a part of their daily life and diet and was causing digestive illnesses along with skin problems, especially in their children. the chws also asked about water filters nearby, and the community shared that the closest one was 5 to 6 kilometres away and required motorbikes or rickshaws to access in order to carry back enough water for everyone. the community also shared their feelings and experiences around the issue: politicians who wanted their votes would leave them with false promises to fix their water problem, the government had never taken any notice and would not change anything now. “our faith has been removed from these politicians and the government. we are poor people and they don’t care about us.” as farm-hands and labourers who work primarily on farmland, the chws then asked if they had considered asking the feudal lord of their area for assistance to which one community member responded: “we are simple workers while he is a man of power. what if he is offended by our complaint and takes away our livelihood?” many agreed with him. in an open discussion with the community, the chws raised some points about the community’s positionality: their role as workers in the fields was in fact a position of power, and the feudal lord would have no reason to remove them from work as he required their labour for his own livelihood. moved by this, the men in the community decided that they would approach the feudal lord as a group. as one person shared: “by collecting our strength, we decided we would go to him together and try.” over a period of a few days, the community approached the feudal lord about the water issue and requested for a solution – within two weeks, a tube well was installed in their village for the community to have a clean water source. step 1: identifying the research question 1. to what extent do certain social categories and phenomenon (such as feelings and ideas) enable agency more than others? 2. what gives these their sense of power? step 2: intersectional analysis of narrative type of narrative: group based, involving the community and chws altogether http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 type of experience: collective experience; the community affected by unclean drinking water. the chws become an extended part of this experience when they witness the water change colour and taste it. areas of social experience and locating the catalyst * red dots indicate catalysts identified by the researchers and community. http://www.gjcpp.org/ dark matter and dark energy: a metaphoric look at the impact of colonialism (in the village and on ourselves) jacqueline samuel keywords: author biography: jacqueline samuel ph.d. is the program director of the master of public administration and assistant professor at national louis university. she is actually returning to nlu as she earned her ma in public policy and ph.d. in community psychology. previously jacqueline served as the project manager for the housing authority of cook county, south suburban safe and thriving communities program to address youth violence in 3 suburban townships. she also facilitated and developed quality of life programs for 10 years in the south chicago area. she has served on the health and healing committee/ mayor’s commission for a safer chicago, the mayor’s kitchen cabinet commercial development advisory, advocate trinity hospital community health council, community advisory review council for the institute for translational medicine (carc) and the illinois ace’s response collaborative. her dissertation was about community engagement titled, “advancing the block club model as a violence reduction strategy”. she was also a coinvestigator for community academic collaboration to prevent violence in chicago research for lurie children’s hospital strengthening chicago’s youth. her most recent awards include national louis university reach award, ann & robert h. lurie children’s hospital courage award, and the chicago police department caps award for the 4th district area. global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 recommended citation: samuel, j. (2022). dark matter and dark energy: a metaphoric look at the impact of colonialism (in the village and on ourselves), global journal of community psychology practice, 13(1), 1 12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: jacqueline samuel, national louis university, 122 s michigan ave, chicago, il 60603; email: jsamuel@nl.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:jsamuel@nl.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 dark matter and dark energy: a metaphoric look at the impact of colonialism (in the village and on ourselves) as a tool for critical, participatory and socially transformative praxis, storytelling offers those typically silenced an opportunity to share personal stories (sonn, stevens, & duncan, 2013). this is the aim of author. whether in prose or narrative these stories from the village should be perceived as lessons, teachings, and/or scriptures. this is an acknowledgement of experiences had, to promote an awareness and awakening to the root causes of oppression. the narrative of the oppressed should be treated as delicately as one would treat any sacred journal about life because it chronicles the path of oppression and demonstrates how dark matter becomes a theoretical concept that fuels a metaphysical catastrophe. what is this dark matter? i look at black people as being dark matter. we are that mysterious substance in the universe holding it all together with our gravity-pull, as you look at us through the telescope wondering who we are. where did we come from? and how do we continue to exist? are we a threat to you? we can't be seen. no one will listen. we can bend light with our gasps, our wails, our gospel, our discourse, our rap, our rage, our outcry, our spirituals, our weeps, our silent whispers, our ebonics, our music, our complaints, our jokes, our dry humor, our stories, our peaceful resistance, our satire, our blues, our narrative, always pushed back, ignored, blamed, telling us we do not emit light. and yet you pass through us like we are not there, but you work us, drug us, redefine us, tax us, imitate us, enslave us, cheat us, berate us, watch us and secretly peep at us, stereotype and profile us, arrest us, kill, kill, kill us, suppress us. (gasp) i can't breathe…. well, we exist. we are dark matter. to my community sons thinking that "nobody's praying" for you.... dark energy is an unknown form of energy, this is you, my son, hypothesized to permeate all of space, my dreaded babies with your sagging pants, rage and outrage, shooting to the sky with your anger, swagger, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 your intellect, your presidency, your rhythmic soul, your blue note, your mystery. you tend to accelerate in your immediacy, time to recognize the expansion of your being, presence, in the universe, to finally be heard, all indicating that you, my black energy, are expanding like the sound and splash of the water drum, as you form your resilient voice at an accelerating rate, please know that, we are praying for you. decolonializing space: my re awakening these two poems came from a moment of decolonializing space with my fellow authors. it was a rich and inspiring discourse that felt like an intellectual pilgrimage as we were discovering our truth. one night i was flipping the channels on tv, and i landed on pbs, and they were talking about dark matter and dark energy. dark matter is theorized as a material or substance that cannot be seen in of the universe, (www.science.nasa.gov). it was fascinating to see how much effort these scientists were using as they tried to understand these properties but they just really do not know what dark matter or dark energy is and i felt that it summed up the perceptions and summations as to who we are as black people. i see black people as being this dark matter because of our history of inventions and innovations that hold the world together such as building the white house, pyramids, the time clock, the traffic light, etc. i see our black men as this mysterious dark energy, and even though dark energy is speeding up the expansion of the universe, i feel the same type of oppressed energy being expelled to destroy them. all of these thoughts happened around the same time i was listening to kendrick lamar's new pulitzer prize-winning album called, "damn" which captures the contemporary lifestyle of black men today. when he says, "nobody praying for me," those words went through the very core of my being like that oppressive energy. i felt this fullness, unexplainable presence, inner pain but it was not tangible, almost like a phantom ache or pain, that sensation a person has when they have lost a limb, and it feels like it is still there, but it hurts. it filled my body. i was grief-stricken. sad. i felt that i, we, they, have let our children down. our village is no longer protecting our children. that sacred piece of our legacy. why? if i can take accountability or acknowledge this wrong, why doesn't our oppressor? what is the value in destroying a child, a people, their dreams? it is mean, evil, greedy, disastrous, ugly, devilish, and immoral. it is every gunshot into the backs of black men. it is an assassination of the human spirit. it rapes us of our purpose. our young people should never, never feel uncared for, unwanted or invisible. if i could, i would exchange those words, "nobody prayin' for me," for any expletive or adolescent filled sexual innuendo that would be expected in a song or rap, sung through an exploration of "voice." this was different. it was not exploration but a declaration of one's truth. anything other than those words. this broke my spirit. i bow my head with my hands over my ears, and i sit in silence. i realize that these feelings have been sitting dormant. this is what the impact of colonialism feels like. the destruction of a sense of community as it transforms into a metaphysical catastrophe. in august 2019, america celebrates its 400th http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.science.nasa.gov/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 anniversary of the first slaves brought to america. in the darkness of its belly, the boy---his name was malawi---lay pressed against its wet, wooden hull, naked and chained to a corpse that only hours before had been his older brother, oboto. down there, the air was curdled, thick, with the stench of feces and decaying flesh. already the ship’s rats were nibbling at oboto’s cold stiff fingers. malawi screamed them away whenever they came scurrying through a half a foot of salt water toward his brother’s body. he held oboto as the boat thrashed, throwing them from side to side, and the rusty chains hit deeper into his wrists. but by now, after seven weeks at sea, the rats were used to screams, moaning, and cries in the lightless entrails of the ghost ship. (charles johnson, 1998) in 1940, richard wright wrote the classic novel, native son, about the life of bigger thomas a young black male living in poverty and suffering from oppression. the irony between these stories is how it opens up with bigger in a slum apartment in the 1930’s on the south side of chicago, fighting off a rat with his brother to the screams and cries of their mother and sister in despair. except bigger was different than malawi. malawi was raised in a village that cared for him before he and his brother were stolen into to slavery. bigger represents that mysterious dark energy of black men today as he gets caught up in a horrific crime. this demonstrates the crucial moment where dark matter transforms into a metaphysical catastrophe. metaphysical catastrophe is when a community in hardship becomes at war with itself. this war, self-hatred, inferiority, lack of belonging in the dominate culture, is viewed as normal to society. war zones are created where extreme violence and constant low level violence is directed to these communities in hardship. whether war is within or against these communities everyone becomes desensitized (maldonadotorres, 2007). these two stories example the path of oppression and metaphorically demonstrates the wave of the universe and how these two stories continue to repeat itself and now at a faster pace like the expansion of dark matter in the universe. this wave in the universe evolves into expansionism. every wave emits this dark energy filled with dark matter which in turns sustains oppression. from ancient conquests, the debate of whether christopher columbus really discovered america, through the height of the slave trade, and the human trafficking of today, there is always that historical moment where the first wave of interaction is an exploration of a group that considers themselves as missionaries. this is what happens to malawi. they start with a welcoming venture that betrays the indigenous by shackling them into oppression. usually under the guise of christianity, they bond with converts, find an ally in the elements, and craft a utopia (charles johnson et.al, 1998). however, these colonists are nothing short of being arrogant, greedy, thieves or as del jones best coined the phrase, “culture bandits”. then this indigenous group is subjugated by these culture bandits and exploited in various degrees of severity. this is the global slave trade. there seems to be a lull or stagnation where the indigenous group learns to adapt to the situation. through this adaptation a subculture among the indigenous group evolves and thus begins the next stage of oppression called cultural appropriation. the term “cultural appropriation” which is steeped in debates of its authenticity. it is difficult to simply define it without challenges from those that are ether not affected by it or by those guilty of the taking. unfortunately, the meaning can get so caught-up into rhetoric that the arguments become a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 distraction. cultural appropriation for this narrative is defined as a dominate group benefiting from appropriating or utilizing something that is culturally significant and originated by an indigenous group. however, the indigenous group is either penalized, degraded, stereotyped or all of the above and their dark energy expands into this identity crisis. maldonaldo-torres calls them war zones, where some in the indigenous group assimilates to the dominate culture while the others resorts to violence and selfdestruction. in other words, people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave—position themselves in relation to the civilizing or dominate language: i.e., the metropolitan culture. the more the colonized or indigenous group has assimilated the cultural values of the metropolis, the more they will have escaped the bush. the more they reject their blackness and the bush, the whiter they will become (fanon, 1967). this is dark matter. it is this stage of expansionism or where bigger gets “caught-up” in their own oppression and the metaphysical catastrophe begins. my universe: my roots my father was born in chicago in 1924, but he grew up in the south, union springs, alabama. at this time 16 lynchings had been recorded and the ku klux clan had a membership of 4.5 million (cowan, et al. 1998). my father met my mom, in alabama. my paternal grandmother had a store in tuskegee, alabama and he met my mom in tuskegee when she was attending college. my mother was born and raised in notasulga, alabama, macon county where racism and oppression were at its best. my father served in world war ii. after serving in the war he went back to alabama to get my mother and they married and moved to chicago. his first job was working for fuller hair care products and later worked his way up to security at the united states post office. he died from the usual maladies of oppression, complications of high blood pressure when i was 17 years old. to this day my sister and i could argue that we were daddy's little girl and we both would be right. he always treated my mom, sister and i like queens. he worked hard and loved my mother dearly. it is funny how i know this since i never saw them ever display public affection, it was the 60's and 70's and they did grow up in the south. during that time black love seemed subtle. you cannot help but think that this subtleness came from slavery through an inherited strategy to protect the family unit from being separated or torn apart. however, you would see and feel black love in the family through actions of care and family engagement. no matter the circumstances of what life would throw your way during that time you would feel safe, loved and strong, because you belong. i recall one day when my mother had surgery, and the doctor came out to tell us she was ok. we all had our backs to my father when the doctor turned to address him about instructions for my mother's home care. we turned to face him, but my father had disappeared. when we called for him, he walked around the corner wiping his eyes with relief. at a young age, i imagined he privately thanked god. the other sign of love for my mom was him repeatedly playing wilson pickett's song, “i'm in love”, over and over again until he would fall asleep in his favorite chair sipping his jack daniels. i love and still miss him. i remember our last dinner together. he looked deep into my eyes with this all-knowing look of pride, sadness, with a smile and a silent goodbye not knowing that he had instilled enough love to protect his family for a lifetime. as for my mother, i still stand in awe of her http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 94+ years of life and her ability to live through my extended adolescent years during her menopause. there really should be a medal for any black woman that can survive that. i contribute her survival from her life living in the south. she grew up on the farm, attended a one classroom rosenwald school and graduated from tuskegee institute, now tuskegee university, with a degree in homemaking. she ran track, played basketball, and picked cotton on the farm. her historical stories range from, working for george washington carver in school, working in an ice cream parlor owned by booker t. washington, and seeing the nurse come to town to test the blood of black men during the infamous syphilis experiments. she is a retired school teacher which explains why it was no doubt that my sister and i were expected to attend college. i was raised with the same values taught to me by the village like the slave children in velma kings book, stolen childhood, to be good, do my chores, be honest, turn the other cheek no matter how painful, and respect your elders. i am the civil rights legacy and potential that my parents, ancestors, activists, faith leaders, educators, and the rest of the village invested in. i lived through the lull and stagnation of oppression where the village found a way to adapt. i learned how to navigate the racism without rage and quietly live among my own and strive for my goals. to survive, get an education, a good job, and acquire a lifestyle that is sustainable. this village, "sense of community" had its boundaries and it kept us safe. my father and mother's village kept them safe but today we are surrounded by these broken fences and destructive war zones in our lost community villages. i feel like i am living langston hughes' poem "dream deferred" and nothing hurts more than when you see your people in such strife especially when you want to see them thrive. my universe: the self awakening i was a born into the civil rights movement. it positioned my generation to be the legacy and bearer of all treasures and gains accomplished during this time. in hindsight, it was a success. between 1960-1972 the civil rights movement had accomplished what it had set out to do: integration, equal rights and justice. in terms of integration we were able to use public schools, business, and services. as for equal rights we could work in places where we once could not enter. justice was a historical achievement where we obtained the right to vote. in 1960 28% of the black population was eligible to vote and it grew to 66% by 1968(grant, 1996). it was not perfect but it was definitely a monumental advancement for black people because i was the first generation never to see a “white only/colored only” segregation sign. this is called an “oppression lull”, were the oppressed adapt and thrive within a time span. so i watched what was happening in my universe. i did not always understand, but i had my big sister, nine years my senior, to explain to me what was happening. i was a voyeur. she shared the difference between the black panthers and the black stone rangers, her day in school when president kennedy was assassinated, and the day at home when we heard the news report that the reverend dr. martin luther king was assassinated. she was my village guide protecting my innocence. someone i could trust. i am not sure i knew what i was feeling at the time other than feeling safe, but i knew that my color had something to do with what was going on in the world. it was a very paradoxical time in my life. the news was filled with the fatalities of war which did instill this hidden and unspoken fear. at some point, i remember thinking that war was just a common part of life. then these hurtful acts of racism were another part of my life that i didn't worry about unless i ventured outside http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 of my black community boundary. i will never forget when my sister started driving, and we had a chance to explore the city a little bit more. this was when i learned that there were some communities that we should not visit. one summer my sister drove through marquette park after visiting ford city shopping mall. this is the park where the reverend dr. martin luther king jr. was hit in the head with a brick during a peace march. however, i was not aware of this incident at the time. we knew to stay on the main streets to get to the other areas that were safe for us to be. we were sitting at a stoplight and there was a group of white male bikers sitting on their bikes. i remember feeling uncomfortable as i turned and briefly looked at them and quickly looked at the traffic light waiting for it to turn green. i never said anything. i was afraid to move and let the window up. i am not sure if my sister noticed, but it seemed like that light was red for hours. the hot summer sun felt like a spotlight emphasizing our presence. without words, i knew by the look on their faces that we were not welcome and by the grace of god nothing happened. we got a pass. racist things were always happening to my people, but it was rarely discussed with my peers or my family. i was living in an economically diverse community where we all looked out for each other, and the village allowed us to be children. this was the purest form of mcmillan and chavis' (1986) sense of community. we had a shared emotional connection. so when i saw anything undeniably black, it was cause for celebration. i was doing the "good foot" (dance) to james brown, "say it loud, i'm black, and i am proud!" however, between the assassinations of our leaders and our black men going to war, in my reflection, i believe it was the protection of the village and the black arts movement that was a part of shaping the pride in my community. by now it is the heart of the 70’s and as a people we were beginning to come into our own. by having the ability to vote we entered the 70’s with a 121% increase of black elected officials. a far cry from the 62% in 1962 (grant, 1996). by 1972 we had officially moved into the black liberation movement. i grew up in the largest working/ middle-class neighborhood in the united states called chatham, on the south side in chicago, illinois. our neighbors were blue and white collar workers, artists, teachers, principals, stay at home moms, all respectfully living together. there were also people that lived in our community that was troubled, but they were accepted and respected. we had shared values, exchange of resources. it was nothing for a “stay at home mom” on the block to babysit the rest of the children until their parents got home from work. when i was growing up our artistry was something that white people were curious about but didn't understand. our achievements were coming quick and we were as mysterious as dark matter. our song, dance, style, and speech was different, and it could not be mastered or duplicated. if someone tried, we would laugh, laugh, laugh. it felt like it was all we had. we simply called it "soul." to me, it was more than soul. it is what jazz musicians call the "blue note." our "soul" was that essence of the blue note, those musical notes that are normally not played together but when played in this unexpected way it creates a vibe that will make you blurt out the words "coool." however, the dark matter of it was that you did not see many black people on television, but when you did, you would call the whole family to come and watch. "mama! mama! tina turner is on tv! on saturday's we would clean the house to nat king cole or johnny mathis. never a saturday afternoon went by without watching the dance show "soul train." my best memory was the day my sister took me to my first black owned bookstore, liberating. i remember buying an anthology of black plays and thinking, "wow we can say that?" this is where my love of theater came from. it gave me a voice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 freedom. i was reading literature that told the story of my ancestors, and i remember being proud to be black. it was more than pride, i was glad. it was my decolonializing selfawakening, a moment where you understand who you are in this universe and you know you belong. our villages today are different i can almost benchmark when i noticed the changes happening in our villages. by the mid-70’s we were losing our political gain. the fbi was successful and destroying the momentum of the black panther’s as they were either fighting for their freedom in the courts of law or electing to leave the movement or to another country for their nationalist reasons (grant, 1996). by the time the prolific black panther leader huey p. newton got out of jail we were in the 80’s and in the beginning of the crack epidemic, in which he succumbed. the best visual that captured change in our communities was one scene in the mario van peeples' movie "new jack city." it was the scene where five young men were singing doo wop on their neighborhood block when it was flourishing and it slowly fades to 3 years later, with only three guys singing, slovenly clothed, trying to keep warm over a garbage can fire pit. my real life image was driving down approximately 60th and south king drive and everyone came out on the streets, hanging out their windows and balconies, celebrating one of the chicago bulls basketball team championships. we were all honking our horns, screaming and shouting, having a good time. it did not matter what neighborhood you were from in chicago at that moment. then ten years later that whole block of buildings was abandoned. hip hop and sagging pants were on its way and gangster rap and drive-by shootings became the norm, we were leaving our dark matter. the places, spaces, and mechanisms that allowed us to express and be ourselves as a people are either reduced or no longer exist. our "soul" has been corrupted, copied, defused, marginalized, captured and stolen. or basically, we were being culturally appropriated to the point where prince and michael jackson had to take a stance. our dark matter has been synthesized, criminalized, subjugated and uneducated. this is how oppression sustains itself. dark matter becomes a theoretical concept that benchmarks the peak of the existence of oppression where the oppressed becomes conveniently invisible to society, perceived as inferior and loses its protective factors, in this case the village, and the norms become distorted and destructive. we are all “bigger” now. thus opening the gateway to a metaphysical catastrophe. the cost to colonialism along with policies and practices that create an economic disadvantage for communities of color, violence has played a significant role in our country's legacy of oppression. our system of government is built on a foundation of depriving people of color of their rights and controlling people of color through violence. the regime of slavery was upheld through violence at the hands of slave owners and the law, laying the groundwork for a long history of discrimination, violence, and oppression at the hands of our government and society at large (buitrgo et al. 2017). what we fail to realize is that there is a cost to colonialism. according to the chicago department of public health (2018), the average life expectancy in chicago between low hardship communities and high hardship communities is 8 years and the gap significantly widened by 3.4 years beginning in 2012. violence is one of the largest contributors to this gap. the chicago region's homicide rate would drop by 30 percent—the equivalent of saving 229 lives in chicago in 2016—if we reduced the level of segregation http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 between african americans and whites to the national median (metropolitan planning commission, 2017). if 167 more people had lived that year, they would have had earnings of some $170 million throughout their lifetimes (shapiro, 2012). the chicago region would have saved some $65 million in policing costs and an estimated $218 million in corrections costs. residential real estate values would have increased by at least $6 billion (metropolitan planning commission, 2017). accelerating forward: another wave in the universe the damage has been done, and there is no turning back. how do we free ourselves to capture our own self-determination? first, we must understand the paradox of resilience. the apa (2014) defines resilience as "the process of adapting well in the face of diversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or even significant sources of stress. although i find resilience to be an attribute of survival it also has a double edge to it. when you go through trauma, you usually go through a fight, flight, or freeze collectively but to be resilient; you tend to suppress the most harmful aspects of the situation individually. that is the double edge of resilience. you find a way to push past the traumatic situation but what we need is healing. but these experiences are often kept secret, as are our courageous battles to overcome them (jay, 2017). is this where we go wrong? we hold our secrets so close to our chest when we should be telling our children and share with our village about our struggles so they can learn from them. when we keep secrets and suppress our trauma we suffer alone. we “dis-ease”, high-blood pressure, diabetes, and cancer. we must understand that trauma and healing are collective experiences, therefore we must heal collectively. in order to promote well-being, we must work collectively. our village needs to control the conditions of our life circumstances which is a function of social justice. in order to do this, we must have a sense of hope, ability to pursue dreams, and facilitate our well-being (ginwright 2010). i could never get my grandmother to share the stories of our family history. thank goodness my mother did. a friend told me that their big family secret is that they killed their plantation master and buried him. this was a secret the family shared but they controlled their condition to gain their collective freedom. this story was not told in fear or fright i heard a story that demonstrated how this family healed collectively. when we decolonize space, we heal through sharing our stories. when i was young every summer, we would visit my grandparents on the farm in alabama. we would always drive south. i remember that certain situations would trigger anxiety in me during the trip, such as, driving in stormy weather because i was afraid we would have an accident; get lost on the road, harassed by strangers and never see home again. however deep the stress, the collective healing came from being with my family no matter what the trigger. i didn't know much about racism at the time, but i recall my father being treated poorly by a white waitress and my mother had to step in and smooth the situation over. these were not traumatic events, just stressful. my parents, my protectors, were being threatened, but when i reflect on these situations today, could these stressful moments still have an impact on me? to this day i prefer to drive because it makes me feel like i have control over where i am going. whether the weather is good or bad, if i am lost or not, if i am driving i am not upset. how about my father, being harassed by the white waitress? were there incidents later in his life that triggered unconscious memories http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 of that waitress? could this have been yet another “universe” wave of oppression? did this situation represent the rat that tormented malawi and bigger? was my father malawi, representing the men of his generation? could bigger represent our young men today facing neighborhood violence and police brutality? like malawi, my father was psychologically stolen from the safety of his village while trying to provide a simple meal for his family? could this have been a stressor that was the catalyst of his high blood pressure? as a family, we never talked about the situation. however, i know he was not a fan of going to any restaurant or gas station on the road when driving in the south. my grandmother would make our lunches for our trip home, and we stopped at many bushes when we needed to go to the restroom. at the time i was too young to understand the dynamics of the south. of course, i learned more about racism as i got older but i can't help but wonder if i got sick on that trip because someone at that restaurant put something in my hamburger. the normalization and ordinary actions of self-defeating behaviors: a calling for our villages as a community psychology practitioner working in many communities that are going through a metaphysical catastrophe, you will see villages with sounds of gunfire mixed with underfunded community efforts, giving children some poor semblance of a childhood. a space filled with a dark energy where corruption goes unnoticed between all of the abandoned houses and lifeless backyards. these war-torn playpens where this extraordinary behavior takes place and becomes normal and ordinary in colonial contexts and wherever there are colonial subjects (maldonado-torres, 2016). it is the result of these inequities in society driven by the impact of racism, poverty and oppression that sparked my servitude. one day i shared this story in front of academics that were interested in my work in the community. my question: how do you heal a community? how do you heal a community from seeing arnold mireles gun downed because he stood up to the gangs? and what about the little girl in our community named neenee that was ready to go back to school after labor day weekend but lost that chance to a bullet? i was talking to a teenager that lives in the community, and he had expressed that he had been shot in the leg three times. i asked him about his wellbeing and what was going on in school. he said, "school? i don't go to school much, and when i do, i am wondering why am i still alive, and will i get home safe." so, last summer i surveyed 126 people in the community to better understand the impact of violence. i learned that 51% had witnessed a shooting. all i could think about is, if you have to live with that kind of trauma then what must your life look like? walking to the store for a bottle of milk looking over your shoulder to see if someone might harm you---can't go to the parkcan't sit in a car. then this past january this one girl in the community, sakina, my only community girl that could handle the boys playing basketball, was ambushed by a spray of bullets. see, you don't understand, she was my hope for the future, she was the glimpse of what my mother must have been like on the basketball court in her youth. sakina was just taken…. never to see another day. (samuel, 2016) i thought it was important to share my sacred story to decolonialize my space. there are villages that are still out there but they are in a metaphysical catastrophe in which they think life is normal and ordinary. their shear ability to adapt in this violent culture already makes them resilient because they are surviving the best way they can. malawi was http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 resilient, bigger was resilient. but what we need is healing, a collective healing that will spare the lives of all of the neenee’s and sakina’s out there. we need an awakening that will spark the engagement of our village to heal collectively by preparing our youth to walk in our shoes, be educated, vote, tell our stories often, lead with self-determination, be radical, stand for something, stand for the future of our children because they are our legacies and gateway to eternal life in our universe of dark matter. references american psychological association (2014) www.ncbi.nim.nih.gov breggin, p. r. (2000). reclaiming our children. cambridge, ma: perseus books. buitrago, k., rynell, a., & tuttle, s. (2017, march). cycle of risk: the intersection of poverty, violence, and trauma in illinois. heartland alliance. available at www.heartlandalliance.org/povertyrepor t ginwright, s. (2016) hope and healing in urban education: how urban activist and teachers are reclaiming matters of the heart, routledge dark energy, dark matter, (2017) www.science.nasa.gov cohen s, prachand n, bocskay k, sayer j, schuh t. (2016) healthy chicago 2.0 community health assessment: informing efforts to achieve health equity. chicago department of public health jay, m. (2017) supernormal: the untold story of adversity and resilience, hatchette book group king, wilma (1995) stolen childhood: slave youth in nineteenth century america, indiana university press. maldonado-torres, n. (2016). outline of ten theses on coloniality and decoloniality. foundation frantz fanon. metropolitan planning council, (march 2017). www.metroplanning.org/costofsegregati on mcmillan, d.w. and chavis, d.m. (1986) sense of community a definition and theory. journal of community psychology, 14, 623. patterson, o. (1998). rituals of blood: consequences of slavery in two american centuries. washington, dc: civitas/counterpoint shapiro, robert j. and kevin a. hassett. "the economic benefits of reducing violent crime: a case study of 8 american cities." center for american progress, (2012). https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wpcontent/uploads/issues/2012/06/pdf/vi olent_crime.pdf samuel, j. (2016) reach awards speech. sonn, c. c., stevens, g., duncan, n. (2013). decolonisation, critical methodologies and why stories matter. in race, memory and the apartheid archive: towards a transformative psychosocial praxis, chapter 15, p 295-214. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.ncbi.nim.nih.gov/ http://www.science.nasa.gov/ https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2012/06/pdf/violent_crime.pdf https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2012/06/pdf/violent_crime.pdf https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2012/06/pdf/violent_crime.pdf global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 politicized healing: addressing the impact of state sponsored violence troy harden 1 and elizabeth deligio2 keywords: state sponsored violence, racism, racialized trauma, torture, liberation, and collective healing author biographies: troy harden, phd, lcsw has over 25 years’ experience working in higher education and community settings. his on-going research interests are in racial equity, community violence, and social trauma and interventions within community and organizational settings. he recently developed and led northeastern illinois’ university’s master of social work program, and is now director of the race and ethnic studies institute (resi) and faculty in the department of sociology at texas a & m university. he has worked closely with communities partnering for peace (cp4p), an effort to develop violence interventions for african american and latino street outreach workers addressing violence in chicago. as well, he is the lead researcher with the department of justice bureau of justice assistance’s community-based crime reduction grant in englewood, partnering with the englewood public safety task force. he has served as a leadership consultant with multiple institutions on issues of race, gender and poverty, including the city of chicago’s department of family support services, the latino policy forum, chicago public schools, fathers, families, and healthy communities, the pan african association, the illinois african american coalition for prevention, burrell communications and cook county’s project brotherhood, a black men’s health clinic. he is also board president of the chicago torture justice center, which provides mental health and community services for survivors of police 1 texas a&m university & chicago torture justice center 2 chicago torture justice center http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 torture by chicago police commander jon burge and others impacted by statesponsored violence. he received an outstanding educator award from congressman danny k. davis in 2017, is a graduate of loyola university chicago’s master of social work program, and received his doctorate from depaul university’s school of education. liz deligio, mdiv, phd is a community psychologist with over ten years of experience in the psycho-social accompaniment of impacted communities. liz has worked with communities throughout chicago and internationally. she began her career accompanying communities impacted by the loss of public housing. as she pursued a masters of divinity and then later a ph.d. in community psychology, her work became more expansive, focusing on state violence, memory, and collective healing. liz deligio was a member of the cómision ética in colombia, a coordinator for capacitar training with impacted youth in kabul, and currently works with the chicago torture justice center addressing police violence in chicago. recommended citation: harden, t. & deligio, e. (2021). politicized healing: addressing the impact of state sponsored violence. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(2), 1 12. retrieved day/month/year, (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author(s): troy harden (tharden@tamu.edu) and elizabeth deligio (eininn@gmail.com) http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:tharden@tamu.edu mailto:eininn@gmail.com global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 politicized healing: addressing the impact of state sponsored violence from 1972 to 1991, the chicago police department (cpd), particularly cpd commander jon burge, systematically tortured over 120 predominately africanamerican men into false confessions for crimes that they did not commit, resulting in several decades of incarceration for many of these men. after years of activism, in may 2015 the chicago city council offered an unprecedented response to oppressive and anti-black racism demonstrated by the chicago police department by approving an ordinance to provide reparations to those harmed by racially-motivated law enforcement violence. the reparations ordinance included the creation of a community center informed by the needs of survivors of police torture. this paper explores the concept of politicized healing as a method to address racialized trauma, providing a case study and discussing the impact of race-based police violence and key aspects of the model, including how this can be supported for individuals and communities impacted by other forms of state-sponsored violence and oppression. author note: both authors are board members of the organization that is featured in the article. addressing the impact of state-sponsored violence through a politicized approach from 1972 to 1991, the chicago police department (cpd), particularly cpd commander jon burge, systematically tortured over 120 predominately africanamerican men into false confessions for crimes that they did not commit, resulting in several decades of incarceration for many of these men. after several decades of activism, in may of 2015 the chicago city council offered an unprecedented response to anti-black oppression demonstrated by the chicago police department by approving an ordinance to provide reparations to those harmed by racially motivated law enforcement violence. the reparations ordinance included the creation of a community center informed by the needs of survivors of police torture. although there are different models to address trauma, including addressing complex trauma, few explicitly offer culturally appropriate responses to racebased and state-sanctioned violence. as well, little in the literature illustrates the use of an anti-racist praxis in therapeutic or community settings. the chicago torture justice center asserts that helping individuals, families and communities heal from state violence and institutional racism requires making justice work an integral component. this paper explores the concept of politicized healing, which emerged from the community center, as a method to address racialized trauma, providing a case study and discussing the impact of racebased police violence and key aspects of the model on community psychology, including how this can be supported for individuals and communities impacted by other forms of state-sanctioned violence and oppression. politicized healing combines a set of practical approaches based on the belief that healing can be political and the political can be healing. politicized healing addresses the harm -felt or experienced by individuals and communities -caused by historic and evolving systems of oppression. for communities of color to engage actively in health and well-being, this can mean resisting conforming to practices of business-as-usual approaches that historically oppress and are designed to limit active civic engagement. politicized healing is derived from liberatory psychology and healing-centered justice practices that seek to address oppression http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 through consideration of how individuals, families and communities are harmed by oppression. politicized healing rejects an apolitical and ahistorical orientation to healing. transformation occurs through actions designed to liberate and create a just society. this paper reviews this concept by naming specific forms of injustice (in this case, state-sanctioned racialized police violence), naming how trauma is shaped by this form of violence and includes the impact of historical trauma, racialized police and institutional violence, mass incarceration, and interpersonal violence and several key factors in addressing the impacts of the justice system. politicized healing in this sense can serve as a catalyst towards antiracist praxis, addressing racial injury in one of its most public forms. trauma and race judith hermann’s seminal work on trauma introduced a frame that included both interpersonal manifestations of violence and trauma and how structural violence can create harm (herman, 1997). although clear in her work that structural forces contributed to violence and trauma, much of the research and literature that followed clearly focused on the interpersonal impact of violence, and until recently, little effort has been done to review racialized aspects of trauma. a recent text explores how social justice-informed trauma theories are developing that include the lens of historical, cultural, intergenerational and collective trauma, offering that collective and intergenerational views of trauma are not included within traditional eurocentric trauma perspectives (delgado, 2020). these incidences of collective trauma are generally brought on by the state, and rarely happen in absence of sanctioned efforts. many scholars have written through the years on the impact of this form of violence on the lives of vulnerable populations impacted by historical and contemporary oppression. however, with the development of work that specifically identifies the impact of traumatic experiences, there is a growing interest in being able to provide scholarly contributions to trauma research and interventions that seek to understand the impact of racism. for example, carter (2007) highlights how people of color have elevated levels of ptsd not explained by other factors, illuminating a point that politicized healing seeks to address; everyone in the community may be impacted by a hurricane but not everyone will be impacted by racism and a hurricane. the solutions for those impacted by both cannot look like the solutions for those impacted solely by a natural disaster. in another example, the 2020 pandemic has highlighted global disparities that previously existed. although arguably an issue that has impacted everyone on the globe, including all aspects of human life, the hardest hit has been those who have been historically marginalized, and in the u.s., particularly african american and latino populations and low-income communities. however, this is not the first recognition of health disparities within these communities. too much of psychological literature, while willing to name disparities created by racism, does not in turn offer therapeutic models that treat the unique needs of communities impacted by racism including the psychological need to end the harm. some scholars have begun to note the historical aspects of racism and white supremacy, specifically noting how the impact of slavery and state-sanctioned violence perpetuated harm that continues to manifest within the african american community (degruy, 2017). others have written how scientific racisms of the nineteenth and twentieth century, including psychoanalytic theories and psychotherapeutic practices, built models that ignored racialization and its impacts on the trauma-focused and therapeutic relationship while lending credence to genocidal projects like eugenics (stevens, 2009). other scholars have written that models that ignore the impact of historical legacies limit the understanding of how http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 trauma effects across generations (brave heart, 2003; degruy, 2017). when manmade disasters, such as slavery, interment in concentration camps, and wars occur, the impact can be seen for generations. although it is difficult to make causal claims to future generations on the impact of the trauma on a current group, narrative approaches can help understand how psychological and physical health can be impacted by traumatic events (mohatt, et al, 2014). in this way, the collective impact on a group can be seen, and should be addressed in therapeutic settings. several movements of the past have centered health concerns and practices as critical to address generational trauma, including efforts by the black panther party, citing the importance of the free breakfast program as a part of its ten-point program in order to encourage families and children to engage in healthy eating. initially, the ten-point program did not include health as a part of its strategy. in 1972, the ten-point program was ratified to include as its sixth point “we want completely free healthcare for all black and oppressed peoples” (bassett, 2016). the party established 13 free health clinics across the united states. although no longer in existence in its previous formation, the bpp set the stage for the establishment of health as a human right, and as an important part of liberation movements towards social justice for black and historically oppressed people (bassett, 2016). within the arena of health scholarship, and particularly mental health work, there is still little that discusses the impact of statesanctioned violence, as most literature focused on the impact of microaggressions that occur in the workplace and within therapeutic relationships. state-sanctioned, or state-sponsored violence can be intended or unintended violence that is either generated or supported by the state, connecting cultural beliefs, laws, and policies that harm individuals and communities (cruz, 2014; delgado, 2020). politicized healing is the belief that healing is political and that politics can be healing. utilizing the framework of heal, create, and dismantle, politicized healing seeks to locate a site of emergence between the actions/frameworks of heal/create/dismantle. this site of emergence simultaneously holds: heal(ing)addressing/redressing racialized trauma. create(ing)--imagining/designing/birthing a world without racialization. dismantle(ing) or abolition praxis- processes of justice, truth, accountability and transformation of white supremacist institutions/legacies/systems of power. politicized healing centers a holistic view of the needs and wisdoms of people impacted by racism; racialized harms impact every area of a person’s and a community’s life therefore remedies to redress them must also impact every area of an individual’s or community’s life. treating state violence and racialized violence will require looking at historical legacies, methods for individuals and communities, a critical examination of assumptions in western liberal societies of a rights-bearing ontology, and re-imagining of “past” to protect against erasure for survivors. historical legacies a discussion of trauma inevitably will include a discussion of memory as memory is central to the treatment of trauma. discussions of traumatic memory tend to focus on discrete episodes or periods of time in which a person experienced an overwhelming event. (herman, 1997) traumatic memories are often treated through a lens of post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd); a “disordering” of time in which a person is responding to the present as if the traumatic experiences of the past are still occurring (herman, 1997). much therapeutic work is focused on putting memories into the past and reestablishing a trauma survivor's relationship to the present unimpeded by past events. what is available if a trauma is past and present? what if its contemporary http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 manifestations also extend through familial lines to before a person was born? as stevens (2009) writes, the case of trauma that exceeds individual experience is also difficult to localize and thereby normalize. categories of ongoing or repeated trauma, multigenerational institutional relations, or even the sense of impending trauma that can produce ptsd symptoms, are all types of trauma that fall outside the temporal parameters of conventionally applied ptsd models (pp.2-3). historically oppressed communities, such as african americans, indigenous and latinx groups in the u.s. live with complex historical legacies including inheritance of harm and of resistance, kinship, and radical creativity. this intersection of holding the contemporary impacts and generational harm and resistance produces temporalities that are not linear. decolonial philosopher alejandro vallega (2014) writes, “the western concept of history is dependent on a specific line of temporality; the past is what has been left behind or what remains to be written by the most advanced western thought of the present; the future belongs to the western present, as does the destiny of humanity (p.105).” western european settlers and their descendants through colonization became the lone authors and meaning makers of historical events. white supremacy requires a narration of history that while able to name atrocities like slavery, decenters or even erases the impacts and in turn opportunities for redress and responsibility. through a linear framework, the past becomes something that is over rendering the harm it holds unavailable for redress. the present is not impacted by the past nor should the future be shaped by its obligations. it should be noted that, western thought continues to hold past positives in a framework that impacts the present and the future. the honorable history of establishing a republic is a living history that shapes the actions of politicians and other civic actors today and into the future. it is only histories that negatively implicate the western european settlers and descendants that no longer create impact or call out for redress. for survivors of former commander jon burge, there is no way to understand their detention, torture and incarceration outside of history. legacies from centuries of white supremacist statecraft require members of african american communities to understand history in order to address the threats they face in the present. history for impacted communities are not events abstracted away from the present; history is a continuation of harms committed against the community as well as wisdoms developed by older generations to address racism. in demonstrating this levins morales (1998) writes, “medicinal history...make[s] medicine for the cultural and psychological effects of poverty, enslavement, intense racism and patriarchal colonial rule (p.5).” historical legacies have contemporary impacts and shape the lives of individuals today. to make the impacts “medicinal” requires an intentional engagement with legacies, inherited practices, and ancestral wisdom to create collectively what can be nourishing and not just damaging from inherited legacies. a victim of a police violence, such as george floyd, joins a long line of people of color killed by state actors or aligned para-state actors such as the klu klux klan or proud boys. to approach the trauma of the floyd family through an ahistorical ptsd lens is to encourage them to put the death of their loved one into a past-ness. the grieving of their lost loved one does not have to include the fear of ongoing violence. they may move forward into a world, that while marked by grief, is free of the harm that took their loved one. this approach is not simply ineffective; it is a racist praxis that imposes onto their lives and trauma a rights bearing ontology they are not allowed. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 rights bearing a falsehood in the construction of western psychological knowledge is the centuries old ideal of a universal subject that is guaranteed a rights bearing ontology in the modern nation state. (mills, 1997) in this paradigm there can be breaches of rights, an episode of abuse, but not a total and lifelong denial of being a rights bearing subject. much of psychology presumes in the treatment of trauma that a person has the ability to move past the period of being denied their constitutionally enshrined rights. this orientation makes it difficult to research and reflect accurately the experiences of many communities in the west and in the world who are born into bodies that ta nehisi coates (2015) calls “marked for plunder (p.81).” the survivors of former commander jon burge are all from communities of color and almost exclusively african american. for many survivors the day(s) of their torture in detention was not their first encounter with law enforcement or a pervasive white worldview that stripped them of inherent dignity, giftedness, and humanity. the harm that entered their lives through detention, torture and incarceration was an escalation of the racialized violence that had marked their lives but it did not happen in isolation or as a discrete episode of abuse. it was both ordinary (quotidian racialization) and extraordinary (a unique experience of the brutality of torture). it was an attack on them as individuals and an attack on the larger black community as a warning. it was both historical (a continuation of state violence) and a unique contemporary manifestation (engaging torture to coerce confessions). christina sharpe (2016) writes, “...we must think through containment, regulation, punishment, capture, and captivity and the ways the manifold representations of blackness become the symbol, par excellence, for the less -than-human being condemned to death. (p. 21).” sharpe suggests historical and contemporary manifestations of white supremacy reveal an absence of the rightsbearing ontology that the liberal western nations state roots its history, law, and intellectual traditions within. blackness becomes not a symbol of rights but of a condemnation to a “less thanness” that brings death before it ensures protection. members of african american communities will know themselves as son, mother, brother, funny, smart, kind while also being forced to know themselves as “less-than.” this creates a multiplicity in ontologies not being a sign of pathology but simply a reflection of what is required for living in a black body. therapeutic processes need to incorporate the wisdom born of generations of black communities that have found ways to endure the grinding, eroding pressures of racialization. it is important to not impose an experience of rights bearing nor to entirely exclude it but rather let it be named in the experiences of the people who live it. treating individuals, communities and individuals in communities as explained in the previous sections, communities impacted by racialized violence live with a series of obstacles that the generalized white subject does not. african american communities live with a set of historical legacies that bring both loss and insight. they live with a multiplicity of identities, not a singular rights-bearing identity. and they live with contemporary manifestations of racialized violence. racialized violence can be directed at any member of the group because the violence is in response to a racialized identity and not to individual actions. therefore efforts to address individuals will fall short by ignoring collective impact and strengths. few models for trauma healing explicitly detail the shared impacts of racialized violence and the need for collective healing (rinkler & holland, 2018). special focus on community healing in the redress of racialized violence should be explored, as communities that survived racialized violence for generations, particularly separation and destruction of families, have developed unique concepts of kinship, community, and solidarity. these cultural practices provided mending, strength, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 inspiration, and resiliency. they are a rich and necessary resource for working with racialized trauma. it is not that the individual is not relevant in praxis for black communities it is simply that they are not the stopping point. a complex moving between individual to community and community to individual allows the therapeutic relationship to interrogate the harms and wisdoms present in the pursuit of a praxis that centers liberation. racialized violence oppresses individuals based on their relationship to a community of people deemed other and simultaneously puts pressure on the entire community. burge arrested individuals and he signaled to a larger whole he can detain and torture bodies that look this today it is not you but tomorrow it could be. resmaa menakem (2017) writes, “...trauma and healing aren’t just private experiences. sometimes trauma is a collective experience, in which case our approaches for mending must be collective and communal as well. (p. 13).” african american communities live with actual harm and the threat of harm based on racialized bodies and identities. there is no end to the trauma of racialized violence if it does not include the whole community. individual african american community members do not get to be counted out from the threat of violence through individual choice or healing praxis. the whole community must be provided the eradication of the harm and its redress. this has implications not just for developing community praxis but also for the development of psychologies that work actively to eradicate racism. the work of social justice is central to the treatment of racialized trauma. problematizing pastness “although the formal, clinical term is posttraumatic stress disorder, a more accurate term would be pervasive traumatic stress disorder. post means after, and for many black americans, traumatic stress is ongoing, not just something from the past. (menakem, p. 15, 2017).” as discussed in previous sections it is incorrect to approach racialized violence through a westerncentric linearity that is based in the belief that if an event is in the past it is not ongoing nor does it impact the present. the orientation of pastness does several problematic things: it renders legacies invisible through ahistoricity and blocks knowledge needed to understand the trauma, “pastness” prevents/delays a redress of historical harms and distorts understanding of contemporary manifestations, and “pastness” asks communities and individuals to engage a framework of closure that is not available to them as the harms are ongoing. in a pastness orientation police violence becomes separated from lynching, jim and jane crow, slavery, convict leasing, the war on drugs and mass incarceration. families separated by incarceration are not seen in line with families separated by the transatlantic and domestic slave trade. individuals harmed by vigilante violence like lynching are not seen in a relationship to the contemporary individuals harmed by state actors (including state actors who created harm by not preventing vigilante violence). authors paul and angela lederach (2010) write, we explore social healing through its metaphoric structure, with an emphasis on examples that address the simultaneity of temporal experience; of how we as humans construct meaning around our response to the past, present, and future, not as a linear concept but as lived multiple realities that are simultaneously present in the way we make sense of our lives, our place, and our purpose, particularly in the context of protracted conflict (p.9). temporal simultaneity does not ask communities impacted by racialized harm to have a separate past; instead they can mourn slavery as they would the death of a loved one, they can experience outrage over lynching in the immediate aftermath of the civil war as they do the death of trayvon martin. they can live in temporal simultaneity; unwilling to ignore the harms, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 past or contemporary, and further white supremacy’s erasure, distortion, and minimization to prevent accountability, redress, and transformation. recently, the black lives matter (blm) movement has centered the concern for racialized violence in the public sphere, particularly noting how policing impacts black bodies. some community psychology scholars have noted how a blm framework can guide critical social justice and movement practice (thomas & zuckerman, 2018) and others how blm can offer a healing justice approach towards therapy and clinical work (bartholomew, et al., 2018). politicized healing then becomes an important arc towards addressing racialized trauma. politicized healing: what is it and how does it address the gaps? politicized healing arose from years of communal reflection amongst the survivor community impacted by former commander jon burge and the detectives underneath his command. this community lived through decades of abuse perpetrated specifically by burge and the chicago police department, various states attorneys, judges, prosecutors, and mayors. the abuse included detention, exposure to methods of torture designed to induce coerced confessions, incarceration (a complex trauma holding separation/loss of family, exposure to ongoing psychological/emotional violence, loss of dreams/careers/future-ness, and ongoing exposure to a punitive/unpredictable authority structures with significant control over the well-being/options/hopes of inmates--at a minimum), segregated confinement and isolation, the disappearing of members of the community through detention (community awareness of the abuse and impunity connected with the cpd), explicit threats made to family members and loved ones who sought information/accountability, and the cruel erasure of the knowledge/lives of survivors and loved ones as they faced impunity in court rooms, prisons, police stations, and in the media. this community and its extended circle of advocates is well positioned to reflect on what it takes to address the impacts of state and racialized violence. survivors and families knew that the injuries were to individuals and the collective. survivors and families understood that burge’s confidence that he would receive impunity for his illegal actions was grounded in historical legacies with lines tracing both to law enforcement and vigilante groups. they knew that their lives stood as one mark in a longer line of history for racialized peoples and that they are impacted by the strength and wisdom of their ancestors as much as the force and ignorance of racism. finally, this community knew with measured certainty that the manifestation of racialized state violence though the mechanism of police was not in the past for them or for the community. through different community processes three main tenets emerged as definitive to the work the community was engaging: heal, create, dismantle. survivors wanted praxis for healing that reflected their experiences of power, time, and being. this included addressing the impact of the torture experienced as individuals and its impacts on the community, exploring losses associated with incarceration including the effects of persistent stress while in confinement. survivors and their loved ones wanted to build community for transforming unjust systems by dismantling white supremacist power structures. they wanted a community that holds the interpersonal connections they have with other survivors as well as allies who sacrificed in solidarity, empathize with their conditions, and perform actions that address the structural oppression. finally, they wanted to create together a world not dominated by racialized state violence, by transforming systems and community to operate in new ways toward creating peace, safety, and justice. these three tenets make up politicized healing and work to address the gaps identified in the current approaches to trauma and race. the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 following explores each tenet and examples utilized within the center. by heal, we refer to survivors engaging in a self-determined process of restoring ourselves and connecting to others and what we care about. hooks (2000) identifies love as a practice of freedom including the ability to move toward what you desire and away from what oppresses. healing from racialized violence is not a finite act or moment. it is about the freedom to move away from what oppresses (dismantle), including historical legacies and trauma, and toward what is desired (create). for the survivors, there is an understanding of the multiple ontologies that are present, and healing can be individual and collective. heal in this case study is a dynamic movement between heal/create/dismantle. we know healing is occurring because the freedom to move is there and that freedom is being put to the purpose of creating a world that is liberatory. healing in this model is not as directed toward a reduction or removal of symptoms although certainly those are metrics that may help identify that what is being created is what is needed. rather it is a reduction and removal of harm; a wellbeing that is not in spite of racialization but free of it. one such example was the creation of a “politicized grief” work group, that utilized boxing as a way to explore grief and trauma recovery. participants creating a “squaring up and letting go” toolkit, that utilized the strengths and interests of survivors to develop an intervention to address trauma and while encouraging to “fight” the system. politicized healing works to dismantle by unapologetically exposing and deconstructing systems of harm. one of the most effective social lies that reproduce white supremacy is the trope that racism necessitates tinkering at the edges of a liberal society instead of dismantling a white supremacist system. the liberal lie is clearly evidenced in the explanation of police violence resulting from a few bad apples instead of as the intentional consequences of a diseased orchard. if the trees are sick, they will always produce bad apples—if the trees are left untreated for centuries it is safe to assume the harvest is meant to be bad apples. for communities of color who live with chronic cycles of exposure to racialized harms dismantling is not a choice it is a matter of physical and emotional survival. for the survivors of the chicago torture justice center individual healing cannot be separated from social healing which requires dismantling failed power structures and creating new systems of participation. survivors engage in advocacy efforts to change policy that harms communities, advocate for torture survivors who are still incarcerated, participate in direct action events addressing injustices, and overall are active participants in transforming current systems. politicized healing helps to create by building reparative power towards new paradigms that we collectively imagine for our communities. something that is not often discussed in the treatment of trauma is the necessity of imagination. in the heal/dismantle/create dynamism, to move past the site of the rupture in an individual or a community’s life necessitates imagining a time, a place, an embodiment of wellbeing that is not currently available. an individual not impacted by racialized violence may be able to reach backward; i would like to go back to the time before the loss. this is not an exact blueprint but it provides the individual with a sense of what they are looking to restore or reconnect with as they heal. for communities impacted by racialized violence reaching back does not afford a time “before” the harm although the past holds resources and inspirations. reaching forward can feel blocked or unobtainable in the light of centuries of oppressive power. rather a transcendent reaching must occur; a reach of imagination that holds the knowns of the past with the desires for a different future and transcends limits to establish a place that can hold what is longed for, needed, and desired. this praxis of imagination aligns with afrohttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 futurism. guillame (2020) defines it as, “afrofuturism draws from the history of the african diaspora to imagine liberatory possibilities for the future (pg. 1).” politicized healing, like liberatory imagination, recognizes this is a moment of emergence and of liminality or betweenness. what is being called for and created to transform systems is known and unknown, it is here and still emerging, it requires a praxis of presence and action. it requires a framework of simultaneity, a past/present that is individual/collective that seeks to create/dismantle in pursuit of healing/justice. transcending pushes past the limits of current possibilities toward a new society. it rejects the endless iterations of reform that maintain core structure and limit transformation. transcending also acknowledges that what we know/have is not reflective of all we can be/create. survivors have worked towards the creation of a memorial that will honor the police torture survivors and their resilience, as well as the struggle for justice they waged with family members and activists. the work towards the memorial has actively engaged the art and social justice communities in co-creating and imaging what the possibility of the memorial could be. through communal participation, a memorial and gathering space entitled breath, form, and freedom was chosen, by artist patricia nguyen and john lee. in summary, politicized healing represents an opportunity to address racialized violence through the activation of healing, dismantling, and creation, that can allow for individuals and communities to heal from oppressive and structural violence while actively working towards community change. it invites practitioners, activists, policy leaders, and community members to work collectively, and does not separate these respective entities that are often separated in practice. in this sense, the opportunity to for a collective healing of historical and recent structural violence can occur. references bartholomew, m.w., harris, a.n., & maglangland, d.d. 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(2015). between the world and me. new york, ny: penguin random house. cruz (2014). book review. structural violence: the hidden brutality in the lives of women. the british journal of criminology, 54(2), 366–368. danieli, y. (ed.). (1998). intergenerational handbook of multigenerational legacies of trauma. new york: plenum. degruy, j. (2017). post-traumatic slave syndrome: america’s legacy of injury and healing. new york. delgado, m. (2020). state-sanctioned violence: advancing a social work social justice agenda. new york: oxford university press. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 duran, e., & duran, b. (1998). healing the american indian soul wound. in y. danieli (ed.), intergenerational handbook of multigenerational legacies of trauma (pp. 342-372). new york: plenum. guillame, c. (2020, september 4). the books briefing: imagining black futures. the atlantic. retrieved from:https://www.theatlantic.com/boo ks/archive/2020/09/octavia-butlertomi-adeyemi-ta-nehisi-coates-andafrofuturism-books-briefing/616033/ herman, j. (1997). trauma and recovery: the aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror. new york, ny: perseus book group. hooks, b. (2000). all about love: new visions. new york, ny: harper perennial. lederach, j. p., and lederach, a. j. (2010). when blood and bones cry out. new york, ny: oxford university. levins morales, a. (1998). medicine stories: history, culture, and the politics of integrity. cambridge, ma: southend press. menakem, r. (2017). my grandmother’s hands: racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. las vegas, nv: central recovery press. mills, c. (1997). the racial contract. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. mohatt, n.v., thompson, a.b., thai, n.d., & kraemer tebes, j. (2014). historical trauma as public narrative: a conceptual review of how history impacts present-day health. social science and medicine, (106), 28-36. rinker, j. & lawler, j. (2018). trauma as a collective disease and root cause of protracted social conflict. peace & conflict: journal of peace psychology, (24), 2, 150-164. sharpe, c. (2016). in the wake: on blackness and being. durham, nc: duke university press. stevens, m. (2009). from the past imperfect: towards a critical trauma theory. the semi annual newsletter of the penn warren center for the humanities, 17(2), 1-9. thomas, d. & zuckerman, a. (2018). black lives matter in community psychology. community psychology in global perspectives, (4)2, 1-8. vallega, a. (2014). (latin american philosophy from identity to radical exteriority. indianapolis, in: indiana university press. http://www.gjcpp.org/ hopes and fears for the future of different local communities minou ella mebane and maura benedetti keywords: community psychology, empowerment, community profiling, multidisciplinary author biographies: minou ella mebane is an associate professor of social psychology at the telematic university giustino fortunato. she is the author of several publications in national and international journals, books and contributions to volumes in english and italian. her principal areas of research are community psychology, political participation, gender studies and on line learning. maura benedetti is contract professor of family social psychology at lumsa university of rome, italy. she is a community psychologist and psychotherapist. she has always combined clinical and community psychology activities, working for the promotion of wellbeing of individuals, groups, organizations and local communities in different spheres and contexts: university, school, neighborhood, neuropsychology and healthy aging, environmental psychology, solidarity and volunteering networks promotion. recommended citation: mebane, m.e. and benedetti, m. (2022). hopes and fears for the future of different local communities. global journal of community psychology practice, 13(2), 1-17. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: minou ella mebane, a università telematica giustino fortunato, benevento, italy; email: minou.mebane@gmail.com http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:minou.mebane@gmail.com global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 hopes and fears for the future of different local communities abstract community psychology theorists underline the importance of fostering community empowerment (rappaport, 1981). however, to become empowered, a community needs to envision a better future (francescato, 2009; 2017). the aim of this study was to investigate the perception of the future of their community of people resident in the city center of rome, in peripheral areas of rome and small towns of the metropolitan area of the capital, analyzing what they fear most for their community and what they desire mainly for the future of their community, through community profiling. a collective reflection on hopes and possibilities provides opportunities to build a sustainable future community. a total of 147 communities were involved in the research, 49% from the city centre of rome, 27% from the suburban areas of roma, and 24% from small towns of the metropolitan area. our research was based on the community profiling methodology (francescato, tomai & ghirelli, 2002). the community profiling has a multidisciplinary approach since it integrates tools from different disciplines. in this study, we focused on the analysis of the future profile. specifically, we analyzed how people feel about the future of their community, their main anxieties and hopes, comparing the different communities. results were analyzed considering the seven profiles of the community profiling methodology (territorial, demographic, economic, service, institutional, anthropological, and psychological). the desires for the future most mentioned regarded territorial aspects for people living in the centre of rome, economic factors for people living in small towns, and services for people of peripheral areas. in all three communities, fears focused primarily territorial and psychological aspects. introduction at the 8th international conference of community psychology (iccp) held in melbourne in 2020, there were strong calls to expand research and action, widening our ecology of knowledge approach beyond the traditional empirical knowledge evaluating alternative ways knowledge can be produced. rua et al. (2020) have underlined that critical reflective praxes are needed to make the theory more grounded in reality to acquire knowledge and promote social change. following this direction, this study focuses on praxis-oriented research that aimed to foster community-based knowledge in three different types of local italian contexts through community profiling. community profiling widens the ecology of knowledge, promoting an interdisciplinary approach based on competencies and knowledges of different professions. it stimulates interaction with other fields of human sciences such as architecture, economics, anthropology, political science, history and integrates subjective and objective knowledge. this research focused on the reflections of members of different communities on the vision and path of the future of their communities. it was carried with people and is not on people. to increase knowledge and collaboration for sustainable futures is important to discuss together as community members' desires and fears for its future. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 according to bruscaglioni and gheno (2004), the first step to empowerment is achieved by creating new narratives, allowing new objectives to become "imaginable" for an individual, a small group, an organization, and a local community, or a country. to become empowered, members of a community need first to be able to desire and imagine a better future (francescato et al., 2021). the ecological perspective and community profiling the ecological framework (brofenbrenner, 1979; prilletensky, 2001, 2008, 2012) is the pillar of community psychology (c.p.) for both research and action and is considered the field's principal insight (hess, 2005). community psychology explores how individuals relate to society and communities at the intra-psychic, interpersonal, organizational, cultural, and political levels. this model reflecting a coping and adaptation perspective assumes that people are agentic and not passive respondents to their environments (trickett, 2009). through this framework, community interventions are developed considering the dynamics among communities, groups, and organizations as they relate within specific settings (kelly, 1968). c.p. best explains and makes great use of lewin's famous formula (lewin, 1936), stating that behavior is a function of the person and his/her environment (arcidiacono, 2017). c.p. has acknowledged the importance of methods that investigate in which ways the ecological contexts impact the lives of individuals. from the community psychology perspective, the context is not a backdrop; rather, it is the set of the play where social actors realize their life (arcidiacono & di martino, 2012). several scholars (e.g., prilleltensky & prilleltensky, 2006; watts & flanagan, 2007) bring forward a social-political perspective on local ecology, emphasizing the relevance of promoting social justice and eliminating oppression. a premise of c.p. is that psychological and social problems do not arise randomly in society but are directly related to locations, living conditions, and economic disparities. c.p. has a long history of being concerned with social issues such as marginalization and social exclusion. it has focused, for example, on indigenous people (thompson-guerin & mohatt, 2019); lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (lgbt) organizations (d'augelli, 2006), rural african american families (kohn-wood & wilson, 2005), homeless people (ornelas et al. 2014), poverty (moura jr. et al. 2020) and decolonization (serrano garcia, 2020). c.p. scholars have tried to bring theory, research, and action for social justice and psychological wellbeing into closer alignment. from an ecological perspective, understanding a local community is a sine qua non to identify which goals and interests are central and which key individuals, groups, and social settings are most necessary to achieve the specific objectives (trickett, 2009). community profiling (francescato et al. 2021) is an important tool that can be used to identify the strengths, weaknesses, needs, and issues of a community and to identify ways to improve community life. community profiling and empowerment community psychology theorists underline the importance of fostering community empowerment (e.g., rappaport, 1981). european community psychologists (martini & sequi 1988; ehmayer et al. 2000; francescato et al. 2021) have developed, widening the ecological approach, the community profiling technique. it has been applied in austria, italy, and portugal to promote the empowerment of local communities and civic participation and in serbia and south africa repowering minoritized groups and promoting a better integration (e.g., arcidiacono et al. 2016; benedetti et al. 2010; tuozzi, 2013; mebane & http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 benedetti, in press). this critical reflective praxis has investigated the strengths, weaknesses, needs, and community problems, considering different social and cultural groups. several researchers (e.g., berghold & seckinger 2007; reich et al., 2007) underline the importance of interventions based on a pluralistic approach in the field of c.p. community profiling assess a local community examining different soft and hard profiles. this process promotes new forms of knowledge productions and a pluralistic view that integrates different types of knowledge. while not always directly involving experts from other fields in the process, tools from various disciplines are used to carry out community analysis. the interaction of different disciplines and tools favor forms of collaboration and participation and local knowledge creation. according to zimmerman (2000), empowerment refers to the processes of participation, critical awareness, and control. community profiling fosters the development of these crucial and intertwined aspects of empowerment. for example, through the exchange of ideas in the focus group and during the different phases of the intervention, community members are actively involved in identifying issues of their neighborhood that can be addressed collectively. through participatory decisionmaking, they evaluate which objectives are more relevant for their community. according to eklund (1999), being involved in defining priorities fosters a "substantial" form of participation. critical awareness is reached by better understanding the power structures and their influence in the community. following a multicultural perspective, community profiling allows participants to analyze their neighborhood's positive and negative aspects using different lenses (from territorial to psychological profiles) and favors their critical understanding of the contextual factors. a critical understanding of the social, cultural, and political conditions that influence their community is also promoted through the interviews of stakeholders and key figures of the community. community profiling enhances residents' sense of control, increasing their ability to influence decisions regarding their neighborhood, considering the various needs and hopes. focusing on action-oriented plans brings members to move forward and create positive changes for their community, increasing their sense of control. a core of the community profiling technique, through which residents find new understandings and knowledge of their community, is the relationship building that facilitators promote, linking different community groups (e.g., elders, young people, minority members). discussing, discovering common issues and shared needs can enhance social participation. developing positive relationships improves a community's ability to cope with collective problems. several authors have underlined the development of empowerment is contingent on interpersonal relationships (chirstens, 2011). the exchange of information and opinions using the different profiles makes visible diverse aspects of the community, thus generating unfreezing moments to contribute to community empowerment and change. following the community profiling approach, this study will focus particularly on hope and fears for the future of three different types of community. several authors (e.g., freire 1976) have emphasized the role of hope in promoting community involvement. hope can be a success key in promoting community participation. the concept of hope has several important characteristics (rand, 2018): is http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 directed towards a goal, is future-oriented focusing on a goal that has still to be reached, is a general belief appropriate in a variety of situations and aims, it accentuates the relevance of the processes rather than emotions, it tends to focus on what individuals can do to accomplish goals (rand, 2018). through hope, community members can identify possibilities for the future of their community and build collective projects to achieve them. when a sense of hopelessness characterizes instead a community, fatalism, the belief that events are predetermined and therefore unavoidable, tends to prevail. several studies have emphasized the relation of oppression and injustice to fatalism (e.g., martin barò, 2017). analyzing fears can become a strength for community development since it can help community members recognize something they do not want for their community. identifying fears for the future of the community raises awareness of social, economic issues that worry members. fears can mobilize local knowledge and resources and encourage people to cooperate to solve problems that may affect the community in the near future. many useful community projects can be inspired by fear. for example, fear of an increase of homeless people or neighborhood decay can lead to the development of homelessness prevention and neighborhood rehabilitation programs. through community profiling technique, hope and fear can both promote community development (francescato, 2021). methodology the aim of this study was to investigate the perception of the future of their community of people resident in the city center of rome, in peripheral areas of rome and small towns of the metropolitan area of the capital, analyzing what they fear most for their community and what they desire mainly for the future of their community, through community profiling. community profiling the community profiling process examines the local contexts through eight profiles (five hard profiles and three soft ones), integrating subjective and objective approaches (for a more detailed description of the community profiling technique, see francescato et al., 2021). the territorial profile explores data related to the territory: physical characteristics, environmental conditions, climate, land resources, and transportation infrastructures. the economic profile examines the different economic activities in the territory divided into primary, secondary, tertiary. in addition, data related to employment in other fields are also analyzed. the institutional profile considers the political-administrative organization of the community, the presence or absence of particular institutions (police station, prisons, church(s), tribunals, etc.), and their perception among the residents. moreover, this profile investigates the relation of the municipal administration with the state, the region, the province, and the european union. the demographic profile includes the number of inhabitants, divided by age group, civil status, gender, and education. population increase/decrease and migratory flows are also analyzed. the service profile is three-pronged into sociomedical, socio-educational, and recreationalcultural. data refer to the number of services, their location, and ease of access, and also the functioning organizational and operating procedures are analyzed. experts' opinions on the services are compared to the judgments of ordinary people. the anthropological profile involves community history, values, social attitudes, rituals, myths, traditions, and community festivities. the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 psychological profile explores affective dynamics, sense of belonging, collective identification, level of participation, social support, the tendency to collaboration conflict, and emotional security. the future profile explores the future perception. participants research participants come from the metropolitan area of rome, characterized by different local dimensions: the center, the peripheral neighborhoods, and small municipalities. a total of 147 communities were involved in the research, 49% from rome's city center, 27% from the disadvantaged peripheral areas of rome, and 24% from small towns in the province of rome. in rome, a social-economic gap is associated to the distance from the center of rome (lelo et al. 2016). with respect to education, the percentage of people with a complete university-level education are higher in the center of rome; they range from 42% in the rich neighborhoods of parioli and salario (42%), acquatraversa, eur, and celio (41% ) to as low as 5% in peripheral areas outside of gra (great ring road of rome) such as tor di cervara, santa palomba (6%), borghesiana (6,6%). also, the occupational rates reflect a strong division between the center and the peripheral areas outside gra (lelo et al. 2016.). the unemployment rates of peripheral areas are three times higher than some of the central neighborhoods of rome (tor cevara 17%, tufello, santa palomba, tor fiscale (14%) compared to the unemployment rate of 5% of the central areas such as parioli, pineto and tor di quinto). from 2002 to 2017, the number of people living in the center has decreased by over 8%; in the same period, in the peripheral areas outside the gra, inhabitants have grown more than 39% (lelo et al., 2018). the composition of the family varies too since living in the center has a higher cost family with numerous members tend to live more in the peripheral areas. the metropolitan area of rome includes 120 municipalities. the municipalities vary in size, from 175 inhabitants of the smallest municipality vivaro to guidonia with more than 80.000 residents (25 municipalities have less than 1000 residents). the income distribution shows that 64% of the municipalities are characterized by a mean income inferior to the territorial mean average. furthermore, an analysis of the data shows a high presence of work commuting; of the 238.000 inbound displacements towards rome, 63% involve municipalities near the center of rome (istat, 2017). in each community analysis, small groups of about ten men and women, including young people (under 30 years of age), adults (40 to 65), and the elderly (over 65), were involved. focus groups were facilitated by 50 master level graduate students trained in community profiling intervention methodologies in the practicum lab connected to an advanced community psychology course in sapienza university of rome and community psychologists in 2015-2019. students who lived in the center of rome, or in the periphery of rome or small towns around rome, recruited residents to form focus groups, members of local associations, ranging from business associations to volunteer groups, or from youth and elderly recreation centers. participants were asked to consent to participate in the study. to assess how residents perceived the future of their community, the future profile was used. first, people in small groups were asked how they visualize their community in the next ten years and subsequently their desires and fears for the future of their community. after every member had a chance to give their opinion, members discuss whether they agree that a specific item cited during the brainstorming phase is a relevant/common http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 desire/fear of the community. answers are then classified as belonging to one of the profiles. finally, they discuss solutions to given problems/desires that emerge. results view of the future of the community in ten years the members' answers on how they would see their local communities in 10 years showed that 43% of the people living in the center, 48% of the people living in small towns and peripheral areas thought that their communities would improve in the future. around 46% and 45% respectively of the people living in rome center and peripheral areas and 35% of the residents in small towns had a negative view of their future in the community. about 11% of the people from the center, 7% of the people living in the peripheral areas, and 17% of the people from small-town believe that it will remain as they are now. this data (see graph below) shows that a negative and positive view of the future are quite balanced, especially in rome center and peripheral areas. there is a less pessimistic view in the small towns and a more optimistic tendency to view the future, and a higher percentage of citizens have a neutral expectation toward the future. figure 1: view of the future in 10 years desires for the future rome central area in the rome central area, the greatest number of wishes expressed concerned the territorial profile (34%). specifically, 22% of hopes regard less pollution and 22% maintenance of green areas in this profile. summarizing 44% percent of the comments contemplate a greener city, 12% of the desires related to more interventions to limit the architectural degradation. people emphasize that several historic buildings suffered degradation and decay due to neglect and misuse. around 17% of the comments focus on greater transport efficiency, especially at night, traffic regulation 9.5%, and a greater possibility of finding free parking spaces 8%. the second profile (17% of comments) mainly mentioned was the psychological profile, most of the remarks (46%) related to the desire to feel safer in their community. residents were primarily worried about the rise of local crime in their community. the third profile most frequently (16%) mentioned was the economic profile. people from the center desired: more business premises (26%), more work (25%), regulation of the costs of houses and rents (22%), and an improvement in the tertiary sector (19%) (especially store hours of shops). the fourth profile (16%) most mentioned by people in the center is the service profile. comments related to this profile (54%) concerned the desire to have more culturally recreative neighborhood activities (cinemas, theatres, cultural spaces, promotion of arts). for the health sector (39%), they wished for better health services, easier usability, and efficiency. the anthropological profile (7%) is mentioned very rarely there. people underline that contemporary society is http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 characterized by the loss of past values and superficiality in dealing with current issues. the demographic profile (6%) also is seldomly mentioned. the observations focus on the age group of young people, for whom more and better opportunities are desired, especially in finding a job. finally, the institutional profile is hardly mentioned (4%); they appreciate the involvement of religious institutions in the community, and they would like to trust more their politicaladministrative institutions. peripheral areas people that live in the peripheral areas long for more recreational and cultural activities and a higher quality of these services (26%). around 57% of their observations are related to the recreativecultural area. residents denounce that cultural activities are unsatisfactory and demand more high-quality cultural opportunities. moreover, residents' comments on the social, educational area (28%) regarded the desire to increase the number of schools (educational offer is limited only to certain types of educational institutions). the second profile most mentioned by people in the disadvantaged peripheral area (19%) is the territorial one. citizens comments on this profile related mostly (37%) to the architectural decay of the neighborhoods and buildings due to lack of care, to the desire that air pollution dropped significantly, traffic would diminish in the future (24%), communication routes (16%) improved, better maintenance of roads (residents lamented for example that poor lighting made places more dangerous). the third profile mostly cited (18%) among desires for the future is the psychological profile. most desires in this area focus on a higher level of support and collaboration in the neighborhood (30%) and affective security (22%). desires related to the economic profile (15%) regard especially improvements in the tertiary activities, especially those services of communication and relation with the public (such as banks, post offices) and more leisure clubs. almost 13% of the wishes focus on the institutional profile; residents see political and administrative institutions as entities responsible for changes. they want them to take care of the community providing for the modernization of the various areas. moreover, they also desire more police control in the future. finally, 8% of the wishes focus on the anthropological profile. people would like to receive in the future more social support in their neighborhood. they hope for a greater community spirit, more affectivity, friendships, and involvement in the neighborhood. small towns in the small towns, most desires involve the economic profile (26%). people would like more job opportunities in the future, a revival of production activities typical of the area. they also hope for an increase in tourism. about 23% of the wishes focused on the service profile, 77% of the desires focused on the recreational aspects, residents of smalltown lamented to be often forced to move towards rome to find places to meet and have fun. they wished that new recreational activities will be offered. overall, 15% of the comments related to different aspects of the psychological profile such as feelings towards the community (20%), greater collaboration (20%), emotionally safe (20%). almost 14% of residents mentioned the territorial profile. people living in small towns were generally satisfied with the geographic characteristics of their territory (22%), they hoped that in the future, there would be lower levels of architectural decay (22%), lower levels of pollution (17%), and a better system of communication (17%) and also better maintenance of the green areas. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 overall, 11% of the wishes concerned the engagement of local and political institutions in modernizing the towns, implementing policies for the maintenance and protection of the town, increasing control, and carrying out an existing project that could help solve problematic situations. the anthropological profile's desires (10,5%) concerned more support and promotion of historical traditions, folk festivals, and the perseverance of popular values. the main results on the desires of the three communities, classified according to the seven profiles, are shown in figure 2 figure 2: desires for the future in rome centre, peripheral areas, and small towns fears towards the future rome central area concerning the fears, the profile mostly cited were the psychological, 30% of the comments, and the territorial, 24% of the comments, followed by demographic profile (14%), the anthropological profile (14%), and the economic profile (13%). most of the comments on the psychological profile (35%) related to the widespread fears for the rise of crime, and 22% of the statements in this profile related to emotional aspects: they feared that in the future, there will be more relational difficulties among members of the community and that the values of community unity will be lost. furthermore, they also feared (14% of comments) that social representation of their neighborhood will lose prestige in the coming years. the second profile mostly mentioned was the territorial profile (24%). in this profile, 55% of the comments related to fear of increasing air pollution and their harmful effects on public health and traffic congestions. moreover, they also worried about an increased degradation of the community and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 littering in green areas and streets (such as abandoned garbage and writing on walls). the third profile mainly mentioned was the demographic one. people from the center fear the increase of population density in the neighborhood due to the presence of non-eu nationals in the territory (54% of the comments). they are afraid the presence of immigrants will be a source of crime for the community and loss of security. they are worried that immigrants may take the place of italians in the neighborhood. the fears related to the anthropological profile (14% of the comments) concerned the disappearance of historical traditions (50% of the comments), the rise of disrespectful lifestyles, rudeness, bad habits in the neighborhood (18%), and negative social norms (18%). finally, about 13% of the fears of residents in the center were related to the economic profile. in this profile, 71% of the observations concerned mostly preoccupations associated with a possible further increase of the already high cost of living, the high rents, and house prices. peripheral areas in peripheral areas, the first profile (25%) that raises concerns is the psychological one. people that live in the peripheries are especially afraid of the spread of crime and drug dealing (53% of fears); 22% of the comments refer to experiences of fear of isolation that might worsen in the future. the second profile is the territorial one (24%). about 59% of the comments related to this profile refer to the fear that in the future, there will be fewer green areas, more pollution, and more traffic and 24% of the concern refer to architectural decay. fifteen percent of the fears related to the demographic profile and 14% of the concerns associated with the anthropological profile, most of the comments on this profile refer to losing the typical traditions of the neighborhood. for the demographic profile, 63% of statements were related to preoccupations due to the increase of migration flows and immigrants' high presence, which could contribute significantly to the rise in crime and concerns related to the rise in delinquency in the neighborhood. about 11% of the fears related to the economic profile, also the people of the peripheral area feared that the cost of houses and rents, and living costs would rise even more in the future (70% of comments). small towns in the small towns, most of the fears concerned the territorial profile (22%) and the psychological profile (22%), the anthropological profile (19%), the demographic profile (17%), the economic profile (13%). in the territorial profile, 48% of the comments related to pollution, residents of small towns fear that typical territorial characteristics of good climate and green spaces will be lost, in short, that what is defined as "an oasis of peace in nature" will disappear. among the psychological profile, 32% of the fears focused on the rise of crime (drug dealing, robberies, assaults), 24% of the concerns of the psychological profile regarded the deterioration of the feelings about their own town. they mainly feared that people would feel even more isolated, not very fulfilled, and need to move away from the town to have a satisfying life. comments related to the anthropological profile regarded the fear of the loss of values (29%), tradition, customs (24%), and history (29%) of the small towns. residents feared especially to lose the sense of peacefulness that characterizes small town will. comments regarding the demographic profile related (58%) to migration flows and immigrants. residents feared that migrants could replace the original italian local community because many italians in the future will leave the small towns to accomplish their life goals. in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 the economic profile, most of the comments concerned occupation issues, especially fears of a low employment rate, difficulties finding a job, and the rise of undeclared work (53% of the comments). the main results on the fears of the three communities, classified according to the seven profiles, are shown in figure 3. figure 3: fears for the future in rome centre, peripheral areas, and small towns discussion to promote a sustainable future, we need to involve community members and understand their perception of their community's future and especially their desires and fears for the community they live in (francescato et al., 2021). the community in which persons live can significantly impact their mental wellbeing (e.g., diez roux & mair, 2010). the profile of the future fostered deep and considered reflections of residents on the possibilities of their communities. one of the first steps to become more empowered is defining your vision of the future and direction (francescato et al., 2007; francescato & mebane, 2016). members in the groups revealed in their feedback that exchanging considered reflections, experiences, and feelings on their local community's future broadened their understanding and thinking of the community. in their feedback, they observed that listening to other community members' thoughts sometimes triggered impressions of their community they previously underestimated or did not consider. moreover, hearing stories and opinions from different people who lived in the community with whom they usually did not interact also offered an opportunity to look at the community from different perspectives and choose solutions they would never have considered before. giving voice to minority groups stimulated the production of new narratives for their communities. participants also reported that participating in the project created ties among residents that shared a dream or problem. discussing their hopes and fears, in several cases, community members could identify the means and ways to achieve the desired http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 objectives through self-determined and selfsustained projects. during their analysis of their collective desires or problematic issues (fears), members of the groups were helped by the community psychologists facilitators to distinguish among projects that they could manage on their own, projects that needed the creation of networks and resources outside the community, and issues that needed to be addressed at an institutional and political level. making this distinction helped members not to feel powerless to change the situation since they focused on objectives they could master. future interventions could take into account the data of this first research. instead of performing a general community profiling, they could focus on collecting more data on the profiles that residents in the different areas felt were relevant for the future of their communities. though they are several similarities among the three communities, we can notice that concerning the desires, people from the center focused more on the territorial profile, they wanted to promote interventions to reduce pollution and increase green areas, to maintain parks better, to keep the neighborhood cleaner and keep the roads in better conditions. the second profile mainly mentioned was the psychological one; feeling safe and secure is a critical foundation for living better in a community. residents wished to feel more confident in the future and meet more with people that lived in the same area. in the peripheral poor neighborhoods, the main focus is on the services, especially the cultural and educational areas. the residents wished for wider educational opportunities. they pointed out that education could be an important contributor to a successful career and lower the social class gap. they also hoped for more cultural activities like the wealthier, more central neighborhoods. these findings can be in part explained by the urban sprawl in the last years brought urban the expansion of peripheral areas that lead to the development of large neighborhoods with few services (lelo et al. 2016) the second profile mainly mentioned was territorial; people wished for better maintenance and proper management of the neighborhood and the buildings and reduced air pollution (by increasing, for example, public transport and bicycle lanes). overall, communities in the center and peripheral areas share the vision of a better urban/territorial organization (less traffic and architectural barriers, pollution, and environmental degradation); in small towns, people tend to mention more positive territorial aspects related to the beauty of surroundings and opportunities for enjoyment of nature. we can hypothesize that in urban areas of the city, where there is a higher concentration of population with respect to smaller towns, problems related to pollution and local degradation are more felt. in the small municipalities, the economic issue seemed more central; hopes for the future were focused primarily on occupation growth; this can be in part justified by data from istat (2017) that reveals a lower-income average in the majority of the municipalities. they had several business ideas that could contribute to job creation, cultural preservation, and economic growth, from investing more in locally produced products (oil, bread, cheese, hams, cheese) to revitalizing the artisan sector (e.g., glass, ceramics, mosaic, handmade toys workshops). moreover, they felt it was crucial to find new means to attract more tourists after the summer season since the city of rome catalyzes the tourism of the entire province (istat, 2017). the second profile mostly mentioned was the service one. residents felt that more recreative and cultural activities (the most popular ones are in the capital) should be promoted to increase the participation in community, thus avoiding that certain categories that have less http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 access to cultural or welfare services (e.g., poor elders or families) risked being marginalized from society. on the whole different identity markers (belonging to communities in the center, in peripheral areas, and small municipalities) provide in part distinct ideas about hope for community development. in small towns, attention is focused more on creating work suitable for the expectations of young people (that often tend to emigrate to rome to find jobs). residents of peripheral areas are interested mostly in programing more cultural events in the future and increasing the educational offer to reduce the educational gap between downtown and urban suburbs. for residents in the center, the problems of air pollution and keeping green areas healthy are the central themes to be addressed in the future. future c.p. programs taking into account the results of this project could gather more data on the profiles that seemed more relevant for the residents (for example, for the service profile in the peripheral area, they could distribute questionnaires to residents with children on the satisfaction of the education offer, which schools/courses they would like to have in the area). the main fears (1st and 2nd profile most mentioned) for all three communities are more similar since they focus primarily on the psychological and the territorial profile. our study shows in all three areas the need for community building initiatives to improve the safety of the community (e.g., organizing block parties and other ways to engage with members of the community, neighborhood watch system), and territorial improvements (e.g., creating more green areas, bicycle lanes, walkways, water refill stations, community clean-up days).feeling safe is considered a key element for sustainable communities and is related to positive mental health outcomes (alik & kearn, 2016). the territorial profile was often mentioned among the fears and the desires, revealing the importance of a greener community for citizens of the three areas. research has shown an association between health and greener spaces (mebane, 2020; twohigbennett & jones). climate change has become the most significant threat, and as reyes cruz (2020) points out, its effects could continue to grow and worsen over time if we don't take urgent action to prevent the breakdown of the earth's climate. there is a strong need for residents to meet these global challenges. c.p. can have an important role in building a future of climate justice (reyes cruz, 2020; francescato, 2020). community members take a more significant role in pursuing green goals when they are actively involved in developing environmental projects. overall our community profiling praxisoriented project moves beyond the concept of knowledge generated by external professionals to "local knowledge" created by members of the community discussing the future of their community, reflecting, finding new understandings, and identifying together priorities to obtain change. the focus groups give voice also to marginal members of the community (immigrants, elders, housekeepers) and their vision of the future, enabling them to participate in the construction of shared desires and social changes for the community. finally, community profiling can promote in communities and neighborhoods selfdetermination, defined by ortiz-torres (2020) as the ability to identify needs of their contexts and respond in ways that enable communities to take control over lives and act for collective wellbeing. one last reflection on our community profiling experiences. members in our groups differed in age and gender and given the gender and old-young divides, in a familial patriarchal society as italy, some of them mentioned how meaningful had been to them http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 to be able to share a reflective experience with people of different age and gender who were not their relatives. these findings support the belief of sonn (2016) that we have "to construct a community psychology that values a plurality of epistemologies, methodologies (de sousa santos, 2007, 2009), and relational ethics (dussel, 1985; montero, 2007)" (p.312). enhancing and reviving different knowledge types can help communities create sustainable futures; community psychology profiling can be a valuable tool for uplifting communities. references alik, m. & kearns, a. 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(2000). empowerment theory: psychological, organizational, and community levels of analysis. in j. rappaport & e. seidman (eds.), handbook of community psychology (p. 43–63). kluwer academic publishers. http://www.gjcpp.org/ effect of youth mentoring on depressive symptoms of single mothers tina braun1, joachim kruse1, jennifer singleton1, benjamin hiemeyer2,3, & timo von oertzen1,2 keywords: depressive symptoms, single mothers, youth mentoring author biographies: tina braun, is a postdoctoral researcher at the bundeswehr university munich. she has a phd in developmental psychology and currently works in the methods and evaluation department of the psychology institute. next to her methodological research, she is interested in the evaluation of youth mentoring programs, working with “biffy berlin” and “balu und du”. tina has also worked as a practitioner in “balu und du” for the past three years, supervising more than 40 mentoring dyads. joachim kruse, is professor for clinical psychology and trauma therapy at the bundeswehr university munich. his research is mainly in the area of developmental clinical psychology. lately he focused on the role of emotion regulation in psychotherapy, e.g. the importance of guilt and shame in post-traumatic stress disorder. he is also a licensed clinical psychotherapist and head of the department’s outpatient clinic, organizing the clinical research and psychotherapy training. jennifer singleton, is a german air force officer and early career psychologist with a master’s degree in clinical psychology from the bundeswehr university munich. her master’s thesis, which examined whether youth mentoring has a positive influence on single mothers, was rewarded with an outstanding achievement award. jennifer currently holds a position as research assistant at the bundeswehr university munich and focuses on further research into youth mentoring and single parenthood. benjamin hiemeyer, is a clinical and research psychologist with a master’s degree in psychology from the humboldt university of berlin. he is currently working on his phd in clinical psychology and psychotherapy at university of bern in cooperation with medical school berlin and in psychotherapeutic practice. moreover, he is teaching clinical, developmental, and health psychology and is also an affirmative supporter of youth mentoring. timo von oertzen, is professor for quantitative psychology at the bundeswehr university munich. he is co-developer of several sem software systems, including the graphical tool onyx and the r-package openmx. his academical background is in computer science (dissertation 2003 from the university of the saarland) and psychology (habilitation from the humboldt university berlin in 2013), with main research interests in mathematical methods in psychology and childand youth mentoring. 1 bundeswehr university munich 2 max planck institute for human development 3 medical school berlin global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 recommended citation: braun, t., kruse, j., singleton, j., hiemeyer, b., & von oertzen, t. (2020). effect of youth mentoring on depressive symptoms of single mothers. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(3), 1 17. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: tina braun, department of humanities, bundeswehr university munich, werner-heisenberg-weg 39, 85577 neubiberg, germany. contact: tina.braun@unibw.de http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:tina.braun@unibw.de global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 effect of youth mentoring on depressive symptoms of single mothers past evaluation studies of youth mentoring programs have focused solely on the children. while they are often the main recipient of the mentoring, effects on parents should not be neglected. especially single mothers often face many challenges in their everyday life and might benefit from youth mentoring programs. in the present study we investigate whether youth mentoring programs can lower depressive symptoms in single mothers. the hypothesis was investigated using data of the youth mentoring program” biffy berlin e.v. big friends for youngsters”. the results showed a significant association between depressive symptoms and duration of the mentoring relationship while relevant covariates were controlled. in a follow-up analysis we explored whether reduced levels of stress might mediate the association and the data was in line with this idea. implications for future studies are discussed. with 15 % of the 65.6 million families with children in europe, single parents form a considerable part of our society (eurostat, 2017). in the majority of single parent households, the mother is taking care of the child or children (oecd family database, 2016). past research shows that in comparison to households with two parents, single mothers display a greater risk for physical and mental health disorders (benzeval, 1998; berkman, 1969; ross, mirowsky, & goldsteen, 1990; targosz et al., 2003). especially depressions seem to be more prevalent in single compared to married mothers (brown & moran, 1997; cairney, thorpe, rietschlin, & avison, 1999; cairney, pevalin, wade, veldhuizen, & arboleda-florez, 2006; davies, avison, & mcalpine, 1997; lipman, offord, & boyle, 1997; wang, 2004). as one of the reasons for increased levels of depressive symptoms in single mothers is a lack of social support (barnett, de baca, jordan, tilley, & ellis, 2015), a mentor for the child might be able to compensate some of the burden resting on single mothers. therefore, in the present work we investigate whether youth mentoring might be one way to alleviate depressive symptoms in single mothers. single mothers and depression a wide range of cross-sectional studies shows that single mothers are especially at risk of developing a depression within their lifetime (crosier, butterworth, & rodgers, 2007; subramaniam, prasad, abdin, vaingankar, & chong, 2014). in their longitudinal study, brown and moran (1997) compared married and single mothers during a two-year followup period and found a significantly higher risk for single mothers to develop a major depression. this and other longitudinal evidence (cairney et al., 1999) suggests that women do not become single mothers because they already have a major depression, but rather develop depressive symptoms in response to the strain of single parenting. another possible interpretation of the finding would be that a third so far unknown aspect of the mother’s life results in their status as a single mother and their increase in depressive symptoms. typical depressive symptoms like constant fatigue, feelings of hopelessness and generally decreased energy levels will intensify problems mothers might have had before in coping with the demands of life. such symptoms like irritability, difficulties concentrating, or fatigue might directly hamper the interaction and relationship with a child. in addition to the many stressors and hassles single parents experience due to mostly having to get along alone, internal stressors accumulate and start a vicious cycle http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 of ever-increasing demands on the one hand and diminished resources on the other. the negative impact of higher depressive symptoms in single mothers is not restricted to the mother herself. they also negatively affect the children in multiple ways. for example, higher depressive symptoms have been found to foster negative parenting practices like less responsive, more intrusive, and harsh parenting (goodman et al., 2011; lovejoy, graczyk, o’hare, & neuman, 2000; riley et al., 2008). another negative effect is that mothers perceive their children’s behavior as more negative when they are in a depressed mood (griest, wells, & forehand, 1979; forehand, wells, mcmahon, griest, & rogers, 1982). this would again lead to harsher parenting and have an adverse effect on the children as well as on the mother. moreover, children of depressed parents carry a risk of adverse consequences well into adulthood. they show a higher risk for depression, morbidity, and mortality that persists into middle adulthood (weissman et al., 2016). in a recent study gotlib et al. (2014) could even demonstrate that children of depressive mothers have shorter telomeres and that shorter telomeres were associated with greater cortisol reactivity to stress, showing effects on an epigenetic level. a wide range of factors have been discussed as possible reasons for the higher prevalence of depressive symptoms in single mothers, for example socio-economic disadvantages, like unemployment, financial hardship, lack of social support, the responsibility of caring for children, trauma (e.g., domestic violence), lower education, and young age (15-24) (brown & moran, 1997; butterworth, 2004; coiro, 2001; hope, power, & rodgers, 1999; jackson, brooks-gunn, huang, & glassman, 2000; kessler, turner, & house, 1987; parker & ritch, 2001; patten, 2001; wade & kendler, 2000). lack of social support appears to be one of the most important of these factors (crosier et al., 2007). single mothers often lack social support (barnett et al., 2015; cairney, boyle, offord, & racine, 2003; crosier et al., 2007; youngblut, thomas, brady, & brooten, 2000). the unavailability of social support has been found to be detrimental for both mothers and children, as it is associated with lower levels of parenting efficacy (cochran & niegro, 1995; marshall, noonan, mccartney, marx, & keefe, 2001; suzuki, holloway, yamamoto, & mindnich, 2009) and higher levels of depressive symptoms in single mothers (barnett et al., 2015; cairney et al., 2003; crosier et al., 2007; parker & ritch, 2001; patten, 2001; wade & kendler, 2000). availability of social support might, therefore, be a factor which leads to lower levels of depressive symptoms in mothers. social support can take on many forms. the distinction between instrumental and emotional social support for example is well established (house, umberson, & landis, 1988; shakespeare-finch & obst, 2011; tardy, 1985). in different life circumstances and depending on the kind of stressors one has to deal with, various facets of social support might be needed or helpful. manuel, martinson, bledsoe-mansori, and bellamy (2012) discuss the hypothesis that the protective capacity of instrumental and emotional support might depend on the level of poverty. this might explain mixed findings concerning the buffering hypothesis of social support (cohen & wills, 1985). while there is some evidence that social support does not entirely buffer the negative effects of stress in depressive mothers, especially in low-income families (manuel et al., 2012) there is a direct relationship between social support and depression and various studies show such an interaction effect exists (moak & agrawal, 2010). in order to better understand the mechanisms of what kind of social support might be helpful for single mothers, particularly for those dealing with depressive symptoms, intervention studies might be especially promising. one central aspect of this lack of social support for single mothers is support with the education of their http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 children. this issue might be addressed by youth mentoring, in which the mother receives social support in the caregiving and education of her children, from which not only the child directly, but also the mother might benefit, in particular with regard to depressive symptoms. moreover, depressive symptoms, especially in a more severe form, may diminish the ability of a mother to obtain social support and hence exacerbate the vicious cycle described above. another aspect that might lead to higher rates of depression among single parents has to do with the separation preceding their current marital status. in a lot of cases a divorce or separation puts immense stressors on both partners, sometimes over the course of several years (amato, 2010). having gone through an emotionally exhausting divorce will leave parents with depleted resources for problems of all kinds. the children of families in separation face stressors themselves that might directly lead to more problems in child rearing as there would have been without a divorce of their parents. not only when they feel guilty in some way that their parents do not want to stay together but also because of phenomena like ’pressure to side’ or witnessing fights between their parents, maybe even going through legal battles (walper, kruse, noack, & schwarz, 2005). it has been reported in a variety of studies that children show higher levels of distress before marital dissolution (amato, 2010). sun and li (2002) for example were able to show that compared to children with continuously married parents, students with divorced parents had lower test scores 3 years prior to divorce and further declining during the years post-divorce. strohschein (2005) found that even before marital dissolution, children whose parents later divorced exhibited higher levels of anxiety, depression, and antisocial behavior than children whose parents remained married. following a divorce, anxiety and depression levels increased even further. cairney et al. (2003) found higher levels of chronic stress in single compared to married mothers. further, avison (1995) and cairney et al. (2003) found higher rates of depression in single mothers, explaining in their discussion that single mothers are more often exposed to stressors, and that these stressors are often more sever. results from krech and johnston (1992) and middlebrook and forehand (1985) suggest that this influences the relationship to children: mothers are exposed to stress tend to rate behavior of their children as more deviant than mothers with less stress rated the same behavior. single mothers are therefore in danger to be trapped in a downward spiral: the stress of being a single mother, for example due to lack of social support (sperlich, arnhold-kerri, & geyer, 2011), may result in a more negative view of their children, which in turn increases the stress as the mother feels the need to react to this transgression (krech & johnston, 1992). this increased stress will also increase the probability of depressive symptoms (kim & shin, 2004). to break this circle, or ideally avoid it initially, interventions that reduce stress are needed. providing social support can be such an intervention. youth mentoring youth mentoring programs typically partner an adult with a child, where the adult takes the role of a friend and mentor for the child, which may include, but is not limited to, the role of a teacher and educator (grossman & tierney, 1998). they meet regularly, spend time together at fun activities, and share experiences and stories with each other. in the best case, this results in the establishment of a mutually trusting relationship. youth mentoring programs have been shown to be beneficial for children in multiple domains, like social-emotional, cognition, and identity (dubois, holloway, valentine, & cooper, 2002; dubois, portillo, rhodes, silverthorn, & valentine, 2011). what has been neglected so far is how parents might benefit when their http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 children are paired with a mentor. when a mentor becomes a stable part of their lives, mothers most likely benefit in addition to their children. as the mentor meets the child regularly for a variety of activities, the social participation of the child is increased. mentors are not expected to spend money for the children, but by simply spending one-onone time every week for a continued amount of time, the child will be able to make a wide array of new experiences. while this does not affect the lack of social participation of the mother herself directly, it removes the burden resting on her shoulders to enable her child to take part in a variety of activities. the mother further receives direct support from the mentor in the form of care for the child. when mentor and child meet for a few hours every week, this gives the mother time for daily errands, time for herself, or maybe time for her other children. as a professional babysitter would further increase the financial strain single mothers likely refrain from using such options, meaning that they have less or even no time for themselves. a mentor offers regular free timeframes which can be used by the mother. if the mentoring relationship persists for a long time, it is possible that the mentor becomes an advisor or friend of the mother as well, offering further social support. the mentor can be an ally when a problem arises with the child, thereby further alleviating the pressure resting on the mother. it seems therefore, likely that a mentoring relationship with the child of a single mother should alleviate the strain resting on the mother due to the lack of social support. more generally, a single mother should feel less pressured, or in other words less stressed, if her child has a mentor. this in line should lead to a decrease in depressive symptoms in single mothers. in other words, we believe that a mentor can reduce the stress, most likely in the domain of social support, a single mother experiences and thereby alleviate depressive symptoms in the mother. the present study the present study investigates the effect of mentoring within the mentoring project “biffy berlin − big friends for youngsters.” the program was inspired by” big brothers big sisters of america” (grossman & tierney, 1998) and has been adjusted to the german society. since 2001 a total of roughly 900 mentoring relationships have been matched. mentors and mentees are free in how they spend their shared time. it is suggested that they meet once a week for a couple of hours. in order to maximize the chances of a successful mentoring relationship each mentor attends a workshop before being matched with a child. every mentor is further required to submit a certificate of conduct to ensure the safety of the children. the matching then relies on former experience of the program organization, shared interests between mentor and mentee, and the proximity of mentor and mentee. the first four to six weeks of a newly matched dyad is considered a trial period. if both are satisfied with the relationship after this time, they are officially registered as matched. the program requires that the mentors commit for at least one year, but typically the mentoring relationship persists for multiple years, not rarely into the teenage or even young adult years of the mentee. the program actively promotes exchange between dyads by offering regular get-togethers and various activities such as comic-workshop, visiting the berlin international film festival, creating new music instruments, or circus artist training. biffy berlin also offers individual supervision and supportive advice for all parties involved for the complete duration of the mentoring relationship. while especially for the first year regular updates on the current state of the mentoring relationships are requested, they are not required by the program organization. biffy further follows most of the best practices found to enhance the effectiveness of youth http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 mentoring (dubois et al., 2011, 2002). more precisely, they match mentors and mentee based on similar interests, provide training for the mentors, the children are young at the time of the matching (typically in primary school), and although not necessarily the case, many children in the biffy program can be considered to be at greater individual risk; for example, 79 % of them live in single mother households. this yields ideal circumstances to investigate the effectiveness of mentoring not only for the children, but single mothers as well. within this setting we investigate the hypothesis that the period of time that a child is in a mentoring relationship is associated with lower levels of depressive symptoms in single mothers. we explore the possibility that this is the case as single mothers experience less stress if their child is matched with a mentor. we controlled for age of the mother and the child, number of children, further social support, education of the mother, and household income, as these aspects are expected to have an impact on depressive symptoms (butterworth, 2004; coiro, 2001; jackson et al., 2000; wade & kendler, 2000). method sample within the active sample of biffy, every mentor, mentee, and primary parent was invited to take part in an evaluation study. of the completed 374 questionnaires, 71 were completed by a primary parent and could be matched to an actively mentored child. of these, 47 were completed by single mothers and were included in the present analysis. the mothers were on average 44.69 years old (sd = 6.56) and had 1.80 children (sd = 0.83). the child in the mentoring relationship was on average 11.41 years old (sd = 3.00). the household net income of the single mothers was on average between 1000eur and 2000eur a month. their mean time of education was 15.82 years (sd = 3.71). the children of 4.26% of the mothers had only been just matched by the time of the assessment, the others had been in a mentoring triad for 49.61 months on average, with a standard deviation of 32.62 month; the longest mentoring relationship in the sample lasted for 117 months. measures participants each received an e-mail with a link to the online assessment. the questionnaire started with the production of a unique pseudonymous code for each triad, consisting of mentor, mentee, and primary parent. this allowed the matching of the completed questionnaires. all participants who completed the assessment had signed a consent form and were informed about the study aims. depressive symptoms and stress. depressive symptoms and stress were assessed with the depression and stress subscales of the short version of the german translation of the depression anxiety stress scale (lovibond & lovibond, 1995; see nilges & essau, 2015, for the german translation). with cronbach’s alpha values of .91 for the depression and .92 for the stress subscale the dass provides good reliability in the current sample. the participants were asked to think about the past week when answering the items. both subscales consist of seven items (e.g., “i could not experience any positive feelings,” for depression and “i had the tendency to overreact to certain situations” for stress) and are answered on a 4-point likert-scale, ranging from 0 (did not apply to me at all ) to 3 (applied to me strongly or most of the time). the sum for each scale was calculated as the measure of each construct, respectively, leading to a maximum score of 21 and a minimum of 0. a score of 10 or higher is considered clinically relevant (nilges & essau, 2015). 42.6% of the current sample were above this threshold for depression, stress, or http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 both. no one reported a clinical diagnosis of depression. mentoring relationship. the duration of the mentoring relationship in months was retrieved from the biffy data file. mentoring relationships are expected to persist for at least one year. they can persist for as long as all involved individuals like them to. covariates. participant’s age and the age of the child in a mentoring relationship was assessed in years. further, the mothers were asked to state the number of children they have, as well as the number of years they spent on their education. each participant was asked to rate their monthly household net income on a scale from 1 (less than 1000 eur) to 6 (more than 5000 eur). finally, it was assessed how much social support the mothers had in addition to the mentor. six categories of potentially helpful people, like grandparents or friends, were given. the number of categories ticked by the mothers, indicating that they received help from at least one person fitting this category, served as a score of social support. results first, we depict descriptive statistics of the sample. the following paragraph focusses on the analysis of the first hypothesis, testing the association between depressive symptoms and duration of the mentoring relationship. the last paragraph addresses the second hypothesis, exploring whether the association between depressive symptoms and duration of the mentoring relationship can be explained by stress experienced by the single mother. the analyses are conducted using ωnyx (von oertzen, brandmaier, & tsang, 2015), a program used to compute structural equation models. this allows us to use full information maximum likelihood, meaning that participants with missing data do not have to be excluded from the analysis. all analyses are controlled for age of the mother, age of the child, number of children, social support, as well as education and income of the mother. descriptive statistics the average of the single mothers on the scale of depressive symptoms was 5.30 (sd = 5.49), with a minimum of 0 and the maximum reached in the sample was 19. 10 single mothers (21.3 %) scored 10 or higher, the cut-off value for clinically relevant scores. for stress an average of 8.91 (sd = 5.82) was reached, 0 being the minimum and 19 being the maximum. 20 mothers (42.6 %) scored a 10 or higher. main analyses association between depressive symptoms and mentoring. depressive symptoms were regressed on the duration of the mentoring relationship. depressive symptoms and duration of the mentoring relationship were controlled for the age of the mother, her education, income, age of the child, and number of children, as well as other social support the mother received. all variables were z-transformed before entering them into the analysis. the model is saturated, resulting in a perfect model fit. for each standard deviation of the mentoring duration, the depressive symptoms in single mother were 0.62 units lower, ci = [−1.04; −0.20]. in other words, over every time span of 33 months of mentoring, single mothers decreased by 3.4 points on the scale assessing depressive symptoms. this finding is in line with our hypothesis. additionally, the age of the child shared a significant association with depressive symptoms. full descriptions of the results can be found in table 1. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 table 1 effect of the mentoring duration on depressive symptoms controlled for age, number of children, social support, education, and income model parameters b se lr (1) p effect on depressive symptoms (controlled) duration mentoring -0.62 0.21 7.55 .006 effect of control variables on depressive symptoms age 0.21 0.15 1.84 .175 number of children 0.06 0.12 0.24 .626 social support 0.23 0.15 2.05 .152 age of the child 0.56 0.14 13.62 .000 education 0.05 0.12 0.14 .708 income 0.14 0.14 1.00 .317 mediating the association using stress. in a second step, a mediation analysis was calculated to test whether the association between mentoring duration and depressive symptoms can be explained as the stress experienced by the mother is lowered. the model was similar to the one described above. additionally, z-transformed stress was added to the regression of depressive symptoms. stress was further regressed on duration of the mentoring relationship. all three variables were controlled for the covariates listed above. the model is saturated, resulting in a perfect model fit. as can be seen in table 2, stress experienced by single mothers was 0.42 units lower, ci = [−0.82; −0.02], for each standard deviation of the mentoring duration. in other words, single mothers scored 2.4 points lower on the scale assessing stress for each 33 months the mentoring relationship had persisted. when stress is added to the regression of depressive symptoms, duration of the mentoring shares a smaller significant association with depressive symptoms than without stress. this shows that the relationship between mentoring duration and depressive symptoms is partially mediated by (lower) stress of the mother. depressive symptoms in single mothers were 0.78 units higher, ci = [0.58; 0.98], for each standard deviation of stress experienced by the mother. this means that for each 5.8 points on the scale assessing stress, single mothers displayed a 4.3 higher score on the scale assessing depressive symptoms. the full mediation model can be seen in figure 1. table 2 stress as a mediator of the association between the mentoring duration and depressive symptoms controlled for age, number of children, social support, education, and income model parameters b se lr (1) p effect on depressive symptoms (controlled) duration mentoring -0.28 0.12 4.22 .040 stress 0.78 0.10 30.00 .000 effect on stress (controlled) duration mentoring -0.42 0.20 3.87 .049 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 figure 1. stress as a mediator of the association between the mentoring duration and depressive symptoms controlled for age of the mother, number of children, social support, age of the child, education, and income. covariances between all covariates are omitted, given that none exceeded a value of 0.3 except for the covariance between age of the mother and income, b=0.45, lr(1)=8.47, p=.004 and between age of the mother and age of the child, b=0.49, lr(1)=12.92, p<.001. discussion the aim of the present article was to investigate whether youth mentoring is one possibility to alleviate depressive symptoms in single mothers. the analysis shows that in this population, depressive symptoms are on average reduced by roughly 0.11 to 0.75 standard deviations for each standard deviation of mentoring duration, which is equivalent to a decrease of 0.60 to 4.06 points on the dass over each duration of 33 months of mentoring. multiple possible confounds were controlled for in this analysis. this confirms the hypothesis that mentoring is in fact beneficial for single mothers with regard to depressive symptoms. the analysis further suggests that the association between depressive symptoms and the duration of the mentoring relationship is mediated by the stress experienced by the mother. effect of youth mentoring on single mothers past studies have focused nearly exclusively on the effects of youth mentoring on the children, neglecting possible additional advantages for parents (dubois et al., 2002, 2011). the present work addresses this gap in past literature by showing how single mothers benefit when their child is matched with a mentor. as single mothers are confronted with a large number of obstacles (brown & moran, 1997; butterworth, 2004; coiro, 2001; costello, 1991; jackson et al., 2000; parker & ritch, 2001; patten, 2001; wade & kendler, 2000), the potential to improve their situation is larger than it would be, for example, in married couples. our results suggest that it is beneficial for single mothers to seek out a mentor for their child. as youth mentoring programs are still not widely known in the public, it is important for agencies and practitioners to inform single mothers about this possibility. mentoring duration is associated with lower depressive symptoms, and depressive symptoms in turn are associated with negative parenting practices (goodman et al., 2011; lovejoy et al., 2000; riley et al., 2008). therefore, it is possible that positive aspects for children are associated with mentoring via this pathway, in that parents are able to engage in more successful parenting strategies, in addition to direct positive effects. further research studying how parents benefit from youth mentoring programs might additionally increase our understanding on how children benefit. this stresses the need to investigate not only mentors and mentees, but full triads of mentor, child, and parent in youth mentoring research. interdependencies are very likely to occur and understanding these might be helpful to further maximize the positive effects of mentoring programs. we also explored whether one mechanism by which youth mentoring is associated with http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 lower levels of depressive symptoms is decreasing stress of the mother. in fact, the mediation analysis showed that the direct effect of mentoring on depressive symptoms was reduced considerably when adding the pathway via stress of the mother. therefore, a possible explanation for the association between mentoring duration and decreasing depressive symptoms is a causal pathway in which mentoring reduces stress, which in turn reduces depressive symptoms. mentoring as one form of social support provides mothers with help on multiple levels, instrumental as well as emotional. increased time for herself or for work, direct help with child rearing, relief from solely borne parenting responsibilities will all reduce stress via social support. however, since the current study is only quasiexperimental, future research is needed to test whether this causal pathway can be confirmed. covariates and characteristics of biffy some noteworthy findings deserve to be mentioned in addition to the main hypotheses of this analysis. while financial hardship was one of the strongest predictors of depressive symptoms in single mothers in former studies (crosier et al., 2007; hope et al., 1999), it did not show a significant association with depressive symptoms in the present study. if our estimated reliability is true for the population, a post-hoc power analysis showed that one would need roughly four times as many participants (n = 188) to find a significant effect. nevertheless, the effect size is rather low even then. an additional possible explanation of this finding is that as single mothers often have a lower income, the variance in the income variable is reduced in this study compared to the general population. with less variance available, it is more difficult for the effect to reach the significance level. the reduction of variance is even stronger considering that social aid in germany is relatively high compared to other countries; therefore, levels of income which actually threaten the existence of single mothers are very rare in this sample. this explanation should be further investigated in cultural comparison studies, when evaluating youth mentoring programs. another aspect that deserves notice is the high education level of the single mothers in this study. single mothers are typically less educated than married mothers (subramaniam et al., 2014). in the current sample, the average time of education is 15 years, which is, for example, equivalent to a university degree. a possible explanation is that single mothers with a higher level of education are more likely to recruit the help provided by a mentoring program. limitations and future directions the present study gives a first indication how parents, more precisely single mothers, can benefit from youth mentoring programs. while the results support our hypothesis that depressive symptoms are lower the longer a mentoring relationship lasts, a range of open questions remains. the current study is cross-sectional, comparing depressive symptoms in single mothers who had been in the mentoring program for different amounts of time. longitudinal studies are needed to investigate granger causality of the association (granger, 1969). further causal conclusions are important and can only be drawn from experimental designs. even assuming a causal link underlying the correlation between youth mentoring and lower depressive symptoms, there could be multiple mechanisms of how a mentor for the child results in lower depressive symptoms in the mother. we explored the hypothesis that the mentoring relationship reduces the stress level experienced by the mother and, hence, results in less depressive symptoms; http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 however, other pathways most likely exist in parallel. also, future research is needed to investigate more precisely what mechanisms can explain the lower stress levels for single mothers with children in a mentoring relationship. we described some pathways on how this might occur, for example that the mother has more time to allocate on activities of her liking as the mentor supervises the child for a couple of hours every week. yet, it seems likely that this is not the only pathway on how a mentor can reduce stress levels experienced by the mother. for example, the mother might appreciate a second opinion on the development of her child, calming her worries, or she might grow to see an ally in the mentor when an argument arises with the child. it is possible to think of a wide array of pathways on how a mentor might reduce the stress experienced by a mother and future studies are needed to investigate which are the most important ones to further the effectiveness of youth mentoring programs. also note that in the current study, we only investigated depressive symptoms, not single mothers who have been diagnosed with an actual depression. while some of the mothers showed depressive symptoms over the threshold of a clinically relevant depression, to our knowledge none had been diagnosed with a depression by a clinician. a clinical sample might depict different results when investigating the same research questions, as for example interactions between mentor and a depressive single mother might be more strained, or there might be problems in keeping appointments to meet. however, the current data points in the direction that mentoring for children of single parents may be a support factor to overcome a mother’s depression. conclusion the present work is a first step in broadening our understanding on the variety of positive outcomes of youth mentoring programs, extending our view beyond the child as the unit of analysis. data of the biffy mentoring program showed that single mothers can benefit from a mentor for their child in the form of lower depressive symptoms the longer the mentoring relationship had persisted. we explored the possibility that this might be the case as the stress experienced by the single mother is lower the longer the mentor had been a part of the child’s life. the data was in line with this hypothesis, prompting further research to increase our understanding of the underlying mechanisms and multiple benefits of youth mentoring. in summary, it might be beneficial for single mothers if practitioners would inform them about local options of youth mentoring programs. references amato, p. r. 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(2004). the difference between single and married mothers in the 12month prevalence of major depressive syndrome, associated factors and mental health service utilization. social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 39 (1), 26– 32. doi: 10.1007/s00127-004-0699-7 weissman, m. m., wickramaratne, p., gameroff, m. j., warner, v., pilowsky, d., kohad, r. g., . . . talati, a. (2016). offspring of depressed parents: 30 years later. american journal of psychiatry, 173 (10), 1024–1032. doi: 0.1176/appi.ajp.2016.15101327 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 youngblut, j. m., thomas, d. j., brady, n. r., & brooten, d. (2000). factors influencing single mother’s employment status. health care for women international, 21 (2), 125– 136. doi: 10.1080/073993300245357 http://www.gjcpp.org/ intervention mapping: using theory and evidence to inform the ocean mind surf therapy program for improving youth mental health lisa olive1,2,3rachael parker4, madeleine dober1, cameron drake1, michael keith1, and rohan telford5 keywords: surf therapy, children, adolescents, mental health, intervention mapping author biographies: lisa olive, is a senior research fellow at the centre for social and early emotional development, school of psychology and the centre for innovation in mental and physical health and clinical treatment, school of medicine at deakin university. she has a phd in clinical psychology and is a national health and medical research council research fellow. lisa also holds honorary senior research fellow positions at the anu medical school, australian national university and in the mental health in elite and community sport unit at orygen, university of melbourne. lisa’s research program focuses on novel approaches to preventing and treating mental health problems, with a focus on youth and co-morbid cardiometabolic outcomes. she has a strong track record of intervention development, implementation and scale-up and over $3.5m in research funding. rachael parker, the ceo and founder of ocean mind, is a youth worker with over 10 years’ experience, an avid surfer and protector and lover of our coastal environments. rachael’s passion for working in the mental health sector stems from her own lived experience. after completing her bachelor of arts (youth work) she worked supporting young people experiencing homelessness and those in the youth justice system. rachael has designed and implemented innovative and evidence-based programs in the youth sector to support young people. rachael is passionate about using outdoor environments to create positive experiences and opportunities for young people to thrive. since discovering surfing in 2015, she’s combined her passion for the ocean and working with young people to create ocean mind. rachael believes there is nothing better than sharing your love for the ocean with young people and teaching them to engage, protect and enjoy the coastal environments. madeleine dober, is an early career psychologist with a masters degree in clinical psychology from deakin university. she also holds qualifications of a bachelor of arts and a bachelor of applied science (psychology) (honours). madeleine 1 center for social and early emotional development (seed), school of psychology, deakin university, melbourne, australia 2 centre for innovation in mental and physical health and clinical treatment (impact), deakin university, geelong, australia 3 orygen, the national centre of excellence in youth mental health, centre for youth mental health, the university of melbourne, australia 4 ocean mind, torquay, australia 5 research institute of sport and exercise, university of canberra, canberra, australia global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 has clinical experience working with children, adolescents, and adults in public and private health sectors within melbourne and coastal victoria. she is currently employed as a research assistant with deakin university. she has conducted several research studies exploring surf therapy as an intervention to improve the mental wellbeing of youth, and the experiences of people with chronic illness, specifically inflammatory bowel disease. cameron drake, graduated from deakin university geelong with a bachelor in psychological science (honours), where he was awarded one of three awards for best student thesis and the honours publications award for his investigations into surf therapy. cameron currently works as a research assistant at deakin university as part of a randomised controlled trial to evaluate the ocean mind surf therapy program on the surf coast of victoria, australia. michael keith, has always had an interest in mental health and started his psychology undergraduate at deakin university in 2014, recently completing his bachelor of psychology (honours) in 2019. michael’s honours thesis focused on understanding the barriers and facilitators to implementation of surf therapy. michael has a passion for exercise and nature and hopes to incorporate these into future mental health research. rohan telford, is a senior research fellow at university of canberra’s research institute for sport and exercise. he holds a phd in public health and has received over $3.5m in research funding. in 2017, rohan developed the physical activity physical literacy (pepl) approach, which has been rolled out across primary schools in south australia. rohan has a diverse range of research experience working in education, government and academic sectors. having extensive experience in designing, conducting and coordinating multidisciplinary research and randomized controlled trials, rohan’s main interest is translating research findings into practical real world solutions. recommended citation: olive, l., parker, r., dober, m., drake, c., keith, m., & telford, r. (2020). intervention mapping: using theory and evidence to inform the ocean mind surf therapy program for improving youth mental health. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(2), 1 – 21. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 intervention mapping: using theory and evidence to inform the ocean mind surf therapy program for improving youth mental health abstract surf therapy is a novel intervention that has been shown to have positive effects on youth mental health and associated downstream negative effects on social, physical and occupational functioning. while the evidence-base on the effectiveness of surf therapy to improve youth mental health is emerging, to date there is little published evidence outlining program development or potential mechanisms and pathways to positive change. intervention mapping is a method often used in program development in other health fields. the intervention mapping protocol outlined by bartholomew eldredge and colleagues (2016) describes an iterative process that allows program developers to identify and then solve complex problems, leading to program development. the protocol involves six steps: 1) needs assessment, 2) formulation of change objectives, 3) selection of theory‐based methods and practical strategies, 4) development of the intervention, 5) adoption and implementation plan, and 6) evaluation planning. this study aims to describe the intervention mapping protocol and apply it to the development and refinement of a novel surf therapy intervention, ocean mind. the ocean mind program combines psychoeducation, water safety and learn-to-surf activities with the overall program objective to improve mental health among child and adolescent participants. based on the steps of intervention mapping, theory-based methods and strategies were selected that informed the activities of the intervention and these were applied at the level of the individual and environment. this process led to a theory and evidence informed surf therapy program adapted to the local australian context. while intervention mapping has been criticized for being time-consuming and burdensome, the resulting outcome may lead to increased effectiveness. it is hoped that the matrices of change objectives presented in the current work will assist future surf therapy program developers to design, implement and evaluate surf therapy interventions using a similar systematic approach. introduction childhood is generally perceived as a time of health, yet 5-20% of children and adolescents in any given year experience a mental health problem, most commonly depression or anxiety (kessler et al., 2005; lawrence et al., 2015). mental health is fundamental to good quality of life. mentally healthy youth are most likely to grow into emotionally healthy adults, who in turn contribute to the health and well-being of their community (rao, 2001). young people with good mental health tend to experience improved self-esteem, as well as increased rates of school attendance, educational achievement, social cohesion and future health and life success (olweus, 1991). they also tend to possess problem-solving skills, social competence and a sense of purpose. however, there are many factors that can affect a young persons' ability to achieve and sustain a state of mental wellbeing. such factors can operate at the level of the individual, family, school or community and at a broader societal level (morgan et al., 2008). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 risk factors for mental disorders include, but are not limited to, poverty, social exclusion, peer rejection, isolation and lack of family support (curtis et al., 2013; patel et al., 2007). protective factors for mental wellbeing are linked to cohesion at community level, family well-being, individual behaviors and skills, and access to youth-friendly social services (who, 2004). the more risks young people experience, the worse their developmental outcomes are likely to be and the higher the probability of experiencing psychological distress or mental health disorders (sawyer et al., 2008). in contrast, the more opportunities young people have in childhood and adolescence to experience and accumulate the positive effects of protective factors that outweigh negative risk factors, the more likely they are to sustain mental health and wellbeing in later life (sameroff et al., 2008). accumulated evidence shows that strengthening protective factors in schools, homes and local communities can make important contributions to improving developmental outcomes of vulnerable young people (resnick, 1993; rutter, 1985; vanderbilt-adriance & shaw, 2008). surf therapy programs for youth at risk of mental health problems present a unique opportunity to positively affect child and adolescent mental health by combining the benefits of the practice of surfing, together with psychoeducational and mentoring activities (snelling, 2016). there is a small but promising evidence base that demonstrates the positive effect of surf therapy programs for vulnerable populations (e.g., godfrey et al., 2015; taylor, 2013; matos et al., 2017). however, to date, there is limited published evidence demonstrating the systematic planning and development process that led to the development of the surf therapy programs that may produce these positive outcomes. greater transparency and detailed reporting on how programs are developed would benefit the surf therapy literature, specifically, linking program objectives and strategies to prior evidenced-based interventions and theory (i.e., which program component is predicted to lead to which outcome, based on what theoretical reasoning?). interventions which make extensive use of theory tend to have larger effects on behavior (taylor et al., 2012; webb et al., 2010) and more explicit efforts in this respect in future literature in the field may lead to improved outcomes for participants. the intervention mapping protocol (bartholomew et al., 2011; bartholomew eldredge et al., 2016) provides a structured approach to intervention development, incorporating theory and evidence into intervention design, implementation and evaluation. intervention mapping describes a protocol for the development of a theory and evidence-based intervention in six steps: 1) needs assessment, 2) identification of outcomes and change objectives, 3) selection of theory-based methods and practical applications to change health related behavior, 4) designing and/or adapting an intervention, and 5) creation of an adoption and implementation plan and 6) evaluation planning. this approach has previously been used to develop a range of health behavior change interventions, such as increasing physical activity and improving mental health education (e.g., mceachan et al., 2008; wheeler & fowler, 2013). more specifically, the process follows the development of an intervention, mapping the path from recognition of a need or problem to the identification of a solution (bartholomew et al., 2011). this approach goes beyond simply describing what was done in an intervention, which has been the common approach to reporting in the surf therapy literature, but comprehensively identifies a logic model that can explain the path from the identified problem (e.g., the objective of the program) to providing a theory and evidence-informed solution (e.g., program strategies and outputs). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 in this paper, the authors describe the use of the systematic planning process that makes up the intervention mapping protocol, to develop a surf therapy program aimed at improving indicators of youth mental health within the australian context. the authors provide a brief introduction to intervention mapping, followed by a description of how the framework was applied in the development of the current surf therapy program. finally, the authors will discuss the strengths and limitations of this approach to help surf therapy program planners of future interventions. method the intervention mapping protocol was designed to guide the development of effective behavior change interventions and involves six steps: 1) needs assessment, 2) formulation of change objectives, 3) selection of theory‐based methods and practical strategies, 4) intervention development, 5) adoption and implementation plan, and 6) evaluation planning (see figure 1 for a summary of these steps). for the surf therapy program, the authors engaged in the intervention mapping process, which involved the completion of all steps, over a period of 10 months. step 1: needs assessment in the first step of the intervention mapping protocol, a needs assessment was conducted to determine the following: a) the prevalence of youth mental health problems (both symptoms and disorders), b) to identify the characteristics of young people who are at risk, as well as those with the greatest burden of risk, c) to identify community members and assess the strengths and resources common to this community, and d) to gain information on how to reach young people at risk of mental health problems. the needs assessment involved literature searches and consultation with key stakeholders. community members and stakeholders provided information on the issue of youth mental health; strategies to improve youth mental health; individual and environmental factors effecting this health problem; and barriers, facilitators, and recommendations for the development of the surf therapy intervention for the australian context. the program goals and objectives were identified at the completion of the needs assessment. step 2: formulation of change objectives in step two, the overall program objective was broken down into performance objectives. the aim of performance objectives is to specify the expected targets that need to be achieved by each group involved in the intervention in order to meet the overarching program objective. in the case of ocean mind, these groups were youth aged 7-18 years, surf mentors, and the surf program coordinator. evidence from literature searches, as well as consultations with community members and stakeholders resulted in the identification of important determinants of youth mental health, both behavioral and at the level of the environment (e.g., interpersonal, parental, organizational and community influences). from these identified determinants, those judged as most relevant, and also easily changeable within the context of the intervention, were selected as targets for change. following on from this process, specific intervention objectives, labelled ‘change objectives’ in the intervention mapping protocol, were created by cross examining the determinants with the performance objectives. thus, the resulting list of change objectives specifies what needs to change in the determinants (e.g. what the resulting behavioral and environmental level outcomes will be) in order to accomplish the performance objectives. step 3: selection of theory‐based methods and practical strategies in step three, the authors identified the relevant theoretical methods underpinning http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 the means to which change in determinants were likely to occur. the authors then considered each identified determinant and mapped them with the corresponding change objectives (created in step 2), which was then followed by linking matching theoretical methods for each determinant. this process was undertaken at both the level of the individual and environment, with a focus on the interpersonal environment. finally, the practical strategies or delivery methods were then developed, which could put the theoretical methods into practice. step 4. development of the surf therapy intervention in step 4, the products and materials that make up the intervention were selected, based on information gathered in the first three steps of the intervention mapping protocol. in this step, the intervention materials were designed and developed, informed by consultations with community members, stakeholders and implementers, with the aim of achieving the program objective. figure 1. intervention mapping protocol (adapted from bartholomew eldredge (2016)) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 step 5. adoption and implementation plan the adoption and implementation plan of the surf therapy intervention was developed during step 5 of the intervention mapping protocol. firstly, intervention adopters and implementers were identified and this was informed by information gathered during the first four steps of the intervention mapping protocol. the program director, program coordinator and the surf mentors were identified as key intervention adopters and implementers. in this step, program developers assessed recruitment strategies specifically, to recruit the target population (i.e., youth with or at risk of mental health disorder and their parent/guardian), and ways to maximise their participation in the ocean mind program. during this step, the program developers also developed strategies for recruiting and engaging surf mentors, who in part, would facilitate the implementation and maintenance of the program. an advisory board was also formed, along with the appointment of an administrator to further assist with the maintenance of the program. a strategy for dissemination of the program was also devised, which involved developing a network of referrers from a number of social and community systems. step 6. evaluation planning in step 6 of the intervention mapping protocol, a plan to evaluate the effectiveness of the surf therapy program was developed, including a process evaluation to determine the impact of the surf therapy program and to gain an understanding of the influence of planning decisions made at each step on the intervention mapping protocol. results step 1: needs assessment in the first step of the intervention mapping protocol, a needs assessment was conducted to determine the prevalence of youth mental health problems (both symptoms and disorders), to identify the characteristics of young people at risk, as well as those with the greatest burden of risk, to assess the strengths and resources common to this community, and to gain information on how to reach young people at risk of mental health problems. in the first instance, literature searches were undertaken to: 1) determine the prevalence of mental health problems in youth aged 7-18 years, 2) identify the characteristics of those most at risk; and 3) produce a list of determinants that influence the complex problem of youth mental health. findings from these searches revealed that 1 in 7 children (aged 4‐17 years) in australia experienced a mental health problem in the preceding 12 months and that only half of families accessed professional help (johnson et al., 2016). in victoria (the state in which the ocean mind program is delivered), for those children and young persons who did receive help, most received clinical treatment in the community. there were also indicators of a limited workforce of child mental health clinicians who were able to service those in need (department of health and human services, 2019), adding further weight to the need for community programs like ocean mind that can complement clinical and acute care services. some of the major risk factors for mental illness included age (older youth were more at risk), identifying as aboriginal and torres strait islander, gender (females were at greater risk), inconsistent caregiving, family conflict, weak social ties, being bullied, academic failure, trauma (abuse and neglect), maladaptive personality traits, difficult temperament, and learning disorders (patel et al.,2007; steinhausen, & metzke, 2001). in addition to searching the literature, consultations took place with community members and stakeholders, including schools (e.g. teachers, principals and school http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 counsellors), staff members from community mental health organizations, the surf industry, other surf therapy program developers, and local government, as well as parents and children (n ≈ 50). these consultations were particularly helpful in contextualizing the strengths and resources that were common in the victorian surf coast community, and for producing ideas and strategies on how to reach young people at risk of mental health problems. two major barriers were identified relating to financial and geographic access. specifically, these included the need for a low cost program and increasing safe access to the coast for families who had a limited history of engaging with coastal environments or beach activities. these barriers were overcome by ensuring the program was delivered free of cost to participants and by providing transportation for children whose parents/guardians may not have otherwise been available or able to transport the child each week to the program. based on findings from both searches of the literature and consultations with community members and stakeholders, the following program objective was devised – children between 7 and 18 years will improve on indicators of mental health by the end of the intervention. program objectives at both the individual and interpersonal level were formulated and these are summarized in table 1. the identified program objective at the level of the individual was improvement in indicators of youth mental health (e.g. social connection, self-efficacy, depression/anxiety symptomology); and at the interpersonal level program coordinator and mentors support children to experience improved mental health table 1 summary of the surf therapy program and performance objectives for indicators of mental health at each level of the intervention level of the intervention target group program objective performance objective individual level youth improvement in indicators of youth mental health (e.g. social connection, selfefficacy, symptoms of depression/ anxiety) p1. youth participate in 6 sessions of om group psychoeducation p2. youth participate in 6 mentor-led learn to surf sessions (mastery experience) p3. youth develop and maintain secure relationships with mentor across 6 sessions interpersonal level pc and surf mentors pc and mentors support children to experience improved mental health p1. pc facilitates and mentor participates in 6 sessions of psychoeducation relevant to child p2. pc and mentors provide children with a mastery experience (6 sessions of learning to surf) p3. mentors provide children with supportive mentoring experience that can build stable, secure relationship note. pc = program coordinator; om = ocean mind; p1-3 = performance objective 1-3. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 step 2: formulation of change objectives in step 2, specific performance objectives relating to the program objective were formulated at each level of the intervention, including the individual level (children/adolescents) and the interpersonal level (surf mentors, program coordinator). this was followed by identifying the important and changeable determinants related to the program objective of improving youth mental health. this was informed by the investigations undertaken at step 1 in the needs assessment. matrices of change objectives were then developed at both the individual level and interpersonal level, by crossing the performance objectives with the list of personal determinants (summarized in table 2 and table 3, respectively). this resulted in a statement of what was expected to change as a result of the intervention, which could influence the performance objectives in order to achieve the program outcome of improved mental health in youth. the personal determinants selected for both the individual and interpersonal level were knowledge, self-efficacy, attitude and capability. step 3: selection of theory‐based methods and practical strategies in step 3 of the intervention mapping protocol, theory-based approaches that informed changes in determinants were identified and linked to intervention strategies that were appropriate to achieving the performance objectives. this step was achieved by listing all determinants that were presented in the matrices of change objectives at both the individual and interpersonal level, and then pairing these to relevant theory. a summary of the theorybased methods and practical strategies to achieve the change objectives at each level of the surf therapy intervention is outlined in table 4. in addition to theory-based methods, practical strategies informed by the prior evidence base in surf therapy were also considered. in particular, many of the adopted practical strategies in the ocean mind program were largely informed by the wave project (https://www.waveproject.co.uk), with permission and consultation from their program developers. the uk-based wave project is a national health service (nhs) funded surf therapy program developed to help young people improve their emotional and physical wellbeing. engagement and early collaboration with the already established wave project was an important element in the development of the ocean mind program and this process highlights the value and benefit that can be gained from such generous and open collaboration within the field of surf therapy. to provide an example of what was undertaken during step 3 of the intervention mapping protocol, the steps taken when looking at the first individual level performance objective, ‘youth participate in 6 mentor-led learn to surf sessions’ are presented here. firstly, this performance objective was crossed with the determinant ‘self-efficacy’, which then resulted in the change objective ‘children express confidence in their ability to learn to surf’. relevant theory was then identified that could support and inform program strategies that were targeted at achieving this change objective. in this instance, theory relating to change in self-efficacy can be explained by bandura’s social cognitive theory (1991), which emphasizes how cognitive, behavioral, personal, and environmental factors interact to determine motivation and behavior (crothers et al., 2008). the theory of selfefficacy lies at the center of social cognitive theory. when applied to the current example, unless children believe that their actions can produce the outcomes they desire (i.e. success in implementing the skills involved in learning to surf), they have little incentive to act or to persevere in the face of difficulties (i.e. poor surfing conditions, poor http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 performance on a particular wave). based on social cognitive theory and specifically, selfefficacy theory, characteristics of the interaction between child and mentor and between the child and the larger group (interpersonal level) are therefore important. interactions between child and mentor should involve verbal persuasion (e.g. encouragement related to the child’s performance or ability to perform). additionally, interaction with the larger group can provide opportunities for vicarious experiences, where a child may watch another child achieve a goal, such as standing up successfully on a wave, which may motivate them to keep going or hold the belief that the skill of standing up is achievable (e.g. increase their self-efficacy). similarly, setting surfing challenges at a level that is suitable for the individual child, where they are likely to achieve success, is another important aspect in achieving the change objective of ‘children express confidence in their ability to learn to surf’. another individual characteristic is the child’s ability to receive physiological feedback when participating in learn to surf sessions. children are likely to experience sensations in their body, such as those relating to the release of adrenalin (e.g., increased heart rate, surge in energy, feelings of excitement or fear). how a child perceives these physical sensations and the associated emotional arousal will influence their beliefs of selfefficacy (bandura, 1977). a child’s ability to receive emotional and physiological feedback also ties in with another performance objective, ‘youth participate in 6 sessions of om group psychoeducation’, which when crossed with the determinant ‘self-efficacy’ resulted in the change objective ‘youth express confidence to participate in psychoeducation activities’. by providing children with psychoeducation aimed at increasing their awareness and ability to label feelings (both emotional and physical), as well as their ability to identify the link between thoughts, feelings and behaviors, their self-efficacy beliefs around the physiological reactions experienced when learning to surf may be improved. these strategies are again informed by social cognitive theory. step 4. development of the surf therapy intervention in step 4, the strategies and activities that make up the intervention were selected, based on information gathered in the first three steps of the intervention mapping protocol. this included designing communication that conveyed the intent of the surf therapy program to parents and children, as well as a pre-program training workshop for surf mentors to increase their program knowledge and mental health literacy. during this mentor training, information was provided on: a) symptom presentations for a range of mental health disorders (e.g. anxiety, depression, neurodevelopmental disorder); b) mentoring skills, including what it means to be a mentor, how to develop a safe, non-judgmental space for youth and how to communicate effectively with youth; c) how to develop a growth mindset in youth; and d) building supportive relationships with youth. for the intervention, a series of six sessions combining land-based psychoeducation plus water-based skills activities of learning to surf were developed. combined, these activities form the six week surf therapy intervention and were designed to target the change objectives outlined in table 2-4, with the aim of achieving the overall program objective of improving indicators of youth mental health. step 5. adoption and implementation plan the adoption and implementation plan of the surf therapy intervention was developed during step 5 of the intervention mapping protocol. in this step, program developers addressed strategies aiming to increase the likelihood that the target population (e.g., http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 child with or at risk of mental health disorder) would take up the program. this included providing transport for children to and from the program and ensuring the program was offered at no cost to participants. strategies aimed at recruiting and maintaining surf mentors in the ocean mind program were also devised and included ensuring mentors and child participants were well matched on skills, experience and personal characteristics to increase the likelihood of a successful and fulfilling mentor relationship. further strategies included ensuring surf mentors received adequate training prior to the program commencing, both in terms of mental health literacy and surf coaching skills but also to ensure surf mentors had a clear understanding of expectations and the ethos and overarching aims of the program. it was hypothesized that this would aid adoption of the program while maintaining fidelity to the components identified as necessary to achieve the change objectives and in turn, the overall program objective. a strategy for dissemination of the program was also devised, which involved developing a network of referrers from a number of social and community systems. in order to increase the reach of the program, it was a key principle that the intervention be provided in the community free of charge. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 table 2 matrices of change objectives for youth at the individual level of the surf therapy intervention performance objectives personal determinants knowledge self-efficacy attitudes capability p1. youth participate in 6 sessions of om group psycheducation c1.1.1 children identify symptoms of mental health c1.1.2 children label emotions c1.1.3 children describe link between thoughts, feelings and behaviors c1.1.4 children identify the relationship between physical activity and mental health c1.2.1 children express confidence to participate in psychoeducation activities c1.3.1 children express positive attitude about the helpfulness of group psychoeducation activities c1.3.2 children express an attitude of acceptance of mental health symptoms for self and others c1.4.1 children have cognitive capability to participate in psychoeducation activities p2. youth participate in 6 mentor-led learn to surf sessions (mastery experience) c2.1.1 children recall the sequence of skills required to learn to surf c2.1.2 children describe basic water safety principles c2.2.1 children express confidence in their ability to learn to surf c2.3.1 children express positive attitudes about the experience of learning to surf c2.4.1 children have the physical capability to participate in learnto-surf activities p3. youth develop and maintain secure relationships with mentor across 6 sessions c3.1.1 children express knowledge on how to communicate with adults c3.1.2 children describe developing social skills and building stable, secure relationships c3.1.3 children describe learning about thoughts, feelings and behaviors c3.1.4 children describe the importance of their relationship with their mentor c3.2.1 children express confidence in their ability to talk with mentor c3.2.2 children express confidence in their ability to make friends c3.3.1 children express positive attitudes about their relationship with their mentor c3.4.1 children have the communication and social skills to engage with mentor note. c1.1.1=change objective 1.1.1 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 table 3 matrices of change objectives for program coordinator and surf mentor at the interpersonal level of the surf therapy intervention performance objectives personal determinants knowledge self-efficacy attitudes/beliefs capability p1. pc delivers 6 sessions of psychoeducation relevant to child c1.1.1 pc can describe child models of mental health and identify individual symptoms of mental health problems c1.1.2 pc describes the relationship between thoughts, feelings & behaviors c1.1.3 pc can list benefits of physical activity on mental health c1.1.4 pc recognizes the principles of vicarious experience (modelling) and its effect on mental health c1.2.1 pc expresses confidence that they can provide psychoeducation to children that may lead to improvements in mental health c1.3.1 pc holds positive attitude of the benefits of psychoeducation activities on child mental health c1.4.1 pc have the skills to facilitate psychoeducation activities p2. pc and mentors provide children with a mastery experience (6 sessions of learning to surf) c2.1.1 pc and mentors state the skill components required to learn to surf (e.g., paddling for a wave, catching a wave, standing up, turning) c2.1.2 pc and mentors explain tenets of water safety c2.1.3 pc and mentors recognize the principles of vicarious experience (modelling) and verbal persuasion and state their effect on learning a new skill c2.2.1 pc and mentors express confidence in their ability to teach children to surf c2.2.2 pc and mentors express confidence that they are able to use verbal persuasion and vicarious experience (modelling) to encourage children in learning to surf c2.3.1 pc and mentors express positive attitudes about surfing as an agency to improve selfefficacy and mental health c2.4.1 pc and mentors have the skills required to instruct children to learn to surf http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 p3. mentors provide children with supporting mentoring experience to build secure relationship c3.1.1 mentors describe the features of a stable and secure relationship c3.1.2 mentors describe the importance of a stable and secure relationship on child mental health c3.2.1 mentors have confidence in their ability to form a stable and secure relationship with child c3.3.1 mentors make clear the meaningfulness and importance of forming a relationship with the child c3.3.2 mentor makes clear the importance of the child’s wellbeing c3.3.3 mentors appraise that a stable, secure relationship with child is feasible and effective c3.4.1 mentor possess the skills to form stable, secure relationships note: pc = program coordinator; c1.1.1 = change objective 1.1.1 table 4 theory-based methods and practical strategies to achieve the change objectives at each level of the surf therapy intervention level of the intervention determinant change objective theory-based method theory practical strategy individual (youth) knowledge c1.1.1, c1.1.2, c1.1.3, c1.1.4, c2.1.1, c2.1.2, c3.1.1, c3.1.2, c3.1.3 group discussion, elaboration, rehearsal, using cues theories of information processing (smith, 2008), elaboration likelihood model (petty et. al., 2009) psychoeducation activities; learn to surf activities self-efficacy c1.2.1, c2.2.1, c3.2.1, c3.2.2 modelling, feedback, persuasive communication, facilitation, reinforcement social cognitive theory, learning theories communicationpersuasion matrix (mcguire, 2001) psychoeducation activities; learn to surf activities http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 attitude/beliefs c1.3.1, c1.3.2, c2.3.1, c3.3.1 persuasive communication, framing, feedback, selfmonitoring, active participation, group discussion communication persuasion matrix; learning theories; selfregulation theory psychoeducation activities; learn to surf activities capability c1.4.1, c2.4.1, c3.4.1 active learning, individualization, goal setting social cognitive theory, trans-theoretical model; theories of goal directed behavior psychoeducation activities; learn to surf activities note. om = ocean mind; c1.1.1 = change objective 1.1. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 step 6. evaluation planning a plan to evaluate the effectiveness of the surf therapy program was developed in step six, the final step of the intervention mapping protocol. the program is currently being implemented and effectiveness of the intervention for improving indicators of youth mental health is being evaluated in a pilot cluster waitlist randomized controlled trial. the program is being evaluated at the individual level of the child, but also at the interpersonal level of the surf mentor and program coordinator. individual and interpersonal level assessments include measures of both internalizing and externalizing symptoms, depression, anxiety, self-efficacy beliefs, quality of the childmentor relationship, as well as changes in behavior related to the specific change objectives. these assessments are mixed methods, involving both questionnaires, direct observation and interviews and are being completed by a number of informants, including children, parents, surf mentors and referring professionals to corroborate reports. semi-structured interviews and focus group are focusing on answering three main questions, (1) what are the benefits and limitations of the program, (2) what are the potential mechanisms of action, and (3) how well was the program implemented? process–evaluation questionnaires for both parents, referrers and surf mentors were developed to record and assess the implementation of the intervention. discussion in this paper, the authors aimed to describe how a systematic planning process, based on an intervention mapping protocol (bartholomew et al., 2016) could be used to develop a surf therapy program. the overall objective of the ocean mind surf therapy intervention was to improve indicators of youth mental health within the australian context. the intervention mapping protocol provided a multistep planning process, which included a needs assessment, the application of theory, program design, program development, adoption and implementation, and evaluation. this process involved a number of stakeholders, including program developers, mental health practitioners, school principals, teachers and school counsellors, children, parents, and researchers in order to capture a wide range of experiences, as well as practical and theoretical contributions to inform the intervention. the ocean mind surf therapy intervention was designed to improve indicators of youth mental health. in the first instance, this program was largely informed by the wave project (https://www.waveproject.co.uk), with permission and consultation from their program developers. however, given the wave project was developed in the united kingdom and originally delivered in cornwall, england, it was important that the ocean mind program was developed specifically for the australian context, with local adaptions relevant to the victorian surf coast region, where the program is delivered. this consideration was important as the region has its own set of unique social, cultural and environmental circumstances that may not be comparable to other coastal areas of australia (olive, 2015). for example, the victorian surf coast climate is much cooler, with cooler water temperatures than the majority of coastal regions within australia. this had important bearings on the 1) timing of program delivery, meaning the program could not be delivered all-year-round, 2) the type of equipment that would be required to ensure participants were comfortable, and 3) the way in which potential participants engaged, or in the case of the current population, has a lack of or minimal prior engagement with the beach/ocean environment. other considerations included the way in which surf permits were distributed in this area. compared to some more populated surf breaks in australia, sufficient access to beaches was not a major http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 barrier in the development of the ocean mind program. during the needs assessment and with the identification of determinants, it became evident that children would benefit from more than just learning to surf, which did not appear to target all of the important and changeable determinants of youth mental health that were identified. this lead to the idea of the land-based psychoeducation session to accompany the water-based ‘learnto-surf’ component in the program design and development stage. the resulting intervention was a 6-week surf therapy program, delivered across consecutive weekends, lasting two hours in duration, which is broken down into a psychoeducation session, a brief water safety session and learn-to-surf session. to the authors knowledge, this is the first study to use intervention mapping methods to develop and refine a program of surf therapy for youth at risk of, or experiencing mental health problems. the intervention mapping protocol outlined by bartholomew eldredge et al. (2016) provided a useful framework to assist the group in the planning stages of program development, while also prompting developers to consider implementation and evaluation from the beginning, during the planning process. from the authors experience, we believe that the intervention mapping protocol ensures that input is provided from a variety of sources, which may lead to more coherent, integrated and meaningful implementation and evaluation plans from the outset. while the authors valued the intervention mapping process of developing a program logic that clearly identifies what needs to happen within the program to increase the likelihood of achieving the program objectives, there were some limitations to the process. for example, the intervention mapping process requires an investment of time and resources, particularly when developing new programs rather than adapting existing programs. even so, the authors argue that to progress the field of surf therapy, there is a strong need for evidence-based practice. the steps undertaken in the intervention mapping process will not only assist future program developers to identify clear program objectives, but will also allow them to identify potential agents of change through the identification and evaluation of key determinants and change objectives. limitations and future directions a lack of resources was a limiting factor in the current study, which limited the scope of program development. with greater resources, both time and financial, the ocean mind program may have benefited from a more multilevel approach to intervention that went beyond the individual and interpersonal levels. in future iterations, it will be beneficial to expand on the logic models developed for the current intervention to meaningfully incorporate determinants at other environmental levels beyond just the interpersonal. for example, program design might benefit from targeting organization and community factors that could not be addressed in the current iteration due to limited resources. additionally, it is well established that parents/guardians play an important role in a young person’s mental health. this could be another focus, at the interpersonal level, of the ocean mind intervention in future iterations. given that program developers are often juggling competing priorities, and limited in time, resources and means to engage in such a resource-intense process, undertaking the full intervention mapping protocol may not always be feasible. to address this barrier, partnering with local universities or research institutes that do have the capacity for such work may prove to be a beneficial way to address this barrier. given the emerging nature of the field of surf therapy and the methodological limitations in much of the published literature, there is a need for http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 program developers and researchers to articulate the theory, scientific evidence-base and systematic planning that often informs surf therapy program development but is less often adequately reported in the published literature. intervention mapping presents a comprehensive approach to program development that can produce these detailed outputs but there are a variety of methods that can be considered (see o’cathain et al., 2019 for a review of approaches). the benefit of undertaking and documenting such systematic approaches to program development as those outlined by o’cathain et al. (2019) and others, relates to the clear identification of change objectives and predicted outcomes. this detailed information can clearly inform evaluation, such as the selection of applicable outcome measures, as well as process assessments that can identify possible pathways and mechanisms of change. a systematic approach to program development also assists with implementation evaluation, which can inform revisions to program delivery. there is evidence to show that interventions which make extensive use of theory and prior evidence in their systematic planning tend to have larger effects on behavior (taylor, conner, & lawton, 2012; webb, joseph, yardley, & michie, 2010). with such systematic planning, it is perhaps then that the ethical investment in to more rigorous and resource intensive randomized controlled trials are justified, which can serve to improve the quality of the evidence base in the field of surf therapy. conclusion the current study has demonstrated that the intervention mapping protocol can provide a systematic and rigorous approach to program development and planning for implementation and evaluation. the authors have provided a case example of how intervention mapping was used in the development of a surf therapy program aimed at improving youth mental health. the intervention mapping process outlined in the current work may assist future program developers in assessing whether intervention mapping is feasible approach to program development in context of their available resources. references bandura, a. 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(2013). using an intervention mapping framework to develop an online mental health continuing education program for pharmacy staff. journal of continuing education in the health professions, 33, 258-266. doi: 10.1002/chp.21198 world health organization (2004). prevention of mental disorders: effective interventions and policy options: summary report. world health organization. http://www.gjcpp.org/ empowering peer outreach workers in an hiv prevention and care program for kenyan gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men: challenges and opportunities in the anza mapema study darya kizub1, laura quilter2, lucy atieno3, teddy brian aloo3, duncan o. okall3, fredrick o. otieno3, robert c. bailey3,4, & susan m. graham5 keywords: hiv prevention, hiv care, peer educators, peer outreach workers, men who have sex with men, kenya author biographies: darya kizub, is interested in community-participatory research, bridging health disparities, and making healthcare more equitable and just, especially for people who are more likely to be marginalized or live in communities or countries with fewer resources. she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in public health from johns hopkins university. prior to medical school, she served as a research coordinator for a qualitative research project to study access to hiv and sti prevention and treatment services among gay, bisexual, and other more hidden men who have sex with men in three cities in russia with the goal of creating more equitable programs and services. during medical school, she helped found a non-profit organization called charm city connection together with her classmates and the community organization the men and families center to link underserved residents of east baltimore to medical care and existing social services. she also traveled to morocco to conduct a qualitative study among physicians treating tuberculosis in morocco to explore reasons why some patients stop treatment early and to create a tool to help physicians identify these patients early to provide tailored assistance to help them complete treatment. during residency, dr. kizub traveled to kisumu, kenya to help implement and evaluate an hiv prevention and treatment program for gay, bisexual, and other more hidden men who have sex with men described in this paper. she is currently training as a hematology/oncology fellow at md anderson and plans to conduct research in health disparities and global oncology. laura quilter, is an infectious disease specialist and 1 medical hospitalist team, the everett clinic, everett, united states of america 2 department of allergy and infectious disease, university of washington, seattle, united states of america 3 nyanza reproductive health society, kisumu, kenya 4 division of epidemiology, university of illinois at chicago school of public health, chicago, united states of america 5 departments of medicine, global health, and epidemiology; university of washington, seattle, washington, usa global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 medical epidemiologist. her research interests focus on public health and sti prevention with prior research experience involving extragenital gonococcal and chlamydial infections, neurosyphilis, and the surveillance of antimicrobial resistance in n. gonorrhoeae. dr. quilter completed her infectious diseases fellowship and received her master of public health in global health at the university of washington. she completed her internal medicine residency at the university of pittsburgh medical center and earned her medical degree from the indiana university school of medicine. lucy atieno, is currently a research assistant at kemri faces clinical trial in migori county kenya. she has been a study research assistant and a counselor in several studies in the center for disease control kisumu, nyanza reproductive health society kisumu and action aid kenya. she has a higher diploma in community health and development at great lakes university kisumu kenya and a higher diploma in psychological counseling, kenya association of professional counselors kisumu. teddy brian aloo, has a bachelor of arts in sociology from maseno university, kenya. he is passionate in working with the gender minority groups, specifically men who have sex with men (msm). teddy currently works at the anza mapema clinic, a nyanza reproductive health society (nrhs) program, as an outreach services coordinator, supervising peer educators and outreach workers. he has extensive experience that spans over four years providing with sexual reproductive health services and information. teddy has a strong community work background and is a well-trained community engagement champion with good clinical practice, human subjects’ protection and msm sensitivity training for health workers. fredrick otieno, is a medical epidemiologist and the research director of nyanza reproductive health society (nrhs). his research interests are in adolescent health and men’s health in the fields of hiv/aids, stis, infectious diseases and reproductive health. he graduated with a phd in public health epidemiology from the university of the western cape in south africa and an mph from the same university. dr otieno has been pi for several epidemiological and clinical trials mostly in the fields of hiv and stis and has over 30 publications in peer reviewed journals. he is a member of the msm health research consortium and has also conducted several trainings in kenya, uganda, tanzania, malawi, south africa and zambia. he also has a passion for emergency medicine and is a certified advanced trauma life support trainer by the american college of surgeons. robert c. bailey, is distinguished professor emeritus of epidemiology at the university of illinois at chicago (uic). he is also interim director of the nyanza reproductive health society (nrhs) located in kisumu, kenya. he holds a phd from harvard university and an mph in epidemiology from emory university. author of five books and over 180 scientific papers, professor bailey is known for his research in the field of hiv/aids prevention and has led teams of biomedical and behavioral researchers and practitioners in africa, primarily in kenya, since 1996. he was the p.i. for the randomized controlled trial of medical male circumcision (mmc) to reduce hiv http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 incidence in kisumu, kenya. he has lead studies of and implementation programs for mmc among men, women and providers in uganda, malawi, zambia, kenya and the dominican republic. he initiated the formation of the first support group for lgbtq in western kenya, called kisumu initiative for positive empowerment (kipe), and has been the p.i. or co-investigator on numerous studies and prevention programs for msm over the last 10 years. bailey has trained phd, mph and ms students from the u.s., kenya, zambia and other countries and served as technical advisor and consultant to the world health organization, unaids, the bill and melinda gates foundation, usaid, ogac, cdc, the kenyan moh and the centre for hiv and aids prevention studies in south africa, and he has served on the advisory boards of various clinical trials and implementation programs. susan graham, is an associate professor of global health and medicine and an adjunct associate professor of epidemiology at the university of washington. she currently holds the robert w. anderson endowed chair in medicine and is associate chair for academic programs in global health. her research focuses on developing effective interventions to support hiv prevention and improve hiv care outcomes in vulnerable populations, including men who have sex with men and male and female sex workers, in kenya and the united states. recommended citation: kizub, d., quilter, l., atieno, l., aloo, t.b., okall, d.o., otieno, f.o., bailey, r.c., & graham, s.m. (2020). empowering peer outreach workers in an hiv prevention and care program for kenyan gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men: challenges and opportunities in the anza mapema study. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(3), 1-17. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://wwww.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: darya aleksandrovna kizub, 419 ne 71 st., apt 117 seattle, 98115, united states of america. email: daryakizub@gmail.com http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://wwww.gjcpp.org/ mailto:daryakizub@gmail.com global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 empowering peer outreach workers in an hiv prevention and care program for kenyan gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men: challenges and opportunities in the anza mapema study gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (msm) are at high risk for human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) infection. in rights-constrained settings with pervasive stigma, peer outreach workers play a key role in recruitment and retention of msm in hiv research, prevention, and treatment programs. we explored factors affecting the empowerment of peers in an hiv prevention and care study for msm in kisumu, kenya, with the goal of improving program services and supporting good participatory practice. the anza mapema study, conducted from 8/2015-10/2017, aimed to enroll 700 msm in a comprehensive package of find, test, link and retain in hiv prevention and care interventions, with quarterly follow-up over 12 months. seventeen mostly heterosexual salaried staff implemented the clinical and research components of the study, while 13 gay and bisexual peers facilitated recruitment, retention, and participant education, supported by a monthly stipend. a community advisory board provided feedback on program methods and performance. in-depth interviews with peers and staff at two timepoints were used to obtain feedback and make program improvements. thematic analysis was conducted, and results were presented to peers and staff for discussion and triangulation. despite mutual appreciation of peers’ contributions to the project, peers and staff had different goals and vision for anza mapema. while staff focused on implementing the study protocol, peers envisioned broader programming including community-building activities, advocacy, mental health and substance use services, and economic empowerment. from the outset, power disparities and power struggles between peers and staff favored the staff, as peers were younger, less educated, and had lower compensation for their time. while peers appreciated the opportunity to help their community and the free health services provided by the project, they voiced concerns about stigmatizing attitudes from some staff, insufficient training, exclusion from decision-making, minimal representation on the study team, and lack of opportunities for advancement. staff were supportive of peer’s requests but felt constrained by limited funding and rigid study timelines. peers’ concerns were addressed at least in part through monthly team meetings with program leadership, weekly meetings with outreach coordinators, additional training, the promotion of one peer to a salaried position, and the development of community-building activities and a support group for participants who struggled with alcohol and drugs. integration of gay and bisexual peers into hiv research and programming is critical in rights-constrained settings but challenged by disparities in power between peers and staff. empowerment of peers is an important component of good participatory practice, and requires attention to training, inclusion in decision-making, opportunities for advancement, and support for community-building. future studies that rely on peers for participant recruitment and retention should address these issues and make peer empowerment an overt component of the program. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 introduction hiv prevention and care research focused on gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (msm) is especially challenging in countries like kenya, where same-sex sexual relations are criminalized [1, 2]. msm are vulnerable to hiv due to the high risk of transmission during anal intercourse and as a result of structural factors that impede access to prevention and care, including criminalization, societal stigma, discrimination, violence, and exclusion from education and employment opportunities [3]. good participatory practice guidelines for biomedical hiv prevention trials were written to prevent the replication of existing societal injustices and power inequalities in research studies and ensure equitable partnership with and input from communities and individuals affected by hiv, in order to assure that studies are carried out with scientific and ethical integrity. the respect, protect, fulfill guidelines provide additional information and tools for researchers and members of the gay and bisexual community to form sustainable collaborations during all phases of research and ensure that studies are relevant to community needs [4]. in settings where msm remain hidden and hiring openly gay or bisexual local staff is difficult, peer outreach workers (hereafter, ‘peers’) serve as crucial links between researchers, healthcare workers, and msm in need of information and hiv prevention and care [5, 6]. both good participatory practice and the respect, protect, fulfill guidelines support the integration of peers, who are community stakeholders and representatives of study participants, as full partners into hiv prevention and care research. this is done both because it is “the right thing to do” and because direct engagement of peers facilitates participant recruitment and retention. community-based participatory research similarly supports the full and equitable integration of community participants into all phases of research with the goal of learning together, decreasing inequalities, and achieving positive social change [7, 8]. few studies have explored challenges to the empowerment of gay and bisexual peers working to improve the health of their communities in rightsand resourceconstrained settings. this information could be uniquely valuable to practitioners of community psychology, as well as to clinicians, public health and social science researchers, and policymakers who are interested in community-based participatory methods and would like to learn more about empowering and improving health outcomes of sexual minority individuals and members of other marginalized communities. we explored successes and opportunities for improvement in the collaboration between peers and full-time staff involved in a twoyear hiv prevention and treatment study called anza mapema (kiswahili for “start early”) in kisumu, kenya. our goal was to empower peers, improve program services and achieve good participatory practice, identifying lessons learned that could inform similar research and programs for msm in rights-constrained settings such as kenya. methods study context the anza mapema study aimed to enroll 700 msm in a comprehensive package of hiv prevention and care interventions, with quarterly follow-up over 12 months. between 8/2015 and 10/2017, 636 hiv-negative and 75 hiv-positive msm enrolled in the study, which was funded by the u.s. centers for disease control and prevention and implemented by the nyanza reproductive health society (nrhs) in kisumu, kenya [9]. kisumu is kenya’s third largest city and has a sizeable msm population, a relatively tolerant political climate, and a robust presence of gay and bisexual community organizations, led by the nyanza, rift valley, and western kenya http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 (nyarwek) coalition, which integrates the views of organizations it represents to empower them and advocate for health and socioeconomic well-being of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community. nrhs had previously conducted a respondent-driven sampling study of msm in the local community [10], and supported an initiative called kipe (the kenya initiative for positive empowerment) to promote empowerment for the gay and bisexual community; kipe’s funding ended in 2013. prior to study initiation, the anza mapema investigators met with gay and bisexual community stakeholders, law enforcement, religious leaders, and local hiv clinicians, to explain the aims of the study and address any questions and concerns. a community advisory board that included the executive director of nyarwek, a representative of local law enforcement, a lawyer, and a religious leader was formed to oversee the study. study staff including two clinicians, a nurse, several counselors, two data managers, four outreach coordinators, and two project administrators were hired locally, with preference to staff with interest in and experience working with gay, bisexul, and more hidden msm. one female staff identified as lesbian and one male staff as bisexual, while all others identified as heterosexual. all staff received evidence-based sensitivity training on male sexual health [11]. eighteen peers worked with the project at some point during implementation. all peers identified as gay or bisexual. peers received training about study procedures and on prevention and treatment of hiv and other sexually transmitted infections. a sub-group of hivpositive peers receivied additional training about how to promote hiv treatment adherence by providing information (teaching), empathy (listening) and encouragement (coaching) [12]. both staff and peers received human subjects protection training and certification, with an emphasis on confidentiality. all program staff were salaried and worked full-time. peers were volunteers and received a monthly stipend to offset expenses of transportation and phone calls to study participants, as well as paid transport and meals during trainings. data collection a semi-structured, open-ended topic guide was developed that explored experiences with participant recruitment and retention, program service delivery, work environment, and suggestions for program improvement, as part of a comprehensive mid-way evaluation of the program. interviews lasting ≈60 minutes each were conducted in english or dholuo with translation into english during june and july 2016. notes were taken to supplement digital recordings. data analysis both interview notes and transcripts were analyzed. a coding dictionary was developed based on themes included in the interview guide and those that emerged from the data, including themes related to the good participatory practice and respect, protect, fulfill guidelines framework (peer’s concerns and priorities, perceived factors affecting peer empowerment and integration on the research team) and study outcomes (perceived factors affecting recruitment and retention) [13]. transcripts were coded independently by two team members (dk and lq), and discrepancies were resolved through discussion. inductive analysis was used to describe common and outlying responses, as well as the broader relationship between themes [14]. preliminary results were presented to staff in 7/2016 and to peers in 2/2017, then refined based on feedback. direct quotes illustrating emergent themes were extracted for presentation. ethics statement study procedures were approved by the ethics review boards at maseno university, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 the university of illinois at chicago, and the university of washington. all participants in this qualitative study provided written informed consent and received 500 kenyan shillings (≈$5) to compensate for their time. results characteristics of peers and study staff seventeen of twenty-four current and former local staff were interviewed, including both staff members who did not identify as heterosexual. thirteen of fifteen current and one of three former peers were interviewed. staff had 0-13 years of experience working in hiv prevention and care, and 0-10 years in programs focused on msm. peers had 4-6 years of experience working in hiv prevention and 3-5 years in programs for msm. staff were in their late 20s to late 30s, while all peers were in their early to mid-20s except one who was 42. all staff identified as christian, as did all peers except one who was muslim. most staff had a diploma or bachelor’s degree and all were employed fulltime. most peers had completed secondary school and were either unemployed or did not have a stable job. emergent themes overall, themes that emerged included appreciation by peers and by staff of peers’ role in the project, differing goals and vision for the project, power disparities and power struggles related to project implementation, and the need for ongoing work to address peer concerns and empower them. appreciation of peers’ project role. peers were appreciative of the opportunity to help their community, the free health services provided, and of study staff. “there is no other organization that is doing what anza mapema is doing. they received a lot of people from our community. when they get sick they get their medications here for free. they get condoms and lubricants. on sunday, they come to church here, a person preach for us. i really appreciate anza mapema, they taught us a lot of things, like interacting with people in the community to remove stigma an discrimination.” – peer “there are so many risks to being an msm, like sti/hiv, so i wanted to learn more for my health. this was the right place for me because, this place, it is msm friendly. another reason is to see myself being free, while for other msm coming out is so difficult. even though here the staff are not lgbt you feel free because they know how to handle msm and bisexuals.” – peer “being a peer outreach worker motivated me, i have helped people to come access services, i am happy to be helping many people.” – peer staff praised individual peers for their hard work and dedication and were appreciative of the positive impact that peers’ input had on the project. “peers teach participants about hiv, sti symptoms and signs. some bring people for treatment of anal warts and gonorrhea. they promote hiv testing, do condom demonstrations and distribution. those who are from maaygo [a local gay and bisexual men’s organization] see their participants constantly. others only see them for peer led group meetings. some peers bring 7 participants, others 27. a few are very good.” – staff “i like the peers because they get to speak their mind, and also they get to let you know what the participants think, what the participants want… we are able to see what happens behind the study, and this makes the study http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 better.” – staff differing goals and vision. at the same time, peers and staff had different goals for anza mapema. peers wanted the project to be a space for community-building activities, advocacy for lgbtq rights, training about health and job skills, and opportunities for enconomic empowerment, and were dissapointed when their vision, related in part to past activities by kipe, did not materialize. “when the study was started, we were promised so much. promised trainings, now there are none. before, there were coffee wednesdays, movie mondays, dancing club, now only the health talk and sunday church.” – peer “the previous project kipe seemed to have lots of activities supported financially as opposed to this other one. peers and participants draw comparisons between what happened before and now.” – staff staff generally discussed the project goals in the narrow sense of hiv prevention and care, and the need to achieve established targets for recruitment and retention. a few staff felt that the research aspect of the program took up too much of their time, at the expense of building relationships with peers and the gay and bisexual community. “i think we need to have more inclusion and more partnerships with the lgbt community. i think we sort of got into research mode, we were thinking of the outreach department as the group who should be doing projects while we would be doing research work.” – staff staff mostly discussed peers in the context of recruitment and retention, and not in a broader sense of collaborative effort to improve health or welfare of gay and bisexual men. because most staff were busy with the research side of the project, peers usually only interacted with outreach coordinators, project administrators, and the receptionist, but not other staff. “the clinicians and nurses have helped me know my status and ways to maintain the negative status. i have not been close to clinicians and nurses, so i do not know much about them.” – peer even after working for a year on the project, some staff still had stigmatizing attitudes and misconceptions about msm. some were aware of this and requested additional training. “generally kisumu is an msm-friendly town, and the msms just need to be told that their behavior, the way they behave our there can affect their security. this takes us back to that being an msm is a choice, when you make that choice, you need to know that it should not be bad. i do not need to act out because i am straight, neither do i need to act out because i am msm, just be msm and let people be comfortable.” – staff “sometimes they hang out here and staff say, why are these people here, it is not their visit today. in another program, i know there was a drop in center. no one would ask them what they were doing.” – staff “trainings for staff about lgbt other than the marps sensitivity training would be helpful for me to learn how to handle lgbt better.” – staff other staff, including those who had worked with gay and bisexual men for years, described how they initially had stigma against them and changed their mind after connecting with the peers and study participants. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 “they are like my sisters and brothers, they want to be accepted. i have to be motivated coming to work, as this is my source of income. this work makes me have more hospitality. i was brought up in christian society. at first i thought: “ah! this is against my religion!” i changed my mind after encountering them and seeing what they go through.” – staff “actually, my first encounter and experience with msm, i was traumatized, i could not understand men having sex with men. but then i accepted them. initially i was rooted in my own values, but having to work with them, i learned that they just normal as any other people. for you to help them, their medical health, and even mentor them, you need to accept people the way they are.” – staff power disparities and power struggles. there were tensions between peers and project administrators over pay. as most peers were young, had a low education level, and were either unemployed or working temporary jobs, many regarded their volunteer stipend as a salary and complained that it was insufficient. “most of these people don’t have jobs and are poor. it’s also the case with peers, they tend to see it as employment, not as volunteering, when stipend is reduced it becomes an issue. the 4500 ksh is a stipend to thank them for work, 500 ksh for airtime, the rest to help facilitate their work including transport. they take 4500 as salary and say it is not enough.” – staff “stipends are so little. there’s so much work… they say use 500 ksh to look for new clients, 500 ksh for tracing, 500 ksh for airtime, 500 ksh for follow-up. it is like a favor, what we are doing.” – staff “you come here in the morning, they say you have to go look for a client, you have no time to do work elsewhere.” – staff staff spoke in glowing terms about some peers whom they perceived to be hardworking and effective in recruitment, counseling, and retention. they also voiced concerns that some peers were inflating the frequency and quality of their follow-up. “a few are very good. others are good mobilizers but semi-literate. the peer who says he meets with his 35 participants for 30-45 min face-to-face twice a month, this is not realistic. sometimes they talk big to impress.” – staff staff worried that some peers had misunderstood what follow-up entailed due to low literacy or limited training, and suggested additional training on follow-up procedures and reporting requirements. “there should be a refresher training every six months. we found that they do not even know how to fill reporting tools, some can’t calculate the number of condoms they distribute or know what face contact with the participant means. they should be trained on basic knowledge of hiv and stis. they are good mobilizers but semi-illiterate and do not accept that.” – staff “there are reporting tools, every month they are supposed to see their clients and fill out forms after distributing condoms and lubricants. it is not easy to fill these every month for 45 clients, so many are complaining.” – staff some staff thought that peers were not paid enough, while others, including administrators, thought the stipend was sufficient. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 “they are not staff so we cannot pay them salaries. instead, for their volunteering we provide them with resources for what they need to do, same way as we provide them with lubricants and condoms.” – staff some peers worked to maximize the amount of reimbursement money they received, including by double enrolling participants into other ongoing studies in the area, as well as recruiting participants who were not sexually active with men. at the same time, some participants would not tell peers that they were already enrolled in another study or receiving hiv care elsewhere, and some straight men who struggled with poverty pretended to be gay or bisexual to receive reimbursement money. all this contributed to tensions between peers and staff. “some peers work for lvct, nyarwek, and refer participants to several programs. some msm take drugs at multiple facilities. there is double entry, double the medication, wrong data.” – staff although staff provided additional funds for tracing on a case-by-case basis, they worried that peers would sometimes pocket this money, make insufficient efforts, or recruit men who were really not eligible for the study. “for some peers it is just about the money. we give one 300 ksh to trace people, the next day he has come back. he has not brought the participants, cannot account for the money, then asks for more money to trace new participants. but not all peers are bad. for others, i can tell him, bring the person first, then you will be reimbursed.” – staff “some of the peers are so hardworking and trustworthy, they bring genuine clients. some of them are not really trustworthy. it took some time to let the peers know that it is wrong to coach clients. maybe the targets they are given are making them to cheat. at the same time, there were many meetings to discuss how to make peers not cheat, to bring the correct clients, to feel not so much pressurized.” – staff with respect to increasing communitybuilding activities, project administrators emphasized that the current focus was research and that only sustainable programming would be supported. “whatever we start, it has to be sustainable, because we do not have a big pot of money where we keep dishing money to go watch a movie, transport reimbursement to come to church, to come and say hi.” – staff peer views focused on their struggle to have more power and ownership in anza mapema. as a result of not being involved in decisionmaking, and because it took months before their suggestions resulted in addition of community-building activities, many peers did not feel sufficiently integrated into the project. “if someone is sick, stis are treated for free. if someone is hiv-positive, there are free drugs. there is also transport back home that is free. there is free lunch. they are treating guys and putting them in care, making this place a freezone for msm. anza mapema is really trying but is not there. this is not an msm-led organization. in other organizations, i can say what i want. here peers feel afraid, they can't kiss, they fear judgment.” – peer some of peers felt that they were not treated fairly by staff, promised things they were not given, or received insufficient training to do their job, then had their stipend amount cut when whey were unable to trace lost http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 participants. “they promised a prize for the best performing peer and did not give it. the peers were not taken to the retreat. there should be an orientation about how to handle msm. they’re only straight guys working here, the training should motivate them.” – peer “they are trying to choose and favor certain peers. they don’t tell you the time for your peer-led activity. educators are supposed to be trained: there should be a refresher training to teach them how to do their work. some of the peers do not know how to do their work. i get a small stipend and somebody with fewer clients gets more money.” – peer some peers requested that more staff be hired from the gay and bisexual community to help them and their participants feel welcome and have more ownership of the project. “some msm are still closeted. it would be helpful for them if one of the study staff was also msm so that they could feel close to him and relate to him. the study coordinator is good and everyone likes him, but he is often busy and in meetings. it would be nice to have someone like him who is also an msm and can talk to study participants anytime they have questions or problems or issues.” – peer program administrators agreed with this, but struggled to find anyone who was openly gay or bisexual and had the required qualifications as clinician, counselor, community outreach coordinator, receptionist, quality assurance, despite multiple advertisements posted for these positions. peer empowerment. despite differing visions for the program and persistent power disparities, both peers and staff felt their relationship during the study to have been constructive and positive overall. turnover rate was moderate, with three counselors and three peers leaving anza mapema for projects with higher salary or other reimbursement. staff and peers credited monthly meetings between staff and peers and more frequent one-on-one meetings with individual peers with helping resolve challenges and misunderstandings. “some of the staffs were not friendly to the msm community, they took it as a different thing they did not know before, but i think through holding staff meetings they reached and understanding, they improved.”peer “there was a challenge in retention. at one point many did not turn out for month three. since then the peers have turned out strongly. they [the project administrators] met with the peers. they said that participants should not be lost to follow-up and created that database for peers, and for anybody who has more than 40 participants that they are in charge of, these participants should be redistributed to peers who have less than 20 participants. he has advised the peer coordinators to improve their supervisory skills. this has worked well.” – staff peers suggested additional sensitivity training for staff about how to work with gay and bisexual men and suggested joint events to help staff and peers get to know each other better. “clinicians and counselors are very friendly and cooperative. there are some people here, we call them putting on a sheep’s wool, they just want money so they say they are willing to work with gay. peers should sit down one on one so they can ask questions, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 anything they do not understand. they do not see the challenges that peers raised. you can do a retreat, maybe call for a day meeting, because you cannot work when you cannot understand people, you only see them as gay.” – peer some staff had suggestions for how to empower peers: “in the past, everything was left to participants and peers to bring food and receipts, to appoint themselves, to educate one another. if you take all these responsibilities from our peers and the participants, they will not get a chance. you should leave it to them. they should be allowed to organize themselves, if they have a problem they bring to us. but anything else, money, what, let them organize themselves,” – staff the peer stipend was eventually tied to demonstrated ability to recruit and retain participants, which most peers found to be fair. those who were struggling requested additional training. “we changed the contract so that the stipend is not fixed and just tied additional money to being able to bring the participants and trace them. because it is not fair and demoralizing to pay the same to those who do more work. it is hard to get people to be consistent. some are on and off.” – staff “they say they will look to see what is wrong…they tell us we are not working well. my clients are always coming but some relocated, some are busy at their work, and some changed their phone numbers. a training would boost me on my peer education to learn more.” – peer some staff were acutely aware that peers wanted and needed to be more involved in project programming. at the same time, they also realized that peers would not take up additional responsibilities without additional pay, which was not available in the project budget. “we need to have the gay community to be incorporated into the activities as one or two staff. they have this saying“nothing for us without us.” we have staff, none of them counts as msm, it creates a lot of suspicion, one day they may decide, this is not a place for us, you do not recognize us,” – staff a few peers requested full-time employment or vocational training to help obtain a stable job outside of the project. several staff were supportive, including of hiring peers to improve engagement of peers and study participants in anza mapema. “besides reimbursement, we should have a long term plan to equip some of them with knowledge, some are learned. if we have job opportunities in the future, a few are graduates who can be helpful. we can recruit them. this will provide them with a stable income and this will help us retain participants.” – staff feedback, triangulation, and resulting program change preliminary results from this study were presented to anza mapema staff and peers in 7/2016 and 2/2017, respectively, to ensure the accuracy of findings and discuss how to improve the program. based on recommendations from peers and staff, additional peer trainings we conducted on counseling for behavior change and hiv prevention. importantly, one of the peers was formally hired to help provide supervision and serve as peer advocate. as a result of peer requests, movie monday and a support group http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 for drug and alcohol abuse were added to improve community-building and support participant ownership of the clinic space. in march 2017, peers and staff cooked and shared a meal and came together at another event to discuss concerns and answer each other’s questions. follow-up in the anza mapema research project ended in 10/2017, and a pre-exposure prophylaxis (prep) study has since been completed. currently, programmatic services for hiv prevention and care are ongoing. discussion this study is the first to describe challenges faced by peers and staff in building a collaborative relationship and supporting good participatory practice in a research project investigating an hiv prevention and care intervention for msm in an african setting. anza mapema successfully enrolled its [7] and achieved retention of over 80% at one year. despite staff working hard to create a supportive environment for participants, and peers valuing project services and the opportunity to help their community, we fell short of engaging peers as full partners and overcoming existing power inequalities between peers and staff. this was in part due to differences in goals and vision for the program and in part due to anza mapema structure and context as a research project with limited funding. some peers and staff suggested that peers would benefit from more comprehensive and ongoing education, training, and supervision. they also felt strongly that peers should be empowered by being given an equal seat at the table, through better compensation and mentorship, to make a meaningful contribution to anza mapema program design and implementation, start on a path to a career, and advocate for their community. while these are all in line with good participatory practice principles and had support of the project leadership, they could not be fully implemented due to pressures to conform to the research timeline and budget constraints. while both peers and staff advocated for hiring more gay and bisexual staff, none applied who had the required qualifications, likely at least in part due to structural barriers to educational and work opportunities for openly gay and bisexual men. funding for many research studies that recruit msm in kenya contrasts sharply with the poverty and lack of advancement opportunities for peers and participants who make these studies possible. this problem has frequently perpetuated existing power inequities and inadvertently created incentives for participant double-enrollment, as well as for straight men who similarly struggle with poverty to pose as msm to receive study reimbursement. despite representation of gay and bisexual community and advocacy organizations on the anza mapema community advisory board, the peers’ vision of a program focused on community empowerment and advocacy was not attained because the priority of the program was hiv prevention and care research. community-based participatory research encompasses a spectrum from outreach and consultation with the community to collaboration and ultimately shared leadership, where community members participate fully and are invested in both research and program design, which are concordant with community goals [15]. such an approach could overcome some of the challenges we faced in anza mapema. for example, when black msm were part of the leadership team starting in the planning stages of an hiv prevention study in the united states, they were able to suggest qualified black msm candidates for staff positions overseeing participant retention, recruitment, and study implementation in a way that reflected community needs and values, incorporating support for employment, education, and empowerment http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 into their work [16]. our findings reflect themes that emerge clearly from other hiv prevention and care studies that have depended on peer educators for msm participant recruitment and retention, regardless of country setting [17-19]. in south africa, peer volunteers recruited to help with an hiv prevention program for msm in black townships received basic training about peer responsibilities and had opportunities to contribute to program design. as in anza mapema, peers were less interested in research processes and outcomes and more interested learning how to advocate effectively for their community. they asked for additional training in community advocacy and raising awareness about human rights, becoming role models to their peers, and how to build relationships with peers who were more closeted or for whom trust was an issue. [17]. in an hiv prevention program in el salvador, salaried peer educators struggled with participant recruitment in a society characterized by widespread stigma, gang violence, and mistrust of the healthcare system by gay and bisexual men, and advocated for economic and educational empowerment of participants to improve retention [18]. in the unites states, salaried or volunteer peers in the young msm of color npns initiative were tasked with recruitment, linkage, and retention of young minority gay and bisexual men living with hiv infection. like anza mapema peers, these peers were young, of a low education level and limited work experience compared to program staff. as in anza mapema, they similarly struggled with feeling overworked, underpaid, not sufficiently trained, and not being asked for input about program decisions. staff similarly advocated for close supervision, full-time employment, and mentorship as possible solutions [19]. our findings also mirror challenges highlighted in the research engagement document put together by g10, the research advisory committee hosted within the gay and lesbian coalition of kenya: the lack of sustained partnership between many researchers and the gay and bisexual communities they work in, lack of shared research objectives, insufficient research training and literacy among gay and bisexual men, lack of durable partnerships within the community due to diverse interests, and lack of appreciation among researchers about how a full partnership with peers and the larger lesbian, gay, queer, and trans-sexual community has the potential to result in research that is more relevant and of better quality [20]. although anza mapema researchers have sustained relationships with local lesbian, gay, queer, and trans-sexual organizations and are eager to incorporate suggestions from the community, funding for their efforts is often limited to research on biomedical outcomes and is time-limited, hampering the long-term goals and objectives of reducing community risk. hiv biomedical research studies in vulnerable and economically disadvantaged communities have recently included funding for community-building activities and community empowerment as part of good participatory practice, as well as program evaluation using qualitative research methods with the goal of explaining the reasons for successes and failures to assist with scale-up and adoption in different contexts [21]. based on our findings, we fully support this approach. moreover, we are currently taking a community-based participatory approach to the development of a new prep and sexual health intervention (funded by nih grant r34mh118950), in collaboration with nyarwek. this study had several limitations. first, interviews were conducted by an englishspeaking investigator who was not kenyan, with dholuo translation provided by a research assistant in four peer interviews. neither of research these team members identified as gay or bisexual. this may have led to biased or incomplete responses. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 second, these results capture a point in time for the anza mapema project, and may not reflect all ongoing challenges. third, these results reflect work at a specific research project in kisumu, kenya, and may not apply to other geographic and cultural settings. although some results may have limited generalizability, the congruence of our findings with those of similar studies employing young gay and bisexual peers from vulnerable communities is striking. strengths of the study include an open approach to identifying challenges, in which all interviewees were encouraged to be honest and assured of confidentiality. results were presented to and discussed with both staff and peers, who felt them to be an accurate representation of their views. conclusions despite a higher prevalence of hiv among msm in kenya and east africa compared to the general population, there is a lack of programming prioritized for this marginalized and vulnerable population. our study is the first to describe challenges with empowering peers to be full partners in an hiv prevention and care research project for gay, bisexual, and other msm in an african setting. peer research team members in resource-constrained settings need to be empowered to make their voices heard, through education about research and good participatory practices that takes into account their youth, their health literacy, and their limited educational and career opportunities. staff should similarly receive education about the importance of good participatory practice and full engagement of peers, to ensure the scientific and ethical intergrity of the study. study protocols should include specific goals and metrics, numeric and qualtative, related to peer empowerment, and study budgets, staffing, and timelines should allow for implementation of a common vision. peers need adequate compensation and resources to do their work, ongoing mentorship and supervision, and frequent discussions to facilitate work to achieve agreed-upon common goals and not just the goals of the researchers. these may include advocacy for gay and bisexual rights and economic empowerment through continuing education and job training. ultimately, more providers and researchers from the gay and bisexual community are needed to advocate for and mentor others and to create greater trust and a truly shared research agenda. our findings may be informative for other projects that aim to improve health for gay, bisexual, and more hidden men who have sex with men in other resourceand rights-constrained settings. references 1. graham sm, harper gw. improving hiv prevention and care for african gbmsm. lancet hiv. 2017;4:e234-e236. 2. section 162: unnatural offenses. laws of kenya. the penal code. chapter 63. revised edition 2012. nairobi, kenya: national council for law reporting, 2012. 3. good participatory practice. guidelines for biomedical hiv prevention trials. 2011. unaids. avac. available at: www.avac.org/sites/default/files/resour cefiles/good%20participatory%20practice %20guidelines_june_2011.pdf. accessed mar 14, 2019. 4. respect, protect, fulfill. best practices guidance in conducting hiv research with gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (msm) in rightsconstrained environments. amfar. iavi. available at: https://www.avac.org/sites/default/files /resourcefiles/respectprotectfulfill2015.pdf. accessed march 14, 2019. 5. amfar, the foundation for aids research in partnership with the global http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.avac.org/sites/default/files/resource-files/good%20participatory%20practice%20guidelines_june_2011.pdf http://www.avac.org/sites/default/files/resource-files/good%20participatory%20practice%20guidelines_june_2011.pdf http://www.avac.org/sites/default/files/resource-files/good%20participatory%20practice%20guidelines_june_2011.pdf http://www.avac.org/sites/default/files/resource-files/good%20participatory%20practice%20guidelines_june_2011.pdf https://www.avac.org/sites/default/files/resource-files/respectprotectfulfill2015.pdf https://www.avac.org/sites/default/files/resource-files/respectprotectfulfill2015.pdf https://www.avac.org/sites/default/files/resource-files/respectprotectfulfill2015.pdf global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 forum on msm & hiv. lessons from the front lines: effective community-led responses to hiv and aids among msm and transgender populations. available at www.amfar.org/uploadedfiles/_amfaror g/around_the_world/lessons-frontlines.pdf accessed july 26, 2018. 6. international hiv/aids alliance. case study: service delivery outreach models for msm: experiences from kenya and uganda. available at www.aidsalliance.org/assets/000/002/6 74/16_8254_alliance_sharp_case_study_ web_original.pdf?1469006111. accessed july 26, 2018. 7. wallerstein n, duran b. theoretical, historical and practice roots of community based participatory research. in: minkler m, wallerstein n, editors. community based participatory research for health. san francisco: wiley; 2017. p. 17–30. 8. wallerstein n, muhammad m, sanchezyoungman s, rodriguez espinosa p, avila m, baker ea, barnett s, belone l, golub m, lucero j et al. power dynamics in community-based participatory. research: a multiple-case study analysis of partnering contexts, histories, and practices. health educ. behav. 2019, 46, 19s–32s. 9. kunzweiler cp, bailey rc, okall do, graham sm, mehta sd, otieno fo. factors associated with prevalent hiv infection among kenyan msm: the anza mapema study. j acquir immune defic syndr. 2017 nov 1;76(3):241-249. 10. plenty a, bailey r, geibel s, ndinyaachola j. men’s health study: preliminary findings of a respondent-driven sampling study of msm in kisumu. university of nairobi annual collaborative meeting; nairobi, kenya january 2011. 11. van der elst em, smith ad, gichuru e et al. men who have sex with men sensitivity training reduces homoprejudice and increases knowledge among kenyan healthcare providers in coastal kenya. j int aids soc. 2013;16:18748. 12. graham sm, micheni m, kombo b et al. development and pilot testing of an intervention to promote care engagement and adherence among hiv-positive kenyan msm. aids. 2015;29:s241-s249. 13. macqueen km. codebook development for team-based qualitative analysis. cultural anthropology methods 1998;10:31-36. 14. patton mq. qualitative research and evaluation methods, 3rd ed. thousand oaks, ca, usa: sage publications, 2002. 15. sprague l, afifi r, ayala g, el-nasoor ml. participatory praxis as an imperative for health-related stigma research. bmc med. 2019;17(1):32. 16. watson cc, wilton l, lucas jp, et al. development of a black caucus within the hiv prevention trials network (hptn): representing the perspectives of black men who have sex with men (msm). int j environ res public health. 2020;17(3):871. 17. tucker a, de swardt g, struthers h, mcintyre j. understanding the needs of township men who have sex with men (msm) health outreach workers: exploring the interplay between volunteer training, social capital and critical consciousness. aids behav. 2013;17: s33-s42. 18. buck m, dickson-gomez j, bodnar g. combination hiv prevention strategy implementation in el salvador: perceived barriers and adaptations reported by http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.aidsalliance.org/assets/000/002/674/16_8254_alliance_sharp_case_study_web_original.pdf?1469006111 https://www.aidsalliance.org/assets/000/002/674/16_8254_alliance_sharp_case_study_web_original.pdf?1469006111 https://www.aidsalliance.org/assets/000/002/674/16_8254_alliance_sharp_case_study_web_original.pdf?1469006111 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22903420 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22903420 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22903420 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22903420 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22903420 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22903420 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28462359 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28462359 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28462359 global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 outreach peer educators and supervisors. glob qual nurs res. 2017;4:2333393617703198. 19. hidalgo j, coombs e, cobbs wo et al. roles and challenges of outreach workers in hiv clinical and support programs serving young racial/ethnic minority men who have sex with men. aids patient care stds. 2011;25: s15-s22. 20. g10 research engagement. a 3 year roadmap for action for sexual orientation gender identity and expression (sogie) engagement in research. g10. national sogie research advisory committee. july 2016. http://icop.or.ke/wpcontent/uploads/2016/09/g10research-engagement-road-map201617-%e2%80%93-201819.pdf 21. camlin cs, seeley j. qualitative research on community experiences in large hiv research trials: what have we learned? j int aids soc. 2018 oct;21 suppl 7: e25173. competing interests the authors have no conflicts of interest or commercial associations to declare. authors’ contributions sg and dk conceived the idea for the paper. dk and la conducted interviews. dk and lq coded data. dk wrote the first draft. sg, rb, so, fo, lq, and la provided feedback and guidance for revisions. all authors reviewed and contributed to the final document. acknowledgements we would like to thank the men of the anza mapema study who made this research possible. we would like to thank especially all the research and staff members of the anza mapema study including leah osula, beatrice achieng, george n’gety, caroline oketch, violet apondi, evans kottonya, caroline agwanda, ted aloo, george oloo, caroline obare, eve obondi, and edmon obat. funding the anza mapema study was supported by the us centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) (u01gh000762) to the nyanza reproductive health society. smg was supported by the robert w. anderson endowed professorship in medicine. disclaimer the findings and conclusions in this manuscript are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the u.s. centers for disease control and prevention or the funding agencies. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28462359 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21711144 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21711144 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21711144 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21711144 http://icop.or.ke/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/g10-research-engagement-road-map-201617-%e2%80%93-201819.pdf http://icop.or.ke/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/g10-research-engagement-road-map-201617-%e2%80%93-201819.pdf http://icop.or.ke/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/g10-research-engagement-road-map-201617-%e2%80%93-201819.pdf http://icop.or.ke/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/g10-research-engagement-road-map-201617-%e2%80%93-201819.pdf global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 community engagement: using feedback loops to empower residents and influence systemic change in culturally diverse communities karen t. jackson, sylvia burgess, forrest toms, and ernest l. cuthbertson keywords: community engagement, data, decision-making, empowerment, evaluation, feedback loop, neighborhood revitalization, organizational change author biographies: karen t. jackson, ph.d. is an assistant professor in leadership studies at north carolina a&t state university. dr. jackson teaches online and face-toface graduate quantitative research methods course and research design courses. she is also an evaluator and is principal consultant with katalyst innovative consulting services. her research is grounded in systems theory, policy studies, organizational theory, understanding of community engagement, equity, and social justice. helping leaders understand how these systems and policies can create pathways and barriers especially for under-represented groups and people from low socio-economic backgrounds is a goal of dr. jackson’s research. dr. jackson is a published author in the areas of student success and organizational culture in community colleges, biased policing, and various topics related to leadership and teaching in secondary education. she has a b.s. in chemistry and m.ed. in mathematics and curriculum and instruction from the university of southern mississippi and a ph.d. in educational research and policy analysis from north carolina state university. sylvia w. burgess, ph.d. is the vice-president of operations and senior partner with one step at a time consulting services for leadership training and development. dr. burgess is a facilitator of team training and professional development for team building through classroom and simulation activities, strategy, and self-improvement subject matters. she has over 18 years of experience in teaching, facilitation, development and curriculum design in leadership development, diversity and cultural competency, community engagement, team building and conflict resolution. dr. burgess is a published author in the areas of spiritual capital and community engagement. she received ba in speech and language pathology and mpa from university of north carolina greensboro. she earned a ph.d. in leadership studies from north carolina a &t state university. she has proven leadership and senior management experience in business, operational management, and training and with the center for creative leadership. dr. burgess has served as an adjunct professor at north carolina a&t state university in the leadership studies doctoral program. dr. burgess is an active member in the community serving in several service roles. forrest d. toms, ph.d. is interim executive director of the north carolina naacp. his current research is in the areas of leadership development with faith-based/community leaders around spiritual capital and civic engagement. dr. toms is also a senior partner with one step at a time consulting. toms is recognized nationally for his systems approach and processes related to diversity and cultural competency in the education, health and mental health fields. he has published global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 articles, produced books and multimedia training products in the areas of diversity, cultural competency and community engagement. dr. toms received his bs and ma degrees in psychology from middle tennessee state university, murfreesboro, tennessee; and a phd in developmental psychology from howard university, washington, dc. he resides in hickory, nc with his wife phyllis, son, forrest ii and daughter, zakiya. ernest l. cuthbertson, ph.d. is a 28-year veteran of law enforcement. he applies the skills of investigation, data collection, and community analysis gained through his experience in law enforcement, criminal justice, and political science to the research and evaluations he performs. cuthbertson is the founder and executive director of a non-profit program, racing 4 our future, incorporated. the primary focus of the program is impacting at-risk youth. he lectures on gangs, youth violence, school violence, trends and various youth programs dealing with youth at risk. he is recognized nationally and internationally in the area of crime prevention through environmental design (cpted), safe school planning and street gang awareness. he was directly responsible for gathering, analyzing, and assisting the fbi and members of the joint terrorism task force with dignitary protection for city visits and dissemination of criminal intelligence. cuthbertson holds a master’s degree is criminal justice administration and policy from methodist university in fayetteville, north carolina. he is a graduate of north carolina agricultural and technical state university with a b. a. in political science and guilford technical community college with an associates in applied science of criminal justice. he completes his ph.d. in leadership studies at north carolina agricultural and technical state university in december 2018. recommended citation: jackson, k. t., burgess, s., toms, f., & cuthbertson, e. l. (2018). community engagement: using feedback loops to empower residents and influence systemic change in culturally diverse communities. global journal of community psychology practice, 9(2), 1-21. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org) http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 community engagement: using feedback loops to empower residents and influence systemic change in culturally diverse communities abstract a multi-faceted approach to community engagement includes the need to involve the community members in the design, implementation and feedback of any program, services, or supports provided. intentional participatory engagement of residents also requires shared responsibility for workload, shared recognition of achievement, thoughtful communication, engagement in robust discussions taking care not to internalize conversations as personal affronts and holding close the rules of effective decision making (toms & burgess, 2014). implementing a feedback loop process can be used as a tool to foster intentional resident engagement. the findings presented in this article are from a case study of a neighborhood that implemented a feedback loop process. analysis of data indicate that while transportation, housing, and places for people to safely be outside are real community concerns, acts of nature and choices made by city government also directly impact the quality of life of the residents in this community. the need for purposeful channels of communication to be established among residents, between neighborhood action groups, and city government is evident. leveraging relationships with community partners to establish trust and organizational understanding of culture within community socio-economic context, along with the multiple layers of community engagement is discussed. introduction building capacity for change in communities requires a multi-faceted approach to community engagement (toms & burgess, 2014). we know that meeting the needs of families and concerned citizens involves preparation by individuals and organizations within neighborhoods. there are multiple research-based inquiry processes that can be used to assist concerned citizens to lead in their communities. these processes can be used in communities to organize, plan, develop, and implement programs to improve the quality of life. the feedback loop process is one approach used to engage residents in solving community problems. the goals of the feedback loop process include: • intentional and consistent participation in community meetings and forums to provide input from the point of view of community residents. • making space for residents to identify their own needs. • establishing strategies to meet residents expressed needs. • garnering the support and resources to implement the necessary strategies. at the core of the fbl process are the tenets of humble listening and co-creation of events and activities. neighborhood partners can also enhance revitalization activities, programs, or strategies by continuously integrating a feedback loop process, to listen to community residents’ input and cocreating changes that will enhance their overall quality of life. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 habitat for humanity partners with people in communities in the u.s. and around the world to help them build or improve a place they can call home. habitat’s work with homeowners has shown that individuals and families thrive when they have a safe and stable home in a safe and stable community. through its neighborhood revitalization efforts, habitat takes a holistic approach to expand the organization’s core mission of building safe, decent and affordable homes in partnership with families at the community level. neighborhood revitalization empowers families to build up their own communities, so neighbors can thrive and enhance their quality of life together. local habitat for humanity organizations work in coalition with neighborhood residents and partners to address the many elements that contribute to a higher quality of life, including health care, safety and economic development, in addition to housing. the multifaceted approach to community engagement takes on various forms. it goes beyond the general annual planning of programs and services and intentionally creates an environment that is conducive to building trust, respect and shared power within a community. it includes the need for community members to engage in the design, implementation and feedback of any programs, services, or supports provided within the community. since neighborhood revitalization is challenging in communities where unemployment rates are high, property values are low, and human safety is of constant concern habitat’s neighborhood revitalization program began efforts to systematically engage and document resident voice in these types of communities. the mechanism for engaging residents and documenting resident voice was the pilot of a feedback loop (fbl) process in 12 neighborhoods. these 12 neighborhoods applied for and received funding from habitat to implement the fbl process. the feedback loop implementation was led at the habitat national level by organizational development consultant, whose role was to communicate with and train the leaders at the local affiliate neighborhood revitalization offices how to implement the fbl process. the local affiliate leaders in turn recruited resident leaders in their respective communities to train and lead the fbl process in their own communities. the intent of this study is to share the experiences of the members of one community that participated in the feedback loop pilot. this study also uses the lens of the multi-faceted approach to community engagement to discuss the community member experiences in the feedback loop process. feedback loops the feedback loop (fbl) process is a method of engaging residents in facilitating community conversations. during the fbl process data is collected from residents to make decisions about neighborhood concerns. neighborhood revitalization staff work with residents to make decisions on how to address the concerns and equip residents to design a plan to address the concerns. implementation of the designed plan includes hearing from residents continuously and making changes as needed based on the vocalized needs of the residents. during the community conversations, realtime feedback is provided by community residents on 3-5 action-oriented questions. the feedback is then used to spark a conversation with community residents about their aspirations or concerns. based on the dialogue, the community works together to co-create changes in their community that address their aspirations or concerns. this process, equips residents to design and implement a plan that addresses neighborhood aspirations or concerns, while hearing from residents continuously and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 making changes as needed based on the vocalized needs of the residents. the feedback loop process that the 12 pilot neighborhoods learned and implemented in partnership with their communities included five steps: co-design a survey, collect resident feedback using the co-designed survey, analyze the feedback, dialogue about the feedback, and course correct as needed using the collective feedback. however, after engaging in the fbl process pilot the eightstep shown in figure 1 emerged. figure 1 8 step feedback loop process description of each phase step 1. community conversation #1 – the ultimate purpose of a community conversation is to identify and determine neighborhood priorities. for success to be realized in this step, it is important to gather honest input that represents the diversity of residents. step 2: co-design data collection – co-design appropriate questions with residents to ensure valuable data is gathered. ensure collective agreement that those questions are the right questions. step 3: data collection – collect feedback by determining which method of data collection would work best for the community. step 4: community conversation #2 – this community conversation occurs to determine consensus on what action is appropriate. ensure that residents feel that the analysis http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 shared is accurate and representational. come to agreement on the best path forward. step 5: implement – during this step, modifications are made to programs or strategies or projects are implemented. to ensure the community continues to be aware of progress: • keep the neighborhood updated on how the project is progressing (social media, flyers, communication bulletins/information stations, or postcards). • track successes and challenges with implementation. • take pictures, videos of process. also interview folks and share interesting findings from interview at subsequent conversations when applicable. step 6: co-design second data collection – codesign appropriate questions with residents to assess progress based on the agreed upon modification. step 7: data collection – ensure the feedback collected is representative of the voice of the community. accountability, transparency of residents’ voice, and increased understanding of collective neighborhood priorities may be realized in this phase. step 8: community conversation #3 – community conversation occurs to achieve consensus about if the action was appropriate. if it is realized that there is a need to make changes in the plan, changes are made to the plan as the plan that was developed is being deployed. empowering and leveraging residents voice questioning assumptions, roles, and myths in a manner that is truth-seeking empowers people to think critically about their environment (alinsky, 1962; boykin & ellison, 1995; chávez, et. al. 2007; corneille, et. al., 2005). the cycles of understanding, listening, dialoguing, acting, reflecting, and correcting create space for residents to feel empowered to improve their own neighborhoods and their own lives. the fbl process helps residents to gain control, begin to understand how to access resources, and to better understand their physical and social environment. the fbl process is characteristic of empowerment, which is defined as: “an intentional ongoing process centered in the local community, involving mutual respect critical reflection, caring, and group participation through which people placing in equal share of valued resources gain greater access to and control over those resources” (cornell empowerment group, 1989). neighborhoods determining the goals of and evaluating the effectiveness of their fbl process prior to implementing the fbl process, it is critical to meet with residents and talk about whether they want to engage in the process and what their expectations would be from engaging in the process. development of fbl process goals can be accomplished by beginning with the end in mind. this can be accomplished by exploring and determining which of the following fbl process goals align with resident expectations: • is the goal of the fbl process to empower residents to use their own voices to advocate for neighborhood improvements? • is the goal of the fbl process to develop a collaborative process between habitat staff and neighborhood residents to accomplish certain events and projects in the neighborhood? • is the goal of the fbl process to build upon existing community http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 partnerships or build new community partnerships to establish and gain access to the resources needed to implement projects for neighborhood improvements? engaging in dialogue with residents to assess whether the goals of the fbl process are being met and documenting and assessing whether the goals are changing along the implementation process is another way to build relationship and establish trust with neighborhood residents. to monitor the level of integration of the fbl across the communities, local habitat offices were asked to self-rate the effects of the fbl process using the rubric below. table 1 resident self-rating feedback loop implementation rubric to what effect are feedback loops integrated into your neighborhoods? beginning to close the loop rarely are residents asked questions to encourage their feedback during community conversations conversations focus on a statement of correct or incorrect rather than deeper/meaningful exploration of ideas. developing the process to close the loop seldom are residents asked questions designed to encourage discussion on a few points during community conversations conversations seldom build on residents’ responses or encourages them to build on each other’s responses progressing on closing the loop occasionally, residents are asked questions to build on other responses, clarify comments, push for more elaborate answers, or engage in thinking about the conversations throughout community conversations feedback loops sustain the conversation. occasionally, end with the partners indicating correct or incorrect responses, and allow for deeper/more meaningful exploration of some ideas. sustaining the process of closing the loop frequently, residents are asked questions to build on other responses, clarify comments, push for more elaborate answers, or engage in thinking about the conversations multiple times throughout community conversation extended feedback loops are used to support residents’ elaboration and to have them contribute to extended conversations. they are characterized by consistent use of feedback/probes that encourage deeper/more meaningful discussion. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 conceptual framework endeavoring to bring about systemic and sustainable change in diverse social climates where differences in norms, beliefs, values, and linguistics exist can stimulate cultural conflict. community engagement activities, programs, and initiatives that do not intentionally include residents of the community in the development and planning stages can lead to confusion, unrealistic expectations, and disengaged residents (chappell, 2008). some research suggests that when african americans and white americans meet without including in their agenda a discussion of the way they are interpreting one another’s behavior, which is grounded in the assumptions about their expectations for the meeting, failed communication and unmet expectations result (kochman, 1991; toms & hobbs, 1997). a community engagement approach that empowers residents to interact and communicate with individuals from different groups and to make decisions about the community engagement activities, can lead to higher levels of resident participation, clear interpretation of differences, relationship building, and community programming that residents perceive as meeting the needs of their community. a multifaceted approach to community engagement can foster resident empowerment which includes the following components (toms & toms, 2014): • intra-community capacity building meeting with key stakeholders • create forums for community input and for them to identify their own needs • establish strategy to communicate with community on a consistent basis • know how agencies operate and their key stakeholders • know the status of consumers and services needed and offered (collected data) • set times to consistently interact with agency stakeholders • establish a group to visit and discuss issues and concerns with provider agencies • identify community stakeholders who have the skills and time to be on committees, boards, and planning groups. capacity building for community engagement in communities where the majority of residents are people of color requires the addition of trust building and understanding of spiritual capital and social capital influences in intrapersonal relationships in the community. it is critically important that an environment is created that is conducive to trust building, inter-personal respect and a sharing of power. (hood, 2004; hopson & hood, 2005; mcbride, et. al., 2006; mccloskey, et. al., 2011; toms & burgess, 2014; tyrone, 2016). the multi-faceted approach incorporates the need to involve the community members in the design, implementation and feedback of any program, services and supports provided. intentional participatory engagement of residents also requires shared responsibility for workload, shared recognition of achievement, thoughtful communication, engagement in robust discussions taking care not to internalize conversations as personal affronts and holding close the rules of effective decision making (toms & toms, 2014). methods for this study we used a qualitative case study constructivist approach (creswell, 2012; patton, 2015; yin, 2002). we used purposeful and opportunistic sampling to collect the data and gain understanding of the fbl process implementation in a neighborhood in southeastern united states. these sampling approaches allowed the researchers to be intentional about the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 selection of participants to learn and understand the residents and staff involved with the implementation of the fbl process and to capitalize on events that were unfolding (creswell, 2012). site selection the irene chapel/palmers crossing neighborhood is located forrest county, city of hattiesburg, which is in the pine belt region of southeast mississippi. this neighborhood was chosen for case study because of its unique history of difficult race relations, education and economic challenges as well as the challenges this region has had over the past several decades and recently with catastrophic natural disasters in the form of major hurricanes and tornadoes. hattiesburg is a college town, home to the university of southern mississippi and william carey university. the military installation, camp shelby, sits just south east of the irene chapel/palmers crossing neighborhood. during the civil rights era irene chapel/palmers crossing was a community proud of its self-reliance and small black businesses despite a political climate where voter suppression was normal. during freedom summer 1964 palmers crossing was headquarters for civil rights activities in the 5th congressional district. it was the largest and most active site in the state with 90 volunteers and 3000 participants. one of seven freedom schools in the state was located in palmers crossing, three freedom libraries were set up, and a community center established during freedom summer. currently, many of the homes in the irene chapel/palmer’s crossing neighborhood are legacy housing. nearly 32% of residents live below the poverty level and the neighborhood has 214 vacant units. the u.s. census bureau american community survey 2011-2015 estimates the population density to be 552.62 persons per square mile, which is greater than the national average population density of 89.61 persons per square mile. the neighborhood is 3.17 square miles and has a total population of 1,750. the neighborhood sits inside of forrest county which is 466.04 square miles and has a total population of 76,267. the racial demographics of the neighborhood are 41.59% white, 56.74% black, 0.22% other, 1.45% multiple races. 51.01% female, 50.99% male. 98.79% of the 330 students living in this neighborhood qualify for free/reduced lunch. on time high school graduation rate for students in this neighborhood is 31.76% while the same statistic for students in all of forrest county is 70.3%. per capita income for this neighborhood is $15,772. participants and data collection the purpose of all interview questions and the intent of observations was to gain insight into the fbl process as it was implemented in the irene chapel/palmers crossing neighborhood. the methodology involved two primary phases of data collection involving rapid interviews, interviews before and after the site visit, and observations at the neighborhood meeting. the rapid interviews occurred at the feedback loop summit held in atlanta, ga at the habitat for humanity international headquarters office. the regular interviews occurred during a two-day site visit to the irene chapel/palmers crossing neighborhood (see interview questions in appendix). the neighborhood revitalization manager recruited the volunteers, board member, and principal for interviews. the researcher was allowed to recruit community residents during the neighborhood meeting that occurred during the site visit. approximately 60 residents including parents and children flowed in and out of the room during the neighborhood meeting. two residents, one black female and one hispanic female volunteered to participate in the interview. observations and field notes from the neighborhood meeting http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 were also included. table 2 below provides a summary of the participants and the types of data collected. table 2 research methods and data sources phases methods source of data phase i rapid interviews neighborhood representatives at feedback loop summit – atlanta, ga 1 habitat revitalization manager phase ii interview (during and post site visit) 3 habitat for humanity volunteers 1 habitat board member 2 community residents 1 neighborhood revitalization manager (hattiesburg area habitat office) 1 pre-k -6 community school principal neighborhood meetings research journal observations and field notes data analysis the purpose of coding interview data is to identify patterns and themes to eventually construct meaning resulting from the qualitative data. coding is “the process of categorically marking or referencing units of text (e.g., words, sentences, paragraphs, and quotations) with codes and labels as a way to indicate patterns and meaning” (gay, mills & airasian, 2012). documents were examined and coded to understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges of implementing the program. interviews with subject matter experts involved asking the same questions of each interviewee. the interview transcripts were examined and coded for similarities and differences. field notes from the observations made during the neighborhood meeting were examined and coded in order to explain the effects of these events. we used a qualitative constructivist approach to analyze the data in order to further explain and understand the fbl process implementation (creswell, 2012; miles, huberman & saldaña, 2014; patton, 2015; yin, 2002). trustworthiness study participants were provided an opportunity to review this article prior to publication in order to validate the findings. the findings presented in this article represent the voice of the participants of this study. the findings demonstrate the study participants perspective of the fbl process implementation within the context of the community where the case study was conducted. the findings are not authored by habitat for humanity international. the authors of this article followed the traditional methods for analyzing data collected for a case study to present these findings. results rapid interview during the rapid interview the neighborhood revitalization manager shared what she http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 learned from the fbl process. she also provided the information gathered during the community conversations and the decisions that were made by the residents of the palmer’s crossing/irene chapel community. during the course of the fbl process implementation, the number of residents engaged in community conversations rose from 13 to 82 between the first and second community conversation. after designing the data collection with residents, collecting data from residents, working with residents to analyze the data, and dialoguing with residents about the results of the data analysis the residents began to make choices about the projects they would engage in to improve their neighborhoods. three community conversations were held. findings from the fbl process implementation pilot demonstrate that with each community conversation resident attendance increased on average by 70% between the first and second community conversation. dialogue between residents and between residents and habitat staff became deeper and richer over the course of each individual conversation and community conversation. top resident concerns were activities for neighborhood youth and elderly and safety. residents best liked neighbors, affordability of housing, schools, safety, access to healthcare. the list of items least liked by residents are reflected in the comments about projects they want to work on which include eight comments recreation for youth and elderly, three comments each safety, neighborhood upkeep, speed bumps, cheaper homes, road repairs, more community involvement, two comments each access to grocery stores, more police presence, cookout facility, community events table 3 below shows projects chosen by the residents of the neighborhood and the percent of engaged residents voting for each project. the chosen projects are reflective of the concerns of neighborhood residents. 46% of neighborhood residents participated in voting for project one and 22% of neighborhood residents participated in voting for project two. table 3 neighborhood project chosen – fbl process implementation state city, neighborhood/# residents engaged in decision making* ms irene chapel/palmers crossing (82) project 1 (% of engaged residents voting for project) fundraiser for youth (46%) project 2 (% of engaged residents voting for project) community event, neighborhood clean-up (22%) *number based on second community conversation at the second community conversation residents used the self-rating rubric to determine where they felt they were in the process of implementing the fbl process. they rated themselves as beginning to close the loop. characteristics of beginning to close the loop are that residents are rarely asked questions to encourage their feedback during http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 community conversations and conversations focus on a statement of correct/incorrect rather than deeper, meaningful exploration of ideas (see the self-rating rubric). site visit interview and observation findings the community as described by the participants. study participants provided background information about the irene chapel/palmers crossing neighborhood. this information provides context and describes a few of the challenging situations within which the fbl process was being implemented from the participants point of view. neighborhood housing problems, choices made by city government, and the consequences of historical racial divisiveness present an environment where as one of the volunteers stated, residents have a “decimated sense of community”. palmers crossing was annexed 27 years ago, and their drainage problems still have not been addressed. in recent years commercial industry has worked with the city of hattiesburg on annexing along highway 49, one of the borders of the neighborhood. from the resident’s point of view this recent annexing appears to demonstrate that the city of hattiesburg is more concerned about chasing the tax dollars than taking care of what they already own. residents feel the city should take care of issues that have been neglected in their neighborhood before expanding. legacy housing and residents desire to keep their family homes present challenges. a participant shared a story about a 98-yearold woman that had been asked to move out of her house that her daddy built because her foundation is cracking and sinking and to move into the house next door until habitat could fix the foundation. the resident chose to stay in her home. the irene chapel/palmers crossing community has also been directly affected 3 times in the last twelve years by major natural disasters. a tornado with 136-165 mph winds in january 2017, another tornado with 170 mph winds in february 2013, and hurricane katrina with sustained winds of 120 mph in august 2005 have left indelible marks on this community. residents who had little were left with nothing. many of the houses are not protected by insurance because having insurance not a part of the family habit therefore many families are completely wiped out. one participant noted that fema money was not adequate to meet the effected resident’s needs. community needs from the perspective of residents “we need public transportation access to this neighborhood.” the pto president and other community volunteers agreed that the lack of public transportation is a limiting factor for residents. parents would like to participate in sports events at the high school, but parents can't attend because of transportation issues. buses were purchased, and the routes were about to begin before the january 2017 tornado. the tornado destroyed the buses. parents with kids at the prek-8 school in the neighborhood walk 2 miles to attend meetings. residents also noted the need for larger and better apartment complexes in the area. the ones available are not enough. this sentiment was echoed by volunteers who shared that the two major apartment complexes in the neighborhood are run down and one of the complexes has brown water. the pto president lives in one of the neighborhood apartment complexes and says that she watches drugs being dealt on her sidewalk. her kids are not allowed outside unless she or her husband are outside with them. there is a playground close by, but it is next to a pond with a fence around it, there is hole in the fence and the playground equipment is old. she is fearful of the hole in the fence because her children don't swim. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 the feedback loop process as described by the participants one participant shared that when irene chapel/palmers crossing was chosen as the focus neighborhood they initially didn't get any input from the residents. when they started engaging the residents they thought they'd get invited by the neighborhood action teams to come talk about the fbl process or we could set up the first community conversation and the neighborhood action teams would broadcast information about the fbl process to their participants. what we found is that none of the four neighborhood action organizations had regular meetings and none of them had asked the residents what they wanted. each neighborhood action team had their own agenda. for example, one neighborhood action team wanted to set up a pavilion so that they could bbq. the irene chapel neighborhood action team didn’t want to be a part of building a pavilion because they didn’t want to be a part of palmers crossing. prior to receiving the funding for the fbl process implementation hattiesburg habitat neighborhood revitalization staff were awarded a $2500 grant from gulf states health policy center, which they used to begin the fbl process implementation. once the attempts to work with the neighborhood association teams failed the habitat neighborhood revitalization manager partnered with the prek-8 principal to host community meetings in conjunction with parent meetings at the prek-8 school. it was during these meetings that residents began to engage, habitat staff were able to find out what they wanted, and habitat staff were able to begin to help residents understand that they can assist residents in getting some of their concerns addressed. some of the funds from the gulf states health policy center grant went to reimburse the prek-8 school for the use of their facilities and the establishment of the neighborhood watch and youth entrepreneur micro loans youth mentorship program are both a direct result of this partnership. one participant said, “what's going on in palmers is sustainable and can be easily replicated.” the partnership between the hattiesburg habitat neighborhood revitalization staff and the prek-8 school has resulted in real engagement of residents in conversations about their needs. the prek-8 school principal has intentionally worked to build relationship and trust with neighborhood residents over the 3 years that she has been principal. the residents see the principal’s invitation to bring the habitat staff into their parent meetings and they slowly begin to engage with the habitat staff in the fbl process. a former student and resident volunteer to translate the meetings for the hispanic residents. the community is highly transient. the principal reports that everyday 3-4 kids register, and 5-6 kids move, which adds to the difficulty of building relationships. however, the fact that some parents walk 2 miles to come to “ms. pollard's meetings” demonstrates how hard the principal has worked hard over the past 3 years to gain this kind of trust and interest of neighborhood residents. habitat staff are following the prek8 principal’s lead with respect to developing relationships with the hispanic residents. the prek-8 principal has recommended that they have a literacy meeting and use that meeting to engage the hispanic residents in conversations about what things need to be worked on to improve their living conditions and they are moving forward with this recommendation. the prek-8 principal said: “habitat staff is engaged with feedback loops. i am driving parental involvement through the paths they are leading me down. building relationships is really important in this community. once i identified how different groups of parents react to data/information, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 etc., what they need, and how they choose to communicate, i develop my strategies for engaging them. they do not like to meet long nor do they want to be put on the spot. they like that we share data and information regarding funding, community involvement, instructional help, etc. some like information on paper. some religiously follow us on social media and depend on our parent phones calls. some prefer the newsletters and call us with questions, etc. i think feedback loops can be [standard operating procedure], but we must make adjustments. we have to understand who we are serving and how to keep them engaged.” while one participant thinks that the engaged residents are thinking more about resident voice than the fbl process method because the residents don’t fully understand the method, she still believes the residents recognize their opinion is important and valued. earl travillion middle school helped get more people involved. once residents were able to see the responses from the initial conversations in the word clouds they were able to understand that how addressing the flooding and having a pavilion did not have to be exclusionary from one another. conversations during the community meetings were able to help them see that their concerns about having safe places for children and safety in general could be addressed by engaging in activities with neighbors in public spaces. a habitat staff participant also believes that the residents will come to the health and wellness strategies once trust is built. the habitat neighborhood revitalization manager realizes the limitations of tapping into the current open door to the community that is the prek-8 school, so she is also exploring strategies to connect and interact with residents that don't have kids or a connection to earl travillion. to date the habitat affiliates role has been providing the funds for meetings, printing notices, flyers, surveys, postcards, postage, feed at meetings. the hope as we build trust in the community, meet the first identified needs, to be more of a partner in change by providing housing products and financial training/counseling. the affiliate is thinking about the feedback loop method and appreciates how it gives voice to residents who otherwise would not be heard. the fbl process has provided a tool that the affiliate has been seeking for years. one participant said, “too often in meetings and forums we only hear the same few voices. feedback loops allows for more voices to be heard. we believe the prototype leverages voices. we have experienced how the technology can be a challenge, but the benefits are worth working around/through those challenges.” engagement of residents, community groups, and community organizations there are multiple groups and organizations providing resources and supports for this neighborhood and its residents. for example, the hattiesburg police department participates in the block parties to build relationships for the neighborhood watch and william carey university brings teacher candidates to offer free after school tutoring. hattiesburg habitat partnered with a local business to donate cleats to every member of the earl travillion football team. the gulf states health policy grant is a partnership between habitat, earl travillion, gulf states health policy center, and city of hattiesburg and free health services are provided through edward st. the translator has found that the reason hispanics don't apply for citizenship is because they think they need an attorney and she is creating a tool kit for the hispanics to try to dispel some of the myths. habitat staff has also partnered with a volunteer who has connections through the local university and the faith community to negotiate data collection. this was necessary because in the past groups and individuals have come to the neighborhood with a grant and they get what http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 they want from the residents and leave. when the money runs out you have crippled the community because they came to trust the resource. one participant stated the following: “we have learned that although there are several existing neighborhood associations however, they aren't effective. through fbl process we've learned that there are shared concerns and there are ways they could work together if they took time to listen for understanding and not just listen to respond.” internal neighborhood divisions have also made development of relationships difficult. the neighborhood has 4 neighborhood action teams: community action team, concerned citizens, irene chapel, and fordetra. fordetra is the oldest and reportedly most active and influential neighborhood action team and is made up of alumnae of the neighborhood prek-8 school. participants shared that it has been difficult to get these groups focused on common neighborhood goals. the fact that residents take pride in the school and see it as the center of their community demonstrates why leveraging the relationship the prek-8 principal has with neighborhood residents to engage residents in the fbl process makes sense. residents were upset when the principal came because of their perceptions of the changes she was making, and they thought she was using the school’s money for things they weren't on board with. however, the principal has been a change agent for the school. she's in favor of and has modeled advocacy for problems that residents have in the community. for example, there is an apartment complex in the neighborhood that has brown water. the principal has attempted to represent the residents at the city level to advocate to have the water problem fixed. as one participant said, “there are many layers to this work.” another participant said, “strategies applied to engage residents in a middle to upper socio-economic community cannot be applied in low socio-economic communities.” leaders that understand things like the truancy challenges at the school are related to poverty in the community are needed to build relationships that will lead to resident sharing their needs and trusting that the local organizations and partners will help them make change happen in their neighborhood. another participant said, “it takes a village and understanding how to achieve a collective truth that speaks to what the village does and needs is important.” historically city council meetings have been a racial divide, three to two, but with the new mayor there seems to be more compromise across the board. prevention of gentrification in the midst of the revitalization is desired by residents. a participant commented that if people have managed to maintain their home “we don't want them put out because of property taxes”. city government chooses to build new homes for some with disaster relief funds while others still have leaky roofs and sagging floors, a participant shared has contributed to the perpetuation of the neighborhood housing challenges. equitable distribution of funds is a real issue and in addition to the racial and socio-economic divide there is a race privilege versus language privilege which cripple’s residents with respect to advocating for themselves. one participant stated: “some people have a whole new house and some people still have leaky roofs……… [we’re talking about the] haves and have nots, educated and uneducated, blacks, hispanics, and whites. we're talking about race privilege but not a lot about language privilege. it's hard to help white people understand that you're only a storm away from being just like the people you're looking down on.” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 language privilege refers to privilege provided an individual that clearly speaks the language of dominant culture. individuals that lack language privilege are less likely to advocate for themselves and as a result have less access to goods and services. one participant shared that one thing that katrina did was to bring people together across the racial divide and socio economic divide. however, there still is some resentment among residents. some feel “why should i pay insurance when they get a free house?” irene chapel/palmers crossing neighborhood leaders understand that opening conversations to equitably distribute funds is needed. discussion and conclusion by listening to the residents, affiliate staff, and volunteers within the community a unique insight into the activities surrounding and involved in the fbl process implementation in the palmer’s crossing/irene chapel community is observed. through the fbl process the residents voice that transportation, housing, and places for people to safely be outside are real community concerns. from the point of view of the case study participants, challenges presented by acts of nature and choices made by city government directly impact the quality of life of the residents in this community. the need for purposeful channels of communication to be established among residents, between neighborhood action groups, and city government is evident. leveraging relationships with community partners that have established trust is critical to development of purposeful communication. understanding of culture, community socio-economic context, and the multiple layers of community engagement is critical, and this understanding once gained must be weaved into processes and policies that effect community engagement and the systems that govern and effect individuals within the community. central to successful capacity building for systemic and sustainable community change is the engagement of community leaders, stakeholders, and policy makers (hood, 2004; hopson & hood, 2005; toms & hobbs, 1997; toms, et. al. 2011). gaining understanding that what the community has to offer is rooted in developing relationships by spending time in the community. relationship building is an integral part of the fbl process and in some ways, can be realized through the community conversations and co-creation of activities steps in the fbl process. reciprocal or mutually beneficial relationships help in the building of trust, equity, and fairness as well as individual’s perceptions of trust, equity, and fairness. reciprocity, empowers all stakeholders by creating space for all experiences and expertise, both individual and collective, to be viable in dialogue, development, planning, and implementation while not compromising attention to process, purpose, and decision-making (toms & burgess, 2014). organizations that invest in understanding communities and responding from that space of understanding will see communities improve over time (mačiulienė & skaržauskienė, 2016). using the fbl process as a tool yields the ability to cross barriers and to co-design and co-create events, activities, and programs. providing space for individuals to be heard, to share information focusing on the findings of data collected on purpose to inform the community, allowing time to dialogue about the information and to make decisions based upon information informed by all relevant voices creates an environment where change can occur. once this environment has been cultivated the fbl process may be a tool that can be used to lead to organizational changes, changes in social climate, and concrete changes in quality of life. access to local amenities, economic opportunities, education, health care, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 housing, safety, and transportation are proposed to impact quality of life. as organizations prepare staff and residents within communities become equipped to use data to make decisions that will bring about systemic and sustainable change acknowledging that all interactions between people teaches something is paramount (hopson & hood, 2005; fetterman, 2017; patton, 2017). in the application of frierian critical principles to evaluation patton (2017) recommends using evaluative thinking to open up, develop, and nurture critical consciousness, where critical consciousness is defined as the attainment of deep, meaningful, realistic, and reality-based understanding of one’s world. this consciousness resides in communities of people and individuals and this critical consciousness must be interactive, dialogical, reflective, and active. the feedback loop process implementation, which engages residents in facilitating community conversations, collecting data from residents to make decisions about neighborhood concerns, working with residents to make decisions on how to address the concerns, equipping residents to design a plan to address the concerns, and implementing the designed plan while making hearing from residents continuously and making changes as needed based on the vocalized needs of the residents, contains characteristics of this critical consciousness. nurturing of community and individual critical consciousness that leads to social cohesion and collective action must take into account cultural differences. assumptions of understanding across diverse cultures leads to miscommunication, ineffective engagement, and ultimate discord (brown & cooper, 2011; chávez et. al., 2007; house, 2017; iverson, 2007; kochman, 1991; pratte, 1972; winter, 2006). the concept of “language as privilege” means that the language of the dominant culture is used to communicate and to understand issues. any deviation from the language of the dominant culture breeds miscommunication and misunderstanding. understanding of unfamiliar language occurs not just in interpretation of words but interpretation within the context of the culture where that language was developed. indicators of organizational readiness and staff preparedness to understand cultural differences and to effectively listen and communicate within the context of cultural differences should be assessed by organizations and appropriate teaching and learning opportunities should be engaged in as a part of the implementation of change processes (adler & coggin, 2005; altschul, 2008; brown & cooper, 2011; de gruyter, 2007; foster-fisherman, 2007; grasby, et. al., 2005; hood, 2004; leung & wang, 2015; wallerstein & duran, 2006; white, 2009). as the use of the fbl process as a tool to understand cultural differences in context may assist organization leaders and groups that desire to realize effective community engagement for positive, meaningful, purposeful, and systematic community change, thoughtful consideration should be given to the potential necessary shifts in institutional culture. references adler, r. p., & coggin, j. (2005). what do we mean by “civic engagement?” journal of transformative education 3(3), 236–53. alinsky, s. d. (1962). citizen participation and community organization in planning and urban renewal. chicago, il: industrial areas foundation. altschul, i., oyserman, d., & bybee, d. (2008). racial-ethnic self-schemas and segmented assimilation: identity and the academic achievement of hispanic http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 youth. social psychology quarterly, 71(3), 302-320. boyatzis, r. e. (1998). transforming qualitative information. thousand oaks, ca: sage. boykin, a. w., & ellison, c. m., (1995). multiple ecologies of black youth socialization: an afrographic analysis. african american youth. r. i. taylor (ed.). praeger publishers. brown-jeffy, s., & cooper, j. e. 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(2009). who participates and why: building a process model of citizen participation. health education and behavior, 39, 550–69. gay, l.r, mills, g.e. & airasian, p. w. (2012). educational research: competencies for analysis and applications (10th ed.). boston, ma: pearson. grasby, d., zammit, c., pretty, g., & bramston, p. (2005). ready, set, go: using the community readiness method to engage social networks for sustainable natural resource management in the queensland and murray-darling basin. in: international conference on engaging communities, brisbane, australia. hood, s. (2004). a journey to understand the role of culture in program evaluation: snapshots and personal reflections of one african american evaluator. new directions for evaluation, 102, 21–37. hopson, r. k., & hood, s. 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(eds.), lead the way: principles and practices in community and civic engagement. (pp. 7-24). san diego, ca: cognella. tyrone c. howard. (2016). why black lives (and minds) matter: race, freedom schools & the quest for educational equity. the journal of negro education, 85(2), 101–113. doi:10.7709/jnegroeducation. 85.2.0101 wallerstein, n. b., & duran, b. (2006). using community-based participatory research to address health disparities. health promotion practice, 7(3): 312–23. white, b. p. (2009). navigating the dynamics between institutions and their communities. kettering foundation, dayton, oh. winter, w. f. (2006). the measure of our days: writings of william f. winter. william winter institute for racial reconciliation, university of mississippi. yin, r.k. (2003). case study research design and methods. thousand oaks, ca: sage. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 acknowledgements habitat neighborhood revitalization team rebecca hix, executive director, neighborhood revitalization melissa rivera, organizational development consultant kelly cox, associate director, neighborhood revitalization calli speakman, technology specialist habitat hattiesburg affiliate staff and volunteers laura goodwin-wright, habitat neighborhood revitalization manager dr. marcus gaut, assistant professor, coordinator, doctor of nursing practice program, school of leadership and advanced nursing practice, college of nursing and health professions, the university of southern mississippi lucinda pascarella, hahfh family selection committee chairperson kristina pollard, principal earl travillion attendance center dr. sue whitcomb, associate professor of education, william carey university http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 appendix interview questions rapid interview questions what have you and/or your neighborhood learned as a result of participating in the feedback loop pilot? we understand that funding and advocacy were challenges you had with neighborhood revitalization. please talk about your neighborhood’s challenges with advocacy and/or funding. site visit interview questions affiliate staff, volunteers, and principal tell me about your neighborhood. tell me about the feedback loop process from your perspective. tell me about the strengths and challenges of implementing the fbl process. talk about how residents engaged (or did not engage) in the fbl process. talk about how community groups and organizations have been involved in the feedback loop process. residents tell me about your neighborhood. tell me about the feedback loop process from your perspective. if you could do anything to improve her neighborhood what would it be? post site visit interview questions (affiliate staff, volunteers, and principal) how are the affiliates/residents thinking about the fbl method? is this about the method or are they thinking about the resident voice? are the feedback loops the right way of doing this? explain your thinking. why (or why not) should feedback loops be a part of standard operating procedure? what does the fbl process look like in the future for your affiliate? what's your affiliate's role in the coalition? how did your affiliate share the fbl process with the board? how does the prototype leverage voices or does the technology get in the way? http://www.gjcpp.org/ assessing feminist community psychology pedagogy michele m. schlehofer1, yuki okubo1, and dominic d. w. williams2 keywords: undergraduate education, community psychology, feminism, pedagogy, experiential learning author biography: michele schlehofer, holds a phd in applied social psychology from claremont graduate university. she is a professor of psychology at su. she has training in applied, community-based participatory action research approaches, and her work lies at the intersection of action research, public policy, advocacy, and activism. she is evaluator of su’s safe spaces training program, and just completed a term as board member of the non-profit pflag salisbury, inc., which she founded in 2015. she received a 2017 usm board of regents faculty award in public service, and a 2019 distinguished faculty award. she is co-director of the department of psychology's accelerated mentoring program with dr. yuki okubo in psychology, which provides intensive mentorship and training for students with interests in social justice who are looking to pursue graduate training in psychology. she also co-directs the reach (reenvisioning ethics access and community humanities) initiative with dr. tim stock in philosophy, which engages representatives of local businesses, community organizations, advocacy groups, and other community stakeholders in ongoing discussions about community ethics and ethical decision-making. yuki okubo holds a phd in counseling psychology from columbia university. she is an associate professor of psychology at salisbury university. she is trained both as a researcher 1 salisbury university 2 gifts outpatient mental health clinic global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 and a clinician and conducts research from a racial-cultural and social-justice perspective. her research focuses on racism and coping, experiences of the marginalized, mentoring of students of color, social justice issues, and qualitative inquiries. her racism & coping research lab., has been conducting a qualitative research study on how people talk about race, racism, racial identity, and race relations, and they have developed and recently implemented an antiracism 101: starting a race dialogue, a peer-led, 2-hour workshop for su undergraduate students. she is a codirector of the accelerated mentoring program (amp) in the psychology department with dr. michele schlehofer. she received university system of maryland women’s forum faculty research award in 2018, a 2020 fulton school faculty research mentor award, and most recently, 2021 president’s diversity campion award at su. dominic williams, is an lgpc practicing in baltimore county, maryland. his primary client base consists of high school age youth, women of color, and individuals with mood disorders. while most of his experience is working in the clinical space, he looks forward to continuing to take on new opportunities in research. mr. williams obtained his bachelor of arts in psychology in 2017 from salisbury university. while enrolled, he was a visible and active member of the university, including serving as the president of the naacp salisbury university chapter. he also participated in multiple research projects, including assisting co-author dr. yuki okubo identify multicultural interactions between students and professors. while serving as an intern, he was supervised by co-author dr. michele schlehofer. following his undergraduate studies, mr. williams obtained his master’s in clinical psychology in 2020 from loyola university of maryland. wanting to contribute to the department, he served as a teaching assistant for ethics in psychology, as well as multicultural issues in psychology. his therapy uses an eclectic framework, heavily utilizing cbt and act principles. he intends to pursue his ph.d. in the next few years and continue to explore ways to better serve marginalized communities. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 recommended citation: schlehofer, m. m., okubo, y. williams, d. d. w. (2021). assessing feminist community psychology pedagogy. global journal of community psychology practice, 12 (4), 1 20. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: michele m. schlehofer, salisburty university, email: mmschlehofer@salisbury.edu. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ mailto:mmschlehofer@salisbury.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 assessing feminist community psychology pedagogy abstract feminist pedagogy and community psychology share many ideological similarities, including an action-oriented approach to social problems, a focus on the voices of marginalized communities, and an emphasis on empowerment. there is a dearth of research on feminist community psychology pedagogy (fcpp), yet there is a compelling case for implementation of this approach in the undergraduate psychology curriculum. this article presents focus group findings from seven students who took an undergraduate community psychology course taught with fcpp, to better understand the impact of this teaching approach on their educational experiences. thematic analysis identified 10 themes, including those regarding student professional growth, the empowering process of collaborative power-sharing, and a deeper understanding of social problems within a broader ecological context. the findings suggest fcpp enhances students’ educational and career development, providing tools otherwise underdeveloped by other pedagogies. these findings have implications for further research and instruction regarding fcpp, as well as broader implications for community psychology as a discipline. exposure to the field of community psychology (cp) is a rare opportunity for most undergraduate psychology students, as cp is typically not part of undergraduate curricula either as a stand-alone course or as part of introductory psychology textbooks (bauer et al., 2017; carmony et al., 2000; glantsman et al., 2015; jimenez et al., 2016; mcmahon et al., 2015; simmons & smiley, 2010). there are many benefits to undergraduate cp education. in addition to helping secure a pipeline of students into graduate training programs, undergraduate cp education provides students opportunities to learn about the role of larger macrosystemic, organizational, community, and mesosystemic factors that impact human behavior and mental health, which are often absent or under-emphasized in psychology courses (kornbluh et al., 2019). exposure to cp as an undergraduate thus increases students’ awareness of systemic factors contributing to social problems and political awareness (cattaneo et al., 2019), and provides students training in community practice skill sets, which are both useful in a multitude of careers and can also catalyze advocacy and activism (jimenez, et al., 2016; mcmahon, et al., 2015). exposing undergraduate students to cp’s strong social justice value orientation can improve multicultural competency skills (gallor, 2017) and help attract and retain students of color in psychology (garibay, 2015; gibbs & griffin, 2013; henderson et al., 2019; mcgee & bentley, 2017; torres-harding et al., 2014). moreover, such exposure increases both students’ commitment to addressing oppression through social change (cattaneo et al., 2019; gallor, 2017; henderson & wright, 2015), and students’ preference for socially responsible jobs upon graduation (ellison, 2018). for these and other reasons, community psychologists have called for the development of strong undergraduate cp pedagogy (jimenez, et al., 2016; lichty & palamaro-munsell, 2017). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 despite the benefits of undergraduate cp education, there remains a dearth of literature on best teaching practices (jimenez et al., 2016), making it difficult to implement cp coursework at the undergraduate level. one promising approach is feminist community psychology pedagogy (fcpp; schlehofer & vapsva, 2019; whelan & lawthom, 2009). although feminist pedagogical approaches are underutilized at the undergraduate level (kite et al., 2001; mccormick, 1997) and undergraduate fcpp is almost unheard of (worell & johnson, 1997), there are strong benefits for development of this pedagogical framework. feminist pedagogical approaches are those which incorporate feminist values into teaching (forrest & rosenburg, 1997). feminist values closely align with those of community psychology, making a feminist approach a strong fit for undergraduate cp education: both feminism and community psychology take a critical approach to mainstream disciplinary perspectives and challenge existing power structures, both emphasize empowerment, and both feminism and community psychology call attention to the lived experiences of people who are marginalized in the pursuit of social justice (hill et al., 2000; mulvey, 1988; riger, 2017). further, a feminist approach can enhance cp by helping to deeper contextualize people’s lived experiences and cp’s understanding of diversity, and by reinforcing power-sharing processes (riger, 2017). development of fcpp in undergraduate education is thus consistent with the alignment between cp and feminism (bond & mulvey, 2000; mulvey, 1988; riger, 2017) and affords benefits to the undergraduate cp classroom in ways that can deepen the educational experience and enhance cp undergraduate education. there are four important features of feminist pedagogy: (a) participatory and reciprocal engagement in the learning process, (b) reflexivity and personal experiences as a source of knowledge, (c) development of critical thinking skills, and (d) creation of political and social change (stake & hoffman, 2000). these four features directly reflect the values of feminist community psychology (moane & quilty, 2012). specifically, the participatory and reciprocal engagement of the feminist classroom mirrors the focus of participatory and power-sharing research processes in cp; feminist pedagogy’s focus on personal experiences as a way of knowing aligns with cp’s emphasis on the importance of respect for human diversity; and feminist pedagogy’s focus on political and social change aligns with cp’s emphasis on action-research, public policy, and facilitating second-order social change processes. the unique features of feminist pedagogy influences not only what content is taught in the classroom, but also teaching processes and classroom climate (chin et al., 1997). therefore, incorporating feminist pedagogy into the undergraduate cp classroom can faciltate creation of a learning environment in which cp principles are integrated into the classroom itself; in essence, turning the classroom into a site for community practice (lichty & palamaromunsell, 2017). this paper assesses the impact of fcpp on undergraduate students’ learning and growth. feminist pedagogical practices were incorporated into an upper-division undergraduate course, community and applied social psychology. feminist pedagogical components (e.g., power-sharing, a focus on social change via action-research, and centering the voices of marginalized people) were incorporated into numerous aspects of the course. institutional and instructor positionality consistent with feminist pedagogy’s focus on reflexivity (stake & hoffman, 2000), it’s important to discuss institutional and instructor positionality, as these contextual factors provide insight into the application of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 fcpp. the institution is a mid-size comprehensive public institution located in the mid-atlantic region of the united states of america, on maryland’s rural eastern shore. the department offers a bachelor of arts degree in psychology and minors in psychology and cognitive science; together, enrollment exceeds 600 students. the institution is predominately white, with approximately 35% of psychology majors and minors identifying as students of color. most (82%) of psychology majors are female. most courses in the program are taught from a traditional post-positivist framework which situates experimentation (particularly lab experimentation) as central to the discipline. most students do not go to graduate programs. the instructor is a white cisgender and heterosexual female trained in applied social psychology who engages in community psychology research and practice. at the time the course was taught, the instructor was serving as chair of the department and was in the process of being promoted to full professor. the course, community and applied social psychology, is not required for majors, and open to any student who has taken psychology 101. the course was taught face to face during a 15-week spring semester (meeting for 50 minutes three times a week) prior to the covid-19 pandemic. the course had an enrollment of 21. all students were undergraduate psychology majors. consistent with demographics among psychology majors, students enrolled in the course were predominantly female (18 students; 86%), and white (76%). feminist pedagogy was implemented into numerous aspects of the course. first, the course was intentionally structured around the voices and perspectives of marginalized people. the course textbook (kloos et al., 2011), was supplemented with journal articles and other readings, 60% of which were written by and discussed community projects with all-female participants, people of color, people of diverse sexual and gender orientations, immigrant populations, or other marginalized and oppressed people. further, all guest speakers represented a marginalized group. out of six guest speakers, one was a white woman who was a practicing (non-academic) community psychologist, and five were local community activists: one black woman, and four black men (two of whom were immigrants). second, the course was structured to deconstruct power in the classroom as much as possible. the inherent context of the learning environment makes it impossible to deconstruct power in the classroom, particularly at the undergraduate level (lichty & palamaro-munsell, 2017; morgan, 1987; schneidewend, 1983; shrewsbury, 1987). instructors and students differ in education, expertise, and experience, and institutions of higher education reinforce these hierarchies (spencer, 2015). further, instructors must set at least some structure: they create syllabi, assignments, and engage in preparatory work without input from students. instructors are also “gatekeepers” (kimmel et al., 1997): they write letters of recommendation, can create or offer key professional activities and opportunities to students, and grade performance, all of which have very real implications for students’ educational trajectories. the instructorstudent hierarchical structure of higher education means that undergraduate students typically enter the classroom expecting the professor to serve as an authority figure. colleagues may question the use of power-sharing in the undergraduate classroom or the rigor of this pedagogical approach. these and other factors can make use of fcpp risky for vulnerable instructors, such as graduate students serving as instructors, contractual instructors, part time instructors or adjuncts, and untenured faculty, particularly faculty of color (spencer, 2015). for these and other reasons, powersharing can never be fully attained in the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 undergraduate cp classroom, limiting the application of feminist pedagogy at the undergraduate level (kite et al., 2001; mccormick, 1997; worell & johnson, 1997). to help deconstruct power as much as possible, the professor gave significant responsibility and ownership of the course to students. rather than planning lectures, students engaged in classroom-based discussion throughout the duration of the semester. students were also responsible for giving presentations to the class on course content, and were required to include one supplementary, related source of information (e.g., an article, book, video, relevant current event, etc.), from which to inform their presentation. the above components of feminist pedagogy, along with political and social change, were exemplified in the semester-long course project. prior to the start of the course, a consortium of haitian community leaders contacted the university seeking assistance with their goals of attaining social and political capital in the local community. the community leaders were referred to the instructor, and from a series of conversations, the course project was formed. throughout the semester, students, working alongside their instructor, were responsible for meeting with community stakeholders, determining their needs, and planning an event to meet them. the partnership and relationships were new for the students and for the instructor, which facilitated power-sharing during the planning process and provided the instructor with an opportunity to model how to establish cross-cultural collaborations. the event, educated and empowered, was a threehour long haitian community fair which provided resources on area social service agencies (based on needs identified the community), opportunities for civic engagement (voter registration, positions on advisory boards, and 2020 census information), and offered an outlet for building social capital via both intra-cultural bonding and cross-cultural bridging with the african american community (see barbierri et al., 2021). for the project, students worked collaboratively with the local haitian community, the course instructor, and students enrolled in a masters-level social work practice iii course (the last of three courses focusing on macro-level social work practice). students decided early on in the planning to divide themselves up into teams, with each team assigned a specific set of duties for the event. this resulted in four teams, each with three to seven students, depending on amount of people-power needed and student interest: a planning team (logistics and event oversight), street team (worked closely with the haitian community to learn needs and advertise the event), advertising team (developed advertising), and a fundraising team (fundraised for the event). each team collaboratively discussed what their duties would be, and the instructor helped differentiate each team’s tasks to minimize overlap. teams met inside and outside of class frequently, both to complete tasks and to establish group norms and a sense of community. students had significant control and direction over the project, including: assessing community need, determining the structure and flow of the event, making decisions about the division of work, being responsive to feedback from various stakeholders, and determining how to work collaboratively. the instructor monitored their progress, connected students with haitian community collaborators, and provided suggestions for student teams when they got “stuck.” when student plans were misaligned with cp principles or input from community collaborators, the instructor provided guidance and redirected students by connecting their practice work back to their learning. for example, at one point the street team was planning to door knock and distribute advertising flyers in haitian neighborhoods. the instructor prompted http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 students to recall that they learned the haitian community was close-knit and skeptical of outsiders; many do not have u.s. citizenship and speak only creole. after discussion, the team decided to advertise with the assistance of local haitian churches and grocery stores. additionally, and in line with deconstruction of power in the classroom, students had some control over how and what they were assessed on for their project grade. although the weight of the project in students’ final grade calculations was pre-determined, students developed their own grading rubrics. a multi-stage process was used to develop rubrics. first, student teams discussed how they wanted to be assessed and their ideas were submitted to the instructor, who developed preliminary grading rubrics for each team. teams provided feedback on the preliminary grading rubrics, and the instructor modified them. this process continued until consensus was reached; groups created between one to three drafts before consensus. methods participants participants were 7 out of 21 students (onethird) enrolled in an upper division undergraduate community and applied social psychology course. all students identified as female, and were aged 20 to 23 (m = 21.57; sd = .98). four (57.1%) self-identified as black, one of whom self-identified as african; the other three students (42.9%) selfidentified as white. students who participated in the focus group were thus more likely to be students of color (57.1%) in comparison to students enrolled in the course (24%). three students were juniors (42.9%) and four were seniors (57.1%); all had taken 6 or more semesters of coursework towards their undergraduate degree. five students were transfer students. student course loads were between 12 and 21 credits (m = 16.83; sd = 3.25). procedure recruitment students were invited to participate via course announcements made in-person by the instructor and via the online learning management system. in order to ensure that students would be available, the focus group took place during their normal class period. interested students were informed of the focus group date and were asked to be present if they wanted to participate. focus group procedure the focus group was facilitated by a white, female faculty member from the social work department who teaches only undergraduate and graduate social work majors and who was not involved in the project. this faculty member was selected to conduct the focus group for two reasons: (a) she has minimal to no contact with students majoring or minoring in psychology and does not assume an evaluative role (e.g., instructor, supervisor) if and when she interacts with psychology students; and (b) she has experience facilitating student focus groups coupled with understanding and commitment to diversity issues. the faculty member conducting the focus group was provided with the study goals and underlying methodology. upon arriving for a focus group, participants were greeted by the faculty facilitator and provided with a copy of a signed consent form to read, sign, and return. the consent form stressed the confidentiality of the focus group. as part of the consent process, all participants signed a statement indicating their agreement to keep the discussion and identities of the other participants confidential. after informed consent, the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 facilitator provided an overview of the structure of the focus group, and discussed ground rules as follows: (a) we all can choose to speak as much or as little as we want, and we can skip questions we do not feel comfortable answering, (b) we will respect each other, will not speak over each other, and will respect differences in opinion, and (c) we will keep what we discuss today confidential, and will not tell other people what was talked about, or the identities of others in the room. participants were invited to develop additional ground rules; none did so. participants then introduced themselves and were given letters (e.g., a, b, c) as their pseudonyms. after completion of introductions and assignment of pseudonyms, the facilitator started audio recording equipment, and engaged the participants in a dialogue about their experiences in the course. students could leave the focus group at any time, and could refuse to answer any or all questions. at the end of the focus group, participants completed a brief anonymous demographic questionnaire for purposes of reporting the sample. the focus group lasted 1 hour and 15 minutes; this was the duration of the class period. participants were then debriefed. the focus group was transcribed by the second author using dragonspeak talk-to-text transcription software. transcription did not occur until after final grades were submitted, to ensure that student confidentiality was maintained. the second author assisted with transcription as she has experience conducting qualitative research and was not involved in teaching the course. any and all identifying information was removed from the transcript during the transcription process. after the audio recording was transcribed, the digital recording was permanently deleted. focus group prompts participants were asked: (1) i’d like to know a bit about your experiences in community and applied social psychology this semester. what did you like best about this course?; (2) did the way you think about social problems change as a result of taking this course? did the way you think about social problems change as a result of learning about the ecological model? if so, how? if not, can you explain why not?; (3) did the course change the way you think about psychology and what psychologists do? if so, how? if not, can you explain why not?; (4) did this course change the way you see multicultural issues and diversity? if so, how? if not, can you explain why not?; (5) did the way you think about social justice issues this semester change at all as a result of the course? if so, how? if not, can you explain why not?; (6) did this course change how you think about community empowerment and social change? if so, how? if not, can you explain why not?; and (7) did this course influence your career goals? if so, how? coding and data analysis to code the data, thematic analysis was used (braun & clarke, 2016). this process began with the data analysis team consisting of the first two authors independently analyzing the transcripts and formulating themes. they then compared their work and established a consensus version of themes. the third author analyzed the focus group transcript and coded themes independently as an auditor to ensure trustworthiness. the third author then reviewed the consensus version and provided feedback based on their independent data analysis process. feedback consisted of noting themes they agreed and disagreed with, any discrepancies between themes, and any suggested functional improvements. this feedback was then taken into consideration when formulating the consensus version by the data analysis team. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 after this, the 2nd and 3rd authors listened to the audio recording of the focus group to better understand if there is anything that was not captured by a transcript. the first author was the course instructor, and therefore did not review the original audio recording to maintain participant confidentiality. after review, it was concluded that there are some themes that were more salient than others, thus we provided distinctions in the following section. specifically, following braun and clarke’s (2006; 2016) description of theme development, determination of what constitutes as primary, supplemental to primary, and secondary themes were made by paying particular attention to participants’ level of enthusiasm, lengths and depths in which they were discussed, and examinations of how some themes seem to be connected to one another. primary themes were discussed in depth and at length, with much enthusiasm, and involved many participants. supplemental themes stemming from primary themes seem to be intertwined with primary themes in the way they were expressed, where they were the outcomes developed from primary themes. secondary themes were also discussed at length by participants, however, they did not influence other themes in the way primary themes did. results the focus group yielded 4 primary themes (broadened view of psychology field; ecological understanding of and perspective on social problems; experiential learning with real world applicability; collaborative learning); 2 supplemental themes stemming from primary themes (empowering to students; honed future career goals); and 4 secondary themes (cultivating cultural competencies; understanding of how changes occur; disconnect with larger social movements; and things to change in future class.) each theme is described in this section. primary themes broadened view of psychology field students were forthcoming in admitting that they had certain perceptions of psychology and what they could do with a degree in it. students tended to think of psychology as clinical or developmental, and it was new to them to think about community empowerment and community-based work as also psychology. this course provided exposure to the field of community psychology and they learned how to instigate change in social problems. for instance, one student stated: “i was thinking that psychology was basically clinical, because my parents are psych. nurses so i always saw that perspective of psychology. it wasn’t until this course that i saw it was broader than that, so, social change and it’s more community-based.” ecological understanding of and perspective on social problems in this course, students learned bronfenbrenner’s ecological framework (1979) to expand their understanding of how social problems are defined and understood, and then moved towards solutions. students voiced that learning about the ecological framework was helpful in seeing social problems and change processes from various ecological perspectives. as an example, one student said: “it put it in a perspective because sometimes we tend to focus on one level and because of this class it made me see how one level can affect the rest of it.” experiential learning with real world applicability students discussed the course being applicable outside of the classroom setting, beyond exams and quizzes, where the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 community project they engaged in provided an opportunity for them to interact with community leaders and members outside of campus. one student stated: “i like that there was an aspect of the class that was applicable outside of the exams and quizzes. i really feel like i’ve been able to hold onto a lot more materials from the class because we had the community projects to apply to as opposed to just reading the textbook for the purpose of taking the exams and quizzes.” collaborative learning students commented on the difference in how the class was facilitated in the cp course where they had a lot more say in the course structure, evaluation, and process of discussions. students had the ownership of how much discussions were going to occur, and the instructor provided the environment for students to take the lead on the project, creating a collaborative learning environment where students felt equal and centered, and where they made the decisions. one student stated “...it was almost like the whole class was collaborative with her and us.” supplemental themes empowering to students the collaborative learning process of this course seems to empower students, providing them courage and confidence. initially, power-sharing was confusing but it led to feeling empowered. they stated that the course and how it was taught led them to build confidence, learn from failure, and feel like they can do more than they initially thought. students felt that they learned more from this course than from traditional courses. one student stated “[...] it [professorstudent relationship] was more like nurturing and it made you feel like you can do it. it made you feel like you can do more than what you think you can do.” another student stated: “...[instructor] uses her practice. when she is teaching she’s doing the same thing with us where she is empowering us. most professors, they don’t really give the students the power to make decisions for the class, or have a say in grade or how they perform. i think i’m given a voice and it's a choice if i perform or not.” honed future career goals students shared during the focus group that they rarely heard of opportunities that exist outside of the classroom. when asked if this course has influenced their career goals, participants enthusiastically expressed this experiential and collaborative learning experience’s impact on their career paths. along with newfound information about what psychology could be, they felt that they were provided with career guidance. they shared how they are now incorporating cp by aligning it with their career goals or using it to enhance them. they also expressed their increased interest in community involvement. “[...] i do a lot of working with the community and giving hands to the community so at first i didn’t know how to do that. i thought pre-med was the way and it’s definitely not. so seeing that and knowing that something like community health and community psychology exist, and these are two of my favorite things and how to combine it, to figure out how to combine it for future career and the future degree is kind of, i am at this, i don’t know if they can both play a role in it or if i can get a degree in one and still apply the other. i’ve really revamped my whole perspective as to changes in what to do so...it’s for the good, i am assuming.” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 secondary themes understanding of how changes occur students expressed their understanding of how social changes occur has expanded as a result of taking the course. instead of social changes stemming from laws and regulations, students experienced the power of grassroot organizing. moreover, students recognized community empowerment to be an integral part of the community change process, which requires community members getting involved in the community, engaging in longterm changes, and building intimacy and trust within their community. one student stated: “[...] i really learned about how change can happen from individual communities? ‘cause i think coming into this course with social justice issues, i felt like it was the responsibility of the legal side of the law for us to get to that point where we put those laws to be in place and then change the issues. but i definitely was able to see how social justice issues can be approached from a grassroots perspective. [...] and so this class really broadened my thinking towards social justice issues in that it’s not always that we have to rely on law for. individuals can positively [make] longterm changes [in] our lives.” cultivating cultural competencies as students were learning concepts and theories of cp, they also established a partnership with the haitian community in the area, and worked collaboratively with social work master’s students at their academic institution in holding a community event. working on the community project increased their awareness in a number of areas. they learned the diversity that exists in the city in which the academic institution is located, and the existence of the haitian community, which some students were not aware of. they also learned the impact of their behaviors and how they may be perceived by members of the haitian community, where their good intentions for their behaviors may not be understood, and may be taken very differently than intended. one student said “at times we can be blinded as college students or americans or whatever in relations to other cultures. it just really kind of humbled us, and how to react and interact with other cultures.” moreover, they honed in on their interpersonal communication skills in interacting with all the project stakeholders throughout the semester and with each other. disconnect with larger social movements while students gained much knowledge, perspective, and skills in working with the community, they had lingering questions after taking the course. at the time of the course, movements such as #blacklivesmatter and #metoo were thriving, and students struggled to transfer the knowledge and skills they were learning to these “larger social movements” as they said. students wondered about how to affect social change in larger movements, and how to sustain their effort in the face of fatigue and burn out. speaking of black lives matter, one student stated: “[...] i just feel like that demographics and that community specifically, kinda feels like they are hitting the ceiling and they are not being able to break through it because the legal system is just not listening at all. and because the legal system is such a big entity and it’s so high up on the ecological model it feels almost impossible.” things to change in future class when asked what aspects of the course they would change, students stated that the course http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 should be offered more frequently so more students can take the course and have the experience. other suggestions included starting the community project early, having more communications with the community, and having more advanced notice for meetings outside of the class. discussion in this paper, we describe what an undergraduate fcpp approach might look like, and provide an assessment of the method. the four components of feminist pedagogy: (a) participatory engagement in the learning process, (b) reflexivity and the incorporation of personal experiences as a source of knowledge, (c) development of critical thinking skills, and (d) creation of political and social change (stake & hoffman, 2000), were implemented in a cp course in a variety of ways, including by incorporation of course content that prioritized marginalized voices, through the use of assignments and activities which were largely student-defined and student-driven, and by restructuring of course project grading criteria to allow for collaborative assessment. undergraduate students responded well to this pedagogical approach. students reported the course deepened their understanding of the ecological model and social change processes, empowered them to create change in their communities, helped them develop stronger multicultural practice competencies, and clarified their career goals. when reflecting on their experiences, students noted several classroom components that were impactful on their learning. students noticed and appreciated a pedagogical style which put them in the driver’s seat, both giving them control over the direction of the course and centering them as sources of authority in the classroom. 3 the most recent edition of kloos et al. (2021), published after the conclusion of the course, includes discussion of cultural humility. students also explicitly mentioned several class assignments, discussions, and even specific classroom exercises that impacted their learning. out of all class activities, the collaborative community-based project conducted with haitian community leaders was repeatedly and most frequently mentioned as having had a strong impact on student learning and development. involvement in social change or social action efforts is perhaps a critical component to fcpp, reflecting both the values in feminism and the discipline of cp (mulvey, 1988). students reported that engagement in the project helped put course concepts into action, resulting in deeper learning. they also reported increased multicultural competency, a finding consistent with research on the impact of engaging in community-based projects on student multicultural competence (einfeld & collins, 2008). however, while students self-identified their perspective as one of increased multicultural competency, their descriptions better reflect cultural humility. while acknowledging that multicultural competencies is an integral aspect to people understanding each other as racial cultural beings, it has been critiqued for inadvertently suggesting that people can reach a mastery of sufficiently knowing a particular culture (abbott et al., 2019). the concept of cultural humility emphasizes a way of being with people, honoring flexible and fluid interpretation of people’s experience, taking into account power, privilege, and oppression that exist in the society (abbott et al., 2019). students’ lack of use of the term “cultural humility” may reflect the way that topics are framed in cp textbooks3 and articles or in general psychology education (abbott et al., 2019), including the ones used in this course, which continue to use a “competency” frame4. 4 the practice competencies are currently being revised, and the use of the term “competencies” may change; as noted elsewhere (e.g., akhurst et al., 2016) the framing of cp work as http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 of course, engagement in a community-based action-research project in and of itself is part of-but does not fully embody-fcpp, and courses may entail a community actionresearch component which are not feminist in design or execution. in this course, the community-based project was infused with feminist pedagogy by relinquishing almost full control over all stages of the project to students. the project was conducted in a classroom environment in which powersharing and deconstruction of the hierarchy between students and instructor was integrated as much as possible. while students initially found components of power-sharing in the classroom confusing (particularly around the project), they ultimately appreciated and benefited from this teaching approach. this confusion is not surprising, as undergraduate students often have no prior experience or context for a collaborative teaching method. as such, this pedagogical approach requires instructors to provide undergraduate students with ample and ongoing explanation, justification, and reinforcement of the method. deconstructing hierarchical relationships between instructors and students in an undergraduate classroom is challenging and can never be fully accomplished (lichty & palamaro-munsell, 2017; schlehofer & vapsva, 2019); the instructor has to determine at least some of the content and structure of the course in advance, and serves as a gatekeeper. ultimately, the instructor has authority, regardless of any pedagogical approach. however, the findings suggest that power differentials can, to some extent, be deconstructed in the undergraduate cp classroom. deconstruction of power is not without potential risks. risks are two-fold. the first risk is that students might incorporate content that is outside the scope of or “competencies” is oppositional to community psychology’s democratizing and ecologically focused approach. contradictory to cp principles if tasked with co-creation of course content (schlehofer & vapsva, 2019). there were times in this course in which students added materials which contained questionable language (e.g., a student showed a video which described black-white biracial people as “mulatto”), or which skirted viewpoints which reinforced “helping” mentalities instead of community empowerment approaches to community practice work. when this happens, the instructor must course-correct on the spot, in a way that maintains power-sharing processes. the second risk is that power deconstruction brings with it increased threat of bad-faith ideological “challenges” to instructors. there is a well-documented history of students challenging the experience and expertise of instructors from marginalized socio-localities in the classroom (e.g., sue et al., 2011). intentionally deconstructing hierarchical relationships might further invite challenges of this nature; indeed, one student directly and repeatedly challenged the instructor in the course. how can power deconstruction occur in a way that fosters interpersonal connections and student learning and growth, while avoiding “opening the door” to bad-faith challenges or “push back” to difficult course content? this is an important question that must be addressed before fcpp can be widely adopted, and scholarship and theorizing on the relationship between power deconstruction in the classroom and challenges to instructors as a source of embodied knowledge is needed. instructor positionalities likely impact this balance, the nature of which should be explored in future work. in this course, the instructor was a white female faculty member who had tenure protections and was department chair. this positionality likely provided both challenges to deconstruction of power hierarchies, as well as potentially discouraged students from directly challenging the instructor’s expertise. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 instructors teaching from different sociolocalities might experience this process differently. this course attempted to deconstruct power in multiple ways: students contributed to course content, took the lead in designing and executing a community-based project, and controlled over how a large portion of their work was assessed. interestingly, few students explicitly reflected on the impact of having control over their project grading. it is possible that this component was not as impactful in reaching pedagogical goals of power-sharing. conducting community-based work is more challenging in general than other types of work (warren et al., 2018), and when that work is incorporated into a course, it can create additional problems that must be continually addressed. the timelines of community work are often structured significantly differently than semester timelines: community work is faster-paced, deadlines are often tight and can change with little notice, and the ability to be flexible throughout is critical. students struggled with adjusting to the timelines and rapid changes inherent in community work: a common concern with community-based projects (e.g., mckibban & steltenpohl, 2019), and while not unique to fcpp, these challenges impact the classroom. while creating challenges, the rapidly adjusting timelines and changes inherent in community work presents an excellent learning opportunity, facilitating the development of skills that students can use in the future. however, instructors may need to spend extra time to explain the nature of community work and to help students adjust to changing community timelines. the increased risk of implementing fcpp in the undergraduate classroom presents real challenges for instructors, particularly those who are untenured, and implementing this pedagogical approach requires additional resources and support. community-based action-research projects take time, energy, and resources that far exceed those expended with other pedagogical approaches (mckibban & steltenpohl, 2019). for the project, the instructor had to “pound the pavement” to establish community contacts and enter into mous, seek external funding to support the work, and pick up additional tasks and duties when students lacked competencies or needed assistance. institutional and departmental level support for undergraduate community psychology courses is often insufficient (kornbluh et al., 2019); employing fcpp may further highlight these insufficiencies. institutions and departments must be willing to provide the support, space, and time for instructors to engage in this pedagogy. they must also be willing to support instructors, particularly those without tenure protections, if their best pedagogical attempts fail. there is substantial payoff in adopting an fcpp framework, and thus with greater risk also comes the potential for greater reward. students felt empowered, as both emerging professionals and as change agents. these feelings of empowerment are a direct byproduct of the pedagogy used. in addition to stronger and more empowered students, benefits for departments supporting faculty using this pedagogical approach include stronger community-department relationships which can lead to later opportunities for student training and employment, students who are better-prepared for workforce entry, and a program that is situated to attract and retain students of color, thus helping diversify the field of psychology. of course, it may not be possible for instructors to implement community-based action-research projects in their cp courses for a variety of reasons: institutional contexts might not permit inclusion of such a component, the instructor might not have the resources or community connections to do so, or the course might be offered remote or http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 online, which reduces opportunities for placebased community interactions. in these instances, instructors could still weave in components of community-based actionresearch projects to instill fcpp throughout the course. for instance, students in an undergraduate cp course could focus their work on an on-campus action-research project, or, for an online or remote course, be asked to implement cp principles to create change in their own online learning community. provided that the components of fcpp are present (e.g., an action-research project centered around creating secondorder change in a community, in which power differentials are actively deconstructed as much as possible), fcpp using a communitybased project could be implemented in a wide variety of classroom and institutional settings. because fcpp is such a pivot from how many, if not most, undergraduate psychology courses are taught, it can be a hard approach to introduce at the end of students’ undergraduate education. the instructor spent considerable time in class deconstructing well-established behavior patterns for faculty-student interactions and student expectations. introducing fcpp earlier in undergraduate students’ academic careers would be beneficial, both in terms of better-preparing them for upper division undergraduate coursework, and in terms of their general growth and development at emerging professionals (kornbluh et al., 2019). students felt that the cp course content was disconnected from larger social movements that are currently playing out in society, such as black lives matter and metoo. this speaks to the question of whether cp is bestpositioned to be of relevance to large-scale social movements. the field of cp has been criticized as focusing too heavily on individual level and microsystemic solutions to problems, to the deficit of focus on larger ecological processes (angelique & culley, 2007; riger, 1993). this bias can be addressed by pedagogy, but should also be addressed by the field. this is perhap a key cruxpoint for the discipline; students clearly are concerned about ongoing civil rights movements, and are looking to cp for solutions. to address this through classroom pedagogy might require intentional teaching collaborations with instructors from disciplines that are better-positioned to address higher-level ecological levels and their associated social movements, such as sociology, political science, and history (perkins & schensul, 2017). limitations limitations of the study include lack of a course to serve as a control against which student outcomes can be compared. selection bias could have resulted in those students most impacted by the course being most likely to participate in the focus group. further, as data were collected at the end of the course, it is unclear the extent to which different course components of fcpp most (or least) impacted student growth and learning. a process evaluation would be useful in helping determine which pedagogical components are most effective. implications feminist pedagogies remain under-utilized at the undergraduate level (whelan & lawthom, 2009; schlehofer & vapsva, 2019). yet, feminist pedagogies and feminism generally is a strong ideological fit with cp (mulvey, 1988; whelan & lawthom, 2009), and show promise as a framework from which to build a distinct fcpp (schlehofer & vapsva, 2019). given the utility of cp education for undergraduate students, both in terms of generation of future community psychologists and for students’ growth and development as scholars and workers (jimenez et al., 2016), identifying ways to best http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 bring cp principles into the undergraduate classroom is a worthy endeavor. a feminist approach to undergraduate cp education can deepen student learning by turning the classroom environment into a community practice setting, empowering students and better-preparing them for their future educational and career goals. at the same time, the findings raise interesting questions regarding the ability of cp undergraduate education to truly embody cp principles, how to best help students navigate concepts pertaining to cultural humility as opposed to multicultural competency, and ways to bestconnect our discipline to current, pressing social issues which are of interest to students. references abbott, d. m., pelc, n., & mercier, c. 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(1997). introduction: creating the future: process and promise in feminist practice. in j. worell & n. g. johnson (eds.), shaping the future of feminist psychology: education, research, and practice (pp. 1 14). washington, dc: american psychological association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10245-000 acknowledgements thank you to the students who participated in the assessment process, and to dr. becky anthony for leading the focus group. this work was supported by a salisbury university office of graduate studies and research faculty mini-grant awarded to the first author. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1080/00986280903426274 https://doi.org/10.1080/00986280903426274 https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2015.1022909 https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2015.1022909 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/a0024190 hidden hunger in a land of plenty: food insecurity in aotearoa new zealand rebekah graham1, kimberly jackson2, bridgette masters-awatere2, ottilie stolte2 keywords: children, food, māori, material hardship, scholar-activism author biographies: rebekah graham, phd (pākehā) is based in the waikato region of aotearoa new zealand. rebekah is a registered community psychologist and is the national executive officer for parents of vision impaired nz, a consumer group with blind low vision nz. in this role, rebekah advocates strongly and consistently for inclusion, accessibility and support for all, with a focus on parents/whānau of a vision impaired child. dr graham’s academic work is in the areas of poverty, health, and food insecurity with a particular focus on the ways in which inequities of access to resources play out in the everyday lives of new zealanders. rgraham@pvi.org.nz twitter handle: @bexgraham kimberly jackson is a phd candidate in social psychology at the university of waikato. she holds a ba in education and sociology from the university of canterbury. kimberly completed her masters in social policy in the uk while caring for her young family. kimberly’s work is motivated by a critical approach to social policy, specifically in relation to equity, welfare, and poverty issues. her doctoral research is an interdisciplinary exploration of programmes responding to hunger in schools in the past and present, encompassing media and policy analysis as well as the everyday experiences of parents feeding their families on low incomes. associate professor bridgette masters-awatere (te rarawa, tuwharetoa ki kawerau, ngai te rangi) is an associate professor of psychology at the university of waikato. she holds leadership 1 school of psychology, massey university, albany, nz 2 school of psychology, university of waikato, hamilton, nz global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 roles as the director of the māori and psychology research unit and is the director of the community psychology professional practice programme. as a community psychologist, bridgette’s approach is seek to understand experiences in a broader context and to find pathways for those impacted the most by power and resource differences. you can read more about associate professor masters-awatere’s research work here: https://www.waikato.ac.nz/fass/about/staff/bridge or bridgette.mastersawatere@waikato.ac.nz ottilie stolte, phd works for the university of waikato in the school of psychology as an interdisciplinary social scientist who applies societal, community, and critical approaches to her research. ottilie has broad interests in contemporary societal issues and inequalities. particular research interests include poverty, homelessness, health and inequalities. in her research, ottilie seeks to understand psychological issues within the broader social, cultural and political contexts of people's everyday lives. in 2006, ottilie completed her phd on the implementation frameworks for training policies targeting disadvantaged unemployed people. this research examined the policy process, from the macro-level concerns and political constraints, to the local context of community-based initiatives. you can find dr stolte’s research publications here: https://www.waikato.ac.nz/fass/about/staff/ottilie ottilie.stolte@waikato.ac.nz recommended citation: graham, r., jackson, k. masters-awatere, b., & stolte, o. (2022). hidden hunger in a land of plenty: food insecurity in aotearoa new zealand. global journal of community psychology practice, 13(2), 1-20. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: rebekah graham orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-65764023 twitter: @bexgraham; email: rgraham@pvi.org.nz http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.waikato.ac.nz/fass/about/staff/bridge mailto:bridgette.masters-awatere@waikato.ac.nz mailto:bridgette.masters-awatere@waikato.ac.nz https://www.waikato.ac.nz/fass/about/staff/ottilie mailto:ottilie.stolte@waikato.ac.nz http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6576-4023 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6576-4023 mailto:rgraham@pvi.org.nz global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 hidden hunger in a land of plenty: food insecurity in aotearoa new zealand abstract aotearoa new zealand is a relatively wealthy, food-producing nation. yet, increasing numbers of the populace are experiencing food insecurity, hidden hunger, and material hardship. more than an individual issue, ensuring food security requires consideration of the social and cultural components of growing, preparing, and consuming food and meals. access to sufficient food to eat and the surrounding social practices are central to human flourishing. this article documents three research exemplars that challenge dominant global representations of aotearoa new zealand as an idyllic haven. each case explores the invisibility and downplaying of hunger and poverty that occur within this ‘land of plenty’. in describing and reflecting our respective research projects we illustrate how broader socio-political and economic factors play out materially in the everyday lives of marginalised groups by restricting access to food. given that community psychologists have values which necessitate a critical praxis, we have the responsibility to challenge power differences and practices based on historical perceptions that serve to maintain inequities. introduction hunger and deprivation do not normally feature in global narratives about aotearoa new zealand (nz). with a population of 5 million, nz is a relatively wealthy oecd country that exports enough high-quality food (such as dairy, beef, lamb, kiwifruit, and apples) to feed 35 million people a year (rush & obolonkin, 2020). despite the land producing more food than is needed for its own population, one in five nz children aged 2-14 years live in households that are food insecure and have poor access to the types of nutritionally-rich foods required for optimal nutrition and health (ministry of health, 2019). experiences of hunger and food insecurity are correlated with socioeconomic deprivation, with 40% of nz children from the most deprived areas experiencing moderate to severe food insecurity (dpmc, 2021; ministry of health, 2019). food insecurity is also disproportionately more prevalent in māori and pacifica households (gerritsen et al., 2020). the colonisation of nz over the past 200 years has meant pākehā (european) settlers and their families have been able to forge new lives of health and opportunity (bell et al., 2017). these new lives have occurred at the expense of māori (the indigenous people of nz) who were alienated from their land which was the basis for communal food growing, production, and distribution activities (hutchings et al., 2020; revington, 2017). the development of pākehā society has also benefitted from the low-paid labour of pacifica peoples in food harvesting, production, and related industries. the ongoing impacts of colonisation, land removal, and low-waged labour have resulted in reduced socio-economic opportunities and increased food insecurity for māori and pacifica. food insecurity refers to the inability to access nutritionally adequate and safe foods in a socially acceptable way, which includes meeting cultural needs such as providing for http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 guests or food for special occasions (parnell & gray, 2014). more than an individual issue, in contemporary societies, security of food requires a complex food system that accounts for the social and cultural dimensions of food production, collection, and consumption (gorton et al., 2010). increasing inequality of access to food has resulted in growing micronutrient inadequacies, or “hidden hunger”, in many oecd nations (biesalski, 2013). hidden hunger and food insecurity in wealthier nations contributes to the ‘double burden’ of malnutrition, whereby undernutrition and obesity occur concurrently, impacting on health (delisle, 2008). rather than having opportunities to select food for optimal nutrition, people on low incomes frequently need to purchase food that will satiate hunger (mackay et al., 2018). foods that are poor in essential vitamins and nutrients are often the most affordable, yet consuming these foods typically exceeds recommendations for salt, sugar, and calorie intake. such foods do not contribute to diverse microbiomes and gut health (rush et al., 2007). again, these experiences are disproportionately experienced by poorer groups (pollard & booth, 2019). alongside effects on individual health, food insecurity and hunger have wider social and societal impacts. emplaced food-related practices, such as gardening, reciprocal sharing, and eating of meals, are deeply connected to broader ways of being in the world (graham et al., 2016). such practices also embed a sense of belonging and sustain social relationships with others (king et al., 2015). within a māori worldview, the ability to engage in reciprocal acts of sharing and exchange with regards to food are key expressions of the values of manaakitanga (hospitality) and whanaungatanga (sense of belonging) (hutchings et al., 2020; revington, 2017). the expression of manaakitanga in particular is most commonly enacted through sharing of food and meals (hutchings et al., 2012; mead, 2003). these acts of manaakitanga contribute to and maintain the social cohesion of whānau (family) and wider groups (hutchings et al., 2012). the absence of sufficient food to feed oneself, one’s whānau, or to share when hosting others, ruptures important cultural practices and relationship activities thereby disrupting social cohesion (graham et al., 2018). this rupturing leaves people feeling out-of-place, and socially and culturally disconnected. access to sufficient food to eat and the surrounding social practices are central to human flourishing. the dignity and mana (status) of food-related practice is in itself an issue of social justice and equity. as a field of practice and engaged in action-oriented research, community psychology has a long history of involvement in actively working towards human flourishing, dignity, equity, and social justice (prilleltensky, 2001; rappaport, 2000). these values are embedded into the competencies for psychological practice and are integral to the practice of community psychology (langhout, 2015). the concurrent commitment to social transformation (langhout, 2015) develops a sense of what might be politically possible, what is necessary, and how to potentially achieve change (gould, 2009). that desire to ensure all people have access at all times to sufficient nutritious food to eat is at the heart of our respective research projects described within this article. as such, (a lack of) access to food acts as both a material and symbolic focus for action. this article documents three research exemplars that challenge dominant global representations of nz and explore the invisibility and downplaying of hunger and poverty in a ‘land of plenty’. each of the cases illustrates how broader socio-political and economic factors play out materially in the everyday lives of marginalised groups by restricting access to food. across all three cases we highlight the connections between http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 community psychology, scholar-activism, and principled practice, as well as identifying symbolic and material sites of tension. in writing the cases, the lead researcher on each project briefly describes their research before reflecting on the levers for social change that they actioned. in the first case, kimberly reveals how social narratives surrounding hunger in schools work to invisibilise poverty. by making erased experiences more visible, kimberly seeks to unsettle commonsense norms, in order to create space for broader discussions about causes of, and solutions for child hunger in schools. bridgette builds on the importance of revealing hidden accounts of food insecurity and hunger. she offers a research exemplar of ways in which socially engaged researchers can elevate the voices of māori persons whose hunger is overlooked and unheard within a pākehā institution, in this case a tertiary hospital. lastly, rebekah reflects on the challenges experienced when working to change entrenched social narratives circulating in mainstream and social media about poverty and food insecurity. as we demonstrate, a community psychology praxis orientation opens up key leverage points from which to instigate community, institutional, and policy change. case 1: milk in schools (kimberly jackson) one challenge to assumptions about nz as a ‘land of plenty’ has been reports of growing numbers of children arriving at school hungry, with little or no food to sustain them during the school day. this case study focused on characterisations of low-income parents and families within contemporary media and policy materials relating to hungry school children and feeding children in schools. the research project contextualised micro level practices taking place within schools by questioning the wider structural processes that produce and reproduce material responses to food insecurity. during the 1990s, the issue of hungry school children garnered significant media, public and political attention in nz. child hunger is a symptom of increasing levels of poverty and food insecurity for the whole family (boston & chapple, 2014). adult citizens tend to hide their hunger for fear of stigma, so much adult hunger goes unnoticed. in contrast, schools are spaces within which hunger is rendered visible. a plethora of schemes emerged during the 2000s ranging from local level initiatives to high-profile national programmes. most have been led by corporations, charities, social enterprises, and operate through ‘partnership models’, which is a mix of government, corporate and philanthropic funding (wynd & o’brien, 2014). narrative analysis was employed in this case as a methodology as it recognises the fundamental role of stories in how human beings create meaning (bruner, 1990). the situation of school hunger, and the responses to the issue, sparked widespread discussion. while media, policy, public relations and advertising all function to shape and reinforce particular stories about hunger communities and individuals exercise agency in how stories are received and mobilised, or resisted (rappaport, 2000). nonetheless, over time, dominant narratives tend to develop status as ‘common sense’ understandings, ritualised through their prevalence within media, policy, and institutions (couldry & curran, 2003). crucially, dominant narratives have material impacts, including impacts on people’s health and their capacity to flourish by enabling or constraining their everyday life situations (parker, 2005). from 2012 until 2018, kimberly garnered a research corpus of relevant secondary materials from a diverse range of sources. this material was comprised of the following: (1) 103 text-based items from mainstream national and regional news sources; (2) 26 items from broadcast radio, television news, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 and current affairs programmes; (3) 36 policy items, for example reports, briefings, working groups and reviews, political speeches, and parliamentary debates; (4) 30 items from schemes aimed at feeding children in schools, including charities, corporates, social enterprises, and partnership schemes. the analysis process across the research corpus identified stories consistent across multiple sources and which were recognisable within different contexts. this led to the identification of five overarching narratives that characterised hunger in school children and what should be done to address it. the following five core narratives emerged from the analysis: 1. punitive responsibilising the dominant narrative of punitive responsibilising constructs the problem of child hunger as an outcome of failed parenting. this construction reflects neoliberal narratives of self-responsibility where the parent is punished for their failure to meet their child’s needs. from this perspective, the involvement by outside parties who feed children (e.g. providing lunch in schools) is a moral hazard that will worsen child hunger and reinforce parental irresponsibility. one such example is the following excerpt from a newspaper opinion piece, written by politician, broadcaster and writer, michael laws: the responsibility for hungry kids needs to go back where it belongs: the parents. it should be an instant notification to child youth and family when a child arrives at school without food. the parent who approves that abuse should not be a parent. examine their circumstances and you will likely find other antisocial instances instantly, all blighting the innocent child (laws, 2014). the assumption expressed in this comment encompasses the notion that children have insufficient food because of their parents’ choices and parents should be subject to individual sanctions from the government agency responsible for intervening in child abuse, child youth and family. 2. taxpayer sovereignty the taxpayer sovereignty narrative recognises the practical and ethical imperatives of alleviating child hunger. however, the over-riding priorities are prudence with state funds and that the “hardworking taxpayer” is not held responsible for feeding other people’s children. this narrative contrasts the “hard working taxpayer” with the “dependent” recipient of government money (hackell, 2013; wiggan, 2012). for example, blogger and former national party advisor david farrar writes: “the green policy to provide free (i.e. taxpayer funded) school lunches to all decile 1 to 4 primary schools is a woefully bad use of taxpayer money – even if one accepted that it is the state’s role to provide two out of three meals a day to school kids” (farrar, 2014, para 1). here, farrar emphasises the costs to taxpayers of providing food to children in low-decile schools. the taxpayer sovereignty narrative promotes the idea of choice for taxpayers and suggests individuals should decide who and how they contribute (weiss, 2001). instead of state involvement in feeding children, charities and businesses are encouraged to choose to develop schemes, and individual citizens encouraged to support such schemes through donations and volunteer work. 3. communitarianism the communitarian narrative also argues against state responsibility for feeding children in schools. whilst community psychology as a discipline understands communities as diverse collectives, community as a term is deployed in varied and complex ways (clarke et al., 2000; http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 mcclure, 2013). the communitarian narrative mobilises nostalgic notions of community in order to delegate responsibility from the state. this narrative favours a return to an imagined time when communities were more self-sufficient (fyfe, 2005). the increase in hungry children is attributed to a loss of capability within communities as a result of state dependency, and that communities contain the expertise and resources to resolve problems without recourse to state funding. the following extract is from a newspaper commentary about proposals to fund schools to provide food. silloway smith is a member of maxim, a pro-business organisation that funds reports into nz policy: so what happens when you replace community initiative with government handouts? ... these things have to come organically through communities, tended by people like my friends in south auckland and allowed to grow by the whanau and neighbours who make up those communities … it should be communities at the heart, not schools. and definitely not the state. (silloway smith, 2014). the communitarian narrative thus emphasises the role of motivated individuals and communities in creating solutions for themselves. it is presumed that this will build self-reliance and restore resourcefulness. 4. virtuous benevolence the virtuous benevolence narrative can intersect with communitarian and tax-payer sovereignty narratives. however, virtuous benevolence foregrounds the social rewards of non-state forms of assistance, such as volunteering, for those who provide help, with positive experiences of helping others emphasised. the focus of action is personal engagement and charitable giving on the basis that the “essence of private charity is voluntariness, individuals helping one another through love of their neighbour … there is no compassion in spending someone else’s money – even for a good cause” (tanner, 2003, p. 97). this narrative elevates charitable giving above political responses and highlights the positive benefits of reaching out to those less fortunate. for example, the following comments on a company’s website following a staff day of making lunches for low-decile schools: “the feedback about how people feel afterwards is incredible, and explains the 3-month waitlist to volunteer. you will feel something you won’t doing anything else in nz” (stoyanof, 2018, para 10). in this extract the opportunity to help feed children is positioned as a positive experience for those participating as helpers. 5. third way pragmatism this narrative focuses on the social and economic costs to society of children unable to learn because of hunger, irrespective of whom or what may be responsible. the third way pragmatism narrative does not engage directly around the causes of hunger in schools, but rather advocates for immediate responses on moral and/or practical grounds (clarke & newman, 1997). the moral basis for action is that children are suffering and cannot be held responsible for their own circumstances. debating the causes of the problem, it is argued, will not get children fed and we should care that innocent children are going hungry, more than we care about why. david shearer, a labour party politician from 2009-2016, explains in a media interview: “i hear people argue that this is the responsibility of parents. we can debate that endlessly but it won’t change this reality: tomorrow morning kids will still turn up to school hungry. and a hungry kid is a distracted kid who can disrupt an entire classroom” (hartevelt, 2012). this narrative is used to support any means of alleviating hunger, including public-private partnerships and initiatives targeting school children. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 the five prevalent themes explored above demonstrate that parents are often blamed within dominant narratives about hungry school children. children with insufficient food at school are frequently characterised in terms of their families failing to adequately care for them, despite the material austerity many communities are subject to (boston & chapple, 2014). the dominant narratives about hunger in schools do not engage with structural or upstream causes of food insecurity. those who advocate for food in schools (e.g. third way pragmatism) typically draw on a child poverty model whereby children’s needs are addressed in a targeted way that problematises or invisibilises the hunger of the child’s parents (devine, 2014). further, narratives regarding hunger in schools are illustrative of a dominant cultural context favouring self-reliance, reflecting the intersection of neoliberal norms regarding self-responsibility and reduced reliance on state support. attending to the historical and cultural context of dominant narratives about hunger in nz highlights how transnational and local narratives interact to express “common-sense neoliberalism” (hall & o'shea, 2013). in relation to hungry school children, the dominant charity and corporatebased responses to hunger serve to maintain the neoliberal status quo. clarifying the ways in which dominant narratives hegemonize neoliberalism aided myself (kimberly) to disseminate my research beyond academic contexts. even compassionate and empathetic citizens struggle to understand why de-politicising hunger, narrowly targeting children for charitable attention, or promoting volunteering can become barriers to resolving food insecurity, rather than representing solutions. by bringing to the fore core narratives underpinning responses to hunger in schools and discussing the principles they are built on, such narratives are revealed as culturally and historically situated. assumptions about ‘how we do things’ can then be subjected to a more critical questioning. in this way, examining dominant narratives becomes a form of praxis, expanding possibilities for how social issues like hunger are understood and responded to. the next case further draws out aspects of praxis and examines a hospital ward as a material site of hunger and tension. case 2: hungry in hospital (bridgette masters-awatere) this case study draws upon research undertaken at a large, publicly-funded hospital in nz. hospital staff observed recurring readmissions of māori children (04yrs) for preventable illnesses, such as those associated with poor living conditions. experiences like these are not unique to the one hospital in the study. this hospital was the site of a randomised control trial (rct research), which involved 1000 parents/caregivers of a child (0-4 years) admitted to the paediatric ward within a oneyear period. the particular focus of this case is on the narratives shared during 24 interviews with 15 whānau (families) of a tamariki māori (child of māori decent) admitted during the rct. a significant issue raised by whānau during interviews was the limited access to food for the parent/caregiver while caring for their child during their hospital stay. subsequently, an analysis of hospital policies relating to the provision of food for parents/caregivers of a child admitted to hospital was undertaken. the negative and positive hospital experiences revealed by whānau were used as leverage points to improve hospital experiences for all whānau. my position as a researcher whose employment was independent of the hospital, meant that i occupied multiple privileged positions; 1) as a māori (who has had experiences of the hospital system and could understand the coded ways that whānau may share negative experiences, such as racism), 2) as an http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 academic (who has the skills, knowledge and abilities to draw upon multiple sources of evidence and conduct robust analyses), 3) as an independent researcher (who was employed outside of hospital structures); and 4) as a community psychologist (who can combine all of these positions into praxis to examine the structures at play to find leverage points within the hospital system from which to challenge power dynamics). my praxis as a scholar-activist served as a platform to challenge a public hospital system designed to privilege pākehā (nz european) health needs. hospitals in nz were designed from the very beginning to serve pākehā health needs (waitangi tribunal, 2001). enabled through the repression of indigenous health knowledge (for example, the tohunga suppression act, 1907) and restrictions on culturally centred health care (durie, 1987; laing & pomare, 1994), māori health has been negatively impacted since the arrival of europeans in nz (moeweka barnes & mccreanor, 2019; walker, 1990). māori continue to encounter barriers to making fully informed, culturally cognisant decisions about their choice of health provision and access (dawson et al., 2019), experience ongoing health inequities (graham & masters-awatere, 2020b), and are less likely to access, and benefit from, a health system based on pākehā norms and values (durie, 1987). subsequently, is vital to identify barriers and to reduce the negative experiences of māori whānau in the nz health system. my conversations with the 15 whānau (families) revealed that parents often suffered hunger and stress in addition to the distress of having a sick child in hospital. these parents shared harrowing stories of: • going without food for the duration of their child’s admission, • surviving on the leftover food provided for their 7-month-old child • being denied hospital meals for 4 days while they stayed with their 18-monthold child, despite having a medical condition that required regular meals • the financial strain the family suffered as a result of reduced employment hours by their partner who had to provide care for other children • severe stress when leaving a 18-monthold alone in hospital in order to access local convenience store food the lack of food meant that parents were reliant on other whānau members to purchase and deliver meals to the hospital ward. if whānau lived far afield from the hospital location, were caring for the siblings of the admitted child, and/or unable to take paid leave from their place of employment, the parent in hospital often went hungry. additional barriers included the cost of food items at the hospital cafeteria and being reluctant to leave their child alone on the hospital ward. subsequently, māori mothers in particular went without food, subsisting on cups of tea and left-overs (such as pureed apple and half-eaten yoghurts) from the supplied meals for the admitted child. our analysis of whānau māori interviews produced overwhelming accounts of hunger and isolation by parents and caregivers while caring for their child in hospital (see graham & masters-awatere, 2020a; masters-awatere, graham, scott, & atatoa carr, 2020). considering these shared experiences in combination with the aforementioned processes of colonisation and marginalisation, the distress māori mothers were experiencing produced bile-in-themouth feelings of sickness for these parents. the stress, shame and stigma meant that parents tend to hide their hunger and avoid asking for help. the ongoing removal of māori infants from their families by state agencies (stanley & froideville, 2020), which have http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 occurred in hospital settings, creates a deep sense of fear for māori mothers and leaves many reluctant to draw attention to their own hunger and need. examination of existing policies related to the provision of food for parents/caregivers made it clear that the health system was marginalising (and therefore failing in its obligations to) the parents of māori children. driven by a desire to contribute to socialjustice and health equity, a technical report that centred whānau māori experiences was published (graham & masters-awatere, 2020a). when presented with the technical report, hospital staff sympathised with the shared narratives. however, for various reasons, there appeared to be reluctance to make meaningful changes that would improve hospital experiences for whānau māori. a similar experience has been observed in a related study (mastersawatere, cormack, graham & brown, 2020). curious that hospital staff seemed apathetic when they were presented with a hospital systems issue, a systematic literature review was conducted (graham & masters-awatere, 2020b). the literature review provided wider context of the dismissal of māori experiences while in hospital and gave further impetus to examine food policies at hospitals throughout nz. while a diverse range of policies was observed, findings highlighted inconsistencies in considering access to food for parents/caregivers who remain with a child during a hospital admission (mastersawatere, graham, scott & atatoa carr, 2020). this case study has highlighted the various ways a community psychologist can utilise their skills to challenge policies and practices that fail to serve those caught within a system that attends to individual care of a sick child whilst ignoring the parent. the power of the participants’ stories was utilised within dissemination strategies (conference presentations, social media posts and speaking forums) in combination with peer reviewed publications to affect positive change for whānau. the ministry of health has been challenged to improve service provision in order to meet international standards and national obligations to meet the needs of parents and caregivers who remain with their child during a hospital admission (masters-awatere et al., 2020). this case uncovers instances of food insecurity for māori parents when away from their home and community supports and connections during a family health crisis. recent findings that families flow into and out of food insecurity at various times and points in their lives (gerritsen et al., 2020) highlights the need for ongoing action in seeking reform and change, and for systems thinking that intentionally applies a poverty lens. the case also provides a real-world exemplar of scholar-activism in practice. the third case continues with the scholar-activism theme and describes one approach to finding leverage points to change societal narratives. case 3: the community meal (rebekah graham) in this section, i (rebekah) draw on my phd research in hamilton (a city in the central north island of nz) with families living with food insecurity. as part of this research, i spent 18 months attending a community meal and eating alongside and talking with meal attendees regarding their experiences of food insecurity. additionally, i conducted a series of in-depth interviews with seven families regarding their everyday food-related practice. i utilised photo-elicitation and goalong interview techniques alongside active listening, participant observations, and field notes. engaging in multiple interactions with families was a crucial part of the research process and created ‘thick’ participant accounts of everyday lived realities. a high level of trust was necessary for participants to share their experiences of poverty, hardship, and hunger. part of my analysis included making the invisible visible and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 articulating the unsayable. as was noted in the milk in schools case study, those living with hunger in nz today are constrained by dominant narratives of blame and shame with regards to hunger. subsequently, participants are typically reluctant to share experiences of hardship and poverty. my conversations with families and community meal attendees highlighted problematic societal assumptions regarding food insecurity and poverty. my research participants were knowledgeable about food and health eating, but they were constrained by insufficient resources with which to feed their family. in response to ongoing hardship, households pooled resources, activated broader familial networks, and accessed charitable and state supports to try to ensure that all family members got enough to eat. participants also experienced shame and stigma with regards to their food scarcity and engaged in rationing practices to hide their situation and present as ordinary families. such practices of passing were one way for individuals to avoid being judged by wealthier groups. however, passing is problematic in that these practices delegitimise experiences of hardship and reinforce dominant hegemonic assertions that there is ‘no real poverty in nz’. the provision of food in dignifying ways such, as the community meal, helped to mitigate the negative impacts of food insecurity on health and well-being. nevertheless, there is a need to move beyond ameliorative responses and overly-simplistic individual victim-blaming narratives that shame people in need and silence their everyday lived experiences of hardship. subsequently, in disseminating research findings i sought to challenge dominant narratives surrounding food insecurity in aotearoa new zealand. as well as presenting participant stories in person, i wrote articles for news media that challenged dominant constructions of food insecurity and argued for societal solutions grounded in a humanistic approach. this activism was a deliberate attempt to counter the dominant narratives of neoliberal blame. in order to approach this as solidarity work (warren, 2010), i intentionally elevated the lived experiences of participants through using quotes that conveyed their humanity, humour, and hardships. when presenting stories, i contextualised participants’ lives by outlining the complexities involved, and i did not shy away from the emotions evoked by grim circumstances. during in-person presentations, there would often be a visceral, audible response from the audience when they were presented with the realities of impoverished lives. to avoid this becoming a form of “poverty tourism” or ”poverty porn”, i invoked socio-political aspects of hunger and framed participant experiences as occurring within a broader context of trauma, poverty, and undiagnosed health challenges. incorporating values-based praxis into research dissemination meant challenging the dominant neoliberal narratives surrounding food insecurity and communicating the lived experiences of poverty in a humanising manner. the dominant deficit oriented narratives, erase the wider societal context within which poverty exists, and present charity as the preferred response. articulating alternative accounts of food insecurity that made visible societal structures provided one way of shifting public assumptions about individual culpability for food insecurity. utilising mechanisms, such as social media and news platforms, was a key leverage point. another leverage point was political agitation in the form of policy writing, responding to select committees, and activism on social media sites. changing socially-constructed knowledge requires creating – and repeating – alternative narratives that provide new ways of thinking (berensten-shaw, 2018). sharing people’s stories and lived accounts is more http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 effective at communicating ideas than only presenting statistics and figures (berenstenshaw, 2018). i repeatedly communicated stories to illustrate the message that parents are doing the best they can, people live under-resourced lives, and that nz has the resources to ensure that all citizens are fed. for instance, one piece i wrote for the spinoff3 (an online current affairs website) was widely shared on social media and subsequently reposted by a nationwide commercial news station under their newshub brand4. i was also invited onto national public radio5 to discuss the topic of food insecurity. these platforms provided an outlet for me to elevate and contextualise participant experiences and directly challenge dominant constructions of food insecurity. case study 3 illustrates the commitment of the time, energy, and effort required to write, pitch, and promote written articles via social and news media. for example, radio work requires several hours of preparation. this work is unpaid and occurs on top of existing workloads. further, engaging on social media means exposing oneself to negative commentary, angry responses, and harassing behaviours. media engagement, when compared with published journal articles, is less valued within academia and does not neatly fit current measures of academic worth. consequently, scholar-activist type work, while important in addressing societal attitudes and arguing for change, comes at a personal cost. these costs create additional barriers to engaging in the very type of work needed for social justice engagement integral to the practice of community psychology. 3 https://thespinoff.co.nz/parenting/06-092019/why-hungry-parents-make-for-hungry-kids/ 4 www.newshub.co.nz/home/newzealand/2019/09/why-hungry-kids-make-for-hungryparents.html discussion each of our respective projects took a community psychology orientation that broadened the focus of food insecurity beyond individual-level experiences, and reflected our commitment to social justice, social innovation, and social transformation. a common thread is the role community psychologists can play as spokespersons who shine light on these hidden hardships and agitate for social justice, solidarity and systems change (robertson & mastersawatere, 2007). our approach foregrounds human stories of lived experiences to disrupt the common public recourse to poverty denial and victim-blaming. we utilised research methodologies that were narrative and relational, and which prioritised the perspectives of people living with poverty and hardship. across each case there are three core community psychology values expressed: 1) prevention and promotion; 2) ecological thinking; and 3) action/praxis. the community psychology value of prevention and promotion underpins our core research theme of intentionally making visible the unseen to benefit the underserved. visibility creation is crucial for building momentum for social transformation by bringing the stories and experiences of excluded and marginalised people to the fore and working to prevent their stories from being ignored and/or dismissed (balcazar & suarezbalcazar, 2016). each of the described studies make visible the invisible aspects of poverty: the societal narratives used to frame child hunger, mothers in hospital quietly going without meals, and the shame that drives parents to hide their hunger from others. 5www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/thepanel/aud io/2018712191/the-panel-with-leonie-freeman-anddavid-slack-part-1 http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://thespinoff.co.nz/parenting/06-09-2019/why-hungry-parents-make-for-hungry-kids/ https://thespinoff.co.nz/parenting/06-09-2019/why-hungry-parents-make-for-hungry-kids/ http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/09/why-hungry-kids-make-for-hungry-parents.html http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/09/why-hungry-kids-make-for-hungry-parents.html http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/09/why-hungry-kids-make-for-hungry-parents.html http://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/thepanel/audio/2018712191/the-panel-with-leonie-freeman-and-david-slack-part-1 http://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/thepanel/audio/2018712191/the-panel-with-leonie-freeman-and-david-slack-part-1 http://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/thepanel/audio/2018712191/the-panel-with-leonie-freeman-and-david-slack-part-1 global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 ecological systems thinking (trickett & rowe, 2012) is reflected in the way in which our respective research moves across and between individuals and systems. our cases exemplify ecological systems thinking that moves beyond individual intervention programs in order to influence contexts as well as individuals (trickett et al, 2011). in doing so we disrupt the dominant ‘downstream’ focus. each exemplar integrates research, intervention, and analysis at multiple levels (trickett & rowe, 2012). the milk in schools case links the hunger of individual school children to broader narratives utilised to deflect and quell demands for structural change. the hungry in hospital findings of mother’s going hungry while caring for a child in hospital led bridgette to investigate national policies on food provision. rebekah utilised individual stories of hunger shared by attendees at a local community meal to challenge dominant constructions of hardship. each case moves across and between the agency of the individual(s) concerned and the inequitable systems and structures which impact on the individual. however, shifting societal perspectives on issues such as hunger, without losing sight of the agency and selfdetermination of the people involved, is an ongoing challenge in this space. the practice of ‘giving voice’ is insufficient when that is all that is done; action must also be taken. as noted in our cases studies and in table 1 (below), action includes actively searching out for opportunities to redress inequity (oetzel et al, 2018), intentionally working to decolonise one’s psychological practice (robertson & masters-awatere, 2007), and seeking out opportunities for resistance within the confines of systems (preston & aslett, 2013). table 1 summarises the core intersections between community psychology values and the core themes across our cases. the hungry in hospital example demonstrates that merely presenting participant experiences was insufficient to action change. hence, further ongoing advocacy was required to change hospital practices. rebekah’s case highlights challenges for community psychology researchers when inserting more humanising, dignifying accounts of people facing food insecurity into media deliberations. such accounts can function to contextualise the everyday lived experiences of having insufficient food and connect these to the larger social structures that create poverty, perpetuate inequities, and drive poor health. the core community psychology values align with our three key themes of 1) scholaractivism, 2) decolonising through principled practice, and 3) understanding food as a material and symbolic representation of inequality and poverty. table 1 presents these ideas in matrix form. the first column of table 1 outlines the intersection of community psychology with scholar-activism. scholar-activism requires cognitive and emotional engagement and a strong sense of what is morally right (gould, 2009). one such approach is reflexive practice, which encourages community psychologists to articulate their worldviews, values, assumptions, and experiences in order to interrogate how positionality influences their work (novak & harter, 2008). each of our respective cases required a high degree of reflexive work. bridgette’s case in particular makes visible the reflexive components of positionality and praxis. despite the importance of reflexive practice in interrogating one’s positionality, there is a long tradition of psychological research practice that denies the visceral and devalues the expression of values, emotions, and affect (kelly, 2010). nevertheless, it is the heart and mind engagement that is an important component for turning activism into solidarity work (warren, 2010). solidarity work results in an activism that is “practiced with subordinated groups and not for them” (langhout, 2015, p. 267). practicing with and not for people is particularly http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 table 1: matrix of community psychology values and core themes http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 important for scholar-activists engaging in poverty-related work, in cases where the scholar-activist is socially distant across class, race and/or life experience. this solidarity work of bridgette’s praxis and rebekah’s efforts to disseminate research findings into the public space of popular media offer exemplars of this form of activism. the second column highlights how community psychologists can engage in principled practice as a form of decolonisation in action. decolonisation requires active intentionality by the researcher and/or practitioner (robertson & masters-awatere, 2007; sonn & quayle, 2013). privileging logic and mind-work acts to suppress the very emotional engagement that drives both solidarity and activism work mentioned in the preceding paragraph (sonn & quayle, 2013). decolonising community psychology means reflexively engaging in ways to incorporate socially transformative change and how we do (or do not) conform to scholarship demands for detached mindwork. most mainstream academic scholarship remains situated within “white western patriarchal structures which champion rationality” (langhout, 2015, p. 268) and demands research based on the notion of the detached observer (smith, 1999). long-term activism and engagement, such as that described in our exemplars, avoids the practice by researchers of disengaging from participants, or the topic of research, once their data has been extracted. too often researchers leave the scene with no further sense of responsibility to the research participants, and little or no compulsion to address the societal conditions creating poverty. the three cases convey our respective sense of ethical responsibility to address the wider systems impacting on individuals. this form of principled practice is informed by cultural concepts such as manaakitanga and care for others that cultivate reciprocal relationships (hodgetts et al., 2020). principled practice is a ‘higher’ form of ethical engagement beyond merely ticking application boxes for institutional ethics committees. as noted earlier, solidarity work across socially distanced groups and issues requires reflexivity about one’s positionality and is central to principled practice (hodgetts et al., 2020). lastly, we turn our attention to symbolic and material sites of tension. more specifically, the way in which each of our cases identified food as a material and symbolic focus of poverty and inequality. as identified in the introduction, sharing food and meals are reciprocal acts of sharing and exchange and key expressions of manaakitanga and whanaungatanga (hutchings et al., 2012, 2020; revington, 2017). across all three cases, the absence of sufficient food to eat along with blame-filled narratives communicated an absence of care, whether for impoverished school children or māori mothers caring for a child in hospital. insufficient provision of food and meals when away from home disrupted valued cultural practices and relationship activities and left people feeling out-of-place and socially excluded. the previous paragraph on ecological systems thinking identified the ways in which each of our exemplars sought to influence contexts as well as individuals (trickett et al, 2011). community psychologists work to identify the leverage points within systems (micro, meso and macro) whereby we can insert our research findings to assert the changes that are needed to redress inequity (oetzel et al., 2018). for example, a determined māori researcher whose place of employment was situated within an academic institution (and not within the hospital system) provided the ability to challenge policy, as this was a privilege enjoyed by bridgette (that was not afforded to hospital employees). each author intentionally actioned leverage points and foregrounded people’s experiences as one way of addressing the de-legitimization of people’s experiences of food insecurity. now, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 more than ever, community psychologists need to seek opportunities for resistance within the confines of systems, such as the neoliberal academy (preston & aslett, 2013). advocating for change is a form of praxis connected to the value of social justice and transformation (mcnamara & naepi, 2018). there is a need for community psychologists to continue to engage with political power in seeking reform and change in order to improve the lives of under-served people living with poverty and hunger (prilleltensky, 2001). conclusion for many of us, food can be a taken-forgranted daily aspect of our personal subsistence, tastes, lifeways, and routines. yet, food is about so much more, since it also reflects wider cultural, political, and social mores, as well as notions of power. exploring who has access to food in a country like nz tells us a great deal about who has social worth and political value in society. such positioning differs from a rights-based approach in that it is not just about the right to food, but rather considers who has access to food, how much of it, and of what quality. the shame and stigma of poverty and hunger, and the habituated ameliorative responses, serve to entrench the framing of these issues as an individual affliction or flaw. in the current context of pervasive individualism and neoliberalism, there is an acute need for community psychologists to challenge and disrupt common sense norms. in particular, our role is to remind others of the importance of structural dimensions of contemporary issues, such as food insecurity and hunger. given the entrenched and pervasive extent of individualistic framings, our reminders need to be constant and patient. engaged community psychologists have a duty to be the conscience of society and in doing so have the responsibility to challenge the power differences and historical practices (such as colonisation) that maintain inequities. after all, what good is gathering information if it is not turned into action and used to make socially transformative changes? especially when one’s research uncovers the 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(7 edw vii 1907 no 13). retrieved from www.nzlii.org/nz/legis/hist_act/tsa1907 7ev1907n13353/ trickett, e.j., beehler, s., deutsch, c., green, l.w., hawe, p., mcleroy, k., miller, r.l., rapkin, b.d., schensul, j.j., schulz, a.j., & trimble, j.e. (2011) advancing the science of community-level interventions. american journal of public health 101, 1410-1419, doi:10.2105/ajph.2010.300113 trickett, e.j., & rowe, h. (2012). emerging ecological approaches to prevention, health promotion, and public health in the school context: next steps from a community psychology perspective. journal of educational and psychological consultation, 22:1-2, 125-140 doi:10.1080/10474412.2011.6496511 waitangi tribunal. (2001). the napier hospital and health services report: wai 692. department of justice, ed. legislation direct: wellington. retrieved from: https://forms.justice.govt.nz/search/doc uments/wt/wt_doc_68596252/wai692. pdf walker, r. (1990). ka whawhai tonu matou: struggle without end. auckland, nz; penguin. warren, m. (2010). fire in the heart: how white activists embrace racial justice. new york, ny: oxford university press. weiss, r. p. (2001). charitable choice as neoliberal social welfare strategy. social justice, 28(1 (83), 35-53. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29768057 wiggan, j. (2012). telling stories of 21st century welfare: the uk coalition government and the neo-liberal discourse of worklessness and dependency. critical social policy, 32(3), 383-405. doi:10.1177/0261018312444413 wynd, d., & o’brien, m. (2014). food in schools: targeting versus the right to food. new zealand medical journal, 127(1407), 1-4. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 resisting the coloniality and colonialism of a westernized community psychology: toward a critical racial justice praxis ann marie beals1, dominique thomas2, jesica siham fernández3, ciann l. wilson1, and geraldine palmer4 keywords: coloniality, colonialism, anti-racism, critical racial justice author biographies: ann marie beals is a two-spirit indigenous-black l’nuwey – a mixed-blood african nova scotian and first nation mi’kmaq from the territory of mi’kma’ki. ann marie is a graduate student at wilfrid laurier university and a storysharer working on the proclaimingourroots.com project. stories from this project revolve around afro-indigenous identity and relationships with indigenous and black communities. their research explores the health and wellbeing of these communities in looking at the effects of colonial legacies of oppression and violence, and lack of acknowledgement of indigenous-black identity in the settler nation-state known as canada. ann marie shares afro-indigenous voices in uplifting the sacred stories of strength, self-assertion, and consciousness-raising, through the lived experiences and knowledges loudly resonating in indigenous-black communities. dominique thomas is editor of the community psychologist. he attained his ba in psychology from morehouse college and his ma and phd in community psychology from georgia state university. he was a scholarship to practice fellow in the national center for institutional diversity at the university of michigan. dr. thomas is interested in the areas 1 department of psychology, wilfrid laurier university 2 not affiliated with a university 3 ethnic studies department, santa clara university 4 co-founder/managing director of community wellness institute and adjunct faculty, adler university, chicago http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 of black identity, racial socialization, activism, afrofuturism, and the black radical tradition. he co-edited a special issue of community psychology in global perspective, black lives matter in community psychology and is co-editing a forthcoming special issue in the american journal of community psychology, imperial algorithms: contemporary manifestations of racism and colonialism. jesica siham fernández is an assistant professor in the ethnic studies department at santa clara university. she received her phd in social psychology and latin american & latinx studies from the university of california, santa cruz. grounded in a decolonial feminist praxis, she engages critical par paradigms and approaches to support latinx communities, youth and communities of color in actualizing collective conditions for sociopolitical wellbeing, thriving and, transformative justice. as a teacher-scholar-activist, jesica’s praxis is rooted in a commitment to racial justice and anti-oppression toward decolonial liberation. ciann wilson is assistant professor in the community psychology program at wilfrid laurier university, and is an accomplished educator and researcher whose work aims to share the stories and lived experiences of black, indigenous and racialized peoples in canada. her research through the laurier centre for community research, learning and action (ccrla), where she serves as co-director, includes work on hivaids in black and indigenous communities in canada, mixed black-indigenous community identity and the use of arts-based and digital media in community research. wilson holds a master of environmental studies and a phd in environmental studies from york university. geraldine (geri) palmer, ph.d. is a scholar-activist, practitioner, educator, and writer who uses an interdisciplinary approach of community psychology, social psychology and sociology to understand and work on issues of concern among black, indigenous, people of color (bipoc) including racial justice and anti-blackness practices. she earned her ph.d. from national louis university, chicago. in addition to her position as assistant professor at adler university she is the cofounder and managing director of community wellness institute (cwi). through cwi, dr. palmer and a team of consultants facilitate the f.a.c.e. of justice workshops with topics on anti-racism and anti-blackness practices and social and racial justice, provide http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 consultations with non-profits to help them strengthen their infrastructure, and conducts social research. her teaching, research, and praxis has its foundation in her dissertation study which focused on homelessness particularly among black/african americans, and currently centers on language that often reproduces colonialism ideology, dismantling the code of silence, and historical trauma among black/african americans. recommended citation: beals, a.m., thomas, d., fernández, j.s., wilson, c.l., & palmer, g. (2021). resisting the coloniality and colonialism of a westernized community psychology: toward a critical racial justice praxis. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(2), 1 22. retrieved day/month/year, (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: ann marie beals, c/o department of psychology, wilfrid laurier university, 75 university ave w, waterloo, on, n2l 3c5. email: beal0950@mylaurier.ca http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 resisting the coloniality and colonialism of a westernized community psychology: toward a critical racial justice praxis the institutional violence we are now experiencing, coupled with historical and ongoing waves of oppression, is a result and continuation of the legacy of colonialism. the outward eruptions that we are seeing over the last years are a result of american and canadian settler nation-states that have taken hold in north america but are now in decline. yet, the perpetuation of imperialism and white supremacist ideologies via the academe and other noneducational entities reproduced through curricula, pedagogy, and institutional policies and practices must still be addressed. the discipline of community psychology (cp) is no exception. as a part of the imperialist empire, cp, a mainstream academic discipline born at the heart of the empire of the colonial ruling class, continuously asks: what can we do? we, the authors of this paper, are troubled by this question and respond with a question of our own: can community psychology really be part of the solution if it does not acknowledge that it is part of the problem? through the lens of five indigenous, black, and racialized scholar-activists, educators, and practitioners, we identify three community psychology principles and argue that in practice within black and indigenous communities, they are not sufficient. further, we illustrate that, related to these principles, community psychology is situated within what is termed the industrial complex, and we elucidate the implications of this situating. lastly, we offer a proposal for how we, as part of the academe and practice, can decolonize community psychology and move it forward to align with current liberation movements and indigenous sovereignty. i can’t believe what you say because i see what you do. – james baldwin introduction who we are we are indigenous, black, and racialized educators, students, activists, scholars, and practitioners across sovereign indigenous lands. some indigenous communities refer to these lands as turtle island. in our conceptualization, turtle island represents a counter-mapping of imperial colonized geography, to upend settler-colonial discourse of land and place, and resist colonial perceptions of power and control (hunt & stevenson, 2016). given this context, we intentionally acknowledge and honor the first peoples of turtle island as we strive toward a decolonial praxis. by this, we describe our efforts to de-link our theory, research, and practice, as well as pedagogy away from western eurocentrism that dominates psychology, and more broadly ways of thinking, knowing, and being. linked by the dual traumas of genocide and displacement, indigenous and black communities share a common fate and are often subjected to the same structural and cultural traumas and oppressions, though our experiences may differ. in this article, we use the term black to signify a political term for describing diverse communities that are part of the broader afrikan diaspora. this includes people who are first, second, or third generation from the caribbean, continental africa, as well as those who are several generations in-continent such as african american and african canadian communities. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 our response to the legacy of colonialism and imperialism amidst this imperialist colonial history and our refusal to be silent, we come together to share our lived experiences and practices as resistance and praxis. we take a critical stance in deconstructing how white supremacy ideologies manifest in the academe and our communities, specifically in communities where we grew up, live, and work. now, more than ever, we are specifically focused on calling attention to what we have come to critically understand as a need to decolonize community psychology (cp). our call to decolonize speaks to the understanding of indigenous epistemologies and connection to land, while engaging with the urgencies of unsettling whiteness, dismantling white supremacy, and decentering racial colonial logics. emerging from western eurocentrism (a worldview that is implicitly or explicitly european centered), such ideologies and conceptualizations have continued to oppress indigenous and black communities by erasing our histories and knowledges, as well as limiting our power to determine our issues of concern and their solutions. community psychology, as a discipline, has the potential to play an overarching role in decolonizing academia and advancing social and racial justice in our communities and broader society; however, as it stands, the discipline is ill-equipped to carry that torch forward. in its current form, community psychology perpetuates coloniality by leaving out the voices and realities of black, indigenous, and people of color (bipoc) in facets of scholarship, curricula, research, and practice. therefore, influential power remains 5 “the other,” describes a dominant ‘superior’ group’s (e.g., white settlers) designation of negative attributes of identity, such as lower status, stereotyping, and morally and nonrepresentative and inaccessible for the majority. because cp becomes legitimized through scientific research, this epistemic violence manifests as omitting the knowledge – the ideas, concepts, and wisdoms of the other,5 which promotes the inherent hegemonic inferiority of the other. the other knowledge is labeled as “folk or myth,” thus further delegitimizing communities who are not of the status quo nor who benefit from the dominant structures (held, 2020). as emerging critical community psychologists, we work with our communities and within institutions of higher education to reveal the hidden colonial power of systems of oppression within historic and contemporary contexts. critical community psychology, as a domain within cp, is one characterized by a socio-historical and political critique of cp’s roots in western eurocentrism and the need to decenter it away from white supremacist logics that reify oppressions. the critical community psychologist is oriented toward the ethical imperative that community psychology must be shaped and informed by the needs, concerns, and strengths, as well as agency and dreams determined by communities themselves. as noted by the society for community research and action (scra) community psychology, division 27 of the american psychological association (2021, para. 1), in solidarity and close partnership with groups – oppressed through violence, exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, or cultural imperialism – critical community psychology seeks to draw attention to the socially divisive and intellectually inferior, with the ultimate purpose of dehumanization and exclusion/marginalization of another group (e.g., indigenous and black peoples) (jensen, 2011; said, 1979). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 ecologically destructive broader patterns and structures – such as capitalism, neoliberal globalization, patriarchy, colonialism, hegemony, and racism – that condition the scope of social problems and engage in collective action to dismantle oppressive social arrangements (evans et al., 2017). we are critical of community psychology because doing so will aid the discipline’s ability to live up to its purported values. we commit ourselves to dismantling these systems through decoloniality and racial justice lenses, inclusive of practices such as writing, publishing, and producing work that seeks to raise our voices and our community voices in resistance to white supremacy ideologies. the institutional violence we are now experiencing, coupled with historical and ongoing waves of oppression, is a result and continuation and legacy of colonialism. the outward eruptions that we are seeing over the last several years are a result of the american and canadian settler nation-states that have taken hold in north america, but are now in decline. considering this worldwide paradigm shift, the academe, and other noneducational entities, whether inadvertently or intentionally, have historically perpetuated imperialism and white supremacy ideologies through curricula, pedagogy, and institutional policies and practices. to this end, the discipline of community psychology is no exception. born at the heart of the empire of the colonial ruling class, community psychology, as it was established, is a part of the imperialist empire – a mainstream academic discipline. therefore, as we are in the throes of the empire’s decline, with strong and violent opposition from those who seek to retain hegemonic domination, the question that arises for us is: can community psychology align with current sovereignty and liberation movements? we believe that it can. this article, then, provides a detailed narrative arguing that three principles of community psychology are not sufficient for practice within black and indigenous communities while also illuminating community psychology’s place within the industrial complex that perpetuates imperialism and neocolonialism. further, we discuss the implications of these experiences and then offer a proposal for how we can decolonize cp and move it forward to become part of the solution to align with sovereignty and liberation movements. community psychology: in times of birth and early years “community psychology’ (cp) in the u.s. emerged in the 1960s in response to the limitations of [clinical] psychology in solving social problems” (community psychology, 2021, para. 1). the discipline was born in swampscott, massachusetts in 1965 (cp, 2021), partly in response to the deinstitutionalization of mental health care in hospitals (toro, n.d.). additionally, the 1960s and 1970s were and still are considered a time of liberation movements and social justice protest, as indigenous, black, and racialized people fought inequity, oppression, and death from police brutality and systemic racism and oppression, while working toward a more just society (jones & walker, 2016; samudzi & anderson, 2018; ward, 2018). influenced by the “global south,” while slowly coming to understand that there was much cp could learn beyond its imperialist borders, so too did the spirit of liberation for countries under the thumb of white supremacy, manifested via colonization and coloniality. thus, freedom uprisings did not only take place in the united states (us), but in liberation movements in many nation-states, such as méxico, in response to the tlatelolco http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 massacre (bosteels, 2018), as well as afrikan independence movements in countries such as algeria, kenya, angola, guinea, mozambique, eritrea, and namibia (fanon, 1963; obeng-odoom, 2017). in the settler nation-state of canada, the sir george william affair (1969) highlighted the overt and systemic racism that black students faced at what is now concordia university. the students, in resisting racism and oppression, staged peaceful protests in highlighting their objectives. however, the state retaliated with its enforcers in the use of violence against the protesters and spun the story to say that the black students were riotous, not the militarized arm of the imperialist settler nation-state (forsythe, 1971). in the 1960s, aboriginal and torres strait islanders were fighting for their rights of fair wages and adequate working conditions, as well as sovereignty on their lands, stolen by the settler nation-state of australia, as part of the british commonwealth (australians together, 2020). community psychology on turtle island has a history of responsiveness to community issues in concepts such as (but not limited to) prevention and health promotion, a psychological sense of community (soc), and an empowerment framework, yet these tenets may not be serving all communities as intended. we take these three examples of cp principles to explain how bipoc are not served in practice and praxis by the current iteration of community psychology. prevention and health promotion. principle #3 at the swampscott conference of 1965, “focusing on wellness, strengths, and competence (vs. deficits and disorder), including an emphasis on prevention, resilience, and health promotion” (cp, 2021, para. 4) is laudable and has the potential to bring a sense of hope for community health and wellbeing, in theory. however, this principle has yet to reach actual practice in black and indigenous communities. rather the more notable deficit model continues to be the dominant mode of practice. community psychology attests to moving away from the deficit model, while a larger trend of individual blame continues. what is visible is a lack of practitioners on the ground in black and indigenous communities. at the policy level, bipoc are left to resist and protest against racism and oppression, the real culprits behind health disparities and mortality rates. if these assertions are not true, then perhaps it has been the silence and seeming avoidance of community psychology to address issues, as described in the next section, that prompt our supposition. community psychology reproduces western colonial agendas, focusing on black and indigenous peoples as ‘at risk,’ ‘dysfunctional,’ or ‘too difficult to work with,’ along with other stereotypes and assumptions. exclusion of bipoc communities regarding the formations of and input on prevention and health promotion policies is part of the western reproduction of cp (mcnamara & naepi, 2018). always portrayed as needing assistance from white saviours and having little agency, intelligence, or fortitude of our own accord, black and indigenous folks are made dependent and thus infantilized, as well as considered not quite human. it is a miracle any of us have survived on our own. and when white cp practitioners do work in black and indigenous communities, are their worldviews considered as part of health promotion? this question remains to be seen. black and indigenous peoples must be seen as fully human, interconnected with our cultures, spiritualities, practices, and the land, and quite able to make decisions regarding our health and wellbeing. sense of community (soc). much has been theorized about soc, and in some cp programs in universities, students learn about sarason’s (1974) founding theory, where humans maintain a desire to belong http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 and are mutually dependent. sarason believed that soc is a core discipline component of cp (bess et al., 2002) and it is incorporated within the discipline as such. students are likely to learn about mcmillan and chavis’ (1986) work exploring soc as membership, influence, integration and fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection. in these theoretical perspectives, the focus is mostly on the individual, based on positivist methodologies and measuring factors considered in soc theory (bess et al., 2002). left unaccounted for, however, are the historical, relational, and sociocultural, as well as political dimensions that shape communities, and our positionalities within them. in light of mcmillian and chavis’ (1986) element of belonging as part of their conception of sense of community, for some of us, as black, indigenous, and racialized students, faculty, and practitioners, we constantly hear the rhetoric of belonging to the university community, we are the [insert university name here]community and we are here to support you!” yet, we do not feel as if we “belong” to our university communities. for example, when we are continuously taught via textbooks authored by white, male academics without mention of, for instance, african american psychologists, among them francis sumner, the first black male psychologist, or inez beverly prosser, the first black woman psychologist, as well as indigenous scholars and activists such as, cindy blackstock, maria brave heart, arthur manuel, pam palmeter, and so many more. we do not see ourselves reflected in the canon of community psychology. this contributes and furthers the experience of not belonging – of being on the peripheries of the discipline, marginalized and invisibilized at the same time, so that our identities and positionalities as black, latinx, and indigenous psychologists make us visible. in addition, works of activists, community leaders, and other postcolonial theorists who have much to say about the dynamics of black, indigenous and racialized communities such as, frantz fanon, paulo freire, sylvia wynter, james baldwin, afua dadesen cooper, rinaldo walcott, harsha walia, emiliano mundrucu, the combahee collective, and so many more, are not integral in the studying of community psychology. we believe such crucial pedagogical omissions serve to erase our identities, perpetuate racism, and reinforce silencing; consequently, we cannot belong to these academic communities that purport to support us. empowerment. empowerment is lauded as the bedrock and a foundational principle of cp (cp, 2021). for some cp students, julian rappaport (1987) is introduced as the developer of the concept of empowerment, as he states, “empowerment conveys both a psychological sense of personal control or influence and a concern with actual social influence, political power, and legal rights” (p. 121). however, with further learnings and conceptualizations, we come to understand that empowerment is based on more than one theoretical concept, such as the work of freire (1971/2000), who espoused empowerment as a way to transform one’s world by developing critical consciousness as emancipation. latinx feminists and black power movements have used freire’s conceptualizations in understanding and working toward liberation (calvès, 2009). aside from the perception that the cp canon neglects bipoc scholars, activists, and community members in the defining of empowerment for their communities, the coopting of empowerment by capitalist forces now relegates empowerment to the acquiring of material and financial resources. as noted by frieman (1992, as cited by calvès, 2009), the process is actually one of “disempowerment,” defined as, “a historical process of exclusion from economic and social power,” which allows for the enduring maintenance of white supremacy status quo. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 this is evidenced by increased poverty in both ‘developed’ countries and ‘developing’ countries still suffering under the yokes of colonialism and coloniality (calvès, 2009; friedman, 1992). the conceptualization of empowerment has been stripped of its focus on power – in the rebalancing of power – and become individualized, with a focus on individual capacity (calvès, 2009), within neoliberal globalization. riger (1993) discusses how empowerment is typically framed as mastery, control, and other individualistic constructs rather than ideas such as cooperation and communion. such a framing of empowerment can lead to groups coming into conflict with one another, particularly in the context of racial capitalism in which racialized groups are often placed into conflict and competition over scarce resources or foundation funding. such competitive and individualistic notions are counter to community building and organizing, leaving community psychology unable to fulfill its promise as a field and discipline. as examples, we find these core theories do not offer a critical lens nor are they conceptualized through the lenses of bipoc communities. we perceive the lack of criticality as eurocentric-driven community psychology. thus, to reiterate, cp must grow beyond western eurocentric philosophical bindings to address the systemic forces of power that work to promote and sustain the white supremacist status quo. this requires a paradigm shifting of the lenses that have so long shone on the perceived deficits of bipoc communities, and the inherent, built-in systemic racism that continues to burn ever so brightly. overall, we argue that because cp continues to reproduce western european epistemology as the dominant narrative, it is situated within what is coined the “industrial complex.” through our eyes, this situating fosters our call for cp to be decolonized. in the next section, we conceptualize the academic and nonprofit complexes and further explain our positions. community psychology and the academic and nonprofit complex we assert that community psychology sits at the intersections of the academic and the nonprofit industrial complex because of its role as a field of practice and knowledge production. an industrial complex is the relationship between capitalism and industry, with other sectors of society such as nonprofits, the nation-state, medicine, military, and prisons (rodriguez, 2007). as a discipline that is oriented toward the academic, specifically empirical and theoretical research and applied clinicalcommunity practice, cp is constantly navigating between these two domains; each one with a unique set of ethics and implications informed by the institutional structures where the theoretical-empirical and the applied are situated. straddling these two worlds, cp serves two sets of masters: 1) the norms of the western eurocentric academe and of community-based practice, often in collaboration with nonprofit organizations and, 2) other public sector services. unfortunately, this means many of the issues, such as the discipline being constrained by white supremacist ideologies, emerge within the field. nonprofits have a symbiotic relationship with the nation-state’s attempt to suppress counter-hegemonic struggles through mass incarceration and other forms of violent social control. social movements are often steered toward adopting structures that mirror nation-state and capitalist structures. energy and resources for social change are redirected to bureaucratic structures (topdown, committees, executive boards, etc.) that promote the status quo rather than grassroots structures that challenge http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 dominant norms, structures, and institutions, including higher education. this often legitimizes the racist fears and genocidal attempts of the settler nation-state civil society (indigenous erasure, anti-blackness, islamophobia, anti-semitism, etc.), forcing movements into more “legitimate” methods of pushing for social change. social movements are also pressured to conform to standards set by the foundations that fund them, an example of how capitalism co-opts social movements (rodriguez, 2007). thus, in addition to our overarching aims to align cp with liberation, other important questions arise that we invite readers to reflect and engage with: whose knowledge matters? and relatedly: who decides what is social change? where do we get our theories? how does a field develop to effectively meet the changing demographics and sociopolitical times when its founders are mostly white men? is community psychology benevolent colonialism? we are cautious of offering absolute answers and solutions to these questions, as the answers to these will vary depending on the sociopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts, as well as positionalities of the community psychologist. however, we do offer some guidance and recommendation for answering these questions. first and foremost, we must start with acknowledging the problematic western eurocentric hegemonic roots of psychology. the roots of psychology are shaped by the colonial matrix of power – a set of interrelated spheres of management and control, held up by racial and patriarchal epistemologies. in particular, the colonial matrix of power perpetuates the hidden curriculum and foundation of community psychology. to this end, power dynamics come into play when determining expertise, often at the expense of bipoc communities. laws are an example of this – laws determine who is criminal, often coinciding with indigeneity and racialization. it becomes a basis for war by creating the other – those who violate imperialist laws and norms become threatening to “our” way of life. laws rooted in coloniality take on another form when entire communities are the other. the “war on drugs” is a prime example, as it was devised as a strategy to oppress and undermine the black liberation uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s. as noted, community psychology’s rise coincided with state repression of black liberation, red power, and counterculture movements (ward, 2018), as well as with america and neoliberal capitalism becoming global hegemonic forces. malcolm x would describe this as “benevolent colonialism” or “philanthropic imperialism” (thomas, 2017, p 155). these concerns take on great importance when determining social change efforts. community psychologists in the academe often must navigate the same power structures and work towards the same capitalist/colonial interests as any other academic field – focusing heavily on integration and legitimization by the academe. given cp’s relationship with nonprofits, such as, for instance, the american psychological association (apa) and scra, whose organizational structures are member-led and nonprofit, it is important to discuss how the nonprofit industrial complex reproduces racial capitalism. erasure and suppression of radical change although a range of epistemologies is practiced and promoted within cp, there is still an emphasis on us-centric positivist research. indigenous and racial justice that incorporates indigenous and alternative epistemologies remains on the margins of the field. this is especially problematic given cp’s quest to be legitimized by institutions such as schools, police, military, and nonprofits, rather than by communities. the need for acknowledgement and recognition from these http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 institutions further justifies the white supremacist status quo, given the historical and contemporary ways these institutions oppress and dominate indigenous, marginalized, and racialized peoples. for example, to bring the conversation back to a key principle of cp, discussions and conceptualizations of empowerment often have colonial, neoliberal, individualistic, and masculine perspectives – concepts held deeply within white supremacist ideology. the deficit modeling of bipoc communities in cp has led to burgeoning academic and industrial complexes as money, status, and career generators, ironically squarely on the backs of those most marginalized, whom the discipline proclaims to “help.” moreover, without an examination of these systems and in working toward dismantling these systems, the concentrated power, the domination, and white supremacist status quo remain intact. the systems that perpetuate marginalization continue to operate in our societies and continue to maintain inequity, oppression, and brutality (i.e., in the settler nation-state of canada, between 2007-2017, one-third of people killed by the rcmp were indigenous peoples; a black person is 20-times more likely to be shot and killed by the police (yellowhead institute, n.d.). we do not intent to overlook the ongoing work and efforts happening in communities to relieve some of the distress that bipoc people endure on a constant basis. however, the manifestations of these systems, operating under the systematic and systemic structures of white supremacy, continue as intergenerational poverty, intergenerational trauma, intergenerational violence, and intergenerational injustice (beals & wilson, 2020). consequently, we ask: where is the transformative change that is the purported hallmark of cp? without throwing a wrench into these systems, we do not see muchneeded equitable changes. so, we must focus on the analyses and redistribution of power and work conscientiously toward a change of mindset – transformative change in dismantling white supremacist ideologies, and all the concepts that fall within. fanon’s prehistory and context of community psychology charting the intellectual history and context of community psychology as emerging from and being maintained by white supremacy is the focus of this section. thus, we center the work of frantz fanon, specifically his analysis of the colonial world. such a critical analysis serves as an example of work that can help move toward the decolonizing and fresh iteration of cp. frantz fanon is considered a founding father of the afrikan liberation movement. he discussed and theorized the nature of ideology as it relates to race and national culture, his political philosophy confronted the ideological structures of colonialism, and he promoted indigenous political theories of democratization (forsythe, 1973; ranuga, 1986; staniland, 1969; grohs, 1968; adam, 1993; nursery-bray, 1980; jinadu, 1973). fanon’s insights can be used to understand how the racial discourse in america has been appropriated through academic institutions and disciplines, including psychology, in similar ways as justification for genocides, slavery, jim crow, and other institutionalized social control of black/african people. fanon provided two important insights that could be used to describe the continued colonial condition in the united states: 1) in the aftermath of an anti-colonial struggle (i.e., the american revolution) the group most likely to gain power are “native petitbourgeoisie” (white men who own land/property), not the working people (white men without property, women, enslaved africans, indigenous peoples), and 2) this new ruling class appropriates the racial discourse of the previous ruling class so http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 they can maintain their position as elites. many of the illustrations and contexts draw from the us south, given its prominent economic and intellectual role in the global cotton economy, fueled by labor from enslaved and exploited africans (du bois, 1935; woods, 1998). the social change that birthed the us settlercolonial nation-state was a violent revolution. yet, the emerging ruling class reproduced the racial hierarchy of the previous colonial ruling class. this included their foreign policy with haiti, the next nation to overthrow a colonial power through revolution. this served both an economic and psychological incentive, preventing enslaved africans from feeling empowered to overthrow their enslavers, some of whom were the “founding fathers,” including george washington and thomas jefferson. more than half of the precivil war presidents owned enslaved africans (robinson, 1997). in addition to upholding a domestic racial hierarchy, a neocolonial hierarchy was maintained by the us in refusing to acknowledge haiti as a sovereign nation and france demanding restitution from haiti. but it was too late, the dam had been broken. freedom from enslavement and colonial rule was in sight, but it would not be without trials and tribulations. in america, colonial relations were maintained even with the political emancipation of formerly enslaved africans. this would be done with and through the assistance of academic institutions, which act as vectors for colonization in their degrading and disenfranchising “scholarship” about black, indigenous, and racialized people and communities, viewed as being outside of the bounds of white settler society. plantation social science. academic institutions participate in the maintenance of the status quo through the production of knowledge and the reproduction of knowers (osuna, 2017). this was no different for the racial discourse in service of colonial structures. institutions such as harvard were intimately involved in the cotton plantation economy. harvard’s ascent to global prominence was heavily aided by the donations and services of new england textile mill owners and british banks, both vital segments of the cotton-plantation economy. additionally, harvard professor louis agassiz was a prominent scientist who helped create racial theories that turned personality traits into biological characteristics of race (beckert & stevens, 2011). these hidden facts were uncovered by diligent students engaging in rigorous archival research through harvard documents. harvard is but one example of fanon’s warning of the appropriation of racial discourse to upload colonial power relations. plantation owners aspired to empire, so they expanded their representations of reality into the social sciences (woods, 1998). white supremacy, as an ideology of a plantation owner's view of reality, is what founded the us academic discourse on race, institutionalizing plantocrats’ views of economics, history, biology, sociology, and psychology. social darwinism was the dominant academic perspective on black life in america; leading academic research was conducted by confederate soldiers, historians, and political economists. “empirical” social science attached to black people criminality, lack of industrial efficiency, child neglect, low intelligence, and sexual deviance. theories of african “barbarism” and black inferiority were justification for the imperialist occupations of haiti, hawaii, cuba, the philippines, puerto rico, and other nations. intelligence tests created by psychologists would be used in schools and the military to justify segregation in these spaces. for example, psychologist lewis terman (1916) adapted the stanford-binet iq test and promoted racially segregating bipoc students from white students. terman sat on the board of several eugenics organizations and his intelligence test would be widely used http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 in the harm and violence against indigenous, black and racialized people. institutional social control. black codes and jim crow laws also performed the psychological feat of giving a white racial identity social meaning in a racially segregated society, allowing white men without land ownership access to citizenship. this allowed white racial identity to become a form of property. police and carceral systems participated in the violent upholding of the social order and defending the property of whiteness. they served as an institutionalized form of the slave patrol and “indian” catchers. unfortunately, violent policing of indigenous and black people has never been solely the domain of official state agents. for instance, the fugitive slave law of 1850 called on all white citizens to do their part in recovering “fugitives” and returning them to the plantations from which they escaped (robinson, 2000). the dred scott supreme court case ruled that black people had no rights and they were obliged to defer to and respect white people. black people were targeted as a population to be managed and controlled (essentially colonized) by white society. vigilante white supremacist terrorist groups such as the ku klux klan (kkk) were informally deputized to keep black populations disempowered, oppressed, and in terror, killing thousands and driving away millions to other regions of the country and beyond. often, their ranks consisted of citizens, ministers, and lawyers. to dispel the illusion that american racism in its most explicit forms is a particularly southern phenomenon, let us consider the fact that ku klux klan members reached 8.9 million in 1925, with most members being from northern states, as well as in canada, with a chapter in toronto, and large followings in the west (snowden, 2016) for example, michigan had 875,000 kkk members, while mississippi had 93,000 members (woods, 1998). when explicit race-based rhetoric became unfashionable, southern social science reorganized to provide more race-neutral and sociologically acceptable explanations for poverty. this allowed plantocrats the ability to craft a regional identity that masked the racial and economic inequalities that maintained their power in the mississippi delta region. positivist objectivity was a veil to shroud the racial hierarchy still promoted by social sciences. instead of biological inferiority, the explanation shifted to cultural deficiencies (woods, 1998). the concessions gained from the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s gave way to law and order and the “war on drugs,” leading to the increased police presence and surveillance of indigenous and black communities. the black panther party would use fanon’s work to connect police control of black communities to other colonial situations in the afrikan diaspora and global south (bloom & martin, 2016). they demonstrated how often the police served as domestic arms of american imperialism, with the use of government agencies in ensuring that legal surveillance, such as cointelpro and mainstream propaganda were used to sustain a state campaign of violence against blpoc liberation movements (speri, 2019). there have been several high-profile cases through decades that have brought public awareness, yet they also show how black and indigenous lives can be taken with little consequence, as many officers are not indicted by grand juries or significantly reprimanded by their departments. police violence exacerbates the already negative effects of racial capitalism on mental and physical health. indigenous and black people are overrepresented in cases involving the use of force such as tasers, canines, spray, hands and body use, and weapon use (goff et al., 2016). according to the guardian, in 2015-16 african americans made up 12-15% of the us population, but accounted for almost 30% of unarmed individuals killed by http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 police officers (swaine & mccarthy, 2017). this hyper-surveillance of indigenous and black communities has harmful and destabilizing effects on people and their families. this environmental stressor erodes social cohesion and creates dual psychological and physical effects. the threat of police brutality places indigenous and black communities under a state of psychological stress, leading to worse physical, mental, and spiritual health. this hyper-surveillance also furthers the political and economic exploitation of our communities. the 2014 murder of 18-yearold michael brown in ferguson, missouri took place within this colonial context of hypersurveillance and economic exploitation. the predominantly black community had already experienced parasitic governing practices at the hands of their municipal officials and police, leaving many people with excessive fines and living in fear of being arrested for lack of payment (wang, 2018). a call for a decolonization of western community psychology how do we escape the colonial matrix of power and oppression? the us settler-colonial empire, founded on stolen peoples, stolen land, stolen wealth, and stolen knowledge, is in a state of crisis in the year 2021. the events of the preceding year, 2020, have continued to expose the imperialist and colonial nature of america and the settler nation-state of canada, as several emergent crises continue to disproportionately affect bipoc communities. the covid-19 pandemic forced millions out of work, leaving millions without income, health insurance, and the ability to pay their rent. the economic conditions have not been in such a state since the great depression. on turtle island, the climate crisis is reaching new levels with wildfires, floods, and drought, meaning that environmental racism is a continual area of struggle. the intersections of indigeneity, race, capitalism, and empire intersect again as bipoc communities are disproportionately vulnerable to collateral damage from an empire in decline. the murder of george floyd sparked the largest protests around the world in the last 50 years. there had already been too many murders of black and indigenous peoples in 2020 that had gone without justice, as we saw concurrent explosions of protests in the streets. these uprisings sparked conversations on whether police should be abolished, and justice placed in the control of community. the events of the last year have demonstrated that statues and symbols fall, but social structures are enduring, sometimes through force. we also saw examples of fanon’s references to “native petitbourgeoisie” employed to manage social unrest and outrage. in other words, selected members of indigenous and racially oppressed groups are permitted elite status and access so they can be the enforcers of racial hierarchy. during a press conference, atlanta mayor keisha lance bottoms, along with rappers t. i. and killer mike all implored people to go home, with t.i. even referring to atlanta as wakanda. it is important to note that as elites of “wakanda,” killer mike and t.i. both own significant amounts of real estate in one of the most rapidly gentrifying and surveilled cities in the us. wakanda forever? moreover, the complicity of universities has been on display, through administrations’ decisions on whether to reopen during the pandemic, their responses (or lack of) to protests against racism and police brutality, and increasing tuition. tuition hikes will intensify the indigenous and racialized class barriers to higher education. for example, in the us, 7/10 black and latinx college students attend open access/community colleges, while 8/10 white students attend a selective college (warikoo, 2016). the commodification of racial diversity adds http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 difficulty to advocating for indigenous and racial justice in capitalist institutions. there has been variance in how adept institutions have been in navigating the racial discourse to manage their students and faculty, but this demonstrates academic institutions’ historic function of using racial discourse to uphold the social order. toward a decolonial critical community psychology thus far, we have offered a narrative on our position regarding why community psychology must be decolonized to play a more intricate role in current liberation movements. as scholar-activists and practitioners, it is also our praxis to propose a call-to-action. we are clear that decolonizing community psychology and broader efforts to advance indigenous and racial justice is no easy task. yet, the core of resistance work we engage in is action. to this end, an action worthy of considering is to intentionally integrate paulo freire’s (1971/2000) theory of conscientização within community psychology programs. freire based his pedagogical theory of conscientização from frantz fanon’s (1967) psychiatric practice to help his clients consciousnessize. fanon and freire both engaged in consciousness-raising and psycho-politics as processes of helping others to see how they have psychologically internalized political power structures and racism. fanon (1967) pointed to colonial and contemporary racism as an “epidermalization of economic inequality.” fanon conceptualized this phrase as racism as an internalized social structure, which is entwined with economic inequities that reproduce conditions of oppression, precarity, and dehumanization (p. 11). elamin et al. (2017) argued that, particularly for bipoc students, the development of critical consciousness is necessary to examine systems of oppression and inequality. this includes understanding the use of language and silencing to better challenge these oppressive systems, and at the same time, foster student academic achievement and engagement. thus, moving to the transformational eradication of issues that stem from white supremacy, we propose that cp move to a more critical stance, beyond prevention and health promotion, sense of community, and empowerment, as its raison d'être, to the dismantling of white supremacist ideology and all its systems, within critical consciousraising pedagogy. we propose to do so through a critical community psychology (ccp) discipline, an offshoot of cp and an already emerging discipline. ccp then becomes the primary tenet holder of cp, as it encapsulates decolonial analyses of white supremacist power structures, as well as the critique of white supremacy into pedagogy (g. palmer, personal communication, august 14, 2020). as a broader, more interdisciplinary approach, ccp embraces liberation psychology, indigenous psychology, critical race, decolonial feminist standpoints, and intersectional approaches (kivell et al., 2020), vis-à-vis critical praxes and critical epistemologies. moreover, we critically theorize within our lived experiences. without the dismantling of white supremacy and the decentering of whiteness, the seven generations to come will live as the seven generations before – not in an equitable society where we are human, where we live with the land, and we are valued within a nonhierarchical egalitarian society. we imagine such places and spaces for those who come after, for those who have come before. cp must bring to the fore the unrevised and brutal histories of imperialism, as these historical oppressions directly affect the social, economic, and political inequitable conditions of systematically marginalized and indigenous communities in the contemporary contexts of oppression (tuhiwai smith, 2012). community psychology can then wrest http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 off the yoke of white supremacy that burdens bipoc on stolen lands marked by white supremacy. as a discipline, cp can work to set right inequity and oppression with the reckoning of our histories, which then promotes the liberation, healing, and wellbeing of bipoc people – of all people. moreover, a significant role of ccp would be to step into an alignment with critical consciousness and healing that affirms humanizing connections. ubuntu, in lak’ech: a philosophy of community and humanizing connections in further decolonizing community psychology while influencing the broader academe, we must look to bring to the surface humanizing relationships that allow for true connection, mutuality, accompaniment, and solidarities in action that align with critical consciousness and healing. frantz fanon (1963), and current liberation and decolonial critical psychologists, such as urmitapa dutta (2017, 2018), deanne bell (2018), and mary watkins (watkins & shulman, 2008), among others, have described the urgencies to rehumanize us and each other. the afrikan philosophical principle of ubuntu centralizes community and emphasizes relationality with all dimensions of existence. a person is a person through their relationships; individuality and interdependence are connected (davis, 2019; gathogo, 2000). restorative justice is a key component that seeks to heal the harm to relationships and communities (davis, 2019). it is a proactive relational strategy to create a culture of connectivity where everyone can thrive and feel valued. such practices are related to lower incarceration and crime rates in afrikan countries. individual and community safety and security emerge from healthier and self governing communities, not more police or prisons. inspired by the political philosophies of fanon and malcolm x, the black panther party viewed itself as inextricably tied to the local black community (bloom & martin, 2016). community programs were a cornerstone. from august 1969 to august 1970, the bpp launched a series of programs that would eventually become the free breakfast for children program, liberation schools, free health clinics, the free food distribution program, free clothing program, development centers, free shoe program, free busing to prison program, sickle cell anemia research foundation, free housing cooperatives, free pest control, free plumbing and maintenance program, renter’s assistance, seniors escorts program, and the free ambulance program. community members also brought all kinds of disputes to the local party, such as jobrelated conflicts, evictions, legal problems, and issues with government services (bloom & martin, 2016). this was a form of remediation and recognition without the interference and need of the nation-state. future black student unions and black liberation organizations would model the black panther party and their ways of rehumanizing connections. building relationships of mutuality through connectivity rehumanizing connections are those characterized by the experiences, contexts, and relational modalities that affirm our sense of being. that is, our full humanity as we are seen, heard, and embraced as we are, encompassing indigeneity, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, age, and class. indeed, we are human in connection and mutuality with one another, including those who are perceived to be different from us. humanizing connections can manifest and unfold in multiple ways, depending on the context and the subjectivities of each person and how they may choose to engage with one another. and to promote the centering of humanness and our relationships with earth mother in our work, we offer examples of practices that work toward cultivating http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 humanizing connections. in sharing our writings, we do not intend to denote a certain hierarchy or linear process, but note that these practices are interconnected in nonlinear/nonhierarchical ways. firstly, community dialogues that allow for and facilitate reciprocal co-learning, cosharing and reflection through dialogue or conversation center the importance of stories and narratives. stories grounded in histories and past experiences, as well as present moments and encounters, can lend themselves to affirming the lived conditions and realities of another person and their relationship to the land. the conversational exchanges need not be spoken, for there are multiple ways to dialogue – ceremony, song, poetry, dance, writing, and cultural performances, among other modes of expression, that can help restore human and humanizing connections. relationships of connectivity can be social, cultural, and political, and just as importantly, spiritual. secondly, the revival and acceptance of all knowledges – practices, traditions, ontologies, epistemologies, and cosmologies – that reflect ancestral, intergenerational, and indigenous traditions are crucial to survival, healing, and restoring, in moving toward selfdetermination and in harmony and stewardship of the land. our ancestors walked paths that many of us have not followed or have not shared in the oral traditions, because they were forced to forget or hide in the shadows of imperialism and colonization – these paths and stories of our histories need to be uncovered, resurfaced, and shared as the legitimate knowledges that they are. we must revive ways of being and knowing that come from the ancestors and intergenerational wisdoms of communities and peoples that are on the periphery. we must rekindle and cultivate our connection with the land and water and all living beings and things that inform and affirm our humanity and equanimity to earth mother. we must allow ourselves to be guided in a good way. thirdly, and of relevance to the previous practices, is the importance of strengthening and supporting the thriving, rising, and wellbeing of communities through the eradication of injustice and violence, and consequently a resistance to the institutions that dehumanize and threaten our lives. commitment to social movement efforts and actions that challenge the militarized violence of institutions, such as those that are so characteristic of our criminal (in)justice systems, including police departments, must be dismantled. such logics of violence and oppression exist as well within the settings we most often occupy as academics – the neoliberal academe that must also be troubled and contested, and surely efforts must be aimed to transform. humanizing connections are those in resistance to all institutions, mechanisms, and technologies that keep us from embracing our fullest humanity – resisting actions that do not affirm our dignity to live a fully human life and that disconnect us from the land. community psychology can offer a humanizing connection in our research, our actions, and our practice. closing remarks: an epilogue toward decoloniality and decolonization through this writing, we have sought to offer a framework grounded in our knowledge of a colonized community psychology. as a discipline, cp has remained silent amid community challenges, such as policing as social control, as well as historical and intergenerational trauma that continues to envelop bipoc communities. the indigenous erasure, racist, and anti-black systemic structures that traumatize bipoc persist in contemporary times, as white supremacy has consistently permeated turtle island since first contact with the white man. we, nor community psychology, cannot remain http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 unconscious when we continue to live with a status quo that continues to represent the “hegemonic mind” (martinot, 2004). we put forward our position that a critical community psychology can offer more tools to support a decolonial and healing praxis, while making a significant impact on the lives of indigenous and racialized people in working to dismantle white supremacy. a critically decolonized community psychology would center the voices of bipoc, conduct research, and ferret out truth from “mythologizing the past,” and offer a much more divergent psychology that is not steeped in whiteness and white supremacy ideologies. our resistance is also rooted in the power of storytelling that can support and cultivate humanizing connections. language is a political instrument; words are containers of reality used for creation, definition, and destruction (baldwin, 1979). indigenous afrikan cosmologies describe the birth of the universe coming from a universal sound and the creative force of the word (ford, 2000). we draw from our ancestral knowledge to help our communities as we recognize the strengths that have always existed and will continue to exist within our communities. as prathia hall notes: the people are our teachers. people who have struggled to support themselves and large families, people who have survived in georgia and alabama and mississippi, have learned some things we need to know. there is fantastic poetry in the lives of the people who have survived with strength and nobility. i am convinced of how desperately america needs the blood transfusion that comes from the delta of mississippi (as quoted by brooks, 2014, p. 11) and as noted by betty vásquez (2018), “it is not an option but rather an obligation to speak out, all of us together, to demand changes.” our resistance moves toward a community psychology that is truly humanizing, community-centered and oriented – a community psychology that is embracing of diversity, while remaining vigilant of misrepresenting, romanticizing, and essentializing such differences that further challenge the discipline’s potential to contribute to community and societal liberation. we resist being complicit in the oppressions, and commit to community struggles for sovereignty, racial freedom, and liberation, wherever we may find it. references adam, h. m. 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(1998). development arrested: the blues and plantation power in the mississippi delta. verso. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/what-community-psychology/critical-community-psychology/ https://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/what-community-psychology/critical-community-psychology/ https://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/what-community-psychology/critical-community-psychology/ https://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/what-community-psychology/critical-community-psychology/ https://theintercept.com/2019/03/23/black-identity-extremist-fbi-domestic-terrorism/ https://theintercept.com/2019/03/23/black-identity-extremist-fbi-domestic-terrorism/ https://theintercept.com/2019/03/23/black-identity-extremist-fbi-domestic-terrorism/ https://socialistworker.org/2018/08/08/1968-the-rise-of-the-red-power-movement https://socialistworker.org/2018/08/08/1968-the-rise-of-the-red-power-movement https://socialistworker.org/2018/08/08/1968-the-rise-of-the-red-power-movement global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 yellowhead institute. (n.d.). police brutality in canada: a symptom of structural racism and colonial violence. https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2020 /07/15/police-brutality-in-canada-asymptom-of-structural-racism-andcolonial-violence/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2020/07/15/police-brutality-in-canada-a-symptom-of-structural-racism-and-colonial-violence/ https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2020/07/15/police-brutality-in-canada-a-symptom-of-structural-racism-and-colonial-violence/ https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2020/07/15/police-brutality-in-canada-a-symptom-of-structural-racism-and-colonial-violence/ https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2020/07/15/police-brutality-in-canada-a-symptom-of-structural-racism-and-colonial-violence/ surf therapy: a scoping review of the qualitative and quantitative research evidence elizabeth benninger1, chloe curtis2, gregor v. sarkisian3, carly m. rogers4, kailey bender5, and megan comer6 keywords: surf, therapy, intervention, program, scoping review author biographies: elizabeth benninger, is a post-doctoral fellow at case western reserve university and the ceo of healthy minds healthy communities consulting. she obtained her m.a. in psychology (applied community psychology) from antioch university, los angeles and her ba in community development and phd in psychology from the university of the western cape in cape town, south africa. dr. benninger created a therapeutic surfing program aimed at promoting the psychosocial wellbeing of children experiencing toxic stress in cape town, south africa through a communitycentered design. she additionally served as the co-director of waves for changes and founded the organization’s surf therapy program. her research interests include the study of children’s well-being, health disparities, participatory research approaches, and community health promotion. her work additionally focuses on national and international collaborations which specifically focus on promoting the health of children and families within communities experiencing high levels of poverty and violence. chloe curtis, is the research & evaluation team coordinator for the jimmy miller memorial foundation. she earned her ba in marketing, and ma in education from loyola marymount university. she is now working on her second masters in counseling at loyola marymount, while coaching the division i men’s and women’s cross country and track teams. ultimately, chloe plans to earn a ph.d. in sport psychology. chloe discovered surf therapy by volunteering as a surf instructor with jmmf for the first time in 2017. since then, she has assisted dr. gregor sarkisian with everything from data collection to report writing for the foundation, which serves youth at-promise, veterans, and active duty military service members. gregor v. sarkisian, professor, has taught in the applied community psychology specialization within the m.a. clinical psychology program at antioch university los angeles since 2005. dr. sarkisian began working with the jimmy miller memorial foundation (jmmf) in 2015 where he has served as a volunteer surf 1 case western reserve university, cleveland, oh, usa 2 loyola marymount university, los angeles, ca, usa 3 antioch university, los angeles, ca, usa 4 independent researcher, san luis obispo, ca, usa 5 independent researcher, san diego, ca, usa 6 independent researcher, manasquan, nj, usa global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 instructor and more recently as the director of research and evaluation for jmmf to better understand the benefits of surf therapy for youth at-promise and u.s. veterans. since 2018, dr. sarkisian has been a member of the international surf therapy organization (isto) and he is actively engaged in coalition building, the dissemination of research on surf therapy and serves as a technical consultant to programs interested in developing surf therapy program evaluations. carly m. rogers, is a clinical occupational therapist and independent researcher. she received her ba in psychology from the university of california at santa barbara and her masters and clinical doctorate in occupational therapy from the university of southern california. during her master’s coursework, dr. rogers created a therapeutic surfing program titled ocean therapy, aimed at enhancing self-efficacy in participants from diverse backgrounds. she later became the director of programs for the jimmy miller memorial foundation, where she implemented ocean therapy with underprivileged youth and military populations until 2015. she has since presented at the regional, national and international level both on the topics of surf therapy and occupational therapy’s role with veterans diagnosed with combat ptsd. dr. rogers is the primary author of “high-intensity sports for posttraumatic stress disorder and depression: feasibility study of ocean therapy with veterans of operation enduring freedom and operation iraqi freedom". kailey bender, is a pediatric occupational therapist. she received her bs in kinesiology from csu long beach, and her masters of science in occupational therapy from csu dominguez hills. kailey discovered surf therapy through the jimmy miller memorial foundation, where she volunteered as a surf instructor with veterans and at-risk youth. during her master's program, kailey and her colleagues had the unique opportunity to research the effects of ocean therapy on veterans with ptsd, and heard first-hand accounts of the profound benefits it had upon their well-being. since graduating, kailey has volunteered with multiple other surfing therapy organizations throughout southern california. meg comer, is an occupational therapist who specializes in pediatrics with children under the age of three. she additionally works in acute care and inpatient rehabilitation with adults of all different needs and backgrounds. she received her ms in occupational therapy from thomas jefferson. she is additionally aquatic therapy and rehabilitation institute certified. recommended citation: benninger, e., curtis, c., sarkisian, g. v., rogers, c. m., bender, k., & comer, m. (2020). surf therapy: a scoping review of the qualitative and quantitative research evidence. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(2), 1 – 26. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 surf therapy: a scoping review of the qualitative and quantitative research evidence abstract over the past 15 years, surf therapy has emerged as a growing therapeutic intervention in diverse communities around the world. although the programs operate on the premise that surf therapy provides a range of benefits for both physical and psychological health, there is limited research evidence available to support these claims. there additionally remains a need to further develop evidence-based practices around surf therapy that support the global impact of existing and future surf therapy interventions. this research provides a scoping review of academic literature focused on surf therapy. the objectives of the research are; (1) to gain a better understanding of the global use of surf therapy and its physical, psychological and social benefits, (2) to identify intervention and research gaps related to surf therapy, (3) to provide recommendations for future surf therapy research, (4) to use the evidence to inform best practices in the field. a systematic article search of the meta-databases google scholar, ebscohost, and wiley yielded 18 studies that met the inclusion criteria. an additional search for master’s theses, doctoral dissertations, and expert search yielded 11 studies. a total of 29 studies were found to meet criteria. the data from the studies were analyzed using metasynthesis. as a result, the review provides an overview of the current scientific evidence related to surf therapy, including its physical, psychological, and social benefits. it additionally provides a detailed description of existing research methods and measures used to evaluate the impact of surfing as a therapeutic intervention that could inform further research designs. the study supports surf therapy as a means of improving both physical and psychosocial health outcomes and includes recommendations for improving surf therapy research and practice. research evidence in december 2019, surf therapy was defined by the international surf therapy organization (isto) as a method of intervention that combines surf instruction/surfing and structured individual and/or group activities to promote psychological, physical and psychosocial wellbeing (international surf therapy organization, 2019). surf therapy interventions have been utilized across various disciplines including occupational therapy, physical therapy and psychology. in the clinical setting, mental and/or physical health clinicians integrate their clinical expertise with the activity of surfing in order to achieve therapeutic outcomes for their clients. other surf therapy interventions, however, are structured through a health promotion perspective. these programs may or may not be run by clinicians and aim to improve psychological, psychosocial and/or physical health outcomes. unlike traditional treatments that often use a symptom reduction approach through talk therapy and/or medication, surf therapy programs utilize the physical activity of surfing as an anchor to the healing process. in addition to surf-instruction/surfing, these programs often include individual mentoring, social skills development, psychoeducation and/or group discussions to promote healing, strengths, resilience and personal growth in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 an inclusive social environment. surf therapy is used as both a stand-alone intervention and as an augment to other approaches (e.g., traditional psychotherapy and medication management). although surf therapy programs emerged in the 1990’s as non-profit organizations, research on surf therapy programs is relatively new with the first peer-reviewed publication appearing in 2010 (morgan, 2010). in the same year, a systematic literature review of randomized control trials on sports for post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) concluded that none existed (lawrence et al., 2010). more recently, the formation of the international surf therapy organization (isto) in 2017 has provided more opportunities for surf therapy program personnel and researchers to collaborate and share best practices and research strategies (isto, 2017). globally, over 50 surf therapy programs serve a wide range of populations from youth with disabilities to veterans with ptsd. although randomized control trials have recently begun in some programs, many programs struggle with limited funding or research expertise to conduct surf therapy research. a number of studies have captured the physical, psychological, and social benefits of combining physical activity and being in nature, however, there is a further need for evidence that supports the potentially unique benefits of utilizing the sport of surfing as a key element of a novel therapeutic intervention (eigenschenk et al., 2019). the focus of this study was to gain an understanding of the current scientific evidence of surf therapy in order to inform further research and practice in the field. research aims and objectives this research aims to provide a scoping review of academic literature focused on surf therapy. the objectives of the research are; (1) to gain a better understanding of the global use of surf therapy and its physical, psychological and social benefits, (2) to identify intervention and research gaps related to surf therapy, (3) to provide recommendations for future surf therapy research, (4) to use the evidence to inform best practice in the field. methods due to the scarcity of empirical evidence related to surf therapy, along with the variability in which surf therapy is defined, utilized, and measured, it was decided that a scoping review was an ideal methodology to identify the current scope of evidence related to surf therapy and to clarify how surf therapy is utilized and defined across multiple therapeutic sectors (munn et al., 2018). the evidence presented in this scoping review is intended to be a useful precursor for defining more specific research questions related to surf therapy and for conducting a more concentrated systematic review. this review was conducted by a team of five researchers and supervised by the lead author who is a trained research psychologist with prior experience and training related to conducting systematic and scoping reviews. the review questions included: what interventions exist related to surf therapy? what are the physical and psychological benefits of these interventions? who do these interventions serve? what research is available to support surf therapy interventions? what are the gaps in research? and, how can this research inform best practices in the field? included databases ebscohost, googlescholar, and wiley metadatabases were searched for relevant studies. these metadatabases were selected due to their inclusion of hundreds of relevant fulltext research articles and databases. utilizing these three meta-databases helped to guarantee adequate and efficient coverage of relevant research studies. studies with titles and abstracts that met the inclusion criteria were obtained and reference lists of the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 identified studies scanned to identify additional relevant studies. personal contact was also made with research and practitioner experts in the field of surf therapy who directed the researchers to additional relevant studies. time period/inclusion/ exclusion criteria (1) the time period considered was the last 10 years (2008-2019) (2) the study examined or measured benefits related to surf therapy (3) study published in a peerreviewed journal, book or book chapter, or was a master's thesis or doctoral dissertation that resulted in the award of a degree. studies that did not meet criteria were excluded. key words the preliminary keywords used within the search were surfing, therapy, treatment, intervention, and program. during the initial search, the searches yielded over 100,000 studies, with the majority of the studies related to web surfing or interventions and treatments other than those that included the sport of surfing. it was then decided to narrow the search procedure to include the keywords "surf therapy" or "surfing" and "treatment" or "surfing" and "therapy" and to limit the dates from 2008-2019. although the preliminary article searches and consultations with experts in the field identified the first surf therapy article to be published in 2010 (morgan, 2010), it was decided to conduct a systematic search to include the last 10 years to ensure the inclusion of articles that may have been missed during the preliminary search. for the google scholar database, the researchers were able to set it to include the studies without the word internet in order to exclude the studies based on “surfing the internet”. after the initial search stage of peer-reviewed academic journal articles, the researchers decided that it would be beneficial to conduct an additional search for master’s theses and doctoral dissertations to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the scope of research available on the topic. during this phase the research team reached out to professionals in the field of surf therapy, searched the bibliographies of the studies acquired through the initial systematic search procedure, and additionally searched cinahl, ovid, and google scholar by using key search phrases including: "surf therapy" "surfing therapy", "masters theses", "doctoral dissertations", "therapeutic surfing", "surfing", "therapy" in combination with one another. data extraction the researchers independently extracted the data from the studies identified, all of which were reviewed by a second researcher. data were extracted following the procedures of metasynthesis, a form of data analysis commonly utilized within scoping and systematic reviews that include both quantitative and qualitative studies (see bennion et al. 2012; dolman et al. 2013; wells et al. 2013) and formatted into a table commonly utilized for data extraction. the table was formatted to extract data specifically relevant to the research question, that included the study authors, aim, sample size, population and subpopulation, types of therapy/intervention, region, research design, measures, length of intervention, outcomes, and themes. data analysis data from the studies were analyzed using the procedures of metasynthesis. the analysis included a process of reading, rereading, and taking notes of the key aims, methods, and findings of each article (bennion et al. 2012). this was followed by data extraction, characterized by the charting and thematic coding of the data to provide a logical and descriptive summary. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 results the article search procedure resulted in 29 studies that met criteria. ebscohost search yielded a total of 63 hits, eight of which met criteria through the abstract search and article review, an additional five studies met criteria through reference mining. googlescholar yielded a total of 42 hits, seven of which met criteria through the abstract search and article review, and an additional 13 studies met criteria through reference mining. wiley search yielded a total of 1,141 hits, one of which met criteria through the abstract search and article review, and no additional studies met criteria through reference mining. sixteen duplicates were removed from the three database searches leaving a total of 18 studies. the search for master’s theses and doctoral dissertations yielded an additional five studies. an expert search, that included reaching out to an international network of surf therapy researchers and practitioners, yielded 6 additional studies that were not already included in the systematic search procedure (see figure 1). figure 1. article search procedure summary of findings the appedix includes the 29 references identified through the scoping review. table 1 is located after the references and includes characteristics of the studies included in the scoping review. geographical region. studies came from a variety of countries from various regions of the world, including australia (morgan, 2010), new zealand (wheaton et al., 2017), portugal (matos et al., 2017; lopes, 2015), south africa (rolfe, 2015; snelling, 2015), the united kingdom (caddick, 2014; caddick et al., 2015a; caddick et al., 2015b; colpus & taylor, 2014; godfrey et al., 2015; hignett et al., 2018; marshall et al., 2019), and the united states of america (armitano et al., 2015; cavanaugh & rademacher, 2014; clapham et al., 2014; clapham et al., 2019; crawford 2016; fleischmann et al., 2011; harris, 2015; moore et al., 2018; mueller, 2017; rogers, 2014; rosenberg, 2014; walter et al., 2019a; walter et al., 2019b). populations. the sample size ranged from 1 to 492 participants. most explored the potential benefits of surf therapy for child and youth participants (16). however, this was closely followed by a focus on various adult populations (13). populations served include children and youth with a range of disabilities, children and youth with autism spectrum disorder, children and youth in need of social and emotional support, military service veterans, active duty service members, adults with various addictions and co-occurring psychological disorders, adults with disabilities, and young adult cancer survivors (see table 1). focus of therapy. all studies aimed to provide evidence of positive changes in well-being through surfing. focus areas included physical strength and fitness (6), general health and well-being (4), psychological and mental health (9), and psychosocial wellbeing (13) with many programs aiming to improve some combination of multiple areas for a specific population (see table 1). most programs included supportive surf instruction with some component of group http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 processing and/or mental health support. the duration of programs ranged from one day to six months in length, with most lasting between 5-8 weeks at one session per week. (see table 1). research design and measures. the most commonly utilized research designs were observational pretest-posttest (n=10) and case study (n= 9). eleven studies used standardized measures, however there was significant variability in the measures utilized, and inconsistency in the way the same constructs (i.e. trauma, physical fitness) were measured across studies. ten of the studies included qualitative interviews. other qualitative data collection methods included semi-structured life history interview, focus group discussion, participant observation, field notes, and program data. there were additionally three literature reviews and three program evaluations (see table 1). therapeutic outcomes by population children and youth in need of social and emotional support. seven of the studies focused on surf therapy interventions with children and youth who were in need of additional social and emotional support. the way this population was referred to varied between studies, however the majority of the programs touched on the idea that for these “challenge averse” populations – foster youth, youth at-risk of isolation, youth with a history of abuse and neglect, youth exposed to violence– surf therapy provided a manageable challenge in a fun and supportive context. the results from these studies included increases in self-concept, emotional regulation and social competencies; reengagement with school, and decreases in behavioral problems reported postintervention. however, the strength of evidence related to these changes varied. for example, the studies by snelling (2015) and matos et al. (2017) used the strength and difficulties questionnaire to measure behavioral changes in participants ages nine to sixteen. although the results of snelling (2015) showed no statistically significant changes in behavior, matos found significant improvements in interpersonal relationships and emotional regulation. the absence of significant findings in snelling’s study could be due to a variety of factors that impacted program delivery, including inadequate completion of program tasks by coaches and incomplete attendance by participants, or factors related to the research design, such as literacy levels of the participants who completed the surveys (snelling, 2015). godfrey et al. (2015) used the stirling children’s well-being scale, that measures social and psychological wellbeing with two subscales: ‘positive outlook’ and ‘positive affect’; and reported statistically significant improvements on both subscales as well as the total. in qualitative interviews, participants also self-reported feeling better (96%), happier (98%), had fun (99%), made friends (89%) and felt fitter (87%). marshall et al. (2019) also used qualitative interviews and found that participants reported feeling a sense of mastery at learning a new skill, reported a feeling of respite and escape while at the beach, and developed social connections with other peers who participated in the program. these authors were able to use these “consequent categories,” defined as themes that arose from the research that affect the outcomes, in addition to “antecedent categories,” the themes that emerged from environmental inputs that include social and physical environmental factors as well as the surfing therapy group design, to establish “core categories” that attempt to explain how surf therapy works though program design. the authors determined that self-selected pacing and progression, as well as the creation of both an emotional and physical safe space within the surf therapy group, contributed to the success of the surf therapy group participants. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 colpus & taylor (2014) measured changes in well-being with an unstandardized scale, and their participants reported a mean increase in confidence by 45.7%, with the mean score rising approximately 2.5 points on a 10-point scale (taylor, 2013). hignett, et al.’s (2018) study found a statistically significant increase in satisfaction with appearance, using a relevant portion of the british panel household survey (bphs-y) for measurement. the same study also reported a significant decrease in resting heart rate, which indicates an increased level of aerobic fitness among participants (hignett, et al., 2017). youth with disabilities. for youth with disabilities, results included improvements in physical fitness, self-confidence, social development, behavior and sleep, and reduced levels of anxiety. children with disabilities tend to have lower fitness levels than their able-bodied peers, as well as fewer opportunities to participate in group activities – which only compounds their difficulties with confidence and social interaction (moore et al. 2018; mueller, 2017). armitano et al. (2015) used the brockport physical fitness test to measure upper body strength, core strength, and endurance pre and post intervention, with improvements in all areas (armitano et al, 2015). four of the studies focused on youth with disabilities included qualitative interviews with the parents of participants with various disabilities, all of which reported increases in confidence and social skills as well as improvements in behavior (armitano et al., 2015; clapham et al.; moore et al., 2018; mueller, 2017). some parents described surf therapy as a “normalizing” opportunity for their children who are typically excluded from social events, and others noted that surf therapy provided a rare opportunity for family bonding (moore et al., 2018). those studies that focused specifically on populations with autism spectrum disorder reported that the ocean served as a unique therapeutic environment with just enough sensory input for participants with asd (cavanaugh, 2014; moore et al., 2018; mueller, 2017). one parent of two children with asd who participated in an eight-week summer program described, “the tightness of the wetsuit is a good thing for both my children. they are both deep-pressure seekers. so, between the wetsuit, the crashing of the waves, just the water on the wetsuit, it’s all sensory” (moore et al., 2017). congruently, most parents reported the same sensory inputs to have a calming effect on their children with asd, that seemed to lead to reduced anxiety and better sleep (cavanaugh & rademacher, 2014; clapham et al, 2014.; moore et al., 2018; mueller, 2017). active duty military service members. for active duty military service members, walters (2019a) showed that following six weeks of surf therapy among 74 participants, negative affect and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and ptsd (among those with probable ptsd) significantly decreased and positive affect significantly improved; however, 75% of participants were receiving some other type of treatment (e.g., psychotherapy, medication management, physical therapy) in addition to surf therapy. the study also looked at the immediate effects of a surf session, measured before and after each session, and found significant improvements in depression, anxiety, and positive affect. in one case study involving an active duty military service member, surfing was found to have the ability to provide an alternative form of pain management (fleischmann, 2011). these findings, combined with the larger body of evidence supporting the effects of surf therapy for military veterans and others, have led to the development of the sector’s first randomized control trial (walters, 2019b). the rct will compare surf and hike therapy as complementary interventions for active duty service members with major depressive disorder, to understand whether changes in depressive symptoms over time vary between the two interventions. among other factors, it is hypothesized that surf therapy http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 may have even greater benefits than other outdoor activities, because the intervention requires participants to be immersed in the water or ‘blue space’. veterans. for veteran populations, surf therapy reportedly provided respite from the symptoms of ptsd, in addition to decreased stress levels, depressive symptoms and use of narcotics, and an increase in feelings of selfefficacy (caddick, 2014; caddick et al., 2015a; caddick et al., 2015b; crawford, 2016; rogers et al., 2014). furthermore, rogers et al. (2014) found that surf therapy acted as a means for veterans to improve feelings of self-efficacy through success in goal-directed activities. as a result, this increase in feelings of self-efficacy may be linked to a statistically significant reduction in depressive symptoms. a study by caddick et al. (2015ab) discussed the impact of surf therapy on providing respite from depressive and ptsd symptoms. by engaging in surfing, veterans reported feeling a brief break from the symptoms of ptsd, as surfing demands focusing on the present, providing periods of respite (caddick, 2015ab). through stringing together periods of surfing, veterans reported feeling better able to manage their symptoms of ptsd. young adult cancer survivors. in a study by rosenberg (2014), a young adult population of cancer survivors was investigated to explore the impact surfing has on the participants’ body image, self-esteem, and self-compassion. results included decreases in self-reported depressive symptoms/depression as well as decreased feelings of alienation (rosenberg, 2014). in addition, participants reported increased feelings of positive body image, self-esteem and self-compassion following the conclusion of their engagement in surfing (rosenberg, 2014). adults recovering from addiction. one study focused on an adult population recovering from addiction (harris, 2015). results from this phenomenological study found five main themes including mindful embodiment, developing secure attachment, selfempowerment, differentiation, and surfing as a ritual and spiritual experience in relation to the investigated healing phenomenon of surfing (harris, 2015). of particular emphasis is the relationship between mindful embodiment and supporting the repair of the mind-body connection following the experience of a trauma, such as addiction and societal influences (harris, 2015). an implication from this study is the potential for surfing to provide a new way to incorporate the body into treatment in a contextually relevant way. studies focused on adult populations acknowledged the lack of generalizability of the results obtained due to small sample size, lack of a control group, biases potentially skewing data collection, confounding factors, and significant variability in surf conditions (caddick, 2015b; fleischmann, 2011; harris, 2015; rogers, et al., 2014; & rosenberg et al., 2014). among the results, only three reported statistically significant results. rogers, et al. (2014) reported decreases in depressive symptom severity in the veteran population studied. rosenberg, et al. (2014) reported a reduction in depression/depressive feelings, anxious feelings, and an improvement in selfesteem in individuals with cancer along with increases in positive affect. walter et al. (2019a) reported significant changes with active duty military service members; total scores for symptoms of depression, anxiety, ptsd, and negative affect significantly decreased, and positive affect significantly improved. the studies that did not find statistically significant quantitative results, also utilized qualitative methods to interpret interview and self-report questionnaire data to better understand their overall findings (caddick, 2015; fleischmann, 2011; harris, 2015). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 discussion the global use of surf therapy and its physical, psychological and social benefits this scoping review provided a comprehensive overview of the range of existing surf therapy interventions from various regions of the world and their potential impact on physical and psychological health and well-being amongst a diverse range of populations. populations served include children and youth with a range of disabilities, children and youth in need of social and emotional support, children and youth with autism spectrum disorder (asd), veterans, active duty military service members, adults with various addictions and co-occurring psychological disorders, adults with disabilities, and young adult cancer survivors. although the results of the quantitative research designs varied from studies showing weak correlations or no statistically significant improvements to significant improvements in health outcomes as a result of surf therapy interventions, the qualitative measures helped to contextualize these results and further understand the benefits and short-comings of surf therapy interventions. all studies aimed to provide evidence of positive changes in well-being through surfing. focus areas included physical strength and fitness, general health and wellbeing, psychological and mental health, and psychosocial well-being, with many programs targeting multiple health outcomes. most programs included supportive surf instruction with some component of group processing and/or mental health support. for youth in need of social and emotional support, results included increases in selfconcept, emotional regulation and social competencies, re-engagement with school, decreases in behavioral problems reported post-intervention, and increased social connections with surfing peers (colpus, 2014; matos et al., 2017; godfrey et al., 2015; hignett et al., 2018; morgan, 2010; rolfe, 2015; snelling, 2015; marshall, 2019). for youth with disabilities, results included improvements in physical fitness, selfconfidence, social development, behavior and sleep, and reduced levels of anxiety (armitano et al.,2015; cavanaugh & rademacher, 2014; clapham et al., 2014; lopes, 2015; moore et al., 2018; mueller, 2017). for veteran and active duty service member populations, surf therapy reportedly provided respite from the symptoms of ptsd, decreased levels of stress, anxiety, depressive symptoms and use of narcotics, increased affect, and improvements in pain management (caddick,2014; caddick et al., 2015a; caddick et al., 2015b; fleischmann et al., 2011; rogers et al., 2014; walters, 2019a). for adults recovering from addiction, surfing has the potential to support mindful embodiment, developing secure attachment, and self-empowerment (harris, 2015). research gaps and recommendations studies from six countries were included in the literature, however the authors of this review are aware of surf therapy programs occurring in a number of additional countries and regions that were not represented in the research literature (international surf therapy organization, 2019). overall, there is a lack of generalizability of the research results, due to small sample sizes, lack of control groups, biases potentially skewing data collection, confounding factors, lack of validated standardized measures, and significant variability in surf conditions (caddick, 2015; fleischmann, 2011; harris, 2015; rogers, et al., 2014; & rosenberg, et al., 2014). further research exploring the impact of surf therapy among additional populations, cultures, and socioeconomic groups would contribute towards our understanding of the effectiveness of surf therapy across a diverse range of populations. a range of therapeutic measures and benefits were included in the literature, especially related to occupational and psychological therapies. it would be http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 beneficial to compare how surf therapy outcomes differed across mental health diagnoses and its utility for the treatment of additional psychological disorders beyond addiction, ptsd, depression and stressrelated disorders. furthermore, there is a need for critical outcomes to be identified within each surf therapy focus area and measures established to evaluate these outcomes across studies. currently, there are a myriad of measures used across studies, however there is not a way to compare across findings given so much variability in the measures used. the use of validated or established measures would be important to include in assessment. in the cases in which measures do not exist to evaluate a certain construct, care should be used in developing and validating new measures. however, given the diversity of surf therapy programs operating in culturally and linguistically diverse groups, researchers should use caution when utilizing surveys designed to measure constructs within a particular culture with other cultural groups. the field of surf therapy could benefit from a deliberate design of a survey constructed specifically for comparative research purposes. there is an additional gap in the literature understanding both the immediate and longterm effects of surf therapy programs and interventions. although several studies included a follow-up from between two weeks to three months (see cavanaugh, 2014; godfrey et al, 2015; walters et al., 2019a), none of the studies included a follow-up for a time-period beyond one year. this highlights the need for longitudinal research designs to better understand the long-term impact of the programs and outcomes for participants, especially after the termination of the surf therapy program. it also poses additional questions around the appropriate time frame, quantity, and quality of interventions for sustaining long-term improvements in physical and psychological health and wellbeing. the field additionally needs studies that at least use control groups, if not randomization, so that we can better understand if surf therapy is producing the outcomes we are measuring or if they are attributable to other factors (i.e., time, other treatment). a limitation of the literature is that it is likely that many surf therapy participants are receiving other forms of treatment or care, but that most studies fail to assess or to statistically account for other treatment use. from a health promotion perspective, individual health outcomes, such as those measured through surf therapy interventions, are recognized to be interconnected to other social determinants of health, defined as “the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age” (who, 2008). these conditions are inclusive of societal structures, institutions, policies, and distributions of power and resources and mediated by social interactions. further research on surf therapy within a social determinants of health framework is needed to better understand how surf therapy can be utilized as a social mechanism contributing to community health outcomes within specific socio-cultural contexts and amongst diverse participants. this would additionally allow for investigation of how other social determinants (i.e. schools, parents, policymakers) can be leveraged within surf therapy to improve and sustain health outcomes. recommendations for surf therapy practice many of the surf therapy interventions were facilitated by licensed clinicians such as psychotherapists, behavioral therapists, clinical psychologists, and physical and occupational therapists who integrated their clinical training and techniques into the surfing environment. other surf therapy interventions, however, were structured within a health promotion design. this type of design focused on improving mental http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 and/or physical health outcomes by strengthening well-being, more broadly defined as feeling good and functioning well (wahlbeck, 2017). within both of these frameworks, it is important to consider whether surf therapy is a stand-alone intervention or an adjunctive intervention and if this differs by population and contributes towards different outcomes. the existing studies are focused on establishing outcomes of surf therapy, but the mechanisms of how surf therapy works are not well understood. there has been some work on social support by caddick (caddick, 2014; caddick, 2015ab), marshall et al. (2019), and rolfe (2015) that address this aspect. for example, marshall et al. (2019) attempted to identify the core categories of surf therapy using program theory in order to understand how antecedent categories including the challenges presented by the ocean waves, removing perceptions of failure, as well as the support provided by the surf instructors result in improved mental health outcomes. these core categories can be used by surf therapy instructors and researchers to better understand the process by which surf therapy improves the self-confidence and self-esteem of participants. rolfe (2015) evaluated the quality of the surf coach training in relation to its impact on surf therapy program outcomes. she identified a number of areas such as the quality of coach recruitment criteria along with adequate surfing equipment as posing threats to the successful implementation and outcomes of surf therapy programs. several the surf therapy programs aimed to improve outcomes related to self-concept, self-efficacy, and self-esteem (cavanaugh & rademacher, 2014; godfrey, 2015; fleischmann et al., 2017; rolfe, 2015; rosenberg et al., 2014 snelling, 2015). selfconcept has been linked to a number of adverse social and emotional health outcomes such as aggression, depression, eating disorders, adjustment problems, suicide, and shame, and is therefore considered a critical component of therapeutic programs (demaray et al., 2009; margolin & gordis, 2007; mclean et al., 2010; neff, 2007; parkes, 2007). within the research literature, the majority of these programs focused on measuring individuallevel changes in self-concept through the use of various standardized measures. understanding and improving aspects of an individual’s self-concept additionally encompasses components beyond the individual’s thoughts and behavior as captured within the current measures, such as the social, cultural, and historical environment (egan & perry, 1998; rogers et. al, 2014). taking this into consideration within the design of surf therapy programs is especially important given the social and historical context of surfing, which in many regions has been considered a ‘white’ and ‘male’ dominated sport and a marker of exclusivity and privilege (see thompson, 2011). many of the studies acknowledge female program directors, staff members and participants from a spectrum of socioeconomic backgrounds and racial and cultural groups. further research is needed within the context of surf therapy to examine the diversity or lack thereof in this sector and its impact on the participants’ outcomes. surf therapy interventions, especially those that prioritize ‘marginalized’ or ‘underserved’ populations, should account for structural features that perpetuate physical and psychological health disparities and social exclusion, and be inclusive of strategies for addressing these within the intervention designs. the way surf therapy interventions are designed could have a broader impact on social transformation that supports health or could perpetuate existing power structures that continue to marginalize the health of the populations (i.e. underserved youth) they are intended to serve. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 finally, the literature provides important implications regarding the appropriate time frame and quantity of the intervention programs. due to the variability of the surf therapy interventions and the lack of strongevidence base, it is not possible to generalize the results to confidently make specifications regarding the appropriate dose required to achieve therapeutic outcomes. additionally, there remains little evidence supporting the sustainability of these outcomes over time. however, surf therapy appears to have a wide range of benefits within programs ranging from a couple of hours to six months. considering the timeframe of an intervention should align with the program’s ultimate goals and aims. for example, for a program that seeks to improve the affective experience of an individual and their sense of selfefficacy, a one-day surf session might be appropriate to achieve such outcomes. on the other hand, a program that is seeking to improve sustained mental health outcomes for individuals with mental illness or a program aiming to see significant changes in physical capabilities for children with disabilities, may require long-term engagement and sustained contact with the participants. the appropriate time frame and dosage may also be dependent on whether the surf therapy intervention is a standalone program or in conjunction with an additional program or treatment plan. in terms of supporting sustained health outcomes, interventions that include participants and supporting individuals such as parents, siblings, and significant others could enhance the likelihood that the surfing will continue once participants have completed the program. it is also important to consider the socio-economic background of the participants, that could pose additional barriers to the continuity of surfing even when both the child and the parent have been provided with the skillset to continue after completing the surf therapy program (e.g. resources such as transportation, disposable income to purchase surfing equipment). creating a surf club for participants to sustain the surfing and social support aspects of a program could be an additional way of addressing the issue of sustained outcomes for health and well-being. this is consistent with the findings of godfrey et al. (2015). conclusion this scoping review provided an overview of the current scientific evidence related to surf therapy. this included a description of surf therapy’s physical, psychological, and social benefits. it additionally provided a detailed description of existing research methods and measures used to evaluate the impact of surfing as a therapeutic intervention that could inform further research designs. it also provided support for surf therapy as a means of improving both physical and psychosocial health outcomes, and included recommendations for improving surf therapy research and practice. further research is needed to explore context-specific aspects of surf therapy that should be taken into consideration when working within various cultures and subpopulations. there is a need for critical outcomes to be identified within each surf therapy focus area and measures established to evaluate these outcomes across studies. research is also needed to analyze the long-term impact and sustainability of surf therapy programs and to gain a better understanding of the appropriate time frame, quantity, and quality of interventions for sustaining long-term improvements in physical and psychosocial health and wellbeing. references armitano c., clapham, e.d., lamont, l. & audette, j. 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(2014). high-intensity sports for posttraumatic stress disorder and depression: feasibility study of ocean http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 therapy with veterans of operation enduring freedom and operation iraqi freedom. american journal of occupational therapy, (68), 395-404. rolfe, e. (2015). a formative evaluation of the development and implementation of the waves for change coach training programme: a programme evaluation (master’s thesis). university of cape town, cape town, south africa. rosenberg, m. (1965). society and the adolescent child. princeton, nj: princeton university press. rosenberg, r. s., lange, w., zebrack, b., moulton, s., & kosslyn, s. m. 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(2019a). comparison of surf and hike therapy for active duty service members with major depressive disorder: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial of novel interventions in a naturalistic setting. contemporary clinical trials communications, (16), 100435. walter, k. h., otis, n. p., ray, t. n., glassman, l. h., michalewicz-kragh, b., powell, a. l., & thomsen, c. j. (2019b). breaking the surface: psychological outcomes among us active duty service members following a surf therapy program. psychology of sport and exercise, (45) 101551. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychs port.2019.101551 weathers, f., litz, b., herman, d., huska, j., & keane, t. (1993, october). the ptsd checklist (pcl): reliability, validity, and diagnostic utility. paper presented at the meeting of the international society for traumatic stress studies, san antonio, tx. wells, m., williams, b., firnigl, d., lang, h., coyle, j., kroll, t., & macgillivray, s. (2013). supporting ‘work‐related goals’ rather than ‘return to work after cancer? a systematic review and meta‐synthesis of 25 qualitative studies. psycho-oncology, 22(6), 1208–1219. wheaton, b., roy, g. & olive, r. (2017). exploring critical alternatives for youth development through lifestyle sport: surfing and community development in aotearoa/new zealand. sustainability, 9, 2298. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://electra.lmu.edu:2070/10.1080/07347332.2014.936652 https://electra.lmu.edu:2070/10.1080/07347332.2014.936652 global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 winnick, j.p., & short, ex. (1999). the brockport physical fitness test. champaign, il: human kinetics. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 table 1 characteristics of studies on surf therapy included in the scoping review author(s) population(s) focus of therapy research design sample size measures armitano et al., (2015) youth with disabilities physical strength/fitness, physiological health observational pretest-posttest 16 brockport physical fitness test manual britton et al., (2018) children, youth & adults with mental health conditions/ in need of social & emotional support general health/well-being systematic review 33 studies literature review caddick (2014) veterans with ptsd psychological/mental health narrative* 16 participant observation semi-structured lifehistory interviews follow-up interviews caddick et al., (2015a) veterans with ptsd psychological/mental health narrative 16 interviews participant observation caddick et al., (2015b) veterans with ptsd general health/well-being narrative 15 interviews cavanaugh & rademacher (2014) youth with asd psychosocial well-being observational pretestposttest, case study 11 social skills improvement system piers-harris children’s self concept the surf skills checklist the surf camp curriculum activity observation checklist clapham et al., (2014) youth with disabilities psychological/mental health narrative* 16 participant observation semi-structured lifehistory interviews follow-up interviews clapham, et al., (2019) youth with disabilities physical fitness observational pretest-posttest 91 brockport physical fitness test manual colpus & taylor (2014) youth in need of social & emotional support psychological/mental health observational pretest72 attendance sheets pre and post course rating scale http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 posttest, case study client, parent/caretaker feedback forms focus groups crawford (2016) veterans with ptsd psychological/mental health observational pretestposttestfollow-up * 95 general self efficacy (gse) assessment beck depression inventory (bdi-ii) posttraumatic checklist (pcl 5) fleischmann et al., (2011) active duty service member with physical and psychological health conditions physical health/psychological/mental health/psychosocial wellbeing case study 1 patient report/chart review godfrey et al., (2015) youth in need of social & emotional support psychosocial well-being observational pretestposttest, case study 84 stirling children’s wellbeing scale (scwbs) rosenberg self esteem scale qualitative interviews harris (2015) adults with addiction, mental health issues & co-occurring disorders psychological/mental health phenomenology not stated participant observation hignett et al., (2018) youth in need of social & emotional support physical strength/fitness, physiological health psychosocial well-being observational pretest-posttest 58 parent-child interaction system (parchisy) physiological measures (heart rate, blood pressure) inclusion of nature in the self scare (ins) youth version of the british panel household survey (bphs-y) section on participants wellbeing lopes (2015) youth & adults with disabilities physical strength/fitness, physiological health case study 321 demographic records & program information http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 psychological/mental health psychosocial well-being lopes et al., (2018) youth & adults with disabilities physical strength/fitness, physiological health general health/well-being psychosocial well-being case study 187 literature review observational & program data marshall et al., (2019) youth with mental health conditions psychological/mental health psychosocial well-being grounded theory 22 interviews matos et al., (2017) institutionalized youth psychological/mental health observational pretest-posttest 48 strengths and difficulties questionnaire youth experiences survey moore et al., (2018) youth with disabilities physical strength/fitness, physiological health psychosocial well-being case study 15 children 10 parents parent & child interviews morgan (2010) children in need of social & emotional support general health/well-being qualitative evaluation 8 children 7 parents parent & child interviews focus groups moroney (2017) children, youth & adults with mental health conditions/ in need of social & emotional support psychological/mental health literature review* not stated systematic literature search mueller (2017) children & youth with asd psychosocial well-being ethnography/ case study 8 field notes, informal interviews with subjects’ parents, instructors and follow-up email with parents rogers et al., (2014) veterans with ptsd & depressive symptoms psychological/mental health observational pretest-posttest 11 ptsd checklist-military version (pcl-m); major depression inventory (mdi) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 rolfe (2015) youth/ surf therapy coaches psychosocial well-being formative evaluation/ case study 17 interviews, focus groups rosenberg et al, (2014) young adult cancer survivors psychosocial well-being experimental pre-test/posttest 492 body image scale self-compassion scale psychological screening inventory snelling (2015) youth in need of social & emotional support psychosocial well-being experimental randomized control trial; program evaluation* 115 children's hope scale strengths and difficulties questionnaire the social and health assessments scales (saha) wheaton et al., (2017) adults with disabilities psychosocial well-being grounded theory 8 interviews walter et al., (2019a) active duty service members with psychological or physical conditions psychological/mental health observational single-group, longitudinal design 74 patient health questionnaire (phq-8) generalized anxiety disorder 7-item scale ptsd checklist for dsm5 (lec-5) positive and negative affect schedule (panas) numeric pain rating scale (nprs) insomnia severity index (isi) client satisfaction questionnaire (csq-8) walter et al., (2019b) active duty service members with major depressive disorder psychological/mental health physical strength/fitness, physiological health experimental randomized control trial 110 checklist for dsm-5 tbi identification method (osu tbi-id-sf) insomnia severity index positive and negative affect schedule http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 4-item response to stressful events scale short form health survey (sf-36v2) treatment utilization questionnaire borg rating of perceived exertion scale the athletic identity measurement scale (aims) international physical activity questionnaire-sf fitbit physiological measures *dissertation or thesis http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 appendix scoping review references 1. armitano c., clapham, e.d., lamont, l. & audette, j. (2015). benefits of surfing for children with disabilities: a pilot study. palaestra, 29. 2. britton, e., kindermann, g., domegan, c. & carlin, c. (2018). blue care: a systematic review of blue space interventions for health and wellbeing. health promotion international, 1-20. doi: 10.1093/heapro/day103 3. caddick, n. (2014). a narrative study of the lives of “combat surfers”: suffering and surfing in the aftermath of war (doctoral thesis). loughborough university, london, england. 4. caddick, n., smith, b. & phoenix, c. (2015a) male combat veterans' narratives of ptsd, masculinity, and health. sociology of health & illness, 37(1), 97–111. https://electra.lmu.edu:2070/10.1111/1467-9566.12183 5. caddick, n., smith, b. & phoenix, c. (2015b) the effects of surfing and the natural environment on the well-being of combat veterans. qualitative health research, 25, 76–86. 6. cavanaugh, l. c. & rademacher, s.b. (2014). how a surfing social skills curriculum can impact children with autism spectrum disorders. journal of the international association of special education, 15(1), 27-35. 7. clapham, e.d., armitano, c.n., lamont, l.s. & audette, j.g. (2014). the ocean as a unique therapeutic environment: developing a surfing program. journal of physical education, recreation & dance 85, 8-14. 8. clapham, e. d., lamont, l. s., shim, m., lateef, s., & armitano, c. n. (2019). effectiveness of surf therapy for children with disabilities. disability and health journal, 100828. 9. colpus, s. & taylor, j. (2014). ride every challenge: the impact of surfing on 100 young people facing personal and emotional challenges. british journal of sports medicine, 48, 1581. 10. crawford, r. (2016). the impact of ocean therapy on veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (doctoral dissertation). available from proquest dissertations & theses global database. (no. 10252268) 11. fleischmann, d., michalewicz, b., stedje-larsen, e., neff, j., murphy, j., browning, k., nebeker, b., cronin, a., sauve, w., & stetler, s., herriman, l., mclay, r. (2011). surf medicine: surfing as a means of therapy for combat-related polytrauma. journal of prosthetics and orthotics, 23(1), p. 27. doi:10.1097/jpo.0b013e3182065316 12. godfrey, c., devine-wright, h. & taylor, j. (2015). the positive impact of structured http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://electra.lmu.edu:2070/10.1111/1467-9566.12183 global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 surfing courses on the wellbeing of vulnerable young people. community practice (88) 26-29. 13. harris, k. (2015). working through addiction through surf therapy: a phenomenological exploration of healing (master’s thesis). pacifica graduate institute, santa barbara, california, usa. 14. hignett, a., white, m.p., pahl, s., jenkin, r. & froy, m.l., (2018). evaluation of a surfing programme designed to increase personal well-being and connectedness to the natural environment among ‘at risk’ young people. journal of adventure education and outdoor learning, 18(1), 53-69. doi: 10.1080/14729679.2017.1326829 15. lopes, j. t., (2015). adapted surfing as a tool to promote inclusion and rising disability awareness in portugal. journal of sport for development, 3, 4-10. 16. lopes, j.t., masdemont, m. & cruz, g.m.v., (2018). adaptive surfing: leisure, competition or therapy? brazilian journal of education, 11(1), 148-159. 17. marshall, j., kelly, p., & niven, a. (2019). “when i go there, i feel like i can be myself.” exploring programme theory within the wave project surf therapy intervention. international journal of environmental research and public health, 16(12), 2159. 18. matos, m.g., santos, a., fauvelet, c., marta, f., evangelista, e.s.(2017) surfing for social integration: mental health and well-being promotion through surf therapy among institutionalized young people. j community med public health care (4) 026. 19. moore, a.m., clapham, e.d. & deeney, t.a. (2018). parents’ perspectives on surf therapy for children with disabilities. international journal of disability, development and education, 65(3), 304-317. doi: 10.1080/1034912x.2017.1400660 20. morgan, p. (2010). get up. stand up. riding to resilience on a surfboard. child and family social work, 15, 56-65. 21. moroney, c. (2017). surf and ocean therapy as a creative and expressive model for mental health (master's thesis). marymount manhattan college, nyc, ny, usa. 22. mueller, m. (2017). surf therapy for students with asd (unpublished doctoral dissertation). california state university, san marcos. 23. rogers, c. m., mallinson, t. & peppers, d. (2014). high-intensity sports for posttraumatic stress disorder and depression: feasibility study of ocean therapy with veterans of operation enduring freedom and operation iraqi freedom. american journal of occupational therapy, (68), 395-404. 24. rolfe, e. (2015). a formative evaluation of the development and implementation of the waves for change coach training programme: a programme evaluation (master’s thesis). university of cape town, cape town, south africa. 25. rosenberg, r. s., lange, w., zebrack, b., moulton, s., & kosslyn, s. m. (2014). an http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 outdoor adventure program for young adults with cancer: positive effects on body image and psychosocial functioning. journal of psychosocial oncology, 32(5), 622–636. https://electra.lmu.edu:2070/10.1080/07347332.2014.936652 26. snelling, m. (2015). breaking cycles of violence, one wave at a time: a formative evaluation of the waves for change surf therapy programme (master's thesis). university of cape town, cape town south africa. 27. walter, k. h., otis, n. p., glassman, l. h., ray, t. n., michalewicz-kragh, b., elliott, k. t. k., & thomsen, c. j. (2019a). comparison of surf and hike therapy for active duty service members with major depressive disorder: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial of novel interventions in a naturalistic setting. contemporary clinical trials communications, (16), 100435. 28. walter, k. h., otis, n. p., ray, t. n., glassman, l. h., michalewicz-kragh, b., powell, a. l., & thomsen, c. j. (2019b). breaking the surface: psychological outcomes among us active duty service members following a surf therapy program. psychology of sport and exercise, (45) 101551.doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2019.101551 29. wheaton, b., roy, g. & olive, r. (2017). exploring critical alternatives for youth development through lifestyle sport: surfing and community development in aotearoa/new zealand. sustainability, 9, 2298 http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://electra.lmu.edu:2070/10.1080/07347332.2014.936652 effects of ptsd and mdd comorbidity on psychological changes during surf therapy sessions for active duty service members nicholas p. otis1,2, kristen h. walter1, lisa h. glassman1,2, travis n. ray1,2, betty michalewicz-kragh3, and cynthia j. thomsen1 keywords: physical activity, posttraumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, comorbidity, surf therapy, military author biographies: nicholas p. otis, senior research associate at the naval health research center in san diego. he received bachelor of science degrees in kinesiology and global nutrition from the university of massachusetts amherst, where he was endorsed for a marshall scholarship. he is primarily interested in the impact of geography on health, such as the impact of natural environments on psychological outcomes, and the nuances of locality on nutritional outcomes. nick’s early career has been dedicated to improving the health outcomes of understudied populations in these domains. kristen h. walter, clinical research psychologist at the naval health research center in san diego, california, where she investigates the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd) and conditions that commonly co-occur with ptsd, such as major depressive disorder (mdd), and traumatic brain injury. dr. walter explores both evidence-based treatments for ptsd and co-occurring conditions, as well as complementary and alternative approaches. she is an investigator on several department of defense-funded trials, including randomized controlled trials comparing evidence-based psychotherapies for co-occurring ptsd/mdd and another comparing two activity-based interventions (surf and hike therapy) for mdd. she is also a privileged clinical provider at naval medical center san diego and a licensed psychologist in the states of california and ohio. lisa glassman, clinical and research psychologist at the naval health research center in san diego. she received her ph.d. in clinical psychology from drexel university and held a joint appointment at va san diego and the university of california, san diego for her pre-doctoral internship and post-doctoral fellowship. dr. glassman’s research is dedicated to improving service delivery within active-duty populations. specifically, her research is focused on increasing access to care, enhancing quality of life, and improving the clinical effectiveness and efficiency of evidence-based interventions. she leverages technology (e.g., video teleconferencing, mobile apps) to improve treatment delivery, conducts program evaluations and clinical trials in understudied populations, and is an advocate for institutional change to ensure that evidence-based practices are effectively and 1 health and behavioral sciences department, naval health research center, san diego, ca 2 leidos, san diego, ca 3 health and wellness department, naval medical center, san diego, ca global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 broadly implemented. dr. glassman also has clinical expertise in the delivery of evidence-based psychological interventions for mood, anxiety, and trauma-related conditions. travis n. ray, received a bachelor of arts in psychology from point loma nazarene university and a master of science in psychology from oakland university. travis currently is a doctor of philosophy student at oakland university, concentrating in social and health psychology. his interests fall within two primary lines of research. the first examines masculinity and how it relates to violence and aggression. the second examines the interconnectedness between individuals and the natural environment, such as the psychological benefits of being in nature and predictors of pro-environmental behavior. travis also works as a research associate at the naval health research center, where he assists with research examining military sexual assault, the interpersonal experiences of lesbian, gay, and bisexual military personnel, as well as the psychological effects of surfing. betty michalewicz-kragh, exercise physiologist and program manager of the surf therapy program at naval medical center san diego. as an exercise physiologist, she believes that people are better able to cope with life’s challenges if they are active and spend ample time outdoors. betty was a founder of the surf therapy program and has provided surf therapy to wounded, ill, and injured service members for over 12 years. the program offers a holistic way to manage posttraumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, and other psychological and physical conditions. as part of her regular outdoor self-care, betty spends time enjoying the beach with her family and friends, surfing, swimming, running, practicing yoga, and stand up paddle boarding with her dog, fiji. cynthia j. thomsen, research psychologist at the naval health research center in san diego, ca. for over twenty years, she has studied military stressors and their effects on service members’ mental and behavioral health. dr. thomsen’s research has focused on a range of adverse outcomes, including sexual, family, and workplace violence; suicidal behavior; impaired decision-making and performance; substance abuse; mental health problems such as ptsd and depression; and health disparities. in addition to research focused on identifying risk and protective factors for psychological health issues, dr. thomsen and her team also develop and test interventions to prevent service members from developing health problems and to mitigate existing problems. recommended citation: otis, n. p., walter, k. h., glassman, l. h., ray, t. n., michalewicz-kragh, & thomsen, c. j. (2020). global journal of community psychology practice, 11(2), 1 – 23. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjccp.org/). corresponding author: nicholas p. otis, health and behavioral sciences department, naval health research center, 140 sylvester road, san diego, ca 92106-3521. email: nicholas.p.otis.ctr@mail.mil http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjccp.org/ mailto:nicholas.p.otis.ctr@mail.mil global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 effects of ptsd and mdd comorbidity on psychological changes during surf therapy sessions for active duty service members abstract together, posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd) and major depressive disorder (mdd) are debilitating and commonly comorbid; however, the effects of this comorbidity on psychological outcomes during exercise programs, such as surf therapy, have not been examined. this study compared changes in depression/anxiety and positive affect during surf therapy sessions between active duty service members with comorbid ptsd and mdd and those with either disorder alone. the study applied dsm-5 criteria to baseline self-report measures to assign probable disorder status, and used a longitudinal design involving repeated measurements to assess outcomes within 6 weekly sessions. service members completed validated self-report questionnaires using the patient health questionnaire-4 and the positive affect schedule before and after each session. within surf therapy sessions, both the comorbid and single disorder groups reported significant improvements in symptoms of depression/anxiety and positive affect. however, those with comorbid ptsd and mdd experienced significantly greater reductions in depression/anxiety (β = −1.22, p = .028) and significantly greater improvements in positive affect (β = 3.94, p = .046) compared with the single disorder group. surf therapy appears to have global effects on psychological symptom reduction and may be a useful adjunctive intervention for the treatment of comorbid ptsd and mdd in both clinical and community health settings. posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd), a psychiatric disorder that can result following exposure to a traumatic event, occurs among both civilian and military populations. although estimates vary (creamer, wade, fletcher, & forbes, 2011; sundin, fear, iversen, rona, & wessely, 2010), metaanalytic results estimate that 23% of u.s. service members serving during the conflicts in iraq and afghanistan have ptsd (fulton et al., 2015). unfortunately, more often than not, individuals with ptsd also have one or more other psychological disorders—most commonly, major depressive disorder (mdd). approximately 50% of u.s. service members with ptsd also have a comorbid diagnosis of mdd (walter, levine, highfill-mcroy, navarro, & thomsen, 2018). compared to individuals with either disorder alone, those with this comorbidity exhibit more severe psychological symptoms (gradus et al., 2010; ikin, creamer, sim, & mckenzie, 2010; lindley, carlson, & hill, 2014; nixon, resick, & nishith, 2004; shalev et al., 1998; taft, resick, watkins, & panuzio, 2009; tural, onder, & aker, 2012), greater functional impairment (blanchard, buckley, hickling, & taylor, 1998), and a higher risk of suicide (jakupcak et al., 2009; panagioti, gooding, & tarrier, 2012). the high prevalence of this comorbidity, along with ensuing impairments, highlight the need for interventions that alleviate symptoms of comorbid ptsd and mdd and improve functioning. currently, the most efficacious treatments for ptsd are manualized, trauma-based psychotherapies (foa, keane, friedman, & cohen, 2008), and these are the primary treatments recommended by the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 departments of veterans affairs (va) and defense (dod; va, dod, & management of posttraumatic stress disorder work group, 2017). pharmacotherapy options, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, are also supported as treatment options for ptsd, albeit with weaker evidence for effectiveness or sustained improvements (lee et al., 2016; watts et al., 2013). for mdd, first-line treatments include several psychotherapies and pharmacotherapies that have shown effectiveness alone or in combination, depending on depression severity (va, dod, & management of major depressive disorder working group, 2016). although effective evidence-based treatments for both ptsd and mdd are available, these interventions present limitations, such as varied individual response to treatment (cipriani et al., 2009; steenkamp, litz, hoge, & marmar, 2015), limited accessibility (sayer et al., 2009), patient dropout (cooper & conklin, 2015; najavits, 2015), symptom relapse (hollon, thase, & markowitz, 2002), negative stigma (dickstein, vogt, handa, & litz, 2010; sharp et al., 2015), and side effects (papakostas, 2008). moreover, few treatments specifically address the comorbidity of ptsd and mdd (some exceptions include nixon & nearmy, 2011; strachan, gros, ruggiero, lejuez, & acierno, 2012; walter, glassman, hunt, otis, & thomsen, 2018), despite recommendations to develop integrated treatments to do so (najavits et al., 2008). for these reasons, there is a critical need to identify alternative and adjunctive interventions to optimally treat comorbid ptsd and mdd. physical activity is one type of alternative intervention that has been shown to improve symptoms among individuals with either ptsd (fetzner & asmundson, 2015; greer & vin-raviv, 2019; hegberg, hayes, & hayes, 2019; oppizzi & umberger, 2018; powers et al., 2015; rosenbaum, sherrington, & tiedemann, 2015; rosenbaum, vancampfort, et al., 2015; rosenbaum, stubbs, schuch, & vancampfort, 2017) or mdd (babyak et al., 2000; craft & landers, 1998; mota-pereira et al., 2011; schuch et al., 2016; silveira et al., 2013), suggesting that it may be an effective intervention option for those with both disorders. however, research examining the effects of exercise on psychological comorbidities is limited. the present study examines the effectiveness of one specific type of exercise-based intervention—surf therapy—for alleviating mental health symptoms among service members with comorbid ptsd and mdd. previous research on surf therapy emerging evidence indicates that surf therapy may improve psychological symptoms among service members and veterans with ptsd or mdd. in a study of u.s. service members participating in a 6-week surf therapy program (as a largely adjunctive intervention), walter and colleagues (2019) found clinically and statistically significant reductions in self-reported ptsd and depression symptoms from preto postprogram. they also found significant reductions in anxiety and negative affect, and increases in positive affect. notably, the magnitude of symptom change was greatest for service members with probable ptsd or probable mdd (based on self-report instruments) compared with the full sample. in addition to the changes from preto postprogram, immediate changes in psychological outcomes were found during surf therapy sessions; that is, within each session, depression/anxiety symptoms lessened and positive affect improved. importantly, the effect size for positive affect was the largest observed for any outcome, a critical finding given that emotional numbing and sad mood are impairing symptoms of ptsd and mdd that are often recalcitrant following otherwise successful treatment (larsen, fleming, & resick, 2019; mcclintock et al., 2011). additional studies have evaluated the benefits of surf therapy for symptoms of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 ptsd and mdd among veterans, with similar results. based on qualitative data, caddick, smith, and phoenix (2015) found that surfing improved both ptsd symptoms and psychological well-being in u.k. veterans. in a quantitative study with analogous results, rogers, mallinson, and peppers (2014) examined outcomes following a 5-week surf program among 14 u.s. veterans with ptsd, mdd, or both; levels of ptsd and depression symptoms were significantly lower after program completion. likewise, in an evaluation of a surf program for u.s. veterans with ptsd, crawford (2016) found that ptsd and depression symptoms decreased significantly from preto post-program and remained significantly reduced 30 days later. collectively, these findings suggest that surf therapy may be an effective intervention for service members with comorbid ptsd and mdd. why surf therapy? although research broadly supports the utility of physical activity for mental health symptoms (rosenbaum, tiedemann, sherrington, curtis, & ward, 2014; stubbs et al., 2017), evidence suggests that beneficial effects of physical activity on psychological health may be enhanced under specific conditions. for example, benefits of physical activity appear to be enhanced if the activity occurs in a natural environment (barton & pretty, 2010; bowler, buyung-ali, knight, & pullin, 2010; thompson coon et al., 2011), especially one near water (barton & pretty, 2010). in military/veteran samples, exercise involving water sports (e.g., kayaking, sailing, fly-fishing) has been shown to produce improvements in several psychological outcomes, including symptoms of ptsd, depression, anxiety, and negative affect (bennett, piatt, & van puymbroeck, 2017; gelkopf, hasson-ohayon, bikman, & kravetz, 2013; lundberg, bennett, & smith, 2011; scherer, gade, & yancosek, 2013). the fact that surf therapy occurs in a natural environment near water may enhance the positive impact of this type of intervention on psychological health. another factor that may make surf therapy particularly suited to addressing symptoms of ptsd and mdd is the fact that it can occur in a social setting involving interaction with others. social interaction has consistently been shown to produce improvements in psychological health (umberson & montez, 2010). the importance of social support in surf therapy has been supported by caddick and colleagues (2015), who found that u.k. veterans with ptsd participating in groupbased surf therapy reported feeling connected to others through this experience, rather than experiencing social isolation. other research also suggests that relationships developed around exercise, such as surf therapy, may create a sense of community based on shared experiences, and that this may increase the desire to develop social connections more generally (carless, peacock, mckenna, & cooke, 2013). this sense of connection and community may be particularly beneficial for service members or veterans seeking reintegration or the restoration of a community such as that found in service (caddick & smith, 2017). another aspect of surf therapy that may contribute to alleviating symptoms of comorbid ptsd and mdd is mindfulness. mindfulness—that is, awareness of the present moment—is a component of some existing treatments for ptsd or mdd (e.g., mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy). surf therapy may invoke mindfulness because it occurs in a unique environment that requires intense focus on one’s immediate surroundings in order to navigate shifting waves. the focused attention required for surfing may provide a temporary reprieve from symptoms of comorbid ptsd and mdd. based on qualitative interviews with u.k. veterans with ptsd, caddick and colleagues (2015) found that the mindfulness needed for surfing provided a respite from traumatic http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 memories and psychological symptoms. additionally, diversion from distressing symptoms may allow for the experience of positive emotions, which can be challenging for individuals with ptsd, mdd, or both. in sum, surf therapy offers the benefits associated with engaging in exercise in a natural, water-based setting, and can facilitate social connection and engender a state of mindfulness, thereby offering a respite from psychological symptoms. for these reasons, surf therapy may be a beneficial intervention for individuals with comorbid ptsd and mdd. the current study extends prior surf therapy research (walter et al., 2019) by comparing the benefits of surf therapy for improving psychological symptoms among active duty service members with probable comorbid ptsd and mdd (i.e., comorbid group) and those with either probable disorder alone (i.e., single disorder group). the effects of surf therapy are examined with respect to immediate changes in symptoms (depression/anxiety symptoms and positive affect) across each surf session attended. previous research has demonstrated that, following surf therapy, symptoms of ptsd and mdd significantly decreased among military service members or veterans with ptsd, mdd, or both (crawford, 2016; rogers et al., 2014; walter et al., 2019); however, no study to date has specifically evaluated the immediate psychological effects of surf therapy for those with both disorders, or compared their outcomes to the outcomes of individuals with either disorder alone. given the high prevalence and detrimental consequences of comorbid ptsd and mdd, it is critical to explore and identify treatments and adjunctive interventions that might be optimally suited to address this comorbidity. methods participants data were drawn from a larger study (see walter et al., 2019) that included u.s. active duty service members participating in a surf therapy program at naval medical center san diego (nmcsd). the study used broad inclusion criteria, excluding only those who had not received a medical clearance or who had previously participated in the surf therapy program. to be included in the current study, participants (n = 47) also must have met criteria for probable ptsd, probable mdd, or both (see measures). procedure active duty military personnel seeking surf therapy as part of their standard medical care at nmcsd provided voluntary, written informed consent. service members who did not wish to participate in the study received surf therapy as normal, but they did not complete study questionnaires and were not included in the sample. consenting participants completed an initial pre-program self-report questionnaire, which included assessments of probable ptsd and probable mdd. in addition, before and after each surf therapy session, participants completed brief self-report questionnaires assessing depression/anxiety symptoms and positive affect. all study procedures were approved by the nmcsd institutional review board. program the surf therapy program is part of the wounded, ill, and injured wellness program at nmcsd; it is an established program that incorporates therapeutic activities designed to rehabilitate service members suffering from physical or psychological impairments. the surf therapy program consists of 6 weekly sessions, each lasting three to four hours. each cohort consists of roughly 20 patients, and sessions occur on a public beach in southern california. participants are provided with necessary equipment (e.g., wet suits, surfboards) and assigned a surf instructor, who typically works with them for http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 the duration of the program to achieve individually tailored goals (e.g., comfort in the water; paddling; standing up). surf instructors are certified through the armed services young men’s christian association and receive basic training in patient safety, mental health (e.g., behaviors/symptoms associated with ptsd and mdd), and program policies and procedures. prior to each surf session, patients have the option of engaging in a beach yoga class. the program provided was the standard nmcsd surf therapy protocol; the only addition for purposes of the study was self-report assessments. measures pre-program survey. the pre-program survey assessed mental health symptoms (ptsd, depression, anxiety, and positive and negative affect), demographic and military characteristics, and concurrent treatment. these measures were used to characterize the sample and to categorize participants as having probable ptsd and/or probable mdd. probable ptsd. the ptsd checklist for dsm5 (pcl-5; weathers, litz, et al., 2013) assessed probable ptsd based on dsm-5 diagnostic criteria. this 20-item self-report measure asked respondents to indicate the extent to which they were bothered by each of the 20 symptoms over the past month (ranging from 0 [not at all] to 4 [extremely]). the pcl-5 also contains the extended version of the life events checklist for dsm-5 (lec-5; weathers, blake, et al., 2013), which assesses lifetime exposure to traumatic events. in accordance with dsm-5 criteria, participants were classified as having probable ptsd if they self-reported a criterion a traumatic event on the lec-5, and endorsed a score of 2 or higher (i.e., “moderately” to “extremely” bothersome) on at least one symptom in cluster b, one symptom in cluster c, two symptoms in cluster d, and two symptoms in cluster e. symptom severity scores were also computed by summing responses to each symptom item. internal consistency in the current sample was excellent (α = .92). probable mdd. the 8-item patient health questionnaire (phq-8; kroenke, strine, et al., 2009) was used to assess probable mdd in accordance with dsm-5 criteria. respondents indicated how often they had been bothered by each of eight symptoms over the past 2 weeks, ranging from 0 (not at all) to 3 (nearly every day). participants were classified as having probable mdd if they provided a rating of 2 or higher (i.e., “more than half the days” or “nearly every day”) on (a) at least one item assessing loss of interest and/or feeling down or depressed, and (b) at least four of the remaining six items. severity scores were computed by summing item responses (α = .83). anxiety symptoms. anxiety symptoms were assessed using the 7-item generalized anxiety disorder scale (gad-7; spitzer, kroenke, williams, & löwe, 2006). respondents rated the frequency with which they experienced each symptom in the past 2 weeks. severity scores were computed by summing item responses (α = .86). positive and negative affect. the positive and negative affect schedule (panas; watson, clark, & tellegen, 1988) was used to assess pre-program levels of positive and negative affect. the 20-item self-report instrument consists of 10 positive and 10 negative emotions; respondents rated how frequently they had experienced each emotion in the past several hours (ranging from 1 [very slightly or not at all] to 5 [extremely]). responses were summed to create separate indices of positive and negative affect (α = .88 and .85, respectively). within-session assessments. before and after each surf therapy session, participants completed brief measures of depression/anxiety symptoms and positive affect. data from these within-session http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 assessments were used for the main study analyses. depression and anxiety symptoms. the 4item patient health questionnaire (phq-4; kroenke, spitzer, williams, & lowe, 2009) assessed depression/anxiety symptoms. the phq-4 includes two depression items from the phq-8 and two anxiety items from the gad-7. participants rated how much they were currently bothered by each of the four items, ranging from 0 (not at all) to 3 (extremely). item responses were summed to compute a total depression/anxiety score before and after each surf therapy session (α = .75 at the initial pre-session assessment). positive affect. the positive affect schedule (pas), a 10-item subscale of the panas (watson et al., 1988), assessed positive affect at the preand post-session assessments. scores were computed as described previously (α = .91 at the initial pre-session assessment). data analysis analyses compared service members who met criteria for probable ptsd and mdd (n = 24) and those with a single disorder (either probable ptsd or probable mdd; n = 23) and were conducted using ibm spss statistics 25. initial analyses compared the individual and programmatic characteristics of service members in the comorbid and single disorder groups, using t tests for independent samples for continuous variables and chi-square tests of association or fisher’s exact tests (when expected cell counts were low) for categorical variables. multilevel modeling (mlm) was used to determine whether benefits of surf therapy differed for service members with and without comorbidity. mlm is a flexible statistical approach that was selected because of its advantages over traditional repeated measures analyses, including the accommodation of nested data (e.g., repeated measurement of service members within group) and estimation approaches to address the missing data often present in outcome research. separate two-level mlm models were run to examine changes in depression/anxiety symptoms and positive affect. results pre-program group comparisons of the 47 service members in the study sample, 51% (n = 24) met criteria for both ptsd and mdd, and 49% (n = 23) met criteria for only one disorder (ptsd, n = 16; mdd, n = 7). table 1 provides pre-program characteristics as well as program participation characteristics of participants in each group. the groups did not differ in demographic or military characteristics, the use of concurrent treatment, or the mean number of surf therapy sessions attended, although service members with comorbid disorders attended significantly fewer yoga sessions than those with a single disorder. significant differences between the comorbid and single disorder groups were evident with respect to the severity of mental health symptoms at pre-program. compared to service members with either disorder alone, those with comorbid ptsd and mdd endorsed significantly greater symptom severity of depression, ptsd, anxiety, and negative affect (see table 1). differences in pre-program levels of self-reported positive affect approached significance (p = .071). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 table 1 pre-program sample characteristics characteristic total sample (n = 47) comorbid ptsd and mdd (n = 24) either ptsd or mdd (n = 23) n (%) n (%) n (%) gender male 26 (55.3) 12 (50.0) 14 (60.9) female 21 (44.7) 12 (50.0) 9 (39.1) service branch navy 37 (78.7) 19 (79.2) 18 (78.3) marine corps & coast guard 9 (19.1) 5 (20.8) 4 (17.4) ranka e1–e4 19 (40.4) 11 (45.8) 8 (34.8) e5–e9 20 (42.5) 10 (41.7) 10 (43.4) officer 6 (12.8) 2 (8.3) 4 (17.4) concurrent treatment any treatment 37 (78.7) 17 (70.8) 20 (87.0) psychiatry 14 (29.8) 5 (20.8) 9 (39.1) psychotherapy 23 (48.9) 12 (50.0) 11 (47.8) health and wellness 23 (48.9) 9 (37.5) 14 (60.9) m (sd) m (sd) m (sd) age, years 29.6 (8.4) 28.4 (6.6) 30.9 (10.0) sessions attended surf therapy 4.4 (1.7) 4.6 (1.6) 4.3 (1.7) yoga 1.3 (1.7) 0.8 (1.4)* 1.9 (1.8) pre-program measures phq-8 15.0 (5.4) 18.4 (3.0)*** 11.4 (5.0) pcl-5 52.8 (15.3) 58.0 (12.2)* 47.3 (16.6)b gad-7 14.7 (5.0) 17.1 (2.9)** 12.3 (5.6) pas 23.1 (8.1) 21.0 (6.2) 25.3 (9.4) nas 28.3 (8.6) 31.3 (8.5)* 25.3 (7.8) note. ptsd = posttraumatic stress disorder; mdd = major depressive disorder; e = enlisted rank; phq-8 = 8item patient health questionnaire; pcl-5 = ptsd checklist for dsm-5; dsm-5 = diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, fifth edition; gad-7 = 7-item generalized anxiety disorder scale; pas = positive affect schedule; nas = negative affect schedule. ptsd and mdd diagnoses were based on dsm-5 criteria applied to self-report measures, and are therefore probable. marine corps and coast guard categories were combined due to small cell size. because concurrent treatment categories are not mutually exclusive, the sum across treatment categories is greater than 100%. for other columns, totals may not sum to sample numbers or percentages due to missing data. asterisks indicate significant difference between comorbid and individual disorder groups. arank variables could not be further combined in a meaningful way, and thus were not analyzed due to low cell count. bpre-program scores of ptsd symptom severity were used to describe the entire sample, even though some service members in the single disorder group did not have ptsd, but rather mdd only (n = 7). *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 preto post-surf session analyses in the first step of each mlm model, the intercept and random time slope were entered; time was coded as 0 (pre-session; intercept) and 1 (post-session). in the second step, between-subjects grouping variables were added to the model as fixed effects. these included comorbidity status (0 = single disorder, 1 = comorbid disorders), week of session (1–6), and number of yoga sessions attended (0–6). in the third step, two interactions were added to the model (time × comorbidity, time × week). model specifications consisted of intercept as random, time as repeated (and linear), covariance structure as unstructured, and the estimation approach to account for missing data as restricted maximum likelihood. continuous predictors were grand-mean centered. initial mlm models for both depression/anxiety and positive affect showed significant variation for time and intercept variables (ps < .001), allowing for additional variables to be added in ensuing steps. in the second step, the number of yoga sessions attended was not significantly associated with outcomes (ps = .697-.970), indicating that yoga attendance was unrelated to phq-4 and pas scores. this variable was therefore dropped. the final models thus included the intercept, three main effects (time, comorbidity status, and week), and two interactions (time × comorbidity, time × week). results from the final mlm models for both outcome variables are provided in table 2. mean scores on each of the outcome variables across and within sessions, separately for individuals in the comorbid and single disorder groups, are provided in figure 1. for both outcomes, a significant main effect of time indicated that across all participants, outcomes improved from preto post-session (ps < .001). that is, on average, depression/anxiety symptoms decreased from preto post-session, and positive affect increased. the main effect of comorbidity status was also significant for both outcomes, indicating that overall, participants with comorbid ptsd and mdd endorsed greater depression/anxiety (p < .001) and lower positive affect (p = .006) than those with a single disorder. table 2 summary of final multilevel analyses examining ptsd and mdd comorbidity status on preto post-session change for outcome variables variable phq-4 pas β (se) intercept 9.21 (0.91)*** 18.77 (3.10)*** time (within session) −3.19 (0.55)*** 6.96 (1.79)*** week of session 0.07 (0.21) 0.14 (0.63) comorbidity status 3.35 (0.94)*** −10.16 (3.50)** time × week of session –0.06 (0.13) 0.26 (0.40) time × comorbidity status −1.22 (0.54)* 3.94 (1.92)* note. ptsd = posttraumatic stress disorder; mdd = major depressive disorder; phq-4 = 4-item patient health questionnaire; pas = positive affect schedule; dsm-5 = diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, fifth edition. probable ptsd and mdd diagnoses were based on dsm-5 diagnostic criteria applied to self-report measures. comorbidity status refers to grouping variable for participants who met probable criteria for ptsd and mdd (coded as 1) and those who met criteria for either disorder alone (coded as 0). *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 figure 1. means of preto post-session outcomes by comorbidity status. phq-4 = 4-item patient health questionnaire; mdd = major depressive disorder; pas = positive affect schedule; ptsd = posttraumatic stress disorder. interactions. for both outcomes, the interaction between time and week was not significant (ps = .513-.665), suggesting that the degree of change within surf therapy sessions was consistent over the course of the six weekly sessions. however, the interaction between time and comorbidity status was statistically significant for both depression/anxiety and positive affect. depression/anxiety. for depression/anxiety, the interaction between time and comorbidity status was statistically significant (p = .028), reflecting the fact that participants in the comorbid group 0.00 1.00 2.00 3.00 4.00 5.00 6.00 7.00 8.00 9.00 10.00 pre 1 post 1 pre 2 post 2 pre 3 post 3 pre 4 post 4 pre 5 post 5 pre 6 post 6 session 1 session 2 session 3 session 4 session 5 session 6 m ea n p h q -4 s co re phq-4 ptsd or mdd (single disorder) ptsd and mdd (comorbid) 0.00 5.00 10.00 15.00 20.00 25.00 30.00 35.00 40.00 45.00 pre 1 post 1 pre 2 post 2 pre 3 post 3 pre 4 post 4 pre 5 post 5 pre 6 post 6 session 1 session 2 session 3 session 4 session 5 session 6 m ea n p a s s co re pas ptsd or mdd (single disorder) ptsd and mdd (comorbid) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 experienced greater reductions in depression/anxiety symptoms over the course of surf therapy sessions than did those with a single disorder. specifically, adjusting for other predictors, those with comorbid ptsd and mdd decreased by an average of 4.41 points, while those with either disorder decreased by an average of 3.19 points. moreover, independent group t tests showed that the comorbid and single disorder groups had statistically different average pre-session phq-4 scores (mdiff = 2.12, p < .001), but the two groups did not differ on average postsession scores (mdiff = 1.01, p = .065). these results indicate differing average trajectories. positive affect. patterns of change were similar for positive affect. a significant interaction of time by comorbidity status (p = .046) revealed that service members with comorbid conditions demonstrated greater average improvements in positive affect over surf therapy sessions than those with either disorder alone. in particular, when accounting for other predictors, service members with comorbid conditions increased their positive affect scores by an average of 10.90 points, compared with 6.96 points by those with either disorder alone. similar to the findings for depression/anxiety, independent t tests revealed that the comorbid and single disorder groups had statistically different average pas scores prior to participating in surf sessions (mdiff = 6.32, p = .012), but afterward they did not (mdiff = 1.79, p = .519), indicating differing trajectories of improvement. discussion ptsd and mdd comorbidity is debilitating and highly prevalent among military, veteran, and civilian populations. due to limitations in traditional treatment approaches, alternative and adjunctive interventions that reduce ptsd and mdd symptomology are critically needed. as an adjunctive treatment, surf therapy is an intervention that has been shown to improve the symptoms of each disorder alone. results from this study suggest that individuals with probable ptsd or mdd experience improvements in depression/anxiety and positive affect following surf therapy sessions. however, individuals with comorbid ptsd and mdd demonstrated even greater improvements in depression/anxiety and positive affect following surf sessions when compared with individuals who had one of the two conditions. these results echo findings reported in previous research among military/veteran populations with ptsd or mdd (crawford, 2016; rogers et al., 2014; walter et al., 2019). our findings add to the current body of literature by showing that surf therapy may be even more beneficial for individuals with both mdd and ptsd than for those with either disorder alone. individuals with both conditions began each session, on average, with significantly higher depression and significantly lower positive affect scores compared with their single disorder counterparts, yet they improved more. additionally, differences in average outcomes scores between groups were significant at pre-session but not at post-session. considering little attention has been given to the relationship of psychological comorbidities and exercise therapy outcomes, there is currently no literature to contextualize these findings. other comorbid outcomes research has investigated different treatments, measures, and time points (e.g., green et al., 2006; walter, barnes, & chard, 2012). overall, changes in depression/anxiety and positive affect following surf therapy sessions appear to be more beneficial for those with comorbid ptsd and mdd than for those with either disorder alone, although more research is needed to confirm our findings. there are various plausible explanations for the greater response to surf therapy sessions among individuals with comorbid ptsd and mdd. first, the effects of surf therapy may be http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 global in nature, and not specific to one disorder (e.g., trauma-focused treatment). by targeting multiple symptom types, surf therapy may produce greater changes among comorbid individuals by reducing symptoms of both ptsd and mdd. for example, surf therapy may be optimally suited to address comorbidities because it includes several factors that are beneficial to general psychological health, including social interaction, mindfulness, increased selfefficacy, and exercise in a natural environment (caddick et al., 2015; rogers et al., 2014; thompson coon, 2011). second, greater improvements in depression/anxiety and positive affect among those with ptsd and mdd may be due to statistical artifacts such as regression to the mean or a floor effect. in other words, because the comorbid group began surf sessions with more extreme scores on both outcome measures, there is more room for possible improvement, and/or ensuing measurements are expected to fall closer to the population mean. however, this study used several techniques that are likely to reduce the influence of regression to the mean on results. for example, participants were not selected for the overall study based on pretreatment symptom scores, data were collected repeatedly for up to 12 time points per participant, and all measures used have strong psychometric properties, including among military samples; therefore, it may be less likely that current results are due to regression to the mean (marsh & hau, 2002). both depression/anxiety and affect results suggest that the benefits of surf therapy may be general in nature and not specific to one single disorder, which has important clinical implications for individuals with comorbid conditions. oftentimes, psychological or psychiatric treatments are tailored for a particular disorder, rather than targeting cooccurring conditions or common non– disorder-specific symptoms (e.g., insomnia, anger). this could limit the benefit of these interventions for individuals with comorbid conditions. for those with both ptsd and mdd, surf therapy sessions appear to reduce negative symptoms associated with both disorders (like depression/anxiety), and also improve positive ones (like affect). as such, surf therapy may be particularly effective as an adjunctive treatment to address a range of symptoms that present with varying psychological disorders. there are many benefits to using surf therapy. surf therapy might be well suited for individuals who do not want to seek traditional treatment options for ptsd or mdd, or for those who prefer exercise-based therapies. first, interventions involving exercise may particularly appeal to military/veteran samples, as fitness is a fundamental component of military readiness (chief of naval operations, 2011). therefore, interventions that target both physical and mental health, such as surf therapy, may be especially useful for service members and veterans. outside of military and veteran populations, this type of intervention may broadly appeal to individuals who value physical fitness and outdoor activity, as well as those in physically demanding occupations, such as firefighters or search and rescue personnel. relatedly, interventions that address both physical and mental health, such as surf therapy, offer additional benefits in that they are likely to be less stigmatizing than traditional mental health treatments (e.g., psychotherapy; caddick et al., 2015). this stigma can be a significant barrier to mental health care and utilization, especially among military/veteran populations (blais & renshaw, 2013; greeneshortridge, britt, & castro, 2007; kulesza, pedersen, corrigan, & marshall, 2015; sayer et al., 2009; sharp et al., 2015; tanielian et al., 2008; vogt, 2011). lastly, adding surf therapy as a new therapeutic option for patients with ptsd and mdd broadens the range of treatment options available, which may enhance patient engagement and willingness to participate. surf therapy thus offers theoretical promise for increasing use of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 mental health therapies among multiple populations. there are also a number of practical and behavioral limitations of surf therapy that must be considered. generally, surfing is only feasible in select parts of the world with access to large bodies of water that generate waves, such as oceans, large lakes, and swift rivers. moreover, equipment required to surf may be cost prohibitive (wagner, nelsen, & walker, 2011). thus, surfing may only be an alternative or adjunctive intervention for those with geographic or financial means to access this care. behaviorally, avoidance and lack of motivation also present barriers to engagement in surf therapy. for example, activities like purchasing surf equipment, transportation to surfing locations, and motivation to exercise may be significant functional and behavioral challenges for individuals with ptsd and mdd. however, research suggests that if exercise is guided and progressive, it may be a viable adjunctive and well-tolerated form of treatment for those with mental illness (cooney et al., 2013; gourgouvelis, yielder, clarke, behbahani, & murphy, 2018; richardson et al., 2005; knapen, vancampfort, moriën, & marchal, 2014; stubbs et al., 2016; vancampfort, stubbs, ward, teasdale, & rosenbaum, 2015). therefore, where available, progressively phased and guided interventions that are integrated into care (such as the surf therapy program at nmcsd) may be the best approach for treatments utilizing surf therapy. this study offers numerous strengths that contribute to the larger literature. more broadly, to our knowledge, this was the first outcomes study to analyze the effects of psychological comorbidity on an exercise intervention—and, importantly, an intervention that also occurred in a natural environment. this study was also unusual in its focus on the immediate effects of surf therapy—changes in symptoms from preto post-session—and how those varied by comorbidity status. this provides a more fine-grained view of changes within and across individual surf therapy sessions. further, the study not only examined reductions in mental health symptoms of depression/anxiety, but also potential benefits for well-being with respect to positive affect. in addition, the study used a naturalistic design to observe standard care provided at ncmsd without manipulation of the subjects or existing program design. this allowed for broad inclusion criteria and increased generalizability of findings. lastly, this work utilized validated psychological measures commonly used with military/veteran samples, and determined probable mental health diagnoses by applying dsm-5 criteria to self-report measures, rather than relying on patient self-reported medical diagnoses. there are also several study limitations to consider despite promising findings. our moderately small (n = 47) sample included active duty service members who were relatively young (mean age = 28 years); thus, generalizability may be limited, especially with respect to older individuals or nonmilitary populations. in addition, although dsm-5 criteria were used, diagnoses of ptsd and mdd were based on self-report measures, not “gold standard” clinician assessments; therefore, they should be considered “probable.” relatedly, withinsession outcomes were based on self-report measures, which have inherent limitations (e.g., social desirability, individual interpretation). the study also could not determine whether other comorbidities were present. furthermore, the single disorder group consisted of service members with either ptsd or mdd; although it would be preferable to consider both single disorder groups separately, the small numbers of participants in these groups necessitated combining them for statistical power. finally, symptom changes within surf sessions were examined for depression/anxiety (as well as positive affect), but not for ptsd. this was http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 done because of the lack of well-validated short measures of ptsd symptoms; still, it leaves a gap in our understanding of the immediate benefits of engaging in surf therapy for ptsd symptoms. future directions research examining surf therapy is nascent but growing. to begin, future research studies should employ randomized controlled designs to increase study rigor and extend findings. they should also improve assessment techniques (including the use of multiple methods rather than exclusively relying self-report measures) to enhance validity and to confirm diagnoses. based on the present findings, which suggest that surf therapy is more beneficial for individuals with comorbid ptsd and mdd than for those with either disorder alone, future work should examine whether surf therapy offers similar advantages to individuals with other comorbidities, including both psychological (e.g., depression/anxiety) and psychological– physical comorbidities (e.g., depression/metabolic syndrome). additionally, research that includes sufficient numbers of participants with either disorder alone, as well as with both conditions, would yield more specific information about how treatment effects differ across these groups. future research should also examine hypothesized mechanisms of change, such as social connectedness, mindfulness, and selfefficacy; further exploration of the factors associated with psychological benefits achieved during surf therapy would inform future intervention development and refinement. lastly, surf therapy as a complementary intervention should be compared with surf therapy as a stand-alone treatment to determine treatment effectiveness. conclusions our results suggest that surf therapy may be an especially effective intervention to improve symptoms associated with comorbid ptsd and mdd. participants with comorbid ptsd and mdd experienced significantly greater reductions in depression/anxiety during surf therapy sessions compared to those with either disorder alone. comorbid participants also showed significantly greater improvements in positive affect, an often recalcitrant symptom following successful treatment of ptsd and mdd. surf therapy appears to have global effects on symptom reduction, targeting nonspecific symptoms common to many disorders (e.g., affect). given that symptom severity is typically worse in those with comorbid disorders, these findings suggest that surf therapy may be a useful adjunctive intervention for the treatment of comorbid ptsd and mdd in both clinical and community health settings. considering the promising results of surf therapy for addressing psychological symptoms and affect among those with comorbid ptsd and mdd, additional research on environmentally based exercise interventions is greatly needed. references babyak, m., blumenthal, j. a., herman, s., khatri, p., doraiswamy, m., moore, k., . . . krishnan, k. r. 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(2013). the ptsd checklist for dsm-5 (pcl-5). retrieved from https://www.ptsd.gov/professional/a ssessment/adult-sr/ptsdchecklist.asp acknowledgments http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.ptsd.gov/professional/assessment/adult-sr/ptsd-checklist.asp https://www.ptsd.gov/professional/assessment/adult-sr/ptsd-checklist.asp https://www.ptsd.gov/professional/assessment/adult-sr/ptsd-checklist.asp global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 the authors would like to kindly thank renée g. dell’acqua, robyn m. highfill-mcroy, matthew a. humphreys, andrew m. kewley, alexandra l. powell, and jessica l. beltrán for their contributions to this study, as well as aaron c. del re and ben porter for sharing their statistical knowledge. we thank all volunteer surf therapy instructors, yoga instructors, study participants, and lifeguards for their efforts and commitment. we appreciate the considerable support the challenged athletes foundation and semper fi fund provide to the naval medical center san diego surf therapy program. disclaimer i am a military service member or employee of the u.s. government. this work was prepared as part of my official duties. title 17, u.s.c. §105 provides that copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the u.s. government. title 17, u.s.c. §101 defines a u.s. government work as work prepared by a military service member or employee of the u.s. government as part of that person’s official duties. report no. 19-67 was supported by the u.s. navy bureau of medicine and surgery under work unit no. n1600. the views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the department of the navy, department of defense, nor the u.s. government. the study protocol was approved by the naval medical center san diego institutional review board in compliance with all applicable federal regulations governing the protection of human subjects. research data were derived from an approved naval medical center san diego institutional review board protocol, number nmcsd.2016.0032. http://www.gjcpp.org/ reverse innovation in mental health: review and recommendations christine ngaruiya, kunmi sobowale, anniyizhai annamalai keywords: global health, global mental health, noncommunicable diseases, knowledge exchange, reverse innovation, lmics author biographies: christine ngaruiya, md, msc, dtm&h is an assistant professor in the department of emergency medicine (dem) at yale university. she completed the global health and international emergency medicine fellowship in the dem in 2015, also matriculating with a master of science and diploma in tropical medicine and international health from the london school of hygiene and tropical medicine at that time. her research interests center on: non-communicable diseases, barriers to care, and community-based interventions with a particular focus on africa. some past honors include: the emergency medicine resident’s association (emra) augustine d’orta award for outstanding community and grassroots involvement, harambe entrepreneur alliance associate and the 2014 harambe pfizer fellow award for social entrepreneurship, the 2016 university of nebraska outstanding international alumnus award, the 2018 young physician award of the society for academic emergency medicine, and the 2019 yale school of medicine leonard tow humanism in medicine for clinical excellence and compassionate care. in 2020, she was one of 24 women selected nationally to be part of the inaugural cohort of the gates foundation funded womenlift health leadership program. her academic work has included projects with the kenya ministry of health, the african population health research center, and most recently, with the world bank to design and implement effective strategies to address ncds in africa. kunmi sobowale, md, is a child and adolescent psychiatry fellow and postdoctoral research fellow at the ucla university of california los angeles semel institute for neuroscience and human behavior. he has explored increasing access to global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 mental health care in vietnam, japan, hong kong, mainland china and with low-income populations in the united states via economic and digital health interventions. his interest is in the prevention and early intervention of mental illness using digital health and psychosocial interventions. his education includes university of chicago (md), stanford inter-university center for japanese studies, and yale university (ba: behavioral neuroscience). he completed his psychiatry residency at the yale school of medicine. anniyizhai annamalai, is an associate professor at the departments of psychiatry and internal medical at yale school of medicine. she is dually trained in internal medicine and psychiatry and has been the medical director of the yale adult refugee clinic for over ten years. she is a founding member of the society of refugee healthcare providers and has served on the board of directors for this international organization for six years. she teaches medical students and residents on refugee health and until recently, was the co-director of the yale global mental health program. she is the editor of the book, ‘refugee health care’, which is now in its second edition. she has received several teaching and clinical awards locally as well as nationally. her interest in global health stems from observing the myriad ways in which cultural background influences disease manifestations and treatment modalities. she is interested in vulnerable populations, whether displaced people or those with serious mental illness. she believes that holistic health care incorporating physical, mental, cultural and social elements is key and there is an incredible amount of learning that the study of other cultures can teach clinicians and public health experts alike. recommended citation: ngaruiya, c., sobowale, k., & annamalai, a. (2021). reverse innovation in mental health: review and recommendations. global journal of community psychology practice, vol(iss), 1-10. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: christine ngaruiya, assistant professor, section of global health and international emergency medicine, department of emergency medicine, yale new haven hospitals. 464 congress avenue, suite 260 new haven, connecticut 06519-1362. email: christine.ngaruiya@yale.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:christine.ngaruiya@yale.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 reverse innovation in mental health: review and recommendations abstract the global health community has strived to attain equitable partnerships in global mental health. to this end, there has been a growing interest in reverse innovation. this is defined as the development of an initiative in a lowor middle-income country setting that is then adopted by a western counterpart or high-income country setting. while often referenced in other branches of medicine, reverse innovation remains especially underexplored in mental health care. this paper presents a commentary and literature review examining the status quo on reverse innovation in mental health. barriers to knowledge exchange between lowand middle-income, and high-income country partners are discussed, and potential solutions are presented. introduction mental illness was once perceived as a “firstworld” problem, however it has become clear that mental illness is a pervasive issue globally. according to the global burden of disease (gbd) study, mental health disorders (1,619.3 ylds per 100,000) are the second highest contributor to years lived with disability (ylds), among all other diseases (institute for health metrics and evaluation, 2020). furthermore, there is a disparate need for mental health care in lowand middleincome countries (lmics) (ferrari et al., 2013; patel et al., 2016). for example, countries in south america, africa and southeast asia face morbidity burden due to depressive illnesses that are nearly twice as high as their counterparts in north america and western europe (patel et al., 2016). this burden of disease is compounded by an inadequate number of mental health providers in both high-income countries (hics) and lmics leading to a treatment gap (bruckner et al., 2011). the field of global mental health needs to elicit truly global knowledge generation in order to address the treatment gap for both hics and lmics. this aligns with the concept of reverse innovation (ri) in health care (govindarajan & trimble, 2012; syed, dadwal, & martin, 2013). reverse innovation refers to diffusion of solutions from lmics to high-income settings. in other parts of medicine, ri has had a significant impact. one landmark example is the adaptation of the antimalarial drug artemisinin, which originated in china (maude, woodrow, & white, 2010). another example is general electric’s development of the electrocardiogram (ekg) with partners in india, which is widely used in hics and lmics alike (immelt, govindarajan, & trimble, 2009). however, the role of ri in mental health remains underexplored (mckenzie, patel, & araya, 2004). only scant examples exist in the literature that constitute true reverse innovation in mental health. we describe one example below, which used a task-shifting intervention that mobilized a novel set of members of the community grandmothers. the intervention was developed in an lmic setting, and had reverse innovation or implementation demonstrated in a hic. this example from the literature demonstrates the importance of knowledge exchange, it is innovative, scalable and easily implemented in other settings given the universal nature of key actors, elderly figures in the community. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 “the friendship bench: a south-north knowledge and experience transfer” the friendship bench is a culturally adapted individual psychotherapy intervention delivered by elderly female lay health workers (called “grandmothers”) at primary care clinics in zimbabwe (chibanda et al., 2016). the intervention was developed to circumvent limited access to mental health care providers in this setting. patients presenting to primary care clinics for mental health services are referred to meet with a grandmother from the local community. this one-on-one interaction takes place on a bench on the clinic premises. grandmothers were uniquely positioned to deliver the intervention because they are well-respected in zimbabwe and had skills that were valued and could further be developed including empathetic listening and patience. as a result, patients are often more willing to discuss their distress with them than their doctors. as with many task-shifting interventions, grandmothers had minimal prior mental health training, but were trained in manualized problem-solving therapy with ongoing supervision from a mental health professional. grandmothers also debrief with each other for peer learning and support. in a recent clusteredrandomized controlled trial, the intervention successfully decreased depressive symptoms and anxiety and improved functioning for the interventional group compared to enhanced care as usual (chibanda et al., 2016). currently, the intervention is being disseminated in the united states (fleck, 2018) where taskshifting to trusted individuals in the community could help close the treatment gap for nearly 50% of individuals with mental illness who do not receive treatment (wang et al., 2005). under the purview of the new york city department of health and mental hygiene, the friendship benches nyc uses minimally trained volunteers who often have lived experience to deliver problem-solving therapy to hardto-reach populations in new york city (friendship bench zimbabwe, 2018). similar to the original intervention, these lay health workers meet clients on benches. however, to promote outreach, some benches are mobile and can be transported to areas of need and public events. also, lay health workers in new york city vary in age (between 26-54 years old). within a few months of its inception in july 2017, over 2000 individuals received support through the program. while the example of the friendship bench summarized is encouraging, the dearth of interventions demonstrating reverse innovation in the literature is alarming. some of the lack of representation in the literature could also be due to publication bias. all in all, interventions or components of interventions developed and implemented successfully outside of the western setting could be of utility in improving practice of mental health elsewhere. however, the challenge in incorporating these practices seems to remain elusive. we propose a number of solutions to the continued dilemma. addressing the reverse innovation lag rebalancing partnerships in the global context as defined by the united nations, the terms “global north” and “global south” have been used “to refer to the social, economic and political differences that exist” between predominantly hics in the north and lmics in the south. “it should be noted that the division is not totally faithful to the actual geographical division.” traditionally, northsouth collaborations, have dominated global health partnerships where the movement of resources occurs from the north to the south (united nations, 2020). however, in targeting global health issues over the last decade, a shift to a greater focus on south-north and south-south exchanges of knowledge has http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 occurred, which has displaced the notion of a paternalistic northern framework for global public health practice (world bank, 2020; world health organization, 2021). this move is highlighted in the global mental health movement which was founded as a result of the seminal lancet 2007 series on the topic, and in response to a 2001 call by the world health organization (horton, 2007; saraceno et al., 2007). the mission of the movement is to improve health services for mental illness in lmics where access to care remains a disproportionate problem (institute for health metrics and evaluation, 2020). the perpetuation of colonialist tendencies in international research, coined “neocolonialism” or “semi-colonial” is one argument for the hampered success in achieving partnership goals. for example, partners from the global south may be directed towards fieldwork, but have sparse involvement in project innovation or leadership components such as leading paper authorship (feierman, kleinman, stewart, farmer, & das, 2010; godoy-ruiz, cole, lenters, & mckenzie, 2016). this confers little opportunity for the autonomy of these partners. overcoming this barrier not only requires abolishing these constructs that are entrenched in our practices for global health, but replacing them with new ones. the leadership of the consortium of universities for global health, one of the leading global health organizations, has laid out an ideal framework for change to occur. cugh challenges the conventional idea of global health, which places ownership or leadership on either partner and instead endorses relying on “interconnectedness” as the way forward (koplan et al., 2009). lord nigel crisp in his seminal book, “turning the world upside down: the search for global health in the 21st century,” also highlights this “inter-dependedness”(crisp, 2010). finally, the world health organization has advocated for the importance of south-south exchange of knowledge which includes the move away from a donor-recipient model (world health organization, 2021). the international partner as lead innovator unique practices that have persisted among these cultures could be incorporated into western societies causing a constructive transformation and dismantling of established frameworks. the need for this is driven by the limited ability of already strained healthcare systems in lmic settings to assume mental health care, which requires creative delivery approaches (wilson & somhlaba, 2017). an example of a novel care delivery model developed in the lmic setting is exemplified by the case study presented earlier in the paper, the friendship bench. similarly, the proliferation of peer support groups in lmics can also inform established practices in hics. to this end, the upsides (using peer support in developing empowering mental health services) initiative (hiltensperger r et al., 2018) aims to foster north-south learning by exploring best practices of peer support for individuals with serious mental illness in lmics and hics settings. novel methods for delivering interventions and diagnostic tools that take into account cultural complexities may be useful in ensuring individuals with mental health symptoms are properly diagnosed and cared for. consensus statements and guidelines for global mental health practitioners it has been suggested that the role of the international partner has been poorly established because of a lack of evidence for best practices on how to approach such equitable setups (crane, 2010; smith et al., 2009). the development of clear consensus statements and guidelines for the practice of international research collaborations by key stakeholders is one potential solution. at the helm of this effort should be international http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 governing bodies like world health organization and development agencies with large footprints in these settings. additionally, leading scientific bodies could set basic minimum standards for their members to adhere to when conducting studies with lmic partners. finally, academic institutions and research institutes could be purveyors of these guidelines, and they could be further enforced by funding bodies and other research governing entities. one such example to emulate by morrison and colleagues’ work, which proposes a model of ethical relationships for northsouth partnerships identifying all key parties affected, including incorporation of legal advisors in establishing international partnerships (morrison, tomsons, gomez, & forde, 2018). reevaluating cultural dissonance in approaches to care along with the consideration of guidelines that govern research practices, it is important to reevaluate clinical approaches as well. the idea that the same framework that has governed practices in the west need be transferred, like a stencil or cookie-cutter, in order to study or implement in southern nations is short sighted. the imperfect definitions of “pathology” as defined by wellestablished international guidelines such as the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (dsm) and national institute for health and care excellence (nice) guidelines (american psychiatric association, 2013; national institute for health and care excellence (nice)) are important to note, as their implementation in foreign settings may be severely undermining efforts to affect improved “well-being”. these tools may lack the bandwidth to adequately address the spectrum of illness seen in the international setting. and what appears as pathologic behavior as understood by western patterns, may in fact be culturally acceptable coping mechanisms in these societies. additionally, disease processes may present very subtly, particularly given profound stigma in these cultures (chan, hung, & yip, 2001), or differently as a result of local idioms of distress (adeponle, groleau, & kirmayer, 2015; ryder, sunohara, & kirmayer, 2015). this in turn is likely to affect health-seeking behaviors and to contribute to under-diagnosis by providers. finally, the natural progression of disease as seen in western constituents may differ from those seen elsewhere (hopper & wanderling, 2000). jordan and colleagues successfully used novel visual aid tools for mental health screening and diagnosis in nepal (jordans, kohrt, luitel, komproe, & lund, 2015). in the united states, where depression is underdiagnosed in certain groups such as the elderly or african american patients due to lower screening rates and more somatic symptoms (akincigil & matthews, 2017), this approach may have some merit. for treatment, indian psychosocial rehabilitation models for patients with mental illness have led to improved disease course (stanhope, 2002). these models are based on the role of social networks surrounding patients. foremost is the family, whose involvement and low level of criticism can promote recovery. furthermore, a more interdependent mindset and an external locus of control consistent with the religious belief “karma” foster more acceptance and role supports for the afflicted within their family and the wider society. although promising, whether these social network elements can incorporate into care in western countries with more individualistic values, remains to be seen. innovative and unconventional research approaches are needed unconventional approaches to data collection are key in order to drive innovative intervention development. for example, traditional healers have proved to be http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 invaluable sources of data through case studies and ethnographies on their practices (adeponle et al., 2015; poltorak, 2016; ryder et al., 2015). while case studies and ethnographies are less commonly employed research methods, they have significant potential to identify nuanced cultural practices that are imperative to guiding care. through these and other approaches, we could engage and learn from mental health care in these unique settings (stanhope, 2002), but this will take patience and flexibility on all sides (morrison et al., 2018; ofori-atta, read, & lund, 2010). in another example described by poltorak et al, a western practitioner who practiced in tonga understood the necessity of first defining what healing meant to this community. as part of this process, he first sought to establish context-specific terminology referring to mental health concerns, and designed communication strategies based on this. he also developed new definitions of disease in close collaboration with traditional healers (poltorak, 2016). as demonstrated in this case, an appreciation and incorporation of local religious and community practices can be beneficial (petersen, baillie, bhana, health, & consortium, 2012). treatment can be guided by the international partner, and concepts elucidated where the target population in the lmic setting is used to develop ideas and concepts, rather than parachuting in with preconceived notions and approaches. through this strategy, we will be able to engage with and transform mental health care for this community as well as learn for our own communities in the west. publication and global dissemination through easily accessible channels in parallel, building of research capacity and dissemination of findings should continue to be prioritized as much as possible (thornicroft et al, 2012; vasquez et al, 2013; wilson & somhlaba, 2017). the 2013 development of the mental health innovation network provides some gains in addressing dissemination by acting as a database of international interventions in mental health (mental health innovation network, 2021). while efforts demonstrated through this initiative are laudable, further consolidation and dissemination of innovations is needed, and particularly from underrepresented settings. a predominance of northern leading partners is evident in the limited research originating from international partners, including in our own literature review where northern partners predominated as lead actors in developing interventions. flow of information from and to lmic stakeholders is limited by access to online platforms. growth and dissemination through alternative modalities will be critical in continuing to highlight novel ideas from the developing setting. conclusion the cost of mental health care, lack of providers, and low investment in mental health care all make it important to look for innovative solutions to deliver mental health care laterally, across countries and regions. if we truly want to improve mental health for all, we need to disrupt the deeprooted tendency of knowledge flow from hics to lmics and look for solutions in all places. there is an extraordinary opportunity to incorporate innovative practices from across the world. however, as demonstrated in this review, reverse innovation from lmics to hics in mental health is rare. reverse innovation in mental health will require more collaborations across regions to ensure that progress and knowledge is shared. to achieve this goal, partners in lmics should be prioritized as stakeholders in setting the global mental health agenda, developing policy, and implementing interventions. through these efforts, the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 promise of reverse innovation in global mental health can be actualized. acknowledgements the idea for this publication stemmed from a workshop discussion, "mental health in the 21st century", at the 2016 yale network for global noncommunicable diseases (ngn) inaugural campus symposium. we thank the participants and funders for making the workshop a successful one. we also thank the attendees for their contributions to the discourse on that day. we hope that the reader finds the paper that resulted out of discussion from the conference workshop stimulating and informative. the symposium was supported by the edward j. and dorothy clark kempf fund at the whitney and betty macmillan center for international and area studies at yale university. we would also like to thank alexandria brackett (librarian), tracie slade, and rebecca leff for their efforts in supporting this work. references adeponle, a. b., groleau, d., & kirmayer, l. j. 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(2005). twelve-month use of mental health services in the united states: results from the national comorbidity survey replication. archives of general psychiatry, 62(6), 629-640. wilson, a., & somhlaba, n. z. (2017). the position of ghana on the progressive map of positive mental health: a critical perspective. global public health, 12(5), 579-588. world bank. (2020). united nations office for south-south cooperation: southsouth knowledge exchange. https://www.worldbank.org/en/regi on/lac/brief/south-south-knowledgeexchange-latin-america-caribbeanregion. world health organization. (2021). who's work with countries: south-south and triangular cooperation. http://www.who.int/countrycooperation/what-who-does/southsouth/en/. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/intergovernmental-coordination/south-south-cooperation-2019.html https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/intergovernmental-coordination/south-south-cooperation-2019.html https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/intergovernmental-coordination/south-south-cooperation-2019.html https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/intergovernmental-coordination/south-south-cooperation-2019.html https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/lac/brief/south-south-knowledge-exchange-latin-america-caribbean-region https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/lac/brief/south-south-knowledge-exchange-latin-america-caribbean-region https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/lac/brief/south-south-knowledge-exchange-latin-america-caribbean-region https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/lac/brief/south-south-knowledge-exchange-latin-america-caribbean-region http://www.who.int/country-cooperation/what-who-does/south-south/en/ http://www.who.int/country-cooperation/what-who-does/south-south/en/ http://www.who.int/country-cooperation/what-who-does/south-south/en/ microsoft word billberkowitz_alternativestheorydevelopment_formattedfinal.docx alternatives to theory development bill berkowitz university of massachusetts lowell keywords: theory, science, community psychology, framework author biography: bill berkowitz is professor emeritus of psychology at the university of massachusetts lowell and former coordinator of its graduate program in community social psychology. he is also an original and continuing team member of the community tool box (http://ctb.ku.edu), the largest single source of information about community development presently in existence. his prior work includes community program creation, program administration, and consultation in different community settings. bill’s particular interests are in local community development and the strengthening of community life. his four books, book chapters, and articles focus on skills, ideas, and examples for improving local communities. in his home community, bill represents his neighborhood in public office as an elected town meeting member. recommended citation: berkowitz, b. (2016). alternatives to theory development. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(2), pages 1-4. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). correspondence should be addressed to bill berkowitz, health and social sciences building #355, university of massachusetts lowell, william_berkowitz@uml.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 alternatives to theory development start with the preliminaries: it’s good that jason, stevens, ram, miller, beasley, and gleason’s (2016) paper has been written and that we’re responding to it. discussions of theory are relatively rare in the community psychology literature; for that reason alone i’m glad this is happening. the paper itself features a thorough and sophisticated exposition of theory and what theory is supposed to do, based on the twin premises that community psychology should be a science and therefore be guided by conventional standards of scientific inquiry. this is followed by a useful descriptive and critical review of three current theories in the field, and then by a particularly compelling and challenging analysis of prospects for future theory development, one worthy of close re-reading. this paper should be a helpful resource – let’s go further and say a benchmark resource – for students, and for professionals who want to acquaint or reacquaint themselves with our current state of theoretical affairs. i can see it as being frequently assigned for graduate school reading, and having an enduring shelf life. all these are positives. but this paper appears in a journal for practitioners, whose daily work may not ordinarily be informed by theory. are they mistaken, or missing out? perhaps not. the heart of the matter may come down to: • what is the actual relationship of current theory in community psychology to everyday practice? • what should it be? • what could it be? these are the determinative questions we should be addressing. i believe that current community psychology theory has little demonstrated value for practitioners. while it may describe or explain, it is not easily testable, it has not been shown to make helpful predictions, and it usually provides no clear direction for practitioner behavior. as jason and his coauthors point out, current theories are better described as orienting frameworks rather than actionable guides. current theory should be useful for practitioners, and could be useful for practitioners, if it could either predict or guide. but if it can’t, its worth is unproven. i think i may be in essential agreement with jason et al., though i may also be more comfortable in accepting our theoretical limitations, as will be noted shortly. theory may also have low value for practitioners for a different reason practitioners know little about it, and, perhaps accordingly, don’t use it. for whatever reasons, theory has not been well marketed. hard data are lacking here, but in any case, as a practitioner with some knowledge of how other practitioners operate, were we to ask a random sample of practitioner colleagues how much community psychology theories – those reviewed here, or others – influence their work, i would venture the dominant answers would be “very little” or “not at all.” instead, their primary sources of guidance would come from their own experience, complemented by what they have learned from teachers, supervisors, peers, and community members themselves. however, practitioners are not entirely atheoretical. i would suggest they are typically informed by higher-order generalizations – sometimes explicitly stated, sometimes implicit – about the way community life works, again based upon their formal studies and leavened by practical experience. we might call these generalizations principles, and i will provide some examples of what i mean. back in the 1990s, paul mattessich and barbara monsey wrote a short manual titled community building: what makes it work?, global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 with the subtitle of a review of factors influencing successful community building (mattessich & monsey, 1997). this is a compilation based on a review of more than 500 published research studies, from which the authors derived 28 factors (or principles) of success. for instance: “successful efforts are more likely if community goals, tasks, and activities have clear, visible benefits to many people in the community.” “successful community building efforts more likely occur when residents have control over decisions, particularly over how funds are used.” these factors or principles are not theories, nor parts of a theory. but they are higherorder statements intended to guide practitioner behavior, wise guidance in my opinion. i’ve used this manual frequently in classes; students appreciate it; an updated version, or other related compilations, would be contributions to the field. (cf. also the fundamental principles identified in jason’s own recent book on principles of social change; jason, 2013). a simpler and more homespun example: in community organizing courses i have taught, there is usually a unit on community participation and how to get it. i commonly offer some basic guidelines for gaining participation, along the lines of (1) set your participation goals; (2) determine how to reach potential participants; (3) create a participation plan; (4) recruit your participants; (5) maximize the benefits; (6) minimize the costs; (7) publicize your message; (8) use multiple exposures; (9) evaluate your results; and (10) adjust, and repeat as necessary. again, these statements do not belong to a formal theory. but as they are derived from both the research literature and from realworld experience, they bear theoretical resemblance, though at lower levels of abstraction. i tend to favor the term “principles”; others might prefer to call them factors, propositions, guidelines, or something else. the labels attached seem less crucial. the key point is that these types of statements have practical value on the ground and are useful in shaping how we work in the community. ultimately, the practitioner must focus on what works. i believe then that we would benefit from generating more such syntheses of tested empirical principles; should we be so inclined, we could develop and refine them through further research studies – including hypothesis-testing studies with experimental designs – and codification of experience. these evidence-based syntheses would be valuable for community psychology as a whole, and should be a priority for practitioners and their academic supporters. here’s an alternative to full-blown theory development, one that may be a preferred pathway to making a societal difference. who will doubt that forming theories is hard, especially since community life is inherently complex? if others can develop systematic theories with predictive value, theory’s usefulness will surely increase. let’s greenlight their work; let’s wish them well. but community psychology theories, as they currently stand, yield limited benefits. for now, given the time most professionals have available and given compelling community needs, i think a practitioner’s full efforts must be to utilize and apply existing factual knowledge to address the pressing community problems of our time. references jason, l. a. (2013). principles of social change. new york: oxford university press. jason, l. a., stevens, e., ram, d., miller, s. a., beasley, c. r., & gleason, k. (2016). theories in the field of community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice.7(2). pp. 1-27. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 mattessich, p. & monsey, b. (1997). community building: what makes it work: a review of factors influencing successful community building. st. paul, mn: amherst h. wilder foundation. foundations for relational ethics: introducing a continuum of community psychology praxis tiffeny r. jiménez, ericka mingo, judah viola, bradley olson, & christopher balthazar1 keywords: community psychology, practice, action, relational ethics, decolonial praxis, transformation author biographies: tiffeny reyleen jiménez, a community psychologist, and educator. her story is rooted in indigenous americas-méxico traversed through terrains of turtle island known as california into the midwest u.s. being of mixed heritage, she views the world and relates as a borderlands survivor, rajetas y sin fronteras, queer, alternative world compostactivist. currently, she is most interested in how to support spaces for communicative justice using mixed and creative methodologies, developing strategies for embodying praxes of decoloniality, and engaging in collective action scholarship via liberation-oriented andragogy/pedagogy towards transformative systems change. she participates in action/service praxis enacting an ecologically grounded institutional philosophy of scholarship that connects authentic student voice and inquiry with streams of public scholarship to shape our public sphere using multi-modalities. she is also the internal collaborative evaluator for clave: colaborando con las comunidades latinx para avanzar en educación / collaborating with latinx communities to advance education, which supports doctoral student fellows and postdocs across disciplines. tiffeny is the recipient of the 2019 national louis university (nlu) excellence in research, scholarship, and inquiry award, and is currently working to co-develop the ideological infrastructure needed to support ethical and deliberate community engagement across nlu for communities we serve in the chicagoland area and beyond. she is most active in co-developing critical global education for community psychology (https://criticalglobaleducation.wordpress.com/), co-developing the cultural community of xicanx psychology – institute of chicana/o psychology (https://razapsychology.org/), learning with the rooted global village (https://www.rootedglobalvillage.com/), supporting the emergence network (https://www.emergencenetwork.org/), and reflecting with others of the society forcommunity research and action (https://www.scra27.org/). for more information see:https://tiffenyjimenez.wordpress.com/. judah viola, is a community psychologist and associate professor of psychology at national louis university (nlu) in chicago, illinois where he teaches in nlu’s phd program in community psychology and previously served as dean of 1 acknowledgements: we thank christopher sonn, cari patterson, moshood olanrewaju, aaron baker, ramy barhouche, gorden lee, and raphael kasobel for their early input and reviews of this paper over the last year. https://criticalglobaleducation.wordpress.com/ https://razapsychology.org/ https://www.rootedglobalvillage.com/ https://www.emergencenetwork.org/ https://www.scra27.org/ https://tiffenyjimenez.wordpress.com/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 the college of professional studies and advancement. judah’s oer publications include community psychologists: who we are. in jason & glantsman, o’brien, & ramian (eds.) introduction to community psychology: becoming an agent of change. rebus pressbooks, and diverse careers in community psychology. oxford university press. judah currently serves as the publications committee chair for the society for community research and action. he also manages an independent consulting practice specializing in program evaluation, needs assessment, community building, and collaborative community research. his community research and advocacy interests involve neighborhood revitalization, disability rights, affordable housing, access to healthcare and healthy food, community police relations, posttraumatic growth and violence prevention and intervention. for more information see: https://works.bepress.com/judah_viola/. bradley olson, is a community psychologist, activist, and evaluation consultant. he is an associate professor at national louis university in the community psychology phd program and part of the university’s illinois school of professional psychology where he teaches statistics. his research areas include human rights (e.g., mass incarceration, global immigration), critical psychology, nonviolence, philosophy of science, mixed methods research, and the psychology and ethics of privacy. he is a founder of the coalition for an ethical psychology and past president of psychologists for social responsibility (psysr), the society for the study of peace, conflict, and violence (division 48 of the apa), and the society for community research & action (division 27). he is currently a council representative for the american psychological association (apa). christopher balthazar, holds a master’s degree in clinical psychology and school counseling from roosevelt university in chicago and recently obtained his doctoral degree in community psychology from national louis university. he works as a research project director at stroger hospital (cook county health) for the past 13 years, conducting critical hiv prevention and treatment research among lgbtq+ youth of color. he also currently serves as the executive director of taskforce prevention and community services, a local grassroots community-based organization that utilizes a for-us-by-us approach to provide health, wellness, and advocacy for lgbtq+ adolescents and young adults of color. as a researcher and community-practitioner, he is working with community to design and support the implementation of a community-led structural interventions designed to dismantle systems of oppression by improving the social economic status, professional development, health, and wellness of lgbtq+ communities of color. dr. balthazar identifies as a black gay man and uses he/him pronouns. recommended citation: jimenez, t.r., mingo, e., viola, j., olson, b., & balthazar, c. (2023). foundations for relational ethics: introducing a continuum of community psychology praxis. global journal of community psychology practice, 14(1), 1-27. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: tiffeny jimenez, 122 s. michigan ave., chicago, il 60603 email: tiffeny.jimenez@nl.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://works.bepress.com/judah_viola/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 foundations for relational ethics: introducing a continuum of community psychology praxis abstract community psychology (cp) attends to the challenges facing communities in our efforts to bring about justice and well-being. we are explicitly concerned with understanding the origins of oppression within various contexts, using diverse approaches. it is therefore necessary to reflect on our conceptions of practice where our diverse roles in the community facilitate collaborations within and across complex cultural contexts (jimenez, sanchez, mcmahon & viola, 2016). this article introduces a continuum of cp praxis emphasizing the need for an increasing awareness of the history of oppression, the need for epistemic justice, and ways in which power is built into the sciences from which our field has grown. we hope that such a continuum will help us better frame our practice, as it provides a framework for holding multiple worldviews toward a more ethical, relational praxis. “…philosophy will be able to increase the amount of justice, beauty, and truth in this world only when its practitioners begin to exhibit genuine pluralism in their work.” (mungwini, 2019) community psychology (cp) attends to the challenges facing communities in our efforts to bring about justice and well-being. we are explicitly concerned with understanding the origins of oppression within various contexts, using diverse approaches. it is therefore necessary to reflect on our conceptions of practice where our diverse roles in the community facilitate collaborations within and across complex cultural contexts (jimenez, sanchez, mcmahon & viola, 2016). this article introduces a continuum of cp praxis emphasizing the need for an increasing awareness of the history of oppression, the need for epistemic justice, and ways in which power is built into the sciences from which our field has grown. we hope that such a continuum will help us better frame our practice, as it provides a framework for holding multiple worldviews toward a more ethical, relational praxis. setting our intentions and positionality the purpose of this paper is to offer readers a re-conceptualized definition of cp practice. recognizing the need to address the way coloniality is embedded with cp we first mention how our own positionality has influenced our approach. we chose to write the current paper in first-person narrative to ensure we keep clear the contextualized nature of our conceptualization. we intend for this paper to support epistemic justice. in other words, getting across the ways we value forms of knowing beyond the more dominant cultural values system embedded within the north american/western context. our collective perspective on cp practice is grounded within our ability to feel with varying forms of double consciousness (anzaldúa, 2015; du bois, 1903), our belief in the paradoxes of what we have experienced, and frustrations with the potential for justice after years of working within existing constraints of current settings, roles, and practices. we see the lifeworld systems that flow beyond, behind, and underneath human created systems, regarded as merely backdrops to a “developed” world (habermas, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 1981). this re-conceptualization of cp practice attempts to tune in deeper to the lifeworlds that are more often ignored, unfelt, or intentionally diminished, regardless of the ways in which we understand ourselves to be interdependent with such ecologies. we are cp practitioners living in the chicagoland area of the united states (u.s.); one of the most diverse urban landscapes in the country. tiffeny jimenez, judah viola, and brad olson are tenured professors at national louis university. ericka mingo is a graduate of the nlu doctoral program and full time faculty member. christopher balthazar is a recent graduate of the nlu doctoral program. we have each spent years working as employees or consultants to non-profits and government-funded projects or agencies (e.g., chicago public schools, state councils, museums, community based organizations, national housing nonprofits, disability advocacy organizations, foundations, and federally funded grants). on a more personal level, one author identifies as female, mestizaje2, and queer, as part of a broader earth-cycle-connected sense of self. two authors identify as black, while one is female and the other is male and identifies as queer. there are also two white-bodied, cisgendered males without impairments. through these varied perspectives, and recent months of discussions with cps around the u.s.3 we offer an additional perspective on cp practice, including a revised definition and model of a continuum of cp praxis. cycles of praxis a reexamination of cp practice ought to consider the ways in which community 2 the use of the term mestizaje here refers to someone living within the borderlands. one who is in the making of a new culture una cultura mestiza with all three cultures white, mexican, indian. see gloria alzuldua (2010) movimientos de rebeldía y las culturas que traicionan. also see the book "the existence of the mixed race psychologists engage in an ongoing process of collective-action-inquiry-reflexivity (i.e. praxis). such a praxis should possess clear points of reference to power, politics, and ethics aligned with liberation psychologies (martin-baró, 1994; montero, sonn, & burton, 2017). this article reexamines the ways in which we enact cp practice; without asserting any specific tasks or roles for a practitioner. nevertheless, these recommendations are broadly applicable to all community psychologists, regardless of their role/positions across various organizational contexts (e.g., academia, nonprofit, healthcare, government, consulting, etc.); as well as across related disciplines. focusing on practice as cycles of praxis (see olson & jason, 2015) means further examining who we are, where we are, and how we decide to engage with communities; an examination of theory as it is experiences situated within context; i.e., liberating ways of knowing (freire, 1970; hooks, 1991; martin-baró, 1994; mckittrick, 2015; pitts, ortega, & medina, 2020). more specifically, we examine aspects of praxis in light of our intentions, our purpose, our positionality, and the power embedded in settings and relationships. from this standpoint, we offer a temporally-oriented, community-integrated model of cyclical praxis--one that involves ongoing co-learning, with inquiry, with equal collaboration with partners, with theory, and through deliberative scholarship. community psychologists work with others, deliberating with stakeholders, making new connections, and reflecting on what we learn in that process through cycles of writing/reflection, discussion, critique, creation, inquiry, and action. damnes (global critical caribbean thought) by daphne taylor-garcia (2018). 3 we proposed a draft definition during a special session of the 2020 midwestern eco conference. a wealth of perspectives and important understandings influenced what was proposed and this generated further revisions. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 our cycles of praxis are grounded in place, in relationship to culture, and in an analysis of power. most of all our praxis is rooted in the sincere efforts of community psychologists to connect with others. we work to understand the politics embedded within the history of geographies and institutions. we remain in dialogue within deep tensions. we mutually reflect on the philosophies of science and action we choose. we believe that through this ongoing collective process we can (un)learn the myth of neutral, bystander ideologies. we develop theory that is reflective of lived realities, and attempt to bring new emancipatory realities into existence (gergen & zielke, 2006). our emergent definition in his community practice model for cp, julian (2006) opened a dialogue around an understanding of community psychology practice and the community psychology practitioner. first, julian advanced thinking about the community practitioner by describing someone with a recognized (often wealth of perspectives and important understandings influenced what was proposed and this generated further revisions, but not necessarily) paid role in the community, engaging in long-term improvement interventions that involved continuous evaluation, planning and implementation. second, he asserted four sets of skills for the successful community psychology practitioner: (1) community mobilization; (2) planning and decisionmaking; (3) implementation; and (4) evaluation. as the foundation of his definition, these skills form the basis for community dialogue and data informed decision-making; with the collective goal of addressing specific community challenges. data-informed practice requires input from stakeholders. our definition goes beyond traditional connotations of data, requiring historical and demographic data, analysis, observation, conversation, and meaning making. this interpretation of data more fully lives up to julian’s (2006) definition of community practice as: the collection of communal understandings, aimed at community improvement and intervention, through the aid of a community psychology practitioner, implementing four core skills, community mobilization, planning, decisionmaking, and implementation. a new perspective revision of the existing definition for cp practice begins by questioning assumptions about where cp is practiced. overwhelmingly, cp has been practiced in communities conceived as “disadvantaged groups”, existing under oppression, occupation, or some other form of strife—often communities of color. too often, this work reflects programs engaged in first-order rather than secondorder change. while community psychologists work collaboratively with community members we must also engage in critical and activist practice directed at power structures—we work “with” our partners to dismantle structural violence. with this paper we hope to challenge the field to think of practicing engaged inquiry in places we have not spent enough time in the past (e.g., in the face of agents and structures of oppression). such places are often unnoticed, yet are fundamental when attending to those who hold power over people and other living beings. these are the places, the structures, the policies, and narratives that uphold and protect ideologies and ways of the oppressor. justice, in any community, is an increasingly articulated, desired outcome of community action. all too often, when we engage in justice work, it is an add-on to our inquiry and programming as opposed to an intrinsic part of the practice. even the actions in the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 field of social justice policy change can be more first than second order. there is more we can do to shift structural and cultural landscapes (olson, viola, & fromm-reed, 2015; olson, o’brien, & mingo, 2019). to this end we hold that social justice should be embedded in any definition of practice. communities can be perceived as broad, including any group of people with shared goals and a shared fate--meaning that it applies to any social groups that believe in holistic and integrated ways of being, tied to historical and geographic, land-based or also more electronically dispersed spaces. respecting these spaces requires the community psychologist to de-center our own professional trajectories, to strive toward better alignment with those doing work often very different from our own. beyond new perspectives around what is practice and who is the practitioner, community practice should grapple with balancing collaborative efforts with efforts critical of power structures. this will allow us to better mobilize our practice in terms of more equal collaborative interventions toward altering harmful, unjust, narratives, processes, and policies. this brings us to a renewed definition of cp practice: community psychology (cp) praxis is a collective action, capacity building process in which a community psychologist engages a community area, organization, or social group, in an effort to collectively remove barriers to lateral interdependence, autonomy, and self-determination. this work takes place both within groups suffering from oppressive barriers to wellness and those responsible for setting up or maintaining those barriers. community mobilization, planning, decision-making, and implementation are developed through the collection of communally constructed understandings and shared praxis. this work requires the community psychologist deeply (encouraging outside critique) aimed at developing their most optimal role, based on clarity of intent, purpose, positionality, power, and relationality. this definition of cp practice/praxis can be enacted by all community psychologists, regardless of whether one is situated in a university, government, human services, ngos, or the private sector. our definition is an attempt to provide a flexible base for holding multiple worldviews in order to move towards a more ethical, relational praxis. it attends to the politics and philosophies of action/science, which includes resurgent calls for justice, evident within post-colonial and decolonial scholarship. intentional reflexivity on global citizenship we need to be more reflexive as global citizens, intentionally exploring harmful dominant systems. given that the undercurrent of our collective unconscious and associated language guides how we think, act, and relate to others, reflexivity involves making clearer the assumptions embedded within various settings that shape our character, our emotional reactions, and subsequent behaviors. there is much observable harm prevalent today to which we have been desensitized. we are learning to see more clearly how our praxes in service of the dominant culture contributes to harm. we understand that the work we do within the local chicagoland area is interconnected with a larger sense of critical global citizenship and interdependent with larger systems of oppression (morales & de almeida freire, 2017). through an onto-epistemology of interdependence, we believe the fate of our http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 communities, and those of our students, are tied to the reality of those who occupy other geographic spaces on the planet. this universalist approach makes it of critical importance that we create opportunities to educate ourselves, and others, about this larger context, and how we are shaped by global events/dynamics, (escobar, 2020). it is with this foundation in mind that we also work to build a global sense of community that emphasizes the world as an interconnected, interdependent, whole living organism, and that can allow for global collective action (see marsella,1998 for similar points and implications for education and training for a global-community psychology). we believe it is important to acknowledge how various social groups and certain geographies have intentionally been oppressed for the benefit of others (de sousa santos, 2007; escobar, 2020; de sousa santos, & meneses, 2020; mbembe, 2019). for example, we acknowledge that globally, people of northern regions have enacted structural and cultural dominance over those of the global south (i.e., african, latin american, south asian), which has led to inhumane living conditions for many. while we are careful not to emphasize the binary inherent in this understanding (north vs south), we do acknowledge that people more commonly of the northern geographical locations have enacted violent acts against those of the global south for centuries. this complexity acknowledges that a eurowestern-imperial ideological lens involving militarization, theft, racism, and abuse have together depleted a variety of natural and cultural resources from those community areas (caouette & kapoor, 2013; grosfoguel, 2020; mungwini, 2019; teo, 2010). (see activists working to raise consciousness of this, for example, https://youtu.be/uayhruj9voi). the ongoing reality of the history of colonial forces impacting everyone on the planet, even though we are living in “post-colonial” times, is currently termed coloniality (maldonadotorres, 2007; quijano, 2000). we believe acknowledging this history is critically important because the mindset embedded within this way of being is still present in and across almost all settings of the world we live in today (mckittrick, 2015; mignolo & walsh, 2018). it is from this critical perspective that we can more clearly see the harms happening within our own local settings as they tie into a larger framework and systems of oppression happening across madre tierra (mother earth) (e.g., capitalism, neoliberalism, racism, extractivism, etc.). an expanded context clarifies the importance of acknowledging multiple ecologies of knowledge (de sousa santos, 2007); the importance of relational ethics (hopner & liu, 2021; norsworthy, 2017; tucker, 2018); and why we believe in working together (co-laboring) to coconstruct pluriversality – a world of many worlds (escobar, 2017; escobar, 2020; rojas, 2016). it is with this global-community context in mind that we introduce the continuum of cp praxis. placing the continuum of cp praxis in historical context a brief overview of the social sciences, and field of cp, shows alignment in shifts that have occurred over time. much of the social sciences developed in ways that sought to replicate understandings about the reality of society through a positivist or post-positivist lens, a way of inquiry using methods seeking generalizations about universal human traits, behaviors, and motivations.. this kind of work seeks generalizations about universal human traits, and stems from scientific criteria developed from the “hard sciences” perspective in which we assume there is a single, external reality or truth that can be http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://youtu.be/uayhruj9voi global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 measured, understood, predicted, and controlled. human and social systems however, are different, and have, therefore required a shift in scientific paradigms and methodologies (muller, 2022). differing organizational settings are also tied to these earlier scientific paradigms. institutions such as medical research facilities and clinical research settings engage in projects where basic research criteria or clinical trials are necessary, and linked to larger policies related to human “subjects,” “safety,” and “rigor.” these kinds of institutions are also concerned with disseminating evidence-based practices through interventions designed to reach diverse populations (e.g., public health), often utilizing community health workers to connect with populations deemed “hard to reach.” one critique of the translational sciences paradigm is that it has over-enforced or imposed western medicine and therapeutic approaches on people who believe in other ways of healing and wellbeing (gone, 2007). this paradigm has created whole lines of inquiry that emphasize human difference, deepening grooves of stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination (e.g., racism, sexism, ableism) (ruti, 2015; tucker, 1996; yakushko, 2019a; yakushko, 2022). in a first wave of professional growth in the u.s. (~1965-1991), cp grew out of a desire to shift the focus of practice to understanding the environmental forces that create oppressive situations (kloos et al. 2012). the development of cp was based on the professionalization of the psychologist, as a laboratory-oriented research expert, who learned how to take into consideration environmental factors that influence the human experience. however, the communitylevel, action-oriented aspects associated with changing conditions linked to structural problems did not receive as much attention in the u.s. as it did in other areas around the globe (reich, riemer, prilleltensky, & montero; 2007; reich, bishop, carolissen, dzidic, portillo, sasao, & stark; 2017). within the u.s., this did not occur until the rise of cp practitioners who were concerned with the outcomes of interventions more than the purity of the science that went into their design (see: https://www.scra27.org/publications/tcp/tc p-past-issues/tcpfall2015/communitypractitioner/). undoubtedly, this shift led to the perception that there are two distinct groups of community psychologists distinguished by the professional standards associated with the organizational cultures in which they work and incentives embedded within those contexts – i.e., either academia or everywhere else. in a second wave of professionalization (~1992-2012), there was an increase in the awareness of cp practice that emphasized the implementation of cp principles in community, nonprofit, government, and health settings. this second wave was also characterized by the rise of qualitative methods and the constructivist paradigm (denzin, 2009), a shift acknowledging unique realities of individuals and questioning generalizable claims about the experience of people in context. generating new forms of knowledge based on cp principles applied in practice began to counter the perceived hegemony and adulation of academic-based researchers in the field. the practice of nonacademic cp practitioners became increasingly known through publications, scra awards, and cp practice competencies being implemented in graduate programs (sarkisian, saleem, simpkin, weidenbacher, bartko, & taylor, 2012). overall, there has been quite a bit of growth and development in the practice of cp, and one of the most important aspects associated with increased acknowledgement of cp practice was the awareness of the disconnect between the values embedded within a stance of research or practice. more importantly, within this http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.scra27.org/publications/tcp/tcp-past-issues/tcpfall2015/community-practitioner/ https://www.scra27.org/publications/tcp/tcp-past-issues/tcpfall2015/community-practitioner/ https://www.scra27.org/publications/tcp/tcp-past-issues/tcpfall2015/community-practitioner/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 awareness, while not entirely explicit, was the realization of a hierarchy; where research designed by experts within academic institutions was more valuable than the perspectives, concerns, questions, and ways of being experienced among everyday community members. today, we attempt to unseat this rift within a renewed conceptualization. introducing a continuum of cp praxis historically, cp within the u.s. has been conceptualized as being comprised of either those who engage in cp research or cp practice (bennet, anderson, cooper, hassol, klein, & rosenblum, 1966; mcmahon & wolfe, 2016; mcmahon, jimenez, bond, wolfe, & ratcliffe, 2015). for example, past data for understanding the cp practice competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012) has asked community psychologists who filled out a survey to place themselves within one of two groupings, as being community-based or university-based. this distinction between the roles of a community psychologist employed by a university versus a community psychologist employed by any other type of agency or organization may have been helpful for developing cp as a legitimate field of study within the broader context of professional psychology. in our current historical context, however, we suggest that considering the roles of a community psychologist consistent with multiple points across a continuum could help to capture a more nuanced understanding of the unique, cross-fertilizing, boundary spanning contributions of all community psychologists. we believe this new conceptualization of cp practice as a continuum and temporal cycle allows for more clarity regarding the assets embedded within the varied contexts of our work. it emphasizes the assets of each possible employment setting, and across disciplines, which we hope can increase collaboration across the field for the purpose of a larger sense of transdisciplinary, community wellbeing and efficacy. figure 1: a continuum of community psychology praxis http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 examining more closely the philosophy of action/science in which we community psychologists engage in any setting requires us to be explicit about our orientation to the world when we participate in communityengaged and participatory inquiry approaches, including assumptions about ontology (nature of reality), epistemology (nature of knowing reality), axiology (what has value), ideology (role of values and politics), and methodology (tools used to obtain knowledge). clarifying this underlying paradigm within our projects requires us to be clear about the kinds of questions we consider legitimate lines of inquiry, what counts as knowledge, which forms of knowledge are privileged within any particular project, and the intentions behind projects such as how data will be used and for whose purpose. in terms of relational ethics, this deeper examination of our assumptions about the world encourages an examination of power – who has it, and how power will be wielded within a specific context. everyone benefits when we are able to hold a deeper understanding of how the settings in which we work (“where we work”) shapes the philosophy of action/science underlying our approaches to working hand-in-hand with communities (“how we work”). the cp praxis continuum (see fig. 1) illustrates a philosophy of action more than a philosophy of science, indicating that cp praxis is action with science integrated in the unique ways we enact our roles in any setting. in other words, our paradigms associated with science are inextricably linked to our relationships with communities through praxes associated with community-engaged and participatory inquiry approaches (israel, schulz, parker, & becker, 1998; olson & jason, 2015) explicitly grounded in relational ethical praxis. how we perceive knowledge or data, and how we use knowledge or data in various spaces are embedded within both the unique worldviews of organizational settings we occupy, as well as the paradigms we personally lean into; either due to paid contracts, structural conditions and discourses surrounding a particular issue, or our own preferred philosophies of action/science. from this perspective, all projects using any type of knowledge or information as “data” are enacting some philosophy of action/science and are included in this new conceptualization of cp praxis. this includes all types of projects that are empirically grounded, including, for example, different types of evaluation, use of qualitative data as part of a participatory or facilitated process, interventions using data to understand the value of certain identified variables, or drawing from indigenous processes, or using visual data metrics to raise consciousness or capacity to work more collectively. this continuum allows us to hold multiple types of data/knowledge and methods as part of a philosophy of action/science; therefore, the use of the term “data” will be used throughout this paper to refer to all forms of information being used to inform social action. maintaining a deeper understanding of our paradigms within settings, increasing awareness of our relationship to the politics within settings, and interrogating how these factors inform all actions are essential elements of our cp praxis. analyzing our philosophy of action/science and positionality within settings related to any number of problematizing projects within and between settings (i.e., alternative spaces) as power flows shift over time, is what we refer to as “the work.” unpacking the continuum there are two main components incorporated into this concept of a cp praxis continuum: (1) the translational sciences continuum used from a medical model perspective (drolet & lorenzi, 2011); and (2) a framework of major research paradigms for http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 considering the worldview or paradigms we carry through our philosophy of action (riemer, reich, evans, nelson, & prilleltensky, 2020), with some modications (barnett, 2022). when considering the unique needs required by different groups to experience well-being and thrive, we view the integration of these two frameworks as complementary and allowing for raised consciousness regarding the role of a community psychologist. the continuum of cp praxis also aligns with aspects of an article by tebes, thai, and matlin (2014) regarding needed approaches to science for the 21st century, so the connection to this framework is discussed here as well. while the past conceptualization of cp practice has assumed that the practitioner is one who implements theory and knowledge from science into community settings (julian, 2006), it is important to acknowledge that supporting and promoting science for the unique conceptions of well-being held by a variety of social groups also occurs through other means. based on our revised definition, this involves privileging the perspectives of historically marginalized groups to ensure they are taken seriously, generating knowledge blended with relational and colaboring processes for developing new understanding about what qualifies as conditions for well-being, or merely working to clear barriers to well-being in cases where assumptions have been made about what people need (i.e., concepts of health). in this sense, the cp praxis continuum inevitably holds a critical stance in that we acknowledge, and need to act against, the long history of oppression of certain groups that has led to health disparities. this raises the necessity of questioning traditional western professional expertise based on certain dominant conceptions of science (gone, 2007). this acknowledgement on a global level compels us to seek deeper understanding of epistemological diversity and plurality, and question the ways cultural hegemony has occurred in the name of universality (reiter, 2018). on the left: translational sciences moving from left to right (see fig. 1), projects that occur within the left end of the continuum (see the gold coloring) include those grounded in the assumptions of the biomedical research, translation continuum. they involve the translation of laboratorybased or clinical treatments to humans. these projects use positivist or post-positivist research methods and testing via practicebased research for public health purposes. this type of work includes drug or therapeutic dosage testing and assumes that professional knowledge and methodologies (e.g., clinical trials, experimental conditions) are necessary before such interventions are deemed safe enough for human application/use. there are a number of behaviorally focused approaches that have applied community psychology values in the development of interventions for issues such as drug addiction, bullying, recycling, and illegal sales of cigarettes to minors (see: https://press.rebus.community/introduction tocommunitypsychology/chapter/behavioral -approaches-in-community-settings/). in terms of public health benefits specifically, the study of translational science has become an important research priority to learn better how knowledge progresses to health gains given that significant health benefits are often lost in translation (drolet & lorenzi, 2011). there is a range of cp praxis that attends to a variety of possible projects within the blue side of the continuum. for example, we have been involved in implementation of prevention interventions for public health needs where we apply evidence-based knowledge and use quantitative survey data to test effectiveness (post-positivist) for a program within a particular setting. this could be a cancer-screening program, or an evaluation of an intervention designed to http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://press.rebus.community/introductiontocommunitypsychology/chapter/behavioral-approaches-in-community-settings/ https://press.rebus.community/introductiontocommunitypsychology/chapter/behavioral-approaches-in-community-settings/ https://press.rebus.community/introductiontocommunitypsychology/chapter/behavioral-approaches-in-community-settings/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 support caregivers of people with alzheimer’s. the efforts may utilize quantitative and qualitative data for both formative and summative assessment. other projects might involve collecting data to document or acknowledge differences in experiences, examining unique lived realities that assist in uncovering harmful variables. we might interview people experiencing homelessness in chicago to learn more about how city dynamics influence a person’s ability to maintain housing, thus identifying levers for structural change. while one might interpret this section as “research,” we see this dialogue as fundamental to the actionbased praxis cycle. the decisions made and solutions decided upon in any data-to-action event lie in the shared decisions co-created by all stakeholders, not simply the “analytic” or theoretical contributions of the community psychologist(s). acknowledging that all project data is tied to larger transdisciplinary, ongoing complex systems change and discourse, it is important to note that projects might start out grounded within one paradigm, then merge with other paradigms as data links to other spaces, sectors, and organizations within the system. a constructivist approach may require a qualitative data orientation in a relational conceptualization of cp praxis, and may lead into another project using different types of data and to different stakeholders. in many cases, it can be a challenge to identify where one project starts and another begins. this is the nature of conceptualizing cp practice as ongoing cycles of praxis (olson & jason, 2015), and it is important for following the flow of knowledge movement as we seek knowledge generated to shape existing structures (habermas, 2005/1962). therefore, many projects often become mixed-methods approaches in the name of pragmatism to ensure the usefulness of data depending on the diverse groups and organizations involved, as well as the supports needed to link to next steps in working to disrupt the flow of the system. on the right: critical, transformational, and ecological the far right side of the continuum represents how we community psychologists can be involved in projects/processes that take a critical, emancipatory stance to dominant historical, structural, and cultural system dynamics. we may actively engage in analyses/processes with the intention of shifting discourse, clarifying power dynamics, or raising consciousness about the nature of resource use, or how to maneuver resource conservation/distribution (i.e., more transformative forms of change). projects/processes within the ecological realm deserve special mention here. this standpoint assumes humans are enmeshed with the universe, which regards relationality with the whole earth; listening and attending to the character of each ecosystem through active concern (barnett, 2022). this realm directly opposes dominant ideologies about the nature of reality that have assumed humans are separate from and superior to “nature” (mignolo & walsh, 2018). projects/processes within this realm of knowing may be grounded in postcolonial or decolonial paradigms, and may engage with indigenous ways of knowing and being. one effort might include projects where we work to document how dominant systems function as systems of oppression that have created barriers to well-being for indigenous communities in real world settings while simultaneously validating indigenous knowledge systems (indigenous). the first author is, for instance, supporting the work of the native american center’s goals to ensure proper education about native americans in the chicago public school system and to collaborate with artist/activists to bring awareness around the land that was unapologetically taken over by the city (for information on a current related project http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 called “whose lakefront,” see https://www.jeeyeunlee.com/). transparadigm approach: critical realism the transparadigm approach of critical realism (bhaskar, 2002), a modern school in philosophy of science—from post-positivist to post-modernist (lauzier-jobin, brunson, & olson, in press)—spans the cp practice continuum. critical realism allows for understanding whole4 community systems, unpacking the elements of harmful and violent systems of knowing and being that enable oppression of certain social groups within and across geographies. critical realism is a way of seeing the world of cp praxis as a philosophy of inquiry that allows for integration of ontological realism and constructivism or interpretivism. this view recognizes that there are things in the world that are real, there are events that occur, and there are empirical observations we can make about these events. the critical realist paradigm allows for holding both knowledge of shared reality (e.g., structural system dynamics, politics, organizations, etc.) as well as diverse epistemological standpoints. “even if one is a realist at the ontological level, one could also be an epistemological interpretivist…our knowledge of the real world is inevitably interpretive and provisional rather than straightforwardly representational” (frazer & lacey, 1993; p. 182). this orientation, that there is a real world that exists independent of our perceptions, theories, and constructions, means that there are established truths about a shared reality (some things about systems are identifiable and generalizable). at the same time, we also view and seek to understand socially 4 use of the term “whole” to refers to a concept of communities that includes all aspects of place and how people relate to all elements of their place. constructed, local realities (social groups hold unique realities – some things are not generalizable). therefore, we view the critical realist paradigm as inherently critical in orientation given modes of inquiry continuously encourage critical analysis incorporating multiple types of data and divergent perspectives, including perspectives on the nature of reality (ontology). as gorski (2013) states, “a genuinely scientific realism is necessarily a critical one, which continually reflects on and revises its own categories and instruments. its ontology is provisional and fallible” (p. 2/659). furthermore, when applying this approach toward the social world we believe that a focus on power dynamics as part of the critique is essential to understanding the past, present, and future of settings and groups, as well as person-environment fit. a critical realist paradigm of inquiry encourages transdisciplinarity in order to understand various layers of truth and reality. it also encourages a connection between knowledge and action. generating, connecting, and moving the flow of knowledge is done to help guide the way we act to promote well-being in the world. the comprehensive nature of the critical realist paradigm encourages us to explore multiple perceived truths and multidimensional ways of understanding truth and lived realities, including how contexts, needs, and narratives shift over time. when considering the relational aspects of this new definition of cp practice, and working transdisciplinarily, we find points of alignment with an article by tebes, et. al. (2014) on 21st century science that refers to the work as a relational process. they suggest that cp embraces a more collective-action this is not to be confused with borders imposed on communities such as city, state, or other political lines drawn within and across geographic community areas. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.jeeyeunlee.com/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 “team science” to bridge various transdisciplinary knowledges and for science to better link research and community practice. unfortunately, power inherent in academic settings can place communitydriven data at a disadvantage, particularly in what the various institutions regulate and authorize as “valid” perspectives shaping system policy/practice. dominant policy institutions are those supported by government efforts that favor post-positivist forms of professional knowledge, hence controlling what data and lines of inquiry can shape systems of care and the distribution or preservation of resources (e.g., natural ecologies). the continuum of cp praxis helps us appreciate multiple emergent ecologies of knowledge beyond the dictates of scientific rigor and acknowledges the history of intentional marginalization of certain voices and ways of knowing/communicating (i.e., sociolinguistic justice). instead, we engage in connecting with how a broader group of people view the world, all of which are legitimate forms of data, and it comes down to us more intentionally, calling out power dynamics and prioritizing relational ethics. the continuum of cp praxis addresses these limitations by uplifting the importance of examining an embodied and relational experience of acting alongside, adding to, and contesting the dominant discourse on how to perceive and act on social problems (e.g., mental health challenges, health disparities). through use of this continuum of cp praxis, we acknowledge that relationships are dynamic and data includes more than what is intentionally collected through the limits of a scientific lens and agenda. we believe in more fully embracing what it means to be in relationship with, and within a thicker understanding of history, time, and diaspora. from this stance, we are moved and move others, through empathy and a deeper connection to understanding our shared pain and interdependence (alzaldúa, 2015). in summary, the continuum of cp praxis, situated within the localized political, cultural, and situational dynamics of a community system, indicates that knowledge is generated from various interpretive frameworks/paradigms, not only from positivist or from even post-positivist research paradigms, as was once assumed. the knowledge generated is shared, contemplated, debated, taught, and critiqued from multiple stakeholder perspectives. through this ongoing dialogical process, through an increased consciousness and capacity, there is brought a greater potential for cultural and structural change (habermas, 2005/1962). this is why the arrows within the model flow horizontally from left to right, indicating that all knowledges gained from the various methodologies are equally valid within the work of cp praxis. we believe it is our job to insist on this values-forward framework (axiology). from a cp praxis standpoint, merely acknowledging that various types of knowledge are valid brings new perspectives into general or scholarly debates, however, we believe this does not go far enough and could be working against directing resources to tangible and needed change. clarifying how epistemic injustice manifests in our daily lives, within our institutional and organizational settings, and therefore everyday situations, requires further unpacking and clarifying relational ethics in daily praxis. given that cp praxis happens within a historical, cultural, and community context, we believe it is important to first consider how these dominant cultural dynamics have contributed to epistemic, social, and cultural injustice, and then reverse-engineer the strategies. applying the cp praxis continuum to understanding institutions and organizations understanding the ongoing dominant cultural dynamics of our complex community systems http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 involves understanding institutional and organizational settings. we consider how the worldviews and practices of each are distinct from one another within a larger city setting, and how these dynamics work together for larger purposes (jimenez, 2012). each organization embedded within a geographically specific setting plays a role in a larger system of established policies and practices intended to serve the needs of communities. these policies and practices are embedded within particular worldviews that can be located along the continuum of cp praxis. just as any individual community psychologist effort can fall somewhere along the continuum of cp praxis, so too can those efforts of whole organizations, sectors, broadening from state to global levels of governmental entities. differing organizations are shaped by disciplinary scholarship and adhere to certain philosophies of action/science. they make whole sets of assumptions about the development, use, and allocation of resources based on particular ways humans are believed to relate to the natural environment (ontology) and certain ways of knowing (epistemology). in fact, this is how universities play a role in shaping how our complex community systems perpetuate injustice. the structural and colonizing function of academia highlights the problem with the power afforded to “science.” this is problematic for cp work in general, given that the most valued work has been traditionally sourced within these elitist entities; and based within cartesian philosophical assumptions about human reality and knowledge. the assumptions embedded in the format of scientific writing, the role of a university faculty member as an expert in disciplinary content areas, and the incredible amounts of resources funneled into supporting hierarchical relationships from universities to their surrounding communities—these embedded factors all play a role in sustaining oppressive ways of knowing and being. therefore, if we hope to change which perspectives are taken seriously within the configuration of our community systems, while truly uplifting the needs and perspectives of those social/natural communities we care about, we must address those forms of structural violence that have continued to oppress. it is the role of community psychologists to uncover the seemingly invisible, underlying ideologies inherent within these systems (jimenez & barhouche, 2021). part of cp praxis is engaging in critical reflexivity on the community systems in which we are embedded and promoting collaborative critical thinking with our partners in our daily work to increase awareness of harm (evans, 2014). this level of problemitization is needed so we can break down how settings built within a colonizing standpoint perpetuate destruction of the human spirit through their very existence (freire, 1970). one example to explore here is the kinds of activity associated with the u.s. department of health and human services (dhhs). the dhhs is by nature a federal department comprised of multiple agencies that send federal funds and guide state dollars to financially support organizations that provide resources such as food, shelter, and counseling supports to alleviate the stresses that manifest within a hierarchical capitalist system (incite!, 2007; kivel, 2009; renz, 2016). the governmental agencies hold the power, distributing resources according to certain assumptions about which organizations deserve to be funded and valuing certain ways their services must be evaluated as effective. health services are tied to epistemologies emphasizing the left end of the continuum of cp praxis (positivist/postpositivist), indicating that professional expertise and evidence-based practices are the desired criteria for determining what is funded and therefore what is available to the public. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 in this case, assumptions embedded within positivist and post-positivist philosophies of science determine how we attend to the health needs of a variety of communities, some of whose members do not believe in the forms of knowledge generated by the science that has been prioritized (e.g., indigenous ways of knowing). moreover, it goes even deeper than this when considering assumptions embedded within dominating structures of city and state. in this kind of scenario, the intersection of assumptions about science in this organization (dhhs) about health, and humans, mixed with city policies, and federal control mechanisms (i.e., policy) regarding land and resources at local levels (i.e., privatization), all get in the way of allowing people the self-determination needed to experience life/health in ways harmonious with their spiritual, social, and cultural worldviews (fadiman, 1997). it is through this epistemological control that institutions perpetuate oppression. locally, we try to better identify how our work spans the continuum and supports greater collaboration with those of us around the chicagoland area, and is invested in creating a better future. all data is and can be useful for changing community culture and system structures, yet there also needs to be explicit awareness and articulation about how different epistemological standpoints carry more or less weight when bringing data into dialogue. grappling with application of the continuum helps us and our students better engage with our communities in an inclusive way. this continuum exists in a way that includes all community psychologists and their work to be enacting some form of 5 the term “spaces” refers to the places we gather outside of existing system-designed settings such as non-profits, for-profits, large/small organizations, designated centers, and institutions. spaces are created, abide by the cp praxis. while it can be argued that many, if not all, community psychologists are engaged in, or focused on achieving some level of social/systems/transformative change, the process and manifestation of this work looks different with different approaches, different settings, and spaces5. community psychologists therefore have different priorities when it comes to the nature of their work, the forms of knowledge privileged in specific settings/spaces, and the skills needed to be effective in those varied contexts. various ways of knowing may be challenged within larger system structures and we argue that within our own cycles of collectiveaction-inquiry-reflexivity (praxis), no one position is of any greater value than another. all community psychologists, across disciplinary lines are important for revealing the oppressive mechanisms inherent in the system and organizing resources necessary to subvert or dismantle them. working collaboratively and in alignment with this purpose is the future of the field. each informs and can complement the work of others because the conditions of every work context limits activity, and what can be known. we believe that integration or recombinations across the continuum, to the extent possible, are more useful than hardening or polarizing distinctions between academic and practice or between science and practice. one person or team might engage in an inquiry project positioned very far to the post-positivist side of this continuum and also be engaged in other projects grounded in a philosophy of transformation, or work to uplift or preserve indigenous knowledge systems. then again, relational needs of those in attendance, and flow like water. spaces may either occur online or inbetween existing settings (e.g., online spaces, personal spaces, creative spaces, natural spaces) where created relational norms exist, for as long as they are needed. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 cp projects may apply a variety of tools, with multiple intentions, including building generalizable or transferrable knowledge that builds capacity for system change. the main way the continuum of cp praxis can be helpful here is in clarifying the sets of assumptions embedded in the work of varying organizations, bringing more intention to identifying the power embedded within varying frames, and helping us to be intentional in bringing these data into dialogue that is intentionally more equitable within ongoing cycles of relationally ethical praxis. clarifying relational ethics in praxis “…epistemic decolonization is not sufficient: a radical change in forms of being, living, and acting in the world is also necessary.” (leanne betasamosake simpson, in “epistemic extractivism: a dialogue with alberto acosta, leanne betasamosake simpson, and silvia rivera, by ramon grosfoguel; de sousa santos & menses, 2020) all knowledge gained from various projects along the continuum are valid forms of knowing, and through inclusion of varying perspectives, we are able to expand ecologies of knowledge considered within everyday decision-making (epistemic justice). the revised definition of cp practice also points to the value of developing and cultivating horizontally structured, relationship networks, or, at minimum, acknowledges the potential for harm embedded in relationships based on hierarchies. vertical relationships can manifest in many ways, including, for example, extracting the data/stories from local communities and framing their community activism/labor within cognitivebased frameworks that potentially mischaracterizes the nature of their/our struggle. it is safe to say here, that all forms of regular praxes must be questioned as we have all been desensitized to the nature of harm normalized in daily practices. this is precisely why it is so important that we prioritize a relational ontology, grounded in empathy and care for all actors (human, nonhuman, living, non-living, through spiritual interconnectedness), and then see what possibilities emerge from that ethical standpoint. it is from this stance that we work to peel back all the ways we are, by default, often engaged in an ethic of domination and work towards an ethic of love (hooks, 1994). the shift from the focus on a philosophy of science to a philosophy of action/science (i.e., praxis) is intentional in that this distinction indicates a shift in the approach all community psychologists take to their work. one that encourages an emphasis on ways of being based within deep appreciation, understanding of power and oppression, and care. through this lens, community psychologists may need to stray beyond any comfortable personal ethics or moral bounds and instead engage in ways of being, and specific actions, that end suffering for life and allow for preservation of many forms of life. this calls for a deeper understanding of responsibility and enactment of accountable autonomy (see vanessa de oliveira andreotti, 2021, book titled hospicing modernity: facing humanity’s wrongs and implications for social action. see also: https://decolonialfutures.net/). although cp is not a field that espouses a purely science orientation, as taught through mainstream education, the ideological bases of the professionalization of the field can unintentionally reinforce habits of being in relationship with community/life that tends to emphasize a superiority over others (e.g., cognitive superiority). while some cps are intentional in the development of practices consistent with horizontal relationshipbuilding, other norms embedded in the field continue to emphasize a more dominant cultural approach to inquiry (e.g., academic research, teaching, and mentoring norms). we understand these norms as suspect, and http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://decolonialfutures.net/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 therefore are routinely scrutinized in our work. traditional research and scholarship norms create harm through imposing theoretical frameworks over lived experiences of local communities, analysis, and compartmentalization or reductionism. that is how current science education encourages taking the world apart rather than understanding the world in terms of complex, interrelated social and ecological systems (bateson, 1982; datta, 2015). the revised definition of cp practice articulated here is akin to the philosophy of liberation psychology, particularly in how we accentuate relational ethics (martin-baró, 1994; montero, sonn, & burton, 2017). our reconceptualization of cp praxis emphasizes relational ethics as the process of becoming one with complex adaptive systems of relationships within geographic regions, organizational settings, and community spaces, which involves a mutual, co-laboring, capacity-building process, predicated on ongoing conversations and co-learning with attention to differences in power and care for experiences of harm. this dovetails with liberation psychology literature on critical consciousness in action that indicates how intentional analysis of power within relationships is key to authentic dialogue that allows for liberatory transformation (montero, 2009; serrano-garcia, 1994). in our work, lengthy or ongoing dialogues are often prioritized to share/hear experiences and knowledge, which are praxes that have been long valued by social communities appreciating indigenous knowledges of the global south. one example of this is how our university’s civic engagement center is cohosting a discussion session on the “whose lakefront” project with the native american center of chicago. this is particularly important within the context of chicago where oppression based largely on coloniality of power manifests through the living legacy of colonialism through racial, gendered, spiritual, political, and social hierarchical orders (lugones, 2007; quijano, 2000). these hierarchies have been the foundation for the design and ongoing functioning of the city as reflected in current social and economic structures (nightingale, 2012). in addition, we believe acknowledging power dynamics is critical in that if we are in dialogue without acknowledging the global, historical context of subjectivities, and a frame of decoloniality, we may only be replicating discourses based on a hegemonic monologue. therefore, unless we (multiple community stakeholders – academics included) understand how power dynamics influence our relationships, we will not be able to engage in the local dialogue necessary to bring all forms of knowledge into consideration when seeking to change harmful systems structures (e.g., public policy, organizational practices, normalized harmful ways of being in relationship to the world in general). we view ourselves in ongoing dialogue with those of varying roles within our geographic and political landscape. we strive to better connect across obstructions of power to bridge new understandings that we hope can build to influence real social, cultural, and structural change. our work to apply the variety of cp practice competencies is part of this praxis. to better participate in this relational praxis, we seek to enhance our understanding of what it means to be “in relationship.” building horizontal relationships through an increasing understanding of how power manifests itself in relationships, we work to deepen our understanding of how various power dynamics influence our positions and processes. within our own geographic space (i.e., united states, midwest, chicagoland, urban setting) and in our attempt to reach and build expanded relationships globally, we believe that raising our deep structural, cultural, and political consciousness within our current http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 context and settings, involves deliberate cycles of praxis on five main points related to all projects, including intention, purpose, positionality, power and relationality. 1. intention refers to being clear with ourselves and others about why we seek to engage with a particular community or issue and our relationship to that community or issue. questions to consider include: ● why are we here? ● who has encouraged us to enter/occupy/hold space in this setting? ● how are we potentially an agent of larger forces/energies that may be enacting some form of harm? 2. purpose refers to what we hope to achieve by engaging with others in a space. questions to consider include: ● what will we be doing here, with whom, and to what end? ● what are the goals we hold in this space/setting? ● what are goals we hold for those we are working with in this space and to what extent do we know whether those goals are consistent with their objectives? ● are we to enact a stance of disruption or assimilation with the goals of the setting in which we are working? 3. positionality refers to an acknowledgement of social, cultural, and institutional settings in which we are embedded, including aspects of our own human characteristics such as age, race, gender, residency, etc. reflecting on positionality involves a close examination of the human characteristics we hold within our being and unpacking their meaning in the context of a specific historical and present setting (harrell & bond, 2006). questions to consider include: ● who are we in this setting? ● how are we perceived? ● how does this community experience us in the context of our social identities and locations, and what does this mean for our work in this context? ● is there any reason someone else might be feeling uncomfortable with our presence in this setting? ● is there a space for us, more conducive to achieving our goals, based on positionality? 5. power refers to an explicit analysis of how power is experienced by us and others as it relates to the three points above. this analysis includes examining and determining whether we hold integrative power, power to, power over, power with, or power from oppression (neal & neal, 2011; serrano-garcia, 1994). we believe this analysis of our power is tied to characteristics of our positionality and our relationality in every setting. questions to consider include: ● how are our ways of understanding and making sense of the world consistent with the dominant culture or dominant action/science paradigms? ● are there different cultural values systems being taken less seriously, or valued less on a particular issue? ● what paradigm is grounding this project and how are others potentially marginalized in this setting? ● whose voice holds weight in this setting and how can we ensure we are considering needs related to other ways of knowing? ● who holds the power in this setting/situation and what needs to change in order for these dynamics to change? ● what power do i hold and how can i maneuver this power to change conditions? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 6. relationality refers to the assumption of a relational ontology emphasizing an understanding that we are not spectators of reality but actors that are an interdependent part of this world, taking into consideration relationships with land, nature, and sustainability (datta, 2015). it is important to understand the relationship we have to the settings/spaces in which we participate and the people, all of which is intricately tied to our positionality and power. it is through an analysis of our relationships that we learn ways to enact our agency for social, structural, and cultural change. ultimately, relationships are of central importance to every aspect of our lives including our relationship to madra tierra. questions to consider include: ● how will this engagement influence our relationship with _ (fill in the blank) __? ● how will this funding opportunity influence our relationship with, among, and across social groups about which we care? did we get their input first? ● how do we consider engaging with various social groups, as we consider pursuing a certain project idea? ● how does our purpose, positionality, and power influence our relationships? through a cycle of praxis on these five main reference points within every project, and varying stakeholders, we believe we are able to enact a model of cp praxis that allows for critical, liberatory, community building that also supports alternative settings grounded in the spirit of decoloniality (see: global journal of cp practice special issue: embodiment of decoloniality, 2022, https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue =42&article=258). implications for education and training we end the current paper with a series of our own commitments and considerations for other community psychologists related to the promotion of this new and dynamic definition of cp practice. we also conclude with some recommendations for higher education more broadly. 1. work through development of relational ethical praxis – through ongoing self-reflexivity within our pedagogy (through writing, teaching, discussions) on intentional global, historical, and decolonial analyses, we will work to make clear our intentions, purpose, positionality, power, and relationality, in all of our work and encourage these practices among other cp colleagues. we will prioritize educating about the importance of embodying cycles of praxis on these five main reference points within every project, including varying stakeholders within community partnerships and deliberative dialogues. we will explicitly embed these criteria within assessment of our dissertations and link it within the content of our courses: mixedquantitative-qualitative methods, advanced cross-cultural communication, prevention & interventions, and leadership and organizational change. 2. acknowledge critical global citizenship – we will seek to understand global history and its connections to local history and create opportunities for global community connections and learning. to promote community psychologists as planetary citizens, we will develop a resource for education programs to reference when considering educational opportunities transnationally, acting in alignment with others to address global injustices and allowing for potential cross-cultural http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=42&article=258 https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=42&article=258 global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 inquiry/action/scholarship opportunities. we will aim to create spaces that assist us in identifying and gaining deeper understanding of the intangible belief systems that create and maintain structures of oppressive systems. to foster learning from our varied colleagues around the globe, we will participate in the creation of a consortium that focuses on transnational knowledge, development, and action. inevitably this involves understanding how relational ethical praxis uncovers our positionality from a global historical frame. 3. seek to understand the complexity of whole communities – this includes a variety of adjustments to our relationality and our worldview around connectedness similarly or differently than those of our colleagues: ● we intend to continually challenge ourselves to move beyond first-order change initiatives that blame the victim of systems designed to control and oppress by demonstrating aligned ways first, second, and third order change approaches can work together. ● we will seek deeper understanding of underlying ideological structures, policies, and cultural systems at work holistically within our local geographic community that similarly influence social communities around the globe (i.e. capitalism, neoliberalism, patriarchy, hierarchy). ● we will seek ways of more deeply unpacking power dynamics when bringing data and dialogue together. we expect to use multiple paradigms depending upon the context but perhaps relying most heavily on critical realism and dialectical pluralism – as different methodological tools allow for capturing different components of community system dynamics. 4. continuously critically analyze the depths of our local historical context and the role of the university as methodologists and co-learners/laborers with our students, alumni, and local communities, we will intentionally prioritize understanding how philosophies of action/science are embedded in local systems and how they shape dominant discourses and orientations to identified resources. ● this occurs through applying the continuum of cp praxis to understanding the role of organizations and institutions within our communities, including explicit examination of the power, positionality, intention, relationality, and purpose of various organization and institutional structures within local settings. ● we are currently considering the historical context out of which universities have been developed, reexamine underlying ideologies that shape educational experiences, civic engagement, and scholarly output. through this deeper understanding we will develop a revised philosophy of scholarship that acknowledges the potential breadth of community engaged scholarship spanning the continuum of cp praxis, and working towards being more like an ecological university (barnett, 2022; jimenez, 2020 – see a working document: https://tiffenyjimenez.wordpress.co m/2020/07/05/a-checklist-fordecolonizing-the-university/). ● we are currently considering how to be more intentional in linking educational experiences (e.g., class assignments, dissertations) with needs of communities, and create more intentional links between http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 inquiry, action, and dialogue spaces. this includes exploration of how our doctoral program can be more directly linked through creating diverse modes of scholarship and circulating knowledge engaging with publics and community decisionmaking processes. ● we continue working towards deeper awareness of our roles in academic settings, understanding and subverting dominant ideologies and paradigms inherent within universities, and co-creating with marginalized voices, including indigenous and afro-descendent populations. questions to consider include: what do our communities learn from universities? what do our communities teach universities? how can we envision ways to continue disrupting universities to assist in creating structural and social-cultural transformation? (freire, 1970; montero, 2009) 5. intentionally promote a sense of community in cp – we believe that enacting our strategies for building just, healthy, supportive, and vibrant community engagement also applies to our personal, professional, and educational communities (see jimenez et al., 2016). through enacting the new cp practice definition, we can better respect paradox and complexity within our field and address undercurrents of ideologies and belief systems negatively influencing social dynamics across contexts while building on our assets to improve our local and global well-being. 6. continuously improve the definition of cp praxis – let us synthesize the current proposed changes to the definition of cp practice and continually take in feedback to change, improve, and consider the downstream effects of those changes on competency development, training, and actual sense of community. we are certain that essential ways of enacting relational ethics in professional spaces and settings will reveal themselves over time as we hope the social-political conditions shift as well. conclusions as community psychologists, we attempt to ethically and judiciously shift the norms of our settings to create more of a collaborative, co-laboring, sharing spirit, rather than competition and any individualistic striving toward recognition. this more truly collective approach is the empowered path forward, the unapologetic stride of many new and diverse community psychologists in the field prepared to not only accept shifts towards more just work, but to be the shift. and yet the norms of the field may at times leave some of community psychologists afraid to freely share ideas, fearful of not receiving credit for our work and ideas in an academic world that very much replicates masculine, capitalistic worlds striving after power and dominion. let’s put a stop to those tendencies that reduce our chances of creating a world to which we all aspire to belong (jimenez, 2018). we aim to step away from competitive individualism passed on to current cultures via western imperialism. we do so by reducing judgments and by valuing the diverse work and perspectives of our colleagues working in and around various organizational contexts. we create shared spaces and learning communities within local contexts, across whole continents, and across the globe. we work to build more of a sense of community across our roles and identify how the inquiry in which we are each engaged, contributes to a more in-depth understanding of reality. we hope this conceptualization of a cyclical cp praxis continuum helps better aim the development of the field to actively promote justice, healing, and wellness among the various http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 communities we inhabit and engage, as well as more firmly engaging in vigorous dialogue with the power structures that are otherwise poised against needed social change. references anzaldúa, g., & in keating, a. l. 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(2015). the age of scientific sexism: how evolutionary psychology promotes gender profiling and fans the battle of the sexes. bloomsbury publishing. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://youtu.be/uayhruj9voi global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 27 sarason, s. (1974). the psychological sense of community: prospects for a community psychology. the jossey-bass behavioral science series. san francisco, ca: josseybass publishers. isbn 978-0-87589-216-0. sarason, s. b. (1978). the nature of problem solving in social action. american psychologist, 33(4), 370–380. sarkisian, g. v., saleem, m. a., simpkin, j., weidenbacher, a. bartko, n. & taylor, s. (2013). a learning journey ii: learned course maps as a basis to explore how students learned community psychology practice competencies in a coalition building course. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4). teo, t. 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(2022). in science we (should not always) trust: decolonizing the science of psychology. global journal of community psychology practice, special issue on embodiment of decoloniality. https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?iss ue=42&article=251 http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=42&article=251 https://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=42&article=251 a community narration assessment of master’s level psychology students at antioch university los angeles kimberly morgan1, suzy herbert1, melissa dellens1, connie yang1, tanya barr1, krista page1, deshanna finn1, & jade richards1 keywords: community narration approach, academic program evaluation, organizational assessment, community psychology tool author biographies: kimberly morgan (she, her, hers), is an associate marriage and family therapist working in a community health clinic in los angeles. she is dedicated to community building and social justice. kimberly is passionate about promoting health, well-being and empowerment. she also works as a fitness professional and is a member of the american college of sports medicine. kimberly is a graduate of antioch university, los angeles and holds a master of arts in clinical psychology with a specialization in applied community psychology (acp). as a student, along with suzy herbert, kimberly presented community narration for two los angeles nonprofits as acp field study. suzy herbert (she, her, hers), has utilized her own life experience and talents for more than 20 years toward helping the disenfranchised and less fortunate populations of los angeles. ms. herbert’s passions have included advocating for the homeless, working in the hiv+ community, assisting mothers at risk of losing custody of their children due to mental health and substance abuse related issues, and working with persons struggling with addiction and mental illness of all kinds. she remains an active volunteer and activist for social justice, serving on multiple boards, committees, and coalitions in the los angeles area, in addition to public speaking events. in december of 2019, ms. herbert earned her m.a. in clinical psychology with a specialization in applied community psychology from antioch university in los angeles. she is certified in gestalt experiential psychology, and reality therapy. ms. herbert holds degrees in business management, liberal studies, and has college-level experience in project management. suzy is currently working full time with homeless, disenfranchised, and at-risk individuals as a psychotherapist for step up on second in santa monica, ca. suzy resides in the los angeles area. melissa dellens (she/her/hers), will complete her master of arts in psychology at aula in september 2020 specializing in applied community psychology (acp). she is a marriage and family therapist trainee at valley community counseling clinic, providing low fee psychoanalytic and psychodynamic therapy. melissa has been a family support coordinator at jay nolan community services (jncs) since 2011 and is a community advocate for full inclusion of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. melissa grew her passion for storytelling as a part of her social justice work through her 1 antioch university los angeles global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 background in theaters and summer camps. connie yang, is an ma clinical psychology student specializing in applied community psychology at antioch university los angeles. she currently receives her marriage and family therapist (mft) training at south central training consortium, working with children and families at a schoolbased site in south los angeles. her heart is in the prevention of unnecessary traumas and oppression, as well as strengthening communities. passionate about storytelling, connie gravitates toward spaces that create authenticity, vulnerability, and connection. she has worked and volunteered for several nonprofits that center around storytelling for social impact. she is deeply interested in understanding power dynamics and empowering human beings to live fulfilling lives. tanya barr, is an associate marriage and family therapist working for a non-profit child and youth community mental health agency and as an associate with the narrative counseling center, ncc in los angeles, ca. tanya is dedicated to providing equitable access to mental health that is centered in social justice. she is also passionate about holistic healthy lifestyles and has focused her work toward empowering individuals, families, and communities towards resiliency, mental health, meaning, and purpose. tanya graduated with her m.a. in clinical psychology with a focus in applied community psychology from antioch university. recommended citation: morgan, k., herbert, s., dellens, m., yang, c., barr, t., page, k., finn, d., & richards, j. (2020). a community narration assessment of master’s level psychology students at antioch university los angeles. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(3), 1 13. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: kimberly morgan and suzy herbert, tmf antioch university los angeles, map program. email: morgankimberly428@gmail.com or suzyaherbert@gmail.com. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:morgankimberly428@gmail.com mailto:suzyaherbert@gmail.com global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 a community narration assessment of master’s level psychology students at antioch university los angeles applied community psychology (acp) is a specialty field of study in the master’s of arts in clinical psychology (map) at antioch university los angeles (aula). students participate in classes and workshops that present theory along with opportunities for real life application. in the spring 2019 quarter, eight students were enrolled in a community narration (cn) approach workshop to learn the theory and practice of facilitating the cn. the students used cn to discover commonalities and differences in their experiences as students of aula. they created a community narrative which expressed the culture of students at aula. in addition, the students learned how to conduct cn in the community with application in program evaluation and consultation. a discussion of the results of the community narrative that emerged is described, and implications for faculty and administrators are presented. the cn approach (olson & jason, 2011) was designed to facilitate community building in organizations. cn is a participatory activity in which members create the narrative of the organization. group participants begin with personal stories, or narratives, about their experiences in the organization. cn strives to empower participants to discover the organization's goals and deepen understanding of the strengths and challenges. cn can be used as part of the beginning of an evaluation process to assess, plan or solve problems in an organization. cn has been used in previous research in community settings such as a convention for a member-run organization (olson & jason, 2011), non-profit organizations, institutions of higher education, and community banks (g.v. sarkisian, personal communication, april 26, 2020). participants engage in discussions concerning the organizations’ culture in order to foster understanding and facilitate change. cn begins with telling personal stories which people experience as enjoyable and uplifting (olson & jason, 2011). participants in the non-profit organizations felt a sense of individual purpose during this phase. as they shared and found commonalities in the narratives, participants discovered the group’s identity, values and collective beliefs. in these cases, the members of the organizations participated without leadership. at the conclusion, the facilitators presented the written report to leadership. it provided them with a qualitative strengthbased evaluation. olson and jason’s (2011) approach contributes to the tools available to facilitate empowerment evaluations, however in a review of the literature, no other examples of the cn approach were identified. this paper summarizes the experience of students involved in the cn approach workshop as it pertains to their time at aula. it identifies the values of aula and how the students experienced the culture of the university. methods participants the participants consisted of master of arts of clinical psychology program (map) students at antioch university los angeles (aula). seven of the students were in the applied community psychology (acp) specialization, one student was in the general practice specialization. all participants identified as female, ranged in age from 26 to 56, and racially identified as 1 afrocaribbean, 1 black, 1 korean american, 3 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 caucasian, and 2 undisclosed. participants and students are used interchangeably throughout this paper. organization and setting participants were from the map program at aula tasked with training to become masters-level licensed marriage and family therapists (lmft) and licensed professional clinical counselors (lpcc). gregor v. sarkisian, ph. d., a professor at aula, was the instructor in the cn workshop. the workshop was a one-day (8 hour) class introducing students to the background and theory of cn with the end goal being the development of a community narrative reflection of the student experience. the mission was to engage in an experiential run of a cn so that the students learn the process of facilitating this intervention in community and organizational settings. aula is a commuter campus located in culver city that has at the core of its mission statement a commitment to social justice and equity. in addition to the one campus in los angeles there are four campuses located within the us (seattle, new england, santa barbara) along with an online track. all of the campuses are governed by an office in yellow springs, oh. the authors of this paper were currently enrolled as students in the map program as both full time and part time students. we are organizationally independent of aula although our relationship with the university is involved and intense as we have financial and professional vested interests in the map program. we do not consider ourselves “consultants” for the organization. procedure the cn exercise began with members of the class gathered together in the classroom. the descriptions and time frames are specific to the evaluation process that took place at aula and can be used as a framework for future evaluation experiences. the following eight phases describe the process in full: phase 1 – introduction. the session began with the instructor providing history and understanding to the cn approach and identified antioch university los angeles (aula) as the binding community of the group of participants. next, the importance of storytelling was emphasized as a means to determine the common community constructs within the group (olson & jason, 2011). the goal as aula students was to identify a personal highlighting or defining moment at aula and prepare to share their story of that experience. this phase lasted approximately fifteen to thirty minutes. phase 2 gathering in subgroups. students were broken up into groups of 2-3 people at random throughout the room. group members were asked to introduce themselves. this phase moved quickly with the support of the facilitator and took five minutes. phase 3 sharing stories. each group was asked to take approximately five minutes per person to describe in detail their “high point”, a personal story about their most favorable experience while attending aula. this would be the moment that most closely defined for them their experience at aula. the instructor walked around the room, listening in on discussions and answering questions as they arose. students were then asked to wrap things up after thirty minutes. phase 4 identifying commonalities. the next phase involved finding the commonalities across stories within each group. each of the groups were asked to identify in 2-3 words the commonality of their stories. the result of this process was to allow for the stories to be qualitatively broken down into a manageable body of work. as described in kelly’s (1955) methodology, the idea was to create community constructs from the individual constructs. participants were encouraged to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 associate quickly, and not take too much time finding these commonalities; this took approximately ten minutes. examples of the commonalities included fulfillment, making a difference, a sense of purpose, connectedness. phase 5 voting on commonalities. as the commonalities became more evident and some redundant, such as useful and applied learning, they were clustered and eventually condensed into fewer constructs. as the groups identified their commonalities, these terms were written down on the left side of the whiteboard, leaving the right side of the whiteboard clear for the opposite or bipolar constructs to be identified and documented later. the group voted to reduce and combine once more. for example, creativity and passion were combined to form the construct inspiration. the group defined this as the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something creativity. this left eighteen primary constructs. constructs receiving no votes such as symbiotic relationship were removed from the board. those receiving only one vote, such as self-discovery and humanizing sadness and pain, were then removed from the board. this brought the final number of constructs down to eight, which were a sense of community, empowered, authentic relationships, safe space, minority visibility, real world usefulness, inspiration, and excellent curriculum. phase 6 identifying bipolar constructs. the group worked collectively to identify bipolar constructs by developing terms that reflected the opposite meaning from the original constructs. there was discussion among the group as the importance of weighing and choosing the right terms, terms that conveyed the perceived feelings of the community were selected. notably, the participants spent a significant amount of time finding the bipolar concept for the construct “real world usefulness”. the group took a great deal of satisfaction landing on the word obfuscation, and felt it expressed moments of learning that can be confusing, disorienting and created environments that students struggled to find relevance in. when the group arrived upon a decision, there was an excitement and an overall camaraderie that developed. phases five and six combined were allotted approximately one hour to reach a community consensus. phase 7 rating bipolar constructs. a survey was constructed, adding a seven-point scale between each bipolar construct, and then distributed to identify individual ratings of where participants fall in the bipolar constructs. this phase was developed by the instructor, used through experience applying the tool in his community practice and is not included in the olson and jason (2011) article. each of the participants were asked to vote individually by secret ballot. the votes were then collected, and the ratings were copied onto the whiteboard, allowing all participants to see the results as a whole to prepare for the final discussion. this phase, which was thirty minutes in length, is helpful in collaborating with communities to track changes in a narrative of the same community over time. phase 8 group discussion. the results of the voting process were then discussed in great detail, and the overall sense of the class was that, due in large part to the quality of the instructors at aula, along with the authenticity of the students who attend, the overall experience is positive. however, several areas of improvement were also identified, and it was agreed that some change is strongly suggested with regard to the structure and standards of the university overall. the discussion section below summarizes an hour-long wrap up of the group’s experience and the important outcomes of the cn approach experience. results table 1 presents the bipolar constructs as well as the ratings on each construct http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 indicating where participants see the map program now on each bipolar construct. numbers represent how many students marked the same area on the scale. table 1 community narrative method dichotomies listed in rank-order by vote alternative aula higher education constructs * * * * * * * dominant traditional higher education constructs sense of community 1 2 4 * * 1 * isolation empowered * 2 2 3 * * * oppression authentic relationships * 1 3 3 1 * * distant relationships safe space 1 2 3 1 * * * toxic space minority visibility * * 1 6 * 1 * marginalization real world usefulness 1 4 * 1 1 * * obfuscation inspiration * 1 4 * 1 1 * apathy excellent curriculum 1 4 3 * * * * irrelevant curriculum note: table 1 shows the themes that antioch university los angeles students have gathered from their experiences in the master of arts clinical psychology program, and the opposite term to create a dichotomy. the dichotomy was formed so that students were able to create an interval scale and mark which they felt best represented their experience. the numbers represent how many students marked the same area on the scale. discussion according to olson and jason (2011), cn assists a community to clarify group culture, values and identity. the primary strengths of the approach are designed to empower and center the experience on the participants of the program. this approach is particularly effective in graduate level psychology programs because it engages the skills that are actively being honed throughout the educational experience. aula focuses on process, and the students in this program are well suited to listening deeply to each other’s stories. the cn approach sets the tone to center the participants as a valued factor in their process. their personal stories became the foundation for the shared commonalities, bipolar constructs, and evaluation. cn engaged participants to be the expert of their own experience no matter their ranking within the organizations. using kelly’s (1955) bi-polar constructs, the group created a narrative story to interpret their experiences. the following is a review of what each construct meant specifically to the group of participants exploring their community narrative as students at aula. sense of community vs. isolation this bipolar construct garnered the most votes amongst the group. according to participants, this construct referred specifically to a shared sense of purpose, strong individual and networked relationships, inviting spaces to mingle informally on campus, as well as the processoriented content of curriculum. aula is an institution committed to social justice, and each class is designed to consider diversity, bias, and issues of privilege and oppression. specializations and cohorts allow students to continue learning together throughout their educational journey and build ongoing relationships. the campus has many social spaces that invite informal conversations building on conversations started in class. additionally, the university sends emails regarding community events that invite students to participate in discussions, art events, and lectures. these events foster a sense of community and self-expression outside the classroom. strong relationships http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 with advisors can also aid in the sense of the academic community at aula. in contrast, the participants identified experiences of isolation when students are unable to join in this community. barriers include students enrolled in general practice specialization (lacking community of a specialization) or who take advantage of flex scheduling (lacking a cohort). the nature of the commuter campus can create a sense of isolation by students who are unable to spend as much time on campus in informal settings. while process-oriented education allows for experiential and intrapersonal learning, classes that are led by professors who are unable to contain the emotional experiences in the room can leave students feeling very alone with unprocessed emotions. empowered vs. oppressed according to the aula website (2019) the mission states, “antioch university provides learner-centered education to empower students with the knowledge and skills to lead meaningful lives and to advance social, economic, and environmental justice.” antioch’s mission statement conveys the commitment that students experience empowerment in their education. participants reported that antioch offers accessibility to higher education by providing flexible schedules, financial aid, and scholarships for textbooks and travel to conferences. these opportunities have empowered them to pursue graduate studies while working and transitioning careers. professors respond to student’s needs and encourage students to advocate for themselves while at aula. this allows students to practice the skills to advance justice while in school. participants discussed the feelings of oppression while attending aula. several participants discussed the difficulties of transporting to aula, given its location close to the 405 freeway and congested major streets. many reported being instructed by adjunct faculty with clinical experience in a wide variety of settings, but no experience teaching at aula. this led them to feel distressed and powerless in the quest to receive high quality instruction. some noted that the administration was not responsive to feedback about the classes. all participants discussed the two tuition raises in six months as oppressive and discouraging. authentic relationships vs. distanced relationships the group of participants defined authentic relationships as professors bringing themselves as human beings and showing up as a whole person to class rather than only as a professional therapist or as a professor, including the mistakes they have made during therapy sessions with their clients. sharing mistakes makes professors look humble and more human. furthermore, authentic relationships were defined as professors being invested and genuinely interested in their students’ learning. professors appreciate their students’ growth and students’ willingness to be vulnerable. professors cultivate a brave space for students to be open and vulnerable. in addition, students are showing up as a whole person rather than only being in the role of a student. the group operationalized distant relationships as professors providing limited or not enough office hours, having jaded attitudes, being inaccessible or unavailable to students such as providing slow to no response to students’ emails or concerns in person, and applying rigid and clinical boundaries with the students as they would do with their clients. safe space vs. toxic space participants identified many experiences in which the professor managed the classroom http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 well. this promoted feelings of safety which encouraged them to authentically share their experiences to deepen their learning. when the participants understood clear boundaries, they felt free to disclose thoughts and observations pertinent to the course material. when the participants felt challenged by the rigors of graduate school and clinical training, they felt supported by experienced instructors. they noted that they appreciated encouragement about self-care, in particular. when an inexperienced or incompetent instructor mismanaged the classroom, participants experienced the classroom as a toxic space. this included, but was not limited to, microaggressions, and discrimination by classmates and/or instructors. in addition, if the instructor lacked the skills to reset boundaries, the participants felt that they had no support. this was particularly true if a student disclosed personal thoughts or feelings that were negated or ignored by classmates and the instructor. if the instructor was not able to provide alternatives to the students, then it was not safe to authentically participate in class. minority visibility vs. marginalization participants identified minority visibility as a value that they shared with aula’s mission and for the majority of the group, was one of the main attractions to apply to this particular university. the group had a shared sense of appreciation for the university’s empowerment of students to “call out” forms of prejudice and oppression, such as (but not limited to) racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, ageism, ableism, and other forms of dehumanizing belief systems. according to the group, however, while the university is successful in stating this value and encouraging students to identify these belief systems in order to increase minority visibility, there is an expressed need for more integration of that value in order to prevent the opposite construct, defined by the group as marginalization. this was proposed to be done in ways such as increased faculty representation, updated curriculum that included modern perspectives from people of color and other marginalized groups, and more accessibility for study abroad opportunities. additionally, some of the participants expressed that classmates had the experience of feeling the pressure of having to speak on behalf of the minority group they belonged to, as opposed to feeling like it was a shared responsibility of the class (including the professor). lastly, in order to address experiences and feelings of marginalization at the university, the need for psychoeducation around how to engage in brave spaces where transparency is still encouraged, but respect and sensitivity to how that transparency may affect others was discussed. it was suggested by participants that this type of learning would be beneficial as a preface to the map program’s entry course, society and the individual, which focuses on raising awareness of one’s and others’ cultural subjectivities. this could take shape in empowering students with tools for deepening empathy, fostering vulnerability, and effective, compassionate communication. the group believed that with such tools, it would decrease experiences of marginalization in the remaining course of the program. real world usefulness vs. obfuscation the group found real world usefulness in the map program in several ways. participants felt that learning from professors who are clinicians gives them an opportunity to gain experience from professionals in the field. courses that support students to apply theories early on increase the usefulness of the course. experiential learning and dyadic work contribute to the application of this theory. students felt aula’s reputation in the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 field also supported and encouraged students’ learning. the participants identified several conditions that contributed to obfuscation. students found frustration in syllabi that assign irrelevant and outdated texts and research. when professors offer too much selfdisclosure and individual experiences, this can muddy what is being taught. students expressed obfuscation when professors speak on too many topics in one class. additionally, obfuscation was experienced when instructors teach courses that are not related to their field, practice, or area of interest. inspiration vs. apathy the group identified that inspiration was a part of their narrative around antioch. students found professors who share their experiences and wisdom to be inspiring. professors sharing their passions outside of school and their vulnerabilities (successes and failures) motivate students. the inclusion of a holistic and spiritual dimension into the curriculum provides a feeling of integration. participants discussed the sacrifices of fellow students as inspirational for the forward momentum needed to complete the map program. the group identified apathy as lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern. the group found that apathy is evident when it comes to the task of improving the school system largely as a result of the brief two-year period for the map program. this challenging window of time is generally navigated by focusing on the requirements to complete the program requirements which depletes student energy that could be used to address systemic university issues. this tension often culminates in apathy. the commuter campus is a convenience for the older adult population, but it also presents as a barrier for a sense of campus cohesion, culture and unity which maintains a sense of apathy for confronting systemic change. additionally, having to navigate the ever-evolving bureaucratic process of the antioch system, can result in members of the group feeling unenthusiastic to change. excellent curriculum vs. irrelevant curriculum the group decided that the curriculum was a major factor of what sets antioch apart from other schools. each professor brings their own experience and knowledge of class topic and tailors it. this way each professor adjusts and improves curriculum, ensuring it is enhanced. participating students found that materials presented in most classes are relevant to real life clients and their challenges. professors are committed to remain up to date with current books and journals. antioch maintains a wide range of classes that expose students to the needs of a population they may later want to work with. students get the option to specialize in lgbt affirmative psychology, trauma studies, child studies, spiritual and depth psychology, applied community psychology, addiction and recovery, general practice and even professional clinical counselor courses. these specializations allow the student to get a wide range of curriculum that suits their career path in psychology. with all of these options of class choices, students agree that the classes are flexible which also accounts for what makes it excellent. with regards to irrelevant curriculum, participants discussed one class in particular. society and the individual is a class that is required in the first quarter of the map program. participants agreed that the materials are outdated, lack theory and academic rigor. students suggested that the curriculum for this class be reformulated. implication for faculty and administrators specific to this study, the mission of antioch university is to provide “learner-centered education to empower students with the knowledge and skills to lead meaningful lives http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 and to advance social, economic, and environmental justice.” if faculty and administration are afforded an honest assessment of their program from the vantage point of the student body, one which provides them with the specific areas of deficit and targeted constructs failing to meet the standards of the university, then they would be empowered to realign the academic experience with aula’s mission. utilizing the information obtained through the cn process, faculty is provided with just such an opportunity: to strategize with members of the student body to develop a course of action focused on moving those constructs from dominant to alternative as the desired outcome. some examples of putting this practice into action would be as follows: beginning with the bipolar construct sense of community vs. isolation, the authors suggest aula engage in community building activities such as virtual events to include students who are unable to participate in events due to distance and transportation challenges. this could lead to more meaningful engagement within the aula community. if more online space was made available for special interest groups, affinity groups, and for students to share skills and information with one another (possibly through a time bank or by creating bulletin boards for community announcements and opportunities), the students as a whole would develop a stronger sense of community and feel less isolated, even off campus. this is especially important because aula is a commuter school. another way to promote inclusion would be to encourage the development of coalitions to operate within individual communities, encouraging students to work alongside their fellow community members to affect change both in the school environment and within their community. furthermore, instructors are encouraged to reach out to students in class to discuss incidents that have happened during class in order for students to finish processing their emotions while being able to judge what discussions must be continued in the classroom. next, with regard to the constructs of empowerment vs. oppressed, it is suggested that administrators ensure that faculty are cognizant of the aula mission and environment. the authors suggest more vetting and training of adjunct faculty to assure that they are an appropriate match for the learner-centered culture of aula. to ensure access to transportation for all students, aula may create a carpool message board online so that students traveling from the same areas can carpool as a way to save time, money, and make the trip more social. collaborative solutions for providing feedback regarding instructors would empower students to engage more fully in their educational process (wolff, t., 2010). aula could consider both formal, such as an ombudsperson, and informal channels to encourage participation. to address tuition hike concerns, administrators might discuss tuition openly and provide justification for tuition increases by sharing a transparency report with the aula community. administrators could also consider cohortbased tuition which provides incoming students with tuition stability which empowers students during their time at the university. in considering authentic relationships vs. distanced relationships, faculty and administrators may think how they might be more accessible to students such as the professor who returns emails within twentyfour hours, and virtual office hours. if faculty has an attitude of ‘doing time’ this may need to be addressed. faculty could benefit from support of the administration to maintain their own morale and passion for teaching. advisors may consider minimum requirements to meet with students, for office hours and availability. a reasonable number of advisees may need to be reconsidered. in the spirit of authentic relationships, having transparent communication between faculty http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 and students helps manage student expectations. administrators could empower instructors to teach more courses that are truly of interest to them, adding passion and a thriving learning environment for students. this may also encourage authentic interactions between instructors and students. within the construct of safe space vs. toxic space, faculty could employ evidence-based practices for cultural competence in the classroom in order to provide a safe and brave space for difficult conversations. specifically, in process classes, it is helpful if instructors are proficient as facilitators with experience in holding a safe space when the topics are volatile or controversial. in such classes, the boundaries may become clouded if the facilitator does not have a solid background in facilitating conflicts as teachable moments. hiring instructors who are committed to ongoing self-reflection and growth may be useful in preventing incidents of microaggressions and discrimination. it may also be useful for new/potential hires to be required to shadow identified professors with a proven track record. this process would allow them time to become familiar with the aula student body and curriculum, which differs from other universities due to the nature of classes taught. professors could set expectations of self-disclosure at the beginning of process courses and maintain such expectations. when a boundary is crossed, the instructor should be comfortable stopping the conversation so the class can process the boundary violation and move forward on the same page. in the construct of minority visibility vs. marginalization, the university ranked in the middle, indicating a neutral position to advance social justice. aula states in the inclusion and diversity statement of commitment that the university seeks to respond to concerns so that no one is marginalized (aula, 2020). a collaborative approach (wolff, 2010) could be to engage faculty, administrators and all minority students, ideally led by minority faculty members and/or alumni, with a goal of ascertaining what can be done to increase minority visibility over marginalization. a coalition of both students and faculty could be empowered to develop and implement a plan of action. aula could consider engaging in collaborative leadership (chrislip & larson, 1994) which promotes shared decision making to facilitate change. regarding real world usefulness vs. obfuscation, administrators could improve hiring practices to match instructors with their areas of expertise. this is particularly relevant for adjunct faculty in order to provide a more real-world experience for students. aula could offer financial support to faculty for professional development opportunities in order to increase their knowledge and skill set to improve the student experience. if aula realized its own mission statement and advanced economic justice within academia, the university would consistently attract a higher caliber of instructors with expertise in the desired subjects. students are expected to use resources presented within the last five years for their assignments unless a text is foundational to the area of study. if faculty held the same standard to resources in the syllabus, students would have access to the most recent research and conversations about the area of study. many professors bring professional experience into their classroom to share with students, and this is helpful. professors should be encouraged to limit self -disclosure in this way in order for classroom conversations to stay on topic and remain relevant to course learning objectives. if courses were scheduled a year in advance, there would be fewer incidents of professors not teaching a class in their area of expertise or being assigned to teach a class with little notice. for the construct inspiration vs. apathy, the authors suggest the administration and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 faculty formalize communication and feedback channels. aula could provide collaborative formats to improve the school system and campus cohesion, engaging students in a collaborative communitybuilding processes to explore ways in which aula can harness its strengths and continue innovation in higher education. providing students with the option for completing their degree in two years or extending for three to four years without severe fiscal impact may provide a more equitable solution for students who need additional time to complete. this concession might inspire even more students to embark on a journey of educational enlightenment and address systemic university issues. another example could be for instructors to promote more egalitarian relationships with students through providing a choice of multiple options to demonstrate their knowledge of course content; promoting inspiration through more collaborative ways of learning. the construct of excellent vs. irrelevant curriculum explored areas of the curriculum that are irrelevant. if students report they are not feeling challenged or that the material being used is no longer relevant, this may be a signal to faculty that it is time to refresh and update the material they are using. if aula prioritized student feedback and responded in a timely manner, the mission of building a learner-centered community may be more fully realized. limitations of the current study one limitation identified is the sample size. the results gathered are based on the experiences of eight students out of approximately 600 registered in the map program. qualitative data from a larger sample of students would provide a more accurate depiction of the community and enrich the collective narrative of aula students. another limitation might be the hesitancy of students to discuss challenges openly throughout the activity, either due to confidentiality concerns, or due to an expectation that their ideas will not be addressed. conclusion participants learned the theory and application of the community narration approach. they experienced as community members and, in addition, they gained the knowledge to facilitate cn for organizations as consultants. students learned the techniques to consult while empowering people to understand the organization in order to adapt and change. it is of note to mention that this was the first time this class had been taught at the antioch university los angeles campus, and this group of students was the first group to participate. at the end of the class, the group was asked to share their experience throughout the assessment. key aspects were that during the sharing stories phase, members felt a sense of camaraderie and intimacy they had not anticipated. throughout the identification of constructs and voting phases, students expressed additional bonding upon realizing they were not isolated in their feelings – that others in the student body shared the same experiences. some identified having chosen aula because of its mission statement and found the school to be lacking in specific areas that were of value to them. at the end of the class, the participating students agreed upon a feeling of empowerment, due in part to the unification process. as participants, students discovered that their experiences of the constructs generally reflected the mission of aula. cn deepened their understanding of the values of aula as it seeks to provide a culture of belonging, empowerment, and justice. this alternative view is in contrast to the dominant narrative of other institutions of higher education. for the most part, participating students felt that aula succeeds in meeting the mission. areas http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 that participants discussed as needing improvement were noted when a student experienced a sense of isolation, marginalization, and apathy of instructors. as stated above, aula’s mission statement expresses its commitment to social justice; this means aula is not only aware of power and oppression but is committed to dismantling unequal power structures within its organization. cn can be used to cultivate inclusivity and diversity by encouraging students to take agency over their education and learning. providing a platform where aula students have a voice encourages and instills empowerment in the aula community. in addition, both nonprofit and for-profit sectors can use cn to evaluate their programs more effectively and accurately. cn organically encourages authenticity and transparency among all participants, which creates an organizational culture that prioritizes integrity, trust, and human fulfillment. references antioch university (2019). aula mission statement. retrieved from https://www.antioch.edu/losangeles/ antioch university (2020) aula inclusion and diversity statement of commitment. retrieved from https://www.antioch.edu/losangeles/ chrislip, d. d., & larson c.e (1994). collaborative leadership: how citizens and civic leaders can make a difference. san francisco: jossey-bass. kelly, g. a. (1955). the psychology of personal constructs (2 vols.). new york: w.w. norton. olson, b.d., & jason, l.a. (2011). the community narration (cn) approach: understanding a group’s identity and cognitive constructs through personal and community narratives. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(1), 1-7. retrieved 12/21/11 from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). wolff, t. (2010). the power of collaborative solutions: six principles and effective tools for building healthy communities. san francisco: josseybass. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.antioch.edu/los-angeles/ https://www.antioch.edu/los-angeles/ https://www.antioch.edu/los-angeles/ https://www.antioch.edu/los-angeles/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ community psychology in the community college setting: strengths and challenges chanté d. deloach1 keywords: hsis, community college, community psychology author biography: chanté deloach, is a long-time educator, scholar-activist, and practicing psychologist. she currently serves as professor of clinical and community psychology at santa monica college. as an educator, dr. deloach values formal and informal education as opportunities for personal transformation. she envisions the classroom as a space of refuge to subvert oppression and to advance social justice. as both a scholar and psychologist-healer, dr. deloach relies upon both the science of psychology as well as traditional cultural and spiritual wisdoms to facilitate healing and liberation. her research centers on the intersections of community, culture, and trauma. specifically, she explores culturally distinct understandings of and responses to trauma, resilience, and trauma recovery primarily in populations of african and latin ancestry. recommended citation: deloach, c. (2019). community psychology in the community college setting: strengths and challenges. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(2), 1-20. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: chanté d. deloach, psy.d., associate professor of clinical and community psychology, department of psychology, 1900 pico blvd santa monica, ca 90405. email: deloach_chante@smc.edu 1 santa monica college http://gjcpp.org/ mailto:deloach_chante@smc.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 community psychology in the community college setting: strengths and challenges abstract within the field of community psychology there is growing recognition of the role of undergraduate education in community psychology training as a primary introduction to the field. in this [recent] discourse however, the unique position of the community college has been rendered invisible. this omission is critical given that approximately half of all undergraduate students in the u.s. are educated through the community colleges (ccrc n.d.). the community college mission also reflects the foundational principles of community psychology as it prioritizes open access to education, responsiveness to community need, and equity in higher education for individuals to achieve social mobility (dougherty, lahr, & morest, 2017). in this article, the author used the development and implementation of a community psychology course at a two-year hispanic-serving institution as a case example of the utility of the community college to advance community psychology goals. distinct strengths and challenges of a two-year college setting are presented. recommendations for undergraduate faculty teaching community psychology are presented. introduction undergraduate education as a primary vehicle to introduce students to community psychology is only a recent emphasis in the field. the role of the community college in this discourse, however, is conspicuously absent. this omission is critical given that approximately half of all undergraduate students in the u.s. are educated through the community colleges and a disproportionately higher number of non-traditional students, low-income, first-generation, african american, and latinx students are enrolled in community colleges (ccrc n.d.). the community college mission also reflects the foundational principles of community psychology with its emphasis on open community access to education, responsiveness to community need, and equity in higher education for individuals to achieve social mobility (dougherty, lahr, & morest, 2017). thus, the community college environment presents a robust opportunity for community psychology to advance its intended goals. in an effort to galvanize the benefits of the community college setting, the present author developed a community psychology course specifically for students enrolled in a twoyear hispanic serving institution (hsi). guided by the principles and competencies of community psychology, this course is deeply rooted in critical and community engagement pedagogies, is a designated service-learning course which integrates ongoing reflective practice and community based research experience. the purpose of this article is threefold: 1) to outline the contextually specific course development considerations of a community psychology course at the community college level; 2) to make visible the distinct strengths and challenges facing community psychology students and faculty at community colleges and; 3) to discuss the development of a community based participatory research lab specifically designed for the college’s african american and latinx student support programs. the author contends that the community college system is fertile ground for community psychology to extend its reach and actualize http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 its foundational principles. yet, the complex diversity, limited two year setting, and modest resources present distinct challenges. community college the community college dates back to early 20th century when college was limited primarily to society’s elite (bailey & jaggars, 2016; dougherty, lahr, & morest, 2017). the junior college, as it was initially known, allowed access to a larger portion of lower income populations. some argue that the establishment of the junior college was a way to cement the cultural and educational elitism of the time that allowed only individuals from upper social classes or those deemed the most intellectually capable access to upper level undergraduate education (drury, 2003). such a two-tier system was arguably designed to allow universities to focus primarily on research while the junior college served as an extension of the secondary (high school) curriculum. it offered terminal occupational education and vocational training to prepare its students for the workforce (cohen, brawer, & kisker, 2014; drury, 2003). the junior college was later called the community college to refer to publicly funded, two-year colleges that are connected to and embedded within its local community (cohen, brawer, & kisker, 2014; dougherty, lahr, & morest, 2017). initially, the community college was not widely accepted. yet, it experienced significant growth following the great depression and again during the 1960s and 1970s as more individuals returned from war and sought education and training to enter the labor force (cohen, brawer, & kisker, 2014) and contribute to the economic growth of the time. the historic role of the community college in training workers continues to date. while numbers vary across institutions, a majority of degrees and certificates awarded by community colleges are in occupational education (dougherty, lahr, & morest, 2017) although degrees and certificates continue to be offered across the liberal arts, humanities, and the sciences. generally, workforce preparation “ranges from preparing students for their first job to retraining unemployed workers and welfare recipients, upgrading the skills of employed workers, assisting owners of small business, and helping communities with economic development planning” (dougherty, lahr, & morest, 2017, p. 6). developmental education remains an essential component of community college which includes courses such as english as a second language (esl), dual high school enrollment, as well as noncredit courses often in primary subjects such as english, math, and writing (bailey & jaggers, 2016; dougherty, lahr, & morest, 2017). approximately two thirds of community college students require developmental courses to adequately prepare them for college level coursework (bailey & jaggers, 2016). today, community colleges educate a large number of undergraduate students. during the 2016-2017 academic year, approximately 8.7 million students were enrolled in community colleges in the u.s. (ccrc, n.d.). community colleges also have older students and more ethnic and racial diversity than their four-year university counterparts (bailey & jaggers, 2016; dougherty, lahr, & morest, 2017). recent data indicates that 34% of undergraduates are enrolled at community colleges and among recent graduates, almost half report having attended community college during their undergraduate career (ccrc, n.d.). community colleges also educate a large number of african american, latinx, lowincome, and first generation students. forty four percent of latinx students and 35% of black students were enrolled at community colleges last year (ccrc, n.d). given its open access educational model, lower tuition cost, diverse student composition, and practical training, the community college is often http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 viewed is a space of offering additional opportunities for those who want or need additional training and retraining and who may not otherwise have access elsewhere (bailey & jaggers, 2016; dougherty, lahr, & morest, 2017). taken together, this data substantiates the critical role that community colleges play in educating and supporting individuals and communities subject to racial oppression and economic subjugation in the u.s. minority serving institutions relevant to the present exploration, is an understanding of the role of minority serving institutions such as the college where this course was developed and implemented. the term “minority serving institutions (msis),” is an overarching organizational term that refers to schools with federal designations to serve particular racial and ethnic communities. this includes historically black colleges and universities (hbcus), tribal colleges and universities (tcus), asian american and native american pacific islander serving institutions (aanapisis), and hispanic serving institutions (hsis) (nguyen, lundy-wagner, samagoa, & gasman, 2015). notably, while hbcus and tcus are designated an msi by virtue of their articulated mission, other institutions receive such a designation (and its accompanying financial benefits) as a result of enrollment rates of target student demographics. for example, to be a designated hispanic serving institution, a student population must be comprised of at least 25% hispanic/latinx students (nguyen et al, 2015). this is noteworthy since unlike hbcus which were established specifically for the purpose of educating students of african ancestry (and within a specific historic and political context), hsis do not share this history or designated mission to specifically serve latinx students. in addition, schools that have become designated hsis as their latinx student population increased, may not have changed their missions or redistributed their resources in order to better serve latinx students (garcia et al, 2017). msis play a large role in the education of racialized students in the u.s. as they educate approximately 40% of racially diverse undergraduate students in this country (garcia et al, 2017; nguyen et al, 2015). while the majority of research on msis focuses on four-year colleges and universities, approximately 22% of community colleges are designated msis (nguyen et al, 2015). this oversight is noteworthy given that twoyear msis enroll a disproportionately higher number of all racially diverse undergraduate students including “30 percent of hispanics/latinos, 26 percent of pacific islanders, 22 percent of asian americans, 12 percent of american indians, 10 percent of blacks/african americans, and 6 percent of whites” (nguyen et al, 2015, p. 3). research suggests that msis, particularly two-year msis, serve a critical role in reducing the persistent racial disparities in postsecondary educational success necessary for social mobility (garcia et al, 2017; nguyen et al, 2015). despite the large number of students enrolled in the community college system and particularly two-year msis, its value and utility in the advancement of the community psychology agenda has been overlooked. reasons for this invisibility are tentative yet some higher education researchers postulate that hsis are often not the subject of higher education research as they have been racialized and marginalized just as the students they serve are marginalized in society (garcia et al, 2017). the community college has the potential to be a critical space of education and empowerment in which oppression is disrupted. it is particularly aligned with the aspirations of community psychology such as diversity, social justice, and empowerment. moreover, given the research suggesting that students from http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 racially diverse backgrounds seek cultural representation in curriculum and are often drawn to psychology as a means to engage in social intervention (lott & rogers, 2011), it is reasonable to conclude that community psychology would be attractive to the diverse student population at a two-year hispanic serving institution. in the following sections, the process of course development and implementation of a community college community psychology class as well as the contextually specific strengths and challenges are presented. case study setting: two-year hispanic-serving institution the course was developed in 2018 at a designated hispanic serving institution (hsi) community college that is comprised of an ethnically diverse student body in the southwestern region of the u.s. the college is comprised of approximately 34,000 students with 40% identifying as hispanic/latinx, 27% white, 15% asian or pacific islander, 9% african american, and 11% international students according to college enrollment data. it is noteworthy that despite the diversity of the student body and the school’s designation as an hsi, a recent college diversity indicated that the faculty (full time and part time) remain predominantly white. this contrast presents the complexity of the environment of the institution. that is, the student body reflects a range of diversities and positionalities that are not proportionately reflected within the faculty. the course this course presents the first time the psychology department has offered a community psychology course. it also serves as the only introduction to community psychology for students as community psychology is not required content in the general psychology course. the department consists of six full time faculty members and numerous part-time faculty members. the department has an emphasis on the biological bases of psychology, yet faculty discussions about the subfields of psychology represented in the curriculum generated faculty interest in the inclusion of a community psychology course. like many institutions, offering a course for the first time requires a rigorous multi-level approval process including: course development at the instructor level, review and approval by the department, review and approval by the college’s interdepartmental curriculum committee, and finally, approval by the academic senate. notably, this process took approximately one year to navigate and complete. an overview of the course development and implementation process at a community college is important to understand the distinct strengths and challenges of this particular academic context. course development and approval all courses offered within the department are lower level psychology courses. this course was developed as an elective and like many of the department’s elective offerings, does not require general psychology as a prerequisite course (although it is advised). while students do not take courses in a prescribed order, there are recommended curricular pathways based upon each student’s goals. for example, there are required classes for students who wish to attain the associate’s degree and specific courses for students who wish to transfer to specific schools or university systems. the course description in the course catalogue reads: “this course provides an overview of prevention science and an introduction to the history, goals, and methods of community psychology. community psychology focuses on the application of psychological principles to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 understand and address community issues. this course emphasizes the preventive and strength-based approach within community psychology to understand the ecological context of human experiences, initiate action research, and implement social change. topics such as family and community violence, oppression, criminal justice, and mental health policy are explored. this course requires students to engage in learning outside the classroom in conjunction with various communitybased organizations.” the institution’s curriculum committee serves as an internal regulating body that ensures compliance with curricular mandates. given how central transfer credit is to the function of the community college, there is a symbiotic relationship between the presence and content of community psychology courses at four-year undergraduate institutions and its existence and content at community colleges. to this end, the college curriculum committee requires supplemental information about the existence of lower level community psychology courses at local transfer institutions to substantiate its local approval. because community psychology is not offered at all four-year public and private universities or, it is offered only as an upper level undergraduate course, this course is one of the few departmental electives that is not eligible for transfer credit at many institutions. more specifically, as an elective, it can count toward an associate’s degree, however, it is not eligible for transfer credit to one of the largest public college systems in the state. this is noteworthy as it may present a barrier to enrollment for some students who seek to transfer to schools that do not offer an undergraduate community psychology course. another distinct consideration in the approval of this course at the community college level is how the course prepares students for the workforce. as previously mentioned, one of the primary functions of the community college is to provide vocational and practical work skills for students (cohen, brawer, & kisker, 2014). thus, the college curriculum committee also requires the inclusion of current employment and workforce data (see appendix b). this may be a departure from how community psychology faculty think about classes and their intended outcomes. inclusion of transfer and employment data was central to the approval process. remarkably, despite these potential barriers, the course was warmly received and approved by the curriculum committee and the full academic senate. reviewers agreed that this course was aligned with the college mission, fostered positive student-community relations, and introduced students to community-based research. committee colleagues noted that the course should also be considered for inclusion in the college’s public policy program. the most critical feedback was at the departmental level. there are intradepartmental differences about the extent to which the biological bases of human experience should be emphasized as well as differences around using exams as a primary metric of student learning. because this course emphasizes social and cultural determinants of psychological health and uses qualitative modes of assessment, this course was an opportunity for faculty to discuss these ideological differences. upon approval of the course, 38 students enrolled in the first offering of the course in spring 2018 despite limitations with transfer credit. this may demonstrate how the content and subject matter resonates with the diverse student population attending this particular community college. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 pedagogy and instructor positionalities before discussing the content of the course, it is important to acknowledge critical and liberation pedagogies (rooted in the traditions of freire, fanon, and giroux) that undergird the course development process and pedagogical methods employed in this course. critical and liberation pedagogies maintain that both teaching and learning should be empowering (even liberatory) experiences in which students are agentic beings in the learning process and their academic careers (freire, 1972). i endeavor to co-create a learning experience in which both students and faculty alike are encouraged to contribute to knowledge production about self and community. professors’ identities matter and may be of even greater importance in the contested spaces of academia where even within designated minority serving institutions, there may be a lack of proportionate racial representation on the faculty. in the first class, i talk openly about my own identities as an african american cisgendered heterosexual woman and make visible the diversity that i embody and bring to the subject matter. i recognize that my identities disrupt the hegemony of the discipline of psychology and academia that remains centered in whiteness. it is from these positions and within the context of a two-year hsi that i developed and teach this course. class experience multiple teaching methods were employed including lecture, discussion, community engagement, and integration of small group activities and reflexive practice. as mentioned previously, 38 students enrolled in the course. while student demographic information is not provided to faculty, students discussed their identities in class. self-reported racial backgrounds and nationalities were comparable to their representation in the student body with the exception of having a disproportionately lower representation of asian-american students. to encourage students to think about their multiple identities, i begin the semester by talking about my own identities. i also give students a ‘quiz’ about me during which they are asked a series of questions that require they make assumptions about my background including for example, what neighborhood i live in and how many languages i speak. i use this exercise to invite students to externalize the ways in which we make assumptions about identities and community affiliations. through my use of self-disclosure and making visible my positionalities, i also model the use of disclosure to foster safe space, begin community building, and begin personalizing the subject matter. thus, critical pedagogy shaped the class experience and pedagogical methods employed including choice of readings as well as the topics we discussed in class. for example, in one discussion about documented and undocumented immigration, students shared their own personal experiences with undocumented immigration and the myriad emotions they feel given recent legal uncertainty about their protected status. during this discussion, one student shared her own experience as a non-latinx daca student and the ways in which her experience is often silenced in broader discussions about legal status. students were able to think critically about the intersections of power and voice even within marginalized groups. this discussion was not an isolated incident, rather it became the norm in the class that students personalized the material. perhaps one of the most powerful class discussions was in response to a nationally publicized hate crime that occurred on one of our satellite campuses. students verbalized myriad emotions about this event, and applied lessons from class in intersectional http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 understandings of power and domination and potential community organizing and action. another method used in this course was a problem-posing approach in which students worked in dyads and were presented with a question such as: why are so many youth experiencing homelessness in los angeles? students then worked together to define the problem, its impact on wellbeing, and consider potential methods of prevention and intervention applying principles of community psychology. relatedly, the city’s senior advisor on homelessness served as a guest presenter and engaged students in a discussion on factors contributing to youth homelessness in the city. she invited students to problem solve and provide counsel to her as she and elected representatives work on means of prevention and intervention. students were not only excited that someone in an influential position was presenting in class, they took seriously the opportunity to provide actual feedback to someone actively working and making decisions about the issue of homelessness. in course feedback, one student addressed this by stating: “everything in that class opened my eyes. i came out that classroom depressed, laughing, happy, smiling, angry, sad. i was feeling everything because it was so powerful and engaging. especially when we would talk about homelessness and how the united states has the most criminals incarcerated. those were powerful and interesting to learn about because some the ideas spoken about i never knew and the discussions we would have were good to hear from other people. we gave ideas on how we can help kids with a parent incarcerated and that was a powerful discussion to hear about. everything we did in that class was amazing.” course content there are multiple goals to consider regarding content in a community college course including providing the content in the course that will qualify for transfer credit as well as the applied knowledge and skills necessary to meet student workforce preparation needs (cohen, brawer, kisker, 2017). there are also developmental considerations. as previously noted, for some students, this may be their first psychology class. some students at the present institution, like many community college students, require developmental courses in english and/or math to increase their preparedness for college level coursework (bailey & jaggars, 2016). thus, choices in the reading level of texts, articles, and other supplemental materials must take these factors into consideration. second, in a cursory review of available undergraduate community psychology syllabi, much of the content across courses is similar. many courses are thematically organized around the chapter titles of the most frequently used community psychology textbooks (see for example the sampling of course syllabi available through the society for community research and action). in selecting a text as well as supplemental readings for the course, i was keenly aware of the dialectical tension between making visible the erased world knowledges that have contributed to the development and continuation of community and liberation psychologies (reyes crux & sonn, 2011; sonn, arcidiacono, dutta, kiguwa, kloos, & torres, 2017). on the other hand, i attended to the required content codified as the community psychology canon necessary for students to qualify for and receive transfer credit. remarkably, this scholarship is primarily american, white, and male (martin-baro, 1994; reyes cruz & sonn, 2011). thus, it requires intentionality about how to include dissident or silenced voices in the curriculum http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 alongside standard content. in weighing these issues, i selected a commonly used textbook (kloos, hill, wandersman, elias, & dalton, 2012) and chose to supplement the textbook with select readings and article excerpts to provide students with a more diverse and globally inclusive representation of community psychology scholarship. this included the work of more diverse scholarship from within the u.s., south africa, australia, and south america (see appendix c with course schedule for sample). it is also noteworthy that lectures and videos included excerpts from scholar-activists such as franz fanon, paulo freire, and steven biko. in addition to diverse examples of research, national and local examples of community organizing and action (e.g. black lives matter, environmental activism, prison reform/abolition) were integrated as examples of embodied community psychology values in practice. course assignments both formative and summative assessment of learning were intended to evaluate student learning and engage students in personally meaningful ways. given the diversity of the student population, as well as racial and political concerns on campus during and following the u.s. presidential election, it was imperative that the course not only introduce students to the principles of community psychology, but to also apply them to their lived experiences. there were students in the class who have been formerly incarcerated or have family members who are involved with the criminal justice system, live at or below the poverty level, and have mixed (legal) status families. in valuing the embodied knowledge of students and the communities of which they are a part, i encouraged students to personalize the assignments (and the learning process). as illustration of this approach, select course methods and assignments are discussed below. photovoice. one assignment used early in the semester is a variation of photovoice in which students engage in participatory action learning and are asked to present an image or collage of images with a corresponding brief narrative in response to the question: what defines your experience of community? despite lack of familiarity with photovoice, many students are able to draw upon personal photonarrative practices to curate life and community experiences through social media. once students realize the parallels between their lived experiences and community psychology concepts, they are often excited about an assignment that allows them to express themselves artistically. this is noteworthy since many students may not connect methods such as photovoice with psychology. community engagement and service-learning. students were required to complete a minimum of 20 hours of community engagement. prior to the class beginning, i worked with the service-learning coordinator to identify community sites focused on issues of concern to community psychology. the coordinator also worked throughout the semester to ensure that sites complied with minimum criteria established by the college. students chose to immerse themselves in their own communities including working with: current and emancipated foster youth, formerly incarcerated men, the elderly black queer community, the transgendered and non-binary community, first generation and mixed status families, and low-income black and latinx neighborhoods. one student was also able to engage in research on discrimination facing mental health consumers as part of her service learning with a community-based organization. while students who had extenuating circumstances and were unable to engage in service-learning were given an alternative on-campus community research option, it is notable that no students selected this option. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 we integrated students’ community engagement experience through ongoing journals and in-class writing reflections. in addition, students presented individually and in groups at the end of the semester about their service-learning experience. a number of students reported learning more about issues facing their communities and learned more about themselves as well. one intended goal of community engagement, from a community college perspective, was to provide students with valuable volunteer work experience while meeting needs within the community. during in-class presentations about their service-learning experiences, many students indicated: 1) that they were continuing to work with the organization beyond the end of the class and; 2) that they were interested in learning more about and working with other organizations in their communities because of their servicelearning experience. one student commented in course feedback: “a community is not just where you live. a community is all around us. whether it is in person or through social media, we can all feel that we belong somewhere. i learned that i have many communities that i belong to and that each member is an essential component of the whole picture.” community based research. students gained community-based research experience in addition to the service learning experience. they were required to engage in a semesterlong community assessment project in which they applied what was learned in the classroom to an identified community. specifically, students used community member interviews, naturalistic and participant observations, and public data to learn more about the most pressing issues impacting psychological and community wellbeing of their identified community. through this semester-long project, students were able to learn about community psychology principles and theory and apply them at their service-learning sites as well as within their community-based research. the project was divided into four different sections throughout the semester to align with class lecture and discussions, facilitate students working on the project in smaller chunks throughout the semester, and to provide feedback throughout the semester prior to submitting the project in its entirety at the end of the semester (see appendix c). students and faculty learned lessons through the multiple methods of instruction and assessment. in the below sections, i reflect on the strengths and challenges of implementing this course. lessons learned: strengths and challenges strengths one of the primary benefits of teaching a community psychology course at a community college that is also an hsi is the student population. the students represent a wide range of identities and lived experiences that enrich the learning experience and animate course material. because it is not a predominantly white university, students typically present with some degree of racial and cultural awareness. the applied nature of course and topical content was timely and aligned with student interests and the political moment in the country (and on campus). we were able to actualize a safe, learning community in which students felt open and free to engage in personal and intellectual discourse as illustrated in the student quotes above. one of the criticisms of community college students is that they are not engaged (bailey & jaggars, 2016). these students demonstrated that not only were they engaged in the classroom, they were also engaged in their communities. these were issues that mattered to them. relatedly, one student commented in a course evaluation: “in the beginning of my college career [here], i felt awkward because all my http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 instructors were white. however, seeing a person of color as an instructor, i was able to project myself in them. i felt the connection with other students as well. i am happy that i took this course because all the students were required to give back to the community. we all shared a common goal as opposed to just learning and passing exams. exams are great benchmarks but donating some of our time to different organizations made a difference.” as this student’s comment illustrates, another strength of the course was having a professor who shared or could relate to the racialized identities, cultural backgrounds, and experiences of oppression as the students. as previously noted, professors identities matter. because of the particular ways in which i give voice to my identities, this gave students the permission and safe space to do the same, which personalized the material. another strength was the institutional support for community engagement. the service-learning coordinator was instrumental in identifying and cultivating relationships with community partners. she also ensured that student and community partner needs were met. in addition, she provided an in-class orientation on servicelearning that was helpful for students new to service-learning courses. having this institutional resource was vital to ensure quality student and community partner experience and to track student hours. ultimately, this reduced the amount of oversight and labor required by the instructor for the service-learning component of the course. while the strengths dominated the experience, there were also distinct challenges. challenges there were also distinct developmental and contextual considerations given the community college hsi setting. first, there are currently no available undergraduate community psychology textbooks available as an open educational resource (oer). the community college system to which the present institution belongs supports open educational resources and zero cost classes. given the economic constraints of community college students, as a faculty member, i have committed to make all of my classes zero cost when possible. without the availability of an oer community psychology text, a zero cost designation was not possible for this course. thus, some students had difficulty accessing the textbook in a timely manner and had to rely upon other students or reserve copies. a widespread concern for community college students is that of preparedness for collegiate work and the large number of students who require developmental coursework (bailey & jaggars, 2016). as this is a writing intensive course, this was particularly challenging for some students. some students required additional writing support and were therefore referred to campus-based and online writing support resources. writing intensive courses are often encouraged at the community college level as a method of increasing students’ writing skills and preparation for transfer to four-year universities (cohen, brawer, & kisker, 2014). since community colleges are teaching institutions however, faculty teaching loads and class sizes may be barriers to this goal. in short, writing intensive classes can be laborious for community college faculty who have little or no additional support resources such as teaching assistants. for this class, it required several hours or more per writing submission to provide student feedback. given the extraordinary amount of time involved, this component of the class may need to be revised given the large number of classes and students. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 there were also a number of barriers to service-learning. community college students are also more likely to attend school parttime and need to navigate a host of other life and familial responsibilities that make fulltime academic commitment prohibitive (flynn, james, mathien, mitchell, & whalen, 2017). accordingly, these life circumstances may serve as potential barriers to servicelearning in particular. there were several students who did not complete the servicelearning requirement and/or did not complete the class. as most of these students were not responsive to outreach from the instructor, it is not clear the specific factors that impeded course completion. one student experienced a relapse and reported having been in a drug treatment program for the last half of the semester. this student’s experience is related to an aspect of student identity that presents both strengths and unique challenges. approximately one-third of the class disclosed having a history of mental health challenges. while many community college students may not openly disclose this history, approximately one-half of community college students report current or previous mental health issues and the majority of those do not receive treatment (eisenberg, goldrick-rab, ketchen lipson, & broton, 2016). rates of mental health challenges reported by community college students is higher than those reported by students at four year universities. students’ openness to disclosing this sensitive information illuminates the multiple ways in which students felt safe within the context of this course. it may also reveal the few spaces in which students are able to publicly voice mental health struggles. within class discussions, some students stated that this was the first time they talked about their mental health in a classroom. one student shared that it was ‘refreshing’ to be able to be open in talking about how personal the material was to her own experience growing up in foster care. other students also wrote about personal and family mental health struggles in their journals. with this background, we were able to personalize discussions about evolutions in community mental health, the power of the mental health consumer and recovery model, and stigma and discrimination facing individuals with mental health concerns. while some students were able to speak openly about some of their personal challenges, these same concerns at times presented barriers to assignment completion, class attendance, and methods of communicating. conclusion the future of community psychology education would benefit from prioritizing undergraduate education. given the large percentage of undergraduate students enrolled in community colleges, particularly african american and latinx students, it is clear that the community college can serve as a primary avenue to introduce community psychology early in students’ academic careers. community colleges have distinct challenges including limited time with students given the increased number of students with part time status. in addition, it is important for faculty to be mindful of developmental considerations and the additional support that some students may need to fulfill course objectives, such as writing assistance. to this end, community colleges often have modest resources to support community psychology faculty. the development of research and writing collectives or other methods of collaborative work models may help support faculty and prevent individual community psychologists from working in isolation. one recommendation is the establishment of a community psychology community of practice that includes national and international community college faculty. such a community of practice would benefit from having a specific section devoted to those working within minority serving institutions. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 an important consideration emerged during course development and implementation around the use of community engagement and service-learning. service-learning has long been identified as a method to advance the goals of community psychology, particularly attitudes around civic engagement and social responsibility, respect for diversity, consciousness raising, and ability to perspective take, and even increase student confidence (henderson, 2017; reeb, 2010). service-learning can also be particularly beneficial in the community college in terms of achievement of learning outcomes, critical thinking, and an enhanced sense of personal and civic responsibility (prentice & robinson, 2010). despite these data, a number of students in the current course encountered difficulties in balancing the time requirements with other life commitments. while the majority of students who completed their service-learning hours reported positive learning experiences and some stayed at their sites for longer time, others were unable to meet the requirements or may have dropped the class because of it. further reflection on the demands of community engagement for adult learners with jobs, families, and other life commitments is warranted. another lesson learned is that curricular decisions should be interrogated. community psychology scholarship emerging from south africa and south america appeared to resonate with this specific student population possibly because of similar demographic backgrounds of students and current cultural and political issues in the u.s. inclusion of scholarship from outside of the u.s. may also foster more globally minded community psychology students (jimenez, sanchez, mcmahon, & viola, 2016). consideration of transfer and workforce preparation is a distinct consideration for faculty at two-year msis even as we attempt to create a more inclusive curriculum. given the disturbingly low transfer rates for african american and latinx students in particular (ccrc, n.d.), removing barriers to transfer and increasing access to the course and discipline fosters equity and is arguably a measure of justice. this same process may also inadvertently perpetuate the practice of disciplinary hegemony. through the very practice of regulating that particular content be included, or particular methods of assessment and evaluation be employed, we run the risk of institutionalizing the erasure of traditionally marginalized and excluded scholarship in favor of what has been defined as the canon of community psychology. in this way, the process of reviewing and approving curriculum may become not only a pedagogical or curricular process, but also a moral and ethical dilemma. such a process illuminates the importance and potential power of curriculum committees which is often minimized. indeed, faculty and curriculum committee members have the opportunity to engage in “epistemological resistance” (santos, 2017) to invite, challenge, or even necessitate the inclusion of marginalized scholarship across coursework. for example, this could include the requirement that faculty make note of the diversity across identities of the authors of any texts or selected readings. this should also include diversity of research samples and populations studied including non-american research contexts. for faculty at msis, this may include a requirement that curriculum reflect the cultural demographics of the student population. this diversity should move beyond mere racial integration, however, to include diverse ideological perspectives from which community psychology is taken up. this same diversity should be reflected in videos, images, and subject matter in the classroom. because curriculum committees have the authority to require changes, they may have the ability to serve as gatekeepers to decolonizing curriculum. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 as mentioned previously, there is a need for more open access textbooks in community psychology which is of particular importance for low-income students and lower resource institutional settings. there is also a need for more intentional and systematic ways of centering community knowledge in community psychology instead of sole reliance on knowledges emerging from academia. as carolissen and colleagues (2017) describe, exclusion of non-western ecologies of knowledge is a perpetuation of cognitive injustice. thus, representative and inclusive knowledge ecologies are part of the “decolonial turn in community psychology” (p. 497). perhaps one of the most important lessons garnered from the development and implementation of a community psychology course at a community college is the reminder that as educators, we are also tasked with preparing students for employment. we seldom consider that service-learning and fieldwork requirements may facilitate the attainment of work experience for students. thus, we must be aware of how to translate the science of community psychology in concrete ways that may be beneficial for students who work in an array of sectors. it may be advantageous for faculty to contextualize research, critical thinking, and analytical skills as job skills that may be beneficial to employment within psychology (e.g. community mental health, community organizing) as well as outside of the field (e.g. education, law, sales). importantly, students learn important knowledge and skills that increase their abilities as engaged community members. future directions: community based research lab while there were many lessons learned in the development and implementation of this course, there are many opportunities to continue to advance this work. first, further assessment of learning and outcomes is warranted, particularly with attention to equity outcomes. it is important for faculty to review and consider data showing us who completed our courses and any differences across student groups in learning outcomes. this course has only been offered one time. student feedback as well as learning outcomes must be considered and integrated into future versions of this course. consideration of ways to introduce community psychology outside of the classroom and to non-psychology majors is also important. the present instructor developed a community-based research lab specifically for students enrolled in the college’s african american and latinx student programs. the purpose of the community, liberation, and african-centered psychology (clap-back) lab, is to offer students an opportunity to: a) gain valuable communitybased research experience; b) contribute to their own communities; and c) gain research, academic, and professional skills that may increase their competitiveness for admission to four-year universities. we look forward to implementing this next aspect of community psychology at the college. this will be the first time a community-based research lab is offered through the department and through the african american and latinx student programs. ultimately, the community college, including two-year msis, serves as a ripe opportunity to introduce community psychology to the millions of students enrolled in these important educational settings. this presents an opportunity for community psychology to more fully embody its values and move toward a more inclusive and decolonized curriculum. community psychology courses can also produce tangible skills that can be helpful for them and their communities. in this way, community psychology has the potential to move beyond theory to resonate more loudly with a wider more diverse student base. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 references bailey, t., & jaggars, s.s. (2016). when college students start behind. retrieved online: https://tcf.org/content/report/colleg e-students-start-behind/ carolissen, r., canham, h., fourie, e., graham, t., segalo, p., bowman, b. (2017). epistemological resistance towards diversality: teaching community psychology as a decolonial project. south african journal of psychology, 47(4), 495-505. ccrc (community college research council) (n.d.) community college enrollment and completion. retrieved online at: https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/commu nity-college-faqs.html cohen, a.m., brawer, f.b., kisker, c.b. (2014). the american community college (sixth edition.). san francisco, ca: jossey-bass dougherty, k.j., lahr, h., morest, v.s. (2017). reforming the american community college: promising changes and their challenges. ccrc working paper no. 98. retrieved online at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed5 79007.pdf drury, r.l. (2003). community colleges in america: a historical perspective, inquiry, 8(1). retrieved online at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej87 6835.pdf eisenberg, d., goldrick-rab, s., ketchen lipson, s., & broton, k. (2016). too distressed to learn? mental health among community college students. retrieved online: http://www.wihopelab.com/publicati ons/wisconsin_hope_labtoo_distressed_to_learn.pdf flynn, j., james, r., mathien, t., mitchell, p., whalen, s. (2017). the overlooked context: pedagogies for engagement and empowerment at the community college. curriculum and teaching dialogue, 19(1-2), 69-85. freire, p. (1972). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: herder and herder. garcia, g.a., ramirez, j.j., patron, o.e., & medina, o. (2017). reframing hispanic-serving institutions (hsis): a counterstory of a “latinized” institution in the midwest. cmsi research brief. retrieved from: https://cmsi.gse.upenn.edu/sites/def ault/files/gina%20garcia%20researc h%20brief%20%28r2%29.pdf henderson, d.x. (2017). modeling community engagement in an undergraduate course in psychology at an hbcu. teaching of psychology, 44(1), 58-62. jimenez, t.r., sanchez, b., mcmahon, s.d., viola, j. (2016). a vision for the future of community psychology education and training. american journal of community psychology, 58, 339-347 kloos, b., hill, j., thomas, e., wandersman, a., elias, m., & dalton, j. (2012). community psychology: linking individuals and communities (3rd ed.). belmont, ca: wadsworth/cengage. lott, b., & rogers, m. r. (2011). ethnicity matters for undergraduate majors in challenges, experiences, and perceptions of psychology. cultural http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://tcf.org/content/report/college-students-start-behind/ https://tcf.org/content/report/college-students-start-behind/ https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed579007.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed579007.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej876835.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej876835.pdf global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 diversity and ethnic minority psychology, 17(2), 204-210. martin-baro, i. (1996). writings for a liberation psychology. new york: harvard university press. nguyen, t., lundy-wagner, v., samayoa, a., & gasman, m. (2015). on their own terms: two-year minority serving institutions. penn center for minority serving institutions, retrieved from http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pub s/342 reeb, r.n. (2010). service-learning in community action research: introduction to the special section. american journal of community psychology, 46(3), 413-417. reyes cruz, m., sonn, c.c. (2011). (de)colonizing culture in community psychology: reflections from critical social science. american journal of community psychology, 47, 203-214. santos, (2007). beyond abyssal thinking: from global lines to ecologies of knowledges. retrieved from: http://www.boaventuradesousasanto s.pt/media/pdfs/beyond_abyssal_thi nking_review_2007.pdf sonn, c.c., arcidiacono, c., dutta, u., kiguwa, p., kloos, b., maldonado torres, n. (2017). beyond disciplinary boundaries: speaking back to critical knowledges, liberation, and community. south african journal of psychology, 47(4), 448-458 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 appendix a course objectives upon completion of this course, the student will be able to: 1. demonstrate knowledge of the theory, historical foundations, and methods of community psychology. 2. differentiate community psychology from other sub-disciplines of psychology. 3. demonstrate familiarity with the empirical basis for prevention science, health promotion, and community psychology in preventing and responding to community issues. 4. demonstrate critical understanding of the factors shaping contexts that promote health and psychological well-being of individuals and communities. 5. demonstrate critical thinking through collaboration with community partners in identifying, designing, implementing, and interpreting community based research. 6. students will determine how psychologists can use psychological science and principles for the betterment of a community. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 appendix b course rationale community psychologists work with groups and communities to promote the health and well-being of communities, build resilience and foster empowerment of a community as a whole. they focus on issues of social concern and use research and evaluation tools to advocate for social justice and redress social inequities. community psychologists work with community members and stakeholders such as: non-profit organizations, social service providers, school administration and staff, health services professionals, law enforcement personnel, and private employers. community psychologists may also work within the community mental health system to prevent and provide effective treatment of chronic mental health conditions including drug and alcohol addiction. ultimately, community psychologists utilize multiple strategies to engender optimal community functioning. currently, the smc department of psychology does not offer a community psychology course. community psychology is an emerging area of psychology ripe with opportunity. there are an increased number of community psychology and interdisciplinary degrees being offered at the undergraduate and graduate levels. a community psychology course would provide the theoretical and scientific foundation for not only students interested in pursuing further studies in community psychology, but also in areas such as public health and social work. as previously stated, community psychology has as part of its core values and praxis, community engagement and advocacy for social change. this class may also be of particular interest and benefit to students interested in community activism and organization. in addition to the academic benefits, training in community psychology has employment benefits. recent workforce data indicate that between 2014 and 2024, employment opportunities in psychology are expected to rise by 19% (bls, 2016). the american psychological association (apa) has identified a few areas of increased employment opportunities relevant to community psychology. specifically, the apa (2008) notes that there is an increased need in the areas of program evaluation and multidisciplinary collaborations. in addition, there remains continued demand for professionals across degree levels in community mental health, substance abuse, and consulting. as these are areas of community psychology in which students receive specialized training, they will be uniquely qualified to take advantage of these emerging opportunities. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 appendix c class class topic reading unit 1: origins and foundations of community psychology 1 introductions course overview 2 what is community psychology? ch. 1 3 history of community psychology continued *service learning orientation ch. 2 4 foundational principles unit 2: defining and understanding community 5 understanding community ch. 6 due: photovoice assignment 6 ecological framework: individuals and environments ch. 5 service learning paperwork due unit 3: community based research 7 community based research ch. 3 8 community based researchexemplars ch. 4 due: community member interview unit 3: diversity, social justice, & wellness 9 social capital and social networks individuals and place: la neighborhoods ch. 5 +podcast: there goes the neighborhood 10 diversity, social justice, & wellness ch. 7 11 applying cp: racialized violence excerpt: fanon, (1963); richardson, l.s. (2015) start service learning due: neighborhood or behavioral/setting analysis 12 applying cp: gendered violence clifford et al (2017) recommend: serrata et al (2017) unit 4: coping, treatment, and prevention 13 stress, coping, and resilience ch. 8 14 community mental health excerpt: nelson, kloos, & ornelas (2014) 15 prevention ch. 9 due: section 3 of comm assmt project 16 prevention and promotionprograms ch. 10 unit 5: empowering communities http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 17 community and social change ch. 11 18 empowerment and citizen participation community activism and coalition building ch. 12 19 applying cp: criminal justice issues duckett & serinkel (2008) excerpt: alexander, m. (2010) 20 program development and evaluation ch. 13 21 homelessness prevention and programming excerpt: nelson, kloos, & ornelas (2014) begin creating closure with community partner due: section 4 comm assmt project unit 6: future directions 22 future directions: cp and global liberation psychologies excerpt: martin-baro (1996); sonn et al, (2017) 23 sl presentations 24 sl presentations final community assessment project due supplemental class readings alexander, m. (2010). the new jim crow: mass incarceration biko, s. (1978/2015). i write what i like: selected writings. chicago, il: university of chicago press. clifford, d.f., freund, n.m., douglas, j.a., douglas, j.s., turosak, a., lewis, r.k., drum, j., ojeda leitner, d., sarlonder, r., chinnes, a.c., & kller, p. (2017). using the community psychology competencies to address sexual assault on a college campus. global journal of community psychology practice, 8,1, retrieved online at: https://www.gjcpp.org/pdfs/10cliffordetal_final.pdf duckett, p., & serinkel, m. (2008). community psychology and injustice in the criminal justice system. journal of community and applied social psychology, 18(5), 518-526 fanon, f. (1963). the wretched of the earth. new york: grove press. nelson, g., kloos, b., & ornelas, j. (eds.). (2014). advances in community psychology. community psychology and community mental health: towards transformative change. new york, ny, us: oxford university press. richardson, l.s. (2015). police racial violence: lessons from social psychology. fordham law review, 2961. retrieved online from: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5108&context=flr http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5108&context=flr coloniality unplugged: cosmologies and terrains of the dark matter tiffeny jiménez, gordon lee, hana masud, ericka mingo keywords: coloniality, decoloniality, power author biographies: tiffeny reyleen jiménez community psychologist. educator. mestiza, queer, alternative world compost-activist. member of the village group that emerged from the racial justice action group. internal collaborative evaluator for clave: colaborando con las comunidades latinx para avanzar en educación / collaborating with latinx communities to advance education. founder and co-creator of critical global education for community psychology. since 2012 she has worked hand in hand with people located all around the chicagoland area, and places around the world, through transdisciplinary student-driven rhizomatic co-laboring inquiry projects on various topics, including: understanding black mother activism, supporting entrepreneurial efficacy to address economic inequality, uncovering roots of systemic oppression within law enforcement, exploring how naturally-occurring mentorships emerge within a mexican cultural context, and understanding internalization of the model minority myth among southeast asian students in higher education. current service involves developing an institutional philosophy of scholarship that connects student voice and inquiry with streams of public scholarship using multi-modalities. additional collective actions include: supporting organizational capacity building for local mexican, immigrant and refugee communities; community organizing and advocacy on deferred action for childhood arrivals (daca); promotes accurate education on native american history in chicago public schools; and recently organized with local potawatomi tribes and artists on addressing land rights with the whose lakefront initiative https://www.whoselakefront.com/. tiffeny is the recipient of the 2019 nlu excellence in research, scholarship, and inquiry award, and is currently working to co global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 develop the ideological infrastructure needed to support ethical and deliberate community engagement across nlu for communities we serve in the chicagoland area. she is most active in co-developing critical global education for community psychology (https://criticalglobaleducation.wordpress.com/), the rooted global village (https://www.rootedglobalvillage.com/), the emergence network (https://www.emergencenetwork.org/), xicanx psychology – institute of chicana/o psychology (https://razapsychology.org/), and the society for community research and action (https://www.scra27.org/). for more information see: https://tiffenyjimenez.wordpress.com/ gordon lee was born and raised on the island of oahu, kingdom of hawaii. part of a displaced diaspora, his mother’s family (his motherline) had traveled from the pearl river delta to the western coast of north america in the 1880s. after experiencing antiasian violence and yellow perilism, his great grandmother, on her way home, left the boat in honolulu, pregnant with her second child. after giving birth to a daughter, his grandmother, remained in hawaii and never saw her family again. as a result, he grew up in what was then called the territory of hawaii, a euphemism for what was and still is an occupied nation. his first realization of coloniality and of his own story arose during a period of political upheavals in the united states, hawaii, asia, and africa in the 1970s. for much of his life he has unknowingly carried the trauma of his ancestors. his grandfather was shot and killed. his father, as a youth, felt the colonial matrix of power firsthand in china (no chinese or dogs allowed!) and throughout his life in the hawaiian colony. his work with space, healing, and re-membering began in 2007 when he was invited to join a pilgrimage to the manzanar nikkei incarceration site in the eastern sierra nevada mountains. he taught asian american studies at san francisco state university where he practiced social biography and critical/liberation andragogy and first experienced the classroom as a village. his work has been guided by questions related to psychology and its relation to social justice and ontological change; collective trauma and the shadow of empire; psychosocial biography and decolonial stories, and space as a site http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 of re-membering. dr. lee was president of psychologists for social responsibility (psysr) in 2016. at psysr he supported a vision of racial justice, relationality, and decoloniality; he advocated a critical role for psychology in the struggle for racial justice; and he helped to vision and facilitate the co-creation of decolonial spaces and projects. he co-initiated a series of conferences that addressed the relationship of psychology and racial justice (that is referred to in this special issue). he was part of the original team that created the project from which the writings in this issue emerged. he is also a part of the village and was a co-holder of that space. he has written on pilgrimage, on community based decolonial projects, on community psychology, and on asian american activism. hana masud, phd is an adjunct lecturer and researcher at the university of massachusetts-boston. her research and practice focuses on the coloniality of mental health services, its impact on re-colonizing local resistance, and radical collective trauma healing for local and marginalized communities in occupied palestine and chicago. her phd dissertation explored “embodying decoloniality indigenizing psychological practice and pedagogy”. dr. masud is the co-chair of decolonial and racial justice in praxis group, an initiative of psychologists for social responsibility. the group is a virtual space that brings scholars and practitioners from around the globe to reflect on the impact of coloniality, begin the healing process, and develop strategies to overcome and abolish colonial practices and systems. ericka mingo holds a phd in community psychology and is currently an assistant professor of applied behavioral science and community psychology at national louis university. dr. mingo is a certified teacher in illinois, with a mat in secondary education. ongoing research interest include the ecology and praxis of lateral community building, often through the lens of education, experiential learning and ways of knowing, and pan-african liberatory psychology. currently dr. mingo is engaged in an exploration of urban agriculture, as a vehicle for food security and ecologic entrepreneurship. dr. mingo taught at the high school level for over 16 years in brooklyn, ny, kansas city, mo and on the south side of chicago. she is the executive http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 director of ecologic outreach, a nonprofit urban farm on chicago’s southside, the past president of psychologists for social responsibility, faculty chair for national louis university’s black student union, co-founder and faculty planner for national louis university’s environmental justice group, an active member of and advisor for the racial justice action group, and many other local, national, and international community organizations working towards sustainability and justice. recommended citation: jiménez, t. lee, g., masud, h. and mingo, e. (2022). coloniality unplugged: cosmologies and terrains of the dark matter. global journal of community psychology practice, 13(1), 1 7. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: tiffeny jiménez, national louis university, chicago, il; email: tiffeny.jimenez@nl.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 coloniality unplugged: cosmologies and terrains of the dark matter this is the story of the development of the special issue… special issue coloniality unplugged: cosmologies and terrains of the dark matter this journey started with a feeling that emerged into a vision, a direction, and a process but not a destination, psychology, racial justice, not limited by united states/eurocentric perspectives, not confined by its definitions and vocabularies. a fire, an intention, embracing but not limited by the politics of coloniality. the psychological, the political, and the ontological as one. we knew it in our bodies, bodies that had lived inside and outside the united states that had felt and carried the wounds of repression and the rage carrying rebellion through generations. we talked about paddling a canoe across the ocean, to a place that existed in our souls but not on a map, moved and guided by intentionality and purpose. we were okay with not knowing exactly where. origins: seeking racial justice as radicle uprooting we had come together with our sights on an ecologically empathetic world, we wanted past harms accounted for, globally arrested development to come of age, and to open unfamiliar passages. this passage had started to take shape in a series of racial justice conferences that were held at national louis university in 2016 and 2017. racial justice was the focal point of the conferences, explored through the lens of the black experience in the united states, negotiated alongside the experiences of other ethnicities and cultures. when the black voice speaks to coloniality in the company of other ethnicities we are often, racially, in communion still with our oppressors. this is an existential risk for black voices, which dare a strategy of community with those who have posed historical violence to us, but suffer violence themselves. we understood that colonial pathologies, racial hierarchies, and antiblackness, are embedded, even if invisibly so, in most social relationships and experiences. our critical conversations did not run from this reality; it was centered and laid bare. through consistent conversations held within ever evolving groups, we shared our experiences. black people living in the united states under incessant attempts, both undetectable and blatant, to disfigure our dispositions and consciousness, held conversations with racial others. the conversations cost. it costs the primarily black voices solidarity of story, shared understanding, and safety. it costs non-black members the realization that you can’t cry freedom with your foot on someone else’s neck, and that solidarity is born of sacrifice. we had those conversations. we held the praxis of presenting story, negotiating community, paying the costs for doing so, and then doing it again, intentionally holding spaces that were painful, progressive, messy, disjointed, and profound. decoloniality until this point, we were articulating and asserting racial justice within a framework of psychology. decoloniality moved us beyond modernity, beyond justice, beyond race. it http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 allowed us to see race as a form of social control and as part of a colonial matrix of power (cmp). equality within a system of oppression was not the goal; neither was moving to a different position within the hierarchies. we began to understand how framing racial justice in the context of decoloniality would shift the context of the conversation and the work. we knew that praxis/process was critical. this involved an exchange of resources and ideas between researchers\organizers and the community members\writers as a way of understanding that is guided by community needs, known to some as participatory action research. communities of writers; not just people writing. this process took a longer time. we asked ourselves: how was my life impacted by coloniality and by metaphysical catastrophe? we began by telling stories of coloniality based on our own life experiences. indestructible and interconnected nodes of the (rhizome) جذور articles in this issue are like different communities connected by bodies of water through the rhythms of the water drums. the articles are an assemblage of cultures of resistance and affirmation. they are all interconnected like a rhizome, even though it is not always clear how. interwoven in these stories is the larger context of the united states as part of the new world project, including the slave trade, the us civil war, jim crow, the great migration, the industrial revolution, wwii, the civil rights and third world movements, and the united states as a global superpower. ultimately, the content of this issue is about creating space to make radicle connections and build decolonial villages. • rochele royster provides reflections on the first racial justice in praxis conference. • oksana yakushko’s article focuses on identifying, unraveling, and connecting the links among constructions of race, narratives of eugenics, and epistemologies of science and psychology. • sirena dieudonné begins to uncover the dust, which settled from the colonized bondage to learn the generational treasures that exist within. • geraldine palmer’s examination of the code of silence looks at the effects of racial constructions, narratives, and epistemologies on her mother, herself, black women in the united states, the larger african american community, and their multigenerational trauma and resistance. • jacqueline samuel names and describes a theory of dark matter, which addresses the psychological and political effects of metaphysical catastrophe on the african american community. • gloria west introduces theories of selfactivism and the mobile village. • deidra somerville on the motherline. • hana masud and khaled batrawi tell a story that can be read as a metaphor that connects palestine to the rest of the world, as a parable and practice of resistance that affirms the humanity of both oppressed and oppressor in the most extreme conditions. • palestinian psychologists, clinicians, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 researchers, and activists collectively write to uplift liberation narratives and justice work ignited by dr. ibrahim makkawi. • tiffeny jiménez and gordon lee articulate the larger theme of this issue: radicalizing psychology and embodying decoloniality. challenging community psychology we challenge community psychologists (including ourselves) to understand that what we are doing is not working. currently our work is complicit in harm (i.e., modernity/coloniality), and yet it has the potential to be an affirmation of our radical roots and practices. we ultimately, with this issue, seek to radicalize approaches to psychology and embody decoloniality. the journey to the village turns out to be part of a larger project to map the colonial and capitalist matrix of power, to critically question and reveal the interconnections of how it functions, to make it visible and to understand its evolution over time. empowerment from a community psychological perspective cannot exist in isolation from this framework. it requires questioning, digging, and embarking on new ways of knowing in the service of uncovering its interconnected flows and functions. during this process, we have been aware that editors often play a pivotal role in the production and dissemination of new knowledge. editors are the holders of space and set the tone for how writing/scholarship spaces are cultivated. it was important to us that this experience nurtured and amplified, and did not disfigure, the voices of the writers, which further shaped the overall direction of the issue. language is colonial, it imposes a worldview, a cadence, a way of expressing knowing, which is often out sync with the author. with this issue our intent was to open a space which allowed for the author’s embodied ways of knowing (multi modal formatting, poetry, music, video, images.) let us weave our spirits in a conspiracy of hope, humility, belonging, presence and possibility. we invite, call on you, to consider, to think about, to use these articles as a non-dogmatic, unconventional “manual,” a kind of rules (stories and working principles) for radicals, for anyone who knows that something is not right in this world, to nurture you and your work. we look forward to hearing from you. in radical healing, an other world is here. http://www.gjcpp.org/ stakeholder perspectives on ontario’s bill 13: a macrosystem-level intervention supporting gay-straight alliances and other initiatives affirming lgbt youth renato (rainier) liboro1, robb travers2, and ketan shankandass2 keywords: education legislation, gay-straight alliances, lgbt youth, macrosystem level intervention, mental health author biographies: renato (rainier) liboro, is an assistant professor of the department of psychology, and a community-based researcher of the interdisciplinary team of the population health and health equity initiative, of the university of nevada, las vegas (unlv). rainier is the research lead of the community health advocacy for minority populations, immigrants and other newcomers, and their mental health (champion mental health) research lab at unlv. he is also a collaborator scientist of the institute for mental health policy research at the centre for addiction and mental health in toronto, ontario, canada. his research agenda focuses on factors and issues that impact the mental health and wellbeing of sexual/gender and racial minorities, migrants with or without status, older adults, and people living with and at risk of hiv/aids and other hidden/episodic disabilities. robb travers, is an interdisciplinary social scientist with degrees in psychology and public health sciences. robb is a professor and the chair of the department of health sciences at wilfrid laurier university, waterloo, ontario, canada. he maintains an active community based research program that investigates the impact of discrimination/marginalization on health and wellbeing of gender and sexual minorities. he is an advocate for community-based research approaches as a tool of community empowerment and social change. ketan shankardass, is an associate professor in the department of health sciences at wilfrid laurier university, waterloo, ontario, canada, and an affiliate scientist at the map centre for urban health solutions at st. michael's hospital, toronto, ontario, canada. he is a social epidemiologist and educator who builds on training in epidemiology, public health, biology, and geography to understand the drivers of population health inequity from “cell to society.” he aims to use research to support innovative solutions for more equitable health systems. recommended citation: liboro, r., travers, r., & shankardass, k. (2019). stakeholder perspectives on ontario’s bill 13: a macrosystem-level intervention supporting gay-straight alliances and other initiatives affirming lgbt youth. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(3), 1 -31. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: renato (rainier) liboro, assistant professor, department of psychology, university of nevada, las vegas. email: renato.liboro@unlv.edu. 1 university of nevada 2 wilfrid laurier university http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 stakeholder perspectives on ontario’s bill 13: a macrosystem-level intervention supporting gay-straight alliances and other initiatives affirming lgbt youth abstract researchers have argued for the positive impact education legislation can have as a macrosystem-level intervention on the implementation of microsystemand mesosystem-level interventions (e.g., gay-straight alliances) empirically documented to support sexual and gender minority students. this paper presents the findings of a qualitative community-based research study that explored the perspectives of advocates for lgbt students from waterloo region, ontario, canada, on the impact of bill 13; a bill purportedly proposed to address the needs of minority youth in publicly funded schools. this paper emphasizes the value of legislation that is able to both explicitly mandate the implementation of lgbt-affirming initiatives empirically recognized to promote student mental health, and provide flexibility for advocates to develop new initiatives that will meet the specific needs of their minority students. perhaps one of the most prominent theoretical frameworks considered central to community psychology discourse, research, and practice (jason et al., 2016; nelson & prilleltensky, 2010), urie bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological systems theory (table 1) has been utilized and adopted over the years to underscore the need to recognize interdependent, multi-level systems of influence and intervention that impact the development and wellbeing of children and youth, particularly those most vulnerable to mental health challenges in schools (burns, warmbold-brann, & zaslofsky, 2015; hornby, 2016; lee, 2011). because of its broad applicability, the ecological systems theory has been readily applied to various research contexts involving developing youth. community psychologists have made considerable use of the ecological metaphor bronfenbrenner described in their own research and practice (trickett, kelly, & todd, 1972). because of its ability to contextualize issues and problems faced by disadvantaged people over time and across multiple nested levels of analysis (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010), the ecological systems theory has had a wide range of practical applications that have proved valuable to many community psychology research areas and focuses. as a theory that places value in holism over reductionism, the relevance of the ecological systems theory to the research focus and context of the study described and discussed in this article is that it underscores the importance of the interconnectedness and interdependence of social phenomenon and factors found in the smaller systems (e.g., individual-level: characteristics of the individual lgbt youth, microsystem-level: school teacher support for students) with those found in the larger systems (e.g. mesosystem-level: lgbt-affirming collaboration between school faculty and community service providers, macrosystem level: societal homophobia and lgbt-positive legislation). moreover, the ecological systems theory recognizes the significant impacts that the interconnectedness and interdependence of these nested structures could have on vulnerable individuals within an open ecological environment where social phenomena and factors from the different system-levels are free to dynamically interact and considerably influence one another, and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 more importantly, developing youth (bronfenbrenner, 1979; nelson & prilleltensky, 2010; trickett et al., 1972). table 1 bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological systems system-levels descriptions examples individual the individual youth nested within the different ecological system-levels a child in the context of the child’s home or school microsystem a pattern of activities, social roles, and interpersonal relations experienced by an individual in a given direct setting that would constantly influence the individual a youth’s interactions with family members or peers from school mesosystem interrelationships between 2 or more microsystem-level settings in which the individual is situated interactions between a child’s peer group and home environment macrosystem organizational, social, cultural, and political contexts, which influence the interactions within the other systems belief systems, shared knowledge, laws, and policies for instance, in empirical investigations, much attention has been given to the positive effects of family, peer, and school microsystems on the mental health and wellbeing of the individual sexual and gender minority youth (kosciw, greytak, giga, villenas, & danischewski, 2016; kosciw, greytak, palmer, & boesen, 2014; poteat, rivers, & vecho, 2015). several research studies have focused on the perspectives and important roles of parents, fellow students (i.e., both lgbt and non-lgbt youth), teachers, counsellors, administrators, and community advocates in the direct provision of personal and social support, as well as on the creation of gay-straight alliances (gsas), which have been empirically documented to create positive school environments and safe spaces for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (lgbt) youth in schools (goldstein & davis, 2010; hatzenbuehler, 2011; kosciw, greytak, diaz, & bartkiewicz, 2010; valenti & campbell, 2009). in this same context, mesosystem-level interactions (i.e., those that do not involve direct interaction with sexual and gender minority youth) of entities within and between these microsystem settings have also been the focus of studies on interventions promoting the mental health of lgbt students in recent decades. research has shown that the perspectives, collective advocacy, and collaborations and partnerships between ally (i.e., non-lgbt) student leaders, teachers, staff, counsellors, principals and vice-principals, and school board trustees have led to the successful implementation of lgbt-affirming initiatives such as the incorporation of age-appropriate, lgbt-positive material in school curricula and lesson plans (bellini, 2012; bittner, 2012; fisher et al., 2008; ryan, patraw, & bednar, 2013); the practice of lgbt-inclusive in service professional development training of school employees (bellini, 2012; case & meier, 2014; fisher et al., 2008; greytak, kosciw, & boesen, 2013; mayo, 2013); and the creation of board-wide policies that explicitly recognize and address critical issues such as bullying, victimization, and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 harassment related to students’ sexual orientation and gender identity (fisher et al., 2008; goldstein, collins, & halder, 2007; kosciw, palmer, kull, & greytak, 2013) – all of which have been documented by research to support individual-level lgbt youth mental health and wellbeing. unfortunately, although a number of articles have been published in academic literature that highlight the value of macrosystem-level interventions such as legislation and public policies in the promotion of microsystemand mesosystem-level interventions empirically documented to support the mental health of sexual and gender minority students (anderson, 2014; rayside, 2014; winton, 2012), there has not been a great deal of studies conducted that examine the perspectives of key stakeholders on the impact of legislation on such initiatives dedicated to foster the wellbeing of lgbt youth (bellini, 2012; kitchen & bellini, 2013). this may be because of the controversial and political natures of the issues that are involved with examining stakeholder perspectives on provincial legislation; or perhaps because there are not enough research agendas that have been funded and supported in the recent past to highlight the importance of exploring and promoting the perspectives of stakeholders from relevant communities, a key component in community psychology research and practice (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010). the aim of this paper is to present, discuss, and analyze the perspectives of relevant stakeholders from waterloo region, ontario, canada, on the potential impacts of a proposed provincial legislation, bill 13, on advocacy, lgbt-affirming initiatives, and policies in publicly-funded schools that are dedicated to support the mental health of sexual and gender minority youth, based on the findings of the community-engaged qualitative study that we conducted in 2012, around the seven months before, during, and after bill13 was legislated, passed, and then given royal assent in june of that year (ontario legislative assembly [ola], 2012). bill 13 was a piece of provincial legislation that was proposed by then ontario liberal party leader and premier dalton mcguinty in 2011. it later came to be more popularly recognized as the accepting schools act. among many other things, bill 13 was poised to be the controversial legal statute that would explicitly mandate all publicly-funded schools in ontario, including all publicly funded catholic schools, to accept and support the establishment of gsas upon the request of any of its students (lewis, 2011). bill 13 was purportedly proposed by the ontario liberal party to impact and help support the wellbeing of all students in publicly-funded schools; especially those who needed more positive spaces to thrive. specifically, this paper will present, discuss, and analyze the perspectives of students, teachers, staff, administrators, board trustees and superintendents, and community-based service providers from and collaborating with the waterloo region district school board (wrdsb) and the waterloo catholic district school board (wcdsb), who were actively working towards the promotion of lgbt student mental health and wellbeing in their schools at the time of our study. method partnerships the participants included in our qualitative study were part of a larger study examining the success of gsas and other lgbt-affirming initiatives in supporting sexual and gender minority students in waterloo region, ontario, canada. the equity, sexual health, and hiv (esh-hiv) research group of the centre for community research, learning, and action at wilfrid laurier university undertook the larger study, in partnership with the ok2bme program of kw counselling services of waterloo region. ok2bme is a program that offers counselling and support groups for lgbt youth, as well as education http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 and training to service providers, school based stakeholders, and the broader community. over the years, the esh-hiv research group, the ok2bme program, and advocates from both district school boards of waterloo region have collaboratively worked together as community partners to identify and address lgbt youth concerns and issues in their region’s schools. it was because of these strong connections and collaboration that we were able to recruit and involve many participants for our study. the wilfrid laurier university research ethics board (reb) reviewed and approved the purpose and conduct of our study. we used an reb approved, interview guide to maintain a degree of structure during the study interviews (appendix a). participants twenty-six stakeholders from waterloo region were interviewed within a seven month duration (i.e., from march to september 2012) to explore and examine their perspectives on the potential impact of bill 13, the accepting schools act, on the advocacy, policies, and initiatives of publicly funded schools dedicated to support the mental health and wellbeing of lgbt students. each of the 26 stakeholders were interviewed only once at some point during the seven-month period of data collection, either before, during, or after bill 13 was incidentally legislated, passed, and given royal assent in june 2012 (ola, 2012). the different groups of stakeholders were all recruited during the same period of time, and each stakeholder was scheduled for interview based on their availability, and venue and time preferences, during the seven-month period. the interviewees were recruited through a variety of strategies, initially using purposive sampling (palys, 2008), and later, through snowball sampling (morgan, 2008). students were recruited in 2012 at the waterloo region gsa conference, an annual event co sponsored by the ok2bme program and the wrdsb, which brought together youth from across the region to network and discuss issues relevant to gsas, as well as participate in workshops facilitated by lgbt community members. the recruitment was accomplished by posting reb-approved advertisement flyers at the premises of kw counselling and the gsa conference location, and by making two public announcements on the day of the conference. students who attended the conference were selected for recruitment because of their past or current membership in local gsas. an additional recruitment flyer through the ok2bme program’s e-mail network listserv was circulated, and an advertisement was placed using the same flyer on their website. teachers, school staff, and board representatives at the gsa conference were also recruited by invitation through the personal and professional networks of the research team using reb approved recruitment emails. students, teachers, school staff, administrators, and representatives from the two district school boards who were in unique positions to provide information and personal perspectives relevant to the objectives of the study were purposely recruited based on their roles, job descriptions, individual commitment, collaborative involvement, histories, and own lived experiences studying, and working in or with the waterloo region school systems, particularly in relation to advocacy for lgbt student mental health and wellbeing. individuals from the two school boards were recruited during the gsa conference because many of them stood out as highly informed and actively engaged participants of the conference. they were outspoken and confident about their advocacy for lgbt youth issues in schools, and their passion for their advocacy was apparent during the conference, making them excellent candidates for the interviews of the study. subsequently, some participants were recruited from the referrals of initial interviewees who http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 suggested names of other key stakeholders in the school settings who would be able to share valuable perspectives on the research focus of the study. at the time of the study analysis, 11 students from eight high schools, six teacher gsa sponsors from five high schools, seven representatives at the administration level of the two school boards, and two key informant service providers who provide lgbt counselling, education, and outreach support to the community (table 2) had participated in the study’s confidential, digitally audio recorded, semi-structured, open-ended interviews. among the 11 students (table 3), only one identified as transgender. none of the students identified as heterosexual; four identified as bisexual; and seven identified as gay/lesbian. there were five students who table 2 study stakeholders (n=26) identified as male and six who identified as female. the students’ ethno-racial backgrounds were mostly white, with six students who identified as white-canadians, two who identified as white-south americans, and one who identified as white european. only two students identified as non-white, one who identified as asian, and another who identified as someone of mixed aboriginal-european descent. eight of the students were from schools affiliated with the wrdsb and three were from a school affiliated with the wcdsb. based on their cities of origin, seven students were from schools located in kitchener, three students were from schools in waterloo, and one student was from a school in cambridge. pseudonyms were assigned to each student from the beginning of the study to protect their privacy and confidentiality. type of stakeholders # of stakeholders # of schools sampled personal demographic information requested students 11 8 yes teachers 6 5 no board representatives 7 n/a* no service providers 2 n/a† no *representatives worked for one of the two school boards, not one single school †service providers were from the community and delivered services to school boards among the six teacher gsa sponsors (table 4), there was only one who confidentially identified as gay. four of the teachers were from four different schools affiliated with the wrdsb and the other two were from a school affiliated with the wcdsb. none of the seven representatives at the administration level of the two school boards identified as a sexual or gender minority. from the seven board representatives, four were from the public school board, and three were from the catholic one. out of the seven board representatives, three were trustees, one was a superintendent, two were staff members who worked closely with school gsas, and one was a school administrator. each of the seven representatives at the administration level of the two school boards were in privileged positions of influence with regards to advocating for lgbt youth mental health and wellbeing. most of them had already spent years advocating for lgbt students in their own capacities as school administrator, staff member working on equity and inclusion board initiatives, superintendent, or board trustee. this was also true for the two community-based service providers who had been in their positions for years. they have witnessed the positive changes brought about by their own advocacy for lgbt students, as well as the advocacy of other key stakeholders in waterloo region. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 table 3 student demographics (n=11) participant pseudonym age gender identity sexual orientation gsa membership ethno-racial background keith 19 cis male gay 1 year white canadian shaun 18 cis male gay 4 years white canadian sydney 16 trans male bisexual 2 years aboriginal/european mike 18 cis male gay 1 year white canadian ariel 16 cis female bisexual 1 year white south american mary 17 cis female lesbian 4 years white canadian alice 17 cis female lesbian 1 year white european sara 18 cis female bisexual 2 years asian helen 16 cis female bisexual 2 years white canadian chloe 18 cis female lesbian 1 year white canadian jaime 19 cis male gay 1 year white south american table 4 teacher demographics (n=6) teacher age of gsa grade level in school 1 5 years 9-12 2 1 year 9-12 3 5 years 7-8 4 6 years 9-12 5 1 year 9-12 6 4 years 9-12 procedures participants were interviewed either at the wilfrid laurier university campus or at a community location. the digitally audio recorded, confidential interviews were between one to two hours in length. all participants provided written consent to participate in the study prior to their interview. youth received a $25 honorarium following their participation. the youth each completed a demographics sheet detailing their age, sexual orientation, gender identity, and the number of years they had been with their gsa, as well as the city where their high school was located, and their ethno-racial background. using another demographics sheet, teachers were asked about the grade level they taught in school and the age of the gsas in their schools. however, information about the teachers’ ethno-racial background was not requested. since there were a lot less teachers and administration-level representatives and service providers from the community who could have participated in the study, demographic information, particularly ethno-racial background, was not requested from them to protect their privacy and confidentiality. the semi-structured interviews with the students focused on what their general impressions were of bill 13, what they believed were the strengths and weaknesses of the bill and the benefits or challenges that would result from its legislation, and what other specific comments they had regarding the bill. the teacher gsa sponsors, global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 representatives at the administration level of the two school boards, and the service providers were asked similar questions about their own perspectives on bill 13. materials and analysis a modified version of the grounded theory approach to qualitative data analysis (charmaz, 2008; corbin & strauss, 2008) was used in this study. the grounded theory method allows theory to emerge inductively from data rather than starting from a hypotheses and then deductively establishing findings. instead of applying a theoretical framework to data, theory emerges from the data. our research team modified this approach by establishing a categorical coding framework prior to inductive coding, which allowed analysis to focus on our areas of interest. we transcribed the recorded interviews verbatim without the use of transcription software, and then coded the transcribed interviews using nvivo 10. after reviewing the initial transcripts, our categorical coding framework was modified accordingly based on the research objectives, interview guide questions, our interviewer’s experiences, and the transcript data. several categories were developed for the framework during this initial process. in the second stage of coding, two members of our research team separately coded interviews with one youth, one teacher, one board representative, and one service provider to ensure intercoder reliability. codes were developed inductively, through the use of open coding – using the coding framework as a guide for sorting the data (corbin & strauss, 2008). next, our research team gathered together to reach consensus regarding any codes where disagreement existed. at the same time, members of our research team began to make connections among codes and discussed potential theories. once consensus on the open codes was achieved from the interviews, the first author coded the remaining transcripts using the established coding framework. during the final stage of coding, emerging themes, patterns, and relationships within and between participants’ responses were identified by the research team. the process of data triangulation (denzin, 1989) between service provider, board representative, teacher, and student responses was used to enhance the credibility of the data. themes were also appraised and altered iteratively and reflexively as a team (watt, 2007), so that alternate explanations could be explored and discussed. it was kept in mind that researchers and participants in the study affected each other mutually and continually during the research process. results according to the information shared by the participants, all 16 schools affiliated with the waterloo region district school board (wrdsb) already had actively running gsas; professional development in-service trainings on lgbt topics; close collaborative connections with the ok2bme program and their board’s equity and inclusion office; and policies, administrative procedures, and guidelines from their board that explicitly included sexual orientation as one of the bases for bias-based harassment and offenses related to discrimination. additionally, several of the wrdsb schools that the respondents belonged to also had lgbt positive events and campaigns every year; inclusion of lgbt topics in their curriculum; and available counselling specific for lgbt concerns. at least two of the schools affiliated with the waterloo catholic district school board (wcdsb) were not far behind with similar initiatives and supports for their own lgbt students at that time. it was apparent from the interviews that the perspectives of the participants on advocacy for lgbt issues were going to be based on their lived and work experiences as key stakeholders who actively engaged and challenged their school http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 systems in order to successfully establish and promote much needed changes. their perspectives on bill 13 were not just going to be opinions based on information that they had read or heard, but views that they developed from years of experiencing marginalization and/or advocating for lgbt youth’s needs and rights. “it’s about time!” the first comments of the participants on bill 13 could only be described as an overwhelmingly positive response. although there were elements of discernible initial concern in some, most were full of anticipation and hope with what the legislation of bill 13 could bring. since the respondents were from a pool of lgbt youth and advocates who had been working on getting lgbt-positive initiatives established in their schools for years, it was not surprising that only one student among all the participants had not known about bill 13 prior to joining the study. most of the students were very enthusiastic with the thought of having a law that would set up supports and protections for lgbt youth in schools, and some teachers expressed that they thought it was about time something like bill 13 was proposed. sara was quite proud of the fact that ontario was the first province to propose such a bill, “ontario is one of the more powerful and influential provinces. i’m sure it will lead the way when it comes to this kind of legislation and then other provinces will eventually follow.” one of the teachers got emotional when she shared her initial reaction to hearing about bill 13: if we want to see consistent change at a ground level, it has to be legislated by the government. that means it has to have the legislative chops to be able to act and say, “you’re doing this because it’s the law”. it’s so that people can then say, “we’re doing this because it’s people’s civil rights. in ontario, we believe that people have those rights and these are how they are encompassed.” when someone like the premier says, “i don’t really care what your religious beliefs say, when there is something we must do to save our children’s lives, we do it.” that sends a huge message to the public. although she felt optimistic about the bill’s impending legislation, another teacher still had a little skepticism about what a law can actually accomplish: “i think it’s amazing and it’s about time right? i also think that we’ve had anti-racist stuff for a long time, and very often, i don’t see that leading to any change at the school level. if the bill leads to change at the school level, then that will be even better. i think it could be useful for us because for us doing the work in the schools, we know we’re going to be supported.” one of the service providers shared this skepticism saying that it will take a lot of time after legislation for change to happen, but also commented that she was in support of the bill, “there’s a real need for it, and we know it.” two of the trustees had positive feedback. one of them remarked, “it’s a good piece of legislation. people should not be afraid of possible pushback. there’s always going to be some gripe for every new law.” reputation earned. as the discussion on bill 13 went further in the interviews, it became more apparent that the bill had already earned a reputation for being a statute that was proposed specifically to force publicly funded school boards in ontario to allow the formation of gsas in their schools, if there were students who requested for them. nearly half of the participants had very little idea about the rest of the contents of bill 13 and were surprised to hear that it had more amendments to the education act (ontario legislative assembly [ola], 1990) that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 required specific tasks from the education minister, the school boards, and the school principals of ontario, which addressed more needs of lgbt students. more so, for those respondents who thought that the bill was mostly about coercing ontario publicly funded schools to support gsas, and even for some respondents who did know that there was more to the bill, bill 13 earned the reputation of being the statute that was proposed specifically to target catholic schools. chloe was one of the students who believed bill 13 was proposed to deliberately force the hand of catholic school boards: “i do think the law sets important groundwork for students and gives them some coverage where maybe they didn’t have that, especially in catholic schools. from what i’ve heard of public schools, at least in the city i grew up in, they do try to protect students in that regard. it’s just different in catholic schools. i think the bill was proposed with catholic schools in mind. the bill gives catholic school students some coverage, so that we don’t feel like we’re completely alone…that we don’t feel like we’re being ignored and subject to the whims of catholic school authority figures.” jaime, who recently graduated from a catholic high school, completely agreed with chloe’s sentiments: “i definitely think that was a huge part of the bill, especially the wording. when i tried to start a gsa in my final year, there were infinite roadblocks. they were saying we weren’t even allowed to use the word “gsa”. just having that, it was evident that the bill was proposed for catholic schools because they were banning that term, much less the concept behind it.” however, not all respondents believed that bill 13 was proposed based on a mission to target catholic schools. several participants believed to the contrary. one of the representatives from wrdsb who has had several occasions to work with members of wcdsb on initiatives meant to support minority youth thought the opposite: “i honestly don’t think it was developed just to give catholic school boards specific direction. there’s lots of ontario public school boards, non-catholic, secular ones, that have not done a lot in this area, so this is for them as well. i hope this isn’t seen as a law for catholic school boards. it’s for everybody!” mike also thought that the bill was not just meant to help lgbt youth in catholic schools. he pointed out that many others apart from lgbt students would benefit from the amendments proposed by bill 13: “i think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about it because a lot of the pushback comes from people who believe that this is a gay celebration document almost, and only focus on that one issue. not only does the bill works to address the growing number of students who are struggling because of pushback against their sexual identities, it also talks about other forms of bullying on the rise, like cyber-bullying. i think that there needs to be a lot more awareness about what the bill actually does and how it doesn’t seek to give special privileges to gay youth in catholic schools.” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 strengths of bill 13 naming school clubs “gay-straight alliances”. because the participants had an overwhelming positive response to the legislation of bill 13, it was no surprise that many of them found certain aspects of the bill personally appealing and relevant. for example, a lot of the participants found the section of the bill that explicitly forbade ontario boards and principals from prohibiting the establishment of gsas and lgbt-affirming clubs in schools as an important amendment in the bill. more so, respondents appreciated the fact that the section also specified that boards must allow students to name their clubs “gay-straight alliances”, if they desired to do so. prior to the legislation of the bill, some advocates felt that the provincial government allowed catholic boards to get away with suppressing the needs of lgbt youth. as one of the trustees expressed with frustration: “the law is only as good as the people prepared to enforce it. and quite honestly, before bill 13, the provincial government was not ready to enforce it, or at least push the envelope. it didn’t matter that they had policies on safety and progressive discipline; they still allowed our coterminous board, the catholic school board, to prohibit students from forming clubs and naming their clubs “gay-straight alliances”. they still allowed the catholic school board to indulge with discriminatory practices, and i think it was for political reasons.” the bill’s language. another related point that respondents found very important was the language used in the bill. many of the interviewees were pleased that the language used was strong yet open and flexible enough to back advocates up in terms of letting them create lgbt-affirming initiatives suited to their schools’ needs and settings. because they found that their circumstances were not always necessarily the same or ideal as those in other schools, many respondents were relieved to see that the verbiage used in the bill gave them enough freedom to be creative so that they could navigate their unique challenges in their own schools. one teacher explained: “there’s enough flexibility within that legislation to respect religious beliefs or specific issues of different people, but also respect the fact that these are our students and they have real problems. they need our support and it’s just been too long that we’ve turned a blind eye to their suffering.” some participants also liked how the bill’s language encouraged schools to come up with initiatives to improve school climates and become inclusive and supportive of students of any race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, age, marital status, family status, or disability. to them, this clearly meant that the bill was not solely providing special treatment for lgbt youth in the way some conservative critics claimed. one service provider pointed out that others seemed to forget that bill 13 was developed to support all marginalized students, but added, “we all know that lgbt kids need it the most.” new surveys and other strengths. several of the respondents conveyed their interest in the idea that the bill mandated the establishment of new and more specific surveys and reports on bullying and issues connected to negative school climates every two years, on top of more general surveys and reports already being implemented. they felt that if the right people implemented http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 the surveys and responded to its findings on a regular basis, there would be a consistent form of assessment of the lgbt-affirming initiatives that schools were implementing. as one of the service providers commented: “the other piece that i found interesting was that there’s going to be a new survey required that’s supposed to be done every two years that would track what schools have been doing in response to the directives of the bill. that would be a cool way to impose a check and balance.” other components of the bill that participants believed were assets to the overall strength of bill 13 as a statute proposing new amendments to the education act (ola, 1990) included: 1) the explicit addition of cyber-bullying in the description of bullying offenses for schools to address; 2) the specific duties and responsibilities of the education minister, school boards, and principals that were laid out in detail; and 3) the increased focus on the importance of observing the principles of progressive discipline, particularly with regards to involving parents and members of the community in the rehabilitation of repeat offenders, and placing the provision of necessary supports for youth such as counselling at par with the attention to disciplinary actions. some of the respondents said that the bill was able to raise the observance and respect for the principles of progressive discipline and restorative justice to a higher level. weaknesses of bill 13 not mandating the name “gay-straight alliances”. some participants found certain aspects of the bill weak. for one, although certain participants found the section of the bill that mandates ontario boards to support the formation of lgbt-affirming clubs in schools to be a strong part of the bill, other participants criticized the bill for not specifically insisting that all the clubs be named “gay-straight alliances”. for some, it was important to them that schools acknowledged the word “gay” by accepting the name “gsa”; while for others, it was just as important to acknowledge the word “alliance” because it honoured the solidarity that straight allies show in the clubs. one of the representatives at the board level shared her views on this issue: “there was just the one word in that section. that part where it says that students “may” call them gsas, but to me it wasn’t strong enough. i can’t remember exactly how all the wording was written…but my stand is…if they are gsas, then they should be called gsas. they shouldn’t be called something else. that’s what we hear from students. in the catholic board, they call them equity groups or something else.” no specific support for advocates. another criticism participants had of bill 13 was that none of the sections that mandated schools to come up with initiatives to foster accepting and inclusive climates mentioned anything explicit about promoting supports for teachers and staff advocating for marginalized youth. although the respondents conceded that the bill was primarily conceived to address the needs of minority youth, they pointed out that if the bill had specific mandates that encouraged or required supports for advocates in the schools, the youth would have indirectly but significantly benefited too. in the earlier part of their interviews, many of the respondents extoled the merits of students having adult role models who identified as lgbt in their schools. the participants said that the bill missed an opportunity to help lgbt youth in that manner, by failing to explicitly add http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 amendments that would ensure protections for school employees if they decided to identify as lgbt. some of the respondents also said that advocates in the schools were in sore need of additional resources and reprieve from compassion and carer fatigue brought on by years of struggle and continued advocacy. they criticized the bill for not including strong enough elements and directions that would promote positive climates in support of hard-working advocates for lgbt students. one teacher clarified how support for advocates in the bill would have helped: “there have been people who said, i know the teachers who run the gsas are getting burnt out. so i think we need more supports, we need more release time to go and do some training for us around the more difficult issues. we do have kids that have a higher rate of suicide attempts and depression in our clubs than other clubs. i think, if you want the gsas to keep going, you have to support the people who are passionate about it by giving them the skills that they need to deal with these kids’ issues because i know of amazing people that have stepped away from this club. you need a larger skill set than just being a nice teacher who gets the issues, right?” leaving gay-straight alliances only as an option. lastly, some participants felt strongly that bill 13 should not merely be mandating ontario boards to allow the creation of gsas in schools if students requested for them. for these participants, the benefit of having gsas in schools has already been well documented and that the government should no longer be leaving schools the option to wait for students to ask for them. instead, these respondents believed that the bill should already be unequivocally directing all district boards in the province to create gsas in each of their schools. a trustee from the catholic school board had much to say about this point: “if you look at the secular system, every single public high school in waterloo region, and even some of the senior elementary, has a gsa. in waterloo catholic, we have 5 of the largest high schools in the region, and only two of them have a club like a gsa. the implementation approach that we’re taking is if students ask for them, we’ll permit a gsa. the reality is, these are vulnerable students. a gsa is a policy tool that works. the fact that every public school has one, and we’re among the largest, shows that the demand is there. the argument that we’re waiting for students to come up and ask for one to show that there’s actually a need for it just doesn’t make sense. the problem i come back to often is that trustees need to play a leadership role. we’re not playing that leadership role!” dichotomy in standpoints in the analysis of the participants’ perspectives on the strengths and weaknesses of the different aspects and components of bill 13, a distinct dichotomy in standpoints became discernible under early scrutiny. while there were many occasions when participants appreciated the specificity of certain aspects and components of the bill because they believed it was completely necessary for it to be effective, there were other times when they underscored the merits of having some of the bill’s aspects and components stated in more general terms to allow for flexibility so that stakeholders could be more creative in coming up with strategies http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 and programs that were more customized to the needs of their lgbt students. on one end of the dichotomy, respondents emphasized the importance of specificity in the bill’s verbiage so that desired outcomes could be achieved promptly; on the other end, they also made a point of noting how useful it is for parts of the bill to allow for flexibility that would permit advocates to tailor initiatives in their efforts to navigate challenges they encountered along the way. specificity. participants lauded several aspects and components of bill 13 because of their specificity and explicitness, which the participants believed significantly contributed to the strengths of the statute. they particularly respected the fact that the bill specifically forbade school boards and principals from prohibiting students to form groups that promoted safety, diversity, equity, and inclusion, including gsas and lgbt-affirming clubs. they also appreciated the bill’s explicit mandate that school boards and principals unconditionally allow students to call their clubs “gay-straight alliances”, if they chose to do so. these directives were clear and non-negotiable, and provided the necessary sanctions for lgbt youth to create gsas and other similar clubs. two of the board trustees who participated in the study commented that they believed it was appropriate for the bill to mandate boards to allow students to call their clubs by any name they wanted. one trustee from the catholic school board elaborated: “i think fundamentally, the real issue was “what name are we going to use?” that was what the opposing sides within the catholic school system started fighting over. and the reason why that becomes important, is not because the name necessarily matters, it’s because the name becomes a symbolic issue that is either saying “we’re okay with the word ‘gay’.” or “we’re not okay with the word ‘gay’.”and by extension, we’re not okay with you coming to our school if you’re gay. my sense is more, if you let kids call it what they want, then it encourages them. whatever language they find most affirming to them, you give them the freedom to use it.” participants were pleased to know that new surveys were going to be implemented that would specifically monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the school boards’ policies and programs related to the bill’s new goals. apart from the already existing surveys to examine school climates, these new surveys were going to be implemented to track the progress of the schools’ initiatives in response to the other mandates of the bill. students were comforted to know that bill 13 explicitly added cyber-bullying as an offense that warranted disciplinary action under the bullying section of the bill because they knew more than anyone else how rampant online harassment could be as it was mostly done covertly and insidiously. in relation to disciplinary actions, many participants expressed praise for the increased focus on the principles of progressive discipline in the specified and detailed duties and responsibilities of the education minister, school boards, and principals that were distinctly outlined in the bill. they noted how important it was to explicitly mandate that school employees who inform principals of any reportable incident must be included in the discussion on the subsequent steps to be taken in the investigation process of the incident. they also noted the importance of including the parents or guardians of both the student they believed was bullied, and the student they believed to have engaged in the bullying, in these discussions. consequently, they recognized the value of the bill’s specific inclusion of the community’s role in the implementation of progressive discipline. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 participants commended the specific mandate for principals to pay close attention not only to the corresponding disciplinary actions warranted in bullying incidents, but also to the provision of supports such as counselling for the students who were bullied, witnessed the bullying, and engaged in the bullying. they believed this not only showed concern for justice and fairness but also for the welfare of all students involved. apart from mandating support for the creation of gsas in schools, bill 13 also explicitly included directives for school boards to provide annual professional development in-service trainings and workshops for staff on bullying prevention and the promotion of positive school climates; create equity and inclusion educational policies that would address the incorporation of elements promoting diversity in school curricula; provide counselling services using the expertise of psychologists, social workers, and other professionals who can address conflicts related to bullying of all kinds; and submit annual reports to the education minister with respect to suspensions, expulsions, and other disciplinary actions related to harassment and discrimination. one of the representatives from the board who work closely with teacher gsa sponsors emphasized how professional development in-service trainings were able to help make the link between the role of school curricula and advocacy more apparent, and encouraged teachers to incorporate lgbt topics into their lesson plans. one teacher mentioned something related to this point, “we’ve had in service on how to incorporate diversity and inclusion into lesson plans. last year there was information sent to staff on tips to broach certain topics. the understanding is that you shouldn’t just be sticking to your old habits.” it was apparent from their responses that the participants truly believed that certain mandates needed to be expressed as explicitly as possible. the more specific certain aspects and components of the bill were, the less room for excuses and negotiation in their implementation. the participants just as clearly emphasized this appreciation for explicitness when they expressed disappointment in the lack of specificity regarding certain sections of the bill. one major disappointment among the advocates for lgbt youth was the fact that they did not find enough elements in any of the sections that outlined mandates for providing supports in schools that specified increasing resources for school staff who devote their time and energies to fostering positive school climates that are safe and inclusive for all students. it was their hope that in some way policymakers would recognize that by supporting minority students’ advocates they would indirectly but effectively be supporting the students too. save for the mandate on requiring school boards to provide annual professional development in-service trainings for school staff, the participants were not aware of any other supports that were specified to help advocates. issues concerning protections for staff who openly identify as sexual and gender minorities, the need for more adult sexual and gender minority role models for youth, and compassion and carer fatigue were brought up. the lack of any mandates to address these issues served as a source of frustration for some participants. two related aspects of the bill that some participants found lacking specificity were the sections that allowed for the creation of lgbt-affirming clubs in schools and the naming of these clubs “gay-straight alliances”, if students desired to do so. apparently, although some participants found these aspects specific enough to provide necessary supports for lgbt students, others thought that simply forbidding school boards from prohibiting students from forming lgbt-affirming clubs and calling them “gay straight alliances” was not quite specific enough. for these participants, since ontario http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 publicly funded both secular and catholic schools, it would have been best if bill 13 explicitly mandated all publicly-funded school boards to create gsas in all their schools and made sure that they were not called any other name. these differences in perspectives created a dichotomy that raised the question on where policymakers should push or draw the line on being specific in the content of their proposed bills. some participants argued that there was also value in keeping aspects and components of the bill open or general enough to allow for flexibility so that stakeholders could devise creative solutions to navigate challenges that they encounter in their own particular settings. depending on the reasoning of a stakeholder, a strong argument could be made for either of these opposing perspectives. flexibility. several participants believed that the more general and encompassing certain statements of bill 13 were, the more flexibility they afforded to the stakeholders who were expected to implement initiatives developed to adhere to the bill’s mandates. for example, although respondents noted that the sub section of the bill that mandates school boards to “promote a positive school climate that is inclusive and accepting of all pupils” goes on to specify “including pupils of any race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status or disability” (ola, 2012, p.3), they still believed that the statement was general enough to allow for flexibility because it did not go on to say exactly how school boards were supposed to promote a positive school climate. this statement was not only specific enough to establish that the mandate was not just directed for the benefit of sexual and gender minority youth in schools, squashing the nonsensical claim of conservatives that the bill was proposed solely for the purpose of providing lgbt individuals special treatment; it was still general enough to afford the flexibility required to allow room for individual creativity and customization on the part of school boards’ implementation of initiatives to respond to the bill’s mandate. this flexibility that allowed for customization in the implementation of initiatives to respond to the bill’s mandate was passed down to individual schools, which as many participants repeatedly pointed out, were different and unique from one another in many ways. for the participants who saw the merit of having some aspects and components of bill 13 affording flexibility in the implementation of initiatives to support lgbt youth, the prospect of being able to more freely develop and establish different strategies and initiatives that could stimulate the interest of new advocates into joining any of the community coalitions working towards the promotion of positive school climates was a welcome advantage. they believed that with more opportunities to create a greater variety of lgbt-affirming initiatives, strategies, and policies, there would be more for prospective new advocates to choose from that would fit their convictions, available time and resources, degrees of commitment, and comfort levels. these participants also saw this flexibility as a quality that would permit them enough leeway to find ways to implement sought-after initiatives, such as the creation of gender-neutral washrooms in schools, which did not necessarily fall under any of the specific mandates of bill 13. another example participants gave to support the merits of having certain aspects and components of bill 13 affording flexibility, and some degree of openness to interpretation, is the aspect where the bill made it clear that its mandates were created for “all publicly-funded schools” to follow. although many participants chose to interpret this statement in the same way that most of the ontario public chose to interpret it, which was that it was to include catholic http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 high schools, some participants chose to interpret it as a directive and reason to extend their efforts to help lgbt youth in secular elementary and middle schools. some advocates chose to interpret this mandate as a push to create more gsas and lgbt affirming initiatives in their elementary and middle schools. one teacher confessed, “for me personally, the next step is obvious. we should have gsas or something…some sort of initiative in elementary schools that show how we connect, regardless of our differences.” another teacher shared her thoughts about expanding lgbt-affirming initiatives to middle schools: “we’ve had a gsa here for five years. there are maybe only two others that run at the [senior] elementary level. people come to our school and say, “you’re allowed to say that in class when you talk about gay marriage? you read novels with gay characters?” more schools should be able to do more at the [senior] elementary level. with this bill, i hope things will change.” based on the participants’ responses, they believed that affording flexibility in the language and content of the bill was just as important as exercising specificity when it was needed. although these views typically represent the opposite ends of any important deliberation, it can be argued that such a dichotomy in perspectives need not be perceived as a dilemma. the merits of exercising specificity in the verbiage and contents of the bill would not necessarily preclude the merits of affording flexibility in some of its aspects and components. the merits from each end of the dichotomy are not exclusive of one another, and this dialectical nature would only enhance the rigour in the process of determining the most beneficial times to exercise specificity over flexibility, or afford flexibility over specificity, in certain aspects and components of a policy or bill. this would be particularly true if the bill was carefully developed and constructed to contain both specificity and flexibility in different parts of its entirety. benefits resulting from the legislation of bill 13 unqualified backing. when the topic of potential benefits resulting from the legislation of bill 13 came up, many of the respondents got excited during the interviews. it seemed that the prospect of positive outcomes resulting from bill 13 was something that inspired and stimulated the key stakeholders. for the majority of respondents, there were going to be obvious benefits to the legislation and enactment of bill 13. the most obvious would be, that for advocates like them, they would have the unqualified legal backing to carry out strategies and initiatives that they knew were effective in supporting lgbt youth. not only would they be able to carry out current work that helped lgbt students without trepidation, but they would also be able to initiate new lgbt-affirming initiatives in their schools with more confidence. for advocates who had doubts or fears of repercussions when others questioned their efforts, they would have the sanction they need to reinforce their positions. one representative at the administration level of the board indicated that school boards would then have all the justification they needed to support minority youth. she quipped, “i didn’t know how much longer the liberal government was planning on staying subtle. i’m glad they finally did this.” another representative at the administration level pointed out that the legislation of the bill would not only provide stakeholders more backing, but it would also give boards the strong push they need. for advocates in schools who have already been quietly working under the radar to help lgbt youth, opportunities might come up for them to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 officially work on their projects as boards would have to find ways to respond to the mandate to develop more positive school climates. a few teachers admitted to feeling safer knowing that the law would be behind them. other teachers, on the other hand, said that the new act would provide them greater motivation to work harder on their advocacy for their lgbt youth. ariel remarked, “the bill’s enactment will show that the government is in support of tolerance, acceptance, and equality. it’s also an indication that society is changing and that our leaders are responding to the change.” the superintendent commented that the passing of bill 13 is “a public endorsement that cannot be ignored”, and added, “schools should take advantage of the message the government has conveyed”. some participants sounded more assured and confident than the rest with the idea that with explicit mandates of the new law, advocates would certainly have what they need to make their efforts count even more. alice commented that the benefit of having bill 13 passed is “it will tell teachers and school staff where they should stand”. sara interjected, “at least now, students will know their school will have to follow the law.” although she knows that things are not necessarily as simple as school boards automatically following all the dictates of the law, the school administrator still remarked, “it’s non-negotiable now. the law will be there to hold schools accountable.” mary felt that bill 13 would give more voice to the sentiments of marginalized lgbt youth and their advocates – “a voice that can no longer be silenced by religious conservatives.” when the legislation of bill 13 was imminent, a trustee from the catholic board who was upset about the controversy on using the name “gsa” retorted, “okay, call it a gsa, don’t call it a gsa, but let’s get something started in the schools. you’ve got the support from the province now. let’s make that happen.” the school administrator shared this sentiment as well, “whether it will be called prism (i.e., pride and respect for individuals of a sexual minority) or not…i know one of the other schools wants to use our name prism…we’re going to get some form of group in every catholic high school in waterloo region by next year.” rallying the troops. several of the respondents thought that bill 13 would be able to act as an accelerant to the advocacy efforts of the stakeholders in waterloo region. whereas before its legislation, efforts to form gsas or similar clubs and implement lgbt-affirming initiatives were bogged down by administration concerns of parental pushback and other complaints, advocates now believed that bill 13 can help fast forward initiatives started by community coalition members in schools. there was also the notion among the interviewees that with bill 13 passed as law, there would be more opportunities and confidence to rally other school personnel to become new advocates for the cause of supporting sexual and gender minority youth. one of the public school teachers pointed out that it seemed that, in the past, the bulk of school staff refused to get involved because of fears of repercussions. he believed that with approbation from the government, more teachers, counsellors, and other employees would be able to step up and offer their support in their own ways: “before bill 13 was passed, we were on an island and we didn’t know what the next action to support these kids was going to be because we could get into a whole heap of hot water with the board. so then i think, what happened was, about 80% of the staff that were in the middle, who were on the fence, just sat there and said, “i’m not getting involved.” whereas now, we have the freedom to say, if you’re in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 that 80%, get involved and help!” another teacher emphasized that the law would sanction more activities related to finding new ways to support minority youth in schools, which would provide new advocates different options to choose from so that they could offer support at their comfort level. more importantly, she believed that long-time advocates could take advantage of the opportunities provided by bill 13 to educate more individuals within and outside of the school community about lgbt youth needs and rights because more people would likely be more open to persuasion with the new law in place. she was convinced that there would be more opportunities to get more advocates for their cause without having to force anyone into changing entire belief systems. a teacher from a catholic school had similar ideas when she expressed that the new act would provide occasions for recruiting people who have been “on the fence for a long time”, and that with successful recruitment, “there would be more people on board.” supporting existing initiatives and jumpstarting new ones. several interviewees pointed out that with the new act, there will no longer be a risk for existing gsas and lgbt-affirming initiatives facing opposition in their schools from being removed or abolished. they thought that with the government mandate, struggling gsas and lgbt-affirming initiatives could at least have a better chance of getting more support in terms of leadership from teachers, staff, and administrators, as well as funding from their schools. also, with certain sections of the bill that were general and open enough to allow for greater flexibility and creativity in the establishment of initiatives that would promote school climates inclusive and accepting of all pupils, lgbt students and their advocates saw the potential for them to be able to develop new strategies, initiatives, and policies that would address persistent as well as emerging issues. sydney wondered, “maybe now we can get gender-neutral washrooms set up on some floors.” ariel underscored the fact that the new act was not just about pushing schools to establish or support gsas but also encouraging them to come up with more ideas on how to make the school climates safer, more inclusive, and accepting. helen, who is part of an active gsa, hoped that their school administration would ask their teachers to include more lgbt history and culture in their curriculum. one teacher commented that advocacy in the various schools affiliated with the two boards of waterloo region looked very different from one school to the next because each school was unique and had distinct circumstances. she conceded that some schools were more advanced with their success in helping lgbt youth, while others definitely needed help getting their initiatives going. another teacher revealed: “many of the existing gsas are still struggling. perhaps this directive from the government could breathe new life to those gsas. there are teachers and child and youth workers out there who have needed support to help these kids. everyone could certainly use more resources too. so there’s still more room for improvement with the gsas we already have.” since bill 13 would sanction any initiative that would help promote positive school climates inclusive and accepting of all students, its legislation inspired new ideas from the participants who thought that there could still be so much that could be done in waterloo region. one idea that many participants shared was the creation of more gsas in their senior elementary/middle schools. mary had very strong feelings about this idea: “the most important part now is http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 that there could be a safe space in every school. so no student is feeling that they don’t have anywhere to go in school. some parents might not like the idea of gsas in middle school. they may not like that lgbt material is being taught at that age. but tough, they have to suck it up. we’ve been the ones at the tail end of things for so long! they should realize it’s about kids, not them. they think they know better, but really, they don’t. the law will even things up for us now!” both representatives from the public board who have been working on equity and inclusion projects for years also had thoughts about new opportunities to help younger students that could stem from the enactment of bill 13. one board representative said, “with our board, it will help us expand and start gsas in more of our senior elementary schools. with the other board, well, they don’t have clubs yet in their grades 7 and 8. so we’ll see.” the other representative revealed: “we’ve heard from teachers how some students in middle schools love talking to older kids from high school about starting up gsas. maybe we can even network gsas between middle and high schools so that the older kids can mentor and support the younger ones even more.” the superintendent mentioned that cross grade interactions would be encouraged if their region’s gsa network would have more gsas in their elementary schools. one service provider who was responsible for maintaining the region’s gsa network website confirmed that these interactions were already ongoing online and that younger students really appreciated the chance to reach out to older youth who could mentor them. a more obvious idea that many of the participants expressed was the notion that with the new act, students in the three remaining catholic high schools in waterloo region would be able to form their own clubs similar to prism, as well as celebrate lgbt positive events and campaigns, with the support of the advocates from their schools. shaun, ariel, and sydney all mentioned that they had non-catholic friends who studied at catholic high schools and it was a relief to know that their friends could finally start their own gsa-type clubs and request for lgbt-focused activities. keith made a point to emphasize that it was his hope that with the creativity and flexibility that bill 13 inspired and allowed, schools in rural areas would also be able to begin looking into new ways of establishing lgbt-affirming initiatives such as incorporating inclusive material in their curricula, as well as creating connections to community agencies with lgbt-specific knowledge and resources for isolated youth. one trustee shared that his hope was that the new act would encourage schools to want to do more than just be able to “tick off the box and claim that they have already fulfilled what the law has required of them” and not just execute the bare minimum. dialogue drawing attention to the cause. participants saw that the proposal and legislation of bill 13 already resulted in an unintended outcome that from their perspective was actually something positive. many of the respondents, especially the teachers and the administrator, thought that despite the tension that was raised by the debates on bill 13 between conservative and liberal factions of the larger community, it was gratifying to know that it also raised awareness and intelligent conversations about lgbt issues in the process. one teacher said that the more dialogue the bill’s legislation produced, the higher the profile it http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 created for lgbt human rights and the importance of keeping our sexual and gender minority youth safe in schools. another teacher was giggling when she commented: “i didn’t think i’d ever hear the archbishop of toronto ever say the word ‘gay’ because catholic church conservatives always want to use awkward terms like ‘same-sex attracted’. but there he was on broadcast radio, talking as if he was still on a pulpit. he kept using the word ‘gay’ over and over. i thought it was hilarious! i bet that his message got a lot of heated conversations going. i’m sure all that discussion brought attention to the plight of our lgbt students, which for me was certainly a plus.” challenges resulting from the legislation of bill 13 implementation challenges. there were moments in the interviews that highlighted the participants’ concerns about potential challenges that could result from the legislation of bill 13. among the different challenges that they could foresee, the one that many respondents were concerned about was how the mandates of the bill were going to be implemented, particularly the sections that did not have explicit details with regards to implementation. this is what helen implied when she asked, “like all of a sudden the bill is supposed to make kids feel safe once it’s passed?” she was concerned that having such a law might make some people become complacent instead of inspired to make use of the opportunities that the law would present. one teacher noted that people should remember that there has to be a change at the school level once the law comes into effect. she cited, “certain policies on curricular changes that were established in the early 2000s were never really implemented in our school”. she was afraid that this new act would not bring in any significant change unless advocates remained vigilant and remembered to consistently make the most out of its directives. another teacher could not curb her cynicism and retorted, “it doesn’t solve everything though. it will depend a lot on how it is disseminated and enforced.” one of the representatives at the administration level of the public board was more positive in her outlook and said, “the implementation of the act will look different in each school. that’s just the nature of legislation and policies. people will really have to go for it once the bill’s passed as law.” some participants’ concerns on the implementation of the mandates of bill 13 were more specific and practical. one teacher remarked, “one of the big challenges for us is choosing the right people who would become involved with the planning and implementing of initiatives meant to help students. it’s important that we look into their background, attitudes, qualifications…even lived experience.” her statement was very similar to a comment of another teacher who wanted to make sure that when it came to the implementation of lgbt-affirming initiatives in schools, the personnel who would lead and take responsibility for the initiatives not only need to have the appropriate credentials and experience, but also the right values and convictions to do the work. the superintendent commented that choosing the right people for leadership roles was just as important for the purposes of safeguarding the “sustainability of the school’s efforts.” procuring and managing resources. another specific and practical concern related to the implementation of the mandates of bill 13 involved the procurement and management of resources. some of the respondents felt that the bill did not pay particular attention to this concern, and that without specific provisions to resources, advocates would have a difficult time carrying out initiatives. there was no doubt that the scarcity of resources was an issue for almost all of the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 advocates from the school community, the different levels of the school board, and the external agencies who provided additional support to the waterloo region lgbt students. students, teachers, and service providers in particular, all expressed the need for resources in order to carry out needed initiatives. one teacher remarked, “even with the enthusiasm of the students and the manpower provided by faculty and staff who devote their time and energy after school hours, without the necessary resources, initiatives are limited and people become demoralized.” one of the service providers was already anticipating an increased demand for their support once the bill passes, “schools know that they can come to us for additional counselling, professional development training and workshops, books, dvds, and the use of the region’s gsa network website. once bill 13 becomes law, there will be more demand and limited supply.” one of the board representatives who is consistently involved with work dedicated to gsas offered some optimism by suggesting that, because lack of resources is an issue for everyone, people will have to find ways to be more creative, flexible, and resourceful: “the funds aren’t always there. so i always encourage our gsa leaders to approach their vice principal for student activities and ask for funds if they want to run an event because that’s their right; students pay for that in their fees. if they want to do some sort of initiative, like get a speaker, or if they want an outing…they need some money, they should ask their school for it!” one of the trustees had a near identical suggestion as a solution to the problem of scarce resources for implementing activities, “funding’s always an issue at the board level. you can say that about special education needs, infrastructure…funding’s always an issue. but students can ask for money from their school’s budget if they need it.” another trustee pointed out that the allocation of resources for amendments and specific mandates of education legislation are not really included in the bill itself, and that it usually follows later in other documents created by the ministry of education, based on a budget. so details of how resources would be allocated for directed initiatives in the content of the bill are not something people should actually expect to find on the bill itself. however, he expressed that he did understand that what advocates were likely looking for were directives on the bill specifying that the education minister should allocate resources for supports required by its other mandates, and not just more directives to create more policies and initiatives for school boards. evaluation challenges. apart from the need for more resources and having the right people involved in the establishment of gsas and the implementation of lgbt-affirming initiatives in response to the legislation of bill 13, another challenge associated with implementation that the respondents noted was the proper evaluation of school boards’ efforts to create positive climates for minority youth. one teacher raised the question, “how exactly does the government intend to check if the act is being enforced?” some participants were not convinced that additional surveys specifically conducted to evaluate efforts in response to bill13’s mandates would be enough to track changes over time. although other participants had related doubts about performance and response evaluation, they also felt that it was everyone’s responsibility to ensure and check that the directives of the act were followed, and not just the government’s. in relation to some participants’ concerns about the lack of specific details and explicit directions regarding the implementation and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 evaluation of initiatives in accordance to bill 13’s mandates, several respondents from the school board level were careful to point out that these details and directions are usually specified and outlined in the creation of documents containing procedures and guidelines that follow after the legislation of a bill. they also noted that many times, policymakers purposely hold back on adding specifics in certain aspects of a bill in order to allow key stakeholders to customize their initiatives or solutions to the context of their own settings. public pushback. one last major challenge that participants anticipated with the enactment of the bill was the possibility that the heated debates between members of society with opposing opinions on bill 13 would escalate. there were already months of building tension due to the pushback from the conservative sector against the liberal government’s proposal to require all publicly-funded (secular and catholic) school boards to support lgbt-affirming clubs in schools and allow students to call them “gay straight alliances”, if they chose to do so. the religious sector of ontario claimed that the bill was part of the government’s agenda to push their liberal ideas in schools. however, it was noticeable that it was the participants interviewed before the bill was passed in june 2012 who mostly expressed this apprehension. the concern about more pushback and greater tension building significantly diminished among participants interviewed after the bill was enacted as law, and particularly, after a statement was released by the catholic bishops of ontario announcing they were not going to promote or tolerate any form of civil disobedience to bill 13 as a new law (mann, 2012). discussion according to mccaskell (2005), any initiative or strategy dedicated to combatting marginalization and oppression, particularly in school systems, could only be effective if it combined three important determinants: education, rules with consequences, and political action. if this assertion were accurate, it would make education legislation an ideal intervention to fill the bill. fetner and kush (2007) previously endorsed the development of legislation and public policy favouring lgbt students and their rights to promote transformative change in school systems. they argued that if anti discrimination policies were combined with anti-bullying policies, it would not only provide protections for lgbt students, but it would also send an important message to society in support of lgbt rights. robinson and espelage (2012) reinforced this message by directing this appeal to progressive political leaders who they believe are pivotal for securing a higher level of change in society. our study participants could not have agreed more, asserting that legislation is the next important step to ensuring that efforts to create positive school climates for lgbt youth are both legally mandated and made socially sustainable. although researchers have expressed the value of legislation in the advocacy for lgbt youth mental health and wellbeing in schools (fetner & kush, 2007; robinson & espelage, 2012), there are not that many discussions based on empirical research studies in published academic literature that have explored the role of legislation in such advocacy, leaving its implicit value mostly still unexamined and unexplored. academic literature has already examined and explored how change happens in schools so that advocacy and action to support lgbt youth mental health and wellbeing can be initiated and even sustained (fisher et al., 2008; hansen, 2007). the role of the strength of the commitment of advocates and the implementation of initiatives that have been documented to be empirically sound and successful in providing supports for lgbt youth have been extensively discussed in peer-reviewed journal articles (hansen, 2007; hunter, 2007). in their study on how to make http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 ontario school climates safer and more inclusive, kitchen and bellini (2013) found evidence that positive policy direction from government is critical in advocating for the mental health and wellbeing of lgbt youth in schools, supporting arguments that push for lgbt-affirming education legislation made by other canadian researchers (anderson, 2014; liboro et al., 2015; mccaskell, 2005; rayside, 2014; st. john et al., 2014). in the analysis of their interviews of 41 educators working with gsas, kitchen and bellini’s (2013) data suggested that ontario policy had a positive impact on school climates for lgbt youth, in particular, decreasing negative experiences among lgbt youth in hostile school environments that have been linked in previous research with increased rates of depression and suicide attempts (hatzenbuehler, 2011). for this study, it was important to explore how bill 13 was perceived by the key stakeholders of waterloo region who advocated for lgbt students because it was a bill that was purported to be a piece of legislation that was strategically developed to engender positive change in the climates of ontario publicly-funded schools. it was important to acquire the stakeholders’ views on bill 13 because its legislation was reputedly meant to help them as lgbt youth advocates, and therefore, their perspectives could prove to be particularly useful in determining whether success in addressing lgbt youth issues in schools could be achieved with the authority of its mandates. if they believed that the mandates of bill 13 were not going to be useful and implementable in their schools, then its mandates would likely need to be amended entirely in the future. as the key stakeholders who have worked at the grassroots level of lgbt youth advocacy, their perspectives were the most important for determining if the contents of bill 13 reflected their needs as advocates, as well as the needs of the lgbt youth they are advocating for in schools. it was vital to investigate their perspectives so that the aspects and components of bill 13 that they deemed were strengths of the statute could be reinforced in future policies, and conversely, the aspects and components that they deemed were weaknesses of the bill could be removed or amended accordingly. it was also vital to investigate their perspectives on what they believed were going to be the benefits and challenges that would result from bill 13’s legislation so that both advocates and policymakers could work toward reaping the benefits from the bill, as well as anticipating and overcoming the challenges that lay ahead. lastly, it was important to explore their perspectives on bill 13 because their perspectives could help inform other advocates and policymakers of what is sorely needed in and from education legislation in order to support and promote new lgbt-positive bills in the future. over other people’s views, the perspectives of our participants who have worked unremittingly for lgbt students for years needed to be heard, documented, and valued in this study so that future bills and public policies would potentially have a better chance at helping lgbt youth. as important as it is to remember how the evolution of the human rights advancement, lgbt advocacy, and the legislation of previous lgbt-positive bills and public policies in ontario history have paved the way for the successful enactment of bill 13, it is just as important to remember the potential impact bill 13 may have on the enactment of new ontario lgbt positive bills and policies in the future. from the outset, we sought to gather the perspectives of relevant stakeholders on the prospective impact of bill 13. the participants of this study believed that, as a macrosystem level intervention, provincial education legislation such as bill 13 could hold as much influence on the beliefs, values, and behaviour of people in society, as other macrosystem level factors such as homophobia and transphobia, heterosexism, and discrimination against sexual and gender http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 minorities. for them, legislation and public policy have the potential to turn the tide when it comes to influencing negative public opinion on lgbt human rights and needs. although it was their understanding that many people believe that schools have the moral obligation to provide positive school climates that are safe and inclusive of lgbt youth, from their perspective, provincial legislation and public policy would make this obligation a legal one that school boards would be mandated to obey. they also believed, that as a macrosystem-level intervention, legislation such as bill 13 has the power to enforce what needs to be done to support lgbt youth mental health and wellbeing in schools by mandating the establishment of microsystemand mesosystem-level interventions such as gsas, lgbt-affirming initiatives, and local or board wide policies that have been documented to be empirically sound and historically successful in doing so. education legislation such as bill 13 would legally allow and support them as advocates not only to do what they have already been doing to address lgbt youth issues in schools without question and interference, but also initiate more customized initiatives for the specific needs of lgbt students that they were unable to do before. our participants expressed that bill 13 was a much-needed, much-awaited policy that would serve as a facilitator and tool for social movement that opponents against lgbt-positive change cannot disobey and should not ignore. they saw bill 13 as an educational policy that had the capacity to help them as advocates create school climates that could produce positive outcomes with regards to sexual and gender minority student safety, academic performance, social behaviour, mental health, and wellbeing. based on the findings of our study, we recognized the heightened awareness of the different stakeholders who participated in our interviews on the significant potential of bill 13 as a macrosystem-level intervention for supporting the creation of gsas and other initiatives affirming lgbt youth mental health in ontario publicly-funded schools. because of this heightened awareness, our participants were likely able to take advantage of bill 13 as piece of legislation to support their efforts to enhance the wellbeing of their lgbt students, and thus, promote the implementation of bill 13. with their perspectives on bill 13, stakeholders would have been able to make full use of what they perceived as the bill’s strengths, and find ways to overcome what they believed are its weaknesses. future work in this area can focus on investigating how bill 13 was actually implemented by ontario school boards years after it was legislated, how accurate our participants’ perspectives on the bill were, and how effective the bill actually was as a macrosystem-level intervention. just as importantly, subsequent work can also determine how our stakeholders’ perspectives on bill 13 were able to actually impact its later implementation, as well as help validate the value of considering the specificity and/or flexibility legislation affords in terms of supporting lgbt youth mental health, since our own study took place only a few months before, during, and after the bill was passed. the findings of our study, and the discussion in this article, argue for the benefits of utilizing an ecological systems approach in community-engaged research addressing issues affecting lgbt youth mental health in schools. it is an approach that takes into consideration the significant impact of synergistically combining top-down macrosystem-level interventions with grassroots initiatives, as well as the value of the dynamic interconnectedness and interdependence of different, nested ecological system-level factors in the promotion of individual-level lgbt youth mental health. the notion that education legislation is a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 macrosystem-level intervention that can significantly influence microsystemand mesosystem-level interventions, as well as the beliefs, values, and even behaviour of people in society is not entirely new. however, as some responses in our study confirmed, there are people who are skeptical about the influence that provincial educational policy such as bill 13 can have on the day-to-day efforts of advocates, including those who advocate for lgbt students. perhaps, instead of thinking of legislation like bill 13 as statues that could never be perfect, or simply full of compromises, researchers and advocates from the community can think of the creation or amendment of bills as an endeavour to obtain the maximum amount and best quality of positive outcomes achieved through the pursuit of an optimal balance between specifying the implementation of initiatives empirically documented to support lgbt students, and providing flexibility for advocates to establish new initiatives more customized to address lgbt youth needs that have 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an elementary school curriculum. journal of lgbt youth, 10, 83–105. doi: 10.1080/19361653.2012.718540. st. john, a., travers, r., munro, l., liboro, r., schneider, m., & greig, c. (2014). the success of gay-straight alliances in waterloo region, ontario: a confluence of political and social factors. journal of lgbt youth, 11, 150–170. doi: 10.1080/19361653.2014.878564. trickett, e. j., kelly, j. g., & todd, d. m. (1972). the social environment of the high school: guidelines for individual change and organizational redevelopment. in s. e. golann & c. eisdorfer (eds.). handbook of community mental health (pp. 331-406). new york, ny: appleton century-crofts. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/catholic-schools-will-%20follow-ontarios-gay-straight-club-requirement https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/catholic-schools-will-%20follow-ontarios-gay-straight-club-requirement https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/catholic-schools-will-%20follow-ontarios-gay-straight-club-requirement https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90e02 https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90e02 https://www.ola.org/web/bills/bills_detail.do?locale=en&amp;billid=2549 https://www.ola.org/web/bills/bills_detail.do?locale=en&amp;billid=2549 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 29 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 valenti, m., & campbell, r. (2009). working with youth on lgbt issues: why gay– straight alliance advisors become involved. journal of community psychology, 37(2), 228–248. doi: 10.1002/jcop.20290. watt, d. (2007). on becoming a qualitative researcher: the value of reflexivity. qualitative report, 12, 82-102. winton, s. (2012). from zero tolerance to student success in ontario, canada. educational policy, 27, 467–498. doi: 10.1177/0895904812453994. funding details this work was supported by the institute of gender and health, canadian institutes of health research, under grant number #mop 119472. disclosure statement there are no conflicts of interest to declare related to this manuscript and the work described in its contents. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 30 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 your gsa and you 1. what school do you attend? appendix a interview guide 2. how long have you been involved with your gsa? please describe your involvement or role in your gsa. how big is your gsa? 3. what motivated you to participate in this interview? 4. in the previous phases of this study there was some discussion related to the role of gsas especially in the promotion of a “safe school” environment, and particularly for lgbt students. can you talk about the success of your gsa in promoting a “safe school” environment? a. prompts: for you, what makes a school environment safe? how does your gsa help achieve this safety? please talk about the programs your gsas have that are successful in reaching this objective. b. probes: is safety mostly physical? emotional? psychological? relational? gsas and other lgbt-affirming initiatives 1. does your school have policies that reflect the values promoted by your gsa? please give examples of these policies. a. prompts: does your school have policies that support the formation or maintenance of your gsa? policies that require teachers, school staff or personnel to intervene when witnessing discriminatory language or acts of harassment? policies that implement stricter sanctions or counseling for bullies, especially for repeat offenders? can you describe any school policies that are specific for the different forms of lgbt bullying? what role has your gsa played in initiating or advocating for policies like these? b. probes: what school policies do you think should be implemented? 2. what lgbt topics or issues are incorporated in your school curriculum that reflects the ideals of your gsa? a. prompts: topics in health class? sex education class? b. probes: what topics do you think should be included in school curricula? 3. what programs does your school have that are complementary to the programs your gsa implements? a. prompts: continuing education and professional training of staff and personnel on the management of lgbt issues and bias-based conflict? rehabilitation programs for perpetrators instilling diversity, inclusion, equality, and equity? public awareness or outreach programs? b. probes: what kind of programs do you think your school should implement that would be complementary to the programs your gsa runs? 4. what advantages or disadvantages do you think there are in having other lgbt-specific school initiatives apart from gsas? 5. most importantly, is there anything else that you think needs to happen in addition to or instead of gsas in order to create “safe schools”? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 31 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 the accepting schools act 1. last december 2011, ontario premier dalton mcguinty proposed an amendment to the education act, called bill 13 or the accepting schools act. this act will require all publicly funded schools to support gsas and implement several initiatives such as lgbt-positive school policies including stricter penalties for bullies, lgbt-inclusive curricula, and programs that will support goals of gsas. what do you think about this new legislation? 2. now that the ola has passed the accepting schools act, what do you think are the possible benefits to having it legislated? prompts: will it help with the further implementation of pro-lgbt school policies already in place but encountering resistance from different sectors of the community? how? how do you think it will affect or interact with other pro lgbt interventions in the community that seek to help youth with the challenges they face on a daily basis? do you think there will be risks or repercussions? 3. likely not everyone is happy that the accepting schools act has been passed and legislated. certain sectors of society feel that schools should not be forced by law to go against their religious beliefs and be required to support gsas and other pro-lgbt school initiatives, say for example, representatives of the catholic school district board. what can you say about this? 4. some people would say that legislation like the accepting schools act is exactly what is needed to strengthen gsas and other initiatives that promote inclusion and diversity. do you agree with this? please explain. 5. can you think of other issues that we have not mentioned that will affect ontario school gsas and lgbt youth now that the accepting schools act has been passed and legislated? http://www.gjcpp.org/ the development of regional networks to promote housing first implementation in canada kathleen s. worton1, geoffrey nelson, 1tim aubry2, julian hasford3, eric macnaughton1, catharine vandelinde4, sam tsemberis5, jino distasio6, vicky stergiopoulos7, angela yip7, and paula goering7 author biographies: kathleen s. worton, recent graduate of the community psychology phd program at wilfrid laurier university in waterloo, ontario. in her academic work, she has examined the role of networking and peer-learning in building capacity for housing first research, policy, and practice. geoffrey nelson, professor emeritus of psychology at wilfrid laurier university. he served as co-lead for the qualitative research for canada’s five-city at home/chez soi housing first study, and he was principal investigator of a study of knowledge transfer of the at home project. dr. nelson was the recipient of the mcneill award for innovation in community mental health in 1999 and the award for distinguished contributions to community psychology theory and research in 2013, both from the society for community research and action of the american psychological association. his research has focused on housing, homelessness, community mental health, and prevention. tim aubry, full professor in the school of psychology and senior researcher at the centre for research on educational and community services at the university of ottawa. he is currently holder of the faculty of social sciences research chair in community mental health and homelessness. julian hasford, assistant professor in the school of child and youth care at ryerson university, whose research focuses on issues of equity and empowerment through systems change and community-based prevention, with a particular focus on african canadians. he holds a ph.d. in community psychology from wilfrid laurier university, and a m.hsc. in health promotion from the university of toronto. eric macnaughton, received his m.a. in community psychology from wilfrid laurier university, and his ph.d. in interdisciplinary studies from university of british columbia. he has worked in the ngo sector in the area of mental health, and was a member of the national qualitative research team for the at home/chez soi project, an initiative to implement and evaluate supports for people experiencing homelessness. he presently works at the university of british columbia, and lives in vancouver bc. catharine vandelinde, executive director of options bytown, a nonprofit supportive housing organisation that provides affordable housing and supports to help individuals leave homelessness and become stably housed. prior to coming to 1 wilfrid laurier university 2 university of ottawa 3 ryerson university 4 options bytown 5 pathways housing first training institute 6 university of winnipeg 7 centre for addiction and mental health global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 options bytown, catharine worked at the mental health commission of canada where she led the implementation of housing first across canada. she worked alongside 18 canadian communities in the design and implementation of housing first. currently catharine is vice-chair of the alliance to end homelessness ottawa, chair of the ottawa supportive housing network and a member of the ottawa social housing network. sam tsemberis, leads pathways housing first, which trains direct service organizations, conducts research projects, and influences policy related to housing first. dr. tsemberis is also on the faculty of the department of psychiatry at columbia university medical center. jino distasio, professor of geography at the university of winnipeg where his research focuses on mental health and homelessness and urban issues. much of his recent work has examined housing first and the indigenous approaches used to end homelessness in winnipeg, canada as part of the at home chez soi project. vicky stergiopoulos, clinician scientist and the physician-in-chief at the centre for addiction and mental health. she is also a professor and vice chair clinical and innovation in the department of psychiatry at the university of toronto. her clinical and research activities focus on the development and evaluation of interventions to address the needs of people who are homeless and of those who use acute mental health services. she has a great interest in the redesign of our health system for the purpose of system improvement, in partnership with service users. angela yip, knowledge broker with evidence exchange network in the provincial system support program at the centre for addiction and mental health. with a background in neuroscience, health systems and services research, she is currently focused on working with different stakeholders to transfer evidence into practice and policy. paula goering, was director of the health systems research consulting unit at the centre for addiction and mental health in toronto and a faculty member in the department of psychiatry at the university of toronto. dr. goering was the lead researcher on ontario-wide mental health services projects, including the community mental health evaluation initiative and the systems enhancement evaluation initiative, and she was the research lead for the national at home/chez soi research on housing first for homeless people with mental illness. dr. goering was committed to knowledge transfer and mental health systems transformation and held a 10-year chair in knowledge transfer from the canadian health services research foundation and the canadian institute of health research. sadly, dr. goering passed away on may 24, 2016. corresponding author: kathleen worton, wilfrid laurier univeristy, waterloo, on, canada. email: wort4840@mylaurier.ca. recommended citation: worton, s. k., nelson, g., aubry, t., hasford, j., macnaughton, e., vandelinde, c., tsemberis, s., distasio,j., stergiopoulos, v., yip, a., & goering, p. (2019). the development of regional networks to promote housing frist implmentation in canada. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(3), 1-19. retrieved day/month/year from, (http://gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:wort4840@mylaurier.ca http://gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the development of regional networks to promote housing first implementation in canada abstract while knowledge mobilization strategies, such as training and technical assistance, have been used to facilitate the implementation of evidence-based practices, little is known about the role of networks in influencing implementation. in this article, we describe the role of a variety of networking strategies (regional training events, community of practice teleconference calls, and the creation of regional networks) used to implement housing first (hf) in canada during a three-year training and technical assistance initiative. we report on three main findings from research on this initiative. first, data from regional training events (n=110) revealed that 92% of participants wanted a regional hf network. participants in the regional training events, as well as those who participated hf training needs assessment focus groups (k=11, n=83), believed that the networks should focus on mutual learning and influencing policy and have strong leadership and an open membership. second, hf training events held in four regions of canada (the west, the prairies and northern territories, ontario, and the atlantic region) were very positively evaluated by participants (n=276) in terms of their value in increasing hf knowledge and comprehension, and overall satisfaction with the training. third, field notes (n=146) were used to generate a narrative of hf networks that emerged from training and technical assistance activities, including a province-wide network in ontario and practitioner-led networks in southwestern ontario and british columbia. we discuss how these network activities contributed to capacity-building in hf programs designed to end homelessness in canada. introduction housing first (hf) is an evidence-based practice (ebp) to ending chronic homelessness that can be challenging to implement because it presents a paradigm shift from the “treatment as usual” approach and requires change at individual, organizational and systemic levels (goering & tsemberis, 2014; padgett, henwood, & tsemberis, 2015). strategies for facilitating the implementation of community-based interventions in new settings often involve researchers engaging with community stakeholders to provide resources, training, and technical assistance (e.g., wandersman, chien, & katz, 2012). research suggests that in addition to these strategies, networking can advance the capacity of community stakeholders to implement innovative practices (leeman et al., 2015). network strategies for knowledge mobilization can thus complement researcher-led knowledge mobilization activities. while training and technical assistance can advance technical knowledge of the innovation, networking can facilitate the sharing of experiential knowledge among stakeholders related to changes in practice in their local community context (nutley, walter, & davis, 2007). the purpose of this article is to describe how networking has been used as a http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 knowledge mobilization strategy in combination with training and technical assistance to advance the implementation of hf in canada. housing first in canada hf is a program model that was developed in new york city in the 1990s to address the needs of people with mental illness who are homeless (tsemberis, 2015). hf combines housing—through rent subsidies—with support through either assertive community treatment (act) or intensive case management (icm) teams. the rent subsidies enable clients to rent private market housing, so that housing is scattered throughout the community rather than located in a “single-site” (i.e., congregate facility exclusively for people with mental illness who have experienced homelessness). hf is based on the principles of consumer choice, recovery, and community integration, and it has a strong evidence base attesting to its effectiveness in reducing homelessness (aubry, nelson, & tsemberis, 2015; padgett, henwood, & tsemberis, 2016). in canada, hf programs began in calgary, alberta and quickly expanded across the province in the early 2000s. in 2008, the federal government of canada funded a five-year research demonstration project— at home/chez soi—which implemented hf and evaluated its effectiveness. the mental health commission of canada administered this project and hf programs were implemented in five cities (moncton, montreal, toronto, winnipeg, vancouver) (goering et al., 2011). the evaluation used a longitudinal (two-year) randomized controlled trial design, and found that hf participants receiving support and treatment with either act (aubry et al., 2016) or icm (stergiopoulos et al., 2015) showed significantly better outcomes in terms of achieving housing stability over a two-year period when compared to individuals receiving treatment as usual. as well, hf participants receiving icm reported greater improvements in quality of life relative to participants receiving usual treatment (stergiopoulos et al., 2015). networks as a knowledge mobilization strategy for housing first network strategies have been developed to advance knowledge mobilization and to support the uptake of ebps. these strategies are valuable in creating connections that allow for program managers and service providers to share experiences and knowledge related to a topic of shared interest. in addition, these networks also promote the generation of new knowledge as participants build an increased understanding of the practice across different contexts (nutley et al., 2007). there are a variety of different types of network-based strategies for knowledge mobilization, such as learning communities, communities of practice, and communities of interest. learning communities connect individuals for the purposes of sharing knowledge and engaging in mutual learning (e.g., behl, houston, & stredler-brown, 2012). communities of practice (cops) is an approach that aims to link individuals with a shared “domain of interest,” encourage the development of relationships and interactions, promote shared learning, and advance the development of shared practices (wenger, mcdermott, & snyder, 2002). communities of interest (coi) have been described as “a community of representatives of communities” because they bring together stakeholders from different areas of professional practice to share knowledge to help address a particular problem (fischer, 2001, p.4). there is substantial overlap in the goals and structures of these types of networks. in practice, not all networks will fit into defined categories or types. networks may http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 develop or evolve in response to existing opportunities or needs of the members. these more emergent networks may incorporate elements of different network types (e.g., a focus on informing shared practice and information sharing across sector or geographic boundaries) (worton, under review) making them more difficult to define. depending on the overarching goals of knowledge mobilization initiatives, network strategies can promote information sharing amongst participants, or advance commitment to change or engagement in collaborative efforts (himmelman, 2001). a commitment to collaboration often requires participants to have support from their organization to contribute time, share “turf”, and take on both shared risk and shared reward (himmelman, 2001). groups adopting a networking approach to advance both shared learning and collaboration towards changing practice or policy, often describe themselves as cops, coalitions, or collaboratives. groups that engage in collaborative initiatives may limit membership to allow for the establishment of trust and commitment (himmelman, 2001) and to advance change towards a planned goal quickly. groups that adopt an emergent, mutual learning approach may have more fluid and inclusive membership criteria (nutley et al., 2007; wenger et al., 2002), allowing members to join on an ongoing basis and determine their own level of participation. network approaches can influence knowledge mobilization and implementation of ebps by creating opportunities for members to connect, exposing members to innovative practices or ebps through these connections, and informing members’ decisions about adopting an ebp in their own organization or practice (palinkas et al., 2011; ward et al., 2018; worton, under review), although network approaches appear to be a promising strategy for mobilizing knowledge, they are rarely evaluated (nutley et al., 2007; ranmuthugala, plumb, cunningham, georgiou, & westbrook, 2011). further research is necessary to understand how network approaches influence knowledge mobilization in different contexts and for different types of ebps (e.g., guidelines, programs, complex interventions). to better understand how network approaches can advance hf, it is helpful to look to existing networks in the homelessness sector, such as the alberta 7 cities on housing and homelessness. alberta 7 cities on housing and homelessness. the 7 cities on housing and homelessness (www.7cities.ca ) was established in 2001 by the seven organizations designated as administrators of federal canadian funding for homelessness services and supports (cameron & makhoul, 2009). leaders in the network meet in person several times per year and connect regularly to support one another, share information resources, and advance strategic initiatives to end homelessness. the 7 cities network has played a key role in advancing hf in alberta and has developed the capacity to work collaboratively on shared initiatives (e.g., a coordinated count of individuals experiencing homelessness). in addition to supporting the implementation of local plans to end homelessness, the 7 cities core leadership has worked closely with the provincial government to inform and advance alberta’s 10-year plan to end homelessness. the 7 cities also coordinate hf educational opportunities (e.g., an annual hf conference and an online hf learning portal for frontline staff). member organizations contribute resources to support collaborative activities and maintain a part-time administrative staff position. using the hf approach, the 7 cities have been successful in reducing http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.7cities.ca/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 homelessness across the province by 20% from 2014-2016 (seven cities on housing and homelessness, 2017). advancing networks for housing first knowledge mobilization in canada with the advent of hf in alberta and the at home project, hf programs have emerged across canada (gaetz, scott, & gulliver, 2013). this development was accelerated by a change in federal policy that mandated hf programs beginning in 2013 (macnaughton, nelson, goering, & piat, 2017). to assist communities in making the transition from managing homelessness and delivering timelimited treatment and support (e.g., shelters, transitional housing, outreach services) to hf, the mental health commission funded a training and technical assistance initiative in hf from 2013-2016 that included the development of practitioner networks. this initiative consisted of initial and follow-up training for communities in hf and fidelity assessments of the local hf programs. there were two-day training events in four regions of canada, cop teleconference calls, and work to promote regional hf networks (worton et al., 2018). the training, technical assistance, and fidelity review teams were led by dr. sam tsemberis, the founder of pathways hf. present study the present study, also funded from 20132016, was conducted in collaboration with the national training and technical assistance initiative. the study examined learning needs of communities, early implementation of hf, related systems changes across communities, and the development of regional networks among communities implementing hf. findings from the broader project have been published elsewhere (e.g., macnaughton et al., 2018; worton et al., 2018). in this article, we address the following questions: 1. what are participants’ views of the need for, purpose of, and structures and functions of potential regional hf networks? 2. how were hf regional training events evaluated by participants in terms of their value in increasing hf knowledge and comprehension, and establishing a foundation for network connections? 3. what was the nature of the regional hf networks that emerged from training and technical assistance activities? method data collection and analysis using a developmental stage approach to evaluation (pancer, 1997), the research began with a needs assessment of local stakeholders for hf training, then moved to hf program planning, implementation, training, and fidelity assessment. research participants provided their informed written consent, and the research was approved by the research ethics board of wilfrid laurier university. in the sections below, we describe the data collection activities that were used to gather information on our three research questions. data gathered through the training needs assessment and network discussions at hf regional training events were analyzed to answer research question one. evaluation data from the hf regional training events was analyzed to answer research question two. researcher field notes completed throughout all activities of the training and technical assistance initiative were analyzed to answer research question three. housing first training needs assessment. a total of 11 focus groups and six key informant interviews (n = 83) were http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 conducted in seven canadian cities across six provinces (hasford et al., 2019). a team of eight researchers conducted the focus groups and key informant interviews in 2014. either one or two interviewers conducted the interviews in each community. a common protocol of openended questions was used to inquire about the need for hf regional networks. all interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. theme coding, as described by braun and clarke (2006) was used to analyze the qualitative data for themes pertaining to networks. housing first regional training events. four regional hf training events were held, one in the west (with participants from british columbia (bc) and alberta), the prairies (with participants from saskatchewan, manitoba, nunavut, and the northern territories), ontario, and atlantic canada. the regional training events were designed to provide information about hf, convene meetings of community stakeholders, create dialogue, and facilitate the development of regional hf networks. the agendas for the training sessions typically involved a keynote on the hf model, plenary sessions featuring regional/national experts, a selection of specialized workshops (e.g., service teams, evaluation and policy, peer support, housing procurement, etc.) and a workshop on the hf toolkit. a presentation on hf networks was made at each of the regional training events and was followed by facilitated small and large group discussion sessions focused on planning the next steps in network development. during these sessions, open-ended questions were posed to the audiences (e.g., who should lead and/or host a regional network? what types of assistance are needed to start a regional network? what would the next steps be in starting a regional hf network?). facilitators recorded ideas presented by participants on flip chart paper during the session. these flip chart pages were analyzed using thematic analysis to capture participants’ views on potential structure and functions of a hf regional network. data on participant satisfaction with the regional training events were gathered through an evaluation form completed by participants (n = 276). the evaluation form included closed-ended questions about the participant’s background (e.g., age, gender, work sector), ratings of how workshop presentations increased participants’ knowledge (1 = “not at all” to 5 = “extremely”), comprehensiveness of the information provided, and overall satisfaction (both from 1 = “very low” to 5 = “very high”), one question about whether they would find a regional hf network valuable (answered yes, no, or not sure), and four open-ended questions about the purpose, structure, and functions of such a network. field notes. the researchers participated in all focus groups, hf regional training events, cop teleconferences, and the fidelity assessments that took place during the training and technical assistance initiative. using a structured form, the researchers recorded qualitative field notes, including descriptive observations and impressions (n = 146). flip chart notes on the network discussions at the regional training events were included in the field notes (n = 4). a total of nine cop conference calls were held over three years for ontario, and minutes of those calls were incorporated into researchers’ field notes. theme coding was also used to analyze these data to create a narrative about the emerging networks. timeline a timeline for the hf training and technical assistance initiative is presented in figure 1. activities positioned above the timeline were initiated by the research team to collect data and advance the development of a regional http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 coi. activities below the timeline were initiated by participating community leaders. although these practitioner-led regional networks are independent of the study, these networks were informed by leaders’ participation in the hf training and technical assistance initiative. figure 1. timeline of activities related to hf training and technical assistance findings research question 1: participants’ views on establishing regional housing first networks the findings regarding participants’ views regarding the potential development of regional hf networks are based on thematic analyses of data from the needs assessment and from facilitated group discussions at the hf regional training events. the majority of stakeholders completing evaluations for the regional training events indicated a potential hf regional network would be of value (86-96% across the four regions). some stakeholders were unsure of the value (4.5-14%), but no stakeholders indicated a network would not be of value (see table 1). participants’ views on the potential development of hf regional networks included considerations regarding network structure, composition, purpose, development, and infrastructure. . table 1 perceptions of whether a regional housing first network would be of value % of attemdees selecting each response option region bc/alberta (n=23) atlantic (n=35) prairie (n=24) ontario (n=28) no 0 0 0 0 not sure 4.3 14.3 4.2 7.1 yes 95.7 85.7 95.8 92.9 http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 network structure. two main types or structures for networks were identified as potentially useful resources to support hf implementation: regional networks (organized by geographic and/or demographic characteristics) and cops (organized by sector or area of expertise). regional networks were considered particularly valuable if they could connect cities of similar size or with similar demographic profiles; so being part of a network within a specific geographic region was not necessarily a priority for all participants. for instance, some communities were most interested in making connections with communities of similar size, similar stage of hf implementation, and/or common challenges. for this reason, some communities looked to connect with communities in other provinces that met these criteria. network composition. participants considered strong leadership to be necessary for the creation of a regional network. the existence of a coordinating body early in network development was suggested as a means of establishing ownership from communities as well as potential government and cross-sector partners. shared leadership between grassroots stakeholders and individuals with systems influence was considered important. open membership was another key consideration around network composition. a broad approach to membership was suggested to ensure the networks would be open to stakeholders across sectors with ties to housing supports and efforts to end homelessness. open membership was suggested as a means of engaging multiple stakeholder groups including service providers, individuals with lived experience and peer support workers, cross-sector leaders (e.g., health, justice, mental health), government representatives and funders, as well as funding entities. network purpose. participants considered the overarching purpose of a potential regional network to be to enhance the capacity of network members to implement hf. two main objectives for a potential network were identified. the first main objective identified was to promote mutual learning and collaboration among network members. a regional network was seen as a strategy to facilitate knowledge mobilization through dialogue (e.g., case studies), coordination of hf training and technical assistance opportunities for members (e.g., webinars, site visits), and creating opportunities to share tools and information resources (e.g., intake forms, evaluation forms). some participants expressed an interest in access to problemsolving support akin to a “help desk” function. several communities also identified case-level problem-solving as a valued resource for dealing with challenging client scenarios. for example, one participant described the need for ongoing hf learning and problem-solving opportunities in the following way: “even if you train the staff with housing first… how do you keep the learnings current? how do you do reflective practice? how do you setup problem-solving options […]. but, you know, what are the strategies that might also come [from…] sort of a support group, a community of practice…” the sharing of knowledge and experience was considered important to learn from the successes and failures of communities with greater experience in hf implementation in specific areas (e.g., rent supplement procurement, system planning, and landlord engagement). one participant http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 described the potential value added contributions of a network for hf implementation in the following manner: “i think it’s having an extremely supportive network […] having a group that is kind of going through the processes you are going through, but also some of them may be further ahead […] so the latter group is kind of learning from the experience of the previous group. i think having that network allows for… as we put policies in place and guidelines in place…working through all of these things together, sharing the knowledge so an organization doesn’t feel alone and helpless, as they go through these changes.” the second main objective identified was to support systems and policy change. connections developed through a network (e.g., relationships among leaders or communication channels with policy makers and/or government funders) were considered to be of value in supporting hf. participants suggested that regional networks could facilitate hf implementation at the systems level by supporting planning and advocacy. a participant described the value of a strategic focus on systems-level change in the following way: “there is something somewhat informally established already. i think more can be done with an actual strategy […] not just networking… it’s advocacy to the government to put some resources into this…to put more money toward health, put more money toward child and family services. they seem to focus a lot of money on housing which is always good, but it all sort of feeds together.” network development. the process of network development was generally considered to comprise two key components. the first component was engagement to encourage “buy-in” from existing stakeholder groups and begin developing opportunities for connection and discussion to begin establishing the network. a key part of engagement is establishing clear objectives for the network. the second component was support. participants were asked directly how they felt the leaders of the training and technical assistance initiative could support the network development. participants indicated that support could be best provided in terms of helping to build connections and identifying existing resources (e.g., information resources and research findings, training and support, and sources of funding). network infrastructure. participants suggested three main infrastructure needs to establish and maintain potential regional networks. first, as many communities have pre-existing homelessness advocacy and provider networks, participants indicated that such networks could offer potential infrastructure to house or facilitate the development of regional hf networks. there may be challenges, however, in housing new networks within established ones, due to existing community politics and conflicting mandates. second, specific types of infrastructure were identified as necessary, including online information systems, and administrative support or staffing since networks can’t be implemented “off the side of a desk.” third, meetings such as regional conferences or social events were also viewed as valuable facilitators of networking infrastructure, as a conference or event could serve to engender support for a network and the infrastructure to support one. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 research question 2: contributions of training and technical assistance activities to hf knowledge and regional network connections there were three main regional network activities/initiatives stemming from the training and technical assistance research and developmental evaluation: (a) hf regional training events, (b) regional cop teleconference calls, and (c) the establishment of new networks that continue past the end of the training and technical assistance initiative. housing first regional training events. evaluations of the regional networking events (see table 2) suggest that these events may have impacted hf planning and implementation by increasing regional awareness of hf, knowledge about its principles, and readiness to implement the program. the majority of attendees were frontline providers and agency directors who had not participated in previous hf trainings. regional training evaluations revealed very good ratings for the influence of the training on their overall knowledge of hf (average of 3.7 on a 5-point scale), comprehensiveness of the information provided (average of 4.0/5), and overall satisfaction (average of 3.9/5). the opportunity to learn from other communities was viewed by participants as a benefit of the regional event. table 2 summary of key evaluation ratings for regional networking events sites attendance # of evaluation forms completed influence on knowledge comprehensiveness of information provided overall satisfaction west 150 103 3.5 3.9 3.8 prairies and territories 115 54 3.8 3.9 4.0 atlantic 100 88 3.7 4.0 4.0 ontario 55 31 3.8 4.1 3.9 average total % of all participants who completed an evaluation 105 69 / 66% 3.7 4.0 3.9 *note: ratings are on a 1-5 scale with 5 as the most positive rating. cop teleconferences. cop conference calls were held on a bi-monthly basis in the four regions. the calls were facilitated by mental health commission staff members (including members of the training and technical assistance team for this project) with agendas focusing on updates and information sharing from each community and discussion driven by questions raised by local stakeholders around specific aspects of hf implementation. in ontario, topics during the calls included experiences and challenges in preparing for system change within the housing/shelter system, funding models, and processes for enumeration activities to count the number of individuals experiencing http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 homelessness in each community. in the central cop (saskatoon, sk; winnipeg, mb; yellowknife, nwt) discussions focused on specific aspects of hf implementation, including the use of measures and indicators, ensuring consumers are getting the right level of support, considerations of consumer “flow through” in programs, job descriptions and staff roles in hf, and landlord relations. the western cop (fraser valley, bc; nanaimo, bc; kamloops, bc) focused early meetings on considerations of readiness for hf as some communities navigated what hf would look like in their local context and how to begin developing partnerships. communities farther ahead in the hf implementation process shared strategies they had been found helpful to build readiness. the eastern cop (moncton, nb; halifax, ns; saint john, nb; sydney, ns) also provided the opportunity for communities to learn from the experiences of halifax and moncton, which had more hf implementation experience than other sites. discussions focused on topics such as consumer needs assessment, data collection, and effective systems monitoring. how to navigate potential constraints on new federal funding was a key topic in all communities, as stakeholders grappled with adapting their programs to hf or introducing new hf programs. the cop teleconferences provided an opportunity for communities with more experience with hf to share insights with communities newer to hf with the additional support of the training and technical assistance teams. this facilitated the planning process for communities at earlier stages of implementation. discussions focused on the nuances of the hf model and participating communities shared knowledge and skills gained from addressing issues arising in the process of implementing hf locally. the extent of community participation on the calls was varied. although there were often a number of communities engaged in the calls, there were times when only one community would be present. in these instances, the calls provided opportunities for consultation with facilitators. upon completion of the training and technical assistance in 2016, facilitation and administration of the cop calls was transferred to the canadian alliance to end homelessness. the calls have continued and format of calls has remained the same. research question 3: the nature of emerging regional networks in connection with the training and technical assistance, new regional networks developed after the delivery of the hf regional training and technical assistance events. new networks include the ontario housing first regional network – community of interest and a number of emerging regional practitioner-led networks. ontario housing first regional network – community of interest. in 2016, two researchers who led the training and technical assistance evaluation successfully applied for support from the evidence exchange network (eenet) located at the centre for addiction and mental health to develop the ontario housing first regional network – community of interest (ohfrncoi). findings from the needs assessment and network discussions undertaken in the training and technical assistance evaluation indicated that there was value and an identified need for a network with strong leadership that would connect communities to enhance capacity for hf implementation and to support systems and policy change. building of these learnings, the ohfrn-coi was conceptualized as a hf capacity-building network with representation from the different regions of the province. the goals of the ohfrn-coi are to: (a) build local capacity for hf programs, (b) promote http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 high quality implementation of the hf model that includes both fidelity to and adaptation of the model, and (c) advocate for and influence public policy related to hf. these goals stem from expressed needs of participants in the needs assessment research and the discussions about regional networks at the regional training events. a steering committee provides direction for the ohfrncoi in line with these goals. it is made up of ontario hf policy-makers, planners, managers, service-providers, researchers, and persons with lived experience, including representatives from the housing, health, and justice sectors and indigenous programs. the ohfrn-coi has been provided with one-half day of staff support per week from eenet 2017-2020. the ohfrn-coi has a website, http://eenet.ca/initiative/housing-firstcommunity-interest#about. to meet the first goal of building local capacity for hf programs, it has held several webinars (e.g., rent assistance, landlord engagement strategies). these webinars have attracted the participation of approximately 80-100 individuals in ontario, from across canada, and from europe. the ohfrn-coi has also organized full-day forums on hf, one in 2018 and one in 2019, that included workshops on topics relevant to hf. working in partnership with the training and technical assistance team of the canadian alliance to end homelessness, the ohfrn-coi has developed a roster of hf training and technical assistance consultants and researchers. an inventory of hf programs in ontario is also being created. to meet the second goal of promoting high fidelity implementation of hf, the network has held a webinar and workshops at the annual forum on hf fidelity. materials on fidelity assessment are posted on the network’s website, and a project piloting a fidelity exchange approach between two agencies is underway. regarding the third goal of advocating for and influencing public policy related to hf, the network has produced two policy briefs for the provincial and federal governments: one on the application of rent subsidies in hf programs (nelson & aubry, 2017) and another on the need to link hf with act (nelson & aubry, 2018). letters to provincial and federal politicians and op-ed articles in canadian newspapers have also been written to influence public policy. the ohfrn-coi will also continue to advocate for resources from the provincial and federal governments to scale up hf throughout ontario with the development of programs of good quality and high fidelity. practitioner-led regional networks. one of the early activities of the training and technical assistance initiative involved a preconference meeting at the 2015 canadian alliance to end homelessness conference. this meeting included a presentation by the chair of the alberta 7 cities about this network. this presentation was the catalyst for a group of leaders in southwestern ontario to establish a similar network. one leader instigated the development of the network, identifying like-minded municipal leaders of communities of similar size, generally located within the same region (worton, under review). members draw upon their local experiences with hf and knowledge gained from the training and technical assistance and share it in the network. similarly, knowledge shared among leaders in the network informed hf implementation, with leaders implementing hf for the first time drawing on the experiences of leaders representing communities with established hf programs (worton, under review). two researchers from the training and technical assistance evaluation have consulted with leaders of homelessness services in british columbia and assisted them with the creation of a similar regional http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://eenet.ca/initiative/housing-first-community-interest#about http://eenet.ca/initiative/housing-first-community-interest#about global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 network – the bc 10. this network is now in the early stages of development, but has regular conference calls and has engaged provincial-level organizations in its work. discussions about regional networks have also been held with hf stakeholders in the atlantic provinces (nova scotia, new brunswick, newfoundland, and prince edward island) and the prairie provinces (manitoba and saskatchewan). discussion there are a variety of networking strategies that can be used to facilitate knowledge mobilization. the research described in this paper demonstrates how training and technical assistance for hf can be advanced and sustained through the incorporation of networking strategies. it also demonstrates how networks developed for knowledge mobilization may differ in form and function based on the goals of the network leaders and members. in this section, we highlight key considerations in developing networks, and describe how networking activities can be incorporated into implementation theory as a capacity building strategy that complements training and technical assistance. key considerations in developing networks for hf knowledge mobilization the research findings highlighted three main considerations for developing networks for hf knowledge mobilization: (a) readiness, (b) leadership, and (c) network composition. readiness. the establishment of the regional networks in this study began by bringing stakeholders together and engaging in dialogue regarding the value of a network and learning from existing networks in the homelessness sector (e.g., the 7 cities). at the regional training events and throughout the needs assessment research activities, stakeholders had an opportunity to consider how regional networks could be structured, facilitated, and resourced. in this way, the research activities served to promote “buy-in” for the development of regional networks. the regional training and technical assistance activities also provided a foundation for the development of networks by providing opportunities for interaction among participants from different communities. leadership. the network activities described in this research vary in terms of who facilitates network activities and provides core leadership and/or administrative support. across the activities leadership varies. in the cop calls, leadership is provided by a central organization. in the ohrn-coi, a multi-stakeholder steering committee chaired by two researchers provides leadership with the support of eenet. in the emerging practitioner-led networks, it is the members who share the leadership and facilitation of the group. determining the leadership for networking activities requires consideration of the network size, resource needs, and goals. composition. scope and membership are two aspects of network composition that were identified in this research. scope. networks in this research were regional in nature, aiming to facilitate connections across communities rather than within communities. this approach is different than local network-based approaches for advancing strategies to end homelessness, such as community advisory groups or coalitions. many communities already have local advisory boards comprised of diverse stakeholders working to end homelessness (e.g., scott, 2013). the regional networks described in the present study complement, rather than duplicate, existing local networks. membership. the networking activities and new networks developed through the course of the training and technical assistance also http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 differ in approach to membership. in the ohrn-coi, membership is open while in other networks (e.g., the emerging practitioner-led networks) membership is limited to a core set of organizations/participants. each approach is suited to different goals. open membership facilitates broad knowledge mobilization and learning amongst a diverse group of participating stakeholders, while limited membership supports the development of stronger ties based on similarity (lawlor & neal, 2016) and the formation of relationships through ongoing interaction (worton, under review). networks as a capacity building strategy for implementation capacity for implementation can be developed through the provision of tools, training, technical assistance, and quality improvement/quality assurance (e.g., fidelity assessment), (leeman et al., 2015; wandersman et al., 2012). these strategies are considered to be additive, each enhancing the one before it (wandersman et al., 2012). peer networking is another common component of capacity building in community implementation (leeman et al., 2015). in the present study, the development of network connections contributed to informing and advancing knowledge sharing through training, technical assistance, and quality assurance activities. this suggests that networking also plays an additive role in enhancing training and technical assistance and advancing capacity for implementation. aspects of the training and technical assistance were designed to create network connections (e.g., regional training events, cop calls). these connections play a role in establishing relationships, advancing change in communities, and promoting ongoing learning, all of which are important for implementing hf. establishing relationships. capacity-building for implementation takes place in the context of relationships (wandersman et al., 2012) and the network activities outlined in this study contribute to the development of relationships between training and technical assistance providers and community stakeholders (e.g., through ongoing cop calls), as well as connections among community stakeholders (e.g., through regional events and events of the ohrn-coi). the practitioner-led regional networks established by homelessness sector leaders provide an opportunity for leaders to establish meaningful professional relationships across jurisdictions. these networks developed through a more emergent process than the cop call groups or the ohrn-coi and do not fit a specific network type. although the purpose of these networks is to advance practice (like a cop) and promote information sharing (like a coi), the emphasis on achieving these goals through role-specific, relationship-based support among leaders is unique. advancing change. network connections are helpful to advance learning and create change in community settings, as participants can share strategies for change (lawlor & neal, 2016). the cop calls provided an opportunity for community leaders implementing hf to learn from one another while also receiving guidance from the trainers participating on the calls. much of the information shared is directed towards implementing hf at the local level. however, the policy-related activities of the ohrn-coi (e.g., policy brief) serve to influence change at the systems level as well. promoting ongoing learning. the regional practitioner networks that developed as a result of the training and technical assistance initiative have created opportunities for ongoing learning around hf implementation in canadian communities. some formal training and technical assistance has http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 continued beyond the original initiative (i.e., cop calls), and new regional networks continue to emerge and evolve. the continuation of the ohrn-coi in the coming year means that the coi can offer more topicspecific webinars and knowledge-sharing events such as the hf forum to stakeholders across the country. the development of a number of regional networks across canada provides opportunities for national learning if these networks can be linked in the future. regional networks in which members are closely connected (through strong or dense connections), may eventually be able to be linked across the country, creating what is referred to as a “small world network” in which information can be easily shared between regions (lawlor & neal, 2016) and solutions to the complex issue of homelessness can be advanced. this would require some coordination at a national level but could be highly beneficial in advancing hf knowledge mobilization between regions. conclusion in this paper, we described how networking strategies have been informed and adopted as a part of a national training and technical assistance initiative. these strategies provided a means of identifying stakeholder networking needs and informing and contributing to the development of various networks, many of which are continuing to emerge beyond the end of the project. strategies such as the regional cops and the community-led networks engage a small group of leaders who participate regularly for the purposes of informing practice. the ohrn-coi engages a broad range of stakeholders to promote shared learning and education around hf research and practice. an important area for future research is to examine connections among these various networks to determine how information may flow between networks with similar goals, and how actors participating in more than one network can play a role in facilitating these connections. in addition, it would be of value to examine the influence of network participation on capacity-building for hf varies for individuals in different roles (e.g., organizational leaders, front line staff, peer support workers, etc.). although more research on networks as a knowledge mobilization strategy is needed, this paper demonstrates the value of incorporating networking strategies into training and technical assistance initiatives. references aubry, t., 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(2017). a portable housing benefit as an indispensable component of ending homelessness in canada. toronto, on: evidence exchange network. available at http://eenet.ca/initiative/housing-firstcommunity-interest#about nelson, g., & aubry, t. (2018). assertive community treatment (act) and housing first in canada. toronto: eenet, ontario http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2019.03.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2019.03.001 https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12052 http://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-015-0272-7 http://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-015-0272-7 http://eenet.ca/initiative/housing-first-community-interest#about http://eenet.ca/initiative/housing-first-community-interest#about global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 housing first regional community of interest. available at http://eenet.ca/resource/policy-briefassertive-community-treatment-act-andhousing-first-in-canada nutley, s., walter, i., & davies, h. t. o. (2007). using evidence: how research can inform public services. bristol: the policy press. padgett, d., henwood, b. f., & tsemberis, s. j. (2016). housing first: ending homelessness, transforming systems, and changing lives. new york: oxford university press. palinkas, l. a., holloway, i. w., rice, e., fuentes, d., wu, q., & chamberlain, p. (2011). social networks and implementation of evidence-based practices in public youth-serving systems: a mixed-methods study. implementation science, 6(1). 10.1186/1748-5908-6-113 pancer, s.m. (1997). program evaluation. in s.w. sadava & d.r. mccreary (eds.), applied social psychology (pp. 47-67). englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. ranmuthugala, g., plumb, j. j., cunningham, f. c., georgiou, a., & westbrook, j. i. (2011). how and why are communities of practice established in the healthcare sector? a systematic review of the literature. bmc health services research, 11(1), 273. http://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-11273 scott, f. (2013). community action group on homelessness: fredericton, new brunswick. in s. gaetz, f. scott, & t. gulliver (eds.) housing first in canada: supporting communities to end homelessness (pp. 147-158). toronto: canadian homelessness research network press. seven cities on housing and homelessness (2017). 2016 alberta point-in-time count of homelessness: final report. retrieved from https://www.7cities.ca/7-cities-pitcount on march 6, 2018. stergiopoulos, v., hwang, s. w., gozdzik, a., nisenbaum, r., latimer, e., rabouin, d., … & goering, p. n. (2015). effect of scattered-site housing using rent supplements and intensive case management on housing stability among homeless adults with mental illness: a randomized trial. journal of the american medical association, 313, 905-915. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.1163 tsemberis, s. (2015). housing first: the pathways model to end homelessness for people with mental illness and addiction. center city, mn: hazelden publications. wandersman, a., chien, v. h., & katz, j. (2012). toward an evidence-based system for innovation support for implementing innovations with quality: tools, training, technical assistance, and quality assurance/quality improvement. american journal of community psychology, 50(3-4), 445-459. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-0129509-7 ward, v., smith, s., keen, j., west, r., & house, allan. (2018). creating and implementing local health and wellbeing policy: networks, interactions and collective knowledge creation amongst public sector managers. evidence & policy, 14(3), 477-498. https://doi.org/10.1332/174426418x15 314036922151 wenger, e., mcdermott, r., & snyder, w. (2002). cultivating communities of practice: a guide to managing knowledge. boston, ma: harvard business review press. worton, s. k., macnaughton, e., hasford, j., nelson, g., macleod, t, tsemberis, s., stergiopoulos, v., goering, p., aubry, t., distasio, j., & richter, t. (2018). understanding systems change in early implementation: an examination of http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://eenet.ca/resource/policy-brief-assertive-community-treatment-act-and-housing-first-in-canada http://eenet.ca/resource/policy-brief-assertive-community-treatment-act-and-housing-first-in-canada http://eenet.ca/resource/policy-brief-assertive-community-treatment-act-and-housing-first-in-canada http://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-11-273 http://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-11-273 https://www.7cities.ca/7-cities-pit-count https://www.7cities.ca/7-cities-pit-count http://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-012-9509-7 http://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-012-9509-7 https://doi.org/10.1332/174426418x15314036922151 https://doi.org/10.1332/174426418x15314036922151 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 barriers, facilitators, and points of leverage in canadian communities implementing housing first. american journal of community psychology, 61, 118130. doi: 10.1002/ajcp.12219 worton, s. k. (under review). examining peer networking as a knowledge mobilization strategy for implementing housing first. acknowledgements this research was funded by the canadian institutes of health research (cihr), partnerships for health systems improvement (phsi) program (grant number 293443), and st. michael’s hospital of toronto, and was supported by the tricouncil research support fund. thanks to community partners, the mental health commission of canada, and research and decision-maker partners for their participation in this research. we dedicate this paper to dr. paula goering, co-principal investigator for this research, who passed away on may 24, 2016. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ community social psychology practice: reflections from experiences in brazil bernardo parodi svartman1, antonio euzébios filho2, gustavo martineli massola1, mariana prioli cordeiro2, and alessandro de oliveira dos santos2 keywords: community social psychology, popular education, consciousness, decolonization author biographies: recommended citation: parodi svartman, b., euzébios filho, a., martineli massola, g., prioli cordeiro, m., & de oliveira dos santos, a. (2023). community social psychology practices: reflections from experiences in brazil. global journal of community psychology practice, 14(1), 1 15. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: bernardo parodi svartman, department of social and work psychology, intersubjectivity, social criticism, and human rights laboratory, university of são paulo. av. prof. mello moraes, 1721 – 05508-900 – são paulo, sp email: bernardo@usp.br. 1 department of social and work psychology, intersubjectivity, social criticism and human rights laboratory, university of são paulo 2 department of social and work psychology, university of são paulo http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:bernardo@usp.br global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 community social psychology practice: reflections from experiences in brazil abstract the current definition of community psychology practice has the merit of recognizing that the struggle against inequality characterizes community practice in general. however, by proposing a definition that encompasses all psychological practices within communities, one runs the risk of falling into an abstract definition that disregards history. a more accurate definition must consider the meaning of community in different social realities and, consequently, different practices. in latin america, the classical definition of community as a consensual and homogeneous unit of interaction, interdependence, and social ties, within a well-defined geographical area, does not adequately suit the diversity of community psychology practice. colonial processes of epistemicide, genocide, and slavery have created a deep sense of uprooting in brazil. for this reason, community social ties are often under threat or are even non-existent. community psychology practice consists of creating conditions for the development of such social ties, which must be forged in the fight against forces that result in inequality. in this context, the concept of community psychology practice must encompass social group interactions and social ties; their potency of action; their experience with a territory; and the relationship between groups’ internal and external histories. this article presents three empirical experiences that substantiate and exemplify these dimensions. we conclude that community psychology practice in brazil helps communities to understand their past to build their future; itt focuses on the struggle against oppression, on developing political literacy, and on increasing consciousness of relations between communities and society in general. in this article, we argue that the concept of community psychology practice, in the field of community social psychology, encompasses four interconnected dimensions: (1) interactions and social ties of social groups; (2) their potency of action; (3) their experience with a territory; and (4) articulations between the internal and external history of social groups. this proposition derives from the dialogue between the literature review and the authors’ experiences in the field of community social psychology in brazil, three of which will be discussed in detail. the first experience occurred with social groups that live in or around protected areas of the brazilian atlantic forest. the second and third experiences take place with social groups that live in vulnerable neighborhoods on the peripheries of the city of são paulo, the largest metropolis in the country. two of them are research experiences, and one is a professional experience that has been subject to scientific analysis. these experiences resulted in work with social groups that articulated and helped to outline the four dimensions of the concept of community practice advocated in this article. before we introduce these experiences, we will present a brief history of this field in latin america and brazil, in order to contextualize the subsequent discussion. we conclude by offering recommendations for future research and professional action in the field of community social psychology, on the basis of the lessons learned from these experiences. brief historical review of community social psychology in brazil the current definition of community psychology practice has the merit of recognizing that engagement in the struggle against inequality and oppression is an intrinsic characteristic of community practice in general. thus, community psychology practice requires a deep understanding of community, referring to its historical http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 determinations. yet, in proposing a definition that encompasses all community practice, one runs the risk of ignoring what distinguishes specific realities across different regions of the globe. in brazil, defining community is historically a process that is concomitant with the work done with communities. in other words, this process conveys a political, and not just a descriptive, meaning, and it expresses the struggle against inequality and violence as an inherent element in the organization of communities. the violence that we refer to consists of the genocide of the original peoples and the formation of a black slave, the labor force in proportions never seen in any other historical context. therefore, the phenomenon of community, as it occurs in brazil, finds a little parallel in other places in the world. as a result, the practice of community psychology in this region also presents its own particularities. similar characteristics are noticeable throughout latin america. the field of community social psychology (as community psychology is known in latin america) is strongly marked by the social critique of inequality and oppression and brings together a plurality of experiences of research and professional performance. while such a plurality may create the impression of a fragmented field, it also expresses its richness and constant movement. this is because the involvement of different social groups, their histories, characteristics, and needs, tend to prevent community psychology actors from constructing knowledge and practices that are indifferent to context and social relations (kelly & chang, 2008). this way of producing knowledge leads to theoretical and practical innovations vis-à-vis the tradition of modern sociological thought about communities. to contextualize our discussion, it is important to review some characteristics of the concept of community from this intellectual thread so that we can see in more detail to what extent they have been criticized and modified. such a task is important because practice must be consistent with the theoretical and conceptual understanding of community. nisbet (1969) states, after an extensive review of the literature, that the core of the recurring sense of the term generally means "forms of relationship characterized by a high degree of personal intimacy, emotional depth, moral commitment, social cohesion, and continuity in time" (p. 71). outhwaite and bottomore (1996) similarly define community as "a group of people within a limited geographical area who interact within common institutions and have a sense of interdependence and integration" (p. 116). for bauman (2003), also reflecting on this sociological tradition, the concept of community expresses a sense of security, shelter, and belonging. such definitions have in common the fact that they consider a community as a consensual and homogeneous unit of interaction, interdependence, and social ties, within a welldefined geographical area (sawaia, 1996). however, in latin america, the research and professional experiences of psychologists have challenged these abstract definitions of the concept, aiming to understand its specific character in a reality marked by high levels of violence whose origin lies in its colonial history. the struggles of social movements and popular classes that took place on the continent in the 1970s and 1980s urged the field of community social psychology to grapple with the history and problems of the region. this experience required an understanding of both the power relations that were at work in daily life and of the processes that fostered cooperative and transformative action by different oppressed social groups (lane, 1996). for ignácio martín-baró, one of the most important representatives of community social psychology in latin america, the main characteristic of the peoples of the continent is precisely this situation of oppression that prevents them from articulating their historical perspective. therefore, the task of community social psychology would be to recover the memory of these peoples and to make the continent's popular classes conscious of the injustices and social inequalities they face. this means producing a liberation psychology that considers power relations in the configuration http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 and dynamics of human behavior and social groups (martín-baró, 1985/2009). another important scholar in the field of community social psychology in latin america is maritza montero. in line with martin-baró (2009), she argues that it is the responsibility of this field to understand the factors that enable social groups to cultivate and maintain the power to solve problems in their environment and to achieve change. thus, for martin-baró (1985) and montero (2005), the focus of community social psychology is on issues of oppression and the forms of struggle and resistance of oppressed social groups. the history of struggles for recognition and rights of oppressed groups help to understand the definitions of community adopted by latin american community social psychology. it is in this spirit that montero (2005) defines community as "a group in constant transformation and evolution (its size may vary), which in its interrelationship generates a sense of belonging and social identity, making its members conscious of themselves as a group, and strengthening themselves as unity and social potential" (p. 207). this definition of community emphasizes the potency of action of social groups that by organizing and acting also create consciousness and identity. the temporal aspect highlighted here is not the past, as in the social sciences tradition of the 19th and early 20th centuries. since the group is in search of constant transformation, its future emancipation is prioritized. however, strict emphasis on the group's internal resources can lead to a vision that disregards broader historical aspects that determine the constitution of the group itself and of the problems it faces. similar to what happened in other latin american countries, the 1970s and 1980s in brazil, were marked by the imposition of a military dictatorship, political repression, and persecution of social movements and popular classes. in the field of psychology, these circumstances fostered engagement in the struggle for re-democratization and urged responses to national problems, social movements, and popular classes. this process was related to a critique of theories and forms of action that were imported from europe or the united states and adopted in a decontextualized manner. according to freitas (1998b), community social psychology in brazil also accompanied these movements of resistance against the dictatorship and the uncritical importation of psychological knowledge. initially, this occurred timidly and began with research motivated by simple academic curiosity about life and relationships in peripheral communities of large urban centers. brazilian cities at this time (1960-70) went through a rapid transformation caused by rural exodus, which resulted in massive demographic concentration and led to different problems related to infrastructure and basic sanitation, housing, and access to basic services, among others. in a second phase, academic curiosity and preliminary research intentions gave way to what freitas (1998b) called activism, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. by the end of the military dictatorship (1964-1985), this period coincided with the consolidation of a critical movement within brazilian psychology, characterized by engagement with social movements. the third phase, currently in effect, has been characterized by the expansion of community social psychology nationwide and beyond the peripheries of large urban centers, spreading also to rural areas of different territories of the country. it is a stage characterized by the ethical-political commitment of community social psychology, which seals a relationship between sectors of brazilian psychology with social movements and local agents that fight for social rights and to overcome the scourges of capitalism. this stage is characterized by actions inspired by paulo freire's experiences in popular education and by participatory action research, among others (freitas, 1998b). in this last stage, community social psychology does not necessarily separate itself from activism, but it also takes on a scientific character, seeking explanations for community http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 demands based on concepts such as ideology, consciousness, and historical memory. since then, community psychology practices have been systematized with more methodological and academic rigor, and courses and disciplines have been consolidated in undergraduate and graduate studies in brazilian universities. thus, from the 1990s onward, research and professional practice in the field of community social psychology – such as the examples presented below – began to focus on the investigation of social groups in urban and rural areas, involved in struggles for recognition and rights (freitas, 2002). such experiences inspired by the educational work of paulo freire, among others, stimulated the reflection and the potency of action of groups through methods that value community participation in the investigation, understanding, and transformation of social reality. on the other hand, it is not enough to state that community social psychology is geared to support social groups in the transformation of the society in which we live. it is necessary to make explicit the work processes and "tools" used with those groups that can enable them to promote transformation. this is especially true when we consider the polysemy of the concept of community, the diversity of theoretical references that underpin it, and the plurality of research experiences and professional practices in this field. despite theoretical and conceptual differences, community social psychology in brazil and latin america departs from some theoretical and methodological principles that contradict a positivist model of science and professional practice and are based on the perspective of participant action research (bonilla, castillo, fals borda & libreros, 1972). these are some characteristics of participant action research: (i) colonialist traces in the relationship between academic and popular knowledge must be overcome; (ii) reality and social practice must guide theory, and exploitation and oppression must be considered structural elements, especially in the latin american reality; (iii) methodology and the researcher are not two separate dimensions of research; (iv) methodology is inseparable from the social groups with which the researcher works; (v) methodological principles vary, develop, and transform according to political and social conditions within and outside communities; and (vi) latin american reality requires overcoming the conception of research as an act of strict contemplation of reality. research must go along with actions carried out in territories and communities, defined together with the participant population and guided by ethical and political principles that coincide with those that underpin community social psychology, itself (bonilla et al, 1972). the influence of participant action research in the three experiences reported in this article (euzébios filho, 2015; massola, svartman, galeão-da-silva, martins, vidoto, & dos santos, 2015; santos, meneses, & nunes, 2005; svartman, dos santos, martins, casco, galeãosilva, massola, 2015) is revealed: a) by the way we approached the participant communities; b) by the recognition of the demands of the groups as the real demands of research and professional action; c) by the strategies adopted for information gathering, which privileged participatory interaction models, such as open interviews and focus groups; d) by the use of accessible language; and e) by the presentation and discussion of the research results with the participants to validate the knowledge produced collaboratively, emphasizing the value of local knowledge. the communities that define latin american community social psychology are forged in the fight against oppression, and they are made up of groups which are the product of colonial processes of epistemicide — the death of local knowledge perpetrated by an alien science (santos et al., 2005, p. 22) — or of the tout court genocide of the original peoples, or the mass trafficking of african people to the americas. in the face of these events, psychologists work with the result of the largest, most systematic, and violent process of uprooting ever witnessed by humanity, which either destroyed the foundations of traditions that would guarantee stable social ties, or always threatens to do so (massola et al., http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 2015). for this reason, community ties always implies a willingness to fight against oppression. brazil was the last country in the world to abolish slavery on may 13, 1888. slaves resisted slavery in several ways, but two of these ways stood out: rebellions — the direct confrontation against slave owners — and quilombos, the greatest symbol of africanamerican resistance in brazil. the socially widespread image of the quilombos in brazil is well known: a group of slaves fleeing from captivity who congregate in wild, sparsely inhabited regions and live in isolation, organizing themselves around customs partly or totally inherited from their african traditions. the colonial system fought many of quilombos violently and sometimes they resisted for dozens of years. most times, however, quilombos have existed close to, or even within, farms and cities as semiautonomous forms of organization (moura, 1986; price, 1996). the word "quilombo" originates from the mbundu word kilombo (munanga, 1996), which designated an association of warriors whose members were submitted to dramatic rituals of initiation that took them out of the protective scope of their lineages. an essential characteristic of the members of the quilombo (or quilombolas) was, therefore, their high degree of uprooting. many quilombos originated in small africanamerican rural communities that exist to date. they rarely had legal ownership of their land which brought high insecurity to their collective existence. a fact of psychosocial relevance concerns the use of the term "quilombo." african-american rural communities abandoned this term by the end of the 19th century, their inhabitants were called only black peasants, and no longer "quilombolas." but the 1988 federal constitution, promulgated after the military dictatorship, gave the “quilombos remaining communities” the right to land ownership, ending a long-standing struggle for these groups. the absence of any guarantees of land ownership, even for communities that, in some cases, had occupied the same place for over 400 years, was an important part of the mechanisms for maintaining their condition of subordination and oppression. slowly, this language began to be used as a sign of empowerment and the fight for territory. young people declared themselves quilombolas, a term that older people rejected (fernandes, 2016). this showed that a new sense of collective identity, built on the struggle against slavery, had been forged during the struggle for land, with a consequent renewal of community ties. quilombos, therefore, are an important example of how communities in brazil originate from uprooted people fighting against violence and oppression, and the constant reinvention of their ties and collective identities. such historical aspects are of paramount importance since the definition of community varies according to the temporal dimension that influences the problems faced by and the strategies of the group. thus, to deal with these characteristics of the field itself, we argue that the concept of community psychology practice in community social psychology should encompass four interconnected dimensions: (1) the history of interactions and social ties of social groups; (2) their potency of action; (3) the experience with a territory; and (4) articulation between internal and external history of social groups. next, we will provide examples of research and practice with brazilian communities. we will briefly present the history of these communities and develop through them, the ideas presented so far. research and professional practice experiences in the field of community social psychology case study 1 – a research with social groups living in protected areas of the atlantic forest the ribeira valley region in brazil contains most of the country's atlantic forest. in this region, the presence of two social groups is especially important, the caiçaras and the quilombolas. caiçaras are people who live on the coast of the ribeira valley and form a group that originated from the miscegenation of indigenous peoples, white settlers, and afrohttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 brazilian groups. they live basically from artisanal fishing, plant extractivism, and ecotourism. quilombolas, in turn, are spread over different areas of the ribeira valley, although with greater concentration in the mountains. they live basically from plant extractivism, family agriculture, and ecotourism. in the ribeira valley, the territories where caiçaras and quilombolas live are called traditional communities, a term that designates the historical presence of these social groups in the region, constituted from family units whose livelihoods are associated with the use and management of natural resources (diegues, 2002). throughout the 1980s and 1990s, much of the ribeira valley was converted into protected areas. the new legislation banned or limited the presence of traditional communities and their management of natural resources. under these threats, the communities organized a series of economic and political activities to give visibility to their struggles, including the recognition that their presence, way of life, and management of natural resources contributed to the environmental preservation of the region. as a result, they implemented ecotourism initiatives combining income generation, their struggle for rights, and environmental protection. this community social psychology research aimed to learn about the ecotourism initiatives developed by the caiçara and quilombola communities and the difficulties they experienced. ten professors from the university of são paulo participated in the research, investigating specific themes related to community-based tourism, such as the relationship with the territory, political memory, artistic production, and work relations. the research was negotiated and developed in collaboration with local leaders. it involved the participation of students from local high schools, who were trained in research methodologies for data collection and the identification and selection of local agents in the communities to form the research coordination team. once the field research and data systematization stages were completed, the results were presented to community members and their leaders. the results showed that ecotourism initiatives advanced through participatory forms of the political organization of the communities, produced significant changes once the communities created associations to represent them with public authorities, nongovernmental organizations, and private initiatives. in addition, these were important initiatives for recovering collective memory, promoting their culture, and generating income while preserving the environment. this research was an important foundation for our reflections on community social psychology praxis. throughout this work we encouraged exchanges between academic and community knowledge brokers. we organized events at the university and in the communities, in which representatives of both spheres, presented their views on the research topics. this epistemological dialogue was evaluated as a positive experience by the communities’ members and leaders. the strengthened ties between local schools and communities increased students’ knowledge about the region in which they lived. this resulted in a sense of unity between students and communities and raised the visibility of the struggles undertaken by communities for recognition and rights. the research findings generated technical support for tourism projects, increased the visibility of territorial struggles, and supported the creation of environmental education projects linking local schools and communities. detailed results of this research can be found in dos santos et al. (2016), massola et al. (2013), and svartman et al. (2015). this experience portrays some characteristics of psychological practice in communities in brazil: community psychologists are involved in a struggle against the consequences of secular violence whose origins lie in the processes of colonization; their practice requires intervention on the quality of community ties to promote more democratic relationships; threats to social groups’ territories are fundamental components of mechanisms of oppression against http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 communities; and the result of this work is often the creation of projects for the transformation of the community itself, to the point of recreating its identity in response to the residents’ struggles and projects. regarding the four dimensions of the concept of community psychology, the first dimension (history of interactions) draws attention to the fact that social relations were supported by a traditional culture, which had developed over three or four centuries and involved interconnected economic, political, artistic, and religious activities. at the same time, young people wanted to know about the lifestyle of the bigger cities, which represented a conflict between tradition and modernity. the third dimension (experience with a territory) relates to the lived experience with the territory of these communities, which featured the integration of culture and nature and a lowimpact economy that were responsible to some extent for preserving the environment. such communities held a view in which environmental preservation could be accomplished with human presence in the territory. when this culture was threatened by the creation of the state park and the consequent threat of eviction, community groups created associations that started to organize economic and political activities inside and outside the communities. these actions increased the visibility of their struggles. we see here dimension two (potency of action) and four (articulation between internal and external history) expressed in the fact that an external intervention extended the reach of struggles that already existed, but in an embryonic, incipient, or very localized way. the action research encouraged the communities' investigation about their own history and fostered their consciousness of the need to navigate between the traditional and the modern, assisting in the development of new projects and increasing the interaction with their surroundings (mainly the schools from nearby towns) and with the university. case study 2 – a research with social groups living in peripheral neighborhoods of the city of são paulo cidade ademar and pedreira are peripheral neighborhoods in the southern region of são paulo characterized by scarcity of green areas and health, educational, and cultural facilities. these territories are predominantly inhabited by low-income families, and the number of informal workers is much higher than in other areas of the city. for many years, residents of these neighborhoods have struggled to improve their living and working conditions. in 2010, they created a space to discuss the problems of both neighborhoods and formulate strategies to face them collectively, called cidade ademar and pedreira social forum, which brought together local leaders and representatives of the earliest social movements in the region. this community social psychology research initially studied the history and organizational structure of this effort. forum members reported a decrease in the participation of residents in the forum’s activities. they also reported that young residents were not very engaged, which meant that the memories of all their actions could be lost, in addition to the risk of losing potential new leaders. other similar community spaces also faced the same problems. this led participants to establish a partnership with the federal university of são paulo to create a course on political systems and public policies, democratic participation, social rights, and citizenship. the citizenship school project was then created to address the political qualification of leaders and the population of the city's peripheral neighborhoods. members of the cidade ademar and pedreira social forum attended some classes and decided to implement the citizenshio school in their neighborhoods. they requested the support of the research coordinators to build the project, present it to the university and help with the course. the political-pedagogical project (the presentation of principles and methods of work) was built collectively, during several meetings, with intense participation of the whole team formed by different community leaders. the consensual objective was to create a participatory space for the construction of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 knowledge that would facilitate the dialogue between academic and popular knowledge, built upon the history of struggles in the region. classes were to include expert guests and residents, which would stimulate a dialogue between broader and local perspectives. the first course was held in august 2016, it lasted 12 months, and had 33 attendees. besides enrolled students who attended the entire course, there were often listeners that followed a specific debate, and some meetings had 120 participants. in 2018 and 2019, there were new editions with similar attendance rates. at the end of each course, as part of the research in community social psychology, questionnaires were administered and interviews were conducted with participants, members of the coordination team, and representatives of social movements. the results showed improved communication among the leaders of the housing, health, educational, cultural, and environmental movements in the region. participants also felt better qualified to deal with demands for improvements in public policies. in addition, there has been an increase in participation of residents and engagement of local artists in cultural activities such as literature and poetry events. a significant number of residents and local leaders, mostly those associated with the housing movement, had not completed formal education, a reflection of a long history of denial of rights and decent living conditions to the working classes. these courses made it possible to re-establish their school trajectory and awakened their will to complete formal schooling. public school teachers reported that they would take what they learned to their schools. in some cases, this group undertook final school assignments related to issues addressed in the citizenship school. participants’ general evaluation was that the citizenship school provided a new cycle of popular education and renewed local community participation. this work also presented important elements for reflection on community social psychology. classes included reports on local activities and debates on the relationships between what was discussed by teachers and the history and problems experienced in the region. local cultural activities were shared and became more visible. young students learned that many positive aspects of their neighborhoods, such as parks and hospitals, were the result of actions organized by leaders and members of movements who attended the course. on many occasions, narratives and recollections were complementary to the historical examinations of local problems, favoring an articulation between history and memory. this contributed to overcoming the false notion that problems are immediate, when in fact they are mediated by historical relations of concentrated power and dispute. the first dimension of the community psychology practice (interaction), in this case, can be related to the fact that the group's initial relationships were based on the political and friendship ties of former community leaders in the region, linked to different social movements. the aim of the forum and the citizenship school was to discuss the region's problems, increase the participation of the local population in community activities, involve youth in political formation activities, and preserve the memory of popular struggles that resulted in improvements for the region. we see here an articulation between dimensions one (interaction) and two (potency of action), since these initiatives aimed to address specific and local problems, and also leveraged emancipatory projects that took the community's struggles beyond its immediate territory. the territory of life and action of the group (third dimension) refers to a region of the city in which it is possible to observe various effects of social inequality and urban segregation. people engaged in popular movements know that community struggles with public power are fundamental and ensure the realization of some social rights. here, we highlight the fourth dimension, that is, articulation between internal and external history. the evaluation of participants was that the citizenship school project created an important space for dialogue and exchange of experiences, strengthening local community http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 ties. courses and debates allowed a better understanding of the characteristics of the territory where participants lived and worked. community participation in social movements increased, encouraged by the debates held during courses, revealing the importance of activities that brought together research, popular education, and community activities. case study 3 – an intervention with social groups that live in peripheral neighborhoods of the city of são paulo jardim pantanal is one of the 17 neighborhoods located in the floodplain of one of the largest rivers that runs through the city of são paulo. although the neighborhood is in an area of environmental protection, it coexists with large industrial facilities that pollute the river. its population lives below the poverty line and suffers from precarious conditions of housing, work, and access to health and public education. residents have been working collaboratively since the 1990s to seek improvements in living and housing conditions through their residents’ association, named movement of urbanization and legalization of jardim pantanal (mulp). in this context, the psychologist’s work revealed a peculiarity : it was an experience that, although it resulted in academic research (euzébios filho, 2015), was characterized more precisely by what freitas (2002) called community practice in the field of psychology, with an emphasis on group processes and the strengthening of sociopolitical ties. this practice started as a demand from mulp itself, where the psychologist was already a collaborator. it should be noted that both in the work done with mulp and in the work done with citizenship school, the initiative to seek psychological counseling came from the community. this is important because the initiative of social groups has a direct influence on popular education in community social psychology and is a way to resist populist manipulation of the masses (freire, 2020). this implies that this work aimed to stimulate collaboration in the strict sense (when groups participate in the research on equal terms with researchers), rather than cooperation (when the project still "belongs" to the researcher) and certainly more than compulsory participation and co-optation, coming closer to what tripp (2005) calls emancipatory action research. such demand for the psychologist’s expertise reconfigured the initial relationship. the psychologist was acting as an activist when the movement identified specific needs in the psychology realm: to strengthen the social ties between young students in mulp's university entrance prep course and spaces of deliberation and claims of the movement. as part of the political pedagogical project of the university’s prep course, this demand elicited community practice in the field of psychology over and above individualized clinical care. initially, the psychologist sought to build rapport with the students, to learn about their life trajectories, and what led them to the prep course. following that initial stage, the psychologist facilitated group activities to stimulate reflections on issues concerning: black people’s insertion in public universities, citizenship and social class, peripheral youth insertion in the world of work, and professional identity. the meetings that were scheduled by the psychologist gradually began to be organized by the students themselves. at a later stage, these meetings began to be organized between students and members of mulp, surpassing the institutional space provided by the prep course. finally, mulp integrated these meetings into their open discussion forum for the entire community, which contributed to effective interactions between students and actors in the movement. the forum’s meetings also created spaces for listening to residents' narratives, contributing to the rescue of the historical memory of the neighborhood and the organized social movement. thus, stories about the origin of the neighborhood, the movement and its personages were told to young students, who came to know more about the very territory in which they were born, and about the origin of mulp's agenda. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 these meetings held by the forum also contributed to the organization and realization of cultural activities, of which the “sarau do pantanal” is an example. the objective of the “sarau” (a party or artistic event held in the evening) was to encourage the expression of artists from the neighborhood, favoring the strengthening of local culture. moreover, participation in the forums fostered engagement of residents in mulp's activities and the recognition of other social movements outside the neighborhood, which were engaged in similar struggles for recognition and rights of peripheral communities and the working class – thus expanding the notion of community beyond a geographically delimited territory. still, intending to strengthen the link between students and the movement, efforts were made to understand how the relationship established between students and mulp took place, as well as the degree of political participation of students in the struggles of daily life of the neighborhood population. a participatory diagnosis was then carried out, elaborated through the collection of different reports and opinions about the functioning of the prep course and its relationship with the movement. part of this diagnosis was transformed into academic research (euzébios filho, 2015). it revealed, among other aspects, that training spaces offered by mulp, in partnership with the prep course, were the object of interest of students, who emphasized the importance of the prep course for academic and political training. the reports stating that the course contributed to academic and political training somehow portrayed the quality of ties established between students and mulp. these ties started being built through discussions held in the prep course classrooms, taking into account that the political pedagogical project highlighted the importance of establishing connections between academic content and issues that involved residents' concrete reality. the diagnosis also identified students willing to contribute to the movement and to the prep course (euzébios filho, 2015). these students were contacted and consulted about the role they wanted to play in these spaces – becoming members of the course’s pedagogical coordination, contributing to practical tasks related to the course’s operation, or as coordinators or promoters of mulp forums and assemblies. the psychologist was also called into action, at different times, as a coordinator of meetings involving students and members of the movement. in this role, this professional sought to distance his identity as a specialist and promoted his support of community agents. still, as a coordinator, the psychologist sought to facilitate the search for consensus, engaging participants’ plurality of trajectories and thoughts – divergences arose at all times, after all, as previously stated, the community did not present itself as a static and homogeneous entity. diversity should be encouraged – not repressed – by the group. the community is dialogue, it is negotiating, and it is movement. throughout this experience of community practice in the field of psychology, the local agent was considered the living agent of change and the protagonist of his destiny, emphasizing the importance of community self-organization. thus, from the beginning, there was a clear need to build projects and actions "with" the community, and not "for" them. as advocated by freitas (1998a), this shows the importance of starting all community practices through participatory methods of needs analysis. we could thus summarize the relations of this work with the four dimensions of the concept of community psychology practice: the first dimension, the interactional history, relates more directly to the fact that the reunion and organization of people stemmed from the struggle to guarantee a basic and fundamental social right, the right to decent housing. the resulting movement (mulp) supported the group's action to claim this right and work toward urban improvements in the neighborhood. after a while, a preparatory course for university entrance exams was created in the neighborhood, something that met the interests of youth. the territory of action initially referred to the neighborhood where the struggles for a dignified living space http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 took place. gradually, as the communication with movements based in neighborhoods that experienced the same problems increased, the territory of action of those groups transformed into a space where political and cultural exchanges could occur. the psychologist was invited to help bring the two groups (mulp and the preparatory school) closer together. on one hand, mulp could help in the political formation and, on the other hand, young people could get to know the history of the neighborhood better and offer continuity to the history of struggles and claims. after the project, the preparatory school started to receive more attention from the movement, since it was related to an important life project for young people, and the movement benefited from the contribution and formation of new leaders. recommendations for future research and professional practice in the field of community social psychology as stated in the introduction to this article, we argue that the concept of community psychology practice in the field of community social psychology in latin america must encompass four interlinked dimensions: (1) interactions and social ties of social groups; (2) their potency of action; (3) experience with a territory; and (4) articulation between social groups’ internal and external history. these dimensions can help guide research and practice in the field by forming a scheme to understand contextual and historical variation of community phenomena. through the examples of research studies and professional experiences discussed above, we sought to demonstrate how it is possible to collaborate with social groups and cultivate these four dimensions. thus, we propose that community psychology practice should be understood as the development of activities in communities that allow social groups to broaden their knowledge about their history, their political experiences, and their forms of social relations and inhabitation of a territory. the elaboration of such knowledge by social groups should foster the formulation of projects of cultural and political participation and action (both internal and external to social groups) toward the goal of good-living, emancipation, and social justice. our experiences indicate that it is essential to observe how the people who make up a social group participate in the group’s discussions and decisions. the quality of social ties and the feeling of belonging to the group are directly related to the respect for personal participation in the different areas of the group’s life, and not simply delimiting borders and repeating traditions, norms, and social roles. the study of this dimension also allows psychologists to understand the formation of subgroups and identify the leaders with whom they can negotiate the construction of each stage of a project. further, we emphasize the importance of organizing processes for collective action in the constitution of social groups called community. that implies mobilization for securing rights, such as the right to permanent presence in a territory and access to housing, health, and education. in this way, social groups are inescapably in interaction with several other types of actors and institutions, such as government representatives, public policymakers, ngo’s, and political parties. hence, it is possible to affirm that the notion of community always entails some “political literacy” that calls on the social group to learn ways (strategies and tactics) to influence the broader social organization and ensure achievement of collective goals. we also highlight the relevance of understanding the relationship between the social group’s internal and external history. this dimension refers to the temporal aspects that explain social group formation, characteristics, and power of action, as well as the evolution of the group-society relationship. it is essential to understand the context that leads to the formation of a group and for what it is fighting. these are aspects of group constitution and characterization that make it possible to understand the formation of its projects and the relationships established with society as a whole. on the other hand, helping a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 group to tell its own history is one of the tasks of community social psychology, that is, helping social groups to speak with their own voices, recovering their historical memory. in this context, the notion of territory entails the spatial and symbolic dimension of community social life. it is fundamental to the understanding of a community to observe the space in which its interactions and social ties take place, its material life forms, and its spatial-symbolic delimitation. these factors reveal the material dimension of group culture and collective identity. in the case of traditional communities, it reveals members’ particular way of handling natural resources and relating to nature. in the case of urban communities, it exposes the inequality in the distribution of resources and access to rights in urban spaces, articulating the material and symbolic aspect of members’ struggles. finally, we would like to highlight the ethical dimension that permeated the community psychology practices reported in this article. we believe that reflexivity is a fundamental aspect of any research or intervention with communities. thus, we always seek to reflect critically on the temporal, ethical, and political dimensions that guide our practice. according to paiva and yamamoto (2010; 2011), such a posture prevents us from assuming the “quixotic” posture of wanting to save the world with only good intentions. to promote meaningful transformations in the communities where we operate, we need to understand our context of action, review our attitudes, and “seek real solutions for the community groups we serve, always in the direction of emancipation” (paiva & yamamoto, 2011, p. 48). adopting a reflective stance, therefore, entails not being content with some of the ideas widely accepted by psychology. it means, for example, not being content with the premise that all community psychologists promote social transformations or that working with groups in a situation of vulnerability is, by itself, an indication of our social commitment. furthermore, when we adopt a reflexive posture, we must specify what social commitment we address. it is necessary to specify the strategies, the alliances, and the tools that we use to promote transformations – especially when we consider the polysemy of the concept of community and the diversity of theoretical references and political positions that support it. a reflective posture also implies that it is not enough to define ourselves as those who seek to promote the well-being and the quality of life of communities. after all, what do wellbeing and quality of life mean? who decides what a “good life” is? what criteria and interests guide these decisions? 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(2005). pesquisa-ação: uma introdução metodológica. educação e pesquisa, 31(3), 443–466. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1590/s1413-294x2010000200004 https://doi.org/10.1590/s1413-294x2010000200004 1 running head: surf therapy and hope among underserved youth emerging hope: outcomes of a one-day surf therapy program with youth atpromise gregor v. sarkisian1, chloe curtis2, and carly m. rogers3 keywords: surf therapy, youth at-promise, one-day surf therapy program author biographies: gregor v. sarkisian, professor, has taught in the applied community psychology specialization within the m.a. clinical psychology program at antioch university los angeles since 2005. dr. sarkisian began working with the jimmy miller memorial foundation (jmmf) in 2015 where he has served as a volunteer surf instructor and more recently as the director of research and evaluation for jmmf to better understand the benefits of surf therapy for youth at-promise and u.s. veterans. since 2018, dr. sarkisian has been a member of the international surf therapy organization (isto) and he is actively engaged in coalition building, the dissemination of research on surf therapy and serves as a technical consultant to programs interested in developing surf therapy program evaluations. chloe curtis, is the research & evaluation team coordinator for the jimmy miller memorial foundation. she earned her b.a. in marketing, and m.a. in education from loyola marymount university. she is now working on her second masters in counseling at loyola marymount, while coaching the division i men’s and women’s cross country and track teams. ultimately, chloe plans to earn a ph.d. in sport psychology. chloe discovered surf therapy by volunteering as a surf instructor with jmmf for the first time in 2017. since then, she has assisted dr. gregor sarkisian with everything from data collection to report writing for the foundation, which serves youth at-promise, veterans, and active duty military service members. carly m. rogers, is a clinical occupational therapist and independent researcher. she received her b.a. in psychology from the university of california at santa barbara and her m.a. and clinical doctorate in occupational therapy from the university of southern california. during her master’s coursework, dr. rogers created a therapeutic surfing program titled ocean therapy, aimed at enhancing self-efficacy in participants from diverse backgrounds. she later became the director of programs for the jimmy miller memorial foundation, where she implemented ocean therapy with underprivileged youth and military populations until 2015. she has since presented at the regional, national and international level both on the topics of surf therapy and occupational therapy’s role with veterans diagnosed with combat ptsd. dr. rogers is the primary author of “high-intensity sports for posttraumatic stress disorder and 1 antioch university, los angeles, ca, usa 2 loyola marymount university, los angeles, ca, usa 3 independent researcher, san luis obispo, ca, usa global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 depression: feasibility study of ocean therapy with veterans of operation enduring freedom and operation iraqi freedom". recommended citation: sarkisian, g.v., curtis, c., & rogers, c. m. (2020). emerging hope: outcomes of a one-day surf therapy program with youth at-promise. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(2), 1 – 16. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 emerging hope: outcomes of a one-day surf therapy program with youth atpromise abstract the purpose of this study was to evaluate the benefits of participation in a one-day surf therapy program among youth at-promise. participants (n=152) were predominantly hispanic or latino (71%), followed by black or african american (18%), 57% were female, and age ranged from 6 to 19 years. participant drawings were rated to evaluate program process. the program outcome was evaluated through an observational onegroup pretest-posttest follow-up design using the children’s hope scale. a paired samples t-test found a statistically significant increase in mean scores on hope after participation. a one-way analysis of variance on a subsample (n=50) with one month follow up data found a statistically significant increase in mean scores on hope after participation and one-month after participation. results suggest that the study participants experienced a significant increase in hope through their participation in the jimmy miller memorial foundation’s one-day ocean therapy program. limitations of the study design and implications for research and practice are discussed. the population of los angeles county, california was just over 10 million in 2016, with a youth (0-18 years of age) population of nearly 2.5 million. the dominant ethnicity of youth in los angeles county is latino (48.4%), followed by white (28.3%), asian/pacific islander (14.6%), africanamerican (8.5%) and native american (0.19%) (los angeles county department of mental health, 2017). nearly 40% (979,991) of these youth are estimated to be living at or below the 138% federal poverty level, 8% are estimated to experience serious emotional disturbances or serious mental illness, and only about 3% of youth ages 0-15 were served by outpatient mental health programs in the 2015-2016 year (lacdmh, 2017). of the estimated 30,000 youth in foster care in los angeles, less than 50% graduate from high school, 33% of young women become pregnant by age 17, 25% who age out of foster care will be incarcerated within two years, and, at age 19, 60% of former foster youth are unemployed (casa, 2015). furthermore, obesity among youth in los angeles has been found to be significantly related to economic hardship (los angeles county department of public health, 2011) and rose nearly 5% among youth 12-17 years of age between 2001 and 2012 (wolstein, babey, & diamant, 2015). these data are by no means comprehensive but provide a broad view of the prevalence of characteristics that are relevant to youth ‘at-promise’ in los angeles county. in october 2019, the state of california passed legislation to amend language in the education code and replace the term at-risk with at-promise (assembly bill no. 413, 2019). the legislation also added language about the role of schools in developing policy and procedure to address intimidation, harassment, discrimination and bullying based on identity or status immigration status, gender-identity/expression, disability, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, or association with a person or group. youth in foster care and recipients of the public mental healthcare system are also identified as ‘at-promise’ due to socioeconomic disadvantage and exposure to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 trauma and other adverse experiences such as abuse, neglect or permanent separation from parents. the term at-promise was intended to acknowledge the resilience of youth growing up in challenging conditions and remove the negative stigma associated with the term at-risk (assembly bill no. 413, 2019). adverse experiences are traumatic experiences that affect the developing body and brain of a child, and, that may impact adult health and livelihood. adverse experiences in childhood have been correlated to negative health behaviors and several leading causes of death in adulthood, including abuse (i.e., physical, emotional, sexual), neglect (i.e., physical and emotional) and household dysfunction (i.e., mental illness, incarcerated relative, mother treated violently, substance abuse, and/or divorce) (felitti et al., 1998). in a study of 13,494 adults from a large health maintenance organization (hmo), compared to respondents with zero adverse childhood experiences, respondents reporting four or more adverse child experiences had increased risks for drug/alcohol abuse, smoking, depression, suicidal attempts, sexually transmitted diseases and obesity (felitti et al., 1998). there is some research to suggest hope may strengthen resilience among youth atpromise. hope among youth has been defined as cognitively based beliefs in the capability to take realistic steps to accomplishing goals and self-perceptions of one’s ability to begin and sustain movement toward goal attainment (snyder et al., 1997). hope among youth has been found to be positively related to life satisfaction, personal adjustment, higher academic achievement and greater participation in structured extracurricular activities (gilman et al., 2006). hope has also been found to be positively related to family cohesion and adaptability and negatively related to loneliness (sharabi et al., 2012). among youth at-risk, hope is believed to be a critical factor in resilience while the lack of hope is thought to impact individual vulnerability (martinek & hellison, 1997). among a sample (n=699) of youth at-risk who were predominantly african-american and from low-income communities, valle et al. (2006) found that high scores on hope not only predicted higher scores on life satisfaction a year later but also found that hope served as a moderator to stressful life events resulting in fewer maladaptive internalizing behaviors a year later, suggesting that hope can serve as a buffer to negative life events. these results suggest that hope may serve as a protective factor for youth at-promise experiencing stressful life events. outdoor water environments and surf therapy programs may provide opportunities for participants to increase hope through respite, social support and the physical activity of surfing. the use of outdoor water environments or blue space for the benefit of health and wellbeing has grown in recent years (britton et al., 2018). although many blue space activities including scuba diving (carin-levy & jones, 20017), kayaking (casey, o’broin, & collins, 2009) and river running (dustin et al., 2011), have been explored, the sport of surfing specifically has demonstrated increases in multiple areas including positive affect and mood (pittsinger et al., 2017), health and wellbeing (britton, et al., 2018), physical strength, endurance and agility (farley, harris, & kilding, 2018). surfing is a unique sport that allows an individual to engage with nature in a symbiotic manner, whereby the individual not only physically propels them self into a wave, but must also connect their efforts to become part of the wave in a fluid manner. this fluidity gives way to the concept of flow or a state where a person performing an activity is fully immersed in the feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity (czikszentmihalyi, 1990). surfing provides a natural catalyst for http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 the bi-products of wellbeing and self-efficacy to emerge. surf therapy is an emerging intervention technique for youth, which combines supportive surf instruction with group processing for the positive outcome of improved mental and physical health. from existing studies, psychological benefits of surf therapy have been shown to include increases in self-concept, emotional regulation and social competencies (morgan, 2010; taylor, 2013; colpus & taylor, 2014; godfrey, devine-wrigtht, & taylor, 2015); reengagement with school (matos, et al., 2017), and decreases in behavioral problems (matos, et al., 2017; morgan, 2010). physical benefits included improvements in cardiovascular fitness (hignett, et al., 2017), improved sleep (morgan, 2010), higher levels of physical activity upon program completion and healthier choices as reported by parents of participants (godfrey, et al, 2015). for youth with disabilities, parent-reported benefits have included increases in confidence and social skills, improvements in behavior (armitano et al., 2015; clapham et al., 2014; moore, clapham & deeney, 2018; mueller, 2017), opportunities for family bonding, and opportunities for normalizing for children who tend to be excluded from social events with their peers (moore, clapham & deeney, 2017). although published results demonstrate positive benefits for youth, the duration of programs vary, ranging from 6 to 32 weeks. most programs meet once or twice per week, totaling between 8 and 60 individual sessions. research on one-day programs is rare and existing data from adult populations indicates that a one-day surf session can produce significant positive results (pittsinger et al., 2017). evidence indicates that a 30-minute surfing session could produce significant increases in positive affect and tranquility, regardless of the individual’s surfing history, frequency or paaskill level (pittsinger et al., 2017). the theme of escape or respite through the activity of surfing has emerged among adult populations in qualitative research among veteran populations with ptsd (caddick et al., 2015). participants from a qualitative study by wheaton et al. (2017) described surfing as an unstructured freeing experience that promotes personal transformation as an alternative discourse to the dominant sports activity research perpetuating a value on achievement through structured activities to build individual and interpersonal skills. in the context of this research, and consistent with the flow state described above (czikszentmihalyi, 1990), escape includes temporarily leaving everyday concerns behind through being in the ocean and experiencing the freedom of riding waves (caddick et al., 2015; wheaton et al., 2017). while the benefits of participating in surf therapy programs have been observed, children’s hope has only been studied in one randomized control trial that found no significant differences in pretest-posttest scores between experimental and control groups or after participation in a 32-week, 64-session surf therapy program (snelling, 2015). study limitations included program attendance, in that participants attended less than half of the available sessions, and a prolonged period of time between testing in that the posttest was administered 32 weeks after the pretest (snelling, 2015). program description the jimmy miller memorial foundation (jmmf) is a nonprofit 501c3 established in memory of jimmy miller, an exceptional waterman and ocean lifeguard who sustained a quick onset of mental illness and tragically took his own life shortly after receiving his diagnosis. jimmy’s expansive community, along with his family, came together to create a non-profit that showcased jimmy’s love for the ocean and surfing. the jmmf ocean therapy program was first implemented in 2005 to increase perceived self-efficacy and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 physical activity among youth at-promise through engagement with the ocean environment. ocean therapy is a “community-based, sports-oriented occupational therapy intervention,” which “combines surfing performance, focused group processing, and social participation” (rogers, mallinson & peppers, 2014, p. 396). the program is designed to provide an inclusive and supportive social setting where participants can gain respite through experiencing the ocean and acquire new surfing skills in a safe but unpredictable ocean environment. the jmmf partners with organizations who serve youth in foster care, youth receiving individual and/or family therapy, and youth at-risk for negative outcomes in adulthood due to early traumatic experiences (e.g., exposure to individual, family or community violence). the one-day ocean therapy program for youth at-promise includes 1) an opening talking circle where participants share their experience around a given theme, 2) a surf lesson on land, 3) a surf lesson in the ocean, 4) a second talking circle, 5) a second surf lesson in the ocean, 6) lunch, and 7) a closing talking circle with opportunity to reflect on the theme of the day and other experiences (e.g., about self, the ocean, or other attendees). typically, there are 10-12 youth participants at each jmmf ocean therapy session and the program is free to participants. while the program is intended as a one-day program, participants have returned three or more times, especially participants who are affiliated with a jmmf partner organization for multiple years. in terms of surfing skills, the main goal of the program is for participants to be exposed to surfing in a fun, safe and socially inclusive environment. ideally, participants are provided with a means of escape through exposure to the ocean and surfing with talking circles to provide space to express new perspectives that may have been gained through the day. during surf lessons, while riding a wave, participants are encouraged to move into a standing position on the board, with the instructor riding on the back of the board for support. based on a participant’s experience with the ocean and surfing, skills such as paddling, balancing, sitting on the board, and surfing without the instructor on the back of the board may also be practiced. the surf lesson is participant-centered, so if interest is lost in surfing, alternative activities such as body surfing are available. through talking circles, participants experience an inclusive social environment where they can express feelings and share their life experiences. the talking circles focus on various themes, such as learning to face new challenges, allowing for participants, program surf instructors and volunteers to share their experiences in a socially inclusive environment. the ratio of surf instructors to participants is 1:1 and a water-volunteer assists participant-instructor dyads through retrieving surf boards and providing other assistance. an important aspect of safety to the jmmf model of surf-instruction is that instructors utilize a teaching method whereby they ride on the back of the board behind the participant all the way to the shore to provide maximum stability. finally, there is an ocean safety coordinator at every session who is either an expert surf instructor or a former los angeles county ocean lifeguard, and, each session is facilitated by the program director who is a licensed therapist (i.e., licensed marriage and family therapist or occupational therapist). current study the current study reports on data collected during the summer 2017 and 2018 jmmf ocean therapy sessions. the program evaluation utilized a mixed-method approach employing qualitative methods to assess program process and quantitative methods to assess the program outcome. program process was evaluated through rating participant drawings. the program outcome was evaluated through an observational onehttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 group pretest-posttest-follow-up design. it was hypothesized that one of the benefits to participation in a one-day surf therapy program is a significant increase in hope. method participants participants were recruited through five jmmf partner, youth-serving organizations, two that chose to keep their names anonymous. of the five partner organizations, two were mental health organizations (didi hirsch mental health services & richstone family center), two were youth summer camps providing services to youth in foster care or receiving mental health services (happy trails for kids & organization 4), and one was a group home for youth in foster care (organization 5). all participants were either receiving public mental health services or in the foster care system or both. partner organizations utilized differing inclusion criteria for participation in the jmmf ocean therapy program and all program participants were invited to participate in this study resulting in a convenience sample. while two partner organizations did not use any inclusion criteria other than participant availability, two organizations used recent prosocial behaviors (e.g., helping friends work out a conflict) and one used recent leadership behaviors (e.g., leadership in groups conducting project-based learning) exhibited by potential participants. qualitative data were collected from 157 participants and quantitative data were collected from 152 participants. five participants opted out of completing quantitative data but completed qualitative data. additionally, one-month follow-up data from a subsample of 50 participants with additional demographics on history of adverse experiences and personal challenges are included in this study. while participants do not participate in the program more than once a year, some participants have participated for multiple years if they are affiliated with the same jmmf partner organization. thus, some data may reflect participants who have participated in multiple years of the program. table 1 presents demographic data on the main sample of 152 participants who completed quantitative questionnaires. fiftyseven percent (n=86) were female and age ranged from 6 to 19 years (m age = 11.29). two age categories are presented: 6-11 and 12-19, based on piaget’s stages of cognitive development, which associate these age ranges with the concrete operational and formal operational stages, respectively (piaget, 1964). the ethnicity of participants was predominantly hispanic or latino (71%), followed by black or african-american (18%) and other ethnicity (6%). of the 10 participants who indicated an other ethnicity, six were hispanic or latino and white, one was hispanic or latino and black or african american, one was black or african american and jamaican, one was black or african american/mixed, and one was mixed. of the subsample of 50 participants with onemonth follow-up data, age ranged from 8 to 19 years (m age = 12.24), 54% were hispanic or latino and 40% were black or africanamerican. based on the aces study (felitti et al., 1998) and personal challenges faced by youth at-promise (assembly bill no. 413, 2019), demographic data on selected adverse experiences and personal challenges were obtained from therapists of participants when available. while the average number of adverse experiences and personal challenges was over 1.5 (m adverse experiences and/or personal challenges = 1.69, n=50), 70% had a history of emotional or behavioral problems, 34% had a history of trauma, 28% had a learning disability or educational difficulties, 26% experienced child abuse or neglect and 10% had a history of substance/alcohol use/abuse. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 table 1 demographic data on gender, age and ethnicity 2017 – 2018 sample (n=152) n % gender female 86 57 male 66 43 age 6 – 11 92 61 12 19 60 39 ethnicity hispanic 108 71 black or african american 28 18 asian 4 3 american indian or alaskan native 1 1 white 1 1 other 10 6 measures drawing form. a drawing form was constructed by the first and third authors as an exploratory method of obtaining projective data on participants’ experience of the ocean therapy program. while the drawing form was used initially to identify potential outcomes of interest, it has been used to assess program process since 2017. participants complete a drawing of their experience of the day and have space to write in a theme for the day as well as a few sentences to describe their drawing. while there is a theme in the talking circles during the ocean therapy session, participants are free to enter whatever theme they choose. next, drawings and their associated text are rated based on a coding system developed from prior research by benninger and savahl (2016) that applied the delphi method to identify aspects of social programs 10-12year-old, impoverished youth in cape town, south africa found to be most beneficial to their well-being – children’s safety, social support, opportunities of learning and fun, and basic needs. these findings were adapted to reflect the jmmf ocean therapy program processes, developed into coding criteria and are described in table 2. drawings and their associated text were then rated for expression of the four program process indicators. table 2 coding criteria for jmmf program process indicators indicator description safety drawing depiction or text that reflects education about ocean safety or jmmf team members and/or peer participants keeping them safe. social support and inclusion drawing depiction or text that reflects social support received during the day or feeling included and valued by jmmf team members and/or peer participants. learning something new or having fun drawing depiction or text that reflects learning to surf or swim; learning anything new; and, having fun in a structured or unstructured way. self-identity or selfconcept drawing depiction or text that reflects a change in attitude about one’s abilities, skills or potential in relation to self, peers, or their community. note: criteria adapted from benninger and savahl (2016) an inter-rater reliability analysis was conducted for both years in which a total of 157 drawings were rated. in summer 2017, three volunteers from jmmf served as http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 primary raters with each rating all 73 drawings. in summer 2018, two volunteers (one from 2017 and one new) served as primary raters with each rating all 84 drawings. the primary author of this article served as the final judge in resolving discrepancies between raters for both years. total inter-rater reliability was 32% (23 of 73 drawings coded the same on all four items) for 2017 and 57% (48 of 84 drawings coded the same on all four items) for 2018. the lower percentage for inter-rater reliability during 2017 is due in part to having three versus two raters. both percentages were interpreted to have acceptable levels of interrater reliability for the number of raters. hope. participants completed snyder et al.’s (1997) children’s hope scale, a six-item measure that defines hope as including pathways and agency as they relate to future goals, using the following statements measured on a likert scale: 1. i think i am doing pretty well. 2. i can think of many ways to get the things in life that are most important to me. 3. i am doing just as well as other kids my age. 4. when i have a problem, i can come up with lots of ways to solve it. 5. i think the things i have done in the past will help me in the future. 6. even when others want to quit, i know i can find ways to solve the problem. hope is conceptualized as consisting of cognitive processes related to future goal attainment. three items focus on agency, defined as beliefs about beginning and making progress toward goals, and three items focus on pathways, defined as belief in one’s capacity to develop realistic routes to accomplish goals. the children’s hope scale (snyder et al., 1997) utilizes a six-point likert scale with responses ranging from “none of the time” to “all of the time” and has been validated across five samples with youth 8 to 16 years of age with no statistically significant differences found on age, gender or between three ethnic groups (hispanic or latino, black or african-american and white). in terms of internal consistency, cronbach’s alphas ranged from .72 to .86 with a median alpha of .77. temporal stability was reflected by strong correlations for a 1-month test-retest sample r(359)=.71, p<.001 and a 1-week testretest sample r(89) =.73, p<.001. convergent validity was established through statistically significant positive correlations to parent ratings of their children’s hope, children’s scores on competence, self-perception, and self-worth scales, and statistically significant negative correlations to perceived helplessness and depression. procedure institutional review board (irb) approval was obtained from antioch university los angeles in june, 2017. the only inclusion criterion was participation in the jmmf ocean therapy program. parents of participants provided informed consent and participants provided assent. staff from jmmf partner organizations were trained in the irbapproved data collection protocol and collected all data. two to four weeks before each partner organization had their first ocean therapy session, the jmmf research team provided on-site training on the irb-approved data collection protocol. the five partner organizations determined which potential participants were eligible to participate in the ocean therapy program. parental informed consent and oral assent from participants was obtained by trained staff from partner organizations. staff from partner organizations completed a brief demographic data form (age, gender and ethnicity) and administered the children’s hope scale (snyder et al., 1997) the day of surf therapy http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 before departing to the beach. after returning from surf therapy (on the same day), staff from partner organizations administered the drawing form and the children’s hope scale. finally, the children’s hope scale was administered by staff from partner organizations one-month after participating in surf therapy. partner organizations providing ongoing mental health or foster care were able to collect one-month follow-up data on hope and additional demographic data. data analysis using ibm spss statistics 25, analyses compared mean scores on children’s hope before, after and one month after participation in ocean therapy. a paired samples t-test was conducted to analyze for statistically significant differences on children’s hope mean scores before and after participation in ocean therapy for a sample of 152 participants. for a subsample with onemonth follow up data, a one-way within subjects anova was conducted to analyze for statistically significant differences on children’s hope mean scores before, after and one-month after ocean therapy for a subsample of 50 participants. two cases missing three and five responses from the follow-up hope scale were excluded from analysis resulting in a subsample of 50 instead of 52. results process evaluation. based on the ratings of 157 drawings and related text reflecting participants’ experience of the day on four program process indicators, 92% (n=145) of participants expressed experiencing opportunities for learning and fun, 77% (n=121) expressed a positive attitude about their self-identity or self-concept, 61% (n=95) expressed feeling safe, and 58% (n=91) expressed experiencing social support and inclusion. figures 1, 2 and 3 present samples of participant drawings rated as including all four program processes described above. additionally, demographic data indicates that each of the participants experienced adverse experiences and personal challenges. figure 1 presents the drawing and associated text of a 15-year old, female participant, identifying as hispanic or latino, with a history of trauma, emotional or behavioral problems, child abuse or neglect and substance or alcohol use. figure 2 presents the drawing and associated text of a 14-year old, female participant, identifying as african american, with a history of trauma, emotional or behavioral problems, and child abuse or neglect. figure 1. drawing and associated text of 15year old, female participant, identifying as hsipanic or latino, with a history of trauma, emotional or behavioral problems, child abuse or neglect and substance or alcohol use who expressed experiencing all four program processes – opportunities for learning and fun, the expression of positive self-identity or self concept, safety, and social support and inclusion. outcome evaluation. two data sets are presented in this section. the first includes pretest and posttest mean scores on the children’s hope scale (snyder et al., 1997) for http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 152 participants. the second data set is a smaller subsample (n=50) that includes pretest, posttest and one-month follow-up mean scores on the children’s hope scale. table 3 presents means for subscale and total scores on the children’s hope scale for both groups. results of a paired samples t-test are also included, comparing mean scores on children’s hope before and after participating in ocean therapy (n=152). there was a statistically significant increase in mean scores on the children’s hope scale (subscale and total mean scores) between pretest and posttest. figure 2. drawing and associated text of a 14year old, female participant, identifying as african american, with a history of trauma, emotional or behavioral problems, and child abuse or neglect who expressed experiencing all four program processes – opportunities for learning and fun, the expression of positive self-identity or self concept, safety, and social support and inclusion. figure 3. drawing from a 13-year old, female participant, identifying as african american, with a history of trauma and emotional or behavioral problems who expressed experiencing all four program processes – opportunities for learning and fun, the expression of positive self-identity or self concept, safety, and social support and inclusion. because the t-test was statistically significant, a one-way within-subjects anova was performed to test whether there was a difference in mean total scores on children’s hope before ocean therapy, after ocean therapy, and one-month after ocean therapy for the subsample of 50 participants. while two of the underlying assumptions (independent observations & multivariate normal distributions) for anova were met, the assumption of sphericity was violated, as indicated by munchy’s test of sphericity, and the greenhouse-geisser corrected value was used. the observed f value was statistically significant, f(1.6,49)=11.25, p=0.000, partial n2=.187, which indicated a positive difference in mean scores on the children’s hope scale observed between pre and post-test and sustained one-month after participation. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 table 3 mean scores and paired samples t-test on the children’s hope scale 2017 – 2018 sample (n=152) 2017 – 2018 subsample (n=50) pre ot post ot pre ot post ot 1-mo. m (sd) m (sd) t (151) p m (sd) m (sd) m (sd) agency subscale 12.9 (3.5) 13.9 (3.5) -5.67 0.000 11.1 (3.4) 12.8 (3.5) 12.6 (3.5) pathways subscales 12.8 (3.6) 13.5 (3.6) -3.56 0.001 11.4 (3.4) 12.7 (3.4) 12.5 (3.5) total 25.7 (6.6) 27.4 (6.8) -5.72 0.000 22.5 (6.1) 25.5 (6.4) 25.1 (6.5) note. ot = ocean therapy, 1-mo. = 1-month after, p = 95% confidence interval discussion the main hypothesis of this study, it is hypothesized that one of the benefits to participation in a one-day surf therapy program is a significant increase in hope, was supported by a statistically significant increase in hope between pre and post-test (n=152) and sustained one month after (n=50). the subsample of participants who were primarily latino and african-american experienced an average of 1.69 adverse experiences (i.e., trauma or child abuse or neglect) and/or personal challenges (i.e., emotional/behavioral problems, learning disability or educational difficulties, or substance/alcohol use/abuse). this subsample is representative of at-promise youth and the results are promising. participants of the jimmy miller memorial foundation’s (jmmf) one-day ocean therapy program included in this study experienced a significant increase in hope that lasted up to one month after participation. while a statistically significant increase in hope was observed between pretest and posttest and pretest and one-month follow-up, results do not imply cause due to the observational design of the study. elements of the jmmf ocean therapy program include talking circles, surf instruction and lunch, all of which include interactions with peers, volunteers, surf instructors, the program director and other program/partner organization staff. considering surf therapy programming varies greatly between programs and there are no standardized program process measures for surf therapy programs, study staff developed a method to assess program process. this method includes rating participants’ drawings and related text on their experience of the day administered immediately after returning from ocean therapy. drawings and related text serve as participants’ visual and text depictions of their experience of the day which serve to inform jmmf program process. the coding system provides criteria for raters to assess for program process indicators through participant selfexpressions in four areas safety, social support and inclusion, learning something new and having fun, self-identity or selfconcept. it is hypothesized that if participants express positive program process indicators through their drawings, they will be more likely to experience an increase in hope. contribution to the literature the current study is the first of its kind to evaluate a one-day surf therapy program for youth at-promise. observational studies have explored one-day surf therapy programs for adult populations and youth with disabilities but not youth at-promise. the current study builds upon previous research using hope as http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 an outcome measure for surf therapy. only one other study (snelling, 2015) examined hope as an outcome for surf therapy and did not find any significant differences between a control and surf therapy conditions. however, study methodologies, including a significantly longer period of time between preand posttests (i.e., same day and four weeks vs. 32 weeks) and a much longer surf therapy program may explain the difference in findings. perhaps differences in hope are more salient immediately following a session of surfing. additionally, there were no obstacles in the collection of follow-up data for the current study whereas snelling (2015) reported difficulties in obtaining follow-up data (35.6% drop-out rate). finally, the results of the current study are consistent with the findings of studies on three other programs reviewed in this paper that utilized an observational design and found statistically significant increases in one or more measures of wellbeing (e.g., increases in self-concept, emotional regulation, and social competencies) (taylor, 2013; colpus & taylor, 2014; godfrey, et al., 2015; hignett, et al., 2017; and, matos, et al., 2017). limitations of the current study while the results of this observational study indicate that therapeutic benefits (i.e., increase in hope) were achieved by youth atpromise through a one-day surf therapy program, causal attribution would require an experimental design. additionally, due to the observational design using a convenience sample, the generalizability of the results of this study to other groups is limited. and, given that three of the five partner organizations only included youth who were exhibiting prosocial behaviors, results of this study may have been skewed. future studies on one-day surf therapy programs should consider utilizing comparison or control groups if possible. given the limited funding for research among most surf therapy programs, utilizing non-equivalent comparison groups may be the most realistic starting point. it is unclear as to whether results obtained were related to a certain aspect of the program (i.e., surf instruction vs. talking circles) or the complete experience of the jmmf one-day ocean therapy program. a common factor among many surf therapy programs is the effect of surfing in relation to the effect of other programming directed toward promoting participant well-being. in the current study, talking circles served as a means for sharing and community building. talking circles were separate from the surf lessons and the roles of each alone are not well understood in their relationship to hope. a quasi-experimental design with intervention groups receiving surf lessons and talking circles or surf lessons only could address this issue. the outcome evaluation used the children’s hope scale which has been validated only with youth populations between the ages of 8 and 16, however, 5.3% (n= 8) of our sample was over the age of 16. additionally, two cases were removed from the subsample due to missing responses from the one month follow up hope scale. and, some participants participated during both years of data collection although none participated more than once a year. because the pretest and posttest were administered on the same day, immediately before and after surf therapy, it is less likely that maturation or history (i.e., two common threats to internal validity) impacted these results than with the onemonth follow-up data. yet, it is also more likely that data were impacted by practice effects – completing the hope scale twice in the same day. the process evaluation utilized a selfconstructed method that was informed by previous research and adapted to reflect the jmmf one-day ocean therapy program process. through rating participant drawings http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 on four program process indicators, raters generate numeric frequencies of unsolicited self-expression for each program process indicator. because the process of rating requires that raters interpret drawings and text, there is an increased risk that bias could impact the rating process. to reduce this risk, an additional rater was added as a judge to resolve discrepancies in ratings and an interrater reliability analysis was conducted and interpreted as having a strong level of reliability among raters. yet, there is no research evidence to support this method of process evaluation and it is likely that as long as programs include differing psychosocial interventions alongside surf lessons or surfing in surf therapy programs, a standardized process evaluation measure will be difficult to develop. conclusion results of this preliminary study suggest that surf therapy may be an effective intervention to increase hope among youth at-promise. participants experienced a statistically significant increase in hope after participation that was sustained one-month after participation in the jmmf one-day ocean therapy program. the observational single group pretest-posttest-follow-up research design serves an important program evaluation function in supporting program effectiveness, yet, is limited in identifying causal attributes and in generalizing results to other populations and settings. references armitano c., clapham, e.d., lamont, l. & audette, j. 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(2017). surfing for social integration: mental health and well-being promotion through surf therapy among institutionalized young people. journal of community med public health care, 4 (26), 1-6. doi: 10.24966/cmph-1978/100026. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.casala.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/casa-fact-sheet.pdf http://www.casala.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/casa-fact-sheet.pdf http://www.casala.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/casa-fact-sheet.pdf http://file.lacounty.gov/sdsinter/dmh/1029995_qievalreportcy2016.pdf http://file.lacounty.gov/sdsinter/dmh/1029995_qievalreportcy2016.pdf http://file.lacounty.gov/sdsinter/dmh/1029995_qievalreportcy2016.pdf global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 moore, a.m., clapham, e.d. & deeney, t.a. (2018). parents’ perspectives on surf therapy for children with disabilities. international journal of disability, development and education, 65(3), 304-317. doi: 10.1080/1034912x.2017.1400660 morgan, p. (2010). get up. stand up. riding to resilience on a surfboard. child and family social work, 15, 56-65. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2206.2009.00637.x. mueller, m. (2017). surf therapy for students with asd (unpublished doctoral dissertation). california state university, san marcos. piaget, j. (1964). cognitive development in children. journal of research in science teaching, 2, 176-186. pittsinger, r., kress, j., & crussermeyer, j. (2017). the effect of a single bout of surfing on exercise-induced affect (unpublished master’s thesis). department of kinesiology, california state university, long beach, ca, usa. rogers, c.m., mallinson, t., & peppers, d. 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(2015, june). obesity in california. los angeles, ca: ucla center for health policy research. doi: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2017.04.010. http://www.gjcpp.org/ giving community psychology away: a case for open access publishing crystal n. steltenpohl1, amy j. anderson2, and katherine m. daniels1 keywords: community psychology, open science, open access, collaboration author biographies: crystal n. steltenpohl, is an assistant professor of psychology and founder of the online technologies lab at the university of southern indiana. as a scholar, gamer, and participant in online worlds, her major research interests revolve around how we interact with various technologies, especially those that house online communities. she is particularly interested in understanding how technologies influence communities, the self, and health behaviors. amy j. anderson, is a doctoral candidate in community psychology at depaul university. her research focuses on positive youth development and educational equity. specifically, she is interested in the roles of identity and supportive adult relationships on youth educational experiences. in addition, she is interested in public policy solutions to increase educational access. katherine m. daniels, is an assistant professor of psychology at the university of southern indiana. her major research interests include animal cognition and student learning. she and dr. steltenpohl head an effort to create an open source video game that teaches high school and undergraduate students about research methods. corresponding author: correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to dr. crystal n. steltenpohl, liberal arts 3046, 8600 university boulevard, evansville, in 47712. e-mail: cnsteltenp@usi.edu recommended citation: steltenpohl, c., n., anderson, a., j., & daniels, k., m. (2019). giving community psychology away: a case for open access publishing. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(3), 1 14. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). 1 university of southern indiana 2 depaul university mailto:cstelten@usi.edu http://gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 giving community psychology away: a case for open access publishing abstract amidst increased pressure for transparency in science, researchers and community members are calling for open access to study stimuli and measures, data, and results. these arguments coincidentally align with calls within community psychology to find innovative ways to support communities and increase the prominence of our field. this paper aims to (1) define the current context for community psychologists in open access publishing, (2) illustrate the alignment between open access publishing and community psychology principles, and (3) demonstrate how to engage in open access publishing using community psychology values. currently, there are several facilitators (e.g. an increasing number of open access journals, the proliferation of blogs, and social media) and barriers (e.g. article processing charges (apcs), predatory journals) to publishing in open access venues. openly sharing our research findings aligns with our values of (1) citizen participation, (2) social justice, and (3) collaboration and community strengths. community psychologists desiring to engage in open access publishing can ask journals to waive apcs, publish pre-prints, use blogs and social media to share results, and push for systemic change in a publishing system that disenfranchises researchers, students, and community members. "i can imagine nothing we could do that would be more relevant to human welfare [...] than to discover how best to give psychology away." george a. miller (1969) concerns about research reproducibility in psychology span decades (vanpaemel, vermorgen, deriemaecker, & storms, 2015; wicherts, borsboom, kats, & molenaar, 2006). in recent years, however, there has been an increasing push toward open science, in part due to difficulties replicating popular studies (open science collaboration, 2015) and renewed concerns about questionable research practices (fiedler & schwarz, 2016; gelman & loken, 2014; john, loewenstein, & prelec, 2012; simmons, nelson, & simonsohn, 2011). while the "replication crisis" has focused its gaze largely on social psychology, there are reasons to believe these concerns apply to other subfields, for example clinical psychology and clinical neuropsychology (gelman & geurts, 2017; tackett et al., 2017); community psychologists often utilize theories from these and other disciplines in their own work. additionally, increased concerns about the lack of accessibility of research materials, including stimuli and measures, data, and results, have spurred conversations of what researchers can do to make science a more transparent and democratic process (fecher & friesike, 2014; grant-kels, 2017). community psychologists in particular have outlined the importance of sharing one’s results with the community with which they are working, especially as this practice relates to building trust with community members, ensuring high quality analyses, and promoting social justice values (barker & pistrang, 2005; christopher, watts, mccormick, & young, 2008; suarez-balcazar, harper, & lewis, 2005). existing conversations regarding open science are relevant to the practices and values within the field of community psychology, and the current paper seeks to expand community psychology’s engagement within this important debate. the term “open science” encompasses many practices, but we will focus on one practice in http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 particular: open access publishing, defined as access to research results free of charge and of most copyright and licensing restrictions (suber, 2010). this paper aims to (1) define the current context for community psychologists in open access publishing, (2) illustrate the alignment between open access publishing and community psychology principles, and (3) demonstrate how to engage in open access publishing using community psychology values. current context for community psychologists in open access publishing open access publishing has increased substantially since the expansion of the internet in the 1990s (laasko et al., 2011), wherein over 11,000 open access journals are currently available online (directory of open access journals, 2018). the degree to which these journals openly publish their contents, however, varies widely. for example, gold open access journals allow the most accessibility in which all articles are open access, whereas other journals may postpone open access by transitioning an article to open access over time (i.e. delayed open access) or by allowing authors to pay a fee to make an article open access (i.e. hybrid open access; cope & kalantzis, 2014). in september 2018, various national research funding organizations, the european commission, and the european research council announced plan s, which would require all scientific publications resulting from research funded by public grants to be published in open access journals (science europe, 2019). other funding agencies, like the national institutes of health (nih), have also mandated that articles published with federal funds be archived and publicly available (poltronieri, bravo, curti, ferri, & mancini, 2016), although in many cases, journal policies go directly against these mandates (van noorden, 2017). this initiative has dramatically impacted the biomedical field by contributing to disciplinewide movement toward open access (poltronieri, bravo, curti, ferri, & mancini, 2016). the existing landscape of open access publishing provides researchers, including community psychologists, with a promising path toward increasing accessibility of research findings. recently, community psychologists have called for our field to evaluate our efforts and create innovative strategies to improve our visibility and relevance (jimenez, sánchez, mcmahon, & viola, 2016). researchers who publish open access are more likely to have their work seen, which in turn increases the chances of someone actually reading and using our findings. for example, in an examination of citations in top ecology journals, tang, bever, & yu (2017) compared the change in citations over time of articles published in open access and non-open access journals. the findings indicated ecology articles with open access status saw an increase in citation of one citation per year (tang, bever, & yu, 2017). in a review, mckiernan and colleagues (2016) show psychology-related open access articles are more than twice as likely to be cited than those not published as open access. moreover, open access articles are more likely to be shared on social media, viewed and read online, and covered in the news. mckiernan and colleagues (2016) also highlight new funding opportunities for open research and discuss the possibility of improved career outcomes through increased opportunities for finding collaborators. indeed, the first author has found two largescale collaborative opportunities through twitter alone (lakens et al., 2018; moshontz et al., 2018). with open access, researchers can more easily find one another and collaborate, increasing the chances of the data we collect being used. the economic cost associated with access to non-open access journals can create unnecessary burdens to those in academia, akin to scientific gatekeeping. tenure and promotion are often contingent on scholarship, with researchers relying on their http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 home institutions’ libraries to access journals. subscriptions to these journals account for a large portion of the libraries’ budgets which places institutes with limited library funding at a severe disadvantage especially when the costs of journal access have continued to increase. to save on these costs, some universities have begun to cancel their journal subscriptions. for example, taiwan tech recently announced it would no longer subscribe to elsevier's sciencedirect due to increasing prices that eventually took up over 20% of the library's budget for electronic journal databases (huang, 2016). tactics like these may help to balance budgets, but they can make it more difficult for researchers to access necessary articles. in fact, researchers at underfunded universities may not even be able to access their own articles through their library databases. in some instances, interlibrary loan or paying membership fees to certain societies can defray these costs; if not, researchers must pay access fees themselves which may create barriers for those at underfunded universities. perhaps not coincidentally, libraries have been involved in creating their own open science initiatives (heckel, n.d.). regardless, current publishing practices appear to be unsustainable, and it is up to those wanting to share their research to decide how to proceed. the requirement to publish for tenure can create a burden on academics who are often inundated with email offers for journals looking to publish their research. these offers may be the result of another potential concern predatory journals (butler, 2013). the difficulty for these researchers is in differentiating between predatory and nonpredatory journals. predatory journals seek to make as much money off of unsuspecting researchers as quickly as possible. open access journals may require article publishing charges (apcs), which can make them appear to be money making ventures similar to predatory journals. however, these fees can be found in predatory journals, open access journals (e.g. plos one) and non-open access journals (e.g. pnas). additionally, for nonopen access journals, publishing charges may be required if authors wish to make their articles open access. there are some key differences between predatory and open access journals. open access journals have formal editorial boards whereas predatory journals may indicate they have editorial boards, but those may be in name only. the clearest difference between predatory and non-predatory journals is the use of a peer-review process. predatory journals fast track articles, provide little to no oversight, and can even allow plagiarism through in their goal of earning money. nonpredatory journals should provide a formal peer review process, though of course, sufficient peer review is not guaranteed. there are, however, ways to identify whether an open access publisher is predatory (beall, 2015). for example, if a journal offers a feebased “fast-track” service for getting peer reviewed, or if the journal does not identify a formal editorial board, it is likely a predatory journal. one way to check if a journal is predatory is to do a google search with the journal name and “scam” afterward, search for lists of predatory journals and publishers (for a historical and sometimes controversial list, see anonymous, n.d., for an archived version of beall’s list) or to search the directory of open access journal’s “white list” of publishers. in sum, promising opportunities, as well as legitimate barriers, exist within the current context scholarly publishing. community psychologists are positioned to navigate this diverse landscape. namely, the alignment of community psychology values and emphasis for systemic-level change facilitate the field’s ability to benefit from this new direction in scholarly publishing. how open science aligns with community psychology values as a field, community psychology is primarily concerned with improving the well-being of http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 individuals, communities, and societies through research and action. to achieve this overall goal, community psychology strives to fulfill core values to direct research and action (kloos, hill, thomas, wandersman, & dalton, 2012). three particular values provide support to open access publishing within the field: (1) citizen participation, (2) social justice, and (3) collaboration and community strengths. each will be discussed in turn. citizen participation community psychologists should consider open access publishing in relation to the values of citizen participation. specifically, citizen participation is a useful empowerment process in which individuals exert their power to influence decision-making process within their communities (prilleltensky, 2001; kloos, hill, thomas, wandersman, & dalton, 2012). open access is related to this value because access to information fosters individuals’ ability to engage meaningfully in democratic decision-making processes. moreover, citizen participation facilitates individuals’ ability to engage in decisionmaking across ecological levels, such as local and federal levels of government (rappaport, 1981). cost of access to non-open access sources can hinder not only scholarship and community engagement, but the educational experience of our students, who are and will continue to be members of their own communities. for those of us who are instructors, we should be presenting the latest findings whenever possible, rather than focusing solely on phenomena that have been contradicted by more recent findings. as with scholarship, instructors and students at underfunded universities would bear the heaviest burden of these costs. however, when these findings are in open access sources, such as the open science framework, github, or institutional repositories, instructors can provide students with the most recent developments. in accordance with apa guidelines for the undergraduate major 2.0 (american psychological association, 2016), students should develop scientific inquiry and critical thinking skills throughout their undergraduate career, resulting in many students being assigned papers requiring access to published empirical research, particularly in upper level courses. an individual researcher may decide to ultimately pay for access to an article to help their own scholarship, but these expectations are not extended to students. students are, instead, entirely dependent on university library funding to access non-open access databases and journals. this economic burden could result in scientific gatekeeping that ultimately impedes student learning for those at underfunded institutes. regardless if one is an academic, practitioner, or some mix of the two, access to research is an important step in actively engaging citizens, be they citizens of academic spheres or communities more broadly. engaging in open science practices aligns with many of our values as community psychologists, but we will specifically address how this practice aligns with our values of social justice and collaboration and community strengths. social justice community psychology’s focus on social justice emphasizes the equitable distribution of resources. specifically, the field endorses the critical examination of how resources and power (e.g., research knowledge) are allocated across groups in society. the core value of social justice underscore the present discrepancy of access to research journals between individuals who can afford costs of academic articles, whether it be through personal finances or connection to institutional resources, and those without economic access. emphasis on social justice in the field highlights the alignment between community psychology and open access, wherein community psychology values would support giving psychology away by giving everyone open, free access to the results of http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 our studies to provide distributive justice of research (kloos, hill, thomas, wandersman, & dalton, 2012). hiding our science behind paywalls keeps community psychology in the shadows. it disenfranchises anyone without connections to a university with enough money to access the thousands of journals in circulation. further, not sharing our results openly prevents community members not in contact with us from seeing the data they contributed to our studies or what we said about them. it prevents students, professors, and researchers from smaller universities and independent researchers, evaluators, and practitioners from accessing important theoretical and empirical articles, thereby reducing their ability to stay current on the literature. we cannot give psychology away if we lock it up and charge anywhere from $10 to $50 per article for access. yearly subscriptions to journals are even more expensive and place financial burdens on both individuals and institutions. one effort to strengthen the alignment between community psychology values and equitable access to knowledge has been the development of an open access community psychology textbook (jason, glanstman, o’brien, & ramian, 2019). the introductory textbook aims to reduce costs for students and community members who want to learn about community psychology research and practice. in this example, and in research generally, open access alleviates the financial barriers to accessing academic literature. collaboration and community strengths another guiding principle of community psychology involves actively collaborating with researchers, practitioners, and community members (society for community research and action, n.d.). community partners desire working with researchers who share their data and results, as well as control over the project (ferman & hill, 2004; minkler, 2004; rotheram-borus, rebchook, kelly, adams, & neumann, 2000). a variety of stakeholders are beginning to require open access to the results of our studies. for those of us funded by government grants like those from the national science foundation or national institutes of health, one could argue taxpayers have the right to see the results of research they paid for (suber, 2003). in fact, funders, professional organizations, and journals have begun their own initiatives to support open access practices (center for open science, 2015; national institutes of health, n.d.). engaging in open science practices may be one way we can improve our own professional standing and grow the field of community psychology. further, open access publishing may be a mechanism through which community psychologists can employ their values in everyday practice. given the field’s emphasis on empirical grounding, social justice, and collaboration and community strengths, community psychologists may be well suited to implement strategies to engage in open access publishing. how to engage in open access publishing practices there are several ways to engage in open access publishing practices, each with their own benefits and drawbacks. researchers can publish their articles as open access in traditional journals or in open access journals, share preand post-prints online, put pressure on editorial boards and our institutions to support open access practices and policies, and consider alternative forms of research finding dissemination. despite benefits and diverse options for open access publishing, there are barriers to this mode of research dissemination. many publishers levy an "article publishing charge" (apc) to publish an article as open access. paying this apc will allow the article to be immediately available--for free--upon publication. as mentioned earlier, plan s will require all articles to be published in fully http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 open access journals. according to their 10 principles (science europe, 2019), funders and universities are expected to pay these apcs, which has been controversial. plan s is pressing for these fees to be standardized and capped, although it is worth noting that it also restricts authors from publishing under hybrid publishing schemes, where journals may have some open access articles (usually paid for through apcs) and closed access articles (where apcs are not applied). apcs can be quite prohibitive, especially for students, community members, and those without grants. elsevier (n.d.) currently charges anywhere from $500-$5,000 per article; these prices are based upon factors like the journal's impact factor, market conditions, and the journal's other revenue streams. lest anyone think elsevier is the only one to charge these amounts, wiley (n.d.) currently charges $1,000-$5,000 per article, except for one journal, which charges $50 per publishing unit (number of words/500 + number of figures + number of tables; a 7,000-word manuscript with two tables and two figures would cost $900). similarly, springer (n.d.) charges $3000 per article and taylor & francis (n.d.) appears to charge between $750-$2,950 (note that some cells in the cited spreadsheet refer viewers to the journal’s author instructions). these prices are often before taxes or vat. it may also be worth noting that journals that use this model are double dipping: they get to charge authors/institutions to publish open access, but libraries and institutions are not getting discounts on their subscription rates based on how many articles are published open access, and therefore should be “free” (brown, 2015). another consideration for the apcs is the divergent ways in which the funding model influences researchers globally (sotudeh & ghasempour, 2018). namely, apcs can disproproately hinder researchers in developing countries because of apcs are more costly relative to their countries income (solmon & bjork, 2005). this problem can result in researchers from lower income countries more often using personal funds to pay for apcs compared to authors in higher income countries (solomon & bjork, 2012). if the apc model is maintained, one possible solution is to revise the model to accommodate for differences between countries (e.g., country development, university budget; sotudeh & ghasempour, 2018). future evaluation into the global effects of apcs is needed and community psychologists’ emphasis on ecological differences may benefit this exploration. what is a community psychologist who wants their manuscript to be published as open access to do? if researchers are committed to publishing in a particular journal (perhaps it is the flagship journal of our field, and we need tenure at a university whose administration focuses on impact factors), we can ask the journal to waive the cost, although it is unclear how often this is successful, and there is the potential for this to be an alienating process for researchers from under-resourced institutions, who may be hesitant to ask for waivers more than once and be judged for it. lawson (2015) provided a review of fee waiver policies and found that 22 of the 32 publishers included in the review had an explicit fee waiver policy. of those publishers with waiver policies, however, 36% reserved fee waivers for researchers from lowand middle-income countries. moreover, the review reflects the presence of a waiver policy and not necessarily the actual disbursement of funds. this suggests uncertainty about this route and more research is needed on availability of waivers. an alternative route to fee waivers is for those with grants can request funders cover the cost, though it is unclear how many funders are supportive of such requests. institutions with large endowments or financial resources may be willing to shore up the money, although obviously few--if any-institutions can afford for all of their researchers to do this. some institutions have agreements allowing for free open access http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 publication, although this often appears to be limited to certain journals (technische universiteit eindhoven, n.d.). if those avenues fail, the cost is often on the researcher. it is important to note apcs can be charged by both non-open access and open access journals. typically, non-open access journals may charge apcs so that individual articles can be made available free of charge (presumably to make up for lost revenue for not charging people to read it), but not for publication of the article in and of itself. researchers can often publish in these journals for free, given they are not asking for open access. open access journals, which are not often subsidized by a professional organization, may charge apcs for publication of an article. this practice has been criticized, as it has the potential to influence editorial decisions (brown, 2015). as noted above, it is unclear how many grant and other research-funding institutions are willing to pay for a journal article to be published in an open access format. there are some journals that do not charge apcs to publish open access, though choosing to only publish in these journals may unreasonably limit where someone can publish in at this moment. if researchers cannot afford the apc for open access, but still want to publish in a top journal, it is possible to publish in the journal of your choice without open access and archive a free copy elsewhere. self-archiving is the process of uploading a free copy of some version (usually what you submitted to a journal or the draft before the paper is edited and formatted for final publication). self-archiving in an archive like psyarxiv (https://psyarxiv.com/) or one’s personal or lab website is beneficial as it allows anyone to access your work, regardless of university affiliation. there is also sometimes confusion among members of the public over whether researchers charge those asking for a copy of the article; self-archiving takes the guesswork out of this process by not creating an environment where someone has to 1) know they can ask authors for a copy of the article and 2) feel comfortable doing so. many of the above-referenced benefits to open access, including increased visibility, also apply here. because self-archiving might go against journal copyright regulations, it is recommended to look up a journal's archiving policy first (sherpa, n.d.). some journals allow you to archive a post-print (the final draft before publication) or the publisher's version of the manuscript. some journals only allow researchers to publish a pre-print (the version of the article before it went to copyeditors). many journals who allow postprints do not allow them to be posted before a certain embargo date, usually a year or two after publication. sometimes, the author cannot archive the publisher's version of the manuscript. it is important to understand journals’ policies before engaging in this process. when in doubt, email the editor for guidance. in the meantime, in alignment with our value of promoting systemic change, community psychologists can implore the editorial boards of journals in our field to allow authors to publish their work as open access without prohibitive fees, and to be more transparent about where apc funds go, as some journals have (the regents of the university of california, n.d.). further, community psychologists can refuse to publish in journals that do not adequately support open science. for example, approximately 60 major german research institutions recently refused to publish in response to, as they put it, elsevier's rejection of "more transparent business models that are based on the publication service and would make publications more easily accessible" (göttingen state and university library, n.d.). this is community psychology at work: stakeholders in a community (in this case, academic communities) engage in collective action in an attempt to enact change in a system. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://psyarxiv.com/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 in addition to the guides mentioned above, there are several avenues to get involved in open science practices. for example, there are several active and high-quality groups on social media, including on facebook (e.g. psychmap, n.d.), where researchers share resources and provide support and consultation on open science practices. the center for open science also offers several training services, including workshops and webinars (n.d.). we can start small, integrating open science practices--like open access publishing--in our own labs and inviting other researchers to the table. we can have conversations with the leadership of our professional organizations, like the society for community research and action, asking them how we can promote open access--and open science more broadly--as an organization. regardless of one’s path as an academic author, it is important to disseminate research with community partners and the public at large. for some researchers, this may include making videos, engaging on social media, or blogging about their research and the research process (etz, n.d.; jason, n.d.; lakens, n.d.; steltenpohl, n.d.). websites run by community psychologists have also been used as an avenue to freely disseminate research findings to large audiences of researchers, practitioners and community members. for example, the chronicle of evidence-based mentoring (rhodes, 2018) aims to facilitate conversations among stakeholder groups invested in mentoring practices. the chronicle achieves increased access to evidence-based mentoring resources by publishing summaries of recent mentoring research and disseminating a monthly digest through their online platform (rhodes, 2018). similarly, the society for community research and action has also created a public-facing website, communitypsychology.com, which allows researchers to share their thoughts on research, practice, and theory, meaning researchers do not have to host and maintain their own website, while still disseminating their research. as discussed above, engaging community members and "academic twitter" can increase our reach and engagement. communicating with the public is an increasingly important responsibility for scientists and utilizing a mixture of social media outreach and open access publishing can meet both our academic needs regarding publication and our commitment to creating a healthy feedback loop with our community partners. it is important to use services that are free and remain free, however. for example, academia.edu is a popular “open access” website for archiving one’s work and connecting with other researchers; however, in recent years, there has been backlash against the website as it has begun to charge for increased visibility and premium search features like being able to search within the full text of documents (bond, 2017). one might wonder if work is really open access if you have to pay $99 a year to be able to search its contents or find other people who do similar research. conclusion the present paper defined the current context for community psychologists in open access publishing, illustrated the alignment between open access publishing and community psychology principles, and demonstrated how to engage in open access practices and encourage system-level change. technological and social advances have made it easier to share our work with others, but some systemic barriers still exist. however, there are ways around these barriers, including publishing only in non-predatory open access journals, disseminating research online, and challenging existing publishing structures. open access publishing provides several benefits for community psychologists, including the possibility of increasing our field's reach and influence. it enables us to be http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 more transparent and collaborate more easily, regardless of where our collaborators are in the world. more importantly, open access publishing aligns with our values of giving community psychology away, promoting equitable distribution of resources, which is a particularly meaningful contribution to progress for students and researchers not flush with institutional resources. references american psychological association. 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2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 colour between the lines: self-determination and the creation of settings as resistance to structural violence rama p. agung-igusti1 and christopher c. sonn1 in collaboration with colour between the lines keywords: self-determination, african diaspora, racial justice, home-places, community-engaged author biographies: rama agung-igusti (he/him) is a phd student at victoria university on the lands of the wurundjeri people of the kulin nation in naarm (melbourne), australia. his research interests include ways individuals and communities respond to and resist racialisation and structural racisms, how identity and belonging is negotiated in the context of australia as a settler colonial nation, and ways creative practices are mobilised for social change and the radical imagining of new ways of being and doing. christopher c. sonn, phd, is professor at victoria university, melbourne, australia on the land of the wurundjeri of the kulin nation. he is a fellow of the institute of health and sport and teaches in the applied psychology programme in the college of health and biomedicine. his research is concerned with understanding and changing dynamics of oppression and resistance, examining structural violence such as racism, and its effects on social identities, intergroup relations and belonging. he holds a visiting professorship at the university of the witwatersrand, south africa. he is co-editor of creating inclusive knowledges and co-author of social psychology and everyday life, and associate editor of the american journal of community psychology and community psychology in global perspective. anyuop dau is an artist facilitator & multidisciplinary creative practitioner ranging in film, handcrafting & creative directing 1 institute of health and sport, victoria university http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 in styling. anyuop is also a lead facilitator in the cohealth arts generator program sisters & brothers which is a program that works with young primary school students to deliver workshops on race-based discrimination using art forms of dance, acting & songwriting. anyuop believes in the power of words to transform people and also gains pleasure from working with intergenerational communities. ez eldin deng is a south sudanese film and music video director, producer, and writer. he has directed and produced numerous music videos, which have reached millions of views in total on youtube. deng first arrived in melbourne, australia in 2004 with his family and to this day, melbourne is still his home as he continues to break new grounds within the australian film and television industry. he currently also works as an assessment trainer at pulse studio in geelong. ruth nyaruot ruach is a south-sudanese multidisciplinary artist, who uses art to heal, explore her surroundings and create comfort within her blackness. ruth's art explores the experiences of being an african of the diaspora although she is strongly influenced by, decolonising language, tone and the cultivation of shared perspectives in place of assimilation. geskeva komba is a creative humanitarian of comorian and tanzanian heritage. raised in the western suburbs of melbourne she has experience combined in community development, theatre, spoken word as well as music. geskeva continues to work in spaces that combine critical thinking, art and community. nyakeer akoul is an artist who loves to support broader community members to participate and take action on social justice issues. nyakeer facilitates multidisciplinary artistic workshops which support platforms for marginalised voices and takes action around mental health, race-based discrimination, family violence and more. recommended citation: agung-igusti, r.p., sonn, c.c., dau, a., deng, e.e., komba, g., akoul, n., & ruach, r.n. (2021). colour between the lines: selfdetermination and the creation of settings as resistance to structural violence. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(2), 1 19. retrieved day/month/year, (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: rama p. agung-igusti, institute of health and sport, victoria university, melbourne, australia. email: rama.agung-igusti@vu.edu.au http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:rama.agung-igusti@vu.edu.au global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 colour between the lines: self-determination and the creation of settings as resistance to structural violence for many people from communities of the african diaspora in australia, raced-based discrimination through mechanisms of structural violence frames day to day lived experiences. yet, while racialised and other forms of structural violence pervade the lives of black people and other marginalised groups, individuals and communities also resist and survive every day. resistance and struggles for survival are evident in the creation of alternative settings that are important for affirming culture and histories, and for providing opportunities for a sense of community, consciousness raising, and constructing new and alternative narratives to those that pervade dominant cultural contexts. the focus of this paper is to examine the formation of a self-determined alternative setting within the broader context of race relations in naarm/birraranga (melbourne). a secondary focus of this paper is to describe community engaged ways of working that were engendered by the setting, as university-based researchers collaborated with a collective of creative practitioners to document the project. the alternative setting examined is called colour between the lines, a self-determined initiative comprising a collective of five creative practitioners from the african diaspora. we describe the emergence of cbtl as an enactment of racial justice through the self-determined activity that has emerged from a group of people who individually and collectively continue to be subjected to racialised structural violence. we suggest that cbtl can be understood as an alternative setting that further engenders important forms of resistance and community making, and that is shaped and constrained by social power relations. thus, we argue the need as communitybased researchers to work with and within communities, engaging in critical and collaborative forms of anti-racist and decolonial praxis to support the creation of such settings. author note: colour between the lines is a collective of five creative practitioners consisting of anyuop dau, ez eldin deng, geskeva komba, nyakeer akuol and ruth nyaruot ruach (https://www.nextincolour.com/about), this paper was written in collaboration with the collective. the recent global protests against antiblack racism, racisms and deaths in custody, police brutality, and the recentering of black lives matter has brought again to the forefront the continuities of racialised oppression in contemporary times. wilderson (2019) noted that violence saturates the lives of black people: “violence spreads its tendrils across the body, chokes the community, and expands, intensifies, and mutates into newer and ever more grotesques forms …” (p. 217). for many people from communities of the african diaspora in australia, raced-based discrimination through mechanisms of structural violence, frames day to day lived experiences. structural violence refers to “the production, maintenance, and reproduction of social inequalities and oppressions. the concept refers to social systems, as well as mechanisms through which they produce and normalise marginalisation, exclusion and exploitation (dutta et al., 2016, p. 1-2). yet, while racialised and other forms of structural violence pervade the lives of black people and other marginalised groups, individuals and communities also resist and survive http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.nextincolour.com/about global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 every day. resistance and struggles for survival are evident in the creation of alternative settings that are important for affirming culture and histories, and for providing opportunities for a sense of community, consciousness raising, and constructing new and alternative narratives to those that pervade dominant cultural contexts (rappaport, 1995; sarason, 1972; sonn & fisher, 1998). alternative settings are “radically different ways of perceiving, enacting, and experiencing…basic relationships and life activities…it is a protest, a reaction, an attempt to find a better way, a rejection” (cherniss & deegan, 2000, p. 360), and in some ways, sites for infrapolitics, a politics from below (scott, 1990). many scholars and activists in critical community psychology have signaled the importance of these settings and advocate for research and action to be oriented towards disrupting oppression and to be engaged in the everyday struggles, reimagining and contributing to pathways for self-determination (coimbra, et al., 2012; seedat, suffla, & christie, 2017). the focus of this paper is to examine the formation of a self-determined alternative setting within the broader context of race relations in naarm/birraranga2 (melbourne). a secondary focus of this paper is to describe community engaged ways of working that were engendered by the setting, as university-based researchers collaborated with a collective of creative practitioners to document the project. the alternative setting examined is called colour between the lines, a self-determined initiative comprising a collective of five creative practitioners3 (see table 1) from the african diaspora, each of whom bring their biographies, experiences, and varied cultural heritage to shape the vision and mission of the setting, conscious of the fact 2 these are wurundjeri and boon wurrung names for the area around port phillip bay and for the area of melbourne. 3 the collective is currently comprised of [anyuop dau, ez eldin deng, ruth nyaruot that african migrants occupy a unique position in australia. whiteness, racialisation and violence in australia raced-based discrimination is an enduring facet of day-today life for many groups in australia. for these groups race is applied as a meaningful marker of social difference that informs inequitable relations of power and systematic forms of violence (stevens, 2014), this is a process of racialisation that both constrains subjectivity and constructs new racialised subjects (stevens et al., 2017). racialisation can occur through harmful dominant group narratives propagated through news media as well as in political rhetoric that perpetuates misrecognition and legitimates forms of structural exclusion that deny people access to opportunities and resources required to construct healthy selves and communities (kwansah-aidoo & mapedzahama, 2018; han & budarick, 2018; windle, 2008). the link between the impact of these stigmatising and pervasive dominant narratives and adverse outcomes for the communities targeted have been well documented (see e.g., mansouri, elias & sweid, 2017; markus, 2016) with deleterious effects on individual well-being and the opportunities available for both individuals and communities (paradies et al., 2015; priest et al., 2013). this is further compounded by what some have described as hegemonic and normative “whiteness” that preserves ways of knowing, being and doing (green, sonn & matsebula, 2007). in the australian context racism rooted in eurocentrism normalizes and privilege traits associated with whiteness (hage, 1998). hence whiteness refers to the dominance and normativity of eurocentric ways of being, doing and knowing the world – in short, the ideology of white supremacy ruach, geskeva komba and nyakeer akuol. however, at its conception the collective also included tiyami amum whose insights are also presented in this paper. the collective members have also chosen to be identified in the text. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 (moreton-robinson, 2015). however, many people from the african diaspora, as well as other communities who bear the brunt of racialised structural violence do resist and survive everyday through the active creation of settings. these settings are safe family and community spaces, and also arise through the construction of selfdetermined culturally anchored activities through they can affirm histories and cultural heritage and also challenge table 1: cbtl collective members anyuop dau an artist facilitator & multidisciplinary creative practitioner ranging in film, handcrafting & creative directing in styling. anyuop is also a lead facilitator in the cohealth arts generator program sisters & brothers which is a program that works with young primary school students to deliver workshops on race-based discrimination using art forms of dance, acting & songwriting. anyuop believes in the power of words to transform people and also gains pleasure from working with intergenerational communities. ez eldin deng a south sudanese film and music video director, producer, and writer. he has directed and produced numerous music videos, which have reached millions of views in total on youtube. deng first arrived in melbourne, australia in 2004 with his family and to this day, melbourne is still his home as he continues to break new grounds within the australian film and television industry. he currently also works as an assessment trainer at pulse studio in geelong. ruth nyaruot ruach a south-sudanese multidisciplinary artist, who uses art to heal, explore her surroundings and create comfort within her blackness. ruth's art explores the experiences of being an african of the diaspora although she is strongly influenced by, decolonising language, tone and the cultivation of shared perspectives in place of assimilation. geskeva komba a creative humanitarian of comorian and tanzanian heritage. raised in the western suburbs of melbourne she has experience combined in community development, theatre, spoken word as well as music. geskeva continues to work in spaces that combine critical thinking, art and community. nyakeer akuol an artist who loves to support broader community members to participate and take action on social justice issues. nyakeer facilitates multidisciplinary artistic workshops which support platforms for marginalised voices and takes action around mental health, race-based discrimination, family violence and more. misrecognition and claim the right to belonging, and fair and just treatment (sonn, baker, & agung-igusti, in press). racism and its concomitant racialising forces are shrouded in complexities and continues to change across time and place (stevens, 2018). the language and discourses of racism, its supporting ideologies, have all proven transitory as it takes different shapes and attaches itself to different shared understandings of the world (bonilla-silva, 2014). yet, this does not foreclose on our capacity to seek and enact change, and racism in its complexity, must be addressed at multiple levels and in multiple ways. critical scholar activists have argued, social change requires the involvement from and needs to be rooted in the experiences of those affected by oppressive systems in pursuit of liberation, community and wellbeing (lykes, 2013; watts & serranogarcia, 2003). in pursuing approaches that desire to build change we must then seek to foster and sustain the creation of alternative http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 spaces and support the mobilisation of communities facing racialisation and violence in deeply meaningful ways. the development of cbtl we argue is an example of a grass roots initiative that seeks to produce racial justice through the creation of self-determined alternative settings. in these settings people develop strategies to tackle racism and create and affirm cultural and community narratives that provide positive resources for identity, belonging and wellbeing. the emergence of cbtl: selfdetermination and racial justice the cbtl project is a proactive response to interconnected forms of racialised structural violence and is grounded in the lived experiences of the collective members and broader racialised communities of the african diaspora in melbourne. the initiative was an outcome of strategic planning that drew on community engagement approaches through a framework focused on social determinants of health, within a public health context. the initiative had emerged through years of work that had mobilised community arts for racial justice, through the arts generator, a participatory arts space that seeks to build connections within and across communities, supporting the development of positive social identities and increasing wellbeing and agency through participatory arts practice. at the heart of arts generator’s approach is focus on relationality and community building that brings diverse young people together through creative practices and a desire for equity and social justice (cohealth, n.d.). the arts generator is situated within cohealth, a community health organisation that focuses on reducing health inequities for those who experience marginalisation and stigma. cohealth’s approach is premised on working in partnership with communities and is underpinned by a model that envisions the interlinkages between caring for individuals, communities and society more broadly (cohealth, 2018). this entails awareness and capacity building projects to support community members in civic participation and advocacy efforts, as well supporting efforts to influence policy change at the level of government and various service design and delivery organisations. thus, the arts generator was an important avenue through which cohealth could address social determinants of health, such as race based discrimination. cbtl presents: next in colour the genesis of cbtl can be traced back through relationships emerging through many of the projects that developed out of the arts generator. the initiative is situated within the collective knowledges that each of the creative practitioners involved have brought to the project: from their communities; from the work they have done and continue to do, whether within the creative arts, community development or elsewhere; from their experiences of being of african heritage in australia; from their engagement with decolonial understandings and approaches to inform what they do. many of its members had facilitated or developed projects and programs through arts generator and had been brought together by the organisation’s former program coordinator to extend this work but in a more self-determining way. in the following paragraphs cbtl write together to describe their intentions for the next in colour project. creating our world. through the next in colour project we want to create a world for creatives to find a safe place to live in and to give an opportunity to build close connections with other artists and groups in our local and wider community. we want to shape a road map that builds a strong foundation that is clear for the younger generation to continue to be their own leaders and empower their own generation. we want to advocate for the rights of individuals within our community and for the wellbeing of our community, to empower them by making a positive change. we want to do this by providing a space that acknowledges the traditional http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 owners of the land and that operates in multiple ways, ensuring accessibility for all people. storytelling is one of the ways that gives everyone the opportunity to explore their ideas, and storytelling through art is a way that a narrative can be created. changing the narrative. creative practices have power that can shape and create the narrative for our people. through the exchange of cultural knowledge. through combating persistent negative media representations of african youth by providing other young people with our own positive stories that are written, directed and produced by people of colour. changing the narrative is about taking autonomy back and re-writing the stories from our experiences and perspectives, instead of assimilating into a narrative that has been told by people who are not from our communities. it is not just about mere representation but about creating a narrative that is embodied in our everyday practice. configuring brave spaces. our intention is to also create brave spaces to engage with people and the structures they work in to make change. being a part of the cbtl collective has been an opportunity to learn the process of running a creative initiative and working with community and government organisations. these processes are not always easy as we as a collective have been met with major challenges in configuring our space to the means of what we set our values and morals to be. using our own agency was and is important to the work we do and how we wanted to enable ourselves. this self-determination is paired with our own individual beliefs and values but has also manifested as our groups core principles to how we work: respect, wellbeing, communication and passion. we believe in a reflexive practice whereby what we share as our values we want to bring forward as part of the actioning in what work we do, how we work and why we work. co-researching with cbtl as community-engaged praxis as university-based researchers we (rama and christopher) have sought ways to support the justice and action-oriented works of the communities we are embedded in, finding opportunities to shift resources and opportunities from institutional university settings to alternative settings engaged in the work of resistance and creation. this has involved the development of enduring relationships with a community of creative practitioners from the african diaspora, from which cbtl emerged, across differing and evolving creative and emancipatory projects. this relationship has taken both formal and informal shapes, from which material supports and critical friendships have emerged. as university-based researchers, this has also meant shaping our own ways of working to reflect the alternative settings that members of this community have created. values, reflexive practice, and ways of working that support self-determination are central to the cbtl project and must underpin the work of documenting the project and the research context. our approach of community-engaged praxis seeks to honour these desires and resonates with calls across various fields including critical community and liberation psychology for focussed social change and equity (coimbra, et al., 2012; evans et al., 2017; kagan et al., 2019; sonn, stevens, & duncan, 2013). community-engaged praxis is informed by a range of methodological approaches and epistemological projects, such as community based, participatory, and action research. community-engaged praxis draws from critical race, feminist and indigenous scholarship, and centers reflexivity, collaboration and care in research, evaluation, and action, embodied in the relationships formed and the troubling of researcher/researched dynamics (sonn & quayle, 2013; sonn et al., 2013). this praxis entails a rejection of damage-centered research that leverages pain and suffering to effect social change, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 perpetuating constructions of vulnerability and dysfunctionality that serves to disempower (tuck, 2009). this is further underpinned by a goal of epistemic justice, which seeks to privilege lived experience and knowledge and support marginalised communities, as knowers of important frameworks through which they can understand their social worlds and validate a sense of self (fricker, 2013). this goal of epistemic justice further involves an intention of unsettling what knowledge is valued, and consideration of how knowledge and knowledge production can be democratised so that various communities’ histories and cultures can be nurtured, valued and strengthened (stevens, et al., 2013). this is particularly important given the evidence of strong links between positive cultural identities, experiences of inclusion, and links to psychosocial indicators of wellbeing (renshaw, 2019; vichealth, 2005). therefore, expanding opportunities for cultural and self-determination can enact epistemic justice, which in turn can contribute to the health and wellbeing of people and communities. through our long-term collaboration university-based researchers have created a community of praxis with cbtl, carving out meaningful and respectful ways to gather information to inform action. this collaboration has involved engaging in deep, meaningful and respectful relationship building with the group to ensure that we were able to design data collection strategies that are sensitive, appropriate and reflect the values of the collective. ongoing discussions with the collective from the beginning of the project were held to conceptualise what they saw as important to be documented in the project: processes of self-determined knowledge and community-making, and how intersecting structures of racism, sexism, ableism are navigated. some examples of these processes of collaborative decision making are captured in how data collection tools were developed and also how information was analysed and thematised. drafting schedules and questionnaires to capture reflections on people engaging with the outputs of their project occurred with the collective who drew on shared epistemic resources which provide important knowledge to guide what questions should be asked, and how. for example, some members of the collective raised that discussion of accessibility in the creative industries was often framed solely by disability, prompting a discussion around accessibility of racialised communities into white spaces, and the intersections of both. these were ongoing conversations, and these spaces further enabled a dialogical process that informed our analysis. together we have devised methods to document the ways cbtl have navigated various settings and institutions and the ideologies of race and whiteness that circulate in these that inform everyday interactions, relationships, subjectivities, and possibilities for action. hence, a vital part of the critical project of creating alternative settings is to document and make visible the dynamics of race and whiteness, that is, the circuits of privilege, that shaped the collective towards an enactment of racial justice through selfdetermination (weis & fine, 2012). experiences of everyday racism persists despite discourses and practices of inclusion and valuing diversity that is expressed in policy and organisational values. thus, the need remains to hold fast and deconstruct the elusory and furtive flows of racism. through close analysis of interviews with the collective, important personal stories and collective narratives were identified, which show the many ways the work of cbtl is grounded in individual and community experiences. narratives create meaning and make sense of our complex social worlds (bruner, 1990), shaping social identities and understandings, and thus constituting powerful cultural resources (rappaport, 1995). narratives are also an important site for examining the workings of power and resistance and various ways http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 race and other structures are reproduced through discursive, symbolic, and material means (ladson-billings, 2002). the narratives shared by cbtl members clarifies how the initiative is a response to structural violence such as racism and racialisation as well as the enactment of hope and desire for safe and healing spaces for community making. analysing stories: forms of violence, resistance, and liberation through the analysis of narrative, individual and community experiences are contextualised through the cultural resources which are drawn on. in documenting the narratives shared by the collective members, the setting they have created can be situated within the lived realities of structural violence faced by themselves and their communities within the australian context, as well as the forms of knowledge they have collected navigating previous settings. further, it is from these experiences that powerful forms of counterstorytelling can emerge. thus through these narratives the collective name racism as structural violence, detailing the specific ways this is experienced and manifesting culturally and materially with psychosocial consequences. it is this meaning-making that necessitates the need to respond to violence and allows resistance strategies to cohere. for cbtl these resistance strategies entail the creation of alternative settings, home-places and healing spaces, for themselves and their communities to ‘declutter’. it is from these settings, that cbtl are able to engage the decolonial actions of counter storytelling, authentic visibility and building solidarities, and together to radically reimagine relationships and ways of working. the next section draws from interview data to illustrate the interconnected processes and practices of structural violence and politics of resistance. naming structural violence: “... they feel like they're going to be judged” for the collective structural violence was acutely felt by both them and their communities through particular expressions of racism that worked to vilify, inferiorise and commodify black people. firstly, stereotyping and forms of everyday racialisation work to vilify through the construction of people of african descent as, criminal or deficit: ...cause a lot of the times, what i see is the youth, they feel uncomfortable to reach out to white spaces because they don't feel like they're wanted or they feel like they're going to be judged before they approach. it's like there's all this talent in the community but they don't know what to do with it because, they've been already looked at like, "you're criminal. you do this and you do that. (anyuop dau) the devaluation of cultural, intellectual or creative products and identities, inferiorise as particular ways of being in the world are constructed as lesser than or signal deficit: …when it comes to being around people who aren't from your community, you have to change yourself…. you've got to speak a certain way. if you speak and people don't understand you, you're automatically seen as unknowledgeable. having to ensure that you are educated and you know what you're doing around the people you're with so that you're not categorized as something you're not. (nyakeer akuol) such devaluation of social identities places a burden of labour on racialised individuals and communities as these representations are navigated and challenged (kwansahaidoo & mapedzahama, 2018). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 “blackness” can also become commodification as individuals of african descent are rendered objects, and their “blackness” consumed. in doing so white norms are upheld through “the othering of constructed black culture and identities” and applications of white ideals to black bodies” (nguyen & anthony, 2014, p. 771). through the lens of whiteness, black cultural products and identity are defined and assigned value. in the context of the creative industries, this can manifest in how creative works are made niche, or constrained to particular content that serves to construct “blackness” in particular ways: there's a lot of space that exists for people of colour to just be. however, those spaces are so poisoned nowadays because you go to an art gallery or you go to an event where people can overly consume you as an artist or overly consume me as a person because they have their own connotations of who you are or they have their own ideologies of who you are. sometimes that imagery does not fit you. (ruth nyaruot ruach) this often occurs in a context of “white” organisations that seek to maintain control of spaces and filter diverse ethnic and cultural identities and experiences through the lens of whiteness: there's not a lot of places that cater to black bodies and black people. it's always, we're under the ice grip of whiteness, and to be able to have a space where [people in our community] feel comfortable and that no one's looking down on them or they're being controlled by an organization or an individual in order for them to do what they need. (anyuop dau) this form of racist structural violence, whilst different to the vilifying discourses of criminality and deficit, depicts the experience of being black under a controlling gaze, “looking through … a lens of you”. the controlling gaze works towards limiting the ways individuals can identify or represent themselves. often such forms of structural violence can be seen as celebratory or employed within discourses of diversity and multiculturalism. these discourses reduce “blackness” or “africanness” to overdetermined categories that still maintain “otherness” and constrain people within dominant group narratives (kwansah-aidoo & mapedzahama, 2018). structural violence works to exclude racialised people from equitable access to important resources and opportunities through acts of interpersonal and institutional racism, both overt and covert: a lot of the times when we wanted to go use a space, they would kind of agree and it would be great over the phone, it would be great over email, and it's a totally different story in person. that's just kind of like, well, the only thing that's different now is that you've got a chance to see me, and you're just like, "it's a bunch of black kids. i don't know if we can really count on having you." (tiyami amum) there also is an added cost for racialised individuals and communities who must navigate structural violence conveyed in narratives and stories about the capacity of racialised people. this cost is the emotional labour involved in resisting misrecognition and misrepresentation and asserting complex identities and telling complex stories (evans & moore, 2015). this is an everyday form of labour that is produced by an everyday form of racism. emotional labour, like “burn out” as an example, takes a deep psychosocial toll as individuals navigate racism: there's also a lot of stolen time in having to explain my blackness and having to explain why that's the thing that i have to explain, and then http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 having to explain why that's the thing that you should stop doing to me. that's a lot of stolen time, a lot of stolen energy when i could be expressing something so much more. (tiyami amum) this product of structural violence frames interactions and relationships and is often unseen and unaccounted for. thus, it is important that it is recognised and understood when examining how racialised individuals and communities both respond to structural violence, but also form relationships and interact with individuals and organisations across contexts. home places, healing spaces: “our own space is like you can just declutter there” for cbtl, an important way to respond to structural violence is the creation of alternative settings through the activation of a physical space from which projects and the collective can be based, but also that is both for and shaped by community. whilst many of the events and workshops cbtl have undertaken, can and have been located within other spaces both physical and digital, having a physical space is an integral part of self-determination and the creation of home-places that allow criticality, healing, the fostering of relationships and cultural safety. such a space allows for the maximisation of resources. it connects communities. it is imbued in its own symbolic meaning, of home place, of autonomy. if you don't have a home, you're considered homeless. we need a space to call a home for us to be free. get up, have breakfast, and also we have family without a judgement. you could do what you needed to do, as long as you've got respect and you've got a vision. then in that home, you can go anywhere, but you're going to come back and share your stories with the family. you're not generating any negative impact. you're just building a relation. (ez eldin deng) importantly, such a space would be selfdetermined, free from the overdetermining and racialising gaze of whiteness, manifest through individuals and organisations. such as gaze constrains agency and seeks to shape representation within the parameters of dominant narratives, thus enacting specific forms of epistemic violence that creates unsafe spaces. on the one hand, for many creative artists from racialised communities, systemic inequities have constrained their ability to find spaces at all within which they can create and produce. on the other hand, when there are spaces made available it is often on the terms of others which can discourage collective and community forms of working and wrests away control over the creative and subjective representations of artists. such a space would also serve an important role beyond moves towards structural inclusion within the creative industries, or simply gaining autonomy over representation. watkins and shulman (2008) speak of building communities of resistance, and extending on the writing of bell hooks (1990), fostering public homeplaces through cultural work. such spaces are counterspaces that engender humane relationships and networks that seek to enact collective care and healing, form a sense of community, as well as engage in positive meaning-making relating to self, community, and imagined futures beyond the frames of dominant systems. it allows for processes of collective remembering, across communities, and across generations (case & hunter, 2012). as noted by one of the participants, such spaces make it possible to create the conditions to be vulnerable, to be reflective and to decolonise one’s own “psychic space”, a space within individual’s minds that enables “creativity, play, symbolisation and meaning-making, as well as the on the growth processes that rely on these functions to take place” (rapoport, 2014, p. 1533). this psychic space can be subject to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 colonisation as racialised bodies and minds absorb the meanings and products of a society shaped by racism (oliver, 2004). creating a space or allowing a space to be created collectively by community is so important because it's not only operated and run by a collective of people that understand the language of being marginalised and the importance of having a space to just be, it's like we're creating a sense of home. we're creating a space where you can be vulnerable and where you can deconstruct stuff for yourself. (ruth nyaruot ruach) whilst there are many opportunities to develop projects, whether workshops or performances, that access and utilise existing spaces, these spaces are both temporary and dependent on other organisations and institutions. it is not to say that important meaning making does not occur in such spaces, or that it prevents collective forms of healing, or the flourishing of networks. it is an impermanence that is linked to wider patterns of structural inequity and devaluing of social identities. it is an impermanence that solidifies the power of white institutions as arbiters of control and access and upholds this arrangement through ongoing processes of misrecognition. thus, the possibility of selfdetermined space, shows the cracks in this logic and reasserts a control over self and communities. to be able to have this space and then allow people to really thrive and create how they feel like they should be creating … for us to be able to support that, foster that, empower and encourage that, and then see what comes out of that. it would then speak for itself. (tiyami amum) counter storytelling, authentic visibility and building solidarities: “we're not these kind of people that you see on the news all the time” from these nurturing and relational spaces, and through these ways of working, cbtl can create and surface powerful counterstories to the damaging and harmful narratives that denigrate africans in australia. counter stories are the obscured stories that emerge from those people and communities who experience oppression and marginalisation, they are challenges and responses to damaging dominant modes of understanding circulated within a society (delgado, 1989). counter stories as a form of self-representation are an important way for racialised communities to resist structural violence. they can be thought of as resistance stories that fight the negative representations of the dominant society and the inequitable systems they uphold (bell, 2010). it also creates resources for people within those communities to construct identities and understandings of the world, drawing on their own experience and knowledge grounded in community and cultural histories. for me, they can be able to learn what we do and not just see us from a lens of negativity or what the media shows them and being like, "these people are actually like grinding out here." they want spaces, they want to do better and we're just, we're not these kind of people that you see on the news all the time, but we're trying to create change for our community and trying to better ourselves for the next generation… (anyuop dau) self-determination is central to efforts of self-representation, and the project itself, is: it was an important thing because it was about our representation, but also visibility, authentic visibility. also, it's about having autonomy http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 and self-determination over the work that we do and how we deliver it. (geskeva komba) to be autonomous and able to selfdetermine, enables communities to develop their own resources and opportunities, to develop projects and programs that actually meet their needs, and to privilege knowledges and ways of being and doing grounded in community histories and experiences (rappaport, 1995). whilst a project such as cbtl may realise autonomy and self-determination, it still exists within the context of the creative industries or social delivery sectors, and the various organisations within these spaces. there are various interactions and relationships that must be navigated, and for cbtl, this means conceptualising how partnerships and collaborations can occur, and providing opportunities for organisations to reflect on and learn from their interactions with various communities. within organizations, the changes that would definitely be made is the way that the african diaspora, the indigenous community and people of colour are being seen. there'll definitely be a conversation on the ways that we work together or the ways that we have delivered a project or ways that these organizations could work better in being aware, being culturally aware in their platforms or in their organizations. (nyakeer akuol) counter-stories are deployed within these important settings where structural violence is experienced, seeking to transform relationships and ways of working in these contexts. the project also seeks to build solidarities with other racialised and marginalised communities. structural exclusion for marginalised communities translates to a scarcity of resources and opportunities, creating an environment of competition. for many of these communities there are similar sets of racialised experiences perpetrated by the same structural mechanisms. all of us, indigenous community, pasifika communities, we are all looked at from the same lens, from the white perspective. to be able to have that connection with them and being like, "hey, you're doing this and we're doing that, let's collab." cause if we don't help each other, no one else is going to help us. we have to work through these spaces so that we can give our own communities the same benefits. (anyuop dau) in fostering these solidarities, engaging in cultural sharing and understanding, and connecting shared experiences within the australian settler colonial context, exclusionary structures can be better challenged and shifted, and new narratives created. radical reimagining of relationships and ways of working: “it's understanding our identity first, collectively” key aspects of the cbtl project is deconstructing taken for granted ways of being and doing, and ultimately creating a framework through which future generations can self-determine and access important resources and opportunities. to work towards these goals, internal and external relationships and processes are equally important. the collective has had to conceptualise ways of relating with each other, other organisations, partners and collaborators, and various communities. the collective has also had to consider how the organisational practices and processes they develop, define these relationships, reflect their values and form a basis for their broader goals. for this the collective engage a radical imagination from which they are working and imagining from a different set of ethics and principles to the settings they are responding to. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 with the cbtl project, the collective members have had an opportunity to draw on their experiences with and within various organisations and projects to deconstruct their approaches to the work they are doing. this includes structure, how they’ve constructed their roles within the project, and particularly a commitment to non-hierarchical ways of organising. it also includes their internal practices and processes, how they make decisions, how they communicate, take and hold accountability, learn and grow, and share successes and failures. this praxis emerges from radical decolonial reimaginings that asserts humanity and recentres relationality, we all agreed that to move forward and to develop community, we have to use a practice that is so healing and is so connected to ourselves, and connected to our souls. i think that change is not changing the exterior, but also changing the internal... ifeel like cbtl we have our intentions, we have our values, we have the structure, how we want it to look like but it's always changing because we're individually growing. we'll bring in different things and different perspectives. (ruth nyaruot ruach) for the collective, this change needs to be grounded in a core set of shared values that guide and frame the intention behind these important decisions. however, importantly, there is also an ongoing commitment to reflection and learning. as the members of cbtl grow individually and collectively, there is an openness to draw on new experiences to re-think and re-imagine their approaches to doing this work. yet, whilst the collective has much agency in shaping these aspects of the project, there are some important contexts which also impact decisions around structure, process and practices. cbtl, are not apart from, but rather are a part of the communities of the african diaspora. thus, the histories and knowledge from these communities have also played a part in shaping the project. a central goal of cbtl is to, as one collective member tells, “[build] a constructive map that we will leave to our young generation to follow”. the project aims to create a foundation, and resources that younger generations can then access, and not having to face many of the challenges that are experienced currently. this goal is also dependent on the sustainability of the project beyond the lifespan of a single grant, or within cycles of grant applications. at this point, it's just a learning process and creating events and workshops that will have people come in and offer their opportunities and to learn more things so that those people can take what they've learned and build something for themselves or within their own community or within their own space. (anyuop dau) this goal is also premised on building capacities of young people to become part of cbtl, taking it further, or extending opportunities to other areas and communities. in this way cbtl, is less about the collective which currently constitutes it but rather how this collective can create a framework and praxes for communities of the african diaspora to self-determine. the practices and processes cbtl develop also shape the relationships and interactions they have with various communities and organisations, for myself, i think that being true to the values of self-determination, transparency, intersectionality. then communicating those values to people or an organization that we would be collaborating with that they believe that they… share those values. (geskeva komba) by ensuring that partnerships and collaborations are grounded in shared values, and centring this within relationship http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 building, there are opportunities for organisations and individuals to reflect on their own practices and processes. this focus on values, works towards creating culturally safe spaces and collaborations, but also raises broader questions and considerations about working alongside and within various communities. within building these relationships with various organisations, there are also opportunities for more structured learning and change processes. the collective members position cbtl as embedded within communities of the african diaspora but also as point of contact between different groups and organisations. the project has been envisioned as building networks and facilitating new and stronger relationships, recognising and supporting the resources and opportunities that currently exist. this creates an important condition of dialogue between the collective and communities of the african diaspora, in shaping the project’s outputs and approaches. however, this communitybased relationship building seeks to enhance how resources and opportunities are made accessible. this collaborative approach can also maximise resources and lead to new opportunities being created. discussion in this article, we described the emergence of cbtl as an enactment of racial justice through the self-determined activity that has emerged from a group of people who individually and collectively continue to be subjected to structural violence. we suggested that cbtl can be understood as an alternative setting that further engenders important forms of resistance and community making, and that is shaped and constrained by social power relations. the work alongside the initiative to date has further provided new insights about the delicate task of crafting research practice at the university-community interface. while we have taken guidance from the long tradition of community based and participatory action research, our activity has further blurred the boundaries between research and practice and researcher and researched opening up a dialogue that makes possible mutual and co-constructed processes of meaning making. through various methods we have documented the stories of struggle for racial justice by this group within and across settings. many settings which racialised communities and individuals encounter replicate structures and symbols of white supremacy. the creation of new and alternative settings creates a safe and healing space for these communities and individuals, but also fosters radical approaches towards working toward racial justice and creates powerful counterstories. sarason (1972), noted two key insights for the success of a setting. that what precedes the creation of a setting, the contexts from which it emerged from, those who supported and constrained it, and the sparks which gave the very idea of the setting life, play an immense role in the success of the setting. secondly, that setting success is further dependent on external relations with other settings it engages with (cherniss, 2012). whilst alternative settings offer some reprieve from oppressive structures, they must still engage with those same structures and exist within a broader oppressive social context. thus, documenting the formation of cbtl as a setting, the values they hold, their ways of working and relating, and the narratives which sit at the centre of their initiative, provides us important insights into the dynamics of oppression and resistance. by using the notion of structural violence, we were able to explicate how racialisation was enacted in everyday language to maintain privilege while marginalising people with emotional and psychological cost. structural violence is expressed and manifest through the vilification, inferiorisation and commodification of “blackness” and black people constraining self-determination over stories, histories and identities. a product of these expressions of structural violence is http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 emotional labour, which continues to structure the experiences and relationships of individuals within racialised communities. structural violence is also met with resistance and desire. the formation of cbtl is resistant and emancipatory action. critical scholars have long shown the benefits and functions of homeplaces (hooks, 1990) and alternative settings in the lives of oppressed communities. it is in these settings that people are able to come together to imagine alternative ways, affirm community cultures and histories, provide mutual support, and craft alternative visions. these alternative settings can be conceived as relational healing spaces grounded in collectively held values of care, recognition, reciprocity. important, both cbtl and the spaces they create continue to exist within contexts of race and coloniality, and so the products of re-imagining and pre-figuration reach back out through counterstories and authentic forms of visibility, that seek to form solidarities and broader practices and ways of relating within the creative industries. furthermore, these insights can shape our ways of working within critical community psychology. as we align ourselves in the struggles for liberation and racial justice, we should always seek to be grounded in the ways justice is imagined by those who have been racialised and marginalised. our capacities for supporting and enacting change lies in the relationship of trust we nurture through dialogue. ratele and malherbe (2020) call for an anti-racist psychology in which, the point, instead, is to realise one’s own agency (i.e., become one’s own foundation) through rejecting habitual iterations of racism, asserting the dignity of the racially oppressed within the everyday, and altering racist culture so that we might transform racist structures (cooper & ratele, 2018, p. 3). this call is a commitment to criticality in our reflexive practice across all domains of everyday life. it is also a call to relationship and accountability in line with the assertion that decoloniality is a collective project that builds from below and entails a radical transformation of knowledge, the aesthetic and a commitment to action (maldonadotorres, 2016). what radical possibilities lie in our relationships, in our partnerships and collaborations, in our ways of working and walking alongside? thus, racial justice must be born through radical imagination, both an act of world-making and worldimagining. these potentialities not only configure the creation 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(2008). the racialisation of african youth in australia. social identities, 14(5), 553-566. http://www.gjcpp.org/ kymberly byrd1, inés palmarin2, roxann mcneish3, connie walker-egea3, yusuf ali4, marcos beleche5, and renée boynton-jarrett 6’7 author biographies: kymberly byrd, third year phd student in the community research and action program at vanderbilt university. her research examines social entrepreneurship as a pathway to economic opportunity. her research focuses on three areas: 1) social enterprise and entrepreneurship combatting post-incarceration unemployment and underemployment; 2) social enterprises providing wraparound services to their employees; and 3) not-for-profit social enterprises that utilize market-based strategies to support the financial sustainability of their organizations. prior to vanderbilt, she served as project manager at vital village network. inés palmarin, serves as the senior community development analyst at federal reserve bank of boston. prior to joining the regional and community outreach team, inés worked as the senior program officer for resilient communities, resilient families for lisc boston. she spent over a decade as a senior planner/project director for the boston redevelopment authority, where she managed the fairmount indigo planning initiative and worked on numerous neighborhood planning initiatives. roxann mcneish, research assistant professor in the department of child and family studies at the university of south florida. dr. mcneish has experience conducting qualitative and mixed methods research. her current work includes being the principal investigator of a national community-based initiative to promote mental health wellbeing of boys and men and evaluating the samhsa funded system of care expansion in florida. connie walker-egea, senior social and behavioral researcher at the university of south florida. she has conducted program evaluation and research in a variety of settings and with different populations. she has considerable experience with data collection and analysis using quantitative and qualitative methods and designing surveys and research instruments. yusuf ali, grew up and has worked professionally in the communities of dorchester, roxbury and mattapan over the last 8 years. yusuf graduated with a bachelor’s of science in business administration from florida 1 vaderbilt university 2 federal reserve bank of boston 3 university of south florida 4 community of dorchester 5 four corners main street program 6 boston medical center 7 boston university school of medicine an action research collaboration to promote mental wellbeing among men of color global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 a&m university in 2008. yusuf is passionate about holistic healthy lifestyles and has focused his work towards empowering and providing families & individuals with resources in the areas of access to wealth, food access, and civic engagement. marcos beleche, executive director of the four corners main street program in dorchester, massachusetts, where he leads an economic development and placemaking agenda grounded in equity and inclusion, to support small businesses owned by immigrants and people of color. raised in a farmworker family, his community organizing began early on with farmand canneryworker struggles in california. marcos is an avid gardener who values its restorative power as an opportunity to also embrace and validate his cultural food traditions. he currently serves on the board of directors of the dorchester food coop and the dudley street neighborhood initiative. renée boynton-jarrett, a pediatrician and social epidemiologist, is an associate professor at boston medical center and boston university school of medicine. she is the founding director of the vital village network. vital village uses a trauma-informed lens to improve community capacity to promote child wellbeing in boston and support coalitions nationally through the now forum. her scholarship has focused on early-life adversities as life course social determinants of health. corresponding author: kymberly byrd, community research and action, vaderbilt university. email: kymberly.l.byrd@vanderbilt.edu. recommended citation: byrd, k., palmarin, i., mcneish, r., walker-egea, c., ali, y., beleche, m., & boynton-jarrett, r. (2019). an action research collaboration to promote mental wellbeing among men of color. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(3), 1-12. retrieved day/month/year from, (http://gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:kymberly.l.byrd@vanderbilt.edu http://gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 an action research collaboration to promote mental wellbeing among men of color abstract background: action research seeks to affect social change by prioritizing partnership and participation. this approach fosters the equitable engagement of marginalized populations in research. in boston, the marginalization of men of color has resulted in inequitable outcomes in education, employment, health, and other indicators of wellbeing. objectives: a boston-based coalition of community organizations was tasked with developing an action plan to promote mental wellbeing among men of color. the coalition engaged in action research to identify the individual, organizational, and community-level factors that contribute to mental wellbeing. methods: the coalition collected 174 surveys and facilitated focus groups with 55 men. the planning process created valuable opportunities for relationship building and partnership development. lessons learned: the planning process reinforced the importance of proactive community engagement, continuous capacity building, inclusive data collection, and cross-sector collaboration. conclusions: centering lived experience resulted in community-driven, culturally sensitive solutions to promote mental wellbeing among men of color. background action research is an approach to knowledge creation that seeks to effect social change (bradbury-huang, 2010). unlike conventional research, it emphasizes equitable partnerships and meaningful participation. action researchers develop partnerships and foster participation by establishing mutually beneficial relationships with their population of focus and prioritizing their involvement in all stages of the research process (bradbury-huang, 2010). action research is often used to engage marginalized populations whose experiences are poorly understood by mainstream society (fenge, 2010; pollner & rosenfeld, 2000). it seeks to expand the definition of valid knowledge and asserts that research drawing on lived experience can be as valuable as other forms of systematic inquiry (glasby & beresford, 2006). furthermore, action research can facilitate empowerment processes for marginalized individuals by granting them control over the knowledge creation process and ensuring that any data that is collected and disseminated accurately portrays their lived experiences (ross et al., 2005). in the city of boston, one population experiencing social exclusion is men of color. over half (52%) of black men and 21% of latino men in the city reside in roxbury, dorchester, and mattapan, neighborhoods that have experienced unequal access to affordable housing, high-quality education, employment opportunities, and other social determinants of health (united states census bureau, 2016; boston public health commission, 2015). this has resulted in inequitable outcomes for black and latino men in education, employment, health, and other indicators of wellbeing. fewer men ages 25-64 in roxbury, dorchester, and mattapan have obtained college degrees than men elsewhere in the city of boston (united states census bureau, 2016). the unemployment rate for black and latino men in these three neighborhoods is higher than the unemployment rate for white men in the city of boston (united states census bureau, 2016). men of color also report experiencing higher rates of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 physical ailments. one-third (33%) of black and latino men who reside in these three neighborhoods mentioned above report experiencing 15 or more days of impaired functioning due to anxiety, sadness, or stress each month (boston public health commission, 2015). these men are also disproportionately targeted by law enforcement and experience disproportionate rates of incarceration (american civil liberties union of massachusetts, 2014; forman, van der lugt, & golberg, 2016). with its emphasis on social change, action research provides a platform to engage black and latino men in identifying strategies to address these complex, interconnected issues. the partnership in 2009, local initiatives support corporation (lisc) boston began the resilient communities/resilient families initiative (rc/rf), investing in comprehensive community building efforts in roxbury with nuestra comunidad development corporation, dorchester with codman square neighborhood development corporation, and action for boston community development/mattapan united. with lisc boston’s support, these organizations spent 7 years identifying their communities’ needs and implementing comprehensive solutions. with traction at the neighborhood level and shared priorities for community development, this coalition of organizations shifted its focus to improving outcomes for men of color. since male staff of color represented the three neighborhood sites on the coalition, this shift created leadership opportunities for these men while responding to an unmet need in the city. with its expanded focus, the coalition strategically partnered with boston medical center (bmc) vital village network to develop grant proposals. bmc vital village network aims to build community capacity to optimize community wellbeing through cross-sector collaborations and civic engagement. this work gained momentum in 2015 when boston lisc was awarded a prevention institute grant requiring the development of an action plan to improve mental wellbeing among men of color. this grant was part of making connections for mental health and wellbeing for men and boys, a national initiative funded by the movember foundation. for the action plan, the coalition decided to focus on men of color ages 25-55 in response to an unmet need. most organizations in the city were either targeting men under 25 or over 55. the grant’s focus on mental wellbeing created a need and provided an opportunity to partner with organizations with this expertise. in 2016, bmc vital village network began to oversee research and evaluation and health resources in action (hria) was invited to facilitate the action planning process. hria aims to improve population health through prevention, health promotion, policy, and research. the coalition identified a male staff of color from hria with several years of community engagement experience to lead the planning process. committed to developing a community-driven, culturally sensitive action plan, the coalition engaged in action research to identify the individual, organizational, and community-level factors that contribute to mental wellbeing. developing the action plan: prioritizing partnership and participation though the three neighborhood sites had been collaborating with lisc boston for 7 years, information sharing and relationship building were the first priorities for the coalition. during the monthly meetings, the coalition participated in activities exploring challenges and opportunities that exist for men of color in their focus neighborhoods. early on, each organization was tasked with identifying their needs and assets and how the other neighborhood sites could supplement any gaps in programming. as a coalition seeking to enhance existing resources and not duplicate efforts, these activities were essential to the success and sustainability of the action plan. these meetings were critical for relationship building and created opportunities for cross-site collaboration to address mental wellbeing. developing a community-driven, culturally sensitive action plan required action research that would capture lived experience and shift knowledge creation opportunities to men of color. interested in both qualitative and quantitative data, the coalition decided on a survey (appendix a) and a focus group (appendix b) for data collection and spent several http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 meetings deliberating on the structure and format of each. bmc vital village network obtained approval from the boston university medical campus institutional review board and began engaging a group of men involved in the bmc vital village network to develop survey questions. during this process, one man commented on the deficit-laden narratives of men of color in society. he was eager to see more data that reflected men’s strengths and suggested that we begin the survey with the question, “what makes you great?” this question was the first of three open-ended survey questions that focused on assets. the coalition then developed the remainder of the survey, which captured information on demographics, sources of stress, and utilization of community resources. the sites stressed the importance of a brief survey that did not feel overwhelming. a total of 174 surveys were collected from male residents of the three neighborhoods at a variety of community events. the staff from the neighborhood sites recruited survey respondents at community conversations, health fairs, basketball tournaments, and other locations. when reflecting on the focus group design, the coalition wanted to identify an innovative way to generate meaningful conversations on mental wellbeing. there were concerns that a traditional focus group on a sensitive topic among a group of strangers could feel intrusive and uncomfortable. therefore, the coalition decided to incorporate film into the focus group to universalize the challenges experienced by many men of color. they also designed focus group questions sensitive to the complexity of mental health among men of color. each focus group opened with clips of a documentary examining how toxic masculinity impacts society. several men remarked that the documentary closely mirrored their personal experiences and felt affirmed seeing stories similar to their own conveyed on film. they were also elated to be participating in a conversation on a topic so infrequently discussed. without prompting, the men began suggesting additional community spaces to show the film and offered to assist with future events. bmc vital village network provided support at each focus group, but the conversations were facilitated by men of color from the neighborhood sites. five men participated in the focus group facilitated by one staff member from nuestra comunidad development corporation and 10 men participated in the focus group facilitated by two staff members from codman square neighborhood development corporation. two staff members from mattapan united hosted a larger community discussion on the topic. after showing clips from the film, the men separated into groups to discuss the focus group questions. over 40 men attended the mattapan united event. the focus groups were audio recorded and a staff member from bmc vital village network was responsible for notetaking. the research and evaluation team from bmc vital village transcribed the focus groups and reviewed the transcripts to identify recurring themes. the recurring themes from the focus groups centered around individuality, vulnerability, loneliness, socialization patterns, self-defeating behavior, and lack of social support. developing a sustainable action plan also required detailed information on existing resources. this included resources at the neighborhood sites and other community organizations that provided services tailored to men. it was important for the action plan to highlight existing efforts and illustrate how the comprehensive strategies would enhance their work. the aim was to work in collaboration with existing community efforts, not to create competition. another critical component of the action plan was the identification of community champions, who are men of color leading efforts to improve their neighborhoods. the coalition identified neighborhood religious leaders, mental health providers, educators, community organizers, and other men with a demonstrated commitment to serving their community. twenty-five community champions were identified during the planning process across the three neighborhoods. several of them participated in the focus groups, completed surveys, and provided feedback on the action plan. though the coalition is representative of the population of focus, community champion involvement was essential to an action plan created by and designed for the community. the coalition then compiled data from the coalition meetings, surveys, focus groups, and community champion feedback to create the action plan. to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 synthesize the survey and focus group data, the research and evaluation team prepared a powerpoint presentation with charts, graphs, and tables of the survey data and a document that outlined the recurring themes and representative quotes from the focus groups. the coalition explored trends and patterns in the survey and focus group data to develop the action plan. the goals of the action plan are outlined in table 1. by implementing this plan, the coalition aims to increase hope among men of color ages 25-55 in roxbury, dorchester, and mattapan. this will be achieved through the provision of table 1 action plan resources and services pertaining to financial stability, anti-displacement advocacy, and mental wellbeing. though the grant focused specifically on mental wellbeing, achieving this aim required a comprehensive strategy that capitalized on existing resources and available expertise. a few months after the conclusion of the planning process, the coalition was awarded additional funding from the movember foundation via the prevention institute to implement the action plan. action plan goals mental wellbeing facilitate conversation to destigmatize mental health service. forge partnerships with community health centers to increase access to mental health services. facilitate conversations on mental wellbeing in established community spaces (e.g. barbershops, churches). host regular community conversations with law enforcement to develop strategies that address police related tensions. highlight the impact of systemic racism on mental wellbeing in the activities mentioned above. financial stability provide education on financial wellness, savings, estate building, college savings plans, and other financial stability resources. expand entrepreneurship opportunities by recruiting men of color into existing entrepreneur programs. address the impact of systemic racism on financial stability by advocating for policy changes in child support, tax increment financing, and other areas. anti-displacement advocacy provide education on tenant rights, homeownership, foreclosure prevention, and other anti-displacement resources. address the impact of systemic racism on displacement by advocating for policy changes in criminal offender record information (cori)-determinate housing, affordable housing, and other areas. increase affordable housing units. highlight the impact of systemic racism on housing. the coalition felt it was important to brand the strategies described in the action plan and at the conclusion of the planning process decided on the name male engagement network (men): making connections. the mission of men: making connections is to build pathways to success for men of color by focusing attention and resources on the social stressors that obstruct their potential. men: making connections seeks to create a safe space where men of color can come together to receive and give support, to learn and to teach, to heal and be healed. the network will be an empowering space where men are not just service recipients, but also providers responsible for their own and each other’s betterment. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 lessons learned proactive male engagement the neighborhood sites had not previously focused on male engagement or mental wellbeing. an opportunity to build relationships with men in the community prior to beginning data collection would have enhanced the action planning process. some of the sites did not have an existing base of men to engage and established relationships could have increased participation in the survey and focus groups. training on research methods a training on collecting surveys and facilitating focus groups would have benefitted the neighborhood sites. many staff at the sites were newer to research and needed time to become acclimated to both activities. this training could have included strategies for engaging survey respondents and tips for effective group facilitation. the sites had two months to collect the survey, recruit for the focus group, and facilitate the focus group. the short timeline created limited opportunities to provide feedback to improve these processes. participating in a training would have enhanced the data collection process and improved future research and evaluation efforts for the neighborhood sites. clearer expectations for community champions a broad scope of work for the community champions would have been helpful. the neighborhood sites were not clear on how the community champions could contribute to the action plan and more guidance was needed on how to best incorporate them into the planning phase. the coalition could have identified specific tasks for each community champion based on their personal or professional affiliation. for example, a religious leader could have distributed surveys to his congregation and a mental health provider could have assisted with focus group facilitation. the community champions were eager to deepen their relationships with men in the community and more structure could have supported this process. increasing their visibility heightens the impact of their work, which contributes to the success of the network. identifying existing resources the importance of identifying existing resources to incorporate into the action plan cannot be overstated. the coalition was adamant about creating a sustainable action plan with attainable goals, a strategy that also increased the visibility of existing work. the neighborhood sites became more aware of the variety of available resources while completing the action plan and can now better engage men with diverse needs. empowering, engaging data collection methods the uniquely designed survey and focus group empowered individuals on both sides of the data collection process. the participatory crafting of the survey created a meaningful opportunity for respondents to reflect on their assets. the inclusion of film in the focus group created a space of safety and belonging. the enthusiastic response to the survey and focus group reinforced the need for men of color to design strategies to address mental wellbeing. the men from the neighborhood sites challenged the coalition to develop a more comprehensive definition of mental wellbeing. this holistic understanding resulted in innovative data collection methods where men were eager to explore a deeply stigmatized topic. contextualizing the data during several coalition meetings, the neighborhood sites were invited to share their own interpretations of the data. though most of these conversations formed the substance of the action plan, the coalition also had more informal, less task-oriented conversations about the data. as organizations focused on housing and financial opportunity, these conversations illuminated the clear intersections between their work and mental wellbeing. they also solidified the need for a cross-sector approach to address these issues. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 conclusion equitable partnership was prioritized during the planning process. though the coalition employed traditional data collection methods, men of color meaningfully participated in the planning process by creating the questions, facilitating the conversations, interpreting the findings, and generating solutions. as the coalition implements the action plan, the community champions will ensure the strategies are responsive to their needs of men in their neighborhoods. these processes empower men whose experiences are frequently ignored and whose voices are often silenced. centering the lived experiences of marginalized, excluded individuals can generate an abundance of community-driven strategies to promote mental wellbeing among men of color. acknowledgments the authors wish to thank juan carlos canales, jason boyd, jarred johnson, mo barbosa, david kapaon, and jasmin johansen for their outstanding leadership and tireless dedication and during the action planning process. this work was made possible by generous funding from the movember foundation and the doris duke charitable foundation. the views expressed in this paper are not necessarily endorsed by these organizations. references american civil liberties union of massachusetts. (2014). stop and frisk report summary. retrieved from https://www.aclum.org/sites/default/files/ wp-content/uploads/2015/06/reports black-brown-and-targeted-summary.pdf boston public health commission. (2015). health of boston 2014-2015. retrieved from http://www.bphc.org/healthdata/health-of boston-report/documents/hob-2014 2015/fullreport_hob_2014-2015.pdf bradbury-huang, h. (2010). what is good action research? why the resurgent interest? action research, 8(1), 93-109. fenge, l. (2010). striving towards inclusive research: an example of participatory action research with older lesbians and gay men. the british journal of social work, 40(3), 878-894. forman, b., van der lugt, l., & golberg, b. (2016). the geography of incarceration: the cost and consequences of high incarceration rates in vulnerable city neighborhoods. retrieved from https://massinc.org/wp content/uploads/2016/11/the-geography of-incarceration.pdf glasby, j., & beresford, p. (2006). who knows best? evidence-based practice and the service user contribution. critical social policy, 26(1), 268 284. pollner, m., & rosenfeld, d. (2000). the cross culturing work of gay and lesbian elderly. advances in life course research, 5, 99-117. ross, f., donovan, s., brearley, s., victor, c., cottee, m., crowther, p., & clark, e. (2005). involving older people in research: methodological issues. health & social care in the community, 13(3), 268-275. united states census bureau. (2016). american community survey [data file]. available from https://www.census.gov/programs surveys/acs/news/data releases/2015/release.html http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.aclum.org/sites/default/files/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/reports-black-brown-and-targeted-summary.pdf https://www.aclum.org/sites/default/files/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/reports-black-brown-and-targeted-summary.pdf https://www.aclum.org/sites/default/files/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/reports-black-brown-and-targeted-summary.pdf http://www.bphc.org/healthdata/health-of-boston-report/documents/hob-2014-2015/fullreport_hob_2014-2015.pdf http://www.bphc.org/healthdata/health-of-boston-report/documents/hob-2014-2015/fullreport_hob_2014-2015.pdf http://www.bphc.org/healthdata/health-of-boston-report/documents/hob-2014-2015/fullreport_hob_2014-2015.pdf https://massinc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/the-geography-of-incarceration.pdf https://massinc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/the-geography-of-incarceration.pdf https://massinc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/the-geography-of-incarceration.pdf https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/news/data-releases/2015/release.html https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/news/data-releases/2015/release.html https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/news/data-releases/2015/release.html global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 what makes you great? appendix a survey instrument _________________________________________________________________________________________________ list three words that describe your role as a man in society. ________________________________ ________________________________ _______________________________ list three things in your community (people, places, organizations, activities) that contribute the most to your health. health is defined as physical, mental, and social wellbeing. ________________________________ ________________________________ _______________________________ what places, programs, or people in your community contribute to your physical, mental, and social wellbeing? please endorse how much these resources contribute to your wellbeing. the following contribute to my wellbeing: not at all very little somewhat to a great extent health center/clinic group or program (name: ) place of worship (church, mosque, synagogue) sports or fitness activity, program, or team other (please list): other (please list): other (please list): if you needed support with any of the following, please respond whether or not you would seek help and where you would seek help. would you seek help? if yes, from where? yes no friends family community organization government agency other (please list): housing financial assistance finding a job education and training http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 in general, how is your health? would you say it is… ☐ excellent ☐ very good ☐ good ☐ fair ☐ poor do you see a doctor on a regular basis for check-ups? ☐ yes ☐ no do you have health insurance? ☐ yes ☐ no how stressful are each of the following? please check one box in each row. does not apply to me not at all stressful slightly stressful somewhat stressful extremely stressful finding affordable housing finding a job managing my finances completing my education getting medical care dealing with police or the court system raising my child(ren) getting along with my family interacting with neighbors what is your age? (in years) __ __ which of these categories best describes your racial/ethnic identity? check all that apply. ☐ african-american ☐ african national/caribbean islander ☐ haitian ☐ hispanic or latino ☐ cape verdean ☐ white (non-hispanic) ☐ asian ☐ multi-racial ☐ middle eastern ☐ native hawaiian/pacific islander ☐ native american or alaskan native ☐ other what is your zip code? __ __ __ __ __ were you born in the united states? ☐ yes ☐ no  if no, how many years have you lived in the united states? what is your current relationship status? ☐ married, live together ☐ married, live apart ☐ live-in partner ☐ divorced ☐ separated ☐ single ☐ widowed http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 what is the highest grade that you’ve completed? ☐ less than high school ☐ high school graduate/ged ☐ vocational degree or certificate ☐ some college or vocational school ☐ college graduate ☐ graduate school do you have children? ☐ yes  if yes, how many children do you have? __ __ ☐ no answer the following if you have a child or children: how often have you seen your child(ren) in the past 12 months? ☐ almost every day ☐ once a week ☐ once a month ☐ a few times ☐ never in the past 12 months i often feel overwhelmed by my responsibilities as a parent. ☐ strongly disagree ☐ disagree ☐ neither disagree or agree ☐ agree ☐ strongly agree http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 appendix b focus group questions 1. what does it mean to be a man? 2. what are some of the qualities, traits, and characteristics you associate with masculinity? 3. share your opinion on these qualities, traits, and characteristics. 4. how was masculinity taught to you growing up? 5. has your perception of masculinity changed as an adult? 6. in what ways does masculinity interact with mental wellbeing (e.g. self-esteem, selfimage, self-worth)? 7. recognizing this interaction, what steps could you take to improve your mental wellbeing? 8. how might you share these strategies with friends and family members? 9. how might you share these strategies with the larger community? 10. is there anything else you would like to discuss? http://www.gjcpp.org/ positive effects of surfing on psychological wellbeing for children with developmental difficulties hanneke van ewijk1,2,marjolein wansink-lokerman3, andreas lamerz3, and suzanne van den broek1 keywords: surfing, down syndrome, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorder, quality of life, developmental difficulties, children. author biographies: hanneke van ewijk, has a background in psychology. she obtained a clinical master's degree focussing on developmental (neuro)psychology, as well as a research master's degree in cognitive neuropsychology. she obtained her phd at the vrije universiteit in amsterdam, the netherlands. her dissertation focused on brain structure and functioning in children and adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. she currently works as a senior researcher (assistant professor) at curium-lumc, a centre for child and adolescent psychiatry in the netherlands. hanneke has been an active volunteer for the surf project for several years. she is a personal mentor for participating children and is volunteer coordinator and research coordinator for the organisation. marjolein wansinklokerman, followed her psychological training in the netherlands, in utrecht and amsterdam. she graduated in 1982 with a master in child and adolescent psychology. she enrolled in the “integrated psychotherapy child and family training” and completed that in 1988. marjolein wansink-lokerman is a registered clinical psychologist and child and adolescent psychotherapist in the netherlands. she is 1 surf project, the netherlands 2 curium-lumc, department of child and adolescent psychiatry, leiden university medical center, the netherlands 3 gcz-nhn, division triversum, centre for childand adolescent psychiatry, the netherlands global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 working as a clinical psychologist and head trainer at ggz nhn in the netherlands. she published serval articles on child psychotherapy and on emdr. andreas lamerz, followed his medical training in germany, italy, the uk and the usa and graduated in 1996. his dissertation focused on research into visual phenomena in focal epilepsy at the department of neurology at the charité, humboldt university berlin. he enrolled in the program of forced migration and health at the columbia university in nyc, usa and graduated in 2000 with a master of public health. he also enrolled in the international trauma studies program of new york university, usa and successfully completed the training in 2000. andreas lamerz is a registered psychiatrist and child and adolescent psychiatrist in the netherlands. he is also registered with the netherlands register of court experts (nrgd) and momentarily working as chief psychiatrist at ggz-nhn in the netherlands. his particular interests are international aspects of psychiatry, e-health and digital psychiatry as well as tic disorders and trauma therapy. suzanne van den broekdietz, ended up working as a project manager in amsterdam, despite being a graduate of psychology. ten years in, she asked herself whether this was what she really wanted to do with her life. as she chatted with a boy from the care farm where she volunteered, telling him about her surf trips, he asked her the important question that opened her eyes: "can't you teach us how to surf?" in 2014, the answer (yes) became reality, as suzanne founded surf project, an organisation that provides structured surfing lessons for children with down syndrome, autism, and adhd. since then many of these children found a new sense of belonging through surfing. recommended citation: van ewijk, h., wansink-lokerman, m., lamerz, a., & van den broek, s. (2020). positive effects of surfing on psychological wellbeing for chidlren with developmental difficulties. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(2), 1 – 17. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 positive effects of surfing on psychological wellbeing for children with developmental difficulties abstract children with developmental disorders or disabilities often experience a wide range of difficulties and reduced quality of life. surfing is gaining popularity as a sport that can promote psychological well-being, but research is still scarce. the current study aimed to investigate the effects of surfing on the quality of life of children with developmental difficulties. participants were 84 children with down syndrome, autism spectrum disorder (asd) or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (adhd). quality of life was measured by a parent-rated questionnaire (kidscreen-27) before and after a series of three adapted surfing lessons. additionally, responses on an evaluation questionnaire were qualitatively analysed to gain more insight into the experiences of children and parents. results of the kidscreen showed a significant increase in the children's quality of life after 3 surfing lessons for the total score, as well as subscale scores for psychological well-being, social support & peers and school. a trend towards significance was found for the subscale autonomy & parent relation. qualitative analysis of evaluation data showed consistent positive experiences by children as well as parents. according to parents, surfing improved the child's mood, self-confidence, self-esteem and social-emotional functioning. they saw their child enjoy the lessons, conquering their fears, feeling safe and free. according to many parents, effects transferred into their child's daily life. surfing in a safe, structured and positive environment holds promise to improve the quality of life for children with developmental difficulties. findings provide valuable insights into the scope of these effects and possible working mechanisms underlying the effects. introduction the prevalence of childhood disorders and disabilities is high. overall prevalence rates for developmental disorders or difficulties have been estimated to range between 7% and 20% worldwide (boyle et al., 2011; houtrow, larson, olson, newacheck, & halfon, 2014; kieling et al., 2011) and appear to be increasing over time (houtrow et al., 2014). children with developmental difficulties often experience a wide range of challenges, not only as a direct result of the symptoms of their disorder or disability, but also secondary difficulties resulting from disadvantages and barriers they experience in daily life. often described difficulties include lower self-esteem, poor social and emotional functioning, and lower overall quality of life (harpin, mazzone, raynaud, kahle, & hodgkins, 2016; sawyer et al., 2002; van gameren-oosterom et al., 2011; van heijst & geurts, 2015). physical exercise is known to be highly beneficial for children, not only for their physical health (janssen & leblanc, 2010) but also for their cognitive and psychological well-being (biddle & asare, 2011; spruit, 2017). despite the known benefits, the majority of children and adolescents is insufficiently physically active (colley et al., http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 2011; griffiths et al., 2013; hallal et al., 2012) and activity levels are even lower for children with developmental difficulties or disabilities (levinson & reid, 1991; rimmer & rowland, 2008). although a variety of (adapted) sports programmes is available, the options for youths with special needs are typically more restricted and parents and children often experience barriers to participate due to various reasons. often-reported barriers include the child's physical or social limitations, high costs, unsafe environments or fear, lack of programmes with adequate facilities and a lack of staff or volunteers that are trained for or experienced with working with children with disabilities (king et al., 2003; murphy & carbone, 2008; shields, synnot, & barr, 2012). due to such barriers, children with developmental difficulties often do not participate in (adapted) sports programmes or are limited to individual sports due to cognitive or social limitations that prevent them from playing in a team. thereby, they are missing out on the positive effects of social interactions on mental health (umberson & karas montez, 2010) and the development of relationships with peers that are developed during sports programmes. surfing is upandcoming as a sport that can positively influence mental health. programmes that use surfing to improve psychological well-being (surf therapy programmes) are quickly gaining popularity and publicity. while surfing can be beneficial to children and adults like any other type of physical activity, it is different from other sports in several ways: it is practiced outside in a natural environment, the athlete is dependent on uncontrollable factors such as waves, wind and the tide, it is perceived as a risky sport and it is often perceived by children as 'cool' and adventurous. importantly, recent research indicates that doing sports in a natural environment may yield greater psychological benefits compared to doing sports indoors, including a greater reduction of stress, tension and depression (thompson coon et al., 2011), increased energy (thompson coon et al., 2011) and increased feelings of well-being and vitality (griffiths et al., 2013; ryan et al., 2010). there is a growing body of literature describing the positive effects of activities or interventions in a 'blue space' setting (a natural water setting; völker & kistemann, 2011). a recent systematic review reported overall improvement among a wide variety of blue space interventions. most often reported effects included self-esteem, self-confidence, resilience and psychological indicators such as stress and mood (britton, kindermann, domegan, & carlin, 2018). this suggests that water sports such as surfing may be especially suitable for stimulating psychological well-being in those who struggle with mental health problems or developmental difficulties. at the same time surfing is perceived as a risky or extreme sport and is therefore typically not available for individuals, especially children, with special needs. children with developmental difficulties are often excluded from regular surfing lessons due to safety issues (e.g. due to limited self-reliance or physical limitations) and the lack of professional guidance (e.g., instructions are not appropriate for all cognitive levels). moreover, groups are often quite big which can lead to distraction, difficulties with information processing, and social difficulties for children with developmental problems or disability. adapted surfing programmes may offer unique opportunities for these children to increase their psychosocial well-being by doing a risky sport in a natural setting. the number of adapted surfing programmes around the world is quickly rising, and an international network has been created to exchange experiences and expertise (international surf therapy organisation; www.intlsurftherapy.org). programmes are http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.intlsurftherapy.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 offered to a wide range of populations, and preliminary evaluations and research into such programmes show beneficial effects of surfing on a variety of outcome measures. for example, surf programmes for war veterans, often struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd), have been reported to be able to reduce symptoms of ptsd, depression and anxiety (caddick, smith, & phoenix, 2015; rogers, mallinson, & peppers, 2014; walter et al., 2019). a large uk-based surf programme for children facing mental health issues or social isolation reported increases in general well-being in a sample of 84 children, which were sustained over time (godfrey, devinewright, & taylor, 2015). other programmes for children are generally described as surf or summer camps, during which the children receive surfing lessons combined with other activities or lessons. for example, a 2-day surf camp combined with a social skills curriculum in the usa showed improved assertion, responsibility and engagement in 11 children with autism (cavanaugh & rademacher, 2014). parents of 15 children with a wide range of disabilities, who evaluated an 8-week usa-based summer camp programme that included surfing twice a week, reported a positive physical, social and behavioural impact on their children (moore, clapham, & deeney, 2018). another study investigated the effects of a surf camp with 8 surfing sessions on institutionalized youths in portugal (n=48) and showed improvement in behavioural problems as well as improved skills such as perseverance, social competencies and social-emotional functioning (matos, santos, fauvelet, marta, & evangelista, 2017). in sum, despite the large variety between programmes and targeted populations, adapted surfing programmes appear to have great potential to improve quality of life of individuals struggling with mental health difficulties or special needs. however, most reports concern preliminary studies or evaluation reports in small samples, and systematic scientific research is still scarce. furthermore, due to large differences between programmes and targeted populations, it is difficult to draw robust conclusions regarding the effects of surfing on individuals with a disability or disorder. the surf project provides adapted surfing lessons for children and adolescents with down syndrome, autism spectrum disorder (asd) or attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (adhd) in the netherlands. surfing lessons are given in a safe environment with an adapted programme and professional guidance by trained volunteers. the current study aims to investigate the effects of surfing on several aspects of the quality of life of youths with down syndrome, asd or adhd. furthermore, programme evaluation and satisfaction are systematically evaluated and described. methods programme description the surf project (www.surfproject.nl) provides adapted surfing lessons in the netherlands for children with down syndrome, asd and adhd, aged 8-18. compared to regular surfing lessons, several adaptations are made to create a safe, predictable and structured environment and to stimulate a positive experience in the participating children. the programme eliminates often-reported barriers towards adapted sports programmes such as high costs, unsafe environments, required physical or social skills, lack of adequate facilities, or a lack of experienced, trained staff or volunteers (king et al., 2003; murphy & carbone, 2008; shields et al., 2012). therefore, the surf project provides unique adaptive sports opportunities for children with developmental difficulties in the netherlands. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.surfproject.nl/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 first, the structure of the curriculum is adapted to facilitate a safe and structured experience for the children. children surf in small teams, which allows them to benefit from the social environment of a team while they surf individually and therefore do not have to play together to win. teams typically consist of 4 participants (maximum of 6), assisted by 4 personal mentors (volunteers), 2 additional volunteers, and 1 surfing instructor. teams have their own colour, reflected in their shirts and the beach flag where they assemble. surfing lessons have a fixed structure: changing, assembly, warming up, feeling the water, surf instruction, surfing lying down, surfing standing up, assembly, drinks, changing, cleaning up. the sequence is presented at the beginning of each lesson, using a surfboard with wooden pictograms, each representing a specific part of the surf lesson. personal mentors assist the children in the water with catching waves, while the additional volunteers catch the children after they have ridden a wave with positive feedback and high fives. photographers (also volunteers) capture everything on camera, and photos are made available through the website. all volunteers are 18 years or older, and are required to hand in a certificate of good conduct (issued by the dutch government) before attending. in 2018, the average age of the volunteers was 34 years (ranging from 18 to 68), with 65% being female and 35% male. although volunteers are not required to have experience with surfing or children with developmental difficulties, many of them do. second, protocolled preparation is of the utmost importance for children with special needs. the surf project schedules an intake with each participant and their parents one to two months before the start of the programme. the goal of the intake is twofold: to gather the child and parents with the surf project, and to gather relevant information about the child. to familiarize the family with the project, the intake is held at the beach at the same location as the surfing lessons. the programme is explained to the children with the use of a photo book with pictograms. information is gathered about the child's difficulties, preferences, hobbies and goals, all of which is later written up in a 'child description' for their mentor. before the lessons start, the participants will receive the name and a photo of their mentor. at the start of the lessons, before the children arrive, their wetsuits are placed in the changing room accompanied by the children's photo and name. third, a personalized approach is a crucial theme. each child's personal mentor will supervise and help them during the surfing lessons. children and their mentors are carefully matched, based on factors such as personality, experience with special needs, and experience with surfing. mentors are required to attend at least 3 lessons in a row, to give the children the chance to become familiar and feel safe with their mentor. volunteers are required to attend a one-day training programme, run by the surf project, before participation. the training programme includes information about the programme, children with special needs, tasks and responsibilities of volunteers, and a practical session in the water during which they are taught how to assist the children with surfing. before the surfing lessons start volunteers receive a description of each child in their team to facilitate easy acquaintance and to inform them on how to handle difficult situations with each specific child. volunteers are instructed to adapt the pacing and level of instructions and activities to the child's individual needs, to ensure a successful experience. for example, catching a wave lying down on the board is celebrated the same way as making turns on an unbroken wave. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 the surf project runs at four locations along the dutch coastline. the duration of each surfing lesson is typically 2 hours. parents pay a small fee for the lessons to secure commitment, but the fee is kept low to avoid financial barriers to participate. two types of lessons are distinguished: the surf academy provides three surfing lessons in three consecutive weekends for children who are new to the surf project. these lessons end with a 'finals day', during which they receive a surfing diploma and medal, and their surfing skills are celebrated during a bbq with all children, parents and volunteers. this celebration is crucial for the overall feeling of success. children who would like to continue surfing can subsequently subscribe to the surf club, providing 3-6 additional surfing lessons throughout the season. children can keep participating in the surf club until the age of 18, and each surf club season is also concluded with a finals day with a small bbq. by continuously collecting feedback from parents and volunteers through evaluation questionnaires, the programme structure and content is further developed and improved each year. the surf project is a non-profit organisation, which is run by volunteers and funded by grants, donations and sponsorships. participants participants of this study are children who participated in the surf project (surf academy or surf club) between 2016 and 2019, on four different locations. participants were between 8 and 18 years old, and suffered from down syndrome, asd, and/or adhd or another disorder with similar needs (mainly intellectual disability). materials two questionnaires have been used to measure the effects of the surfing programme on the children and to evaluate programme satisfaction: kidscreen. the kidscreen-27 questionnaire (ravens-sieberer et al., 2007) is a shortened version of the kidscreen-52 (ravens-sieberer et al., 2008) and measures quality of life in five domains: physical wellbeing (exploring the level of physical activity, energy and fitness), psychological well-being (exploring positive emotions, satisfaction with life and the absence of feelings such as loneliness or sadness), autonomy & parent relation (exploring the quality of interaction between child and parent and feeling loved and supported by family, as well as the child's perceived level of autonomy), social support & peers (exploring social relations with friends and peers as well as the quality of the interactions), and school (exploring the child's perception of their cognitive capacity, and feelings about school and teachers) (tkg europe, 2006). the shortened kidscreen-27 shows strong correlations with corresponding scales of the kidscreen-52 ( 0.63 ≥ r ≤ 0.96) and can therefore also be seen as a valid measure for health-related quality of life in children and adolescents (ravens-sieberer et al., 2007). a study in a large european sample extensively described the psychometric properties of the kidscreen-27 which were overall described as adequate to good (ravens-sieberer, 2006). raw scores were calculated for each of the five domains as well as a total score for quality of life. evaluation questionnaire. a customized questionnaire was developed by the surf project to measure programme satisfaction in participating children and their parents. open-ended questions were focused at a) evaluating how parents and children had experienced the surfing lessons, b) the effects parents saw in their child (during lessons as well as afterwards, at home), c) their opinion on the supervision and mentoring of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 volunteers, and d) space for extra feedback or comments. a categorical question was used to evaluate the desire to continue the surfing lessons ('yes', 'no' or 'maybe'). procedure from 2016 onwards, parents of all children participating in the surf project have received one or two questionnaires to fill out, depending on the type of programme they were enrolled in. parents of surf academy surfers were asked to fill out questionnaires twice. the pre-measurement (t1) consisted of the kidscreen and was filled in during intake, which was typically planned 1-2 months before surfing lessons commenced. the post-measurement (t2) consisted of the kidscreen as well as the evaluation questionnaire and was filled in within two weeks after the last surfing lesson was completed. parents surf club surfers only received the evaluation questionnaire at t2 in each year they participated, within two weeks after the last surfing lesson. in all cases, the questionnaires were sent out digitally. parents received an e-mail with a link through which they could fill out the questionnaire online on their computer, tablet or smartphone. parents participated in this study on a voluntary basis and did not receive a monetary reward for participation. data were collected and processed in conformity to dutch ethical and privacy guidelines and regulations. analyses kidscreen. data were analysed using repeated measure anova's for all outcome variables: the total score, as well as the five subscales (raw scores). before analyses were run, assumptions were checked and the dataset was checked for outliers. descriptive variables that were significantly associated with an outcome variable were added to the analysis as a covariate. evaluation questionnaire. to systematically evaluate data gathered from the open-ended questions from the evaluation questionnaire filled in by parents, thematic analysis was applied based on open coding of the questions. results kidscreen the initial dataset consisted of 128 participants. the t2 measurement was missing for 17 participants, who were excluded from the analyses. furthermore, data was incomplete or deemed unreliable for 27 participants, due to several reasons: if the period between the last lesson and t2 measurement was too long, if the parent had made a comment about the measurement being unreliable (e.g. because of a recent medication change with behavioural sideeffects), or when the t2 measurement was filled out by a different parent than at t1. the resulting dataset contained 84 participants and contained no outliers. all outcome variables were normally distributed. sample characteristics are summarized in table 1. table 1 sample characteristics n % total sample 84 age (m, sd) 12.8 2.52 sex male 64 76% female 20 24% disability or disorder down syndrome 35 42% adhd 12 14% asd 13 16% other 9 11% mixed 15 18% location zandvoort 53 63% ouddorp 10 12% http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 camperduin 13 15% ter heijde 8 10% lesson type surf academy 75 89% surf club 9 11% month may 12 14% june 45 54% july 14 17% sept 13 16% follow-up period in days (m, sd)* 11.14 10.54 *= time between last day of surfing and the t2 measurement. age was significantly associated with the total score and psychological well-being subscale of the kidscreen. therefore, age was added as a covariate in these analyses. results of the repeated measures analyses showed a significant increase in the total score as well as in the subscales psychological well-being, social support & peers and school, with medium to large effect sizes. a trend towards significance was found for the subscale autonomy & parent relation. no significant pre-post differences were found for physical well-being. results are shown in figure 1 and table 2. figure 1. mean scores on the total score and five subscale scores of the kidscreen. * = significant difference at p<.05. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 table 2 pre-post comparison on quality of life n t1 (m, sd) t2 (m, sd) f(df) p η2 total score 84 97.89 (12.69) 102.51 (11.23) f(1,83)=12.38 0.001 0.130 physical well-being 84 16.11 (3.06) 16.33 (2.8) f(1,83)=0.733 0.394 0.009 psychological wellbeing 84 26.77 (4.32) 28.25 (3.44) f(1,1)=7.58 0.007 0.085 autonomy & parent relation 84 26.96 (4.79) 27.89 (4.17) f(1,83)=3.364 0.070 0.039 social support & peers 81 13.06 (3.84) 14.07 (4.06) f(1,80)=4.31 0.041 0.051 school 61 15.67 (2.76) 16.36 (2.21) f(1,60)=6.002 0.017 0.091 note. age was added included as a covariate for the total score and the psychological well-being subscale. evaluation questionnaire a total of 149 evaluation questionnaires were available for analysis, of which 80 for surf academy participants and 69 for surf club participants. no differences were identified between the evaluations of children in the academy versus surf club lessons, or between children participating in different years. general programme experience. the general experience was consistently described as "awesome", "fantastic" and "beautiful". parents greatly enjoyed seeing their child enjoying the surfing lessons and feeling free. they felt safe leaving their child with capable volunteers who adapted their approach to each individual child and its needs and capacities, and provided the children with undivided personal attention. they consistently mentioned the good organisation and programme structure and the warm, positive and enthusiastic vibe. parents frequently referred to positive aspects of the design of the surfing programme, such as the structure, the setting (beach and ocean) and the relaxed and fun atmosphere. several parents indicated that the good relationship between their child and their child's mentor helped their child to achieve goals that contributed to positive effects of the surfing lessons. challenging aspects were also mentioned by a minority of parents. several parents reported their child to be nervous beforehand, especially before their first lesson, but also reported their child overcoming their fears after or even during the first lesson. a few parents mentioned their child having difficulties with the cold water, putting on their wetsuit or the changing circumstances of the sea (waves, tide, wind). despite these challenging aspects, their general experience was very positive. "it was super fun and wellorganised. a lot of room for the kids to be themselves and be able to succeed. there was a clear structure, and tranquillity." (parent, 2017) effects of surfing lessons. positive effects on the children were consistently mentioned. parents reported to see their child happy and cheerful after surfing, saw increased self-esteem and self-confidence (feeling proud or 'cool') and indicated http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 that their child had felt safe and that they had conquered their fears. after the surfing lessons, most children were tired, but relaxed: they appeared satisfied, peaceful and slept well. at the social-emotional level, parents often reported that their children were better able and more prone to express emotions, they felt included, got positive reactions from peers or were more inclined to engage in social behaviours or relationships. many parents saw effects of the surfing lessons on their child's daily life (e.g., their child would push through to overcome their fears, undertake new activities and become more independent or self-reliant). some parents mentioned that their child seemed to be free of their everyday struggles or disability during surfing, they learned something new, and found a new hobby or talent. "a boost for his confidence. he is not a fast learner at school. surfing made him realize that he can have other talents." (parent, 2018) "at home he was less stressed, took things as they came, was focused but at the same time relaxed. also, he started talking more, took more initiative in conversations." (parent, 2018) mentoring by volunteers. parents' opinions about the mentoring were exclusively positive. volunteers were consistently described as enthusiastic, kind, a good match with their child, and able to recognize what their child needed, which contributed to positive effects of the surfing lessons. another theme that was identified was the respect and gratefulness of parents towards the volunteers, for devoting their time and energy to the project. parents felt comfortable and safe leaving their child with the volunteer and were impressed by what they witnessed at the beach. "the volunteers were open, enthusiastic and driven. they knew what the children needed. they were there for the children 100%!" (parent, 2018) continuation and general feedback. when asked whether the child desired to continue the surfing lessons, 88% answered "yes", 9% "i don't know (yet)", and 3% "no". reasons for not continuing included the fact that their child had outgrown the surf project or was planning to continue in a regular surf club or individually with a parent. when asked for general feedback or tips most replies consisted of compliments, grateful messages, the desire to continue and the advice to continue the project the same way. tips were mainly focused on the desire for more (frequent) lessons during the season and opportunities for continuation for children who outgrew the project (either because they were older than 18 or were capable of more). discussion this study evaluated the effects of surfing in an adapted surfing programme for children with developmental difficulties. a positive effect of surfing was found on the quality of life of children participating in the surf project. significant improvement was seen in overall quality of life as well as three specific domains: psychological well-being, social support and peers, and school. these findings indicate that after three surfing lessons the children were more satisfied with life and experienced more positive feelings (such as happiness) and fewer negative feelings (such as loneliness or sadness). their social http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 relations were stronger and they felt more supported by their peers. they had a more positive perception of their own cognitive abilities, learning and concentration, and they had more positive feelings about school and their teachers. a trend towards significance for the domain autonomy & parent relation suggests that children may feel more autonomous and more supported by their family. no improvement in physical wellbeing was found. this may be due to the fact that three surfing lessons could be insufficient to cause changes in overall physical well-being. future research could provide more insight whether more surfing sessions can in fact improve physically wellbeing in children with developmental difficulties. qualitative analysis of evaluation questionnaires highlighted positive effects on mood, self-confidence, self-esteem and socialemotional functioning. effects often transferred to the children's daily life where they appeared to be more prone to take on new activities or tasks, more engaged in social interactions, and better able to overcome insecurities or fears. these findings give more in-depth insight into the beneficial effects of surfing. although systematic research into adapted surfing programmes is scarce, findings are consistent with previous studies and evaluation reports, which show improvement in general well-being and mental health problems in children and adults with a variety of mental health difficulties (caddick et al., 2015; cavanaugh & rademacher, 2014; godfrey et al., 2015; matos et al., 2017; moore et al., 2018; rogers et al., 2014; walter et al., 2019). an important difference with previous studies is that many studies evaluated a six or eight-week therapeutic programme that included surfing lessons (e.g., moore et al., 2018; walter et al., 2019). in contrast, the current study shows that a programme without explicit therapeutic elements can produce similar beneficial effects on the children's development and psychosocial well-being. moreover, current findings show that a series of three surfing lessons is already sufficient to reach such effects. in interpreting these findings, it is important to note that the surf project provides surfing lessons under specific conditions, including thorough preparation, a strongly personalised approach, and several adaptations to facilitate a safe and positive experience. it is likely that such programme elements play an important role in the positive effects. although this study was not intended to investigate working mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of surfing, important insights were gained from the evaluation questionnaires that give rise to several hypotheses. for example, several factors appear to contribute to the warm, personal and positive atmosphere: volunteers are explicitly trained to adopt an individual approach, focus on possibilities instead of limitations and receive information about each child, in order to be able to adapt their communication and expectations to each child's capacities and needs. this presumably contributes to the children feeling safe, seen, appreciated and empowered, which is an important basis for a child to be able to learn and grow. the fact that the project works with volunteers who dedicate their time and energy to help others is likely to contribute to the enthusiastic and positive vibe. the fixed structure, pictograms and thorough preparation ensure that possible stressors, such as uncertainties or last-minute changes, are minimized. all these factors contribute to a stable, safe and positive environment in which the children can optimally enjoy themselves, grow and achieve new goals. "the volunteers were amazing. so well attuned, the mentors follow the children. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 therefore the children experience no limitation." (parent, 2018) another theme that stands out is the growth in self-esteem, self-confidence and autonomy that is consistently found in this group of children. there are several factors that are likely to contribute to these effects. during the lesson, children and parents are physically separated from each other by the coastline which forces the children to trust new people and learn and grow without their parents on their side. parents frequently reported their child to be nervous beforehand, but overcoming their fears during the first lesson. both these factors are likely to contribute to increases in selfconfidence and autonomy. the fact that the children can participate in a sport with a cool and adventurous image, combined with the surf project's warm, personal atmosphere in which any achievement is celebrated as a success, is presumably a strong contributor to the increase in self-esteem. "she was excited and a little nervous. had to get used to something new. but was very proud when she progressed and succeeded." (parent, 2018) progress and growth in social-emotional functioning may be explained by the fact that children surfed individually, but were still part of a team. therefore, possible socialemotional or cognitive limitations were not a hindrance to be part of a team and to build on social relationships, which is a unique combination in adapted sports. teams consisted of children with different disorders, allowing them to learn from each other, and gain respect for each other. the undivided positive attention from their mentors made them feel appreciated and important, which may have had an indirect effect by giving the children the confidence to engage in social interactions with their peers. furthermore, children were able to show photos to their family and classmates, further stimulating their social relations without having to rely on their language skills to tell their story. effects often seemed to transfer into the children's daily lives. it is likely that improvement in mood, self-esteem, selfconfidence, and social-emotional functioning stimulates the children to take on new challenges in daily life. additionally, positive effects on the parents were also reported: they had felt safe to leave their child with the volunteers and felt grateful, cheerful, and were impressed. they were touched by the fact that their child was welcomed in such a positive way, which is something they do not often experience. it is highly possible that the positive effects on children and their parents reinforced each other, especially after the surfing programme had ended. parents frequently reported looking back at the photos together with their child or making large-scale prints to put in their room, which may have stimulated the formation and recollection of positive memories. some parents mentioned that they actively reminded their child to the lessons they had learned during surfing, encouraging their child to overcome their fears or insecurities in daily life the same way they did during surfing. such factors are likely to play an important role in the transfer to or reinforcement of positive effects in daily life. several strengths and limitations of this study are important to consider. strengths of this study include the use of quantitative methods with a validated questionnaire, supplemented with qualitative analyses from evaluation questionnaires, to gain more in-depth insight into the effects of surfing. the fact that the data was collected in a relatively large sample of children with a variety of developmental difficulties, over multiple years and locations, contributes to the robustness and generalizability of findings. however, given http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 that the study lacked a control condition, it cannot be ruled out that other factors may have caused, or at least contributed to, the effects. the fact that the evaluation questionnaire was administered by the surf project may have created a bias towards positive responses by parents, although the questionnaire also explicitly asked parents to fill in suggestions for improving the programme. other possible limitations include the use of a parent-rated questionnaire (in contrast to self-report), and the lack of a long-term follow-up prevents us from drawing conclusions about long-term effects. results discussed in this article give rise to several suggestions for further improving the programme. for example, parents consistently expressed a desire for more (frequent) surfing lessons. therefore, the surf project will focus on creating more (frequent) lessons and look into surf-related activities during the winter. by reminding the children of surfing and its effects during winter time, it may be possible to lower the chance of positive effects tapering off during the winter when the children cannot surf. the surf project will also create possibilities for participants to continue the programme after they turn 19 years of age. current results also give rise to several suggestions for future research. gaining insight into the experiences or feelings of children with developmental difficulties remains a challenge, because self-report questionnaires or interviews are not always feasible. future studies could look into more individualised and qualitative ways of evaluating the child's experience, for example using pictograms or creative art-based methods (e.g., crivello, camfield, & woodhead, 2009; gillies & robinson, 2012). another important topic is investigating short-term versus long-term effects, to distinguish whether surfing mainly elicits short-term effects or effects remain stable after a longer period without surfing (e.g. during winter). future studies could also provide more insight into the effective elements of surfing or surf therapy programmes. pooling research from different programmes will provide insight whether the effective elements and effects are universal, or may (partly) differ between programmes, countries or populations. in conclusion, surfing in an adapted environment is a promising tool to boost the quality of life of children with down syndrome, adhd or asd particularly in the areas of psychological well-being, social support and peers, and the school environment. parents consistently report seeing their child happier and more relaxed after surfing and with improved selfconfidence, self-esteem and social-emotional functioning. according to many parents, effects transferred into their child's daily life in which they were more prone to undertake new activities, overcome their insecurities, and become more independent and selfreliant. several hypothesis are discussed that may underlie these positive effects which provide important avenues for further research. given the promising results, it is important to continue research to gain more in-depth insight into the underlying working mechanisms and to investigate possibilities for structural funding of the project. references biddle, s. j., & asare, m. 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(2019). breaking the surface: psychological outcomes among us active duty service members following a surf therapy program. psychology of sport and exercise, 101551. http://www.gjcpp.org/ from theory to practice: forging a collaborative evaluation strategy for a culturally informed domestic violence initiative m. alejandra arce1, daniel w. snook1, hannah l. joseph1, miklós b. halmos1, rebecca rodriguez2, rosario de la torre2, teresa burns2, & gabriel p. kuperminc1 keywords: program evaluation, community advocacy, domestic violence, cultural sensitivity author biographies: m. alejandra arce, is a doctoral candidate in the clinical and community (clc) psychology concentration at georgia state university. she received a bachelor of arts in psychology from florida international university, honors college. her graduate research has focused on immigrant well-being, and she is particularly interested in investigating multi-level contributors to resilience and positive developmental outcomes among immigrant youth of color. for her master’s thesis, alejandra examined contributions of racially-based harassment and variation in personality to differences in multiple group identities among immigrant-origin adolescents and emerging adults. more recently, alejandra developed an integrated conceptual model to better understand processes that may facilitate or hinder civic engagement among immigrant youth of color. she is currently working on her dissertation proposal for which she hopes to empirically test this model in a sample of firstand second-generation immigrants of color. alejandra's ultimate goal is to make significant contributions to the disparities that continue to affect immigrant and other communities of color via prevention efforts that extend beyond the individual. daniel w. snook is a doctoral candidate in the community psychology program at georgia state university. he earned a b.s. in psychology from the university of florida honors college. currently, he is working with advisor dr. john horgan and the violent extremism research group (verg). his research framework is a mix of applied social and community psychology. broadly, daniel studies the psychology of intergroup conflict, religious and ideological extremism, and terrorism. specifically, his recent research has focused on understanding americans’ risk perceptions for terrorism and the implications of such perceptions for society, e.g., islamophobia, and policy, e.g., support for armed conflict and restriction of civil liberties. his primary long-term goal is to better understand the roles of risk perception and motivated social cognition in 1 department of psychology, georgia state university 2 national latin@ network for healthy families and communities: casa de esperanza global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 reciprocal intergroup violence, especially the cycle of violence between farright and islamist terror groups. his skill set also includes program evaluation. he has experience working on more than 15 program evaluations and is currently working on projects to evaluate countering violent extremism programs and comprehensive interventions to transition people out of homelessness. hannah l. joseph is a doctoral candidate in clinical and community psychology at georgia state university. she earned her bachelor’s degree in latin american studies from oberlin college and her master's degree in psychology from georgia state university. her research focuses on developing resilient communities to support adolescents throughout development, with a particular emphasis on youth violence prevention. miklós balázs halmos, is a community psychology doctoral student at georgia state university. he graduated with a bachelor of science in psychology from the university of new orleans. as an undergraduate he worked with dr. monica marsee examining risk factors for youth aggression and delinquency in community and incarcerated populations. additionally, he worked with dr. gary dohanich at tulane university researching the role of hormones in stress and learning. postbac he worked as a lab manager for dr. peter giancola at the university of kentucky conducting studies examining alcohol intoxication and laboratory aggression. miklós is currently working on his dissertation project examining the role of sexual minority stress in the perpetration of aggression among sexual minority individuals. his graduate research under dr. dominic parrot is focused on examining both individual and community, and temporal and proximal, risk and protective factors for perpetrating and falling victim to aggression and violence. furthermore, he is interested in developing and evaluating improved methodologies and analytical models for assessing and predicting aggression among intimate partners in order to prevent the progression of aggression into violence. his work outside the laboratory focuses on program and policy development and evaluation. rebecca rodriguez served as manager and then director of research and evaluation at casa de esperanza from 2016 to 2020. she is a community psychologist whose research interests broadly focus on culturally-specific and community-centered approaches to prevent family violence in latin@ families. as a child of mexican migrant farm laborers, she is passionate about social justice for migrant and seasonal laborers and mentoring other latin@ researchers. rosario de la torre is the codirector of the family advocacy and community engagement program at casa de esperanza. she came to the united states from mexico in 1988 and is a highly experienced and respected advocate in the fields of domestic violence and sexual assault. she was a primary contributor to the development of the latina advocacy framework and provides training to other advocates and organizations across the country. teresa burns, is the manager of casa de esperanza’s refugio program providing safe shelter for latin@ women who have experienced domestic violence. her work focuses on providing holistic and culturally-specific support at the refugio as http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 well as on minnesota’s only 24-hour bilingual crisis line. she also oversees training of family advocates and sits on homeless and housing system committees in the community to improve access to and coordinate services for domestic violence survivors, especially those in immigrant communities. gabriel p. kuperminc, is professor of psychology and public health at georgia state university where he serves as director of the doctoral program in community psychology and chairs the university’s new interdisciplinary initiative, resilient youth (resy), which emphasizes a resilience perspective to study and develop interventions to reduce health disparities among urban youth. he has conducted largeand small-scale evaluations of prevention and health promotion interventions focused on community health and youth development, using methods that range from qualitative case studies to randomized trials. he consults on youth development, health promotion and prevention of violence and substance abuse with various organizations including mentor: the national mentoring partnership, the georgia family connection partnership, boys and girls clubs of america, the canadian women’s foundation, the national latin@ network for healthy families and communities, the georgia statewide afterschool network, the georgia department of education, the united way of greater atlanta, and the centers for disease control and prevention. recommended citation: arce, m. a., snook, d. w., joseph, h. l., halmos, m. b., rodriguez, r., de la torre, r., burns, t., & kuperminc, g. p. (2020). from theory to practice: forging a collaborative evaluation strategy for a culturally – informed domestic violence initiative. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(3), 1 19. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: m. aleganra arce, clinical and community psychology doctoral student, georgia state university. p.o. box 5010 atlanta, ga 30302-5010 usa. email: marce1@student.gsu.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:marce1@student.gsu.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 from theory to practice: forging a collaborative evaluation strategy for a culturally informed domestic violence initiative community programs for domestic violence (dv) in the u.s. have historically focused on white populations. few programs exist to meet the needs of racial/ethnic minority populations, including latinx women, who encounter greater barriers to access services than their non-hispanic white counterparts. casa de esperanza is one of the few organizations in the u.s. focused on addressing the unique needs of latinx survivors of dv. in particular, their family advocacy initiative (fai) seeks to support latinx communities impacted by dv by facilitating a variety of services including a 24-hour hotline, shelter, community advocacy, and transitional housing support network. this program utilizes casa de esperanza’s latina advocacy framework, which was developed to address the unique risks, considerations, and needs of latinx communities, but has yet to be empirically evaluated. as part of a graduate community psychology course on assessment, consultation, and evaluation, a university-community partnership was established to explore the process of defining, designing, and planning an evaluation of casa de esperanza’s fai. this paper describes the university team’s process in learning about casa de esperanza and the fai and collaboratively developing an evaluation plan. we briefly summarize the program’s theory of change, review its logic model, and present results from a focus group conducted with program staff. based on this information we discuss the evaluation and recommendations for implementing it. throughout the paper, we highlight the need for culturally sensitive programs for survivors of dv and the importance and benefits of collaborative community partnerships and evidence-based evaluative learning. background women of all races experience intimate partner violence (ipv) – referred to as domestic violence (dv) when it occurs within the home (e.g., benson, woolredge, & thistlethwaite, 2004; cho, 2012; grossman & lundy, 2007). these terms and their acronyms (i.e., dv/ipv) are often used interchangeably to describe experiences of physical, sexual, and/or psychological violence, as well as stalking by a current or former intimate partner (breiding, basile, smith, black & mahendra, 2015).3 historically, dv intervention programs have emphasized helping survivors leave their abusive partner in order to secure safety. however, when examining the issue of dv among latinx immigrants specifically, studies have documented a number of unique 3 in this paper, the term dv is used to be consistent with the language used in the casa de esperanza program. cultural, structural, and institutional barriers that influence decisions about staying with or leaving abusive partners, and/or seeking services and support (e.g., alvarez & fedock, 2016; ingram, 2007; vidales, 2010). these barriers may increase their vulnerability to continued exposure to violence and trauma. predominantly, studies have found that immigration status, limited english proficiency, traditional gender-based and family norms, and financial instability greatly influence latinx survivors’ decisions to seek help and/or report the abuse to authorities (e.g., reina, lohman, and maldonado, 2014; vidales, 2010). for instance, in a qualitative study on the experiences of latina immigrants who faced dv, over 20% of latina http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 survivors of dv identified limited english proficiency as their main barrier to seeking and receiving the help they needed (vidales, 2010). ingram (2007) found first-generation (i.e., foreign-born) latinx immigrant survivors of dv are less likely to access formal help than both their secondgeneration and their non-hispanic, white counterparts. although not directly measured, ingram (2007) identified problems related to immigration status (e.g., fear of deportation) as potential underlying causes for the limited formal help-seeking behaviors. furthermore, latinx survivors of dv that do access services are more likely to do so after longer periods of experiencing abuse and are likely to experience more severe mental health consequences of abuse (e.g., caetano & cunradi, 2003; edelson, hokoda, & ramoslira, 2007; gonzalez-guarda et al. 2011; klevens, 2007). for example, edelson and colleagues (2007) found that latina women experienced lower self-esteem, more severe trauma-related symptoms, and more severe depression symptoms following abuse than did non-latina women. despite increasing evidence for the unique socio-cultural barriers impeding help-seeking behaviors and service utilization among latina survivors of dv, interventions to support survivors of dv have historically and predominantly been developed with and geared toward white, english-speaking, nonimmigrant populations (e.g., barner & careney, 2011; bograd, 2007; pence, 1983; roberts, 2007; shepard & pence, 1999). only in recent decades has cultural sensitivity been considered and incorporated into dv programs and interventions (barner & carrney, 2011; gondolf & williams, 2001; hampton, lataillade, dacey, & marghi, 2008; ragavan, thomas, medzhitova, brewer, goodman, & bair-merritt, 2018). such interventions are better equipped to support latinx survivors because they treat dv as a multidimensional problem. these programs approach dv as a public health issue that stems from the maladaptive social relations between intimate partners that might be experiencing additional stressors unique to their cultural contexts. thus implementers of culturally sensitive interventions need to have deep knowledge of issues that may impact latinx survivors, such as systemic racism, immigration status and restrictive immigration climate/policies, language barriers, cultural orientation or identity, and acculturation, among others (e.g., dutton, orloff, & hass, 2000; klevens, 2007; rodriguez et al., 2018). culturally sensitive programs and organizations, such as casa de esperanza, have been at the forefront of providing services that incorporate the many unique cultural and contextual issues present in the lives of latina survivors (serrata, rodriguez, castro, & hernandez-martinez, 2019). such interventions identify the role of culture early in the initiative planning stage and incorporate it into the framework of the intervention at every subsequent stage of development and implementation. for example, a culturally sensitive intervention would not only address survivors’ individual needs, but also extend services to family members and provide education about immigration options for immigrant latina survivors (perilla, serrata, weinberg, lippy, 2012). additionally, program staff might actively engage community leaders, especially cultural or religious authorities, and invite them to serve as mediators between providers and participants in order to develop collaborative relationships and practices. evidence for the effectiveness of culturally sensitive interventions for latina survivors of dv is growing. these programs have been found to foster a sense of empowerment (serrata, macias, rosales, rodriguez, & perilla, 2015; serrata, hernandez-martinez, & macias, 2016), selfesteem (fuchel & hysjulien, 2013; fuchel, linares, abguttas, padilla, & hertenberg, 2016), and psychological well-being for latinx survivors (serrata, rodriguez, castro, & hernandez-martinez, 2019). current study research suggests that creating a comprehensive evaluation plan that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 incorporates contextual realities improves evaluation quality and conducting program evaluation helps ensure that programs are evidence-based (e.g., chatterji, 2004). the goal of this project was to generate an evaluation plan for casa de esperanza’s family advocacy initiative (fai) that accounts for the cultural and organizational context that is so critical to the program’s success. the project emerged from a graduate community psychology course on assessment, consultation, and evaluation (ace). a university-community partnership was established leveraging university resources to develop an evaluation of the efficacy and success of the fai. the university team was composed of four community psychology doctoral students and one community psychology faculty member with expertise in program evaluation, and the community team was composed of casa de esperanza leadership and fai staff members. this partnership included consistent communication between university team members and fai management and staff members to gain a clear understanding of the problem of dv among latinx survivors, daily initiative operations, overarching initiative goals, and existing measures for assessing initiative success. as part of this process, the university evaluation team conducted a focus group with fai advocates (see subsequent section) to collaboratively operationalize program activities, program outcomes, and current limits to and strengths of program evaluation capacity. informed by qualitative analysis of these data, the university evaluation team assisted casa de esperanza leadership in the production of a logic model that matched latent community processes and mechanisms of change to the fai’s manifest operational activities and overarching program goals of dv harm reduction and future violence prevention among latinx women. to provide context, we first briefly describe the framework within which casa de esperanza approaches dv, including the components of this multi-faceted and long-standing culturally sensitive dv intervention program. we then present findings from a focus group conducted with staff members tasked with implementing the fai, and summarize recommendations for the final evaluation plan, operationalizing how fai’s theory of change links program activities to measurable indicators. a secondary research on data or biospecimens application was submitted to georgia state university’s institutional review board (irb). the project was exempt from irb approval given that data were previously collected for nonresearch purposes. the family advocacy initiative at casa de esperanza the family advocacy initiative (fai) is casa de esperanza’s core program, which includes direct services and support structures for latinx families experiencing dv. specifically, the fai includes: a 24-hour crisis shelter with advocacy, a 24-hour bilingual crisis phone line, transitional housing support, roving advocacy (i.e., meeting survivors in their homes or community settings to share information and resources), and referrals to other service providers. the fai uses casa de esperanza’s latina advocacy framework (laf; casa de esperanza, 2013) to guide how fai advocates work with, support, and advocate for latinas who have experienced dv. based on more than twenty-five years of dv advocacy, this framework emphasizes the importance of maintaining a cultural lens in order to deeply understand latinx realities which center all programmatic activities. the laf describes two key pieces of successful latinx advocacy: (1) advocates must maintain a depth of latinx cultural knowledge, understanding, and appreciation, which are supported by (2) organizational policies, procedures, and services designed to embrace and build on latinx cultural realities. the central tenets of the fai’s advocacy framework are also reflected in their theory of change, which highlights the importance of promoting http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 knowledge of rights and systems, facilitating access to services, and providing culturally appropriate support to latinx survivors of dv. these core elements are meant to empower survivors and help them successfully transition from a state of crisis to more long-term planning. the ultimate goal is safety and stability, which is achieved through access to necessary crisis interventions and resources. additionally, attitudinal change and independence/agency are facilitated through interactions with and support from bilingual and bicultural advocates working within the laf. these advocates empower participants to advocate for themselves and independently navigate systems relevant to their stated goals including safe housing, legal justice, immigration relief, mental health, increased income, stable employment, and opportunities to advance their future(see figure 1 for a visual representation). figure 1. fai theory of change insights from the advocate focus group as part of the evaluation team’s effort to understand the full scope of casa de esperanza’s fai, a focus group was conducted with nine of the 10 full-time advocates to assess their unique perspectives about the implementation and success of the program. a flexible questioning route (kruger & casey, 2015) was used to guide the group discussion around four general areas: (1) goals of the program (e.g., how do you know that the program is successful?), (2) participant needs (e.g., how do you assess the needs of each participant?), (3) advocate role (e.g., what is your day-to-day like? in what ways could the program best support its advocates?), and (4) feasibility of follow-ups (e.g., is there a system in place to follow-up with participants?). the meeting lasted about an hour and was audiorecorded with permission from the advocates. using a phenomenological approach (creswell, 2014), responses were later assessed to form categories of comments and ideas, which are referred to as themes (described below). advocates were open and engaged throughout the meeting and expressed excitement at the idea of developing an evaluation plan for the fai. their commitment to the fai and the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 communities they serve was evident in their responses and their willingness to collaborate with the research team. this all may indicate that the acceptability and feasibility for conducting the proposed evaluation will be high. theme (1): long-term orientation as success many advocate comments related to perceptions of program goals and participant outcomes that represent these goals. in particular, advocates seemed to agree that the program’s fundamental goal is to establish participants’ safety and stability over time. advocates repeatedly highlighted that this goal involves more than just addressing participants’ immediate, shortterm needs (e.g., shelter) but also helping them gain confidence in their ability to advocate for themselves and develop and pursue long-term goals (e.g., ged, savings). for example, one advocate noted that, “when participants come in at first, they say, ‘can you call the clinic for me?’, or, ‘can you find me an interpreter?’, but after they’ve been through advocacy and they begin to understand that they can navigate these systems, they start to say, ‘i’ll call them, it’s no big deal.’ they start doing it for themselves and that’s when we know it [advocacy] is working.” notably, for advocates, success of the family advocacy initiative is “... more than just meeting [participants’ stated] goals, like finding stable housing or getting an order for protection, although it’s that, too. it’s helping them realize they have the power to get out of this and to be safe and happy.” theme (2): operational details throughout the discussion, advocates described the details of day-to-day operations and discussed their work in practical terms. generally, advocates reported an average workload (in terms of number of participant cases they manage at a given time) of between 25-30 participants per advocate, which they described as challenging but manageable. advocates also described two key advocacy processes, (1) intake and needs assessment, and (2) case termination and follow-ups, which are described as subthemes below. sub-theme: intake and needs assessment process. advocates generally described the intake process as long, with a number of demographic variables to record and many ‘boxes to check.’ in response to the question, how do you assess participant needs? advocates were quick to note that each participant is a unique human being and must be treated as such rather than as a case to manage. advocates further noted that participants are often in a state of crisis at the time of their intake, and; therefore, advocates are faced with the difficult task of providing emotional support while also trying to appropriately and accurately assess participant needs – a task which advocates do not often feel fully prepared for (this will be discussed further in theme (3). sub-theme: case termination and followups. advocates reported that there is no formal protocol for closing a case. instead, advocates noted that it is up to the discretion of the advocate and supervisor to determine when an individual is no longer an active participant of the fai. one advocate stated, “usually, a case is closed if the participant has met their goals, says they don’t need services anymore, or if we just can’t get into contact with them anymore.” additionally, in response to the question, how feasible would it be to conduct follow-up calls with participants after their cases have been closed? (in order to follow-up on long-term outcomes), advocates reported quite firmly that it would not be feasible given their already high workloads. the caveat was added, however, that it is a good idea and could be implemented if new hires were made for that purpose. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 theme (3): increased structural support throughout the focus group advocates expressed their unanimous support for the work that the organization is doing in general, and within the family advocacy initiative, in particular. although advocates expressed pride in being part of the casa de esperanza community and to be able to help participants in such tangible ways, they also expressed dissatisfaction with some aspects of the program and identified ways in which these could be improved. these were further categorized into two subthemes: (1) recordkeeping, and (2) increased training and support. sub-theme: record-keeping. advocates generally seemed to think that the intake and needs assessment process is currently too unwieldy. advocates described the intake forms as “inorganic and cumbersome,” and their database as not user-friendly, noting that the information they are required to record is mostly demographic in nature, likely for funding reporting purposes, and not particularly relevant to participant needs or goals. one advocate noted, “it’s just too much red tape.” advocates also mentioned that the previously reported lack of formal protocol for tracking participant goals and needs often leaves them relying on ‘their head’ or their own informal/unofficial records to remember all the information. advocates stated that all of this makes it difficult for them to listen to participants and be fully present with them at the time of their intake. the following quote summarizes this concern, “it’s like, i want to listen to the participant, but because i have of all these reporting requirements, i end up having to continuously write down little details that actually have nothing to do with assessing or addressing what the participant needs.” sub-theme: increased training and support. advocates suggested that there are a few areas in which they could use more support at the organizational level, and that these improvements would make them more effective and productive in their work. for example, advocates reported that, for many of them, their advocacy position is their “first job in the field.” as such, they described thinking that specialized training for how to respond to dv at the start of the position would be very helpful. advocates also suggested training for specific issues that are commonly found among participants’ situations (e.g., training in legal issues, common psychological responses to trauma typical for dv, immigration procedures). finally, advocates expressed interest in receiving further support and training to mitigate job burnout and compassion fatigue, which are frequently reported problems in helping professions, particularly for those who respond to survivors of trauma (e.g., killian, 2008). one statement especially embodied this sentiment, “there’s a lot of compassion fatigue and just a lot of hard emotions that go on as advocates… we need to hold advocates up. we have high turnover because of the burnout, and we need to address that.” evaluation plan and design in order to effectively capture success within the fai, the university team designed an evaluation plan that includes a broad spectrum of methods, such as participant and advocate narratives, as well as quantitative measurements. importantly, this plan was informed by and responsive to the concerns as well as suggestions made by advocates during the focus group discussion. in particular, when developing this plan, we remained mindful of advocates’ expressed interest in receiving additional support and resources, including additional staff, to help with data collection and management. thus, in developing recommendations, we sought to limit wherever possible the addition of new evaluation components that would add to advocates’ record keeping burden. for example, we emphasized the use of existing administrative records and forms, such as the fai’s intake and exit interview forms. in some cases, we recommended ways of enhancing the data that were already being gathered (e.g., converting yes/no questions to likerthttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 type scales). in other cases, we suggested incorporating scientifically valid psychosocial measures, recognizing that additional resources directed toward evaluation would be needed to supplement the existing data collection. thus, the recommended evaluation plan takes advantage of the wealth of qualitative observations from interviews and reports that fai advocates and other staff members do as part of their practice. the plan offers options tailored to specific logic model outcomes for use with current data and measurement infrastructure. it also offers options for expanding data measurement, collection, and management procedures to support ongoing advocacy and to create a more holistic and accurate assessment of program components and their success. by establishing means to capture both quantitative and qualitative data, this evaluation plan provides a platform for accurate evaluation of program outcomes and impacts through a depth and variety of information. in the next section, we describe the process that the university team engaged in when reviewing the fai’s logic model and offer recommendations for refining it and for strengthening outcome measurement. review and refinement of fai’s logic model in addition to conducting the focus group, the university team reviewed a draft logic model that was developed by casa de esperanza leadership in collaboration with fai staff members (see figure 2). this initial draft clearly considered evidence-based recommendations for effective program logic modeling (e.g., see w. k. kellogg foundation, 2004), and was critical in helping the university team gain a greater understanding of how core program components were linked to expected outcomes. in the next section, we offer an ‘outsider’s perspective’ to recommend modifications to the logic model. broadly, our recommendations were intended to help the initiative more clearly align each impact/outcome with a specific activity/output, and link elements of the logic model to specific evaluation strategies. we also offer suggestions about where additional data collection is needed, both before and after program participation, to evaluate the effectiveness of outputs. finally, we make recommendations to ensure that clear and consistent language is used throughout in order to enhance the usefulness of this tool for future evaluation efforts. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 figure 2. fai logic model a key outcome in the fai’s logic model is that participants will gain comfort with and knowledge of the processes related to accessing various systems. given the importance placed on this outcome, we suggested that it would be valuable for an evaluation to obtain rich information about the nature and extent of knowledge gained by participants. we recommended building on the existing measure, which is limited to a single yes/no question from an exit interview protocol. the question asks participants to report whether, as a result of the program’s support, they have developed further knowledge of available community resources. a simple enhancement would be to incorporate a five-point, likert-type scale ranging from not at all to very much to capture the extent to which participants perceive their knowledge and understanding of a given system has increased as a result of the program’s support. the question could also be added to a baseline and periodic assessment throughout the client’s participation as a means of monitoring change over time. two related key outcomes include (a) increased social support and social networks with community and cultural groups, and (b) increased sense of emotional support and reassurance. these outcomes highlight the critical role that social groups such as family, friends, and community members play in the well-being of survivors of dv. although there is currently no formal protocol in place for assessing perceived social support, the fai team could rely on observational data (from the advocates) to determine whether these goals are being met. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 with the additional use of validated measures of social support (e.g. the multidimensional scale of perceived social support (zinat et al., 1988), advocates could ascertain, document, and quantify (e.g., determine quality of support from family members, count number of close friends) participants’ social support networks after each contact session or after a predetermined period of time. another key outcome involves increased healthy relationships (family and community). this outcome emphasizes the importance of social networks – with particular focus on family and community relationships – for fostering resilience among latinx survivors of dv. currently, the fai team relies primarily on qualitative observations from the advocates to assess this outcome, which as described by the advocates during the focus group meeting, are not systematically recorded. instead, each advocate relies on their own informal/unofficial records to track this data. although valuable, qualitative observations that are not documented may make it difficult to accurately assess and track progress over time. therefore, our team recommended casa de esperanza/fai leadership develop a formal protocol for documenting qualitative observations and other advocate notes (see next section on broad recommendations), and complement such observations with validated measures of quality of romantic relationships (e.g., investment model scale; rusbult, 1998) and of sense of community (e.g., psychological sense of community scale; jason, stevens, & ram, 2015) in order to better understand and assess participant progress and program success. further, the program’s expected goals of increasing (a) knowledge of violence and its manifestations, (b) understanding of individual rights, and (c) positive sense of self, confidence, self-efficacy, and capacity all promote survivor empowerment and selfadvocacy. at present, these outcomes are not being formally assessed. it was our recommendation that the program add questions to the intake and exit interview forms to assess these outcomes preand postparticipation in the program, and to again complement such data with validated measures whenever possible. the evaluation team also recommended that the program take an active role in providing psychoeducation to participants by offering psychoeducational materials, workshops, or coordinating guest presentations on the topic. the program’s overarching goal is to address the needs and concerns of participants by empowering them to cultivate and sustain a life of agency and safety. to better assess efficacy for this goal, we also recommended that fai staff conduct follow-ups to evaluate if concerns and needs participants presented at the time of intake have been remedied, and whether gains in safety have been maintained post-participation in the program. broad recommendations for the evaluation design to best support the continued success of this comprehensive program, the implementation of the following recommendations will be helpful in establishing a sustainable evaluation plan that allows easy and complete assessment of the achieved goals and processes involved. it is important to note that whereas the research team prioritized and considered sustainability and feasibility throughout the process (e.g., by relying on and maximizing existing resources), the implementation of some of these recommendations may require additional resources, including additional staff, and all of them will require organizational appreciation of the utility of a program evaluation as a means of program improvement. 1. advocates should carefully record and archive progress notes for each of their participants. given that so much important information is absorbed by advocates from personal interactions with participants, this information is invaluable for progress evaluation. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 also, having a structured form for progress notes could result in better, more systematic information, and prove to be more efficient in terms of time management. cameron and turtle-song (2002) offer a description of commonly used formats for writing progress notes that may be useful in this regard. as the authors note, the purpose and benefits of utilizing structured formats for progress notes, such as the subjective objective assessment and plan (soap) format, are many and include improving the “quality and continuity” of services, as well as communication among providers. further, structured progress notes help providers with “recalling the details of each client’s case” and “ongoing assessment of both the client’s progress and treatment successes” (pg. 287). notably, keeping progress notes concise is important across settings and perhaps especially when working with survivors of dv. above all, survivor privacy and safety should be prioritized. 2. in order to evaluate outcomes at shortand medium-term time intervals after participants have left the program, it was recommended that fai staff members and/or leadership conduct follow-up interviews with participants. these follow-ups could be conducted via a short phone call asking brief questions on key data points of interest. to this end, during the exit interview, advocates should ensure that accurate phone numbers for contact are collected and that participants expect follow-up phone calls. when conducting these phone calls, advocates should consider confirming physical location and security of the survivors to ensure confidentiality. should the participants report ongoing safety concerns, they will be referred to get back in touch with their advocate to be connected with relevant resources. responses from these follow-ups should also be included in the database for each participant. this follow-up information is critical in order to assess progress during and after participation in the program and for assessing if skills and knowledge gained during participation have a lasting effect on participants. given the previously noted concerns regarding the workload of advocates and their limited capacity to take on additional tasks, the evaluation team recommended casa de esperanza/fai leadership consider creating a new position within the program to fill this need. 3. an individual-level database should be constructed and maintained which captures all information about participants in a secure manner. this database should be comprehensive and include complete information on demographics, the needs assessment from the intake interview, the case plan (with participant goals and current progress notes), the exit interview, follow-up call responses, and responses on other recommended measures for every participant. collecting and storing these data centrally is critical to support ongoing advocacy, reporting requirements, and future evaluation analyses. investment in a comprehensive system of data storage will facilitate sustainable ongoing evaluation endeavors moving forward. a. user-friendly data entry form templates could be employed to allow advocates to enter new data directly into a central database (specific recommendations were http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 provided to the organization in an oral presentation of evaluation findings. a list of these is available upon request). b. additionally, several recommendations were provided for analytical approaches and computations necessary to evaluate the types of questions using the various forms of information. these suggested resources were provided to the organization and are available upon request. implementing these recommendations would gather valuable information to improve the efficacy of the fai but would also come with some risks to participant confidentiality. systematically collecting and recording additional information about participants, particularly after participants have left the program, may present additional pressures on the fai staff to keep that information, and thereby participants, safe. although most dv agencies do include confidential paperwork, many of the evaluation-specific measures recommended above can be deidentified or aggregated after collection to preserve participant privacy. in addition, instituting clear data management protocols and training for all advocates would help the fai maintain confidentiality for participant data. conclusions and lessons learned in this concluding section, we offer brief reflections, conclusions, and lessons learned from the student research team, the instructor, and the lead evaluator from casa de esperanza. students for students in the community and clinicalcommunity psychology programs at gsu, first formal exposure to the practice of community psychology often happens in the context of a class project such as the present evaluation. this was the case for most members of our student team. as second and third year graduate students in the program, we were excited for the opportunity to translate the theoretical knowledge we had gained from foundational community psychology courses and research into practice through the development of an evaluation plan for a wellestablished national organization that exemplifies many of the tenets of the field. indeed, casa de esperanza is a long-standing organization serving a need for culturally sensitive services for latinx survivors of dv. core community psychology practice competencies and value propositions such as empowerment, socio-cultural, and crosscultural competence, among others (e.g., dalton and wolfe 2012; ratcliffe and neigher, 2010) are evident in all their initiatives, including (and perhaps especially) the fai. in the process of reviewing formative program materials, engaging in ongoing communication with organization leadership, and conducting a focus group of family advocates, we gained valuable insights into the practice of community psychology. we believe this experience facilitated effective learning and professional development, as well as helped solidify our interests in developing, implementing, and/or evaluating community-based initiatives. instructor this consultation with casa de esperanza is an example of a successful project to introduce students to community psychology practices that align with their career goals (kuperminc, chan, seitz, & wilson, 2016). in ace, we work to create a ‘win-win,’ in which students gain valuable experience while community partners gain a valued and tangible product that they might not have had the resources to accomplish on their own. a less obvious outcome is that these projects serve to deepen long standing relationships with community organizations that program faculty and students have worked with over http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 the years, and to establish new partnerships. in this case, three of our faculty members have worked closely with casa de esperanza starting more than 10 years ago in work that has involved multiple graduate and undergraduate students. two alumni have gone on to full-time employment with casa de esperanza. in fact, one of those alumni (the 5th author of this article), served as the main point of contact for the current consultation project (see community partner reflections below). as an instructor for ace, i have learned that successful projects like this one are built on laying the groundwork up front, including transparency about strengths and limitations with regard to student time and previous experience, as well as establishing as much as possible a clear and feasible set of goals and expectations, and emphasizing shared ownership of and responsibility for the work. toward that end, i ask that community partners provide a brief (typically one paragraph) description of the project they have in mind and meet with the class (either in person or by video conference) for an hour to kick off the project. student teams then take the lead, building a collaborative working relationship, learning about the organization, defining specific deliverables, and reporting results. individually, students also maintain a journal of their experiences, structured in a way that bridges their experience in the field with topics covered in class readings throughout the semester (e.g., planning an evaluation, selecting criteria, research design, ethical considerations). as the instructor, i try to provide enough ‘scaffolding’ to help students work through the process while allowing for an authentic experience that includes all the inevitable bumps in the road. in the end, my hope is that students emerge from this experience ready to take the next step to more independent projects. community partner we have a great deal to learn from culturally specific, community grounded programs such as the fai, which are often engaging in creative and innovative approaches to meet the needs of survivors. casa de esperanza is home to the national latin@ network (nln) for healthy families and communities, the federally designated cultural resource center on dv and latino communities (domestic violence resource network, 2017). through the nln we provide training, technical assistance, research, and public policy advocacy to better serve latinas and their families. part of this work includes providing evaluation support and evaluation capacity building with latino-serving and culturally specific dv organizations. the partnership described in this paper is an example of how evaluation can be used as a tool to document and lift up culturally specific practices into the broader dv field, which has not always been supportive of approaches to dv work that fall outside mainstream white feminist models (starr, 2018). there are many organizations – especially those run by and for communities of color – that lack the resources or internal capacity to evaluate their innovative practices and many have had negative experiences with external researchers and evaluators. thus, it has been important to ensure that the evaluators we partner with are grounded in community psychology principles and are as open to learning as the students involved in this project were. casa de esperanza’s many programs have previously benefited from the assistance of student evaluators, but this partnership was the first to engage the fai specifically. prior to the current partnership with gsu ace students, the fai staff (the 6th and 7th authors of this article) and i, the director of the researcher and evaluation center for the nln and alumni of the gsu community psychology phd program, had begun a participatory approach to evaluation. we worked together to outline the initiative, develop the logic model, and inventory their current evaluation practices. in addition to serving as a gentle introduction to evaluation, this pre-work modeled participatory evaluation and set the stage for working with http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 external evaluators. in our first meetings with the students, it was important to set clear expectations for the scope of the project. we emphasized the importance of ensuring that any evaluation plan and tools developed would need to fit within the program context. for example, some of the grants that support the fai require their own data collection forms to be used for evaluation. the students heard our concerns and conducted a web-based focus group with fai staff to learn more about the current limitations and structures that might impede a successful implementation of the evaluation. in addition, the staff who participated in the focus group shared their appreciation for the opportunity to offer direct input and be part of evaluating the impact of their work on survivors. the findings from the focus group document the real need for more advocates to fulfill the high demand of advocacy support and services for survivors of dv. overall, the rich partnership between casa de esperanza and gsu, setting clear expectations for both the scope of work and the evaluation approach used facilitated a positive experience for our fai staff. we look forward to the chance to improve and enrich our work and to be able to share casa de esperanza’s unique approach to working with latina survivors of dv. references alvarez, c., & fedock, g. 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(2004). retrieved from https://www.wkkf.org/resourcedirectory/resource/2006/02/wkkellogg-foundation-logic-modeldevelopment-guide. used with permission of the w.k. kellogg foundation. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.wkkf.org/resource-directory/resource/2006/02/wk-kellogg-foundation-logic-model-development-guide https://www.wkkf.org/resource-directory/resource/2006/02/wk-kellogg-foundation-logic-model-development-guide https://www.wkkf.org/resource-directory/resource/2006/02/wk-kellogg-foundation-logic-model-development-guide https://www.wkkf.org/resource-directory/resource/2006/02/wk-kellogg-foundation-logic-model-development-guide fortaleciendo el vínculo universidad-comunidad: buenas prácticas y material de apoyo para el aprendizaje servicio1 strengthening the university-community bond: good practices and support material for service learning marianne daher, antonia rosati, nicole vásquez, laura carstens palabras clave (keywords): universidad, comunidad, aprendizaje servicio, psicología comunitaria, vínculos, buenas prácticas (university, community, service learning, community psychology, bonds, good practices) author biography: marianne daher es doctora en psicología y magíster en psicología social comunitaria de la pontificia universidad católica de chile. es profesora asistente de la escuela de psicología y coordinadora de la formación profesional en psicología social comunitaria de dicha universidad. involucrada en actividades académicas de formulación de estudios y proyectos, revisión teórica y empírica, producción y análisis de datos, publicación de artículos, organización y difusión en conferencias, elaboración de material de apoyo, y enseñanza de cursos acerca de temas sociales y de investigación. impulsora de la plataforma www.praxiscomunitaria.com antonia rosati es psicóloga social comunitaria y magíster en ciencias sociales con mención en sociología de la modernización. dedicada a la docencia universitaria y a la investigación sobre programas sociales, intervención comunitaria, pobreza y vulnerabilidad social, enfoques y modelos de políticas públicas, desgaste y cuidado de equipos psicosociales, salud mental 1 esta investigación se ha realizado en el marco del proyecto fondedoc “aprendizaje servicio: levantamiento de prácticas asociadas a la vinculación entre estudiantes, socios comunitarios y equipos docentes, y elaboración de material de apoyo”, financiado por el centro de desarrollo docente de la pontificia universidad católica de chile, cuyo objetivo es apoyar propuestas o soluciones innovadoras y pertinentes desarrolladas por docentes para mejorar el aprendizaje de estudiantes de pregrado. global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 comunitaria y docencia universitaria. nicole vásquez es magister en comunicación social y educación de la pontificia universidad católica de chile. es consultora en educación, capacitadora y asesora en prácticas pedagógicas. con experiencia en consultoría, coordinadora pedagógica, docencia, relatorías y acompañamiento a nivel de pregrado, postgrado y profesionales de la educación en ejercicio, desempeñándose en universidades, fundaciones, entidades de asistencia técnica educativa y ministerio de educación. actualmente, se desempeña como analista de docencia en la universidad católica del maule. laura carstens es psicóloga clínica-comunitaria de la pontificia universidad católica de chile, diplomada en psicoterapia infanto-juvenil de la misma institución. dedicada a la clínica con niños, niñas y adolescentes, así como también a padres y madres en el proceso de crianza. además, implementa intervenciones a comunidades escolares en aspectos socioemocionales.  recommended citation: daher, m., rosati, a., vásquez, n., and carstens, l. (2022). fortaleciendo el vínculo universidad-comunidad: buenas prácticas y material de apoyo para el aprendizaje servicio global journal of community psychology practice, 13(2), 1-26. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: marianne daher, pontificia universidad católica de chile. email: mdaher@uc.cl http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:mdaher@uc.cl global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 fortaleciendo el vínculo universidad-comunidad: buenas prácticas y material de apoyo para el aprendizaje servicio resumen el fortalecimiento del vínculo universidad-comunidad es un desafío pendiente para la psicología comunitaria. para avanzar en esta dirección, sistematizamos prácticas asociadas al vínculo entre estudiantes, equipos docentes, socios comunitarios, comunidades, agencias intermediarias (entre la universidad y socios comunitarios), y grupos de estudiantes. esto lo hicimos en el contexto de dos cursos sobre diagnóstico e intervención comunitaria que utilizan el método de aprendizaje servicio. desde un enfoque cualitativo, realizamos un grupo focal con seis estudiantes, y entrevistas semiestructuradas con cuatro integrantes de los equipos docentes y cinco socios comunitarios. para el análisis de los datos utilizamos los procedimientos de la teoría fundamentada y llevamos a cabo análisis descriptivo. como resultados, describimos aspectos relevantes y buenas prácticas asociadas a los vínculos entre estos agentes, a partir de lo cual desarrollamos un material de apoyo innovador para favorecer estos vínculos y así potenciar el trabajo entre universidad y comunidad. éste consistió en una guía de buenas prácticas, un vídeo tutorial para los socios comunitarios y una presentación para ser utilizada por los equipos docentes en clases. finalmente, concluimos destacando cómo la formalización de los vínculos entre los agentes involucrados en el aprendizaje servicio puede favorecer, tanto la formación integral del estudiantado, así como los servicios ofrecidos a las comunidades. además, discutimos los aportes de la psicología comunitaria para potenciar el vínculo entre universidad y comunidad en el contexto actual, desde los principios de participación, colaboración, pertinencia local, autonomía, aprendizaje activo, flexibilidad, pensamiento crítico y vocación social. abstract strengthening university-community bonds is a pending challenge for community psychology. to advance in this direction, we systematized practices associated with the bond between students, teaching teams, community partners, communities, intermediary agencies (between the university and community partners), and student groups. this was done in the context of two courses about community diagnosis and intervention which follow the service learning method. from a qualitative approach, we conducted a focus group with six students, and semi-structured interviews with four members of the teaching team and five community partners. for data analysis, we followed grounded theory procedures, and conducted descriptive analysis. results include relevant aspects and good practices associated with the bonds between these agents, from which innovative support material was developed to favor these bonds and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 enhance university-community work. this consisted in a guide of good practices, a tutorial video for community partners and a presentation to be used by teaching teams in classes. finally, conclusions highlight how the formalization of bonds between the agents involved in service learning can favor both the integral formation of the students, as well as the services offered to the communities. in addition, we discuss the contributions of community psychology to strengthen the university-community bond in the current context, based on the principles of participation, collaboration, local relevance, autonomy, active learning, flexibility, critical thinking and social vocation. antecedentes teóricos y empíricos aprendizaje servicio: características del método tal como señala guevara (2017), actualmente se experimenta una brecha en la vinculación entre universidad y comunidad, requiriéndose formas de investigación y acción que se orienten a las necesidades locales y a la toma de conciencia por parte de agentes sociales y comunitarios. un método innovador en educación, ampliamente utilizado para alcanzar tales fines, es el aprendizaje servicio (deeley, 2016). en latinoamérica, este método ha tomado vigor en las últimas décadas (herrera, 2010), en línea con la tendencia internacional de una excelencia académica integral en la que se transmitan valores, y la importancia de una participación ciudadana comprometida con las necesidades de la comunidad (herrera, 2010). así, el servicio articulado con el aprendizaje académico ofrece una gran diversidad de actividades como la realización de diagnósticos participativos, diseño e implementación de intervenciones, entre otros (martín & puig, 2017). desde el centro latinoamericano de aprendizaje y servicio solidario (clayss) se definen tres ejes de este método: a) protagonismo activo del estudiantado, b) servicio solidario de calidad y c) aprendizajes articulados intencionadamente con la actividad solidaria por parte del personal docente (tapia, 2010). así, el método de aprendizaje servicio busca aunar una docencia de calidad con la prestación de un servicio a la comunidad (martínez, 2017). los beneficios del aprendizaje servicio son múltiples. en el estudiantado se promueve un aprendizaje colaborativo, contextualizar socialmente el conocimiento, aunar teoría y práctica al “aprender haciendo”, activar competencias, sensibilización y reciprocidad, y la reflexión crítica, social y ética del impacto de las acciones realizadas (martín & puig, 2017). los socios comunitarios ganan por los vínculos interinstitucionales y la satisfacción de necesidades reales (esparza & morín, 2017). el equipo docente se favorece por la posibilidad de innovar y realizar una actividad docente más estimulante, así como incluir el aspecto práctico a los contenidos teóricos, que además representan una contribución social (esparza & morín, 2017). la universidad se enriquece al ofrecer un aprendizaje más humano, así como al traducirse en una institución social y éticamente responsable (martín & puig, 2017). ahora bien, riesgos asociados a esta práctica son el asistencialismo, paternalismo y la falta de estructura (tapia, 2010), la improvisación o el concebirlo como un voluntariado (martínez, 2017), la falta de confianza o resistencias, inequidades en la distribución del control y poder, y conflictos por diferencias de perspectivas, valores, creencias y lenguajes (herrera, 2010). para evitarlos, la universidad debe cuidar el diseño y dar http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 seguimiento y evaluación a este tipo de cursos, complementándolo con investigaciones rigurosas y la difusión de sus resultados (tapia, 2010). aun cuando han aumentado las investigaciones y sistematizaciones de prácticas pedagógicas asociadas al aprendizaje servicio, esto es incipiente y disperso (tapia, 2017), lo que revela la importancia de reconocer buenas prácticas en este tipo de método. estas pueden entenderse como aquellas experiencias que permiten orientar soluciones concretas para mejorar el desempeño en cualquier ámbito (rodríguez, 2008). según martínez (2011), las buenas prácticas son aquellas experiencias que sirven de guía y estímulo a los agentes formadores, ya sean iniciativas, políticas o modelos exitosos que mejoren los procesos educativos. por lo tanto, puede decirse que la buena práctica es aquella que se introduce para mejorar actividades, procesos y relaciones educativas. aprendizaje servicio y psicología comunitaria más allá de su identidad educativa, el aprendizaje servicio puede considerarse también como una herramienta de desarrollo comunitario (batlle, 2010). desde esta perspectiva, se han analizado recientemente experiencias concretas de aprendizaje servicio, como la realizada por miranda y colegas (2021), quienes reconocen la presencia de componentes centrales de la psicología comunitaria como la problematización, la reflexión crítica, la concientización y la movilización a la participación. esto conecta con el hecho de que en el desarrollo del aprendizaje servicio ha tenido gran influencia la pedagogía crítica de paulo freire, posicionándose no desde la beneficencia, sino como cambio social basado en un aprendizaje experiencial y una práctica reflexiva (deeley, 2016; rodríguez et al., 2007), sintónicamente con la psicología comunitaria como disciplina. asimismo, el método de aprendizaje servicio se relaciona con la psicología de la liberación, desde el llamado a que quienes practicamos la psicología mantengamos una postura más comprometida con lo social y lo político, en un esfuerzo de preocuparnos por los problemas de las comunidades oprimidas (martín-baró, 1986). por su parte, el aprendizaje servicio conecta con el carácter relacional, colaborativo y participativo de la psicología comunitaria, mediante el cual se espera que entre quienes prestan el servicio (en este caso, estudiantes), los tutores y tutoras (equipos docentes) y los agentes de la comunidad, se genere una red de relaciones y acciones entretejidas, en vías a desarrollar una labor conjunta desde el respeto y la valoración del entorno y las relaciones que allí se generen (tapia et al., 2000). otro aspecto fundamental de este método es la reflexión, en tanto elemento de unión entre el aprendizaje y el servicio, desde el entendido de que sin reflexión no se podría hablar de verdaderas experiencias de aprendizaje servicio (guevara, 2017). este aspecto reflexivo del quehacer, así como su claro contenido teórico-práctico, es fundamental también en la psicología comunitaria, en la cual se ha posicionado el concepto de praxis, entendido como teoría que produce práctica y práctica que produce teoría, en un proceso continuo de reflexión (montero, 2004). así, es posible reconocer claras conexiones entre el método de aprendizaje servicio con enfoques, nociones, principios y valores de la psicología comunitaria. sin embargo, aunque existen estudios empíricos recientes que vinculan esta herramienta con aspectos epistemológicos (racionalidades, componentes, campos temáticos) y metodológicos (agentes, fases, competencias) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 asociados a la psicología comunitaria (cleveland, 2013; guevara, 2017; miranda et al., 2021), identificamos la falta de estudios que analicen las múltiples relaciones entre quienes participan en este tipo de experiencias, así como buenas prácticas, recomendaciones y material de apoyo para fortalecerlas, desde la perspectiva de esta disciplina. vínculos entre los agentes del aprendizaje servicio para llevar a cabo instancias de aprendizaje servicio, es necesario el trabajo conjunto entre los diversos agentes implicados que, según el programa a+s uc (jouannet et al., 2017), corresponden a estudiantes, equipos docentes (integrado por uno o más docentes y, eventualmente, por uno o más ayudantes) y socios comunitarios (personas pertenecientes a agrupaciones, organizaciones o instituciones). a esto podemos agregar también la comunidad en sí, agencias intermediarias (entre la universidad y los socios comunitarios) y los grupos de estudiantes (cuando el trabajo no es individual y se ven implicados también procesos grupales). no obstante, la relación o vínculo entre los tres primeros agentes se suele dejar a la improvisación y voluntades personales, requiriéndose su formalización y definición de roles, funciones y responsabilidades. a continuación, señalamos aspectos clave detectados en la literatura para formalizar dichas relaciones (tabla 1). para favorecer la mejora de los procesos formativos y la calidad del servicio social comunitario ofrecido, nos propusimos como objetivo analizar el vínculo entre estos tres agentes implicados en los cursos de aprendizaje servicio, así como entre los grupos de estudiantes, las agencias intermediarias y las comunidades. además, presentamos un material de apoyo innovador basado en tecnologías de la información y comunicación orientado a su formalización, el cual favorece la vinculación entre universidad y comunidad. método diseño realizamos un levantamiento de prácticas desde un método cualitativo (canales, 2006). el diseño fue exploratorio y transversal. esto lo llevamos a cabo en dos cursos de la formación profesional en psicología comunitaria de la pontificia universidad católica de chile, que trataban sobre diagnóstico en comunidades y diseño de intervenciones sociales y comunitarias. participantes participaron seis estudiantes, cinco socios comunitarios y cuatro integrantes de los equipos docentes de ambos cursos (ver tabla 2). realizamos un muestreo intencionado de caso típico (patton, 2002), para representar el común de las experiencias de trabajo de aprendizaje servicio. producción de datos la producción de datos fue por medio de entrevistas semiestructuradas (kvale & brinkmann, 2009) a los equipos docentes y a los socios comunitarios, y mediante el grupo focal (flores, 2009) al estudiantado. para su realización elaboramos un guión temático, que se utilizó tanto para las entrevistas como para el grupo focal. este se organizó en función a las siguientes secciones: a) presentación (datos sociodemográficos y aproximación general a la experiencia de aprendizaje servicio y los vínculos entre agentes), b) motivaciones y expectativas, c) comunicación entre agentes, roles y funciones de los agentes, d) aprendizajes finales y buenas prácticas, e) cierre y agradecimientos. registramos las conversaciones a través de su grabación en audio, con el debido consentimiento de las personas participantes. luego, realizamos una transcripción literal de http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 agentes aspectos clave estudiantes inculcar autonomía en el proceso de aprendizaje (buscar información, preparar material, ensayar acciones, escritura académica) (esparza & morín, 2017). promover una mirada reflexiva (esparza & morín, 2017). impulsar habilidades de trabajo en equipo (esparza & morín, 2017). incentivar la participación ciudadana (folgueiras et al., 2010). socios comunitarios conocer las particularidades académicas asociadas al servicio y respetar los límites de la acción (madrid, 2017). retroalimentar y reconocer el servicio ofrecido (martín & puig, 2017). mostrar disponibilidad y atención personalizada (esparza & morín, 2017). facilitar acciones y estrategias organizativas que favorezcan los proyectos (esparza & morín, 2017). asumir un rol formativo acorde a las competencias del estudiantado (esparza & morín, 2017). aportar en su proceso de concientización y sensibilización social (deeley, 2016). equipos docentes seleccionar iniciativas sociales pertinentes y promoverlas entre el estudiantado o bien estimular su búsqueda en base a criterios bien definidos (batlle, 2010). cerciorarse que se conozcan y acepten las particularidades del proyecto (madrid, 2017). planificar conjuntamente el servicio (esparza & morín, 2017). innovar en la actividad docente (con metodologías activas y aprendizaje colaborativo) (esparza & morín, 2017). transmitir motivación y apoyo (esparza & morín, 2017). mostrar disponibilidad e implicación para analizar y resolver incidentes críticos (deeley, 2016). abordar posibles resistencias (deeley, 2016). evaluar constructivamente (deeley, 2016). enfatizar la importancia del respeto y el diálogo en un marco de responsabilidad ética (deeley, 2016). tabla 1: aspectos clave para formalizar las relaciones entre agentes del aprendizaje servicio las actividades de producción de datos, para facilitar su posterior análisis. procedimiento la estrategia de reclutamiento fue mediante informantes clave. primero, a través de la investigadora responsable para el acceso a integrantes de los equipos docentes de manera presencial en las salas de clases. segundo, a través de los equipos docentes para convocar al estudiantado a participar, esto en las salas de clases al finalizar los módulos lectivos. y, tercero, a través del estudiantado que accedió a participar para contactar a los socios comunitarios con quienes realizaron la actividad de aprendizaje servicio, esto vía correo electrónico o teléfono. análisis de datos el análisis de datos de las entrevistas y del grupo focal lo realizamos siguiendo las http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 indicaciones de la teoría fundamentada para el análisis descriptivo, a través de la codificación abierta (strauss & corbin, 2002). para ello, detectamos de manera emergente conceptos en el relato de las personas participantes, los cuales luego organizamos en categorías y subcategorías, incluyéndose memos interpretativos y notas prácticas para el equipo de investigación. de esta forma, identificamos aspectos relativos a los vínculos entre estudiantes, equipos docentes y socios comunitarios, al ser este el foco del estudio, así como resultados emergentes respecto a los grupos de estudiantes, agencias intermediarias y las comunidades donde se realizó el servicio. consideraciones éticas para la realización de este estudio, contamos con la aprobación del comité de ética de la pontificia universidad católica de chile. llevamos a cabo el procedimiento de consentimiento informado, que implicó la lectura de la carta de consentimiento, atender a preguntas y, en caso de que la persona aceptara participar, firmar la carta. para ello, elaboramos tres cartas de consentimiento informado distintas según el tipo de agente (estudiantes, equipos docentes, socios comunitarios). actividad sexo edad ocupación grupo focal mujer 23 años estudiante de psicología comunitaria mujer 23 años estudiante de psicología comunitaria mujer 23 años estudiante de psicología comunitaria mujer 23 años estudiante de psicología comunitaria hombre 23 años estudiante de psicología comunitaria hombre 23 años estudiante de psicología comunitaria entrevista 1 hombre docente de psicología comunitaria entrevista 2 mujer 39 años docente de psicología comunitaria mujer 24 años ayudante de psicología comunitaria mujer 24 años ayudante de psicología comunitaria entrevista 3 mujer cientista política, coordinadora de integración social en una ong sobre viviendas sociales hombre 24 años sociólogo, coordinador de integración social en una ong sobre viviendas sociales entrevista 4 mujer 49 años psicóloga, encargada del área de salud de una municipalidad urbana en una comuna en situación de pobreza entrevista 5 mujer asistente social, coordinadora de programa sobre viviendas sociales en municipalidad urbana mujer 27 años trabajadora social, profesional de apoyo en programa sobre viviendas sociales en municipalidad urbana tabla 2: datos sociodemográficos de las personas participantes del estudio resultados los temas a tratar en esta sección surgen de las seis categorías (las cuales corresponden a los subtítulos), y sus conceptos (la descripción de los elementos que componen la categoría), que fueron identificados a partir del análisis de datos. los resultados se http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 acompañan de citas textuales de las personas participantes. en estas, entre corchetes se contextualiza lo dicho (por ejemplo, se hace alusión a la pregunta realizada por la entrevistadora), y los paréntesis con tres puntos suspensivos se usan para constatar cuando, por motivos de extensión, la cita no es presentada completamente, sino que más bien se expone un extracto de ella. a partir de lo reportado por las personas participantes, constatamos la importancia de los agentes más mencionados o abordados por la literatura respecto al aprendizaje servicio. estos fueron: el estudiantado, el equipo docente y el socio comunitario. además de estos agentes, las personas participantes identificaron la relevancia de la comunidad donde se lleva a cabo el trabajo, de las agencias intermediarias entre la universidad y el socio comunitario (por ejemplo, oficina de la universidad que está a cargo de la vinculación con el medio), y del grupo de trabajo conformado por el estudiantado. en cuanto a los tres primeros agentes, para cada uno se mencionaron una serie de roles y funciones respecto al vínculo con los otros dos, reflejando así una bidireccionalidad en el vínculo entre cada dupla de agentes, lo que detallaremos a continuación. además, se mencionaron los otros tres agentes ya referidos (comunidad, agencias intermediarias y grupo de trabajo estudiantil) y con los cuales los tres primeros (el estudiantado, el equipo docente y el socio comunitario) establecen vínculos relevantes, describiéndose posteriormente (figura 1). vínculo entre estudiantes y socios comunitarios el vínculo entre estudiantes y socios comunitarios lo identificamos como uno muy visible, sobre el cual se construye gran parte del aprendizaje servicio. sin embargo, queda sujeto a las voluntades y no a aspectos figura 1. vínculos entre los agentes del aprendizaje servicio formales mínimos. además, fue difícil diferenciar el aprendizaje servicio de otras instancias similares, como prácticas profesionales, observaciones y voluntariados. el rol del estudiantado fue difuso, al igual que el rol formativo de los socios comunitarios, tal como fue mencionado por una coordinadora de un programa municipal: es como esa cosa media extraña, nebulosa, quizá como que uno dice “¿hasta dónde me meto?, ¿puedo preguntar más?, ¿los puedo corregir?”. por ejemplo, cuando ellos [estudiantes] nos mandaron los objetivos de su estudio a nosotros, igual les hicimos algunas correcciones de acuerdo a nuestra mirada. pero, así como sin saber si eso era parte de como… de lo formal, como que hubiese que corregir o no, sino que más bien le dimos la mirada que teníamos nosotros (entrevista 5, socio comunitario) desde el estudiantado hacia los socios comunitarios, se destacó que los/as primeros/as deberían realizar un trabajo profesional, con un manejo adecuado de herramientas teóricas y metodológicas que garantizaran la calidad del servicio, y desarrollar un posicionamiento personal respecto al servicio que llevan a cabo. asimismo, que deberían negociar la demanda o requerimiento, comunicando al socio comunitario desde el inicio los alcances y límites del servicio que realizarán. asociado a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 esto, se comentó que el estudiantado debe tener apertura ante posibles necesidades que surjan en el proceso y flexibilidad para hacer modificaciones en función de la contingencia. por otra parte, se manifestó que deben exhibir proactividad en la relación con el socio comunitario y con la comunidad, así como en la gestión de actividades y en la implementación del servicio en general. al respecto, una funcionaria municipal de una comuna urbana en situación de pobreza señaló: ellas [las estudiantes] tuvieron harta capacidad para poder adaptarse, porque nosotros entramos en un sistema. entonces, tampoco es que uno tenga ni tanto tiempo, ni en los centros tampoco tantas posibilidades de atender a las estudiantes, ellas tuvieron que buscárselas de alguna u otra manera, insistir bastante de repente para poder tener algunas reuniones, para poder contactarnos (entrevista 4, socio comunitario). por otra parte, el estudiantado debe saber pedir ayuda y apoyo de manera oportuna y asertiva cuando se requiera. se señaló, además, la relevancia de comunicar al socio comunitario los avances y dificultades del proceso, como un aspecto fundamental para garantizar el carácter participativo de este método. tal como mencionó un estudiante: “si no hay comunicación uno puede quedar totalmente descolgado, como que es muy clave y en comunitaria es aún más clave si uno quiere hacer un proceso más o menos participativo” (grupo focal 1, estudiante). asimismo, se mencionó que el estudiantado debía cumplir con los compromisos adquiridos dentro de los plazos estipulados y contribuir, desde un espíritu constructivo, a la mejora de la labor que realiza el socio comunitario, aportando ideas, recomendaciones y nuevas estrategias desde la particularidad de sus disciplinas. con respecto a este punto, los socios comunitarios pertenecientes a una ong sobre viviendas sociales señalaron: como lo dijimos anteriormente, él es sociólogo y yo soy cientista política. entonces, contar con una mirada desde la psicología fue también muy positivo (…) claramente nos pudieron aportar una visión que nosotros, por nuestras disciplinas, estamos más limitados también. entonces, en términos de diseño de intervención, el producto final estuvo muy bueno (…) en términos de aprendizaje la interdisciplinariedad nos viene bien (entrevista 3, socios comunitarios) por su parte, desde los socios comunitarios hacia el estudiantado, se reveló que los primeros deben presentar al estudiantado sus necesidades o requerimientos, buscando que puedan aportar en labores relevantes y atingentes a su formación profesional, y que definan en conjunto el servicio a realizar, transmitiendo sus propias expectativas y acogiendo sus intereses. además, las personas participantes indicaron que los socios deben agendar reuniones periódicas con el estudiantado durante el proceso para ofrecer orientaciones y retroalimentación sobre el servicio que llevan a cabo, desde un rol formativo. a su vez, deben conectar al estudiantado con agentes clave de la organización/institución o comunidad, y estar disponibles para ayudar y dar respuesta a sus inquietudes y solicitudes durante el proceso. vínculo entre equipos docentes y socios comunitarios el vínculo entre los equipos docentes y socios comunitarios fue la relación más débil y menos formalizada, según las personas participantes tanto del grupo focal como de las entrevistas. sin embargo, se manifestó la preocupación de que una mayor vinculación podría atentar contra la autonomía del http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 estudiantado y sobrecargar a los equipos docentes y socios comunitarios: [entrevistadora consulta si existió o no un vínculo entre equipos docentes y socios comunitarios] no, y de hecho con la escuela [de psicología] tampoco, (...) porque yo tengo una apuesta también con la autonomía de los estudiantes, (…) meterle como más actores igual creo que es difícil, y aparte creo que parte del mensaje importante de este curso también es cómo ellos se acercan y se aproximan a las organizaciones, cómo ellos negocian, cómo ellos encuadran el trabajo. entonces, desde ahí es importante que lo hagan ellos, sabiendo que tienen supervisión y que tienen un espacio para pensarlo con nosotros [el equipo docente]” (entrevista 1, equipo docente) ahora bien, las personas participantes reconocieron la importancia de formalizar algunos aspectos y fortalecer determinadas prácticas entre ambos agentes. de los equipos docentes hacia los socios comunitarios, se señaló como relevante que el personal docente les contextualice sobre el método de aprendizaje servicio, el curso y la actividad que se realizará, así como los roles de cada agente. asociado a esto, se consideró positivo que los equipos docentes acuerden condiciones adecuadas para el trabajo como, por ejemplo, relativas a la seguridad, espacio físico, acompañamiento, entre otros. respecto a esto, un socio comunitario mencionó: yo creo que quizá sí habría sido bueno que vinieran los profesores y nos explicaran a nosotros exactamente qué es lo que ellas querían de los estudiantes. quizá incluso nosotros podríamos haber apoyado más las funciones de ellos si hubiésemos tenido más claridad de lo que ellos tenían que hacer, (…) como recomendación yo haría esto de definir un poco mejor los roles” (entrevista 5, socio comunitario) también las personas participantes consideraron clave que el equipo docente esté presente al inicio de la interacción del estudiantado con el socio comunitario, ya sea de manera presencial o virtual. asimismo, indicaron como positivo el compartir datos de contacto para comunicarse durante el proceso, ya sea en instancias establecidas con anterioridad o frente a situaciones imprevistas que lo ameriten. además, mencionaron que los equipos docentes deben resguardar que el socio comunitario esté al tanto sobre situaciones ocurridas en la universidad (por ejemplo, paro, suspensión de actividades académicas, cambio de docentes, entre otros), ya sea informándoles directamente, a través del estudiantado, o por agencias intermediarias. por su parte, de los socios comunitarios hacia los equipos docentes, se manifestó que estén disponibles al inicio del proceso para presentarse, compartir datos de contacto, exponer expectativas y consultas, así como definir condiciones mínimas para el funcionamiento del aprendizaje servicio. además, consideraron relevante que se comuniquen con el equipo docente en caso de situaciones complejas, ya sea con el estudiantado, debido a asuntos institucionales o producto de la contingencia. por otra parte, sería clave que, en caso de ser pertinente, los socios comunitarios participen de un espacio de cierre del proceso junto al equipo docente, para retroalimentar al equipo docente sobre el funcionamiento del servicio y entrega del producto final. vínculo entre equipos docentes y estudiantes la relación entre estudiantes y equipos docentes se destacó por su carácter formativo en el aprendizaje servicio y se reconoció como clara, pero sujeta a la tensión entre un acompañamiento directivo versus la http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 autonomía, lo que se refleja en las siguientes citas, tanto por parte del equipo docente como por parte de un estudiante: se trata en cuarto [año] de que ellos [el estudiantado] logre vincularse, entonces, no tiene mucho sentido que nosotros les facilitemos el vínculo [con el socio comunitario], y en quinto [año] igual, es como una práctica profesional de alguna manera. en un sentido de que también son sus habilidades de lograr ponerse a conversar con agentes municipales, con equipos profesionales, lograr negociar las expectativas que tienen respecto al trabajo con lo que ellos realmente pueden hacer, o con el enfoque comunitario que le quieren dar. (…) entonces, es como el espacio de poder practicarlo teniendo un acompañamiento de afuera (entrevista 1, equipo docente) luego quedamos a la deriva, no recibimos tanto acompañamiento del equipo docente. o sea, las supervisiones son algo importante y fundamental y casi ético, que todos tenemos que tener (…). aquí, en este trabajo es demasiado necesario, y también como [adicional], los docentes y las ayudantes también tienen que estar pendientes sobre la organización interna de los grupos (grupo focal 1, estudiante) de parte de los equipos docentes hacia el estudiantado, se señaló como buena práctica que los primeros realicen una inducción al curso o área de especialidad en que se enmarca la actividad de aprendizaje servicio. a esto se agregó el explicitar cuál será su rol en el proceso de establecer contacto con el socio comunitario, ya sea directamente, a través de una agencia intermediaria, u orientando la elección por parte de cada estudiante. también se mencionó como clave que ofrezcan sugerencias y orienten el proceso de inserción y negociación del estudiantado con el socio comunitario. tal como mencionó una estudiante: se notaba mucho que la profesora hizo el ejercicio antes de presentarnos, de que todos los requerimientos eran muy atingentes al ramo, como que había una factibilidad importante en cada uno. y también porque hubo la posibilidad de estar conversando con ella todo el rato, como de ir pensando en el requerimiento, como profundizarlo y darle vuelta (grupo focal 1, estudiante) por otra parte, se indicó que el equipo docente debe retroalimentar de forma constructiva y contener al estudiantado, acompañándolo de manera constante, así como establecer indicaciones claras para realizar el trabajo (pautas, rúbricas, guías, entre otros). este aspecto sería fundamental en términos de acompañamiento a el estudiantado, tal como lo señaló una integrante del equipo docente: [refiriéndose a los y las estudiantes] darles [confianza], sobre todo al principio en el diagnóstico, yo los notaba como súper inseguros, como que no sabían muy bien como iba a ser, qué iba a pasar. entonces, de repente me mandaban la pauta de algo y retroalimentar eso, como que también se enfrentaban de manera distinta al momento de ir a terreno por primera vez, (…) como que les va dando más seguridad (entrevista 2, equipo docente) otros aspectos destacados del rol de los equipos docentes fueron generar instancias que permitan al estudiantado reflexionar sobre la experiencia, así como conectar y evaluar los contenidos, y las habilidades técnicas y transversales del curso con la experiencia práctica. por último, se valoró que promuevan en el estudiantado la actitud profesional (autonomía, trabajo colaborativo, capacidad para resolver problemas, entre otros) y su habilitación sociolaboral (formalidad y pertinencia en las interacciones en contextos laborales). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 por su parte, del estudiantado hacia los equipos docentes, se manifestó que el primero mantenga una actitud profesional en la implementación del aprendizaje servicio en la sala de clases, relacionando los contenidos del curso con la experiencia. también se señaló la importancia de que colaboren con el equipo docente durante la supervisión, desde una escucha activa a los otros grupos, aportando ideas respecto a sus inquietudes y con disposición a aprender en conjunto: [refiriéndose a la posición que debería tomar el estudiantado respecto al espacio de acompañamiento] es como una reunión de equipo técnica, la idea es que somos todos profesionales, estamos haciendo nuestro trabajo, estamos aprendiendo desde ahí, y también aprendemos colaborativamente con nuestros compañeros, y estamos ahí para ayudarlos a resolver las inquietudes que traigan” (entrevista 1, equipo docente) además, se mencionó que es clave que el estudiantado reporte al equipo docente los avances y desafíos con el socio comunitario, así como la experiencia en general. a esto se agregó la importancia de que puedan pedir ayuda o apoyo al equipo docente de manera oportuna y asertiva cuando se requiera. vínculo con la comunidad por otra parte, pudimos reconocer buenas prácticas del estudiantado para su vinculación con la comunidad donde se realizará el servicio. para comenzar, se señaló la importancia de que manifiesten interés y motivación de vincularse directamente con la comunidad, a través del trabajo “en terreno” constante, tal como fue reportado por un personal docente: aparece la motivación en el camino, quizá no tanto por las contrapartes institucionales, pero sí cuando empiezan a vincularse con los actores comunitarios, los dirigentes, los vecinos o con el personal del [centro de salud comunal]. porque también van palpando más la importancia real del trabajo que están haciendo (entrevista 1, equipo docente) a partir de esto, se comentó sobre la importancia de que el estudiantado integre a la comunidad en el servicio que ofrecen, participando activamente con ella, evitando las relaciones asimétricas o desde el asistencialismo. esta sería una preocupación fundamental para un gran número de estudiantes, tal como lo relató uno de ellos: hay un tema con el asistencialismo, que igual a todos nos preocupa mucho, que no se caiga en prácticas al final asistencialistas y poco participativas, que es lo que se dio mucho en experiencias anteriores. quizá, esta ha sido una excepción este semestre, en realidad en ese sentido (grupo focal 1, estudiante) a esto se agregó como relevante el acoger, en la medida de lo posible, las necesidades de la comunidad que surjan a lo largo del proceso. asimismo, se comentó sobre lo clave que es detectar las figuras de liderazgo en la comunidad para trabajar cooperativamente con ellas. además, se consideró fundamental que el estudiantado actúe desde un rol profesional y que detecte la importancia del trabajo que están realizando para las personas o comunidades. por otro lado, se reconoció como una buena práctica del equipo docente, asociada a la comunidad, asegurarse de que se les realice una devolución del resultado o producto final del trabajo, en caso de ser pertinente. a su vez, se detectó como un rol relevante del socio comunitario conectar al estudiantado con la comunidad, compartiendo contactos o vinculándolo directamente con las personas y/o con el liderato vecinal. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 vínculo con las agencias intermediarias de la universidad a su vez, pudimos reconocer buenas prácticas de las agencias intermediarias en distintos momentos del aprendizaje servicio. se sugirió que antes del proceso, estas deben conocer en profundidad el contenido y el programa de los cursos donde se mediará el aprendizaje servicio, para favorecer la pertinencia de los requerimientos y el encuadre de la actividad. asimismo, se consideró relevante que introduzcan al socio comunitario en el método de aprendizaje servicio, y que expliquen el rol del estudiantado en la organización/institución (horas destinadas, conexión con el curso, expectativas por cumplir, etc.). por otro lado, se destacó que las agencias intermediarias presenten los requerimientos al estudiantado de manera profunda y detallada, resguardando su libertad para decidir si vincularse o no con base en sus propios intereses, y se mencionó que es clave informarles si existe más de un grupo de trabajo con relación a un mismo requerimiento (por ejemplo, de otra carrera). al comienzo del proceso, se espera que este agente comunique claramente al estudiantado el rol que tendrá como agencia intermediaria, el tipo de relación que se establecerá, y las expectativas sobre su trabajo. también se mencionó que las agencias intermediarias deben establecer y comprometer en conjunto con el estudiantado acuerdos mínimos entre ambas partes (por ejemplo, firmar un contrato particular a cada caso), y que esto se constituya en una herramienta efectiva y no solamente simbólica. además, se recomendó explicitar al estudiantado los usos que hará la agencia intermediaria de los productos finales del servicio. con respecto a la importancia de aclarar el tipo de relación que se mantendrá, así como las expectativas, una persona del grupo de estudiantes mencionó: [la persona encargada del municipio en la agencia intermediaria] nos explicitó muy bien, ella dijo: “yo no voy a ser su supervisora, yo solo soy como el intermediario, y si ustedes necesitan de mi ayuda para insistirle a la municipalidad de que les responda algo, yo estoy para eso”. ella fue muy clara en decirnos qué podíamos esperar de ella y qué no (grupo focal 1, estudiante) durante el proceso, se consideró relevante que las agencias intermediarias mantuvieran una relación cercana y de involucramiento con el trabajo, para aportar efectivamente en el quehacer del estudiantado y que el monitoreo de la actividad le "haga sentido". además, es importante que se comuniquen con los equipos docentes en casos críticos o de dificultad. respecto al acompañamiento y permanencia constante, una estudiante mencionó: [refiriéndose a la relación con la agencia intermediaria] yo creo que fue súper positiva (…) primero, por esa vía llegan [estudiantes] y, por otro lado, la [persona intermediaria] igual ha estado pendiente; ella también vino cuando hicieron la presentación del diagnóstico. quiere venir mañana que van a hacer la presentación de la intervención. entonces, yo creo que ha sido súper colaborador el vínculo, para ambos lados (entrevista 5, socio comunitario) a esto se agregaron como buenas prácticas que las agencias intermediarias establezcan una vinculación a mediano o largo plazo con una misma área académica, cursos o docentes, para ir desarrollando un filtro selectivo de requerimientos y socios comunitarios pertinentes a cada caso. respecto a la perspectiva de largo plazo, un socio comunitario mencionó: nosotros trabajamos procesos que son largos, en intervenciones que son de años. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 entonces, sería ideal poder pensar en algo más de largo plazo. entonces, tener este curso que nos sirve para este momento, pero después va a venir otro curso que va a servir para la intervención cuando ya lleguen al barrio, cuando ya se consolida. entonces, poder pensar en algo más de largo plazo con esta metodología habría sido, es algo muy positivo (entrevista 3, socio comunitario) además, se sugirió prever posibles cambios y/o reemplazo de personal en la agencia intermediaria, informando oportunamente al estudiantado y facilitando el traspaso. a su vez, se recomendó promover, dentro de lo posible, que las personas que integran las agencias intermediarias tengan afinidad con la carrera y/o cursos a su cargo, pues facilita la identificación de requerimientos y la relación con el equipo docente. vínculo al interior de los grupos de trabajo de estudiantes acerca de este vínculo, identificamos buenas prácticas del equipo docente que favorecen el trabajo grupal del estudiantado, así como buenas prácticas de parte del estudiantado para con su grupo. respecto a lo primero, las personas participantes señalaron que los equipos docentes deben explicitar al estudiantado los límites respecto a lo que será objeto de acompañamiento docente, y lo que debe ser resuelto autónomamente por parte de cada grupo. además, que el equipo docente verifique, previo a la presentación de los requerimientos y de los socios comunitarios, su solidez y que éstos no fallen una vez iniciado el trabajo. esto sería clave para evitar conflictos o frustraciones del estudiantado en sus grupos de trabajo. respecto a este tema, una estudiante comentó: en mi grupo nos conformamos en base a un requerimiento en común, pero ese requerimiento se cayó. entonces, después quedamos así como peleando porque no teníamos nada similar que nos uniera y nuestro trabajo en grupo fue bien complejo, a la interna. porque no nos conocíamos, nunca habíamos trabajado juntos y estábamos trabajando en un tema que uno no quería y el otro sí (grupo focal 1, estudiante) también el estudiantado sugirió que los equipos docentes faciliten un espacio para que quienes integran el grupo que realiza el aprendizaje servicio puedan conocerse con mayor profundidad, considerando el posicionamiento y situación de cada persona respecto al trabajo que realizará. estos espacios deberían contemplar no solo aspectos técnicos del trabajo práctico, sino que también al clima emocional y al vínculo entre estudiantes del grupo. a su vez, se señaló la importancia de que los equipos docentes presten atención a aquellos posibles conflictos que pudiesen aparecer en los grupos de trabajo. el estudiantado recomendó conformar grupos de trabajo relativamente pequeños, que apunten a aspectos afines entre sí y llevar a cabo una división de roles dentro del equipo. señalaron la importancia del compromiso de todos en el grupo con relación al socio comunitario y el trabajo. en cuanto a la aparición y manejo de conflictos, mencionaron el comunicar y transparentar de manera oportuna a las personas integrantes del grupo de trabajo los propios límites, recursos y situaciones personales que podrían interferir con la dinámica grupal. a esto cabe agregar la capacidad del estudiantado de monitorear la complejidad de los posibles conflictos que pueden aparecer a lo largo de la experiencia y el dar aviso de estos de manera oportuna al equipo docente. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 productos del proyecto: material de apoyo para el aprendizaje servicio a partir de la información generada, con el apoyo de un diseñador y con fines de innovación docente, elaboramos materiales de apoyo para formalizar mayormente la vinculación entre los agentes involucrados en el aprendizaje servicio. primero, creamos un vídeo tutorial para los socios comunitarios (ver figura 2), que presenta de forma breve y atractiva los aspectos clave del aprendizaje servicio, y los roles asociados a su relación con el estudiantado y equipos docentes. segundo, elaboramos un material docente en formato de presentación power point (ver figura 3), orientado a la inducción del método al estudiantado, agregándose a lo anterior los roles asociados a la relación entre equipos docentes y estudiantes, contenidos de habilitación sociolaboral y gestión del conflicto en los grupos de trabajo de estudiantes. tercero, creamos una guía de buenas prácticas a modo de material complementario (ver figura 4), en la cual profundizamos algunos de los aspectos ya mencionados e incorporamos recomendaciones respecto a los grupos de estudiantes, agencias intermediarias y comunidad. este material es de libre acceso y circulación, y se encuentra disponible en www.praxiscomunitaria.com, en la sección de docencia universitaria (material de apoyo), buscando así aportar a la realización de actividades de aprendizaje servicio en diversos contextos universitarios. para construir el material de apoyo, orientado a favorecer el potencial formativo y de servicio del método, y para su aplicación consideramos tres nudos críticos: (1) la tensión entre el dar más orientaciones y el énfasis en la autonomía/profesionalismo del estudiantado; (2) el riesgo de que una mayor formalización de los vínculos se constituya en una sobrecarga para los agentes; y (3) el desafío de elaborar directrices que formalicen los vínculos, sin atentar contra la flexibilidad de cada experiencia y modalidad de aprendizaje servicio. discusión a partir de lo reportado por las personas participantes del estudio, reconocimos múltiples roles y funciones que cumple el estudiantado, equipos docentes y socios comunitarios. también identificamos aspectos relevantes de la vinculación con las comunidades, las agencias intermediarias y los grupos de estudiantes. con respecto al vínculo entre estudiantes y socios comunitarios, los primeros reportan que aprenden mucho de los segundos, incorporando aspectos técnicos, pero sobre todo desde lo experiencial y el trabajo en terreno, donde se da un aprendizaje por modelaje, a partir de la observación y la entrega de orientaciones para actuar. sin embargo, es notoria la falta de formalización de este vínculo, siendo evidente el ambiguo rol formativo de los socios comunitarios. esta situación puede responder a que suele asumirse que el rol formador del estudiantado recae en el equipo docente y a que “no es fácil abandonar el papel preponderante que a menudo asume el profesorado en los procesos de aprendizaje y otorgar protagonismo a los otros participantes” (esparza & morín, 2017, p. 33) en el contexto del aprendizaje servicio. dado lo anterior, creemos necesario discutir y explorar el rol formativo de los socios comunitarios, entendiendo que la formación trasciende el rol docente y el espacio del aula. esto, comprendiendo que el término formación, heredado del griego, es entendido como “paideia”, cuyo fin es la formación integral de las personas para vivir en sociedad y ejercer sus deberes y derechos cívicos (sobrino, 2011). en contraste, el concepto de docencia, derivado del latín “docēre”, conduce a la noción de enseñanza, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 figura 2. video tutorial para los socios comunitarios figura 3. material docente para inducción en clases http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 figura 4. guía de buenas prácticas http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 que adquiere la connotación de transmitir conocimientos y que, por extensión, se asociacon “instruir” y “amaestrar” con reglas y preceptos (foulquié, 1976). desde esta perspectiva, los socios comunitarios tendrían un rol fundamental en la formación del estudiantado, siendo relevante que se involucren, no solamente como receptores de un servicio o como facilitadores operativos para el funcionamiento del proyecto, sino como agentes colaboradores en el proceso de formación integral de cada estudiante y de grupos de estudiantes. si bien el énfasis en el trabajo colaborativo se ha señalado en otros estudios sobre aprendizaje servicio y psicología comunitaria (cleveland, 2013), este suele referirse a la colaboración de los socios comunitarios con respecto a su dimensión de servicio, pero no tanto con respecto a su dimensión de aprendizaje. no obstante, la familiarización, entendida como el conocimiento bidireccional entre agentes externos e internos (montero, 2006), en este caso, estudiantes y socios comunitarios, puede favorecer, no solamente la implementación del servicio, sino también ofrecer un espacio seguro y de confianza para la formación del estudiantado. desde la literatura se ha señalado extensamente la importancia de la confianza y de establecer relaciones de colaboración que eviten el paternalismo, para el proceso de enseñanza y aprendizaje en el sistema educativo (conejeros et al., 2010). en este sentido, el proceso de familiarización entre estudiantes y socios comunitarios, y la cercanía y confianza que permite, se constituye en una herramienta de la psicología comunitaria que podría reforzarse en las instancias de aprendizaje servicio para que los socios comunitarios puedan ejercer un rol formativo de manera más clara, que permita que el conocimiento producido en dicho encuentro con el estudiantado tenga un carácter situado y de pertinencia local (montero, 2003). en cuanto al vínculo entre estudiantes y equipos docentes, se hace visible la apuesta por la autonomía del estudiantado y su tensión con la necesidad de acompañamiento. esta situación es especialmente interesante al considerar que la autonomía en el aprendizaje, la posibilidad de participar activamente y de dirigir el proceso de trabajo serían aquellos aspectos del aprendizaje servicio que mayor motivación generan en el estudiantado (esparza & morín, 2017). este énfasis en la autonomía conecta con un cambio de paradigma asociado a la escuela nueva, en la cual se aspira a fortalecer la actividad, libertad y autonomía del estudiantado (palacios, 1978, citado en narváez, 2006), donde cada docente cumple una función de acompañamiento, mediación o facilitación de los procesos de aprendizaje (jiménez, 2009). este paradigma surge en contraste a la escuela tradicional, desde el cuestionamiento de que esa forma de comprender la educación genera dependencia del estudiantado hacia el personal docente y una actitud pasiva por parte del estudiantado, frente a lo cual se plantea que éste debe asumir “una presencia activa y decisoria en su propio aprendizaje” (tueros way, 1992, p. 171). sin embargo, aunque el paradigma de la escuela nueva se remonta a inicios del siglo xx, aún existen resistencias por parte de los distintos agentes de la comunidad educativa en incorporar sus premisas. a partir de este estudio, constatamos que esto no siempre ocurre en el personal docente (fenómeno ampliamente reportado en la literatura; liesa et al., 2018), sino que en ocasiones es el estudiantado el que demanda un rol docente más tradicional, asociado a dirigir, controlar y resolver determinadas situaciones, así como a ofrecer respuestas o “verdades” absolutas, especialmente en cursos donde deben realizarse acciones novedosas y que exigen implicación con comunidades (como el caso expuesto por fox & giolla, 2021). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 por otra parte, esta perspectiva de aprendizaje activo y participativo toma especial relieve en el marco de la psicología comunitaria pues, a pesar de su énfasis en la participación, la horizontalidad y la autonomía de los sujetos y comunidades (wiesenfeld, 2015), se ha reportado que estos y otros contenidos y valores de los programas de formación en psicología comunitaria no necesariamente se reflejan en el trabajo que el personal docente ejecuta en la práctica (olivares et al., 2016). por ello, se ha propuesto que si buscamos que el estudiantado aprenda un funcionamiento interactivo y colaborativo, es necesario incorporar estrategias pedagógicas en esa misma dirección (serrano-garcía, 2010), en miras a que el vínculo entre estudiantes y equipos docentes sea coherente y sintónico con los principios de la disciplina. así, reconocemos como un desafío avanzar hacia formas de acompañamiento docente en el marco del aprendizaje servicio, que resguarden el principio de autonomía del estudiantado, pero al mismo tiempo eviten sensaciones de “abandono” o de “quedar a la deriva”, la cuales pueden obstaculizar el aprendizaje. tal como señalan sarkisian y taylor (2016), en los cursos básicos de psicología comunitaria, como era el caso de los cursos contemplados en este estudio, el estudiantado suele sentir temor o un bajo nivel de confianza al enfrentar ciertos desafíos, como retroalimentar al socio comunitario, siendo fundamental la supervisión del trabajo de campo para apoyar el desarrollo de la confianza en la activación de habilidades prácticas. asimismo, y considerando los vínculos al interior del grupo de estudiantes, recalcamos la importancia de definir bajo qué situaciones de conflicto o con relación a qué niveles de complejidad del conflicto se debe esperar acompañamiento y apoyo directo de los equipos docentes, pues esto parece quedar poco claro y/o sujeto a la interpretación, dificultando el vínculo entre ambos agentes. además, consideramos importante reforzar el acompañamiento entre pares, reconocido como una práctica fundamental para el logro de los resultados de aprendizaje en el marco del aprendizaje servicio (vivero et al., 2020), así como implementar estrategias de apoyo al estudiantado por parte de egresados y egresadas de los programas o estudiantes de magíster, desde un modelo formativo “en cascada” y colaborativo (zambrano & henríquez, 2020). con respecto al vínculo entre equipos docentes y socios comunitarios, observamos que sería uno escasamente delimitado y poco profundo. esto puede asociarse a que las personas participantes consideraron al estudiantado como protagonistas del aprendizaje servicio. esto es consistente con la literatura, en la que se señala constantemente que el estudiantado debe protagonizar este método, especialmente en su desarrollo o implementación (albertín et al., 2015; ochoa & pérez, 2019). la formalización y profundización de este vínculo podría contribuir en dos direcciones: por un lado, en fomentar el rol formativo de los socios comunitarios y, por otro lado, en promover el espíritu y vocación de servicio en equipos docentes. ambas direcciones permitirían generar una mayor sinergia entre las universidades y las comunidades, permitiendo que el aprendizaje servicio se constituya efectivamente en una herramienta que fortalezca las alianzas entre el mundo académico y social-territorial (martínez, 2017), desde la contribución mutua y evitando aproximaciones instrumentales de uno u otro lado. para ello, en este estudio toman especial relevancia las agencias intermediarias entre la universidad y los socios comunitarios, pues ellas pueden evitar que las acciones de aprendizaje servicio sean acciones aisladas o dependientes de la buena voluntad de los http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 equipos docentes, y favorecer que el vínculo con las comunidades sea más sostenible y perdurable. esta contribución sería muy importante considerando lo señalado por serrano-garcía (2010): que en la formación en psicología comunitaria dos desafíos centrales son la desvinculación entre la sociedad civil y otras estructuras comunitarias de la academia, y la tendencia a que las universidades “exploten” a las comunidades con fines de aprendizaje o investigación, sin realizar devoluciones u ofrecer servicios útiles para las comunidades. en este contexto, la institucionalización y formalización de los vínculos establecidos entre las agencias intermediarias y los otros agentes del aprendizaje servicio, es una oportunidad para la formación en psicología comunitaria. también contribuye a que el trabajo en terreno esté fundado en los derechos de las comunidades, como el derecho al respeto y el reconocimiento y el derecho a recibir intervenciones de calidad y de largo plazo (olivares et al., 2018). por otra parte, toma relieve en esta investigación el vínculo con la comunidad a la cual se orienta la experiencia de aprendizaje servicio, respecto a lo cual el estudiantado indicó la importancia de evitar aproximaciones asistencialistas y con bajos niveles de participación, que podrían traducirse en un mero “turismo social”. esta preocupación da cuenta de cómo este método favorece efectivamente una mirada reflexiva, el pensamiento crítico, la formación en valores y la responsabilidad ciudadana (barrios et al., 2012; esparza & morín, 2017). este énfasis en ofrecer servicios realmente participativos también llama a fortalecer en la formación el desarrollo de herramientas concretas y diversas, que favorezcan procesos participativos y de construcción colectiva en múltiples niveles de intervención (zambrano & henríquez, 2020). en este contexto, serían especialmente importantes la formación en habilidades asociadas a la facilitación de procesos grupales, la evaluación e investigación, la planificación, la elaboración de presupuestos, la gestión de comunicaciones, entre otros (julian & collins, 2011). conclusiones en este estudio, sistematizamos prácticas asociadas al vínculo entre estudiantes, equipos docentes, socios comunitarios, comunidad, agencias intermediarias y grupos de estudiantes, para la posterior elaboración de un material de apoyo. buscamos la formalización de tales vínculos, como una manera de favorecer tanto la formación en psicología comunitaria como los servicios ofrecidos a las comunidades, es decir, tanto la dimensión de aprendizaje como de servicio de este método, haciendo un llamado para evitar el turismo social y realmente ser un aporte respecto a las necesidades e intereses de las comunidades. sin embargo, es necesario considerar que, a pesar de que la flexibilidad del aprendizaje servicio puede conducir a que algunos vínculos sean confusos, ésta también parece ser una característica atractiva para los socios comunitarios al vincularse con el estudiantado, debido a su capacidad para adaptarse al contexto institucional y al trabajo que realizan. en este sentido, consideramos importante visualizar que no necesariamente la alternativa óptima es formalizar cada aspecto de los vínculos, sino que más bien habría que buscar un equilibrio entre su formalización y flexibilidad. lo anterior es sintónico con lo planteado en el marco de la institucionalización de este método en los contextos universitarios, donde se advierte que los modelos de aprendizaje servicio deben tener una estructura flexible y resiliente frente a imprevistos y procesos propios del contexto. es así cómo buscamos que exista un estándar en el ámbito universitario para implementar http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 este método, pero que se reconozca la particularidad de las carreras disciplinares, de los socios comunitarios, y de los tipos de servicios que se ofrecen (jouannet et al., 2017). en este sentido, es clave buscar el equilibrio entre la institucionalización del método, y el respeto a la espontaneidad, la autonomía y la libertad de los equipos docentes y de la universidad (campo, 2017). por otro lado, identificamos como limitación metodológica el tamaño muestral en términos de la variedad de cursos y la cantidad de participantes, situación que fue producto de la crisis social acontecida en chile en octubre de 20192. si bien el proyecto original contemplaba una amplitud mayor de participantes, dada la contingencia no fue posible abarcarlo, considerando además que el fenómeno de los vínculos podría haberse visto muy interferido por ser los socios comunitarios organizaciones sociales y por interrumpirse el proceso normal de asistencia a clases. por último, reconocemos como limitación el no haber considerado en el diseño del estudio los vínculos con la comunidad, las agencias intermediarias y el de los grupos de estudiantes, motivo por el cual estos no se estudiaron en profundidad, siendo necesario en próximos estudios orientar el análisis a estos agentes, fundamentales en la implementación del aprendizaje servicio en contextos universitarios. como alcances de este estudio, reconocemos el considerar la perspectiva de tres agentes centrales del aprendizaje servicio, lo cual permite triangular y analizar los vínculos desde distintas miradas. esto permite 2 en octubre de 2019, ocurrió en chile una crisis social, también denominada “estallido” o “revuelta”, debido al alza de los precios del transporte público, que visibilizó y gatilló el malestar por otras injusticias sociales asociadas a la desigualdad en materia de ingresos, salud, educación, jubilaciones, entre otros, así como las avanzar en la producción de conocimiento, al compararlo con otros estudios que incorporan solo a un tipo de agente, o donde la experiencia de uno de ellos es referida por otros (por ejemplo, donde los equipos docentes refieren a las vivencias del estudiantado). además, consideramos importante que en la descripción de los vínculos y en la identificación de prácticas y recomendaciones se consideren tanto aspectos positivos como negativos de las experiencias reportadas, en contraste con estudios donde solo se registra y comparte lo positivo de estas actividades y métodos. a esto agregamos como alcance que no solamente realizamos una investigación a través del levantamiento de buenas prácticas, sino que también elaboramos material de apoyo y productos específicos para acompañar el uso del método en contextos universitarios. una proyección al respecto es la aplicación y evaluación de estos productos en diversos escenarios y ajustarlos en consideración a lo que se observe. asimismo, recomendamos a investigadores e investigadoras en docencia universitaria de otras disciplinas que realicen estudios similares para contextualizar el uso de este método en función a cada disciplina y contexto de aplicación. deficientes condiciones de vida de gran parte de la población. a partir de esta crisis, se propuso como salida institucional la redacción de una nueva constitución. este proceso, en su momento más álgido, conllevó la suspensión de actividades académicas en las universidades, incluido el establecimiento donde se realizó este proyecto. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 referencias albertín, p. masgrau, m., soler, p., heras, r., bofill, a.m. bellera, j. & guiu, e. 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(2000). aprendizaje y servicio solidario en las escuelas argentinas: una visión descriptiva a partir de las experiencias presentadas al premio presidencial escuelas solidarias (2000-2001). center for social development, washington university. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/23321 5852.pdf tueros way, e. (1992). planeamientos para la formación del profesional docente. educación, 1(1), 19-34. https://revistas.pucp.edu.pe/index.php/e ducacion/article/view/4394/4371 vivero, l., molina, w. & standen, d. (2020). un análisis crítico al modelo aprendizaje servicio: su implementación en la universidad católica de temuco. sophia austral, 25(1), 121-137. http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/s071956052020000100121 wiesenfeld, e. (2015). las intermitencias de la participación comunitaria: ambigüedades y retos para su investigación y práctica. psicología, conocimiento y sociedad, 5(2), 335-387. https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/4758/475 847271014.pdf zambrano, a. & henríquez, d. (2020). construyendo formación en psicología comunitaria: reflexiones desde la praxis en la región de la araucanía. en j. alfaro, b. olivares, v. monreal, p. gamonal & f. jeannerett (eds.), diálogos contemporáneos en psicología comunitaria. escenarios, problemas y aprendizajes (pp. 385-403). astrolabio ediciones. https://psicologia.udp.cl/cms/wpcontent/uploads/2020/11/diálogoscontemporáneos-en-psicologíacomunitaria-1.pdf http://www.gjcpp.org/ the wave project: evidencing surf therapy for young people in the uk hannah devine-wright1,2, and cath godfrey3 keywords: surf therapy, wellbeing, youth, evaluation author biographies: hannah devine-wright, is an environmental psychologist whose research focuses on the nexus between health, wellbeing and sustainability. hannah is the director of placewise ltd, a social research consultancy, an honorary senior research fellow at the european centre for environment and human health at the university of exeter, uk, and a founding member of the international surf therapy organisation (isto). since 2013, hannah and her colleague, cath godfrey, have developed and implemented an iterative evaluation programme for the wave project, a charity delivering surf therapy for young people across the uk. hannah and cath are currently investigating how surfing can be made available on prescription for young people within the uk’s national health service, and how young people living outside coastal areas can benefit from surf therapy. cath godfrey, is an evaluation consultant with a background in health psychology and clinical audit. cath has worked largely on public health and applied social research and evaluation projects, often engaging “hard to reach” communities. access to services and decisions around self-care have often formed part of this work. her focus has long been on sustainable ways to support wellbeing and positive ways to communicate this and over the last seven years, cath has worked with hannah devine-wright and the wave project to develop an evaluation programme and evidence an exemplary wellbeing service for young people. 1 placewise ltd. uffculme, devon, uk 2 eurpean centre for environment and human health, university of exeter, uk 3 cath godfrey evaluations, falmouth, cornwall, uk global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 recommended citation: devine-wright, h., & godfrey, c. (2020). the wave project: evidencing surf therapy for young people in the uk. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(2), 1 – 15. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: for correspondence, please email dr. devine-wright at h.devine-wright2@exeter.ac.uk http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:h.devine-wright2@exeter.ac.uk global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the wave project: evidencing surf therapy for young people in the uk abstract sport and exercise are known to have long-term, positive consequences for the physical and mental health and wellbeing of the individual and society as a whole. in the uk, a quarter of young people experience long-term illness, disability or mental ill-health. however, understanding the impact of surfing on physical and mental health is complex, not least because there are different pathways by which surfing can improve health and wellbeing including: playing, being in nature, socialising, taking risks and identifying as a surfer. the wave project is a uk-wide surf therapy charity which provides vulnerable young people aged 8-21 with an opportunity to surf once a week for six weeks. at the wave project, clients ‘do’ surfing with the one-to-one assistance of a volunteer overseen by a surf coordinator. after completing the wave project clients are invited to become members of a follow-on surf club staffed by volunteers or become a wave project volunteer themselves. this paper provides an overview of the wave project evaluation programme between 2013-2017. during this period there have been three evaluation phases centred around wave project delivery: spring 2013, summer 2014-autumn 2015 and spring-summer 2017. each phase has employed a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods to assess the experience of clients, parents/carers, referrers and wave project staff. these methods have included preand post-intervention client surveys, focus groups, interviews and log books. the results to-date show that surf therapy can improve the health and wellbeing of vulnerable young people in the uk. participation in sporting activities is known to have long-term, positive consequences for the quality of life of individuals and the equity and cohesion of society as a whole (levitas et al., 2007). however, children with physical disabilities, who have the same activity requirements as all children (world health organisation (who), 2012), tend to have less opportunities to participate in sport (armitano et al., 2015). this can contribute to reduced fitness, an increased obesity risk (murphy, carbone & the council on children with disabilities, 2008) and associated secondary health problems in later life, such as coronary heart disease and diabetes (fragalapinkham et al., 2008). in the uk, the incidence of long-term illness (e.g. diabetes) or disability amongst young people is high, affecting almost one quarter (23%) of children aged 11-15 (institute of health equality, 2017). one in eight children and young people aged 5 to 19 had a mental health difficulty in 2017 (nhs digital, 2018). for children living with a disability, poor mental health or any longterm condition, who may not conform to local norms of appearance, language or behaviour (levinson et al., 2013), there is a higher risk of being bullied by peers (sentenac et al., 2013) which itself can exacerbate psychological and physical illhealth and poorer life outcomes (durcan & bell, 2015). only one quarter of school-age children with a diagnosable mental health problem receive any form of intervention (khan, 2016). in 2017, the children’s society estimated that 60% of 10to 17-year-olds across england who were referred to child and adolescent mental health services were not treated because their problems were not deemed ‘serious’ enough (the children’s society, 2019). although parents http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 and carers often seek advice and assistance from professionals they can face lengthy delays, on average 12 weeks from referral to first treatment (the children’s society, 2019). research on the impact of marine sports on wellbeing has tended to focus on ablebodied participants (pitt, 2018) despite marine environments being well-suited to people with physical disabilities (foley & kistemann, 2015). highly aerobic aquatic sports like surfing can help manage adversity by significantly improving cardiorespiratory endurance and building upper body and core strength (armitano et al., 2015). the buoyancy provided by water enables children with impaired mobility on land to function independently of mobility devices and being able to move through water unassisted has been linked to enhanced self-esteem and self-awareness (clapham et al., 2014). although natural, aquatic environments tend to be associated with improved wellbeing (e.g. gascon et al., 2017; gleave & cole-hamilton, 2012; grellier et al., 2017; hignett et al., 2018), the strength of this effect is not well understood (britton et al., 2018; hartig et al., 2014). understanding the impact of surfing on physical and mental health is complex. some have focused on the embodied performance or ‘doing’ surfing and how this contributes to young peoples’ ‘authentic’ selves (e.g. wheaton & beal, 2003), others have concentrated on how social connections to others enhances wellbeing (e.g. durcan & bell, 2015; gutman et al., 2010; mcpherson et al., 2013). furthermore, for disabled children experiencing degrees of protection well beyond the norm (gill, 2007), ‘lifestyle’ sports like surfing can provide an opportunity for taking risks and experiencing heightened emotions including exhilaration, fear, pleasure and fun (bell et al., 2015; kelly, 2018). this paper provides an overview of an ongoing mixed methods surf therapy evaluation programme in the uk which was established in 2013 (godfrey et al., 2015). the evaluation to-date has focused on establishing the effect of the wave project, a six-week surfing intervention, on the positive functioning of vulnerable young people and the role of associated activities, notably, follow-on surf clubs and volunteering for maintaining and enhancing wellbeing. the wave project the wave project is a six-week, uk-wide surf therapy programme for vulnerable young people aged 8-21. clients who are referred to the wave project typically experience physical and mental health issues or social isolation due to experiencing peer aggression (durcan & bell, 2015; khan, 2016). the particular characteristics of the wave project are important: there is an ethos of acceptance, support and non-competitive challenge. the aim is to teach surfing in a way that young people value: ‘genuine, warm, confidential, non-patronising, that co-produces solutions and builds on strong relationships.’ (khan, 2016). at the wave project, clients ‘do’ surfing with the one-to-one assistance of a volunteer overseen by a surf coordinator. after completing the wave project clients are invited to become members of a followon surf club. since 2013, membership of the surf club has expanded from 15 participants to more than 500 members in 2018. furthermore, in excess of 50 former wave project clients have become young volunteers with the wave project. operating throughout the uk, the wave project runs courses in eight locations in england and one in wales, scotland and northern ireland respectively. sessions are delivered at weekends and are free of charge, with transport provided for young people who would not otherwise be able to attend. this helps to ensure that young people who are at ongoing risk of social isolation due to social or economic challenges are able to access surf therapy. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 however, demand for surf therapy in the uk is very high with potential clients at established courses having to wait for up to a year. between 2013-2017, the number of people referred to the wave project more than quadrupled, from 100 in 2013 to 461 in 2017. the ratio of female to male participants has remained constant at 1:2 for five years. there are currently more than 400 people on a waiting list and 10-15 new referrals coming in weekly from professional services. around a third of the wave project participants have diagnosed mental health issues, a third suffer social deprivation (e.g. household poverty) or family breakdown (the centre for social justice, 2013) and a third are socially isolated because of a disability, being a young carer or being bullied. most are not taking part in other sporting or leisure activities. all are vulnerable to further isolation. the wave project has developed from a regional to nationwide surf therapy charity, reaching with the help of 869 active volunteers (the wave project, 2018). in 2017/18 the wave project received over £500,000 in donations and grants to support its surf therapy program. a founding member of the international surf therapy organisation (isto), the wave project has co-created, a client-centred, evidence-base for surf therapy that aligns with its core ethos of acceptance, support, non-competitive challenge and importantly, having fun. the wave project evaluation programme demonstrating the value of the wave project surf therapy programme is important for service users, practitioners and commissioners, all of whom share an interest in promoting the well-being of young people. in order to better understand the impact of surfing on young people’s health and wellbeing, the wave project has monitored the experience of clients, parents/carers, referrers and staff since 2013 whilst following social research association guidance for research ethics. the evaluation program has used mixed methods including surveys, focus groups, interviews and open-ended responses recorded in log books. this paper outlines three evaluation phases completed between spring 2013summer 2017. data analysis in each phase, a core measure of client wellbeing was established by computing the reliability of six items within the preand post-intervention client survey. these items formed the ‘positive outlook’ subscale of the stirling children’s wellbeing scale (scwbs), a positively worded measure validated for use with children from age 8 upwards (liddle & carter, 2010). cases were excluded if the scwbs data was incomplete either preor post-intervention. therefore, subsequent analysis of survey data was limited to clients who had completed the scwbs scale at two time points. no analytic strategies beyond excluding cases with missing scwbs data were employed. with regard to the ‘positive outlook’ scale, an alpha coefficient of .7 or more was treated as an indication of a reliable scale. differences in client wellbeing over time were calculated using a paired samples ttest. the t-test compared the mean score on the scwbs ‘positive outlook’ scale prior to the intervention with the mean score on the scwbs ‘positive outlook’ scale after the intervention. for all the scaled survey items, a low score, that is, one, was reserved for strong disagreement with a statement, and the highest score (five) was reserved for strong agreement with a statement. as all the statements were presented in the same format, it was not necessary to reverse score any of the items. all qualitative data, for example, derived from interviews, log books or focus groups, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 was thematically analysed (braun & clarke, 2006). evaluation phase one: spring 2013 the aim of phase one was to develop a modular and modifiable means of assessing client subjective wellbeing. participants: phase one overall, this study consisted of 155 participants: 103 clients aged 8-18 years (70% male, 30% female), of whom 84 completed the scwbs ‘positive outlook’ subscale preand post-intervention; 39 parents who completed a parental feedback survey, and 13 referrers (representing 18 clients), who completed a referrer feedback form. just over half (n=45, 554%) of the clients attended all six sessions. a further third (n=27, 32%) attended five sessions and n=12 (14%) clients attended four or less sessions. measures: phase one acknowledging that there was no single measure of young person’s well-being, a tailored preand post-intervention questionnaire was designed using validated measures including the scwbs ‘positive outlook’ subscale. table 1. provides an overview of the items included in the pre and post-intervention client questionnaire. table 1 phase one client questionnaire items to assess well-being wellbeing aspect indicated items source instructions and scoring positive outlook* i think good things will happen in my life i’ve been able to make choices easily i can find lots of fun things to do i feel i am good at some things i think lots of people care about me i think there are things i can be proud of stirling childrens’ wellbeing scale (scwbs) positive outlook’ sub-scale (liddle & carter, 2010) for each question, please tick the box that best shows how you’ve been thinking or feeling over the past couple of weeks’ 5-point scale: never, not much, some of the time, quite a lot, all the time emotional wellbeing i’ve been feeling calm scwbs single item from ‘positive affect’ sub-scale as above vitality social wellbeing i’ve been having fun i feel safe with my friends own item children’s society item (draft children’s wellbeing scale) as above ‘please show how much you agree or disagree’ social trust i think other people are basically good recommended by new economics foundation (nef) as above physical health i like being active i feel fit and healthy national obesity observatory standard evaluation framework as above *note. in phase one, these items formed a reliable ‘positive outlook’ scale pre(t1) and post(t2) intervention, with t1 alpha .781 (6 items) and t2 alpha .766 (6 items). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 parents completed a short survey focused on overall satisfaction with the wave project and perceived impact on their child. the referrer feedback survey consisted of six sections: four categorical and two openended. the categorical questions focused on impact of the wave project on the client (e.g. they made new friends, demonstrated more self-confidence, showed interest in joining a club) and five items related to satisfaction with the wave project (e.g. overall satisfaction, waiting times, meeting expected outcomes, likelihood of recommending the service to others). the open-ended questions probed impact on client wellbeing and suggestions for how, if at all, the service could be improved. results: phase one in phase one, client wellbeing improved across seven locations in the south-west of england up to three months after intervention (godfrey et al., 2015). the only significant effect of gender was females were significantly less likely than males to complete the full course (chi2 = 6.659, p=.01). it was not possible from the survey results to understand the reasons why females were less likely to complete all six wave project sessions. one year later, 70% of clients regularly attended a surf club. the wave project became a ‘touchstone’ for some young people e.g. a parent reported, “we have been able to use the wave project to boost his low self-esteem and low self-worth. when he doubts himself we remind him how he feels when he is in the waves with wave project instructors. when he feels life is too difficult or he is too depressed, we remind him how soon his next surf session is.” across all five sub-categories relating to satisfaction, referrers reported 100% satisfaction with the wave project. the five categories were: overall satisfaction with the wave project, whether they would recommend the service to others, whether they would refer other clients to the wave project, whether waiting times were satisfactory and whether the wave project met the outcomes they expected. each of the satisfaction questions required a categorical (yes/no) response. referrers noted that the consistent support, kindness and friendliness of staff and volunteers was an integral part of the intervention. referrers noticed an increase in positive attitude and better communication, as well as improved self-management and behaviour at both home and school e.g. “both young people have gained more confidence.” however, one referrer noted “i think the project is great but i feel that the number of sessions needs to be increased. [my client] was becoming more confident with surfing and the people he was working with and then the sessions ended.” evaluation phase two: summer 2014 autumn 2015 building on phase one, phase two had three aims: 1. to use case based, qualitative data to show the real, lived experience and positive effects of initial outcomes on clients and their families over time; 2. to measure wellbeing ‘in participant’s own words’; 3. to reflect wider impact over a longer period of time up to three years from first contact with the wave project using qualitative methods. this was achieved using a mixed methods approach in a case study location. ‘mid cornwall’, a region in the south-west of england where the wave project had been operating for the longest period of time. participants: phase two in june 2015, ten semi-structured interviews were conducted with six wave project participants (two participants who had progressed to volunteering through the surf club, two who were potential volunteers and two who were unlikely to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 volunteer). the remaining four interviewees consisted of two adult volunteers and two referrers who had each referred at least ten clients to the wave project. 28 parents/carers and surf coordinators entered unstructured comments into a surf club log book between july 2014-september 2015. measures: phase two interviewees were asked to describe their involvement in the wave project, to comment on any changes that they had observed over time in themselves or others, and to tell us about what they thought were the most important aspects of the wave project. log book entries which shared a common referent, that is, ten entries which referred to the same person at least twice, were selected. each of the interviews was transcribed and thematically analysed. entries from the log book were collated and coded using the themes identified in the interviews. results: phase two within the log book and interview transcripts we identified six themes that varied in scale from emotional responses through individual to social processes: 1. positive emotions (e.g. “doing this makes him really happy.”, parent j, interview). 2. coping, self-management and empathy (e.g. “when someone else does something good i say, ‘well done’ and if there’s a good wave i could get, i let someone else take it.”, participant j, interview). 3. confidence and motivation (e.g. “it’s given me confidence, built my self-esteem and opened many opportunities for me.”, participant a, interview). 4. social trust; identity and sense of belonging (e.g. “[he] has made friends that he cares about, improved social skills, is meeting and interacting, and feels supported and safe.”, parent m, log book). 5. trajectory and future self (e.g. “me and my dad started volunteering. it’s been great.” participant e, interview). 6. wider impact (e.g. “whole family involvement includes [participant’s] dad’s friends at work raising money for the wave project. it’s all good, good for all of us.”, parent l, interview). these six impact themes formed four potentially overlapping clusters associated with improved wellbeing: firstly, shifts in positive emotion, coping, self-management and empathy; secondly, increased confidence, motivation and social trust leading to more engagement; thirdly, changes in self-perception and social identity and fourthly, a positive impact on family and community (devine-wright & godfrey, 2015). a transformation narrative emerged which is illustrated by the following account from the mother of harry, aged 13, who had been referred to the wave project: “[he] had been excluded from school, didn't really have friends, wasn't part of any clubs. this wasn't for the want of trying, he just didn't fit in, he couldn't follow instructions therefore it would end with yet another negative experience. he didn't really see anyone apart from immediate family. i could see my boy becoming more withdrawn. the [wave project] lady on the phone put me at ease and told me he would have fun so we signed up … he is back in school now, he has a few buddies and he has stuff going on in his life…the wave project was very important at a time when he needed it and he will always be a part of it. he now goes to other activities but we would have been reluctant to try these before. he had a foundation because he succeeded at the wave project first.” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 phase three: spring-summer 2017 phase three focused on refining the client preand post-intervention questionnaire to reflect what had been learnt in the previous phases and undertaking a broader survey of surf therapy across the uk. participants: phase three in 2017, almost 90% (n=412) of clients participating in the wave project in ten uk locations (mid, west and north cornwall; north and south devon; dorset, isle of wight, scotland, south wales and scarborough) completed the preand postintervention questionnaire. however, all subsequent analysis was restricted to 347 clients who completed the stirling positive outlook sub-scale before and after the intervention. measures: phase three a questionnaire was designed that incorporated both closed items (e.g. likerttype five-point response format) and openended items (e.g. a word association task). all the items in the questionnaire were worded positively to reflect the ethos of the project as a whole. wellbeing: positive outlook based on feedback from clients all the items from the scwbs positive outlook sub-scale were included but they were rephrased to make them simpler and shorter e.g. ‘i’ve been able to’ was replaced with ‘i can’. the wave project positive outlook scale used in this study consisted of six items: ‘i feel good about my future’, ‘i can make choices easily’, ‘i can find fun activities to do’, ‘i feel that i am good at some things’, ‘there are people in my life who really care about me’, ‘there are things i can be proud of’. cronbach’s alpha pre-intervention was 0.759 (t1) and 0.814 post-intervention (t2). the 6-item scwbs positive emotional state sub-scale was not used because pilot research showed that the items: ‘i’ve been getting on well with people’ and ‘i’ve been feeling relaxed’ were ambiguous for this particular client group. word associations each questionnaire included word association tasks (devine-wright, devinewright and sherry-brennan, 2010; pitt, 2018) which required clients to describe up to three words associated with ‘me and the sea’ (pre-intervention), ‘me and surfing’ (post-intervention) this paper focuses on associations with ‘me and surfing’ generated by clients who completed the post-intervention survey. in order to calculate the frequency and type of words generated, phrases such as ‘i love it’ were compounded into a single word e.g. ‘iloveit’. similar words, for example, ‘standing’, ‘standingup’, ‘standup’ and ‘stand’ were rephrased using the dominant word, in this case, ‘stand’. to triangulate ‘hard outcomes’ e.g. joining a surf club, a short post-intervention survey was completed by 218 (53%) parents/carers. semi-structured follow-up interviews (individual and small group) were conducted with twenty-two people (13 adults and 9 clients) representing projects in england, scotland and wales. this paper uses quotations from the interviews and small group discussions to illustrate word association task outcomes and findings associated with key measures in the client preand post-intervention survey. qualitative data was analysed using thematic analysis (dahan-oliel et al., 2012). the relative frequency of words generated in the word association task was represented diagrammatically using ‘wordle’ (www.wordle.net), a free, infographic software programme. results: phase three a significant increase in positive outlook was measured using the stirling positive outlook subscale (t1 (m=3.89 sd=.63), t2 (m=4.18, sd=.63); t(347)=-10.21, p<.000)). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.wordle.net/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 in 2017, 98.2% of wave project participants (n=338) were positive about surfing, with 85.5% (n=289) rating surfing at least 9 out of 10. a total of 833 words were generated in the ‘me and surfing’ word association task which consisted of 134 different words. these words constituted six superordinate categories: positive aspects (53%), features of the natural environment (26%), surf sport related (9%), negative aspects (8%), social (3%) and ‘others’ (2%). as the infographic in figure 1. shows, the largest, and therefore the most frequent word associated with ‘me and surfing’ was ‘fun’ (n=156, 19%). in over half (57%) of cases where surfing was described as fun it was the first word in the list. the second most frequent word associated with ‘me and surfing’ was an aspect of the natural environment, ‘waves' (n=73, 9%), whilst the third most popular descriptor was an emotion, ‘happy’ (n=56, 7%). figure 1. word cloud for ‘surfing and me’ about three quarters of the positive words associated with ‘surfing and me’ were extreme (e.g. awesome, epic, best) rather than moderate (e.g. good). a sixth (16%) of all words were related to happiness (e.g. happy, smile). a similar number (n=46) referred to feelings of arousal (e.g. exciting, exhilarating) or a sense of calm (n=32). amongst words categorised as psychological, the majority referred to feeling confident (n=18) or free (n=9). almost a tenth, (n=68, 8%) of words were categorised as negative, many of which referred to feeling cold (n=26), afraid (n=6), falling (n=5) or ‘wiping out’ (n=5). whilst learning or acquiring skills (n=13) accounted for approximately 3% of responses, a similar number (n=11) described ‘surfing and me’ as challenging or hard work. only two clients used surfing specific words, for example, ‘stoke’an intense awareness of the moment and feeling ‘at one’ with the environment (wheaton, 2016). the post-intervention survey corroborated the word association results showing that surfing was strongly associated with fun and positive emotions. a very strong increase in ‘i can find fun activities to do’ was noted between preand postintervention (p<.000, n=344) with 99.7% (n=343) of participants saying that they ‘had fun’. as a surf club member since 2015 in scotland stressed, “can’t go to something without having fun.” after taking part in the wave project, the majority of participants reported feeling fitter but the benefits of surfing extended beyond the physical, with clients enjoying the activity, appreciating the acquisition or development of a new skill and reporting a significant increase in social connectedness (t1 (m=4.00, sd=.63), t2 (m=4.33, sd=.55); t(346)=-11.60, p<.000)). “[my son] just slid in there rather than edging his way in. he just blended right in.” (parent, scotland) almost three quarters (74%, n=218) of wave project participants reported that they were either interested in, or had, joined a surf club, another sports club, or volunteered. two-thirds (63%, n=100) of clients who responded, indicated that they had joined a surf club and a quarter (26%, n=38) said that they had joined a sports club. a quarter of clients (n=88, 25%) expressed an interest in becoming a wave project volunteer and almost 10% (n=30, 9%) would consider other types of volunteering. 3% (n=10) had become volunteers with the wave project. being able to access a follow-on surf club and become a surf mentor provided clients http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 with a positive pathway to wellbeing. as a parent in south wales said, ‘[he] has recently stated that he wants to volunteer with the wave project and become a mentor himself this is amazing and such a turnaround from the young lad who didn’t want to come out of his room, didn’t want to live.’ discussion the wave project promotes wellbeing by combining the embodied experience of being in the sea and surfing with an ethos that young people value, ‘help that is genuine, warm, confidential, nonpatronising, that co-produces solutions and builds on strong relationships.’ (khan, 2016, p.5). being able to access a follow-on surf club and become a surf mentor widens participation in sporting and voluntary activities (office for disability issues, 2014) and provides clients with a positive pathway to wellbeing, confidence and resilience (mckay et al., 2018). approximately, ten per cent of those aged 14 or over and able to do so, become volunteer helpers with the wave project (devine-wright & godfrey, 2018; godfrey et al., 2015). the positive impact of volunteering is well documented (ockenden & stuart 2014) with the transformation narrative identified in phase two extending beyond benefits accrued to clients who become volunteers, to also include volunteers drawn from the wider community, some of whom also experience significant health issues. although there are too many situational factors to report an accurate figure on costs saved, some costs are averted by the volunteer-based mode of delivery. across time, as clients become surf volunteers they become ‘cost neutral’, experiencing additional benefit at no cost to the project at all. the results support fun as a primary indicator (kelly, 2018) and pathway to wellbeing for young people. this is evidenced by being able to find fun activities to do, one of six items within the scwbs positive outlook sub-scale, increasing significantly postintervention. as a ‘protective factor’ (hartley-brewer, 2001) or ‘signature strength’ (seligman, 2002), positive outlook may contribute to resilience by framing potentially difficult or adverse situations as challenges, opportunities for sensation seeking (mckay et al., 2018) or play (laatikainen et al., 2017). irrespective of whether a young person has a formal diagnosis, the wave project provides a bespoke, client-centred, surfing intervention that improves wellbeing through stimulating an emotional response and fostering a sense of connection: between people (durcan & bell, 2015), with nature (hartig et al., 2014) and with the wider surfing community (wheaton, 2016). whilst some may seek to establish the relative contribution of these different types of connectedness, greater understanding of surf therapy may be achieved by adopting an integrated, multifaceted approach to the role of connectedness. strengths and limitations of the research whilst the evaluation programme aimed to collect preand post-intervention questionnaire responses from all clients this has not always been achieved. in phase one, the response rate across the seven locations varied from 55% to 86% with less than 60% of participants in three locations completing both the preand postintervention questionnaire. it is acknowledged that by seeking to follow ‘good’ data analytic practices, such as focusing analysis on clients who completed the scwbs ‘positive outlook’ scale preand post-intervention, some of the ‘hardest to reach’ clients may be excluded. it is possible that for those clients without completed scwbs scales, surf therapy may be less relevant and/or less likely to have a positive or significant impact on their wellbeing. however, the main reason why participants http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 did not complete the questionnaire was administrative, that is, a hard copy questionnaire was not made available to the client. over time, the response rate has improved as surf co-ordinators have received training about research methods and the need for consistent data collection. going forward, online formats for presentation and response are being explored, to support response validity across all clients and improve opportunities for staff, volunteers, referrers and parents to give feedback over time of impact and transformation. the wave project is suitable for a very broad client base but for some clients, surfing may not be acceptable nor accessible despite the provision of adapted surfboards. going forward, it will be important to ensure that the views of all clients are adequately represented including those for whom surfing is less appropriate. this may require identifying ways to inspire potential clients at the point of need, or referral, to facilitate co-creation of pathways to participation. conclusion over three iterative phases spanning five years (2013-2017), a uk-wide surf therapy evaluation program has developed in collaboration with clients, parents/carers, volunteers, referrers and staff. by conducting a programme evaluation that adheres to professionally accepted standards of practice (dalton & wolfe, 2012), the wave project has been able to empirically demonstrate a sustained, positive impact of surfing on vulnerable young people’s wellbeing over time. as a hub for volunteering and through its ambassadorial and social activities, the wave project builds community by raising awareness of the positive impact of surfing on mental health and by promoting the shoreline as a pleasurable, accessible place for recreation, learning and wellbeing that is relevant locally, nationally and internationally. this is important since connected and empowered communities are healthy communities (public health england, 2015, p.4). participants show transformation in their lives, shifting from isolation to engagement with others through a combination of surfing, volunteering and mentoring. clients and their families describe great benefit from this shift and their stories about themselves and their real lived experiences become markedly different. further unfolding of these stories will be valuable for practitioners, policy makers and academics seeking to understand the health and wellbeing benefits associated with surf therapy. references armitano, c. n., clapham, e. d., lamont, l. s., & audette, j. g. 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online methods; photovoice author biographies: lauren f. lichty, associate professor at the university of washington bothell in the school of interdisciplinary arts and sciences. she teaches undergraduate courses in community psychology, participatory action research, sexuality, and gender. her primary research interests focus on university-based prevention and intervention efforts to address sexual and relationship violence. mariah kornbluh, is an assistant professor in clinical-community psychology at the university of south carolina. her research focuses on developmental settings (schools, neighborhoods, after-school programs, community-based centers, and youth homeless shelters). her work examines how these environments can facilitate as well as hinder well-being, health, and empowerment. in particular, she focuses on the social networks within a system (i.e. relationships, information channels) and utilizes participatory research methods to elevate young people’s insight and voice. she employs arts-based methods, mixed methods, participatory research, technology, and network analysis to document, and inform systemic change efforts. jennifer mortensen, works in the research, analytics, and insights department at ymca of the usa. currently, she manages a project to develop a scholarship-backed and experience-based theory of community strengthening to define how ymcas work to improve their communities through youth, adults, and work in the community. she prioritizes including voices from diverse stakeholder groups to ensure local and national staff perspectives are included, with a lens toward equity. pennie foster-fishman, professor in the department of psychology and a senior outreach fellow in university outreach and engagement at michigan state university. she has over 25 years of experience as an organizational, community, and systems change researcher and change consultant. she has examined the role of policy and systems reform, community organizing and civic action, community development, service coordination, organizational change, and resident engagement on individual and community well-being. she has consulted with numerous public and nonprofit agencies, coalitions, federal and state agencies, international development organizations, and funders to improve their community systems change efforts. her frameworks for promoting collaborative capacity, family engagement, and systems change have been adopted by 1 university of washington bothell 2 california state university chico 3 ymca of the usa 4 michigan state university global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 communities, coalitions, funders, and state and federal government agencies around the world to address a range of health, economic, educational, and community development problems. corresponding author: lauren f. lichty, school of interdisciplinary arts and sciences, university of washington bothell. box 358530, 18115 campus way ne bothell, wa 98011-8246. email: lflichty@uw.edu. recommended citation: lichty, l. f., kornbluh, m., mortensen, j., & foster-fishman, p. (2019). claiming online space for empowering methods: taking photovoice to scale online. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(3), 1-26. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:lflichty@uw.edu mailto:lflichty@uw.edu http://gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 claiming online space for empowering methods: taking photovoice to scale online abstract photovoice is a participatory action research method that combines documentary photography, individual storytelling, and critical group discussion processes. curated photographs and stories that constitute the data of photovoice projects often serve as catalysts for community-driven social change. traditionally excluded voices are amplified through the strategic dissemination of knowledge generated through photovoice projects. past community-based projects have tended to be small, geographically constrained, demanding on participants, and resource intensive, thus limiting the potential for use in large-scale social change efforts across diverse stakeholders. to push the boundaries of photovoice use within the field of community psychology and other applied settings, this paper introduces an innovative online photovoice method, discussing in detail the mechanics of developing an online platform as well as key facilitation processes necessary to design an empowering online setting. through analysis of one project involving 120 youth across one state, we will demonstrate how the move online promotes participant engagement while retaining quality, empowering the participatory processes that are the hallmark of photovoice projects. future directions and implications are discussed for this novel methodology to be used within the current sociopolitical context. as community psychologists, it is imperative that we continue to develop methods that respond to the needs of our evolving ecological landscape. our methods ought to amplify the voices of historically silenced communities as well as facilitate social action, perspective taking, and exposure to civic discourse (langhout, 2003). one powerful method for achieving action-oriented social justice goals is photovoice, which combines photography, individual reflection, and critical group discussions to generate local knowledge about social issues and help communities move to action (wang & burris, 1997). while photovoice has been used in diverse contexts with historically marginalized populations (i.e. people who are unhoused, women living in rural communities, people with disabilities, survivors of gender-based violence, and adolescents), widespread use has been hampered by its resource-intensive processes and small-scale implementation (catalani & minkler, 2010; wang & burris, 1997; streng, rhodes, ayala, eng, arceo, phipps, 2004; teti, murray, johnson, & binson, 2012). teti and colleagues (2012) discuss being restricted in their photovoice dissemination plans, specifically being unable to afford the costs of displaying multiple photovoice exhibits. wang and burris (1997) highlight the challenges they encountered in supporting large-scale application of photovoice within rural communities (i.e. yunnan, china) including resources, time, and transportation. arguably, these limitations hinder the breadth, scope, and reach in connecting diverse stakeholders and geographically isolated populations via methods of photovoice. there has being growing interest in the development of online platforms as an avenue for facilitating the photovoice process http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 (strack et al., 2015), diversifying community networks (kornbluh, 2017), and disseminating information (kia-keating, santacrose, & liu, 2017; kornbluh, neal & ozer, 2016). research has been limited in documenting the mechanical considerations and facilitation techniques required to maintain an empowering participatory photovoice process via online platforms. to extend the reach of photovoice and address gaps in the literature, we discuss the logistics of transferring the primary activities onto an online platform. this transfer allows for broader participant engagement while retaining empowering high-quality participatory processes central to photovoice. in this paper, we: 1) provide an overview of the traditional photovoice process, 2) discuss key processes for facilitating empowering outcomes, 3) highlight limitations of the traditional photovoice approach, and 4) describe our online adaptation. we evaluate our process utilizing data from a project with 120 youth residing in one state to examine the effectiveness of this transition photovoice from in-person to online. lastly, we discuss implementation, ethical considerations, and future research within our current sociopolitical context. photovoice overview photovoice is a qualitative method of inquiry rooted in participatory action research (par) that values participants’ knowledge and expertise as well as the use of data to guide future social action (foster-fishman, nowell, deacon, nievar, & mccann, 2005; lykes, 2003; wang & burris, 1997). in a review of 37 photovoice projects, catalani and minkler (2010) found that photovoice projects consist of four essential steps: first, participants are trained in photography, ethics, and safety when photographing one’s community. second, participants engage in a cyclical 1 the showed technique involves a series of reflective questions regarding their photographs to help guide critical dialogue: a) what do you see here? b) what’s really happening here? c) how does this relate to our process of individual research and documentation in which they record their narratives through photography and written text, often guided by a set of framing questions. third, facilitated group discussions using strategies similar to and adapted from the showed technique1 (shaffer, 1983) serve to provide additional insight into images and narratives. most projects conclude with participant reflection on the images and stories shared with the intent of curating an exhibit that presents a coherent message to the broader community as a form of social action. photovoice projects often lead to enhanced community engagement in action and advocacy, improved understanding of community needs, and increased individual empowerment (catalani & minkler, 2010; lykes, 2003). engaging participants in critical dialogue is the backbone of the photovoice process, yielding useful data and fostering an empowering setting for participants to self express, partake in critical inquiry, raise critical consciousness, and collectively construct knowledge to guide action (foster fishman, et al., 2005). when engaging in photovoice with adolescent urban youth, foster-fishman, law, lichty, and aoun (2010) similarly emphasized the need for facilitators to guide participants beyond a simple description of a community problem, towards considering the root causes of an issue and developing potential solutions. below, we focus on the processes believed to foster an empowering experience for participants, as these form the foundation of effective photovoice projects. empowering participatory processes the power of photovoice is rooted in individuals’ ability to document, share, and discuss their insights about their lives? d) why does this problem, concern or strength exist? e) what can we do about it? (shaffer, 1983). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 communities (catalani & minkler, 2010; foster-fishman et al., 2005). foster-fishman and colleagues (2005) solicited in-depth facilitator reflection and participant feedback at the completion of a photovoice project to explore individual and collective photovoice project outcomes as well as mechanisms underlying perceived impact on individuals and communities. this work identified indicators of photovoice as an empowering method, including increased self-competence, emergent critical awareness, and a cultivation of resources for social action. three aspects of the photovoice method are instrumental in fostering these impacts: 1) empowering participants as experts on their lives and community, 2) supporting deep reflection about participants’ lives, and 3) creating a safe climate for diverse perspectives. similarly, catalani and minkler’s (2010) meta-review found that the majority of participants reported greater understanding of community needs among stakeholders. the authors attributed this to the ability of photovoice to both engage difficult to reach groups and develop feelings of trust between them, including among diverse project members and the researcher. relationships are developed by eliciting honest and open discussion. in these interactions, personal narratives are disclosed and put in conversation creating opportunities for enhanced community awareness. by documenting community strengths/challenges and engaging in critical dialogue across stakeholders, participants are able to expand critical thinking skills to analyze their environment and develop supportive relationships that promote individual and collective sense of efficacy (catalani & minkler, 2010; foster-fishman et al., 2005). in summary, photovoice aims to bring marginalized voices into public debate (catalani & minkler, 2010; wang & burris, 1997; streng, rhodes, ayala, eng, arceo, phipps, 2004) by engaging community members who are often excluded from decision-making processes in critical documentary and dialogue-based activities (foster-fishman, et al., 2005; frohman, 2005). principles of empowerment education (freire,1972) are particularly evident during the facilitated critical dialogues about participants’ photographs and personal narratives (wang & burris, 1997; foster fishman, et al., 2005; streng, et al., 2004). the photovoice process fosters participant empowerment, generates meaningful community-based knowledge, and can serve as a catalyst for community change (catalani & minkler, 2010; foster-fishman, et al., 2005). photovoice limitations photovoice is limited in the breadth of community engagement it fosters. traditional approaches to photovoice tend to involve relatively small samples, with a median project size of 13 participants (catalani & minkler, 2010). in a recent search, only one project was identified with more than 100 participants (n = 122; wilson et al., 2007); however, participants were divided into smaller groups (n = 6 to 10) with no described contact across groups. we theorize that photovoice projects remain smaller scale due to the intensive in-person resources required for the in-person small group dialogue sessions. for example, one in-person project completed by the authors involved 19 youth participants (foster-fishman, law, lichty, & aoun, 2010). to execute each round of in-person photovoice required coordinating selection and printing of images between meetings, transporting eight facilitators along with all relevant materials for reflecting on and selecting photos to discuss, transportation of all participants, and staff time for all eight facilitators during sessions in addition to recording and transcribing photo-narrative sharing and group discussion. without process modifications or substantial financial investment, large-scale photovoice projects http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 are infeasible in most contexts. as a consequence, fewer voices are represented in photovoice projects, fewer participants experience the benefits of this participatory method, there is less opportunity for hearing diverse perspectives, and larger research studies may bypass this method for generating knowledge altogether, deeming it infeasible on a large scale. this restricts the potential for photovoice to contribute to large-scale social justice organizing and critical discourse from stakeholders across geographic regions. why take photovoice online? while not specific to photovoice, researchers have stressed the value of technology in promoting the large-scale application of youth engagement in health promotion efforts and community development (flicker et al., 2008; frasquilho et al., 2008; kornbluh, 2017; kornbluh et al., 2016; akom, shah, nakai, & cruz, 2005). informed by this literature and field experience, we argue that an internet-based photovoice method offers three benefits beyond the traditional in person approach, including the potential to 1) engage and connect a large, diverse set of participants, 2) be culturally responsive, and 3) preserve project resources. first, adopting an online approach to photovoice allows for the engagement of a large number of geographically dispersed participants, creating a bridge between silos and diversifying collective efforts. studies have found similar effects utilizing online mediums to facilitate large-scale youth engagement in participatory action research across urban cities and countrywide (akom et al., 2005; frasquilho et al., 2018; kornbluh et al., 2016). online platforms may be particularly important when engaging individuals in rural communities, with limited access to transportation, or with other mobility challenges. an online method has the potential to foster a more equitable distribution of the benefits of the photovoice process because people who would not normally be brought to the table can be engaged. the critical dialogue space created through online photovoice represents a potentially powerful opportunity for generating insight into issues that may transcend local communities and deepen perspective taking through exposure to alternative viewpoints. it also may support the creation of unified action plans across counties, regions, and/or states. second, an online photovoice method is more responsive to the technologically-driven communication culture of potential participants. recent studies indicate a growing interest in activist forms of civic participation and organizing through online mediums (kornbluh et al., 2016; smith, 2013). a large proportion of youth and adults live their lives in a virtual world through social media sites such as facebook, tumblr, snapchat, twitter and instagram. as of 2015, the pew research center’s internet project estimated that 92% of youth within the u.s. (aged 13-17) spend time online and 71% are using a social media platform to, among other things, post photos of themselves (pew research center teen fact sheet, 2015). by adapting photovoice to an online platform, processes can more closely reflect how a population typically shares their ideas, experiences, and photographs with one another. this should enhance participant comfort with the process and decrease the extent to which the project feels like it operates outside normal life. it is possible this will promote interest in projects and more authentic participation. third, on a pragmatic level, taking photovoice online reduces project costs. many online spaces are free. participants also upload images and engage in conversations through online written communication (e.g., online commenting functions). this saves the costs of digitizing and preserving in-person sessions (e.g., transcribing recordings, scanning photographs). in addition, by http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 bringing people together in a virtual space, projects will save money and time by not requiring travel to a physical location. further, in the virtual space, a single facilitator can engage multiple photovoice groups simultaneously whereas an in-person project would require one to two facilitators per group to generate the same output. as such, the online shift presents the potential for an expansion of photovoice projects without an increase in project costs, thus increasing the access of this method to diverse and underserved communities. in the remainder of this paper, we present a case example of an online photovoice project. to examine the success of our online photovoice process, we considered two primary questions: 1) to what extent did youth participate in the photovoice process, and 2) to what degree did we replicate quality and empowering participatory processes of in-person photovoice in the online environment? first, we provide the context of the case study, including an overview of our mixed methods for evaluating the implementation of photovoice online. second, we share our blog-based photovoice method, discussing the mechanics and infrastructure necessary to transfer an in-person method to an online platform. data concerning the extent to which youth were engaged (i.e. frequency in posts, comments, and online discussions) is also provided. third, we discuss the empowering participatory processes we adopted to an online platform (i.e. valuing participants as experts, fostering deep reflection, and creating a safe and supportive environment), and provide evaluative findings from a case study to assist in assessing impact. context of the current project the current photovoice project emerged as part of a statewide, year-long youth leadership development and substance abuse prevention project in one state in the eastern united states. the national youth leadership initiative (nyli) project involved a partnership between three organizations: community anti-drug coalitions of america (cadca), community connections, inc. (cci), and michigan state university (msu). we describe the core components of the project briefly below. what is nyli? nyli trains youth and their adult advisors to become agents of change in communities across the country. nyli was created by cadca, a community-based drug abuse prevention organization, to support the inclusion of youth as partners and decision makers within anti-drug coalitions and other local organizations. through the nyli program, cadca strives to increase coalitions’ capacity to include youth in their work as well as youths’ capacity to serve as community leaders. following the motto “youth led, adult guided,” the overarching goal of nyli is to produce community change by increasing a community’s capacity to solve its own problems and to build youth capacity for youth-led civic engagement. community partners for the current project, cadca partnered with one state-wide organization (community connections, inc.) to implement a state-wide nyli training model intended to create a surge of youth and adults who are prepared to mobilize on a broader scale to create local and state-wide community transformations. a photovoice component was added to the training as a method of generating knowledge about local conditions and to promote individual empowerment. photovoice was incorporated throughout the nyli experience to support cadca’s training. framing questions for this project asked what youth were proud of in their community, what leadership meant to them, and what problems youth in their community faced. with participants sampled in clusters from multiple counties, photovoice generated insights into youth experiences both within http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 and across communities. our team served as evaluators/consultants throughout the project and led the photovoice component. collectively, our research team had completed more than 10 in-person photovoice projects prior to undertaking this project. youth participants cadca training was delivered through three four-day residential sessions held over the course of one year. at the first training, there were 133 youth from 25 counties across one eastern us state. youth ranged in age from 12-19 years (mean = 14.95), were 60% identified as female, and were predominantly white (90%; consistent with state demographics). local sites were responsible for recruitment, and the institutional review board at michigan state university approved all processes. parental consent and youth assent were obtained. over time, several counties and individual youth withdrew. in follow-up conversations, we learned that counties withdrew due to staffing challenges. youth left the program because of commitments to other activities or moving out of the area. by the end of the project, there were 95 youth from 21 counties. during photovoice, there were approximately 120 youth participating. evaluating online photovoice in order to examine our key research questions, we analyzed three data sources (see table 1). first, blog posts and comments were reviewed and tallied to assess the frequency and extent of participant engagement. second, we conducted a rich case analysis of the two most consistently active blogs (referred to as blog 1 and blog 2) based on the percentage of blog members who posted during each round of photovoice. we expected that the effects of our facilitation process would be more evident the longer the youth engaged in the photovoice blogging process, therefore we examined patterns of engagement and critical discourse over time. third, at the end of the photovoice process, six focus groups were conducted (three high participating and three low participating focus groups) to learn about the overall experience of participating in the nyli project. participants were asked to share what they liked and disliked about photovoice, as well as what it was like to participate in photovoice online (e.g., was the blog a comfortable place for you to share your ideas?). while the focus group protocol was not designed to directly assess the three domains of valuing youth as experts, deep reflection, and safety, the open-ended opportunity to describe what they liked and disliked allowed space for youth to organically identify those elements if they were important to their experiences in positive or negative ways. focus groups were facilitated by the lead investigator on the project (foster-fishman) who had not actively participated in the online photovoice facilitation process. discussions were audio recorded and transcribed. fourth, we gathered anonymous survey data on participants’ perceptions of the blog climate and the impact of participating in photovoice using 13 survey items. the survey items were administered to 86 participants present at our second in-person meeting after the completion of photovoice activities. two members of the research team consensus coded the blog narratives and focus group data using analytic induction to assess our assertions that our facilitation process promoted youth identifying as experts, deepened reflection, and created safe space for diverse voices to share (additional details of these concepts are in the sections below). prior to coding, the analysts (lichty and kornbluh) reviewed the foster-fishman et al. (2005) paper and developed shared understandings of how the concepts may manifest in practice through identifying examples of the phenomenon and negative cases. coders then reviewed the transcripts noting each set of text related to an assertion (e.g., “youth are valued as experts"). all codes http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 were compared and differences resolved via consensus. transcripts were then re-reviewed for negative cases, including evidence that contradicted the assertion (e.g., youth explicitly not valued as experts) or the absence of table 1 evidence for an assertion (e.g., no indication of youth valued as experts). results are presented following our description of our facilitation strategies to clearly link the process with the outcome. question outcome data source & measure to what extent did youth participate in online photovoice? frequency in participation blog post: # of posts # of comments # of group discussions to what degree did we replicate quality and empowering participatory processes of in person photovoice in the online environment? participants: 1) identify as experts 2) reflect deeply on topics raised 3) feel safe and supported blog narratives: archival records analysis (blog 1 & blog 2): assessed blog transcripts for direct statements and behavioral shifts to see whether youth increased in in indications of three outcomes over time. including: 1) experts: ownership over the blog process by providing additional ideas and/or taking on a facilitator role 2) reflection: provided expanded detail and critical analysis beyond individual level 3) safety: personal disclosure and openness to communicating divergent points of view post-project focus groups: analyzed transcripts for themes related to outcomes. below are examples of how statements related to outcomes emerged: 1) experts: “youth have ideas or insights” (stated directly), presenting own analysis of issues that emerged on blogs, and naming other youth as experts or people from which they could learn 2) reflection: described thinking differently, thinking more complexly, as well as building new understanding surrounding their communities 3) safety: online process promoted opportunities to share without judgement post-project survey data: likert scale items assessing perceived blog climate and perceived impact of participating on outcome domains (see table 2 for items) evaluation question, outcomes, and data sources http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 taking photovoice to scale online: mechanics (part one) our online photovoice adaptation involved developing infrastructure as well as modified facilitation and participant engagement strategies. in the section below, we introduce the mechanics behind developing an online photovoice platform, highlighting the intentional structure of the platform, our strategy for elevating participants’ online capacity and comfort, and the importance of asynchronous facilitation strategies for individual documentation as well as group level reflection. blog structure for this photovoice project, the process of photo sharing and critical dialogue was moved to a blog-based online space through www.wordpress.com. wordpress allows individuals to upload photographs, videos, and written narratives. posts are archived and can be categorized for easy searching. each blog was password protected, requiring an invitation from our research team to gain access. to maintain the intimacy of the small group space found in typical in-person photovoice projects while also promoting rich dialogue, no blog had fewer than six participants or more than twelve. as such, some counties with fewer participants were grouped together and assigned to single blogs, while larger counties had their own. county matching was completed by our state level partner in order to build upon known relationships across counties. the project included 15 blogs made up of one or two counties with six to twelve people (m=9) per blog. we did not grant adult advisors access to the youth blogs in order to create a space where youth were free to explore ideas without the concern of local adults critiquing their thoughts. photovoice process this project consisted of four phases: training, photo-narrative sharing and group discussions, data analysis via the react method (foster-fishman, et al., 2010), and dissemination. youth were nested into smaller county-based groups for the photovoice sharing process. youth shared themes and insights across-counties via the online platform and during in-person meetings after communities completed photovoice data collection and analysis. participants shared their final products (e.g., photovoice exhibits, digital stories, and websites) generated from their photovoice data across counties at a photovoice project exhibition. we narrow our in-depth description here to focus on the first two components which align with traditional in person photovoice activities and form the foundation for scaling up photovoice online. training participants. as described by catalani and minkler (2010), photovoice projects begin with participant training. training on this project occurred primarily during our first in-person nyli residential training session. consistent with previous in person photovoice projects, a photographer and consultant trained participants in photography basics (including the use of the digital cameras supplied to them). the research team trained participants in the photovoice process using strategies similar to those employed in other projects (e.g., see foster-fishman, et al., 2010). next, participants completed a round of photovoice using traditional, in-person photovoice processes to respond to the framing question, “what are you most proud about in your community.” since they were at the residential training session rather than in their communities, participants took primarily symbolic photographs to document characteristics of their communities. participants engaged in individual photo and narrative sharing, group nomination of a photo/narrative to discuss further and http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.wordpress.com/ http://www.wordpress.com/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 facilitated group dialogue. this activity helped individuals understand the purpose, goals, and process of photovoice. the final and most challenging piece of our residential session involved training participants to utilize the online blog interface. for all but a few of our participants, blogging was an entirely new concept. as such, our training addressed two components: a) how to use wordpress and b) how to do photovoice online. in two large group sessions, research team members guided participants through an in-depth process of setting up wordpress accounts and creating posts with their own images and words from the first framing question. after completing one post with facilitators present, participants were asked to create a “self portrait” post on their own before leaving the residential session in order to reinforce the training. in addition, given that many participants were meeting for the first time at the residential session, as is common on photovoice projects, we wanted to make sure their ongoing online communication felt connected to a real person. the self-portraits were intended to help individuals maintain a sense of connection to one another once we were no longer physically together. this is consistent with best practices literature for fostering participation in online discussion forums via sense of community (rovai, 2007). on the final day of the session, we discussed the timeline for the online photovoice activities. participants received copies of training information and follow-up reminder emails about project activities, along with a distance learning refresher course on using wordpress and the photovoice process. individual documentation, reflection, and sharing. consistent with in-person photovoice projects, the individual reflection and documentation of participants’ individual insights was completed by each youth independently. after taking digital photographs in response to the framing questions, participants created online posts that included an uploaded photograph and a typed narrative explaining the meaning of the photograph. individuals linked their posts to the framing questions using a “category” function ensuring all participant responses to the same framing question were easy to find and review. this served as the space where participants could highlight their individualized narratives; individual photographer’s voice and expertise was honored and retained as it is during traditional photovoice projects. focusing the conversation. during in-person photovoice sessions, individual photo sharing is followed by a group process of nominating photographs/narratives for additional group discussion. this allows the group to collectively identify which stories are of greatest meaning to them and moves the group toward in-depth discussion and reflection on a select set of images, stories, and emergent themes. during in-person sessions, participants vote for photo narratives by placing sticky dots on the photos in which they are most interested. to move this voting process online, we adopted wordpress’ “rating” function. this function can be adapted to meet individual needs. we elected to use a “thumbs up” icon. individuals clicked the icon for the posts they wished to discuss further. this function was activated by blog administrators for a restricted time and was removed once discussion posts were identified. facilitating asynchronous group discussion. the wordpress interface provided a “reply” option for posting threaded follow-up questions and comments to original posts. both facilitators and other blog members used this function to dialogue about the photographs and narratives. one notable advantage of taking this project online was that our project processes respected participants existing lives by encouraging them to fit photovoice activities into their schedule rather than disrupt it. however, this resulted in a wholly asynchronous photovoice http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 project. there was no time everyone would be together, or even a time when we knew a participant or group of participants would view facilitator or peer comments. as a result, each facilitator post held different weight relative to in-person facilitator comments. in traditional facilitated group dialogue, a facilitator can ask a question, gauge the group reaction, and offer modified questions to the group. facilitators can read the climate of a group and encourage more sharing with a nod or smile. in this asynchronous online context, we did not have that luxury. collectively, this asynchronous approach led to several choices in our facilitation processes. these were developed based on insights from online facilitation literature (rovai, 2007, hew & cheung, 2008), in consultation with media communication scholars (i.e., drs. jeffrey grable and casey miles), and based on team members’ experiences as both facilitators and participants in online discussions. first, we wanted to make sure that when someone connected to the blog, they were met with information and activity that made them want to return. this meant paying close attention to the pacing of participation to determine when a facilitator question might be strategically added. we were also mindful of the tension between over-facilitation by adult facilitators and blog silence (rovai, 2007). we saw risk for photovoice activities to become work done for us, rather than inquiry done by them, for them. if facilitators were the most dominant presence on the blog, then we felt we had failed in that effort. ultimately, we wanted to promote participants engaging one another in dialogue, not just responding to the facilitator. our facilitation occurred during two phases of the photovoice process: a) individual post follow-up and b) group discussions. during the individual posting phase, facilitators replied to participant posts within approximately 24 hours. this was to ensure that each youth felt heard (or read) in hopes that this would foster further engagement. facilitators made positive statements reflecting back ideas the youth shared and asked follow-up questions when appropriate to clarify elements of the post. this is consistent with the concepts of social presence and encouragement described by hew & cheung (2008). during group discussions, facilitators allowed more time for youth to reply to one another before adding questions to the discussion. we gave a brief training on critical, open-ended qualitative inquiry during our first in-person meeting. this helped participants understand the intent behind facilitator follow-up questions and gave them both the tools and permission to engage one another through open-ended questions and follow-up comments. when facilitators did post, the content validated participant comments, highlighted themes and ideas raised, and asked broad questions to further explore comments or the original post. questions were directed to the group rather than individuals in order to promote engagement across participants. facilitators also encouraged comments from participants who tended to be less vocal. the second important consideration in relation to asynchronous online facilitation was regarding the content of our comments. each comment made by a facilitator was viewable by all participants at any time; they were part of the shared “permanent” project record. the team of facilitators reviewed comments before posting to ensure that they were clear, meaningful, and engaged participants on stimulating topics linked to participant dialogue (rovia, 2007; tagg & dickinson, 1995 as cited by hew & cheung, 2008). we also attended to facilitation processes that are relevant to any qualitative project (e.g., clarifying and contextualizing participant statements and prompting additional reflection). during individual http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 sharing our facilitation framework prioritized clarifying participant statements (i.e., ensuring the “what” of their statements was detailed, clear, and made sense as a stand alone construct). facilitators identified key ideas and determined whether enough detail was provided to summarize the post as a free standing data point. if not, then follow-up questions on the “what” of the post were needed. during group discussion, facilitators posed open-ended root cause and consequence questions to deepen understanding. blog and participant outcomes our efforts to create an online platform and process that supported active youth engagement yielded 381 original photovoice blog posts. in addition, youth made 755 comments in response to peers’ posts or facilitator prompts and participated in 58 group discussions. overall, 94% of participants made at least one original post per round of photovoice (i.e., per framing question), and 75% of participants shared comments in at least one group discussion per round. these participation rates are consistent with in-person projects where nearly all participants share images in response to framing questions, and the majority, but not all, participate in group discussions. structural feedback from youth. while youth successfully engaged in online dialogue, some youth described two sources of frustration during informal communications and focus groups: 1) not having access to all blog conversations and 2) steep learning curve related to the online platform. youth expressed a desire to see other counties’ blogs from the beginning. we designed the project to prioritize local learning first (e.g., within county). cross-county learning was to happen at the second residential session, after completing the first three rounds of photovoice. youth feedback suggests we should have considered additional shared learning opportunities earlier. youth felt limited in their ability to problem solve by only blogging with their county (or in some cases, one other county). one youth said, “...i like doing the blogs and stuff but i wish we would’ve seen more of everyone else’s posts, instead of just our county and [another county’s] ...we didn’t get to know what everyone else was thinking in their communities and stuff, to know a better view of [our state].” likewise youth didn’t know about the problems other counties were targeting: “...i know [another] county had the same like problem as my county and we didn’t even know that they had the same problem until this week...we could like work with them and knowing that they were doing the same thing as us…would have been useful.” in response to this feedback, a community blog was created, but little activity occurred as youth did not have framing questions to respond to. during focus groups, youth suggested future projects change the blogging platform to one that is more user-friendly. participants found wordpress difficult to use, “it was hard to navigate wordpress at first. like, trying to figure out how to post... i had the worst time trying to find other people’s posts” and had a difficult time finding what they needed, “you basically had to stumble upon what you had to do.” youth suggested using more familiar platforms (i.e., facebook) or creating a customized, simpler application. taking photovoice to scale online: creating an empowering online setting (part two) attention to the mechanics and structure of an online blog are not enough to bring photovoice to life online. this required a facilitation plan intended to replicate the empowering, quality participatory processes employed during in-person projects (catalani & minkler, 2010; foster-fishman et al, 2005) focused on: a) valuing participants as experts, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 b) promoting deep reflection, and c) creating a safe space. valuing participants as experts facilitation strategy. we sought to foster self identification as experts by creating a non evaluative space where youth had narrative autonomy (foster-fishman et al., 2005). this included reinforcing participants’ role as experts throughout the research process. participants were encouraged to think creatively and independently, that the right answer to any framing question was simply their own answer. this message was also explicitly reiterated through the nyli training processes and through all project communications. small group facilitators also play a critical role in the effectiveness of photovoice (foster-fishman et al., 2005). facilitators validated each youth’s story during individual photo sharing, making sure to express appreciation and interest in what was shared. facilitators asked non-directive follow-up questions with the assumption that by posing meaningful questions, the youth were best positioned to deconstruct the problems and circumstances of their lives and communities. blog and participant outcomes. as proxy indicators of youth identification as experts, we examined: 1) blog narratives over time to assess whether youth began to take ownership over the blog process by providing additional ideas and/or taking on a facilitator role, 2) focus group statements stressing youth having ideas or insights, sharing those insights directly, and also naming other youth as experts or people they could learn from, and 3) survey items measuring the extent to which youth felt valued as experts as well as positively impacted by the photovoice process. blog narratives. over time, youth began to engage in more in-depth and extended conversations with facilitators, identifying root causes as well as potential solutions. from the first framing question to the last, we observed a 43% increase in responses to facilitator questions on blog 1 and a 100% increase on blog 2. we saw similar shifts in the ownership participants took of the blog space. in the first round, no youth on blog 1 engaged in self-facilitation while 50% of posts on blog 2 involved some self-facilitation. by the third round, 43% of blog 1 posts and 100% of blog 2 posts involved self facilitation. we observed youth make explicit statements self-identifying as experts. for example, in one post a youth stated, “although we are young we aren’t stupid, we do know about problems in our community, and how to solve or fix them.” focus groups. during the focus groups, we learned that many youth had never blogged or shared their personal beliefs online before. the online photovoice project provided a platform for them to express their ideas and learn from the expertise of others. one participant explained, “i really liked being able to get my opinion out there...with other things it was, like, well this is the facts. what do you see? but here…we’re really getting your voice... and to see what other people were thinking too, like, things you otherwise might not know.” thus, photovoice provided a frame for youth to explore several ideas held by other youth and share their voice and insights. one topic strongly supported across the focus groups was the youth’s ability to convey their ideas creatively through photovoice. many youth had never expressed themselves or thought about their community in this way before, and combining photography with their personal reflections online allowed them to share their ideas freely. one youth commented, “i really, really liked it cause, just the whole idea of it, i never really thought of any… like of expressing myself in that way before. and that’s something i can take and use for anything, like not just for this.” similarly, another youth said, “we want our voices to be heard; you know we want to be standing on the streets protesting what we believe in. and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 [photovoice] was something that we could use to be able to express our opinions in that manner. or be able to just, you know, do something tangible.” survey. six survey items focused on the extent to which youth felt valued as experts. using a 5-point response scale ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”, participants were asked to indicate whether they agreed with statements about the blog being an encouraging, non-evaluative environment where each person’s insights were valued. for clarity, we collapsed responses into categories of agreement and disagreement. across all six items, the vast majority (over 78% across items) of participants reported positive experiences on their blog (see table 2). of the youth who did not explicitly agree with positive items (i.e., feeling heard, important, appreciated) or table 2 blog climate and perceived impact survey items disagree with negative items (i.e., feeling silenced or discouraged), the majority selected the neutral “uncertain” response option. participants also reported how the photovoice experience impacted them using a 5-point likert response scale. the majority of participants (82% or more) reported that the process gave them space to share their voice, helped them identify important messages, and made them feel more comfortable expressing those ideas (see table 2). these positive endorsements of the photovoice experience may also serve as proxies for youth’s identification as experts on their communities and lived experiences. in sum, findings across all three data sources indicated that the photovoice project supported youth finding their voice, communicating ideas in creative ways, and recognizing and valuing their expertise as well as that of other youth. on my photovoice blog, i felt… strongly agree/ agree (%) strongly disagree/ disagree (%) uncertain (%) valued as expert heard 87.8 3.7 8.5 silenced 3.7 85.4 11 important 78 2.4 19.5 appreciated 82.9 3.7 13.4 discouraged 0 91.4 8.6 encouraged 87.8 0 12.2 safe context safe 93.9 1.2 4.9 comfortable 91.5 3.7 4.9 participating in the photovoice blog… valued as expert gave me a space to share my voice (my ideas) 86.8 3.7 9.8 made me feel like i have an important message to share with my community 82.9 3.7 13.4 made me feel more comfortable sharing my ideas about problems in my community 81.5 1.2 17.3 engaged in deeper reflection http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 helped me clarify what i think about problems in my community 84.1 2.4 13.4 made me more aware of problems in my community 76.8 6.1 17.1 *percentage are valid percents, youth who reported posting to their blog on only posting once for the duration of the project (n=4) were excluded as effective not having participated). fostering deep reflection facilitation strategies. in order to develop critical consciousness, individuals must have time and space to reflect on their experiential knowledge (freire, 1972). to foster critical consciousness, photovoice projects must provide participants with an extended period of time to reflect on framing questions followed by facilitated dialogue that intentionally seeks deeper understanding (foster-fishman, et al., 2005). while no specific duration is recommended in the literature, the goal is to provide adequate time to move beyond first reactions and invite people to think deeply around framing questions. on our project, each round of photovoice lasted four to six weeks allowing youth an extended period to reflect on framing questions. four to six weeks was the longest amount of time possible for reflection given the number of framing questions and the time required in each other step of the photovoice project and larger nyli process. in typical in-person sessions, researchers are often constrained by time such that each participant may only share a limited number of photos. online, youth could post photographs and narratives multiple times providing an opportunity to consider the topic from various perspectives and express themselves in different ways. minkler and wallerstein (2003) note the importance of sharing diverse perspectives when striving to achieve empowering participatory processes. during the facilitated group dialogue process, individual narratives can be reinforced and challenged by the personal lived experiences and reflections of others. this requires that projects create safe space for exploring diverse perspectives. in the context of the online platform, youth had an extended period to view and dialogue with peers on both their individual posts and within the facilitated group discussion, further helping them refine their own critical analyses. similar to in-person photovoice projects, our open-ended facilitator guides were also intentionally designed to seek deeper understanding of ideas presented by participants. specifically, we asked questions that followed from three guiding concepts: a) understanding conditions and root causes, b) describing and explaining targeted issue, and c) identifying consequences and impact. blog and participant outcomes. deep reflection in photovoice is indicated through the complexity of thought and environmental analysis of social issues during individual photo sharing and group discussion. this includes participants moving beyond individual-level explanations of social issues and identifying potential causal chains. we anticipated seeing increasing levels of complexity both within rounds of photovoice (from individual reflections to group discussion content) and over the duration of the project. as proxy indicators of youth engaging in deep reflection we examined: 1) blog narratives over time to assess whether youth increased their detail and critical analysis over time, 2) focus group statements asserting that the online process fostered claims of different and complex thinking, as well as building new understanding of themselves and their surrounding communities, and 3) survey items measuring the extent to which youth felt photovoice impacted their critical analysis of social issues within their communities. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 blog narratives. in response to facilitator prompts, youth provided additional clarity on key concepts and, as a group, shifted from individual level to root cause analysis of problems focused on environmental factors. in addition, the earliest photovoice posts were often limited to description with no corresponding analysis of the focal phenomenon. in later photovoice rounds, post content extended to include assessments of root causes, impact, and potential solutions without facilitator prompts. for example, a final round blog post used crayons of different colors to represent bullying. the initial post focused on the interpersonal dynamics and exclusion. as follow up discussion unfolded the conversation moved from analyzing individual intentions to considering school based interventions and effectiveness. the ninth commenter in this thread stated, “bullying occurs most often in the school systems. our school is on this huge kick to show us videos about bullying but it doesn’t faze anyone. there are students who watch the videos, walk into the hallway and right into a fight. punishment for fighting in our school is ten days on suspension but the punishment for starting rumors, tormenting others with words or rude remarks is nothing. cyberbulling is nothing new and i’m sure we have all experienced it. the punishment for it is nothing in [our] county. hazing in college is welcomed to be able to fit in. there many different forms of bullying and many of us experience them daily.” in addition, they examined problematic media portrayals, power, and the complicated histories that may fuel behavior. another commenter in this thread stated, “bullying is portrayed as something funny in movies and on television shows. in real life it is not something to mess with. people have died and killed themselves due to the effects of bullying. whether it is jealousy or the mere fact that someone gets a kick out of degrading people, bullying is neither a way to make friends nor ideals clashing, in my opinion. i think bullying is more of a system of power to those who were degraded themselves in the past. we think of bullies as these big, great people that can beat anyone down, but what exactly created this feeling of hate within these people. they were probably bullied, but not by peers, but by people closer to them like family.” these quotes highlight the shift from more simplistic analysis of single incidents to consider environmental context as well as individual histories. focus groups. during the focus groups, youth often described how reading others’ thoughts and experiences challenged them to consider alternative ways of making sense of their own context. youth described learning from other youth, enjoying reading viewpoints that differed from their own, and learning about the variety of problems across the state. one youth explained, “i like reading them because everybody had...different ways of saying things. and even if their pictures were similar, it’s like their voices were just so different that you could—you could get an idea of who they were and what they were a little bit like.” another said, “i felt that whenever people post… like, the pictures of their community and their problems and how they plan on fixing it, in a way it can help us by seeing like if our communities have like a similar problem. whenever they describe their solution it might help us think of an idea...” youth also described the benefits of being able to go back to past posts and comments to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 see what others said about an issue. comparing the in-person photovoice training process to online, one youth noted, “the in person was fun but the online was more informative...you could track what people were saying about [a topic]. unlike the in-person one, cause if someone just says it then you kind of forget sometimes what they say, but on the blogs it has what they said…still there.” this effort to track and revisit ideas over time is a cornerstone of deep reflection. survey. three survey items related to the impact of the photovoice project on how youth think about their communities and the problems they face, including improved clarity and awareness of problems, and general perceptual shifts in how youth conceptualize their communities. responses, presented in table 2, indicate that the majority of participants (77% or more) found the photovoice process extended the ways they think about their communities’ problems. as before, the majority of students who did not endorse these items selected the neutral response option. notably, a smaller percentage reported a generalized change in how they think about their communities. this may be an artifact of many participants already identifying as leaders and change agents within their communities. therefore, this process may not have changed how they view their community, but instead enriched their existing perceptions. data across sources indicate that the online process created a space for co-learning to occur and bolstered deep reflection and analysis of community contexts through reading diverse blog posts. creating a safe and supportive environment facilitation strategy. the final critical element to an empowering photovoice project involves creating a safe and supportive environment for sharing (foster fishman, et al., 2005). to create this environment online, we worked with the youth at our first in-person meeting to co create norms for online communication. youth disclosed difficult personal information in the blog space, we acknowledged and affirmed their stories, thanking them for sharing with the group. we also encouraged youth to support one another. we sent private off-blog communications that offered additional support and concrete communitybased resources as appropriate. finally, following feminist approaches to interviewing and space sharing, facilitators occasionally shared their own personal experiences with issues raised as a means of supporting and validating a youth’s experiences with and reactions to particular community issues. we believe this vulnerability indicated our respect for and belief in the sacredness of the online space we were sharing. blog and participant outcomes. safety was operationalized as comfort and freedom to share participants’ thoughts and ideas on the photovoice blogs. as proxy indicators of creating a safe and supportive environment, we examined: 1) blog narratives to assess the level of personal disclosure along with openness to communicating divergent points of view, 2) focus group statements asserting that the online process promoted opportunities to share without judgement, and 3) survey items measuring the extent to which youth felt comfortable participating on the blog. blog narratives. the extent to which youth experienced the blog space as safe was demonstrated by their willingness to disclose deeply personal issues. for example, one youth shared about a family member who was addicted to pills and how that affected her emotionally. other youth on the blog validated this disclosure and expressed deep sympathy for her experience. participants also disclosed their fears regarding their future and the pressure they feel not to “make a mistake.” yet another youth shared her experience behaving as a bully to other youth, the guilt about those actions, and why she thought she engaged in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 them. across blogs we saw youth also talk about the importance of respecting the sacred space of the blog by not sharing what was said—even with other members of the project outside their blog. another example indicating that we created a safe environment was through the expression of respectful disagreement during group discussions. to exemplify what this looked like in our project, figure 1 presents a verbatim exchange among the youth. the original photograph and narrative were in response to the question “what does leadership look like?” the image is provocative; it shows a dead-end street sign at night. on first glance many of us on the team assumed the post would be negative. however, the original photographer and several of the youth articulated a message of faith, innovation, and creativity found in effective leaders. other youth pushed back on that interpretation of the image, and also considered whether this is what they actually see occurring among leaders in their community. this case example highlights the ways in which youth felt free to present divergent opinions within their blog space (for additional insight into participants’ thoughts on leadership see mortensen et al., 2014). focus groups. many youth within the focus groups indicated that they enjoyed the online photovoice process because they felt that it was a safe space to share their ideas. when asked if they felt comfortable sharing their ideas on the photovoice blog, one youth stated, “yeah, because nobody really knew who was talking. well, they did but they really didn’t know. i think you were kind of like mysterious,” followed by another youth agreeing: “yeah, and you guys aren’t judgmental or anything.” this may suggest that the online platform was non-threatening, allowing more freedom to speak your mind to others. it also reflects the efforts to create a supportive, non-evaluative climate for expression. survey. two survey items about the climate of the blog assessed the extent to which participants felt safe and comfortable on their blogs. consistent with the content observed on the blogs, participants overwhelmingly (more than 90%; see table 2) reported feeling safe and comfortable on their blogs. figure 1. “what does leadership look like” example online photovoice discussion original post this “dead end” sign signifies leadership to me. leaders must create their own path, even when it looks like there is no possible way to do so. i also took a picture of it at night to symbolize that not all leaders know where they’re going. they might have a fantastic idea, but they might not always be sure what do to with it or how to go about it. the picture stands to represent itself in a different way than most others. i didn’t want to take a picture of a person, or of something incredible because that’s not who i am. i took a simple photo and thought about how it affects me... “formal” group discussion facilitator: why is this post important? why did this post intrigue you? what in this photo or story is important for us to talk about? looking forward to reading your thoughts! facilitator: why is this post important? why did this post intrigue you? what in this photo or story is important for us to talk about? looking forward to reading your thoughts! http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 youth 2: ...it’s important the sign says dead end. it shows that a leader can make something out of nothing. youth 3: this photo makes me feel like i’m not going to go anywhere...it doesn’t scream progressive happy thoughts to me, but a more bleak overtone. i feel like it’s reminding me to get back to basics, and return to my roots. i don’t know if it’s because i hate being stuck, but this photo makes me want to run in the opposite, not exactly find a new path. however, backing up is always a good thing. all the doors and windows that you’ve past on your journey to your own metaphorical “dead end street” might have closed, but that doesn’t mean you can’t go back and bust them down and start over on a new path. youth 1: …to me it creates a sense of hopelessness. i like that because without hope you are forced to create something out of nothing. nothing appears right before you and screams “i am here, put me to use.” nothing is that simple and i enjoy that about being a leader. you are forced to think in a new light and gain a new perspective. i enjoy the complications of things and the fact that i have to work for everything. youth 3: i so agree with the statement that a sense of hopelessness causes some people to start working! (personally, i am prone to quit when all seems hopeless unless it’s very important to me) i think that sometimes things are screaming “i am here put me to use,” but that we just don’t hear them... other process feedback from youth a few participants did not like the way the facilitators asked questions. one youth explained, “you can say exactly what you mean and they will dissect every last word of that and flood you with comments as to what you meant by it even though you explained it.” in anecdotal conversations with youth, it seemed as though some of our follow-up questions were read as critiques like an english teacher’s comments in writing courses. however, several groups discussed how conversation was extended when facilitators posed questions, and that discussions would “fizzle” without facilitator engagement. in addition, some youth indicated during focus groups that the online written structure of our photovoice process was challenging. one youth said, “i feel like if i’m talking to people i can get more out than trying to write my feelings down. so orally, i get my feelings out better.” it is possible that for the more orally-inclined, this environment stifled their ability to communicate their insights. while the minority, these negative cases are important to attend to in designing inclusive facilitation training and processes. discussion this paper describes both the mechanics and facilitation processes for adapting photovoice to an online platform. the potential of this method was illustrated with a large group of geographically-dispersed youth (n = 120) engaged in a state-wide youth leadership and community assessment project. while others have described taking photovoice online in classroom, schools, and community contexts (e.g., kornbluh 2017, kornbluh et al., 2016, & strack et al. 2015), none to our knowledge have described a process that engaged participants at this scale without increasing project costs (e.g., funding, staffing, or time). we transferred core in-person photovoice activities (catalani & minkler, 2010) online via small group blogs. in order to retain the quality in-person participatory processes that promote participant empowerment, we engaged in online training and facilitation practices that valued participants as experts, fostered deep reflection, and provided a safe context for sharing (foster-fishman et al., 2005). informed by diverse data sources (i.e. surveys, blogs, focus groups), we contend that you can expand the photovoice method to an online platform replicating quality participatory in-person processes (foster fishman et al., 2005). the success of this photovoice adaption opened the door for further community engagement over time. for instance, adapting photovoice online allowed us to engage nearly 10 times the number of participants of the median in-person project (n = 13, catalani http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 & minkler, 2010) with the same number of facilitators over the same period of time. with a small number of facilitators than a typical project and no transportation or transcription costs, this project supported simultaneous photovoice-based community analysis and reflection among 120 geographically dispersed youth. in other words, the project engaged more people with less cost than if we had tried to replicate the process with the same number of people using traditional in-person methods. given the topography of the state, available transportation resources, and school-year scheduling challenges, no exclusively in person method of photovoice could have supported this group of geographicallyand socially-dispersed participants coming together (either within or across counties) to explore issues that mattered to them and their lives for such an extended period of time. participation across groups was consistent with in-person projects, with participants regularly sharing photo-narratives in response to framing questions and engaging in group discussions. participants had the opportunity to access and revisit conversations on their own timeline, allowing for more flexible engagement and ongoing reflection. notably, participants provided extensive positive feedback (via surveys and focus groups) consistent with what is described by participants of traditional in-person photovoice projects. after completing photovoice in smaller online groups, participants engaged in data analysis utilizing the react method (see foster-fishman et al. 2010), and developed knowledge products to ignite conversation, awareness, and advocacy across groups via in-person meetings. online engagement in photovoice fostered local learning, and created the foundation and shared language for co-learning across counties and at a statewide level both online and during time restricted in-person sessions. overall, youth explicitly named themselves as change agents, engaged in critical root cause analysis, and disclosed deeply personal insights into their lives and communities. recommendations and opportunities there are several lessons to be learned from our experiences regarding the integration of technology into this method. in the u.s., internet access is not a right. like many resources, access flows along privileged lines. therefore, youth in low income, rural, and otherwise minoritized communities were less likely to have in-home internet access than other youth (larose et al.,2007). these youth also often had fewer technological skills (dimaggio & hargittai, 2001), meaning their learning curve related to the online posting process was significantly steeper. in many cases this gap in technological skill was multi-generational, thus adult advisors were not prepared to provide technological support. while all youth were able to participate, some had to work disproportionately harder to do so. this may have been unintentionally disempowering for some participants. new innovations take time to adopt (rogers, 1962), thus, the research team had to actively encourage some participants to initially engage online, as well as help them problem solve (via skype, phone sessions) when technological support was not easily available. future projects ought to conduct a technological readiness assessment with prospective participants and consider how they will address the digital divide (i.e. identify local resources). asynchronous online communication posed the most significant challenge to the online photovoice process. online facilitators lose the ability to use or respond to non-verbal cues observable during in-person communication. facilitators had to quickly respond to blog posts or risk participants being met with silence; facilitators’ initial http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 responses to posts became the equivalent of holding eye contact, nodding one’s head, or smiling as someone shares in-person. to jumpstart dialogue and maintain participation, we developed questions and comments that would elicit conversation and validate youths’ ideas. these strategies ensured that each participant’s photo narrative was given space to be seen and reflected on. while there were challenges in ease of access as well as the asynchronous communication, regular responses to facilitator comments, along with corroborating focus group and survey data serve as evidence that this facilitator strategy was overall productive. however, a small number of participants reported feeling as though facilitator questions were akin to the critiques of writing teachers rather than genuine inquiry. indeed, an adult asking “could you say more?” may mirror comments on a high school literature essay. facilitator question asking could be better normalized during the training phase of the project through the presentation of sample online dialogues. participants could also help identify language that they find encouraging, and/or a project develop a rotating group moderator role to be held by participants for each framing questions. this strategy would reinforce participant ownership of the space. such preparation and shared responsibility of group discussion process could mitigate negative feelings about follow-up questions. notably, participants who shared this feedback were some of our highest participators and self-selected to take leadership roles working with the msu evaluation team. so while they may not have found the question posing to be the most enjoyable, it did not discourage participation. to further enhance conversational possibilities online, we also suggest beginning group discussions with live, synchronous online facilitation. this form of online facilitation could also be applied to in-person ethics training, camera support, and live focus group practice sessions. adding such an option reduces the participatory flexibility of the online method, which is one of the benefits for participants with busy lives. however, even if all participants are not present, this would put the power of jumpstarting dialogue more squarely in the hands of the participants. absent participants could interject comments into threads, harnessing the benefits of digital capacity for tracking lines of conversation that may otherwise be lost during in-person discussion. conversation could proceed asynchronously, or participants could decide to commit to additional joint log-in sessions at their own discretion and ability. the success of our effort to move photovoice online opens the door for further adaptation to expand participant engagement using the online platform. our project structure used small group engagement, similar to traditional photovoice projects. however, across-group sharing occurred in later phases of photovoice data analysis and sharing and community project development based on photovoice data, which involved a blend of in-person and online spaces. future projects could intentionally introduce additional strategies for learning across groups, thereby deepening the diversity of voices and experience and opportunities for developing understanding across communities. we can imagine a cross community blog opening after each round of small-group dialogue where all participants have access to the voted-on posts and group conversations. participants could be invited to respond to other groups’ discussions and bring observations from those group discussions back to their own group. considerations for content sharing, facilitation, and participant ownership would have to be further explored. replication of an online photovoice approach and further research is needed to ensure generalizability. in the context of this novel http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 3 september 2019 study, there was potential selection and response bias in participants whom were already identified as potential leaders within their county participating, as well as our in depth analysis of extremely active blogs in further unpacking processes surrounding impact. future projects could also take advantage of the opportunity online platforms provide for innovative analysis to track dimensions of empowerment at both the individual and collective level throughout the photovoice process. for instance, social network analysis allows for the examination of multiple-level communication networks at the actor, dyadic, and group level (kornbluh & neal, 2016). textual analysis provides the opportunity to statistically test for growth in critical discourse in distinct units (i.e. nouns, verbs, adjectives, and phrases; handler, denny, wallach, & oconnor, 2016). additionally, online photovoice projects could further contribute to the youth civic development literature by exploring the relationships between online civic engagement and offline civic activity (lenzi et al., 2015; smith, 2013). as we continue to explore the potential for online platforms, it is important to be mindful of the ethical considerations associated with users re-posting or sharing personal images from the photovoice project on their own personal platforms, and the agreed upon consensus of the group in determining which content is public versus private (see kia keating et al. 2017 for a further discussion). conclusion online photovoice processes have the potential to extend the reach of photovoice by engaging geographically dispersed individuals. overall, we found taking photovoice online to be meaningful to our collaborators, participants, and our team. photovoice data yielded useful local insights that aided the development of community action projects in conjunction with the larger nyli training process. in the efforts, we must be mindful of the technological burden of this project in a world where technology is not evenly distributed; however, upon addressing this issue, moving photovoice online opens opportunities for creative participant configurations and for co-learning across counties, states, and even countries. it also seems important to consider the potential for photovoice methods to create and disseminate new conceptualizations of existing spaces and ways for people to engage. as community psychologists, these methodological adaptations are key to actualizing our values of utilizing research to push for systemic change (foster-fishman, nowell, & yang, 2007). as prior scholars have noted, current public discourse frames the internet as a source of misinformation, hostile exchanges, and self-reinforcing echo chambers (jones, mitchell, finkelhor, 2013; keith & martin, 2005; lenzi et al., 2015). online photovoice projects have the capacity to disrupt this perception (and reality) of some online spaces as toxic. through supportive, thoughtful question posing, we can push against the deficits framing of internet discourse while bringing together diverse stakeholders engaged in root cause community analysis and change conversations. the hope is that people will carry these new practices into other online and in-person spaces. as the use of photovoice moves online, we encourage our colleagues to continue documenting the impact of this shift so that we may better understand the interplay of our processes and platforms for fostering individual and collective empowerment through participatory research methods. references akom, a. a. 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(1997). photovoice: concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. health education & behavior, 24, 369 387. wilson, n., dasho, s., martin, a. c., wallerstein, n., wang, c. c., & minkler, m. (2007). engaging young adolescents in social action through photovoice—the youth empowerment strategies (yes!) project. journal of early adolescence, 27(2), 241-261. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.samhsa.gov/prevention/spfcomponents.aspx http://www.samhsa.gov/prevention/spfcomponents.aspx http://www.samhsa.gov/prevention/spfcomponents.aspx http://www.samhsa.gov/prevention/spfcomponents.aspx using the community psychology competencies to address sexual assault on a college campus by: daniel clifford, nicole m. freund, jasmine a., douglas, julia siwierka, anna turosak, rhonda k. lewis, phd, jessica drum, deborah ojeda-leitner, refika sarionder, anna caroline chinnes, and paige keller wichita state university keywords: community psychology practice competencies, sexual assault, research and action author biographies: dan clifford, ph.d., is a post-doctoral research associate for the sedgwick county division of health in wichita, kansas. dan works for the public health performance subdivision and assists health department programs with data collection, analysis, and program evaluation and provides technical assistance to the fetal and infant mortality review group of sedgwick county. he is interested in mindfulness interventions, particularly pertaining to post-traumatic stress disorder, and trauma-informed systems of care. dan is also an organizer for the homefront initiative, a community-based program that uses veterans to teach mind-body self-care and leadership skills to other veterans and first responders in the wichita community. nicole m. freund, ma, mba is a research associate with the center for applied research and evaluation at wichita state university’s community engagement institute. she is a doctoral candidate in the community psychology program at wichita state and holds a master of arts in both english and psychology (northern illinois university, wichita state) as well as a master of business administration (wichita state). in addition, nicole has over a decade of experience in the private sector working in marketing research. her graduate work in the community research, assessment, and methodology lab includes research on the federal drug re-entry court in the district of kansas (kan-trac) and social network analysis for offenders re-entering communities in kansas. jasmine douglas, ph.d. has experience in program evaluation, global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 management and development, prevention and intervention research, statistical methods, community based participatory research, empowerment, organizational development, leadership, policy, and consultation. currently, dr. douglas is employed at james bell associates (jba) and is the associate project director on the national cancer institute project, research-tested intervention programs. dr. douglas brings to jba research skills in the areas of evaluation, survey design, quantitative and qualitative data analysis, literature review, and project management. prior to joining jba, dr. douglas’s research focused in the areas of tobacco control and prevention and community based research and action for sexual assault prevention by applying scientific methods to implement evidencedbased research programs. julia siwierka is a third-year graduate student in wichita state university’s doctoral program. while her primary research interests focus on literacy and education, she is likewise passionate about preventing and raising awareness about sexual assault. as the current secretary for community psychology association, julia is coordinating a benefit production of the vagina monologues on campus as an extension of this research project. she also serves as the media relations coordinator for nami on campus. anna turosak is a third-year graduate student in the community psychology doctoral program at wichita state university. her research interests include understanding the factors related to mental health and wellbeing, community mental health, and working with college-aged populations to better understand their experiences and perceptions of mental health on their campus. anna currently works at the community engagement institute as a research assistant focusing on the evaluation of mental health services. rhonda k. lewis, ph.d., mph. is professor and chair of the psychology department at wichita state university. she is a member of the society for community research and action and the association of black psychologists. currently, she is the advisor to the community psychology association. she is also serving as one of the serve-learning faculty fellows at wsu. as a member of scra, she has served in a number of capacities being the midwestern regional representative, member at large, chair for the council on education programs and chair for the cultural and racial affairs committee. she uses behavioral and community research methodologies to promote health among adolescents and reduce health disparities. dr. lewis has over 20 years of experience in community organizing, program development and evaluation. she has over 50+ publications and 100 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 presentations at regional, national, and international conferences. jessica drum received her phd in community psychology from wichita state university in 2016. she currently works as a ux researcher at facebook where she studies the ecology of social media. previously, jessica worked at the center for applied research and evaluation at wsu’s community engagement institute. her work was primarily focused on the evaluation of programs funded by kansas’s early childhood block grants. jessica also worked on a variety of topics during her graduate studies, including a computer intervention that worked to decrease loneliness and social isolation for older adults, and a sexual assault prevention study for college students. jessica currently works at facebook as a user experience researcher, utilizing her skills to understand and improve the experiences people have when using facebook. deborah ojeda-leitner is a third-year community psychology graduate student at wichita state university. before graduate school, however, she proudly served as an americorps member in new york city and was involved in community health. her interests include health, social justice, equality, social change community-based interventions and advocacy. recently, she finished a project on health-related stereotype threats among the lgbt community and hopes to expand on healthcare, social justice, and public policy. refika sarionder has earned degrees in sociology (b.a., university of bogazici, turkey), in sociology of development (m.a. university of bielefeld, germany), and in community psychology (m.a., wichita state university). her research interests focus on gender issues, and religious and ethnic minorities. over the last years, sarionder has published academic articles and chapters in edited volumes on gender and heterodox minorities in islam, and co-edited a volume on myths on creativity. aside from participating in international research projects at german universities and research centers in bielefeld, heidelberg, berlin, and essen, she presented papers at national and international conferences. sarionder served as a steering committee member of the sociology of religion group at the american academy of religion. she has worked and assisted in women’s counseling centers and shelters in turkey, germany and switzerland. currently, sarionder is a board member of the global learning center of wichita (glc). anna caroline chinnes recently received her master of art degree in psychology at wichita state university (wsu). she is currently in the clinical/community phd program at wsu. for the past two years, she has worked as a member of the grant development team at the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 community engagement institute in wichita, kansas, as well as one year with the center for applied research and evaluation. she holds clinical practicum positions at wsu’s psychology clinic and counseling and testing center. she has enjoyed working on this important research with the community psychology association and looks forward to future collaborations. paige keller born and raised in small town cheney, kansas, paige keller always had a spot for the “big city.” ms. keller started my college career at butler community college in 2012 and graduated with an associate’s degree in liberal arts. then moved on to work on her bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in criminal justice at wichita state university starting in 2014 and graduated in 2016. as of now, spring of 2017, she is in her second semester of graduate school and working on her masters’ in criminal justice. her ambitions are to go into law enforcement either in wichita, ks or tulsa, ok. she would like to work in a specialty unit within law enforcement like scat which is street level drug crime enforcement. eventually she would like to move up to the federal level and work in dea. recommended citation: clifford, d., freund, n.m., douglas, j.a., siwierka, j., turosak, a, lewis, r.k., drum, j., ojeda-leitner, d., sarionder, r., chinnes, a.c., and keller, p. (2017). using the community psychology competencies to address sexual assault on a college campus. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(1), pages 1-34. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 using the community psychology competencies to address sexual assault on a college campus abstract sexual assault on college campuses is a national issue, with a recent report from the white house estimating that 20% of women will experience a sexual assault during college. students at wichita state university formed a campus organization to bring visibility to both community psychology and address this important problem. the community psychology association is comprised of both graduate and undergraduate students, and members utilized three community psychology competencies: ecological perspectives, information dissemination/building public awareness, and community organizing and community advocacy in their work to improve resources and campus support for this issue. community psychology association members utilized focus groups with campus students, faculty, and staff to facilitate discussions on sexual assault, campus safety, and university and administrative accountability. content analysis revealed multiple themes that were used to generate a larger campus discussion and promote change in campus policies. as a result of these activities, major changes occurred at wichita state, including data driven programming for interventions regarding sexual assault, changes in leadership in the offices of title ix and student affairs, support for a cdc grant, and overall increased organizational awareness for sexual assault survivors. this study highlights the importance of applying community psychology principles and concepts to research and action to ultimately have a positive and tangible impact on the local community. context for using the competencies with campus sexual assault the white house recently made headlines by reporting that approximately one out of five women would experience a sexual assault during their attendance at a university, and the association of american universities published the results of their study showing a range of incidence between 13% and 30% (white house task force to protect students from sexual assault, 2014; cantor, et.al., 2015). the community psychology association at wichita state university (wsu) recognized the need for an examination of this issue on their campus after a sexual assault occurred in a new dormitory and students and faculty were dissatisfied with 1 all student statistics are reported by wichita state university through their office of planning and analysis: http://www.wichita.edu/thisis/home/?u=opa the university’s response. three community psychology competencies guided the community psychology association in an effort to address sexual assault on wsu’s campus. the competencies most relevant to the issue were ecological perspectives, information dissemination and building public awareness, and community organizing and community advocacy. this article discusses community psychology students’ engagement with research and practice regarding sexual assault prevention and the resulting positive impact on the university community. ecological perspectives wichita state university1 (wsu) is situated in an urban setting within the city of wichita, http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.wichita.edu/thisis/home/?u=opa global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 kansas. its student body is split between a majority of commuters (those students who live off campus) and a smaller percentage of students living in on-campus housing. importantly, that dynamic began rapidly changing in the fall of 2014. with the construction and occupation of new dorms on campus, the residential student population more than doubled literally overnight. neither the situation of a college campus within an urban setting, nor the large proportion of commuter students make the ecology of wsu unique. what does make wichita state unique is the rapid expansion of a residential population, a lack of relationship with urbanand community-based sexual assault services, and a lack of experience with sexual assault (due to a relatively small residential student population). this ecological context was important to both the assault that happened in the fall of 2014 (miller, 2014; sunflower, 2014), the dissatisfying university response, and a growing realization that the culture at wichita state needed to be examined in order to improve campus response to sexual assault. many urban universities work with the communities in which they are located, establishing relationships with organizations specializing in assault or trauma to provide consistent information and support for those who survive an assault. for example, depaul university in chicago, illinois, provides information about the chicago rape crisis hotline and also works with the local ywca to train faculty and staff to be certified rape crisis workers (sexual & relationship violence prevention, 2016). wichita state has not cultivated the same relationships with community partners. the wichita area sexual assault center (wasac) is a leader in crisis intervention in wichita, and yet the wsu website provides no information about the services wasac can provide. the university has essentially tried to handle issues related to sexual assault within the confines of its own internal protocols and campus safety department. the ecological context of sexual assault at wsu was unique due to: 1) the dramatic increase in residential students for which the university infrastructure was ill designed to respond and 2) the university culture that isolated the campus community from the municipal partner organizations that could provide assistance to the university given the change in environment and increase in potential on-campus sexual assaults. this unique context made ecology an important consideration when thinking about how to address this issue. by taking an ecological perspective and making the different layers of context an essential component in the approach to studying the issue, the community psychology association – a student-led campus organization – was able to move the conversation away from victim blaming and individual action, instead focusing on a system that was not equipped to prevent assault from occurring. the study and ultimately the advocacy was informed by this ecological context and considered foundational to both how data were to be collected and how they should be analyzed and framed in dissemination. information dissemination/building public awareness the crux of information dissemination and building public awareness is “giving psychology away” through engaging diverse groups in dialogue and consultation, empowering community members, and tailoring the communication of results to stakeholders to inform their action (dalton & wolfe, 2012). in the work undertaken at wichita state, multiple stakeholder groups were consulted and involved in the research and action that took place. viewing the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 campus as a community with a specific ecology necessitated collaboration in the process of identifying how, where, and what to ask community members. this was done with the aim, expectation, and purpose of building awareness about the issue of sexual assault on campus, convincing the community that the problem was one that needed more direct intervention and prevention efforts. additionally, the community psychology association focused on university officials, student stakeholders, and other members of the community to have the greatest impact with dissemination of results. community organizing and community advocacy the competency of community organizing and community advocacy heavily influenced the approach to addressing sexual assault on wichita state’s campus. marti-costa and serrano-garcia (1983) have argued “needs assessment may be utilized as a central method to facilitate the modification of social systems so they become more responsive to human needs” (p. 75). the community psychology association modeled their approach to understanding the culture of sexual assault at wsu on this idea, with the strategy of using this process of learning the needs of the campus community to also mobilize constituents and activate change. they actively recruited undergraduate and graduate students to fully engage in the process of research and action focusing on sexual assault on campus. research efforts began as the community psychology association utilized this approach with stakeholder focus groups to generate qualitative data that would be linked to advocacy efforts and would describe the ecology of the campus from the perspective of individuals living in that environment. additionally, these data provided a foundation to shift discussions away from traditional victim blaming and focus on systemic issues that would be targeted for change. the action phase involved reaching out to the wichita area sexual assault center (wasac) for their experience and expertise, which led to engaging with campus stakeholders including campus safety, the counseling and testing center, the office of the vice president of student affairs, the student government association, the university title ix coordinators, the office of housing and residence life, greek life, and other campus entities. the organizing activities expanded the reach of advocacy efforts so that voices from this bottom-up work could not be immediately dismissed by university decision makers who used top-down procedures when developing and enforcing policy. community psychology principles and these competencies were embedded in this process and helped facilitate this transition from research to action, enabling the community psychology association to have a meaningful and positive impact on the wichita state campus community through the practice of community psychology. methods the community psychology association the community psychology association was developed as a local chapter of the society for community research and action by graduate students who had a desire to bring visibility to community psychology, its competencies, and practices in applied settings. another goal of the association was to introduce undergraduates to the field and engage them in meaningful research and practice around relevant topics at their university. over the course of designing and implementing this project, undergraduates were directly involved in the research and practice and had the opportunity to receive training in focus group moderation and other advocacy activities. focus group participants participants in the focus groups were students and faculty at the university and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 were required to be at least 18 years of age and english speaking. there were no other exclusion criteria. participation was voluntary, and recruitment used fliers, emails, and tables set up at the student center during high traffic times. participants received a $5 gift card at the conclusion of the study. twoperson teams facilitated separate focus groups for students and faculty and were gender-specific to the corresponding genders of the groups. student groups consisted of a male only, female only, and a mixed gender group. lack of response from male faculty and staff resulted in a faculty group of female participants only. focus group script a packet for each team of facilitators helped keep consistency between focus group conversations among participants. participants had a coordinating packet that allowed them to write down their responses and help gather their thoughts before responding in a discussion to the group. questions included defining sexual assault, what information would be useful in incident reporting, responding to a friend that had been sexually assaulted in a hypothetical scenario, estimating prevalence, law enforcement as a resource, and identifying safe and unsafe areas on campus and the surrounding neighborhoods (for the full discussion guide, please see appendices a and b). experienced graduate student facilitators mentored less experienced undergraduate and graduate student facilitators, including an hour-long training session to prepare all who would lead focus groups. an important part of this procedure was the integral participation of the population (i.e., students) who are affected by sexual assault and the policies addressing this issue. procedures focus groups utilized paired facilitators who each moderated different parts of the discussion. informed consent was obtained from each participant, and conversations were audio or video recorded for later transcription. groups were held on campus in the student center as a centrally located and contextually relevant environment. the moderator facilitated discussion through open-ended questions, sometimes assisted by having participants write responses to questions in a handout packet and subsequently discussing written answers with the group. follow-up questions for clarity and expansion of answers led to more in-depth discussion among group members. basic demographic information was also collected. the audio or video recording of each group was transcribed for further analysis. results focus group data were coded and analyzed following a conventional qualitative content analysis approach (hsieh & shannon, 2005). each focus group interview was transcribed, and researchers collaboratively determined codes based on the data transcriptions and created a codebook for analysis. the research team used this codebook to organize key statements in transcripts according to these predetermined codes. coding was understood as a process to understand the overall themes and to recognize trends and patterns that contribute to the interpretation (boyatzis, 1998). this process included intercoder agreement, by having a second coder in the analysis of each focus group. the coders then convened and developed consensus meanings for each key statement, which ultimately led to seven themes: 1) personal experience, 2) scenario response, 3) resources, 4) reporting, 5) awareness, 6) situations and locations, and 7) university and administrative accountability. the themes and code counts are found in table 1. http://www.gjcpp.org/ table 1: focus group themes with code counts based on group make-up personal experience of the eight themes that emerged from analyzing qualitative data from the focus groups, personal experience was the least mentioned. this theme related to having directly or indirectly experienced a sexual assault, being impacted by an assault, or otherwise witnessing symptoms of trauma in someone close to them. neither the femaleonly nor the female-faculty groups mentioned personal experience in their focus groups. several participants in the mixed-gender student group knew someone who had experienced sexual assault and the affect it had on them as a confidante. these students mentioned that because of this experience, they are more aware of sexual assault occurrence. male students echoed similar sentiments in terms of preparedness if a friend confided in them. one student noted that because he has been sexually assaulted: … three times so i feel very prepared… i’ve done extensive counseling on it and so know if someone does something i feel i've been violated, [i'll] absolutely…take it to the police. i feel very prepared to do that. yet another male student relayed that safety or perceptions of safety, at least for some people, may be relative to lived experiences: i come from a country where you can pay someone $10 to kill someone so i'll just walk and if in the neighborhood there's a drug dealer but he says hi, i have no problem with that. hey to each his own. you know. so like i have a much higher tolerance i guess to what other people might consider dangerous. reporting reporting referred to the dissemination of sexual assault’s incidence or prevalence, the reporting of procedures or practices, or the lack of reported cases that are campusfocus group participant make-up personal experience scenario response resources reporting awareness situations and locations university & administrative accountability mixed gender students 6 16 34 35 10 43 5 female students 0 5 26 22 17 30 3 male students 5 27 31 52 41 48 14 female faculty 0 8 10 19 11 19 20 frequency total 11 56 110 128 79 140 42 global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 specific, college-specific, or across all contexts. all groups mentioned that the reporting on this particular campus needs more attention and transparency, for there have been instances where a sexual assault has happened, and it was “swept under the rug.” participants in the mixed-gender group mentioned the university of virginia case earlier in the study year and cases in general where a survivor came forward and the public backlash intensified. a participant described his/her perspective: i don't think anyone reports it; i mean rape does happen and a lot of times people won't report it because they're afraid they'll be called a liar. when asked what types of information the university should =shared= with students about an assault, common information included: location, time of day, relationship between the perpetrator and survivor, what happened to both people, and resources that were made available for the survivor. regardless of what information was shared, participants in all groups agreed that the survivor’s personal information needed to be protected. this discussion brought up the point of sharing of information with a large group of people. messages about incidents, resources, and reporting from the university were thought to be potentially helpful if conveyed via social media (e.g., twitter, facebook, instagram). many students mentioned that they do not watch the news, so even if universities or the general public report information through that medium, the information would not be received. a few male students also noted the viewpoint around reporting on domestic violence might need to be changed as well: …the domestic incident is not gonna be headline news. in general it's just, ‘oh it's in their kitchen let's leave it there.’ and frankly i feel like that should be reported on a little more, should be because then, then you know it's there and you know it's wrong for the people who don't know but it's a form of education. the female faculty and staff group also brought in a different perspective as mandatory reporters, especially when considering students’ cultural and social backgrounds which may prevent or delay someone from reporting. when a student does share an incident with a faculty or staff member, faculty mentioned they would respect the student’s wishes by connecting them with the resources and reporting methods with which the student felt most comfortable. the female student group also provided another possible reason for fewer reports, citing that the severity of an assault may determine whether or not a student will report (e.g., unwanted groping may not warrant a full police report in the student’s mind). all participants noted how emotionally difficult it was to report any sort of assault, regardless of who the survivor was reporting to or the circumstances of the assault. awareness awareness was described as being able to define sexual assault and recognize instances in which a potential situation could be difficult to interpret (e.g., at a party between classmates). all groups’ definitions were fairly similar, only differing in the key words each chose to focus on. the overarching definition that transcended groups posits that sexual assault includes unwanted touching, sexual behaviors, and comments from one or more individuals to one or more other individuals. for the male student group, the key word was “unwanted,” in that the recipient of such advances felt an invasion of their personal boundaries. in the female student group, the focus was on the individual’s ability to have their own definition. all groups agreed that the general http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 definition is publicized fairly well on campus, but some participants in the female faculty and mixed-gender groups expressed questions about the discussed differentiation between sexual assault and sexual harassment. challenges with interpreting consent were a topic of conversation as participants described multiple means of communication. …we have to get away from a culture of just body language getting more into expressing what we want and how we want it…if we can get to the point where we can verbally express our sexual interests without it being awkward or you know a mood killer. many participants recognized that it is necessary for the public to steer away from the misconception that sexual assault is from “stranger danger” to promote safer prevention programs. there was some discussion on trying to determine what is consensual and not, for instance, at a party. in these more ambiguous situations, students said they would be hesitant to intervene. as the female faculty and staff group pointed out, however, it will be necessary to not only focus on females’ abilities to prevent an assault, but also to involve males in the efforts as well. scenario responses scenario responses described anything involving the identification of, reaction to, or learning about a sexual assault. this is also regarded as the level of preparation or skill participants believed was needed to handle a situation involving sexual assault. during this point in the discussion, faculty and students were able to express how they would handle specific situations regarding sexual assault and address steps they would take if they had been sexually assaulted or a close friend or student (for the faculty members) had experienced it. in the student focus groups, a common response was that they did not believe they were particularly prepared about what to do in the event a sexual assault occurred. participants wanted to believe they would be able to take the proper steps, but in some cases, just did not feel as though they would really know unless it really happened. i don't know, honestly. you don't really know until it happens to you, so. i'd like to think i'd know what to do just because, you know, i have somewhat, you know, awareness about the situation. another important aspect to this theme was how to handle a potential situation if it didn’t seem like an appropriate setting to intervene. students stated that if it was a circumstance such as a house party, where it was a more casual atmosphere and people were likely to know each other, they would feel more comfortable stepping in if they believed a sexual assault was happening; however, if they were out somewhere like a bar, and weren’t sure about the context between two people who were interacting with one another, they would be less inclined to step in and make sure everything was okay. if it's that case where it's at a party and the-a girl who's totally drunk and can't even walk… yeah, i can recognize it and if i can, i'll stop it and like make sure the girl finds her friends and they can take her home. but, i mean, in any other case… i could probably recognize it but i mean, if it's not in public. although many students believed they would be unprepared in a sexual assault situation, many stated they would report the assault and would strongly encourage a friend to do so if they had been assaulted. despite stating they would contact authorities, some still made sure to reiterate that they would not be totally sure of what they would do unless they had to deal with it in real life. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 i would want it to be reported, and if it were my friend then i would definitely report it, if it were me but i think it would be hard just because like everybody else said, you're never, i mean especially in that situation, you don't know how you're going to handle it until you're in that situation. faculty members talked a lot about the current events on the university campus that were relevant to the issue, such as the rape in the new dorms, or assaults that occurred on or near campus grounds. faculty members thought they had noticed a difference in the way their students conducted themselves, but did not see any big changes among their fellow faculty members. one faculty member said that her students did not mention their assaults until long after they happened, but she still made sure to refer them to the counseling and testing center on campus for additional resources. resources resources were defined as any type of treatment or prevention resource, which included options such as escorting by police to students’ vehicles, information provided by the counseling and testing center, the wichita area sexual assault center (wasac), topics covered in campus orientations, or any other resources students utilize regarding this issue. students brought up several points regarding the various resources relating to sexual assault prevention. one that was commonly discussed was the police escort system. some students believed this was an important resource because a perpetrator was far less likely to assault you if there is a police officer present; however, many believed this option was not appropriate to use more than a couple of times per week, if ever. it was viewed as more of a special option to be used when one really felt unsafe, although specific examples of when that may be the case were not discussed in greater detail. another option that students spoke about was using a group system when walking to their cars at night. by using their fellow students and friends as a resource, they had safety in numbers and were able to make sure everyone made it to their vehicles safely and did not have to walk alone at any time. pepper spray was another option that was brought up, with students saying they made sure to have it on them whenever they walked alone at night. as far as resources provided directly by programs within the university, students mentioned information they had learned during campus orientations; however, the information they received regarding sexual assault seemed to be mostly tied into the issue of alcohol, and a few students made the suggestion that sexual assault be discussed as an issue on its own. …it shouldn't be more focused on the alcohol point of view but more focused on sexual assault in general. i mean, there's probably more methodical things you could talk about in orientation than they do. female faculty members referenced resources such as wasac and discussed the importance of really trying to understand what would most benefit the particular situation with the student. these participants believed that academic resources were also an important aspect to the process, as they had seen instances where students were more likely to shut down and stop attending classes. it was suggested that there are always ways to improve upon the resources offered to students in these circumstances. is there enough resources? i always think you could have more, you can never have enough resources… university and administration accountability participants were concerned with how the university responds to a sexual assault http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 report. across all groups, participants shared that the university can provide more training and resources and can improve reporting measures. specifically, students wanted to feel confident that the university will ethically and properly investigate all sexual assault reports. students also wanted to be informed of the university course of action during and following an investigation: “what is the campus and what is the university going to do about it? like, after the situation.” most participants were concerned with the university’s next steps and wanted to be informed of the course of action taken. focus group participants also wanted to ensure that survivors received counseling and their needs were met. also, participants wanted to know that due process had occurred. it was unclear for some staff if they were mandatory reporters, and there was some uncertainty regarding university reporting protocol. similarly, students believed that when an incident was reported, there was not followup to explain what happened, and they wanted to know about incidences sooner: “let us know on the student listserv, and follow-up.” prevention and training were central in this discussion on university administration accountability. staff reported that there was awareness around sexual assault, but more training was needed around sexual harassment. participants believed the university could invest in more prevention training beyond self-defense training. i feel like our campus does not necessarily do as much education here as compared to other campuses. situations and locations situation and locations referenced physical locations, context, or social situations where sexual assault happens or hypothetically could happen. perceptions of safe and unsafe areas were also discussed. participants were aware of the common rape myth that sexual assault perpetrators are mostly strangers; however, participants did not often discuss other known rape myths as being false, particularly in regard to where and how sexual assault incidences can occur. many participants reported not feeling safe in surrounding areas of the campus. this was mainly attributed to the reporting of past criminal incidences that have occurred near the campus, with a common reference to a crime that occurred at a nearby park where the victim was sexually assaulted and murdered. despite this incident occurring over a year ago, the event and impact was a salient topic of discussion. i mean, it was devastating, and then, hitting close to home because, i no longer live on this side of town, but i grew up on this side of town so we used to play at that park, you know? it was like man, that could have been anybody. i still have friends and family that live around there, so, it-i mean, scary as hell. additionally, some believed the news was biased in reporting sexual assaults that transpire in areas that are deemed as unsafe, and participants were aware that sexual assaults could happen anywhere. areas directly outside of campus were still perceived as unsafe by many participants, although there was a general consensus that campus property was safe. sexual assault was believed to occur mostly during the evening hours, at parties, dorms, in homes, and in the summer. although the participants were aware that sexual assault can occur at any time of the day, most thought about sexual assault happening in the evenings. evening hours are when participants felt less safe even on campus, particularly in parking lots, shady areas where lights are burned out, and around tall bushes. additionally, going to bars and drinking were mentioned as contributors to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 sexual assaults. female dress style in these locations was also referenced as to where and why sexual assaults occur: “if a girl’s like, dressed in clothes that are provocative or just show a lot.” discussion this study examined the opinions of students and faculty members regarding sexual assault on their college campus and offered students the opportunity to engage in community psychology research and practice. seven themes emerged from the focus groups: personal experience, scenario response, resources, reporting, awareness, situations and locations, and university and administrative accountability. a number of these findings are in line with what other researchers have found regarding a university’s culture concerning sexual assault (worthen & baker, 2014) along with factors aligning with wichita state’s unique ecological context. catalyst for change several changes on campus resulted from this research and action project. regarding awareness, resources, and university and administrative accountability, both student involvement personnel and the title ix coordinator have collaborated on ways to widely disseminate the results of this work. a three-year center for disease control (cdc) grant will allow surveys to be conducted by the equal opportunity and title ix offices on campus that address student perceptions of sexual assault on campus. additionally, a student-run title ix committee has been established to plan events that highlight title ix, advocate for students’ rights, raise awareness regarding campus policy change related to title ix issues, and attempt to connect with other title ix student committees nationwide. these steps will help address students’ requests for more education and awareness being brought to the issue of sexual assault. culture was also reflected in scenario responses and the reaction to location reported by focus group participants. these participants were not clear on when to intervene if a situation got out of hand or whether something that happens off campus is reportable. more education and practice is needed for students to know when to intervene appropriately and how to identify when an individual may be at risk for a sexual assault. many stated during the focus group they were totally unsure about the various scenarios that were discussed. the campus has recently implemented a bystander intervention course, available on all students’ university homepage. this course touches on many of the issues participants in the focus group brought up as worries and challenges. in addition to the new training course, bystander intervention will ideally be made more visible with the newly implemented student committee and the results of the cdc title ix survey. focus group participants were clear that reporting was an issue they believed was not adequately addressed. if someone did come forward to report an incident, they believed the incident would be “swept under the rug” or there could be backlash experienced by the survivor. in sharing results with the title ix office, we learned that the process is not widely understood, especially with respect to how the university must respond to allegations. because the reporting process in place currently requires the university staff to remain neutral, it can cause additional distress or lack of trust for the person reporting an assault. while impartiality is important in adjudication, it can also unintentionally communicate a lack of support, increasing the trauma for the survivor. as a response to the dissemination of these results, the title ix office is actively pursuing an advocate system, and they have established a memorandum of understanding with wichita area sexual assault center. finally, focus group participants were able to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 problem-solve on their own and generate a list of potential resources, but the university’s role was considered unclear and difficult to navigate. no university programs or offices (beyond the counseling and testing center and the campus police) were identified as a specific resource. in sharing these results and generating discussion on campus, it became clear that the university culture was not conducive to providing support to survivors of sexual assault, nor was it structured to prevent future issues with timely, sensitive communication to the community. focus group participants were concerned about how sexual assault incidents were resolved once a case was brought to the attention of administration. participants noted that nothing was ever reported back to the student body after an incident was reported, which raised anxiety and doubts about the support they might receive. the increased visibility that has come from this work has catalyzed administration plans for transparency, changes in policy, and overall greater support for survivors. ecological and cultural successes and challenges engaging all stakeholders to participate in this process is essential to any ecological change that might occur. the community psychology association initiated the conversation as a way to increase the awareness of organizational responsibility when it comes to sexual assault, which has occurred as a result of these efforts. some of the major changes include: • data driven programming for interventions • changes in leadership in the offices of title ix and student affairs • the support and impetus for pursuing a cdc grant, including using data from these efforts in the proposal • increased organizational awareness for support for survivors of sexual assault of course, the original project sought to incorporate male perspectives, but encountered difficulties with recruitment and participation. this highlights the initial lack of engagement with the issue as well as the necessity to find a way to bring males into the conversation and recognize their role and responsibility regarding the issue of sexual assault. additionally, male students who participated typically had a specific reason for choosing to be a part of the focus groups, and many of them cited that they did not believe they had any part in the solution. it is important to identify why men, particularly faculty and staff, were unwilling to participate so that all stakeholders can be involved in a solution. final thoughts this study provided valuable insights on the issue of sexual assault on campus, especially with respect to extending and expanding the use of community psychology competencies in the university community. this process has already begun, with the implementation of a student-led title ix group and a newly created university-wide climate survey addressing the issue. among the actions and practices that might grow from this investigation and the resulting programs and resources are strategies for increasing awareness of sexual assault and reducing its incidence. ongoing evaluation and improvement of wichita state’s reporting procedures and resources can create a campus culture that both broadly understands sexual assault and sets precedence for zero tolerance. the issue of sexual assault has gained visibility and momentum on college campuses across the nation, and faculty, staff, and student input are needed to create a campus culture that is safe and open for survivors to come forward. policies need to be thoughtfully explored, implemented, and properly enforced so that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 perpetrators are fairly punished and college students feel safe and supported. without the involvement of the community psychology association, these difficult conversations and work would not have been accomplished with such broad campus support at wichita state. during the process of the research project, the community psychology association was able to engage their membership and involve students, faculty, and staff to gain a deeper perspective on the issue of sexual assault. the process also allowed greater visibility for the organization and garnered interest in both the organization and community psychology as a discipline and its doctoral program. as a result of their growing profile within the campus, a community psychology association monthly bulletin was created that highlights one competency each issue and includes interviews with practicing community psychologists who can provide insight from their real-world experience in the field. the entire process served as a powerful example of what can happen when a group of engaged and passionate students come together for the common goal of making their campus a better place. references boyatzis, r. e. (1998). thematic analysis: coding as a process for transforming qualitative information. sage publications. cantor, d., fisher, b., chibnall, s., townsend, r., lee, h., bruce, c., & thomas, g. (2015). report on the aau campus climate survey on sexual assault and sexual misconduct. rockville, md: westat. dalton, j. & wolfe, s. (2012). education connection and the community practitioner. the community psychologist 45(4), pp. 7-13. hsieh, h. f., & shannon, s. e. (2005). three approaches to qualitative content analysis. qualitative health research, 15(9), 1277-1288. marti-costa, s. & serrano-garcía, i. (1983). needs assessment and community development: an ideological perspective. prevention in human services, 2(4), 75-88. miller, b. (2014, sept. 8). “wsu officials investigating campus rape.” retrieved september 30, 2015 from http://ksn.com/2014/09/08/wsuofficials-investigating-campus-rape/ rape, abuse and incest national network. (2009). who are the victims? retrieved september 17, 2015, from https://rainn.org/getinformation/statistics/sexual-assaultvictims sexual & relationship violence prevention. (2016, december). division of student affairs. depaul university. http://offices.depaul.edu/studentaffairs/support-services/healthwellness/sexual-relationship-violenceprevention/pages/default.aspx smith, t. (2015, august 12). “curbing sexual assault becomes big business on campus.” all things considered, national public radio. retrieved from: http://www.npr.org/2015/08/12/43037 8518/curbing-sexual-assault-becomesbig-business-on-campus. sunflower. (2014, sept. 8). “rape reported at shocker hall: university police investigating an incident reported on labor day.” retrieved october 8, 2015 from https://thesunflower.com/5678/news/r ape-reported-at-shocker-hall-universitypolice-investigating-an-incidentreported-on-labor-day/ white house task force to protect students from sexual assault. (2014, april). not alone: the first report of the white house task force to protect students from sexual assault. washington, dc: author. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assault-victims https://rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assault-victims https://rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assault-victims http://offices.depaul.edu/student-affairs/support-services/health-wellness/sexual-relationship-violence-prevention/pages/default.aspx http://offices.depaul.edu/student-affairs/support-services/health-wellness/sexual-relationship-violence-prevention/pages/default.aspx http://offices.depaul.edu/student-affairs/support-services/health-wellness/sexual-relationship-violence-prevention/pages/default.aspx http://offices.depaul.edu/student-affairs/support-services/health-wellness/sexual-relationship-violence-prevention/pages/default.aspx http://www.npr.org/2015/08/12/430378518/curbing-sexual-assault-becomes-big-business-on-campus http://www.npr.org/2015/08/12/430378518/curbing-sexual-assault-becomes-big-business-on-campus http://www.npr.org/2015/08/12/430378518/curbing-sexual-assault-becomes-big-business-on-campus global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 worthen, m. g. f. & baker, a. (2014). “consent is sexy”? analyzing student reactions to a campus mandatory online sexual misconduct training program. sexual assault report, 17(5). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 appendix a student focus group script sexual assault on wsu’s campus i. introduction ii. trends and culture a. handout 1: how would you define sexual assault to someone new to wsu who has no experience with the concept? probe on: 1. what, if any, distinct properties do you think the definition of sexual assault has? 2. when and how do you think this definition breaks down? iii. information dissemination a. what is your reaction to the current local news on sexual assault? probe on: 1. has your behavior or thought process changed at all? 2. what changes have you seen in others as a result of the news? b. handout 2: what do you feel it is your right to know about if a sexual assault occurs on campus? probe on: 1. do you feel those rights are being exercised at wsu? 2. if you could change one thing about the way you receive information what would it be? iv. resources and personal reaction a. handout 3: if you or a friend were sexually assaulted, what would you do? probe on: 1. how well do you feel prepared for this kind of scenario? 2. how well do you feel resources are made available to help you in this kind of situation? 3. how prepared do you feel to recognize a potential sexual assault situation in progress? 4. what does it mean to “report it”? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 5. have you ever received any training on sexual assault, either by the university or some other source? if so, tell me about it. v. role of law enforcement a. handout 4: on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is extremely uncomfortable and 10 is completely comfortable, please indicate your feelings about being escorted to your vehicle by a police officer. probe on: 1. please explain your rating. 2. how would you feel about routinely calling police for an escort to your vehicle or residence hall? 3. how would you feel about a colleague or a student routinely calling a police officer to escort him or her to their vehicle or residence hall? b. other than increased legal enforcement, what type of resources or programs do you think could help prevent sexual assault on campus? probe on: 1. what circumstances would allow you to feel safe on campus? 2. what topics or parts of the issue do you feel are being covered too much? 3. what topics or parts of the issue do you feel are being covered too little? vi. areas of safety/danger a. handout 5: how often over the course of a semester do your think wsu students encounter unwanted sexual activities? when do you think these are most likely to occur? where do you think these are most likely to occur? probe on: 1. please share/explain your answers 2. when = time of day? 3. when = time of week? 4. when = time of year? b. handout 6: please indicate on these maps with places where you feel the most safe (green) and the places you feel the least safe (red). probe on: 1. please share/explain your answers vii. closing a. remind participants of counseling center information viii. demographics http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 handout 1 how would you define sexual assault to someone new to wsu who has no experience with the concept? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 handout 2 on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is extremely uncomfortable and 10 is completely comfortable, please indicate your feelings about being escorted to your vehicle by a police officer.(circle one number) extremely uncomfortabl e neutral completely comfortable 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 handout 3 if you or a friend were sexually assaulted, what would you do? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 handout 4 1) how often over the course of a semester do your think wsu students encounter unwanted sexual activities? 2) when do you think these are most likely to occur? 3) where do you think these are most likely to occur? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 handout 5 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 handout 5 (cont.) thank you for your participation! http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 appendix b faculty focus group script sexual assault on wsu’s campus i. introduction ii. trends and culture a. handout 1: what trends or changes in the way that sex and sexual assault is discussed on campus amongst students and faculty have you noticed? probe on: 1. what, if any, new cultural trends do you think have had an impact on the culture of sexual assault? 2. what observations have you had of interaction amongst students that might promote or prevent a culture of safe interrelational contact? iii. information dissemination a. what is your reaction to the current local news on sexual assault? probe on: 1. has your behavior or thought process changed at all? 2. what changes have you seen in others as a result of the news? b. handout 2: what do you feel it is your right to know about if a sexual assault occurs on campus? probe on: 1. do you feel those rights are being exercised at wsu? 2. if you could change one thing about the way you receive information what would it be? iv. resources and personal reaction a. handout 3: if a student or colleague came to you and had been sexually assaulted, what would you do? probe on: 1. how well do you feel prepared for this kind of scenario? 2. how well do you feel resources are made available to help you in this kind of situation? 3. what does it mean to “report it”? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 27 4. have you ever received any training on sexual assault, either by the university or some other source? if so, tell me about it. v. role of law enforcement a. handout 4: on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is extremely uncomfortable and 10 is completely comfortable, please indicate your feelings about being escorted to your vehicle by a police officer. probe on: 1. please explain your rating. 2. how would you feel about routinely calling police for an escort to your vehicle? 3. how would you feel about a colleague or a student routinely calling a police officer to escort him or her to their vehicle or residence hall? b. other than increased legal enforcement, what type of resources or programs do you think could help prevent sexual assault on campus? probe on: 1. what topics or parts of the issue do you feel are being covered too much? 2. what topics or parts of the issue do you feel are being covered too little vi. areas of safety/danger b. handout 5: how often over the course of a semester do your think wsu students encounter unwanted sexual activities? when do you think these are most likely to occur? where do you think these are most likely to occur? probe on: 1. please share/explain your answers 2. when = time of day? 3. when = time of week? 4. when = time of year? c. handout 6: please highlight this map with places where you feel the most safe (green) and the places you feel the least safe (red). probe on: 1. please share/explain your answers vii. closing b. remind participants of counseling center information viii. demographics http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 28 handout 1 what trends or changes in the way that sex and sexual assault is discussed on campus amongst students and faculty have you noticed? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 29 handout 2 on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is extremely uncomfortable and 10 is completely comfortable, please indicate your feelings about being escorted to your vehicle by a police officer.(circle one number) extremely uncomfortabl e neutral completely comfortable 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 30 handout 3 if a student or colleague came to you and had been sexually assaulted, what would you do? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 31 handout 4 1) how often over the course of a semester do your think wsu students encounter unwanted sexual activities? 2) when do you think these are most likely to occur? 3) where do you think these are most likely to occur? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 32 handout 5 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 33 handout 5 (cont.) thank you for your participation! http://www.gjcpp.org/ context for using the competencies with campus sexual assault methods focus group participants focus group script procedures results personal experience reporting awareness resources university and administration accountability situations and locations references appendix a student focus group script sexual assault on wsu’s campus i. introduction ii. trends and culture probe on: iii. information dissemination probe on: probe on: iv. resources and personal reaction probe on: v. role of law enforcement probe on: probe on: vi. areas of safety/danger probe on: probe on: vii. closing viii. demographics handout 1 handout 2 handout 3 if you or a friend were sexually assaulted, what would you do? handout 4 handout 5 handout 5 (cont.) appendix b faculty focus group script sexual assault on wsu’s campus i. introduction ii. trends and culture probe on: iii. information dissemination probe on: probe on: iv. resources and personal reaction probe on: v. role of law enforcement probe on: probe on: vi. areas of safety/danger probe on: probe on: vii. closing viii. demographics handout 1 handout 2 handout 3 if a student or colleague came to you and had been sexually assaulted, what would you do? handout 4 handout 5 handout 5 (cont.) learning through doing: reflections on the use of photovoice in an undergraduate community psychology classroom rachel m. hershberg, olivia andringa, katheryn camm, halimatu hill, joshua little, rebecca smith and, sarah wilkinson1 keywords: empowerment, photovoice, sense of community, undergraduate, pedagogy author biographies: rachel hershberg, is an assistant professor of developmental and community psychology at the university of washington tacoma. she teaches classes in developmental and community psychology, immigrant youth and family development, and qualitative research methods. her research examines the impact of detention and deportation policies and practices on migrant families and communities, and how such families and communities maintain relationships and well-being in these challenging contexts. she also examines critical consciousness development in young adults from different backgrounds. she uses community-based and participatory research methods in her research and undergraduate classrooms. olivia andringa received her bachelor’s degree in psychology from the university of washington in 2017. she was an undergraduate researcher focusing on critical consciousness and that is what peaked her interest in community psychology. katheryn camm is currently working as a manager for the bachelor of applied science in digital filmmaking program at olympic college in bremerton, wa. in this position she has worked to identify barriers to student success and developed support systems to guide students successfully through the bas program. she graduated from the university of washington tacoma in 2016 with a bachelor of arts in psychology. she has recently discovered her passion in applying this psychological education towards graphic design and aims to begin design school in fall of 2019. her hobbies include cooking, making both 2d and 3d art, gardening, reading, writing, and exercising regularly. halimatu essi hill comes from several diverse backgrounds including being a member of a blended family and having been born in kano, nigeria. essi, as she prefers to be called, moved to the united states when she was only six years old leaving behind a middle-class muslim upbringing. it was during her early years in america that she set her sights on becoming a lawyer due to the poverty she encountered. currently, essi has earned a bachelor of arts in psychology and criminal justice and is looking forward to going to law school. she is also a devoted mother of seven children, five boys and 2 girls. joshua little graduated from the university of washington tacoma in 2017 with a bachelor’s in psychology. he is 1 univeristy of washington tacoma global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 currently working in direct services supporting at-risk students in tacoma, wa. joshua’s role is of an advocate and mentor to the students. he works directly with the student, family, and school personnel to address barriers and develop strategies to support the students’ success. joshua also volunteers as a board member for guided pathways support, a non-profit organization. joshua has a passion for addressing issues of racism and for promoting inclusion. his goal is to become a college professor. rebecca smith graduated from the university of washington tacoma in 2017 with a bachelor of arts in psychology. she is a research fellow for the action mapping project at uwt, and a member of conversations regarding tacoma which is a public engagement organization that hosts an annual lecture series about local urban design. currently, she is working to pursue a master’s degree in city and regional planning with an emphasis in the relationships between human behavior and urban spaces. after earning a master’s degree, she would like to work towards her phd and ultimately teach at a university. sarah wilkinson is a current masters of social work student at the university of washington tacoma (uwt). in 2017, she received her bachelor of arts in psychology from uwt, during which time she participated in the community psychology class and the photovoice project. through this experience and other undergraduate and graduate opportunities she developed a love for academia and hope to one day implement tools like photovoice into her own classroom instruction. she currently serves her community through americorps and as a case manager for kitsap community resources. wilkinson plans on pursuing a phd in social work and furthering her research experience before moving into academia recommended citation: hershberg, r., m., andringa, o., camm, a., hill, h., little, j., smith, r., & wilkinson, s. (2019). learning through doing: reflections on the use of photovoice in an undergraduate community psychology classroom. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(2), 1-38. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). author note: please direct all correspondence to rachel m hershberg, ph.d., assistant professor interdisciplinary arts & sciences, university of washington tacoma, 1900 commerce st, box 358436, tacoma, wa 98402, rmhersh@uw.edu. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ mailto:rmhersh@uw.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 learning through doing: reflections on the use of photovoice in an undergraduate community psychology classroom abstract photovoice is becoming an increasingly popular research method in the field of community psychology (cp). this is, in part, because it reflects some of the values of cp, including respect for diversity and participation and collaboration. more recently, photovoice has also been used in undergraduate classrooms as a way to actively engage students in their learning, to enable students to investigate and address social problems of importance to them, and to help students develop self-efficacy skills. there are few extant studies in the cp literature, however, that describe how this has been done in undergraduate cp classrooms specifically, and in what ways it has influenced students, from students’ perspectives. accordingly, in this article, an assistant professor of community psychology and six of her former undergraduate students reflect on their experiences of the community psychology, research, and action course she taught at an urban-serving university in washington in spring 2016, which was centered around the learning and implementation of a student-directed photovoice project about their campus. the instructor describes her objectives in centering her course around photovoice, including that students would learn this method well and add it to their toolbox, while also developing a stronger sense of community. students then reflect on the aspects of their learning that most significantly influenced their development as students and people more broadly. reflections suggest that participating in photovoice throughout a cp course has the potential to help students learn about cpincluding its core values and principlesand experience some long-term empowerment-related outcomes on campus and in their communities. implications for educators at similar universities, who may also want to experiment with photovoice in their undergraduate classrooms, are discussed. introduction photovoice is a community-based and participatory and action research method that has been used to communicate the voices and experiences of minoritized individuals and communities to policymakers, organizations, and institutions that have decision-making power (wang & burris, 1994, 1997). in the last two decades, photovoice has also increasingly been used in a variety of undergraduate classrooms as a pedagogical tool and as a means for facilitating individual and collective empowerment processes for students (goodhart, 2006; wang, morrel-samuels, hutchinson, bell, & pestronk, 2004). empowerment processes are described as those that enable people to gain greater control over their lives, in part, through developing skills for addressing unjust social conditions in their communities and society more broadly (ballard & ozer, 2016; zimmerman, 1995). one of the key skills identified in this research is critical consciousness, wherein individuals develop a more critical understanding of unjust systems and how to combat them (foster-fishman, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 nowell, deacon, nievar, & mccann, 2005; freire, 1970). given that the field of community psychology (cp) views such processes (e.g., critical consciousness) and outcomes (e.g., community betterment) as essential to the research process, it is perhaps unsurprising that photovoice is one research method that has been used more frequently by community psychologists in the last several decades (lykes & hershberg, 2012). community psychologists specifically are also turning to photovoice as a popular pedagogical tool for introducing undergraduates to the field and practice of cp. however, few exemplars of how this has been done, and/or of how it has impacted students from students’ perspectives, are available in the extant community psychology literature (lichty, 2013). accordingly, the purpose of this paper is (1) to present one example of how an assistant professor of community psychology used the photovoice method in the undergraduate community psychology course she taught for the first time at the university of washington tacoma, an urban-serving university with a distinct mission of providing access and facilitating success for nontraditional students, and to serving the community in which it is based (i.e., tacoma and the south sound region more broadly) (see usuc, 2018). we hope that community psychologists and educators in similar fields will be able to draw on this example as they try to integrate photovoice into their undergraduate classrooms in the future. additionally, drawing on the photovoice literature, the professor’s reflections about how she developed the course, and reflections from six former students in the class about which components of the class most significantly impacted them, we aim (2) to describe how this pedagogical experiment facilitated students’ interest and engagement in learning about and practicing cp values, (3) helped them add a practical skill to their toolbox for use inand outside of the college environment, and (4) enhanced their sense of community as well as their individual empowerment. we begin by presenting a review of the literature about photovoice’s varied uses in the social sciences and cp, and its specific use in the classroom to date. we then describe our university and classroom, and thus, the research context for this investigation. here, the instructor also notes her specific learning objectives in centering the course around photovoice, describing in particular how the unique context of the school informed her objectives. following this description, all major components of the curriculum, insofar as the photovoice project was concerned, are presented. students then reflect on which particular in-class and out-of-class experiences most significantly influenced them and their engagement in cp, as well as their empowerment immediately after the project ended, and several years later. we conclude with a discussion of some encouraging implications and lessons learned for instructors at similar campuses who might want to use photovoice as a pedagogical tool in the cp classroom. the photovoice method historically and at present the photovoice method has been used in many communities and contexts around the globe since its development by public health researchers caroline wang and mary anne burris in 1994. wang and burris turned to photovoice (initially described as photo novella) when they recognized that conventional research methods would not be the most effective tools for engaging village women in the yunnan province of china in a systematic analysis of reproductive health concerns in their communities, or in related social change processes. wang and burris (1994, 1997) described that when doing http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 community-based and participatory research with communities comprised of multiple languages, identities, positionalities, and, accordingly, varying levels of familiarity with the written word, different kinds of epistemological methods were required. in their initial writings about this method, wang and burris described photovoice as involving several basic steps, such as training community members in photographic techniques, engaging in group dialogue and discussion about the photos participants take and shared experiences represented therein, and communicating findings to policymakers. they noted that through this process, women also experienced one element of empowerment, specifically, “access to decisions.” through their photos and captions, their voices were heard by policymakers and informed policies affecting their communities. since this time, researchers and practitioners in other fields, and working with diverse communities throughout the world have also turned to photovoice as a means for knowledge generation and dissemination within and across groups. these projects are numerous and varied, including the work by umurungi, mitchell, gervais, ubalijoro, & kabarenzi (2014), which focused on centering the voices of teenage girls who live on the streets of rwanda regarding their perspectives of safety and security vis-à-vis sexually-transmitted diseases, or research by true, rigg & butler (2015), which included veterans in the u.s. as coresearchers and highlighted their experiences (and specifically, barriers to) accessing mental health treatment. common across these studies is a commitment to using photography generated by participants as a means for engaging vulnerable communities in an analysis of their social conditions, and for thinking through what resources might be needed to improve the well-being for such communities. however, these studies, and the myriad others that have been conducted in the last few decades, vary with respect to the degree to which participation and engagement of community members were emphasized, the specific photovoice processes that were implemented, and the outcomes that were prioritized (catalani & minkler, 2010). accordingly, catalani and minker (2010) undertook a review of 37 photovoice studies to identify shared processes within them, and how variation with respect to group participation in particular, appeared to influence participant and community outcomes. notably, they found that studies that included less group dialogue and analysis among participants yielded less active participation throughout the process. they also concluded that “engaging participants in critical dialogue had a double yield: producing valuable research data in the form of discussion of transcripts and serving as an empowerment intervention that had immediate benefits for research participants and their communities (catalani & minkler, 2010, p. 443).” these benefits included participants developing some critical consciousness around the issues they were investigating, and, as documented within some of the studies they reviewed, an increased sense of self-efficacy regarding facilitating social change in one’s community. although only few of the studies they reviewed described empowerment outcomes among participants (e.g., foster-fishman et al., 2005), other important outcomes were mentioned, including enhanced community engagement in action and advocacy (or the potential for it), and improved understanding of community needs and assets. however, as catalini and minkler (2010) also noted, many of the studies were limited by not including evaluation of these potential positive impacts; they were described by study authors as likely to occur but not formally assessed. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 despite some variation in processes and outcomes, catalani and minkler found that the majority of studies involved the same elements of photovoice described by wang and burris (1994, 1997): photography training, research and documentation (e.g., photographing realities), and photo-elicited discussion. additionally, the photo-elicited discussions in the majority of studies they reviewed were guided by some version of showed method, popularized by wang and burris’s research (1994, 1997). after being trained in photography, taking photos, and selecting photos that were most meaningful to them, community members asked these questions of one another’s work: 1. what do you see here?; 2. what is really happening here?; 3. how does this relate to our lives?; 4. why does this problem, concern, or strength exist?; and 5. what can we do about it? their review closes with a suggestion that future researchers continue to capitalize on the flexibility of the method so that it can continue to be used in a variety of settings and with a variety of communities, while taking participants’ needs, concerns, and availability into consideration. they also suggest that researchers and practitioners put more effort into documenting shortand long-term impacts of photovoice on participants and communities. photovoice in the classroom catalani and minkler (2010) also documented that colleges are one setting in which photovoice has been used more frequently. it has been found to be a particularly effective method for engaging undergraduate students in the classroom because of its emphasis on experiential learning experiences; interrogating and addressing social problems that may especially impact students from diverse racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, disability/ability, and linguistic backgrounds; and, as well, because of its influence on critical thinking and problem solving skills (foster-fishman et al., 2015; latz, phelpsward, royer, & peters, 2015; lichty, 2013). photovoice has also been found to be an effective tool for facilitating more active participation and engagement within a classroom because it prioritizes the coconstruction of knowledge, rather than a “banking model” of education that assumes the instructor’s role is simply to impart knowledge onto students (freire, 1970; lichty 2013). this aspect of photovoice has also made it particularly suited to the cp classroom, where more participatory learning approaches are also emphasized (lichty, 2013) photovoice has also been found to be a meaningful way to facilitate applied learning experiences and community connections on college campuses where community belonging might be particularly low for students (latz et al., 2015). this is because it has the potential to enhance participants’ feelings of concerns for one another and for the settings in which such projects take place (foster-fishman et al., 2005). photovoice projects also may enhance participants feelings of self-efficacy in regard to improving their environments, including college campuses (latz et al., 2015; seitz, strack, rice, moore, duvall, & wyrick, 2017). through photovoice, students can investigate issues that they identify on their campus or in a community-based setting that they may be connected to, which may, in turn make them more motivated to try and press for change within these contexts (seitz et al., 2017). finally, because of its emphasis on shared dialogue and analysis, photovoice may also promote collective learning and reflection in a way that standard classroom lessons might not. moreover, with photovoice students felt that their voices, collectively, were heard and well received by the community. in one http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 example, an undergraduate classroom at a university utilized photovoice to advocate for change in a smoking policy (seitz, et al., 2017). through photography training sessions, photo discussion and utilizing the showed method, students were able to come to shared conclusions about why it was important for administrators to make changes on their campus. they found that there were aesthetic concerns, as well as health concerns for students related to second hand smoke and smokeless tobacco use, that they believed were imperative to address in order to promote well-being among their peers (seitz et al., 2017). they utilized these themes to put together an exhibit and address the stakeholders in their community, including administrators and their fellow students. they were eventually able to get some policies on campus to change such as moving ashtrays away from common grounds. students reported that they felt good about their learning experience in this public health class overall, and specifically about their abilities to effect change on their campus as a result (seitz et al., 2017). however, student outcomes from being engaged in this project (e.g., empowerment), were not systematically assessed. photovoice was also utilized as a participatory research process and pedagogical activity that joined graduate students from one institution with community college students from a nearby institution (latz et al., 2015). the goals of the project were to better understand community college students’ lived experiences prior to enrolling at their colleges, and while interacting with campus agents (staff, administration, and faculty), and to help graduate students learn the photovoice method. additionally, the researchers hoped that the graduate students specifically would come to recognize the diversity in community college students’ experiences (that all community college students are not the same), and that information from the project could be generated that would enhance community college students’ experiences on their campus. community college student researchers were, indeed, able to share their experiences and perspectives about poverty, financial literacy, and relations with faculty, staff, and administrators. they worked with the graduate students to communicate their good and bad experiences with campus personnel, and specifically, that they felt that their voices were not always heard by the individuals on campus who they sought support from (e.g. faculty). poverty narratives differed between various students in the project. some were very personal and others focused more on discussions of poverty in the community. at the conclusion of the project, an exhibition was put on, which many community members attended. the exhibition reportedly educated faculty, administrators, and staff about challenges their students faced and how to address them. graduate students also reflected on the process when it was over and described feeling that the project was an effective way for them (and their coresearchers) to understand photovoice methodology and, simultaneously, to deepen their understanding of community college students’ lives. research context: bringing photovoice to the university of washington tacoma for many of the reasons described above, i, rachel, decided to center the community psychology, research, and action course i taught at uwt in spring 2016 around learning and implementing the photovoice method. in particular, i believed some of the key assets of the method, including its usefulness for connecting individuals from different racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and language backgrounds together to investigate social issues of importance to them, as well as its focus on the co-construction of knowledge, would complement our campus and student http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 body (wang & burris, 1994; lichty, 2013; lykes & hershberg, 2012). uwt is one of three schools in the university of washington system. the school was primarily developed to serve students from tacoma and the south sound region. as such, students are from a range of sociodemographic backgrounds: 59% are the first generation in their family to attend college, and of the 5,375 students who enrolled for 2018-19, 42% identified as caucasian, 21% as asian american, 14% as hispanic/latinx, 12% as african american, 5% as international, 2% as hawaiian/pacific islander, and 2% as native american (2% did not specify). over 10% of students are veterans. in addition, our campus is one of 37 universities that is part of the coalition of urban serving universities coalition (cusu) (see cusu, 2018). this means the school has a mission of achieving transformative change through various initiatives, such as “providing opportunities for every student to succeed,” including students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and nontraditional college students (uwt, 2018). additionally, the school aims to serve the larger community in which it is based through fostering campus-community partnerships. with these aspects of the school’s mission in mind, i had initially hoped to facilitate photovoice projects with uwt students and several partner organizations in the city of tacoma. however, time limitations (i.e., quarters are only 12 weeks long), as well as the limitation of me being a relatively new assistant professor, with few established community connections to leverage, prevented me from doing this. however, it was also because of my positionality that a friendly colleague informed me that our campus was engaging in the process of developing a 5-year strategic plan that would help the school stay on track regarding putting the values of the usuc into practice. the faculty and administrators who were leading the development of the plan were seeking input from students on campus as well; my colleague suggested i chat with the faculty member in charge of the process to see if there could be any connections between it and my course. if not for my privileged position as a relatively new assistant professor, i may not have been made privy to this important process, or willing to reach out to colleagues who were leading it. i thus began the quarter with the goal of facilitating a photovoice project for students that we could eventually connect back to the strategic planning process, as part of the objective of enabling students to share the work they would produce with decision-makers on campus. this was one of four objectives that guided my use of photovoice in the community psychology classroom, as described below in more detail. classroom context and participants as mentioned above, the community psychology, research and action class was the first community psychology class ever offered at uwt. sometimes, new courses are avoided by students, so i was particularly pleased when 25 students enrolled in the course. out of the 25 students, 21 were psychology majors, and all but one were juniors and seniors. seventeen students (68%) identified as white, and eight (32%) identified as students of color. among the students of color in the class, three identified as black or african american, two identified as native american, one identified as arabamerican, one as indian-afghan, and another identified as puerto rican. sixteen (68%) students identified as female, and eight (32%) students identified as male. one (0.04%) student identified as gender neutral. twentyfour students identified as heterosexual, and one female student identified as gay. students were twenty-four years of age on average. eight (32%) students identified as parents. thirteen students (52%) identified as firsthttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 generation college students. compared to our university’s demographics, there were more females, white students, and fewer firstgeneration college students in our class. the description of the course, which students had access to before enrolling was: introduces community psychology, a field examining the interrelationship between individual wellbeing and the multiple social systems with which individuals interact. covers the principles and approaches of community psychology, including attention to diversity and equity; social change; and communitybased, participatory, and action research methods. learning objectives and anticipated outcomes with the characteristics of uwt and our class in mind, as well as the previous literature, i developed several learning objectives that guided my use of photovoice in the classroom. as noted in the course description above, one goal of the course was to help students learn about the field of cp in general, and guiding values more specifically (e.g., respect for diversity, caring and compassion, collaboration and participation, nelson & prilleltensky, 2010). i believed that facilitating a photovoice project wherein students would the coresearchers/participants would be an effective way to achieve this goal for two primary reasons (lichty, 2013). first, participatory approaches like photovoice are, in and of themselves, core to practicing cp. engaging in them highlights that knowledge is subjective and co-constructed and that minoritized individuals are well-poised to investigate and document their realities in partnership with researchers and practitioners who may or may not be from their communities (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010; lichty, 2013). cp as a field is committed to these tenets (e.g., nelson & prilleltensky, 2010). second, successfully implementing a participatory research project requires not only learning about but enacting cp values (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010). as noted above, for example, photovoice projects that do not include consistent group participation have been found to be less likely to promote positive outcomes among participants (catalani & minkler, 2010). moreover, one of the strengths of photovoice is that individuals from diverse backgrounds, and especially individuals who are from different minoritized communities, can come together and reflect on shared concerns and challenges and work to collectively redress these challenges (foster-fishman et al., 2005; latz et al., 2015; lykes & hershberg, 2012). a second key objective was for students in this course to gain familiarity with and practice photovoice as a systematic and analytical research method within psychology and related fields. through practicing the method, my hope was that students would eventually add it to their toolbox of research methods for use in their future careers or studies. i myself gained familiarity with the method from being a participant in a photovoice project as part of an advanced research training seminar for community psychologists in south africa facilitated by expert photovoice practitioners shanaaz suffla and umesh bawa (e.g., seedat, suffla & bawa, 2015. it seemed that “learning this method through doing it” could also be an effective pedagogical approach to use with undergraduates in the community psychology classroom (lichty, 2013). a third learning objective i had was for students to experience a greater sense of community through being a part of this classwide project. as defined by mcmillan and chavez (1986), sense of community is “a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together (p. 9).” i was specifically hopeful that students would http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 develop a greater sense of belonging or relatedness through engaging together in a project about their experiences of uwt (mcmillan & chavez, 1986). this objective was important to me because in previous courses, i had heard that some students felt very disconnected from campus, in part because many commuted from far away and did not spend much time on campus aside from going to and from their classes. additionally, many students had families and jobs outside of campus that reportedly prevented them from going to on-campus events that might facilitate bonding with other students and even their instructors. feelings of disconnection and isolation at campuses like uwt, which aim to serve a significant number of nontraditional students who had more of an indirect path to and through college, and have other competing commitments, as well as traditionally-aged students who are fresh out of high school and may seek more of a residential college experience, has been documented (bensimon, 2007). however, examples in the literature of college campuses where students from these different backgrounds forge relationships and connections to one another, are scarce. thus, through engaging in this project, i hoped students in this class, who also represent some of these varying identities, would feel more connected to their peers, the classroom, and the campus at large. furthermore, i hoped this project would at least offer some ideas for how sense of community might be enhanced in classrooms and colleges like uwt. finally, a fourth learning objective was for students to experience some degree of empowerment through investigating some aspect of their college experience vis-à-vis the strategic plan, and hopefully, sharing their research with policymakers on campus. through doing this, i also hoped students would feel a greater sense of self-efficacy in regard to affecting change on their college campuses, and perhaps, in their communities more broadly (catalini & minkler, 2010; foster-fishman et al., 2005). greater empowerment has been found to be associated with a number of health and wellbeing outcomes in youth and adults (ballard & ozer, 2016). however, when the course began, i was not exactly sure what opportunities would be available for students to present their work to stakeholders on campus. thus, this was a learning objective i had in mind, but was not as formative in my planning process until the end of the quarter, once students had successfully completed their photovoice project. methods photovoice curriculum and assignments throughout the quarter, i included multiple assignments and activities that corresponded to each of the learning objectives described above. in table 1, components and corresponding learning objectives are listed. also listed are some additional activities i facilitated with the goal of trying to continue to foster empowerment processes for students, particularly regarding their abilities to effect change on campus and in their communities and society. (objective 4) (foster-fishman et al., 2005). here, i speak broadly about how i aimed to achieve these objectives. student authors then individually reflect on the course components that each found particularly meaningful and connect them back to these objectives, in their own words. we then collectively discuss majors impacts of the photovoice process, and as well, challenges or limitations in regard to achieving each objective within the context of our classroom and campus. here, we bring in the literature described above. we close with lessons learned for future instructors and photovoice participants to consider. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 table 1. photovoice activities and corresponding learning objectives activity objective (1) learning about cp and cp values (2) practice photovoice, add method to toolbox (3) develop greater sense of community (4) experience empowerment and greater self-efficacy introductory presentation about photovoice. x x photography training by expert photographer. x guest lecturer-photovoice in nursing sciences. x class assignmentempirical studies reviewed, cp values identified. x x small-group and class-wide discussions about topics. x x x photographs taken and three are sent to instructor with captions. x class goes through showed method in small groups. x x x class discusses withinand acrossgroup themes. x x x five volunteers and work together to develop posters based on each theme x x coauthor present at strategic planning meeting. x x students have option of conducting additional photovoice projects for final. nine students do this and present work to class. x coatuhors present photovoice at uwt undergraduate research symposium. x x photovoice posters are hung in library throught summer. x coauthors present photovoice at community research and action in the west. x x x as depicted in table 1, throughout the quarter i designed activities and assignments that i hoped would enable students to see how photovoice, as a participatory research method, also reflected the values of cp. i also wanted students to recognize that engaging in a photovoice project, even within the confines of an undergraduate classroom, required enacting some of the values of cp. between weeks 1 and 2, i helped students make these connections by giving a presentation on the photovoice method historically and its main http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 components, while also assigning chapters 13 in nelson and prilleltensky’s (2010) community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and wellbeing, which introduces readers to the field of cp and overarching principles and values. i also had students complete the assignment of reading the flint photovoice project facilitated by caroline wang and colleagues (2004), and identifying how values came up in the project. the post they had to respond to was as follows: read the article attached to this module about the flint photovoice project. as you read this article, think back to our discussion on monday, april 4 about values in community psychology and identify a least one value from our discussion (or from the ppt posted for april 4) that seems to be emphasized in this project. in your discussion post, describe the value you identified and note how it comes through in the flint project (or, in other words, note an aspect of the project that reflects this value). also identify a vale that you hope is emphasized in our class-wide photovoice project. as the quarter continued, i repeatedly reminded students of the main cp values we had read about throughout the quarter. these also come up throughout the textbook, which helped to reinforce students’ learning about them. i described these again as an entree into their engagement in the showed method of analysis in small groups (during week 5). during one group meeting, it also came to the fore that there were disagreements about which photos to use in the next iteration of the project. one student was attached to her photos while members of her group believed that at least one of her photos was not relevant to the class project. when the class came back together, i reminded them of the flexibility in the method, and that individual as well as collective interpretations were essential aspects of the group analysis process. as described below by wilkinson, these discussions reportedly helped this small-group leverage values of participation and collaboration, and respective for diversity, as they tried to resolve their disagreement. in addition to helping students learn and practice cp principles and values, i had hoped this project would enable students to learn how to do photovoice and view it as a systematic and analytical method that could be used in the college classroom and beyond. almost all class components involved some element of learning about photovoice and how to do it. these included having students read empirical articles about the method, giving lectures on photovoice, and inviting a guest lecturer to the class who had used the photovoice method in his participatory and action research with latina mothers of children with asthma (see postma, evansagnew, & capouya, 2015 for more information). this instructor graciously presented about this work and allowed students to ask him questions about challenges and limitations he and his coresearchers experienced during the process. additionally, to help students learn how to do photovoice, the class involved all major components of the photovoice method described in previous literature, including photography training sessions, topic selection, taking photos, smalland largegroup analysis and discussion of photos, and presenting research findings to decisionmakers. importantly, as part of this process, students were also exposed to qualitative research practices more generally, and learned about what themes were, and how to identify themes as salient in a project (we talked about description of salient themes as themes that were recurrent and highly relevant to research questions, drawing from buetow, 2010). a final component of the class aimed at helping students learn how to do photovoice (aside from students actually engaging in the class-wide photovoice project throughout the course) was that, for their culminating class project, they could choose to do a more conventional research paper http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 about a social issues of importance to them and the field of cp, or conduct their own photovoice projects in small groups and write up a report. nine students (across four small groups) decided to do this for their final projects (including five of the coauthors). through engaging in these projects as facilitators, students had the opportunity to enhance and demonstrate their familiarity and knowledge of photovoice as a systematic analytical method. through multiple experiential opportunities, i believed this method would become a future resource for students. to address the third objective of enhancing students’ sense of community, we engaged in smalland large-group discussions as part of the photovoice process throughout the quarter. these discussions included conversations about what questions should guide students’ photography; their smallgroup and large-group showed analyses; and even on-line discussions wherein students discussed their reviews of photovoice articles, as well as different concepts in cp. when meeting in person, students met in the same groups they engaged in on-line. through staying in the same groups throughout the quarter, i hoped students would develop additional friendships and ties to one another, and see the value in having different perspectives that could be respectfully engaged in a photovoice project (foster-fishman et al., 2005). i also sought to foster these ties for students through bringing students to a regional community psychology conference or portland state university in october 2016 (community research and action in the west).through the community psychology conference, and presenting their research to community psychologists as well as students in community psychology programs, i also hoped students would feel more confident about their developing research skills, and as well, about their competencies as change agents in their school. importantly, this experience built on their culminating presentation to the strategic planning committee in may of 2016. i had the opportunity to facilitate this presentation for students due to previously-established ties, as mentioned above. nevertheless, students’ presentation to this committee appeared to have a significant impact on students, and on the project at large, as described below. student reflections on “strengths and challenges of being a uwt student”a photovoice project implemented within an undergraduate cp classroom in this next section, we, halimatue hill, olivia andringa, sarah wilkinson, becca smith, katie camm, and josh little describe what each of us consider to be the most impactful aspects of the photovoice project on our learning and development. we also share some reflections about which particular outcomes we believe these project components influenced in us. for ease of reading, the title of each subsection includes the name of the coauthor whose reflections are being presented. halimatu’s perspective: learning about and experiencing cp values and empowerment processes through presentations and studentled research there were two aspects of this class and project that impacted my understanding of photovoice as an important, accessible, and potentially empowering research method. these aspects of the class also helped me appreciate the cp values and principles we read about throughout the course. the first was the visit from a professor from the school of nursing at uwt. the professor came to our class and presented on his project with latina mothers of children with asthma. he also allowed for us to ask questions about his work and photovoice more generally. from his presentation in particular, i grasped how the photovoice method can create a platform http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 for addressing social issues among participants from different backgrounds, and how it can be used to effect change in the community. the professor, an expert on asthma, was a white male, for example, while the coresearchers in the project were mexican mothers. the professor addressed these dynamics and also spoke of challenges that arose during the project, including language barriers (he admitted to knowing very little spanish while all the mothers were primarily spanish speakers). he also talked about how challenges themselves enriched the process through honest discussions and reflections. in addition, he addressed the importance of ethics surrounding such a project with a primary concern being not interjecting the researcher’s “voice” into the project but allowing the women to express themselves. he also elaborated that the actual process involved more than just taking pictures. it also included getting funding, meetings, challenges, training as well as the analysis of the photos taken by the latina mothers. from his presentation, the many steps involved in doing photovoice well were evident, as were the important role that cp values, such as collaboration and respective for diversity, played in the process. the potential for photovoice to also be an empowering process was also clear from his presentation as he described how the mothers on the project have since gone on to educate others about asthma triggers in the environment. i additionally experienced photovoice as empowering when dr. hershberg gave the class the opportunity to decide together what we would investigate, rather than dictating it for us. dr. hershberg mentioned that the school was working on rebranding itself and that she thought it would be great if our project could contribute to this discussion. however, she left it up to us to decide what topics we thought were important to investigate related to our campus community. through small-group and large-group discussion our class of 25 students eventually agreed on three main topics that would guide the project: challenges to building community, challenges and strengths of being a uwt student, and uniting communities. we agreed that these topics were similar enough to ensure that we could eventually put together one cohesive project, but broad enough so that students’ different interests and concerns were accounted for. we also agreed to revise the title of our project at the end of the quarter to ensure it more directly reflected our final product (at the conclusion of our project, we agreed to move forward with one of the initial topics as our title: “strengths and challenges of being a uwt student”). olivia’s perspective: developing community through photography and group discussion out of all of the photovoice steps we engaged in, i found the photography aspect itself, and our initial small-group discussion about our photos, to be the most meaningful aspects. when i set out to photograph our campus with the guiding topics in mind, i felt that i was viewing our campus with a new and critical lens. i also felt that this lens was providing another form of a voice for me to have on our campus. this was particularly meaningful for me as i often am reluctant to voice my views publicly. when students came together to discuss the photos they took and their interpretations of them, this also allowed me to feel that my views were shared and validated, and to recognize similarities and differences among the students in our class. after our group discussion, it was interesting for the class to take a step back and see the campus from a new perspective one that was collectively developed. additionally, through developing these new views of our school based on individual as well as shared experiences and interpretations, i realized that our campus offers a lot of positive opportunities (see poster 1 in appendix b), but also presents http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 some emotional barriers for students such as loneliness and a lack of community. using the photovoice method helped us to learn more about one another’s experiences and views, to better understand our campus, and to feel more connected to one another. sarah’s perspective: learning photovoice and enacting cp values through the showed method as described above, an important part of this project was also systematically going through the showed method in small groups. i found this process to be very positive and validating for me as a student. it also forced us to use the cp values we had been reading and writing about throughout the class. i will describe this experience here; it is also depicted below (see figure 1). figure 1. small-group analysis using showed method when going through showed method using one of my own photos (see figure 2), i explained what i saw when i was taking the photo and what i wanted other people to see, which was that students at uwt feel disconnected from one another. the picture i took clearly shows multiple people sitting on the stairs alone, lost in their phones, completely unaware of each other. figure 2. photovoice image “the distance between all of us” when you look at these people, do they seem close to one another? technology and social media have been huge factors in why people are so disconnected, even with people sitting right beside them. during our group discussion, my peers brought to my attention how impactful my photo was. not only was i able to capture disconnection and loneliness from the individuals in my photo, but the lighting and the layering of the stairs in the picture were apparently able to depict that as well. this was something that i hadn’t even realized when choosing this photo. their recognition of these additional elements of the photo enhanced my confidence in my abilities as a photovoice researcher and helped me to see that my peers also felt kind of isolated and disconnected from one another, even those who did not have multiple children and jobs outside of work like i had. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 as part of the showed process, dr. hershberg also instructed each small group to select the five photos that best reflected our shared experiences and concerns as related to our guiding topics (e.g., challenges to building community, challenges and strengths of being a uwt student, and uniting communities). this was hard because many of the photos were so interesting and different from one another. through some tense discussion, my group agreed that we would alter a caption of a photo (see figure 3) that one student developed so that it included some of the ideas from another caption accompanying another photo that ultimately was not selected as part of our final five photos. we agreed to do this so that all students in our group would have some aspect of their photovoice work (i.e., their pictures or the captions they created) included in the larger project. the end result was a meaningful photo with an equally meaningful caption that reflected multiple voices from our group. this experience offered us the opportunity to witness the importance of prioritizing respect for diversity when using the photovoice method, as well as caring and compassion, values that are also essential to the practice of cp. figure 3. combined caption and photo from small-group analysis in tacoma, the military is an important presence. in the military, as is in the university of washington community group, the lgbt community is a faction that is struggling for legitimacy. relatively speaking, the short journey of embarking on a college education can be painful, arduous, and for the most part, improbable for the vast majority of young lgbt youth. despite being one of the most lgbt friendly cities in washington, newcomers to this area still have trouble assimilating and getting equality, recognition, and consequently, employment outside of college because of their sexuality. even if they have served in the military their service may be undermined by discrimination they face for their sexual orientation. every life matters and should be celebrated instead of marginalized on campus and in the larger communities of which uwt students are a part. katie’s perspective: developing community through group dialogue and dissemination i found that our class-wide discussions, though difficult at times, were when we as a class really developed stronger relationships with one another. however, as with any close relationship, this process required some conflict resolution. specifically, once our small groups had finished discussing their photos, we came together as a class to discuss what themes were most salient across groups. as we began the conversation, we found that some topics were easily agreed upon, such as the issues of limited parking on campus, or the lack of social and community spaces for to use. other topics seemed to provoke more dissension than agreement, such as what it meant to be a uwt student and how much of an impact uwt students have on the tacoma and south sound communities. at times, there was a palpable awkward tension, such as when people disagreed with one another about what themes were salient across groups. here, dr. hershberg acted as a facilitator, asking questions to help us move from thinking about individual impressions of photos, to collective views that also may reflect experiences of other uwt students. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 at one point, we discussed how multiple individuals took the same picture of the w, which is our school symbol in our courtyard area, which suggested something significant about the symbol of the w on our campus. however, each person had different interpretations of what the w meant to them. as a class, we agreed to keep all three of the images of the w in the project because each picture evoked powerful, but different experiences such as loneliness, lack of school pride, and students’ feelings that although uwt was perceived as an important asset to tacoma, it was not recognized as valuable to the wider uw community. figure 4. photovoice image “the w” what has brought us all together is a common decision to attend uwt. we are told we are huskies but it doesn’t feel this way. our w does not really give us a sense of belonging to the entity. i have felt like my degree is less than seattle’s campus because we have a signifier. we also do not get similar perks and are limited in many aspects, such as the graduation debacle that has happened recently. punishing people with larger families by only affording 5 tickets. we spent money on a metal w to be on our campus, but we cannot afford to have a larger venue? i am a husky, i deserve to have all of the rights afforded that amazing signifier. we also noticed an overwhelming number of pictures that depicted the problems related to parking around campus (e.g., limited spaces, too expensive). as a group, we came to a decision to leave some of these repeated images in our project to give more power to those specific concerns. by engaging in a class-wide discussion that was facilitated by a community psychologist like dr. hershberg, it seemed we were about to create a stronger sense of cohesion and community in the class, while also recognizing the diversity of our group. i also felt a strong sense of community through this project when i had the chance to present our research to the university’s strategic planning committee at the end of spring quarter (depicted in figure 5). during the discussion with the administration, we displayed our posters on the walls of the meeting space, and went through our method and our five overarching themes: (potential) strengths of uwt, disconnection from uwt, parking as a barrier to academic engagement, lack of community space, and isolation and loneliness. there was one poster dedicated to illustrating each theme (see appendix b). figure 5. photo from presentation to strategic planning committee during this presentation, i was pleased to see so many administrators and faculty attending to what we were saying. furthermore, after the presentation, administrators approached us to ask clarifying questions about our research and discuss solutions to the challenges we had presented. following the colloquium, the strategic planning committee http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 also emailed the group a response stating that our presentation was one of the most vivid and moving moments in the past ten months of the committee’s work and that the presentation “brought data they had collected previously and separately, to life.” parking, for example, had been identified as a significant student barrier to academic success. they said that our presentation had made this issue a more tangible reality. they spoke about continuing to make student engagement a high priority in response to the isolation that students were feeling as well. the committee wanted to make sure that students continued being engaged, so that they were more likely to graduate and live a fulfilled life. that administrators attended to our research during the presentation, and followed up with us after, made me feel like they actually cared about us students, and took us seriously as budding researchers. through this experience, i also felt more connected to and invested in uwt. becca’s perspective: gaining confidence in photovoice and my research skills through presenting at conferences one of the most impactful experiences that i had with photovoice was presenting to our fellow students and professors at the uwt undergraduate symposium. the presentation was very well received. students who we spoke with agreed that many of these topics were issues on campus. they hoped this project would help the administration see what could be improved. many of the professors who i interacted with said that these were problems that they also dealt with, especially in regard to parking on campus. they engaged me in conversations about how this method could be used within their classrooms and across campus, and what we might be able to do as a group to include quantitative data collection in this process in the future. this enhanced my confidence in the photovoice method and its ability to accurately capture individual and collective experiences. it was helpful to understand the profound impact that these issues had on other students and faculty at uwt. having conversations about our research and the future possibilities for photovoice in other communities was an enriching experience that has continued to influence me. i am currently utilizing photovoice and the showed method within my research at uwt in the urban studies field. i feel confident that this method is a great way to address stakeholders and to work toward needed changes in one’s community. joshua’s perspective: experiencing empowerment throughout the photovoice process similar to katie and becca, i too was significantly and positively impacted by having the opportunity to co-present our research to administrators and faculty on the strategic planning committee in may 2016, and in other forms, including the community psychology conference we attended in october 2016. however, i first began to feel a sense of empowerment through the photovoice project when walking around the campus early in the quarter, looking for a photograph to capture. it was when i saw the abandoned building, and had the idea of how that building represented myself as a black man in our society, in my community, and as a student. as seen in figure 7 you have this old abandoned building with broken windows and deteriorating paint that is scheduled to be remodeled. right next to this abandoned building are buildings that the university had remodeled, so the building in the photograph sticks out on campus and doesn’t look like it belongs. sticking out and not belonging is what i have felt and have been implicitly and explicitly told my whole life. but that is only the surface, the first thoughts one has when they see this building, and therefore, when they see me. at second look, and under the layers, a full story worth knowing can be told. making these http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 connections between the building on campus and my own experiences reminded me that my story is unique, worth being told, and like this building, not finished. figure 6. photovoice image “abandoned building on campus” when you look at me what do you see? am i casted off as being worthless? do i give your eyes strain and make you want to turn away? or maybe its… let me tell you what i see when i look at me. i see the potential of what i can be. a structure that has weathered many storms and still stands. having the opportunity to talk about this photo, and the caption i included with it was a powerful experience for me and reinforced some of the ideas i had when first taking the photo. additionally, the opportunity to present the project and talk openly about this photo and my analysis to administrators and faculty inspired self-confidence in me. having the chance to contribute to the discussion on changes to come in the university’s trajectory made me feel like i could make a difference on our campus. furthermore, standing in front of the committee members, who are were all various chancellors and deans of different programs and departments, allowed me, a young black male, to share thoughts and feelings with people i would have otherwise never come in contact with. seeing the way they all were focused on what i had to say, and hearing their positive feedback, made me feel like what i had to say mattered. this experience, and the conference in portland, also made me realize that i might have a talent for public speaking. since graduating from the university of washington tacoma in spring 2016, i have been involved in several other public speaking opportunities. one of these opportunities was facilitating a washington state youth leadership training at green hill school, a maximum juvenile rehabilitation facility. in doing this training, i shared my experience with photovoice and presenting it to the strategic planning committee with 24 youth, incarcerated at green hill, who attended the training. the purpose of me sharing the story was to inspire these youths that someone like them can have a voice. in conclusion, the opportunity to speak about concerns and strengths i saw within the campus, to an audience of powerful but seemingly committed authority figures, gave me a sense of accomplishment that did not exist in any of my other college courses. what started off as just another course towards my bachelor’s degree turned into something more. it set the mental foundation that i could not only bring awareness to issues, but also conduct myself as a leader and articulate those issues to people in power to create change. i have come to recognize that these empowering experiences have been vital in my career and personal development ever since. discussion of findings and implications for instructors photovoice as a research method that is becoming increasingly popular in cp also holds promise for revolutionizing the college classroom, and the psychology classroom in particular (lichty, 2013). as presented here, hershberg experimented with focusing her cp class on the development and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 implementation of a photovoice project by students, and it seems to have yielded several important outcomes, in relation to both students’ learning about the field of cp and participatory research methods, and their development as students and people in the world. we discuss these outcomes in regard to the literature reviewed above, and identify some lessons learned for future instructors to consider as they too begin experimenting with photovoice as a pedagogical tool in the undergraduate classroom. one of the great insights from student reflections was that by engaging in the photovoice process from start to finish, they experienced some of the tensions that come up in participatory research projects more generally (such as how to ensure equal participation among participants is promoted throughout the process, and shared decisionmaking, e.g., lykes & herhsberg, 2012). to address these challenges, students also then had to directly engage with some of the cp values they were introduced to throughout the quarternamely collaboration and participation as well as respect for diversity. by refocusing their concerns on the goals of respective for diversity (i.e., respect and appreciation for diverse social identities and perspectives) and collaboration (i.e., seeking and honoring input from all participants), students were able to respectfully come to some agreement about which photos and themes to select for the photovoice posters, both in small and large groups (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010). these experiential components of the photovoice process were able to “bring to life” the course content (lichty, 2013, p. 96) in meaningful ways for students that appeared to stick with them long after the process ended. one lesson learned from student reflections in this area is that instructors should be open from the beginning of a course about how challenges will come up when engaging students in a participatory research process. dr. hershberg was upfront about this, which helped the group productively address concerns as they arose…rather than letting them simmer or boil over. additionally, placing an emphasis on values and principles regarding engaging in participatory researchthroughout the duration of a coursecan make such values and principles a resource for students as they embark on resolving conflicts within their group processes. as dr. hershberg noted, learning about and enacting cp values was, indeed, a goal of this course, and one that seemed to be achieved. another important insight was that students seemed to really come to understand what a rigorous photovoice process entailed (learning objective 2). they successfully articulated this process in multiple forums, and having the opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge in these ways also seemed to make students more confident about their research skills (as joshua noted, such experiences “inspired self-confidence” in him). however, when reflecting on the most impactful aspects of the course, students did not reference their final photovoice projects, even though five of the six student coauthors engaged in these projects. it is possible that this last element of the course did not help students crystallize the components of the research method in the way that hershberg had imagined it would. the guest lecturer’s presentation about his photovoice work, for example, appeared to make more of an impact on students’ learning about the method. it’s possible that assigning final photovoice projects at the end of a course may not be necessary for helping students learn about photovoice as a systematic and analytical method…but perhaps presenting students with different examples of photovoice projects, across disciplines, and engaging in multimodal techniques to present such information (e.g., empirical article reviews, guest visits) is. additional course objectives that also appeared in students’ reflections on their http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 photovoice experiences related to enhancing their sense of community in the classroom and on campus. previous research has also identified that these are some of the ways in which photovoice projects can benefit the participants, particularly on college campuses (foster-fishman et al., 2005; latz et al., 2015). in regard to developing a sense of community, olivia and sarah described that opportunities for group analysis and discussion of their photos with one another enabled them to see some of the ways in which they were similar to their peers, but also different from them. the majority of students in the class agreed, for example, that one of the challenges of being a uwt student relates to parking expenses. they also agreed that parking expenses conflict with uwt’s value of providing access to students from lower-income backgrounds. other students identified the challenge of achieving balance in one’s life regarding being a full-time parent and student. although, as olivia noted, not all students had to deal with this latter challenge, knowing that their peers did, however, reportedly made them feel like they had a better understanding of their peers and their student body overall. it also helped them to understand why students seemed to feel so disconnected from one another. in this way, it appeared that the showed method of analysis was also a mechanism through which students came to better understand and value diversity within their classroom and on their campus more broadly (foster-fishman et al., 2005). this suggests that the photovoice method may be particularly effective in classrooms and universities that specifically recruit students from an array of socio-demographic backgrounds, and as well, with very different life experiences. urban-serving universities in particular aim to attract and support both traditional college students who begin their college experiences right after graduating from high school, and nontraditional students, who often include students who transferred from community colleges as well as working parents. the photovoice method may be particularly useful for helping these members of a student body develop a greater sense of connection and community to one another, outcomes that are also believed to be essential for academic success (bensimon, 2007; latz et al., 2015). finally, an additional outcome that student coauthors reflected on was their empowerment experiences throughout the project. halimatu mentioned that even when initially learning about another example of photovoice, wherein latina mothers of children with asthma eventually became health advocates in their communities, she saw the potential for photovoice to empower participants from diverse racial/ethnic, economic, and linguistic backgrounds. joshua especially spoke to these outcomes when reflecting on his own experiences of the project. he highlighted that having the opportunity to capture his perspective about his experiences as a student (though photography), and to then present it to powerful players on our campus who listened to and appeared to value his views, made him feel like his perspective and knowledge mattered. these feelings were reinforced for joshua and all other student coauthors when they received positive feedback and even words of thanks from administrators on campus regarding their photovoice work. joshua was also able to draw on this experience two years after the photovoice project ended in his current work as a case worker to young men in juvenile detention, with the aim of inspiring them and helping them recognize that they too have a voice and can affect change in their communities. one important take-away message is that administrators and other powerful agents on college campuses (faculty and staff, latz et al., 2015), can make a positive impact on their students by providing opportunities for them to share their perspectives and specific university-based research experiences with http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 them. such opportunities may also help students feel more confident about their research skills, and more eager to continue pursuing graduate study or career paths that require such skills (goodhart et al., 2006). this may be an underutilized resource on college campuses that has the potential to significantly impact students’ success while in college and well into their careers (as joshua described). student reflections about their empowerment experiences within this project also mirror some of the findings described in previous photovoice research. it seems that participants may experience photovoice projects as especially empowering when significant amounts of time within such projects are devoted to facilitating group participation and dialogue (minkler & catalani, 2010). these elements appeared to be built into the use of photovoice in the community psychology classroom described here. additionally, research suggests that empowerment outcomes are more likely to be facilitated for participants in a photovoice project when, as part of their participation, they are also given support and scaffolding as they develop competencies and skills that might be necessary for engaging in their communities and larger sociopolitical contexts (foster-fishman et al., 2005). more specifically, photovoice projects that also promote participants’ critical consciousness about social and systemic forces that might be contributing to the social issues they are investigating are believed to be effective for promoting empowerment in participants, and specifically, participants coming to view themselves as efficacious and knowledgeable change agents. it is important to note here that although the class was inherently about understanding social issues and systemic injustices due to its focus on the field of cp, more time could have been dedicated to helping students connect the issues they identified in their projects to larger social and systemic forces on and off campus. why, for example, were students forced to pay such high parking costs on a daily basis, despite the school’s focus on providing access and facilitating academic success for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds? although students in the class were able to convey to the administrators their shared concerns about parking, they did not connect these concerns to a more systemic analysis of these challenges. the same could be said for participants’ descriptions of challenges related to being a full-time parent and student. thus, an additionally important lesson learned for educators who may want to incorporate this method in their undergraduate classroom is to help students connect their projects to more critical analyses of the social and political forces influencing the topics they choose to focus on. in a cp classroom, this may mean making more explicit connections between the photovoice project that students conduct, and previous research and actions that have come out of cp (foster-fishman et al., 2005). an additional limitation of this project was that the impact of the project on each student in the class, and the class as a whole, was not sufficiently assessed. thus, the outcomes of the project described by student coauthors cannot be applied to all participants in the classroom. however, that all students appeared to passionately engage in small and large group analyses and discussions of their photos suggested that the majority of the class had some interest and engagement in the project. additionally, that nine students chose to pursue photovoice projects for their final, suggested to the instructor that students had some comfort with the photovoice method and could add it to their research methods toolbox. alternatively, students’ enthusiasm could have reflected their awareness that they were going to receive a grade for their photovoice participation. thus, another lesson for http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 instructors who may wish to bring this method into their classroom is to plan ahead to evaluate its impact on all students in the classroom, perhaps in the middle of the quarter or semester, and at the end. if possible, circulating a long-term assessment tool (even a one-question survey) six months later could also be an effective way to gauge if the project has any long-lasting impacts on students (e.g., regarding their knowledge of cp, sense of community, self-efficacy, etc.) (foster-fishman et al., 2005). another limitation is that it is still unclear exactly how the project impacted the campus. the project continues to be advertised on uwt’s website as an example of how student experiences have been incorporated in the strategic plan (http://www.tacoma.uw.edu/initiatives/inde x.html). however, it is not clear which of the initiatives that have been implemented since the may 2016 strategic planning committee meeting were directly or even indirectly influenced by the students’ photovoice presentation. parking challenges persist for students, for example. however, more community and social spaces have indeed been developed. building in some mechanism for following up with administrators to assess the impact such projects are having on university may be important for educators who wish to experiment with this method on their campus. conclusions despite these limitations, we believe that photovoice may be an effective and even inspiring tool for instructors to use in the undergraduate classroom, and in the cp classroom in particular. in addition to learning about, enacting, and adopting some of the values of cp, through doing photovoice students in our class enhanced their participatory research skills and gained a greater sense of community and self-efficacy, particularly regarding their abilities to effect change on our campus and in their larger communities. moreover, through having the opportunity to present their research to powerful leaders on campus, some students (including student coauthors) were reassured that their voices mattered, while senior faculty and administrators were reminded that our students are researchers and change agents in the making. we suggest that photovoice has the potential to transform the lives of those who do it, but also of those who view it, and hope it will increasingly be used in the undergraduate cp classroom and beyond. references ballard, p. j., & ozer, e. j. (2016). implications of youth activism for health and wellbeing. in j. conner & s. rosen (eds.),contemporary youth activism: advancing social justice in the united states (pp. 223-244). santa barbara, ca: praeger. bensimon, e. m. (2007). the underestimated significance of practitioner knowledge in the scholarship on student success. the review of higher education, 30(4), 441-469. https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/re view-higher-education buetow, s. (2010). thematic analysis and its reconceptualization as ‘saliency analysis’. journal of health services research & policy, 15(2), 123-125. http://dx.doi.org/10.1258/jhsrp.2009. 009081 catalani, c., & minkler, m. (2010). photovoice: a review of the literature in health and public health. health education & behavior, 37(3), 424–451. doi: 10.1177/1090198109342084 coalition of urban serving universities (2018). coalition of urban serving http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.tacoma.uw.edu/initiatives/index.html http://www.tacoma.uw.edu/initiatives/index.html https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/review-higher-education https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/review-higher-education global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 universities-about page. retrieved from http://usucoalition.org/ foster-fishman, p. g., law, k. m., lichty, l. f., & aoun, c. (2010). youth react for social change: a method for youth participatory action research. american journal of community psychology, 46(1–2), 67–83. doi 10.1007/s10464010-9316-y freire, p. (1970). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum. goodhart, f.w., hsu, j., baek, j.h., coleman, a., maresca, f., & miller, m (2006). a view through a different lens: photovoice as a tool for student advocacy. journal of american college health, 55(1), 53-56. https://doi.org/10.3200/jach.55.1.5356. latz, a. o. (2015). understanding community college student persistence through photovoice: an emergent model. journal of college student retention: research, theory & practice, 16(4), 487-509. https://doi.org/10.2190/cs.16.4.b lichty, l. f. (2013). photovoice as a pedagogical tool in the community psychology classroom. journal of prevention & intervention in the community, 41(2), 89-96. doi:10.1080/10852352.2013.757984. lykes, m.b., & hershberg, r.m. (2012). participatory action research and feminisms: social inequalities and transformative praxis. in s. nagy hessebiber (ed.), handbook of feminist research (pp. 331-367). thousand oaks: sage. mcmillan, d. w., & chavis, d. m. (1986). sense of community: a definition and theory. journal of community psychology, 14(1), 6-23. nelson, g., & prilleltensky, i., (2010). community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and well-being (2nd ed.). new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. postma, j. m., evans-agnew, r., & capouya, j. (2015). mexican-american caregivers’ perceptions about asthma management: a photovoice study. journal of asthma, 52(6), 593-599. https://doi.org/10.3109/02770903.20 14.996651 seedat, m., suffla, s., & bawa, u. (2015). photovoice as emancipatory praxis: a visual methodology toward critical consciousness and social action. in d. bretheron & s. fang law (eds.)., methodologies in peace psychology (pp. 309-324). switzerland: springer international publishing. seitz, c., strack, r., rice, r., moore, e., duvall, t., & wyrick, d. (2012). using the photovoice method to advocate for change to a campus smoking policy. journal of american college health, 60(7), 537-540. https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.20 12.688781 true, g., rigg, k., & butler, a. (2015). understanding barriers to mental healthcare for recent war veterans through photovoice., qualitative health research, 25(10), 1443-1455. https://doi.org/10.1177/10497323145 62894 umurungi, j. p., mitchell, c., gervais, m., ubalijoro, e., & kabarenzi, v. (2008). photovoice as a methodological tool to address hiv and aids and gender violence amongst girls on the street in rwanda. journal of psychology in africa, 18(3), 413-419. doi:10.1080/14330237.2008.10829217 http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://usucoalition.org/ https://doi.org/10.2190%2fcs.16.4.b https://doi.org/10.3109/02770903.2014.996651 https://doi.org/10.3109/02770903.2014.996651 https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2012.688781 https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2012.688781 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1049732314562894 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1049732314562894 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 university of washington tacoma (2018). about university of washington tacoma. retrieved from http://www.tacoma.uw.edu/about-uwtacoma/about-university-washingtontacoma, wang, c., & burris, m. a. (1994). empowerment through photo novella: portraits of participation. health education quarterly, 21(2), 171-186. wang, c., & burris, m. a. (1997). photovoice: concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. health education & behavior, 24(3), 369-387. wang, c., morrel-samuels, s., hutchinson, p., bell, l., & pestronk, r. (2004). flint photovoice: community building among youth, adults, and policymakers, american journal of public health, 94(6), 911-913. zimmerman, m. a. (1995). psychological empowerment: issues and illustrations. american journal of community psychology, 23(5), 581-599. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.tacoma.uw.edu/about-uw-tacoma/about-university-washington-tacoma http://www.tacoma.uw.edu/about-uw-tacoma/about-university-washington-tacoma http://www.tacoma.uw.edu/about-uw-tacoma/about-university-washington-tacoma global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 appendix a tpsych 306: community psychology, research, and action spring quarter, 2016 mw(f) 9:30am – 10:50am dougan 280 instructor: rachel hershberg, ph.d. office: mcdonald smith, 103d office hours: mondays and wednesdays, from 11:30-1:00 and by appointment email: rmhersh@uw.edu course website: canvas overview this course will introduce students to community psychology, a field of psychology that examines the interrelationship between individual well-being and the multiple social systems with which individuals interact (including neighborhoods, cultural practices, educational institutions, etc.). students will learn about the history of the field, key concepts and values, and some of the community-based research projects that have been developed and implemented by community psychologists and the communities with which they work, toward the promotion of social justice and well-being. students will practice using one research method in community psychology, and also begin thinking about projects they could develop in tacoma that reflect the key principles and approaches of community psychology, including attention to diversity and equity, social change, and community-based and participatory and action research methods. readings the community psychology textbook listed below will be our main text for this course. however, readings from this textbook may be supplemented with empirical examples of community-based and participatory and action research, as well as reflection pieces written and co-written by academics and practitioners on different kinds of community-based and participatory research studies. these supplemental readings will be available on canvas. nelson, g., & prilleltensky, i. (2010). community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and wellbeing. 2 nd edition. palgrave macmillan. isbn-10: 0230219950 student learning outcomes after taking this course, you should be able to • understand the main historical influences and contemporary approaches to community psychology • learn about the values community psychologists use to guide their work and identify your own research values • think critically about power, inequality, and marginality and how these factors play a part in your own life and in the lives of others, and if and how community psychology and the kinds of activism associated with this field can be used to redress systems of inequality • become familiar with organizations and other resources in the tacoma area that contribute to individual, familial, communityand/or societal well-being • apply an ecological perspective and lens of community psychology to investigating contemporary society and how education, law, government, health—and associated institutions—may contribute to inequitable distributions of power and privilege in society, with http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 27 consequences for the well-being of particular groups • use some of the vocabulary and main concepts of the field of community psychology in your future research projects, and as you critically examine your work in other disciplines the following slos for the psychology major are addressed through this course: • understand the core concepts and methodologies of psychology, including what scientific psychology is, the contributions and limitations of different methods of empirical research, and be able to apply research methods, including design, data analysis and interpretation. • be able to read and interpret verbally, and in writing, psychological research • understand the application of psychological principles to the understanding of social issues. expectations: this class will include a combination of interactive lectures, in-class and on-line group activities and discussions, quizzes, and visits from guest lecturers who engage in communitybased and participatory research. the course will also be centered around research methods used in community psychology, and specifically, the photovoice method. to excel in this course, you have to fulfill the responsibility of coming to class prepared to discuss the assigned readings for that day and to participate in lectures and activities. this means you are expected to have completed assigned readings before coming to class. you are also expected to be present and attentive when we have visits from guest lecturers. your presence in class, and in our on-line community, are, thus, vital to the success of our class and to your own learning. if you cannot attend class on a particular day, it is your responsibility to get notes from a classmate and to keep up with the readings. the main textbook for this course can be purchased in hard copy or as an e-book. all other readings will be available on canvas. grading *class participation (10%) *on-line discussion groups (15%) quizzes (3 total) (15%) class-wide photovoice project (15%) *discussion facilitation (10%) final paper: choose one (25%) review paper small-group project final paper presentation (10%) ______________________________________________ =100% course requirements & grading class participation (10%): class participation is critical to learning and to understanding the material from the course. participation grades will be comprised of your class attendance, in-class and on-line activities, and your attention and participation during lectures (by the instructor, your peers, or guests). to ensure you are able to participate throughout the quarter, readings should be read prior to each class and you should be prepared to draw on your on-line discussions as part of your contributions to in-class discussions. on-line discussion groups (15%): throughout the quarter, you will engage in on-line discussions with a group of your peers about topics we will cover in class. on most fridays, you will have to respond to a question that i will post by thursday afternoons, and respond to at least one of your http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 28 peer’s questions/comments. your posts will be due by 11:59 pm on the fridays on which they are assigned, but you are encouraged to post responses earlier in the day. your responses should demonstrate your intellectual engagement with the material and 2) some level of personal reflection on past or current experiences of relevance (*this form of reflexivity is essential to the field of community psychology, especially as it relates to developing and identifying your values). i will give you feedback on your first entry, and then will expect you to make use of that feedback in future entries. i will ask you to submit your collection of posts and responses in one document on friday, june 3 by 11:59pm. quizzes (15%): there will be three short quizzes throughout the quarter. each will be comprised of up to 10 multiple-choice questions, based on the material covered in the readings and lectures. the purpose of these quizzes is to assess your learning in this course and to ensure that you are keeping up with the readings and understanding the concepts from community psychology to which you are being introduced. you will not be able to make-up a missed quiz unless you have uwt-approved documentation explaining your absence. quizzes will not be cumulative; they will be based on the materials reviewed leading up to or between quizzes (quiz 1 will focus on what we learned between weeks 1 and 3; quiz 2 will focus on material from weeks 3-6, and so on). class-wide photovoice projects (15%) photovoice is: a process by which people can identify, represent and enhance their community through a specific photographic technique. it entrusts cameras to the hands of people to enable them to act as recorders, and potential catalysts for social action and change, in their own communities. it uses the immediacy of the visual image and accompanying stories to furnish evidence and promote an effective, participatory means of sharing expertise to create healthful public policy (wang & burris, 1997). to learn about this method, and the larger uwt community, the class will engage together in a photovoice project about an issue related to uwt. we will prepare for the project throughout the quarter and between friday, april 22 and monday, april 25, you will take photographs and develop accompanying narratives that address the issue we are focusing on. you will upload these photographs and accompanying narratives to canvas by 5pm on monday, april 25. on wednesday, april 27, we will engage in the showed method as a class. you will receive a grade for your contributions to the class-wide photovoice project using the criteria below (and the general grading criteria listed in the syllabus): 1) photographs met criteria discussed in class; 2) narratives met criteria discussed in class and were well-edited, polished, and reflected critical engagement with the subject matter; 3) student was fully engaged in showed method and added to the analysis. we will put together an exhibit based on our analyses and showcase this exhibit at the conclusion of the quarter! *discussion facilitation (10%): in groups of 2 or 3, you will lead interactive lectures covering one of the nine chapters in the addressing the issues section of the textbook (chapters 15-23). these lectures will allow students to gather in-depth information about a topic in community psychology, and significantly reduce the reading load during weeks 7,8, and 9. specifically, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 29 students will only be required to closely read and write a response to three of the nine chapters assigned during those weeks. groups will meet during class time on friday, april 27 to plan their lectures. by 5pm that day, groups will upload an outline of their presentation to canvas. they will also email dr. hershberg the ppt (or updated outline) for the presentation by 8pm the night before it is assigned. lectures must include 1. a thorough overview of the chapter, including the important take-away messages for community psychologists; 2. a class-wide activity or discussion based on an important topic that came up in the chapter; 3) the use of multimedia, including photographs or very brief video/news clips of relevance; and 4. be within the thirty minutes allotted for each group. final papers (25%): choose one of the two options to complete for your final paper. on friday, may 6, you will upload to canvas a description of the option you have chosen, and your plan for your final paper. you will turn in a hard copy of your final paper, and post it to canvas, by 5pm on monday, june 6. option 1: small-group photovoice project with one or two of your peers, you will design your own photovoice project about a topic that is relevant to your community in tacoma. you can each be the participants, or work with another group of participants. together you will go through all the steps of the showed method practiced in class. you will then put together an 8-10 page report of your project, and present this report during the last week of class. your report will include the following components: (1) an introduction where you describe and define the issue you investigated, drawing from: a. the class textbook, and b. at least one resource describing the history and scope of the problem/issue in tacoma (for example, newspaper articles, informal interviews with individuals working at community organizations, professors on campus, etc.). (2) a methods and findings section summarizing your photovoice process and product, including example photos and analyses of each (you will draw from the showed guidelines for much of this section). (3) a discussion of your findings as they relate to some of the empirical literature on this topic in community psychology (you will find 3-5 empirical articles to include in your discussion of your findings). (4) a conclusion section describing: a. potential implications of your findings for practice and policy in tacoma and beyond (drawing from textbook and empirical literature you cited in your paper). b. your reflections on the data collection and analysis process and how your own positionality may have influenced the data you collected and analyzed and your interpretations of the findings. (5) an appendix a, describing who contributed to what specific components of the project. (6) an appendix b, including photographs that didn’t make it into your report. *your report, including headers, in-text citations and references, should be in apa format. you should also have a title page that is in apa format. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 30 option 2: review paper the review paper will be a thorough review of research about a social problem of interest to you and relevant to the field of community psychology. in addition, this paper will include a critique of some of the research in psychology related to this social problem, drawing from the conceptual and methodological components of community psychology, as described in your textbook. if you are interested in this option, you should be exploring research about a problem of interest to you throughout the quarter. check out chapters 14-23 to spark some ideas. you will inform the instructor by monday, may 6 of the problem you will be examining, as part of your final project plan (see class calendar, below). your paper should be approximately 8-12 pages, including title page and references, and include these components: *paper should be in apa format, including title page, headers, in-text citations, and references. 1) begin your paper with a succinct statement about the problem, including a clear description of the problem and its scope (i.e., describe who is affected by it, including which individuals and communities, and how). o here you should draw from the textbook and at least one additional academic resource (including legitimate websites, such as the center for disease control, the national institute of health, etc.). (1-2 pages) 2) next present a review of the research that has been conducted to address this problem, drawing from the ecological perspective that is at the heart of community psychology. specifically, describe the research that has been conducted to address this problem at the individual, community, and/or societal levels. if much of the research focuses on individual-level outcomes, at the very least, include a description of the community, and social factors that may "drive" the problem and/or that get in the way of resolving the problem. (2-4 pages). o here you should be referencing the bulk of the research you reviewed; at least five empirical articles. 3) next present a critique of the research you reviewed drawing from some of the conceptual and methodological components of community psychology. in other words, imagine how some of the studies you reviewed could have been improved if some of the tenets of community psychology (e.g., values, principles, research methods.) were incorporated, either at the level of defining the problem, designing the study, and/or making use of the results. aim to point out limitations of two studies, but you can also talk across your studies if you identified a common limitation. (1-2 pages) *** notethis section can also be weaved into section two. 4) the last section of the paper should focus on potential and innovative solutions to the problem. some of these solutions may be referenced in the articles you reviewed. if so, cite those articles accordingly. however, you are also encouraged “to think outside the box” and add to descriptions of potential solutions presented in the articles you reviewed based on what you have learned in class. (2-3 pages). final paper presentations (10%) during the last week of class, you (and your group members) will present your final paper to the class. you will describe the main components of the paper and either the main implications for http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 31 practices and policies in tacoma, or potential solutions to the social problem you investigated (depending on the option you chose). extra credit: there are two extra credit options. completing either of these will go toward your final class percentage. option 1: attend a presentation or service-learning opportunity of relevance to the class and write up a one-page synopsis of the presentation/activity, connecting it to the class in some way. option 2: participate in a study on sona and write up a one-page description of the study and what it was like to participate in it. grading criteria: all papers will be graded based on how well you followed the guidelines for the assignments, and according to the following criteria: a +/= meets or exceeds highest expectations, very well-written and well-edited, and excellent in content b +/= good solid work, either content or writing has some problems c +/= below average work, numerous errors in editing/writing, content lacking in a significant way d +/= does not meet minimum expectations, incomplete, dominated by errors in writing. f = either no project is turned in or what was turned in was too incomplete to warrant receiving credit you will receive percent and letter grades on your assignments according to the scale below. % grade pt letter % grade pt letter % grade pt letter 100% 4.0 a 86% 3.1 b 72% 1.7 c­ 99% 4.0 a 85% 3 b 71% 1.6 c­ 98% 4.0 a 84% 2.9 b 70% 1.5 c­ 97% 3.9 a 83% 2.8 b­ 69% 1.4 d+ 96% 3.8 a­ 82% 2.7 b­ 68% 1.3 d+ 95% 3.8 a­ 81% 2.6 b­ 67% 1.2 d+ 94% 3.7 a­ 80% 2.5 b­ 66% 1.1 d 93% 3.7 a­ 79% 2.4 c+ 65% 1 d 92% 3.6 a­ 78% 2.3 c+ 64% 0.9 d 91% 3.6 a­ 77% 2.2 c+ 63% 0.8 d­ 90% 3.5 a­ 76% 2.1 c 62% 0.7 d­ 89% 3.4 b+ 75% 2 c 61% 0.7 d­ 88% 3.3 b+ 74% 1.9 c 60% 0.7 d­ 87% 3.2 b+ 73% 1.8 c­ <60% 0.0 e http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 32 course policies academic honesty: any work you turn in for this course (papers, discussion questions, etc.) should be your own work. you may not turn in work that you turned in for a previous or concurrent course. you are responsible for knowing what plagiarism is and for citing all the resources you use in any assignments you complete for this course. briefly, you are committing plagiarism when you appropriate and pass off someone else’s ideas or writing as if they are your own (or previous assignments as if they are new assignments, without consulting with the professor ahead of time). plagiarism hurts not only you but is also unfair to your classmates and to the primary author who did not receive credit for his or her work. students are responsible for learning how and when to document and attribute the resources they use in papers or presentations. if you are not sure whether something is plagiarism (or self-plagiarism), please review the university of washington policies on academic conduct, https://depts.washington.edu/grading/pdf/academicresponsibility.pdf, or ask me. grade appeal procedure: except in case of error, i cannot change a grade that has been submitted to the registrar, usually on the monday following the final exam week. if you believe your final grade is incorrect, you must submit your request for a review in writing and meet with me no later than the end of your next quarter in residence. be prepared to show your class notes and all graded assignments. this request must include a) your name, b) course section, c) date of grade change request, d) title of assignment, e) assigned grade, and f) justification for changed grade. i will then schedule a conference to discuss the request. no grade change will be considered without a formal request. if you are not satisfied with the result of this meeting, you must submit a written appeal to the director of ias within 10 days of our meeting. see the student catalog for full details of this procedure. counseling: the counseling center offers short-term, problem-focused counseling to uw tacoma students who may feel overwhelmed by the responsibilities of college, work, family, and relationships. the service is provided confidentially and without additional charge to currently enrolled undergraduate and graduate students. to schedule an appointment please call 692-4522 or stop by the student counseling center (scc), temporarily located in cherry parkes 206. additional information can also be found by visiting: http://www.tacoma.washington.edu/studentaffairs/shw/scc_about.cfm/ access and accommodations: the university of washington tacoma is committed to making physical facilities and instructional programs accessible to students with disabilities. disability support services (dss), located in mat 354, functions as the focal point for coordination of services for students with disabilities. if you have a physical, emotional, or mental disability that "substantially limits one or more major life activities [including walking, seeing, hearing, speaking, breathing, learning and working]" and will require accommodation in this class please contact dss at (253) 692-4522, email at dssuwt@uw.edu, or visit www.tacoma.uw.edu/dss for assistance. teaching and learning center: the teaching and learning center (tlc) offers free academic support for students at all levels. for writing, reading, learning strategies and public speaking needs, please make an appointment online: http://uwttlc.mywconline.com/index.php winter 2016 course schedule wee k date weekly topic and assignments readings http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://depts.washington.edu/grading/pdf/academicresponsibility.pdf http://www.tacoma.washington.edu/studentaffairs/shw/scc_about.cfm/ mailto:(253)%20692-4522 mailto:dssuwt@uw.edu http://tacoma.uw.edu/dss http://uwttlc.mywconline.com/index.php global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 33 1 march 28 march 30 april 1 what is community psychology? review of course and syllabus, introductions -history and main concepts of community psychology -chapter 1 continued issues, values and tools for liberation and well-being on-line discussion groups: post 1 chapter 1 chapter 2 2 april 4 april 6 april 8 values , principles, and conceptual tools -values for liberation and well-being -ecological system, prevention and promotion • photovoice project discussion • sign up for lecture topics • on-line discussion groups: post 2 chapter 3 chapter 4 3 april 11 april 13 april 15 values, principles and conceptual tools -community & power -commitment, accountability and inclusion • quiz 1 • final options discussion tools for action -overview of community psychology interventions • on-line discussion groups: post 3 chapter 5 chapter 6 chapter 7 4 april 18 april 20 april 22 tools for action -social interventions guest lecturer: robin evans-agnew rn,phd, uwt nursing and healthcare leadership -organizational and community interventions • work on class-wide photovoice projectphotos and narratives • read empirical article example (post response by april 25 at midnight) chapter 8 chapter 9 *empirical example of photovoice http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 34 5 april 25 april 27 *april 29 (no in-class meeting) tools for action -small group and individual interventions • work on class-wide photovoice projectupload photos and narratives by 5pm! • upload empirical article response by midnight -foundations of community research • showed photovoice method • go see dr. hershberg’s research presentation • groups meet to plan discussion facilitation • groups upload outline of discussion by 5pm chapter 10 chapter 11 6 may 2 may 4 may 6 tools for research -methods: post-positivist and social constructivist paradigms -transformative paradigm • quiz 2 addressing the issues -marginalization • upload plan for final paper • on-line discussion groups: post 4 chapter 12 chapter 13 chapter 14 7 may 9 may 11 may 13 addressing the issues -globalization, poverty & social justice (group 1) -colonization & racism (group 2) -immigration and settlement (group 3) gender, power, and cp (group 4) • on-line discussion groups: post 5 (*response to one chapter) chapter 15 chapter 16 chapter 17 chapter 18 8 may 16 may 18 may 20 addressing the issues -confronting heterosexism (group 5) -ableism (group 6) -promoting liberation, well-being and recovery (group 7) -disadvantaged children & families (group 8) • on-line discussion groups: post 6 (*response to one chapter) chapter 19 chapter 20 chapter 21 chapter 22 9 may 23 addressing the issues -environment & climate change (group 9) guest lecturer: dr. lindsay mccunncommunity-based research in environmental psychology chapter 23 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 35 may 25 *may 27 • quiz 3 • overview of the issues! • on-line discussion groups: post 7 10 may 30 june 1 *june 3 no class -liberation and change and politics final project presentations * final project presentations • on-line discussion groups: post 8 chapter 24 11 june 6 turn in hard copies of final papers by 5pm! note: * indicates the fridays when we may meet in-person important dates: april 6: sign up for lecture topics april 13: quiz 1 april 18: guest lecturer: dr. evans-agnewparticipatory research in nursing sciences april 22 & 25: students participate in photovoice projects (upload photos and narratives by 5pm on april 25) *april 27: groups meet to plan lectures may 4: quiz 2 may 6: students decide on final paper plan and upload plan to canvas may 23: dr. mccunn: community-based research in environmental psychology may 25: quiz 3 *may 27: possible meeting for final paper presentations *june 3: last day of class and final paper presentations june 6: hard copies (and canvas uploads) of final papers due at 5pm http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 36 appendix b “strengths and challenges of being a uwt student” posters http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 37 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 38 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 a photovoice project for ethnic health justice: reflections from roma communities in seville, spain daniela e. miranda1, lilyana zhelyazkova2 & jana sladkova3 keywords: roma, health disparities, photovoice, narrative, empowerment, critical consciousness, sociopolitical development, community-based participatory action research, advocacy author biographies: daniela e. miranda candidate in the social psychology department at the universidad de sevilla (spain) and researcher at the center for community action-research. she is passionate about amplifying the voices of historically marginalized women and girls across community, academic and political settings. expertise includes civic engagement, community-based participatory action research, intersectional health equity, and reproductive justice. lilyana zhelyazkova holds a master of psychology of social and community intervention from the university of seville and a bachelor of psychology from the sofia university. she works for achieving social inclusion and health justice for roma people in bulgaria. her professional interests are related to participatory action research approaches and their influence on the process of sociopolitical development of marginalized communities. jana sládková is an associate professor of psychology at the university of massachusetts lowell. she is a co-coordinator of the m.a. in community social psychology and a coordinator of the b.a. concentration in community psychology. jana’s main research interests are in (undocumented) migration issues, diversity and inclusion, and qualitative research inquiry. 1 coalition for the study of health, power and diversity (cespyd), university of seville 2 university of seville 3 university of massachusetts lowell http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 recommended citation: miranda, d.e., zhelyazkova, l. & sladkova, j. (2021). a photovoice project for ethnic health justice: reflections from roma communities in seville, spain. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(2), 1 17. retrieved day/month/year, (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author(s): daniela e miranda (danimiranda@us.es) acknowledgments: thank you to the community members for sharing their reflections, ana mauri for her participation in the transcription process. the data analysis section of this article was a part of the second author’s, lilyana zhelyazkova, master thesis at the university of seville. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:danimiranda@us.es global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 a photovoice project for ethnic health justice: reflections from roma communities in seville, spain roma are europe’s largest ethnic minority and despite their national citizen status, 80% live in extreme poverty and have a much worse health status than their nonroma counterparts. european institutions have identified the institutional discrimination targeted at roma communities—antigypsyism—as the underlying cause of the violation of their rights (european union agency for fundamental rights, 2018). policies, practices and societal attitudes contribute to maintaining the status quo (miranda et al., 2019). from a community psychology perspective, we understand antigypsyism as institutional discrimination that needs to be addressed by creating processes with roma communities that empower them to resist against this systemized oppression. photovoice creates critical knowledge, increases individual skills to gain capacity to advocate and creates cohesion among oppressed groups to develop strategies for action (garcía-ramírez et al., 2011). thus, we propose that photovoice can serve as a liberating process at the individual and community levels when utilized for advocacy. in this paper we present results of one aspect of road4health (2016-2019), a project we carried out with roma neighbors in seville, spain. the project aimed at developing advocacy processes in three at-risk, predominantly roma neighborhoods to ensure the implementation and evaluation of roma health policies through participatory action research (par). here we focus on the potential of photovoice to serve as a liberating process to resist antigypsyism. (wang & burris, 1997). in order to understand the individual and community impact of photovoice for advocacy, we interviewed four of the roma neighbor participants. our analysis of the interviews resulted in two overarching themes from the citizen empowerment model (kieffer, 1984): (1) from lack of consciousness to era of entry; (2) achieving critical consciousness in the era of commitment; the second theme was divided into three subthemes, components of critical consciousness (watts et al., 2011): (1) critical reflection; (2) political efficacy; and (3) critical action. overall, the roma neighbors referred to the photovoice as a method that instigated a conscientization process and helped gain commitment towards social justice actions, also reflected in actions following the photovoice study. these results confirm that photovoice as advocacy can contribute to individual empowerment and contribute to meaningful change towards community transformation to challenge antigypsyism. recent reports consistently show that more than 80% of european roma, the largest ethnic minority in europe, live in poverty as a result of institutional discrimination (european union agency for fundamental rights, 2018). european institutions have identified that the systemic discrimination targeted at roma communities— antigypsyism—is the underlying cause of the violation of roma rights and the failure of roma policies. many roma communities in europe live in extreme conditions that lack sewage systems, potable water, garbage collection, and many of the roma settlements are located in contaminated industrial areas (heidegger & wiese, 2020; harper et al., 2009). roma people live at constant risk of being forcefully evicted and reallocated from their households due to gentrification (european commission, 2016). these conditions are apparent http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 across european countries, irrelevant of differences among national policies. the oppression experienced by roma people have resulted in lack of civic participation and opportunity to access resources for a healthy life despite european programs designed to better integrate roma people (council of europe, 2018; heidegger & wiese, 2020). in 2005, national roma integration strategies were created across eu member states. these policies involved non-governmental organizations and governmental actors in the development and implementation of action plans aimed at improving the living conditions of roma. however, roma participation was tokenized, which further silenced the most vulnerable roma groups (mcgarry & agarin, 2019). for example, organizational networks developed provider-user relationships with the racial discrimination and marginalization lead to low self-esteem, feeling of powerlessness, and little participation in society (crowley, genova, & sansonetti, 2013). in the next section, we present the effects of discrimination on roma participation in spain. the effects of discrimination on roma participation in spain a recent report from the united nations rapporteur signaled that roma people in spain experience more unfair living conditions, poor health status, low employment rates, difficult access to good education, and lower life expectancy than the non-roma (ohchr, 2020). the report stated that the marginalized neighborhoods where roma live were alarming, and it was noticeable that the “government appears to have abandoned the people living there” (ohchr, 2020, p. 9). these conditions have been internalized and normalized by the roma, reflecting the consequences of marginalization and its effects on the disempowerment of roma living in these unjust contexts (miranda et al., 2019). these issues were exasperated and more visible during the initial lockdown measures of covid-19. from march 2020 roma people suffered additional discrimination related to governmental responses and guidelines that were not sensitive to existing roma conditions. for example, sanitary measures did not consider families in overcrowded housing, homes with lack of running water and unstable electricity, state support did not cover those that survive on informal economic activity, and finally online schooling overlooked the digital gap of roma families (fra, 2020; korunovska & jovanovic, 2020). driven by racist beliefs and reminiscent of discriminatory practices from the past, roma people were blamed by the media and politicians for the spread of the virus. these measures led to an increase in roma exclusion and hate speech against them (matache & bhabha, 2020). for example, back to school measures were developed without the voices of roma communities and have caused distrust between the educational system and roma families. roma communities are blamed for devaluing education, which further justifies their living conditions. more than ever, antigypsyism has excluded roma people from being active citizens in social, political, and economic spheres (alliance against antigypsyism, 2019). liberating methodologies community psychology offers a series of methodologies and values that can reverse the effects of antigypsyism by creating collaborative processes with roma people that empower them to resist and challenge the oppressive narratives against them and build new ones. through community-based participatory action research (cbpar), communities have the opportunity to create their own knowledge, increase skills to gain the capacity to advocate, and create cohesion among oppressed groups to develop strategies for action (garcíaramírez et al., 2011). cbpar linked to advocacy allows citizens to feel empowered to control the decisions that affect their http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 lives and helps their voices to be heard. it also assists with recognizing their priorities and addresses their real needs (balcazar et al, 2012). with policies that are not aligned with their realities, roma people are left in abandonment, and they are collectively made helpless and marginalized, while dominant voices continue to prevail (briones-vozmediano et al., 2018). through cbpar, roma people shift the concept of themselves individually as well as their community, which lead to recognition, equitable influence, and access to resources. the objective of this paper is to highlight the transformation in personal and collective narratives of a group of roma neighbors who were involved in a cbpar project. this project, road4health, was linked to local advocacy efforts to improve the health of local roma communities in seville, spain through a photovoice methodology for advocacy. the interviews analyzed in this paper were conducted with participants after the photovoice project. we propose that photovoice linked to community advocacy efforts can transform narratives in terms of how roma perceive their role in community change. from a community psychology perspective, we understand that individuals have an expansive capacity to lead in changes that affect their lives by uncovering the injustices against them when given the tools to do so. in this study we utilized a photovoice methodology linked to community advocacy, which we understood as a process that promotes meaningful engagement of communities to address the concerns through their eyes and voices (suarez-balcazar, 2020). the methodology also explains social and political realities and develops critical consciousness (seedat et al., 2015). through liberating methodologies that assume participants as co-researchers and equal contributors to the research process, from data collection to analysis, roma people had the opportunity to re-narrate their experiences with oppression caused by antigypsyism (fosterfishman et al., 2010; miranda et al., 2020). photovoice has been utilized in communitybased participatory action research since wang and burris (1997) gave rural women a vehicle to shed light on their lives and build a narrative around their personal and collective experiences. various authors working with “hard-to-reach” populations, such as people experiencing homelessness, migrants, those with low-income, women, or youth, have utilized photovoice (e.g. budig et al., 2018; madrigal et al., 2014; royce et al., 2006; seedat et al., 2015; wang et al., 2000). the photovoice procedure entails: (1) researchers posing a framing question that probes reflection (i.e. what are the health concerns in your community?), (2) community members taking photographs that answer the framing questions, (3) community members share photographs and present their individual experiences (i.e. researchers utilizing questions from the showed methodology provided by wang et al., 1997), (4) utilizing the photographs and narratives to undergo a collaborative thematic analysis of the photographs and narratives between researchers and community members (i.e. following foster-fishman et al, 2010 youth react methodology), and (5) utilizing this new-found theory to advocate for change across various settings (i.e. following the meaningful community advocacy model miranda et al, 2020). authors that have critically reviewed photovoice have suggested looking at the implications for empowerment of the methodology to understand its usefulness in the process within the larger contextual and political arena (liebenberg, 2018). catalani & minkler (2010) reviewed literature that included the photovoice methodology unveiling the lack of studies that evaluated the implications of photovoice on individual narratives. some years later budig et al. (2018) found from their study that this methodology empowers participants increasing their knowledge and skills, participation and social networks, and improving their selfperception. in order to monitor and further understand the potential impact that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 photovoice methodology has when utilized for advocacy purposes, we interviewed participants about the road4health project which incorporated a photovoice study for advocacy. based on bruner's narrative construction model (1996), we conceptualize narratives as a way of constructing human reality and events over time, of meaning-making of processes and events. according to him, narratives are based on our own individualized experiences, how they relate to others and how they are influenced by time and culture. for roma people, their narratives have been co-opted or tokenized. for example, the lack of roma representation in political spaces at the local level—both in the city council and in local neighborhood coalitions and grassroots movements—has silenced roma living in the most marginalized areas. at the national level, there is a roma state council that does a widespread effort for roma rights—for example, denouncing antigypsyism. in some cases this has duplicated power structures between organizational leaders and the everyday neighbors. other leaders have adopted a feminist movement that has left behind the complicated narratives of roma women and girls living in contexts with little resources and opportunities (garcia-ramirez et al, 2020.). in this sense, roma are now recognized in political spheres, yet are not heard (vernmeersh & van baar, 2018). roma lives have been defined by the majority culture, and antigypsyist cultural explanations have been used to control and victim-blame roma people. therefore, we believe that liberating methodologies such as photovoice can help to deconstruct this assumed reality. when linking photovoice to advocacy, through a horizontal relationship with researchers, the participants can gain the capacity to respond to injustices, represent themselves and reconstruct their narratives based on their experiences. linking citizenship empowerment to critical consciousness in order to resist oppressive narratives and situations, community psychology principles argue that a sociopolitical development process should occur (baker, & brookins, 2014), and a part of this process is developing the critical consciousness of individuals and groups. according to watts et al. (2003), sociopolitical development involves context and personal experiences as mediating elements to awaken this consciousness. in our study we categorized the coded narratives into the three components of watts’ et al. (2011) model of critical consciousness and used overarching themes of kieffer’s (1984) citizenship empowerment model, as the two theories complement each other. please see table 1. the photovoice linked to advocacy, builds on the notion of critical consciousness, which consists of critical reflection, political efficacy and critical action (watts et al., 2011). we argue that watts’ model mirrors the photovoice cbpar methodology when linked to advocacy as presented by miranda et al. (2020). the interviews carried out in this study were done after the photovoice process and consist of the community members’ reflections regarding the changes they observed within themselves as a result of their participation. utilizing kieffer’s (1984) citizen empowerment model and watts’ components of critical consciousness helped us to identify the stages of change within grassroots efforts as a result of the liberated narratives through photovoice. cbpar, when linked to community advocacy efforts over a long period of time can help individuals become and grow as leaders within their community. method background the photovoice study was part of a larger project road4health, which was financed by the open society foundations (2016-2019) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 citizenship empowerment critical consciousness era of entry. initial mobilization of citizen participation, triggered by a perceived threat to the community; participation is exploratory and begins to question established systems; critical reflection emerges. critical reflection. an awareness of social inequities “that constrain well-being and human agency” (watts, et al., 2011, p. 46) appears. era of advancement. supportive peer relationships within a collective, a critical understanding of power; a mentor who encourages gaining of new skills; building of political efficacy. political efficacy. the perceived capacity to achieve a change. we place here gaining new skills and improved self-esteem. era of incorporation. organizing skills and leadership abilities are improved, increased awareness of self (self-competence and selfesteem). critical action. individual or collective action towards social inequities. era of commitment. finding meaningful ways to engage with acquired participation skills; a critical consciousness is developed. critical consciousness. all three components are present and reinforce reciprocally. table 1: citizenship empowerment (kieffer, 1984) and critical consciousness (watts et al, 2011) and took place in three marginalized neighborhoods with high roma populations in seville, spain: torreblanca, poligono sur and el vacie. the aim of this project was to build advocacy capacity among roma neighbors and a group of health care professionals to advocate for roma health at the local level. a university-community partnership was developed by university researchers from the coalition for the study of health, power and diversity (cespyd), a roma ngo, and three roma communities. roma neighbors utilized a photovoice method for the purpose of advocacy actions that were implemented and targeted at various audiences, in the following steps: (a) prioritize social determinants of health in their communities, (b) take related photographs of their neighborhoods, (c) discuss and categorize photographs for thematic analysis, (d) develop a set of advocacy objectives based on their findings and identify allies (e) take short-term and long-term actions. the photovoice sessions took place over the course of weekly sessions for two months, followed by advocacy actions. for more information on the photovoice studies please see miranda et al. (2019) & miranda, gutierrez-martinez, vizarraga-trigueros & albar-marin (2020). in order to understand the efficacy of this methodology in the roma communities, we conducted interviews with some participants in the project. this paper focuses on the analyses of the interviews. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 participants in interviews four roma women, between the ages of 19 and 46. none of them had finished secondary schooling and each had at least one child. the women, from two predominantly roma neighborhoods in seville, spain, poligono sur and torreblanca, volunteered for the interviews. data collection and analysis in order to understand the individual and community impact of photovoice for advocacy, two researchers conducted semistructured interviews with these four participants. the purpose of these interviews was to evaluate the road4health project, from the photovoice through the corresponding advocacy elements, and collectively reflect on the process. examples of the interview questions were: (a) what have you learned through this project, (b) do you think you have the capacity to influence your community, (c) what was it like working with university researchers, (d) what was it like meeting with healthcare professionals, (e) what do you think you can keep doing to improve your community? two interviews were carried out individually, while the other two participants answered in the same session, simultaneously. interviews lasted between 30 minutes and 1 hour. all were recorded and then transcribed by two graduate students who didn’t take part in the interviewing process. the interviews were analyzed utilizing an atlas.ti software. a theoretically based thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006) was carried out to identify the transformation in participants' narratives in terms of perceived citizen participation in their communities, according to the processes of citizen empowerment and building of critical consciousness in the participants as a result of their participation in the project. first, we searched for meaningful units in the narratives and used a free-coding procedure for the selected quotations. then the ones that represented the three components of critical consciousness were divided into the previously selected subthemes “critical reflection”, “political efficacy” and “critical action”, derived from the concept of critical consciousness (watts et al., 2011). as major themes we used the first and the last stages of the citizen empowerment as a developmental process (kieffer, 1984): “before the project: from lack of consciousness to the era of entry” and “after the project: achieving critical consciousness in the era of commitment” to better compare the transformation process. please refer to table 1 for definitions. results our results showed that as a consequence of photovoice and advocacy actions, participants experienced an empowerment process and gained critical consciousness. in their narratives, the women expressed the growth from before to after project participation. we followed the stages from kieffer’s model of citizen empowerment (1984) to describe the changes: participants started the project without critical consciousness, then passed through the development stages during every step of the photovoice process and finally achieved the era of commitment. we divided this era of commitment into three subthemes, corresponding to watts' (2011) three components of critical consciousness, as they are all present in this empowerment stage. the most representative quotes of each theme were selected to emphasize the development/changes which occurred during the project. before the project: from lack of consciousness to the era of entry before the project, the participants had no critical consciousness about the oppression and had normalized the living conditions in their communities. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 normalization: “and when you are here you don't really notice because you are used to it, you pass by you find a broken bottle and it is like you see nothing” (t2). “we really saw it as normal because we are used to it” (t1) they also didn’t have skills to speak in public and felt insecure about their capacity to advocate for their rights. lack of capacity: “… it is like you don’t feel capable. to speak with somebody, with a professional. is it true that you know the problem of the neighborhood better than them but you don’t feel capable for, i don’t know, right? express it, communicate it, i don’t know. and... very nervous. because you have to express yourself and that costs a lot, you know it. i was ... embarrassed, right?” (ps1) insecurity: “i didn't see myself presenting well, i didn't see myself as a good speaker, truly” (ps1) “i arrived and didn’t know even what to say” (t2) that’s why, at the beginning of the project the participants positioned themselves lower in society than the people outside of their community: researchers, students, and health professionals. feeling of inequality: “and now the women were coming to give a talk and i thought that this woman understood all of life” (t2) their narratives about the time before the project reveal passivity and lack of reaction against the injustice. passivity: “we had not reacted [to confront the unjust living conditions]” (t1) the lack of support from public institutions such as social services, waste management and healthcare services provoked feelings of hopelessness and abandonment in the participants and their communities. hopelessness: “here we believe that no one is going to help us or reach out to us, here is what happens in torreblanca because, it is that nobody has come to offer us help and many people, well, they believe that, you know?” (t1) “they don't support us much in this neighborhood¨ (t1) precisely this and the negative attitude and blame from outside was a key factor that acted as a trigger to open their eyes and lead to the emergence of critical reflection and the era of entry. facing negative attitude: “there were people who did not want us, who said no /… / really racist” (t1) “we live in a marginalized neighborhood, we have no studies, it makes you feel inferior (ps2) blamed: “they /the health professionals/ told us: “it is you, you have to become conscious, your neighbors, you have to educate them /the community/” (t2). “there was also another one /health professional/ who said: “no, but that is you that have to fix it because what are we going to do, because you do this” (t2) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 after the project: achieving critical consciousness in the era of commitment critical reflection: understanding oppression the narratives showed that all the participants increased their awareness through the photovoice project, and realized the inequity in which they live. awareness through photos: “in my case, for example, i have opened my eyes at the time when comparing, seeing the neighborhoods through the photos” (t2). “at the moment we took the photos, /.../ there you think and say to yourself: we have no right to live like this this. and i pay my taxes”. (ps1) awareness of inequity: “look what there is, it’s not right that we live this way because it is inhuman and why do we have to be living this way? … when i have my right because i am a spanish citizen. i pay my taxes?” (ps1) “for being a poor neighborhood. because we are marginalized /… / intolerance is in it. not in the roma race. but, unfortunately, we roma, we are usually in that marginalization. i suppose that because they have always despised us, they have not given us ... more or less the right, one could say, or the place. they have always kept us there and marginalized us. and this place is like the ... seville's butt. /.../ and these people have led them to believe that they have almost no right”. (ps1) this provoked strong feelings such as anger and indignation, but also sadness because of the realized inequity. anger: “it is not normal or fair that our neighborhood is so polluted with shit, so to speak, and it is clean there in the other neighborhood/” (t2). “torreblanca lacks many things, not only cleanliness or neglect of the best of the asphalt of the steel pavements, of safety /… / truly scarce, i see it, apart from which is a neighborhood where the neighbors are poor, right? okay, but it is a neighborhood that lacks everything” (t1) sadness: “i felt sorry when i was there /at the university/ and saw a few classes from the windows with people, i felt sorry and i said to him /to the researcher/: "i don't know why, but i am here, i feel so sorry because we are not there, no roma have got there, really” (t1) with the emergence of critical reflection they could overcome the internalized oppression and see themselves as equal to other people: researchers, health professionals, students, and citizens from better maintained neighborhoods. feeling of equality: “we are equal” (t1). political efficacy: perceived capacity to make a change the change from before to after the project wouldn’t be possible without the support from the researchers who had the role of mentors for the participants. mentorship: “i see that you are kind of helping us, this neighborhood, right? apart from giving us a course, you are also fighting for this to be possible, for an improvement through us too” (t1). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 this relationship contributed to participants’ personal development and self-esteem, but at the same time it was horizontal and without superiority and helped them gain strength. gaining self-esteem: “i see myself as great” (t2) gaining strength: “you /the researchers/ have made me feel that i have more strength to do things.” (ps1) as the women interacted with the researchers, they began to compare themselves with them, seeing that they are no different. participants highly valued the new skills to speak in public and express themselves in the professional sphere. gaining new skills: “i have learned psychology (laughs), a little, i love it! /… / i have learned things ... professional, such as talking to professionals” (ps1) after the meetings with health professionals from different institutions, held during the project, the participants felt stronger and independent. gaining independence: “i see myself more ... you see, more independent when it comes to speaking, that i know more, i swear, more independent because before maybe i was going: ¨momma, momma, come with me, come down and speak,¨ and now it is different, now i go and now i go alone and maybe my mother stays in the car and i go and i fix my things …” (t2) speaking in public served as an instrument for empowerment, improved selfperception and perceived capacity to change the oppressive system. gaining capacity: “i felt like someone, yes. and also, with ... with the right to give voice too. and well, and having achieved something that scares you because putting yourself in public is scary, but having managed to do it. better or worse, but i've done it! / ... / because ... i'm capable, right? i am capable.” (t1) “i have rights and i have a voice, i am capable of talking to anyone” (ps2) critical action: individual and collective reaction against inequity with the critical reflection and political efficacy, participants became more decisive and empowered to change the situation. the project also helped them understand that they do not have to conform to the unjust conditions in which they live and that they have the resources for achieving a change advocating for their rights. nonconformity: “i must not keep quiet, it has changed me that i should not adapt to these conditions and ... to what i have changed in that if it is necessary to go to speak for something for the neighborhood, for defend it, to say: ¨look that this is needed here¨, in that i do have changed” (t1). they started to set bigger goals and decided to influence the community, and to start to require more from them. bigger goals: “we must encourage our roma girls to go to high school and then later on to the university, so they have their careers and their own things” (ps2) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 decisiveness: “i see myself more confident, i know i would go to the houses to talk from house to house, i would go” (t1) requirements towards others: “i also want to see people cleaner, just as i say i want to see it, i also want to see that the neighborhood participates a little more…” (t2) during the empowerment process, the participants showed commitment to the actions they started with the desire to learn more and to continue their personal development. commitment: “/we have to/ go as far as we have to go to achieve a worthy torreblanca.” (t1) “maybe [we should] meet more, so that you teach us more things” (ps1) they started to give ideas for action, understood the importance of unity within their community and expressed the readiness to initiate collective action. ideas for action: “maybe throwing a piece of paper through the mailboxes /… / it has to attract attention so that people see and read it” (t2) collective action: “i think giving voice first in the whole neighborhood, okay? that we take strength here and that we all think together and that it is not the same that we give two voices, than a neighborhood, that many people hear and that we are all united, i think that is how they would listen to us and then we all go together here, i think, where we go, i think they would pay more attention to us.” (t2) “[we have to] be united, move forward and win people over” (t1). discussion the objective of this study was to reflect on the process of community-based participatory action research (cbpar) with a group of roma neighbors who participated in the road4health project. we wanted to determine if the photovoice methodology linked to advocacy can change personal and dominant cultural narratives and facilitate a liberation process. our results confirm that the used methodology promoted personal development, helped participants gain critical awareness and sparked initiatives for individual and collective action. these results support findings from earlier community psychology studies (balcazar et al., 2012; garcía-ramírez et al., 2011; paloma et al., 2009). our study supports the power of critical consciousness to transform narratives of oppression and to empower people from minority groups (chan & mak, 2019; freire, 1972). golden (2020) raised a series of concerns regarding the empowerment rhetoric around photovoice. in this article we interpreted empowerment as a developmental process, according to kieffer’s model (1984). the era of entry which started with the process of taking photographs of the poor living conditions, corresponds to the first component of critical consciousness when individuals begin to identify the relations of power and desire to participate in political decisions is stimulated. to achieve this first era of entry, a thread for the community is necessary (kieffer, 1984) and the negative attitude of health professionals expressed in the meetings with them acted as one. thus, our findings confirmed that dominant narratives about roma people amongst health professionals are the most present (briones-vozmediano et al., 2018). the participants in our project reflected that this negative attitude helped them gain http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 awareness and provoked group-based anger which influenced the critical action (chan & mac, 2019; watts et al., 2011). an important outcome from the participation of the roma women in the project was their commitment to empower and involve the whole community in the advocacy actions, like the adolescents from a youth advocacy group (nicholas et al., 2019). following lockdown measures and the covid-19 crisis, the same women involved in the road4health project have continued to advocate for their rights and formalized into an advocacy group in two neighborhoods. these commitments and increased agency are characteristic for the era of commitment from the empowerment process (kieffer, 1984). as reflected across the theories of empowerment, this process takes years of cultivating the relationship between researchers and the community. the horizontal relationship between researchers and participants built during the project is a key element of impactful photovoice. as stated by wang & burris (1994), empowerment needs access to knowledge, decisions, networks and resources. without access to these photovoice may have no social or political impact, therefore, the key role of researchers in integrating an advocacy process with photovoice helps to promote critical knowledge, the expansion of networks and allies, identification and access of resources and builds capacity for decision-making (miranda et al, 2020). it is clear from the analyzed narratives that this relationship was beneficial for the participants as they felt supported and understood. such empowering results including personal development, better selfperception, and development of new social networks with peers to confront challenges affirm results from other studies (aamboe, escobar-ballesta, garcía-ramírez, 2017; balcazar et al., 2012). democratizing the cocreation of knowledge reconnects marginalized groups to the scientific community in order to influence change. the relationships established between the research partners and community members challenged the traditional roles adopted in the research process. participants were coresearchers who collected data, made sense of the data and were part of the decisionmaking processing. together both university researchers and community members spent time in their respective neighborhoods through both formal and informal encounters, collaborated together in the university settings (i.e. classrooms and conferences) and established a relationship that was founded on trust and mutual recognition. the photovoice methodology creates a safe environment for critical reflection and further development of critical consciousness (carlson et al., 2006). this study confirms the importance of critical consciousness for overcoming internalized oppression and initiating collective action (chan & mac, 2019). without the awareness stage, action does not take place. as reflected in other studies that utilize photovoice, we confirmed that building capacity for advocacy using photovoice empower and lead to personal development (budig et al, 2018), improved self-esteem, self-confidence, critical thinking and perceived control (teti et al., 2013), and enhances mutual learning and cohesion in the community (duffy, 2011; kovacic et al, 2014). our study presents a series of limitations. first, this is a small group that is not representative of all roma communities across europe. nevertheless, the deep analyses of the interviews did provide us with interesting results that seem to support and add on to previous research with cbpar. for example, that processes that involve silenced populations have the capacity to build critical consciousness (chan & mak, 2019) and new sociopolitical skills (madrigal et al., 2014), that communities have the capacity to identify issues that affect them and represent themselves for change (suarez-balcazar, 2020). it is also hard to evaluate the development as reflected in kieffer’s model http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 because these phases take years to develop. we would need to conduct similar interviews at a later time to see whether the results still hold. more research with ethnic minority communities, especially ethnic minority women, girls and sexual minorities should be included in cbpar to contribute to challenging the hegemonic narrative that is sometimes attached to ethnic communities as a whole which then attribute poor health to cultural behaviors. photovoice and other cbpar methodologies identify and deconstruct power structures and should go a step further to understand the different forms of marginalization that ethnic minority women experience during the research process by incorporating reflexivity (palencia et al., 2014). this should include aspects such as reviewing positions of power during the research process, exchanging experiences in order to challenge the status quo, triangulating outcomes with community members and consistent knowledge transfer (abrams et al, 2020). future researchers should ask the following questions: how much is the community really a part of the research process? do the evidence we find at the local level triangulate with findings from other top-down approaches, is there common ground we can use to strengthen the voice of ethnic communities? how can we use photovoice or other cbpar methodologies to promote resilient communities during pandemic or other global crisis? the role of community psychologist includes the self-examination process in order to ensure a reciprocal conscientization that is truly a liberating methodology. references aamboe, a., escobar-ballesta, m., & garcíaramírez, m. 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(2020). statement by professor philip alston, united nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, on his visit to spain, 27 january – 7 february 2020. available online: https://www.ohchr.org/en/newsevent s/pages/displaynews.aspx?newsid=25 524&langid=e retrieved on july 16, 2020. vermeersch, p., & van baar, h. (2017). the limits of operational representations. intersections, 3(4). https://doi.org/10.17356/ieejsp.v3i4.4 12 wang, c., & burris, m. a. (1997). photovoice: concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. health education & behavior, 24(3), 369–387. https://doi.org/10.1177/10901981970 2400309 wang, c. c., cash, j. l., & powers, l. s. (2000). who knows the streets as well as the homeless? promoting personal and community action through photovoice. health promotion practice, 1 (1), 81-89. watts, r. j., diemer, m. a., & voight, a. m. (2011). critical consciousness: current status and future directions new directions for child and adolescent development, 2011, 43–57. watts, r. j., williams, n. c., & jagers, r. j. (2003). sociopolitical development. american journal of community psychology, 31, 1/2. http://www.gjcpp.org/ when students listen: a co-constructed autoethnography of graduate student activists eradicating racism in higher education kevin ferreira van leer1, kimberly m. ashby2, sriya bhattacharyya3, gloria g. mcgillen4, cedrick-michael simmons56 keywords: racism, higher education, graduate students, activism, resistance author biographies: kevin ferreira van leer, phd, is an assistant professor of child & adolescent development at california state university, sacramento. as an action researcher he examines the social and cultural contexts that promote positive development and liberation for immigrants of color in the u.s. and their families with an emphasis on how contexts influence the educational and caregiving experiences of latinx immigrant families. within the classroom he aims to co-construct knowledge and co-examine assumptions in the field while preparing students to critically examine their contexts in hopes of positively transforming them. kimberly m. ashby, phd, is a black, afro-indigenous, queer, woman artist, activist, and counseling psychologist. she received her phd in counseling psychology at boston college and her ba in psychology and comparative ethnic studies from columbia university. kimberly currently acts as a post-doctoral fellow at the ladipo group, providing individual therapy to black community members in philadelphia with a range of presenting concerns and anti-racist facilitation and consulting to organizations, non-profits, and corporations. kimberly is 1 child and adolescent development program, california state university, sacramento 2 department of counseling, developmental, and educational psychology, boston college 3 center for health equity, department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, albert einstein college of medicine 4 department of educational, school, and counseling psychology, university of missouri 5 5department of sociology, boston college 6 6department of sociology, ithaca college global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 also a multi-media, visual artist. through her collages, kimberly attempts to bring visibility to marginalized communities and to celebrate their various means of surviving and thriving in the face of oppression. sriya bhattacharyya, phd, is a postdoctoral fellow at the center for health equity at albert einstein college of medicine and harvard medical school, is a psychologist working at the intersection of social transformation + creative healing. she also serves on the international council of psychologists at the united nations, as a clinical instructor at columbia university, and as an asylum evaluator for physician’s for human rights. gloria g. mcgillen, ma, is a phd candidate in counseling psychology at the university of missouri and a psychological trainee at the university of missouri counseling center, where she will begin her clinical internship in august 2021. she is currently serving as a tri-chair of the national student organization of the society of counseling psychology (american psychological association division 17) and is a member of the society of counseling psychology executive board, 2019–2021. cedrick-michael simmons is a diversity dissertation fellow at ithaca college and a phd candidate studying sociology at boston college. his research focuses on the conflict that arises when antiracist administrators (diversity workers and multicultural affairs administrators) are responsible for managing the grievances of students and employees. recommended citation: ferreira van leer, k., ashby, k.m., bhattacharyya, s., mcgillen, g.g., & simmons, c.m. (2021). when students listen: a co-constructed autoethnography of graduate student activists eradicating racism in higher education. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(3), 1-23. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: kevin ferreira van leer, phd, child & adolescent development program, california state university, sacramento, 6000 j street, ms 6079, sacramento, ca, 95819, usa. email: k.ferreiravanleer@csus.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:k.ferreiravanleer@csus.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 when students listen: a co-constructed autoethnography of graduate student activists eradicating racism in higher education abstract although anti-racist and decolonial scholars in community psychology have shared valuable ways professionals can promote racial justice and contend with potential barriers (e.g., lykes et al., 2019; makkawi, 2017), little consideration has been given to graduate students’ resistance to institutional oppression. this paper explores the experiences of five graduate student activists resisting institutional racism at their institution. through co-constructed autoethnography, it provides narratives addressing three central themes: (1) isolation, racism, and community-building; (2) direct actions and institutional pushback; and (3) internal conflicts and endurance. it considers how graduate students, as individuals who are structurally disempowered in higher education, persist in the face of oppressive institutional structures to challenge them, risks they experience in doing so, and techniques and resources that aid them. it concludes with a discussion of the importance of embracing graduate student activism to advance anti-racist praxis in community psychology. acknowledgements. we extend our love and deep admiration to all of our fellow organizers and mentors who resisted alongside us, activists who came before us who carved the path for our work, and those who will take the torch after us and will continue to “set the world aflame” as the boston college and jesuit tradition calls us to do. specifically, we would like to thank bryn spielvogel for her stealth edits, and dr. leigh patel, for continuing to be a guide and champion for our collective praxis. contemporary anti-racist and decolonial movements—including black lives matter, the dreamers movement, and rhodes must fall—have prompted more psychologists to reckon with institutional racism and colonialism in higher education (hargons et al., 2017; kessi, 2017; pillay, 2016). community psychology as a speciality in the united states emerged at a time of sustained agitation for racial justice and related forms of social justice that bore similarities to today’s environment (lykes & mcgillen, in press; meritt et al., 1999). despite this history, there has been critique within the profession of scholars’ and practitioners’ lack of personal engagement with anti-racist and decolonial movements, given community psychology’s stated commitment to social action, community empowerment, and pursuit of equity and justice (e.g., pillay, 2017; ratele & malherbe, 2020). the profession’s failure to confront white supremacy has been specifically criticized (furman et al., 2019; sonn et al., 2017). to support community psychologists and trainees in becoming more involved in local anti-racist movements and to continue to push the profession toward tranformative forms of praxis, anti-racist and decolonial scholars have documented a number of strategies community psychologists may use to help resist and mitigate institutional racism and colonialism in universities and colleges (e.g., lykes et al., 2019; makkawi, 2017; pillay, 2016; ratele & malherbe, 2020). little consideration has been given, however, to the unique perspectives of community http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 psychology graduate students involved in campus activism, including strengths they exhibit and constraints they must navigate given their lower power relative to faculty and administrators within university affairs (chesler et al., 2005). a few recent exceptions to this oversight have appeared in the last decade as community psychology graduate students have begun to be seen and communicate from their standpoints campus activists and individuals engaged in everyday anti-racist resistance in higher education. centrally, bell and colleagues (2020) reflected as an international collective of community psychologists of color who have contested racism and colonialism in their universities in south africa, the united kingdom, and the united states. mahwahi (2017), kessi (2017), and lykes et al. (2019) as faculty allies have also documented the significance they perceive in students’ activism, a reflection echoed by students távara and moodley (2017). to date, however, no in-depth exploration has appeared in the community psychology literature concerning graduate student activism in higher education and its significance for the profession. in this article, we take the position that as community psychologists seek to engage in and foster liberatory praxis, it is imperative that we not only create counterspaces in the classroom (e.g., case & hunter, 2012) but also work to eradicate institutional policies and practices that bolster racist, colonial, and neoliberal ideologies and structures in higher education (sonn et al., 2017). we assert in this article that it is important for community psychologists to consider the assets graduate students possess as activists, as well as constraints and risks they face in listening to the profession’s principles and answering the call to address injustice in society and on their campuses. to serve these aims, the article presents a critical, co-constructed autoethnography of five graduate student activists who organized together in a collective known as eradicate #bostoncollegeracism (ebcr). the group mobilized together from 2015–2018 and focused on addressing institutional racism within a private, predominantly white university in the historically liberal northeastern united states during the early years of the black lives matter movement and its permeation into higher education (douglas et al., 2020) and psychology in the united states (hargons et al., 2017; winerman, 2016). our organizational history we situate our work within the larger tradition of student movements seeking racial justice within the united states, explicating connections to community psychology and introduce the context in which we organized. although the academy has been a site for the legitimation and reproduction of racial inequality in the united states (wilder 2014; gutiérrez y muhs et al., 2012; ross, 2016; patel, 2015; bhattacharyya et al., 2014), it has also been a space where students and faculty have mobilized resources to resist racism and other forms of oppression (bhattacharyya et al., 2014; ferguson, 2017; lykes & mcgillen, in press; rhoads, 2016). our organizing began as a response to heartbreak and anger that resulted from the highly visible murders of black people by law enforcement in the early 2010s that sparked the emergence of the black lives matter movement (taylor, 2016). like many students across the country, we recognized that oppression has historically been housed and legitimated ideologically through academic institutions, where the interests of those in power dictate the needs and realities of subordinated groups (ahmed, 2006; bhattacharyya et al., 2017; simmons 2020). we were one of over http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 80 u.s. higher education institutions7 during this period in which students organized sustained movements to address institutional racism. we are a multidisciplinary coalition who situates our work within the work of community and liberation psychology. our organizing aimed to counter oppression through naming injustice, disrupting mainstream ideologies, and motivating individuals to seek change and imagine an anti-racist institution. in this way, we aligned ourselves with central values of community and liberation psychology, which aim to foster critical consciousness, liberation, and social change (montero, 2007; lykes & mcgillen, in press; martín-baró, 1994). moreover, we aimed in our organizing to pursue anti-racist praxis, or a dialectical process of action and reflection directed towards social transformation (freire 1973/1964; prilleltensky & nelson, 2002). in these ways, our work aimed to leverage our skills as psychologists and affiliated professionals in training to advance antiracism in our university. ebcr was an extra-institutional organization and grew into a multi-racial collective of boston college (bc) students, staff, faculty, and administrators, as well as supporters and volunteers around the country. at its peak, approximately 2,000 people followed ebcr’s facebook page, which had a reach of over 34,000 page views, and 888 people subscribed to ebcr’s mailing list. our website received over 23,000 page views over a three-year period, and over two dozen people regularly attended potlucks and weekly meetings. our overarching mission was to “call truth to power and motivate individuals within systems to change policies and procedures which materially impact people of color in adverse ways” (ebcr, n.d.), and to 7 see thedemands.org for a list of u.s. student organizations and campus movements and their create an alternate, affirming space for people of color to heal and imagine a better bc together. we primarily used the following tools to pursue our institutional goals, which we elaborate on in the narratives that follow: (1) public scholarship, (2) direct action, and (3) community-building. our work was featured in npr (caputo, 2015), the boston globe (krantz, 2016), al jazeera (wilson, 2015), local and campus news outlets, and disciplinary outlets such as the american psychological association's gradpsych magazine (zimmerman, 2015) and monitor on psychology (winerman, 2016). although ebcr began as a response to institutional racism, we align ourselves with all movements and organizations that aim to dismantle systemic oppression. method this article draws on the autoethnographic work of others, specifically critical coconstructed autoethnography (cann & demeulenaere, 2012), to collectively examine our work as five graduate students engaged in anti-racist praxis. autoethnography situates knowledge within personal experience, prompting scholars to re-examine familiar events while interrogating them in social, cultural, and political context (denzin, 2003). below we juxtapose individual narratives to illustrate the multiple roles of graduate students and student movements in anti-racist praxis. the critical co-constructed autoethnographic process allowed for greater solidarity among us while revealing narrative truths within the events reported. we also draw on adrienne maree brown’s (2017) sentiment regarding collaboration in organizing that “[t]here is an art to flocking: staying separate enough not to crowd each other, aligned enough to maintain a shared direction, and cohesive enough to always move towards each other.” formal demands for racial justice during this period. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 this process began through an examination of our previous work, including archival research, media statements, infographics, and meeting minutes. as we joined together to better understand our lived realities as organizers within the group, we each drew a visual representation of our time within ebcr. we created and made meaning of the drawings as echo images (bhattacharyya et al., 2020), an arts-based inquiry technique in which researchers create images to summarize their understanding of an experience, topic, or story to more deeply explore their positions about concepts which were salient to them. then we presented, compared, and contrasted the images of our experiences. this allowed us to explore our embodied, non-verbal experiences, and helped us to tap deeper into our salient memories of ebcr. we identified themes that captured shared experiences that we agreed were central to our praxis. individually, we wrote narratives regarding each theme and engaged in an iterative process of sharing, reading, discussing, and re-writing to construct reading the singular narrative presented here. collectively, this manuscript represents an engaged dialogue that recognizes the relational and ever-developing nature of anti-racist praxis. this piece comes after a two-year pause of our collective work within ebcr. it is situated within a historic re-mobilization of the black lives matter movement following the police and white vigilante murders of ahmaud arbery, breonna taylor, george floyd, and tony mcdade in 2019. as described below, a major contributor to the pause was the naming of ways sexism and patriarchy circulated within the group. nonetheless, we are re-engaging with bc (ebcr, 2020) and current student movements, as well as reflecting on the broader relevance our experiences have for community psychologists and trainees who wish to address racism within higher education. we also recognize the benefits of pausing, which provides an important opportunity for reflection (patel, 2015). in the sections that follow, we provide personal narratives around three central themes: (1) isolation, racism, and community-building; (2) direct actions and institutional pushback; and (3) internal conflicts and endurance. isolation, racism, & community-building in the following section, kimberly ashby and gloria mcgillen describe the context of institutional, interpersonal, and intrapersonal racism on our campus and reflect on the isolation born of these forms of racism among students of color and white students, and our initial efforts to build community around combating racism on campus and beyond. kimberly’s narrative i (kimberly) am a black, afro-indigenous, queer, cis-woman. i joined ebcr during my third year in the counseling psychology doctoral program because the challenges of life on my campus as a black woman necessitated that i identify and engage with collaborators who made me feel valued and who felt called to challenge the racist realities and isolation that contributed to making me feel unseen at our institution. black women have a history of being made to feel invisible in predominantly white institutions of education (gutiérrez y muhs, niemann, gonzález, & harris, 2012; matthew, 2016; solorzano, ceja, & yosso, 2000). i was ebcr’s visuals co-coordinator, often engaging in the creation of infographics and using the arts as a way to build community among organizers. i also placed myself on the frontlines of many direct actions, often acting as a speaker at rallies and protests. furthermore, i facilitated many of ebcr’s potlucks, welcoming in new organizers and encouraging the development of interpersonal relationships amongst the group members. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 in 2015, i was coping with the deaths of michael brown, eric garner, and tamir rice, while attending an institution that had little to say about the murder of black people by the police. while i was a student in the critical race course that sparked the ebcr movement, i was one of many students who received a letter (mogan, & maturana sendoya, 2015) from the thea bowman ahana and intercultural center and office of the dean of students urging the campus community to “stand up to confront racist and bigoted behaviors.” this statement, in light of my university’s silence on issues of racism, did not feel comforting. rather, it felt infuriating that my university would issue such a statement, while at the same time refusing to acknowledge the institutional and interpersonal racism thriving on campus. in 2015, institutional racism existed in many manifestations on my campus. for instance, faculty recruitment and retention of faculty of color was low, with 86 percent of faculty identifying as white and only 14 percent of tenured faculty identifying as people of color (cedeno, 2015). rather than setting specific targets for faculty of color, an administration claimed, “we don’t have specific targets -we just keep at it every year.” like the faculty, the board of trustees was overwhelmingly white, with students reporting that out of 54 people, only a handful of people on the board of trustees were people of color. when it came to the student body, only 32 percent of students identified as black, latinx, asian, or native american (boston college, 2015). the university newspaper reported that black and african american students indicated the most dissatisfaction with their experiences at the university. in a 2010 survey in which one third of the university’s black male population was sampled, 43 percent of black male students felt that they had been racially profiled by the campus police department (black student experience project team, 2012). furthermore, the university maintained biased admission processes for undergraduates, particularly in the form of supplemental essays in which applicants socialized in predominantly white, private, jesuit schools were rewarded. similarly, the curriculum at the university was overwhelmingly eurocentric in terms of course content and readings. the university also maintained procedural barriers to free speech, such as punishing students who engage in unsanctioned protests. moreover, at the time, the university neglected to release campus climate data that had been collected in the previous years, claiming that the data were not “publicly accessible,” (longworth & mcgee, 2015). when members of eradicate requested the data, the request was ignored. in response to these racist realities, and in light of the letter sent encouraging campus community members to confront racism, i and many other students from my critical race theory class found it appropriate to take some form of action. however, we saw the necessity of looking to the university’s history of anti-racist activism to determine the ways that students before us have mobilized. we learned that in 1969, the black student forum was created and the same year, a number of demands were made, including (a) recruitment of black faculty members, (b) cross-registration with other schools, (c) an increase in course offerings in black studies, (d) 50 black students by september, 1969, (e) the creation of a genuine black studies program, (f) approval of black studies personnel, and (g) a full-time black administrator to supervise the program and a minimum of two black administrators to develop plans for an endowed black chair. in 1970, black students took over an administrative building to promote the demands. it wasn’t until 1978 that these demands led to the hiring of a director of minority programs. in 1981, the demands led to the creation of the mlk scholarship for students of the african diaspora. in 2004, nearly 30 years after this first set of demands, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 the student movement o.n.e (obeying no establishment) was formed and passed out the following demands to administrators: (a) hiring a dean of color to the school of arts and sciences, (b) the president of the university disclosing his position on affirmative action, and (c) creating a major in the black studies department and giving more funding to student of color programming. in 2006, black students continued to make demands. a series of hate crimes spurred the creation of truth, a student mobilization that made demands similar to those of o.n.e., including (a) hiring a dean of color in arts and sciences, (b) the development of a hate crime protocol, and (c) a commitment to a diverse core curriculum. these series of movements created the foundation for the creation of ebcr. the critical race theory course, where many of ebcr’s organizers first met, acted as a counterspace in the institution where ebcr’s first members collaborated with critical peers and faculty allies. my memories of this course are some of the fondest memories i have of being in a classroom at my university. the professor, dr. leigh patel, opened class with music videos by artists like d’angelo and erykah badu, urging us to consider the ways in which their music spoke to issues of power and privilege. dr. patel’s classes introduced us to pedagogy on racism and anti-racism and used popular current events to illustrate the ways in which they impact institutions and structures. dr. patel used innovative teaching methods, such as having students respond to quotations and images related to course content by writing their reflections on the walls. this was a classroom in which every voice was valued, leading students to be authentic in their engagement. james baldwin wrote, “the paradox of education is precisely this -that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated” (baldwin 1963). dr. patel’s class was responsible for bringing many of us into consciousness and as a result, we began to investigate systemic questions about racism at our university. gloria’s narrative i (gloria) am a white woman and joined ebcr in the late spring of 2015, a semester into the group’s work, at a time when i perceived organizing meetings and a spirit of anti-racist resistance were growing among students in the department. i became involved in ebcr’s institutional research, and later direct action planning and interfacing with administrators. the reactions the group received at all levels of the university shifted my awareness of how white people maintain white supremacy in higher education—including white liberals and leftists who view themselves as allies to racial justice movements, like i did. in organizing, i learned to see and better challenge my participation in the university’s culture of white silence, chosen ignorance, and diversion of historical demands by black students for structural and material change into “diversity and inclusion” initiatives that do not require white people to relinquish resources or substantial institutional control (ahmed, 2012). i crashed into ebcr more truly than planfully joined the group. unlike the other members involved in our organizing longterm, i was a master’s student at the time the group formed and was in my first year on campus. it was a mournful year in the master’s program in many ways, with class sessions devoted by some faculty of color to processing police violence and other forms of systemic violence against people of color. however, i also experienced the year as a time of isolation and limited community to explore what it would mean to confront this violence as a white person to change it. over several consequential weeks late in the spring semester, the urgency i felt to find an outlet for connection and anti-racist action grew dramatically. i learned that a group of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 students of color within the master’s program had been working privately to secure conversation with department faculty about addressing racism within the master’s program. i also learned about the bc police department’s string of confrontations in the preceding months directed against anti-racist protestors, predominantly student of color, including ebcr co-founder sriya bhattacharyya. finally, administrative leaders decided to terminate student posting privileges on the department’s listserv after a student posted an infographic about the history of campus racial justice activism that contained a quote by a previous student organization identifying the university president as complicit in racism (see figure 1). figure 1. infographic timeline on the history of racial justice activism at boston college (note: ahana is an acronym at boston college used to describe people of african, hispanic, asian and native american descent.) these events conveyed a pattern of suppressing accountability for racism on the campus, and it was jarring to recognize my disconnection from awareness of them despite occupying the same campus and department. it was clear that students of color, particularly black students and women of color, had been on the front lines demanding change throughout a painful year, and that broad support and accountability from white students, faculty, and staff, myself included, were absent. i went to my first ebcr meeting hoping to break out of my silo and be part of shifting more of the risk and burden of naming racism off of people of color on the campus. this began a process i remain in today of learning through action and community what anti-racist change for the long-haul, personal and institutional, involves. as the group began to build community, meetings evolved from fast-paced actionplanning sessions, where i vividly remember myself and others sprawled across university lounge floors making signs, distributing tshirts, and sharing information to work around institutional resistance, to more intimate and slower gatherings, like ebcr’s monthly community potlucks. it was in those spaces that i began to recognize and trust myself as a white person who was accepted as part of an anti-racist collective and committed to institutional transformation http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 and the personal work accompanying it. in those gatherings, i felt in touch with an immense sense of peace, connection to my friends and co-organizers, and generational responsibility as a white person to be part of the critical mass needed to change the deadly systems white supremacy has built and continues to defend. it has been half a decade since my first ebcr organizing meeting or potluck, but those feelings are still alive in me as i reflect on our work and relationships. i believe they helped propel me toward sustained action and avoid staying immobilized by fear and guilt. direct actions & institutional pushback in this section we introduce some of the ways we collectively resisted institutional racism and encountered institutional pushback over our three years of organizing. kevin ferreira van leer and cedrick-michael simmons review direct actions we engaged in with the aim of creating social change within the institution. kevin’s narrative i (kevin) am a cisgender, queer man who was the born in the united states to portuguese and colombian immigrant families. i joined ebcr in my second year of the doctoral program as i struggled to integrate my doctoral studies with an ongoing career as an immigrant rights organizer. one of my first experiences of a neoliberal university that centered and reproduced whiteness came as faculty recommended i stop taking courses situated in critical practice, such as participatory action research (lykes, lloyd, and nicholson, 2018) and social movement analysis (gamson, 2008), and concentrate on completing my main program of study. in addition, i was encouraged by faculty in my program not to enroll in the critical race theory course mentioned previously. it was during this time that i was pulled to the back of the library by friends who sought my feedback on what later became the first infographic (see figure 2), which highlighted the contradictions of an institution that called on members to follow in the footsteps of the civil rights movement months after disciplining students for participating in a die-in (ebcr, 2015a; wilder, 2014). without realizing, placing the first infographic across campus became our first act of resistance, as flyers, posters, or other material required approval from the institution to be displayed on campus. while we initially obtained approval, the approval was called into question and subsequently rescinded for failing to be associated with a department or a recognized organization on campus (sandwick et al., 2018). despite this, we continued to post the infographic around campus and were swiftly called into disciplinary meetings with college administrators. this began a pattern of bureaucratic barriers which barred us from posting infographics, registering protests on campus, and requesting space for events. outraged by the institutional silencing and disciplinary threats we rang the alarm, launching our movement. while we shared an institutional analysis of racism and a vision for how the university could address racism (see figure 3), our strategies to achieve this goal were the subject of passionate debate. once a week in the late afternoon, 8-10 of us would pile into a graduate student office, rearranging chairs and the lone couch and putting up posterboard to discuss new developments, check in with each other, and plan next steps. in these strategy meetings we debated the best ways to engage with the university in the face of its opposition. these meetings were a space of laughter and camaraderie allowing us to build bonds as we mapped out next steps and a place of frustration and pain as we disagreed on strategy. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 figure 2. eradicate’s first infographic juxtaposing institution’s call to action with campus events http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 figure 3. infographic outlining actions to eradicate injustice and racism at boston college (note: the infographic has been modified from its original format to enhance readability. the infographic originally appeared as one full-length column with the panel on the right appearing below the panel on the left.) we each came to strategy building informed by our disparate experiences and knowledge. i came to ebcr with previous experience organizing in immigrant rights movements and trained in the structure-based traditions of saul alinsky, heather booth and the midwest academy (schutz, 2015) which encouraged targeting power brokers who can make the changes sought. this meant we often tried to meet with specific administrators. many of us were also influenced by liberatory pedagogies of paulo freire (1970) which informed strategies, such as our use of infographics and public http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 campaigns, to problematize the popular narratives about racism as an interpersonal phenomenon. infographics became a mainstay of our strategy, an accessible way to highlight the contradictions within public discourse of diversity and inclusion by the institution (and their representatives) and the lived reality of students. over time, our strategies evolved as we connected with other local organizers and schools of thought. for example, a handful of core members attended momentum’s social movement training, infusing new strategies that aimed to activate greater popular support and grow our movement. we continued to target power brokers who could make change but also began more intentionally leveraging our potlucks and strategy meetings as ways to absorb others energized by our work. engaging the media was a central component of our strategy. one of my main roles within ebcr was our traditional media contact and twitter account holder. in this role i documented our direct actions via twitter, organized collective writing of press statements and liaised with traditional media. as we planned actions, we constructed a press release sent to the media in advance, setting the context and main goals of our action. these were written collaboratively, often behind the glow of a computer screen, where the colored circles at the top of the google document became a virtual representation of our community. in fact, i fondly remember these moments of writing, editing, and commenting where we collectively narrated and framed our work. during direct actions we each had a role, and i often could be found on the sidelines furiously writing notes, live-tweeting quotes and pictures and attempting to capture key moments. these fieldnotes became the fodder for quotes and images that were embedded into the press statement which was sent after the event. the goal of our media outreach was to (1) increase external pressure to change policies and practices and (2) play an active role in framing the narrative, a critical component of social movement building (polletta & ho, 2006). our core framing, that racism is located within institutional policies and procedures, was central to our movement and is encapsulated by our name, ebcr. nonetheless, this framing was contested by university officials and media outlets alike. in a quote to a campus newspaper the university spokesperson stated, “the supposition that bc is an institutionally racist place is a difficult argument to make,” (reardon, 2015), going on to emphasize individuals’ beliefs opposing racism by campus community members. here the university aimed to counter our frame by reinforcing notions of racism as interpersonal in nature. similar tug of wars occurred with media outlets, for example a journalist affiliated with a wellknown national media organization requested to shadow a student and document the racism they faced. over a flurry of emails, we strategized on to shift the story’s focus from individual acts of discrimination to institutional policies and practices while preserving their interest. we compromised, allowing the reporter to meet with a group of students, not an individual, who could collectively speak to their experiences of institutional relationships. as a result, a piece was published that spoke to both interpersonal and institutional racism and we preserved a relationship with the journalist. these framing contests mirrored the larger disagreements in public discourse regarding racism as located within individuals (e.g. individual policemen as “bad apples”) rather than within systems (e.g. policing and systems of mass incarceration). cedrick’s narrative i (cedrick) am an african-american man that was born and raised by a working-class family in the united states. i joined ebcr during my first year of graduate school, and i http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 quickly learned about the paradox for people who dare to speak about racism at postsecondary schools that ahmed (2012) highlights in the book on being included: “describing the problem of racism can mean being treated as if you have created the problem, as if the very talk about divisions is what is divisive” (p. 152). specifically, antiracist graduate students are simultaneously told by administrators and faculty to use our research as a resource for combatting social injustice, but we are treated as punishable “troublemakers” whenever we actually use our research to push against institutional racism at our own campuses. i joined ebcr after participating in a graduate student seminar about critical race theory (crt). while crt began as an academic and political project by legal scholars, the instructor of our course, dr. leigh patel, rightfully pushed us to examine the relationship between diversity discourse and the reproduction of racial inequality. for example, the promotional materials highlighting racial representation and inclusion as values can not only be used as a “move to innocence” (tuck & yang 2012), but also used as a tool to displace the responsibility for addressing institutional racism onto students labeled as “diverse.” after the threats of expulsion to me and other students for participating in a silent demonstration called a “die-in,” which was an expression of solidarity with the thousands of other anti-racist student activists in the country, the crt seminar pushed me to believe that resistance could be successful-even if institutional change seems impossible. ebcr gave me an opportunity to explore those possibilities. one of the most rewarding aspects of ebcr was the chance to develop creative tactics to expose the contradictions between the “racial justice” discourse on campus and the inaction to address racism and racial inequality. for example, after the pushback to our infographic, some members of ebcr used their social ties to secure a small airplane that would fly over the spring graduation ceremony. the large message trailing the airplane read, “eradicate boston college racism.” to the dismay of the administrators and trustees present, the plane circled around the graduation ceremony for approximately 30 minutes. fortunately, we didn’t violate the arbitrary codes of conduct by displaying our message above the heads of hundreds of students, faculty, staff, administrators, trustees, alumni, and parents. in december of 2015, we decided to contribute to the holiday spirit at our jesuit university by providing songs and gifts to the most powerful stakeholders at a university: the board of trustees. undergraduate and graduate members of ebcr decided to sing christmas carols and provide gifts to the board of trustees at their on-campus meeting. we didn’t sing ordinary christmas carols. instead, we provided an anti-racist remix to popular songs , like “deck the halls with walls of white men,” “leahy baby,” and “walking through a white man’s wonderland” to highlight the fact that the most powerful decision makers on campus tend to be white men despite their rhetoric about diversity and inclusion. our “gifts” were scrolls that listed our demands for institutional change. we attempted to also bring a plate of cookies along with our “gifts” to the president of the college, but we were told that he was unavailable. to ensure that the president didn’t feel left out of the celebration, one of our members recorded their personal rendition of “leahy baby” for the school’s president, william leahy. we knew that the spectacle was necessary if we wanted to get any media coverage of the demonstrations. since bc is a prestigious research-oriented institution, and since the “proper channels” are managed by at-will employees, it was imperative to use media http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 coverage to exert pressure on the senior administration. to prepare ourselves—and any other allies on campus pushing for different institutional changes—for the inevitable pushback, we organized several workshops and training sessions. the trainers included alumni who organized their own anti-racist campaigns at bc in the past, lawyers who teach activists about their rights both on and off-campus, and members of antiracist groups throughout the city of boston. finally, we used these workshops and training to make informed decisions about the risks of civil disobedience that we were willing to take, such as ascertaining whether or not we have enough money to bail students out of jail. there were some faculty who helped us deal with the pushpack by the administration. for example, some faculty voluntarily accompanied us at our disciplinary hearings with the dean of students despite the fact that they were not permitted to speak or intervene (unless the administrator granted them permission to do so). their participation was important because they were able to witness administrators’ attempts to rationalize the restrictive conduct policies and the evidence of institutional racism on campus. in addition, over a dozen faculty even organized their own program to describe the legacy and benefits of anti-racist protests on campus, and they articulated why it was incumbent upon administrators to expand the scope of permissible speech for faculty, graduate instructors, and students on campus. as a result of my experiences with ebcr, i have concluded that administrators can use the language of “social justice” as a branding exercise. we did not have any clear allies in the administration. no diversity managers, student affairs administrators, or any other administrators publicly defended or supported us. instead, we were constantly met with silence and contempt. i even almost left ebcr after a small meeting with an administrator who presented themselves as an advocate for students of color on campus, but suggested that our actions could cost the jobs of our faculty allies. overall, it seems clear that administrators tend to use lostcost efforts like diversity statements and programs centered around dialogue and “bringing people together” as a buffer rather than a mechanism for addressing racism. furthermore, those symbolic gestures provide far more benefits for the administrators themselves and their employers than the targets of racism on their campus. internal conflicts & endurance in this section, sriya bhattacharyya reflects on internal conflicts, personal tolls, and difficult losses our group faced, and how, despite these hardships, we found ways to maintain our collective resistance and celebrate our wins. she also shares ways our group maintains continued solidarity with present-day activist groups at bc. sriya’s narrative i (sriya) am a femme presenting, brown south asian, who helped start ebcr because it was vital for me to hold a mirror to bc to witness its own complicity in racism and to create a liberatory space where black and brown students’ voices were not silenced, rather, celebrated. in the group, which formed during the third year of my phd program, i helped organize and plan creative direct actions, facilitated potlucks, scheduled trainings with the aclu & activism training institutes, spoke with media outlets, and hosted the majority of our meetings, healing spaces, and action planning gatherings in my living room. when i think about my time organizing in ebcr, i largely recall joy and community-building, and resistance and direct actions. my fondest memories of graduate school are staying up late painting http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 banners, writing funny lyrics to anti-racist christmas carols, and remembering all the laughter and tears with some of the most brilliant, dedicated, and fun people i have ever had the pleasure to be in close relationship with. sometimes i do not understand how we had the time to take classes, teach, research, do clinical work, write our dissertations and organize, but from what i remember, for each of us, the organizing is what fueled our energy to get through all the other aspects of our lives and graduate school. we ate together, went kayaking together, had sleepovers, watered each other’s plants and watched each other’s dogs. we made care packages for each other whenever we had big life hoops to jump through whether it was weathering the highs and lows of activism or burnout or taking comprehensive exams and proposing our dissertations. ebcr felt like a space where our full selves could exist, we could critique the elitist institution we were in while still moving towards securing power within its confines. at our potlucks, we had check-ins, where we shared about our identities, and about how we were truly, deeply, doing as people walking on this messy earth. everyone also was invited into a team or a role at our potlucks, an organizing technique we picked up from momentum, to help with “vibes”, “nurturance”, “connection”, or “clean up”. i think this helped everyone feel like they had a small part in the movement, whether their voices were loud or soft. we tried to emulate these team structures in our organizing work too. however, there also was a shadow side to the brightness ebcr brought into my life. when i remember what i struggled with during our organizing together, all i can think about is patriarchy. as a multi-race multi-gender collective, dynamics informed by our identity socialization were regularly at play. i remember feeling sometimes like women planned the gatherings, drew in and fed the people, while men sat back and intellectualized theory, and mocked our desire and attempts to build caring, healingcentered activism spaces. when we raised this concern, male-identifying members in our group denied this reality. so, the women in the group started meeting separately and collectively reflected on our experiences to share within our group, highlighting relevant research and offering resources and suggestions. movement spaces are regularly disrupted by patriarchy and in-fighting (walia, 2006) and one of the resources which supported our healing were practices we learned from a movement training institute called momentum. their model of training built in a gender analysis, recognizing women do a lot of caretaking work, and explicitly ask men to serve and clean at meeting spaces. they also emphasized the power of song, which we utilized in anti-racist caroling (mentioned above) during our “12 days of bc racism” action (ebcr, 2015). many of the gender dynamics we faced were also problematized by the idea that men try to fight other powerful men in institutions and measure winning by defeating them in institutional and policy-focused battle, while women more often engage in healing and creating transformative, liberated, community spaces. i ended up organizing an activist healing retreat for the women and nonbinary folks in the group, where we wrote ourselves and each other love notes, had tincture making, nail painting, and face mask stations, and took a pause from fighting. it was so needed to keep our work going. to sustain activism with ebcr, nurturing our friendships were essential, which we did through holding community-building potlucks, activist healing nights, and dreaming up creative resistance together. years have passed, and we have reflected on the dynamics that built us and broke up, and ultimately, i believe we each draw on our experiences in ebcr and our friendships with http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 one another as sources of wisdom in our day to day lives. we also keep an eye on current activists at bc (peep @blackatbostoncollege) and stand in solidarity with our power as alumni, just as historic activist alumni did with us. we offer to send funds, buy dinner, and write letters of support to leverage our collective power as alumni to demand changes within bc. conclusion ebcr was one of over 80 student-organized anti-racist movements in institutions of higher education within the u.s. and one of an even greater number across the globe in the mid-2010s. our narratives above interrogate the ways in which we, as graduate students within community psychology and across disciplines, contest the ways we were expected to participate in the racist and neoliberal practices of higher education and create liberatory institutions of higher education. over three years, we generated awareness regarding systemic racism on campus, fostered conditions for changes in policies and programs on campus, and created counterspaces for many students of color on campus. through informational campaigns, such as infographics, as well as direct actions, such as protests and rallies, we problematized the everyday conditions of the university and engendered critical awareness of how the university perpetuated inequity through programs and policies. such problematization and de-ideologization aims to help others interrogate their understanding of reality and their role within it so they can begin to dismantle oppressive ideologies (martín-baró, 1994; montero, 2009). our potlucks further nurtured this critical awareness and allowed students of color, alongside white students, to find community, feel empowered, and know that it was the system, not them, that was the problem. these actions also aided the push by faculty and students for the creation of an african diaspora studies major. furthermore, a group of faculty, faculty for justice, formed to support the work of students resisting institutional racism, including ebcr. this group of faculty has remained active since its formation 2015, supporting student action and publicly commenting on the institutions action, including most recently calling for more concrete commitments to address antiracism on campus (faculty for justice, 2020) our organizing built on previous student movements at our institution, as well as traditions of scholarship that address injustice. institutional analysis of student activism at bc from 1969 through 2016 revealed a legacy of student activism over 5 decades where students consistently demanded racial justice (ebcr, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c). our finding that many of the demands remained the same over this time period reveal the entrenched nature of white supremacy as well as the perseverance of student activism, of which ebcr was a part (see figure 4). our infographics join a larger tradition of public scholarship which aims to engage the broader public, supports social justice and resists perpetuating settler colonialism (kezar et al., 2018; dachegerbino, 2018). we encourage others to utilize mediums such as infographics, which can accessibly illustrate institutional racism and challenge dominant narratives to the broader public. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 figure 4. infographic outlining demands for racial justice at boston college from 1969 to 2016 throughout our narratives, the importance of relationship-building and friendship is clear. this reinforces empowerment as a relational phenomenon (christens, 2012) and the centrality of relationships in creating collective change. relational labor, the creation and maintenance of relationships, is necessary for the functioning of a group and for a group to achieve its goals (elisson, 2017; fletcher, 1999). as our collective aimed to address racial oppression embedded within the university and society-at-large, patriarchal oppression was reproduced within the group. the reproduction of patriarchy within organizing spaces has been identified in other movements (walia, 2016) and researchers have identified ways that counterspaces and organizing groups can mirror societal oppression (mcconnell et al., 2016; ellison, 2017). future organizers, and community psychologists, must recognize that oppression can be replicated in antiracist praxis and other change making processes and invest in the examination of relational labor resource distribution and actions to address it when inequitable distribution occurs. our analysis includes implications for students seeking out and leading anti-racist praxis. first, we identified multiple types of resistance over our time organizing that reveal the many ways institutions maintain white supremacy. the institution utilized university policy to create a byzantine maze of bureaucracy that aimed to slow down and silence our work as well as create barriers for allies (students, faculty and staff) in supporting us. the university deployed threats of disciplinary action, invitations to dialogue in lieu of material action, and changing policies through this bureaucracy. moreover, the university publicly competed with us over our core frames, creating alternative narratives of our work and challenging our institutional analysis of racism. second, we identified key practices for students interested in anti-racism that expand on previous practices encapsulated in a toolkit developed in 2016 , and used by organizers on other campuses (caputo, 2015). third, we learned that engagement in this type of anti-racist practice will be emotionally draining, taxing on relationships and may lead to feeling betrayed. in short, the work is intense. it is important for movements to build a practice of celebrating victories, create a practice of pausing and develop shared commitments to assess problematic dynamics. lastly, beware that in retrospect, when movements become popular, others will try to capitalize on your work and co-opt it as their own. we will not http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 be surprised if in 20 years, ebcr is celebrated by the administration. this analysis also has implications for those faculty and university staff interested in supporting and fostering student-led change. a clear example of interest-convergence, we found that faculty and staff, even those with relatively high levels of security, such as posttenured faculty, would disassociate themselves from eradicate. we urge faculty and staff to stop protecting their own power and support student-led anti-racist praxis on their campus. current initiatives by the university demonstrate a continuation of rhetoric used to perform condemnation of racism while continuing to pursue actions to oppress students of color and others within and outside of the institution. most recently, the institution has stated black lives matter while simultaneously sending bc police department officers to work with boston police at a protest in response to the murder of george floyd in boston (not on or near campus; baker, 2020). moreover, the institution has announced the “forum of racial justice in america” which will be a place “for listening, dialogue, and greater understanding about race and racism in our country” (university communications, 2020) while simultaneously moving between censoring and “listening to” the stories of racism posted by current students and alumni of color (kelly, 2020). these forums represent another iteration of performative listening and dialogue while ignoring the present and historical demands of students which has advocated for material changes within the university. as white supremacy and settler colonialism persist and manifest in new ways within higher education, community psychologists must contest their expected participation in these practices and create liberatory spaces. community psychologists must embrace extra-institutional challenges and recognize that institutions and disciplines need to be pushed towards justice. we invite others to join ebcr and a larger a tradition of community psychologists and other scholars in imagining and creating universities as radical, anti-racist spaces (hooks, 1994; bell et al., 2020). as they do so, we ask them to anticipate that graduate students and other community psychologists in-training will take up the call as well, and prepare to support and join them in eradicating the institutional policies and practices that bolster racism. references ahmed, s. 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(1999). a history of division 27 (society for research and action). in d.a. dewsbury (ed.), unification through division: histories of the divisions of the american psychological association. washington, d.c.: american psychological association mogan, t. & maturana sendoya, i. (2015). retrieved from [website masked for blind review] montero, m. (2009). methods for liberation: critical consciousness in action. in m. montero & c.c. sonn (eds.), psychology of liberation. springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-38785784-8 patel, l. (2015). decolonizing educational research: from ownership to answerability. routledge. pillay, s. r. (2016). silence is violence: (critical) psychology in an era of rhodes must fall and fees must fall. south african journal of psychology, 46(2), 155– 159. https://doi.org/10.1177/008124631663 6766 pillay, s. r. 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(2017). decolonising the academy: praxis and participation: response to ‘community social psychologies for decoloniality: an african perspective on epistemic justice in higher education’ by shose kessi. south african journal of psychology, 47(4), 517–519. https://doi.org/10.1177/008124631773 8180 taylor, k. y. (2016). from #blacklivesmatter to black liberation. haymarket books. university communications (2020, july). forum on racial justice will highlight bc initiatives on racism. bc news. https://www.bc.edu/bcweb/bcnews/campuscommunity/around-campus/forum-onracial-justice.html walia, h. (2006). challenging patriarchy in political organizing. colours of resistance archive. http://www.coloursofresistance.org/731 /challenging-patriarchy-in-politicalorganizing/ wilder, c. s. (2013). ebony and ivy: race, slavery and the troubled history of america’s universities. bloomsbury publishing. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 wilder, c. (2014, december 16). boston college students involved in die-in face ‘disciplinary outcomes’. boston.com https://www.boston.com/news/localnews/2014/12/16/boston-collegestudents-involved-in-die-in-facedisciplinary-outcomes wilson, j. (2015, december 31). how black lives matter saved higher education. al jazeera. http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2 015/12/how-black-lives-matter-savedhigher-education.html winerman, l. (2016). students lead antiracism efforts: graduate students are organizing to support the black lives matter movement. monitor on psychology, 47(9). retrieved from https://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/10/ anti-racism zimmerman, l. (2015, november). campaigning for social change. gradpsych, 11, 16–17. https://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2015/1 1/social-change http://www.gjcpp.org/ from the womb to the world a girl learns her mother’s story deidra somerville keywords: author biography: diedra somerville was born in ramaytush ohlone territory (san francisco, ca). she is a mother, activist scholar and healer whose work is intentional in organizing, cooperative development, healing from trauma, and advancing decolonized principles and practices in organizational spaces. her dissertation work, examining the strategies and networks of black maternal activists in chicago, has given her insight into the challenges, opportunities, and possibilities for communities to use disruptive practices while working with established systems to improve the quality of life in communities. her work centers black mothering, organizing and the indigenous knowledge that is drawn upon to resist and persist in the face of structural oppression and white supremacy. her commitment to indigenous community-centered work are evident in her roles as founder of esusu chicago, her work as a ritual worker and diviner for haji healing salon, and in her role as core team member of cooperation for liberation, a cooperative working and study group that promotes coop development in the black tradition. recommended citation: somerville, d. (2022). from the womb to the world a girl learns her mother’s story, global journal of community psychology practice, 13(1), 1 12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: deidra somerville, email: http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 from the womb to the world a girl learns her mother’s story the article explores the continuity of the village through the experiences of four generations of women, each working within her own conscious knowledge of mothering, mothering practices, and her role in village life. the author tells the story as inheritor of indigenous ways of knowing passed on to her, the coloniality that disrupts and dismantles the practices she inherits and how decolonial praxis informs her voice, choices, and practices in response to coloniality. she contextualizes her family experiences through the motherline, the impact of coloniality on the motherline, and how each daughter sees herself in resistance to forces of coloniality and how their stories unfold. the motherline serves as a means through which mothers pass on to daughters strategies to resist coloniality and construct a narrative that centers her in her own womanhood. the author discusses potential ways to restore the motherline and heal connections to familial ways of knowing that have been weakened over many generations. she incorporates motherline theory and decolonial theoretical frameworks to explain how four generations of women reflect on mothering and healing and the act of finding and holding our space in the village. where is the house where the mouse is the leader? ~kossula, as told to zora neale hurston in barracoon: the story of the last black cargo all of our stories begin with our mother’s story. the stories of who we are, who we were and who we are to become are derived from what has been mapped onto the wombs, hearts, minds, and spirits of the identities of our mothers. the condition of our very humanity, both the process of becoming more human, and the actions that define humanity, arise from our notions of motherhood, experiences with our mothers, and retelling of our mother’s stories. for their stories tell ours. i am the daughter, granddaughter, greatgranddaughter and great-great granddaughter of women born from practices that acknowledge the role of spirit, medicine, and prayer as part of childbirth. my grandmother recalls the stories of how my great-grandmother (her mother-in-law) was her “treater” and “catcher”, providing her with treated herbs and salves to ensure comfort and ease with childbirth, and overseeing my mother’s birth. as my grandmother prepared to birth my mother into the world, my great-grandmother combed and styled my grandmother’s hair, massaged her entire body from head to toe, and prayed with her. she treated the room with herbs to drive away impurities to the space and gave my grandmother warm food and teas, nothing cold. at the time of the birth, she kept the room lights low, letting very little natural sunlight into the space. after childbirth, my great-grandmother bound my grandmother’s womb with a warm white cloth for 6 weeks and prayed with her every day. she said many prayers and sang many songs, some spirituals, some traditional songs from her lineage. my grandmother recalled that she didn’t see sunlight for 6 weeks and was treated with the most tender care. “i didn’t have to do anything but rest. i was made to lay there and sit there. i only got up to relieve myself and for her to do her work on me. that was it.” my grandmother was 18 years old when she gave birth to my http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 mother. when she greeted the sun and moon again, my grandmother was carried out with prayer and water while she held my mother and walked around to the four corners of their home. my great-grandmother recalled that my grandmother was not the same person and had to be reintroduced to the elements. she was reborn as she gave birth to my mother. her space within that room in san francisco’s hunter’s point community was more than just a room. it was a place where my grandmother experienced birthing a spiritual being and this process required her to transform in order for her body, mind and spirit to facilitate this process. she herself was in a womb, giving birth to promise, possibility, continuity, and possibly the return of an ancestor among them. this transference of power from the universe through the mother was understood as essential to the training my great-grandmother received in how she approached the journey of motherhood. something happened in that space. my great-grandmother knew she was part of something much bigger than her understanding. a woman with deep knowledge of people, spiritual energy, and how to facilitate hope and connection with people, she gave herself to a process and made herself an instrument of transformation. she did so with every birth she served as catcher or treater for. each one is different, but the facilitation of this process established spiritual order, a call and response with the universe. an action and reaction. i asked my grandmother to tell me this story repeatedly while growing up. i wanted to reconcile my grandmother’s stories of her life coming into motherhood, with my own mother’s life. this was my first introduction to praxis, applying her stories and insights to them to my mother’s story, and ultimately, my own. this was how the motherline was established in my family, and now continues with me and my children. their first engagement with praxis will not begin with what they are taught in a classroom, it will begin with what they learn from me. reestablishing our motherline, the praxis of our mother’s stories and experiences braided into our own existence, can be the first step to decolonize our actions and beliefs about the potential of the village to know itself, both past and present. the motherline is our tool of resistance that avails us the opportunity to reclaim what is ours and to assign it a meaning and purpose in our lives. andrea o’reilly describes the motherline as a strategy through which a mother “gives her daughter strategies of resistance, and hence constructs an alternative script of coming into womanhood” (o’reilly, 1998, p. 17). the motherline is a powerful tool that helps to fill the missing pieces of ourselves. through motherline praxis, we can repair and braid together our collective memories and collective resolve to see ourselves through the eyes of our communities and not our oppressors. the motherline redirects how we http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 gain knowledge of ourselves, look for answers to questions, find remedies to heal ourselves. motherline stories ground a...daughter in a gender, a family, and a feminine history. they transform the experience of her female ancestors into maps she can refer to for warning or encouragement (edelman, 1994, p.61). maldonaldo-torres reminds us in the series of theses he pinned on coloniality, that a key component to ensure the persistence of coloniality is through use of modernity as “a form of metaphysical catastrophe that naturalizes war” (maldonaldo-torres, 2016, p.11). metaphysical catastrophe occurs when the value systems, beliefs and rituals that support them are systematically destroyed through a campaign of corrective measures that serve to undermine our ways of knowing and make them far distant to our current and lived reality. this amounts to war a war on our ways of being and knowledge generation of how to understand the world as connected, through body, mind, spirit and the universal principles that inform that connection. the destruction of the motherline and its function to maintain connectivity between mothers and daughters, and with it, sacred rights and ways of knowing, is a casualty of the war on indigenous communities and the villages they strive to maintain. western psychology is a tool of coloniality in this way, through its emphasis on the separation of daughters and mothers during adolescence as a “natural” phenomenon that should be encouraged and embraced (o’reilly, 1998). the severance of the mother-daughter connection that is deemed a natural phenomenon occurs for indigenous peoples at the same time that daughters and sons are undergoing rites of passage, questing, training to become healers, and learning/determining their role/purpose within the village. this form of metaphysical catastrophe has cast the relationship of daughters to mothers into a strange place of uncertainty and dislocation. this disrupts the village and its continuity. psychologist bobby wright identifies this metaphysical catastrophe as “mentacide”, defined as “a deliberate and systematic destruction of a group’s minds with the ultimate objective being extirpation of that group” (wright, 1985, p. 17). mentacide is a condition that has disrupted the motherline, which for generations served as a tool of resistance and defense for our villages. these tools of resistance are used by us to define ourselves, our needs, our strengths, our power, on our own terms. modernity is a tool to perpetuate coloniality. in order to disrupt the effects of modernity on the motherline, we must first understand what modernity is, define and name its presence in our ways of being and knowing, and reclaim what we have lost, by finding, remending, and carrying forward the stories of our mothers and grandmothers. my great-grandmother was performing an act of resistance as she burned herbs, stirred liquids to a salve in her double boiler, and soaked leaves in oils and homemade vodka to treat my grandmother. she carried on http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hehswbvtbyq global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 practices that are actively disrupted through licensing of doctors, midwives and nurses, and laws that take the means of production and connection to the land away from people. she was one of the migrants to california from the south who organized and petitioned to have her communities zoned for livestock during the 1940s and early 1950s in an area known as the iron triangle in richmond california, where she settled after living in san francisco’s hunter’s point neighborhood. this act of resistance to disruption of ways of life that created multiple dependencies of families on colonized ways of life impacted several generations that followed her walk on earth. she saw her sense of her own power as deeply connected to earth. she fought to make sure that this connection was retained. her efforts to maintain this connection were met with multiple attacks through colonization. the 1950s emerged as a time when mass production of baby formula disrupted breastfeeding practices. science labs were used to test how to mass produce powder-based formulas that could be sold across the country, and eventually, across the world. commoditization of breastfeeding was another tool to sever the motherline and to undermine folkways that maintained breastfeeding practices amongst indigenous peoples. indigenous breastfeeding practices were supported with knowledge of maternal and infant health. foods and herbs and lay midwifery supported knowledge of digestive health, mental/emotional stability, and reproductive health. the rise in pharmaceutical corporations during this time period successfully profited through this metaphysical catastrophe, severing a connection between my grandmother and mother. my mother’s story is tightly interwoven with this advance in industrialization. once my grandmother left the womb created by the safety and sanctity within my greatgrandmother’s home, she was told by her doctor that breastmilk, and by extension her breasts, were too unsanitary for my mother to receive nourishment from. she was not the only black woman to be told this. home births were also severely restricted or outlawed in various states (matthews & zadak, 1991). this massive campaign disrupted generations of breastfeeding practices within the black community, and the natural remedies that support this practice along with it. “they gave me a pill and said i had to take it immediately to dry up my milk. i listened to what my doctor said and took that pill. it worked. i couldn’t nurse your mother after that.” she was sick on that formula, but we gave it to her anyway. mama would cry about it. she cried. i remember that.” this disruption resulted in a persistent lack of support for mothers born into my generation who chose to breastfeed in my family. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 my mother’s story began with two generations of women being divided in a community context where the ways that women’s bodies and connections to spirit were disrupted to “improve health outcomes” of infants. my mother was born small and vulnerable to death taking her. my greatgrandmother foretold it, and based her work as a treater and catcher to ensure my mother’s survival. she did not follow the prescriptions of doctors for her first granddaughter. as she told it, “i followed what my god told me to do. i followed his will”. my mother lived. my grandmother recalled how my great-grandmother “oiled her up every day with her creams and prayed and laughed and sang with her. she never cried or was sad.” i asked my greatgrandmother to recall those stories, and she would never say she was saving my mother’s life, she said she was never meant to die that way. her spirit wanted to stay, so they did what was necessary to make sure she did. the doctors called it a miracle, inexplicable, even. my great-grandmother called it “divine order”. she never asked permission from a doctor to treat her granddaughter. she was part of a group of activist lay midwives in the south, west and the north who fought against the limitations of medical practice and training to include their knowledge of spirit and its relationship to material existence and their divine assignment to act as a bridge between two worlds, distinct and connected. my mother’s choices to be centered in herself as a woman and mother came from a conflicted place. the values that informed her choices were from these two strands of reality: one that valued women as centered in a place of power and transference between the world of spirit and material existence to facilitate community healing, and the other that valued the ways we are forced to define progress and advancement that support the propagation of the power structures that disrupt and dismantle that centered place of power. my mother’s story and the story of the village mother’s story is the story of the village torn apart by metaphysical catastrophe, disconnecting from the motherline, and looking for solutions using, in audre lorde’s words, “the master’s tools” which “will not dismantle the master’s house”. this dual existence, between the coloniality that we live and raise our children in and the world we left behind, are not reconcilable. the village has to recognize this is indeed the world we live in, one designed for “mentacide”. as we reflect on the stories and past of our peoples, our villagers, we have to determine not only that these stories are no longer relevant to our current reality, but how and why they are no longer relevant. can we still hear our elder’s stories? the master’s tools of modernity/coloniality deafen our ears to our elder’s stories. they instruct us that these stories and ways of knowing have no place in a “modern” society. they are treated as fossilized relics that reflect a people and time that are not instructive to our lives today. the motherline is shaped by what we embrace here and now, as praxis for the village and its continuity. we have all been willing to leave the world of our elders behind, defining their stories as only being relevant to our past within our villages and not relevant to our current and present realities. this must change with us. my mother marched forward in a world largely unfamiliar in many ways. with strong women and men in her home, raised by her grandmother and mother, father, grandfather and extended family, the worlds that existed outside of these highly defined spaces were peripheral to her knowledge of herself. she was encouraged to venture to the world less known to her, less known to her spirit and its ways of knowing. she left a tightly woven community and found her dark skin, hand woven and machine sewn clothes, and her lack of interest in the mundane to be at odds and oftentimes supplanted to ways http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 of thinking and knowing that invalidated her and her unfolding story. there was no road map for her to navigate this schism. her bouts of depression went unrecognized, undiagnosed and untreated. she was not able to reclaim her personhood as different from her inability to navigate the foreign world she encountered daily. the two worlds were forced to be fused together: her spiritual self that exuded confidence, wit, the gift as a seer, ritual singer, and masterful craftswoman with the woman navigating the external material world an asthmatic, diagnosed as bipolar, survivor of rape which led to my conception, and domestic violence, christian, and left this world by taking her own life at age 59. peace and light to her spirit. my mother gave birth to me at the age of 18. my mother’s journey from the spirit world, into material existence, and back to the spirit world is a cycle that affects my journey as her daughter and carrier of her story to the world. i have to navigate these same two worlds, often in conflict and at odds with one another. our existence as casualties of a war waged through metaphysical catastrophe and mentacide forces this negotiation. our mothers’ navigational abilities help us to know and understand what it means to be centered in our sense of power, where it truly lies, and to recognize it and utilize it for what it is. without knowledge of my mother’s story and her mother’s story, i would mistake strength as contextualized or framed as tools for colonization. those tools serve to disrupt our motherline and displace my motherline power and elevate my ability to have successfully competed for and won a “good” job, “good” education, and material resources as evidence of my power and center of transformation. colonization has served to confuse and distort our sense of centeredness as mothers, claiming that our centeredness lies in a patriarchal system and within the industrial complex that mechanizes our existence to ourselves, our bodies, our very humanity. our ability to work in jobs as cogs in wheels of an oppressive system of domination is not where the center of our power lies as mothers. our ability to be free from the ways in which our bodies and spirits work together to facilitate our ways of knowing and being, is not true freedom. decolonization of our village will not be complete without a critical examination of our displacement of mother’s power and place within our village. the continuity of the village depends upon it. to find and heal the motherline in our own families and communities, we face down the bitterness that comes with oppression, racism, isolation and metaphysical depravity. to apply motherline work in praxis, we must gather these strands, acknowledge their damage in all forms we experience it and activate our compassion, love, and connections to our past and present, to comb through the entanglements that ensnare our hopes and ability to love and engage in community care. we must offer the patience, love, and care it takes, as our mothers did when we sat between their legs late into the night as they combed our coils and curls. with our hands resting on their knees, our mothers would take the comb firmly in their hands and begin to comb our hair, from the tips, working slowly down to the roots. by starting at the tips, our mothers start at the place easiest to disentangle, and to comb through to the end. when working with mothers, children, and elders to re-establish our motherlines, we must start in a similar place, closest to the places in our ancestral memory we can reach. the stories we know and remember that remind us of the love and sense of community our families and homes do bring us. in her book on black love, hooks reminds us that these stories are indeed part of black community life, and should be unearthed and rediscovered to remind us that our communities are capable of providing us with love, care and support (hooks, 2000). she also reminds us that to heal strands of our family stories that reconnect us to a love ethic is also an http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://canyoumakeitfromscratch.blog/2019/02/02/happy-birthday-ma/ https://canyoumakeitfromscratch.blog/2019/02/02/happy-birthday-ma/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 act of resistance to coloniality (hooks, 1990, 2000). grace lee boggs also acknowledges the absence of love as part of activism work and shares her interest in and hope for the work currently being done to change this. she writes: however, since discovering that the personal is political, women activists have been abandoning the charismatic male, vertical, and vanguard party leadership patterns of the 1960s and creating more participatory, empowering, and horizontal kinds of leadership. instead of modeling their organizing on the lives of men outside the home for example, in the plant, or in the political arena they are beginning to model it on the love, caring, healing and patience that, along with an appreciation of diversity and of strengths and weaknesses, go into raising a family (boggs, 2013, p. 217). the motherline is an essential part of our learning and transmitting the inherited wisdom that supports the new vision of activist leadership boggs refers to. as motherline praxis further crystallizes the ways that we bring healing traditions of love and care that are community centered, we will begin to see clearly for ourselves how coloniality has attacked the core of our very being by destabilizing and undermining our relationship to love and its meaning to mothering and motherhood. we have been made to believe that our positionality as oppressed also compromises our capacity to give and receive love. by lifting up a love ethic as part of motherline praxis, we directly combat the metaphysical war being waged on our ability to love. without acknowledgement of a love ethic forming the foundation of restoration of the motherline, movements that support restoration of mothering practices in communities will risk losing an essential element that can and will fuel such efforts. we do not have to look to other cultures to find and define a love culture in our communities. as we comb to the roots of our motherline, we use love and community care as the means to recondition and satiate the strands of our motherline, healing the brittle and broken places that threaten to estrange mothers from daughters and mothers from their essential role in communities. the strands of the motherline will remain brittle, unhealthy, vulnerable to coloniality and destruction without it. sarason’s work on the creation of settings also acknowledges the very essential, yet often overlooked role of “local and social histories” (sarason, p. 141). as we lift up the contributions of the motherline to our family continuity, through prayers, marking of sacred spaces, family reunions or setting aside small plates of home cooked meals for departed ancestors on our dinner tables in acknowledgement of their presence among us, we ignite this idea of local and social history in a way that acknowledges that spark of divine that our foremothers left behind for us to carry with us, even as we eat meals together and reminisce and share loving memories together. with intention, these small acts to activate the connections we share with our departed ancestors bring their rightful presence and place into our families and our motherlines. ultimately, they inform our resistance and activism. as we work our way down the entangled strands, still combing to the roots, we continue to find patches that we know for sure no matter how softly or gently we attempt to comb them, we will feel pain. the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 process of decolonizing our villages can and will find hurt places in our hearts, homes, and relationships that require space for healing. re-centering our sacred practices in spaces where we are told they don’t belong is painful. coloniality ensures that pain is part of the process of decoloniality, challenging our ability to successfully resist. like those late evenings while getting my hair combed as a child or combing my own daughter’s hair, we know that if we choose to leave the tangles in place, they will only become more entangled and will make it harder for our comb, oils of love and community care, and patience to get through. to go around it is to go around an essential truth: to delay and defer the pain that we must go through does not lead to healing and resolution. even when our patience is threadbare, we need to persist. we need to resist the call of modernity to abandon the journey we are taking to restore our motherlines. we have torchbearers that are helping to light our way when it grows dark, feed our wanting spirits when they are weary and tired. the torchbearers are pairing motherline work with activism, much in the way of my greatgrandmother, establishing healing spaces for black women to learn the ways of our traditions as healers bridging work that combines spiritual practices with activism. we can begin with our own families, our own ancestral memories, at our own dinner tables, creating places of honor for our ancestors, serving our intention to honor our own resistance and activism, and reclaim our motherline. references boggs, g. l., & kurashige, s. (2012). the next american revolution: sustainable activism for the twenty-first century. univ of california press. edelman, hope. mothers daughters: the legacy of loss. new york: delta, 1994 hooks, b. (1990). homeplace: a site of resistance. hooks, b. (2000). feminist theory: from margin to center. pluto press. hurston, z. (2018). barracoon: the story of the last "black cargo", edited and with an introduction by deborah g. plant amlstad/harpercollins. maldonado-torres, n. (2016). outline of ten theses on coloniality and decoloniality. fondation frantz fanon. mathews, j. j., & zadak, k. (1991). the alternative birth movement in the united states: history and current status. women & health, 17(1), 39-56. o'reilly, a. (1998). mothers, daughters, and feminism today: empowerment, agency, narrative, and motherline. canadian woman studies, 18(2). sarason, s. b. (1972). the creation of settings and the future societies. brookline books. wright, b. e. (1985). the psychopathic racial personality and other essays. chicago: third world press. http://www.gjcpp.org/ developing an undergraduate community psychology program in a graduate institution christopher b. keys, olya glantsman, susan d. mcmahon, and leonard a. jason1 author biographies: chris keys, began teaching community psychology to undergraduates at the university of illinois at chicago in 1972. in the mid-70s he helped develop the applied psychology major at uic with an introduction to community psychology course as the gateway. in the 1990s he created an undergraduate community psychology research course. at depaul chris taught undergraduate community psychology, developed a service-learning component for the course and mentored graduate students who taught that course. as described in this article, while department chair he initiated and supported faculty conversations leading to the creation of the concentration in community psychology in the depaul psychology undergraduate curriculum. chris studies the positive community psychology of disability and empowerment. he is a fellow and past president of scra and a recipient of the scra distinguished contribution to theory and research award. he has presented and discussed innovative ways to teach and develop programs in conferences, colloquia and consultations for five decades. olya glantsman, earned her doctorate in community psychology and a graduate certificate in women’s and gender studies from depaul university in 2013. she is currently the director/coordinator of their undergraduate concentration in community psychology and a visiting professor in depaul’s psychology department. she is currently working on a free open access introduction to community psychology textbook. dr. glantsman has been active in the society for community research and action (apa division 27) since 2002. among others, she is a co-chair of the practice council, an editor of the community psychologist’s the community practitioner column, and a member of the council of education programs. her research interests include cultural diversity, improving academic environments for students and faculty, community psychology values, and teaching of psychology. susan dvorak mcmahon, is associate dean for research and faculty development for the college of science and health and professor of clinicalcommunity and community psychology at depaul university. she has held many national leadership positions within the society for community research and action (scra; division 27 of apa), including president, regional network coordinator, and council of education chair, and she is a fellow and recipient of the outstanding educator award. dr. mcmahon has over 80 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters and over 197 presentations; her scholarly work has been cited over 5,500 times according to google scholar. her research focuses on teacher and student 1 depaul univeristy global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 experiences with violence, school climate, risk and protective factors at multiple ecological levels, school-based intervention and evaluation, and enhancing our educational systems. leonard a. jason, is currently a professor of psychology at depaul university and the director of the center for community research. his interests are in public policy, community building, evaluating recovery homes for those with substance use disorders, reducing stigma for those with chronic health conditions (i.e.. chronic fatigue syndrome and myalgic encephalomyelitis), and preventing violence among urban youth. jason is a former president of the division of community psychology of the american psychological association (apa). he has served as the vice president of the international american association of cfs/me, and also served as the chairperson of the research subcommittee of the u.s. jason has edited or written 28 books and has published over 800 articles and 100 book chapters. he has served on the editorial boards of ten psychological journals, and has received over $36,900,000 in federal research grants. recommended citation: keys, c. b., glantsman, o., mcmahon, s. d., & jason, l. a. (2019). developing an undergraduate community psychology program in a graduate institution. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(2), 1-19. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ https://outlook.depaul.edu/owa/ https://outlook.depaul.edu/owa/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 developing an undergraduate community psychology program in a graduate institution abstract this article provides an overview of the undergraduate degree program in community psychology at depaul university. the recommendation of an undergraduate student ignited latent student and faculty interest. a program-bigger than a course but smaller than a major-was developed in 2005-2006 and was first offered in 2006-2007. subsequently, this community concentration has been well received by students and has grown to an enrollment of about 20-25 students annually (glantsman, mcmahon, & njoku, 2015). graduates have gone onto positions in community and public agencies, graduate school in community psychology and related fields, and other relevant contexts. we highlight the three primary phases in the history of the community concentration: (1) building upon a receptive institutional context, (2) creating the program, and (3) developing learning opportunities. for each phase we identify focal elements important to its success. we consider their transferability to other educational settings that include both undergraduate and graduate community psychology educational opportunities. we note the accomplishments, challenges and strengths of the program. finally, we offer this case study to encourage faculty in other educational institutions to develop more and better learning opportunities for undergraduate students in community psychology. for some time, community psychologists have been concerned that undergraduate students typically have few opportunities to learn about or focus in depth on community psychology. few introductory psychology texts mention this subfield (bauer, glantsman, hochberg, turner, & jason, 2017; cook, 1987; douglas, glantsman, brown, lemke, johnson-hakim, wolff, & meissen, 2014), and the preponderance of undergraduate psychology curricula lack even a course in community psychology. these two special issue of the global journal of community psychology practice (gjcpp) addresses this concern by showcasing a number of ways to educate undergraduate students about community psychology. this manuscript tells the story of the creation and development of a multi-course community psychology concentration for psychology majors at depaul university, an institution with deep roots in the values and teaching of community psychology, especially at the graduate level. as a field, we need to grow our undergraduate and graduate educational programs (mcmahon, jimenez, bond, wolfe, & ratcliffe, 2015), teach more community psychology courses, reach more students, graduate more community psychologists, and raise the visibility of community psychology (jimenez, sánchez, mcmahon, & viola, 2016). we submit that an important way to educate more undergraduate students about community psychology and grow the field is to take advantage of the settings, resources, experiences, and talents of graduate community psychology programs and other resources on campus and in the community. we offer the specifics from depaul’s efforts as what we hope is a constructive example of the development of an undergraduate community psychology program. to convey the initial phases of this process, we focus on three important periods: the receptive institutional http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 context, the creation of the program, and the building of the curriculum and related learning opportunities over time. for each phase, we identify focal elements and consider their transferability to other graduate and undergraduate settings. we also consider the accomplishments, challenges and strengths of the program to date. we underscore the importance of graduate programs in community psychology investing in the future by developing greater undergraduate opportunities to learn about our field. building upon a receptive institutional context: phase one mission and values of depaul university seymour sarason’s (1972) insightful account of the creation of settings highlighted the period before a new setting was created. he called that prehistory period “before the beginning,” and by naming it so distinctively, sought to convey the importance of what preceded the creation of a setting in subsequently shaping it. in that spirit, first, we will describe the focal elements of the ecological niche from which our community psychology concentration at depaul university emerged. one focal element of this institutional context is the mission and values of depaul university. the university is named for the roman catholic priest st. vincent de paul, who was dedicated to serving the poor in france in the seventeenth century. the university’s mission and value of service are compatible with the goals of community psychology. the vincentian religious order founded depaul over 120 years ago to provide higher education to immigrants and others at society’s margins. depaul’s vincentian mission still focuses on social justice, promoting inclusion and community outreach to underrepresented populations from diverse backgrounds who make up more than one third of the student body. the university values developing positive relationships with community-based organizations and creating service learning opportunities for our students to engage with and learn from the community. the values, scholarship, and action orientation of community psychology provide an ideal fit with the vincentian mission. this mission tends to attract students and faculty with an orientation toward social justice, service, and community engagement, values held by many institutions of higher education presently. enhancing coverage of community psychology in undergraduate curricula can advance university missions. by graduating students who have developed community psychological competencies in real-world settings through fieldwork and service learning experiences, universities can increase the number of effective, collaborative contributors to social justice in increasingly global and diverse work settings (mcmahon et al., 2015). experience and knowledge regarding educational programs and the local setting having experience and knowledge regarding educational programs and the local setting is a second focal element in the institutional context that can facilitate the development of new programs (cf., keys, mcmahon, gooden, back, & digangi, 2009). over the years, a number of faculty have played instrumental roles in the development and maintenance of community psychology education at depaul university. ed zolik was an early clinical community psychologist who initiated the community psychology agenda at depaul university. in 1967, he transformed our parttime evening master’s psychology program into a full-time doctoral program with an emphasis on clinical community psychology, making it one of the oldest doctoral programs of any sort in community psychology. another early development was the offering of community-related graduate (jason, 1977) and undergraduate coursework. beginning in 1978, an undergraduate internship program http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 was begun at depaul university (jason, & smith, 1980), which leonard a. jason and ernie doleys later developed into a human services program. this program within the psychology major prepared undergraduate students for further education and work in clinical and other kinds of applied psychology. it consisted of both coursework in applied psychology and field work with an emphasis on intensive supervision and training for helping people in need. a broad program, it included some material and experience relevant to community mental health and community psychology which were closely aligned at that time (jason, 1981); however, it did not have an identifiable track focused on community psychology. consequently, it addressed the community interests of some students; others took courses based on social justice, sociology, and other community psychology values in other social science departments. in brief, from this experience the faculty involved learned how to establish a new curricular program as part of the psychology major. faculty opportunities for students to learn about community psychology in the 1980s, the core group of clinical community faculty included ed zolik, leonard a. jason, lavome robinson, rod watts, and pat tolan. one of the strengths of the program was a commitment to diversity among its graduate students. in the 1990s and 2000s, other core members of the clinical community faculty included gary harper, susan mcmahon, gayle iwamasa, brigida hernandez, bernadette sanchez, patrick fowler, nathan todd and chris keys. these faculty individually provided many opportunities for undergraduate students to learn about community psychology. their active research groups and related projects were another focal element in the depaul ecology receptive to community psychology for undergraduate students. the faculty and participating doctoral students involved undergraduate students in community studies as research assistants, independent study students, honors students and/or volunteers. clinical community psychology faculty and doctoral students actively mentored undergraduate students with community psychology interests. faculty also taught an introductory undergraduate course in community psychology, sometimes with a service learning component. they also often introduced community psychology and its values in other courses they taught. in 2000, joseph ferrari and leonard a. jason launched a doctoral program in community psychology because some students wanted an in-depth education in community psychology. they did not apply to the clinical-community program because they were not interested in becoming clinicians. some students in the clinical community program found it challenging to focus on the community aspects of the program due to the overwhelming commitments of clinical training. also, there were several faculty across the psychology department who had community psychological interests (mcmahon, jason, & ferrari, 2010). over the years, the doctoral program in community psychology has accepted about 3 students per year and has grown to include a number of interdisciplinary faculty from other subdisciplines of psychology and from other academic units on campus who do, or are interested in, community-based research. faculty leaders in community psychology nationally and locally the community and clinical community psychology graduate programs at depaul university were successful prior to the founding of the undergraduate program. among faculty and former students, 7 from depaul university have been elected presidents of the society for community research and action, 4 prior to the initiation of the community concentration (g. anne http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 bogat, jean hill, leonard a. jason, chris keys) and 3 following the launch of the program (susan mcmahon, brad olson, susan torres harding). joseph ferrari has been editor of the journal of prevention and intervention in the community for over two decades. community psychologists also have held leadership positions at depaul which have helped foster and sustain the community program. leonard a. jason led the largest research institute on campus, the center for community research. joseph ferrari, susan mcmahon, and bernadette sanchez all served as directors of the community psychology doctoral program. chris keys served as psychology department chair during the initial development of the program and susan mcmahon supported the community program as department chair following its initial development. in sum, the institutional mission, the four decades of experience and knowledge from developing doctoral education in clinical community and community psychology and a related undergraduate program were important elements. furthermore, many research, course and mentoring opportunities for undergraduate students with community psychology graduate students and faculty, and faculty leaders in community psychology nationally and locally also contributed meaningfully. all these focal elements interacted to create an institutional context favorably disposed to the development of greater educational opportunities for undergraduate students in community psychology. “before the beginning” there was fertile soil for planting the idea of an undergraduate program in community psychology at depaul university. transferability of insights regarding institutional context in considering how this experience may transfer to and have implications for other educational settings, we suggest that just as depaul had no community psychology faculty or program at one point in time, so may other institutions. to begin, identify qualities of a university and an academic unit that may encourage the development of a community psychology undergraduate program or other related program. it is helpful to examine the match between community psychology values and those of the host institution and academic unit. often there are some. to be specific, many universities, colleges and departments have social justice, scientific grounding, community health, diversity, service learning, and/or community engagement as central values or at least strategic directions. thus, community psychology values may resonate with the mission of many institutions, graduate and undergraduate, including those who presently have no programs in the field. also, consider the importance of faculty to any community program and the limited number of community psychology faculty, if any, in many academic departments. it can be worthwhile to identify other faculty and staff on campus inside and outside the psychology department with community psychology training and/or interests. faculty and staff from outside of the psychology department may become affiliated faculty for a community program and/or may teach a course in the program, perhaps as part of their existing role. they may have relevant experience with program development and leadership, and/or may be involved in community projects that can offer learning opportunities for students. creating the program: phase two based on the distinctive, yet replicable, institutional context of depaul that arose from the previous four decades, faculty set out to create a new undergraduate program in community psychology as the second phase in this program development. given the historical context, one issue was how would a community concentration complement the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 existing human services program in the undergraduate curriculum? when the human services program was developed in 1980, there were fewer than 20 students enrolled (jason, 1984). by the early 2000s, there were more than 60. since the classes were initially planned to provide intensive supervision and training, larger classes made accomplishing this goal more difficult. moreover, the human services program had no electives for students to choose, rather, a full set of required courses. the community faculty and the director of the human services program thought a new community psychology program would complement and relieve some crowding in our human services program. those students interested in improving individual health and well-being could receive training that emphasized one-to-one approaches through the human services program. those interested in more systems-level approaches to social justice and change and/or greater flexibility in selecting electives could find an intellectual and action home in the community psychology concentration. focal elements in creating this community program included: student energy and interest, the mission and goals of the program, and faculty engagement, each of which built on the others. student energy and interest an initial focal element was the energy and interest of students, which were evident before the beginning of the community program. by the early to mid-2000s, having taken the introduction to community psychology course, a growing number of undergraduate students at depaul told the community faculty about their interests in community psychology. in 2005, one student wrote: [reading articles on community psychology] i was sure i had found the perfect blend of science and compassion. it is from this context that i respectfully suggest that the depaul psychology department develop an undergraduate focus in community psychology. i have met many undergraduate students with a commitment to social justice that feel isolated from the psychology department, and i am also aware of many students who have never considered psychology as a valid means of achieving social change. the creation of this focus would not only attract more students into the field, but i also believe it would increase depaul’s stature as one of the only universities in the united states (to my knowledge) to offer this program to undergraduates . this student prepared a full letter requesting stronger undergraduate opportunities in community psychology and gave it to chris keys, his introduction to community psychology instructor. the mission and goals of the community psychology program the second element of creating the program focused on its mission and goals. the mission of the community program was to enhance undergraduate opportunities to learn about and develop competencies in community psychology. the goals included: 1) offering distinctive education in community psychology, emphasizing large scale prevention of mental and physical problems, program evaluation, and consultation; 2) enabling students to develop research and practice competencies as community researchers and advocates for social justice and empowerment; 3) actively illustrating to students and community organization staff the relevance of academic work in applied settings; 4) assisting students in building and/or applying technical, communication and interpersonal skills in a work http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 environment; 5) strengthening students’ confidence in their abilities to function effectively in a professional setting; and 6) enhancing students’ opportunities for future success as graduate students and/or employees in many fields that value community psychology knowledge, competencies and experience. the interest and engagement of students and faculty gave rise to the vision embodied in the mission and goals of the community program. in turn, the mission and goals further mobilized student and faculty involvement in the development of the program. as approved, this new community program aimed to instantiate the mission and goals articulated above. it was designed to educate students in research methodologies to be applied in social and community interventions. it sought to prepare students to be community professionals in the public and not-for-profit sectors working with diverse populations, in terms of gender, ethnicity, race, disability, sexual orientation, etc. it aimed to provide students with educational and practical skills for scientific and leadership development as community advocates for social justice and empowerment of those at the margins. it included both theoretical and applied components, and the experience culminated with a community internship/fieldwork experience. finally, a program in community psychology enabled students to develop the skills to work in collaborative ways with community agencies, not-for-profit groups, and grass-root organizations, as well as to do graduate study in community psychology and related disciplines. faculty engagement a third focal element for creating the program was faculty engagement. this engagement included the faculty support for and participation in the development of the program proposal. when chris keys shared the student letter with the community psychology doctoral program faculty, they were excited by the request and decided to propose an undergraduate program in community psychology. however, faculty were already committed to their research, teaching and service responsibilities and had modest time to devote to program development. fortunately, olya glantsman was then an advanced doctoral student in depaul’s community psychology program. she became inspired by the vision for the community concentration and took a leadership role in its creation. with leonard a. jason, she did background research and helped formulate the proposal for the program. in this effort she was also supported by other community psychology faculty from inside and outside the psychology department, including douglas cellar, joseph ferrari, harvette grey, gary harper, brigida hernandez, gayle iwamasa, chris keys, susan mcmahon, w. lavome robinson, bernadette sanchez, and midge wilson. the leadership of the community psychology faculty in the approval process also helped bring the proposed community program to life. like many, if not all, institutions of higher education, at depaul university obtaining approval for a new program is a multi-level process that requires formal endorsement from several parts of the organizational hierarchy. as community psychology program director, susan mcmahon along with leonard jason led the effort to obtain approval from the community psychology faculty and then from the psychology department faculty. these faculty and chris keys as department chair next sought and obtained approval from the curriculum committee within the college of liberal arts and sciences and finally the university curriculum committee. in order to gain the necessary approvals at each level, there were presentations and discussions, input was http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://condor.depaul.edu/~jferrari/ http://condor.depaul.edu/~bhernan3 http://condor.depaul.edu/~bhernan3 http://condor.depaul.edu/~bhernan3 http://condor.depaul.edu/~mwilson global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 provided and feedback responded to, and modifications were made. this process took most of an academic year (2005-2006) to complete. in sum, the first focal element most relevant to creating a community program was the energy and interest of students who became advocates for and were involved in the creation of the program. the second focal element involved articulating a compelling mission and goals developed from the energy and interest of the students. third, faculty engagement to support the proposed program’s development and effect its approval was also a crucial element. transferability of insights regarding student interest in considering how this experience may transfer to another college or university, among other things it is helpful to consider who are the students with community interests and what do they do to pursue those interests. at depaul, some took classes about social and community issues in other social science departments like sociology; others were involved with university social action organizations, community settings and social change. identifying these students and others from psychology courses, then recruiting them into a community psychology class if one exists, or a relevant topical seminar or an independent study if one does not, can be the start of something bigger. also seeking out talented undergraduate students with community interests to join a community psychology faculty member’s research team, or to take part in a community project, can help build a community of those interested in community psychology. then members of this community, faculty and students, may take the next step to develop or advance community psychology coursework, community research, and fieldwork sites appropriate to their educational setting. building learning opportunities in the community concentration: phase three once the community concentration was approved, olya glantsman and the community psychology faculty began to build learning opportunities for students, the third primary phase to consider in program development. focal elements for building these learning opportunities included developing the courses for the core curriculum, providing strong mentoring, evolving the electives offered, and using local resources and opportunities. developing core courses developing core courses meant planning and conducting an advanced course in community psychology and a two-course field experience/internship. each of these courses was adapted from an existing approved course not offered regularly in order to avoid becoming engaged in the substantial bureaucratic effort associated with establishing a new course in the university catalogue. also, the existing introductory community psychology course was modified to prepare students for the other core courses in the program. students begin the program with the gateway course of community psychology. this introductory course has had a long history of being taught in the psychology department given faculty interest and engagement in the field. students are introduced to the basic concepts of the field, such as valuing human diversity, largely through textbooks, lectures, and class exercises. exams are content-driven to ensure that students are learning and retaining the material. students are also introduced to empirical research through an annotated bibliography assignment as special emphasis is placed on the value and importance of empirical evidence and grounding all work in research. students learn to search for, critically analyze, and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 write about peer-reviewed articles in preparation for the final project, which also includes an activism component. this project is designed to help students make key connections between community psychology theory and research and real-world social issues, such as systemic racism. working in groups, students present their final projects to their classmates at the end of the term. for example, recently the presentations included issues of domestic violence, reducing anxiety levels on college campuses, childhood literacy, and feminine hygiene among the homeless. not long ago, the final assignment was slightly adjusted. students still worked in small groups; however, instead of students picking a topic of interest themselves, each group was matched with a local non-profit agency. in collaboration with the partnering organization, students identified an issue of shared interest, reviewed psychology scholarly empirical evidence related to the issue, and presented the literature review to their partners in class. students focused on a variety of topics including homelessness among young women, cultural competence among incarcerated youth, service learning in chicago public middle schools, community advocacy, lack of opportunities for employment and childcare for low-income mothers, housing issues affecting formerly incarcerated individuals, indigenous healing practices, and spirituality and support for cancer patients. since the beginning of the program, these class projects typically have been centered around low-income communities of color in chicago. in addition to the existing introductory community psychology course, 3 courses were adapted for the community concentration: an advanced community psychology course (principles of field research and action) and a two-course internship sequence (field work in community research and action i & ii). typically, about 15-20 students are enrolled in each of these three courses, which are offered once a year. principles of field research and action builds on the introduction to the field as the second course in the core of the community psychology undergraduate program. students read peerreviewed articles by a wide range of community psychologists with a focus on the field’s values, history, current theory, research, and practice. students meet community psychologists from diverse backgrounds including immigrants, people of color, academics and practitioners, and learn about their community psychological work and perspectives through their lectures. among other topics, the students are introduced to basic program evaluation and consultation skills. this course also seeks to prepare students for their fieldwork and relatedly make them more marketable for whatever they decide to do after they receive their undergraduate degree, whether a job or graduate school. among other course sessions, this preparation for the future includes a lecture on graduate school application, a visit from graduate students representing both clinical-community and community ph.d. programs at depaul, a curriculum vita assignment, and a visit from the career center representative focusing on resume writing and the center’s services available to the students before and after graduation. to further illustrate how the course helps students develop community competencies and thereby become more marketable, we describe one of the assignments in detail from principles of field research and action, the organizational profile, which assists with these objectives. organizational profile. for the organizational profile, each student is required to choose a nonprofit organization or a research project of interest to him/her. this assignment facilitates internship search and selection, which may be at a community agency or in a community psychology research project team. to some extent the assignment parallels the process of searching for http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 graduate schools and jobs. students are required to visit the community agency/research project and collect information about that community organization or research team. this information may include the relevant mission, substantive emphases, current programs, physical surroundings, ease of access via public transportation, attitudes of staff, and need for interns, and other salient setting specifics. they compose a profile of the site (e.g., what is its organizational chart, where does its funding come from, etc.). students also conduct an interview (at least 30 minutes) with a member of the community organization or research team. in addition, they describe the social issues addressed by the organization/team (e.g., employment discrimination) and the specific problem/social issue in which they are personally interested in (e.g., reducing unemployment for people of color with invisible disabilities). they reflect on what they liked or did not like about the organization/team and what they learned in the process. this report also explores how, if they were to work with the organization, their experiences would relate to community psychology including what they have learned in class to date. the final aspect of this assignment includes a brief literature search and review on the topic related to the organization/research team they have chosen. the objectives of this assignment are to increase knowledge, to develop rudimentary organizational entry competencies, and to enable students to apply the concepts, methods, and issues discussed in class. students practice searching the empirical literature and they review and prepare for engaging with their internship site. further, this process provides experience relevant for selection, preparation, and engagement with a potential graduate program or job. as noted above, a major emphasis in the second course in the community concentration, principles of field research and action, is to prepare the students for the field work sequence typically taken in the senior year as a two-quarter internship. this 22-week course sequence engages students more deeply into community psychology. each week involves 6-8 hours at the internship and also a class meeting. the class meetings provide students with opportunities to share their experiences with their peers, learn from one another, and discuss substantive issues associated with work in the field of community psychology. they also allow students and the instructor to recognize and, if necessary, address issues that may arise at their individual sites. building on the organizational profile assignment, students identify, appraise and select an internship site, which helps prepare them for finding future graduate schools and/or work positions. this site selection is made with each student’s career path in mind. as an example, many students have interned at the center for community research at depaul university, where students have been involved in one of three major projects: (1) stigma reduction research with a chronic illness known as chronic fatigue syndrome and myalgic encephalomyelitis, (2) evaluation of the effects of community building work with recovery homes to help those with substance use disorders of different races and ethnicities re-integrate into the community, and (3) violence prevention programs for youth, especially youth of color, within the chicago public schools. these projects are like most fieldwork in that they typically involve low-income participants of color and/or issues of poverty and race/ethnicity. this fieldwork sequence enables students to apply their academic learning in a community setting as they engage in hands-on experiences, typically in a setting that is dealing with the consequences of social inequities and is promoting social justice. students have the opportunity to develop their community research and/or community http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 intervention competencies. another aim of the two fieldwork courses is to strengthen students’ confidence in their abilities and critical thinking skills to function effectively in a professional setting. every assignment is designed to make students more perceptive consumers of knowledge and/or help them move closer to their future careers (e.g., interview a community psychologist; attend and assess a society for community research and action’s council or interest group call). students also work with their site supervisors in identifying the organization’s/project’s needs and creating a tangible product that fulfills those needs. some examples of these products may include a volunteer training manual, a program effectiveness survey, a workshop curriculum, or an informational video. the final project for the course includes an individual powerpoint presentation for the class, which becomes the basis of a poster presented at depaul’s annual psychology night conference. one of the goals of the in-class presentation is to help students practice their “elevator speech” about their internship experience in preparation for future graduate school or job interviews. extensive mentoring in addition to developing core courses, the second focal element of building learning opportunities is extensive mentoring of students in the community psychology program. the director, olya glantsman, serves as a mentor to virtually all students in the program. she helps them think through their future goals and develop their skill set so they can achieve them. she writes letters of recommendation and fields phone calls from prospective faculty and employers to help students gain admittance to graduate programs and obtain positions in community and public agencies. moreover, students may also receive mentoring support from other community psychology faculty in whose research teams they participate, from community psychology doctoral students who supervise their research contributions on these teams, and/or from field supervisors in community internship settings. for example, one student shyly approached a faculty member who supervised her research team about writing a letter of recommendation to a m.a. program to which she planned to apply. the faculty member asked to review her full record and discussed her goals in some depth with her. the faculty member then explained to the student that she had an exemplary undergraduate record not only in her research team but overall. she could apply for doctoral education if she was so inclined. the student then raised her sights, applied to a top community psychology ph.d. program, and recently obtained her doctoral degree. given the small footprint of the field of community psychology, mentoring and other assistance is helpful, and in some instances necessary, to obtain maximum benefit from the valuable knowledge and competencies learned. in our experience, mentoring has been very useful for those in the community concentration. evolution of the electives a third focal element of building learning opportunities is the evolution of the elective courses. since 2006 as the program has developed, the elective courses have been an important area for flexibility and innovation. at the outset four courses were mandated in addition to the core courses, and were elective in name only. then as students made clear their variety of interests, faculty created a longer list of possible elective courses. over time, faculty realized the relevance of more psychology courses for students with community psychology interests. yet the list of electives was still too restrictive to give students the flexibility many needed to pursue their interests. now we have adopted a more individualized approach; students may choose any four advanced courses offered in the psychology department. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 faculty increased the flexibility of elective selection to respect each student’s diverse background and future career interests. in terms of innovation, in 2017-18 the growing interest in understanding trauma led to the creation of two elective courses, the psychology of trauma and the psychology of disaster and crisis intervention, and therewith, a trauma track in the community concentration. there was some interest in developing a trauma program for our psychology major, and the community faculty advocated to build a trauma focus as part of our program as a first step. we are always looking for ways to enhance and grow the program, as well as meet student needs and provide them with skill sets and knowledge that will be useful to them as they engage in jobs or graduate study. as we have become aware of the pervasive influence of trauma on many, especially those at the margins of society, such as people of color, those with disabilities, refugees, different sexual orientations and women, we believe offering a trauma focus and courses as an option in the community concentration enhances the learning opportunities for students. for example, it provides substantive background for them to participate in faculty research teams that study trauma in community settings. the instructors of the trauma coursework are aware that many depaul undergraduates have experienced and/or witnessed traumatic events. in class instructors seek to create a supportive culture in which students are asked to respect one another, to be empathic and to selfdisclose appropriately. in the psychology of disaster and crisis intervention course, for example, class presentations and papers offer students the option of focusing on traumatic events with which they are familiar in their communities, but only if they choose to do so. those students who have psychological difficulty during the term are encouraged to seek help from professional counselors on campus or elsewhere. such a track and elective courses help prepare students for trauma-informed positions and graduate study. resources and opportunities available to all a fourth focal element that builds learning opportunities for students in the community concentration is the resources and opportunities available to all. these resources and opportunities are available to all psychology majors. some are especially relevant for those in the community program and all may be tailored to advance learning for students in the program. they include but are not limited to the chicago community settings, the steans center for service learning, alternative forms of participation on research teams, and research funding. chicago has a wealth of community settings, both not-for-profit and public agencies, that offer excellent field work experiences in a range of areas. initially the community program worked with the steans center for service learning at depaul, one of the largest service learning centers in american higher education. the steans center had working relationships with about 500 settings of all types in the chicago area at that time and could help students seeking an internship placement. the steans center helped students secure their field sites by identifying a subset of organizations that were good internship sites from which students could choose. this approach to seeking internships worked well in the early years. subsequently, the community concentration has seen benefit in students negotiating for their own internship, with support from the instructor for the two fieldwork courses. typically, students are more motivated, learn more and develop greater self-confidence when they obtain their own fieldwork sites with adequate support. other opportunities to meet the fieldwork requirement involve developing research http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 competencies through participating on a research team. research experiences can also be completed through taking an independent study course with a community faculty member, doing an honors research project, or volunteering for a research team. students may write an internal college or departmental student research grant or scra mini-grant to work on a research project with a faculty member or doctoral student or be hired as a research assistant on an internal or an external faculty grant. in sum, in the third phase of building learning opportunities, focal elements that promote program development are creating core courses, mentoring students, evolving electives, and taking advantage of other learning opportunities and resources. these elements grow and interact to sustain and strengthen the community concentration over time. transferability of insights regarding coursework innovation in terms of transferability, we recognize that adapting courses with modest enrollments may be challenging in some educational settings. we encourage some more general thought toward how to innovate to develop coursework. for example, if courses are difficult to establish or adapt, perhaps community fieldwork could become part of a broader, larger fieldwork course staffed at least in part by a community psychologist. moreover, the introductory community psychology course can be a gateway for those looking to pursue applied psychology more generally. gateway courses for broad programs usually attract significant enrollment. we also encourage the involvement of community psychology graduate students when possible to assist in teaching, mentoring and sharing information about other resources. the main messages regarding evolving electives and drawing on other resources are to stay tuned to relevant emerging student interests and developing fields of knowledge and to take advantage of the local strengths on and off campus. accomplishments, challenges, strengths and future directions accomplishments where are we now more than a decade since launching the community concentration? the accomplishments of the community program to date include increasing curricular access and breadth, educating many students and opening up new opportunities. depaul has increased its access to community psychology in its undergraduate curriculum both in terms of introducing more students to community psychology and in making programmatic, in-depth study of community psychology available to undergraduate students. in terms of increasing access to community psychology, the introductory course in community psychology had been taught for years prior to the creation of the community program. the frequency of this introductory community psychology course has increased over time, especially since the beginning of the community program. initially the course was offered only once per year, then twice per year; with the advent of interest leading to the community program it began to be given every quarter. then it was added during summer session, and now we offer two sections every quarter, one typically online, with about 40 in each section. by integrating this course into a program and having faculty and advanced doctoral students teach it more frequently, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of students who are introduced to the field of community psychology from 30 to over 250 annually. similarly, the number of students who have the in-depth experience of the community concentration has grown to about 20 annually, an increase from 8 in the first cohort. the program has a decade of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 graduates that now totals 150. the program seems to be particularly attractive to firstgeneration and students of color as these students are drawn to the field’s values, including empowerment and its emphasis on working with marginalized populations. estimates are that between 35% and 50% of each cohort are students of color and/or firstgeneration college students. the community program has opened opportunities for students to learn research, become acquainted with community agencies and thus be better prepared for graduate education and positions in community and public settings. many have gone on to top graduate programs in community psychology and related fields. a number now work in the chicago area or elsewhere in field settings and other community and public agencies. some examples of the various programs and schools that the students have entered include master’s programs at university of chicago, depaul, and university of illinois at chicago. students have entered various doctoral programs, including michigan state university, university of wisconsin, adler university, unc charlotte, and depaul. some specific examples of the students’ career paths include development coordinator in institutional giving at ann & robert h. lurie children’s hospital of chicago, a special education teacher at chicago public schools, research associate at the center on community research at depaul university, and participant in americorps and in teach for america programs. challenges while depaul’s community concentration has accomplished much, similar to any other undergraduate program, it is not without its challenges. for example, there are annual information campaigns about the program. community faculty and graduate students recruit promising undergraduates from diverse backgrounds in their classes and research groups. university staff familiar with the program recruit students of color with whom they work as part of intensive programs preparing these promising students for advanced degrees. nonetheless, many psychology majors, particularly transfer students, may not learn about the community program in time to complete the sequenced requirements during their junior and senior years. another challenge for students is balancing their varied senior year requirements while completing an internship in the field. in addition, internships can vary in terms of the responsiveness of the organization, the fit between the student and organization, and the quality of the student experience. the many benefits of the program, however, overshadow the challenges. community program evaluations indicate students reflect positively on their newly acquired skills. these include conceptualizing strategies to address social issues, building collaborative relationships with not-for-profit organizations, evaluating and utilizing research, and understanding how not-for-profits may use consulting and evaluation tools. in addition, students grow professionally in managing time and in finding and securing experiences. all of these talents are helpful to them in seeking relevant positions in community settings and in pursuing advanced degrees in community psychology and related fields. taking a step back from the community program to consider the larger context of the university, we see a number of macrochallenges that may affect the program going forward. as a university, depaul, like other institutions of higher learning, has experienced multiple changes in leadership in recent years, increasing expenses, revenue limitations, and increasing concerns over longer-term trends of fewer college-age individuals in the united states. consequently, there are pressures for the development of revenue-generating programs. as community psychology faculty are engaged in so many current initiatives http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 that we value, we worry that new revenue generation will be prioritized over sustaining the existing quality of academic programs. further, as the university develops additional new and innovative programs, we may find ourselves competing internally for majors. reductions in psychology majors and course credit hours taken may reduce our ability to maintain and grow faculty and important programs. fortunately, the introduction to community course (n=40 or so is comparable to or larger in size than other advanced courses in the psychology department. however, the advanced community course and the fieldwork sequence (n=15-20, while larger than the current undergraduate enrollment minimum, are smaller than typical undergraduate offerings and may need to be increased in size in the future to be sustainable. we have discussed a variety of ways to better market our program to increase growth and interest, as there are recommended strategies including building alliances across disciplines, using social media, and increasing visibility in undergraduate textbooks (jimenez et al., 2016. jason and colleagues (2018 are currently working on a free undergraduate open-access online community psychology textbook, which will likely generate additional interest in and growth of the field. strengths nonetheless, the undergraduate community concentration and the doctoral community psychology programs at depaul more generally have several strengths that will help us address concerns due in part to the valued place we occupy within our university. first, depaul university is a vincentian institution and driven by st. vincent de paul’s mission. saint vincent came from modest beginnings, yet grew his skills at connecting with others to facilitate significant systems-level change. he was instrumental in reforming the roman catholic church and organizing people to serve the poor in france in the 1600s. he went beyond the individual approach to create and sustain structures that serve the underserved. his goals, values, and approach were consistent with the values of community psychology. so, the work that we do at depaul university in community psychology represents a 21st century manifestation of the work of st vincent himself engaged in with communities. second, although our undergraduate and our doctoral program in community psychology are relatively new, our clinical community psychology doctoral program has strong beginnings in the 1960s. so, our long history of curricular development, program strengths, and faculty contributions are recognized as valuable and core to the university. third, our community and clinical community faculty have worked collaboratively and ascended to leadership positions within depaul and nationally. for example, as department chairs, chris keys and susan mcmahon were instrumental in increasing the frequency of offering the introduction to community psychology course. as a senior member of the depaul community, learnard jason has provided wise counsel in each stage of program development. finally, olya glantsman is a talented program director who has taken on whatever needs to be done and who prizes the success of students. she has been critical to all accomplishments of the program. in recognition of the efforts of depaul’s faculty in community psychology education at the doctoral and undergraduate levels, the society for community research and action honored depaul as the first recipient of the award for excellence in educational programs. as we look to the future, we need to be cognizant of new issues as they arise and work collaboratively to enhance our strengths and impact on the department, college, and university, the organizations and communities with which we work, and our field more broadly. for example, we are currently exploring the possibility of developing a combined 3+2 ba-ms degree: community psychology through social justice. we hope program development http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 initiatives such as this one will increase the number of students in our community concentration, introduce community psychology to a new set of students, and provide a niche program for those interested in efficiently completing a bachelors and masters degree. modifications and innovations to our various programs over time increase the relevance and accessibility of community psychology . thereby we can address student interests and prepare them for their next steps in their professional journeys. our recent hiring of outstanding early career faculty, megan greeson, molly brown, annie saw and ida salusky, is building a strong foundation for the future in areas of violence against women, homelessness, asian immigration and mental health, college students from underrepresented groups and latin american women and youth. future directions in closing, we consider the current status of community psychology and a future direction for growth. although the field of community psychology has maintained steady growth over the past five decades, we remain a relatively small field. our size puts us at risk of losing ground in academic settings. if we do not have doctoral programs, we will not be able to train the next generation of community psychologists. community psychologists in academic institutions have a wonderful opportunity to grow the field through creating undergraduate programs, specializations, and majors. ultimately, the number of talented applicants to community graduate programs and allies in community and public agencies is likely to grow. there is no shortage of jobs for community psychologists, yet most positions that are ideally suited to community psychologists are not advertised as such (mcmahon & wolfe, 2016; viola & glantsman, 2017). undergraduate programs can increase the visibility of our field, both in colleges and universities and in the field at large (bauer, glantsman, hochberg, turner, & jason, 2017). unfortunately, most universities do not have community psychology faculty, staff or courses, so they are missing a major gateway to attract students and grow the field. those of us with an undergraduate course and/or graduate programs in community psychology would be wise to enhance our focus on undergraduate education, even as those with graduate programs sustain that valuable focus (jimenez et al., 2016; mcmahon et al., 2015). that is, we need a “both-and” approach, rather than an “either-or” approach to program development. in broad strokes, the approach adopted here may be adapted and tailored to build upon strengths in both undergraduate teaching colleges and in graduate universities. undergraduate institutions need to consider the attractiveness of community engagement and social justice in their settings and creatively expand the opportunities for learning about community psychology to those with community curiosity. there are many avenues for graduate institutions to consider, taking into account their unique context, history, values, and future directions. the important point to keep in mind is that graduate programs in which community psychology plays a meaningful role likely have relevant resources. these programs typically have the faculty, research opportunities, graduate students and community ties to create rich undergraduate foci in community psychology. in fact, in this era of innovation in higher education, such graduate programs may be some of the settings particularly suited to creating undergraduate programs in community psychology. in parallel, undergraduate institutions of many sorts have community engagement and social justice aspirations and resources that may foster greater opportunities to learn about community psychology. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 today, depaul is one of the few universities, if perhaps not the only university, with both clinical community and community psychology doctoral programs and an undergraduate program in community psychology. we would like to be less distinctive in this regard and eagerly anticipate that faculty in other community psychology graduate programs and in undergraduate institutions will also develop and strengthen opportunities for undergraduate students to learn community psychology. we are proud of this accomplishment and what our program has been able to provide to the greater chicago metropolitan area and to the society for community research and action as well as beyond. yet we are humbled by the knowledge that social inequities, related systemic problems, and their sequelae persist, worsen and cry out for our attention. students, faculty, and community settings continue to value our undergraduate focus on community psychology at depaul. we hope others find our description of the primary phases, the accomplishments, the challenges, and the strengths helpful as they consider how to build their emphasis on undergraduate education in community psychology. references bauer, h.m., glantsman, o., hochberg, l., turner, c., & jason, l.a. (2017). community psychology coverage in introduction to psychology textbooks. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(3), 1-11. retrieved 27/12/2017, from http://www.gjcpp.org/. cook, j. r. (1987). undergraduate education in community psychology: a call for action. the community psychologist, 21, 4-6. douglas, j., glantsman, o., brown, k., lemke, m., johnson-hakim, s., wolff, t., & meissen, g. (2014). scra community psychology practice council: summit on community psychology practice ii. the community psychologist, 24(2), http://www.scra27.org/publications/tcp /tcp-pastissues/tcpspring2014/specialreport/ glantsman, o., mcmahon, s.d., & njoku, m.g.c. (2015). developing an undergraduate community psychology curriculum: a case example. in m.g.c. njoku, c.c. anieke, & p.j. mcdevitt (eds.). frontiers in education: advances, issues, and new perspectives. abic books, enugu, nigeria. jason, l. a. (1977). a seminar in community psychology. college student journal, 11, 60-65. jason, l. a. (1981). training undergraduates in behavior therapy and behavioral community psychology. behaviorists for social action, 3, 1-8. jason, l. a. (1984). developing undergraduates' skills in behavioral interventions. journal of community psychology, 12, 130-139. jason, l.a., belyaev-glantsman, o., mcmahon, s.d., olson, b., keys, c., balcazar, f., suarez-balcazar, y.,…hochberg, l. (2018, october). giving it away via liberation pedagogy: empowering students, sharing knowledge, and growing the field. roundtable presented at the midwest ecological community psychology conference. chicago, il. jason, l. a., & smith, t. (1980). the behavioral ecological matchmaker. teaching of psychology, 7, 116-117. jimenez, t. r., sánchez, b., mcmahon, s.d., & viola, j. (2016). a vision for the future http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 of community psychology education & training. american journal of community psychology. 58, 339-347. doi 10.1002/ajcp.12079. keys, c., mcmahon, s., gooden, a., back, l. & digangi, j. (june, 2009). organizational empowerment: theoretical developments and school profiles. presentation at the 12th biennial convention of the society for community research and action, montclair, n.j. mcmahon, s. d., jason, l. a., & ferrari, j. r., (2010). community psychology at depaul university: emphasizing urban education in america. in c. vázquez, d. pérez jiménez, m. f. rodríguez, & w. p. bou (eds.). international community psychology: shared agendas in diversity. (pp. 419-449). puerto rico: actividades d formación comunitaria, inc. mcmahon, s. d., jimenez, t. r., bond, m. a., wolfe, s. m., & ratcliffe, a. w. (2015). community psychology education and practice careers in the 21st century. in v.c. scott & s.m. wolfe (eds.). community psychology: foundations for practice, 379-409. sage publishing, inc, thousand oaks, ca. mcmahon, s. d., & wolfe, s. (2016). career opportunities for community psychologists. in m. bond, i. serranogarcía, & c. keys (eds). handbook of community psychology: volume ii, 645659, washington d.c.: american psychological association. sarason, s. (1972) the creation of settings and future societies. san francisco: jossey-bass. viola, j.j., & glantsman, o. (2017). diverse careers in community psychology. available at: http://works.bepress.com/judah_viola/ 20/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://works.bepress.com/judah_viola/20/ http://works.bepress.com/judah_viola/20/ in science we (should not always) trust: decolonizing the science of psychology oksana yakushko1 keywords: decoloniality, science, psychology, racism, sexism author biography: oksana yakushko, is a first generation immigrant who grew up in soviet ukraine. she holds a doctorate in psychology and a doctoral minor in women and gender studies. her work has focused on varied aspects of migration including xenophobia and human trafficking. her recent work turned toward a focus on past and contemporary use of eugenics and social darwinism in psychology as "empirical supports" for varied forms of scientific racism, scientific sexism, scientific xenophobia and other forms of oppression. she also studies this history in relation to attacks on critical theories in psychology such as psychoanalysis while promoting eugenic-based views including emotional/behavioral self-control, "positive" or resilient mental health responses, and biologizing (brain, genes) based explanations of human social differences. she is a faculty in the clinical psychology program at pacifica graduate institute, ca, usa. recommended citation: yakushko, o. (2022). in science we (should not always) trust: decolonizing the science of psychology, global journal of community psychology practice, 13(1), 1 17. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: oksana yakushko, pacifica graduate institute, 249 lambert rd, carpinteria, ca 93013. email: oyakushko@gmail.com 1 pacifica graduate institute http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 in science we (should not always) trust: decolonizing the science of psychology this paper is intended as an introduction and a call for questioning psychological sciences. western sciences, especially sciences that focuses on racial and gender “differences,” have served among the most colonizing influences worldwide. frantz fanon’s (1959) term “shameful sciences!” especially applies to social darwinism and eugenics as forms of scientific racism, scientific sexism, and scientific imperialism. in this contribution, i highlight my struggles as a scholar to recognize these scientific narratives, to decolonize my own praxis as a scholar and a psychology clinician, as well as to address the long standing impact of these ideologies in the academy and society. i argue that in science we (should never) blindly trust, and share my suggestions for ways to learn, name, and resist racist and sexist ideological sciences. prologue: a prologue sets the scene for the story to come… in light of the recent apology on racism issued by the american psychological association (see link: https://www.apa.org/about/policy/racismapology), this prologue serves to more directly link this article to potential next steps for psychologists moving towards anti-racist and non-colonial praxis. sciences of human experience, like all other areas of human cultural and narrative production (e.g., the media, art, religion, politics) are produced within particular contexts. eugenics is a scientific movement that has provided the foundation for white supremacy and justification for numerous other forms of social injustice for over a century. eugenic sciences (i.e., colonial science) became the cornerstone of american psychology and its related sub-disciplines (e.g., statistics, testing, vocational placement, use of experimental animals, psychoeducational policies, behavioral control practices) and remains a fundamental part of the american psychology and its key organizations such as the american psychological association (apa). apa's recently released apology on racism, while a vital step toward recognizing the ideological uses of psychological sciences that have supported varied forms of prejudice and social oppression, nevertheless fails to address and reject eugenic-based epistemologies, theories and practices that have laid the foundation and defined the science of american psychology. historical and contemporary projects to address racism within the science and practice of psychology highlight that without concerted efforts to replace racist epistemological methods, tools, tests and concepts, racism in psychology will persist. a decolonial view of science recognizes its positionality within a broader historical context, including that the term “science” denotes a limited way of knowing based within a eurocentric timeframe. a historical recognition of harm done in the name of scientific pursuits is one of the most essential components of decolonizing epistemology. from this stance, decolonial science asserts and affirms varied voices of resistance, critique, dialogue, alternative knowledges, and engaged discussion in relation to any concept claimed to have been produced by scientists under supposedly neutral scientific conditions. this includes an active examination of types of epistemological practices for their past and present day impact on all communities, but especially those who have been the subjects of such http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.apa.org/about/policy/racism-apology https://www.apa.org/about/policy/racism-apology global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 investigations. for an example of decolonial sciences see: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post .php?story=20210602122154852 introduction(s) this contribution details my path as a scholar, clinician, and citizen to decolonize myself in relation to ideologies presented via scientific rhetoric, including those couched in statistical normality curves, evolutionary theories, or empirical validity. moreover, this contribution highlights alternative forms of evidence, including archival historical evidence, that showcases deep sustained engagement of western psychology scholars in sciences that uphold and promote social oppression. i wish to counteract the notion, common in the contemporary western world, claiming that science has become the only force, which is supposedly progressive, salvific, good and true. the statement “according to research” appears often in justifications of human social differences and in support of social inequalities while racist scientists promote their ideas as “evidence based” not just in altright media but in mainstream spaces such as cnn or wikipedia. if i mentioned terms such as “religion,” “cultural critique” or “politics,” the reader is likely to view my contribution with a skeptical stance because religion, cultural views or political opinions are assumed to represent multiple opposing perspectives and agendas. in contrast, the modern western world, regardless of whether liberal or conservative, left or right, does not appear to question sciences or scientists. the “march for sciences,” organized to rally against the trump administration’s supposedly anti-scientific stance, appears to entirely ignore that this same administration justifies its acts and rhetoric via scientific scholarship (e.g., “immigration causing rise in crimes”). the national public radio, a supposedly progressive media group, routinely broadcasts such shows as “science friday,” where scientists promote all manner of research, typically without any discussion of alternative perspectives (find episodes on “positive psychology” scholarship) claiming that one’s environment does not matter to one’s happiness based on research with caged monkeys (yakushko, 2019b). t-shirts and car bumper stickers show off slogans designed to pit “biased” religion against “non-biased” sciences: “in science we trust.” in contrast, this contribution is intended to share my personal account of decolonizing my own perspective in relation to sciences through an active immersion in critical readings of archival and contemporary psychology scholarship and its varied uses by groups that promote hate. the supposed purity of science to most individuals engaged in any aspect of academia in the u.s., whether as students or scholars, western sciences are revered as being a type of gold standard of justice, neutrality and good will. this perspective is not only promoted within the academy but is actively sold via national best-sellers on the salvific role of science in western “civilization.” a recent example was offered by steven pinker (2018), a harvard psychologist, a popularizer of “evolutionary” and “behavioral genetic” psychologies, who recently published best-sellers on the wholly salvific, liberating, and progressive role of science, in contrast to all other social endeavors. according to pinker (2002, 2018), everything good in western societies, and in fact around the globe, occurred only because of western scientific developments and contributions, even if science and scientists, whom pinker promotes, produced research identified by scholars as racist or sexist (ruti, 2015; tucker, 1996; yakushko, 2019a). while http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20210602122154852 https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20210602122154852 global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 pinker’s books are filled with promotion of racism, sexism, and eugenics (just as his twitter account posting), and although he is directly implicated in supporting the pedophiles such as jeffrey epstein (flaherty, 2019), scientists like pinker continue to enjoy protection and promotion by the very powerful in american society (gates, 2018). in addition, i find that even within social activist circles discussions of “research,” “evidence-based” community solutions, and the “importance of science” in building their arguments appear to have become common. my growing awareness of the use and misuse of scientific rhetoric is based on my experiences of being raised in the former ussr, a culture, in which moniker “scientific” prefaced most educational offerings encouraging the appearance of credibility (e.g., “scientific socialism,” “scientific atheism,” or “scientific military education”). after immigrating to the u.s. and entering into its advanced educational systems, i was struck by how numerous ideological positions were similarly couched in rhetoric of being “empirical” or “research-based” or “scientific.” for example, i was struck by numerous proclamations about gender roles or women’s intellectual capacities that appeared entirely based on western capitalist notions of gender norms. during my doctoral studies in psychology i became aware of questioning clinical theories and practices, which were typical of totalitarian aspects of my soviet upbringing (i.e., focus on cognitive and behavioral controls), seemed routinely touted as the only “empirically valid” approaches. while being taught that cognitive-behavioral and behavioral clinical treatments are the most rigorously researched, i became aware that clinicians and scholars elsewhere in the world, especially in former soviet block countries as well as most parts of latin america, asia, and africa embraced contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives. in contrast, psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic treatments continue to be attacked as nonscientific within mainstream psychology circles. dissatisfied with lack of qualitative and feminist forms of research training, i pursued doctoral-level women and gender studies. in this intensive interdisciplinary graduate experience, i discovered a world of critical gender, critical race and anti-colonial scholarship, most of which also drew on psychoanalytic theories (e.g., butler, 2004; bhabha, 1984; fanon, 1959). during one formative psychology conference on gender and race, which i attended as a graduate student, i also began to learn about liberation psychologies (martin-baro, 1994; watkins & shulman, 2008), critical psychology (walsh, teo, & baydala, 2014), and participatory based community research (fine, 2009). i read and attended lectures by howard zinn (2010), and pursued activist-scholarship positions in work with issues of recent migration and human trafficking. when i became a fledging research i faculty member, i published on xenophobia and sexism, but still found myself timidly navigating dominant psychology via empirical studies, evocations of “multicultural competence,” and citations of numerous western-based empirical data. several recent experiences with u.s.-based psychology sciences further emphasized the need for me to decolonize my own view of the “empirical” assumptions in psychology. as i participated in presentations on historical and contemporary origins of xenophobia with historians from the smithsonian memorial holocaust museum, i began to note intersections of xenophobic rhetoric, supposedly based in sciences, that continues to promote the view of immigrants as diseased, violent, unintelligent, and “alien” (yakushko, 2018b). i also began to examine history of eugenics and social darwinism in western psychology, discovering a stunning http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 number of leading western psychologists engaged in supporting these ideologies as central to their views of human beings (yakushko, 2019a). whereas scholars and historians in other disciplines have been naming the horrific impact of eugenicist and social darwinian views on treatment of diverse human beings and experiences (bannister, 2010; bashford & levine, 2010; dimen, 2013; lombardo, 2011; ruti, 2015), i was enraged to discover that dominant psychology scholars, institutions, organizations, and publications openly promote these perspectives as “empirically valid” and even somehow socio-politically progressive. for example, during a recent convention of the american psychological association, a wall of history, celebrating 125th anniversary of the apa, including as its opening panels openly celebratory proclamations of violently xenophobic, racist, and anti-semitic scientists (i.e., h.h. goddard) and studies (i.e., the army mental tests). in returning to those critical aspects of my soviet and socialist education, as well as through my interests in critical psychoanalysis (e.g., f. fanon, j. derrida, h. bhabha, g. spivak, s. ahmed, j. butler), i began my own process of decolonizing. recommendations, with which i end this contribution, stem from my own struggles to examine, to name, and to re-envision what is considered psychological sciences and practices. in james baldwin’s (1965) pivotal essay entitled white guilt, history repeats itself by being lived on, unconsciously, by individuals and groups, and that in facing accurate historical accounts of self and society are a vital step of liberation. fanon (1959), who accounted these histories in relation to colonization and enslavement of african peoples, specifically named the racist and imperialist brutality wielded in the name of “shameful sciences!” (p. 120). thus, in this contribution i will invite you to abandon the colonizing method of dispassionately reading about violent, oppressive, and often sadistic forms of sciences, past and present, without your human responses of anger, sorrow, guilt, and dismay (laenui, 2000). how the assumptions of science and eugenics shaped the oppressive nature of psychology use of sciences to reify oppressive ideologies has long standing history in western countries, including in the u.s. (guthrie, 2004; tucker, 1996; yakushko, 2019a). eugenics is a historic and contemporary science as well as a social movement grounded in darwin’s theories of human evolution, which emphasize the survival of the fittest in the supposed struggle over resources, especially women (bannister, 2010; bashford & levine, 2010; lombardo, 2011). supported by charles darwin (1872) himself, eugenics was first proposed by darwin’s cousin francis galton, who termed it the “science of racial betterment” (i.e., based on greek words “great” and “born”) (galton, 1865, 1869, 1904; popenoe & johnson, 1935). eugenics is primarily associated with nazi germany’s policies of racial purity and the holocaust (kuhl, 2002; weikart, 2004). however, the past and present eugenics’ focus on scientific examination of human fitness via their fight for survival and control over procreation to produce supposedly evolutionary better subsequent generations (bashford & levine, 2010; lombardo, 2011). their slogan was that some people do not deserve to be born, and that human differences can be predicted and controlled. the enlightenment sciences, which including darwinian evolutionary and galtonian eugenic views, were grounded in cultural assumptions of the day, and indeed extended from histories of european cultural genocides, especially the witch-hunts, which swept both europe and everywhere the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 europeans colonized (wistrich, 2014; yakushko, 2019b). scholars note that what are known as contemporary social sciences developed in close tandem with sciences of racial and gender difference (elias & feagin, 2016; jackson & weidman, 2004) replacing religious and early scientific efforts to identify which individuals and groups were prone to being possessed by demons, scientists shifted to other biological explanations that made the same determinations (e.g., superiority of nordic white wealth men to all others) but in the language of germo-plasms (“genes”) or cranial measurements (“brains”). religious tales that justified inequalities, such as the biblical adam and eve story, were replaced with mythic “cave men” accounts that supposedly led to the development of superior and inferior biological heredity. moreover, enlightenment psychologies’ search for legitimizing themselves as true sciences resulted in their promotion of what contemporary philosophers of sciences have termed scientism: the insistence on the use of exclusively natural or physical empirical tools to produce “facts,” which consist primarily of moralizing value-laden descriptions of human experiences (sorell, 2013; stenmark, 2018). for example, stenmark (2018) emphasized that “scientism typically is a combination of certain scientific theories and a particular ideology or world view, namely naturalism or materialism… [which themselves] are not scientific but philosophical theories” (p. 4). such scientific or scientistic efforts are not neutral but lead to varied forms of what teo (2008) termed epistemological violence. for many historians and philosophers of sciences, darwin’s theories of evolution as applied to human social differences serve as prime examples of ideological sciences or scientism that led to varied forms of epistemological violence. notably, darwin’s primary work is nowadays only titled as the origins of the species whereas the actual title, which in fact is used by contemporary eugenicists and white supremacists such as david duke (1999), was the origins of the species: or, the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. in this work, darwin (1859) proclaimed that the "grade of civilization… [as] a most important element in the success of nations" (p. 239). darwin’s (1872) next most celebrated book, the descent of man in relation to sex, is filled with eugenics as well as promotion of the british men as both an evolutionary superior race and gender. in his second most celebrated work, the descent of man in relation to sex, darwin (1872) openly proclaimed that “at some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace, the savage races throughout the world” (p. 252). throughout his works darwin justified imperialist, racist, and sexist views as merely observations of the natural world or the evolutionary “truth” which should be dispassionately accepted and carried out. darwin’s (1872) allusions include comparing his work and the works of eugenicists to those of a surgeon, who must impassively cut out sick tissue (e.g., nonnordic racial minorities, the poor, “unchaste” women) from the ever-evolving body of humanity. francis galton, darwin’s colleague, friend, and cousin, began his work by similarly claiming to dedicate himself to extensive neutral scientific work (i.e., experimental statistical studies, empirical observations of other cultures), which he claimed to have verified darwin’s theories. he compared wealthy, nordic/british white males, including “great men in history” as well as cambridge university graduates to nonbritish minorities, british poor, and women, making scientific pronouncements such as that “the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own” and that “the number among the negroes of those who we should call halfhttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 witted men, is very large” (galton, 1884, p. 338-339). decrying the dysgenic dangers (i.e., evolutionarily problematic) of having these individuals live and have children, galton became the first scientist to offer empirically designed “utopias” or the world that is filled entirely with socially engineered racially pure (i.e., nordic white), highly intelligent (i.e., by western iq measures), physically perfect (i.e., lacking any illness or disability), emotionally and behaviorally self-controlled, and perpetually optimistic individuals (cattell, 1987; galton, 1869; watson, 1914). from galton to today eugenicists openly discuss their efforts to create a “super race” by “breeding” the “super man” (nearing, 1912, pp. 25-26). among the main strategies undertaken by eugenicists, past and present, is demanding complete compliance with their ideas by shaming individuals for being non-scientific and offering “empirical” data on dangers of not following the eugenics with total blind faith. for example, in his popular book entitled national life from the standpoint of science karl pearson (1905), a founder of the field of statistics and british eugenicist, shamed his readers for following their feelgood inclinations to humanize “the evolutionary unfit” or care for their wellbeing. rather than having “sympathy toward the red indian” by reading fiction, pearson proclaimed that indigenous people’s destruction reflected “the natural history view of mankind’’ because truth of darwin’s scientific theories was “verified…chiefly by way of war with inferior races” (p. 44). in the u.s., numerous scientists, especially academic psychologists, took up the flagship of social darwinism and eugenics and made these theories foundations of their work. the majority of leading psychology scientists who occupied top academic posts, scientific journal boards, and professional organizational leadership positions were also leading multiple eugenic societies and the founding member of the american eugenic research organization (eugenical news, 1916-1924). for example, robert yerkes, who was harvard based psychologist who founded the field of “comparative” or animal psychology, who served twice as the president of the american psychological association and served as a director of the national research council, was an avowed eugenicist. yerkes (1923) produced such works as the eugenic bearing of measurements of intelligence in the united states, in which he stated that “eugenics, the art of breeding better men, imperatively demands reliable measurement of human traits of body and mind” (p. 225). according to yerkes, eugenics needs accurate and reasonably complete descriptions of human behaviour as partial basis for methods of control. it may look to psychology hopefully for accurate descriptions of traits of mind and their expressions in action, for measurements of the manifold features of intellect, feeling, will, temperament, character-in fine for the scientific description of the human personality. (p. 226) similarly, louis terman (1916), a distinguished stanford psychologist, and the developer of the most commonly used iq tests routinely referred to eugenics as central to his work because “considering the tremendous cost of vice and crime…it is evident that psychological testing has found here one of its richest applications [in eugenics]” (p. 12). terman regularly decried the “dullness” among certain groups of americans, stating that [supposed lack of intelligence] “seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family” and found with “extraordinary frequency among indians, mexicans, and negroes” (p. 91). among the first large and enormously http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 popularized studies by american psychologists were the army alpha and beta tests, which were developed, conducted and published by top american psychologists, including yerkes (harvard), brigham (princeton), thordnike (columbia), terman (stanford), john b. watson (johns hopkins), and many other notable psychology scholars (eugenical news, 1916-1924; tucker, 1996). carl brigham (1923), princeton university psychologist who later developed the scholastic apperception test (sat) summarized the results of this study in a national best-selling book a study in american intelligence. yerkes (1923) urged the american public “to consider their [study results’] reliability and their meaning, for no one of us as a citizen can afford to ignore the menace of race deterioration or the evident relations of immigration to national progress and welfare” (p. viii). the study was proclaimed to be unbiased, highly scientific, and one of its kind in providing bell-shaped “normality” results (the book is filled with statistics, data tables, and scientific discussions). among its key results were conclusions such as the confirmation of “the marked intellectual inferiority of the negro” which was “corroborated by practically all of the investigators who have used psychological tests on white and negro groups” (brigham, 1923, p. 190). these results were used then to discuss the importance of segregating african american children in schools for the supposed sake of black children’s well-being because “the average negro child cannot advance through an educational curriculum adapted to the anglo-saxon child in step with that child” (p. 194). other racist and xenophobic scientific discoveries by this all-encompassing and heavily funded study were such empirical assertions as “our figures… tend to disprove the popular belief that the jew is highly intelligent” (p. 190) and that “our study of the army tests of foreign born individuals has pointed at every step to the conclusion that the average intelligence of our immigrants is declining” (p. 197). these empirical results were openly promoted not only to the public but to its representatives, who in fact enforced such policies as to “only to admit those who are superior to the median american in mental endowment as far as this is shown by approved mental tests” (evans, 1931, p. 16). brigham (1923), however, offered an optimistic summary that “the deterioration of american intelligence is not inevitable, however, if public action can be aroused to prevent it. there is no reason why legal steps should not be taken which would insure a continually progressive upward evolution” (p. 210). these eugenic-based steps, according to brigham, had to focus on the “prevention of the continued propagation of defective strains in the present population” (p. 210). these stunningly racist and xenophobic empirical proclamations were profoundly disturbing to me, not only in relation to openly white supremacist and white nationalist ideology, but because these studies and sciences were produced by founding “fathers’ of psychology, whose works i was taught to accept as salutary. i also made myself aware of profoundly damaging and violent impacts on vulnerable communities, including decisions by the u.s. government to close american borders to all but a small number of nordic immigrants or formalization of racial school segregation (gould, 1996; guthrie, 2004; kuhl, 2004; lombardo, 2011; tucker, 1996). another example of scientific eugenics in u.s. psychology involved a famed psychologist, whose work became essential for biologically and genetically reductive perspectives in psychology and explanations of human social behavior in terms of hereditary traits: h. h. goddard. during the early xx century goddard ran of the most noted eugenic laboratories around the globe—the training http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 school for feeble-minded girls and boys in vineland, nj (bashford & levine, 2010; black, 2003; goddard, 1912, 1917; smith, 1999; tucker, 1996). goddard’s main focus was on individuals determined to be “feeble-minded” who he claimed could appear “normal,” thus necessitating specialized professional testing by trained psychologists. according to goddard (1911), the feeble-minded individuals were treacherous for american society because while appearing to be average, “these are the people who cannot be taught decent living, and through their ignorance of things, which they have not the capacity to learn, they spread disease, through their person and their untidy surroundings. they are thus a menace to public health as well as to morals” (p. 263). therefore, goddard scientifically guaranteed that “the elimination of this grade of feeblemindedness would result in an enormous improvement in happiness and possibilities of achievement in every community” (p. 262), specifically in his highly popularized kallikak study (goddard, 1912). the kallikak study was central to the u.s. supreme court decision to uphold involuntary sterilization of carrie buck, a young woman who was raped by a nephew of her adoptive family but blamed and institutionalized as a feebleminded prostitute (lombardo, 2011). moreover, the 1933 nazi german book’s second re-print named h. h. goddard to be the most significant contributor to the “law for the prevention of sick or ill offspring” because goddard demonstrated “just how significant the problem of genetic inheritance is” and that “no example shows so clearly as the kallikak study” (in kuhl, 2002, p. 41). whether racist, xenophobic, sexist, homophobic or misogynist assumptions in these studies, i open myself to evidence of how detrimental and profoundly oppressive were their assumptions and influences. contemporary eugenics by many other names my discoveries in reading both historical, including archival, and contemporary scientific publications by western psychologists led me to affirm baldwin’s (1961) recognition that oppressive histories live on, often in renamed and rebranded formats. for example, american eugenic and socially darwinism-oriented scientific groups persisted, evolved, or rebranded, such as “social biology,” “evolutionary psychology” or “behavioral genetics” (dusek, 1999; ecklandolson & beicken, 2012). many leading u.s. psychologists developed new strategies for promoting social oppression as scientific. h. e. garrett, an apa president in 1946 and columbia university professor, continued to openly support eugenics and its new iterations such as social biology and behavioral genetics (tucker, 1996). notably, garrett served as the scientific expert witness who argued for maintaining racial segregation in american schools by providing empirical testimony on the supposed intellectual deficiencies of racial minorities in brown v. board of education hearings (tucker, 1996). garret’s (1952) scientific testimony in brown v. board of education was filled with numerous studies and data, as well as his own statements on keeping schools segregated: my prediction would be that if you conducted separate schools at the high school level for negroes and whites, one of the two things might happen: that the negro might develop their schools up to the levels where they would not mix, themselves; and i would like to see it happen; i think it would be poetic justice… the other would be in a mixed school where, as i said, a great many animosities, disturbances, resentments, and hostilities and inferiorities would develop. (p. 955) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 garrett also contributed white supremacy publications as the white citizen gazette and served as the director of the pioneer fund, which was designated as “one of the most influential racist groups of the 20th century” and the “primary source of scientific racism” by the southern poverty law center (2017, online). garrett (1961) was among the scholars who began to insist that the “true” sciences of racial differences were denied because scholars and non-scholars fell pray to what he termed “the equalitarian dogma” (title of the article). this ideology espoused that equality and social justice are feel-good non-scientific dogmas while “real” science “proved” superiority of whites. many contemporary western psychologists, whose studies continue to fill western psychology journals and textbooks, such as a. jensen, h. eysenck, r. cattell, and p. rushton continued to promote hereditary, biological, genetic, and evolutionary bases of human social differences while attacking the notion of racial equality or racial justice as “dogmas,” “moralistic fallacies,” “political correctness,” and anti-scientific “chimeras” (cattell, 1987; gottfredson, 1994ab, 2005; lynn, 2001; rushton & jensen, 2005). whereas historical psychology eugenics were hidden behind terms such as intelligence testing, behaviorism, comparative (animal) psychology, eugenic psychologies developed new terms to hide ideologies. for example, jensen and rushton (2005) rebranded their racist studies as empirical “race realism” while attacking any efforts to question such promotion of racial inequality as a “moralistic fallacy” (p. 328). “race realism” is one of the most widely used terms as the foundation for the scientific justifications of white nationalism and white supremacy, such as in the racist underpinnings of the american renaissance group (southern poverty law center, 2019). facing my own privileging of my academic, and thus, social position, i discovered that relegating representations of racist and white supremacist individuals as lacking in education and being non-scientific, i found that some of the most stunning examples of racist and sexist ideologies are produced and promoted by my colleagues who are fellow psychologists. white supremacy and white nationalism, just as slavery, colonization, and genocides against indigenous nations, were and continue to be justified as based in sciences (kendi, 2015; tucker, 1999; zinn, 2010). many openly racist western organizations, such as the pioneer fund, offers financial backing exclusively to scientists (southern poverty law center, 2017; tucker, 1996; yakushko, 2019ab). moreover, pop scientific books sold to the public continue to promote a view of science and scientists as always correct, salvific, and unbiased. recent voluminous books by steven pinker (2002, 2018) offer a prime example of a psychologist promoting science of racial and gender “differences” while evoking need for eugenics. in my own stunned discovery that pinker’s books are filled with promotion of pioneer fund supported studies (e.g., linda gottfredson’s (1994ab, 2005) attacks on affirmative action and promotion of racist ideologies in regard to human intelligence), i was even more shocked to find that pinker is openly celebrated by financers such as bill gates, propelling his work to national best seller status. while quoting obama and the beatles, and claiming to be a “liberal” and a “gender” (i.e., non-equality) feminist, pinker decries “scientific truth” being misrepresented and maligned by leftist academics, “anti-scientific humanities,” “jeering social justice mobs” of students, the media and even the united nations, which, in his words, follow “dogmas” of human equality rather than true sciences of human differences. in his recent best-selling book pinker (2018) admonishes those who critique eugenics for following “anti-scientific http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 propaganda” (p. 400). he attacks any critical historian or scholar as not only being “antiscientific” but also “progressophobes” and “prophets of doom” (his list includes c. west, f. fanon, m. foucault, k. marx, h. marcuse, j. derrida and others). pinker and other “race realism” and “gender feminist” scientists claim that their works only explain, but supposedly do not encourage racism or misogyny. however, white supremacists, white nationalists, and other hate groups openly celebrate and utilize their works to support their actions (e.g., the american renaissance group or incels – see anti-defamation league, 2019). for example, i discovered that david duke’s (1999) my awakening: a path to racial understanding, considered the white supremacy manifesto by contemporary white nationalists and altright adherents, not only bases justifications for his “aryan” kkk utopian vision of “white awakening” on works by darwin, galton and many contemporary psychologists, but is introduced by an academic psychologist. g. whitney (1999), a psychologist and one time president of the american behavioral genetics association, offered a lengthy introduction not only described how psychological sciences and scientists maintain racist stance while hiding it from “feel-good” equality promoters in psychology. he also used his scientific authority to vouch for duke’s my awakening’s scientific veracity and accuracy, stating “as a scientist who specializes in the field of behavioral genetics, i must tell you that i have gone over david duke's considerable data on genetics and race and find it in line with the latest scientific discoveries and knowledge in this area” (p. 5). whitney asserts that “david duke's awakening is presented here in three interconnected major themes of his discoveries of honest truths that are politically incorrect. one of his honest truths is that from a thorough immersion in modern science he became convinced that racial egalitarianism is the scientific equivalent of the flat-earth theory. he rejects the smear of "racist" while maintaining that the true data are very different from those that most of us have been led to believe” (p. 6). thus, duke’s empirical justifications of white supremacy is summarized in chapters with titles such as a question of intelligence, heredity and environment, race and intelligence, the roots of racial differences, and the evolution of race the history of race. duke’s “aryan vision ” offers eugenic, genetic, and evolutionary utopias of an exclusive “white, christian civilization”: “when our whole nation becomes a white community again, and when the media and our schools are a reflection of the highest of our aryan ideals, the new millennium will truly arrive, and the natural order will commence” (p. 456). his “white strategy for victory” included “scientific” awakening of the white people: “every awakened white person becomes an aryan, a racially conscious white person dedicated to our survival and evolutionary advancement… our real strength can only come from our utter dedication to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” (p. 470). in summary, i have sought to become more aware of contemporary racist sciences that make appearances not only on cnn (southern poverty law center, 2017), and who are “marching for sciences” in places like charlotsville, va, where david duke openly rallied for “taking the country back” (nbc news, 2017). i listen for scientific justifications of closing borders and vilifying immigrants by far-right politicians and the media (yakushko, 2018b). i have protested racist sciences which are promoted via speaker tours of campuses (e.g., tours by charles murray of herrnstein & murray, 1999 or pinker, 2018). my own skills with archival http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 research, publishing, teaching and speaking leads me toward venues of responding to empirical justifications of continued oppression toward african americans, recent immigrants, and women via evolutionary “theories” and dispassionate uses of statistical or genetic data. i try not to look away from the recognition that much of psychological “knowledge,” especially in regard to brains and behavior, is produced on tortured experimental animals and that such sciences are being used to torture human beings as “terrorists” (the independent report, 2015; yakushko, 2019). i am dismayed that western individuals are sold scientific utopias of perpetual happiness that claims that emotions such as anger, sorrow, guilt, shame, regret, or fear are a form of mental illness (ahmed, 2004; hedges, 2009; yakushko, 2019b). i seek out scholars and writers, such as g. k. chesterton (1922), whose book eugenics and other evils, inspires me to recognize that the “thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is science… that creed… which began with evolution and has ended in eugenics” (pp. 7778). in search for courage, understanding, and vision for my personal epistemic decolonization, i turn to critical psychoanalytic scholars such as fanon, derrida, bhabha, said, butler, ahmed and hook. frantz fanon (1959), a practicing psychoanalyst and a founder of anti-colonial movement in africa, began to document the significance of using supposedly scientifically supported views of black people as unintelligent, aggressive, impulsive, and amoral. he also emphasized that these scientific “facts” were used to colonize the minds of the african black people themselves, leading to lives being “haunted by a galaxy of erosive stereotypes” (p. 129) that were unconsciously internalized. works by fanon and other social critics and activists have helped me recognize ways in which sciences can be violent, insidious, and vicious while dehumanizing and inciting oppressive policies, norms, and stereotypes. i would like to offer several other considerations, which i have found meaningful in my attempts to decolonize or offer a decolonizing perspective in psychology. insist on questioning dominant historical accounts, especially in relation to sciences focused on human social differences. taking an inspiration from zinn (2010), rather than accepting the dominant cultural accounts i encourage and participate in efforts of re-examining western sciences from the standpoint of those at whom such studies are directed and whom varied ideological sciences attack. such critical work may require insistence on reading the original documents instead of summaries included in textbooks, peer review journals, or professional organizational accounts. i have discovered that majority of the original texts are found in libraries, internet search engines, academic searches such as ebsco, and white supremacy websites, which republish these works. make this history about real people, not just data, ideas, and academic/professional identities. like with good literature, stories, myths, or films, i seek to compassionately imagine what it might have been like to be “deborah kallikak,” proclaimed to be the poster-child of feeble-mindedness; or carrie buck, who was raped and sterilized against her will based on kallikak and other similar “science”; or an illiterate military recruit or a jewish immigrant coming to ellis island, who were tested and found evolutionarily unfit and “parasitic;” or a 9-month old “little albert” on whom the eugenicist and behaviorist john b. watson sadistically experimented; or an adolescent in studies on the amounts of “white blood” in relation to your intelligence and optimism; or a dog tortured in studies by the “happiness guru”, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 and cia consultant on human torture martin seligman on “learned helplessness.” having empathy toward human and non-human creatures in these experiments may lead to feeling necessary sorrow, anger, guilt and shame – essential internal states that may lead to personal decolonization and change (chilisa, 2012; laenai, 2000). similarly, i attempt to enter into reading contemporary scientific works by holding these views from multiple perspectives and critical disciplinary paradigms. whether justifications of eugenics, or abolition of affirmative action, or promotion that rape is merely characteristics of biological sex and not violence, consider the direct living impact of these ideas on people, toward whom such science is directed. if needed, be inspired by journalists who bravely document the misuses and impact of sciences on human communities. for example, learn more about boston journalist walter lippman (1922) who took on paragons of eugenic american psychology and developed the term “stereotype”. i strongly recommend reading the works that distress and sicken you, such as a study in american intelligence, or the bell curve, or my awakening. to help you understand the impact of these publications, utilize support offered by those who pay attention to ways sciences and scientists are utilized by hate crime groups, such as by the southern poverty law center or historians of scientific racism (e.g., guthrie, 2004; tucker, 1996) and scientific sexism (e.g., dimen, 2013; ruti, 2015). these readings will inform you about terms, names, and fields to pay closer attention to, such as the pioneer funded gottfredson, rushton, bouchard, herrnstein & murray as well as “social biology,” “behavioral genetics” or “race realism.” make a commitment to study those scholars, whom contemporary promoters of social darwinism and eugenics, such as pinker, vehemently attack as “anti-scientific,” as “prophets of doom” or “progressophobes” (e.g., f. fanon, c. west, j. derrida, s. gould, m. foucault, e. fromm). i have had and continue to reexamine what i have been taught in my educational programs, including in regard to theories such as psychoanalysis, which have served as a foundation for critical theorizing for many of the aforementioned scholars. i hope that all of us also make history and participate in its vital revolutionary changes. for example, we could begin by summarizing alternative and critical perspectives on sciences and scientists via informational internet sites such as wikipedia (which often represent either sanitized or misleading views of ideological sciences and scientists). we can write op-eds to our local paper when we see race scientists coming through our community and presenting their ideas as “truth” because of their supposed neutral unbiased empirical work. whether we hold an academic position or a professional license, or act as a concerned citizen, we can contact news agencies and journalists who cite racist and sexist sciences. lastly, i hope we commit to making our own scholarly and professional work visible in regard to its sociopolitical, epistemological, and cultural values. no science, especially sciences of human social difference, can be neutral or unbiased. passionately challenge the motto in science we trust, and become a conscientious resistor who marches against “shameful sciences!” references ahmed, s. (2004). cultural politics of emotion. new york: routledge. the american renaissance. (2019). about us. https://www.amren.com/about/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.amren.com/about/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 anti-defamation league. (2019). when women are the enemy: the intersection of misogyny and white supremacy. https://www.adl.org/resources/reports/ when-women-are-the-enemy-theintersection-of-misogyny-and-whitesupremacy#involuntary-celibates-deadlyresentments. baldwin, j. (1965). white man’s guilt. ebony magazine, august, 47-48. bannister, r. (2010). social darwinism: science and myth in anglo-american social thought. temple university press. bashford, a., & levine, p. (eds.). (2010). the oxford handbook of the history of eugenics. oxford university press. bhabha, h. 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(2015). eugenic nation: faults and frontiers of better breeding in modern america. university of california press. teo, t. (2008). from speculation to epistemological violence in psychology: a critical-hermeneutic reconstruction. theory & psychology, 18(1), 47–67. terman, l. m. (1916). the measurement of intelligence. houghton mifflin. tucker, w. h. (1996). the science and politics of racial research. university of illinois press. walsh, r. t., teo, t., & baydala, a. (2014). a critical history and philosophy of psychology: diversity of context, thought, and practice. cambridge university press. watkins, m., & schulman, h. (2008). towards psychologies of liberation. palgrave mcmillan. watson, j. b. (1914). behavior: an introduction to comparative psychology. h. holt. weikart, r. (2004). from darwin to hitler: evolutionary ethics, eugenics, and racism in germany. palgrave macmillan. whitney, g. (1999). introduction. in d. e. duke. my awakening: a path to racial understanding. (pp. 2-11). free speech press. wistrich, r. s. (ed.). (2013). demonizing the other: antisemitism, racism and xenophobia. routledge. yakushko, o. (2018a). don’t worry, be happy: erasing racism, sexism, and poverty in positive psychology. psychotherapy and politics international, 16(1), e1433. yakushko, o. (2018b). modern-day xenophobia: critical historical and theoretical perspectives on the roots of anti-immigrant prejudice. springer. yakushko, o. (2019a). eugenics in history of american psychology. psychotherapy and politics international yakushko, o. (2019b). scientific pollyannaism: from inquisition to positive psychology. springer. yerkes, r. m. (1923). eugenic bearing of measurements of intelligence. the eugenics review, 14(4), 225-229 zinn, h. (2010). the twentieth century: a people's history. harper & row. http://www.gjcpp.org/ towards an emergent conceptualization of decolonial praxis and competencies in community psychology nuria ciofalo and mary watkins keywords: decolonial praxis; community psychology praxis; epistemologies of the global south; pluriversality; ecology of knowledges; conscientization; epistemic and ecological justice; sentipensar; buen vivir; ecopsychosocial accompaniment author biographies: nuria ciofalo is core professor and co-founder of the community, liberation, indigenous, and ecopsychologies specialization at pacifica graduate institute. born in mexico, she gained her b.a. and first m.a. in clinical and social psychology at the university of munich, germany where she specialized in psychoanalytic theories. her m.a. in urban and regional planning and ph.d. in community psychology at the university of hawaii immersed her in the native hawaiian sovereignty movement and healing practices. she has worked with indigenous communities in hawaii, northern, central, and southern mexico for more than 40 years. she teaches indigenous psychologies centering indigenous cosmologies, epistemologies, axiologies, and healing praxes in academic curricula applying participatory action research in partnership with communities. she has published in the areas of participatory youth action research, program evaluation, and decolonial, depth community and indigenous psychologies. her recent book, indigenous psychologies in an era of decolonization (2019), was written in partnership with maya lacandon youths and community leaders of the lacandon rainforest in chiapas, mexico. mary watkins, ph.d., is the chair and a co-founder of the m.a./ph.d. depth psychology program at pacifica graduate institute, co-founder and co-chair of its specialization in community, liberation, indigenous, and eco-psychologies, and founding coordinator of community and ecological fieldwork and research at pacifica. she is the author of mutual accompaniment and the creation of the commons, waking dreams, and invisible guests: the development of imaginal dialogues; co-author of toward psychologies of liberation, talking with young children about adoption, up against the wall: re-imagining the u.s.-mexico border, and a participatory research team member of the community education project in the shadows of paradise: testimonies from the undocumented immigrant community in santa barbara. in 2019 she received the award for distinguished theoretical and philosophical contributions to psychology, society for philosophical and theoretical psychology (division 24, american psychological association). recommended citation: ciofalo, n. and watkins, m. (2023). towards an emergent conceptualization of decolonial praxis and competencies in community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice, 14(1), 1-19. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 corresponding author: nuria ciofalo, pacifica graduate institute, 249 lambert road, carpinteria, ca 93013, united states. email: nciofalo@pacifica.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 towards an emergent conceptualization of decolonial praxis and competencies in community psychology abstract the epistemologies of the global south teach that co-creating alternatives to modernity requires a commitment to delink from colonial ideologies and practices that have been normalized by many institutions and venues, including the academy itself. looking from “the south” allows us to move ustatesian approaches to community psychology from the center, a privileged position “above” other approaches, as though to the edge of a circle alongside other approaches from different cultural contexts. this repositioning enables us to see pluriversal, community psychology praxes, i.e., multiple localized approaches to engendering thriving. epistemologies of the global south reject universalizing theories. these epistemologies generate an ecology of knowledges that resist the hegemonic conception of an only-one-world contained in global standardizations of consumption and extraction propelled by capitalism. learning from the global south, we propose a definition of a decolonial community psychology praxis that reflects pluriversality within a relational ontology that promotes the values of sentipensar/feeling-thinking with the earth, affective conviviality, conscientization and annunciation, decolonial solidarity, ecopsychosocial accompaniment, and buen vivir (collective well-being). it includes the rights of the earth, embracing an ecology of knowledges and webs of solidarity with communities’ struggles to sustain cosmovisions (indigenous worldviews) that delink from western-centric ideologies. the epistemologies of the global south teach that co-creating alternatives to modernity requires a commitment to delink from colonial ideologies and practices that have been normalized by many institutions and venues, including the academy itself. it also demands we engage in critical self-reflexivity that confronts the implications of our positionalities and assumptions (santos, 2014). the euro-american discipline of psychology not only developed in the historical context of colonialism, but made its own contributions to sustaining the racist and capitalist logics of colonialism (fanon, 2008; keller, 2007). quijano (2000) introduced the “coloniality of power” construct to describe the ongoing effects of colonial relationships, including the pervasive strategy to usurp indigenous lands and peoples, labeling those conquered and subjugated as inferior, and establishing a racist hierarchical system supported by colonial difference and abyssal exclusion (mignolo, 2009; santos, 2014). abyssal exclusion describes the divisions created by this racist, hierarchical system, dividing those who deem themselves superior from those deemed inferior, and, even, less-than-human. the coloniality of power colonizes space, economics, wealth, self-valuation, time, values, knowledge, compassion, language, religion, identity, medicine, and madness (bulhan, 2015). at the personal level, the coloniality of power affects being, knowing, feeling, and acting, including our experience of our bodies and our relationships with other humans, other-than-human animals, and built and natural environments. it manifests as “modernity and epistemic universalism.” this universalism poses eurohttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 american-centric epistemologies as more advanced than indigenous epistemologies. this prejudiced assessment is used to pseudo-legitimize the export of western systems of knowledge to all other parts of the world, derogating and displacing knowledge systems that are pronounced deficient and non-rational. meanwhile, western-based educational systems that preserve the ongoing ecocide and epistemicide of nonwestern, geopolitical regions and knowledge, continue to sustain capitalism, neoliberal globalization, and coloniality. the western academy, inclusive of psychology, has served to maintain and perpetuate coloniality. community psychology is no exception (carolissen et al, 2017; dutta, 2016; 2018; grosfoguel, 2008; maldonado-torres, 2007; mignolo, 2000; roshanravan, 2014; santos, 2009; smith, 1999, 2012). sonn (2016) outlined the problem: in community psychology, the contested view exists that the discipline started at the swampscott conference in the united states. this discourse is perhaps an example of “abyssal lines” (see santos, 2007) being drawn, where one history is rendered visible and valuable and claimed to be universal. in this process, other histories are erased, leading to epistemicide (santos, 2007), or the invalidation of non-hegemonic knowledges, usually those belonging to marginalized cultures, groups, geopolitical regions, and traditions. this colonizing process involves abstract hierarchies of power (especially the socio-economic power that constitutes them) and contributes significantly to the maintenance of cognitive injustice. for example, our geospatial location in the global south means that unless we, at great cost, travel to community psychology conferences in the global north and publish in american community psychology journals, our knowledges are rendered invisible and our reputations as scholars are questioned. these forms of cognitive injustice contribute to the maintenance of hegemonic manipulation and ignore the value of the co-existence of world knowledges or ecologies of knowledge. (p. 497) us-centric community psychology has been critiqued as a monolithic and universalizing discourse (dutta, 2016). this can be seen more clearly from perspectives that arise in different locations and contexts. looking from “the south” allows us to move ustatesian approaches to community psychology from the center, a privileged position “above” other approaches, as though to the edge of a circle alongside other approaches from different cultural contexts. this repositioning allows us to see pluriversal, community psychology praxes, i.e., multiple localized approaches to engendering thriving. indeed, it helps us to see u.s. community psychology as itself a set of “local” approaches that to different degrees reflect and conserve the u.s. context (marsella, 2013). carolissen et al (2017) further argued that “…it is important to recognize that community psychology is not unitary in its aims and practices and that complex pluralities and fluidities of representation exist across numerous geospatial and political locations (bond, serrano-garcia, keys, & shinn, 2016)” (p. 496). the recognition of this pluriversality or diversality—as the authors called it—provides an opportunity to learn from efforts emerging in the global south to review curricula and practices that can become alternatives to epistemological and praxiological hegemony. critical reflections on the kinds of practice competencies that can support the construction of a decolonial curriculum are necessary. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 in this paper, we draw on possibilities to coconstruct a decolonial, pluriversal, community psychology praxis, distinguished from practice that is regulated by universalized theories and not guided by localized experience. such a praxis would follow gone’s (2016) proposal for “practicebased evidence,” in contrast to the pervasive evidence-based practice that validates and imposes generalized theories (p. 320). our efforts are informed by liberation psychology and indigenous psychologies, and are enriched by decolonial praxes of solidarity and deep commitment to cultural, economic, political, racial, ecological, and epistemic justice. we believe that we are introducing familiar language used by scholars and practitioners from the global south. our intention is to imagine decolonial definitions of us-community psychology's practice including diverse (and perhaps unfamiliar) epistemologies and praxes that may shift the paradigm. we propose a definition of a decolonial community psychology’s praxis that reflects pluriversality within a relational ontology that promotes the values of sentipensar/feeling-thinking with the earth, affective conviviality, conscientization and annunciation, decolonial solidarity, ecopsychosocial accompaniment, and buen vivir (collective well-being). it includes solidarity with the earth through acknowledging and advocating for its rights. such an approach respects and embraces an ecology of knowledges and webs of solidarity with communities’ struggles to sustain cosmovisions (indigenous worldviews) that delink from western-centric ideologies. we will review definitions of community psychology practice that have emerged from both the global north and the global south. we will also unpack the terms of the proposed definition and describe practice competencies that can guide curricular activities. in an ongoing feedback loop, learnings from the application of these competencies inform our emergent definition of a decolonial community psychology praxis. community psychology practice definitions from the global north julian (2006a) proposed that community practice is defined by a set of processes: “community mobilization, planning and decision-making, implementation and evaluation” (p. 27). he envisioned the role of the community practitioner as primarily assisting and supporting communities in the identification of needs and the translation of scientific, evidence-based practice into transformative action. the practitioner “actively manages community collaborations in the interest of achieving specific meaningful results” (p. 26). given this definition, community psychology programs need to develop skills and capacities in the application and management of these processes. julian recommended that community psychology “cultivates relationships with consumers of these practice skills” (p. 26). practitioners are trained to apply ameliorative—rather than transformative (prilleltensky & nelson, 2002)—solutions to community problems that are effective as determined by the conceptualizations and research conducted by experts, who provide services to communities conceived as “consumers.” julian proposed that issues such as “poverty and race relations” can be addressed by the community practitioner following the same processes and “understanding state-of-theart” knowledge on those issues as background information to know how to intervene effectively and “support meaningful community dialogue” (p. 26). in this delineation, community psychology’s practice is aligned with expert-driven, ameliorative strategies that do not confront the system but contribute to improve the fit between the individual community and the environment in which it is embedded, an environment in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 which structural inequities, exploitation, oppression, racism, poverty, sexism, xenophobia, ecological extraction, and exclusion continue to exist. evidence-based knowledge arrives in the hands of professionals, to be consumed by community members. tom wolff (2014) incorporated the definition embraced by the division 27 of the american psychological association (apa), society for community research and action (scra) educational practice council (julian, 2006b), asserting that “community psychology practice acknowledges that community is the level where change needs to happen and that change occurs by strengthening the capacity of communities to address their problems and realize their dreams” (p. 804). among the main domains that this practice targets are the ecology, prevention, social and systems change, empowerment, and the integration of multiple disciplines (p. 804). wolff addressed the social determinants of health as main indicators of ecological prevention and suggested that most programs and public health institutions focus on individual indicators, disregarding person-environment interactions. wolff further noted that systems-change toward social justice and equal distribution of resources are core principles in prevention work, whereas empowerment—as defined by rappaport (1981)—entails that community members take charge of their own lives through selfdetermination. agreeing with rappaport, wolff contended that community psychologists need to partner with the grassroots and facilitate political, economic, and psychological resources. we need to collaborate with other social scientists and communities to effect comprehensive social change. moreover, the field needs to recognize the work and contributions of community practitioners (wolff, 2008). based on lessons learned from his life-long dedication to community practice, wolff’s critique indicates that the most difficult challenge has been to promote organizational change from service provision to social justice work. many public service organizations and institutions appear to be more interested in designing prevention or education programs that target individual or population health rather than addressing the systemic causes of social suffering (kleinman, 1997), such as poverty, racism, and forced migration. wolff has been instrumental in the conception of 18 community psychology practice competencies to guide the education of community practitioners based on research and applications as well as lessons learned from collaborations across educational institutions. let us pause and question what is “community psychology practice” and the purposes it pursues. as dzidic, breen, and bishop (2013) have argued, community psychology has conceptualized its practice in communities that have been conceived as a conglomeration of separate individuals who are the targets of psychological interventions emerging from western theorizations and worldviews. consequently, the discipline proposes individual skills and competencies that can promote the community psychologist’s capacity to apply theorized interventions. these authors stated: “competencies wrongly imply that once a standard is met, the individual is therefore ‘competent’ irrespective of context” (p. 3). a set of practice competencies has been determined by the scra educational practice council that is expected to be applied across settings, independent of their cultural context. this is an indicator of the ethnocentric tendency to position western theories and practices as universal truths. dzidic, breen, and bishop (2013) clearly exposed the coloniality of us-centric community psychology. they cite fryer and laing (2008), http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 put bluntly, the usa has the resources and personnel to promote its community psychology in exactly the same way that it promotes its soft drinks industry, fast food industry, and film industry. the ideological domination of community psychology by united statesian versions of community psychology is arguably just another manifestation of united statesian global military, economic, cultural, and intellectual domination… .(fryer and laing, 2008, quoted in dizic et al, 2013, pp. 9-10) dzidic, breen and bishop (2013) articulated the gaps that need to be mirrored as selfreflexivity in this hegemonic imposition of western and narcissistic disciplinary scholarship. they noted that the assessment of practice competencies is usually conducted by means of dichotomous variables or rating scales, creating a mechanistic process that perpetuates the academic status quo. the settings and contexts in which community practice occur are complex. consequently, scientific reductionism—as an innate characteristic of western ideologies—cannot conceive of the multi-layered factors at play and the diversity and uncertainty these generate. in contrast, critical community psychology has emphasized the centrality of values and worldviews to guide reflective practice that informs theoretical conceptualizations and is relativized within particular contexts (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010; riemer et al, 2020). dzidic, breen, and bishop (2013) proposed virtue (value-based) competencies that integrate continuous self-reflexivity and humility to address positionality, uncertainty and ambiguity, and the deconstruction of complex settings within diverse and often chaotic cultural contexts. furthermore, community psychology’s practice needs to address systems change within discussions on colonialism’s consequent manifestations in modernity, extractive capitalism, and coloniality. failure to do so perpetuates the imposition of the status quo through uscentric hegemony in disciplinary theorizing. under this critical analysis, community psychology’s research and action can appear as an imperial and global intervention. hart and ackhurst (2017), referring to community psychology in the united kingdom (uk) and acknowledging kagan’s call for a critical community psychology that integrates liberation psychology and the main value of social justice, critiqued this state by noting that the involvement of students in community-based learning (cbl) runs the risk of perpetuating the values of employability based on neoliberalism. higher education has become the place where students become consumers of marketable skills. consequently, community psychology practice becomes coopted in this neoliberal system and serves the market-driven criteria of training students to be competitive in the job market while too often exploiting communities from which they extract knowledge and practical experience. the authors asserted, for example, rather limited attention has been paid to the propensity of cbl to mirror and replicate existing power structures and inequalities routinely found in the workplace, academic institutions, and wider society (mitchell, 2008). students may ‘buy into’ the dominant mode of amelioration, rather than considering more transformative actions (nelson & prilleltensky, 2005). (p. 7) a particularly important critique these authors provide focuses on the potential of community practice, as it is applied in university settings, to promote “cultural voyeurism,” also known as “poverty porn,” “slum tourism,” and “ghettourism” (p. 10). students may neglect power differentials and conceive their roles as helpers and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 benefactors to eliminate their own guilt from complicity and to satisfy narcissistic desires to rescue and “help” (see also watkins, 2019, 2021). citing australian aboriginal social worker lila watson, the authors reinforced that the role of the education of community practitioners—even in initial phases as student practitioners—is not that of liberating others but of collaboration and coliberation. universities need to pay particular attention to the construction of a critical curriculum that clearly provides opportunities to learn about and confront the dynamics and consequences of oppression, racism, and the pursuance of social, epistemic, and ecological justice (watkins, ciofalo, & james, 2018). mohatt (2020) offered a set of lessons from his lifelong dedication to rural community practice. one main recommendation is to build passionate and enduring relationships with the communities we work with. he indicated that curiosity and observations are more important than following a prescribed procedure. lastly, he recommended that we conduct our practice while being sensitive to the community’s emotional responses, and that we give ourselves permission to be confused. watts and serrano garcia (2003) asserted that in the community psychology from africa, latin american, and the caribbean, one is more likely to find power analyses on structural violence, colonialism, resilience, privilege, and emancipatory action than in the us or europe. fisher and sonn (2007) centralized power analyses in reflections on both research and practice. the authors critiqued the current situation by noting that the training of community practitioners has been based on positivistic philosophies of science favoring the scientist practitioner who maintains a detached and objective gaze in evidencebased applications in the field. this kind of epistemological and ontological paradigm has greatly contributed to the maintenance of the neoliberal status quo. furthermore, they stated that “…we have the lessons from smail (2001) […who] said that we need to depsychologize psychology to work in different and more effective ways” (p. 257). in this regard, langhout et al. (2016) proposed that the scra core competency of “ethical-reflective practice” be revised to “an ethical, critically reflexive, anti-racist feminist praxis” (p. 4). community psychologists need to transparently disclose embraced assumptions, beliefs, and personal experiences and how these influence, enhance, or constrain their practice (dalton & wolfe, 2012, p. 11; cited in langhout et al, 2016, p. 1). this kind of praxis, the authors contend, is based on feminist women of color who have emphasized relationality (montero, 2007) and critical self-reflexivity on intersectionality such as gloria anzaldúa, cherrie moraga, patricia hill collins, and aida hurtado (cited in langhout et al., 2016, p. 2). it is an embodied praxis that makes the practitioner’s identity visible. furthermore, addressing issues of power, the authors propose heterarchy, a non-hierarchical system of interactions that can be dynamically governed by different components at different times (tebes, 2012; cited in langhout et al., 2016, p.7). such a system engenders equally distributive responsibility and accountability with shared tasks within a collaborative of relational individuals who co-construct academic knowledge and praxis. community psychology practice definitions from the global south significant social movements and contestations to the continuations of colonial impositions at all levels of existence— economic, social, cultural, political, epistemic, spiritual, and ecological—have grown in abundance throughout formerly colonized countries in the americas, asia, africa, australia, the middle east, and the pacific. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 community psychology has been constructed and re-constructed within struggles of liberation and self-determination across these regions. it has evolved from practice, mostly re-conceived as praxis in the global south and as self-reflexive and transformative community work to effect structural change. montero and serrano garcia (2011) noted that in latin american social community psychology (scp) there has been a tendency to neglect theoretical and methodological developments in favor of community practice. wiesenfeld (2016) proposed a scp “upside down” that addresses the following requirements: (1) confluence of a diversity of knowledges that integrates interdisciplinarity and popular knowledges emerging from communities; (2) intersectionality, conceived as the fundamental mission of the academy that has a creative capacity to multiply knowledge and relate with heterogeneous communities as well as with government to influence policies for transformative change; and (3) diversity approached from “a vison of multidimensional knowledge” (p. 7; translation by ciofalo) . a community psychology that accountably commits to care for global, social, epistemic, and ecological justice needs to learn from indigenous scholars, psychologists, and activists from former colonized countries and to contest racism and the erasure of indigenous cosmovisions (dudgeon et al., 2018, 2017; duran et al, 2008; dutta, 2018; gone, 2016; sonn, 2016, wilson, 2008). reyes, cruz & sonn (2015) proposed a decolonial standpoint in the construction of our theories, research, and actions, becoming aware of the impacts of white privilege, unequal power in racialized and ethnicized, discursive practices and relations, and promoting alliances and solidarities to address them. referring to freire’s problematización, a process to develop critical awareness by which people come to understand structures of oppression, irma serrano-garcia (2020) stated, as community psychologists you must be aware of the impact of coloniality on any research or intervention effort. you must reflect about what “researching and intervening” means to people. not only will you be considered a representative of the colonizer, particularly if you are from the u.s., but you will additionally carry the “aura of science.” thus, problematización starts with ourselves. what research methods are pertinent and non-exploitative? which…research areas are more useful to people participating in “sovereign acts”? …you will contribute to decolonizing by engaging others in conversations about the ideologies and diverse mechanisms that support oppression and coloniality. (pp. 9-10) furthermore, indigenous women who promote holistic, community wellbeing through the use of traditional healing practices, spirituality, and activism to revive cultures and knowledge systems have been contributing significantly to our understanding of decolonial community praxes (ciofalo, 2017; dudgeon & bray, 2018; speed, castillo, & stephen, 2006; riveracusicanqui, 2018). below we review and define the practices and aims we see as essential to a decolonial approach to community psychology. buen vivir, collective well-being we begin with the interdependent understanding expressed in buen vivir or collective well-being that needs to guide our practice. grondona-opazo (2016) proposed that community psychology be based on the new political formations in ecuador emerging from indigenous cosmovisions of sumak kawsay/buen vivir (collective wellbeing). the author distinguished between the rhetoric of buen-vivir that has served as http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 mythic discourse of indigenous worldviews exploited as [global] “political marketing” of the bolivian and ecuadorian governments, and sumak kawsay (gudynas, 2014) as a referent of an ancestral position of indigenous peoples (p. 61). grondona-opazo (2016) stated, buen vivir constitutes itself as a category of permanent construction and reconstruction which articulating axis is the collectivity; that is, it asserts that the personal realization depends on the collective realization, on the relations among humans and those of nature. buen vivir “purports to retake society as unity of observation and intervention and equity, inclusion, and social cohesion as values that allow the promotion of the solidary and cooperative spirit of the human being” ( senplades, 2009, p.37). in this way, social inclusion and cohesion constitute the social policy pillars of the ecuadorian state. (p. 54; translation by ciofalo) these social policies require that all praxis contributes to the attainment of buen vivir values. at an ethical level, there have been continuous tensions in community psychology’s praxis between top-down or bottom-up interventions. the former tensions are derived from rational evaluative assumptions instead of guided by ethical and political values. at a strategic level, tensions exist between assistance-based and participatory interventions, and between prevention efforts and community development (grondona-opazo, 2016, pp. 5455; translation by ciofalo). like in other places in latin america, community psychology in mexico evolved from praxis as a branch of social psychology. almeida (2012) noted that mexican community psychology has roots in prehispanic indigenous practices. it is a perspective that “has strong roots in the unconscious of the mexican people (almeida & osorio, 2011, p.137).” during the 60s and 70s, many programs initiated by the government and non-governmental organizations to address severe poverty conditions provided the terrain for newly graduated psychologists to be involved in communities applying popular education and participatory action research. some universities utilized applied psychoanalysis in their work with communities, while in universities influenced by marxism and populism, community work meant consciousness raising for liberation. theories in community psychology evolved from praxis applied in indigenous movements for social justice, from praxis networks, and from social and community psychologists’ experiences with minimal contact with scra and apa (almeida, 2012; almeida & osorio, 2011). almeida and sanchez diaz de rivera (2014) asserted that the first ingredient to coconstruct authentic, reciprocal, and longlasting relationships with communities is through presencia (presence). the authors proposed that community praxis is cocreated, weaved within dynamics of conflict and hope for utopic ideas of “vivir bien” (wellbeing), tracing uncertain pathways toward the application of strategies to confront corporate capitalism, modernity, and coloniality. almeida (2016) added, it is about the restoration of human communities as genuine as possible… that includes collective participation…and flexible collective ties beyond the conviviality of individuals who are consumers and opportunists…a utopia…of individuals who dialogue with each other and who establish vital synergies with others and with the environment. a history that belongs to all, that has not yet come to an end and that allows us to learn and redeem the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 humanizing potential of failures. (p. 19; translation by ciofalo) furthermore, almeida recommended that the zapatista movement, emiliano zapata de liberación nacional (ezln), can teach community psychologists how to confront the many heads of the capitalist hydra. referring to the important contributions of zapatista women, he added, it is about the construction of community grids that cause allergies to the hydra. ana lydia flores (2016) says in her text, in the 2nd volume published by the ezln, that the smell of collective work disconcerts the capitalist hydra. she is accustomed to the smell of the slave work and the seat of organized effort and solidary work disconcerts her. vilma almendra (2016) cites a thought of the nasa indigenous peoples: the word without action is empty, the action without word is blind, the word and the action that is outside of the community spirit is death. (pp. 14-15—translation by ciofalo) almeida invites us to reconstruct the discipline considering these learnings to decolonize knowledge, research, and action. furthermore, academic institutions need to resist neoliberal models of education and band together in collectivities to promote praxis competencies that learn from popular struggles carried on by indigenous peoples and communities, resisting the tentacles of the capitalist hydra to co-create decoloniality. as arturo escobar (2016) stated, those struggles and movements are more complex than the knowledge imparted in the western academy. sentipensar the epistemologies of the global south, a term first coined by santos (2014), create the structure on which praxis competencies that build “the otherwise” emerge. such competencies allow for the deep cultural and ecological understanding of the needs of the earth applying sentipensar (thinking-feeling with the earth), a capacity first addressed by colombian sociologist orlando fals-borda who conceived the holistic relationality of human and planetary coexistence (cited in escobar, 2016, p. 14). one of the main propositions of epistemologies of the south is that eurocentric modernity has created an onlyone-world (oww) mentality erasing the rich diversity of other mentalities that define pluriversality rather than universality. “the pluriverse is a tool to first, make alternatives to the one world plausible to one-worlders, and, second, provide resonance to those other worlds that interrupt the one-world story (blaser, de la cadena, and escobar, 2014)” (cited in escobar, 2016, p. 22). epistemologies emerging from struggles for territoriality and cultural preservation constitute an ecology of knowledges and practices that present alternatives of relational ontologies where there is no divide between culture and nature. escobar (2016) stated, “sources of novel theoretical-political projects do exist, but they are more likely to be found at present in the knowledges, practices, and strategies of subaltern actors as they mobilize in defense of their relational worlds” (p. 16). it is from these practices that we must learn to delink from the practices, epistemologies, and ontologies of the oww, as mignolo proposed, in order to end the perpetuation of the extractive, capitalist hydra whose survival is legitimized by its derived academic disciplines. conscientization and annunciation the brazilian educator, paulo freire, defined praxis as interlinked reflection and action that raises consciousness by means of critical reflection (conscientization) to understand http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 the effects of oppressive structures of society on everyday life so that we can transform them. this praxis must be horizontal, founded on dialogical relations, graced by humility, and love. it must resist universalization and be free to evolve differently in varying contexts. those coming from social positions of privilege must interrupt their socialized tendencies to take over and to talk to others with less social privilege, usurping revolutionary potentials. through conscientization, group members can understand together how oppressive realities are structured. once this is understood, it is possible to imagine together more mutually desired futures and to announce, to annunciate, them. these desires and visions can orient actions in concert with others that seek to transform oppressive structures and practices. the work of liberation is not conceived of as individual, but as social. it requires solidarity. ecopsychsocial accompaniment re-visioning psychological practice from his immersion in el salvador in the 1980’s, ignacio martín-baró, spanish jesuit and social psychologist, embraced freire’s focus on nurturing critical consciousness as a role for psychologists. he also advocated for psychologists to encourage forms of attachment where the humanity of each is affirmed, where joyful modes of interdependence are promoted, and people’s virtues acknowledged and utilized (martínbaró, 1994). borrowing from liberation theology, he challenged psychologists to accompany the majorities in libertory social movements (watkins, 2015; 2019; 2021), rather than seeking to help individuals accommodate to pernicious social structures and inequalities. perhaps the most radical choice central american psychologists face today concerns the disjunction between an accommodation to a social system that has benefitted us personally and a critical confrontation with that system…the choice is between accompanying or not accompanying the oppressed majorities….this is not a question of whether to abandon psychology; it is a question of whether psychological knowledge will be placed in the service of constructing a society where the welfare of the few is not built on the wretchedness of the many, where the fulfillment of some does not require that others be deprived, where the interests of the minority do not demand the dehumanization of all. (martinbaró, 1994, p. 46) an essential aspect of such psychosocial accompaniment is understanding and challenging greed and helping people reevaluate their “needs” so that they do not act to maintain inequality in the distribution of wealth. for martín-baró, psychology should not evade a necessary critique of capitalism and the multilevel violence it breeds in people’s lives (watkins, 2019). ecopsychosocial accompaniment requires that the accompanist learn as much as possible about the particular history of the group and the issue with which one is working. this includes a history of place and an awareness of the health and well-being of not only humans, but other-than-human animals and natural and built environments. affective conviviality the commitment to decolonial praxes requires that we apply methodologies of affective conviviality, weaving deep relations with all those involved in our work, epistemic and ecological justice, and decolonial solidarity, sharing stories that build interconnections among peoples, authors, scholars, practitioners, artists, and nature (ciofalo et al, 2019). in alignment with the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 zapatista call for a world in which many worlds coexist, de la cadena & blaser (2018) proposed that the epoch in which we live, the anthropocene, is being vigorously contested by indigenous movements against a oneworld-world (oww), the world of the powerful, and “what we see as the making of an ‘uncommons:’ the negotiated coming together of heterogeneous worlds (and their practices) as they strive to make each of them be what they are, which is also not without others” (p. 4). kowal (2015) and land (2015) alerted committed practitioners to be aware of conscious and unconscious motives that perpetuate power and colonial difference and confront the “white savior complex” that drives helping, assisting, or redeeming those conceived as marginalized and oppressed and that is anchored in coloniality. instead, practitioners are urged to apply solidarity with partnered communities to learn from them and collectively unite for social, economic, racial, gender, epistemic, and ecological justice. in addition, those with racial, ethnic, economic, and other kinds of privilege are urged to turn back to their own privileged neoliberal communities to undo both the social and economic structures that generate social suffering for the majorities and to transform their own consciousness, seeking out destructive assumptions that continue to fuel coloniality and instead nurture a biophilic orientation. the questions to ask are the following. to what extent has community psychology from the global north and its us-centric hegemony perpetuated western practices and competencies based on white supremacy? has it leaned on narratives of social justice to reduce guilt and shame? has it concealed complicity with neoliberalism and avoided confrontations over privilege? it is now due time to contribute to grassroots efforts to return occupied land, acknowledge appropriated epistemologies, and to show respect for community praxes from the global south. toward an emerging, decolonial community psychology praxis informed by practice competencies dzidic, breen, & bishop (2013) advocated for indigenous and cross-cultural psychologies to provide models from which we can develop community practice competencies. they asserted, in australia, working with aboriginal and torres strait islander people is an example where “tick-a-box” competence assessment does not and cannot work (purdie, dudgeon, & walker, 2010; vicary & bishop, 2005). rather, these forms of competence assessment are seen as incompetent as they perpetuate the status quo. (p. 5) in these cultural contexts, competencies have a different meaning that signifies value-based, practical readiness, and critical consciousness. they refer to maritza montero (2012) who asserted that while the community researcher may facilitate and assess participation, participatory researchers have to be critically aware of the entanglements of their position as oppressor. “in that sense, the practical ideological identification is a hard conquest that only a few achieve” (montero, 2012, p. 83; cited in dzidic, breen, and bishop, 2013, p. 6). furthermore, carolissen et al (2017) presented case studies of curricular applications that aim to promote theory, research, and practice informed by decolonial theory and critical participatory action research methods that address transformative social change and social justice. the authors concluded that key competencies to achieve decolonial curricular goals are the continuous application of critical consciousness and self-reflexivity on positionality and intersectionality. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 in our community, liberation, indigenous, and eco-psychologies m.a./ph.d. specialization at pacifica graduate institute we have been laboring to understand our own diverse positionalities and their impacts on our theorizing and practice. we have placed the study and practices of critical community psychology into dialogue with liberation psychology, indigenous psychologies, and radical ecopsychology, the latter revisioned from an environmental justice perspective. we have conceived the following practice competencies based on our learning from knowledge and praxes systems from the global south as well as from ongoing assessment of practice competencies in our program over a decade (ciofalo, james, & watkins, 2016). to co-construct decolonial community psychology praxes, we defined practice competencies emerging from our conviviality in academic-community partnerships (see appendix). we are learning from their application, from students’ and faculties’ engagement in ongoing reflexivity, and from the specific ecopsychosocial challenges that we are addressing. definitions of emergent decolonial community psychology praxis will reflect the particular context of its theorizing practitioners. our context in the u.s. is one of ongoing coloniality-of racism, gross economic inequality due to unregulated capitalism, environmental extractivism, unbridled imperial violence, and massive ecopsychosocial collective trauma. a community psychology that aspires to nurture decoloniality must seek to address structural change while accompanying communities and individuals in the promotion of buen vivir, social and environmental justice, and ecological sustainability. we offer below our delineation of decolonial community psychology praxis from where we are standing and look forward to learning from yours. decolonial community psychology praxis is weaved within a relational ontology that promotes the value of sentipensar/feeling-thinking with the earth, affective conviviality, conscientization and annunciation, decolonial solidarity, ecopsychosocial accompaniment, and buen vivir (collective well-being). it includes the rights of the earth within an ecology of knowledges. it builds webs of solidarity with communities’ struggles to sustain a plurality of cosmovisions delinking from western-centric ideologies. testimonies of this definition’s application and its related practice competencies can be accessed in our yearly newsletters, hearing voices. we welcome multiple definitions of decolonial, community psychology praxis, arising from diverse locations, reflecting communities’ varied cosmovisions, challenges, and virtues. each of these will have its own distinct genealogy and will be susceptible to ongoing re-visioning. references almeida, e. 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(2016). thinking through our processes: how the http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.eurozine.com/transmodernity-border-thinking-and-global-coloniality/ https://www.eurozine.com/transmodernity-border-thinking-and-global-coloniality/ https://www.eurozine.com/transmodernity-border-thinking-and-global-coloniality/ https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.12122 global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 ucsc community psychology research & action team strives to embody ethical, critically reflexive anti-racist feminist praxis. global journal of community psychology practice, 7, (4), 1-13. maldonado-torres, n. (2007). on the coloniality of being: contributions to the development of a concept. cultural studies, 21, 240-270. marsella, a. (december, 2013). all psychologies are indigenous psychologies. psychology international, american psychological association. martín-baró, i. 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(2015). psychosocial accompaniment. journal of social and political psychology, 3(1). http://jspp.psychopen.eu/article/view/1 03/html watkins, m., ciofalo, n., & james, s. (2018). engaging the struggle for decolonial approaches to teaching community psychology. american journal of community psychology, 62, (3-4), 319329. watts, r., & serrano-garcia, i. (2003). the quest for a liberating community psychology: an overview. american journal of community psychology, 31, 73– 78. wiesenfeld, e. (2016). trascendiendo confines disciplinares: continuidad, psicología comunitaria crítica y psicología social comunitaria al revés. revista interamericana de psicologia/interamerican journal of psychology, 50, (1), 4-13. wolff, t. (november, 2014). community psychology practice: expanding the impact of psychology’s work. american psychologist, 803-813, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0037426. wolff, t., & swift, c. (2008). reflections on “real-world” community psychology. journal of community psychology, 36(5), 609-625. wilson, s. (2008). research is ceremony: indigenous research methods. fernwood publishing. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://jspp.psychopen.eu/article/view/103/html http://jspp.psychopen.eu/article/view/103/html http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0037426 global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 appendix: community, liberation, indigenous, and eco-psychologies (clie) practice competencies depth psychology capacity to imagine unconscious dimensions of individual and community experience through attention to narratives, dreams, metaphors, images, symbols, silences, and gaps. capacity to communicate through artsand image-based experiences, including community visioning. capacity to be aware of, to track, and to take responsibility for one’s own projections. liberation psychology ability to apply self-reflexivity in identifying coloniality through indicators of racism, sexism, class and gender aggression. ability to facilitate dialogical, empathic, horizontal, and democratic relationships aimed at transparency and shared decision-making. capacity to join in solidarity with people engaged in struggle against oppressive conditions. indigenous psychologies capacity to include the historic, socio-cultural, political, spiritual, and ecological context of a particular place under consideration. ability to understand and consciously participate in indigenous knowledge systems, their relational holistic and metaphysical philosophies, and ecological praxes. ability to participate in indigenous research methodologies that contribute to decoloniality in communities where fieldwork and/or dissertation research is implemented, including understanding of relationality with nature and spirit, and participation in cultural practices, ritual and ceremony. ecopsychology capacity to integrate multiple influences comprising a place, including bioregional and geopolitical context. capacity to analyze the environmental crises in a transdisciplinary manner, connecting socio-cultural, economic, political, and climate issues. understanding and addressing the role of extractive industries and industrialization in environmental degradation. http://www.gjcpp.org/ 1 imagination praxis: white anti-racist culture building gloria dykstra and cristien storm keywords: racial justice, praxis, critical liberation, anti-racism author biography: gloria dykstra, is an activist-scholar and licensed mental health therapist in seattle, washington, who works from an anti-racist, anti-oppression, liberatory framework. her philosophy on individual psychotherapy is informed by liberation and community psychologies as well as somatic approaches to trauma healing. originally receiving her masters in existential-phenomenological therapeutic psychology, gloria found her way to liberation psychology after working in the community mental health sector for 4 years. she became interested in the discordance between providing low-barrier mental health therapy and the realization that the very systems of provision were perpetuating harm in the marginalized communities they aimed to help. in 2008, gloria co-founded the coalition of therapists for justice as an aspirational community response to this tension. she works in private practice in seattle, wa, usa and vancouver, b.c. where her client work is focused on decolonizing our ways of relating to emotional distress and moving alongside clients toward healing generational and racialized trauma. cristien storm, is a writer, activist and politicized mental health therapist with a long history of integrating arts and cultural organizing into anti-racist and anti-fascist activism. she is the author of empowered boundaries: speaking truth, setting boundaries and inspiring social change. her global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 writing has appeared in numerous publications including perspectives on anarchist theory journal and against the current magazine. cristien is a co-founder and former executive director of home alive, where she developed and facilitated self-defense and boundary setting curricula rooted in marital arts, social justice, and anti-oppression sensibilities. she is also a co-founder of if you don’t they will, a northwest collaboration that provides concrete and creative strategies to counter white nationalism through a cultural lens which includes creating spaces to generate visions, hopes, desires, and dreams for the kinds of worlds we want to live in. recommended citation: dykstra, g., & storm, c. (2021). imagination praxis: white anti-racist culture building. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(3), 1 15. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: cristien storm, 206-769-3160, seattle, wa. email: cristienstorm@gmail.com http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:cristienstorm@gmail.com global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 imagination praxis: white anti-racist culture building this paper will chronicle the racial justice praxis the authors, and seven additional white colleagues, have undertaken in response to our growing awareness of the need for critical-liberatory spaces in which white anti-racist cultures can be cultivated. the practices undertaken by the group of white therapists and psychologists are a gesture toward anti-racist imaginings; striving to disrupt social and institutionalized white body supremacy. this work is informed by the recognition of a longstanding call from black and indigenous people of color (bipoc) for white people to recognize that dismantling white supremacy is white peoples’ work. our practices draw on long lineages of black radical imaginations and bipoc theory, including works from octavia butler, grace lee boggs, derrick bell, robin d.g. kelly, n.k. jemisin, dr. joy degruy, adrienne maree brown, and many other bipoc thinkers and cultural world-builders. “there is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” ― octavia e. butler introduction this paper will chronicle the racial justice praxis the authors, and seven additional white colleagues, have undertaken in response to our growing awareness of the need for critical-liberatory spaces in which white anti-racist cultures can be cultivated. the practices undertaken by the group of white therapists and psychologists are a gesture toward anti-racist imaginings; striving to disrupt social and institutionalized white body supremacy. our group has adopted the concept of ‘imaginings’ to ensure that our praxis embodies the spirit of curiosity and dialogue without the pressure to ‘arrive’ at conclusions. this work is informed by the recognition of a longstanding call from black and indigenous people of color (bipoc) for white people to recognize that dismantling white supremacy is white peoples’ work. our practices draw on long lineages of black radical imaginations and bipoc theory, including works from octavia butler, grace lee boggs, derrick bell, robin d.g. kelly, n.k. jemisin, dr. joy degruy, adrienne maree brown, and many other bipoc thinkers and cultural world-builders. through such work we hope to participate alongside the traditions of critical, liberation, feminist and post-colonial psychologies (burton, m. & kagan, c., 2014; fox, d. & prilleltensky, i. (eds.), 1997; fox, d., prilleltensky, i. & austin, s. (eds.), 2011; lykes, m. b., & mallona, a., 2008; martín-baró, i., 1985; moane, g., 2010). the group aims to shift away from a white culture-normed, individualized, dis-embodied, medical-model of psychology. our work joins that of other critical psychologies in the hope of establishing robust anti-racist and liberatory models of repair, reconciliation, and reparation (coates, 2014; menakem, 2017; nieto, 2010; kendi 2019; et al.). the article will outline the history of our groups’ formation and offer an analysis of the scholarship and activism that has informed our approach. we will provide examples of our imagination practices, explore the successes and challenges of our work together and reflect on future hopes for our work and the potential contributions it may present to the field of critical community psychology practice. to begin, we see our work as a part of several praxis-oriented traditions. our discussions of group work and vision are informed by http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 critical community psychology (kagan, c., burton, m., duckett, p., lawthom, r., siddique, a., 2011), liberation and feminist psychologies (lykes & moane, 2009), as well as somatic, or nervous system-based, trauma theory (levine, p. a., 1997; menakem, r., 2017; porges, s.w., 2011; van der kolk, b. a., 2014, ogden, p., 2015). we also draw from anti-racist movements and inquiry lineages from outside academia. these include grassroots anti-fascist and anti-capitalist theory and practices, coalition-based social movement work and abolitionist traditions1. our group has utilized the notion of movement lineages, akin to martin-baro’s (1986) emphasis on the recovery of historical memory, to identify the intellectual and activist legacies we bring to our work. we emphasize curiosity for the movement lineages each group member brings to our relational work, and in particular, those lineages outside formal academia. as watkins and shulman (2008) state, we endeavor to be an example “...where individuals and communities have found local, creative, and participatory solutions to problematic conditions and institutions by transforming their psychological relationship to self and other, sometimes in dialogue with psychologists who are transgressing academic boundaries” (p.16). it is the authors’ hope that by sharing some of our groups’ experience, as therapists and psychologists specifically, we will add to the body of critical community psychology practice. we hope this paper reads as a case study outlining the dynamics of a group constructed by white mental health professionals to build anti-racist culture within our contextual environment. in this paper, we aim to closely describe our groups’ 1 anti-capitalist grassroots and community mobilizations (street medics, food not bombs, books for prisoners, blockades, rent strikes, redistribution projects, etc.). rural organizing project, institute for research & education of human rights, northwest coalition for human dignity, western states center. formation, process, ruptures and repairs over the last two years. history in the fall of 2018, a multi-racial group of mental health therapists and psychologists began organizing and fundraising to bring nationally recognized racialized somatic trauma expert, resmaa menakem, to seattle, washington, for a weekend event. the gathering was inspired after several seattlearea therapists and psychologists read menakem’s book, my grandmother’s hands: racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies (2017). group members met monthly for one year, focusing on event planning with an implicit intent to create what menakem calls a ‘cultural container’ in the planning process. cultural container is a term utilized by resmaa menakem (2017). this term speaks to the intentional process whereby members of a group commit to long-term engagement in practices and relationships that become the building blocks for culture. in this instance, the deliberate work of creating a white, antiracist striving culture that can ‘contain’ the ruptures and repairs necessary for building somatic fortitude (or stamina) in white bodies. this container includes cross-racial relationship-building, and community networking. event planning prioritized centering black and indigenous people of color (bipoc) in both the process and execution of the weekend itself. the group worked with menakem’s team to ground these anti-racist values in his call for embodied container work. another explicit goal was to develop more racial stamina2 and capacity to address 2 racial stamina asks white bodies to develop more skills and capacities to interrogate, interrupt and develop accountability practices for the evasive strategies white people use to avoid their complicity in white supremacy culture. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the ruptures and wounding that inevitably occur in cross-racial (and white-caucus) organizing. despite members of our group being long time anti-racist activists, this kind of container-building was novel. the initial year of mixed racial organizing included anti-racist relationship-building and somatic practices with a focus on interrupting white-normed methods in both the planning and the weekend itself. this resulted in several steps towards de-centering whiteness: a bipoc-only friday night event with resmaa menakem, pre-openregistration ticket sales for bipoc-only with a sliding scale, a community reparations fund where community members could pool money for bipoc registration, a bipoc healing space at the event, and a higher than average percentage of people of color, and black participants in particular at the event (atypical for psychology-based events in seattle, washington). we also faced challenges and confronted ways our implicit and explicit anti-racist intentions did not manifest. for instance, we had people of color but no black members in the planning group, which we recognized as the anti-blackness baked into anti-racist work, even in multiracial anti-racist organizing. we also noted the deeply segregated legacy in our therapy community, which despite the higher-than-average number of bipoc attendees, remained largely, and sometimes painfully, intact. it became clear we were part of a white community that was unprepared for the racialized ruptures that occurred during the weekend. this insight amplified a host of concerns needing redress in our various personal and professional communities. and, unsurprisingly, there were the numerous microand macro-aggressions that occur when white communities, and individuals, engage in anti-racist work. many important things came out of the weekend, including the recognition that white anti-racists need to develop more racialized stamina and more individual and collective capacity for participating in cross-racial organizing. bipoc organizers and attendees additionally made it clear that the white organizers in our group had not created a robust enough anti-racist container to hold and attend to the harm and ruptures that occurred during the weekend. in addition, there was a clear call from resmaa menakem that white anti-racist-striving individuals need to pivot from focusing on strategies and, instead, invest and dedicate energy and resources toward creating anti-racist cultures. this group was born of that call toward commitment and action. in the year and nine months after the training, nine of the white members of the planning committee have continued in this work. group members have met monthly and communicated, often daily, to discuss antiracist culture and somatic container-building as part of a core commitment to developing embodied racialized stamina. as a group we explore various commitments to developing anti-racist norms and group cultures, work to identity and interrupt white body supremacy in our various contexts and engage in antiracist imagination projects. methods these commitments to developing and expanding through our own limitations have taken many forms. some of the anti-racist imagination and culture building projects include: developing and facilitating workshops, organizing anti-racist salons, constructing an audio archive, study groups, community discussions, anti-racist curricula development, incorporation of anti-racist scholarship in somatic therapy trainings, and triad work. triad work is a somatic pedagogy practice that involves body-oriented focusing to increase racialized distress tolerance and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 nervous system regulation (menakem, 2017). we engage in group practices of communitycreation – naming and discussing sticking points and grappling together – to increase our capacities to tolerate the distress and discomfort of doing anti-racist work in community. somatic fortitude and racial stamina are necessary to interrupt the propensity for white individuals to become emotionally dysregulated when confronted with complex and charged conversations about race. this type of reactivity can lead white individuals and groups to inadvertently engage in ineffective emotional processing at the expense of bipoc. our group collaborates with others to identify and interrupt white body supremacy culture, develop intersectional white anti-racist cultures, and attend to individual as well as intergenerational and collective traumas. the practical balancing both internal (personal growth and change) and externally facing anti-racist work (events and trainings), group members have participated in community discussions about anti-racist culture building with other groups and organizations to ensure we interrupt the silo’ing that can occur in anti-racist work. sub-groups have studied the histories of antisemitism, as well as racist white feminism, as side projects to sharpen our social-historical awareness. internally, we have begun the-long term collective work of identifying and developing communal practices for interrupting the ways white supremacy cultural norms show up in our group. these include hierarchical, topdown decision-making structures, often with white leaders in positions of power, or white norms as guiding principles. these include centering values of ‘professionalism’, ‘civility’ as well as invoking tone-policing and silencing dissent to privilege white comfort. in service of this interruption, we employ a number of rudimentary practices, including practicing leaderful shaping with projects (raelin, j. a., 2003), and a non-hierarchical group structure. we are also cognizant of white culture-normed reliance on the written word as a primary way of relating. in our meetings, even if virtual (as has been the case through since march 2020), we have begun to include singing, movement, and somatic practices as part of our time together. after the weekend, resmaa menakem tasked the white participants to meet regularly in triads to do embodied exercises from his book in service of developing somatic fortitude. triad work involving three people—observer, participant, and tracker— is a common component of many somatic, trauma-focused training programs. it is also an integral part of embodied anti-racist culture building. it is clear that it is not enough to identify and name white body supremacy culture, and that groups like ours must also develop robust anti-racist values, norms, and practices. in between monthly meetings we also draw from individual group members’ separate organizing histories. for example, some members’ orientations have historically been focused on anti-fascist organizing. others have focused on somaticbased healing traditions and its sociopolitical potential. as a group we purposefully examine how these inform our approaches in ways that move us, both towards, and away from anti-racist culture building. another way group members develop, and practice anti-racist imagination practices is through outward-facing culture building projects. the public-facing projects demand rigorous inner-facing and interpersonal group work as well. thus far, a few of these projects include producing an anti-racist salon, creating an audio archive, and a community stickering campaign. the social and collective sensibilities of these projects have invited group members to dream, imagine, and develop new ways of being together. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 practices of community dreaming, imaging, and visioning reconnect individual and community transformation, creating public spaces to hear the imaginal’s critical and creative commentary on our lives. whereas ideology usually tends to conserve status quo arrangements, utopian imagination brings forward the new, posing a discontinuity. (kearney, 1998a; ricouer, 1986, as cited in watkins & shulman, 2008, p. 219) that is, group members have joined together in the work of scheming, sculpting, and envisioning anti-racist collaborations. building anti-racist culture: the salon members organized an anti-racist evening salon entitled “build it and they will come” (appendix a) that brought together (mostly) white folks to sing, dance, write, play and imagine anti-racist worlds and possibilities. we encouraged people to bring their incantations and imaginations to the event and asked those who do not normally perform, or identify as artists, to be involved. we threaded somatic and relational games into the evening, hoping to disrupt the audience-performer binary that reproduces a distanced relationship to art; whereby a piece is produced to be enjoyed (taken in) by an audience. group members prepared antiracist fairytales and bedtime stories imagining a post-white-supremacy landscape for future generations. one member led the approximately 80 attendees through a group sing-a-long to a popular 1980s song with alternate anti-racist lyrics. another group member shared her piece “a case for antiracist fairy tales” (appendix b). in it she invited guests to: imagine how much change might erupt in just one generation if most, or many, or even just some white babies nestled in loving caregiver arms while sweet words were whispered and songs were sung of a kingdom terrorized by a false supremacy based on a myth of something called “race”... imagine white babies being sung to as they develop in the womb, swimming in anti-racist amniotic fluid, and listening to lyrics of anti-racist resistance and celebrations sung sweetly from the ether of the other side of the amnion and chorion sac. what kinds of developmentally lovecentered, courageous, deeply connected and anti-fascist nervous systems could we manifest? much of the evening centered around these communal imaginings of a culture where being explicitly anti-racist is the status-quo. group members also created and distributed cards explaining the concept of reparations and inviting contributions to a specific local group raising funds for a bipoc-dedicated, owned, and operated farming and retreat center (appendix c). the salon aspired to facilitate the experience of being-together, investing in the value of developing our collective and personal affective responses to doing anti-racist practices. that is, the event was a coming together to anti-racist dream and imagine with friends and strangers alike, and then part ways connected in some ways, and detached in others. interrupting white expertise: the audio archive group members created an audio archive, entitled “getting our cousins”, to collect and share stories about various ways white people have, are, and strive to dismantle and divest from whiteness. the archive interrupts white ‘expertizing’ or ‘elite-ification’ by having audio recordings exist in conversation with one another; using interviews that share and explore the process and messiness of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 anti-racist culture building. they include various voices to amplify a diversity of perspectives. interviews are intentionally informal, conversational, and disrupt professional, authoritative and authenticated white-norms of credentialing one’s professional identity. as the project unfolded, group members grappled with disrupting hierarchies of decision-making, ownership over projects and ideas, and to stymie white-normed impulses to control process and outcomes. the archive also surfaced tensions in the group around various approaches, styles, and sensibilities in anti-racist movement work. these various tensions remain current and led to a pause in the project while group members continue developing communal practices, racial stamina, and anti-racist container building3 skills. group members orient toward anti-racist work in many ways, and we strive to allow space for that variety rather than falling into the trap of believing there is ‘one right way’. communal anti-racist action: the stickering campaign in the beginning stages of the covid-19 pandemic, group members mused on ways to engage in collective actions while remaining in spacious solidarity. in an effort to think creatively amidst pandemic restrictions, our group found inspiration in different scholarship regarding the role of art in liberation psychologies. as watkins and shulman (2008) describe, “[m]ost liberation psychology projects involve participatory forms of art-making to help awaken new symbols for transformation, seeking to liberate underground springs capable of renewing cultural landscapes” (p. 208). 3 container building is a term used by resmaa menakem which involves the interpersonal and community building work of people engaged in anti-racist work to create robust enough communities to hold and maintain group members proposed a stickering campaign supporting immigrants’ rights work as an avenue that could inspire consideration of abolitionist approaches to border resistance and immigrants’ rights struggles. the stickering campaign invited people to engage, or post stickers, in various places depending on individual and community comfort, accessibility, and safety. the stickers were intentionally provocative and humorous. the group settled on stickers with the image of a small cocktail glass that read “neat please, fuck i.c.e.” (figure 1), (storm; hirsh, 2020) using a simple pun referencing a cocktail to call out the american immigration and customs enforcement’s (i.c.e) ongoing violation of human rights and illegal detainment of refugees seeking asylum in the united states. another sticker included mocking images of instances where ice is necessary, contrasted with the unnecessary presence of i.c.e. (figure 2), the agency (prince, 2020). the group then commissioned a local printing press to create these stickers. the company agreed to offer a 15% discount and we invited folks to donate that 15% to la resistencia, a local grassroots group “working to end the detention of immigrants and stop deportations” (la resistencia, 2014), specifically at the northwest detention center in washington state. a letter was then composed by group members anne phillips and cristien storm (2020) with excerpts from the la resistencia website (la resistencia, 2014) to explain the stickering action. the letter included information outlining several avenues for participation alongside resources directing readers to additional opportunities to engage (appendix d). tensions emerged as group members wrestled with the reality that each member related differently to realities such as safety, comfortability regarding proximity to legal and illegal activities, and fears of white supremacist backlash to more connection when the charge that arises in confronting white supremacy pushes and, in his words, “blows through bodies”. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 public-facing aspects of the campaign. these differences also offered opportunities to begin to explore how to develop anti-racist practices, norms and values that support varied positionalities inside whiteness, and various anti-racist lineages. this public-facing action gave us the opportunity to face what freire termed ‘limit situations’, “...where we are met both as though with an impassable limitation and at the same time given the possibility of finding a new voice, understanding, and way of being-in-theworld” (watkins & shulman, 2008, p. 289). these kinds of anti-racist group norms, practices, and values are central to embodied imagination. figure 1. sticker campaign example, image 1 figure 2. sticker campaign example, image 2 discussion these inwardand outward-facing collaborations and shifting of embodied and affective states has offered numerous possibilities for expanded collective imaginations and has also, at times, collapsed into reflexive white supremacy culture. woven into this striving toward a divergence from white body supremacy cultural norms is an ongoing movement, or a ‘betwixt and between state’, that turner (1977) referred to as liminality. during the liminal period, the group might be stripped of rank and class privileges and characteristics and meet as equal and unique human beings. 'thus...liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon'. (as cited in watkins & shulman, 2008, p. 137) this inhabitation of liminal spaces, of attempting to move towards a collective disengagement from white-normed ways of being, has led our group into unforeseen spaces together. this striving has been generative and delightful, as well as painful and distressing. this way of being together has tasked our white bodies with the invitation to engage with the tensions of finding new ways of slowing down, holding novel relational and interpersonal affective states, and developing racial stamina in inhabiting anti-racist imaginal liminal spaces. new kinds of slowing down group tensions around communal doing or being-with have offered opportunities to explore limit situations and liminal spaces intended to produce various forms of antihttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 racist slowing down. this kind of attending invites group members to interrogate whitenormed slowing down which is often an attempt to maintain status quo in response to white body discomfort or dysregulation in doing anti-racist work. differentiating between white-normed calls for slowing down which can be rooted in intergenerationally transmuted4 white fears of destabilization and more revolutionary calls for change from bipoc, is critical in being able to name when slowing down is defensive vs. intentional. the concept of trust is also something for consideration. the group has deliberated around the concept offered by reverend jennifer bailey of faith matters network: ‘relationships move at the speed of trust, social change moves at the speed of relationships’ (bailey, n.d.). members have mused on the invocation offered by rev. bailey, including various interpretations of trust and relationships, arriving at no single conclusion and exposing divergent ideologies and approaches to both. these include the desire to slow down and focus on interpersonal and relational trust through engaging in various collaborations. the quest for cohesion around these tensions also reveals disparate ideological approaches to social change existing in the group. group members rely on trust and affective relational binding to ensure that disagreement in praxis doesn’t result in unnecessary shutting down of connection or the capacity for dialogue; without which collaborations could dissipate or stall due to defensiveness. we hold these latter possibilities in mind in our work, as both can hinder or smother curiosity and collective imaginations. knowing when, and how, to slow down is our lesson, personally and interpersonally. we continually strive to hold the development of anti-racist practices around a ‘slowing down’ that disrupts white 4 authors consider white supremacy epigenetics or the intergenerational transmission of embodied white supremacy culture. supremacy norms and systemic functions, in service of sabotaging white-normed calls for self-care5 or inaction. what we are asking of ourselves, and perhaps inviting other white individuals to do, is to shed the armor of inherited or unconscious white ways of being, and to enter into a place of unknowing, and suffering, in order to transform. watkins and shulman (2008) describe this as a state of regression, borrowing from d. w. winnicott’s concept, not in the reverting sense but, "a stepping back from busy or manic doing, toward a slower more reflective stance" (p. 135). they describe this as a space where we can grieve, hold space and lean into the suffering. we are, implicitly, tasking ourselves with the invitation to enter this “radical space of pilgrimage” (p. 134), both individually and collectively, so that we may suffer and transform in service of building white antiracist culture. striving to cultivate new kinds of slowing down offers group members an opportunity to develop anti-racist cultural practices which attend to the dysregulation and dis-ease of being in liminal spaces, both together and separately. because group members are also mostly somatic therapists, this is also an opportunity for future explorations of how to ground somatic and mindful practices of slowing down and co-regulating in embodied anti-racist sensibilities that support racial stamina and interrupt white supremacy culture. historically, in many white anti-racist organizing, there can be a tension, and at times oppositionality, between engaging in projects or mobilizing actions and interpersonal group work. at times this can imply an adversarial, either/or dynamic, where group members are either doingtogether or being-together. our interrogation of this dynamic invites group members to 5see crimethinc.com (2013). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 explore the liminal spaces of doing-by-beingtogether and relationship-building-by-doing (dreaming, imagining, practicing together). in addition, group members are delving into the somatic stamina and resilience-building that titration between these spaces can offer (levine, 1997). the hope, then, is that individual and group pendulation between these affective states increases racialized stamina and white body tolerance for embodied and life-long commitments to various forms of anti-racist work. new ways of holding relational and interpersonal space white bodies are not a monolith. group members hold a variety of agent and target memberships.6 it is critical that white antiracist striving individuals interrupt the reflexive and defensive use of target membership as a mechanism to manage group affect or deflect from engaging in the difficult work of undoing white supremacy culture. target membership is also real and impacts the ways white bodies are in the world and in anti-racist spaces. group members struggle with how to cultivate relational connections around target group memberships (and ally or accomplice connections to target memberships) which support the ongoing interrogation of embodied white supremacy culture. a core skill for this kind of intersectional interrogation, or exploring multiple social identities related to positions of power and privilege, is to better track the emergence of reflexive white-normed defensive behaviors that arise when white bodies engage in antiracist change-work. in addition to tracking, group members are working to engage in what dr. leticia neito calls channel 6 target and agent membership refers to both pamela hays’ addressing model as well as the work of dr. leticia nieto in her book, beyond inclusion, beyond empowerment: a developmental strategy to liberate everyone. switching7, or developing multiple nimble connective capacities based on agent and target memberships. this weaving together, rather than attempting to dismiss various aspects of white group members’ identity, is new to group members. one challenge group members face is how to navigate and hold different nervous system activations and emotional dysregulation that occur when differently positioned white bodies engage in anti-racist work. this kind of tearing apart and rupturing is what menakem (2017) calls “burning off”, a necessity for racial stamina and anti-racist culture building. group members continue to grapple with the challenge of recognizing the interwovenness of embodied white supremacy culture, target/agent memberships, and personal and familial trauma wounds. many questions have surfaced inside these struggles. we have wondered: how can white people develop interrogation and tracking skills that are nimble enough to tease apart and attend to other experiences of oppression and personal trauma wounds? is this always necessary? if not, how do group members know and decide when, and if, to do this kind of work? when is tending to these wounds a deflection or other reflexive maintenance of white supremacy culture (and thus a retreat from developing stamina around the activation, discomfort, and distress of doing anti-racist work)? how does a group know when this is white supremacy culture maintaining itself, and/or white fragility disrupting anti-racist work, versus an opening to develop more intersectionality inside white anti-racist culture building work? how can our group hold relational and liminal spaces with relentless compassion and curiosity to 7 the concept of channel switching comes from the antioppression training, somatic improvisational theater and psychodrama work by dr. leticia nieto and refers to times when people switch channels or modes of communication, experience and connection under real or perceived threat. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 explore and then develop communal practices that support this kind of anti-racist interpersonal group development? most importantly, we do not yet have answers to these questions but engage with them actively as they inevitably show up. ...what i feel is the most important thing is that white bodies have to begin to get into a room with each other, deal with the uncomfortableness, deal with the hierarchy that starts to show up, deal with all the brutality that starts to happen with each other's bodies and then figure out how they're gonna develop culture around beginning to heal that over time… (menakem, as cited in langbert, 2019, 12:49) new ways of being-with in affective states developing bonds while in these liminal states invites white bodies to work at the edges of consanguinity and develop new communal binding practices. collectively, challenges arise around how to hold onto one another in ways that expand individual and collective racialized stamina and anti-racist culture building capacities. in other words, group members have worked to develop practices that support white body pendulation between dysregulation and regulation; between inhabiting anti-racist social spaces and anti-racist psychic spaces. this praxis is in service of expanding individual and communal capacity to tolerate white body discomfort and dis-ease. our group is in the formative stages of developing a psychological sense of community (sarason, 1974, 1988; fiser et al., 2002; mcmillan and chavis, 1986. p. 75). mcmillan and chavis (1986) describe this as, 'a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members' needs will be met through their commitment to be together’ (as cited in kagan, et al., 2011, p. 76). over our time together, members have struggled with belonging as it rises inside individual member’s internal emotional experience as well as our group positionality inside antiracist social movements. in the initial months, group cohesion seemed centered around the resmaa menakem weekend and the call to build anti-racist cultures. in the near two years after the training with menakem, the nine white anti-racist striving group members have continued to evolve together and grapple with our individual and collective needs for this psychological sense of belonging and community. group members continue with the deliberate work of building various forms of relational glue and striving toward sustainable white anti-racist cultures. conclusion one of the intentions for this kind of culture and container-building work is to support anti-racist white somatic fortitude that interrupts white supremacy norms inside anti-racist work. concurrently, we aim to create spaces for white people to emote and express with each other, rather than harming bipoc people, communities, and spaces. when this deliberate kind of work is not done, the risk is that white bodies will “blow their trauma through bodies of culture”, as menakem (2017) says. while this container work has happened in small ways throughout the past eighteen months, invariably, there have been numerous challenges. a lack of historical robust anti-racist cultures, even as our group is beginning to develop, means group norms and practices inevitably fall back on more intellectualized, less embodied and white culture-normed antiracist interventions. continuing to integrate imagination praxis into collective work is an ongoing commitment. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 in ongoing accountability consultations, our group was tasked to re-focus on developing foundational anti-racist commitments, communal cohesion and trust, and somatic fortitudes. one reflection was that white antiracist groups often mis-identify how deeply sophomoric our skill and development are with this kind of culture building work. in the authors’ imaginational strivings, we are regrounding our collective work inside an antiracist ‘beginner mindset’ with a cultivation of curiosity. this is alongside a commitment to inhabiting liminal spaces together, which may support an increased racial stamina. additionally, the hope is group members build capacity to divest from white supremacy cultural formations, social arrangements, and group constructions. the authors hope the manuscript inspires readers to explore anti-racist culture and container building in their particular contexts. as such, we consciously avoided providing readers with a blueprint for how to engage in similar praxis. while it is essential that critical community psychology research and practice enable readers to do this work, we feel the provision of such a prescriptive model would distract from our central message: doing this work requires becoming comfortable with the unknown as it arises. in the authors’ opinion, increasing this distress tolerance is the task for white-bodied individuals. white bodies need imagination practices that are robust enough to not be crushed under the weight of white supremacy. white supremacy is winning in myriad ways, one of which is snuffing out imagination praxis. it is through this kind of fierce anti-racist imagination praxis that transformation is possible. it is our hope that the culture building practices being developed through our work can be one small contribution to the legacy of critical community psychology and bipoc imagination practices (both in and outside of academia) upon which all our work stands. “our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.” ― adrienne maree brown references bailey, j. 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(2017). my grandmother’s hands: racialized trauma and the pathway http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://crimethinc.com/2013/05/31/for-all-we-care-reconsidering-self-care?fbclid=iwar3nx24dw9ab-wupuvqij_7idfnzihpksr76qn59cgk_nucpzpjs-zu-sa4 https://crimethinc.com/2013/05/31/for-all-we-care-reconsidering-self-care?fbclid=iwar3nx24dw9ab-wupuvqij_7idfnzihpksr76qn59cgk_nucpzpjs-zu-sa4 https://crimethinc.com/2013/05/31/for-all-we-care-reconsidering-self-care?fbclid=iwar3nx24dw9ab-wupuvqij_7idfnzihpksr76qn59cgk_nucpzpjs-zu-sa4 https://crimethinc.com/2013/05/31/for-all-we-care-reconsidering-self-care?fbclid=iwar3nx24dw9ab-wupuvqij_7idfnzihpksr76qn59cgk_nucpzpjs-zu-sa4 https://crimethinc.com/2013/05/31/for-all-we-care-reconsidering-self-care?fbclid=iwar3nx24dw9ab-wupuvqij_7idfnzihpksr76qn59cgk_nucpzpjs-zu-sa4 http://laresistencianw.org/shut-down-the-nwdc/ http://laresistencianw.org/shut-down-the-nwdc/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 to mending our hearts and bodies. central recovery press (crp). menakem, r. 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(2014). the body keeps the score: brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. viking. watkins, m., & shulman, h. (2008). toward psychologies of liberation. palgrave macmillan. winnicott, d. w. (1989). psycho-analytic explorations. harvard university press. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 appendix a: flyer for anti-racist salon evening http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 appendix b: the case for anti-racist fairy tales, cristien storm, 2020 “until white people understand that racism is embedded in everything, including our consciousness and socialisation, then we cannot go forward.” --robin diangelo, white fragility, why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism whiteness is many things: a category of identity, an intergenerational inheritance, a kind of property (resources, access, material gains), a set of privileges, a system of power over and entitlement. let me be clear, i am not talking about individual white people, but whiteness as it exists as an invention manifested as a brutal reality with a horrific legacy of violence, currently operating in myriad ways. whiteness, however much an appalling reality for so many, mostly remains invisible to and refused by white people, which rather conveniently upholds and feeds the very real material monster of white supremacy. there is an urgent need to un-deny whiteness. urgent because we can never slay the dragon of white supremacy and the growing dragon child white nationalism without white people, white bodies, waking up. we (white folks) need a lot of things to wake up and fight the demons of racism (hell, we need to wake up in order to just use and hear the word racism without freezing or becoming defensive). fiction, storytelling, songs, lullabies are powerful ways to get us out of intellectualizing, into our bodies, and into spaces of grounded, connected, collective liberation. it is not enough to talk, write, think, about white supremacy, we white bodies must imagine the death and destruction of something invisible to us. we must help steward the annihilation of something we have been taught to not see and we must do this work while also conjuring radical future possibilities. we do not need to heal whiteness or find ways to redeem white culture, we need to be death doulas and steward white supremacy and with it, whiteness to its passing over into rich verdant soil so seeds smothered by white culture violence and hatred can finally sprout and grow. this does not mean ignoring the present reality of white privilege and white supremacy. we must be fully grounded in the brutal reality of white supremacy and wake up every day committed to resisting it. we must also look beyond its construction. this means practicing saying no to what we don’t want and yes to the kinds of worlds we want to create. we must, in other words, practice imagining. fairy tales are one way to practice and develop our antiracist imagination muscles. stories drop bodies into present oriented experiences of past and future events. this kind of presence, of being in and with while staying here and now, opens up wild spaces for transformation, healing, and of new kinds of possibilities. this is why truth telling and story sharing are at the heart of many kinds of healing practices. this is not the same as reliving or retelling traumatic events, which survivors are asked to do all the time in the name of justifying their experience, but about collective meaning and possibility making. stories, songs, lullabies can transform us, change our bodies, our nervous systems and alter our relationship to the present, the past and the future. that is some powerful magic. developing anti-racist stories is challenging for white folks because whiteness is invisible and racism and white supremacy are relegated to specific kinds of violent acts (by bad and racist people) and not talked about as a deeply ingrained, embodied, and historical culture and the institutions and systems that uphold it. all kinds of stories can help white people begin to see the invisible, challenge the “non-existent”, and develop fierce anti-racist cultures. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 fairy tales entertain, but the main purpose is to impart moral lessons that listeners metabolize, internalize, and embody. fairy tales are, in other words, culture builders. they have been used to uphold, normalize and mainstream christianity, heterosexuality, capitalism, white supremacy, why not anti-racist and anti-fascist culture jamming through fairy tales and storytelling? “we are in an imagination battle...imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of ability...and i must engage my own imagination in order to break free.” ― adrienne maree brown, emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds imagine how much change might erupt in just one generation if most, or many, or even just some white babies nestled in loving caregiver arms while sweet words were whispered and songs were sung of a kingdom terrorized by a false supremacy based on a myth of something called “race”. all the white babies breathed in the noxious air of these lies that made them feel superior and in turn encouraged them to create organizations and institutions based on this imagined feeling of superiority and entitlement, which lead to violence, despair, isolation, disembodiment, fragility, rigidity, and some really bad music and psychological diagnostic systems. some babies surrendered to the lie, while others developed resistant nervous systems that refused to submit to the deceptions. these white babies developed anti-racist anti-bodies that flooded their systems making them speak truth to power, truth to one another, truth to authority, truth to lies and dishonesty, truth to rivers, oceans, of white supremacist saline solutions that have poisoned every water system, helped white bodies regulate, helped them step up to authority, step into communities and gave them x-ray vision to see the invisible threads that bound this false ideology together and wove it into all the institutions that were created. imagine white babies being sung to as they develop in the womb, swimming in anti-racist amniotic fluid, and listening to lyrics of anti-racist resistance and celebrations sung sweetly from the ether of the other side of the amnion and chorion sac. what kinds of developmentally love-centered, courageous, deeply connected and anti-fascist nervous systems could we manifest? imagine white bodies that can blow antiracist microbes into water systems. imagine some culture jamming millennial hacking into digital spaces altering every single baby music soundtrack to include anti-racist/anti-fascist lyrics. whale sounds and the cries of a dying white supremacy fluttering flutes and falling fascism in all iterations birdsong and stories of john brown waterfalls, windsongs, and whispered tales of women like lydia maria child bells, chimes, and abolitionist dreams of women like elizabeth margaret chandler imagine the nervous systems of those infants, fiercely grounded in visions of possibilities we white folks are just beginning to realize we need to remember so we can practice and develop more possibilities. white voices resonant with the clarity and conviction of antiracist imaginaries ready to dream and do, resist and revive. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 imagine making capitalism a, “once upon a time there was a system of never-ending extraction and expansion based on some people taking whatever they wanted and justifying their taking by making up a wild thing called race.” some people came to believe this fiction that permeated everything, but others, brilliant bad ass story tellers and vision makers, warriors, healers, medicine folks, architects, scientists, witches, rose and made potions and cast spells that made the invisible systems visible and people grabbed all kinds of tools and smashed, and kicked, and screamed and sang, and meditated and loved that horrible system out of existence. the water cleansed and the land healed. and now, we share this story so we don’t ever forget that we manifested a monster and must never do it again. to never forget that we created an invisible beast and we need to remember it’s vital organs, it’s weak points, so that we know exactly where to strike should it ever try to rise up again. imagine the collective power and creative force of the kinds of no. not ever’s that could be generated with white nervous systems that didn’t have to do thousands of hours of diversity training before committing to collective action. now. just picture the kinds of delicious yes! and hell yes!’s that would emanate from these kinds of white bodies. the songs, the stories, the games, the memes, the party themes, the dance playlists, the dinner parties, the picnics, the institutions, systems, the buildings, the art shows, the paintings, the schools, theater productions, dance moves, and music classes…imagine…the delight, the joy, the ability to be here now and to dream there now. just imagine the futures those bodies could dream. then manifest. just imagine. then sing. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 appendix c: reparation card for anti-racist salon http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 appendix d: copy of letter for stickering action hi friends! we are reaching out to folks to see if they have the interest and capacity to host a sticker party in support of immigrants’ rights work that is, among many things, calling for the release of families detained at the tacoma detention center. why are we doing this? a) detention centers are wrong. b) covid-19 is spreading rapidly in confining environments. c) no one is illegal. seeking asylum or crossing borders should not be punished with incarceration. what is a sticker party? you order a roll of stickers from girlie press at quote@girliepress.com put: girlie press quote no 33870 in the subject line in your email make sure to include: the estimate number on the info below the quantity you want and the image/s you want if they need to ship it or you will pick them up (if shipping, your address). we have three images--you can get one or all of them! we included those below as well. the prices listed below are for a roll of one image--there is a combo discount for orders over 5,000 if you want to throw a really big sticker party! girlie press is giving us a 15% discount and you generously donate that 15% to la resistencia. the pieces listed below are the regular rate so you would be able to take 15% off that to donate to la resistencia here: http://laresistencianw.org/donate/ you drop off or mail stickers to friends and family who stick them up wherever you all can to generate awareness about the necessity of immediately releasing people from the tacoma detention center and the overall need to abolish criminal and carceral responses to immigration. the sticker party is one small action that supports a national call to shutdown immigration detention centers across the country. why is this important? (from take action by la resistencia) the nwdc is one in a network of over 200 facilities across the country where migrants are caged. ending the practice of caging migrants will require concerted action, and this shut-down campaign is part of a national strategy to challenge the existence and expansion of immigrant detention. shutting down the nwdc, one of geo group’s “flagship” facilities, would send a powerful message to the private prison industry and the federal government, and more importantly, to the thousands fighting detention centers across the country and along the border, that ending immigration detention is within our reach. central to the fight to shut down the nwdc are efforts to free all who are detained there, and to support those who http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 may be transferred elsewhere when the facility closes. when there are fewer prisons for immigrants, fewer immigrants are arrested and detained. we can see this if we compare washington, massachusetts and georgia. these states have similar size immigrant populations, but massachusetts has less than half the detention capacity of washington. according to trac, ice made about half as many arrests in massachusetts (3760) as they did in washington (7139). in contrast, georgia has a similar size immigrant population but twice as much immigrant detention infrastructure, and 3.5 times as many ice arrests (25,137). if we dismantle the infrastructure that allows for easy detention of our neighbors and family members, we expect less immigration enforcement in this state. sticker options: see attached images and price and quantity info below 1. estimate number 84178.1 finished size: 3 x 4 quantity & price [1] 250..................$329.90 [2] 500..................$391.00 [3] 1,000..................$493.20 2. estimate number 84178.2 finished size: 3 x 4 quantity & price [1] 2,000..................$629.70 [2] 3,000..................$846.30 [3] 5,000..................$1,049.30 http://www.gjcpp.org/ development of a community psychology undergraduate course from a feminist pedagogical framework: faculty and student experiences michèle m. schlehofer, and juliet vapsva1 keywords: community psychology, feminist pedagogy, undergraduate teaching author biographies: michele schlehofer, earned her phd in applied social psychology in 2007 from claremont graduate university, located in claremont, california, united states of america. trained in the lewinian tradition of actionresearch, much of her work consists of community-based research designed to directly address social and community problems. as an applied psychologist, she is a vocal proponent of not only intervention and prevention work, but also evidence-based decision-making and research-backed public policy. over the course of her career, she has worked on projects addressing a myriad of social and community issues, including adolescent pregnancy prevention; community-building processes for people living with hiv and aids; and community breast health initiatives for women. she received a 2017 board of regents award in public service for several initiatives conducted in wicomico county and the lower shore area. this included conducting a pro-bono communitybased needs assessment of county-wide resources for families and children for the wicomico partnership for families and children. since 2012, dr. schlehofer have been involved in advocacy efforts by, with, and for lgbtq (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning) people. she serves on the steering committee of the lower shore lgbtq coalition, as president of salisbury’s pflag chapter, and co-chairs the public policy committee for division 44: the division for sexual orientation and gender identity of the american psychological association. juliet vapsva, earned her ba in psychology from salisbury university in 2018. her research interests involve the role of gender in perceptions of responsibility for alcohol-related decision-making. she has worked on a number of different research projects involving what attitudes influence an lgbtq ally identity, early experiences of parents of transgender and gender nonconforming youth, and the role of symmetry in liking of abstract images. she has presented her research at the eastern psychological association conference and the salisbury university student research conference in both 2017 and 2018. at salisbury university, she served as an undergraduate research fellow as well as president and secretary of the salisbury chapter of psi chi. she has received the psychology department award and the center for student achievement scholar holler award. she is now working as a market researcher for yougov to gain experience prior to graduate school, and seeks to ultimately earn a phd in social psychology. 1 salisbury university global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 recommended citation: schlehofer, m. m., & vapsva, j. (2019). development of a community psychology undergraduate course from a feminist pedagogical framework: faculty and student experiences. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(2), 1-19. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: michèle m. schlehofer, ph.d., associate professor and chair, psychology department, salisbury university, 1101 camden ave. salisbury, maryland 21801. email: mmschlehofer@salisbury.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ mailto:mmschlehofer@salisbury.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 development of a community psychology undergraduate course from a feminist pedagogical framework: faculty and student experiences abstract community psychology is typically not a part of most undergraduate curricula. yet, undergraduate coursework in community psychology affords many advantages to students. it encourages ecological thinking and exposes students to content such as community empowerment, intervention and prevention programming design, program evaluation, and other aspects of community psychology practice. this paper describes the development of a community psychology course taught from a feminist pedagogical framework within an undergraduate-only psychology program at a mid-size comprehensive public university in the united states. as the majority of undergraduate majors in our program enter entry-level human services positions upon graduation, the course was primarily designed to expose students to alternative ways of conceptualizing the role of psychological science, mental health, and of psychologists in addressing social and community problems. a secondary goal was to provide undergraduate psychology majors with basic skills in community psychology practice. in keeping with a feminist framework, the selected activities incorporated communitybased, collaborative experiential learning as much as possible. both benefits and challenges, including the difficulties in prompting students to think ecologically; teaching sensitive topics in the classroom; the difficulties of implementing a feminist pedagogical teaching and learning framework at the undergraduate level; and helping students take ownership over their learning; are explored. “i entered the classroom with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer...education as the practice of freedom.... education that connects the will to know with the will to become. learning is a place where paradise can be created.” bell hooks (american educator and feminist, 1952). most undergraduate psychology students are not exposed to the field of community psychology, and the course is typically not part of undergraduate curricula (carmony et al., 2000; jimenez, sanchez, mcmahon, & viola, 2016; mcmahon, jimenez, bond, wolfe, & ratcliffe, 2015). as of the writing of this publication, only six undergraduate programs with a specific community psychology (cp) focus are listed on the society for community research and action (scra) website (scra, 2018). while some introductory psychology textbooks include content on cp, it is unknown whether cp content is covered thoroughly, if at all, in the typical undergraduate introductory psychology course. there is a surprising dearth of literature on cp education (jimenez et al., 2016). in recent years, the scra council on education has emphasized the importance of undergraduate cp education, and community psychologists have called for the development of strong undergraduate cp pedagogy (e.g., jimenez, et al., 2016; lichty & palamaro-munsell, 2017). the interest in better-developing undergraduate pedagogy in cp is for good reason, as it affords many advantages to students. aside from helping to recruit and prepare students for graduate programs in the field, undergraduate cp courses http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 encourage ecological thinking and expose students to content not typically taught in undergraduate level psychology coursework. this includes content such as community empowerment, intervention and prevention programming design, program evaluation, participatory community research, and other aspects of cp practice competencies. teaching cp practice competencies at the undergraduate level is important, as practice competencies are highly relevant skills for undergraduate students who seek employment in the human services and allied fields upon graduation (jimenez, et al., 2016; mcmahon, et al., 2015). further, undergraduate education on practice competencies can serve as a catalyst for social change, advancing the efficacy and reach of the field (jimenez, et al., 2016). our institution, salisbury university, is a midsize comprehensive public institution located in the mid-atlantic region of the united states of america, on maryland’s rural eastern shore. part of the state university system, su is historically a predominately white institution, but campus initiatives have increased racial and ethnic diversity in recent years. of the roughly 7,700 student population, 27% of the students are students of color, with the modal race being african american or black (14%); 1.4% are from other countries outside of the united states (salisbury university, 2018). the psychology department offers the bachelor of arts degree and a minor in psychology. psychology is a robust program; it is the 6th largest major on campus, with approximately 400 student majors. psychology majors are more racially and ethnically diverse than the broader student body; 35% of psychology degrees awarded in the 2017 – 2018 academic year were awarded to students of color (salisbury university, 2018). most courses within our program are taught from a traditional post-positivist framework. this framework recognizes researcher subjectivity, but capitulates subjectivity as “bias” and requires researchers to use tight experimental and statistical controls in an attempt to work towards objectivity. our program situates experimentation (and particularly lab experimentation) as central to the discipline of psychology, and is structured around four major areas: brain sciences, developmental processes, social processes, and clinical psychology. most students do not go into graduate programs, but many enter entry-level human service positions upon graduation. given the juxtaposition between our program’s emphasis on traditional postpositivist, laboratory-based psychology and where our students end up post-graduation, one goal of the undergraduate community and applied social psychology course is to expose students to different philosophies of science (specifically, critical and social constructionist paradigms), as well as how community psychologists operating from different philosophies conceptualize the role of psychological science, mental health, and of psychologists in addressing social and community problems. the ecological model is emphasized throughout the duration of the course, and students are heavily encouraged to move beyond individual-level explanations for social and community problems. a secondary goal, as suggested above, is to provide undergraduate psychology majors with basic skills in cp practice. this upperdivision undergraduate course is for many students their first and sometimes only exposure to the ecological model, critical and social constructionist philosophies of science, and concepts of cp practice. in order to both encourage students’ professional and personal growth and to deepen their understanding of the different perspective and approach to science which cp affords, and in line with the instructor’s selfidentification as a feminist, the course is taught from a feminist lens. the course met twice a week (3 hours total a week) over a 15-week semester and had a total enrollment of 24 students. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 an overview of feminist community psychology several community psychologists have noted that the field considerably overlaps with feminist perspectives (e.g., angelique & culley, 2000, 2003; bond & mulvey, 2000; hill, bond, mulvey, & terenzio, 2000; mulvey, 1988; riger, 2017; swift, bond, & serranogarcia, 2000; tebes, 2017). feminism is an action-oriented philosophy of science that focuses on how “one’s position in the world shapes knowledge and experience (and) dissatisfaction with existing approaches to scientific inquiry” (tebes, 2017, p. 25). feminism’s focuses is on analysis of gender inequality. in her seminal article, mulvey (1988) argued for the development of a feminist community psychology approach, identifying several commonalities, including: a common history, criticisms with predominant paradigms and perspectives, and an emphasis on the social construction of lived experiences and subjectivity of experience (see also hill et al., 2000; riger, 2017). both fields value empowerment and social change via adoption of alternative models and methodologies, including social constructionist or critical qualitative research which deconstructs oppression and power differentials (mulvey, 1988; tebes, 2017). and, cp provides tools to translate feminist theory into action (gridley & breen, 2007). riger (2017) argued that formation of a uniquely feminist cp perspective can add breadth and depth to several guiding principles of cp, including an appreciation of diversity, incorporation of context in understanding one’s lived experience, sharing power in the research process, and emphasizing the importance of social change. however, despite their shared mission, the field of cp, like that of psychology in general (eagly & riger, 2014, yoder & kahn, 1993), 2 some people may choose to identify with a term, such as humanitarianist or egalitarianist, rather than adopt an explicit feminist identity. however, while these and related concepts share similarities with feminism, they are distinct from feminism in ways that are meaningful at both an ideological has androcentric roots (angelique & culley, 2007); cp has largely been developed using patriarchal-driven and rooted practices of research and scholarship, practices which may limit cp’s full integration with feminism. although community psychologists are perhaps more likely to apply social constructionist or critical philosophies to their work, most community psychologists were trained in and embrace the traditional post-positive orientation of the general field of psychology. further, many community psychology practices are not explicitly labeled as “feminist” (tebes, 2017), and those engaging in feminist work may not personally self-identify as feminists2. a distinct feminist community psychology approach remains underdeveloped. development of feminist community psychology pedagogy due to their shared overlap (bond & mulvey, 2000; mulvey, 1988), and the first author’s self-identification as a feminist, the course was taught using a feminist community psychology pedagogical (fcpp) approach. however, if feminist community psychology as a whole remains underdeveloped, the development of fcpp is even less so (whelan & lawthom, 2009). feminist pedagogy generally tends to be underutilized at the undergraduate level (kite et al., 2001; mccormick, 1997; worell & johnson, 1997), posing additional challenges in its adoption as a pedagogical method. yet, there are advantages to fcpp worth exploring. a fcpp approach to education benefits students in multiple ways. with its emphasis on socially constructed knowledge (tisdell, 1998), inclusion of marginalized voices, and critical analysis of social power and privilege, feminist educational practices can foster critical thinking skills, raise consciousness, and practical level. zucker (2004), for instance, found that women identifying as egalitarian scored lower on measures of feminist identity and activism than women who explicitly selfidentified as feminists. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 and train the next generation of feminist thinkers (mccormick, 1997). these practices provide opportunity for progressive social change and political action to occur in the classroom (donahue-keegan, 2014). teaching from a fcpp stance could further students’ understanding of community psychology by immersing them in community psychology principles in the classroom. in this way, the classroom itself becomes a site of community psychology practice, in line with suggestions by lichty and palamaro-munsell (2017). feminist pedagogy typically has four important features: participatory engagement in the learning process, incorporation of personal experience as a source of knowledge (a process known as reflexivity), development of critical thinking skills, and facilitative of political and social change (stake & hoffman, 2000). these features directly reflect the values and emphasis of the field of cp, and particularly feminist community psychology (moane & quilty, 2012). however, while whelan and lawthom (2009) argue for the development of a distinctly fcpp approach, they also note that adaptation of feminist pedagogy might not easily translate to the community settings in which community psychology operates. there are many methods by which feminist pedagogy can be used to build an undergraduate community psychology course. in their chapter on feminist curriculum development, chin and colleagues (1997) state that feminist pedagogy influences multiple aspects of the educational experience, including educational content, teaching processes, and classroom climate. there are several aspects of feminist approaches to classroom learning: attenuation to what perspectives are taught, connectedness, participatory and reflexive learning, and establishment of a nonhierarchical environment in which students draw on personal experiences to co-develop knowledge (macdermid, jurich, myers-walls, & pelo, 1992). implementation of a fcpp framework these various feminist pedagogical strategies were incorporated into our undergraduate community and applied social psychology course in multiple ways. in line with feminist teaching practices (chin et al., 1997), feminist pedagogy was incorporated into all aspects of the educational experience: educational content, teaching processes, and classroom climate. drawing on best practices for feminist pedagogy (e.g., see macdermid et al., 1992; stake & hoffman, 2000), a fcpp approach was developed that: (1) was attuned to what perspectives were being taught, intentionally including diverse perspectives, (2) was non-hierarchical, to the extent possible, (3) highlighted participatory, reflexive, and collaborative learning, and (4) focused on applying the ecological model and community psychology practice skills to fostering social change. each aspect of these approaches is discussed below. attenuation to diverse perspectives. a fcpp approach is highly attenuated to what perspectives are being taught, and seeks to include diverse voices, particularly those marginalized or oppressed (mccormick, 1997). the course instructor identifies as a cisgender, heterosexual white woman. the field of psychology is highly dominated by work conducted from white cisgender people, and students—particularly at the undergraduate level—are not exposed to many psychological theorists and researchers from different social localities. however, an important contribution of feminism is to center the voices of people who are traditionally marginalized. this is particularly important as we have many students of color in our major. as such, the course instructor made substantial effort to center the perspectives of people who did not share one or more of the instructor’s social localities. diverse voices were incorporated into the course content in multiple ways. first, the primary textbook in the course (kloos et al.’s community psychology: linking individuals and communities, 2012), was supplemented with a variety of required reading materials http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 (e.g., journal articles, websites), most of which were authored by women and/or people of color. it is important that work by people of different social localities be centered in the course; otherwise, the instructor runs the risk of tokenizing people’s work and lived experiences. in addition, supplementary in-class content in which the experiences of marginalized, oppressed people and communities were presented as models for community strength and empowerment were also intentionally included. these included articles highlighting lgbtq+ communities, communities of color, and communities outside the united states. unfortunately, most research with marginalized or oppressed communities operates from a deficit model or focuses heavily on risk factors and negative outcomes. as exposure to this research can be psychologically harmful to students from those backgrounds (e.g., lichty & palamaromunsell, 2017) and reinforce stereotypes, attention was given to select readings which intentionally drew on a strength-based or empowerment perspective. for instance, students read about hays, rebchook, and kegeles’ (2003) strengths-based, empowerment approach to hiv prevention among young gay and bisexual men; varasdiaz and serrano-garcia’s (2003) article on colonialization’s impact on puerto ricans and liberation community psychology; and foster-fishman et al.’s (2006) work mobilizing economically distressed communities in michigan. attenuation of diverse perspectives also encompasses recognition of our own perspectives, as educators and students. rather than operate from a (false) standpoint of objectivity, and consistent with feminist community psychology principles of nonobjectivity and social constructionism, the instructor’s social localities and ideological orientation and standpoint was intentionally shared with students. the syllabus included a statement on course structure and pedagogy, something not typically included on undergraduate course syllabi in the department. the statement described the nature of the course, explicitly identifying it as taught from a feminist pedagogical framework which will actively “challenge (students’) existing knowledge base; encourage you to critically think about what you know and why you know it; and to present some alternative perspectives and methodologies.” the statement mentioned the course used a reciprocal learning environment in which everyone is engaged as active participant-learners. on the first day, the course structure and pedagogical framework was introduced intentionally and deliberately, highlighting the importance of reciprocal learning, including the fact that the instructor was also engaged in the learning process. the instructor also also identified herself as cisgender, heterosexual, and a firstgeneration college student (instructor race was apparent). this message was repeated throughout the semester. further, during the second week of the class, the instructor exposed students to various philosophies of science. significant time was spent discussing how the different philosophies of science affect both the epistemologies and methodologies of psychologists. in our experience, students are typically not taught about philosophies of science in the undergraduate psychology classroom. a purview of seven common undergraduate psychology research methods textbooks in the first author’s collection found that philosophies of science, or even recognition that most psychological research operates from a post-positivist framework, was not mentioned in any of them. indeed, it is highly likely that thousands of students graduate from undergraduate psychology programs in the united states each year with absolutely no knowledge of the fact that they are trained in post-positivist science, and that other approaches exist. students worked through an activity where they read a short piece from the community psychologist and identified the philosophy of science and resultant epistemology and methodology. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 finally, several research articles students read for the course presented qualitative research findings. qualitative research was integrated throughout the course for a few reasons. first, qualitative research is more frequently employed by researchers using critical or social constructionist approaches, highlighting how these philosophies of science contribute to the discipline. second, qualitative research helps personalize and give voice to the lived experiences of diverse people in a way that quantitative research cannot. students read about the process of qualitative research (stein & mankowski, 2004), as well as several examples of qualitative research in diverse populations; for instance, interviews with service providers on their perceptions of human trafficking (gleason, 2014), and a photovoice project exploring health assets among lowerincome communities (wang & pies, 2004). videos describing community psychology research included several projects which included qualitative methodologies. student perspective. as a student, i had not been exposed to alternative frameworks in the classroom and was unsure of what to expect from a feminist teaching method. the supplemental course content, especially the supplemental readings, facilitated the development of critical thinking skills. we had to read and discuss articles from marginalized groups, something i had not experienced in my other courses, most of which utilize a textbook written from a mainstream psychological perspective. the supplemental material was dissimilar from the textbook, offering alternative viewpoints and distinct voices; this helped me focus on application of content over memorization of definitions, and provided a refreshing challenge. this course gave unique and different viewpoints on community psychology and worked to open my eyes to alternate perspectives, leading to a deeper understanding of these topics. instructor perspective. to encourage students to approach course content with an open mind and to persevere through challenging thought processes, students were presented with a course contract (available on request) on the first day of class. the course contract included the bell hooks quote presented at the beginning of this article, explained what is meant by a “liberal arts” education, and emphasized the liberating nature of education. the hooks quote’s focus on the importance of active learning was highlighted. i also warned students that some of the content might be uncomfortable or disagreeable. the contract encouraged students to think of any discomfort with or difficulty in understanding course content as indicative of learning and growth. students were asked to sign and return the contract; all students agreed to do so. when i noticed that students were visibly uncomfortable, i referred to the course contract they signed at the start of the semester. students were reminded that feeling discomfort with the ideas or subject matter is an indication that they are engaged in the learning process; their current thinking was being actively challenged, a stated goal of the course. student perspective. giving us the course contract right away helped facilitate a comfortable classroom environment; students felt more comfortable discussing sensitive topics in an informed and tactful manner. a large portion of our class discussions were focused on our own personal experience as they related to topics in community psychology. in a course of this nature, getting to know and understanding your fellow classmates on a personal level is a way of building our own community. sensitive topics opened the door to deeper discussions, and the students talked more about their background and their lives. in an undergraduate psychology classroom, it is often expected that the professor will stand at the front of the class and lecture for their allotted time. we do not often have long discussions involving the personal lives of the students and their experiences. when talking about privilege and support and risk factors, i believe that many students’ eyes were http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 opened to new perspectives. these discussions were helpful in better understanding the concepts, but we could still not escape having some students feel awkward and uncomfortable at various topics. non-hierarchical learning environment. in line with an fcpp approach which seeks to reduce power structures and promote equality in learning (see macdermid et al., 1992), students were provided with ample opportunities to exhibit ownership over the course content and engage with each other in a collective learning environment. as part of the course, students gave two short presentations, in conjunction with another student, on course content of their choice. students were required to draw on one outside source in the creation of their presentation. the outside source could be any form of media (e.g., a news article, a video, etc.), and was not limited to scholarly materials. this requirement was given to encourage students to contribute to the knowledge base in their own classroom. students were also required to provide two discussion questions. instructor perspective. as instructor, i relinquished as much power as possible in the course, giving ownership over the teaching and learning process to the students. many students put a lot of forethought into their presentations, and as such, they were very creative and thought-provoking; several provided materials that would not have been included in the course otherwise. for instance, one student used the assignment as an opportunity to educate other students on the socio-political history of her country of origin and her experiences as a religious minority in the united states. i would not have been able to adequately teach this content on my own. with two presentations a class session, student presentations accounted for one third to two thirds of each class period; the remaining time was devoted to a mix of presentations from myself, class activities and discussions, and group work on several collaborative assignments (mentioned below). turning ownership of course content over to students in this way can be difficult (chin et al., 1997). students, particularly undergraduate students, are used to hierarchical classroom models which place teachers in the position of authority. in reality, despite the collaborative in-class environment, i was in a position of authority that can be shared, but never fully relinquished (lichty & palamaro-munsell, 2017; morgan, 1987; schneidewend, 1983; shrewsbury, 1987). the instructor’s true authority in the classroom is perhaps best illustrated by the irony that i had to build non-hierarchical learning into the course by “required” assignments. indeed, in addition to selecting course content and assignments, instructors establish the course structure, grade students, and serve as “gatekeepers” who provide access to later resources (e.g., write letters of recommendation, passing along opportunities to students, kimmel et al., 1997). this “paradox of power and authority” poses a barrier to completely integrating fcpp in the classroom. it also can limit student experiences of empowerment (lichty & palamaro-munsell, 2017) and generate resistance (chin et al., 1997). there is some risk to me as instructor, too: students might not fully present course materials, might present them inaccurately, or might be unprepared to lead a class. to help students with this process, i required students to submit a draft of their presentation, with the selected outside source, to the instructor at least one week prior to the deadline. this allowed me the opportunity to provide feedback and assistance to students if needed. relinquishing ownership of the course to undergraduate students posed another problem for me as instructor: what do professors do when the student brings ideas into the classroom that contradict cp principles? for instance, in one class presentation on privilege and oppression, a student team showed a video in which a black http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 male narrator actively discredited the concept of white privilege, instead arguing that failures of upward mobility in the black community are the result of lack of effort, poor values, and low motivation. students, particularly our more conservative students, generally tend to be resistant to the concept of white privilege, and teaching about white privilege can result in poor student evaluations (boatright-horowitz & soeung, 2009). as an instructor, there was concern that students would be even further dismissive and resistant--hostile even--to the concept after viewing this video. further, some students of color in the class were viscerally upset at the video, further complicating matters. as a white instructor, i was unsure of my ability to effectively teach about white privilege in a way that was not tokenizing to the students of color in my classroom, nor disparaging of my white students (common concerns white instructors have when teaching on race; e.g., see smith, kashubeck-west, payton, & adams, 2017). the spirit of bringing equality into the fcpp classroom opens the door for expression and discussion of ideas that are bigoted, exclusionary, or that ideologically contrast with course subject matter (kimmel et al., 1997). however, this does not mean that these ideas cannot be criticized. as such, i used the video as an opportunity to discuss intersectional privilege and oppression processes, and to highlight the benefits of an ecological viewpoint. i am unsure whether my social locality as a white woman facilitated teaching this content. one of the tenets of white privilege’s “invisible knapsack” is that “if i declare that there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn’t a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have” (mcintosh, 1989), which suggests that perhaps i, as a white woman, are more effective at teaching concepts of white privilege than faculty of color. however, recent work by west (2018) finds white people largely disregard arguments for the presence of racism, regardless of whether those messages are coming from people of color or white people. student perspective. preparing our presentations proved to be harder than initially thought. we had to decipher what information was useful to teach to the class and what would be tested on, as well as teaching it to the class in an effective and engaging manner. this process made me feel highly responsible for a large part of my learning. the instructor had to budget out the rest of the class time based off of what was taught well by students. if my presentations were not helpful or if they did not contribute to the lesson, then michèle would have to cover the topic in her planned lesson time. this meant that if our presentations were unhelpful, michèle could spend less time elaborating on other concepts, and we would have to teach course content to ourselves later on. if students wanted the majority of core course content to be covered in class, it was to our benefit to cover our topic well and keep the class engaged. in this way, michèle had structured a course that made me as a student responsible for our classes’ education. participatory, reflexive, and collaborative learning. consistent with spirit of the type of cooperative, collaborative learning which fcpp and feminist pedagogy in general is dependent on (chin et al., 1997), the course was structured to facilitate communitybuilding, reflexivity, and collaborative, participatory learning. this was inherently promoted by use of a non-hierarchical classroom environment. reflexivity was promoted and encouraged during the learning process in a few key ways. in addition to ongoing discussions regarding discomfort with course content as a sign of growth, in-class discussions centered reflexive learning. student perspective. as students, we were able to incorporate our own personal experience as a knowledge base when http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 discussing community psychology concepts. we wrote about the ecological levels that we face and our different types of communities and support. having these discussions helped change how i felt about my standing in different communities and my life as a whole. to further encourage reflexivity, students wrote reflective pieces after completion of out-of-class activities. for instance, one outof-class activity (all activities and assignments available on request) asked students to complete a diversity scavenger hunt, in which they perused big box stores for specific items representing different facets of diversity (e.g., a romantic greeting card written for a gay couple, a stock photo in a photo frame featuring a person with a visible disability, racially and ethnically diverse dolls in the toy section, etc.). after completing the scavenger hunt, students answered a series of guided questions on the extent to which the inclusion of diverse items for sale in “big box” stores was reflective of demand, vs. valuing of diversity; students also reflected on the impact seeing (or not seeing) diverse items for sale may have on members of specific communities. similarly, after completing a cultural plunge assignment, students were asked to reflect on their experience, including how they felt, what they observed or witnessed, and what they believe they would need to become culturally competent to work with that community. student perspective. the out-of-class activities and reflective writing process were helpful learning tools. the cultural plunge activity was a favorite of mine because it made me more aware of diversity in the community that i would not have noticed on my own due to my various privileges. ecological social change and participatory action. in line with fcpp’s emphasis on social change and participatory action, the course included a multi-faceted, community-based component in which students completed a variety of activities centered around a realworld, localized community problem. many of these activities were experiential learning opportunities. experiential activities were selected as they help students retain content and link theory and practice (wehbi, 2011). experiential activities also allow students the opportunity to try their hand at social change efforts. the majority of these assignments were done in collaboration with other students in the course. a new topic is selected each time the course is taught. for this course, we examined homelessness and addressed specific issues homeless people faced with the knowledge and thought process of a community psychologist. for the development of this component, the class worked with the local city’s housing and community development (hcd) department (the department tasked with serving people experiencing homelessness) to ensure that the communitybased activities were consistent with community needs. this resulted in several diverse, inter-related learning activities, many of which were community-based. in addition to a standard research paper, students participated in service learning, developed a logic model, and completed a research application assignment. each of these activities is discussed briefly below. service learning. service learning entails working in the community to address a particular community need (jacoby, 1996) and is regularly incorporated into community psychology education (mcmahon, et al., 2015). service learning simultaneously meets the goals of providing experiential learning opportunities for students, while addressing a social problem via community participation and empowerment (marullo & edwards, 2000), and is consistent with a fcpp approach. for our course, students conducted 10 service-learning hours with a local agency (or agencies) of their choice that served the homeless. students could work all 10 hours in the same agency or split their time among multiple agencies. this flexibility was intentional; it helped give students greater ownership in the course, and thus aligned http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 with the fcpp goals of relinquishing power to the students where possible via participatory, collaborative learning. as not all students were familiar with the local area, they were given a partial list of local agencies serving the homeless (e.g., area shelters, food banks, etc.) as a starting point. instructor perspective. several students took ownership over the service learning component of the course. this was exciting for me to see as an instructor, as it signified fcpp goals were being met. one group of students, having limitations that made it difficult to complete their service learning at a local agency, completed the assignment by developing and running their own food distribution program. beforehand, the students met with me to get feedback on their plan, such as where and when to distribute food, what types of food to distribute (the group decided on pre-packaged granola bars, water, and fruit), and what to expect. the student team distributed their food packages to homeless residents over the course of two weekends. student reflective papers indicated this was a powerful learning experience for them. logic model. towards the end of the semester, students worked alongside others in the class to create logic models of resources in the local community to address a problem of the students’ choosing related to homelessness. logic models have been used successfully in the undergraduate community psychology classroom, helping both convey course content and empowering students to make change in their communities (zimmerman, kamal, & kim, 2013). students were given an overview of logic models and presented with several examples. then, working in collaboration with other students, students spent several class periods generating their own logic models. the use of a group project facilitated fcpp goals of collaborative learning. students were encouraged to bring their own experiences (both inside and outside of the course) into their final product, which aligns with fcpp’s reflexive approach to learning. research application paper. finally, students rounded out their experiential assignments by writing a paper in which they, based on their learned experiences with the other experiential assignments, designed practical solutions to real-world problems homeless people in the community experienced. this is the only assignment developed for the course which did not explicitly include feminist pedagogy. the city of salisbury’s hcd partnered with the class for this component of the course. the hcd approached the instructor and asked for assistance in addressing the needs of several people experiencing homelessness which their office was grappling with. all the situations were ones in which a unique, complex constellation of concerns made provision of services under the existing structure of community services delivery problematic or impossible. for instance, one scenario entailed a person who was recently released from prison and was on disability. however, due to the person’s incarceration, their disability had been terminated, and the renewal period would take time. the person had no family in the area, and was therefore experiencing homelessness. the hcd provided eight of these types of problem-based scenarios; students selected one case to work with. in writing their paper, students were asked to write an analysis and recommendation of how to best address the person’s situation. the students were to draw on empirical literature used for their research paper, and to incorporate best practices for working to address homelessness. students were asked to explicitly identify the ecological level(s) their intervention would be implemented at. student papers were shared with the hcd. the hcd was interested in implementing juliet’s ideas, and she met with the city to learn how to put her ideas into action. student perspective. the research application assignment proved to be harder than http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 expected due to the complexities involved. my proposed project, entitled “card carriers,” consisted of a plan that offered community members who met eligibility criteria a multitude of services (such as vouchers for food, laundry, and other vital services) at free or reduced rates, paired with a mentoring relationship with the salisbury police department. the head of the hcd was interested in discussing my ideas with me, as they matched some of the ideas for potential programs that the office already had in mind. i therefore set up a meeting and went downtown. it was my first experience consulting and i went in expecting the town would implement my project exactly the way i presented it. this was not what happened. there were many constraints that the department had to work through, including limitations in funding, labor, and time to work on the project. a large portion of my program was centered around an unevaluated taskforce in houston. i had no empirical evidence that the program would work in a considerably smaller city. the city hcd was interested in the idea, yet expressed caution in implementing an approach that had only been implemented in a metropolitan area. after funding other programs, the hcd had minimal funding available to devote to my idea. i was surprised to learn that the hcd, while interested in my ideas, was unable to carry them out without significant assistance from me, coupled with funding from a government grant, which i was asked to apply for. unfortunately, the hcd, while liking my idea, decided it was not feasible to implement. learning of these constraints was somewhat surprising. i had spent much of my time thinking through the development of the program, and i did not anticipate that the resources to implement the program were not available. this experience was a wakeup call to the difficulties of applying community psychology principles in a real-life setting. in class, we learned about how program design should include consideration of available resources, including time, properly-trained staff, and money; and how program implementation is often not ideal due to lack of various resources. this experience allowed me to witness that textbook knowledge of community psychology was not enough to design a successful program. a community psychologist could have a well-designed program with empirical evidence that it will benefit the people, but its implementation heavily depends on the resources of the community and the decisions of those in charge. ideally, existing resources and stakeholder perspectives should be incorporated into the design of a program. development of fcp pedagogy: concluding thoughts and next steps this paper outlined an initial attempt at teaching undergraduate community psychology from a feminist community psychology pedagogical approach. as community psychologists, we are wellsituated to integrate alternative pedagogies into the traditional educational framework. pedagogies such as the approach presented here are relevant to our discipline and have been applied in other classroom contexts. using an fcpp approach in the classroom, specifically, aligns with cp principles, values, and practices. it also afforded students with strong, hands-on learning experiences, and encouraged greater student responsibility for their own learning. in our experience, an fcpp approach in the undergraduate classroom provides these benefits to students, and more. however, as we have noted throughout this paper, there are limitations to its full integration as an undergraduate teaching pedagogy, and challenges to its implementation. these include broad challenges in terms of decisions about the extent to which and how to implement fcpp, challenges pertaining to the impact fcpp might have on classroom direction and dialogue (including the possibility of “opening the door” for bigoted ideas in the classroom), as well as challenges specific to the delivery of course content, such http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 as encouraging students to think ecologically and facilitating dialogue about sensitive topics. in this last section, we conclude with some thoughts on where to go from here in the development of fcpp. one key challenge entailed decisions over how much of a fcpp framework to incorporate into the course. full implementation of fcpp may not be possible, as the instructor-student relationship is inherently unequal and limited in powersharing ability (e.g., lichty & palamaromunsell, 2017). while the unequal power distribution between instructor and students is evident in all classrooms, we argue this is particularly true for undergraduate classrooms, when students are newer to the discipline of psychology and hierarchies between student and instructor are perhaps most pronounced and reinforced on an institutional level. the instructor is ultimately responsible for student learning. as such, decisions must be made both before the course started and on a class-by-class basis regarding the extent to which instructor control could be relinquished to students. there are also structural and institutional limitations in the extent to which fcpp could be implemented, which significantly impacted students’ experiences in the course. for instance, the need for a defined, static syllabus with a set list of assignments and relative point value presented to students at the start of the semester meant that the class projects had to be selected in advance, violating the power sharing principle of feminist pedagogy. instructor perspective. the limits of my ability to fully integrate fcpp into my course is most apparent in the social change projects. ideally, i would have preferred students work collectively to identify and execute a community change project. however, time limitations and irb concerns hindered my ability to have students identify a community need, and design and implement a project in the course of one semester, particularly if they desired to work with vulnerable populations and/or collect data. thus, i instead selected a topic for students (violating fcpp principles of power-sharing), based on community need and an identified agency who was willing to work with us. as collaboration with the hcd required that their needs be meet, i built the assignments (particularly, the applied research paper) around the hcd’s request. this decision, while in line with best-practices for partnering with outside organizations, limited student participatory action, and as a result, this particular assignment was not reflective of the fcpp approach i was aiming for. for liability reasons, there were also limitations placed on students’ ability to interact and work with people experiencing homelessness in a participatory action setting (as this work was completed outside of formal inter-agency agreements), which significantly impacted students’ experiences. my experiences here demonstrate the tensions that can exist when implementing both a cp and a feminist approach in the classroom, and highlights the dilemma posited by whelan and lawthom (2009), who argue that feminist pedagogy doesn’t always align with requirements for community practice settings. unfortunately, as feminist pedagogy is not often implemented in the undergraduate classroom, there were few existing guidelines to follow. using an fcpp framework presented additional challenges in the classroom on a day-by-day basis. shared instructor-student control of the course meant that the course of each class period was not fully developed in advance. this led to several interesting and unexpected discussions, and unique learning experiences that would not have otherwise occurred. however, this approach also increased the possibility of students expressing problematic or bigoted ideas that were not in line with a community psychology approach. further, i had to often make last-minute decisions as to what course content to lecture on, based on what topics students presented and how thoroughly and accurately students covered course content. it http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 was often the case that lectures i had prepared were abandoned, because student presenters had done such a thorough job of teaching the course content. it was also the case that student presentations were sometimes better—both in terms of coverage of content and in terms of presentation style and formatting—than lectures that i had prepared. i realized instructors have a lot to learn from their students on how to construct a good lecture. and, although this approach meant that some discussions were problematic or outside the scope of cp, some of the best classroom discussions arose from increasing student control over the course. any undergraduate classroom is likely to face challenges in regards to encouraging students to think ecologically, exhibit ownership over learning, and fully engage with sensitive, uncomfortable, or challenging course content. fcpp is not unique in those regards. however, we theorize that these challenges might be further amplified in the fcpp undergraduate classroom, as students are additionally navigating a teaching style and classroom structure that is likely foreign. by the time students enter an upper-division course, they had been exposed to several semesters worth of coursework and research and have a strong set of expectations of what “should” comprise an undergraduate psychology course. these factors were anticipated to be a barrier to student growth and learning, and therefore were addressed early on in the class. however, implementation of an fcpp classroom might be easier if students are exposed to basic community psychology concepts earlier in their college career. for this reason, jimenez and colleagues (2016) suggested that undergraduate students be exposed early to community psychology, including in introductory psychology courses. we agree that this approach could help smooth students’ transition into upper-division fcpp taught courses. teaching from an fcpp approach, and particularly relinquishing a good degree of control to the student, resulted in challenges regarding presentation of course content that are absent from other classrooms. there is always the risk that students will present information in a confusing—or worse, inaccurate—way. students who are already marginalized may experience further oppression from these discussions (lichy & palamaro-munsell, 2017). in order to teach using a fcpp framework, instructors have to be particularly adept at responding to confusing or inaccurate information in a way that is corrective, protective of marginalized students, and fair, but in a way that does not undermine student authority in the classroom. it is difficult for instructors to not only manage student reactions to certain content, but also “correct” content provided by students, in a way which is not oppositional to fcpp’s idea of collaborative, non-hierarchical learning. those interested in fcpp need to acquire additional skills on holding sensitive discussions at the undergraduate level in ways that both facilitate student learning while also minimizing this risk. targeted training in how to teach using reflexive methods would be useful to instructors who want to teach from an fcpp framework at the undergraduate level. in this paper, we tried to present a description of how fcpp could be applied in the undergraduate classroom. however, there are other teaching approaches, such as critical pedagogy, integrated learning, or inquiry approaches, which might also nicely align with the discipline of community psychology. more discussion and resources are needed for those interested in teaching from one of these pedagogical approaches at the undergraduate level. in line with recommendations by lichty and palamaro-munsell (2017), we believe that what is needed at this juncture is an increased and intentional focus on the development and application of best pedagogical practices for teaching community psychology, including fcpp. scra is wellhttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 situated to provide support and designate formal resources towards the professional development of distinctly community psychology-informed pedagogies and teaching practices. the development of such pedagogies can advance the field and assist in resolving some of the dilemmas cps face in the undergraduate classroom (lichy & palamaro-munsell, 2017). this would have the additional benefit of further differentiating cp from other subdisciplines of psychology, and of sparking innovative growth in the field. references angelique, h. l., & culley, m. r. 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(2004). disavowing social identities: what it means when women say, “i’m not a feminist, but…” psychology of women quarterly, 28, 423-435. doi: 10.1111/j.14716402.2004.00159.x http://www.gjcpp.org/ introduction to the special issue on surf therapy around the globe guest editors gregor v. sarkisian1, kristen h. walter2, giovanni martínez3, and philip b. ward4 author biographies: gregor v. sarkisian, professor, has taught in the applied community psychology specialization within the m.a. clinical psychology program at antioch university los angeles since 2005. dr. sarkisian began working with the jimmy miller memorial foundation (jmmf) in 2015 where he has served as a volunteer surf instructor and more recently as the director of research and evaluation for jmmf to better understand the benefits of surf therapy for youth atpromise and u.s. veterans. since 2018, dr. sarkisian has been a member of the international surf therapy organization (isto) and he is actively engaged in coalition building, the dissemination of research on surf therapy and serves as a technical consultant to programs interested in developing surf therapy program evaluations. kristen h. walter, is a clinical research psychologist at the naval health research center in san diego, california, where she investigates the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd) and conditions that commonly co-occur with ptsd, such as major depressive disorder (mdd), and traumatic brain injury. dr. walter explores both evidence-based treatments for ptsd and cooccurring conditions, as well as complementary and alternative approaches. she is an investigator on several department of defense-funded trials, including randomized controlled trials comparing evidence-based psychotherapies for cooccurring ptsd/mdd and another comparing two activity-based interventions (surf 1 antioch university los angeles, ca, usa 2 naval health research center, san diego, ca, usa 3 founder, surf4dem, aguadilla, pr 4 university of new south wales, sydney, au global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 and hike therapy) for mdd. she is also a privileged clinical provider at naval medical center san diego and a licensed psychologist in the states of california and ohio. giovanni martínez, is a licensed clinical psychologist in puerto rico, the founder/executive director of the 501(c)3 non-profit organization, surf4dem, inc., and advisor to the board of directors of the international surf therapy organization (isto). surf4dem offers children and families affected by autism spectrum disorder an environment of support to connect and share by creating opportunities and enjoying the therapeutic benefits of surf therapy. as a clinician dr. martinez has vast experience working with neurodevelopmental disorders in particular asd, in relation to the clinical evaluation, training and program development. his background on research comes as an adjunct professor at the medical sciences campus university of puerto rico, his research focus on aspects of public health and development of alternatives methods of intervention for children with asd. philip b. ward, is a clinical neuroscientist and unsw sydney professor of psychiatry who has always loved body surfing. phil is a passionate advocate for building the evidence base for surf therapy and is inspired by the positive vibe that surrounds surf therapy and the people who support it. he is a founding partner of the international surf therapy organisation, and a board director of the waves of wellness foundation. recommended citation: sarkisian, g. v., walter, k. h., martínez, g., & ward, p. b. (2020). introduction to the special issue on surf therapy around the globe. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(2), 1 – 10. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). introduction to the special issue on surf therapy around the globe http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 abstract this special issue on surf therapy around the globe in the global journal of community psychology practice is devoted to advancing the science and practice of surf therapy for diverse populations around the world. this introductory article provides a framework for this special issue. surf therapy’s beginnings as a small group intervention that served a variety of marginalized populations over the past fifteen years is outlined. next, a description of how surf therapy programs utilize four community psychology practice competencies – empowerment, mentorship, community inclusion and partnership, and health promotion – in the delivery of surf therapy is detailed. a brief overview of each article in this special issue is provided, linked to three practice competency categories – collaboration and coalition development, participatory research, and program evaluation. finally, videos ancillary to three of the articles are introduced and a fourth video without an accompanying article is also outlined. this special issue of the global journal of community psychology practice (gjcpp) on surf therapy around the globe features articles on emerging theory, program evaluation and empirical research on eight surf therapy programs delivered in six countries ireland, the netherlands, portugal, south africa, the united kingdom and the united states of america – serving diverse populations, including youth with disabilities, vulnerable youth, active duty military service members and military veterans. surf therapy is a small group intervention that has been growing in popularity over the past fifteen years. given that many surf therapy programs developed organically, operate on small budgets, and serve marginalized groups, program evaluation and empirical research efforts began ten years ago but have increased considerably over the past five years. surf therapy programs vary greatly in dosage (i.e., session frequency, duration and program length) and programming. typically, surf therapy programming includes both surf instruction and additional activities (e.g., talking circles or psychoeducation) to promote mental health and wellbeing among participants. community psychology practice competencies at play in surf therapy programs as the reader will see in the feature articles of this special issue, surf therapy programs utilize four community psychology practice competencies in the delivery of surf therapy (dalton & wolfe, 2012). empowerment is grounded in the physical activity of surfing and enhanced through additional program activities. while some programs focus on surfing as a form of respite, other programs seek to provide participants with opportunities for surf skill development. surf therapy program participants, who are typically drawn from marginalized groups, often report a shift in their perspective as to where they stand in relation to their sociopolitical environment. mentoring occurs through the relationship between the surf instructor or therapist and program participant. a key role of the surf instructor or therapist is encouraging participants to identify strengths, undertake self-reflection, and build social engagement – both while surfing and in everyday life. mentoring relationships between surf instructors and participants quickly establish trust from the outset as surf instructors provide participants who may have limited experience of the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 ocean with a sense of physical safety. community inclusion and partnership are central to most surf therapy programs through the ongoing maintenance of a participant-driven experience. from stretching on the beach to learning to surf, progress occurs at the participant’s selfselected pace. the provision of a social environment free of marginalization through positive role modeling and program processes that promote inclusivity outside of surfing, allows participants to express themselves in a socially supportive environment. finally, health promotion is the general goal of surf therapy programs. while symptom reduction has been observed and measured, most surf therapy programs focus on the promotion of wellbeing and involve the measurement of hope, wellbeing, or positive affect. below, three community psychology practice competency categories are used to structure nine of the twelve articles in this special issue. one article focuses on collaboration and coalition development, two articles center on participatory research, and six articles encompass program evaluation. a community tool for planning to replicate programs in new environmental and social contexts is described. and, in a concluding article, the coeditors discuss the implications for future surf therapy practice, research and coalition building based on a synthesis of the work presented in this special issue. to set the scene, we start with a scoping review by benninger and colleagues on research on surf therapy around the globe. surf therapy: a scoping review of the qualitative and quantitative research evidence elizabeth benninger, chloe curtis, gregor v. sarkisian, carly rogers, kailey bender, and megan comer benninger and colleagues conducted a scoping review on surf therapy over a tenyear time-period that covers peer-reviewed research papers, dissertations, theses, and outreach to experts. their search yielded 29 studies that met inclusion criteria. they describe the geographic regions in which the programs took place, the populations served, the focus of the surf therapy program, the research design and measures employed, and the reported outcomes. therapeutic benefits were reported for a variety of populations including vulnerable youth, youth with disabilities, active duty military service members, military veterans, young adult cancer survivors, and adults in recovery from addiction. gaps in research, such as a lack of generalizability due to an overreliance on observational designs, and practice, such as the difficulty of identifying specific elements of surf therapy programs that lead to observed outcomes, are identified and recommendations for future research and practice are provided. collaboration and coalition development coalition building in surf therapy: a case study on collective impact mathew mattila mattila described his experience using the collective impact model as a framework for coalition building in the development of the international surf therapy organization (isto). isto was founded in 2017 when representatives from eight leading surf therapy organizations met for the first isto conference in south africa to bring collaboration to the sector. mattila outlines benefits and challenges of using the collective impact model during the first three years of the development of isto as well as how isto can address inherent challenges of the collective impact model in its future work. benefits include shared leadership, common agenda, reinforcing activities and continuous communication while challenges include the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 approach feeling top-down, difficulty with setting a common agenda, shared measurement and uneven contribution and follow-through from members. future efforts of isto to address the challenges of collective impact include developing opportunities for participants to contribute to coalition building, developing opportunities for social justice initiatives and increasing funding for isto. finally, mattila provides recommendations to similar groups seeking to develop coalitions. participatory research “when i was surfing with those guys i was surfing with family.” a grounded exploration of program theory within the jimmy miller memorial foundation surf therapy intervention jamie marshall, brendon ferrier, philip b. ward, and russell martindale building on previous research led by marshall, marshall and colleagues used a grounded theory approach to better understand the experience of eighteen military veterans with physical and/or mental health challenges who participated in the jimmy miller memorial foundation oneday ocean therapy program in california, usa. five prevalent categories emerged, two related to the nature of the surf therapy intervention and three related to individual participant experience. tackling a challenge at one’s own pace and a familial nonjudgmental safe space emerged as categories relevant to how the surf therapy program was organized. respite, social connectedness and personal accomplishment emerged as categories connected to the experience of being a participant in the surf therapy program. marshall and colleagues discuss these findings in relation to both flow and self-determination theories. additionally, they discuss how the findings of this study build on previous grounded theory research in this area. surfing and the senses: using body mapping to understand the embodied and therapeutic experiences of young surfers with autism easkey britton, gesche kindermann, and caitriona carlin in donegal, ireland, britton and colleagues utilized participatory community research in their work with the liquid boardriders club, a surf therapy program serving youth with disabilities. the program consisted of twohour weekly surf therapy sessions over eight weeks. the boardriders club places a special focus on mind-body, self-other and selfnature connections. largely informed by somatic studies, body mapping is used as an intervention and research method to encourage the communication of physical and emotional feelings of participants before and after surf therapy. britton and colleagues utilized three methods of body mapping with twelve participants. the body mapping process was conducted before and after surfing to provide visual representations of the body-mind-environment capturing physical and emotional states of participants. they found that body mapping facilitated increased communication about complex emotions through visual representations. body map themes after surf therapy expressed feelings of happiness, freedom, and being weird or silly. parents reported that after surf therapy sessions their children felt happy, relaxed and more confident. britton and colleagues discuss the implications of body mapping as an intervention and research tool for youth with disabilities. program evaluation effects of ptsd and mdd comorbidity on psychological changes during surf therapy sessions for active duty service members nicholas p. otis, kristen h. walter, lisa h. glassman, travis n. ray, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 betty michalewicz-kragh, and cynthia j. thomsen psychological conditions commonly co-occur in individuals, which is known as psychological comorbidity. in order to determine the impact of psychological comorbidity on surf therapy outcomes, otis and colleagues explored whether surf therapy session outcomes differed among 47 u.s. active duty service members with probable posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd) or major depressive disorder (mdd), or both. this study was conducted in collaboration with the surf therapy program at the naval medical center san diego (nmcsd). the nmcsd surf therapy program occurs once per week for six weeks, with each session lasting approximately 3-4 hours. in order to examine the effects of each surf therapy session, brief self-report assessments were completed before and after each session. the study found statistically significant increased positive affect and decreased depression and anxiety within surf therapy sessions for both groups, with greater effects observed for participants with both ptsd and mdd. these findings indicate that surf therapy can improve symptoms and affect within sessions among service members if they have probable ptsd or mdd, and particularly if they have both. furthermore, study results suggested that surf therapy may have more global effects on symptom and functioning, rather than specific effects for particular disorders. emerging hope: outcomes of a one-day surf therapy program with youth atpromise gregor v. sarkisian, chloe curtis, and carly m. rogers sarkisian and colleagues report on a two-year program evaluation of the jimmy miller memorial foundation one-day ocean therapy program in california, usa. in addition to surf instruction, the program includes talking circles to provide participants and surf instructors with the opportunity to share stories of resilience and coping in an inclusive and socially supportive environment. the program serves youth at-promise with opportunities to try something new (surfing), have fun, and enjoy a day of respite at the beach and in the ocean. sarkisian and colleagues use a mixed-method design that included measuring hope before and after surfing (n=152), one month after surfing (n=50), and, rated drawings and related text of participants’ experience of the day (n=157). they found a statistically significant increase in mean scores on the children’s hope scale after surf therapy. one-month follow-up mean scores for a subsample of 50 participants were also observed to be significantly higher than pre-surf therapy means. while the results are promising, sarkisian and colleagues discuss the limits of the observational design in attributing the cause of change in scores and limits to generalizability. surf.art in portugal: daring, accomplishing and transforming portuguese youth and their communities paulo gomes, nuno fazenda, diego gomezbaya, mary elizabeth rauktis, and grace provost gomes and colleagues conducted an evaluation of surf.art, a surf therapy program in cascais, portugal, that works with vulnerable youth using a social-ecological approach through engaging with parents, providing psychoeducational workshops, support for crises and surf instruction and practice for youth participants. participants of surf.art engage in weekly 4-hour surf sessions over three years with the opportunity to serve as a mentor after program completion. using an observational pretest-posttest design with 69 participants using the strengths and difficulties questionnaire (sdq), gomes and colleagues found a statistically significant decrease in difficulties and a statistically significant http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 increase in prosocial behavior. while a significant decrease in difficulties was observed for all years of participation, there was a greater effect for youth who participated for two years. and, while a significant increase in prosocial behaviors was observed for all years of participation, there was a greater effect size for youth who participated for one year only. this is one of the first studies to explore dosage of surf therapy in the context of benefits to participants. the surf.art film, no mar somos todos iquals (at sea we are all the same), is a feature video in this special issue. the wave project: evidencing surf therapy for young people in the u.k. hannah devine-wright and cath godfrey devine-wright and godfrey conducted a three-phase evaluation over five years with the wave project in the united kingdom. the wave project is a six-week, strengths-based program delivered over six weekends with opportunities to continue participation after program completion as a mentor. the wave project provides vulnerable youth with opportunities to learn how to surf in a noncompetitive, supportive, and accepting social environment. devine-wright and godfrey utilized a mixed-methods approach that included interviews, focus groups, word cloud and observational pretest-posttest measures. using subscales from several standardized measures, they found a statistically significant increase in measures of wellbeing among the 84 participants after surfing that persisted up to three months after program completion. through semi-structured interviews with ten participants to better understand program effects in participants own words and longterm benefits of the program up to three years after completion, four overlapping theme clusters associated with wellbeing emerged – (1) shifts in coping, positive emotion, empathy and self-management; (2) increased trust, motivation, engagement and confidence; (3) changes in social identity and self-perception; and (4) a positive influence on family and community. among 347 participants, devine-wright and godfrey used a modified version of the sterling child wellbeing scale (scwbs) – positive outlook subscale, and, a word association task postsurf therapy to generate a word cloud. they found a statistically significant increase in mean scores on the modified scwbs positive outlook subscale and 833 words were generated through the word association task related to me and surfing with fun being the most commonly reported word. devinewright and godfrey discuss the implications of their five-year, three-phase evaluation as it relates to the positive impact on vulnerable youth over time. positive effects of surfing on psychological wellbeing of children with developmental difficulties hanneke van ewijk, marjolein wansinklokerman, andreas lamerz, and suzanne van den broek van ewijk and colleagues evaluated the surf project in the netherlands, serving youth with disabilities. the surf project consists of a surf academy that includes three two-hour surf lessons over three weeks and a surf club that includes 3-6 additional surf sessions after the conclusion of the surf academy. youth are able to participate in the surf club each year until 18 years of age. the curriculum of the surf project was developed to facilitate a safe and positive experience for participants through a structured curriculum, protocoladherent preparation, and a personalized approach through one-on-one mentoring. using an observational pretest-posttest design, 149 parents (of 84 youth) completed the kidscreen-27, which measures five domains of quality of life, before and after the three surf therapy sessions. they found statistically significant increases in three kidscreen domains, psychological wellbeing, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 social support and peers and school. autonomy and parental relation approached statistical significance whilst there was no statistically significant change in physical wellbeing. van ewijk and colleagues also collected data using a customized evaluation questionnaire and found that the general program experience, surf lessons, and mentoring were all experienced by parents as very positive for their children and young adults. the surf project (the netherlands) video is included in this special issue. more than surfing: inclusive surf therapy informed by the voices of south african children with autism spectrum disorder nicci van der merwe and paula yarrow using an exploratory case study design, van der merwe and yarrow evaluated the process of adapting the waves for change surf therapy program, developed for neuro-typical vulnerable youth, to serve neuro-diverse vulnerable youth populations in south africa. neuro-typical refers to the typical development of intellectual and cognitive abilities while neuro-diverse refers to developmental differences commonly associated with autism spectrum disorder (asd). through surf therapy and psychoeducation, waves for change works to build opportunities for youth to develop skills to regulate behavior and emotions, cope with community trauma, and develop their sense of purpose. for this pilot program, 45 youth with asd participated in two, 16-week, weekly 3-hour surf therapy sessions. focus groups were conducted with 10 parents/caregivers, 6 teachers/occupational therapists, and, makaton symbols were used to provide visual stimuli on emotions participants were experiencing pre, mid and post surf sessions. makaton symbols include six visual symbols representing emotions – frightened, sad, angry, happy, calm, brave. makaton symbols were analyzed using word clouds to illustrate change in emotions during the course of surf therapy sessions with most common words pre-surf therapy session being nothing, mid-surf therapy session being happy and post-surf therapy session being brave. from the focus groups with parents/caregivers and teachers/occupational therapists, four major themes emerged in terms of benefits: increased confidence and sense of identity; strengthened peer and adult relationships; increased communication initiation; and, increased verbal output. van der merwe and yarrow discuss four areas in which they had to adapt the waves for change program in serving neuro-diverse participants – (1) integrating visual communication; (2) embedding routine and structure into the regular program operations; (3) a decreased ratio of facilitator to participants (1:2 vs. 1:10); and, (4) increased training for facilitators on how to interact positively with youth who have asd. a video outlining the program is included in this special issue– autism is my superpower. community tool surf therapy program planning intervention mapping: using theory and evidence to inform the ocean mind surf therapy program for improving youth mental health lisa olive, rachel parker, madeleine dober, cameron drake, michael keith, and rohan telford olive and colleagues share intervention mapping, a protocol they used to replicate the u.k. based wave project surf therapy program for use in australia as the ocean mind surf therapy program. both programs serve vulnerable youth, however the contexts in which the programs work vary in cultural, environmental and social circumstances. they describe how they applied the six steps of intervention mapping as a planning tool for surf therapy program development, implementation and evaluation – (1) needs http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 assessment; (2) formation of change objectives; (3) selection of theory-based methods and practical strategies; (4) intervention development; (5) adoption and implementation plan; and, (6) evaluation planning. olive and colleagues describe how they navigated each step of the planning process and provide detailed examples of how intervention mapping works to plan a surf therapy program. one major limitation they experienced was a lack of resources which limited the scope of planning and resulted in an intervention that was focused on individuals. to expand the reach of interventions to larger social contexts, olive and colleagues recommend collaboration with local community organizations and groups during the planning process to expand the reach of surf therapy programs from an individual to a community level. videos in addition to the videos highlighted above, the special issue includes a video from the warrior surf foundation (wsf), based in south carolina, usa. a surf therapy program delivered by veterans for veterans, the wsf serves veterans active duty military service members and their families through a 12week surf therapy clinic with opportunities for participants who complete the clinic to serve as mentors and continue participation indefinitely (http://www.warriorsurf.org): founded on folly beach, south carolina in may 2015 by american combat veterans and surfers, the warrior surf foundation addresses post-service transition challenges such as post-traumatic stress, moral injury, survivor’s guilt and traumatic brain injury. the wsf has recently partnered with faculty from local universities to begin program evaluation efforts. guest editors surf therapy practice, research, and coalition building: future directions kristen h. walter, gregor v. sarkisian, giovanni martinez and philip b. ward in the concluding article, walter and colleagues synthesize the collective work in this special issue and discuss implications pertaining to future practice, research, and coalition building in the surf therapy sector. though there is variability among surf therapy programs, intervention components, and populations served, there are core competencies and common elements that may contribute to the positive outcomes reported by surf therapy participants. these aspects and processes by which they may occur are discussed. additionally, each of the articles in this special issue assists in furthering the knowledge base of surf therapy in unique ways; however, recommendations and considerations for future surf therapy studies are presented as to encourage the continued scientific evolution of surf therapy. lastly, this compilation of articles reflects the mission and values of the international surf therapy organization (isto). the initiatives of isto and how they are informed by the current state of science and practice are presented to pave the way for the future of the surf therapy sector. references dalton, j. & wolfe, s. (2012). joint column: education connection and the community practitioner. competencies for community psychology practice: draft for review. the community psychologist, 45(4), 714. disclaimer khw is an employee of the u.s. government. this work was prepared as part of her official http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.warriorsurf.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 duties. title 17, u.s.c. §105 provides that copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the u.s. government. title 17, u.s.c. §101 defines a u.s. government work as work prepared by a military service member or employee of the u.s. government as part of that person’s official duties. the views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the department of the navy, department of defense, nor the u.s. government. http://www.gjcpp.org/ home | dara collective a tale of resistance and love hana masud & khaled batrawi keywords: author biographies: hana masud, phd is an adjunct lecturer and researcher at the university of massachusetts-boston. her research and practice focuses on the coloniality of mental health services, its impact on re-colonizing local resistance, and radical collective trauma healing for local and marginalized communities in occupied palestine and chicago. her phd dissertation explored “embodying decoloniality indigenizing psychological practice and pedagogy”. dr. masud is the co-chair of decolonial and racial justice in praxis group, an initiative of psychologists for social responsibility. the group is a virtual space that brings scholars and practitioners from around the globe to reflect on the impact of coloniality, begin the healing process, and develop strategies to overcome and abolish colonial practices and systems. khaled batrawi, civil & industrial engineer by profession, is a human rights activist and co founder of the treatment and rehabilitation center for victims of torture (trc). batrawi was a board member of many ngos in the west bank, where he offered his expertise in regards to aligning the missions to international human rights, rule of law, independence of judiciary and democracy protocols. batrawi is also a columnist, his weekly articles reflect on critical social and political issues on the ground, where he generates praxis for embodiment of justice and peace in our local communities.between the years (1988-1993) batrawi served as the director of the fieldwork unit at al-haq, the palestinian organization for human rights and the west bank affiliate of the international commission of jurist/geneva. then, moved to the mandela institue for human rights as he was responsible for international relations. batrawi joined international fact finding missions organized by the dutch interchurch and the global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 march 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 international commission of jurists in some of the former soviet union republics. batrawi is the author of three small handbooks published by the mandela institute for human rights: 1) now we are free – a handbook for released prisoners and their families, 2) the palestinian regulations on arrest and searches, and 3)the palestinian open fire regulations. moreover, batrawi is a short stories writer, married to a dentist and the father of three, two lovely daughters and handsome son, very soon will be a grandfather. recommended citation: masud, h. and batrawi, k. (2022). a tale of resistance and love, global journal of community psychology practice, 13(1), 1 12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: hana masud, university of massachusetts, boston, ma; contact: https://www.daracollective.com/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.daracollective.com/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 march 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 a tale of resistance and love the nature of this piece asks us to open ourselves up to operating at a different level of awareness, calling on a more creative, intuitive, and more abstract/poetic epistemological frame. this piece is a short fable-like story exploring the ethics of the human within moments of immense struggle. for those of us who grapple with living within dynamics of various forms of oppression, this is essential reading for deeper discovery into ways of maintaining a sense of freedom. who we are hana is a postdoctoral scholar-activist working with local communities in palestine. khaled currently resides in palestine, and uses memory of ex-detainee experience to demonstrate pathways of resilience and connection towards transformative justice. this approach centers the potential for change through processes of healing and accountability grounded on everyday needs and strengths of those most directly impacted by violence and oppression (brown, 2019). we seek to integrate understandings of decolonization and decoloniality when derived from our flesh, born from experiences of our bodies within acts of resistance, and from our relationships in/to each other, who resist colonization and coloniality throughout our lives and beyond. theory and methods born of our flesh teach us how decolonial processes are rooted in the fight for the right to exist, to belong, and to express the full range of our humanity (moya, 2000). we bring this story into the public eye so we can collectively learn more about how one person holds both resistance and love, simultaneously, in preserving both their own humanity and that of their oppressor. why storytelling? our understandings of resilience, of justice, and of transformation, have certainly been informed by our trainings, research, and practice experiences as psychologists. however, these understandings also arose deeply from within our most intimate stories of loving, rebuilding, reconnecting, and surviving intergenerationally as palestinians in the face of colonial violence and longlasting, intersecting oppressions. we came to this understanding by processing together much of our own pain, our families’ collective grief, and by caring for one another. through deep listening and authentic storytelling, we emphasize (counter)stories in ways that honor our communities, remembering our villages, our lands, and our loved ones that we have lost to annexation, to incarceration, to desperation, to dreams deferred, to murder (atallah & masud, 2021). with this context in mind, we see the value embedded in telling/reading/hearing our stories from our own ways of knowing. we also see the harm inherent in ways of doing/being that are grounded in worldviews of the colonizer. this is why we refuse to give our stories in fragments to qualitative data methodology to meet the requirements of academic writing, where researchers code, and reduce stories to bits and nodes. refusal is persistence; we persist because we sense what is possible. refusal is generative. it is using imagination, love for ourselves and our interconnected humanity, and vision to articulate and dream possibilities. it is regrounding ourselves in a present, not only marked by the past, but also by the imminence of that which is still unsaid, unthought, unlived. it is desire, longing, and action. it is (re)mapping, (re)making, weaving together and traversing a landscape of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 march 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 decolonial praxis that is rooted—not in disciplines, but in lived stories of refusal, resistance, and community experience inherited legacies of struggle and survival. *the following story is based on real events and experiences of an activist struggling to navigate dehumanizing conditions and oppression under israeli imprisonment. to protect the identity of the activist, names of people and places have be made up. a tale of resistance and love story version 1: i am raed, and was born in january, 1960, and have lived in nablus most of my adult life. the body is where we live, where we fear, hope, and remember. when something happens that is too much, too fast, it overwhelms our bodies and can create trauma. today, i tell my story, i tell my pain, in attempts to honor my wounds, and understand how the physical, mental, emotional, as well as social and political structures have influenced my trauma and resistance responses. when i was detained, a series of threats and warnings were made to force a confession out of me, and if i didn’t conform, i would be subjected to penal liability. in february of 1985 around 2:15am, i woke up to disturbing banging on the front door and angry voices from multiple people shouting “soldiers! soldiers!” in arabic. my father hurriedly opened the door, he knew that to keep them waiting would not only heighten their anger and imminent aggression, but also strengthen their conviction of the palestinian’s guilt inside the home. there were fifteen soldiers at the night raid and arrest! with the exception of the israeli officer called captain avi who wore civil clothing, the rest dressed in israeli soldier uniform as they rushed into the house with their automatic guns in readyto-shoot positions. captain avi, asked all family members to gather in the living room where my family typically receives loving friends and family for tea and coffee, where they would spend many long nights of laughs and gossip. the room now was to become tainted with the memory of this awful night. captain avi ordered the soldiers to search the house, an order that meant the total destruction of property and personal belongings. during this so-called search, all i could think of was my poor mother, who prided herself in a clean and tidy home. once they were satisfied with the destruction of our home, captain avi asked my father to name all the members of my family. when my father said my name, captain avi told him to stop and then ordered me to raise my hand. i raised my hand. he told me that tonight i will go with them and “be their guest”. what an eerie way to refer to an arrest and interrogation, i thought to myself. and my family felt the same way, for they began shouting and demanding that they let me go. captain avi calmed them down by assuring them that “don’t worry, he will be our guest only for a few hours. he will be questioned and return home to you before noon the next day.” i did as i was told and changed out of my pajamas. the soldiers led me out of my home and placed me in one of the military vehicles. i will always remember that night as the last night i spent at home with my family before everything changed, the night that i was arrested as an israel’s prisoner, not their guest. on the way to the detention facility, the car was far enough to ensure that no family member could see or hear, they handcuffed my hands behind my back and bagged my http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 march 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 image 1: families of political prisoners are prisoners too by mohammad sabaaneh. head with a sack that smelled of human vomit. the soldiers then began beating me all over my body using their fists and heavy military boots. the beating lasted the entire ride to the military compound which is thirteen minutes away from our house. they not only struck me with their fists, but with their words as well. they cursed me, my family and my people. after five minutes, i began to lose consciousness and could not remember the rest of the car ride. when i woke up, i found myself surrounded with people dressed in civilian clothing speaking in hebrew. this is where the interrogation and torture began. it took me a few moments to realize that i was at a detention facility. a medic hovered over me and examined my eyes and pulse, finally saying to the others in hebrew (from what i understood) “he is now physically fit for questioning”. two people led me into an interrogation room, and the moment i stepped inside a third person shouted “blindfold him now! you should have done this before entering!” my head was hooded again, and this time i thanked god that at least this sack smelled less foul than the first one. the two people holding me forced me to sit on a small chair, similar to the ones used for children in daycares. they handcuffed my hands behind the chair, then left. in the few minutes of silence that followed i became keenly aware of the horrible pain all over my body. before i could begin to analyze the extent of my wounds, the person who remained in the room finally spoke in fluent arabic. “i am captain rony. i am in charge of your case. listen, it is really late, my wife is pregnant and we are expecting our first baby, so i don’t want to waste my time here tonight. i will let you rest tonight and tomorrow we will start your questioning. questioning is a dialog between two brains; when an interrogator uses force, it means that he failed”. i was placed in a foul uninhabitable cell. it was extremely small with no light, no toilet and no water source. later i realized that the small bowl they placed on the floor was the toilet. the cell’s floor was full with dirty water, and if you desired an ounce of sleep you quickly realized that you couldn’t spend the entire time standing. so i laid in the dirty pool and slept. the pain and exhaustion took me away. between now and then, the guard positioned outside my cell would bang on the door so that my sleep was never continuous. i noticed he had eastern features and later realized he was an iraqi jew. when i woke the next day, i had my first meal since my detention began. a slice of bread, two olives, butter and a cold cup of tea with no sugar. it was not appetizing, but i was famished and had no choice but to eat. after my meal i was taken outside for a few minutes to empty the urine bowl in which i was able to briefly enjoy the sun. it didn’t last long. i was hooded and handcuffed again and led to the interrogation room. the moment i entered i noticed the brown shoes from my peeks under the hood that captain roni was present. i was the one who started the conversation. i asked him if his wife gave http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.transcend.org/tms/2018/03/drawing-palestine-from-prison-the-artwork-of-palestinian-cartoonist-mohammad-sabaaneh/ https://www.transcend.org/tms/2018/03/drawing-palestine-from-prison-the-artwork-of-palestinian-cartoonist-mohammad-sabaaneh/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 march 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 birth and if they are expecting a baby girl or boy. he immediately removed the hood, looked sharply towards me, and said “she is fine, still did not give birth”. captain roni introduced himself as a graduate student in social studies from tel aviv university, and that he wants to continue his studies and specialize in middle eastern studies. his current work at the prison was part of his research. he said he wanted to help me. he told me to cooperate so that the interrogation will be quick, and that he promised to put all his efforts into convincing the military judge to issue me a light sentence. “just a few months”, he said. i was incredulous. “what are you talking about? i have no idea why i was arrested. there is nothing to interrogate.” captain rony responded with a story. “once upon a time, there were two neighbors, one was very practical, he went fishing daily and came back with fish. the other one was very lazy that he would end up stealing the fish from his neighbor’s kitchen. his neighbor caught him once and gave him three choices: eat one hundred fish, go fishing and bring me back a hundred fish, or pay him the value of 100 fish. the lazy neighbor was so happy and said he’ll eat a hundred fish. he started eating and managed to eat only thirty. he said he’ll go fishing and come back with 70 fish. he went and after the entire day he caught only twenty. he promised his neighbor that he’ll pay the value of the other 50 fish. the lesson is, if he just paid for the fish from the beginning, he could have saved his time, effort, and health. “i don’t understand what this has to do with me,” i told him. captain rony answered, “you will confess in the end. so why not save both our time, effort and health and confess now?” he hooded me and left the room. ten minutes later a group of people came in and i inspected their shoes from the small space in the hood. two wore military boots and the other three wore regular shoes. they started beating me, beating all over my body while they shouted curses in hebrew “ben zanah” (son of a bitch) they cursed my islamic religion, my god, and even cursed me a bit in my own language. i soon fell unconscious. i lost sense of time, location and dates. i remember that i woke up in the same room, still hooded and surrounded by nothing only complete silence. for how long i was unconscious, i cannot tell. captain rony came back and found me lying on the ground and asked what happened, as if he wasn’t the one who ordered the attack. i kept silent. he removed the hood, pulled me up and ordered me to sit on an average sized chair, not the small one. he asked again, “what happened?” i told him, “you should know”. he wiped off the blood from my face using toilet paper and water. then he phoned his wife and talked to her in hebrew. from what i could understand, she did not give birth yet and that he is going to go home in a few hours. i was taken back to the cell and kept there for a long period of time as i heard a nearby mosque’s call for prayer for the noon, afternoon, night and dawn prayers. in the cell i was given some bread, a cup of cold tea without sugar, and chocolate spread on a piece of bread. this was the first time i learned that chocolate could be eaten with bread. as the days went by, captain rony told me that i was being charged for being a member of an illegal palestinian faction and participating in the 1982 war in lebanon. i was shocked and denied the charges. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 march 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 as usual, the torture started, but never in captain rony’s presence. i have gotten used to the routine. interrogation, torture, food and sleep deprivation, as well as denying my basic biological right to go to the toilet, not to mention the major hygiene issues. i was taken to the military court and found out that eighteen days have passed because israeli military order number 378 concerning security gives interrogators eighteen days to obtain confession or else the prisoner will be brought to military court where the judge will decide to release or extend the detention period. the judge gave me an “open check” which meant the interrogator had an unlimited period of time to interrogate me. i can’t shake off the numerous times with captain rony when told me that he has plenty of time to obtain a confession from my side, and yet, in those critical moments, i remember when i asked him, if his wife gave birth, he said “not yet” and added “i beg you to confess so i could be near my wife”. i wondered if he knew how i wanted to be near my family too, but i’m a mere palestinian to him, so that luxury could never be mine. while interrogating he would phone her every half an hour inquiring about the situation there. once i told him i wanted to talk to her. and i did. i wished her an easy delivery and apologized that her husband could not be with her. i also asked her, “have you been in a situation like mine, where the interrogator is giving you a list of false charges, asking you to confess in which it could result in at least a 25-year sentence. she answered in good english, “definitely no, a big no”. the torture increased, same methods same daily agenda. bringing me back and forth to the cell. trying to rest but was not successful as mosquitos start attacking. i started thinking about mosquitos. i remembered my mother, when she used to spray the bedrooms before sleeping with anti-mosquito liquid with no success. instead we would scratch all night in our sleep, and wake up to red bumps all over our bodies. if we were lucky, they would avoid our faces. torture continued, questioning continued, still what worried me was the mosquitos. how come humanity did not find a solution to the mosquito problem? i discovered that the mosquitos’ strength is in its wings. as long as it is flying and does not settle on the ground or on walls, it is superior. similar to an airplane. i spent countless hours in solitary confinement imagining the life cycle of a mosquito. i evened remembered my science teacher at school explaining to us how planes fly because the idea is to make the pressure over the wing less than the pressure under the wings; thus, a force is established under the wings which allows it to fly. the idea sparked in me: if the pressure over the mosquitos’ wings is more than that under the wings, mosquitos will land and be disabled from its raids. it’s not that difficult, for you wouldn’t need to arrest each mosquito and remove its wings individually. torture increased and i fainted several times. i then found myself in the prison’s clinic where i overheard the guards being told that my health is deteriorating. rony’s wife gave birth, to a baby boy, i congratulated her, and she thanked me. i continued my concentration on finding a way to paralyze mosquitos, if i will come to a tested result, i will register it as a patent and intellectual property for all prisoners. the judge ordered that i will be released on the basis of no evidence. after nine months and thirteen days, i walked out of the prison. i was so sad that i did not come up with a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 march 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 solution to the mosquito dilemma. i decided to postpone thinking about mosquitos until my next arrest. image 2: lives interrupted by mohammad sabaaneh ************** *the story is told here again from a different angle. consider the connection between these two versions. a tale of resistance and love story version 2: when raed was detained and thrown into the cell, before the guard closed the iron door, the interrogator said, “i will leave you here to revive your memories.” with a bloody face and aching body, raed crawled towards the very thin, dirty mattress and laid on his back. he closed his eyes and began deep personal reflections. this is the third interrogation session, they tortured him intensely and violently. he was always covered in blood. they said they had strong evidence against him, even one of his colleagues confessed in front of him. what should he do? should he meet the interrogator’s request “to rethink and confess”, or to continue the act of denial? raed slept deeply, his body and nerves relaxing. meanwhile, a mosquito flew over his head and landed on his right cheek. it punctured his skin and he felt the poke. he automatically extended his hand to shoo it away. it flew away and met with its companions who rushed to support an attack on raed. every exposed part of raed’s body was targeted. raed rose to his feet and looked over the bites. he was outraged. not only was he being tortured by the intelligence personnel, but also mosquitos. he removed the remaining part of his torn, blood-stained shirt and fell back on the foam mattress exhausted. he closed his eyes and the mosquitoes came at him once more. raed rose again, unable to come up with any viable solution. raed leaned against the rough wall and extended his feet to the opposite wall. he poured his anger onto the mosquitos in their capacity as intelligence agents, and remembered the poet's words: do not despise a young creature in the fight… as a mosquito destroys the lion's eyeball. raed smiled a little as he remembered his mother, who used to shut all the windows tightly at night and commenced spraying each room with mosquito spray. then half an hour later, she would re-open the windows for ventilation. raed recalls that, despite his mother's efforts, the mosquitoes were engaged in night raids. raed reviewed the modern chemical means in the fight against mosquitoes, which only drove the mosquitos to other rooms instead of eliminating them completely. raed was surprised that despite humanity’s many advancements, mosquitos still roamed around freely. the cell’s door was opened. the guard shouted for him to walk out where he handcuffed raed’s hands behind his back and blindfolded him. the guard then covered raed’s head with dirty bag disabling his vision. the guard took him to an unknown location, and after removing the hood he found himself again in the interrogation room facing the interrogator, who was accompanied by four men. he immediately http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.transcend.org/tms/2018/03/drawing-palestine-from-prison-the-artwork-of-palestinian-cartoonist-mohammad-sabaaneh/ https://www.transcend.org/tms/2018/03/drawing-palestine-from-prison-the-artwork-of-palestinian-cartoonist-mohammad-sabaaneh/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 march 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 asked him: "did you think about your confession, raed?" "i did. and i have nothing to do with what you accused me of.” the interrogators started torturing him. raed tried his best to hide his face, but failed. he drowned in his own blood. as they beat him savagely, his attention and discontent were focused on the issue of humanity as a whole, where he could not find a solution to the problem of mosquitoes. raed resembled a corpse when they returned him to the cell. he crawled toward the dirty mattress, laid his back against the coarse wall, and closed his eyes. the mosquito came again. instead of trying to rest, he started thinking again about mosquitoes. minutes passed, hours passed. raed’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the small window at the cell’s door being opened. raed glanced at the window and noticed the guard watching him. he ignored him and returned to his meditations on mosquitoes. the guard rushed to the interrogator reporting that raed is “thinking deeply”--the first step towards collapsing and confession. the interrogator smiled and spit on the guard's shoulder and laughed, "they all keep their mouths shut at first. but they eventually spill everything. they all do." raed went back to the seventh grade. he remembered the science teacher ali, who always held a stick in his hand forcing pupils to study science, or else they’d be whooped. when mr. ali taught us about the aircraft, he explained how the entire concept of flying was inspired by the bird. then he said, “a plane has long wings and a smooth body, and has big fans on either side. the secret of flying lies in the wings.” raed heard the sound of the cell’s lock key turn. he remained indifferent. the guard smiled, handcuffed him to the back and left him in the interrogation room. as soon as he entered, the interrogator smiled, hugged him and took him by the arm and said, "listen my darling, stop thinking hard and thinking a lot. thinking too long causes harm. so tell me your story." "i have nothing to say,” raed said. "listen, my darling, i will tell you a story,” said the interrogator. “once there were two neighbors, one was hardworking and the other a lazy man. one day the hardworking one caught a hundred fish. when returning home he hung the fish near the window. he went to the market and when he returned the fish were gone. he knew right away that his lazy neighbor stole them. he confronted him and said, “you have three options. eat the one hundred fish, give me a hundred fish, or pay me for a hundred fish. the lazy neighbor chose the first option, but he was only able to eat thirty. so he promised to catch the fish, but returned with only four. finally, he decided to pay him the value of the fish.” the interrogator then added, “so dear raed, if this lazy neighbor just paid from the beginning he would not have had to go through all that trouble.” “i don’t understand,” raed responded. “you are the lazy neighbor, the donkey”. beatings and abuse continued, blood flowed, his face swelled and his eyes popped. then raed fell unconscious. they dragged him into the cell. when raed woke up he noticed his clothes were wet. after examining his body he decided nothing was out of the usual, besides the bruises and wounds. raed reflected on planes some more. the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 march 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 shape of the wing is important for the flight process. the bottom surface of the wing is flat and slightly tilted from the horizon and this exposes it to the wind. while the upper surface of the wing is curved in the shape of an arch. may god's mercy fill your days teacher ali, raed thought. he recalled how mr. ali used to walk around the classroom repeating the airplane lesson, "when the plane moves very fast, its wings are exposed to a strong stream of air. the wing splits the air into two parts, the first hitting the surface of the lower wing, the other sliding over the surface, bending over it to meet the lower wind…..” another interrogation round followed in which the interrogator was furious. this time he had three assistants to beat raed. he fell unconscious again and they threw water on his face to wake him up, so that may torture him again. they kept repeating this process until they finally returned him to the cell unconscious. but he woke up this time to the sound of mosquitos buzzing in his ears. raed leaned his back on the rough wall. he remembered how mr. ali hit him when he failed to define the forces that raised the plane up. "the wing is exposed to two forces, the first caused by the pressure of the wind hitting the surface of the lower wing, and the second by a force formed by the partial vacuum above the surface, which makes the atmospheric pressure above the top surface very low, resulting in pressure difference, the overall air on the lower surface is a big force that lifts wings up and the plane rises with it.” so that's the simple answer: the force pushing the wing up and up with the plane. that is, the mosquito flies upward with a force that pushes its wings upwards. the idea came to him, just as archimedes found it and discovered its famous base. and the same as the apple fell on top of newton's head before he discovered the law of gravity. raed underestimated all human scientists. they can eliminate mosquitoes if they render them flightless, he thought. they should create a power of an adverse action that hinders and prevents the fly of the mosquito. that is to say, bringing up a force from the top down, forcing the mosquito to stay ground and cripple its ability to fly. then the housewife pours a bucket of water on the ground and the water runs the paralyzed mosquitoes down the drain. as the poet says, the mosquitos would be “as if he were going to war without weapons." raed focused all his attention on how to create the opposite force from top to bottom. as the torture continued, his thoughts remained on mosquitos and planes. what raed hadn’t realized is that he began to resemble the flightless mosquitoes he thought of. still, silent, and unmoving in the face of interrogations and abuse. the intelligence officer and his staff eventually realized this. they knew there was no point in continuing the investigation, and so they finally released him. raed returned home. he decided to stop thinking about reversing the force from top to bottom until his next arrest. ************** reader reflection questions * what do we learn about pain/suffering/wounds, resistance, and human connection? how do these two versions of the story differ? how does love manifest in these two versions of the story? how does resistance manifest in these two versions of the story? how are resistance and love intertwined? ************** http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 march 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 image 3: an artist in gaza city works on a mural glorifying six palestinian prisoners who escaped from israel's gilboa prison. [mahmud hams/afp] this is a continuous struggle. our struggle is a metaphysical resistance and this image is the actual physical revolutionary reflections what kept raed alive during this time is his political training by other revolutionary figures and leaders on strategies he can draw on to maintain the spirit of life. within this training, we learn that our inner resources will help us transform the world around us. that maintaining our wellness in a torture room is where we practice resistance and love towards justice and liberation. the above testimony demonstrates how our tortured mind can protect itself through intentional and deliberate wandering; occupying itself with topics unrelated to the present situation, to protect us from the occupier’s grasp. any person who is involved in national liberation must be equipped with theory, and ideology, which shapes their vision, language, and actions towards targeting and resisting interrogation and oppression. they must also be able to apply theory in practical steps towards national liberation. here are three main points to remember: • there are no limits to the amount of harm that can, and will be enforced. the occupying powers will deploy every effort to combat national activities including willful, extrajudicial killings, detention, and deportation. the occupier will not only cause personal harm to one individual involved in national liberation, but will also enforce collective punishment and harm that targets our family and community as a whole. • we must understand that when we are imprisoned, the prison’s gates will not be closed forever. we will someday leave the prison. the catch is, we will either leave walking on both legs, or dead, or unconscious on a stretcher. • while in detention, we have two choices: we either allow ourselves to be destroyed by the occupier’s abuse, or become selfempowered. while being tortured, if we think about our wellbeing, family and friends, or the charges and potential sentencing, we will only be assisting the occupier in destroying our mind, body, and spirit. connecting with embodied decolonial praxis the wounds and imagination of our prisoner and intuitive theory born of the embodied experience orient this story. through the telling of this experience, from two angles, we see how our prisoner takes this opportunity to resist by connecting through imagination and love – a revolutionary act opposing colonialism. for some people under fight for the right to exist, the struggle to be human, to enter a solitary confinement for 9 months and 13 days like the case of raed, to make time, in a tiny box, not just to proceed to survive but to be there at all. you have to do something, say something. the act of liberating the imagination from a crisis has hindered losing oneself to pain. a person in a space of resistance, does not seek heroism, he is persistent in self-denial. inside the http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/9/19/spoons-a-new-symbol-of-palestinian-freedom https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/9/19/spoons-a-new-symbol-of-palestinian-freedom https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/9/19/spoons-a-new-symbol-of-palestinian-freedom https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/9/19/spoons-a-new-symbol-of-palestinian-freedom https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/9/19/spoons-a-new-symbol-of-palestinian-freedom https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/9/19/spoons-a-new-symbol-of-palestinian-freedom global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 march 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 solitary and under interrogation, you must not think of yourself, family or the social cause, because that is a key factor to break you psychologically. one must only think about how to uphold their dignity and pride, and fight for their humanity. mindfulness and clarity is not a luxury, it is key to think collectively. it is easy to see how settler occupation bodies and systems have created soul wounds for many thousands and millions of palestinian people over the past 70 years. it is less obvious what the experience of trauma has done to their bodies and psyches. however, trauma is not destiny, especially for those fighting for humanization and liberation. while trauma can look like destiny when people choose to blow their trauma through others, we choose not to pass on our trauma to others, and that choice begins to mend some of the trauma for future generations. it changes what looks like destiny of pain into healing and transformative capacity. refusal is generative – we can refuse to pass on trauma to others (menakem, 2017). we have written this with clarity and courage, like when we say “end the occupation” or “get your knee off our necks”. because even when a police officer or soldier pushes his knee upon our necks, we can still see clearly, far into the horizons of justice. references brown, a. m. (2019). pleasure activism: the politics of feeling good. ak press. atallah, d.g. & masud, h.r. (2021). transitional or transformative justice? decolonial enactments of adaptation and resilience within palestinian communities. in j.n. clark's & m. ungar's resilience, adaptive peacebuilding and transitional justice: how societies recover after collective violence (pp 234256). cambridge university press. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/978110891950 0.011 menakem, r. (2017). my grandmother's hands. central recovery press moya, p. (2000). 2. postmodernism, "realism," and the politics of identity: cherríe moraga and chicana feminism. in p. moya & m. hames-garcía (ed.), reclaiming identity: realist theory and the predicament of postmodernism (pp. 67-101). berkeley: university of california press. https://doi.org/10.1525/978052092494 9-004 http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108919500.011 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108919500.011 https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520924949-004 https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520924949-004 https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520924949-004 community psychology at a regional university: on engaging undergraduate students in applied research amie r. mckibban and crystal n. steltenpohl1 author biographies: amie r. mckibban, is an associate professor and department chair of psychology. much of her work at the university of southern indiana has focused on sexuality, with an emphasis on sexual and gender identities in the local community. she is currently involved in research on sexual and gender identities, sexual and gender minority policy in public education, and attitudes toward aging. crystal n. steltenpohl, is an assistant professor of psychology and founder of the online technologies lab at the university of southern indiana. as a scholar, gamer, and participant in online worlds, her major research interests revolve around how we interact with various technologies, especially those that house online communities. she is particularly interested in understanding how technologies influence communities, the self, and health behaviors. recommended citation: mckibban, a. r., steltenpohl, c. n. (2019). community psychology at a regional university: on engaging undergraduate students in applied research. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(2), 1-14. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). author note: correspondence should be addressed to dr. amie r. mckibban, college of liberal arts 3042, 8600 university boulevard, university of southern indiana, evansville, in, 47712, armckibban@usi.edu. 1 university of southern indiana http://gjcpp.org/ mailto:armckibban@usi.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 community psychology at a regional university: on engaging undergraduate students in applied research abstract engaging students in service learning projects grounded in community psychology values and practices when working in a rural, conservative area provides several challenges and opportunities for faculty members. the authors share processes and outcomes from three case examples taking place between 2010 and 2013: (1) running focus groups and survey development with a local ymca branch that predominantly serves people of color in low income housing, (2) the development of a strategic plan for the implementation of an art crawl in the local downtown community, and (3) the development and execution of an asset map evaluating supportive resources and spaces available to the local lgbtqa community. the authors reflect on feedback from students and community partners. these case examples highlight the complexity of balancing students’ skillsets, work and other life obligations, and desire to use classroom knowledge in community settings. it also highlights the importance of preparing community partners for working on applied research. we provide recommendations based on each project’s challenges and successes for universities and communities of similar demographics. working in rural, conservative settings provide their own challenges and opportunities, but are well worth it if implemented in an intentional way, and more research is needed to strengthen our understanding of how best to engage students from a variety of social and political backgrounds. the society for community research and action (scra) lists four broad principles and various concepts that guide community psychologists (society for community research and action, n.d.b). these principles and guiding concepts highlight the importance of valuing diversity among people and settings, understanding context, engaging in collaborative ventures that respect community needs and preferences, promoting social justice values, and utilizing change strategies at multiple levels. further, scra outlines various competencies for practice in our field, which focus on foundational principles, community program development and management, community and social change, and community research (society for community research and action, n.d.a). these competencies offer a framework for understanding how community psychologists achieve the goals outlined in the principles and guiding concepts and an opportunity for educators to reflect upon their pedagogical practices. community psychologists in academic settings can use service learning projects as one means of introducing students to scra’s principles, guiding concepts, and competencies. while there is a general agreement that service learning is a form of experiential education, there remains disagreement on what, exactly, service learning looks like. according to howard (2003), service learning generally entails three key components: (1) service is provided to the community, (2) students’ academic learning is strengthened, and (3) students’ commitment to social responsibility is strengthened. one avenue to provide service learning opportunities to students studying community psychology is to engage in applied research projects, partnering with community organizations and networks. depending on community contexts, however, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 it can be difficult to create opportunities for students to engage in applied experiences in line with scra’s principles, guiding concepts, and competencies. as a field, we struggle to find the most effective ways for engaging students in and teaching them the skills they need for community practice (francescato & zani, 2013). it is important for instructors to be reflective about their teaching practices and understand community and university contexts when designing classroom experiences for students studying community psychology. in this paper, we highlight successes and challenges of working with undergraduate students at a regional university in southern indiana. to do so, we illustrate three case examples: (1) focus group and survey development with a local ymca branch predominantly serving people of color in low income housing, (2) the development of a strategic plan for the implementation of an art crawl in the local downtown community, and (3) the development and execution of an asset map evaluating supportive resources and spaces available to the local lgbtqa community. each case example is more involved and complex than the last regarding the skillsets taught and outcomes evaluated. we will provide recommendations based on these challenges and successes for institutions and communities of similar demographics. we hope this will provide insight into the practice of community psychology with undergraduate students residing in more rural and conservative areas, given many us universities are situated in such areas. further, we will illustrate that the teaching of community psychology, and more importantly engaging students in applied research, often serves as the first time students are exposed to a community-level perspective of human behavior. we hope this illustrates areas where we can further develop strategies to engage students from a variety of political and social backgrounds. community context demographics. the university of southern indiana is located on the outskirts of evansville, in vanderburgh county, which serves as the regional hub for a tri-state region (illinois, kentucky, and indiana). the tri-state region itself is heavily rural, with a population of 474,251. vanderburgh county itself (population of 181,877) is homogenous, with 86% of the population classified as white and non-hispanic (9% black, 6% other). the county tends toward a relatively high poverty rate of 17.4% (above the national rate of 12.7%), which may also be reflected in the county’s educational attainment, with only 24.9% of the population holding a bachelor’s degree or higher (significantly below the national rate of 33%; us census, 2016). a slight majority (53%) adheres to religious institutions, with the largest representation (22%) identifying as evangelical protestant (us religion census, 2010). demographics of the surrounding area mirror those of vanderburgh county. as is common with many regional universities, the majority of usi students are from indiana (83.2% in state, 14.6% out of state, 2.2% international), with 44% of those students coming from vanderburgh and contiguous counties and 27.2% from other indiana counties (usi fact book, 2017). of the 9,014 undergraduate students enrolled, 80.5% are attending full time with 76.6% classified as traditional (24 years old and younger). as such, almost a quarter of our students are non-traditional. racial demographics closely mirror that of the region, with 85.8% classified as white, 11.9% as non-white minority, and 2.2% as international. faculty demographics are similar (88% white, 9% non-white minority, 2% international). institutional positionality. undergraduate student engagement in applied projects is not only supported by the university but encouraged through our classification as a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 community engaged university through the carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching, making our community psychology course a seamless fit with the mission and vision of the university itself. at the university of southern indiana, the course is offered as an upper level undergraduate elective for majors and minors within the department. however, many other students can enroll in the course, as introduction to psychology and social psychology are the only prerequisites to the course. frequently, these students come from service and healthcareoriented majors, taking the course to fulfill an upper level general elective. therefore, community psychology is taught to a diverse group of students, particularly regarding their interests and educational background. this combined with the percentage of students holding jobs (75% working 10 or more hours a week, 45% working 20 hours or more a week) and living off campus (88%) can create unique challenges in the way we engage students and ultimately the projects we choose. the relationships the students have with their community is best understood in the context of a region that is rural and conservative, both politically and economically. this has also provided unique challenges, and unexpected successes in teaching community psychology research to undergraduate students. author positionality. the first author completed her phd in community psychology at wichita state university in 2009. following the completion of her degree, she began a tenure track position at the university of southern indiana, where she developed an undergraduate course in community psychology as part of the departmental curriculum, and which serves as the basis for this publication. she has worked in the southern indiana community in outreach and program development for the last nine years while earning tenure and promotion, including the development of an lgbtqa asset mapping project called map evansville. she currently sits as department chair of psychology at the university of southern indiana. the second author was a student with plans to be a social psychologist when she took community psychology--then a special topics and not a standing course--from the first author. her experiences in the course and working on the ymca project altered her career trajectory, and she earned her phd in community psychology at depaul university. during her time at depaul, she continued to work with the first author on map evansville. she has returned to usi as a tenure-track faculty member in the psychology department, currently overseeing the internship course for psychology undergraduate students and the community psychology course on a regular rotation as of fall 2018. case studies ymca caldwell center project description. in fall 2010, 23 students teamed up with the ymca caldwell center located in glenwood neighborhood, a racially diverse, economically disadvantaged area with 46.8% of the residents living below poverty and 53.5% having less than a high school education. this location was chosen given its demographics and ease of alignment with the scra guiding principles and concepts, namely diversity among people and settings, contextual understanding, and engaging in collaborative efforts that incorporate community needs and preferences. the goal of working with this ymca branch was twofold: the project aided students in developing real-world, marketable skills relevant to community psychology research, and the community partners had assistance in developing a tangible product that could be utilized to better serve community member needs. this partnership was established through the university’s outreach and engagement office, which is designed to connect community entities in need of services with researchers and professors on campus, and relevant to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 this project, to develop service learning projects with tangible outcomes. institutional review board approval was granted through normal university procedures prior to the start of the project. the collaborative effort rested on two demonstrable outcomes for the caldwell center: to provide qualitative feedback from different age groups utilizing their services (a bottom-up focus on resident needs) and create a quantitative measurement tool that could be used to collect data more easily and quickly once we ended our partnership. given the vast difference between our students (largely white, middle class, and educated) and the residents utilizing the center, it was imperative to design the project in a way that allowed the students to become acquainted with the center and develop a sense of investment and rapport before the creation of deliverables. as such, during the first two weeks of class, each student visited the caldwell center to observe activities (health and wellness programs, games, etc.) for a minimum of 30 minutes. following their observation, they wrote a field report allowing them to connect their observations back to classroom material and to reflect upon their own perceptions and potential biases. this not only allowed for the students to build rapport with the caldwell center, but for discussion of potential biases and assumptions when working with a racially diverse community. these conversations took place on two separate occasions in the classroom, both with and without, representatives from the caldwell center present. students were then divided into research teams and trained to conduct focus groups with community members. training was conducted in the classroom by another researcher who specializes in focus groups. this training included lecture and hands-on simulations, affording the students the opportunity to demonstrate competency. once properly trained, the teams visited the center and ran focus groups with the following age groups (one focus group per age group): 3rd-5th grade (9 participants), middle school (15 participants), high school (8 participants), and adult (7 participants). teams submitted their findings from each session in written form. two representatives from the ymca then visited the class to discuss what was found and elaborate on any findings that may have been ambiguous, as a form of member checking. utilizing information garnered from focus groups and meetings with ymca representatives, teams then spent the remainder of the semester developing a survey instrument to assess the needs and wants of the community members the caldwell center serves in each respective age group. throughout this process, literature from community psychology (e.g., cycling of resources, ecological systems, etc.) was presented through lecture and processed in small group work to ensure the material from the classroom remained connected to the service learning project. the questions developed by each team were edited and formatted by the first author, resulting in three usable survey instruments. each team presented their results and lessons learned at the end of the semester. several of the caldwell center’s staff and community members attended the presentations, further ensuring rapport and establishing closure. student experiences. students were asked about their experiences in this course at midterm, utilizing a formative evaluation and an outside evaluator, and at the end of the semester utilizing the university’s summative teaching evaluation instrument. at midterm, students largely expressed satisfaction with the course, with two notable themes for improvement: they unanimously disliked the textbook, and some found it cumbersome to have to leave campus to participate in the class project, suggesting a project in the future where a bulk of the work was done on campus and in class. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 by the end of the semester, concerns regarding the text remained, while concerns about off campus project work were not as pronounced. for example, one student indicated, “this has been one of my most rewarding classes in college so far. i really think actually leaving the classroom and going out into the community to do a project helps us to get the real-world applications of what we learn in class.” it is important to note students with initial reservations about working off campus may not have provided qualitative feedback at the end of the semester. quantitative results from the university’s summative course evaluation were positive (4.81 on a five-point scale) compared to normative comparisons across campus (4.23). students felt they learned a lot in the course (4.81), performed up to their potential (4.44), and that the assignments helped them increase their understanding of the course content (4.81). as alluded to above, qualitative feedback corroborated the quantitative feedback. to illustrate, some of the comments from students included, ● “very interesting look at a subject i had never really considered before.” ● “i feel i have learned more from this single course than from the three other psych classes i am taking combined.” ● “the service learning project has given me experience which i will be able to utilize in the working sector.” ● “this course turned out to be much more rewarding than i initially anticipated.” ● “although there was much information to cover in this class, dr. mckibban presented it to the class in a way that we could apply it and understand it in our project, which helped us to retain it with much greater ease.” organization experiences. the ymca caldwell branch’s experiences with the project can be considered from two perspectives: that of the focus group members and that of the representatives and staff. although we did not systematically evaluate participant satisfaction, feedback from the representatives indicated the youth (all age groups) and adults appreciated the opportunity to voice their opinions about programming, and most notably in the high school and adult groups, the opportunity to voice concerns about the center itself, particularly regarding staffing and safety. throughout the project, the representatives were impressed with the level of professionalism exhibited by students and their willingness to listen and adjust their language so that the local youth could more easily interact with them. they were also surprised by the quality of information gathered. during a follow-up conversation eight months after the conclusion of the project, the representatives indicated they were continually using the data gathered to modify programming. they further indicated the utilization of the surveys had allowed them to gather data and successfully apply for grant monies. art crawl project description. for the following year, two considerations informed the development of the project. first, based on feedback from the previous year, students were given primary sources in place of a textbook. these sources included journal articles and community toolbox materials. given there were numerous students at midterm the previous year indicating a preference to do more work on campus and a project that focused on community development more broadly, we did not work with a designated community partner, but focused on multi-system, program development and a more multifaceted, marketable skillset. this project was developed with the scra competencies of community program development and management, community change, and research in mind. as such, 20 students produced a strategic plan for a monthly art crawl (a three-to-four hour event once a month during which community members http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 visit local businesses displaying artists’ work, often involving live music, drinks, and food) for downtown evansville in the fall semester of 2011. the first author reached out to local artist groups, business owners, and community members to arrange the partnerships. institutional review board approval was not sought in this project given no unique data was being collected or utilized for dissemination. this decision was supported and approved by the irb. students were trained in survey question development, interview techniques, and data collection with existing data banks throughout the semester by the first author and another professor on campus who specializes in interview techniques and focus groups. this latter training was like what took place in the first case study where students learned through lecture and handson simulation. to develop the sections required of a strategic plan, students conducted interviews with artists, potential artists, business owners, and community members (each student interviewed two community members) and used data from city sources and the u.s. census. students produced vision and mission statements for the project that gave voice to the community and embraced differing ideas within that community. in the same manner, students conducted a swot (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis regarding the area’s strengths and weaknesses (associated with downtown), and opportunities and threats (associated with evansville and the broader tri-state area). students also collected demographic data on the community, downtown business area, and local artistic groups. the analysis took into consideration the needs of the artists, potential artists, business owners, and community members regarding the functionality and sustainability of an art crawl. students then composed a project statement and rationale for the art crawl. this statement and rationale included objectives of the plan, fiscal benefits of the crawl, benefits regarding human welfare, and the benefits of fostering a sense of community. students also completed an action plan, including measurable goals, objectives, and activities. the action plan mapped out the art crawl in its entirety and was thorough enough to function as a blueprint for implementation. to iterate the importance of evaluation, students developed an evaluation plan, which included suggestions on formative evaluation measures (how are things going from monthmonth) and outcome evaluation measures (is the art crawl successful overall). the evaluation plan offered a way to tangibly measure the goals and objectives with their respective outcomes in the action plan. it is noteworthy students worked in teams when gathering information throughout the semester, but ultimately wrote individual action and evaluation plans. student experiences. although students reported the class was beneficial, throughout the semester they struggled to make the connections between the art crawl and community psychology. despite every effort to make this connection, in the end, students found this project less beneficial compared to the previous year. this observation is based on informal feedback gathered mid-semester and at the end of the semester. although students’ feedback on formative evaluations mid-semester suggested utilizing primary sources was beneficial and preferable, this class performed significantly lower on examinations than previous semesters. this suggests they may not have understood the material to the level expected. this may also reflect the difficulty many students have with comprehending primary sources over secondary sources, such as textbooks. this decreased understanding of the material may have ultimately resulted in less satisfaction with the course overall, indicated by end of the semester summative evaluations (4.57, compared to 4.81 the previous year). further, students rated the class lower on whether they felt they learned a lot in the course (4.33, compared to 4.81), performed up to their http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 potential (4.0, compared to 4.44), and most notably that the assignments helped them increase their understanding of the course content (3.89, compared to 4.81). qualitatively, some students found the course, and project, helpful as illustrated by one student in the following comment: “this course was very informative and very useful. the hands-on approach that professor mckibban used was effective in not only teaching the material, but also showing the practical application. this connection from theoretical to practical is sometimes difficult for students to make. this course has provided me with experience and a skillset (strategic planning) that will be useful throughout my life.” while most found the material to be taught well, they struggled with their involvement in the project as can be seen in their feedback below. ● “i liked this class because it was hands on. aimee [sic] is my favorite teacher and she makes the subject easy to relate with. i felt the material was repeatitive [sic]. i wish we could have been more involved in the project.” ● “although some of the material is pretty dry, dr mckibban makes it enjoyable! i cant [sic] wait to see the finished product next semester. i think the only issue for this course is most of the students will not get to be a part of the finished product but have done a lot of the leg work. being involved with the art crawl until it starts would perhaps make students more invested in the project.” ● “this was an interesting class for me. i learned a lot, but i wish we could have had more say into what project we did for the semester.” organization experiences. although this project was not completed in partnership with a specific community partner, a few comments regarding organizational experience, understood in the context of community experience, are warranted. at the time of this project, discontent existed within the local art community, particularly between two local groups. one of these groups expressed an appreciation for the possibility of “getting the conversation started” between the different fractions in the community. further, the downtown business community, although poised for an uptick in development, was just beginning to have meaningful conversations with the city redevelopment commission. although business owners were happy to be interviewed and genuinely interested in assisting the students with the project, they expressed no real interest or investment in the idea. at the conclusion of the project, the best parts of each action and evaluation plan were combined and given to the then director of the local arts council. unfortunately, this director left the area the next year. although an art crawl downtown was never implemented, one local business began to hang local art in his establishment. further, a monthly art crawl eventually took root in a neighboring district, although its connection to any action of this project is unknown. map evansville project description. in the fall semester of 2013, 25 students (21 enrolled in the class and four student research assistants) worked with members in various lgbtqa communities to develop an assessment tool that would eventually be utilized in the development of a lgbtqa-focused asset map of evansville and the surrounding areas. this project was designed to be the initial planning phase of a larger, grant-funded, project that would be launched live (website to collect data from service providers for the asset map) by the end of the following summer with the help of the second author (map evansville, n.d). pre-existing partnerships the first author had established over the years working in the lgbtqa community were utilized and proper irb http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 approval was obtained. with the differences between the two previous projects in mind, this project was developed to give students more contact with community partners, more hands-on experience outside of class, an opportunity to learn about the importance of contextual and historical understanding of a community, and the ability to engage in a collaborative effort incorporating community needs and preferences, in line with scra competencies. like our first case study, guest speakers from two groups serving the local lgbtqa community visited class for in-class discussions with students. this discussion was moderated utilizing an interview schedule for each speaker, developed by the students and modified by the first author. this interview phase was important in beginning the initial phase of defining what “inclusivity” meant for the local lgbtqa community. students were then assigned to one of five research teams, with a research assistant assigned to each team, and the first author assigned to the fifth team. students were trained to conduct focus groups, including cultural awareness when working with the lgbtqa community (for example, the use of appropriate vocabulary). focus group training was conducted by the same professor as in the first two case studies (including simulations), and cultural training was conducted by the first author, which included working through scenarios to ensure competency prior to entering the community. utilizing information collected from community partners, each team developed an appropriate focus group protocol, dependent upon their assigned sector of the lgbtqa community. once properly reviewed and practiced in the classroom setting, the students ran focus groups with a lgbtqa youth group, a local trans group, the university’s lgbtqa student group, a group of lgbtqa faculty and staff, and a local lgbtqa early adulthood group. once the focus groups were completed, teams submitted their findings in written form. utilizing data from the focus groups, interviews with organizational representatives, and evidence-based practices from the human rights campaign equality index and the national assessment tool questions for pride indexes, the teams spent the remainder of the semester developing an instrument to assess the inclusivity of service providers in the area, regarding services provided and employment practices. at the end of the semester, each group presented on what was done, lessons learned, insights students had regarding community psychology, and students’ understanding of community psychology as an applied field. community members were invited to watch and ask questions, which was important to ensure the assessment was a good fit within the city’s historical and cultural context, a critical aspect to asset mapping. student experiences. students were asked about their experiences during a formative evaluation mid-semester and at the end of the semester in a summative evaluation. the themes that emerged (formative and summative) in the qualitative feedback were in line with previous years. for example, students appreciated the hands-on experience with focus groups. more specifically, students felt they not only learned about community psychology, but about themselves. as illustrated in one student’s comment, “i really enjoyed the real life aspect of the course and the focus groups that were done outside of class time. i feel like i not only learned a lot about community psychology, but also about myself.” indeed, many students expressed these sentiments during the formative evaluation and in personal communications. given this project focused on the lgbtqa community at a time when the national conversation was active (e.g., marriage equality), students appeared to be more personally invested in ways that allowed them to re-examine their own assumptions and biases. overall quantitative feedback increased once again to levels similar to the first case study as compared to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 the second (4.73 overall class satisfaction, up from 4.57), and particularly compared to normative comparisons across campus (4.31). students felt they learned a lot in the course (4.89, up from 4.33), performed up to their potential (4.50, up from 4.44), and that the assignments helped them increase their understanding of the course content (4.63, up from 3.89). organization experiences. the organizational experiences with the project can be considered from two perspectives, like the first case study: that of the focus group participants and that of the organizational representatives. feedback from focus group participants notably indicated a sense of relief that someone was finally listening to their needs regarding the local community and that the product of the entire project (an interactive, online resource guide) would be developed in a way that allowed them to define what inclusivity meant (as opposed to people outside of the community making those decisions). throughout the project, both representatives were impressed with the professionalism exhibited by students and their willingness to listen and learn. they were impressed by the quality of information gathered, particularly from our transgender community members. once the class ended, both authors continued to have contact with one of the representatives over the course of approximately nine months in preparation for the launching of the assessment and ultimately the asset map. challenges there are several challenges to consider when including service learning projects in community psychology courses at institutions comparable to usi. first and foremost, students need to be well-prepared to enter community settings, which requires an understanding of community psychology concepts and the community with which they will be working. while students appeared satisfied with the opportunity to gain handson experience in the community, they expressed dissatisfaction both with community psychology textbooks and primary materials. further challenges emerged when considering their preparedness to enter a community setting with which they were unfamiliar. to illustrate, 98% of the students participating in the strategic planning of an art crawl in the downtown neighborhood had never visited the area during their three to four years at usi. likewise, the majority of students did not have experience with either low-income black or lgbtqa communities. although students appeared eager to learn more and subsequently adjust their world views when working with the lgbtqa community, such a shift in perspective did not appear to happen with the other communities. for example, in the final reflections from the ymca project, students focused more on individual factors contributing to poverty and other obstacles participants mentioned (e.g., poor grades could be improved with better discipline), as opposed to structural factors. the first author took this opportunity to revisit structural oppression and have open dialogue to address these challenges during class. some of this may also be due, in part, to different conceptualizations of course-related concepts. some research suggests there are three conceptualizations of what makes someone a “good citizen”: someone who is personally responsible (a more conservative view), someone who participates in society, and someone who is justice oriented (a more liberal view) (westheimer & kahne, 2004). it is likely easy to think of different ways students may interpret other concepts in community psychology. given the often personal and political nature of many topics in community psychology, conversations can become difficult if students do not share similar perspectives, but as educators, we balk at the idea of forcing students to all think alike. ultimately, it is difficult to choose projects that will be appropriately challenging for students’ worldviews without the perception of evangelizing one point of view. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 in line with difficulties associated with students entering community settings is the challenge of scheduling. this was of concern in all three case studies. many of our students live and/or work off campus, which makes balancing student desires for community engagement and on-campus work difficult. students appreciated the connection between course material and working in the community but struggled with going off campus to do the work. however, when most of the required coursework was doable without leaving campus, students reported disengagement with the parts of the local community in which the research was being done and a disconnect between the actual research and engagement with the community. hence, finding a balance can be a nebulous adventure. although this was a challenge, it should be noted that students largely participated equally across all three case studies (on and off campus). this may be due in part to two factors: attendance is a required part of the course and students were grouped together based on availability outside of class. assignment to community work was based on this availability. lastly, it is important to prepare community members for working with students, as there were difficulties with community partners helping students navigate experiences associated with applied research. while having guest speakers come to class and having students interview community members was helpful for students, it did not necessarily allow for community members to be prepared to work on research, with which they may have little to no experience. to illustrate, one representative from the asset map project had a difficult time understanding why the information gathered in the focus groups was presented in a summative manner and scrubbed of all possible identifying characteristics, preferring the ability to identify folks who found the services provided by their organization problematic. situations such as this, of course, place students in uncomfortable positions as they often see the community members as authoritative figures, much like they see their professors. when community partners are members of extremely disadvantaged groups, preparation with the community partners themselves prior to the students entering the setting is especially important, but also easily overlooked. this was perhaps most evident in working with youth at the ymca. as one might guess, it can be surprising to have a group of privileged, largely white, college students enter a space where such privilege does not exist. indeed, it proved difficult for some of the student research teams to establish rapport. it is suggested that more loosely structured face-to-face interaction between students and community partners be incorporated prior to the collection of data via focus groups. of course, with challenges also come successes. successes one of the most immediate successes of engaging in service learning projects was the shift in students’ understanding of community. as previously mentioned, this course often served as students’ first real examination of social issues from a focus other than on individual factors. even with smaller, applied projects (e.g., having them create a problem definition based on a local news story and outline a needs assessment with the individuals impacted), students seem to be taken aback by how much they learn. indeed, it is particularly rewarding when students express sentiments such as, “this course is great! and she had my mind working out problems i'd never thought i'd have to figure [out],” and, “[this] is the first class i've had in which i can easily explain what i've learned and relate it to every day [sic] happenings.” students appreciated that their class projects resulted in usable products with the potential for measurable impact in the community, as opposed to simply presenting on or writing a paper about a theoretical topic or hypothetical action. for example, some of the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 students involved in the asset map contacted the first author once the project launched (i.e., a usable, interactive resource guide) and expressed gratitude for having been a part of something so important. despite the risks of focusing on communities students may be uncomfortable working with, there are benefits of utilizing larger scale projects focused in communities with which students are familiar due to political buzz (e.g., working with the lgbtqa community during a time when marriage equality was a focus in policy changes), as is evident in the latter example. recommendations prior to integrating service learning into any course, it is first useful to consider the scope of the desired project, and whether there will be enough time to complete the project (especially if it involves off campus work) along with other course activities (papers, tests, etc.). to balance the coursework with off campus activity, the first author minimized the number of tests (two), and all writing assignments were designed to relate to the service learning project. as can be gleaned from the three case studies, it is also important to consider the types of skills—and scope of those skills—imparted through the service learning project. for example, students performed better when the skillset was limited (experience with qualitative data through focus groups and experience in survey development), as opposed to a largescale set of skills (strategic planning from start to finish and evaluation of the plan). preparing students for community work involves introducing key community psychology concepts, such as reflexivity, the cyclical nature of community change, and the nonlinear way problems are often solved in the applied setting, to name a few. in our experience, it became evident early on that students need these concepts to understand the structure and expectations of the projects. indeed, previous research suggests service learning courses that do not intentionally interrupt biases before students enter the field ultimately fail (kirkland, 2014). structuring the course in a way where the bulk of the academic coursework (i.e., lectures, readings, etc.) occurs during the first half the term allows students to feel a greater sense of self-efficacy regarding performing up to their potential and allows students to more fully consider community contexts rather than only individual factors. additionally, it is important to prepare students for working with community members, especially if community members are demographically different from students. students on the map evansville (asset mapping) project benefited greatly from the cultural awareness training, which prepared them for doing focus groups with community members with sexual orientations and gender identities that differed from their own. indeed, community members expressed gratitude for students’ understanding and respect during their interactions. it is not only important to prepare students for interaction with community members, but also to prepare community members for interacting with students and interfacing with applied research. beyond the recommended increase in face-to-face interactions mentioned earlier, this can also be done by meeting with all community members who will be involved with the project prior to introducing the students to the community setting. doing so may lessen the abruptness of a group of students entering what are held as safe spaces for disadvantaged groups. on a similar note, it is also recommended that each partner organization be given a brief summary of what can be ethically done with the data collected, and what cannot be done. community psychologists would benefit from more research about community engagement in conservative areas, as conservatism can and does affect the services communities provide their members. for example, while some faith-based organizations may be able to facilitate preventative health programs for http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 diseases like stis/hiv, they may also act as a barrier to these services if they use abstinence-only programming (brown & williams, 2006). currently, there is a dearth of research on this topic. understanding how to work within these settings, with and without student involvement, is important to moving the field forward. perhaps most importantly, instructors may benefit significantly from reflection about their teaching practices considering responses from students and community partners. therefore, it may be most beneficial for instructors to solicit feedback from students at several points during the term, instead of simply waiting for end of term evaluations. this approach, as formative assessment often does, allows for modifications that ultimately benefit everyone involved. it is also recommended to have an outside evaluator conduct the formative assessment (like a focus group), as this allows students to be more open and honest. and lastly, it is of utmost importance to utilize the feedback given. where faculty can engage in reflection and work to connect in-class material to meaningful applied experiences, students will benefit from engaging in service learning projects while taking community psychologyrelated courses. where service learning projects align with community needs and preparation, community members can benefit from building relationships with faculty and students engaged in applied research. while there are challenges to engaging in service learning projects in rural and conservative areas, it is possible to create experiences that benefit students and community partners in meaningful ways and allow us to create opportunities for both to empower themselves. references brown, e.j. & williams, s.e. (2006). southern rural african american faith communities' role in sti/hiv prevention within two counties. journal of hiv/aids & social services, 4, 47-62. doi: 10.1300/j187v04n03_05 francescato, d., & zani, b. (2013). community psychology practice competencies in undergraduate and graduate programs in italy. global journal of community psychology and practice, 4(4), 1-12. retrieved from http://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?i ssue=16&article=79 howard, j. (2003). service-learning research: foundational issues. in s.h. billig, & a.s. waterman (eds.). studying servicelearning: innovations in education research methodology (pp. 1-10). new york, ny: routledge. kirkland, d.e. (2014). “they look scared”: moving from service learning to learning to serve in teacher education— a social justice perspective. equity & excellence in education, 47, 580-603. doi: 10.1080/10665684.2014.958967 map evansville (n.d.) map evansville. retrieved from http://mapevansville.com society for community research and action (n.d.a). competencies for community psychology practice. society for community research and action. retrieved from http://www.scra27.org/what-wedo/practice/18-competenciescommunity-psychology-practice/ society for community research and action (n.d.b). who we are. society for community research and action. retrieved from http://www.scra27.org/who-we-are/ u.s. census bureau (2016). quick facts. u.s. census bureau. retrieved from https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fac http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=16&article=79 http://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=16&article=79 http://mapevansville.com/ http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/practice/18-competencies-community-psychology-practice/ http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/practice/18-competencies-community-psychology-practice/ http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/practice/18-competencies-community-psychology-practice/ http://www.scra27.org/who-we-are/ https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/vanderburghcountyindiana/pst045217 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 t/table/vanderburghcountyindiana/ps t045217 u.s. religion census (2010). religious congregations & membership study. u.s. religion census. retrieved from http://usreligioncensus.org/index.php u.s.i. fact book (2017). university facts. office of planning, research, and assessment. retrieved from www.usi.edu/planningresearch-and-assessment/usi-factbook/2017-fact-book/ westheimer, j. & kahne, j. (2004). what kind of citizen? the politics of educating for democracy. american educational research journal, 41, 237-269. doi: 10.3102/00028312041002237 author disclosure statement: none of the authors have any commercial associations or financial interests that might create a conflict of interest in connection with this manuscript. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/vanderburghcountyindiana/pst045217 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/vanderburghcountyindiana/pst045217 http://usreligioncensus.org/index.php http://www.usi.edu/planning-research-and-assessment/usi-fact-book/2017-fact-book/ http://www.usi.edu/planning-research-and-assessment/usi-fact-book/2017-fact-book/ http://www.usi.edu/planning-research-and-assessment/usi-fact-book/2017-fact-book/ using a revolutionary conscious praxis (rcp) to dismantle the code of silence as internalized colonialism geraldine (geri) l. palmer keywords: code of silence, silencing, internalized colonialism, internalized oppression, black, african americans author biography: influencers. philosophies. black african american activists. soldiers. amiri baraka. nikki giovanni. angela davis. james brown. i’m black and i’m proud. revolutionary. the black panthers. the civil rights movement. the black power movement. the assassination of martin luther king, jr. the assassination of malcom x. the assassination of medgar evers. the little rock nine. birmingham church bombing. fred hampton murdered. huey p. newton incarcerated. angela davis on the fbi most wanted list. i start writing a book of poems dedicated to my son called “for my people.” it is lost. i am lost for decades. i wake up and remember. there is no going back to silence. ...who make dough from fear and lies who want the world like it is who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national oppression and terror violence, and hunger and poverty. -amiri baraka when i forgot who i am, i became a chameleon. changing colors. the colonizer did the same. changed from english to white. there is no going back to silence. “when you know who you are, you don’t have to worry anymore.” -nikki giovanni global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 often, i desire to run away. it’s too much! what can i do, i cry? i can write. write. write. i remember, i am the daughter of african kings and queens, of powerful, influential, scholars and activists. i am the dream of those who dreamed for a distant shore, while marooned on a foreign land---with a bent for power and greed. i can write for resistance. i study my bible. i remember some more. i am fearfully and wonderfully made. i am named after my aunt and grandmother. warriors. there is no going back to silence. genocide. genocide. genocide. we always knew there was a ‘campaign of genocide’ even when we didn’t understand why. we followed our soldiers and embraced “…peace if possible, but justice at any rate”1 we’re still okay with that… there is no going back to silence. this, then, is who i am. for my people. -geraldine palmer recommended citation: palmer, g. (2022). using a revolutionary conscious praxis (rcp) to dismantle the code of silence as internalized colonialism, global journal of community psychology practice, 13(1), 1 12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: geri palmer, email: gpalmer080@gmail.com 1 phillips, w. (1783-1815). the new nation. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/glc0399806 http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:gpalmer080@gmail.com global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 using a revolutionary conscious praxis (rcp) to dismantle the code of silence as internalized colonialism this paper is intended as an introduction and a call for questioning psychological sciences. western sciences, especially sciences that focuses on racial and gender “differences,” have served among the most colonizing influences worldwide. frantz fanon’s (1959) term “shameful sciences!” especially applies to social darwinism and eugenics as forms of scientific racism, scientific sexism, and scientific imperialism. in this contribution, i highlight my struggles as a scholar to recognize these scientific narratives, to decolonize my own praxis as a scholar and a psychology clinician, as well as to address the long standing impact of these ideologies in the academy and society. i argue that in science we (should never) blindly trust, and share my suggestions for ways to learn, name, and resist racist and sexist ideological sciences. introduction the “code of silence” embraced among many descendants of the african diaspora, has its roots in the african/black african american2 experience during enslavement and the jim crow era. it is both a historical and contemporary survival strategy and can be used as a means of resistance. the code of silence also has an association with “silencing” a well-known tactic of colonizers as well. the multiple contexts in which the code of silence or silencing are sometimes used may influence why it can be difficult to discern when these modes of communication are most beneficial to employ, if at all. consequently, rather than protect, these concepts often reproduce and perpetuate 2 i use black/african american because i am striving to honor both the work of south africans against apartheid with rereading “black” to “black” and the descendants of africans who were enslaved in the americas. colonialism ideologies. in a historical context with respect to africans enslaved, the code of silence can be conceptualized as simply “not snitching” (dennis, 2013) at all costs. those who ascribed to the code of silence had a special contempt for those who snitched. dennis noted that “informants” or snitches were used to police a wide assortment of offending behavior of those enslaved and were deemed especially helpful at preventing and squelching rebellions. further, distinguishing occurred among informants where some cooperators merely provided information while others actively assisted the slave owner in regulating african misconduct” (p. 287). the decision to speak up or not may have been predicated on a few factors. weighing in on the side of telling might rest on loyalty or misplaced loyalty to the slave owner, preservation of life, perhaps the thought of attaining freedom, or perhaps a morsel of more food for the family. accordingly, those who spoke up set the stage for mistrust and disunity among the enslaved africans, which is theorized by some scholars as an impetus behind the modern-day code of silence often http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 found in many african american communities (p. 287). use of the code of silence in contemporary times point to a key element found in the “the talk” black/african american parents must have with their children, in particular black males on how to avoid and survive—white police encounters (mahadevan, brock, and prescott, 2020). the thread of survival strongly runs through these discussions and has its origin in the same code of silence found among enslaved africans as dennis (2013) pointed out. it can also be argued that the code of silence or silencing used by black/african american women today is employed paradoxically to protect both white and black men when confronted with sexual assault. broussard (2013) explains that the protection for black men may have its origins in attempting to not add to the heinous atrocities already heaped upon them by the slave master. for white men, this practiced silencing is noted to have its derivation in the lack of legal recourse for black women if a white man committed sexual assault against them. it was futile during enslavement to speak-up because the repercussions did not fall on the perpetrator, but often felt by the black woman, and possibly her family. broussard concluded that there was and remains an unspoken sisterhood of "don't tell" that pervades the black community today because of the imposition of centuriesold silencing tactics and codes of silence developed to survive. these internal codes are akin to the culture that speaks to "snitching" to the cops or any other authority figure… (p. 375). broussard is clear that this silencing and its implications should not be laid at the feet of black women. in the context of colonialism, enslavement and its aftermath, this practice is a systemic silence and therefore our entire society should be held accountable for it. broussard believes society should come up with reparations to pay the debt owed to black women for their pain and suffering. conversely, questions do surface such as have black women been complicit in their own suffering because of their silence? broussard answers this question by pointing out that the creation and maintenance of racist systems in america have allowed and perpetrated sexual and other abuses on black women---and thus the onus of responsibility rest on society. the code of silence or silencing as oppressive has been a major portion of life in american black society and is a constant reminder that black/african americans were not considered human, but chattel property. forced to construct such strategies to survive has negative biopsychosocial and cultural implications on contemporary generations of black/african americans. frantz fanon (1965) argues that this psychological oppressive system or internalized colonialism was passed down intergenerationally in black/african american families, and my family (the author) was no exception. my ancestor’s positionality was resounding. “don’t tell ‘em nuttin!” thus, the code of silence became my go to, my code of conduct in all circumstances where i determined a threat loomed. i had been taught to survive by embracing the code of silence. yet, as a young adult who internalized the pain and trauma my ancestors bore, when it came time to make a different decision than employing the code of silence, i was not woke or living consciously at the time. i only understood i needed to survive and with survival comes automatic and unconscious living (palmer, 2007). purpose of the article using a personal story of the author, this article offers an example of how decision making can look when we are living from internalized colonialism. a model is offered for transforming internalized colonialism and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 decolonizing our spaces. additionally, this article is an effort to fill the void in telling black/african american women’s stories where historically they have been erased, ignored and generally unacknowledged. telling our stories is decolonizing, healing, and transformative. my story i grew up with and was influenced by such notables within the black power movement such as fred hampton, angela davis and the black panthers, amiri baraka, nikki giovanni, malcolm x and more. i was born with a voice and easily gravitated to the frontlines of protests, speaking out, sit-ins in my highschool, and with no misgiving identified with the oppressed. yet, the fear that something tragic was going to happen to me for using my voice must have weighed heavily on my mother and that fear came out consistently. she likely remembered how the code of silence had kept her and my ancestors alive. she had every right to be fearful having lived through the murders and killings, the attacks, the dehumanization of african americans: the little rock nine, the birmingham church bombing, medgar evers, martin luther king, jr., emmitt till, and so many, many more. “your mouth is going to get you into trouble someday,” she would say. how many times had she heard that from her own mother? she was also a voice. in any case, i heard her. i had learned how to survive. my interpretation of the code of silence one day i decided to go along with a friend and steal hair color from the local kmart. it had happened before---the petty theft---a candy bar here---a make-up brush there…everyone did it…the laughter as everyone tumbled out the store---the feeling of exhilaration…part protest and part rebellion against racism…we were african american teenagers… all was fun until i was out the door, and this time felt a hand on my shoulder. “come with me.” now, this adventure was no longer fun… but i knew what to do. my mother’s voice and the voice of the ancestors were clear. “don’t tell em’ nuttin!” upstairs in the store office---a piece of paper was shoved in front of me. no explanation. i was too scared to read i for myself. the fear of my ancestors kicked in. they asked me to sign it. sign it, never. this was the same as do not say anything. the police came. get in the back! i took the long ride (or so it seemed) to the police station. my first time. i was fingerprinted, put in a little holding cell. but i had not talked or signed anything. i was not even afraid at the time of being in jail. after all jail was where african americans went…jail meant you had protested racism and survived. …a call allowed to my friend. tell my mother. one-hundred dollars needed. bring it. the friend brings it. i can go home. my mother is surprisingly understanding. forget it happened. but i never forgot. you never forget trauma. the coloniality of silence has farreaching tentacles. not only was the system of the code of silence passed down intergenerationally, so was fear that accompanies the overwhelming need and courtesy of dr. g. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 quest to survive. our ancestors lived each day during enslavement fearing they would not survive---and many did not. i took on this pain perhaps by historical or intergenerational trauma passed down socially and epigenetically and lived in constant fear the hand on my shoulder would come. i will not delve into studies that concur around responses from fear here, but conspicuously, i was no longer in that big box store but transported by this traumatic occurrence back to the enslavement camps where the slave master had caught me. at the time i never once thought of the real crime that i had committed. it was the furthest thing from my mind. psychologically, i was instead an enslaved african with no rights; a black child with ancestors from the “dark” continent of africa, uncivilized, guilty, and deserving of punishment. i had, in essence, drank from the water fountain labeled whites only. i was assigned a court date. the case was heard in one of the most segregated and racist south suburban towns in the chicago south suburban area at the time. i went to court by myself. my name is called---and i go up. no one from the store is there. i am confused again. “what do you plead?” the judge roars. “guilty”. i say in a very small voice. “guilty, it is!” the gavel slams. the judge moves on to the next case…was that a snicker? life goes on. i am stopped by the police in a western suburb--was i speeding? oh boy, i am going to get a ticket i thought. instead, i had to follow the police to the station…for a ticket? it does not dawn on me at the time white people do not get hauled to the police station for a speeding ticket. a new friend is called. he comes. what is going on? “you have a jacket”, he says after conferring with the police. “what’s a jacket?” i am so not woke. a conviction on your record”. “from what?” more confusion. the judge in the box store case has placed a conviction on my record-a-misdemeanor--petty theft. what i began to realize is the code of silence in the wrong context is not golden. it is oppressive. i had begun to wake up… internalized colonialism it is my hope that the reader sees there is more to this story than an unwise decision of a young adult to engage in petty theft, although that is here as well. and rightfully, there are consequences for such actions. but rather it is my hope here, that the reader sees my response to this situation as an example of an embedded survival strategy, albeit an absolute necessity in its context, but woefully out of place here. had i read the document put in front of me, which was simply asking me to sign declaring i would never come into the store again and i could go. the product was a $2.50 box of hair color. i believe this situation is an example of frantz fanon’s (1965) internalized colonialism theory. the literature abounds with studies attempting to conceptualize internalized colonialism or more commonly termed internalized oppression. for the purposes of this article, let us think with fanon on internalized colonialism. fanon, a postcolonial theorist and clinical psychologist offered a four-phase model as a classic framework for understanding oppression or wnd news service, 2014 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 internalized colonialism. the first phase points to colonialism as the forced entry of a foreign group into lands to exploit its natural resources including inhabitants (e.g., africa). the second phase occurs when the colonizer imposes their culture, obliterating the indigenous culture and recreates the culture as defined by the colonizer. this speaks to the indigenous culture talking on the colonizer’s more civilized ways of life in contrast to the colonized people’s alleged inferior ways. once this contrast is set up, the third phase begins, now the colonized are uncivilized and monitoring and policing begin. this sets up the colonizer’s ideology of tyranny and domination, such that the stage is set for oppression, which is the crux to maintain this system. phase three leads to phase four---the establishment of a society where the political, social, and economic institutions are constructed to benefit and maintain the superiority of the colonizer---while at the same time bringing the colonized into subordination. this fourth phase shows up in boarding schools, educational institutions, religious institutions, and more. fanon’s framework illustrates that there is massive biopsychosocial and internal work in constructing the colonized (okazaki, david, & abelman, 2007, p. 96). fanon (1965) further put forward that internalized colonialism is the major psychological effect of colonialism and it also perpetuates oppression (duran & duran, 1995; hill, 1999). duran and duran (1995) argued that internalized oppression on an individual and group level most often benefits the colonizer or oppressor, not the ones oppressed. when we connect this back to broussard’s (2013) discussion on black women practicing silencing, it does not protect, it instead, propagates colonialism ideological frameworks of tyranny and domination. audre’ lorde declared, “my silences had not protected me. your silence will not protect you.” i concur and argue we must stop living automatically and unconsciously but intentionally live on, and with purpose. there are no circumstances where we, black/african americans and/or descendants of the african diaspora, indigenous, people of color (bipoc) should allow ourselves to not be aware of when we are unconsciously perpetuating colonialism. we can do this by thinking with post-colonial theorists, liberators and contemporary black/african american scholars-activists, activists, practitioners, community psychologists, allies, and co-conspirators. how does silencing perpetuate colonialism ideologies? i believe it is important in this article to add a brief discussion on how silencing perpetuates colonialism ideology. we must start with understanding that silencing was a core tactic of colonization, and its meaning extends into coloniality, the legacy of colonialism. across the americas and canada, both settler nations, preoccupation with its own language, political discourse, social norms and cultural values have throughout history been imposed and forced on others through colonization (dénommé-welch & rowell, 2017) such as silencing. an example of the impacts of silencing as a colonizing tactic are felt among indigenous people and africans captured and forced from their land and enslaved in the americas (africans). within residential or boarding schools, the identities and culture of indigenous people were erased, and they were forbidden to speak their native mother tongue---in essence, silenced. this same tactic was forced upon africans, those that were alive when the slave ships alit upon the shores of virginia. they were not allowed to speak their native tongues in public spaces, and this erased their culture and ways of being. subsequently, in the jim crow era, this silencing showed up in laws enacted that discounted african americans as a whole person. consequently, generations of indigenous people and descendants of the african diaspora experienced the isolation http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 and annihilation of their own language, culture, and ways of being through the racist form of systemic silencing. in turn, the voice of european settler society in north america has been the voice deemed privileged and rewarded. dénommé-welch & rowell explained that western culture places great emphasis on speech and voice, both in literal and figurative ways. this can show up either by emphasizing or demarking separation between “dominant” and “minoritized” voices. this has directly and indirectly contributed to forms of oppression and the subjugation of indigenous and black/african american racialized voices (p. 13). gloria anzaldúa aptly proclaimed, “…the anglo with the innocent face has yanked out our tongues, thus sentencing colonized cultural beings to a silenced culture. drowned, we spit darkness. fighting with our every shadow we are buried by silence (anzaldúa, 1987, p. 203). this is not a space we want to live from, and the use of silencing that is not used as resistance hurls us back into darkness. importantly if we internalize the image of the colonizer, then we construct the colonizer’s reality. like bell hooks (1997) and the way she rereads concepts as a theoretical stance and a public act of resistance, we want to begin to do the same regarding the code of silence and silencing and view it as an erasure by the colonizer---and instead, we must center and raise our black/african american voices. reclaiming the village where the mothers planted silence…the angry daughters sit to uproot -ijeome umebinyuo black consciousness (bc) principles the black consciousness movement came about the result of the shutdown of major apartheid organizations in south africa such as the african national congress and panafricanist congress in the 1960s by government repression (hadfield, 2017, para. 1). frustrated with white leadership and the prevailing social issues, steve biko and other black students established a completely black association, the south african students’ organization (saso). the saso coined the term black consciousness which redefined “black” as an inclusive, positive identity and taught that black south africans could make meaningful societal change if they were “conscientized” or awakened to their selfworth and the need for activism. youth joined this group and new community, and political organizations were also formed such as the black community programs and black people’s convention organizations (para. 1). ultimately, biko was killed by the south african government---and the movement wanned after his death. yet, core elements of this black consciousness philosophy has been found in contemporary freedom movements. conceptualized as “an attitude of mind” or “way of life”, black consciousness spoke to black people who believed in their value and that unity was needed to move liberation forward (para. 8). black consciousness activists sought to change the mindset of black south africans asking them to examine their internal philosophies to build capacity to realize their own freedom. to achieve nigerian village – society of african missions http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/south-african-student-organisation-saso https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/south-african-student-organisation-saso https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/conscientize https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-83 https://sma.ie/nigerian-village-2/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 liberation under the black consciousness movement two realizations were critical: (1) south africans needed to define “black” as a new positive conception that included all people of color discriminated against by the color of their skin. a black positive identity would increase black south africans faith in their own possibilities; and (2) black consciousness activists rejected white liberals as their leaders, which this second element prompted many to view it as reversed racism. others felt it led to a more “refreshing, emboldened new consciousness” (para. 8). while the black consciousness philosophy has its challenges as does any approach or movement toward liberation, the overall concept of core markers such as living through their own “ways of life” was what was lived out. for example, young black south african women threw away straight hair wigs and skin lightening creams and donned natural afros. fanon (1965) argued that black consciousness was, and still is, “the psychological manifestation of liberatory selfactualization; the psychic movement away from the reductive, racial designation of ‘the black,’ to the self-affirming identification of ‘black,’ an actional agent catalyzing revolutionary socio-political change. building on the concept of the “conscientized” paulo freire (1971-1993) built on this work of conscientized or conscientizaҫão3. both fanon and freire engaged in consciousness raising and psychopolitics as processes of helping others to see how they have psychologically internalized political power structures and racism. fanon (1967) would point to colonial (and contemporary) racism as an “epidermalization of economic inequality” (p. 11). freire brought forward this conscient advance within educational pedagogy to liberate the masses from 3 the term conscientizaҫão refers to learning to perceive social, political, and economic systemic inequity maintained and perpetuated by process, practices and outcomes of interdependent systems and institutions (jemal & bussey, 2018, p. 602). freire, (1970) conceived of “critical consciousness” when working with adult laborers in brazil. to this end he proposed a cycle of critical consciousness development processes that: 1. involve gaining knowledge about the systems and structures that create and sustain inequality (critical analysis). 2. involve developing a sense of power or capability (sense of agency), and 3. involve ultimately committing to acting against oppressive conditions (critical action) (para. 6). freire recognized that unless the workers were able to decode their social condition, oppression would be sustained. revolutionary conscious praxis (rcp) taken together, black consciousness principles and fanon’s and freire’s work on conscientized, brings us to this point where i offer a three-pronged model revolutionary conscious praxis as an approach to dismantling “silencing” or “codes of silence” and other contemporary positionalities that perpetuate colonialism ideology in any form. from black consciousness principles, fanon and bell hooks (1997), i include in this model: a. freire’s (1970) “critical consciousness” comprised of: ➢ gaining knowledge about the systems and structures that create and sustain inequality (an awakening and critical analysis) ➢ developing a sense of power or capability (sense of agency), and contradictions, and to act against the oppressive elements of reality. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-349-95816-0_13 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-349-95816-0_13 global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 ➢ committing to acting against oppressive conditions (critical action) (para. 6). b. bell hooks (1997) reflection on theoretical positionalities which is a: ➢ rereading of imposed labels and terms such as “black” to black or “private domesticity” to “homeplace of resistance”, and c. critical action which includes: ➢ investigating and examining historical and contemporary concepts that have their origin in colonialism ideologies, racism, sexism, imperialism, capitalism and other terms that speak to social scourges such as subjugation, erasure, racism, and denigration. ➢ centering and raising the voices of bipoc. this model is shown in figure 1: figure 1: revolutionary conscious praxis (rcp) model the negative impacts of racism, an aftermath of colonialism, including experiences of trauma ranging from forcing those colonized to silence to erasure of their culture and identities is heinous at best, and are well documented (e.g., bryant-davis & ocampo, 2006; carter, 2007). to this end, the recent awakening and reckoning among bipoc must continue. this work must begin with critical consciousness. prilleltensky (2003, 2008) put forward critical consciousness is often seen as a prerequisite of resistance and liberation. a second step in the model is rereading or theorizing not only from academic or public spaces, but also from the material reality of the lived experiences of bipoc (hooks, 1997, para.3). from here we can determine when we need to use theoretical stances as acts of resistance. critical action must follow. manya whitaker (2020) conceptualizes critical action as a praxis that requires people to engage in collective work to dismantle oppressive social systems. critical action is human activity and is both theory and practice or praxis. it should not be reduced to either verbalism or activism (freire, 1970). vladimir lenin argues, “without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement” (lenin, 1966). lenin further pointed out that the revolutionary efforts to transform spaces radically cannot designate its leaders as its thinkers and the oppressed as doers. going further, freire offers, revolutionary praxis must stand in opposition to the praxis of the ruling powers---as they are by nature antithetical. moreover, critical action is always deliberate and systematic, it either serves the colonizer or the liberation of people (p. 126). conclusion the complexities of the atrocities laid on, and at the feet of african descendants and members of the african diaspora are too numerous to account. yet, we must begin to take back and use our own stories and disclose these accounts in our writing and our work. we are becoming clearer that the tools used to force silence and fear on black/african americans are appalling and evil. in this article i have used one of my stories to highlight the ramifications of the http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.igi-global.com/dictionary/utilizing-feminist-pedagogy-to-foster-preservice-teachers-critical-consciousness/62914 https://www.igi-global.com/dictionary/utilizing-feminist-pedagogy-to-foster-preservice-teachers-critical-consciousness/62914 https://www.igi-global.com/dictionary/utilizing-feminist-pedagogy-to-foster-preservice-teachers-critical-consciousness/62914 global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 code of silence, which was by necessity a survival mechanism of africans and then, black/african americans. yet, when this mechanism morphed into a stronghold, it becomes psychologically damaging and a perpetuation of coloniality ideologies when we fail to discern when, or if we should use it at all. to foster liberatory psyches in future generations of black/african americans i suggested a revolutionary critical praxis (rcp) approach towards engagement. i am positioning myself to help break the silence of historical and intergenerational pain by understanding, acknowledging and then speaking (broussard, 2013). i believe you can do the same. above all, to those who are reading this that are members of the african diaspora, my sisters and brothers, i am so proud of you. keep disrupting and dismantling the silence. the ancestors are listening. references anzaldua, g. (1987). borderland: the new mestiza. san francisco, ca: spinters/aunt lute. broussard, p. (2013). black women's postslavery silence syndrome: a twenty-first century remnant of slavery, jim crow, and systemic racism--who will tell her stories? journal of gender race & justice, (16) 373. bryant-davis, t., & ocampo, c. (2006). a therapeutic approach to the treatment of racist-incident-based trauma. journal of emotional abuse, 6(4), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1300/j135v06n04_01 carter, r.t., (2007). racism and psychological and emotional injury: recognizing and assessing race-based traumatic stress. the counseling psychologist, 35(1):13105. dennis, a.l. (2013). a snitch in time: an historical sketch of black informing during slavery, 97, marq. l. rev. 279. dénommé-welch, s., & rowell, j., (2017). epistemologies of silence. brock education journal, 27(1), 10-25. fanon, f. (1961). the wretched of the earth. paris, france: françois maspero. freire, p. (1970-1993). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york, ny: the continuum international publishing group, inc. hooks, b. (1997). homeplace: a site of resistance. routledge. jemal, a. & bussey, s. (2018). transformative action: a theoretical framework for breaking new ground. http://www.ejournalofpublicaffairs.org/t ransformative-action/ kingsley, r., m., middleton, m. & moore, p. (2016). (re)frame the case for new language in the 21st century museum. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5 8fa260a725e25c4f30020f3/t/594d17681 b10e374e472f754/1498224505601/14_ exhibition_reframe.pdf lorde, a. (1977). the transformation of silence into language and action. https://electricliterature.com/wpcontent/uploads/2017/12/silenceintoact ion.pdf lenin, v. (1966). what is to be done in essential works of lenin, h.m. christmann, ed. p. 69. palmer, g.l. (2007). the brightness of your dawn: moving from survivor to soldier. author. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1300/j135v06n04_01 http://www.ejournalofpublicaffairs.org/transformative-action/ http://www.ejournalofpublicaffairs.org/transformative-action/ https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58fa260a725e25c4f30020f3/t/594d17681b10e374e472f754/1498224505601/14_exhibition_reframe.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58fa260a725e25c4f30020f3/t/594d17681b10e374e472f754/1498224505601/14_exhibition_reframe.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58fa260a725e25c4f30020f3/t/594d17681b10e374e472f754/1498224505601/14_exhibition_reframe.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58fa260a725e25c4f30020f3/t/594d17681b10e374e472f754/1498224505601/14_exhibition_reframe.pdf https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/silenceintoaction.pdf https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/silenceintoaction.pdf https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/silenceintoaction.pdf global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 prilleltensky, i. (2003,2008). understanding, resisting, and overcoming oppression: toward psychopolitical validity. american journal of community psychology 31,(1-2), 195-201. umebinyuo, i. (2015). questions for ada. createspace independent publishing platform. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 developing undergraduate community psychology pedagogy and research practice lauren f. lichty1, eylin palamaro-munsell2, and jen wallin-ruschman3 the goal of this special issue is to center the practice of community psychology (cp) teaching and research within primarily undergraduate institutions. while there is discussion broadly about the importance of increasing the visibility of cp in undergraduate education to support graduate programs in the field, less attention has been given to the pedagogical and research-related practices of people working primarily with undergraduates. although undergraduate cp students may not all go on to graduate school, they do apply cp principles to a variety of settings and organizations post-graduation. therefore, community psychologists working within undergraduate settings have a wider reach to bring interested individuals into the field and to bring the field to communities than perhaps anyone else in cp education or practice. it is imperative that we develop a cp pedagogy (including goals, approaches, and activities) through reflection and evaluation. moreover, understanding the successes, challenges, and needs of community psychologists in these roles is long overdue. many community psychologists are doing creative, meaningful work within undergraduate-focused settings. often they are doing this work in relative isolation, as few undergraduate-focused programs employ multiple community psychologists. at present, the broader field rarely invites undergraduate-focused work or voice into our scholarly spaces. moreover, undergraduate educators may have limited 1 university of washington bothell 2 northern arizona university 3 college of idaho support for research and publication from their home institutions. put another way (and putting ourselves into the conversation), the field of community psychology as a whole rarely facilitates access and inclusion for those of us working at primarily undergraduate institutions. therefore, little has been recorded about the opportunities and challenges faced by community psychologists working within these settings. similarly, there is limited scholarship of community psychology pedagogy. this reflects a missed opportunity for community psychologists to support and learn from one another while building a theoretical and applied body of scholarship on social justice teaching and learning in cp. this special issue emerged as a compliment to ongoing efforts to open new space for dialogue, professional development, and intentional scholarly attention on undergraduate cp pedagogy and research practice. in the last five years, community psychologists at primarily undergraduateserving institutions and those dedicated to undergraduate education within graduate programs have expanded the conversation about undergraduate education in cp. at conference sessions and in publications, we named and discussed the unique challenges of doing cp research in our contexts and the too often unspoken or ignored complexity of teaching cp in ethical, socially just ways (lichty & palamaro-munsell, 2017). the cp practice in undergraduate settings interest http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 group was founded in 2017, and provides an adaptive space for collaboration, developing skills, and sharing professional practice (lichty, wallin-ruschman, & palamaromunsell, 2018). as a collective we recognize the need for more structured and supported opportunities to communicate, evaluate, and grow undergraduate cp pedagogy and practice. this special issue starts to address that need. the six articles included in the first volume of this double special issue on undergraduate cp teaching and learning reflect unique voices and experiences in undergraduate cp practice. the educator and student authors are engaged in innovative, intentional, and rigorous teaching and learning cp practice. we are inspired by their creativity and commitment to undergraduate students. observations from this collection the field of community psychology, as an applied, participatory, empirical approach to power-conscious social change has much to offer undergraduate education and undergraduate institutions. as illustrated in this two volume collection of submissions, cp instructors create space for students to challenge existing ideologies, analyze social issues through multi-level frameworks, build skills for engaging in community change, and participate in collaborative, applied research and learning practices. the papers included in this special issue speak to the transformative potential of the undergraduate community psychology classroom and research team. janelle silva bridges her personal identity and journey as an educator with the concept of transcommunality to explore class assignments and activities that serve as a catalyst for praxis of cp values. benjamin graham presents the design process and implementation strategies of a geographically and historically-grounded community-based service learning project. utilizing case analysis, dawn henderson, pamela martin, and katina harris identify unique opportunities and challenges associated with course construction and implementation at a historically black college and university (hbcu). lauren cattaneo, rachel shor, jenna calton, kris gebhard, syeda buchwach, nour elshabassi, and stephanie hargrove present in-depth course design alongside quasiexperimental findings assessing the impact of a social justice service learning course nested in a traditional psychology program. elizabeth thomas, marsha walton, anna manoogian, anna baker-olson, bianca branch, adele malpert, karina henderson, and remi parker describe their campusbased participatory research model and examine the potential for undergraduate research experience as meaningful site of learning and community of practice for students, institutions, and the field. mariah kornbluh, danielle kohfeldt, lindsay banks, and holly bott completed the teaching community psychology survey, which provides insights into the conditions, practices, successes, and challenges of undergraduate cp teachers. they combine dynamic data displays with qualitative data and invite us to ask our own questions about what comes next in our efforts to learn about and support cp undergraduate educators. the methods for inquiring about teaching and learning practice are varied: sources of evidence include auto-ethnographic field notes and systematic reflection, multiperspective reflection on course components, analysis of course evaluations and student products (e.g., reflective essays, field notes, and final project presentations), and quantitative surveys assessing change over time. many authors included example syllabi and/or course activities as a way to share teaching approaches and strategies with colleagues. of particular note in this collection is the collaboration between faculty http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 and students. half of the work in this issue include undergraduate and graduate student co-authors. this intentional valuing of the voice and expertise of students as participants in pedagogy development is significant. alongside the excitement of the transformative potential of these collective works, readers will detect the significant responsibility we have to support those engaged in undergraduate cp education or risk harm to both students and faculty. in considering the experience and contribution of these undergraduate-focused practitioners (including recent/current undergraduate student co-authors), we surface key questions and considerations for our field. cp pedagogy-environment fit as in all community psychology practice, context matters in undergraduate education. attention to institutional and programmatic culture and resource allocation is critical to the success of undergraduate cp education and research. we think of this as the cp pedagogy-environment fit. many cp educators are teaching in contexts that may be resistant, if not hostile, to cp values and methods. departments and institutions may not be familiar with cp, despite having hired a community psychologist. where cp values and commitments are not aligned with the institutional or departmental context (i.e., infrastructure and practices), instructors face heavier lifts to execute applied, reflective learning opportunities and especially community-engaged social justice projects. regional characteristics such as the political context, geographic spread of the student population, and surrounding economic realities can influence challenges and opportunities for cp practitioners to create engaged learning projects. where we are successful in those settings, we unleash students to manage a social ecology that may not welcome them. these potential instructional challenges and real-world outcomes warrant thoughtful attention and support from the field. nested student-faculty dynamics: readiness and capacity institutional, regional, and student characteristics all dynamically interact with cp practitioner characteristics in the execution of any given cp classroom. when we recognize the cp classroom as a site of cp practice, we should not be surprised to note the importance of (student) readiness and (instructor) capacity. student characteristics significantly impact undergraduate education practices. this includes readiness to engage in everything from social justice dialogue to personal reflection to research practice. readiness to engage in the undergraduate cp classroom is influenced by individual and shared student characteristics, such as their identities, values, past academic and personal experiences, and these characteristics shape how they experience cp courses leaving cp educational practitioners to adapt and respond. institutional requirements for instructors influence classroom practices by impacting capacity. time constraints due to course load and class size (note that more than 50% of respondents were carrying six courses or more as their annual load; kornbluh et al) impact what is possible in the classroom and on research teams. perceived and actual job security, prior training in pedagogy, campus resources or lack thereof, individual social location, and systems of oppression (notably, sexism and racism among others) all factor into the construction and execution of courses. recurring calls to the field: support undergraduate education by valuing undergraduate educators http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 when cp undergraduate instructors operate in isolation with limited professional support, we may be needlessly replicating challenges and iterating on questions that have been answered by many before us. just as we develop frameworks for research practice in the complex conditions that inform cp research outside the university, so can we develop these for work within higher education. each piece included in this special issue showcases potentials and challenges in undergraduate cp practice. the authors repeatedly call for more research, more conversation, and more support. we interpret this refrain as a call to the field to value undergraduate education and educators by doing more than simply inserting the word “undergraduate” into organizational documents. we need structural and practical changes. we have an opportunity to create a meaningful culture shift within scra. we need not wait until students pursue masters and phds to have impact. cp undergraduate competencies can be developed with undergraduate students and infused into undergraduate education. concrete mindset shifts and skill development are happening. by engaging education as a site of social justice for students and communities and bringing cp practice into undergraduate settings, we can increase the reach and impact of community psychology. drawing on the findings and recommendations presented by the authors of articles in this collection, we identified the following opportunities for structural and resource shifts to support the growth of undergraduate cp practice. furthermore, we hope to see an ongoing cycle of assessment and action in service of undergraduate education and ultimately in communitydriven social justice. include social justice teaching as a valued cp practice competency. in this case teaching could be conceptualized as both classroomand community-based education. recognize and respond to the discrepancies in non-research workload demands and access to resources between colleagues at primarily research institutions and teaching institutions. systemic inequities within the academy are not unique to community psychology. adjunct professors, those in non-tenure track lines, those in tenure-track lines in non-research universities, and those that teach at primarily minority-serving institutions or outside the 4year college and university system all face marginalization. teaching institutions are not second class to research institutions. professors of instruction and teaching (adjunct, lecturer, or otherwise labeled) are not second-class community psychologists. educational practice is not an add-on to our professional work. given our professed cp values, it is imperative that we acknowledge these factors and not replicate the hierarchies and inequities of the larger academic culture in our own behaviors and policies. more specifically, relative to our colleagues in research-intensive doctoral granting institutions who may teach one or fewer undergraduate courses per year, there are significant barriers in workload and support for research at teaching institutions and across ranks within colleges and universities. these structural differences deserve acknowledgement and action from our professional organizations. if we, the undergraduate community psychology practitioners, are equal members of our organization, how will scra shift its practices to include us? for example, many of us had more access to conference travel dollars when we were graduate students in doctoral programs. this lack of funding paired with the cost of our conferences without sliding http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 scale accommodation or other creative adjustments is a classic case of structurallydetermined exclusion. we need to think intentionally about (and take action on) the ways scra and other cp professional sites systematically exclude and isolate an entire subset of our professional population to help create more inclusive spaces for sharing our community psychology practices. integrate train-the-teacher institutes for undergraduate education. at scra biennial and regional conferences off-biennial year, we suggest offering half or full day institutes on cp pedagogy and classroom practice. institute instructors should receive reduced rate or free conference registration. this would increase access for individuals working at institutions that provide little to no professional development or travel dollars (most undergraduate institutions) while creating more opportunities to grow and disseminate cp pedagogy. encourage and provide support for collaborating and publishing with undergraduates. just as we value publishing with our community partners, we should consider ways to flatten the hierarchy of higher education and pursue more participatory practices with students. many undergraduate students are engaged in rigorous community practice and their work should be acknowledged and celebrated. identify scholarship of teaching and learning as relevant to our field and provide dedicated, ongoing journal space. there’s phenomenal work happening in cp classrooms; it needs a home. for archiving, for disseminating, for developing our distinctive iterations of cp pedagogy. we recommend that all cp journals (e.g., gjcpp, jcp, ajcp) create formal spaces dedicated to the scholarship of undergraduate teaching and learning in community psychology (or undergraduate community psychology pedagogy & research). provide templates for submission to aid educators in translating their teaching practice into written scholarship. expectations for such work are unclear. we need to define the genre for ourselves. when we are disseminating teaching practices, what kinds of information do we expect to see? at what stages of practice can someone share a strategy? what counts as data providing evidence for our claims? our journals can take cues from journals such as feminist teacher to develop author (and reviewer) guidelines. based on our experience with this special issue, we suggest manuscripts on class-based practice provide detailed institutional and programmatic context (program and campus size, population served, mission and values, regional characteristics), author social location and connection to material, and specific course characteristics (e.g., course description, course size, learning objectives). see cattaneo and colleagues in this volume for an exemplary model describing a specific class-based practice. similarly, journals like psychology of women quarterly solicit teaching resources related to empirical and theoretical articles. we recommend this approach to support undergraduate cp educators integrating new scholarship into courses. moreover, we suggest that when developing publishing opportunities, solicit thoughtful, critical reflection. contrary to the empirical demand to prioritize publishing our successes, we wish to encourage intentional sharing of practices that did not work as well as naming challenges that are persistent and demanding. in this way, we can begin to normalize and visibilize the struggle that is undergraduate cp practice. ideally, as a discipline we would generate creative, dynamic opportunities for practitioners to take up these challenges. these efforts might http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 take the form of an engaging column or an invited panel of practitioners who respond and reflect on ideas presented. let us harness our journals and other platforms to continue developing conversations and communities of practice around undergraduate teaching and research. conclusion we are honored to hold space for the transformative, applied work of our colleagues. we are grateful for their integrity and the commitment they demonstrate in bringing community psychology practice into undergraduate settings. we also acknowledge this is a limited, north american-centric look at the work of undergraduate cp practitioners and students. there is much to uncover about the innovations of undergraduate cp educators across disciplines, geographies, ancestries, and other identities. we end with a question: what would it look like to centrally value and support undergraduate education and research in scra? we can imagine a version of scra that values undergraduate education and practice, that grows the scholarship of cp pedagogy, and invests in undergraduate-focused practitioners. we look forward to an ever expanding commitment to this work from the broader society for community research and action. references lichty, l. f., & palamaro‐munsell, e. (2017). pursuing an ethical, socially just classroom: searching for community psychology pedagogy. american journal of community psychology, 60(3-4), 316326. doi 10.1002/ajcp.12199 lichty, l. f., wallin-ruschman, j. & palamaromunsell, e. (2018). creating space for networking, support, and developing undergraduate community psychology pedagogy. the community psychologist, 51(2), 18 full citations from the first 6 special issue articles cattaneo, l. b., shor, r., calton, j. m., gebhard, k. t., buchwach, s. y., elshabassi, n., & hargrove, s. (2019). social problems are social: empirical evidence and reflections on integrating community psychology into traditional curriculum. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(1), 1 – 29. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). graham, b. c. (2019). local lessons: teaching place-based social justice through historical case analysis and servicelearning. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(1), 1 – 24. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). henderson, d. x., martin, p. p., & harris, k. (2019). a case study on undergraduate community psychology at a historically black college and university (hbcu). global journal of community psychology practice, 10(1), 1 – 23. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). kornbluh, k., kohfeldt, d., banks, l., & brott, h. (2019). sharing strengths and struggles in the classroom and beyond: results from the teaching community psychology survey. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(1), 1 -29. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). silva, j. (2019). bridging disciplines to teach community psychology: notes from a transcommunal classroom. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(1), 1 -17. retrieved http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12199 http://gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). thomas, e., walton, m. d., manoogian, a., baker-olson, a., branch, b., malpert, a., henderson, k., & parker, r. (2019). undergraduate community psychology research practice: the story of the community narrative research project at rhodes college. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(1), 1 – 22. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ surfing and the senses: using body mapping to understand the embodied and therapeutic experiences of young surfers with autism easkey britton1, gesche kindermann2, and caitriona carlin2 keywords: surf therapy, blue space, body mapping, embodiment, surfing author biographies: easkey britton, is a marine social scientist with a phd in environment and society from university of ulster. her work explores the relationship between people and nature, especially water environments, or ‘blue space’. as a research scientist at the national university of ireland galway, she contributes her expertise in blue space, health and social wellbeing on national and international research projects including the eu-funded horizon2020 project on seas, oceans and public health in europe (sophie). a life-long surfer, her parents taught her to surf when she was four years old and she channels her passion for surfing and the sea into social change. her work is deeply influenced by the ocean and the lessons learned pioneering women’s big-wave surfing in ireland where her performances in the wild atlantic earned a global world surfing league (wsl) big wave nomination in 2011 and 2013. gesche kindermann, is an environmental scientist with an interest in the interrelationships between the environment, its conservation, and human activity. she holds a phd in environmental science and an msc in ecosystem conservation and landscape management. gesche has extensive experience in researching irish environments, especially coastal areas, with an emphasis on their conservation management and a particular focus of her work is stakeholder engagement in this process. as postdoctoral researcher with the near health project she lead the investigation of stakeholders’ values, motivations and barriers to using nature for health and wellbeing. further work focusses on stakeholder engagement in and access to green and blue environments for their health and wellbeing. she is also the academic coordinator for the mscs in biodiversity and land use planning and in environmental leadership at the national university of ireland galway. caitriona carlin, is a postdoctoral researcher with an interest in engaging people with nature. her interest in this area began when she worked for the statutory nature conservation sector in england (natural england). she is the principal investigator on a jointly funded epa/hse project to assess how nature and environment can attain and restore (near) health. she contributed to the “sheer wellbeing” project and led “health benefits from biodiversity and green infrastructure” both epa funded. she is a member of the applied ecology unit since 2008. additional research interests include nature conservation, biodiversity, behavioural ecology. she has extensive experience in engaging members of the public with nature. she co-directs msc sustainable resource management: policy and practice with dr bernadette o’regan at ul, and the msc sustainable environments with professor mike gormally at nui galway. recommended citation: britton, e., kindermann, g., & carlin, c. (2020). surfing and the sense: using body mapping to understand the embodied and therapeutic experiences of 1 whitaker institute, national university of ireland galway 2 applied ecology unit, centre for environmental science, national university of ireland galway, galway, ireland global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 young surfers with autism. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(2), 1 – 17. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 surfing and the senses: using body mapping to understand the embodied and therapeutic experiences of young surfers with autism abstract there is a growing body of evidence for the benefits of the use of water-based activities and environments as an alternative or complimentary therapeutic intervention to mainstream, medicalised approaches. surfing is one such activity with the health benefits of surf therapy linked to the fluid and dynamic nature of surfing and the sea, while learning to surf in a group context can help enhance a sense of belonging and identity through shared experiences in the surf. this paper introduces the ways in which embodied and creative work in nature can empower young people with mental health difficulties, in particular autism. the study explores embodied experiences and the use of a creative, participatory approach to evaluating a surf therapy intervention. as such, we investigate the usability of a novel participatory evaluation method, body mapping, to evaluate the feelings and emotional wellbeing of young participants in a surf therapy programme. findings show how body mapping can be used to help create a richer picture of the potential health and wellbeing outcomes from engaging with the sea and highlights surfing as psychosomatic experience. the paper highlights the potential of in-situ embodiment practices and creative methodologies like body mapping to support therapeutic processes, in particular those related to the imagination and emotional body, in a playful and engaging way. given the global rise of medicalised interventions, especially among young people and the associated high rates of prescription drug-use to treat anxiety and mood-related disorders, across all ages (pratt et al., 2017; sarginson et al., 2017), there has been a search for alternative solutions such as surfing and other waterbased activities as therapy (britton et al., 2018). there is a growing body of evidence for the benefits of ‘blue care’, the use of waterbased activities and environments (i.e. ’blue space’) as an alternative or complimentary therapeutic intervention to mainstream, medicalised approaches (britton et al., 2018). scholarship about surfing is increasing, in particular, understanding surfing as a therapeutic intervention (marshall et al., 2019; britton, 2019; 2018; wheaton, et al., 2017; evers, 2015). surfing is increasingly being advocated and implemented as a therapy for a range of physical and mental health issues, such as the national health service (nhs) pilot programme (nhs, 2014) in dorset in the uk, a study identifying positive emotional impacts after 30 minutes of surfing (pittsinger, 2010), the establishment of the international surf therapy organisation, with a specific focus on building evidencebased research, and the popularity of surfing globally as a ‘blue care’ activity (britton et al., 2018). although the mechanisms underpinning how surf therapy contributes to wellbeing are not yet fully understood, the literature does suggest that learning to surf in a group context can help enhance a sense of belonging and identity through shared experiences in the surf (hignett et al., 2017; godfrey et al., 2015). in addition and central to any discussion of health and wellbeing, is the importance of immersion in producing a sense of ‘respite’ from everyday and acquired anxieties and disabilities (marshall et al., 2019; wheaton, et al., 2017). marshall et al. (2019) document this specifically with young people dealing with mental health challenges or social isolation, who are engaged in surf therapy programmes. in addition, wheaton et al’s (2017) review, identified strongly positive developmental and health/wellbeing aspects of surfing programmes that are associated with the capacitybuilding potential of lifestyle sports like surfing and that can challenge more instrumental and structured sports programmes. yet, they and others note that such surfing sites and experiences are also contested (lazarow & olive, 2017). for example, a separate uk study of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 youths with social behavioural problems noted the social norms that can persist around watersports and surfing with youth from lower income backgrounds feeling socially and culturally excluded (hignett et al., 2017). although limited, studies are emerging that go beyond the action of surfing and point to the particular nature or quality of our interactions with water and waves (britton & foley, in press; lisahunter, 2018). emerging research on blue care suggests that there is a relationship between the environment in which an activity occurs and improvements to wellbeing (bell et al., 2018). specific qualities of the natural environment that are particularly life-enhancing were identified in some studies, such as the feeling of weightlessness in salt-water and the connective properties of water environments, however this aspect is under-investigated (britton et al., 2018). authors have also recognised the challenge of measuring health and wellbeing outcomes in these complex and dynamic outdoor, wet and fluid environments. for example, britton et al. (2018) noted that wellbeing measures are often highly individualised and fail to account for the socio-ecological factors of disadvantage and social inequality or indigenous models of wellbeing (mansfield et al., 2018; ritchie et al., 2015). traditional pre-post survey methods that rely on verbal or written communication skills can also pose a challenge in wet environments and for diverse population groups who may have a wide range of differing needs and abilities (britton & foley, in press). increasingly, there are examples of creative approaches to ‘measuring’ wellbeing for groups with diverse needs, for example, the ‘measuring wellbeing creatively’ project, which works with people who have communication difficulties because of a brain injury or stroke. it explores how different colours and sensations can help them express feelings and emotions, which may help to measure their wellbeing. body mapping is a creative, in-situ method with origins in art and dance therapy and has been used as a participatory research evaluation process to examining embodied experience in physical space (borovica, 2019; de jäger et al., 2016; fraleigh 2015). it is considered particularly effective when working with children and adolescents and can also be used as a therapeutic intervention (kalucy et al., 2018; de jager et al., 2016). reported outcomes include shifts in participants sense of identity and self-awareness, improving confidence, interpersonal and communication skills for those with low self-esteem (fullagar, 2019). more broadly, in‐situ methodologies are increasingly popular within research into diverse geographies of health and wellbeing (foley et al., 2019; lisahunter 2018; evers, 2015). however, despite the moving, mutli-sensory nature of ocean and coastal environments, the use of more embodied practices and participatory evaluation methods of therapeutic blue space interventions is limited (bell et al., 2018; britton et al., 2018). an exception is a study by berger and tiry (2012), which draws upon creative methods including drama therapy to engage people coping with psychiatric disabilities in a therapeutic process at the beach. in this paper, we explore how young surfers engage with and utilise the sea and surf as health-enabling through the use of an in-situ participatory evaluation method, body mapping. the paper is informed by empirical and participatory fieldwork in ireland over the course of two summers (>12 months) with a non-profit organisation called liquid therapy (lt) and one of their surf programmes called the liquid boardriders club for youth with autism spectrum disorder level 1-1 and various other mental health issues, who wish to develop their surfing skills. we present empirical and sensory accounts drawn from direct experiences, along with critical reflections on the observed experiences and experiments with body mapping. the primary focus of the study is how the novel use of an in-situ methodology, body mapping, can offer a rich understanding of the complex experiences of health, emotional wellbeing and active embodiment through surfing. this approach works with the body, the senses and more elusive experiences, both literal and metaphorical. we investigate body mapping as an evaluation approach aimed at exploring how experiences of and immersion in the beach space, sea and surf influence, shape and produce specific dimensions of wellbeing. we tease out links with the immersive and human/non-human dynamics of the body, sea and surfing and how best to capture the articulation of those experiences. in choosing to use such a methodology, we argue that this is an approach that can help uncover differential accounts around how participants feel http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.ucl.ac.uk/culture/projects/measuring-wellbeing-creatively https://www.ucl.ac.uk/culture/projects/measuring-wellbeing-creatively global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 in place or building up to and winding down from a surf and how the acts of immersion inform and shape their health and wellbeing. these accounts move beyond the mind-body and self-nature dualisms and reveal a relational understanding of surfing. we draw on merrel’s (2003) term bodymind to capture the relational entanglement of body, mind and nature. fullagar et al. (2019, p.13) define “bodymind practices to be sites of dynamic intra-actions constituted through bodies-environments, bio-chemical flows, affective states and relational power.” research methodology this study was approved by the nui galway research ethics committee with informed consent received from both parents and participants. it was emphasised repeatedly that participating in the study was entirely optional, choosing not to it would in no way impact the ability to participate fully in the surf lesson, they could opt-out at any time, and that it would not take away from their time in the water. we draw on a key competency for community psychology (cp) practice by adopting a participatory community research approach, working in partnership with community members (e.g. surf therapy coordinators, surf instructors, volunteers, parents and participants) “to plan and conduct research that meet high standards of scientific evidence that are contextually appropriate, and to communicate the findings of that research in ways that promote community capacity to pursue community goals.” (scra, 2012, p.13). in this paper we present findings from a preliminary, qualitative study appropriate to the context and purposes of the surf community and including morethan-human elements such as the beach, tides, waves, wind and weather (abram, 2012). in this section we first outline the surfing intervention’s therapeutic process followed by a discussion of the methods. activity and setting liquid therapy is based in county donegal, a rural region in the north-west of ireland, and utilises the sea and surfing to tackle mental health issues and surrounding stigma for young people by providing a range of tailored surf therapy programmes from one day surfing sessions to eight weeks for young people with disabilities. their programmes are designed with a focus on mind-body, self-other, self-nature connections in a playful way (fullagar, 2008), rather than a focus on ‘physical activity for (mental) health,’ which can dominate behaviour change and health promotion interventions. this study included participants from the liquid boardriders club, an eight week surf programme with two hour surf lessons every week from july to august 2017 and 2018. although instruction was given on the technical aspects of how to catch a wave, stand up on the surfboard and ride waves, the pedagogic ethos was more concerned with the creation of an enabling and playful environment, meeting each child at their individual level, made possible with the ratio of one-to-one instruction. the aim of lt is to create a positive, enabling environment for participants through surfing. each surf session took place on rossnowlagh beach, considered one of the best and safest beaches to learn to surf on the west coast of ireland due its gently sloping profile, rolling waves and lack of currents or hidden rips. participants a total of twelve surfers, seven girls and five boys aged 8 to 17, with autism spectrum disorder level 1-1 (asd l1-1) and a mix of other psychological and anxiety disorders and learning issues commonly associated with asd l1-1 participated in the study. the surf programme did not assess participants based on their diagnosis and no formal medical diagnosis was required to participate, welcoming participants with a mix of various mental and physical disabilities. this particular programme, the liquid boardriders club, was established in order to facilitate an environment where participants could assert greater independence, progress their surfing skills through peer learning and where the emphasis was not on surfing as a therapy or treatment. in some cases the children were not aware they had a formal diagnosis and in other cases, preferred not to be viewed as somebody with a mental health disability. participants were occasionally referred or heard about lt via various support groups and networks and / or word of mouth. in addition to the participants, their parents (n=11) and three volunteer instructors, including the programme organiser, were included in the study in semi-structured interviews. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 body mapping in response to the challenges of using traditional research methods in blue care settings, we wished to trial in-situ methods that rely less on verbal or written responses and were more multi-sensory and embodied. body mapping is a qualitative, participatory research method that engages the senses and draws on similar methods used in dance therapy as well as mindfulness-based practice. according to fullagar (2019, p.9) it, “incorporates art (drawing), reflection and narrative that provides the means of creatively exploring the embodied interrelationship of personal and social worlds”, with a focus on the natural world in this study. body mapping was used as an experimental method with the study participants in the surf therapy programme as a different way of understanding complex experiences of physical health and emotional wellbeing. we wanted to evaluate the usability of body mapping in a surf therapy setting to understand the sensory, embodied and emotional experiences of young people. the evaluation was developed collaboratively as part of the surf programme, while being conducted independently by the lead author of this paper. informed by the somatic work of fullagar (2019) and fraleigh (2015) amongst other movement practitioners, the integration of the body mapping research method into lt surf sessions created a safe and enabling space where participants creatively explored, sensed and communicated their emotional and physical feelings. similar to fullagar (2019), we describe this research design as an ‘assemblage model’ that recognises the interrelationships between the surf programme and evaluation methods that are productive of different ways of knowing (borovica, 2019; atkinson & scott, 2015). the body mapping process was carried out on the beach once participants were in their wetsuits and before their surf instruction began. it took 15-20 minutes and was facilitated by the lead author and carried out at intervals during the weekly surf sessions in week 2 and 4 of the eight week programme during july august 2017 and a follow-up one year later during the next season’s programme in august 2018. three different approaches to body mapping were experimented with throughout the programme; i) using the sand and items found on the beach as a canvas to create individual body maps before surfing, ii) using sheets of paper and coloured pencils and crayons to create individual body maps before surfing, and iii) using the sand to co-create a single, large collective body-map to represent the entire group before and after surfing. eight of the participants from the previous year participated in this third exercise. this was also the only exercise to carry out body mapping before and after. on each occasion, participants drew their body outlines on the sand (except when the paper maps were used with generic print-outs of body outlines). to support a greater bodymind connection, participants were invited to ‘scan’ their body from head to toe, engaging as many senses as possible and noticing any sensations as they moved through their body, physical or emotional. after that, they used found objects or drew in the sand in whatever way they felt captured or symbolised physical and emotional feelings and sensations. the findings from each exercise are presented and compared in the results section. upon completion of the body maps, participants were invited to share their insights about their maps and to connect with the maps others had created in a whole group discussion facilitated by the researcher. prompt questions were asked to encourage participants to ‘notice’ feelings, and participants were invited to respond to open questions about: • how and where they might feel emotions and sensations in the body, • how they found the experience of body mapping (what they liked / disliked), • anything they noticed about themselves that surprised them or they didn’t notice before. comments shared by participants were written in the researcher’s field-notes immediately following the activity and body maps were photographed. the process, outcomes, opportunities and limitations of these creative, embodied approaches to understanding complex feelings and emotional wellbeing in relation to surfing are discussed in the following sections. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 semi structured interviews and participatory observation at the end of the programme (week 8) semistructured interviews were carried out with instructors, parents and participants. interviews typically lasted 10 to 20 minutes. instructors were asked questions relating to the sea and surfing and what they thought were particular health enabling qualities of both the setting and the activity and any changes they noticed in participants. parents were asked to share their observations about how their children experienced the sea and the impact of surfing on their overall health and wellbeing and participants were asked how the sea and surfing made them feel. interviews were recorded and transcribed and a word frequency analysis was carried out under the categories of ‘how surfing/sea makes me/my child feel.’ the findings are discussed in relation to the outcomes of the body mapping exercises in the results section. in addition to interviews, the lead author attended four surf sessions in week 2, 4 and 8 during the summer of 2017 and a follow-up session at the start of the programme in the summer of 2018. during these sessions the researcher moved between the sea and the beach, alternating between being in the surf as an observant participant (smith, 2019) and on the shore where parents spent their time while their children surfed. this form of participant observation acknowledges the active engagement of the researcher and helped to build rapport and a temporal understanding of place (britton & foley, in press). findings this section presents the ways in which the participatory methodology of body mapping can be used to help understand the complex experiences of health, emotional wellbeing and active embodiment as a process of change. this section presents the empirical and sensory accounts drawn from direct experiences of the participants, along with the observations of instructors, parents and participants elicited during semi-structured interviews. the body mapping sessions are described first, followed by responses from the interviews. although survey data (published elsewhere, see nearhealth, forthcoming) identified each participant as physically active with a preference for outdoors and the seaside, for the majority, their only opportunity to experience surfing was with lt. body mapping outcomes body mapping 1 (bm1), july 2017 during bm1 participants formed a circle on the beach and took it in turns to draw a large outline of their body on the sand. lying down, participants were invited to take a few moments to focus on their breathing, bringing their awareness into their bodies, noticing how their bodies felt on the in-breath and out-breath (see fig. 1a). this helped to settle and relax the group although some children found it difficult to be still and others preferred to sit instead of lie down. after the ‘body scan’ visualisation, participants created their personal body maps drawing on the surface of the sand or using items found on the beach space such as pebbles, shells, feathers and plastic bottle caps to symbolise different sensations and feelings. for one to two minutes each, participants took it in turns to share their bodymaps with each other while the facilitator moved between the groups observing the interactions (fig. 1b). everyone returned to the large group circle to share their responses to the prompt questions. figure 1. (a-c) participants taking part in a body mapping exercise before surfing. discussions were lively and highlighted a strong bodymind connection with both physical and emotional feelings expressed. ‘nega‐ tive’ sensations or feelings of discomfort were identified such as an ‘x’ drawn between the shoulders to symbolise muscle tightness, and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 zig-zags or ‘xs’ on hands and feet to symbolise feeling cold in that part of the body (fig 1c). physical sensations were also linked with positive and mixed emotional responses, for example, wavy lines drawn on the middle of the body represented the feeling of ‘butterflies in the belly’, which participants described as feeling both excited and a little nervous. body mapping 2 (bm2), august 2017 at week 4 of the programme, bm2 was carried out using pre-printed body maps on a4 sheets of paper (fig. 2). the process was the same except this time instead of creating body maps on the sand body maps were created by drawing on and colouring on the sheets of paper. having material objects and colouring pencils and crayons seemed to help focus the attention of participants. creating the maps allowed individuals to quietly reflect and become absorbed in the act of colouring. figure 2. (a-f) examples of body maps from bm2 using paper hand-outs and colouring pencils. when sharing with the group, participants were able to show and ‘talk through’ their body map, enabling them to express more creatively a mix of complex feelings through the use of visuals and colour. for example, the body map in fig 2a shows a spectrum of colours used by the participant to illustrate the mix of emotions she was feeling. she explained that the warm colours (pinks, oranges and reds) symbolised her love of surfing and excitement to get into the surf, the cooler greens and blues symbolised her connection to the sea. the body map of a male participant in fig. 2b shows the use of colour to symbolise various physical sensations with the blue representing cold hands, feet and head, the red colour was for stiffness or soreness in the shoulder, ankle and wrists and the yellow colour was a feeling of excitement running through the body. another participant used symbols to illustrate emotion, such as the feeling of excitement as a bodily sensation in her belly illustrated by the butterfly in fig. 2c. this was not linked to nervousness but rather anticipation of having fun in the surf and how that made her feel happy, illustrated with a smiling face. one participant chose to use the words ‘happy’ and ‘weird’ to describe how she felt and drew them where she felt these emotions in her body (fig. 2d). another filled his body map with a mass of dark squiggles to convey a complex mix of emotions that he wasn’t able to tease out or articulate. the red colour symbolised stiffness in his arms because he had been surfing earlier that week and his arms felt a little tired (fig. 2e). the body map in fig. 2f shows the use of blue for cold in hands and feet. the female participant explained that the yellow in the head represented a sense of calm and pink in the centre of the body symbolised a feeling warmth both physically and for her love of surfing. body mapping 3 (bm3), august 2018 one year later, bm3 was carried out with the surf club and included a total of eight participants from the previous summer. on this occasion, body mapping was carried out before and after surfing by co-creating one large collective body map on the sand. each participant was invited to draw or add to the body map in the centre what they had noticed about their bodymind (fig. 3a). after surfing, as the surfers left the water at slightly different times and the tide was now higher leaving less sand for the mapping exercise, each participant was invited to take a moment to notice how they felt in their body and if they experienced any changes. they described and drew these sensations on a new body map drawn on the sand, capturing the collective expression of how participants felt after surfing (fig 3b). due to low light / poor image quality this body map was redrawn later on paper. although this process was less http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 nuanced it did provide a more rapid and accessible way to integrate body mapping as part of the lesson plan and to capture bodymind experiences immediately after surfing before participants got too cold. it also illustrates the collective energy and emotional state of the group as a whole. figure 3. (a-b) before (a) and after (b) collective body maps the body maps before and after surfing highlight the interrelationship between body-mindenvironment, with a mix of physical and emotional states captured. similar to bm1 and bm2, before surfing participants explained that ‘x’s and zig-zags illustrated muscle tension or soreness / stiffness in various parts of the body; elbow, knee, shoulder. temperature was noted with some having cold feet or fingers. vertical wavy lines symbolised happiness and horizontal wavy lines, excitement. the collection of pebbles in the centre of the body symbolised a little anxiety that they might not get the waves they wanted or that they might experience a bad wipeout. some chose white stones placed on the head to symbolise feeling calm, and someone chose a black stone to symbolise feeling nervous that she might have a big wipeout. the large circles that fill the body map after surfing (fig. 3b) represent feelings of happiness and feeling good. interestingly, the circles were started by one participant and repeated by others to also symbolise feeling happy. the wavy lines drawn outside the body symbolised feeling wobbly, cold or tiredness ‘all-over’, although this was combined with expressions of desire to go back into the sea and did not seem to hinder their enjoyment, as one female participant described, “my body feels all floppy, but happy.” another participant who drew a wave on the crown of the body map said all she wanted to do was to keep surfing and that she always had “surfing on the brain”, and another response captured the embodied effect of surfing, “i can feel it in my body.” a noticeable difference after surfing, despite feeling ‘surfed out’ (tired from the physical exertion of surfing), there were very few aches or pains felt in the body, apart from one participant who still had a sore knee, which he blamed on playing football at school. he explained that surfing had made him feel better everywhere else in his body and for a while he had forgotten his knee was sore. the female participant who felt anxious / nervous about wiping out, described how her body now felt excited and buzzing, she was delighted she didn’t have any big wipe-outs and had no more feelings of anxiety. a participant said his pains and any negative feelings in his body had gone. another said she felt very tired but full of a sense of accomplishment. however, not all experiences were positive. one participant was very disheartened and when asked how he was feeling, said he felt disappointed and low because he didn’t get any ‘good’ waves, defined by him as being able to stand up and ride to the beach without falling off. he shrugged his shoulders saying, “that’s just how it goes.” surf instructors explained how the impact of societal expectations on a child’s self-perception can be a challenge, “it’s expectation. the expectation doesn’t come from us, it doesn’t come from the ocean, or the child, it comes from society.” (lt founder, personal communication, 2018) and that this is heightened in a society where surfing and what it means to be a ‘good’ surfer is portrayed in the media in a homogenised way with a focus on the performance aspects of surfing (olive, 2015). participants experiences of body mapping there was full participation in every exercise and participants were invited to share in group discussions what they thought about each of the body mapping exercises. some said they enjoyed the use of found objects (bm1), others said they liked ‘adding colour to their bodies' (bm2). some stated a preference to sit instead of lie down on the sand (bm1). others found it very difficult to lie still and were impatient to get in the water. in the case of bm1 and bm2, the decision was taken by the researcher not to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 carry out the exercise after surfing as participants were too cold and some the surfers left the water at different times. this was why bm3 was modified in order to capture body maps from each individual as they left the water in a collective map. the participants of the study were interested to know the purpose of the exercise and it was important that it had a relevance to their surfing experience. this led to a discussion about why it might be important to connect with the body and notice feelings in preparation for surfing, as well as an awareness of how surfing and the sea makes us feel. for the most part, direct responses were difficult to capture as the priority was getting into the water as quickly as possible, which may have biased overly positive responses. however, participants became less impatient as familiarity with the exercise grew and so it took less time to complete. they also became more comfortable sharing in a group as they got to know each other and form friendships as the weeks progressed. through a more tactile approach, some of the participants were able to literally draw their feelings out and use metaphor and symbols to give them meaning and expression. there was no clear preference for which exercise they found the best. from a practical point of view, the final exercise was the quickest to deliver, adapted with individual contributions creating a collective map. how each exercise compares is discussed in greater detail in the discussion. how the sea and surfing makes me feel the overwhelming response from participants when asked how being in the sea makes them feel was happiness, as well as more embodied sensations of freedom (table 1). one boy said, “it makes me feel like i’m in space, i feel floaty and free.” the ability to feel or be ‘weird’ and ‘silly’ came up in both the body mapping exercises and the interviews. for participants this meant the ability to be themselves, including being more open to failure and making mistakes as part of the learning process. when following up year a later, one participant explained how the sea is a space where he is free to be himself without judgement, “i don’t get bullied when not at school”, and another added, “everyone falls off their board.” the increase in confidence was noticeable as participants progressed and seemed to be maintained the following year with one participant saying, “i can do anything if i put my mind to it.” similarly, parents noted how being in the sea made their children feel happier, calmer and more confident. when asked what was the greatest wellbeing outcome they perceived for their children, confidence was the most frequently cited response (table 1), as one parent shared, ‘surfing helps him feel good about himself.’ the embodied and immersive experience of surfing was emphasised with some parents mentioning the health enabling impact of specific qualities of the sea and surf such as the, “deep pressure therapy of waves washing over her.” and another commented how the, “sea motion of surfing brings calm.” bodily changes as well as mood were also noted by parents, “my daughter has asd and anxiety disorder, surfing makes her extremely happy and confident, her eyes light up, stress goes away and she just loves it.” increased confidence, communication skills, the ability to share feelings in a group, and becoming less distracted and more focused during the exercises were observed and reported in interviews with parents and instructors. table 1 most frequently cited responses from interviews with parents and participants top cited word count how the sea makes my child feel (parents, n=11) happy 6 relaxed/calm/at ease 5 confident 3 how the sea makes me feel (youths, n=12) happy 7 freedom free 3 weird, silly 2 love 1 floaty (like i’m in space) 1 wellbeing outcomes your child experienced (parents, n=11) confidence (self-belief, self-esteem) 11 happy 8 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 relaxed, calm 6 refreshed, energetic 3 social friendship 3 discussion connections to self, others and the sea body mapping as a participatory research methodology addresses key competencies for cp practice by embedding the research process within the natural and contextual environment. the capacity to build on and draw out personal skills, strengths and competencies of participants, thereby enhancing collective empowerment among individuals working together to achieve shared goals through surfing is emphasised. emotions felt in the body were richly described and reflected upon, with findings highlighting an inclusive and creative approach that supports diverse forms of expression, engaging multiple senses and facilitating greater selfawareness and engagement. it can be integrated within the therapeutic process to support some of the key enabling factors of a surf programme by creating a safe space where each individual has the freedom to creatively express themselves. findings reveal that the experience of surf therapy is a dynamic process where outcomes may vary depending on, for example, weather and surf conditions at the beach that day that may present varying degrees of challenge. overcoming challenge (e.g. size of waves, going beyond depth) is seen as a key aspect of building confidence in surf therapy (britton & foley, in press; britton et al., 2018) and this was evidenced in the body maps, in particular the sense of ‘buzz’ having overcome a fear of ‘wip‐ ing-out’ (fig. 3b). participants also described their experiences of being in the sea and surfing as a very embodied experience, connecting their sense of emotional wellbeing to felt changes in their bodies, such as butterflies in the belly. furthermore, body mapping helped build rapport between participants and create a space for different forms of expression, overcoming verbal or written limitations. group sharing enhanced communication skills and provided participants with the opportunity for interpersonal connections across ages or outside of their typical everyday peer group. for example, a 13 year old youth sharing their lived, bodily experiences with an 8 year old child. importantly, the process provided participants with an active role in data creation and interpretation (de jager et al., 2016) in addition to its use as an evaluation tool, body mapping has potential to be used as an exercise that can help facilitate greater bodymind-nature connection. the influence of the participants’ relationship with the natural environment, in this case, the sea and surf, on their wellbeing is evident. for example, the multi-sensory and changing state of the sea can enhance a sense of freedom and play. the interactions between the material, natural and emotional dynamics of place are an essential part of how wellbeing is accessed and experienced (britton & foley, in press; britton, 2019). the importance of an embodied sensory experience was observed with frequent comments from surfers noticing changes in their bodies in response to emotional states and environmental changes (e.g. temperature change, wind, texture of sand). it was also a useful way to prepare for surfing by ‘sensing the body’ before entering the water, as well as a way to reflect on how the experience made them feel, noticing any changes in their bodies, immediately after surfing. as a therapeutic tool, body mapping could provide insights for surf instructors about individual and overall energy and emotional ‘weather state’ of the group. comparing body mapping exercises we explored different variations of this in-situ methodology. the first approach (bm1), using the sand as the canvas for creating individual body maps, embeds the exercise within the natural environment, allowing participants to begin to sense not only their bodymind but also their bodymind-in-nature, noticing the direct sensation of the weight of the body on the sand, the texture or wetness of the sand, etc. this could be expanded upon to include beach combing as an activity prior to body mapping where participants are actively engaged in gathering found objects to use in their map, further enhancing their ability to sense their environment and become more ocean literate http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 by creating a discussion about these found objects, especially marine litter. studies have shown how engaging in organised group beach cleans can enhance social wellbeing outcomes (wyles et al., 2017). the interactive nature of this exercise (sharing in pairs and groups) might not be suited for those who are more introverted. for bm2, using blank body maps on sheets of paper with colouring materials provided the opportunity for quiet reflection with participants working alone on their own body maps initially (introversion) combined with sharing what they created with the group (extroversion). as de jager et al. (2016, p.12) state, “drawing activities are likely to be familiar and therefore less anxiety-provoking to children, who are likely to have been exposed to similar tasks at home or at school.” this approach to body mapping provided more detailed body maps, however, the pre-defined outline of a body map could be constraining, especially for those who wish to draw ‘outside the lines’ or create different body shapes (fullagar, 2019). bm2 was also weather-dependent, it would not have been possible to do this exercise on the beach if it was raining. bm3 allowed for the greatest amount of group interaction and worked well within a group where everyone was already familiar with each other and had established close bonds as committed members of the surf club. this suggests the role surf therapy can play in helping to establish interpersonal relationships and trustbuilding. bm3 provided an overview of the complex and diverse bodymind dynamics and mixed emotional states, mood and energy within the group as well as the changes participants experienced after surfing. of particular significance was how surfing impacted the emotional state and how sensations were felt through the body, with those who experienced various 'negative' feelings reporting none after surfing, and how they felt 'happy all over' with 'surfing in the brain.' that said, it also allowed for the acknowledgment of difficult feelings and even disappointment, and that outcomes from surfing may not be universally felt. bm3 did not provide the same level of detail but it could be carried out more rapidly and so may be better suited where a pre-post evaluation is desired, without participants getting too cold or tired after surfing. evaluating post-surf experiences in this way enabled participants to deepen levels of body awareness and link bodily sensations and feelings to their surfing experience. it might be difficult for some to express feelings if these feelings are seen to be at odds with the overall group. comparing body mapping exercises with interview data body mapping has been recognised as an important tool to work with youth as it “avoids imposing the researcher's or broader societal or cultural views onto participants experience” (de jager et al., 2016, p. 12). when compared with the interview data there are notable similarities such as the feelings of happiness and love, and how surfing enables the freedom of self-expression (to be 'silly and weird'). however, the body mapping exercises reveal a richer and more textured experience and how and where these emotions are felt in the body as physical sensations, as well as the transformation of these feelings after surfing. for example, the 'x's' of tension or anxiety becoming circles of joy or happiness. it also allowed for the acknowledgement of more complex and mixed emotions, whereas there are no 'negative' feelings expressed in the interview data. it is possible that participating in the exercises may have enhanced communication and verbal skills, fuelling the imagination, with the use of metaphor used in some interview responses, e.g. “surfing makes me feel floaty, like i'm in space.” findings from interviews highlight increases in self-esteem and confidence as direct outcomes, which were also observed during body mapping. limitations for some participants it was just too much to sit or lie still for any length of time and they may seem distracted or difficult to engage. that said, during group discussion everyone contributed and was able to express how their bodies were feeling both physically and emotionally. in some instances it can be helpful to invite those who are more unsettled to ‘co-facilitate’ and help demonstrate the exercise. in most cases participants were too cold post-surf to repeat the process. therefore, an alternative could be to carry out the exercise indoors, once participants are dressed and warm. that said, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 it could work much better in a warmer climate than ireland. body mapping requires a certain level of facilitation and can be time consuming, although there is potential to integrate it into an existing surf therapy intervention. this approach can be difficult to quantify, however, it can be useful as a qualitative approach and may be particularly useful in a setting where the cohort may experience survey fatigue, or the wet / watery nature of the outdoor setting makes traditional paper surveys difficult to administer. where there are verbal limitations the sensory and tactile qualities of body mapping, using symbols and objects to express feelings, may be beneficial. direct comparison with different methods, such as surveys, would be worthy of further research. although outcomes were generally positive, body maps also revealed the complexity of feelings and sensations – the anxiety felt before surfing associated with a fear of failure or not succeeding, and the physical discomforts caused by the weather (cold) and body aches. these are not necessarily a limitation for all participants, as evidenced in changes in the before/after body mapping, however, for some it can impact their mood negatively (caddick et al., 2015). a key barrier identified by surf instructors and volunteers was expectation (and the associated disappointment), as evidenced by the disappointment felt by one participant post-surf, feeling like he had not measured up to what it means to be a successful surfer, i.e. to stand up on the surfboard. in a group setting this could be a challenge when others clearly experience a post-surf ‘buzz.’ lt’s emphasis on play over performance (britton, 2018) is important to overcome this, as well as creating pathways of support for those who do want to compete in mainstream surfing competitions. furthermore, lt have a debrief after every session providing a space and opportunity for volunteers to share their experiences, learnings and insights, a group sharing that offers support and a space to openly identify and address any issues from the session in ‘real time.’ conclusions the use of body mapping enables complex thoughts and feelings to be elicited and expressed creatively, contributing to a deeper understanding of place-based therapeutic interventions as well as the visual communication of embodied meanings as qualitative ‘evidence’ (fullagar, 2019; kalucy et al., 2018; boydell et al., 2016). this study highlighted the interrelationships between the surf programme and evaluation methods that are productive of different ways of knowing, sensing and acknowledging. findings from the use of embodied methods like body mapping reveal a richer picture of the potential health and wellbeing outcomes from engaging with the sea and highlights surfing as psychosomatic experience. using body mapping as an in-situ methodology and embodiment practice can be a playful and engaging alternative or complement to traditional research methods such as interviews. it enables greater freedom of expression by tuning into bodily sensations and feelings, allowing participants to notice how they are feeling in their bodies in the present moment. as demand grows for surf therapy, there is a need to monitor new therapies to provide evidence for practitioners and policy makers. this would support the provision of evidence-based training by governing sporting and recreational bodies to mainstream inclusion practices and to facilitate therapeutic nature encounters for health and wellbeing in ways that help promote the capacity of communities to pursue their goals. body mapping is a tool that could be applied in other blue space and naturebased settings and activities with adults as well as children. however, more empirical investigation would be valuable in determining its characteristics in researching embodied people’s experiences and relationships to 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(2017). antidepressant use among persons aged 12 and over: united states, 2011-2014. nchs data brief. number 283. national http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/http:/dx.doi.org/10.17169/fqs-17.2.2526 https://doi.org/http:/dx.doi.org/10.17169/fqs-17.2.2526 https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400701756345 https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400701756345 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14729679.2017.1326829 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14729679.2017.1326829 https://doi.org/10.18432/ari29337 https://doi.org/10.3390/su9122298 http://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2017-020959 http://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2017-020959 https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16122159 https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16122159 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315266466 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315266466 http://www.dorsethealthcare.nhs.uk/current-%2520news/surfingformentalhealth.htm http://www.dorsethealthcare.nhs.uk/current-%2520news/surfingformentalhealth.htm http://www.dorsethealthcare.nhs.uk/current-%2520news/surfingformentalhealth.htm https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x1515500112 https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x1515500112 global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 center for health statistics. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/ ritchie, s.d., wabano, m.j., corbiere, r.g., restoule, b.m., russell, k.c. and young, n.l., (2015). connecting to the good life through outdoor adventure leadership experiences designed for indigenous youth. journal of adventure education and outdoor learning, 15(4), pp.350-370. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14729679.2 015.1036455 sarginson, j., webb, r. t., stocks, s. j., esmail, a., garg, s., & ashcroft, d. m. (2017). temporal trends in antidepressant prescribing to children in uk primary care, 2000–2015. journal of affective disorders, 210, 312-318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2016.12. 047 scra (2012). competencies for community psychology practice society for community research and action, draft, august 15, 2012. society for community research and action (scra; apa division 27). the community psychologist, 45(4) https://www.scra27.org/what-wedo/practice/18-competencies-community-psychology-practice/ smith, t. s. (2019). therapeutic taskscapes and craft geography: cultivating well-being and atmospheres of recovery in the workshop. social & cultural geography, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.20 18.1562088 wheaton, b., roy, g., & olive, r. (2017). exploring critical alternatives for youth development through lifestyle sport: surfing and community development in aotearoa/new zealand. sustainability, 9(12), 2298. https://doi.org/10.3390/su9122298 wyles, k.j., pahl, s., holland, m. and thompson, r.c. (2017). can beach cleans do more than clean-up litter? comparing beach cleans to other coastal activities. environment and behavior, 49, 5,509-535. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916516 649412 http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14729679.2015.1036455 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14729679.2015.1036455 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2016.12.047 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2016.12.047 https://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/practice/18-competencies-community-psychology-practice/ https://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/practice/18-competencies-community-psychology-practice/ https://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/practice/18-competencies-community-psychology-practice/ https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2018.1562088 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2018.1562088 https://doi.org/10.3390/su9122298 https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916516649412 https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916516649412 global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 what we not finna do: respectfully collaborating with skinfolk and kinfolk in black feminist participatory action research monique a. guishard1, devin a. heyward2, justin t. brown3, & marcia stoddard-pennant4 keywords: collaboration, par, photovoice, racial justice author biographies: monique a. guishard, phd (she/her/hers) is a blacktina, born on st. thomas u.s. virgin islands and raised in the south bronx. these homespaces flavor all of her scholar-activism. she is an accomplished ethnographer, educator, community social psychologist, research ethicist, and organizer. her work pairs theory, lived experience, and robust community-based research ethics to decenter white methods/epistemes/ethical frameworks. dr. guishard is an associate professor of psychology and deputy chairperson at her alma mater, bronx community college (bcc). she is the vice chair of the board of directors of the bronx community research review board (www.bxcrrb.org). guishard is a board member of cuny’s center for lgbtq studies and a founding member of the public science project. monique was the principal investigator of the $250,000 pcori eugene washington funded: community engaged research academy. dr. guishard has 16-years of experience working in partnership with: young people, parent organizers, environmental justice advocates, and a bipoc research ethics collaborative—on mutually beneficial action research partnerships. devin a. heyward, phd (she/her/hers) is an assistant professor in sociology, urban studies, and anthropology, the director of the office of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and 1 department of social sciences, cuny bronx community college 2 sociology, urban studies, and gender and sexuality studies, saint peter’s university 3 department of health sciences, cuny laguardia community college 4 the bronx community research review board inc. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 the director of the gender and sexuality studies program at saint peter’s university. her current research focuses on racial identity transformation over the lifespan and how it is influenced by self-initiated (or agentic) encounter events, specifically genetic ancestry testing. throughout this work, dr. heyward uses qualitative techniques, such as life narratives, critical identity mapping, and theater performances to document how individuals describe and experience racial becoming. dr. heyward has also worked on various research projects, including hiv prevention for college going women; a national queer/trans person of color (qt-poc) participatory research project for incarcerated persons; and two international projects in uganda and peru concerning children’s rights. she currently serves on the board of directors for the bronx community research and review board (bxcrrb) in the bronx, ny. justin t. brown, phd, mph (he/him/his) is a black gay man from smalltown southern ohio. he is an associate professor and program director of public & community health at laguardia community college, cuny. dr. brown is also the executive director of the center for lgbtq studies (clags), the first us university-based research center investigating lgbtqia community-identified concerns. dr. brown utilizes intersectional-based, culturally-centered community-based participatory approaches to address lgbtq youth of color (yoc) health inequities. currently, his work explores public policy implications on public health infrastructures. dr. brown was the former deputy director of the cuny institute for health equity (cihe) and the program director of boston gay & lesbian social services (glass), a social service agency dedicated exclusively to addressing lgbtq yoc needs. among his professional service, he serves on the boards of the bronx community research review board (bxcrrb) and the manhattan-staten island area health education center (msi ahec). marcia stoddard-pennant (she/her/hers) is a health education and promotion specialist who works specifically with pregnant mothers and residents in low income communities in the bronx. originally from jamaica, marcia currently resides and works in the northeast section of the bronx. marcia attended bronx community college where she majored in community school health. in 2012, she entered lehman college where she pursued both her bachelors and masters in health education and promotion. a graduate of the community engaged research academy 2017 cohort, marcia helped mentor students enrolled in cera 2018 and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 planned graduations with cera staff. marcia is a member of the bronx community research and review board and hopes to continue to promote the health and wellbeing of bronx residents. recommended citation: guishard, m.a., heyward, d.a., brown, j.t., & stoddardpennant, m.(2021). what we not finna do: respectfully collaborating with skinfolk and kinfolk in black participatory action research. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(2), 1 35. retrieved day/month/year, (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: monique a. guishard, dept. of social sciences, 2155 university avenue, bronx, ny 10453. email: monique.guishard@bcc.cuny.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 what we not finna do: respectfully collaborating with skinfolk and kinfolk in black participatory action research in this article, we (black community social psychologists and community organizers with over 40 years of collaborative research experience) share the successes and challenges of using black feminist participatory action research to actualize the community engaged research academy (cera). cera was a two-year multimethod project (utilizing community dialogues, focus groups, surveys, photovoice, body mapping, and space mapping) aimed at teaching bronx patients the language and ethics of research. cera did not merely teach research methods for its own sake. it redressed research and schooling as sites of trauma and humiliation for black, indigenous, and people of color (bipoc) persons by nurturing the capacity of participants to develop research projects without researchers. we scrutinize the missteps and accomplishments of the cera project to offer a tangible example of what attending to racial justice in community psychological inquiry looks like from all facets. our imagined audience of readers is composed of burgeoning and veteran black community psychologists, members of community-based organizations, and members of institutional review boards (irbs). we write to this audience mindful that analyzing what went wrong, and right would be instructive to academicians and practitioners, about how to ethically and respectfully collaborate with skinfolk and kinfolk. we start by interweaving a brief engagement in critical reflexivity about our prior experiences with black participatory research as next generation black scholars/organizers, which grounds our theoretical framework. we move to a discussion of community-academic partnerships (caps) within black communities, where our engagement with the scholarship that has influenced our work refuses the traditional structure of a literature review. historically, caps between black professionals (researchers, doctors, nurses, educators, social workers, etc.) and black communities have not always begun or ended well (brown, 2017; 2019; chilisa, 2009; freimuth et al., 2001; guishard et al, 2005; guishard, 2009; 2015; heyward, 2019; jordan et al., 2001; smith & guishard, 2017; suarez-balcazar, harper, & lewis, 2005). too often, the epistemes, theories, methodologies, and approaches to community engagement black community psychologists learn, from largely whitestream institutions, are imbued with scientific racism, are extractive, and some likely with exploitative intentions. this past work has done more harm than good and has made our kinfolk distrustful of us and our intentions. we share our confrontations with ways of being, we had to leave behind and adopt to accomplish the cera project. some of the lessons we learned included centering black community psychology, embracing critical race praxis, naming sacred moments that were excluded from the purview of research, and honoring the complex stories black patients shared with us with hermeneutics of love (guishard, 2016; hooks, 2001a; hooks, 2001b; laura, 2013). we move to analyzing moments within the community engaged research academy that taught us much about the importance of healing-centered engagement. we offer: unwaveringly committing to loving all and not some black folx, checking your professional humility before you wreck the project, being of service before making an ask, developing community agreements, articulating refusals, shared decision making, returning findings http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 quickly, and shared ownership of the products of our research as ethical levers to readers. it is important to note that in addition to being evaluated by our institution’s irbs, the cera project was also constantly evaluated by members of a local community-based irb. the bronx community research review board (the bxcrrb) ethically assessed the extent to which we attended to the project’s focus and remained accountable to black and brown bronx patients. we conclude by sharing the community agreements, template for our research presentations, and an evaluation tool we developed, with the bxcrrb, with hopes that they: 1) will expand and build upon critical race community psychological interventions, 2) can be reused and remixed by other caps between black community psychologists and black communities. as members of the black community, black community psychologists can contribute to community empowerment by developing psychological interventions and research that are in sync with communal norms and values, and that will actually make a difference in the lives of black people. they can also mobilize resources, both internal and external to the community, to enhance the capacity of local communities. finally, they can utilize their bicultural skills to advocate for more ethical treatment of black communities. these efforts will benefit black communities directly, and academic institutions indirectly—by creating adaptive community narratives regarding research, thereby increasing the potential for success of future collaborations with those communities. ~lisa c. jordan, g. anne bogat, and gloria smith (2001 p. 616) in this article, we (black community social psychologists and community organizers) share the successes and challenges of using black feminist participatory action research (bfpar) (akom, 2011; heyward, guishard, brown, 2019) to actualize the community engaged research academy (cera). briefly, cera was a longitudinal multi-methods bfpar project (community dialogues, focus groups, surveys, photovoice, body mapping, and space mapping) designed to provide abolitionist and healing-centered research literacy and ethics education to bipoc (mostly black) bronx patients. we will scrutinize the accomplishments and victories achieved at great cost of the cera project to offer tangible examples of what attending to racial justice in community psychological inquiry looks like. our target audience of readers is comprised of black: community psychologists, members of communitybased organizations, and folx who serve on institutional review boards (irbs). we wrote, in the conversational traditions of other black scholars, to this audience unapologetically, lovingly, and with great critical reflexivity. we hope that our contribution, to this special issue, will be instructive to black academicians and practitioners, about how to ethically and respectfully partner with our kinfolk because, right now, black scholars and black communities need each other. we need radical solidarity to survive state sanctioned murder, emboldened anti-black racism, emboldened misogynoir, and the many ways the covid-19 pandemic continues to disproportionately impact our communities. we, and many of our colleagues, have found ourselves constantly questioning when, where, and how can our labor be used? we cannot divorce ourselves from the current spirit of the times, because this is the activist-scholar-organizer life of black community psychologists. we wrote this mostly from the bronx, in new york city, during the 5th and 6th months of the coronavirus pandemic, where 457,000 persons have tested positive and over 32,691 residents have transitioned (new york city department of health, 2020a). we are/were outraged, but not surprised by the impact of covid-19 on black and latinx http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 bronx residents and bipoc nationwide. this is further set on the backdrop of global rebellions centering the sanctity, dignity, and value of black life that were sparked by the murders of so many black and brown bodies. for all those we have lost, both now and across time, we must continue to #saytheirnames and remember their faces as we grapple with knowing that often these are “bodies that are invisible, that have disappeared, or whose absence is unaccounted for and not remarked in popular culture or by government agencies.” (casper & moore, 2009 p. 3). we write to our skinfolx, intentionally, in the form of a front-porch or kitchen table conversation, not just to connect with them, but to facilitate a space wherein radical truth-telling, about how black collaborative research can be meaningfully aligned with the principles of the movement for black lives. we share these yearnings, always mindful that not all of our skinfolk are kinfolk. we know that it is perhaps contentious to make this declaration within this special issue on racial justice, within and outside of many black spaces. we dance a complex line of willingness and unwillingness to unpack this. we are not finna define nor defend our decisions and desires in this work. we could have coauthored a separate piece describing the endless times we have been invited to step, inadvertently, into messes left behind by other black scholars and organizers (see mawhinney, 2016). these conversations are necessary and urgent, but there are aspects of this discourse that we will not publicly engage in, because the academy does not deserve to know about them, or be given the opportunity to appropriate them (tuck & yang, 2014). for us, blackness is a unique constellation of lived identities and experiences that are beautifully complex, heterogenous, diasporic, and dynamic. we won’t essentialize blackness; we also refuse (re)presentations of blackness as synonymous with trauma. in our discussion of a black feminist participatory action research project, trust that we will center black joy, ceremony, black futures, and black liberation. in the next section, we focus on the need to engage in critical reflexivity and name our relationships with the diverse black communities we have partnered with in research. we invite readers to engage in similar reflective praxis in writeups of their work--to name connections and lack of relationality with kinfolk. who we are/who we be! we are black american, black caribbean, black and latinx, multi-hued, and cisgendered black feminist participatory action researchers. some of us are dis/abled, some of us are queer, some of us grew up working poor, and some of us are precariously middle class. monique, devin, and marcia are bronx residents. justin has worked and organized in the bx for almost a decade. monique has conducted action research for over 15 years. she has partnered with black youth to document their parents’ organizing (guishard et al., 2005; guishard, 2009). she has worked with multi-racial middle school students to conduct oral histories and has collaborated with black environmental justice organizers to build ethics review boards. monique is a founding member of the public science project (psp), where she has consulted to dozens of participatory research projects in the psp’s annual critical participatory action research institutes. she has partnered with mothers on the move, we act for environmental justice, the peekskill middle school, the bronx community research review board (the bxcrrb), the bronx community health network, and several translational science centers. devin has collaborated on several projects that center black diasporic identity experiences. she has worked with black and latinx college students in queens and brooklyn, in new york, to develop culturally relevant hiv/sti prevention programming (project change); incarcerated queer and trans black indigenous persons of color http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 (qt-bipoc) to create narratives concerning their experiences in prison (black and pink); and black american adults discovering their ancestry and delving deeper into their understanding of their black identities (the continuum project). each of these projects humanized and centered the lived experience of participants. justin’s work has centered community engaged social justice research with black/brown sexually-fluid and gender variant youth. for nearly 15 years, he has co-created projects and initiatives around black/brown youth harassment from police and transit workers, sexual health awareness and education, family violence, homelessness, survival sex work, food insecurity, educational support/equivalency, and holistic health care. all of these actions included a frame of amplifying youth voices, infusing youth lived experience, and creating community. justin worked in a number of capacities with: boston gay lesbian social services (glass)/justice resource institute (jri) health, the cuny institute for health equity (cihe) and the center for lgbtq studies (clags). monique, justin, and devin are students of emeritus black psychologists drs. aj franklin, bill cross, tamara buckley, and roderick watts. much of what we characterize as what we finna and not finna do in our research with black folx, was shaped by lessons learned from our mentors. marcia has worked as a health educator and directed many faith-based community interventions targeting black maternal health, disparities in access to insurance, among other projects in the bronx. she has liaised with dozens of community-based health equity organizations throughout new york city, including the bronx health link, the bronx neighborhood action center, and the bxcrrb. we shared our histories collaborating with black communities with intention. we are not merely flexing; we shared our insiderwithin emic approaches, that did not absolve us of encountering many ethical hiccups, quandaries, and what-hadhappened-was moments. what we not finna do epistemically, ontologically, & ethically “the master's tools will never dismantle the master’s house” ~audre lorde (1984) the multi-generational, multi-racial, multiethnic, socioeconomically diverse population of the bronx has great wealth in social capital, dignity, and resilience. for the last ten years, the bronx was consistently ranked as the 62nd unhealthiest county, out of 62, in new york state (robert wood johnson foundation, 2020). compared to other nyc residents, bronxites are more likely to die prematurely, live in unsafe neighborhoods, report poor to fair health, be born with low birthweight, have children living in poverty, lack health insurance, lack access to exercise opportunities, be hospitalized due to asthma or stroke, struggle with obesity and/or diabetes, be overexposed to air pollution and drinking water violations, and experience high levels of stis (new york city department of health, 2020b). in new york city, we are more likely to: contract, be hospitalized, and subsequently die of covid-19 more than those in any other borough (new york city department of health, 2020a). addressing the holistic health needs and inequities of bronx residents is vitally important. yet, there is a critical disconnect between community experiences of illhealth and researcher-driven health research initiatives. because of long histories of egregious violations of their well-being in research and personal examples of: racism, sexism, fatphobia, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia in healthcare settings—many bronx folx mistrust researchers. we share this background in order to mark the geographic and historical contexts within which we designed the cera project. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 as experienced black feminist participatory action researchers (bfpar), we knew that turning to non-whitestream interventions was necessary to redress mistrust within failed community academic partnerships (caps). we also knew that turning away from whitestream theorizations, organizing practices, and conceptualizations of ethical conduct were not going to work either. more specifically, we could not rely on the “usual suspects'' in community and social psychological research, because they haven’t worked in our overly researched borough, or they have been complicit in sustaining health inequities by silencing bipoc organizational voices. this meant letting go of the cisnormativity and raceevasiveness (annamma, 2016) in lewinian and frierian action research perspectives within bronfenbrennian and alinskyian models. this also meant embracing the unrecognized, discounted intellectual, organizational labor of black scholar/activists, in addition to centering black healing and abolition. when we make mention of what we not finna to do epistemically, ontologically, and ethically we are referring to a refusal to disentangle the multitude of interactive connections between our theoretical framework, methodologies, ethical practices, and the outcomes/experiences of researchers and participants in the community engaged research academy. we are sure readers are asking themselves where can black community psychologists turn to learn how to ethically and professionally collaborate with black folx? this is a question that many of us struggle with, who are not at well-resourced hbcus, or connected to large black research collectives. we not finna gloss over the fact that there is a scarcity of academic writing on black feminist, inclusive, healingcentered, loving work and black caps. in the next section we introduce and share the framework for bfpar, which is related to black emancipatory action research, black participatory research, and critical par but stands alone in its interdisciplinary black feminist roots, epistemologies, ethics, and goals. we are confident that we are among the first scholars to use and frame our work as bfpar. however, bfpar was not birthed in the ether. its evolution was promiscuously shaped by black feminist scholarship and early writings in journals like the journal of black studies, journal of black psychology, and the american journal of community psychology by scholars like paul m. smith, jr. (1973), a. wade boykin (1978), joseph a. baldwin (1989), lisa c. jordan, anne g. bogat, and gloria smith (2001). we name these elder scholars fully, outside of parenthetical citations, to honor their contributions to our work. in the interest of brevity and of detailing the nuances of the cera project we invite our audience to procure these pieces and other additional foundational works to take a deeper dive into their nuances. however, we will give y’all a sip of the tea that lies within their pages by focusing on jordan et al.’s (2001) research. of all the pieces we could emphasize, we selected this one because it was among the first articles that we encountered, within a community psychology journal, that centered collaborations between black academics and black communities. jordan, bogat, and smith’s (2001) article taught us that too often the community engagement black community psychologists learn, from largely whitestream institutions, includes epistemes, theories, methodologies, and approaches that are imbued with scientific racism, and act to extract from communities with the intent of exploitation. they offered five methods toward “building positive, culturallyrelevant collaborations.” (jordan et al., 2001, p. 608) the five methods are: “create a foundation for trust; focus on community needs; establish forums for community feedback and involvement; create autonomy and not dependence; and help train future professionals” (jordan et al., 2001, p. 610). their lessons taught us that: 1) our work had to be evaluated by irbs and folks in the community; 2) we needed to be humble; 3) we needed to have community dialogues before we started our http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 academy; 4) we needed to go to the hood, the most impacted, most disparate places to do this work; 5) we needed to transfer skills to cera graduates to empower them to teach future generations of scholars. before moving forward in our discussion of bfpar and cera we want to acknowledge the mistrust that black folx have with black scholars and the structurally racist medical industrial complex, we want to acknowledge the og black community organizers/ interventionists who were so heavily involved with improving the lives of black communities--but have not been published. we have learned much from these elders, who aren’t academicians, and who might have intentionally divested themselves from participating in the onerous knowledge production gauntlet prevalent in academe. we try to honor the labor these folx as much as possible. these are folx like septima poinsette clark, claudia jones, barbara smith, marsha p. johnson, miss major griffin-gracy, peggy shepard, wanda santiago, fae ellington, the legacy of the community work of dr. kenneth clark and mamie phipps clark engaged in the northside center, and countless others. however, there isn’t a literature review we can provide that adequately documents their community engagement scholarship. what is bfpar? black feminist participatory action research (bfpar) is an unapologetic continuum of approaches to participatory inquiry and action between black scholars and black communities. bfpar actively engages, produces, and conducts research in service of empowering and improving the plight of black people. with respects to its theoretical genealogy, bfpar is rooted in: • cross-disciplinary and international black feminist scholarship (carty & mohanty, 2018; combahee river collective, 1983; guy-sheftall, 1995; kendall, 2020; ransby, 2003; wynter, 2003) • black feminist qualitative inquiry (brown, carducci, and kuby, 2014; dillard, 2000; evans-winters, 2019; patterson et al., 2016) • black, latinx, and indigenous feminist epistemologies (arvin, tuck, & morrill, 2013; cahill, 2019; guishard, 2019; hill collins, 2002; hooks, 2001a; lorde, 1982; mendoza aviña, 2016; nelson, 2016; okafor, 2018; sharpe, 2016) • black community psychology (palmer et al., 2019; thomas & zuckerman, 2018) • indigenous research ethics (chilisa, 2009; tuck & guishard, 2014; smith, 2013) • critical race public health (barlow, 2016; bowleg, 2012; ford & airhihenbuwa, 2010; jones, 2000) • abolition and black liberation education studies (das & strong, 2020; dumas, 2014; halkovic & greene, 2015; ladsonbillings, 2000; love, 2014; payne, 2011; tuck et al., 2014) • bipoc writings on community-based participatory action research (dill et al., 2020; drame & irby, 2016; franciscomenchavez & tungohan, 2020; kruegerhenney, 2016) bfpar methodologies are diverse; it can aim to produce new shared knowledge, but also includes secondary data and archival analyses, because new research is not always the intervention that is needed (guishard, 2018; guishard & tuck, 2013; tuck & guishard, 2014; tuck & yang, 2014). bfpar does not frame black people as researchable objects to be classified and (re)surveilled. it instead reflects on the racist, sexist, ableist history of research on black bodies (and other bodies) and endeavors to empower participants through research. bfpar recognizes the ways settler colonialism and white supremacist capitalistic hetero-patriarchy continue to shape research. however, it dares to imagine that research can be used as a tool to connect us together; wielded to advocate for social justice; and used to document our: private inequalities, shared hardships, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 histories of activism/resistance, and desires. bfpar articulates explicit refusals. it refuses dehumanization, misogynoir, preserves dignity, searches for complexity, documents embodied understandings, and decenters whitestream epistemes and ethics. it holds space for sacred moments and relational care. it is historically attuned to current and past intersectional liberation movements, traversing across space and time to forge connections between the past and the present (sankofa). lastly, bfpar carefully considers how we enter, tend to, dwell within, and adjourn black collaborative spaces/places (brown, carducci, & kuby, 2014; dill et al., 2020; evans-winters, 2019; guishard, 2015; 2016; laura, 2016). many practices of bfpar showed up throughout the course of our project. we relied on ancestral and community knowledge throughout our work. participants and graduates of the program (whom we call community experts) developed their own community agreements, which reflected the ways in which they were going to show up and regard each other within our collaborative space. we displayed these agreements wherever we were and consistently called folx out (and checked ourselves) for violating them. throughout our sessions, when the content of the academy was triggering, we instituted a practice of stopping any recordings of sacred moments to collectively process any traumatic experiences. we cared more about tending to each other, and our relationships, than documenting black pain or answering our research questions. we wish we could talk more about the importance of providing an abundance of food options, of ceremony (celebrating birthdays, accomplishments, holding graduations, etc.), and rituals (setting up and breaking down the room, serving food, debriefing after sessions, etc.). breaking bread over the course of the project created trust amongst and between participants. it supported deeper connections that outlasted the project; it furthered and enriched our love for each other. what is cera? briefly, the community engaged research academy was a two-year community-based patient engagement and bfpar project that began in september 2016 and concluded in october 2018. cera was funded by a cost reimbursable $250,000 patient centered outcomes research institute’s (pcori) eugene washington engagement award (contract #3422). pcori funds research topics, patient engagement activities, clinical trials, and other forms of research outcomes that are important to patients, clinicians, policy makers, and researchers. pcori was established and is funded through the patient protection and affordable care act of 2010. in other terms without obamacare, there would not be a cera. cera was established through a community-academic research partnership between the bronx health link (the fiscal sponsor), the bronx community research review board, (the patient/community partner), and bronx community college, through dr. monique a. guishard. monique was cera’s project director and principal investigator. figure 1: example of community agreements http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 using multi-phased community engaged methods, cera aimed to successfully establish an infrastructure, in the form of an interstitial research academy, for patients, caregivers, and other stakeholders to meaningfully engage in the research process beyond their passive participation as research subjects. we characterize cera as an interstitial (situated outside of traditional academic space) because it took place in academic and community spaces. we held classes and events within meeting spaces at the borough president’s offices within the bronx supreme courthouse, lincoln medical center, bronxcare hospital, bronx community college, community rooms at metropolitan college of new york bronx, and at mothers on the move. that is, we took cera to the people, and claimed space, on our academic plantations, to bring the community to academe. we taught regular bronx folx how to: 1. work ethically and collaboratively. 2. identify linkages between their private health troubles and health inequities impacting the residents of the bronx. 3. recognize and analyze the social determinants of bronxites’ health. 4. develop and improve their research methods and research ethics literacy. 5. research/document on the ground efforts aimed at empowering communities, along with efforts that interrupted and resisted structural racism in healthcare. 6. enact the principles of patient-centered, community engaged, and black feminist participatory action research. 7. design small scale community-based action research projects. 8. catalyze a passion for radical participation in health research as: patient advocates, community members of local irbs, members of community advisory boards, members of clinical and translational science award centers, pcori patient ambassadors, cofacilitators, and co-researchers. the community engaged research academy was guided by the following hypotheses. first, we hypothesized that bronx residents who are: racialized, from poor and working-class backgrounds, dis/abled persons, members of the lgbtqia+ community, and all persons at the intersections of these groups—are rarely actively engaged in health research or interventions designed to target them, beyond their passive participation as research subjects. secondly, we presupposed that histories of exclusion, exploitation, and mistrust in/with research could be ameliorated by 1) centering the experiential knowledge bronx residents bring to research and 2) by developing a humanizing educative space for lay people to master the language and ethics of research. please see table 1 for a complete list of our research questions and the mixed methodologies we used to attempt to answer them. we shared our hypotheses and research questions to unsettle presumptions that participatory research projects are not methodologically rigorous. organizational structure pcori eugene washington engagement awards are aimed at supporting dynamic projects charged with developing a transparent and accountable decisionmaking structure to assist with addressing ethical quandaries and/or collaborative hiccups, above and beyond approvals gained from irbs. we established a steering committee composed of our program coordinator, principal investigator, program evaluator, class facilitators, community organizers, patients, cera graduates, and members of the bronx community research review board (bxcrrb). we intentionally ensured that community members outnumbered academicians on the committee. every decision, about our hypotheses, research questions, community outreach strategies, evaluation measures, and resources disseminated were presented to cera’s steering committee before they were enacted. the steering committee frequently sat in on class sessions and ethically evaluated cera’s practices using the principles of community engagement http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 (clinical and translational sciences awards consortium, 2011) and the principles of community academic partnerships (shore et al., 2008). additionally, bxcrrb members held most of the seats on cera’s steering committee, co-authored cera presentations, and co-facilitated community outreach, and research activities. the steering committee helped develop our ethical framework (see figure 1) which was grounded in hermeneutics of love (laura, 2013). cera’s steering committee also mediated and circumvented a lot of ethical quandaries that often occur in collaborative inquiry. however, even with several, loving evaluative eyes on the project, drama popped off. research questions methodologies what are bronx residents, patients, caregivers, and patient advocates experiences with and presumptions about public health research? − 3 community dialogues − 105 community dialogue evaluations − 17 ethnographic fieldnote sets from community dialogues − 4 evaluation focus groups what role does cera play in redressing disrespect, exploitation, and research predation in bronx based health research? − 352 cera individual course evaluations − 292 cera individual artifactsa − 29 ethnographic fieldnote sets from cera sessions − 2 cera community experts evaluation focus groups what role does facilitating classes for cera play in influencing the ethical praxes and engagement among facilitators? − 14 individual facilitator evaluations what is the impact of community experts’ use of research methods and patient-centered organizing efforts after graduating from cera? − 4 cera community experts evaluation focus groups − 40 individual feedback surveys what lessons, about relational ethics can be learned from evaluating the community academic research partnership between: bronx community college, the bronx health link, and the bronx community research review board that directed cera? − 2 cera project team focus groups − 26 observations of cera activities − 12 cera project team member autoethnographic reflections a session artifacts included different things produced by the cera ces like body maps, space maps, letters to bronx patients, photovoice pictures, and draft participatory survey question table 1: research questions & data collection methodologies http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 cera’s successes and challenges cera was successful in achieving its aims and answering its research questions, over the lifespan of the project, but there were many growing pains. cera demonstrated, through mutual respect and engagement, how social movements can be put into motion. the cera community came together and completed over 47 national and local presentations about the work of the academy. establishing the community engaged research academy took us all on a journey marked by joyful peaks figure 2: the engaged research academy’s ethical framework (note: the content was grounded in hermeneutics of love and developed by cera’s steering committee.) disappointments, heartbreak, cooling off periods, healing, and boundless hope. the lessons we learned about the difficulties and promise of instigating a patientcentered research movement have irrevocably changed us. cera was a project that developed out of fierce love for our families and neighbors. it is best described as “the little engine that could” because it persisted, despite the loss of key personnel, a shaky fiscal infrastructure, and a myriad of relational ethical challenges between its research partners, facilitators, and between participants. methods & materials cera employed a variety of research methods including community dialogues, questionnaires, cognitive/space mapping, body mapping, patient narratives, focus groups, photovoice, participant observation auto-ethnographic fieldnotes and 22 bimonthly reports to pcori to capture why having a black educative space like cera is so important. we used a mash-up of these methods across different parts of the project: community dialogues (cds), cera sessions, and academy evaluation group discussions. it began with the cds. these helped spread the word about cera, consult with bronx patients on what the curriculum should cover, and to find folx interested in applying to be a cera community expert (ces). also, borrowing elements from world cafes (aldred, 2011), the conversations let community folx develop health literacy and talk openly and honestly with health officials, policy makers, service providers, and academy facilitators about the physical, social, and environmental things going on in the bronx that were affecting folx’ health. our participatory approach was purposeful in keeping folx engaged and respecting the expertise they brought into the room. cds (n=105) took place in neighborhoods most impacted by health inequities. two dialogues happened before cera 2017 (in january [n=31] and april of 2017 [n=28]); one cd happened before cera 2018 (in march of 2018; n=46). cd participants received $30 and a meal. from these rooms, word of mouth, and social media posts about cera, bronx folx earnestly responded to the call for participating in a project developed by us, about us, and for us as bipoc. seventy-eight people that either lived or worked in the bronx and were dedicated to shifting the script on bronx health, applied to cera. they applied to a program that initially only had a total of 30 spots (15 for each year). we responded by expanding cera so more folx could join (n=44; year 1 [n=20]; year 2 [n=24]). cera classes ran from march to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 june each year. there were 13 cera lessons and each one focused on a different part of public health research from ethics to methods. see table 2 and table 3 for the list of cera topics covered over the two years. the 52 hours of training were broken up by sessions that took place on thursday nights from 6:00-8:00pm and saturday mornings from 10:00am-2:00pm. we built into our planning, time off for holidays, rest, and self/community care. cera ces also received $560 for being in the academy. we always had nourishing, healthy snacks and meals. it was important to recognize and respect the labor that folx put into being a part of the cds and cera, which included making sure we came correct with how we compensated them. topics session facilitator(s) welcome & what is public health in the bronx? dr. monique a. guishard, prof. barbara hart, dr. hal strelnick, mx. nicky smith, & dr. calpurnyia roberts introduction to research ethics in the bx dr. monique a. guishard clinical data research network & practice based research network mr. paul meissner community-based ethics ms. bernice williams & ms. barbara salcedo the language of research & ethics dr. monique a. guishard space/cognitive mapping dr. patricia krueger-henney 21st century public health dr. justin t. brown x-ray/body mapping dr. jessica ruglis epi-query & interpreting data dr. calpurnyia roberts creative narrative analysis: aka research poems dr. leconte dill par-ticipatory survey design miss allison cabana & miss prakriti hassan introduction to genetic ancestry testing dr. devin a. heyward focus groups dr. tellisia williams clinical trials rev. dr. lula mae phillips participatory action research dr. monique a. guishard table 2: cera 2017 curriculum http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 topics session facilitator(s) welcome to cera: who we are, what bx hood we represent, & expectations dr. monique a. guishard, dr. justin t. brown, dr. lucretia e. jones, mr. michael williams, mr. albert greene social determinants of health dr. lucretia e. jones community engagement prof. barbara hart par-ticipatory survey design miss allison cabana & miss prakriti hassan traditional surveys & narratives dr. tanzina ahmed & dr. rositsa t. ilieva community & patient perspectives of research dr. tanzina ahmed, ms. marzetta harris, ms. alexandria sumner, mr. michael g. williams introduction to ethics dr. monique a. guishard patient ethnographies dr. leconte dill space/cognitive mapping dr. patricia krueger-henney x-ray/body mapping dr. jessica ruglis what is photovoice! dr. monique a. guishard dna 101 and genetic testing dr. devin a. heyward table 3: cera 2018 curriculum http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 cera project participants to be eligible for cera, applicants had to be a bronx: patient, resident, or provide services to patients in the bronx; at least 18 years old and be fluent in english speaking and writing. folx also had to commit to coming to the classes. for cera 2017, the average applicant was a 39-year-old, black woman, with some college, that lived/worked in the bronx for 21 years. the cera 2018 applicant was a little older, 46, and lived/worked in the bronx for about 23 years. see table 4 for cera 2017-2018 applicant demographics. we wanted an academy that reflected the broad diaspora of bronx folx, but black women, overwhelmingly, responded to our call to join cera. as a result, cera ces, in both years, included more black women in their 40s. the average community expert was a 42-year-old, black woman, with a college degree that lived or worked in the bronx for 25 years. see table 5 for cera ces’ demographics. cera facilitators cera sessions were facilitated by a collective comprised of 24 diverse feminist participatory scholar-activists with distinct organizational and institutional affiliations. cera “faculty” more closely resembled faculty at hbcus and were less like hogwarts. we, the facilitators, were overwhelmingly cis-gendered womxn (n = 18) and 58% of us identified as black (n = 14). however, cera also featured blacktinas (n = 2), latinx (n = 2), desi or southeast asian (n = 2), and white (n = 4) facilitators. in the planning of the academy, we made space for the graduates of the 2017 cohort to become facilitators for the 2018 class, helping us build capacity amongst our folx to one day do this work without us. we intentionally worked to transfer enough skills about research and public health methods, so that graduates could both do this work without us--independent of all researchers and replicate their own mini-ceras within their own communities. what we not finna do stories we collected a lot of data in order to tell dynamic and nuanced bronx patient stories and stories about the cera project. the successes of cera were inextricably linked to our use of bfpar, to the evaluative loving engagement with our steering committee, and our reliance on non-whitestream relational ethical practices. however, the community engaged research academy was not wakanda! with the best of intentions and tons of expertise we fumbled frequently. in this section we share our missteps to offer up tangible examples of the complexity of attending to racial justice in community psychological inquiry. we begin with hard lessons we learned about being explicit about our solidarities and unapologetic love for black and brown peoples. we wish we could flex and share that we anticipated these lessons and had planned for them, but that would be disingenuous. these stories are hard to tell because they are personal, are characterized by multiple layers of reflexivity, fraught with lots of emotion, including what we’ve started to call participatory heartbreak. we will use a blend of naming folx and strategic pseudonymity in our retellings. pseudonymity is used to mask the identities of problematic and contentious moments within our collaboration that intersect with racial injustice. we purposely located our analyses in situations and did not impose them on bodies or locate them in individual dispositions. universally, applying pseudonymity to all actors doesn’t make sense. the cera project was discussed at dozens of academic conferences and community gatherings. the names of the community partners are readily accessible on the web, in other publications (guishard et al., 2019), within our public curriculum, on our website, and public pcori reports about the project. telling these stories makes space for folx to weaponize our vulnerabilities and ostensibly invites surveillance of nuanced, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 cera 2017 applicants cera 2018 applicants all cera applicants n % n % n % gender women 30 65.2 22 71.0 52 68.4 men 15 32.6 6 19.4 21 27.6 gnc 1 2.1 2 6.5 3 4.0 race/ethnicitya black 26 56.5 21 67.7 47 60.3 latinx/hispanic 19 41.3 3 9.7 22 28.2 middle eastern 0 0.0 0 0.0 0 0.0 asian, southeast asian, pacific islander 4 8.7 2 6.5 6 7.6 white 2 4.3 1 3.2 3 3.8 afro-caribbean 1 2.2 2 6.5 3 3.8 indigenous/native 2 4.3 1 3.2 3 3.8 other/not listed 0 0.0 3 9.7 0 0.0 educationa some grade school 1 2.2 0 0.0 1 1.3 some high school 1 2.2 2 6.5 3 3.8 high school/ged 8 7.4 1 3.2 9 11.5 some college 18 39.1 6 19.4 24 30.8 some technical training 2 4.3 0 0.0 2 2.6 technical training 3 6.5 0 0.0 3 3.8 associate’s degree 2 4.3 4 12.9 6 7.7 bachelor’s degree 10 21.7 10 32.3 20 25.6 some post-graduate school 3 6.5 3 9.7 6 7.7 master’s degree 6 13.0 4 12.9 10 12.8 doctorate/professional degree 1 2.2 1 3.2 2 2.6 table 4: cera applicant demographics aapplicants could select as many categories as applied; these percentages add up to more than 100% note. cera 2017 (n= 46). applicants were on average 39 years old (range 18-66) and lived/worked in the bronx for 21.2 years. cera 2018 (n=32). applicants were on average 45 years old (range 23-63) and lived/worked in the bronx for 23.6 years. some respondents did not answer all items and n may vary for each demographic factor. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 cera 2017 community experts cera 2018 community experts all cera community experts n % n % n % gender women 15 75.0 17 70.8 32 72.7 men 4 20.0 5 20.8 9 20.5 gnc 1 5.0 2 8.3 3 6.8 race/ethnicitya black 14 70.0 15 62.5 29 65.9 latinx/hispanic 5 25.0 3 12.5 8 18.2 middle eastern 0 0.0 0 0.0 0 0.0 asian, southeast asian, pacific islander 1 5.0 2 8.3 3 6.8 white 0 0.0 1 4.2 1 2.3 afro-caribbean 0 0.0 3 12.5 3 6.8 indigenous/native 0 0.0 1 4.2 1 2.3 other/not listed 2 10.0 2 8.3 4 9.1 educationa some grade school 0 0.0 0 0.0 0 0.0 some high school 0 0.0 2 8.3 2 4.5 high school/ged 4 20.0 1 4.2 5 11.4 some college 3 15.0 4 16.7 7 15.9 some technical training 0 0.0 0 0.0 0 0.0 technical training 1 5.0 0 0.0 1 2.3 associate’s degree 0 0.0 4 16.7 4 9.1 bachelor’s degree 6 30.0 6 25.0 12 27.3 some post-graduate school 0 0.0 3 12.5 3 6.8 master’s degree 5 25.0 3 12.5 8 18.2 doctorate/professional degree 1 5.0 1 4.2 2 4.5 table 5: cera community expert demographics a applicants could select as many categories as applied; these percentages add up to more than 100% note. cera 2017 (n=20). ces were on average 42.5 years old (range 18-62) and lived/worked in the bronx for 24 years. cera 2018 (n=24). ces were on average 43.3 years old (range 23-64) and lived/worked in the bronx for 25.2 years. some respondents did not answer all items and n may vary for each demographic factor. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 complex, and sacred aspects of our collaborative work. we can’t stop people from hating or engaging in overzealous simplistic analyses of villains and saints of our stories. however, like drame and irby (2016) we contend that, producing antiracist scholarship, and, in particular, engaging in the processes of coproducing anti-oppressive research, requires that black researchers carry out the intellectual, emotional, and creative task of working the margins to produce distinctive processes and analysis steeped in freedom to be both different from and part of the solidarity of humanity. (p. 3) lesson one: we finna unapologetically love all black and brown peoples “what do you mean their pronoun is they?” cera steering committee member “speak english! i hate it when they talk spanish around us.” cera community expert “she’s just the fiscal conduit.” cera program staff “i know what lgbt means, what do all the letters after it mean?” cera community expert we can tell a bunch of stories that fit within the frame of no hateration in this dancerie. throughout the life cycle of cera, we had to wrestle with our demonstrations of unapologetic love of black and brown peoples between collaborators, among the facilitators, for, and within the two cohorts of cera graduates. as it pertains to clashes between collaborators contentious moments abound. first, we (different permutations of we) sometimes misgendered or did not immediately check folx for misgendering our non-binary program coordinator nicky. real talk, we all made this injurious violation at least once, though some of us identify as queer. we had to learn to check our own cisnormative privilege and let go of religious beliefs, along with reinscriptions of the gender binary, that got in the way of loving nicky (our program coordinator), later rodrigo (our lawyer), and any of our non-binary, gnc, & trans family. though we normalized sharing gender pronouns, were more explicit about our refusals, (see figure 3), figure 3: the ethics guiding cera's work and held space for all gender identities later on, there were some collaborators that refused these demonstrations of love. misogynoir, race-evasiveness, ageism, antilatinx sentiments also reared their ugly heads in our work. in the interests of brevity, we will share our confrontations with misogynoir. cera had two principal investigators at the beginning of the project: monique and reynaldo. however, we were also very reliant on our community partner, barbara, for: office space, mentoring of program staff, procurement of materials, stipend distribution, and overall budget management. on many occasions the pis did not agree about how to fully honor barbara’s contributions as a co-investigator, co-author, and co-owner of cera. monique misinterpreted several comments the other pi consistently made about where barbara should be situated in the project’s organizational structure. she initially characterized requests to remove barbara as a co-author on a research poster and to refer to her solely as the fiscal partner, as the result of personality clashes between reynaldo and barbara. reynaldo was a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 dedicated retired community pediatrician in the bx for many years. he was a white presenting older argentine man who worked diligently, for decades, on a multitude of community health interventions. barbara was a beautiful nubian locked black woman, in her sixties, from harlem, new york. she worked in hiv/aids and black infant and maternal health for over 20 years. for over four years reynaldo, barbara, and monique had successfully collaborated on communitybased projects. however, the partnership was strained by power asymmetries. monique readily admits that she was so consumed with teaching five classes, her own invisible dis/abilities, leading the methodological aspects of the project, writing, and submitting the 67-page irb application, that she glossed over the overt and subtle tensions. that is, being caught up with onerous pressures of knowledge production in the academy and personal illness contributed to her, albeit momentarily, eschewing black feminist ethics of care, and honoring lived expertise as a key criterion of meaning. without barbara we could not have procured meeting space for the community dialogues. without barbara’s name on recruitment emails, we ran the risk of folx deleting our invitation. truth was, barbara was more hood famous, in bronx public health circles, than any of us. monique ultimately effusively apologized to barbara and committed to radically acknowledging barbara’s contributions in all presentations, writeups, and products of the academy henceforth. reynaldo left the project after attempts to mediate and reconcile what monique later characterized as misogynoir were unsuccessful. his departure was the first of many that greatly impacted our ability to establish and sustain the community engaged research academy. later on, barbara would also resign from her position as executive director of the organization that was our community partner, but she never left the project. she would go on to teach a cera class on community engagement, co-present with monique at dozens of conferences, and procure additional funding to support the afterlife of the cera project. barbara taught us all so much about the importance of being explicit about refusing racial and social injustice within bfpar. she taught us that good ethical intentions were speculative if they were not accompanied up by transparent consistent deeds. she reminded us that expertise came in beautifully diverse and embodied forms. she re-centered our commitment to developing relationships and solidarities that would outlast the life of research projects (guishard et. al, 2018). lesson two: we finna check ourselves before we wreck ourselves “why is the data so old? i know it takes time to update, but they got to do better than this!” cera 2017 community dialogue participant “hold on...can you explain what these acronyms mean? “ cera 2017 research team member there is considerable overlap between diasporic black feminist epistemes, indigenous epistemologies, and embodied ethical practices as it pertains to honoring community, reflecting on mutuality, entering spaces respectfully, co-creating research that edifies all stakeholders, and exiting communities improved, healed, or better as a product of community-based research. in this section we share blips of interconnected stories about another intersection of racial justice of black feminist participatory action research, which required us to dynamically exercise humility and unsettle our reliance on academicease. these stories weave across time within the project. we start by retelling a story, about old data, at the abuelita table, at our first community forum. we will move to some generative drama that we confronted, at the second cera class we facilitated, two months later. our stories reach their climax during a class on clinical trials, in 2018, and conclude with excerpts of a focus group of both cohorts http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 reflecting on cera as a humanizing learning space that needs to be sustained. most of cera’s facilitators were academic professors at public colleges. most of us attended and ultimately graduated from the cuny graduate center, in new york, wherein we were instrumental in cocreating a hub for participatory action research. non-academicians facilitated lessons on publicly available health datasets and patient research networks, in addition to assisting with our community conversation events. we shared this to say that we made some foolish assumptions about our ability to coordinate a research academy that did not humiliate, dismiss, and/or traumatize non-white bronx patients in the ways that too many american classrooms and schools have done. in part, we assumed that our shared commitment to social justice, racial justice, public education, and community engagement, among facilitators, would be the connective tissue that held the cera classes together---we were wrong. the abuelita table it was a cold, late january evening at lincoln medical center in 2017. this was cera’s coming out party. folx were there from all over the south bronx. we asked them to consult with us, about the design of our patient-centered research academy. we compensated attendees with a $30 money order and a resource packet. the agenda was full; it included breakout sessions and presentations (see table 3). moe (monique) introduced the project and invited community members to talk about their experiences with research, health care institutions, and the public health system. next, calpurnyia, a black woman epidemiologist, from the new york city department of health (nycdoh), stepped up to present morrisania’s community health profile data to the room. things seemed to be going great, that is, until we split up, for smaller group discussions. marcia, devin, and justin were in the room facilitating these conversations. moe was busy handling logistics. it was justin’s table that shook things up. many issues came up during calpurnyia’s presentation, one around terminology/language use and one around the data. throughout the presentation, calpurnyia used terms like morbidity and mortality instead of birth and death rates. she didn’t unpack other terms or, even check in with folx in the room to see if clarity was needed. to her credit, the slides she used were preformatted, by the nycdoh and part of a larger community toolkit. we reviewed them before her presentation, but she had to get approval to make edits. the language was exclusionary and made the content inaccessible to most of the community members present. moments like these often cause people to shut down. part of our understanding, and interpretation, of bfpar’s praxis requires an ethic of care that evaluates the needs of everyone in the room. if the energy shifts, discerned by glazed, diluted, disinterested eyes, it is important to pause, check-in, and re-evaluate the direction of the conversation. recognizing the energy shift, monique and justin turned to a table with approximately 7 older black and latinx women. these abuelitas gave us “the look.” for the uninitiated, the look is a glare that prompts folx in the know that they’ve committed an infraction and calls for you to act right--immediately. one of the abuelitas, evelyn, was a retired social worker, who challenged the veracity and age of the data on calpurnyia’s slides. the other elders expressed similar sentiments as persons who had lived/worked in morrisania for decades. this push back prompted monique to ask calpurnyia to break down the terms she was using. monique and nicky also started a “parking lot” at the front of the room (figure 4). the parking lot was a series of large white poster paper that served as a space to document questions and translate jargon into everyday language – in real time. this practice allowed for the community dialogue to shift from not just a place of review and feedback, but one of shared learning and knowledge building. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 figure 4: an example of the parking lot used during cera sessions. as a result of the public snatching, from the abuelitas, calpurnyia went back to the doh and explained how she was reprimanded for taking old data to the 'hood. her supervisors took this experience seriously and subsequently updated the toolkits employees of the bronx neighborhood action center used for community outreach. calpurnyia bravely checked herself and listened to elders with deep knowledge about their disease communities. it was important for cera’s programmatic staff and future facilitators, in the room, to witness this call out moment from the abuelitas. we didn't want to get snatched too. we learned to actively check each other, on our use and overreliance of jargon to teach research methods. within the audio recordings for sessions, dr. moe can often be heard saying: "what does that mean? we gotta unpack that!" the latter would prompt the rest of us to define any medical or academic-ease spoken into the room. participants of the academy would frequently take pictures of these unpackings and share them on social media with family and friends. we were surprised by this strategy, but we also recognized how important this was to the community. we saw this as less symptomatic of note taking in the instagram generation, and more of an attempt to memorialize the information, the moment, so that it could be remembered and shared. we need a motha lovin’ presentation template the community dialogues helped us decide the content of the cera classes but not the specific ways we would teach the curriculum. this became clear during the second cera session in 2017. a key moment occurred during a hot, rainy, lengthy saturday session. the vibes that day were off, there was a lot on the agenda to get through, the room was too small to comfortably accommodate all of us and the food order was jacked up. by the time tobias showed up, the air was a bit thick. tobias was late and some folx were in their feelings about it, but there might have been a number of reasons to explain his tardiness. maybe he was late because he had never been to the campus. perhaps it was hard to find our meeting spot. maybe he was late, and in his own feelings about having to pinch-hit for another facilitator. unfortunately for tobias, he had to present last. it seemed like the presentation was a generic one that had been used before, and probably successfully delivered before at his own institution. this carbon copy presentation made it seem like there was no attempt to tailor it to an audience that looked like us. an alphabet soup of acronyms and esoteric terms were used throughout the presentation. it was too much like traditional schooling. we had just heard from bxcrrb members and dr. moe talking about community-based research ethics. we had just completed an interactive ethic roleplay exercise. either way, the presentation fell flat. in this moment, we understood that we needed to change things up. a number of lessons were learned. the day was just too packed and contained too much damn information. we resolved not to attempt teaching more than two methods in a day. we learned to organize food, good and tasty food, from offcampus eateries. trust that black and brown community folx will judge about/from the type of food you provide. we also learned to make sure that our meeting spaces were accessible and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 comfortable for everyone. most of all, we learned that a critical part of checking ourselves, before we were snatched by grannies and other folx was to create a consistent, predictable template that kept our methods lesson cute, tight, and on point. we began the template that night and worked to finalize it for our next class. we wanted to create a template for the comfort of folx that historically have experienced educational spaces as sites of trauma. the layout of the template included 10 slides: a cover slide, an agenda slide, an introduction to the facilitator which asked them to be explicit about their community-based work, an overview of the method of topic, an analysis of the role of the researcher and participant within the method, advantages and disadvantages of the method, a tangible example of ethical issues that emerge with the method, and the facilitator’s contact information with a set of references. there was also space for facilitators to include an activity/homework slide for folx to try it out. conclusion as i reflect on my experience as a graduate of cera’s 2017 cohort, i have complicated thoughts. i utilized the education i received, through the various topics in the curriculum, in many ways. i was able to share what i learned with other community residents, who i came in contact with at my church. i also shared what i learned while conducting outreach as a health educator. i brought my eldest daughter, petagaye, who was a college student studying nursing at the time, to participate and learn about the academy. she had the opportunity to work and get paid as a focus group facilitator at two of cera’s community dialogues. but, i must honestly admit that there were times i felt very uncomfortable because not everyone at the table was sincere. some people seemed to be opportunistic and only in it for the stipend; their hearts weren’t really in the project. though those people made me feel uneasy, i was encouraged to continue attending and play my part, which was to learn how to engage my community, advocate for myself, my family, community, and more. so many of the lessons we learned, how they influenced transformations within me and the other participants…were breathtaking to witness. ~marcia stoddard pennant as you digested our stories, you might have asked yourself what was to be gleaned from these truth-tellings that are pertinent to racial justice or black community psychology? were there any strategies or ways of being that could have circumvented these relational ethical quandaries we encountered? was cera a success if community experts decided not to do the community-based research projects we worked hard to help them design? was it a failure if they chose to join a local community-based ethics review board instead (the bxcrrb)? throughout this article, we have attempted to address these questions whilst sharing the successes and challenges of using black feminist participatory action research to actualize the community engaged research academy (cera). we scrutinized the accomplishments and pyrrhic victories of the cera project to offer concrete examples of what attending to racial justice in community psychological inquiry can look like to readers. we offered an unwavering commitment to loving all and not some black folx, checking your professional humility before you wreck the project, centering black feminist participatory praxis (in the forms of developing community agreements, and articulating refusals), as lessons to be gleaned about initiating and sustaining racially just interventions. as marcia notes, above, cera was imperfect. it was successful in achieving its aims and answering its research questions, over the lifespan of the project, but there were many growing pains. it took us all on a journey marked by joyful peaks, disappointments, heartbreak, cooling off periods, healing, and boundless hope. the lessons we learned about the difficulties and promise of initiating a patient-centered research movement that has instigated transformation for all of us, community experts, the programmatic staff, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 the steering committee, and the facilitators. it literally transformed the bronx community research review board (bxcrrb). figure 5: cera community experts: what is cera? – these words reflect what cera ces said where words they would use to describe cera displayed in a word cloud. outside of obtaining irb approval, we used shared decision making through our steering committee, and consulted with the bxcrrb to check our collaborative ethics. we argue that ethics, in black community academic partnerships, can never be prescribed away or resolved with the most robust resources. evaluations of ethics evoke more questions than they answer and invite analyses of power in partnerships. ethics should be reflected upon throughout the life cycle of a participatory research project. we were fortunate to be able to work with the bxcrrb and encourage other black community psychologists to host community conversations, and/or consult with community advisory boards, and research review boards on the focus, design, data collection methods, and plan to share back research findings before and throughout the life of the project. the bronx community research review board is a non-profit, volunteer organization of bronx residents, patients, researchers, organizers, and caregivers. the membership of the bxcrrb is multigenerational, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, though most of us identify as black. members come from or work in 9 bronx neighborhoods. members actively bring scholarly and organic expertise with many of the disease communities that are prevalent in the borough we call home. fundamentally, the board has 3 main arms: community research ethics review, healingcentered community engagement, and healthcare advocacy. to be clear, the bxcrrb predated the establishment of cera. however, it was on its last legs and badly in need of funding to survive. monique and reynaldo wrote the cera pcori grant to assist with sustaining the work of the board. we mention the bxcrrb here because many of its past members facilitated classes for cera. we mention it because of all the options we thought graduates of cera would pursue after the grant was over, completing the small community-based project they designed, joining an irb as a community rep, or becoming a patient advocate; they gravitated toward joining the board. some might see this as a failure. however, that simplistic perspective ignores the agentic power that participants have in deciding their fate. we choose to see it as the truest, most liberatory expression of selfdetermination that graduates could have pursued. under the praxis of bfpar, research is not always the intervention that is needed. joining an organization dedicated to health equity justice in the bronx may be more impactful and empowering in the long run. at the request of graduates, we extended the curriculum of cera, to include rigorous training in research ethics. cera graduates joined the bxcrrb, formed a new board of directors, and were able to declare independence from the fiscal and sponsoring organizational partners (the bronx health link and albert einstein college of medicine). the bxcrrb has since become a 501(c)3 organization with its own mission and vision. the board now aims to ensure that bronxites are meaningfully consulted and included in community-based interventions geographically located in their neighborhoods. the bxcrrb convenes threshold spaces wherein the results of research projects are returned to intended and unintended participants in timely, culturally responsive, relevant, and accessible ways. the bxcrrb and the cera project are guided by the core ethics and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 mission in our shared hashtag- #nomoreresearchaboutuswithoutus. cera was like catching lightning in a bottle. it was a moment where everything aligned, and the heavens opened up (in the form of the affordable care act and federal funding to address health inequities). however, now we question whether this work can be reproduced. by us? by others? should or can it be sustained? when pcori is dying? when the outcome of the election decides the fate of the affordable care act? when racial justice inquiry, in the form of critical race methodologies are being racially attacked by this current administration? we have been asked to replicate cera in many forms, to develop academies for young people, formerly incarcerated, lgbtqia+, and undocumented persons. we have often asked ourselves whether we emotionally afford to do it all again? we lost personal and professional relationships, time with our families, time away for accomplishing academic milestones, and a lot of sleep. and yet, we were able to gain new relationships and deepen existing ones. cera changed the way we see ourselves, in the academy, in the community, within in between spaces. it changed the ways we thought it was possible to enter, live within, meaningfully partner, and 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(2005). an interactive and contextual model of community-university collaborations for research and action. health education & behavior, 32(1), 84101. https://doi.org/10.1177/10901981042 69512 tedxtalks. (2014, july 10). allegories on race and racism | camara jones | tedxemory [video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g nhcy6ftybm&t=5s thomas, d., & zuckerman, a. (2018). black lives matter in community psychology. community psychology in global perspective, 4(2), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1285/i24212113v4i 2p1 tuck, e., & guishard, m. (2014). uncollapsing ethics: racialized sciencism, settler coloniality, and an ethical framework of decolonial participatory action research. in t.m. kress, c. malott, & b.j. porfilio (eds.), challenging status quo retrenchment: new directions in critical qualitative research, 3 – 27. tuck, e., smith, m., guess, a. m., benjamin, t., & jones, b. k. (2014). geotheorizing black/land: contestations and contingent collaborations. departures in critical qualitative research, 3(1), 5274.https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2014. 3.1. 52 http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.16.2.18 https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.16.2.18 global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 30 tuck, e. & yang, k.w. (2014). unbecoming claims: pedagogies of refusal in qualitative research. qualitative inquiry, 20(6), 811-818. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004145 30265 wynter, s. (2003). unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation--an argument. cr: the new centennial review, 3(3), 257337. http://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 31 appendix: additional images http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 32 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 33 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 34 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 35 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 36 http://www.gjcpp.org/ social representations of indigenous people within a sample of non-indigenous young adults in quebec, canada thomas saïas1, mathilde perray2, karen devaud1, & johanna nouchi1 keywords: indigenous people, canada, relationships, non-indigenous, social representation, racism author biographies: thomas saïas, is a professor in the psychology department at uqam, where he chairs the epione research team on public health and community health. the research team's topics focus on the transformation of public services to reduce social inequalities. french, he has been working in canada since 2015 and has developed a research focus on relations between indigenous and non-indigenous people, struck by the difficulty of public institutions to overcome operating models that promote inequalities. mathilde perray, is a phd student in social psychology at greps laboratory in university lumière lyon 2 (france), under the supervision of professor marie preau. she turned towards community psychology and community-based participatory research after completed her last year in bachelor's degree in psychology at the université du québec à montréal (uqam). she is currently working on the evaluation of a community program toward women living with hiv in mali, in order to study the process of community empowerment. she focused on hiv research through social issues, including to the most vulnerable populations, and the psychosocial problems they may encounter. karen devaud, graduated from the university of lausanne (switzerland) with a master's degree in clinical psychology and psychopathology. deeply rooted in practice, she conducts various action-research projects in switzerland, india and canada in the field of community psychology and urban sociology. she also works as a systemic psychotherapist in lausanne with a youth population. she dedicates her therapeutic practice and community projects to minority populations living with social and territorial injustices, particularly teenagers, migrants and indigenous communities. johanna nouchi, graduated with a bachelor's degree (licence) in psychology from the university of caen (france). currently a student at the université du québec à montréal (uqam), she is completing a psy.d. in community psychology under the supervision of thomas saïas, ph. d. her research interests focus on reconciliation processes in a postcolonial context. more specifically, as part of her doctoral research, she is interested in the experience of secondary school 1 université du québec à montréal, 100 rue sherbrooke o montréal, québec. h2p3x8 canada 2 greps, université lyon 2, lyon, france global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 history teachers regarding the transmission of the history of aboriginal peoples within the history of canada in quebec. the objective is to document the extent to which federal and provincial policies resonate with francophone quebec communities through teaching. recommended citation: saïas, t., perray, m., devaud, k., & nouchi, j. (2020). social representations of indigenous people within a sample of non-indigenous young adults in quebec, canada. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(3), 1 18. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: thomas saïas, université du québec à montréal, département de psychologie. email : saias.thomas@uqam.ca http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:saias.thomas@uqam.ca global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 social representations of indigenous people within a sample of non-indigenous young adults in quebec, canada relations between indigenous and non-indigenous people in quebec have been characterized by cultural and political domination by european-canadian populations. recently, a pro-reconciliation political movement has emerged and is trying to ease these relations. the purpose of this study was to evaluate the extent to which the proreconciliation discourse has succeeded in being integrated into the social representations of the youngest quebeckers. using a qualitative methodology, we have highlighted that a paternalistic discourse remains, as well as elements of representation that identify indigenous people as diseased, helpless and freeloaders. the discussion focuses on the dangers of a reconciliation approach that would only emphasize the place of indigenous people without taking into account the obstacles generated by the implicit prejudice of social representations. introduction relations between indigenous and nonindigenous people in canada are currently administrated through a national “reconciliation” policy. this reconciliation process was formally initiated in the 1990s. and, since 1998, successive federal administrations have sought to make amends by acknowledging the abuses committed by the canadian state trough the indian residential school system (1883-1996), where hundreds of thousands of indigenous children were forcibly abducted and physically, psychologically and culturally abused. political actions targeting reconciliation seem to be based on public repentance of the canadian state and its desire to “moving forward with indigenous partners on different paths toward reconciliation”, in a nation-to-nation relationship (crown-indigenous relations and northern affairs canada, 2019). today, canada's federal and provincial governments provide specific services and administrative structures for indigenous people. two federal departments were created in 2017: the ministry of crownindigenous relations and the ministry of indigenous services. celebrating the 2018 international day of the world's indigenous people, carolyn bennet and jane philipott, whom held the aforementioned offices, said: “prime minister trudeau has emphasized that there is no relationship more important to canada than the one with indigenous people […] reconciliation is not just the work of governments. on this very special day, we encourage all canadians to honor the diverse cultures of indigenous people around the globe and to reflect upon our shared responsibility in the journey of reconciliation towards a fairer, sustainable and more prosperous canada” (crownindigenous relations and northern affairs canada, 2018). while national policies encourage people to look to the future, the same is true at the regional and local level. in quebec, the first indigenous territory to be colonized by the french and home to 11 indigenous nations and 105 000 indigenous people, policies are aligned with the federal government: “as for indigenous communities, the government will continue to support them in order to that they participate fully in prosperity of quebec by the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 establishment and maintenance of partnerships based on development economic, social and cultural” (gouvernement du québec, 2018, p. 2). from an indigenous perspective, the discourse on reconciliation and the application of the law in the context of the various treaties is worrying. for the assembly of first nations quebec-labrador, it is an ongoing struggle to have their selfdetermination and voice recognized in the process itself: "the process must be reset to zero to ensure that it is based on our fundamental principles of participation. the government of canada must reconsider its strategy to be more respectful of our perspective rather than impose its own ideas. [...] the federal government will have to accept that the failure of this process is a direct result of its unilateral approach rather than a failure of our leadership” (assembly of first nations quebec-labrador, 2018, p. 1). furthermore, the assembly remains cautious and wonders if: "the government of quebec is interested in seriously addressing the recommendations of the united nations declaration on indigenous rights” (nuovo, 2019) in this context, the political reconciliation process appears highly superficial and settlerdriven. it aims to set new rules on a way to live together on the same territory. it is hiding the psychological process that would aim to provide settlers with new mindsets on the colonial processes, their consequences, and the way they repeat themselves. reconciliation is a “multi-level task that requires ongoing attention and effort directed towards constitution building, institutional reform and relational transformation” (maddison, 2017). as so, it requires not only political gestures and discourses but also education and actions directed to sociopsychological alterations in society (maddison, 2017; maddison, clark, & de costa, 2016; regan, 2010). as stated by davis et al., the reconciliation discourse and political process have been dismissed by indigenous scholars “as a romantic attempt to smooth over indigenous–settler relationships while leaving the status quo untouched” (davis et al., 2016). researchers from australia, canada, the united states and new zealand have stated that, in addition to recognizing conflict and the history of violence towards indigenous people, work on the depth of social representations and mutual acculturation is needed to overcome the settler-led reconciliation process. (carlson, 2017; maddison et al., 2016; regan, 2010; tuhiwai smith, 1999). neocolonialism through settler cultural standards is rooted in daily behaviors and social representations. social representations refer to modalities of knowledge of common sense that enable individuals to create meaning in the world in which they live, to orient their actions and their relationships with others (delouvée, 2016). unlike social cognitions, such as stereotypes or attitudes, social representations are not a person's response to the social environment, but rather a dynamic whole: they designate both the content of knowledge and the social process by which it is formed through interaction (duveen & lloyd, 1990). using group position theory (a theory of prejudice based on the perception of the superiority of one group over another), denis (2015) studied small communities in ontario. through 160 interviews, he unveiled that pervasive prejudice and discrimination towards indigenous people from nonindigenous people remained, while intergroup marriages and apparent friendship seemed to rule the community. following similar objectives, morrisson et al. studied prejudices and stereotypes in central canada and detailed how indigenous people still experience discriminations and prejudice http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 at different structural levels: institutional, legal, educational and medical as well as at an interpersonal level, through discriminations and racism (morrison, morrison, harriman, & jewell, 2008). in canada, and from the settler point of view, reconciliation may appear as a comfortable, compatible with human rights and promoting the peace-maker myth of the canadian people (davis et al., 2016; regan, 2010). hence, to achieve a “reconciliation process”, it seems necessary to identify the facilitators allowing a real shift of representations, beside the political discourse. so that a bi-directional (indigenous towards non-indigenous and vice versa) acculturation can take place (bourhis & el-geledi, 2010). yet, very few studies sought to investigate the social representations that indigenous and non-indigenous have towards each other, in order to implement policies that would be based on facts as well as on political interests. within a larger research program intending to evaluate the psychological aspects of reconciliation in quebec, canada, our research team led an exploratory study aiming to describe the social representations of indigenous people from the point of view of non-indigenous young adults. by studying social representations, and not only the stereotypes of non-indigenous towards indigenous people, we seek to understand what these representations are, but also how they have been constructed and disseminated among this generation. hence, our objective was to evaluate the extent to which the previous colonial order remained within the youngest adult population, which could possibly affect the way to which the current reconciliation can be used as a neocolonial instrument. we hypothesized that, using social representation conceptual framework and the spontaneous evocations method (abric, 2003), social representations in nonindigenous young adults would remain tinged with racism and paternalism, in spite of the communication efforts from the technocratic authorities. methods conceptual framework social representations theory (moscovici, 1963) is a “conceptual framework that enables to understand and explain the way individuals and groups elaborate, transform and communicate their social reality” (rateau, moliner, guimelli, & abric, 2011). social representations constitute a knowledge system, collectively elaborated and acquired through communication (jodelet, 1984). their evaluation has been the subject of a large body of literature and the “hierarchical evocation” method developed by abric is now the most commonly used way to investigate social representations in the structural perspective (abric, 2003; guimelli & deschamps, 2000). it aims to reveal the central structures of a social representation (structures shared among people from the same social group), as well as its peripheral system (contents sensitive to context). more importantly, it allows to unveil the existence of a sub-structure, within the core of the representation, called the “silent zone” (dany, urdapiletta, & lo monaco, 2015; lo monaco, piermatto, rateau, & tavani, 2017). the silent zone is constituted with counter-normative elements, which cannot be seized through direct questioning. counter-normative elements represent elements from the social representation in contradiction with the group’s values and valued norms (abric, 2003). the “hierarchical evocation” method uses specific techniques that release the subjects from social desirability, in order to identify these counter-normative elements called “silent zone” (dany et al., 2015). instruments http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 in the hierarchical evocation method (abric, 2003; lo monaco et al., 2017), participants are asked to spontaneously associate five words or expressions to the concept being studied. in the case of this research, nonindigenous participants were asked: “what are the first five words or expression that come to your mind while hearing ‘indigenous people’”. they were then asked to order their answers, ranking them from the less important to them (concerning the object being studied) to the most important. the method also allows to reveal the silent zone of the representation, by using a “substitution technique”. in this context, the substitution technique was as follows: “according to you, if we were to ask all the students from your program what were the first five words or expression that would come to their mind while hearing “indigenous people”, what would they answer?” this substitution technique brings the participants to mention the components of the social representation that are sensitive to social desirability and would not be spontaneously brought up using the first instruction (lo monaco et al., 2017). analyses hierarchical evocations. following abric’s instructions (abric, 2003; dany et al., 2015), our research team used a 3-step analysis: step 1: all words and expressions were grouped into semantic categories sharing common meaning. two members of the research team operated this thematic grouping task. words used by the participants were also used as frequently as possible to name the definitive category. step 2: frequencies of appearance were calculated for each semantic category. in this study, categories that were used by at least 10 participants were considered into our description of the social representations. categories that were above the threshold of 10% of the participants were considered as “highly represented”. step 3: mean ranks were calculated for each semantic category. we considered the mean ranks from 1 to 2,49 as “important” terms and from 2.5 to 5 as “less important”. table 1 presents the structure of the social representation, according to the method developed by abric and considering the thresholds used in this study. table 1 the structure of a social representation using hierarchical evocations high rank (1-2.49) low rank (2.5-5) high frequencies (>10%) central system periphery: 1st peripheral system medium frequencies (<10%) periphery: contrasting elements periphery: 2nd peripheral system note: semantic categories were included in this structure if they were mentioned by at least 10 participants. counter-normative elements are revealed through the comparison of the participants’ answers to the two set of instructions. researchers examined the variation of frequency of the semantic categories appearing while using with the substitution instruction. we selected the semantic categories that varied from more than +/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 30% (the threshold was chosen to reflect important variations) between the regular and substitution instructions. all instruments were administrated online, in french language, using limesurvey™ solutions. participants and procedure young canada-born adults (born in the 1990s or 2000s) with a medium to high level of education were recruited, as we sought to recruit individuals who were exposed to the canadian culture with regards to the indigenous people of canada. we also sought to homogenize our sample in terms of education, seeking people who were currently enrolled in an academic program (undergraduate or graduate). by using these criteria, we hypothesized that the exposure to the governmental discourse would be similar within our sample. six quebec universities were contacted in order to circulate our online questionnaire. administrators from each program whose contact information was available online were contacted, as well as any sports or alumni association whose contact information could be found. online students’ groups (through social media) were also considered and were asked to circulate the questionnaire. the questionnaire was released april 19th, 2018 and closed april 26th, 2018. results participants during the seven days of the study, 821 individuals accessed the questionnaire. from those, 515 adequately completed the survey. ninety-two participants were born before 1990 and thus entered the questionnaire in spite of the initial filter question. we decided to remove their answers from the present analyses. in this initial sample, 59 participants were not born in canada and only 27 declared they belonged to indigenous nations of canada. these numbers were not high enough to run specific analysis using the hierarchical evocation method. they were removed from the present study and will be analyzed at a later stage of our research program. as several questionnaires were excluded for cumulative reasons (age, place of birth, indigenous status), the final sample was constituted of 351 valid questionnaires from 1990’s canada-born, non-indigenous students. table 2 presents the final sample of this study. this sample of 23.4 mean years of age is mainly feminine. only 7 people were born outside quebec, giving a particular cultural homogeneity. almost 8 out of 10 participants were undergraduate students. table 2 final sample of the study n % gender male 59 16.8% female 289 82.3% none of the above 3 0.9% mean age 23,36[20-28], sd=4,06 place of birth canada (quebec) 344 98.0% canada (other provinces) 7 2.0% academic status undergraduate 275 78.3% graduate 76 21.7% http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 social representations while exposed to the instruction: “what are the first five words or expression that come to your mind while hearing “indigenous people”?”, the 351 participants from the final sample produced 1755 words/expressions. from these, 157 semantic categories were created. fourty-three of these categories were used by at least 10 participants and 10 categories were used by 36 or more participants, hence reaching the 10% threshold. table 3 presents the social representation of indigenous people from our sample, according to abric’s method of investigation. table 4 presents the categorization process, with the initial wording of the participants in each semantic category. table 3 social representation of indigenous people from non-indigenous young adults in quebec, canada high rank (1-2.49) low rank (2.5-5) high frequencies (>10%) category n participants category n participants first nations 84 [indian] reservation 159 culture 75 alcohol 47 native americans 55 nature 45 community 41 traditions 38 poverty 37 indians 36 medium frequencies (<10%) category n category n ancestors 17 north 33 first comers 15 residential schools 27 rights 13 family 26 nations 10 history 26 hunting 25 inuit 22 spirituality 20 feathers 20 natives 19 exclusion 18 discrimination 18 defining physical characteristics 17 minority 16 fishing 16 traditional housing 15 territory 15 quebec 15 origins 14 people 14 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 isolation 13 differences 13 traditional instruments 13 violence 13 colonialism 13 language 13 difficulties 13 arts 13 beliefs 12 assimilation 11 injustice 10 no taxes 10 social issues 10 table 4 categorization process final category words/expressions within the category regular instruction [indian] reservation reservation, blue point, wendake, kanawake, mashteuiatsh, uashat, kitiganzibi, pikogan, mistissini, pessamit, indian reservation, native reservations, mastheuiach, odanak, kanawaki, wemontaci alcohol alcohol, alcoholism, alcohol / drugs, alcohol problems, fetal alcohol, alcoholics, beer, alcoholic beverage ancestors ancestors, "i see the face of an old indian sage", ancestral, older arts dance, arts, music, artistic, emerging literature, tales and legends, indian time, samian, songs, rap assimilation assimilation, deculturation, loss of identity, forced assimilation beliefs different beliefs, spirits, beliefs, spirit of all, symbol, holistic, cycle colonialism colonial, colonization, colonized people, destroyed by colonizers, colonialism, colonization / paternalism, colonized community community, importance of community, group, group of people, ethnicity culture culture, cultural richness, strong culture, indigenous culture defining physical characteristics dark skin, dark hair, dark skin (tanned), braids, swarthy, tanned, dark complexion, almond eyes, dark color, dark, brown skin, different skin colors, red skin, dark face differences different, they have their own rhythms, differences, different mentality difficulties difficulties, live difficulties, numerous difficulties (alcohol, suicide, abuse, etc.), difficulties: drugs, low schooling, lack of confidence, personal difficulties, daily struggle http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 discrimination discrimination, victims of discrimination, second-rank citizen exclusion people sidelined, exclusion, excluded from society, excluded, social exclusion, lack of inclusion, people left to themselves, excluded, sad exclusion family family, family and group culture, intergenerational, intergenerational, big family, fraternity, culture (family values) feathers feathers, makeup / feathers first comers first-comers, those who populated and inhabited america through beringia, first, first nations, first inhabitants, first resident of a place, first people first nations first nations, iroquois, montagnais, cree, innu, naskapi, mohawk, anishnabe, micmacs, atikamekw, anicinabe, algonquians, maliseet of viger, wendat fishing hunting and fishing, fishing, hunting, fishing and gathering history ancient civilization, old times, history, sad history, history of quebec, 1700, duplessis, ancient times, past pain, stories ignored, ancient nations hunting hunting indians indians, american indian injustice injustice / social issues, injustice inuit inuit, inuit / husky isolation isolation, separated, isolation, isolated, isolation of rest of quebec, isolated people language language, native language, orality, different language, different language, language barrier, people speaking english or others, kuei, culture and language minority minority, visible minority nations nations native americans native americans natives "from the country where he lives, whose ancestors lived in this country" (from the dictionary), indigenous, aborigines, native, indigenous title, indigenous, native montrealer. nature life in the forest, away, nature, star, needing nature to live, outdoors, forest, snow, river, natural products, lake, nature connection, earth connection, deep relationship with nature, fire, rock, manwan, environmental defense, relation to nature (different from western culture) no taxes no taxes, tax exemption, pay no tax north northern, northern quebec, far north, northern canada, north plan origins origins people people poverty poor, poverty, financial difficulties, misery, deprived, underprivileged, social misery http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 quebec pierreville, chibougamau, hochelaga, maniwaki, abitibi, nunavik, lac simon, quebec, sept-îles, james bay, new france, gaspésie, roberval, gatineau residential schools convent, residential schools, residential school history, native boarding schools rights rights, rights and freedoms, human rights, indigenous rights, rights acquired social issues delinquency, social issues spirituality spirituality, spiritual wealth, spiritual territory ancestral territory, territories, region traditional housing tipi, longhouse, wigwam, hut traditional instruments dreamcatcher, bark canoe, drum, dinghy, calumet, feather hat, inukshuk, sock rackets, woolen clothing traditions traditions, respect of traditions, party, ancestral knowledge, celebration violence violence, murder, dangerous, crime, aggressiveness, cover episode, crime, maltreatment substitution instruction alcohol "it's an indian. it does not support alcohol", alcoholism, alcohol, alcohol / tobacco, alcoholics, drunk people in front of the building, alcohol issues, alcohol problem, drunk ancestors ancestral, ancestors, elder, respect to elders arts art and culture, primitive art, emerging literature, music community other communities, clan, community, indigenous community, life in the community defining physical characteristics black hair, dark skin color, dark skin, dark skin, red skin, dark complexion, slanted eyes different culture other culture, cultural barrier, different culture, culture specific to them, cultural difference, cultural differences, different cultures, different ways of life, diversity, cultural diversity, intercultural, multiculturalism, intercultural relationship, different values drug addiction substance abuse and alcohol, substance abuse, drug / alcohol / suicide, drugs and alcohol, high alcohol, tobacco and drugs, poisoning, alcohol and drug problems, toxicism issues, tobacco and drugs, substance abuse drugs drugs feathers feathers freeloaders "it's a gang of freeloaders!" (some would think that :(), social welfare, social welfare, welfare, freeloaders, supported by the government homelessness homelessness, itinerant, homeless injustice injustice, injustice to them. isolation isolated, isolation, social isolation, isolate, isolated, isolated, isolated population, seclusion, withdrawal from other populations, solitude, live away nations another nation, nation. natives indigenous, indigenous, native http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 nature needing nature to live, connection to the land, water, fire, link to nature, nature, nature (proximity to), people living along rivers, outdoors, rock no taxes "he should pay taxes like us!" (some would think that :(), tax free, tax exemption, people who do not pay taxes, do not pay taxes, non-payment of taxes , pay no taxes, no taxes, save taxes north northern quebec, northern, northern canada, nordic origins origin, native physical/mental health problems difficult acceptance of care, comorbidities, depression, psychological distress, diabetes, dialysis, lower health status, low dental hygiene, hypertension, disease, illness, lack of care, unhealthy eating, not healthy, health problem, mental health, transcultural care, care, psychological disorder, disorders, mental disorders, psychological disorders poverty underprivileged, deprived, low income, misery, no money, poor, poverty prejudice population on which many people have prejudices, prejudices, prejudices conveyed in society towards them, stereotypes social problems multiplicity of social problems, social issues, social issues, societal issues spirituality spirituality, spiritual taxes taxes territory land, territory tipi tipi traditional housing longhouse, tent, hut, igloo traditions ceremonies, traditional knowledge, customs, folklore, heritage, traditional knowledge, traditions, ancestral traditions, knowledge transfer vulnerability risk factors, population at risk, vulnerable population, risk, vulnerability, vulnerable, the core of the representation (high frequency / high rank) gathers the most descriptive features of the indigenous people. “first nations” (84 participants, 24% of the sample), “culture” (21%), “native americans” (16%) and “community” (12%) were the main components of the central structures of the social representation. in the periphery of the representation, we found: a) frequent and low-rated categories regarding the social/geographical environment of indigenous people were found (“[indian] reservation” (45%), “nature”, “tradition”, “indians), as well as “alcohol” (13%) and “poverty” (11%). these concepts complete the central elements of the representation. b) less frequent, high-rated categories, similar to those found in the central nucleus (“ancestors”, “first comers”, “nations”), suggesting that the core elements of the social representation (stable shared structures) are mainly descriptive of first nation people or based on what essentially distinguishes the first nations from non-indigenous people. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 c) less frequent, low-rated categories referring to the colonialism and the oppression of the indigenous people (“residential schools” (8%), “exclusion” (5%), “discrimination” (5%), “violence” (4%), “colonialism” (4%), “difficulties” (4%), “injustice” (3%)). among the overall sample, 27.6% of participants used at least one of those terms. substitution technique the substitution technique (“according to you, if we were to ask all the students from your program what were the first five words or expression that would come to their mind while hearing the “indigenous people”, what would they answer?”) allowed to identify variation in the categories from the regular condition. table 5 synthetizes the categories that were less frequently (-30% and below) named by participants with the substitution instruction while table 6 presents the semantic categories that were more frequently (+30% and over) quoted in the substitution technique. categories that were used by at least 10 participants in one or the other conditions were considered. table 5 semantic categories that were less frequently named in the substitution condition semantic category n participants (substitution instruction) n participants (regular instruction) variation origins 3 14 -78% arts 5 13 -62% traditional housing 6 15 -60% defining physical characteristics 8 17 -53% injustice 5 10 -50% spirituality 10 20 -50% north 19 33 -42% nature 26 45 -42% feathers 12 20 -40% ancestors 11 17 -35% territory 10 15 -33% natives 13 19 -32% traditions 26 38 -32% community 28 41 -32% nations 7 10 -30% table 6 semantic categories that were more frequently named in the substitution condition semantic category n participants (substitution instruction) n participants (regular instruction) variation physical/mental health problems 24 3 +700% drug addiction 17 4 +325% http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 as table 5 shows, using the substitution technique, we found that participants associated less descriptive categories to the concept “indigenous people”. except for the term “injustice”, most of the categories that were less used with the substitution instructions referred to the characteristics (“origins”, “nations”, “territory”, “defining physical characteristics”, “native”, “north”, “community”) and the romanticized indigenous way of life (“arts”, “traditional housing”, “spirituality”, “ancestors”, “feathers”, “nature”, “traditions”). in contrast, as shown in table 6, a number of categories appeared or were most frequently associated with the “indigenous people”, while using the substitution technique. a few categories referred to stereotypes (“different culture”, 6%; “taxes”, 5%; “tipi”, 5%; “no taxes”, 5%), whereas the majority of the terms refer to specific flaws (“alcohol”, 23%; “poverty”, 15%; “physical / mental health problems”, 7%; “drugs”, 6%; “isolation”, 6%; “social problems”, 5%; “drug addiction”, 5%; homelessness, 4%; “vulnerability”, 3%; “freeloaders”, 3%). according to our conceptual framework, the categories that raised or appeared in the substitution technique are characteristic from the counter normative elements of this social representation. prejudice (4%) is the only term participants used to describe negative attitudes towards the settler state. it is the only category from this list which carries this attitude, while 9 out of 15 categories (alcohol, poverty, physical/mental health problems, drugs, social problems, drug addiction, homelessness, vulnerability, freeloaders) from the silent zone were tainted negatively. among all participants, 43.9% used at least one term from these 9 categories. discussion in 2017, to celebrate the 375th anniversary of montreal’s founding, the city council (where no indigenous sat then) offered to the first nations communities to choose a new symbol to appear on the montreal flag. besides the traditional fleur-de-lys, rose of lancaster, shamrock and thistle representing the french, english, irish and scottish colonization of the province, the white pine was chosen to represent the indigenous origins of montreal. this paper presented the results of a study, which is part of a larger research program entitled “the white pine’s roots”, seeking to evaluate the relation between the political and psychological aspects of the “reconciliation” process, in canada. this study sought to investigate the nature of the social representations of indigenous people in taxes 19 5 +280% different culture 20 6 +233% drugs 20 7 +186% prejudice 13 5 +160% freeloaders 10 5 +100% social problems 19 10 +90% homelessness 13 7 +86% vulnerability 12 7 +71% alcohol 80 47 +70% no taxes 16 10 +60% isolation 20 13 +54% poverty 53 37 +43% tipi 18 0 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 canada, among the youngest canadians adults (millennials) living in the quebec province of canada. results show that a two-level social representation emerged from our sample. when asked what they would immediately associate with the term “indigenous people”, participants used romanticized and stereotyped terms. terms such as “first nations”, “nature”, “ancestors”, etc. were widely used, showing a cultural homogeneity with regards to who indigenous people are. these terms are characteristics from the current public discourse on indigenous people, sustaining the reconciliation policy currently implemented by the federal government of canada. searching for counter normative elements of the social representation, we identified counternormative (but central) elements of the social representation. amongst these elements, negative associations with the indigenous people were found in the participants’ answers. reference to alcohol, drug or dependence, to poverty, violence, social problems, vulnerability or homelessness, to health problems, mental health problems and isolation were found in 43.9% of our sample. the words and expressions that disappeared when asking participants to substitute to their social group were related to community features of indigenous communities. in contrast, words that appeared were related to individual flaws, disorders, or illnesses. with regards to the present state of the art, our results confirm and detail the pervasive forms of romanticism and paternalism in the youngest non-indigenous people in canadian adults; it also brings attention to the new forms of stigma that affect indigenous people. the pervasive romanticism and paternalism in 2010, lynne davis raised concerns about the “best intentioned deeds when they are not rooted in a critical, self-reflexive consciousness […] and how instead then can perpetuate and deepen paternalistic colonial relationships” (davis, 2010). our results show that, in a population of non-indigenous young academic students, knowledge and awareness do not come together. core components of the social representation of indigenous people were characteristics of a romanticized image of the indigenous-as-anoble-savage, perpetuating a form of racist paternalism. the young adults from our sample were raised within a very selfrighteous context where the reconciliation (as a political construct) was at the heart of indigenous-settlers relationships. thus, their social representation of indigenous people include (a) descriptive features of the indigenous as a specific culture as it could have been read in a school manual and (b) paternalistic features, when it comes to characteristics that move away from description. the social representation is perfectly aligned with the current political and media speeches on indigenous people. it gives evidence of how the paternalistic conception of the indigenous can be carried on from generation to generation. in this millennials generation, the traditional romanticized representation (north, nature, ancestors, culture, first comers) is completed with paternalistic descriptions of the indigenous (poverty, difficulties). it gives support for the hypothesis that, besides supporting the status quo, the reconciliation discourse has created a representation of the powerless indigenous, victim of the previous generations’ reprehensible assimilation policies. it is coherent with dion’s (2009) research on the way canadian schools are set to promote the colonial narratives. in a more recent publication, davis and colleagues (davis et al., 2016, p. 399) asked “what will help shift the consciousness of contemporary canadians to a new story, where canadians recognize and acknowledge themselves as occupiers of indigenous homelands, perpetrators of cultural genocide and sustainers of settler colonial practices in the present?”. if this radical assumption that critical awareness on past history constitute http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 the key for newer and sound relationships, the second contribution of our results casts a shadow on this promising (though ambitious) guideline. the new forms of prejudice and stigma it is now accepted that settler cultural dominance has created a very oriented narrative of the indigenous/non-indigenous relationships. we saw that millennials have integrated the main components of this narrative and can display it together with compassion for the indigenous people. however, new forms of prejudice have raised from oppression and discrimination. collective precariousness, isolation, stigma, social discrimination and political violence have transferred into individual struggle. what was a collective abstraction (the good indigenous people) has become an individual reality (the sick indigenous). when pushed to leave the social desirability behind the substitution technique of our social representation inquiry, participants from this study described elements from this representation composed of the indigenousas-a-diseased-individual (poor health, depressed and drug user), helpless (isolated with social problems and vulnerability) and a freeloader (uses the system while not paying taxes). this study revealed that, besides paternalism and basic colonialist rhetoric, academic millennials have integrated a new form of implicit racism (olson, 2010) targeting indigenous people. this implicit racism is constituted by contents describing indigenous individual flaws. wolfe (2006), as well as regan (2010) and davis (2016) stressed that colonialism was an ongoing social system of thought. for wolfe, colonialism cannot be exclusively explained through history. this study validates that hypothesis, showing that paternalist narrative were found pervasive within the youngest adults of quebec. it also shown that implicit racism could transform into new generations of social representations. indigenous people, who were previously found as oppressed and in need for settlers’ help are now also seen in the eyes of the youngest generations of adults as diseased, helpless and unfairly taking advantage of the social structures. as it has been demonstrated that implicit prejudice was associated to social behaviors (olson, 2010), one can find that the numerous initiatives within the policy of reconciliation, aiming to promote indigenous culture and achievements may not be the most effective way to challenge the negative side of the social representations. non-indigenous people in canada, and specifically in quebec might want to work further in understanding the conditions within the non-indigenous dominant society that would allow to go beyond stereotypes and paternalism. this will contribute to reach ethically acceptable objectives (identifying the obstacles to inclusion, avoiding the pervasive paternalistic initiatives…) for nonindigenous canadians. the results of this study question us, as community psychologists, about the ways social change can take place from the perspective of institutions. public institutions have, to a large extent, chosen to consider information (to their employees, to their constituents) as a lever for transforming relations between non-indigenous and indigenous people. while the intention to inform is commendable, our results show that social representations convey many barriers to quality relationships, which information cannot overcome. within our larger research program, we have developed partnerships with community organizations as well as with public institutions, so that these social representations are better known and better taken into account in the willingness of nonindigenous institutions to participate in social change. the study of social representations seems to us to be relevant for community psychologists in both fundamental and applied research. it allows us to better grasp the implicit content organizing inter-group relations. it also http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 allows us to define relevant levers for largescale population interventions. but this remains valid only from the point of view of non-indigenous people and should not mask the pre-eminence of political decisions (with reparation in the first place), which prevail for the implementation of reconciliation and self-determination processes. references abric, j. c. 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(2010). unsettling the settler within: indian residential schools, story-telling, and reconciliation in canada. vancouver: ubc press. tuhiwai smith, l. (1999). decolonizing methodologies : research and indigenous peoples. london: university of otago press. wolfe, p. (2006). settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. journal of genocide research, 8(4), 387-409. disclosure statement this research has received no funding. the authors do not declare any conflict of interest. http://www.gjcpp.org/ talking about race in puerto rico: four descendants of the transatlantic african diaspora share their experiences nataka moore, julissa pagán-peña, paola rodríguez-dávila, rebecca rodríguezrivera, and tiana santisteven keywords: puerto rico, well-being, puerto rican, racism, blanqueamiento, blackness author biographies: nataka moore, is on faulty at adler university in the department of psychology. dr. moore is a licensed clinical psychologist with over 15 years of clinical and academic experience. dr. moore currently sees individuals and couples in her private practice. dr. moore, as a human rights activist, has led major social justice based international initiatives and have recently won the 2019 social justice award at adler university for her work. in cuba her work centered around racial equity and women's rights as she co-led a delegation of 19 women through her work with the us women and cuba collaboration. dr. moore has been recognized by the women issues committee through the national council of schools of professional psychology and was awarded the 2017 diversity award for her commitment to women's issues and intersectionality. in the dominican republic and liberia she worked with issues related to human rights and mental health. this coming september through the support of a department of state grant and an adler university seed grant, she will be working in madagascar addressing post-partum depression with rural malagasy women. julissa m. pagán-peña, is a bicultural and bilingual clinician who is currently completing her post-doctorate fellowship in dallas, tx. she completed her undergraduate studies at the university of puerto rico and received her doctorate in clinical psychology from adler university in chicago, il. dr. pagán-peña has trained in different settings including medical, schools, and community-based organizations. her clinical work global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 has focused on providing psychological evaluations and psychotherapy services to families and children from diverse cultural backgrounds and survivors of complex developmental trauma. her dissertation focused on examining the relationship between parent-child acculturative discrepancies and youths’ self-efficacy. her past and most recent research experiences have looked into black-puerto rican identity development, depression among puerto rican adolescents, and mental health in latino communities in chicago. paola garcia, obtained her doctorate degree in clinical psychology (psyd) in december 2019. she also has an ms in clinical psychology from ponce health sciences university; ba in general psychology from university of puerto rico in cayey. she currently works as a staff therapist/ psychologist for the talley center at the university of mary washington. dr. paola garcia is both an english and spanish speaker, who was raised and born in puerto rico. she completed her internship at central state hospital, a state psychiatric hospital, and then worked as a psychology associate for a private practice. paola enjoys working with a variety of populations but has a particular interest in working with diversity, self-esteem, and acceptance/ adjustment issues. she also has a great interest in working with issues relating to skin conditions such as keloids, which she herself has. she mostly works from an integrative psychotherapy approach and mostly integrates cbt and mindfulness skills. when it comes to therapy she tailors her treatment to the needs, goals and interests of the client using a dynamic, collaborative, and creative approach. she has experience working with mood and anxiety disorders, self-esteem issues, and adjustment and acceptance difficulties. rebecca l. rodríguez rivera, is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at adler university in chicago. she was born and raised in san juan, puerto rico. she holds a ba in psychology from the university of puerto rico and a ma in clinical psychology from adler university. rebecca is an adjunct professor at st. augustine college in chicago, where she works with bilingual and bicultural non-traditional latino psychology students. her clinical and research work include substance abuse and trauma treatment, puerto rican diaspora, acculturation, and systemic racism. tiana santisteven, is doctoral candidate in counselor education http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 and supervision at adler university. tiana is a chicago native. she earned her m.a in counseling with a specialization in rehabilitation counseling in 2018 and has been a vocational rehabilitation counselor at the department of veterans affairs. tiana assists veterans reach their vocational goals while addressing mental health concerns, physical disabilities, co-morbidities, and social justice themes. while in graduate school, tiana lead the hispanic latinx student association at adler university for two years. tiana is eager to complete her dissertation that is focused on the latina experience in doctoral programs and begin a career in academia. recommended citation: moore, n., pagán-peña, j., rodríguez-dávila, p., rodríguezrivera, r., & santisteven, t. (2021). talking about race in puerto rico: four descendants of the transatlantic african diaspora share their experiences. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(3), 1 – 22. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: nataka moore, psy.d., licensed clinical psychologist (il, ny), professor, department of psychology, adler university, 17 n dearborn st, chicago, il 60602. email: nmoore@adler.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:nmoore@adler.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 talking about race in puerto rico: four descendants of the transatlantic african diaspora share their experiences abstract puerto ricans are racially characterized by a mix of three races (spaniard, taíno, and african). in fact, this statement dominates any other version of the puerto rican racial identity, which has limited the discussions about racial issues such as blanqueamiento and racism. in an effort to better understand racial dynamics and the puerto rican’s perception of race, four descendants of the african diaspora engaged in a self-reflective process using a roundtable approach to analyze their experiences in puerto rico. the roundtable approach is based in an ethnographic method of the qualitative approach. each individual journaled each moment from their own perspective, then as a group they came together to discuss the themes, experiences, and impressions of the journey. they did this by attending the latin american studies association conference that was held in san juan in 2015. while visiting the conference, the attending researchers made efforts to learn as much as they could through experiences such as visiting historical sites and engaging with residents. the investigators discussed the themes they observed in puerto rico that related to the overarching question, “what does blackness mean in puerto rico?” and the impact of this meaning on the well-being of black puerto-ricans. these roundtable discussions took place over a year with multiple 2-3 hour meetings. in discussing the themes, the researchers created a space where each author had an equal voice and expertise. this roundtable process not only expanded the authors’ understanding of how blackness is understood in the diaspora, but also their very own personal understanding of blackness. the findings from each author were compared to develop a broader and deeper understanding of how each viewed the research questions. if the themes from the different authors arrived at the same resolution, then their confidence in the themes was strengthened. this process resulted in the team identifying four major themes; the romanticization of belonging to the three races, psychological sense of belonging and resiliencies, tension points in loíza: resiliency, resistance and social exclusion and the rehabilitation of each individual’s cultural identity as descendants of the transatlantic african diaspora. each individual reproduced their own experiences in this process into these four themes. in regards to the romanticization of belonging to the three races, one member wrote “on my way home i couldn’t believe the day we had. i saw discrimination and racism with my own eyes. i saw it here in a place i always believed was filled with no racism. in a place, i consider was innocent to color differences and that respected and valued the power of differences. i discover that as puerto-ricans we are so used to the fantasy of diversity that we do not see that, for some, diversity is unrealistic; especially when you can’t even acknowledge the basic rights of others.” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 using their individual reflections as data, the four researchers were able to identify the resiliency factors that have helped to strengthen their and others’ racial identity. in this process, the researchers were able to have a deeper understanding of their african ancestry and develop a more inclusive puerto rican identity. this process included the researchers examining ways that anti-blackness and colorism are displayed in the puerto rican culture, and also detecting areas of racial justice and resiliency throughout their community. the ultimate goal is to determine how transgenerational transmission of resiliency could better inform interventions and strategies targeting racial adversities for all descendants of the transatlantic african diaspora while considering its impact on cultural identity development and formation. collectively, as a result of this project, there is a higher sense of connectedness to african roots. in team discussions, it was found that a limitation of this paper is not having a person who identifies as black puerto-rican as an author and how this would have added greatly to the roundtable discussions and findings. the authors recognize that there may be tension points that exist for puertoricans to fully accept their african heritage. the objective of this paper is to start a dialogue to open up spaces and opportunities to engage in this difficult conversation. it is the authors’ hope that this paper can spark conversations and strategies to address the historical and contemporary impact of how blackness is socially constructed in puerto rican society. finally, it is with hopes that this can connect the experiences of black puerto ricans’ historical/contemporary resiliencies to the larger knowledge base of strategies that can help address racial adversities of all people from the transatlantic african diaspora. introduction as an african american psychologist, i have been grappling with the question of how do we as african americans heal from the wounds of historical trauma and the continuous brutal racism that exist in every corner of american society that impact our lives daily? the historical trauma that we experience is not only rooted in 400 years of slavery, segregation, and lynchings but also continues through mass incarceration, police brutality, and mass inequities in almost every sector of life be it through economic, health and education disparities. as a black psychologist, i am well aware that while there are theories and interventions that address healing from trauma, there are few theories that attempt to address healing from 400 plus years of historical and ongoing trauma. the urgency of needing to find methods of healing from 400 plus years of trauma lead me to wonder about the ways in which we as a black american community have developed resiliencies to address the ongoing pain and suffering of living in a racist society embedded in white supremacy. in connection to this question, i also became curious about how black people across the transatlantic diaspora, those who have ancestors that was brought to the americas and caribbean to be enslaved, developed resiliencies in the face of white supremacy in their respective countries. in answering this question, i wanted to investigate the challenges, strengths, and resiliencies that black people face throughout the diaspora. the aim would be to develop a framework of the collective healing and resiliency experiences of the black transatlantic diaspora to gain a broader understanding of what is needed to heal from a macro-level http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 transnational optic. i began this journey by publishing a paper in 2015 titled, talking about race in cuba: four trans-atlantic diaspora women share their experiences. for this paper, i pulled together a team to investigate what blackness means in puerto rico and to understand the strengths and resiliencies of black puerto-ricans in the face of white supremacy by engaging in an ethnographic study. to embark on an ethnographic study in puerto rico, i knew that i would understand the impact of racism from my location as black person of the diaspora but there would be cultural nuances i would not understand, as i am not puerto-rican. i engaged three puerto-rican women to be a part of the research team who were born and raised on the island, and one woman who is of puerto rican ancestry but raised in the united states. the co-authors of this paper are julissa pagán-peña who identifies as caribeña, tiana santisteven as latina, paola rodríguez dávila who identifies as white puerto rican, and rebecca rodríguez-rivera who identifies mestizo, a light-skinned puerto rican. methods to develop this study, we decided to use ethnographic methods. our ethnography approach involved a comprehensive narrative of what we observed through dialogues and reflective experience attending an international conference in san juan, puerto rico, visiting communities, tourist places, and organizations in puerto rico that serve black puerto-ricans. overall, this method allowed us to integrate the analysis of social interactions and perceptions within puerto rico through our eyes and experiences. the first author nataka, along with paola and rebeca were the team that attended the conference in puertorico and thus the majority of the ethnographic data are from their experiences. as a research team we wanted to learn what blackness means in puerto rico, how racism toward black puerto-ricans was perceived on the island. we also wanted to know about the resiliency and obstacles black puerto ricans face in maintaining a sense of well-being. additionally, we wanted to raise the questions of political and social differences, as well as similarities between puerto rico and the united states. to answer this question, we began by reviewing literature on racism in puerto rico and the similarities and differences of the history between the united states and puerto rico. as a team, we wanted to make sure that by reviewing the literature we were grounding ourselves in the topic at hand. as first author, i needed to understand puertorican culture. for the rest of the research team, all puerto rican women, it was different because they were born into this culture. however as none of the puerto-rican authors identified as black or afro-puerto rican, they needed to ground themselves in the experiences of black puerto-ricans found within the literature and documentaries. as a team, we had an extensive research meeting on which questions to ask and how to approach and coordinate our visit to the island. we mapped out the areas we wanted to visit and we came up with the places to visit and people to engage with that for us had knowledge on the topic of what does it mean to be black in puerto rico. we had the opportunity to coordinate our visit to the island around the latin american studies association conference held in san juan in 2015. through using an ethnographic method, we had the opportunity to journal our experience through those four days on the island. we were also able to write our observations on how this research and findings confronted our understanding of blackness on the island and our own value systems. our journal reflections were pulled from our engagement in the conference, museums, visits to various communities across the island, cultural activities, and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 conversations with multiple people. the researchers who attended the 2015 conference journaled independently and later discussed their findings with the additional authors. we had what we called “round table discussions” that took place over a year with multiple 2-3 hour meetings. in discussing the themes, we created a space where each author had equal voice and expertise. this roundtable process expanded our understanding of how blackness is understood in the diaspora but also our very own personal understanding of what it means to be black in the diaspora. the findings from each author were compared to develop a broader and deeper understanding of how each of us viewed the research questions. if the themes from the different authors arrived at the same resolution, then our confidence in the themes was strengthened. through this process we gained a wider understanding of the experience of black puerto-ricans through our own eyes. literature review shared history of slavery in the u.s. and the caribbean the caribbean and the u.s. share similar history, particularly as it relates to colonization, slavery, and human rights violations of african slaves (moore et al.,2015; lopez-levy, 2011; oldfield, 2012). between the 17th and 19th centuries there was a mass slave trade from africa to the “new world” (bondarenko, 2015). in the us, most of the traded slaves were located in the southern and northern colonies to work on various plantations where they spent extensive hours of physical labor (the library congress, 2020). african slaves did not control their labor hours which began early in the morning and ended late afternoon, and whose “supervisors” utilized physical punishment as a threat. interestingly, the mortality rates among slaves in the us were lower than in most of the “new world” territories, especially when compared to the caribbean. therefore, by 1850 the african slave population included third, fourth, and fifth generation americans (berlin, 2009). furthermore, as the african slaves reproduced themselves, the owners’ wealth increased as well because they did not have to invest in trading more slaves from africa. in sum, the purpose of slavery, in both the us and the caribbean, was to maintain the colonized status while promoting the economic growth of the european imperialism (moore et al., 2015; klein, 2010; oldfield 2012). similarly, to the us, puerto rico and other colonized islands in the caribbean experienced a massive importation of african slaves (duany, 2001). in fact, the caribbean was the recipient of almost more than half of the imported african slaves (godreau, et al., 2008). the slaves were spread between the greater and minor antilles. although the caribbean islands share similar experiences on the slavery trade, puerto rico’s slavery history slightly differs from other islands in the caribbean. whereas other caribbean colonies had a sugar plantation industry well established for many years, the sugar industry in puerto rico did not start to develop until the end of 18th century beginning of the 19th century (west-durán, 2005). haiti’s independence in 1804 was one of the primary events that influenced puerto rican sugar plantation industry growth. by this time, haiti was considered one of the world's largest producers of sugar. due to haiti’s independence, cuba and puerto rico doubled their sugar production to cover haiti’s production. during 1850 puerto rico’s sugar industry exponentially grew, producing as much sugar as other caribbean islands (west-durán, 2005). given this economical growth, the slave population was also growing. previous to haiti’s anti-slavery and anticolonial revolution, the african slave http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 population in puerto rico was relatively smaller [15%] in comparison to other colonies in the caribbean (west-durán, 2005). it was not until the sugar plantation industry started to develop by the end of 18th century that the island’s slavery population started to grow from 5 to 9 percent until slavery was abolished in 1873. in fact, puerto rico experienced one of the earliest laws that liberated slaves in the caribbean. this law stated that slaves could be emancipated three years after the law was established. additionally, one of the statements included the freedom of babies born in 1873 or after and of slaves over sixty years of age (sanchezkorrol, 2014). this gradual emancipation of slaves promoted a phenomenon of african non-slaves and slave population in puerto rico. in fact, by 1873 the total number of free black slaves was greater than the total of slaves in the island (godreau et al., 2008; mintz, 1989:87) by this year slaves in puerto rican society composed 5 to 15 percent of the total population where the majority included white or free non-whites (west-durán, 2003;west-durán, 2005). this data reflects the significant racial mixture between black, spaniards (white), and native (taínos) that happened in puerto rico, which is considered greater than any other island in the caribbean (west-durán, 2005). the omitted history of slavery and blancamiento historically, there has not been full acknowledgement of the atrocities of slavery in the caribbean. although governments (i.e. cuba) have slightly identified and weighted the historical injustice related to the slave trade (de la fuente, 2001; cited on moore, et al, 2015;), puerto rico’s society is still struggling with the idea of fully recognizing the impact of the age of slavery. societal entities and the colonized condition of puerto rico perpetuate this denial. godreau and others (2008) conducted an ethnographic study that aimed to examine how the slavery was taught in history in an elementary public school located in cayey, puerto rico. the researchers identified racetalk anxiety when discussing the history of slavery on the island, where black equals slave. they further observed the rhetoric statement of racial identification about the “three races” which refers to the fact that puerto ricans are the result of the racial mixture between white, taíno (natives), and africans. this statement dominates any other version of the racial identity. from a historically perspective, talking about puerto rican slavery represents a threat to the racial discourse of “mix of the races” because it elicits a dialogue about racism and racial discriminations (godreau, 2008). this further relates to the notion of whitening or blancamiento. in addition, the “three races” speech does not allow room for racism and racial discrimination in puerto rican society, minimizing the presence of blackness among puerto ricans. throughout us history, blackness, as a race, has been conceptualized differently. for instance, due to the union between slave african mothers and white fathers, a new classification system called “one drop rule” emerged over the 19th century in an effort to distinguish between those who were of a mixed race (black and white) while promoting segregation (davis, 1991). historically the “one drop rule” suggests that even if only one of your ancestors was african, one or several generations ago, you would be identified as either black, mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon; thus, you were nonwhite. as a result, racially mixed generations have been classified to socially constructed subordinate racial groups formed by racist ideologies. this modality of race-thinking throughout us history has limited other possible racial classifications (glasgow et al., 2009). in contrast, there is ambiguity among puerto ricans in how the term negro (black) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 is used. from a negative perspective, negro could be associated with the slavery trade history and is often considered offensive. conversely, when a puerto ricans uses the diminutive version (i.e. negrito, negrita) is contemplated as an attempt to transmit some type of affection depending on the relationship that the communicator and receiver have (godreau, 2008). nevertheless, trigueño is the most common term used to describe a dark-skin puerto rican because of the negative connotation that the word negro has, as it relates to slavery. mulata and jabao are other two racial categorizations within puerto rican society that directly refer to the historical trajectory of eliminating any trace of racial blackness heritage (godreau, 2008). contemporary puerto rican blackness whitening is still encouraged in puerto rican contemporary society. women with darker skin are persuaded to marry a white man to erase any black trait in the family genes (santos, 2010). this process promotes black puerto rican women to develop a sense of rejection towards their own race. along with racial oppressive feelings, they can experience low self-esteem and feelings of inferiority in comparison with lighter skin women. similarly, men are conditioned to be attracted to lighter skin women; they are raised in an environment where black features on women are not seen as attractive as white features. the ultimate goal is whitening the family to eliminate any black feature among generations to come (santos, 2010). therefore, family values play a crucial role in the socialization of many black puerto rican women and men. post-slavery, most of puerto ricans have perceived themselves as racially white. there has been an evident denial or resistance to racially identify with the african heritage. furthermore, the census has reported a drastically shift suggesting an apparent growth of the white population. even though white immigrant population did not increase, by 1950 almost 80 percent puerto ricans reported being white (west-durán, 2005). this exponential growth of white puerto ricans was given to a phenomenon of racial identification; those who once identified as trigueño shifted to white, and those who were black before changed to identify themselves as trigueño or mulatos (a mix of white and black). therefore, from a generational perspective, race identity in puerto ricans was “whitening, not a darkening process” (west-durán, 2005). research on puerto rican women’s racial self-identification has supported this notion of whitening. landale & oropesa (2002), conducted a study with a sample from puerto rican women residing in the u.s. and puerto rico who were asked about their racial identity. interestingly, women from both cultural contexts responded to the race question by identifying themselves as puerto rican. some of the participants residing in puerto rico identified as white, black or trigueña but none of the mainlanders identified with skin color or race. furthermore, the authors identified that dark-skin puerto ricans living in the us did not consider the traditional black-white understating of race (landale & oropesa 2002). this speaks to the flexibility of racial categorization in the island where other shades of black skin color are contemplated as racial identification (i.e mulatto or trigueño). on the other hand, this is not the same case for the us society where there is a dichotomy conceptualization of race. those who migrated to the us utilized puerto rican as both their ethnic and racial identity. like other caribbean cultures, puerto rico acknowledges and celebrates their african heritage through various art expressions. cuba is one of those caribbean islands where, the african heritage is present in their literature, art, dances, and music, yet there is a lack of research on black-cuban identity http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 (moore et al., 2015). in puerto rico, the afro boricua pride is mostly celebrated throughout musical and dance expressions (west-durán, 2005). contemporary genre music such as salsa and reggaeton have also highlighted the african heritage with some pride. the concept of afro boricua pride suggests the beginning of an identity transformation among puerto ricans. nevertheless, when it comes to racial identity, most puerto ricans are still identifying as white or mulatto. this is mostly perpetuated by the historical rhetoric of mestizaje (racial mixed), which allows little room to re-think racial identification in the context of puerto rican society. perhaps, until slavery is fully acknowledged, accepted, and processed, puerto ricans' racial identity will remain in a grey area. results theme 1: obstacles/anti-blackness in puerto rico in this section, the team members describe interactions and observations that demonstrate anti-blackness in puerto rico. through these encounters, one can vividly see how anti-blackness is not only active on the island but how african heritage and influence on puerto-rican culture is often minimized. this is showcased using moral credentialing as a rationale for anti-black sentiments and behavior. according to krumm & corning (2008), moral credentials are collections of evidence accrued by an individual to be utilized in the future as a token that they are in fact not prejudice. this gathering of proof may be used to reduce their likelihood at being perceived as discriminatory. some examples indicated by krumm & corning of moral credentials included over-favoring groups, participating in activist activities, trivial compliance and affiliation with others. one may state, “i have black friends or my cousin is gay” or some may rationalize their donations as acts of activism towards justice (2008). in addition, anti-blackness is present through minimized opportunities for black puerto-ricans to express blackness/african heritage, limited opportunity to discuss racism, and the dismissal of black puerto ricans in this society. sub-theme 1: the romanticization of belonging to the three races and moral credentialing we identified that many puerto ricans describe themselves as deriving from the three race/ethnicities in this order: “white, brown, and black”. we found that although there appears to be pride in the discussion of being descended from the “three races”, it is often discussed in a romanticized fashion. the discussion tells a picture that all three races have equal standing and acceptance in puerto-rican identity and culture. we found that the romanticized rhetoric can give the appearance that everyone is equal and have the same racialized experiences and opportunities. we observed puerto-ricans who do not identify as black puerto-rican, openly acknowledge having african heritage. however, the discussions were not from a space of pride in acknowledging how it may show up in the curls of their hair, or the color of their skin, the food they eat, and the deep african roots that exist within every fabric of puerto-rican culture, but instead talked about it in a way that deflected anti-blackness on the island; thus using moral credentialing. the following journal entries are reflective of our observations in this regard. paola’s journal: we asked another lady in the museum how many people from the island and tourists came and she said that it depends on the day but that people from puerto rico do visit the exhibition. i also explained our research and asked her opinion and she said that she was no racist, that her family wasn’t racist, and that in puerto rico, because we http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 were mixed, we were not racist. there i saw it once again, the colorblind. so i challenged her, what about loíza? don’t you think there is segregation?... and she said, “well, maybe.” another staff person came into the conversation and she was horrified that the other lady told us that there was segregation, and she said “not here, no such thing here”…we only acknowledge the music and the culture that comes with our african heritage, but hide the fact that we are black. she said that there are absolutely no policies in place that give rights or power to black puerto ricans or black movements in the island…. we prefer to say we are the three races as a way to romanticize these ideas instead of dealing with the fact that there are also people who relate/identify more with one of three individual races and who differ in their ability to obtain privileges. nataka’s journal: puerto rico uses names to call people in their community triguena or mestizaje and it is basically saying that we are all “mixed”. this is opposite than what happens in the united states, as most african americans are of multiracial/ethnic heritage as research and genealogy has shown us and yet we identify ourselves as black. lastly, black seems to be associated with slave status in puerto rico. when you became free in puerto rico you no longer had the status of being black…you were now triguena maybe? thus, people do not want to associate with this status…because there is shame, thus they do not want to call themselves black. rebecca’s journal: the ideology of mestizaje does not confront racism. in fact, racism is hidden by mestizaje discourse in vida diaria (daily lives). racism has been hidden when explaining afro puerto-rican poverty and skin color diversity. racism is omitted when explaining history, which perpetuates actual discourse and the oppressive intentions of the white man. what are the effects/consequences of racial and ethnic categories? of selfcategorizing? of wanting a lighter skin color? blanqueamiento is not an ideology but rather a “real economical, political, and personal process” (bonilla-silva, and dietrich, 2009). blanqueamiento is a way of negating discrimination where a darker skin color means the recognition of racism. with blanqueamiento de la raza, the perception of discrimination is minimized… it makes me remember foucault’s reading on power and oppression because we have to rethink general discourse and how language is constructed (body, race, country). slavery is the base/center of capitalism. capitalism became alive as a result of racism and slavery, which at the same times it is narrated in our education as a romantic story hiding the atrocities of slavery. sub-theme 2: limitations on discussing antiblackness the team found that because puerto ricans describe themselves as descending of the three races it did not leave much room for those who self identity as black puerto rican to take up space and make known their reality on the island with anti-black racism. through sitting in community groups focused on women sharing and working through their collective experiences with racism we found that some black puerto rican women struggle to describe their experiences and put language to their encounters of racism at all levels (macro, meso, micro and personal levels) and make meaning out of internalized racism. we also found destructive and dehumanizing images of black people in puerto rico (i.e. pikininis) that seem to be accepted in puerto rico as the images remain and flood tourist shops and cultural spaces despite being hurtful to black puerto ricans. how do you explain experiences of racism and living in anti-black spaces when it is not supposed to exist? the following reflections illustrate this issue. paola’s journal: she works in an organizational project that works with black http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 communities to work against racism. in this workshop they tried to open the minds of black women to challenge and hopefully change their perspectives on race, racism, and internalized racism. for example, the institutionalized perspective about hair, what type of hair is beautiful and which one is not. nataka’s journal: we then went to the proper place to meet with the professor but before we met with her we met with another black puerto rican woman who was very informative on her experience. she talked about some of her work in communities talking about racism at the systemic level and at the interpersonal level; helping women to put words and language to their experiences of racism. one of the topics is black hair and the women keep a journal of this discussion. rebecca’s journal: we constructed a social imaginary about the pikinini on black people. we have naturalized these images and they have intersected puerto rican culture and education as well. the paradox of the pikinini images is that why do these images bother us? is it because it reflects the other or it reflects myself. nataka’s journal: the barriers to wellbeing however is being excluded and consistently oppressed and not really knowing that “being black” is why they are oppressed. he said not having a movement makes it difficult to connect to the plight of their people as afrodescendant. this is what we heard before as well. i asked if there is a movement now and he said there is a group going around and “waking people up” to know what it means to be black. it reminds me of the “stay woke” campaign somewhat happening amongst black americans. i was thinking to myself that knowing is only part of it because i am black and african americans are black and know it and yet we still have issues of knowing our worth at times or acknowledging the barriers we experience due to institutionalized racism and the impact on our health and well-being. i saw so many similarities to a constant assault on the black diaspora knowing their worth collectively. i was loving the collections of book and videos they collected to raise the consciousness of the people. sub-theme 3: denying puerto rican identity to black puerto ricans while there we had opportunities to observe how people treated the first author as a black person in puerto rico. it was interesting to observe how people automatically treated the first author as if she was not puerto rican. they refused to speak to her in spanish. after talking to another black puerto rican woman who has lived on the island her entire life and grew up in loíza, a predominantly black municipality on the northeastern coast of puerto-rico, she expressed that she too has had the same experience; a refusal from lighter puerto ricans to address her in spanish. this renouncement sends a message that phenotypical ideas of blackness do not belong. some of the team’s experiences with observing racism are illustrated below. nataka’s journal: one young lady had a critique on who has the ability to publish. she states that while they may have had a black experience in the us they are white here {puerto-rico} and yet they are the authority on blackness in puerto rico. she also talked about her feelings of anger related to people in puerto rico refusing to talk spanish to her although she and her family has lived in puerto-rico their whole lives. she is from loíza, a predominantly afro-puerto rican community. paola’s journal: so when he asked what we were doing, i told him we were researchers studying how afro puerto-ricans understood their african heritage. in that moment he bluntly said, “so is the black women with you the experiment.” i was so mad i wanted to scream and call his manager but i just answered: no, actually she is the professor. i http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 could tell he was embarrassed so he just said he was a psychology student too and all this shit about education. he automatically assumed that because she was black she had to be the person we were studying, he didn’t even hesitate to think that she could have being another student at least. i didn’t know how to tell dr. moore or even rebecca but i knew i had to because it was a shared experience. however, i didn’t want to because i felt so ashamed and disgusted of how a person working in a tourist store was so bluntly disrespectful. nataka’s journal: he later spoke to my student about what we were doing and paola told him about our research project and he asked if i was the experiment. still processing my thoughts with this…my shield was up with this comment. as a black american woman, i noticed that probably as a coping skill passed down through generations, i have to compartmentalize personal experience with racism and process the issues later. rebecca’s journal: conversations with locals: how they view blackness and racial segregation? are we really that color bind? how we negate racism exist?! theme 2: spaces and places to challenge antiblackness in puerto rico in this section, the sub-themes of the psychological sense of belonging will be explored. it was found that national patriotism and academia are some of the places where anti-blackness is confronted. this will elucidate how the research team navigated spaces where anti-blackness existed in puerto-rico while recognizing the same spaces held opportunities to discuss and challenge white supremacy. the investigators observed individuals in these areas and reflected on how socially inclined individuals work and put efforts forward to dismantle anti-blackness on the island through advocacy, literature, research and more. subtheme 1: psychological sense of belonging and resiliencies (national patriotism and belonging) while the identified issues in theme one (i.e. romanticization of trigueña) can serve as barriers for black puerto-ricans to openly talk and make meaning out of their experience of racism. the national identity may conversely, in context of the puerto rican and united states divide, serve as a facilitator for black puerto ricans to feel a sense of belonging to the national agenda. in addition, puerto rico has adopted african influenced music as part of its national identity. music genres that have strong african ties have gained popularity thus evolving into a form of resistance towards anti-blackness and movement towards pride. through the adoption of black inspired forms of music and art, black voices and worldview can become visible and validated in some spaces. although the black puerto rican civil rights movement was officially suppressed, music and art in puerto-rico has continued to be an expression of resiliency and resistance of all puerto ricans. however, there is tension that exists as the authors observed that the music by black puerto-ricans that more explicitly talk about experiences of racism and discrimination might not always be considered acceptable. the following quotes highlight these aforementioned themes. nataka’s journal: being colonized by the us has had an impact because folks are fighting against nationalism, which might have stopped a black puerto-rican movement from happening. but you have to wonder like in cuba, is at the heart of this a sense of belonging? so we are all puerto ricans fighting against america…like we are all cubans fighting against the blockade of america…thus we are the same and can “pass” in this respect. with this understanding black http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 puerto-ricans can feel more like an equal citizen fighting against colonialism versus having to address white supremacy and racial injustice. paola’s journal: i also love that they mention music as a source of resilience. however, the way we interpret it is because here some lyrics from the reggaeton music talk about freedom and nondiscrimination but because they come from a genre of music that we associate as bad and mostly from the streets we dismiss the voices of many singing to be heard. most of the composers and singers of reggaeton that sing of freedom and ending discrimination are black. meaning that still in music we tend to disregard their opinions and feelings about how the color of their skin dictates the way they life. rebecca’s journal: there is a discrepancy in the feelings of belonging between black people in the united states and in puerto rico. in the united states, black people found spiritual strength and cohesion in the civil rights movements. however, in puerto rico we tend to see it more as music and food than spirituality and sense of belonging (black people do not have in puerto rico a place where they belong). in puerto rico there was no affirmative action because we are blind or do not want to see segregation, or policy changes based on race, but there was skin color segregation. sub-theme 2: academia the experience at an international conference revealed to the researchers that discussions of blackness in puerto rico in academia still faced challenges. despite the efforts that scholars have made to record, investigate, and report on blackness in puerto rico there are some unexpected barriers for these scholars to seek full recognition of these efforts. however, these scholars have continued to find creative ways to break down barriers and share knowledge amongst puerto rican academics and the community. the following reflections exemplify this observation. paola’s journal: i have to say the speaker that impacted me the most, was a professor from the university of puerto rico. what a lady! i have to admit that at the beginning i was a little confused when she changed her shirt into a t-shirt that said “negra desobediente y qué?” i didn’t understand how in a conference she would act this way, i felt a little bit uncomfortable at the beginning but after she started explaining her reasons and talking about the discrimination black puerto-rican authors and professors suffer. i was shocked, mad, and astonished to find out that even after all she studied and having a doctorate she still doesn’t get the same privileges as other professors just because she is black. my first thought was so much for equal rights. one of the things she said that i love was that in puerto rico we have been taught to deny our african heritage, to eliminate any signs of that culture in our body and our way of thinking. there is a build up code of silence in our culture that prevents us from recognizing our dislike and complete lack of knowledge and respect for our african roots. she also said that none of the universities here in the island have a class on african culture. lastly, i had to ask her what the shirt meant i knew what it meant in the literal sense, negra desobediente y qué? means black disobedient women, and what? but she explained that for them it means that for centuries black women were domesticated and subjected to take federal help because of fear to have repercussions from the government. however, they believe is time for them to resurface from the discrimination and into the light to be heard and to give themselves a voice. one of the ways they plan to do this is by giving recognition to black women in the arts as well as black men that have written books about our african roots and the importance of that part of us in our lives, as well as our traditions and culture that come from our african heritage. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 nataka’s journal: we also went to a very powerful conversation of a black woman who was placed on a panel of students talking about the built environment and she was going to talk about racism against black people in puerto-rico. she also discussed how there isn’t a black studies program in the department as well. she did not understand why she was placed on this panel with students given what she was presenting. when she came up to the podium she put on a t-shirt that said negra disobediente, y qué? we found out later this shirt was to say that i am going to be me…black and i am not going to be silenced by controlling images you may place on me. anyways, i really enjoyed her presentation but i thought it was interesting to observe others in the room. the students on the panel, who were white, were challenged as to why they did not include discussions about racism in their discussion when talking about gentrification issues. they only said that they have discussion of racism in gentrification process in their notes and in their dissertation but did not have time to discuss this in the presentation. i also observed how earlier in the session a white woman used her privilege to shush a black woman who quickly whispered something to a colleague before she was going to present (unbeknownst to the white woman) and a young man who also shushed me and my student for her translating. it left me wondering why they felt it was ok to do this. through informal conversations and conversations with scholars and community activists, we began to understand the connection between the absence of a formal black puerto-rican civil rights movement and why it is thus difficult to have discussions about race on the island. nataka’s journal: we also talked about puerto rico and their understanding of diaspora issues. she said there is not much recognition of the relationship with other diaspora people possibly because there has never been a black movement in puerto-rico…also by not having this movement…there has been less recognition that they are black or at least that there is more than just africa being the “third” root. i feel that i have more understanding of the many ways in which government /political/ macro-level ethos can impact identity. what has been nice however is that there seems to be a small movement of people who want there to be more acknowledgement and acceptance of their african ancestry and ties to the larger diaspora…and through this will racism begin to decrease. theme three: tension points in loíza: resiliency, resistance and social exclusion there are areas across the island that many puerto ricans identified as “dangerous” or “bad places” to go. interestingly, loíza, one of the towns with a rich black history, is one of those areas where many puerto ricans who do not identify as black do not feel safe to visit. the residents in loíza share resiliency factors that make them stronger as a community. loizeños have emphasized survival and passing down of their culture as a form of activism and advocacy. throughout their history, they have focused on the importance of belonging to a strong community and passing down their resiliencies to younger generations. the culture, traditions, and community values have promoted this resiliency. however, there are tension points that exist as people in loíza are not fully protected from the negative stereotypes that exist about their community and its impact on their identity and well-being. although residents in loíza are aware of how often they are marginalized in puerto rican society due to their african ancestry, there is a resistance to talk with others about their discriminatory experiences. the following reflective quotes highlight these aforementioned themes. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 nataka’s journal: ok, so today we went to loíza. it was interesting because people said loíza is a bad place to go. i was initially hesitant that we were going without a guide but when we pulled into the community i initially just saw raw beauty, the vegetation, the extensive beach. as we drove along i kept asking rebecca how far we were because it made me realize how excluded loíza is from other municipalities. anyhow, as we got closer i noticed that parts of loíza were surrounded by water, which means before the bridge and roads the community was even more so isolated. i began to wonder if loíza was a place where people who were enslaved escaped as it seemed difficult to penetrate it if thinking about it from over 150 years ago…we then went to the public library in loíza. it was small but i was amazed at what the library with its resources was able to accomplish. the library was used as a hub to educate the community on their african history and to be empowered. while in the library i heard a lot about resiliency in talking about the elders and how they have passed on information of resistance (i.e food, family, dance, music and religion) and pride in that but in an age where documentation means truth. and since many people are not publishing their story in loíza, passing down of history it is at risk of being lost. i liked how one of the people we engaged in a conversation at the library talked of the day of patrons as the whole community comes out to celebrate together and at times how they mocked their oppressor but in the end they survived. rebecca’s journal: i had fears and biases before visiting loíza. i was so sad that it took me to leave my country to really be interested and appreciate my african heritage since i never visited loiza before. i am ashamed of myself. it resulted in that this place surprised me: it was the contrary of everything i had imagined. in addition, after visiting the cave, i had a feeling of something; like something has had happened there in the past. you can feel it. this cave was a place for slaves to hide and find refuge. paola’s journal: the first thing i noticed was the friendliness and warmth of the loizeños and how many elders there were around the city. they might have been abandoned by our society, but it definitely preserved their history and the value of age. our first stop of the day was in “el centro cultural de loíza” were we met the nicest ladies who explained their festivities and the meaning behind their saints. they seem invested in promoting their town. however, when we asked about the elements of “santeria” in their traditional festivities they totally dismissed our questions; until i asked a lady if she felt that loíza was segregated and then she answered me and said yes. she didn’t hesitate and i don’t blame her because that’s the way i felt about it too. from there they sent us to the library, i never thought i would learn so much from the library and i’m not talking about the books but the actual people we were able to talk to in the library. we came to the library and we didn’t even have to ask many questions because this man was an open book about loíza. he had so much passion in his eyes and his words, but he also spoke a truth that for a second felt hard to swallow. i had never seen segregation before on my island until that day, and when he started explaining how that happened, i could not stop thinking how much i wanted to cry. i almost did, i almost cried but not because loíza didn’t have resilience, but because we pushed them away. they have wonderful resources and touristic areas like “cueva maria de la cruz” a beautiful cave in the middle of loíza. the person who shared so much with us said that loíza was pushed away from the main routes after the bridge was build. he also said “we have so many culture, beautiful people but modern developments just seemed to skip us.” when he said that, my heart just sank, and a tear actually came down my face because i could feel the pain in his voice, and the anger as well. i felt sad and angry because it was clear to me then that loíza was segregated. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 what’s ironic is that the part of the island that had a larger black population was the most discriminated and full of stereotypes. he also said we have so much to give, so many traditions, culture, beautiful people, and beaches. so much to give but they were left behind, and this is the reason why there is so much poverty in loíza. unemployment tripled in loíza making some of the residents resort to underground business. we asked him why he thought afro puerto ricans didn’t fight for their rights. he answered that when we don’t know about our roots, we reject them, and sometimes we even demonize them to walk away from them. in that moment i remember the professor from the talk yesterday and how she said that we have learned to push our african heritage and our blackness away. loiza is a huge example of that, we push blackness so far from us that we pushed them into a small space of and forget that they as black puerto-ricans have rights and a lot to give. before going back to the conference we stop by “cueva maria de la cruz”, a beautiful cave that felt peaceful and with lots of history to offer. there we received information about the meaning that this cave had for our indigenous ancestors and for the african slaves during colonization. it was a safe haven for many of our ancestors and without loíza, perhaps, the essence of who we are as puertoricans will have being lost forever. theme four: re-examining african ancestry for the puerto-rican authors one theme that surfaced during the review of this project was that there was an increase understanding of blackness in puerto rico amongst the contributors. they journaled throughout their cultural identity shift and reactions. readers are able to envision the process of re-examining of blackness with the experiences of puerto rican women and can see how they grow to comprehend their own blackness. at times, the contributors demonstrated guilt, shame, and confusion about their african ties in their beloved three race culture. puzzled by some discoveries and encounters, the researchers documented their internal processes with vulnerability. it should be recognized that these puerto rican identifying women conducted this analysis and processed their findings with a black identifying woman. it would be interesting to see how results would vary if the lead researcher was not a black woman. nonetheless, the contributors provide rich content that showcases the clash of courage, acceptance, guilt and resistance to blackness in puerto rico. these journal entries are untouched and heartfelt depictions of a complex experience to unlearn anti-blackness and shift to appreciation of african roots. the following journal entries demonstrate these encounter: rebecca’s journal: we have thought africa contributes to my culture in art, food, and music. however, i’ve never thought about how it contributes to my identity, racism, politics, and “slaving” others. my personal experience as a light-skinned woman in the united states on this trip has made me rethink what it means to be black and have african heritage. how can i fully understand what being black means as a light-skinned puerto rican? can i connect with my african roots and feel part of the african diaspora being half cuban with white spanish father and grandparents? does this mean i am white? how do i make sense of this? paola’s journal: i really wanted to ask if it was difficult for puerto-ricans to define or explain the term race in a place like puerto rico since we consider ourselves mixed or the three races. i thought my question was coming from attending the conference that day as i heard so many people comfortably talking about race issues. however, this question came more from me and my need to understand myself. i even remember growing up, and never touching on those subjects. it wasn’t until i moved to chicago that i learned about race issues and racism, especially against black people. so i http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 was surprised to confirm that for us it wasn’t difficult to talk about race but it was difficult to talk about blackness in the island. this explained why we put it on the back corner and never acknowledge issues of blackness in puerto rico. on my way home i couldn’t believe the day we had. i saw discrimination and racism with my own eyes. i saw it here in a place i always believed was filled with no racism. in a place, i consider was innocent to color differences and that respected and valued the power of differences. i discover that as puerto-ricans we are so use to the fantasy of diversity that we do not see that, for some, diversity is unrealistic; especially when you can’t even acknowledge the basic rights of others. tomorrow is our last day and i wonder what i feel when this adventure is over because i have learned so much that i’m pretty sure i’m a different person. paola’s journal: after that we saw the african roots exhibition, it was hard to see the way they were slaved and the awful treatment they were given. the rape, the killing, the agony, and the transatlantic meant so much hurt. all of this hurt but they were heroes because even with all the hate against them they found a way to be resilient. their humanity was striped from them, but they rebelled in creative ways like their music and dance. the “bomba” is not only a dance but a creative way to reaffirm our african roots and for the slaves it was a form of resistance…the whole way home i could not stop thinking about this day and it was incredible to discover my own ignorance; how i could be so blind?, how could i talk about changing the world if i didn’t even know what laid on my own backyard? i truly discover that i didn’t know anything about my african heritage and that in my own white puertorican privilege i didn’t do anything to change that. paola’s journal: hearing her, i discovered why my grandma always told me to have my hair straight even when i love my curls. it’s amazing to hear her own understanding of her hair, as well as her african heritage and how that challenges my own beliefs about what hair is beautiful. actually, analyzing it, should exist a type of beautiful hair? one unexpected contribution to this exploration is that the additional contributors experienced their own course of cultural identity reclamation. contributors julissa and tiana, who both share puerto rican ancestry, contributed in writing and editing to this project but did not join the team on the visit to the island. interestingly, with their efforts they both experienced a more inclusive development of puerto rican cultural identity and recognition of blackness. with the translation of dr. moore, paolo and rebecca’s experience, julissa and tiana faced their own cultural reclamation and documented their findings. julissa’s journal: writing this paper has challenged me to reflect on how my racial heritage has influenced multiple experiences throughout my life. childhood memories aroused as i read some articles for the literature review and engaged in discussion with my colleagues. as a daughter of a lightskin dominican mother and puerto rican father, i always heard implicit and explicit messages about my skin color and blancamiento. i remember feeling very confused by my skin color because i do not fall within any side of the spectrum (white or black) but more so in the middle. i was always called “trigueñita” or “colorá” which means my skin has red pigmentation [?]“don’t exposed yourself so much to the sun because you are going to turn“negrita” [darker]! this is an example of some of the messages i was exposed to since an early stage in my life. as an innate curios person i remember asking myself “what’s wrong with being darker?” it was not until i moved from puerto rico to the mainland to attend graduate school that i started learning and discussing topics related to race and racism in a deeper level. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 as puerto rican and caribeña who considers herself an advocate for racial equity, i have had to allow myself to grief the multiple losses around racism and the history of slavery: (1) letting go of the internalized narrative of the white colonizer being the “savior” through relearning puerto rico’s and the caribbean’s history; (2) the fact that are limited spaces where discussions about race and racism can be talked about in puerto rico without people feeling the need to defend the whitening narrative (3) the fact that we (puerto ricans) are still colonized by americans and the main narrative is still the romanization of the three races. reflecting on my racial heritage has also strengthened my own identity which has helped me to navigate spaces where people and/or systems try to limit my identity. tiana’s journal: i quickly realized that this role of contributor would have a lasting impact on myself when i had my own personal revelations towards my cultural identity. my father is mexican and my mother is puerto rican. my parents selected a more affluent neighborhood to raise my sister and i without the full understanding that geography would play a role in our culture formation. my cultural identity did not flourish until undergraduate school when i engulfed myself in latin american studies, spanish language courses, and engaged in discussions with family members about our histories. interestingly, through this discovery period there was an absence of african roots in these explorations. with this manuscript, i soon realized that i have abandoned a part of my own cultural narrative. i had general awareness of african roots in puerto rico and mexico but during this i felt an enormous amount of shame and guilt. i was ashamed that i have neglected my ancestors of african descent. i felt guilty about my lack of appreciation of african influence to our culture. additionally, i felt sadness and anger that black puerto ricans who have fought so long for recognition have seldom received respect and honored as their non-black counterparts. i had many reactions while reading the experiences of my peers. i had the privilege to process my reactions with the first author, dr. moore, and it served me tremendously, but it was not a seamless process. often dr. moore challenged my schemas of my african roots and we wrestled with my resistance. dr. moore asked me to think about my african ancestors, think about them in the room with you right now, what would you say to them or what would you do. later, after this exercise she stated, “your african ancestors matter”. it was then when things shifted for me because they do matter. working on this paper while in the midst of continued racial injustices towards black people in america provoked emotions and allowed me to further investigate ways to improve advocacy and social justice work. it is evident that between all contributors, there is a lasting impact by either participating with the island visit or writing about blackness in puerto rico. this theme showcases the challenges that puerto rican women have when they challenged with their african ancestry. the women in this article have wrestled with memories of childhood, oral traditions of ancestry, historical evidence, and live observations towards blackness on the island. it is commendable of all contributors to be vulnerable and willing to participate in this experience. additionally, these four themes supported by personal recollections provides narrative evidence that contributes to the challenges of unlearning anti-blackness in the lands that have thrived because of the transatlantic slave trade. discussion in researching this topic, analyzing the data and in writing the paper, we collectively as a result of this project feel a higher sense of connectedness to our african roots. for the first author, this paper aided in her continual work of expanding beyond her african american identity to be able to integrate her place in the greater african transatlantic http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 diaspora. for the four authors of puertorican descent this project helped to increase a more complete identity; to not just say that they are the three races but to more completely identify with their african ancestry. for the four puerto rican authors it felt before this paper that there was something missing in their ability to articulate the difficulty of discussing racism in puerto-rico and the united states. in our roundtable discussions, the four puerto-rican authors discussed that through heightened awareness and self-reflections, they felt a sense of increased competency in navigating the racial dynamics in the united states, particularly as it pertains to black lives and other marginalized groups without fuller explanation needed. in addition, this project has transformed the three authors' experience in puerto-rico of the racial dynamics through their ability to recognize at a deeper level what the racial issues are and ways that puerto rico can heal and move forward as a society. in our discussions, we also discussed that a limitation of this paper is not having a person who identifies as black puerto-rican as an author and how this would have added greatly to the roundtable discussions and findings. in addition, we recognize that there may be tension points that exist for puerto-ricans to fully accept their african heritage. in puerto rico we found that many people connect to their african roots as expressed through art and music that is deeply embedded in the larger puerto-rican culture. this is seen as a possible facilitator to well-being for black puerto-ricans as it can helps speak their truth of their experiences with antiblackness, describe their resiliencies and take pride in their cultural identity. however, as a barrier to overall well-being and a tension point, there is also deep silence in discussing racism and its impact on black puertoricans. in addition, there is difficulty in dialoguing or articulating what does belonging (a bi-directional concept) to blackness mean in puerto rico. the tension points may help to address possible disparities that exist due to institutionalized and interpersonal forms of racism. one outcome of this is that there is a dearth in the literature that reviews racial health disparities and prevention/intervention methods in puerto rico because of the notion that racism does not exist in puerto rico. another tension point is that many afro-puerto ricans may feel a belonging to national unity which can increase well-being, but that same macro-level society may ignore that darker skinned or black identified puerto ricans have different racialized experiences, which can impact well-being. we also found through loíza that community, traditions, respect for the elders, and the passing down of stories of resistance have been an incredible source of resiliency and pride for many black puerto-ricans of that community. loíza as a community has provided a strong psychological sense of community and safety for its residents. however, black puertoricans in loíza are not immune to the racist attitude of larger puerto rico toward their community. thus, we acknowledge that there are facilitators and barriers to health and well being for black puerto ricans. it is our goal with this paper to start a dialogue as a means to open up spaces and opportunities to engage in this difficult conversation. it is the authors’ hope that this paper can spark conversations and strategies to address the historical and contemporary impact of how blackness is socially constructed in puerto rican society. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 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(2005). puerto rico: the pleasures and traumas of race. centro: journal of the center for puerto rican studies, 17(1), 46-70. http://www.gjcpp.org/ bridging disciplines to teach community psychology: notes from a transcommunal classroom janelle m. silva keywords: praxis, undergraduate education, community psychology, pedagogy author biographies: janelle m. silva, associate professor of community psychology at the university of washington, bothell (uwb). she received her phd in social psychology and feminist studies from the university of california, santa cruz, where she examined how elementary school curriculum can teach young children about social justice and community engagement. her current research includes a collaboration with high school and undergraduate students to create a shared curriculum based on identity, community and social action, as well as continuing her work with student activists at uwb to document the changes they have facilitated on campus. recommended citation: silva, j. m. (2019). bridging disciplines to teach community psychology: notes from a transcommunal classroom. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(1), 1 17. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). http://gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 bridging disciplines to teach community psychology: notes from a transcommunal classroom abstract this paper explores how an interdisciplinary pedagogy can amplify community psychology (cp) values in undergraduate education. sociologist john brown childs’ (2003) concept of transcommunality, which emphasizes working across difference through shared practical action via respect, understanding, and communication, illustrates how bridging disciplines can transform cp classrooms. this framework acts as a catalyst for teaching cp values of empowerment, citizen participation, wellness, diversity, sense of community, and social justice (kloos, hill, thomas, wandersman, elias, & dalton, 2012). a transcommunal approach grounded in power, privilege, and oppression are further examined to explore possible class assignments and activities to facilitate student interest and thinking about cp values in relation to a transcommunal society. the paper concludes with suggestions and an assessment of the (dis)advantages of these activities for instructors. in her seminal book, sentipensante pedagogy: educating for wholeness, social justice, and liberation, laura rendón (2001) examines how her latino roots have shaped and shifted her pedagogy. she states that “at the heart of this effort is the reunification of the mind and the heart at the living center by which we know who we are, stay connected, and care for the world we are given to steward” (rendón, 2001, p. xi). she encourages other educators to record their own journeys as a way to create an inclusive pedagogy of sharing that benefits learners, teachers, and our communities. she calls upon educators to lean in to these moments of reflection so that educators can cultivate transformative pedagogies that speak to diversity, voice, and inclusion. this call for connecting the personal journeys of educators toward building an inclusive classroom community resonates with the elements of transcommunality (childs, 2003). described in his book, transcommunality: from the politics of conversion to the ethics of respect, sociologist john brown childs’ (2003) writes that “transcommunality relies on concrete interpersonal ties growing out of…shared practical action from diverse participants…[and] from such practical action flows increasing communication, mutual respect, and understanding” (p. 11). as childs (2003) connects positionality, power, and dialogue as central components to learning how to live together as one, rendón (2001) suggests that educators should reflect on how our classrooms can facilitate this process through lessons on identity, collaboration, and diversity. as this special issue attempts to capture the current and future of undergraduate education in community psychology (cp), is it important to ask what a pedagogy of cp looks like. what does it mean to teach in the field of cp? how do we incorporate and bridge disciplines in our classrooms, as well as embrace our whole selves as teachers and students? how can we include cp values in and out of cp classes? lastly, what does it mean to foster a transcommunal pedagogy of cp? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 this paper is my pedagogical journey of developing a transcommunal pedagogy of cp. entrenched within interdisciplinarity, i illuminate where this pedagogical approach derives from and why it resonates with my own identities and journey into the field. next, i discuss how i utilize john brown child’s (2003) theory of transcommunality to teach students cp values such as empowerment, citizen participation, collaboration, and sense of community (kloos, hill, thomas, wandersman, elias, & dalton, 2012). by charting out my pedagogical framework, i explain how i utilize a transcommunal pedagogical approach to classroom learning through three examples: social histories, radical speaking order, and praxis projects. students’ voices and reflections help illuminate the collective learning and lessons that can transpire from this approach. lastly, i conclude this paper with my personal reflections on what a transcommunal pedagogy can teach undergraduate students. a genealogy of thought: connecting cp values with transcommunality before i outline my cp pedagogy, i believe it is important to explain why i have chosen this approach. for many individuals, teaching cp values in cp-based courses may seem obvious, albeit even effortless for some. this was not the case for me. i first learned about community psychology during my last two years of graduate school, where i was completing my degree in social psychology with an emphasis in feminist studies. learning alongside undergraduates in an introduction to community psychology course, i saw the importance of cp concepts and values. however, when it came time to teach the course as a faculty member, i struggled. as a first generation, cis-gender, 1 as chronicled by childs (2003), the haudenosaunee or “iroquois” confederacy resided in what is now upstate new york. it is through the lessons and ways of knowing of his able-bodied, latinx woman of color, there was disconnect between what i was teaching and how it connected to my identities embedded within my pedagogy. the struggle for me was not how to explain cp, but how to get my students to care about cp. seeing their struggles with the material brought me back to that undergraduate classroom where i sat as a graduate student, flummoxed by cp. many students have confided in me that, although they want to do “cp work,” they struggle with how the field connects to their lives and lived experiences within their environment(s), rather than studying their communities. to understand cp was one thing, but to bring it to life in the classroom and have it resonate with students from various backgrounds, identities, and ages was entirely different. as a graduate student, transcommunality (childs, 2003) spoke to me. amplifying the voices of his ancestors, the haudenosaunee1 society, john brown childs (2003) defines transcommunality as “a way to both maintain particularistic rooted affiliations and create broad constellations of inclusive cooperation that constructively draw from such diversity” (p. 8). to put it simply, transcommunality is a lesson on listening, mutual respect, collaboration, cooperation, and understanding in order to move toward pragmatic action. the synergies between transcommunality and cp values allowed me to see myself within this field and to surface these connections for my students, particularly my students of color that often feel like outsiders within the discipline. by using transcommunality to amplify cp values, i provide students with an additional framework connected to the field and indigenous ways of knowing. table 1 illustrates the connections i have made between cp values and elements of native ancestors that childs (2003) conceptualized transcommunality. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 transcommunality. i have chosen to group certain cp concepts together to illustrate how i make sense of the field and see them resonating within this framework. the intention here is not to fixate on the arbitrary grouping of these values, but on how the concepts can inform one another and utilized as teaching tools in the classroom. as kloos and colleagues (2012) note that cp values build on one another, i follow their lead by building and expanding upon these values through an interdisciplinary lens. table 1 connecting community psychology (cp) values2 with transcommunality (childs, 2003) cp values connection transcommunality empowerment, citizen participation, practical knowledge, constructive & collaboration task-focused outlooks, shared disputing respect for human diversity & wellness associations creating of transcommunal sense of community & social justice propulsion of vision personal transformation & propulsion of vision facilitating citizen participation and empowerment through collaboration. community psychologists often view citizen participation as the ability for all citizens within a particular community to engage in shared actions that lead to a common goal (kloos et al., 2012; prilleltensky, 2001). i believe that in order to facilitate citizen participation within a group, those in the group must also have shared access and the skills needed to utilize these resources (rappaport, 1981). both citizen participation and collaboration require members to interact with groups different from themselves. in so doing, they may recognize their own positionality, both within their specific group and in the greater community. to engage students in these cp values, i emphasize the transcommunal concepts of task-focused outlooks, shared practical knowledge, and constructive disputing. tasked-focused outlooks require having a shared vision of a project goal and creating clear roles for individuals to take on to 2 adapted from kloos, et al. (2012) and prilleltensky (2001) complete the goal. tasked-focused outlooks are most effective when there is a shared practical knowledge among the group. this can range from a having a shared communication pattern, shared skills, a collective discourse, and/or life/academic skills. in non-homogeneous groups, shared practical knowledge is still possible despite individual differences that might arise. in a classroom, task-focused outlooks and shared practical knowledge give students a common goal and a commitment to cooperation and interaction among all participants. what transcommunality offers to elevate these cp values in a classroom is constructive disputing. acknowledging that group work can be difficult at times, childs (2003) states that constructive disputing should be expected and not avoided. thus, to engage in transcommunality means to acknowledge the gaps between members and learn how to create bridges with one another to see through the groups’ collective vision. respect for human diversity and wellness. respecting human diversity means not only http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 recognizing and honoring diverse groups in our communities, but it also means understanding the communities we work with (kloos et al., 2012). this is particularly important given the field’s commitment to wellness. community psychologists often speak to individual and family wellness; in my classrooms, i emphasize prilleltensky’s (2001) concept of collective wellness. this form of wellness extends beyond the individual and calls attention to communities and societies (prilleltensky, 2001). in order to facilitate collective wellness in collaborative, community-based work, we must consider and amplify the diverse needs and perspectives of the individuals involved. the cp values of wellness and respect for diversity aligns with the transcommunal belief of developing transcommunal associations. specifically, transcommunal associations encourages communities and/or groups to work together to create mutually beneficial change and learning to step aside when the work should cease. childs (2003) is not arguing that once change occurs it is complete; rather, this element asks for the constant reflection upon the individuals involved to determine if the change they are seeking is necessary and if they should be the ones still pushing for that change. this element requires reflection upon the individual’s positionality and that of the group. essentially, to engage in transcommunal action also means understanding how identities intersect with structural oppression, often hindering their ability to be empowered. sense of community and investment in social justice. i strongly believe that two of the most valuable cp values we can incorporate into our teachings are a sense of community and an investment in social justice. a sense of community requires that individuals learn about one another, our differences, lived experiences, our connections, and expertise. it requires understanding what it means to feel a sense of belonging and commitment that may lead to a collective goal or identity (sarason, 1974). it pushes the community psychologist to think beyond the individual in order to foster change that is meaningful for the entire community. community psychologists strive to make changes that facilitate social justice. there is not one fully accepted definition of social justice within the field of cp. i have chosen to use prilleltensky’s (2001) definition that calls for “fair and equitable allocation of bargaining powers, resources, and obligations in society in consideration of people’s differential power, needs, and abilities to express their wishes” (p. 754). this definition highlights the importance of distributive (i.e., resources) and procedural (i.e., processes) aspects of social justice that the community psychologist should take into account in community work. combined, understanding the community we are working with can help better define the social justice we are seeking. feeling connected to your community and an increased commitment to social justice, whether it is in the classroom or greater society, ties into the personal and group level transformative processes of transcommunality. for me, i approach these cp values through the transcommunal concepts of personal transformation and the propulsion of vision. in a transcommunal community, personal transformation is an ongoing, cyclical process strengthened by engaging in collective action and learning from one another. as interpersonal connections strengthen, adapt, and shift, so does the groups’ collective vision of its purpose. referred to as the propulsion of vision, this essential element emphasizes that the actions put forth by the group be grounded in social justice, equality, and peace. as a collective, the group must consider how larger political, historical, and institutional structures work to reinforce http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 power and oppression that may undermine the groups’ vision. to ensure this, an understanding of diversity and structural oppression is key. a working definition of transcommunal pedagogy transcommunality has changed how i teach cp. my pedagogical approach is praxiscentered and informed from interdisciplinary scholars such as childs (2003), as well as my own lived experiences, both inside and outside of the classroom. i define a transcommunal pedagogy of cp as one centered on the practice of communication, mutual respect, understanding, diversity, and engagement with the intent of moving toward collective action. aligned with cp, i emphasize praxis, the process of connecting theory to action (freire, 1970; kelly, ryan, altman, & stelzner, 2000) in order to engage students in pragmatic projects connected to course curriculum, their intersecting identities, and society. my pedagogy seeks to amplify voices often absent in mainstream curriculum or as defined by the dominant group(s). i take into consideration who is in the classroom and who is not, whom i can speak for and whom i cannot, and how to bridge these gaps for students. power, privilege, and oppression are essential for students to understand why cp values should be a right, and not a privilege for some groups to thrive. this approach emphasizes the principles of the field by connecting citizen participation, shared power, change, sense of community, and social justice through a framework of identity and collective action. moreover, it is a constant acknowledgment of the diverse experiences and voices of the students, their lives, and the context in which we teach and thrive. i truly believe that we must go outside of the discipline to prepare students for cp work that often requires them to engage in levels of analysis, collective wellbeing, social justice, and social action. table 2 classroom activities that connect cp values3 with transcommunality (childs, 2003) cp concept transcommunality connection classroom activity empowerent, citizen participation, & collaboration task-focused outlooks shared practical knowledge, constructive disputing community agreements, radical speaking order, anonymous writing respect for human diversity & wellness creating of transcommunal associations social histories, silencing of dominant groups sense of community & social justice personal transformation & propulsion of vision praxis projects examples and notes from a transcommunal classroom integrating the tools and lessons i have learned from scholars, teachers, colleagues, and students, i believe this pedagogy can foster a classroom environment that 3 adapted from kloos et al. (2012) and prilleltensky (2001) emphasizes transcommunal action embedded within cp values. table 2 offers different classroom activities that educators can use to develop their own transcommunal pedagogy of cp. in this section, i will analyze three different classroom activities that build from http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 one another toward the goal of transcommunality. the first two examples center on smaller scale course assignments and classroom management, while the third draws on a larger scale praxis project that attempts to engage students in transcommunal action. although each can stand alone, i use the first two examples to prepare my students for the larger praxis projects. additionally, i have included reflections given by permission from former students to capture their interpretation of my pedagogy. as past educators have taught me, our pedagogies are only as strong as our students’ understanding and experiences of them; what is “lost in translation” can surface what needs to improve. by including their voices, i hope to illustrate the planned and unplanned outcomes from a transcommunal approach to cp. it is important to preface that all these examples come from my classes taught at the university of washington bothell, a small public university that is the most ethnically and racially diverse in the state (fast facts, 2015). as our cp major resides in the school for interdisciplinary arts & sciences, students often come to class prepared to engage in dialogue that transcends their chosen degree. what has worked for me as a first generation, cis gender, able bodied, latinx woman of color faculty member may not work for others. each example discusses the risks, challenges, and rewards, as well as possible adjustments for faculty from different backgrounds at institutions that are not as diverse as my own. i offer the following examples and notes for inspiration of what could be possible. transcommunal classroom example one: social histories at the heart of childs’ (2003) conceptual framework of transcommunality is the importance of communication, mutual respect, and understanding. separately, these can take the form of using one’s voice, acknowledging one another’s presence and learning to listen. combined, these three concepts can be a difficult task to accomplish in a classroom, where students often enter as strangers and may lack trust, with their peers and/or the instructor. to engage in transcommunality, one must meet these three goals to develop a sense of unity that will lead the group to social action (childs, 2003). as childs’ (2003) eloquently describes, this process is not about losing one’s identity, but is about humanizing our experiences to challenge acts of domination. in a transcommunal classroom, i use communication, mutual respect, and understanding to center our positionalities and amplify diverse voices. one way that i attempt this is through social histories. taking the form a letter, i ask students to introduce themselves to me. i ask them to write about their family, childhood, education, identities, relationships, connections, and anything else they would like me to know about them beyond my own assumptions. i invite students to write sections or phrases in their home language, to use poetry to express themselves, or to include pictures or drawings. i provide no actual template or expectation for this assignment beyond beginning their letter with the salutation, “dear professor silva”. given how personal these letters can be, i model this activity by writing my own social history letter to my students, sharing my story, identities, experiences, and photos. this assignment extends beyond the traditional in-class introduction given the amount of detail i choose to disclose about myself to my students. i ask that students keep my letter confidential, just as i will do the same with theirs. rather than return these letters back with a marked grade, i use them for our first one-on-one meeting that takes place the first two weeks of the quarter. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 the letter provides us with a starting point for our conversation, building a level of trust between the student and myself and allowing me to learn more about who is in my classroom. on the surface, this assignment might seem mundane or irrelevant given the short amount of time we have to engage students in curriculum. however, this assignment is critical for my classes. if i want us to engage in shared practical action, task-focused outlooks, constructive disputing, personal transformation, and have a shared propulsion of vision, i believe it is important for me to understand who they are and where they are coming from. understanding who they are allows us to work towards cp values of participation, collaboration, and builds a respect for diversity (kloos, et al., 2012). i use me instead of us because i have found that the hardest trust to earn is between students and myself. as one student put it, “i don’t trust folxs in power. i just don’t. and i don’t think folxs in power-even my professorswant to listen to anything i have to say. schooling has taught me that they don’t care about me, or how i need to be taught, or what i want to learn, they just want to get it done and over with. when you asked us to write you a letter, i thought, ‘she’s a little weird. let’s see if she can handle it [their lived experience].’ so i wrote my truth. and when we sat down to meet and you asked me about what i wrote, i started to tear up. because i realized you not only read it, but you cared. you asked me questions, but you didn’t critique me or judge me for what i have been through. so when it came time to do other stuff, i was like ‘alright. i can trust her. she cool.’” (somalian, cis gender, working class, first generation male student, personal communication, 6/1/17). the social history assignment has become central to creating a transcommunal classroom that amplifies student voice and cp values through the process of writing and listening. risks, rewards and making it your own. it would be disingenuous of me to say that this letter assignment is an easy one for me, even after assigning it in over 40 classes. the first time i used this assignment, i stared at my computer for what felt like hours. it is very easy to give a surface introduction of myself; the struggle was with how honest i wanted to be with students who i would be meeting for the very first time, at a new institution, as a junior faculty member who was also a latinx woman of color. as one of six latinx faculty on campus, i was cognizant of how students of color and white students might perceive me. on the surface, my story is what many might call a “happy, normal childhood”: raised by two loving parents in the same house my entire life, with a high achieving older sister, both of us graduating with advance degrees and no financial debt. it would be easy to tell that story. it was more difficult to tell the story of the personal struggles i faced based on my skin color, being first generation, my (constant) battle with imposter syndrome, and my physical struggles as a woman of color trying to fit a societal mold. although i asked that students not share my letter, i knew i had no way of knowing if they would honor that. like them, i had to trust that they would, just like they had to trust that i would. in seven years of teaching, i have only had one student ask for their letter back before i could read it. appearing at my office immediately following class, the student explained she was not comfortable with me reading the letter just yet. i did not question her decision; i found her letter in the pile of work and handed it back to her, telling her that i hope she might feel differently as the course continued but completely understood if she did not. slowly, this student started to attend my office hours each week to discuss the course and eventually revealing layers of herself, both in her assignments and in our one-on-one conversations. during the final http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 week of class, she handed me her letter and a card, thanking me for respecting her decision and stating she was ready to share herself with me. i learned a valuable lesson about this assignment from this student. i now tell students they can be as personal as they would like and can be as private as they choose. i often provide prompts now for students to help those who might not be comfortable divulging their lives on paper. the prompts address topics in the course i want them to consider and often ask them to reflect back on their lived experiences. for example, in courses where we discuss gender socialization, i write about the role of my gender and ethnic identities on my upbringing. in courses where we discuss gentrification, i spend time writing about what it was like growing up in a gentrified community and living on “the wrong side of the tracks”. for faculty from other institutions or backgrounds that differ from my own, i would encourage them to begin this assignment by providing a set of questions or specific prompts you would like the students to address. for example, in a cp course, you might ask students to reflect upon a time they felt empowered in their lives and how it made them feel. for students who are afraid to be vulnerable with their faculty, guiding questions allow them to be selective in their writing. i also grade this assignment based on completion of assignment, not the context of the letter. emphasizing that you will be grading them on whether they turn it in rather than what they share can also help reduce students’ trepidations. transcommunal classroom example two: radical speaking order this assignment allows me to engage students in the next step of my transcommunal pedagogy, radical speaking order. adapted from feminists of color (collins, 1999; lorde, 1984) and widely used in community activist spaces (davis, 2013), radical speaking order asks individuals to step back and listen when the conversation ignores or silences their identities. it requires students to recognize their positionality and privilege within conversations about communities, social groups and social issues that they may possess knowledge about, but are not directly affected. it is not an act of silencing people. the intention is to create space for marginalized groups-often viewed as subjects in academia-to speak first, with the goal of raising awareness of diverse lived experiences. dominant groups are then invited to speak, using statements that are based on their experiences and to avoid (when possible) relying on stereotypes or assumptions of groups they are not members. in all settings, whether it is the classroom or a community meeting, proponents of radical speaking order emphasize the value from learning to listen to one another and respecting diversity. in my pedagogy, i strive to transform silence in the classroom into action through dialogue and uncomfortable conversations. it is more than acknowledging our intersecting identities and differences, but it is linking these differences to power, which i believe speaks directly to cp values (kloos et al., 2012). if we want to train students to work with communities, they must first understand the structural oppression faced by certain communities. i think carefully about how i want to do this based on who is in my classroom. as a woman of color, i am often standing in front of a group of students from dominant social groups. i do not want to make these conversations about one specific group or to create a space that validates victim blaming (ryan, 1971) or reinforces stereotypes. this is why creating a communal space is key. as lorde (1984) states, “without community there is no liberation” (p. 112). this is not a call to ignore difference, but is a push to understand difference, power, and be in dialogue with one another. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 there is a clear process i utilize in my classrooms in order to move toward a radical speaking order. as a class, we structure our community agreements to align with radical speaking order. on the second week of class, we cover our classroom walls in large butcher paper and start the process of recognizing who is in the classroom. students use post-its to write down their identities anonymously and place them on the paper. this process has been quite moving for students. although they may see someone who looks like them, this can often be the first visual acknowledgement in the classroom that someone else shares your same identities. after we take time to recognize who is in the room, we then begin a conversation on intersectionality. intersectionality teaches us how it is our intersecting identities that influence our lived experiences, interactions, and access to resources to create change (collins, 1999; crenshaw, 1991). students have come to class prepared to discuss excerpts from hooks (1994, 2003) and lorde (1984) to guide our difficult conversations on power, privilege, and identity. we use these texts to frame our roles in the classroom, including my own. we use guiding questions: when is the appropriate time to speak? when can we bring in our lived experiences? is it okay to speak for other groups, as long as you know someone from that group? how do we include the majority of us in our conversations? how do we hold space for silence? what is silence? how do we choose to disagree? is it okay to disengage when the conversation is too much? how can we ensure our classroom is a space where we all want to talk and where we will continue coming back? this activity takes the entire class period and sometimes requires an additional class session to complete. some questions are easy; the majority are not. students are encouraged to step back at any point and can use additional post its (if they choose) to stick to the whiteboard to explain why they stepped back and what might be done differently to change the dynamic. by the end of this class session, we have established our community agreements, begun to acknowledge one’s presence and positionality, and are learning to listen. i provide students with hard copies of these agreements and we keep them on the board for each class session. we acknowledge that we might not always succeed in achieving these agreements, but are committed as a class to creating a sense of community intertwined within transcommunality. through listening to one another, students are gaining shared practical knowledge (childs, 2003) that is central to working toward task-focused outlooks. moreover, the assignment and class activity helps build interpersonal relations among the students who may hold assumptions about their peers based on perceived differences. additionally, it can facilitate student empowerment (albeit limited to that specific class time and place) and a respect for diversity. as a latinx identified student commented, “i liked that i was given a space to speak. and not just speak, but it was a space where others had to listen. because we spent time getting to know one another and radical speaking order was explained to us, we didn’t sit back and get upset. well, some did at first. but after a while, we understood why we had to listen sometimes. even me. that made me a better listener, thinker, and taught me to approach projects differently” (personal correspondence, 3/12/18). social histories and radical speaking order help lay the groundwork that is necessary for engaging in cp work. to help create a sense of community (prilleltensky, 2001) in the classroom, i use these two methods to move us toward a deeper understanding of who we are, what we each bring to the space, and how we can learn from one another to work collaboratively. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 risks, rewards, and making it your own. the reason i use class-derived community agreements to engage students in radical speaking order is due to the inherent risks that come from this practice. as this practice asks that people recognize their privilege and to step back and not speak for groups they are not a part of, i am very aware and concerned that students will view this as silencing. moreover, as a latinx woman of color, i am cognizant that students from more privileged backgrounds (and even students of color) might interpret this as me being prejudice toward dominant groups. due to these risks, i spend a considerable amount of time explaining this process and do not enact it until week three or four of the course. i also only attempt radical speaking order in my upper division classes. personally, i am hesitant about using such a structure for first year students who are new to the institution and are still adjusting to college. moreover, i would not recommend that faculty begin radical speaking order prior to having general class discussions where they can observe class interactions. if there is a high level of tension in the classroom, i would refrain from enacting radical speaking order in each class session. instead, i would suggest proposing discussion questions-led by the faculty-to the class where students work in pairs. each pair would have a set amount of time to discuss the question, with one person listening and not interjecting while their partner speaks and then transition. eventually, i would consider making these groups larger, with the goal of having a class-based discussion that could utilize components of radical speaking order. it is important to be cautious and not risk the classroom community and to listen to students if they are not ready to engage in this process. as illustrated above, radical speaking order can be very rewarding for students, both for marginalized groups that want to demystify stereotypes and for dominant groups. not all students want to participate in radical speaking order. i do not require that all students speak when the discussion question pertains to their lived experiences. it is never the job of students from dominant groups to educate others about themselves. this is a very fine line in any classroom. this practice requires constant reflection on community agreements and checking in with students about classroom dynamics. i often use “exit tickets” or online polls to check in with my students about the process. we constantly revise the process for our classroom, always knowing we can abandon it if students believe it is causing harm. transcommunal classroom example three: praxis projects the above examples provide the foundation needed to create a transcommunal classroom and learning experience for my students to engage in praxis assignments. as stated earlier, praxis is the cyclical process of reflection and action. all of my classes require students to engage in a praxis project. these projects range in both size and scope: from 45 students to small groups of four, to projects focused on social change within our campus community and others involving collaboration with a community group (silva & the students for diversity now, 2018; silva & the students for gender equity, 2015;). each praxis project asks students to be “pragmatic realists”; that is, to draw upon their knowledge and skills and address an issue in a manner that is feasible, attainable, and sustainable. pragmatic realism draws upon cp values by focusing on practical and sustainable change that centers on transcommunal action and is driven by collaboration and communication. the praxis project i will be using as an example of transcommunal pedagogy is the k-5th grade social justice project. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 the k-5th grade social justice project asks students to develop a 30-minute lesson plan to teach young people about social and community psychology to show the importance of teaching these concepts in schools (see appendix for an example). in self-selected groups of four, students spend four weeks (one hour each week) identifying the concepts they want to include in their lesson, create an activity, and a short homework assignment for a randomly assigned grade level. to connect this project with the community, i collaborate with a local elementary school whose mission includes social justice and community action. as a class, we visit the school twice, observing different classrooms and spending time on the playground with students. my students have the opportunity to visit their specific grade level and speak to the teacher. in addition, i give students the school’s demographics, community description, and school goals to inform their lesson plans for a specific target audience. during the last week, students present their lesson plan to the class and we collectively evaluate the plans for feasibility, illustration of concepts, level of engagement, and practicability. the elementary school teachers review the lesson plans with the highest overall score. the teachers then select one plan that they would like to adapt for their classrooms and the selected group co-facilitates their lesson. as a thank you for their partnership, the teachers are given all lesson plans to use. intended as a project that promotes pragmatic realism in action, the k-5th grade social justice project integrates cp values within a transcommunal framework. as both cp and transcommunality call upon the importance of social justice, community, collaboration, and action, this project, both indirectly and directly, attempts to bridge these frameworks. students are involved in creating change within a school, but must attend to the needs of that school and its students. although tasked with incorporating social and community psychology concepts within their lesson, school field trips provide students with the opportunity to get to know their audience and listen to their needs. during these visits, groups are encouraged to spend time in their selected grade level classroom, asking students for input on class activities and aiding them in their project. moreover, as a group project, students are sharing power and collaborating with others not just in our classroom but also with the elementary school. teachers provide them with a list of activities and projects their students have engaged in to help guide the groups. additionally, the selected group collaborates with the teacher before they can teach the students their lesson. this project aims to give students a tangible example of the importance of cp values within a transcommunal approach. as a praxis project, these cp values align with the goals and intention of transcommunality that i seek to bring into my classrooms. in order for the students to create change and develop a sense of community, both with their group and the elementary school, students must have defined task-focused outlooks and a propulsion of vision to guide their project. shared practical action is important for students to think pragmatically about their goal. they must develop a project that is feasible and engages the young learners they will be teaching, while also meeting the needs of the elementary school teacher. students must also learn how to work through constructive disputing, often requiring them to step back and listen. listening, both to one another and to young students, is essential for them to develop a lesson plan connected to social justice. interpersonal relations is what drives their project, strengthening the relationships they have developed with one another inside of the classroom. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 for many students, this project becomes one of personal transformation. as a filipino student wrote in his group reflection, “this wasn’t just a class project where we had to turn in an assignment for a grade. this project served a purpose. meeting with our first graders taught me how even young people have opinions and deserve to be heard, because they matter. this project was a lot of fun but was very hard. we each put so much of ourselves in the final lesson plan. i am grateful that i got to take part in a project with a purpose and that i get to see it through” (personal correspondence, 3/6/18). similarly, one student noted the lasting impact of this project on her educational experience. identifying as a muslim, first generation woman of color, she wrote, “this project challenged me because i made assumptions about my peers. i didn’t think they could understand what others were going through [their group topic was focused on introducing second graders to the muslim community in their area]. i almost refused to do it. but i thought about what we learned and what you said about the importance of us learning from each other. so we focused on trust, because i told them i was [a] skeptic. and that helped us make something great. i learned how to argue and not hurt my peers and also how to take feedback that was critical but honest. i grew. i think we all did. and i think we all took a part of those lessons with us to other spaces, whether it was in a class or in a student club” (personal correspondence, 2/18/16). for students, what could be a mundane project with extensive group work this has become a project that engages students in transcommunal association through a praxis project. risks, rewards, and making it your own. this project is one of the most rewarding projects i have implemented in my classroom but it takes a considerable amount of effort from the instructor. building relationships with schools is not easy; finding a school that will welcome college students and collaborating with a teacher that will make time in their curriculum for this project is extremely difficult. i am fortunate to be at an institution where community-based classroom projects are encouraged. being able to bring experts in to train students regarding conduct (particularly with young children) and community expectations is critical to the success of this project. if i was at an institution where i did not have this support, i would likely scale down this project to accommodate my own limitations. for this project, i have chosen to collaborate with a school because my research focus is the k-12 system; however, other faculty can adjust this assignment based on the community they are working with. it is important that your community partner approve of the parameters of the assignment, adjusting it to meet their needs while simultaneously meeting your learning objectives. there are considerable risks that come with inviting others to a field site, especially for an assigned class project based on the course. although some students may lack the motivation for this assignment it often changes after they visit the school. if students remain resistant to the project after the school visit, i would then give that group an option for an alternative project to not risk my partnership or sacrifice their learning. it took me two years to plan this project before i executed it. my advice is to take time with a praxis project, starting small before creating an assignment that might require more scaffolding than what is feasible during one quarter or semester. what is possible: a concluding thought as i reflect on my pedagogical approach and lessons that myself and my students have learned in this process, i go back to rendón’s (2009) sentipensante pedagogy and her http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 “invitation to make our classrooms matter” (p. xi). an educational manifesto, rendón (2009) asks educators to consider the lived experiences that brought them to the classroom in the first place and to reimagine their classrooms as spaces that embrace their whole selves. as i move toward a transcommunal pedagogy of cp, my intention is to continue to reflect and rethink of the ways in which i can bridge disciplines to create moments of wholeness, respect, authentic dialogue, transformative knowledge, and inclusive participation as we move toward pragmatic, praxis-focused actions. i also remind myself of childs’ (2003) assertion that this “is a process-often difficult, slow, and even defeated at certain moments-that constantly creates, and when necessary rebuilds, structures of commonality among diverse peoples” (p. 76). for me, that means that failure happens. no classroom is perfect and oftentimes our plans must be adapted or even lost for the betterment of our students. despite these potential failures, i believe our classrooms matter because of what is possible; for me, what is possible starts with transcommunality. references childs, j.b. (2003). transcommunality: from the ethics of conversion to the politics of respect. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. collins, p.h. (1999). black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment, 2nd edition. new york & london: routledge. crenshaw. k.w. (1991). mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. stanford law review, 43(6), 1241-1299. doi: 10.2307/1229309. davis, a. y. (2013, january). martin luther king jr keynote address. seattle university, seattle, wa. fast facts (2015). university of washington bothell. freire, p. (1970). education for critical consciousness. new york & london: bloomsbury. bhooks, b. (1994). teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. new york & london: routledge. bhooks, b. (2003). teaching community: a pedagogy of hope. new york & london: routledge. kelly, j.g., ryan, a.m., altman, b.e., & stelzner, s.p. (2000). understanding and changing social systems: an ecological view. in j. rappaport & e. seidman (eds.), handbook of community psychology (p. 133-160). newyork: kluwer academic/plenum publishers. kloos, b., hill, j., thomas, e., wandersman, a., elias, m.j., & dalton, j.h. (2012). community psychology: linking individuals and communities, 3rd edition. boston, ma: wadsworth cengage learning. lorde, a. (1984). sister outsider. berkeley, ca: crossing press. prilleltensky, i. (2001). value-based praxis in cp: moving toward social justice and social action. american journal of community psychology, 29(5), 747-778. doi: 10.1023/:101041720. rappaport, j. (1981). in praise of paradox: a social policy of empowerment over prevention. american journal of community psychology, 9(1), 1-25. doi: 10.1007/bf00896357. rendón, l. i. (2009). sentipensante (sensing/thinking) pedagogy: educating for wholeness, social justice, and liberation. sterling, va: stylus. ryan. w. (1971). blaming the victim. new york: vintage books. sarason, s. b. (1974). the psychological sense of community: prospects for a community psychology. london: josseybass. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 silva, j. m. & the students for diversity now. (2018). #wewantspace: facilitating activist identities in college students through course curriculum. the american journal of community psychology, 62(3-4), 374-384. doi: 10.1002/ajcp.12284. silva, j. m. & the students for gender equity. (2015). a feminist approach to teaching community psychology: the senior seminar project. the feminist teacher, 25(2-3), 111-123. doi: 10.5406/femteacher.25.2-3.0111. acknowledgements the author would like to thank her students and colleagues for their support on this paper. she is extremely grateful to dr. erin ellison and two anonymous reviewers for their critical and compassionate feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 appendix a social justice for young people: the elementary school praxis project: 130 points objective: this project requires you to work collaboratively, integrating diverse opinions and voices, to consider audience/community/community partner, integrate course material, and successfully execute a lesson plan appropriate for an elementary classroom. who is involved: you and your peers in this course, your professor, and acorn elementary school4 the project: you will be working in groups of four or five. this is largely an in-class assignment (meaning i will devote several class meetings to group work on this project) but you will likely have to still work on this project outside of class. choose your group wisely. over the course of the quarter, we will examine how social psychology intertwines with our daily lives and the importance of learning about these concepts in k-12 education, specifically elementary school. your task will be to select two concepts (or more) that you think students in elementary school (k-5) should learn about. remember, many people see these concepts as not “appropriate for young people”. through your lesson, you will have to show teachers (and provide an explanation for the lesson to guardians/parents) that young people should know these things to be empowered and motivated toward socially just change. what tools are you teaching them? keep in mind… -you are not simply creating a lesson plan to teach students about prejudice. -you will need to determine how to teach this lesson to a particular grade and age level. you will need to understand (and research) how that particular age level thinks of these concepts. terminology might need adjustment. outside research will guide your lesson. you will have to develop a plan that will make students care and listen to you, and is feasible for the teacher. you must take into consideration what the teacher discusses with you during our class visits. grade levels are randomly assigned. each group will present their lesson plan during the last week of class. the teachers at acorn elementary will evaluate your plans and will select the group that will come and co-facilitate their lesson in the classroom. acorn elementary: to get to know our community partner, we will be watching a video presentation by the faculty, staff and students of acorn elementary. in addition, we will be visiting the school during two class meetings. the first meeting focuses on meeting the students and the faculty and staff. the second meeting will give each group time to spend with their grade level and an individual meeting with the teacher. 4 the elementary school was given a pseudonym. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 project outline/timetable: week four select groups and brainstorm with class topics that could be covered in an elementary school; grade level assigned and tentative topics selected week five first class visit to acorn elementary; receive class overview from teacher and list of topics covered in class week six & seven research and begin lesson brainstorming week eight second class visit to acorn elementary; groups can arrange additional visits week nine lesson plans week ten lesson plan presentation and final selection by acorn elementary point breakdown: lesson plan (70 points) you will turn in one written, descriptive, explanatory lesson plan. be as detailed as you need for someone else to be able to pick up your lesson plan and execute it. lesson plans should be no less than 9 full pages double spaced. you will need to explain your topic and justify the reasoning behind your lesson. things to keep in mind while planning: -age appropriateness of activity -engagement -does it makes sense? -what is the intended goal? -do you need to change the words to make them more student friendly? -what will the teacher say to the students at the conclusion of the lesson? -what will the teacher say to parents/guardians or the principal if they have concerns about the lesson? remember, the goal is that someone should be able to pick up your lesson and execute it. that means the following: a list of materials, handouts, detailed steps of your plan, teacher dialogue, an appropriate homework assignment for the students to do after the lesson plan to continue their learning. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 community health improvement and the community psychology competencies by jonathan p. scaccia1, noé rubén chávez2, lena hatchett3, kymberly byrd4, shanika blanton5, kassandra alia6, laura jean brennan7, paul howard8, niñon lewis9, somava stout10 keywords: community health improvement, coalitions, scale, health equity, sociocultural competence, diverse contexts author biographies: jonathan p. scaccia, phd, is a practicing community psychologist who has extensive experience helping organizations select, adapt, implement, and evaluate improvement interventions. his current research focuses primarily on how readiness influences outcomes. this includes developing comprehensive methods to evaluate quantitative and qualitative differences in organizational readiness and enhancing strategies that can help to build readiness. dr. scaccia also works toward developing practical implementation science techniques that are usable by front-line practitioners, and facilitating the use of evidence-based implementation support strategies (e.g. technical assistance, quality improvement, etc.). dr. scaccia has his phd in clinical-community psychology from the university of south carolina, and has previously completed a research fellowship in the office of the assistant secretary for health at the u.s. department of health and human services (oash/hhs). 1 institute for healthcare improvement 2 city of hope medical center 3 loyola university chicago stritch school of medicine 4 vital village network 5 proviso partners for health 6 university of south carolina 7 pathways to pacesetter program 8 community solutions 9 triple aim for populations focus area at institute for healthcare improvement 10 100 million healthier lives, institute for healthcare improvement http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 correspondence to this article should be addressed to jonathan scaccia, 1014 hartman road, reading, pa, 19606: email. jonathan.p.scaccia@gmail.com noé rubén chávez, phd, is a postdoctoral research fellow in the population sciences department at the beckman research institute, within the comprehensive cancer center of city of hope, in duarte, ca. he is a trained community psychologist with interests in youth empowerment, cultural competency, health equity, and community-based participatory research. one of his current projects involves working with an interdisciplinary team of scientists, including biologists and breast cancer researchers and clinicians, on developing, implementing, and evaluating programs to mentor and inspire children and adolescents of color to pursue science and health careers. as a community psychologist, his role is to assure that the science and health mentoring programs are developed, implemented and evaluated by working with local communities, engaging youth in participatory research, challenging traditional paradigms of science, and empowering youth of color to become leaders in achieving health equity. lena hatchett, phd, is a social and health psychologist at loyola university chicago neiswanger institute for bioethics. her research focuses on community-based participatory action to promote health equity. dr. hatchett’s collaborative work in the area of local food justice founded the maywood multicultural farmers market and the cook county green corps, a youth green job program. on-going projects include proviso partners for health, a multi-sector coalition for community health and economic growth using policy, system, and environmental change strategies. you can read more about her work at provisopartners.com. beyond the local level, dr. hatchett is a member of the leadership team and the health equity hub for “100 million healthier lives”, a multisector campaign to promote health, wellbeing and equity. this work is funded by rwj foundation to the institute for healthcare improvement for the scale initiative and the trinity health system transforming communities initiative. kymberly byrd, msw, mph, serves as the project manager for vital village network at boston medical center, a network of residents and organizations committed to maximizing child, family, and community well-being. she obtained her bachelor's in social work and spanish at http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 oakwood university in huntsville, alabama and her master's in social work and public health at boston university. she has research and evaluation experience in the fields of community engagement, homelessness, mental health, substance abuse, sexual health, hiv/aids, and maternal and child health. personally and professionally, kymberly is passionate about raising awareness about social justice issues and empowering people to take action. shanika blanton, phd is the program manager for proviso partners for health (pp4h) in west suburban cook county, illinois. dr. blanton’s role is to work with community and organizational partners through strategic planning and development, as well as program implementation and evaluation of specific aims addressing health equity and promoting the development of a green economy. dr. blanton also lectures at loyola university chicago in the stritch school of medicine in the neiswanger institute for bioethics. as a community psychologist, dr. blanton is guided by a deep conviction that interdisciplinary and multi-faceted approaches that are co-lead and collaboratively designed with stakeholders from the communities they serve effect the most engaging and sustainable positive changes. kassandra alia, ma, works as a member of the formative evaluation team for the insitute for healthcare improvement's scale (supporting community accelerators through learning and evaluation) initiative. kassy is particularly passionate about addressing inequities in resources needed to live healthy lives and in working with organizations to use research and evaluation to build readiness for facilitating systems change efforts. she is currently working on her ph.d. in clinical-community psychology while working as an evaluator/consultant with a focus on the use of implementation support strategies for promoting community health. laura brennan, msw, has supported communities throughout the united states to create community-based coordinated systems of care that ensure better health for all people at less cost. currently, laura is the co-chair of the 100 million healthier lives leadership team. further, laura is the director of pathway to pacesetter, a 100 million healthier lives program, supporting communities across the united states accelerate their efforts to promote health, well-being and equity. previously, laura supported rural oregon http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 communities to innovate and transform their systems of care while serving as the community affairs senior manager at careoregon, a non-profit health plan that serves people enrolled in medicaid and medicare. laura also worked for pacificsource health plans as their community development and policy director as well as the executive director of their charitable foundation. in addition, laura worked for the state of oregon in a variety of public policy and community health and development positions. paul howard, mpa, is the senior director of knowledge sharing (knosh) at community solutions, leading their domestic and international consulting work. knosh uses its agile problem solving methodology to improve systems and solve complex issues, particularly in the areas of homelessness, poverty alleviation and health. his work has included managing the launch of the institute of global homelessness, the planning and launching of a 20,000 homes campaign in canada and the european campaign to end street homelessness and leading community solution’s efforts as a partner in 100 million healthier live. previously, paul served as the director of data and performance management for community solution’s 100,000 homes campaign. paul brings 20 years of experience working in human services, including direct services, system design, training, facilitation, performance management and consulting. paul holds a masters in public administration from city university of new york, baruch school of public affairs. niñon lewis, ms, currently leads ihi’s triple aim for populations focus area, which encompasses innovation, content, and programming in the areas of the triple aim, population health, population management, primary care, and communitywide improvement efforts. over her time at ihi, her work has focused on leading largescale initiatives on population health and the triple aim, including the ihi triple aim improvement community and the scotland early years collaborative. in addition, she has led ihi’s new business development team, developing large-scale programs and initiatives for the organization. somava stout, md, ms is the executive lead of 100 million healthier lives, a global partnership initiative convened by the institute for healthcare improvement (ihi) that aims to support thousands of people, organizations and communities to develop the capacity to achieve breakthrough improvements in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 health, wellbeing and equity. she is the principal innovator for scale, which helps 24 communities in the us to become communities of solution. she has worked with health systems and communities across the globe to achieve sustainable large-scale transformation in health and human development for over 20 years. previously, as a vice president at cambridge health alliance, she led a large-scale transformation of a harvard safety net system from volume to value that achieved breakthrough results and earned numerous national accolades, including the robert wood johnson foundation young leader award in 2012 for her contributions to the health and healthcare of the nation. she also served as the co-director of leadership programs at the harvard medical school center for primary care, where she developed faculty and student leaders in innovation, improvement and implementation. recommended citation: scaccia, j.p., rubén chávez, n., hatchett, l. byrd, k., blanton, s., alia, k., brennan, l.j., howard, p. lewis, n., & stout, s. (2017). community health improvement and the community psychology competencies. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(1), pages 1-25. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 community health improvement and the community psychology competencies abstract community health improvement initiatives are strongly influenced by the local context in which they take place. community coalitions of diverse stakeholders are expected to determine the needs of their population of interest, select an appropriate strategy, implement with quality, and evaluate for effectiveness. many public health initiatives look toward behavioral scientists with experience in collaborating with community members. the competencies that community psychologists possess make them particularly useful contributors in these initiatives, especially when the projects explicitly focus on increasing health equity. this paper describes how community psychologists can contribute to community health improvement work by sharing our experiences in the spreading community accelerators through learning and evaluation (scale) initiative funded by the robert wood johnson foundation. as part of scale, community coalitions are expected to develop appropriate aims and corresponding driver diagrams as well as implement quality improvement projects to help reach those aims. we demonstrate how community psychologists operationalize scale by working with communities of color in three distinct settings with different contextual factors: the proviso partners for health (chicago, il), boston medical center’s vital village network (boston, ma), and the san gabriel valley healthy cities collaborative (los angeles, ca). we also describe how community psychologists contribute to the formative evaluation of the entire scale project. we note that specific community psychology competencies are applicable across diverse settings in community health improvement work. consequently, community psychologists can contribute significantly to improving community health and advancing health equity. introduction community psychologists work in a diverse range of settings and contexts. one emerging area for practice is community-based health improvement (wallerstein & duran, 2006; campbell & murry, 2004). since community health improvement initiatives are strongly influenced by the local context in which they take place, they require both an in-depth understanding of the social and cultural factors that affect health outcomes and a commitment to working closely with local communities. as health organizations begin to shift toward implementing more population and community health models, there are great opportunities for community psychologists to contribute positively to this work. the core practice competencies of community psychology training and the professional identity of community psychologists are well aligned to meet the needs of community health improvement (dalton & wolfe, 2012). traditionally, the public health field has incorporated knowledge from the social and behavioral sciences in order to enhance understanding of community-level health work (green, 2008). knowledge of social and ecological determinants of health is an area where community psychologists have expertise. community psychologists integrate theory and action research and develop http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 trusting long-term relationships with local community stakeholders. a focus on social justice, concretely operationalized by the core competencies of community psychologists, illustrates significant opportunities to engage the broader community on issues pertaining to health equity (see table 1). there is ample evidence that inequity negatively affects health outcomes, particularly in low-resourced communities (ahrq, 2014). working toward health equity for all is a major focus of many national policy initiatives (e.g. hhs, 2011; astho, 2013). as an example, healthy people 2020 defines health equity as the “attainment of the highest level of health for all people”. this simple definition belies the complex moral and practical challenges of how to effectively make decisions as a coalition and take action collaboratively that balance limited resources and promote fairness and justice for all, and doing so in situations when inequity is embedded in the structural and social systems of community health. to achieve this requires the genuine inclusion of communities in the intervention development and delivery process (e.g., research, intervention implementation, and evaluation). for example, the minnesota department of public health approach to equity engages a community decision-making process and identifies who will benefit or be burdened by a given decision (nelson, spokane, ross, & deng, 2015). community psychologists are equipped to foster this type of community decision-making to help address the social determinants of health, and work toward promoting health equity in lowresourced communities. community psychologists have the skills (dalton & wolfe, 2012) and the values/motivation (i.e., community psychology principles; scra, 2016; kloos, hill, thomas, wandersman, & elias, 2011) to push for inclusion of multiple stakeholders and manage relationships among community members, researchers/academics, policy makers, and relevant others. applying these skills in community health settings is a way to work toward reducing health disparities between different populations (wallerstein & duran, 2010) and improve overall wellness in communities. the institute for healthcare improvement’s spreading community accelerators through learning and evaluation (scale) initiative, funded by the robert wood johnson foundation (rwjf), has designed a unique approach to building equity for community health improvement that prioritizes trust and equitable relationships with meaningful implementation and evaluation (see figure 1). leading from within reflects the need for change agents to be consciously aware of one’s own identity in the social structure of society to promote equitable change. leading together promotes the co-design processes that are central to community health improvement. this tenet guides the reality that the lived experience of community members and professional expertise are both needed to address the social determinants of health and promote equitable solutions. leading for outcomes highlights the critical need for health improvement work to achieve meaningful systemic change using the tools of improvement science. finally, leading for equity explicitly calls out the need to maintain an equity-promoting mindset in all activities and applies the skills of leading from within (understanding one’s own bias), leading together (understanding the lived experience of inequity to create solutions whole growing the capacity of those most affected), leading for outcomes (using data to identify and improve equity gaps) to sustainably improve equity. collectively, the scale leadership uses these frames to collective foster the skills of leading for abundance in communities. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012) scale approach to fostering abundance1 practice examples from scale community identified 1. ecological perspectives the ability to articulate and apply multiple ecological perspectives and levels of analysis in community practice. leading for outcomes • identifying how setting influences particular interventions • scope of the scale evaluation • san gabriel • scale evaluation 2. empowerment the ability to articulate and apply a collective empowerment perspective, to support communities that have been marginalized in their efforts to gain access to resources and to participate in community decision-making. leading together • partnering with people with lived experience • setting up structures to meaningfully value the participation of community members • san gabriel • proviso 3. sociocultural and crosscultural competence the ability to value, integrate, and bridge multiple worldviews, cultures, and identities. leading together • recognizing how power influencing choice of metrics • proviso • scale evaluation 4. community inclusion and partnership the ability to promote genuine representation and respect for all community members, and act to legitimize divergent perspectives on community and social issues. leading together • partnering with people with lived experience • proviso • vital village • san gabriel • scale evaluation 5. ethical, reflective practice in a process of continual ethical improvement, the ability to identify ethical issues in one’s own practice, and act to address them responsibly. to articulate how one’s own values, assumptions, and life experiences influence one’s work, and articulate the strengths and limitations of one’s own perspective. to develop and maintain professional networks for ethical consultation and support. leading from within • using facilitation skills • cross-community sharing of good ideas and bright spots • proviso table 1: competencies of community psychology practices as applied to scale http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012) scale approach to fostering abundance1 practice examples from scale community identified 6. program development, implementation and management the ability to partner with community stakeholders to plan, develop, implement and sustain programs in community settings. leading for outcomes • activities involved in collaboratively implementing quality improvement projects (e.g., developing and deciding on aims and driver diagrams, running tests of change, etc.) 7. prevention and health promotion the ability to articulate and implement a prevention perspective, and to implement prevention and health promotion community programs. community and organizational capacity-building leading for outcomes • goal of many projects • proviso • vital village • san gabriel 8. community leadership and mentoring leadership: the ability to enhance the capacity of individuals and groups to lead effectively, through a collaborative process of engaging, energizing and mobilizing those individuals and groups regarding an issue of shared importance. mentoring: the ability to assist community members to identify personal strengths and social and structural resources that they can develop further and use to enhance empowerment, community engagement, and leadership leading from within leading together • leadership capability is one of the primary drivers of success in scale: addressed through a variety of community coalition supports (training, coaching, tools) • vital village • san gabriel table 1 (cont.): competencies of community psychology practices as applied to scale http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012) scale approach to fostering abundance1 practice examples from scale community identified 9. small and large group processes the ability to intervene in small and large group processes, in order to facilitate the capacity of community groups to work together productively. leading together • social change 2.0 master class (method of facilitation offered to all scale communities) 10. resource development the ability to identify and integrate use of human and material resources, including community assets and social capital. leading together • process of asset mapping: taught to all scale communities • vital village 11. consultation and organizational development the ability to facilitate growth of an organization’s capacity to attain its goals. leading for outcomes • identifying and building coalition readiness (motivation and capacities). 12. collaboration and coalition development the ability to help groups with common interests and goals to do together what they cannot do apart. leading together • requirement for participating in scale (was part of selection criteria) • coalition development part of driver diagram • vital village 13. community development the ability to help a community develop a vision and take actions toward becoming a healthy community. leading for outcomes • process of selecting and prioritizing an aim table 1 (cont.): competencies of community psychology practices as applied to scale http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012) scale approach to fostering abundance1 practice examples from scale community identified 14. community organizing and community advocacy the ability to work collaboratively with community members to gain the power to improve conditions affecting their community. leading for outcomes • project-specific; scale communities are implementing their own projects based on community-needs. method to reach these aims vary. 15. public policy analysis, development and advocacy the ability to build and sustain effective communication and working relationships with policy makers, elected officials, and community leaders. leading together 16. community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness the ability to communicate information to various segments of the public, to strengthen competencies and awareness, or for advocacy. to give community psychology away. leading together • vital village table 1 (cont.): competencies of community psychology practices as applied to scale http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012) scale approach to fostering abundance1 practice examples from scale community identified 17. participatory community research the ability to work with community partners to plan and conduct research that meet high standards of scientific evidence that are contextually appropriate, and to communicate the findings of that research in ways that promote community capacity to pursue community goals. leading for outcomes • involving all stakeholders (funder, implementation team, communities) in formative evaluation • scale evaluation • scale evaluation 18. program evaluation the ability to partner with community/setting leaders and members to promote program improvement and program accountability to stakeholders and funders. leading for outcomes • vital village • scale evaluation table 1 (cont.): competencies of community psychology practices as applied to scale note: we believe that leading for equity is potentially applicable to all competencies, as they can be practiced in a way that helps to foster equitable conditions in communities. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 in this paper, we discuss how community psychology contributes to community health improvement by illustrating the core competencies in practice. we do this by sharing community psychologists’ unique experiences and insights stemming from their close collaboration with communities of color in three distinct settings within scale with different contextual factors: the proviso partners for health (chicago, il), boston medical center’s vital village network (boston, ma), and san gabriel valley healthy cities collaborative (los angeles, ca). we also describe how community psychologists contribute to the formative evaluation of the entire scale project based on the insights and experiences of the evaluators who are community psychologists. in each of the sample cases we discuss, we describe how key community psychology competencies are applicable across diverse settings in community health improvement work and how the competencies are used to promote equity in communities of color. figure 1: elements of leading for abundance in scale project setting scale is led by the institute for healthcare improvement (ihi) in collaboration with three partner organizations – community solutions, communities joined in action, and the collaborative health network. the scale initiative is designed in the spirit of robert wood johnson foundation’s (rwjf) vision to promote a culture of health for all by changing social, policy, financial, and community-level structures (mockenhaupt & woodrum, 2015). broadly, scale is the first community-based program of the ihi-led global initiative, 100 million healthier lives, which aims to achieve the goal of 100 million people living healthier lives by 2020 (ihi, 2016). the overarching goal of scale is to increase the readiness and capability of communities to improve health, well-being and equity within communities. working toward health equity is specifically called out as, “the price http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 of admission” (ihi, 2016). to reach this goal, scale is targeting three primary drivers of change: 1) develop leadership capability to transform and improve within and across communities; 2) create vibrant relationships and functional networks between communities that accelerate trust, learning and achievement of a shared goal; and 3) create and improve the inter-community spread system. this full driver diagram can be found in figure 2. figure 2: scale driver diagram. a driver diagram is a tool from improvement science (langely, moen, nolan, nolan, norman et al., 2009) helps to organize thinking about what changes will lead to an improvement. the left-hand box represents the outcome of interest. the primary drivers (middle boxes) are the change that will lead to this outcome. the right-hand boxes are the secondary drivers that will lead to change in the primary drivers. twenty-four community coalitions nationwide were selected through an application process that identified communities with experience in improving the health of their communities, and motivation to accelerate their work, to learn from others, and to contribute to a shared learning community. selected community coalitions received funding over the 20month period to support scale community health improvement efforts, travel to four immersive training events (community health improvement leadership academieschilas), and access to a variety of tools, supports and resources developed exclusively for the scale initiative. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.ihi.org/education/ihiopenschool/resources/pages/activities/goldmanndriver.aspx global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 as part of the selection process, community coalitions needed at least three partnering organizations representing different sectors (e.g., education, public health, social services, health care) who are working together to address the social determinants of health. this inclusion creates a challenge of operationalizing equity in collaboration. in such settings, community psychologists must be aware ofpower and resource differentials and assure these do not hurt relationships and trust among partners and especially that community members’ voices and decisionmaking is valued and respected. the promotion of equity in health and education in our communities and society begins within our own coalitions and collaborative partnerships. in scale, one method to ensure this is by requiring that every coalition has a “community champion.” this is a person with lived experience (i.e. expertise that is not acquired through learning or training but through personal experience) who can use this knowledge to inform the development and implementation of community health improvement projects. community champions are an integral part of the coalitions and the process of including their voice and experiences is very intentional and thought out within scale. scale centrally supported champions by having special content and training dedicated to fostering their leadership skills. many coalitions adopted a model of shared leadership on all levels (planning, implementation and now evaluation) and clearly communicated the role of champions to other institutional partners to guard against tokenism. although scale leadership recommended that champions be compensated for their time because they may have challenges and barriers to participation, we do not have data on how consistently this was implemented across all scale communities. the following sections will highlight four teams within the scale initiative. each section below includes a short overview of our respective settings and projects. we will identify how community psychology competencies are utilized in each project. we will demonstrate how competencies are used to address health equity. the communitylevel projects for scale broadly fall under the community psychology competency of prevention and health promotion. this is because many of the projects aim to improve the health, well-being, and equity within communities. the examples will demonstrate how community psychologists enact other competencies under the umbrella of prevention and promotion. each section was developed independently of one another. as a group, we did not specify which competencies we would address beforehand. rather, we left it to the respective section author(s) to identify which competencies were most relevant to their work. we did decide, however, to make sure each of our sections address issues pertaining to leading for equity. we also note that, in many cases, examples apply to multiple competencies. when possible, we tried to preserve the voice of each author in these sections as they reflected upon their experiences in each of their projects. we parenthetically note the authors of each section. the proviso partners case focuses on power dynamics in decision-making in leading from within (sb, lh). the vital village network case highlights the positive impact of working collaboratively for sustainability and leading together (kb). the san gabriel valley describes emerging learning on leading together and leading for outcomes (nc). finally, the section on the scale evaluation highlights how equity inform the types of methods and processes utilized (ka, js). proviso partners for health proviso partners for health (pp4h) is a multisector coalition to support community health and economic development with a focus on http://www.gjcpp.org/ file:///c:/users/jonathan/dropbox/scale%20formative%20evaluation/research%20article%20and%20resources/provisopartners.com global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 school and community healthy food access and social entrepreneurship. the coalition serves four segregated african-american and latino neighborhoods that experience disproportionate rates of obesity, unemployment, poverty, and low educational attainment. to address the complex challenge of these social and structural determinants of health, proviso partners promotes equity by sharing power and leadership, leveraging resources, and strengthening capacity of organizations and community members with lived experience. currently, we are expanding our urban farm network and partnering with small urban agriculture businesses. the case description below describes how the community psychology competencies help to promote equity in the proviso partners coalition. collective impact initiatives represent diverse stakeholders working together to make changes around a common agenda with a group of staff that help to support the structure and facilitate an agreed-upon approach or group process (kania & kramer, 2011; 2013). as a multi-sector coalition engaged in various initiatives, it is valuable to explore the coalition processes, activities, and outcomes through the lens of community psychology. the core community psychology competencies provide a shared understanding of the group process, challenges, and potential for success in addressing chronic illness while promoting a health equity lens. sociocultural and cross-cultural competence sociocultural and cross-cultural competence in community psychology involves the “ability to value, integrate, and bridge multiple worldviews, cultures, and identities” (dalton & wolfe, 2012). pp4h explicitly aims to address sociocultural competence and health equity through our guiding principle of shared power and leadership. despite our effective collaboration, there are complex social and cultural biases at play in our decision-making process (kubota, li, bardavid, banaji, & phelps, 2013). for example, partners faced the influence of racial and power status bias in a decisionmaking discussion on indicators for measurement. an african-american “novice” business owner introduced the outcome measure of community self-esteem as an important community level metric relevant to community members with lived experience. a white “experienced” business owner misinterpreted this suggestion as individual self-esteem. the group sided with the perspective of the experienced business owner and the importance of community level assessment was on the verge of being lost. community self-esteem was dismissed as a concept once it was deemed irrelevant by the white “experienced” business owner. using facilitation skills, a community champion and member of the leadership team used their influence and the scale training on communication to make everyone clear about the potential importance of community self-esteem as an outcome measure in our work. she explained that communities have identities and cultures that go beyond an assessment of a group of individuals. that critical moment highlights the skill of eliciting “open and honest communication,” which helps diverse partners engage in difficult conversations and not be influenced by the apparent racial and power dynamics in the conversation. community inclusion and partnership given the coalition’s focus on health, it was important to encourage co-design regarding health when community members interacted with faculty and staff from a local hospital and university. we intentionally did not want those from the university to be seen as “experts” on how to best address health outcomes and set the action plan for the community members. currently, we strive to engage diverse community members (e.g. students, parents, teachers, residents, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 business owners, etc.) involved in the decision-making process. this involves community organizing and advocating for involvement at multiple levels and stages of the community change process, including organizational participation, leadership, program implementation, and evaluation. diverse community representation helps ensure that power, resources, and capacity are granted to those who have traditionally been disempowered and is part of our attempt to address health equity (healthy people, 2020). furthermore, the emphasis on inclusion with pp4h (and scale as a whole) helps to address one of wolff’s (2016) central critiques of collective impact by meaningfully engaging community members who have been most affected by issues and consequently may possess unique knowledge about potential causes and solutions. for example, our executive leadership team, steering committee and work groups are each co-led by community members. one of the challenges of getting community members engaged has to do with life and work demands in their personal lives. parents of young children can be difficult to reach because of the barriers of high unemployment in our community. parents in communities of color can struggle to find high quality good paying jobs. for instance, a young mother lives in the west suburbs of chicago, takes her children to childcare in the south suburbs, and works at a fast food restaurant in the north suburbs. this commute takes 2.5 hours by bus and train leaving limited time and energy for family and community health activities. we addressed this issue in pp4h by prioritizing funding an additional community champion as a critical priority of our scale process. it was important for us to pay our community champion in order to tap into their lived experiences and commitment to improving their community. offering support for the time and energy of community champions involved in our project was one way we met the challenge of community engagement. ultimately, our coalition values the time, energy and voice of our community members and so we have decided that it is important to respect their willingness and commitment to improving their community. one of many ways a coalition can do this is by recognizing that they add value and warrant remuneration. further, inviting the community champions to take a decisive role at the table reinforces the intrinsic value that they possess. coalitions can engage those who might not otherwise have a voice and develop avenues for respectful dialogue and listening between diverse groups of stakeholders. vital village network vital village network is a network of residents and organizations in boston committed to maximizing child, family, and community well-being. we mobilize collective investment from residents and community institutions to seed scalable and sustainable community change to promote healthy social and emotional development in early childhood. vital village utilizes a collective impact approach to enhance existing resources and align existing efforts focused on prenatal opportunity, early childhood education, and peer-to-peer advocacy. our organization’s focus for the scale initiative has been the expansion and enhancement of the peer-advocate action roundtable (par) and infusing trauma-informed practices into classrooms. the par project is a collaboration between the medical-legal partnership and the boston and dudley street neighborhood initiative that provides legal advocacy training to support peer-to-peer community lawyering efforts. infusing trauma-informed practices into classrooms is a collaboration between the child witness to violence project and vital village network and provides resources to students, teachers, and school administrators to improve emotional support http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.vitalvillage.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 for students, classroom organization strategies, and instructional support. to help facilitate the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity-focus of these projects (especially as they related to scalability and sustainability), we have been committed to embedding quality improvement methods (langley et al., 2009) into all network activities. collaboration and coalition development initially, a need for cross-sector collaboration between partner organizations that utilize existing community resources inspired the formation of vital village network. many community-based organizations in the surrounding neighborhoods spend months designing and attempting to implement programs that are already being offered by other organizations. these efforts are often time and cost-intensive and tend to have a poor reach since similar programs already exist. furthermore, many of these programs lack depth and breadth because they are focused on a specific need and may not address holistic well-being. the vital village network is committed to reducing these occurrences through aligning existing efforts and spurring innovation where needed. both scale projects are innovation pilots designed to grow into sustainable collaborative efforts. these collaborations have resulted in child development trainings for informal caregivers, the opening of a community garden, the formation of a drop-in breastfeeding group, and the development of a curriculum for trauma-informed group child care. community inclusion and partnership and community leadership and mentoring. vital village network is fundamentally committed to amplifying the community voice by partnering with organizations that deeply identify with this mission. the scale community champion also serves as the president of the vital village community partnership (vvcp), a group of resident leaders aiming to build neighborhood investment in child, family, and community well-being. vvcp has created numerous leadership opportunities for individuals whose skills and assets are often overlooked and underutilized. for example, one individual participating in par applied this knowledge to secure a public safety officer for her child’s school. community education, information, dissemination, and building public awareness and program evaluation. an integral component of promoting healthy social and emotional development in early childhood is determining what indicators to track and how to measure them. a public, accessible data dashboard is currently being developed that will involve three community champions. the champions will determine which indicators to include in the dashboard and how to disseminate this information within the community. specifically, community champions will be responsible for 1) sharing findings from the data dashboard with community members; 2) obtaining feedback on how to modify and refine to specific indicators; 3) formulating action plans to address adverse outcomes; and 4) acknowledging and celebrating neighborhood resilience. program evaluation is essential to the successful implementation and management of the infusing trauma-informed practices into classrooms initiative. staff members conduct classroom observations preand post-intervention and collect and analyze quantitative and qualitative data to measure improvements in classroom management. recognizing that formative evaluation can help improve service delivery, staff engagement, meeting/event effectiveness, and other organizational processes, we have begun to use our data in a more dynamic and collaborative manner. this helped vital village develop several resources to enhance http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 programming for our network partners, including tools to capture parent engagement at a family fun day, an interview to enhance a peer-led program, and evaluation forms for a community event. these examples illustrate how community psychology competencies are deeply embedded in the structure and process of vital village network and have been pivotal to its success. san gabriel valley healthy cities collaborative san gabriel valley healthy cities collaborative (sgvhcc) is a community coalition that includes four multi-sector partners in the san gabriel valley (sgv) of southern california. sgv is a region with various small to midsize cities close to the dense metropolitan city of los angeles, and officially a part of the sprawling los angeles county. the region is home to approximately 1.5 million residents, living in a richly diverse and multicultural environment with a large immigrant population, primarily from asian and latin american countries. the four coalition organizations include a comprehensive cancer center, school district, and a city parks and recreation department (all three in the same city), along with a small grassroots community-based organization located in a different city 20 miles away. the ethnic composition of the neighborhood where the cancer center, school district, and city parks and recreation are located is predominantly latino, while the neighborhood ethnic composition of the community-based organization is predominantly latino and african american, but with an increasingly white, middle class population due to gentrification. the population in these neighborhoods is categorized largely as low-income, with high rates of obesity, low rates of exercising and healthy eating (greatly influenced by the lack of quality healthy foods within the neighborhoods). the coalition’s approach to promoting community health is parallel to that of scale, which is in large part capacity building. as we strengthen our abilities to promote health with the support of the scale initiative, we seek to increase the capacity of youth in our communities so they can be fully engaged in promoting health. our aim is to improve healthier living (as defined by healthier eating and exercising) in our under-resourced communities. the process of collaborating as a coalition toward achieving our aim has provided an opportunity to reflect on core competencies from community psychology that are fundamental for community engagement, including empowerment, community inclusion and partnership, community leadership and mentoring, and an ecological perspective. empowerment, community inclusion and partnership, and community leadership and mentoring the three competencies of empowerment, community inclusion and partnership, and community leadership and mentoring, undergird a broader theme of engaging the community as equal partners by creating the environment for not only including their voices, but also developing their talents. the community we are engaging with includes ourselves within our coalition and high school youth living within our neighborhoods. our hope is that the youth will be key in spreading knowledge, motivation, and new norms of healthier behavior through peer-to-peer education and advocacy in their neighborhoods. for the youth to develop into leaders in health promotion, an empowerment process and the right environment are essential. to accomplish this, there is a need for both integrating valuable knowledge and skills from researchers and the activism of the community. this involves synthesizing theory, systematic methodology, metrics, program evaluation skills, and a need for deeply engaging with the lived experiences of http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://healthdoers.bravenew.com/c/100-million-healthier-lives/i/san-gabriel-valley-healthy-cities-collaborative-chila2/ http://healthdoers.bravenew.com/c/100-million-healthier-lives/i/san-gabriel-valley-healthy-cities-collaborative-chila2/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 people in the community who are outside the “culture of research”. within our current coalition, we have been challenged to work together and promote health in two different cities/neighborhoods within the same county and geographic region but 20 miles apart. the communitybased organization, located in a different city, joined the rest of the coalition organizations who have had an ongoing relationship for the past five years. during the union, there was a natural excitement for the new collaboration and genuine motivation to “join forces” for mutual benefit. however, in that process there was also a rush for implementing a youth peer-to-peer education program with the grassroots organization that had been created and implemented by the three organizations for the past five years. there was a good intention to adapt the program to the new context and the input of youth in that context was obtained in doing so. the program, a health curriculum to develop the knowledge, skills, and leadership of youth to become community health educators, has shown initial promise. the program is being further developed in the setting where it has been implemented for the past five years. additionally, we are engaging youth in this setting in a photovoice project where we are seeing youth become empowered as they meet with and influence local policy makers about the needs and resources of their community toward health promotion and advocacy. ecological perspective the grassroots organization that is a part of our coalition and is located in a different city has been engaging youth in their setting on a project to create a “healthy living hub” that includes education and supports for healthier living. the vision of this project is to change the environment in the local neighborhood to improve access to healthy foods for all youth and their families. the rapid gentrification currently happening in this neighborhood and continuing disparities in resources, income, and other factors, points to the entrenched inequities and racism prevalent in our systems. the challenges faced by the grassroots organization tied to gentrification and local racial disparities challenged the other coalition partners to respect the need of this grassroots organization for other projects better tailored to their specific local neighborhood. the different health projects in our two different cities reminds us of the distinction between a focus at the individual-level and system-level, as well as the challenges in changing behaviors through first vs. secondorder change. the vision does not differ with respect to what the outcome should be better health for our youth and communities but the process of how to get there, due to contextual differences, is envisioned differently. therefore, using the community psychology competency of an ecological perspective helps us to be sensitive to context and respecting the local social ecology and vision. in both contexts, there is the acknowledgement that the tools of research and activism/advocacy are helpful. among our coalition, members may differ in placing an emphasis on research or community organizing or on what should be the particular project or method by which to achieve our aim. however, it is clear for all of us that promoting health equity is necessary and are becoming more keenly aware by applying an ecological perspective that the dynamic in a particular context will determine how the core competencies of empowerment, community inclusion and partnership, and community leadership and mentoring, along with others, are put into practice. scale formative evaluation community psychology competencies greatly inform how progress is evaluated in scale. we are using a formative evaluation approach http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 to monitor ongoing program implementation and to provide guidance for improvement of scale supports. the evaluation team includes community psychologists and improvement scientists from the university of south carolina, the university of north carolina, and ihi. we are utilizing a collaborative approach to evaluation where we partner with the rwjf, the implementation team (ihi and community partners), and scale communities in the codesign of the evaluation plan and in the cocreation and synthesis of evaluation findings and use. the evaluation plan is driven by four broad questions (figure 3). in this section, we describe how community psychology competencies promote meaningful collaboration and evaluation development, implementation and use that are grounded in empowerment and equity. ecological perspective our work embraces an ecological perspective that captures implementation at multiple levels of analysis: 1) the implementation team level, specifically those activities implemented by the scale implementation team and community partners to all scale community coalitions (like training and tools), 2) intercommunity interactions and spread occurring between community coalitions, and 3) activities delivered locally within each community. our ecological approach emphasizes understanding of how communities interact with the scale support system, how they engage with one another, and how change occurs in local contexts. this perspective ensures that feedback provided through the evaluation for program improvement is shared across systems and that evaluation methods are tailored and adapted to meet the needs of diverse stakeholders. figure 3. scale formative evaluation questions sociocultural and cross-cultural competence and community inclusion and partnerships our evaluation approach also emphasizes sociocultural and cross-cultural competence and community inclusion and partnerships. we collaborate with scale communities to develop and review evaluation methods with the goal of enhancing their clarity and cultural relevance. for example, we share and pilot surveys with community representatives prior to implementation and revise per feedback. all evaluation results are shared with communities. further, we communicate to communities how their feedback is used to inform program improvements. as an example, we used an approach called ‘you said, we did’ to share with communities how findings generated through their feedback were integrated to 1. what are the accelerators and inhibitors of progress in pacesetter communities across phases of the scale project? a. what are the criteria and associated indicators of readiness and capability (capacity and motivation) to assess performance of pacesetter communities? b. how can we use these indicators to monitor and predict progress? 2. how are these accelerators and inhibitors influenced by other aligned initiatives in a community? what can we say about scale’s contribution to progress? 3. what are the facilitators and inhibitors of intercommunity spread? how can the scale approach be improved to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of spread? 4. how do we synthesize, document, disseminate, translate, and support implementation lessons learned from scale to facilitate spread across communities? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 make requested changes to the program design. participatory community research it is important to reflect on the effectiveness, efficiency and other quality indicators of the evaluation method and results. as part of our evaluation methods, we ask for feedback from the ihi implementation team and scale communities with the goal of assessing the quality of the evaluation itself. we ask questions regarding their perceived value of the evaluation approach and relevance, clarity and utility of evaluation methods and findings. results from our first implementation of this method revealed a number of things, including that communities wanted to better understand our evaluation approach. thus, we created a 1-page overview of our evaluation plan that was intended to communicate evaluation methods in an easy to understand format. findings from this “evaluation of the evaluation,” also revealed that some communities found surveys burdensome. in response, we are actively working to revise our surveys to reduce the number of items and continue to explore further ways to reduce evaluation burden through alternative methods. we also heard that the ihi implementation team felt that our evaluation reports appeared to focus more on negative feedback from communities and we have thus revised our reports to include a broader range of responses. conclusion in community health improvement work, community psychologists practically contribute in several ways that concretely align with the community psychology competencies. when reflecting upon each of our four settings, we collectively decided not to pre-specify what competencies we would discuss. rather, we wanted each of us to share which competencies we believed were most salient in our work. after reviewing our work, we found that there are extensive activities in which the community psychology competencies are applied. in particular, we note that the competency of community inclusion and partnership emerged as particularly relevant in our settings. recognizing how power and privilege can separate stakeholders has proved instrumental in developing community health improvement projects that have tangible resonance for the community. community inclusion (i.e., incorporating people with lived experience) is a particular driver in how scale hopes to foster health equity. furthermore, scale’s theory of change on how to increase health equity in communities directly parallels the community psychology competencies. nearly all of the competencies can be practiced with an equity lens (e.g. collaboration development can be informed by developing relationships with organizations that have reach and representation with underserved communities.) scale’s framework for building communities’ abundance (leading from within, leading together, leading for outcomes, and leading for equity) can be concretely operationalized using the skills that community psychologists possess (table 1). each of the case examples describe the unique local and social determinants of health that impact low income communities of color and solutions to promote equity. the scale approach to abundance provides a guide for the processes and actions needed for equitable solutions. we also recognize the importance of collective learning (evaluation and participatory research) as a method to promote action toward health equity. apart from the examples in the scale formative evaluation, both san gabriel and the vital village used evaluation methods as a tool to promote engagement among community members and to focus health equity work. other specific examples of how the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 competencies can be used to address equity can be found in vital village collaboration structure, the capacity-building work of san gabriel, and the emphasis on empowerment and prevention and health promotion (all projects). furthermore, although we only discussed a portion of the competencies in each of our project reviews, we note that nearly all of the competencies are currently being applied in scale across settings. we summarize other areas of our work as it applies to scale in table 1. concurrently, there is a rich history of public health practice that closely aligns with our work. similar to the work of dalton and wolfe (2012), the public health foundation (2014) has identified eight core competencies of for the practice of public health. these competencies are: 1) analytical/assessment, 2) policy development/program planning, 3) communication, 4) cultural competency, 5) community dimensions of practice, 6) public health sciences; 7) financial planning and management, and 8) leadership and systems thinking. each of the domains is further subdivided into three tiers that represent career stages for public health professionals: front line staff/entry level, program management/supervisory level, senior management/executive level. the tier format is a helpful heuristic for comparing and contrasting roles and responsibilities at various career stages, and something that would be useful to consider as the competencies of community psychology are applied to community health improvement. this type of structure may also help to facilitate additional training design for the next generation of community psychologist. although the core competencies of public health seem to broadly mirror community psychology, some critical distinctions exist. for example, instead of confining community dimensions of practice skills to one domain, these skills are embedded in all 18 community psychology competencies. similarly, the financial planning and management skills domain includes a competency on addressing community health needs but does not explicitly mention engaging the community in this process. community psychologists are charged with prioritizing the needs of the community regardless of their role, responsibilities, or work environment. our experiences working in these case settings we described earlier, especially when trying to foster health equity, has reinforced this point. furthermore, depending on their work environment, public health professionals may not be expected to master these competencies. additionally, most public health programs are organized into specific analytical concentrations such as health policy and management, epidemiology, and biostatistics. students focus their coursework on these topics, whereas community psychology training, in comparison, more heavily prioritizes relational skills to engage and empower their community throughout all activities. for these reasons, community psychologists may be well equipped to engage in collaborative community health improvement initiatives in public health professionals due to both the overlap and distinction between their practice skills. there is great potential for synergy through the use of these collective assets. based on our experiences and reflections, we believe that community health improvement is an appropriate setting for community psychologists to use a wide range of their competencies and skills to collaboratively work toward health improvement goals, especially when these goals include a focus on increasing health equity in communities. in this article, we have described how community psychologists have been able to apply their skills in community-based, collaborative projects designed to improve health and wellness in communities. community psychologists who wish to work in these settings may find extensive and varied opportunities to use their skill set. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 references agency 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(2015). national stakeholder strategy for achieving health equity. us department of health and human services. retrieved from. http://www.minorityhealth.hhs.gov/asse ts/pdf/final_hhs_action_plan_progress _report_11_2_2015.pdf. wallerstein, n. b., & duran, b. (2006). using community-based participatory research to address health disparities. health promotion practice, 7(3), 312-323. wallerstein, n., & duran, b. (2010). community-based participatory research contributions to intervention research: the intersection of science and practice to improve health equity. american journal of public health, 100(s1), s40-s4 wolff, t. (2016). ten places where collective impact gets it wrong. global journal of community psychology practice. 7(1). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.scra27.org/who-we-are/ http://www.minorityhealth.hhs.gov/assets/pdf/final_hhs_action_plan_progress_report_11_2_2015.pdf http://www.minorityhealth.hhs.gov/assets/pdf/final_hhs_action_plan_progress_report_11_2_2015.pdf http://www.minorityhealth.hhs.gov/assets/pdf/final_hhs_action_plan_progress_report_11_2_2015.pdf community health improvement and the community psychology competencies community health improvement and the community psychology competencies abstract introduction project setting proviso partners for health vital village network san gabriel valley healthy cities collaborative scale formative evaluation conclusion references the fundamental value of presence in peer and mutual support: observations from telephone support for high risk groups edwin b. fisher1, patrick y. tang1, megan evans1, nivedita bhushan1, mark a. graham2, dawn dreyer valovcin2, & cherie castellano2 keywords: peer support, mutual support, being there, and sense of presence author biography: edwin b. fisher, is professor in the department of health behavior in the gillings school of global public health at the university of north carolina at chapel hill. prior to moving to unc in 2005, he was professor in medicine, pediatrics and psychology and director of the division of health behavior research at washington university in st. louis. a clinical psychologist, he has served since 2008 as global director of peers for progress that promotes evidence, resources, and advocacy for peer support in health, health care, mental health and prevention around the world. prior to that, he was national program director of the robert wood johnson foundation’s diabetes initiative that examined self-management of diabetes in primary care and community settings. his research has also addressed challenges in asthma, cancer, cardiovascular disease, mental health, smoking cessation, and weight management, focusing on self-management, social support, and community-based approaches. among other honors, he is a past-president of the society of behavioral medicine and principal editor of principles of behavioral medicine: a global handbook (springer, 2018). patrick y. tang, is a program manager at peers for progress, in the department of health behavior, gillings school of global public health at the university of north carolina at chapel hill. in this position, he has a track record of successfully developing, implementing, and evaluating peer support programs in clinical and community settings. his research interests are focused on mental health and chronic disease management, but he enjoys working outside of those areas when providing consultation and technical assistance to collaborating organizations. megan evans, is a doctoral candidate in the department of health behavior in the gillings school of global public health at the university of north carolina at chapel hill. she holds a bachelor of science in psychology and a master of science in community and behavioral health, both obtained from the university of iowa. she also has considerable experience working in mental health and human services. her research centers around social factors and mental health, in particular the role of social and peer support in promoting 1 peers for progress, department of health behavior, gillings school of global public health, university of north carolina-chapel hill 2 rutgers university behavioral health care, department of psychiatry, rutgers university medical school, piscataway, nj global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 and maintaining mental health and wellbeing. throughout her doctoral training, ms. evans has worked as a research assistant at peers for progress, a global initiative dedicated to promoting research in and dissemination of peer support. nivedita bhushan, is a postdoctoral fellow at the institute for global health and infectious diseases at the university of north carolina, chapel hill. dr. bhushan’s research examines how social relationships, including peer support and related interventions, impact sexual, reproductive, and mental health outcomes especially among adolescent girls and young women, particularly in settings with a high burden of hiv. mark a. graham, is a retired major general in the us army and the executive director of the national call center of rutgers university behavioral health care. the center includes the national vets4warriors peer support program, the new jersey suicide crisis line, and the programs that are the focus of this paper, cop2cop, vet2vet, worker2worker (for child protection workers), care2caregiver (caregivers of those with dementia), and mom2mom (mothers of children with special needs). during almost 35 years in the army, general graham served in varied positions in the united states, germany and korea. in addition to a master’s in business administration (mba) from oklahoma city university and a master of science in national security strategy from the national defense university in washington, d.c., he is a graduate of the u.s. army command and general staff college and the national war college. his numerous military awards include the distinguished service medal, the bronze star medal, the defense superior service medal, the legion of merit, the meritorious service medal and the humanitarian service medal in addition to his service and current leadership of the national call center, general graham’s ties to the needs of those in high-risk, stressful positions are deep and personal. dawn dreyer valovcin, is a program coordinator at rutgers university behavioral healthcare working with many programs including mom2mom, worker2worker and cop2cop for the last 10 years. she also teaches psychology at middlesex county college in addition to teaching faculty workshops. in her role as program coordinator, ms. valovcin is responsible for rutgers national call center for peer support training, grant writing, staff supervision and coordinating with state agencies. her last project was managing a caregiver skills training curriculum with the world health organization and autismspeaks. cherie castellano, is a national expert in the field of peer support after twenty years of experience as the creator of the “reciprocal peer support model” recognized as a national best practice by the american psychiatric association (2018) and department of defense center of excellence (2011.) as the director of the rutgers national center for peer support, she directs over 200 staff in 14 peer programs with over ten million dollars of funding annually. ms. castellano has published extensively on the topics of peer support, crisis intervention, police psychological services, and suicide prevention and is a voluntary faculty member of the department of psychiatry new jersey medical school and a senior research fellow at duke university. recommended citation: fisher, e. b., tang, p.y., evans, m., bhushan, n., graham, m.a., dreyer valovcin, d., & castellano, c. (2020). the fundamental value of presence in peer and mutual support: observations from telephone support for high http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 risk groups. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(3), 1 20. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: edwin b. fisher, ph.d., professor and global director, peers for progress, department of health behavior, gillngs school of global public health, university of north carolina-chapel hill. campus box 7440, 135 dauer drive, chapel hill, nc, 27599-7440, usa. phone: +1 919-966-6693; cell: +1 919-360-3928; fax: +1 919-966-2921; email: fishere@email.unc.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:fishere@email.unc.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 the fundamental value of presence in peer and mutual support: observations from telephone support for high risk groups “i have listened to every one of the voicemails you left for me. you are the only one who continued to reach out. because of you there is one less dead marine.” quote from a vets4warriors client “being there” takes on considerable importance amidst recognition of the substantial deleterious effects of social isolation and loneliness. in particular, presence/ “being there” may be important features of the many contributions of peer and mutual support to health and wellbeing. this study examined how peer support may enhance a sense of presence based on a) contact data for years 2015-2016 from telephonic peer support services of rutgers university behavioral health care, and b) structured interviews with peer supporters and clients of these programs. features of peer support that convey presence include a) 24/7 availability, b) structure of peer support around shared cultural roles – e.g., “cop2cop,” “mom2mom,” rather than shared diagnoses, c) training of supporters to provide a setting for open expression of feelings, and d) structural features such as it systems that facilitate continuity by enabling those answering a call readily to refer to previous calls. impacts include client reports of being understood, not being judged, and being cared for through routine follow-up, even though contact such as voicemails. managers and peer supporters should recognize the diverse organizational and processes that convey presence/ “being there” and its central importance in peer and mutual support. introduction “being there” must be among the most common clichés in discussion of social support, stressors, and human behavior. however, recent attention to the health effects of loneliness and social isolation (holtlunstad, robles, & sbarra, 2017) suggests greater attention to what it means to be there. the influence of social isolation, being as lethal as smoking cigarettes or obesity (holtlunstad, smith, & layton, 2010; house, landis, & umberson, 1988), make this a serious conversation. in light of such concerns, the british government appointed a “minister for loneliness” in 2018 (ryan, 2018). some papers indicate greater importance of objective social isolation (e.g., steptoe, shankar, demakakos, & wardle, 2013) and some place greater importance on experienced loneliness (perissinotto, holtlunstad, periyakoil, & covinsky, 2019) but there is a great amount of evidence that, alone and together, these are related to diverse effects on health risks, emotional status, morbidity and mortality. if, as lowenthall and haven noted over 50 years ago, those who have someone they can talk to about personal matters and call on for a favor (a simple indicator of connection) are better able to address a variety of life’s challenges (e.g., lowenthal & haven, 1968), then an important contributor to benefits of social support may be that fundamental connection, “being there.” mutual support and other approaches to enhancing social support may also convey presence. here we focus on observations and lessons learned from a telephone-based service providing individual peer support to police, veterans and other high-risk groups. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 the value of simply “being there” is illustrated in the common expression, “it wasn’t anything she said or did; it was just knowing she was there.” this is common in other languages such as in dutch, “het was niet zozeer wat zij zei of deed, maar dat ze er voor mij was” (“it’s not necessarily about what she said or did but that she was there for me”). more simply, varied languages refer to “being there,” such as in thai, "ขอบคุณท่ีคอยอยู่ช่วยเหลือตลอด" ("thank you or for always being here for me”), or german, “ich bin (immer) für dich da” (“i am (always) there for you”; “you” in the informal), or brazilian portuguese, “o que importa e’ a sua presença” (“what matters is your presence”). in mandarin chinese, “感谢你 在我身边” (“thanks for being by my side”) is likely to be used by younger people and in close relationships and even then, not frequently. similarly, implicit support that “does not involve an explicit transaction of seeking and providing” (kim, sherman, & taylor, 2008) is often more acceptable in collectivist or asian cultures than explicit emotional support. with cultural emphases on the family and harmony, individuals are reluctant to burden family or groups of which they are a part with their own, individual problems or concerns. instead, the support of the family or group is conveyed and assumed without explicit discussion (kim et al., 2008) and, indeed, explicit support in such cultures may be ineffective or even counterproductive. in a qualitative study of how emotional support emerges in their work with individuals, peer supporters represented programs from three distinct geographic and cultural settings: low-income latinos served by a federally qualified health center in chicago, low-income, african-american women in rural north carolina (cummings et al., 2013), and retired, middle-class adults in cambridgeshire, england (simmons et al., 2015). across these three settings, peer supporters identified implicit support as important (kowitt et al., 2015). examples included showing interest and concern through attending a support recipient’s art exhibit, “giving hugs,” praying for/with people, group walks, talking about family, and playing cribbage with one another. a remarkable study examined the benefits of minimal communications to individuals at high risk for suicide (by virtue of hospitalization for depression or suicidal precautions) but who refused or discontinued post-discharge follow-up (motto & bostrom, 2001). among those who merely received periodic contact through occasional letters, initially monthly but fading to quarterly, a total of 24 over five years, rates of suicide were significantly lower (p = 0.043) than among those randomized to usual care. suggesting that it was the contact itself that was important, its effects declined as it became less frequent. these background observations suggest the importance in peer support of the fundamental value of connection. peer support provided by “community health workers,” “lay health advisors,” “promotores de salud” and individuals with a number of other titles has been shown to play influential roles in health and the health care delivery system (gibbons & tyus, 2007; perry, zulliger, & rogers, 2014; swider, 2002; viswanathan et al., 2010). similarly, mutual aid and self-help organizations have been long been utilized to help people initiate and sustain health behavior changes by providing social support (kyrouz, humphreys, & loomis, 2002). these groups are often centered around a shared problem, such as substance abuse, mental health disorder, or bereavement, and are usually run by people who share the problem addressed in the group. although there are many different approaches to providing peer or mutual http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 support, at the core of all programs seems to be the value of presence of similar others in coping with life stressors. the reciprocal peer support model (castellano, 2012) that guides the programs from which the present observations were drawn emphasizes connection as the first of four tasks of peer support and, within it, “pure presence” as “at the heart of … engagement and … necessary for successful peer support” (p. 138). similarly, peers for progress, an international program at the university of north carolinachapel hill, that is dedicated to promoting research in and dissemination of peer support, emphasizes five “key functions” of peer support. three of the five reflect presence: being there or presence, social and emotional support, and ongoing availability of support (evans, daaleman, & fisher, 2020; e. b. fisher et al., 2015; e. b. fisher et al., 2012)}. in a previous paper (evans, tang, et al., 2020), we reported general evaluation of the telephone peer support services for police, veterans, and other high-risk groups provided by rutgers university behavioral health care (rubhc). here we extend that evaluation to include patterns of engagement in services and peers’ and callers’ responses to structured interviews to gain greater understanding of “being there” and the varied aspects of programs that convey such presence. methods these data were collected as part of a general evaluation of peer support services provided by rubhc, carried out by a collaboration between program staff at rubhc and researchers at peers for progress. three of the authors (mg, cc, ddv) are rubhc program staff. rubhc’s peer support telephone services are designed to provide peer support to high-risk groups including law enforcement officers (cop2cop), veterans (vet2vet), child protection workers (worker2worker), caregivers of those with dementia (care2caregiver), and mothers of children with special needs (mom2mom). peer supporters are members or retired members of the identified groups (e.g., retired police officers, mothers who themselves have cared for children with special needs). prior to contacting callers, they complete an intensive, eight-day training that covers reciprocal peer support (castellano, 2012), competence in relating to the sub-cultures served in the programs, behavioral health training and recovery principles, peer communication skills, managing crisis and emergent situations, peer support principles, self-care and ongoing support. the services are designed for populations who are exposed to vicarious or secondary trauma and/or are vulnerable to behavioral health problems. after completing general training, peer supporters undergo more specialized training for their particular sub-population. call frequency and length are determined based on caller needs and availability, as was the overall length of the peer support relationship. quantitative evaluation of caller and call data as part of a general program evaluation, two years of caller and call data (2015-2016) from four of the rubhc telephone peer support programs (cop2cop, mom2mom, vet2vet, and worker2worker) were analyzed. these data were collected as a routine part of providing telephonic peer support services. date and time of call and peer supporter fielding the call were recorded. all contacts were documented including voicemails. due to the confidential nature of many of these services, demographic information about the callers was not routinely collected. data were analyzed utilizing statase, version 14.2 (college station, tx). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 qualitative interviews with peer supporters and callers a sample of 10 peer supporters and 12 callers from five of rubhc’s peer support programs (care2caregiver, cop2cop, mom2mom, vet2vet, and worker2worker) completed semi-structured in-depth telephone interviews between november 15, 2017 and february 9, 2018. the interviewer (me) was a doctoral research assistant at the university of north carolina paid by subcontract from rubhc for the purpose of the evaluation. she had previous contact with some of the peer staff through several project meetings but had no supervisory relationship with them and had no contact with callers other than through the present interviews. potential interviewees were chosen randomly from the pool of callers and peer staff who received or provided support between january 1, 2015 and december 31, 2016, the same time period included in the quantitative call data. the telephone interview guide for peer supporters covered training they receive, support they provide, workflow processes, and thoughts on how services could be improved. for callers, interviews focused on expectations of peer support prior to engaging with the programs, support received, any benefits or drawbacks of participating, and thoughts on how services could be improved. interviews were recorded, transcribed, and independently analyzed by two coders (me and pt) using inductive identification of themes following standard procedures (boyatzis, 1998) and utilizing atlas.ti. coders each read through the transcripts, jointly developed a codebook with 25 codes that captured important information in the data and applied these codes to each transcript. all coding discrepancies were resolved through consensus at research team meetings. after organizing the data in this way, coders again read through the transcripts and code reports to identify emerging themes. results engagement over the two-year period from january 1, 2015 – december 31, 2016, the four programs accounted for a total of 64,786 contacts with a total of 5,616 callers. of these, 49% were phone calls and 51% voicemails. disaggregated by program, cop2cop accounted for 15,494 contacts with 1,132 callers, mom2mom – 27,227 contacts with 2,088 callers, vet2vet – 14,883 contacts with 1,436 callers, and worker2worker – 7,182 contacts with 960 callers. on average over this two-year period, each caller received a total of 11.5 contacts, split evenly between calls (5.8) and voicemails (5.8). across programs, average number of calls ranged from 3.1 in worker2worker to 6.4 in vet2vet. consistent with the objective that the peerline provide straightforward information or referral regarding a specific problem, 15% of callers had one contact and 22% just one or two. excluding this pattern of use to gain a clearer sense of callers’ connection to the peerline, the average number of contacts among the 78% with more than two contacts was 14.4, with an average of 7.1 calls and 7.4 voicemails. these numbers suggest the peer services provided are of value to members of these high-risk groups in that over three quarters remain engaged over a substantial number of contacts. ways in which peer support conveys presence table 1 includes the ways in which rubhc programs convey presence. these include the availability of peer support around the clock, communicating security and comfort that a lifeline exists if one needs it, “just knowing there is someone out there that (sic) cares” [caller8]. presence is also communicated by calls nearly always answered by a live person, not an http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 answering system. at the same time, emotionally reassuring continuity of care is supported by it systems that provide access to detailed notes of previous conversations so that the peer supporter for example answering the phone at 2 am can pick up where the primary peer supporter left off. peer supporters identified being “trained to listen” [peer2] as a key part of providing support to their clients and a safe space for the unfiltered expression of negative emotions. they help their clients to problemsolve, offering suggestions but not judgment. if services exist to help with the problem, the peer supporter will provide referrals. responsiveness, being able often to provide same-day referrals to clients in need enhances the sense that the peer supporter cares about their wellbeing. additionally, providing encouragement and affirmation that the client is doing the best they can also conveys acceptance and promotes resilience. following up after the initial phone call may be viewed by program managers and peer supporters as mere due diligence, however, this follow-up appeared to be much appreciated by clients. they reported being surprised when their peer supporter called to check in with them, as this had not been their experience with other providers. reaching out helps to enhance trust and convey commitment; “i don’t think she’s ever going to give up on me. she always checks up on me” [caller6]. in spite of the client using the vernacular “checks up” and mindful that “checking up on me” may suggest surveillance, peer supporters are encouraged to avoid any sense of surveillance but to follow-up emphasizing the connection that has been made and the peer supporter’s caring about and wanting to know how the client is doing. in addition to these features of how peer support is introduced and provided, peer supporters are also part of a comprehensive approach to the client’s problems, supervised and trained to work in an integrated structure. peer supporters indicated that this helps clients feel both the ability to connect with someone “like me,” as well as the security of knowing that sound professional services are available through the channel of the peer. standing as backdrop to all of these, the simple existence of the programs and use of them by substantial numbers of those to whom they are offered both confirms the rationality of needing such support and conveys a sense of availability of support to those who may never directly contact the programs. shared identity and culture as basis for presence rubhc structures its peer support programs around culturally defined groups, police officers, military veterans, or mothers with children with special needs, rather than around diagnostic groups, e.g., those with depression. that is the shared lived experience of the peer supporter is culture, not diagnosis. this communicates that the peer supporter will have “walked in my shoes” and understand not just the problems an individual may be having, but the circumstances and cultural setting of the military, police, etc. that may shape those problems. the program descriptions and names, “cop2cop,” “mom2mom” and the like make clear that clients will speak to someone with whom they share important sources of identity and concern. while reducing stigma and isolation, the presence of similar others also establishes a base for rapport that may facilitate the impact of even brief communications, like a voicemail. indeed, the very fact that a program was developed for “my group,” veterans, police, etc. communicates a recognition and acceptance of the fact that those in the group have particular needs or challenges, reducing http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 stigma associated with using the service. it also contributes to trust. one peer supporter noted that “a lot of combat veterans, they have some issues, like i do… but once they find out that i’m a combat veteran…i’ve seen it all…they bond with me, trust me” [peer7]. defining services culturally rather than diagnostically also conveys that no one gets turned away from this service; there is no entry criterion other than being a police officer, veteran, mother of a child with special needs, etc. as a result, people call in with a range of presenting issues with which they are seeking assistance, and the peer supporters are trained to refer clients to a variety of care, services, or community resources. building rapport based on a shared lived experience also conveys a sense of credibility, in that callers trust advice and perspectives they are given because they come from someone with a similar life experience. in the words of one client, the advice given to her by the peer supporter was trusted because “she has a special needs kid also, so she will think what i think.” credibility, trust and rapport are also suggested by peer supporters’ reporting being supported by their clients, creating a reciprocal peer support relationship. table 1 ways in which rutgers health university behavioral health care peer support conveys presence ways in which peer support conveys presence • 24/7 availability, sophisticated it coordination for continuity when primary peer supporter unavailable • security, lifeline, unconditional support • reciprocity of support between peer and client • creating a safe space for the unfiltered expression of negative emotions • establishing credibility through sharing of personal lived experiences • leveraging personal experiences to connect with clients (e.g. finding common ground in faith) • listening first, then asking the right questions to probe at underlying problems • good follow through with referrals; same day referrals are highly appreciated • providing reassurance that clients are making good decisions and doing the best they can for themselves and family members • strengths over other agencies and providers o not a “sterile provider” o “the doctor had no practical suggestions” o other agencies provided nonconstructive advice • no one gets turned away • always follow up and call back (based on prior experience, clients don’t expect follow up from health care providers) • willingness to be a part of a comprehensive approach to the client’s problems, supervised and trained to work in an integrated structure. • qualities of the peer o no pressure, no judgment, good listener, real, understanding, compassionate, encouraging, uplifting, professional, humorous, soothing voice • confidentiality • clients have chaotic schedules that prevent them from picking up the phone every time o reliable follow up provides consistency, predictability http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 peers supporters also understood the busy schedules of their clients since they too shared a lived experience. they understood that, rather than not wanting to talk, clients described their engagement with their peer supporter as highly determined by their chaotic schedules and noted that when they were not able to answer the phone, “it wasn’t for lack of interest, it was the whirlwind thing” [caller1]. peer supporters also sent emails and cards to maintain presence with their clients. this varied and reliable followup conveys presence and provides reassurance that support is available should it be needed. table 2 includes quotations from clients and peer supporters illustrating key features of presence. table 2 quotations from clients and peer supporters illustrating key features of presence key features of presence quotes ways in which peer support conveys presence “we support our moms unconditionally… we let them know this is a comfortable, safe space, they never have to apologize, they never have to give an excuse.” – mom2mom peer supporter “she was a safe place, so sometimes i would be able to let down, which is an important part of supporting a caregiver.” –care2caregiver client “just being an anonymous, confidential ear for guys that don't always have somewhere to call.” – cop2cop peer supporter "just to give me that one hug that i might have needed that day." – vet2vet client “it was comforting that he knew what i was talking about and he was able to relate. … like, okay, i don't sound like i'm crazy, or i don't want to come off as complaining.” – worker2worker client shared identity and culture as basis for presence “it really helped, that fact that he had experience in this field. that made a huge difference, `cause certain things i would talk about, he knew exactly what i was talking about.” –worker2worker client “a lot of veterans don't talk about a lot of things to non-veterans. we're veterans, we've been there. just a question of experience. within the military. so they have someone that they can lean on.” – vet2vet peer supporter “it takes a while to build that bond … but once they find out that i'm a combat veteran, i was in the infantry for one year, i’ve seen it all.” – vet2vet peer supporter key features of the process of engagement “i just let them know that i have been thinking about them and that's why i'm calling, to just say hello. i ask them about their children, if there was something that was outstanding, like their kid just got into a new school or something, i ask them how is it going, are they enjoying the new school, so on and so forth.” – mom2mom peer supporter http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 using information systems to facilitate personalization: “we have an electronic system where we write everything about them, so i usually just quickly read what we discussed the time before or if there are outstanding issues that they were waiting to discuss. and then we address that.” –mom2mom peer supporter regarding clients needing ongoing follow up and support: “our other calls are all our follow-up calls of clients that we've been talking to for maybe a week, maybe just from last week or a few days ago, or clients that we've had for three or four months that we stay in contact with to just make sure that they're still on track.” –cop2cop peer supporter the simplicity of being there – voicemail “when i follow up, i think there's initial shock, from their end, that i'm calling back. they love it. even if they don't answer, they're appreciating it. i could have a lot of left messages and then, somewhere down the line, i might reach them and then they just say, 'oh, thank you so much for calling.'” – care2caregiver peer supporter “the ones where the people are just happy that somebody's remembering them out there and they just want to be able to say, ‘hi, we're good. thank you for calling me and it's nice that you remembered me.” – mom2mom peer supporter benefits of presence “just knowing that there's somebody out there that cares.” – vet2vet client “… relieved because i found someone to vent to and they give me so much courage and hope.” – mom2mom client “i was really able to pour out my heart to her, and she was able to give constructive advice and comfort, and then to say, ‘if you ever need to call, call anytime you want, if i'm not here the other ladies will be glad to talk to you because we keep notes and we know what's going on, so please don't hesitate to call.’” – care2caregiver client “guys were able to express themselves more often than they would have due to our profession as the cop tough guy, alpha male … it's okay to get upset, i think it opened up a lot of guys minds to this is a normal reaction to something abnormal.” – cop2cop client “that they provided an unbiased opinion about where i was at, and what i should do. they were not judgmental. they didn't point a finger and try to tell me that i was doing anything wrong.” –cop2cop client “i wish they had a worker2worker in every office, 'cause sometimes you just need that down time.” – worker2worker client "it was a sense of relief, like i was relieved. like, okay, i got this off my chest. he gave me that support. he was a listening ear. it was like a stress off my shoulder." – worker2worker client http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 peer support is different “i think the whole point of peer support is that you can relate, so i think it’s appropriate that we should be able to relate through our own life experience.” – mom2mom peer supporter “i think basically when they hear that you were in this job for that period of time, that long that they know they can open up. they feel comfortable knowing that it’s someone outside of dcp&p. it’s not an employee, they feel that we’re confidential and they’re sharing themselves with someone who’s going to keep everything confidential.” –worker2worker peer supporter “and she was not a sterile provider, she was somebody who was shoulder to shoulder, peer to peer, it was okay to tell her things and she got it. i did not have to explain much.” –care2caregivers client “a lot of people don’t fully understand what it is that i do and how demanding and stressful it can be, but the fact that he knew, and he had experience, it was refreshing.” –worker2worker client key features of the process of engagement prior to calling, clients reported not knowing what to expect. this reflects a broader challenge: defining peer support. with many different definitions or versions of peer support it is no wonder that clients may be unclear about what they will receive. clients often called because they needed immediate help, had a pre-identified problem, and desired concrete advice and direction. they hoped to talk with someone who is objective and experienced and often wished to remain confidential. program managers maintained that it is important also that clients talk to a live person. peer supporters reported that the time for them to establish rapport with a new client ranges from one to four phone calls. peer supporters identified three patterns of client contact. one is characterized by a need for urgent and specific help with something. this may include, however, resistance to recommendations of professional treatment, leading the peer supporters to address this resistance before facilitating referral. a second pattern centers on a need for time to talk about what’s going on, including concerns that are related to both behavioral health problems and problems and issues specific to the cultures of police, veterans, etc. in a third pattern, callers want to be “checked up on.” it is probably better to describe these as seeking ongoing follow-up and support (e.b. fisher, brownson, & o’toole, 2007) and to be “checked in with” (e. b. fisher et al., 2009), rather than being “checked up on” with its connotations of surveillance and even mistrust. such occasional “checking in with” may provide ongoing support for those with enduring challenges such as parenting a child with special needs, or those who have dealt with a problem but who need still to be encouraged to sustain their coping with it. also, consistent with the theme of this paper, the knowledge that someone is interested in me and keeping track of me conveys support and may combat isolation (kowitt et al., 2015). the simplicity of being there – voicemail program managers and peer supporters may often interpret voicemails that do not lead to live contact as failed efforts. this makes sense http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 if one thinks of live exchange as a necessary component of support and as voicemails useful merely for arranging such live exchange. from the perspective of “being there,” however, voicemails may take on a different status. even when clients are unable to be reached by phone, the simple act of leaving a voicemail to check in with them does not go unnoticed. peer supporters understand that their clients often have erratic schedules and are not always able to get to the phone. for example, one peer supporter related continuing to follow up with a particular client because, “she really cannot get to the phone, but when she gets to the phone she’s really grateful for that phone call, so i make note of never closing her case because i know she really enjoys getting my voicemails and when she is able to pick up she really enjoys being able to talk to me” [peer6]. figure 1. mean number of contacts per client, disaggregated by voicemail and telephone calls. as portrayed in figure 1, a substantial portion of total contacts across programs are voicemails, ranging from an average of 4.4 voicemails per client in worker2worker (relative to 3.1 phone calls), to an average of 7.5 voicemails in cop2cop (relative to 6.2 calls). over all programs, clients average 5.8 voicemails and 5.8 calls, so that voicemails constitute 50% of all contacts. because of their prominence, rubhc provides guidance and model “scripts” to guide but not prescribe voicemails so they are personal messages, not simply a “call me back” voicemail or an “automated or customer service” message. respondents expressed appreciation that someone recognized they deserved extra support and thanks for the program being created. a cop2cop staff member reported calling an isolated officer who was often in crisis on his birthday and wishing him a happy birthday. the client called back saying the peer supporter was the only person who remembered his birthday and that it had a profound effect on him. a major pitfall we have recognized and avoided is callback messaging that portrays follow-up calls as checking up on a client to see if they used an offered referral, made an appointment, etc. often the populations served may struggle to get to appointments or comply so a “follow-up” call to “check up” risks making the peer supporters the “appointment police,” leading clients not to want to answer further calls. when voicemails do not suggest holding clients accountable but rather emphasize the connection that has been made and that “i care about how you are doing this week and am interested in speaking to you more,” clients are far more likely to call back and stay connected in the future. benefits of presence as many other studies have shown, peer support is related to a wide range of benefits (e. b. fisher et al., 2017; perry et al., 2014). here we focus on the benefits clients of the rubhc programs reported that seemed especially tied to the simple presence of peer support. clients reported reduced feelings of isolation and loneliness along with relief of stress, peace, energy, and joy. some noted a sense of clarity and reassurance, feeling as though they were “oxygenated again” [caller1]. the normalization of clients’ experiences, “making the abnormal normal,” was also identified as a positive effect of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 simply participating in peer support. the peer support relationship helped them to make sense of life situations and gain a clearer perspective. this extended beyond simple presence to facilitate subsequent reframing threats and challenges and problem solving to cope better with their circumstances. peer support is different the shared lived experience aspect of peer support makes it unique from the support provided by others, including medical and mental health providers, managers and supervisors, and family and friends. also setting peer support apart is the fact that peer supporters offered unconditional support with no judgment or expectations attached. clients stated that their experiences with peer support were different than experiences they had with traditional medical and mental health providers. not viewed as “a sterile provider” [caller1], unique advantages of a peer support relationship include the ability to connect on a personal level and receive practical, constructive advice from the perspective of someone with shared experience. in the words of one caller, “the doctor had no practical suggestions,” and “i needed somebody in the trenches to help me find ideas on ways to take care of him” [caller1]. this lived experience perspective is different from, but complementary with, professional advice and recommendations. in other words, a doctor may tell someone what to do while a peer supporter helps them to figure out how to do it (davis, o'toole, brownson, llanos, & fisher, 2007). in the programs focused on occupational groups (cop2cop, vet2vet, and worker2worker), callers noted that they liked having someone who understood the culture of their job but was also outside of it, so they did not have to worry about potential repercussions of sharing their struggles which may not be the case with their supervisors or co-workers. police officers, in particular, noted the confidentiality of the peer support service to be especially beneficial. confidentiality and the option to remain anonymous provided people with jobs that often require stoicism the opportunity to be vulnerable and share openly and honestly. additionally, peer support is different from the support provided to callers by their family and friends. because they have a similar lived experience to their callers, peer supporters are able to validate the experiences of their callers. for example, one peer stated that “a lot of times family members or friends don’t understand the job [of a child protection worker]” [peer9] and a caller stated that it “really helped, that fact that he had experience in this field... `cause certain things i would talk about, he knew exactly what i was talking about” [caller12]. these observations underscore that peer support is uniquely suited to meet the needs of those it serves. discussion that the 78% of callers who had more than 2 contacts with the present peer telephone support services averaged a total of 14.4 contacts over 2 years attests to callers’ valuing the continued availability of support. the qualitative findings here also attest to the value of that support’s pure presence, “being there” and its many benefits, including reducing loneliness and social isolation – [add quote about the voicemail being the only message for a birthday]. not only is being there important in and of itself, many of the observations shared by callers and peers suggest it is necessary as a base for the other things peer support may provide (castellano, 2012). the observations presented here make clear that presence and “being there” are not the result only of “saying the right thing,” but http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 rather are based on a broad range of features of the peer support programs. these include, for example, the it resources that facilitate smooth reference to a previous call by a peer supporter answering the phone at 2 am who may never have talked to the client. they also include the arrangements that support rapid, often same-day referrals as well as the training and supervision of peer supporters. presence is clearly a feature of programs as well as the peer supporters who implement them. when designing and implementing peerand mutual-support programs, explicit attention should be paid to workflow processes so that they routinely provide opportunity for the communication of presence. an explicit program plan or theory that recognizes the value of presence can lay the groundwork for providing helpful peer support services. the rubhc peer support programs described here are guided by the reciprocal peer support model emphasizing four key steps in the process of peer support: connection & pure presence; information gathering & risk assessment; case management & goal setting; and resilience, affirmation & praise (castellano, 2012). clearly the current findings are consistent with the importance of connection & pure presence among these four and indeed with its place as first in order among them. the findings reported here and the experience of the rubhc programs point to “being there” as the base on which other peer support services are built, whether they be referrals to professional services, peer supporters helping clients in pursuit of goals they set, or providing ongoing affirmation & praise as part of follow-up. this centrality or primacy of “being there” is reflected also in the training of rubhc peer supporters first and foremost to connect before going on to detailed information gathering or case management tasks. encouraging clients first to tell their stories and connect with peer supporters facilitates their being comfortable then in receiving recommendations or referrals. a shared lived experience provides a solid base from which connection and presence can be built. peer support services are unique because the advice and assistance given is informed by practical experience, not professional training or knowledge. these observations make clear that this shared lived experience lends credibility to the advice given and often allows for rapport to quickly develop between peers and clients. peer support operates in a complementary manner to other services, where peers can assist in implementing recommendations of professionals, as well as referring clients to professional services or support groups they are aware of or have had personal experience with. reliable follow-up is a powerful tool for communicating presence. as noted in the findings, a peer supporter identified a common pattern of calls as centered on wanting to be “checked up on,” referring to wanting peer supporters to continue to keep in contact and communicate availability. a peer support program for low income mothers of children who were eligible for medicaid and had been hospitalized for asthma was successful in engaging 89.6% of the mothers and reducing their children’s subsequent hospitalizations by 50% relative to controls (e. b. fisher et al., 2009). resembling the present findings, the “asthma coaches” reported that mothers were surprised and gratified when coaches called back in several weeks as they said they would to “check in” with them. the asthma coaches felt it was indicative of their non-demanding but persistent approach to mothers that they talked of “checking in with them,” rather than “checking up on them.” an important aspect of reliable follow-up that should not be minimized or discounted is the role of voicemail. voicemail messages that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 focus on the connection made and communicate continued concern for the client are meaningful in and of themselves to clients and should not be viewed simply as “missed connections” or attempts to schedule contact. as noted in the introduction, the present study focuses on peer support provided by trained peers to individuals by telephone. but valuing presence is not unique to peer support. a recent study of participants in online support communities for those dealing with self-harm identified five “therapeutic affordances,” first listed among which was “connection, the ability to make contact with others who self-harm for the purposes of mutual support and in so doing reduce feelings of loneliness and isolation”(coulson, bullock, & rodham, 2017). although some of the procedures such as the it systems supporting 24/7 coverage may be different, many of the features of being there identified apply as well to mutual support groups as well as other channels of social support. shared cultural identity and experience, emphases on acceptance, validation of experience, encouragement and affirmation, ongoing availability of support (e.g., the ability of most members to find an alcoholics anonymous meeting anywhere in the world), along with the simple existence of programs all convey the presence of others who will be there. among the characteristics noted in the results related to “peer support is different,” most would apply also to mutual support programs, although the protection of confidentiality, so important to groups like police, may be easier to guarantee in supervised, individual support than in some mutual support approaches. additionally, although some mutual support or self-help programs may see fit to follow strict limits on who may join or how they may participate, they may accept a variety of reasons for joining and varied patterns of attendance or may encourage varied shared activities as ways of providing flexible accessibility, again to convey presence and availability of someone to “be there.” although not reported in the present findings, experience of the rubhc managers suggests that the connection established between peer supporters and clients may often include a “trauma bond” such as when a client who has successfully dealt with suicidal impulses attributes that success to the peer supporter and that relationship. this suggests a range in the communication of presence, from a simple voicemail to helping a client turn back from suicide. but the quotation at the start of this paper, “that those voicemails resulted in one less dead marine” suggests also that simple actions along that range may have effects far more profound than their simplicity may suggest. conclusions qualitative and quantitative data from the telephone peer support services of rubhc add support and broader illumination of the importance of “being there” in peer support interventions. clients’ as well as peer supporters’ observations describe the importance of shared cultural experience, of a nonjudgmental and accepting atmosphere, of support that makes little demand on clients doing something to earn or maintain services but largely takes them as they are, and, as in the case of voicemail, maintains contact and communicates caring and availability even when clients, for any of many reasons, go for extended periods without utilizing services. in terms of quantitative data, average contacts per client were almost 12 total across all programs, pointing to the value of this kind of support to recipients. that these included a substantial portion of voicemails attests also to the communication of availability as a important part of support, not merely an attempt to schedule it. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 research & policy implications future research should acknowledge the fundamental value of presence in peer support services and extend focus beyond instrumental or emotional support features and quantifiable outcomes. nuanced approaches to research that seek to understand how peer support may covey presence and the benefits of presence is warranted. as detailed in the practice implications that follow, policymakers, should recognize that communicating presence may require flexibility at the level of the support provided as well as the levels of protocols, standards, and financial policies that govern their funding. practice implications presence, or “being there”, is central to the provision of peer support and, as such, should not be overlooked in the design and implementation of peer support programs. knowledge about disease and its prevention and management, assistance with access to care, or skills for caring for oneself are frequent and enduring themes of peer support programs. program managers and peer supporters should recognize, however, that their first objective may be simply to be someone who is interested in and has time to spend with those they would help. even if not needed to convey helpful knowledge and assistance in prevention or disease management, simply “being there” for people may convey substantial benefit. program developers and managers should generally prioritize ‘being there’ as a peer supporter’s first priority. indeed, focusing peer supporters too much on technical knowledge, disease information, or referral resources may distract from the fundamental value of their presence. the workflow processes of peer supporters should reflect this, by prioritizing active listening and allowing time to build rapport with clients before addressing more in-depth information gathering and problem-solving. additionally, intentional follow-up for the sole purpose of checking in with clients and communicating concern about them and their well-being should be emphasized. documentation systems that facilitate records of conversations with clients – while avoiding distractions of requiring too much or unnecessary detail – allow for personalized messages that emphasize presence and the connection between supporter and client, even when peer supporters carry high caseloads of clients. reflecting all of this, training should emphasize that listening and “being there” for clients can be profoundly impactful and are integral parts of peer support initiatives. references boyatzis, r. e. 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(2010). outcomes and costs of community health worker interventions: a systematic review. med care, 48(9), 792-808. doi:10.1097/mlr.0b013e3181e35b5 1 conflicts of interest http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=citation&list_uids=5644337 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=citation&list_uids=5644337 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=citation&list_uids=5644337 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/01/16/theresa-may-appoints-minister-loneliness-jo-cox-commission-highlight/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/01/16/theresa-may-appoints-minister-loneliness-jo-cox-commission-highlight/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/01/16/theresa-may-appoints-minister-loneliness-jo-cox-commission-highlight/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/01/16/theresa-may-appoints-minister-loneliness-jo-cox-commission-highlight/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 general graham is the senior director and ms. castellano is the peer support director of the rutgers university behavioral health care national call center from which these observations were drawn. ms. dreyer valovcin is the program coordinator for the mom2mom and worker2worker programs of the center that are among those from which observations were drawn. no other authors have any pertinent conflicts of interest. confidentiality all patient/personal identifiers have been removed or disguised so the patient/person(s) described are not identifiable and cannot be identified through the details of the data presented. funding this work was supported by the the healthcare foundation of new jersey through a grant to rutgers university behavioral health care. this project was also supported from the university of north carolina – michigan peer support core of the michigan center for diabetes translational research (p30 dk092926, william herman, pi) and by a grant from the merck foundation to edwin fisher as principal investigator. acknowledgements thanks to muchieh maggy coufal, ulrike ehlert, peter goth, yuexing liu, john piette, yiqing qian, joel rodríguez-saldaña, frank snoek, chanuantong tanasugarn, silvana p. barros and wessel van lith for assistance in the translations of vernacular expressions regarding “being there.” http://www.gjcpp.org/ “when i was surfing with those guys i was surfing with family.” a grounded exploration of program theory within the jimmy miller memorial foundation surf therapy intervention jamie marshall1, brendon ferrier 1, philip b. ward2 and russell martindale1 keywords: qualitative research; grounded theory; mental health; program theory; surf therapy author biographies: jamie marshall, researcher working on the world’s first dedicated surf therapy phd at edinburgh napier university. he has published and researched primarily around exploration of change theories amongst established surf therapy programmes worldwide. his background is that of a practitioner having founded and managed the wave project surf therapy programme in scotland. brendon ferrier, lecturer in the school of applied sciences at edinburgh napier university in scotland. he currently lectures sport and exercise science students in the effects of maturation and development of children, as well as in the area of safeguarding and protection of children and vulnerable populations in a sport and recreation setting. philip ward, clinical neuroscientist and unsw sydney professor of psychiatry who has always loved body surfing. phil is a passionate advocate for building the evidence base for surf therapy and is inspired by the positive vibe that surrounds surf therapy and the people who support it. he is a founding partner of the international surf therapy organisation, and a board director of the waves of wellness foundation. russell martindale, associate professor and head of sport, exercise and health sciences at edinburgh napier university in scotland. he has published and worked extensively in the area of talent development. he is particularly interested in understanding how people can fulfil their potential and successfully progress through challenges in life. recommended citation: marshall, j., ferrier, b., ward, p. b., & martindale, r. (2020). “when i was surfing with those guys i was surfing with family.” a grounded exploration of program theory within the jimmy miller memorial. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(2), 1 – 19. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: jamie marshall, school of applied sciences, 9 sighthill ct, edinburgh eh11 4bn, uk james.marshall@napier.ac.uk 1 school of applied science, edinburgh napier university, edinburgh, scotland 2 school of psychiatry, unsw sydney, australia http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:james.marshall@napier.ac.uk global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 “when i was surfing with those guys i was surfing with family.” a grounded exploration of program theory within the jimmy miller memorial abstract surf therapy is an intervention increasingly being utilized to tackle a range of health inequalities for military veterans. while increasing evidence demonstrates the effectiveness of surf therapy, there has been limited exploration of program theoretical explanations as to how it achieves positive outcomes. theoretical understanding is important as it allows for service optimization, monitoring and further development. the current study utilized a pragmatic qualitative approach to explore theoretical mediators of the outcomes of jimmy miller memorial foundation (jmmf) surf therapy intervention. jmmf is a california (usa)-based program supporting military veterans facing mental and physical health challenges. eighteen people who had participated in jmmf interventions (12 males and 6 females; mean age = 42 years; standard deviation = 11 years; range 28-71) were interviewed in depth about their experiences of the surf therapy intervention. data were analyzed through constant comparative analysis and memo writing in line with pragmatic grounded theory. two core intervention categories (relating to service delivery) were identified: “constant challenge tackled at own pace” and “a non-judgmental familial safe space.” a further three individual categories (relating to participants) were identified: “accomplishment,” “respite,” and “social connections.” one contextualized category was identified; “physical therapeutic elements.” furthermore, a culture of “reframing failure” pervaded every element of the intervention. the findings demonstrated strong links to self-determination and flow theories which suggest potential theoretical frameworks for better understanding of the constructs that underpin surf therapy. the findings provide empirical evidence as to how best to optimize and expand jmmf service delivery in the us and potentially for surf therapy in wider veteran populations. the mental health challenges experienced by military veterans are well-documented. in the usa mental health conditions are a significant burden for veterans and a major focus of the department of veterans affairs (va) service delivery (maynard et al. 2017). meta-analysis has found post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) prevalence rates of 23 % among us veterans who took part in operation enduring freedom and operation iraqi freedom that is far above general population prevalence of 7.8 % (fulton et al. 2015). veteran populations face increased risk for suicide compared with non-veterans (kaplan et al. 2007; mccarthy et al. 2009). veterans account for 20 % of all suicide deaths annually in the us while only accounting for 1 % of the population (department of veterans affairs 2010). physical activity, which includes structured exercise, has a strong evidence base for decreasing ptsd and depressive symptoms (rosenbaum et al. 2015) including the use of ‘blue space’ interventions (britton et al. 2018). physical activity interventions have been demonstrated to be effective in addressing mental health challenges specifically for veteran’s populations (goldstein et al. 2018, shivakumar et al. 2017; reinhardt et al. 2018; marchand et al. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 2018), including the use of surfing (fleischmann et al. 2011; rogers, mallinson & peppers 2014). surfing as a physical activity intervention has been labelled ‘surf therapy’ by an international collaboration of organizations offering such programs: the international surf therapy organization (www.intlsurftherapy.org). surf therapy has been conducted in a broad range of contexts with a variety of populations. the most common outcomes include improved personal well-being and mental health alongside population specific outcomes. while evidence for the effectiveness of surf therapy, in supporting positive mental health continues to grow, there has been limited research focus on how surf therapy achieves its outcomes. although the mode of delivery is well-understood and is consistently implemented, in-depth understanding of the theoretical framework underlying surf therapy remains limited. empirical exploration of program theory within surf therapy interventions targeting military veterans is currently limited to two studies. these studies utilized dialogical narrative analysis to explore participant experiences within a united kingdom (uk)based veterans’ surf therapy intervention (caddick, phoenix & smith 2015a, 2015b). a combination of observation and life history interviews highlighted peer relationships and a sense of respite achieved through surfing as key elements that underpinned the effectiveness of the program. to date these remain the only targeted theoretical investigations within surf therapy for veterans. targeted investigation alongside young people facing mental health challenges also identified elements of respite and social components within surf therapy program theory while also suggesting basic human needs from self determination theory as important components (marshall, kelly & niven 2019). translation of these findings to a veterans’ context must be viewed with caution due to the very different populations examined. program theory a structured approach to describe such frameworks can be implemented through interrogation and description of program theory that underpin an intervention. program theory offers comprehensive understanding of how an intervention works (pawson 2006). through investigation intervention pathways can be broken down into individual mechanisms which explicate or ‘trace the destiny’ of a program theory (pawson & tilley 2004). visualization of program theory using a logic model allows for explicit theoretical mapping which is valuable for both academic researchers and surf therapy practitioners (nutbeam & bauman 2006). the logic model or map of intervention program theory can be used to enhance program delivery, quality control and outcome monitoring (pawson 2006). furthermore, an in-depth expression of program theory allows for expansion and scaling of projects (pawson 2006). while continued effectiveness testing is still required, comprehensive program theory allows better targeting of efficacy evaluation and identification of plausible and testable mechanisms may add strength to claims of effectiveness (bradford hill 1965). the current study aimed to build on previous work to improve understanding on how taking part in a targeted surf therapy program supports veterans facing mental health challenges. it will shed light on the contextual similarities between interventions of this kind in the usa compared with previous studies in the uk (caddick, phoenix & smith 2015a, 2015b). the study aims to identify the program theory that links a successful surf therapy program’s inputs to associated positive outcomes related to mental health and personal well-being. such program theory allows for theoretical discussion, optimization of delivery and a pathway to future development of surf therapy for veterans. it will also allow for comparison of the key processes identified during initial development and testing of this http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.intlsurftherapy.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 intervention (rogers, mallinson & peppers 2014). the jimmy miller memorial foundation the jimmy miller memorial foundation (jmmf) (https://jimmymillerfoundation.org/) provided the context for this study. jmmf is a californian charity that utilizes surf to support military veterans facing a wide range of challenges including ptsd, traumatic brain injury (tbis), anxiety, depression, addiction and homelessness. the program also works with active duty military through the wounded warrior battalion at camp pendleton (www.woundedwarrior.marines.mil/wwb n-w/) and with at-risk youth groups. jmmf was founded in 2005 in memory of jimmy miller. jimmy was a la county lifeguard and surf instructor who took his own life in 2004. jimmy’s family set up a legacy fund which enabled occupational therapists to develop a 5-week surf therapy intervention delivered to at-risk young people and veterans. a pilot study of the jmmf surf therapy intervention in veterans found clinically significant reductions in both ptsd and depressive symptoms (rogers, mallinson & peppers 2014). the intervention currently runs as an opt in bimonthly club-based program. veterans attend through the greater los angeles veterans association hospital or self-refer. prior military service is the only official criteria, but referral pathways are designed to prioritize participants in need of support. sessions consist of a half day of surf therapy including themed discussion on the beach, time in the water, a team debrief and a shared meal. veteran and non-veteran volunteers from the local community provide one-to-one surfing support. other support roles on the beach also contribute to the participant experience. jmmf was selected for this research due to their longstanding successful provision of surf therapy for military veterans and their commitment to maintaining an evidencebased program. the principal researcher accessed a large pool of participants with varied and in-depth surf therapy experiences whilst remaining independent from surf therapy delivery. method theoretical framework the ontological framework for this study centered on pragmatic grounded theory (timonen, foley & conlon 2018). this study focused on identification of a theoretical understanding of the social and behavioral components that lead to the intervention outcomes. grounded theory provided an appropriate methodological approach to expand surf therapy’s theoretical basis (hutchinson & wilson 2001). concurrent data collection and analysis along with a constant comparative approach, memo writing and a theoretical sample of appropriate participant experience identify this study as grounded theory (charmaz 2014; schwandt 2007). the work undertaken was pragmatic with data collected in the practical, real world intervention setting (harris 2015). ethics ethical approval was granted by the edinburgh napier university school of applied sciences ethics committee (22/08/2018). written informed consent was obtained for all participants. sample a purposive theoretical sample (charmaz 2014) was utilized in line with grounded theory practice. veterans who had participated in surf therapy with jmmf were invited to participate by jmmf gatekeepers, primarily by its lead practitioner. all but one of the participants had experienced a minimum of 4 surf therapy sessions with jmmf. one participant expressed an interest in taking part in the study after their first surf therapy session. most participants lived in http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://jimmymillerfoundation.org/ http://www.woundedwarrior.marines.mil/wwbn-w/ http://www.woundedwarrior.marines.mil/wwbn-w/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 the greater los angeles area. a small number of participants had attended jmmf surf therapy sessions previously but moved away from the area. the sample demographics are listed in table 1. the broad age range (28-71) meant that veterans from a wide range of conflicts including vietnam, 1st and 2nd gulf wars and subsequent counter insurgency operations were included. the sample included noncombat and peacekeeping deployments undertaken by three arms of the us military. the high number of us marine corps participants reflects the personnel previously based at local military bases. table 1 breakdown of sample demographics n male female mean age age sd age range marine corps (usmc) army air force (usaf) 18 67 % 33 % 42.2 11.0 28-71 78 % 11 % 11 % data collection and analysis interviews were conducted between september 2018 and october 2018 with a mean interview time of 50 minutes (range 19 to 82 minutes). online video conferencing was used for 5 interviews for logistical reasons. the remaining 13 interviews were conducted in person at locations suggested by participants including local cafes, participant’s homes or on the beach. this maximized participants’ sense of control and comfort and facilitated more equal power-sharing between interviewer and participant. quiet spots at said locations were prioritized to support confidentiality with protocols in place to move if space was too encroached upon. said protocols were used on one occasion. in addition, informal discussion with practitioners and observation of surf therapy sessions enabled better understanding of the intervention context. these pragmatic approaches facilitated research while allowing appropriately grounded focus on participant experience (timonen, foley & conlon 2018). interviews were semi-structured and opened with an open-ended question about participant experiences at jmmf surf therapy sessions. further open-ended and non-leading questions allowed for exploration of participants’ experiences with opportunities to explore processes highlighted in previous literature (see table 2). prompts were used to further unpack relevant experiences while clarification prompting enabled better understanding of meaning (charmaz 2014). the initial schedule was designed to ensure thorough exploration of participant experience. as interviews took place, additional questions were included to explore identified categories in keeping with grounded theories’ iterative approach (charmaz 2014). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 table 2 open-ended interview schedule initial open-ended interview schedule tell me about your experience of surfing alongside the jimmy miller foundation. how would you describe yourself as a person at the beach? can you talk me through your process of getting involved with jimmy miller? have you noticed any changes in yourself since you started surfing? when you look back at your initial experiences surfing, are there any events that stand out in your mind? can you tell me what surfing now means to you? can you describe to me how you felt when you caught your first wave? can you tell me about working alongside the jimmy miller surf mentors? can you expand on the emotions you feel at the beach and in the water? can you describe to me your expectations of surfing prior to starting? (follow up: how, if at all have these changed?) can you describe to me what it was like meeting with new people at the beach? is there anything else you think i should know to understand the jimmy miller foundation? can you describe to me your experiences of the atmosphere at the beach? is there anything you would like to ask me in relation to anything we have discussed? all 18 interviews were recorded, and rough transcriptions were created using transcription software. key interview segments were transcribed verbatim while filler was left in rough form. at this stage all participants were ascribed a pseudonym to protect confidentiality throughout analysis and reporting of results. this process of cleaning transcripts was repeated several times throughout data collection and analysis. transcripts were analyzed in an iterative, emergent and non-linear manner comparing data obtained from different participants (glaser 1978). three stages of coding were utilized: initial, intermediate and advanced. all three stages were used throughout the concurrent data collection and analytical processes in line with established grounded theory practice (charmaz 2014; saldana 2009). a threestage coding was utilized. the first stage focused on in-depth exploration and comparison of individual processes as reported by participants using gerundbased codes such as ‘being present’. these initial codes were in vivo where possible. the second stage involved extrapolation of initial codes into broader categories and synthesis of preliminary program theory. the final stage of analysis involved mapping of participant pathways within the synthesized program theory to understand directionality and relationships between categories. at all stages analysis remained grounded in participant experience. audio interpretations were recorded as an alternative to written memos to facilitate reflection and mapping of the analytical process. upon completion of 15 interviews similar categories continued to be identified alongside a strong program theory suggesting theoretical saturation (charmaz 2008). three further interviews were conducted offering further in-depth and diverse data but did not add to or change the nascent program theory. this further suggested that theoretical saturation had been achieved. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 reflexivity reflective audio was recorded throughout the study to highlight awareness of personal preconceptions, bolster credibility and supplement analysis (charmaz 2014). the research team included a range of prior experiences around surf therapy practice, mental health, psychology and surf science. the range of different expertise allowed for open and regular discussion about prior assumptions and potential impact on whether conclusions were grounded in participant data. an example of reflective practice that came out of such discussions was the extensive use of prompts to thoroughly unpack participant experiences of surfing by the lead researcher. this ensured thorough understanding of participant experiences as opposed to imposition of own beliefs based on the lead researcher’s previous surfing experience. other members of the research team with limited surfing experience were also of assistance in this regard. results program theory figure 1 is a logic model representing the program theory that was constructed from participant interview data. seven emergent categories were identified as pathways from intervention inputs to associated outcomes and reflect three different domains: intervention, individual and contextual. figure 1. logic model of program theory for jmmf surf therapy intervention the first two categories were labelled intervention categories as they primarily related to processes facilitated by the intervention itself. the final three categories were labelled individual categories as they relate to individuals’ surf therapy experiences. constant comparison of data throughout analysis highlighted salience between participant experiences and all categories apart from one example. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 one contextualized category was identified contingent on one specific participant experience. this category was reported due to the insight it offered to a specific subsection of the sampled population. final stage analysis allowed for mapping of directionality and relationships between categories. the program theory was framed within the culture of the intervention. intervention culture the intervention reframed what it was to fail through surf therapy. the quote, “the first thing you learn in surfing is how to fall,” was frequently spoken by the lead practitioner and was utilized at every single session attended. this ethos pervaded every element of the intervention, including all listed categories, and was identified as ‘culture’ rather than a discrete category. participants highlighted how this culture positively impacted their experience providing encouragement and positive reinforcement. “they were saying specific technical things about what we could do to improve but they were saying things in a positive way, they never said anything in a negative manner. so that was a, i believe that was structurally built into the program where if we did something wrong, they would just say, if you try it this way, it'll give you better results. instead of saying, don't do it that way.” michael, us army “the way they explain it to you, you don't feel like a failure, you feel, like, ok i can do this. this is part of the surfing experience.” jane, usmc this reframing of failure was highlighted as an important lesson that could translate into other life situations and contrasted with the intense performance-based mentality that many veterans experienced in active service. “if you fall off, just get back up man, it was a cool metaphor for life, just get back up man it’s life.” will, usmc “and all these things, instead of being performance based, i just realized i just need to be me.” jimmy, usmc jmmf’s reframing of failure pervaded the program theory, supporting other categories, enabling pathways and was associated with positive mental health outcomes. this culture reflected the actions of staff and volunteers and was reinforced throughout intervention delivery. intervention categories constant challenge tackled at own pace participants identified that surfing was challenging although their expectations varied regarding the degree of difficulty. some participants thought it might be easy to learn prior to their first attempt. the challenge continued to be identified even as participants progressed. “i thought it was going to be super easy, that was my first expectation and i was quickly humbled by the ocean.” ryan, usmc “i'm pretty good at being able to do what i want to do physically, and here i am not being able to keep my balance.” will, usmc participants highlighted how the challenge was balanced by the focus on learning at one’s own pace. this focus was supported by the patience and encouragement offered by intervention staff and volunteers. “if you don't get it on the first couple tries, don't even worry about it, don't sweat it. the waves never end so you can keep going.” david, usmc http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 “it’s not a competitive space, it’s an inclusive challenging space.” michael, 47, army “they (the intervention staff/volunteers) practiced patience and encouragement really just verbally said, it’s okay just try again. it’s a very powerful thing.” will, usmc furthermore, the focus on surfing skill development at one’s own pace was highlighted as being critical to participation by individuals facing major physical challenges. “with jimmy miller foundation i was like hey i can't walk yet, i can't stand up yet so they would actually like have me just lay on the board and lay down and surf and body surf and slowly i started getting up and it wasn't like 'get up, stand up, go faster' it was kind like take your time, don't get hurt but have fun, of all things have fun.” jessica, 28, usmc a challenging task conducted at a selfselected pace was consistently highlighted as a key element of participant experience and for some was fundamental to being able to take part. this approach, which was facilitated by those delivering the intervention, also seems to have underpinned individual categories that form part of this program theory. a non-judgmental familial safe space participants cited how the intervention fostered a non-judgmental safe space often drawing comparisons to a supportive family network. “so, when you talk about the jimmy miller environment, it's a matter of emotional safety.” michael, us army “the way that they create the environment, it's like, you can tell that they’re family off the bat, but it's an open family, and then you're welcome to walk in and experience, you know, the love and the joy and the surfing.” kimberly, usaf this safe space was facilitated by elements of the intervention including how staff and volunteers conducted themselves, as well as the structure of service delivery. participants often highlighted that there was a complete lack of judgement of individuals, of either how they were in the past or in the present. for participants this was a novel and extremely rewarding experience helping to break down isolation. “i have been isolating myself for seven years, i began to realize that there's, there's actual people out there that care about me, and i'm gonna be safe to be around.” michael, us army the structure of the sessions further promoted this idea of a safe space through participation in a non-clinical sharing. this consisted of joining in a circle to discuss a positive theme as part of the surf therapy session. participants emphasized how this gave an opportunity to share their feelings and how participation by everyone, staff and volunteers included, made it easier to share themselves. “they're teaching me but they're sharing too. um, so i guess it kind of broke down that barrier for me of like, oh, this is somebody who's in authority, which i, you know, usually have issues with, whereas, you know, they're human. and they're opening up so i could be open.” kimberly, usaf “so, you have other non-military people sharing their feelings because that will automatically put a military member more at ease, because if they are doing it why not?” joe, usmc http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 this safe space created through the structure and the delivery of the intervention seemed integral to overall participant experience in the program and specifically enabled later individual categories related to social connections. the importance of this safe space at the intervention is highlighted by one veteran who compared it to their feelings in wider life. “whenever you start getting back into society from wounded warriors or veterans in general, even if you are going out to walmart, or to the gym, or the mall, you kinda sit in your car and you just like i'm really anxious to go into the public right now. it’s all these different emotions but when you roll up to the beach for jimmy miller, it had to be the first place that i didn't get anxiety at.” jessica, usmc individual categories a transferable sense of accomplishment mastering aspects of surfing, the aforementioned challenging task, resulted in a real sense of accomplishment. a feeling of achieving something that many thought they would never be able to do. this was further facilitated by the intervention reinforcing this accomplishment wherever possible. “i realized i was the only one that was standing and surfing, it was just one random wave that i got on my own and i think every blue shirt (volunteers) on the beach was cheering like, like i was about to like, score the game winning goal for the world cup.” david, usmc “it’s success and achievement every single step of the day.” jane, usmc participants reported that this sense of accomplishment was transferable to wider life. this feeling of accomplishment reinforced individuals’ sense of capability challenged self-doubt or reminded participants of achievements when things were not going well. “certainly (surfing) means to me that i mean, in a very, very big picture, like i really can accomplish anything that i put my mind to. so yeah, something i thought was impossible, that i would never enjoy, never could be good at.” steph, usmc “the accomplishment helps you longterm, because honestly then you are not just fixated on this week has been crap.” jessica, usmc this transferable sense of accomplishment was linked to specific instances where it helped to tackle other challenges in life. one veteran reported how their own sense of accomplishment in surfing gave them the confidence to tackle some tax issues that had been too intimidating for them to address. such examples highlight the place of a transferable sense of accomplishment in this program theory and possible pathways to associated mental health outcomes. a feeling of respite through being present veterans interviewed reported a feeling of respite from negative emotions, symptoms and memories that may otherwise be persistent throughout daily life through surfing with jmmf. “and i remember the first time i went surfing, i was more in a depressive state. and so, when i caught that wave, but i almost felt like i was kind of rising above like, a lot of the situation or the gunk.” kimberly, usaf “you go surf with those guys, because no matter how bad things had got, whenever i got into the ocean is just like everything got washed away.” jimmy, usmc http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 this feeling of escape provided respite in the moment, however participants also reported that it was transferable to other situations such as avoiding or coping with a ptsd flashback. one veteran explained how going back to this feeling of respite helped them to cope with flashbacks related to the noise of fireworks. “i had a ptsd moment where there's like these firework shows up and my doctor told me just think back where a place where you're more calm and i thought about the ocean surfing […] i thought about surfing and i just literally felt so relaxed you know. those (fireworks) to me sound like mortar rounds, that whistling noise that got me in iraq, like constantly were attacked by mortars yeah, three times a day average.” justin, usmc in another example one participant described how the respite provided by surfing provided hope for future respite even when personal circumstances may be in a very negative place. “you can't wait for the next one because you know if you’re having a rough time, or if you know, you’re suicidal or if you’re injured or whatever, you know that you are going to have a good day when you go (jmmf).” jimmy, usmc participants noted that the feeling of respite was facilitated by the complete focus that surfing demanded. a combination of the challenge of the activity itself and the need to be present and aware of the ocean environment left little space for negative thoughts or emotions. “whatever stress i had, from school or whatever, i didn't think about it at all because i was so focused on the task in hand.” will, usmc “you really have no choice but to be present. like, even if you start having conversations about something. sometimes waves will come and knock you over like hey pay attention. so yeah, it's, it's like, it's a good practice in being present without like, having to try hard at it. just really kind of natural.” brad, usmc the need to be focused and present and the accompanying positive feelings were highlighted by one participant who reported elements of temporal distortion while riding on a wave. “pure, happiness, unless you have done it it’s a feeling that’s very hard to describe, it’s like everything slows down. your entire life just, not so much pauses but is very slow motion as you go through the section (of the wave), and it’s just incredible.” brad, usmc the feeling of respite from negative emotions, thoughts and symptoms that may be present in veterans’ wider lives seems to be a very important element of participants’ experiences with jmmf. not only was respite experienced in the sessions but it was also linked with transferability to other situations, leading to better mental health outcomes. non-veteran centered social connections participation in the intervention enabled creation of new social connections both in session and more broadly. this was highlighted as particularly important for veterans facing forms of social isolation. “i mean like i said i was fucking alone bro i was i was like really fucking alone and i'm not anymore. yeah you know just being able to you know go out with other people who actually like want me there, this is just night http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 and day from how life used to be.” dan, usmc “to be able jump into like a kind of pre-made community right there was pretty cool. i already felt comfortable. i felt compassion towards myself and towards everybody there and felt accepted into something a little bit bigger than just us.” brad, usmc one aspect of these new connections that participants highlighted as especially important was breaking out of self-imposed veteran centered comfort zones and engaging with other non-military communities. this was cited as a big step for many of the veterans spoken to. “connecting with a community where there is both veterans and people that have never been in the military is one of the most healing things for me as far as social skills helping me transition back, that i can find.” brad, usmc “it eliminated that whole us vs them thing, you know us vs civilians, it was more like just us.” will, usmc the fostering of new social connections, in particular non-veteran centered social connections, was a critical element of participant experience surfing with jmmf. the ways in which this broke down reported isolation among participants offers a possible pathway within this program theory leading to better mental health outcomes. contextualized category physical therapeutic elements one of the participants reported how taking part in surf therapy greatly supported their rehabilitation following an accident. physical elements related to the water and the sand were cited alongside the element of taking part in stealth physical therapy masked by a fun activity. “through jimmy miller, i definitely learned how to walk again, wasn't scared to fall in the water. […] it’s fun, fun and more fun.” jessica, usmc “it put my muscles and nerves through therapy that no hospital setting could imitate.” jessica, usmc furthermore, improvements to physical challenges faced by participants could contribute to mental health improvements associated with the jmmf intervention for this participant. while an isolated example within this study, and not the primary focus of this work, it is important to note the physical therapeutic elements surf therapy may offer. discussion the study aimed to further explore theoretical underpinnings, of the emerging paradigm of surf therapy, by empirical investigation of the jmmf surf therapy intervention. a visualization of the identified program theory was presented as a logic model in line with established intervention evaluation techniques (nutbeam & bauman 2006) while remaining grounded in participant experiences (timonen, foley & conlon 2018). self determination theory (sdt) has been previously highlighted as a possible theoretical framework for exploring surf therapy program theory (marshall, niven & kelly, 2019). the current study supported this suggestion by highlighting the importance sdt concepts including autonomy (e.g.,constant challenge tacked at own pace), competence (e.g., a transferable sense of accomplishment), and relatedness (e.g.,non-veteran centered connections). these three concepts are identified within sdt as basic human needs (ryan & deci 2017) and as such it is not surprising to see http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 them as integral to a program aimed at boosting mental health and personal wellbeing. the use of sdt as a framework for physical activity is well established (perlman & webster 2011; saebu, sørensen & halvarial 2013; fenton, duda & barrett 2016) although the focus is often on behavior change in relation to promotion of and adherence to physical activity. the use of sdt models specifically for mental health and well-being was previously identified (ng et al. 2012) and the current study tied these established theoretical pathways to intervention processes and structures that can be translated to or replicated in other contexts. thorough investigation of intervention categories provided key insights into successful implementation of sdt frameworks that are focused on human need fulfilment within a mental health intervention context. along with sdt the concept of respite has previously been investigated within surf therapy delivered to military veterans (caddick et al. 2015a, 2015b). the ‘distraction’ hypothesis was linked with physical activity and improved mental health (biddle, gorely & mutrie 2015) maintaining that physical activity provides a general sense of distraction from negative mental health symptoms. however, the findings in this study offer an alternative theory for this pathway in the form of flow theory (csikszentmihalyi, 2002). flow theory describes a mental state in which an individual is completely immersed in the task at hand and is commonly described as being ‘in flow’ or ‘in the zone’. participant experiences from this study described respite from negative thoughts, emotions or symptoms while surfing. as the task demanded their full attention, to the point where they could not think about anything else. this matches the description of flow state, alluding to complete involvement and a sense of serenity (csikszentmihalyi, 2002). other participant experiences that were potential markers of a flow state include: timelessness or temporal distortion, intrinsic motivation to surf, inner clarity and a sense of ecstasy (csikszentmihalyi, 2002). the requirements for flow state also appear to be present, clear goals identified by participants and immediate feedback available. these goals could include simply getting in the water, riding board prone or riding standing. immediate feedback was provided either through falling or by volunteer surf instructors (csikszentmihalyi, 2002). the autonomy provided to participants via selfselection of goals and progressing at their own pace, combined with the ongoing challenge of surfing, also links to the skill challenge balance model identified as necessary for flow (csikszentmihalyi, 2008). flow theory has been previously linked to surfing (mckenzie, hodge & boyes, 2012) and to positive mental health (nakamura & csikszentmihalyi, 2009) but there has been limited study of how flow can be employed in interventions. the appearance of flow within the jmmf surf therapy intervention and the way in which it offers a potential pathway to mental health improvements through respite is therefore a novel finding. the jmmf program theory can be divided horizontally between surfing elements and social elements of the intervention. surfingbased pathways related to accomplishment can be linked with sdt and can also be linked with existing theories on mastery and self-efficacy that are well-established in mental health research (bandura 1997; carless & douglas 2010; lubans et al. 2016). alongside surfing-related elements we identified social pathways related to the creation of a safe space and making new social connections that also link with prior research. creation of safe spaces within a mental health setting has been discussed previously (bryant, tibbs & clark 2011) with safe spaces characterized as “a lack of judgement with a focus or respect for others and with a psychological sense of community” (walker, hart & hanna 2017, p.54). combining a safe space with a sporting/physical activity intervention has http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 been identified in previous surf therapy research (marshall, niven & kelly, 2019). safe space provided by the intervention and facilitation of other social connections was critical. the debilitating effect of social isolation was frequently noted by participants, which echoed other literature examining this population (wilson, hill & kiernan, 2018). furthermore, the way in which the intervention builds upon this safe space, to promote positive interactions with civilians, appeared integral in breaking down social barriers for veterans. it may be that not including civilians within the surf therapy program might maintain social barriers and be less conducive to successful acculturation to civilian life. the successful provision of a safe space, inclusive of civilians, within this intervention seems to have been integral to positive participant experience. this can be replicated in other interventions targeting this population with other therapeutic modalities. the possible physical therapeutic effects of surf therapy were reported by one participant in this study. given what was reported, even by a singular participant, it is worth noting possible physical therapeutic effects linked to surf therapy that have been previously described (fleischmann et al. 2011). further research into the physical benefits of surf therapy and their links to mental health outcomes is warranted. implications this study provided a grounded iteration of program theory for the jmmf surf therapy intervention. these findings include novel theoretical observations, while also connecting with established theory, to provide clear pathways from known inputs to associated outcomes. this work adds to the emerging evidence base surrounding surf therapy, both in terms of understanding program theory, and providing plausible theories to account for effectiveness. practical implications include service optimization and development and the program theory has been presented to support implementation by practitioners. an elucidated program theory allows for the jmmf intervention to optimize its service delivery by focusing on key aspects of the program identified in this study. this could involve specific volunteer training related to the provision of a safe space or emphasizing that participants should work at their own pace while at the beach. this could also inform similar interventions for veterans in the us. the inclusion of civilians within this intervention suggests that other interventions could employ a similar approach to break down social isolation and promote veteran acculturation. the utilization of the sdt framework, married to clearly expounded intervention processes and structures, offers a key bridge between the theoretical and the practical in terms of mental health outcomes. while further examination in other contexts is needed, the program theory iterated here offers a clear framework for future intervention design. furthermore, the intervention categories that underpin the jmmf program, while evident in surfing, are not unique to this sport. self-paced challenges can occur in a range of adventure sports, such as climbing or mountain biking. this offers the potential for the current findings to support mental health intervention discussion, design, implementation and evaluation across a wide range of paradigms tailored to local needs and context. these findings provide a foundation for community psychology practitioners to better integrate surf therapy into usual ptsd treatment for veterans or to adapt non-surf specific findings to contextual treatment and intervention opportunities. the identification of flow theory as the mechanism for respite from negative emotions, thoughts or symptoms is another potentially novel theoretical approach to intervention design. the pre-requisites of flow are well established and could be built http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 into a wide range of interventions beyond surf therapy or other physical activity paradigms. future research should incorporate empirical testing of the presence of flow states within surf therapy using validated tools (jackson & eklund, 2002). identification of probable flow states within surf therapy in the current study, paves the way for such empirical testing, and could have wider implications for other mental health interventions. strengths and limitations study participants were heterogeneous in relation to age and were drawn from three arms of the us military who had undertaken a wide range of deployments. the gender split of 66 % male to 33 % female differed from total us military forces where males make up 83 % of service members (us department of defense, 2016). there were no noticeable gender differences in participant experiences identified in this analysis. it is possible that this reflects wider trends of males having more negative attitudes to mental health support (gonzalez, alegria, & prihoda, 2005). an attempt to match the military gender makeup by purposive sampling was not undertaken as the primary goal was to identify participants with rich experiences of the jmmf program. it is possible that different experiences could have been reported by other program participants who did not contribute to this study. while extensive background research was carried out prior to data collection the lead researcher’s status as a uk citizen limited interaction with us military services that support the transition from active duty to civilian life. further exploration, experience and understanding of this process may have been useful given it was frequently discussed in interviews. interviewing key workers within these services may have facilitated further triangulation (the convergence of conclusions based on experiences of different stakeholders) and provided better understanding of where the jmmf interventions fits within the wider veterans’ service landscape. conclusion this study provided a pragmatic grounded exploration of program theory within the jmmf surf therapy intervention. this was visualized in a logic model highlighting pathways from known inputs to associated outcomes. the findings offer practical suggestions for the intervention in terms of service optimization and future expansion. furthermore, this work contributes to the emergent surf therapy evidence-base offering plausible theoretical understanding. the study also highlights future research priorities including the importance of self determination theory and flow theory within both surf therapy and veterans’ interventions more broadly. references bandura, a. 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(2017). building a new community psychology of mental health: spaces, places, people and activities. london: palgrave macmillan. walter, k. h., otis, n. p., ray, t. n., glassman, l. h., michalewicz-kragh, b., powell, a. l., & thomsen, c. j. (2019). breaking the surface: psychological outcomes among u.s. active duty service members following a surf therapy program. psychology of sport & exercise, 45, 101551. doi: 10.1016/j.psychsport.2019.101551. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2015.10.017 https://download.militaryonesource.mil/12038/mos/reports/2016-demographics-report.pdf https://download.militaryonesource.mil/12038/mos/reports/2016-demographics-report.pdf https://download.militaryonesource.mil/12038/mos/reports/2016-demographics-report.pdf http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0520.pdf http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0520.pdf global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 wilson, g., hill, m., & kiernan, m. d. (2018). loneliness and social isolation of military veterans: systematic narrative review. occupational medicine, 68(9): 600 – 609. http://www.gjcpp.org/ making collaboration count: a tool for tracking and building participation in community collaboratives and coalitions ashley e. anglin, phd chris m. kirk, phd sharon m. johnson-hakim, phd atlantic health system, morristown, nj, usa keywords: collaboration, partners, partnership, evaluation, coalition recommended citation: anglin, a.e., kirk, c.m., and hakim-johnson, s. (2020). “making collaboration count: a tool for tracking and building participation in community collaboratives and coalitions.” global journal of community psychology practice, 11(1), 1-13. retrieved month/day/year from, (http://www.gjcpp.org). global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 2 making collaboration count: a tool for tracking and building participation in community collaboratives and coalitions abstract evaluation is necessary not only for assessing the impact of programs and interventions, but also for gathering actionable feedback on the ways in which organizations work together. continuous evaluation of collaboratives themselves can help to address common issues, such as getting the right people at the table, balancing multiple stakeholder priorities, avoiding tokenism, and perhaps most importantly, encouraging participation and maintaining it over time. with the growing interest in collaborative processes over the past several years—and with collaboration and coalition development as a key practice competency identified by the society for community research and action (2012)—it is necessary to identify new tools that can be used to evaluate coalition processes, promote participation, and to ensure that these groups function in a way that promotes working toward collective goals. this article presents a tool and supporting strategies for tracking and encouraging participation in collaborative processes, as well as a case example illustrating how this tool has been utilized within the north jersey health collaborative. introduction: principles and practices of successful coalitions/collaboratives community collaboration and coalition development is a primary focus of the field of community psychology (society for community research and action, 2012). community psychologists are familiar with the call to action to bring together diverse community residents to combine and align efforts and resources to meet mutual goals. they also recognize the fundamental values of inclusion/participation and respect for and attention to diversity that guide their work. with the growing popularity of coalitions and the need to assure that collaborations are effective and sustainable, it is now more important than ever to evaluate the work of these groups, to identify best practices, and to develop tools that strengthen the work of community coalitions and collaboratives. the first step in this process is to clearly define “coalition.” according to wolff (2001), a coalition is composed of community members; it focuses mainly on local issues rather than national issues; it addresses community needs, building on community assets; it helps resolve community problems through collaboration; it is community-wide and has representatives from multiple sectors; it works on multiple issues; it is citizen influenced if not necessarily citizen driven; and it is a long term, not ad hoc, coalition. inherent in this comprehensive definition are several important questions that each coalition must ask of itself to take the next step in assessing overall coalition functioning. for example,  who is this coalition comprised of? community members? outside agencies?  what is the focus of this coalition? what sectors are represented? are the right people at the table? can it address multiple issues?  is there true collaboration? what does collaboration mean to the coalition? is it avoiding tokenism (i.e., empty participation)? do the processes in place http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 3 encourage participation? are there multiple ways for individuals/organizations to be involved?  is the coalition building on community strengths? is it leveraging existing relationships?  is the coalition going to be around long-term? what will involvement look like over time? does its membership create opportunities for meaningful involvement? how will the goals change over time? these questions constitute the basis of an evaluation of coalition functioning. to assist in answering these vital questions, this article presents a unique tool for evaluating the basic functioning of a coalition, with particular emphasis on participation and engagement. the authors argue that coalition evaluation should include more than just an outcomes evaluation (i.e., assessing the impact of coalition action in the community); it should also include a process evaluation that can provide actionable, real-time feedback on the ways in which organizations are working together in a given coalition. the engagement scorecard is a spreadsheetbased tool, which allows users to input member information (who is the coalition comprised of?); keep track of opportunities for participation and member engagement (do the processes in place encourage participation?); measure coalition diversity by sector, geography or other category (what is the focus of this coalition? are the right players at the table?); assess participation over time (is the coalition going to be around long-term?); and disseminate a score card to members, allowing them to target their outreach and build on existing relationships and resources (is the coalition building on existing community strengths?). in addition to outlining the steps needed to implement this tool, a case example is provided illustrating how this tool has been utilized within the north jersey health collaborative (njhc). the “engagement scorecard” and the north jersey health collaborative the njhc is a charitable not for profit 501 (c)(3) corporation whose members are working to leverage resources and expertise to maximize the impact on the health of our communities. founded in 2013, the mission of the njhc is to “coordinate the efforts and resources of public health, healthcare, and other organizations to maximize our impact on the health status of our communities and minimize avoidable illness, injury, and hospitalization” (north jersey health collaborative, 2015). the njhc is membersupported and member-governed, combining both regional and local expertise and efforts. we define health broadly, and at the time of writing have 24 member organizations (paying with voting rights) and over 80 partner organizations (non-paying), including healthcare, social services, education, pharmaceutical, faith-based, and grassroots organizations as well as private businesses. as the njhc grew in its inaugural year, it became clear that we needed a way to not only keep track of who was involved (which was especially difficult for partners, who often stepped in and out of the process, or who may send different representatives at various times), but also to assure that there were enough opportunities for organizations to be involved. though a partner may be interested when introduced to the njhc, limited or tokenistic opportunities to engage may quickly diminish this interest. we also wanted to target our outreach, but found it difficult to assess who else needed to be at the table for the njhc to be effective when we did not have a clear picture of who was already involved and the extent of their engagement. from these all too common struggles, the engagement scorecard was created. this scorecard allows us to keep track of member organizations, the number and type of http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.njhealthmatters.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 4 opportunities we provide for member/partner engagement, our geographic reach, and the distribution of our members/partners across sectors. it also allows us to increase personal connections between members, create shared ownership between members to “get people in the room” and maintain engagement over time, and motivates us to create additional opportunities for engagement. using the following steps, this tool can be implemented in any collaborative/coalition, regardless of the size or scope. specific examples of how the engagement scorecard has been implemented within the njhc will be provided along with the steps for creating and using this tool. readers can also click here to view a sample sheet, which can be copied and edited to meet specific needs. 1) choose a platform: the first step is to decide what software/web tools will be used to track information. both excel and google sheets are good options, and using the steps below, users will be able to insert the formulas directly. there are other options, however, such as editgrid and numbers (mac only). for the njhc scorecard, we use google sheets because it is free, accessible on multiple platforms, downloadable, and promotes transparency (we can share the link to view and/or edit with members/partners). the following instructions work best with google sheets. if any reader decides to use excel or another platform, he or she can contact the lead author for additional instructions. 2) input member/partner information: next, users will need to input basic information about the collaborative/coalition members. this can be done at the individual or organizational level or both. for example, in the njhc, there are many member organizations, most of which have more than one representative who participates in the collaborative. therefore, each individual has their information in the scorecard (name and e-mail address), but the overall score is calculated by organization, so there is also organizational information included (name of organization, county(ies) the organization serves, and sector (e.g., healthcare, education, faith community)). it works best to create separate cells for each type of information. if users will be calculating scores by location, for example, and some individuals/organizations work in more than one location, it is easier to create a column for each location and to insert a “1” if that individual/organization works in the locale (see figure 1). users decide which categories are relevant to each collaborative, whether geographic or otherwise. figure 1. example location http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18pebeik4g3sg0qot-pdkm7x2lqlnt6gh1vahw9mcnhy/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18pebeik4g3sg0qot-pdkm7x2lqlnt6gh1vahw9mcnhy/edit?usp=sharing global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 5 3) input engagement opportunities: a key component of the scorecard involves keeping track of engagement opportunities (see figure 2). depending on the collaborative/coalition, this can include email communications, regularly scheduled meetings (collaborative-wide and those for special committees/work groups), attendance at events, the number of community members/target population present, on-line surveys, focus groups, planning sessions, and contributions to the website/social media. create a column for each event to the right of the individual/organization details, with a descriptive label and insert the date on the row below (see figure 2). figure 2: engagement opportunities 4) assign weight to the engagement opportunities: this is an important step as it is evident that attending a meeting or chairing a committee involves much more time and effort than simply opening an email. the weight assigned to each engagement opportunity is up to the collaborative members. in the njhc scorecard, for example, opening and e-mail is worth 1 point, clicking a link in an e-mail is worth 2 points and attending a committee meeting is worth 10 points. for the njhc, we also include bonus points for chairing committees or work groups. users should insert the number of points assigned to each engagement opportunity below the date in each engagement column (see figure 2). note that the purpose is not to “grade” individual organizations, but to assess the function of the collaborative as a whole. 5) input engagement data: for each individual/organization users track, input the number of points accrued for each engagement opportunity and place it in the corresponding row/column. 6) calculate engagement scores overall: to calculate engagement scores, users need to first decide on three things: 1) time period, 2) level of calculation, and 3) maximum score. with the njhc, we calculate engagement scores every 60 days (this is why the date field under each engagement opportunity is important). we calculate both individual and organizational scores (with individual scores feeding into organizational scores and organizational scores reported). for example, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 6 if organization x had three people attend a meeting worth 10 points, that organization would accrue 30 points for that engagement opportunity. we keep track of individual scores in order to see exactly who is participating from each organization and so that we have their contact information on file. it also helps to know this information when communicating with leadership. we set the maximum score per time period at 100. this number is arbitrary, but a nice round number like 100 makes the charts easier to read/interpret (see figure 3). figure 3: calculating the engagement score for the njhc, we also include a column for active past 30 days. this helps us to see quickly whether or not an organization has been active lately. to create this column, create a new column to the right of the engagement score column, and insert the formula =if (engagement score cell>0, “yes”, “no”). for example, in figure 3, the formula would be =if(e5>0,”yes”,”no”). once you have typed in the formula in the first row of your data, you can simple copy the cell, “paste special”, and select “formulas.” this will insert the correct formula for each following row (the row number will automatically change for each following row). to calculate the engagement score, create a new column and insert the following formula: =(cell of engagement opportunity 1+ cell of engagement opportunity 2 + cell of engagement opportunity 3 + cell of engagement opportunity 4) * (100/total available points for the time period). 100 can be substituted for whatever you decide the total possible points will be. so for example, the engagement score formula for figure 3 would be =(k5+l5+m5+n5+o5+p5)*4.7619. the 4.7619 comes from dividing 100 by the total points offered (in this case 2+1+5+10+2+1= 21). once you have typed in the formula in the first row of your data, you can simple copy the cell, “paste special”, and select “formulas.” this will insert the correct formula for each following row (the row number will automatically change for each following row). if you are calculating scores at the organizational level you will need to create additional columns for the “organization points” for each engagement opportunity. you can then use these cells for calculating the engagement score in the same manner as described above. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 7 7) calculate engagement scores by chosen grouping: in our experience, it is helpful to break down the engagement scores by group. for the njhc, the groups important to us are county and sector. however, groups could be broken down in other ways depending on what makes the most sense for another collaborative/coalition. to start this step, users will need to create new columns for each subgroup (e.g., for each county or each sector; see figure 4). the idea is to generate an average score by subgroup (e.g., average scores for morris county, sussex county, etc.). to do so, users will need another formula that will pull the engagement scores of any individual/organization that falls within that subgrouping. for example, using sectors, in step two, when i was entering individual/organization information, i made a cell for “sector” and typed in the sector (from a pre-determined set of choices) directly into the cell (e.g., “advocacy org,” “pharma,” “education,” “fitness”). what the new formula will do is input the engagement score from the individual/organization into the new cell if and only if that individual/organization has that specific sector written in the column. the formula is as follows: =if (the sector cell= “specific sector”, cell with that individual’s engagement score written as $column$row). in the example in figure 4, the formula for the first row in the “advocacy org” column is =if (j5=”advocacy organization”, $e$5), where j5 is the cell in the “sector” column and e5 is the cell with the engagement score for that individual/organization. if the formula finds “advocacy org” in the sector column for that individual/organization, it will input the engagement score into the new cell. if not, it will input the word “false.” with the njhc, we also calculate engagement scores by county, but many organizations work in more than one county. in this case, the formula is slightly different. looking at figure 1, there is a column for each county, and if an organization works in morris county and union county, there is a 1 in each column. therefore, when pulling the engagement scores by county, we aren’t looking for a specific phrase like we did with the sectors. figure 4. calculating engagement score by chosen grouping http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 8 instead, we need the formula to input the engagement score from the individual/organization into the new cell if and only if that individual/organization has a “1” written in the cell for that county. 8) create automatic charts: on a separate sheet in the same file, users can make charts that automatically update as they change/add to the data in the scorecard. this makes generating the scorecard much easier. to start this step, first calculate average scores for each of the chosen groupings (see figure 4). to do this, select the cell at the end of the first column, go to “functions” and click “average,” then highlight all of the data in that column (don’t worry about the “false” entries; they are not calculated into the average). the average for that column should now show up in the selected cell. do this for all groupings (see figure 5). next, name the sheet with the data, by double-clicking on the sheet tab at the bottom. we use the name “engagement scores.” then, open another sheet in the same file (at the bottom of the screen). on the new sheet select any cell and type in the formula =’name of your previous sheet’!the cell with the average score you are using. for example, in figure 5, the average for morris county (or cell az93) is 13. this is the number i want to show up on my second sheet in the table for average score by county (see figure 6). therefore, the formula for this cell is =’engagement scores’!az93. follow the same steps for each of the average scores. once users create a table for the average grouping scores (like the table shown in figure 6 for engagement score by county), select the entire table and click “insert” followed by “charts.” use the popup editor to format and select the chosen chart. we choose a bar graph to show average engagement by county and a pie chart to display engagement by sector. the formula is as follows: =if (the county cell= 1, cell with that individuals’ engagement score written as $column$row). in the example in the example in figure 2, the formula for the first row in the “morris” column is =if (g5=1, $e$5), where g5 is the cell in the “morris” location column and 5e is the cell with the engagement score for that individual/organization. if the formula finds a “1” in the “morris” location column for that individual/organization, it will input the engagement score into the new cell. if not, it will input the word “false.” for this type of formula, you need to hand-change the row number when copying the formula to subsequent rows. this is true when you first make the spreadsheet and anytime you add a new individual/organization. for example, when you copy the cell that contains the original formula, “paste special,” and select “formulas,” the row will stay the same as the original formula. look at figure 2. the formula in cell az5 is =if (g5=1, $e$5), where g5 is the county cell and e5 is the engagement score cell. when copied to the cell below, the formula will show =if(g6=1, $e$5) however, since you are now working in row 6, you will need to manually change the last digit in the formula to a 6, so it shows =if(g6=1, $e$6). the first digit will change automatically. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 9 figure 5. creating automatic charts, part 1 figure 6. creating automatic charts, part 2 http://www.gjcpp.org/ once satisfied with the charts, users are ready to create the final scorecard. first, download the charts (click the small box in the righthand corner of the chart in google sheets, then select “save image.” then use word, publisher, or other document-editing software to format the scorecard. users can also create a standard template like the one shown in figure 7. for the njhc, we like to add other information to the scorecard, such as website statistics (e.g., through google analytics), upcoming meetings, and constant contact data (e.g., records of who opens emails and clicks on embedded links). an example of a formatted scorecard can be seen in figure 8. figure 7. example template for engagement scorecard global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 10 global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 11 figure 8. example formatted engagement scorecard for dissemination suggestions and lessons learned  it is important to recognize that promoting engagement and working collaboratively is always a work in progress that requires continual evaluation and modification. the njhc went through several iterations of this tool before arriving at a format that works for us, and it took time to create a broader engagement strategy that complements this tool. it is good practice to work with members to agree upon the structure and format that would work best for any process metrics.  this tool can be adapted for other types and sizes of collaborative groups and can be modified to meet context-specific needs. for example, an early learning center is georgia is currently tailoring the scorecard to evaluate the success of the center in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 12 engaging parents in their parenting program.  the scorecard is a good jumping off point for meaningful conversations about the structure, function, and scope of the group, but the tool alone will not significantly increase participation. it is important that collaborative members engage in discussion around the scorecard and opportunities for participation, ensure that it is disseminated widely, and make certain that members/partners feel a sense of personal responsibility for increasing engagement opportunities and getting the right people at the table. if they do not feel this responsibility, then the use of the scorecard as a tool is limited. supporting tools/strategies for use with the scorecard include: a collaborative website, which for the njhc provides opportunities for online engagement (including surveys, contests, and forums); tracking over 150 health indicators; communicating meeting times and agendas; and highlighting topic areas, best practices, and other resources (visit www.njhealthmatters.org). use of constant contact (www.constantcontact.com) or other e-mail tools such as mail chimp (www.mailchimp.com) to track e-mail engagement (e.g., who opens e-mail, clicks on links, or registers for an event). focusing the process evaluation on both the amount and type of opportunities provided by the collaborative and the levels of member engagement. (e.g. evaluating the coalition at multiple ecological levels). actively encouraging members and leaders to use the scorecard to address who else needs to be at the table and to reach out to their contacts. use of the scorecard to promote connections between members based on chosen sub-groupings (e.g., county, topic area, sector). disseminating the scorecard on a regular basis and highlighting month-to-month changes during in-person meetings.  setting up and maintaining the scorecard takes time. for the njhc, it worked best to have a designated team of people, each working in three areas: 1) keeping track of who participates in each opportunity, 2) inputting the data into the scorecard and filling out the template, and 3) disseminating the scorecard and encouraging others to view the google sheet and subgroup lists (in our case these are county lists) to direct outreach to potential members and explore new opportunities for engagement.  new engagement opportunities and scores should be added to the form on a regular basis, if possible, to avoid a lag in information over time. we found it helpful to establish a process and timeline for when new information should be entered. this also allows for quarterly summaries and for tracking the ebb and flow of participation over time.  it is important to avoid placing blame or requiring more than members can provide. the capacity of organizations/individuals to engage must be considered. the scorecard can generate some healthy competition between groups (e.g., one county working hard to “beat” another county next month), but members need to be sensitive to the fact that too much competition or http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.njhealthmatters.org/ http://www.constantcontact.com/ http://www.mailchimp.com/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 13 competition that places blame on some individuals/organizations is not good for those individuals/organizations or for the collaborative as a whole. some may also feel uncomfortable with the “surveillance” suggested by tracking participation. this is why discussion must happen early on to generate mutual goals for the use of the scorecard and to assure that this information is communicated to all members/partners. there is also the option to keep individual names/organizations anonymous and to only present the information in aggregate to the larger group. this, however, erases some of the transparency, so it is important to weigh the pros and cons of each strategy. in the case of the njhc, we have decided to compromise by providing aggregate data (like in figure 5) to all members/partners, and the full data to the executive committee only.  finally, we have learned that funders appreciate the information that the scorecard provides. those who have received grant funding know that funders often require detailed evaluations of programs and interventions. however, not many funders are aware of the structure and processes that go into community collaboration. from our experience, funders are very interested in the scorecard and perceive it as another way to track the effectiveness of their funding and appreciate a glimpse into how the collaborative functions. summary due to the nature of the work, most community psychologists spend time working collaboratively with multiple individuals and/or organizations. there has been much written in the field regarding the importance of collaboration and the hallmarks of successful collaboratives/coalitions. however, there has been less discussion on the ways in which coalitions/collaboratives themselves are evaluated and how this evaluation can be used to promote engagement, continuous quality improvement, and give the coalition itself feedback on its functioning in order to give it the best chance to achieve its goals. this article describes a tool that can be used and modified to evaluate levels of participation over time, encourage engagement, create join ownership for collaborative processes, and track and expand upon the opportunities for engagement that the group provides to its members/partners. this tool has been used with success for a multi-member group called the north jersey health collaborative and has proven to promote engagement and help njhc members to avoid the common pitfalls of community collaboration. references north jersey health collaborative. (2015). about us. retrieved from http://www.njhealthmatters.org/index.php ?module=htmlpages&func=display&pid=1 society for community research and action. (2012). competencies for community psychology practice: draft august 15, 2012. the community psychologist, 45(4), 7-14. wolff, t. (2001). community coalition building—contemporary practice and research: introduction. american journal of community psychology, 29(2), 165. http://www.gjcpp.org/ passing the torch: the communal roots of intergenerational messaging deidra somerville keywords: intergenerational messaging, black maternal activist author biographies: deidra somerville, phd, msw was born in ramaytush ohlone territory (san francisco, ca) and is a mother, activist scholar and healer whose work is intentional in organizing, cooperative development, healing from trauma, and advancing decolonized principles and practices in organizational spaces. her dissertation work, examining the strategies and networks of black maternal activists in chicago, has given her insight into the challenges, opportunities, and possibilities for communities to use disruptive practices while working with established systems to improve the quality of life in communities. her work centers black mothering, organizing and the indigenous knowledge that is drawn upon to resist and persist in the face of structural oppression and white supremacy. her commitment to indigenous community-centered work are evident in her roles as founder of esusu chicago, her work as a ritual worker and diviner for haji healing salon, and in her role as core team member of cooperation for liberation, a cooperative working and study group that promotes coop development in the black tradition. recommended citation: somerville, d. (2021). passing the torch: the communal roots of intergenerational messaging. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(2), 1-13. retrieved day/month/year, (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: deidra somerville (deidrasomerville@gmail.com) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 passing the torch: the communal roots of intergenerational messaging intergenerational messaging has been shown in previous studies to play a pivotal role in providing continuity to knowledge generation in black life, particularly as related to passing essential knowledge of cultural, social, spiritual and practice. an examination of the ways black maternal activists perceive intergenerational messaging as supporting their work as organizers is still in question. this study fills this gap by examining the forces that keep the hands of black maternal activists steady as they guide the threads of activism for the next generation of liberators. even as black maternal activists are guides themselves, intergenerational messaging establishes the ways they are also guided by others. this construct is central to african-centered thought and practice within black community life. intergenerational messaging has a potential role to play in shaping the perceptions and actions of black maternal activists. the question of what messages are perceived to be essential to black maternal activists and the ways black maternal activists engage to make meaning of their perceptions is also explored. this study centers the lived experiences of black maternal activists living and working in chicago’s west side. through semi-structured interviews with ten black maternal activists ages18 years and older, this study uses a phenomenological approach and case study design to discover key findings related to intergenerational messaging. key findings are that black maternal activists view teachers as pivotal intergenerational messengers and incorporate themes of remaining steadfast, maintaining a clear focus on purpose, practicing inclusivity and maintaining a spiritual foundation to their work as fundamentally important messages received from ancestors and community elders to inform their organizing work. intergenerational messaging is being introduced through this article to be considered part of our practice work as community psychologists. introduction black maternal activists are leading efforts to rescue blighted neighborhoods all over the country. from the black maternal activist cofounders leading the movement for black lives to the growing number of political leaders, artists, and scholar-activists, the presence of black women who mother communities through activist work is the needle guiding the thread to piece and hold together a liberation struggle to dismantle white supremacy and racist oppression in its varied forms. in her description of the home as a place of resistance, hooks (1991) describes the role of black mothers as often repairing harm from the assaults on the minds and hearts of black children. this role is rooted in the home place but not bound there. the community mothers, or other mothers are black women who play this role in the community at large, assuming responsibility for the health and well-being of children by providing various forms of help to children when necessary (collins, 1991). julia cooper, a 19th century clubwoman and educator describes black women’s activism as “the fundamental agency under god in the regeneration...of the race, as well as the groundwork and starting point of its progress upward” (giddings, 1984, p.81). cooper’s discussion of activism acknowledges the role as a spiritual calling, and the role of women as mothers, childbirth. motherhood is defined as a principled role that contains knowledge, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 strategies, tools, nurturance, and ways of knowing that can result in the ability to buffer the community from the ravages of antiblackness and white supremacy (sakho, 2017). motherhood is the regeneration principle that contributes to community knowledge and capacity. the question of what makes this transference of strategies, tools, knowledge, and ways of knowing possible and passed on from generation to generation is lesser known within scholarship on black maternal activism. the purpose of this study on black maternal activism was to learn the role of intergenerational messaging in black maternal activist practice. i wanted to learn who were the influences of black maternal activists? how did intergenerational messengers inform strategies employed by black maternal activists? and finally, what are the broader implications for activist practice? intergenerational messaging is being introduced through this article to be considered part of our practice work as community psychologists. i am introducing intergenerational messaging as a means to displace coloniality and recenter indigenous knowledge and practice. methods researcher description the road that has led me to study this topic comes from my own background and family history. while growing up in the san francisco bay area, i was taken to organizing meetings by my great-grandmother on a regular basis for many years. she brought me, my younger sister and our cousin, also a girl, with her to meetings that she either facilitated, prepared food for, and/or invited others to attend. i stood, sat and swayed next to my great-grandmother, a black indigenous woman, as we attended meetings in churches, mason lodges, private homes, and community centers. i observed and took in all her efforts to clean up alleys in our neighborhood where illicit drug activity took place on a regular basis, to advocate for more inclusive voting rights, along with a host of other causes she fought for. the experiences in these rooms, filled with primarily women varying ages and from diverse backgrounds, had an impact on me that lead to my own interest and lived experiences as an organizer. i recognize that my story as a young organizer growing up in the bay area is quite different from the stories of the black maternal activists interviewed for this study. the methods employed in this study emphasize use of contextual and subjective realities and community participatory research. the reason for my choice to use this approach is to ensure that the stories told, insights reached, and decisions made regarding next steps for black maternal activism in north lawndale belong to the women recruited to participate in this study. by design, meaning making is placed in the hands, hearts and minds of the black women from north lawndale, for this story is rightfully theirs to tell. i take the honor and privilege of facilitating the means by which their story is told and use research methodologies that ensure my own personal history with activism does not influence or impede upon theirs. phenomenological approach a phenomenological approach was used to describe the experiences participants had in common and distill their experiences to reveal the essential nature of a phenomenon (palmer, de visser & fadden, 2010). qualitative interviews were conducted with black maternal activists affiliated with black churches and local organizations to learn about their experiences with intergenerational messaging. these interviews were merely one piece of the data puzzle being used to understand the essence http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 of the experience of being a black mother activist within a larger case study. case study research design the single case study design was used to capture qualitative and quantitative data to gain more in-depth understanding of the phenomena of black maternal activism within the unique social and historical cultural context of north lawndale, chicago. black maternal activists were the primary unit of analysis and north lawndale was the bounded system and context for the unit of analysis. the case study approach was most appropriate and useful for this study for its utility to facilitate “exploration of a phenomenon within its context using a variety of data sources” (baxter & jack, 2008, p. 544). this case study drew from multiple sources of data, including archival data, and semi-structured interviews with black maternal activists. the case study approach emphasizes the use of data collection strategies that can inform understanding of knowledge utilization among black maternal activists in north lawndale (yin, 1981). knowledge utilization is defined as “the notion of adapting knowledge to the needs of society” (backer, 1991). in the case of black maternal activists in north lawndale, the collection and analysis of archival data provided historical perspective on how knowledge utilization has been used historically in north lawndale to address the concerns posed by various events and circumstances black maternal activists were confronted with in the past. qualitative interviews provided current context that informed on knowledge use as related to activist strategies employed by black maternal activists. learning about the context and decisions that led to how they used their knowledge of current systems they engaged as activists informs the perception of the problem they identify and the response that best responds to that problem or issue. participants participants were ten black maternal activists who were either born and/or raised in north lawndale and who have experience as activists in north lawndale. black maternal activists were defined as black women engaged in activities associated with community organizing across issue areas and servant leadership working within churches, various organizations and public institutions. the participants included black maternal activists engaged in pastoral leadership, housing advocacy, arts activism, neighborhood based and block club leadership, childcare, community planning and development. black maternal activists included mothers and other mothers who were not mothers to biological children. recruitment participants were recruited using purposive convenience sampling targeting black church members and black organizations within north lawndale. purposive snowball sampling was useful as a recruitment methodology because it established a pool of eligible applicants through knowledge of individuals already identified and determined to be eligible for study participation. in line with purposive sampling methods, eligible participants identified and contacted by the researcher informed other participants they knew who would also be eligible to participate, which established the study and the researcher as a credible source for prospective participants (creswell & creswell, 2017). the interviews were conducted in various places within north lawndale over a 3-month period. three of the participants were ages 18-35, three participants were ages 36-50 and four participants were ages 51 and older. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 study locale north lawndale is abounded by cermak (22nd st) to the south, taylor to the north, rockwell to the east and kilburn to the west. the story of chicago’s west side communities and their struggles for justice and equity are not well known. the migratory ports of entry and politics of place for blacks within the south and west sides were distinctly different (seligman, 2016; seligman, 2005). these differences in how each community area became defined as black communities are stories that shed light on dynamics that directly demonstrate how black mothers were able to organize themselves and their communities. everything, from population density, to the relationship of whites to geographic and political space, to the institutions that were built and maintained to sustain black life, and the organizing mechanisms employed, all influence the ways that black maternal activism have been shaped and sustained. data collection interview protocol instrument semi-structured interviews included questions about their experiences growing up in north lawndale, the migratory history of their families, influential black women in their lives and their experiences as activists in north lawndale. archival data collection and analysis a preliminary analysis of north lawndale’s black maternal activist community was conducted during the first phase of data collection using archival data. this phase of the study set the context for the next two phases of the study by identifying the institutions within north lawndale that play a historical role and aid in understanding black maternal activism. the churches that have played a particularly important role in the history of the community and context for black maternal activists within that setting were identified. archival records were used to examine black maternal experiences within churches and their experiences and contributions within other institutions in north lawndale. using a coded data matrix sheet to record the findings, archival data sources were used to look for the presence of black maternal activists passing on their knowledge of strategies to other black maternal activists. semi-structured interview data collection, data analysis and procedures data collection began with a search of black women in north lawndale who would be most likely to lead me to find other black women engaged in activist work. all interviewees were notified of procedures for providing their consent for participation, including being tape recorded. interviews were held for 60 to 100 minutes, with an average of 80 minutes per interview. all interviews were transcribed and coded for themes related to intergenerational messaging through proverbs or sayings that influenced their strategies. qualitative software on a password protected personal computer was used to analyze themes from all interviews. field notes were taken while in the settings to capture all personal observations, reflections, interactions and activities (creswell & hanson, 2007). each participant was asked a series of questions in order to generate the names of other activists and affiliated organizations within their network. the names they identified were also used to determine whether there were specific actors within the network who had passed on knowledge of black activist traditions to others. analysis of results the experiences of black maternal activists were examined with qualitative analysis. the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 transcriptions of the semi-structured interviews were analyzed to identify themes present in each transcription to find the common threads among the different interviews according to three age groups: 1835, 36-50, and 51 and older. three age groups were identified based on the interest to analyze how patterns related to meaning making in intergenerational messaging may emerge for different age groups. the research questions developed for the semi-structured interviews were used as a guide to establish the identification of relevant data. the responses were open coded and subsequent themes across the interviews were identified by a process of looking for consistent codes and ideas expressed by participants. each transcription was analyzed to determine how often themes were present across all interviews. the identities of participants are kept confidential through a numbered system that was used for each transcription and written on all protocol materials. pseudonyms were used in place of actual names of participants as part of this study. the coding system was put in place to ensure each finding was consistently coded to the participant and within their age group. each transcription was prepared for analysis to identify evidence of repeated themes across the interviews within age groups. the codes were analyzed with nvivo, software for qualitative analysis. findings participants were asked to talk about their current activities as activists and to discuss how they saw activists as influencing and providing meaningful direction and inspiration to their current work. the question that helped to glean insight into the ways black maternal activists were able to demonstrate the ways that their ancestors were influential to them was “tell me about the person who you remembered modeling that for you.” responses were coded to find statements that reflected actions taken, keen observations, and the behaviors connected to challenges they faced that they attributed to something they learned from a black maternal activist. the following themes were found in coded transcriptions from their interviews: remaining steadfast, being clear on their purpose, inclusivity, and the importance of a spiritual foundation guiding their work as activists. remaining steadfast participants reported seeing their respective influencers in community outside of formal settings. for example, nearly all of the participants reported seeing their teachers in and around the community outside of the school setting. this observation made a lasting impression on them, regardless of their respective age group. this has directly influenced them to feel that their connection to community as an activist is not just grounded in a particular setting or planned setting. she [great-grandmother, who was a minister] describes in her book stay at your post. when god assigns you to an area you stay at your post until that job that assignment is complete. so that's been my mantra in most places that i've been, but now really holds near and dear to me as i'm in north lawndale. because it's my place, it's where i originally come, it's where i come from. if you know when you are from a place and even if you leave and come back, it's means something to you (black maternal activist, delores) i can’t think of any specific phrases, but i can say the vibe or what the mood is like that’s, it’s steadfastness. ‘i’m not going nowhere. a matter of fact, i’m going to open a store, or i’m going to start this right here. now is the time to plant those seeds, so i feel that that’s the mood that i’m always feeling from http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 the women (black maternal activist, angie). this also spoke to many as a deep commitment to the community and its wellbeing, in contrast to individuals tied to institutions who come and leave when their formal engagement with the community was no longer needed. this also related to the notion of always being seen by women elders, or other mothers in the community which also emphasized for them a certain level of comportment they had to maintain regardless of the setting they were in. clear focus on purpose participants shared stories and insights about remaining on assignment in their work as activists. the assignment they may be charged to carry out is not tied to a title, or some designation from a person or institution given power to validate their role or purpose. the use or place of a title does not define them in their role. this was evident in the number of women identified as leaders in the community without a title or designation that would indicate they were the head of a committee, organization, or organized effort. in fact, four participants identified people as heads of organizations or programs that were actually not, as part of the network data that was collected. for example, a participant would name an individual in their network as the head of an organization or program, when their actual title did not reflect this perception by the participant. when documented information or personal knowledge of the person identified was researched further, it was discovered that the person was not the head of the program or the organization, but the person assumed a leading role to ensure a program was implemented within north lawndale and this is how the participants identified them as head of the organization or program. when asked who the women were they identified as heads of organizations, the numbers were nearly synonymous with the number of women leaders identified. three participants identified their influencers as having roles in the community as leaders through their work even if their actual occupation was decidedly different. their ancestors often had leadership roles and rose to community prominence even if their occupation was not aligned to that role. many spoke of their ancestors or community leaders as having full time jobs as homemakers, washer women, maids, farmers, but they weren’t known in the community according to their occupations, but as having some say and influence in their neighborhood without a title. one participant learned years later after watching one of her community heroes growing up that her occupation was much different from the role she played in the community: “and i learned what miss judy did. i never will forget this. miss judy was a housekeeper, she cleaned people's homes. blew my mind” (black maternal activist, delores). this influential value also reflects the interest black maternal activists have in not letting limitations inform their capacity to act and lead. staying on purpose is also about limiting the influence of deterrents on their goals, or making a way out of no way. teachers demonstrated this by changing their settings to incorporate non-curricular experiences that ultimately radicalized their students or directly influenced their interest in furthering black pride in their own work or advancing community development. as one participant stated: “i felt like i was something that really represented true blackness. even as a kid i felt really special being in her classroom, that's the one that i can really think of” (black maternal activist, angie). inclusivity practicing inclusivity was a way for black maternal activists to remain true to values they saw practiced in neighborhoods and in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 their homes. this practice was the only direct tie to southern traditions that was identified as retained in north lawndale, according to participants in age groups 36-50 and 51 and older. returning to their family homes in the south, participants remarked on how they saw their mothers and grandmothers reach out to individuals that would not otherwise know about the resources available to them or helping out young families by boarding them for as long as they needed the support, opening their homes to people, sometimes little known to the family. this practice also occurred in north lawndale for families who met misfortune due to an unexpected event or loss. wow, my mother. my mother was very inclusionary. like very. we had a neighbor who wasn't very neighborly but her house burned down. she had a place for herself to go but she didn't have a place for her two younger kids. my mom let those two young kids move into our home. when other family members were migrating from the south my mother would let them move in. my mother was a person who would feed everyone (black maternal activist, angie). when i became the manager of that program, i wanted a very good mix of community kids. i wanted the seasoned people and i wanted those that nobody wanted to hire. the kids on the corner, the guy on the corner. i wanted the sagging pants, the white t-shirts. i see them on the corner. i’d stop them and i said to them, “do you want to do something different? do you want to try something different? do you want to experience something different? would you work for me?” (black maternal activist, tangella). participants connected this practice to the traditional ways black families welcome individuals into their homes. it was customary to offer food to every guest, no matter how much or how little a family had. it was also customary to accept the offer and not refuse. families would give their last to someone in need. three participants 51 years and older also saw the organizing efforts of the 1960s and 1970s as even relying on a mutual support system in order to be able to reach populations that would otherwise not be reached. the practice of holding space in community settings that would otherwise exclude people was the primary way that participants expressed this influence in their own lives. one black maternal activist uses her platform as first lady of her church and pastor to carry out this practice: another time this guy raised up his hand and had a bunch of guns around his waist. i came over to him and i said ‘i'm going to need you to stay in your seat and keep your arms down. that way you can stay. if you can't do that, then i'm going to have to ask you to leave, you got that darling? and can i get a hug?’ he's in here. i don't know who else got guns. i don't know what's wrong with me, but i just trust god. i don't know if everyone got one but i know i seen this one and i have to address this one. i have to address the one that i see and i have to let them know that i am coming from a loving place. ‘i know you have to carry a gun. i know you are a gang member. i know they might be outside waiting for you. but in the meantime, keep your arms down stay seated and if you leave you can't come back.’ that simple (black maternal activist, angie). inclusivity is also expressed as standing in the gap for individuals and sectors of the community deemed as the underdog. those who expressed use of the practice of inclusivity were aware that they were indeed http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 standing in the gap for people who would otherwise not have advocates, champions bringing their stories to tables of influence. in the words of one participant, the meaning of holding space has implications for how service and faith are connected: “if we say that the bible says there are many members but one body and we're all one so sayeth the lord, we can't exclude you because you don't act like us.” [angie]. spiritual foundation participants acknowledged the deep roots of faith and service that were evident in the work of their forebearers in community, their ancestors, and their own work. this connection was most clearly made among 3650 and 51 and older age groups. this was a grounding principle for some participants, supporting their efforts to be at tables of influence, whether invited or validated by others, or not. this was particularly true among the spiritual leaders interviewed. they expressed their belief in god as the ultimate power, not those who try to control resources and perpetuate structural oppression and racism. as one participant said to a pastor who did not believe that women should preach the word of god: “whatever you need me to be that doesn't define who i am. and your pulpit, that's not god, because god would let me come” [angie]. the acknowledgement of god as the ultimate power gave them the stamina and perseverance to think and imagine a world beyond the world in front of them. this connected them to ideas outside of racist and oppressive settings that were not conducive to progress and that inhibit negative thinking and naysayers. the belief that god called me to this work and that god has the last word or god would let me in here if you won’t were evidence of this idea that oppressors are not the owners of justice. discussion key findings of this study are the importance of settings in facilitating activism and the ways that black maternal activists observed and perceived their early experiences can influence how they approach and engage in their own activist work. intergenerational messengers were primarily teachers this study discovered a connection between school settings and early influence on black maternal activists. as students, teachers and other school leaders had a profound impact on black maternal activists. they were able to feel a sense of safety, hope, pride, and mothering care from their teachers. this connection made them all strivers, eager to learn about black history, eager to learn how to successfully navigate systems with support of teachers and counselors, and eager to remain in community as they had seen their own teachers do. teachers brought in resources and connected their students to possibilities to reimagine the world they lived in. the participants saw their teachers as other mothers, extending the network of support and care they received beyond their homes and churches. grace lee boggs (2011) refers to this and other strategies discussed in this study as the quiet revolution which takes the intentions of local leaders and emphasizes resource mobilization, navigational skills, intergenerational knowledge sharing and localized organizing to change neighborhoods. in her book, the next revolution: sustainable activism for the twenty-first century, boggs (2011) shares her experiences as an activist in detroit over the span of 40 years and suggests ways we can best sustain activism for current and future generations. boggs (2011) identifies the school setting as a critical component to sustaining activism over time. she views schools as prime locales http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 to formulate hubs and bring families, community members, educators and children together to solve local problems while advocating and working to transform neighborhoods. this is differently placed from the early experiences of black maternal activists in this study but draws upon the activism that formed part of their early experiences. the restorative justice hubs that are community based and linked to school partners as anchor institutions to support reduction in community violence while transforming the relationships among local police, families and the court systems is one example of a current model in place. reimagining the school setting as a place in which children can identify and lead social justice projects is another way to continue to advance civic engagement, activism, and transformative change. reimagining the school setting to be centered around solving community problems and preparing students to know their communities and the strengths, skill sets, and knowledge they have to contribute to making their communities better would continue the legacy of radicalized socialization that black maternal activists were exposed to in their earlier years. the quiet revolution taking place within school systems is taking the connections that teachers have to students and communities and redefining the educator as a facilitator of learning beyond the demands of state-driven standards. models of school development that emphasize civic engagement are being developed to bring new and relevant meaning to education for children. conclusions community psychologists are well versed in how to “stay in our lane as participant conceptualizers, but intergenerational messaging asks for more. participant conceptualizers seek to understand community processes while also helping communities to make meaning of change in order for communities to effectively lead as change agents (elias, 1994). in my practice, i am clear on the role that ancestors, tradition, and storytelling play in recentering the narratives of indigenous communities from the margins to the center. as community psychologists endeavor to advance antioppression and anti-racist work, our willingness to hold space with community will have to evolve to embrace practices that reflect our intentions. the ways of knowing that inform black maternal activism through intergenerational messaging can be incorporated into a participant conceptualizer’s understanding of community change and processes. as community psychology continues to integrate decolonialized practices of questioning in both research and practice, we can grow in acceptance of methodological approaches that place indigenous ways of knowledge utilization at the center of our work and transform our connection with community and our own efforts to engage in decolonial practice (maldonaldo-torres, 2016). limitations of study due to the limited number of individuals interviewed for the network survey, a truly representative sample of the black maternal activist network was not obtained for this study. implications for practice/policy the role of community psychology in working with community organizers has generally been to utilize our skills as participant conceptualizers, providing support and assistance as needed. as we enter local spaces and get to know community members, we may consider the role of intergenerational messaging to understand a community on its own terms. intergenerational messaging is a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 process that allows us to disavow ourselves of preconceived notions of what communities are like, how they define their own strengths, and what is important to them. we can fully focus our attention on their stories, and the stories of their community and family ancestors and learn how their examples and practices of remaining steadfast, practicing inclusivity, remaining clear on one’s purpose, and maintaining a spiritual foundation support activist practices. we also learn through this process that no community has the same story, each one is unique. black maternal activists are in the driver’s seat of north lawndale’s organizing, planning, and social service spaces. as we observe the changing landscape of the current national and local movements led by black maternal activists to end the criminalization of black bodies and to braid together the remaining strands of community that are forming the basis of current organizing efforts, we know that north lawndale is not alone. community psychologists are now charged to consider this as part of what community-based practice will look like in urban communities like chicago. developing strategies that incorporate intergenerational indigenous knowledge can only enrich our positioning as partners and collaborators with black maternal activists and the communities they lead and support. references aniefuna, l. i., amari aniefuna, m., & williams, j. m. 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(1981). the case study as a serious research strategy. knowledge, 3(1), 97-114. http://www.gjcpp.org/ promoting undergraduate student engagement in the scra biennial conference ashlee lien, alicia fyne, juliet devito, oluwadara ogunbo, rhayna prado and julissachaparro 1 author biographies: ashlee lien, is an assistant professor of psychology at suny old westbury and also serves as the program coordinator for the research aligned mentorship program. she graduated with a phd in community psychology in 2013 from wichita state university. her teaching and research interests include applied learning techniques, mentorship of undergraduate students, and engaging traditionally bypassed/ underrepresented students. alicia fyne, graduated from suny old westbury with a bachelor's degree in psychology, and works for the suny research foundation as the research aligned mentorship program assistant. she has assisted with qualitative research on the barriers and successes of first generation college students, and is working on pursuing police-community relations and incarceration for future research. juliet devito, is a master’s student at baruch college, studying industrial/organizational psychology. she earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from suny old westbury. broadly, her research interests include diversity in organizations, psychometrics, selection and placement, and training and development. oluwadara “dara” ogunbo, graduated from suny old westbury with a bachelor of arts in psychology. as an undergraduate student, she was a member of the first-generation college student research team. she hopes to further her studies in a graduate program for clinical/community psychology. rhayna prado, is a fourth-year undergraduate student at suny old westbury college. she will graduate in the spring of 2019 with a b.a. in psychology and a minor in accounting. she has worked as an undergraduate research team member since her junior year in efforts to improve her academic experience and gauge her research interests when applying to graduate programs. julissa chaparro, earned her b.a. in psychology at the state university of new york at old westbury. she hopes to advance her education in mental health counseling, in pursuance of assisting individuals of all environmental and cultural backgrounds. recommended citation: lien, a., fyne, a., devito, j., ogunbo, o., prado, r., & chaparro, j. (2019). promoting undergraduate student engagement in the scra biennial conference. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(2), 1-12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). 1 suny old westbury http://gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 promoting undergraduate student engagement in the scra biennial conference abstract there are many benefits for undergraduate students who attend professional conferences, such as having increased confidence for conducting research, gaining a better understanding of a field, developing a professional identity, and improving abilities to network. professional organizations also benefit from undergraduate student attendance by improving field recognition and promoting the growth of the field through the development of future professionals. it is important to mentor students for professional conference attendance to decrease anxiety and provide a context in which they can benefit from conference attendance. the project described includes a systematic reflection from six undergraduate students from suny old westbury and their faculty mentor about the group’s attendance at the 2017 scra biennial conference. logistics of getting to the conference and other preparation for the conference are also discussed. recommendations are provided for faculty mentors to effectively mentor students before, during, and after conference attendance. recommendations to conference organizers are provided to improve integration of undergraduate students in professional conferences. providing meaningful opportunities to facilitate professional identity development is an ongoing challenge for mentors of undergraduate students. many faculty members hope to influence a student’s intention to enroll in graduate school and form a strong professional identity, and mentoring (formal or informal) is key to this process. student interaction with professionals in the field is an important component for launching a successful career (patitu & terrell, 1997), and can be accomplished through professional conference attendance. encouraging conference attendance from undergraduate student mentees who are interested in graduate programs must become a priority for mentors and administrators at undergraduate-serving colleges. interacting with professionals may be an important way to expose students to fields that are not well-known, like community psychology, and may also benefit the growth of the field. the society for community research and action (scra), community psychology’s division of the american psychological association (division 27), has been actively working to promote field recognition. expanding upon these efforts by more intentionally integrating undergraduate students into scra is a logical next step. specifically, encouraging undergraduate student attendance at the scra biennial conference may be an important way to expand interest and identification with community psychology among future practitioners. this project provides an indepth look at the experience of undergraduate students and their faculty mentor while attending the scra biennial conference. undergraduate student involvement in professional conferences engaging undergraduate students in research and conference presentations has many known benefits (caprio & hackey, 2014). student involvement in research introduces them to a new field of study, stimulates interest in the discipline, confirms career http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 choices, and promotes the development of a professional identity (hunter, laursen, & seymour, 2006; seymour, hunter, laursen, & deantoni, 2004; lopatto, 2004). adding conference attendance and participation compounds the benefits of undergraduate research experience by providing additional skill development and increasing self-efficacy (mabrouk, 2009). after participating in research that culminated in a conference presentation, kardash (2000) found that students improved in tangible research skills as well as a general understanding of the field, according to student self-report data and mentor rating of the student. additionally, the survey of undergraduate research experiences noted that students in the sciences who participated in research and conference presentations reported increased motivation to learn and attend graduate school (lopatto, 2007). beyond just motivation to learn, hathaway and colleagues found that students who engage in research as undergraduates are more likely to continue their education by attending graduate school (hathaway, nagda, & gregerman, 2002). the benefits of participating in research presentations are clear and include skill development, increased confidence in ability, motivation to learn, development of professional identity, and increased likelihood of attending graduate school. undergraduates typically attend two types of conferences: university-based undergraduate research conferences and professional conferences. undergraduate-oriented conferences typically focus on research poster sessions and short verbal presentations to audiences of other undergraduate students and research advisors. these conferences may be more comfortable for students as they are similar to classroom-style presentations in a familiar university setting. they engage students and provide an important introduction to research conferences. while university-based, undergraduate-oriented conferences provide a strong introduction to research conferences, they are unable to provide students with a sense of the breadth and depth of a specific field or the opportunity to network with individuals in their chosen profession. attending professional conferences beyond the local campus, therefore, provides these additional benefits that promote professional identity development (flaherty et al., 2018; patitu & terrell, 1997; helm & bailey, 2013). professional conference attendance provides the additional benefits of increased enjoyment of conference participation and increased confidence in the ability to conduct and interpret research (helm & bailey, 2013). undergraduate students also receive the benefit of enhancing their curriculum vitae by adding professional presentations, which contributes to a stronger graduate school application. although attending a professional conference provides substantial benefits for undergraduate students, high levels of anxiety may interfere with desire to attend a conference (flaherty et al., 2018) or prevent full integration into the conference environment (mabrouk, 2009) while attending. flaherty and colleagues (2018) discovered that much of this anxiety decreases with structured support and mentoring before, during, and after the conference. in other words, it is not enough for faculty mentors to encourage undergraduate students to submit a poster or other presentation; we must also support them in preparing for, understanding, and participating in the professional conference context in order for all the benefits of conference participation to materialize. mentoring for professional conference participation there is little consensus regarding the definition of mentoring or the essential components of mentoring to provide optimal benefits for students. crisp and cruz (2009) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 conducted a thorough analysis of all empirical studies about mentoring undergraduate or graduate students, and identified only 42 empirical journal articles published between 1990 and 2007. while the importance of mentoring in academia is emphasized and formal mentoring has become a common practice, the shortage of empirical literature may contribute to confusion about the role of a mentor and a lack of clarity on best practices for mentoring. articles that included the keyword of mentoring and made reference to mentoring undergraduate students for conference attendance are reviewed below. nora and crisp (2007) describe the role of a mentor to include four major domains: “1) psychological or emotional support, 2) support for setting goals and choosing a career path, 3) academic subject knowledge support aimed at advancing a student’s knowledge relevant to their chosen field, and 4) specification of a role model” (nora & crisp, 2007, p. 342). each of these four domains are important considerations for supporting students as they navigate professional conference experiences. for example, it is important to assess a student’s strengths, weaknesses, and abilities as a starting point when preparing for a research presentation and identifying professional goals. academic subject knowledge for the specific conference is important for students to feel prepared for their own presentations and for participation in other sessions. in addition, students may require emotional support from their faculty advisor as they process the experience, identify problems or concerns, and require encouragement. therefore, it is important for mentors to go beyond academic preparation to help students identify sessions related to their interests, assist with envisioning professional potential, and engage students in a reflective process based on experiences at the conference. prior to attending a professional conference, guidance is needed to prepare for not only the presentation but also for the conference atmosphere. helm and bailey (2013) designed a curriculum to support students attending conferences. students were required to develop a schedule for preferred sessions to be approved by the faculty member in advance of the conference and complete literature reviews for several session topics of interest. this level of conference preparation ensured more effective time management and confidence in order to actively participate in sessions. flaherty and colleagues (2018) developed a highly-structured model for mentoring undergraduate students in preparation for conference attendance in order to decrease student anxiety and enhance the conference experience. through multiple courses at several different undergraduate institutions, instructors provided a series of assignments meant to familiarize students with session formats, conference structure, and to develop skills for professional socialization. students also identified personal goals for the conference and met with the faculty member for guidance for a number of topics related to professional engagement (e.g., appropriate attire, how to engage in professional conversations, safety while traveling). in addition to structured preparation before the conference, flaherty and colleagues (2018) offered formalized mentoring for students during and after the conference. during the conference, students completed formal checklists requiring specific experiences and attended daily meetings with the faculty member and other students. after the conference, students met as a group with the faculty mentor and wrote a reflection essay about their conference experience. students reported increased confidence through the experience and identified benefits including a sense of belonging, affirmation of career choice, and an increased desire to attend graduate school. these benefits were consistent with literature http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 identifying general benefits of undergraduate conference participation (e.g., helm & bailey, 2013; mabrouk, 2009) and addressed the anxiety that impacts undergraduate student engagement in professional conferences (flaherty et al., 2018). current project beyond the technical aspects of mentoring, it is important to understand mentoring as the development of a strong and supportive relationship that requires ongoing reflection by both students and faculty members (roberts, 2000). there is a lack of research that explores how students and faculty members experience mentoring associated with professional conferences and what supports successful conference attendance. this project attempts to bridge this gap by providing a reflection on undergraduate student engagement in a professional community psychology conference. undergraduate students who attended the 2017 scra biennial conference completed a process of systematic qualitative reflection through conversations. the primary goal of these reflections was to gain a meaningful assessment of experiences that could improve the process/experience of mentoring undergraduate students for conference attendance. an additional goal was to collect information that may assist with the integration of undergraduate students in professional conferences. student reflections about their experience at the conference along with reflections of the faculty member on the mentoring process are included. undergraduate student attendance at 2017 scra biennial conference the present project involves a systematic reflection of six student members of a research team from suny old westbury who attended the 2017 scra biennial conference in ottawa, ontario along with their faculty mentor. each student attended sessions, presented at the conference, and reflected on their experiences engaging in their first international, professional conference. the faculty mentor also reflected on the effectiveness of mentoring and preparation for professional conference attendance through conversations with students and reviewing their written reflections. to contextualize student and mentor reflections on the conference experience, this project will first describe the college setting and structure of the team. the systematic reflection process that the team engaged in will be described along with goals of the reflection and the steps taken to complete the process. finally, reflections will be presented—preserving the words of the team members where possible—and recommendations for faculty mentors and conference organizers will be provided. setting suny old westbury is a liberal arts college on long island, new york, that primarily serves undergraduate students. it has been ranked as the fourth most diverse liberal arts college in the united states (u.s. news & world report, 2015), and many of the students come from traditionally underserved backgrounds. the psychology department has long emphasized the college mission of civic engagement and social justice through requiring courses focused on diversity and social justice, many of which have a specific emphasis on community psychology. in this setting, many students express interest in learning more about these areas and finding ways to work in their communities to bring about empowerment and social change. research team during the 2016-2017 academic year, undergraduate research team members engaged in research surrounding firstgeneration college student issues through survey administration and qualitative interviews. six undergraduate students were http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 part of the research team and divided into teams working on surveys or thematic analysis according to self-identified interest. regular team meetings included discussions about applied careers and graduate programs in psychology, including discussions about student interest in community psychology. some students were unfamiliar with the field, but all were interested in learning more about it and expressed interest in attending the 2017 scra biennial conference in ottawa, ontario. team members submitted two proposals that were accepted for presentation. the faculty mentor worked within the university to identify sources of funding and make travel arrangements for all six team members to attend the conference with full funding. documenting and reflecting on student experiences the members of the 2016-2017 research team engaged in a process of systematic qualitative reflection to explore the impact of attending the 2017 scra biennial conference. as a method, systematic reflection is an effective way of learning from both successes and failures by evaluating the contributions of one’s own behavior to positive and negative outcomes (ellis, carette, anseel, & lievens, 2014). this is accomplished through a three-step process of 1) self-explanation, or analysis of behavior, 2) data verification, or being confronted with a different perception, and 3) feedback, which includes a self-evaluation of performance. new team members who did not attend the 2017 scra biennial conference assisted with the systematic reflection by conducting semistructured conversations with the students who attended the conference. the team members’ individual perspectives provide a better understanding of the research team experiences at the 2017 scra biennial conference. human subjects approval was obtained through the institutional review board at suny old westbury for this process. all members of the 2016-2017 research team participated in a conversation about their experiences. all participants identified as cisgender women, ages ranging from 20 to 31. three participants identified as white, two as black, and one as asian. during the academic year, two were unemployed and the remaining four worked between 25 and 40 hours weekly. one team member graduated the semester prior to the research and another graduated halfway through the year, but both returned to engage in research throughout the 2016-2017 academic year. complete demographics are displayed in table 1. names are excluded to provide anonymity. table 1. 2016-2017 fgcs research team member demographics age gender race employment graduation career interest 27 female asian part-time spring 2016 clinical psychology 21 female white unemployed fall 2016 forensic psychology 25 female black unemployed spring 2017 i/o psychology 31 female white part-time spring 2017 community psychology 25 female black part-time spring 2017 community psychology 20 female white full-time fall 2017 i/o psychology http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 during the systematic reflection, conference attendees were partnered with a new team member who did not attend the conference. each pair had a conversation about their experiences using a list of questions as a general guide to facilitate the conversation. prior to participating in the conversations, individuals provided written consent to share and analyze their experiences. after participants signed the consent form, the conversation was held, and audio recorded in a private setting. each conversation lasted approximately one hour. the semi-structured protocol displayed in table 2 was used during discussions to identify experiences at the scra biennial conference. systematic reflection was accomplished by directly asking about individual contributions (self-explanation), the impact of the experience on future plans (feedback), and by probing/ asking follow-up questions comparing their experiences between the different settings or exploring the reasons for identified struggles (data verification). table 2. guiding questions for systemic reflection thematic analysis, as described by braun and clarke (2006), was utilized to identify emerging themes. the new research team members worked on each step of the analysis. two of the former research team members who were attendees at the 2017 scra biennial conference assisted in the analysis of all conversations except their own. during the process of thematic analysis, all meetings consisted of at least three team members and the faculty mentor. research team members independently noted any statements that stood out in the context of the conference experience and then reached consensus as a group. meetings were used to discuss the data, extrapolate meaning, and discuss which trends were apparent in individual reflections and across the entire team. the team then reached consensus on themes that emerged from the data and noted where each theme was present. after identifying themes and discussing implications, the faculty mentor had individual conversations with team members who attended the biennial conference. follow-up questions were asked regarding the implications and conference experiences. reflections from the faculty mentor were also noted. the reflection process was less formal for the faculty mentor and included informal reflections written in a journal. engaging students in discussions about their experiences triggered insights that were then recorded in writing. none of the faculty mentor’s reflections were included in thematic analysis but are included in general reflections of the themes that emerged from the systematic reflection. questions 1. describe your experience at the scra conference in canada. 2. describe your experience as an undergraduate student presenting at the conference. 3. was the conference "friendly" for undergraduate students to attend? a. what would make the conference more accessible for undergraduate students? 4. discuss your experience networking with others at the conference. 5. what did you learn from the conference? how did it impact your future plans? 6. what did you like the most about attending the conference? 7. what was the most difficult thing about the conference? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 to build a coherent narrative of the conference mentoring experience, themes that emerged from the reflections are organized into two distinct sections. preparing for the conference and undergraduate experience at the 2017 scra biennial conference. this is followed by a recommendations section. brief descriptions introduce each section. to bring together the technical aspects of mentoring with reflections on the experience, specific activities by the mentor and team members are described where relevant. quotes are included where possible to highlight the themes associated with each topic. each research team member selected a pseudonym for the purpose of sharing information publicly, and all names mentioned reflect the selected pseudonyms of “alice”, “dorthy”, “henny”, “jane”, “lucille”, and “tula”. preparing for the conference preparing for the 2017 scra biennial conference was a motivator for the team throughout the academic year, resulting in excitement while preparing the initial abstract submissions, conducting research, and preparing presentations. while students worked diligently on conducting research and preparing for the conference, the faculty mentor also focused on finding a way to fund the travel and make arrangements for the team. getting to the 2017 scra biennial conference logistically, attending any conference with six undergraduate students can be a challenge. necessary arrangements include transportation, lodging, registration fees, and planning for food expenses. for international conferences, documentation is required and is an important consideration for students with special circumstances, including international students, undocumented students, or those with felony offenses. funding. none of the six research team members were able to fund their own trip given financial responsibilities at home. through various funding sources, four members of the team (current students) were fully funded for their trip. the remaining two members who had graduated in the previous year were partially funded and were only responsible for their conference registration fee. obtaining full funding for all students required persistence from the faculty mentor over a period of three months. partial funding was available from multiple sources including the collegiate science and technology entry program (cstep), school of arts and sciences, a university-sponsored faculty development grant, and a universitysponsored diversity grant. each funding source was limited, so the faculty mentor negotiated for each source to cover a different portion of the expenses. for example, one source paid for transportation costs up to the amount of one airline ticket. to stay within this budget, team members agreed to travel together in a large rented vehicle that was rented with a discount code. lodging was covered through a grant which allowed for team members to share an apartment, which enabled the alumni members of the team to receive lodging at no additional cost. fortunately, registration fees were paid by the college and two members were provided with a stipend for food and other travelrelated expenses through cstep engagement. for the two team members who had graduated and were unable to have conference registration fees covered, one took advantage of the scra volunteer program and another was able to pay the fee independently. while it was difficult to work out the funding for each component of the conference separately, persistence in this endeavor paid off as all six team members were able to attend the conference. funding request status updates were provided to the team during every team meeting, which enabled the students to feel http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 more involved in the process. during meetings, successful funding was reported, and discussions centered around how to make the remaining expenses fit into potential funding source restrictions. for example, one source had limited funds that would pay more for transportation but was also the only source that was allowed to cover an airbnb. the team decided that the airbnb was the most valuable cost-saving method for lodging, so the faculty mentor used that funding source exclusively for lodging. the success of these efforts was evident in the low anxiety reported by team members regarding funding. jane explained that “accessibility was not a concern for financial concerns [sic] since the funding from the school made it easy to attend.” henny agreed that the funding helped her attend. she said, “i had been working and was able to pay for my passport. if dr. lien hadn’t scrambled to cover the rest of the expenses, it would have been hard.” it was clear that without full funding or the support of the mentor to identify funds, not every student would have the financial stability to attend the conference. border crossing. while students expressed low anxiety surrounding the expenses of attending the conference, the international focus created issues for one student. tula, a student possessing a green card, found the experience to be anxiety-provoking. team members were aware of tula’s anxiety and everyone was on edge while crossing the border. at the border, federal agents asked a series of questions of tula, including the purpose of going to canada. it was worse upon return, however, as the united states border agents questioned why tula had shown both her green card and passport, insinuating she had done something wrong, and requested detailed information about the conference we attended. tula’s account of the experience is included as a full narrative (figure 1). figure 1. tula’s border crossing experience it was my first time going to canada and, apart from my visit back home to guinea in 2011, i had not traveled out of the country since i came to the united states. the closer we got to the border my nerves heightened, my anxiety increased, and i tried to conceal it the best way i could. the fear that took over me was one that i did not want to project onto the others in the car, and i tried even harder to mask the fear once we got to the border. i’ll never forget what happened. i had a turban on for the drive and remember taking it off and putting on my school hat. i feared that if the agent had seen my turban and my travel document, he would reject my entrance. after looking at several of my peers’ passports it was now my turn, border patrol looked at my refugee travel document (not being able to pronounce my name) and looked out his booth window toward the inside of the car looking for me. i was asked why i had this type of document and i explained that i was a permanent resident and provided my green card as well. in just a few seconds there were two men at the window both looking at me then back at my travel document as if they had not seen this form of “passport” before. as my travel document was handed back to my professor, i felt a sense of relief because what may have been a total of four minutes at the border felt like hours to me. i was afraid that my status as a permanent resident would make the experience at the border very uncomfortable for everyone in the car, although i knew all of my documents were up to date and there were no errors or faults with it, i couldn’t help but fear what would come. after crossing the canadian border, i remained quiet and reserved for a few more minutes. i needed the time to process what had happened and i observed others in the car to see if they have been affected by my immigration issues. the extent of tula’s anxiety only became apparent after crossing into canada. as a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 faculty mentor, this experience was stressful. after crossing the first border, the faculty mentor secretly prepared for returning to the united states by gathering phone numbers for deans and the university’s legal department. upon reflecting, multiple team members said they had also been silently planning ways to help tula if things went poorly. thankfully no assistance was needed, but the stress of crossing a border was in stark contrast to the low anxiety experienced by team members in relation to the other logistics. the faculty mentor used the opportunity to open a discussion about social justice issues related to the freedom to travel and the differential treatment of individuals based on their country of origin. preparing students for a professional conference in preparation for the 2017 scra biennial conference, the research team members worked closely to complete the research and to prepare their presentations. this section describes two themes related to this period of work: intensity of workload and unexpected collaboration challenges. the section is concluded with a description of the structured activities completed to prepare students for the conference environment. intensity of workload. it is difficult to fully understand the amount of work required to prepare for a professional conference without experiencing one. in spite of discussing the amount of work required as a team, several students felt unprepared for the magnitude of the commitment. team members had experienced research methods courses, preparing them for short research projects with a semester-long timeline, but they had not experienced a more intense project with an abbreviated timeline. dorthy and alice both specifically mentioned the workload as a source of stress, but all team members were able to cope with the amount of work by relying on their team members to share responsibilities. unexpected collaboration challenges. during the research process dorthy became very ill and her team members had to cope with an unplanned increase in the workload in order to support their team member. the anxiety experienced by the students became a source of discussion during team meetings, and the faculty mentor attempted to discuss ways to deal with the anxiety through reframing and structuring their time. while the illness created a stressful situation for the entire team, it provided a learning opportunity about preparing under pressure. structured conference attendance preparation. prior to the conference, research team conversations focused on preparing for the scope of an international professional conference. team members discussed differences between professional conferences and student conferences. topics included format of sessions, time management, speaking about research and career interests, and goals for attendance (additional detail included in table 4). alice noted that this level of preparation was helpful. she said, “the elevator speech was helpful in terms of preparation, and it was beneficial to have our professor guide us to certain sessions.” during this time, discussions were held as a team so that students could support each other and provide models for structuring their conference schedule around interests. undergraduate experience at the 2017 scra biennial conference while a lot of effort went into preparing students for the 2017 scra biennial conference, students reported that the most meaningful aspect of engaging with the team was the time attending the conference. during the conference, the entire team met with the faculty mentor regularly to reflect upon sessions, plan engagement in the conference, and rehearse research presentations. based on the systematic reflection, team members identified the most http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 important aspects as the conference environment and integration of values, session engagement, learning opportunities, networking opportunities, shaping of career ambitions, and gaining new cultural experiences. experiences also varied based on social class and race. conference environment & integration of values the conference environment was perceived positively by all team members, although one member noted that in spite of a generally positive experience, one exchange stood out as inconsistent with the values of community psychology. most of the team members had positive recollections about their experience. jane said, “the conference itself was more than i expected. it was well-organized, there were plenty of people to talk to, there were plenty of networking opportunities, and the location itself was astounding.” lucille mentioned that the sense of community, which left a positive impression, stood out as being her favorite aspect of the conference. dorthy described her experience as “intimidating, but encouraging” and explained that everyone was welcoming during the entire conference. jane described a general feeling of acceptance and said “they definitely made students and teachers and professors of all rankings feel welcome.” alice expressed excitement to learn more about the field throughout the conference, and felt that the environment was a reflection of the core values of community psychology. she explained that the topics of sessions indicated genuine concern about social issues, which led to excitement when selecting sessions to attend. she added that the respect for diversity that was apparent in sessions made her feel comfortable expressing her own passion for working with lgbtq populations. henny, however, felt that the environment was complicated when it came to a reflection of community psychology values. through her personal interactions, she felt that “some of the actual principles or values that the society for community research and action uphold are not necessarily practiced by some of the practitioners or bigger names in community psychology.” in specific, henny experienced an exchange with a community psychologist who made assumptions about her identity based on her physical appearance. during the exchange, henny was encouraged to become involved in a group that did not fit her expressed interests. upon reflecting, she realized that the individual made assumptions about her identity that shaped the interaction. as the team member who was most interested in pursuing community psychology, this interaction was a “disappointing” realization that individual behavior is not always perfectly aligned with the values of social justice and respect for diversity that most excited her about the field. in addition, henny felt that her status as an undergraduate hindered the way others viewed her work. she explained that “there wasn’t a large presence [of undergrads] at the conference.” she added, “there could be more done to be more inviting or welcoming of undergrads, or making it more visible.” session engagement at the biennial, research team members were excited about the topics represented at the conference, but did not always participate in topics outside their comfort zone. both dorthy and jane expressed appreciation for the fact that the conference included a variety of different events and meetings throughout each day, so that they could explore several of their interest areas while attending. henny, alice, tula, and lucille each stated that they had specific interests that dictated the meetings that they chose to attend. while this helped the students narrow their focus, it may have prevented full participation by limiting their scope of involvement to certain topics. for all team members, deciding which http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 sessions they should attend became challenging. for example, alice identified a number of sessions related to her interest in working with lgbtq communities but discovered that many of the sessions were held concurrently. this resulted in an overall feeling that they did not participate as much as they could have. despite the conference environment feeling generally welcoming toward undergraduates, certain sessions intimidated students due to the use of advanced statistical analyses or the number of professionals present with expertise in an area. other team members felt underprepared to attend certain sessions due to their undergraduate status, since they could not contribute in what they felt was a meaningful way. dorthy and jane both explained that they felt a sense of intimidation due to their lack of knowledge. jane confessed that this prevented her from attending some sessions and rationalized by saying, “there was no way i'm going to this...there was no way that i could be able to grasp what they were talking about.” henny, on the other hand, felt that she needed to attend as many events as possible during the conference. this challenge may be familiar to many first-time conference attendees who frequently attend so many sessions and have little time for networking, reflection, or relaxation. in spite of receiving advice from the faculty mentor to take breaks throughout the conference, henny learned this lesson the hard way. she explained that she thought it would be fine, as she would just be “sitting and learning.” ultimately, this resulted in exhaustion. she explained, “i was going to everything. i even had a breakdown at one point. if i had taken the time to just chill, it would have been prevented.” learning opportunities throughout the conference, team members gained new perspectives about the field of community psychology. lucille expressed appreciation for learning about the infrastructure and organization of the conference through volunteering. henny mentioned multiple benefits of the conference, including learning more about the process of conducting research in community settings and the importance of recognizing failures in research. she said, “i learned things on a science level, to human social dynamics, to networking, to having an epiphany in the bathroom of what i wanted to do with my grad work.” all team members left the conference with a greater appreciation for the diverse applications of community psychology. lucille was able to see herself in a new professional setting through her conference experience. she said, "you got to see what these people are doing, and it gives you an insight as to what you could be doing in a few years." dorthy felt empowered by learning more about community psychology, and said “just because we don’t wear white coats doesn’t mean our research isn’t valid.” dorthy had experienced obstacles in college defending her interest in community research and felt a sense of belonging at the biennial. she continued to explain that she believes community research should be highlighted, and that it was refreshing for her to see this happen in a conference. barriers to learning. lucille, however, felt that her involvement in volunteering throughout the conference actually hindered her ability to learn about community psychology. she volunteered approximately 10 hours during the conference, frequently serving as a technology support during sessions. she felt that she left the conference with ambiguity about the field, which she attributed to being too busy with volunteering. networking opportunities research team members agreed that the conference provided numerous networking opportunities. prior to the conference, the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 faculty mentor spoke with the team about how to take advantage of networking opportunities appropriate for their levels of interest. at first, they were uncertain about engaging in networking opportunities and were hesitant to participate. with continued encouragement, however, students became more relaxed in their approach and began to speak with more individuals. specifically, dorthy stated that she was able to utilize the networking opportunities by making connections with individuals engaged in consulting, which was her career ambition. dorthy and lucille both identified the women’s social as one of the highlights of their conference experiences. this social presented many networking opportunities and connections that persisted throughout the duration of the conference. after this event, dorthy explained that she felt encouraged during the conference due to seeing women obtain empowered positions of employment within community psychology. other members, such as henny, preferred more informal opportunities to connect with others in the field and felt more relaxed without feeling the pressure to connect. henny spoke positively about several such connections that she made while at the conference. networking also provided team members with the opportunity to gain insights into graduate school. alice felt that the networking opportunities at the conference contributed to her future in terms of gaining insight into potential graduate schools. she explained, “i met a few people from colleges that i want to attend. even though i don’t plan on going into the field of community psychology in particular, i met people from schools that i was interested in applying to and they would tell me about the program that i’m interested in, which is industrialorganizational psychology. they would tell me about the professors there and who to talk to, who to reach out to, and how well-known they are at that school for that program.” other meaningful connections were made with people who offered opportunities for students to join other professional organizations or being invited to contact them about graduate programs or even encouraged to apply to work with them as an advisor. team members left the conference feeling empowered by the connections they made. overall, networking experiences generally had a positive influence on the research team members’ conference experience but had to be repeatedly encouraged by the faculty mentor to prevent withdrawal from settings that were perceived as intimidating. career ambitions attending the biennial had a positive influence on student plans to integrate community psychology into their careers. lucille and alice both stated that attending a conference centered on community psychology helped them learn about how they can utilize community psychology ideas and values in their future career paths, even though they may not have been initially interested in pursuing a career in community psychology. the conference helped dorthy identify that there are different areas of community psychology, including consulting. this helped her realize that she could pursue her interests in consulting in either industrial psychology or in community psychology, and that multiple options existed for graduate education. alice explained that the conference “made me realize my interest in helping lgbt individuals in the workplace to face less discrimination." the experience of the conference even led lucille, who was in strict pursuit of a clinical psychology degree, to apply to a community psychology program. henny, who expressed that she would like to continue her education in community http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 psychology, mentioned that the conference helped her gain insight about the type of community psychology research that she would like to focus on in graduate school. she experienced an epiphany during a conversation with a conference attendee, where she realized that she needs to acknowledge her social privilege when working within certain communities, ultimately shifting her focus. henny appreciated this discussion about how to apply community psychology’s respect for diversity and mentioned that it was a highlight of her conference experience. new cultural experiences the team collectively agreed that they gained a new cultural experience visiting the university of ottawa, which granted some students the opportunity to travel internationally for the first time. "it was my first time being out of the united states,” said alice. “it was nice to see a different area." dorthy appreciated the experience of visiting a new, unfamiliar culture, as she had seldom left new york. when asked about the experience, she focused on the new experiences exclaiming, “they speak french in that area, and there were different french and english signs. the food was good; i found out about poutine, so that was lovely." dorthy was especially excited about the opportunity to visit another culture and seemed most excited about this aspect of the experience. experiences related to social identity social identity played an important role for the conference experience of multiple team members. the impact of social identity was an important consideration for the research team as team members engaged in an exercise to explore their assumptions related to various social groups prior to engaging in research. the faculty mentor promoted ongoing discussions about the impact of race, gender, and social class on their life experiences. many team members embraced this and continued to hold discussions about how their backgrounds impacted their experiences at the conference. specifically, students expressed issues of inclusivity related to race and social class. racial bias. race was important in the perception of inclusivity of scra. lucille specifically mentioned that the racial diversity of the conference stood out to her, as she had not seen this type of diversity at undergraduate conferences she had attended outside her own college. team members of color described an overall welcoming environment, but also debriefed with the faculty mentor that they occasionally felt tokenized or alienated in the environment through individual interactions. for example, tula explained that while people were friendly, they seemed more interested in what she had to say after they found out she was from guinea. she said, “i had a lot to say but struggled with how to word things in order to not bring a lot of attention to myself and my status [as an immigrant].” while there wasn’t a specific event that she could pinpoint, she explained that the experience contributed to an overall feeling of alienation. social class. during the short duration of the conference, the team began to divide around the ability to engage in different cultural experiences (e.g., type of food purchased, theater, paid tours, souvenir purchases). as a result, conflict centered on social class surfaced and was highlighted by disagreements regarding the perceived ability to afford graduate education (a concept that became prominent in the analysis of qualitative data and in discussing professional goals) and gain cultural experiences while in canada for the conference. the faculty mentor provided emotional support in one-on-one meetings with students, but did not discuss this issue as a large group. in retrospect, a group conversation may have resolved some of the conflict experienced by team members. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 recommendations engaging in a systematic reflection of experiences preparing for and attending the 2017 scra biennial conference revealed a number of themes related to the values of community psychology, undergraduate engagement in the conference, networking opportunities, and the importance of social identity. recommendations follow the insights and are presented through recommendations to faculty mentors and recommendations for scra conference organizers. recommendations for faculty mentors of undergraduate students the logistics of attending a professional conference with undergraduate students may create more work for the faculty mentor than for the students. it is important to be mindful of standard logistics, such as transportation and lodging, while attending to other important considerations such as documentation and accommodations (table 3). hold space for addressing anticipated challenges, emotions, and building solidarity plans to support students with logistical considerations, such as the border stress felt acutely by this team. table 3. logistics for professional conference attendance ✓ secure funding o determine limitations associated with funding source(s) ✓ secure lodging ✓ register for conference and pay associated fees ✓ secure transportation o determine airfare, train, or vehicle mileage rates o secure transit to and from airport/ train station o gather information on public transportation options for destination ✓ determine documentation needs (e.g., passport, immigrant travel documents, visa) o identify potential barriers (e.g., documentation status, restrictions for country of origin or history of criminal offense) and secure needed support. ✓ identify accommodations for dis/ability status ✓ secure language support for non-native speakers or for international travel ✓ prepare list of emergency contacts, university contacts, us embassy, medical emergency procedures importantly, faculty mentors must create space to discuss the aspects of a professional conference with which students may be less familiar. in lieu of creating a formal assignment due to the absence of a structured class, it is critical to engage with students before, during, and after the conference experience following an informal structure (refer to table 4). frequent engagement as a team should be a goal to create a strong working relationship and build rapport, increasing sense of community while decreasing anxiety experienced among students. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 table 4. strategies for preparing students for a professional conference activity purpose example strategies for supporting students before the conference review the conference schedule explore the structure and content of the conference. discuss strategies for effective participation, like pacing and session selection. define general session formats and kinds of learning opportunities, expectations of participants for each session. explain symposiums, roundtables, poster sessions, “concurrent sessions”, and keynote sessions. discuss expectations for attending sessions while encouraging to take breaks or disengage from conference events. prepare to network increase comfort level with personal interactions and prepare for questions from other conference attendees. assign creation of elevator talks about current research, general research interests, and graduate school and career ambitions. create individual plans explore themes of conference congruent with student interests. discuss strategies for cultivating social connections with professionals in interest areas. assist students in aligning future career interests with conference themes. explain how to explore the conference guide, highlighting sessions consistent with interest area. discuss strategies to connect with professionals working in interest. encourage emails to graduate programs to schedule meetings during the conference. during the conference hold regular team meetings discuss experiences and create a plan for the remainder of the conference. request information from sessions attended and assessment of session formats. use information to revise individual plans for session attendance. promote personal reflection explore the impact of the conference on career ambitions and understanding of the field. provide space to explore social identity as related to inclusiveness of the field. create space for personal reflection on sessions in team meetings and through technology (e.g., google docs), including a session’s impact on understanding of field. model social group identity reflection by discussing inclusion and power dynamics during sessions and interactions. provide emotional support to create a safe space for sharing. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 after the conference final team meeting debrief the conference experience. follow up with connections made at the conference. meet as a team to discuss the conference experience, techniques and etiquette for following up with contacts. ask students to write a short reflection to send with a thank you note to all funding sources. prior to the conference. several mentoring strategies were successful in preparing team members for engaging individuals on a professional level. discussions about networking, asking informed questions, and preparing short talks (“elevator talks”) about research and career interests may help with professional engagement. students struggled with time management, however. before attending a conference, it is important to work with students to review the conference schedule. discuss the types of sessions available and create individualized plans for conference attendance that include specific formats or topics that align with their goals. while the research team discussed these topics, individual plans were not created and may have resulted in conference fatigue for some and low levels of engagement for others. during the conference. throughout the conference, it is important to create space for mentors to meet with students to debrief about the sessions, experiences, and create a plan for the remainder of the conference. this time can be formal or informal so long as students are asked to reflect on content and process information from sessions. the reflection can include tangible information the students learned in each session, and their assessment and comfort of the type of session attended (e.g., symposium, roundtable) including the extent of presenteraudience interaction and their comfort level during the interaction. students may also reflect on how their experience with each session contributes to their understanding of the field and their own future careers, what questions were raised, and whether it impacts the type of session they will attend during the remainder of the conference. to formalize this process, it may be useful to use technology (e.g., shared google doc) to provide space for immediate written reflections. while conference schedules are generally full of sessions throughout the day and networking opportunities in the evening, early mornings are often reserved for a casual start to the day. we found that mornings were the optimal time to meet as a team to begin the day with a review of the previous day and planning conference activities for the upcoming day. during team meetings, it is necessary to encourage independent behavior while providing necessary guidance for professional presentation and selfreflection. during in-person check-ins, we found that it was beneficial to discuss interpersonal interactions with professionals in the field. students were able to reflect on how the interactions contributed to their understanding of the field, including their assessment of whether the values of community psychology were consistent with the actions of professionals. this provided a unique opportunity to discuss social identity, which should be discussed both individually and as a group. for members of our team, this included reflections on social class, racial identity, and inclusiveness. the faculty mentor allowed students to express their excitement and frustrations without judgment, while providing much needed http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 reflection and emotional support. it is also important to discuss burnout with students, who may be feeling overwhelmed with the experience and need permission to take breaks from the conference. after the conference. after the conference, it is crucial to debrief the entire experience. meeting as a team provides the opportunity to reflect on the experience while understanding how others processed similar experiences. in addition, conflict within the team can be debriefed at this time. students should be encouraged to provide reflections, follow-up with connections, and discuss plans for the future. for the research team, we were able to spend most of the road trip back by taking turns to discuss highlights, challenges, and reflecting upon the overall experience. students seemed engaged in the conversation and were candid about their experiences, surprises, and the impact of the conference on their future career goals. overall, the conference provided a rich experience for the students. for the faculty mentor, it provided an opportunity to reflect on ways to provide a positive learning experience for undergraduates interested in community psychology. recommendations for scra the experiences of the research team were primarily positive when it came to participating in the 2017 scra biennial conference. based on the experiences of the team, we offer several recommendations for conference organizers for engaging undergraduate students in scra. increase accessibility of conference. some team members did not feel comfortable attending specific events at the conference due to their undergraduate status. emphasis should be placed on creating a more welcoming atmosphere for undergraduate students and those new to the field. it is important to create an accepting environment by integrating the values of the field, while providing opportunities to learn about the foundations of the field. introduction to the field. attending the conference provided a lot of information about community psychology, but not every member left with a clear understanding of the field. encouraging the submission of events that provide an overview of the field and an orientation to scra may be beneficial for engaging newcomers. increasing the visibility of graduate programs through a graduate program meet-and-greet may also be appropriate for enhancing the experience of undergraduates at the biennial. in addition, providing information to newcomers about professional jargon would be beneficial for full integration. conference design. as discussed by mabrouk (2009), undergraduates tend to select more technical components of a conference to attend, as they may not understand the benefits of other conference formats. the research team members attending the biennial conference followed this trend, as they did not fully understand the structure of the conference. this tendency may occur with individuals who are unfamiliar with professional conferences or are new to scra. thus, providing a brief description of the format and purpose of each type of session (i.e., symposium, roundtable, innovative other) and learning outcomes in the conference guidebook would be beneficial. distributing sessions with similar topics throughout the conference rather than offering them concurrently may increase interest in the conference by individuals hoping to gain information in specific content areas. networking and mentoring opportunities. a benefit of attending a conference as an undergraduate student is the ability to network with individuals in a field of study. research team members identified networking opportunities as some of the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 highlights of their experience at the 2017 scra biennial conference. meeting with other undergraduate students is important for attaining social support throughout the conference. for faculty mentors, it is important to meet other scra professionals with undergrads attending. collaborations might include joint sessions or orientations. the recent development of the undergraduate interest group will support these endeavors. to further promote mentoring, it may be necessary to provide guidance and encouragement through more formal structures. incorporating events that provide informal networking opportunities would be advantageous for this reason. it may also be beneficial to build in more breaks between sessions to encourage individuals to pace themselves and use breaks for networking. in addition, creating more formal mentoring structures (i.e., pairing more advanced graduate student mentors with undergraduate student attendees) would provide guidance and formalize connections that may be intimidating for undergraduate students to obtain on their own. resource allocation. scra has done a good job of providing opportunities to fund graduate student conference attendance. it would be ideal to provide similar opportunities for undergraduate students, specifically those who intend to pursue a career in the field and are facing economic hardships. continuing the student volunteer program, while improving opportunities for volunteers to be involved during sessions, will assist students with the financial hardship of conference attendance while enhancing interactions at the conference. promote inclusivity. when planning events, such as social gatherings at local restaurants or ticketed events, it is important to recognize differences in the ability to afford the event. for example, explore options such as tickets that do and do not include food/drinks, or to hold social events at locations with low-cost options or student discounts. beyond financial considerations, it is important to recognize power dynamics and social group identity, especially in a field that values inclusivity and respect for diversity. understand that identities—in respect to race, gender identity, sexual orientation, country of origin, and other social group identities—impact the experiences of individuals. while highlighting identities may be intended to promote inclusiveness, it may quickly become tokenizing. scra should consider integrating regular conversations and trainings about inclusiveness and social group identity in interest groups, conferences, and written publications. undergraduate students often feel a power differential in terms of social group identity and in their lack of a professional identity. the members of the research team identified several suggestions for welcome undergraduates in the conference. first, provide opportunities for involvement in roundtables and session by including prompts/directions for people without direct experience. second, ask about undergraduate experiences and graduate school plans as it demonstrates interest in their experience. third, understand that students may not have direct experience but do have valuable contributions based on life experience. finally, avoid labeling individuals as undergraduate students in introductions unless it is relevant to the conversation. undergraduate institution engagement. as community psychologists continue to gain recognition, it is important to support the role of community psychologists working in primarily undergraduate-serving institutions to raise awareness of the field to future scholars and practitioners. in order to make scra more accessible and engaging to undergraduate students, scra must engage with undergraduate institutions by providing resources for undergraduate teaching of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 community psychology courses, preparing presentations about the field, supporting undergraduate students engaging in community psychology practice, and offering opportunities to network. continued support for the newly formed undergraduate interest group is vital for promoting interest in community psychology among undergraduate students. limitations & future research the current project included a systematic reflection on undergraduate research team member experiences preparing for and attending the 2017 scra biennial conference. the inclusion of reflections by research team members and the faculty mentor provide more specific recommendations for mentorship before, during, and after the conference. these recommendations complement those by flaherty and colleagues (2018) while providing tangible examples. in addition, recommendations for the organizers of professional conferences include multiple low-cost recommendations that could be implemented in future conferences. limitations of the project included the timing of the conversations, which occurred several months after returning from the biennial. holding the conversations immediately after the conference may be beneficial at better identifying the impacts of the conference, and the importance of some events may have been lost due to the lag in time. in addition, the involvement of new research team members in the conversations may have contributed to social desirability, as the students who attended the conference may have perceived themselves as informal mentors for the new team members. future studies should attempt to understand undergraduate professional development and the impact of engaging in professional conferences and organizations on future engagement and career choice. in addition, the needs of undergraduate students participating in professional conferences and impact of support strategies should continue to be formally assessed. finally, examining how the undergraduate student experience is impacted by variables such as race and social class is important in determining the accessibility of conferences, professional experiences, and graduate programs. references braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77-101. doi: 10.1191/1478088706qp063oa caprio, m. & hackey, r. (2014). if you build it, they will come: strategies for developing an undergraduate research conference. the journal of health administration education, 31(3), 247-266. crisp, g., & cruz, i. (2009). mentoring college students: a critical review of the literature between 1990 and 2007. research in higher education, 50(6), 525-545. doi: 10.1007/s11162-0099130-2 ellis, s., carettem b., anseel, f., & lievens, f. (2014). sysematic reflection: implications for learning from failures and successes. current directions in psychological science, 23(1), 67-72. doi: 10.1177/0963721413504106 flaherty, e. a., urbanek, r. e., wood, d. m., day, c. c., d’acunto, l. e., quinn, v. s., & zollner, p. a. (2018). a framework for mentoring students attending their first professional conference. natural sciences education, 47(1), 1-8. doi: 10.4195/nse2017.10.0022 hathaway, r. s., nagda, b. a., & gregerman, s. r. (2002). the relationship of undergraduate research participation http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 to graduate and professional education pursuit: an empirical study. journal of college student development, 43(5), 1-18. helm, h. w., & bailey, k. g. d. (2013). perceived benefits of presenting undergraduate research at a professional conference. north american journal of psychology, 15(3), 527-535. hunter, a., laursen, s. l., & seymour, e. (2006). becoming a scientist: the role of undergraduate research in students’ cognitive, personal, and professional development. science education, 91(1), 36-74. doi: 10.1002/sce kardash, c. m. (2000). evaluation of an undergraduate research experience: perceptions of undergraduate interns and their faculty mentors. journal of educational psychology, 92(1), 191201. doi: 10.1037/00220663.92.1.191 lopatto, d. (2004). survey of undergraduate research experiences (sure): first findings. cell biology education, 3(4), 197-277. doi: 10.1187/cbe.04-070045 lopatto, d. (2007) undergraduate research experiences support science career decisions and active learning. cbe— life sciences education, 6(4), 251-360. mabrouk, p. a. (2009). survey study investigating the significance of conference participation to undergraduate research students. journal of chemistry education, 86(11), 1335-1340. doi: 10.1021/ed086p1335 nora, a. & crisp, g. (2007), mentoring students: conceptualizing and validating the multi-dimensions of a support system. journal of college student retention, 9(3), 337-356. patitu, c. l., & terrell, m. c. (1997). participant perceptions of the naspa minority undergraduate fellows program. naspa journal, 17, 69-80. roberts, a. (2000). mentoring revisited: a phenomenological reading of the literature. mentoring and tutoring, 8(2), 145-170. seymour, e., hunter, a., laursen, s. l., & deantoni, t. (2004). establishing the benefits of research experiences for undergraduates in the sciences: first findings from a three-year study. science education, 88(4), 493-534. doi: 10.1002/sce.10131 u.s. news & world report (2015). campus ethnic diversity: national liberal arts colleges. retrieved from http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandre views.com/bestcolleges/rankings/national-liberalarts-colleges/campus-ethnicdiversity. http://www.gjcpp.org/ is there room for more?: considering the need for a decoloniality community psychology core competency jesica siham fernández and janelle m. silva keywords: decoloniality, community psychology competencies, autoethnography, critical reflexivity author biographies: jesica siham fernández, is an assistant professor in the ethnic studies department at santa clara university. she received her phd in social psychology and latin american & latinx studies from the university of california, santa cruz. she engaged in community-based and participatory action research (par) paradigms, projects and collaborations to support latinx communities, youth of color, and student activists in their sociopolitical wellbeing, thriving and liberation. her scholarship is grounded in a decolonial feminist praxis, and informed by critical race and ethnic studies. janelle m. silva, is an associate professor of psychology at the university of washington, bothell (uwb). she received her phd in social psychology and feminist studies from the university of california, santa cruz, where she examined how elementary school curriculum can teach young children about social justice and community engagement. her current research includes a collaboration with high school students to create a shared curriculum based on identity, community and social action, as well as continuing her work with student activists at uwb to document the changes they have facilitated on campus. recommended citation: julian, d.a., wolff, t., bishop, b., brown, k., ornales, j., renner, m., & scott, v. (2023). re-examining the definition of community psychology practice. global journal of community psychology practice, 14(1), 1-21. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: jesica siham fernández, assistant professor, ethnic studies department, santa clara university, 500 el camino real, santa clara, ca (usa) 95053. email: jsfernandez@scu.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 re-examining the definition of community psychology practice abstract from a decolonizing standpoint, as proposed by cruz and sonn (2011), the current community psychology competencies seem insufficient because these often leave power structures intact. consequently, we propose a decolonizing, decolonial and anti-colonial competency in community psychology practice to facilitate the practitioner’s process toward decoloniality, specifically decolonizing language, discourses, relationships and research processes with communities. a decolonial competency in community psychology practice is characterized by an iterative process of critical ethical reflexivity that aims to de-link community psychology practice from hegemonic western eurocentric perspectives in order to foster and center community voice, knowledge and power. through an autoethnographic methodology we offer reflexive vignettes to illustrate a decolonial competency, and the lessons we have learned throughout community psychology practice. as a core community psychology competency, decoloniality can equip practitioners with the skills to engage meaningfully in a critical ethical reflexive practice that aligns with the discipline’s values and foundational principles. community psychology in the united states has experienced multiple iterations of change and transformation in response to pressing social issues. from the 1950’s deinstitutionalization moment to the ongoing anti-torture interrogation campaigns that shed a troubling light on the american psychological association (apa), community psychology has long been a beacon of ethical responsibility and justice. through these agitations toward change, community psychology practitioners have been called to engage with communities in pursuit of liberation and social change (langhout, 2016). informed by this history, and the discipline’s values, a set of core competencies for community psychology practice were developed by the practice council and the council on education nearly a decade ago. the groundbreaking publication featured a set of competencies for community psychology practice to further the development and promotion of the discipline. the document made explicit competencies in community psychology practice to help strengthen and support the skills and capacity-building of communities in order to have them meet their needs (chavis, 1993). meeting community needs facilitates the achievement of community objectives, such as creating conditions to promote wellbeing, social justice, economic equity and selfdetermination across ecological systems, including organizational and/or individual change (julian, 2006). most importantly, the competencies support the professional training and ethical development of community psychology practitioners (dalton & wolfe, 2012). to date, the competencies remain paramount to the discipline as these continue to be the focus of much writing and reflection on the development of community psychology, especially in the domains of professional http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 development, training and practice.1 dalton and wolfe (2012) underscored that the competencies were aimed at encouraging dialogue, introspection and a careful, critical evaluation of community psychology practice. we value the definition of community psychology practice, along with the competencies offered by the pioneers. we acknowledge, however, that a critical ethical reflexive practice that attends to the sociohistorical roots of social problems entrenched in western eurocentric perspectives is necessary. to actualize liberation and social justice at multiple levels through a community psychology practice, practitioners must reckon with coloniality in its multiple manifestations. thus, it is the promotion of ongoing dialogue and critical ethical reflection, or a dialogical disciplinary recognizance, that guides our engagement with a critical question: is there room for more? in other words: is there room for a decolonial competency – or processes toward decolonization, decoloniality and anticoloniality – within the practice of community psychology? in revisiting and re-connecting with these core competencies we believe there is room for more. we propose that a decolonial competency in community psychology practice is characterized by an iterative process of critical ethical reflexivity that aims to de-link community psychology practice from hegemonic, western eurocentric perspectives to foster and center community voice, knowledge and power. as we relationally reflect with each other on the relevance of some competencies, as well as 1 for examples of articles and special issues focused on community psychology practice consider the following: kelly, j.g. (2010). more thoughts: on the spirit of community psychology. american journal of community psychology, 45(34), 272-284.; lichty, l. f., palamaro-munsell, e., & wallin-ruschman, j. (eds.). (2019, february). developing undergraduate community psychology their application and significance to the discipline, we draw from our experiences as community psychology practitioners committed to a decolonizing praxis to propose a decolonial competency. grounded in a socio-historical intersectional analysis of power and oppression, a decolonial competency is important for us to consider as we pursue collaboration with communities, as well as students, whose lived experiences and knowledge are often left unseen and silenced within the discipline and the broader context of academe. even when we strive to be as inclusive in our praxis, the silencing and misrecognition can often be unintentionally reproduced by us, at the same time as we may experience invisibility and marginality within the discipline. a decolonizing, decolonial and anti-colonial competency must inform the discipline’s ethics and principles, including community programming and development, social change initiatives and communitybased research, as well as training and practice for emerging professionals. we offer our reflections as a starting point for more authentic conversations grounded in a critical, ethical reflexivity on how we can improve upon the existing core competencies for community psychology practice. because the existing community psychology competencies seem insufficient to us, as these often leave power, knowledge and positionalities intact, we feel the urgency to center a decolonizing, decoloniality and anticoloniality competency. one that allows us to make room for more; more voices, experiences and knowledge that reflect the strengths, assets and agency of local and pedagogy and research practice. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(1), 1-7. scott, v. & wolfe, s. (eds.). (2015). community psychology: foundations for practice. thousand oaks, ca: sage.; wolfe, s., scott, v. c. & jimenez, t. (eds.). (2013, december). community psychology practice competencies: a global perspective. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), 1-9. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 cultural communities. a decolonial standpoint must make its way into the classroom, field and discipline if it is to reflect its true ethics, values and principles. cruz and sonn (2011) define a decolonializing standpoint as one that aims “to develop theory and practice that reveals distortions in individual and public discourse and action that serve to maintain systems of oppression” (p. 128). a decolonial competency, consistent with a decolonizing standpoint, seeks to equip the community psychology practitioner with the critical understanding to engage and challenge the structures of power that are entwined with oppression. community psychology stands to gain from this intervention, which is the inclusion of decoloniality as a competency. decoloniality can therefore aid the discipline’s aim of deconstructing the coloniality of power in knowledge (quijano, 2000; fernández, sonn, carolissen & stevens, in press). as trained, critical community-social psychologists based in the united states, we have a responsibility to deconstruct systems of oppression that reify colonial power, and the knowledge systems that shape the discipline. reflecting on the historic and sociopolitical contexts that led to the development of u.s. community psychology, our introspective interrogation of our decolonial praxis allows us to see how the field in its early formation strived toward the deconstruction and rejection of pathologizing, deficit-based perspectives and positivist research approaches. have we, as community psychologists, lost sight of our beginnings and earlier values? we think not, and yet there must be room for more. to do so, however, we respond to the following question: is there room for a decolonial competency – or processes toward decolonization, decoloniality and anti-coloniality – within the community psychology practice? community psychology core competencies a fundamental purpose of community psychology competencies is to equip community psychologists with the skills to think critically and engage sensibly in efforts to create empowering conditions that support community social change via organizational capacity-building. most importantly, these competencies make explicit the principles and ethical values for community psychology practitioners. the competencies provide a framework for identifying and describing processes and practices within the field that could aid practitioners in training prospective students, communicating with stakeholders and building partnerships for social change. given these competencies, community psychology practice has been defined as a process of strengthening and supporting communities to meet the needs of their constituents via systemic, institutional, organizational and/or individual level change (scott & wolfe, 2014). to be clear, competencies communicate the principles of community psychology to potential partners, budding professionals and colleagues in psychology and allied disciplines. the standardization of community psychology competencies within education and training programs aims to make explicit the foundational principles that guide the discipline. yet, the empiricism, positivism and individualism of psychology in general have been at odds with these principles. grounding ourselves in community psychology’s history of responding to the urgencies of sociopolitical moments, these competencies reflect the field’s intentions to put into practice its values. thus, the competencies reveal an attempt to articulate what community psychology practice is and looks like, whilst fostering a set of ethics and values for ecological social analysis, sociocultural awareness, collaboration through http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 relationship building, innovation in addressing systemic social problems and ongoing dialogue and reflection toward the development of the discipline, as well as the practitioner. all eighteen competencies are individually explained; however, these must be understood as interconnected. none of these competencies are mutually exclusive, rather they are part of a whole composite of tools and resources that community psychology practitioners can draw from. each competency is organized under one of the four broad categories: 1) foundational principles, 2) community program development and management, 3) community and social change and 4) community research. indeed, the competencies offer valuable insight into the guiding ethics and values of community psychology practice, however these do not explicitly offer opportunities or guidance on how to engage with, or reflect upon, interrogate and deconstruct coloniality. to be clear, the current competencies do not center decolonization, decoloniality and anticoloniality in discourse nor in praxis. in critically approaching the application and relevance of these competencies to our community psychology practice, which we view as inclusive of our pedagogy, we note some limitations and constraints. we are especially attuned to how these competencies, as they stand, are informed primarily by individualistic, deficit-based and positivist research approaches within psychology, which we purport limit possibilities for liberation, transformative justice and anti-oppression. decoloniality in u.s.-based community psychology practice in a fundamental way, decolonization is about detaching oneself from coloniality and colonialism. specifically, from the perspectives and understandings that created structures of power and oppression that render some communities and their knowledge as inferior, deficient or “backwards.” coloniality is the process of gazing from the outside, of “looking in” through documenting or researching about “others” without ever fully acknowledging that these presumed “others” can think, speak and act on their own terms – that they are knowledge-producers and knowers. frantz fanon (1967), known for his critical writings on the psychology of oppression, understood decolonization as a process of humanizing those who have been dehumanized, of reconstituting the knowledge and histories of people’s stories, a past that has been silenced. underscoring these remarks, nelson maldonado-torres (2016) purports that “decoloniality refers to efforts at rehumanizing the world, to breaking hierarchies of difference that dehumanize subjects and communities and that destroy nature and to the production of counterdiscourses, counter-knowledge, countercreative acts and counter-practices that seek to dismantle coloniality and to open up multiple other forms of being in the world” (p. 31). because decolonization is a continuous iterative process, it is important to remain critically, ethically reflexive of how, where and with whom we engage in undoing the coloniality of power. colonialism exists at multiple levels, from race, ethnic, gender and class categories, to the structures that reproduce inequities in access to resources, opportunities and wellbeing. decoloniality and anti-coloniality must be understood as a verb—as actions and behaviors oriented toward challenging the status quo by deconstructing systems of oppression at multiple levels. as maori scholar linda tuhiwai smith (2012) states, decolonization invites the formation of community collaborations that seek to cultivate and build knowledge through relationships and experiential relational knowledge. decoloniality can contribute to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 the transformation of social conditions where the power, liberation and wellbeing of one community does not rely on the oppression of another. with this fundamental understanding of decolonization, decoloniality and anti-coloniality – as the rejection and interrogation of colonial power in knowledge, along with practices that strive to re-center community knowledge – we offer our autoethnographic vignettes as reflections toward a decolonial competency. we share these examples of how we have engaged decoloniality as a core competency in community psychology practice, from our development and training as critical community-social psychologists to our teacher-scholar-activist praxis.2 autoethnography as method to illustrate how a competency of decoloniality can transform community psychology development, training, and practice, we utilize an autoethnographic method (bond & harrell, 2006; langhout, 2006). autoethnography is a qualitative methodology rooted in an ethnographic approach that generally involves documenting sociocultural practices and interactions within a given context. unlike ethnography, however, autoethnography involves the researcher engaging in critical reflection and reflexivity characterized by introspection and analysis of the self within sociocultural, political and relational contexts where subjective experiences surface to inform the person’s understanding of themselves and their experiences thereby 2 we identify as critical community-social psychologists as those are the sub-disciplinary threads that have served as our foundation for our research and practice. we approach research as praxis, specifically as the process and practice of putting theory and knowledge into action. while we recognize that there are valuable distinctions between research and practice, we are grounded in our positionalities as practitioners who engage producing a story, or an autobiographical narrative, of a given experience. as decoloniality seeks to push the field to reflect and interrogate the role of coloniality within practice, research and pedagogy, autoethnography positions the writer to do just that. autoethnography gives validity to scholars who want to unveil their multiple selves within their work (chang, 2016). through autoethnography, voice is given to silenced experiences whilst marginalized standpoints are amplified (boylorn & orbe, 2014; denzin, 2003a, 2003b; madison, 2012; silva, 2017; spry, 2001). as a reflective process, autoethnographic writing surfaces complex contradictions that are often absent or misrecognized in academia. as part of a decolonial competency, autoethnography provides the author with an opportunity for the “living body/subjective self” (spry, 2001, p. 711) to be centered. for scholars from marginalized identities, autoethnography involves a dialogue between the reader and the author by building knowledge that is shared through the lens of the oppressed. because autoethnography speaks directly to the importance of illuminating systems of oppression rooted in colonial power, we engage in this methodology. autoethnography as a tool to facilitate a critical, ethical reflexive practice invites practitioners to engage decoloniality and decolonization by unsettling the power dynamics tethered to colonial relationships and subjectivities, and how they surface in research. our autoethnographic vignettes in research and practice actively and often through pedagogy. we therefore use the term practitioners to refer to those who engage in both research and practice, as we do. a discussion on the distinctions between community psychology research and practice is beyond the scope of this paper; however, we acknowledge the importance of nuancing these dichotomies, including how for some practitioners the lines between research and practice are permeable and intertwined. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 make visible the invisible challenges of a community psychology practice through a decolonial competency. we purport that a decolonial competency can further the development of a critical ethical reflexive practice that fosters a socio-historical, cultural awareness and refuses and rejects western eurocentric logics. specifically, this methodology is useful where community partnerships are oriented to centering community voice, power and knowledge as fundamental decolonial and decolonizing elements of a community psychology practice. as the existing core competencies seek to provide a framework for practice, training must go beyond mere reflection toward a decolonial and decolonizing praxis. amplifying community voice and sustained agency is crucial to challenging the coloniality of power in the production of knowledge. our goal is to contribute to the development of a critical community psychology practice aligned with a decolonizing standpoint (cruz & sonn, 2011). brief overview of community-based research projects janelle’s autoethnographic vignettes focus on her community-based partnership and how that has informed her classroom pedagogy. drawing on her work at graham high school3, she discusses how the latinx high school students pushed back on community psychology methods. her narrative illustrates how community partners are also “mirrors” that make us stop and look back on how the colonized tools and terms we were taught to use need to be reconsidered for us to move to a decolonized community psychology. research does not happen in a vacuum, nor do the lessons janelle learned from the high school students. therefore, in the second vignette, janelle incorporated their voices and guidance as she worked to decolonize her 3 all proper names have been given pseudonyms where appropriate. college classrooms. consistent with janelle’s experience of interrogating research approaches that fail to uplift community voice and knowledge, jesica’s autoethnographic vignettes draw from a community-engaged research collaboration and ongoing relationships with the madres emprendedoras, a group of mexican immigrant mothers trained in participatory action research (par). the first vignette highlights the importance of decolonizing language to cultivate connection and support to facilitate research grounded in community experience and knowledge, a point similarly illustrated as well in the second vignette. an overview of our projects sets the context for the lessons we relationally reflect upon in our call for a decolonial competency. janelle’s high school chronicles. in many ways, the origin of this project was an act of decolonization, in itself. i did not find myself at graham high school by chance; rather, it was an undergraduate student who invited me to this place that would become a site for collaboration. in my classes, i emphasize the importance of bringing knowledge “home,” whether that be your family, community, church, friend group or on social media (rendón, 2014). i would share how my research is an example of that because i value bringing knowledge to local schools to facilitate students’ sense of agency in shifting their campus community to be a space of healing and connectedness for themselves (hooks, 1994, 2003; rendón, 2014). during a lecture on feminism, intersectionality and education, a student followed me back to my office, rattling off questions before i could even answer them. a long-time resident of south seattle, yoli spoke about her excitement for what she was learning but also her anger. “i wish i had known this sooner,” was a common phrase yoli would use. when more privileged students would reference http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 learning about feminisms in high school or attending district events featuring guest speakers, yoli felt more and more that she was denied these same opportunities in her youth. “schooling is not equal,” she said. i would ask her how she wanted to change that for the next generation of yoli’s. as she looked around my office, her eyes turned as she said, “you need to be at graham” (fieldnote, 2014). one of 12 high schools in the largest school district in the state (seattlepublicschools.org, 2019), ghs is the most ethnically and racially diverse. a recently designated stem school, the high school excels in math and science courses but has struggled to find ways to support its diverse student body beyond ethnic clubs and events (fieldnote, 2012). at my first meeting at ghs, i was astonished to see the stem curriculum and medical path for students. as the administration walked me through these academic paths, yoli’s voice kept appearing in my head, “don’t forget to ask about diversity classes.” as i visited the sports facilities, music room and career services, i stopped and asked yoli’s question. the principal smirked and said, “well, they read native son their senior year. but students are here for stem. it’s not an issue” (fieldnote, 2014). i was both shocked and unsurprised by his response. with no ethnic studies curricula mandate (castro gill, 2019), this was a common theme in schools across the district. for the principal to assert that it wasn’t an issue, for a school as diverse as this, i was stunned. diversity was everywhere in this school. posters were written in at least seven different languages, there were ethnic clubs, and tagging on the cafeteria wall read, “we see us. do you see us?”. the tagged wall stood with me as i drove the 15 miles back to my office, escaping the chaos that comes from being in a high school environment. seeing my office door open, yoli stuck her head inside, fully knowing i had gone to ghs that morning. i told her about what i heard, observed and the tagging in the cafeteria. “it hasn’t changed,” she said as she started to furiously text on her phone. she showed me a secret facebook page the ghs students of color had created three years prior that was still active and thriving. when i had asked about the different ethnic groups on campus, the administration kept emphasizing how they “fully supported these causes” but could not “force” the students to show up. on this online forum, the students of color showed up for one another. current students posted questions on how to deal with certain well-meaning faculty, ramadan support groups were being run, questions about how to talk to their families about wanting to go to college knowing that they were undocumented or the financial burdens that question would open up and how to hang out at lunch without “getting in trouble.” alumnae offered their advice, and students connected with one another. “we connect here because we don’t have space to connect there,” yoli explained. a few days later, i received a follow up email from the administration, saying there was interest from the latinx students for me to be on campus. “if you are interested, we are happy to discuss what this could look like to best serve ghs” (personal communication, 2014). i knew “best serve ghs” was likely code for “we will help you and you will help us.” that email also implied i would be granted access to work with the latinx students and the students wanted me there. i said yes immediately. over the last six years, i have been welcomed by the ghs community, attending school events, collaborating with teachers for their summer school programs, chaperoning dances, helping build out family engagement activities and mentoring latinx students, many of whom will be the first in their families to attend higher education. i knew i was walking a fine line between researcher and community member (silva, 2017). as an ethnographer, i felt it was necessary to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 embed myself within the community (behar, 1996; fine, 1994; gone, 2006; langhout, 2006). at the same time, as a scholar, i knew that the bonds i was building with the students on campus would complicate my ability to “pull myself out” of the research (silva, 2017). was i going to ghs to do research or was i going to be immersed within this community i cared deeply for? was caring allowed in research? is there such a thing as getting too close? these questions would stay with me throughout the project and are still present each time i bring this work to an academic audience. the process of sharing this work-work that might appear as me being “too close” and “too intimate”carries much anxiety for me, especially as a woman of color in psychology. with tenure, i have felt less restrained and more vigilant on the need to provide reflective examples of how i have wrestled with decoloniality in my practice. this autoethnographic vignette is one example of how a core competency of decoloniality can help move scholars toward a practice that centers reflection to better serve those we collaborate with. jesica’s engagement with the madres emprendedoras. in the fall of 2017, a participatory action research (par) course was offered as part of a communityuniversity collaborative project to support the leadership development and research skill training of local members of the guadalupe washington (gw) community, located in a predominantly working-class latinx community in the city of san jose (ca, usa). approximately 82% of the more than 9,679 people that live in gw are latinx. scenes of upscale apartments in the process of being built or occupied starkly juxtapose the pueblito (small town) feeling of gw. many families in the community are not able to afford rent for adequate single-family housing, and often have no choice but to live in garages converted into subpar housing units. thus, it is within this community where the madres emprendedoras project began as a par course that was supported through santa clara university’s (scu) ignatian center for jesuit education under the thriving neighbors initiative (tni). as a private jesuit institution in close proximity to gw, scu has maintained longstanding ties to the gw community via tni. since 2013, scu has run several education, health and community enrichment programs and projects in gw to support wellbeing, education access and leadership of families and youth. the par course was offered at no cost to any one from the community who was interested in participating. several quarters prior to offering the course i (jesica) was invited to contribute to the development, design and implementation of the par course by an scu colleague and faculty member in sociology (dr. laura nichols). together and in collaboration with the former tni program director (irene cermeño), who oversaw this communityuniversity partnership program, we crafted a vision for the par course. from the beginning, our process was intentional in serving and supporting the gw community. i was keen on having the par course be structured with and by the participants. we held meetings with gw community members to discern their interest in the course, welcomed their input and connected with a community member (patricia rodriguez, “patty”) who served as the liaison between us, the community and prospective participants who would join the par course. we agreed that i would teach a modified version of the par course in spanish to participating members from the gw community. the par course participants who joined were already engaged in the other programs and initiatives affiliated with tni, as well as the local elementary school, where we meet regularly, and our par sessions took place. as the course proceeded, several of the women began to refer to themselves as “madres” (madres), as that was the most salient and shared identity among them, and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 they referred to me as “maestra” (teacher). we informally and relationally established a name for the group, madres emprendedoras, and a caring relationship that has continued well beyond the initial eleven weeks of the quarter. striving to include the madres in the par course required building relationships, as well as a holding space where i could learn from and listen to the madres. specifically, it required that as a researcher and outsider to gw, i decolonize my entry into the community, including my researcher-teacher positionality with the madres. instead of going in with a research plan or agenda tied to some particular outcome or metric of scholarly productivity, i had to deconstruct what research is and who research is for. to aid me in this process of decolonization, i turned to the work of decolonial scholars, such as smith (2012) who writes: “decolonization is a process which engages with imperialism and colonialism at multiple levels. for researchers, one of those levels is concerned with having a more critical understanding of the underlying assumptions, motivations and values which inform research practice” (p. 21). engaging a decolonial competency was fundamental in guiding my process of co-building the development of a par course that would meet the interests and needs of the madres. additionally, it required that i relinquish assumptions of what i thought would be best for the community based on my previous experiences with other latinx communities, including those that i grew up in, and where i had been involved as a researcher and community advocate. my initial experiences in gw were centered on being present, learning, listening and finding opportunities to connect with the madres and the greater gw community. these actions helped inform my understanding of the diversity of experiences and struggles within gw, and the importance of holding space for community members, including the madres, to reflect on their concerns, needs and hopes. our interactions in the par course were oriented toward understanding how the madres would like to engage, and what they would like to see in the context of the par course. at one of our first meetings, socorro (soco), a mother of three, immigrant from guanajuato and long-term resident of the gw community, asked “y que vamos aprender maestra?” (what are we going to learn?), and i responded, “lo que ustedes quieran aprender, eso aprenderemos” (whatever you want to learn, that is what we will learn). the initial hesitation with claiming the space and collective autonomy to determine what we would learn shifted with another remark offered by patty, “queremos aprender a mejorar nuestra comunidad. contar nuestras historias. no lo que otros dicen de la comunidad” (we want to learn how to better our community. tell our own stories. not what others say about the community). i was keen on connecting, building community and learning from the madres of gw, and putting into practice what one of the madres, maria, a mother of five and immigrant from jalisco, underscored “aprenderemos en comunidad, y lo que no sepamos lo averiguamos” (we will learn in community, and what we don’t know we will find out) (fieldnote, 2018). the madres’ engagement in the par course reflected their efforts to “emprender” (undertake, challenge, begin) “cambio” (change) in their community; a meaning that subsequently led the madres to embrace their group, and their par course, under the banner of the madres emprendedoras (entrepreneurial mothers) project. summary situating generally and broadly the background for our respective projects, we – janelle and jesica – offer our autoethnographic reflections of two experiences, or lessons that illustrate http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 decoloniality as community psychology competency in the section that follows. we present these as vignettes, organizing each one along two lessons. the first lesson focuses on decolonizing terminology in training and practice, as illustrated by janelle’s experience with facilitating high school students’ “decolonial dictionary,” which relates to jesica’s process of engaging with the madres in re-defining “community agreements.” the second lesson is on decolonizing community relationships and modes of inquiry, which both janelle and jesica illustrate through their stories of “walking the walk” and acompañamiento (accompaniment). lessons toward a decolonial competency in community psychology practice first lesson: decolonizing terminology in training and practice janelle supporting high school students’ decolonial dictionary. colonial ways of research advocate for separation of the researcher from the subject (smith, 2012). many scholars have written about the complex nature of fieldwork and the need to be neutral (behar, 1996; smith, 2012). as a decolonial scholar, this felt counter to who i (janelle) am and to decoloniality as a framework. decoloniality has taught me the value of un-learning and re-learning to move away from dominant paradigms that continue to speak for groups, and not amplify their voices. as a decolonial ethnographer, i fully integrated myself (if possible and i am welcomed) into this space. i understood that i arrived with the privilege that comes from having an institution and title attached to my name. i stepped back when needed and continually reflected on my role in this process. the students were my guide. i was there to join them. rather than approach the campus administration with research questions, i developed on my own, within the ivory tower and informed by academic journals, i allowed the latinx students to dictate my research agenda. it was that phrase, “research agenda,” that raised flags for the students. “you got an agenda?” they would say with sideways glances. i could see them beginning to question my authenticity when i used these terms that had been drilled into me during graduate school, such as “research agenda,” “study,” “collaboration,” “community-based work,” and “agreements.” “pssh, like why you got to be like that, profe? we thought you were cool” (fieldnote, 2015). it was in that moment i realized that these colonized terms i had adopted needed to be adjusted for and with the community’s input. i needed to find a new word that made sense to the latinx students, and myself. if i wanted to work with them, i needed to decolonize my language, a skill i was not taught as a graduate student. i decided to do this with the latinx students so we could develop a common language. decolonizing the language we used would help us begin to decolonize the practices that embodied colonized approaches to research. as we worked toward what would become our future project, we first started with reimagining how certain phrases and terminology could be decolonized. for the latinx students, agendas were met with suspicion and automatic distrust. administrators had an agenda. authority figures had an agenda. they did not want to continue to be in communion with someone who had an agenda. agendas were one-sided, not shared, void of discussion, and biased. research was done to people like them, not something they were able to construct on their own. a study was another way to ‘other” them. collaborations were (as one student put it) “what white people would say when they come to ghs but all they wanted was our words and not our voices” (fieldnote, 2015). community-based work meant they were a project that needed to be fixed. agreements http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 were rules that were followed by a punishment that lacked input. i spent hours with these students going over the terms that had become a part of my everyday research jargon. before this moment, i would use these terms without abandon; now, i stop and pause, considering if this is what i want to convey. i shared with the latinx students what the terms were and how they were defined; they understood that words had power and wanted to know the origins of these terms before dismissing them. “connection” became our first term that they wanted to use to describe our collaborative projects together. connection to them called attention to the relationship component that they felt was absent from the word “collaboration”. “people collaborate with us all the time and then bounce,” a student said during a meeting. “you have been here. you are invested. you connect with us” (fieldnote, 2015). as we worked on decolonizing our shared language, we spent a good deal of time thinking about “agreements.” i brought the idea of creating “community agreements” to the group so we could establish a shared vision and goals that we could fall back on in times of need (dalton & wolf, 2012). community agreements worked well in my courses and the phrase had been adopted by different student organizations on campus. when the latinx students pushed back, i had to see how this term has been used to disempower and “police” them. as students of color in the k-12 system, they felt “agreements” have been used to elicit unfair punishments. indeed, i was aware of how punishments were disproportionately allocated to students of color, boys of color and first-generation students (silva, langhout, kohfeldt & gurrola, 2015). for me, “community agreements” were central to our future “connections” and that meant decolonizing our language. “agreements” became “check-ins” to signal that we would use our shared vision and goals to begin our meetings and “connect” with each other. instead of a set of rules or agreements to keep us on track, these became central to strengthening our group bond. when i reread my fieldnotes on this moment, i was struck by two things: (1) how this experience catalyzed the decolonizing of our project, and (2) that i have never shared this with a public audience. i cringed when i saw that i wrote the students “pushed back.” yes, it felt like a push back to me because they were challenging the academic language i had accepted as legitimate. however, describing students of color who were challenging colonized language as “pushing back” was an example of the continuous work i have done to decolonize my language and framework for working with community partners. they were not pushing back on me to be disrespectful, but they wanted me to question why these words were acceptable. in many ways, it was not them “pushing back” on me but it was the students moving me forward. together, we engaged decoloniality by deconstructing language through reflective writing, lived experiences and unlearning. when i shared with one of the teachers our process, that teacher gave me a baffled look. “why would you let them tell you what to do? you have the degree. you are the teacher-not them” (fieldnote, 2015). having spent several years collaborating with k-12 schools, this comment did not surprise me. yet, it stuck out to me more than before. schools were intended to be spaces that challenged students’ curiosities, facilitated critical thinking and connected to their lives. if these students were denied the opportunity to question, or seen as “pushing back on authority,” they were not being given the chance to decolonize their minds. clearly work needed to be done at ghs beyond my time with the students. if this was the space where they were able to challenge language and question colonial thinking, we would walk that path together. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 madres re-defining jesica’s proposed community agreements. in the university classroom “community agreements” serve as a set of principles students and i (jesica) will mindfully engage to support each other in our collective learning and growth through in class reflections, discussions and activities. in the context of the community par course, however, these “community agreements” had to be translated to “acuerdos comunitarios” (community agreements). when introducing them by their literal spanish translation several of the madres were confused by their meaning. the spanish term was too academic, formal and felt sterile. i was intent on having the “community agreements” extend beyond the physical space of the classroom where our par course took place. i hoped the “community agreements” would inform the development of our relationships with each other, open and transparent communication, as well as a mutual commitment to our learning, research and community advocacy work. clearly, the phrase “acuerdos comunitarios” (community agreements) was not translating well; we were getting lost in translation and meaning. this moment served as an opportunity for me to re-think the colonial elements of language, and how certain phrases and their meaning may become inaccessible even though they are devised with the best of intentions. patty’s question about what i meant by “acuerdos comunitarios” (community agreements) and whether these were meant as “reglas” (rules) opened upon an avenue for me to unravel their true meaning and purpose. i clarified that these were not meant to be rules, instead they were to be “maneras de pensar y actuar que nos unan” (ways of thinking and acting that can unite us). maria proposed that we refer to them as “promesas que reflejan nuestros valores” (promises that reflect our values). i asked the madres if “promesas” (promises) would be a better word, and several agreed to re-brand the “acuerdos comunitarios” (community agreements) as “promesas” (promises) because the latter would more adequately reflect our values and commitment to each other. we then began to reflect and describe those instances when the madres feel heard and seen. i invited the madres to identify the practices that allow for a sense of belonging. they mentioned the importance of “respeto” (respect), “hablar desde el punto de vista propio” (to speak from their own experiences), and “escuchar para entender” (listen in order to understand). we jotted these on the white board for us to see, elaborate on or question. as we continued the activity of collectively developing our “promesas,” i heard stories of experiences where the madres were seemingly included yet not a part of the decision-making process, or where someone in a group took the lead without considering the opinions or thoughts of others. in listening to their stories, which reflected problematic power dynamics, we agreed that we would follow a consensus decision-making process: “todas en una sola voz” (all in one voice) as patty remarked. for the madres “ser incluidas” (to be included) and “comprometerse” (to commit oneself) seemed to be fundamental values that they cultivated amongst themselves through their daily interactions and relationships. “compromiso” (to commit oneself) relied on the importance of working together to support and care for each other. thus, inclusion and commitment founded upon an ethic of care, collaboration and support were added to our “promesas” (promises). in line with the values of showing up and caring, the madres proposed “estar presentes” (to be present). responses to this comment surfaced different experiences. some madres acknowledged difficulties with staying focused, while others elaborated that attending events allowed them a break from responsibilities as mothers, caregivers and providers for their families. we agreed to add http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 “cuidarse a uno mismo” (self-care). a portion of our meeting centered on creating a version of the madres’ community agreements. as a group, we developed a list of “promesas” to guide our collaboration grounded in a decolonial process and practice. our “promesas” included: “respeto” (respect), “hablar desde el punto de vista propio” (speaking of one’s experiences), “escuchar para entender” (listen to understand), inclusion, commitment, consensus decisionmaking, being present and practicing selfcare. we agreed to revise and revisit these “promesas” as the par course continued and our relationships unfolded (fieldnote, 2018). reflecting on this fieldnote, it was in those moments when we opened up to share our individual and collective experiences with one another, and how we wanted our learning space to be, that we engaged decoloniality. a decolonial competency was fostered through reflexive dialogues that challenged research language, relationships and decision-making. the objectives and expectations of a structured course and project, tied to and reflective of the institution, did not set the foundation for our par course. on the contrary, we engaged with and experienced what bell (2018) characterizes as a decolonial atmosphere, imbued with stories and emotions that helped us discern the space and relationships we sought to cultivate. we did this by sharing stories, which called for us to engage in a critical, ethical reflexive practice that helped us shift away from the conversational conventions of turn-taking speech. the often methodical and structured process of research, language and training can often prevent opportunities for deeper meaningful learning, that in turn, maintains power dynamics of research that i sought to interrogate. as i reflect, this vignette demonstrates the development of a decolonial competency. our “promesas” (community agreements) mirrored our feelings and desires, rooted in reflections of lived experiences that allowed us to build “comunidad” (community) as we troubled the dynamics of colonial power in knowledge and practice. second lesson: decolonizing community relationships and modes of inquiry janelle “walking the walk” to cultivate a decolonizing practice. this autoethnographic vignette showcases how i integrated the lessons i learned from the students at ghs within my college classrooms. as we continued our work on decolonizing our language, we started to rethink the overall process that i had previously presented to them on how we would work together. this was a process that i had established based on my schooling and the ethics and values of community psychology (dalton & wolf, 2012). yet, this was a process that i did not develop in collaboration with the latinx students. what follows is how decolonizing our language led to decolonizing our entire process and centering our lived experiences and voices within all aspects of this project. these lessons transformed how i approached my college classrooms and how i taught cp. reflecting on my pedagogy, i offer this vignette to illustrate my continued investment in decolonizing all aspects of my practice. once we established an agreed upon language free from colonized ways of knowing, we were ready to work on our first “connection.” following our “check-in” set up, i knew the students would not agree to a project that was disconnected from their experiences. they were well aware of how others used the stereotypes attached to their social identities to shape and shift commonly held ideologies that they struggled to debunk. for these students, anyone who entered their space wanting to work with them-even if they shared identities with them-was “suspect” (fieldnote, 2014). it was not enough to decolonize research terms-we had to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 decolonize what i represented and what my presence meant in that space. our need to decolonize our language taught me that i also needed to center all of us in this space beyond the future “connection” we would develop. i did not want anything we did to feel disconnected from their lived experiences or devoid of the pain they conveyed when speaking about the institutionalized oppression they felt, both at school and in the community. to get us to the point of brainstorming, we decided to “break down the walls of 341 and be real to get real” (fieldnote, 2016). to initiate our brainstorming, we each brought in something that was meaningful to us. i told the students it could be a photo, book, song lyric, drawing or an object-any artifact that would spark conversation and that they felt comfortable sharing with the group. family photos, serapes, mayan statues, jewelry, rosaries, cardi b. lyrics, feminist posters, buttons, soccer jerseys, work badges and city maps took over our classroom. each artifact was central to the students’ sense of self and what it meant to be a latinx high schooler. being a latinx student could not be defined by what was already written about them. as we slowly shared our artifacts, stories of frustration, anger and pain were shared. students were angry about the texts that were used in their classes that supposedly “told their histories” (fieldnote, 2016). for a campus as diverse as ghs, the latinx students felt “trapped” by “old ideas” (fieldnote, 2016). this process took several weeks for us to process and determine where to go next. i knew research (in the traditional sense) had a timeline and a part of me was concerned that this activity was taking too long. yet, i knew that was my colonized approach to research talking. they were guiding me on this journey, and i needed to trust them. a researcher does not always have all the answers. two months later, our weeks of brainstorming, crying, sharing and laughing brought us a breakthrough. the students wanted to explore who they were as our first “connection.” together, we developed what would become our “research” or “connection.” in many ways, the hours spent with the latinx students at ghs informed my pedagogy and i discussed community practice with my undergraduates. working through the core competencies with undergraduates really highlighted how inaccessible students of color found them to be. although the competencies were written for graduate programs, i believe in sharing them with my undergraduate students in our community psychology program. teaching them the values and principles of cp also includes the core competencies of the field that they are considering as their future careers. the frustration that my students felt that these competencies were written for graduate students and neglected to consider undergraduate training is for another time and place. what my students fixated most on, was how to engage in a decolonial community psychology practice through re-imagining the field. as my high school students pushed back on terms they found colonizing and detached from their experiences, so did my undergraduates. in my senior seminar community projects class, undergrads rejected the competencies. the communities they were interested in working with were their communities, ones that were ethnically/racially diverse, with complex histories related to the land and social institutions. what my undergraduate and high school students were seeking was a decolonial community practice. both groups wanted to take something back to their communities that felt authentic to who they are. “why can’t we create a manifesto instead?” (fieldnote, 2017) a student raised in the seminar course. “if there are no cp core competencies for us, we should make our http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 own that reflect us,” said another student (fieldnote, 2017). i can remember leaning back against the classroom wall as i watched my undergrads take each core competency, reframe it to reflect their needs, and reimagine what new competencies might look like. the first competency they reimagined was number two, empowerment (dalton & wolfe, 2012). they wanted to know who first theorized about empowerment: what is that person’s positionality? what does it mean to empower communities? can you empower a community that your social group has disempowered? should empowerment come from community insiders only? as they wrote down their questions on the whiteboard, they decided that what they wanted to know was more about the community psychologist’s whose work they were reading. what is their backstory? how do they position themselves within their work? as competency number five encourages an ethical reflective practice (dalton & wolfe, 2012), my students were struck as to how few academic articles required a reflective paragraph to be included when discussing research. “why do they [academics] get to stop reflecting? does the degree and commitment to competencies mean you just do it but don’t have to actually show it?” one student asked. their need for a reflective practice that re-centered their lived experiences and humanized research echoed the frustrations of my ghs students. as decolonial scholars (buttaro, 2010; portillo, 2013; tejada & espinoza, 2003; quijano, 2000) note, decoloniality surfaces the systemic oppressions marginalized groups face by amplifying their voices within the project. the sense of urgency that came from high school and undergraduate studentsalthough miles part and in different locationswas palpable and intertwined. as the high school students engaged in a project that centered decoloniality beginning with language, the college students developed a decolonial framework to guide them on their emerging journeys as budding community psychologists. in both settings, we sought guidance in texts by women of color who were feminists (collins, 1990; hurtado, 1996) and decolonial scholars (lissovoy, 2010; portillo, 2013; quijano, 2000) as we considered the field we wanted to engage with. the practice we developed in the high school and university became markers to seeing ourselves/themselves reflected in research beyond being a “subject.” jesica’s acompañamiento with the madres emprendedoras’. in the next autoethnographic reflection, i (jesica) illustrate how the madres applied and implemented their par skills to develop their own research project, the finding kids project (fkp), with support and resources from tni. unlike the action-projects the madres developed and implemented in the context of the par course, the fkp was of their own making and design. the madres’ initiative and leadership in developing the fkp, demonstrated their skills in community engaged research. additionally, it underscored the importance of cultivating a decolonial competency of re-centering experiential knowledge as a legitimate and valuable source of knowledge, and one where curiosity, inquiry and research can unfold. the initial interests expressed by tni about children's experiences in the afterschool program animated the madres’ initiative to implement the fkp to document the impact of the afterschool program, as well as the needs and interests of families in the gw community for additional education resources. as soco, one of the madres shared, “muchos de nuestros hijos han pasado por el programa [tni], nosotros sabemos lo importante que es para nuestros hijos. pero debemos demostrarles con hechos el impacto” (many of our children have gone through the [tni] program, we know how important it is for our children. but we must demonstrate the impact with evidence). setting themselves up as a team to document and demonstrate http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 the impact with “hechos” (evidence) required them to begin with their stories about the afterschool program. in striving to be resourceful and supportive of the madres, it was i who gained a valuable resource through a hard-learned lesson, however. during one of the initial fkp meetings, i shared with the madres a few peer-reviewed research articles, which were in english but annotated and summarized in spanish by me. i wrongly believed that these sources would be useful and assumed that what these articles had to say would help validate the madres’ experiences. i assumed the implications of these articles on the benefits of afterschool programs for youth of color from low-income communities would serve as a starting point for their research. i was wrong. i learned then that what is most valuable is not what others have written, but what one has witnessed or what humanizes their experience. embarrassingly, after summarizing and presenting some of this research, i listened to juanita kindly remark that this was not news for her, that she had seen such benefits and outcomes among her daughter, and that most all of the madres could speak from a place of personal lived experience: “maestra, todo eso ya lo sabemos, lo hemos visto y vivido, no leído en un libro” (teacher, we already know that, we have seen and lived it, we didn’t read it in a book) (fieldnote, 2018). my intentions with sharing the research were to aid the madres in the development of their project, yet i soon realized that what i was offering was knowledge “from the outside,” from the colonial gaze that is antithetical to a decolonial competency (dutta, 2018). purporting that research must and should begin from a review of past literature erases and overlooks the knowledge that already exists within communities. the madres did not need an empirical, peer-review, published set of articles and my translations of these to tell them that afterschool programs, which are culturally and community-centered, are beneficial to students’ learning and wellbeing. the madres knew this to be true because they had personally experienced this. that was a moment of reckoning that brought me to the realization that not all research must begin with past research. on the contrary, research can begin with stories, with reflections of experiences that have shaped understandings of others and ourselves, as well as the thriving conditions we wish to see in our communities. for the madres, they were interested in telling a story about their children’s’ afterschool program experiences. through the development of the fkp they sought to advocate for programming and resources they had long been wanting to see for youth in their community. shortly after a few planning and design meetings, the madres began to develop their own survey questions to include in their afterschool program assessment. several drafts of the survey were developed that included a combination of open and closeended questions written in colloquial spanish that the madres articulated would be accessible to gw families. the madres were intent on keeping the language, questions and length of the survey as accessible as possible. each survey draft was piloted with other parents, mostly other madres in the community who enthusiastically offered their input, feedback and recommendations on the survey. their feedback helped develop new questions or remove those that were repeated in various ways and those that were confusing or irrelevant to the goals of the survey. with each iteration of piloting, editing and revising, the madres gained skills in finetuning their questions and narrowing the scope of their project. although initially interested in the outcomes of the afterschool program, the madres decided to specifically focus on the youths’ academic experiences and how the afterschool program supported or challenged their academic engagement. the questions included in their survey http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 reflected the knowledge and information they sought to document in order to advocate for their youths’ academic needs and wellbeing. the fkp provided the madres emprendedoras with an opportunity to “poner en practica” (to put into practice) that which they had learned in the context of the par course. however, rather than beginning with or drawing from past research, surveys and empirical evidence, the madres began with their stories and experiences; they reflected in community with each other, and together they pieced survey questions together and then consulted with other parents in their community. although supported through resources from tni, the survey was done through a collaborative, community-lead process determined and guided by the madres. via this autoethnographic reflection, i illustrate how a decolonizing competency is one where the research is guided by the intellectual curiosities and humility of not-knowing and wanting to know, instead of the conventions of scientific inquiry. the desire to understand, document and tell their story on their terms, and to serve, advocate and improve one’s community, is the cornerstone to a decolonial competency. instead of adding knowledge to the cannon of social sciences that is reserved for a few, yet excludes the many, i maintain that research, and community psychology in particular, must strive to decolonize itself – where and how it begins, and who it serves. implications and possibilities for a decolonial competency the process of naming, claiming identities and discourse, what language to use for example, can help facilitate decolonial community engagement in community psychology practice. decoloniality, tied to the reclamation of land, resources and power while crucial to the broader decolonial project, or what maldonado-torres (2016) describes as the decolonial turn, is also fundamentally about the right to name oneself instead of being labeled or influenced by an outsider, such as a researcher. our autoethnographic reflections offer snapshots of moments where a decolonial competency was centered and put into practice in order to support the power, agency, and research training development of latinx students (janelle) and the madres emprendedoras (jesica). supporting the students and madres’ process to use language and knowledge of relevance to their experiences in order to appropriately cultivate their research skills and critical inquiry attests to the value of incorporating a decolonial competency in community psychology practice. an iterative process of critical, ethical reflexivity that unsettles a hegemonic community psychology practice rooted in western eurocentric perspectives, characterizes a decolonial competency in community psychology practice. the aims of unsettling or de-linking are to cultivate and amplify community voice, knowledge and power. attuned to the colonial gaze in research we therefore offer four specific principles toward engaging a decolonial competency in community psychology practice that build from our autoethnographic reflections. these principles, informed by the two lessons we described via our vignettes, include: 1) engaging in an critical, ethical reflexive practice of how colonial power is reproduced in language, or discourse, 2) de-centering power hierarchies in community settings via the development of mutual understanding and commitments, 3) fostering opportunities for co-learning that embrace multiple ways of knowing, difference and refusal and 4) cultivating collaborative research partnerships grounded in connection, especially accompaniment. together, these principles underscore the value of a decolonial competency in community psychology practice that acknowledges lived experience, community wisdom and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 relationality as fundamental sources of inquiry toward a liberatory, decolonizing praxis of social justice and change. in addition to these principles, and grounded in our autoethnographic vignettes, we offer two takeaways to help orient the budding (or seasoned) community psychology practitioner toward a decolonial competency. first, a decolonial competency that deconstructs academic language and discourse can facilitate a community psychologist’s practice of engaging in a critical, ethical reflexive practice. this requires embracing values of cultural humility, compassionate self-criticism and openness to unlearn in order to un-learn/relearn with and alongside communities. keeping these values central to a community psychology practice allows the practitioner to become attuned to the community’s needs, and less complacent and complicit in the use and application of discourses that do not serve nor uplift the community. second, a decolonial competency necessitates that practitioners engage in deep introspection and an interrogation of our training, and how this can reproduce and sustain the coloniality of power in knowledge in unconscious yet significant ways. we must contend with how ways of thinking, being and relating to others in the context of research have kept dynamics or structures of hegemonic power intact. what are the consequences of engaging in a community psychology practice that prioritizes community empowerment, yet expects community voices to be analyzed, contextualized and theorized in particulars ways often without community engagement or input? we need not speak for the communities as they speak for themselves. we refuse to partake in the hegemonic reproduction of knowledge as we acknowledge that communities hold wisdom and a repertoire of knowledge, language, discourses and practices that can guide them. and, if we humble ourselves, they can guide us as well into more meaningfully applying our skills and resources to better meet their needs and interests – not those of the academe, or even the discipline. a decolonial competency invites us to engage in ongoing reflection, specifically a critical ethical reflexive practice that is a response to the socio-historical, cultural and political/social conditions of communities. we engage a decolonial competency by questioning what we say, do and think, and who it serves. we remain mindful – even vigilant of ourselves – and critically, ethically reflecting by asking: who benefits from this work? is it serving the community, academia and/or the institution? in decolonizing our community psychology practice, and our ways of knowing and being, we encourage practitioners to go beyond surface-level reflections, and to dig deep into how we have been trained to see – through a colonial and colonizing gaze – the community as “other” when in fact we are often embedded in similar communities (dutta, 2018). our lessons and reflections urge practitioners to strive for connection, as this allows us to humanize the community. our experiences illustrate how we have come to listen and talk less – with students and madres. we embrace not knowing how the research process will unfold, yet prioritizing the direction, voice, agency and power led by the community, whether these are high school students or mexican immigrant, working-class women who are madres. our autoethnographic reflections highlight the value of decoloniality as a community psychology competency to support community leadership, agency, voice and power. competencies that reflect decoloniality in theory and praxis, as well as the development of anti-colonial research approaches, relationships and modes of inquiry that must begin with a recognition that community knowledge and lived experience are fundamentally important as http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 communities work toward socially just liberation. references behar, r. 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(2012). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. zed books ltd.. spry, t. (2001). performing autoethnography: an embodied methodological praxis. qualitative inquiry, 7(6), 706-732. tejada, c. & espinoza, m. (2003). toward a decolonizing pedagogy: social justicereconsidered. educational foundations and social studies faculty publications. 26, 1-9. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/article2360.html http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/article2360.html http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/article2360.html community psychology values and community-based participatory research joy agner1 keywords: community-based participatory research; participatory research; action research; community psychology methods; community psychology values author biographies: joy agner, is a community psychologist, dancer, occupational therapist and post-doctoral fellow at the social science research institute at the university of hawai`i at mānoa. agner engages community members in participatory research to promote more efficient, empowering, and equitable health systems and services. recommended citation: agner, j. (2021). community psychology values and community-based participatory research, global journal of community psychology practice, 12(1), 1 10. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: joy agner, university of hawai`i at mānoa, 2530 dole street honolulu hi, 96822. email: joyagner@hawaii.edu 1 university of hawai`i at mānoa http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:joyagner@hawaii.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 community psychology values and community-based participatory research conventional research involves participants primarily as sources of data (wallerstein & duran, 2006), relies upon a positivist tradition wherein researchers are seen as neutral, objective observers (bhawuk, 2008), and is not necessarily concerned with the application of findings to improve the social conditions of those involved. in many places around the world, this has led to distrusting relationships between communities and researchers, and has also likely limited the potential for research to help ameliorate social problems (smith, 1999). in this article, action research is presented as an alternative to conventional research practices, and is examined in relation to four community psychology values. a brief history and the main principles of action research are described, followed by a discussion of its evolution to participatory, or communitybased participatory research (cbpr), and connection to four values identified by bond (2016). these include: 1) empowerment, 2) promotion of social justice, equity and social change, 3) attention to diversity in its various forms, and 4) adoption of an ecological perspective and multilevel analyses. each value is discussed in terms of theoretical alignment as well as challenges and successes in application to research and practice. this work deepens the rationale for the use of action research in community psychology, and may be used as a lens to evaluate practice and research. introduction the society for community research and action highlights participatory community research as one of the core competencies for community psychologists (tebes, 2016). however, community psychology literature lacks an explicit examination of how participatory research aligns with or departs from community psychology values. to fill that gap, four values of community psychology are used to examine the appropriateness of action research for community psychology, and to describe some of the challenges inherent in that form of research and practice. bond (2016) identified these themes while editing the most recent apa handbook of community psychology, and they resonate with other expressions of community psychology values (rappaport, 1977, 1981; tebes, 2016). first, a brief introduction to the main principles and history of action research are outlined, followed by a discussion of each value, including challenges and successes in application through action research. history of action research: northern and southern roots the term “action research” was coined by lewin (1946), a social psychologist who studied discrimination against minorities in labor and neighborhood settings. beginning in the 1930s, lewin’s work focused on intergroup relations, and he noticed that labor organizing based on participation rather than coercion led to greater productivity, reduction in stereotype biases, and better relationships across minority groups (adelman, 1993). lewin’s emotional connection to the lived reality of the people he was working encouraged him to critically evaluate his own research methods, process, and impact. in 1943, lewin published a landmark paper on action research in which he states simply, “research that produces nothing but books will not suffice”(p. 34). instead, scholars should dedicate themselves to research that led to, or incorporated, social action. lewin critiqued the notion that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 communities required outside expertise to understand their own situations, and posited that researchers had as much to learn from communities as communities had to learn from them (adelman, 1993; lewin, 1946). the principles of co-learning and emphasis on social action were also fundamental to social movements that were developing independently in latin america not long after lewin’s paper on action research was published (reich et al., 2007). these social movements were informed by marxism and liberation theology. they were based on the premise that those who were poor and disenfranchised by colonialism had equal worth, and that communities should reclaim power through cooperative enterprises, education, and land ownership (comas-díaz et al., 1998). again, it was not only the end goal of liberation that was important, but the process. in the case of education, paolo freire (2000) argued that knowledge was power, but he made clear in his landmark work, pedagogy of the oppressed, that the purpose of education was not to fill the minds of those involved, but to engage them in critical inquiry – to uncover the knowledge they held from experience. explaning his stance on process, freire (2000) stated, “no pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors” (p. 54). these two traditions can be referred to as the northern and southern theoretical roots of action research (wallerstein, duran, oetzel, & minkler, 2017). they have differences that reflect these histories. the northern tradition tends to focus on utilizing collaboration to improve existing systems and to inform interventions, while the southern tradition tends to focus on the damages of colonization, and emancipatory research aimed to challenge political domination and internalized oppression (wallerstein et al., 2017). however, both are rooted in the principles of co-learning, collaboration, reciprocity, and social action. core principles of action research several decades later, the principles at the heart of action research remain unchanged, but there has been a multiplication of terms that embrace the same ethos and philosophy. some examples include participatory action research, community-based participatory action research, partner-based participatory action research, emancipatory research, critical action research, popular epidemiology, and street science (wallerstein et al., 2017). several scholars have reviewed these approaches and found certain disciplines favor certain terms, and certain terms indicate application to a specific context (for example, tribal participatory research, or industrial action research), but the core philosophies remain the same (jason, 2004; wallerstein et al., 2017). here, community-based participatory research (cbpr) is used interchangeably with participatory action research (par) or action research, which is in keeping with several recent reviews and books on action research (israel, parker, & becker, 1998; jason, 2004; nueces, hacker, digirolamo, & hicks, 2012; wallerstein et al., 2017). the core tenets of cbpr include: 1) an emphasis on co-learning, 2) development of trusting, collaborative relationships between researchers and practitioners, 3) involvement of participants in all phases of research from question development to dissemination, and 4) intention and attempts to utilize the research to improve social conditions (israel, eng, amy, schulz j., & edith parker, 2013). in sum, the defining features of cbpr are that the dynamic between researcher and participant is changed so participants are engaged in the inquiry, and that practice is seamlessly integrated with research process (wallerstein et al., 2017, p. 28). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 in conventional research, practice (or application) is downstream of research findings. it is an eventual hope. in cbpr action is part of the research process. developing meaningful relationships is the first and most important step, and it requires time, skills, and ongoing effort. relationship development is action and community practice. particularly in communities that have distrusting relationships with researchers based on prior abuses, this can be a long and difficult process. without this interpersonal work, however, there is no potential to do research collaboratively, to develop priorities as a team, or to implement changes based on research findings. this shift in perspective from subject as source of information to subject as actor aligns with four core values in community and cultural psychology, which individually examined below. action research and community psychology values empowerment an important distinction between conventional research and cbpr is that empowerment is viewed as essential to the process as well as the outcome. empowerment has both subjective and objective elements; i.e. the feeling of being empowered and having power (wallerstein, 1992). cbpr aims to increase both of these aspects of empowerment by involving participants as co-researchers rather than participants. unfortunately, claims of empowering research participants are made sometimes injudiciously, without any evidence of assessing empowerment outcomes among the participants (qualitatively or quantitatively) (see crawford sheare, 2008; skår, folkestad, smedal, & grytten, 2014). this is problematic because even the most egalitarian process can be manipulated, and words like “empowerment” are often used without theoretical clarity or critical self-reflection. however, a growing body of cbpr research has evaluated process outcomes specifically. for example, a retrospective ethnographic analysis of a photovoice project among african americans in texas found that over the five week project, photographs and elicited stories moved thematically from stories of disenfranchisement and feelings of helplessness, to a desire and sense of capability to act (carlson et al., 2006). researchers interpreted this as increased in critical consciousness and perceived efficacy that emerged from the group process. similar findings are reported in qualitative cbpr process research with indigenous y`upik communities in alaska (rasmus, 2014), youth engaged in hiv/aids prevention research (flicker, 2008), low-income graduate students (foster-fishman et al., 2005), and individuals with severe and persistent mental illness (schneider, 2010). these findings illustrate how cbpr blurs the lines between practice and research. by empowering community members through the process of cbpr the research is itself a type of intervention. it is a way of interacting with community members to promote a sense of empowerment, and also to develop power. jason and colleagues (2004) assert that cbpr can increase actual power by reducing or eliminating power differentials between academic and researcher. while power sharing is an important goal of cbpr, wallerstein et al. (2017) and others have argued that there is never a completely equal power balance. researchers may have power in certain ways and community members in others. furthermore, despite good intentions, researchers may unwittingly reproduce unequal power dynamics between university and community groups (p. 36). instead of aspiring to an unrealistic goal of erasing power differentials, power sharing and power shifting can be promoted in the following ways: making power differentials and positional privilege transparent (curry http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 stevens, 2012), developing lasting relationships based on trust, attempting to understand community power dynamics (wallerstein et al., 2017), and using guiding documents, such as collaboration evaluation tools and codes of conduct created by the community to assess equitable partnerships (andrews, cox, newman, & meadows, 2011; israel, parker, & becker, 1998). developing empowerment through partnerships is part of the practice aspect of cbpr, as is developing increased power through the promotion of social justice. promotion of social justice, equity and social change the second community psychology value, promotion of social justice, is at the heart of cbpr, and was an organizing principle in both northern and southern lineages of action research. in addition to creating a democratic and inclusive process lewin (1946) envisioned action research addressing external, systemic problems based on discrimination, economics, housing, and law. promoting social justice and equity is fundamentally tied to empowerment through the process of cbpr, but it also extends to the outcomes of cbpr research in communities and systems. although empirical comparison of social change outcomes of cbpr versus conventional research are difficult to find, theoretically, cbpr is more likely to produce social change from research findings than conventional research. this is because a) it engages people who are experiencing a problem in understanding it and trying to change it, thereby increasing ecological validity and engaging participants as change agents (jason, 2004), and b) desire for social action determines what is studied, how it is studied, and how it is disseminated (balcazar et al., 2004). myriad examples exist of cbpr projects that have informed or changed community programs and interventions. pruitt et al. (2018) outlined how the photovoice research influenced transformative change at the individual, program, community, and policy level among housing first clients in honolulu, hawaiʻi. the cbpr process created opportunities for housing first clients to redefine narratives on homelessness, countering those that were prevalent in the local media. collecting and amplifying these narratives as part of the cbpr process had inherent merit because it contradicted dehumanizing narratives about individuals experiencing homelessness, and it may have influenced policy decisions. the housing first photovoice exhibit was followed by an announcement that the program funding would be extended for another year, and that it would be extended to more hawaiian islands. attention to diversity in its various forms diversity is an organizing principle within cbpr as well as community psychology, because both are based on a social constructivist viewpoint that asserts multiple realities have worth and are essential to developing a complete picture of any situation, problem, or solution (bess, fisher, sonn, & bishop, 2002; gallimore, goldenberg, & weisner, 1993; wallerstein et al., 2017). this inclusion of diverse voices and experiences in the research process helps to promote epistemic power, which dutta (2016) defines as “the authority to construct what is considered legitimate and valid knowledge” (p. 329). a diversification of epistemic power, among people who may face discrimination based on race, class, geography, ethnicity, gender, ability, age, etc. allows a more complete picture to emerge, for social action to become more grounded in local realities, and for diversity experiences to be contextualized. to illustrate this point, i draw on an example from a cbpr process in a federally qualified health center in oʻahu: kokua kalihi valley http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 (kkv). kkv serves primarily low-income native hawaiian and pacific islander clients. many do not speak english as their first language, and many are first-generation immigrants from pacific islands. as part of an ongoing cbpr process, kkv held a series of listening circles where they asked the simple prompt, “share a story about the last time you felt healthy” (odom, jackson, derauf, inada, & aoki, 2019, p. 4). as they listened to the responses, the researchers learned and redefined the purpose of the work. based on several iterations of listening circles, they found that their clients defined health using four overlapping connections which they called pilinahā: connection to past and future, connection to place, connection to community, and connection to better self (odom et al., 2019). when these connections were shared with the medical professionals at kkv, they began to reframe and understand their interactions with their patients in new ways. for example, a doctor who had learned about pilinahā reflected on an interaction with a samoan patient with uncontrolled diabetes. he had advised her on all of the things that could happen to her if she did not control her illness. in response, she showed a photo of her grandson and expressed her pride that he was graduating high school and would be the first to go to college. he described, “at the time, i interpreted this abrupt change in topic as the patient’s denial of the seriousness of her disease. now i understand that she was trying to share what was important to her, what she valued, and her source of meaning and health” (p. 19). this reflects how diversifying epistemic power can affect how communities are perceived and responded to by people in positions of power. this shift in perspective also illustrates how research and practice are entwined in cbpr to promote social justice. currently, kkv is working to integrate pilinahā into their health system evaluation more broadly. it can provide a framework of how staff should be trained and engaged and what health actually means within this community. adoption of an ecological perspective and multilevel analyses this community psychology value is addressed last, because achieving an informed, locally-relevant, ecological perspective rests upon incorporating the three prior values into the research process. this work of relationship building and understanding dynamic, changing cultures is never finished. as communities evolve and change, cbpr can be instrumental in promoting justice across ecological levels by employing a wide diversity of methods. for example, leung, yen, and minkler (2004) describe strategies for shaping and modifying epidemiological research to incorporate cbpr principles. they argue that combining population health data with experiential knowledge increases the likelihood that their research can meaningfully inform community development, programs and policies. this has come to be described as participatory epidemiology, and is as a growing trend in population health research (bach et al., 2017). other examples of methodological diversity in cbpr include application to randomized-controlled trials (nueces, hacker, digirolamo, & hicks, 2012), social network analysis (lightfoot et al., 2014), participatory mapping (israel et al., 2013), and a wide variety of qualitative methods (castleden, garvin, & first nation, 2008; israel et al., 2013). this methodological diversity enhances our ability as community psychologists to capture some of the ecological complexity of the environments we work in, and to use those findings immediately to promote social change. conclusion this work outlines the core principles of action research (cbpr), describes the historical origins of those principles, and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 applies those principles to core community psychology, while highlighting challenges and successes in their application. by explicitly examining the relationship between cbpr and community psychology values, the importance of utilizing cbpr to inform practice and to guide community psychology research is underscored. there are limitations to this work. for one, this list of values is not exhaustive. other commonly cited community psychology values include a focus on prevention, mutual and informal support, a strengths-based focus, and even inclusion of participatory methods (rappaport, 1977, 1981; tebes, 2016). some community psychologists argue against unifying values or principles in community psychology, stating they pose the risk of causing division among community psychologists with a different philosophical or value orientation (dutta, 2016). another limitation is that there are several challenges to cbpr that are not addressed, such as confronting neocolonial aspects of the research process and historical trauma (fisher & ball, 2003; smith, 1999), determining what counts as meaningful participation in participatory research (flicker, 2008), and reconciling sometimes antithetical priorities between research funders and community priorities (yonas et al., 2006). despite those limitations, this work contributes novel perspective on how the four common values of community psychology are inter-related building blocks for action research, and how action research can be utilized to put into practice the values and aims of community psychology. references adelman, c. 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(1999). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. zed books; university of otago press ; distributed in the usa exclusively by st. martin’s press. tebes, j. k. (2016). reflections on the future of community psychology from the generations after swampscott: a commentary and introduction to the special issue. american journal of community psychology, 58(3–4), 229– 238. retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12110 wallerstein, n. (1992). powerlessness, empowerment, and health: implications for health promotion programs. american journal of health promotion: ajhp, 6(3), 197–205. wallerstein, n. b., & duran, b. (2006). using community-based participatory research to address health disparities. health promotion practice, 7(3), 312– 323. retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1177/15248399062 89376 wallerstein, nina, duran, b., oetzel, j. g., & minkler, m. (2017). community-based participatory research for health: advancing social and health equity. john wiley & sons. yonas, m. a., jones, n., eng, e., vines, a. i., aronson, r., griffith, d. m., white, b., & dubose, m. (2006). the art and science of integrating undoing racism with cbpr: challenges of pursuing nih funding to investigate cancer care and racial equity. journal of urban health, 83(6), 1004–1012. retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-0069114-x http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.3109/09638288.2013.808273 https://doi.org/10.3109/09638288.2013.808273 https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12110 https://doi.org/10.1177/1524839906289376 https://doi.org/10.1177/1524839906289376 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-006-9114-x https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-006-9114-x proceso de transformación comunitaria a través de las artes escénicas en dos escenarios comunitarios en puerto rico process of community transformation through the performing arts in two community settings in puerto rico yazmín e. maldonado peña palabras clave (keywords): universidad, comunidad, aprendizaje servicio, psicología comunitaria, vínculos, buenas prácticas (university, community, service learning, community psychology, bonds, good practices) author biography: yazmín e. maldonado peña es psicóloga social comunitaria y doctora en psicología por la universidad de puerto rico (upr), recinto de río piedras. también tiene un bachillerato en artes con concentración en trabajo socialde la upr, recinto de humacao. además, ha cursado estudios en danza contemporánea e improvisación coreográfica en el programa de danza de la escuela preparatoria del conversatorio de música de puerto rico (cmpr). por los pasados años se dedicado a la docencia universitaria en la universidad de puerto rico en carolina y en la universidad albizu, recinto de san juan. actualmente forma parte de investigaciones adscritas al departamento de salud de puerto rico para promocionar la equidad en salud y la salud mental comunitaria recommended citation: peña, y.e.m. (2022). proceso de transformación comunitaria a través de las artes escénicas en dos escenarios comunitarios en puerto rico. global journal of community psychology practice, 13(2), 1-18 retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: yazmín e. maldonado peña. email: yazmin.maldonado@upr.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:yazmin.maldonado@upr.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 proceso de transformación comunitaria a través de las artes escénicas en dos escenarios comunitarios en puerto rico resumen las artes comunitarias tienen la capacidad de generar procesos significativos de transformación en los distintos niveles de intervención psicosocial (individual, grupal, comunitario, institucional, político, cultural e ideológico). en este trabajo, analizamos los procesos de transformación comunitaria producto de la participación en proyectos comunitarios basados en artes escénicas. con el objetivo de obtener una perspectiva crítica, comparamos el proceso de transformación en dos tipos de comunidades: una geográfica (proyecto de vivienda pública) y una institucional (escuela alternativa basadas en artes). los hallazgos en la comunidad geográfica evidenciaron un proceso de transformación social-comunitaria a partir de: cambios en la percepción del arte como ‘mero adorno’, reconocimiento de su función protectora-preventiva; desarrollo de empowerment individual y colectivo, de redes sociales y de capital social; cambios estructurales e impacto en los sistemas sociales educativo y familiar. los hallazgos en la comunidad institucional incluyeron: transformaciones cognitivas sobre prejuicios y estereotipos sociales, aumento del interés de los/as familiares por las capacidades y logros de los/as participantes del arte, transformaciones institucionales y logros estéticos significativos. la participación comprometida y a largo plazo en las artes escénicas generó importantes puentes de solidaridad; mitigó disputas heredadas que reproducían violencias y las transformó en acciones cooperativas y en un sentido de familia. las artes escénicas promovieron un nuevo sentido de identidad y pertenencia al involucrar y comprometer a diferentes sectores de la comunidad en un objetivo común. el carácter comunitario que adquirieron las artes escénicas fue una herramienta crucial para el restablecimiento de relaciones y el desarrollo de nuevos vínculos comunitarios. abstract community arts have the ability to generate significant processes of transformation at different levels of psychosocial intervention (individual, group, community, institutional, political, cultural and ideological). in this work, we analyze the processes of community transformation resulting from participation in community projects based on performing arts. to gain a critical perspective, we compare the transformation process in two types of communities: a geographic one (public housing project) and an institutional one (alternative arts-based school). the findings in the geographic community evidenced a process of social-community transformation based on: changes in the perception of art as 'mere ornament', recognition of its protective-preventive function; development of individual and collective empowerment, social networks and social capital; structural changes and impact on educational and family social systems. findings in the institutional community included: cognitive transformations about prejudices and social http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 stereotypes, increased interest of relatives in the abilities and achievements of art participants, institutional transformations, and significant aesthetic achievements. committed and long-term participation in the performing arts generated important bridges of solidarity; it mitigated inherited disputes that reproduced violences and transformed them into cooperative actions and a sense of family. the performing arts promoted a new sense of identity and belonging by involving and engaging different sectors of the community in a common goal. the community character acquired by the performing arts was a crucial tool for reestablishing relationships and developing new community bonds. contexto histórico y realidad actual de puerto rico conocida como la colonia más antigua del mundo, puerto rico, es una isla-archipiélago que enfrenta un entramado social complejo, cuya comprensión debe poner en perspectiva tanto su contexto histórico como su realidad sociopolítica (bbc mundo, 2017). históricamente, su situación política ha sido cuestionada por tratarse de un particular ‘estado libre asociado’ (ela) donde el ‘estatus colonial’ queda suplantado por un supuesto estado de autonomía democrática para la toma de decisiones al interior de la isla (bbc mundo, 2017). no obstante, se han denunciado tanto las contradicciones del llamado ela, como sus problemáticas ante el ejercicio de la democracia y ante las posibilidades de desarrollo económico del país (cruz-martínez, 2017). en 1952 (año de instauración del ela) puerto rico pasó a tener “autoridad” sobre su política interna (supeditada a las leyes estadounidenses) pero sin adquirir control sobre sus relaciones exteriores (bbc mundo, 2017; cruz-martínez, 2017). en 2016, de cara a la crisis fiscal, a la degradación del crédito del país a categoría chatarra, a su descualificación para asumir nuevos préstamos económicos y ante la imposibilidad de declararse en bancarrota (por no ser un territorio incorporado a los eeuu) puerto rico acudió al congreso estadounidense en búsqueda de soluciones (noticel, 2014; bbc mundo, 2017). en este momento histórico, el grado de autonomía interna del país terminó de extinguirse con la aprobación de la ley promesa (puerto rico oversight, management, and economic stability act), mediante la cual eeuu impuso una junta de control fiscal (jcf), un organismo encargado de controlar y auditar todas las acciones financieras del gobierno de puerto rico (cruz-martínez, 2017). en el 2017, la jfc enmendó arbitrariamente el presupuesto aprobado por el gobierno de puerto rico – dejando en evidencia la realidad colonial y falta de autonomía de la isla – pero sobre todo dejando a la ciudadanía desprovista de mecanismos económicos reales y urgentes para enfrentar las crisis fiscal, social y ambiental que ha confrontado en las últimas décadas (cruz-martínez, 2017). la imposición de una jcf ha tenido serias implicaciones en el panorama político, económico y social del país. a finales del 2017, la isla vivió el duro azote de dos fuertes huracanes y quedó devastada en más de un aspecto: económico, estructural, emocional, psicosocial, ambiental, entre otros (bonilla, 2020; wiscovitch padilla, 2018). el huracán maría dejó un saldo de 4,645 muertos/as y socavó las condiciones de pobreza previamente existentes, dejando a la mayoría de las familias sin acceso a los servicios http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 básicos para sobrevivir (agua potable, techo y/o vivienda segura, ventilación y oxígeno para enfermos/as encamados/as, acceso a servicios de salud básicos y especializados y acceso a alimentos) (bonilla, 2020; sosapascual, 2018). esta situación ahondó las condiciones de pobreza en la isla y dejó a muchas familias sin vivienda, sin techo o en condiciones inseguras (bonilla, 2020). la situación general de la isla empeoró a comienzos del 2020, tras enfrentar un sinnúmero de fuertes temblores y terremotos que devastaron muchas comunidades (dejando nuevamente a familias sin sus hogares1 in techo y sin refugios seguros a los cuales acudir) (díaz-ramos, 2020; robles & rodríguez, 2020). sin embargo, tales eventos medioambientales han sido solamente el telón de fondo de una crítica realidad previamente existente. ante este difícil contexto, algunos/as líderes comunitarios/as han denunciado la inacción del gobierno y la ineficiencia de las medidas implementadas para afrontar los embates del medioambiente, señalando que el verdadero desastre lo constituye la crisis de gobernanza, la falta de transparencia gubernamental, la corrupción y el colonialismo (bonilla, 2020; gelardi, 2020; wiscovitch padilla, 2018). en este sentido, nos encontramos de cara a una crisis colonial ahondada por la inminente crisis económica, desencadenada a su vez en diversas crisis sociales, confrontada por los estragos de los inevitables pero impredecibles desastres naturales, pero sobre todo precarizada por un estilo de gobernanza corrupto (atiles, 2020; bonilla, 2020; gelardi, 2020; wiscovitch padilla, 2018). dicho panorama nos ofrece una idea de la situación 1 durante el huracán maría, muchas familias cuyas residencias ubicaban en zonas rurales (con pobre infraestructura), en zonas inundables o casas de madera (ubicadas en sectores pobres del país) perdieron sus techos. a tres años del paso del general del país, una bastante complicada, precaria e insostenible para las comunidades más vulnerables. una mirada a las problemáticas principales de las comunidades en puerto rico no es posible, o por lo menos realista, presentar una radiografía de las comunidades puertorriqueñas sin enmarcarla desde el contexto anteriormente planteado – o lo que bonilla (2020) ha llamado la ‘colonialidad del desastre’. tampoco es posible referirse de manera homogénea a “las comunidades”, ya que las realidades que manifiestan unas y otras son heterogéneas y diversas. sin embargo, a continuación, pretendo ofrecer un contexto común sobre la mayoría de las comunidades puertorriqueñas y presentar sus problemáticas más apremiantes. del mismo modo, no pretendo pasar por alto las fortalezas y capacidades de los diversos sectores del país. de cara a un gobierno que se caracteriza por un estilo de gobernanza corrupto, la fuerza y solidaridad comunitaria han mantenido la isla a flote y el valor de lo comunitario resalta como una estrategia de resistencia, movilización, democracia, resiliencia y sobre todo autogestión. no obstante, cuando hablamos de las principales problemáticas de nuestras comunidades perfilan los temas de violencia, criminalidad, desempleo, salarios de pobreza, educación precarizada, problemas de viviendas, pobre calidad de vida y falta de acceso a recursos, entre otros. huracán, muchas de estas residencias aún permanecen con los llamados techos azules (toldos de emergencia otorgados por la federal emergency management agency). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 vivienda segura y calidad de vida uno de los problemas más importante que se perfila en las comunidades del país es el acceso a viviendas asequibles y/o seguras. el problema de la vivienda segura ha sido uno que ha aquejado por años a las familias y comunidades puertorriqueñas (sobre todo a las comunidades más vulnerables ubicadas en zonas inundables o zonas rurales con pobre infraestructura). esta situación empeoró luego de los diversos desastres naturales que ha enfrentado la isla desde el 2017 al presente (bonilla, 2020). durante el huracán maría en dicho año, algunos de los refugios (incluyendo escuelas o edificios públicos) sufrieron grandes daños, los cuales escasamente han sido reparados por el gobierno (díaz-ramos, 2020). además, durante los eventos de terremotos del año 2020, las estructuras ya debilitadas volvieron a sufrir nuevos daños hasta hacerse completamente inseguras (ej. escuelas de la comunidad) o en ruinas (díaz-ramos, 2020). el gobierno de turno realizó pocos esfuerzos por reubicar a dichas comunidades en estructuras seguras, por lo que muchas familias (incluyendo niños/as, embarazadas y envejecientes) permanecieron por meses durmiendo en carros, casetas de campañas, carpas, entre otras; situación que se extendió incluso hasta el surgimiento de la pandemia del covid-19 (efe news, 2020; robles & rodríguez, 2020). además, debo añadir que el costo de las viviendas en puerto rico es uno extremadamente alto, lo que contrasta con el salario anual de muchas familias puertorriqueñas ubicadas bajo el umbral de pobreza (red state data center de puerto rico, 2019; caraballo-cueto & rodríguez-galí, 2018). salarios de pobreza, costo de vida y desempleo. son precisamente los salarios de pobreza una problemática crucial que enfrentan las comunidades puertorriqueñas en contraposición a los altos costos de vida en la isla. siendo un territorio asociado a los eeuu, puerto rico carece de la libertad para importar y exportar productos libremente con otros países, por lo que todo lo que llega a la isla debe pasar primero por los puertos estadounidenses elevando el costo de vida en la isla (nina, 2016). a pesar de que el salario mínimo en puerto rico es el mismo que en eeuu, el costo de alimentos en las áreas metropolitanas de puerto rico es 23% más alto que en las áreas metropolitanas de eeuu y el ingreso mediano es aproximadamente 60% menor que el de eeuu (hernández, valdés & gonzález, 2018). este elevado costo de vida hace que para los/as trabajadores/as no diestros/as (o con baja escolaridad) sea muy difícil subsistir con menos del salario mínimo y a su vez los/as trabajadores/as educados/as en diversas industrias devengan salarios similares o muy cercanos al salario mínimo (hernández, valdés & gonzález, 2018). a este panorama se suma la alta tasa de desempleo que enfrenta la isla, que actualmente es del 8.3% de la población, esto es, aproximadamente 89,000 personas (departamento del trabajo y recursos humanos, 2021). además, expertos/as arguyen que la situación del salario mínimo no incentiva a los grupos poblacionales que cualifican para la mayoría de los programas de transferencia por ingresos como el pan, medicaid, seguro social por desempleo, sección 8 y tanf ya que estos reciben un nivel de beneficios cuyo valor monetario total es más alto o similar a la remuneración de un trabajo a tiempo completo, a salario mínimo (hernández, valdés & gonzález, 2018). debido al contraste entre el alto costo de vida vis a vis los bajos salarios, adquirir una vivienda propia, segura y asequible es un reto para muchas familias. muchas comunidades enfrentan problemas de infraestructura en http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 sus viviendas y/o acceso a recursos básicos como agua potable y/o estabilidad en el servicio de energía eléctrica (un servicio de primera necesidad que se ha visto severamente afectado por el embate de los huracanes y terremotos y tras su reciente privatización) (sin comillas, 2021). espiral de violencia, criminalidad, falta de acceso a la cultura y educación. otro problema crítico que enfrentan las comunidades puertorriqueñas es la ola de violencia y criminalidad, particularmente en los sectores más empobrecidos del país. muchos sectores residenciales (mejor conocidos como viviendas públicas o caseríos) enfrentan espirales de violencia y criminalidad como consecuencia de las pugnas derivadas de la economía subterránea sostenida por el narcotráfico y los llamados “puntos de drogas”. a esto se añade, el hecho de que la educación pública (primaria, secundaria y a nivel superior) ha sido precarizada haciéndola cada vez más inaccesible para los sectores con pocos recursos económicos e incluso para la clase media. por lo tanto, un problema subyacente a la violencia y criminalidad es la falta de acceso a una educación primaria de calidad, a educación superior pública, así como al arte y a la cultura. son muchos los retos que históricamente han enfrentado las comunidades puertorriqueñas. este trabajo fue motivado por la curiosidad de conocer las herramientas para la resiliencia y el desarrollo de lazos solidarios, así como la capacidad de transformación comunitaria que el acceso a las experiencias artístico-educativas puede ofrecer a los grupos y comunidades. en esa dirección, propuse contextualizar la pertinencia del 2 por lo general se considera el teatro, la danza y la música como las principales artes escénicas, desarrollo de proyectos comunitarios basados en artes escénicas en: la promoción de los valores de la psicología social comunitaria (psc), el adelanto de su objetivo de transformación comunitaria y su compromiso con el cambio social. psicología social y comunitaria: terreno fértil para las artes comunitarias las artes escénicas2 – conocidas también como representacionales – se distinguen por compartir su carácter efímero, esto es: “ocurren en vivo, sobre el escenario, y no pueden ser “vividas” si uno no se encuentra presente en el mismo espacio-tiempo de los artistas” (gonzález & ruiz, 2009; p.123). su adjetivo ‘escénicas’ hace referencia al tipo de arte que ocurre exclusivamente en vivo, donde la presencia real a través de cuerpos vivos no se inscribe en formatos cristalizados (como fotografía o libros) sino que es presencia viva y energía que en el presente interactúa a su vez con la presencia de los/as espectadores/as. por tanto, este tipo de arte es por naturaleza vinculante y relacional, permitiendo un encuentro cada vez único entre actores, espectadores, cuerpos, presencias, voces y sonidos (gonzález-ruiz, 2008). son precisamente tales cualidades de las artes escénicas las que las hacen una herramienta excepcionalmente útil para el campo de la psc – ayudando a promover las principales metas y valores de la disciplina, entiéndase el cambio social, la transformación comunitaria y la justicia social (puga-rayo, 2012). las artes comunitarias, por su parte, son una herramienta de naturaleza expresiva, creativa aunque otras disciplinas artísticas pudieran ser consideradas como arte escénico. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 y procesual3 el concepto engloba una multiplicidad de experiencias que vinculan la capacidad creativa individual, la realidad y creatividad colectiva y el contexto social (nardone, 2010; palacios-garrido, 2009). nardone (2010) destaca el carácter procesual y la naturaleza diversa del campo al indicar que el arte comunitario se trata de un proceso que puede incluir diversos lenguajes artísticos tales como: artes plásticas, teatro, música, danza, fotografía, video, así como también multimedia, circo y creación literaria. finalmente, puntualiza que las artes comunitarias pueden referirse a experiencias promovidas por actores diversos (programas de arte comunitario, grupos de artistas profesionales o no profesionales y/o asociaciones culturales) y desde espacios variados (organizaciones de servicio social, centros de arte performativo, gobiernos locales, organizaciones religiosas, centros comunitarios, clubes de jóvenes, programas y centros de arte, programas especiales en el ámbito escolar, programas especiales para la juventud y/o espacios públicos) (nardone, 2010). el quehacer disciplinario que nos convoca se ve reflejado a través de distintas maneras de nombrar la arena teórica (sea psicología social, psicología comunitaria, psicología social-comunitaria) dependiendo del país o la corriente teórica a la que responda su origen (jiménez-domínguez, 2004; miranda gierbolini, 2005). conceptualizadas como un espectro de posibilidades desde las cuales gestar la intervención psicosocial, política e ideológica, la psicología comunitaria y la psicología social (o psicología social comunitaria como particularmente la nombramos en puerto rico) comparten su 3 el término ‘procesual’ en este caso se utiliza en referencia al ‘arte procesual’ o ‘arte en proceso’, en inglés process art. el movimiento artístico compromiso con la transformación crítica, el empowerment comunitario y el cambio social en pro de la justicia social origen (jiménezdomínguez, 2004; miranda gierbolini, 2005). la psc – como disciplina que integra la ps y la pc – se define como “una psicología de relaciones creada para un mundo relacional, donde interesan las formas específicas de relación entre personas unidas por lazos identitarios construidos en relaciones históricamente establecidas, que a su vez construyen y delimitan un campo: la comunidad” (puga-rayo, 2012; p. 202). partiendo de lo antes planteado, podemos afirmar que las artes escénicas (por su naturaleza vinculante y relacional) y las artes comunitarias (como concepto amplio que da paso a una multiplicidad de experiencias basadas en las artes y desarrolladas por un colectivo que comparte una identidad) se presentan como disciplinas cónsonas con los valores de la psc y como herramientas excepcionalmente útiles para la promoción y consecución de sus metas (león-cedeño, 2010; puga-rayo, 2012). sus cualidades permiten a la psc elaborar diversas metodologías de intervención psicosocial en múltiples niveles, pero particularmente en los niveles extra individuales desde donde es idóneo potenciar el cambio y la transformación comunitaria, social, política e ideológica. por tanto, en el presente trabajo elaboraré sobre el rol de las artes escénicas en la promoción de la transformación comunitaria, discutiré las implicaciones para el cambio social y para el desarrollo de nuevas relaciones solidarias y esbozaré recomendaciones para el diseño e implementación de futuras intervenciones comunitarias basadas en artes escénicas. procesual está más enfocado en el proceso que en el objeto de arte en sí mismo o el producto final. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 método interesada por las disciplinas artísticas tales como la danza, poesía y el teatro y desde muy pequeña siendo testigo de cómo estás tienen un potencial de transformación tanto a nivel personal como colectivo, me propuse desde este trabajo documentar y analizar dicho poder transformativo de manera formal y sistemática. reconociendo la complejidad de análisis de los fenómenos de transformación personal y colectiva, el presente trabajo se desarrolló en un periodo de cuatro años que abarcaron la conceptualización, evaluación y selección de los escenarios de investigación, el establecimiento de acuerdos colaborativos con las comunidades y los/as participantes del estudio, el cumplimientos de los procesos administrativos requeridos y de las autorizaciones éticas institucionales, el reclutamiento de voluntarios/as, jueces y transcriptores/as para el equipo de investigación, y la recopilación de datos, análisis de contenido, organización, análisis y presentación de los hallazgos. el objetivo general de esta investigación fue examinar y explicar cuál fue el rol de las artes escénicas (específicamente de la danza y el teatro) en los procesos de transformación comunitaria de dos comunidades puertorriqueñas. de manera específica, comparé el proceso de transformación comunitaria resultante de la implementación de proyectos basados en artes escénicas en una comunidad geográfica versus una comunidad institucional (krause, 2001). para esto, elaboré un diseño metodológico cualitativo-comparativo en el que consideré tanto las particularidades como los aspectos comparables de cada escenario. a continuación, en la figura 1, presento el modelo del diseño metodológico y detallo los aspectos para los cuales identifiqué figura 1. diagrama del diseño metodológico (modelo cualitativo-comparativo) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 comparaciones en cada proyecto de arte, así como las principales las técnicas utilizadas para recopilar los datos. según presentado en el diagrama anterior, seleccioné dos escenarios de investigación: 1) una comunidad geográfica (escenario 1: residencial luis lloréns torres) y 2) una comunidad institucional (escenario 2: crearte, inc.). en el residencial luis lloréns torres (un proyecto de vivienda pública en el área metropolitana del país) seleccioné particularmente el taller de teatro comunitario y en crearte, inc. (una organización sin fines de lucro) seleccioné el programa crea tu arte. el proceso de selección de los escenarios de investigación fue uno riguroso para el cual utilicé una rúbrica con criterios específicos para la preevaluación de cada comunidad. esta rúbrica facilitó la selección de comunidades con características realmente comparables y con proyección de continuidad a largo plazo de sus proyectos, de manera que – una vez obtenidas las autorizaciones de los comités de ética institucional – pudiésemos implementar la investigación sin riesgos a que el programa desapareciera en el proceso4. de los criterios considerados en la rúbrica los más importantes fueron: 1) la ubicación geográfica del proyecto (ambos proyectos están ubicados en la zona metropolitana del país, específicamente en la capital), 2) la duración del proyecto desde su origen hasta el momento de la selección (seleccionamos proyectos que tenían una trayectoria de entre 10 a 15 años lo que nos permitiría realizar un análisis retrospectivo de la evolución de los proyectos y por ende de 4 ] en puerto rico la estabilidad y continuidad de muchos de los programas comunitarios basados en artes se ve constantemente afectada por la ausencia o asignación de fondos gubernamentales cada año fiscal. esto, a su vez, depende de los/as los procesos de transformación derivados durante la implementación de los mismos) y 3) los tipos de arte utilizados (elemento que también comparamos y evaluamos su impacto sobre la transformación según el tipo de arte utilizada). previo a la selección de estas dos comunidades, visité diversos escenarios (comunidades, instituciones, programas/proyectos) que contaran con proyectos comunitarios basados en diversas artes (visuales, plásticas, escénicas, entre otras) y entrevisté a los/as líderes, gerentes, coordinadores/as y/o directores/as de los programas. una vez evaluados todos los proyectos visitados y analizados los resultados de la rúbrica, seleccioné los dos escenarios de la investigación dando prioridad a los primeros dos criterios (ubicación y duración). por último, luego de evaluar los tipos de arte mayormente utilizados por los programas, limité la investigación a únicamente artes escénicas. partiendo tanto de la revisión de literatura (como de mis intereses artísticos personales), seleccioné un escenario que utilizara el teatro (escenario 1 – taller de teatro comunitario) y otro escenario que trabajara con danza – en este caso danzas culturales, específicamente bomba y plena – (escenario 2 – programa crea tu arte). cabe destacar que el programa crea tu arte, no es exclusivamente sobre danzas culturales, sino que un programa que incluye y combina diferentes estrategias de educación artísticas que incluyen: danzas, teatro, movimiento corporal, circo, pintura, yoga, deportes, entre otras. las entrevistas realizadas incluyeron tanto a participantes líderes y gobernantes de turno, de los presupuestos asignados y de los recortes presupuestarios a los proyectos comunitarios. las artes y los deportes por lo general son los primeros en afectarse con tales recortes. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 que formaron parte de las clases de danzas culturales como de los grupos que tuvieron experiencia en teatro y movimiento corporal. el procedimiento para la recolección de datos incluyó desde reuniones con el personal, líderes y coordinadores/as de proyectos, hasta visitas a los cursos y ensayos para la realización de entrevistas grupales con los/as participantes del arte, citas individuales con los/as facilitadores/as del arte para realizar entrevistas individuales, revisión de documentos administrativos oficiales y otras técnicas etnográficas (conversaciones informales, observaciones y anotaciones sobre la dinámica cotidiana de los proyectos, visitas a las clases de danza y teatro, visitas a los ensayos de obras teatrales y visitas a obras teatrales y presentaciones de fin de curso). hallazgos a continuación, presento los hallazgos más importantes y pertinentes en cada uno de los escenarios de la investigación. presento en primer lugar los hallazgos correspondientes al proyecto de vivienda pública (escenario a: taller de teatro comunitario del residencial luis lloréns torres). al final de la sección presento los hallazgos relacionados a la escuela alternativa (escenario b: programa crea tu arte de crearte, inc.). es importante señalar que se presentan los hallazgos más sobresalientes y de relevancia para esta publicación, sin profundizar en todos los hallazgos emergentes de este trabajo investigativo. escenario a: taller de teatro comunitario en el escenario a, el residencial luis lloréns torres (mejor conocido como lloréns), examinamos el proceso de transformación comunitaria del taller de teatro comunitario (conocido como taller de teatro viviendo el arte o grupo vea) desde su fundación en el 1997 y su evolución posterior en el taller de teatro entre líneas (existente al momento de la recopilación de datos). el grupo vea surgió como una opción económicamente asequible (libre de costo y de carácter voluntario) para aquellos/as interesados/as en el arte, con el propósito de generar un espacio lúdico y de esparcimiento (que fuera unisex y que brindara opciones de participación a los varones de la comunidad y no sólo a las féminas). el objetivo primordial al desarrollar esta iniciativa fue posibilitar un espacio de ocio y de desarrollo personal para prevenir que los jóvenes (principalmente varones) se inmiscuyeran en las drogas, delincuencia y otros males sociales. el grupo vea comenzó con un pequeño grupo de niños/as (entre 6 a 9 años) haciendo estampas navideñas en la comunidad y evolucionó exponencialmente hasta ser considerado el primer movimiento de teatro comunitario de amplia envergadura en el área metropolitana del país. a dicha evolución le denominaron el “boom de vea”, contando con más de 60 integrantes clasificados en tres subgrupos: vea kids, vea teens y vea. a partir del 2010, el grupo vea pasó un proceso de transición de liderato y membresía y evolucionó a lo que se nombró taller de teatro entre líneas (organizado en 2013-2014) siguiendo la estructura que ya había sido desarrollada por vea. en términos del teatro comunitario en lloréns el primer hallazgo importante fue la transformación que vivió la comunidad al pasar de una postura de ‘resistencia’ a una de ‘aceptación’ hacia el grupo de teatro. en palabras del grupo pionero de teatro, a pesar de que en la comunidad había un teatro disponible “…al grupo de teatro, no le podían prestar el teatro, porque el teatro era para actividades que se vinieran a hacer.” los padres y madres de los/as jóvenes de teatro se organizaron y solicitaron a la administración del residencial que se http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 cambiara el reglamento que indicaba que el teatro era exclusivamente para el uso de actividades externas a la comunidad. en este sentido, hubo una transformación dual al lograr que: a) los padres de los/as jóvenes que participaban del grupo de teatro se organizaran para solicitar y lograr que b) la administración cambiara el reglamento que indicaba que el teatro era exclusivamente para el uso de actividades especiales. esto se trató de una transformación tangible en la medida en que posibilitó que el grupo de teatro tuviera un espacio propio, seguro e ideal para continuar organizando y mejorando las actividades de arte comunitario. otro hallazgo importante relacionado a este primer hallazgo de ‘resistencia vs aceptación’ fue el cambio en la percepción del arte que tenían los familiares, miembros y residentes de la comunidad. cuando los/as jóvenes y adolescentes de la comunidad comenzaron a interesarse por hacer arte e involucrarse en el grupo de teatro comunitario, varios de los padres y familiares cercanos a estos/as mostraban y expresaban prejuicios sobre la participación (particularmente de los varones) en el arte. no obstante, con el paso del tiempo esta percepción se transformó radicalmente al ver el impacto tan beneficioso que estaba teniendo el teatro tanto en sus integrantes como en el resto de la comunidad. en ese sentido, parte de la transformación fue la problematización de prejuicios y estereotipos sobre el ‘género del arte’, ya que se cuestionó la idea de que las artes son únicamente para mujeres o “sólo para gays.” otro estereotipo alrededor del concepto de arte que se problematizó fue el rol verdadero del arte (sus beneficios reales) versus la idea de que 5 jerga coloquialmente utilizada en puerto rico para referirse a personas criminales, relacionadas al mundo del narcotráfico, armas y violencia. hacer arte es simplemente una “pérdida de tiempo.” el cambio en la percepción del arte implicó a su vez transformaciones a nivel cognitivo en las personas de la comunidad. el taller de teatro comunitario fue conformado inicialmente mayormente por varones de la comunidad (entre el 70 a 80% de los integrantes del grupo fueron varones) y su líder (un joven varón de 15 años al momento de fundar el taller) desarrollaba guiones que aludían principales a los problemas e intereses de los jóvenes varones de la comunidad para que estos pudieran identificarse con las temáticas y trabajar con sus problemas mientras enviaban un mensaje a la comunidad mediante su arte. en el contexto del proyecto de vivienda pública, la inserción de los varones en las artes y la participación del grupo de teatro ayudó a reivindicar la imagen del varón como ‘maleante’5 – un estereotipo que aún prevalece con referencia a los varones de la comunidad, pero que a través del grupo de teatro se logró problematizar. las transformaciones antes descritas fueron dando paso a un proceso amplio e in crescendo de transformación comunitaria en este escenario en el cual no sólo la comunidad paso de resistencia a aceptación, sino de aceptación a apoyo comunitario. la comunidad comenzó a apoyar abiertamente todas las iniciativas del grupo de teatro – desde asuntos como la confección de los vestuarios necesarios para las obras hasta la participación en un reality show organizado por el grupo vea donde miembros de la comunidad (externos al grupo de teatro) fueron los/as protagonistas. esto a su vez implicó un cambio en la cultura general de la http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 comunidad en la medida que el grupo de teatro fue educando a la comunidad sobre lo que significa una cultura de teatro al mismo tiempo que instruyó a la comunidad a disfrutar del teatro como una herramienta lúdica, de ocio y cultural. el grupo de teatro comenzó a tener un rol importante en lloréns al representar un modelo y ejemplo a seguir para los/as jóvenes que los veían y que a su vez querían tener un espacio para desarrollar sus talentos y descubrir sus potencialidades. además del grupo de teatro convertirse en un ejemplo a seguir, comenzaron a gozar también de un mayor grado de respeto dentro de la comunidad al punto en que formar parte del grupo representaba una especie de protección ante la violencia que enfrentaba la comunidad: “no se metían con ellos/as” “éramos un ejemplo a seguir” “nos respetaban... por el simple hecho que éramos del grupo de teatro.” del mismo modo, el grupo vea (particularmente su líder) logró tener un rol crucial en las polarizaciones comunitarias relacionadas al narcotráfico y a los conocidos “puntos de drogas” al fungir como mediadores para lograr armonizar decisiones comunitarias entre sectores antagónicos. de este modo, el grupo de teatro recibió el reconocimiento de todos los sectores de la comunidad y, además, la participación en las artes comunitarias resultó en el desarrollo de empowerment tanto a nivel individual como colectivo. otros hallazgos en este escenario trascendieron la dimensión de ‘lo comunitario’ y tuvieron implicaciones a nivel social tales como: desarrollo de redes sociales intracomunitarias, capital social de enlace, cambio estructural e impacto otros sistemas sociales. uno de los logros más importantes de esta iniciativa fue el desarrollo de una producción teatral titulada por amor en el caserío que se presentó alrededor de la isla con más de 500 funciones (en la mayoría de los pueblos y teatros más populares del país) y que luego se llevó a la pantalla grande como producción cinematográfica de altura. este filme se utilizó, además, como recurso educativo para ofrecer talleres de prevención en el sistema educativo del país mediante un proyecto titulado transformando mi entorno escolar que impactó sobre 60,000 estudiantes. además, en el 2015 se comenzó a utilizar formalmente la película por amor en el caserío como parte del curso the evolution of latino/a culture y landscaping latin america en la universidad de harvard. escenario b: programa crea tu arte (crearte, inc.) el escenario b lo constituyó una organización sin fines de lucro conocida como crearte, inc., cuya sede principal está actualmente ubicada en el barrio san josé (santurce, puerto rico) desde su fundación en el 2001. crearte, inc. ofrece servicios psicoeducativos a jóvenes que han abandonado la escuela tradicional funcionando como un espacio educativo alternativo al incorporar las artes en sus intervenciones (crearte, 2021). para efectos de esta investigación nos enfocamos particularmente en el programa crea tu arte, un programa en el que los/ as jóvenes realizan actividades creativas y aprenden técnicas artísticas a la vez que desarrollan destrezas sociales, desarrollan valores y fortalecen su autoestima utilizando el elemento artístico como medio principal (crearte, 2021). un primer hallazgo en este escenario demostró cambios de percepción de manera multidireccional con respecto a la relación entablada entre arte-comunidad-institución y sus respectivas combinaciones (artecomunidad, comunidad-comunidad, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 comunidad-institución y arte-institución). los cambios de percepción por parte de la comunidad implicaron que la propia visión que mantenía la comunidad sobre sí misma se pudo transformar a medida que esta se involucró activamente en los proyectos de arte. en otras palabras, miembros de la comunidad al ver a otros miembros de la comunidad haciendo y creando algo estéticamente significativo – que anteriormente se creían incapaces de lograr – su percepción como comunidad se transformó al sentir que yo como comunidad también soy parte de esto también. esta transformación implicó a su vez una transformación en los prejuicios externos sobre la comunidad que otras comunidades y sectores pudieran mantener tales como los criminales, los cacos, las yales6. además del cambio en las distintas percepciones tanto de la comunidad hacia al arte, hacia sí misma y hacia la institución, otro hallazgo importante fue la transmutación de prejuicios comunitarios que habían sido heredados generación tras generación. del mismo modo, a través de la preparación artística (libretos, ensayos, ejercicios teatrales, discusiones reflexivas sobre las obras y sus temáticas, entre otras actividades asociadas al proceso creativo) se logró una transformación a nivel cognitiva sobre importantes estereotipos sociales (ej. estereotipos de género) que de continuar reforzándose pudiera generar a su vez cambios en la en la vida comunitaria y en la praxis social. otro de los hallazgos significativos en este contexto demostró un impacto en el subsistema familiar en varios aspectos. se manifestó un aumento en el interés por parte de familiares de los/as participantes en 6 expresiones utilizadas en puerto rico de manera peyorativa para referirse a un cierto estereotipo de persona (ya sea por sus gustos musicales, jerga cuanto a las capacidades y logros alcanzados mediante los proyectos artísticos. asimismo, las relaciones interpersonales entre los diferentes miembros del sistema familiar mejoraron significativamente a partir de la participación tanto de los hijos como de los padres en los proyectos artísticos organizados por la institución (los cuales fungieron como pretexto y espacio para la mentoría, acompañamiento, educación, desarrollo de destrezas interpersonales y guía de los padres/madres y/o encargados/as en la tarea de la crianza y educación de sus hijos/as). otras transformaciones comunitarias fueron de carácter institucional en la medida en que el propio staff (personal, facilitadores/as artísticos/as, coordinadores/as de proyectos) se transformaron conjuntamente en la medida en que conducían los proyectos de artes comunitarias. finalmente, podemos hablar de un hallazgo importante al registrarse importantes resultados estéticos y evolución en las destrezas artísticas de los/as participantes. si bien este último no es el objetivo primordial de la participación en los proyectos artísticos, resultó en un hallazgo enriquecedor que tuvo un impacto positivo tanto individual (autoestima, autorrealización) como comunitario (mostrar a la comunidad los logros, obtención de becas artísticas, entre otros). discusión los hallazgos antes esbozados en cada comunidad tienen un sinnúmero de implicaciones tanto para la praxis de la psc como para su meta central: el cambio social. si bien la dimensión desde la que pretendí analizar el proceso de transformación fue la comunitaria (sea geográfica o institucional) y/o moda utilizada, conducta social, nivel educativo y económico). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 los hallazgos mostraron la pertinencia y el rol potencial de las intervenciones comunitarias basadas en artes para la promoción de importantes transformaciones a nivel macrosocial (sobre todo evidenciadas desde el proyecto desarrollado en la comunidad geográfica). una particularidad que dentro de este escenario potenció un mayor alcance de la transformación fue la naturaleza del proyecto; una en que la participación de todos/as los/as participantes era de carácter voluntario. sin embargo, los/as participantes de este escenario expresaron que, aunque iban inicialmente buscando una actividad de ocio y lúdica, eventualmente comenzaron a obtener múltiples beneficios colaterales al participar comprometidamente y a largo plazo del taller de teatro comunitario. de este modo, el compromiso de los/as participantes y la duración de los proyectos (que sean iniciativas a largo plazo) son elementos que resultan determinantes en términos de lograr una verdadera transformación tanto personal, como comunitaria y/o social. en otras palabras, el nivel de impacto que tengan los proyectos basados en artes sobre la transformación social comunitaria va a estar relacionado con el compromiso de los participantes, la voluntariedad del proceso y la duración a largo plazo de los proyectos, entre otros factores. por otro lado, los beneficios que mencionan obtener los/as participantes de los proyectos están precisamente relacionados y derivan del rol de las artes escénicas en los procesos de transformación (individual, grupal, comunitaria, social). a la luz de los hallazgos, podemos destacar que el arte – de modo general – cumplió con roles tales como: factor protector/preventivo, promover la interacción y la socialización, herramienta para la paz y medicina alternativa. de manera más específica, mediante el teatro es posible crear realidades alternas en las que los/as jóvenes podían despejar su mente y ‘olvidar’ sus propias realidades obteniendo un alivio emocional y psíquico. el teatro se presenta como la oportunidad de ensayar la realidad mediante el análisis y comprensión de temas cotidianos. mediante la creación y estudio de personajes se posibilita además una mejor comprensión de las relaciones interpersonales y de la diversidad humana. la improvisación como técnica imprescindible para el teatro tiene implicaciones positivas para la solución de conflictos en la vida cotidiana. dicha técnica te enfrenta ante situaciones que requieren de rápida acción y provee herramientas para solucionarlo por medio de la creatividad. el teatro funciona en este sentido como una metáfora de la vida misma ofreciendo a los/as participantes múltiples destrezas para la vida cotidiana. por otro lado, cuando examinamos el impacto a nivel social comunitario del grupo vea, es importante destacar que el taller de teatro comunitario resultó en una importante plataforma que catapultó múltiples otras iniciativas que impactaron no solo la mayoría de los municipios de la isla (mediante la obra y luego película por amor en el caserío), sino otros países como republica dominicana, chicago, nueva york y méxico (donde se presentó la obra). de igual modo, el impacto en el ámbito educativo es un elemento importante de transformación social, ya que la producción cinematográfica se utilizó como recurso educativo en las escuelas públicas del país, pero además a nivel universitario como referencia de análisis cultural. el denominado “boom de vea” realmente resultó en una colmena para el desarrollo de talentos y potencialidades e incluso la gestión y eventual autogestión de empleos para muchos de estos jóvenes una vez entrada en etapa adulta (quienes han continuado dedicándose al arte de manera profesional). el desarrollo de redes y lazos sociales fue un http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 elemento que logró extender el impacto intracomunitario de este proyecto a otras comunidades aledañas que (al ver los logros del grupo vea querían ser parte de la iniciativa) generando a su vez el desarrollo de capital social de enlace y nuevas solidaridades entre comunidades y sectores sociales. en términos de futuras intervenciones, proyectos comunitarios o iniciativas basadas en las artes escénicas es importante destacar el alcance que se logró al poder convertir una obra teatral (como arte escénico desarrollado en vivo) a una producción cinematográfica. si bien el formato de obra teatral posibilitó un impactó en la dimensión comunitaria, el formato de filme fue crucial para impactar otros subsistemas sociales y lograr una transformación en dicha dimensión. en términos de las artes escénicas, el teatro comunitario resulta un medio idóneo ya que permite la integración de múltiples disciplinas artísticas tales como danza, música, arte plástico (escenografía), artes visuales, escritura creativa, entre otras. esta variedad de medios y opciones artísticas posibilita a su vez la integración interdependiente de grupos comunitarios diversos con distintas capacidades, talentos e intereses, pero comprometidos de manera cooperativa y solidaria con un fin común: el arte comunitario. la versatilidad que provee el teatro permite además partir los distintos intereses específicos y talentos particulares de los/as participantes del arte comunitario, elemento que se destacó como uno crucial para el éxito general de los proyectos artísticos. en esta dirección es importante además considerar los diferentes aspectos de género que pudieran mediar el proceso. en ambos escenarios, el teatro comunitario resultó ideal para poder integrar tanto a chicos como a chicas de la comunidad. a pesar de que algunas disciplinas artísticas (como la danza) suelen asociarse como formas femeninas, delicadas y que sensibilizan, dentro del escenario teatral los chicos/as se dan permiso de bailar (ej. teatro musical) como parte de una pieza dejando de lado los estereotipos sociales sobre el baile. del mismo modo, en el caso de lloréns, el teatro sirvió como un pretexto para atraer a los jóvenes varones que estaban ociosos mediante el desarrollo de guiones sobre temas cercanos a sus propias realidades, con los que se pudieran identificar y que les atrajeran. por lo tanto, el teatro demostró funcionar como una herramienta para superar los estereotipos de género relacionados a la participación en las artes. consideraciones finales a pesar de que investigaciones como la presente hacen un gran esfuerzo por evidenciar el rol y potencial transformador de las artes tanto a nivel individual como colectivo, sigue predominando lo que matarasso (1997) llama “percepción del arte como un mero adorno social.” esta es una concepción social ideológicamente muy difícil de transformar, ya que existen muchos prejuicios sociales con relación al arte. como psicólogos/as sociales comunitarios/as, es necesario pensar en estrategias desde la disciplina para – a nivel social extracadémico – visibilizar la ya evidenciada función del arte y no relegar únicamente en los/as artistas y/o comunidades participantes de los programas. la psc debe elevar su voz en la promoción de esta herramienta a nivel político; particularmente en el desarrollo de políticas públicas, programas y designación de fondos para proyectos sociales y comunitarios basados en las artes. las artes, por su capacidad de prevención y protección de los problemas y males sociales, deberían incorporarse como estrategia para el mejoramiento social y para la promoción http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 de sociedades más saludables. sin embargo, nos seguimos topando con presupuestos recortados o eliminados para este tipo de actividad, precisamente por considerarse una actividad extra o innecesaria. debido a la falta de comprensión de las capacidades del arte para mejorar las sociedades, se subestima la necesidad de mantenerlas como parte de nuestra vida cotidiana. además, las artes se consideran todavía un gasto innecesario (o un lujo) y no son vistas como una inversión social. cabría realizar investigaciones rigurosas que verifiquen y comparen la costoefectividad de implementar a corto y a largo plazo estrategias artísticas como medidas de prevención vis a vis los altos costos de las estrategias paliativas para afrontar la delincuencia, el abuso de drogas, la deserción escolar, el detrimento de la salud mental, entre otros problemas sociales. en el sistema educativo de puerto rico, por ejemplo, las materias relacionadas a las artes (teatro, pintura, danza, música) solían ser electivas a tomar en algunos planteles. no obstante, cada vez son menos las escuelas del sistema educativo puertorriqueño que cuentan con presupuestos para ofrecer electivas en artes, siendo las materias en artes las primeras en eliminarse (de cara a la crisis fiscal). no obstante, esto resulta contradictorio con las experiencias comunitarias que demuestran el potencial transformador del teatro, con las opiniones de expertos/as y con las nuevas investigaciones que afirman que el teatro se destaca cada vez más como una asignatura completa. mientras tanto, la disciplina y el gremio pudieran brindar más espacios para concientizar, adiestrar y desarrollar proyectos que utilicen las artes como herramienta medular. asimismo, invertir en el reclutamiento de artistas y de manera transdisciplinaria adiestrar(nos) conjuntamente entre psicólogos/as y artistas para hacer una labor social de pertinencia desdibujando las fronteras disciplinarias para obtener un mayor alcance social. finalmente, como psicólogos/as sociales/ comunitarios/as y a la luz de hallazgos debemos reconocer y comprometernos a destacar el carácter 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(2005). lo social y lo comunitario de la psicología social comunitaria: bifurcaciones, reorientaciones y encuentros. en n. varas-díaz, & i. serrano-garcía (eds.) psicología comunitaria: reflexiones, implicaciones y nuevos rumbos (pp. 81104). san juan, pr: publicaciones puertorriqueñas. nardone, m. (2010). arte comunitario: criterios para su definición. miríada: investigación en ciencias sociales, 3(6), 47-91. nina, d. (2016). puerto rico and the united states under the cabotage laws: a breach to the world trade organization’s member agreement? forum empresarial, 21(2), 59–78. http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=6 3150031003 noticel. (2014, febrero 4). el crédito de puerto rico se convierte en chatarra (documento). https://www.noticel.com/credito-depr/economia/20140205/el-credito-depuerto-rico-se-convierte-en-chatarradocumento/ palacios-garrido, a. (2009). el arte comunitario: origen y evolución de las prácticas artísticas colaborativas. arteterapia. papeles de arteterapia y educación artística para la inclusión social, 4, 197-211. puga-rayo, i. (2012). teatro del oprimido: dispositivo crítico para la psicología social comunitaria. revista sociedad y equidad, (3). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 red state data center de puerto rico. (2019, diciembre 19). en pobreza el 50% o más de la población en 36 municipios de puerto rico. https://censo.estadisticas.pr/comunicad o-de-prensa/2019-12-19t145558 robles, f., & rodríguez, é. p. (2020, marzo 3). meses después de los terremotos en puerto rico, miles siguen a la intemperie. listín diario. https://listindiario.com/lasmundiales/2020/03/03/606667/mesesdespues-de-los-terremotos-en-puertorico-miles-siguen-a-la-intemperie sin comillas. (2021, abril 13). puerto rico está atrapado entre la aee y luma. sin comillas.com. https://sincomillas.com/puerto-ricoatrapado-entre-la-aee-y-luma/ sosa-pascual, o. (2018, mayo 29). estudio de harvard estima 4,645 muertes por el huracán maría. centro de periodismo investigativo. https://periodismoinvestigativo.com/20 18/05/estudio-de-harvard-estima-4645muertes-por-el-huracan-maria/ sosa pascual, o., campoy, a., & weissenstein, m. (2018). the deaths of hurricane maría. centro de periodismo investigativo. https://losmuertosdemaria.com/ wiscovitch padilla, j. (2018). las comunidades luchan por recuperarse: relatoría del panel de discusión celebrado en el evento 365 de maría el 18 de septiembre de 2018. centro de periodismo investigativo, pp. 1–6. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global perspectives and experiences of community psychologists for the promotion of social change and the construction of radical solidarities james f. moura jr1, christopher c. sonn2, irma serrano garcia3, blanca ortiz-torres3 keywords: social change, praxis, solidarity, oppression author biography: james moura, jr. is professor of the interdisciplinary bachelor of humanities at the university of international integration of the afro-brazilian lusophony (unilab) and of the graduate program in psychology at the federal university of ceará (ufc). he is a fulbright visiting scholar in the center for international justice and human rights at boston college (2021-2022). he is a member of the latin american training network in community psychology. coordinator of network for the study and confrontation of poverty, discrimination and resistance. he has been active in participatory action research and university extension through direct actions with women and children in poverty situations, developing actions focused on improving the lives of these populations in the region of maciço de baturité in ceará/brazil. christopher c. sonn, phd, is professor at victoria university, melbourne, australia on the land of the wurundjeri of the kulin nation. he deputy director research training and fellow of the institute of health and sport. his research is concerned with understanding and changing dynamics of oppression and resistance, examining structural violence such as racism, and its effects on social identities, intergroup relations and belonging. he holds a visiting professorship at the university of the witwatersrand, south africa. he is co-editor of creating inclusive knowledges, and coauthor of social psychology and everyday life, and associate editor of the american journal of community psychology and community psychology in global perspective. 1 university for international integration of the afro-brazilian lusophony, brazil 2 victoria university, australia 3 university of puerto rico, puerto rico global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 dr. irma serrano-garcía is a retired professor of the department of psychology at the university of puerto rico. she has over 150 scholarly publications including journal articles, book chapters and seventeen books of which the best known include: the apa handbook of community psychology, and historias de psicología comunitaria en américa latina, co-edited with maritza montero. she has presided the puerto rico psychology association (prpa) and the society for community research and action (scra). she has coordinated many professional events including the interamerican congress of psychology and the first international conference of community psychology. she has presented her work across five continents and received various awards including the life-time achievement award from the prpa, the interamerican psychologist of the year award from the isp and the distinguished contributions to theory in community psychology award from scra. after her retirement, dr. serranogarcía continues to publish about community psychology, coloniality, public policy, program evaluation, university teaching and learning and is a consultant to non-profit organizations and universities. blanca ortiz-torres was born and raised in puerto rico. she has a ph.d. in community psychology from new york university and a juris doctor from the university of puerto rico (upr). she has held several research and teaching positions in puerto rico and new york. for twenty-five years she was a faculty member in the psychology department and the institute for psychological research at the upr, río piedras campus (upr). at upr she was dean of the college of social sciences and associate dean for research and graduate studies. she retired from the university in 2019. her research interests include decoloniality, gender, sexuality, community empowerment, the development of structural interventions to prevent hiv in various groups, public policy, and cuban migration. she also does research in areas such as community activation, citizen participation and development of community capital. she has offered courses as invited professor in cuba, uruguay, méxico, ecuador, united states, dominican republic, and perú. she has published multiple articles and book chapters. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 recommended citation: moura, j., sonn, c. serrano garcia, i., & ortiz-torres, b. (2022). global perspectives and experiences of community psychologists for the promotion of social change and the construction of radical solidarities. global journal of community psychology practice, 13(2), 1-17. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: christopher sonn, victoria university, po box 14428 melbourne, vic 8001 australia. email: christopher.sonn@vu.edu.au http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:christopher.sonn@vu.edu.au global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 global perspectives and experiences of community psychologists for the promotion of social change and the construction of radical solidarities abstract in this special issue we seek to document and learn from exemplars from around the world of interventions and other forms of applied work in organisational, community, and everyday social settings that are aimed at producing social change and changing oppressive social and cultural realities. this introduction presents the colonial origins of oppression and strategies for building social change based on radical solidarity. colonialism, violence, and social inequality are interconnected. we realize that it is urgent to generate solitarily social change to transform these historical and transnational realities of oppression. social change is realized through the praxis developed in historically deprived community contexts, respecting individuals' cultural and identity characteristics. radical solidarity is necessary to question possible practices of colonial tutelage of communities. likewise, praxis for social change must be developed creatively at the various levels of action and respect the intersectional trajectories of groups and individuals. we present diverse praxis experiences for social change in different contexts and levels of action developed by community psychologists, seeking to build a network of radical solidarity focused on dismantling colonial power. the editors of this special issue are located in different parts of the globe: australia/south africa, puerto rico, and brazil. these countries are connected through and shaped by histories of slavery, colonization, racialized capitalism, and ongoing forms of structural and symbolic violence, as well as the concomitant efforts of struggle, resistance, and survival. we understand the need to act locally in our territories, the dynamics of power and oppression and its transnational circuits, and the importance and value of learning from different regions, communities, and social groups. with this local and global interconnectedness in mind, we developed this special issue, inspired by the goals of promoting solidarities for social transformation of the international conference on community psychology held in melbourne, australia in 2020. we are cognizant of the interconnectedness of the global knowledge economy, english language dominance, the pervasiveness of euroamerican centrism in the circulation of psychological and community psychologies. hence, we also set out to bridge language and cultural contexts by bringing together a multilingual team with diverse social and cultural locations to coedit an issue of gjcpp. in this issue, we want to illustrate the possibilities that come with widening the ecology of knowledge, approaches, and practice for community research and action through intercultural dialogue, the power of critical reflective praxis and consciousness, and the important practices of ‘repowering’ (rua et al., 2021) in different contexts and countries. for rua and colleagues (2021) the concept of repowering comes from an indigenous imagination and efforts to reassert and re-narrate indigenous knowledge and practice, suppressed by colonizing discourses and practice, in the process of self-determination and sovereignty. repowering is akin to the notion of re-existence expressed in the writing on http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 decoloniality, which refers to practices of “redefining and re-signifying of life in conditions of dignity in self-determination” (alban in mignolo & walsh, 2018, p .18). this introductory article is divided in three sections. first, we will analyze some of the main social problems experienced locally and transnationally. this is followed by the identification of some strategies for developing social change through the construction of bridges for solidarity. after that, we present the articles included in this special issue that focus on these local practices of promoting social change. colonialism, violence, and social inequality poverty, violence, and social, racial, and gender inequalities with their origins in colonialism plague different countries globally (mignolo, 2008). with the support of christianity, colonizers created the ideology of the superiority of wealthy white heterosexual men from the global north (quijano, 2005), racialising and dehumanizing populations with identities constructed as inferior (sonn, & stevens, 2021). colonialism created a global structure based on racial, sexual, gender, class, and territorial divisions (nelson-maldonado, 2008). coloniality, a contemporary variation of colonialism, dehumanizes and legitimizes violence against non-white people, women, lgbtiqiap+ people, and individuals in the global south (bernardino-costa, maldonadotorres, & grosfoguel, 2019). modernity and capitalism as connected change processes entailed various, social, cultural, technological practices along with ideologies of progress and development about change akin to those underpinning colonization (bernardino-costa et al., 2019). modernity is molded in europe, particularly from the 18th century onward. it was, however, a result of a complex of changes that occurred throughout the totality of the world that was subjected to european domination beginning at the end of the 15th century. (quijano, 1989, p. 148). capitalism emerged from europe's appropriation, accumulation, and violence during colonization (mignolo, 2008). racism, patriarchy, and capitalism continue to be intertwined in world geopolitics, with some arguing that the world is divided between south and north, between humans and nonhumans (santos, 2019). there is more violence against populations located in the global south that are marked by racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, among other forms of oppression (mbembe, 2016). community psychology must be attentive to these oppressions and the colonial matrix of power present in developing practices to dismantle these historical inequalities (fernández et al., 2021). martín-baró (1998) states that the work of psychology should be based on realismo crítico, considering the concreteness of inequalities, violence, and discrimination, and producing efforts to deideologise and transform reality. montero (2004) adds that the possibility of change resides in problematization, consciousness raising and de-ideologization, thus placing these processes at the forefront of community psychology’s charge. poverty and social inequalities have intensified globally due to the pandemic of covid-19 and geopolitical disparities (oxafam, 2021), with 5,331,019 people killed (world health organization, 2021) due to this virus. covid-19 has fatally affected historically marginalized populations, exacerbating inequalities (calmon, 2020). the covid-19 pandemic has in fact become a site of oppression and coloniality. there is an upsurge in poverty and labor precariousness as well as deepening barriers to healthcare access primarily in populations of color, the poor, adolescents and children, people with disabilities, and those in the global south http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 (nunes et al., 2021). poverty should be recognized beyond monetary deprivation, being understood as a violation of fundamental human rights in and across contexts and countries (moura jr et al., 2019). like inequality, poverty is maintained and reproduced by the unequal structure of societies reflected in hierarchical systems, the accumulation of wealth by local and global elites through exploitation, and growing gaps between those in the zone of being and nonbeing, thereby continuing colonial systems (dussel, 2000; therborn, 2009). various forms of violence have also plagued social groups with non-hegemonic identities. structural violence comprises cultural and symbolic dimensions that are concretized in direct violent acts against distinct populations located within these identities marked by coloniality (dutta et al., 2016). extreme right-wing authoritarian movements reproduce and strengthen white supremacist, racist, and sexist dichotomies (gounari, 2021), intensifying acts of violence. this violence should be understood through the intersection of axes of oppression (crenshaw, 1989) with distinct identity markers (race, class, gender, sexuality, territory, nationality, generation, empowerment), uniquely impacting groups in their collective trajectories. violence is a tool for maintaining inequalities used by governments to control historically marginalized populations (martín-baró, 1983). thus, it is necessary to aim the praxis of community psychology for social change on these historical realities and the mechanisms through which privilege and disadvantage are maintained and reproduced at present (ruglis & fine, 2009; sonn & stevens, 2021). praxis and social change we believe that it is urgent to develop a community psychology with a concrete and ethical praxis to construct a more just reality focused on the social change of these oppressive structures at several levels (gois, 2005; montero, 2003, 2006). praxis is the articulation of theory and practice aimed at transforming the unequal system of society (freire, 1974). this praxis must be based on three epistemological axes: a) overcoming of the paradox between individual and social, b) the imbrication between theory and practice, and c) the indispensability of the ethical dimension (guareschi, 2009; montero, 2009; winkler et al, 2014). the practice of community psychology should be oriented to the historically subordinated classes or what martín-baró (1994) referred to as a ‘preferential option for the poor’ and the questioning of elitist positions in psychology (lane, 1996). the ethical dimension should be liberating because our actions should target the structural and colonial violence present in society (dussel, 2000). strategies for social change include recovering historical memory, de-ideologizing reality, and strengthening the potentialities of historically marginalized groups (martín-baró, 1996) ethics is the foundation for the construction of social change aimed at radical solidarity. solidarity is a core value in community action at the personal, interpersonal, and community level (moane, 2003). solidarity can be expressed in various ways but it ultimately entails that we understand “our own lives and agency as bound together with the rights, well-being, health and dignity of others here and now” (jennings, 2017, p. 557). community psychologists must choose to act with historically marginalized groups (nelson et al., 2001). solidarity needs to be transnational, avoiding paternalistic practices that reproduce a salvationist colonial structure (dutta, 2018). this choice is based on the sacrifice of serving collectively over individualistic approaches, constantly questioning the unequal structure of society (martín-baró, 1986). lykes (2013) conceives that there must be a repositioning of power and the cultivation of empathy with local communities that suffer daily from the consequences of colonization and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 imperialism. solidarity is also a value and embodied praxis that grounds resistance, oppression, and engagement in community action (moane, 2003). solidarity is an embodied relational praxis and requires that different positioned social actors navigate the dilemmas and challenges that arise in the context of power/knowledge relations (seedat, & suffla, 2017). for social change to be feasible, it must target multiple levels: the personal, group, community, and societal levels. oppressions impact individuals, communities, and society differently and must be addressed at these different levels (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010). consciousness of oppressive situations is central to the critical appropriation of reality and the development of concrete actions for social change (freire, 1979). communities should be the central locus of action in community psychology (kelly, 2006; montero, 2003). community psychology actions should be carried out with people, groups, and communities in collaborative ways, focusing on autonomy, avoiding practices of tutelage of individuals (gois, 2005, 2008, 2012), and paternalistic attitudes (watkins, 2021). people should be understood from the imbrication between life trajectory, groups, communities and society in an intersectional way (wallerstein et al, 2015). actions should have a practical and daily character with social commitment from the community psychologist (saciparodriguez & montero, 2014). communkity efforts can result in the development of critical consciousness, strengthening of people, groups, and communities, more significant community mobilization, advocacy and activism with macro-structural impacts on social policies (burton & kagan, 2009; gois, 2005; moane, 2003; vera, 2020). equally, these praxes must respect the intersectional trajectories that constitute the lives of local groups. the intersectional lens helps build a social justice-oriented praxis more concretely, as it connects to the specificities of the identity trajectories of diverse social groups (moradi & grzanka, 2017). impoverished women of color should be central in action in an intersectional perspective (bernardino-costa, 2015), because the multiple axes of oppression, such as racism, sexism, and classism, subordinate the trajectory of black, brown, indigenous, and asian women in a more violent and intersectional manner (collins, & bilge, 2016). community psychology actions must contemplate the specificities of diverse groups of women of color (dutta, 2016). however, we point out that strategies of resistance developed by historically marginalized groups need to be understood at their intersections and in the context of dynamics of oppression and resistance (henning, 2015; lugones, 2016). likewise, praxis for justice and social change must be immersed in the cultural contexts in which these groups operate (kral et al, 2011). working with communities from distinct cultural contexts must be based on a process of constant learning and recognitions of multiple and diverse “saberes” (suzuki et al, 2019). we must be aware that particular cultural contexts are intersectionally entangled with racism, colonialism, classism, sexism, cisgenderheteronormativity, among others (apa, 2017). chavez et al (2019) suggest that racialized groups should involve individuals, families, and communities in interventions. transformative community action needs to be based on the cultural universe of the groups involved (chavez et al., 2010). dialogue is the primary tool for understanding the cultural dimension of people, the groups they are part of, and the community itself (freire, 1983). as noted by montero and sonn (2009) dialogue: is expressed in the need to incorporate the cultural knowledge and the people’s voices. the need to understand everything happens in social relationships, and that the other in those http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 relations has to be not only acknowledged, but also heard and answered (montero & sonn, 2009, p. 2). finally, creativity ought to be central to actions aimed at social change (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010). the path to social transformation is linked to the ability to imagine different possibilities for a more critical and just life (watkins, 2021). gois (2005) states that research in community psychology should be creative and guided by the community's interests and can be developed in qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods, but also beyond this narrow categorization reflecting on the politics and ethics of knowledge production. hence, we need to be aware of capture, subordination, and classification practices that the ‘scientific method’ can reproduce (castro-gómez, 2007; sonn & green, 2006). this is especially so with assumptions of the objectivity and universality of its products rooted in the ways of knowing of western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic (weird) countries (decolonial collective, 2021). thus, research should be used to construct counterhegemonic narratives and empower local knowledge by questioning colonial structures of oppression in society, academia, and in our disciplines (dutta et al., 2021; sonn & green, 2006). community psychologists should facilitate actions of social change at the personal, community, and societal levels to transform these historical and colonial oppressions. we act using liberation ethics (dussel, 2000; martín-baró, 1986) to question meritocratic and individualistic attitudes, expanding solidarity to interconnected local and global realities. we have to reflect on our practice so we are not captured by the colonial logic of reproducing inequalities. according to freire (1979), we must constantly reflect and problematize the theories that we use, the practices we develop, and the interactions we establish. thus, we must be humble and open to critique our positions to overcome colonial oppression in a dialectical way and to operationalize social change in our actions. guided by this freirian attitude, in this special issue we critically present local practices that promote social change in different territories. local actions and transnational dialogues for social change: in search of a critical global solidarity we begin this transactional and critical journey into various actions to promote social change with the video "doing ethical research together: a communitarian toolkit for ethical research beyond borders" by calia and colleagues. researchers and professors from the united kingdom, italy, malawi, and chile assisted in its production, constituting a global effort. we start our conversation with this video because, as previously stated, we understand that ethics is central to social change. thus, ethics should guide critical reflection about our attitudes. also, we would suggest that ethics must be of liberation (martín-baró, 1986; dussel, 2000). central to values-based practice is relationality and ethics that guide research and action. calia and colleagues, introduce an ethics toolkit for research that they developed through collaborative processes with research and practitioners in various countries, from different sectors and diverse disciplines. in their conversation they highlighted that clarifying worldviews, standpoints and principles are vital to ethical practice across all phases of the research cycle through translation and dissemination. their toolkit provides an important resource to research crossing in and across border spaces and raises important questions about the geopolitics of the knowledge economy and the importance of asking questions about whose ethics we respond to and how to ensure that these are at the forefront of placebased and community-engaged research and action. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 equally, actions for social change can be developed by other social actors. research must be aligned with collaborative interventions with people in their communities (gois, 2005; montero, 2006). we see this reflection on the characteristics of interventions in local communities in the work of chilean authors marianne daher and adriana rosati in the article "fortaleciendo el vínculo universidad-comunidad: buenas prácticas y material de apoyo para el aprendizaje en servicio ." daher and rosati present research with agents involved in community interventions in chile. the authors systematize the community practices developed by students, teachers, community leaders and communities. they conducted qualitative research with focus groups and semi-structured interviews. in this article, there is a focus on the development of actions in community psychology by university members emphasizing the importance of the relational and collaborative character of efforts in community psychology, avoiding non-dialogical practices in communities. they present the characteristics for developing bonds between the external agents and the residents of the communities, which facilitated building guides for operationalizing these practices in a creative audiovisual production. the construction of these powerful bonds can promote actions focused on local relevance, social commitment, justice, social change, and solidarity between communities and external agents. in the video "linking important community experiences to academic training in social psychology" presented by eduardo almeida about work in mexico, the need for communities to lead the way in community psychology work is also highlighted. through a description of a long and fruitful career, almeida demonstrates how his work in a rural indigenous community highlighted the limitations of the training of community psychologists. he also speaks to the development of participatory research experiences, which as recommended previously, were guided by the community. finally, he presents what he considers key elements of community practice. daher and rosati as well as almeida reflect on the role of universities and on the importance of transforming community psychologists training so both are more responsive to communities while grounded in critical analysis. training should be a process that respects local community dynamics, builds meaningful relationships with residents of the communities, and generates problematization and critical analysis in the faculty and students involved. continuing in latin america, we present action focused on social change built collaboratively with the communities using artistic processes and manifestations. yasmín maldonado (puerto rico) in the article “process of community transformation through the performing arts in two community settings in puerto rico” reports research using community art to develop strategies for community transformation in historically marginalized communities in puerto rico. the author presents a context of poverty, unemployment, violence, and consequences of natural disasters constituting a scenario of the coloniality of catastrophe. to transform this colonial reality at the interpersonal and community levels, community psychology principles and strategies were use to mobilize creative art as a tool to facilitate solidarity and critical actions for the transformation of reality in two distinct contexts, a geographic community called residencial luis llorens torres and an institutional community called escuela alternativa. this participatory intervention research used several document reviews, ethnographic participant observation, questionnaires, and interviews. a plurality of instruments demonstrates the diversity of knowledge construction http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 processes and active participants at the personal, interpersonal, community, and institutional levels. the results of their participatory action research was demonstrated on several levels, with workshops that promoted a process of empowerment for the communities and the people involved. the participating youth began to understand gender norms more critically, questioning gender coloniality and its relations with various forms of oppression (segatto, 2014). families became closer to their children, developing more critical and activist positions for change in policies and their surroundings. in addition, community networks became more robust in mobilization and collective creation, resulting in the expansion of actions to produce other mobilization strategies such as audiovisual materials. there is poverty, violence, and discrimination running through the trajectories of social groups with non-hegemonic identities in territories in the so-called global north. minou mebane and maura benedetti’s article entitled "hopes and fears for the future of different local communities" is based on a survey to identify the perception of the future among communities in the center of rome, italy, on the periphery of the capital and in small towns in the metropolitan area. the authors used an interdisciplinary methodology called community profiling including focus groups with members of different communities. communities were analyzed from territorial, geographical, economic, service, institutional, anthropological, and psychological perspectives. the authors explore the hopes and fears about the future of both psychological and territorial dimensions. they argue that the function of community psychology is to develop actions for the construction of more united futures for historically marginalized communities and populations in situations of oppression at the personal, interpersonal, and community levels. thus, the authors point to the need to identify the strengths, weaknesses, and needs that run through community life to promote social justice. mebane and benedetti understand that the trajectories of communities need to ground the construction of better futures. residents feel more empowered when they know how their communities are structured to be able to act in their contexts. this process of community profile building also empowers historically marginalized groups who share their communities' visions. from an intersectional lens, residents of central areas point to ways to improve their communities with physical interventions in their spaces. the poorer suburbs indicate that cultural and educational services should be improved. the residents of small towns report the need for improvements in the economy. in general, the residents of the different communities point to the basic need of feeling safe as the primary psychological need. the authors point out the importance of local knowledge with gender and generation-specific understandings to construct new and fairer realities. reflecting on these experiences in chile, mexico, puerto rico, and italy, we understand that it is also essential to question the university's role since academic institutions can reproduce colonial practices of classification and subordination of populations. even though the research was developed in the global south, coloniality is present as a cognitive system in modern societies (bernardino-costa et al., 2019). therefore, it is essential to reflect about if and how our praxis is oriented towards social change (gois, 2015). in addition, intersectional lenses must be operationalized to understand the oppressive processes that can be developed from the interactions between distinct markers of privilegeoppression between university-community. maryam khan from pakistan, in her article http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 "catalytic framework: intersectional analysis for community engagement" develops an important intersectional model to analyze the praxis of social change in communities. khan and co-authors present the catalytic framework that aims to develop intersectional community engagement in pakistan's peripheral urban and rural communities. the authors reject the extractivist mode of knowledge production supported by colonial origins. they bring their experiences to poor and historically neglected communities. these experiences present community engagement as a strategy to strengthen critical consciousness and collective resolution of local problems. this engagement must be developed from participatory and dialogical actions with the communities. they conceive intersectionality as indispensable to understanding the life contexts of social groups. the authors prioritize qualitative narrative methodologies to understand the intermingling of collective and individual experiences. catalysis is the process of reflection on the possible changes that can be made in the presented narratives, which should help identifying the necessary actions. in addition, the methodology foresees the questioning of the intersections with race, class, gender, sexuality, and territory present in the communities' narratives. with this, the authors envision constructing a path for interventions in the communities based on the visibility of these colonial oppressions and their points of change in an intersectional perspective. the last two articles present intersectional insights and the questioning of the colonial basis of social inequalities. thus, we perceive that these last two experiences even though situated in the global north, bring intersectional trajectories of the global south and coloniality into their territories (sonn & stevens, 2021). they also present decolonial resistances and proposals for social change and solidarity focused on ancestral knowledge. graham and colleagues with the article “hidden hunger in a land of plenty: food insecurity in aotearoa new zealand” focus on the issue of food insecurity in aotearoa/new zealand. they define food insecurity as people’s inability to access nutritional food in socially acceptable ways and highlight the role of food in the context of cultural needs and practices. they explore food practices within a maori worldview arguing that access to food and practices that are interwoven with ways of being is essential to flourishing communities. with this background they describe three research case studies to visibilize hunger and poverty in nz, and the levers for social change. the authors identify the importance of research to highlight these often hidden issues and the role of scholar activists to elevate stories of people who are often blamed for their circumstances. through case studies in different settings the authors show elements of scholar activism expressed as solidarity work, research practice interface at different levels of analysis, and the centrality of principled practice. a range of methods and analytic frameworks are applied; one project drew on media reports, political speeches, and other materials that construct and convey common – sense understandings and dominant narratives about hunger in school children. narrative theory, storytelling, critical narrative analysis were used to examine how neoliberal ideology and other practices and discourses can be barriers to addressing food insecurity. a second project examined the experiences of maori families in the hospitals, a system with its roots in settler colonialism that privileges pakeha norms and values. the interview data revealed that family members often suffer hunger while a child is hospitalized. in their analysis the author bring attention to how systems can fail to attend to the needs and experiences of parents and family in distress in a system that is anything but culturally safe. a third study drew on ethnographic methods including http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 interviews, field notes and participant observation as well as photo elicitation to document the experiences of people living with food insecurity. the study showed the effects of not having sufficient resources to feed families including attendant issues of stigma and shame, as well as strategies to survive in a context where they feel judged. the study presents methods for activism and contesting dominant narratives that are dehumanizing and victim blaming by elevating counter stories through media and other modes of dissemination that convey humanity, humor and hardship. for graham and colleagues “decolonising community psychology means reflexively engaging in ways to incorporate socially transformative change and how we do (or do not) conform to scholarship demands for detached mind-work.” through community oriented research practice the studies elevate an often overlooked issue of food insecurity in what many consider a land of plenty. the studies elevate the stories of families who suffer the brunt of structural and symbolic violence in a context of settler colonialism and neoliberal capitalism. the authors show how research within a scholar activist framework can be mobilized to stand with and as groups who are oppressed. they conclude that “engaged community psychologists have a duty to be the conscience of society and in doing so have the responsibility to challenge the power differences and historical practices (such as colonization) that maintain inequities” (p. 16). houglum and nobrega-olivera from the united states with the article “the kanaeokana network: reflecting on five years of envisioning a hawaiian education system and aloha ʻāina leaders,” document the journey of the kanaeokana network developed to foster cultural knowledge with community focus and global reach including the production of digital and nondigital spaces. a key goal is to strengthen a native hawaiian education system. similar to graham and colleagues houglum and nobrega-olivera also present community engaged practice in a context that recognizes a history of colonialism and its alarming present effects on indigenous populations, maori in new zealand and native hawaiians. these authors describe the origins of the network rooted in the need to address educational and other inequities experienced by native hawaiians. they present the formation of a network of leaders supportive of hawaiian culture, rooted in values and ways of being reflected in the term “aloha ʻāina” connoting loyalty and allegiance to the land. they note that aloha ʻāina is … deeply rooted connection and commitment to the physical and spiritual health of hawaiʻi’s lands, seas, and skies; a devotion to protect and support hawaiian cultural practices that take place within the embrace of ʻāina … (p. 3-4) the article describes a network approach, a broad coalition made up of diverse stakeholders, with a shared vision, mechanisms of communication and strategies for change and influence. a central feature of the approach described in the paper is the centering of native hawaiian cultural values and practices and the various stages that are informed by aloha ʻāina. in some ways the article is illustrative of an effort to produce social change through the enactment of indigenous imagination (smith, 2017) which in so many countries in the global south has been suppressed by colonialism. the approach described in this paper echoes the body of work advancing indigenous frameworks and approaches as vital to decolonization. maori scholar linda tuhiwai smith, noted that decolonization: “has not meant a total rejection of all theory or research or western knowledge. rather, it is about centering our concerns and world http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 views and then coming to know and understand theory and research from our own perspectives and for our own purposes” (p. 41). one of the practices evident in this project akin to the decolonial concept of re-existence, recovery and resurgence of practices that are concerned with “redefining and re-signifying of life in conditions of dignity in selfdetermination (alban in mignolo & walsh, 2018, p .18). rua and colleagues (2021) refer to similar practices as ‘repowering’. valuesbased practice is a central feature of community praxis as shown in the projects described by graham and colleagues and houglum and nobrega-olivera.] final considerations as is evident in the works presented, global social problems have a colonial origin. these colonial marks cross the diverse cultural contexts and the intersectional trajectories of individuals, groups, communities and nations. in this collection, we brought together several examples of efforts from around the globe that focus on these urgent and necessary social changes. as community psychologists, we need to learn from these varied actions in dialogue and solidarity in local and transnational contexts. these actions must be based on respect for the cultural and intersectional dimensions that constitute communities. we must also instill these values and practices in future generations of community psychologist by challenging rigid and theoretically laden curricula in academic settings. furthermore, all authors in this issue highlight that we should act in a collaborative, solidary, and collective way with individuals in their contexts. we hope that these transnational bridges of social change become whole territories where social 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(2021b) coronavirus (covid-19). https://covid19.who.int/> http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://covid19.who.int/ the tale of two villages gloria west keywords: community, racism, village author biography: gloria west’s life work is social service. she has over twenty years in the industry and more than twelve years in nonprofit management. her experiences include advocacy, building partnerships, community outreach, and policy. she connects the most vulnerable groups to programs, services, and educational resources. in her efforts to support them she collaborates with local city and state government organizations, faith-based organizations, nonprofit organizations, and businesses. she believes that families and individuals are resilient and grow stronger when they have access to holistic and equitable resources that help them overcome obstacles of oppression. gloria recognizes that we cannot always prevent seen and unforeseen life events that derail people, but we can respond to those that are impacted faster. her goal is to build community coalitions and strengthen existing collaborations, creating comprehensive wrap-around services for all. gloria earned her phd from national louis university in community psychology, her master of science degree in nonprofit management from spertus institute, a bachelor of arts degree from chicago state university, and a child development certificate from the city colleges of chicago. she is a member of scra, cera, and the national society of leadership and success. she understands that her approach to living a decolonized life is attributed to her mother unconsciously breaking her family’s cycle of generational trauma. gloria also accredits her ability to preserve psychological freedom by continuing to push back on the systems of oppression through her christian faith, self-love, family moral values, global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 and lived experiences. these are tools that helped her identify psychological oppression. she believes we can liberate ourselves from oppressed lifestyles by understanding that our community dictates our resources, and our race dictates the equity within the resources. her mission is to help people recognize oppression and free themselves from debilitating thinking, build self-efficacy, and obtain self-sufficiency and sustainability while living in our colonized world. recommended citation: west, g. (2022). the tale of two villages, global journal of community psychology practice, 13(1), 1 12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: gloria west, phd email: gloria_west@ccc.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the tale of two villages the saying is that each generation is supposed to do better than the generation before it. i was told that we can never live the “american dream” if we do not go to college, get a good-paying job, and buy a home. the question is, why are these human rights accessible for some and a struggle for others? i want to tell you about the history of my family’s survival. this story is important because it has blazed a trail for four generations of my lineage to live differently from our ancestors. each generation has a painful but beautiful story of endurance. it could be a roadmap for so many fighting families. the purpose of my story is to bring awareness of the black struggle and survival. i understand the journeys of my lineage and i would like to make a suggestion. we must learn who we are, where we come from, where we want to go, and how to get there, which would be based on our own sense of stability in a decolonized village. prologue it has been a long journey. feeling like i belong was/is always important to me, it is part of myidentity. knowing where and who i come from, being linked to my family, having a place to callhome, and planting my seeds have fulfilled me. i have experienced that sense of belonging,needing to connect, understand, have a purpose, and be satisfied. the consciousness of my life,my lineage, our thrive to survival, their presence in me, and our journey from the beginning tothe present day are alive. my lineage’s determination has grown and evolved since mississippi,and i have learned who i am. as i reflect on my/our journey in this article, what we experiencedis awareness and consciousness as we encounter oppression and displacement. we understandself-value and the love of selfcreated self-activism and that space to resist all things that are notjust. what has emerged can be described in three theoretical concepts: 1. the mobile village: in the beginning, i saw the mobile village as having close relationshipsand family stability. today, isee it as a space of struggle towards reexistence, in the midst ofoppression and deliberate displacement. too often the mobile village interferes with thestability of a family. 2. self-activism: a) is the foundation of my mother’s ability to create the space that protectedher from the multiple traumas that she experienced. it became an unconscious method that sheused to shield her children and her future generations from ancestral traumas. b) it is thefoundation of my ancestors' moves from the south to the north during the great migration.they push through oppression, discrimination, and inequalities that they suffered and theirdetermination to survive. it is their role in politics and the black community as it relates tohousing in chicago. 3. planting seed: a) is the connection ofhousing as land, landholder, and space for belonging,holding and creating "real" decolonized relationships, "community," home, and family. b) it isthe ideaof housing being a component of reexistence, in the space that i can classify as a“village” on the land that i have connected with. c) it is the drive of my family and ourstability that created our self-activism. “you can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.” – maya angelou http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 this writing tells the story of my ancestors’ survival and their fight for freedom. they fought for housing and the right to be safe; i am fighting to secure and improve their legacies. although the “american dream” remains dominated by colonialism and trauma, my ancestors were creative, rebellious, and resilient, to name a few of their survival skills. my strength is inherited; it’s a skill of my family. they took dangerous risks to change the trajectory of their situations and those of future generations through their conscious and unconscious actions. i live because of their self-activism. they wanted not only to survive but to thrive and to secure an equitable quality of life. i have learned that equity includes community stability, psychological freedom, protection, healing, resources, and homeownership. stability includes stopping the historic pattern of “black mobile communities” and preventing the colonizer’s patterns of interrupting our black family. thesis nine “decoloniality involves an activist decolonial turn whereby the damné emerges as an agent of social change.” (maldonado-torres, 2016, p. 28) village and community i have heard a few “black baby boomers” talk about their upbringing, and they often used the term “village.” they define a “village” as a place where people looked out for one another and stuck together. they shared how the adults in the village would discipline them for their behavior and inform their parents about their mischief. when i was a child, i remember calling my neighbors “cousin” and our friends having meals at our home and traveling with us. i remember my mother’s moral value system and how it grounded her children. although my mother never used the term “village” in our home, nor did i hear it in my community, for a brief time i felt it. we were taught that we are our brothers and sisters’ keepers, to love each other and our neighbors. we have built on her moral values, incorporated education, homeownership, and community. we’ve passed them on to our children, and they continue to build on them. her grandparents and mother claimed the land, and she laid the foundation. her children understand that we won’t stand strong on any foundation until we plant seeds. this requires strong “whole families” or villages to work together to plant more seeds while decolonizing our “community.” the dictionary definition of a village is a place where people come to settle and to build a community. i often wondered what determined a village. in the context of this article, the term “village” will refer to the connections people make when living together as a family with the land, and “community” will refer to the development structures that are built over time within the context of a specific geographic, historical, and political location. this article talks about my village and community experiences within the settler-colonial geographic area referred to as the united states (see barker & lowman, n.d., for more information on settler colonialism). within the united states, black villages were referred to as ghettos—parts of a city, especially slum areas, occupied by a minoritized group or groups—and put in or restricted to an isolated or segregated area or grouping. this was the housing experience of black people migrating from the south during http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 wwi and wwii. today, black families continue to face housing discrimination in the city of chicago. more than a decade ago, i relocated to park manor, a smaller community within the greater grand crossing area on the southside of chicago (see map of chicago, neighborhood #69; wikipedia, 2022c). it borders the once-bustling black chatham community (see map of chicago, neighborhood #44), which does not fit the description of a ghetto (wikipedia, 2022d). i experienced chatham while attending high school in the mid-1980s. this is a place where several of my friends from high school live(d), and what i did not understand at that time was that i had been introduced to a highly functioning black community. my chatham friends were full of life and so was their community, as there were thriving black-owned businesses and rows of occupied homes, beautiful landscaping, and peace. this black area looked and felt nothing like where i lived, the audacity of me to want my village to experience that community. i was certain that my future community would resemble chatham (o’beirne, 2019). in the mid-1990s, i relocated to the lake view area on the northside of chicago (see map of chicago neighborhood #6) and experienced another bustling and thriving community. predominantly white and different from chatham, it is rich in resources, services, businesses, various styles of homes, trees, and stuff that i didn’t know that i needed or wanted (lakeview east chamber of commerce, n.d.; wikipedia, 2022e). both looked or felt nothing like my predominantly black, southside community within the larger bronzeville community. the robert taylor homes (african american registry, n.d.) touched me with trauma that i never want to see again. we endured experiences that no family should ever have to live through. i lived in a war zone for 10 years. i lost many classmates to drugs, gangs, prison, and death. families separated before my eyes and children didn’t return home. when my ancestors arrived from the south in search of their village, i am sure they hoped that their future generations would not have to go through what they had gone through. history repeats itself but it doesn’t have to, and i hope that telling our stories will inspire other black people to become self-activists and fight for their villages and communities. “this black area looked and felt nothing like where i lived…” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 the roots of self-activism i love myself, my dark skin, and everything about me but being black, and what comes with being black is trauma all by itself. my great-grandparents were born in mississippi between the 1870s and 1890s. they lived in the times of the movement of social activism and political reform (the late 1890s to the 1920s). this was known as the progressive era that was taking place across the nation and the continuous racial segregation (jim crow laws) that swept the southern states. the trauma that they had to live with is unthinkable. after learning of higher wages and less racial tension described and advertised by the chicago defender, a blackowned newspaper, they seized the opportunity to start over. they married, relocated to arkansas in the 1920s, gave birth to my grandmother, and moved to chicago seeking a better life (greetham, 2013, p. 21). at the time that my grandparents were in chicago, they were unable to buy any homes, which is what we continue to experience today. therefore, even though my greatgrandfather found a good-paying job and was able to rent housing in his community, he was not able to purchase a home because he was “redlined,” which is a form of housing discrimination that prevented black families from buying homes outside of more common areas designated for black communities (greetham, 2013, p. 92). my greatgrandparents, grandmother, and mother could not buy where they lived, and this continued the pattern of displaced living—as a mobile village. two generations were forced to relocate, but they were survivors, practicing selfand collective activism toward a vision of a better life. my mother’s children are the first generation to weave ourselves out of this housing oppression. in 1952, my great-grandfather and grandmother worked for illinois state representative vito marzullo. in 1953, they supported marzullo’s alderman campaign by canvassing for him as he ran for the city of chicago’s 25th ward, the north lawndale community. my family helped mr. marzullo secure the black vote to win the seat. alderman marzullo supported richard j. daley’s mayoral candidacy, and in 1955 daley was elected mayor of chicago. keeping his promise to build housing for black families, he created the black chicago housing authority (cha), which segregated housing on less desirable land (choldin, n.d.). several black communities were built in what were considered the most undesirable areas of chicago at the time. built in 1962, the nation’s largest public housing development was the robert taylor homes (bowly, 1978). this public housing project was the largest in the world. while my great-grandparents and grandmother were engaged in collective activism and fought for black people’s justice, my mother was practicing self-activism as she fought for herself. my mother called the area of north lawndale home from the 1940s “the robert taylor homes touched me with trauma that i never want to see again.” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 until the early 1970s, and here is where she created her survival skills (wikipedia, 2022b). as a child, she experienced much trauma both in her community and at home, acts that hurt the black village and black community to the present day. like so many people, my mother was physically and sexually abused in her home by relatives. when she fought back against her attackers she was locked in closets and starved. my mother shared that every day and night she prepared herself for a fight. when she arrived home acting furious, she would walk in the house screaming and yelling until she entered her room. as she got older, her family members called her crazy and stopped interacting with her. north lawndale was a very white colonial community when she was growing up. this is where she was mentally abused. my mother stated that when she was in kindergarten, her white teacher would call on her using racial slurs and call her derogatory names. regardless of the mental anguish my mother suffered, although she was an honor roll student, her teacher wanted to show my mother that she had the power over her and retained her in kindergarten. fortunately, after my mother finished the first grade she doubled, skipping the second grade and putting her with her regular third-grade class. my mother stated that many things happened in this community, but because she volunteered as a crossing guard, volunteered at the school library, read to the lower grade children, and played sports, she was known, but not accepted because she was black. my mother was a teen when the lawndale area experienced “white flight,” (white people relocating from “communities” after black people began moving in) and the businesses left too. by the 1960s, it had gone from a resourceful community to a slum (taylor, 2010). in 1968, the day of dr. martin luther king’s assassination, fires were set to many of the existing businesses, and the community was destroyed. the community fell into dilapidated condition, another factor adding to the high crime, drugs, and gangs. the rebuild did not happen; this was a factor that supported my family’s decision to leave. my parents moved us to the cha’s robert http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 taylor homes in the early 1970s when i was a very young child (wikipedia, 2022a). this was a colonial community within the bronzeville community area of chicago (wikipedia, 2022f), the community in which i lived until i was a young adult. my memories about this place do not capture nor reflect the definition of any community, nor is it my idea of a black community. among various other disparities, we had minimal access to vital resources and services. i have had a lot of experience with the colonizer’s concept of a community, and it has not included the inherent values within my concept of the village. in the mid-1980s, i witnessed the colonizer destabilize the black villages and our community, separating us and forcing us to live in mobile communities (for a video telling more about the raw truth of the robert taylor experience, see mcquilling, 2022); but the pursuit of freedom is worth fighting for. protecting the village and decolonizing our community there is something powerful about watching the actions of happy people. making people smile or feel good about themselves and their families has always been my desire since i was a child. today, this is my life work. i come from a large loving family; we look out for one another and our neighbors. this is the village that i often hear black people describe. i believe in supporting people, fighting for people’s rights to self-sufficiency, and connecting them to resources and services that will continue to help them sustain. regardless of skin color, every person has the right to an equitable quality of life. in 1953, mayor richard j. daley fulfilled two bad promises he had made. he expanded the existing cha by keeping white low-income housing white, as he built black segregated low-income housing. the black chicago housing complexes were placed in undesirable and undeveloped areas in the city. undesirable areas do not attract businesses, and neither did black people, limiting resources and services in our communities. this practice continues today. to change how we are serviced, we must change who serves us. we must decolonize our communities by changing the programs, resources, services, and businesses in ways that reflect our values. as long as we allow the colonizer to dictate our community, we lose control of our village. we can no longer live according to the dictionary’s definition of the village. until we understand how powerful self-activism is and how to use it, we will never achieve psychological freedom and we will continue to live in colonial villages. we must fight for our villages, we must use what we have access to, we must be creative, and we must push back. my mother’s story will always be a mystery to me; she did something that she can’t explain. her actions changed her children’s future, protected us, and helped her raise what i define as a village. she was, and is, a selfactivist. her decision to defend herself was not normal at her age, and not wise to do. she was determined to stop her pain, never to live it again or talk about it with her children was the answer to breaking the generational cycle of trauma. we must be determined to stop our villages from suffering at the hands of any colonizer. we must also decolonize our black communities. my definition of a black decolonial community (a community that is decolonized) is the right of families to live in a thriving community, defined by the ways of being that align with our vision. what does this look like? we have to free ourselves psychologically, strengthen as a village and push toward building our community. there is a choice you can make, but we don’t have to live in a colonized community. the more we make our black families aware of their choices, and the consequences of their http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 choices, the sooner we can rid ourselves of the problems laid upon us. the family is the foundation of the community; it is the whole family bonded or mended by love and unity. we are our brothers and sisters’ keepers, and without collective support we cannot survive or sustain, nor can a community thrive. families build communities by connecting to the land that we belong to, the place where we can truly call home and plant our seeds on our land. my great-grandparents and grandmother understood the importance of keeping their village together, but my mother unconsciously showed her children how to build healthy villages and keep them safe. while their self-activism helped to secure housing for black villages, her self-activism helped her push back against abuse. she found safe spaces for herself, that helped her escape and grow; these were her resources. you cannot build a “healthy village” unless you can control generational trauma. she survived her mental strongholds, freeing her children from the way she lived and from the trauma she suffered. the saying, “only the strong survive” has truth to it. it has been a few years since i learned the story of my family’s past, their journey, struggles, and contributions. i know that they would be proud of their grandchildren; we followed their path. generations two and three reaped the benefits of the housing that my great-grandparents and grandmother fought for. generations three, four, five, and six reap the benefits of our ancestors’ activism. we achieved the so called “american dream” and purchased land. i secured my village, but this was no easy journey. i see them in me, like my robert taylor, chatham, and lake view experiences, their southern and north lawndale experiences cultivated our collective and selfactivism. the struggles each of our communities suffer(ed) could have been manageable if the villages were strong. the oppressor went after the chatham community, but their villages remain strong. to this day they continue to push back against separation. as their businesses closed, they added resources filled the void. the lake view community is strong, and their villages are unified. the oppressor moves quickly to root out their disruptions, restore and heal the white villages with plentiful resources and services. support systems help keep their families grounded; rarely are their villages mobile by force. the robert taylor community fell victim to the oppressor— businesses closed, few were replaced, and villages were divided and broken. i experienced a connection to the greater grand crossing community. it felt and looked like chatham but after settling in, merely a few years later the oppressor has arrived. i have seen this face before, and i am ready to support the black villages to save the greater grand crossing community. we have the right to have stable homes, not mobile like many of our ancestors, and we have the right to keep what is already ours. the right to be safe, to be healthy, and to live in peace is what everyone is entitled to; it is our human right. psychological freedom and homeownership are just a couple of things that balances a village, resources and services help to achieve self-sufficiency and sustainability. we must learn to create opportunities that help us thrive and live. déjà vu. i see the dismantling of this community approach. the oppressor has the spotlight shining, and they continue to maliciously separate black villages by taking their generational property and pushing them back into mobile living. we are not separate and unequal to any other community. this community does not have the resources and services of lake view and the unity of chatham, but similar struggles of robert taylor. all my adult life, i longed for a place to belong and people to connect with, and i refuse to watch the families in my community be uprooted and lose stability. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 “we know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” (king, 1963) i know through personal and professional experiences that resources and services save families and communities. my greatgrandparents’ and grandmother’s resources were employment and housing. my mother’s resources and services were school, sports, and self-defense. my resources are employment agencies, educational institutions, culture, child, youth, and adult activities, health care and hospital facilities, a variety of businesses, real grocery store options, and religious institutions, just to name a few. communities with access to stimulating goods provide families with the tools to achieve psychological freedom and take control of their lives. respect is not given but earned; my future generations must keep fighting for unity, community access, and peace. “if you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. when you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. if you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. if you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. he will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.” (woodson, 2010, p. 45) i am at the beginning of building my community. it is difficult to claim the land and build on the foundation if i don’t have a seed plant. we must retire the mobile family village. if we plant seeds on someone’s property, the legacy of colonialism and the constant uprooting and disruptions of our villages will continue to take our land. homeownership helped me to be able to put roots down. i look at it as developing generational wealth. i introduced this concept to my family. i didn’t like moving and i bought land, so we didn’t have to move again. when i purchased my land, i planted our seeds, and now i’m watching the growth of my children. my responsibilities in building my community in the 21st century are: bringing awareness of colonial systems, highlighting harmful generational norms, healing from generational trauma, bringing awareness to illegal family practices, removing stigma, obtaining psychological freedom, purchasing and retaining our land, investing in and developing social enterprises, and building coalitions or partnerships that create systems that meet the needs of the black village and the black community. references african american registry (n.d.) mon., 03.05.1962: the robert taylor homes open. retrieved march 22, 2022, from https://aaregistry.org/story/the-roberttaylor-homes-opens/ barker, a., & lowman, e. b. 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(2015). trauma and recovery: the aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror. basic books. king, m. l. (1963). king’s letter from birmingham jail. https://www.facinghistory.org/resourcelibrary/letter-birmingham-jail lakeview east chamber of commerce. (n.d.) getting around. retrieved march 26, 2022, from https://lakevieweast.com/gettingaround/ maldonado-torres, n. (2016). outline of ten theses on coloniality and decoloniality. franz fanon foundation. https://fondationfrantzfanon.com/outline-of-ten-theseson-coloniality-and-decoloniality/ mcquilling, m. (2022, march 16). robert taylor homes. the hal baron project. https://halbaronproject.web.illinois.edu/ items/show/44 modica, a. (2009, december 19). robert r. taylor homes, chicago, illinois (19592005). black past. https://www.blackpast.org/africanamerican-history/robert-taylor-homeschicago-illinois-1959-2005/" https://www.blackpast.org/africanamerican-history/robert-taylor-homeschicago-illinois-1959-2005/ o’beirne, j. (2019, january 16). it’s a beautiful day in chatham. https://jasonobeirne.com/chathamchicago/ taylor, k.-y. (2010, march 24). when black homeowners fought back. socialist worker. https://socialistworker.org/2010/03/24 /black-homeowners-fought-back wikipedia. (2022a, january 20). robert taylor homes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/robert_ta ylor_homes wikipedia. (2022b, february 14). north lawndale, chicago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/north_la wndale,_chicago wikipedia. (2022c, february 26). greater grand crossing, chicago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/greater_g rand_crossing,_chicago wikipedia. (2022d, march 1). chatham, chicago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/chatham,_ chicago wikipedia. (2022e, march 16). lake view, chicago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/lake_view ,_chicago http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://openworks.wooster.edu/independentstudy/3801 https://openworks.wooster.edu/independentstudy/3801 https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/letter-birmingham-jail https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/letter-birmingham-jail https://lakevieweast.com/getting-around/ https://lakevieweast.com/getting-around/ https://fondation-frantzfanon.com/outline-of-ten-theses-on-coloniality-and-decoloniality/ https://fondation-frantzfanon.com/outline-of-ten-theses-on-coloniality-and-decoloniality/ https://fondation-frantzfanon.com/outline-of-ten-theses-on-coloniality-and-decoloniality/ https://halbaronproject.web.illinois.edu/items/show/44 https://halbaronproject.web.illinois.edu/items/show/44 https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/robert-taylor-homes-chicago-illinois-1959-2005/ https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/robert-taylor-homes-chicago-illinois-1959-2005/ https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/robert-taylor-homes-chicago-illinois-1959-2005/ https://jasonobeirne.com/chatham-chicago/ https://jasonobeirne.com/chatham-chicago/ https://socialistworker.org/2010/03/24/black-homeowners-fought-back https://socialistworker.org/2010/03/24/black-homeowners-fought-back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/robert_taylor_homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/robert_taylor_homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/north_lawndale,_chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/north_lawndale,_chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/greater_grand_crossing,_chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/greater_grand_crossing,_chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/chatham,_chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/chatham,_chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/lake_view,_chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/lake_view,_chicago global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 wikipedia. (2022f, march 18). douglas, chicago—bronzeville. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/douglas,_c hicago#bronzeville woodson, c. g. (2010). the mis-education of the negro. seven treasures publications. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/douglas,_chicago#bronzeville https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/douglas,_chicago#bronzeville what does it mean to use competencies in "praxis" with undergraduate students at historically black institutions? by dawn x. henderson1, jameika r. matlock2, dayquan garrett2, and christopher clark2 keywords: hbcus, community psychology, competencies, undergraduate students author biographies: dawn x. henderson, phd, received her training in community psychology from north carolina state university. she uses pedagogy to engage in empowerment and social and racial justice work with undergraduate students. she served as an assistant professor in the department of psychological sciences at winston-salem state university. jameika r. matlock received a bachelor of arts degree in psychology from winston-salem state university. she is currently pursuing a master of science degree in community psychology at florida a&m university. dayquan garrett received a bachelor of arts degree in psychology from winston-salem state university. he currently works in the u.s. department of personnel management in washington, dc and aims to pursue a phd in community psychology. christopher clark received a bachelor of arts degree in psychology from winston-salem state university. he currently volunteers as a firefighter and plans to pursue a master of science degree in marriage and family counseling. acknowledgements: the authors would like to thank the s.g. atkins community development corporation, carol davis, drs. russ smith, tammy evans, and paul kron with the piedmont triad regional council. we would like to acknowledge the residents of waughtown, staff, and everyone who participated in organizing the waughtown neighborhood revitalization project. we would also like to acknowledge all of the 1 north carolina a&t state university 2 winston-salem state university global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 undergraduate students who participated in the introduction to community psychology course at winston-salem state university. recommended citation: henderson, d.x., matlock, j.r., garrett, d., and clark, c. (2016). what does it mean to use competencies in "praxis" with undergraduate students at historically black institutions?. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(4), pages 1-21. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). correspondence should be directed by mail to dawn x. henderson, 222 new science building, department of psychology, north carolina a&t state university, greensboro, nc 27401, or via electronic mail to dawnxhen@gmail.com. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:dawnxhen@gmail.com global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 what does it mean to use competencies in "praxis" with undergraduate students at historically black institutions? abstract dialogue concerning competencies in community psychology practice has contributed to the articulation of undergraduate and graduate education in community psychology. this dialogue shares resources in applying community psychology competencies but lacks a voice—historically black colleges and universities (hbcus). historically black colleges and universities have undergraduate courses and graduate programs in community psychology, yet, no one has written on competencies and "praxis" from these settings. this article uses reflective narratives from faculty and undergraduate students to illustrate the use of competencies in community psychology practice with a local community. the context of the institution, emerging from legal segregation in the south, and primarily populated by economically disadvantaged and ethnic minority students, models community inclusion, ecological perspectives, empowerment, value of socio-cultural diversity and reflective practice in a neighborhood revitalization project. discussion centers on lessons learned and challenges in engaging in praxis across undergraduate settings and hbcus. introduction “you helped inspire me in ways that placed a fundamental access in my education. i might not have been the a student in your class or the ideal one, but i took all of you[r] lessons and implemented it in my life. i grew up in a home where my dad often verbally, mentally, and sometimes (very rare occasions) physically abused my mom. i have never told anyone about the issue because i didn't want pity from my at home situations. i grew up very isolated from my peers and i honestly hated high school. i came to college thinking that my community did absolutely nothing for me. after taking your course, i realize that a community is beyond geographic location. my community includes people that are in similar situations as i am. i have a desire to make a difference and now i know how to begin…thank you so much for inspiring me and although your classes were a challenge for me, i appreciate you for pushing me to go past the mental limit i had set for myself.” this is the voice of tiffany; she sent this email after completing the introduction to community psychology course at winstonsalem state university. tiffany and, to date, more than 60 undergraduate students at the university have had the opportunity to complete a community psychology course and, for her and others, it has transformed the way they think about themselves, community, and social justice (henderson & wright, 2014; henderson, in press). these undergraduate students at a historically black university located in the southeastern region of the united states are underrepresented voices in the field of community psychology practice. many are first-generation and from economically stressed or disadvantaged households. we reflect on their voices and our own. this article answers the call, “how are the competencies being received and used in the field by academics and students” through short reflective narratives—writing from the standpoint of faculty and undergraduate students in a historically black university. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 we use a racial justice lens to lift the stories of african american undergraduate students and faculty out of the shadows of community psychology to reflect critically on our work with a neighborhood revitalization project. since the dalton and wolfe (2012) publication in the community psychologist, there has been great dialogue on using competencies in community psychology (langhout, 2015; wolfe, 2014; wolfe, chien, scott, & jimenez, 2013). wolfe, chien-scott, and jimenez (2013) presented a special issue of the global journal of community psychology practice on competencies across international contexts, to include western australia, italy, and egypt. wolfe (2014) provided reflection from the standpoint of practitioner, building on her experience in health disparities research and evaluation. langhout (2015) articulated the application of competencies as both scholar and activist across class and racial settings. these reflections build knowledge in our field and the tensions across competencies in community psychology practice. however, this dialogue lacks representation of historically black colleges and universities (hbcus). we argue hbcus have a historic mission to racial justice and can model “praxis” of competencies across undergraduate education and with ethnically and economically diverse populations. we begin our narrative with a history of hbcus in the united states to articulate the racial injustice african americans encountered and the tensions these institutions faced with community activism. we reflect on our work with the waughtown neighborhood revitalization project, from the standpoint of african american faculty and undergraduate students, in order to model community psychology competencies, community inclusion, socio-cultural diversity, ecological perspectives, empowerment, and reflective practice. we conclude with a discussion on lessons learned and challenges to elucidate barriers in translating theory to practice and community change, especially in this setting. we share our stories of “praxis” and write in the spirit of once enslaved african americans who entered historically black colleges and universities in search of freedom, of tiffany, and many other students who transitioned through the community psychology course. racial justice and historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) in the united states, the notion of race is tied to a historical belief and value system predicated on color—specifically black or to be african american in the united states indicates a history of exclusion and violence (christians, 2014; degruy, 2005; glaeser & vigdor, 2012). notions of whiteness and racial superiority further demoted african american children as intellectually inferior and denied them access to education (christians, 2014). the end of the civil war and emancipation proclamation dismantled slavery in the united states but african americans continued to face violence through peonage and segregated schools (degruy, 2005). simultaneously, northern philanthropist and religious groups developed institutes and schools to educate african americans on vocational trades in a post-slavery and racially segregated united states (albritton, 2012; wenglinksky, 1996). these institutions would evolve into historically black colleges and universities. many hbcus relied on white funders, were developed around religious ideologies (e.g., methodist) and were created with a political agenda. whites controlled many hbcus and comprised the majority of teachers and administrators; thus, education focused on vocational skill training and religious doctrine rather than political activism (dubois, 1903; woodson, 1933). critics of hbcus argued these institutions pacified african americans and reinforced docility (dubois, 1903; hughes, 1934; woodson, 1933). while hbcus served as institutions primarily for african americans from 1865 to http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/0b1hccn5nj_jiqulxn0k4qzdovk0/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/0b1hccn5nj_jiqulxn0k4qzdovk0/view?usp=sharing global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 the 1960s, they still encountered criticism from numerous african american activists. at one point in time, the african american poet, langston hughes (1934), called them “cowards” in the midst of social turmoil and civil unrest in the united states. by the 1940s, african americans were entering the military and shifting tides in the economic and political landscape of the united states required a new kind of workforce. more african americans began to pursue higher education and, consequently, the political climate of hbcus shifted. hbcus became institutions of access for african american students who were denied admission into historically white institutions (hwis; evans, evans, & evans, 2002; wenglinksky, 1996). from the 1870s to 1960s, hbcus graduated teachers, doctors, and other professionals to respond to the needs of a newly freed population and provide services to communities in a highly segregated context (allen, jewell, griffin, & wolf, 2007; wenglinksky, 1996). noted civil rights activist, such as w.e.b. dubois, martin luther king, jr., ralph david abernathy, huey p. newton, and marion wright edelman attended hbcus; thus, hbcus became sites of political resistance and civil rights advocacy in the united states (albritton, 2012; douglas, 2012). hbcus, whether consciously or unconsciously, pursue a racial justice mission—decades of literature suggest they continue to offer social mobility to students who are primarily first-generation, economically disadvantaged, and ethnic minorities (allen et al., 2007; albritton, 2012; douglas, 2012; sydnor, hawkins, & edwards, 2010). their undergraduate classrooms, more often, include students who do not meet the academic criteria to enter more “elite” institutions (evans, evans, & evans, 2002). they have served as sites of resistance against segregation and racial oppression while struggling to sustain their mission in a racial climate filled with hostility, reduction in financial aid to low-income families, rising cost of tuition, and greater competition from hwis (douglas, 2012). furthermore, hbcus are linked to localities that face significant economic instability and disparate health and education conditions. as sites for racial justice, hbcus and their surrounding locality, in theory, provide an ideal context for engaging community psychology practice (albritton, 2012; henderson & wright, 2014; sydnor, hawkins & edwards, 2010). the use of narrative in empowerment and reflection narrative is a method used in empowerment and reflection (nelson & prilleltensky, 2005; rappaport, 1995). it provides a story, creates visual imagery and affective response, and documents the learning process (asselin, 2011; connelly & clandinin, 1990; ollerenshaw & creswell, 2002). narratives have a rich tradition among african americans in the united states. for example, gates (1987) argued the origin of slave narratives became passages of freedom for african americans. used as a method of storytelling, slave narratives allowed people of african descent to exercise power and challenge racial injustice in the united states. the power of the narrative, retelling and restorying, became a tool to carve a path from slavery to freedom and construct new realities for african americans (gates, 1987). narratives invoked emotion and visual imagery, allowing storytellers to engage in social action and empowerment (connelly & clandinin, 1990). the narrative illustrates the lived experience of individuals, generates new forms of knowledge, and can be an exercise of power among marginalized groups (nelson & prilleltensky, 2005; rappaport, 1995). narratives can be reflective by a process of reunderstanding, which aims to reframe attitudes and beliefs from specific experiences and events (asselin, 2011; ollerenshaw & creswell, 2002; olshtain & kupferberg, 1998). for instance, the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 reflective narrative allows the storyteller to critically examine his or her actions, feelings, and attitudes about an experience (connelly & clandinin, 1990; nygren & blom, 2001). in the course, the reflective narrative prompted undergraduate students to think about their attitudes and beliefs both prior to an experience or reading and afterwards. it became a tool to generate tension and resolution between former and developing beliefs (nygren & blom, 2001). similar to slave narratives, the reflective narrative can build our understanding of lives outside the dominant narrative and foster social action. the slave narratives were reflective—passages that demanded the united states and world to pay attention to injustices of slavery. narratives are also relevant to community psychology because they illustrate developmental processes and draw pathways between the past and potential future (rappaport, 1995). narratives are a reflection of the past and engage a visioning process of what can be. slave narratives illustrate the injustices of our past but they also presented a possible future, a time when african americans would achieve justice and equality. we draw on the use of narratives in african american traditions and community psychology as methods of knowledge sharing, learning, and empowerment (gates, 1987; nelson & prilleltensky, 2005; ollerenshaw & creswell, 2002; rogers & mosley, 2013). the scene: winston-salem state university and waughtown the undergraduate community psychology course is one of several courses listed under the community, health and counseling foundation in the department of psychological sciences at winston-salem state university. the university is located in the southeastern region of the united states. founded in 1892 as a training school for african americans, winston-salem state university now serves more than 5,000 undergraduate and graduate students; 71% of the population is female, 72% self-identify as african american, and about 66% receive the federal pell grant3. service is an important thread in the fabric of the university; students perform a variety of service-oriented activities on and off campus. at the time of this work however, there were no clear indicators of the extent of community-engaged practice or research at the university. moreover, the department of psychological sciences did not offer any course integrating service learning or participatory research experiences to undergraduate students. the s.g. atkins community development corporation (cdc) is an extension of winston-salem state university and works in partnership with the city of winston-salem. located in the waughtown neighborhood, the s.g. atkins cdc aims to improve economic development, foster collaboration between the university and community, and serve as an incubator for small businesses. the waughtown neighborhood revitalization project was an initiative funded by the city of winston-salem for the s.g. atkins cdc to engage local residents in identifying priorities for improving their locality and developing a plan of action for community change. waughtown is less than seven minutes away from the university and, at the time of the project, had an estimated population of more than 2,500 residents. the presence of the tobacco industry and manufacturing led to economic and population growth between the 1930s and 1950s; however, as more african american families moved in white residents moved out. in the 1990s, manufacturing jobs began leaving the city, which resulted in a significant portion of undereducated and unemployed residents in waughtown. an increase in residents from central and south america led to significant shifts in the 3 the federal pell grant is funding support awarded to students who have never received a bachelor’s degree and demonstrate financial need. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.sgacdc.org/ http://www.sgacdc.org/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/0b1hccn5nj_jiqulxn0k4qzdovk0/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/0b1hccn5nj_jiqulxn0k4qzdovk0/view?usp=sharing global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 population over the past decade. today, waughtown is considered one of the most diverse localities in the city of winstonsalem; 80% of the population self-identify as an ethnic minority. waughtown faces significant social barriers. only 31% of the adult population had an education post high school; the median household income in 2014 was $23,587 (compared to $43,665 for the city of winstonsalem). about 21% of households in waughtown are headed by single-females and about 62% of the children live in poverty (neighborhoodscout, 2015). the state identified the two schools in waughtown as high priority schools, indicating over 80% of students qualify under free or reduced-price lunch and less than 55% are performing at or above grade level on statewide exams (nc department of public instruction, 2015). in spring 2015, the s.g. atkins cdc collaborated with faculty from the community-based participatory research learning community to engage undergraduate students in the revitalization project. we reflect on this project. the actors our narratives are from two standpoints, faculty and undergraduate students, and reflect on the five foundational principles of community psychology practice. we aim to illustrate “praxis” in our work across the community psychology course and waughtown neighborhood revitalization project. faculty: henderson the course at winston-salem state university is one-semester and i have limited time with students. i decided to use the foundational principles (ie. ecological perspectives, empowerment, socio-cultural competence, community inclusion, and ethical and reflective practice) as topical areas because i believed they were critical to undergraduate students’ knowledge of community psychology and the most pragmatic. in reflecting on her work and competencies, langhout (2015) suggests our work in community psychology is driven by both heart and hand—deep held beliefs and affect towards reducing inequality and injustice. when i entered winston-salem state university there was a common story about hbcus, these stories included “you will not be able to do research with the teaching load they give you” “the students are underprepared” and “they do not have resources or the infrastructure to…” this language reflects a deficit narrative and influences perception of hbcus and the students within them (evans, evans, & evans, 2002). i entered this space driven primarily by my passion to spread the doctrine of community psychology and infuse community engagement into the psychology paradigm. my presence in the university served as a point of activism in a context where undergraduate students primarily represent individuals from economically fragile, rural and urban communities, who are more often characterized by under-resourced k-12 public schools. i joined a learning community at the university, community-based participatory research (cbpr), with the desire to develop community partnerships and collaborate with faculty on curriculum and research projects. three faculty (from urban geography, graphic design, and social work) and i collaborated with the s. g. atkins cdc to support development in waughtown. using a modified version of curriculum mapping (sarkisian & taylor, 2013; sarkisian et al., 2013), dialogue with faculty from the learning community led to aligning goals from the project with the course and competencies (see table 1). i proceeded with designing the syllabus knowing very little of waughtown. i was a faculty member who came on campus to teach, conduct my research, and never ventured on the southeast side of town. i, like my undergraduate students, was going to learn about this rich community through the course. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://abcs.ncpublicschools.org/abcs/ http://abcs.ncpublicschools.org/abcs/ http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/practice/18-competencies-community-psychology-practice/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/0b1hccn5nj_jiqulxn0k4qzdovk0/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/0b1hccn5nj_jiqulxn0k4qzdovk0/view?usp=sharing global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 course goals community psychology competencies student learning activities waughtown project goals increase student knowledge on systems that promote social inequality, inequity, and marginalization. increase student knowledge in research in the field of community psychology. increase student knowledge of points of leverage from the micro to macro setting. increase student knowledge in advocacy and ways to promote social justice and change. • ecological perspectives • empowerment • community inclusion and partnership • ethical, reflective practice • sociocultural and cross-cultural competence • ecological perspectives • empowerment • community inclusion and partnership • empowerment • classroom-based discussions and learning activities • collaborative exams and reading activities • applied research activity (i.e., historical analysis) • classroom-based discussions and learning activities • writing activities • classroom-based discussions and learning activities • collaborative exams and reading activities • classroom-based discussions and learning activities • field learning activities (i.e., attend and co-facilitate resident meetings, youth focus groups, etc.) increase community engagement increase residential interaction increase community investment http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 course goals community psychology competencies student learning activities waughtown project goals increase student knowledge in research practices that integrate collaboration and participatory methods. • community inclusion and partnership • ethical, reflective practice • sociocultural and cross-cultural competence • classroom-based discussions and learning activities • collaborative exams and reading activities • writing activities • field learning activities (i.e., attend and co-facilitate resident meetings, youth focus groups, etc.) • applied research activity (i.e., sense of community project) increase community engagement increase residential interaction increase community investment table 1: mapping project and course goals to competencies http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 in the class, we modeled dimensions of sociocultural diversity by challenging students’ notions of diversity beyond ethnicity and race. we discussed how dimensions of diversity grant access to resources and power. some of the discussions centered on how education and ability allows students to access resources and power but gender may prevent them from gaining access to equal paying jobs. i designed the syllabus to challenge students to think about position, power, and privilege; it forced undergraduate students to examine their own biases. i wanted students to understand they would enter waughtown from a standpoint of privilege and therefore carried perceptions that reinforced oppressive systems (e.g., people were poor because they choose to be poor). one student shared her thoughts on privilege in her reflection: in class, we talked about the meaning of being privileged and what made people more "privileged" than others…doing the assignment in class, it helped a lot of us realize where we fall when it comes to being privileged…i realized that i was considered to be extremely privileged although i don't feel like i am. i say this because growing up, we struggled a lot. there was a time where we lived in a house with no heat or lights and i had to watch my mother do everything she could to provide for us. even today, she struggles but we've come a long way from where we used to be. i would say that i am a part of a middle class family and i've had many [more] opportunities than others. ecological perspectives were introduced to undergraduate students using the kloos et al. (2012) textbook model, where they engaged in looking at issues from a multi-systems perspective. students were required to identify how multiple systems and resource allocation influenced development and behavior and apply this to a neighborhood. using kelly’s (1986) ecological metaphor, i modified the historical analysis (appendix a) activity used in political science education to engage students in identifying how economic and social forces drove change in waughtown. we used maps of waughtown provided by the s.g. atkins cdc to generate course discussion on resources. students were asked to think about challenges residents would encounter; maps identified schools, parks, as well as demographics of waughtown (e.g., age, median income, ethnic composition, etc.). the maps challenged students’ preconceived notions about resources in waughtown and proximity to the university. matlock shared in her reflection: it bothers me that our school and the s.g. atkins cdc is so close and the students don’t even know there’s another community less than two minutes away…it saddens me how we’ve placed ourselves above the surrounding community to the point we don’t interact with them unless it’s for community service. to counteract our current mindset of being above; if students were to involve themselves in the community of waughtown we could possibly [restore] waughtown. i fostered community inclusion and empowerment by requiring undergraduate students to engage course dialogue and work with residents from waughtown. all of us, undergraduate students and i, attended meetings and various events at the s.g. atkins cdc. we co-facilitated focus groups with residents and youth to frame challenges in waughtown and envision a potential future. we discussed elements of community in the course (mcmillan & chavis, 1986) and talked about how these exist across localities, organizations, and institutions. i designed the sense of community video project (appendix b) to give students an opportunity to identify assets and strengths in waughtown; they worked in teams (3 to 4 students), and interacted with residents, youth, business http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/0b1hccn5nj_jizvjjs2rxofp0nda/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/0b1hccn5nj_jieu1nmku0yudzrza/view?usp=sharing global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 owners, and agencies to think through their projects. projects required undergraduate students to drive around waughtown, meet with residents and business owners, and take pictures of landmarks or symbols that represented waughtown’s identity. at the end of the spring semester, the s.g. atkins cdc invited students to share their video projects with more than 125 residents to highlight assets and demonstrate a projected vision for the future. ethical and reflective practice was woven throughout the course experience. we engaged in discussions on the strengths and weaknesses of the revitalization project. undergraduate students had to write reflections on selected readings and experiences. i discovered in their writing reflections cognitive shifts, tensions between their prior attitudes and beliefs about waughtown. the undergraduate students were engaged in a discovery of their own agency as well as the capacity of residents in waughtown, they ventured beyond the borders of the university and initiated efficacy towards community change (henderson & wright, 2014). i share their stories. undergraduate students matlock i enrolled in the introduction to community psychology course in spring 2015. prior to completing the course, i never thought about using multiple perspectives in research and was unaware of the term “community practice.” i remember the term “multiple perspectives” in an introductory course in sociology. i had no idea waughtown existed down the street from our university and i am not sure if many students who live on campus are aware of waughtown. our university emphasized community service to surrounding localities, but i do not think any of us ever ventured into waughtown. along the way, i discovered how to collaborate with residents in the research process. prior to the course, i had a belief that research only occurred by administering surveys to people. this is what we learn in our psychology paradigm, we have two sequenced courses of research methods and statistics. in the community psychology course however, i discovered new ways to conduct research. i discovered how to include community members in the research process. i was able to see how community members gained control and participated in the process of creating change in their community. the sense of community project allowed us to use a process of storytelling, where members talked about issues affecting their community from their point of view. we collected their responses and tallied them. i went to community centers and schools to gain insight from youth and discovered what they wanted to see in waughtown. we used a form of participatory action research by talking to residents and youth and asking them to envision an ideal community—we shared our findings with them and had them rank what was most important. this process became an important foundation in developing the neighborhood plan. at one point in my life, i believed the problems facing many communities of color were primarily due to the residents in the community. honestly, i did not think people cared about the condition of their communities until we watched the dudley street neighborhood initiative documentary in class. in one of our meetings with residents at the s. g. atkins cdc, some residents indicated they did not feel like their voice or their problems were important. at that moment, i realized the importance of residents feeling included and their role in building or rebuilding waughtown. i no longer looked at community issues from the individual level because i gained an understanding of an ecological perspective. i gained an understanding of bi-directional movement across systems—the behavior of localities impact residents and residents can http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-spldlh9lm http://www.dsni.org/ http://www.dsni.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 have the capacity to impact their locality. i know the important role resident engagement plays in driving community change. this class alone transformed my thought process on the topic of community. this class opened my eyes to the concept of community psychology where i am able to practice the concepts of community inclusion, empowerment, and ecological perspectives to everyday experiences. prior to this course, i never believed that i could inspire someone or even empower a person. i used to think empowerment came from professors, teachers, and anyone that was of higher status. however, i had the opportunity to facilitate sessions with residents and youth for the waughtown project. throughout this journey, i was able to unpack personal biases and fears i had of waughtown. even now, i use reflective practice to rethink what i am doing and how it relates to where i am going. i used to think justice demanded protesting but this course taught me there are others ways to address injustice. i reflect on these experiences because i aim to improve who i am and continue work in community building. in my opinion, after the course, i believe college students, at minimum, should be aware of their surrounding locality and find ways to build them up. clark i began as a social work major prior to transferring into the department of psychological sciences, so i knew a little about systems theory. prior to taking the community psychology course, i never had a great concern about what was going on in the community, specifically waughtown. the research conducted in the course helped me realize the bigger picture and design a plan of action for waughtown to thrive. having the opportunity to work with a team to develop an economic development plan for the community and provide assistance was a tremendous experience. personally, i have never tried to make a difference in any community because i never believed the communities around winston-salem state were home. yet, after working in waughtown, i began to see people working together to change their community. one day, i visited a discount tire and auto shop in waughtown for an oil change and had a brief conversation with the owner. he informed me that occasionally he helps provide food for the less fortunate in the community; he emphasized the importance of building up waughtown and giving back. he was not aware of it on that day, but i gained much from that conversation. he helped me realize that i can have the power to make a difference; small changes can lead to larger change. as a student on the economic development committee with the waughtown project, i participated in generating ideas to address low employment and health with various residents and professionals. we were confronted with multiple ideas and thoughts. we had to think about cultural diversity and ways to adapt our ideas to represent the diverse residents in the area. as undergraduate students, we had to form partnerships with certain residents and leaders in the community in order to achieve a common goal. on the committee, i collaborated with two elders who lived in waughtown on ways to strengthen businesses and residential homes. this experience changed me a bit; those elders challenged me to value the diversity of waughtown—both young and old, african american and hispanic. together, students, residents, and business owners co-facilitated the learning process while strengthening relationships between waughtown and the university. we threw plenty of ideas around in class on how to solve certain problems, such as transportation and accessing medical support, but we needed the leaders in waughtown. in the meetings, residents shared their ideas and vision for waughtown. we were able to work together in prioritizing http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 short-term versus long-term goals and points of advocacy. engaging in the locality allowed residents to see us as partners and establish trust. we needed to communicate to the residents that we cared about them and their well-being. we aimed to recognize the resources and assets in waughtown and make sure these residents became equal in the process. i was able to see the value in our work with waughtown residents by sharing the process of identifying goals and developing plans of action. garrett i took the community psychology course entering my senior year at winston-salem state university. prior to the community psychology course, i had no knowledge of ecological perspectives. i also never considered the myriad ways systems can influence people and their decision making. the course broadened my perspective on how problems emerge in communities. it broadened my perspective on how to leverage systems change. prior to taking this class and reading about points of leverage, i associated the term leverage to business and it had a negative connotation. to me, it meant taking advantage of someone or exploiting him or her for your own benefit. i discovered, points of leverage are where we choose to enter the system and address change. the ecological perspective challenged us to understand waughtown from the perspective of changes over time. we were challenged with thinking about how to increase collectivism and healing in the community. i have been thinking constantly about how i could use this knowledge in my hometown, washington d.c. i believe that i can have a greater impact on driving change by focusing on how culture and assets build individuals rather than complaining about the high crime rate and poverty. prior to the community psychology course, i used reflective thinking as a way to challenge my assumptions and beliefs. in the course, we used reflective thinking to reflect on our work with waughtown and examine challenges. before we had the opportunity to enter waughtown, we participated in a number of discussions and class exercises on ethical behavior and reflective practice. we also moved away from emphasizing concepts like sample size, experiment, and focused on participatory and community research. as participants, we noticed how input from residents was challenging. we did not have large representation among the hispanic community and some residents were hesitant about trusting the revitalization plan. in the end, i realized how important it is to give opportunities and provide spaces for residents to engage in problem solving. volunteering in waughtown shifted my perspective of community. i originally perceived waughtown was like any other broken community, a place where residents demonstrated little hope in changing their circumstances or lacked positive relationships with each other. i did not feel i would find a sense of community in waughtown. i volunteered at a community garden event and in resident meetings, talked with residents, and i began to witness this sense of community in waughtown. waughtown had residents who cared about the relationships they have with each other and wanted to change—this will forever remain with me. i cannot take everything at face value, every community is diverse, but there are always residents who care and believe they can make their locality better. i think there is plenty of hope for waughtown if we continue to find ways to encourage and integrate the voices of residents and undergraduate students. in the community psychology class, i believe we all experienced a sense of empowerment because we realized our roles in advocating for waughtown. we often look to others who have higher rank or more authority to create change but this course demonstrated power is fluid and lies within the smallest individual, both students and residents. we encouraged http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 the residents of waughtown to use their points of privilege and voices in community change. after completing the course, i stepped outside my comfort zone; i became a mentor to first-year students, and completed an internship with the american psychological association. i made it a point to find ways to encourage others and give back. faculty: henderson prilleltensky (2001) argues praxis is cyclical and defined by constant reflection and action. i reenter our narrative to reflect on challenges in applying competencies in waughtown and within hbcus. first, trust emerged as a central theme among students and residents in waughtown. populations that experience constant disruptions or share a history of unethical research practices (e.g., tuskegee experiment) are accustomed to people entering and exiting their localities. they experience the “let downs,” often exploited for their resources or always “talking” but rarely moving to action. trusting the project would lead to change was challenging for undergraduate students and residents. one student wrote in her reflection: it is clear that many of the citizens in waughtown want change, but it is questionable whether that change will even happen. at the meeting, the concerns of local residents, landlords and business owners were written down but they were just talked about. the meeting lacked two key elements that would have maybe helped to advance the process of improvement. those two element are; more input from the residents and an actual plan to address the issues. currently the waughtown community is in the contemplation stage, but the residents want action…although multiple meetings have occurred within waughtown, not much has happened. this cycle can lead to discouragement [among] residents and business owners... i remember speaking to one of the men and he said, “we keep having these meetings, and we talk about all of the problems, but nothing is going to change.” many of the citizens know that even though they meet and discuss problems, nothing will change in their community. this was one of the most difficult pieces to translate to both undergraduate students and residents. how do we get communities and populations to believe in change when they have experienced a history of exploitation and marginalization? i, in my limited experience, did not have the answer but reflect back on langhout (2015). i reminded the undergraduate students, community psychologists are driven by a high sense of optimism and a deep belief that we can achieve justice. our involvement in waughtown did not center on changing their problems but rather granting residents the power to identify their challenges and collaborate with a university and community development group to design an action plan in order to map attainable short and longterm goals. second, we must understand our work rarely produces immediate results and requires investing time beyond our duties as faculty, students, and practitioners. in a university primarily driven by teaching and, at the time, one that did not quite understand community psychology, i had to sacrifice time. i questioned the amount of time committed to this project. i was teaching a research methods and statistics course with two labs and had a family. the students were attending meetings outside the normal day and on weekends; many of the undergraduate students in the course had jobs and families. a few of them drifted in and out of the course; largely due to family challenges and other personal issues. our stakeholders wanted immediate results and, on occasion, were unwilling to understand the developmental process of change—specifically change at the http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 locality level. furthermore, the students knew they were only in this space temporarily and their work with waughtown was limited. i believe this challenges our ability to see lasting benefits of our labor, particularly for students who are not in an undergraduate community psychology program and only commit one semester. finally, i want to reflect on our challenges in community inclusion and participatory processes. our course did not drive the project and we had little control over the involvement of residents in the planning process. early in our project, we realized youth and hispanic residents were absent in the planning process. i constantly reminded the planning committee to think about underrepresented groups in our meetings and had to rely on my experience with youth to facilitate youth engagement. i developed an activity to use in youth focus groups, which allowed youth to identify five wishes for their community; we tabulated the results and shared this information with the committee. we used these results to convince the planning committee youth could provide relevant perspectives. unfortunately, it was more challenging to engage adult hispanic residents. no one in the course was fluent in spanish. we encountered not only language but also trust barriers. on the peripheral, we were unaware of the power of hispanic pastors in waughtown and missed outreach to this community. later in the project, a hispanic pastor informed us some residents feared the presence of law enforcement at meetings and would not attend. at times, it appeared as if we were all in a cloud of obscurity when it came to engaging hispanic residents. i believe equitable inclusion was difficult given the diversity of waughtown; we captured about 10% of the residents’ perspective in the planning project. inclusion of more residents would require a team member or undergraduate students who were fluent in spanish and able to work across various groups in waughtown. conclusion legitimacy of community psychology is linked to challenges hbcus and our communities encounter in the united states. we all struggle to tell our story and express our worth and value. we encounter social limitations due to histories of marginalization and distrust. as agents of social and racial justice, we push against the limitations and emerge out of the shadows. we acknowledge the inequalities in waughtown and the residents struggle for community change. we recognize the social inequalities that led us into hbcus, yet we refuse to accept them. garrett wrote in one of his reflections: the course taught us that social equality and equity are driving principles in community psychology and should be applied everywhere. this principle is highly relevant to me as a young black man in america, a country that historically imposes injustices against my demographic…i would like to think that it takes it a step further and it gives you the power to recognize inequalities directed towards you and still be able to recognize your worth at the same time. it helps you realize that oppression is both a state and a process and that you do not have to accept those standards that oppress you. our stories demonstrate the “praxis” of community psychology competencies; praxis empowered undergraduate students and residents to gage their assets and strengths. using competencies in "praxis" led to our collective worth and power despite living in a context that ties notions of worth and value to color, class, etc. praxis challenged us to grapple with transforming theory into practice and we continue to learn. we add our voices to the dialogue and understand we still have a long journey ahead. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/0b1hccn5nj_jieu1nmku0yudzrza/view?usp=sharing global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 references albritton, t. j. (2012). educating our own: the historical legacy of hbcus and their relevance for educating a new generation of leaders. urban review, 44, 311-331. doi: 10.1007/s11256012-0202-9 allen, w. r., jewell, j. o., griffin, k. a., & wolf, d. s. (2007). historically black colleges and universities: honoring the past, engaging the present, touching the future. the journal of negro education, 76, 263-280. asselin, m. e. (2011). reflective narrative: a tool for learning through practice. journal for nurses in professional development, 27(1), 2-6. doi: 10.1097/nnd.0b013e3181b1ba1a christians, j. c. (2014). understanding the black flame and multigenerational education trauma: toward a theory of dehumanization of black students. lanham, md: lexington books connelly, f. m., & clandinin, d. j. (1990). stories of experience and narrative inquiry. educational researcher, 19(5), 2-14. dalton, j. & wolfe, s. (2012). competencies for community psychology practice: society for community research and action draft august 15, 2012. the community psychologist. retrieved from http://www.scra27.org. degruy, j. (2005). post traumatic slave syndrome; america’s legacy of enduring injury and healing. portland, or: uptone press. douglas, t. m. o. (2012). hbcus as sites of resistance: the malignity of materialism, western masculinity, and spiritual malefaction. urban review, 44, 378-400. doi: 10.1007/s11256012-0198-1 dubois, w. e. b. (1903). of mr. booker t. washington and others. retrieved from http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/40 /. evans, a. l., evans, v., & evans, a. m. (2002). historically black colleges and universities (hbcus). education, 123 (1), 3-17. gates, h. l. (1987). the classic slave narratives. new york, ny: signet. glaeser, e., & vigdor, j. (2012). the end of the segregated century: racial separation in america’s neighborhoods, 18902010. manhattan institute for policy research, no. 66. henderson, d. x. (in press). community engagement in an undergraduate course in psychology at an hbcu. teaching of psychology. henderson, d. x., & wright, m. (2015). getting students to “go out and make a change:” promoting dimensions of global citizenship and social justice in an undergraduate course. journal of contemporary issues in higher education, 1, 14-29. hughes, l. (1934). cowards from the colleges: an essay. the crisis, 41. 227-228. kelly, j. g. (1986). context and process: an ecological view of the interdependence of practice and research. american journal of community psychology, 14(6), 581589. doi:10.1007/bf00931335 kloos, b., hill, j., thomas, e., wandersman, a., elias, m., & dalton, j. h. (2012). community psychology: linking individuals and communities (3rd ed.). belmont, ca: wadsworth. langhout, r. d. (2015). considering community psychology competencies: a love letter to budding scholaractivists who wonder if they have http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.scra27.org/ http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/40/ http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/40/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 what it takes. american journal of community psychology, 55(3), 266278. mcmillan, d.w., & chavis, d.m. (1986). sense of community: a definition and theory. american journal of community psychology, 14(1), 6-23. nc department of public instruction. (2015). abcs of public education. retrieved from http://www.ncdpi.org neighborhoodscout. (2015). waughtown. retrieved from http://www.neighborhoodscout.com nelson, g., & prilleltensky, i. (2005). community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and well-being. new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. nygren, l., & blom, b. (2001). analysis of short reflective narratives: a method for the study of knowledge in social workers' actions. qualitative research, 1(3), 369-384. doi:10.1177/146879410100100306 ollerenshaw, j. & creswell, j. w. (2002). narrative research: a comparison of two restorying data analysis approaches. qualitative inquiry, 8 (3), 329-347. doi: 10.1177/10778004008003008 prilleltensky, i. (2001). value-based praxis in community psychology: moving toward social justice and social action. american journal of community psychology, 29(5), 747-778. rappaport, j. (1995). empowerment meets narrative: listening to stories and creating settings. american journal of community psychology, 23(5), 795807. rogers, r., & mosley wetzel, m. (2013). designing critical literacy education through critical discourse analysis: pedagogical and research tools for teacher researchers. new york, ny: routledge. sarkisian, g. v., & taylor, s. (2013). a learning journey i: curriculum mapping as a tool to assess and integrate community psychology practice competencies in graduate education programs. global journal of community psychology practice, 4 (4). retrieved from http://www.gjcpp.org/en/ sarkisian, g. v., saleem, m. a., simpkin, j., weidenbacher, a., bartko, n., & taylor, s. (2013). a learning journey ii: learned course maps as a basis to explore how students learned community psychology practice competencies in a community coalition-building course. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4). retrieved from http://www.gjcpp.org/. sydnor, k. d., hawkins, a. s., & edwards, l. v. (2010). expanding research opportunities: making the argument for the fit between hbcus and community-based participatory research. the journal of negro education, 79(1), 79-86. wenglinsky, h. (1996). the educational justification of historically black colleges and universities: a policy response to the u.s. supreme court. educational evaluation and policy analysis, 18 (1), 91-103. woodson, c. g. (1933). the mis-education of the negro. hampton, va: u.b. & u.s. communication systems. wolfe, s. m. (2014). the application of community psychology practice competencies to reduce health disparities. american journal of community psychology, 53(1-2), 2314. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.ncdpi.org/ http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ http://www.gjcpp.org/en/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 wolfe, s. m., chien-scott, v., & jimenez, t. r. (2013). community psychology practice competencies: a global perspective. global journal of community psychology practice, 4 (4), 1-9. retrieved from http://www.gjcpp.org/e http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 appendix a. historical analysis activity-introduction to community psychology historical analysis (50 points): historical analysis is less a separate analytical framework or approach than it is an element that should be present in any analysis of a community. observing and analyzing changes over time is essential to understanding the underpinnings of a community and its challenges. we cannot understand our present without understanding our past. and we cannot fully imagine change without a sense of how a community has changed over time (cultural politics, 2014). this paper (4-6 pages) requires students to examine the history of the waughtown community as it relates to neighborhood changes, populations, etc. you should use digital forsyth and the o’kelly library archives as sources of information. you can also use google search or other search engine to find articles, blogs, community forums, etc. that may have existed. in your final paper, you should have the following: introduction (frame the assignment in the value of understanding human development over time and in context) o use ecological perspectives o human development theories, etc. this body should be organized by decade and discuss the following: o what are four major events that occurred between the 1950s and 2014? how did they impact the community? who was affected by those changes? o what did the community look like in the 1950s and over the decades? demographics schools religious organizations, centers. etc. culture in terms of traditions, ethnic groups, etc. o what kinds of industry existed here? what were sources of economic development? businesses, etc. for example: waughtown, 1950 in 1952, waughtown began to see a shift in the people who comprised the working class community. one the major steel plants, colby, was shut down and it left a number of people without jobs… conclusion (frame the conclusion as a summary of your findings and how this influences the present waughtown community). o what are major issues facing waughtown today? o what are some recommendations for improving one of the concerns facing the waughtown community. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 appendix b. sense of community activity-introduction to community psychology sense of community project (100 points): mcmillan and chavis (1986) describe a sense of community in four elements: membership, influence, integration and fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection. using these elements, you will prepare an audiovisual piece that defines how waughtown displays a sense of community and submit a paper. this is a major assignment and should not be approached lightly. the goal of this activity is to provide with an opportunity to develop a narrative and visual project that frames the waughtown community development project. final submission of the writing assignment should be double-spaced, 12-font, times new roman, arial, or calibri. this assignment will ask that you collect historical and current data and information on waughtown using a variety of sources (e.g., journal articles, blog post, newspapers, community meetings, and interviews). in this assignment you will be required to: examine the population/demographics of the waughtown community gather evidence using multiple sources from the internet and archives about the community. attend 2 – 3 community events in the waughtown area and collect data. develop a story (informational or advocacy base) integrate media. for the template and complete listing of requirements refer to blackboard. the final paper should have the following headings (50 points): introduction (briefly introduces the assignment, its purpose and how your group went about the project; provide a brief summary of the history and current conditions of the waughtown community). element 1 membership: what includes and excludes members within the waughtown community? what are common symbols, expressions, and language? what defines safety and well-being within the community? what are examples of the waughtown identity and how is it expressed? element 2 influence: how do members exert their own personal power? is this economic, religious, culture, etc? who are individuals who represent influence and why? element 3 integration and fulfillment of needs: what are shared values and resources? what are common goals among individuals and populations in the community? how do individuals meet their physical, psychological, and social needs? element 4 emotional connection: what could be the shared bond between community residents and populations? what are celebrations and shared stories that bond individuals? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 conclusion (briefly provides a summary of how waughtown exhibits or does not exhbit a sense of community and how to strengthen these community bonds). the final presentation should be a representation of the paper and display the four elements of a “sense of community” provided from the paper (50 points). remember, work smarter not harder. this project will require you to: identify and collect media materials (e.g., pictures) that reflect the elements. use community quotes and archived data to reflect the elements. conduct analysis and integrate community perspectives. develop a story (informational or advocacy base). integrate media. you should develop a 5 to 10 minute video/powerpoint presentation. we will use some our class time to engage in brainstorming to think about what major concepts you want to cover in the presentation. all media used should be cited; no pixeled pictures. you should make sure your final presentation has the ability to touch an emotional aspect of the viewer, provide information, and end with a call to action. the main focus of the presentataion is to provide the audience with relevant information needed to inform or advocate. at the end of production, acknowledgements and list of references should be listed. the final presentation should be edited with microsoft live movie maker/goanimate and uploaded as a video into blackboard. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 appendix c. five wishes for my community-youth activity-introduction to community psychology five wishes for my community a youth facilitated activity designed to gain perspectives of community needs in waughtown, winston-salem, nc. in order to complete this activity, you will need at least one facilitator for every 5-7 youth. age range between 4th and 12th grade (10 to 19 years) supplies poster board (or somewhere you can have youth write their ideas) markers or crayons tape directions divide youth into groups of 5 to 7. begin with a short facilitated discussion on descriptions of community. ask questions like: o what defines your community? what does your community look like? then start a short facilitated discussion on what are some things missing in your community. ask questions like: o what do young people do in your community? older populations? o where do you go for food, to eat, shop, have fun, etc.? then, using the groups, tell youth if they were given 5 wishes (things they want in their community) what would they be. all the youth to work in their groups and write their ideas on poster board. they should write everyone’s ideas. then instruct youth they must choose the top five from all of their ideas. share each group’s 5 wishes and then engage in discussion on whether there are certain wishes that are more important than others. ask questions like: o why do you think these are important? for example, why would having a park be important in the community? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 appendix d. sense of community video-introduction to community psychology view video here: https://youtu.be/3-spldlh9lm http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://youtu.be/3-spldlh9lm author biographies: dawn x. henderson, phd, received her training in community psychology from north carolina state university. she uses pedagogy to engage in empowerment and social and racial justice work with undergraduate students. she served as an... what does it mean to use competencies in "praxis" with undergraduate students at historically black institutions? abstract racial justice and historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) the use of narrative in empowerment and reflection the scene: winston-salem state university and waughtown the actors faculty: henderson undergraduate students matlock clark garrett faculty: henderson conclusion references neighborhoodscout. (2015). waughtown. retrieved from http://www.neighborhoodscout.com appendix a. historical analysis activity-introduction to community psychology for example: waughtown, 1950 appendix b. sense of community activity-introduction to community psychology the final paper should have the following headings (50 points): waughtown identity and how is it expressed? five wishes for my community age range supplies directions appendix d. sense of community video-introduction to community psychology “lessons that simply cannot be lectured”: highlighting the experiences and benefits of undergraduates engaged in community psychology research danielle chiaramonte, jake quarles, rachael goodman-williams, trevor strzyzykowski, rachel weber, kelli broessel & timothy thompson1 author biographies: danielle chiaramonte, is a doctoral student in michigan state university’s ecological-community psychology program. her work centers around health equity, with a particular focus in increasing access to sexual health resources for lgbtq youth and addressing systemic barriers that limit access to health and social services. her current work is focused on the evaluation of innovative housing models for intimate partner violence survivors. jake quarles, is a recent grad of michigan state university, where he graduated with a bachelor’s of science in human biology. jake is currently involved in healthcare research and passionate about patient education, professional development, and health information. additionally, jake hopes to pursue medical school in the future. rachael goodman-williams, is currently pursuing her ph.d. in community psychology from michigan state university. her work broadly focuses on gender-based violence, with specializations in quantitative methods, evaluation science, and undergraduate teaching. her specific research interests include community responses to sexual violence and the impact of methodological decisions on research findings. she works in the community as an evaluator with the michigan coalition to end domestic and sexual violence and as a research partner on the sexual assault kit initiative training and technical assistance team. trevor strzyzykowski, is a master’s level ecological-community psychology student michigan state university. he is interested in systems change to promote healthy environments for youth and queer folk, including the development of efficient, effective and culturally competent systems of care. currently, trevor works with a team to evaluate project aware michigan’s progress in mental health first aid training and in connecting children, youth and families to mental health services. rachel weber, is a recent grad of michigan state university, where graduated with a bachelor’s of arts in psychology, spanish, and women’s studies. she became involved in community psychology research at msu as an undergraduate in 2016 with the safer sex research team. she served as an undergraduate researcher on this project, focusing on qualitative analysis of barriers to hiv resources and treatment for youth. rachel’s research interests include 1 michigan state university, department of psychology, east lansing, mi global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 resource access, issues impacting youth, critical consciousness, hiv, and sexual violence. kelli broessel, is a recent grad of michigan state university. she graduated from the college of natural sciences with bachelor’s of science in neuroscience and psychology. she is currently pursuing a doctorate of pharmacy at pacific university in hillsboro, oregon. her current research interests include understanding the pathology of parasite leishmania which is responsible for the infectious tropical disease leishmaniasis which affects 12 million people annually. she also aspires to continue to work in healthcare as a patient advocate and to work in improving healthcare for underserved and marginalized populations. timothy thompson, is currently a senior at michigan state university and is studying toward a bachelor’s in psychology. tim worked with the safer sex research team evaluating an hiv prevention community mobilization initiative and has worked on the msu adolescent diversion project where he acted as a one-on-one advocate to reduce youth recidivism in ingham county. currently, he is assisting with a research study focusing on the economic aspect of domestic violence. in his leisure, timothy enjoys coaching soccer and creating music. his academic passion focuses on mental health and sports psychology. timothy is excited to continue his studies and attend graduate school for clinical psychology. recommended citation: chiaramonte, d., quarles, j., goodman-williams, r., strzyzykowski, t., weber, r., broessel, k., & thompson, t. (2019). “lessons that simply cannot be lectured”: highlighting the experience and benefits of undergraduates engaged in community psychology research. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(2), 1-21. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). author note: correspondence may be addressed to danielle chiaramonte, 316 physics rd, psychology building, michigan state university, east lansing, mi 48824. ph: 517-353-9217. email: chiaram1@msu.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ mailto:chiaram1@msu.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 “lessons that simply cannot be lectured”: highlighting the experiences and benefits of undergraduates engaged in community psychology research abstract globally, community psychology (cp) currently struggles with a lack of visibility and a shortage of platforms from which to engage future researchers and practitioners. many of these future researchers and practitioners study psychology as part of their undergraduate education, making psychology departments in undergraduate institutions an ideal point of exposure. discouragingly, however, undergraduate students are unlikely to be exposed to cp in their course curriculums forcing students to seek out opportunities for exposure elsewhere (jimenez, 2016; glantsman, mcmahon & njoku et al., 2015). this is especially true of community psychology within the united states. this study aimed to explore how students got involved in cp research and the benefits of that involvement. a total of 34 former undergraduate research assistants involved in cp research teams at michigan state university completed a 20-item online questionnaire comprised of openand closed-ended questions. quantitative data were analyzed descriptively and qualitative data were analyzed using an iterative coding process. results showed that the majority of students had no experience in cp and merely stumbled upon the research. despite this, respondents reported gaining many skills, competencies, and knowledge during their time on the research teams. respondents particularly benefited from: 1) gaining hands-on and community-based research skills; 2) attaining transferable skills they could carry with them in future positions; 3) acquiring cp-specific competencies; and 4) cultivating greater awareness and passion for social issues. finally, the majority of respondents discussed how their involvement on cp research teams honed in their interest and passions and/or shaped their professional trajectory. these findings provide preliminary evidence of the benefits of cp research involvement at an undergraduate level and has important implications for how cp as a field may choose to invest in undergraduate research opportunities. introduction one goal of psychology is to apply research findings in a way that will make a positive impact on the world (goodwin, 2010). community psychology (cp), in particular, is a discipline in psychology dedicated to conducting research that can inform health promotion, alleviate or prevent social adversities, address oppression, and integrate research with action to facilitate lasting improvements in community wellbeing (dalton, elias & wandersman, 2012; kloos, hill, thomas, wandersman, & elias, 2012; prilleltensky, 2001). because cp’s values support one of psychology’s overarching goals of research applicability, exposure to cp has the potential to benefit not only future community psychologists but future researchers and practitioners of all disciplines. this exposure to cp also has the potential to benefit students beyond their career paths by developing skills to foster http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 civic engagement, activism and awareness of key issues affecting their communities. globally, cp currently struggles with a lack of visibility and a shortage of platforms from which to engage future researchers and practitioners (glantsman, mcmahon, & njoku, 2015; jimenez, sánchez, mcmahon & viola, 2016). many of these future researchers and practitioners study psychology as part of their undergraduate education, making psychology departments in undergraduate institutions an ideal point of exposure. discouragingly, however, undergraduate students are unlikely to be exposed to cp in their studies (elias, 1987; glantsman et al., 2015). this is especially true for cp in the united states. introductory psychology courses are a venue in which many students are exposed to different psychology disciplines (e.g., developmental, social, clinical, etc.), yet cp is left out of most introductory psychology textbooks (bauer, glantsman, hochberg, turner & jason, 2017). in an examination of 53 introductory psychology textbooks, bauer and colleagues (2017) only found adequate representation of cp in nine of the textbooks. furthermore, if undergraduate students do happen to encounter cp in an introductory psychology course, they may have few options for deepening their exposure. most institutions, worldwide, have no representation of cp in their psychology coursework and, of those that do, a single elective course is often the only offering (glantsman et al., 2015). there are a variety of possible ways to address this lack of visibility and increase access to cp, such as advocating for cp inclusion in undergraduate textbook and course curriculums. these strategies, however, require a level of institutional support that may be absent. one uniquely flexible solution ripe for exploration is engaging undergraduate students in cp research. through hands-on experience with community-driven research, undergraduate students could gain the exposure to cp that they are unlikely to encounter in their classrooms. previous studies have found positive benefits of research team participation for undergraduate students. these benefits include enhanced leadership skills (etmanski, hall, & dawson, 2014), an increased likelihood of pursuing graduate education (hathaway, nagda, & gregerman, 2002; russell, hancock, & mccullough, 2007), and improved analytical or independent thinking (ishiyama, 2002; ryder, leach, & driver, 1999). studies have also consistently found that participation in undergraduate research can increase students’ interest in their discipline and clarify or confirm pursuit of specific graduate study (see seymour, hunter, lauren, & deantoni, 2004, for a review). while the benefits of undergraduate students’ involvement in research teams is well established, examination of discipline-specific outcomes has received less attention. these discipline-specific outcomes may be especially important for cp as leaders in the field grapple with how to increase its visibility and engage with future scholars and practitioners. the society for community research and action (scra) has recently developed a list of competencies that help to serve as a framework for discussion of skills involved in community psychology graduate training (dalton & wolfe, 2012). broadly, these competencies cover the following areas: foundational cp principles, community program development and management, community and organizational capacitybuilding, community and social change, and community research. a recent issue of the global journal of community psychology practice highlighted various global applications of these competencies in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 academia and practice settings (wolff, francisco & meissen, 2016), however only one of the articles from the special issue discussed how these competencies might be incorporated into undergraduate education and research experiences (henderson, matlock, garrett, & clark, 2016). while the cp-competencies are primarily geared towards tailoring graduate education, it is still important to note if any competencies may be acquired during undergraduate experiences. if undergraduate involvement with cp research teams produces similar experiences and benefits to what would be expected through more traditional platforms of engagement (e.g., classroom instruction), then cp as a field may choose to invest more heavily in undergraduate research opportunities, paying particular attention to the cp competencies acquired. if, alternatively, the experiences had by undergraduate students in cp research teams does not benefit undergraduate students in meaningful ways, the field may choose to direct its efforts elsewhere. current study this study aims to provide insight on the benefits of cp-engaged research for undergraduate students. this student-led investigation focuses on bringing undergraduate perspectives forward and using those experiences to inform cp outreach to undergraduate students. the current project seeks to answer the following research questions: 1) what duties or roles did undergraduate students hold on community psychology research teams? 2) what do undergraduate students perceive as the benefits to having worked on a community psychology research team? 3) what skills or cp-competencies were gained by undergraduate students? 4) what challenges do undergraduate students face when engaging in cp research? 5) how, if at all, do students perceive their engagement in community psychology research to have influenced their professional goals? keeping with the focus of this article, the research team for this project comprised undergraduate and graduate students (all listed as authors in this manuscript) who worked collaboratively from the project conceptualization, through survey design, data collection, data analysis and interpretation and manuscript preparation. in particular, undergraduate students took the lead in proposing the initial research concept and designing the data collection tool. graduate student researchers supported these efforts by providing information, resources and guidance. undergraduates also served as coders in the qualitative coding and data analysis process. graduate students took the lead on manuscript preparation, although the undergraduates were still heavily involved. methods participants and procedures this study examined experiences of current or former undergraduate students who were involved in cp research teams at michigan state university in the past three years. to obtain this sample, a comprehensive list of the names and emails of undergraduate student researchers was collected from current faculty and their respective graduate students. all eligible current or former undergraduate students were sent a recruitment email with information about the project and a link to an online qualtrics survey. after one week, a reminder email was sent to the entire list to increase recruitment numbers. from the email, prospective participants were directed to an online consent form that provided additional information about the study and their rights. if prospective participants consented to participate in the study, they were http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 immediately directed to an online qualtrics questionnaire. of the 384 potential participants who were contacted, 62 consented and 34 completed the survey. respondents did not receive any compensation for their participation and the survey took approximately 30 minutes to complete. former undergraduate students (graduated michigan state university within the last three years) made up the majority of the sample (64%) and reported experiences from one of five (out of 11) cp research teams on campus. the proportion of respondents in each research project appear proportional to the number of undergraduate students who work within each project. all data was downloaded directly from qualtrics onto a secure server. qualitative data was downloaded into excel and quantitative data into spss for data management, coding, and analysis. all materials and procedures for this study were approved by michigan state’s institutional review board. measures the questionnaire was comprised of closedended and open-ended questions pertaining to participants' experiences working or volunteering on a community psychology research team. in order to capture the experiences, benefits, and challenges of involvement on cp research teams, we created a 20-item online questionnaire this questionnaire was specifically crafted for this research study through a collaboration with current and former undergraduate researchers from michigan state university. we began developing a quantitative measure to describe undergraduates research roles and development of skillsets by first reviewing the core competencies for community psychology practice. next, graduate and undergraduate students met to discuss which competencies appeared relevant to undergraduate research in community psychology until a consensus was reached. then, we created an inventory of items for skills and roles of undergraduate research students that represented the consensus. the qualitative portion of the survey was drafted by undergraduate student authors who wished to capture stories around specific research experiences, benefits, challenges, and the influence community psychology has had on their academic and professional life. graduate students and faculty provided feedback and suggestions to bolster each item’s interpretability, to create a more openended question structure, and to enhance the breadth of topics covered. undergraduate and graduate students continued the process until we achieved a consensus and the measure was finalized. the first section of the measure included questions about the number of semesters involved in research, compensation, course credit and grand tour questions about research experiences, broadly. the second section included an inventory of duties, roles and responsibilities during their tenure as an undergraduate researcher, such as project development, collecting and working with data, analyzing data, academic writing and community partnerships. we then asked questions about challenges and benefits pertaining to their duties as an undergraduate researcher. the third section asked participants to report the skills they developed from a predefined list informed by the core competencies of community psychology. lastly, we asked about their current position, educational level, and how their experience in community psychology influenced their career or employment. a copy of the final measure is available in appendix a. analysis http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 to analyze the 10 close-ended questions, we computed descriptive statistics. to analyze the 10 open-ended questions, we used an iterative coding process following hruschka and colleague’s (2004) guidelines for maintaining efficiency and reliability when coding open-ended data. all qualitative data was coded inductively by question, such that coders were trained to identify emergent themes separately for each question. emerging themes were coded, reviewed, refined, and recoded by the first and second authors until at least 80% inter-rater reliability was established for each question. results a total of 34 current and former undergraduate research assistants participated in the study. respondents were diverse in their undergraduate research involvement and experiences. respondents worked an average of three semesters on cp research teams (range one to eight semesters). approximately 70% received course credit for their involvement and 17% were, at some point in their engagement, paid hourly for their work. at the time of the survey, 43% of respondents were currently employed in full or part-time positions, approximately 35% were still working on their undergraduate degrees and 21% were currently in graduate school. participants who completed the survey discussed their work on one of five cp research teams focusing on an array of social justice-oriented research projects. the primary research projects in which respondents were involved included: 1) hiv prevention and care among youth (38%); 2) juvenile justice diversion and mentorship (29%); 3) substance use among arab american youth (15%); 4) gender-based violence (12%); and 5) community-based implementation evaluation (6%). exposure to cp prior to their involvement on cp research teams, the majority of respondents had no experience or knowledge about cp. of those that were exposed to cp through a cp course or faculty member, research involvement was seen as a way to deepen that exposure. one respondent’s experience is illustrative: “i had a class with [cp faculty], and on the first day realized his research was exactly what i wanted to do, so i approached him after class to learn more. originally, i was interested in public health.” one of the main reason students sought out cp research opportunities was because the research topics reflected student’s interests, passions or issues of importance to them: “i wanted more hands-on experience in my field and to start making a difference with the knowledge i had learned. once i met some of the people on the team it seemed like the position for me.” others stumbled upon the field through their community service activities or completely by accident, hoping to gain research experience or boost their cvs. one respondent said:” i was hoping it [research involvement] would have an influence and help me decide what i wanted to do in my future and it did both!” overall, regardless of how respondents got involved in community psychology research, a clear majority appreciated the experience. responsibilities and benefits of cp research engagements respondents perceived many direct benefits from working on cp research teams. first, we report on the quantitative findings of the various responsibilities and skills that respondents reported gaining because of cp research team involvement. subsequently, we discuss respondents’ perspectives on the benefits of cp research team involvement. most notably, respondents discussed gaining hands-on research skills, growing professionally and interpersonally, building http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 critical consciousness around pressing social issues, and attaining fulfilling postbaccalaureate positions. responsibilities and skills. respondents held diverse responsibilities on cp research teams. most respondents were involved in data management (82%), data collection (53%) and data analysis (53%). of all respondents, 56% held responsibilities pertaining to research project development such as project conceptualization and designing measurement tools. respondents were tasked project management responsibilities (53%) including administrative work, scheduling, or supervising other team members. respondents also were tasked with various writing responsibilities for manuscripts (56%) and technical reports (18%). approximately half of all respondents were involved with conference presentations, and a similar proportion with community engagement. table 1 displays the various skill and knowledge gains respondents reported as a result of their research engagements. as illustrated, most respondents described gaining valuable advanced research skills which they attributed to their research engagements. respondents also noted vast growth in their knowledge base around qualitative and quantitative methodologies and community-psychology specific topics such as community-based participatory research, implementation and dissemination, empowerment, and ecological systems theory. table 1. frequencies of skills and knowledge acquired during research engagements frequency % skills gained presenting research 16 47.1 analyzing data 21 61.8 interviewing participants 22 64.7 using statistical analysis software 22 64.7 working on a team 27 79.4 manuscript preparation 28 82.4 knowledge gained frequency % quantitative methods 20 58.8 qualitative methods 22 64.7 cp topics and theories 27 79.4 general research methods 32 94.1 hand-on research skills. many respondents specifically discussed the benefit of “getting firsthand experience in field of psychological research”. respondents commented that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 psychology research was something they learned about and discussed in class often but had been unable to engage with beyond course lectures. through involvement on community psychology research teams, respondents felt they were able to connect the research methods and statistical analysis course material to real world problems and begin to understand how community issues can be addressed through research. one respondent noted: “being able to have the opportunity to implement what you've learned in the classroom in real world research was super valuable in allowing me to develop as a student and a researcher. it really allowed me to grasp the concepts learned in class and apply them in ways we've never had the opportunity to apply them before. it's one thing to learn vocab words and visualize how things function in the classroom, it's another to get to apply them in real-world research and it allowed me to excel in my psychology classes afterward.” in addition to general research skills (e.g. data analysis, coding, interviewing), respondents particularly valued learning community-based and participatory research skills, such as “learning what elements go into the creation of a community assessment”, “sitting in community partner meetings”,” seeing what a community/research partnership actually looks like”, “hearing stories of women…and learning how to code [them] for themes” and “seeing how [faculty researchers] approach community participatory research”. respondents felt strongly that these types of skills are lacking or difficult to teach in a classroom and felt fortunate to learn these skills through their research opportunities. one respondent said: “i am grateful for my experience on a community psychology research team. i learned real-world lessons that simply cannot be lectured, they must be experienced.” interpersonal and transferable skill development. respondents discussed gaining interpersonal skills that allowed them to not only establish important career connections, but also feel more comfortable in teamwork environments: “having worked on a team helped me build the interpersonal skills needed to competently be able to work with and discuss psychology with my co-workers now.” all cp research at this institution is teambased, and respondents noted positive experiences working on teams with other undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff. some respondents greatly appreciated the mentorship relationships that developed on these teams. transferable skills were also particularly important to respondents. this theme was especially salient among currently employed respondents and graduate students. these respondents discussed how the skills they gained on cp research teams were directly applicable to a student entering graduate school or a young professional joining the workforce. most often, respondents discussed learning how to better manage their time as a result of research involvement or be more confident in their research and writing skills. one respondent described the skills they gained as “tangible skills i can carry with me no matter what my career path ends up being”. respondents who were not currently students or researchers also discussed how the skills they gained during their research engagements worked to their benefit in their current positions: “my topical knowledge has allowed me to [an] effective advocate for gender-based violence and i carried these skills and knowledge into my current job as a substance use and domestic violence offender assessor.” overall, skills gained from cp research teams seemed to last far beyond their cp research team engagements. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 awareness of social problems. respondents felt they grew more critically conscious of social issues impacting various communities. despite the varied lengths of cp research engagement, most respondents discussed how experiences in cp research cultivated greater awareness and passion for social justice: “it helped me realize how many people are impacted by these issues that exist in our society today and how many are under educated on these problems.” respondents spoke of how knowledge gained through cp research increased their passion around the topics being studied, but also affected how they place themselves in the context of social issues and their communities. one respondent said: “my entire view on the world, social problems, science and health shifted to be more enlightened by values of social justice and social ecology”. participants suggested knowledge gained from their research engagement enabled them to more effectively contribute to positive change in their communities. one participant said they were “now better equipped to contribute to the world.” framing social problems. for many respondents, cp research engagements helped students apply different cp approaches and frameworks to better understand the social issues about which they were passionate. “i'm also in grad school now, and definitely approach the program with a feminist/community psychology framework.” a clear majority of respondents explicitly discussed how being able to view community problems through an ecological lens has helped them in their current work. for example, one respondent described how cp research influences their current work as a social worker: “it reminds me to look at the big picture when identifying problems. i also understand that some of the barriers i encounter as a social worker are systemic and issues that can only be solved by changing policy.” this comment was similarly echoed by another respondent who wrote: “i have gained more knowledge about how many problems communities face have to be address on several different levels from state policy to local resources.” identifying and attaining goals. finally, many students sought out psychology research to get experience necessary to apply to graduate school or attain a professional position. one respondent spoke highly of how the research team they worked on supported their future goals: “they helped me get into a master’s program and i have built relationships with faculty members that recognize my skills and knowledge in community psychology.” about half of all respondents reported that their cp research experiences encouraged their interest in pursuing cp or communityengaged work. almost all respondents said their work on cp research teams honed in their interests and passions, which in turn shaped their professional trajectory: “[cp research team] helped me find my research interest and passion.” a quarter of respondents directly tied their current positions to their experiences working on cp research teams. for example: “i feel very strongly that [research team and staff member’s] mentoring are the biggest factors in why i am where i am today! [they] confirmed my desire to work with underserved and disadvantaged populations and [redacted] guided me in the right direction to pursue my msw.” taken together, respondents felt fortunate that they found cp research teams, they were appreciative of the responsibilities held and skills gained over their research engagements and felt that cp research involvement not only helped shape their career goals, but also their outlook on social problems in communities. challenges http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 in addition to discussing benefits of cp research, respondents also discussed challenges they faced while pursuing research as an undergraduate student. respondents provided valuable insight to the reasons and challenges of their exposure and experiences with cp research teams. balancing full-time coursework as well as employment, volunteering, and extracurricular activities can be challenging enough for undergraduate students. however, as stated by one respondent, there was a feeling that research “was necessary to secure a job or acceptance into a graduate program”. with the pressure for higher education, employment, and commitments to other university activities, it is no surprise that 41% of students reported challenges with time management as part of a cp team. students also mentioned feelings of a lack of confidence in their ability to adequately contribute to a research team as a challenge to involvement. of respondents, 23.5% stated that their lack of prior exposure and experience with cp research challenged them in their success. though challenges were addressed by respondents, no surveys were received outlining negative experiences with their research involvement. we expect that those who did not have pleasant experiences, chose not to respond to the survey. discussion this student-led research investigation was carried out with the specific aims of understanding undergraduate students’ experiences on cp research teams and how these experiences affected their professional trajectories. findings from this study not only provide valuable insight into how undergraduates are exposed to cp, but also the benefits gained from their engagement with cp research. awareness of community psychology field unsurprisingly, respondents typically had little awareness of cp prior to engaging in cp research, suggesting that a lack of platforms from which to educate undergraduate students about cp stymies their exposure to the discipline. fortunately, many students independently sought out or stumbled into cp research opportunities. these opportunities provided students with hands-on experiences that complemented their coursework, provided valuable community-based research training, built transferable skills and cultivated knowledge of pressing social problems. respondents emphasized that engagement in cp research provided a depth of understanding that they felt could not be learned in classroom environments. in addition to this cp-specific understanding, respondents also reflected that engagement in cp research strengthened their understanding of concepts taught in other psychology classes. while we want to underscore the ability of classroom environments to build cp visibility on a broad scale, these respondents’ accounts seem to point to research involvement as a uniquely enriching academic experience. as a result, cp might consider allocating significant energy toward creating opportunities for such research-based learning to occur. skills and competencies gained previous research in other disciplines has demonstrated the personal benefits of research involvement for undergraduate students (etmanski, hall, & dawson, 2014). our study is consistent with these findings providing evidence of various skills gained from research team engagements. in addition to completing administrative tasks, respondents collectively contributed to all stages of the cp research process from engaging in partnership formation and project conceptualization to manuscript preparation and disseminating findings http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 through community reports. respondents also discussed valuable skills they acquired that helped identify and attain professional goals outside of the research team environment, highlighting a reciprocal relationship between faculty, graduate students and the undergraduate research team members. consequently, involving undergraduates in cp research may not only benefit the undergraduate student, but also the discipline’s visibility and individual research teams’ productivity. given this, highly productive cp programs may be able to leverage their measurable performance to argue for greater departmental representation in undergraduate coursework leading to increased benefits felt outside of traditional cp research. the findings also provide preliminary evidence of the acquisition of cp competencies through undergraduate research experiences. many of the skills and experiences reported by undergraduate students map on well to dalton and wolfe’s cp-competency work (2012). most notably, competency in foundational principles of cp were noted in respondent’s discussions of being able to see social problems through an ecological perspective. relatedly, respondents identified increased competence in more than ten areas of social issues such as substance use, domestic violence, lgbt issues, and hiv prevention and services. this increased exposure and knowledge of social issues strongly reflects the development of social competence and “the ability to value, integrate, and bridge multiple worldviews, cultures, and identities.” (dalton & wolfe, 2012, p. 10). long term benefits an important goal of this research was to explore the long-term benefits of cp research involvement for undergraduate students. findings from this study provide preliminary evidence of the positive impact cp research team involvement can have on educational and professional trajectories. our results support previous findings that student engagement in research teams not only encouraged undergraduate students to pursue graduate school, but also clarified their specific educational aims (hathaway et al., 2002; russell et al., 2007; seymore et al., 2004). additionally, engagement in cp research groups also appeared to foster skills, relationships, and recommendations that supported undergraduate students’ pursuit of graduate education. respondents consistently described their involvement on cp research teams as contributing to their professional success outside of graduate school as well. many respondents described cp research experiences as shaping their career goals by expanding their professional networks, increasing their quality of work, or intensifying passions for social justice. select respondents discussed their involvement relating to their decision to pursue a career directly in a cp-related field. regardless of whether respondents pursued graduate school, work in cp, or work in a non-cprelated field, involvement in cp research teams seemed to support those pursuits finally, this research found that involvement on cp research teams cultivated greater awareness and passion for social issues that challenge community wellbeing. overwhelmingly, respondents felt they grew more critically conscious of social issues that impacted their communities or communities around them. multiple respondents mentioned shifting their worldview to see problems through an ecological or systemic lens. these findings support the seminal critical consciousness work of paulo freire and provide preliminary evidence that cp research teams may serve as an important pedagogical tool uniquely situated to help shape undergraduate students into civically http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 engaged citizens and scholars (freire, 1968; hall 1992). limitations though these findings contribute valuable insight to an under-explored area of research, there are limitations that should be recognized. first, this study had a relatively small sample with a low response rate (9%). it is possible, therefore, that students whose experiences were less positive did not return the survey and our results are therefore skewed. there were other factors that likely influenced the response rate, however, such as researchers often only having expired university email addresses for previous undergraduate research assistants. while this does not eliminate the possibility of response bias, it does suggest that it may not be the primary explanation for non-response. secondly, our data gives us limited ability to infer what aspect of cp research team involvement is most responsible for the reported benefits. additional studies conducted on this topic should explore whether certain cp research team experiences (e.g., data collection, community meetings, academic publishing, project conceptualization) or dynamics (e.g. mentormentee fit) yield more benefit than others. furthermore, these findings represent the experiences of undergraduates at only one institution in the united states. results must be interpreted within the context that michigan state university is a large research institution (approximately 39,000 undergraduate students and 11,000 graduate students as of fall 2017). it should also be noted that, unlike at many colleges and universities, cp has a strong presence within michigan state university’s psychology department. although these findings may not generalize to the experiences of smaller institutions or large universities without robust cp programs, it does give our field a baseline measure of how students might benefit from involvement on cp research teams. in addition to addressing the noted shortcomings of our current study, future research should continue to explore the longitudinal outcomes of undergraduate research involvement. while some previous research has examined undergraduate research experience as a predictor of graduate school enrollment (hathaway et al., 2002), future studies could explore whether benefits persist past graduate enrollment in terms of post-graduate placements, research productivity, and career satisfaction. future research should continue to build on this work, by exploring additional cp competencies students are currently gaining and may need to gain throughout their undergraduate career. with this knowledge, undergraduate institutions could tailor programming to make sure students acquire these skills, not unlike graduate cp training programs. additionally, scra may consider developing undergraduate-specific cp competencies aimed at producing ecologically competent students better serving their universities and communities. conclusion the central implication of these findings is that cp coursework is not the only way to engage undergraduate students in cp. rather, it seems that many of the central tenants of cp, including a commitment to social justice, action-based research, and a systems-level focus can be fostered in undergraduate students through their engagement with cp research teams. insofar as one of the motivating interests of cp is to encourage these frameworks in a variety of future practitioners and scholars, engaging undergraduate students in cp research teams is a promising strategy for community psychologists to explore. additionally, these http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 findings reinforce the benefits that undergraduate students appear to gain from involvement in research teams spread through a variety of disciplines. with the increased exposure to interpersonal problems following undergraduate graduation, the cp method of problem solving gives students an advantage in using empirical data for real world application (etmanski et al., 2014; russell et al., 2007). in recognition of these benefits, colleges and universities should be encouraged to explore mechanisms through which to expand and promote research opportunities available to undergraduate students. references bauer, h. m., glantsman, o., hochberg, l., turner, c., & jason, l. a. (2017). community psychology coverage in introduction to psychology textbooks. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(3). retrieved from http://www.gjcpp.org/. dalton, j. h., elias, m. j., & wandersman, a. (2001). community psychology: linking individuals and communities. belmont, ca: wadsworth. dalton, j. & wolfe, s. (2012). joint column: education connection and the community practitioner. the community psychologist, 45(4), 7-14. elias, m. j. (1987). improving the continuity between undergraduate psychology and graduate community psychology: analysis and case study. journal of community psychology, 15(3), 376-386. https://doi.org/10.1002/15206629(198707)15:3<376::aidjcop2290150311>3.0.co;2-j etmanski, c., hall, b. l., & dawson, t. (eds.). (2014). learning and teaching community-based research: linking pedagogy to practice. toronto, canada: university of toronto press. freire, p. (1968). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york, ny: seabury press publishing usa. glantsman, o. & mcmahon, s. & njoku, m. g. (2015). developing undergraduate community psychology curriculum. in njoku, m. g. c., anieke, c. c., mcdevitt, p. j. (eds), frontiers in education: advances, issues and new perspectives (pp. 65-90). enugu, nigeria: bic books & equip. ltd. goodwin, c. j. (2010). research in psychology: methods and design. (6th ed.). hoboken, nj: wiley & sons. hall, b. l. (1992). from margins to center? the development and purpose of participatory research. the american sociologist, 23(4), 15-28. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02691928 hathaway, r. s., nagda, b. a., & gregerman, s. r. (2002). the relationship of undergraduate research participation to graduate and professional education pursuit: an empirical study. journal of college student development, 43(5), 614-631. henderson, d. x., matlock, j. r., garrett, d., & clark, c. (2016). what does it mean to use competencies in" praxis" with undergraduate students at historically black institutions? global journal of community psychology practice, 7(4). retrieved from http://www.gjcpp.org/. hruschka, d. j., schwartz, d., st. john, d. c., picone-decaro, e., jenkins, r. a., & carey, j. w. (2004). reliability in coding open-ended data: lessons learned from hiv behavioral research. field methods, 16(3), 307-331. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-6629(198707)15:3%3c376::aid-jcop2290150311%3e3.0.co;2-j https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-6629(198707)15:3%3c376::aid-jcop2290150311%3e3.0.co;2-j https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-6629(198707)15:3%3c376::aid-jcop2290150311%3e3.0.co;2-j global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822x042 66540 ishiyama, j. (2002). does early participation in undergraduate research benefit social science and humanities students? college student journal, 36(3), 381-387. kloos, b., hill, j., thomas, e., wandersman, a., & elias, m. j. (2012). community psychology: linking individuals and communities. belmont, ca: wadsworth, cengage learning. prilleltensky, i. (2001). value-based praxis in community psychology: moving toward social justice and social action. american journal of community psychology, 29(5), 747-778. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:101041720 1918 jimenez, t. r., sánchez, b., mcmahon, s. d., & viola, j. (2016). a vision for the future of community psychology education and training. american journal of community psychology, 58(3-4), 339-347. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12079 russell, s. h., hancock, m. p., & mccullough, j. (2007). benefits of undergraduate research experiences. science, 316(5824), 548-549. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.11403 84 ryder, j., leach, j., & driver, r. (1999). undergraduate science students' images of science. journal of research in science teaching: the official journal of the national association for research in science teaching, 36(2), 201-219. https://doi.org/10.1002/(sici)10982736(199902)36:2<201::aidtea6>3.0.co;2-h seymour, e., hunter, a. b., laursen, s.l., & deantoni, t. (2004). establishing the benefits of research experiences for undergraduates in the sciences: first findings from a three-year study. science education, 88(4), 493-534. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.10131 wolff, t., francisco, v., & meissen, g. (eds) (2016). special issue of gjcpp on practice competencies in community psychology and their applications. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(4). retrieved from http://www.gjcpp.org/. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822x04266540 https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822x04266540 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 appendix a: online questionnaire exploring undergraduate involvement in community psychology research: questionnaire section a: research team the following questions pertain to your experiences with community psychology research. please feel free to skip any question that you do not feel comfortable answering. 1. how long were you a member of a research team? (in semesters) (if you were part of more than one team, answer questions about the team on which you were a member the longest.) 2. were you ever paid to be involved on this research team?  yes  no 3. did you ever receive course credit for your involvement on this research team?  yes  no 4. describe the research project(s) in which you were involved. 5. why did you pursue a community psychology research experience? 6. describe your experiences, if any, with community psychology before your involvement on the research team. section b: duties the following questions pertain to your duties and roles as a member of a community psychology research team. please feel free to skip any question you do not feel comfortable answering. 1. please select from following duties or roles in which you participated as a member of your research team?  project development  brainstorming or conceptualizing projects  training other team members  writing an irb application  designing measurement tools  collecting literature for literature reviews  other: please specify http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17  project management  administrative work, such as ordering purchases or preparing mailings  keeping/organizing/managing records  scheduling meetings, interviews or other activities  answering telephone calls or emails  supervising other team members  other: please specify  data collection  interviewing participants  running focus groups  observing behaviors or settings  administering surveys  other: please specify  data management  transcribing qualitative data (interviews, focus groups, etc.)  cleaning or managing qualitative data (interviews, focus groups, etc.)  entering quantitative data in spss, stata, excel or other program  cleaning or managing quantitative data in spss, stata, excel or other program  other: please specify  data analysis  developing codebooks  analyzing qualitative data (coding, interpreting themes)  analyzing quantitative data (descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, etc.)  other: please specify  reports and presentations  creating tables / graphs / figures  preparing conference presentations  presenting at conferences  other: please specify  writing and editing  preparing annotated bibliographies  reviewing manuscripts for journals  writing community reports  writing introductions for manuscripts  writing methods sections for manuscripts  writing results sections for manuscripts  writing discussion sections for manuscripts  writing conference abstracts  editing community reports  editing introductions for manuscripts http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18  editing methods sections for manuscripts  editing results sections for manuscripts  editing discussion sections for manuscripts  editing conference abstracts  other: please specify  community work  developing curricula  designing interventions  implementing interventions  attending community meetings or events (e.g., town halls)  planning community meetings or events  building community partnerships  other: please specify  other:  please specify 2. what were the biggest challenges for you in fulfilling these duties? 3. what were the primary benefits of fulfilling these duties? section c: skills and knowledge the following questions pertain to the skills and knowledge you gained as a member of a community psychology research team. please feel free to skip any question you do not feel comfortable answering. 1. please check whether you gained knowledge or skills in any of the following areas as a result of your involvement in a community psychology research team:  using analytic programs  spss  nvivo  stata  r  mplus  social network analysis software  geographic information systems software  meta-analysis software  agent-based modeling software  other software: please specify  topical knowledge  hiv prevention  hiv testing http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19  hiv care and access to services  lgbt issues  domestic violence  sexual assault  reproductive coercion  stigma  youth positive development  substance use  dissemination and implementation  information sharing on evidence-based practices in schools  systems approaches to solving social problems  other: please specify  research skills  interviewing  transcribing  cleaning data  designing surveys  analyzing qualitative data  analyzing quantitative data  writing syntax or code in data analytic programs  reviewing literature  creating a literature database  other: please specify  professional development  writing resumes/cvs  writing cover letters  writing for publication  collaborating with others on a team  improving interpersonal skills  improving oral and written communication skills  other: please specify  community psychology competencies  ecological perspectives and theories  empowerment  sociocultural and cultural competence  community inclusion and partnership  ethical, reflective practice  program development, implementation and management  prevention and health promotion  community leadership and mentoring  group processes http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20  resource development  consultation and organizational development  collaboration and coalition development  community development  community organizing and community advocacy  public policy analysis, development and advocacy  information dissemination and building public awareness  participatory community research  program evaluation  other: please specify any other areas in which you gained skills or knowledge during your time on community psychology research teams 2. what were the biggest challenges you faced in gaining knowledge and skills you identified? 3. what are the primary benefits of gaining the knowledge and skills you identified? section d: professional benefits the following questions pertain to what you are doing now and to the benefits of your involvement on a community psychology research team. please feel free to skip any question you do not feel comfortable answering. 1. what is your current level of educational attainment?  some college  bachelor’s degree  some graduate school  advanced degree (e.g., ma, phd) 2. what is your current employment status?  employed full-time  employed part-time  graduate student  undergraduate student  other: please specify 3. if you are employed, describe your current position. 4. how, if at all, has your experience on a community psychology research team benefited you in employment or higher education? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 2 june 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 5. how, if at all, has your experience on a community psychology research team influenced your career interests? 6. how could your experience on a community psychology research team have been improved? 7. please share anything else you’d like us to know about your experiences as an undergraduate researcher on a community psychology research team. http://www.gjcpp.org/ radicalizing psychology; embodying decoloniality tiffeny r. jimenez and gordon lee1 keywords: modernity, decoloniality, coloniality, psychological subjectivity, racism, colonial matrix of power, epistemic hegemony, community psychology, intervention, non-modernity, non-occupied space, embodiment, re-membering, denormalized stories, village, de-legitimization, silence. author biographies: tiffeny reyleen jiménez community psychologist. educator. mestiza, queer, alternative world compost-activist. member of the village group that emerged from the racial justice action group. internal collaborative evaluator for clave: colaborando con las comunidades latinx para avanzar en educación / collaborating with latinx communities to advance education. founder and co-creator of critical global education for community psychology. since 2012 she has worked hand in hand with people located all around the chicagoland area, and places around the world, through transdisciplinary student-driven rhizomatic co-laboring inquiry projects on various topics, including: understanding black mother activism, supporting entrepreneurial efficacy to address economic inequality, uncovering roots of systemic oppression within law enforcement, exploring how naturally-occurring mentorships emerge within a mexican cultural context, and understanding internalization of the model minority myth among southeast asian students in higher education. current service involves developing an institutional philosophy of scholarship that connects 1 this article does not reflect primary and secondary authorship. instead, it is a co-creation of both authors, individually and collectively. we also want to acknowledge that we are both part of dialogue circles that, while not directly working on this article, had significant impacts on the authors’ perspectives. additionally, we would like to acknowledge the contributions of ramy barhouche and christopher sonn in the development of the ideas that shaped this writing. global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 student voice and inquiry with streams of public scholarship using multi-modalities. additional collective actions include: supporting organizational capacity building for local mexican, immigrant and refugee communities; community organizing and advocacy on deferred action for childhood arrivals (daca); promotes accurate education on native american history in chicago public schools; and recently organized with local potawatomi tribes and artists on addressing land rights with the whose lakefront initiative https://www.whoselakefront.com/. tiffeny is the recipient of the 2019 nlu excellence in research, scholarship, and inquiry award, and is currently working to codevelop the ideological infrastructure needed to support ethical and deliberate community engagement across nlu for communities we serve in the chicagoland area. she is most active in co-developing critical global education for community psychology (https://criticalglobaleducation.wordpress.com/), the rooted global village (https://www.rootedglobalvillage.com/), the emergence network (https://www.emergencenetwork.org/), xicanx psychology – institute of chicana/o psychology (https://razapsychology.org/), and the society for community research and action (https://www.scra27.org/). for more information see: https://tiffenyjimenez.wordpress.com/ gordon lee was born and raised on the island of oahu, kingdom of hawaii. part of a displaced diaspora, his mother’s family (his motherline) had traveled from the pearl river delta to the western coast of north america in the 1880s. after experiencing antiasian violence and yellow perilism, his great grandmother, on her way home, left the boat in honolulu, pregnant with her second child. after giving birth to a daughter, his grandmother, remained in hawaii and never saw her family again. as a result, he grew up in what was then called the territory of hawaii, a euphemism for what was and still is an occupied nation. his first realization of coloniality and of his own story arose during a period of political upheavals in the united states, hawaii, asia, and africa in the 1970s. for much of his life he has unknowingly carried the trauma of his ancestors. his grandfather was shot and killed. his father, as a youth, felt the colonial matrix of power firsthand in china (no chinese or dogs allowed!) and throughout his http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.whoselakefront.com/ https://criticalglobaleducation.wordpress.com/ https://www.rootedglobalvillage.com/ https://www.emergencenetwork.org/ https://razapsychology.org/ https://www.scra27.org/ https://tiffenyjimenez.wordpress.com/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 life in the hawaiian colony. his work with space, healing, and re-membering began in 2007 when he was invited to join a pilgrimage to the manzanar nikkei incarceration site in the eastern sierra nevada mountains. he taught asian american studies at san francisco state university where he practiced social biography and critical/liberation andragogy and first experienced the classroom as a village. his work has been guided by questions related to psychology and its relation to social justice and ontological change; collective trauma and the shadow of empire; psychosocial biography and decolonial stories, and space as a site of re-membering. dr. lee was president of psychologists for social responsibility (psysr) in 2016. at psysr he supported a vision of racial justice, relationality, and decoloniality; he advocated a critical role for psychology in the struggle for racial justice; and he helped to vision and facilitate the co-creation of decolonial spaces and projects. he co-initiated a series of conferences that addressed the relationship of psychology and racial justice (that is referred to in this special issue). he was part of the original team that created the project from which the writings in this issue emerged. he is also a part of the village and was a co-holder of that space. he has written on pilgrimage, on community based decolonial projects, on community psychology, and on asian american activism. recommended citation: jimenez, t.r., lee, g. (2022). radicalizing psychology; embodying decoloniality, global journal of community psychology practice, 13(1), 1 32. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: tiffeny jimenez, 122 s. michigan ave., chicago, il 60603 email: tiffeny.jimenez@nl.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 radicalizing psychology; embodying decoloniality modernity has disembodied and dissociated psychological subjectivity. it has significantly affected the capacity of individuals and communities to engage proactively in their worlds. racism is part of modernity’s system of social control and is embedded as part of a colonial matrix of power (cmp) (quijano, 2000). epistemic (epistemological) hegemony is an underlying assumption that is rarely called into question and is the glue that sustains the matrix. community psychology is based on assumptions rooted in the cmp, and its methodologies and conclusions must be called into question. this article is intended as an intervention to stop the ongoing harm of the cmp. non-modernity is a starting point for challenging the cmp, to identify its false narratives and to recognize different epistemologies and ontologies. non-occupied space is a condition for embodiment, the re-membering (re-integration) of the disembodied parts (anzaldua, 2015). out of this space emerge denormalized stories that simultaneously reveal how the matrix of power functions and re-member the village (i.e. epistemologies, ontologies, and social relationships delegitimized and silenced by conquest and violence). part one: a challenge and calling to community psychologists in this moment of various fracturing and inevitable change, including the globally recognized killing of george floyd, black lives matter, planetary climate crisis, the covid-19 global pandemic, and the most recent news of the u.s. supreme court leaked draft to overturn roe v. wade, which would turn back needed shifts in support of women’s rights . . . what are the most urgent issues facing community psychology today? we suggest that the following issues must be addressed. how do we get beyond ways of thinking that are intimately connected/intertwined to existing ways of being, including within ourselves? what kind of space can nurture and support a new culture of politics that empowers groups and individuals to think and imagine “otherwise” and enables a process of construction of another world. a space that is an incubator of new frameworks of research, teaching, and application (andreotti & dowling, 2004). unknown author [online image] (2022): https://twitter.com/oliviaugino/status/12684087135656 71424 http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://twitter.com/oliviaugino/status/1268408713565671424 https://twitter.com/oliviaugino/status/1268408713565671424 global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 …unless a radical shift in paradigm praxis takes place in the field of counseling psychology, it will remain both irrelevant and a tool for further colonization of indigenous/tribal people as well as for those who seek an existence based on peace for all beings on the planet. . . . i have come to a standstill in my career, presented with an irreconcilable difference that must be addressed if this field and the praxis that underlies its basic assumptions are to be considered a viable avenue in making a better world for all (grayshield, 2010). remembering radical community psychology these are not new questions or new challenges. in the united states, critical psychology, black psychology, liberation psychology, and other threads within the field have long recognized the “failure” or incapacity of mainstream psychology to acknowledge the inequities of the broader psychosocial world and to identify the systemic and epistemic sources of 2 we reject legitimization and authority based on a politics of citation reflective of euro-modern epistemology in the context of articulating decolonial concepts, ideas, and practices. as such, we recognize that knowledge arises from multiple sources not subject to traditional academic biases. this includes all references to people, websites, and images in this article. 3 “frantz omar fanon, also known as ibrahim frantz fanon, was a french west indian psychiatrist and political philosopher from the french colony of martinique. his works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and marxism. as well as being an intellectual, fanon was a political radical, panafricanist, and marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization. in the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, fanon supported the algeria's war of independence from france and was a member of those inequities as part of its practices. notions of a more radical approach have been present for many generations, particularly during times of and in conjunction with different social-political movements. community psychology itself arose from the political movements of the 1960s. the swampscott conference was held in massachusetts in 1965.2 the association of black psychologists (abpsi) was founded in publication they wrote: rt [radical therapy] is a way of living, not another “new kind” of therapy that can take its place in the psychotherapy spectrum. rt starts from the awareness that therapy is a social and political event, and moves to the conviction that therapy systems – like many of this country’s institutions—must be changed. (radical therapist collective, 1971; preface) more than ten years earlier, franz fanon had formulated a third world model of community psychology, writing black skin, white masks in 1952 and wretched of the earth in 1963.3 aimé césaire explicated a discourse on colonialism in 1950.4 thirty years before swampscott, carter g. woodson the algerian national liberation front. for more than five decades, the life and works of frantz fanon have inspired national-liberation movements and other radical political organizations in palestine, sri lanka, south africa, and the united states. he formulated a model for community psychology, believing that many mental-health patients would do better if they were integrated into their family and community instead of being treated with institutionalized care” (wikipedia, n.d.d). 4 “césaire's ‘discourse on colonialism’ challenges the narrative of the colonizer and the colonized. this text criticizes the hypocrisy of justifying colonization with the equation ‘christianity=civilized, paganism=savagery’ comparing white colonizers to ‘savages.’ césaire writes that ‘no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either’ concluding that ‘a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization and therefore force—is already a sick civilization.’ he condemns the colonizers, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 explicated the miseducation of the negro in 1933.5 w.e.b. dubois, in the souls of black folk, identified double consciousness in 1903.6 we are not alone, and this article and issue is not just about us. the field is wide and it extends well beyond the academy and beyond the united states. to connect to other creative outlets on this, we invite you to listen to the audio recording of “something in the way of things (in town)” by the roots and amiri baraka, within a larger discussion of this poem and author: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts /147442/something-in-the-way-a-discussionof-amiri-barakas-something-in-the-way-ofthings-in-town. (poetry foundation, 2018) saying that though the men may not be inherently bad, the practice of colonization ruins them. he also examines the effects colonialism has on the colonized, stating that ‘colonization = “thing-ification'", where because the colonizers are able to ‘other’ the colonized, they can justify the means by which they colonize” (wikipedia, n.d.a) 5 carter godwin woodson (december 19, 1875 – april 3, 1950) was an american historian, author, journalist, and the founder of the association for the study of african american life and history. he was one of the first scholars to study the history of the african diaspora, including african-american history. carter g. woodson was born in new canton, virginia on december 19, 1875, the son of former slaves, anne eliza (riddle) and james henry woodson. his parents were both illiterate and his father, who had helped the union soldiers during the civil war, supported the family as a carpenter and farmer. the woodson family were extremely poor, but proud as both his parents told him that it was the happiest day of their lives when they became free. convinced that the role of his own people in american history and in the history of other cultures was being ignored or misrepresented among scholars, woodson realized the need for research into the neglected past of african americans. along with william d. hartgrove, george cleveland hall, alexander l. jackson, and james e. stamps, he this article is about: • introducing concepts that assist in understanding the invisible underlying ideologies that shape our reality in the united states and beyond. this includes concepts associated with the embodiment of decoloniality. • introducing the colonial matrix of power (cmp/octo), which is a web of social, political, and psychological forces that control ways of thinking and being as well as mechanisms of control manifested as institutions, organizations, government, economy, and political rhetoric. • outlining a psychological liberatory praxis that begins to examine and identify the “symptoms” that are experienced living in the cmp/octo and connecting those symptoms to their roots. founded the association for the study of negro life and history on september 9, 1915, in chicago. woodson described the purpose of the asnlh as the "scientific study" of the "neglected aspects of negro life and history" by training a new generation of blacks in historical research and methodology. believing that history belonged to everybody, not just the historians, woodson sought to engage black civic leaders, high school teachers, clergymen, women's groups and fraternal associations in his project to improve the understanding of afroamerican history” (wikipedia, n.d.c). 6 william edward burghardt du bois (february 23, 1868 – august 27, 1963) was an american sociologist, socialist, historian, civil rights activist, pan-africanist, author, writer and editor. born in great barrington, massachusetts, du bois was one of the founders of the national association for the advancement of colored people (naacp) in 1909. racism was the main target of du bois's polemics, and he strongly protested against lynching, jim crow laws, and discrimination in education and employment. his cause included people of color everywhere, particularly africans and asians in colonies. he was a proponent of pan-africanism and helped organize several pan-african congresses to fight for the independence of african colonies from european powers” (wikipedia, n.d.f). http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/147442/something-in-the-way-a-discussion-of-amiri-barakas-something-in-the-way-of-things-in-town https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/147442/something-in-the-way-a-discussion-of-amiri-barakas-something-in-the-way-of-things-in-town https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/147442/something-in-the-way-a-discussion-of-amiri-barakas-something-in-the-way-of-things-in-town https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/147442/something-in-the-way-a-discussion-of-amiri-barakas-something-in-the-way-of-things-in-town global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 • suggesting an embodied praxis that begins to help us to reground ourselves outside the cmp/octo. • previews what happens in psychology when we decenter north america, i.e., we see the north american experience from a global perspective, not the world through the perspective of the united states. part two: decoloniality and embodiment over the last 30 years (1990-2020) thinkers, writers, activists, and artists have engaged, in different ways, and from different perspectives, in projects to understand and describe the conditions which have emerged in the era of post-decolonization (mignolo & walsh, 2018; wynter, 2015). the concept of decoloniality is attempting to differ from, and go deeper/further than, previous projects of decolonization. the distinction being that decolonization sought to take hold of the state, and decoloniality seeks to uncover the etiology of how we view the world and how the world functions through an in-depth examination of the nature of knowledge, knowledge management, dissemination, and power. in other words, decoloniality pursues epistemological and ontological decolonization, or the decolonization of knowledge and epistemic justice (dreyer, 2017) as well as western ways of living (escobar, 2020). decoloniality simultaneously challenges eurocentric ideologies and the dominant imperial western knowledge systems that have shaped the development of economic, cultural and political systems across the globe; while also reclaiming and legitimizing a pluriverse of knowledge systems and ways of being that have been oppressed. to clarify the basic concepts of decoloniality that we have found helpful, we provide some descriptions. the core connection here is that these concepts come alive within us and 7 the film, the truman show, is a good illustration of the principle of horizons. see also constructing the manifest differently, or other-wise, in relationship to the world we inhabit. it is important to note first that, according to mignolo and walsh (2018), the three main concepts of modernity/coloniality/ decoloniality work together as a conceptual triad. decolonial thinking makes it possible to see coloniality. therefore, we begin with the concept of decoloniality, and then show how modernity and coloniality relate to embodied praxes of decoloniality: • decoloniality is the analysis of how modernity and coloniality function. its aim is to make coloniality visible and connect our being and behaviors to the harms inherent in coloniality so we stop ourselves from normalized dominant ways of being that perpetuate harm. “the task of decoloniality is to unveil this logic and these processes” (mignolo & walsh, 2018; p. 140; maldonado-torres, 2016). decoloniality is understanding how coloniality is embedded within our thoughts and feelings, how we make sense of reality, how we view our relationships with other humans, other species, the so-called “natural” environment, and the possibilities and limits (horizons) we perceive to be around us.7 decoloniality allows us to uncover the etiology and genealogy of dominant ideologies, investigate the source of their power, examine the consequences inherent in such systems (e.g., capitalism, patriarchy, racism, heterosexism, ableism) and see clearly how these worldviews, narratives, structures, and coeval global processes and projects manifest in our local, continental, and global environments (lowe, 2015). ideally, within increased consciousness of these structures, we work towards more holistic ways of being and become increasingly delinked self, constructing america (cushman, 1995). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 from worldviews that perpetuate enacting epistemological and further harm.8 • modernity is the centering of a eurocentric epistemological worldsense that we live in every day. it is the dominant western imperial idea of the pursuit of well-being and happiness tied to concepts of liberty, liberal personhood, society, and government developed from the beginning of the nineteenth centuries (lowe, 2015). to provide a concrete example of this, it is the idea that if we enlist and participate in the story/narrative that comprises all the shininess of the liberal american dream (e.g., individual ownership of a house, a car, appliances, new technologies, etc.), we will be happy citizens. modernity is the product of thinking that exalted the “achievements” of “progress driven change,” created by deliberate human efforts to “better the human condition;” or “advances” in human “civilization” (e.g., reason, science). modernity assumes that all parts of the world are disposable and designed for human consumption, leading to constant degradation of natural and human resources for the benefits of development and capitalistic goals. since these three concepts work together, we draw attention to examples here of how products of modernity also hold aspects of coloniality in their underbelly (in parentheses). through modernity we have witnessed early characteristics of globalization, including the development of democracy and liberalism, european colonization of the americas (the new world project), the spread of christianity, and the columbian exchange which includes industrialized agriculture (the slave trade) 8 the film, the matrix, provides one depiction of what how our experience and perspective on the world can shift through increased consciousness of and residential schools (native american genocide). this period of development came about through the industrial revolution, along with a communications revolution, which is also referred to as the age of ideology and the scientific revolution. modernity contributed to the distinction between those who are civilized and those who are not, but this is not something we will readily see in our daily world, which is why we need to clarify how coloniality manifests within modernity, or what has been referred to as the dark side of western modernity (mignolo, 2011). • coloniality is the dark side of modernity that assumes dehumanization of those who have been colonized, and creates feelings of metaphysical catastrophe among the colonized (maldonado-torres; 2007). it refers to the ways in which all of the living beings put to service for the ways of modernity experience the world. it is the acknowledgement of what happens when we enact dominant western ideological assumptions. it is the dark side of modernity in that it draws attention to the experience of oppression embedded within the ongoing ways of the world that have shaped the development of assumptions embedded in whole community systems including institutions, cities, politics, economics, and nations (e.g., concepts related to time, space, relational ethics, power, education, social norms, health, justice, etc.). enacting coloniality perpetually maintains institutions that uphold the pursuit of modernity, which is also tied to endless and perpetual states of war (both within ourselves, and in relation to others, including the so-called “natural ecologies”). the structures embedded within these ideologies and what it means to “delink”. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 • embodiment refers to the experience of an integrated way of being with ourselves, our sensations, our emotions, our thoughts, and our relationships, as subjects with interiority (sentipensante). when we live in a state of dissonance or disconnection from our felt sense of self and the world, we experience a lack of embodiment (disembodiment). embodiment can appear as a complete representation of character and purpose, including our understanding of the world and how that relates to actions (i.e., judgement, discretion, choice, etc.). from a physiological perspective, embodiment is the synergistic sharing of information between cognitive and sensorimotor processes where all organs of the body work to inform how and what we think. living a more embodied existence allows us to subvert the pressure to live in particular conforming ways, and instead builds the foundations for us to connect more authentically; to allow our felt sense of life to influence our potential, to understand the reality of choices available to us, and engage in the world in more creative ways. layers of disembodiment: individuals and organizations/communities our bodies, our subjectivity, are shaped by political, economic, and psychological systems normalized by modernity/coloniality, which means that our experiences are shaped by this landscape, including technologies, dominant narratives, and political economics. all characteristics of our being are, to varying degrees, politicized in every sphere of life, often through a binary lens, including: ability/disability, black/white, male/female, good/bad. all of this influences how we hold 9 see a recent interview with walter mignolo here: https://www.e-ir.info/2017/01/21/interview-waltermignolopart-2-keyand relate to ourselves physically, shapes our emotional landscape, and plays a role in how we experience ourselves individually and in relationship with others. this world is highly interconnected (a matrix), so it extends (flows) into whole sets of human-designed community systems shaped upon the terms spewing from this dominant narrative and ontology e.g. non-profit/ngos, government funded programs. this also includes the assumptions embedded within institutions (higher education). to embody a praxis of decoloniality involves being in a heightened state of awareness and ongoing questioning of our own positionality in terms of the power of choice within varying situations. this feeling has been described as “seeing the world in technicolor”, where we see the shininess of the object in front of us (modernity), but we also see all those who suffered for that object to exist (coloniality). from there, we can also see different options depending our assessment of that situation, discerning how we want to be in relationship to such “objects”, and the necessary actions to choose from as we can see how all our actions are tied to the underlying web of control based on social constructions that maintain the relevance of that object. ultimately, embodiment of a praxis of decoloniality is understanding our embeddedness within a constant flux of analytic and prospective doing, and centering our awareness on choices of action9. our unique positionality being in the “united states of america” our positionality within the united states in the year 2022 is of particular importance in our analysis of our situation and the value and significance of embodying decoloniality. the concepts/?fbclid=iwar0gyrhaobakwt2kceaeqnxr eyuftsswymt_f83jqqqlpwujdb9rawlubcy http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.e-ir.info/2017/01/21/interview-walter-mignolopart-2-key-concepts/?fbclid=iwar0gyrhaobakwt2kceaeqnxreyuftsswymt_f83jqqqlpwujdb9rawlubcy https://www.e-ir.info/2017/01/21/interview-walter-mignolopart-2-key-concepts/?fbclid=iwar0gyrhaobakwt2kceaeqnxreyuftsswymt_f83jqqqlpwujdb9rawlubcy https://www.e-ir.info/2017/01/21/interview-walter-mignolopart-2-key-concepts/?fbclid=iwar0gyrhaobakwt2kceaeqnxreyuftsswymt_f83jqqqlpwujdb9rawlubcy https://www.e-ir.info/2017/01/21/interview-walter-mignolopart-2-key-concepts/?fbclid=iwar0gyrhaobakwt2kceaeqnxreyuftsswymt_f83jqqqlpwujdb9rawlubcy global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 historical, political, and economic location we are situated within as a country within a larger international landscape has much to do with why we believe this understanding of modernity/coloniality is crucial. while many of us that inhabit this land likely relate to some mix of terms such as: “native american”, “indigenous”, some version of “ethnic minority”, “afro-descendent”, “black”, “immigrant”, or “refugee” from this or another land of which we were forcibly displaced, or voluntarily traversed from, our location of this moment is planetarily political. with all the technology, information, and communication tools we have access to now, we have a choice (and we might argue, a responsibility) to act with this awareness. problematizing this situation allows us to see what is behind the curtain. if we do not buy into the american narrative of ourselves, how do we affirm ourselves without re-centering our own selves in the united states? how do we reclaim different parts of who we are, and not see ourselves based on a construction of someone else’s story about us? people have become inhabitants of this land for many reasons, and many continue to come here under the narrative that this is the land of “opportunity” and “freedom”. there is little consideration paid to the understanding that opportunity in this context, within the lines and federal regulations that have been drawn on this land, required a numbing of our senses to the harms imbedded within such an ideological frame. those who created this narrative created concepts of freedom and opportunity with the intent to extract and exploit natural and human resources, which required global domination and the taking of many of our ancestors for labor; whose hands were put to the dirty, and often bloody, work of an industrial machine (industrial and technological revolutions). these issues we 10 this includes: racial justice, environmental justice, disability justice, epistemological justice, are grappling with here are about american, particularly north american, imperialism grounded in the machine of global capitalism. the united states has participated in a long history of oppression and harm (e.g., war) through the agenda of globalization using military, economic, and scientific tools. if we do not take this opportunity to be archeologists of ourselves, to excavate our diasporas and unearth the layers of eurocentered colonial sediment that is the foundation and source of human misery, we will remain tools of the machine. it has always been our desire to see outside the box, to think, question, and seek solutions from outside the box. to embody praxes of decoloniality is to ideologically and physically delink/unplug from the machine this is how to get outside the box. while the term “justice” is a liberal idea that is grounded within the box we wish to escape, if we truly do care about justice, in all its forms10, then we have a responsibility to understand the ways in which our lifestyles/daily choices maintain the power/domination of the us in larger forces of harm around the world. let us figure out how to get rid of the box! given the history of the development of the united states being grounded in the history of european colonization, when we use the term modernity, we mean it as euromodernity to specify our knowing that modernity exists around the globe in many different forms depending on the histories of colonization that developed these ideologies on different continents (mignolo, 2007; 2021; lowe, 2015). we believe it is important to learn further how modernity/coloniality manifested and maintains its grip at many points and histories around the planet (royal institute of philosophy, 2022). sociolinguistic justice…etc. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 a. epistemic oppression, the cmp, and disembodiment the web of interweaving forces, structures, constructions, narratives, and ways of knowing and being has been called the colonial matrix of power (cmp) (quijano, 2000). we have experienced and visualized it as the octopus (octo).11 the cmp/octo is embedded as the framework, the power lines that hold the reality of modernity/coloniality together. it affects us as much as it affects the world. as such, the matrix is embedded in our human psychology. in other words, the constructions embedded within the cmp have established known and dominant realities that have influenced our sense of self and our relationships with the world (intersubjectivities). for some, there is an unravelling of wholeness that follows us throughout our lives. the consequences are that the cmp/octo is embedded in the fabric of the world and within us simultaneously. octopus [online image]. yin, 2015 11 at a mtg. in may, 2018, there was a discussion about oppression, trauma, and what it feels like. there was a sense that it was bigger than just what was in front of one, that it had multiple arms that it sometimes hit one from not just the front, but from the sides and the back, where one couldn’t see it. someone said “it feels like an octopus!” then, someone went up to the board and drew an octopus. when we saw the picture, everyone went “oh yes!” it resonated at a deeper level. there was a collective understanding the flows of the cmp/octo the cmp/octo is a stealth-like system of control. a planetary intervention that originated approximately 500 years ago via processes of eurocentered colonialism, or european political, social, and cultural domination. there is much written about the cmp (mignolo, 2007; mignolo & walsh, 2018; mignolo, 2021; quijano, 2000, 2007), so we will not cover this framework in all the details through which many authors have attempted to unpack how it works. however, a summary will be attempted, connecting its relevance to psychology. the cmp/octo intervention is a global economic business model of capitalism that intentionally dismantled the existing ways of life and social organization of mother earth— “the aim of these tools and institutions [are] to contain and administer all of life itself” (escobar, 2020, p. 49). the dynamics associated with this continues to do so today and manifest as hegemonic common sense rhetoric, logics, and a system of management manifesting as patriarchy, sexism, heterosexism, racism, ableism, and religious superiority. these isms (among others) are engrained in the fabric of our social norms and institutional practices, all articulated by the cmp/octo. the cmp/octo manifests as a set of assumptions that clarify the epistemological and ontological reality of the euromodern worldview based on specific domains of sense that we had named “something.” it was “just a feeling.” however, it turned out that this feeling led us towards what has become a central image of a 3-4 year project, and an image that has been used by others beyond our village to explain similar phenomena. you will find an image of this conceptual octopus as it manifested on a whiteboard in part 3 of this paper. (see: https://coco-net.org/whitesupremacy-culture-in-organizations/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://coco-net.org/white-supremacy-culture-in-organizations/ https://coco-net.org/white-supremacy-culture-in-organizations/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 management. the four main domains of control include: control of economy (type of economy), control of authority (legal authority/governance), control of gender/sexuality (human/humanity), and control of subjectivity (knowledge/understanding). however, these are not discrete categories of control. they compose a matrix (or patrix12): streams of assumptions that weave through our conception of reality through flows of discourses tied to enunciations (mignolo, 2021). these intermingling discourses perpetuate the social constructions that shape our understanding of reality, epistemic oppression, and disembodiment. there are four main assumptions of the rhetoric and logic. first, humans are superior on earth, indicating that the natural world of the planet exists on a separate plane of existence with a different and separate ontology that is less than the value of humans (i.e., anthropocentrism). second, “human,” or man (sylvia wynter’s (2015) concepts of man1 and man2 are essential here), is central in all domains, providing this concept of human with top authority. third, “humanity” is based on a hierarchy where people of light/white skin color are human, and everyone else is non-human, which has also been based on religious hierarchies where christians were humans and non-christians were non-human. though this is an oversimplification, it demonstrates the key concepts. within this third assumption is the fourth, based on the binary subjective groupings of men and women, which is another hierarchical relationship of patriarchy, where men hold the power and women are excluded from it. while there are exceptions in some places/spaces, some version of all of these assumptions are embedded within our 12 another term used to reference the cmp/octo. to quote my sister, anasuya isaacs, from our “we will dominant onto-epistemological reality, our social, political and governing systems. essentially, being a system of control, where the outputs are predictable, the nature of the cmp/octo is hierarchy upon hierarchy upon hierarchy… to get at how the varied social problems we are working to address are all connected to the cmp/octo rather than as separate unrelated issues, we need to address the politics of ontological construction. in other words, how our concept of natural reality has been constructed and how the cmp/octo plays out in daily life. cp and the flows of the cmp/octo across settings and time the h*story of the united states indicates that we inherited certain worldviews started/created by english imperialism. through the process of european colonization over-time grew the business model of the cmp/octo. it is important to remember whose hands have shaped our current reality. the social constructions that dominate the structure of our current world came from the ideologies of a particular way of knowing and dance with mountains” course: “we live in the patrix disguised as a matrix holding up misogyny sneakily.” https://www.alamy.com/stock-image-englishimperialism-octopus-162787570.html http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 being in/with the world. we can imagine how the assumptions of the cmp/octo flow through to the varied regions through the minds, hands, and decisionmakers of the new world order. seymour sarason, a community psychologist, quoted the need to critically analyze existing social, economic, technological, and organizational life. he articulated the importance of knowing the etiology through which settings are created in his book on “the creation of settings” (1972). he talked explicitly about how important it is to consider the historical developmental context through which social organization is accomplished and the importance of this for the creation of new settings. he discussed the importance of understanding the basic assumptions which govern thinking, and he critiqued ideas of “progress” marked by concepts of quantity and the passing of time. he states: “the enlightenment is drawing to a dark close” (p. 5). sarason (1972) pointed out how history helps us to focus on the character of the thinking that created the system (not just the content of that system): “unless the compass that guides us has history built into it we will go in circles, feel lost, and conclude that the more things change the more they remain the same.” (p. 22). while the cmp/octo is a psychological, sociological, and theoretical tool in understanding underlying ideologies embedded within our current moment, it should be noted that there is a long history prior to euromodernity/coloniality. that history should also be accounted for if we are to understand the longer historical context out of which such a large system of control emerged (but is beyond the scope of this article). we believe the flows/assumptions/narratives of the cmp/octo shaping our ways of understanding reality (epistemic oppression) is a critical factor preventing our world from changing. if we consider that the assumptions of the cmp/octo have been embedded in the worldviews, mindsets, and logics of the decision-makers since the inception of the united states as a nation-state, we should assume that all of our state institutions, affiliated non-profit, for-profit, and hybrid organizations, as well as dominant family/social-cultural systems, are also built with these onto-epistemological assumptions. this is akin to what has been articulated within the book “the revolution will not be funded: beyond the non-profit industrial complex” (incite!, 2007) and in kivel (2016) referencing the economic pyramid (https://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigatingneoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofitsand-beyond/paul-kivel-social-service-orsocial-change/0/). the flows of the cmp/octo have an invisible power embedded in language and discourse, and flow lie water through our institutional and organizational structures. one community psychologist that has written about the stability of organizational settings and their influence on human behavior is barker (1968) on behavior settings. through empirical research conducted during that time, he found there are a handful of organizational types that demonstrate certain behavioral patterns. he also found that, no matter who you placed into the roles within these settings, you would see similar types of behaviors. this research is consistent with more current literature on the stability of organizational culture (cameron & quinn, 2011). given that the cmp/octo is based on assumptions of control of and discrimination against certain social groups, and is embedded within organizational culture and structures that align with the cmp/octo (i.e., policy, practices, social norms), we need a deeper analysis of how organizations participate in ongoing epistemic oppression, possibly as this overlaps with the work of another community psychologist, http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/paul-kivel-social-service-or-social-change/0/ https://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/paul-kivel-social-service-or-social-change/0/ https://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/paul-kivel-social-service-or-social-change/0/ https://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/paul-kivel-social-service-or-social-change/0/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 rudolph moos, assessing social context and climate (holahan, 2002). federal and state institutions are responsible for a number of decisions made on behalf of large populations regarding health, education, and property. significantly, these structures are shaped by disciplinary scholarship which adheres to certain philosophies of science. in some cases, these organizations are mandated to comply with policies they must only use “evidence-based research/practices.” this is problematic when the sciences on which those criteria were based on themselves use underlying principles and methodologies that marginalize certain onto-epistemological frames and treat people as objects (see jimenez et al., in press; see also the science of eugenics in yakushko, this special issue). ultimately, we need an embodied understanding of how our dominant understanding of reality and actions are tied, like puppets, to perpetuating the interests of the cmp/octo. the institutions and organizations we work within are all part of this system of control. the ways they are funded by, and ruled/policed by, in many ways, need deep scrutiny. it is not accidental that they lack a breathing and feeling (beating) heart. to embody praxes of decoloniality within roles we hold is to be in constant critical analysis of these behavior settings, the narratives they perpetuate, and to act in ways that continue to dismantle 13 the cultural injustice that occurs when the concepts and categories by which people understand themselves and their world are replaced or adversely affected by the concepts and categories of the colonizer. harmful norms, or create completely new worlds. without a deeper understanding of how our thinking and behaviors are influenced by the cmp/octo, we will continue to be the puppets of the cmp/octo and likely fall back into old norms. our bodies will know and will tell us when something is not right. transforming ourselves from being the puppet to cutting the strings, requires being attuned to new ways of knowing and being and seeing more clearly the assumptions that keep us in the experience of modernity/coloniality. creating alternative settings (spaces) where we can learn this new way of knowing/ being, and practice exercising our voice and sense of empowerment to dismantle the norms, policies, and practices inherent in the design of settings built within the model of the cmp/octo, are an important piece of this work (see part 3 of this paper for more on space). education and control of subjectivities (knowledge/understanding) through “educational” institutions and systems (public schools, higher education institutions) the cmp/octo reproduces its narratives through creating and re-creating subjectivities, funneling multiple generations of youth and adults through ongoing epistemic colonization13. communities of color whose diasporas have originated within different worldviews and colonial histories live in the borders between this dominant socially constructed reality and alternative ones within which they grew up in at home, sometimes indicative by speaking more than one language (rodriguez, 1982)14. 14 this autobiography by mexican-american writer, richard rodriguez, called “hunger of memory: the education of richard rodriguez” tells his story of cultural loss through language and education. he tells us: once upon a time, i was a ‘socially http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 the assumptions of the cmp/octo above have been used as the foundation for justifying use of human and natural resources through academic study of the world through various disciplines such as community development, anthropology, and psychology for the development of the global economy. the natural and social sciences have been the primary industrial engine (the academy or canon) that controlled the ways we know the world via the development of concepts/constructs, and communication channels, including how we know social and natural life systems. the tools of “science” (in all of its set criteria) have constructed our world, and are perpetuated through text books, research methods, peer-review systems, academic mentoring, and reward systems. given the origins of the university as grounded in north and central europe and founded within religious belief systems of those regions, the assumptions of the sciences for understanding the world as objects has also been used to understand people as objects. this way of thinking and being allows for blatant exploitation of the natural elements of mother earth for purposes of the production of market goods and whole populations of people of color, specifically, to be used as the free labor behind the engine of the global economy. all these social constructions are important to serve the power and control of economy/capitalism. therefore, we need to question/problematize the value of our systems of education and inquiry. “the assumption that knowledge is based on a subject/object relation suddenly made the rest of the world an extended object of european knowledge. this was devastating disadvantaged’ child. an enchantedly happy child. mine was a childhood of intense family closeness. and extreme public alienation. thirty years later i for the dignity and humanness of people in the rest of the planet.” (mignolo & walsh, 2018, p. 200). this article is intended as an intervention to stop the ongoing harm of the cmp/octo. embodying decoloniality allows us to understand more deeply how grappling with and escaping the cmp/octo is a necessary and at the same time an existential moment-tomoment and situational awareness. through this increasing awareness of our ways of being in the world, we can see how the ways of modernity/coloniality are literally dripping from the walls and from inside our minds, shaping our subjectivities, roles, and commonsense ways of being. this is a critique of psychology, community psychology in particular, in its current state. from an embodied perspective, our current paradigm of what constitutes “science” and “practice” is unable to help us understand the root of our problems. we are saying that our analysis of behavioral settings, community systems dynamics, political activism, program evaluation, and policy are incomplete and significantly misguided, at the very least. we need to re-examine the underlying ideologies that influence the shape, function, and power of institutions, organizations, and all behavioral settings designed within the framework of the dominant cultural paradigm of the cmp/octo. we need to change the sets of assumptions that make up our ontological and epistemological reality. community psychological work without this level of awareness contributes to ongoing praxes of disembodiment for people/beings at all levels of hierarchy. we must question what write this book as a middle-class american man. assimilated… it is education that has altered my life.” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 we are a part of, how our own disembodiment within daily settings and systems are manifesting these concepts at larger levels. once we understand what to delink from, and our own power to do so, this is where we become radical. embodiment is the next step. …grant us help then. help us to be more of the earth each day! help us to be more the sacred foam more the swish of the wave! from “this is where we live”, pablo neruda15 b. embodiment as praxes of decoloniality engaging in embodied praxes of decoloniality is often a process of multi-dimensional shapeshifting. it emphasizes the interdependent individual and collective-level self-reflexivity needed to experience schematic tectonic shifts in how we perceive and connect with reality. it is a praxis of ontological-epistemological transformation toward a vision of a different world, which entails both letting go of one reality (set of horizons) and grabbing on to or creating another (see more information on the concept of the pluriverse in escobar, 2020.) it is a form of remaking ourselves as “human” (wynter, 2015). it is a process of learning to live differently within our bodies and with the world, reversing what has occurred over multiple generations and what is currently embedded in our social, political, and economic institutions. some of us who have experienced this kind of shape-shifting have referred to this experience as mini-earthquakes. much like earthquakes, where plate tectonic activity is the hallmark of a planet undergoing changes at earth’s core to adjust the elements of the global environment to make it more habitable, 15 for more information on the chilean poet, pablo neruda: the tectonic activity we experience is the indication we are working on the deeper core of our being to make our environment more habitable as well. we believe this is the type of deep core shifts that occur within what is referred to as third-order change (bartunek & moch, 1987). the analogy of an earthquake has been used to refer to deeper cultural change from cognitive and organizational sciences literature as well. bartunek and moch (1987) distinguish between first-order, second-order, and third-order change as they relate to organizational development. they refer to the importance of the concept of “schemata” in addressing how people gain deeper understanding of themselves and their organizational frames. third-order change is “…to be aware of [our] present schemata and thereby more able to change these schemata as [we] see fit.” (p. 486). it refers to the development of the capacity for human systems to change our schemata as events require. schemata have the potential to constrain or guide change, indicating that schematic awareness is important in realizing the underlying frameworks that shape the way we make sense of the world: “cognitions, interpretations, or ways of understanding events are guided by organizing frameworks—or schemata . . . the portion of the perceptual cycle which is internal to the perceiver, modifiable by experience, and somehow specific to what is being perceived to alternative world views . . . we view schemata analogically as templates that, when pressed against experience, give it form and meaning. . .” (bartunek & moch, 1987; p. 484) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/pablo-neruda http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/pablo-neruda global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 integrating embodiment and decoloniality together into a new schemata required to attend to the events we grapple with today has the potential to create deep level shifts in our worldview/senses. this frame integrates our cognitive schemas about reality (the cmp/octo, modernity/coloniality) with deeper awareness of the emotional terrains experienced through sensations of our bodies, which widens what data is relevant to understanding the world. integrating this data and interpreting these plates can manifest in tectonic shifts where the earth of our being shudders violently within us, causing damage to previous perceptions of the world and our place in it. through this process we experience many emotions and realizations, including realizations about self, increasing awareness of the consequences of the way our current reality works, and our relationship to this. to enact a decolonial and embodied way of being demands an increasingly deep understanding of how modernity/coloniality is embedded in our ideological lens, how it manifests within ourselves, collectively, together, with the world around us. it requires simultaneous engagements on multiple levels. this praxis presupposes understanding that we are submerged in modernity/coloniality under the guise of living out increasingly modern ways that produce devastating and irreparable harm to natural environments, other living beings, and ourselves (mignolo & walsh, 2018). inevitably, this experiential process can bring feelings of loss and grief and is all part of the kind of internal composting we need to do to collectively reorient, and recreate our shared reality (i.e., compostactivism) (akomolafe, 2016). the embodiment of praxes of decoloniality encourages a larger framework in which our interpretations require deeper awareness and analysis of our experiences. embodied awareness means that my body matters; the feelings and emotions i experience are part of my interpretations. this involves a multilayered process of delicately exploring current and h*storical trauma; mapping the complexes and symptoms that have arisen, and are continuing to arise from it, while seeing how these underlying ideologies have manifested across our shared reality. one major mythical tectonic plate to grapple with is the assumption of individualism. the bodies of others matter too. we are all connected. all of us are impacted—none of us are safe—we all create and recreate harm within this shared reality. we embody praxes of decoloniality when our being has internalized a deep cellular-level awareness of the three interrelated concepts associated with decoloniality (i.e., the conceptual triad) and the feelings associated with participating in this reality. this awareness places us within cycles of reflection-action-resistance-delinkingcreation—an integrated way of being where we understand the origins of the words that make the world, understand their impact, and become the active creator of new worlds/words. gaining such awareness requires a reorientation of understanding grounded in bodily systems and the body’s interaction with the environment (soylu, unknown author [online image] (2022) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 2014), and this is what the authors in this special issue are doing in their narratives (see articles in this special issue by samuel, west, somerville, palmer, dieudonné). decoloniality needs to be felt in our body, so we can be in touch with the very personal ways in which modernity/coloniality manifest within ourselves and in relation to us. feeling the realization of our participation in the production and reproduction of harm, whether to ourselves, to each other, or beyond humans, and connecting to that felt sense of responsibility is the key. there may be pain to be felt that has been numbed for some time, there may be healing to do around wounds that continue to be open, and there may be actions to take to ensure we speak up or step back, depending on our positionality to some event. this can be considered deep, honest work with ourselves through a personal narrative approach, or testimonios (de jager et al., 2016). there are many ways we can go about these explorations, but one way to explore this is through body mapping, a strategy most commonly used in medical settings working to document and assess where physical harm is experienced within the body. in this case, however, harms can be physical, emotional, linguistic, spiritual, or any kind of experience where we may have numbed ourselves to the challenges of our existence and associated pains. in terms of health and health disparities, this undue and often unacknowledged package of harms associated with those of us experiencing varying depths of discrimination and exploitation, can tell us much about how to better our health through this telling of coloniality and ways modernity continues to oppress. questions to ask of our bodies might include: • how does modernity/coloniality manifest in my day-to-day life? • how does modernity/coloniality make me feel? where does it hurt? • how has modernity/coloniality influenced ways of being in my body? • how has it influenced my relationships with others, and the world around me? we must constantly ask ourselves: how do we hold and participate in the production of ongoing harm, to other life forms and ourselves? deep embodied awareness of these concepts resensitizes us to the subtleties of harm, the harms that have been normalized, that we participate in without realizing it. this harm in which we participate in extends beyond our personal physical bodies, however, to include our intimate interconnectedness with each other in and across organizational settings, and integral natural ecologies all around us. let us become more aware of this! for example, when we walk through a forest, we are walking with whole ecosystems of biodiversity, including tree roots, mycelium, mosses, plants, insects, etc., that all communicate and function together. when we have an awareness of such systems, and appreciate our own interdependence with them, the embodiment of this awareness encourages us to walk a little lighter and maybe also work to communicate with more nuance within this setting. this level of awareness of harm on an individual person-to-person level could make us even more aware of the harms we engage in when we speak (e.g., use of certain terms), the assumptions we make about how people perceive time, and how we respond to others http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 (e.g., reacting with defensiveness instead of openness or curiosity). we need to engage not just the content but the means, mechanisms, and epistemologies of oppression—not to relive our trauma but to understand the structures and systems that perpetrated them in a way that will enable us to change those systems and their roots. changing not just the subject but the terms of the conversation requires letting go of the narratives, the constructions, and the epistemologies of modernity/coloniality. it requires knowing and learning what to let go of and what to grab on to. part three: space, story-making, and the village a. reclaiming different ways of being non-modernity is a necessary concept and the starting point for reclaiming different ways of being. how to access and navigate/sustain the experience of this “duality of existence”? meaning, how do we live in two worlds at the same time? the power of language is of critical importance to acknowledge. english betrays the indigenous subject (simpson, 2021) and others as well. non-european knowledges and languages have been excluded and erased but nevertheless have survived. “the bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. language was the means of the spiritual subjugation,” ngugi wrote. it 16 maori communities and indigenous scholars in new zealand have framed it this way. kupe is a maori ancestor who knew the world through his own traditions and ways of knowing (epistemologies). james cook, the english colonizer, knew the world through the european “sciences.” these two also examined the close relationship between language and culture. for him “language carries, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in our world.” (wa ngugi, 2018, para. 2) the genocide and catastrophe perpetuated by the cmp/octo makes epistemic hegemony visible and sets the narratives and practices of “border” epistemologies as forms of resistance and re-existence. “to end coloniality is to end the fictions of modernity” (m. r. trouilliot, as cited in mignolo & walsh, 2018, p.109) “thinking without modernity, delinking from its fictions, is [a] major decolonial challenge. decolonial knowledge production and critique are part of an entirely different paradigm of being, acting, and knowing in the [colonial] world” (maldonadotorres, 2016, p. 7). modernity and all of its fictions and premises are the faces of the cmp/octo. you cannot decolonize knowledge if you do not question the very foundations of western epistemology and ontology, (i.e., kupe vs. cook).16 as long as questions (“scientific” inquiry) remain within the rules and horizons of the existing naming game, the world of the cmp/octo (modernity), the dominant ideologies currently shaping the worlds of the apa and scra, the control of knowledge itself is never called into question. first people’s and indigenous knowledge have been defined as a “multidimensional body of lived experiences that informs and sustains epistemological systems lead to two very different ways of being. the assertion of hegemony of one over the other was and is part of the project of coloniality. the reclamation and practice of their non-european epistemology is part of their vision for the present and the future. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 people who make their homes in a local area and always takes into account the current socio-political colonial power dimensions of the western world” (grayshield, 2010, p. 6). many indigenous/tribal cultures related “harmoniously to their environment, experienced colonization, and provided an alternative perspective on human experience that differed from western empirical science” (denzin et al., 2008, as cited in grayshield, 2010). (re)learning indigenous stories, myths, ways of seeing and knowing, can be one framework to understand the ways coloniality has broken, paralyzed, and disconnected us from our bodies and the natural world. for many of us that have familial lineage tying us to indigenous ancestry or cultural worldviews/practices that have been buried or forgotten over time, we may lean in to reconstruct them, ourselves, in a process of revisioning and remaking a relational (disalienated) and embodied self and community. however, we know that connecting with indigenous knowledge systems is one of many ways we can learn to embody praxes of decoloniality. we each need to find our own way. as gloria anzaldúa (2015) explained: “i need a different mode of telling stories, one that can simultaneously hold the different models of what i think reality is. i need a different way of organizing reality.” (p. 43). embodying decoloniality consists of unlearning normalized reality, of seeing through reality’s roles and descriptions, contesting and disrupting narratives and constructions, by acts of non-doing and nonbeing (anzaldúa, 2015). dissonance, depression, dispossession, expressions and manifestations of resistance and re-existence are forms of unconscious separation, of letting go. these manifestations need to be reframed, “externalized.” where does this exist in social/political/economic spheres? when we feel disoriented or depressed, we need to understand this, not necessarily as a harm to push away or to numb (avoid) through medication or other means, but as possibly evidence of an unconscious desire to delink and a desire to connect to another self. within the context of coloniality, other epistemologies take on greater meaning, particularly in regard to experiences of the body and psyche/spirit, because these could be aspects of ourselves that are silenced within the frame of coloniality. this allows for the creation-emergence of a new reality based on different premises and values. in these new spaces, the who-we-are experiences disintegration and reconstruction. it allows the creation of different narratives based on the identification of shared or parallel experiences while honoring the particularities of each individual’s or community’s lived story. it facilitates the exploration of the ramifications of what we’re becoming and the confrontation with the shadows of our times. it opens the possibility of the emergence of a consciousness that transcends the “us” vs. “them,” bridges the extremes of coloniality’s http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 binaries, and holds a subjectivity and a space that does not polarize. “a process of emotional psychical dismemberment, the splitting of the mind/body/spirit/soul, and the creative work of putting all the pieces together in new form, a partly unconscious work done in the night by the light of the moon, a labor of re-visioning and re-membering.” (anzaldúa, 2015, p. xxi) in my own process of learning to embody praxes of decoloniality and reclaiming new ways of being, i (tiffeny) needed to visually map memories of the various ways i experienced forms of harm from epistemic oppression over time (harm to me and harm i have caused/participated in). seeing my body on a page and recalling messages received, or the development of assumptions that became embedded in my interiority, helped me to recall various forms of harm. i simply had masked, hidden, forgotten, or misplaced my connection to self/body—a deep loss regarding wisdoms embedded in experiences of dis-ease, dis-function, dis-connection, dispossession, and dis-association. i realized how much of what i had come to know as normal ways of being were coping strategies i had learned to use to survive in settings that were designed to control or limit authentic self, selfexpression, self-determination, and feelings of self-efficacy. this occurred in many places across my lifespan where i would have expected to be supported otherwise. this is how pedagogy for the oppressed works— pedagogy in terms of what we are taught, what we are taught to dim, and how we are taught to relinquish aspects of ourselves, our anatomy, to institutions. as someone who is comprised of multiple mixed identities— indigenous americas-mexican, irish, portuguese, scottish, spanish, and northern 17 the concept of “post-activism” was coined by bayo akomolafe as “a new form of deinstitutionalized activism, if you will – represents a leap into the european familial lineages—and who is quite unsure how i am perceived by others, yet primarily speak english, appear as female, and am queer . . . identity, belonging, and feeling a sense of community in the united states is a challenge. especially when living in unfamiliar places where identity is primarily tied with race/ethnicity and class, which gets even more complicated when queer. this is also what many of us call living in the borderlands—a constant process of knowing the world in more ways than one and negotiating awareness of such experiential data in ways that allow us to survive or thrive despite the impact such navigation of rocky terrain may have on our health. epistemic oppression is embedded; deeply and psychologically. to reclaim new ways of being through embodying praxes of decoloniality is to learn to live beyond the hegemony. focusing too long on our identities (as constructions) separates us, as our existing social and political environment requires of us. without some sort of guide or path to grab onto, we can get bogged down in identities as they are understood through modernity/coloniality. the work of increasing awareness of our own narratives and how we are shaped by the cmp is helpful for identifying how we are being harmed and doing harm by believing and enacting these dominant ideological threads. it doesn’t matter what the identity is based on—race, sexuality, gender, age, ability, class or some other categorization used against us—they are all part of a system of control. therefore, we cannot address problems of the social/political world without addressing our own healing/transformation and participation in perpetuating ongoing harm (i.e., “postactivism”17). through the acknowledgment of the workings of the cmp/octo, and how the dark…embracing the unknown.” see: https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/the-times-areurgent-lets-slow-down http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/the-times-are-urgent-lets-slow-down https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/the-times-are-urgent-lets-slow-down global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 flow of narratives about ourselves perpetuate historical/multigenerational trauma, we learn the power to rename, reclaim, and re-exist. through this re-creation of the world we become sovereign (self-empowered; see selfactivism, gloria west, in this issue). “so, don’t give me your tenets and your laws. don’t give me your lukewarm gods. what i want is an accounting with all three cultures—white, mexican, indian. i want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. and if going home is denied me then i will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture— una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture.” (anzaldúa, 2010, p. 6– 7) b. the village as a praxis of reclaiming an example of a project of this type (what became known as the village) began in the summer of 2017. we18 had just completed a second racial justice and psychology conference. the conferences had been a radical departure from the past, not just because the content was focused on racial justice. the organizers had asked two questions: 1. how do indigenous, black, and people of color gather as practitioners and researchers share knowledge and simultaneously, break down the barriers of colonization and racism in academia? 2. how is black and brown liberatory research and expression centered within historically white -dominated spaces? 18 the racial justice action group and the racial justice in praxis project; projects developed in 201618 as part of psysr (psychologists for social how do we reclaim our voices, space, and home? (see royster article in this issue.) both conferences were part of an initiative to place racial justice and communities of color at the center of psychology. to do so the space was shifted from hierarchical to relational, academic to community-centered. after the closing, questions that emerged included: how do we forge ahead as a group and conference? where is the destination, and will it find home? we began to envision a writing project that included collaborative writing circles that would work together over a longer period of time. the intention was to move beyond presentation and dialogue and towards collaborative investigations (re-search) and articulation (writing) of how a de-colonial framework could shift psychology’s perspectives. why decoloniality? equality within a system of oppression is not the goal; neither is moving to a different position within the hierarchies. decoloniality moves us beyond modernity (outside the box), beyond justice, beyond race. it allows us to see race as a form of social control (see palmer, g. in this issue) and as part of a colonial matrix of power (cmp/octo). racism does not exist only as a form of oppression of one racialized group by another, but more significantly as part of a web (system) of control over all communities/continents/worlds. at one of the initial planning sessions, we sat together in small groups sharing stories. someone started talking about villages in chicago, referring to their experience of growing up in public housing projects. how it was, at one time, a self-contained and selfsupporting community. how it changed, how responsibility), a national group formed in the early 1980s. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 gangs and drugs impacted and divided the village. people remembered different things, different stories, and different parts of the stories. at the same time, they couldn’t say, they couldn’t describe exactly what happened to those villages. yet people remembered something, and those memories were very deep and charged with emotion. what they remembered and processed over the last three years is the subject of this section. c. space as a condition of embodiment sacred (non-commodified and nonobjectified) space is a condition for remembering, healing, and intentionally reexisting. it provides a validating mirror to reclaim deep layers of experience which have been erased and normalized. re-membering in a colonially occupied (defined) space often triggers a re-experiencing of trauma. in these occupied spaces we are required to disconnect from our lived experience to comply to what is expected of us, (i.e., how we connect with others, how we sense what’s needed, how we express ourselves, etc.). this leads us into the borderlands, the in-between spaces, the cracks where we are torn between two or more different scripts (narratives) of behavior, mannerism, tone, language, and role. we often experience uncertainty, instability, anxiety, depression, and conflicting identities. some adapt and navigate by codeswitching, developing multi-modal capacities. however, the overall effect is that we exist as disembodied and dissociated from ourselves, our communities, and the world. **** 19 “i am traumatized. i am oppressed. i am not responsible for nor was i the cause of my trauma. what happened to me, my ancestors, and my community(s) occurred and continues to occur in the context of a larger story.” the trauma is not whoyou-are; the trauma is what happened to you (m. james, personal communication, july 21, 2021) being aware of the mechanisms that shape our understanding of the world [and ourselves] is a precondition to a process of liberation from current ways of being, of going beyond prescribed understandings and constructions of reality. (andreotti & dowling, 2004; martín-baró, 1994) **** remembering in a non-occupied space helps one remember what/who-we-are outside of the categories ascribed to us by modernity. to re-witness the violence of disembodiment in a way that begins to reframe the context of one’s trauma-oppression.19 different feelings, reflections, and stories of the trauma emerge within the context of the witnessing. whoyou-are changes – a different you becomes more visible and real.20 re-membering without reliving. it has been described as a “stance of opposition [and affirmation] which creates a liberated territory” (morales, 1998; p. 62). holding this kind of space requires presence, authenticity, and relationality. it is a process of letting go and reaccessing , being fully present in relationship with self and community, “full speech,”21 deep listening, and re-languaging.22 from the point of view of the cmp/octo this space may appear as one of non-doing. it appears unstructured, disorganized, and unproductive. to enter it requires detachment from the cmp/octo’s flows/way of being/thinking/relating. to exit the space requires a conscious return. the space is attentive to and affirmative of the body and psyche, to non-articulated experiences of self 20 the world of you (maldonado-torres, 2016). 21 full speech, parole pleine, is a term developed by jacques lacan in the early 1950s (d. bell, personal communication, january 12, 2022). 22 the practice requires access to and the use of the non-cognitive. it requires emotional and psychological labor. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 and selfhood, to ancestors, food, home, noncolonial languages – to conflicted emotions and psychological splitting that surface as a result of living in two worlds (anzaldúa, 2015; somerville, this issue). people come into unoccupied space already in conflict (disembodied)—torn within social constructions; outside its narratives and inside its fractures. as participants in these spaces, we remind ourselves to be fluid and compassionate in holding the space as each of us grapples with these shifts, contradictions, and re-orientations. to hold these conflicts and tensions requires a capacity to prioritize reflection and discernment, and to reframe how “productivity and achievement”23 are defined (n. nasrat, personal communication, november 7, 2021). that time is fluid, not fixed, that transformation and healing are circular, not linear. that it is important to slow down, to allow for and acknowledge what is held in silences, to listen for and to follow different rhythms and processes. to resist and let go of colonial patterns and modalities. this space is what nurtures our stories and gives life to our silenced selves and communities. without it shifting we continue to live in the crevices and reproduce the constructions and fault lines in which our bodies and psyches have been embedded and encaged in over multiple generations. without it, we cannot make our way to the village. there is intention and permission to detach from the cmp/octo, to not follow the norms and expectations of coloniality (standard operating procedures). there is an understanding that it will be challenging, discomforting. at the same time, one experiences it as liberating. as one of the members of the village said, 23 discussions with nahid nasrat, a transnational feminist, and former president of division 48, peace “you can feel this when you’re in a decolonial space – less so in colonial spaces: these [stories] . . . came from a moment of decolonialitizing space with my fellow authors. it was a rich and inspiring discourse that felt like an intellectual pilgrimage as we were discovering our truth.” jacqueline samuel, (personal communication, august, 23, 2021) in this space, embodiment is recognized and validated. there is an intention to reconnect our silenced thoughts and feelings to our consciousness. to acknowledge and engage emotions as a necessary part of the practice. that uncertainty is part of the process. that not knowing is a form of contesting epistemic colonization; that not knowing can be more important than knowing. d. the story and the village out of the space emerges the story. the story is a canoe, a vessel, and a vehicle that is the container for the life of the subject.24 psychology, of the apa. 24 the canoe as a vessel that holds one and one’s http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 a vessel that has taken the subject and their community on its journey, that is, the lived experience of the person as part of a people.25 the stories are ones of political, educational, and economic trauma, racial oppression, somatic conformity (body shaming, disability discrimination), and others, intertwined with resistance and memories of previous identities, roles, traditions, and practices. the subject is the content of the story. the subject is the story. not learning about the subject, learning from the subject. the subject is the embodiment and affirmation of that experience and of that knowledge. “our lives are the textbooks and it is our way to liberate the minds of the people” (adriano, 2012, p. 64). the story is the journey of the subject over multiple generations. the subject is the author of the story. not seen or interpreted by someone else (scholar or expert) but by each person, themselves, in a space with other members of the village. from the perspective of healing and empowerment, the subject must be the “author and arbiter of her own recovery . . . no intervention that takes power away from the survivor can possibly foster her recovery, no matter how much it appears to be in her immediate best interest.” (morales, 1998, p. 63; quoting judith herman). community on a journey, literal and metaphorical; political and psychological, as told by and reflected in many communities of oceania in the context of their journeying across the pacific ocean. 25 for those of us who feel that we are not part of a people or community, we suggest that this is a condition of alienation, of erasure and forgetting, not of our own volition, but rather part of a social and psychological process. that is rooted in modernity and dis-embodiment. 26 “who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? who taught you to hate the color of your skin? to such extent you bleach, to get like the white the story is like a map to the village. to locate and find the village requires understanding how it was and is being destroyed. villages are identified based on the existence of relationships, a system, political, economic, psychological, and spiritual, that supports the individual and the community. villages are weakened and unable to function when that system has been disconnected and disabled. the destruction of the village was not accidental. it was a consequence of “conquest” and the imposition of a different way of being (i.e., the cmp/octo). the violence was and is still normalized. its way of life was replaced by a eurocentric society. civilization and its particular ways of life have been presented as superior and de facto, that civilized world has viewed people of the village as objects to be measured, categorized, named, pathologized and used. coloniality impacts the village and its people internally (i.e. psychologically, politically and economically). as a result, the colonized subject is at war with themselves, trying to kill any trace of the black, native, and colonized within and without, while also being at war with each other to achieve the same purpose (maldonado-torres, 2016, p. 14). malcolm x (1962) asked: who taught you to hate yourself?26 man. who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? who taught you to hate your own kind? who taught you to hate the race that you belong to so much so that you don't want to be around each other? no . . . before you come asking mr. muhammad does he teach hate, you should ask yourself who taught you to hate being what god made you. we don't steal, we don't gamble, we don't lie and we don't cheat. you can't get into a whiskey bottle without getting past a government seal. you can't buy a deck of cards without getting past a government seal. here the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 jacqueline samuel explains, this is not to say that african american’s don’t trust each other. it is really to say that self-hatred has a grave impact on our community. it impacts how we vote, spend, live, work, worship, and educate ourselves. as it happened on the plantation, it is still happening today. what is disturbing is selfhatred stops our ability to thrive and this behavior starts at an early age when it can be prevented. unfortunately when you see so much conflict and violence in the community you know that those individuals that engage in disruptive behavior are void of the nurturing from the village where they need that connection to grow. jacqueline samuel, (personal communication, august, 23, 2021) the destruction of the village and the phenomena of self-hatred are connected. selfhatred is both a consequence of the cmp/octo and a barrier to seeing how it causes our destruction. that is, coloniality in the form of self-hatred blinds one to their trauma and simultaneously prevents them from connecting with the village. despite, and in the face of, this multigenerational catastrophe, the village has survived. memories of it exist and are passed on in ways that we are not fully aware of. they exist in our stories. deidra somerville describes the role of the mother in the life of the village. the stories of who we are, who we were and who we are to become are white man makes the whiskey then puts you in jail for getting drunk. he sells you the cards and the dice and derived from what has been mapped onto the wombs, hearts, minds, and spirits of the identities of our mothers. the condition of our very humanity, both the process of becoming more human, and the actions that define humanity, arise from our notions of motherhood, experiences with our mothers, and retelling of our mother’s stories. for their stories tell ours. (somerville, this issue) gloria west describes it as: i choose not to be overwhelmed. to work in the world but not be sucked into it. to identify and re-draw the boundaries and to know that one is enough. to stand up for yourself because you’re the only one who can. to learn self-love as part of a selfactivism that is in relationship with community and even those from outside of your community. (west, this issue) the motherline and self-activism allow us to re-conceptualize and build the village as a viable project. e. (un)mapping the colonial matrix of power there are different kinds of “stories.” the stories of the perpetrators are normalized, legitimized, incorporated into the collective narrative (i.e., dominant flows of the cmp/octo). it is the world that exists, that people live and are forced to survive in. the stories of the abused, the oppressed, are erased, silenced, and retold through the framework and language of this society’s “reality.” puts you in jail when he catches you using them” (malcom x, 1962). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 27 the keys here are that: (1) the stories of modernity27 are reflections of and windows into the social constructions, the economic and political structures, and the epistemologies and ontologies of coloniality and its matrix of power; and (2) the stories of coloniality and decoloniality are reflections of and manifestations from the fractures that result from those social constructions and the lived experiences of them. both stories have the ability and power to reveal that which is unseen. [to] identify and clarify the various layers, moments, and areas involved in the production of coloniality as well as in the consistent opposition to it. the goal is to better understand the nexus of knowledge, power, and being that sustain an endless war on specific bodies, cultures, knowledges, nature, and peoples… (maldonadotorres, 2016) the journey to the village turns out to be part of a larger project to map the colonial and capitalist matrix of power, to critically question and reveal the interconnections of how it functions, to make it visible and to understand its evolution over time. this includes mapping the psychological complexes and symptoms of communities and individuals that have arisen and continue to arise from it. empowerment from a community psychological perspective cannot exist in isolation from this framework. empowerment in this context is the ability to negotiate one’s own subjectivity and to go beyond imposed boundaries. 27 it is important to remember that it is the cmp/octo that is “pulling the strings” behind the perpetrator and the abused. to transform the abuse, it is that matrix of power which must be changed. the stories and their embodied experience that contain memories of the cmp/octo also contain memories of the village. the individual, present and past,28 is a microcosm of the village as well as the cmp/octo. within the same crevices and fractures that disembodied us lie memories of what and who-we-are before and during that disembodiment. it requires a practice of putting ourselves back together, remembering. the stories in this issue create a different reality. they ground us outside modernity. they help us see ourselves and the world differently. “there’s something epistemological about storytelling. it’s the way we know each other, the way we know ourselves. the way we know the world. it’s also the way we don’t know; the way the world is kept from us, the way we’re kept from knowledge about ourselves, the way we’re kept from understanding other people.” (anzaldúa, 2015; citing andrea barrett, p.1, preface) when the stories of the village emerge, they “dissolve” the constructions of the cmp/octo. something new is remembered, named. we can breathe. one experiences a sense of being a different person, the world a different place. it makes possible and is a foundation for a new culture of politics. this is a decolonial praxis of embodiment. closing to repeat – this article is intended as an intervention to stop the ongoing harm of the cmp/octo. 28 from a non-colonial perspective, the individual is connected to their past and future. see interbeing, thich nhat hanh (hanh, 2011). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 28 let us be honest with ourselves – all of us – that the current configuration of life itself is not how we want to be. while re-membering our stories and roots may be important for attending to deeper understanding of who we are, we will need to bring a critical lens to those ways of being as well. hierarchical structures emerged among civilizations thousands of years before us. why was this necessary? let us be part of a world that allows for pluriversality while also not replicating dynamics of power over others, or complete disregard for the worldviews of others. we hope that we learn to develop more creative paths forward, together, while also acknowledging our own individual stories. to create a world where these colonial concepts no longer hold power. from a long-view perspective, ideally, everyone learning to hold multiple worldviews simultaneously, without conceding that one worldview is more valid than another is, is of paramount importance. learnings from the village the village is a necessary alternative space for incubating/creating new worlds – a space for learning to embody praxes of decoloniality – empowered within a new kind of politics. it is a space of story-making and storytelling. we construct and apply a framework that does not and cannot exist within the “logics” of coloniality. engaging our entire bodies, the space holds a fabric that affirms and legitimizes different possibilities for selves outside of prescribed constructions. it is a place where a different way of knowing and being becomes real. we suggest the following were key aspects of the village as an embodied decolonial praxis in the united states: • embodied seeing: seeing our stories through the seeing that exists in our bodies and a framework of metaphysical catastrophe (mc). (maldonado-torres, 2016). • identifying feelings, experiences, memories, and perceptions of the cmp/octo and the village. • contextualizing stories, including experiences of trauma and resistance, over multiple generations. reconnecting the fragments; weaving the quilt. • reconstructing a lifeworld outside of modernity. • practicing different ways of being in an incubation space where a sense of decolonial self and community was nurtured and grew stronger. where the possibility of a different world became real. the space as a gym, a place of building our decolonial muscles. • being, writing, and storytelling together over an extended period of time. • engaging in processes of problematization, reflection, and working through new representations, constructions, and narratives (engaged inquiry/investigation/collaborative andragogy). • nurturing the development of decolonial theory based on lived experience or selftheorizing. • the village was an example of an incubator for integrative practices of (from a more academic/colonial perspective): 1. healing and self-transformation (clinical practice and community service) 2. investigation (research/inquiry) 3. andragogy, collaborative learning and teaching (pedagogy) 4. ontological activism: contesting modernity and affirming/holding space for an altermundus (another world). (advocacy/political activism) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 29 we suggest the following as principles and precepts of embodying decoloniality: • if our ways of seeing and being in the world are constructed by colonial and capitalist processes, the construction of a different world starts with questioning and deconstructing who we are and what that world is. • the starting point is that the world is not what we think it is; we are not who we think we are. the reality is that an embodied world is contextual, political, and psychological, not universal, objective, and apolitical. • if we assume that community systems were designed based on the cmp/octo, then we need to re-examine the underlying ideologies that influence the shape, function, and power of all institutions and organizations. • the whole idea of knowledge as a eurocentric epistemology needs to be reconsidered. there are other sources of knowledge that assist us in getting out of the box of modernity/coloniality. (western) psychology is (unconsciously) part of modernity (as a colonial science). • space is the political fabric of a way of being. • the cmp/octo is the embedded experience of modernity/coloniality in our bodies. detaching from colonial-capitalist trauma and oppression and re-embodying noncolonial memories/experiences and knowledge are methodologies of decoloniality. our lives are the textbooks... (adriano, 2012). we close this article by inviting you to consider this as the challenge to and the calling of community psychology. the ways of embodying decoloniality and the ways we enacted the village space are not meant as a model to be replicated as is. the point is to support the ways of the rhizome (deleuze & guattari, 1987). rhizomatic developments of these ideas would ideally look different in different places, with the unique perspectives, h*stories, and positionalities of those engaging in their own worldsenses. we hope to learn more about the creative ways embodying decoloniality happens around the globe. we look forward to hearing your comments and questions and hope that there will be spaces where we can engage in more in-depth dialogue and discussion. an other world is here. references adriano, j.p., (2012). mirrors, masks, and dreams. in on the edge of hope and healing: flipping the script of filipinos in hawaii, (eds.) acido, j. & lee, g. tmi global press, honolulu, hi. andreotti, v. 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(2015). the octopus [digital image]. scholar & feminist online. https://sfonline.barnard.edu/navi gating-neoliberalism-in-the-academynonprofits-and-beyond/about-this-issue/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://lithub.com/mukoma-wa-ngugi-what-decolonizing-the-mind-means-today/?fbclid=iwar0xyez_fxo2cjzch--me_szlct8bvhkjlx2z482zrtkhvqqqgmx4vedjzo https://lithub.com/mukoma-wa-ngugi-what-decolonizing-the-mind-means-today/?fbclid=iwar0xyez_fxo2cjzch--me_szlct8bvhkjlx2z482zrtkhvqqqgmx4vedjzo https://lithub.com/mukoma-wa-ngugi-what-decolonizing-the-mind-means-today/?fbclid=iwar0xyez_fxo2cjzch--me_szlct8bvhkjlx2z482zrtkhvqqqgmx4vedjzo https://lithub.com/mukoma-wa-ngugi-what-decolonizing-the-mind-means-today/?fbclid=iwar0xyez_fxo2cjzch--me_szlct8bvhkjlx2z482zrtkhvqqqgmx4vedjzo https://lithub.com/mukoma-wa-ngugi-what-decolonizing-the-mind-means-today/?fbclid=iwar0xyez_fxo2cjzch--me_szlct8bvhkjlx2z482zrtkhvqqqgmx4vedjzo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/aimé_césaire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/aimé_césaire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/association_of_black_psychologists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/association_of_black_psychologists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/carter_g._woodson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/carter_g._woodson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/frantz_fanon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/frantz_fanon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/the_radical_therapist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/the_radical_therapist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/w._e._b._du_bois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/w._e._b._du_bois https://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/about-this-issue/ https://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/about-this-issue/ https://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/about-this-issue/ individual and contextual factors associated with community building in apartment complexes tabitha underwood roger e. mitchell missouri state university north carolina state university keywords: community building, apartments, property managers, renters, sense of community, neighbor interaction author biographies: tabitha underwood, phd serves as the executive director of missouri campus compact. she has worked in the nonprofit, government, and higher education sectors to foster community engagement and prepare students for leadership within their communities. roger e. mitchell, phd is an associate professor emeritus in the department of psychology at north carolina state university. recommended citation: underwood, t. & mitchell, r.e. (2016). individual and contextual factors associated with community building in apartment complexes. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(3), pages 1-17. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 individual and contextual factors associated with community building in apartment complexes abstract although a large portion of american society is housed in rental units, much of the literature on sense of community has focused on homeowners and their role in community development activities within neighborhoods. much less attention has been paid to the circumstances under which renters become engaged in local communities. in particular, the potential for rental apartment complexes to serve as locations for engagement and the promotion of sense of community has not been examined. as an initial step, this study explored the factors associated with apartment complex managers facilitating community building activities within their complexes. this exploratory study found that managers do have a role to play in building a sense of community among residents, are currently facilitating engagement, and place importance on such activities. results also indicated that the support provided by the management company may be a key variable in whether such interest is turned into action. thus, property managers represent a stakeholder that could be involved in efforts to promote sense of community within rental apartment complexes. this study provides a glimpse into community engagement of renters and examines the possibilities for practitioners to work with apartment complexes, managers, and management companies in promoting sense of community among renters. introduction community building has been defined as ‘any identifiable set of activities pursued by a community in order to increase community social capacity’ (mattessich, monsey, & roy, 2004, p.11). it is the act of enhancing the social fabric of an area through increasing resident interaction and sense of community so that locations collectively develop not just connections with one another but social norms and values to create a community (jason, 1997). there are many ways to think about community building but one central theme prevails. successful community building works to create an environment where neighbors “rely on each other”, work together, and feel connected to each other (mcneely, 1999 p.742). community building can be focused on increasing resident interaction, neighboring, sense of community, collective efficacy, social cohesion, pro-social norms, informal social control, community organizing, and so on. examples of how to build a sense of community and neighbor interaction include resident initiated activities, recreational opportunities, a resident organization, informal neighboring, social activities, and clubs (zaff & devlin, 1998). in all, community building helps residents claim responsibility for the outcomes of their community (mcneely, 1999). as a field of work and study, community psychology provides an appropriate place for http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 discussions of sense of community and community building. it is the field of community psychology that deals with collectively working together to facilitate social action and promote social justice (society for community research and action, n.d.) with sense of community as a cornerstone of the field (sarason, 1974). community building often comes down to social justice issues. while engagement of residents and community building can be seen as pervasive and important concepts, a subpopulation is often left out of the mix. many resident engagement efforts are directed toward homeowner populations, leaving renters stranded on the sidelines. it is the responsibility of practitioners to help remedy this injustice and engage all residents in improving their quality of life regardless of housing tenure. this exploratory study takes a first step in analyzing how community building with renters can be facilitated by property managers and apartment complexes as venues for engagement. renters as a constituency increasing proportions of the u.s. population are housed in high density rental apartment complexes. based on 2013 american community survey data, approximately 35% of households rent, equating to 33% of residents (national multi-housing council, n.d. b). out of all renter occupied units, 17% have 20 or more units (american housing survey, 2013). although rental housing and apartment complexes specifically are becoming fixtures in many neighborhoods, the community building literature says little about whether these apartment complexes might be communities in and of themselves. creating a sense of community in such complexes might contribute to the well-being of such residents. it might also foster their capacity to engage with their surrounding community in civic engagement activities. implicit negative perceptions of renters and rental housing might contribute to the lack of focus on this issue. over the course of american history there has been a negative stereotype of renters, with the view that property, the “american dream,” was the “true measure of a man” (barreto, marks, & woods, 2007; dreier, 1982; kreuckeberg, 1999; rohe & watson, 2008). owning property meant that you were hard-working and industrious and that you had achieved freedom and independence, and were deserving of policies and practices that promoted homeownership (rohe & watson, 2008; goetz, 2007). this means that renting is often seen as the opposite of these highly held values. it is viewed as a temporary situation reserved for certain points in the life cycle while homeownership is perceived as the housing situation that everyone should strive to achieve. “the stigma of not owning property and its association with being poor, transient, politically suspect, and different persists in contemporary society, in community politics, in real estate markets, and in our tax structures” (krueckeberg, 1999, p.26). similarly, negative perceptions of multi-family housing in general include: renters are less desirable neighbors; renters overburden the infrastructure; higher density development creates more traffic problems (obrinsky & stein, 2007); rental units decrease the resale value of single family homes (national multi-housing council, n.d.; perin, 1988; 1977). thus, there is a need for research that examines the presence of community building within apartment complexes, and its potential for empowering individuals and promoting prosocial behaviors (e.g., broader civic engagement efforts.) this study begins to put focus back http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 on the renter population to better understand how their engagement as residents is enabled and encouraged. community building in apartment complexes and the role of property managers interest in the impact of community building and increased social capital outside of traditional owner-occupied residential housing has been seen in work on lowincome public housing (kuo, sullivan, coley, & brunson, 1998; saegert, winkel, & scwartz, 2002), mixed income hope vi communities (chaskin & joseph, 2011; graves, 2010) housing cooperatives (saegert & winkel, 1996), and student housing (foth, 2004). however, there has been a lack of focus on apartment complexes for renter populations. within the rental property management industry, some professionals have argued that increased community building could be a way of improving the attractiveness of facilities in ways that might increase recruitment and reduce turnover. schindler (1994), for example, encouraged property managers to embrace community watches within apartment complexes as a way to reduce the effects of crime on turnover, resident injuries, and vandalism. babka (2008) argued that “creating opportunities for shared experiences, helping residents grow roots by promoting social gatherings and other business networking opportunities, (and) promoting events held on site that draw on common interests you have identified” can help build a sense of community. researchers have found that the use of community spaces and the offering of and participation in community programs were both correlated with resident satisfaction (cho & lee, 2011). to date, however, there has been a gap in systematic empirical examination of community building activities within apartment complexes, or the factors that might promote such activities. property managers represent a leadership role within rental apartment complexes that could support or discourage community building activities. traditionally, community building is a grassroots effort, initiated by residents who want to better their own lives and their neighborhood. however, in the instance of apartment complexes, property managers might be enlisted as allies to promote the community building process by facilitating activities that help to build resident relationships. conversely, they could also view such activities as inconsistent with their roles, or feel threatened by demands from tenants empowered by community building activities (graves, 2010). this study examined the circumstances under which property managers report being more or less likely to engage in community building activities. it should be noted that the purpose of this study was not to measure resident engagement in community building activities or examine the outcomes of such activities. it was to analyze the role that property managers play in community building and the current state of affairs within rental apartment complexes. description of study the aim of this exploratory study was to begin an investigation of the incidence of community building in apartment complexes, how it fits into the role of property managers, and what factors influence property managers who facilitate community building activities. as for the factors associated with community building, researchers examined the following individual and contextual predictors: (1) perceptions they have of renters, (2) the personal experiences they have with community building, (3) the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 importance they place on community building, and (4) the organizational support they receive from the management company. negative stereotype of renters. property managers’ willingness to attempt community building could be shaped by their views of the interest and capacity of renters to engage in their rental community. negative stereotypes of renters prevalent in american society could discourage property managers’ actions. personal experiences with community building. property managers’ experiences with community building in their own neighborhoods would seem plausibly linked to their attitude toward community building in other contexts. past experiences with community building in their own neighborhood might create a familiarity with neighboring, sense of community, and their subsequent positive outcomes. these experiences may also reduce some of the barriers to understanding the impact of community building and the process of implementation. importance placed on community building. to what extent do apartment property managers view community building as an integral part of their work? an examination of several apartment property manager handbooks indicates that managers have a variety of duties, of which potential community building activities (e.g., welcoming new residents, promoting social activities) represent only a small part (banner, 1992; taylor, 2002). one of the aims of this study was to determine whether the importance property managers place on community building affects the actual community building activities they facilitate. organizational support. organizational support or constraint has the potential of affecting the level of performance and goal commitment of employees. greater organizational support and resources have been associated with improvement in a variety of employee behaviors (peters & o’connor, 1980; peters, o’connor, & rudolf, 1980; alpkan, bulut, gunday, ulusoy, & kilic, 2010) . thus, it seems quite plausible that property managers’ community building behaviors would be influenced by the perceived support they receive from the property management company for community building activities. methods sampling frame / procedures online apartment search engines (apartments.com, apartmentguide.com, forrent.com, and move.com) were used to develop the sampling frame for the study. in the spring of 2010, a search of these databases for north carolina apartment complexes yielded a list of approximately 1,234 unique apartment complexes across the state. a random sample of 800 was pulled from this sampling frame, providing addresses of apartment complex property management offices. it should be noted that there could have been potential for bias in the sampling frame because it is not an exhaustive list of all apartment complexes in the state. these websites serve as marketing tools, so those complexes with the resources to devote to such tools were included, potentially used by larger apartment complexes with more amenities including community building and potentially more monetary resources for community building activities. letters describing the confidential, internet survey were sent to property managers at the apartment complex addresses identified http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 through the search engines. the letter provided links to the survey and an informed consent form. two follow-up letters, a follow-up phone call, and a door prize drawing for respondents (i.e., two $100 gift certificates) were used to increase response rate. there were 133 respondents out of the 800 sampled who completed surveys, yielding a response rate of approximately 17%. data available for apartment complexes varied by web site, but four variables were commonly available to allow comparison between respondents and non-respondents: maximum rent, minimum rent, maximum apartment square footage, and minimum apartment square footage. the differences between these groups on the first three variables were not significant. however, the mean minimum rental price for respondents and non-respondents differed significantly (i.e., 605.58 and 630.82 respectively), but the effect size (eta2) of completing the survey was extremely small at .005. from the available data, no clear pattern of respondent bias was detected in the sample. respondents descriptive analyses of the demographic variables obtained from the on-line survey revealed the following about the property manager respondents: the average age was approximately 37 years old, 88% were female, about half made $59,000 or less, the majority of respondents were caucasian (89%), and the average length of time they had been in the industry is about 10 years. about 33% rented vs. owned their own residence, and 21% lived in an apartment on the apartment complex site itself. as for information about the complexes themselves, respondents reported the following: the average rent was $756, the average apartment size was 974 sq ft, the average age of the complexes was 17 years old, the average household income of tenants was approximately $38,371, the average number of apartments in the complexes was 256, and the average length of tenant stay was almost three years. measures community building in apartment complexes. respondents were asked to indicate whether they had ever done (i.e., yes / no) any of 19 activities related to community building in apartment complexes (see appendix a). these items were developed by the authors. the total of yes responses was used as the dependent variable in the study. a set of relatively comparable items were developed, yielding a scale with a cronbach’s alpha of .82. respondents were also asked to indicate the number of times they had engaged in each activity within the past year. however, as described in more detail later, this variable was not used due to missing data. perception of renters. respondents were asked to indicate their level of agreement (1=strongly disagree, 4=strongly agree) with 12 items that characterized renters’ behaviors (e.g., they care about their neighbors in the complex; they move a lot so are not attached to the community of people in the complex). respondents were asked to think about renters in general not necessarily the renters in their current complex. these items were developed by the authors using perin (1977; 1988) and krueckeberg’s (1999) descriptions of statements of professionals working in housing, planning, and real estate industries. an exploratory factor analysis (i.e., efa) produced a single 8 item factor with a cronbach’s alpha of α=.875. items were scored so that higher overall scores http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 represent more positive perceptions of renters. personal experience with community building. respondents were asked to indicate their level of agreement (1=strongly disagree, 4=strongly agree) with nine items that measured the extent to which property managers feel a sense of community and interact with their neighbors in their own neighborhoods. items measuring personal experiences were taken from buckner (1988), peterson, speer, and mcmillan (2008), and one was developed by the researcher. an efa produced a single 9 item factor with a cronbach’s alpha of α=.875. importance of community building in property manager role. respondents were asked to indicate their level of agreement (1=strongly disagree, 4=strongly agree) with 9 items that measured the extent to which community building fits into their roles as managers, how essential it is for their job, and how important sense of community and neighbor interaction are for apartment residents. an efa produced a strong 7 item factor with a cronbach’s alpha of α=.884, and a weak, second factor with 2 highly loading items. the average of the 7 items in the first factor was used to construct an importance of community building scale for this study. organizational support for community building. respondents were asked to indicate the degree to which (1=not at all, 4=to a great extent) they were provided with resources for community building from their management company, such as money, time, buy-in from management, network of other professionals, authority over decision making, staff support, training, and management policies for community building. the authors developed 8 items based upon peters and o’connor’s (1980) dimensions of situational resource variables. an efa produced a single 8 item factor with a cronbach’s alpha of α=.893. covariates. a variety of covariates were analyzed in the regression model. these included average rent, age of complex, average income of residents, number of apartments, and length of time in property management industry. each was measured with open-ended questions. analyses the relationship between independent variables and the dependent variable were computed using a linear regression in spss. covariates were entered into the model first followed by the predictor variables in the second step. results community building measurement respondents were asked the degree to which they had engaged in a variety of community building activities during the course of their careers as property managers, as well as in the past 12 months. there was minimal missing data in the variable used as the major outcome in this study, i.e., community building activities over the course of their careers. however, the assessment of community building activities over the last 12 months was not used due to excessive missing data. many managers left items for this question blank, and it was difficult to determine whether not answering should be coded as 0 or missing. other respondents listed responses such as ‘quite a lot’, which could not be translated into a numerical response among those with complete data (n=83), though, the correlation was r=.97 between lifetime and 12 month indices of community building. this suggests that the lifetime index http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 may be a reasonable proxy for more recent community building activity in this specific sample. incidence of community building and relevance to apartment complexes overall, property managers facilitate a variety of community building activities. out of 19 activities listed (see appendix a), on average, the respondents indicated that they had ever done about 12 of those activities. the majority of activities (15 out of 19) had over 50% of respondents indicating that they had done those activities. the most frequently selected items were: publicize information about the complex (94%), organize informal get-togethers to allow residents to get to know each other (91%, and try to mediate conflicts among residents (91%). the least frequently selected activities were: set up exchanges for residents (18%), organize ongoing programs for residents (22%), and provide activities specifically for youth (29%). most property managers indicated that these activities were consistent with their roles. over 86% of property managers agreed that community building makes sense for their complex and over 82% agreed that they plan on instituting community building initiatives in the future. they also put importance on community building within their complexes. table 1 illustrates the percentage of respondents who agree and disagree with each of the statements measuring importance. results indicate that community building is important for property managers and is part of their role. items valid percent agree disagree community building fits into my role as a property manager. 97.7 2.3 if residents came to me and wanted to enhance the complex in some way, i would likely be involved with those activities. 97.0 3.1 community building is important to my role as a property manager. 98.5 1.6 i think of this complex as a community. 97.7 2.4 community building takes away from necessary parts of my job. 12.3 87.7 community building conflicts with my essential duties as a property manager. 8.5 91.6 community building is a part of my job that i enjoy. 96.9 3.1 it is one of the goals to build a sense of community in this complex. 96.9 3.1 it is important for residents to interact with one another. 95.4 4.6 table 1. level of importance given to community building http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 participants were also given the opportunity to provide an example of their efforts to build community over the past year. eighty-three percent of the respondents gave examples of community building at their complex. these examples included activities such as socials, holiday parties, potlucks and food available in the clubhouse, yard sales, community crime watch, fundraising for charity, pool or pizza parties, and providing garden space. these examples fell in line with the categories of activities measured for the community building measure. correlates of community building the correlations among variables are listed in table 2. as expected, the predictor variables are modestly correlated with one another. out of the four main predictor variables (i.e. importance, perception of renters, personal experiences with community building, and organizational support) only importance that property managers place on community building and the organizational support provided by the management company were significantly correlated with the dependent variable of community building (r=.35 and r=.52, respectively). of the covariates, two (i.e., age of complex, number of apartments) were significantly associated with community building. these were included in subsequent regression analyses, while the covariates with non-significant relationships with community building were excluded [i.e., average rent, income of residents, and length of time (of property manager) in industry]. among the variables to be used in the regression analyses, there was significant skew and kurtosis for importance of community building and number of apartments (i.e., p<.01). the variables were transformed to normalize their distributions, and entered into regression analyses predicting the dependent variable. the pattern of results were similar for the transformed vs. untransformed version of the importance of community building variable, so the untransformed version was retained in the regression analyses employed to test the study’s hypotheses. the transformed variable (i.e. log10 of number of apartments) was retained in the regression equations because the pattern of results between the transformed and untransformed versions was different. predictors of community building one of the aims of this study was to understand what factors influence property managers’ facilitation of community building activities for their residents. table 3 represents the results of the regression analysis. the covariates were entered into the regression model first. these included average rent, age of complex, and number of apartments (log10). together, these variables accounted for an adjusted r2 of 11.9% (p<.001). the addition of the independent variables (i.e., perception of renters, importance of community building, personal experience with community building, and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1. community building 1 2. importance .353** 1 3. perception .103 .264** 1 4. personal experience .134 .240** .242** 1 5. organizational support .524** .314** .084 .186* 1 6. rent .189* .125 .092 .000 .229** 1 7. age of complex .230** -.135 .037 .011 -.148 .460** 1 8. income of residents .101 .044 .061 .124 .214* .718** .401** 1 9. length of time in industry .158 .008 .030 .169 .125 .044 -.035 .046 1 10. number of apartments .214* .094 -.104 .090 .152 .047 -.150 .151 .018 1 *p< .05, **p< .01 note: n for each of the variables ranged from 99 (income of residents) to 133 (community building). table 2. correlations between predictors organizational support) resulted in a significant r2 increment (p<.001), and an overall adjusted r2 of 29.7% (p<.001). in this second step of the model, only organizational support and number of apartments accounted for a significant amount of variance in community building. greater community building activity by managers was modestly (but significantly) associated with larger apartment complexes (t=2.199, p=.03), and more strongly with perceived organizational support (t=4.853, p<.001). in the end, organizational support accounted for 17% of the variance in community building activities (sri2=.174). discussion the purpose of this study was to examine the following questions: 1. are property managers facilitating community building in their complexes? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 model 1 model 2 variable beta beta average rent .079 -.017 age of complex -.163 -.137 number of apartments (log10) .262** .180* perception of renters .028 personal experience .000 importance .121 organizational support .412** adjusted r2 .119** .297** r2 .142** .339** δ r2 .142** .197** *p< .05, **p< .01 table 3. regression analysis for community building variables 2. are their personal experiences with community building related to the facilitation of community building in the properties they manage (including the following factors)? a. the importance they place on community building in their work role, b. their general perceptions of renters, and c. the organizational support provided by the management company importance and relevance to apartment complexes facilitation of community building by apartment property managers is reported as prevalent. out of the 19 community building activities listed in the survey, , respondents had engaged in 12 of them on average. community building is perceived as both relevant and important to the role and practices of the managers. this has potential implications for how practitioners work with managers as allies to foster resident engagement. practitioners could provide training and support that might be lacking from the management company to assist mangers in their community building endeavors. the apartment complexes may provide a venue to reach renters and help break through the stereotype of disengaged and uncaring renter populations. predictors of community building contrary to expectations, perception of renters was not significantly associated with managers’ community building activities. this hypothesized relationship was based on the assumption that a negative stereotype of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 renters would influence community building activities. while this initial premise could be incorrect, there are other explanations. the range of perceptions toward renters may have been restricted (i.e., fewer negative ratings) because: (a) 33% of respondents were renters themselves; and (b) a sample bias toward respondents positively viewing working with renters. personal experience with community building was also not significantly associated with community building in apartment complexes. this hypothesized relationship was based on the assumption that a manager’s experience of sense of community in his/her own neighborhood could influence what the manager thought was possible in his/her work context. this finding could be due to measurement limitations. while the personal experiences measure assessed sense of community and neighbor interaction within their own home neighborhood, the community building measure asked about the leadership roles that managers play in community building in their work context. perhaps more explicit items assessing the active role in community building played by managers in their neighborhood would have been more strongly related to similar behaviors at work. while property managers do place importance on community building, it was not significantly associated with facilitation of community building activities. this could be due to limited variance in the importance variable. the majority of managers agreed with statements concerning the value they place on community building and how it fits into their role as managers. little variance in community building can be explained by this factor, however. when entered into the regression analyses the number of apartment units accounted for a significant amount of variance in community building. complexes with a higher number of units were associated with a higher level of community building reported by the manager. larger apartment complexes tend to have more places for community building (e.g., clubhouse, pool, recreation center, computers) perhaps making it easier to accomplish some community building activities. organizational support in general, property managers perceive management companies as supportive of community building and supplying the needed resources to implement it (e.g., funding, time to devote to these activities, buy-in from the management company, authority to make decisions, and so on). the positive association between perceived organizational support and community building indicates the potential importance of the organizational context (i.e., management company) when instituting community building. organizational support had the strongest bivariate and multivariate relationship with community building. this finding sheds light on a potential avenue for practice. since organizational support was a significant factor, practitioners would be well advised to begin working with management companies to help them find the resources to support community building within their complexes. strengths and limitations of study this study has several strengths. first, it attempted to create a measure of community building for apartment complexes. a measure was developed for this study by taking various community building handbooks, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 guides, steps, and tips and paring them down to major activities or themes. the resulting measure showed moderate internal consistency, despite the use of dichotomous items. second, the study brings the focus on rental settings, which have received little attention in the social science literature regarding their characteristics as a community (capek & gilderbloom, 1992). property managers are also an often forgotten population of inquiry. this study is an attempt to begin the conversation with property managers about their role as leaders within renter communities. while some research has found that property managers may dissuade interaction in order to increase profitability in mixed income communities (graves, 2010), this study found that at least some property managers state an interest in increasing social interaction. there are several potential measurement limitations in this study. one limitation is the use of a lifetime composite for community building (necessitated by missing data on the one year measure), and the temporal relationship between the predictor variables and community building. organizational support is assessed with regard to the current context in which the property manager is located, but reports of lifetime community building could theoretically refer to property manager activities in previous settings. there are also limitations with sampling in this study. first, there could have been potential for biases in the sampling frame because it is not an exhaustive list of all apartment complexes in the state. the databases from which the sample was drawn are marketing tools, so that smaller complexes with fewer resources to devote to marketing may have been excluded. response bias at the respondent level is another potential limitation, given that the response rate was approximately 17%. the managers who responded to the survey may be people who are especially interested in the topic, potentially creating an overestimation of community building and an underestimation of the variance in community building by property managers. implications for practice given both the strengths and limitations of this study, there are several implications for future practice. this was a first step in the development of a measure of community building in apartment complexes. however, further refinement is needed. practitioners have a role in working with both property managers and apartment residents to develop an accurate picture of community building in apartment complexes. sense of community in an apartment complex may mean something very different for managers than for residents and practitioners can play a role in understanding those nuances. second, there should be examination of residents’ participation in community building activities in apartment complexes, and the degree to which this is associated with expected outcomes (e.g., greater sense of community, greater engagement with the broader neighborhood community, and so on). for instance, researchers have found that resident involvement in small community events facilitated by a local nonprofit agency was associated with enhanced personal and community outcomes such as self-efficacy and neighborhood cohesion (molitor, rossi, branton, & field, 2011). while there is the assumption that participation in community building activities in apartment complexes will lead to such desired outcomes, this is by no means assured. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 finally, there should be additional work that looks at potential interventions that might change the degree of sense of community in apartment complexes. there needs to be further work with property managers concerning their community building, organizational support provided to them, and barriers to community building in order to inform practice. because of the significant effect of organizational support, future research could examine this variable more in depth with management companies and property managers to further illuminate its effects on implementing community building activities. it remains to be seen whether interventions to alter the availability of property managers’ organizational support will ultimately result in positive outcomes for residents. participants were given the opportunity to list their top three barriers to community building. the most frequently mentioned by managers were a lack of time (for both staff and residents), money, and resident participation. other barriers included: a lack of space such as a clubhouse or community building, having a diverse community, not having support from the management company, and high turnover. from this preliminary analysis it seems that there are particular barriers that could be influenced by the management company such as the managers’ workload, money, and space. many of the property managers indicated that a barrier to community building is a lack of participation among residents. future research could focus also on the participation of residents by examining barriers and mechanisms to enhance participation in community building. conclusion one of the major gaps in the community building research is community building in apartment complexes and rental properties in general. although renters make up a large and growing population in american society, they are often a forgotten class of social actors. this study attempted to fill those gaps by examining community building in apartment complexes and making the claim that renters deserve the same community experiences as homeowners in traditional neighborhoods. the purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship among individual characteristics of the property managers, the contextual environment of the management, and community building endeavors. results found that only the contextual factor of organizational support was related to community building. this finding allows for future work with property managers and management companies to alleviate constraints on community building endeavors. further development of community building within apartment complexes will help to equate rental housing with owner-occupied neighborhoods and enhance the quality of life for the renters. references alpkan, l., bulut, c., gunday, g., ulusoy, g., & kilic, k. (2010). organizational support for intrapreneurship and its interaction with human capital to enhance innovative performance. management decision, 48(5), 732-755. babka, d. (2008, september). property management: retaining residents by building a sense of community. multihousing news. retrieved from http://www.commercialpropertynews.co m. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 banner, k. (1992). residential property management handbook. new york: mcgraw hill barreto, m.a., marks, m.a., & woods, n.d. (2007). homeownership: southern california’s new political fault line? urban affairs review, 42, 315-340. buckner, j.c. (1988). the development of an instrument to measure neighborhood cohesion. american journal of community psychology, 16, 771-791. capek, s.m. & gilderbloom, j.i. (1992). community versus commodity: tenants and the american city. albany, ny: state university of new york press. chaskin, r.j. & joesph, m.l. (2011). social interaction in mixed-income developments: relational expectations and emerging reality. journal of urban affairs, 33, 209-237. cho, s.h. & lee, t.k. (2011). a study on building sustainable communities in highrise and high-density apartments – focused on living program. building and environment, 46, 1428-1435. dreier, p. (1982). the status of tenants in the united states. social problems, 30, 179198. goetz, e. g. (2007). is housing tenure the new neighborhood dividing line?.chasing the american dream: new perspectives on affordable homeownership, 96. graves, e.m. (2010). the structuring of urban life in a mixed income housing ‘community.’ city and community, 9, 109131. jason, l.a. (1997). community building: values for a sustainable future. westport, ct: praeger publishers. krueckeberg, d.a. (1999). the grapes of rent: a history of renting in a country of owners. housing policy debate, 10, 9-30. kuo, f. e., sullivan, w. c., coley, r. l., & brunson, l. (1998). fertile ground for community: inner-city neighborhood common spaces. american journal of community psychology, 26(6), 823-851. mattessich, p., monsey, b., & roy, m.a. (2004). community building: what makes it work. a review of factors influencing successful community building. st. paul, mn: amherst h. wilder foundation. mcneely, j. (1999). community building. journal of community psychology, 27, 741750. molitor, f., rossi, m., branton, l., & field, j. (2011). journal of community psychology, 39, 749-754. national multi-housing council. (n.d.). quick facts. retrieved from http://www.nmhc.org. obrinsky, m. & stein, d. (2007). overcoming opposition to multifamily rental housing. retrieved from national multifamily housing council website: http://www.nmhc.org. perin, c. (1977). everything in its place: social order and land use in america. princeton, nj: princeton university press. perin, c. (1988) belonging in america. madison, wi: the university of wisconsin press. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 peters, l.h. & o’connor, e.j. (1980). situational constraints and work outcomes: the influence of a frequently overlooked construct. the academy of management review, 5, 391-397. peters, l.h., o’connor, e.j., rudolf, c.j. (1980). the behavioral and affective consequences of performance-relevant situational variables. organizational behavior and human performance, 25, 79-96. peterson, n.a., speer, p.w., & mcmillan, d.w. (2008). validation of a brief sense of community scale: confirmation of the principal theory of sense of community. journal of community psychology, 36, 6173. reynolds, w.m. (1982). development of reliable and valid short forms of the marlowe-crowne social desirability scale. journal of clinical psychology, 38, 119-193. varady, d. p. (2008). chasing the american dream: new perspectives on affordable homeownership: william m. rohe and harry l. watson, editors. cornell university press, ithaca, ny, 2007. saegert, s. & winkel, g. (1996). paths to community empowerment: organizing at home. american journal of community psychology, 24, 517-550. saegert, s., winkel, g., & swartz, c. (2002). social capital and crime in new york city’s low-income housing. housing policy debate, 13, 189-225. sarason, s.b. (1974). the psychological sense of community: prospects for a community psychology. san francisco: jossey-bass. schindler, m. (1994). safety in numbers: building a community watch program. journal of property management, march/april, 22-26. society for community research and action (n.d.). who we are. retrieved from http://www.scra27.org/who-we-are/. taylor, s. (2002). the landlord kit. chicago: dearborn trade publishing. u.s. census bureau (2013). american housing survey. retrieved from http://www.census.gov/programssurveys/ahs.html. zaff, j., & devlin, a.s. (1998). sense of community in housing for the elderly. journal of community psychology, 26, 381398. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 appendix a: community building scale and importance of community building scales community building have you ever done the following? response options: yes, no 1. provide space for residents to have meetings 2. help residents with a community watch 3. publicize information about activities in the complex 4. publicize information about residents (e.g. a resident has furniture they would like to donate to someone, a resident can provide guitar lessons to other residents; celebrating resident achievements) 5. organize informal get-togethers to allow residents to get to know each other (e.g. pizza parties, pool parties) 6. provide residents with information about local resources such as laundromats, leisure activities, social services, etc. 7. organize special events (e.g. donation drives, yard sales, movie nights) 8. support ways to welcome all new residents (e.g. welcome kits/bags/baskets, welcome committee, new neighbor activities) 9. organize ongoing programs for residents (e.g. classes, workshops, book clubs) 10. organize holiday activities 11. survey residents about their needs or concerns 12. try to mediate conflicts among residents 13. provide a forum for residents to air their concerns about the complex 14. bring people together to solve common problems in the complex 15. maintain public spaces for interaction such as a garden, bench, etc. so that people are likely to use them 16. set up exchanges for the residents (e.g. recipes, plants, tools) 17. provide activities specifically for youth (e.g. mentoring, tutoring, carnivals) 18. provide entertainment resources (e.g. video rentals, games, books) 19. talk with residents and encourage them to be involved in the complex http://www.gjcpp.org/ surf.art in portugal: daring, accomplishing and transforming portuguese youth and their communities paulo gomes1, nuno fazenda 1, diego gomez-baya2, mary elizabeth rauktis3 and grace provost3 keywords: surfing; surf therapy; youth development; portugal; social exclusion; experiential education; resilience author biographies: paulo gomes, psychologist specialized in promoting health and healthy lifestyles and optimizing performance in different areas. he has a degree in psychology, a master’s in behavioral and cognitive therapies and advance studies in education sciences. he is an effective member of the portuguese psychologists order, having recognized the general specialty in clinical and health psychology and advanced specialties in psychotherapy, psychological coaching and sport psychology. since 2019 he is the coordinator of the pressley ridge academy (portugal) which works in the development of tools for professionals, families, and organizations through the codification of knowledge, training, supervision and consulting. his research interests are focused on savoring, happiness, optimism, resilience and performance. nuno fazenda, graduated with a b.s. in psychology, specialized in sport and physical activities and postgraduated in surfing and performance, by lusófona university of humanities and technologies. works at pressley ridge in portugal, as a psychologist since 2007. throughout these years, has worked on community intervention projects and family preservation with vulnerable children, young people and families. he is co-founder of surf.art, of which he has been the coordinator since 2013. his focus of intervention and research in recent years has been the study of the impact of surfing on the development of skills in children and young people at risk and its´ ability of inclusion. diego gomez-baya, assistant professor, department of social, developmental and educational psychology, university of huelva, spain. has a phd in psychology and official master's degree in health and quality of life. his research interests are the promotion of psychological well-being and healthy lifestyles in adolescence and youth, and the study of gender differences in risk and protective factors from a developmental and educational perspective. in this line, he has completed research stays with the groups of professor margarida gaspar de matos (university of lisbon, portugal) and professor jane e. gillham (swarthmore college, usa). he leads the project "positive youth development in spanish undergraduates: analysis of developmental assets related to health, psychological wellbeing and social contribution”, integrated in the international study "positive youth development in a cross-national perspective", coordinated by professor nora wiium (university of bergen, 1 pressley ridge association, portugal 2 universidad de huelva, spain 3 university of pittsburgh, school of social work, usa global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 norway). his research results have been presented in international congresses and scientific publications, which can be consulted at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/diego_gomez-baya. mary elizabeth rauktis, assistant professor of research in the child welfare research and training program. she was the director of research and evaluation at pressley ridge, an international nonprofit provider of services to children and families. in 2017 she was a fulbright scholar at the university of porto and additionally a visiting professor at the university of minho, institute of child and family studies in portugal and the university of lisbon. her primary research focus in recent years has been in the area of how youth in substitute care form relationships with helping adults. grace provost, is graduating from the university of pittsburgh’s school of social work in april, 2020 with her bachelor’s of social work. while finishing her degree, she works part time, has an internship at a child welfare agency, and is involved in various clubs on campus. her future goals include obtaining a master’s of social work with a clinical focus, and continuing to do research. grace then plans to obtain social work licensure to practice as a mental health professional. recommended citation: gomes, p., gomez-baya, d., rauktis, m. e., & provost, g. (2020). surf.art in portugal: daring, accomplishing and transforming portuguese youth and their communities. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(2), 1 – 18. retrieved from day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: paulo gomes, pressley ridge association. adress: av. fernando lopes graça 7b, casal da mira; 2650-439 amadora; portugal; tel. +351 214 934 268 e-mail: pgomes@pressleyridge.pt http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.researchgate.net/profile/diego_gomez-baya http://gjcpp.org/ mailto:pgomes@pressleyridge.pt global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 surf.art in portugal: daring, accomplishing and transforming portuguese youth and their communities abstract this manuscript reports the implementation and the six-year outcomes of the surf.art program, a youth development intervention developed by pressley ridge portugal. the program has multiple components including a “life project”, support for crises, psychoeducational workshops, engagement with parents and surfing instruction and practice for youth. multivariate analyses (manova) were conducted with a sample of 69 participating youth to test for differences between groups and over time. in terms of behaviour and strengths, prosocial behaviour increased significantly and problematic behaviour decreased. specifically, in the early stages of the intervention, prosocial behaviour increased three points and general difficulties decreased 10 points, in their respective scales. large effect sizes were observed. gender and age influences were observed as well as variation in outcomes due to dosage (time in program) and engagement in the program. despite limitations due to the small sample and nonexperimental design, this study provides some interesting findings about the value of surfing interventions for youth at risk of social exclusion related to ethnicity and poverty. the municipality of cascais portugal, situated in the lisbon metropolitan area is best known for its beautiful beaches, wealth and tourism. however, despite the high cost of living, 10% of the population in cascais is comprised of individuals from the former portuguese colonies in africa and south america as well as from eastern europe who have settled in the municipality because of the tourist trade and the employment opportunities that it affords in the service industries (municipality of cascais intercultural profile, march 2017). thus cascais is a municipality with financial assets and opportunities unequally shared. unfortunately, ingrained attitudes towards ethnic minorities, structural racism and poverty contribute to early school leaving and the consequent limited employment (artuchgarde et al., 2017), poverty and social exclusion. although early-school leaving has been steadily decreasing in portugal in the past decade, its rate of 12.6% remains higher than the eu average of 10% (eurochild, 2018). additionally, there are structural barriers which increase the challenges that these youth encounter: leaving institutional care without family support (eurochild, 2018; silva, araújo & taveira, 2011), and racism and discrimination if one is portuguese-african, or roma, (abrantes & roldão, 2019; mendes & magano, 2016). the financial collapse of the mid2000’s also resulted in decreased financial support for families struggling with poverty and little funding for preventative family services (aguayo, herráiz, marques, machado & almeida, 2016). the intractable nature of the structural challenges, and the lack of fiscal resources required that creative and strengths-based alternative interventions had to be developed. “how can we better help these youth to succeed at home, in school and in society?” was the question then posed by a group of portuguese psychologists, social workers, educators and community organizers. their vision was to move away from the deficit-based language of “problems” typically used to characterize these youth (aguayo, et al., 2016; http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 eurochild, 2018; mendes & magano, 2016). instead they created an intervention based upon the strengths of the youths while using the natural resources of the country. portugal, the westernmost country in europe, has thousands of kilometres of coastline, a history of surfing, free and accessible beaches and a large surfing community. surfing has been used by other countries such as south africa (snelling, 2015) as a way of promoting positive youth development. consequently, the therapeutic surfing program surf.art was developed. surf.art in portuguese stands for “to dare, to accomplish and to transform.” since its inception in january 2013 as a temporary six-month project, it has operated continuously and has worked with 98 youths, ages 7-13 and indirectly with over 300 individuals such as family, teachers and communities in cascais, portugal. this paper describes surf.art program and explores its success in promoting social competence and reducing problematic behaviour of the youth recruited from several schools in the municipality of cascais. why surfing? humans are drawn to nature (godfrey, devine-wright & taylor, 2015; wheaton, roy & olive, 2017) and surfing is a sport that relies on nature; it is dependent on the waves, the timing of the day, and the ebb and flow of the tide. moreover, available research on sport therapy through surfing places a strong emphasis on the physical and psychological benefits of the highly sensory natural environment (sand, waves, shoreline, buoyancy), which are believed to play a large role (lopes, 2015). surfing creates the feeling of something larger than oneself, the power and pull of the ocean, the vastness, and the scenic display, which connects surfers to the earth, and each other. there is a sense of healing that comes from the ocean as well, whether it be the salt water itself, or the peace one feels while in the vast blue sea (luhmann, 2016). at the same time, surfing creates a context through the shared experience of the ocean. as a catalyst for change, research about surfing and the positive physical and mental health for youth participants (godfrey et al., 2015; luhmann, 2016; matos et al., 2017) reports that youth report physical and psychological differences after participating, such as feeling stronger, and more competent in their surfing abilities (luhmann, 2016). psychologically, they felt more confident and articulate, were less stressed, had a healthier lifestyle after the program, and generally felt more positive (godfrey et al., 2015). the ocean is unpredictable and challenging, surfing requires reading the waves, making decisions and tolerating failure. this promotes a greater internal locus of control, coupled with an increased sense of humility and resilience. upon having acquired the basic skills to surf, youth reported increased self-esteem and better fearmanagement and emotional regulation (luhmann, 2016). surfing can promote social skills as well. in the surf-salva camp in portugal, youth reported improvements in the number of interpersonal relationships and in communication skills. they felt as though their ability to emotionally adapt to some social settings had improved as well (matos et al., 2017). the evaluations of sport-fordevelopment programs highlight the importance of coaching and structure with flexibility. good coaches are able to: self-reflect and be open to expressing emotions (lopes, 2015), and to creating social capital with the youth by understanding their perspectives and what their “normal” looks like (rynne, 2016; snelling, 2015) and to intentionally create a community. structures and boundaries with support and clear expectations are important as they create a sense of safety although authoritarian approaches were not found to be effective (snelling, 2015). fewer http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 programs have included families, but one surf program working with aboriginal youth found that providing a time and space for parents to socialize while their children participated in the program created a sense of community. by involving families, it also allowed them to watch their children learn to surf, and be involved in the experience (rynne, 2016). finally, graduates of surf programs who stay involved and volunteer with new cohorts can provide continuity to the program as well as a sense of personally contributing to the surfing community (godfrey et al., 2015). in summary, surf.art falls under the general theoretical umbrellas of youth development theory (catalano, berglund, ryan, lonczak & hawkins, 2004) and the principles of reeducation (hobbs, 1982) and uses an experiential learning delivery approach (priest & gass, 2018). in order to address emotional problems and crises, elements of strengths-based interventions are included such as life space crisis intervention (www.lsci.org); response ability pathways (www.starr.org); and circle of courage (brendtro, brokenleg & van bockern, 1990). surfing is then the platform for achieving important youth development aims: social bonding, building resilience, asset building, developing social emotional and behavioural competence, self-determination and a sense of the future (catalano et al., 2004). study justification and research questions despite portugal’s prominence as a surfing location, only a few studies have been published in the academic literature about surf therapy in the iberian peninsula. surf.art was one of the first programs in portugal to use surfing as a therapeutic tool in order to promote personal skills and thus the social integration of youths living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in lisbon. the exploratory research questions were: 1. does a structured youth development surfing intervention (surf. art) associate with reduced levels of emotional symptoms, conduct problems, hyperactivity/inattention and peer relationships problems? 2. does a structured youth development surfing intervention (surf. art) associate with increased pro-social skills? 3. do gender, age, dosage of intervention (time spent) and engagement in the program (points earned) moderate these association? method selection of children/youth for surf.art the schools involved were from the municipality of cascais, the red cross neighbourhood and the carcavelos beach area. these schools serve africanportuguese and roma children and youth living at the poverty level. the neighbourhoods that the children come from are stigmatized due to the populace perception of high crime, drug trafficking and violence. in reality, these are neighbourhoods characterized by cultural homogeneity and economic fragility, often located in peripheral areas, adding to social exclusion and fear of the residents. the surf.art team presented at these schools the objectives, vision (all children and youth have potential), mission (to develop the potential and autonomy of children and youth through surfing and contact with nature) and values (safety; stability; and wellbeing) of surf.art to students, parents and teachers. participation in surf.art is voluntary and parental permission must be obtained. if children and their parents were interested, then an analysis was made of the psychosocial profile of each candidate by a team of individuals form http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 the school, the team of the social intervention division of the municipality of cascais and the technical team of the project surf.art. program components and curriculum the surf.art program is based upon the principles of asset-building, and positive youth development (catalano et al., 2004) it uses surfing as the platform for achieving many of the youth development aims: social bonding, building resilience, developing socialemotional and behavioural competence, self-determination and a sense of the future (catalano et al., 2004). the intervention was based upon priest’s experiential learning and judgment paradigm and experiential learning cycles (priest & gass, 2018) and supported on the circle of courage model (brendtro, et al., 1990) and the principles of reeducation (hobbs, 1982). we use an intervention methodology based on a socialecological approach and sustained in forming a therapeutic alliance, where teaching and learning are pillars between the surf.art team and the children. based on the circle of courage, we try to provide a sense of belonging throughout the project by creating a supportive environment to support children and young people in reaching and developing their sense of competence, providing opportunities to care for each other, and being supportive, thus promoting generosity. the intervention is designed for three years: the first year we focused on the sense of belonging primarily; the second year we worked on the sense of belonging and mastery; and in the third year, we worked on independence and generosity. after the third year, the child can continue his involvement as a mentor to youth in the program. surfing has manageable risks and challenges, and the curriculum takes advantage of this "confrontation" with nature. the importance of children's natural competence is highlighted here. indeed, this principle is present in all the work developed by nicholas hobbs in his framework of re-education (1982). reeducation is an approach based not on psychodynamic principles but educational, psychological and ecological principles. re-education goals are to help children in natural contexts by strengthening support systems, reducing conflicts between systems and assisting children in learning to make use of normal affective, formative and disciplinary resources. in working with these children, as well as their families, there are often situations of risk and danger and it is necessary to intervene in the crisis. thus, the methodology was also based on the psychoeducational model of intervention in the crisis of long, fecser and wood (2001) life space crisis intervention. this model is aimed at children with a self-destructive behaviour pattern, providing them with individual therapeutic follow-up. the model views stressful problems or incidents as opportunities for learning, growth, and change, using a multidisciplinary approach to behaviour management and problem-solving. this therapeutic approach has been adapted for portuguese youth and is used within the process of surf instruction and practice. surf.art includes the following components: experiential education and adventure therapy. weekly four-hour surf sessions are delivered by a technical team consisting of a certificated surf coach and a psychologist and 1 or 2 volunteers selected at the beginning of each project year. the physical space and equipment needed to conduct the sessions are provided by project partners (rooms, changing rooms, boards, wetsuits). we use an experiential methodology to deliver these sessions, a process that actively involves children in experiences, bringing the benefits and consequences. the goal is youth to make discoveries http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 and experience knowledge for themselves rather than just listening to others' experiences, thus developing new skills, new attitudes and new theories or ways of thinking that they can then transfer to their lives. they can also relate their knowledge and approach to experience to better understand or modify current behaviours. an essential principle of therapeutic adventure work is to motivate participants to do things that they would not normally do. they must leave the “safe” world to which they are accustomed to engage in a new challenge. in this way unique outcomes are generated, and people grow. this then leads to the empowerment of participants so that they can adapt more successfully to their environment and in so doing become well-adjusted citizens. to surf, the children have to leave the context in which they live, which opens the door to a “new” world, where they have a chance to meet new people with very different experiences than they are used to, integrate new realities, understand or modify concepts and theories and above all have the opportunity to feel what it is like to be part of a positive group. many of these children are engaging in risky behaviours in their daily lives and surfing is an adventure that presupposes risk; we can enjoy the “fight” with the force of nature, that by itself removes them from their comfort zone in a controlled environment to allow them to experience risk which later reflecting it, makes it a great learning and / or relearning opportunity. thus, surfing is not an end in itself, nor a result, but a process, a mean to achieve goals and a tool that allows us to achieve goals, which can provide excellent learning moments. it enables young people to strive for immediate and sustainable involvement with goals and consequences. experiencing success and failure, the child realizes that in order to have a successful experience, which is therapeutic in itself (for example, being able to catch a wave, take off and come to the end of the wave), one has to plan, put it into action and in the end reflect, to understand what went well and what has to improve, that is, a process that actively involves children in experience bringing the benefits and consequences. contingency behavioural system. the motivation or contingency system is implemented in all groups at the project and aims to motivate youth to participate in the sessions and follow the rules. the points are given for the accomplishment of specific rules of surf.art. there are five rules: be present; be available to learn; accept feedback from others; keep hands and feet to yourself; and respect colleagues and teachers. the rules are discussed within the group at the start of the year and the purpose of this system is to reward kids not only for participating in activities but also for the effort they apply in learning and practicing new personal and social skills. for this reason, the system only focuses on positive behaviours. kids can earn between 1 and 5 points per session. the points are awarded at the end of activities, during the reflection, with youth self-evaluations followed by group discussion and psychologist feedback. points are then translated to "power levels", that is, the more points kids have the higher their responsibility. it is expected that when kids earn more points they also will be able to show more adaptive and appropriate behaviours in other situations besides surf.art, namely school, home or in the community context. life project. each child/youth develops with the help of the psychologist, an individualized intervention plan life project focusing on their strengths (there is a sensitivity in technicians to focus not only on needs but on what they are doing well). these strengths will be channelled into situations that promote success, skills developed and fostered positive relationships. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 the process follows these steps: involving a group of supportive people (family, friends, school and other key partners) and drafting the role of these members; identifying needs, strengths, and goals as well as the steps to follow, and the method for measuring progress; drafting behavioural contracts; identification of necessary actions, responsibilities, and plan to be used to achieve them; preparation of the schedule; identification of ways of evaluating the progress; formulation of objectives. crisis support. psychoeducational support in crisis situations if needed is provided by the psychosocial reeducator (with specialized training for this purpose) thematic workshops. bi-monthly workshops are held on the following themes: health and healthy living, environmental education and multimedia production. each theme has subthemes. for example, in the topic health and healthy living, we have workshops on active lifestyles, classes of cooking, how to prepare a healthy meal. in the multimedia production the participants themselves learn to film and photograph surf and moments on the beach. participants have an active role in the organization of workshops and activities. parent and community involvement and psychoeducation. quarterly sessions are held with parents and community with the goal engaging with supportive partners. some of the topics discussed are: health and welfare, hygiene, sexuality, prevention of psychoactive substance use, dealing with challenging behaviours, among others. evaluation. information about behaviour was collected from youth, parents and teacher in each of the cohorts. the level of psychological symptoms across five domains (emotional, behavioural, hyperactivity-inattention, peer relationships, and prosocial) was measured using the portuguese version of the strengths and difficulties questionnaire— teacher version (sdq; goodman, 1997; marzocchi et al. 2004; fleitlich, loureiro, fonseca & gaspar, 2004) collected by the technical team of surf.art. the sdq was administered at the beginning and at the end of each school year to all the children and young people; those who were continuing in the program for a second or third year were only evaluated at the end of the year rather than at two time points. also, attendance and points earned in the contingency system, fulfilment of stipulated goals and interaction and quality of reflection were included as short-term outcomes. informed consent was obtained from all individual participants and their parents, and all procedures performed were in accordance with the ethical standards of helsinki declaration. it is important to note that although the data are not included in this paper, at the end of each year’s programming, a series of focus groups with parents and teachers were held to share the results of that year’s program and to understand the perceptions of significant adults in the life of those children and the impact of surf.art at home and in school. this information is used as part of a quality improvement process for surf.art. data collection procedures surf.art started in 2013 with a cohort of 13 children aged 9-10 year old. the following year the municipality of cascais funded surf.art to be delivered to a second cohort of two groups of 13 children from the 2nd grade. then in 2017 surf.art was extended to two additional schools and the number of groups increased so that there were three groups of 13 children (some children continued from the second cohort). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 data collection commenced in october of 2013, and a second round was carried out in july 2014, and continues as part of the intervention. in addition to the sdq, data is collected to identify the school and grade level, the age of the child, gender, the number of surf.art sessions attended, and points accrued in the behaviour management system. due to the nature of the program, surf.art had 21 participants who at some point in the project did some sessions but were not subject to initial and/or final evaluation. the participation of these youth in the sessions ranged from 2 to 40 %, so we don´t have evaluation data. instrument and variables strengths and difficulties questionnaire (sdq, portuguese version). it was used to measure changes behaviours over time. the sdq has separate versions for various youth ages and informants (parents, teachers, youths). the sdq is a 25-item measure that assesses the level of psychological symptoms across five domains (emotional symptoms, conduct problems, hyperactivity/inattention, peer relationships problems, and prosocial behaviour). a total score for general difficulties was calculated by adding the four problem scales, without prosocial behaviour. in our study, we used the portuguese version for teachers (fleitlich et al., 2004) that was collected by the surf.art technical team. psychometric analyses have shown the sdq to have good validity and reliability, sensitive to change, and valid for wide range of populations (bourdon, goodman, rae, simpson & koretz, 2005). the reliability of the sdq in our study for the general difficulties total scale in all the waves was between .82 and .97. for the prosocial behaviour scale the internal consistency reliability was between .55 and .94. number of sessions (dosage) and points accrued (engagement). they were operationalized by the team as “sessions attended” (dosage) and points accrued in the contingency system (engagement). dosage was measured as one point per presence at a session and engagement in the program was measured as the points earned in the contingency system during the session in that day one point for each rule for a maximum of 5 points each session. data analysis design a total score of sdq difficulties, i.e., emotional, peer, conduct and hyperactivity subscales were added to calculate a new variable on general difficulties. prosocial behaviour indicator included in sdq was examined individually as a positive indicator of psychosocial adjustment. since the groups of participants completed intervention in different years, a new ordinal level variable was created to control the number of years of participation in the project, encoded as one year, two years and three years or more. average score of engagement and of participation (attendance) was computed. additionally, attendance was also calculated by dividing the number of sessions completed between the total of sessions, and an average among the years of participation. averages in levels of participation and attendance were coded as 50% low and 50% high based on median score in these variables. repeated measures analysis of variance was performed in order to examine the level of change in general difficulties after the intervention, by comparing scores from the initial assessment with the final one. gender, age, years of participation, degree of participation, and degree of attendance to sessions, were controlled. as well, moderations of these control variables were studied after including them as inter-subject factors in the repeated-measures variance analyses. f statistic and partial eta squared (η2p) (size effect: small = .01 .05, medium = .06 .13, large ≥ .14) were calculated. finally, student t-tests and variance analyses were performed to study differences in general difficulties http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 by levels in these control variables. the same data analyses were carried out changes in prosocial behaviour after intervention. pearson zero-order correlations were calculated to study the association between prosocial behaviour and general difficulties, before and after the intervention. spss version 21.0 was used for data analysis. results participants a total of 69 children and adolescents (59.4% girls), aged 7 to 17 (m=8.54, sd=1.53) participated in surf.art program. most participants (91.3%) attended the first cycle of basic education (the remaining were attending second cycle of basic education (5.8%), the third cycle of basic education (1.4%), and secondary school (1.4%). a little over half participated in one full year of surf.art (56.5%), 15.9% in two years, 7.2% in three, 7.2% in four, and 13% in five consecutive years. the participation of these youth ranged from 21 to 100%, with a mean participation of 77% (sd = 1.78). it was a convenience sample including children and adolescents in a situation of vulnerability and/or psychosocial risk. because portugal does not collect race or ethnicity data (by legal mandate), race is not reported. effects by surf.art intervention on general difficulties table 1 and figure 1 present the results of the repeated-measures analysis of variance testing the effect of surf.art intervention on general difficulties, in the total sample and by gender, age, years of participation, level of participation (engagement) and level of attendance (dosage). general difficulties decreased after the intervention, in nearly 10 points in the scale, reaching a strong size effect (η2 p = 0.74). this effect was significant in both boys and girls, with no gender moderation, f (1, 67) = .01, p = .958. no gender differences were neither observed in initial scores, t(67) = -1.06, p = .293, nor final ones, t(67) = -1.30, p = .199. moreover, the decrease in general difficulties was also significant in all age groups, although a greater effect was observed in older participants, f(2, 66) = 4.52, p = .014, η2p = .12. thus, if the decrease in 7-8 and 9-year-old participants was around nine points, a greater reduction in general problems was observed in the group aged ten or more (m.d. = 16.34). however, no age differences were detected in the initial scores, f (2, 66) = 2.95, p = .059, neither in the final ones, f(2, 66) = 0.65, p = .525. regarding number of years of participation e.g. dosage, results indicated an interaction with the change in general difficulties, f (2, 66) = 5.50, p = .006, η2p = .14. although the intervention proved to be effective regardless of years of participation, greater size effect was observed in participants with two years of participation, while participants in three or more years showed less size effect. participants in two surf-art years of surf.art presented higher initial difficulties than those with just one year’s participation or those with three or more, f(2, 66) = 6.00, p = .004, η2p = .15. however, no differences were observed in final scores, f(2, 66) = .98, p = .380. furthermore, the level of participation also interacted with the change in general difficulties, f(1, 67) = 6.10, p = .016, η2p = .08, with stronger effect in those children and adolescents with less participation. children and adolescents with a low level of participation showed more initial problems, t(67) = 4.73, p < .001, and also more final problems, t(67) = 3.09, p = .003, compared to those with higher level of participation. thus, a greater decrease in general difficulties was observed in those children and adolescents who participated less, who also began the intervention with more general difficulties finally, concerning the level of attendance, no moderation was found, f(1, 67) = .02, p = .891, and the intervention was just a bit more effective http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 in those with high attendance. children who attended less presented more initial difficulties than those with more attendance, t (67)= 3.00, p = .004. moreover, children with less attendance also presented more final difficulties than those who attended more frequently, t (67) = 3.79, p < .001. table 1 repeated-measures variance analyses of surf.art effect on general difficulties, in the total sample, by gender, age, years of participation, level of participation and level of attendance f η2p pre post m sd m sd total (n=69) 189.42*** 0.74 19.74 7.71 9.93 6.08 gender boys (n=28) 70.53*** 0.72 20.93 8.22 11.07 6.44 girls (n=41) 116.81*** 0.75 18.93 7.34 9.14 5.78 age 7-8 (n=25) 48.13*** 0.67 19.72 7.37 10.96 6.19 9 (n=38) 131.52*** 0.78 18.66 6.97 9.18 5.80 10 or more (n= 6) 44.14** 0.90 26.67 11.08 10.33 7.76 years of participation one (n=39) 144.30*** 0.79 18.46 7.20 9.13 5.76 two (n=11) 58.74*** 0.86 26.64 8.13 11.91 7.94 three or more (n=19) 29.08*** 0.62 18.37 6.64 10.42 5.53 level of participation 50% low (n=35) 148.84*** 0.81 23.51 6.97 12.03 6.15 50% high (n=34) 64.91*** 0.66 15.85 6.48 7.76 5.27 level of attendance 50% low (n=34) 81.37*** 0.71 22.41 7.80 12.50 6.34 50% high (n=35) 109.12*** 0.76 17.14 6.77 7.43 4.69 *** p < .001; ** p < .01; * p < .05. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 figure 1. pre-test and post-test means in general difficulties, by years of participation, level of participation and level of attendance. effects by surf.art intervention on prosocial behaviour table 2 and figure 2 describe the results of the repeated-measures analysis of variance and prosocial behaviour, in the total sample and by gender, age, years of participation, level of participation and level of attendance. a significant increase in prosocial behaviour was observed after surf.art intervention, with nearly three points of increase in the mean score and a large effect size (η2p = 0.65). significant negative associations were observed between initial prosocial behaviour and initial general difficulties, r (69) = -.63, p < .001, and between final prosocial behaviour and final general difficulties, r(69) = -.61, p < .001. although no gender moderation was observed, f(1, 67) = 1.40, p = .241, a greater size effect was observed in boys. gender differences were found in prosocial behaviour before, t(67) = 3.82, p < .001, and after the intervention, t(67) = 3.09, p = .003, so that girls showed greater initial and final prosocial behaviour than boys. concerning age, a significant interaction was found, f(2, 66) = 5.55, p = .006, η2 p = .14. although the increase in prosocial behaviour was significant in all ages, bigger size effects were observed in the groups aged 9 and 10 or more years old, with increases in 3.21 and 4.67, respectively. in the participants aged 7-8 years old, the prosocial behaviour increased by 1.96 points. no significant differences by age was found in the initial prosocial behaviour, f(2, 66) = 2.64, p =.079, nor in the final scores, f(2, 66) = .37, p = .689. furthermore, the change in prosocial behaviour after surf.art intervention was found to be moderated by the number of years of participation, f(2, 66) = 6.91, p = .002, η2p = .17. although the intervention was effective regardless the number of years, a greater size effect, i.e., a greater increase in prosocial behaviour, was found in children who participated only one year, especially compared to those with three or more participations. greater initial mean on prosocial behaviour was observed in children with three or more participations, f(2, 66) = 8.17, p = .001, η2p = .20, while no differences were detected in the final scores, f(2, 66) = .43, p = .656. regarding the level of points for participation, no significant interaction was observed with the change in prosocial behaviour, f(1, 67) = 1.88, p = .175, although greater size http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 effect was observed in participants with lower level of participation. children with lower level of participation presented less initial prosocial behaviour than children with greater level, t(67) = 2.47, p = .016. no differences were found in final prosocial behaviour, t(67) = 1.40, p = .167. finally, no interaction was neither found with level of attendance, f(1, 67) = .32, p = .572, although bigger size effect was found in children with high attendance. no differences were observed in initial prosocial behaviour by level of attendance, t(67) = -1.49, p = .142, while significant differences were found in the final scores, t(67) = -2.47, p = .016. more prosocial behaviour was observed after the intervention in children with high attendance. table 2 repeated-measures variance analyses of surf.art effect on prosocial behaviour, in the total sample, by gender, age, years of participation, level of participation and level of attendance f η2p pre post m sd m sd total (n=69) 126.27*** 0.65 3.96 2.37 6.84 1.98 gender boys (n=28) 74.46*** 0.73 2.75 1.97 6.00 1.98 girls (n=41) 58.20*** 0.59 4.78 2.29 7.41 1.79 age 7-8 (n=25) 13.03** 0.35 4.76 2.62 6.72 2.13 9 (n=38) 206.10*** 0.85 3.60 1.95 6.82 1.78 10 or more (n= 6) 37.69** 0.88 2.83 3.13 7.50 2.74 years of participation one (n=39) 247.00*** 0.87 3.54 1.92 6.87 1.76 two (n=11) 19.06** 0.66 2.64 2.98 6.36 2.84 three or more (n=19) 6.83* 0.28 5.58 2.09 7.05 1.90 level of participation 50% low (n=35) 86.04*** 0.72 3.29 2.42 6.51 2.13 50% high (n=34) 45.88*** 0.58 4.65 2.14 7.18 1.78 level of attendance 50% low (n=34) 45.47*** 0.58 3.53 2.67 6.26 2.16 50% high (n=35) 88.76*** 0.72 4.37 2.00 7.40 1.63 *** p < .001; ** p < .01; * p < .05. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 figure 2. pre-test and post-test means in prosocial behaviour, by years of participation, level of participation and level of attendance. discussion the evaluation of surf.art aimed to explore the relationship between the practice of experiential education sessions and adventure therapy (using surfing as a sport) and the development of socio-emotional skills, and the reduction of problematic behaviours which can lead to educational discouragement and future exclusion. to address the first two research questions a structured youth development surfing intervention associate with reduced levels of emotional symptoms, conduct problems, hyperactivity/inattention and peer relationships problems and improved social functioning was found to be the case. the total scores of difficulties significantly decreased from pre to post participation, and prosocial capabilities increased. age, gender, time spent in the program were moderating factors with less time in the program associating with a steeper gain and suggesting that there may be an “optimum” dosage or time in program of 2 years which gives the maximum benefit. age effects are suggestive of developmental factors in that the curriculum may resonate more with youth of different ages or a period of sensitivity to the curriculum. for example, youth at the stage of concrete operations of thinking have the capacity to classify and conserve and may be better able to utilize private speech to self-regulate than children in a more primitive cognitive stage (inhelder & piaget, 1958). the findings of this study are in line with the results of other studies (godfrey et al., 2015; matos et al., 2017). on the other hand, snelling (2015) did not find differences at the end of their surfing intervention. considering that research in this area is still very recent, and generally non-experimental design, additional research is needed to verify the value of this approach for youth development interventions. one aspect that must be considered when implementing such a program is the experience and training of the technical team. snelling (2015) in his program, had 15 “coaches” working directly with the children and youth and in the other studies referred, those technical teams were substantially smaller. that may imply different approaches and more difficulties in securing high-quality interventions depending upon the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 training and supervision of the coaches and the available resources. the use of experiential learning and adventure-based activities to teach youth new skills is not a new concept. some of the cornerstones of adventure-based work, such as the use of a contract in a therapeutic outdoor group setting, are also not new. in order to have an adventure experience, participants do not need a rush of adrenalin: they need an environment where they can safely learn new and interesting behaviour or skill, with the help of motivating and caring group members and a welltrained facilitator. in the process of learning this skill, the behaviours can be transferred outside of the experiential setting to home, school and community. reyneke (2009) says that the focus of adventure empowerment is the identification and mobilization of the inner potential of every person. people are motivated to take control of their lives and realize their potential and power. people experiencing difficult circumstances are encouraged to make choices to direct their lives within a framework of positive values. by using an intervention methodology based on an experiential approach with a focus on alliance and where teaching and learning are the pillars between professional team and the children, we sought to provide a sense of belonging, a supportive space for developing competence in surfing as well as self-regulation. the relationships between the staff and youth, youth and youth and staff and staff demonstrate and provide opportunities for caring for each other and being supportive, thus promoting generosity. surf.art interacted with children's reference elements (referral educators, parents, teachers) throughout the intervention. several group and individual meetings were held to assess children's intervention and development. as a result, there has been a growing interest in surf.art, which is why many children have continued for three or more years. the results regarding participation revealed a high fidelity of implementation (adherence, dosage and involvement of participants), so it can be inferred that the results obtained regarding its effectiveness are due more to the way the project was designed than to the way it was implemented and as such will be very close to its real impact. there was also a positive association between higher levels of fidelity, namely participation and involvement, where a significant improvement in behavioural problems and prosocial behaviour is evident. at the same time, it was found that some factors, such as the behaviour of the participants during the sessions, the increase of the commitment level, and the fulfilment of the contingency system rules, had a significant influence, i.e. produced positive effect on adherence levels and involvement, which is also positively predicted by the support and commitment of coaches. we emphasize the importance of the methodological care of surf.art implementation, in order to control the possible effects of personal and relational characteristics of project implementers. to this end, it was ensured that it was always the same psychologist who implemented the project in all groups that were part of the research and its evaluation. study limitations this study has both strengths and limitations. the strengths include the six years implementation of the project in the community setting, a structured theory-informed intervention program with multiple components and the stability and training of the technical team. these factors contribute to ensure the fidelity of intervention delivery and to promote the relationships with the participants, their families, school community and stakeholders. however, given that this is non-experimental design, causal relationships between the intervention and outcomes cannot be verified. additionally, the children are recruited by the school and then selfhttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 select into project which can be a threat to the internal validity. in summary, there is positive exploratory evidence regarding the impact of surf therapy, specifically surf.art. however, the results of the study are limited by the lack of a comparison group which hampers the ability to make causal statements. we plan to continue to evaluate surf.art, using data to improve the intervention. a mentoring program is going to be implemented which will give the youth in the program after the 3rd year a role to stay involved that is less therapeutic than that of the first two years. it is also critical to understand the transmission of skills from what is learned in the ocean and in the group to what is demonstrated at home, in school and in the community. future evaluation of surf.art will try to better understand what the mechanism for transfer of learning is and how to support it. finally, although this study used longitudinal data, random assignment to a wait list control and an active program will allow causal statements to be made about the impact of surf.art. in conclusion, we believe that at sea we are all the same, we all have a wetsuit and a board, and the goal is the same, to catch waves and have fun. concluindo, acreditamos que, no mar, somos todos iguais, todos temos um fato de mergulho, uma prancha e o mesmo objetivo: apanhar ondas e divertirmo-nos. references abrantes, p., & roldão, c. 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(2015). adapted surfing as a tool to promote inclusion and rising disability awareness in portugal. journal of sport for development, 3 (5), 4-10. retrieved from https://jsfd.files.wordpress.com/ 2015/05/adapted-surfing-v5.pdf luhmann, b. (2016). the effects of surfing on adolescent quality of life & emotional functioning: a pilot study (order no. 10003937). available from proquest dissertations & theses global; psychology database. (1759630554). retrieved from http://pitt.idm.oclc.org/login?url =https://search-proquestcom.pitt.idm.oclc.org/docview/1 759630554?accountid=14709 marzocchi, g. m., capron, c., pietro, m., tauleria, e.d., duyme, d., frigerio, a., …therond, c. (2004). the use of the strengths and difficulties questionnaire (sdq) in southern european countries. european child & adolescent psychiatry, 13 (suppl 2), 40-46. doi:10.1007/s00787-004-2007-1 matos, m.g., santos, a., fauvelet, c., marta, f., evangelista, e. s., ferreira, j., …mattila, m. 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(2018). effective leadership in adventure programming (3rd ed.). champaign, il: human kinetics. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.eurochild.org/fileadmin/public/05_library/thematic_priorities/02_child_poverty/eurochild/09_eurochild_semrep2018upated_31.10.2018.pdf https://www.eurochild.org/fileadmin/public/05_library/thematic_priorities/02_child_poverty/eurochild/09_eurochild_semrep2018upated_31.10.2018.pdf https://jsfd.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/adapted-surfing-v5.pdf https://jsfd.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/adapted-surfing-v5.pdf http://pitt.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/docview/1759630554?accountid=14709 http://pitt.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/docview/1759630554?accountid=14709 http://pitt.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/docview/1759630554?accountid=14709 http://pitt.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/docview/1759630554?accountid=14709 https://rm.coe.int/cascais-intercultural-profile/1680717a27 https://rm.coe.int/cascais-intercultural-profile/1680717a27 https://rm.coe.int/cascais-intercultural-profile/1680717a27 global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 reyneke, r. (2009). using adventure to increase the emotional intelligence of the poor. social work/maatskaplike werk, 45 (1). 47-61. doi:10.15270/45-1-220 rynne, s. (2016). exploring the pedagogical possibilities of indigenous sport-fordevelopment programmes using a socio-personal approach. sport, education and society, 21(4), 605622. doi:10.1080/13573322.2015.110 7830 silva, a. d., araújo, a. m., & taveira, m. c. (2011, march). tailoring career education and counseling for portuguese foster-youth. 5th international technology, education and development conference, valencia, spain, 1966-1972. retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1822/141 56 snelling, m. (2015). breaking cycles of violence, one wave at a time: a formative evaluation of the waves for change surf therapy programme (master’s thesis, university of cape town). retrieved from: https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream /handle/11427/20657/thesis_co m_2016_snelling_matthew.pdf?se quence=1&isallowed=y wheaton, b., roy, g., & olive, r. (2017). exploring critical alternatives for youth development through lifestyle sport: surfing and community development in aotearoa/new zealand. sustainability, 9(12). doi:10.3390/su9122298 disclosure statement the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest, no financial interest, nor benefit from the direct application of this research. compliance with ethical standards ethical approval: all procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. informed consent: informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study and their parents. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/handle/11427/20657/thesis_com_2016_snelling_matthew.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/handle/11427/20657/thesis_com_2016_snelling_matthew.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/handle/11427/20657/thesis_com_2016_snelling_matthew.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/handle/11427/20657/thesis_com_2016_snelling_matthew.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y more than surfing: inclusive surf therapy informed by the voices of south african children with autism spectrum disorder nicci van der merwe1 and paula yarrow2 keywords: surf therapy, mental health, autism spectrum disorder, neuro-diverse, community-based author biographies: nicci van der merwe, holds a masters degree in programme evaluation (university of cape town). she has 10 years’ quantitative and qualitative research experience in the development sector, which includes programme monitoring, evaluation and learning (mel) experience. her criminology and psychology background coupled with her work experience have refined her passion for and understanding of the necessary requirements when working with children and youth from volatile backgrounds and their specialised needs. nicci is driven to contribute to furthering development initiatives; ensuring that they are adequately designed, effectively planned and executed, and thoroughly evaluated, contributing to the successful achievement of the envisaged impact. she believes that this is critical when duplicating similar initiatives based on the “so what” question and supported by sound empirical research; which she believes, cannot be done without understanding and recognising young people’s needs, their behaviour, the dreams and desires and overcoming their worst fears. paula yarrow, holds a degree in sport and exercise science and a bachelor of laws (llb), specialising in children's rights. she has 8 years of experience living and working with grassroots non-governmental organisations (ngos) in eastern and southern africa, as well as south east asia. based in cape town, paula specialises in supporting organisations to establish skills and systems to comply with international standards in financial stewardship; monitoring, evaluation and learning and child protection and safeguarding. she supports the design and continuous evaluation of grassroots development programmes in partnership with children and young people, and embeds learning to continuously improve programmes. recommended citation: van der merwe, n., & yarrow, p. (2020). more than surfing: inclusive surf therapy informed by the voices of south african children with autism spectrum disorder. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(2), 1 – 14. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). 1 waves for change: monitoring, evaluation and learning director 2 waves for change: global development director http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 more than surfing: inclusive surf therapy informed by the voices of south african children with autism spectrum disorder abstract the article provides the results, as well as policy and practice implications of an exploratory study on the feasibility and unique (unintended) benefits of surf therapy for children with autism spectrum disorder (asd), in a developing world context. the main aim of the study was to understand if and how waves for change (w4c), a southafrican-based non-government organisation’s existing surf therapy programme for neuro-typical children can be adapted to be more inclusive and meet the needs of neuro-diverse children. the objective of the study was two-fold: 1) to gain an in-depth understanding of children’s experiences participating in surf therapy, with specific reference to confidence and self-identity; peer and adult relationships and connectedness; and communication initiation and verbal output; and 2) to understand if and how the existing w4c surf therapy model (designed with and for neuro-typical children) can be offered to a more diverse target population. the study found that children with asd’s experiences at w4c’s surf therapy programme were predominantly positive and surf therapy can have a positive effect on children with asd’s overall wellbeing. the research produced several suggestions for adaptations to the original w4c surf therapy programme, to be more appropriate and effective for neuro-diverse children and more specifically children with asd. introduction autism spectrum disorder (asd) is recognized as a global public health concern, yet almost everything we know about asd comes from high‐income countries (franz, chambers, von isenburg & de vries, 2017). as with most other intellectual and developmental disabilities, asd occurs in every nation of the world, with families often providing lifelong care to their affected relatives. unfortunately, in less affluent countries such as south africa, there is a dearth of studies to inform the development of support services (samadi & mcconkey, 2011). results from a south african stress and health survey (sash) (williams, herman, stein, heeringa, jackson, moomal & kessler, 2008) showed a 75% treatment gap of common mental disorders nationally. in addition to other factors that may be responsible for this treatment gap, stigmatisation of people with mental illness especially by health care professionals may also be responsible for this treatment gap (jameson, 2006). it is evident that there is an increasing demand for mental health care in south africa (as in most developing countries). there are only 1.12 psychiatrists, 1.28 psychologists and 1.6 social workers per 400,000 people in south africa. of the 23 mental hospitals in the country, only 18 (mental health) beds are allocated per 100,000 people. in addition, south africa is a country where poverty is a real problem, and many people in the country live below the poverty line. of the mental health professionals and services available in south africa, most are based in urban areas, highlighting that mental health services are out of reach to the majority of south africans who live in rural communities. as mental health services are predominantly limited to white middleclass individuals, many people living in poverty do not have the financial means to seek professional help (cosme, 2015). the need for mental health care for differentlyabled children appears to be even bigger than that of adults. in south africa in 2013, there were 116,504 learners in the special need schooling sector who attended 448 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 institutions and were served by 10,252 educators (republic of south africa departments of social development, and women, children and people with disabilities, and the united nations children’s fund [unicef], 2012). under the children’s act (2007), the south african government is responsible for ensuring that comprehensive social services are provided for children, with priority being given to funding of services in poor communities, and to ensure that these services are accessible to children with disabilities. however, although non-government organisations (ngos) are rendering services which are mandated by the act, funds paid to them do not cover the full cost of providing these services. ngos working in the disability sector have expressed grave concerns regarding accessing government funding. in south africa, an excess of two million children (aged naught to 14) have some form of disability, including seeing (even when wearing glasses), hearing (even with a hearing aid), walking a kilometre or climbing stairs, remembering/concentrating, self-care such as washing or dressing, and communication in usual language including sign language (republic of south africa departments of social development, and women, children and people with disabilities, and unicef, 2012). it is against this backdrop that w4c, a south african-based non-government organisation, has implemented and subsequently explored the feasibility and unique (unintended) benefits of its surf therapy programme to children with asd. research method study setting the study was conducted over a 4-month period, at w4c’s existing surf therapy programme for children with asd. while w4c has been in existence since 2011, their programme targeted neuro-typical children only. since 2018, w4c have been piloting surf therapy with neuro-diverse children, such as children with asd, in order to establish whether their service was appropriate to a more diverse target population. while w4c’s surf therapy programme for neuro-typical children followed a structured 16-week curriculum, the asd pilot programmes were offered in a less structured way, informed by surf mentors’ informal observations and intuition of ‘what worked’ and ‘what didn’t work’ (things like communication barriers and children’s diverse cognitive abilities and needs, meant that surf mentors could not follow the existing structured 16-week surf therapy curriculum as they normally would). however, in order to formalise and/or scale a more inclusive surf therapy programme, formal research had to be conducted and used to inform such processes. during the 4-month research period, surf mentors offered the existing w4c 16-week surf therapy curriculum as best as possible, while researchers gathered data to establish more formally what worked and what didn’t, and what adaptations were required to the existing programme. some adaptations were made and piloted during the 4-month period (these are discussed later). design a qualitative, case study design (exploratory in nature) was used for this research. sample the study population consisted of 45 children (5 female and 40 male children) (aged 13 to 17) diagnosed with asd from two schools in the western cape, south africa; who were all (at the time of the research) already participants in the w4c asd surf therapy programme. purposive sampling was done for the study, as all children that were in the programme at the time of the research (n=45), were purposely selected for data collection and inclusion in the study. the children were all in different areas on the autism spectrum and therefore had a variety of abilities and needs. for example, some of the children were verbal, while others were pre-verbal; and some http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 showed the cognitive ability to understand activities explained verbally by surf mentors, while others’ showed the cognitive ability to follow instructions through copying the behaviour and actions of surf mentors. data collection while data collection was predominantly qualitative in nature, a mixed-methods data collection approach was used for the study. qualitative data was collected through: a) focus group discussions (fgd) with 10 parents/caregivers, as well as 6 teachers and occupational therapists (fgds were conducted at the end of the 4-month pilot surf therapy programme); b) surf mentor observations during surf therapy sessions (these were collected on an ongoing basis from the beginning to the end of the 4month programme); and c) while both qualitative and quantitative data was collected through ‘on-the-beach’ feedback activities that gave children the opportunity to share their experiences of the programme using appropriate, inclusive tools, such as makaton3 (these were collected on an ongoing basis from the beginning to the end of the 4-month programme). six makaton symbols were displayed on surf mentors’ wetsuits, that children could point to, or read, or show using the relevant gesture. the makaton symbols included ‘frightened’, ‘sad’, ‘angry’, ‘happy’, ‘calm’ and ‘brave’. children were asked at three points during a surf therapy session how they felt while at w4c, which were pre-session (upon arrival at the programme), mid-session (after the ‘breathing/meditation activity’ on the beach), and post-session (once they have finished surfing or swimming in the ocean). in addition, if children did not point to or indicate any of the six symbols, ‘nothing’ was recorded. in some instances, children copied the surf mentor and did not provide a specific answer when asked how they felt; in which instances ‘copied’ was recorded. lastly, children could also give any other 3 makaton is a unique language programme using a systematic multi-modal approach of speech, signs and symbols to teach communication, language and literacy answer in addition to the six makaton symbols (if they wanted and were able to), which were recorded accordingly. data analysis researchers employed thematic data analysis to elicit key themes across all qualitative data collected from children, parents, teachers and surf mentors. in addition, frequency analysis methods were used to analyse quantitative data collected from children using makaton. the waves for change surf therapy model w4c provides a child-friendly mental health service to at-risk, vulnerable young people living in under-resourced, volatile communities. by fusing the rush of surfing with an evidence-based mind-body therapy curriculum, w4c helps children to develop skills to cope with chronic trauma, regulate emotions and behaviour, as well as develop a sense of purpose, belonging and belief. the programme is delivered by unemployed (and in most cases unskilled) youth, who are based in the communities where programme participants are referred from. these youth are employed on a twoyear surf coach and mentor learnership at w4c; where they receive the appropriate training to facilitate the w4c curriculum. children who have experienced repeat trauma (including violence, abuse and neglect) are referred to w4c through schools, as well as community and government referral partners (such as community-based organisations and departments of health and social development). once enrolled at w4c, children participate in a 12-month surf therapy programme, which consists of weekly 3-hour sessions at the beach, where children not only learn to surf, but are connected to surf mentors who offer a 16week coping skills curriculum. over the 12month period, children repeat the curriculum twice (to increase dosage and programme exposure). a typical 3-hour skills to people with communication and learning difficulties. available from: http://www.makaton.co.za/page/what-is-makaton http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 session consists of: a) an energiser/warmup activity, with some physical exercise (such as a short run), followed by b) a group check-in (where children have an opportunity to share how they are doing and how they practised the skills they learnt the previous week, in the current week), c) a breathing/meditation activity, which includes a teachable moment (where coping skills are learnt), d) a surf lesson, where children also practice the coping skills taught (for example, trust, communication, breathing), and e) the day’s session is completed with a group debrief on the children’s experiences of the day’s session. research findings as per the purpose of this study, the findings are accordingly presented in two sections. firstly, the short-term programme outcomes and unique (unintended) benefits of surf therapy for children with asd will be explored first. here, the findings of using makaton in an attempt to capture children’s voices as to how they experienced surf therapy will also be provided. secondly, learning on if and how the w4c surf therapy programme can be inclusively offered to neuro-diverse children, in a lowresource setting. short-term programme outcomes children with asd struggle with behaviours like those that children who are not on the spectrum struggle with, even if the cause is different and the behaviours might be more extreme. such behaviours may include (amongst others) low self-esteem, social interaction, communication, as well as hyper-sensitivity (for example to sounds and touch) (autism spectrum australia, 2019). in addition, children with asd may have difficulties forming and maintaining meaningful relationships with others, as well as their peers (reichow & volkmar, 2009). these difficulties can lead to social isolation and can impact their social, emotional and cognitive development, academic achievements, as well as their self-esteem (stuhl & porter, 2015). shortterm outcomes of w4c’s surf therapy programme for neuro-typical children include increased self-esteem, improved peer and adult relationships, and decreased anti-social behaviour (such as violent behaviour and engagement with gangs) (waves for change, 2019). the current study aimed to explore whether children with asd experienced the same and/or unique/unintended benefits from w4c’s surf therapy, with specific focus on their confidence and identity, peer and adult relationships, as well as communication initiation and verbal output. confidence and sense of identity at w4c it is believed that attempting a challenging new task and facing fears in a supportive and safe environment builds confidence and resilience. by trying something new in a safe environment, children push their comfort zones and learn new abilities in themselves. observations from w4c surf mentors supported this believe: “a highlight was when w4c mentor luxolo, who had been working patiently and in a structured way with two learners who were scared to get their faces wet, got them to kneel down in the water, and all together splash their faces. by the end of the session, the children were soaked and stoked!” w4c surf mentor. in addition, while children with asd often appear to hold this perceived ‘disability’ as their master identity (which may make them experience some feelings of exclusion, marginalisation and discrimination), it was found that they developed a ‘new’ or ‘additional’ identity and sense of belonging in a (often perceived) unlikely group, being a surfer! in the first sessions of the w4c surf therapy curriculum, children learn how to be bananas. ‘bananas’ is the w4c culture, and it means protecting each other from harm, respecting each other’s feelings, and communicating with each other about our feelings. the ‘bananas’ culture at w4c is http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 visualised by the surfer ‘shaka’ sign (figure 1). “the w4c ‘bananas’ shaka sign is great for the children, as they respond well to ritual and structure. at school, children who never used to really interact with me will give the ‘bananas’ sign whenever they see me, which means they're associating me, that sign, and surfing together.” teacher and occupational therapist. figure 1. surfer ‘shaka sign peer and adult relationships the w4c surf therapy curriculum incorporates numerous group and peer interaction activities. for example, pair floating and pair surfing, where participants team up in pairs or small groups and learn how to float and surf together. through helping and teaching each other, children learn how to share and be patient. children master how to share with each other, and to praise each other’s efforts. “i have seen so many changes – selfconfidence, communication and social interaction. in general children with their cognitive functions are quite independent and don’t do much group play or interaction. since being at waves for change, the children have shown a willingness to engage with each other, build friendships and high fives…lots of high fives!” teacher. “the children are more social at w4c than at school. empathy, and understanding that someone else's feelings can be different to their own, is difficult for them. at the programme, they've shown a little more willingness to engage with each other, and to act as a group, which is great.” teacher. communication initiation and verbal output while not every child with asd has a language problem, a child’s ability to communicate will vary, depending upon his or her intellectual and social development (national institutes of health, 2012). while most of the children with asd in the w4c surf therapy programme were unable to speak, some appeared to have a rich vocabulary and were able to talk about specific subjects in great detail. most participants, however, had difficulty using any spoken language effectively to communicate with their surf mentors at w4c. while the w4c surf therapy programme does not aim to teach children with asd to speak, a short-term outcome appeared to have been that there was an increase in children initiating communication (whether verbally or nonverbally using for example makaton) and/or verbal output (such as increased participation in energisers using sounds). “introducing the w4c kilo – a ‘follow-the-leader’ style group energizer, performed in a circle – also proved effective and increased the learners’ attempts to communicate with the w4c surf mentors. call and response, copying actions and group activities were good for the learners. the learners were initially very independent and didn’t interact with the coaches easily. but this changed when they did the w4c kilo exercise.” w4c surf mentor. “one of the boys doesn't usually greet anyone. last week, he specifically said hello to me though, and the teachers noticed and commented that it's something new for him to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 communicate in that way." w4c surf mentor. unique/unintended benefits coping in new/unpredictable environments (other than school and home) sinha, kjelgaard, gandhi, tsourdies, cardinaux, pantazis, diamond and held (2014) write that children with asd experience the world as overwhelming, as they have difficulty predicting situations, which may increase anxiety and extreme sensory sensitivities. neil, olsen and pellicano (2016) note that helping children who have asd cope with uncertainty could ease some of these symptoms. this research made similar findings. a w4c surf mentor noted: "these children need routine and structure. for two weeks there were roadworks between the school and the w4c beach programme, and the school bus had to take a different route. one of the young girls would cry and have aggressive outbursts, and only stop crying when they arrived at the w4c site. we thought this meant she thought they weren't coming, and got upset at the change in routine. it meant she's come to count on w4c as part of her structure and routine, and something she looked forward to." w4c surf mentor. one of the major observed challenges children with asd who participated in w4c’s surf therapy programme faced, was the negative effect any unforeseen changes in programme sessions had on participants. in general, when something unpredictable happened (for example, a session had to be cancelled or changed due to bad weather or community violence) the situation could be explained verbally to neuro-typical children and a session could either be cancelled or changed, without serious negative effects or harm caused to participants. however, when this happened during sessions with children with asd, some participants displayed high levels of anxiety, anger and negative outbursts, and overall negative experiences during participation at w4c. when revised approaches to communicating, explaining and involving participants in unpredictable and unexpected situations were developed and followed, positive outcomes were observed. for example, a visual tool was developed and implemented to non-verbally articulate, but also make provision for unexpected changes in the programme structure and prepare children for such changes before they occur. this appeared to have helped children to cope better in unexpected situations when they attend the w4c surf therapy programme: “it happened often that participants will come to the programme, but then it rained and we couldn’t take children to the beach to surf and we also couldn’t explain verbally to the children why we have to do something else, like play games or make art. lots of the children then would get angry or upset and show behaviour that was not safe for themselves or the other children, like hitting or crying. this created a very difficult situation for us as coaches, as we didn’t want children to have a bad experience when they come to w4c. since we implemented a visual tool, where children are prepared by teachers and us coaches, that they will have options of activities to choose from when they are at w4c, we found we could manage their expectations better and help them cope better in unexpected situations and changes in the programme sessions. on days where we couldn’t take the children to the beach for surfing, we removed that as an option for them to choose before they arrived at programme, leaving only non-beach activities for them to choose from. it was amazing to see how much better the children coped when they were prepared in a ‘language’ they understood for http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 unpredictable situations and it looked like they started learning how to be okay with unexpected situations!” w4c surf mentor. in addition, some parents and teachers reported that some of the children were never able to go to environments other than home and school, as they were faced with unfamiliar and unpredictable situations and experiences. however, it appeared that their participation at w4c has assisted them to develop initial coping skills to visit other places, such as shopping malls, without experiencing the same amount of anxiety as previously. coping with sensory sensitivity (e.g. sand, water, wetsuit, dog/people on the beach) one of the major challenges faced and raised by parents and teachers of children with asd is that they were likely to be oversensitive to information they receive via their senses, such as noise, light, feeling or temperature. “when the school contacted me to obtain my permission for my child to join w4c’s surfing programme, i thought that would be impossible! that is the sea...it is water! there is sand and wetness and fish and sharks. there are dogs and other people on the beach and my child has fears for all these stimuli.” w4c participant parent. the research found that most children with asd who participated in the w4c surf therapy programme, gradually started to develop coping skills to regulate their sensory sensitivity while at w4c. over time, children looked forward to putting their wetsuits on and feeling the water on their faces. a teacher reported that one of the children could not deal with feeling sand under her feet and would “hop from desk to desk and chair to chair” in the school classroom to avoid touching the ground, but after spending time at w4c the child became used to the beach sand under her feet and wear sandals to school on days she attends the w4c programme, as she did not mind feeling the sand under her feet anymore and looked forward to taking her sandals off at the beach. the w4c surf therapy programme provided children with asd the opportunity to be exposed to sensory stimuli outside their home and school environment, in a physical and emotional safe space. this appeared to have helped these children regulate their responses to sensory stimuli over a period of time. “whenever my child saw a dog, she would be so scared and scream...and it would take a long time for her to calm down. we didn’t think this would ever change. since joining w4c, she seems to be dealing with dogs better (it must be because she sees dogs on the beach every week). she told me that she might want a puppy one day and she is even thinking of names for the dog. i could not believe this!” w4c participant parent. strengthen skills for independence one of the main challenges children with asd face is living an independent life as a young person, but also into adulthood. a "normal", independent adult life may include basic life skills (using the toilet, dressing, eating); functional skills (taking a bus, navigating the cafeteria, home repair, responding to a medical emergency); leisure or recreational skills (going to the library or playing a group sport); employment or vocational skills (getting to work on time, interacting with co-workers, doing the job); and technology skills (using a computer or smartphone, purchasing an item online). the ability to live an independent life (especially as an adolescent and ultimately as an adult) was also one of the main concerns parents of the children in the w4c surf therapy programme, had for their children. while the development of independent living skills would require longer-term interventions, some parents and teachers observed initial short-term changes in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 participants that suggested the development of skills to function independently. “my child never used to do any chores at home. i continuously try to teach him to help with the dishes and fold up his clothes. since participating at w4c, i noticed my child washes his own dishes and packs away his clean clothes. i think this may be because m y child has to do this for himself at w4c, no one there assists him with these chores. i am grateful that he is learning some of the things he will need when he lives by himself one day.” w4c participant parent. listening to children’s voices using makaton as mentioned earlier, one of the main barriers and concerns with the w4c surf therapy programme and its’ applicability to children with asd, was the ability of children and surf mentors to communicate effectively. of particular importance was the need for children with asd to share how they feel at any given time during a surf therapy session. the use of makaton as a communication method was piloted and the findings hereof are displayed below in word clouds4. figure 2. word clouds of children’s experiences and feelings pre, during and post w4c surf therapy sessions 4 word clouds are graphical representations of word frequency that give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in a source text. the larger the word figure 2 shows two important findings. firstly, children most frequently did not indicate how they were feeling or did not select a makaton symbol when they arrived for a session and before the session started; as ‘nothing’ (n=24) was most frequently recorded. in addition, other frequent responses from children before their surf therapy session started, included ‘happy’ (n=18), ‘sad’ (n=6), ‘angry’ (n=6), ‘brave’ (n=6), ‘good’ (n=5) and ‘frightened’ (n=5). the most frequent responses reported from children during a surf therapy session (after children completed a breathing/meditation/calming down activity) included ‘happy’ (n=28), ‘brave’ (n=15), ‘calm’ (n=10), ‘good’ (n=5) and ‘sad’ (n=4). lastly, children reported most frequently to be ‘brave’ (n=24), ‘happy’ (n=19), ‘calm’ (n=13) and ‘excited’ (n=6) once they completed a surfing or swimming session in the ocean. from the above it can be interpreted that children’s experiences during a surf therapy session (in most instances) reflected they arrived at sessions less inclined to share how they were feeling and/or that they did not know how they were feeling. after completing a calming down/breathing/meditation activity, children (in most instances) appeared to be calm and happy; while after the surfing/swimming activity in the ocean, children experienced feelings of being brave, happy, calm and excited. secondly, one of the main reasons for developing and using non-verbal communication tools, such as the makaton wetsuit armbands, was to encourage and increase communication between surf mentors and participants, as well as to provide a platform where children with asd’s voices can be heard (in cases where these children were preor non-verbal). when comparing the frequencies of ‘nothing’ and ‘copied’ used at the pre, mid and post-session data collection points, it was found that children more frequently did not initiate communication with their surf mentors when they arrived at a session, but that they appeared to be more inclined to initiate in the visual the more common the word was in the document(s). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 communication as the session progressed. this may allude to the possibility that these visual aids, as well as the trust and safe space being created between surf mentors and participants during a session, provided children with asd with an opportunity to increase communication initiation, as well as to form meaningful relationships. feasibility of current w4c programme for inclusive surf therapy overall, it was found that w4c’s surf therapy programme can be offered as a meaningful, community-based mental health service to children with asd. however, not in the format offered to neuro-typical children, as the programme in its current form was not optimally inclusive and appropriate for neuro-diverse children (such as those with asd). through working closely with occupational therapists and teachers at schools for children with asd, some adaptations to the existing w4c surf therapy programme were made and briefly piloted during the research; which included: • the w4c surf therapy programme was mainly facilitated through verbal communication, which was found to be one of the main barriers for children with asd to meaningfully benefit from the programme. as such, makaton as a form of communication between children and surf mentors was incorporated during programme delivery. these communication tools were also used to collect feedback from children during sessions, to gain a better understanding as to how they experience the programme (where this data was usually collected from neurotypical children through self-report surveys, which required some basic literacy abilities). see figure 3 below. • the use of visual aids to facilitate the programme structure and curriculum were incorporated into sessions. see figure 4 and 5 below. the visual aids included a strip of images that explained the routine during a surf therapy session, as well as ‘choosing’ cards children used when a session changed unexpectedly (e.g. when surfing or swimming were not possible). • in general, a surf mentor to child ratio was 1:7, which was found to be inappropriate for children with asd. as such, a revised policy on surf mentor to child ratio of 1:2 (at a maximum) was implemented, to ensure children were supported appropriately and safely. • while the w4c surf therapy programme predominantly used and encouraged group interaction and group-based learning, more one-on-one and/or smaller group activities were implemented for children with asd. it was found that children’s ability to concentrate on and absorb session content was better when they were in either smaller groups or had one-onone sessions with their surf mentors. this was especially true for sessions where coping skills, such as calming down, meditation and breathing, were taught. larger group activities were found to be useful and beneficial for other physical elements of the programme, such as swimming, surfing, energisers and beach games. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 figure 3. makaton symbols displayed on a coach’s wetsuit figure 4. visual schedule/structure of a surf therapy session figure 5. example of a ‘choosing’ card practice and policy implications this research uncovered three main challenges (amongst others) faced by mental health services for children with asd in a developing country, such as south africa. firstly, there is a dearth of research that informs a better understanding of asd and subsequent guidance for appropriate mental health interventions. secondly, accessible mental health services are far and few, with less than 5 qualified clinicians (such as social workers, therapists or psychologists) per 400,000 people in south africa. lastly, alternative and/or supplementary mental health programmes for children and young adults (such as w4c’s surf therapy programme) are often developed for neuro-typical children and involves ‘typical’ cognitive and physical functioning (such as verbal communication skills, understanding of spoken languages, and reading and writing). the research found that, despite these challenges, existing resources and programmes (such as w4c’s surf therapy programme) can be “re-worked” and implemented to fill some of the mental health service gaps for neurodiverse children in low resource, developing settings. some of the main recommendations derived from the research, that may be used to inform policy and practice in this context included: http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 • integrating visuals into programme delivery: as children with asd learn, communicate and make sense of things differently than neuro-typical children, verbal communication and facilitation of a programme may not always be the most appropriate and/or effective. utilising visuals to engage with neurodiverse children and communicate programme content, may improve such children’s ability to access and benefit from the programme more meaningfully. • embed routine and structure into programme delivery (which may also be done with visual aids): children with asd respond well to routine and consistency. while it may happen that a certain routine can change unexpectedly, a routine designed to specifically accommodate changes can assist learners with asd to better respond to such changes, and mitigate harmful, unintended effects. • decrease programme facilitator to child ratio: while cost-effective mental health programmes for neuro-typical children may require stretching a child to adult ratio to (in some cases) 1:10, it is important to not apply this practice with neuro-diverse children; especially in instances where programmes are facilitated by non-clinical staff. a ratio of 1:2 children to programme facilitators may be more appropriate. • increase specialised training for programme facilitators: delivering alternative and/or supplementary mental health services (such as surf therapy) to children with asd effectively and appropriately, requires specific knowledge and skills. in addition to being equipped with the knowledge and skills to facilitate the programme content to children, nonclinical staff delivering such services to children with asd should be empowered with the necessary knowledge and skills to facilitate their programmes responsibly, and with increased emphasis on specific child protection skills. • integrated service delivery for costeffective, community-based mental health support for the most vulnerable children: in developing countries, such as south africa, children with asd often face barriers to accessing the necessary support and services from the state healthcare system (largely due to a lack of state resources). these barriers may include transport to services, lack of family support or understanding of mental health challenges associated with neuro-diversity. community-based programmes, such as w4c’s surf therapy programme, has the potential to integrate these children into a new, exciting and highly aspirational peer group; while receiving mental health support and services through a network of community-based organisations and partners. concluding thoughts asd is an invisible disability. while individuals with, for example, a physical disability can be recognised by their use of a wheelchair, or the visually impaired by their use of a guide dog, there are no definite signs that a person has asd. this often results in limited understanding of people with asd. people very often judge children with asd as being naughty or as being defiant; this is not the case. it is because of their inability to understand social rules that others very often just accept as the social norm. people with asd have difficulty interacting with others and communicating, their senses are sometimes impaired, and they have a rigid way of thinking. children with asd, specifically in developing countries, are excluded from almost all service provision in their communities and face challenges associated with stigma and discrimination, leading to isolation and poor mental and physical health. community-based mental health http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 services, such as the w4c surf therapy programme, can support neuro-diverse children to integrate coping strategies into their lives, practice socially appropriate behaviour, promote physical activity, as well as develop independent living skills. through an adapted programme that promotes meaningful participation of this group, and specialist training for community-based programme facilitators, mental health services can be inclusive and support all young people to become independent and reach their potential. a need for further, longer-term research was identified, to probe both the longer-term outcomes of surf therapy for children with asd, as well as the possible effect more inclusive programme delivery tools may have on children’s experiences while participating in w4c surf therapy programme. research limitations some of the main research limitations for this study are listed below; which should also be considered during the interpretation of the study findings and subsequent conclusions: influence from the researcher: this is an inevitable limitation, due to the interaction between the researchers and participants in a social process. in addition, in this study, some of the researchers were employed at the programme explored in the study. as such, researchers were aware of personal bias, values and beliefs whilst conducting the research so as not to influence the results in any manner; and study design and length: this was a pilot study and exploratory in nature, over a limited four-month period, which restricted the nature and amount of data that could be collected, analysed and interpreted. more specifically, the study duration did not allow for newly designed programme tools (such as visual aids) to be rigidly evaluated; these tools were piloted and initial feedback on their suitability and potential to offer inclusive surf therapy were assessed and reported on. as such, the findings should be interpreted with caution. references autism spectrum australia. (2019). difficulty areas. available from: https://www.autismspectrum.org.a u/content/areas-difficulty. cavanaugh, l.k & rademacher, s.b. (2014). how surfing social skills curriculum can impact children with autism spectrum disorders. the journal of the international association of special education, spring 2015, 15(1):17-27. clapham, e.d., armitano, c.n., lamont, l.s. & audette, j.g. (2014). the ocean as a unique therapeutic environment: developing a surfing program, journal of physical education, recreation & dance, 85:4, 8-14 cosme, g. (2015). lack of mental health services in south africa. available from: http://www.ginocos.me/blog/lackof-mental-healthcare-south-africa franz, l., chambers, n., von isenburg,m., & de vries, p.j.. (2017). autism spectrum disorder in sub-saharan africa: a comprehensive scoping review. autism res, 10: 723-749. jamison, k. r. (2006). the many stigmas of mental illness. lancet. 2006, 367 (9509): 533-534. national institutes of health. 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(2011). the stigma of mental illness. available from: https://www.health24.com/mentalhealth/living-with-mentalillness/the-stigma-of-mentalillness-20120721 reichow, b., & volkmar, f. (2009). social skills interventions for individuals with autism: evaluation for evidence-based practices within a best evidence synthesis framework. journal of autism and developmental disorders, 40, 149–166. republic of south africa departments of social development, and women, children and people with disabilities, and the united nations children’s fund (unicef). (2012_. children with disabilities in south africa: a situation analysis 20012011. available from: https://www.unicef.org/southafrica /saf_resources_sitandisability.pdf. sayyed ali samadi and roy mcconkey. (2011). autism in developing countries: lessons from iran. autism research and treatment volume 2011. silver eb (1970). operant conditioning of speech sounds in an autistic child. south african journal of psychology. 1970:3–12. sinha, p., kjelgaard, m.m., gandhi, t.k., tsourides, k., cardinaux, a.l., pantazis, d. diamond, s.p., held, r.m. (2016). autism as a disorder of prediction. j autism dev disord. 2016 jun;46(6):1962-1973 stuhl & h. porter. (2015). riding the waves: therapeutic surfing to improve social skills for children with autism. therapeutic recreation journal, xlix(3):253-256. travis j, geiger m. the effectiveness of the picture exchange communication system (pecs) for children with autism spectrum disorder (asd): a south african pilot study. child language teaching & therapy. 2010; 26:39–59. unicef south africa. (2019). available from: https://www.unicef.org/southafrica /support_4707.html. waves for change. (2019). w4c impact. retrieved from: https://www.waves-forchange.org/w4c-impact/ williams d, herman a, stein d, heeringa s, jackson p, moomal h, kessler r. (2008).: twelve-month mental disorders in south africa: prevalence, service use and demographic correlates in the population-based south african stress and health study. psychol med. 2008, 38 (2): 211-220. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www/ https://www.unicef.org/southafrica/saf_resources_sitandisability.pdf https://www.unicef.org/southafrica/saf_resources_sitandisability.pdf https://www.unicef.org/southafrica/support_4707.html https://www.unicef.org/southafrica/support_4707.html https://www.waves-for-change.org/w4c-impact/ https://www.waves-for-change.org/w4c-impact/ the stand up to bullying (su2b) project: participatory action research with middle school youth michele m. schlehofer1, diana parnell2, and ardealia ross3 keywords: bullying, middle school, prevention, photovoice, participatory action research author biographies: michele schlehofer, earned her phd in applied social psychology in 2007 from claremont graduate university, located in claremont, california, united states of america. trained in the lewinian tradition of actionresearch, much of her work consists of community-based research designed to directly address social and community problems. as an applied psychologist, she is a vocal proponent of not only intervention and prevention work, but also evidence-based decision-making and research-backed public policy. over the course of her career, she has worked on projects addressing a myriad of social and community issues, including adolescent pregnancy prevention; community-building processes for people living with hiv and aids; and community breast health initiatives for women. she received a 2017 board of regents award in public service for several initiatives conducted in wicomico county and the lower shore area. this included conducting a pro-bono communitybased needs assessment of county-wide resources for families and children for the wicomico partnership for families and children. since 2012, dr. schlehofer have been involved in advocacy efforts by, with, and for lgbtq (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning) people. she serves on the steering committee of the lower shore lgbtq coalition, as president of salisbury’s pflag chapter, and co-chairs the public policy committee for division 44: the division for sexual orientation and gender identity of the american psychological association. diana r. panell, began her career as a bilingual advocate for women at a domestic violence shelter, bridging the language barrier for those who needed to be heard. later she served as director for a state organization that was a local liaison for child and family programs. realizing the need for a coordinated effort to identify and integrate services, she successfully developed new programs and built a powerful network of community-based “out of school time programs” that effectively served the needs of both the child and the family. ardealia ross, is the program coordinator for the wise after-school program; a comprehensive out-of-school time program serving the students of wicomico middle 1 salisbury university 2 wicomico partnership for families and children 3 wicomico county board of education global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 school in salisbury, maryland, united states of america. ms. ross has been the coordinator since the program’s inception in 2002. she is a native of philadelphia, pa and a 1999 graduate of grinnell college in grinnell, ia. after graduation she returned to philadelphia where she served in americorps as a youth program leader and taught elementary school for 2 years. recommended citation: schlehofer, m., parnell, d., & ross, a. (2018). the stand up to bullying (su2b) project: participatory action research with middle school youth. global journal of community psychology practice, 9(1), 1 19. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the stand up to bullying (su2b) project: participatory action research with middle school youth abstract the stand up to bullying (su2b) participatory action research project is presented as an approach to collaborative community action. the su2b project, conducted in the united states, represents an interdisciplinary collaboration with two county agencies in the state of maryland: the local management board and the board of education. over the course of six weeks, 78 middle school students participating in the su2b project were trained to serve as anti-bullying ambassadors for their schools. middle school students collaborated with undergraduate students enrolled in a community and applied social psychology course to conduct a photovoice component. photovoice is a community empowerment and advocacy tool and qualitative research methodology in which people express their experiences with a social or community problem through photography. the middle school students took digital photographs in and around their school that they felt exemplified bullying. from the resultant photos, they selected two and wrote accompanying titles and descriptions, for display in a public art exhibit. select photographs were subsequently converted into anti-bullying educational posters for display in county public schools. additionally, photographs were augmented with interviewers with participants and project staff to create anti-bullying educational training videos for use in county public schools. findings of bullying experiences with middle school students are discussed. bullying is a significant concern in united states public schools, with an estimated 20% to 30% of youth involved as bullies or victims (salmivalli, lagerspetz, bjorkqvist, osterman, & kaukiainen, 1996). about 50% of youth who bully peers report also being victims of bullying (bully/victims) themselves (haynie et al., 2001). the centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) defines bullying as any intentional, unwanted aggressive behavior between youths that are not siblings or dating partners that is repeated, or is likely to be repeated, and involves a perceived or real power imbalance (cdc, 2017).1 bullying is unique among and differentiated from other aggressive behaviors and interpersonal conflicts as it contains three core components: intention, a power imbalance, and the potential for repeated action (felix, sharkey, green, furlong, & tanigawa, 2011). bullying is often cyclical, with youth participating in the perpetuation of bullying as bullies, victims, or as bystanders at various points in time (e.g., jenkins & nickerson, 2017). bullying can take a multitude of forms, but can be delineated as either verbal or emotional (e.g., teasing, name-calling, or rumor spreading) or physical (e.g., physical violence, destruction of property). bullying can occur either in-person or through technology; when occurring through technology (including email, a website, text messages, social media, etc.) is it referred to as “cyberbullying” (cdc, 2017). verbal or emotional bullying is more common than physical bullying (bradshaw, sawyer, & o’brennan, 2007; demaray & malecki, 2003). however, this may be due to the fact that physical bullying is under-reported (demaray & malecki, 2003). much of the existing http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 research has examined bullying behaviors via teacher’s perceptions; there is a need for more qualitative research on the direct lived experiences of youth. bullying has significant negative consequences for youth populations. victims experience a variety of negative internalizing responses such as increased anxiety (nickerson & slater, 2009), depression, suicide ideation, suicide attempts (klomek, marrocco, kleinman, schonfeld, & gould, 2007; nishina & juvonen, 2005); often report feeling unhappy, lonely (boulton & underwood, 1992), and unsafe at school (varjas, henrich & meyers, 2009). further, being bullied places middle school youth at greater risk of engaging in a myriad of risky behaviors, such as substance use, self-harm, and bringing weapons to school (dukes, stein, & zane, 2010; kim, catalano, haggerty, & abbott, 2011; smalley, warren, & barefoot, 2017). victims also experience poorer academic performance and lower rates of student engagement (lacey, cornell, & konold, 2017). bully/victims tend to be less cooperative than other youth (rigby, cox, & black, 1997), and experience greater rates of depression, suicide attempts, and ideation, as well as exhibiting behavioral problems, such as drinking, smoking, and property theft (e.g., espelage & holt, 2013; haynie et al., 2001). up to 80% of youth participate in bullying behavior as a bystander (salmivalli et al., 1996). bystander responses can vary from reinforcing the bully, assisting the bully, intervening to assist the victim, or ignoring the bullying (salmivalli et al., 1996). given the number of bystanders, it is important to address bullying via interventions to increase helpful bystander intervention behavior. effective bystander intervention responses can be both significantly and practically increased with targeted interventions, and should be a focus of programming to address bullying (polanin, espelage, & pigott, 2012). bystanders who assist the victims either indirectly (by reporting the bullying) or directly (by intervening to stop the behavior) help reduce bullying behaviors (salmivalli, voeten, & poskiparta, 2011) and increase student perceptions of safety (gini, pozzoli, borghi, & franzoni, 2008). interventions to increase bystander response can take many forms. most interventions to increase effective bystander response and reduce bullying have focused on developing or strengthening individual-level factors such as student character, morality, and the adoption of anti-bullying attitudes (e.g., thornrberg, pozzoli, gini, & hong, 2017; see nickerson, 2017 for an overview). yet, these methods are largely ineffective at reducing bullying behavior (nickerson, 2017). bullying behaviors can persist among youth despite personal negative attitudes towards the behavior, provided the greater school climate supports bullying, views it as socially normative, and is discouraging of students speaking out about bullying (paluck & shepherd, 2012). therefore, to increase effective bystander responses, it might be advantageous to conceptualize bullying ecologically; that is, as a problem of school climate (orpinas, horne, & staniszewski, 2003) versus individuals. indeed, schools experience less bullying when they work to foster a supportive, caring environment in which students and teachers have meaningful, trusting relationships with one another (konold et al., 2014; thornberg, wänström, & pozzoli, 2017). a myriad of ecological approaches to addressing bullying in schools exist (see nickerson, 2017, for an overview of various approaches, including ecological approaches). for example, the olweus bullying prevention program (olweus, 1999), one of the longeststanding bullying prevention programs, includes school-wide components, such as anti-bullying events, in addition to targeted interventions for bullies and victims. the olweus program has been effective at reducing bullying and victimization among middle school students (e.g., bauer, lozano, & http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 rivara, 2007). another popular program found to reduce school-wide bullying behavior, kiva (kiva international, n.d.), includes training to increase bullying prevention skills and to develop self-efficacy of allies (garandeau, poskiparta, & salmivalli, 2014; juvonen, schacter, sainio, & salmivalli, 2016; williford et al., 2012). in an innovative approach, paluck and shepherd (2012) worked with identified social referents— students at a high school who were highly socially connected—to develop social norms against bullying. although overall rates of bullying did not decrease throughout the school year, students with greater connections to the social referents were more likely to report bullying behavior (paluck & shepherd, 2012), suggesting that social norms facilitative of effective bystander response can be developed. although many bullying intervention and prevention programming initiatives occur at the high school level, interventions geared towards older adolescents are not always effective (nickerson, 2017). addressing bullying at the middle school level, therefore, may be advantageous. bullying behaviors peak during the middle school years (dicks & kowalski, 2016; mckenna, hawk, mullen & hertz, 2009; nansel et al., 2001; unnever & cornell, 2004), yet middle school youth are less likely than youth of other ages to defend victims of bullying and engage in other helpful bystander behaviors (endresen & olweus, 2001). middle school may be a developmentally appropriate time point at which to address bullying via building social norms, particularly those that support effective bystander intervention strategies. current study we present an overview of the stand up to bullying (su2b) participatory action research project as an ecological approach to address bullying in a middle school youth population. over a six-week period, youth participated in a series of community and skill-building exercises (weeks 1 – 3), and in a photovoice project (weeks 4 – 6). a class of undergraduate students (n = 20) enrolled in a community and applied social psychology course facilitated the photovoice project as part of their coursework. the goals of the paper are to: (1) introduce readers to the stand up to bullying (su2b) project; and (2) provide preliminary insight into how middle school youth perceive bullying. methods participants participants were 78 middle school students enrolled in a county-funded after-school program which serves predominately lowincome farm-eligible (free and reduced meals) youth.2 all participants attended the same middle school, and the after-school program was held in the cafeteria of the school. with a total school population of 657, this sample size represented 11.8% of total students enrolled in the middle school. students were approximately evenly split between 6th (n = 28; 36%), 7th (n = 29; 37%), and 8th grades (n = 21; 27%). students ranged in age from 11 to 14, with an average age of 12 years, 2 months old.3 there were slightly more females (n = 44, 56%) than males (n = 34; 44%). students were predominately black: n = 56 (72%) identified as african american; n = 10 (13%) as haitian; n = 5 (6%) as latinx; and n = 3 (4%) as caucasian or white; n = 4 (5%) students were multiracial. procedures structure of su2b. this project had institutional review board approval. the after-school program in which the su2b project was conducted included a blanket consent process by which parents or guardians of youth consented to student participation in all activities conducted under the auspices of the after-school program, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 including the su2b project. the county school district utilizes an opt-out consent process for photography and videography of students enrolled in the after-school program. the project started with a three-week skill building phase, followed by a three-week photovoice phase. finally, the project concluded with three post-project productions: a public art show, development of educational posters, and creation of educational videos. phase 1: skill building. the program started with a three-week skill-building phase. during this phase, all participants were trained to serve as anti-bullying ambassadors for their school. students were provided with the definition of an “ambassador” as a student leader which emphasized being a representative of the school and setting a positive example for others. the term “ambassador” was specifically selected to facilitate student perceptions that participation in su2b was a privilege, and to discourage perceptions that students in the after-school program were targeted for being lower-income or otherwise “at-risk.” students were led through a series of exercises to strengthen group cohesiveness and community, and to guide students through peer discussions on bullying. first, as not all students enrolled in the afterschool program regularly interacted with or personally knew one another, students participated in a “yarn web” icebreaker exercise. due to the size of the group, students were split into smaller groups of about 20 to 30. while standing in a circle, the moderator announced their name, something unique about them, and then passed the yarn ball to another person in the circle, while holding on to the end. this was repeated until everyone held a piece of the yarn. once the web was completed, students were asked to reflect on the shape of the yarn by asking them, “what does our yarn look like?” and guided to see the shape as a web. this icebreaker activity was selected for several reasons. aside from allowing students to get to know each other, it provided the opportunity to learn student names. second, the yarn web the group created was used as an analogy for the interconnectedness among people. students were selectively identified and asked to loosen the slack or “drop” their piece of yarn, upon which the web lost its structure and collapsed. all students were then asked to hold their yarn tight, thereby strengthening the yarn web. this analogy was well-received by the youth, and while in their yarn web circle, they engaged in a discussion on the importance of supporting each other: when all members of the group are supported, the group is stronger (and the web functions better). after the yarn web icebreaker activity, participants were asked to anonymously provide their own (1) definition and (2) example of bullying. students wrote their definitions and examples on post-it notes provided by the authors. in order to make it a comfortable environment in which students could share, students were specifically instructed not to list their names or any other identifying information on their post-it notes. then, definitions and examples were shared by collecting the post-it notes and placing them on the cafeteria wall. select definitions and examples were read to the group out loud by the authors, and students were guided towards defining bullying as a particular type of student-to-student harassment that consisted of two components: (a) an unequal power differential (or attempt at gaining power over another); and (b) consisting of long-term teasing, harassment, or physical abuse. this definition was chosen as it is both consistent with that used by the cdc (2017), and with the definition of bullying adopted by the county public school district. students discussed situations in which the person who is bullying may or may not realize the extent to which others are hurt by their choices. students also discussed the distinction between bullying and occasional teasing and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 between bullying and other types of interpersonal conflict (for instance, a onetime argument with a friend). students were provided with a description and example of five different methods of effective bystander response: (1) reporting (including detail of the reporting procedures for their school); (2) non-violent, direct intervention (e.g., telling the bully to “stop,” telling a teacher); (3) setting a good example by not giving bullies an audience (not reinforcing bullying); (4) being a friend to a victim of bullying; and (5) indirectly diffusing the situation by creating a diversion or method of escape for the victim (for instance, telling the victim that a teacher wants them in another room). effective bystander response methods of handling bullying were adapted from two existing anti-bullying initiatives: the pacer organization’s national bullying prevention center and the u.s. health and human service’s stop bullying website. according to salmivalli et al., (1996) these are considered to be effective methods of bystander engagement. the last method, which states, “indirectly diffusing the situation by creating a diversion”, was particularly well-received by students. informal feedback from participating youth indicated that this method was perceived to be effective at curbing bullying, while also protecting the student from retaliation for directly intervening or “tattling” or “snitching” (“snitches get stitches” was a concerning phrase consistently repeated by youth). at this point, students were broken up into teams of no more than 10 students. project staff developed scenarios depicting incidents of bullying from the examples generated by students. incidents in the scenarios included a variety of bullying experiences, including both verbal (e.g., spreading unflattering rumors about a student) and physical (e.g., knocking books out of another student’s hands) acts of bullying, as well as cyberbullying (e.g., harassing text messages sent in group chat). working in small groups, students were randomly provided with one of the scenarios, and asked to develop a 10minute skit which demonstrated how they would effectively intervene. the purpose of this activity was to allow students the opportunity to think through an appropriate and effective bystander response to bullying, and to practice these responses via roleplaying. dramatization and role-playing has been previously incorporated into bullying prevention and intervention programming among elementary and middle school youth populations, and shows some promise as an effective and engaging method of bullying prevention (fredland, 2010; hicks, le clair, & berry, 2016; joronen, konu, rankin, & astedtkurki, 2012; newman-carlson & horne, 2004). each group was given 30 minutes to write and practice their skit. after, they acted out their skit in front of the larger group of student ambassadors and project staff. each team was provided with feedback from the larger group of students and project staff, a strategy which increases the effectiveness of role-play (reid, patterson, & snyder, 2002). phase 2: photovoice. the last three weeks of the project were spent directing youth through a photovoice project. photovoice is a qualitative tool in which people express their experiences with a social or community problem through photography (wang & burris, 1997). it can provide rich qualitative data from which to identify themes, theories, or issues that are most important to community populations (wang, morrelsamuels, hutchinson, bell, & pestronk, 2004). photovoice was selected for this project because it has the potential to serve not only as a qualitative research methodology, but also a method of community and individual empowerment, as well as an advocacy tool. photovoice is an effective, practical methodology for youth populations (bashore, alexander, jackson, & mauch, 2017). it is perceived as both more interesting than http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 traditional research (e.g., drew, duncan, & sawyer, 2010; guillemin & drew, 2010) and as empowering to youth (strack, magill, & mcdonagh, 2004). power, norman, and dupre (2014) found that photovoice results in a contextually different, more positive understanding of youth experiences than other, more traditional qualitative methodologies, such as focus groups and interviews. the photovoice component was directed by 20 undergraduate college students enrolled in a community psychology and applied social psychology course. each team of 10 middle school students worked directly with two college student leads assigned to their group. college students received a total of 2 hours and 30 minutes of targeted training, as part of their classroom instruction, in preparation for their role: 50 minutes consisted of training in qualitative methodology, particularly photovoice, conducted by the first author; a 50-minute introduction to the middle school student population, coupled with suggestions for effectively working with this population, provided by the third author; and 50 minutes of instruction on school climate research and bullying. students also read elliott aronson’s book “nobody left to hate,” which provides a social psychological analysis of the columbine shootings and presented suggestions for improving school climate. each middle school student was provided with a vivitar vf-128 14.1 mp digital camera with usb port for purposes of the project. students could choose between a black, purple, blue, or pink camera. college student leads worked with their assigned teams of student ambassadors to develop a team name, teach them the photovoice procedure, and provide technical support on working the cameras. all 10 groups of youth were trained in separate areas of the same cafeteria, allowing the authors to circulate among the groups and provide feedback, correction, support, and clarification where needed. youth were instructed to take as many photos are they liked which they felt exemplified bullying. photos could be figurative or literal interpretations of bullying. students were encouraged to think creatively. students were instructed not to take photos of recognizable people (no faces of any people in their photos), and any photos featuring recognizable people were deleted by project staff directly from the digital camera. students were, however, allowed to take photos of people, provided they were not immediately identifiable. this requirement was put in place for two reasons: (1) to encourage the students to think of more creative ways to express bullying (and, consequently, to avoid having multiple photos depicting staged scenes of one person physically hurting another), and (2) to encourage those students who felt shy or uncomfortable being on camera to fully participate in the photovoice process. the only exception to this rule was a “selfie” that all students were instructed to take prior to taking photos for the project, to assist with identification of camera ownership. after students were provided with these instructions, they toured the school grounds in their teams (accompanied by their college student leads) to take their photos. per county regulations, all student teams were accompanied by an employee of the county school system, whose purpose was to ensure that students abided by county public school rules and regulations while touring school grounds. photos were completed within one week. each student generated between five and 30 photos; as a cohort, youth generated over 1,000 photos. photos were printed as 4” x 6” prints and provided back to the student who originally took the image in a sealed envelope labeled with their name. from these prints, each student worked alongside their college student leads to select up to two images that they felt were the most personally meaningful http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 (see figure 1). students were allowed to choose up to two photos from among any of the images they took. most students selected two photos; a small number of students selected just one photo for display. each student named each of the two photos they selected, and typed a paragraph describing what was happening in the photo and how it related to bullying (see figure 2). figure 1. middle school students work alongside college student leaders to select photos for inclusion in the art show. figure 2. students type titles and descriptors of their selected photographs. the one to two photos selected by the students were reprinted in 8” x 10” size, again returned to the youth, and youth matted their two photos for public display. this resulted in 124 photos selected for display. the photograph and selection process, and writing the photo description and matting, took two weeks to complete. at the end of the project, youth and college student team leaders celebrated with a pizza party, and all youth were provided with their digital camera to keep and a certificate of completion. post-project productions. the benefit of the photovoice approach is that it provides lasting images which can be used in a variety of ways, including a springboard for critical dialogue and as a tool to influence public policy (wang & burris, 1997). the project concluded with three post-project productions, using images generated during the photovoice process: a public art show, development of educational posters, and creation of educational videos. public art show. after completion of the project, matted photos were displayed in a public art show held at the local civic center. the public art show was advertised to the community, and open to the general public. the art show was a catered event. middle school youth participating in the su2b project were in attendance; the county board of education provided bus transportation from their school to the civic center, and parents, guardians, and their families and friends were instructed to meet participating children at the event. additional attendees included the authors of this paper, the college student team leaders, and representatives from the university (the college dean), the county board of education, and the state of maryland governor’s office for children. altogether, all 124 selected photographs were on display, and over 150 people attended the event. photos of the art show are provided in figures 3 and 4. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 figure 3. public art show. figure 4. panel of photographs at the student art show. educational posters. upon conclusion of the public art show, select photos were used to develop anti-bullying posters for the county school system. staff and interns at the local management board, guided by the second author, edited photos for enlargement and printing, and inserted text over the photos describing bullying and the importance of intervention. photos were chosen based on aesthetics, as well as for their ability to be easily adapted to posters with overlaying text. text was taken from student descriptions of their photos, or materials from pacer.org and stopbullying.gov. printed posters were distributed to the county’s three public middle and three public high schools (six schools in total). a sample poster on display in a county high school is provided in figure 5. figure 5. anti-bullying poster on display in a county high school educational videos. finally, post-project completion, a series of anti-bullying educational videos were developed. videos displayed select photos and accompanying descriptions, supplemented with interviews from participating middle school youth and county public school staff. all videos were filmed on location at the middle school during the after-school program. three videos were developed. the first was a music video on the importance of “being true to yourself” and not being a bully (pac 14 keeping kids connected, 2015a, october 30). student ambassadors sang and rapped in the video. the second video described the su2b project—specifically, the photovoice component—and the impact of the project on students and school staff (video available http://www.gjcpp.org/ file:///c:/users/miche/appdata/local/packages/microsoft.microsoftedge_8wekyb3d8bbwe/tempstate/downloads/pac global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 online at: pac 14 keeping kids connected, 2015b, october 30). the third video was a short video describing what bullying is, what the effects of bullying are, and how to “stand up to bullying.” (pac 14 keeping kids connected, 2015c). the local public access channel provided filming and postproduction time pro-bono. these videos were aired on the local public access channel and were displayed during county professional development days. measures photos on display in the public art show were content coded using a grounded theory approach (strauss & corbin, 1998) for themes pertaining to bullying. four themes were assessed: common locations of bullying, types of bullying, victim’s feelings, and bystander intervention. to develop the coding scheme, two researchers (the first author and an undergraduate student research assistant) separately reviewed all photographs and descriptions and noted emerging themes. notes were then compared and a coding scheme was developed. next, the researchers independently coded 25 (20%) of the photographs and descriptions and compared codes; this resulted in refining of the coding scheme. finally, the researchers independently coded all 124 photographs and descriptions. codes were reviewed across researchers, and any discrepancies were discussed until consensus was reached. results from the 124 photos displayed in the public art show, several themes emerged. first, common locations of bullying were identified, with the most common locations being (1) areas outside of school on school grounds (n = 22; 17.7%); (2) in hallways (n = 16; 12.9%); (3) on the stairs (n = 14; 11.3%); and (4) in locker rooms (n = 12; 9.7%). this is consistent with prior work, in which students reported experiencing bullying primarily in the hallways and outside areas of schools (bradshaw et al., 2007). school staff were able to identify from these photos common locations of bullying in their school that they were previously unaware of. second, types of bullying were identified. most (n = 37; 30%) photos and descriptions mentioned physical abuse (e.g., tripping, pushing, physical fighting), and 24 (19.4%) mentioned emotional abuse (e.g., name calling, spreading rumors, teasing). the third theme identified represented victim’s feelings. photos focused heavily on feelings of depression or related emotions, such as sadness or unhappiness (n = 31; 25%); an additional seven (5.6%) explicitly mentioned that bullying can lead to suicide or suicide ideation. only seven (5.6%) mentioned other negative internalizing mental health outcomes, such as feelings of anxiety, worry, or fear. finally, the last theme entailed bystander intervention. student photos expressed that bystanders were largely ineffective at addressing bullying, despite being surrounded by posters which promoted effective bystander intervention. thirty-two (25.8%) photos contained imagery of inspirational or anti-bullying posters in the school; 63 photos (51%) addressed how important it is to stop bullying and be an effective intervening bystander. despite this presence, however, photos indicated that students perceived a lack of effective bystander response. fifteen photos (12.1%) explicitly mentioned that bystander intervention was lacking, either because students do not get involved (n = 7; 5.6%) or because teachers are not present or turn a blind eye to bullying (n = 8; 6.5%). one photo specifically described “packing,” a situation in which a student is harassed while sitting at their desk by neighboring classmates. teachers and school staff expressed surprise, as they had never heard of “packing” behavior http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 and had not previously noticed it occurring in the classroom. subsequent informal discussion with students suggested that packing was a commonly occurring behavior. this feedback was given back to school staff, and staff reported making several changes as a result of viewing the photos. changes largely centered on placing extra staff at those locations identified by students as frequent sites of bullying behavior. teachers also rearranged desks in their classrooms and reported more closely monitoring student interactions after learning of bullying behavior occurring in specific classes. teachers and staff informally reported that relationships with the youth improved after their participation in the project; teachers and school staff felt that youth were more likely to talk to them about personal issues and problems or difficulties they were experiencing, including but not limited to bullying. additional responses from school staff are provided in the previouslymentioned videos, available online discussion a sizeable proportion of youth experience bullying (hynie et al., 2001; salmivalli et al., 2017). bullying has significant negative consequences for youth (e.g., espelage & holt, 2013; haynie et al., 2001; nicerkson & slater, 2009; smalley, warren, & barefoot, 2017). with up to 80% of youth serving as bystanders to bullying (salmivalli et al., 1996), bystander intervention training is an important component of anti-bullying prevention (polanin, espelage, & pigott, 2012). as bullying peaks in middle school (e.g., dicks & kowalski, 2016; nansel et al., 2001), providing bystander intervention training to middle school youth populations is warranted the stand up to bullying (su2b) program is a participatory action research project completed in collaboration with university faculty and students, and two county organizations: the local management board (a state-funded agency that allocates funds at the county level) and the county school system. during the course of the six-week project, almost 80 middle school students engaged in a series of community-building exercises, learned a myriad of ways to appropriately respond to bullying, and were trained as anti-bullying ambassadors. the students also engaged in a photovoice project, which was used to develop educational materials for the school system. overall, the project represents an engaging, collaborative approach to addressing the problem of bullying in public schools. the content analysis of photos proved useful for a variety of reasons. first, the findings are relatively consistent with prior work on bullying. as such, the findings suggest that qualitative methodologies can supplement, and might even be more effective than, quantitative approaches. one interesting finding was that student photos depicted physical bullying more than emotional bullying. this finding may at first seem inconsistent with prior work which finds emotional bullying is most prevalent (bradshaw, sawyer, & o’brennan, 2007). however, physical abuse might have been depicted more frequently among student photos as it may be under-reported in prior research (demaray & malecki, 2003). if this is indeed the case, then this finding speaks to the validity of qualitative research as a tool to better understand youth experiences with bullying. the content analysis conducted on students’ photos additionally found that existing bystander responses were largely seen as ineffective. this is particularly interesting, given the proliferation of anti-bullying posters, signs, and positive messages that youth noted throughout the school. this provides further support for the notion that approaches to bullying prevention that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 primarily focus on student characteristics is largely ineffective (nickerson, 2017). an ecological intervention to impact overall school climate, such as the one implemented here, might be more effective at reducing bullying (orpinas, horne, & staniszewski, 2003). the photovoice component in general was very well-received by both teachers and school staff, and by students alike. students enjoyed participating in the project, even going so far as to applaud project staff when arriving on site. students and school teachers and staff alike felt that a byproduct of the approach was stronger connections to each other and building of trust. as can be seen in the resultant videos (available online), school teachers and staff noticed that participating youth shared more about their personal lives and experiences after participating in the project. further, the photographs were valuable to school teachers and staff, allowing them to not only better understand student experiences, but also to better identify physical locations where bullying was occurring in the school. this subsequently allowed the school to make minor, but meaningful, alterations in the school environment to reduce the likelihood of bullying (e.g., restructuring classrooms to discourage “packing,” monitoring physical areas of the school that were perceived as areas in which bullying frequently occurs, etc.). limitations this manuscript presents a preliminary look at a participatory action research project to address bullying, which included a photovoice component. limitations to the project include lack of assessment of the impact on reports of bullying and the omittance of quantitative indicators of bullying, such as counts of reported incidents. further, as students were occasionally absent, there was some variation on the extent to which students fully participated in the program; future work should explore dosage effects, and how attendance and participation effect program efficacy. the intervention was short-lived, occurring over a six-week period. it is possible that effects dissipated upon conclusion of the project. projects attempting to modify school climate are more effective when they are long-term and ongoing (nickerson, 2017). further, the middle school in which the project was conducted had an existing positive behavioral interventions and supports (pbis) program in place. pbis is a common bullying prevention approach which seeks to reduce bullying by way of character development and reinforcing positive behaviors (e.g., see nickerson, 2017, for a review). pbis programs have had some success in promoting a positive school climate. it is possible that the su2b project might have had a different impact in a school without an existing pbis program. implications for practice and future research this project has several implications for both bullying prevention programming and for future research. first, we implemented an intervention component, that of a yarn web, as both a preliminary icebreaker and as an analogy of the importance of community interconnectedness and support. to our knowledge, yarn webs, although a common icebreaker activity, have not been incorporated into bullying prevention programming in this manner. the activity was well-received by students, and engagement with the process was high. future work should empirically assess the impact of this activity on student interconnectedness and their understanding of the need to support each other as a way to reduce the impact of bullying. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 perhaps most importantly, the project highlights the promise of photovoice as a practical and effective intervention and research tool with youth (bashore et al., 2017). our experiences support prior research which has found that photovoice was seen by youth as more engaging than traditional research methods (drew, duncan, & sawyer, 2010; guillemin & drew, 2010). youth enjoyed the opportunity to express themselves through photography. further, our findings support prior work that found photovoice can lead to novel discoveries that differ from those uncovered with more traditional methodology (power, norman, & dupre, 2014). photovoice holds great potential as a tool with which to address bullying and to gain insight into the experiences of youth. the feedback received from students, teachers, and school staff suggests that the su2b project had potential impact that went well-beyond the targeted purpose of addressing bullying. students, teachers, and school staff indicated informally to project staff and on the created videos that an outcome of the project was a stronger, more trusting relationship between students and school teachers and staff. this was an unexpected outcome; teachers and school staff were not directly involved in nor addressed in the intervention. this feedback suggests that bullying prevention interventions which address bullying as a school climate issue might have a secondary impact of strengthening interpersonal relationships across different stakeholders in the school. this is a possibility worthy of future research. one of the benefits of photovoice is the portability and wide utility of the resultant product. the photos generated by student ambassadors served a variety of functions. not only were they accessible to the general public in a public art show, but they were used as the basis for a series of bullying prevention posters and videos that were subsequently adopted by the county public school district. the adaptability of photos to be used in these other creative outlets, and as an advocacy tool, is an advantage of photovoice methodology over traditional research methods (wang & burris, 1997). from a research standpoint, the project suggests that qualitative methodologies might provide useful ways of assessing the impact of field experiments. paluck (2017) posits that qualitative research methodologies can supplement or replace traditional quantitative methodologies in field experimentation settings. our experience suggests that photovoice could be used as a primary source of measurement in field experiments quite easily, and that the findings would provide information above and beyond that gleaned from quantitative approaches. endnotes 1 other definitions of bullying exist. for instance, paluck and shepherd (2012) discuss bullying in terms of harassment, defined as a cyclical pattern of student-to-student abusive behavior, which can occur regardless of student social status or perceived power. the cdc definition of bullying was used for this project, as it is consistent with the definition of bullying adopted by the county public school system in which the work was conducted. 2 the su2b project was conducted at a second intervention site consisting of an alternative school for youth who have exhibited behavioral problems requiring disciplinary action. however, the number of participants going through the su2b program at this second site was minimal. second, attendance and participation of youth at this site greatly fluctuated, due to both high absentee rates among this population, and the fact that many students were transferred back to the general http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 school population during the course of the project. therefore, this second intervention site is not reported on in this manuscript. 3 we are unable to calculate standard deviation on participants’ age, due to the manner in which the public-school system maintains student records and reports aggregate data. references aronson, e. 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(2004). bully busters: a psychoeducational intervention for reducing bullying behavior in middle school students. journal of counseling and development, 82, 259-267. doi: 10.1002/j.1556-6678.2004.tb00309.x nickerson, a. b. (2017). preventing and intervening with bulling in schools: a framework for evidence-based practice. school mental health. online publication 8/3/17 doi: 10.1007/s12310-017-9221-8 nickerson, a. b., & slater, e. d. (2009). school and community violence and victimization as predictors of suicidal behavior for adolescents. school psychology review, 38, 218–232. nishina, a., & juvonen, j. (2005). daily reports of witnessing and experiencing peer harassment in middle school. child development, 76(2), 435-450. doi:10.1111/j.14678624.2005.00855.x olweus, d. (1999). bullying prevention program. boulder, co: center for the study and prevention of violence, institute of behavioral science, university of colorado at boulder. orpinas, p., horne, a. h., & staniszewski, d. (2003). school bullying: changing the problem by changing the school. school psychology review, 32, 431444. pac 14 keeping kids connected. (2015a, october 30). 2015 stand up project final [video file]. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= n3uwj3d-_ro pac 14 keeping kids connected. (2015b, october 30). 2015 stand up project teachers and staff speak [video file]. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= tgwo8ak335s pac 14 keeping kids connected. (2015c, october 30). 2015 stand up tools final [video file]. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 9qie8zocuv4 pacer organization. (2017). pacer’s national bullying prevention center. available at: http://www.pacer.org/bullying/ paluck, e. l. (2017). the promising integration of qualitative methods and field experiments. the annals of the american academy of political and social science, 628, 59-71. doi: 10.1177/0002716209351510 paluck, e.l., & shepherd, h. (2012). the salience of social referents: a field experiment on collective norms and harassment behavior in a school social network. journal of personality and social psychology, 103, 899-915. doi: 10.1037/a0030015 polanin, j.r., espelage, d. l., & pigott, t.d. (2012). a meta-analysis of schoolbased bullying prevention programs’ effects on bystander intervention behavior. school psychology review, 41, 47-65. power, n. g., norman, m. e., & dupre, k. (2014). rural youth and emotional geographies: how photovoice and words-alone methods tell different stories of place. journal of youth studies, 17, 1114-1129. doi: 10.1080/13676261.2014.881983 reid, j. b., patterson, g. r., & snyder, j. (2002). antisocial behavior in children and adolescents: a developmental analysis and model for intervention. washington, dc: american psychological association. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3uwj3d-_ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3uwj3d-_ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgwo8ak335s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgwo8ak335s global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 rigby, k., cox, i., & black, g. (1997). cooperativeness and bully/victim problems among australian school children. the journal of social psychology, 137, 357-368. doi: 10.1080/00224549709595446 salmivalli, c., lagerspetz, k., bjorkqvist, k., osterman, k., & kaukiainen, a. (1996). bullying as a group process: participant roles and their relations to social status within the group. aggressive behavior, 22, 1–15. doi:10.1002/(sici)1098-2337 salmivalli, c., voeten, m., & poskiparta, e. (2011). bystanders matter: associations between reinforcing, defending, and the frequency of bullying behavior in classrooms. journal of clinical child & adolescent psychology, 40, 668-676. doi: 10.1080/15374416.2011.597090 smalley, b. k., warren, j. c., & barefoot, k. n. (2017). connection between experiences of bullying and risky behaviors in middle and high school students. school mental health, 9, 8796. strack, r.w., magill, c., & mcdonagh. k. (2004). engaging youth through photovoice. health promotion practice, 5, 49–58. doi: 10.1177/1524839903258015 strauss, a., & corbin, j. (1998). basics of qualitative research techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (2nd edition). sage: london. thornberg, r., pozzoli, t., gini, g., & hong, j. s. (2017). bullying and repeated conventional transgressions in swedish schools: how do gender and bullying roles affect students’ conceptions? psychology in the schools, 54, 1189-1201. doi: 10.1002/pits.22054 thornberg, r., wänström, l., & pozzoli, t. (2017). peer victimisation and its relation to class relational climate among school children. educational psychology, 37, 524–536. doi: 10.1080/01443410.2016.1150423 united states department of health and human services. (2017). stop bullying. available at: stopbullying.gov unnever, j. d., & cornell, d. g. (2004). middle school victims of bullying: who reports being bullied? aggressive behavior, 30, 373–388. doi: 10.1002/ab.20030 varjas, k., henrich, c. c., & meyers, j. (2009). urban middle school students' perceptions of bullying, cyberbullying, and school safety. journal of school violence, 8(2), 159-176 doi:10.1080/15388220802074165 wang, c., & burris, m. a. (1997). photovoice: concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. health education and behavior, 24, 369-387. doi: 10.1177/109019819702400309 wang, c. c., morrel-samuels, s., hutchison, p. m., bell, l., & pestronk, r. m. (2004). flint photovoice: community building among youth, adults, and policymakers. american journal of public health, 94, 911–913. wilford, a., boulton, a., noland, b., little, t.d., karna, a., & salmivalli, c. (2012). effects of the kiva anti-bullying program on adolescents’ depression, anxiety, and perception of peers. journal of abnormal child psychology, 40, 289-300. doi: 10.1007/s10802011-9562-y author note diana reinoso parnell is now with the university of maryland center for environmental science. we are thankful to cristal savage, micah stauffer, and the staff at the wicomico middle school wise afterschool program for their assistance in this project, students enrolled in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 the first author’s spring 2015 community and applied social psychology course, as well as to an anonymous reviewer for providing invaluable feedback on a prior draft of this manuscript. we would like to thank suzanna mallow of pac-14 for her songwriting abilities and assistance with filming and postproduction of project videos. we thank kaitlyn jackowski for her assistance in content coding of the photographs. finally, and most importantly, we thank our youth ambassadors for their enthusiasm and engagement throughout the project. funding was made available for this project by the governor’s office for children, state of maryland, awarded to the wicomico partnership for families and children. correspondence concerning this article can be addressed to the first author at: salisbury university, department of psychology, 1101 camden ave., salisbury, md 21801. email correspondence can be sent to: mmschlehofer@salisbury.edu. http://www.gjcpp.org/ microsoft word glenn williams_in defence of a multi-paradigmatic_formattedfinal.docx in defence of a multi-paradigmatic approach to theory development in community psychology glenn a. williams leeds beckett university keywords: theory, science, community psychology, framework, paradigm author biography: dr. glenn a. williams is a community psychologist and is committed to working towards: addressing inequalities in health and well-being; fostering inclusivity and challenging marginalisation; adopting a facilitative approach to individual and social change; and empowering people to make healthier choices for their lives. he has been a committee member of the community psychology section of the british psychological society (bps) since the section was formed in 2010 and he is currently chair of the section. he is chartered psychologist and associate fellow with the bps, international affiliate with the american psychological association, and member of the society for community research and action. glenn is employed by leeds beckett university (united kingdom) as principal lecturer in psychological therapies and mental health and previously worked for nottingham trent university (uk) for over 10 years as senior lecturer in psychology and internationalization coordinator. he is currently doing research into the psycho-social needs of people who convert to a different religion or spiritual tradition from that of their upbringing. he has also carried out studies into community arts initiatives and the role that arts participation can have on health and well-being. he has expertise spanning a period of over 20 years of evaluating interventions for health and well-being. he has expertise in using a range of quantitative, qualitative and mixed research methods to address social problems and has written extensively about using this range of strategies to conduct community-based research (e.g. williams & zlotowitz, 2013; williams & kibowski, 2016). recommended citation: williams, g.a. (2016). in defence of a multi-paradigmatic approach to theory development in community. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(2), pages 1-7. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). correspondence should be sent to glenn a. williams, school of health & community studies, faculty of health & social sciences, leeds beckett university, portland building 519, city campus, portland way, leeds ls1 3he, united kingdom. g.a.williams@leedsbeckett.ac.uk global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 in defence of a multi-paradigmatic approach to theory development in community it was once said, “there is nothing more practical than a good theory” (lewin, 1952, p. 169) and yet community psychology (cp) as a practical discipline is beset with a theorypractice gulf that does not appear to be narrowing. the article by jason, stevens, ram, miller, beasley, and gleason (2016) plays a commendable role in outlining the challenges faced by community-based researchers and practitioners in developing, testing and utilizing theoretical approaches that could reliably benefit the health and well-being of target groups in a community. quite rightly, jason et al. (2016) have acknowledged that theories used in the field of cp should more accurately be termed as frameworks, rather than constituting actual theories, since theories would be expected to offer a comprehensive methodology for explaining and predicting behaviors in a range of settings. and herein lies the problem… should the cp discipline be aimed at transposing findings, and theories, developed from research conducted in one type of social environment to a host of other potentially similar social settings? researchers and practitioners alike may experience tensions in attempting to replicate an intervention, based on a theory, with other samples and settings. there are recent worrying trends from one study to show that with “the current (selective) publication system [in academic journals], replications may increase bias in effect size estimates” (nuijten, et al., 2015, p.172). likewise, we find there is a tendency in academia to avoid publishing non-significant findings (franco, malhotra, & simonvits, 2014), even though a more honest and transparent approach to theory development and testing in cp would be through registration of hypotheses before a study has commenced, just as jason et al. (2016) have endorsed. this would certainly be a way forward, but until funding agencies and academic journals are unified in their insistence for all a priori hypotheses to be communicated prior to conducting a study, this may be only one way to build theories that are trustworthy in the field of cp. however, cp researchers, theorists, and practitioners face another, more pivotal challenge to being able to craft theories that can withstand tests of validity, reliability, and utility. jason et al.’s (2016) article appears to be mainly viewed through a post-positivist “lens,” which prizes numbers and the establishment of quantitative trends as the main source for theory development in cp. by reading jason and his colleagues’ (2016) citations of the heavyweights in the philosophy of science field, such as feynman and popper, the reader could be left wondering whether theories that have been used by cp can ever attain the same stature as theories generated by the “hard sciences.” however, although some philosophers of science are quoted, an important theorist is neglected, namely kuhn (2012), who proposed that science can progress via a process of revolutions in which paradigms influence the directions and assumptions of scientific enquiry; such paradigms are challenged and some of them can withstand such challenges. my argument here, however, is that we should not be making one paradigm – post-positivism – rule the roost in cp when there are two other global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 paradigms that can also be influential in their own way. these two paradigms – the constructivist and the transformative (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010) are vital to making progress in cp theory development and understanding how to engage in praxis by unifying the theories with community-based practices (kagan, et al. 2011). it is through the constructivist “lens” that community practitioners and researchers can better understand another community member’s world views and meaningmaking and, in so doing, can work towards a theoretical understanding of how these perceptions evolve. it is through the transformative “lens” that researchers and theorists can understand how best to generate meaningful social change through activism and by engaging fully with a stakeholder group and working from an understanding of this group’s interests and needs. it is through the transformative paradigm that analyses can be conducted into methodologies of effective social change and how best to implement such change, whereas the post-positivist paradigm has its utility in assessing the extent, or degree, of the changes being made. each paradigm asks different questions, but they all play a role in seeing a social, political, and psychological phenomenon through different eyes and having a more holistic understanding of the phenomenon. by adopting a multiparadigmatic approach, cp researchers and practitioners are less likely to be akin to the ‘blind men’ in the well-known parable of “the blind men and the elephant” (saxe, 1881), in which each blind man believed the elephant was solely like the body part of the elephant that was being touched at any given time and insisted his interpretation was right. on the contrary, such blind men were all correct in their own way but they were also wholly wrong by insisting that their perspective was the only correct one. jason et al. (2016) do well in their article to recognize the role of perspectivism and that an understanding of each researcher’s or theorist’s perspective can be pivotal to effective and accurate theory building. towards the end of jason et al.’s (2016) article, the reader is presented with an insight that argues for privilege and power to be acknowledged in relation to theory construction and research in cp. however, this seems more like an afterthought instead of being integral to how cp research and action should be conducted as a matter of course. there is also an implicit hierarchy in jason et al.’s (2016) paper, which is evident in the discussion of cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental designs, but there is little mention of qualitative research methodologies, participatory action research, fourth generation evaluation (guba & lincoln, 1989), and other mixed methods. by placing quantitative methods on a pedestal, the communitybased researcher and practitioner may run the risk of doing research and action on a target group rather than with, or on behalf of, those in a certain target group (williams, 2013). by contrast, qualitative methodologies, in particular, could help cp-relevant theory generation through adopting an inductivist approach by drawing from specific situational and process-oriented insights that research participants have offered. from these specific data, researchers may then be able to examine global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 the potential for transferable dynamics of social situations and interactions being experienced more generally by those in similar settings and with world views and perceptions that are also shared. disappointingly, jason et al. (2016) did not notice the role of grounded theory as a methodology in cp; by its very nature, grounded theory is utilized as a means whereby narratives from research participants can be transformed into a set of coding categories that are meant to show interconnectivity, and the process orientation explains how, and why, people act as they do. although grounded theory is not a common methodology within cp-relevant research, there are good practice examples in which theory can be grounded in the perspectives of study informants (rasmussen, et al., 2016). this inductivist approach is one way that cp can work with what matters to constituents in a sample group of interest, rather than giving undue prominence to the values and perspectives that the researcher brings to the enterprise. the inductivist approach could be a welcome antidote to the tendency in some studies to use general assumptions of how a social world might work and to then use the hyopotheticodeductive method to test out specific hypotheses emerging from these generalizations. this deductive approach rests on problematic assumptions, posing questions of primary interest to the researchers regardless of whether these questions interest those being researched. the resultant methodology that is deployed privileges certain dominant cultural norms and could deprive those in the target group of a voice. for instance, the ‘big five’ (costa, jr, terracciano, & mccrae, 2001) is lauded by jason et al. (2016) as having satisfactory levels of integrity, measurement rigor, and appeal. however, the big five is not without its criticisms (e.g. block, 1995, 2010), not least of which is its reliance on the lexical hypothesis of personality structures being best conveyed by language used by the general public. the big five model also rests on the shaky foundations of not fully resolving the emic-etic tension (dasen, 2012) of striving to find psychological universals while also needing to acknowledge the vital culture-specific influences that may often shape people’s behaviors and, in turn, their psychological, emotional, and relational well-being. models developed primarily from a western psychological context, such as the big five, may often emerge from efforts to constrain its parameters to a predetermined notion of how personality should be experienced and described, rather than from conscious efforts to start from within cultures and draw upon culturally-bound language and experiences. an example of how the big five may not be highly valid in all cultures was an effort to translate the model into arabic within the context of libya; only three out of the five factors emerged after careful translation and back-translation and confirmatory factor analytic tests of this personality model (abdelsalam, 2013). jason et al. (2016) make pertinent points about three cp-relevant theories that they selected out of 32 theories volunteered in a straw poll survey of users of the society for community research and action’s listserv. it is not entirely clear why those three were chosen, but all three certainly have an appeal in terms of their multi global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 layered approach to comprehending complex social phenomena. certainly, every researcher will have a favorite theory, and it was disappointing not to see hobfoll’s (2001) conservation of resources theory mentioned, especially as it too has a multi-layered perspective by scrutinising the influences on the wellbeing of people by scrutinizing people as entities nested within a range of social systems. what makes conservation of resources theory attractive is that there are a number of hypotheses that have been stipulated a priori (hobfoll, 1998) and these relate to resource loss and loss spirals, resource gain, social support, and resource appraisal. hobfoll’s theory has its roots in ecological theory and is it not surprising to see bronfenbrenner’s (1979) seminal approach as being at the heart of this main focus for jason et al. (2016), especially as the ecological theory has such an intuitive appeal for those working in a range of communities. jason et al. (2016) recognized the vital role for understanding how the social ecologies of microsystems, mesosystems, and macrosystems impact people’s health and well-being. however, it is also noteworthy that there are other systems of which community psychologists also might need to be cognisant: the exosystem, which has indirect influences on an individual’s life, and the chronosystem, which encompasses life transitions and embraces the transitory nature of a person’s existence. the chronosystem is particularly pertinent to practitioners in the field of cp because social actors need to be constantly adapting to changes in their social interactions and relationships over time. overall, the conclusion drawn by jason et al. (2016), that the “theory” part of the ecological theory is perhaps less of a theory, seems to ring true. this theory (or rather, framework), with its emphasis on interdependence, cycling of resources, adaptation, and succession, is perhaps more of a metaphor for how a person’s social worlds might interrelate. yet, metaphors, by their very nature, are not literal representations of a real dynamic; they rather share similar characteristics and, owing to this, we would need to be cautious about the utility of the ecological theory in lending itself to the generation of testable hypotheses. with sense of community theory, the challenge is balancing individual perceptions of a community of interest with that of a group’s perceptions. like ecological theory, sense of community as a concept seems to rely on taking more than one perspective by encompassing people as individuals and then people as aggregated groups. empowerment theory also encompasses this dualpronged approach by examining how individuals can be empowered by having enriching social environments in order to flourish. jason et al. (2016) have noted the inherent tensions if an individual’s empowerment capabilities are not fostered by an organization and where there could be the contradiction of having an organization that evinces empowerment among many of its members, but not all of them. this dynamic brings to mind processes of group-think (janis, 1982) and team-think (manz & neck, 1997) in which considerable pressure is brought to bear on team members to conform to group norms and ritualised behaviors. overall, jason et al. (2016) have depicted a compelling argument that the cp global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 discipline is bereft of theories that can withstand clear tests of: being amenable to a priori hypothesis generation, possessing unambiguous operationalization of concepts, and being replicable in a wide range of settings and situations. instead, it is evident from jason and his team’s (2016) arguments that they believe there is much to be achieved before commonly used frameworks and models in the field of cp can attain the status of being theory-like. where jason et al. (2016) and i diverge is the method for achieving better quality theories in cp. although quantitative data collection and analysis, born mainly out of the post-positivist enterprise, can offer a great deal of understanding of the breadth of people’s experiences, they cannot offer the depth of insight and the considerable potential for social change that the respective constructivist and transformative paradigms can offer. a better route for theory relevant to community-based researchers and practitioners is through adopting a practice that should become increasingly more common: utilizing mixed methods to research and to embrace multiple paradigms simultaneously. in doing so, tangible and testable theories can be sculpted to form the basis of making a real difference to people’s lives. references abdelsalam, a.a. (2013). the personal characteristics of university lecturers in libyan universities. unpublished phd thesis, nottingham trent university, united kingdom. block, j. (1995). a contrarian view of the five-factor approach to personality description. psychological bulletin, 117, 187-215. block, j. (2010). the five-factor framing of personality and beyond: some ruminations. psychological inquiry, 21, 2–25. bronfenbrenner, u. (1979). the ecology of human development: experiments by nature and design. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. costa, jr., p.t., terracciano, a., & mccrae, r.r. (2001). gender differences in personality traits across cultures: robust and surprising findings. journal of personality and social psychology, 81, 322–331. dasen, p. r. (2012). emics and etics in cross-cultural psychology: towards a convergence in the study of cognitive styles. in t.m.s. tchombe, a. b. nsamenang, h. keller and m. fülöp (eds.) cross-cultural psychology: an africentric perspective. (pp. 55-73). (proceedings of the 4th africa region conference of the iaccp, university of buea, cameroun, aug. 1-8, 2009.) limbe, cameroun: design house. franco, a., malhotra, n. & simonovits, g. (2014). publication bias in the social sciences: unlocking the file drawer. science, 345, 1502-1505. guba, e. g., & lincoln, y. s. (1989). fourth generation evaluation. london: sage. hobfoll, s.e. (1998). stress, culture, and community: the psychology and philosophy of stress. new york: plenum. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 hobfoll, s. e. (2001). the influence of culture, community, and the nestedself in the stress process: advancing conservation of resources theory. applied psychology, 50, 337-421. janis, i. l. (1982). groupthink: psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascoes. boston: houghton mifflin. jason, l. a., stevens, e., ram, d., miller, s. a., beasley, c. r., & gleason, k. (2016). theories in the field of community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice. 7(2), pp. 1-27. kagan, c., burton, m., duckett, p., lawthom, r., siddiquee, a. (2011). critical community psychology. chichester: wiley. kuhn, t.s. (2012). the structure of scientific revolutions: 50th anniversary edition. chicago: university of chicago press. lewin, k. (1952). field theory in social science: selected theoretical papers by kurt lewin. london: tavistock. manz, c.c. & neck, c.p. (1997). teamthink: beyond the groupthink syndrome in self-managing work teams, team performance management: an international journal, 3(1), 18-31. nelson, g. & prilleltensky, i. (2010). community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and well-being. 2nd edition. new york: palgrave macmillan. nuijten, m. b., van assen, m. a., veldkamp, c. l., & wicherts, j. m. (2015). the replication paradox: combining studies can decrease accuracy of effect size estimates. review of general psychology, 19(2), 172-182. rasmussen, a., akinsulure-smith, a.m., & chu, t. (2016). grounded theory. in l. a. jason and d. s. glenwick (eds.). handbook of methodological approaches to community-based research: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. new york, n.y.: oxford university press. saxe, j.g. (1881). the poems of john godfrey saxe (highgate edition). boston: houghton, mifflin and company. williams, g.a. (2013). doing community psychology research with people and for people, rather than on people challenges and ways forward. keynote presentation at bps community psychology section agm, december 16, 2013, london, united kingdom. strengthening community psychology in europe through increasing professional competencies for the new territorial community psychologists by donata francescato1 and bruna zani2 keywords: territorial community psychologist, critical community psychology, activism author biographies: donata francescato (www.donatafrancescato.it) was introduced to community psychology in 1970 doing an internship in quincy mass, and was an activist in the women’s movement in boston. after receiving her ph.d. (u. of houston 1972) she went back to italy where she wrote the first italian textbook on cp and funded effe, a feminist magazine (1972-1982) now available online www.efferivistafemminista.it. she was the first italian full professor of community psychology at rome sapienza university retiring in 2014. she also funded the european network of community psychologists (encp) and the european association community association (ecpa). in 2013 she was given an ecpa award for “advancing cp both in italy and in europe, and for her unique contribution to the development of specific intervention and research methods involving community profiles and organizational analysis”. she is author of 24 books, 150 papers and of the chapter on globalization in the apa handbook of cp. email (mc0938@mclink.i) bruna zani (www.unibo.it/docenti/bruna.zani.it) is full professor of social and community psychology at the university of bologna (italy), where she was dean of the faculty of psychology (20022008) and head of the school of psychology and education (2012-2015). from 2008 to 2012 she was president of the italian community psychology society. since 2006, she has been a member of the executive committee of the european community psychology association (ecpa), and since july 2015 she has been a member of the executive council of efpa (european federation of psychologists’ associations). her research interests are on risk and healthy behaviours in adolescence; risk perception and risk communication; 1 university la sapienza, rome, italy 2 university of bologna, bologna, italy http://www.efferivistafemminista.it/ mailto:mc0938@mclink.i) http://www.unibo.it/docenti/bruna.zani.it global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 service learning; wellbeing promotion; community development; civic engagement and political participation of adolescents and young people. on this latter topic, she has edited a book with m. barrett, political and civic engagement. multidisciplinary perspectives , routledge, london, 2015. email (bruna.zani@unibo.it) recommended citation: francescato, d. and zani, b. (2017). strengthening community psychology in europe through increasing professional competencies for the new territorial community psychologists. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(1), pages 1-14. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:bruna.zani@unibo.it) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 strengthening community psychology in europe through increasing professional competencies for the new territorial community psychologists abstract in this paper, we first discuss the “political activist” model proposed by critical community psychologists and the specific competencies needed to play this role. we then illustrate the recent passing of regional laws in italy that create the new figure of the “territorial community psychologist,” who works directly with the services of city municipalities. we outline the tasks the new laws assign to these territorial community psychologists and describe the competencies needed to perform the tasks these laws mandate. then we discuss if in italy we need to make further progress in our training of community psychologists to better prepare them for this new role of territorial community psychologists. finally, we consider if an integration of critical psychology and mainstream community psychology could contribute to strengthen community psychology in europe. introduction the purpose of this paper is to contribute to the heated debate that took place during the seminar of the european community psychology association (ecpa) held in lisbon in november 2015. the discussion concentrated on the merits and drawbacks of different roles community psychologists should play, as “political activists” or “practitioners.” we first discuss the “political activist” model proposed by critical community psychologists and the specific competencies needed to play this role. we then illustrate the recent passing of regional laws in italy that create the new figure of the “territorial community psychologist,” who works directly with the services of city municipalities. we describe which tasks they assign to these territorial community psychologists and outline the competencies needed to perform the tasks these laws mandate. then we discuss if in italy we need to make further progress in our training of community psychologists to better prepare them for this new role of territorial community psychologists. finally, we consider if an integration of critical psychology and mainstream community psychology could contribute to strengthen community psychology in europe. the political activist model postulated by critical community psychology critical community psychology (ccp) aims to promote better life conditions from an ecological, value-based, and justice-oriented perspective (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010), pursuing social justice, fighting wars and oppression. (arcidiacono & procentese, 2010). in fact, as burton, boyle, harris, & kagan (2007) have pointed out: ccp is a framework for working with those marginalized by the social system that leads to self-aware social change with an emphasis on value based, participatory work and the forging of alliances. . . . ccp is one alternative to the dominant individualistic psychology typically taught and practiced in the high-income countries. it is community psychology because it emphasizes a level of analysis and intervention other than the individual and their immediate interpersonal context. it is community psychology because it is nevertheless concerned with how people feel, think, experience, and act as they work together, resisting oppression and struggling to create a better world. (p. 219) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 recently prilleltensky and colleagues (2016) have developed a multidimensional model of wellbeing, namely the i coppe model. this novel tool considers wellbeing as a multifaceted construct composed of seven domains, that is: interpersonal, community, organizational, physical, psychological, economic and overall well-being. ccp aims to redefine current social, economic, and political systems as well as to build new ways of living. according to kagan et al. (2011), to reach these goals, community psychologists should commit to political engagement at the local, national, and international levels. community psychologists should support individuals, groups, organizations, or movements that are working to oppose inequality and disempowerment, to promote action on global warming and to protect the environment, and to fight for quality public services and against privatization of national health services. strategies and tools for action the four key strategies of critical community psychological action for change are: 1. furtherance of critical consciousness (coscientization), including problematization, experiential learning, capacitation, and deideologization; 2. creation of new forms of social relations and settings, including multidimensional nature of social situations, behavior settings, new or alternative social settings; 3. making links and the development of alliances and counter systems; 4. accompaniment, advocacy, and analysis of policy. critical community psychologists use a variety of tools to analyze local communities: community audit, community profiling, observation, and community walks. other tools are stakeholder analysis, decisionmaking, panda (participatory appraisal of needs and development of action), swot (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis, force field analysis, visioning (path process: planning alternative tomorrow with hope), and mixed methods (kagan et al. 2011). competencies required fulfilling the role of activist based on the work of liberation psychology, which puts at the center of the theory the concepts of oppression, liberation, and social justice, watts and colleagues (2003) pointed out that critical consciousness and empowerment develop concurrently through action, leading the person over time to become an activist: the activist is a person who acts strategically with others, on the basis of shared values, to create a more just society. the strategies include changing how society or its institutions operate (reform, evolution) and creating new institutions or a new society on the basis of alternative principles (revolution, transformation). methods and tactics include political participation, pressure tactics aimed at gaining concessions, armed struggle, or operating an organization with a mission of social change or liberation. these methods require knowledge, skills, and capacity; so, activism also includes methods at building capacity through community organizing, training, educating, and mobilizing. (watts et al., 2003, p.188) in addition to methodological skills, community critical psychologists need to have skills in interpersonal relationships, including active listening and other communication skills, such as team work, group process facilitation, taking the perspective of the “other”, and bearing witness to oppression… partnership must be based on trust and mutual respect…it http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 is preferable to acknowledge power imbalances.” (nelson et al., 2004, p.3) other skills needed include the ability to talk in public, to spread ideas through old and new media (print, television, internet sites, blogs, and interventions in social networks like twitter, facebook etc.), to organize manifestations, and to write press reports. these skills are currently not taught in most community psychology university programs. some students learn them by shadowing a teacher who is interested in one or more broad social problems like violence on women, unemployment, and migrants. the professional role model as viewed by policy makers: tasks assigned to territorial psychologists by recent laws in italy academic community psychologists who are paid by universities or research centers, can teach, perform innovative research and dedicate much of their time also to the activist role promoted by critical community psychologists. however professional community psychologists, whether selfemployed or working in community services or associations, must pursue more specific and limited goals, working on projects for which they can be paid, since they need to earn a living as community psychologist practitioners (francescato & zani, 2010). one way to know what competencies are required and wanted is to explore what policy makers, through local laws, would like community psychologists to do. therefore, in this part of our paper we will discuss the recent passing of two regional laws and one city law in italy that create a new figure of the “territorial community psychologist” who works directly in municipalities, documenting which tasks the laws assign to these territorial community psychologists. the basilicata law (2007) the first regional law that introduces the figure of the “social community psychologist” was passed by basilicata, a small region in southern italy in 2007. the aim of this law was to insure “continuity of response to the needs of support, care, assistance, health and wellbeing of persons and families through the coordinated involvement of institutions and services of local communities.” the passing of this law was actively promoted by local psychologists who studied community psychology in rome and disseminated among colleagues some community psychology textbooks (francescato & ghirelli 1988; francescato, tomai & ghirelli 2002). they represented a small minority of basilicata’s psychologists, who work mostly as psychotherapists in private practice or as clinical psychologists in health services. however, some of these rome-trained psychologists also worked in local cooperatives and became more aware of the need to use a community approach to deal with the many social problems in their areas. southern italy, a less developed part of the country, was beset by high unemployment and poor quality social and health services. they became active in local politics, and gained the trust of local politicians, persuading them that community psychology approaches were needed. acting as consultants, they even wrote parts of the regional social assistance plan policy makers were preparing. their activism proved fruitful. the regional socio-assistance plan for 2000-2003 instituted a municipal social service, which was required to provide a social worker for every 5,000 inhabitants and a social community psychologist for every 12,000 inhabitants, working at least 18 hours per week. the law of 2007 built on the regional socio-assistance plan for 2000-2003, and prescribed that social community psychologists should conduct community analysis to assess strengths and problems, conduct focus groups, and perform organizational analysis of institutions, associations and groups operating in the community. moreover, the social community http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 psychologist should activate empowerment processes for individuals, groups and organizations. strengths and weaknesses emerged in the implementation process the major strength can be found in the fact that more than 70 psychologists were hired in different municipalities of the region, grouped in thirteen geographical areas, which varied in the number of municipalities they included. basilicata has two major towns: potenza and matera, and many small towns and villages spread around a wide mountainous territory with winding roads which do not allow for easy travel. being hired by municipalities allowed psychologists working in these areas to enjoy greater autonomy to plan their activities responding to local needs. however, psychologists hired in certain areas, which included several small municipalities, ended up having only a few hours each month for each municipality since they spent so much time traveling from one location to the other. moreover, periodic monitoring and evaluation of activities performed by psychologists in different areas showed that passing a law was a necessary step, but it did not guarantee that psychologists performed community psychologist activities prescribed by the law for two important reasons: 1) time needed for urgent issues overtook social community psychology activities and 2) not enough of the psychologists who were hired had the needed training. first, most psychologists found they had to deal with a myriad of different kinds of “emergency” problems, having to offer consultation to residents facing disability, old age, drug dependency, family conflicts, and adoption issues. more recently they also had to counsel migrants and refugees, who had been assigned to reside in different localities. since most psychologists had been hired on a part time basis, with only twenty hours a week to spend in more than one locality, they quickly found that once they dealt with these emergencies, they had little time left to perform community analysis, focus groups or organizational analyses. second, in italy most psychologists are trained as clinical psychologists and psychotherapists, and few learn community psychology methodologies; therefore, only about 10% of the psychologists hired by the municipalities carried out community psychology activities. the psychologists who did use some community psychology methodologies all had at least some training in community psychology skills in master’s programs or in private institutes training psychotherapists which also offered community psychology courses. basilicata’s psychologists have become fully aware that passing a law is an important first step, but if the psychologists hired in the municipalities, do not know community psychology intervention methodologies, they will spend most of their time doing counseling at an individual or family level. the regional order of psychologists of basilicata is therefore now trying to increase the number of paid hours for each psychologist working in municipalities. it has also started a training program to teach community psychologists skills to both psychologists already employed in the municipalities and to young psychologists who aspire to work there. in the fall of 2015 the order promoted a three-day workshop with donata francescato on community analysis, networking, organizational, and empowerment methodologies aimed at individuals and small groups. about fifty psychologists, half of whom had almost no knowledge about intervention methodologies of community psychology, participated in the workshop and asked for further training opportunities. the campania law (2013) in august 2013, the region of campania, situated in southern italy, including naples as http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 the main city, passed regional law n.9. this law instituted a service of territorial psychology to guarantee that citizens of region campania could have access to psychological services necessary to meet their needs. it mandates that single municipalities or groups of municipalities institute in their social plan unit, a service of territorial psychology, in which at least one psychologist is present for every ten thousand inhabitants. the service of territorial psychology has these aims: a) to contribute to the relational wellbeing of people who live in the territory, to tackle and prevent relational problems in families, schools and in the community; b) to promote the full and harmonic development of the individual in family, work, friendship, leisure time, associative and community contexts. to reach these goals the service of territorial psychology intervenes with the following activities: a) support of residential and day structures for people with disabilities or social problems; b) assistance to centers for battered and abused women; c) protection of those who are likely to become victims of physical, sexual and psychological violence; d) support of family with members with disabilities; e) assistance to multiproblem families at high risk of implosion; f) support of families in the adoption processes; g) support of minors and adults who have penal legal problems; h) promotion of full psycho-social integration of immigrants and refugees; i) consultation with schools and planning of activities to promote school wellbeing, successful academic achievement, prevent school dropout, diminish youth discomfort and risky behaviors. this law was strongly promoted by psychologists who were activists for a shelter for abused women, and by community psychologists trained at naples with caterina arcidiacono and fortuna procentese. they organized several innovative community psychology laboratories, who put students in contact with key figures in the community, including local politicians. having access to some politicians involved in policy making and having the opportunity to influence their thinking was an important factor in passing the law instituting the role of territorial psychologist. only a brief period elapsed since the law was passed and we do not yet have evaluation reports on how territorial psychologists have fared. promoting a new law to institute a territorial psychologist in udine (2016) the experience currently under way in udine and nine municipalities of the region friulivenezia giulia (located in the north east of italy) is very interesting for several reasons. first, also in this region, the regional order of psychologists has been playing a leading role in promoting the passing of a new law. learning from the experience in basilicata, the order has also taken some steps to spread community psychology values and theoretical principles among its members, who are mostly clinical psychologists and psychotherapists. particularly the order’s board has become keenly aware of the need to teach community psychology skills to psychologists who want to work as territorial psychologists. the basic assumption guiding this project is that before the law is passed it is necessary to promote a cultural change http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 among psychologists and the public to favor acceptance of the new role of territorial psychologists. the order has created a “community psychology task group” composed of members of local universities, local politicians and members of community associations. they also decided to experiment this new territorial role in udine and nine other nearby small municipalities by signing a formal agreement that provides that volunteer psychologists will work for four hours a week in each of these nine municipalities in deprived neighborhoods. meanwhile they are also trying to create a master’s in community psychology to train the territorial psychologists who will work in the municipalities when the law will pass. in april 2016, the order held a press conference to publicize the formal agreement reached with the nine municipalities, explaining why psychologists need to work in the territory, leaving the walls of their private study, where mostly they are engaged in individual and family counseling or psychotherapy. local print and television media gave ample reports explaining why there is a need for community psychology approaches in their territory. the community psychology task group also promoted a conference, in which different speakers talked about community psychology principles and intervention methodologies focusing particularly on how one can promote personal, groups, organizational and community empowerment. in the same day, a workshop with donata francescato was also offered on how to increase personal empowerment, and on how to use traditional (radio, tv), internet and social media (facebook, twitter) to increase personal and small group empowerment and decrease unwanted media influence in our lives. the community psychology task group released during the april 2016 conference, a first draft of what they considered appropriate activities for a territorial psychologist to perform, based on the acquired competencies. he/she should: 1) analyze the needs and resources, and the future perspectives of a territory using community analysis techniques such as community profiling; 2) plan intervention programs through participatory action research; 3) evaluate services and intervention programs; 4) offer brief consultation services for empowering individuals, families, and groups; 5) increase the organizational empowerment of community organizations, associations, and schools using appropriate participatory multidimensional methodologies; 6) promote networking among local groups, institutions and associations; 7) explore alternative and innovative ways to answer specific local needs; 8) mediate social conflicts occurring in different life contexts (education, work, leisure time, etc.) 9) promote and implement empowerment, socio-affective, and peer education training programs for specific community groups (such as children, youth, old people, migrants, women, and sports mentors). the community psychology task group members were trained in rome with donata francescato and manuela tomai, and in bologna with bruna zani and cinzia albanesi. moreover, the members were also activists in local associations in friuli, and they had positive relations with some local politicians of different parties. main activities assigned to territorial psychologists in all the three laws http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 all three laws give strong emphasis on preventive activities and particularly on building strengths and improving relational wellbeing in all the major areas of citizens’ lives. all three also mandate supporting individuals and families who are already facing specific problems. lawmakers seem to be strongly aware that the recent economic crisis has worsened the lot of the poorest and most marginalized groups of citizens, living in contexts already beset by environmental, social and political problems. the differences between poor and rich, migrants and natives, together with the generational and gender gaps, create multilevel problems that are best handled through a community psychology approach. at the core of these divides is the issue of how to relate to the “other” and how to build positive relationships. the passing of these laws with their emphasis on promoting relational wellbeing at the individual, family, small group, organizational, and community levels gives territorial community psychologists a chance to give an important contribution in this direction. the laws passed in basilicata and campania and the one being promoted in friuli, share several common activities of the territorial psychologists. all three want territorial psychologists: 1) to perform community analysis and promote networking among the institutions, associations, and services of their municipalities, increasing the active participation of citizens; 2) to empower organizations in the community and to organize specific empowerment training programs for groups of citizens (such as children, youth, older people, and migrants), to promote relational wellbeing; and 3) to intervene to support residents who face specific difficulties, such as migrants, conflictridden families, families with members who have special needs (handicap, adoption, penal legal problems etc.). in all three regions, laws were promoted by some community psychologists who acted both as political activists and as professional community psychologists, spreading community psychology values and participatory intervention methodologies. we now turn to examine whether existing community psychology training programs in italy promote the competencies and the intervention methodologies required to perform the tasks these new laws assign to territorial community psychologists. cp competencies that are already present in italian training programs and those that need to be further developed practice competencies included in most italian cp programs one main competency already established in italian cp is action research, or participatory action research. other frequently taught skills are program planning and evaluation. moreover, quantitative and qualitative data analyses are learned in most academic cp programs. these competencies will help territorial community psychologists to plan intervention programs through participatory action research, and to evaluate services and intervention programs as these new laws prescribe. another core competence that is currently taught in most community courses is small group management. in community psychology, group dynamics management is crucial since most of our interventions (from action research to program planning and evaluation, and from consultation to empowering organizations and communities) are very often done in small groups. networking among groups to promote bonding and bridging social capital also requires an understanding of small group processes. in some universities, empowering http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 group workshops are offered face-to-face and online to help students to evaluate the weak and strong points of group functioning; to understand which functions assist group processes and tasks and which hinder group development. students in these workshops also consider the advantages and disadvantages of various methods of decision making, problem solving, and conflict resolution. an important component is sharing these competencies with members of established community groups aiming to empower them to meet their goals. another important learning objective is how to promote new self-help groups needed in the community and how to assist members in their first three or four meetings. these group competencies will be much needed by the new figures of territorial community psychologists. competencies, skills and tools that are offered in some italian programs that need to become more widely taught and used some of the competencies and skills the new laws require are not taught in all italian community psychology programs. in some graduate programs, students learn how to promote partnerships with public institutions at the regional and local level, and to network with unions, schools, police departments, and volunteer organizations of all kinds, creating and implementing integrated intervention programs (zani, 2012). obviously, this particular competency will be especially useful for territorial community psychologists working directly with politicians and administrators at the local level, but training in this competency is not universally available. for example, here we describe four competencies in more detail that need to be more widely learnt to prepare territorial community psychologists for the tasks the laws ask them to perform. community profiling and network building through participatory action research, territorial community psychologists can find out what problems and strengths characterize a local community for different groups of residents and identify their most desired changes. this community profiling includes examining eight domains: territorial, demographic, economic, service, institutional, anthropological perceptions, psychological perceptions, and visions of the future. first a core research group made up of experts in each profile domain is formed and then interviews with these experts are performed. next, special focus groups with dominant and marginalized groups in the community are carried out to explore perceptions, emotions, desires, and fears for the future of the community. in each focus group, first a preliminary analysis is carried out: participants use brainstorming techniques to come up with positive and negative aspects of their community. each comment is then classified as primarily belonging to one of the eight profile domains. this allows researchers to determine which community profiles are perceived as more problematic and which are perceived more positively. it also gives a first measure on how empowered or disempowered participants perceive their communities to be: if more positive points are mentioned, this is an indicator of a perceived empowered community; if more negative comments appear, it is an indicator of a perceived disempowered community. the focus groups lead to a creation activity where participants are invited to develop a plot for a movie script about their community. after this creative phase and the presentation of its results through narration and dramatization, group members are invited to discuss their movie script contents, including the emotions they experienced and portrayed in the narratives together with the problems and strengths that emerge from their narrative about their community. participants then focus on the future of the community, and members discuss: http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 a) how they imagine their community in ten years, b) their major fears, and c) what they desire most for the future of their community. in the final discussion, members of the focus groups outline possible solutions to identified problems and how to obtain desired changes in their community. once the focus groups discussions conclude, there is a presentation of all results in large public meetings during which participants formulate the main priorities for change, identifying which strong aspects of the community they can count on to obtain desired changes in the most problematic aspects identified. specific activities that need to be performed to achieve desired goals are also outlined. (for more details about how this methodology was developed, including several other european countries see arcidiacono, tuozzi & procentese, 2016; ehmayer in press; francescato & mebane, 2015; francescato & zani, 2013) participatory multidimensional organizational analysis (pmoa) empowering organizations and associations in a community is a crucial aim for territorial community psychologists since they affect personal, relational, and collective wellbeing for all members of a local community, who spend a large portion of their life in them. italian community psychologists have developed a specific methodology to promote organizational empowerment. it is called participatory multidimensional organizational analysis (pmoa). using pmoa, individuals representing all hierarchical levels of large organizations (e.g. students, parents, teachers, janitors, and office staff in a school setting) or all members of small ones (fewer than 30) analyze their organization across four dimensions; structural-strategic, functional, cultural, and psycho-environmental. examining the structural strategic dimension, the participants: a) explore the strategic history of their organization (i.e., when it was born, what goals and visions it had, how strategic goals have changed over time); b) assess organizational performance using specific criteria (positioning, etc.); and c) define strategic objectives for the immediate future and for next five years. analyzing the functional dimension, participants outline tasks needed to reach strategic aims and deal with emergencies. additionally, they examine activity flows and detect points of strengths and problem areas using methodologies from sociology and organizational disciplines. the cultural dimension explores group and individual emotional variables using tools from cultural psychology, cultural anthropology, and socio-analysis. group drawings, recurrent jokes, pictures hung on walls, are often used. to capture problemsolving styles, the movie script technique is also employed. the psycho-environmental dimension explores the fit between individuals’ expectations and organizational pressures, using tools from organizational psychology to measure leadership styles, communication, and conflict resolution patterns. participants state preferred functions they may want to exercise in the future and whether they have the skills needed or if they need further training. evaluation of the efficacy of pmoa has been carried out on 140 organizations ranging from unions to schools, from volunteer organizations to hospitals, from small family firms to governmental organizations (for more details in english and spanish on the development of pmoa, see francescato & aber, 2015; francescato & zani, 2013; francescato, tomai & mebane, 2006). these new organizational empowering tools have spurred considerable interest in the global cp community; italian community psychologists have been invited to hold workshops in several european countries, in south africa, and in latin america. additionally, these efforts have had some practical effects on academic cp training. arcidiacono (2013) found that, compared to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 the nineties, more courses on organizational empowerment were offered in european cp programs and more chapters on the topic appear in several recent cp textbooks, especially in germany and italy. however, organizations remain a minority or neglected topic in most cp programs worldwide. recently there has been an increase in interest in the usa, with the publication of three special issues in the journal of community psychology. organizational empowerment is a topic that needs to become more included in university cp courses to ensure that future territorial community psychologists will have the knowledge and skills necessary to promote organizational empowerment in their communities. sociopolitical empowerment training sociopolitical empowerment labs integrate concepts and tools from the affective education movement, feminist consciousnessraising groups, critical community psychology, and mainstream community psychology. they explore the congruence between personal desires and competencies and what the outside world offers. these labs have participants focus first on reflecting how our needs and wishes are influenced by the specific mass media we use daily and by those available to us during our early adolescence (favorite songs, movies, internet sites etc.). then participants examine the political socialization experienced in family, peer groups, school, and specific mass media and social networks, and how one can use media to actively promote desired changes. they detect the strong and weak points of the small groups of which they are members, and, using short versions of pmoa and community profiling, they explore opportunities and problem areas in these territorial contexts. finally, they select priorities for personal change that they can manage on their own. for desired collective changes, participants identify other people, groups, and/or institutions with which they may network to achieve these wider goals (francescato et al., 2009, francescato & zani 2013) these empowerment methodologies could be very useful for territorial community psychologists who are asked to develop specific empowerment training programs for groups of citizens such as migrants, women, children, youth, and older people. combining some of these methodologies, such as community profiling, pmoa and sociopolitical empowerment training, can give a strong contribution to the goal of “promoting the full and harmonic development of the individual in family, work, friendship, free time, associative and community contexts” as the campania law codifies. community profiling, pmoa, and sociopolitical empowerment training competencies can be taught through computer supported collaborative learning as we have verified in several pilot studies which have been summarized in a book chapter available online in english (francescato, mebane, tomai, benedetti, & rosa, 2012). in fact, we strongly recommend consideration of the opportunities provided by virtual communities to train territorial community psychologists who may also decide, depending on local needs, to choose social networks and virtual communities as a new potential intervention setting. consulting and giving aid to people already suffering from different forms of deprivation and malaise using critical community psychologists’ insights in basilicata, most of the time of the territorial community psychologists was taken up by emergency consulting and counseling to individuals and families. the campania law specifically states that the territorial community psychologist should intervene to help people with disabilities; abused women, people who are likely to become victims of physical, sexual and psychological violence, families at high risk of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 implosion, minors and adults with legal penal problems; and immigrants and refugees. most italian psychologists are trained as clinicians so they have some consulting and counseling skills. however, the territorial community psychologists should focus more on using brief, future oriented, political consciousness raising and empowerment counseling. therefore, they may need more specific training to perform this type of empowerment counseling, which is partially based on critical psychology political awareness building (francescato & zani 2013). conclusions to strengthen community psychology in europe we should integrate both critical community psychology insights and improve the competencies and skills of practicing community psychologists so they can perform, for instance, the activities that the new regional laws in italy assign to the new figure of the territorial community psychologists. critical psychologists’ viewpoints are crucial to raise awareness of the global political, structural, and economic dynamics that contribute to create the marginalization and the suffering of the most vulnerable people. as practitioners, we should select among the many global problems that characterize our present world, the ones which are strongly present in our local contexts. in europe, for instance, we should privilege empowering interventions for young people who neither work nor study (the neet generation), for the immigrants from different religious and ethnic groups that require integration, and for women victims of domestic violence. these are huge problems in many european countries, and we have as community psychologists accumulated significant experience in intervening in these specific areas. however, to develop more community programs we also need to become more politically active to convince local politicians to pass laws that create more job opportunities for practicing community psychologists, as has happened in italy. integrating the activist and the practitioner roles will permit us to overcome some of the limits of both roles. community psychologists who focus primarily on activism often do not recognize the great disparities that exist between the multitude of economic, political, and environmental problems that beset our planet and the means community psychologists must use to solve them. on the other hand, community practitioners sometimes focus too much on local issues, neglecting the broader global roots of various forms of oppressions. to reach integration, we need to show respect to both roles recognizing their limits and their strengths. references arcidiacono, c. & procentese, f. (2010), participatory research into community psychology within a local context, global journal of community psychology practice, 1 (2), 1-10. arcidiacono, c. (2013) reflections and actions in community psychology. (ecpa bulletin n.1) retrieved from http//www.ecpa-online.eu arcidiacono, c., tuozzi, t., & procentese, f. (2016). community profiling in participatoryaction research. in l. a. jason & d. s. glenwick (eds.), handbook of methodologicalapproaches to communitybased research: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods (pp.355–364). new york: oxford university press. burton, m., boyle, s., harris, c., & kagan, c. (2007). community psychology in britain. in s. m. reich, m. riemer, i. prilleltensky, & m. montero (eds.), international community psychology: history and theories (pp. 219– 237). new york, ny: springer. ehmayer, c. (in press), how to diagnose a city – the activating city diagnosis (acd) as an innovative tool for participatory urban development. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 francescato, d. & aber, m. (2015) learning from organizational theory to build organizational empowerment. journal of community psychology, vol. 43, no. 6, 717– 738. francescato, d. & ghirelli, g. (1988). fondamenti di psicologia di comunità. roma: nis francescato, d. & mebane, m. (2015) learning innovative methodologies to foster personal, organizational and community empowerment through online and face to face community psychology courses universitas psychologica, 14(4), 15-25. francescato, d. & zani, b. (2010) community psychology in europe: more needed, less wanted. journal of community & applied social psychology, 20,445-454. francescato, d. & zani, b. (2013). community psychology practice competencies in undergraduate and graduate programs in italy. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), 1-12. francescato, d., tomai m. & ghirelli, g. (2002) fondamenti di psicologia di comunità. principi, strumenti, ambiti di applicazione. roma: carocci. francescato d., tomai m., mebane, m. (2006) psicologia comunitaria en la ensenanza y la orientacion. experiencias de formacion: presencial y online. madrid: narcea. francescato, d., solimeno a., mebane, m. & tomai, m. (2009) increasing students perceived political empowerment through online and face to face community psychology seminars. journal of community psychology, 37, 7, 874-894. francescato d., mebane m., tomai m., benedetti m., rosa v. (2012). promoting social capital, empowerment and counterstereotypical behavior in male and female students in online cscl communities. in: h. cuadra montiel (ed.). globalization, book 1, intech, 75-108. kagan, c., burton, m., duckett, p., lawthom, r., siddiquee, a. (2011). critical community psychology, chichester, uk: bps blackwell, wiley. nelson, g., poland, b., murray, m. matickatindale, e. (2004). building capacities in community health action research. toward a praxis framework for graduate education, action research, 2, 389-408. nelson, g. & prilleltensky, i. (2010). community psychology. in pursuit of liberation and well-being (2nd ed.) new york: palgrave macmillan. prilleltensky, i., dietz, s., prilleltensky, o., myers, n.d., rubenstein, c.l., jing, y., & mcmahon, a. (2016). assessing multidimensional well-being: development and validation of the i coppe scale. journal of community psychology, 43(2), 199–226. watts, r.j., williams, n.c., & jagers, r.j. (2003) sociopolitical development, american journal of community psychology, vol. 31, no 1-2, pp. 185-194 zani, b. (2012) (ed.) psicologia di comunità: prospettive, idee, metodi. (community psychology, perspectives, ideas and methods) roma: carocci http://www.gjcpp.org/ by donata francescato and bruna zani the premise of persistence: deconstructing colonial authority in community psychology curricula and structures, towards liberative andragogy and practice ericka d. mingo1, christopher balthazar1, and bradley olson1 keywords: decoloniality, premise of persistence, community psychology education recommended citation: mingo, e. d., balthazar, c., olson, b. (2021). the premise of persistence: deconstructing colonial authority in community psychology curricula and structures, towards liberative andragogy and practice. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(3), 1-17. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: ericka mingo, assistant professor, national louis university, 122 s. michigan ave. chicago, il 60603, 312.261.3674. email: emingo@nl.edu 1 national louis university http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:emingo@nl.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 the premise of persistence: deconstructing colonial authority in community psychology curricula and structures, towards liberative andragogy and practice for my people blundering and groping and floundering in the dark of churches and schools and clubs and societies, associations and councils, and committees and conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches, preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty margaret walker for my people, published as the selection of the year in the yale university series of younger poets in 1942. abstract in the u.s., community psychology (c.p.) arose in the 1960s, attempting to break traditional clinical and research psychology patterns. while cp rejected many eurocentric and oppressive ideas, remnants remain in every ecological corner of our work: research, professional organization, academic institutions, and community practice. there are also underlying assumptions that white authority, domination, and control systems will persist throughout time. this "premise of persistence" is a damaging and almost universal assumption in the field, particularly for students, and can limit the conceptualization of freedom and autonomy for oppressed populations. the premise of persistence lives inside many of our theories, forcing research and practice to reside within first-order change efforts. this paper takes a historical look a the origins, maintenance, and risks of the premise of persistence. what is proposed is the deconstruction of existing literature, prevalent ideology, and even gatekeeping in community psychology classrooms, which often insists on empowerment as the end goal, without consideration of more radical second-order change. the premise in the u.s., community psychology arose in the 1960s, attempting to break out of traditional colonizing clinical and research psychology patterns. although community psychology rejected many eurocentric and oppressive ideas, remnants remain in almost every corner of the field: research, professional organization, academic institutions, and community practice. the impact of the relatively long-standing effects of colonialism is expressed in a variety of nuanced phenomena. one such phenomenon is the premise of persistence. the premise of persistence is the background assumption that white authority, domination, and control, are the reality and will continue to persist throughout time. it is a damaging and almost universal assumption, acting as a universal truth, which limits conceptualizations of freedom and autonomy for those who have suffered and continue to suffer and stagnate due to white aggression and colonialism. the impact of this underlay is that it in many ways dictates how politics, businesses, music, art, medicine, media, law, and other vital elements of our society are http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 conceptualized and conducted. if white authority is the perceived reality, then all who perceive it as such must act within that paradigm; if it is concurrently perceived as perpetual, it is then an enduring and almost invisible component of the way that those operating under the premise view the world and their place in it. to imagine a world outside of white authority would seem foolish to those who perceive the premise as a natural rule. euro-authority is, and will always be; this is the premise that many people of color and white people start from, in almost every consideration, to such an extent that it is practically invisible, background noise, as usual as the subjugation and oppression that it is born of. it is just the way things are, and as they always will be. the premise incapacities actions against it, deforms all within it, and perverts any outputs from it. it is present within the u.s., quietly reinforcing notions that the colonial status quo is everlasting. an example of the ways in which the premise incapacitates threats to it can be seen in the institutional response to racial unrest in the summer of 2020, when many institutions instated or expedited efforts aimed at racial inclusion. the goal was that white-lead institutions were to actively and intentionally “include” marginalized groups towards greater levels of institutional equity. in this action the premise is clear; the institution belongs to the "included," and it was to be through their benevolence only that the excluded would be granted access. this action of appeasement was a granting of greater access to the white-dominated world, not the end of it. institutions often feel as if the greater access is a step too far. both the institutions and the black people and people of color within them often, due to the premise, do not even consider the surrender of ill-gained power; it is inconceivable. remaking unjust power structures is often a notion beyond comprehension at worst and foolish and romantic, at best. to dare to propose democratic power-sharing, an intentional dismantling of centralized white and white serving systems of authority and control, to rebuild institutions toward decentralized non-hierarchical ecologically informed and collectively owned models, are seldom part of "realistic conversations." the very articulation of such models often evokes rolled eyes, heavy sighs, and claims of pie-inthe-sky and impracticality. such a reaction is the ever-persistent premise at play, reminding that the status quo is insurmountable and those in power within it are unmovable. challenges to white-authority appear naive, foolish, and out of touch with “reality," the reality constructed and maintained in part by the premise. the notion that the history of racism, oppression, and white rule will continue into the indefinite future, perhaps forever, lives inside many academic and intellectual spaces, in unique ways, guiding research and practice toward first-order shifts exclusively. this paper aims at a multilayered deconstruction of the premise, with close attention to the history of it, how and why it is maintained, its impact on black students, and the ways that it exists within the field of community psychology, its academic policies, practices, individual students, professors, research, practice, and ultimately outcomes. the history of the premise to understand the history of the premise, a history of race must first be understood. to do so, race must be separated from eurocentric manipulations and tainted racial classifications. müller-wille (2014) sought to unravel the racial understandings of 18thcentury naturalist carl linnaeus, credited with the first categorization and conceptualization of race. the classification of human distinctions, put forth by linnaeus in his work systema naturae (1735), is commonly understood to have laid the groundwork for modern understandings of race and categorizing humans into http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 taxonomies. though linnaeus is credited with the first categorization, many other populations and people had recorded these distinctions earlier on. by the time that linnaeus traveled and wrote his classifications, african and other noneuropean people had traveled the world, in some cases centuries ahead of linnaeus. they encountered many different physical characteristics (davis & sertima, 1978). african people, and those native to what is now known as the americas, understood and even developed names for such distinctions. diop (1997) asserted a heavy african, and asian influence on "ancient" greek and roman understandings of racial distinctions. this understanding suggests that african concepts of categorization were possibly the genesis for the categorizations of linnaeus and likely predated them. the idea that humans failed to notice aesthetic differences in other human groups until europeans classified them is in itself imperialistically problematic and representative of the pathology surrounding the presumption that white knowledge equates to origin. to then use that assumption, coupled with violence and global aggression, to demand acquiescence to the distortion, is an essential component of the premise of persistence. race as a system of classification had not been historically harmful prior to eurodistortion. as stated, many civilizations engaged in classifying plants, wildlife, and peoples. even systema naturae was a relatively benign european formal classification. the distorted uses of the classifications later on, set the stage for more modern conceptions of race held by and large today. alexander (2010), in her work the new jim crow, asserted that race is only a few centuries old and is primarily a result of european imperialism, which leans to the interpretation of race as a euro-constructed hierarchy of superiority. the notion of pseudo superiority enabled colonialism, european invasion, and conquest is described by clarke (1970): from the sixteenth century onward, europeans ranged the earth, conquering, mainly, defenseless people. they set themselves up as ruling aristocracies. in this world-wide rape of peoples and countries, they destroyed many cultures and civilizations that were old before europe was born. their rationales and justifications for these actions were the rankest form of racism ever conceived by the human mind. this tragedy continued during the era of colonization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and again in the era of neo-mercantilist revival called imperialism that had so many articulate defenders in the nineteenth century. clarke further describes the need to robe violent conquest in morality, through notions of superiority, and the role of european christianity in establishing a colonial hierarchy based on race: the christian church was the handmaiden for the development of racism. while it propagated the theory that all men were created equal in the sight of god, in practice, it found all sorts of arguments to prove that noneuropean peoples, especially black men, were inferior and could not be considered as men in the general sense. a search for ways to justify european domination over most of mankind led biologists to the works of linnaeus and buffon. thus, the classification of races began. in deciding the distinctions between higher and lower races, the europeans, of course, became the hierarch of races. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 structural violence has been so embedded in the euro-christian hierarchy of racial groups, that it has become psychologically invisible. modern racism, through classification and divisions, indeed began the moment some humans saw others as less than human. the concepts of psychological colonization and racism go hand in hand. it has been through these historical machinations that colonialism was possible. the premise of persistence and colonialism are constructed of the same materials, remaking existential understandings of one's place in the world. when the perception is that white authority is a given, anyone who is not white must arrange a subordinate place for themselves; this is particularly true for black people who as a result global anti-blackness, are often situated furthest from power, as those furthest from european phenotypes. this hierarchy of racial standing exists as a result of and in service to intentional misconceptions of race and the implicit principles ingrained in everyday assumptions as a result of those misconceptions, which place white people and social constructs, along with euro-features, as the epitome. why the premise is maintained it is beneficial at this juncture to address colonization intentionally, as it is inextricably linked to the ways the euro-authority has been constructed as indefinite. colonization is tied to people and place and is not an abstraction to be utilized outside of foreign dominion over indigenous people. conceptualizing colonialism and gaining a sense of the history, causes, and global nature of its dominant narratives, is an integral part of unveiling underlying presumptions of the ongoing authority of colonialism and colonialist. without colonialism, the premise would not exist, nor would the need for it. free people occupying and controlling their own lands for their own benefit, without external exploitation, would have no concept of white authority. nevertheless, colonialism exists, in new and present ways, globally aided by the premise that euro-rule will go on. it is important to note here that even when this rule is seen as unfavorable, it is still often viewed as insurmountable, so it persists. deconstructing colonialism's impacts and developing decolonizing frameworks can help highlight commonalities among many justice-seeking people living under colonial or neocolonial rule. however, caution must be exercised as unity is forged in shared atrocity and efforts toward freedom from coloniality, because within those bonds is the potential to erase the role of race, and particularly of blackness. the anti-blackness and hierarchy of superiorities born of colonialism and eurodomination is ingrained in many different people. it compounds the impacts of colonialism for black people, as other races in many instances find their perceptions of superiority, which is their position above at least black people in the racial hierarchy, at the expense of rationalizing other races, beneath them. there is an acceptance of white authority and rule, the impact of which is satiated by the comfort of superiority to at least black people, and possibly others within perceptions of the racial hierarchy. dismantling colonialism is essential, as is avoiding the many harmful ways that it can be misunderstood and misrepresented to the detriment of those most negatively impacted by it. the reality is that those who seek to dissect their own positions in a racial hierarchy born of the premise will have to face the real losses that come with rejecting the hierarchy head on, which is a loss some consider too great. on top of colonialism in the united states, the system of chattel slavery required brutal maintenance of white domination as the unchallenged and fundamentally accepted reality. historically, in the u.s., white http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 authority has been an essential form of race and class control. alexander (2010) outlined the concept of the racial bribe. the racial bribe extended special privileges to poor whites to drive a wedge between them and enslaved black people. white settlers were allowed greater access to native american lands. white servants were allowed to police slaves through slave patrols and militias. barriers were created so that free labor (the labor of free white men) would not compete with slave labor. at this juncture, poor whites suddenly had a direct personal stake in the existence of a race-based system of slavery, and although the plight of poor white communities had not improved by much, they felt that they were at least better than black people. white aristocracy needed the capacity to exploit poor white people for both labor and as a tool to maintain enslaved black people and later “free” black people in their subjugation position, to bring them to heel. without the hierarchy of the elite's domination at that time, their power and authority could not have succeeded. even after slavery ended and overt jim crow policy began to subside, the system of black subjugation and white domination continued. nelson peery, a wwii veteran and political scholar, spoke to this continuation as he unraveled the experience of his return home to chicago's southside after three years at war. his last book, black radical, chronicled how he came to understand the larger picture of u.s. power and imperialism, the actual and present goals of elite white men. perry (2007) wrote that the brutal white economic exploitation of black people was necessary to keep whites united, despite class differences, that unity was the foundation of white wealth and the stability of their system. for every law, code, or unspoken rule aimed at giving white men and women a societal edge, the inverse was true for its impact on black people, both materially and psychologically. alexander (2010) also noted that for white people, the idea of supremacy became a religion over time. there was a deep attachment to the notion that black people were bestial and that whites were inherently superior. this religion justified racist economics and politics, which continued and evolved into common and evident conditions across many spaces today. the current elite have long understood that to protect their class position from poor white people, they needed to deter and or split any natural class alliances which might evolve among the collective multi-racial lower class. the wealthy and land-holding gentry in the united states understood the necessity for pathological perceptions of superiority among poor white people. freire (1972) described an essential component of this delusional perception of society as the contradiction of the concrete, the existential ritual of recoding reality to maintain comfortable oppression. that black people were uncivilized, unfit to rule, less than, is at worst an unhealthy projection of internalized guilt for the committing of or complacency in world atrocities. at best, it is a necessary illusion which maintains the notion of white people as members of a master group, offering a moral justification for atrocities and satiation for any latent feelings of guilt or remorse. the real-world experienced and perceived by white people does not easily occupy the same space as the necessary illusion of superiority and must be maintained through consistent propaganda, policies of preference, religious dogma, music, and other media. the documentary film manufacturing consent chronicled scholar-activist noam chomsky and his lectures and ideas. chomsky cites niebuhr (1960), who wrote that: rationality belongs to the cool observer—that because of the lack of awareness in the average person, there is a tendency to follow not reason but faith. this naïve faith requires http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications provided by a mythmaker, thus keeping the ordinary person on a particular course. in this case, the ordinary person must keep the naïve faith of the master race, despite perceived contradictions to it. it is emotionally potent in its presentation and offers an oversimplified division of races essential to generating faith in superiority. this faith has driven poor and working class white-americans toward consistent actions against their own best class interest. parallel pathological notions of inferiority must be maintained in black people, who must also be deluded into inaction, keeping faith and acceptance of dominance. the inferiority instilled in black people in the u.s. is of the utmost importance to maintaining the spoils of colonialism, slavery, and conquest. freire (1972) wrote that the oppressed can adopt an attitude of 'adhesion' to the oppressor. under these circumstances, they cannot consider the oppressor sufficiently clearly to see the oppressor as 'outside' themselves. through manipulation and miseducation, many black people have been reduced as a population to one which has come to possess internal faith in the religion of white superiority over time. this faith is expressed politically and on deeper levels. for white power and authority to persist, dominant white elites in the past needed to spread misinformation, oversimplifications, and glaring contradictions to the concrete. within elite and working-class white communities, varying invisible norms were handed down through generations of maintained authority through what has no doubt come to be perceived as normal behavior, which must be hidden to be maintained. as it is increasingly considered more moral to be anti-racist, those engaged in or benefiting from racist norms, must see those norms as a natural and normal part of reality; in this way, they get to be good while subjugating or benefiting from the subjugation of others. invisible norms are how white authority withstands the changing tides and tastes of new generations. community psychology programs understanding how the premise is maintained on a societal level will aid in the specific understanding of how the premise is maintained within the field of community psychology and specifically its academic programs. often within the field at large and within community psychology programs, invisible norms take shape in the silencing of both dissenting voices and articulations of real opposition to dominant structures in our classrooms. it is found in dissertation committees when students are guided away from liberatory work in favor of more benign and comfortable topics. it is alive in curriculum that is heavy with liberal scholars and work that reaffirms background domination in the most dangerous and subtle ways. mostly white research material is the norm, and is often touted as liberal, which is often most dangerous. liberal research and theory embedded in curriculum often inserts the premise of persistence, while articulating a shadowy sanctuary from it, a sanctuary that allows authors and educators to feel and look good while upholding the status quo, which preserves their positions of authority. the premise maintains student perceptions of white authority as a given and a constant. the premise is maintained through institutional norms, and dominant theory because those who maintain it benefit from it, and often, even if unconsciously, do not want to see that benefit end. how it is maintained modern maintenance of the premise can be found in many small spaces. language is one such space. language of all sorts helps uphold the toxic religion of superiority, without overtly asserting it. there is no http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 overestimating the damage euphemisms have done to ensure the persistence of the premise throughout history. terms like tolerance and civility, for instance, are used to describe ways different people are supposed to share spaces amicably. no one would feel comfortable in a space where they were merely tolerated and not welcomed. that the dominant group will tolerate minority views is applauded as progress when it is, at best, a mediocre and distasteful goal. the call for “civility” (i.e., being nice) is a well-known tool of power structures and within the field of psychology used to dampen the sharing of hard activist truths. another such term is equality, which slides the premise of assumed persistent power held by the currently dominant group. equality is too often used as a quantitative way to suggest the dominant group is the gold standard, anchoring the idea that all groups desire to be equal to the dominant group. economic reform is vital, but diverse groups have qualitatively diverse values, which the concept of equality erases when it becomes a call for homogeneity, acceptance, assimilation, and acculturation to the dominant ways of being. it is even more diminishing when it assumes that black people and other marginalized groups seek to be as white people are, when often that is furthest from actual desires. even a goal of equal opportunity ties and binds black possibility and potential to the limitations of white people. that the opportunities of black and other people are bound by what is available to white people, within spaces often of eurocentric design no less, further entrenches the notion that the only reality is white reality, and that other conceptualizations of being, different political structures, any other social organization, or any assertion for the way that people will interact with each other and the natural world, is a certain impracticality. equality equals equal to white people, thus far, and no further. whiteness as an ideal end goal is an idea often amplified through attention to gaps; gaps between groups. there is much ado about the space between black and white children regarding technology, reading, science, and mathematics, the inequity resulting in gaps between black homeowners and white ones, black wealth and white wealth. a goal of closing these gaps positions white people as the epitome, the quintessential standard. all other groups are to strive to go as far as white people but not further. furthermore, even in trying to be as the powerful are, black people must reach merely for consumption capacity and not actual power. the premise maintains the nuanced perception of place in society as an undercurrent, careful not to disturb adhesion, while creating delusions of equity and inclusion. johnson (1972), in a new york times article, shared a famous quote from an unapologetic activist and member of the 75th congress, adam clayton powell. when asked about his time in congress, powell responded, "i have done nothing more than any other member and, by the grace of god, i intend to do not one bit less.” even a radical black congressperson, only the second seated in 1945, had to refrain from the public consideration that black people may hold desires and aspirations, values, capacities, and understandings beyond white people. it was falsely understood, then as it is now, that the standard is european. academic impositions non-white people are maintained in a perpetual mode of keeping up with white people, in ways that are often times the antithesis of what society needs. this chasing of irrelevant colonizing goals is just one significant way that the premise is http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 maintained. if gaps between white people and black people are to be closed to bring "equality," and if white people and white structures set the standard, the standards will never change. in a passage admired by martin luther king, frantz fanon argued that black people around the world needed to stop using european standards as models, and create things anew from their own strengths. this message rings especially true for new community psychologists. yet, instead of teaching this kind of academic freedom, students often face standardized goals in curricula, euro-normative expectations, and gatekeeping within educational institutions. attempts at unraveling eurocentric approaches to education, by professors who at a minimum seek to offer students opportunities for improvisation based on who their students are, are often thwarted. professors are forced instead to hold the gate firmly closed to student capacity outside of euro-norms. academia often encourages assessment which usually does not seek to understand student critical thought and imaginative approaches to problem-solving or assess the ability to conceive solutions to ecologic and sound problems. ultimately assessment, in many instances, is reduced to ensuring student willingness to follow the rules, their proclivity for the status quo, demonstration of the capacity to withstand insult and disrespect, and ultimately willingness to embrace the premise entirely. in the worst cases it is when those tests are passed with flying colors that the gate swings open, and the multicultural mis-educated file through, prepared to uphold and perpetuate the premise within a new generation of budding psychologists. the premise and the black student the intentionality to define everyone’s means and ends to a singular vision tethers black students and students of color to the white population. for these students, it means they must go where they are told and want what faculty or the larger field, often in service to the status quo, wants. this leaves a diverse set of students, researchers, practitioners, people, chasing white people across aspirations and positions. wilson (1998) wrote in detail about how white dominance is maintained and how notions of perpetual domination are arranged in the black psyche specifically. he writes, dominant whites have used words and symbols to violently and unrelentingly attack oppressed blacks in a thousand and one nefarious ways, including the projection of dehumanizing stereotypes and caricatures, the falsification of their history and culture, the miseducation of blacks, and the engaging in chronic derisive media attacks on their morals, behavior, intelligence, ways of life, sexuality, physical features, motives, and values. the final end of the violent white-instigated psychic assault against the collective psyche of blacks is to induce in them states of false consciousness, self-alienation and selfhatred so as to irreparably impair their capacity to overthrow their white oppressors through the mobilization of their human and material resources false consciousness self-alienation and self-hatred are conjoining states of mind which motivate oppressed blacks to engage in continuing self-defeating, self-destructive assaults against their own interest, and against themselves unwittingly manipulated into forming alliances with their oppressors and exploiters in disempowering themselves and in empowering those who dominate and exploit them. this psychological imposition on black autonomy and self-determination is embedded in many spaces and institutions. it is separate and apart from what other communities of color endure. it is harmful http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 and psychologically disruptive in ways that unique to black people exclusively. it is ubiquitous, even if not always visible. the constant separation of black people from themselves is a hallmark of white control. as a result of being fed long-term distortions, many black students no longer sufficiently see themselves as vulnerable to the contagions. they may feel dedicated to learning approaches in the field towards justice but end up being open to exploitation and manipulation. these manipulations are formal and persistent in academia. they are a significant source of burnout and nonretention of black students and other students of color in programs. community psychology is home to a host of students who possess a desire for justice and have set themselves on a course for community work and action. community psychology work can feel progressive and ecologic in theory; however, too often the curriculum and culture of programs and classrooms, uphold the premise visibly and invisibly, knowingly and unknowingly. in this way, the premise of persistence slides into the collective consciousness of students and reproduces itself in the next generation in the field. community psychology students of all groups are seated in a space which can reroute nonwhite power-seeking movement toward more "rational" goals and away from genuine autonomy, freedom, power, and control. students are told that they need to think practically, i.e., within the premise. it is not uncommon for them to be told, "don't think your work is going to change the world. be practical. go for the lowest hanging grapes.” such assertions are often underscored with text and journal articles highlighting white theory as the epitome. the literature and andragogy, which tends to lead students away from autonomy, usually excludes black thought and the work of other non-european radical thinkers. these assertions and their backing lead black and other community psychology students of color to delay, if not to destroy, the ideal notions of their life practice. when faculty, based on their professional norms and culture, discourage transformative second-order change, the premise is protected and allowed to live on. fanon (1988) wrote that silence is urged when considering any expression of the authentic black self, which is faithful to traditions and linked to african soil's very sap. it is limited, stopped, or broken. he wrote of how black people have been rendered culturally mute. fanon stated that colonial rule is a multidimensional exploitation which controlled african people, and that colonialism draws up an entire code and then instills itself so that blackness's very essence is denied, all for the benefit of white power maintenance and oppression. in his articulation of the audacity of the french union, and the ways in which it controlled african people, fanon touched on a phenomena of control for black students. as black students begin to study, within the field of psychology, it is often to the complete negation of black scholars. even black issues are presented through white research, separating black students from the very sap of their own experience, rendering them culturally mute. it is at this juncture that black students reach for the intellectual tools, and research, which constrained them in the first place. such tools are the worst possible starting points for working toward real change. upon this realization rather conscious or unconscious, students may resign themselves to mere completion and, in the attempt to just get the degree. “i just want to get through. i’ll just let it happen to me. i just want to get done” mentalities are adopted in order to survive the separation from self. if it is temporary, it is tolerable. in these adaptations – both inside and outside of the university and its programs – black student resign themselves to constant capitulation. notions of power and autonomy grow to be seen as sacrilege, an insult to the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 institution in which are seated, or even cause for lost social capital through faculty perceptions of that student as radical or unrealistic. so ingrained are these fears of straying outside of the status quo that many black students don’t even say the words “black people” when referencing their race. they will often refer to “people of color” or “people who look like me” in an attempt to avoid sounding radical. usually, black students avoid saying white people altogether, and it is often whispered when discussed among one another. the original and deep passion present at the onset of their programs is often lost. perceptions of what is possible for their career and capacity are arrested and distorted by the weight of a rigid and unchangeable hierarchy within which they are situated at the bottom. akbar (1995) wrote that outer influences had essentially controlled black people since being brought to north america. as a community, the outer noises of oppression have drowned out the inner voice. the loss of an inner voice can take away the feeling of responsibility for one’s own life. the loss may lead to a reduced capacity to consider a reality outside of that constructed by the oppressor. in a community psychology program, the students' conceptualizations of research and practice then exist only in the confines of the "normal" and the "unchangeable" euro-normative andragogy and curricula upheld by the university. when a student feels the responsibility for their own life (education) has been lost – that is, when they accept the world in which they are oppressed as unchanging – their ability to use their education toward their own best interest wanes significantly. as a result, their genuine efforts at aiding their communities are often bankrupt from the start, due to models of community psychology research and practice, set in place by their education, which offers only temporary reprieve and symptom-based relief at best, while leaving the power structure, white authority, firmly in place. the good and the less good faculty that care can have no better goal than to accompany black students and students of color, refuse to be a barrier to their just aspirations, and interrogate the premise within themselves as they nurture the next generation of the field. in doing so, the faculty decide. they decide against upholding the premise, they choose to uphold the student's best interest towards their liberation, even at the ultimate expense of what they may perceive as advantages within the status quo, but there is indeed a choice to make. many community psychologists, throughout the field, have taken direct stands against false notions of superiority for the just redistribution of resources and a complete re-organization of educational, economic, and political spaces. community psychology faculty and students can similarly interrogate their programs and course structures. by unapologetically doing so, research and analysis are freed from archaic assumptions, untethered from first-order change, and grows the potential of theory and practice toward knowing not yet imagined. many community psychology faculty and programs are due for a reconsideration of curricula and practice. too often, writings and readings assigned in community psychology syllabi read like a litany of how “bad things are” for black america. community psychology came about to fight the focus on deficit and disorder. the lessons seldom include methodologies for ending the suffering or ever daring to address it at the source, inside the pathologies euroconstructed systems of oppression and those who created them. instead, new community psychologists are taught to address issues of oppression among the oppressed. when the focus is predominantly on deficit and disorder, particularly in black communities and communities of color, students of color raise their eyebrows; glances are exchanged. there are questions about the faculty http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 member's motives and loyalties, the degree to which they will be able to express themselves without retaliation or other consequence. in the best cases, community psychology strives to be a collectively reflective field and uncover colonizing regularities and patterns in its practices, programs, committees, and classrooms. through radical and often challenging reflection and striving toward more authentic justice and action, the student and the faculty and institutions become freer? liberation for faculty members requires overcoming fragilities and standing aside for students rather than fighting students to maintain hierarchies. it requires utilizing participatory methods in the classroom, really listening to and drawing from the experiential wisdom of students' community. faculty members, along with academic institutions' practices and policies, should step back from top-down driven syllabi, accept new ways of institutional organizing and education models, and embrace spontaneous learning and power shifts and sharing. the personal, cultural, and collective strengths of all students and the communities that they represent, are an invaluable part of a meaningful and sustainable future for everyone. there will be an embrace of diverse sociological imaginations in the best-case scenarios, and through improvisation, a collective drawing out of new possibilities. ethnic pluralism and allyhood in his final book before his death, martin luther king argued that white allies were essential to the movement. he felt that the civil rights legislation was a long, satisfying battle, which had finally been won. the white supporters, as a populace, felt the work overall had been done, success had been made, and attention could be turned to other interests. yet king pointed out that the progress made was the easiest part and that white americans saw the small and simple shift as enough. more specifically, they were unwilling to make necessary personal or family sacrifices. what posed a barrier to king over 50 years ago poses a barrier to our field's progress and today's academic spaces. some may argue, why be so critical and dedicated to decolonizing the discipline of community psychology? after all, this relatively small group of scholars and actors are some of the most activist, supportive, allied set of people throughout all of the social sciences? in reality, the progress that has been made was the easiest part, community psychologist can celebrate them for the small and simple shifts that they were, while acknowledging that they are not enough. without a willingness to make necessary personal sacrifices, as individuals within the field, the field itself will fail to live up to its principles. white community psychologists are well trained through the field's principles to begin acknowledging historical harms and approach monetary, ethical, and professional decisions to restore justice in the field and beyond. a collective interrogation of existing systems and an examination of internal motivations unravels the premise. facing the ways that positionality in the field have been driven by white advantages, steeped in historically pathological power positions, can be difficult, but is an essential part of rejecting old ways of being towards new, more just alliances. this work may not always feel good, but it is necessary. community psychology now includes many new psychologists of color, ready and willing to collaborate towards new approaches. as new equitable systems are created, and old hegemony and structures of oppression collapse. community psychology and community psychologists are thankfully wellpositioned to shift with poise and grace towards a bold stand for justice. true antiracist work means asking tough questions of oneself and others. it requires risking new adventures. community psychologists will need to actively challenge old habits to know when to step aside and stand up. those in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 positions of present power could choose to perceive this as a loss, or they could welcome new, more just ways of being, which purge the ugliest elements of our practice. where do new community psychologists go from here? new community psychologists can begin to conceive new approaches to research and work, mainly working towards justice. old norms for research often position pathology exclusively among the disadvantaged while turning a blind eye to the apparent need for study and community practice within advantaged communities. this is the type of norm that needs adjustment. some young community psychologists share communities with those who conceive and advance oppressive policy and actions, perpetuating inequity through positions of power and authority over the communities in which the new community psychologist themself may hope to serve. these new community psychology practitioners are often taught to leave those communities, those opportunities to attend to inequity at the source, and to travel into disadvantaged communities, usually of color, to be paid to help them cope with the ignored injustices. in this reach for low hanging fruit, students, often white, will get to be good, a help, an ally, without ever having to face the discomfort of confronting the people responsible, who are often close to them, as a means to end the oppression. elite communities often need service and intervention toward their own healing from and understandings of the harm they inflict on external communities. these communities and the people within them are left all but untouched by the benefits of the field. the assumption, the premise from which they are viewed, is that they hold power and likely always will. to risk offense to such a group would be to risk funding from, standing within, and even rejection, leaving these communities and those within them, who would benefit from our field's approaches, left to continue cycles of repression. these cycles often prove economically beneficial for the field and those who have traditionally researched and practiced in it, but highly harmful to disadvantaged populations in receipt of disproportional "service" as well as the advantaged populations ignored by the field. this research approach has to be reexamined, particularly as increasing community psychologists from communities impacted by oppression enter the field. service within one's own community should be considered for research and practice, as often, if not more so, than work within external communities, specifically when the external community is a disadvantaged community of color. faculty and institutions can begin to more closely reflect and act under new assumptions, those of true equity, within communities in practice, and work with any community. new community psychologists, particularly budding black community psychologists, some of whom will likely be present in the field 50 years from now, should consider what dr. john henrik clarke called “the unglamorous work of revolution,” the intentional and unapologetic work of a bold redesign, without seeking the rewards, acknowledgment, permission, or acceptance of a field, society, or world, in revision. rebellion in real-time baldwin (1971) wrote, a whole generation is grown up, and it has seen and heard the nature of the lies that white people told black people for generations, and it understands the reasons for these lies, whether or not they understand really what the situation is and what the future should be is not a question, it doesn't make any difference at the moment, what they are doing is http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 repudiating the entire theology which has afflicted and destroyed, literally destroyed black people for so long, and what this generation is reacting to what it is saying is that they realize that you, the white people, white americans, have always attempted to murder them. not merely by burning them or castrating them or hanging them from trees, but murdering them in the mind, in the heart, by teaching a black child that he is worthless, that he can never contribute, teaching him to hate his mother, father, and brothers, but right now they are refusing this entire frame of reference, and they are saying to the republic this is your bill, this is your bloody bill, written in my blood, and you are going to have to pay it. black students, other students of color, and young progressive psychologists are beginning to shake free of the confines of white authority and its conceptualizations. they are beginning to purge, in notable number, european installations of power in their ideologies. they are imagining power for themselves, planning interventions and dissertations, research, and community action, which all have the potential to acquire and maintain justice and true, lasting power. community psychology is well-positioned to celebrate these strides and to stand proudly at the forefront, yet again, of progress and justice. the black lives matter, or black liberation movement, bubbling in this country today is a continuation of what baldwin described in 1971. the inability of black and other students of color, as well as their allies, to sit still for the miseducation, indoctrination, and impositions that have run rampant for so long, is evident. such unacceptable patterns are truly intolerable for a field of scholar-activists. new approaches and practices for the field are being conceived; it is happening daily. sarason (1988) asserted that there could be tension when old norms are confronted with new techniques. this tension is often between those supporting the old model, and those pushing for new approaches. the tension is not a necessity. community psychology’s justice-minded multicultural movement is not new pushing back on old; it does not have to be; it is more a collective walk forward, learning and growing together. that is the proposition. new approaches and understandings this moment of beautiful and healthy unrest can be used to deconstruct and decolonize, call out and extract, and ensure different forms of knowing and learning take their place. reform is a debt owed to future generations of community psychologists. black people, black students, students of color, and their genuine allies, have already begun the work, standing up, tall, against brutal force, articulating why the injustice of euro-dominated systems and exclusive ways of knowing can no longer stand. fearless individuals and global collective actions have ignited an existentially necessary movement. students have taken risks to their education by refusing bankrupt norms and are replacing them without permission. faculty, institutions, communities, and organizations have taken similar risks, openly targeting the premise of persistence in order to ensure that the future does not face the same barriers that they have. baldwin (1971) spoke to the sentiment behind the drive to take such risks, particularly for the black people. “i have a two-year-old great nephew. i don’t believe that the band of mediocrities which appear to rule this country now, have any right whatsoever to tell him where to sit and where to stand, who he is and what he is going to become, and i won’t let them do it, really, it is as simple as that.” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 references akbar, n. 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(2011). blueprint for black power: a moral, political, and economic imperative for the twenty-first century. afrikan world infosystems. http://www.gjcpp.org/ here to stay: how we created a movement toward decolonizing our high school janelle m. silva1, las gatas2 keywords: decoloniality, decolonial pedagogy, ypar, community-based partnership, high school, autoethnography author biographies: janelle m. silva, is an associate professor of community psychology at the university of washington, bothell (uwb). she received her phd in social psychology and feminist studies from the university of california, santa cruz, where she examined how elementary school curriculum can teach young children about social justice and community engagement. her current research includes a collaboration with high school students to create a shared curriculum based on identity, community and social action, as well as continuing her work with student activists at uwb to document the changes they have facilitated on campus. las gatas, represents the sixteen self-identified latinx students from nest high school. ranging in grade level from 10 th to 12th, they have many intersecting identities, such as being womxn, gender queer, come from working-class families, will be the first in their families to graduate from college, are varsity soccer players, community activists, sisters, friends, and collaborators. as future scholar-activists, las gatas have chosen to reject the notion that they must be individually identified in this paper. their name represents the clowder of cats that the school administration failed to displace during campus construction. recommended citation: silva, j. m., & gatas, l. here to stay: how we created a movement toward decolonizing our high school. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(2), 1 -16. retrieved day/month/year, (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: janelle m. silva, phd, associate professor, school of interdisciplinary arts & sciences, university of washington – bothell, jmsilva@uw.edu 1 university of washington, bothell 2 nest high school http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:jmsilva@uw.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 here to stay: how we created a movement toward decolonizing our high school a praxis and pedagogy, decoloniality can play a critical role in students’ understanding of systems of oppression and their role in creating systemic change. as decoloniality emphasizes the importance of undoing and unlearning, it is critical that a decolonial pedagogy (buttaro, 2010; lissovoy, 2010) provide students an opportunity to engage in these actions. one possibility that should be explored is how youth participatory action research projects-taught within a decolonial pedagogical curriculumcan be used in schools to enhance students’ understanding and commitment to the decolonial project (cammarota, 2014, 2009; morrell, 2008). using autoethnography (anzaldúa, 2002), the paper discusses the process that a group of latinx high school students went through to create “soy yo” and draw upon decolonial theory to analyze how learning about decoloniality and ypar led them to begin the process of decolonizing their school. the concludes with risks and rewards that these stakeholders encountered during this ongoing project. decoloniality has pushed community psychology to rethink ways of disrupting and dismantling institutionalized oppression through theory, research, and practice (maldonado-torres, 2017). while what is happening within the field is critical to the overall scope of this project, so is what is happening in classrooms. decolonial pedagogy is a critical component of the larger decolonial project as it seeks to disrupt mainstream classroom pedagogies that reinforce dominant narratives and ways of knowing (villanueva, 2013). moreover, a decolonial approach to classroom learning that is “youth-driven” by design can help facilitate students’ interest in social action by seeing how they are able to be part of a transformative process (cruz & sonn, 2011). with commitments to teaching people how to work within diverse settings, critically reflect on positionality, and work towards equity for historically marginalized and subordinated communities, a decolonized pedagogy is a useful approach to engage students in social action. unfortunately, systemic and institutional barriers often result in young people becoming disengaged by their inability to create change in meaningful ways (camino & zeldin, 2002; cammarota, 2014; portillo, 2013). community psychologists have found that youth participatory action research (ypar) programs and/or classes heighten students’ motivation to work toward change and increase participatory behavior (ozer & douglas, 2013). this “youth-driven” approach to research promotes students’ increase sense of self and general attitude toward their education (mitra, 2004). combined with a decolonial pedagogy (cruz & sonn, 2011; lissovoy, 2010; portillo, 2013; tejada & espinoza 2003), ypar classrooms can work to shift the dialogue and structure of schools to better fit the needs of its students and disrupt the dominant narratives that have marginalized students of color within its curriculum. what is often missing from these discussions within community psychology are concrete examples of how to use decolonial pedagogy effectively and how this approach can develop critical consciousness in students to work toward social action. this paper considers how ypar and decolonial pedagogy can facilitate students’ commitment to social action and raise their critical consciousness on issues of social http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 justice in a high school classroom. as scholars have noted, decolonial pedagogy sees education as a tool for critical consciousness and confronting injustice (villanueva, 2013). this approach requires that teachers create a classroom environment that values diverse voices and perspectives where students analyze institutions and develop the necessary tools for social action (cammarota, 2014; cruz & sonn, 2011; lissovoy, 2010; portillo, 2013; tejada & espinoza, 2003). from a community psychology perspective, we concur that decoloniality aligns with “community psychology’s general commitment to developing ways of being, knowing and doing that contribute to decolonization and liberation… [and opening] the way to transformation as we recognize different ways of knowing and value the lived experiences and voices of the marginalized” (cruz & sonn, 2011, p. 207). using autoethnography (anzaldúa, 2002; boylorn & orbe, 2014), this paper describes the process of how one group of latinx high school students worked toward decolonizing their school through an elective class (“soy yo”) codeveloped with the first author. this paper considers how classrooms, specifically high school classrooms, can model these values. decolonial pedagogy & the decolonial project a process entrenched within praxis, decoloniality is a “rehumanizing of the world” (maldonado-torres, 2016, p. 31) that moves away from dominant, colonized paradigms that continue to oppress marginalized identities and groups. the decolonial project requires individuals to shift and uproot their deeply held beliefs that are embedded within coloniality. as praxis requires reflexivity to be centered within the process, the decolonial project also favors critical reflection to be continuously aware of the ways in which we must dismantle these systems of oppression. this is an ongoing project that requires the interrogation of the individual and what they have come to understand as legitimate “ways of knowing”. it is challenging work that requires intentionality from those involved. as tuck and yang (2012) strongly suggest “decolonization is not a metaphor”. to create a new reality, to imagine what can be and amplify the lived experiences of those rendered absent from our current paradigms, the decolonial project requires everyone to engage in this critical work. to envision the decolonial project as only research-based is to deny decoloniality of its true potential. decoloniality is both praxis and pedagogy; equally playing a critical role in moving the project forward as we work to “learn/un-learn/re-learn” (cruz, 2008). this process can occur within the field as well as the classroom. when we consider education as a tool for empowerment, confronting justice, centering marginalized voices, and connecting systems to power, we are engaging in decolonial pedagogy (villanueva, 2013). buttaro (2010) defines it as an approach that “challenges the dominant practices of schooling and makes schools concrete sites for developing critical consciousness in the interests of working class, indigenous and non-white peoples” (p. 2). for skeptics, developing critical consciousness through pedagogy may seem an impossible goal. however, portillo (2013) argues that teachers play a critical role within the larger decolonial project through curriculum choice, textbook usage, and holding their schools accountable for the ways in which they create barriers that disempower students. according to tejada & espinoza, (2003), u.s. schools reinforce colonization through pedagogy and punishment, often positioning marginalized students for failure. it is role of the teacher to leverage their power to disrupt these systems and guide students toward their own unlearning of the world they have been taught to be true. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 as the decolonial project requires critical reflection and action, so too does decolonial pedagogy. teachers must critically reflect on their school and the systems of power in place that are used to “monitor” students. they must turn a critical lens to how colonization and power are reinforced through not only curriculum and assignments, but in specialized courses, classroom design, extra-curricular activities, and student choice (or lack thereof). mainstream curriculum and textbooks are often deeply intertwined with coloniality. decolonial pedagogues must consider how to center and amplify the voices, histories, and experiences of marginalized students and groups. they grapple with how to not only center these voices but to honor them by guiding students as they connect coloniality to systems of oppression. a transformative experience, teachers must consider how they navigate their students on this journey of unlearning and re-learning by connecting curriculum to social action (cruz & sonn, 2011; lissovoy, 2010; portillo, 2013; tejada & espinoza, 2003). this is not a task that is done lightly nor do all teachers have the privilege of engaging in decolonial pedagogy given the external demands placed on them by their schools and the state. we fully recognize the teachers who seek to engage in decolonial pedagogy but feel restrained to do so, for personal and professional reasons that go beyond the scope of this paper. what we are suggesting is that a new type of u.s. high school classroom is possible, and it should include a decolonial pedagogy. decolonial pedagogy in action: ypar as an act of disruption it can be difficult to imagine what a decolonial pedagogy can look like in a classroom and how both teachers and students can benefit from this pedagogical approach. to begin, teachers should first consider how they will decolonize their classroom. as gill & white (2013) note, teachers must be intentional on shifting the classroom environment if they want to teach their students how to confront dominant ideologies and work to dismantle systems of oppression. one way teachers can incorporate decolonial pedagogy into their classrooms is through participatory action research projects that emphasize collaboration, investigation, indigenous knowledge, and collective action (fine, torre, boudin, bowen, clark, hylton, martinez, missy, roberts, smart, & upegui, 2004; mcintyre, 2000). primarily used with adults, there has been a considerable push to employ this same methodology with young people to help engage them in creating change. considering schools, one way to create an act of disruption to the dominant paradigms that shape students’ experiences is through a decolonial pedagogy that is combined with youth participatory action research, or ypar. a decolonial pedagogy that centers ypar can give students a hands-on understanding of systems of oppression and how to dismantle these structures (amer, mohammed, & ganzon, 2013). as morrell (2008) states, ypar is an “important pedagogical and social action tool that affirms youth as transformative intellectuals and involves an important and often neglected population in the process of collecting and distributing information intended to inform, persuade, and ultimately transform oppressive social realities” (p. 159). moreover, michelle fine (2008) asserts that these types of projects represent a “radical epistemological challenge to the traditions of social science, most critically on the topic of where knowledge resides” (p. 215). ypar is one way to bring the decolonial project into the high school classroom as it is meant to ask the collaborators to “interrogate the conditions of oppression and surface leverage points for resistance and change” (fine, 2008, p. 215). it validates and centers marginalized voices and indigenous knowledge by engaging collaborators in acts of resistance that are cocreated. it is not speaking for youth but http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 allowing youth to speak for themselves, amplifying their voices and sharpening their tools for action (cammarota, 2014). yes, we believe it is about sharpening tools, not providing tools for action. the latter suggests that youth, particularly those from marginalized communities, lack the same tools or skills as their privilege peers. ypar and decolonial pedagogy helps surface for others what they have neglected to notice. in a ypar classroom that embraces a decolonial pedagogy, collaboration is critical. successful collaborations require that the teacher center reflection and action within the curriculum, so students are encouraged to look inward to better understand their identities in relation to coloniality (cammarota, 2014, 2009; lissovoy, 2010; tejada & espinoza, 2003; villanueva, 2013). as these projects are student developed, led, and community focused, they can help students see themselves as agents of change. this is essential given how young people are viewed within society and schools. as morrell (2008) argues, “youth simply are not asked to speak as a larger collective, nor are they provided with tools need to amass evidence to speak about the relationship between their particular experiences and the experiences of others in similar situations” (p. 156). moreover, for youth of color and from lowincome communities, they are often not considered to be “knowledge producers” (morrell, 2008, p. 156). as the decolonial project pushes against the deeply rooted notions of whose knowledge and what knowledge is valued within academia, ypar also pushes against the belief of who is an “appropriate” collaborator and who can create change. aligned with decoloniality, the youth are positioned to speak for themselves and to center their lived experiences within research. as such, it is the role of the teacher to help build students’ research skills so they can play an active role within the decolonial project. amplifying our voices through autoethnography it is through this decolonial lens that we chose autoethnography (anzaldúa, 2002; boylorn & orbe, 2014) to amplify our voices as we describe how decolonial pedagogy and ypar sharpened our tools to decolonize our high school. autoethnography allows us to tell our story while reflecting and analyzing our process within a decolonial framework. by “us,” we are referring to both the teacher (the first author, who we refer to as professor silva) and the students (the second author, las gatas) involved in this project. together, we describe the process of how one group of latinx high school students worked toward decolonizing their school through an elective class (“soy yo”) co-developed with professor silva. as my (janelle’s) commitment to teaching decoloniality includes making space for students to be the storytellers of their experiences, this paper is co-authored with sixteen high school students who refer to themselves as las gatas. written from one collective voice, the students (las gatas) will describe how they petitioned for the class and engaged in youth participatory action research through the development of a collective syllabus, contesting dominant class power structures through course design and classroom structure, and confronting the administration to ensure sustainability of this student-led, co-designed course. each part of the process will offer a collective reflection that examines our process and decision making for future students who seek to make similar changes to their school. we offer these “acts of decoloniality” as a starting point for fellow students and co-conspirators who are interested in this work. by situating our project within decolonial pedagogy, we will illustrate how this process helped us shift the campus curriculum dialogue to embrace marginalized narratives and disrupt the classroom climate. through our analysis, we http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 will provide a framework for future students and co-conspirators/researchers as they attempt to decolonize their own schools, one classroom at a time. “soy yo”: our process of decolonizing our high school3 this is the story of las gatas, sixteen selfidentified latinx students from nest high school. who are las gatas, you ask? we are complex to say the least. in our group, we identify as womxn, gender queer, use the pronouns she/her and they/them, come from working-class families who run tienditas in the neighborhood and paint houses, will be the first in our families to graduate from college, are varsity soccer players, community activists, sisters, friends, and collaborators. we believe in decoloniality and collective action and have chosen to reject the notion that we must be individually identified in this paper. we refuse to adapt to the norms academic journals place on authorship and have instead chosen to put forth our teacher and co-conspirator as the lead author and represent our sixteen voices under one unified name. our name represents the clowder of cats that our administration failed to displace during campus construction. we represent the strength and perseverance of our ancestors before us and stand to illuminate what is possible for those that follow us. what follows is our collective social history of how we became las gatas and co-created soy yo. when soy yo began, professor silva asked if we wanted to write our social history of the course so we could ensure our history would not be erased for future generations. moreover, our history-our process, collaborators, barriers-could be used as a starting point for future groups. las gatas agreed and decided to document our entire 3 this section and the following section were written by the second author, las gatas, the sixteen latinx students who founded soy yo. journey as a class, from advocating for soy yo to having a specific class. we spend one class period writing the timeline of soy yo on the board and then wrote our individual names next to sections we wanted to contribute to. when professor silva presented us with the gjccp special issue, we discussed what we felt would be useful to other students and decided as a class to share specific vignettes from our social history. all decisions were made through consensus and if someone was not comfortable with what was in a vignette, we discussed how to change it while maintaining the integrity of our process. all sixteen of us have contributed words, emotions, and language to these vignettes. as we share our story of how we began the process of decolonizing our high school, we invite you to critically reflect on how you, the reader, could take these lessons and facilitate student-led change in your own schools. for scholars, we encourage you to consider what these collaborations could look like within your own community-based work. for students, we hope you can learn from our mistakes and our victories. as the decolonial project is one of praxis, our work is not done. this is just the beginning of how we used ypar and decolonial pedagogy to decolonize our school. how we became las gatas nest high school (nhs) is the third largest high school in our school district with the most ethnically and racially diverse student population (city public schools, 2019). nhs has been designated a “turnaround school” given our increasing graduation numbers and other state sanctioned, colonized benchmarks (e.g., standardized testing, truancy numbers) of success it has achieved in the past decade (seattle public schools, 2019). with a motto of “courage under pressure,” nhs administration frequently highlight the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 school’s active student population and their commitment to centering student voice and experiences in all aspects of our campus community. they often ended morning campus announcements by saying “ask for what you deserve”. little did they know that we were taking their statement to heart. for high school students from marginalized communities, finding a space that values your identity can be critical to survival (villanueva, 2013). for us, we each sought out clubs and extra-curricular activities to help find “our people”. clubs were not well supported at nhs-often you would show up to a meeting only to find out that no student leaders were attending, or clubs were meeting the same time as sports teams, requiring students to make a choice of where to go. as juniors and seniors, we were at our breaking point of accepting this as “it’s just how it is”. on a rainy february afternoon, a group of us went to the diversity center for guidance. we sat in a circle and voiced our anger at not feeling seen at nhs. “athletes are valued here, but not our identities,” one person said. “we learn nothing about ourselves in our classrooms. how are we supposed to care if we aren’t given ways to care in class?” said another. “what is it that you all want?” the diversity center director asked. our eyes quickly turned to the floor. truth be told, we had been discussing this in secret during latinx student union (lsu) meetings that were dominated by watching youtube clips and not much else. “do we say it?” was the text sent in the group chat. being high school students, we had grown accustomed to people shooting down our ideas and diminishing our voice. we had shared our idea with one other adult on campus who quickly laughed at us and said, “get real. no one will let you do that. what do you all know about schooling?” “say it” was the text that appeared. “we want a class just for us. that is connected to us. not just a club that has to compete with everything else. young queens [a club for black identified womxn] has a class. but we want something different. that one is too much of them doing what the administration wants them to do. we want a class for us, by us.” the silence that followed felt like an eternity. “we shouldn’t have said anything” was the next text sent. the diversity center director looked around the circle for what felt like forever and then finally spoke. “well, that stuff happened because students refused to accept the word no. they wrote a letter and did not give up. if you are willing to put in the work, go and get it.” the director walked over to his computer and pulled up a file. “this is their letter. start here.” for the next month we spent our study periods crafting our collective letter. unlike the young queens who asked for a class that could meet once a month, we wanted a class for self-identified latinx womxn that met daily. we wanted this class to earn the same amount of credits given to all elective classes. most of all, we wanted to select the instructor for this class and wanted that person to share our same identities (unlike young queens, which was co-taught by a white counselor and a filipina teaching aide). we asked the principal’s administrative assistant to put us on his next open student-focused meeting agenda, where he often encouraged students to come with new ideas to help improve nhs’ sense of community. the morning of the meeting, we gathered in the diversity center to practice our presentation. as we walked to the principal’s office, a few of us started to get nervous. “what do we do if he says no?” someone asked. “we keep asking” another person quickly chimed in. we were the third group of students on his agenda that morning. walking into a room filled with campus administration is scary under any circumstances. “i am told you want to talk about having a club,” said the principal. “no sir, not a club, we want a class.” “oh really?” he responded. “yes, we do. and here is why.” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 our first act toward decoloniality reflecting on this moment, we now see the connection between us pushing back against the principal and what cruz (2008) refers to as the process of “learn/un-learn/relearn”. our schooling had taught us to never question authority (freire, 1970); a belief further ingrained within us from our families who feared what risks (physical and educational) we might encounter if we “talked back”. we only dared to speak truth to power in spaces that our identities and spirits were honored, such as the school diversity center. there was a clear barrier and lack of trust between school administration and the students, as we felt silenced as students. there were many hoops you had to go through to have a faceto-face meeting with the principal. these meetings took place in his office, where he sat behind a desk and we stood around the one chair at the back of the office. placing us in this way -close to the door-made us feel unwelcomed in our own school. when we later asked the diversity center director why he decided to push us during that vent session, he simply stated “you all were ready”. we had been engaging in critical reflection without fully understanding what that term meant and how it aligned with the decolonial project (maldonado-torres, 2016). we had spent a considerable amount of time discussing how much we resented curriculum that was detached from our lived experiences. as the decolonial project is one of interrogation, reflection, and action, we were finally ready to move to that third step in the process. fall 2018: soy yo none of us expected to leave that meeting with a yes. after our presentation, we were told that the administration would discuss our proposal and petition and then meet with us the following week. we were in the middle of midterms, which provided a nice distraction for some and made studying difficult for the rest. when midterms ended, we still had not heard back from the principal. again, we put ourselves on his student agenda and again, we came prepared to make the same presentation, this time with new data showing why these classes are important for marginalized students. since we had been on his agenda before, we were put last. for two months we waited for our turn on his agenda. “oh, did i forget to follow up?” the principal said. “well, you can have the class. mr. d said he would take it on.” mr. d, a white male, was the assistant football coach/student government advisor/media production teacher. “thank you for saying yes to this class, but we do not want mr. d to teach it.” “well, he is the only person who can fit it in to his schedule. either it’s mr. d or no one.” as quickly as we had the approval to go ahead with the class, we felt it slipping from our grasp. “we need to go and talk to mr. d. he might be able to help us.” when we entered mr. d’s room, he was meeting with professor silva, a professor and community-based researcher from the university of washington-bothell who had made a name for herself on our campus. since 2014, she has collaborated on various student-centered projects at nhs and was always willing to stop and listen to students. mr. d sensed something was wrong. “what’s up?” he asked. we quickly told him and professor silva everything-the petition, the letter, going back to administration for an answer, and to him being assigned the class since no one else could teach it. “well, that is news to me,” mr. d said. “he didn’t ask you about it?” we asked. “nope, but that is not unusual,” he replied. we all sat in silence in the room. “well, could there be an instructor of record but a different actual instructor for the class? is that possible?” asked professor silva. “well yeah, it does happen for specialty classes in the sciences,” mr. d said. “what do you all think of that?” you could hear the vibrations http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 of our phones within the classroom. “go ahead and speak for the group,” the last message read. “mr. d, could you be the instructor of record, and professor silva, could you teach it?” unbeknownst to her, we had all hoped to have professor silva be the instructor for this class. a latinx womxn who is also the first generation in her family to go to college, she was the only latinx womxn at nhs. latinx students sought her out on campus because it was the only time we saw ourselves reflected in an adult in a position of power (unless you count the seattle police department who were also present on campus). she showed up to events for latinx students and made sure nhs students were invited to the uwb college outreach day which was focused on recruiting students of color. even though she was not permanent faculty, she had become a part of our nhs experience and community. “if mr. d can be the instructor of record, i would be honored to teach it,” she said. and that is how las gatas started soy yo. our second act of decoloniality despite our collective fear that we might lose our class, we decided to ask professor silva to be our instructor. connecting our action to decolonial pedagogy, we were challenging dominant practices of schooling by seeking out who we wanted to teach the class and then challenging our principal’s decision (buttaro, 2010; villanueva, 2013). as students, we knew who taught the class was critical to its success. we did not trust the principal to select a person who wanted to be there and was invested in soy yo. however, as students, we did not have the power to hire someone. we did fear that challenging our principal’s choice might mean he would cancel the course, but we took the risk. given our interactions with professor silva on campus, we believed she would be our ally in this process. she had been working to develop a sense of community and belonging on our campus through different projects and collaborations with student groups that showed her commitment to elevating student voice. when she heard us talking about problems at nhs, her first question was always, “how do you plan on fixing it?” she brought her decolonial pedagogical practice to everything she engaged with at our high school. we wanted to be the ones to build the curriculum and reimagine what the classroom might look like, which would mean selecting an instructor who would be open to sharing power (lissovoy, 2010; portillo, 2013, tejada & espinoza, 2003). only then would we be able to shift our campus and our project. “together we shift”: our decolonial process the struggle to get the approval to start soy yo was long and difficult, yet, as professor silva reminded us, this work is a process, and a process is never finished. here we were, fall semester 2018, all sixteen of us sitting in a classroom with a latinx womxn as our instructor. as part of the course approval process, we adapted the syllabus created by young queens. none of us really had any expectations for the class-we just wanted the class. during the first week of fall semester, professor silva passed out the syllabus we had submitted for approval. “is this what you all want to do?” she asked. she had given us small notebooks to use as our personal journals, journals that would not be read by anyone unless we felt inclined to share. she asked us to take out our journals and answer these questions: what is soy yo? why are you/we here? what do you want to do here? these were not easy questions to answer. we had a syllabus that we were told was our “contract” to our school administration. “don’t we have to do what we said we would do?” we asked. “ok, let’s think of it this way,” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 said professor silva. she passed out copies of our petition and letter to administration. “do these documents feel connected?” absent from the syllabus was our reasoning and rationale for soy yo. gone was the emphasis on identity and student-centered, designed education. “your letter explicitly states you want an instructor to help guide you and for this to be a collaborative space. if that is what you want, we should do it,” said professor silva. we are not the students who are used to being asked what we want and being encouraged to follow through. the banking model of education (freire, 1970) that emphasized coloniality made us feel marginalized in the classroom. we were grateful just to have this class and were fearful of what would happen if we went against what had been approved by nhs administration. yet we knew professor silva was right. what we sought out to do and what we were claiming to do in this space were two different things. were we missing out on an opportunity to enact actual change at our school? the following week professor silva assigned some articles for us to read as we thought through what this class should/could be. she introduced us to the idea of youth participatory action research (ypar), which emphasized student voice and collaboration. we discussed collective action, read articles with authors names that looked and sounded like ours, read things we assumed were only for college students, and learned about decoloniality, or, as we understood it, the process of un-learning/re-learning to dismantle systems of oppression. we learned what oppression meant. we learned that these systems shape(d) our lives without our permission. we realized that our textbooks did not resonate with us because they were the perspectives of the colonizer. most of all, we learned our voice and experiences have value. that we had stories to tell. these first few weeks of soy yo were transformative for us to consider what was possible in this space. “can we start over?” we asked professor silva. “like a new syllabus, one created by us, with new outcomes and learning goals?” our goal was to have a soy yo syllabus complete by october 15th, presenting it to nhs administration during a class presentation where we also invited campus allies. in our collective syllabus, we wrote our mission statement: soy yo is a class for latinx womxn, by latinx womxn. aligned with a youth participatory action research approach (ypar), student identities, voice, and perspectives are central to our goals. each year, we identify, research and develop an action plan to address areas of oppression that must be addressed in our school. we seek to create collective action at nest high school by amplifying our voices and those of our marginalized peers to shift our school community. we are here to stay. (so yo syllabus mission statement, 2018) we developed community agreements that emphasized radical speaking order (silva & the students for diversity now, 2018) where you are encouraged to speak from your experiences and to step back when it is time for others to be centered. we agreed that collaboration includes reflection and what professor silva refers to as “critical compassion” where we ask critical questions of one another with the goal of moving our group forward. in soy yo, students will collaborate with the instructor in designing the course. using ypar, students will determine what the focus should be, with the intention that the work produced in this class would improve the overall campus community. throughout this process, there would be “touchpoints” where the class http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 informed the campus about what they were learning and what they were doing. although it would be a small group working on the action project, it was important that we acknowledged that this project extended beyond us. to encourage this collaborative, studentcentered approach, we moved tables to the edges of the classroom and placed all the chairs in a circle. the circle represented the cyclical process of decoloniality; in this space, we were learning/un-learning/re-learning (cruz, 2008) and the circle was a visual reminder. the circle also connected to the notion of praxis; as we were focused on researching ways to improve our school for marginalized students, this circle reminded us to reflect. lastly, a circle has no end or beginning, thus making it difficult to center one individual as having the power in the room. initially we wanted every aspect of the class to be student-led, but we soon realized that creating a class and teaching a class were two different things. professor silva recognized this and offered to craft an outline of the syllabus that we could edit as a group. following our community agreements, we then divided ourselves into different groups based on individual interests. each group researched different topics that they want to incorporate into the syllabus with some readings. under the guidance of professor silva and a school librarian, we decided soy yo would involve these themes: ypar, social identity, decoloniality, and collective action. ypar would help us understand our purpose in this space; social identity would enrich our understanding of who we are; decoloniality would surface how oppression manifests in schools, and combined, we would determine what collective action project, or ypar project, we wanted to enact. the day of our presentation to the administration and campus allies, we were nervous, but not like before. the first time we were afraid we would be laughed at or made to feel inadequate. this time we had an ally who believed in us and wanted this for us as much we did. as the principal, vice principals, counselors, mr. d, diversity center director, and student resource guides settled into our guest designated seats in the circle, we explained our process. discussing each aspect of our syllabus, we addressed our rationale and how this connected to our main guiding themes of ypar, decoloniality, and collective action. we invited professor silva to describe how this class aligned with her decolonial pedagogical approach to teaching where she would incorporate readings that spoke to our identities to better understand who we were allow us to co-construct the assignments and class projects. we discussed why a decolonial pedagogy was necessary for us to achieve our goals. we had handouts, a logic model, and a timeline for our first soy yo ypar project. when it came time to ask questions, the principal spoke first, directing his question to professor silva. “so, this is educational?” he asked. calmly, professor silva reiterated the central components of the course and then said, “as the students have clearly illustrated, this course connects with educational and academic theory on how to support marginalized students, as well as the learning objectives for all nhs courses”. “and they can do it?” he asked her. “with all due respect principal, i think that question has been answered by this presentation.” we noticed the allies in the room smirking. mr. d stood up and clapped. “i am excited to see where this will go and am honored to be the instructor of record for soy yo.” the diversity center director then said, “this class has a lot of potential” while our counselors noted the skills we would acquire from soy yo that were important for our future educational goals. “then i guess we can try it,” said the principal. as they left the classroom, we took our seats back in the circle. “let’s begin” said professor silva. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 our third act of decoloniality in all three of these acts, we have shown the barriers we encountered as soy yo. from lack of trust in school administration to not being including in decisions (and then countering those decisions fully aware we risked losing this opportunity), we had to work collectively to determine how to work around these barriers. one of the largest barriers that is not fully tangible but was always present, especially in the vignette above, was doubt. the reactions by the principal showed how he did not believe we could pull this off. in many ways, we resonate with cammarota (2014) when he echoes how often adults fail to consider the “voices and ideas of students” to make change at schools because students are often dismissed as experts. as we have been honest with our feelings throughout this paper, we admit we were hurt by his reactions but not shocked. we are students of color with layered lived experiences who have been told by people in authority that “i will believe it when i see it” which means “it will never happen because you will not do it”. that is our shared lived experience. he doubted our abilities and our collective desire to create change. without a doubt, constructing a syllabus is hard work. at points we considered simply doing what young queens did, which meant we would meet once a month during our free period (which sometimes was used for school assemblies, making it impossible for young queens to meet consistently). it was through ypar and decoloniality that we realized we could do this work the way we envisioned (lissovoy, 2010). ypar taught us that youth had knowledge that should be brought to the table and our skills were just as important as the skills adults and other educated individuals possess (cruz & sonn, 2011; morrell, 2008; portillo, 2013). decoloniality called out the need to decolonize the knowledge we were being taught and that we should see ourselves reflected in our education (lissovoy, 2010). combined, we believed we could work together to create the syllabus and class structure we had hoped for. it required us to identify how our understanding of education and school structure was colonized and how we could identify possible systems of oppression to be dismantled. our third act is an ongoing one, and our ypar projects are focused on how we can continue to decolonize our school. concluding thoughts as we (students and collaborator) step back and reflect on the year and a half of emotional and psychological labor it took to create soy yo, we realize that, like the decolonial project suggests, decolonization work is never complete. decolonizing our campus takes work, work that often felt more than a high school student should bare. we, las gatas, wrestled with how much we wanted to do this work given all the other obligations we had to our afterschool jobs, family, and other activities that fed our souls. this was not only true for las gatas but also for professor silva, as she was not just our teacher, but became our co-conspirator in this project. her intellectual and emotional labor that she gave freely to nhs and soy yo is just one example of how this project was ultimately possible because it was collaborative. as she reminded us, she helped “sharpen our tools” to do this work and it is now our turn to help sharpen others as we continue this path toward decolonization. we believe that ypar-when used within a decolonial pedagogy-can be a transformational experience for students. as cammarota (2014) argues, “research in which young people are both the researchers and the focus of the study can provide critical insider perspectives into how schools produce success or failure… [and can provide knowledge for others] to take action to improve various aspects of education” (p. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 107). ypar taught us that we had the skills to speak for ourselves and to call attention to what needed to be changed at nhs. decolonial pedagogy showed us collaboration and power must come with a level of respect to engage in this work. together, we identified the need to make classes like soy yo possible at nhs and made that-a written document and toolkit that other high school students could use to identify collaborators and develop courses that aligned with their identities and interests-our first action project. although we have produced a written document, we fully acknowledge that soy yo would not be soy yo if it had not been for the advocating and activism of young queens on campus for their own course. many of us are our friends with members of young queens and know the founding members of that course. we are fortunate that they shared their struggles with us and we were encouraged to write our social history to provide documentation for future students who wanted to advocate for these spaces. young queens carved our path; soy yo is here to document the possibilities that could come from student led and student-centered ypar courses. in 2020, soy yo collaborated with young queens on how to integrate ypar into their class, something they had been advocating for but were discouraged from doing. using our written document, they have embarked on their own ypar project that will begin once we can safely return to in-person schooling. knowing how ethnically and racially diverse nest high school is, we did not want ypar or classes like this to be limited to just two groups. we have invited other students on campus to attend “open houses” to learn about our ypar project and the course. in 2021, soy yo and the young queens will be collaborating with a group of muslim womxn on campus who are also interested in their own class that they are referring to as muslim mosaic. our acts of decoloniality have shown us the value of these spaces for not just us, but for all students. as students with marginalized identities (latinx, working class, queer), we knew that the high school system did not reflect our lived experiences. we often felt frustrated by the lack of representation of non-dominant groups in our classes and the ways in which we have been singled out as not “acting appropriate” more often than our white peers. learning about the decolonial project gave us language and artifacts to root ourselves in. having the opportunity to coconstruct this course through a ypar model and identify other ways students can work towards decolonizing our school also taught us about ourselves. as morrell (2008) suggests, youth from marginalized communities are often devalued as collaborators in transformational work. we believe this is largely due in part by colonized ideology of who are appropriate collaborators and what educational knowledge is needed to do this work. decoloniality taught us that these colonized perspectives are meant to be changed. the skills and knowledge that we (the youth) bring to the table is just as important and valuable as that of adults. professor silva stepping back and allowing us to lead echoes this point. decolonial pedagogy and ypar helped us realize our voices deserved to be amplified. as the collaborator on this project, i, professor silva, would be remiss if i did not discuss the issue of sustainability. las gatas and i spent a considerable amount of time discussing how to make this work sustainable and the barriers that exist within nest high school. the labor it took to create soy yo was evident in their eyes when they met with the campus administration to present our revised syllabus. for students, it can be difficult advocating for themselves within a power system such as a high school. las gatas did not want to have to fight for soy yo every academic year. however, they were aware that classes change frequently, and new http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 campus administrators could easily cancel any elective course without an explanation. moreover, they fully recognized that even though i was the teacher of the course, i was not a teacher at their school. i had built a strong relationship with the campus administration but collaborating with las gatas put me at odds with the principal. i was aware that this could be a risk on my part and that he could terminate my collaboration with his school at any time. this is always a concern for community-based work. the students also knew that i might need a break from teaching this class depending on my personal and professional life. as one student said, “we get to do this and graduate, but everyone will expect you to stay”. there is no easy solution for this. for the time being, we have a written commitment from the administration and school district that classes like soy yo can have an instructor of record with another person teaching the course that share the same identities as the students in the class. i currently have no plans to step away from soy yo, but when the time comes, i do hope the school will have hired a latinx faculty member who can join the class. clearly, there is more systemic work that needs to be done to further decolonize nest high school. soy yo has now been taught for over two years at nhs, with six students graduating and attending colleges throughout washington state. we all look forward to the clock striking 1:18pm and heading to our classroom to be together. this changed in march 2020, when all public schools in the state quickly shifted to remote learning due to covid-19. as the instructor, i was concerned for my students-were they safe at home? did they have reliable internet? did their school rented laptops work? how were they managing their family obligations with school? would they still want to meet over zoom for an elective class? i sent them a short survey to determine how to proceed. two weeks after the campus was closed, we started to meet again on zoom. we would alternate our meeting times between mornings and evenings to ensure everyone could attend. i encouraged them to take care of themselves and not to worry about missing a zoom session. not one student missed. we used our time together to share stories of how they were feeling coming of age during a global pandemic, stress management, venting, and reading. we celebrated our seniors, hosted a zoom prom party, and gave space to laugh, cry, and express our hidden concerns. one student created a group journal on google that we would each write in, either addressing a prompt or just sharing our day. in my final entry, i wrote this: “las gatas, i am so grateful for you. from those of you who started this movement for soy yo to each of you that joined this year, i am thankful for everything you each have brought to this space. this was never a research project for me. this has always been about you”. that is the truth. this has never been a research project to me, nor has any act of the decolonial project been about the research. i have hesitated to write about soy yo (despite knowing the importance of publishing for research/scholarly validation and academic promotion). i only agreed to co-author this paper because it was important to las gatas. they wanted their story told and to share their experiences. most importantly, we are keenly aware of how others rewrite history, and their work could easily be co-opted or erased. it is because of their desire to share their knowledge and continue this decolonial work that we are choosing to share our story. two weeks after my last entry in the class journal, i received a card featuring handdrawn cats on the front. inside was this: “thank you for reminding us we had the tools all along and that they just needed to be sharpened”. whether we return to (masked) face to (masked) face this academic year or will be remote, we will continue to keep sharpening their tools. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 references anzaldúa, g. e. (2002). “now let us shift…the path of conocimiento…inner work, public acts.” in g. e. anzaldúa and a. keating (eds.), this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation (pp.540-561). new york: routledge. behar, r. (1996). the vulnerable observer: anthropology that breaks your heart. boston: beacon press. bernal, g., & enchautegui-de-jesús, n. (1994). latinos and latinas in community psychology: a review of the literature. american journal of community psychology, 22(4), 531-557. boylorn, r. m. & orbe, m. p. (2014). introduction: critical autoethnography as a method of choice. in r. m. boylorn & m. p. orbe (eds), critical autoethnography: intersecting cultural identities in everyday life (pp.13-26). walnut creek, ca: left coast press, inc. buttaro, l. (2010). decolonizing pedagogy in the american classroom. the innovative journal: the public sector innovation journal, 15(1), 1-30. cammarota, j. (2014). the social justice education project: youth participatory action research in schools. in j. cammarota & a. romero (eds.), raza studies: the public option for education revolution (pp.107-121). tucson, az: university of arizona press. cammarota, j. (2009). the cultural organizing of formal praxis-based pedagogies: a socio-historical approach to participatory action research. social justice, 36(4), 6-13. chavis, d. m. (1993). a future for community psychology practice. american journal of community psychology, 21, 171– 184. cruz, m. r. (2008). what if i just cite graciela? working toward decolonizing knowledge through a critical ethnography. qualitative inquiry, 14(4), 651-658. cruz, m. r. & sonn, c. c. (2011). (de)colonizing culture in community psychology: reflections from critical social science. american journal of community psychology, 47, 203-214. fanon, f. (1967). black skin, white masks. new york, ny: grove press. fine, m. (1994). working the hyphens: reinventing self and other in qualitative research. in denzin, n. k. & lincoln, y.s. (eds), handbook of qualitative research (pp.70-82). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. fine, m., torre, m. e., boudin, k., bowen, i., clark, j., hylton, d., martinez, m., missy, roberts, r, a., smart, p., & upegui, d. (2004). participatory action research: from within and beyond prison bars. in l. weis & m. fine (eds.), working method: research and social justice (pp. 95-120). new york: routledge. fine, m. (2008). an epilogue, of sorts. in j. cammarota & m. fine (eds.), revolutionizing education: youth participatory action research in motion (pp. 213-234). new york: routledge. freire, p. (1970). pedagogy of the oppressed. continuum publishing company. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 gill, h. & white, v. (2013). decolonial pedagogy through transcultural narrative inquiry in the contact zone. cultural and pedagogical inquiry, 5(2), 25-38. lissovoy, n. d. (2010). decolonial pedagogy and the ethics of the global. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 31(3), 279-293. maldonado-torres, n. (2016). outline of ten theses on coloniality and decoloniality. retrieved from foundation frantz fanon: http://frantzfanonfoundationfondationfrantzfanon.com/article236 0.html. maldonado-torres, n. (2017). frantz fanon and the decolonial turn in psychology: from modern/colonial methods to the decolonial attitude. south african journal of psychology, (47) 4, 432-441. mcintyre, a. (2000). constructing meaning about violence, school, and community: participatory action research with urban youth. urban review, 32 (2), 123-154. mitra, d. l. (2004). the significance of students: can increasing student voice in schools lead to gains in youth development? teachers college record, 106, 651-688. morrell, e. (2008). six summers of ypar: learning, action, and change in urban education. in. j. cammarota & m. fine (eds.), revolutionizing education: youth participatory action research in motion (pp. 155-187). new york: routledge. ozer e. j. & douglas, l. (2013). the impact of participatory research on urban teens: an experimental evaluation. american journal of community psychology, 51, 66-75. portillo, a. (2013). indigenous-centered pedagogies: strategies for teaching native american literature and culture. the cea forum, winter/spring, 155-178. quijano, a. (2000). ‘coloniality of power, eurocentrism and latin america’. nepantla, 1(3): 533–580. seattle public schools (2019). k-12 demographics and key distinctions. www.seattlepublicschools.org. silva, j.m. & the students for diversity now. (2018). #wewantspace: facilitating activist identities in college students through course curriculum. the american journal of community psychology, 62(3-4), 374384. tejada, c. & espinoza, m. (2003). toward a decolonizing pedagogy: social justice reconsidered. educational foundations and social studies faculty publications. 26, 1-9. villanueva, s. t. (2013). teaching as a healing craft: decolonizing the classroom and creating spaces of hopeful resistance through chicano-indigenous pedagogical praxis. urban review, 45, 23-40. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/article2360.html http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/article2360.html http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/article2360.html http://www.seattlepublicschools.org/ stewardship, volunteerism and “green” sustainable programs: core values of community psychology august j. hoffman1 keywords: community gardening, stewardship, green space sustainable programs, ecological models of behavior, environmental humility author biographies: august john hoffman, is currently a professor of psychology at metropolitan state university. he earned his b.a. from uc santa barbara, m.a. from radford university in clinical psychology, and ph.d. from ucla in educational psychology. dr. hoffman is an avid wisconsin master gardener and has recently participated in community development projects (fruit tree orchards, community gardens, etc.) in detroit, mi, yalpemech, guatemala and red lake tribal nation, mn. his research interests involve the psychological and social benefits of community gardening and urban forestry. recommended citation: hoffman, a. j. (2020). stewardship, volunteerism and “green” sustainable programs: core values of community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(3), 1 15. retrieved day/month/year, (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: august john hoffman, metropolitan state university, department of psychology, 1450 energy park drive, st. paul, mn 55108. 1 metropolitan state university http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 stewardship, volunteerism and “green” sustainable programs: core values of community psychology “study nature, love nature, stay close to nature . . . it will never fail you” -frank lloyd wright this theoretical paper examined how universal core values of community psychology are interpersonally and phenomenologically experienced through the development of different forms of green space sustainable and natural environments. in this paper we examine how community gardening and interdependent experiences in natural environments have facilitated a greater respect for human diversity, increased sense of community, resilience and hope for the future. additionally, we examine how community gardening and horticultural programs may serve as unique activities that have helped improve physical health and psychological states of well-being to ethnically diverse populations through increased access to healthy foods. what are the individual and psychosocial mechanisms that contribute to a healthier and more robust community? recent research increasingly supports the central idea that those communities that provide residents with diverse opportunities to participate and engage in a broad range of interactive and interdependent volunteer programs can influence a greater sense of belonging, purpose and connectedness among community members (gilster, 2012; omoto & packard, 2016; zeldin, krauss, kim, collura, & abdullah, 2016) as well as increased levels of social capital and collective efficacy (ohmer & beck, 2006). current research addressing happiness and social well-being (swb) also suggest that the happiest people in the world were those individuals who live in communities that provide basic resources for needs fulfillment (i.e., volunteerism), social support and social capital (diener, seligman, choi & oishi, 2018). the purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical analysis and review describing how several fundamental core values that are commonly found in community psychology (i.e., individual and family wellness, sense of community, respect for human diversity, 2 photos of this project are included in appendix a social justice, etc.) (kloos, hill, thomas, wandersman, & elias, 2011) may be both interpersonally and phenomenologically experienced and developed through a variety of interdependent and sustainable green space and environmental community programs2. in his pioneering research addressing the fundamental psychological components of building a more peaceful society, ervin staub (2013) identifies several psychosocial mechanisms that underlie human engagement and cooperation as well as conflict and antisocial behaviors. conflict and antisocial behaviors seldom occur insidiously or in isolation but rather develop sequentially and more progressively as a continuum and typically occur as a consequence of authoritarian rule and inequitable economic practices. staub argues that the key components in the development of a more cooperative and peaceful society depends upon proactive measures including prevention methodologies, reconciliation, forgiveness and most importantly common values that emphasize “constructive visions…caring, connection and respect” (p. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 586). once these basic and intuitive psychological needs have been established, communities may then build and organize themselves in a more responsive, prosocial and constructive way that promote a more holistic and meaningful environment through the existence of shared values. community psychology as a discipline has historically remained committed to meeting the needs of oppressed and marginalized groups through the development of core values that serve as guiding factors in the development of programs that can help serve community residents in a variety of ways. historically, marginalized and underserved populations (i.e., persons of color and indigenous individuals or poci) have been exposed to chronic forms of race-based stressful environments and subsequently are at risk for increased psychological and physically-related stress disorders (kaholokula, 2016). increasingly, counseling and community psychologists are being asked to specifically address how to implement and disseminate culturally specific healing modalities to poci and other underserved groups using community-based and culturally specific intervention treatments (comas-diaz, hall, neville, 2019). a central theme of community psychology since its inception has been to combine both a holistic and collaborative methodology as an effective process in the development of social action that leads to individual empowerment, growth and healthier environments (jason, stevens, ram, miller, beasley, & gleason, 2016). more recent research addressing the inherent benefits of community psychology as a discipline has identified how social change is facilitated through the existence of core values and what townley, kloos, green and franco (2011) refer to as a “community diversity dialectic” (p. 70). the term “dialectic” as described by townley and colleagues refers more to a continuum of diverse and traditionally opposed forces that shape individual behaviors and provide a mechanism for understanding the etiology of conflict commonly found in group or community environments. perhaps the most basic of opposing forces that often contributes to conflict within the discipline of community psychology centers on the needs of the individual versus the needs of the larger group or community. this paradox is better understood when the needs of both individuals and group members are holistically analyzed through a lens that encompasses the values and needs that both groups share. improved school systems, health care and trauma centers, and access to healthier foods are the kinds of things that most people are concerned about and share a common interest in maintaining these important community resources. values provide the framework that stimulate and empower individual behaviors to engage in meaningful and reciprocal interpersonal relationships and illustrate how we depend upon each other to help create a stronger and more resilient community. community psychology remains a unique discipline in that community service and outreach are common mechanisms used where practitioners work from a strengthbased model that helps to improve social justice and social capital through collaboration with community members from a bottom-up or grass roots approach. one example of a strength-based model that has impacted both self-efficacy and improved physical health (i.e., reduced obesity and diabetes) among american indians (including the navajo nation) was the yèego gardening! pilot study that was conducted in the northeast region of shiprock, new mexico (ornelas, osterbauer, woo, bishop, deschenie, beresford, & lombard, 2018). in this study, navajo nation tribal members participated in a community gardening program that was designed to increase fruit and vegetable (fv) consumption as a means to improve overall physical health and wellbeing. american indian populations are particularly at-risk regarding health-related http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 problems when compared to other ethnic groups, with an obesity and diabetes prevalence rate of 47% between 2006 and 2009 (centers for disease control, 2007). the researchers found a positive correlation between navajo tribal members participating in a community gardening program with a significant increase in fv consumption which had an overall positive impact on physical health, self-efficacy and reduced sedentary behaviors. more recent research addressing the needs of communities has emphasized the positive psychodynamic impact that communitybased volunteer programs can have in providing community residents with a stronger sense of belonging, identification and community-connectedness (gilster, 2012). specific types of community service programs that provide community residents to interact and engage with each other in outdoor (i.e., “green space”) natural environments has been instrumental in increased reports of psychological wellness (home, hunziker, & bauer, 2012) as well as increased social capital within neighborhoods (alaimo, reischl, & allen, 2010; hoffman, 2011). volunteerism and green space activities, such as community gardening and forestry programs have also been identified as being instrumental in improving access to healthier (i.e., organic) foods to food insecure populations as well as building a stronger familial network among extended family members (carney, et al., 2012). an important component of community-based research is in identifying how the core values shared among community psychologists can be implemented in various programs to enhance community empowerment, social capital and resilience. in their seminal research addressing the processes in which the basic principles of community psychology can address a variety of community-related problems, kloos and colleagues (2011) identified seven core principles or values that remain central to the work of community psychologists that help to facilitate a greater sense of autonomy, resilience and empowerment among community members: individual and family wellness; sense of community; respect for human diversity; social justice; citizen participation; collaboration and community strengths; and empirical grounding. more recently, specific types of activities that involve community participation and engagement can help improve the physical development and provide psychosocial resources (i.e., social capital) to community residents that help to foster a greater sense of purpose, psychological well-being and community connectedness (alaimo, reischl, & ober, 2010). the purpose of this theoretical paper is examining how “green space” sustainable community gardening programs can provide direct support in the development of the fundamental core values of community growth and development. additionally, the focus of this paper will identify the numerous physical and psychosocial advantages of the development of green space and sustainable gardening programs and the restorative effects that are associated with increased exposure to outdoor environments. inspiring social change through empowerment: core values of community psychology the seven core values as described by kloos and colleagues (2011) represent universal and basic principles that community psychologists share in their work through a collaborative approach to community development (see figure 1). emphasis is placed in developmental strategies that enhance individual and group wellness and subjective states of well-being through the existence of inclusive, experiential and interactive diverse community programs. participation in these community programs will not only help to empower community members through the development of social capital but will also provide a mechanism to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 achieve a greater sense of “connectedness” with other community members that is the foundation of social change and action. community psychologists often work within environments and geographic regions that reflect highly diverse and changing populations. there are an estimated 40 million immigrants who are currently residing in the united states, and 39% of those immigrants have lived in the united states for an extended (i.e., 20 years or more) period of time. additionally, the proportion of immigrants who are residing in the united states for extended periods of time is also expected to increase to over 50% by the year 2030 (pitkin & meyers, 2011). given the rapidly changing populations within our society, it is essential that community psychologists recognize the need and importance in developing tools and resources to identify and better understand the value of cultural and ethnic diversity. community psychologists recognize that diversity exists and manifests itself within a variety of ways, and that the discovery of adaptive strategies within ethnically diverse communities can only exist when we provide mechanisms and opportunities for individuals to share their skills and talents which ultimately create a more resilient community. the seven core values of community psychology 1. individual and family wellness; 2. sense of community; 3. respect for human diversity; 4. social justice; 5. citizen participation; 6. collaboration and community strengths; and 7. empirical grounding figure 1. the seven core values in community psychology. adapted from kloos, b., hill, j., thomas, e., wandersmith, a., & elias, m. (2011). community psychology: linking individuals and communities. belmont, ca: wadsworth. a concept that is closely related to respect for human diversity is social justice. social justice refers to fairness and an equitable process in how laws are created, distributed and applied to all individuals who comprise the community. the community psychologist is especially concerned with social justice because of the tendency for unequal distribution of critical resources that can have a dramatic impact on the health and wellbeing of oppressed and underserved groups. distributive justice refers to how the key resources become distributed to different community members and institutions (i.e., school systems, non-profit agencies, etc.). procedural justice refers to who is responsible (i.e., legislature, community stakeholders) in determining the how resources are distributed throughout the community. citizen participation is also essential to the mission of the community psychologist in that both community residents and the community psychologist work collaboratively in identify key issues relative to community development and respond to the collectively to the needs of community members. citizen participation is empowering in that groups of individuals work cooperatively and become actively involved in the decision-making processes that will develop improved policies that impact the health, well-being and wellness of all individuals. in this sense, citizen participation represents a greater form of collective efficacy in that central goals are not achieved individually but rather through an organized and holistic approach. through this process, community strengths and skills provide the mechanisms that help establish social capital for community members to empower and advance themselves. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 a “greener” approach to the core values of community psychology the development of community gardening and sustainable practices has recently been identified as an instrumental and popular mechanism that promotes not only mental health and wellness for community residents, but has also provided mechanisms for neighborhoods to provide opportunities for community members to interact and participate in community improvement programs that have been identified with increased social capital and community connectedness (alaimo, reischl, & allen, 2010). the recent interest in the development of different forms of green space and sustainable programs have been identified as being highly instrumental processes that help to foster numerous positive schoolcommunity relationships (fifolt, morgan, & burgess, 2018) and build dynamic multiethnic partnerships that utilize essential core values among community psychologists such as social justice, food equity (richardson, 2011; glover, shinew, & parry, 2005) and resilience (okvat & zautra, 2011). recent research has identified green space sustainable gardening programs as an effective way to address the problem of food insecurity among many underserved minority populations as well as teach younger populations the importance of proenvironmental values and sustainable practices (carney, et al., 2012; kerret, orkibi, & ronen, 2014). participation in communitybased organic gardening programs not only provided food insecure families with increased access (four-fold) to healthier and organic foods, they also promoted a greater sense of personal wellbeing and togetherness when family members worked collectively in their vegetable gardens. as a central core value to community psychology, community gardening programs increasingly have been identified as an effective recreational and social activity that promotes a greater sense of family unity, community empowerment and healthier relationships among family members as well as reducing food insecurity that disproportionately impacts low-income and underserved community members (carney, et. al., 2012). “eco-schools” and green space programs one innovative program that is being implemented in many primary and secondary school systems are “green school” programs (sometimes referred to as “eco-schools” or enviroschools). schools that provide opportunities for students and family members to participate in programs that emphasize the importance of environmentally-sensitive behaviors such as recycling, reusing, and conserving energy consumption with can have a significant impact on what kerret, orkibi and ronen (2014) refer to as “environmental subjective well-being” (p. 82). schools that provide a greener approach to environmentally sustainable practices can also provide a model for students to learn and understand more about essential ecological values and principles of environmental subjective wellbeing and incorporate them within their own communities (henderson & tidbury, 2004; hoffman, 2015). perhaps more importantly, when school systems incorporate environmentally sustainable practices within their curricula, adolescents are more likely to have a stronger sense of self-efficacy in their beliefs of making positive changes within the environment of their own community and impact more generally positive forms of change regarding the fragile nature of the global ecosystem (kerret, orkibi, & ronen, 2014). perhaps some of the reasons for the significant increases in research addressing the psychological and community benefits of green space sustainable programs such as community gardening, environmental forestry and fruit tree horticultural programs is that they typically provide ideal http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 environments for individuals to experience both the natural and community environment in a way that is individually healthful, holistic and organic. community gardening and green space sustainable programs provide an ideal environment where community members may participate in a voluntary program that teaches residents valuable civic engagement and democratic principles that require participants to work collaboratively and share resources as a means of producing healthy foods. additionally, voluntary programs such as community gardens and horticultural programs can often produce what glover, shinew, and parry (2005) refer to as “public sphere effects” (p. 78) which closely resembles social capital in that community residents work collaboratively and share a common set of principles pertaining to successful gardening practices and also learn the social and communication skills that are necessary in dynamic group projects that frequently involve different views and opinions. when used this way, community gardening and green space sustainable programs can provide an environment where residents share their skills and talents to help bring about effective and positive social change within their own communities while also fostering a stronger sense of community “connectedness” with each other. green spaces facilitating psychological sense of community seymore sarason (1974) was one of the earliest pioneers in the discipline of community psychology and was the first person to coin the term “psychological sense of community.” psychological sense of community is a term that describes how community members view themselves in relation to other community members and recognizes that the achievement of essential community goals are dependent on individuals working together through interdependency, respect and collaboration. community project coalitions, volunteerism and activism have been identified as instrumental processes that can help build empowerment, stronger psychological states of well-being and establish a common ingroup identity that bring community residents closer together (gilster, 2012). community involvement, volunteerism and serving others (i.e., environmental stewardship programs) have also been identified as a key predictor in developing empathy and more broadly developing concern for others in future generations (lawford & ramey, 2017). teaching community residents the value of a common ingroup identity combined with teaching younger community residents the importance of “inclusive caring” (caring for not only family members but all community residents) (p. 586) and respect for other community residents have identified as central components that are necessary in building a more tolerant and peaceful society (staub, 2013). sarason (1974) defined psychological sense of community as: “the perception of similarity to others, an acknowledged interdependence with others . . . and a willingness to maintain this interdependence by giving to or doing for others what one expects from them, the feeling that one is part of and a larger dependable and stable structure” (p. 157). current research has identified the positive and reciprocal relationship between community gardening and the natural environment (okvat & zautra, 2011) and how ethnically diverse individuals can discover greater similarity among one another that contributes to interdependency and a stronger sense of community as described by sarason (1974). used in this way, community gardening programs can provide greater opportunities for individuals to not only improve their psychological state of well-being (parry-jones, 1990), but also help shape and teach basic civic responsibilities in the community-based care and maintenance of land that is used to produce healthier foods for community members. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 related to the themes of community development, interdependency and sense of community, mcmillan and chavis (1986) conducted research that focused on the specific characteristics that contributed to the development of wellness, integration of intrapersonal needs and psychological sense of community. through their research they identified four key elements that contributed to how a stronger sense of community is developed: membership, influence, integration and fulfillment of needs, and a shared emotional connection. cooperative memberships and open access to vegetable gardens, community fruit tree orchards and green space sustainable areas are essential in that the success of the garden depends on the shared responsibility of observing rules and cooperation among community members. community gardens do have physical access boundaries and these boundaries are typically determined through a collaboration among community residents and stakeholders (glover, shinew, & parry, 2005). according to mcmillan and chavis (1986), contributing factors to psychological sense of community and membership include a shared sense of responsibility (i.e., developing gardening plots, irrigation systems, harvesting, etc.) as well as a strong sense of “emotional safety.” a sense of influence is also necessary in developing a stronger sense of community because of the bidirectional and reciprocal nature of volunteerism and community involvement. community group members that work collaboratively in civic engagement, stewardship and community service activities attain a greater sense of purpose, cohesiveness and psychological states of wellbeing because of their shared experiences in working with other residents that share similar goals and interests (omoto & packard, 2016). stated more simply, participants who are involved in environmental stewardship programs (i.e., community gardening) become empowered because they can actually see and experience that their collective efforts are indeed making a positive impact in the environment and community. participation in voluntary programs with other community residents helps to establish a stronger sense of social cohesion and shared identity that help to promote health and empowerment in community development programs (hilgerkolb, et al., 2019). in a recent study that examined the efficacy of green environmental programs in primary and secondary school systems, kerret, orkibi and ronen (2014) determined that the specific types of environmental curricula combined with green community-based sustainable programs influenced student’s perceptions of control and hope regarding how to protect the increasingly sensitive ecological nature of the environment and perhaps most importantly provided the impetus of “improved hope for the planet” among the student volunteers. richard louv (2006) has identified the importance of outdoor natural experiences as essential to children’s healthy development from both a physical and psychological perspective. in his book louv argues that primary and secondary schools should be placing less emphasis on standardized test scores and technology and focus more on the “healing nature” of green space environments that provide children with a greater sense of environmental appreciation and what hoffman (2020) refers to as “environmental humility.” through the development of green sustainable and community gardening programs community residents are able to share positive experiences with each other through the development of providing healthy and nutritious foods that can help build both social capital (alaimo, reischl, atkinson, & hutchinson, 2005) and a stronger, more positive vision of the future for their neighborhoods. in this way, community gardening and sustainable programs help to provide community residents with opportunities to share their http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 skills with each other that contributes to what rappaport (1977) refers to as the “personenvironment” fit. community gardens provide community residents of different economic and ethnic backgrounds both a natural and organic opportunity to share common values with each other while building more positive relationships with each other. current research has also shown that increased intergroup contact as well as superordinate goals provide unique opportunities for ethnically diverse groups to debunk negative stereotypes that often contribute to ethnic conflict and increased ethnocentric ideology (glover, 2004; al ramiah & hewstone, 2013). concluding comments future directions of green space activities green space sustainable programs, community gardening and natural environments present unique physiological, psychosocial and psychological benefits to community members for several reasons. dating back to our early evolutionary history, there were clear adaptive reasons why humans should prefer and feel a greater sense of connectedness to green and sustainable environments (berto, barbiero, barbiero, & senes, 2018; budd & jensen, 2017). natural environments depicting greener meadows and forests were preferred by early ancestors because of the rich resources they provided and the vital resources that existed in these areas (kaplan & kaplan, 1982). additionally, environments rich in greener resources (i.e., expansive tree canopies) provided greater protection from potential predators and thereby improved reproductive fitness and evolved psychological mechanisms facilitating survival (ulrich, 1983). community gardens helped produce the vital resources necessary to sustain optimum health, and perhaps more importantly they provide a unique forum where people can congregate, share ideas and labor to build the trust necessary in establishing community growth and interconnected relationships. recommendations for future research there are many areas of research that still need to examine the relationship between people and nature as well as the numerous interpersonal and psychosocial benefits of green space and natural environments. one area of research may explore the relationship between technology and social media with exposure to green and natural environments. increased community research addressing the topics of exposure to urban forestry and community gardening programs have shown reduced perceived needs and dependency on the use of technology and social media sites among specific younger populations. other areas of future research may examine the relationship between green space environments, existing community values and the process of the development of psychological resilience and perceived interpersonal connectedness among ethnically diverse community residents. for example, what are the inherent and beneficial characteristics of natural green space environments that help promote trust, connectedness and empowerment within marginalized and low-income communities? addressing the relationship between natural environments and the psychological mechanisms that help build trust and reduce conflict are clearly needed within communties that are becoming increasingly marginalized through economic disparities, ethnocentric ideology and ethnic conflict. an additional area of recommended research addresses specifically how the healing qualities of natural environments impact different groups of individuals from culturally diverse populations. given the fact that some members of marginalized communities are more at risk for a variety of health-related disorders (i.e., diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular problems), how might green space and community gardening programs http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 become more available as a health resource for individuals suffering from these healthrelated issues? as this manuscript was being revised in the final stages for publication the tragedy involving george floyd and civil unrest that impacted the communities of st. paul and minneapolis, mn began to unfold throughout the united states. as we have discussed throughout this paper, communities can play an important role in bringing people together to empower lives and enhance psychological well-being, regardless of class, ethnicity or cultural heritage. community gardens, green space and forestry programs provide an important healing quality that fosters both trust and collaboration that can facilitate a greater understanding among groups that have experienced injustice and oppression in the past. community gardening and green space programs serve as an instrument in providing a greater understanding and appreciation of the relationship between essential and universal human core values with holistic and natural environments. in this way we may achieve a more compatible, peaceful and 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(2016). pathways to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 youth empowerment and community connectedness: a study of youth-adult partnership in malaysian after-school, co-curricular programs. journal of youth and adolescence, 45, 16381651. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 appendix a figure 2. metropolitan state university students harvesting vegetables figure 3. metropolitan state university students harvesting apples http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 3 august 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 figure 4. inver hills – metropolitan state community garden figure 5. inver hills – metropolitan state apple orchard http://www.gjcpp.org/ creating change agents: teaching hbcu undergraduates to use community-based research to resist racism leslie v. collins1, latia glasgow1, emily tyra1, stephanie wade1, makayla summerow1, mykaila n. jones1 keywords: liberatory research, participatory based research, community-based research, anti-racism, hbcu students, undergraduates, problem-based learning, social justice author biographies: leslie v. collins, phd is an assistant professor in psychology at fisk university in the department of behavioral sciences. she is constantly striving to be a good scholar, community member, neighbor, friend, daughter, sister, and aunt. for over 22 years, leslie has been working—professionally or as a volunteer-with small, community-based organizations in various capacities. as the director of programs and services for the alzheimer’s association mid-south chapter; and an education coordinator and therapist for the rape and sexual abuse center (rsac). as an assistant professor at fisk university, dr. collins is commented to mentoring and advising students from underrepresented students in the academy, encouraging them to pursue post baccalaureate degrees. leslie’s research includes examining the effects of social inequality on individual and community well-being. as a neighbor and advocate for social equity and justice, leslie has served as a court appointed special advocate (casa) for children, member of the naacp, aarp, member of cayce united (a project for equitable housing), national organization for women, the human rights campaign. she has also volunteered for the urban epicenter, jobs with justice, nashville economic justice alliance, nashville community oversight board, the 1 behavioral sciences department fisk university, usa global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 homeless power project and the tennessee immigrants and refugees center. emily tyra, a health education specialist for the iam! project at fisk university. she graduated with a ba in psychology from fisk in may 2020. she has done work revolving around quantitative and qualitative research. this includes developing and coding questionnaires. she is interested in racial and ethnic identity, as well as sexual health and orientation. finally emily is the proud mother of a two-year old daughter, nova. mykaila jones, is a native of nashville, tennessee, and first-generation graduate of fisk university with a bachelor of arts in psychology in december 2020. mykaila jones has gained research and data collection experience through both the nih marc u-star biomedical research program and fisk-meharry hbcu wellness project. using this knowledge, mykaila assisted in the development of focus group discussion questions, procedures, and data collection and analysis for other community groups. currently, mykaila is attending seminary at american baptist college in nashville, tn. recommended citation: collins, l.v., glasgow, l., tyra, e., wade, s., summerow, m., jones, m. n. (2021). creating change agents: teaching hbcu undergraduates to use community-based research to resist racism. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(2), 1 21. retrieved day/month/year, (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: leslie collins, school of humanities and social sciences, fisk university, nashville, tn 37203-5721. email: lecollins@fisk.edu. phone: 615-579-5291 http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:lecollins@fisk.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 creating change agents: teaching hbcu undergraduates to use communitybased research to resist racism the rise of a “colorblind” vernacular among young adults’ limits how they understand race and racism in ways that allow white supremacists ideologies to thrive. in the united states, for example, immigration policies, policies and practices regarding criminal justice and policing, health and housing are often framed using black and brown people as a cautionary tale for failing policies or to squelch policies that promote redress from historical oppression—conflating issues with race. additionally, young black and latinx adults understand race and racism within this conflation—often to their communities’ detriment. liberatory research methodologies offer opportunities for young adults, specifically undergraduates at historically black colleges and universities (hbcu) to catalyze and expand their efforts for community change and social justice. this descriptive study explores the process of using problem-based learning to teach undergraduates liberatory methodology and qualitative research methods to affect community change and social justice. short surveys with student researchers, their personal reflections and classroom observations illustrate how student researchers’ use qualitative research methods to examine how racism and sexism manifest in contemporary social problems. additionally, the data describe how student researchers perceive their ability to use skills to resist oppression and make social change and continue anti-racist work since the civil rights era, discussions of race have become truncated and coded (west, 2001; bonilla-silva 2001, 2017). specifically, bonilla-silva (2017) describes this kind of language as a mechanism of color-blind racism. he argues that a consequence of the post-civil rights actions was to stop speaking overtly about individuals in terms of their racial make-up; for fear of being perceived as prejudiced. thus, racial identity has become encoded in languages regarding social problems such as crime, poverty, health and educational disparities (bonilla-silva, 2017). the rise of a colorblind vernacular limits how individuals (specifically young adults) understand race and racism, which allows white supremacy to thrive. consequently, in the united states, for example, immigration policies, policies and practices regarding criminal justice and policing, health and housing are often framed using black and brown people as a cautionary tale for failing policies or to squelch policies that promote redress from historical oppression. because of colorblind racism, many of the formerly mentioned social issues are conflated with race. additionally, young adults, including black and brown, have learned to understand race and racism within this conflation—often to their communities’ detriment. thus, antiracist work with young people may involve civic engagement or efforts to redress conflated social and racial issues. social justice and anti-racist scholars criticize traditional research because, although claiming neutrality and objectivity, such research processes and practices are often exclusive (expert-driven), privilege perspectives of members’ dominant culture (white, male, wealthy), and use a deficitsbased approach when considering communities of color. this research process’s hegemonic ideas regarding how communities http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 of color permeate and inform how they can participate in society and limit access to societal resources (tangible and intangible). consequently, traditional researchers link social ills such as poverty, crime, poor health to communities based on race. scholars concerned with liberatory research and practice offer guidance regarding integrating inclusivity, democracy, action, and justice as principles for research. for example, action research (ar), participatory action research (par), and community based participatory research (cbpr) promote including stakeholders to create strategies and actions that promote health and positive community change. other participatorybased methodologies such as critical participatory action research, anti-racist research, and empowerment praxis specifically engage liberatory theories such as critical race and feminist theories as well as theories regarding power to understand how structural forces inform research processes and products (mcmillan, b., florin, p., stevenson, j., kerman, & mitchell,1995; cahill, 2007; thurber, collins, greer, mcknight, & thompson, 2018). moreover, these researchers’ approaches engage in processes towards achieving social justice and liberation. historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) are prime environments for liberatory research methodologies because of their histories of fostering civic engagement and social justice (jean-marie, 2006; sydnor, hawkins & edwards, 2010; lomax, 2015; bowles, hopps & clayton, 2016; mobley, 2017; nelson & williams, 2017). teaching liberatory research methodologies undergraduates at hbcus offer opportunities them to catalyze and expand their efforts for community change and social justice (das gupta, 2003; commarota, j. & fine, m., 2008; zuberskerritt, wood, l. & kearney, 2020). oppression and liberation happen at multiple levels—personal, collective, institutional, cultural, and societal (prilleltensky, 2008). therefore, efforts aimed at ending the former and achieving the latter must include multileveled, multilayered strategies to action, research, teaching and knowledge generation (scholarship). thus, much literature has focused on how researchers can initiate research methodologies that empower marginalized communities to social justice and anti-racist efforts; they tend to target community members and stakeholders. they outline ways to build collaborative relationships within historically oppressed communities, the benefits, and outcomes (i.e., consciousness raising and activism) as well as how to engage community members’ research design, data collection and use of findings. teaching community-based participatory methodologies helps students attend to the multiple voices and experiences that are often excluded or ignored—such as their own. furthermore, when undergraduates learn community-based participatory methodologies as well as qualitative research methods, it can help them build skills to attend to excluded voices—such as their own; promote student activism and resistance efforts; publish research that changes narrative about marginalized communities; and, disrupt color-blind racist ideologies (bonilla-silva, 2001, das gupta, 2003; fine & torre, 2004; cammarota & fine, 2008; wilson, 2008). the research regarding how to engage community members (especially historically marginalized groups) in research for redress to social injustice and oppression is continually growing. yet, there is little scholarship regarding how to train potential researchers and scholars in educational institutions. in addition, there is a dearth of community-based and qualitative research methods course information for undergraduates. yet, teaching students to conduct these kinds of research could be a way to immerse them in racial justice http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 practice. this descriptive study explores the process of using problem-based learning (nilson, 2016) to teach undergraduates liberatory methodology and qualitative research methods to affect community change and social justice (das gupta, 2003; fine & torre, 2004; wilson, 2008). short surveys with student researchers, their personal reflections and classroom observations illustrate how student researchers use qualitative research methods to examine how racism and sexism manifest in contemporary social problems. additionally, the data describe how student researchers perceive their ability to use skills to resist oppression and make social change and continue anti-racist work. research, liberation and social change community based research approaches are rooted in the belief that those directly affected by social problems play a central role in framing, investigation, and intervention efforts (stringer, 1999). for example, community-based research methodologies such as action research (ar), participatory action research (par), and community based participatory research methods (cbpr), empowerment evaluation, and participatory practice (in social work) emphasize engaging stakeholders (specifically those directly affected) in research and planning processes to construct more relevant, inclusive practices. specifically, action research and community-based research privilege marginalized community members’ voices, experiences, and knowledge. however, socio-cultural and political power differentials among community members such as access to resources and social location/identity (i.e., race, class, gender, citizenship status, sexual orientation, etc.) can manifest as imbalances in who participates and how, whose knowledge is validated, and who speaks for community (cahill, 2007; chaskin, khare, & joseph, 2012; thurber, et al 2018). thus, participatory based research practice without reflection or attention to internal and external power differential and dynamics can inadvertently yield oppressive outcomes. furthermore, research teams must be cognizant of who benefits from research efforts and what they gain. liberatory research efforts emphasize using research results to benefit community members individually and collectively over the interests of the academy. consequently, research methods and educational curricula that attend to systems of power and internal power dynamics to ensure valuing and privileging all contributions have emerged. for example, critical participatory action research and antiracist research curricula (das gupta, 2003; cammarotta & fine, 2008; zuber-skerritt, et al, 2020) require attending to how social systems of oppression (i.e., race, gender, class, nationality, etc.) either overtly or covertly privilege certain voices within these processes. specifically, researchers who participate in such liberatory research efforts must attend to how social forces such as race, class gender, nationalism, sexual orientation have become interwoven into all research processes (das gupta, 2003; cahill, 2007; wilson, 2008;). wilson (2008) and tuhiwaismith (2012), argue that researchers do not work in a vacuum. thus, researchers’ critical introspection of how their social identities inform how they maintain oppressive systems and structures (i.e., racism, sexism, classism) without intention. specifically, researchers’ social identities and location can inform our approach methodology, research questions, what we consider data (vital information), data interpretation/analysis, and reporting (the story we tell and how we tell it). thus, introspection about our social identities become vital to the process of using research for social justice. moreover, because research and data inform policy and practices http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 involving those who may have limited access can facilitate researcher introspection and yield richer more accurate information. when we collaborate with members of marginalized communities, they may be more inclined to participate in research efforts that will answer questions and seek solutions for social change within their communities. qualitative methods and social justice community-based research methodologies provide opportunities for researchers and/or potential researchers to root their work in a liberatory philosophy. scholars such as fine and torre, 2004; lyons, bike, ojeda, johnson, rosales, and flores, 2013 contend that qualitative data collection can be used to promote equity, access participation and social change in communities. they contend that qualitative data collection practice and social justice principles converge at multiple points including: areas of convergence include emphasizing: (a) context, culture, and environment (b) true collaborative researcher community relationships, (c) emergent, inductive understanding of experiences, concepts and samples/communities. moreover, and most poignant, the data are collected and used to implement actions that benefit oppressed communities and forward societal change. historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) as training sites for liberatory researchers hbcu students are uniquely positioned to learn and practice liberatory research methods in marginalized communities for three reasons. first, hbcus were developed specifically to provide those, who had been barred from other educational spaces because of race, access to training and education for financial and social mobility— though their target audience were africans enslaved and their descendants. from their inceptions, most have had five primary goals: 1. access to education to freed african americans and their progeny; 2. provide supportive environment in which students could learn and grow (this environment centered on the experiences, values and culture of many in the black community); 3. promote racial uplift; 4. provide and promote community service and civic engagement; and, 5. cultivate community and global leaders who will affect societal change and social justice (jean-marie, 2006; lomax, 2015; mobley, 2017; nelson& williams, 2017). essentially, hbcu’s have been designed deliberately or unintentionally for anti-racist and social justice practice. they have been spaces in which community members, faculty, and students wrestle with the plight of the black community and race relations from 1854, when the first institution was started, to the civil rights era to the present as many communities marginalized continue to face violence and deprivation. scholars who study hbcus chronicle that their rich history is working to promote holistic wellbeing in the black community by producing highly educated persons who have led efforts towards racial equity and justice. these are settings in which faculty and students have and continue to work to secure equal rights and opportunities for women as well as people of color (sydnor, hawkins, & edwards, 2010; bowles, hopps & clayton, 2016; mobley, 2017; nelson& williams, 2017). sydnor, hawkins, and edwards (2010) contend that hbcus are positioned to take leadership in probably a better choice of words. and implementing community based and participatory based research in communities because the core values of each are complementary if not similar— partnership, community engagement, empowerment equity, and social justice. furthermore, they argue some hbcus histories and relationships within community spaces provide opportunities for access and collaboration in marginalized communities. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 specifically, research and work at hbcus have laid the groundwork for academic institutions to continue to grow participatory based forms of research. however, they indicate some challenges that hbcus may face that may impede efforts to take the helm in these areas of research. for example, most hbcus have limited financial and human resources—faculties have heavy teaching loads—to take on such projects. yet incorporating courses into the curriculum may facilitate researchers at hbcus taking the lead in liberatory research efforts. teaching students these research methods at the undergraduate level can address human resource concerns because they can work as research assistants. these applied courses could pique their interest in research and develop potential community researchers and scholars as well as better position them to be competitive candidates in graduate programs. second, according to the united negro college fund, of the 300,000 to 500,000 students who attend hbcus, 80% are african american and 70 to 80 percent of them qualify for federal pell grants and pay for college with student loans. most students are members of communities that are most deeply affected by oppressive social policies and practices such as police misconduct, strained community/police relations, health disparities, and the constant inflation of housing prices pushing them out of their neighborhoods. das gupta (2003) found that most students who participated in their certificate program were from communities marginalized who endeavored to investigate issues and inform practices to redress deleterious effects of oppression within them. moreover, undergraduate students tend to engage in learning when concepts and theories are attached to contemporary social issues to which they can be applied. using community-based participatory methodologies as well as qualitative research methods can help students attend to the multiple voices and experiences that are often excluded or ignored—such as their own. teaching undergraduates to conduct qualitative research using social problems as a context fosters theoretical and empirical insights and enriches their learning with meaningful experiences in and beyond the classroom. finally, hbcus educate students from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. those who attend hbcus tend to choose them because of their history in social racial? justice; thus, they often express a desire to promote social change and resistance. therefore, knowing and conducting action research in these spaces contextualizes patterns around policing and community development in broader structural conditions. additionally, the class can promote civic engagement and social activism among students—around issues that they find relevant and significant. conducting and publishing this research disrupts white supremacy by producing knowledge that is representative of voices that have been historically subjugated and disentangling race from social policy to produce effective policies for just change. the current exploratory study discusses the process of teaching undergraduates participatory based research methods, the impact on students and how their efforts affect community change. the course is designed to train students at a historically black college/university (hbcu) to use qualitative research methods to examine how systems of power (e.g.., race, class, and gender) materialize in contemporary social issues; the potential for student researchers to develop skills to make social change; and begin to instill anti-racist and critical race theory into their practice. the courses integrate problem and project-based learning (nilson, 2016; niehaus, 2017); training undergraduate students to use qualitative research methods in action research projects regarding community policing, police accountability, and gentrification. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 methods context: qualitative research methods and methodologies course this course was the first time that the university offered the introduction to qualitative methods to students in psychology. currently, social science majors are required to take a basic research methods and statistics course and psychology students take an experimental design course. but the university does not have any research courses focused specifically on qualitative methods or participatory research methods. two events informed the development and timing of this qualitative research class. first, in 2017 a local civil rights organization filed a lawsuit against its local southeastern metropolitan law enforcement (southeast sheriff2) for violating established consent decrees and community activists’ privacy. the court ruled against the southeast sheriff’s department. moreover, the court ordered them to make several organizational changes and established an oversight committee to monitor reforms—including conducting focus groups with all community stakeholders to assess attitudes about community/law enforcement interactions, evaluate community members’ understanding of local consent decrees; and garner recommendations to inform changes in policy and practice. the oversight committee contacted the university’s psychology department to design and implement stakeholder focus groups as well as analyze data and report to court. the head of psychology invited me to collaborate with her on the project. as we began to think through the planning process, we decided to develop a qualitative methods class to offer students opportunities to gain knowledge and 2 pseudonyms are used to ensure anonymity and confidentiality. 3 the course was designed to teach principles of qualitative research methodology (specifically action research). experiences beyond our introductory courses. second, in 2016 i co-taught a critical participatory research and action theory in practice (cpartp) seminar, with a colleague from guilford university, regarding her work in justice with students with reference to undocumented youth. i designed this course to model cpartp. the purpose of the course was to teach undergraduate students to apply qualitative research methods to community-based issues (i.e. gentrification and community/police relations), which could inform healthy and just community change. we designed the course using principles of problem-based learning; issues of social change and justice became the context “problem” for learning. the principles include working collaboratively to solve a specific problem or completing a task instead of centering materials, applying course content to real world issues, including research and information literacy, and facilitating student directed learning. although we used two primary texts to teach the course, the primary goal was to provide spaces for students to apply concepts from readings and lectures for the purpose of learning the research process through practice. the instructors constructed a problem-based learning setting in which students learned about action research and qualitative methodologies concepts. students then applied the concepts by first designing a focus group process for the “southeast sheriff's”3 (nilson, 2016; niehaus, 2017) first. then, they designed focus groups for local organizations regarding police/community engagement and gentrification. the class met twice a week on tuesday and thursday for 16 weeks. the class met twice a week (every tuesday and thursday) for 16 weeks. specifically, this semester's course will use focus groups as a context. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 tuesdays’ classes tended to focus on lecture/discussion for instructors to introduce concepts. thursdays were designed in a workshop format in which students designed focus groups, constructed data collection materials; designed focus group processes, constructed and implemented recruitment plans, and assisted with “day of” logistics for focus groups. for example, in initial courses we discussed how to engage with community members or clients to ensure that everyone was on the same page while discussing how data collection and analysis in action research projects was emergent throughout the project. on thursday, students learned manifest and latent coding techniques to analyze sheriff’s responses to the initial expectations survey. student researchers used the information to clarify purpose and design initial research questions that later informed data collection materials, sampling, recruiting and analysis. student researchers participated as observers, recorders, and greeters in approximately 20 southeast sheriff’s focus groups. their participation in the former project provided knowledge for their final class project. two community groups approached the class to design and conduct focus groups regarding civilian oversight of police and gentrification4. after hearing presentations from both groups, student researchers selected their preferred interests. student researchers used experiences garnered from the sheriff’s project to inform their efforts. although students designed the focus group plans, data collection materials, and analytic plans, the effects of covid-19— nationwide/statewide quarantines and the university’s switch to strictly virtual campus—prohibited them from completing their projects. instructors emphasized 4 the course instructors had done volunteer work and developed research regarding these two topics. many students in the course assisted with these previous projects and expressed an interest in taking the class the semester before it was developed. in a future course, the instructors would student researcher experiences observing and participating in the process to inform teaching, and to find teachable moments. additionally, students discussed shared experiences at focus groups to inform how they would develop their research projects. participants: student researchers eighteen students participated in the course—17 females and 1 male. all students identified their race partly or all black/african american and 15 were undergraduate, psychology majors. undergraduates attended class twice a week, participated in focus group recruitment and sampling; group implementation as greeters, recorders, and observers; and/or, data analysts5. three graduate students in the clinical psychology master’s program volunteered to assist with southeast sheriff’s focus groups. during the process they functioned as greeters only because undergraduates were obligated to set up, record and observe as class assignments. thus, their perceptions and observations were also captured. all students were required to have taken an introductory research methods course. most student researchers had taken courses regarding race, gender, social psychology, and social problems. instructors invited specific students, who had excelled in research methods courses and expressed an interest in research, social change, and community work from previous courses, to join the class. additionally, instructors announced the course in their classes to recruit potential students. graduate students were invited to work as student researchers by their instructor and advisor. they volunteered for the focus groups and submitted personal observations. expand topics to solicit potential topics from students to facilitate their agency the kind of data they collect and with whom they partner. 5 some students were limited in their ability to implement focus groups because of travel restrictions. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 the data6 the purpose of this study was to understand and describe how a problem based learning curriculum could enrich students’ class experience; gain student researchers perspectives regarding racism, structural oppression and how it manifest in current community issues; and, the potential for student researchers to develop skills to make social change and engage in anti-racist practices. thus, data collection included the following: instructor observations instructors’ field observations during class sessions and workgroups. classes met twice a week and lasted approximately 120 minutes. classes were recorded when i taught and reviewed, and i took notes when a colleague taught. specific observations were made regarding how students were understanding and applying concepts from the text, as well as how and whether they incorporated information regarding social oppression into their discussions or planning decisions. personal reflections students who participated in the southeast sheriff’s focus group implementation were required to write personal reflections each night after focus groups were completed. personal reflections included their overall reactions to the day’s events, any new learnings or perspectives, changes in perspectives, challenges (things that they would change), affirmations (things that went well), surprises (unexpected outcomes) and confirmations (expected outcomes). seven student researchers responded. 6the original data plan included using recordings from student led focus groups as well as post course interviews with some students. however, because of covid-19 pandemic the university shifted to a virtual platform, residential halls closed, and students were sent home which limited access to them for student post experience surveys undergraduate student researchers were emailed 5 open-ended questions to which they could respond in a word document or email response. questions included: why did you take the course? what did you learn that you can apply to social change and social justice efforts? how so? and, do you plan to continue doing research? why or why not? four student researchers responded. findings data was entered into atlas ti a qualitative analytic software used to store, manage and code documents, audio and video files. the data analysis subgroup7 used content analysis to code data and identify a pattern of persistent themes from observations and personal narratives. the assigned instructor removed identifying information and assigned personal narratives to ensure anonymity. content analysis was a two-step process: 1. coding the data using a manifest coding process--identifying the most frequently used words within documents to detect patterns; and, 2. constructing themes in the data—latent coding. to ensure consistency in the analytic process, analysis team members met regularly to discuss process and findings (lecompte and schensul, 1999). the following 4 themes emerged: skill building refers to student researchers’ discussions regarding developing abilities regarding research design, data collection or data analysis; sampling and power tended to relate to skill building and included student researchers’ perspectives about how recruitment, sampling and group composition could compromise some respondents' safety interviews. additionally, social distancing mandates precluded conducting face-to-face focus groups. 7 the data analysis subgroup comprised instructor/author and 2 student researchers. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 and thus create inaccurate narratives; selfreflection (race/police) refers to student researchers deconstructing their own assumptions (positive or negative) regarding the following: 1. police/community interaction which includes observations regarding the monitoring team who commissioned the focus groups with the university; and, 2. race and racism which involves how student researchers challenge their own biases regarding race and racism, how they regard oppressed persons and how systems of oppression manifest. although student researchers were not asked directly about race or issues of oppression, such themes seemed to be persistent within their responses. skill building generally, student researchers reported feeling confident in the skills that they’ve learned by participating in the course. after participating in the sheriff’s focus groups, student researchers reported feeling confident in the amount of information they learned and that they are getting “hands on” experience. josie, a junior psychology major observed that she felt more confident applying the skills about which she had read. josie wrote “i went in thinking i was just observing and ended up learning how to recruit participants, greeting participants and really understanding how much it takes to do research.” josie’s observations tended to resonate with her classmates. students tended to express more interest and confidence in their capabilities. students also tended to learn more when they could engage with the concepts and materials in an applied setting. (nilson, 2016). moreover, the students applied their newly developed skills in designing focus group projects and reported their intentions to apply their newly developed skills. for example, lisa, a senior psychology major wrote in her personal reflections, “we have the final project and being here [sheriff’s focus groups] has shown me many things that we should do in our focus group project. we have a lot to talk about.” the purpose of utilizing a problem-based learning format was to reinforce student learning. reflections indicate that the format may have the intended effect—student engagement and skill application. (nilson, 2016 & barrows, 2013). sampling and power beyond learning, honing their research method skills and building their confidence, student researchers illustrated that they understood how external forces such as race, sex, social class can inform how their broader decisions about the research process (i.e., constructing research questions, methodology decisions, epistemological frameworks, and analysis). however, personal reflection notes indicate that student researchers also observed how the formerly discussed power dynamics tend to inform logistical processes as well— especially when collecting qualitative data. group dynamics greatly influence the quality of stories researchers receive through focus groups. thus, group composition becomes vital (krueger, & casey, 2015; merriam, & tisdale, 2016). to ensure that all participants feel safe to share their experiences, researchers must consider how societal forces inform power and group dynamics and adjust accordingly. in their personal observations, students noticed how race, gender and class dynamics within the focus groups can often facilitate diversity in narratives or silence them. potential participants included multiple community stakeholders such as activists, community organizers, community organizations, residents, and law enforcement. the research team recruited participants using electronic flyers. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 individuals who wanted to participate in focus groups could choose the day and time to participate. however, individuals were not group based on stakeholder affiliation. on day two of focus groups, student researchers learned how individuals’ affiliations with groups and systems of power can impact the focus group process. an employee from the sheriff’s department was scheduled to participate in a group of activists who had been targeted. another group member demanded she leave and not participate in the session. the police department employee agreed to leave the session. we extended our apologies; however, she would not continue in the process. student researchers’ initial responses to the incident varied. the responses of participants who wanted the sheriff rep to not participate in the focus group were negative. katrina, a graduate student volunteer wrote, “i can’t believe they were so rude and left her out.” she thought that the woman should have been allowed to stay and we require the “rude” participant to leave. other student researchers questioned why the facilitators (class instructors) would allow it. the debriefing session which followed became a teachable moment regarding sampling, safety, and recruitment). even though only one group member spoke up, other members expressed concerns about her participation and relief that she was asked to leave. focus group participants expressed concerns that their stories could be weaponized against them, as their social media accounts were. they also believed that the sheriff’s employee could report their stories and would leave them in peril. one respondent reported being an immigrant and was concerned about possible implications for her immigration status because of her activist work. wilson (2008) and lyle, et al (2012) contend that engaging participants in qualitative data requires that they feel safe to accurately give their stories. because police officers are agents of the state, non-law enforcement employees may also be perceived as such and respondents could be at risk of being arrested, fired from their jobs, or deported based on what they share in the group. interviewing persons from law enforcement and activists who had been violated together may create a space where one or more members feel endangered. although the approach was inappropriate, his concerns were valid, and her presence would have affected accuracy. when we debriefed with the entire class, student researchers reflected on the incident and then began to discuss other instances in which they believed power imbalances could compromise participants’ safety and data accuracy (lyle, et al, 2012; krueger, & casey, 2015; merriam, & tisdale, 2016). after more focus groups student researchers heard more about the extent to which the sheriff’s office had violated activists’ spaces, they understood why the southeast sheriffs may not have been productive to the groups and may have been problematic for some members. the sampling concerns and power dynamics became more glaring when a city council member (a white male) attended a focus group on day three. he was in a group with four women and he tried consistently to shift the conversation away from community interactions with police to community crime and violence specifically black on black violence. student researchers tended to question his motives for participating. specifically, sienna, a junior psychology major, reported the following: “it was interesting to see when we had a public figure be a participant in one of the sessions. when the question came about how the participants would rate their feelings towards their safety as it relates to the police, it looked like the public figure did not http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 respond. i think he wanted to participate in the group because he could be more like a “fly on the wall” within the conversation, but he did provide some input into the conversation. he presented positive interactions from the police and dismissed others when they talked about their experiences—especially connections to black neighborhoods. yet it was only to change others’ perspectives about policing. he kept talking about violent neighborhoods. when he left the meeting, the group could refocus on the questions.” similar to other student researchers, she observed how the council person attributed the constant attempts to shift the conversation to his white male privilege. there were similar reflections when student researchers raised concerns about other white males in other groups. jasmine, a senior psychology major observing wrote, “an interview conducted by another white man was very intriguing because at first i was confused why he kept flaunting his whiteness during the entire interview.” several student researchers expressed similar observations and irritation about how “white privilege” permeated some of the focus groups. yet, although student researchers could identify instances when white men exercised their privilege, students ignored instances when black men dominated group conversations, which precluded women participants from sharing their experiences. ruth, the senior psychologist noticed during class that men in some of the focus groups tended to dominate the conversations while the women were silent. she observed that the facilitators often had to invite women back into conversations, or “make space for women to talk about their experiences”. she noted in her reflection notes that the distinctions in “their experiences were subtle but there.” as student researchers participate in the process, they can see how oppressive structures such as race and gender can shift narratives; thereby, shifting how individuals and communities’ efforts toward social change and justice. additionally, student researchers can observe how at times race can mask gender privilege for black and brown men--as in the formerly discussed example. understanding how men of color can intentionally or unintentionally silence women can also contribute to dismantling racist structure and systems by empowering all women to share their stories and providing a space to value them (mcmillan, et al, 1995; fine and torre, 2004; dei, alone, lyons, et al, 2013; zuber-skerritt, wood & kearney, 2020). student researchers discussed their observations during class discussion and instructors encouraged them to problem solve how to prevent participants from manipulating conversations during facilitation. student researchers considered power dynamics when considering sampling, recruitment, and scheduling for their individual projects. for example, during a working session, gentrification workgroup planned meetings and recruitment based on their specific targeted participants (business owners, old residents, new residents, members of the church who requested the data) the social demographics of these groups are distinctive, and perspectives will be diverse. student/researchers were intentional about their attention to providing safe environments, and power dynamics regarding (race, age, perceived socioeconomic status, and even length of engagement in the neighborhood). the instructor facilitated a conversation about this by introducing the questions. similar discussions were had in the civilian oversight http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 research team regarding potential participants’ gender, educational attainment. for example, participants deliberated whether meetings should be co-ed or single gender. although student researchers have not attributed intention to the participants, their observations illuminate how they perceive social identities and assignments such as race and gender can inform how stories are told as well as whose stories are told inadvertently. they also discussed how this kind of limitation can inadvertently silence historically marginalized groups and perpetuate oppressive structures, systems, and practices (lorde, 1984; hooks, 1984, 1991; fine & torre, 2004; dei, et al, 2005; collins, 2015). self-reflection police/community relations student researchers observed that there tended to be a general mistrust of us as a research team. thus, transparency was more important. they noticed that some respondents wanted access to the data and have followed up with me since the class ended to determine resolution. student researchers tended to identify as members of the black community. they tended to have negative impressions of community/law enforcement interactions. moreover, instructors required student researchers to do extensive research about the activist organization’s lawsuit against southeast sheriffs to prepare focus groups. thus, students tended to report extremely negative attitudes regarding the police, and they assumed that members of marginalized communities would express hostility towards law enforcement and want them gone. students’ previous experiences tended to hear only aspects of the stories with which they identified. during one of our earlier debriefs regarding previous night’s focus groups, dr. paulse challenged students to remember all the information and think about respondents in more complicated ways. some of the more striking interviews happened early in the day with activists who had participated in the lawsuit. thus, these experiences colored the other stories for students. dr. paulse asked them to consider that this may be the case and they were not hearing/attending to responses from others who want more police presence or those who might be conflicted. some of the researchers, some students and an instructor (dr. collins)’s assumptions were initially informed by reports about general police misconduct as well as the lawsuit, which was the cause of the focus groups. thus, they were assuming that the police were unwanted. however, many respondents discussed needing and wanting more police presence (for protection). additionally, during the debriefing, tiana, a junior psychology major observed that focus group respondents’ expressed ambivalence because more police in some communities could mean more danger. the debriefing sessions as well as reflection notes challenged students to consider more dimensional understandings of the responses so that when that they could incorporate nuance into their analysis to insure a more complete, accurate narrative. communities can be complex, and complicated combinations of spaces, people, processes, and interactions between the three. thus, doing research with community members and within these communities require that researchers must be mindful of this. otherwise they risk treating community members monolithically. in this course, student researchers begin to understand how participating in the process can yield a multiplicity and complexity of shared stories and community narratives. this is important when analyzing data and making meaning of these stories. additionally, in the field, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 student researchers could apply theory and principles that they have read about and studied. they could also observe how theories and practices can possibly unintentionally marginalize them which require them to adjust as they engage with community members. this process allows them to think critically about their practices. moreover, student researchers must critically reflect because how they understand those telling the stories, can influence how one hears the stories as well as how accurately the stories are told and how they treat community members. for example, at times in their reflections and research notes, student researchers referred to activists who participated in focus groups as victims. we then processed this as a class: "what does it mean to be victimized and how this viewing could possibly' inform analysis and conclusions”? scholars who study community-based research methods as well as social justice theorists contend that any efforts towards resistance, social change or justice require self-reflection (das gupta, 2003, wilson, 2008, cammarota & fine, 2008, lyle, et al 2012; morris, ida, migliaccio, tsukada, & baker, 2020). individuals must understand how their preconceived attitudes, biases, and beliefs unconsciously construct the lenses through which they make meaning of our work and how they decide to act. therefore, critical reflection in which researchers examine one’s beliefs, values, identities, social identities, experiences (both direct and indirect) and how they inform our approaches to work (hooks, 1991; gonzalezsobrino & goss, 2019; kendi, 2019). during the course, instructors attempted to create spaces in which students could/had to investigate their assumptions and motivations about race relations, police interactions and gentrification. course instructors challenged students to observe and investigate these assumptions through debriefing questions after focus group meetings; and by asking questions during classes and research team meetings to spark conversations. there were times in class where instructors very briefly reflected upon some decisions and discussed how we may have deferred to the monitoring group or the majority participants at the expense of others. however, we missed the opportunity to examine how these decisions were informed by bias and our own social assumptions. if allowed to teach the course again, the instructor would definitely and intentionally create that space and use it to model behaviors for student researchers. the lack of intentional reflection by instructors is a limitation of this process. investigating how these assumptions can become a lens through which we can analyze data and tell stories is vital to accurately telling groups’ that have been oppressed, stories and shifting societal narratives, thereby furthering efforts for antiracist practice. systemic and structural race and racism participating in focus group data collection and analysis also provided opportunities for students to be introspective about how they understand race and racism. student researchers could identify instances in which they believed that focus group. initially, student researchers assumed that the police harassment impacted only black and brown communities. however, as they participated in the focus groups by participating in data collection or analysis, students realized that the southeast sheriff implemented practices to systematically squelch resistance to structural oppression. for example, patrice, a junior psychology major observed in the focus groups, “coming here i knew nothing about how far [law enforcement] would go to stop people and the horrible effects”. patrice’s observations resonated with student researchers’ data analysis team. during the analysis team meeting, student researchers observed that although the activists being surveilled varied based on race, their efforts http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 concerned issues highly connected with race (black and brown concerns). for example, “oppressive policing can also happen to those who actively resist oppression. the police seem to be harassing people regardless of their race/ethnicity), but they are focusing on activist groups that help black and poor people. students researchers observed that the activist's connection to efforts for racial, immigrant, criminal and economic justice made them surveillance targets. most of these efforts have been racialized and concern marginalized, disenfranchised persons. hence, race/racism become conflated with other social problems (bonillasilva, 2001, 2017; gonzalez sobrino, 2019). hearing the stories and lived experiences of community members who have been marginalized or violated helps student researchers to understand the importance of the research process. however, it forces them to broaden their own understandings of oppression and oppressive systems. this becomes vitally important for student researchers who are members of historically marginalized groups (i.e., non-white, working poor/poor, women, men) (das gupta, t. 2003; dei, et al 2005; collins, 2013; kendi, 2019). they must critically engage with all their social identities and see how they construct the lens through which they view oppression for several reasons. first and most important, this lens informs how they do the work of research, who they include in the process, and how they make meaning of the data and the story they tell (palmer, et al 2019; fine & torre, 2004; tuhiwai smith, 2012). second, they must broaden their ideas about who are victims of oppression as well as how and why they are victimized. when considering race and racism in the united states, tend to be informed by the black/white binary racial paradigm (perea, 2019, brooks and widner, 2019). this conceptualization can be problematic for a couple of reasons. first, the black/white binary understanding of race and racial oppression tends to exclude the experiences of racial and ethnic groups who do not fit into the prescribed binary (i.e., black people are oppressed, and white people are the oppressors)—rendering them invisible. second, this thinking may leave us continually thinking about oppression as an individualized process (perpetuates) instead of a systemically embedded process that must be addressed at multiple levels simultaneously. liberation and social change student researchers reported a multitude of reasons for enrolling in the course primarily to learn “how to do qualitative research”. however, they indicated that as the course proceeded, their reasons shifted. after participating in the applied course students understood that social change is necessary, and they acquired skills to make this social change. for example, when asked why she enrolled tatiana, a senior psychology major stated, i took this course for the rare opportunity as an undergraduate student to participate hands-on in the planning, conduction, and data collection of a qualitative research study. i learned through our interactions with and first-hand accounts of our participants the direct impact of injustice and the necessity of political and social change in government and community relations. through the focus groups, i gained profound respect and perspective into the lives and experiences of underprivileged community members, people of color, and grassroots activists. this course sparked within me a love and appreciation for qualitative research methods and the potential they have to impact social change and policy. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 tatiana’s interactions refer to her participation in the focus group processes. for her, the experience helped her to identify systemic oppression within communities. her response is consistent with other students and they indicate that although her initial purpose was to skill build, they connect oppressive systems and practices and how they manifest in behavior. jonda, a senior psychology major enrolled in the course for similar reasons. however, she already had an idea that she wanted to participate in research regarding law enforcement. yet, once she started the process and began analyzing focus group data, she began to challenge her assumptions about law enforcement—she believed that they were unwanted and unnecessary. “i joined the class because i love data! and i also want to do something about policing…. after taking the course i see that it is complicated … more complicated than i thought. that’s why we need to hear and tell all the stories.” although she developed skills by learning to analyze data, her participation in the class has offered jonda the ability to reflect and critically engage with her personal understanding how law enforcement practices can be invasive and oppressive. in her observation, she wrote: before this course i had never heard of the [consent decrees] nor did i realize the major role it played in social justice. i had known that police surveyed communities of color more than white communities, but i didn’t realize the extent they would go to. speaking out against social injustice and racism can have effects on one's everyday life. from their daily routine to their mental health. i would love to continue to do research. i feel there is much more to discover regarding the effects of social injustice and racism. we have only just scratched the surface. after analyzing focus group data, jonda now understands that communities of color may have more nuanced attitudes about police. jonda learned the importance of hearing multiple narratives to gaining a fuller understanding of the community to make effective and efficient change (wilson, 2008; tuhiwai-smith, 2012). however, jonda’s reflection reveals a realization for most of the students in the course. furthermore, working on the project catalyzed student researchers to act. wilson, (2008) and tuhiwai-smith, (2012) argue that sharing stories is vital to research specifically with indigenous people. they maintain that stories allow tellers as well as listeners to gain their own perspectives and draw their own conclusions about communities and individuals. when marginalized groups create and control the narratives about their lives, they can become aware of how systems of oppression are maintained and perpetuated to their harm (consciousness). this knowledge can inform actions for change (action). although jonda and tatiana live in different regions, they are both young black women whose communities are deeply impacted by racism and sexism. thus, both believe that qualitative research can be a tool for ensuring that stories about marginalized communities are accurately told; thus, leading to change. discussion teaching community-based research methods at the undergraduate level provides students with mechanisms for deconstructing the maneuverings of color-blind racism. moreover, the research that they produce can enhance academic perspectives with voices and experiences that are often excluded, which gives oppressed persons the ability to promote accurate narratives about http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 themselves as well as inform social policy and practice that greatly impact their lives (palmer, g., ferńandez, j.s., thomas, d., lee, g., masud, h., bernai, i., 2019). thus, these teachings are inherently liberatory. the above findings suggest that undergraduate students at historically black colleges and universities could be uniquely positioned to become liberatory researchers. consistent with das gupta (2003), the students from the qualitative methods course believe that they have a vested interest in redressing oppression and working for justice in historically oppressed communities because these communities are their home. anti-racist researchers and practitioners analyze and provide processes to engage in ending racism as well as intersecting oppression. researchers are trained to research design and methods; prioritize building networks and collaboration in their work; utilize findings to benefits marginalized communities and integrate anti-racist theories and/critical race theories. student researchers expressed strong desires to learn and utilized skills to change conditions in their communities. additionally, they have connections with community members because they are “insiders”. moreover, they express a vested interest in actions to dismantle societal oppression because thereby ending their own oppression. hooks (1991) argues that when generating theory about oppression, hearing the lived experiences of the oppressed is vital and that current theory neglects to account for that. she writes, “the definition and critical analysis of oppression has left out the complexity, voices and lived experiences of individuals who have been severely impacted by injustice and oppression…” (p.4). liberatory research methodologies and qualitative practice can capture voices of individuals and offer opportunities to inform actions towards sustainable, just change in oppressed communities. however, findings indicate that even student researchers from oppressed communities must be careful. because without critical reflection about their burgeoning roles as researchers and their shifting class locations, they can inadvertently perpetuate the oppressive systems they are trying to end–similar to experienced researchers who act without reflection. thus, all researchers must attend to how societal factors, predisposed understandings and attitudes regarding research and practice can inform the research team’s internal power dynamics (collins, 2015). moreover, researchers and practitioners must attend to skill and education differences that could compromise stakeholders’ agency within the process (residents, clients, students) to ensure that all talents and skills are leveraged for change (fine and torre, 2004; tuhiwai smith, 2012). references bonilla-silva, e. (2017). racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in america. rowan and littlefield. bonilla-silva, e. (2001). white supremacy and racism in a post-civil rights era. lynne reinner publishers. bowles, d. d., hopps, j. g., & clayton, o. (2016). the impact and influence of hbcus on the social work profession. journal of social work education, 52(1), 118-132. doi: 10.1080/10437797.2016.1112650. cahill, c. (2007). repositioning ethical commitments: participatory action research as a relational praxis of social change. acme: an international e-journal for critical geographies, 6(3), 360–373. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 pedagogy for transformational resistance. in revolutionizing education: participatory action research in motion, routledge publications, j. commarota and m. fine editors, 1-14. collins, l.v. (2015). examining intragroup racism and racial battle fatigue in historically black colleges and universities. in racial battle fatigue in higher education: exposing the myth of post racial america, rowman & littlefield publications, k. faschingvarner, k. albert, r. mitchell and c. allen editors, 91-102. collins, p.h. (2013). on intellectual activism. temple university press. das gupta, t. (2003). teaching anti-racist research in the academy. teaching sociology. 31, 456-468. http://about.jstor.org/terms dei, g. j. s., karumanchery, l. l., & karumanchery-luik, n. (2005). playing the race card: exposing white power and privilege. peter lang publications. fine, m. & torre, m. (2004). re-membering exclusion: participatory action research in public institutions. qualitative research in psychology, 1, 15-37. gonzalez-sobrino & goss, d.r., (2019) exploring the mechanisms of racialization beyond the black–white binary. ethnic and racial studies, 42(4), 505-510. heinzen, t. & goodfriend, w. (2019). social psychology. sage publications. hooks, b., (1991). theory as liberatory practice, yale journal of law and feminism. 4(1), 1-12. hooks, b., (1984). feminist theory: from margin to center. south end press. israel, b. a., schulz, a. j., parker, e. a. & becker, a. b. 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(2015). six reasons hbcus are more important than ever. united negro college fund website. www.uncf.org commarota, j. & fine, m., (2008). youth participatory action research: a http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://about.jstor.org/terms http://www.uncf.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 practice with culturally diverse populations, journal for social action in counseling and psychology. 5(7), 10-25. mcmillan, b., florin, p., stevenson, j., kerman, & mitchell, r.e. (1995). empowerment praxis in community coalitions. american journal of community psychology. 23(5), 699727. merriam, s. b. & tisdale, g. (2016). qualitative research: a guide to design and implementation. (4th edition). jossey bass publishers. mobley, s.d., (2017). seeking sanctuary: (re)claiming the power of historically black colleges and universities as places of black refuge. international journal of qualitative studies in education, (30)10, 1036-1041, doi: 10.1080/09518398.2017.1312593. morris p., ida, a.k., migliaccio t., tsukada, y., & baker, d. (2020). collaborative learning in sociology research methods courses: does race matter?. teaching sociology, 0(0), 1-13. nelson, s. & williams, m (2017). tell them we are rising: the story of historically black colleges and universities. [film]. independent lens films. niehaus, e. (2017). building momentum in student engagement: alternative breaks and students’ social justice and diversity orientation. journal of college student development, 58(1), 53-70. nilson, l.b. (2016). teaching at its best: a research-based resource for college instructors (4th edition). wiley publications. palmer, g., ferńandez, j.s., thomas, d., lee, g., masud, h., & bernai, i... (2019). oppression and power. in l.a. jason, o. glantsman, j. f. o’brien, & k. n. ramian (eds.), introduction to community psychology: becoming an agent of change. rebus press. retrieved from https://press.rebus.community/intro ductiontocommunitypsychology/chap ter/oppression-and-power/ prilleltensky, i. (2008). the role of power in wellness, oppression, and liberation: the promise of psychopolitical validity. journal of community psychology, 36(2), 116-136. sydnor, k. d., hawkins, a.s. & edwards, l.v. (2010). expanding research opportunities: making the argument for fit between hbcus and community-based participatory research. journal of negro education, (79)1, 79-86. thurber, a., collins, l., greer, m., mcknight, d., & thompson, d. (2018). resident experts: the potential of critical participatory action research to inform public housing research and practice. action research, 0(0) 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1177/147675031 7725799 tuhiwai smith, l. (2012). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples (2nd edition). zed books. west, c. (2001). race matters. vintage books: a division of random house, inc. wilson, s. (2008). research is ceremony: indigenous research methods. fernwood publishing. lyons, h.z., bike, d.h., ojeda, l., johnson, a., rosales, r., & flores, l.y., (2013). qualitative research as social justice http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://press.rebus.community/introductiontocommunitypsychology/chapter/oppression-and-power/ https://press.rebus.community/introductiontocommunitypsychology/chapter/oppression-and-power/ https://press.rebus.community/introductiontocommunitypsychology/chapter/oppression-and-power/ https://doi.org/10.1177/1476750317725799 https://doi.org/10.1177/1476750317725799 global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 zuber-skerritt, o., wood, l. & kearney, j. (2020) the transformative potential of action learning in communitybased research for social action. action learning: research and practice, 17(1), 34-47. doi: 10.1080/14767333.2020.1712840 http://www.gjcpp.org/ getting to the heart of it: a reflection on the importance of community psychologists developing an anti-racist practice leigh rauk1 keywords: anti-racism, affective whiteness, reflexivity author biography: leigh rauk received her phd in community well-being from the university of miami in 2021. as a researcher she is focused on issues of school discipline, school safety, and the ways youth organizing can address these issues. as a researcher she considers herself to be a community-engaged, activist scholar who uses critical theory, reflexivity, and participatory methods to examine and understand the ways power and oppression negatively impact young people of color. through collaboration and a transformative paradigm, she strives to stand in solidarity with community partners to expose subvert, and challenge injustices to cultivate healthy and just communities. recommended citation: rauk, l. (2021). getting to the heart of it: a reflection on the importance of community psychologists developing an anti-racist practice. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(3), 1 17. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: leigh rauk, postdoctoral fellow, firearm safety among children and teens (facts) consortium, university of michigan, school of public health, 1415 washington heights, ann arbor, mi 48109-2029. email: lmrauk@umich.edu 1 university of miami http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:lmrauk@umich.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 getting to the heart of it: a reflection on the importance of community psychologists developing an anti-racist practice abstract reflexivity is an introspective practice of becoming aware of personal biases, values, and assumptions related to our positionalities as researchers (case, 2017; fernández, 2018a). this paper responds to the call by langhout (2015) for community psychologists to engage in more personal writing about the ways in which affective politics impact feelings and emotions surrounding our work as scholar-activists as well as critiques the core community psychology values of social justice and diversity. through a framework of head, heart, and hand work, i connect my own identity, experience, and reflexive process to critical theories of whiteness and racism, which has helped to inform my engagement with a black-led youth organization and development of an anti-racist practice. i conclude by providing recommendations for how community psychology programs can better train white graduate students to engage with racialized communities in ways that are grounded in ethical reflexive and anti-racist practices (fernández, 2018a). community psychology as a field has a deep and longstanding commitment to social justice (prilleltensky, 2001; watts & serrano-garcía, 2003). as discussed by langhout (2015), empirical literature indicates that social justice activists engage their work with their entire bodies (gould, 2009; warren, 2010). through interviews with anti-racist white activists in the u.s., warren (2010) conceptualized engagement as involving the head (i.e., knowledge and interests), heart (i.e., values and emotions), and hand (i.e., relationships and actions). when we connect our theorizing (head work) to our heart work, we can develop anti-racist practices that guide and inform our action (hand work) to better collaborate with, support, and show up for our community partners (fernández, 2018a; langhout, 2015). if we are attuned to the emotions that arise when engaging in research with communities, case (2017) asserts that it becomes possible to recognize times of solidarity with research participants and times when we have colluded in their oppression. for the past two years, i have been in partnership with a black activist group and, as a white emerging scholaractivist, i see reflexivity as necessary to support my own process of unpacking unearned privileges, as well as to understand how affective responses that arise during my work with community partners may serve to maintain the status quo and thus be out of line with my values as a community psychologist (cruz & sonn, 2011; langhout, 2015). the purpose of this paper is to respond to the call for community psychologists to engage in more personal writing about the ways in which affective politics impact feelings and emotions in our research and partnerships with communities (langhout, 2015). as well as to interrogate community psychology values and roles in conjunction with the racial justice work white community psychologists should be taking up. in this paper i am explicit about speaking to white community psychologists because i am addressing a common white dynamic of retreating in the face of discomfort around the ways we uphold systems of white supremacy (diangelo, 2018). i hope this reflection on my own work to develop an anti-racist practice will http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 be useful to other graduate students and also serve as a call in to my fellow white community psychologists to conversations about white privilege and race. through the framework of head, heart, and hand work (fernández, 2018a) i situate my own identity, experience, and reflexive process in critical theories of whiteness and racism which has helped to inform my engagement with a community organization and development of an anti-racist practice. i conclude with recommendations for how to train graduate students to engage in solidarity work with racialized communities so that we can build a future of community psychology that not only values social justice and diversity, but also values being critical of whiteness and our complicity in systems of white supremacy; as well as commits to practicing anti-racism to dismantle oppressive systems within our field and the communities we serve. head work defining whiteness community psychology’s expressed concern with social justice has inspired important racial justice work. however, coleman et al. (2020) critique community psychology’s focus on social justice as being largely devoid of conversations critically examining whiteness as a dominant system. i uplift their assertion that the field could better address the value of social justice by interrogating whiteness more deeply (coleman et al., 2020). frankenberg (1993) defines whiteness as “the production and reproduction of dominance rather than subordination, normativity rather than marginality, and privilege rather than disadvantage” (p. 236). this definition identifies whiteness as something that places people in dominant positions, granting white people unfair privileges, while also rendering these positions and privileges invisible to white people themselves (green et al., 2007; sonn, 2011). this invisibility of the positions and privileges associated with whiteness means white people do not experience the world through an understanding of their own racial identity or culture, but rather experience whiteness as normative, natural, and universal (bergerson, 2003; green et al., 2007). this allows white people to distance themselves from conversations of race and racism because it is seen as a problem for black, indigenous, and people of color (bipoc) rather than for white people. as a white, middle class, cis gender, woman who grew up living in small, majority white, midwestern towns, i have had to acknowledge and understand the ways in which my own whiteness remained mostly invisible to me. growing up, the significance of my race or what it means to be white was never explained to me. any time race was the topic of conversation, it was talked about as something other people have. in this way, without me being conscious of it, my whiteness was formed in relation to what green et al. (2007) call the oppressed ‘other’. neighborhoods that were predominately black were described to me as bad places where violence and crime occurred, which was antithetical to the neighborhoods where i lived which were characterized by orderliness and safety. i am able to connect my own experience to bonilla-silva (2003) theory of color-blind racism, characterized by scholars as unawareness of various forms of racism and white privilege. growing up i had no understanding of the ways i was privileged because of my white identity. color-blind ideology reflects a discourse of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 “racelessness” which allows white people (myself) to have a race-neutral view of society (coleman et al., 2020). however, the result of this thinking is the tendency to not see important racial differences as well as differences in lived experiences due to structural racism (coleman et al., 2020). this tendency to not see racial differences between groups reifies hegemonic whiteness by making it challenging for white people to recognize the privileges afforded to them based on race (coleman et al., 2020). hegemonic whiteness is defined as social and cultural practices that position those who are white as different and superior from those who are non-white (hughey, 2010). white cohesion is reinforced by “essentialized performative practices of white ideals” (coleman et al., 2020, p. 6; hughey, 2010). one such performative practice, described by hughey (2010), is affective whiteness. affective whiteness a study by todd et al. (2010) examining white university student’s emotional responses after reflecting on their whiteness found that challenging students’ color-blind racial attitudes may result in strong emotional responses, particularly feelings of anger, distress, and guilt. similarly, my first experience reflecting on my own whiteness came from a class i took in college focused on the historical and systemic nature of race and racism. i remember feeling surprised by what i was learning, and angry that no one had taught me this before. i also felt guilty that i always thought of race as something outside of myself. i was dismayed by the fact that what i had learned about the history of racism in high school was incomplete. nelson et al. (2013) work on the marley hypothesis is useful here as it provides evidence demonstrating that a lack of critical historical knowledge about racism leads to white peoples’ denial of racism. growing up i wasn’t taught the history of u.s. racism from a critical or perhaps even accurate perspective. as coleman et al (2020) suggest, learning the critical history of racism in the u.s. helps to boost white peoples’ acknowledgement of systemic racism. learning that history as well as being reflexive about my own identity have been crucial steps in understanding my complicity in dominate structures of whiteness and oppression. further, leonardo and zembylas (2013) discuss the ways in which white privilege exists in affective forms. these affective forms of privilege include anger, fear, and sadness, some of which are reflected in my own story. specifically, they describe that “racial matters and white privilege evoke a range of powerful emotions that can push scholars to take a more careful look at the relationship between whiteness and affect” (leonardo & zembylas, 2013, p. 151). this has been the case in my own experience as those feelings of anger and guilt propelled me on a path of deepening my understanding of race, racism, white supremacy, and my own whiteness. i’ve come to understand that i benefit from and uphold racist systems, even when my intentions are to work to dismantle them. even now as i’ve committed to anti-racism and practices of reflexivity, it is important to understand how my affective responses intersect with racial practices and the white privilege i hold. affective whiteness strategies, such as feelings of guilt, rage, fatigue, defensiveness, and fragility serve to maintain current race structures even as i educate myself against them. sonn (2011) utilizes a whiteness frame to exemplify the ways in which research, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 teaching, and community-based work may lead to further marginalization if we as community psychologists, particularly those of us who are white, do not attend to the way whiteness shows up in the contexts we work. additionally, coleman et al. (2020) suggest that community psychologists should use critical reflexivity and critical awareness of how whiteness shows up in our theories, methods, and settings of practice to promote critical awareness of whiteness as a complex system of racial domination. practicing reflexivity and paying greater attention to the relationship between our racialized ideologies and our practices would facilitate greater understandings of how whiteness shows up even in settings that are meant to be empowering and antiracist (coleman et al., 2020; sonn, 2011). community psychology as a field should become more critically aware of whiteness and work to expose it as a system of domination which shapes how we are socialized into the profession and the social worlds we aim to intervene (coleman et al., 2020). leonardo and zembylas (2013) suggest that in order to understand whiteness, we must also account for the embodiment and affectivity of whiteness. in other words, connecting theories of whiteness and racism to emotions and affective responses can help redirect emotions for different political ends and help to establish ethical relationships with community partners that opens up space for solidarity. heart work heart work, conceptualized by warren (2010) and utilized by other scholars in community psychology (case, 2017; fernández, 2018a; langhout, 2015), describes the ways emotions influence the research process. the inclusion of ethical reflexive practice as a community psychology competency alludes to this heart work by asking us to interrogate our values, assumptions, and privileges (langhout, 2015). this process enables us to envision new community psychology values, consistent with recommendations by wilson et al. (2020), that address systems of oppression; focus on dismantling power structures through anti-racist practices; and emphasize critical reflexivity to mitigate reification of oppressive structures and challenge the status quo within the field and in our work with communities. reflexivity and embodied subjectivities reflexivity is an important component of the research process because it disrupts power relations and creates space for understanding research as a dynamic process that transforms both the researcher and participants (fernández, 2018a; rice et al., 2019). as case (2017) and fernandez (2018a) suggest, reflexivity goes beyond being aware of biases; it is an introspective tool that helps the researcher navigate the implications of their biases and ultimately, helps us as researchers to interrogate and challenge problematic values and prejudices. reflexivity requires us to constantly evaluate ways in which we as researchers contribute to liberation and oppression (cruz & sonn, 2011) and what we recognize and do not recognize given the positions we occupy (rice et al., 2019). further, fernández (2018a) draws on the epistemology of theory in the flesh, first conceptualized by anzaldúa and moraga (1981), to describe embodied subjectivities, which are defined by the lived experiences, identities, and positionalities that are felt throughout the body. when we engage in activism, we engage with our entire bodies http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 and our affective responses—longings, desires, fatigues, and intensities—are housed throughout the entire body, creating a visceral response (gould, 2009; fernández, 2018a). fernández (2018a) urges us to document the ways in which our embodied subjectivities surface in our work and relationships with communities to help guide the development of community psychology competencies and practices that are more holistic and attend to heartcentered work. as community psychologists, we must make our heart work visible and engage in reflexive practices to help us confront the contradictions of privilege and oppression to problematize and deconstruct existing systems of power (fernández, 2018a). as white community psychologists specifically, engagement in reflexivity to understand our embodied subjectivities helps us to become aware of our unearned privileges and advantages as well as the subtle behaviors that support racism and provide motivation to take antiracist action (case & hunter, 2012). in an effort to make my own heart work visible, i share two examples of times when my affective whiteness and embodied subjectivities showed up in my work with a community partner. the examples i share here center on my work with a local, blackled organization focused on youth organizing for education reform. for the purpose of this paper and to protect the anonymity of the organization, i will refer to them as youth for justice. this organization focuses on organizing working class black and brown youth to fight back against school pushout and the criminalization of black students. at their core, youth for justice believes that all young people deserve to be raised in environments that are healthy and promote a sense of safety. as an organization they help support youth development by building leadership skills, fostering political identity, and teaching young people how to organize in their communities to build a more equitable society. as an organization, they are fighting for schools that prioritize human development over profit and provide all students with the access to resources and opportunities they need to reach their full potential and develop into full human beings. heart stories both examples that i share here center on discomfort around conflict, particularly conflict that arises between myself and others who hold more power. what i used to think was a personal fear of conflict, i now understand to be connected to cultural practices of whiteness which serve to uphold the status quo. green et al. (2007) outline these cultural practices as being rooted in colonial constructs of whiteness which are represented by orderliness, rationality, and self-control. i have been socialized to uphold a culture of white supremacy through practices of reinforcing and maintaining dominate structures. in this case, it means avoiding conflict, particularly in cases where engaging in conflict may challenge existing conditions and betray my white identity. in the first example, my affective whiteness and embodied subjectivities manifested in the form of fear, discomfort, and unease, when a school board member asked that we, the community members speaking in support of youth for justice’s demands regarding the districts disproportionate funding on policing over mental health support for students, choose one spokesperson to speak on our demands rather than allowing all eighty of us to give our individual testimonies. my feelings of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 discomfort and fear that we were doing something wrong caused me to initially agree with the school board member; perhaps we were taking up too much space and limiting other community members’ opportunities to speak, as the school board was suggesting. in this case i was relying on rationality as a means of maintaining order, which placed me on the side of the school board members and betrayed my solidarity with the organization. as i was going through this thought process, i realized the executive director and other staff of the organization were telling the school board “no”; their recommendation was not acceptable, and they would not be silenced. each person’s testimony was personal, vulnerable, and unique to their own experience. the school boards assertation that each person’s testimony was the same was deeply problematic and demonstrated the school board’s lack of attention and consideration of each person’s story. i then reminded myself how essential it is for the members of this organization to take up space and that the school board’s comment was rooted in an assertion of power, white supremacy, oppression, and racism. had the room been filled with all white community members and youth, would the same have been asked? i realized in that moment that i needed to become comfortable with conflict and commit to challenging structures of power or i better get out of the way. in this situation, my affective response—fear, anxiety, unease—was keeping me aligned with the status quo, working against my values and goals. by engaging in reflexivity and understanding the ways in which my emotions were connected to cultural practices of whiteness, i was able to recognize a moment where i was colluding in the organization’s oppression by the school board. in a second instance, the conflict i felt was more internal as i had to evaluate if i, the white researcher in the room, had unconsciously taken up too much space. during a presentation youth for justice was being asked to give to a group of teachers enrolled in an education program at a local university, i was asked by a staff member if i would present on the school data myself and other graduate students had helped find and analyze. i was not prepared to help give a presentation and i immediately felt uncomfortable that i was the one stepping into a co-presenter role on behalf of the organization when there were other organization members in the room who may have been better suited for that role. i kept my part of the presentation short in an attempt to leave more space for the staff member to speak and represent the organization. at the end of the meeting, the white professor leading the class began talking to myself and the same staff member. this professor immediately turned to me to tell me how well i had presented the data and that i was a really good presenter. he continued to focus the conversation on me and my work with the organization rather than the organizer standing next to me who was actually there to represent the organization and to lead the meeting. i felt conflicted about my presence in the meeting and taking on a co-presenter role. on one hand this had been a direct ask from one of the staff members, but on the other i felt as though one of the other organization’s members should have been the one to play that role. i left feeling like i had taken up too much space in the meeting as well as uncomfortable and angry about the professor’s comments to me. after this meeting i evaluated the way i had handled the situation and wished i would have made http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 a suggestion for one of the other staff or youth members to present instead of me. i also should have had a conversation with the organization ahead of time to clarify my role and how i could best support them. in the conversation with the white professor, i should have tried to decenter myself in that moment. rather than accepting the compliment as a way of being polite and to avoid any conflict that may illicit discomfort for him and myself, i should have pointed out that it was the organization leading the work not me. my affective responses of anxiety, unease, and fear of conflict did not further my solidarity with the organization in that moment. reflecting on my heart and the emotions that arose during these two instances has helped me to assess my relationship and practices with the organization as well as problematize my positionality and power dynamics that were at play in these spaces. this process of reflexivity has helped me to shift my actions to better align with my values and efforts towards solidarity. i’ve had honest conversations with staff members about my role in this work as a white person and when the organization asks me to take on a role or a task i ask if i am the best person for that role and do my best to step back when it is not my place. the connection of my head and heart has also helped me build a better relationship with the organization as well as recognize the importance of continually committing to an anti-racist practice. this work of connecting the head and the heart to better inform my hand work has also helped me to critically evaluate and recognize where my community psychology values of social justice and diversity have fallen short. hand work hand work, conceptualized by warren (2010), has been defined as building relationships and taking action. i conceptualize hand work here through my process of building a relationship with youth for justice and through my own development of an anti-racist practice. both of these actions have been deeply informed by the head and heart work that have been outlined earlier in this paper. as my relationship with youth for justice began to develop, i realized that my community psychology values of social justice and respect for diversity (kloos et al., 2012) were not enough to guide my actions with the organization. as this relationship grew, and through my process of reflexivity, i realized that to be a white researcher striving to work alongside a black-led organization without an explicit anti-racist practice was negligible at best and harmful at worst. in this section, i provide a discussion of my relationship building process, anti-racism in theory and practice, and why it is so crucial for my work with this organization. in doing so i acknowledge and build upon brodsky (2016) critique of community psychology’s values of social justice and respect for diversity as insufficient so long as they do not prepare scholars to “identify and interrupt how power vis-à-vis whiteness engenders racial silence, even in ‘diverse’ community settings” (p. 10). building a relationship i began building a relationship with youth for justice in a course i took on communitybased participatory action research (cbpar). after expressing interest in collaborating with our class, we supported their work by finding and analyzing school district data related to policing, mental health supports, and student arrests. through the analysis of data, we provided http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 information that helped inform their demands of the district to eliminate police in schools and employ more school-based counselors, social workers, and psychologists. beyond the course, i sustained my involvement with the organization and have now been in relationship with them for two years. in collaboration with them i attend organizational meetings, support direct actions like speaking at school board hearings, attend school district meetings alongside staff members, and continue to help find data that helps to inform their current demands. as an outsider to the organization, i do my best to be responsive to the organization’s needs and follow the leadership of the staff and youth members. as a community psychologist engaged in community work with this organization, i began seeking out ways i could be more aware of my role and values as a researcher and how i could interact with my values, emotions, and affect in a way that is productive for social justice movements broadly, and my work with this particular organization locally. my engagement with this organization essentially held up a mirror for me to reflect on my personal and community psychology values, my biases, and privileges. i’ve had to continually ask myself what my role as a white researcher in this work with a black-led organization is. in asking myself this question i sought out new places to find answers as my community psychology classes were not talking deeply about race and what it means to be a white researcher in the spaces i was occupying. to build an ethical relationship with youth for justice, i realized i needed to do my own work of unpacking and unlearning. to that end, i joined the local showing up for racial justice (surj) chapter, an organization whose goal is to educate, organize, and mobilize white people to show up for racial justice and collective liberation. my participation with this organization led me to a training for white people on antiracism and white supremacy, which led me to read books and articles by bipoc about the topic. i needed to expand my sources of knowledge beyond the white community psychologists we often discuss in our course work and look to bipoc scholars in community psychology (see case, 2017; thomas, 2019; wilson et al., 2020) and beyond (see brown, 2019; davis, 2003; garza, 2014; kendi, 2020) who can provide guidance, leadership, and accountability for the work i need to do. additionally, through my own process of learning and unlearning, i continued to learn from youth for justice about their values, goals, and demands. in order to engage with this organization and mitigate harm as a white person, i needed to learn what it means to be anti-racist and what a sustained anti-racist practice looks like as well as learn new terminologies and ideologies like abolition (see berger et al., 2017; cullors, 2019; davis, 2003) and transformative justice (see brown, 2019; coker, 2002; generation five, 2007). anti-racist practice kendi (2019) defines the opposite of racist is not “not-racist”, but rather, “anti-racist”. claiming to be “not-racist” signifies neutrality by not explicitly claiming and working to be aggressively against racism (kendi, 2019). anti-racism is the collection of anti-racist policies that lead to racial equity and are supported by anti-racist ideas. anti-racism turns the focus to seeing racism as rooted in power and policies that produce or sustain racial inequity between groups (kendi, 2019). as individuals we each have a role to play in anti-racism and we each http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 have the power to protest racist policies and advance anti-racist ones. in their critique, leonardo and zembylas (2013) discuss the problematic ways in which white people have developed antiracist understandings that construct the racist as someone else, a problem residing in other white people. in this way, whiteness is able to bifurcate white people into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ actors (leonardo & zembylas, 2013). this bifurcating perception does not consider the plausibility of being both racist and anti-racist at the same time. further, they problematize the tendency of white people to align themselves with non-racism as a form of image management rather than to align themselves with anti-racism, a political project (leonardo & zembylas, 2013). the distinction between the two is important because non-racist becomes an identity, possibly even a badge of honor, whereas anti-racism is a political commitment in the form of combatting racism. leonardo and zembylas (2013) assert that “to the non-racist, it is something one is; to the anti-racist, it is something one does” (p. 156). for those of us who are white and strive to be anti-racist, we must understand the ways in which we are systemically linked to racial domination and unearned privilege and engage in a lifelong process of selfevaluation and reflection (case & hunter, 2012). yancy (2008) advocates for vigilance for the white anti-racist because of the ways in which whiteness continually entraps us despite our honest efforts to resist it. additionally, our white identities place us in privileged locations in conversations of antiracism, meaning we can choose to be passive observers or active participators (green et al., 2007). given this, being a white anti-racist is a pledge that requires lifelong practice and does not end in a white person’s “arrival” in the form of an idyllic anti-racist identity (applebaum, 2013; yancy, 2008). i turn now to a description of my own commitment to anti-racism and how it shows up as a continual practice in my research, collaboration with youth for justice, and personal life. i document my practice here as a form of commitment and accountability, but also as an example of how i’ve conceptualized anti-racism in practice. my anti-racist practice currently consists of political education, commitments to action and activism, personal reflection, and continual accountability practices with friends and colleagues who are also engaged in broader racial justice and abolition work. for me, political education means intentionally reading books and articles by scholars and authors of color as well as engaging with forms of media that are created, developed, and disseminated by people of color. it also means compensating people for their emotional and intellectual labor when i directly benefit from their work. as morrison (2020) states, those of us who identify as white should not expect marginalized people to provide these resources for free and their labor should be compensated. my commitment to action and activism means showing up to direct actions put on by black-led organizations in my community, such as supporting youth for justice at school board hearings or community events. i use reflexivity to evaluate how i’m doing and if i am acting in ways that are consistent with my values, as described in the heart stories above. sometimes this reflection happens independently and other times it happens in conversation with other people who i know http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 will hold me accountable to my values and the work i am trying to do. reflexivity and accountability are incredibly important to ensure that i am putting my political education into practice and that my practice is aligned with the asks and leadership of bipoc. as dzidic et al. (2013) emphasize, developing into scholar-activists who are accountable to the communities in which we work requires us to interrogate our social positioning and relationships with the community. practicing anti-racism requires persistent self-awareness, criticism, and examination (kendi, 2019). my anti-racist practice is in its infancy stages and there remains a lot of room for growth. i’ve outlined my practice as it currently stands not to demonstrate that i have it all figured out, but to offer some ideas or guidance on where to start. when my perfectionism arises, which i’ve learned is rooted in a white supremist ideology (okun, 2001), i remind myself that it’s a practice and that perfection is not the intent. every day i make the conscious decision to recommit myself to my practice and when i mess up, i recommit even stronger. the process of connecting my head and heart work to better inform my hand work has been a crucial process for my own development as a scholar activist and for my relationship development with youth for justice. as a field, i believe it is necessary for us to critically examine whiteness as well as be reflexive about our own investment in and perpetuation of oppressive systems. the field’s education of graduate students is a ripe place to start this work as well as critical for the development of scholars who aim to build ethical relationships with communities. given recent uprisings, protests, and black lives matter movement building in response to police violence against black people and the deaths of breonna taylor, george floyd, ahmaud arbery, and many others, the field of community psychology’s explicit commitment to anti-racism and the dismantling of white supremacy is now more important than ever. recommendations for training graduate students community psychology’s commitment to social justice has led to community psychology graduate programs that strive to train and develop scholars who work in support of social justice movements (langhout, 2015; nelson et al., 2004; prilleltensky, 2001). community psychology’s focus on head work (i.e., theory and knowledge building) is deeply important, but we must also get to the heart of our work if we are to inform actions that deepen our commitment to social justice. several scholars, including watts (1994), langhout (2016), and coleman et al. (2020), have called for a deeper focus on whiteness in the field, particularly among white community psychologists regarding their positions and roles in social systems. it has been argued that the field’s core value of social justice cannot truly materialize without better theoretical understandings of whiteness and its connection with other structures of dominance (coleman et al. (2020). i believe building that theoretical understanding can and should occur in graduate education and training, particularly for a field who so often trains graduate students who seek to work with marginalized and racialized communities. as coleman et al. (2020) scoping review suggests, educational settings are important spaces for community psychologists to interrogate whiteness and dismantle systems of domination and oppression. additionally, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 in her study of the family portrait assignment, fernández (2018b) suggests that facilitating opportunities for white students to engage in critical reflexivity in educational settings is crucial for social change. further, interventions aimed at white students about their relationship to and complicity in structural racism would be fertile grounds to help white students understand the relationships between their own racialized beliefs and behaviors with their social and historical backgrounds (coleman et al., 2020; fernández, 2018b; todd et al., 2010). although the study by fernández (2018b) is focused on educational settings beyond community psychology graduate classrooms, i believe this work can be applied to community psychology training programs and should be considered in the ways we train white community psychology students. these classrooms can be settings that help students see how their own color-blind thinking and lack of knowledge about racism are expressions of white supremacy and hegemony, as well as engage them in critical reflections on what it means to be white (coleman et al., 2020). in my own core community psychology classes, we talked very little about white supremacy and racism, but yet i was being trained to be a researcher who could “give voice” to marginalized community members. i echo here langhout’s (2015) question in her letter to budding scholaractivists, “how do we become aware of the role our values, emotions, and affect play in our work, and how can we interact with our values, and emotions—which are embedded within dominant structures—in ways that are productive for social justice movements” (p. 268)? as evans et al. (2017) suggests, we need graduate programs that teach students more than just technical skills and traditional theories. drawing on the work of other scholars (coleman et al., 2020; fernández, 2018b; sonn, 2011; todd et al., 2010) and my own experience, i argue that we need community psychology programs that train graduate students to be (1) reflexive, (2) vulnerable, and (3) anti-racist. reflexive practices are essential for those of us who hold dominant positions as community psychologists because it provides the space to critically examine our motives, intentions, and practices as we build relationships with communities (langhout, 2015). in training the next generation of community psychologists, case (2017) recommends fostering cultures of vulnerability in our programs to encourage students to share feelings of shame or guilt that may arise in our work. similarly, langhout (2015) recommends that we honor our hearts and utilize our affective politics to create spaces to explore our unease and discomfort. in addition to reflexivity and heart work, we need graduate programs that value anti-racism and explicitly discuss the importance of developing anti-racist practices. we need to actively call white students in to conversations about race, white privilege, and the ways in which we are complicit in racism and the oppressive structures we seek to change. we cannot dismantle the oppressive structures we claim to revolt against without first acknowledging our own locations within them. by creating graduate programs that focus on reflexivity, foster vulnerability, and raise graduate students’ consciousness about racism and white supremacy we can develop scholar activists who have a deep understanding for what it means to be accountable and responsible to communities (evans et al., 2017). conclusion http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 part of white privilege is our placement at the center of inquiry, an expectation so strong that “even when a time and place are specifically designated for members of a non-privileged group to be central, members of the dominant group will often attempt to take back the pivotal focus” (bergerson, 2003, p. 56). in working with youth for justice, the use of reflexivity and the continual questioning of my role with the organization has been crucial to ensure i do not take center stage as the white researcher in the room. in writing this paper i had doubts and questions about whether i should be the one writing it since my goal is to decenter myself as the white, academic researcher. every aspect of what i do requires deep reflection about my goals, my reasoning for engaging in a conversation, how i engage in that conversation, and who i am truly serving with my presence. i hope my own effort to write more personally about my own process and emotions provides an example for other white scholars to do the same. i am one voice in this conversation and there are many scholars, particularly scholars of color, who have made their affective politics visible and thus paved the path for me to engage in this type of work and to write on this topic (fernández, 2018a; lorde, 1998; mulvey et al., 2000; nash, 2011; ulysse, 2007). as white people, we should follow the leadership of bipoc and engaging in an anti-racist practice means remaining open to accountability and to hearing feedback about how we can do better. by acknowledging my privilege and grappling with how to be more accountable as a researcher, activist, and professional, as mulvey et al. (2000) describes, my own identity has been further revealed, challenged, and transformed through the process of engaging with my community partners. i owe my process of radicalization and learning to my relationship with youth for justice, my colleagues, professors, and friends who have guided me, listened to me, and called me in to conversations about race. if not for their constant challenging and pushing to go deeper, i would not be where i am now. i hope they and many others continue to push me on my anti-racism journey because i have so far to go. additionally, i hope the recommendations for creating graduate training programs that promote reflexivity, vulnerability, and antiracism will help to transform the field into one that is committed to interrogating our role within oppressive structures. as a graduate student i would have greatly benefitted from conversations that helped me to understand and critique my own white identity and socialization to be complicit in structures of white supremacy. instead, i had to do this work largely on my own and outside of my community psychology training. i believe it is crucial for the field to become more critically conscious of whiteness within the field so that we can fully materialize our value of social justice. acknowledgement a special thanks to my community partners who have guided me, challenged me, and taught me so much. i would also like to thank my advisor dr. scotney evans and colleague dr. natalie kivell for their encouragement to write this paper and for their feedback on earlier drafts. references anzaldúa, g., & moraga, c. 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(2019). black lives matter as resistance to systemic anti-black violence. journal of critical thought and praxis, 8(1), 30-45. todd, n. r., spanierman, l. b., & aber, m. s. (2010). white students reflecting on whiteness: understanding emotional responses. journal of diversity in higher education, 3(2), 97–110. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019299 ulysse, g. a. (2007). downtown ladies: informal commercial importers, a hatian anthropologist, and self-making in jamaica. chicago: university of chicago press. warren, m. (2010). fire in the heart: how white activists embrace racial justice. new york: oxford university press. watts, r. j. (1994). graduate training for a diverse world. american journal of community psychology, 22(6), 807–809. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02521562 watts, r., & serrano-garcía, i. (2003). the quest for a liberating community psychology: an overview. american journal of community psychology, 31(1–2), 73–78. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:102302260366 7 wilson, c. l., afua darko, n., kaur singh, a. & hunt, b. (2020). racism and applications of critical race and intersectional theories in community psychology. in m. riemer, s. m. reich, s.d. evans, g. nelson, & i. prilleltensky, (eds). community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and well-being (3rd ed.). red globe pressmacmillian. yancy, g. (2008). black bodies white gazes: the continuing significance of race in america. rowman & littlefield. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019299 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02521562 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1023022603667 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1023022603667 the kanaeokana network: reflecting on five years of envisioning a hawaiian education system and aloha ʻāina leaders liezl alcantara houglum1 and malia nobrega-olivera2 keywords: network, network health, education, native hawaiian, indigenous, collaboration, hawaiian education author biographies: liezl alcantara houglum is a community psychologist serving as principal research associate for kealaiwikuamoʻo within the hiʻialo group at kamehameha schools. her work supports native hawaiian learners and learning environments as well as educators, advocates, and practitioners within native hawaiian communities. malia nobrega-olivera is from hanapēpē valley, kona, kauaʻi. she is currently the hawaiʻinuiākea school of hawaiian knowledge director of strategic partnerships and community engagement and also serves as a member of the kanaeokana kōmike hoʻokele. malia is a native hawaiian educator, kumu hula, event strategist, certified health coach, and advocate of indigenous rights at all levels — locally, regionally, and internationally. her experiences demonstrate her commitment to her people, language, and culture and to indigenous peoples worldwide. recommended citation: houglum, l. a. and nobrega-olivera, m. (2022). the kanaeokana network: reflecting on five years of envisioning a hawaiian education system and aloha ʻāina leaders. global journal of community psychology practice, 13(2), 1-30. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: liezl houglum, kealaiwikuamoʻo, kamehameha schools, 567 south king street, suite 304, honolulu, hi 96813. email: lihouglu@ksbe.edu 1 kealaiwikuamoʻo, hiʻialo, kamehameha schools 2 hawaiʻinuiākea school of hawaiian knowledge, university of hawaiʻi at mānoa http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:lihouglu@ksbe.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 the kanaeokana network: reflecting on five years of envisioning a hawaiian education system and aloha ʻāina leaders abstract how might a network approach be used to address issues and goals seemingly impossible for individuals to tackle alone? established to increase momentum and synergy among multiple organizations through mutual work and shared goals, the kanaeokana network was forged five years ago and today demonstrates progress toward supportive infrastructure, cohesion and collective strength, member engagement, and reach beyond our primary indigenous-serving base. kanaeokana includes more than 80 hawaiian language, culture, and ʻāina-based (place-based) organizations and schools (preschool through university level), collaborating to develop and strengthen a native hawaiian education system. the network’s underlying value of aloha ʻāina, or love of the land, involves a deeply rooted connection and commitment to place, people, and cultural practice. the network fosters cultural knowledge with a community focus and a global reach, notably produced in digital and nondigital spaces, both preceding the pandemic and in response to it. kanaeokana works at the intersections of ʻōlelo hawaiʻi (hawaiian language), culture, advocacy, media, community engagement, and education, all toward the unified goal of developing and strengthening a native hawaiian education system. in this article, we reflect critically on kanaeokana’s approach over the past five years, with a focus on network health, adaptability, and social change in practice. kanaeokana is a network of hawaiian-serving schools and organizations that took form in 2016 (see figure 1). kanaeokana works at the intersections of ʻōlelo hawaiʻi (hawaiian language), culture, advocacy, media, community engagement, and education to develop and sustain a system of hawaiian education that will nurture the next generations of aloha ‘āina leaders—those who love and are loyal to hawaiian lands. in this article, we reflect critically on kanaeokana’s approach over the past five years, with a focus on network health, adaptability, and social change in practice. this article is an extension of a presentation made by the authors at the 2020 international conference of community psychology. figure 1: logo of the kanaeokana network http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 positionality statement both authors are closely involved with kanaeokana. the first author is a us-born daughter of filipinos who emigrated to seattle, washington. liezl is trained as a community psychologist and relocated to hawaiʻi in 2012, where she works for the kealaiwikuamoʻo department at kamehameha schools, which provides financial and resource support for kanaeokana. she has been involved with kanaeokana since 2018. the second author is a native hawaiian educator from hanapēpē valley, kauaʻi, who is trained as an instructional designer and a hula and hawaiian language teacher. malia is currently a faculty specialist in community engagement at the hawaiʻinuiākea school of hawaiian knowledge at the university of hawaiʻi at mānoa. she has been an active part of the kanaeokana network since its first community meeting in 2016 and serves as a member of its kōmike hoʻokele (steering committee). introduction ʻo wai kou makuahine? ʻo ka ʻāina nō! ʻo wai kou kupunahine? ʻo ka ʻāina nō! (who is your mother? the land! who is your grandmother? the land!) (nāwahīokalaniʻōpuʻu, 1895). these words, written by iosepa hoʻoluhi nāwahīokalaniʻōpuʻu, are just as relevant today as they were in 1895. our discussion about hawaiian education begins with ʻāina (land), because for native hawaiians, ʻāina was—and still is—our primary learning environment and source of well-being. ʻāina is generally translated to mean “land,” but the native hawaiian concept of ʻāina is more complex and includes pilina (relationships, connections) between the land, its resources, and people. these pilina transcend time— connecting us to our past and our future, and space—linking ma uka and ma kai (the uplands and the oceans) and remote areas such as kaʻū (the southernmost district on hawaiʻi island) and kekaha (the westernmost town on kauaʻi). ʻāina is that which feeds. we sustain ʻāina, and ʻāina sustains us. aloha for the ʻāina is embodied in moʻolelo (stories) and cultural practices such as oli (chants), mele (songs, anthems, poetry), and hula as forms of pule (prayer) that honor wahi pana (storied places) such as fishponds, salt ponds, islands, communities, and forests. aloha for ʻāina often manifests in collective efforts such as the work of the protect kahoʻolawe ‘ohana in the 1970s to cease us military bombing of the island and, more recently, the 2013-2019 mālama honua worldwide voyage to increase awareness of protecting the environment for future generations as well as the movement to protect maunakea from desecration and development. “aloha requires one to speak and act out in the face of injustice. aloha is active and something that needs to be put into practice, not something that is a state of being” (beamer, 2014, p. 13). practicing aloha for the ʻāina entails living in balance with nature (mcgregor et al., 2020). it also means seeing ʻāina and “places as people, as ʻohana, as the most precious kūpuna [elders] from whom we can learn, and who, when cared for, will continue to nurture us” (abad & gonzalez, 2020, p. 201). such interconnectedness is captured in the term “aloha ʻāina,” which connotes loyalty and allegiance to the land. aloha ʻāina holds special historical, cultural, and patriotic significance for native hawaiians and for the kingdom of hawaiʻi. acting in support of social, cultural, and ecological justice is critical to aloha ʻāina (beamer, 2014). aloha ʻāina is foundational for the objectives of the kanaeokana network. the definition of aloha ʻāina espoused by kanaeokana reads: aloha ʻāina is deeply rooted connection and commitment to the physical and spiritual health of hawaiʻi’s lands, seas, and skies; a devotion to protect and http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.protectkahoolaweohana.org/ http://www.hokulea.com/worldwide-voyage/ https://puuhuluhulu.com/ https://puuhuluhulu.com/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 support hawaiian cultural practices that take place within the embrace of ʻāina and through the lens and voice of ʻōlelo hawaiʻi; and an unwavering dedication to the well-being of ʻōiwi hawaiʻi, including matters of social and political justice. (kanaeokana, 2022) place, therefore, is essential to the cultural survival and identity of native hawaiians. teaching and learning on and with the ʻāina plays a crucial role in shaping identity. trask (1999) notes that hawaiian education and language instruction is cultural because it seeks to preserve the core of a way of thinking and being that is uniquely native, and political because this attempt at preservation takes place in a system where the dominant group has employed legal and social means to deny the use and inheritance of the native language by natives themselves. (p. 42) cultural restoration, community participation, and educational selfdetermination are critical aloha ʻāina goals in the context of transmitting values, nurturing character, shaping intellect, and developing skills for ʻōpio (youth) and adults. hawaiian culture-based education honors time and place; haumāna (students) in kula hawaiʻi (hawaiian schools) look to the past, see in the present, and live for the future. haumāna learn on the ʻāina and from the ʻāina, in the kai (seas), from all of the elements, and with the community. network approach a network approach represents an opportunity for systems change, particularly in our context of addressing historical oppression of hawaiian culture, language, education, and sovereignty. calls to action emerge for learning communities to “engage in collective action to dismantle oppressive social arrangements” (evans et al., 2017), to work toward transformation by participating in social movements as fellow citizens and not as academics or researchers (gokani & walsh, 2017), to build coalitions between those inside and outside the native experience (trask, 1999), and to place ʻāina and community well-being at the forefront of economic and political systems (abad & gonzalez, 2020). systems change is a shared responsibility that requires collective efforts. here, we posit that the kanaeokana network is uniquely equipped to change educational systems. this position acknowledges certain facets of networks and coalitions that are pertinent for exploration: networks address a range of issues and comprise a diversity of stakeholders (lawlor et al., 2020); networks have a greater capacity to mobilize and impact change than do individual organizations working alone (evans et al., 2014); networks follow stages of development, adapting and evolving over time (kegler et al., 2010; network impact and center for evaluation innovation, 2014); and network success can be measured in a variety of ways (hajjar et al., 2020; lawlor & neal, 2016; marek et al., 2015). within the kanaeokana network, practitioners, researchers, and educators form an interconnected learning and actionoriented community, fostering human connection and interdependence to work against institutionalized cultural oppression and inequitable conditions that negatively affect native hawaiian individuals and groups. but addressing these issues is complicated by the fact that solutions are not known in advance and require invention, testing, and adoption (network impact and center for evaluation innovation, 2014). the situation is also complicated by historic trends. for example, fluency in ʻōlelo hawaiʻi—though on the rise, is still rebounding from a low point in the 1980s, when only two thousand native speakers— mostly elderly—and fewer than fifty children http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 could speak hawaiian (souza & walk, 2015). like other indigenous groups, native hawaiians experience the consequences of colonization as displacement from everything that is essential to identity (rua et al., 2020). furthermore, longitudinal data show that native hawaiians continue to face the highest rates of unemployment and poverty and, compared with hawaiʻi’s other major ethnicities, “have higher rates of smoking, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, heart attack, disability, and cancer mortality” (kanaʻiaupuni et al., 2021, executive summary). these obstacles are part of the reason native hawaiians are increasingly turning to cultural traditions for insights and solutions. the possibility for positive impact becomes more apparent when individuals, groups, organizations, and communities work together rather than separately to actualize the power of social change. realizing the substantial work involved in raising the profile of hawaiian language, culture, and ʻāina-based education, the founding members of kanaeokana converged to develop a native hawaiian education system and to grow aloha ʻāina leaders. the true measure of success for kanaeokana—its organizations, collaborations, priorities, and activities—is the aloha ʻāina that we see in the rising generations. this article covers the development of the kanaeokana network and includes reflections on successes and lessons learned. we begin by describing the network’s origins and innovative approaches. then, we explore the growth and responsiveness of the network in the “adaptation and evolution” section. we conclude by connecting to the themes of knowledge expansion and practice through intercultural dialogue and “repowering” (rua et al., 2020) in contexts where oppressive social arrangements continue to constrain the capacities of indigenous and minoritized cultural groups. we also include implications for the field of community psychology and note areas for future research and action. network origins and development compared with hawaiʻi’s other major ethnic groups, native hawaiians are faced with the lowest proficiency rates in language arts, mathematics, and science; the highest rates of chronic absenteeism; the lowest rates of ontime high school graduation; and the lowest rates of college completion (kanaʻiaupuni et al., 2021). such educational disparities have persisted for decades and result in subpar academic, financial, and emotional well-being for many native hawaiians. the disproportionately poor educational outcomes among native hawaiian learners demand that we confront the realities of historical inequity and racism within educational, political, and socioeconomic systems and decolonize such oppressive arrangements (kanaʻiaupuni et al., 2021; rua et al., 2020). changing the status quo is an urgent priority that requires new practices and perspectives to establish a system of education that values, benefits, and uplifts native hawaiian learners. against this backdrop, 69 educational and community leaders supportive of ʻōlelo hawaiʻi, hawaiian culture, and ʻāina-based education responded to an invitation in 2016 to envision a network together. the participants gathered with excitement, partly because of the compelling call to action, and also because many had not seen one another for extended periods of time due to living and working on different islands—from hawaiʻi island to niʻihau and beyond. one of the network’s first activities was an art exercise where participants described metaphorically how their organizations are lāʻau (plants) that contribute to the larger “educational ecosystem.” the community of educational leaders overwhelmingly recognized the value of having many similarities and diverse strengths that each contributed over time. these contributions http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 were also depicted through a collective development of a hawaiian education mural that recognized participants’ shared history, representing the momona (rich or fertile) soil in which each lāʻau is rooted today (see figure 2). figure 2: mural about the story of kula hawaiʻi (hawaiian schools), june 2016 examining the many symbiotic connections that contribute to a thriving ulu lāʻau (hawaiian forest) prompted the ecosystem of friends, organizations, and leaders to say yes to continue contributing to the ulu lāʻau. thus, the network was born. the power of a name the network needed a name. because naming is an important cultural practice for native hawaiians, those with experience in naming proposed ideas based on the intentions of the collective ʻohana (family) or network. the network chose the name “kanaeokana,” which refers to the nae, or net, of kana, a powerful kupua (supernatural being) who was born as a piece of hau (hibiscus tiliaceus) rope and later assumed human form. hawaiian moʻolelo describe kana growing to extraordinary size and lengths and taking varied shapes to fulfill the many challenges he encountered. one of his most famous deeds was rescuing his mother hina from the fortress at hāʻupu, molokai, and returning her back home to hilo (fornander, 1917). the word nae refers to several kinds of netting. for example, fine-meshed nae served as the foundation to which ʻuo (feather bundles) were attached in making traditional ʻahuʻula (feather cloaks), which required expertise and dedication spanning multiple generations. these nae were created from the endemic olonā plant (touchardia latifolia), one of the strongest natural fibers available. nae also refers to fine-meshed fishing nets for catching small fish and shrimp. these intricate nets involve the tying of many hīpuʻu (knots) to ensure cohesion and strength. native hawaiian custom holds that wellmaintained nets are essential to sustaining the health and vitality of a community (see figures 3 and 4). the name kanaeokana, therefore, suggests strength, endurance, focus, flexibility, and excellence. participants connect and strengthen the collective efforts of the network to grow and positively impact hawaiʻi and beyond. kahua of the network building upon relationships tied together like the hīpuʻu of the nae, leaders representing hawaiian-serving schools and organizations desired to work toward a shared vision grounded in ʻōlelo hawaiʻi and ʻike kupuna. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/0b4tdr4cqryxfmgcwulhdy1vvedg/view?resourcekey=0-kqnfpi9iji4cfxfcxigfdg global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 leaders recognized that it was the right time to take action together as a network and to scale up hawaiian culture-based education figure 3: nae—a traditional hawaiian fishing net, credit: hana yoshihata figure 4 : nae, with kanaeokana member organizations representing hīpuʻu, or knots, that strengthen the netting, credit: hana yoshihata and ryan “gonzo” gonzalez for all. this meant making a commitment to a kahua (foundation) where: 1. meaningful, cutting-edge, and engaging learning is occurring in ʻōlelo hawaiʻi, hawaiian culture, and ‘āina-based kula and programs. 2. hawaiian culture, worldview, and practices are ancestrally rooted, relevant in our modern context, future-minded, focused on collective well-being, both locally and globally. 3. students nurtured in such contexts strengthen the long-term well-being of communities, hawaiʻi, and our planet. 4. hawaiian approaches to education are valuable for all students in hawaiʻi and beyond and are a solution to systemic problems in education. in 2017, kanaeokana collaboratively developed a vision, mission, and strategic goals. this important step set the kahua for network participants to increase collaboration and communication. this work also led to a formal shared leadership structure that included kōmike (committees) and responsibilities. kanaeokana nuʻukia (vision) a strengthened lāhui that grows and sustains future generations of aloha ‘āina leaders. kanaeokana ala nuʻukia (mission) collaboratively develop and strengthen a native hawaiian education system—built on a strong foundation of ʻōlelo hawai‘i and ʻike hawai‘i (hawaiian knowledge). kanaeokana pahu hopu (strategic goals) convene network members dedicated to supporting ʻōlelo hawai‘i, hawaiian culture, and ʻāina-based education to forward kanaeokana efforts. • assert educational sovereignty in the process of strengthening our lāhui. • honor and demonstrate the diversity among participating organizations, fostering mutual trust, respect, and pilina among all members. • prioritize renormalization of ʻōlelo hawaiʻi in all sectors of society. • generate and advocate for kanaeokana policy positions. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 • develop and share educational resources (curriculum, instruction, and assessment), ideas, approaches, and strategies through a centralized, virtual waihona. • ensure multigenerational continuity and synergy in the evolving work of kanaeokana. the six kōmike created zones for innovation—spaces that invite members to collaborate, explore, design using all the tools available to create something new, and implement work aligned with kanaeokana’s vision and mission. these are also safe spaces to share an idea or a challenge and look at it from all angles and solve them together. in 2018, ʻaha kūkā (plenary work sessions) served the purpose of reviewing our efforts over the previous two years and creating a plan for where we wanted to go next. these gatherings prompted the network to begin to identify impact indicators (which are discussed in further detail in the section “kanaeokana resources and documents”) to help measure collective progress in the different stages of growing aloha ʻāina leaders. equally important, ʻaha kūkā encouraged new approaches and activities that reflect the diversity and shared vision of the group. the kōmike work groups shared highlights of their efforts during our zones of innovation time to support and create communities of practice–opportunities for kula, ʻohana, kaiāulu, and individuals to ‘ōlelo hawaiʻi, cultural practices, etc. each of the kōmike were also encouraged to establish 1, 3, and 5-year s.m.a.r.t. goals3. our intention throughout the year was to empower one another by fostering ideation, creativity, intuition, innovation, group intelligence, and collective talents. 3 s.m.a.r.t. goals refer to the following: s – specific, sensible, significant; m – measurable, meaningful, motivating; a – achievable, agreed to, attainable; r – the next progression of growth led to the creation of ideation spaces in 2019 at the ʻaha kūkā to engage in a set of brainstorming and discussion to identify and share ideas members were most interested in working on. some examples of ideations included more navigational classes on the other islands and cooking classes that foster ʻōlelo hawaiʻi and healthy recipes using native foods. figure 5 illustrates one of the ideas from a community navigator from anahola who shared a dream of working with our kula hawaiʻi and having small community waʻa (canoes) for educators and families. figure 5: community based navigational schools comprise a dream shared by a community navigator on kauaʻi during our ideation space at ʻaha kūkā creating safe spaces to exchange ideas served to strengthen our communication channels while honoring and sharing our ʻike kupuna (ancestral wisdom) through mele, moʻolelo, film, poetry, and games. from a professional learning standpoint, these activities also offered educators new content and approaches to use with their learners. these efforts also set the stage for greater progress and adaptation in the following year. the kanaeokana network began 2020 by continuing to envision a new hawaiian results-based, relevant, resourced, realistic; t – time bound, timely. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 education system. to coalesce key aspects about what such a system might look like, alakaʻi and members of the network drafted a declaration (see “kanaeokana resources and documents” later in this article). because of the importance of he alo a he alo (face to face) exchanges in hawaiian gatherings, in-person interactive workshops had been key in our networking activities. however, when the coronavirus pandemic hit in early 2020, kanaeokana quickly adapted our focus to facilitate virtual workshops and webinars, online learning resources, performances, and forums (see figure 6). figure 6: virtual workshops and webinars produced by kanaeokana and hawaiʻinuiākea school of hawaiian knowledge included practitioners, teachers and students of all ages and from different schools throughout hawaiʻi kanaeokana’s intention was to redirect the constraints of the public health crisis to allow our network to continue to uplift hawaiian culture, language, and knowledge, to nurture education within families and communities, and to connect people around the world. this proactive approach proved to be exceedingly important during more than a year of physical and social isolation. in 2021, the network continued to engage virtually. this includes live virtual ʻaha kūkā that provide a platform for sharing ideas and energy, networking, solidifying visions, and taking next steps to enliven and actualize projects (see figures 7 and 8). a highlight of our april 2021 ʻaha kūkā included the aloha ʻāina leader awards, which recognized exemplary high school seniors from across the hawaiian education landscape. hawaiian-focused charter schools, immersion schools, and private schools each recognized a single student, selected by their kula leaders, who most strongly embodies aloha ʻāina leadership. although this recognition included a modest monetary prize, the primary objective of the aloha ʻāina leader awards is to elevate young ʻōiwi leaders and recognize that their accomplishments and goals are valued by schools and by our lāhui (see figure 9). figure 7: ʻaha kūkā was adapted as a live virtual experience to engage kanaeokana members, april 2021 figure 8: virtual attendees used emoji paddles during the interactive ʻaha kūkā, april 2021 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 kula leaders, who most strongly embodies aloha ʻāina leadership. although this recognition included a modest monetary prize, the primary objective of the aloha ʻāina leader awards is to elevate young ʻōiwi leaders and recognize that their accomplishments and goals are valued by schools and by our lāhui (see figure 9). figure 9: aloha ʻāina leader award recipients, class of 2021 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 a new project-based process was also launched to replace the kōmike structure utilized for the last five years and empower collaborators to join together around likeminded projects. we share more about this process in “adaptation and evolution” below. from the onset, the network has been committed to sharing the stories about kanaeokana and ramping up our collective efforts toward social change. we knew that stories celebrating the growth and success of hawaiian education, grounded in ʻōlelo hawaiʻi and ʻike hawaiʻi, would inspire and generate support locally and globally. within the network’s first five years, kanaeokana has shared diverse messages on social media platforms and garnered a following of over 545,000 as of february 2022. over the years, kanaeokana has convened 11 ʻaha kūkā and numerous committee working group sessions, and we continue to strengthen our connections, relationships, and communications (kania et al., 2018). these gatherings, both in-person and virtually, have reinforced the need to celebrate our accomplishments—which include maintaining cohesion over a five-year period, sustaining educational offerings throughout the pandemic, sharing resources, amplifying success stories of individual kula within the network, and enhancing our collective identity as native hawaiian educators. for example, survey responses from ʻaha kūkā 2021 indicate that as a result of the latest virtual plenary convening, 93% of members deepened their understanding of kanaeokana’s vision, mission, and goals. in addition, 98% of members believe in kanaeokana’s dual role in developing a native hawaiian education system and growing aloha ʻāina leaders (kanaeokana, 2021 summer). the gatherings also provide opportunities to learn from our challenges and commit to being flexible to the needs of our members, adaptive in our processes, and transparent in our decision-making and collaborative work. like kana, who had the ability to grow, find allies, and take varied forms to overcome challenges, the success of the network is made possible through the collective strength, flexibility, and commitment of active members, partners, and supporters. the “how” of kanaeokana the shared work of kanaeokana is about changing mindsets, relationships, and power dynamics in support of a new native hawaiian education system. building this system on a strong foundation of ʻōlelo hawaiʻi and ʻike hawaiʻi involves shifting the conditions that hold the problem in place (kania et al., 2018) while envisioning and working toward a thriving lāhui. what does this future look like? kanaeokana envisions that people of hawaiʻi will be inherently connected to local and global communities whose well-being flourishes alongside the well-being of the ʻāina. the ʻāina will sustain us as we sustain the ʻāina. how do we create a healthy network that supports the growth of aloha ʻāina leaders? key factors that have contributed to creating a healthy network include a shared leadership structure that supports active member engagement, cohesion and collective strength, a supportive infrastructure, and reach within and beyond our indigenousserving base. our kūpuna teach us through their many ʻōlelo noʻeau (wise sayings) that guide us in our work and in our lives. one such ʻōlelo noʻeau is “o ke kahua ma mua, ma hope ke kūkulu—the site first, and then the building” (pukui, 1983, p. 268). having a strong kahua for the network, guided by a shared leadership structure that supports active member engagement, has helped us sustain our efforts thus far. this structure allows for nonhierarchical decision-making, flexibility and adaptiveness, and responsiveness to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 community needs. the shared leadership initially included a kōmike hoʻokele (steering committee) and six kōmike hoʻokō (working groups). each kōmike was designed to have a specific function to directly align with the vision and mission of the network. kōmike hoʻokele the kōmike hoʻokele comprises wellrespected and revered cultural practitioners, founders and poʻokumu (principals) of hawaiian-focused charter schools, leaders of ʻāina-based organizations, university professors, specialists and academic researchers, and vital voices in political, educational, and social movements impacting native hawaiians. the kōmike hoʻokele members include 17 kanaeokana participants who were nominated and confirmed by the kanaeokana membership. the kōmike hoʻokele has four main responsibilities, as agreed upon by the network: 1. alakaʻi—provide leadership to help move the groups’ goals and work forward 2. kūkulu—organize work to develop synergy among kōmike, set meeting agendas, and facilitate collaboration. 3. kaʻaʻike—ensure effective communications to facilitate collaboration and avoid duplication of efforts. 4. pilina—cultivate cohesion, shared identity, and commitment to common goals among kōmike and member kula (schools) and organizations. kōmike hoʻokō six kōmike hoʻokō, established in 2017, recognized that the network included innovative collaborators who were ready and eager to scale what they were already doing in their communities, and that work groups were a mechanism for this kind of expansion. figure 10: virtual kūʻokoʻa kūkanono hosted by kauluakalana, in partnership with many other kanaeokana partner organizations throughout ka pae ʻāina hawaiʻi, november 2020 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 for example, an in-person event was to be held on the island of oʻahu, hosted by a member organization in their wahi pana. when the pandemic hit, a request to pivot to a virtual event was proposed to the kōmike. in 2021, this event expanded to include ka pae ʻāina hawaiʻi (the hawaiian archipelago), connecting and feeding communities in different ways as we celebrated its extended reach to our global community by utilizing our social media platforms (see figure 10). the six kōmike hoʻokō, which were designed to advance kanaeokana’s strategic goals, included: • kōmike hoʻokuluma ‘ōlelo hawai‘i— encourage and facilitate hawaiian language use in all sectors of society. • kōmike hālau ʻōiwi—support communityand family-driven efforts to provide after-school cultural experiences. • kōmike recruiting and retaining hawaiian culture-based educators— encourage young educators to enter teaching fields, support seasoned educators to continue, and provide opportunities for master educators to mentor others. • kōmike hālauololo—secure funding to forward our collective efforts. • kōmike advocacy—advocate for policy positions that advance the vision and mission of kanaeokana. • kōmike hoʻolōkahi—bring partners together to engage in the collective learning of students and teachers. each of the kōmike served as a community of practice, providing opportunities for network members to collaborate and share projects, experiences, and resources. along the way, opportunities to learn from kanaeokana members and reevaluate our approaches have also contributed to the health of the network. from a network health survey conducted in 2019, members identified areas for possible improvement. these include membership expansion and engagement, more varied meeting venues (e.g., virtual, ʻāina-based), increased and more diverse funding streams, and improved communication (kanaeokana, 2019a). these have become areas of focus for the kōmike hoʻokele. historical roots of the network the cohesion and collective strength of kanaeokana are rooted in shared history. more specifically, an older network of hawaiian-focused charter schools began in 2002 and received support from kamehameha schools. these earlier efforts saw leaders of 17 hawaiian-focused charters working together successfully and committing to a common vision of the graduate. this set the stage for larger-scale collaboration by kanaeokana. similarly, relationships between many individual members and organizations predated the formal establishment of kanaeokana in 2016. some kanaeokana participants have been colleagues for decades, working in tandem to develop hawaiian places of learning from preschool to the university level. other participants, who previously had a student–teacher relationship, are now working side by side as peers within the network. many members share long histories of rallying together as activists, advocates, and allies within and for native hawaiian communities. thus, the threads of interwoven pilina underlie and fortify the network partnerships and collaborations. in the words of one kanaeokana member, “collaboration moves at the speed of trust.” infrastructure of kanaeokana kanaeokana operates under a shared leadership model with a supportive infrastructure. shared governance allows for members to be accountable to their kuleana (responsibility, duty, and purview), rather than to an organizational leader. in other http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://sites.google.com/ksbe.edu/hfcscra/cra-home#h.p_p4e_tr4dlpbz https://sites.google.com/ksbe.edu/hfcscra/cra-home#h.p_p4e_tr4dlpbz global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 words, “kuleana is da boss.” when a member is led by their kuleana and “sets the agenda” for the work we do, it ignites our passion and fills us with joy. this leads to greater commitment of time and aloha to work collectively to further our progress in accomplishing our vision. communication channels, regular meetings, and participatory processes bring the larger network together for activities and opportunities for nonhierarchical decision-making. within this highly decentralized network, membership connections are essential to holding work and people together. backbone support is provided by kealaiwikuamoʻo, a department at kamehameha schools that supports kanaeokana via meeting coordination and facilitation; project management; development and dissemination of strategic content in cultivated social media channels, promotional communications to internal and external audiences; development and dissemination of educational resources; and in-kind and financial support to advance kanaeokana goals. an ongoing concern involves the perception by some that kanaeokana is controlled by the backbone organization. in other words, some may believe that kamehameha schools (ks)—the largest educational organization serving native hawaiians—controls kanaeokana because of the resources it contributes toward network activities. this concern warrants brief discussion. the context surrounding kanaeokana’s formation stage includes ks playing a significant role in convening the network and establishing an organizational structure and communication processes (kegler et al., 2010). perceptions of kanaeokana as a ksowned initiative can be likened to perceptions of higher education institutions driving community–academic partnerships and benefiting from them over and above the benefits realized by their community partners (alcantara et al., 2015; amon et al., 2020; castleden et al., 2015). a pertinent question emerged during network evaluation interviews conducted in 2019: how do we make it clear that kanaeokana is a community-driven network? while there is inherent danger of the backbone support team overstepping its kūlana (position), efforts have been made to ensure that kamehameha schools staff implement the decisions that the network members make, rather than assuming the role of decision-makers. frequent reflection and check-ins with network members and the kōmike hoʻokele help with accountability and upholding integrity in relationships and decision-making. for example, feedback from the 2019 kanaeokana network health survey (kanaeokana, 2019a) pointed to the need to distinguish between kanaeokana’s strategic goals and ks’s strategic goals. actions such as the development of foundational documents, which are described in the next section, have led to a better articulation of the network’s intentions and identity being distinct from those of the backbone support organization. expanding kanaeokana’s reach kanaeokana has expanded the network by encouraging participation both within and beyond native hawaiian communities and native hawaiian-serving organizations. to date, the network comprises more than 80 member organizations. kanaeokana is not currently organized as a nonprofit organization or a legal entity; however, the kōmike hoʻokele continues to explore options that may fit the needs of the network. the diverse membership of kanaeokana is an asset that has spawned creativity in achieving kanaeokana’s strategic goals. examples include holding ʻohana and community events focused on learning and renormalizing ʻōlelo hawaiʻi, asking candidates for elected positions where they stand on education http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 issues and posting answers on the kanaeokana website, and conducting virtual communities of practice with kumu who share their classroom haʻawina (lessons) and develop resources together for an online waihona (repository) accessible to kumu across ka pae ʻāina hawaiʻi. to more broadly connect hawaiian culture to those beyond native hawaiian communities, we imagine a world where hawaiian culture is omnipresent. normalizing native hawaiian culture is more likely to occur when all sectors of society are saturated with the ʻano (character, disposition, nature) of uplifting ʻōlelo hawaiʻi and ʻike hawaiʻi. for hawaiian culture and language to live, we must see, hear, and experience it everywhere—at the center stage of shopping centers, at farmers’ markets, on coffee shop marketing signs, and on radio, television, and social media platforms. bringing down the walls that keep the culture from thriving is part of creating and maintaining a healthy network. while kanaeokana remains focused on maintaining pilina and connections within the network, the relationships outside the network—especially with institutions and leaders in power—are equally important. in action, this means influencing those in power directly and creating the conditions needed for others to build power (kania et al., 2018). kanaeokana supports efforts for expanded influence and for increased capacity to amplify community voice, especially regarding hawaiian educational and cultural sovereignty. for example, addressing power dynamics on a personal level has occurred when hawaiian-focused charter school haumāna (students) appealed to elected officials to protect the precious ala wai watershed and surrounding waikīkī ahupuaʻa (land division extending from ma uka to ma kai). on a community level, political change has resulted from encouraging stronger engagement of kānaka māoli (native hawaiians) in government, particularly within the neighborhood boards on oʻahu for 2021–2023. these boards were created to assure and increase community participation of residents in the decision-making process of government. native hawaiians, comprising about 21 percent of hawaiʻi’s population, are underrepresented in government, which limits opportunities to take part in political processes. supported in part by kanaeokana’s help in promoting political action as being tied to aloha ʻāina leadership, at least 161 native hawaiians filed to run for their local neighborhood board, and at least 124 were elected in 2021. tackling power imbalances at the community level was also seen during hawaiʻi rising, a gathering that kanaeokana played a key role in helping to organize, where hundreds of people occupied the hawaiʻi state capitol when the legislative session opened on january 15, 2020, centering and celebrating hawaiian cultural protocols, classes and presentations, and voter engagement (see figure 11). figure 11: hawaiʻi rising attendees participating in protocol at the hawaiʻi state capitol on january 15, 2020 similar to the 1997 gathering led by the ʻīlioʻulaokalani coalition, a political advocacy group composed of kumu hula, kanaeokana recognized the opportunity to shift the political landscape toward a future rooted in aloha ‘āina. hawaiʻi rising participants maintain that aloha ‘āina is a high priority in our communities and in government http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 decision-making, and gathering at the capitol was one way to add their voice to actions that lead to solutions. kanaeokana resources and documents foundational documents add a layer of legitimacy to kanaeokana’s efforts and complement the strong trust that exists among many network members. one key resource is the kanaeokana handbook (kanaeokana, 2020, winter). inspired by the valve handbook for new employees, the kanaeokana handbook is written in a casual and welcoming manner that reflects kanaeokana’s communication style. the handbook introduces how the network operates and encourages new participants to jump into the hana (action, work). two documents disseminated to network members in april 2021 are helping to define and redefine kanaeokana: palapala ʻōnaehana hoʻonaʻauao hawaiʻi (hawaiian education system declaration) and palapala hoʻoulu aloha ʻāina (proclamation on growing aloha ʻāina). these documents synthesize what kanaeokana means when it refers to the hawaiian education system and aloha ʻāina leaders. each document has a distinctive moʻolelo moʻokūauhau (genealogy story). palapala ʻōnaehana hoʻonaʻauao hawaiʻi for the palapala ʻōnaehana hoʻonaʻauao hawaiʻi, manaʻo (ideas) and suggestions for refinement were gathered from attendees of ʻaha kūkā in 2019 and 2020 (see figure 12). through self-reflection about critical moments in their own lives, kanaeokana members were invited to share experiences to help envision the desired state of the hawaiian education system. the palapala ʻōnaehana hoʻonaʻauao hawaiʻi is a living document that declares essential components figure 12: gathering manaʻo for palapala ʻōnaehana hoʻonaʻauao during ʻaha kūkā, february 2020 of the hawaiian education system envisioned by kanaeokana. examples include: 1.2 the hawaiian education system will require a land base as a means to enable ʻāina-based education, connecting people to land and land to people. 2.3 ‘ōlelo hawaiʻi is a critical liberating force that provides a common belief system to foster social, political, and economic change and development. 3.5 kānaka (hawaiian people) have the right to teach and learn our moʻomeheu (culture) on our own cultural terms as a crucial part of our cultural legacy. this kanaeokana declaration is nested within the context of a larger worldwide movement of indigenous education in communities in which some kanaeokana members have played significant roles. in turn, this movement has shaped the landscape that has enabled kanaeokana to take form. foundational documents of this indigenous education movement have inspired the palapala ʻōnaehana hoʻonaʻauao hawaiʻi and include the kari-oca declaration (1992), the coolangatta statement (1999), and the united nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples (2015). these declarations and statements assert vital rights, freedoms, and entitlements that uphold human dignity for indigenous http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/15jayplagxpfjy0xwe9khdks77yq5pvhu/view?usp=sharing https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/valve_newemployeehandbook.pdf https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qwlok6o7g7tamfi4zbaektpkhwe78dmkrmxawn_atli/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qwlok6o7g7tamfi4zbaektpkhwe78dmkrmxawn_atli/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yd0tip_mheygxdercjzjieopfk0vslrp7l_xg1n8gwe/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yd0tip_mheygxdercjzjieopfk0vslrp7l_xg1n8gwe/edit?usp=sharing https://www.cwis.org/wp-content/uploads/documents/kari-oca.txt http://ankn.uaf.edu/iks/cool.html https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/drips_en.pdf https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/drips_en.pdf https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/drips_en.pdf global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 populations, providing the context for kanaeokana’s own declaration in support of native hawaiian people and places. palapala hoʻoulu aloha ‘āina work on the palapala hoʻoulu aloha ʻāina began in 2018 in response to reflection questions posed to the kanaeokana network: how will we know we are on track to creating aloha ʻāina leaders? what are the key characteristics of an aloha ʻāina leader? what are the critical elements to develop aloha ʻāina leaders, and what role does your organization play in that work? a small working group of cultural practitioners, educators, and historians convened in october 2018 to tackle these questions, eventually formulating an aloha ʻāina leader “growth cycle,” also known as aloha ʻāina impact indicators. the group referenced traditional moʻolelo about hawaiian leaders such as ʻumi-a-liloa, a chief known for his haʻahaʻa (humility), as well as “na kulana o ko ke kanaka ola ana” (stages of becoming a healthy person), which was printed in the nūpepa (newspaper) ka lanakila in september 1909. these sources informed the working group’s understanding of the developmental journey toward becoming an aloha ʻāina leader. the kōmike hoʻokele shared the palapala hoʻoulu aloha ʻāina during the april 2021 ʻaha kūkā, proposing five dimensions of an aloha ʻāina leader: ʻāina, ‘ōlelo hawaiʻi, lololo (intelligent, deep thinking), moʻomeheu (culture), and kuleana. an aloha ʻāina leader progresses along four stages of growth, reminiscent of a plant growth cycle: kupu (sprout), lau (leaf), liko (bud), and lehua (flower). the palapala hoʻoulu aloha ʻāina is a resource for kanaeokana members and their institutions to use as they see fit. table 1 provides an excerpt of this growth cycle for the ʻāina dimension. as an example of organizations using the stages of growth for their purposes, a group of kumu from hawaiian-focused charter schools and ʻāina-based partners utilized the palapala hoʻoulu aloha ʻāina as a reference document and kahua for their creation of ʻāina learning competencies for preschool to grade 12 students (keehne et al., 2021). thus, by building common language and shared understanding, the kanaeokana handbook, table 1: example of the stages of growth for developing aloha ʻāina leaders http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.ulukau.org/elib/cgi-bin/library?e=d-0chiefs-000sec--11haw-50-20-frameset-book--1-010escapewin&a=d&d=d0.3&toc=0 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j2epq4pd9kbkerjdyughocov90fd1ygkizxpetoshti/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j2epq4pd9kbkerjdyughocov90fd1ygkizxpetoshti/edit?usp=sharing https://kahua-site.web.app/ https://kahua-site.web.app/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 palapala ʻōnaehana hoʻonaʻauao, and palapala hoʻoulu aloha ʻāina have propelled kanaeokana’s overall efforts to develop a hawaiian education system and grow aloha ʻāina leaders. adaptation and evolution given kanaeokana’s long-term vision and commitment to evolving community needs, network sustainability is an ongoing concern. kanaeokana, like other networks, has a “chain of impact” that includes the network’s impact on its members, the members’ impacts on based on the literature, kanaeokana is functioning in the “performance and adaptation” stage of development (network impact and center for evaluation innovation, 2014). this means that the network is fully operational with members involved in key activities, that goals and strategies are in the process of refinement, and that there is evidence of influencing and supporting positive changes for native hawaiian communities at individual, organizational, and systemic levels. possible next avenues for kanaeokana include growing and expanding the education focus to apply more directly to building capacity and creating the conditions necessary to transform the local economy, as shown in the ʻāina aloha economic futures action agenda, which envisions hawaiʻi’s post-pandemic economic recovery being rooted in the identity and culture of hawaiʻi. linked to kanaeokana’s goal to grow aloha ʻāina leaders, the ʻāina aloha economic futures document outlines essential leadership qualities to build a healthier, more cohesive, and sustainable hawaiʻi guided by ʻōiwi insights, innovation, and community values (ʻāina aloha economic futures, 2020). another way kanaeokana may evolve is to position the network as an agent of change. this would mean strengthening kanaeokana’s capacity, visibility, and reputation for innovation in hawaiian education and aloha ʻāina leadership. with a robust and supportive following on social media, kanaeokana is poised to influence and amplify transformative results of individual network members, member organizations, and the community at large. what does it feel like, on the ground, to follow kanaeokana’s chain of impact from individuals to organizations and to the broader native hawaiian community? we witness signs of an evolving network in the ways kanaeokana has connected individual members, who then create joint projects together, which in turn raise the prominence of hawaiian culture and language across communities in hawaiʻi and beyond. also, we notice how kanaeokana members bring elements of the network’s vision, mission, and strategic goals into their own institutions, sparking new dialogue and action within hawaiian places of learning. at the time of this writing, long-standing kanaeokana members serving on kōmike hoʻokele are deliberating key questions such as, “what role might documents such as the palapala ʻōnaehana hoʻonaʻauao hawaiʻi play in member organizations?” and “to what extent can member organizations be held accountable for upholding the affirmations in kanaeokana’s foundational documents?” we are seeing instances where members’ organizations are serving as hīpuʻu of the nae—strong knots within the netting—and are becoming hubs of offshoot networks, supporting other collaborative partners outside of kanaeokana while uplifting the lāhui through educational activities, collaborations, and community engagement that prioritizes aloha ʻāina, ʻōlelo hawaiʻi, and ʻike hawaiʻi. as witnessed by members of kōmike hālau ʻōiwi during a september 2018 ʻāina engagement trip to hāmākua, hawaiʻi island, haumāna from kanaeokana member organization hui mālama i ke ala ʻūlili (huimau) recounted moʻolelo and shared oli they wrote about their ʻāina and the chief ʻumi-a-liloa, reflected in vibrant murals erected on the ʻāina of their kula, paʻaulilo http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.ainaalohafutures.com/action-agenda https://www.ainaalohafutures.com/action-agenda http://www.alaulili.com/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 elementary and intermediate school (see figure 13). figure 13: haumāna from paʻaulio elementary and intermediate school with huimau and kōmike hālau ʻōiwi, september 2018 as a result of their learning, these haumāna prompted their kula to adopt native hawaiian protocols as a part of their school’s morning routine to mimic the protocols they learned as a part of their afterschool program led by the nonprofit organization based in their community. this is just the beginning of the kind of transformation that can occur when ʻāina-based organizations strengthen their relationships in their community and become hīpuʻu of nae, developing new relationships to the ʻāina and one another through hawaiian culture-based education. in this manner, individual members of kanaeokana carry the torch to effect change within their own local networks. at the other end of the spectrum, kanaeokana organizations have helped to effect change at a large scale, standing shoulder to shoulder with one another and alongside the broader community in an unprecedented expression of cultural continuity and asserted sovereignty: the effort to protect maunakea and ensure its cultural and environmental integrity. at issue was whether the thirty-meter telescope project would be built near the summit of maunakea, the tallest mountain in the hawaiian archipelago situated on the largest island of hawaiʻi. this mauna (mountain) is seen by many throughout the community as one of, if not the single most sacred ‘āina in hawaiʻi. with the summit’s light atmosphere far above the cloud line and its remote location many miles from any source of evening lighting, maunakea is also considered by many astronomers to be the best place on the planet to site a telescope. the tmt project is supported by multinational corporations and universities in the united states, canada, japan, china, and india. if built, it would tower 18 stories high, intrude two more stories into the ‘āina, and engulf five acres of surface area. the tmt also would sit within a protected conservation and historic preservation area on an island where zoning laws prohibit structures higher than seven stories. the land it would occupy is part of some 1.8 million acres illegally seized from the hawaiian kingdom government and queen liliʻuokalani in 1893 by us interests in a us militarysupported overthrow of the hawaiian kingdom—a nation whose sovereignty was recognized by the united states through formal diplomatic relations and multiple treaties dating back to 1843. the overlapping sectors of society standing unified in protection of the mauna (mountain) include native hawaiians, environmentalists, and those who support the need for government and the judicial system to act in the best interest of ‘āina and the populace rather than the interest of influential corporations. many members of kanaeokana have played key roles in the struggle to protect maunakea. although we, as authors, have not been involved in the front lines to the degree that many of our colleagues have been, kanaeokana has had the honor to assist in protecting the mauna by creating and disseminating educational and advocacy videos and social media posts, giving voice http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.kahea.org/issues/sacred-summits https://www.mkea.info/ https://www.mkea.info/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 and bearing witness to the events on the mauna. for example, in july 2019, kanaeokana members overwhelmingly affirmed the decision to ramp up kanaeokana advocacy and media efforts around maunakea. as evidence of kanaeokana’s community and cultural credibility, the network contributed to major shifts in public opinion’s via its prominent social media presence, advocacy efforts, broadcasting of pivotal events on maunakea, fact-checking and thought pieces, activism art, and amplification of the voices of kiaʻi (guardians)—kūpuna, mākua, and ʻōpio. for example, from november 2015 to september 2019, support for tmt plummeted among native hawaiians and the general statewide public (blair, 2019; dayton, 2019; “how has the state,” 2019; hurley, 2018; kanaeokana, 2019b; simmons, 2015). this shift occurred while the tmt and its corporate supporters were investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into a media campaign to grow support for the project. the slick ads turned out to be no match for coordinated community voices, including kanaeokana, a handful of native hawaiian curated social media platforms, and over 500,000 followers that together reached millions in hawaiʻi and beyond with each of their coordinated posts (abad & gonzalez, 2020). the mark of a healthy network includes the ability to adapt and evolve in response to the needs of members and communities the network serves. the kanaeokana network has been fortunate to play a part in supporting social movements like the effort to project maunakea, which directly impact cultural preservation and community wellbeing. in spring 2020, the covid-19 pandemic presented challenges across our communities. we saw the urgent need to pivot, partner, and develop a platform to connect communities, families, and global classrooms through cultural content in both english and ʻōlelo hawaiʻi. kanaeokana utilized available technologies and skills of network members to create virtual spaces including webinars, online learning resources, performances, and forums. the goals of these virtual spaces are to uplift hawaiian culture, language, and knowledge, to nurture education within families and communities, and to connect people around the world. lei ānuenue and ʻai kole are examples of engaging webinars that families came to rely on during the isolation and uncertainty triggered by the coronavirus. early in the pandemic, we initiated cultural programming five times a week. we were consistent in starting programs at the same time and on designated days. after one month, there was demand—and network capacity—to broadcast two additional programs, featuring content and discussions in ʻōlelo hawaiʻi. these virtual spaces created a community for ʻohana to engage regularly with others and to explore hawaiian culture and language in new ways. the hosts of the webinars found engaging and culturally grounded ways to connect with live participants through chat discussions, always inviting the community to honor the ʻāina they were connecting from. figure 14: ‘ai kole episode hosted by ekela kaniaupio-crozier, featuring mānaleo ipo wong and kahea faria http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://kanaeokana.net/lei https://kanaeokana.net/kole https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qdbqnenvrc2_gx3z7gkrfektwkmpdfpklowaljslnie/edit?usp=sharing global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 cultural practitioners, musicians, artists, mānaleo (native speakers), educators, and others were passionate about sharing stories and lessons through creative educational programming such as mele, oli, art, cooking, exercise, hula, and more (see figure 14). regardless of the subject matter, all of the webinars demonstrated ancestral connection to the ʻāina and encouraged the virtual community to explore these cultural connections in their remote locations. technology has been key in supporting these virtual educational experiences and connecting with our growing global community—which includes more than a half million followers on facebook and instagram. one of the additional technologies kanaeokana and partners are further utilizing is duolingo, a free app that provides bitesized lessons, personalized learning, immediate feedback, and fun ways to learn ʻōlelo hawaiʻi at your own pace. currently, 585,000 learners worldwide are on the app and learning the indigenous language of hawaiʻi. the partnership that kanaeokana and its backbone organization, kamehameha schools, have forged with duolingo has led to ‘ōlelo hawai’i being the first indigenous language to be offered on the duolingo platform, a result of kanaeokana creating each of the lessons involved. as kanaeokana continues to grow, the needs of our community also continue to grow. as a network, we prioritize flexibility and adaptation to address new challenges. this was evidenced at the april 2021 ʻaha kūkā, where we pivoted from the kōmike hoʻokō model to a new project-focused approach. this adaptation was based on observations by the kōmike hoʻokele and survey data, which showed that only 16 percent of kanaeokana members rated themselves as extremely or very active in the network, while one-quarter indicated they were not at all active (kanaeokana, 2019a). this new process allows members to explore new tools, work through a simplified process to enliven new project possibilities to collaborate with one another, and move from ideation to implementation. this new project emphasis includes four main steps: (1) self-assess, (2) share idea, (3) interact with idea, and (4) decide (see figure 15). the evolution from a committee approach to a project-based approach is a recent operational shift to increase member engagement and allow anyone in the network to pitch ideas, offer help, and actualize success collectively. at the time of this writing, we continue to explore this projectfocused approach with our network members and are encouraged by the number and quality of new projects proposed for the coming years. challenges and lessons learned despite the cohesion and collective strength inherent within the network, kanaeokana also has faced challenges and occasional counterproductivity. network survey respondents noted that a subset of kanaeokana members carry the work of the network (kanaeokana, 2019a). this finding suggests the need to involve more members in the projects and also reveals the danger of burnout for those who are more consistently active than other members in leading and figure out how to do so” (kanaeokana, 2019a). questions arise as we seek solutions for improving engagement and communication: how can we use technology tools to communicate and work efficiently and productively? how can we put out the kāhea (call) and conduct more targeted outreach for those who might need more support to engage with kanaeokana? how can we boost awareness about projects and get people energized about contributing to the work? for now, our new project-based approach (described above) is intended to http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.facebook.com/kanaeokana/ https://www.instagram.com/kanaeokana/?hl=en https://www.duolingo.com/course/hw/en/learn-hawaiian global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 figure 15: project process flow chart address this issue. if other models emerge, the network will continue its commitment to being flexible, adaptive, and transparent in how we progress together. although the professional pilina that existed before the creation of kanaeokana were sources of strength, some relationships were nuanced and brought potential discord to the network. for example, in the early phase of the network, competition between some of the organizations colored interactions between network members. however, through kanaeokana’s shared goals and work, interagency competition has transformed into collaboration. respondents from 2019 kanaeokana member interviews stated: “kanaeokana is rebuilding relationships that may have been lost or where there have been divisions. this has come about through consistent convening and kōmike work. it is the shared work that builds bonds. kanaeokana brought us together” (kanaeokana, 2019d). a third challenge was balancing the dynamics of a diverse group of professionals who are known for their strength of conviction and influence. on occasion, deference to the loudest and most powerful leo (voices) in the room has resulted in a disparity of who gets heard and whose manaʻo gets attention. the diversity of kanaeokana means that organizational membership spans large colleges and universities and small neighborhood-based nonprofits. individual membership includes both poʻokumu and their former haumāna. to mitigate challenges associated with power imbalances, kanaeokana ʻaha kūkā have included http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 activities such as small-group work, processing and post-it feedback sessions, and polling where each member is given an opportunity to vote. influenced by the stages of network development across the five years, the repositioning of activities and relationships entails adaptation for both the network itself and the members within it. the kanaeokana network, though unique, seems to follow stages of development that are typical for network formation (network impact and center for evaluation innovation, 2014). over the initial five years, network leaders and members have modified methods and expectations as the network has evolved. we take this as a sign that the network is healthy and is willing to change and adapt based on the shared goals of developing a hawaiian education system and growing aloha ʻāina leaders. concluding comments we are humbled to be a part of this special issue and hope that our reflections on kanaeokana contribute to expanding knowledge and practice through intercultural dialogue and illuminating what “repowering” (rua et al., 2020) looks like in our native hawaiian educational contexts. the innovative strategies espoused by kanaeokana demonstrate how the intentional formation and development of a network with a focus on network health and effectiveness can help the network achieve its goals. in our case, a healthy network is a recent example of long-standing efforts to uplift indigenous cultural values and practices, to uplift a native hawaiian education system, and to uplift generations of aloha ʻāina leaders. kanaeokana’s approach to network development is unique in part because of the network’s responsiveness to the needs of communities within a context of the emerging importance of native hawaiian and indigenous cultural, educational, and social values. kanaeokana actively embodies and broadcasts to others the past, present, and promising waiwai of native hawaiian language, culture, and culture-based education. with implications for the field of community psychology, kanaeokana offers a blueprint for designing and implementing coalitional structures, relationships, and processes toward social change goals. in this paper, we have offered reflections on the past five years of forming a kula hawaiʻi network, from its origins and naming to its infrastructure and foundational documents, a sampling of initial successes, signs of adaptation and evolution, as well as challenges and lessons learned. to advance work regarding the development of networks, we invite community psychologists, practitioners, educators, and researchers to investigate factors that sustain network health in the long term, as networks naturally adapt and evolve over time. particular attention should be paid to collaboratives that seek to decolonize oppressive social arrangements and elevate indigenous and other marginalized voices. further exploration into how networks act as agents of systems change would also benefit work such as kanaeokana’s, as the network matures and increases efforts related to media and communications, advocacy, educational resources, and educational policy. kanaeokana’s approach is inherently collaborative and participatory, since it relies heavily on network members coming together to share talents, resources, ideas, and energies. as a result of this synergy, tangible achievements for members and communities are attained: knowledge is created and disseminated, decolonizing learning spaces—both virtual and placebased—are built and utilized, and new connections are forged personally and professionally across ka pae ʻāina hawaiʻi http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 and the world. aspirationally, we look to rua et al. (2020) as an example for kanaeokana; in their case: “the network within which we are immersed functions as a kind of insurgent movement for knowledge production and action in which we all contribute a piece of the puzzle of how to ensure healthy lives for māori” (p. 22). as a network rooted in native hawaiian values and practices, kanaeokana aspires to continue fostering cultural knowledge with a community focus and a global reach. as we reflect on five years of kanaeokana, we humbly recognize the many successes the network has observed since 2016: • new relationships have been built, and long-standing pilina have been strengthened among network members. • the network continues to survive and thrive during the pandemic. • network leadership has been stable. • the network has grown from 28 to more than 80 kula and ʻāina-based organizations. • six new webinar series, with 153 episodes, have broadcasted to a global audience. • the waihona digital repository was created and now hosts 839 digital resources for 1,308 users representing 141 organizations. • the network has been a significant contributor to such initiatives as the ʻāina aloha economic futures, mahina ʻōlelo hawaiʻi, and hawaiian history month. • we have over 545,000 followers on social media. we attribute these achievements to the hardworking kanaeokana members and backbone support, who, like kana, have stretched their capacities, hearts, and imaginations to envision a hawaiian education system nurturing generations of aloha ʻāina leaders. as we continue to add new hīpuʻu to our nae, we seek to maintain the existing hīpuʻu to forge strong relationships between each other and, most importantly, with the ʻāina, whom we sustain and who sustains us. mahalo we acknowledge the many hands that contributed to this work and the voices of network members we are privileged to represent. notably, mahalo nui to ekela kaniaupio-crozier and hōkūlani holt, our 2020 international conference of community psychology co-presenters whose manaʻo are interwoven with ours in this article. we also extend our heartfelt gratitude to matthew corry for his gracious and skillful editing and to kēhau abad for artfully ensuring clarity and impact. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=34s9aimgzoy&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=34s9aimgzoy&feature=youtu.be https://www.ainaalohafutures.com/ https://www.ainaalohafutures.com/ https://www.mahinaolelohawaii.org/ https://www.mahinaolelohawaii.org/ https://www.hawaiiponoi.info/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 references abad, k., & gonzalez, r. 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(2022). what is a coalition? a systematic review of coalitions in community psychology. journal of community & applied social psychology, 32, 3-18. https://doi.org/10.1002/casp.2554 lawlor, j. a., & neal, z. p. (2016). networked community change: understanding community systems change through the lens of social network analysis. american journal of community psychology, 57(34), 426–436. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12052 marek, l. i., brock, d. p., & savla, j. (2015). evaluating collaboration for effectiveness: conceptualization and measurement. american journal of evaluation, 36, 67– 85. https://doi.org/10.1177/109821401453 1068 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 27 mcgregor, d. p., aluli, n. e., & alegado, r. ʻa. (2020). lessons from aloha ʻāina activism: visioning and planning for our islands and communities in the wake of covid19. in goodyear-kaʻōpua, n., howes, c., osorio, j. k. k., & yamashiro, a. (eds.), the value of hawaiʻi 3: hulihia, the turning (pp. 210–217). honolulu, hi: university of hawaiʻi press. na kulana o ko ke kanaka ola ana (1909, september 23). ka lanakila, 1(11). nāwahīokalaniʻōpuʻu, i. h. (1895, june 8). o ke aloha i ka aina. ke aloha aina, 1(3), 4. network impact and center for evaluation innovation (2014, july). framing paper: the state of network evaluation. network impact and center for evaluation innovation. http://www.networkimpact.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/09/networkeval guidept1_framingpaper.pdf pukui, m. k. (1983). ʻōlelo noʻeau: hawaiian proverbs and poetical sayings. honolulu, hi: bishop museum press. rua, m., groot, s., hodgetts, d., nikora, l. w., masters-awatere, b., king, p., karapu, r., & robertson, n. (2020). decoloniality in being māori and community psychologists: advancing an evolving and culturally situated approach. unpublished manuscript. simmons, t. (2015, november 10). poll: half of native hawaiians still oppose building the tmt. civil beat. https://www.civilbeat.org/2015/11/poll -half-of-native-hawaiians-still-opposebuildingthe-tmt/ souza, k., & walk, k. k. (2015). ‘ōlelo hawai‘i and native hawaiian education. in mackenzie, m. k., serrano, s. k., & sproat, d. k. (eds.), native hawaiian law: a treatise (pp. 1256–1307). honolulu, hi: kamehameha publishing. trask, h.-k. (1999). from a native daughter: colonialism and sovereignty in hawaiʻi (revised ed.). honolulu, hi: university of hawaiʻi press. younis, m. (2017, december). evaluating coalitions and networks: frameworks, needs, and opportunities. center for evaluation innovation. https://www.evaluationinnovation.org/ wpcontent/uploads/2017/12/evaluatingcoalitions-and-networks.pdf hua ʻōlelo (glossary) ʻaha kūkā plenary meeting/session ʻahuʻula feather cloak ahupuaʻa land division extending from the uplands to the sea ʻāina land; that which feeds alakaʻi leader ala nuʻukia mission aloha ʻāina love for the land; patriotism, patriot ʻano character, disposition, nature haʻawina lessons http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.evaluationinnovation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/evaluating-coalitions-and-networks.pdf https://www.evaluationinnovation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/evaluating-coalitions-and-networks.pdf https://www.evaluationinnovation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/evaluating-coalitions-and-networks.pdf https://www.evaluationinnovation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/evaluating-coalitions-and-networks.pdf global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 28 hālau ʻōiwi native schools and name of kōmike that is committed to engaging ʻohana and community members through programs that are beyond the traditional school hours hālauololo name of kana’s canoe house that housed his waʻa; name of kōmike focused on securing funding to forward the collective efforts of the network hana action, work hau hibiscus tiliaceus haumana student he alo a he alo face to face hīpuʻu knot hoʻolōkahi to bring about unity hoʻokuluma to normalize hui group ʻike hawaiʻi hawaiian knowledge ʻike kupuna ancestral wisdom kaʻa ʻike communication kahua foundation kana a powerful kupua, or supernatural being kanaeokana the net of kana ka pae ʻāina hawaiʻi the hawaiian archipelago kiaʻi protectors, guardians kōmike committee kōmike hoʻokele steering committee kōmike hoʻokō working group kūkulu to build kula school kūlana position kuleana responsibility, duty kumu teacher kupu sprout http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 29 kupua supernatural being kūpuna elders; ancestors lāʻau plants lāhui people, race; nation lau leaf lehua flower leo voice liko bud lololo intelligent, deep-thinking ma kai toward or from the sea mānaleo native speakers manaʻo idea, thought ma uka toward or from the uplands mauna mountain mele song, anthem, poetry momona rich, fertile moʻolelo story, history moʻolelo moʻokūauhau genealogy story moʻomeheu culture, cultural nae net, netting nuʻukia vision ʻohana family; extended family ʻōlelo hawaiʻi hawaiian language oli chant olonā touchardia latifolia ʻōpio youth pahu hopu strategic goals pilina relationship, connection http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 30 poʻokumu principal ulu lāʻau hawaiian forest ʻuo feather bundle wahi pana storied place waihona repository waiwai value, wealth, importance http://www.gjcpp.org/ digital storytelling and the narrative turn in psychology: creating spaces for collective empowerment alexios brailas keywords: narrative inquiry; peer-to-peer learning; digital storytelling; community practice; comics; group work; empowerment; resilience; bullying author biography: alexios brailas, phd currently works at the department of psychology, panteion university of social and political sciences, where he teaches courses on qualitative research methods, systems thinking and practice, and psychology of social media. he is also adjunct faculty at the hellenic open university and at the european university cyprus. alexios is a group work practitioner; organizing and facilitating group workshops and interventions with students and the community. his approach to research is participatory, designbased, and practice-focused. research interests include, among others: personal and group development, empowerment and resilience in complex techno-social systems; rhizomatic learning, experiential learning, learning communities, reflective practice and peer-to-peer learning networks; evidence-based group work and community interventions; community digital storytelling; action research and community-based participatory research. alexios is a licensed psychologist and a certified group psychotherapist (european association for psychotherapy) and adult educator. recommended citation: brailas, a. (2021). digital storytelling and the narrative turn in psychology: creating spaces for collective empowerment. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(4), 1 19. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: alexios brailas, department of psychology, panteion university of social and political sciences, athens, greece. website: https://abrailas.github.io email: abrailas@panteion.gr http://gjcpp.org/ https://abrailas.github.ioe/ mailto:abrailas@panteion.gr global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 digital storytelling and the narrative turn in psychology: creating spaces for collective empowerment abstract in this article, we propose a model that combines digital storytelling with narrative practice to create a facilitated peer-to-peer experiential learning space for collective empowerment. this model was inspired by an educational intervention that utilized participatory digital comic strip making to raise students’ awareness of bullying and its consequences. the makerspace involved allows for the creation of digital artifacts representing participants’ personal narratives. narrative practice is grounded in the idea that there are no problematic people but rather not effective narratives about how people are supposed to act. making digital stories, getting constructive peers feedback, and then releasing more polyphonic and adaptive sequel versions is proposed here as an effective way to raise participants’ awareness and help them integrate different points of view, as well as enrich their narratives on critical social phenomena. a significant advantage of the digital storytelling genre employed is that the digital artifacts produced have a concrete material presence: they can be shared, performed, or modified. participants, with the help of their peers, participate in a group process facilitated by their teacher, aiming to locate and change problematic elements in their stories, and by doing so they materialize and consolidate the improvement in their personal narratives. introduction in recent years creative research methods that utilize multimodal artifacts are used more and more in educational research and practice (mannay, 2015). the inclusion of non-verbal modalities in a community project allows participants to access and communicate their lived experiences in a radically new way (brailas, 2020b; vakali & brailas, 2018). a digital story is any multimodal digital artifact that can be experienced offline or online and serves a specific aim, communicates a message, tells a story, by utilizing more than one modality (brailas, 2017; kress, 2010; tham, 2015). digital stories can take the form of a cloud document, video, comic book, presentation, blog, or any other possible digital format. today, digital stories can be produced easily by anyone without the need for special technical skills by using a plethora of software tools or web services. modern teens constantly interact with digital tools and participate in the social reality around them by producing diy (do it yourself) story-artifacts (brailas & tsekeris, 2014). such stories are experienced online or faceto-face while influencing participants' lives in both their physical and digital realities (tzanavaris et al., 2021). in this article, we treat digital storytelling, the process of developing and sharing digital stories with a real or an imagined audience, as an intermediate between the representational and the performative end (brailas, 2020b). people interact with their digital creations during their development as well as during their distribution and sharing, either synchronously or asynchronously. by doing so, storytellers create formal or informal spaces of collaborative learning. participants contribute to an emerging transformative practice, through iterative cycles of reciprocal determination: “we act in the world, and the world acts on us, to and for, in a dynamic process i call the ‘dance of agency’, in which all the partners http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 are unpredictably and emergently transformed.” (pickering, 2017, p. 136) in this paper, we propose a coherent model for educational interventions that combines digital storytelling with narrative practice to create facilitated peer-to-peer spaces for collaborative learning and collective empowerment. this model was developed based on an educational intervention in which digital storytelling, in the form of creating comic strips, provided a group of students with the opportunity to explore and reauthor dysfunctional elements of their bullying narratives. narrative practice promotes the idea that there are no problematic people but rather dysfunctional personal constructions, or cognitive schemata, about how people are supposed to act in specific situations (dickerson, 2016; ricks et al., 2014; white, 2007). cultural narratives have impact on people and determine their social behavior (denzin, 2001). personal narratives matter: “these narratives possess the capacity to inhibit an individual’s growth and happiness or can empower and enable wellbeing and contentment” (casares & gladding, 2019, p. 3). the task of a narrative practitioner in a group of participants is to explore the dominant stories (casares & gladding, 2019) and unearth the neglected narratives that influence human behavior, consciously or unconsciously (lessard et al., 2018). the digital storytelling makerspace described in this article allows for the creation of self-exploratory digital artifacts that represent personal narratives and uncover the group dynamics. digital storytelling can be utilized to access, externalize and share personal narratives: “group brainstorming and discussion of story topics can raise previously unacknowledged situations and behaviors to the surface and provide a forum for open exploration, discourse, and hopefully clarification of appropriate behaviors and actions” (sawyer & willis, 2011, p. 276). especially when the environment is appreciative, “the relating of personal stories to interested listeners … can provide the foundation for the development of resilience” (east et al., 2010, p. 23). digital storytelling in educational interventions supports young people’s ability to reflect on their lives, learn from their peers, focus on the positive aspects, and identify best working scenarios for their lives (de vecchi et al., 2016). narrative inquiry and digital media in education narrative inquiry and digital storytelling can play a critical role in creating educational spaces for peer support, connection, and encouragement. storytelling offers opportunities for students to recreate the narratives by which they live. stories provide individuals “the power to see possibilities by telling variations of a story about themselves and their lives, opening the possibility to live by these alternative narratives” (staley, 2018, p. 24), therefore, creating alternative futures and more appreciative spaces to live in. as mcadam and lang (2003) point out, “we see language not only as describing but as creating and doing… the language we use creates our worlds. language has the power to move us to laughter, to bring us to tears, to lead us to feel with others in their lives.” (p. 49) digital storytelling can provide a safe collaborative space to discuss issues of identity and positionality, to address stigmatized topics, and to listen to marginalized voices (gachago & livingston, 2020; guse et al., 2013; matthews & sunderland, 2017). group storytelling enables participants to interrogate and address prior trauma, support each other, and re-author stigmatizing conversations (gubrium et al., 2019). stories bear the potential to convey critical messages and effectively communicate different perspectives. stories can “evoke feelings, create empathy, trigger tears, and arouse rage. they provide frameworks for finding meaning in lives and the world. and they can help shape beliefs and actions that are http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 inclusive and supporting or exclusive and destructive.” (glesne & pugach, 2018, p. 31) digital storytelling has been widely used in educational settings to explore bullying narratives. digital storytelling can inform students about bullying and help them grasp the difficult emotions that bullied students experience (fokides, 2016, 2017). in a research project by thompson (2014) students who engaged in collaborative digital storytelling demonstrated a notable increase in their levels of empathy toward the bullied as well as toward the bullies and the bystanders. in another research study, digital storytelling was used to situate students in specific bullying scenarios and make explicit to them the cognitive and emotional patterns involved (tsai et al., 2011). digital storytelling can be used as a creative counseling and therapeutic tool to positively influence the behavior of children and adolescents (sawyer & willis, 2011). collaboratively authoring digital stories at school can create an engaging and rewarding environment where teachers can organize specific tasks and students feel that they are in charge of the learning process (blas et al., 2010). digital storytelling can also be used to address health inequities by using technology to unearth the voices of vulnerable groups and underrepresented communities, and by helping participants to reflect on their difficult experiences and seek support (briant et al., 2016). glesne and pugach (2018) systematically asked their students, undergraduates in teacher education courses, to share stories and listen to the stories of others. their narrative and social constructionist practice focused on students sharing autobiographical stories with pairs of different cultural-historical backgrounds, for example asking white students to work with black, latino, hmong, or native american students. this allowed for the difference that makes the difference in bateson’s words; students were able to enrich their perspectives and become more polyphonic in their own narratives: “these story-featuring learning opportunities were designed specifically to create empathy and disrupt students’ (often negative or stereotypical) views” (p. 35). the diverse modalities employed in digital storytelling offer simultaneous access to multiple levels of cognitive processing (informational, emotional, or cultural) (alonso et al., 2013). collective spaces for narrative practice help participants enrich their personal stories by acknowledging and integrating multiple perspectives: “narrative techniques created a sense of empathy and understanding among our students for individuals and communities with differing life circumstances. students made personal connections to and grew curious about and interested in people, cultures, or situations” (glesne & pugach, 2018, p. 37). creating facilitated peer-to-peer learning spaces for collective empowerment many terms have been used before to describe a systemic, networked apprehension of learning: bottom-up pedagogy, rhizomatic learning, peer-to-peer learning, communities of practice, learning organizations, connectivism (brailas, koskinas, et al., 2017; brailas, 2020b). all these terms represent a new understanding of learning as an emergent group phenomenon. this is a perspective that locates learning not only in each and every individual, but (as well) in their collective power: what the group as a whole is able to perform and achieve. toward this direction, dave cormier (2008) coined the term rhizomatic learning to describe a peer-topeer learning ecology, being inspired by the seminal work of deleuze and guattari, and in a global context of exponential growth of the social networking sites. deleuze and guattari (1987) defined the rhizome as an acentric multiplicity, something that “has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 between things, interbeing, intermezzo. proceeding from the middle, through the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing” (p. 25). this conception of the philosophical rhizome shares common characteristics with the botanical original and resembles to the organizational principle of the internet as a network of networks with no central hub needed for its operation. the learning rhizome is a wonderful metaphor to realize the dynamic nature of a peer-to-peer space for collective empowerment. in this view, learning can be defined as “the process of extending, nurturing, cultivating, and catalyzing the development of a living network, consisting of knowledgeable agents, both human and artificial, and material objects/resources.” (brailas, 2020b, p. 310). these material objects/resources can take the form of digital stories in a storytelling project. as digital bricoleurs (sherman & briggs, 2020), participants can utilize the resources available in their networks to enhance their narratives. but this is not a matter of mere summing resources and actors. this is about creating a space of dense group interactions and meaningful synergies that add extra value by processing and integrating the different perspectives of the participants. as michael bakhtin argues, “you can see things behind my back that i cannot see, and i can see things behind your back that are denied to your vision … although we are in the same event, that event is different for each of us.” (page 22). in every synergy, in every interaction between two actors, there are three entities: actor one, actor two, and their relation adding extra value. capra and luisi (2014) point out that the network pattern is the very fundamental pattern of life. but the network as a dynamic process not as a static structure. that is what makes rhizome (both the botanical original and the philosophical one) a wonderful metaphor for learning: rhizomes are always in the becoming, always developing toward every possible direction in a nomadic way. in this context, learners can be understood as nomads traversing their personal learning networks in their own ways in the context of a community of co-learners, and, by doing so, they co-create wonderful and unique peer-to-peer collectives (brailas, 2020b). in rhizomatic education, the primary role of the educator is not to share her wisdom as in the sage on the stage archetype, but rather to catalyze and facilitate the development of the peer learning network, a coherent learning group, an acentric multiplicity with emergent properties. as a guide in the side (king, 1993) teacher will indirectly drive learning toward collective empowerment: “the rhizome creates the background, the contextual validity, and the situated meaning for individual actions ... by developing learning rhizomes, selforganizing confluences of human and nonhuman in the becoming, we participate in anotropic performative dances which help us unfold our full living potential.” (brailas, 2020b, p. 313) the teacher as facilitator in a peer-to-peer learning process for collective empowerment has the duty to develop a space where the participants will be able to co-create “alternative connections, new networks of thinking, and new patterns of relating with each other, and with other available human nodes or non-human learning resources … the rhizome as a whole becomes the teaching apparatus, a multiplier of perspectives, and an amplifier of synergies.” (brailas, 2020b, p. 310) the comics to stop bullying project the comics to stop bullying project was a focused school intervention, a makerspace for co-creating digital stories, aiming to raise students’ awareness of bullying and its consequences. the project took place in a public high school in athens, greece, during february 2016. the intervention was designed and implemented by the author, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 who was at that time in charge of the school's bullying prevention program. twenty-one students participated in the project that lasted for two months. by using digital comic strip production tools, students were able to communicate their stories effectively through a sequence of images supplemented with text bubbles. comic strips are inherently multimodal, combining narrative and visual elements, and can serve as a provocative research instrument to engender deep reflection among participants (leblank & irwin, 2018). many digital comic strip production tools are available online, allowing anyone to create professional-looking products without the need to be graphic artists themselves. these applications allow users to set the comic strip background by selecting predefined patterns, to drag and drop characters onto the backgrounds, and to add text bubbles (brailas, 2017). in this particular intervention, students utilized storyboardthat (http://storyboardthat.com), a freemium online comic strip creation platform with a simple-to-use interface and a short learning curve. an open-source alternative tool recently developed is comiggen library (https://gramener.com/comicgen). comicgen was used to create the example comic-strip stories (under cc0 licenses) used in this article to demonstrate the narrative re-authoring practice (in figures 2 and 3). when possible, we suggest educators utilize open-source tools and open-licensed materials to avoid copyright infringements, and to contribute to the educational commons and the democratization of educational systems (pechtelidis & kioupkiolis, 2020). students were placed in small groups to create a six-cell digital comic strip story about bullying, based on their own experiences, thoughts, and feelings (figure 1). a project blog was used as a hub to aggregate the students’ comic strip artifacts and make these available to the entire group out of the classroom. the comic strip artifacts provided the author with an opportunity to understand students' representations of bullying and to identify potential problematic elements in their narratives. many of the students' stories reproduced stereotypes and dominant narratives related to bullying. the first versions of the digital comics then served as triggers to initiate whole group discussion of the situations depicted in each small group’s story. the researcher helped the whole group to focus on the weaknesses and strengths of each story, and make suggestions for changes and/or additions, creating a facilitated peer-to-peer learning environment. then the student groups were invited to re-design 'sequel' stories: improved and more functional versions of their first comic strips based on the feedback they got from their peers. the intervention concluded with a presentation of the final artifacts produced to the whole group. after the intervention, polytextual thematic analysis (gleeson, 2011; silver, 2013) was used to investigate the students’ initial and sequel comic strip stories and identify themes within these narratives about bullying. central themes that emerged across the two versions of the stories were: the fragile bully, the automatic teacher reactions (e.g., expelling from class), the different other as a trigger for bullying, the safety net that friends offer, and the critical role that social media play in bullying. in the initial stories, more dominant were the patterns of the lonely victim, the lonely bully, the only watching bystander, the only punishing teacher. in the sequel stories, the patterns that more often emerged were family and community involvement, emotional empathy, friends offering help, and managing reconciliation. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 figure 1. six double-versioned comics were created by the students during this intervention. each version consisted of a six-cell comic strip. the comics provided a multimodal way to explore and reauthor problematic narratives. using the case study to develop a model in the present study, we adopted a qualitative case study approach combined with narrative inquiry. the qualitative case study “facilitates exploration of a phenomenon within its context” (baxter & jack, 2008, p. 544). the aim of our exploration was not merely to document the intervention, but rather “to use empirical data to gain insight into some broader set of social phenomena than those provided by the data themselves” (livesey & runeson, 2018, p. 43). the ultimate aim was to build a concise theoretical model based on that particular case that would inform future practice, as “research that produces nothing, but books will not suffice” (lewin, 1946, p. 35). although a situated rich description of an educational intervention provides invaluable insights into a social situation, it cannot be verified or falsified out of its context. however, theoretical models that emerge from such interventions can be tested and subjected to further rigorous investigation in the future. in the present study, the process involved narrative inquiry by gathering data from the participants’ digital storytelling artifacts. as leavy (2015) argues, “narrative inquiry or the narrative method attempts to collaboratively access participants’ life experiences and engage in a process of storying and re-storying in order to reveal multidimensional meanings and present an authentic and compelling rendering of the data” (p. 47). in the next sections, based on our experience of the comics to stop bullying project, we will attempt to combine digital storytelling with narrative practice into a coherent theoretical model for use in educational and/or community interventions. empowering and life-promoting narratives α personal narrative regarding a specific problematic situation should be regarded as functional in the broader sense when that narrative can help the individual and the community prevent or overcome the problematic situation. the relative literature on bullying indicates many critical factors for effective prevention like peer-support for victims, encouraging helpseeking, social-emotional learning and training for both teachers and students, intensive social skills training, dedicated school meetings and training for parents, highlighting the importance of the bystanders' behavior, informing and engaging the families, holding regular http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 classroom meetings on the topic, seeking for the help of mental health workers, and fostering a family-school-community empowering alliance (albrecht, 2021; bradshaw, 2015; farrington & ttofi, 2009; lester et al., 2017; olweus & limber, 2010; villarejo-carballido et al., 2019). school interventions seem to be more effective and efficiently, and can change the school culture “when they include the entire school, when they use a social skills promotion model, when they include peer education, when they favour student participation and initiative, when they use interactive and participated methodologies, and when they last several years” (tomé et al., 2021, p. 21). the proverb goes as “it takes a village to raise a child”. based on the existing literature we can suggest that it takes a whole community to prevent bullying. figure 2. a typical scenario of an initial comic-strip version representing a dysfunctional bullying narrative. the voices of the actors involved do not acknowledge different points of view, neither show empathy for others’ feelings. for an example of a dysfunctional bullying narrative, as depicted in a digital story, consider the comic strip in figure 2. in this hypothetical scenario, the feelings of the people involved are not shared or acknowledged. the story is presented as an automatic and inescapable sequence of events: bullying incident, followed by reporting the incident, and punishing the bully. students are presented as living in a void, without a supporting network such as family, friends, or the school community. no empathetic dialogue and sharing of feelings take place between the students, or between the students and the teacher. the punishment from the authority figure comes as an automatic response to the incident, without explaining the rationale behind and without trying to explore and understand the bully’s context and cognitive schemata that led him to bully his classmate. no care is taken to emotionally support the victim, the bully, and the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 figure 3. a typical scenario of a revised comic-strip version representing a more functional narrative. bystander, and there is no action taken to avoid recurring of problematic behavior. a more functional digital story that helps prevent bullying should include cooperation between families, teachers, and the school community (limper, 2000) as the one presented in figure 3. in this version of the story, there is a greater concern expressed to understand the special circumstances and the feelings of all the parties involved. a determination to call the whole school community to be part of the solution. the participants in the story demonstrate increased empathy. modeling the process: a step-by-step guide for educational interventions, “we don’t know what we mean until we see what we say” (blachowicz, 1998, p. 356). step 1: tell a story through a digital artifact the theoretical model illustrated in figure 4 follows the narrative turn in psychotherapy, which focuses on the idea that as people go through their lives they internalize and hold dominant stories and beliefs about the social phenomena around them (carlson, 1997; staley & freeman, 2017). these stories are influenced by personal experiences as well as by social stereotypes and dominant public discourses. a primary goal of the proposed model is to help students externalize their personal narratives about a social phenomenon with the facilitation of a projective medium, such as digital storytelling. in this way, students’ stories “can provide insights into their backgrounds and experiences, giving a greater understanding of them in context” (east et al., 2010, p. 2018). visual enhanced methods can facilitate access to meanings, emotions, experiences, and stories that are not easily communicated otherwise (kearney & hyle, 2004; silver, 2013). digital storytelling has the potential to make alternative knowledge more visible and actionable (thompson long & hall, 2018). by externalizing their stories, people http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 become free to explore alternatives and to reauthor their narratives in a more empowering way (white, 1993). in the particular case discussed above, students were encouraged to work in small groups of two to four members and create a multimodal comic strip story about bullying. step 2: how could the story be improved? the second phase of the proposed model begins with a teacher-facilitated peer-topeer discussion, in which each group’s comic strip is shared and discussed with the whole group in a storytelling circle. students are invited “to reflect on their dominant stories and to begin to consider alternative narratives regarding their perceived deficits, problems, and challenges” (casares & gladding, 2019, p. 6). maladaptive points, dysfunctional narratives, and not well-working scenarios are identified and get feedback from the whole group, with the help of the teacher when needed as a guide in the side of the group. positive points, themes of resilience and empowerment, and best working practices are identified and acknowledged as well. the facilitator should invest in an appreciative culture that empowers members to express their thoughts in a constructive way (brailas, koskinas, et al., 2017; mcadam & lang, 2009). the aim is for the large group to provide a safe and supportive environment that facilitates meaningful communication (beltran & begun, 2014; polychroni et al., 2008). such a context allows for deeper meaningful involvement in each story. the large group provides feedback to the small groups on the strengths and/or weaknesses of each story and possible ways to improve the initial versions. and this feedback does not originate from an authority figure, but it comes from the peers’ network in a bottomup ecology of learning. in this way, the comic strip stories become “constructed objects which foster dialogue and discussion. fellow participants serve as critics to one another and provide valuable guidance as the story takes shape, acting as an in vitro audience” (freidus & hlubinka, 2002, p. 1). figure 4. digital storytelling, community feedback, and reauthoring to enrich personal narratives: a facilitated peer-to-peer learning makerspace for collective empowerment. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 step 3: tell a new version of the story following the whole group discussion, students are instructed to reauthor the original stories to produce more adaptive versions, materializing the group feedback as sequel versions of the initial stories. a major advantage of the digital storytelling genre is that digital artifacts have a concrete material presence; they can be viewed, reviewed, shared face-to-face or online, performed and re-performed, modified, tinkered, tweaked, and fine-tuned. by locating specific problematic elements in their narratives, students can change specific points in the corresponding digital artifacts and quickly release new and more adaptive versions, or even create many alternative versions, compare them, and put them in a constructive dialogue. coconstructing preferred versions of life in this way could have positive effects on building personal resilience and empowering communities (dickerson, 2016; mcadam & lang, 2009). discussion through writing, sharing, and rewriting comic strip stories, students were provided with the opportunity to better realize the complex and multifaceted nature of bullying-related behaviors. multimodal and embodied methods help make the complexity of lived experience more visible and tangible (cahill et al., 2016). according to fernandez & lina, “generating comic strips… can reveal dysfunctional cognitions that can consequently be addressed” (p. 1). stories have the potential to “reveal the differences and similarities between people’s experiences” (east et al., 2010, p. 17). de vecchi et al. (2016) reported that: “watching digital stories made by others and discussing them in a group supported young people to understand their experience of excessive alcohol consumption” (p. 190). however, reauthoring and enriching narratives has the potential to go beyond mere understanding, to be a transformative process, for the fact that “it is through our own narratives that we principally construct a version of ourselves in the world, and it is through its narrative that a culture provides models of identity and agency to its members” (bruner, 1996, p. xiv). this is about the enactment of a culturally responsive pedagogy that emphasizes critical knowledge production for a more inclusive learning environment (rana & culbreath, 2019). cultural meanings and socially constructed identities “can both support problems or help a person stand up to problems” (stillman, 2016, p. 94). by changing our narratives, we change the world around us. facilitated group discussions provide additional insight into participants’ narratives allowing for local knowledge to emerge (lichty et al., 2019). through the group informed rewriting process, the digital stories can be enriched with new elements and support more empowering personal narratives, with the potential to build networks of resilience: “elucidating personal stories involves sharing which can help form bonds and supportive networks. with reflection, these can help to develop resilience” (east et al., 2010, p. 17). by sharing stories and empowering narratives, we can establish a more democratic classroom culture; a transformative community practice that promotes the development of autonomous human beings (brailas, avani, et al., 2017). an autonomy attained through and for interdependence (vassiliou & vassiliou, 1982). stories can create empowering and appreciative communities of inquiry: “these [narrative] strategies helped to build respect among participants, relationships, and sometimes, long-lasting friendships. by sharing their stories and the stories of others, students came to appreciate and value each other.” (glesne & pugach, 2018, p. 37) in the above context, the combination of digital storytelling, narrative inquiry, and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 facilitated peer-to-peer learning becomes a method that does not just represent the world; it carries the potential to transform and re-construct it in a performative way (clark, 2017). conclusion the main contribution of the present study is that it combines digital storytelling and experiential learning and peer-to-peer facilitated group work and narrative/reflective practice to create a virtual makerspace of possibilities for personal growth and collective empowerment. while none of these practices mentioned is new, the combination of them seems to be quite powerful and promising. digital storytelling is a form of learning by doing, learning by creating digital artifacts with a concrete material presence. these story artifacts represent personal narratives and the process of enhancing and enriching those personal narratives can be translated into a concrete tinkering process, the process of improving digital stories and releasing sequel versions. sharing the stories in a group is a critical, humanizing, process: “sharing is not only an ethical or economic mandate, but a condition built into the structure of human perception, and thus a condition inherent in the very fact of being human.” (holquist, 2002, p. 34) the facilitated peer-to-peer interaction that follows offers a rich set of different perspectives and constructive feedback from the peers to be incorporated into the new story versions. in the virtual mirror that is created through the sharing of all the group stories, each participant can recognize her own unspoken voices and hidden narratives. this is “the tale of how i get myself from the other... in order to forge a self, i must do so from outside.” (holquist, 2002, p. 28) in other words, we co-author ourselves through the stories of our communities. but the main advantage of the group process is not just the informational and cognitive surplus that will enrich the stories and the personal narratives. it is through the peer-to-peer interactions that participants establish meaningful relationships among them, and it is through this process that they practice how to relate and connect with other human beings, and how to create personal humanizing networks. and this skill and attitude and mentality lies at the core of helping prevent bullying and empower a community: nurturing the ability to relate and connect with different human beings instead of isolating, scapegoating, and attacking. this interpersonal work is a prerequisite for promoting social-emotional learning and raising empathy (brailas, 2020a; goleman & senge, 2014). as hessler and lambert (2017) point out, “storytellers recognize one another as peers as they move through a shared creative struggle and culminating experience. the collaborative environment not only allows for the stories’ communicative power to be considered and improved, but for a deeper level of communion to take place.” (hessler & lambert, 2017, pp. 26–27) for practical advice on how to facilitate enriching peerto-peer group work, by moving gradually from the individual to the whole-group level, see also: (brailas et al., 2016; brailas, koskinas, et al., 2017). concluding this article, it is essential to highlight some of the limitations of this study. the proposed model for educational interventions combining digital storytelling, experiential learning, peer group work, and narrative inquiry was developed based on a one-time intervention with a small number of participants. there was no experimental design, and no pre and post measurement of participants’ perceptions regarding bullying, to ensure that there was indeed a positive shift in their personal narratives regarding bullying. therefore, this study lacks the ability to generalize. however, we need to emphasize that a positivist reductionist approach to research is not necessarily concerned with the creative application of a community practice to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 address the social challenges of the participants (agner, 2021; dafermos, 2018). the work presented here is a qualitative case study: a rigorous exploration of a phenomenon in context, aiming to develop a theoretical model (baxter & jack, 2008) to inform community practice. the effectiveness of this model in quantitative terms needs to be supported by further research. notwithstanding these limitations, this paper makes a significant contribution by proposing a concise model for educational or/and community interventions that combines digital storytelling, narrative inquiry, and facilitated peer-to-peer work to create a space for collective empowerment. for participants to question implicit personal or social narratives, they need to be engaged in a collective inquiry led by facilitators who adopt an evocative, appreciative, and performative pedagogy in order to “engage children with alternative and subaltern identifications to create an expansive pedagogy in which each child can seek to find a place in the world and to imagine their lives otherwise.” (o’loughlin, 2016, pp. 19–20) facilitated group feedback provides the context for new, more adaptive, personal narratives to emerge. digital storytelling as a tinkering group process empowers participants to realize alternative, more polyphonic, ways of acting, thinking, and relating with each other. participants create their digital stories, share them and get feedback, and then rewrite the stories more constructively, thus taking the first steps toward internalizing more positive narratives and more confident interactions with the world outside themselves. in this direction, storytelling and peer-to-peer work in the context of an appreciative community of inquiry becomes an emancipatory practice, a form of social activism. references agner, j. 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(2007). maps of narrative practice (1st ed). w.w. norton & co . http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.12681/homvir.19070 https://doi.org/10.12681/homvir.19070 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-9239-6_15 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-9239-6_15 https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16060918 https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16060918 subverting whiteness: a systems theoretical approach to anti-racist praxis charles r. collins1 and erin watson2 keywords: white privilege, systems approach, subverting white dominance, intervention author biography: charlie r. collins is an associate professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the university of washington bothell. he received his ph.d. in community psychology from the ecological-community psychology program at michigan state university in 2013. his research on racial and economic inequality is largely informed by his personal history growing up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in one of the poorest cities in california – san bernardino. his work examines ways communities undermine psychologies, cultures, and systems of racism and oppression. dr. collins’ work with white identified anti-racist activists examines how participation in the movement undermines their adherence to whiteness and white supremacist ideologies. erin watson is the owner of weaving change, an evaluation and consulting cooperative focused on helping groups to promote systemic equity through community engagement. she received her ph.d. in community psychology from michigan state university. her work centers on how organizations and communities can use systems thinking and participatory action learning to design, implement, and evaluate transformative change efforts aimed at promoting equitable outcomes for children and families. her systems change frameworks have been adopted by communities, coalitions, funders, and government agencies around the world. 1 school of interdisciplinary arts and sciences, university of washington bothell 2 weaving change global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 recommended citation: collins, c. r., & watson, e. (2021). subverting whiteness: a systems theoretical approach to anti-racist praxis. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(3), 1-27. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: charles r. collins, school of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at box 358530, 18115 campus way ne bothell, wa 98011-8246. email: crcolli3@uw.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:crcolli3@uw.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 subverting whiteness: a systems theoretical approach to anti-racist praxis abstract whiteness as a is a socio-political identity characterized by expectations, conscious and/or unconscious, of power and privileges that are granted to individuals or groups conferred into a white racial classification. this identity was born out of historic conditions (e.g. laws, policies, and practices) that gave rise to a racial hierarchy in the u.s., granting social, political, and economic privileges to people considered “white” and created the expectation that these advantages should continue. this hierarchy and related structural advantages persist today. to subvert whiteness, activists, educators, and scholars created white privilege (and other related) interventions seeking to illuminate the power inherent in whiteness. however, these psychologically focused (implicit bias) interventions frequently fail to alter the systemic conditions that perpetuate and reinforce white privilege and bipoc oppression. to address this issue, we provide a framework that takes a systems approach to subverting white dominance. bringing together critical whiteness and systems change theories, we provide readers with a framework designed to alter systems’ and settings’ relationship to whiteness. specifically, we detail how interventions may be successful in altering white dominated spaces by (1) defining local patterns of racial privilege/oppression and the system conditions reinforcing them; (2) designing interventions to disrupt and realign these system conditions to promote equity; (3) implementing interventions in ways that uphold justice; and (4) redefining patterns of privilege/oppression and system conditions to learn if efforts are starting to make a difference. we conclude by providing recommendations to change agents, stakeholders, and researchers. introduction "there's a man, african american, he has a bicycle helmet. he is recording me and threatening me and my dog… please send the cops immediately!" (vera, 2020). on may 25th, 2020 these words were spoken during a 911 call by a white woman named amy cooper in central park, new york city. this call occurred following an interaction between ms. cooper and a black man, christian cooper (no relation), who asked ms. cooper to leash her dog. in late june of 2020 william beasley, a white man, repeatedly blocked a mexican american man, michael brajas, with his suv from entering the parking area of his apartment complex, assuming brajas was trespassing. beasley repeatedly threatened physical violence and called the police on brajas (edmonds, 2020). ironically, beasley was driving a car with an out of state license plate, making it more likely that he was trespassing, and not barajas. a couple years prior to these incidents, alison ettel, a white woman, questioned an eight-year-old black girl for selling bottles of water on the street without a permit. once the girl’s aunt intervened, ettel called the police to report the child (campisi, et. al., 2018). videos of these racialized incidents went viral, spreading across mainstream and social media like wildfire. for each of these videos, however, there are innumerable incidents of white people using their whiteness to gain power over people of color. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 viral incidents like these have sparked a collective awareness regarding the power inherent in whiteness, and underscore the systems of domination “white people” have operated under in the united states (u.s.) for centuries – the use of whiteness as a weapon to threaten and gain power over certain people, particularly black, indigenous, and people of color (bipoc; horne, 2020; quijano, 2000, 2016). these incidents highlight the racial biases that lead many white people to perceive the most innocuous behaviors of bipoc as threatening. to address unconscious racial biases within their ranks, institutions and communities across the u.s. have implemented white privilege, implicit bias, diversity, and other trainings: “anti-bias and cultural competency educators, consultants, workshops, and trainings [are] worth close to $8 billion. diversity training is currently mandated at most fortune 500 companies and about half of all midsize firms in the united states. in addition, nearly two-thirds of colleges and universities use diversity trainings, and about 30 percent require their faculty to attend them. and, of course, in the wake of racerelated public relations disasters, it’s now standard practice for corporations to conduct nationwide company sensitivity trainings…” (pan, 2020) while popular, these trainings often fail to improve racial disparities because they are not designed to shift the underlying systems that serve to reinforce the outcomes of whiteness ([carmichael] ture & hamilton, 1992; baldwin, 1984; bell, 2004; bonillasilva, 2006; delgado & stefancic, 2017; harris, 1993; hooks, 1989; lopez, 1997; roediger, 1999). citing the general ineffectiveness to alter material racial disparities, critics argue the real purpose of these trainings is to help institutions avoid public scrutiny and litigation, not to address systemic racial disparities (newkirk, 2019; pan, 2020). to address this issue, we propose a systems praxis framework that attends to multiple systemic conditions – including psychological mindsets and structurally racist goals, decision-making processes, regulations, connections, and resources – that contribute to racial disparities and reinforce white domination. this paper first provides a background on the concept of whiteness, then reviews the literature on the strengths and problems of psychological praxis and white privilege pedagogy, and then describes a systems praxis framework that can be used to inform anti-racist research and action. we write this paper as two white identified community psychologists, scholars, practitioners, and activists who take an action research approach to working on issues of structural inequality. our purpose is not to re-center our own identities, but to illuminate what we believe is an underlying cause of inequities white racial domination. our purpose is also to address an issue we see in many anti-racist efforts, namely the lack of specification to transform system conditions that reinforce white domination, the positioning of white institutional leaders instead of bipoc as drivers of local change efforts, and the lack of attention to learning and (humble) adaptation to anti-racist interventions. this model was developed to help promote a “community psychology for liberation...through the deconstruction of racialized coloniality as it intertwines with systems of power that maintain the structures of whiteness” (dutta, 2016; fernández, 2018, p. 296; montero, 1994, 2009; reyes cruz, 2008; seedat & suffla, 2017; serrano-garcía, 1984; sonn, 2004, 2016). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 whiteness whiteness is the psychological and cultural manifestation of white supremacy and has resulted in a configuration of mindsets, values, beliefs, and practices that uphold white domination of a racial hierarchy (harris, 1993; hughey, 2010; roediger, 2001, 2006). whiteness is a socio-political identity reinforced by expectations, conscious and/or unconscious, of power and privileges granted to individuals or groups conferred into a white racial classification (applebaum, 2016; barrett & roediger, 2002; brodkin, 1998; guglielmo & salerno, 2012; helms, 1990; leonardo, 2004; roediger, 1999; vecoli, 1995). in the u.s., the power and privileges bestowed upon “white people'' was created through european (white) settler colonialism, which violently stole african bodies and indigenous land and resources to expand colonial rulers’ wealth (adams, dobles, gómez, kurtiş, & molina, 2015; david & okazaki, 2006; green, sonn, & matsebula, 2007; maldonado-torres, 2006, 2017; sonn, 2004, 2016; sonn & fisher, 2003; tuck & yang, 2012). the genocide, enslavement, and erasure of indigenous and african people was justified by white colonial settlers through a race-based hierarchy that labeled “white people” as superior and indigenous and african peoples as “savages” and less than human (fanon, 2007; harris, 1993; veracini, 2011). through “the biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora and fauna … the use of particularized modes of control prisons, ghettos, minoritizing, schooling, policing” (tuck & yang, 2012, pp. 4-5), white settlers managed to subjugate or erase entire populations of indigenous and african peoples (phillips & lowery, 2018). whiteness is characterized by several psychological, behavioral, and emotional processes which are mutually reinforcing, operate largely unknown to white people, and can generate conflicting dualities. first, whiteness is characterized by a general ignorance or “historical amnesia” (fernández, 2018, p. 294) regarding the history of violence perpetrated by white people to establish racial dominance and the resultant contemporary racial disparities of that violence (bonam, nair das, coleman, & salter, 2019; mills, 2007; nelson, adams, & salter, 2013). through this ignorance, white people often adopt a “colorblind” worldview that permits them to ignore vast racial disparities, and even support racist policies in good conscience (bonilla-silva, 2006). evidence contrary to a race-neutral/raceequal society is subsequently explained by a “bootstraps” and individualistic narrative that minimizes systems of white privilege and equites racial disparities to the work ethic of individuals (alexander, 2012; coleman, collins, & bonam, in press; feagin, 2013). second, whiteness is reproduced by presumptions of white normality such that white ideals, bodies, behaviors, and cultures serve as the natural order and should be (over)represented in society (hughey, 2010; schneider & ingram, 2005). these beliefs are bolstered by the lack of racially diverse representation in entertainment, politics, and business, for example (andrews, 2016). these presumptions are also reinforced by systems that place “white people in dominant positions and grants white people unfair privileges, while rendering these positions and privileges invisible to white people” (green et al., 2007, p. 390). finally, whiteness is characterized by an emotional fragility that results in the inability for many white people to confront their own history, creation, and support for racist systems (diangelo, 2018). in their fragility, white people may engage in a series of emotional defensive moves, including rage, sadness, and aggression, that distance themselves from racial tension, which allows them to escape from the potential cognitive dissonance that may come from even the most mundane racial topics. paired with the power held by white people, this fragility can result in extremely negative http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 consequences for the targets of such emotion. given the history of white settler colonialism and the structure of white racial domination, we contend, like others, that whiteness lies at the core of racism (applebaum, 2016; baldwin, 1984; brodkin, 1998; feagin, 2020; feagin & hernan, 2000; harris, 1993; ignatiev, 1994; rogin, 1996; thandeka, 1999; wise, 2011). many race scholars illuminated the historic policies, practices, and institutions that brought about the construction of whiteness as a racial identity and the privileges gained through groups’ inclusion in it. for example, harris (1993) investigated u.s. court cases which permitted “white people” to acquire and own “property” in the forms of black bodies and indigenous land. walsh (2018) revealed the ways racially discriminatory tax policies created a u.s. public school system that granted massive benefits to white children at the expense of black children and their communities. roediger (1999) outlined how the u.s. labor movement effectively reinforced racial stereotypes and pitted white workers against black workers. throughout the entire history of the u.s. as a european colonized settlement, the benefits of being accepted into whiteness could literally mean life and death (lipsitz, 2006). because of this, extensive work outlines the ways different ethnic groups such as the irish (ignatiev, 1994), jewish (brodkin, 1998), and italians (guglielmo & salerno, 2012; vecoli, 1995) were granted entry into whiteness and gained access to its benefits (barrett & roediger, 2002; lopez, 1997; roediger, 2006). as the above examples illustrate, whiteness creates (and is reinforced by) systems and institutions that manufacture privileges for white people. mcintosh (2001) demarcated white privileges as a metaphorical “invisible knapsack” that gives white people “special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks” (p. 95) to navigate life. because the privileges associated with whiteness go largely unseen by white people, it can be difficult, if not impossible, for its occupants to be aware of them. a growing industry is working to increase this awareness and subvert the implicit psychological biases inherent in whiteness. activists and scholars developed white privilege, implicit bias, and other trainings to undermine the culture and psychology of whiteness by raising the awareness of white people’s blind spots. below, we review the features, functions, and results of such programs. psychological praxis to address growing racial inequities, activists and academics have recently intensified their efforts to subvert racial biases inherent in whiteness. organizations such as “the people’s institute for survival and beyond” and “race forward” create and conduct antibias and anti-racism trainings for individuals and organizations across the u.s.; activists and academics wrote handbooks to support anti-racist practitioners (e.g. katz, 2003; singh, 2019); and educators created and implemented critical whiteness pedagogies for teacher preparation programs (matias, 2016; matias & mackey, 2016). the purpose of this work is to shift setting members’ (e.g. employees, organization staff, teachers, etc.) awareness of their own white privilege and implicit racial biases, and the potential harm created by these mindsets, to alter their own behaviors and relationships with whiteness and racially unjust systems (kalinoski et al., 2013). generally, this work aims to build individuals’ cognitive-based knowledge about issues of white privilege, skills to intervene in a biased situation, and willingness to take action against biased behaviors (bezrukova, spell, perry, & jehn, 2016; celik, abma, klinge, & widdershoven, 2012; kalinoski et al., 2013; kraiger, ford, & salas, 1993; matias, 2016; matias & mackey, 2016). a central http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 assumption within this work is that “white privilege is the primary driving force behind ongoing racial injustice, and that such privilege operates mostly unconsciously”, and as such the primary goal is to make individuals consciously aware of these privileges (pierce, 2016, p. 509). white privilege pedagogy and anti-bias trainings vary significantly in their form, function, intensity, and timing. in some cases, trainings may take the form of two-hour long “orientations” that brief participants on the do’s and don’ts of racial biases. in others, learners attend more intense training sessions that include participatory exercises, dialogues, and reflections and may occur over a long weekend, week, or even over several months. organizations such as race forward developed interventions that span across the spectrum – from sessions where attendants participate for a few hours, to multiphase trainings where learners attend multiple sessions across several months. consistent with the transfer of training literature (blume, ford, baldwin, & huang, 2010), implementation can also be affected by factors such as the race of the trainer, training environment, and organizational culture (hill & augoustinos, 2001; mathieu & martineau, 1997). although implicit bias-type trainings and white privilege pedagogy are becoming nearly ubiquitous in u.s. organizations and institutions, research on their effectiveness show only small to moderate effects, with results often decaying over time (bezrukova et al., 2016; kalinoski et al., 2013). these proximal results are more likely to remain stable if paired with larger organizational/system interventions (bezrukova et al., 2016). while research indicates anti-bias trainings may alter individuals’ attitudes, they often do little to shift long-term behavior. for example, a recent evaluation of an anti-bias training program with new york police department (nypd) officers showed that although the training shifted officers’ attitudes about the importance of understanding their own bias, it did not significantly reduce racial/ethnic disparities in enforcement actions such as stops, frisks, searches, arrests, summonses, and uses of force (worden et al., 2020). however, the study also suggested that when paired with other system organizational and institutional changes such as monitoring and intervention by superiors, racially biased incidents may be reduced. results such as these indicate even when a learner’s motivation to account for their own racial biases is high, the ability to implement training in a way that alters behavior may be difficult. this again highlights the need for anti-racist praxis to attend to both the psychological and systemic conditions contributing to racial equity. unfortunately, as mentioned above, few white privilege pedagogies and anti-bias trainings directly focus on altering racist organizational/institutional goals, decisionmaking, policies, and practices (noon, 2018). without this focus, anti-racist interventions are insufficient to create sustainable shifts in the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors inherent in whiteness (bezrukova et al., 2016; worden et al., 2020). indeed, critical race scholars have made this point clear. critical race theory argues that while attending to individual level processes (i.e. psychology, behavior, and emotion) is necessary to subvert white racial domination, it is insufficient because whiteness and white privileges will continue to be reinforced by current racist system structures (bell, 1980; [carmichael] ture & hamilton, 1992; desmond & emirbayer, 2009; feagin, 2013; feagin & elias, 2013; feagin & hernan, 2000; kendi, 2017; leonardo, 2004). thus, even if white people increase their critical consciousness of racism and go so far as to “disavow” their whiteness in anti-racist solidarity, they will never be able to escape the conveyer belt of white privileges that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 keeps whiteness firmly in place without also transforming racist systems (roediger, 2001). as leonardo (2004, p. 148) noted, “privilege is the daily cognate of structural domination. without securing the latter, the former is not activated” (emphasis ours). thus, to dismantle whiteness, the systems that perpetuate white racial domination and privilege must also be altered. below, we describe a systemic praxis process that can be used to promote more racially equitable systems and disrupt the cycle of whiteness. systemic praxis a system is often defined as a set of interacting parts that function as a whole (ackoff & rovin, 2003; maani & cavana, 2007). system parts can represent most anything, from tangible elements like individuals, buildings, and money to intangible elements like mindsets, goals, decision-making processes, and policies (meadows, 2008). systems can take on many forms such as a neighborhood, organization, service delivery system, or nation (fosterfishman, nowell, & yang, 2007). the boundaries around a given system are socially constructed and can encapsulate any configuration of actors, settings, and organizations across ecological layers (bronfenbrenner, 1977, 1979; midgley, 2000). systems can also be nested, such as a department within a larger organization (stroh, 2015). most importantly, the configuration of a system’s interacting parts will either bring about outcomes of racial equity or perpetuate white racial domination. as kendi (2019) notes, there is no such thing as an equity neutral system. systems change involves transforming the form and function of a targeted system to bring about desired outcomes (e.g., racial equity; foster-fishman et al., 2007). because of the interdependencies between system parts across ecological layers, systems change often occurs in nonlinear and unpredictable ways (stroh, 2015) and profound changes can emerge from the accumulation of seemingly small actions that have the power to trigger cascading ripple effects throughout the system (e.g. “the butterfly effect;” eoyang & holladay, 2013; patton, 2008). some system parts and interactions have more power to serve as leverage points for system-wide change than others (meadows, 1999) and effective change efforts strategically target a wide array of these leverage points across multiple levels of the system (authors, under review). systemic anti-racist praxis is an iterative problem-solving process where stakeholders understand and transform systems reinforcing white domination and bipoc oppression. this system transformation serves as a necessary step to ultimately dismantle the paradigm of whiteness. systemic anti-racist praxis includes the following phases: (1) defining the ways in which system parts and interactions across ecological layers reinforce patterns of racial inequity; (2) designing interventions to disrupt and realign system conditions to promote racial equity; (3) implementing interventions in ways that uphold justice; and (4) redefining the ways in which targeted system parts and interactions are starting to change and ultimately bring about patterns of racial equity (see figure 1). while this paper focuses on racial inequity, the praxis process can be applied to inequities at the intersections of numerous other social identity categories such as gender, class, sexuality, geography, age, disability/ability, migration status, and religion (hankivsky, 2014). it should be noted that systemic antiracist praxis is a problem-solving process, not a change process; the latter requires additional elements such as ongoing communication and change management (kotter, 2007). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 figure 1. process of anti-racist systems praxis a central tenet of the model is that it positions bipoc stakeholders as the drivers of all four phases, as this ensures bipoc have influence over decisions affecting their lives (fraser, 2009; watts, williams, & jagers, 2003; wolff et al., 2017), improves learning and strategy design by grounding the change efforts in the experiences of the people most affected by racially inequitable systems (ford & airhihenbuwa, 2010; freire, 1973; white, adams, & heywood, 2009), and promotes transformation by expanding the range of actions taken across the system (blanchet garneau, browne, & varcoe, 2018). in contrast, white stakeholders who often dominate decision-making and action processes take on more supportive roles, such as putting sufficient staff in place to convene and organize bipoc, building local resident leadership capacity, and providing necessary supports to ensure marginalized stakeholders can fully engage in the process (e.g., compensation for residents’ time, childcare, transportation, peer networks, etc.; barnes & schmitz, 2016; stark, 2020). systemic anti-racist praxis was developed in response to the growing recognition that most change efforts have failed to improve racial disparities because they continue to use problem-solving processes that are illequipped to navigate the intersection of complex systems and equity (came & griffith, 2018; hogan, rowley, white, & faustin, 2018; rutter et al., 2017). the model represents an integration of research and scholarship on systemic racism (bonilla-silva, 2001; delgado & stefancic, 2017; elias & feagin, 2020; camara phyllis jones, 2000; kendi, 2019) (bell, 2008), systems change (foster-fishman & watson, 2017; meadows, 2008) powell, cagampang, & bundalli, 2011; stroh, 2015), and implementation science (chinman, woodward, curran, & hausmann, 2017; purnell et al., 2016; woodward, matthieu, uchendu, rogal, & kirchner, 2019). it also draws on approaches such as intervention mapping (eldredge et al., 2016), developmental evaluation (patton, 2008), and participatory action research (fosterfishman & watson, 2010; r. g. jones, trivedi, & ayanian, 2010) people’s knowledge editorial collective, 2016). the following sections describe the systemic anti-racist praxis process. phase 1: define system inequities the first systemic praxis phase includes defining local population-level outcome disparities to prioritize for change, local patterns of white privilege and bipoc oppression contributing to these disparities, and the multi-level systemic root causes for why these patterns of privilege and oppression are happening. each of these activities is described below. define targeted outcome disparities. this activity involves using local disaggregated trend data to understand what populationlevel outcomes (e.g., infant mortality rates, high school graduation, homelessness, etc.) are showing the greatest racial/ethnic disparities over time within a given place (e.g., neighborhood, community, region, etc.), (re)define patterns of white privilege/bipoc oppression design interventions to disrupt status quo implement interventions to uphold justice http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 and which of these disparities should be prioritized for action (policylink, 2018). this place-based approach grounds the change efforts in outcomes affecting people in a particular context, making it easier to understand and address multi-level (e.g., from local to global) system determinants of those outcomes (beer, mckenzie, blažek, sotarauta, & ayres, 2020). residents most affected by local disparities can drive this process by making sense of local disaggregated data (including helping to gather necessary data if not already available) and selecting priorities. for example, an initiative in providence, rhode island (united states) engaged community leaders and residents from two focus neighborhoods to discuss disaggregated survey data on local students’ academic success and identify shared priorities; the initiative then adopted these priorities as its targeted outcomes (barnes & schmitz, 2016). this approach requires a shared commitment among institutional leaders to empower bipoc, especially in cases where residents' priorities conflict with those of the historical power brokers (iton, 2016). once outcome disparities have been prioritized, bipoc residents can work with institutional leaders and service providers to define which actors, settings, and organizations across multiple ecological layers (e.g., community, region, state, nation, etc.) are most relevant to include within the boundaries of their “targeted system” (foster-fishman et al., 2007). these boundary decisions are some of the most important in a change effort as they guide all subsequent praxis phases and determine who can be engaged, where change can happen, and who can benefit (midgley, 2000). it is crucial to promote decision-making processes that ensure marginalized actors, settings, and organizations are not unjustly excluded from these boundaries (foster-fishman et al., 2007). see midgley (2000) for example engagement processes. define relevant patterns of privilege and oppression. this activity involves identifying local patterns of white privilege and bipoc oppression occurring within the targeted system that are contributing to prioritized outcome disparities. these patterns of privilege and oppression are then used to guide and focus the root cause analysis process in the final define phase activity. community psychologists have used the concept of social justice to describe privilege and oppression (evans, rosen, kesten, & moore, 2014; prilleltensky, 2012; torresharding, siers, & olson, 2012; watts et al., 2003). unfortunately, the concept continues to lack clarity within the field and often excludes key sources of injustice (coleman et al., in press; gokani & walsh, 2017). to address this gap, foster-fishman, watson, standley, & meeks (under review) developed an integrated social justice framework that brings together the following domains of injustice from fraser (2009) and sen (2001): distribution of material goods, wealth, and opportunities; recognition as full and equal members of society; representation and power within decision-making processes; and the capability to utilize available resources and opportunities to meet one’s needs and desires. table 1 provides examples of each domain; see foster-fishman et al. (under review) for more details. table 2 provides a list of prompts adapted from eoyang and holladay (2013) and checkland and scholes (1990) to help identify patterns of white privilege and bipoc oppression in the community. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 table 1 domains of white privilege and bipoc oppression domain examples distribution the allocation of material goods, wealth, and opportunities across groups (fraser, 2009). related to the social determinants of health (solar & irwin, 2010). bipoc are less likely than white people to have: • inherited wealth (feagin and elias, 2014; lipsitz 2016) • quality housing (rose & ky-nam miller, 2016; williams & collins, 2001) • livable wage employment (hanleybrown, iyer, kirschenbaum, medrano, & mihaly, 2020) • high-quality educational opportunities (davis, 2016) • healthcare (feagin and bennefield, 2014). recognition the extent to which individuals are acknowledged as full and equal members of society (fraser, 2009). related to status dimension of justice. bipoc are more likely than white people to experience: • negative stereotypes and expectations related to academic achievement, employment, parenting, crime, etc. (kirwin institute, 2016; mckown, 2013). • limited benefit from programs, policies, and environments designed to exclusively fit the needs or assets of white people (feagin, 2014; gershoff, mistry, & crosby, 2013). • marginalized, invisible, and/or dependent roles or status such as entry level positions (davis, 2016), incarceration (poe-yamagata, & jones, 2000), school suspension (gilliam 2005), in-voluntary hospitalization (davies et al., 1996); and denial of a business loan applications (davis et al., 2016). representation the extent to which individuals from different groups have voice, influence, and power (fraser, 2009). bipoc are more likely than white people to: • be denied voting power (underhill, 2019; williams, 2019). • lack influence over institutional decision-making (feagin, 2014; mcnulty et al., 2019). • have limited decision-making influence within collaborative community change efforts (wolff et al., 2016). capability people’s ability to utilize available resources and opportunities to meet their needs and desires (sen, 1999), bipoc are less likely than white people to have: • trust of cross-sector service providers and institutions given prior oppressive experiences (e.g., tuskegee experiments; king, 2016). • knowledge and skills to take advantage of employment opportunities (davis, 2016) and effectively participate in community decision-making processes (wolff et al., 2016). • a state of sufficient health to take advantage of employment opportunities and community participation (sen, 1999). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 table 2 prompts to explore patterns of white privilege and bipoc oppression in the community pattern prompt generalizations in general, i notice the following examples of white privilege/bipoc oppression happening across the community... exceptions however, i notice these examples do not always happen in the following situations... contradictions i notice privilege and oppression sometimes happen at the same time in the following situations... surprises i was surprised that the following examples of white privilege/bipoc oppression happened... bipoc stakeholders are in the best position to identify and prioritize which local patterns of white privilege and bipoc oppression are contributing most to targeted outcome disparities (ford & airhihenbuwa, 2010), as white people’s perceptions of these patterns are often obscured by the “sincere fictions” they have developed allowing them ignore the inhumanity of racial stratification (feagin & hernan, 2000). instead, white allies can support this activity by listening to and learning from bipoc. for example, a school district in san diego, california (u.s.) engaged families and students from marginalized groups representing six languages in a series of workshops to improve family-schoolcommunity partnerships. during the workshops, families and youth spoke about their experiences within the school in their own language while educators listened in (without interrupting) to the translated conversations using headsets. the approach not only empowered the families and youth to identify and prioritize examples of privilege and oppression, but it also shifted the mindsets of (mostly white) educators who had never heard these families’ perspectives in such a direct way (rowland, 2016). bipoc can also independently gather data about local current patterns of privilege and oppression, for example by having conversations with other bipoc (people’s knowledge editorial collective, 2016) and/or through methods like photovoice (wang & burris, 1997). define systemic root causes. this activity involves understanding how system parts and interactions across multiple ecological layers of the targeted system contribute to prioritized patterns of white privilege and bipoc oppression. these system parts and interactions can be thought of as the systemic root causes driving local inequities (kim, 1999). systems scholars identified several categories of systemic root causes that can serve as leverage points for change (coffman, 2007; foster-fishman et al., 2007; meadows, 1999) including: mindsets, goals, decisionmaking, regulations, connections, resources, and feedback loops (see table 3 for definitions; for more details see fosterfishman and watson, 2017). diverse stakeholders within the targeted system should engage in a “system scanning” process http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 (foster-fishman & watson, in press) to identify systemic root causes across multiple categories and ecological layers that are contributing to prioritized patterns of white privilege and bipoc oppression. table 3 provides example root cause questions that can be adapted for stakeholders across diverse backgrounds, education-level, and experiences. system scanning processes can also involve developing causal loop diagrams to illustrate the interactions between root causes and illuminate powerful places to intervene (meadows, 2008; stroh, 2015). some participatory diagramming methods incorporate critical race theory (e.g., frerichs et al., 2016). table 3 example systemic root causes of white privilege/oppression of bipoc* systemic root causes example questions mindsets deepest held beliefs, values, ideologies, and attitudes that drive system behavior (senge, 2006). what beliefs, values, and ideologies (e.g., whiteness) are influencing [local pattern(s) of racial privilege/oppression] and in what ways? who holds these mindsets? goals aims and purpose of a system that are driven by mindsets; influence the design and implementation of root causes listed below (meadows, 1999) to what extent do organizations, institutions, policymakers, and funders have goals, outcomes, objectives, and/or strategic plans focused on promoting racial equity? to what extent are they tracking their progress in reaching these racial equity goals (including collecting disaggregated data)? how is this situation influencing [local pattern(s) of racial privilege/oppression]? decision-making how decisions are made, including who is included and excluded (fraser, 2009; meadows, 1999). to what extent do organizations, institutions, funders, and community settings authentically engage bipoc in decision-making processes (e.g., related to selecting priorities, designing policies and programs, allocating resources, hiring staff, etc.)? how is this situation influencing [local pattern(s) of racial privilege/oppression]? regulations formal and informal policies, practices procedures, protocols, laws, and community norms (foster-fishman & watson, 2017). how are policies, practices, procedures, protocols, laws, and community norms influencing [local pattern(s) of racial privilege/oppression]? in what ways is the implementation of these regulations influencing these inequities? connections exchanges of information and resources between and across individuals, organizations/institutions, and subsystems (senge, 2006). how are exchanges of information and resources (or lack thereof) between and across stakeholders, organizations/institutions, and/or sub-systems influencing [local pattern(s) of racial privilege/oppression]? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 resources human (e.g., skills, knowledge, abilities, and diversity; king-sears, 2001), economic (e.g., money and capital; stroh 2015), physical (e.g., parks, roads, housing, technology; metzel & hansen 2014), programmatic/opportunity (e.g., quality, location, and array of services, jobs, etc.; fixsen, blasé, metz, & van dyke, 2013), and social (i.e., trust; pence & shepard, 1999) how is the current level of stakeholders’ skills and knowledge (e.g., awareness of local inequities, understanding of structural drivers of inequity, cultural competency, skills in trauma-informed engagement, leadership skills, systems thinking, etc.) influencing [local pattern(s) of racial privilege/oppression]? how are current budget allocations influencing [local pattern(s) of racial privilege/oppression]? how is the quality and location of physical or built resources (e.g., green space, roads, infrastructure, housing, materials, technology, etc.) influencing [local pattern(s) of racial privilege/oppression]? how is the character (quality, cultural competence, demographics of service providers, etc.) and accessibility (affordability, location, time, etc.) of programs, services, supports, and opportunities influencing [local pattern(s) of racial privilege/oppression]? how is the trust (or lack thereof) between stakeholders influencing [local pattern(s) of racial privilege/oppression]? feedback loops interactions between the root causes listed above that either reinforce or balance out given outcomes such as racial inequity (foster-fishman et al., 2007; meadows, 1999). how are the different issues (i.e., root causes) you described so far interacting with each other? how are these interactions amplifying [local pattern(s) of racial privilege/oppression]? keeping [local pattern(s) of racial privilege/oppression] in check? *adapted from foster-fishman et al., 2007; foster-fishman & watson (2017) phase 2: design systemic interventions systemic anti-racist praxis phase two involves designing interventions best thought of as clusters of aligned and mutually reinforcing strategies to transform prioritized systemic root causes and disrupt current patterns of racial inequity. in most community change efforts, groups engage in long strategic planning processes or spend years developing the “perfect” intervention. this approach is problematic given no systems change strategy is likely to be designed perfectly at first, especially given the complexity of social systems, and extensive resources are often wasted in designing fully developed strategies that end up being ineffective or even worse exacerbate local inequities (chang, 2018; wolff et al., 2017). instead, systemic anti-racist praxis adopts the “lean impact” approach of designing small yet viable intervention prototypes that are tested and improved through short, iterative learning cycles http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 (chang, 2018). this cycle is described in praxis phases 3-4 below. effective system interventions address multiple, interdependent systemic root causes across ecological layers (hankivsky, 2014; king-sears, 2001; solar & irwin, 2010) and use a targeted universalism approach (powell, menendian, & ake, 2019) to ensure system changes meet bipoc needs/situations and prevent white opportunity hoarding (lewis & diamond, 2015). for example, interventions to address root causes of distributive housing inequities may include reallocating local hospital’s community benefit spending (mandated by the affordable care act) to directly fund the development of affordable housing for priority groups (bamberger, bluestein, latimer-nelligan, samson, & shoemaker, 2017) and creating incentives (e.g., density bonuses) and zoning codes to promote the development of multi-family affordable housing near transit hubs (rose, 2016). similarly, interventions to address recognition housing inequities could include creating county-level just-cause eviction and tenant rights policies to limit landlords’ profit-driven evictions in gentrifying bipoc neighborhoods (rose, 2016) and shifting city goals and resource allocations to increase community enforcement of these antidiscrimination policies (estes, haar, mikkelsen, nichols, & cohen, 2016). systemic interventions often require partnerships between groups focused on root causes at different ecological levels to share information, align and coordinate efforts, and champion shared goals (mikkelsen, novotny, & gittelsohn, 2016). bipoc should play a central role in codesigning systemic interventions to ensure they meet local needs and goals. communitybased participatory design methods, such as co-design workshops, have emerged as one approach to engage marginalized residents in addressing social issues in collaboration with community partners (harrington, erete, & piper, 2019). similar to participatory action research, these methods are meant to both center the input and narratives of marginalized groups in the design process (duarte, brendel, degbelo, & kray, 2018) and support collective action (le dantec, 2016). however, co-design processes are highly vulnerable to racialized power dynamics which can exacerbate inequities (tran o'leary, zewde, mankoff, & rosner, 2019). using a postcolonial perspective, harrington et al. (2019) recommend co-design processes attend to the histories of injustice affecting participants, encourage participants to provide rich and full accounts instead of stressing “honest disclosure” (which can become weaponized against them), and challenge “corporate” design thinking approaches that value new, technologyoriented ideas while minimizing existing assets. phase 3: implement interventions the third systemic anti-racist praxis phase focuses on engaging diverse stakeholders with bipoc as the central drivers in taking actions to implement interventions or intervention prototypes. effective implementation involves developing specific implementation processes (fixsen, blase, naoom, & wallace, 2005), putting structures and behind the scenes coaching in place to support these processes (p. foster-fishman & watson, 2018; wandersman et al., 2008), and aligning system characteristics (see table 1) to ensure effective diffusion, use, and reach of the intervention (foster-fishman & watson, 2012). unfortunately, implementation processes often unintentionally contribute to injustice (chinman et al., 2017; woodward et al., 2019) and reinforce the four forms of inequity described in table 1. for example, the implementation of an intervention may not reach oppressed individuals or communities (distribution injustice; fosterfishman, watson, & wattenberg, 2014; http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 trickett, espino, & hawe, 2011); take into account common access barriers affecting marginalized groups such as cost, service location and time, and transportation (recognition injustice; daly et al., 2002; kissane, 2010); or provide the supports or capacity-building needed to use or benefit from the intervention (capability injustice; ribot & peluso, 2003). these implementation failures often occur because bipoc are not positioned as drivers of all praxis phases (representation injustice; alcaraz et al., 2017). stakeholders can prevent this situation by considering how their implementation processes and structures can better align to promote equity and justice before launching their efforts, and carefully track implementation over time to quickly identify and address emerging injustices (foster-fishman & watson, 2017; camara p jones, 2014). phase 4: redefine local context to restart iterative cycle the final phase of the systemic praxis framework involves gathering short cycle feedback from diverse stakeholders and data sources across the system to assess implementation effectiveness and the extent to which interventions are starting to shift prioritized root causes across ecological layers, patterns of racial inequities, and outcome disparities within the targeted system (foster-fishman & watson, 2010; r. g. jones et al., 2010; mckenzie, 2014). the redefining phase also involves looking for unintended system responses to the interventions, as efforts targeting change in one part of the system often unintentionally and unpredictably bring about changes in other parts of the system (eoyang & holladay, 2013; zimmerman, lindberg, & plsek, 2001); and how the system is resisting change to maintain the status quo of white domination (blanchet garneau et al., 2018). as in the initial design phase, bipoc residents can drive the process, for example by prioritizing questions and methods, helping to gather short cycle feedback, and making sense of the information. the feedback is then used to inform design decisions (i.e., praxis phase 2) around how to adapt intervention elements that are not working, scale up elements that are working, and/or take advantage of emerging opportunities like new funding or community assets. the feedback can also help to identify emerging system issues to prioritize for change and determine whether to expand the boundaries around the targeted system. it should be noted that the purpose of systemic anti-racist praxis is not to sustain or scale a particular intervention, as the constantly evolving system context makes any given intervention obsolete over time (schorr, 1998). instead, stakeholders should strive to promote and sustain system dynamics that promote equity using whatever interventions make sense given the socio-environmental context at any particular moment in time. in addition, because broad system changes are often triggered in unpredictable and nonlinear ways by the accumulation of changes across sub-systems (meadows, 2008), it is impossible and illogical to try and precisely evaluate any given intervention’s effect on broad system properties. a more useful approach is to focus on evaluating an intervention’s effects on prioritized root causes and equity outcomes within a targeted system, and then track how interventions across many systems correspond with shifts in broad system dynamics over time. discussion whiteness is a socio-political identity associated with conscious and/or unconscious expectations of power and privileges granted to individuals or groups conferred into a white racial classification. this identity was born out of historic conditions (e.g. laws, policies, and practices) that gave rise to a racial hierarchy in the u.s. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 that gave social, political, and economic privileges to people considered “white” and created the expectation that these advantages should continue (roediger, 2001). this hierarchy persists today, and provides structural advantages and related privileges for white people in nearly every aspect of american life. to subvert whiteness, activists, educators, and scholars have developed antibias trainings and other educational practices to raise individuals’ consciousness about whiteness and racism. while research shows these trainings can at least temporarily shift individual attitudes about white privilege and racism, they often do little to sustainably alter individuals’ behavior. more so, this work often does little to change other relevant system conditions (e.g., policies, processes, practices, etc.) that contribute to racial inequity and by default reinforce whiteness as a shared identity. in response, this paper proposes a systems anti-racist praxis framework designed to help communities understand and address the systemic root causes of white privilege. this paper has several implications for community psychologists. first, although the model integrates well-established theories and scholarship across multiple disciplines, it has yet to be fully evaluated in practice. community psychologists are in a unique position to partner with stakeholders in evaluating (and adapting) the model in diverse system settings. second, the framework has implications for how community psychologists approach their community-based research and evaluation efforts. specifically, community psychologists can integrate the framework into their existing participatory action research and evaluation processes and methods to bring a greater focus on exploring and addressing the systemic determinants of racial inequity. the paper also has several implications for practice. first, the recognition that most psychological interventions fall short of creating sustainable shifts in people’s identity of whiteness because they do little to shift racist systems has direct implications for those responsible for designing, implementing, and funding these trainings. we believe it is unethical to continue propagating the current manifestation of psychological praxis without embedding a dual and legitimate focus on systems change. if not, anti-bias and similar interventions risk becoming simply a tool for avoiding litigation and distracting focus away from systemic transformation (newkirk, 2019). second, systemic anti-racist praxis is a departure from the more typical “programmatic” approach many communities use to pursue racial equity and will require new types of competencies to implement effectively (bensberg, allender, & sacks, 2020). funders and decision-makers should consider how to integrate these processes and related competencies into current capacity-building efforts and funding expectations. there is of course a paradox within the systemic praxis framework related to power: most u.s. organizations and community collaboratives that could benefit from adopting this framework are led and dominated by white people who are most likely operating within the paradigm of whiteness and white supremacy (feagin, 2020). in other words, some leaders may be reluctant to adopt this praxis model (including positioning bipoc as drivers of the process) or the systems changes it aims to bring about because they are benefiting from the current status quo, or exhibit only performative engagement with dismantling whiteness. to address this, critical race scholars suggest promoting what bell (1980) refers to as “interest convergence” – the belief that systemic anti-racist praxis can both meet the goal of racial equity and “secure, advance, or at least not harm societal interests deemed important by middle and upper class whites” (p. 523). stakeholders can promote interest convergence through strategic framing http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 analysis methods (bales, 2005) and/or initiatives such as the movement for black lives that make systemic racism so uncomfortable and publicly unfavorable for white people that they are compelled to make changes (bell, 2004; crossley, 2016). some white stakeholders may also exhibit “white fragility” or “white flammability” during the praxis process a set of highly defensive responses (e.g., shouting, crying, argumentation, withdrawal, etc.) aimed at silencing discussions about racism and protecting whiteness (diangelo, 2018; shin, 2020). initiative conveners and facilitators must have the competencies to help stakeholders examine how white privilege and systemic racism are manifesting themselves in the praxis process, including identifying and addressing paradigms, goals, power dynamics, practices, policies, and processes within the initiative itself that are exacerbating inequity (wolff et al., 2017). these issues can then become targeted root causes. in closing, systemic anti-racist praxis provides a problem-solving process to address the systemic root causes of racial inequity and, in turn, dismantle whiteness. the process expands common forms of antiracist action, such as anti-bias trainings, which typically focus exclusively on shifting white people’s paradigms instead of addressing a comprehensive array of systemic root causes reinforcing whiteness and white privilege. systemic anti-racist praxis is particularly relevant in this moment of history as we witness a climax of racist and anti-racist movements across the world. while systems change work is by no means easy, it is indeed the only way, we believe, our society stands a chance to move beyond the shackles of white supremacy and achieve racial equity. references ackoff, r. l., & rovin, s. 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(june 26, 2018). after internet mockery, 'permit patty' resigns as ceo of cannabis-products company. cnn. https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/25/us/permit-patty-san-francisco-trnd/index.html pan, j.c. (january, 7, 2020). why diversity training isn’t enough: addressing inequality requires more than consciousness raising. new republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/156032/diversity-training-isnt-enough-pamela-newkirk-robin-diangelo-books-... vera, a. (may 26, 2020). white woman who called police on a black man bird-watching in central park has been fired. cnn. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/26/us/central-park-video-dog-video-african-american-trnd/index.html microsoft word isidromayajariego_ecological settings_formattedfinal.docx ecological settings and theory of community action: “there is nothing more practical than a good theory” in community psychology isidro maya jariego universidad de sevilla keywords: theory, science, community psychology, framework, ecological settings, community action author biography: isidro maya jariego, doctor in psychology, is associate professor at the department of social psychology at the university of seville (spain), and director of the laboratory of personal networks and communities. he was founder and coordinator of the master in psychology of social and community intervention (20102013) and coordinator of the doctorate program “community and social intervention” (2007-2013). editor of the journal redes, revista hispana para el análisis de redes sociales since 2002; his main interests are social network analysis, cultural diversity and community intervention. recommended citation: maya jariego, i. (2016). ecological settings and theory of community action: “there is nothing more practical than a good theory” in community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(2), pages 1-6. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). correspondence should be addressed to isidro maya jariego, departamento de psicología social, universidad de sevilla, calle camilo josé cela s/n. 41.018 – sevilla (spain). isidromj@us.es. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 ecological settings and theory of community action: “there is nothing more practical than a good theory” in community psychology "there is nothing more practical than a good theory" (lewin, 1952, p. 169). since its inception, community psychology has been characterized by simultaneously pursuing the social utility of scientific knowledge and the theoretical value of practice (lewin, 1946). theories contribute to community change, while the lessons learned in community intervention in turn contribute to improve our knowledge of social reality. in terms of action research, theoretical models perform a central role in mediating between science and practice. however, when we ask community psychologists which models they consider essential for community research and action, the picture is very complex. jason, stevens, ram, miller, beasley, and gleason (2016) did this exercise, consulting the electronic mailing list of the society for community research and action. both researchers and professionals involved in community intervention participate on this list, and the inquiry resulted in a list of approximately 32 theoretical frames. without being exhaustive in the inquiry, it is striking the number and diversity of theoretical models mentioned. some of them are not theoretical models. others are not even part of psychology. the list shows that, to mediate between research and action, we preferably resort to short-range models, as indeed is proper in social psychology (collier, minton & reynolds, 1991). however, community psychologists also use meta-models, schools of thought, ideas that guide professional practice, ideological frames, and metaphors that guide action, among other conceptual tools. on the other hand, along with concepts that appear in any handbook of community psychology (e.g., psychological sense of community, empowerment, behavior settings), there are also references of sociology, political science, social work, political philosophy, and other areas. perhaps this reflects the fact that community psychology has been shaped as a pragmatic and multidisciplinary field. the resulting impression is that there is not a common body of solid knowledge, or at least the common denominator is very small. "perspectivism" mentioned by jason et al. (2016) may be revealing some confusion between the epistemological, methodological, and substantive planes among scholars and practitioners. it seems that respect for the diversity of views in the community has been transposed to the coexistence of theories that are immeasurable from an epistemological point of view. this is similar to the emphasis on the diversity of contexts appearing to have prevented the search for regularities of a theoretical character. nevertheless, 50 years of community psychology have paved the way to develop the promise of action research: "a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action and research leading to social action" (lewin, 1946 p. 35). as i will elaborate below, community research of the last several decades provides a basis for proposing a systematic view of community settings and a theory of the processes of community action and change. contexts, ecological levels, and community collaboration let us adopt for a moment the point of view of an undergraduate student in psychology. in a subject of introduction to community psychology, the student usually learns that (a) context matters, (b) it is advisable to assess and intervene at different ecological levels, and (c) community interventions frequently include deploying processes of collaboration with the community to facilitate global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 empowerment. with that background, the student takes a contextual, multi-level perspective aimed at boosting the development potential of communities. that is, the skills they develop are so generic that they could be considered part of a metamodel, an approach to research and action, which can actually be applied in many different professional fields. this community approach can be made operational, for example, in the provision of health services, the study of the different stages of the life cycle or even in clinical practice, among many others. when a group of psychologists met at the swampscott conference in 1965, an encounter that is symbolically recognized as the beginning of community psychology, they just reviewed the role of psychology professionals in addressing mental health needs. since psychological processes (and therefore mental health problems) are clearly connected with the social system, psychologists should play the role of community change agents, both to be effective in intervention and to adequately meet the needs of the population. therefore, thinking about (and transforming) the professional role of psychologists is directly linked to the origins of community psychology. however, if we open the focus, the changes proposed in the 1960s affect the whole of psychology to varying degrees. on the one hand, many psychological and social issues of interest are incorporated, without any reduction to only mental health problems. furthermore, the repertoire of intervention strategies is extended beyond individual psychological treatment. so generic skills that we usually associate with a community approach can be developed in practice in different professional fields of psychology. for example, nothing prevents a developmental psychologist to paying attention to family contexts, using the model of bronfenbrenner (1979) on the multiple ecological levels of human development contexts, or even implementing a mentoring program to improve academic performance of children, with the collaboration of members of the community. we can even see that this approach has also been developed in other disciplines. concerns about contexts and collaboration are also present in community nursing or in community medicine, just to illustrate it with the case of public health. to recap, community psychology arises from a reflection on professional practice that produces a meta-model of research and action. however, the emphasis on social contexts and in collaboration with the community is not unique to the discipline, and therefore cannot be considered defining models of community psychology. that does not mean that community psychology has not been able to theorize successfully the role of participant-conceptualizer, empowerment, and collaboration with the community. we return to this point later. what then are the models and the body of knowledge owned by the area? a typology of ecological settings and a theory of community action ecological settings, psychological sense of community, and empowerment are, in my opinion, a good selection of basic theoretical references on community psychology. the three theories that jason et al. focus on (a) have consensus to be considered as a central part of the discipline, (b) have generated, compared to other models, a larger volume of empirical research, and, last but not least, (c) have enormous potential to build the future of community psychology. the notion of psychological sense of community that was introduced by seymour sarason (1974) has a foundational significance in community psychology. it is a central theoretical axis and is also a core value of the discipline. empirical research has dedicated a part of its effort to analyze the factorial structure of the concept (chipuer & pretty, 1999; jason, stevens & light, in press; global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 jason, stevens & ram, 2015; mcmillan & chavis, 1986; stevens, jason, & ferrari, 2011), and is preferably applied to the behaviors of neighboring and citizen participation (kloos, hill, thomas, wandersman, elias & dalton, 2012). the studies on sense of community show that natural leaders, behavior settings, and grass-roots organizations have a key role in the process of social cohesion (mayajariego, 2004). research on neighborhoods – the ecological setting of choice – has shown the risks associated with urban districts where low income, overcrowding, pollution, and daily exposure to violence and vandalism predominate, among other factors (shinn & toohey, 2003; wandersman & nation, 1998). however, the research conducted so far also allows us to identify shadow areas as well as the elements that need greater theoretical development. first, community psychology seems to have paid more attention to the subjective experience of community than to the specific contexts in which it develops. in the words of sarason, the community is a "readily available, mutually supportive network of relationships on which one could depend" (1974, p. 1). so, to improve our understanding of community contexts, we need to complete the assessment of feelings of belonging (or the perception of interdependence) with the objective of describing the structures in which individuals are inserted as well as the properties of the ecological environment (maya-jariego, 2004). in my opinion, the study of the regularities of behavior associated with a specific place (i.e., behavior settings), as in network analysis, can respond quite well to that purpose. second, community psychology seems to have proceeded to accumulate empirical evidence on factors that are relevant in the community context without elaborating sufficiently on their nature from a psychological point of view. for example, we know that juvenile delinquency is more prevalent in neighborhoods with high turnover of residents and a low proportion of owner occupied housing. perhaps we can interpret residential mobility in terms of social control, or people's expectations of residing in the same place in the future in terms of commitment and responsibility in environmental conservation. thus we seek basic psychosocial processes that allow us to compare the between diversity of neighborhood contexts. although the risk and protective factors' framework has been practical in the design of effective interventions, we need to take another step in the formalization of knowledge to contribute to community psychology from a substantive point of view. perhaps this explains why the scales for the assessment of psychological sense of community have been applied equally to classrooms and schools; city blocks, neighborhoods, and cities; or even self-help groups, associations, and political parties (hill, 1996), regardless of the levels of analysis. communities are made up of large groupings of individuals who feel a mutual commitment, although not necessarily know each other. they are structures of a mesosocial level: they refer to unconscious effects of social structure in the individual and represent the power of indirect relations. therefore, neither are they small groups nor are they comparable to macro-social phenomena. i think we need to develop a typology of community settings, ecological environments, to guide research in a more systematic way. that entails reference to contexts and settings, which are at the center for concern of community psychology, with more complexity and precision. it also implies a fine-grained analysis of how some contexts are nested in others, and how this translates to the subjective experience of community. after sense of community, the second concept with possibly more impact on community psychology is empowerment. partly it is connected with reflections on the role of collaboration with the community, and partly it works as an inspiring metaphor for community action. while recognizing the limits of the definition of the concept from a global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 formal point of view (jason et al., 2016), i believe it represents a second line of theoretical development for community psychology, which is concerned with the theory of social action and community. for example, the literature on the implementation of programs has shown that scientific knowledge is necessary but not sufficient for obtaining positive results (biglan & taylor, 2000; goodman, 2000; maya-jariego, 2010). the effectiveness normally goes through a process of community appropriation, where public awareness of the problem, social norms, and the degree of community organization are also decisive for the results. hence the specific contexts may differ in the degree of community readiness for change that is intended with the intervention (edwards, jumper-thurman, plested, oetting & swanson, 2000). the results (i.e., effectiveness), depend on the interaction between the actions carried out (whether planned or emerging) and previous disposition of community context in which they develop. the effective implementation of programs, therefore, is often linked indirectly to the dynamics of community empowerment. in the tradition of action research, this work has been carried inductively (indicating which actions work under what circumstances). the evidence-based practices have followed a highly pragmatic approach. however, also in this case i think we are in a position to formulate a systematic view of the processes of science-practice transference, the process of intervention, and the dynamics of community change. coda in short, community psychology (a) has provided a meta-theoretical framework on the importance of contextual factors at different levels, both in human behavior as in intervention processes; and (b) it has helped redefine the role of psychologists as change agents, working in collaboration with the community. in this context, and despite the lack of theoretical encouragement of the discipline, both systematic vision of community contexts and a comparative analysis of the effects of community actions (with different people in different contexts) may be able to articulate the theoretical development of community psychology in the medium term. references barker, r. g. (1968). ecological psychology: concepts and methods for studying the environment of human behavior. stanford, california: stanford university press. biglan, a. & taylor, t.k. (2000). why have we been more successful in reducing tobacco use than violent crime? american journal of community psychology, 28 (3), 269302. bronfenbrenner, u. (1979). the ecology of human development: experiments by nature and design. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. chipuer, h. m., & pretty, g. m. h. (1999). a review of the sense of community index: current uses, factor structure, reliability, and further development. journal of community psychology, 27(6), 643-658. collier, g., minton, h. l., & reynolds, g. (1991). currents of thought in american social psychology. new york: oxford university press. edwards, e.w., jumper-thurman, p., plested, b.a., oetting, e.r., & swanson, l. (2000). community readiness: research to practice. journal of community psychology, 28 (3), 291-307. goodman, r.m. (2000). bridging the gap in effective program implementation: from concept to application. journal of community psychology, 28 (3), 309-321. hill, j. (1996). psychological sense of community: suggestions for future research. journal of community psychology, 24, 431-438. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 jason, l.a., stevens, e., & light, j.m. (in press). the relationship of sense of community and trust to hope. journal of community psychology. jason, l. a., stevens, e., & ram, d. (2015). development of a three-factor psychological sense of community scale. journal of community psychology, 43 (8), 973-985. jason, l.a., stevens, e., ram, d., miller, s.a., beasley, c.r. & gleason, k. (2016). theories in the field of community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice 7(2). pp. 1-27. kloos, b., hill, j., thomas, r., wandersman, a., elias, j. & dalton, j.h. (2012). community psychology. linking individuals and communities. wadsworth: cengage learning. lewin, k. (1946). action research and minority problems. journal of social issues, 2, 34–46. lewin, k. (1952). field theory in social science: selected theoretical papers by kurt lewin. london: tavistock. maya-jariego, i. (2004). sentido de comunidad y potenciación comunitaria. apuntes de psicología, 22 (2), 187-211. maya-jariego, i. (2010). de la ciencia a la práctica en la intervención comunitaria. la transferencia del conocimiento científico a la actuación profesional. apuntes de psicología, 28, 1, 121-141. mcmillan, d. w., & chavis, d. m. (1986). sense of community: a definition and theory. journal of community psychology, 14, 6-23. sarason, s. b. (1974). the psychological sense of community; prospects for a community psychology. san francisco, ca: josseybass. shinn, m. & toohey, s. m. (2003). community contexts of human welfare. annual review of psychology, 54, 427-459. stevens, e.b., jason, l.a., & ferrari, j.r. (2011). measurement performance of the sense of community index in substance abuse recovery communal housing. australian community psychologist, 23, 135-147. wandersman, a. & nation, m. (1998). urban neighborhoods and mental health: psychological contributions to understanding toxicity, resilience, and interventions. american psychologist, 53 (6), 647-656. there is no community practice that is neutral with respect to justice: a call for activist community praxis scotney d. evans1 keywords: community praxis, activism, critical reflexivity author biographies: scotney d. evans, is an associate professor in the department of educational and psychological studies in the school of education and human development at the university of miami. he is a community-engaged researcher working to understand and support the role of community-based organizations, networks, and coalitions in building collective power to promote community wellbeing, social change, and social justice. dr. evans is the editor of the open-access journal “collaborations: a journal of community-based research and practice” and co-author of the 3rd edition of the textbook “community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and wellbeing.” dr. evans received his ph.d. in community research and action at peabody college of vanderbilt university and holds a master’s degree in human development counseling also from vanderbilt. he joined the university of miami faculty in 2008. he directs the undergraduate major in community and applied psychological studies (caps) and teaches and advises students in the master’s program in community and social change (csc) and the phd program in community well-being (cwb). recommended citation: evans, s. d. (2023). there is no community practice that is neutral with respect to justice: a call for activist community praxis. global journal of community psychology practice, 14(1), 1-23. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: scotney evans. school of education and human development, department of educational and psychological studies. 4203 university drive, mb 312, coral gables fl 33146. email: s.evans4@miami.edu. 1 university of miami http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:s.evans4@miami.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 there is no community practice that is neutral with respect to justice: a call for activist community praxis abstract the urgent crises of today and tomorrow require a serious interrogation of our professional role, theories of change, and chosen strategies and interventions in and with communities. these intersecting crises require reimagining our practice as activist labor, where our time, energy, and resources are directed at eliminating or minimizing the effects of oppressive social structures and institutions in our society. this paper positions activism in the definition of community psychology practice. activist community psychology praxis is a practice of resistance and a refusal to be complicit with the systems and structures that create and maintain inequality often in commonplace and practical ways. the activist community psychologist helps to expose, subvert, and challenge social injustices through a combination of activism and praxis. through critical reflexivity and a process of continual ethical improvement, in the company of others, we can attempt to address the inherent contradictions in our community practice to engage in ways more consistent with liberatory aims. our community research and action either contributes to social justice or it serves to maintain the prevailing power structure. in the ongoing fight for racial justice, our practice either contributes to racial equity or sustains racial inequity. there is no community practice that is apolitical or neutral with respect to justice (freire, 2004). too often, our knowledge of deep social inequities and their contribution to human suffering “fails to translate into a lived praxis that adequately contests the multiplicity of ways racism, capitalism, homophobia, privilege, and sexism are made manifest” (tejeda et al., 2003, p.9). the varied manifestations of community psychology practice are both pragmatic and utopian. we seek to engage in community research and action that responds to the immediate needs of communities and minimizes suffering even as we imagine a more just world. but our predominant theories, perspectives, and practices are inadequate for meeting the critical issues that we face. to respond to the intersecting crises of our times we need to move beyond approaches tied to the political and social philosophy of liberalism and employ radical imagination (haiven & khasnabish, 2010; 2014). we must envision radically different systems and deploy “visionary pragmatism” (collins, 1998, p. 188) to help in the development of a more politically engaged praxis. in this paper i make the case that the primary concern of community psychology practice should be the reduction of structural injustice and power imbalances through community-engaged actions following the lead of those most affected by cultural, political, and economic domination and subordination. this requires an honest acknowledgement that most well-intentioned community change efforts of which community psychologists are a part do not effectively undermine deeply entrenched oppression and marginalization. for a variety of reasons, we often find ourselves in community settings unable or unwilling to examine and act against structural dynamics of power and privilege that operate within http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 and upon our institutions and communities. too often we end up as accomplices to unreflective, reformist practices remaining too careful not to ruffle the feathers of those in positions of power. community psychology practitioners cannot purport to be working for social justice without a commitment to “questioning the practices, epistemologies, methods, and frameworks that contribute to the structures and norms of injustice and oppression” (sandler, 2007, p. 276). we need to be adept at partnering with our community collaborators to challenge structural injustices “without being co-opted into discourses and practices that simply maintain unjust conditions, or worse, exacerbate them” (evans, 2015, p. 365). i define a practitioner as one who takes action in the world from a base of knowledge, skills, competencies, and values, and is both shaped by the prevailing social order and is an active participant in the creation and shaping of that order (finn & jacobson, 2003; giddens, 1984). the 2006 definition of community psychology practice expresses a value-driven desire for a community psychology practice that promotes “well-being, social justice, economic equity and self-determination” (julian, 2006, p. 68). on an ongoing basis, our community of scholar-practitioners can and should interrogate our own blind spots and make judgments about what constitutes better and worse, transformative and ameliorative, competent and incompetent, ethical and unethical community practice. “radical honesty among community members with shared values can be transformative” (carruthers, 2018, p. 81). this is the aim of this paper: to engage us in honest critical reflection on our community practice in this current historical, economic, socio-political, and environmental context to radically reimagine a more ethical, reflexive, transformative praxis. one point of clarification is in order. the issues and challenges raised in this paper are mostly directed at community psychologists like me, and those educated and socialized into systems shaped by, white, privileged, academics and practitioners. too often we are guilty of operating from a base of naive optimism and racial unconsciousness and too comfortable in liberal systems such as universities and nonprofit organizations that require little ideological struggle. in a sense, this paper is also a way for me to attempt to openly hold myself accountable to use my privilege and institutional resources to engage in community research and action that disrupts rather than maintains injustice. much like the pack a day smoker seeking social support for quitting, i’m telling my friends i’m trying to quit the deleterious habit of complicity so they will also hold me accountable. positioning activism in the definition of community psychology practice i bring a critical-theoretical perspective and a scholar-activist orientation to this paper to expand upon and deepen our ethicalreflective commitment to a radical praxis that rises to the level of injustice faced by communities. building on these orientations and commitments i offer a definition (with all the attendant problems of defining) for an activist community praxis that challenges us to take a more openly political stance in our community research and action. activist community praxis is antioppressive collective action grounded in critical theorizing, critical reflexivity, and a political and ethical commitment to social justice. the driving force of anti-oppressive collective action is the practice of joining with others to challenge the complex issues of power, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 oppression, and powerlessness (dalrymple & burke, 2019). a political and ethical commitment to social justice means taking a stance against neutrality and working with others to actively challenge structural injustices, defined here as “pervasive social structures, practices, and norms that lead to disproportionate social suffering for particular categories of people or communities” (sandler, 2007, p. 278; see also structural violence, dutta et al., 2016). activist community praxis is a critical practice wherein action, research, and theory are complexly intertwined and embedded in a deep historical understanding of institutionalized oppression and the experiences of those who are marginalized, oppressed, and dispossessed (evans, kivell, et al., 2014; fine & torre, 2021; freire, 2000; weis & fine, 2012). this praxis is also grounded in anti-racism that places racial injustice at the center of our analyses and actions. it requires the practitioner (especially those of us who are white) to be critically reflexive and “articulate how one’s own values, assumptions, structural privileges and marginalizations, and life experiences influence one’s work, and articulate the strengths and limitations of one’s own perspective” (langhout et al., 2016, p. 2). unless we accept and make clear our critical, anti-oppressive, activist stance, we’re simply tinkering around the edges and contributing to the maintenance of the established order (johansson & lindhult, 2008; lykes & scheib, 2015). in the sections that follow, i acknowledge the diversity of contexts and problem settings encountered by community psychologists yet argue that activist community praxis should be grounded in three interdependent critical insights: 1) the structural dynamics of power and privilege that operate within and upon institutions and communities drive the ethical imperative to critique these dynamics and actively engage with others to correct oppressive abuses of power. we should celebrate our discipline’s collective commitment to social justice while conceding that we can and should do more to turn our espoused values into critical action. 2) our practices never occur in a vacuum. the pursuit of social justice is continually compromised by the need to make our practices economically sound and by the dynamic interplay between the community psychology practitioner and the web of governmental and professional institutions, organizations, and funding agencies with their competing priorities, agendas, and values (dokecki, 1996; sandler, 2007). foucault (1984) recognized this tension when he argued that we should reflect on the limits that systems impose on us while we also "experiment with the possibility of going beyond [these limits]" (p, 50). 3) only through critical reflexivity and a process of continual ethical improvement, in the company of others, can we move beyond these limits and address these contradictions responsibly to engage in ways more consistent with liberatory rather than conservative practices (case, 2017; fernández et al., 2021; langhout et. al., 2016; smith, 2021; watkins, 2019; wilson et al., 2020). what are we called to do? foran (2019) suggests that one way to think of the present moment and the foreseeable future is as a triple global crisis of economics, democracy, and pervasive violence. we see these crises playing out in real time at the global, national, and local levels while we struggle to equitably address and end the coronavirus (covid-19) pandemic. the intersections of these crises are bound together by and intensify the likelihood of climate chaos. we are amidst what james baldwin (1963) might call “dangerous times” and a “revolutionary situation” bombarded by http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 the evil triplets of militarism, capitalism, and racism as our fragile democracies are at risk of being stripped and sold for parts (kendzior, 2018). what are we called to do as community psychologists to be relevant in this current moment and contribute to a more just, equitable, and sustainable society? what do these intersecting crises demand of our community practice? in what ways is our community practice simply propping up the pillars of support for existing power structures? none of us are immune to the effects of white supremacy, colonization, capitalism, anti-blackness, and patriarchal systems. we must take a hard look at our theories of change, recognize the ways we are complicit with power and privilege, and contribute to "the development of a decolonial community psychology in the service of broader emancipatory socioand psycho-political praxis” (fernández et al., 2021, p.3). there is a growing urgency around understanding and challenging systems of power stemming from histories of coloniality—the ensuing crises tied to structural violence; indigenous struggles; racial capitalism; the resurgence of neoconservatism based on race, alterity, and exploitative hierarchization that occurs with absolute impunity across the globe; and the recalcitrance and elasticity in systems of oppression that we do not always fully grasp through the paradigms of the 20th century demand a more critical, humanizing, and emancipatory psychology. (p.3) this “politics of urgency” requires “a commitment to changing social conditions now by any means necessary” (hurtado, 2003, p. 222, emphasis in original). as rappaport (1981) suggested, community psychology is most relevant when fueled with a sense of urgency. “to give up such urgency is to live with mediocrity” (p.8). community psychologists do what we do because we desire to contribute to solutions to these intersecting crises. foundational to cp is a value for social justice and the desire to end oppression (evans, rosen, & nelson, 2014; kloos et al., 2020; prilleltensky, 2012; riemer, et al., 2020; watts & serrano-garcia, 2003). our shared story is that cp, worldwide, developed to address issues of injustice and oppression and to work towards justice, equality, and wellbeing (riemer, et al., 2020). what binds us together as a professional society is that we collectively deem injustice unacceptable, and we believe a more just world is possible. even so, tejeda et al (2003) might critique our liberal notions of social justice in cp as “hopeful americanism” and argue that we cannot combat the current crises “simply by pressing the popgun of liberal, middle-class love against the bosom of oppressive social structures” (p. 9). the urgent crises of today and tomorrow require a serious interrogation of our professional role, theories of change, and chosen strategies and interventions in communities. these intersecting crises require reimagining our practice as activist labor, where our time, energy, and resources are directed at eliminating or minimizing the effects of oppressive social structures and institutions in our society (cann & demeulenaere, 2020). our cp practice will not reduce injustice unless we first acknowledge the ways in which we are complicit in the creation of the social structures and institutions that enable it. our practice must be “grounded in a critical consciousness of this condition and its possible transformation” (tejeda et al., 2003, p. 5). dutta (2016) likens the present moment in cp to some of the “very interests that energized swampscott –cross disciplinary collaboration, pluralistic inquiry, call to social http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 action but a reconfiguration of those interests in the context of a decolonizing project” (p. 335). will we sign on to this project or drift further into irrelevance? facing contradictions i am a white, cisgender man with a tenured faculty position at a historically white advantaged institution in the united states (u.s.) that sits upon stolen land within the territories of the miccosukee, seminole, and tequesta peoples. eight contemporary tribal nations are historically tied to the lands that make up the u.s. state known as florida where my university is located. i have had the privilege of going through most of my life not having to seriously interrogate my whiteness nor the benefits that accrue to me because i am a white man. i took my community psychology (cp) training at another historically white advantaged institution in the southern u.s. like many cps of my generation, i learned a version of cp mostly from other white men grounded in western, eurocentric, and white settler logics and was offered only limited exposure to critical, feminist, liberation, and decolonial perspectives and epistemologies. i am a university professor with one foot in academia and the other grounded in the local community. the past 15 years for me have involved a good deal of unlearning, problematizing, and “digging up the rottenness” (fernandez et al., 2021, p. 13) of my training and what i came to believe was “normal” and common sense regarding social science research and community practice. i’ve been lucky to encounter critical cp friends along the way such as tod sloan, holly angelique, rod watts, regina langhout, paul duckett, irma serrano-garcia, isaac prilleltensky, geoff nelson, dennis fox, david fryer, and chris sonn to name just a few. i’m benefitting from the more recent work of extraordinary critical scholars in cp and have been compassionately re-educated and further politicized by my students and by adult and youth activists of color in my community here in miami. i routinely wrestle with the contradiction between my white, middle-class positionality and my proclivity for community-based research and action alongside marginalized groups and their allies. although i’ve made many missteps along the way, i like to think i now approach my community-engaged research and action with humility, learning and contributing where i can, while remaining vigilant of my privileged outsider positioning. those of us situated in universities with tenured (or relatively stable) positions have a great deal of autonomy and access to resources, spaces, ideas, people, that are available to us by virtue of educational privilege (daza & tuck, 2014; singh et al., 2018). even with these privileges, we often must balance professional, personal, institutional, and community accountabilities and these are often at odds (kesten et al., 2017; perkins, 2010; sonn, 2004). for example, the emphasis on publishing in peer reviewed academic journals doesn’t align with what matters to marginalized communities where we engage. there are inherent contradictions, tensions, and complexities when attempting to engage in activist, anti-oppressive, and anti-racist praxis from a conventional institutional base. in our institutions, disciplines, and organizational fields we are part of what gramsci (1971) calls the “historic bloc” – a complicated network of relationships, systems, and partnerships that propagates “common sense” understandings that often make us complicit in the promotion of ideologies and practices that maintain societal inequities. those working outside the leaky shelter of an academic institution are faced with contradictions and ethical tensions mostly stemming from the need to secure sufficient http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 income to sustain their livelihoods. our pursuit of social justice is compromised, made tragicomic, by the fact that our practices are embedded in social-institutional context (dokecki, 1996). the fact that our pursuit of social justice is compromised makes the terrain thorny, but our community practice risks perpetuating harm when these contradictions exist without any sustained conscious concentration or deliberate pursuit of coherence. the “goods” of community practice in the tragi-comic professional: basic considerations for ethical reflectivegenerative practice, dokecki (1996) draws on the work of macintyer (1966; 1981) to describe the tragicomic dual relationship that exists in our community practice that entails a tension between the pursuit of goods internal to professional practice (e.g., social justice) and goods external to it (e.g., money, recognition, and self-gratification). our community practice is always a mixed-motive affair. the competition for external goods inevitably penetrates and influences the pursuit of what we believe really matters, creating a tragicomic situation. dokecki uses the term tragic to refer to “the inevitable imperfection of human actors that interferes with attainment of the goods they seek; comic to refer to the goods humans can achieve, within limits, if they intend them and exert themselves to achieve them” (p. 13). under capitalism, we’ve come to think of ourselves as self-contained economic units maximizing our personal gains and too easily pushing aside contradictions. we need to be honest about how the need to fulfill goods external to our practice constrains our full commitment to challenging injustice. the ethical reflectivegenerative practitioner is fully conscious of this tension and is engaged in ongoing critical reflexivity and ethical discernment to imagine and unlock possible alternatives that allow them to prioritize actions for equity and justice while still paying the bills. the unethical nonreflective-complicit practitioner focuses on consolidation of their own position, assumptions, and self-serving practices that yield them money and prestige while leaving societal inequities and injustices intact (cann & demeulanaere, 2020). my engagement, power, and social action (epsa) research team frequently wrestles with this contradiction. our team utilizes action research in solidarity with community partners to understand and expose injustice, build social theory, and promote collective action for social justice. we are based in a university and many doctoral students in our community and counseling psychology programs receive only limited financial support, and often for just the first nine months in the program. the acquisition of research grants and contracts allows me to support students throughout their programs while providing them meaningful, community-engaged research, evaluation, scholar-activist, and consultation experiences. for myself, these grants and contracts may provide a summer salary or funds for equipment, software, and conference travel. and of course, these grants look good on our curriculum vitae and create opportunities for writing, publishing, and career advancement. at times, the team has experienced situations where the allure of a large grant or contract that would provide multi-year resources clouds our judgement and brings forth a form of collective rationalization that threatens our social justice purpose (goods internal) in search of increased financial security and advancement (goods external). we utilize an informal decision-making process to help us deliberate and do the type of ethical discernment necessary to try to make the “right” decisions about funded project opportunities while acknowledging http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 the futility in attempting to remain pure and free of contradiction. to align ourselves ethically with community toward the goal of correcting structural injustices, we strive to directly take on these ethical and political contradictions (kivell et al., 2017). our decision-making process is designed to make us uncomfortable and challenge us to reckon with larger questions: is our financial stability, comfort, power, or social rewards more important to us than social justice and racial equity? does applying for or accepting this financial support make us complicit in upholding and further perpetuating harmful and oppressive social structures? in what ways does our livelihood depend on us not seeing? constraints of the social-institutional context dokecki (1996) calls this tension between goods internal and external a “ubiquitous tragicomic issue in professional life: practices of every sort … must be economically sound in order to survive, to exist to pursue their internal goods” (p 21). but beyond the inherent contradictions in balancing goods internal (fighting for social justice) and goods external (paying the rent and power bill), we also must be honest about that fact that for most of us, our practices are embedded in a social-intuitional context that values and legitimizes certain types of actions over others. we often come to our community projects “by way of the powers that be” (martiń-baró, 1994, p. 29). beals et al. (2021) make this point with appealing clarity when they assert that “community psychology sits at the intersections of the academic and the nonprofit industrial complex” (p. 9). energy and resources for social change are redirected to bureaucratic structures (topdown, committees, executive boards, etc.) that promote the status quo rather than grassroots structures that challenge dominant norms, structures, and institutions... (p.9) nonprofits and the agencies that fund them share certain common features that bolster the status quo due to their structural position. they attempt to avoid politics by empowering well-trained professionals to manage away social problems (fong & naschek, 2021). these institutions “systematically white-out the structural and historic causes of injustice and inequity” (fine, 2016, p. 349, emphasis in original) and not only fail to fix injustice but also replicate it within the structures themselves (spade, 2020). we face a contradiction when we invest our time, energy, and resources endorsing or reproducing dominant beliefs and actions aligned with and benefitting from the academic and nonprofit industrial contexts that have roots in settler colonial logics. for example, i strongly denounce the neo-liberalization of academia while participating in and benefitting from some of the very structures, practices, and processes that feed the neoliberal beast. academics like me work in settings that constrain intellectual agency and limit political activity and views unpopular with university administrators, governing boards, and politicians (ladson-billings & donnor, 2005; seedat et al., 2001). our academic training is too often designed to equip us to wield the language, tools, frameworks, and techniques of power in service to conservative agendas (collins, 2013). when our livelihoods depend on legitimacy within these systems, we may be reluctant to risk our professional prestige and income by rocking the boat too much. bourdieu’s (1980) theory of “habitus” or socialized norms or dispositions that guide behavior and thinking accounts for some of the tensions and contradictions that arise in our practice and helps explain how we can resist power and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 domination in some contexts and express complicity in others. many of us have experienced frustration, discomfort, and value conflicts partnering with funding agencies, service nonprofits, government offices, and community coalitions where problematic framing of problems, lack of structural analysis, and unrealistic theories of change all but guarantee nothing of significance will change. yet we often stay in the relationships employing various tactics to justify our participation including (unconscious) repression, (subconscious) rationalization, ambivalence, self-deception, (conscious) lying, or attempts at compromise (berliner et al., 2016). operating in this social-institutional context exerts a powerful yet often unexamined influence on our practice. the multifaceted pressures that come with being entangled with these systems mean that it is often easier to ignore or rationalize the ways in which we are complicit and keep doing what is “acceptable” (rappaport, 1981). evoking sarason (1976), this reality demands a critique of the unexamined ways our practice too often aligns with funding agencies and nonprofits that colonize and the ways in which we confuse these opportunities with the social justice needs of communities (see also trickett, 2015; trickett & beehler, 2016). although writing about decolonization in education specifically, nina asher’s question is relevant to our understanding of contradictions inherent community psychology practice in this institutionalized context: “how do we break out of recreating, recirculating and transmitting colonizing educational structures and practices when we ourselves are enmeshed in the same” (2009, p. 72–73)? even as we strive to contribute to the reduction of oppressive hierarchies and inequalities, we are part of institutional structures and systems that reproduce the very injustices we seek to upend (sandwick et al., 2018). a familiar example? over the past decade, the epsa research team has clearly been guilty of thinking we can contribute to social transformation by aligning ourselves with local funding agencies, powerful nonprofit organizations, and local government offices. our theory of change has historically rested on the mistaken assumption that transformative social change can be accomplished through these systems. recently we completed a three-year evaluation of a comprehensive community health initiative in two local communities under a grant funded by a local health foundation. like many similar efforts in communities, this place-based effort utilized (at least on the surface) a collective impact (kania & kramer, 2010) approach and brought a range of local stakeholders together around a comprehensive community change agenda with the goal to “produce fundamental community-wide changes that materially improve the long-term health and quality of life of community residents”. we had a previous relationship with the foundation and knew many of the organizational partners so it seemed likely that we would be able to wield some influence over the focus of the initiative by employing a collaborative, action research and developmental evaluation approach and acting as critical friends (evans, 2015; langhout, 2015) to deepen problem analysis, challenge victim-blaming theories of change, and support ongoing critical learning in action. unsurprisingly, this didn’t pan out as we envisioned. we were brought on as evaluators after the initiative had already been in motion for three years and the original evaluation team was fired, so we didn’t get to play a part in the planning stage. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 we should have been tipped off early on to the acritical and apolitical nature of this initiative when we saw that the terms “equity”, “disparity”, “racism”, or “social justice” did not appear in the original request for applications and consequentially did not make it into the two community action plans in any substantive way. we also quickly came to realize that there was no meaningful engagement and leadership by community residents most affected by the very health issues the initiative was seeking to address. the effort was dominated by service providers who, as expected, focused on the lack of, or limited access to services as the main problem and more or different programs and services as the solution. our efforts to nudge the coalition leaders and participants toward a deeper systemic and structural analysis of the issues and the inclusion and development of “impacted leaders” (brown, 2017) were largely resisted or ignored. ultimately, we settled into a more traditional role as external evaluators as the initiative chugged along replicating ameliorative programs and services seeking to change black and latinx people’s health behaviors while continuing to ignore the systemic and structural inequities that drive health disparities (see benjamins et al., 2021; williams & sternthal, 2010). we will save a full analysis of this project what went wrong and implications for community practice for another day. however, the team has done a lot of reflecting and soul-searching about this three-year entanglement that mainly centers around a few questions to help us make smarter decisions about our involvement in future community research and action: (a) should we even have considered taking this on in the first place given the knowledge that this community change effort was primarily a topdown funder-driven initiative? (b) to what degree did our desire for “goods external” cloud our judgement and drive the decision to get involved? (c) in what ways were we guilty of strengthening oppressive structures by our complicity in a project that drew attention away from them? (d) in what ways were we part of the problem by operating under a naïve theory of change that arrogantly assumed we can work alongside funding agencies led by white people and service nonprofits to turn a top-down approach to health promotion into a grassroots transformative solution that centers on the interrogation and elimination of racialized community health disparities? this type of reflection forces us to acknowledge that the things funding agencies (mostly led by white folks) like the one described above care about “are often the things least likely to change the systems of oppression and exploitation that make philanthropy necessary” (lee, 2021, para 8). we must embrace the contradictions, consider the consistency or inconsistency of our commitments, and discover what may be productive in them. the richness of activist community praxis comes precisely from forthright engagement with the ethicalpolitical contradictions of our work (hale, 2008). martiń-baró (1994) acknowledged that this type of reflection is difficult, yet necessary if we want to avoid being complicit in the promotion of ideologies and practices that maintain societal inequities. his writings challenge us to critically confront the social system our work is embedded within. “the most radical choice” we face he suggested, “concerns the disjunction between an accommodation to a social system that has benefitted us personally and a critical confrontation with that system” (p. 46). it is challenging to figure out how to position ourselves “alongside the dominated rather than alongside the dominator” (p. 29; emphasis added). how can we utilize our professional competencies, resources, networks, and privilege to work hand in hand with community groups for social justice http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 rather than social maintenance? we must acknowledge and problematize our existing “dependency relationships” (sarason, 1976) and complicity with systems of power, and its institutions, and at the same time, work towards accountability to ensure these systems are undone (fernandez et al., 2021). activist community praxis why activist community praxis? we cannot navigate the contradictions described above and remain fully committed to antioppression and social justice if we do not understand that our community practice demands of us a clear declaration of where we stand (freire, 2000). we must be honest about our political commitments. in the spirit of scholar-activism, i suggest that in addition to grounding our community practice in critical and decolonial theorizing we need to embrace our role as social justice activists so that the political and the professional are more closely intertwined. activism refers to actions that challenge existing social and systemic practices rooted in inequity (arredondo & perez, 2003). social activists are defined as anyone who acts in a way to create a more equitable world (jones, 2007; sloan, 2013). we can enact our activism through active engagements with, and in service of, progressive grassroots social movements (mcinerney, 2021; sudbury & okazawa-rey, 2009). hope, pender, and riddick (2019) draw on curtin and mcgarty (2016) to highlight three characteristics that distinguish activists from nonactivists. first, activists express sympathy for a cause and are more susceptible to being mobilized to actions that support that cause. second, political processes and outcomes are salient to activists, which yield a sense of social and political responsibility for a cause (curtin et al., 2010). last, activists have a politicized collective identity, and belong to or are allied with oppressed groups who seek to counter policies and practices that disproportionally support privileged groups. (hope et al., 2019, p. 186). taking an activist orientation in our praxis means developing a politicized collective identity and acknowledging that our community practice is unavoidably a political project (dutta, 2016). an activist community praxis is a decolonial praxis that stands for the pursuit of justice – racial, economic, gender, sexual, ability, etc. – and is guided by a set of commitments that make it anti-oppressive, anti-capitalist, antiracist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, antiableist and against the prison industrial complex and state sponsored violence. it is praxis because theory, practice, and reflection are integrated, and one does not precede nor hold greater value than the others (freire, 2000; glass, 2001). theory (including knowledge “rooted in the politics of resistance and liberation”; cervantes-soon, 2014, p. 98) is embedded in reflection and action, and action is embedded in reflection and theory. praxis is “ethical, self-aware, responsive and accountable action, which reflects dimensions of knowing, doing and being” (white, 2007, p. 226). it is critical theorizing and conscious reflection both on and in practice. praxis is built on a commitment to social justice and recognizes the importance of considering how our actions always get expressed within specific historical, sociocultural, political, and institutional contexts (freire, 2000; white, 2007). the activist community psychologist helps to expose, subvert, and challenge social injustices through a combination of activism and praxis. activist community psychology http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 praxis is truly counterhegemonic an everyday politics of resistance and a refusal to be complicit with the systems and structures that create and maintain inequality often in commonplace and practical ways (christens et al., 2007; daigle & ramirez, 2019; giddens, 1984). it is a “refusal of traditional and dominant forms of normalcy, of neoliberalism, of capitalism, of racism, of patriarchy, of heteronormativity, of happiness, and of oppressive structures in society that limit the imaginations of historically exploited and oppressed people” (cann & demeulenaere, 2020, p. 99; see also dutta, 2018). any community practice inconsistent with an activist stance is what freire (2000) calls “false generosity” which flows from and dependent on maintaining injustice where true generosity “consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes” of it (p. 45). how do we break out? consistent honest interrogation of the inadequacy or contradictory nature of our actions can risk paralyzing us, yet we must do it anyway. how do we break out of recreating, recirculating, and transmitting colonizing community structures and practices? at the risk of substituting “my thinking for your imagination and self-analysis” (sarason, 1976, p. 257), i want to finish with some practices that are emerging in my own community research and action in close partnership with students and community partners that may in some small way contribute to our collective imagination regarding activist cp praxis and related competencies. as i offer these last thoughts, i again acknowledge my privileged position and recognize that many of you reading this may not have the luxury to explore some of these approaches due to the level of precarity you experience in your specific practice contexts. i hope to at least spark your imagination. i want to highlight critical reflexivity, decolonization, becoming co-conspirators and accomplices, and disruption as possible intersecting activist community practices that can be antidotes to some of the limitations and contradictions we face in our community research and action. i agree with dzidic et al. (2013) that a focus on competencies in cp (competencies, 2012) can be problematic because of the tendency for them to be acontextual, bureaucratic, and reductionist. instead of focusing on the development of specific detectable individual competencies, the focus should be on “developing an orientation that fosters skill development through a process of reflective learning through action – a way of being, not a way of doing” (dzidic et al. 2013, p. 6, emphasis in original). for example, through activist community praxis with community partners organizing against anti-black racism, we can, with sufficient engagement, reflection, and dialogue, gain a critical structural analysis of race, white supremacy, institutional racism, and anti-blackness (thomas et al., 2020; wilson et al., 2020). we can connect our activist community praxis experiences to the literature to gain practical fluency in critical race, black and chicana feminist, liberation, postcolonial, and queer theory and better be able to make visible and co-interrogate histories and structures of injustice and resistance (evans et al., 2016; fine, 2016; fine & ruglis, 2009; thomas et al., 2020; weis & fine, 2012; wilson et al., 2020). praxis is the reason for theory and the way through which we test ideas and build practical knowledge with others (dokecki, 1996; wicker, 1989). ultimately, being “competent” in our praxis is about how we learn in action under conditions of complexity and amidst swirling contradictions. it is honoring the development of practical wisdom and being mindful about how and with whom we apply http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 our talents and resources and to what ends. mary watkins (2019) amplifies walter mignolo’s calls for “epistemic disobedience” to “disrupt the evangelization of european american approaches” (watkins, 2019, p. 208). we can tick all the current cp competency boxes and still uphold and legitimize oppressive systems. are we using our knowledge and process skills for social justice or social maintenance? critical reflexivity in advancing a politics of national liberation in mexico, the zapatistas described their approach as caminar preguntando – to walk questioning (haiven & khasnabish, 2010; khasnabish, 2008; watkins, 2019). critical reflexivity is to walk questioning, closely examining how we are situated in the historical, political, and social context of our community practice and grappling with our own power and privilege (case, 2017; dzidic et al. 2013; fernandez, 2018; fernandez et al. 2021; fisher et al. 2007; langhout, 2016; langhout et al. 2016; montero, 2017; reyes cruz & sonn, 2011; sonn & quayle, 2013). activist community praxis rests on a foundation of critical reflexivity which involves taking pains to understand one’s own positionality with a focus on intersectionality and the effects of this on those with whom one works. a commitment to reflexivity is a partial antidote to naïve relationships that are insufficiently conscious of power differentials and unwittingly reinforce the structures causing suffering. attention to reflexivity encourages us to problematize our encounters with others and interrogate how we might be benefitting from our privilege at others’ expense. (watkins, 2019, p. 17) ethical reflective practice is already well established as an essential competency in cp (competencies, 2012) yet could be made more critical by including awareness of wider historical, social, political aspects and power relationships of practice contexts. this competency should also engage an affective political lens and challenge us to “make visible our heart-work” (langhout, 2015, p. 269) welcoming and tapping into our emotions such as righteous anger. committing to persistent critical reflexivity also provides opportunities for reflectivegenerative ethical discernment as it relates to the navigating the contradictions mentioned earlier. this commitment allows us to better gauge whose interests and power are at stake in particular community actions while exposing and problematizing our own relationship with dominant forms of structural injustice. decolonization one thing we can commit to as a community of researchers and practitioners (especially those of us who are white) is to lean into the decolonial community psychology project transmitted by our cp colleagues of color around the world and become humble, response-able learners of decolonial praxis (dutta, 2018; dutta et al., 2021; fernández et al., 2021; torre & fine, 2021). decoloniality is not just a different mode of critical thought, it is a standpoint, project, and practice that fuels activist community praxis (mignolo & walsh, 2018). as community psychologists, we are so wired to find helpful pragmatic solutions and do not adequately commit to a deep understanding of coloniality of power, knowledge, and being. we must pry open our eyes “to the psychological, community, and ecological sequalae of the last five hundred years of colonialism, capitalism, racism, and ongoing neoliberalism” (watkins, 2019, p. 2). decolonizing our community practice means openly addressing the pillars of colonialism including white supremacy, racism, sexism, and capitalism (chaudhuri et al., 2021). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 we are rich with an amazing bounty of recent decolonial and critical scholarship in cp that highlights the gaps in our disciplinary thinking and practices and offers compelling antidotes to research, teaching, and action that maintains or is agnostic to structural injustice (e.g. beals et al., 2021; dutta, 2016, 2018; fernández, 2018; fernández et al., 2021; dugeon et al., 2020; langhout, 2015, 2016; langhout et al., 2016; lykes et al., 2018; montero et al., 2017; silva & the students for diversity now, 2018; singh et al., 2018; sonn et al., 2017, to name but a few). we should make ample space for the voices “of community psychologists of color who are contributing to and transforming the discipline, while forming their own professional identities…” (fernández, 2018, p. 224) and helping us to question ours. becoming co-conspirators and accomplices in our community praxis we must make clear that we are accountable to marginalized, oppressed communities most impacted by structural injustice (fine & torre, 2021; kesten et al., 2017; o’neill, 1989; wilson et al., 2020). we can seek out black led racial justice organizations and coalitions and other community-based social justice groups already working against injustice to build long-term relationships and share our resources while accepting their leadership and lived expertise (gordon da cruz, 2017; steinitz & mishler, 2009; thomas et al., 2020). i challenge the naïve illusion (that i’ve held for too long) that we can work with privileged groups, organizations, coalitions, or funding agencies that do not center impacted leaders and somehow help them find the error of their ways and move toward centering equity and challenging power. our praxis must move closer to frontline communities who understand the nuances of structural injustice that those of us with more privileged lives do not (fine & torre, 2021). this type of engagement with social justice groups also means going beyond consulting, evaluation, and technical assistance types of contractual relationships to fully demonstrate commitment to the cause. for example, the epsa team has fully committed to the work of a local, black-led youth organization. while engaged in a youth participatory action research project with them, we have also joined with them to speak at school board meetings, helped knock on doors and speak with residents during community canvassing campaigns, and served on the planning committee for their annual fundraiser. one danger that looms in our efforts to accompany and build solidarity with marginalized groups is that we risk becoming part of the “ally industrial complex” (indigenous action media, 2014). like many well-meaning “helpers” in community settings, our work for social change is connected to our careers and livelihoods. as discussed above, we’ll have to navigate these contradictions and find ways to move beyond allyship to become co-conspirators and accomplices through activist community praxis. this means getting more courageous in our praxis and not shying away from being accomplices to the more radical actions of social movement organizations that may make us uncomfortable. for example, we can accompany, amplify, and support with our resources, community organizing and directaction efforts for police-free schools and defunding of police, prison abolition, land reform, mutual aid, worker cooperatives, housing justice and tenant rights, transformative justice, disability justice, reproductive justice, economic justice, and community control of municipal budgets. we need to stop being complicit in propagating community interventions designed by academic elites and nonprofit gatekeepers that do not directly target racist and unjust policies and systems. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 disruption one tactic of activist community praxis is disruption. evans (2015) suggests that playing the role of critical friend is one way to problematize and disrupt ameliorative thinking and action in community settings. for bond (1999), disruption involves “making visible the perspectives and experiences of those who have been kept at the margins... labeling privilege and challenging values and assumptions” (p. 350). but disruption can also mean directly exposing and challenging abuses of power and subverting and redistributing structural power in the settings where we have influence. singh et al. (2018) describe how those of us in academic settings can “exercise our epistemic power to train future scholars committed to dismantling structures that benefit from the oppression of marginalized communities” (p. 386). disruption occurs anytime power is questioned, and the struggles of oppressed people are made primary (cann & demeulenaere, 2020). we can wield all available institutional power we have to detach from white hegemonic positivist transactional ways of practicing (tuck & yang, 2014) and disrupt imbalances of power “while remaining especially vigilant toward the destructive allure of the elitism and hierarchy that surround us” (hale, 2008, p. 18). mary watkins (2019) highlighted the work of critical anthropologist nancy scheper-hughes (1992, 1995) and the role we can play as “negative workers” “a species of class traitor -… who colludes with the powerless to identify their needs against the interests of the bourgeois institution” (watkins, 2015, p. 209). as negative workers, we can disrupt, refuse, and resist in in ways that create cracks in mainstream institutions and systems that allow for opportunities to address power differentials and harmful policies. for example, we can make part of our activist community praxis exposing the complicity of the academic and non-profit industrial complex in perpetuating social and economic injustice. in addition to overt actions to disrupt, refuse, and resist, tuck and yang (2011) highlight the ways in which we can also engage in covert everyday acts of resistance that test and erode power that “might include sabotage, feigned ignorance, false compliance, foot dragging, and theft” (scott, 1985, as cited in tuck & yang, 2011, p. 524). conclusion: seeking emancipatory relevance borrowing from thomas teo’s (2009) scholarship in critical psychology, i believe our community practice should be judged by its emancipatory relevance – the degree to which we are contributing to the collective effort to resist and overthrow oppressive social conditions. we must be relevant to struggles for equality and social justice or risk sustaining injustice. i acknowledge that these ideas for an activist community praxis are more tidily articulated here than most of us experience in the real-world locations of our engaged research and action “where we are challenged to deal with the complexities, contradictions, and binaries…” (suffla et al., 2015, p. 14). these tensions and contradictions are not easily navigated, yet we must recognize and mine the radical possibilities inhabiting this “not-yet” space in the constant process of becoming in an everunfinished process of solidarity (bloch, 1995; stoetzler & yuval-davis, 2002). engaging with radical imagination allows us to then return to the present to shake up our thinking and help us remember how things could be radically different (haiven & khasnabish, 2010; sarason, 1976). in the end, the power of our activist community praxis to affect change “depends on the dosage of its break with the dominant http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 culture” (martiń-baró, 1994, p. 37). the dominant culture of capitalism and neoliberalism, of our disciplines, and of our social-institutional contexts exerts a powerful influence on how we choose to act in the world for social justice. each of us inevitably falls short of consistently living the values and politics we commit to. this is the tragic nature of our praxis. and yet, might we be willing to recognize the ways in which we are complicit in the maintenance of structural injustice and begin to imagine ways we can practice differently? references asher, n. 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(2020). racism and applications of critical race and intersectional theories in community psychology. in m. riemer, s. m. reich, s. d. evans, g. nelson, & i. prilleltensky (eds.), community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and well-being (3rd ed., pp. 441–456). red globe pressmacmillian. acknowledgements i would like to thank dr. leigh rauk and kativon makary for early help conceptualizing this paper. thanks also to andrea botero for helpful feedback on previous drafts. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://scra27.org/files/8915/9735/2183/scra_call_to_action_on_anti-blackness.pdf http://scra27.org/files/8915/9735/2183/scra_call_to_action_on_anti-blackness.pdf http://scra27.org/files/8915/9735/2183/scra_call_to_action_on_anti-blackness.pdf https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-007-9043-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-007-9043-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00922630 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00922630 https://doi.org/10.1177/0022146510383838 https://doi.org/10.1177/0022146510383838 community practice bulletin addressing a frequent practitioner question through synthesizing research & practice wisdom lb klein1 alcohol use is implicated in 50 to 70% of campus sexual assaults (abbey, 2002; carr & vandeusen, 2004; krebs et al., 2009). this intersection of sexual assault and alcohol on campus has led to great interest in alcohol’s role in sexual assault. while guidance from organizations ranging from the american college health association to the white house task force to protect students from sexual assault to the centers for disease control recommends that campuses address this intersection, there is limited concrete guidance as to how campus practitioners should actually do so. to address this critical gap, my colleagues and i are completing a study that uses an interdisciplinary community participatory approach to synthesize the best available research and practice wisdom on this topic. there are four aspects of our approach that may be useful to others. first, we assembled an interdisciplinary research team representing social work, psychology, student affairs, public affairs, and public health perspectives. so often, we end up working within silos based on discipline, so this allowed us to escape our echo chambers and embrace a collaborative 1 university of north carolina at chapel hill school of social work approach. we went to the literature in both our disciplines and others’ to gain a full breadth of what is available while also choosing areas that would benefit from systematic review. we knew that we did not have the resources or timeline to fill all those gaps, but we wanted to make sure that we could illuminate not only the research gaps but share with practitioners what key areas of practice need more evaluation and innovation. second, we aligned closely with a community of practice, campus advocates and prevention professionals association (cappa) that would connect us with over 500 practice experts. the qualitative portion of the study involved interviewing campusbased sexual assault prevention educators from across the united states. in campus sexual assault prevention, there is often a gap between researchers and practitioners, and we sought to close that gap as much as possible in our methods. we developed the interview guide in partnership with the organization’s leadership and piloted it with members. we not only asked them about their perspectives, decision-making, and programming but also asked them if they global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 knew about others who were doing promising or innovative work on addressing alcohol’s role in sexual assault. we worked closely with this group throughout the analysis process to ensure that the themes we identified resonated with their experiences. third, when we began the project, we asked our community partners how they would want to receive the findings and guidance we would develop. they mentioned that they did not frequently conduct searches of peerreviewed literature, as they often felt those articles provided findings but not tangible next steps. therefore, in addition to producing peer-reviewed publications, we worked from the beginning to assemble a freely available toolkit that practitioners could access via pdf. this toolkit will be available in early 2018. because of our close partnership with the community of practice, we were then able to create a dissemination plan that would reach those who needed the information the most including through listservs, blogposts, webinars, and other venues. lastly, we engaged an expert advisory group who are helping us create the toolkit at all stages. through an iterative process, we are working through the content, format, dissemination, and language included in the toolkit to ensure that it represents the interdisciplinary nature of the issue and provides practitioners evidence-informed and practice wisdom-driven strategies for addressing alcohol’s role in sexual assault. while closely engaging stakeholders throughout this entire process has sometimes been time-consuming, it has been essential to ensuring that our research is grounded not only in what is searchable in journals but what is happening on college and university campuses on the ground. our process not only led to a larger wealth of information but also established trust with the professionals who are doing the day-to-day work to prevent sexual assault on campus, leading to more honest answers and greater likelihood that they will use our toolkit in practice. our preliminary findings show that campusbased practitioners want to implement evidence-based prevention practices to address alcohol’s role in sexual assault but they often lack findings that can be integrated into their practice. we are looking forward to completing this process and creating venues for continued practitioner feedback in hopes that we can develop interventions to further address alcohol’s role in sexual assault on campus in our future research. we hope that these practitioner-engaged research methods can help strengthen not only the quality of our research but the likelihood that it will be adopted into practice. special thanks to co-investigator andrew j. rizzo, a social psychology phd student at the university of new hampshire and research assistant rebecca woofter, a public health student at washington university in st. louis as well as to prevention innovations research center at the university of new hampshire for funding this project through an innovative research award. references abbey, a. (2002). alcohol-related sexual assault: a common problem among college students. journal of studies of alcohol, 14, 118-128. carr, j.l. & vandeusen, k.m. (2004). risk factors for male sexual aggression on college campuses. journal of family violence, 19(5), 279-289. krebs, c.p., lindquist, c.h., warner, t.d., fisher, b.s., & martin, s.l. (2009). college women’s experiences with physically forced, alcoholor other drug-enabled, and drugfacilitated sexual assault before and since http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 entering college. journal of american college health, 57(6), 639-647. this is one of a series of bulletins, formerly titled theory into action, highlighting the use of community psychology in practice. comments, suggestions, and questions are welcome. please direct them to tabitha underwood at underwoodtabitha@gmail.com. http://www.gjcpp.org/ toward the future: a conceptual review and call for research and action with online communities crystal n. steltenpohl, jordan reed, and christopher b. keys author biographies: crystal n. steltenpohl, is an assistant professor of psychology and founder of the online technologies lab at the university of southern indiana. as a scholar, gamer, and participant in online worlds, her major research interests revolve around how we interact with various technologies, especially those that house online communities. she is particularly interested in understanding how technologies influence communities, the self, and health behaviors. jordan reed, is a graduate student in the community psychology program at depaul university. he is a founding member of the online technologies lab, receiving a scra community mini-grant with dr. steltenpohl. he examines metastereotypes and community prototypes held by members of the fighting game community. christopher keys, is professor emeritus and former chair of the psychology departments at the university of illinois at chicago and depaul university. he was also the founding associate dean for research and faculty development in the college of science and health at depaul. a fellow of apa, mpa, and scra, chris served as president of the society for community research and action. he has received the scra distinguished contribution to community psychology theory and research. chris is a co-founder of the online technologies lab. chris enjoyed playing video games when his sons were growing up. recommended citation: steltenpohl, c., n., reed, j., & keys, c., b. (2020). toward the future: a conceptual review and call for research and action with online communities. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(1), 1 – 28. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: dr. crystal n. steltenpohl, college of liberal arts 3046, 8600 university boulevard, university of southern indiana, evansville, in, 47712, cnsteltenp@usi.edu. http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:cnsteltenp@usi.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 toward the future: a conceptual review and call for research and action with online communities abstract the internet allows people to connect with virtually anyone across the globe, building communities based on shared interests, experiences, and goals. despite the potential for furthering our understanding of communities more generally through exploring them in online contexts, online communities have not generally been a focus of community psychologists. a conceptual, state-of-the-art review of eight major community psychology journals revealed 23 descriptive or empirical articles concerning online communities have been published in the past 20 years. these articles are primarily descriptive and can be organized into four categories: community building and maintenance (seven articles, 30.43%), community support (six articles, 26.09%), norms and attitudes (six articles, 26.09%), and advocacy (four articles, 17.39%). these articles reflect a promising start to understanding how we can utilize the internet to build and enhance communities. they also indicate how much further we have to go, both in understanding online communities and certain concepts regarding community psychology more generally. community psychologists involved in practice and applied settings specifically may benefit from understanding online communities as they become integral components of advocacy, community organizing, and everyday life. the concept of “community” is multifaceted and has evolved alongside communities themselves throughout history (krause & montenegro, 2017). the advent of the internet is considered by some the largest increase in expressive capability in human history (shirky, 2009). fully 95% of u.s. teens have access to a smartphone, a strong trend across gender, race, socioeconomic status, and parents’ level of education (anderson & jiang, 2018). as of 2019, 73% of adults aged 65 and older use the internet, while 100% adults aged 18-29 use the tool. (pew research center, 2019). our understanding of communities—and the concept of community itself— are being transformed and will continue to change as the use of the internet continues to grow (castells, 2001; nip; 2004; reich, 2010). the internet is profoundly changing how we create and interact with knowledge (wesch, 2009) and how we build and maintain personal relationships and communities. much like there is no universal agreement on what makes a community, there is no universal agreement on what it means to have an online community, although a recent attempt suggests the following definition: an online community is constituted by people who meet together in order to address instrumental, affective goals and at times to create joint artefacts. interaction between members is mediated by internet technology. in order to constitute community members’ need to: show commitment to others; experience a sense of connection (e.g., members need to identify themselves as members); exhibit reciprocity (e.g., the rights of other members are recognised); develop observable, sustained patterns of interaction with others; and show the necessary agency to maintain and develop interaction. community creates http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 consequences which are of value for members (hammond, 2017). social networking sites like facebook and reddit often are the platforms for online communities, but users of those sites may also not take part in, regularly interact with, feel connected to, or identify with a particular or any online group or community. notwithstanding disagreement around what communities truly are, madara (1997) argued community is more easily found, chosen, or started online than face-to-face. for example, people with chronic illnesses or disabilities might benefit from online communities because such communities are often more readily accessible, and online community members can be judged more by their contributions and not their status or appearance (cole & griffiths, 2007). within practice settings, community psychologists have explored online training (arcidiacono, procentese, & baldi, 2010; scull, kupersmidt, & weatherholt, 2017) and social networking sites (lenzi et al., 2015). others have discussed how community psychologists might create mutual-help forums (pita, 2012) or online forums where community members can discuss upcoming and recent programs (shull & berkowitz, 2005), and use social media (brunson & valentine, 2010; crichton & burmeister, 2017; jimenez, sánchez, mcmahon, & viola, 2016; kia-keating, santacrose, & liu, 2017; tebes, 2016). still others have explored how social media can be used in harmful ways (garaigordobil, 2017; santisteban & gámezguadix, 2017). a small but inconsistently growing body of literature within community psychology has focused specifically on the emergence of online communities (figure 1). in the handbook of community psychology (bond, serrano-garcía, & keys, 2017), relevant literature regarding online communities comes from outside of community psychology journals (figueroa sarriera & gonzález hilario, 2017; krause & montenegro, 2017). in this article, we examine existing community psychology literature and suggest future directions for practitioners and researchers. figure 1. historical publishing of community psychology articles on online communities http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 the central questions for this modified conceptual, state-of-the-art literature review (grant & booth, 2009) are: 1. how much has been published in major community psychology journals regarding online communities? 2. what are the major content areas community psychologists have studied regarding online communities? method while we are aware of literature on online communities outside of community psychology, our focus in this review is on work published in community psychology journals. we chose to look solely at community psychology-related journals as they serve as an approximate proxy for the importance of online communities to the field. additionally, it would be difficult to impossible to follow every community psychologist’s publishing record to find if they had possibly published on online communities in a journal outside of community psychology. in short, we seek to identify how much has been published and what is known about online communities in english language community psychology journals and what major themes have been explored. since we are interested in the number of articles published to date as well as their content, we aim to provide a modified conceptual, state-of-the art literature review (grant & booth, 2009). to this end, the first author searched for the terms “online community,” “virtual community,” “internet community,” and “social media” in the following eight major english language community psychology journals: american journal of community psychology, australian community psychologist, community psychology in global perspective, global journal of community psychology practice, journal of community & applied social psychology, journal of community psychology, journal of prevention and intervention in the community, and psychosocial intervention. any article published before or during 2018 was considered. to be included in this literature review, articles needed to discuss how people use technology platforms intended for or with potential for online communities, including but not limited to forums, listservs, and social media. we were not interested in papers strictly about online usage (e.g. using the internet to find information). after identifying an article, we reviewed the abstract for relevance, then the full article for those selected from their abstracts. finally, references were reviewed for any potentially missing articles. all three authors reviewed each article for inclusion and classification. articles were classified by all three authors inductively, derived from the themes discovered within the articles rather than predetermined conceptualizations (braun & clarke, 2006). the authors established reliability through consensus; all three authors had to agree an article belonged in a category. taken together, the authors had significant experience with qualitative research coding, with preparation of literature reviews and with online communities. these qualities support the credibility of the review process and the results presented here. an article could cross multiple categories. for example, it is easy to imagine a study about how communication norms vary across advocacy groups or an intervention testing how different community building and maintenance strategies affect members’ perceptions of support. we assigned papers to the category most closely aligned with the study’s examined variables and/or outcomes. thus, a paper examining communication norms among members of an online support group would be considered a publication on communication norms, not community support. results http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 in response to the first research question regarding the number of publications on online communities in community psychology journals, this literature search returned 23 descriptive or empirical articles published in community psychology-related journals anytime between 1997 and 2018. the distribution is somewhat bimodal; six of the articles (26.09%) were published between 1997 and 2002; no articles were published between 2003 and 2008; and 17 articles (73.91%) were published in 2010 or later (see figure 1). also, no articles were found prior to 1997. in response to the second research question regarding the topics considered, four categories emerged: community building and maintenance (seven articles, 30.43%), community support (six articles, 26.09%), norms and attitudes (six articles, 26.09%), and advocacy (four articles, 17.39%) (see table 1). community building and maintenance refers to the creation and upkeep of communities. community support is defined as care and assistance—emotional, instrumental, tangible, or financial—given and received by community members. the norms and attitudes theme include ways members of a community discuss ideas with one another, communicate what is appropriate in those contexts, and think about and interact with outside groups. finally, advocacy means attempts by a group to garner public support for a cause or policy important to their community. the results described below outline the findings of the 23 articles we found. community building and maintenance the largest category, community building and maintenance, houses seven articles addressing the creation and conservation of communities (see table 1). researchers explored a message board for third culture and missionary children (loomis & friesen, 2011), children on childrenfocused social media sites (reich, black, & korobkova, 2014), older chinese migrants communicating with friends and family in china (li, hodgetts, & sonn, 2014), users of social media sites like facebook (niland, lyons, goodwin, & hutton, 2015; reich, 2010), world of warcraft (wow) players (o’connor, longman, white, & obst, 2015), and technology use among people experiencing homelessness in madrid (vázquez, panadero, martín, & del val diaz-pescador, 2015). most of these studies are descriptive in nature, although one—reich (2010)—directly tested hypotheses. loomis & friesen (2011) studied an online community of adult “third culture kids,” people who grew up in a culture other than their parents’ native cultures or the one in which they have a passport. members came together from across the globe to influence the website’s functioning, community regulations, and norms; provide support for one another; and develop sense of community. they disclosed life updates and stories with one another, engaged in efforts to meet with one another offline, assigned ambassadors to recruit new members, and shared information. similarly, reich et al.’s (2014) three-year longitudinal study examined how users build community in nine online communities aimed at children (e.g. club penguin, webkinz, gaia). even when online communities were designed to restrict communication, users still found creative ways to share personal information and emotions with one another, show affiliation, and gather in large groups. reich and colleagues identified three key components contributing to sense of virtual community: membership, i.e., a sense of belonging; influence, i.e., the sense one affects the community and its members; and immersion, i.e., a state of flow during community navigation. these studies highlight the ability to form communities even when members do not know each other offline, and even with restrictive site policies limiting communication. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 table 1. articles included in review year author(s) title journal community methods findings 1997 salem, bogat, & reid mutual help goes on-line journal of community psychology people with depression coding of 1,863 posts on an online mutual help group similar to face-to-face groups: high levels of support, acceptance, positive feelings unique to online posts: more emotional support, more disclosure 1998 dunham et al computermediated social support: single young mothers as a model system american journal of community psychology single young mothers descriptive analyses of posts on an online support intervention individual differences in participation were associated with social isolation. 98% of replies provided positive social support. most replies provided emotional support, followed by informational and tangible support. there was evidence for the development of close personal relationships and sense of community. mothers who participated regularly reported less stress. 2000 klaw, dearmin huebsch, & humphreys communication patterns in an online mutual help group for problem drinkers journal of community psychology problem drinkers textual analysis of 376 randomly selected messages on online mutual help group consistent with face-to-face groups: infrequent conflict, supportive/warm communication most posts were by women, but no differences in communication patterns 2000 menon the 79-cent campaign journal of community practice mental health advocates description of listserv activity listserv was useful tool in mobilizing an effective campaign 2002 barrera, glasgow, mckay, boles, & feil do internet-based support interventions change perceptions of social support?: american journal of community psychology people with diabetes randomized trial: (a) diabetes information only, (b) personal self-management coach, (c) social increases in perceived support in two support conditions (c and d), largest effects in social support only intervention http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 an experimental trial of approaches for supporting diabetes selfmanagement support, (d) coach and support 2009 riley, rodham, & gavin doing weight: pro-ana and recovery identities in cyberspace journal of community & applied social psychology people suffering or recovering from anorexia discourse analysis of posts on a proana (105 posts) and a recovery website (107 posts) three forms of body descriptions: doing something with body, of body itself, and bodily experiences. on both sites, thin ideal was reinforced and valid claims of group membership were demonstrated. pro-ana group reframed health/appearance concerns as markers of success 2010 dyer, costello, & martin social support online: benefits and barriers to participation in an internet support group for heart patients the australian community psychologist cardiac patients survey of 120 online community members participation not associated with depression, anxiety, stress, perceived interpersonal support, or social network size. participation related to perceived benefits of using forum. participants who offer and receive support may experience greater satisfaction 2010 obst & starfurik online we are all able bodied: online psychological sense of community and social support found through membership of disability-specific websites journal of community & applied social psychology people with disabilities online survey administered to users of disabilityspecific online communities participants received moral support and personal advice online social support and feeling a sense of community positively associated with well-being in areas of personal relations and personal growth http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 promotes wellbeing for people living with a physical disability 2010 reich adolescents’ sense of community on myspace and facebook: a mixed-methods approach journal of community psychology young adults focus group and surveys of high school and college students use of these social networking sites represent networked individualism rather than online communities 2011 loomis & friesen where in the world is my community? it is online and around the world according to missionary kids journal of community psychology third culture individuals qualitative analysis of posts on online community participants developed a sense of community and provided social support for one another. they also influenced the website’s function, regulations, and norms. 2013 alberici & milesi the influence of the internet on the psychosocial predictors of collective action journal of community & applied social psychology young adults survey of participants of political events when online discussion frequency was high, politicized identity predicted collective action intention, and collective efficacy and morality supported collective action intention. when online discussion frequency was low, anger predicted collective action intention. 2013 whittaker & gillespie social networking sites: mediating the self and its communities journal of community & applied social psychology young adults analysis of 37 scottish adolescents’ bebo profiles users challenged single authorship norms of profiles and used creative language to obscure meaning from outsiders. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 2014 li, hodgetts, & sonn multiple senses of community among older chinese migrants to new zealand journal of community & applied social psychology older chinese immigrants to new zealand interviews with 32 older chinese migrants sense of community can be constructed through neighboring and supportive interactions in local contexts and through new media to engage with one’s home country 2014 reich, black, & korobkova connections and communities in virtual worlds designed for children journal of community psychology children three years of participant observation and content analysis of users of nine online communities for children users find creative ways to bypass security features to share personal information, create group membership, and build connections 2015 brady, young, & mcleod utilizing digital advocacy in community organizing: lessons learned from organizing in virtual spaces to promote worker rights and economic justice journal of community practice community organizers description of advocacy effort different social media tools are useful for different practice applications, and each have their benefits and drawbacks. while beneficial, social media is not enough; use must be paired with bootson-the-ground work. 2015 chong, zhang, mak, & pang social media as social capital of lgb individuals in hong kong: its relations with group membership, stigma, and mental well-being american journal of community psychology lgb individuals survey of 233 chinese lgb individuals in hong kong community surveillance, identity expression, and emotional support on social media instills sense of group membership and reduces stigma. social media may boost resilience amongst lgb individuals. 2015 niland, lyons, friendship work on facebook: journal of community young adults social constructionist social networking sites are primarily used for enjoying and investing in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 goodwin, & hutton young adults’ understandings and practices of friendship & applied social psychology thematic analysis of 12 focus groups with friend groups who use facebook friendships. friendship protection was used to maintain friends’ privacy. friends on facebook showed selfauthenticity through self-displays and preferred friendship activities. facebook broadens audience of friendship actions and provides constant access to friends. 2015 o’connor, longman, white, & obst sense of community, social identity and social support among players of massively multiplayer online games (mmogs): a qualitative analysis journal of community & applied social psychology world of warcraft players thematic analysis of 22 semistructured interviews with 22 australian wow players participants reported having sense of community and different social identities. they also receive social support from relationships with other players. 2015 vázquez, panadero, martín, & del val diazpescador access to new information and communication technologies among homeless people in madrid (spain) journal of community psychology homeless people in madrid analysis of 188 structured interviews new information and communication technologies are used by homeless people, but at much lower rates. differences exist across age groups, education levels, and nationality, negatively affecting the elderly, those with lower education levels, and those of spanish origin. 2016 kornbluh, watling neal, & ozer scaling-up youthled social justice efforts through an online schoolbased social network american journal of community psychology high school students engaged in youth-led participatory action social network analysis and interviews who students were connected with was more important than the proportion of communication partners students had with other students in the network. facilitators included receiving motivation and ideas from other students. barriers included a disconnect http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 research projects with class activities and divergences of projects across classrooms. 2018 bliuc, doan, & best sober social networks: the role of online support groups in recovery from alcohol addiction journal of community & applied social psychology online recovery support group computerized linguistic analysis of 257 posts made by 237 members self-stigma negatively predicts selfefficacy and wellbeing, social identification with a recovery identity mediates these relationships 2018 nic giolla easpaig an exploratory study of sexism in online gaming communities: mapping contested digital terrain community psychology in global perspective online gaming spaces issue network analysis of 26 blogs, comment sections, and discussion threads; 2 podcasts; 3 videos debates about sexism in gaming communities are centered around potential (mis)recognition of sexist behaviors within online contexts, mistaken emphasis on the gendered dimension of identity within interactions, and qualification to “count” and be heard on these issues. online spaces reproduce inequalities found in offline spaces. 2018 steltenpohl, reed, & keys do others understand us? fighting game community member perceptions of others’ views of the fgc global journal of community psychology practice fighting game community online survey of 496 fgc members (360 completed responses); quantitative and qualitative analysis of responses fgc members feel misunderstood by non-members; gaming affiliation and media affiliation each had significant effects on fgc members’ ratings of others’ understanding. non-gaming media were perceived as exhibiting especially high levels of misunderstanding. respondents’ negative comments focused on nongaming media’s overreliance on outdated stereotypes and lack of research into the community. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 online technologies can allow users to stay connected with previously established inperson networks while building new ones, and/or allow them to supplement communication with offline networks, creating hybrid communities. interviews with older chinese migrants to new zealand revealed technology’s role in allowing migrants to maintain ties to china while adapting to their new environment (li et al., 2014). utilizing skype allowed them to talk with family members and friends. simultaneously, the migrants forged the “chinese-kiwi friendship programme” to foster greater connection and belonging in their new neighborhoods. technology allowed overseas chinese people in new zealand to maintain ties with their homeland communities while creating relationships in person in their new locales. similarly, niland and colleagues’ (2015) descriptive study challenged the notion that online interactions do not foster friendships. focus groups with existing friend groups found overlap between online and offline interactions. participants agreed friendship requires being open and genuine, which can be accomplished through status updates (although these may also be inauthentic and annoying). friends deterred social misuse of the internet by preventing others from talking badly about their friends or posting negative comments, and by helping with privacy concerns (e.g. helping make a distinction between fun and embarrassing pictures). not having access to communication technology can not only make the internet unavailable, but also affect one’s ability to navigate various communities and keep in touch with family and friends (vázquez et al., 2015). interviews with individuals experiencing homelessness in madrid indicated involvement with communication technologies, but the percentage of those using cell phones (59%) is well below that of the general population of spain (94%). lower cell phone usage makes interacting with government agencies, who increasingly expect the public to use these technologies, more difficult. individuals experiencing homelessness also have trouble keeping in touch with family who live outside madrid. even individuals experiencing homelessness who do utilize these technologies experience social exclusion, although it is unclear to what extent they experience social exclusion compared to their counterparts without these technologies. it is also unclear whether social exclusion could be alleviated with an improvement of free public access to these technologies. while some studies suggest online technologies allow for community creation, social media can also muddy the waters of online community. reich (2010) synthesized data from four projects with high schoolers and college students as participants and found mixed evidence for a sense of online community in these hybrid communities. there was little evidence for membership through boundaries (people were facebook friends with people they barely knew), emotional safety (due to drama), and identity (no evidence of a “myspace/facebook identity”). there was evidence of immersion via personal investment. reich found mixed evidence for integration and fulfillment of needs: there was little evidence of shared values, although there was agreement on norms and shared purpose. there was also mixed evidence for shared emotional connection, as users could experience both connection and isolation while on the sites. on the other hand, a study of current and past world of warcraft (wow) players’ sense of community, social identity, and social support indicated these qualities can be found among wow players (o’connor et al., 2015), despite the low likelihood of players knowing one another offline. wow was a common ground, and players enjoyed feeling a part of a broader, massively multiplayer online (mmo) game community. more specifically, world of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 warcraft players identified as gamers, wow players, and guild members (i.e., members of in-game groups who often play together). through the game, world of warcraft players were able to obtain in-game help, advice about offline concerns, and emotional support, with many players trusting their guildmates. as a result, o’connor and colleagues (2015) propose the degree to which someone identifies with a community may affect their sense of community. since community building has been described as a way to operationalize community psychology’s values (lazarus, seedat, & naidoo, 2017), we would expect community building and maintenance to loom large in our literature on online communities. likewise, the literature in this section reflects the ambiguity in the concept of community building. researchers have utilized various models and measures for a general sense of community (jason, stevens, & ram, 2015; mcmillan & chavis, 1986; nowell & boyd, 2010). many perspectives on sense of community abound; as such, it makes sense to find parallel concerns surrounding definition and measurement for online sense of community. parallel to the offline world, context matters when online. some social networking sites may focus more on networked individualism, i.e., communication emphasizing individuals’ distinctiveness, rather than communication positioning them within communities (reich, 2010). even sites emphasizing networked individualism serve a need for interpersonal connections. all communities highlighted in these studies reflect a bottom-up or community-based approach in their development and maintenance. we can see a desire for community (li et al., 2014; loomis & friesen, 2011; reich et al., 2014), but there are challenges specifying exactly what this means regarding online worlds and how technology can affect our sense of community in general. further exploring what factors contribute to building strong online communities will help community psychologists reach a deeper understanding of online sense of community. one avenue to explore is community support. community support six articles considered community support, specifically the internet’s potential to be used to obtain support, often by members of groups historically seen as marginalized or isolated. these primarily descriptive articles explored support in online communities composed of people with diabetes (barrera, glasgow, mckay, boles, & feil, 2002); lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals in hong kong (chong, zhang, mak, & pang, 2015); single young mothers (dunham et al., 1998); cardiac patients (dyer, costello, & martin, 2010); those with disabilities (obst & stafurik, 2010); and those in alcohol recovery (bliuc, doan, & best, 2018). in these studies, community support comprised of and arose from activities like sharing personal information, experiences, and emotions; chatting with others in real time; expressing one’s identity; providing or receiving guidance or moral support; providing or receiving empathy, sympathy, or comfort; and providing or receiving physical, financial, or material assistance. across these disparate groups, similar themes emerged. in particular, online support group participants perceived increased availability of social support (barrera et al., 2002; chong et al., 2015; obst & stafurik, 2010). additionally, online communication helped some members develop a sense of group membership or receive social support, which they may not have been able to accomplish offline (bliuc, doan, & best, 2018; chong et al., 2015; obst & stafurik, 2010). those who were more socially isolated were more likely to consistently participate (dunham et al., 1998). higher access to the online community was associated with various positive outcomes, such as greater wellbeing, a stronger sense of community, a stronger sense of online social support, and lower stress levels http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 (bliuc, doan, & best, 2018; dunham et al., 1998; obst & stafurik, 2010). a stronger sense of community was also associated with personal growth and better relations with others (obst & stafurik, 2010). even when higher levels of participation were not associated with reduced depression, anxiety, and stress, and/or increased perceived interpersonal support, or social network size, they were positively associated with perceived benefits of using forums. these benefits included but were not limited to learning from others, understanding others with similar experiences, and being reminded one is not alone (dyer et al., 2010). dyer and colleagues do make a distinction between what active participants and “lurkers,” or those who are online but do not offer and receive support, may experience; active participants may receive greater satisfaction from the online community. these articles echo previous findings around social support. according to saegert and carpiano (2017), social support facilitates wellbeing and physical and mental health in the face of stress. online communities may facilitate giving and receiving support to and from those in similar situations and provide opportunities to build relationships and create social networks. taken together, these initial findings suggest the potential for online communities to foster social support and sense of community. a next step is to examine which features of online communities produce these results. one feature may involve communication norms. norms and attitudes six studies examined norms and attitudes in different online and hybrid contexts. researchers explored communication norms among users of the social networking site bebo (whittaker & gillespie, 2013), problem drinkers (klaw, dearmin huebsch, & humphreys, 2000), and those with depression (salem, bogat, & reid, 1997). a comparative study examined how bodies are discussed on a pro-anorexia (pro-ana) and an anorexia recovery sites (riley, rodham, & gavin, 2009). more recently, studies highlighted attitudes and meta-stereotypes within certain communities, in this case specifically gaming-related communities (nic giolla easpaig, 2018; steltenpohl, reed, & keys, 2018). a 12-month longitudinal study examining 37 scottish young people’s bebo profiles qualitatively analyzed how users self-present and evaluate self-presentations, and how they interacted with other users on bebo in prescribed and non-prescribed ways (whittaker & gillespie, 2013). users often “guest edited” each other’s profiles, and the style of communication was targeted to the in-group and was almost unintelligible to out-group members. users often brought their scottish accents to their online “utterances,” and abbreviations were often used. community members created words to show/request a strong relationship between two people. message boards and listservs may or may not be monitored but can provide a sense of privacy through intimacy and disclosure. online support groups may support processes for emotional support, information/advice, help-seeking, affective responses, and self-disclosure (klaw, dearmin huebsch, & humphreys, 2000; salem et al., 1997). posts tend to feature high rates of self-disclosure and support, which might alleviate shame and provide opportunities for people to compare their experiences. professionals tended to post infrequently, highlighting a difference with face-to-face environments where professionals more typically make inputs altering group processes with some frequency. the most active users tended to become informal moderators/leaders and were less likely to address their own issues, taking more of a helping role. they were more likely to address posts to individual users, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 provide emotional support and cognitive guidance, and show social support. overall the findings from these two studies suggest norms of emotional support and self-disclosure in online mutual support groups. the stated purpose of communities may have an impact on how individuals interact with them. for example, one study examined differences in communication norms concerning body talk on a pro-anorexia (proana) and an anorexia recovery site (riley, rodham, & gavin, 2009). almost all members were female. on the pro-ana site, members often included their weight in their post signatures. the recovery site forbade including numbers, so members used workarounds to indicate size more vaguely. weight gain was seen as problematic on both sites, but on the recovery site it was better if it was limited or “for health.” on the pro-ana site, discussions about members’ bodies were usually detailed and reframed negative experiences into positive ones. on the recovery site, bodily descriptions were more about difficult and tentative movement away from behaviors/thoughts relating to eating disorders. the results of this study support embodiment (that users pay attention to and describe their body) on the internet, specifically that internet might not be a “bodiless environment” after all. previous qualitative studies outside the field, including disability studies (e.g, seymour, 2001), have conceptualized the internet as a place where embodiment can occur. sometimes online contexts can mirror offline contexts in problematic ways. nic giolla easpaig (2018) found discussions around gender-based harassment in online gaming communities mirrored many of the ways these discussions have emerged in offline contexts. specifically, conversations around sexism in online gaming spaces focused on the misrecognition of behaviors often deemed acceptable within these contexts as sexist, a tentative acceptance of gender as a salient component of genderbased harassment within gaming communities, and a focus on authenticity of membership (whether women are “real gamers” or not). a study examining the meta-stereotypes of a hybrid community, the fighting game community (fgc), found members felt generally misunderstood by people outside of the fgc, and felt especially misunderstood by nongaming-related media (steltenpohl, reed, & keys, 2018). fgc members believed these negative perceptions largely come from a reliance on outdated stereotypes and a lack of research into the community. these articles highlight the predictable and powerful influence of norms and attitudes. when members help one another, there appear to be strong bonds of connection, for example, for those with alcohol issues and for those dealing with depression. on the other hand, online communities can often mirror offline contexts in problematic ways, particularly when it comes to discussions and norms around sexism and stereotypes. future research might examine what factors encourage norm and attitude development, and if and how these norms and attitudes can lead to a greater sense of community. we might examine whether we can change those patterns, especially if they become ineffective or harmful. understanding this area of research may be helpful in maximizing community efforts at collective action, particularly regarding advocacy and resistance against oppression. advocacy online communities can be used to advocate for causes important to community members. four articles examined how social media and the internet could be used to organize advocacy efforts. two of these were descriptive articles exploring advocacy through the lens of specific issues, particularly labor relations (brady, young, & mcleod, 2015) and schizophrenia (menon, 2000). the other empirical articles http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 examined how engagement with the internet may affect how someone engages in the political process (alberici & milesi, 2013) and barriers and facilitators to diffusion processes— that is, individuals’ knowledge of and decision to adopt new ideas—within a youth-led online network (kornbluh, watling neal, & ozer, 2016). labor organization unite here networked with social workers, academics, and allies to pressure the society for social work research to relocate their conference, in response to low wages for workers at hyatt hotels in san antonio (brady et al., 2015). unite here created a strategy and used multiple social media tools to meet short-term goals, like identifying allies, raising awareness, and building community allied communities. similarly, in the schizophrenia discussion group schizoph, a poster shared a story about a woman with schizophrenia who failed to pay for a cup of coffee ($0.79) and was arrested as a result (menon, 2000). others shared similar stories they had heard or experienced. eventually, one poster said they would send the diner $0.79 with a (nice) letter. other members liked this idea and together, the group sent letters and contacted the local news station that aired the original story. the presiding judge decided the woman’s 17 days in jail was adequate punishment and ordered her release. schizoph considered this a victory. in both cases, online organization led to offline advocacy. alberici and milesi (2013) utilized two offline contexts—meetings and an event—to recruit activists to complete questionnaires on various political outcomes. in the surveys of members of these two contexts, online discussions in attendees’ own online communities were found to moderate the predictive effect of politicized identity. collective action intention was significantly predicted by politicized identity only when participants reported a higher frequency of online discussion. across contexts, when participants reported higher levels of online discussion, anger did not predict collective action intention. instead, collective efficacy predicted collective action and fostered collective action intention. morality supported collective action intention. however, for participants who reported lower levels of online discussion, only anger predicted collective action intention. these results suggest high levels of online interaction can moderate other variables’ influence on collective action intention. one might suggest organization and communication among online communities and coalitions can improve one’s ability to engage in effective advocacy. one study, however, suggests there are barriers and facilitators to such effectiveness (kornbluh et al., 2016). in this study, high school students in three classrooms in three different schools practicing youth-led social change initiatives participated in a facebook group. being in the facebook group inspired students to take action in their own projects and enabled them to receive ideas from other students. some students were able to name specific instances where seeing another student’s post gave them an idea for what they could do with their own projects. in addition to these facilitators, there were barriers to diffusion, specifically a lack of instructor engagement and in-class discussion about the facebook group, and the fact the students were all engaging in activism in different topics. from these findings, we may suggest online communities engaged in advocacy dedicate time to reflection and focus on similar topics to facilitate diffusion of ideas. the internet allows engaged political citizens to organize on issues important to them. while we only found four articles, all highlight the complexity of engaging in advocacy. most event organizing happened online, while the actions resulting from these efforts happened primarily offline. it may be our political processes have not yet advanced to a point where we can truly http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 engage in them from our laptops and mobile phones as impactfully as we would like, but it may also be research has not caught up to the merging of offline and online worlds. in these articles, advocates utilized a variety of online and offline tools in order to create change. the internet was used to share news, action plans, and results of different actions. given the ease with which community members alternated between online and offline contexts, an argument can be made we should not distinguish sharply between online and offline advocacy, and instead see online tools as just that: tools. whether online or offline, it is still advocacy. discussion the discussion reflects on and integrates the studies of this literature review in the context of the four major categories identified in addressing the research question regarding the content of the articles about online communities. these four are: community building and sense of community, community support, norms and attitudes of online communities, and advocacy. implications for future research and action in each category are considered in these four sections and broader implications for research and action are presented in their own section. in consideration of the first research question regarding the number of articles published, as figure 1 illustrates, community psychologists’ interest in online communities has remained low (23) in the past two decades, although the findings of the studies that have been done have been illuminating. many studies drew parallels or comparisons with offline spaces. for example, some articles explored questions like how online sense of community may map on to or influence offline sense of community or how online communities may provide social support. other studies have examined how norms and attitudes we have seen in offline contexts might be recreated in specific online contexts and how online advocacy might influence offline advocacy. lastly, we have also seen some suggestions around synergy between online and offline worlds, to the extent it may make more sense to work towards understanding their various combinations rather than attempting to understand them in isolation. this section will summarize major patterns and suggest further exploration for our field to be informed by, and thus potentially inform online communities. community building and sense of community community psychology research has indicated it is possible to create a sense of community via online communities, although there is disagreement about what this might look like. some applications of social media are likely to foster networked individualism rather than a true sense of community (reich, 2010). however, it remains to be seen whether and under what conditions social networks can host true virtual communities, networks of individuals, or some combination of both over time. when a community assembles for a more unified purpose, sense of community does appear to be possible and even likely (o’connor et al., 2015). further, niland and colleagues (2015) suggest online connections are just as important as offline connections. there is no doubt the internet is increasingly important to interacting with others (li et al., 2014; loomis & friesen, 2011; o’connor et al., 2015; reich et al., 2014). in fact, lack of access to the internet can have a negative effect on individuals (vázquez et al., 2015). yet, there is little curiosity in community psychology literature about whether sense of community manifests differently in online and hybrid communities. researchers disagree on how best to measure sense of community in traditional face-to-face contexts (nowell & boyd, 2010; mcmillan, 2011; stevens, jason, olson, & legler, 2012; jason, stevens, & ram, 2015). if we accept sense of community is contingent on ecology, then we must concede a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 separate or elaborated measurement framework might apply to virtual and hybrid communities compared to in person communities. for example, in a study of 97 online-originated and 80 offline-originated online communities expanding on mcmillan and chavis’ (1986) sense of community construct, koh and kim (2003) found community leaders’ enthusiasm and perceived similarity amongst members impacted members’ sense of belonging more for onlinethan offlineoriginated communities. additionally, frequency of offline activities impacted members’ sense of influence over the community more for online than for offline-originated hybrid communities. as in face-to face contexts, not all online gatherings are communities. as a result, it could be argued that some studies in community psychology journals, while uncovering valuable knowledge about communication online, are not assessing community phenomena. two such examples include wood’s (2018) thematic analysis of news site comment sections and august and liu’s (2018) thematic and discourse analysis of youtube comments. wood’s (2018) analysis applying bandura’s moral disengagement theory to comments on three news articles about anthropogenic climate change is focused on individual behavior. august and liu (2014) note that of the 900 youtube comments they examined in their discourse analysis, only 120 of these comments were replied to, with the modal conversation length being one comment and one reply. while august and liu (2014) sought to learn if gricean norms of cooperative conversation applied to race talk in youtube comments, they add commentary on the general, “thin-sliced, anonymous/shallow” nature of these comment sections. in this way, communication research helps to explore the boundaries of the definition of community. however, direct investigation is required to understand the differences between online and face-to-face communities and is a quicker way to understand the landscape of the ways we associate online. one area where virtual sense of community is more reminiscent of mcmillan and chavis’ conception of sense of community is the importance of behavioral norms and social support (blanchard, 2008). observing and posting supportive messages were related to increased perception of behavioral norms around support, which in turn was related to an increased sense of community. additionally, supportive communication members received or sent through private messages directly increased sense of community. for these reasons, blanchard (2008) suggested social norms mediate the relationship between members’ well-documented need to be identified on the one hand and have a sense of community on the other. practitioners may be able to help community members align their social norms to the purpose of the community and help community leaders develop strategies to increase perceptions of social support within their communities. more research is needed to hone our understanding of sense of community and online communities generally, which can affect how researchers and practitioners’ interface with online and hybrid communities. for instance, how does member turnover affect online communities, and what are the patterns of membership? to what extent and in what ways are new members recruited or discouraged? what is done to sustain or discourage participants’ interest? how do perceptions of a community affect how community members interact with outsiders? for example, researchers and practitioners seeking to gain entrée into gaming communities may need to pay special attention to community members’ perceptions of how others see them. much of the psychological research on gaming in the 1990s and 2000s seemed focused on demonstrating video games cause violence (steltenpohl, reed, & keys, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 2018). to understand these processes, we need to hear from researchers and practitioners alike on which strategies work and which fail, and how well research findings replicate in realworld application. then community psychologists will have a sound basis for assisting online communities in developing a stronger community and therewith a stronger sense of community. community support research reviewed here suggests community psychologists can use the internet to help members of communities, particularly those with members marginalized by others, provide support to one another (barrera et al., 2002; bliuc, doan, & best, 2018; chong et al., 2015; dunham et al., 1998; dyer et al., 2010; obst & stafurik, 2010). understanding how community support may look similar and different across communities may be helpful as communities and community psychologists attempt to build support networks for individuals who are socially isolated for a variety of reasons. examples may include, but are not limited to, being a member of a very specific community (e.g. those who have been diagnosed with orphan diseases), living in a sparsely populated area (e.g. rural settings), or being a member of a stigmatized and targeted community (e.g. identifying as trans in a very conservative area). research on online communities can also enhance the social support literature. as we have seen, online mutual help groups have been in part successful. interestingly, the online social support literature features more successes than the online sense of community literature. this may be because social support is a more concrete concept, with researchers generally agreeing on the definition of social support (saegert & carpiano, 2017) compared to the ambivalence surrounding the definition of sense of community (abfalter et al., 2012; blanchard, 2008; koh & kim, 2003; mcmillan, 2011; nowell & boyd, 2010; stevens, jason, olson, & legler, 2011; jason, stevens, & ram, 2015). the social support literature is especially encouraging, however, as it shows face-to-face support, even among strangers, is possible. we may ask how we can design interventions to turn strangers into supporters. additionally, how much of an effect can we reasonably expect online communities to have in practice? barrera et al. (2002) suggest social integration may not be affected by online mutual help groups but may alter perceptions of support. if true, this leads to other questions. how long does it take for positive outcomes of online communities to manifest, if ever? how might we integrate online support groups into already existing interventions? how does online social support affect other activities, such as engagement in advocacy? norms and attitudes we can also study how online communities’ norms and attitudes affect their activities like advocacy work. future research may focus on when digital efforts are helpful or harmful to advocacy efforts, and what is needed to have a successful digital advocacy campaign. importantly, we can ask how we can moderate online advocacy campaigns through the building of community norms and attitudes. for example, the participants in the 79 cent campaign influenced each other’s letters by highlighting the value of being courteous during the discussion on the listserv (menon, 2000). it would behoove community psychologists to look beyond our field to understand how advocacy and norms may be affected by online technologies. for example, fan communities have used online technologies to advocate for their interests for years (bennett, 2012; dimitrov, 2008; earl & kimport, 2009). researchers have studied online communities such as “black twitter” (brock, 2012; florini, 2014; sharma, 2013) and “academic twitter” (letierce, passant, breslin, & decker, 2010; http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 stewart, 2015; stewart, 2016) to explore how specific groups of people communicate and how these strategies may change over time. advocacy advocacy efforts can be developed and implemented online (brady et al., 2015; menon, 2000) and online advocacy behaviors might affect offline efforts (alberici & milesi, 2013). while online communities can become echo chambers, estimates of online ideological segregation may be overestimated (barberá, jost, nagler, tucker, & bonneau, 2015). internet contact, if used well, could foster action intention, although there are potential barriers to the acceptance of new ideas and strategies (alberici & milesi, 2013). more research is needed on best practices and ways community groups might focus efforts using social media and project management resources like basecamp and slack. beyond capturing online community members’ advocacy efforts, it would be instructive to investigate the degree to which these communities do or do not facilitate empowerment for their members. empowerment develops in progressive stages, contingent on a supportive external response from the environment with which a community interacts (bothne & keys, 2016; keys, 1993). from the studies discussed above, there is reason to believe online settings provide supportive responses through opportunities to participate (the first stage in keys’ model), resulting in power within (keys, 1993). the literature reviewed suggests members are willing to take risks in sharing their experiences with others. this willingness to take risks is essential to the second phase, voice own reality and experience, resulting in power to. however, mentions of themes germane to the subsequent three stages in the keys model (viz., affirmation/power with, increased choice and impact/power over, dignity efficacy and selfrespect/power realized) are less commonly encountered in extant community psychology research. these partial parallels suggest the examination of empowerment in online communities could be a promising area of investigation. evidence for the impact of online communities on advocacy efforts may portend the uncovering of their positive impact on empowerment. additional opportunities for research and action there are topics worth exploring not yet found in this literature on online communities. community psychologists are well positioned to explore emerging issues like conflict resolution, justice, resistance to oppression, and restorative justice practices in online settings (goodman, 2006; katsh, 2007; powell, 2015). community psychologists could also serve important roles in the push against group polarization and extremism (yardi & boyd, 2010). additionally, we might explore members’ views of their identity in light of their online communities. community psychologists could also study how others see their community through understanding concepts such as metastereotypes (steltenpohl, reed, & keys, 2018) as they relate to online communities. online strategies may map onto strategies we use for offline conflict resolution, or we may be able to find unique ways to lessen conflict using technologies as they develop, such as using virtual reality to build empathy (robertson, 2016). as noted above, most of the articles were descriptive in nature with only a few involving research designs amenable to sophisticated quantitative or qualitative analysis. the relative lack of methodological sophistication in most of the articles reviewed speaks to the nascent nature of research concerning online communities in community psychology. future work can utilize qualitative methods such as online discourse analysis to probe the meaning of online communities and their dynamics for the users and quantitative methods like highly http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 structured surveys to examine specific issues of interest. theories popular in community psychology may also be beneficial to the studying of online communities, especially as researchers in the field of “cyberpsychology” consider their research’s own theoretical foundations (or lack thereof) (orben, 2018). bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological systems framework could be used to understand online and hybrid communities. for example, it may help us to understand how policy can affect how people use the internet. recently, the united states federal communications commission repealed net neutrality, which protected users from internet service providers blocking access to certain websites or offering paid prioritization plans (shepardson, 2018). this repeal of net neutrality has the potential to massively affect how people use the internet, if the courts side with the fcc. further, there is what some consider a “moral panic” surrounding screen time, leading to organizations releasing conflicting guidelines. for example, the world health organization (2019) makes cut-off recommendations for children under five but does not outline evidence for this recommendation and acknowledges a research gap. however, the royal college of paediatrics and child health (2018) explicitly states there is no strong evidence for a threshold and does not make a cut-off recommendation at all. indeed, recent pre-registered research suggests little evidence for meaningfully negative associations between screen time and adolescent well-being (orben & przybylski, 2019). community psychologists working in research and practice settings with children and families should be aware of current stereotypes about media’s effects on well-being and the direction of current research. lastly, most of these studies focus on younger adults. we know older adults often differ from younger adults on dimensions like processing capacity, judgment, knowledge, emotion regulation, attention to emotion, affective perspective taking, and the interpretation of ambiguous scenarios (carstensen & mikels, 2005). we might reasonably think there are differences in how older adults use the internet and when they may find the internet relevant or irrelevant to their social goals. some research suggests older adults who use social media have a strong preference for connecting with family (swayne, 2016). there may be differences in usage of and feelings toward the internet between individuals who grew up with the internet and those for whom the internet came into existence later in life. given concerns about loneliness among older adults (zhong, chen, tu, & conwell, 2017), could online communities be one form of intervention for older adults without stable social networks? there are other questions we may be able to tap into, given time and a concerted effort to disseminate our current practices with online communities, and make an intentional effort to include online communities in our research and practice. the potential here is virtually boundless. conclusion given the internet is an increasingly important part of people’s lives and unlikely to have less influence as time goes on, we have a responsibility as community psychologists to explore the types of online communities and activities with which people can engage. online communities have much to offer community psychology in terms of theory, research, and action. by continuing to explore online and hybrid communities, drawing on interdisciplinary work as we build the literature within our field, we can move toward understanding this increasingly important aspect of the future. further, we can apply what we know about online communities--through community psychology and other fields--to create contexts allowing community members http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 to be empowered to advocate for themselves and issues they care about. of concern is the lack of conscious curation of research regarding online and hybrid communities, especially insofar as it can inform social action. these communities fall within community psychology’s domain of interest and should be a prime future focus. when our approaches and foci do not include a globally prevailing, 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(2017). loneliness and cognitive function in older adults: findings from the chinese longitudinal healthy longevity survey. the journals of gerontology: series b, 72, 120-128. author disclosure statement none of the authors have any commercial associations or financial interests that might create a conflict of interest in connection with this manuscript http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/311664/9789241550536-eng.pdf https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/311664/9789241550536-eng.pdf https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/311664/9789241550536-eng.pdf microsoft word theorypaper_reflectionsonreactions_formattedfinal.docx our reflections on the reactions to “theories in the field of community psychology” leonard a. jason ed stevens daphna ram steven a. miller christopher r. beasley kristen gleason depaul university rosalind franklin university of medicine and science washington college university of hawai`i at manoa keywords: theory, science, community psychology, framework author biographies: leonard jason is a professor of clinical and community psychology at depaul university. he been working on a nichd grant with dr. robinson for the past few years on violence prevention with urban 9th grade youth. ed stevens is a graduate of the community psychology doctoral program at depaul university, and previously received his mba from the university of chicago. he is currently a project director/research associate at the center for community research, overseeing a nih funded study of social networks in recovery homes. his interests include methods, measures, and understanding personal change. daphna ram received her phd in developmental psychology from cornell university in 2011. she worked as a project director at the center for community research with dr. leonard jason and is currently the social development director at long beach job corps center. steven a. miller is an assistant professor in the psychology department at rosalind franklin university of medicine and science. he holds a ph.d. in social psychology, masters’ degrees in clinical psychology and statistics, and bachelors’ degrees in philosophy and psychology. steve is interested in the relationship between stable individual difference characteristics and emotional experiences, the application of quantitative and novel research methodologies to psychological problems, and the history and philosophy of science in general. most recently, he has been involved in making taxometric methods more accessible to psychologists. for over five years, he has also been involved in collaborative research with individuals in community psychology where he has ensured methodological rigor and contributed to conceptual global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 formulation of research problems. steve is also interested in helping the field of psychology to embrace methodology which promotes findings that are more likely to replicate. christopher r. beasley is an assistant professor in the department of psychology at washington college and principle investigator for the community engagement research team. he has a m.a in clinical psychology as well as ph.d. in community psychology. dr. beasley's research primarily investigates people's psychological and behavioral engagement in their communities. he has examined processes related to satisfaction, commitment, citizenship behavior, involvement, and tenure in mutual-help addiction recovery homes. dr. beasley also assists mutual-help organizations pursue their research objectives, forming a national community advisory board of oxford house addiction recovery home residents and alumni to guide research projects and fundraising for such inquiry. lastly, dr. beasley has written and presented on theoretical concepts such as person-environment fit and 3rd order change. kristen d. gleason recently graduated from the university of hawai‘i at manoa with a doctorate in community and cultural psychology. she is currently a project director at depaul university’s center for community research in chicago, illinois. her research interests include homelessness, human trafficking, and examining social issues in relation to the structural and systemic factors that sustain them. authors’ notes: our thanks to john light, david glenwick, and diana ohanian for their helpful comments and suggestions. recommended citation: jason, l.a., stevens, e., ram, d. miller, s.a., beasley, c.r., gleason, k., (2016). our reflections on the reactions to “theories in the field of community psychology”. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(2), pages 1-9. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). correspondence should be addressed to leonard a. jason, depaul university, center for community research, 990 w. fullerton ave., suite 3100, chicago, il. 60614 global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 our reflections on the reactions to “theories in the field of community psychology” we recognize that our article (jason, stevens, ram, miller, beasley, & gleason, 2016) will be controversial, and we are delighted that it has sparked some lively discussions. our thesis is that research in our field could benefit from being evaluated on how it contributes to theory (including the development of one’s own). we believe that this recommendation represents a significant and constructive step forward. our reflections on a number of the issues raised by those who wrote reactions to our article are below. paradigms, meta-models, and phenomenon of interest several authors of the reaction papers question why we do not refer to kuhn’s (1962) writings regarding paradigms. paradigms are not identical to theories, and kuhn (1962) claimed (among other things) that paradigms changed when sets of theories that exist within paradigms fail to account for anomalous findings. if this conceptualization of “paradigm” is correct, any theory itself might not account for a finding because of issues in a theory, not in the paradigm as a whole. but, if this is indeed what is meant, then a much broader discussion of paradigms is necessary. unfortunately, kuhn (1962) uses the term “paradigm” in dozens of different ways (e.g., see madsen, 1988). this makes it difficult to examine the relevance of paradigms to science in general. there is also criticism of kuhn (1962) beyond his somewhat vague conception of what constitutes a paradigm (mayo, 1996; scheffler, 1967). furthermore, the way in which paradigms change has been debated. kuhn argues that transitions between paradigms relate to all or nothing rejections of paradigms, whereas science often transitions slowly through conversations about the merits of specific points rather than abruptly and all at once. thus, the kuhnian characterization of the paradigm may be a mischaracterization of the way that science works, and this has further led to our avoidance of it. additionally, within the field of psychology, the term “paradigm” has been used in even more numerous ways than it is used by kuhn (1962). indeed, books have been written on the problematic usage of paradigms in psychology (see o’donohue, 2013) – assessing its usefulness to discussions of psychological theory is by no means straightforward (grove, 2006). in short, while the paradigm concept is certainly related to theoretical development, it raises additional complex issues that cannot be adequately addressed in our article. in addition to several of the authors asking why we do not consider paradigms, maya jariego’s (2016) reaction piece encourages us to include other constructs (e.g., meta-model, meta-theory) as well. while there is a place to consider these broader concepts, we are examining the role of theories per se rather than constructs larger than theories. neal’s (2016) paper asks whether we have theories, or simply broad, general frameworks that point to phenomenon of interest. indeed, neal (2016) claims that phenomenon of interest are broader than either theories or frameworks, and because they may be less articulated than either in their amorphousness, they may be thought of as providing more breadth. however, there is nothing in our argument to the effect that breadth is a bad thing, but eventually breadth has to give way to scientific specificity for tebes (2016), because models are less conceptual, they can help science progress, and we believe that if there is enough persuasive evidence that a given model “works,” it can lead to a broader conceptual picture, which we would refer to as a theory. but we continue to believe that frameworks, global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 models, and the like need to have some kind of underlying motivational direction, i.e. a theory that provides a broader and empirically addressable explanation for how the social world works. models may encompass a representation of a single theory (e.g., per figure 1 in the original paper by jason et al., 2016), or models may represent a collection of theories. in other words, a model represents the measures and their relations that are jointly being tested to give evidence of a theory’s validity. therefore, a misspecified model or a poorly measured model may mask or attenuate evidence relative to the theoretical assertion. perspectivism, pragmatism, feminism, and critical theory tebes (2016) suggests that four philosophical foundations for our field – perspectivism, pragmatism, feminism, and critical theory move our field away from a logical empiricist approach, to one that “embraces catalytic or transformative change” (p.7) critical theory often places an evaluative outcome on the purpose and therefore the utility of the phenomena. however, if we want to reduce racism, for example, we want theories that can help us predict, describe, and explain the development and eradication of racism. feminist theory is another lens, which provides people a perspective to organize and aggregate evidence that describes and predicts and explains phenomena. tebes (2016) appears to believe that one can adopt perspectivist, feminist, critical, and action oriented approaches and still be an advocate for the traditional scientific method; yet at the same time, he believes our field needs to move away from logical empiricist approaches. tebes and authors of other reaction papers believe that this traditional scientific method is often quite limited because they perceive the theories are constrained by narrowly defined parameters and contexts. we agree with tebes (2016) that feminism, critical theory, and action-oriented research explore areas that many scientists have not subjected to the same types of empirical testing or empirical constraints, and these approaches can provide researchers with new ideas and views of the world. one could argue that these approaches should have an evidence based narrative that argues for cause and effect of catalytic or transformative change. this would allow an independent observer to conclude these foundations have led to an understanding that would allow a predictive result, if similar efforts were undertaken. if context plays such a significant role that results cannot be predictive, the field could continue to investigate these contextual boundaries or conditions. each lens should demonstrate that it provides some usefulness in a better understanding of a phenomena and the mechanisms by which outcomes can be achieved. although tebes (2016) suggests four underlying philosophies as an emphasis for the field rather than theory, we believe these philosophies can guide our theory construction rather than supplant them. for example, realism, perspectivism, and the resulting critical multiplism suggest a need for a variety of theories to help explain phenomena from a variety of perspectives. given the current dearth of community science theory, this perspective may be needed for a complete understanding of phenomena. we could be leading the way in integrating context into multilevel theory development. similarly, feminism and critical philosophies can inform theory development by suggesting processes and outcomes of participatory, diverse, and action-oriented approaches as well as theories associated with oppression and liberation. for example, there has been some discussion of third-order change, but there is currently no cohesive underlying theory of the process for such change to occur. robinson et al. (2016) have written about this process in a community global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 context, and participatory, diverse, and action-oriented approaches to building community capacity seem to be a natural fit with such processes. williams (2016) suggests that in pursuing generalizable theories, psychological research runs the risk of privileging the perspective of the dominant group. in cultural and crosscultural psychology, this has long been a concern as many of our most cherished psychological theories have been developed in the west and then transported to other cultures. in many cases, it is quite possible that if one attempted to explain and test the same phenomena from within the cultural framework of these other societies, different explanations with a better fit in that context may arise, thus helping to define boundary conditions for a theory. we do think these are important issues to consider. application within community psychology lorion’s (2016) reaction piece, harking back to lewin (1951), argues that there is nothing so useful as empirical findings. it is possible that lorion was advocating for the production of such findings independent of theories or past research. however, it is unclear how one arrives in such a place; if it were possible, perhaps lorion would be correct. for a practitioner, an idea of how to intervene in the first place is necessary, and our argument is that theories should be a way to provide a way forward, and that the shaky state of theory within our field can make this difficult. christens (2016) argues that the move toward theory testing would negate the very important role of community psychology in solving problems (i.e., a pragmatic approach). indeed, the pragmatic approach is particularly relevant to selecting issues for psychologists to address, and it is not contradictory to the claims we make. rather, we believe that the way in which issues are addressed based on theory should carefully articulate premises that are at work in interventions. in this way, there might be more pragmatic applications in the future. however, the careful way in which things could be tested is not an attempt to move the field to one whose focus is strictly on testing theory; rather, it is the use of careful theory testing in the process of addressing realworld problems. we agree with christens (2016) and maya jariego (2016) that community psychologists should be change agents in a variety of settings and for different causes, but this does not negate the role of theories. we believe that even apparently useful interventions have costs associated with a lack of understanding as to how they actually work. for example, if there are irrelevant parts included within community interventions, due to lack of attention to theorecal issues, they may cost more in money and time than they should, and participants could be provided a dose of an irrelevant intervention. we believe that keys (2016) is right in noting that there has been a tendency to oversimplify in the alleged interest of increased rigor, but at the end, his thesis could have a consequence of the path of “endless exploration,” never culminating in any scientifically-based “knowledge.” his utilization of a musical analogy can be extended to explain why theory is important: there is no music without theory, as random notes played on random instruments do not create music. music is created by having a foundation of theory regarding how pitch, tempo, and phrasing create a musical experience, and even improvised music has structure (e.g. gillespie, 1979). music has lots of genres and variety, but each of these has distinctive defining musical structures. science does not discourage diversity of voices. in fact, it is perhaps the only field that argues against any types of authority. in addition, the argument for diversity without a grounding in empiricism could be unethical if one were to adhere to the maxim, “first do no harm.” well-intentioned activism with vulnerable populations without theoretical global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 and empirical basis has in the past resulted in some harmful intent (e.g., attempts to "reeducate" native american children during the last century). methods with regards to the williams’s (2016) comment about privileging of quantitative methods, this was not our intention per se, but rather a consequence of the fact that quantitative methods fit most easily into our conception of how science proceeds. indeed, we welcome an attempt to show how qualitative methods could be used in a context of scientific justification. furthermore, the context of discovery is not irrelevant – indeed, it is crucially relevant – and an area where qualitative work could contribute to theory development. when writing our article, we decided not to address how theories corresponded to methods, as a full exploration of theory-method relationships would be an extensive task. however, williams (2016) is correct in that this is an area that should be further explored. we agree with barile and smith (2016) that randomized controlled trials (rcts) have their strengths, but also important and inherent weaknesses, particularly when social context needs to be considered. our article does not suggest the sole use of rcts; it only suggested specifying hypotheses a priori. barile and smith (2016) argue that too strong a focus on generalizable theory, and especially on randomized controlled trials as a means to achieve rigorous theory, can hamper the exploration of innovative methodological approaches that capture context. indeed, their argument that randomized control trials often artificially erase some important person-context interactions is particularly relevant to our work as community psychologists. until researchers have a very solid idea of what the randomized controlled trials should be looking at (i.e., what actually is “ignorable” in the context), multivariate methods can often be used to obtain more veridical results. in other words, we must not implement randomized controlled trials prematurely— indeed, this is more appropriate to occur when the very theoretical understanding we advocate for, has proceeded to a point of some reasonable verification. as proposed by barile and smith (2016), two recent papers (jason et al., 2014; light et al. in press) specifically propose the social network framework as one way to capture social context under some circumstances. these papers are as methodological as they are substantive in tone, arguing that the theoretical conception of small group dynamics as complex systems fits quite naturally with the methodological approach supplied by networks, and the longitudinal modeling framework of conditional markov processes (e.g. snijders, van de bunt, & steglich’s stochastic actor modeling (2010)). perhaps, as the network approach (and other more contextual approaches such as multilevel models) becomes more familiar, graduate programs in community psychology may routinely include training in these methods. conclusion our article and the thoughtful reactions have begun a productive point and counterpoint dialogue towards the goal of better defining and differentiating theory, framework, phenomena of interest, etc. in general, the reaction papers nicely sum up alternatives to the viewpoint that we present. we do agree that situations are often complex, unique, and require multilevel, multicomponent analyses and interventions. in addition, as rhodes (2016) mentions, the three prominent theories highlighted in our article were built on a foundation from theorists in other fields, and she mentions objections raised by other reactors who claim that our theories will not be able to compete with specificity achieved in other decontextualized psychological global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 disciplines. we do not argue against openness to diverse perspectives, but rather whether this openness leads to generalizable knowledge. we might also add that other applied areas such as health (brannon, feist, & updegraff, 2013), environmental (steg, van den berg, & de groot, 2012), and industrial/organizational psychology (levy, 2009) explicitly communicate core theories in their respective fields. tebes (2016) maintains that the underlying the view of science based on logical empiricism is inherently flawed due to lack of independence from political, cultural, and social influences. this conclusion does argue for greater participation by diverse voices. ultimately, scientific theories persist or diminish based on their utility. we disagree that logical empiricism lacks validity due to the possibility of bias from those funding and performing research. that is to say that a systemic bias should be identifiable, and that random bias should be eliminated by multiple observations. tebes (2016) is right to point out that current philosophies of science are characterized by realism; we do not eschew describing how “phenomena interact in the world” (tebes, 2016, p.6), but focus on explanation and prediction. logical empiricism is not overturned by a realist perspective, but expanded by it; we do not address arguments of realism (which some of the authors are very sympathetic to), but focus on aspects of prediction and explanation. for a more thorough discussion of realism with some inquiry into logical empiricsm, see recent work by haig and evers (2016). some (e.g., psillos, 2011) have argued that reichenbach’s program was to set up the foundation for realism. rejecting perspectives sympathetic to explanation and prediction means arguing against evidence and theory, and placing our field outside the purview of the scientific endeavor. for many in our field, it appears that what is most important is that change be produced, and explications about the mechanisms of change receive far less attention. this stance is rooted in community psychology’s origins in quasi politically-motivated activism. in this respect, community psychology offers a valuable perspective on social problems and social change, and a way of knowing. in our view, however, these goals need not be inconsistent with scientific rigor. it is the nature of humans to view the world through a socio-cultural lens. this has been an issue for physical science too, such as with galileo, who was famously rejected by contemporaries because his views were not compatible with the world-view of the then dominant catholic church. the church’s views thus stood in the way of scientific progress for quite a long time. however, feminism, critical theory, and action-oriented research are themselves based on certain assumptions regarding how the world works—the fact that these assumptions may differ from mainstream cultural views or prevailing scientific conceptualizations does not necessarily mean that they are correct. approaches need to be investigated scientifically, and if they are not, then there is little basis for evaluating them, any more than there is for evaluating theological views. scientific methods give us the only known way to see whether one’s assumptions are compatible with observations, and thus provide an antidote for “action” based on unverified and possibly incorrect or materially incomplete assumptions. in addition, we fully endorse exploratory research, and we do not argue for simply confirmatory testing. but even in exploratory work, theory generation, theory support, and theory disconfirmation should be part of the discussion process. at the end of this process, one can take in all the gathered evidence, from disparate methods, and ask what are the theoretical implications of the evidence. we continue to feel that evidence should point the field in directions that create knowledge accumulatively rather than as isolated evidence or narratives that stand alone. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 in our original paper (jason et al., 2016), we do not discuss the importance of science as a collaborative and cumulative knowledge endeavor, with theory playing a central role. exploratory research certainly plays an important role in this cumulative process, but theories provide a linguistic framework for communicating ideas within and across disciplines clearly and efficiently. other researchers can then confirm, reject, or modify these ideas. for example, tebes (2016) suggests the limited applicability of some theories like the theory of planned behavior (ajzen, 1985), which better predicts intention than actual behavior. however, this is a dated theory, and theories are often modified and combined with one-another. for example, the health action process approach (schwarzer & luszczynska, 2015; sutton, 2008) incorporates elements from static intention theories with change process theories. another issue we do not address in our original paper (jason et al., 2016) is the role of theory in preventing false positives. while theory does not inoculate science from this risk, it does somewhat limit it to false positives that fit with past and current theories. false positives have proliferated in the field of psychology and are exacerbated by the file drawer effect and exploratory research that lacks replication, which is often the case in psychological research. berkowitz’s (2016) reaction article emphasized that the idea that using frameworks is a useful one, and we whole heartedly agree with this statement: “ultimately, the practitioner must focus on what works” (p.3). on the other hand, alongside this very practical statement, let us not forget kurt lewin’s (1951) maxim, “there is nothing so practical as a good theory.” our hope is that our article might encourage practitioners and researchers to give more careful consideration to theoretical formulation and development as a critical step along the pathway to pragmatically useful knowledge and social change. references ajzen, i. (1985). from intentions to actions: a theory of planned behavior. in j. kuhl & j. beckman (eds.). action-control: from cognition to behavior. (pp. 11-39). heidelberg: springer. barile, j. p., & smith, a. r. (2016). our theories are only as good as our methods. global journal of community psychology practice.7(2). pp. 1-5. berkowitz, b. (2016). alternatives to theory development. global journal of community psychology practice.7(2). pp. 1-4. brannon, l., feist, j., & updegraff, j. (2013). health psychology: an introduction to behavior and health. boston, ma: cengage learning. christens, b. d. (2016). pragmatism, praxis, and predictive theory. global journal of community psychology practice. 7(2). pp. 1-6. gillespie, d. (1979). to be or not to bop. new york, ny: doubleday. grove, w. m. (2006). philosophical psychology. (p. 14). retrieved from https://www.psych.umn.edu/faculty/gro ve/psy8004_syllabus_spring20062007.pdf haig, b. d., & evers, c. w. (2016). realist inquiry in social science. washington, d.c.: sage.. madsen, k. b. (1988). a history of psychology in metascientific perspective. new york, ny: new holland. jason, l.a., light, j.m., stevens, e.b., & beers, k. (2014). dynamic social networks in recovery homes. american journal of community psychology, 53, 324-334. jason, l. a., stevens, e., ram, d., miller, s. a., beasley, c. r., & gleason, k. (2016). theories in the field of community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice. 7(2). pp. 1-27. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 keys, c. b. (2016). cacophony is music to our minds. global journal of community psychology practice. 7(2). pp. 1-7. kuhn, t.s. (1962). the structure of scientific revolutions. chicago, il: university of chicago press. levy, p. (2009). industrial/organizational psychology. new york, ny: macmillan. lewin, k. 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(1996). error and the growth of experimental knowledge. chicago, il: university of chicago. neal, j.w., (2016). phenomenon of interest, framework, or theory? building better explanations in community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice. 7(2). pp. 1-6. o'donohue, w. (2013). clinical psychology and the philosophy of science. new york, ny: springer. psillos, s. (2011). on reichenbach’s argument for scientific realism. synthese, 181, 23-40. rhodes, j.e. (2016). celebrating our evolving, interdisciplinary, contextually-embedded field. global journal of community psychology practice. 7(2). pp. 1-4. robinson, w. l., brown, m., beasley, c., & jason, l.a. (2016). prevention and promotion interventions. in m.a. bond, c. keys, & i. serrano-garcia (eds.). handbook of community psychology. washington, dc: american psychological association. scheffler, i. (1967). science and subjectivity. indianapolis, in: bobbs-merrill. schwarzer, r. & luszczynska, a. (2015). health action process approach. in m. conner, & p. norman (eds.), predicting health behaviours (pp.252-278). 3rd edition. maidenhead, uk: mcgraw hill open university press. snijders, t.a.b., van de bunt, g. g., & steglich, c. e. g. (2010). introduction to stochastic actor-based models for network dynamics. social networks, 32, 44-60. steg, l., van den berg, a. e., & de groot, j. i. (eds.). (2012). environmental psychology: an introduction. hoboken, nj: john wiley & sons. sutton, s. (2008). how does the health action process approach (hapa) bridge the intention–behavior gap? an examination of the model's causal structure. applied psychology, 57(1), 66-74. tebes, j.k. (2016). theories, models, and science in community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice. 7(2). pp. 1-11. williams, g.a. (2016). in defense of a multiparadigmatic approach to theory development in community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice. 7(2). pp. 1-7. dialogues of disruption: confronting oppression in the academy ciann l. wilson, amandeep kaur singh, ann marie beals, rajni sharma, brianna hunt, ellis furman, natasha afua darko, tiyondah fante-coleman, vivila liu, and natalie kivell keywords: critical race theory, white supremacist culture, colonized scholarship, 2slgbtq+ recommended citation: wilson, c. l., singh, a. k., beals, a. m., sharma, r., hunt, b., furman, e., darko, n.a., fante-coleman, t., liu, v., & kivell, n. (2021). dialogues of disruption: confronting oppression in the academy. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(3), 1 – 25. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: ciann l. wilson, wilfrid laurier university, room 2019 science building. 75 university ave. w. waterloo, on. n2l 3c5. phone: 519 884 0710, ext. 4911 email: ciann.wilson@gmail.com. http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:ciann.wilson@gmail.com global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 dialogues of disruption: confronting oppression in the academy abstract within academia in recent years, there has been a concerted effort to re-center the perspectives and rights to free speech of the status quo at the expense of the safety and wellbeing of queer, trans, racialized, and indigenous communities. historically, critical race scholars have identified the centering of freedom of speech as an exercise by the oldguard in white supremacist culture to repurpose and repackage language about political freedoms in an effort to retain white settler control of a society that has long outgrown stunted ideologies about binary gender norms, and the continued oppression of black, indigenous, and racialized communities. through our hard-fought lessons learned from often painful lived experiences as queer, trans, and black, indigenous, people of colour (bipoc) scholars and activists, this paper aims to: 1) archive and document the testimonies and experiences of multiply-marginalized students and emergent faculty in the field of community psychology in a mid-sized canadian university; 2) utilize critical and intersectional analyses in unpacking the layers of violence and harm expressed and experienced through case examples; 3) use our experiences to share strategies on the successful navigation of white supremacy in the academic spaces in which we work and learn; and 4) call academic disciplines, including community psychology, to action by identifying their ethical responsibility to cultivate non-violent spaces for bipoc people. introduction the “ivory tower” is more than just a metaphor or emblem of the western academy. for racialized, indigenous, queer, differently abled, and equity-seeking groups trying to survive the academy, the very image it conjures of a cold and uninviting white structure, perhaps carved from actual ivory, standing as a prophetic symbol representing the carnage of past and ongoing colonial violence within its hallowed white halls. our very existence, our very presence is a disruption; thus, this paper serves as documentation of our stories, survival and disruption. this paper serves as a collective reflection on our group discussions, which have informed the crafting of case examples that are composites of our collective experiences and depict the intersectional violence we individually and collectively experience daily as indigenous, racialized and/or queer people within the academy. by unpacking these case examples, we draw attention to the nuances and layered complexities of the manifestation of systemic racism, transphobia, and oppression in the western academy, and in the field of community psychology, more specifically. through the hard fought lessons learned from our often painful lived experiences as queer, trans, and black, indigenous, people of colour (bipoc) scholars and activists, this paper aims to: 1) archive and document the testimonies and experiences of multiply-marginalized students and emergent faculty in the field of community psychology in a mid-sized canadian university; 2) utilize critical and intersectional analyses in unpacking the layers of violence and harm expressed and experienced through case examples; 3) use our own experiences to share strategies on the successful navigation of white supremacy in the academic spaces in which we work and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 learn; and 4) call academic disciplines, including community psychology to action by identifying their ethical responsibility to cultivate non-violent spaces for bipoc people. that is, the purpose of this paper is to document our collective invisibilized experiences of violence in academia and to give support and guidance to those who experience similar oppressions, while calling on academic disciplines and fields of practice to take accountable and rectifiable action. as such, we reference the misappropriation of free speech advocacy only to provide a necessary context within which our experiences and discussions are situated. who we are we are a diverse group of graduate students and faculty in the community psychology program at wilfrid laurier university in ontario, within the settler nation-state of canada. our identities involve many intersections we are black, indigenous, people of colour, queer, trans, two-spirit, differently-abled, and white allies. we meet on a monthly basis to discuss our ongoing work as a collective, centering themes of racial injustice and indigenous sovereignty, in conjunction with misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, and classism both within and outside the academy. our meetings have become a space of refuge to engage in critical anti-oppressive conversations about how we navigate and survive within postsecondary institutions, the field of community psychology and academia more generally all of which operate within white supremacist ideology. in the absence of spaces to engage in open, honest, and transparent discussions about our experiences, we recognized the need to intentionally carve out room to engage in critical, collective, and reflective conversations and praxis. the following statements and case studies are nested in a burgeoning culture of accountability in research that steers the process of academic writing away from imperial positivist “objectivity,” where a distant expert is supposed to document research processes without bias or any personal connection to perspectives and evidence, towards academic writing that is both personal, collective, and political. this myth of objectivity is rooted in a long tradition of colonial research from which we hope to move away in order to decenter western and eurocentric worldviews and approaches to research and writing. literature review to facilitate an understanding of our experiences within the greater context of academia in the settler nation-state known as canada, we begin this section with an introduction to terminology used throughout this work, followed by a brief introduction to the multiple ways in which canada has systematically marginalized bipoc communities under the guise of education. in the historical framing of our experiences, we will use the following terminology: settler colonialism refers to the ongoing processes by which white settlers occupy land, establish exclusionary infrastructure and systems, and claim ownership over land and resources by way of the violent removal of indigenous peoples on their lands (glenn, 2015). racialized refers to those of us who have been categorized as ‘other’ within white supremacist societies, based on socially constructed racial categories (ontario human rights commission, n.d.); such racial construction has resulted in tangible and material differences, as well as psychological antagonism, in how we are perceived and treated in western society. bipoc refers to black, indigenous, people of colour a term originating in queer activist spaces within toronto, canada (garcia, 2020; grind toronto, 2013) that aims to unite indigenous, black, and racialized people in liberation work. at the same time, we acknowledge that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the ongoing processes of systemic white supremacy and settler colonialism uniquely impact black and indigenous peoples who face the most dire consequences of white supremacist society the legacies of slavery, which drives capitalism to the present day, and colonialism, which continues to erase indigenous sovereignty and ownership of territory (sunrise movement, 2020). in utilizing these terminologies, we outline how white supremacist logic underpins canadian society. free speech or hate speech? we define white supremacy as the principle that a culture of whiteness -a transmutable socially constructed concept associated with people of european heritage who possess white skin is superior to all other cultures, and thus, more deserving of centrality within society. a culture of white supremacy normalizes experiences of white people and expressions of whiteness, regularly centering and legitimizing these narratives within policy and practice (bondi, 2012; gillborn, 2006). white supremacist and colonial logics underpin both mundane and extraordinary racist phenomena, normalizing and legitimizing everything from genocidal policies, starvation, and the forcible removal of indigenous communities from their lands for white settlement and capitalist profiteering, to the racist categorization of natural black hair as “unprofessional” and “untamed” compared to silky white tresses within the academy and other workspaces (simmons, 2019; smith, 2012). the most recent manifestation of white supremacy that has emerged within academic spaces is the prioritization of white narratives, fragility, feelings of safety, and free speech at the expense of the safety, wellbeing, and human rights of bipoc communities (ontario human rights commission, 1990). the result has been a sweltering campaign that aims to coopt and misappropriate ideologies about the right to “freedom of speech,” which is used to thinly veil white supremacist, racist, homophobic, and xenophobic rhetoric. at a superficial level, the recent resurgence of advocacy for freedom of speech in the canadian context seems to harken back to historical free-thinkers and those who fought for democracy within, and outside of canada. advocates for unbridled freedom of speech reference the importance of engagement in academic debate, honouring the socratic method of intellectual interrogation, which underpins the western positivist academy (delgado & stefancic, 2018). however, a closer examination reveals that this resurgence and co-optation of the free speech movement is led primarily by conservative, white, cisgendered people, who claim their right to free speech while denying the humanity, realities, rights, and lived experiences of those belonging to marginalized communities, namely, queer, trans, and bipoc communities (off, 2016; tabachnick, 2018). using free speech advocacy to frame their actions, many proponents of “open inquiry” within the academy provide significant platforms for white nationalist and neo-nazi collectives within canada to further their racist, xenophobic, anti-black, anti-indigenous, and anti-2slgbtq+ rhetoric. the frequent dismissal of hate speech, as a necessary consequence of white, patriarchal, cisgendered free speech is intentional and violent in the harm it causes racialized and marginalized people, who are already systemically silenced in our society (elghawaby, 2018; koggel, 2018; kurtz et al., 2008). in particular, this harm is illustrated through an analysis of those who are afforded the right to freedom of speech. for instance, in the wake of recent public outcry against ongoing settler colonial violence and police brutality directed towards bipoc communities in canada and the united states (us), freedom of speech has been publicly denied to protestors fighting for justice http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 through the systematic use of paramilitary weaponry, including flash grenades and tear gas (rogers, 2020). protesters supporting the black lives matter movement have been labeled “disruptors, thugs, and goons” by the 45th president of the united states (trump, 2020). in canada, land and water defenders peacefully protesting environmental destruction have been forcibly removed from their lands and have been the targets of rubber bullets and tasers state violence carried out by the royal canadian mounted police (rcmp) in british columbia on wet’suwet’en territory (hosgood, 2020), and the ontario provincial police (opp) on the traditional territory of the haudenosaunee in caledonia, ontario (north shore, 2020). to be clear, there is no “correct” way for black, indigenous, and people of colour communities to protest for their (our) lives and livelihoods. the misappropriation, weaponization and selective nature with which the argument for freedom of speech is applied within the canadian and us contexts reveals the nefarious mask project of white supremacy behind the free speech movement, which has long been verified and voiced by critical race scholars (matsuda et al., 1993). historically, critical race scholars have identified the centering of freedom of speech as an exercise by the old-guard in white supremacist culture to repurpose and repackage language about political freedoms in an effort to retain white settler control of a society that has long outgrown stunted ideologies about binary gender norms, and the continued oppression of bipoc communities based on dated and problematic racial hierarchies (matsuda et al., 1993). a white settler’s right to free speech does not, and cannot be permitted to trump marginalized people’s human rights and their right to exist free from discrimination and violence (ohrc, 1990). the problem of white supremacy in the academy when educational institutions brazenly use the narrative of freedom of speech to carve out space for white supremacist viewpoints, their connivance in racist violence is immediately recognizable. however, in the canadian context, white supremacy in educational institutions extends beyond conscious discrimination. historically, canadian white supremacist educational institutions were leveraged as tools of colonial violence that systematically targeted bipoc communities with generations of abusive policies and practices (smith, 2004; truth and reconciliation commission of canada, 2012), including segregation and physical abuse in spaces such as residential schools and the schools for colored children (the nova scotia home for colored children restorative inquiry, n.d.; truth and reconciliation commission of canada, 2015). the violent oppression of bipoc communities carried out through canada’s educational institutions illustrates that modern systems of education within canada are built upon a foundation of white supremacy. the policies of these colonial governments and religious regimes continue to play out through history for indigenous, black, and people of colour. for instance, it wasn’t until 1951, when the indian act was amended, that indigenous peoples were able to keep their “indian” status if they wanted to pursue higher education. while canadian educational institutions increasingly generate diversityrelated policies, there is limited research on the practical impact of these policies (smith, 2004). current research demonstrates that experiences of exclusion, discrimination, and oppression are far from a thing of the past for indigenous, black, and racialized students in canada. despite academic institutions’ diversity and policy statements, bipoc students and faculty continue to experience racism and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 discrimination, the effects of which are compounded by the ongoing denial of racism as an issue within postsecondary institutions (bailey, 2016; milem et al., 2005; morrison, 2010; mohamed & began, 2019; santaramirez et al., 2020). indigenous, black, and racialized scholars and students within canada continue to address how universities have denied the role that racism plays within the academy, as those in power continue to create barriers to transformative structural change, and equitable, safer spaces (bailey, 2016). this denial is deeply embedded in the structures of academia where diversity statements can be used as a screen for institutions to hide systemic inequalities. furthermore, these policies and statements are often inconsistent in practice, inadequate to transform institutions, and fail to challenge the dominant culture and discourse of whiteness within academia (henry & tator, 2010; robinson, 2013; santa-ramirez et al., 2020). additionally, diversity initiatives often fail to meet the demands for accountable change (ahmad & swan, 2006; bailey, 2016; mohamed & beagan 2019; morrison, 2010), as these statements and policies are often limited, intangible, and have minimal impact for indigenous, black, and racialized students, staff, and faculty. this lack of action and denial by academic institutions perpetuate the violence of racism, invalidation, and lack of support for bipoc faculty, staff, and students. for indigenous, black, and racialized students, staff and faculty, the academic experience is often fraught with multiple barriers and forms of discrimination, which can include microaggressions, tokenization, self-doubt, isolation, and frustration. (bailey, 2016; 2011; hubain et al., 2016; mohamed & began, 2019; verjee, 2005). in addition, the lack of bipoc representation in staffing can lead to feelings of isolation, and being positioned as an outsider (mohamed & began, 2019). this often leaves indigenous, black, and racialized faculty and students with the exhausting burden of continuously vocalizing the harm of racism; moreover, bipoc people are expected to educate white peers, professors, and administration about racism, which can lead to trauma-inducing events and burnout (grant et al., 2018; morrison, 2010; timmons et al., 2009). simultaneously, there is pressure for indigenous, black, and racialized faculty and students to assimilate and succeed in the white academic culture. this places indigenous, black, and racialized students and faculty in a precarious position of trying to succeed within a primarily white academic space and engaging with a colonial curriculum that fails to reflect their experiences or histories (delgado & stefancic, 2018; mohamed & began, 2019; morrison, 2010; verjee, 2005). therefore, indigenous, black, and racialized faculty and students are faced with the unfortunate truth that universities at large, and disciplines that operate under the guise of social justice such as community psychology, continue to be in denial about their own systemic racism, violence, and oppression. calling-out community psychology community psychology (cp) was birthed inside these white supremacist institutions and continues to coexist complicitly inside of and benefit from the ideologies, policies, and regulations of these institutions. indeed, our north america-centric, white-washed, ahistorical and a-critical creation story of ‘swampscott’ was itself born out of whiteness. community psychology, as an institutional discipline, continues to play-out what angelique and culley (2007) refer to as the andro and anglocentric history in us community psychology; which resonates loudly in the canadian context, as well. thus, in community psychology, we need to engage in a collective reckoning of this history of discrimination and oppression in our educational institutions and disrupt how it plays out in nefarious and systemic ways http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 inside the bounds of cp, including research, training, and praxis. thomas (2020) asks of cp, “whose knowledge matters? who decides what is social change? where do we get our theories? how does a field develop when its founders are mostly [w]hite men?” (para. 5). in a recent open letter drafted by black, nonblack poc, and white scholars in cp (society for community research and action, 2020), authors called-out the society for community, research, and action (scra) for its silence, disbelief, and disregard for the experiences of bipoc students, faculty, and scholars and demanded the development of an intentional and critical process towards creating space for bipoc students, faculty, and scholars to engage fully with cp. the authors of the letter argue that: white supremacy plays out in the ways that we continue to do an appalling job of attracting and retaining black students, scholars, and practitioners in community psychology programs and scra, while over-researching black communities. we cannot continue to exist as a field if this is how we operate. in this way, we continue to maintain systems of anti-black racism that deter and push out black scholars from training in, and identifying with the field of community psychology (para. 10). in this letter the authors outlined four demands, including: (1) putting tangible resources back into black communities, (2) acknowledging our complicity and maintenance of white supremacy culture in scra, (3) developing our understanding of anti-blackness and white supremacy, and (4) engaging in collective action to dismantle anti-blackness and white supremacy in cp. we have little, if anything, written on the experiences of black, indigenous, and students, staff, and faculty of colour in cp. our knowledge comes from lived experience and stories shared between friends and colleagues. these experiences paint a picture of systemic anti-black racism, anti-indigenous erasure, and white supremacy being produced and reproduced inside the very spaces we are claiming to build for justice. therefore, this paper seeks to create written space for bipoc students and faculty in cp to share some of their collective experiences. methods in crafting this manuscript, we chose to audio record and transcribe two of our monthly group discussions our november, 2019 and january, 2020 meetings, respectively. we then engaged in a collaborative process of reading and reviewing the transcripts to identify the salient themes that emerged, and subsequent to this, conducted a thematic analysis of the transcript data. three team members then worked together to read through the thematically analyzed data to narrow down some stories of our experiences that really captured and exemplified nuanced and complex issues. these stories then formed the foundations for our case examples, which are the result of the amalgamation of our experiences. while the case examples are composites of our collective experiences, they are not embellishments. case examples utilizing case examples and our own lived experiences within canadian academic institutions, in this section we illustrate the current impact of white supremacist and discriminatory practices within educational institutions, and specifically within the field of community psychology. case 1: free speech and white supremacy are bedfellows a white, cisgender, woman-identified graduate student is a teaching assistant for a first year geography class. during one of her http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 tutorials, the teaching assistant takes the liberty of going on a tangent and makes harmful racist statements (such as using the n-word) and transphobic statements (such as denying the validity and grammatical correctness of gender-inclusive pronouns). this leaves many students feeling uncomfortable and unsafe, but given the power dynamics of the university classroom, they feel unable to voice their concerns, so they bring the issue to the attention of their racialized instructor. the instructor schedules a meeting with the teaching assistant to discuss the matter. the teaching assistant escalates the issue to the media, declaring that the instructor has obstructed her right to freedom of speech. despite having no collective agreement that protects the freedom of speech of teaching assistants, primarily because the course content is not created by them, the university decides to side with the teaching assistant by publicly apologizing to her, and the racialized professor is effectively thrown under the bus and is forced to make a public apology. within the context of ongoing misappropriation of freedom of speech, these apologies served as catalysts for validating the perspective of the teaching assistant, who proceeded to harass transgender, nonbinary, and racialized students in the university halls by taunting them with name calling. the teaching assistant also hosted public events on the university campus that centered white supremacist, anti-immigrant, and transphobic ideologies. these situations exacerbated through national news and social media outlets, escalated a roaring wave of harm in the university climate for students, faculty, and staff who identify as black, indigenous, and/or people of colour, two-spirit, queer, transgender, or nonbinary. unpacking this example depicts the ways in which free speech is repurposed, repackaged, and misappropriated to justify and normalize hate speech that denies the realities and lived experience of racialized and marginalized people. arguments for free speech that serve to deny trans people’s right to exist, or the existence of systemic racism in society, also simultaneously serve to center cisgender and white people as victims. often, white people claim to be victims of “reverse racism,” yet there is no empirical evidence of systemic racism towards white people, beyond their refusal to be accountable and take responsibility for the way in which white supremacist logic has been utilized to benefit white communities. it is all too opportunistic and convenient that at the moment in our collective history where conversations about racism and marginalization have become national and international conversations in the western world, the status quo ramps-up and disseminates new messaging to recenter themselves as victims under the banners of “reverse racism” and “white lives matter.” proponents who benefit from white supremacist logic need little more than their opinions to make this issue one that white politicians stand behind, because opinions (not facts or evidence) are the only things white people need to validate their realities in a white settler state. colonial settler nationstates like canada and the us originate in an alternative fact-verse reality that whitewashes history and centers the glory of white people to the detriment and erasure of everyone else. the now infamous amy cooper who studied at our neighbouring university right here in waterloo, ontario made international news when she called the police on an innocent black man who told her to leash-up her dog in a park with clearly demarcated signs mandating leashes. cooper knew and understood very well the power of her voice as a white woman to play the victim and garner sympathy and protectionism from a system built on criminalizing black people (singh, 2020). amy cooper is a perfect example of the way white fragility and white tears are weaponized (diangelo, 2018), just as free speech, when used by white http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 nationalists, is weaponized against nonwhite, cis, hetero people, cultivating a culture of unsafety for marginalized groups. case 2: white fragility absolves white people of accountability a tenured professor who is white, queer, and woman-identified has an extensive history of racist, transphobic, and generally discriminatory behaviour towards students in her classroom. in one of her classes, a group of racialized and queer phd students were harmed by the instructor’s words in dismissing a black trans person’s womanhood. as a collective, the students decided to hold the faculty member accountable for her words and actions. first, the students provided her an opportunity to clarify what she meant, in the event of miscommunication or misunderstanding. when it became clear that the faculty member intended her discriminatory sentiments and refused to acknowledge the oppressive nature of the statements, students sought mediation using the designated university processes. throughout the mediation process the faculty member continued to evade accountability by offering non-apologies and villainizing the students as troublemakers who were “too sensitive” and who just wanted to “get out of doing their course work.” the instructor claimed that students were guilty of obstructing her freedom of speech, despite the fact that the students clearly articulated that her free speech was not more important than their human right to exist as queer, racialized and marginalized people. the instructor also centered herself and her mental health, rather than the impact of her actions on the students and the program at large. students were actively discouraged by the university administration from making a formal complaint, despite the instructor’s history of violent and discriminatory remarks. on top of the labour of trying to progress in their phd coursework, students were made responsible for educating their instructor on the harmfulness of her words and for navigating university policies, procedures, and personnel, who could assist them in a process of holding the instructor accountable. despite their attempts, the instructor declined participating in a transparent process of reconciliation and mediation, leaving the students to process and recover from the trauma with no support from the university and no resolution. consequently, many of the students opted to disengage from the university community, aside from completing required course work, further disadvantaging them as they moved through the institution, unprotected within their own program and department. unpacking this case example demonstrates the contrasting ways in which the university responds to white students, as evidenced by case 1, with the white teaching assistant, versus the queer bipoc students of this case study. it also demonstrates the layered way in which white people are provided ample opportunities to center their own vulnerabilities and use the protections provided to them such as tenure and whiteness by the academy to center themselves as victims, while villainizing and infantilizing queer students of colour, who they claim have diabolical ulterior motives for naming the violence they are experiencing. bipoc people, such as the students in case 2, are always asked to provide insurmountable volumes of evidence to substantiate their claims of oppression. whereas white folks need only express their thoughts, feelings, and opinions; no actual evidence required. power in the academy is never analyzed when it serves to protect the interests of the institution which remains a predominantly white workforce from legal liability. in fact, while all university institutions have some form of conflict resolution process or ombudsperson, these offices are very rarely http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 trained on how to understand and address racism as a form of violent harm that needs to be eradicated. predominantly white institutions provide an alibi for white supremacy. these institutions simultaneously problematize bipoc students as trouble-makers who are ultimately raising issues that make white people feel uncomfortable, because they are unable and unwilling to address or contend with the issues of racism, erasure, and oppression. garner (2016), notes that in the conceptualization and actions of whiteness, the structural inequities that uphold whiteness in the academy remain reinforced, supported, and unexamined, as white privilege continues to manifest and harm those not of such privilege, and who resist the oppression wrought by the structures (hughes & giles, 2010). it is for this reason that predominantly white spaces feel threatened when more than one bipoc person gathers together. in our experience, such spaces are characterized as “militant.” we view them as libratory and revolutionary. importantly, another layer of how racism operates even within queer communities is highlighted in this case example. namely, that white lgbtq people can participate and be complicit in racist, discriminatory, and oppressive violence. identification with one minoritized group does not give one a monopoly of understanding in any intimate way of the oppression experienced by other minoritized groups. we are each individually constrained to our own experiences of the world, and so a white, queer-identified person is not more able to understand the realities of racialized people than their straight counterparts. in virtue of being situated within the bounds of whiteness, there are limitations to the analysis of white queer communities, white women communities, etc. often we find that these communities are complicit in racist violence (furman et al., 2018). case 3: the burden of explaining racism a racialized instructor is invited to give a guest lecture in a seminar course to a group of predominantly white graduate students. in fact, only one student in the class is racialized and one of the white students has made no secret of expressing that he does not think systemic racism exists and that he believes racialized people in the larger cp program demonstrate reverse racism against him. for the lecture, the guest instructor has been asked to share with the class focal points regarding critical race theory and immigration. as a racialized, first-generation immigrant, the guest instructor gives a vulnerablizing, personal testimony of her own experiences of racism in the cp program, and in academia more generally. during the question and answer portion of the class, the instructor for the class – who is a white cisgendered man – asks the racialized instructor, “so much of your work focuses on race and racism. do you always have to talk about race and racism? does the concept of intersectionality have to include a race analysis? how do you know that racism is occurring, how do you know that your perception of racism is not a result of your focus on race and racism in your work?” the racialized guest instructor, caught off guard by the question moreover, given the topic area she was asked to present on by the primary instructor, and the fact that she has to engage in this conversation in front of a group of predominantly white students takes a deep breath before thinking about how to respond. this is not her first time being put on display and asked by white people to explain racism and provide evidence of her experiences of racism in order to “validate” her lived experience. unpacking far too often, bipoc people are asked to validate their experiences by providing evidence, specifically evidence that meets the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 standards of white scientific empiricism. our narratives, testimonies, and accounts of lived experience are thought of as anecdotal, biased, and non-factual clearly unworthy of being taught or acknowledged in most university classrooms. this is juxtaposed with the inherent value bestowed upon the white glare in education systems and academic institutions that uphold a white supremacist logic. if it cannot be observed from the white gaze felt, touched, prodded, and measured, it is thought to not exist. it is this same line of logic that through colonial processes stripped our communities of our connections to language, culture, spirituality, traditions, and land. this empiricism is regurgitated in our university classes so much that students have an unhealthy romanticization of the problems quantitative and empirical research can actually address and solve in our world. university classes rarely teach students that objectivity is an illusion, and even at the quantum level of reality, the very act of observation changes the material conditions of what we are observing. for instance, light exists as a wave in nature, but the act of observation makes it appear as a particle (molecular expressions, 2016). there is no such thing as objectivity. even the act of playing an “objective observer” in a study where one monitors disease progression (i.e., tuskegee syphilis trials) or poverty and disenfranchisement, with no intention to intervene or find an approach to address the pressing issues, is a political choice. namely, the decision to merely observe oppression caused by social inequity but never intervene is to serve the aims of the white supremacy that caused the disparities in the first place. even in a field such as cp, which claims to center ideals such as intersubjectivity, social justice, and equity ends up being (for the most part) little more than a discipline steeped in a white saviour complex that relies on feel-good interventions into “communities at-risk,” with little mobilization to shift the systems that put communities at risk in the first place. as such, bipoc researchers that reaffirm their commitment to centering truthtelling and our testimonies are actively engaged in the process of decolonizing and obstructing the harm caused to our communities by the western academy (tuhiwai smith, 2012). case 4: the impact of white supremacy on the mental health of bipoc communities in being confronted with daily experiences of racism and constantly being asked to provide evidence of these experiences beyond their personal testimonies, black, indigenous and racialized students, staff, faculty, and their white accomplices conduct a study in 2017, gathering the experiences of racialized people regarding the culture of racism in the broader university. for the most part, the student labour is uncompensated, as the student researchers are not paid by the university to conduct this study and the faculty and staff supervisors are not provided any additional resources or support to undertake the study or adequately compensate their students. over 200 racialized, black, and indigenous students, faculty, and staff partake in the study and a report is produced. the report provides detailed accounts of the various examples of racist violence experienced by black, racialized and indigenous people on the university’s campus. the team of researchers host a series of meetings with members of the university administration to highlight the findings of the study and to push for change around issues of racism within the university. the students also task the entirely white university administration to educate themselves and become allied champions of anti-racist, anti-oppression equity, diversity and inclusion (edi) work at the university. for over two years, the administration fails to follow-up on any of the action items specified in the report. instead, they make a series of commitments to the research team, on which they do not follow through. in observing the wave of companies and institutions making anti-racist statements following the uprisings http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 of black lives matter in 2020, the university makes a statement about their commitment to anti-racist practice and edi. in this statement, university leadership use the information produced from the 2017 report, but fail to properly cite the students, staff, and faculty authors. further, the administration proceeds to hire and appoint a black faculty member to the role of an administrator, downloading the insurmountable task of overseeing the university’s entire edi action plan onto one racialized person. the black and racialized students, staff, and faculty in the research team are triggered by their erasure, the overt plagiarism, and the disrespect of their work, and advise that this labour should not be downloaded onto indigenous, black, and racialized people, because of the overwhelming burden, stress, and negative impact on mental health. unpacking in the current climate, with the recent ground-swell in some of dominant society recognizing the deep impact of racism, and in particular anti-black racism, we have collectively witnessed institutions around the world, from the nfl to the academy, pay lip service via anti-racism statements and utter empty words that they will “do better,” lest they face the wrath of the purchasing power of fed-up bipoc and allied communities. and more egregious, are governance and administrators in institutions that fail to acknowledge the significance of this moment in our collective history, who have failed to make any statements, and worse still, who have failed to look inward to shift their organizational culture. as mentioned, this was the case for the scra, the central association in the discipline of cp, which was recently put on notice in a public call to action (scra, 2020) on their organizational anti-blackness. this letter was signed by over 400 bipoc and allied members of scra. too often black, indigenous, and people of colour have to put their bodies, lives, and livelihoods on the line to speak truth to power about racist oppression. the civil rights movement, for instance, resulted in some hard-fought wins that cost many black people and community leaders their lives. it is on black people’s backs that affirmative action and equity policies were created, and those policies were in-turn used by white establishments such as the academy to hire white women and utilize the model minority myth, employing more palatable brown folks instead of hiring indigenous and black people. the academy is no exception to this practice, as we see white women with no knowledge or informed analysis about racism or indigeneity populating equity offices in campuses across the country. this leaves the brunt of explaining and demonstrating experiences of racism on the backs of bipoc students, staff, and faculty, and even when they provide their testimonies, the appointed equity officers are incapable of and unwilling to support them. too often, the work of explaining racism, demonstrating its existence and impact, and doing anti-racist and anti-oppression work in institutions lies squarely on the backs of bipoc people. to be clear, the folks who need to be invested in anti-racist work are the white people that benefit from and maintain the white supremacist systems causing harm. discussion strategies for those trying to survive the academy in the section below, we provide bipoc and systemically marginalized folks some practical strategies that we use in our mobilizing everyday, to help us navigate difficult situations within academic institutions. some of these strategies are informed by a long history of bipoc, and in particular black feminist organizing and thought. others are strategies we have had to figure out for ourselves as we manage these spaces in a tumultuous 21st century context. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 rather than focus on conversations of free speech, which has been sufficiently misappropriated and centered by the status quo to cause harm to our communities, we herein focus this discussion on our navigation as intersectionally diverse bipoc folks in white-dominated academic spaces. this focus is intentional as we are provided few spaces and opportunities to engage in these conversations in combating the multiple ways our experiences are dismissed and absented in academic writing. as such, there is something novel but vital and revolutionary in our sharing our strategies for surviving the academy with other bipoc, queer, and allied folks. take care: as bipoc students, faculty, and staff it is important that as we navigate and survive these systems of oppression and violence, that we find ways to take care of ourselves emotionally, physically, spiritually, and mentally. one strategy is connecting with each other for support and sharing experiences, including expressing feelings of frustration and anger (morrison, 2010; the combahee river collective statement, 1977). this is of particular importance because universities often do not offer adequate, appropriate, or culturallyrelevant support for bipoc people. for instance, on-campus counselling supports often do little to support bipoc students who are navigating issues surrounding systemic racism in the academy, of which the predominantly white counselling staff have no comprehension and little useful advice to provide (banks, 2020). while it is important to put pressure on the university administration to hire more indigenous, black, and racialized staff in reflection of increasingly diverse student bodies, it is also important for bipoc people within the academy to carve out safe, meaningful, and useful collective spaces for themselves, where they can center and validate their experiences, brilliance, and value. other related and useful care strategies include, but are not limited to: saying “no” to undertaking work that makes you feel uncomfortable or tokenized; saying “no” to work more generally, taking a break from work; spirituality, connecting with mother earth; reconnecting with family, friends, and loved ones; finding supportive online spaces (e.g., instagram accounts focused on bipoc wellbeing), etc. keep receipts: whenever there is an incident or an interaction that left you feeling uncomfortable, or merely one you made a mental note of, document it! document everything. include dates and times, like you do in a journal. keeping track of all incidences, regardless of how small they may seem when they happen. oftentimes the full realization of what is happening in a moment takes time to crystalize. very often we fail to trust and follow our intuition about situations that have impacted us negatively, or which made us feel uncomfortable, and often these incidences accumulate over time to really shape our mental health, relationships, outlook on the world, and the social environments in which we study and work. these receipts will come in handy should white supremacist academic spaces, or anyone in the broader structure, wish to villainize or problematize you as the only, or one of few bipoc people in the space. this is one way of gathering evidence and documenting our truths (burey, 2020) as forms of knowledge and power (see torres, 2020, for a more detailed guide on collecting receipts and gathering evidence of your experiences). call-out for accountability: call-out culture is deeply rooted in a long history of black feminist organizing (kahaleole hall, 2018). call-outs intentionally disrupt white supremacist heteropatriarchal structures by naming the oppression in full view of a diverse public, who, through such open dialogue, have the opportunity for collective intervention. the status quo thrives on http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 secrecy, the illusion of complicity and agreement, and private conversations that never leave the "inner circle" in the boardroom so as to not perturb the “natural” order of things. there is nothing white-led institutions fear more than public shame and outcry. solidarity & allyship: murri (indigenous australian) elder, lilla watson (2004) shared “if you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” solidarity is understanding that we don’t all face the same struggles and oppressions; however, there is an interconnectedness between our struggles towards achieving social justice in a society established on white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy (hooks, 1984; reynolds, 2010). allyship is when individuals from privileged groups support oppressed groups by actively working to eliminate the forms of oppression that they themselves may benefit from (goodman, 2011). it is important to remember that allyship is not a badge of honour one can label themselves and wear indefinitely (kluttz et al., 2020). furthermore, as alluded to in the watson quote above, white allies must be diligent and mindful to not take on a white saviour complex, in which recognition is sought for their work in saving others (kluttz et al., 2020). as indigenous, black, racialized, and marginalized peoples, we must stand in solidarity with other marginalized peoples in our fights for justice. for instance, understanding that the fight for racial justice or against islamophobia and related religious persecution by people of colour, is deeply intertwined with and dependent on the fight for sovereignty of the first peoples and subsequently racialization of african diasporic peoples. anti-racism is a directionless project if it does not regard the specificity and hard-fought battles waged over issues of indigenous genocide, anti-black racism, and the humanism of indigenous peoples the world over, who have been exploited in the neoliberal global capitalist empire building project of the western world. together, we stand stronger with our voices amplified. focusing solely on our individual struggle, rather than the interrelationship with others, only serves the status quo (reynolds, 2010). always have witnesses: when entering a room or a meeting with people you do not know or trust, always bring someone you do trust with you into that space. never go alone. always have someone who can bear witness to that moment. white supremacist culture is one of perpetual gaslighting, a-historicity, and make-believe realities. you quite literally have a culture of people who have reimagined themselves as the arbiters of the universe gods of their own reality. it is integral when entering spaces with such staunch narcissism and psychological mind-trips that you bring reinforcements to help ground you in reality and account for the truth of what is. all skin folk ain’t kin folk: this is a wellknown saying in the black community that has roots in the southern states of the us. it signifies the importance of recognizing that while you and another person may be of the same culture, ethnicity or race, or both be racialized or queer or have any countless number of other identities and things in common, that person may not think the same way you do. they may not see the world the way you do and have a completely different politic than you do. they may not see you as their equal, but as someone beneath them in an imagined pecking order. the colonial project has been very thorough and almost no one in western society has escaped it. the same way white people can view racialized people as inferior to them, brown people can view black people as inferior, or black people and other racialized people can view indigenous people as inferior in the ‘grand hierarchy of race.’ we are all products of colonialism. we are all subjected to similar school systems that reaffirm the superiority http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 of white features, white history, and white dominance. as such, it should be no surprise that we have internalized a white way of thinking about others as inferior to us, if there is some feature they lack, and which we have that puts us closer in proximity to whiteness (see fanon, 1963, for more real talk regarding internalized colonialism and racism). this reality often makes it difficult to openly trust people in our own communities, and while we do not encourage paranoid suspicion of everyone, we do encourage holding your personal secrets and thoughts close to your chest until you understand an individual’s politics. guard your relations. understand the system you are in: it is imperative that bipoc communities achieve a clear understanding of the institutions in which they live, study, and work be that in academia or elsewhere. talk to other bipoc folks to gain and deepen understanding about the hierarchy of the institution, the places and people that are safe and unsafe, knowing your allies, accomplices, and where to find useful information in times of need the spaces you can go to seek different kinds of services and resources, the people and places to avoid, etc. for instance, a clear understanding of proper protocols, policies, and procedures is integral in predominantly white institutions that are notorious for making up rules in moments that conveniently disadvantage marginalized people. a keen awareness of proper protocols can be an important form of accountability. an institutional understanding helps to prepare you to navigate these systems should a time call for such navigation. further, getting connected to the intel provided by a network of bipoc in an institution can be instrumental in helping you avoid situations and circumstances that may be harmful. often, there are very few bipoc in a given institution; as such, bipoc people are often very willing to share their experiences to help others avoid negative outcomes. this network of sharing amongst marginalized communities is a very important resource. honour your full humanity: honour your culture, honour your spirituality, honour your traditions. trust your intuition for it is your life’s compass on this journey. reconnect with your family, friends, loved ones, with nature, with yourself. go out into the bush. live on the land. live in the moment. know thyself. honour thyself. the project of colonialism is a thorough project intent on stripping us of all that makes us human. the very projects of enslavement and genocide the world over are intent on stripping us, our peoples, and our ancestors, the predecessors of, and links to our humanity. the most transformative, radical, important thing we can do to resist is simply to exist. to love, laugh, learn, and honour each other with all our flaws. learn from those who came before: as we have mentioned, many of the strategies we pull from are informed by black feminist scholarship, which teaches tools for surviving white supremacist structures, like the academy (hooks, 1994; lorde, 1984). black feminism speaks to black power and liberation. because as noted by the combahee river collective (1977), if black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression (pp. 22-23). in this view, the liberation of black women is deeply intertwined in the liberation of all who are systemically marginalized; hence the approach of mobilizing around the needs of the most intersectionally marginalized in order to meet the needs of everyone else. black feminist thought, organizing, and activism have been at the forefront of upending racism in the academy and uprooting oppression in our communities and in grassroots organizations in canada, the us, latin america, and around the world. there are so many black women to whom we pay tribute past and present, who have sacrificed so much and tirelessly worked toward the liberation of our peoples. to this end, we would also like to recognize and pay http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 homage to the work of indigenous women on turtle island and around the world, who lead in the teachings about decolonization and reclaiming their cultures, languages, ceremonies, traditions, and worldviews and work to free our peoples from oppression and tyranny. it is on the shoulders of these giants that we stand in doing this work. demands for accountability within community psychology over the course of this paper, the conversations we have highlighted focus on the deeply intertwined connections of our experiences with the contemporary sociopolitical issues that are pressing in our broader society, particularly as they pertain to racism. we have interrogated the question, what are the numerous and complex ways predominantly white spaces like the academy reproduce harm and violence towards queer and trans and two-spirit bipoc, and what are the strategies we employ in order to survive these spaces and thrive? in the final section of this paper, we will reflect on how these conversations inform the demands for work on the part of the academy more generally, and community psychology as a practicebased discipline, more specifically. demands of the academy ● acknowledge the legacy of violence in the academy: accountability at the university-wide level entails moving beyond land acknowledgments to addressing the historic and ongoing forms of violence and genocide of indigenous peoples that forever taint the land upon which western academic institutions are built. there can be no reconciliation, if there is no truth. academic institutions tasked with producing knowledge must be intentional about their commitment to truth-telling. the leaders of universities must not only acknowledge the long history of racism and indigenous erasure in the academy, but also the academy’s active and continued role as a vector of colonial research that has been responsible for exotifying and pathologizing equity-seeking communities who are racialized, queer, trans, differently abled, etc. it is incumbent upon the leaders of academic institutions to enact levers for ethical and accountable research and scholarship. ● address violence: in canada, despite having codes of human rights that protect indigneous and equityseeking groups, university institutions are ill-equipped to address conflicts around issues such as racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc. for instance, at laurier, in none of the training offered to university personnel who are responsible for resolving conflict is there training on recognizing issues of racism, homophobia, or transphobia as forms of violence and issues that need to be addressed. just about the only offence recognized in the training is sexism, and in that, a very narrow and limited understanding of sexism that does not include the realities of two-spirit, black, racialized, and trans women. the failure to recognize expressions of free speech disguised as hate speech and as a form of violence that is an affront to the human rights of equity-seeking groups that necessitates swift and decisive action is perhaps the academies greatest ethical and legal liability. a failure to put mechanisms, such as a human rights office, in place that address these issues lays the ground-work for continued violence on university campuses. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 ● representation matters: academic institutions are notorious for being predominantly white spaces with predominantly white staff and faculty complements, perpetuating theories and knowledge produced almost exclusively from white, western frameworks. this is the nature of the academy as an institution of the settler nation-state to uphold white supremacy ideology as the status quo within an neoliberal paradigm (speed, 2020). as the student body of the academy increasingly diversifies, and as post-secondary education becomes accessible to more people than ever before especially with more online teaching and learning modalities there is a proportionate increase in the demand by students and critical scholars alike for the incorporation of non-western scholarship, frameworks, and pedagogy in the classroom taught by people who both respect and understand their realities. many universities in canada lack tangible commitments to diverse perspectives, particularly within curriculum, which focuses on the dominant worldview and ‘other’ or alternative worldviews are viewed as merely additive to the core tenets of western positivist frameworks (campbell, 2003). when students challenge these mainstream approaches, they often face reprimand (verjee, 2013). it is incumbent on post-secondary institutions to hire diverse faculty and staff at all levels, and especially in upper-level administrative roles, and it is important for all faculty (white, racialized, indigenous, black or otherwise) to embrace the thoughts and ideas of non-western scholarship in their teaching and pedagogy, in order to really intentionally engage with the students of today and tomorrow. “more brown faces in white spaces” (gaudry & lorenz, 2018, p. 220) is not the hallmark of transformative change, especially if white supremacy ideology is allowed to persist in the classroom. demands to scra ● recognize indigenous erasure and anti-black racism as acts of violence and serve to disrupt these structures in every facet of your organization, cp programs, and in community partnerships. bipoc scholars are continuing to experience violence in scra through the scra listserv, in cp programs, in committees and council meetings, etc. community psychology continues to fall into the trappings of many disciplines based within the western academy. namely, it is a discipline that is a-historical and presumed to be constructed by, and for white men (angelique & culley, 2007). ● continue to address call for action demands. as previously mentioned, in the summer of 2020, in response to calls at all levels in all spaces to address anti-black racism, a call to action was co-created by black, nonblack poc, and white scholars and circulated to the scra community through the scra list serve. within days, the call to action had over 400 signatures from students, practitioners, and faculty members from across the globe committing publicly to addressing anti-blackness in all spaces that cp and/or cpers participate in scra leadership, interest groups, committees, and councils, cp programs in institutions around the world, and our community praxis. you can refer to the full list of demands here. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ngs-fag0letxs1mynidpavqsj-g7gyq0rdvbz4xojku/edit global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 ● examine the structure of scra and the ways in which it replicates white supremacist structure. the now normalized structure of scra perpetuates systems of indigenous and racial violence in many insidious ways. we demand that as a society we continue to reflect on and disrupt these systems that continue to cause harm. these include but are not limited to: scra’s paid structure and budgetary decisions, the lack of open access journals/knowledge in core journals, and the lack of transparency in executive elections. demands of every cp program ● reflect on the demands this paper outlines in relation to the academy and scra and unpack and address the ways in which systems of white supremacy, indigenous erasure, and anti-black racism play out inside the bounds of our programs. cp is not immune to the issues addressed in this paper. ● re-imagine the skills we need to cultivate in the discipline: doing antiracist work, and challenging the norms of white supremacist logic is a skill set that requires intention and practice. in our cp programs we need to be re-imagining the ways in which we engage students in issues of conflict mediation, nonprofit practice, facilitation and mediation, public policy, advocacy, and social change. we require a change in our pedagogy and a real commitment to edi, as cp theories developed predominantly by white men currently drive and frame our practice. ● nurture program graduates and build ongoing opportunities to develop and practice these skills: in an evaluation of the wlu cp program alcade, 1991) highlighted a need to engage graduates of our programs who are both practitioners and academics in an ongoing and meaningful relationship; building and sustaining a community of practice. ● centering indigenous related issues of sovereignty, history, and nationhood. for example, the territory which laurier occupies is the unceded territory of the anishinaabek, haudenosaunee, and attawandaron peoples. the largest indigenous community in the settler nation-state of canada is a one-hour drive from the waterloo and kitchener campuses and minutes from the brantford campus. yet, most students coming to the cp program are often not aware of six nations and the colonial structures that designate how students navigate this university, based in the historical contexts of imperialism, colonization, oppression and colonial assimilationist policies (crey, 2009). moreover, indigenous students coming to this university are subjected to colonial curricula and lack accurate representation in ways of being and knowing (battiste, 2016; whitlow et al., 2019). cp programs can be transformed into programs that teach the truths regarding the colonization of the land they occupy, and how students and faculty are violently marginalized within the academy. these teachings should form the raison d’etre of the program. demands of white community psychologists ● reflect on your motivation for engaging in justice work. it is crucial that white community psychologists reflect on their own motives for involvement in equity and justice work. white cp practitioners should ask themselves: do you want to learn http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 about the ways that you benefit from settler colonialism and white supremacy? are you prepared to tolerate the discomfort that accompanies this recognition? and, perhaps most salient, are you comfortable with the notion of working yourself out of a career? as scholars and practitioners who work toward indigenous sovereignty and racial justice, community psychologists are effectively working toward a world in which our work becomes irrelevant. as such, it is the responsibility of white cp practitioners to set these systemic changes in motion for that possible future. ● dismantle systems of racial violence. given that white folks move easily through systems that disadvantage bipoc, those who benefit from white supremacy find themselves in the unique position to challenge the systems within which they work. it is the responsibility of white scholars and practitioners to identify and name forms of oppression within their places of work and scholarship. while bipoc scholars and practitioners are often labelled as problematic within academic and community spaces for disrupting the status quo, white community psychologists are in a unique position to challenge traditional administrative channels, advocate for transparency, and contribute to a safer space for bipoc colleagues. ● educate other white people. white community psychologists are able to leverage their education in social justice by naming forms of oppression that impact bipoc and systemically marginalized community members. too often, the role of educating white people about the varied and widespread impacts of white supremacy falls on the shoulders of those impacted by these forms of oppression. when white scholars and practitioners encounter those who are unfamiliar with the impacts of white supremacy, they have the opportunity to share their knowledge and challenge those who dispute the existence of systemic racism and indigenous genocide. in the face of ongoing settler colonial, anti-black, and otherwise racist violence, “agreeing to disagree” with problematic and violent colleagues and partners in research and practice is not an option white cp practitioners can select in good conscience. as many have recently highlighted, white silence is an act of compliance with white supremacist systems and violence in the face of ongoing trauma experienced by bipoc communities. ● beware of a white saviour complex. while it is important for white community psychologists to use their voices to promote equity and social justice, the role of white scholars and practitioners in advancing equity initiatives necessitates careful navigation and ongoing maintenance of the delicate balance between using your voice to educate others and knowing when to be silent to make room for the voices of marginalized community members. cultivating this balance within cp practice is ongoing work that involves a great deal of reflective practice. remember that white practitioners are not “a voice for the voiceless.” bipoc communities have long been perceived as voiceless, when in fact, community members have been systematically silenced by mainstream, white supremacist systems. in turn, bipoc communities have been viewed as helpless through the paternalistic lenses of those http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 september 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 engaged in international and domestic development work. as white community psychologists, your job is to hand over the microphone, not to stand at the forefront of racial justice movements with the bullhorn. your job is not to design novel projects or redesign existing equity work, but to shed light on what bipoc community leaders are actively engaging in at the grassroots level. for example, white scholars and practitioners can direct project funds toward existing, bipocled community-based organizations rather than designing novel studies or programming. following the principle of ‘nothing about us without us’ white community psychologists should, unequivocally, engage in indigenous and racial justice and equity work only with the guidance of members of the communities with which they have meaningful relationships. connection to the themes of this special issue: throughout this piece, we have outlined the realities of the white supremacist academic industrial complex we are confronted by, and the strategies we employ in order to survive these often harmful spaces. in candidly sharing our hopes for indigenous sovereignty, racial justice, and strategies for survival we intend to break the silence around, and the erasure of the experiences of black, indigenous, and racialized students and scholars in the academy. this form of truth telling and knowledge sharing for justice and survival is a revolutionary act in our liberation. acknowledgements this is for all the freedom fighters who transform our spaces of learning every day as they call-out injustice, and push to make spaces of learning inhabitable and survivable for other black, indigenous and racialized people. references ahmed, s. & swan, e. 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(2019). yehyatonhserayenteri: a haudenosaunee model for onkwehon:we (indigenous) education. canadian journal of education/revue canadienne de l’éducation, 42(2), 553-575. http://journals.sfu.ca/cje/index.php/cjerce/article/view/3725/2739 watson, l. (2004, september 21-24). recognition of indigenous terms of reference [keynote address]. a contribution to change: cooperation out of conflict conference: celebrating difference, embracing equality, hobart, tasmania. https://uniting.church/lillawatson-let-us-work-together/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://journals.sfu.ca/cje/index.php/cje-rce/article/view/3725/2739 http://journals.sfu.ca/cje/index.php/cje-rce/article/view/3725/2739 a community psychology approach to program development for female juvenile offenders: a community-based arts initiative anna r. smith university of hawai´i at mānoa university of south carolina women’s well-being initiative keywords: female juvenile delinquency; gender; gender-specific programming; community psychology; ecological levels of analysis; art initiatives author biography: anna r. smith is a community and cultural psychology doctoral student at the university of hawai‘i at mānoa. she previously served as program coordinator for the women’s well-being initiative at the university of south carolina, developing and implementing programs with vulnerable women and children in the community. her research interests include university-community partnerships, program development and evaluation, communities in disaster, and developing research methodologies that take an intersectional approach. recommended citation: smith, a.r. (2015). a community psychology approach to program development for female juvenile offenders: a community-based arts initiative. global journal of community psychology practice, 6(2), 1-17. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org). global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 2 a community psychology approach to program development for female juvenile offenders: a community-based arts initiative abstract this paper explores the benefits of taking a community psychology approach to designing and implementing a program for female juvenile offenders (fjos). despite policy initiatives calling for more gender-specific programming, few gender-specific programs for fjos are evidenced-based and culturally sensitive, and the juvenile justice system still struggles to apply fjo research findings to fjo program development (shepherd, 2002). this struggle to bridge research and practice is especially pronounced in community-based juvenile arbitration programs that often lack time and resources to develop research-based programs. this paper expounds on some of the gaps in fjo programming and argues that a community psychology approach is useful in addressing these gaps. it demonstrates the value of a community psychology approach by describing the process of developing a community-based arts intervention for fjos participating in a community arbitration program. after discussing the process and challenges, the paper concludes with recommendations for the field. female juvenile offenders (fjos) are the fastest growing population in juvenile justice systems worldwide (tracy, kempf-leonard, & abramoske-james, 2009). in the united states, fjos comprise almost one third of all juvenile justice arrests, and although arrest rates have declined overall for both male and female juvenile offenders, in 2013, fjos made up 28 percent of arrests compared to only 22 percent in 1986 (federal bureau of investigation, 2013). in response to this trend, the federal government reauthorized the 1974 juvenile justice and delinquency prevention (jjdp) act in 1992 and again in 2002, calling for gender-specific research on and programs for fjos. the reauthorization of the jjdp act has led to increased emphasis on gender-specific programming in the juvenile justice system particularly with regard to research on differences in fjo and male juvenile offender (mjo) delinquency (american bar association & national bar association, 2001; chesney-lind & sheldon, 1998; sharp & simon, 2004). in 2004, the office of juvenile justice and delinquency prevention founded the girls study group (2014), a research group dedicated to “understanding and responding to girls’ delinquency,” and it has made considerable progress toward this goal (zahn et al., 2008: p. 1). despite this progress, research has been slow to inform practice, and the juvenile justice system still struggles to apply fjo research findings to fjo program development (shepherd, 2002). this struggle to bridge research and practice is especially pronounced in community-based juvenile arbitration programs that often lack time and resources to develop research-based programs. this paper expounds on some of the gaps in fjo programming and argues that a community psychology approach is useful in addressing these gaps. it demonstrates the value of a community psychology approach by describing the process of developing a community-based arts intervention for fjos participating in a community arbitration program. after discussing the process and challenges, the paper concludes with recommendations for the field. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 3 gaps in fjo program development though the reauthorization of the jjdp act has led to increased fjo programming (shepherd, 2002), often these gender-specific programs are not based on best practices or existing fjo research (foley, 2008). in fact, many fjo programs are actually programs that were originally designed for mjos and have been applied hastily to fjos without prior evaluation or consideration of their differential impacts on girls (belknap & holsinger, 2006). while these programs claim to be “gender-neutral,” they are largely geared toward mjos in both design and implementation, and therefore, may not be effective or appropriate for fjos (chesneylind & pasko, 2004; foley, 2008; zahn et al., 2008). regardless, gender-neutral programming may prove an insufficient approach to female juvenile delinquency because research shows that fjos do differ significantly from mjos in terms of pathways to delinquency, the types of crimes committed (chesney-lind & shelden, 1998; zahn et al., 2008), mental health factors (zahn et al., 2010), and behavioral traits (broidy et al., 2003). therefore, fjos likely have very different needs than their male counterparts (chesney-lind, 2001). unfortunately, most programs available to fjos continue to rely on research with mjos (chesney-lind & pasko, 2004). like gender-neutral programs, many genderspecific programs that are designed for fjos are not empirically based nor are they theorydriven (foley, 2008). this gap between research and practice is problematic because in addition to proving ineffective, interventions that are not theory-based can also prove harmful. for example, lacking theoretical backing increases the chance that interventions may be based on misguided assumptions (posovac, 2010). in this case, gender-specific programs for fjos often assume stereotypical gender roles (goodkind & miller, 2006; belknap & holsinger, 2006), teaching “feminine” skills, like cooking, parenting, and etiquette or providing career training for low-paying “women’s” careers, such as hairdressing. these types of fjo programs are based on assumptions of femininity – not theory or extant research on female juvenile delinquency. the lack of theoretical and empirical bases for many fjo programs also is critical because this lack may explain why fjo programs often disregard racial and ethnic differences and rely on notions of white femininity, (goodkind & miller, 2006), despite the fact that effective programs are those that respect diversity within groups and are culturally appropriate (chesney-lind, 2001; chesneylind & pasko, 2004). attention to culture and diversity within groups of fjos is especially important given the disproportionate representation of minorities in the criminal justice system and the national call to address this discrepancy at the local level (solar & garry, 2009). having a clear program theory can help assure that interventions are “culturally safe” for fjos of diverse backgrounds (sherman, 2005) and can also aid in identifying problematic program assumptions (posovac, 2010). effective programs not only are based on sound theory backed by empirical evidence but also are subjected to rigorous evaluation. program evaluation can help to identify assumptions and systematically measure effectiveness. additionally, it aids program staff in articulating program goals, monitoring for fidelity, and linking program activities to outcomes (posovac, 2010). unfortunately, many existing fjo programs have not been formally evaluated (foley, 2008; shepherd, 2002), often because juvenile justice systems lack expertise and resources to conduct scientifically rigorous program evaluations. another challenge to conducting evaluation is that fjo programs are often provided within short or variable time limits. fjos may be released before http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 4 program effects can be detected, and this population is difficult to assess upon release from the system. in these cases, a process evaluation that assesses intermediate effects (e.g., attitude changes) may be more appropriate, especially when long-term effects (e.g., recidivism, graduation rates) that require follow-up may not be easily accessible. unfortunately, juvenile justice systems lack sophisticated methods useful in conducting longitudinal studies and process evaluations, and most of the existing literature on fjo programming focuses primarily on anecdotal evidence and descriptions of program content not outcomes based on social science methodology (foley, 2008). in addition to relying primarily on anecdotal evidence of effectiveness, most fjo interventions focus on individual-level change only despite the fact that juvenile delinquency can be traced to family, community, and policy level factors (bloom, owen, deschenes, & rosenbaum, 2002; chesney-lind, 2001; foley, 2008; and jacobs, 1990). for example, research indicates that family can be both an important risk and protective factor for fjos (bloom et al., 2002), suggesting that family-level interventions may prove effective for fjos. at the policy level, changes in laws, such as the zerotolerance laws in school, and not actual behavioral changes, may have led to the disproportionate increase in fjo arrests (chesney-lind, 2001; strom, watner, tichavsky, & zahn, 2010). in addition to recognizing that multilevel factors contribute to fjo delinquency, researchers also know that programs that focus on higher or multiple levels are more effective at enacting lasting, second-order change (ellis, 1998; roesch, 1995; saegert, klitzman, freundenberg, cooperman-mroczek, & nassar, 2007; and trickett, 2009), while continued focus at only the individual level can lead to victim-blaming and treatments that rely on an individual-deficit model (roesch, 1995). individual-deficit models are likely to be ineffective for fjos because research suggests that fjos benefit more from strengths-based models (sherman, 2005). multilevel interventions can address fjo delinquency in all its complexity and allow for strengths-based and empowermentbased interventions. despite the benefits of multilevel interventions, the juvenile justice system has been slow to incorporate multilevel interventions into its programming, in part, because multilevel interventions are difficult to implement (trickett, 2009), especially within a justice system setting that emphasizes individual responsibility and views delinquency as an individual deficit (roesch, 1995). additionally, multilevel interventions are also difficult to manualize and disseminate because they are so contextually based. this struggle to develop and implement evidence-based, multilevel interventions is especially apparent in community juvenile arbitration programs (japs). japs are community-based restorative justice programs – often offered through county solicitors’ offices – that function as pre-trial interventions for first-time juvenile offenders arrested for minor crimes. once diverted to the program, youth offenders meet with a volunteer community arbitrator, who assigns sanctions tailored to the individual and/or crime committed. if an offender completes all of his or her sanctions, then he or she will not have a court record. japs rely heavily on paraprofessional volunteers and partnerships with community organizations to provide services and case management to juvenile offenders. many japs operate on extremely small budgets, and in some cases, jap directors must perform other duties for the county in addition to their jap duties (appenzeller, nelson, meadows, & powell, 2011). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 5 because they are strapped for funding, japs lack resources for researching and developing interventions. to magnify this issue, little research exists on effective programming – particularly, gender-specific programming – for youth in arbitration. in fact, a literature review conducted for this paper revealed little research on effective gender-specific programming with fjos in arbitration. this lack is alarming given that fjos in arbitration are a very different population than fjos in other types of juvenile justice programs. fjos in arbitration have likely been arrested for minor infractions, like shoplifting, or a schoolrelated incident, like fighting (appenzeller et al., 2011), suggesting that a different approach should be taken when developing interventions for fjos in arbitration as opposed to fjos who have been convicted of multiple or more serious crimes and participate in other programs . more resources should be devoted to such research and programming for this specific group of fjos. in addition to limited resources and information on fjo programming, japs, like other juvenile justice programs, face challenges related to program evaluation. most arbitration programs require cases to be closed within a short time limit – often less than 90 days. this time restriction requires short-term interventions in which lasting change is difficult to achieve and detect. jap evaluations almost always use recidivism as an outcome. however, easily accessible and long-term outcomes like recidivism are insufficient measures of effectiveness by themselves (appenzeller et al., 2011). furthermore, limited resources means that arbitration programs often do not have adequate ways of tracking, storing, and analyzing data in a way that is useful for program evaluation. perhaps as a result of these challenges, the majority of jap evaluation literature focuses on evaluation of the overall ja program and not the interventions that make up the program along with the invervention’s specific goals (appenzeller et al., 2011). as zero-tolerance policies appear to continue to lead to increased arrests for minor offenses (theriot, 2009) – the types of crimes typically committed by fjos in arbitration – monitoring interventions within arbitration programs is crucial to understanding what is really working. ultimately, more than 20 years after the reauthorization of the jjdp act, the juvenile justice system still has a great deal of progress to make in developing evidencedbased, gender-specific interventions for fjos that are sensitive to within-group differences, based on sound evidence and theory, and are targeted at the appropriate level(s). this is particularly true of those fjos in japs –. many researchers and practitioners are well aware of this need but have struggled to connect what is known about fjos with practice. community psychology methods and values are especially useful with regard to fjo programming because they emphasize: 1. applying an ecological framework that considers individuals in multiple levels of context; 2. developing programs that accounts for diversity and are culturally appropriate; 3. developing programs that are theorydriven and evidence-based; 4. developing programs and theories that value empowerment over individualdeficit; and 5. the importance of rigorous program evaluation. the following section illustrates an attempt to bridge the research-practice gap and describes the process of taking a community psychology approach to designing and implementing an effective program for fjos in a jap. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 6 a community psychology approach to fjo program development the women’s well-being initiative’s (2014; wwbi) community-based arts intervention (cbai) is a gender-specific program designed for fjos, ages 12-17, who are participating in a jap in a rural south carolina county. the cbai is the result of a collaboration between the jap and a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, faculty, and students with the wwbi at the university of south carolina (usc). the wwbi is a university-community collaborative that strives to improve the lives of south carolina’s women and children by leveraging university resources to meet community needs. since its conception in 2001, wwbi has developed and conducted long-term community projects and many short-term projects in the community that engage faculty, researchers, and community members as equal partners. the cbai is wwbi’s longest-running community project, and it stemmed from an initial community needs assessment conducted with a nearby, historically marginalized community that, despite its proximity to the university, had been cut off from city and university resources. shortly after founding the wwbi, principle investigators from usc’s community psychology department and the college of nursing conducted the needs assessment in order to identify both community needs and existing resources. because a small cadre of social services and community-based organizations already existed in the area, wwbi asked community leaders how wwbi could assist their organizations in terms of research and capacity-building rather than develop new services (altman, 1995; wandersman, 2003). one of the key informants was the local jap director, who, seeing a rise in the number of female juvenile arrests in the district, expressed the need for a gender-specific program to be offered as a sanction. the director had become uncomfortable with arbitrators assigning fjos to readily available programs originally designed for mjos and was seeking effective programming options for fjos but had limited resources to develop a new program. though the county funds a full-time director and a part-time assistant (appenzeller et al., 2011), the jap did not have enough resources to invest in developing new programs, researching evidence-based practices, or conducting evaluation with existing programs. instead, it relied on what programs were readily available and programs for which it had the resources and personnel to implement. feeling it had the capability to address these needs, wwbi decided to join the jap in developing a gender-specific programming for this niche group of fjos. ecological framework before developing the program, wwbi sought to understand the ecological context of fjo delinquency in this community. wwbi researchers used existing research, information from jap personnel, and the community needs assessment data to examine the possible influence of factors at the family, school, community, and policy levels. using the needs assessment data, wwbi considered the need for fjo programming in context with other identified community needs (e.g., the need for more activities for youth) and with the demographic and social issues predominant in the community at the time (weber, messias, & eaddy, 2012). for example, at the time of the needs assessment, this community heroine mural, 2005 http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.artsandsciences.sc.edu/wwbi/current-projects http://www.artsandsciences.sc.edu/wwbi/past-projects global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 7 was largely working class and racially in flux (weber, 2012). the hispanic population had been increasing, and changes in racial compositions in schools had led to conflict. additionally, youth in these largely poor and working class communities were often marginalized by race and class and lived in neighborhoods with few resources and services. later cbai workshop discussions and participant assessments confirmed that many fjos had home and school environments categorized by gendered violence, drugs, alcohol, and poverty. at the policy level, the rise of “zero-tolerance” policies in schools had led to an increase in fjo `arrests for minor, school-related offenses, such as “disturbing schools” – offenses that were initially handled by the schools and not the justice system (appenzeller et al., 2011; cayir, messias, & weber, 2014). in fact, disturbing schools continues to be the second most common offenses committed by these jap offenders (appenzeller et al., 2011; cayir et al., 2014), and the influx of disturbing schools cases was so great at one point, the jap director asked school resource officers not to charge students until their third disturbing school offense. based on wwbi’s ecological assessment, factors at the family, school, community, and policy levels undeniably impact this population of fjos. therefore, having a comprehensive understanding of this context was important to understanding and defining the problem, and to subsequently developing an effective program. based on this assessment, the wwbi was careful to define the problem in a way that considered the salience of contextual factors and that was consistent with its feminist commitment to social justice. ultimately, wwbi and the jap decided an individualdeficit approach would be inappropriate, considering the multilevel factors affecting this population of fjos. offering an alternative to the individual-deficit approach was especially important given that most of the existing jap interventions relied on this approach. in order to achieve social justice for fjos without either “blaming the victim” or “blaming the environment” (rappaport, 1981), wwbi and the jap director viewed the problem as multilayered requiring a multilevel solution (roesch, 1995) and decided to move beyond an individual-deficit model to a model that considers how the individual fits within a broader social context (kelly, 1971; trickett, 2009). when developing the intervention, wwbi relied on theories that reflected these values. theoretical framework the overall cbai model is based on feminist intersectional and ecological systems theories. intersectionality recognizes that people’s identities are constructed by multiple, intersecting, and simultaneously expressed categories, like race, class, gender, and sexuality (weber, 2010). therefore, identity categories like “girl” or “offender” are intersected by other identity categories that impact an fjo’s sense of self and interaction with her environment. furthermore, these categories are historically, culturally, and socially constructed, and thus, can change meaning depending on context; this suggests an fjo’s gendered identity may not be the most salient identity in every context. for example, when encountering the justice system, race may be more prominent than gender for minority fjos. relying on weber’s (2010) intersectionality framework, the cbai recognizes that these categories are embedded within macroand micro-levels and are also relational and power-laden, influenced by larger systems that can work to oppress certain individuals and groups. this framework required program developers to consider the ways in which power functions in fjos’ lives (weber, 2010). brofenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory helped http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 8 guide wwbi in considering both the multiple levels at which fjos may be disempowered and those levels which the cbai should target. applying a community psychology ecological perspective (trickett, 2009), the wwbi emphasized the interdependence of individuals and community, seeing fjo delinquency as inseparable from fjos’ community and their community’s investment (or lack of investment) in them. indeed, fjos in the jap reported feeling dismissed by their schools and their communities, and felt that the larger society had labeled them “bad girls” because of their mistakes. considering the impact of this stigmatization along with the issues identified in the needs assessment, wwbi decided to target individual and community levels, hoping that destigmatizing fjos would empower them and increase their sense of belonging to the community. meanwhile the community, in turn, would gain more invested citizens who have much to offer. the linkages between individual and community were important components in the initial conception of the cbai model. the question then became how to connect theory to practice. wwbi turned to community art-making as a medium through which to create this link because of the arts’ role in community building (mulvey & egan, 2015) and its ability to disrupt systems of power in a way that strives for social justice (ivashkevich, 2013). as mulvey and egan (2015) note, both community psychologists and feminists have long recognized that the arts can be used to disrupt the status quo and can promote empowering change at individual and collective levels. similarly, the cbai uses art to deconstruct harmful narratives at both the community and individual level. at the individual level, it strives to encourage fjos to “develop a sense of identity and community that w[ill] help them navigate through dominant culture without losing themselves” (hardee & reyelt, 2009). at the community level, the cbai seeks to use public displays of fjo art to “challenge the pervasive discourses of ’girls gone wild,’ and reinvent their public image as powerful writers and capable actors, directors, and editors” (wolfgang & ivashkevich, 2014). though the cbai primarily focuses on individual and community levels and the linkages between them, it also hopes to produce change in the long-term at school and policy levels. at this point, wwbi and the jap developed the program curricula to reflect these goals, a task that began as and continues to be a reflexive process. individual in context the cbai consists of two major components that target the individual and community levels, respectively. the first cbai individuallevel component involves four fjo workshops offered over four consecutive saturdays. workshops are led by university faculty and graduate students from various disciplines, such as psychology, creative writing, art, and women’s and gender studies. each four-week session has a theme that directs the art project, and though the theme and type of project may vary by session, the curriculum outline and objectives remain the same. objectives include: 1. awareness: building participants’ understanding of negative issues that impact their lives and communities (e.g., family and relationship violence, gender stereotypes, substance abuse, peer pressure, body image). 2. response: teaching participants to critically respond to these issues through expressive art media such as creative writing, collage, drama, photography, and video production. (women’s well-being inititive, 2014, p.1). in order to meet these objectives, cbai instructors strive to explicitly connect individual and context by cultivating fjos’ awareness of the impact of structural http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 9 processes in their lives. relying on this “individual in context” perspective, the cbai encourages fjos to engage critically with social and interpersonal issues that affect them with the goal of developing a critical social consciousness (hardee & reyelt, 2009; ivashkevich, 2013; wolfgang & ivashkevich, 2014). ultimately, this component seeks to empower fjos by encouraging the development of “decision-making/problemsolving skills necessary to negotiate successfully the sociopolitical environment” (altman, 1995, p. 229). awareness. using strategies to develop awareness of contextual factors. the first workshop begins with small and large group discussions that encourage participants to identify critical issues affecting their lives, usually using an issues mapping technique. one of the topics that repeatedly comes up in class discussions regarding contextual factors is harmful stereotypes – particularly of “bad girls” or “girls in trouble” – that often work to reify harmful misconceptions of and attitudes toward fjos that can lead to systemic bias. one common misconception includes attributing fjos’ delinquency to an inability to control emotions (goodkind & miller, 2006). while another misconception includes the notion that fjos are bad girls who have committed a double crime: having transgressed both the law and their prescribed gender roles (goodkind & miller, 2006). fjos often have the perception that girls who fight more are more likely to get in trouble than boys who fight. in this case, fjos are implicitly aware of the system’s gender biases. for instance, during the first group discussion, fjos often question why mjos are assigned other sanctions, such as anger management or yard work, while they are assigned what they assume to be “art therapy.” they question why they are considered to need therapy, while boys who commit similar offenses are not. this perception, coupled with the gender discrepancy in sanction types, seems to perpetuate the notion that aggressive boys need to be taught to manage or channel aggression, while aggressive girls are “deviant” for having aggression in the first place and need therapy to learn to control their emotions. indeed, gender bias in the system is well-documented (chesney-lind, 2001), and fjos in the cbai tend to struggle not only with the system’s biases but also their schools’, communities’, and the media’s negative perceptions of them. class discussions show that fjos are often implicitly aware of these biases but are unsure how to respond to them. during discussion, cbai instructors brainstorm with fjos about how to dispel stereotypical notions of “girls in trouble.” fjos are often pleasantly surprised when the class is not what they expect and often report feeling empowered during these discussions. for example, when asked what challenges she faced daily, a fall 2006 participant wrote on her program evaluation: “i would say that people at school treats us like we are little sluts sometimes. [i learned] to ignore them because i know i am not!!!” response. following building awareness, instructors encourage fjos to respond by reflecting and engaging critically with these issues through individual and group tasks, like journaling, artwork, creative writing and small group discussions. the first workshop also includes an introduction to the art medium and project to be used for the sessions, which involve instruction on the selected art medium, individual and group art making, and various types of self-reflective activities. two recent sessions utilized the theme “sheroes”: a redefining of the word “hero” that explicitly avoids the derivative of the masculine (heroine). the first class revolved around discussing shero qualities and identifying individual and structural roadblocks that prevents participants from becoming their version of a shero. the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 10 participants responded to these roadblocks by working as a group to create mannequins that represented sheroes. each group responded differently to the prompt and produced insightful and provocative artwork that reflected individual and relational qualities of a shero. for example, one of the mannequins held a shield that was littered with words that identified challenges presented by family, media, school, and relationship violence. when describing the mannequin to the group, the fjos explained that the shero’s shield represented protecting oneself and others from the effects of negative stereotypes and other systemic and personal challenges. another shero was also designed to be a protector of others, this time, in the form of an angel that came to kids who were victims of bullying. this shero also had a more intimate and personal component because, as one of the artists explained, it represented an inner-child. the mannequin represented a complex juxtaposition between becoming a protector and resorting back to childlike innocence. the portrayal of a shero as both an innocent child and a protector of innocence is incredibly powerful given that many fjos indicated that they served as an adult caretaker in their families. though each mannequin took a different approach, each depicted complex responses to the challenges facing fjos and demonstrated powerful attempts to work together to redistribute power. figure 1 illustrates mannequin work completed by participants. figure 1: shero mannequins created by cbai fjo participants sense of community and empowerment. by giving participants the opportunity to respond to critical issues, the cbai hopes to empower participants and create a sense of community. additionally, the cbai curriculum explicitly encourages empowerment through developing a sense of community in class and by encouraging fjos’ connection to the larger community (reyelt & hardee, 2009). instructors foster a sense of community within the class by inviting fjos to participate in class agendas and through group discussion. additionally, this participation can be empowering because fjos take responsibility for the class discussion, allowing them to set the agenda and define the topics relevant to them. through class discussions, fjos often are surprised to learn that they are not alone in their problems, which creates a sense of community quickly within the class. fjos also report feeling empowered during the artmaking portion of the class because it gives fjos the opportunity to give voice to their thoughts, concerns, and stories through a creative outlet and also through sharing with http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 11 the group if they choose. because each major project is collaborative and reflects the topics identified and discussed by the participants, these projects encourage their participation in the class community as well as the larger community. the artworks made are displayed within the community, and knowing that their work will be exhibited in the community helps fjos feel like they have influence in their community and can change their community’s perception of “girls like them” to a more positive one. diversity/culturally appropriate throughout cbai activities, the wwbi attempts to respect participants’ diversity by training facilitators in issues of diversity and by keeping the curriculum flexible and adaptable. no class composition is identical, and as the students vary and the cultural context changes, so do the issues that are salient. for example, facilitators have recently seen more emphasis on cyber-bullying while some issues, like sexual health and family issues, have remained constant. the flexible curriculum structure allows the fjos who experience these issues to determine the topics rather than facilitators deciding what topics need to be discussed, and it allows for systematic adaptations while remaining true to overall objectives and goals. also, varied teaching methods, topics, and activities help ensure the cbai is applicable to fjos of different backgrounds and learning proclivities. even if fjos do not possess artistic skills or do not feel comfortable participating in group discussion, they are still able to contribute to and learn from the various workshops activities. additionally, cbai facilitators are sensitive to within-group differences and are trained in issues of race and class as well as in reflexivity. when developing the curriculum and implementing the cbai, they are careful not to assume any one notion of femininity recognizing that social identities often defy categories, are in flux, and are influenced and constructed by social processes. facilitators are also trained to be aware of the influence of race, class, and other dimensions of diversity on class dynamics and participant perceptions. once again using the example of art therapy, facilitators learned to dispel the notion that the cbai is “art therapy.” making this point explicit is important because this population of fjos is distrustful of “therapy” as participants associate it with weakness or deficit. therapy is often associated with the white middle-class, and indeed, its techniques are often designed with this population in mind and may be inappropriate for these primarily minority, working-class participants. facilitators actually bring issues of race and class to the forefront of discussions, acknowledging their own biases and racial and classed identities. overall, the cbai strives to remain flexible without compromising purpose, showing commitment to both the program’s goals and its participants’ diversity. community and system-level change the second component of the cbai targets the community-level, hoping to spark change by “[e]ngaging participants in building a productive relationship with the community partners (e.g., schools, families, neighborhoods, law enforcement agencies) by exhibiting and presenting their artwork at different community venues” (women’s wellbeing initiative, 2014). wwbi also strives to disrupt harmful stereotypes at a communitylevel by holding community art exhibits of the participants’ work, giving community presentations, and involving community members in program implementation. for instance, the cbai is always held at a location in the community despite the fact that the participants have frank discussions the about topics like sex and alcohol. in fact, a rather conservative community church has continued to offer wwbi its space for almost http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 12 six years. by involving other community members, wwbi hopes to change their perceptions of these “bad girls” and to encourage the community to become a more accepting and healthier place for young girls. community art exhibits and presentations show the community that these fjos experience many of the same issues as other female adolescents, and participants are often excited to show the community who they are and that they have something meaningful to contribute. for instance, one fjo group project involved developing, shooting, and producing “public service announcements” that responded to girl-on-girl violence, and participants were particularly eager for their peers to see the video in hopes that it might have an impact on school bullying. wwbi has since shown the video at school presentations and community art exhibits. wwbi hopes that these art productions will impact perceptions of fjos and promote positive change at the community and school levels, creating healthier environments for fjos. though it focuses directly on individual and community level change, wwbi also hopes to enact system-level change, in part, by manualizing and disseminating its cbai model. since 2005, wwbi has given presentations to schools, juvenile justice programs, guidance counselors, and policymakers in an effort to encourage other groups that work with at-risk youth to adopt the cbai model in a preventative effort to keep youth from the juvenile system altogether. this goal seems promising given that in 2012, targeting zero-tolerance policies in school, wwbi and jap worked with a local high school to implement a version of the cbai in which the school resource officer agrees to withhold incident reports from the juvenile justice system if youth complete the program. this program keeps male and female youth in the school and out of the system. the program is still ongoing today and has even expanded to include other schools in the area. evaluation wwbi values empirical analysis and theoretical grounding, and thus, seeks to assure adherence to program goals by examining program outcomes at individual and community-levels and monitoring the program for fidelity to the theoretical model. to assess the connection between its theoryinformed practice and outcomes, wwbi has distributed participant evaluations since the first class in 2005. in 2012, wwbi received funding to conduct a more in-depth evaluation including preand post-tests of participants and recidivism rates of cbai participants and a comparison group. the evaluation revealed that cbai participants had lower recidivism rates than participants in other jap sanctions and showed the inadequacy of gender-neutral individual-level sanctions, like anger management, which had the highest rates of fjo recidivism (cayir et al, 2014). to assess community-level change, wwbi currently is conducting focus groups and interviews with community members who have attended art exhibits and/or presentations to assess attitudes toward fjos and their art. these findings in addition to original evaluations will provide a richer view of program impact across levels. like the cbai itself, cbai evaluation has been an iterative process, and wwbi has amended its model as it has gained new information. wwbi hopes to use these collective findings to continue to refine the cbai model and to determine the effectiveness of the cbai to affect individual and community change for fjos and their communities. challenges to practice developing and implementing the cbai has not been without its challenges. one of the challenges the wwbi has faced in implementing the cbai has been negotiating its commitment to empowering participants through contextual perspective and feminist liberatory practices with the systemic http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.artsandsciences.sc.edu/wwbi/barbie-fights-back global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 13 demand of individual responsibility. the majority of jap’s sanctions emphasize “making better choices.” the jap requests that cbai facilitators focus on decisionmaking and requires, at the beginning of each session, that fjos state their names, state their offenses, and reaffirm their guilt. this policy directly conflicts with cbai goals that insist on changing labels like “offender.” cbai instructors negotiate this challenge by acknowledging that many fjos do have choices but that these choices are restrained by contextual factors outside of their control. indeed, class discussions consistently reveal that fjos’ restricted options often result in decisions that directly lead to delinquency and/or arrest. for instance, an fjo responded to a male peer who grabbed her inappropriately at school by punching him. because of past experiences with school racism and sexism, she was unconvinced that school officials would protect her and felt that self-defense was her only option. when discussing decision-making, therefore, wwbi takes a nuanced approach, pushing participants to examine which options are available and to consider why other options are unavailable. however, there remains a tension between the justice system which emphasizes individual responsibility and our program which considers individuals within contexts. navigating this tension, instructors guide participants to make connections between social structures and everyday roadblocks mentioned during discussion while still emphasizing individual agency. another challenge is the short timeframe for participation, which restricts the amount of change the program is realistically able to achieve. the jap’s structure requires shortterm interventions. therefore, the cbai is held for only four saturdays, and most other jap programs are much shorter. for example, the anger management program is a one-day, 8-hour program. relationships are difficult to cultivate within the compressed timeframe even though they are created more quickly through shared experiences. not only is it difficult to implement a multilevel intervention within this short time, but also some jap personnel can have unrealistic expectations concerning the amount of change that is possible for any program implemented within this timeframe. additionally, most evaluation measures must be completed while participants are still in the program because they can be difficult to locate after they are released from the jap. the outcomes that the jap expects in an evaluation may not be the kind that can be detected within four weeks. wwbi uses pre and post-tests along with a qualitative evaluation form to attempt to capture intermediate outcomes such as attitude changes and information learned. finally, enacting a comprehensive multilevel program has been a slow process. fortunately, the lexington county jap was open to and supportive of wwbi’s goal to implement a multilevel intervention, but it still took almost a decade to expand the cbai to community, school, and policy levels. one of the reasons it took so long is the time that was necessary to build relationships in the community made more difficult because of funding and personnel turnovers. instructors include some full-time faculty, but consists mostly of graduate students who come and go. in order to address this challenge, wwbi hired a program coordinator to maintain continuity. currently, wwbi and the jap experiences a high demand for presentations and exhibits on the cbai, and other juvenile diversion programs throughout the state have requested adaptations of the cbai for their participants. recommendations and conclusion based on the cbai presented and a review of existing literature, this article offers the following recommendations for bridging the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 14 research-practice gap when developing programming for fjos. researchers and practitioners developing and implementing fjo programs should: 1) be sure that the program is based on a community needs and ecological assessment of the targeted population; 2) avoid programs that rely on individual-deficit models and instead use strengths-based models that consider the individual in context; 3) consider targeting multiple (and appropriate) levels based on needs and ecological assessments; 4) consider utilizing diverse disciplines’ methods and theories in developing effective programming for fjos; 5) remember that programs may be more effective and culturally appropriate when using flexible curriculum frameworks instead of fixed content curricula; 6) have patience when developing multilevel programs; 8) include a plan for evaluation in the overall program design; 9) be sure the identified program outcomes are realistic and consider including intermediate outcomes, especially when working with time constraints; 10) be sure that the program design and activities are derived from theory and not assumptions of what works best for fjos; and 11) remain flexible and open to adapting the program as needs and context changes. these recommendations follow from a community psychology approach, and in order to develop appropriate and effective programming for fjos, researchers and practitioners should engage with community psychology frameworks that emphasize individuals in context, fjo diversity, and evidence-based interventions and evaluations. references altman, d. g. 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(2008). violence by teenage girls: trends and context. u.s. department of justice, office of juvenile justice & delinquency prevention, girls study group. retrieved from https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/2 18905.pdf http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/218905.pdf https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/218905.pdf toward a definition of the management function as it relates to collaborative community problem-solving david a. julian ohio state university author biography: david a. julian, phd has served as the director of community planning and evaluation at the center for education and training for employment (cete) in the college of education and human ecology at the ohio state university. dr. julian has also held appointments in the college of public health and city and regional planning. he received his ph.d. from michigan state university in community psychology and mcrp (masters of city and regional planning) from the ohio state university. his research and practice interests have focused on health and human services planning and program evaluation. from 1992 until 2001, dr. julian was the director of evaluation and research for the united way in franklin county, ohio. during his tenure, he was instrumental in developing and implementing a comprehensive system for defining and measuring program level outcomes. he has also worked extensively with ohio’s family and children first councils through the partnerships for success (pfs) initiative and with a variety of tribes, state agencies and local schools and health and human services organizations. recommended citation: julian, d. a. (2017). toward a definition of the management function as it relates to collaborative community problem-solving. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(2), pages 1-12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 toward a definition of the management function as it relates to collaborative community problem-solving abstract this article provides a brief review of the concept of management as it applies to collaborative community problem-solving. several management tasks are described as essential to effective collaboration: 1) facilitating group process consistent with the requirements for true collaboration; 2) initiating and managing the steps in the collaborative problem solving process; 3) designing, building and sustaining infrastructure necessary to support collaboration; 4) assuring that fundamental roles are filled and managed in relationship to one another; 5) developing and applying problem solving and decision making procedures; 6) using appropriate tools to support collaboration and instructing stakeholders in the use of such tools; 7) selecting and recruiting individual and organizational participants with the potential to be effective collaborators; 8) motivating individual and organizational participants; and 9) managing specific projects that arise out of the collaborative problem solving process. implications for research, practice and training are discussed. julian and ross (2013) suggest that there are several distinct roles inherent in community collaboration. these roles range from leading collaborative problem-solving to planning and policy development to managing the problem-solving process. for the most part, the management role has been neglected in the literature. however, research, theory and evaluation provide important information related to the importance of management as a necessary ingredient in successful collaboration (florin, mitchell, stevenson & klein, 2000; foster-fishman, berkowitz, lounsbury, jacobson & allen, 2001; viola, olson, reed, jimenez and smith, 2015; ansel & cash, 2007; deyle & wiedenman, 2014; o’leary, gazley, mcguire & bingham, 2009). the purpose of this article is to define specific management tasks associated with collaborative community problem-solving. in general, management of collaborative community problem-solving can be defined in terms of initiating appropriate procedures at the appropriate time, encouraging and fostering relevant role related behaviors and applying appropriate tools in the appropriate sequence in the interests of achieving specific collaborative outcomes (julian & ross, 2013). this definition implies that effective managers must be well versed in knowledge and skills related to collaborative community problem solving. what follows is a synthesis of selected literature that addresses specific management tasks. this is offered as a means of stimulating debate about what constitutes effective management and to generate researchable hypotheses relative to the impact of management on the effectiveness of collaborative community problem-solving. this is an important question as indicated in the literature. there are numerous empirical studies and theory that describe conditions necessary for effective collaboration. for example, merek, brock and savla (2014) identify seven factors related to effective collaboration including process and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 organization, communication, articulation of goals and objectives and effective leadership. in a meta-analysis of collaborative planning projects, ansell and cash (2007) identify several factors related to effective collaboration including history of cooperation, incentives to collaborate, quality of relationships, and effective leadership. finally, in an important empirical investigation of factors impacting collaborative transportation planning, deyle and wiedenman (2014) verify many of the hypotheses related to factors that influence successful collaborative planning. however, the management tasks associated with fostering conditions reflecting these factors are rarely addressed in the literature. coalitions, collaborative community problem solving and community practice as noted by bayne-smith, mizrahi and garcia (2008), the terms collaboratives and coalitions are used interchangeably. the community toolbox (2016) defines a coalition as a group of individuals and/or organizations working toward a common goal. in this article, the author refers to collaborative community problem-solving to identify instances where representatives of a specific community, physical or otherwise, are engaged in a collaborative partnership in order to address recognized community issues. collaboration requires a willingness to share information and resources, alter activities and enhance the capacity or interests of partners (himmelman, 2001; wolff, 2010). in such instances, members of the collaboration must balance internal demands related to the functioning of the collaborative partnership, and at the same time external demands of the larger community (mcguire & agranoff, 2011; provan & kenis, 2007; o’leary, gazley, mcguire & bingham, 2009). community practice is defined in terms of strengthening the capacity of communities to meet the needs of constituents and assist constituents in realizing their dreams (julian 2006; chavis 1993); by definition it’s collaborative in nature. the author proposes that effective collaborative community problem-solving is dependent upon competent management and managers who occupy an important community practice role. management of collaborative community problem solving mcguire and agranoff (2011) suggest that the need to effectively manage partnerships is growing as organizations become more involved in such activities. these authors (mcguire & agranoff, 2011, p. 280) also suggest that managing and leading collaborative networks is “more difficult than is commonly portrayed.” provan and kenis (2007) indicate that the role of management is a critical feature of goal directed collaborations. mcguire (2002, p. 599) states that the “practice of managing across governments and organizations outpaces empirical description and theoretical explanation” while provan and kenis (2007, p. 248) suggest that the role of management needs to be addressed in “greater depth.” finally, mcguire (2006) states that new techniques and competencies are necessary to enhance the ability of public sector managers to effectively manage collaborative partnerships. management of collaborative community problem-solving is an elusive concept but might be addressed in terms of the dissemination of knowledge, development of relevant skills, building and nurturance of collaborative relationships, and engagement in a variety of critical activities. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 management as the dissemination of knowledge there is a wealth of theory and research related to the basic foundations of collaboration. the literature provides important guidelines for initiating and conducting collaborative problem-solving activities. for example, there are a number of manualized processes that include worksheets and/or tools designed to facilitate collaborative community problem-solving. these processes include, among others, “communities that care” (hawkins & catalano, 1992), “partnerships for success” (2008), “getting to outcomes” (chin, imm & wandersman, 2004), and the “community toolbox” (n.d.). while process is a component of collaboration; commitment to actual collaboration presents a significant challenge (wolff, 2010). true collaboration requires that partners place the highest priority on collaborative goals and outcomes. this is particularly difficult because it may mean, in some cases, acting counter to individual organizational interests given the objectives of a specific community. the knowledge base related to collaborative community problem solving also includes how the process of collaboration is related to infrastructural requirements necessary to support collaboration and the roles and expectations of participants. for example, bryan and henry (2012) describe a series of steps designed to support collaborative school and community partnerships. the bryan and henry process includes: 1) preparing to partner; 2) assessing needs and strengths; 3) coming together and creating a formal collaborative group; 4) creating a shared vision; 5) taking action; 6) evaluating and celebrating success, and 7) maintaining momentum. such procedural steps, argue the authors, provide a strong foundation for effective collaboration. similarly, proponents of collective impact address the importance of infrastructure to effective collaboration. kania and kramer (2011) suggest that five conditions are necessary to launch successful collective impact initiatives: a common agenda, shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support. a common agenda requires a shared understanding of issues and vision for change. in addition, stakeholders must agree on the ways success will be measured. mutually reinforcing activities imply that various actors contribute in ways that are consistent with their skills and in ways that compliment other actors. continuous communication offers opportunities to develop trust and effective working relationships. “backbone support” refers specifically to the infrastructure supporting collaboration (kania & kramer, 2011). corcoran, hanleybrown, steinberg and tallant (2012, p. 34) state that “dedicated capacity to support a collective impact initiative is critical.” they suggest that the backbone function consists of six key functions: 1) guiding vision and strategy; 2) brokering relationships to align strategy; 3) developing shared measurement procedures; 4) promoting public awareness and support; 5) advancing policy, and 6) securing funding. kania and kramer (2011) also point out that the backbone function is best undertaken by a separate and dedicated staff whose focus is on highly structured procedures. more specifically, kania and kramer define the role of backbone staff as project managers, evaluators, and facilitators. roles relevant to collaborative community problem-solving include leading collaborative groups; planning and policy development; providing needs and best practices information; mobilizing and engaging the community; acquiring and investing http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 resources; delivering direct services; providing useful evaluation data; and managing the problem-solving process (julian & ross, 2013). importantly, each of the roles in collaborative community problem-solving must be filled and managed in relationship to other roles. the identification and understanding of roles and role related behaviors provides a basis for understanding how collaboration differs from more traditional problem solving activities. according to julian and ross (2013), leading collaborative problem solving is distinct from managing the problem solving process and focuses on creating a vision and inspiring others to action. the planning and policy development role provides a basis for making collective decisions about appropriate courses of action. providing needs and best practices information requires access to research and other information in order to define needs and when appropriate, identify evidence-based responses to specific problems. mobilizing and engaging the community revolves around formal activities that create awareness and support for community collaboration. the resource acquisition role is critically important as collaborative community problem-solving is likely to require investment of resources to implement specific interventions or projects while the service delivery role is typically filled by local services providers. finally, effective problem-solving requires access to useful evaluation information. access to such evaluation information often provides the opportunity to define and measure key outcomes and processes. the preceding discussion suggests that effective management requires managers to understand and disseminate a unique knowledge base to collaborative partners and other stakeholders. management as building and applying skills it is clear that effective collaboration is different from the typical hierarchical approaches to problem solving often used in business and government (viola, olson, reed, jimenez and smith, 2015). as such, there are numerous technical skills that must be mastered in the interest of promoting effective collaboration. for example, it can be argued that creating and sustaining the infrastructure necessary to support collaboration requires the application of a variety of technical skills. infrastructure consists of the structural arrangements and procedures necessary to develop common goals, acquire financial and non-financial resources, implement specific interventions, and apply approved measurement processes. in addition, considerable skill is required to manage key roles necessary for effective collaborative community problem solving (julian & ross, 2013). facilitation of the collaborative problemsolving process is also a critical skill associated with the management function. group facilitation can be defined as a neutral process that increases a group’s effectiveness and assists groups in achieving collective goals (swartz, 2002). it is important to point out that there are well developed theories of group dynamics and facilitation; scholarly journals that publish research and practical guidelines, and abundant training opportunities available to aspiring group facilitators. facilitation skills include planning meetings, ensuring logistical arrangements, developing meeting agendas, building consensus, and a host of other important tasks. anyone who has participated in a skillfully facilitated meeting can attest to the potential importance of facilitation skills to the management of collaborative community problem-solving. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 collaborative managers must also possess the skills necessary to apply a variety of tools that have the potential to support collaborative community problem-solving. many descriptions of the collaborative process make reference to specific tools. for example, the community toolbox (n.d.) refers to more than a dozen “toolkits” associated with specific problem-solving procedures. these toolkits have names such as “creating and maintaining partnerships” and “developing strategic and action plans.” wolff (2010) identifies 11 tools that include the “continuation of collaboration worksheet” and “coalition member assessment.” the partnerships for success (pfs) toolbox includes more than 40 tools (partnership for success, 2008). examples include a workgroup charter, tracking data trends worksheet and defining measurable outcomes template. the work group charter is used to specify expectations related to membership in a collaborative group or sub-group (partnerships for success, 2008). in the partnerships for success process, subgroups are often convened and charged with specific tasks such as needs assessment. the tracking data trends worksheet provides a means for understanding trends across a number of indicators and assessing conditions in the community. the defining measurable outcomes template provides the opportunity for stakeholders to consider a number of questions relative to a specific intervention and develop a formal and measurable outcome. using appropriate tools at opportune times is clearly a critical 1 there are numerous resources related to project management that are available from the project management task as is training members of collaborations to use such tools. furthermore, there are a number of approaches that offer detailed, step-by-step procedures for identifying a specific course of action relative to an identified community issue. for example, the classic rational planning model (alexander, 1979) includes several distinct steps: 1) problem definition; 2) goals specification; 3) analysis of future trends; 4) alternatives development; 5) implementation analysis; 6) evaluation, and 7) implementation. so (1984) defines seven strategic planning steps: 1) performance monitoring; 2) environmental scanning; 3) internal analysis; 4) implications of internal and external analysis; 5) development of goals, objectives and strategies; 6) implementation, and 7) evaluation and feedback. effective collaborative community problem solving requires initiation of formal problem-solving procedures including specification of how group decisions will be made in order to arrive at a response(s) to a specific community issue. finally, many collaboratives create specific programs or other interventions designed to address identified community issues. implementation of such programs represents a fundamental set of skills that can be grouped under the rubric of project management. project management1 can be described as applying knowledge, tools and processes necessary to meet project requirements (cicmil & hodgson, 2006). the project management institute (2013) identifies 47 project management processes that are grouped into five categories including project initiation, planning, management institute and other sources. in addition, the project management institute (pmi) provides formal certifications related to project management. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing. for example, in the project planning phase, various types of tools are used to identify project activities and individuals responsible for completing specific tasks (project management institute, 2013). given that collaborative groups often focus their energies on implementing specific activities or interventions, project management skills would appear to be essential to the management function. management as building and nurturing relationships the collaboration literature suggests that trust and quality of relationship among participants are critical features of effective collaboration. thus managers must be skilled relationship builders and must promote appropriate participant behaviors consistent with building trusting and mutually beneficial relationships. mcguire (2002) indicates that the manager’s responsibility focuses on promoting teamwork and providing leadership. isett, mergel, leroux, michen and rethemeyer (2011) and mcguire (2006) point to the importance of fostering trust. similarly, provan and kenis (2007) indicate that a manager must be adept at handling tensions that might arise in collaborative problem-solving groups. the nature of collaboration requires individuals; typically representing organizational entities or constituencies to come together and plan, implement, and evaluate specific responses to a problem or issue. robertson and smith (2001) point out that high level work performance requires specific skills relevant to tasks to be performed as well as competencies related to organizational citizenship. these authors also suggest that selection of personnel is ideally based on a comprehensive job analysis that captures task specific and organizational citizenship criteria. thus personnel selection and recruitment represent critical management tasks for managers of collaborative community problem solving. in addition to personnel selection, individuals charged with managing collaborative community problem-solving must be adept at motivating team members. this is particularly true in situations where the willingness to collaborate is low. rosas and camarinha-matos (2010) define willingness to collaborate in terms of a partner’s attitudes and intentions relative to a specific proposal to engage in a specific collaboration. they have developed a formal model with a number of factors predicting willingness to collaborate. these factors include beliefs that collaboration will lead to desired outcomes, the value associated with anticipated outcomes, external influences, and a number of other factors. such factors may provide a basis for motivating participants to fully participate in collaborative community problem-solving. sofit (2012) defines motivation in terms of inspiring an individual to engage in a desired course of action. kroth (2007) provides a useful summary of a variety of theories and approaches to fostering highly motivated workers or stakeholders that draws on the organization studies literature. kroth’s analysis concludes with the development of a model that encompasses several different theories related to motivating workers. according to kroth (2007), a leader or manager must create a motivating environment by encouraging behaviors that suggest that the organization (or in this case, the collaborative team or community) cares and values the problem-solving effort. in order to create such an environment, the collaborative group must promote fairness and respect and value individual opinions http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 and/or opinions of the organizations that are part of the collaborative group (kroth, 2007). other factors identified by kroth have particular relevance to the management of collaborative community problem-solving and include setting motivating goals, designing intrinsically motivating assignments, supporting goal pursuit, and managing expectancies. for example, a collaborative problem-solving team might be required to conduct a needs assessment related to the goals of a community collaboration. in addition to managing the technical aspects of the needs assessment the manager must be prepared to position the needs assessment as an important activity in the problem-solving process sufficient to motivate participants to engage in required data collection and analyses activities. management as action agranoff and mcguire (2001) describes four different types of management activities, the first types of management activities are referred to as activation. activation focuses on acquiring the resources (money, people, skills, knowledge, etc.) necessary to achieve desired outcomes. the second type of management activity described by agranoff and mcguire (2001) is framing; referring to the efforts to create and encourage implementation of appropriate structures, roles, norms and values. mobilizing is aimed at developing commitment and support for the operations and outcomes of a community collaboration. finally, synthesizing is the process of creating productive relationships among members of the collaboration. these tasks imply a variety of actions that in theory promote effective collaborative community problem-solving. a synthesis of management tasks mcguire (2002) states that the most important question relative to collaborative problem-solving focuses on the degree to which the actions of a manager contribute to the effectiveness of multi-organizational arrangements. in order to address this question, it is imperative that researchers and practitioners have a detailed understanding of the management function. the preceding discussion implies a number of distinct tasks that define the management function relative to collaborative community problem-solving. these tasks are highlighted in table i and run the gamut from facilitating group processes to assuring that fundamental roles are filled to project management. each of these tasks requires significant knowledge and mastery of specific technical skills. in addition, a manager of collaborative community problem solving must be skilled at building relationships and motivating participants to participate in a manner consistent with the tenets of true collaboration. implications for research the review summarized in the preceding paragraphs suggests that collaborative community problem-solving holds great promise for effectively addressing many of the issues encountered in contemporary communities (berkowitz, 2001). evidence and theory imply that effective collaboration is driven by a high degree of structure and process (o’leary, gazley, mcguire & bingham, 2009). these concepts imply that collaborative groups function best when there are clear procedures and recognized roles. however, there is little empirical data available to guide collaborative groups in how to develop structural arrangements and procedures that facilitate collaboration. the author argues that such tasks fall under the guise of management. this article attempts to provide a definition of the management function relative to collaborative community problem-solving. of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 course, the primary research question implied by this review focuses on whether the presence of a competent manager who actively manages the problem solving process yields more effective collaborative problemsolving (mcguire, 2006). theory and experience would suggest that such is the case. however, future empirical research is necessary to test this critical hypothesis. this review provides a starting point for defining the management function. management task 1. facilitating group process consistent with the requirements for true collaboration 2. initiating and managing the steps in the collaborative problem solving process 3. designing, building and sustaining infrastructure necessary to support collaboration 4. assuring that fundamental roles are filled and managed in relationship to one another 5. developing and applying problem solving and decision making procedures 6. using appropriate tools to support collaboration and instructing stakeholders in the use of such tools 7. selecting and recruiting individual/organizational participants with the potential to be effective collaborators 8. motivating individual and organizational participants 9. managing specific projects that arise out of the collaborative problem solving process table 1. management tasks associated with collaborative community problem-solving there are a number of other variables that might impact the effectiveness of collaborative community problem-solving. collaborative groups vary across a number of key variables: leadership (as distinct from management), action orientation, breadth of desired impact, tenure, diversity of membership and jurisdiction, just to name a few (o’leary & bingham, 2009; community toolbox, 2016). effectiveness of management can be added to this list. the author argues that effectiveness of the management function transcends other key variables. that is, all things being equal, an effectively managed collaboration will be more impactful than a collaboration characterized by less effective management. implications for community practice and training community practitioners there are several implications of this discussion for community practice and training community practitioners. the first implication focuses on practical application. it is clear that collaborative groups are a wellestablished fixture in many communities and are utilized to address a variety of complex issues (wolff, 2010). it is equally clear that practitioners from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines are being called upon to manage the collaborative community problem-solving process (kania & kramer, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 2011). this is occurring even if job descriptions do not explicitly include references to the management function. thus practitioners must acknowledge their management responsibilities and acquire skills related to managing groups of individuals engaged in collaborative community problem-solving. the second implication focuses on training. experience suggests that considerable effort could be spent in mastery of any one of the management tasks presented in table i. it is also safe to assume that these activities represent some but not all of the critical tasks associated with effective management of collaborative community problem-solving. there are undoubtedly other activities that could be added to the list of critical management tasks. thus educators should consider the results of relevant theory, research and evaluation and develop training programs that prepare practitioners to function in the management role. participation in such educational endeavors may provide sufficient expertize for practitioners to perform some of the tasks indicated above and/or provide a basis for the delegation of tasks to qualified individuals or groups. at a minimum, it would appear prudent to build some level of management capacity into future collaborative efforts and to assess the impact of such management capacity on the effectiveness of problem solving efforts. finally, community practitioners are well positioned to take on roles consistent with the management function. evidence suggests that attention to the management function is a critical factor related to the success of collaborative groups charged with addressing complex social issues. references agranoff, r. & mcguire, m. 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(2010). the power of collaborative solutions. san francisco: jossey-bass. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 definition revisited: human dignity and co-creation, the heart of community psychology practice christine robinson keywords: wellbeing, intersectionality, practice, community, practice, policy, social justice, equity author biographies: christine robinson, is president of philanthropy network, greater philadelphia. she is a seasoned national and international thought leader with expertise in nonprofit and public sector systems, generative networks, and systems. she builds pathways to policy and system change for justice and is a recognized strategist in equity, vision articulation, program development, and design. robinson has created initiatives across the us focused on nurturing a culture of well-being. she has served as a senior program staff member, director, and consultant to some of the nation’s leading foundations, including the ford foundation, as co-architect of the sixyear initiative to close the racial wealth gap; the robert wood johnson foundation, as coordinating consultant for the national childhood obesity initiative; the pew charitable trusts; the annie e. casey foundation; the lumina foundation; the moriah fund; florida blue; and the w.k. kellogg foundation. robinson founded one of the first multicultural hiv/aids coalitions in the us in the late 1980s. she has consistently spoken up on behalf of numerous traditionally marginalized communities, having worked to reduce incarceration and with the criminal legal system on immigrant and refugee justice. she is a life-long advocate for the rights and welfare of those with disabilities. robinson served as a consultant to the obama administration white house office of asian americans and pacific islanders, crafting a municipal strategy. in her current role as president of philanthropy network, greater philadelphia, robinson leads a membership organization that brings together more than 125 philanthropic organizations across the greater philadelphia region. the network’s mission is to strengthen philanthropy to create a vibrant, resilient, and equitable region. educated at vassar college, brandeis university, and the university of pennsylvania, robinson is trained as a developmental and community psychologist. she was the 2017-2018 christopher peterson memorial fellow at the university of pennsylvania in applied psychology. she is a senior fellow and a faculty member at the university of new hampshire, carsey school of public policy. recommended citation: robinson, c. (2023). definition revisited: human dignity and co-creation, the heart of community psychology practice. global journal of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 community psychology practice, 14(1), 1-27. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: christine robinson. email: christine@philanthropynetwork.org http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 definition revisited: human dignity and co-creation, the heart of community psychology practice abstract the multidisciplinary applied field of community psychology is remarkably situated to foster multiple frameworks and practices exemplifying respect for the inherent dignity of all people (bond, 2016). definitions matter. shared meanings are the foundations of a field that aspires to engage colleagues and community. how we conceptualize, describe, and define the work of community psychology practice establishes a shared understanding of purpose, process, manifestations, and desired impacts. this article builds on the foundational work of crenshaw (2017), who articulated intersectionality as a framework in which multiple identities are simultaneously acknowledged; this concept is central to community psychology. community psychology designed for equity embraces intersectionality. intersectionality examines power dynamics, transcends communities, identities, and societal boundaries, and is anchored in application and practice (collins, 2019). this article draws upon emerging models from civic discourse, public health, environmental justice, racial and ethnic studies, economic justice, and numerous black, latinx, asian, native/indigenous, and feminist scholars to support the revised definition of community psychology. the bedrock of this article is the socioecological framework (bronfenbrenner, 1979), the social determinants of health theory (sdoh) (marmot & wilkinson, 2005), and social influences on health (williams, yu, jackson, & anderson, 1997). all reckon with current and historical trauma and exploitation of marginalized groups in society. each concept in the revised definition, corresponding rationale, and implications for community psychology practice is outlined in six sections: (1) the salience of collective efficacy, perspectives on collective efficacy, and alignment with personal and group identity; (2) interdependencies between community and larger societal structures and frameworks; (3) the concept of dignity and how it manifests in community psychology; (4) co-creation, partnership, and reciprocity; (5) the concept of human rights chiefly informed by international definitions, and (6) investigation of policy development, implementation, intent, and application. as a multidisciplinary applied field, community psychology is remarkably situated to bring respect for the inherent dignity of all people (bond, 2016). the soulsearing events of the summer of 2020, the capitol insurrection of january 2021, increasing violence against asian americans and pacific islanders, islamaphobia, ongoing murders of black people and the (dis)abled, and attacks on the jewish community demonstrate that in the united states, wellbeing is far from uniform. many organizations, neighborhoods, systems, policies, and places have not consistently enabled wellbeing. manifestation of the power of human dignity, the value of civil society, civic discourse, the salience of collective efficacy, and community wellbeing are at the heart of community psychology. collective efficacy is "a group's shared belief in its conjoint capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given levels of attainments" (bandura, 1997, p. 477). this moment in time http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 prompts a reexamination of paradigms, theories, and definitions alongside aligned practices and values that transcend the field. traditional community psychology and allied traditional wellbeing research focus on manifestations of health, happiness, and thriving at the community level. the dynamic interplay of context, identity, and social policy has pronounced repercussions for wellbeing and disparities at the individual, family, neighborhood, and state levels (bronfenbrenner, 1979; marmot, 2016; wilkinson & pickett, 2019; williams & cooper, 2019). our multiple social identities and the cultural externalities of our lives are inextricably linked and ground selfperception, behavior, relationships, and the evaluation of others (steele, 2011; tajfel, 2020). how the self—endowed with multiple identities—persists and flourishes in daily life amidst numerous contexts is at the heart of wellbeing. in an affirming cultural context, we may thrive; in an aversive culture, we may be threatened and wither (shinn & toohey, 2003; steele, 2011). structural and systemic factors, implicit and explicit bias, environmental racism, and the resultant toll on traditionally marginalized populations in the united states make wellbeing as conventionally defined, nearly unattainable. a social justice framework aligns with emerging models from several disciplines to unveil the challenge of pluralism and the pernicious effects of racism in the united states. inclusive policy, reflecting numerous perspectives, though elusive, is at the heart of enlightening practice and the creation of inclusive systems (williams & cooper, 2019; mcghee, 2021). definitions matter. shared meanings are foundational to a field that aspires to engage colleagues and community. definitions conceptualize meaning. the ways in which we conceptualize, describe and define the work of community psychology practice grounds a shared understanding of purpose, process, manifestations, and desired impacts. generative definitions add exponential value to influencers, our culture, history, and prevailing narratives. definitions are central to policy and system development, comprehensive interventions, and theoretical models (rappaport, 2000; trickett, 2009). definitions are at the heart of a trajectory with potent, powerful, sociopolitical implications (mollica, 2014; prilleltensky, 2019; wilkinson & pickett, 2019). how community psychology welcomes community stakeholders, those most affected, and other disciplines are precipitated on its perceived identity. the braiding of strands of connection, the fabric of understanding, and resulting actions are tied to the shared definitions of community psychology practice or how the field defines itself. this moment in time calls for reflection on the meaning of community psychology practice and its image. this article presents a case for revisions to a definition of community psychology practice that affirms dignity, human rights, physical and psychological health, and co-creation with community. moreover, the field of community psychology examines the practice definition and alignment with disciplines, such as public health, gender, ethnic, racial, refugee and immigrant studies, feminism, and intersectionality in supporting and centering collective understandings and strategies to address systemic racism and marginalization. crenshaw (2017) articulated intersectionality as a framework in which multiple identities are simultaneously acknowledged; this concept is central to community psychology. in this paper, i use the phrase "traditionally marginalized populations,” to include all communities of color, lgbtq+, those living with a (dis)ability, immigrants, and refugees, those who are undocumented, muslims and other religious minorities, people who have been incarcerated, people who have been in the foster care system, and people who are english learners. community psychology http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 designed for equity embraces intersectionality. the synergistic alignment of intersectional equity and community psychology ensures respect for all identities and co-creation where everyone has a pathway to what they need. intersectionality examines power dynamics, transcends communities, practice, and realms of society, and is grounded on application and practice (collins, 2019). in concert with intersectionality, community psychology demonstrates the understanding that our vastly different histories and traditions mean that not everyone has had the same opportunities or ability to be seen and heard. the recognition mandates heightened awareness of bias, “othering,” and the intentional inclusion of traditionally marginalized perspectives. “othering” is a barrier to wellbeing. the many ways in which "othering" harms wellbeing pervades life in the united states and is apparent in the persistence of inequities in health, education, economic status, environmental reality, and domains across the social determinants of health spectrum. racism itself, and aligned marginalization and humiliation, are traumatic for millions of people and manifest in structures, cultural artifacts, and relationships. evidence of racism is easily identified in mental and physical health outcomes (williams, 2016). community wellbeing research is exponentially more influential when all realms of the social determinants and socioecological perspectives are joined. the sociological framework is at the heart of the definition and approach to community wellbeing (bronfenbrenner, 1979). in bronfenbrenner's frame, the individual is nested in a series of concentric circles, continually supporting and being bolstered by factors from the family, neighborhood, and community (figure 1). reciprocity across the framework is strengthened by an accurate narrative, deep listening, trust-building, sharing perspectives, and emerging psychological safety, the foundation of social support (edmonson, 2018). multilayered, nuanced relationships help people grow, develop, and are the bedrock of civic discourse and meaningful lives. figure 1. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 relationships are, in turn, influenced by context, cultural attitudes, societal beliefs, and social policy across all domains of the socioecological framework (intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional/community, and structural/policy) (bronfenbrenner, 1979). the socioecological model frames the interaction between people and their environments. this dynamic process is crucial to psychological wellbeing. concomitantly, the reverse is true if one grows up with a deficit narrative in a toxic environment with a dearth of resources (figure. 2). moreover, a healthy ecosystem meets cultural and personal needs, reflects the interests and perspectives of its members, and increases access to health and human services, parks, recreation, and environments that are healthpromoting (marmot & wilkinson, 2005). a healthy ecosystem is essential to optimal human growth and development (fig. 3). all areas of the puzzle of a healthy ecosystem are inextricably linked. social identities, cultural influences, systems, and policies all ground self-perception, behavior, interactions with others, and physical and psychological wellbeing (harro, 2000). figure 2. however, the united states is a society with profound health, education, housing, economic, and environmental disparities (bullard, 2019; rothstein, 2018; wilkerson, 2020). stigmatization of any traditionally marginalized population has similar implications on human development. whether indigenous, african american, or latino, young or old, gay or straight, woman, man, or nonbinary, with or without a (dis)ability, documented or undocumented, or muslim, experiences of marginalization are often similar. enduring the pain of discrimination, the despair of broken dreams, and the oppression of poverty in a land of relative affluence is a struggle (kite & http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 whitley, 2016). these disparities present an opportunity to examine the field of community psychology practice, how it is defined, and ensuing implications. these realizations prompt modifications to a shared definition of community psychology practice presented at the international conference of community psychology in puerto rico in 2006 and then adopted by scra. the edits reflect the recommended modifications. they may appear minor, but they acknowledge the centrality of cocreation (the artful balance of those directly affected with differing perspectives) and belonging in the work, the imperative to recognize the dignity in all people, the salience of human rights, and the importance of policy and systems. there is an implicit, inclusive social contract at the heart of united states policy doctrine. the united states aspires to be a democratic republic, the perfect union. the vision of pluralism is intrinsic to community psychology. nevertheless, the dynamic nature of diverse perspectives, various meanings, and assumptions urges us to reflect on power dynamics, connections, and our humanity. the current definition and my suggested revisions to the definition of community psychology practice are indicated below. figure 3. original definition: community psychology practice is "strengthening the capacity of communities to meet the needs of constituents and help them to realize their dreams in order to promote wellbeing, social justice, economic equity, and selfdetermination through systems, organizational, and/or individual change" (as presented at the international conference of community psychology in puerto rico in 2006 and then adopted by scra). proposed definition: community psychology practice is intentional work dedicated to cocreation of an inclusive society recognizing all people's inherent dignity, cogenerating means, and tools to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 realize their dreams. it promotes wellbeing, human rights, social justice, intersectional equity, and selfdetermination through all-embracing policies, systems/institutions, organizational, and/or personal change. community psychology: field, practice, and methodologies this section moves from a high-level overview of a vision of pluralism, aspirational democratic values, and a way to align perspectives, power dynamics, and communities of culture with community practice. several values inform this definition which will be described in detail below. the rest of this paper outlines my recommended modifications. i will explain each revision to the original definition and its rationale. the premise that the field of community psychology is based on strengthening society must be accompanied by further analysis. the united states is redefining society and who belongs in this circle of concern. belonging and its aligned attributes are related to the essential ingredient of co-creation. society and inclusion must be defined to ensure that inclusive society is equitable, supportive, democratic, and conducive to nurturing and implementing numerous perspectives and policies (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010). recognition of the inherent dignity of all people is essential in a society too quick to ignore a multitude of traditionally marginalized populations. community psychology is an interdisciplinary, academic arena established as applied psychology and values, lived experience, and co-creation (nemoyer, nakash, fukuda, rosenthal, mention, chambers, alegría & trickett, 2020). this article draws upon the emerging models from civic discourse, public health, environmental justice, racial and ethnic studies, economic justice, and numerous black, latinx, asian, native/indigenous, and feminist scholars to support the revised definition of community psychology. the bedrock of this article is the socioecological framework (bronfenbrenner, 1979), the social determinants of health theory (sdoh) (marmot & wilkinson, 2005), and social influences on health (williams, yu, jackson, & anderson, 1997). these theoretical approaches reckon with current and historical trauma and exploitation of marginalized groups in society. ethics, justice, and respect are at the heart of community psychology's value of social transformation and the aligned commitment to individual, group, and community empowerment (prilleltensky, 2019; rappaport, 1977). the commitment to justice, the value of applied research, multimodal methodologies, and alignment with social policy and practice are embedded in the philosophy of the field. trickett (1996) urges the field to mature in his prescient article, “a future for community psychology: the contexts of diversity and the diversity of contexts.” contextual factors ground our lives and are predictive of wellbeing. perhaps this is most evident in the social determinants of health framework (marmot, & wilkinson, 2005). the world health organization (who) defines the sdoh as "the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life, including economic policies and systems development agendas, social norms, social policies, and political systems" (world health organization, n.d.). these policies and systems are inevitably shaped by wealth, assets, power, policies, and resources at the local, state, and national levels. the transdisciplinary field of community psychology builds upon these connected elements. individual domains may be minimized as "personal responsibility," such as adequate housing, meaningful work, and access to health, education, income, and food security. however, each personal domain has http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 powerful collective implications for society; everyone is inextricably linked, as dr. martin luther king jr. reminds us. the socioecological model, the sdoh framework, and aligned theories, research, and practice bring the proposed revised definition to life. dimensions of ethnicity, racial identity, religion, culture, and other social contexts deepen the understanding of community psychology practice (shinn & toohey, 2003). the experiences of various communities bring discernment to multiple avenues of equity. equity means giving everyone what they need to succeed with the understanding that not everyone has had the same opportunities or ability to be heard. effective community psychology practice is grounded by the dynamic interplay of context, wellbeing, equity, identity, culture, deep listening, and policy (wolff, 2013). intersectional equity goes a step further by recognizing and valuing each person’s multiple identities. equity can be exhibited through an open invitation to participate, unbiased access, and co-creation of entities, institutions, systems, and communities (powell & menendian, 2016). moreover, active engagement, respect, listening to stories, and working to develop pathways to justice is a powerful combination (powell & menendian, 2016). the issues of participatory engagement, intersectional identity, belonging, equity, and social justice are rarely connected. the complexity of developing a simultaneously, matrixed model is central to solid community psychology practice. at this time in the united states, when its egalitarian ethos is frayed, it may be prudent to look toward the predictive work of mollica (2014) and his international focus on human rights. a disproportionate number of preventable deaths from covid-19, people locked in cages at the united states-mexico border, worshipers murdered in synagogues, churches, and mosques, the murders of black people by police, mass incarceration of black men, and hatred spewed at asian communities compels americans to reconsider the “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." the modified definition and rationale this section details each concept in the revised definition and corresponding rationale and implications for community psychology practice. this portion of the article is divided into six sections. the initial section outlines the salience of collective efficacy, perspectives on collective efficacy, and alignment with personal and group identity. the interdependencies between community and larger societal structures and frameworks are the themes of the second section. the third section explores the concept of dignity and how it manifests in community psychology. the bedrock of cocreation, partnership, and reciprocity are contemplated in the fourth section. the fifth section examines the concept of human rights and is informed chiefly by international definitions. finally, the investigation of policy development, implementation, intent, and application is highlighted in the sixth section. communal approach: collective efficacy and co-creation the first change to the definition is the insertion of co-creation alongside capacity building. the replacement articulates mutuality and respect; some may see strengthening capacity as the imposition of a dominant ideology or saviorism. intentional co-creation welcomes lived experience, an egalitarian partnership. co-creation is an artful balance that bridges differing perspectives and develops, in concert with constituent partners, a shared understanding and language to discuss the challenge and a core set of issues to consider and possible pathways when seeking to effect change. many collectivist cultures prioritize the wellbeing of the group over that of the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 individual. society is a communal setting, making collective efficacy more applicable than self-efficacy (markus & kitayama, 2010). triandis (1995) posits that collectivists prioritize the group. collectivist thinking and actions are devoted to the family, team, coworkers, religious community, or other affinity groups. the norms of the group determine priorities, unlike individualists who focus on their personal preferences. co-creation honors authentic perspectives. those directly affected are seated at the table to offer their insights and engage in discourse and decision-making. community psychology, as a field and as a practice, acknowledges power dynamics. practice is bolstered by cofacilitating, co-managing, deep listening, and co-ordination, recognizing assets and the uniqueness and the complexity of community and differing perspectives. there is a range of psychological, social, cultural, and institutional interactions to attend community work. for example, power relations often perpetuate stereotypes and cede power in many settings to those with advanced degrees (fox, prilleltensky, & austin, 2009). lived experience is invaluable; as we know, many interventions are deepened by authentic understandings (nemoyer et al., 2020). critical reflective practices and ongoing discourse facilitate equity, build relationships, and institute effective, genuine change at the individual, organizational, system, and local community levels (farr, 2018). society, community, and the heart of the field the second change is replacing the term "communities" with "inclusive society" to reinforce the values of inclusion and collaboration. society and co-creation are associated with collaboration. community psychology must take the lead in examining collective action and building enduring commitments that sustain collective wellbeing and transcend narrowly defined communities. society brings the value of collective efficacy to the fore, elevating individual, community, and policy interdependencies. historically, the research in psychology and wellbeing has focused on personal wellbeing. though the field is called community psychology, community psychologists must take a broader societal perspective. communities are shaped by societal norms and values (harro, 2000). a panoramic historical view reveals disproportionate implications for traditionally marginalized communities. for example, in the past, communities of color were deprived of the vote by grandfather clauses and “literacy” requirements targeted to oppressed communities. today active disenfranchisement continues with the passage of numerous federal and state laws limiting access, with innumerable hurdles developed to intentionally disenfranchise voters of color or those with a (dis)ability. additionally, the reapportionment legislation gives extraordinary power to national policy to reallocate congressional representation, with direct repercussions for community life. a myopic view of community may be a liability; i, therefore, urge simultaneous examination at the neighborhood and societal realms. for example, racial profiling and the ongoing violence against and murders of people of color are not isolated local events. they are born of a history of dehumanizing narratives, policies that support extraordinary violence and torture of bodies of color, (dis)abled bodies, and a long history of brutality (alexander, 2010; wilkinson, 2020). reciprocity across the socioecological framework is essential in examining the history, resulting policies, socialization, and broad-scale acceptance of dehumanization. community psychology argues that externalities (the physical, social, and policy spheres that shape one's life) affect wellbeing in different ways and are central to collective wellbeing (marmot, 2016). addressing http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 systemic and structural racism and inequities in the united states and worldwide moves us toward the aspirational goal of becoming a beloved community, a pluralistic community of grace. the societal frame invites the field to paint on a larger canvas embracing the power of systems, policies, and multiple social structures. valuing the perspectives and assets of countless identities and cultures fosters wellbeing by creating a supportive environment. community psychology practice aspires to apply principles of inclusion, mattering, and positive relationships across disciplinary perspectives (prilleltensky, 2019). as noted in the previous section, collective efficacy magnifies collective power as groups form and engage in collaborative action to achieve mutual goals. the capacity for initiation begins in the self or a group of individuals with a common goal but manifests in a continuum encompassing collective lives. this dynamic is at the heart of co-creation, practice, and powersharing. co-creation, inclusion, power-sharing, and balance are essential in community psychology practice, paving a pathway of culturally relevant insights. aligning synergies, welcoming constituent voices, and affiliated systems and policy change are generative aspects predictive of a beloved community. examining context and inclusion of culture help arrive at a common understanding of shared and divergent meanings, another reason for co-creation. a contextual analysis permits appreciating the salient and interdependent nuances across the socioecological framework, highlighting the texture of relationships and interactions. perceptions of belonging, relationships, and connections are well-established, psychological wellbeing attributes (steele, 2011). these findings are significant, given that historically humiliated groups have been intentionally, covertly, or overtly excluded (bonilla-silva, 2015) (figure 4). research across history, sociology, anthropology, literature, the creative arts, and other academic fields chronicles the struggles of specific groups for inclusion and acceptance, illustrating the importance of mattering to the fabric of humanity (prilleltensky, 2019). intersectionality theory shows that being "othered" is not limited to any single characteristic— "othering" can be directed toward any number of attributes, and many individuals have more than one identity that may be simultaneously illunderstood (crenshaw, 2017). isolation and sorting of the "other" reinforce stereotypes and narrow categorizations or monolithic views. it also perpetuates hegemonic cultural norms. intersectional belonging goes a step further; one is invited to co-create the thing one belongs to, making it different from inclusion. the active engagement, respect, seeking the story, and working to develop gateways to justice is a powerful combination (crenshaw, 2017). a facility with intersectional belonging is vital as the united states and the world struggle to engage hearts, hands, and minds while contending with issues such as climate change and covid-19. recognition of the inherent dignity of all my modified definition of “dignity” is based on the work of funk, drew & baudel (2015) who urge us to move beyond the trappings of socioeconomic status, gender, or race to see and value the inherent dignity and worth of all members of the human family. the third revision, belief in human dignity, is at the core of psychological wellbeing, social connection, and humanity. at this challenging time in united states history, the nation struggles to acknowledge the dignity of all people. far from a "black people and white people challenge," historically, the united states has struggled to see value, beauty, and humanity in those who are stigmatized. many of those stigmatized deviate from the cisgendered, heterosexual, white, christian, american-born http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 male archetype. the trail of tears, the japanese internment, "muslim ban," jim crow and its repercussions, numerous lgbtq+ battles in the supreme court, and "ban the box, right to employment policies" are but a few examples of racialized policies that are misaligned with the ethos of human dignity. nevertheless, a field as inclusive as community psychology must put muscle behind a movement to shift the united states from a traumatized nation to one that treats its people with dignity. police murders and assaults, humiliation because of documentation status, unemployment, food insecurity, or underemployment because of race are all forms of oppression (franklin, boyd-franklin & kelly, 2006). many people who work on social justice focus on one or two identity categories, but injustices affect actors across myriad inequalities. a small but growing number of groups are exploring how gender and sexuality, for example, shape social justice struggles. the work of grassroots activism, participatory engagement, and environmental justice are multidisciplinary, thus including ecofeminism, critical race theory, public health, and community psychology. numerous forms of inequality perpetuate environmental injustice and shape actors' experiences. this work is strengthened with greater attention to these dynamics, and inclusive intersectionality forms the heart of participatory processes. the richness of different worldviews, disciplines, contexts, cultures, and approaches undergirds the strategy. the revised definition of community psychology urges us to build on human and communal assets and move from tragedy and trauma to dignity and restoration. community psychology principles are dedicated to solidifying a path toward wellness and respect (prilleltensky, 2012). the belmont principles, from the national commission for the protection of human subjects of biomedical and behavioral research, were developed because of the vile treatment of african americans at tuskegee as subjects for syphilis research (national commission for the protection of human subjects of biomedical and behavioral research, 1979). a section in the principles, "respect for persons," recommends that all influences be plainly stated, operationalized, and acknowledged, and all actions of researchers [and practitioners] denote respect (campbell & morris, 2017). these principles provide fodder for contemplation from the multidisciplinary, applied field of community psychology practice, and can intentionally ground respect for the inherent dignity of all people. according to shore (2006), respect entails acknowledging and valuing the different skills and experiences within partnerships. respect also entails a commitment to empowering practices, which include creating participatory processes where all partners have a voice in decision-making and where there is a commitment to translate findings into actual community benefits" (p. 12). julian, smith, and hunt (2017) urge practitioners to develop program and evaluation strategies that include respect for and alignment with the cultures of the communities with which they work. respectfully bridging numerous intersectional identities takes time, given that the teaching of united states history across most of the united states is woefully inaccurate and eurocentric. people must learn more about "the other" to appreciate fully and understand their viewpoints, experiences, story, and assets (defreitas, 2019). people in the united states should learn the true history of all their cultures. textbooks and schools need to be made more inclusive (annamma, 2016). a comprehension of the magnitude of power and distortions propagated by (hi)storytellers http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 is daunting. communication is impractical in a sea of faulty assumptions and lies. for many in the united states, this may be an auspicious time to repair the fabric that has been tattered by time, doubt, lies, conjectures, pain, inaccuracies, insults, assumptions, violence, and abuse (banks, 2002). it is hard to communicate without a connection. it isn't easy to connect when someone else's, or a community's perceptions and understanding are different from one's own (baron-cohen, tager-flusberg, & lombardo, 2013). building a culture of dignity honors historical facts, challenges, and requires a combined effort to communicate on a tricky subject matter and finally, to rebuild, and heal. even more challenging may be the discomfort that disrupts the opportunity for possible connections in the short term. ting-toomey (1999) urges self-reflection as we work to reconcile our identity and communicate more thoughtfully across cultures. her research cautions us to recognize the fact that people overestimate their abilities in social and intellectual domains and, therefore, do not have the awareness to critically examine their performance accurately, thereby overestimating their competence (kruger, & dunning, 1999). ting-toomey outlines a fourstage process to move toward cultural intelligence: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, unconscious competence, and conscious competence. this paradigm-shift asks us to heighten awareness, expand knowledge, and reflect on our actions, thereby addressing bias and ethnocentrism and advancing toward cultural intelligence (ting-toomey, 1999). dignity is one pillar of civil society. the field of community psychology explicitly values and highly regards the socioecological framework's individual, group, community, and cultural dimensions. people and communities must have a sense of value, worth, and connection to create meaning, purpose, and believe that they matter (prilleltensky, 2019). a sense of dignity and belonging offers protection against psychological and social stressors that otherwise precipitate or exacerbate community distress (thoits, 2011). cogenerate means and tools for an organization, network, or movement to thrive in a world where innovation can make a difference, people must share their knowledge and experiences. the fourth revision recognizes the salience of a culture of generativity, a means of sharing concerns, questions, mistakes, experiences, and halfformed ideas. as used in my revised definition, co-creation and the development of generativity builds hope, trust, and possibility. amid the global cultural upheavals triggered by powerful movements, innovations, and insights that propel activity across domains and fields, people and movements are pushing beyond the status quo toward new paradigms. generative organizations, networks, and movements adapt to changing conditions that advance themselves and co-create new societal possibilities. equity, co-creation, and generativity are not a function of size or type; they are found across domains, fields, issue areas, and networks, large and small—in social justice issues, public organizations, neighborhoods, and informal networks. the distinctive capacities and attributes that make it more likely for organizations, networks, and movements to develop and sustain forward-thinking innovation generate the momentum and sustainability needed to improve wellbeing. affirming that their perspectives, worldviews, and insights matter and are valued is a natural next step (prilleltensky, 2019). concomitantly, the affirmation of the identities of constituents is known to improve outcomes, from civic http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 engagement to academic achievement to life outcomes (steele, 2011). cogeneration welcomes the perspectives of various cultural enclaves and traditionally marginalized communities, making the construct more accessible to millions of people in the united states and around the globe (powell & menendian, 2016). from the most senior or outermost policy ring to those closest to the heart of the matter, bidirectional reciprocity is needed; we are all connected. the power of community contagion and its effects are most readily seen in the impact of covid-19 which is discussed in the sixth section. rights and our values restoration of wellness, dignity, belonging, and community engagement, moving toward collective wellbeing, is central to community psychology practice; human rights is the fifth element in the revised definition. community psychology is built on a foundation of social justice and is aligned with emergent international models (venkatapuram, 2013). the modified definition is based on a statement from the united nations. this statement exalts the inherent human rights and dignity of all human being including the right to liberty, life, freedom from torture, slavery, urging regard for the right to education, free expression, work and many more. s, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status. everyone is entitled to these rights, without discrimination" (united nations, n. d.). numerous traditionally marginalized communities argue that the united states has failed to honor their human rights. the modified definition is based on this statement from the united nations. "human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status. human rights include the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and many more. everyone is entitled to these rights, without discrimination" (united nations, n.d.). numerous traditionally marginalized communities argue that the united states has failed to honor their human rights. in some quarters of the united states, there is a burgeoning movement to address inequity as exemplified by black lives matter, stop asian hate, increased efforts of disability inclusion, and efforts aimed at removing the check box that asks if job applicants have a criminal record from hiring applications, known as “ban the box.” these efforts, building pathways to equity, highlight numerous examples of inequitable treatment, standards, and access. human rights abuses indicate a lack of respect for humanity and rights. the united nations is holding hearings to investigate the united states' human rights violations (taylor, 2020, june,16). rappaport notes that "having rights but no resources and no services available is a cruel joke" (1981, p.13). the united states faces the dilemma of bestowing, restoring, and preserving human rights and aligned resources for its people to exercise these rights. international law recognizes the rights of all human beings to health, work, and information. safety and security are at the heart of maslow's hierarchy of human needs (maslow & lewis1987; kaufman, 2018). for example, international refugee care is premised on a shared understanding of human needs, support, and care necessary for healthy development across the lifespan. however, some advocates for health and human rights, medical professionals, and residents in the united states turn to refugee care standards to advocate for populations in the united states. for example, "human rights obligations require that migrants' health and wellbeing take priority over http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 national considerations like sovereignty and immigration control"(willen, knipper, abadía-barrero &davidovitch, 2017, p. 970). immigrants’ legal status should not outweigh their human rights. migrant farmworkers have the right to understand the danger and health consequences of their jobs, environments, earn a decent living, and be treated with dignity. international human rights advocacy may be necessary to enact structural changes for farmworkers and other united states workers. international law may be the entry point for civil and labor rights for those living in the united states (andrews, haws, acosta, canchila, carlo, grant & ramos, 2019). recent research from the centers for disease control reveals shocking drops in life expectancy, particularly for black, latinx, and native/indigenous populations in the united states, reflecting the consequences of systemic marginalization and living in the shadows (arias, tejada-vera, ahmad, &kochanek, july 2021). arias, tejada-vera, ahmad, and kochanek reveal that life expectancy in black and latinx people has seen an unprecedented two to threeyear decline. researchers purport that the causes are beyond covid-19 but reflect ongoing degradation in numerous environmental conditions. health disparities result from inequities in wealth, access to opportunities including education, health care, healthy food, and related societal and ecological conditions predictive of health and wellbeing. additional manifestations of oppression of traditionally marginalized populations include overwork; lack of living wages, clean water, and adequate housing; environmental hazards; loss of hope; and deficit narratives which have become self-fulfilling prophecies (mcewen, 2021). people can only tolerate so much. biological embedding and neuroscience document the biological change wrought through the environment. biological embedding occurs due to experience and exposure; the environment “gets under the skin” research documents the alterations of the process of development and human biology as a result of experiences in different social environments. over time, exposure to environmental hazards can influence learning, health, wellbeing, and behavior over the life course (hertzman, 2012). the stark disparities in morbidity and mortality are an opportunity for community psychology practice to be more engaged in community, societal, and policy discourses, action, and systemic change. co-creating potential pathways to address the numerous cycles of socialization, unbraiding deficit narratives, and work spanning all levels of civic discourse address structural and systemic causative factors is community psychology practice (bullard, 2019; harro, 2000). the denial of appropriate and culturally fluent, timely, physical, and behavioral health care has and continues to cause tremendous suffering across the united states, as exemplified by more than 650,000 deaths from covid-19 as of july 2021 (u.s. center for disease control covid data tracker, september 2019). many of those deaths could have been prevented. aligned with human rights violations are additional forms of humiliation in the united states directed against those who speak of physical or sexual abuse, mental illness, and (dis)ability. scant attention is directed to "the other" by policy, community, or anyone other than direct family members and friends (rozin, haidt & mccauley, 2008). the national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine (2020 a, b) calls for the alignment of resources for covid19 care and treatment. unfortunately, and remarkably, the trauma that black people, native/indigenous people, asian american and pacific islanders, and latinx people face daily are akin to the experiences of refugees in marginalized communities across the globe (gone, 2007; mollica, 2014). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 the lack of clean water, education, constant police presence, inadequate housing, crowded conditions, and poverty are dismayingly common among these populations. policies all-embracing, affirming, evidence-based policies increase the potential of moving wellbeing to scale. the sixth and final revision highlights the need for equitable policy and is evident beyond solely economic policy, as articulated in the initial community psychology definition. if the field continues to look exclusively at economic equity, we overlook multiple interdependencies. equitable policy is evenhanded across all domains. interdependencies matter. moreover, the united states does not and has not ever had a universal functioning, representative democracy (mcghee, 2021). the political system is fractured, and legislative moves over the past two decades continue to dismantle "government for the people, by the people." the system looks more like government for some people by those chosen to affirm an entitled class. disenfranchisement from policy, systems, and communities leaves individuals alone to make a way forward. covid-19's stay-at-home guidance has made the isolation profound for many. community psychology, a collective endeavor, can ground advocacy and systems change efforts (scott & wolfe, 2014). community psychologists build community. shinn and toohey (2003) urge us to recognize the value of context, interdependence, adaptive capacity, building relationships, promoting collective efficacy, and bolstering group norms. externalities, context, policies, systems, and narratives matter and are predictive and/or instrumental in understanding populationlevel action, influences, and wellbeing (rappaport, 2000). despite the threat of covid-19, many parts of the united states and under-represented enclaves see hope in civic engagement and make it a priority to participate in the political process by voting even though access to voting is systematically denied. ongoing litigation on voting laws and ethics, contested for centuries, deprives those in most need of social justice, such as those with (dis)abilities, the elderly, immigrants, and those of african, latinx, native/indigenous, and asian and pacific islander ancestry (baccini, brodeur, & weymouth, 2021; mcghee, 2021). gerrymandering continues as the 2020 census data reveal increased diversity across the united states. public policy is no panacea, is not always designed inclusively, and is inconsistently implemented across jurisdictions. moreover, if policy is well-conceived, there are still questions of interpretation, staff capacity, bias, and the decisions on revenue allocation to move to scale. policy has been used as a wedge, as evidenced by "law and order" policies resulting in overincarceration of people of color, redlining, restrictive voting laws in georgia, and the japanese internment during world war ii (mcghee, 2021). head start, one of the most well-respected policies in the country, is chronically underfunded. the policy debate on national health insurance that denies coverage for pre-existing conditions is an insult to every person with a (dis)ability, nearly 25% of the united states population. restrictive and punitive policies obstruct wellbeing and have toxic effects (wilkinson & pickett, 2018). historically and today, united states policy has had devastating implications for traditionally dishonored communities (robles, leondar-wright, brewer, & adamson, 2006; rothstein, 2018; wilkerson, 2020). figure 4 depicts the extensive history of extraordinary, racialized policies in the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 united states as exhibited in the lower section of the figure, the largest in the diagram. these racist policies contrast with the few policy amendments at the top of the figure where the united states intentionally developed policies to redress systemic racism. noticeably, there are few policies in this section. the middle segment consists of purportedly universal policies. however, the ethics of policies and implementation varies, corresponding to legality of the policy, interpretation, implementation, community norms, and cost implications indicating that "universal implementation" has not occurred. for example, the homestead act (1862) illegally took the home, hunting, and farming lands from native/indigenous people and gave them to european settlers. the policy disregarded numerous treaties and pushed native/ indigenous peoples onto reservations. this horrific act is another example of native/ indigenous annihilation in the united states. at the same time, african americans were denied homesteader status. a civil discourse invites those directly affected to be part of the dialog by offering their input, perspective, and guidance. in my modified definition, inclusive policies are culturally fluent and welcome lived experience to policy formation. issues of access, language, meaning, and implications are explored in a generative, equity-based process. inclusive policies are dedicated to a supportive, developmental dialog, clear shared definitions, and equitable implementation. inclusive policies align with data from multiple sources, including participatory community research, lived experience, qualitative and quantitative data, evaluation of pilots, and insights on implications. inclusive policy promotes wellbeing (adler & seligman, 2016) . figure 4 despite its flaws, the americans with disabilities act (ada) which became law in 1990, is an example of inclusive policy. the ada is a civil rights law that prohibits http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 discrimination against individuals with (dis)abilities in all areas of public life, such as jobs, schools, and transportation. the purpose of the law is to ensure that people with (dis)abilities have the same rights and opportunities as people without them. the ada extends civil rights protections to individuals with (dis)abilities like those provided based on race, color, sex, national origin, age, and religion. it guarantees equal opportunity for individuals with disabilities in public accommodations, employment, transportation, state and local government services, and telecommunications (ada national network, 2021). the field of anthropology has much to offer to the development of inclusive policy. the american anthropological association’s (aaa) "ethic" recommends consideration of potential unintended consequences and longterm impacts on individuals, communities, identities, tangible and intangible heritage, and environments (american anthropological association, 2012). a "do no harm" approach may be instructive (campbell & morris, 2017). the american anthropological association's (2012) conceptualization of risk requires careful deliberation of possible unintended effects before any work begins and cautions against universalistic assumptions of what is beneficial to others (campbell & morris, 2017). similarly, shore (2006) reminds us that "individuals and/or groups have varied interpretations of what constitutes a benefit" (shore, 2006, p.12). in thinking about what constitutes a community benefit, researchers and policymakers need to be self-reflective, value lived experience and community voice, and continually be aware of context. risks and benefits are relative. "nothing about us without us" is the byword of inclusive policy (charlton, 2000). community psychology is in an existential crisis as the world confronts the covid-19 pandemic, hundreds of millions across the globe flee civil unrest and violence, and the devastating implications of climate change become apparent. in 2020, more than 79 million people were forced to leave their homes (unhcr, 2020). the united nations estimates that disasters and climate change will displace more than 200 million people; the 2021 devastation of hurricane ida is an example. with the international pressure building to recognize human rights and climate change and the united states’ social, economic, political, and health systems being strained, humanitarian relief and community psychology are desperately needed. both fields center on community healing, cocreation, and practice. internationally, humanitarian assistance ensures that people have the necessary security, safety, clean water, food, shelter, and sanitation. the crisis before us is daunting. the united states has seen millions of covid-19 infections (u.s. center for disease control covid data tracker, september 2021). clean running water, needed for handwashing, is not available to many families in places such as flint, michigan, or the navajo nation (u.s. water alliance, november 2019). moreover, more than six million homes in the united states are substandard (national center for healthy housing, 2021). nearly one million people are homeless, which is likely to increase at the end of the eviction moratorium as benefits are terminated (bauer, 2020). twenty percent of united states households report being food insecure (schuetz, 2020). access to traditional health care is threatened in a nation where the prevention of infectious disease and the medical care of the seriously ill has traditionally been a national concern. the long-term future of the affordable care act is again in question. the necessity of national health policy, care, and access are starkly portrayed by covid-19; vulnerabilities are laid bare (rosenthal, goldstein, otterman, & fink, 2020). health disparities are aligned http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 with income and wealth disparities, as seen in the devastating impact of covid-19 on the united states economy (darity & mullen, 2020; mcghee, 2021). chronic stress caused by racism has a cascade of adverse health outcomes, from high blood pressure, heart disease, immunodeficiency, and vulnerability to viruses such as covid-19 (national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine, 2020 a, b). racism and sexism endured by black women contribute to the alarmingly high rates of maternal and infant mortality and morbidity (geronimus, bound, waidmann, rodriguez, & timpe, 2019). unceasing vigilance is antithetical to wellbeing and far beyond the purview of an intervention (williams, 2016). stress is a predictor of increased behavioral health challenges, and the mental health of traumatized people is a serious problem (mollica, 2014). however, the history of policies and systems in the united states, associated racism, humiliation, and discrimination has justified neglect, exploitation, and abuse, permanently marginalizing generations of black, brown, indigenous, lgbtq, and (dis)abled people (bonilla-silva, 2006). these challenges have persistently been unrecognized out of the assumption that immigrants, refugees, and people of color should not have better neighborhoods, health care, or other amenities. associated vocational and educational activities are woefully inadequate (mollica, brooks, ekblad, & mcdonald, 2015). community psychology as an applied discipline, in partnership with other domains and the consistent leadership of constituents, must work seamlessly with communities to redirect, reimagine, and reform systems towards producing health and wellbeing rather than marginally preventing or perpetuating conditions of oppression. if there is the will, there is collective power and exponential potential in partnership. the time is now; the issue is urgent. conclusion our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original american, the indian, was an inferior race. even before there were large numbers of negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. from the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. we are perhaps the only nation that tried to wipe out its indigenous population as a matter of national policy. moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. indeed, even today, we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. our children are still taught to respect the violence, which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations (rev. dr. martin luther king, in dyson &jagerman, 2000, p. 38). the united states is acclimated to inequity and the devaluation of "the other." tragically and too often, othering, oppression, and blatant murders are ignored, excused, and, at times, celebrated (wilkerson, 2020). the lives of the "inferior classes" of people have become vilified in destructive narratives, policies, and systems across the united states. the braiding of flawed thinking at the policy table and significant structural and systemic inaccuracies leave the field of community psychology with an opportunity to rethink the direction, augment academic approaches, and re-examine the meaning of aligned practice. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 emerging literature outlines the amplified psychological stress resulting from "othering," discrimination, and the process of acculturation without stereotypical poverty (colen et al., 2018). who we are as a field, as practitioners, as scholars matters. are we showing up at a moment that speaks to the essential life-force of the field? can we learn together, co-create, and develop respectful, thoughtful discourse as colleagues and with community that this moment requires? definitions do matter. perhaps most important is how we define ourselves as deep listeners, servant leaders, and facilitators with the capacity to bridge and translate theory to practice, to impact. moving comprehensive equity-informed research to policy and practice is followed by implementation, technical assistance, and equity evaluation (wandersman et al., 2008). sociopolitical constructs also matter: definitions are at the heart of a trajectory with potent, powerful implications (mollica, 2014; prilleltensky, 2019; wilkinson & pickett, 2019). community psychology research is rich with the constructs and concepts of essential human needs, safety, security, meaning, and purpose in life (jason et al., 2019). the alignment between community psychology, sen's (2002) freedoms, and agency, nussbaum's (2003) hope for a life that is fully human, and emerging research on positive youth development are examples of the grounding of hope (national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine, 2019; shinn, 2015). however, united states policy and systems are often dictated by rigidly defined silos and financing streams; people in the united states are obliged to work in siloed domains, disciplines, and processes (pittman & irby, 2007). compartmentalization is perilous; connectivity is often the catalyst of movement-building stimulated by belonging and co-creation. community psychology as a discipline and practice must braid these strands into a comprehensive network, thereby making health, wellbeing, and healing possible. the trauma endured by black people, native/indigenous people, asian american and pacific islanders, latinx, and (dis)abled people is akin to that of refugees in marginalized communities across the globe (gone, 2007; mollica, 2014). the revised definition and aligned practice approaches bolster strategies, tactics, rationale, and the possibility of systems and policy changes, especially those related to all ecosystem elements that ground wellbeing and address systemic racism and ableism; this is the work of the community psychologist. the prioritization of systems and policy work enhances community healing, acknowledgment, and collective efficacy. models that build on community assets and consistently advocate for culturally fluent physical and behavioral practices and supports are crucial. prevention and avenues toward healthy housing and environmental justice that span all elements of the social determinants of health are the promise and predict improvement over time. multiple levers, strategies, and inputs are needed to build more vital generative movements and networks as part of a broader, social justice ecosystem. the ecosystem is comprised of healthy neighborhoods, housing, engaged residents, community cohesion, and numerous efforts that build community. this rich tapestry is at the heart of community psychology practice. safe, sanitary, healthy, well-constructed housing and neighborhoods with adequate lighting, green spaces, walking, and cycling areas, accessible to all abilities, are paramount. urban design is an upstream community psychology model aligned with creative place-making in public health and urban studies. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 1 january 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 community power, engagement, and direct participation in determining one's destiny are crucial at this moment. community psychology practice is dedicated to strengthening the capacity and co-creation of an inclusive society that recognizes all people's inherent dignity, cogenerating means and tools to realize dreams. it promotes wellbeing, human rights, social justice, intersectional equity, and selfdetermination through all-embracing policies, systems/institutions, and/or organizational and personal change. community psychology has the theory, tools, ethos, and power to be a foundational passing gear to build policies, systems, and equitable implementation. however, we must seize the opportunity, or it could be lost for a generation or perhaps, forever. our society must reflect the inherent dignity of all people in multiple pathways to social justice and equity. we delay at our collective peril. the time is now; 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(2019). reducing racial inequities in health: using what we already know to take action. international journal of environmental research and public health, 16(4), 606. williams, d. r. (2016, june). measuring discrimination resource. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/davidr williams/files/measuring_discrimination_ resource _june_2016.pdf williams, d. r., yu, y., jackson, j. s., & anderson, n. b. (1997). racial differences in physical and mental health: socioeconomic status, stress and discrimination. journal of health psychology, 2(3), 335-351. wolff, t. (2013). a community psychologist’s involvement in policy change at the community level: three stories from a practitioner. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(2), xx-xx. retrieved from http://www.gjcpp.org/. world health organization. (n.d.). social determinants of health. https://www.who.int/social determinants/sdh definition/en/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.digdeep.org/close-the-water-gap https://www.digdeep.org/close-the-water-gap http://www.gjcpp.org/ coalition building in surf therapy: a case study on collective impact matthew mattila1 keywords: collaboration and coalition development, program evaluation, organizational development, small and large group processes author biographies: matthew mattila, helped develop isto as part of the waves for change team in south africa. his role as coo includes contributing to research, launching global projects, and aligning waves for change’s strategy with the sector. mr mattila led coalition development across government, private sector, researcher institutions, and think tanks. he brings a strategy background with roles at the boston consulting group, rocky mountain institute, adidas, nyct and oakley. he studied business at unc chapel hill. recommended citation: mattila, m. (2020). coalition building in surf therapy: a case study on collective impact. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(2), 1 – 11. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). 1 international surf therapy organization http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 coalition building in surf therapy: a case study on collective impact abstract this article explores the experience of the surf therapy sector developing a coalition using the collective impact framework. several dozen surf therapy programs and sector supporters now meet annually to discuss progress and collaborate on shared sector goals after years of programs working independently and even viewing one another as competitors. key participants found collective impact worked in encouraging shared leadership, common agenda, reinforcing activities, and continuous communication. however, participants found challenges with collective impact in the approach feeling top-down, difficultly agreeing on a common agenda and shared measures, and uneven contribution and follow-through from programs. additional challenges included limited opportunities for program participants to contribute to the coalition building, lack of a social justice orientation, and lack of backbone organization funding. recommendations for sectors using coalition building include considering funding and previous experience building coalitions, finding humble and bold leaders, getting the timing right, being focused and realistic with targets, and streamlining decision making. the rapid rise of the international surf therapy organization (isto) suggests a sector with a rich history of collaboration, data collection, and shared goals. however, as recent as a year prior to the organization’s founding, few organizations spoke regularly, and many viewed one another as competitors for funding and media. in this article, we’ll explore how the sector came together using the collective impact framework. collective impact was first described by kania and kramer (2011) as commitment of a diverse group to a common agenda for solving a specific challenge. isto is a collective of the world’s leading surf therapy proponents, researchers and influencers working together to share best practice, collaborate on research, and advocate about the benefits of surf therapy. established in october 2017, isto seeks to enable more people in need access to safe surf therapy programs globally, and for surf therapy to become a widely accepted evidence-based form of care. we collaborate to help change the lives of individuals using surf therapy to positively impact physical and mental wellbeing. isto has three working groups, an independent board, ceo, data collection tools, a shared research bibliography, organizes regular conferences, and provides access and organizational support to a ph.d. candidate specializing in surf therapy. over a period of nine months with the input from the broad coalition, organizing and editing by the research working group, and guidance of professors with experience creating similar documents, isto created a guiding document, our declaration, to help coordinate efforts and to communicate our role for an external audience. the surf therapy declaration (see appendix) guides targets for the organization and the sector. an internal isto research group led the creation of the document based on similar templates used in academic circles. the draft declaration was then shared with the group and further developed. this declaration provides a concise summary of the benefits, targets, and assets of the organization. this helps establish the credibility and rigor of surf http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 therapy as surfing moves into the olympics and grows as a professional sport. since its development, the surf therapy declaration was endorsed by surf professionals and surf therapy practitioners at contests, conferences, and workshops. prior to the founding of isto, surf therapy was viewed as disorganized and often not taken seriously. with little evidence to point to, the view was hard to dispute. few researchers were able to reference existing work and programs did not share or often even collect data. however, programs, like waves for change, continued to grow and develop in isolation as new programs launched regularly. waves for change, a nonprofit based in south africa, works in communities affected by violence, poverty and conflict, where mental health services are often stigmatized and under-resourced. working in partnership with local community members, they identify, train and resource local surf coach mentors, who we work with to open programs that service the youth of their own home communities. they provide child-friendly mental health services through access to safe spaces, caring mentors, and a curriculum based on surfing focusing on teaching skills to cope with stress, regulate behavior, build positive relationships, and make positive life choices. in 2017 waves for change served one thousand participants across six sites and employed thirty coaches. they conducted internal evaluations and began to work with researchers on external evaluations and reviewing existing evidence. waves for change developed the idea for a sector collaboration as an ashoka globalizer program. the ashoka globalizer helps social innovation programs prepare for global growth. they connect programs like waves for change with a team of global advisors to prepare impact and implementation strategies. as part of the program, they were challenged to develop the sector rather than their program. they recognized the factors slowing the expansion of surf therapy were the limited evidence base, lack of communication, and uncoordinated approach to sector development. as waves for change struggled to identify a clear leader in the sector, they explored alternative methods for coordinating action and decided to move ahead with collective impact. kania and kramer (2011) establish the main criteria as different from most collaborations as they involve a centralized infrastructure, dedicated staff, and structured process leading to a common agenda, shared measurement, continuous communication, and mutually reinforcing activities for participants. kania and kramer (2011) explain that five key elements are critical in achieving collaboration and impact include common agenda, shared measurements, reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support. using collective impact, waves for change was able to serve as backbone support without needing to be viewed as the best, oldest, or most qualified participant, although at times other programs perceived waves for change as acting in unilateral ways. this paper explores the isto experience using the collective impact framework. from using a logic model to agree on a shared agenda, to how waves for change provided backbone support until the organization was able to establish an independent board and staff; this paper will outline the challenges including those proposed by wolff in “10 places where collective impact gets it wrong” (wolff, 2016), and successes isto experienced while following the framework. we explore the challenges of maintaining momentum in a collaborative consortium like isto. this paper will explore the pathway to collective impact, benefits, challenges, and the backbone organization’s guidance for the future. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 the lead-up to isto in 2016, a small south african surf therapy program sought to benchmark their success against peer programs. following recommended best practices, they captured data from participants using validated psychological scales at baseline and following the program intervention. however, when they looked for data to compare against, they could not find any relevant findings published. across the few surf therapy programs, they found even fewer published regular findings. those who did tended to only publish annual reports. like waves for change, annual reports tended to read more like advertisements for programs as they are intended to encourage donors, rather provide robust and replicable data that capture program impact. after expanding their search to evidence-based sport for development programs beyond surfing, they still struggled to find comparable data. many peer programs have similar aims, but they capture slightly different measures or using alternative methodologies that make comparison and benchmarking of programs challenging. waves for change explored the challenge further and learned other programs faced similar issues. in the sport for development sector, commonly described as the use of sport as a tool to bring about positive change in the lives of people, standardized data collection tools were uncommon leading to a lack of evidence and slower evolution of the sector. despite having common goals and similar approaches, programs rarely collaborated on building the evidence for their programs or the sector. lack of consistent evidence spiraled back into difficulties for researchers and academics to build studies preventing more evidence from being collected and analyzed. having identified lack of collaboration as a potential driver of the issue, waves for change focused on bringing programs, researchers, and influencers together to forge a path forward. being a small organization based at the far edge of africa did not position waves for change as a leader. in order to attract relevant experts, they had to find a structure to organize people without having a clear leader or any authority. collective impact provided a framework to bring programs together without needing to have authority or expertise over partners. the first attempt at bringing surf therapy programs together failed as waves for change could not achieve critical mass of willing programs to warrant a conference. the timing was too early for the surf therapy sector. wolff (2001a) emphasizes the importance of timing in terms of programs being ready to commit to unified efforts before the coalition is formed. in an effort to establish a common set of tools for tracking the impact of sport for development and driving sector progress, the first international surf therapy conference brought together action sports programs. beginning at the first conference and continuing over the following year through working groups, these programs, sector experts, and researchers came together under the collective impact framework and developed a common logic model, identified gaps in the sector, and built a series of tools to address these gaps. in this first iteration of waves for change leading a surf therapy conference, the group achieved their goals through a collaborative approach to completing a clear scope of work. the group continued to collaborate following the conference to test, validate, and then share what they called the action impact toolkit. the toolkit is freely available for programs and used worldwide. the collaborating partners still regularly work together in the sector. using what they learned from the first international surf therapy conference, waves for change again reached out to numerous surf therapy programs and spread the word about their plan to bring together programs http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 to build the evidence base for the sector and improve programs through learning from one another. several factors may have enabled the surf therapy sector to come together for this conference include the additional time programs had to mature, interest programs developed in collaborating and growing, and the experience and tools the backbone organization gained in hosting an additional conference. benefits of collective impact as a coalition building framework the collective impact framework brings several strengths to coalition building. we focus on the benefits experienced through the isto development. these benefits include shared leadership, common agenda, reinforcing activities, and continuous communication. these components were noted as especially valuable by isto participants and the backbone organization. no established leader reduced early conflict from the onset, framing the approach as one of collective impact helped encourage programs to participate. while waves for change was not viewed as direct competition for programs outside of africa, other programs were reluctant to bestow sector leadership status on them. being able to position waves for change as only providing backbone support, but otherwise having the same status as other programs, helped convince programs to join. although waves for change organized and facilitated the conferences, they made it clear that isto was a collective of programs. whenever decisionmaking was questioned by other programs, they took the time to hear alternatives and change course on decisions. for a sector with many programs positioning for a leadership role, being able to work together without having to declare a leader saved much time and discussion. being part of the community seeking to improve its own program and the sector contributed to waves for change’s success as a backbone organization and the formation of isto. they understood their own struggles and priorities were common to other members of the group. the power of aligned motivation was previously explored as wolff (2001a) explains that coalitions are more likely to succeed when motivation comes from within the community. setting a common agenda provided a shared foundation in a post conference survey, 100% of participants reported that the common agenda was the most important condition of isto’s success followed by mutually reinforcing activities and continuous communication at 67% each. the group established several mantras to center themselves around a common agenda and goal. these included “share wildly” and “to go fast, go alone, to go far, go together.” by encouraging all programs to show and share at least some data collection, programs felt protected from others stealing data and ideas as well as united programs in building the evidence base. in post conference surveys (international surf therapy organization, 2019), participants claimed: “the willingness of organizations to come together and share their experiences, both positive and negative, and even the ip (intellectual property) and processes integral to their success is something i have not experienced in any other setting as either a practitioner or researcher.” mutually reinforcing activities enabled synergy two thirds of respondents felt that working on reinforcing activities was one of the most important conditions of success. these activities included things like advocating for surf therapy using program highlights and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 evidence from individual programs. the development and sharing of this research promoted the individual programs and provided real evidence for surf therapy as a sector. one of the key outcomes of the second isto conference was the surf therapy declaration. the declaration publicly stated where isto would focus and which outcomes were prioritized. when pro surfers, researchers, or new programs wanted to know the goals of isto, we could simply point them to the shared declaration. using a common tracking tool, isto helped programs collect data. this activity reinforced the goal of building an evidence base and helped programs understand their strengths and opportunities for improvement. several research participants were able to leverage data from the shared tools to publish reports, complete graduate research, and construct a doctoral program of study in surf therapy. although the tracking tool was not a validated measure, it instilled the value of collecting data and showed the value collective data could bring. programs also worked together as part of several working groups based on their interest and capacity. as part of their outreach strategy, the organization presented at multiple international conferences, often cited by participants as a key success. continuous communication built cohesion the backbone organization provided escalating levels of communication as programs became more involved. the progression was: 1. public invitation 2. follow-up emails 3. online survey 4. phone calls 5. video conference 6. whatsapp text message group 7. email groups per working group this progression prevented the backbone organization from communication overload from programs that were not yet fully committed to joining the organization. as they provided more information and moved closer to joining, the programs received more personal and frequent communication. leading up to and following the annual conferences, programs were invited to a whatsapp group for frequent, informal communication that encouraged sharing and collaboration. for more formal discussions, regular email groups and video conferences were utilized. participants offered that they found benefits in working with others in the sector: “surfing and surf therapy can sometimes feel like a solo venture, and isto provided a place for all of us to come together as one.” challenges of the collective impact framework to assess where participants found difficulties with the collective impact framework, we surveyed the group following the first two annual conferences. the key challenges in the first three years of coalition building in isto have included the approach feeling top-down, difficultly agreeing on a common agenda and shared measures, and uneven contribution and follow-through from programs (international surf therapy organization, 2019). challenges identified by wolff (2016) and that currently face isto’s coalition building efforts include limited opportunities for program participants to contribute to the coalition building, lack of a social justice orientation, and lack of backbone organization funding. top-down approach did not feel collaborative participants felt too much of the decision making happened through leaders of the coalition, the backbone organization and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 board, rather than organically coming from the group as a whole. among the critiques, the top ranked was the top down approach. as wolff (2016) explains, collective impact emerges from top-down business-consulting experience and is thus not a true communitydevelopment model. the framework was established from a select group. isto also established an advisory board and a ceo as the time commitment exceeded the capacity of the backbone organization. several participants preferred a more bottom-up approach. disagreement on the common agenda and shared measures several programs struggled with the common agenda. one challenge with a common agenda across a large group is that a common goal is seldom unanimous. we encouraged disagreement, but disagreeing about the overall goal of isto caused challenges. several programs felt isto should be used as a gatekeeper to police the sector and ensure bad actors were prevented from developing. while many programs felt enthusiastic around generous sharing, one survey respondent felt over sharing was the wrong approach, and that sharing should be done selectively rather than widely. part of the challenge the backbone organization may have overlooked was the close geographic and offering proximity of programs in surf therapy heavy regions. wolff (2001a) has described this as the intensity of turf wars to demonstrate how competition within sectors can affect readiness for coalition engagement. isto worked to be more culturally and geographically representative on the board by adding advisors from regions including latin america. uneven contributions and follow through were difficult for organizations of varying sizes and capacity while nearly all surf therapy programs are relatively small compared to similar sectors, there is significant variance in individual program’s budget and capacity. the larger, better resourced programs provided significant support in terms of man hours contributed to isto. their contributions supported a number of successes raising the profile of the surf therapy sector and potentially the legitimacy of their own programs. the number of programs participating in isto went from six to nearly sixty across the three annual conferences. many of these programs were launched and accelerated using isto’s resources and shared best practices. newly launched programs used the data collection tools, volunteer and indemnity templates, safety plans, and the research bibliography to support their growing programs. some of the more active and larger programs felt they were contributing more than others and potentially creating competitors in the space. organizations with less experience often overcommitted to tasks and were unable to follow-through while still starting up their own program. across the working groups, many tasks committed to at the conference were not completed by their deadlines. challenges of the collective impact framework that isto coalition building efforts now face wolff (2016) identified several additional challenges found relevant to the isto coalition building process including limited opportunities for program participants to contribute to the coalition building, lack of a social justice orientation, and lack of backbone organization funding. by working with organization founder and mangers, the coalition neglected to bring the voices of those most directly affected by the programs and issues they are trying to address. wolff (2016) establishes this omission leads to missing a critical voice and potential solutions. in addition to limited inclusion of the participant voices, collective impact also http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 lacks a social justice orientation. many of the isto programs address issues that may have similar root causes. however, as explored by wolff (2016), using a top-down method like collective impact often limits the ability for those with little power to establish the urgency of root causes including inequality or systemic racism and sexism. finally, on the operational side, collective impact requests significant contribution from a backbone organization and assumes they are capable and well-funded. as established by wolff (2016) very few coalitions can find or afford such capable and funded backbone organizations. when they do, coalitions run the risk of being more top-down rather than truly collaborative. looking forward, isto plans to address these challenges. at the most recent isto conference, the focus shifted from internal to external audiences with two full days open to public participation. an additional day encouraged everyone to join several organizations in running surf therapy at a local beach. while the participants were able to share their experiences, next year we propose a more explicit role for participants on panels and groups at the conference. isto will encourage individual programs to include participants’ voices in the development and strategy of their programs. waves for change shared several examples including a foundational study on the voices and images captured by participants used to develop the program. in addition, isto as an organization, will review the working groups annually and explore adding a social justice group. wolff (2001b) explains that a social justice component is a unique characteristic of the most effective community coalitions. this group could encourage programs to address local community social justice topics relevant to surf therapy programs. for example, in addition to providing psychoeducation to youth participants on coping techniques to manage stress associated with living in a violent community, waves for change collaborates with local community groups combatting violence and gang participation to improve community conditions. isto could support initiatives that develop partnerships and share resources to address issues such as racism or sexism across regions. if successful, isto could serve in promoting a broader role of surf therapy programs in giving participants greater voice and access to resources that address root causes of marginalization. this working group could also develop a social justice section of the conference and host participant led discussions focused on social justice issues. isto collaborated on a sector theory of change and should continue to update the inputs and potential interventions focused on social justice. one of the most difficult and time-consuming challenges has been developing sustainability in funding. as isto grew from a small data exchanging workshop to an international coalition with annual conferences, the funding requirements have also grown. the number of programs, media inquiries, website, and resource requirements demanded more than part-time volunteers. as part of her role, the ceo leads the fund raising. the ceo sets the budget with approval from the board and strives to meet fundraising targets. isto should also continue to encourage a fundraising working group and a panel at the conferences. past suggestions include ways for programs to participate in larger grants as part of isto to access funds they would otherwise not qualify for. suggestions from the backbone organization for sectors considering coalition building, isto found additional guidance would be helpful. the suggestions include considering funding and previous experience building http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 coalitions, finding humble and bold leaders, getting the timing right, being focused and realistic with targets, and being quicker with decisions. these suggestions are based on the experience of the backbone organization in using collective impact as a structure for coalition building in developing isto in its first three years of development. funding and previous experience building coalitions waves for change staff took on the role of the backbone organization for the launch of isto. waves for change brought previous experience planning, hosting, and managing coalition building. they also had funding set aside to support the first conference. they sought surf therapy programs actively engaged in collecting and sharing data. from previous experience, waves for change recognized the benefit of upfront work from potential participants. they hosted several discussions to align on strategy as well as showcase the amount of work required to secure an invitation to the initiative. participating programs were encouraged to suggest other programs as well as provide feedback to the structure and objectives of the conference. to incentivize participation, they offered a fully paid for travel and lodging in cape town. the benefits of participating as well as the pathway to joining were communicated transparently. without funding or previous coalition building experience from the backbone organization, the success of the initiative would be less likely. both ‘mobilize funding’ and ‘guiding vision and strategy’ are featured in the ssir key roles for backbone organizations (turner et al., 2012). humble leaders with bold vision as waves for change developed from a small startup to a more sustainable organization, it frequently used the phrase humble and bold to describe the ideal leadership style. at waves for change, this phrase encourages leaders at all levels to commit to large scale action and be confident they are moving forward with the organization’s strategy. however, they also augment their bold vision with humility. on the humble side, leaders are encouraged to listen to feedback and respond to program assessments with an open mind. the program maintains it is data driven by frequently conducting third party assessments and adapting their strategy based on the findings. for isto, aware of the competitiveness in the sector, waves for change quickly established itself as a humble backbone organization. while responsible for all of the costs, organization, and strategy of the initiative; they actively solicited feedback and encourage participants to share leadership of conference components. they proposed the collective impact framework early and aligned on objectives through consensus building. to achieve a shared vision, they built a shared logic model for the group based on responses from a standardized survey around individual programs’ objectives and methodology. using this shared framework, waves for change as the backbone organization demonstrated common goals across the organizations. the group set a shared vision which while beyond the reach of even the top surf therapy organizations would be achievable through working together. timing needs to be right as mentioned, the first attempt at a surf therapy network failed. however, waves for change made a second attempt as they felt the sector was well positioned for the emergent opportunity. as identified by ssir the sector could benefit from forming a coalition as an unnoticed practice that could be used locally (kania & kramer, 2013). also, waves for change saw surf therapy as a strategy working locally, but could be spread widely. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 be focused and realistic with targets isto proposed a bold mission but maintained reasonable working objectives. the milestones were often met, despite working with a fully volunteer group. it was often difficult to match the excitement of participating programs with achievable working targets. one method waves for change employed was a simple near-term deliverables approach with individuals signing up for outputs and deadlines. the working groups were able to check-in and maintain accountability although some projects progressed further than others and some stalled. in the follow-up survey participants suggested isto ‘keep the mission manageable.’ this is reinforced from existing literature (baker & horne, 2016). following the excitement of conferences, leadership worked to provide reality checks in terms of resources, time commitments, and near-term milestones. the focus of goals and objectives being attainable, concreate and measurable has been described by wolff (2001a). streamline decision making decision making was slow when disagreements arose. as the group sought to encourage everyone to have a voice, most key decisions took a significant amount of time and effort. as isto matured into the second and third year, they developed structures and processes to make important decisions fairly and quickly. none of these were unique to isto and we would suggest adopting and agreeing to them early in the process to facilitate action. as described by wolff (2001a), successful coalitions are able to streamline decision making and decisions, reviewing responsibilities and roles and codifying processes across membership. conclusion using the collective impact framework to establish isto brought several benefits and challenges. from an opportunity identified by waves for change, a small nonprofit based in south africa, to an international body with 60 programs, multiple research projects, regular conference presentations, and a shared set of evaluation tools, the collective impact framework provided a platform for coalition building. while isto is a new organization, it has achieved several milestones but also encountered numerous conflicts. some of the benefits and challenges can be attributed directly to using the collective impact framework. for example, the backbone organization was critical for launching, organizing, and funding the organization. however, some participants felt the decision making was often too concentrated and top down. another core component of collective impact, a common agenda, was viewed as being fundamental to the progress of isto and a source of disagreement for other participants. even the concept of mutually reinforcing activities, viewed by the majority of participants as a key ingredient for progress, raised some challenges as larger organizations felt they contributed more than other organizations who received more of the benefit at the sector level. additional challenges now facing isto include lack of inclusion of program participants’ voices, lack of a social justice exploration of core causes to common issues, and challenges in balancing backbone organization funding and capabilities with collaborative decision making. for developing coalitions, it may be useful to explore several frameworks and assess their fit with your goals and assets. in developing isto, we feel some of the key components for success could be used within the collective impact framework but could also be applied to other methods of coalition building. these components include having participants with http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 funding and coalition building experience, proposing a bold vision but approaching partners with humility, getting timing right, and being focused and realistic with targets. references baker, s. m., & horne, k. k. (2016). secondgeneration collective impact. standford social innovation review. retrieved from http://www.ssir.org/articles/entry/s econd_generation_collective_impact international surf therapy organization. (2019). participant feedback survey. international surf therapy organization: manhattan beach, ca. kania, j. & kramer, m. (2011). collective impact. stanford social innovation review. retrieved from http://www.ssir.org/articles/entry/c ollective_impact kania, j. & kramer, m. (2013). embracing emergence: how collective impact addresses complexity. stanford social innovation review. retrieved from http://ssir.org/articles/entry/embrac ing_emergence_how_collective_impact _addresses_complexity turner, s., merchant, k., kania, j., & martin, e. (2012). understanding the value of backbone organizations in collective impact: part i. stanford social innovation review. retrieved from http://ssir,org/blog/entry/understan ding_the_value_of_backbone_organiza tions_incollective impact_1 wolff, t. (2001a). a practitioner’s guide to successful coalition. american journal of community psychology, 29(2), 173 – 191. wolff, t. (2001b). community coalition building – contemporary practice and research: introduction. american journal of community psychology, 29(2), 165 – 172. wolff, t. (2016). ten places where collective impact gets it wrong. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(1), 1 – 11. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.ssir.org/articles/entry/second_generation_collective_impact http://www.ssir.org/articles/entry/second_generation_collective_impact http://www.ssir.org/articles/entry/collective_impact http://www.ssir.org/articles/entry/collective_impact http://ssir.org/articles/entry/embracing_emergence_how_collective_impact_addresses_complexity http://ssir.org/articles/entry/embracing_emergence_how_collective_impact_addresses_complexity http://ssir.org/articles/entry/embracing_emergence_how_collective_impact_addresses_complexity http://ssir,org/blog/entry/understanding_the_value_of_backbone_organizations_incollective%20impact_1 http://ssir,org/blog/entry/understanding_the_value_of_backbone_organizations_incollective%20impact_1 http://ssir,org/blog/entry/understanding_the_value_of_backbone_organizations_incollective%20impact_1 global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 2 april 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 appendix surf therapy declaration http://www.gjcpp.org/ surf therapy declaration surf therapy declaration surf therapy takes a structured approach to surfing to achieve a therapeutic benefit. surf therapy plays a significant role globally in improving peoples’ health and wellbeing. target groups include, but are not limited to, disadvantaged children and youth, people with autism spectrum disorder, people with physical impairments and people with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or other forms of mental illness. the last five years have seen a rapid increase in the use of surfing as therapy for vulnerable populations. however, until now, surf therapy organizations around the world have operated primarily alone. the international surf therapy organization (isto) is a collective of the world’s leading surf therapy proponents, researchers and influencers working together to share best practice, collaborate on research, and advocate about the benefits of surf therapy. established in october 2017, isto’s goal is to enable more people in need to access safe surf therapy programs globally, and for surf therapy to become a widely accepted evidence-based form of care. we collaborate to help change the lives of individuals using surf therapy to positively impact physical and mental wellbeing. this isto surf therapy declaration is a statement of intent and a demonstration of the evidence base behind surf therapy. it recognizes the importance of providing surf therapy in not only the prevention space, but also in early intervention and long-term support. this declaration reflects an international consensus among surf therapy organizations on the key principles and processes needed to execute effective surf therapy programs, while providing a gold standard of surf therapy programming to improve health and wellbeing. introduction mission statement to understand, grow, advocate for and equip excellence in surf therapy. we envision a world where… surf therapy holds a trusted and valued place within an integrated approach to healthcare and personal development. the outdoor environment combined with structured healthy social engagement is used for all forms of recovery. health care professionals prescribe surf therapy as a standard means of care. surf therapy empowers, breaks down stigma, and improves social engagement. surf therapy is accessible to everyone in need. if we had the entire world surfing, the fact is, we’d have a much more peaceful place. — peter mel, world surf league, 2017 pic: flashpoint labs the challenge mental health mental health conditions are one of the main causes of the overall global burden of disease. they account for 21.2% of years lived with disability worldwide. mental health conditions are particularly stigmatized across all contexts with individuals facing discrimination even in health care settings. depression, currently ranked fourth among the 10 leading causes of the global burden of disease, is predicted to be positioned in first place by 2030. in the united states 22 military veterans commit suicide each day. eating disorders have the highest mortality rates among psychiatric disorders while specifically anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. disability currently, an estimated 975 million people are living with a disability worldwide. of these, it is estimated that 190 million have “severe disability” – the equivalent of disability associated with conditions such as quadriplegia, severe depression, or blindness. an estimated 95 million children (0–14 years) are living with a disability worldwide. disability is a human rights issue; people with disabilities experience inequalities including denial of equal access to health care, employment and education. adverse environments it is estimated that of people with severe mental health conditions, a staggering 76-85% in developing countries receive no treatment, as compared with the also high rate of 35%-50% in developed countries. on average, there are five psychiatrists per million people living in low and middle-income countries. studies have suggested that around half to two-thirds of young people will be or have been exposed to at least one traumatic experience or event by the time they reach 16 years of ages. isto’s founding organizations currently run programs across the following priority areas; mental health, disability, adverse environments, and marginalized communities. these priority areas are complex and challenging to address. they account for a significant burden of global health as highlighted below: taking part in activities outdoors can do so much to build confidence, and the in-depth evaluation of surf therapy shows what great outcomes it can achieve. — alison johnston msp, health and sport committee scottish government, 2018 best practice requirements to provide best practice, we must consider a holistic approach to healthcare, including the outdoor environment. nature-based therapies provide added benefits to those carried out in traditional settings. surf therapy, like all therapy, should be strengths based and recovery focused, centered around the ‘whole person’. surf therapy must include a rigorous approach to safety provision, governance, evidence and inclusion in practice. surf therapy is associated with the following benefits: improved physical health. improved physical mobility. improved mental health, including reduction of specific symptomologies. improved personal wellbeing, including improvements to: confidence self esteem personal empowerment resilience and coping. improved social skills. improvements to positive functioning. reduced costs and burden associated with future preventable illness. greater quality of life. the benefits surf therapy provides significant benefits across a wide range of populations and has been successfully utilized for the benefit of individuals facing challenges associated with disability, mental health, social isolation, combat veteran status and living in a post-conflict zone. the two hours that i spend here, are the only two hours that i don’t hear the voices in my head, or i don’t have to rehearse everything i’m going to say. — anonymous the ocean has a way of putting everything in perspective, ready or not it forces you to focus, clearing your head and helping you relax. — lance corporal frank schnitenbaumer our goals pathways to impact isto believes in pioneering surf therapy, and helping new organizations flourish and grow. the following 3 pillars define isto: pillar 1 understand increase understanding of surf therapy conduct shared research projects, publish existing research annually and share on intlsurftherapy. org. execute an annual surf therapy conference to highlight impact and best practice in the sector. pillar 2 share promote excellence in surf therapy connect leaders of surf therapy organizations worldwide, share knowledge and exchange program tools, evaluation tools and evaluations to help each other improve practice and evidence base. pillar 3 advocate build awareness of surf therapy share research and impact data at conferences globally, grow social media accounts and recruit global ambassadors to push awareness of surf therapy globally. increase inclusion of surf therapy beneficiaries in the growth of surf therapy worldwide. 1. provide access to surf therapy for people who are physically, mentally or socially disadvantaged. 2. build a research and evidence base to showcase global innovations in surf therapy. 3. grow the global network of gold standard, high quality surf therapy interventions servicing various vulnerable populations. 4. mentor upcoming surf therapy programs for inclusion into the isto network. a. help these programs meet the minimum requirements of surf therapy. b. ensure a high safety standard. c. monitor outcomes and program evaluations. 5. highlight the importance of the natural environment and its benefits in therapeutic interventions. 6. promotion of surf therapy access to landlocked areas using new wave pool technology alongside other innovations. all people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for wellbeing, healing, and therapy. — wallace j. nichols, blue mind, 2014 five year target within the next five years, our aim is to ensure: surf therapy is regarded as an evidence based and integrated approach to healthcare, prescribed and practiced with excellence globally. background to the declaration this declaration was initiated following the inaugural conference of eight surf therapy organizations in cape town, south africa in september 2017. the group, consisting of surf therapy practitioners, clinicians and researchers from four continents, established this consensus to promote the widespread promotion and evidencing of surf therapy. contributing organizations a walk on water jimmy miller memorial foundation kind surf surfers healing surf industry manufacturers association the wave project wave by wave waves for change waves of wellness foundation world surf league surfing has saved my life, if it wasn’t for surfing, i don’t know if i’d be around. — anonymous www.intlsurftherapy.org @intlsurftherapy to download this document or to access references alongside further information about how you may support and endorse this isto declaration please head to: www.intlsurftherapy.org/declaration bibliography arcelus, jon; mitchell, alex j; wales, jackie; nielsen, søren, (2011) mortality rates in patients with anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders: a meta-analysis of 36 studies, archives of general psychiatry, vol.68(7), pp.724-731 armitano, cortney; clapham, emily d; audette, jennifer; lamont, linda (2015) benefits of surfing for children with disabilities: a pilot study, palaestra. 29. 31-34. brown, graham; langer, arnim; 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advocacy; social ecological model; community-based organizations; qualitative research author biographies: jaclyn d. houston, ma is a graduate student of community psychology at depaul university in chicago. her research focuses on attitudes toward violence against women. specifically, she examines how individuals (e.g., rape victim advocates and the general public) and groups (e.g., religious congregations) understand and respond to survivors' experiences of violence. charlynn odahl-ruan, ma is a clinical-community psychology doctoral student at depaul university in chicago; she received a master of arts degree in clinical psychology from depaul and a master of arts in counseling psychology from new york university. her research focuses on the empowerment and well-being of women. mona shattell, phd, rn, faan is associate dean for research and faculty development in the college of science and health, and professor in the school of nursing at depaul university in chicago. dr. shattell is associate editor of advances in nursing science and issues in mental health nursing, a regular blogger for the huffington post, and the author of more than 100 journal articles and book chapters. recommended citation: houston, j.d., odahl-ruan, c., and shattell, m. (2015). exploring community-based advocacy work against human trafficking in the u.s. global journal of community psychology practice, 6(2), 1-17. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org). global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 2 exploring community-based advocacy work against human trafficking in the u.s. abstract research on community organizations suggests there are a variety of factors related to the success of an organization’s mission. this study identifies general facilitators and challenges advocates working against human trafficking experience and the strategies utilized to overcome these barriers. fifteen individuals who are advocates in the chicagoland area participated in the study. qualitative methods using the social ecological theoretical framework show personal, organizational, and system-wide factors impacting advocates. individual support systems and advocates’ collaborations with other organizations are encouraging factors in their work. furthermore, advocates feel motivated by trafficked persons’ stories and by the capacity to raise awareness through social media. challenges advocates face include a lack of time and money, a lack of communication among organizations, and negative cultural attitudes related to trafficking. results focus on the specific experiences of anti-trafficking advocates and convey strategies to provide quality services to survivors and effectively raise awareness in the general public. human trafficking is a multifaceted problem involving interpersonal violence where one individual asserts power and control over another. the trafficking victims protection act (2000) defines human trafficking as the exploitation of a person for labor purposes (e.g., debt bondage, involuntary domestic servitude, or labor trafficking) or a commercial sex act (i.e., sex trafficking) through the use of force, fraud, or coercion, or when any person under the age of 18 engages in a commercial sex act (u.s. department of state, 2010). the body of research about human trafficking primarily focused on sex trafficking and the experiences of survivors. while this research is valuable, research is limited in understanding the personal, organizational, and system-wide factors that influence how advocates and organizations work to end human trafficking. past research suggests that combatting trafficking necessitates a victim-centered response at multiple levels that includes the perspectives of survivors, trained advocates, and collaborations among a variety of social service providers (american psychological association, division 35, 2010). little is known about the general facilitators, challenges, and strategies advocates encounter as they work against human trafficking. to address this gap in the literature, researchers interviewed 15 individuals from five organizations in the chicagoland area working against trafficking. the study was driven by the questions: “what factors impact advocates’ work against human trafficking?” and “what strategies do advocates use to overcome challenges or capitalize on strengths?” such knowledge may benefit organizations and communities through a greater understanding of how multiple factors may assist or hinder advocates in addressing human trafficking. while prevalence rates may oversimplify and underestimate the numbers of this complex crime (bales, 2012), they provide a contextual baseline for understanding the global depth of trafficking as a global social problem. it is estimated that in the u.s. 17,500 people are http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 3 trafficked and 199,000 minors are sexually exploited each year (estes & weiner, 2001). prevalence rates are higher for female survivors, thus human trafficking has been categorized as a form of violence against women (american psychological association, division 35, 2010). women may be more vulnerable for commercial sexual exploitation because of the impact of poverty, limited access to education, fewer employment opportunities, or an exposure to domestic violence (ferraro & moe, 2006). research suggests women are significantly more likely than men to live in poverty (chant, 2008; pearce, 1978), be discriminated against in the division of labor (both in the home and in the workforce; rogers, 2005), and lack access to educational or financial resources (christopher, england, smeeding, & ross, 2002). there are many factors that place individuals at a greater risk to be trafficked. many young girls from disadvantaged populations may have family duties and responsibilities that force them to drop out of school, which ultimately leaves them at greater risk for commercial sexual exploitation (reid & piquero, 2013). indeed, research suggests that factors such as family structure (e.g., traditional gender roles that devalue women or discourage education) also place individuals at greater risk to be trafficked. for both male and female youth, lower educational attainment and exposure to substance abuse in later adolescence and early adulthood are associated with a greater risk of commercial sexual exploitation (reid & piquero, 2013). best-practices suggest survivors need an empowering traumainformed model of service provision addressing these risk-factors across multiple systems (e.g., medical, judicial, counseling, and social services; briere & jordan, 2004). more research is needed to understand the barriers trafficked persons face in accessing services, which may be provided by advocates, but it is also critical to understand the challenges faced by advocates themselves and their organizations while providing services or raising awareness of trafficking. advocacy is one role that nonprofits may fill to bring together individuals who share a common concern for social justice in order to encourage social change and increase the accessibility of resources (salamon, hems, & chinnock, 2000). in particular for survivors of violence, especially violence against women, advocates and those organizations trained to provide trauma-informed services are especiallycrucial because they may be better equipped to provide culturally-sensitive services and be empowering to survivors to reach personal goals (american psychological association, division 35, 2010; briere & jordan, 2004; sullivan & bybee, 1999). research on violence against women has shown that when battered women are aided by community-based advocacy interventions, survivors gain greater access to community resources, more consistent social support, and over time, experience less violence than women who do not receive advocacy services (sullivan & bybee, 1999). advocates aid survivors in navigating the multiple, complex systems that survivors encounter in the process of seeking help or pursuing justice (i.e., legal, criminal, health; american psychological association, division 35, 2010; johnson, mcgrath, & miller, 2014). thus, advocates may be particularly important in assisting survivors of trafficking through gaining access to resources, navigating multiple complex social provision systems, and by raising awareness about the issue to service providers and the general public. within advocacy work, there are a variety of factors that foster or inhibit the role of advocates and organizations as they assist survivors in navigating these multiple http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 4 systems (american psychological association, division 35, 2010). advocates experience both facilitators and obstacles to their work against social injustices and a greater understanding of these factors may increase the effectiveness of advocates and their work. the present study seeks to describe the factors impacting the work of human trafficking advocates in order to better understand what helps and challenges them from an ecological perspective (i.e., individual, organizational, and system-wide levels). despite the importance of advocacy work, little is known about what helps or hinders an advocate’s ability to access resources for survivors. research with healthcare advocates for sexual assault survivors note that advocacy organizations face funding shortages and difficulty collaborating or communicating with other service providers inside or outside of their organization (johnson, et al., 2014; payne, 2007). transportation and geographic characteristics of a region may hinder an advocate in accessing services for a survivor; however, some geographic characteristics may also help advocates, such as living in a smaller community, which can create a stronger network among service providers and may make services more accessible and attainable (johnson, et al., 2014). provided that little is known about what aids or impedes the effectiveness of advocates in organizations working against human trafficking, a deeper understanding of these factors may help organizations to better train and equip their advocates to assist survivors and raise awareness within their community context. present study the present study utilizes a social ecological perspective (i.e., individual, organizational, and system-wide levels) to describe what helps and hinders advocates in their work to end human trafficking within the context of chicago, il. while the research on human trafficking in chicago is limited, the chicagoland area is a hub for human trafficking, likely because of its proximity to multiple airports and high violence and gang activity (often involved in sex trafficking; goh, 2014). raphael and shapiro (2004) suggest that many girls and women who engage in sex work in chicago are or have been trafficked and were first purchased for sex when they were under the age of 18 or were sold by a family member. research to understand the effectiveness of advocates working to end human trafficking is limited, specifically with respect to the personal, organizational, and system-wide factors that influence their advocacy work. thus, the present study is motivated by the following research questions: “what factors impact advocates’ work against human trafficking?” and “what strategies do advocates use to overcome challenges or capitalize on strengths?” the present study seeks to add a greater understanding of how multiple factors may assist or hinder advocates in addressing human trafficking survivors and incorporates perspectives from advocates working to end multiple forms of trafficking (e.g., sex and labor trafficking). method design the present study utilizes qualitative description from a social ecological approach. bronfenbrenner’s (1979) social ecological model of human development focuses on person-context interactions, which encourages the examination of multiple perspectives to assess how different systems interact with one another. a social ecological perspective is especially useful for community issues, like human trafficking, because many individuals, groups, and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 5 systems are involved. personal level factors directly relate to the individual, such as family, peers, and personal characteristics or attributes. organizational level factors relate to the larger system such as the advocacy organization or other organizations with which the advocate collaborates. system-wide factors are at the largest level and are related to community structure, attitudes, and legislation. advocates experience challenges or assistance at all three of these levels (i.e., personal, organizational, system-wide). sample the study sample is comprised of 15 individuals who are volunteers or paid employees at five anti-human trafficking community-based organizations in the chicagoland area (i.e., urban and surrounding suburban areas of chicago). individuals represent a variety of roles within these organizations: three are executive directors, six are specialized directors (e.g., communications director, program director, volunteer director), three are interns, and three are volunteers serving on councils or coordinated teams. participants shared experiences from organizations that they are currently or were previously involved with, focusing on a variety of tasks such as awareness raising, direct service, intervention, legal assistance, and policy advocacy. some participants work with organizations serving one population (i.e., adolescent girls or men in sex work) while other organizations serve any individual over the age of 18 who has been trafficked. our sample also includes organizations focused on raising awareness in the chicagoland area. participants have been involved in advocacy work against human trafficking for durations ranging from one to eight years. eleven of the 15 participants are women. the age of the participants ranges from 25 to 62 (m=32.4 years old); 12 participants self-identified as “white,” two identified as “asian american/asian,” and one identified as “jewish.” data collection and procedures the university’s institutional review board approved the study. potential participants and organizations were identified through personal contacts and internet searches. the researchers emailed a recruitment script that detailed the purpose of the study to executive directors and personal contacts. individuals who wished to participate emailed the first author to schedule an individual audiorecorded interview at a mutually agreed upon time and location. before officially beginning the interview, the premise of the research project was discussed and written informed consent was obtained. individual interviews were then conducted using a semi-structured interview guide that was divided into four parts: 1) demographics and organizational roles, 2) facilitators that influence participants’ abilities to advocate or raise awareness for survivors of human trafficking, 3) barriers to anti-trafficking work, and 4) strategies to overcome these barriers. each participant was interviewed once and after each interview, the first author created “memos” in order to record her initial thoughts and observations (burnard, 1991). audio-recorded interviews ranged in length from approximately 30 to 90 minutes. all interviews were audio recorded and then transcribed verbatim. the first author reviewed the transcripts for content and accuracy of transcription. data analysis data was analyzed using content analysis (burnard, 1991), according to the social ecological model (bronfenbrenner, 1979). the first author began by making notes after interviews with initial observations and continued to memo during the initial analysis process to note categories and emerging themes. transcripts were read by the first http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 6 author and notes were made in the margins. all transcripts were reviewed again by the first and second authors and open coded, noting as many categories as necessary to capture the content of the interview. the first and second authors assessed the categories and independently created a category system that grouped together categories into higher order headings following the social ecological model. the goal of this stage in the analysis was to create a category system that collapsed headings into subheadings. the first and second authors then came together with their independent category systems and worked to combine their structures to capture the content of the interviews while also reducing repetitive headings. a combined category system was developed and the experiences of advocates were captured under the headings of facilitators, barriers, and strategies with specific personal, organizational, and system-wide subheadings. this combined structure was brought to the third author who checked for content, clarity, and consistency. after the combined category system was finalized (see figure 1), the transcripts and thematic structure were uploaded into the online qualitative data analysis software dedoose and each transcript was coded within this program. researchers then analyzed the codes by category to write the results. findings findings will be presented according to the social ecological model individual/personal, organizational, and system-wide facilitators of advocacy work will be presented followed by individual/personal, organizational, and system-wide barriers to advocacy work. the findings section will conclude with suggested strategies that may enhance personal, organizational, and system-wide approaches to anti-human trafficking advocacy work. figure 1. finalized category system using the social ecological model. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 7 facilitators personal. advocates note the importance of strong support systems, especially when confronting barriers. these supports consist of others within the organization who were like-minded or who share their knowledge of human trafficking. these individuals offer understanding and advice around how to deal with barriers the advocate encounters. family members, friends, or significant others also offer support with words of encouragement, resources and information, or networking. various personal characteristics or parts of advocates’ identities are also facilitators such as a personal curiosity, passion for the issue, ability to take initiative, or their heritage and family identity. for instance, one advocate shares that her jewish identity drives her passion for social justice work: being jewish...because we have a strong line of social activism, specifically jewish women. and i think that is because of just years of abuse by everybody. and like, ok, are we going to allow ourselves to be victims or are we going to be survivors? so i think that has been instilled with me as well. so, i think, as part of my identity, those are the things that drive me. other advocates note faith in god as a personal motivator that gives them hope, a mission, and perseverance, especially when facing roadblocks or an unknown future. these personal characteristics and aspects of advocates’ identities provide them with a sense of purpose. participants often recount either “aha” moments (e.g., first becoming aware of trafficking) or personal experiences (e.g., personal abuse history) that motivate them to address the issue of human trafficking and a cycle of violence. as one participant states, i was sexually abused from age 4 to 10 and i dealt with that in an unhealthy way throughout high school and then i was introduced to women’s studies and my life was changed. and i have done a lot of activism work since then…and so, my personal story, not that it drives everything i do, but it is a big part of who i am, and the way that i view things. so i think that is underneath all of it -a huge motivator because the person who abused me was abused as well and i know the cycle of violence. and if i am going to make the conscious choice to not participate in that abuse, i want to help others figure out that they can do that too. or at least provide them the space so that they don’t feel like they have no way of gaining power…so that then they don’t perpetuate that system by trying to gain power in an unhealthy way. so that is the underlying motivator for me. for this participant, her own experience of abuse compels her to become an advocate, create a space for others to process their experiences, and to empower others to end the cycle of abuse. organizational. at the organizational level, advocates identify a variety of resources that help their work such as well-trained colleagues, a clinical/trauma-based approach, a solid volunteer base, grant money or donors, and donations of resources (i.e., space, food, clothing). the presence of these resources has improved the capacity of the organization and the services provided to survivors. advocates also identify access to and participation in trainings as key facilitators and share the importance of these trauma-based trainings for individuals assisting trafficking survivors: we hire, train, train, train, and we use survivors to help us train...we have [name http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 8 of community partner] on contract with our home and she comes over, not only meeting with the girls but she meets with the staff. and it’s a real benefit to us because of her approach [referring to her survivor-focused approach], but training is everything to your staff. further organizational characteristics that were helpful to advocates are those organizations that are “well-run,” hold consistent meetings, foster camaraderie within the organization, connect to the community needs, and carry out successful events. one participant notes that the reputation of their organization is helpful in a variety of ways: and this is another thing, you talk about what helps me, the [name of organization], and their name, and their rep...we’ve been around...and as a result of that the organization, the persona of the organization, our brand identity, our recognition, our trust, people have in us is a gigantic asset. indeed, a good reputation assists advocates and organizations in collaborating with others. local businesses, other agencies working in violence prevention/intervention, churches, and national policy organizations are collaborators who aid advocates and their organizations. these collaborations empower and energize advocates as they facilitate connections, share information, increase resources, and build a supportive network. one participant shares how their partner organization is: “really being a cheerleader for us and connecting us...i would have never known who to talk to, in a lot of things.” interestingly, advocates even identify groups not directly involved, such as feminist groups and artist networks, as facilitators of their work. system-wide. the internet provides information and networks for advocates to connect with other organizations nationally and internationally, specifically to connect and learn from other human trafficking organizations. organizations like the polaris project and the not for sale campaign have online resources that increase advocates’ personal knowledge about trafficking and give them ideas for awareness-raising strategies that their organizations could implement. one major resource that assists advocates, organizations, and the general public is the human trafficking hotline facilitated by the polaris project: “the human trafficking hotline is…also a place where you can call and ask for resources…it’s not just a place to report…and hang up.” social media sites, such as facebook and twitter, are another networking and relationship-building resource. advocates note there is a lot of misinformation in the media about trafficking and advocates use facebook and twitter accounts to correct misinformation and to raise awareness through posting and sharing relevant news articles. one advocate notes how she replies to posts with stereotypes about human trafficking on facebook and twitter through attaching articles and links to blogs to counteract the stereotype and raise awareness. advocates also raise awareness of trafficking through the internet by creating social media accounts, smartphone applications, and responding to media coverage that sparks further conversations. barriers personal. participants identify a lack of resources, such as time and money, as personal barriers to their advocacy work. individuals who are unpaid volunteers have to balance their volunteer work with their paid jobs. the following participant’s experience captures this well: i think the challenge is always to figure http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 9 out ways to be more fully engaged…in different capacities...in the current station of life that i am in right now, i am not able to give my…full work towards really advocating or doing...a lot of significant work. it’s sort of like the scraps in my spare time that i am able to dedicate to it. and i think that’s the way it is for a lot of people...that they don’t necessarily have the time, you know, or finances, to really afford...to dedicate a lot of time to it. i think that’s the hard thing. participants express a desire to be involved in the work, however are limited by time and financial restraints. some advocates are worn down from organizational politics or from the scope of need for trafficking survivors. others share personal struggles such as feeling burnt out, too young, or inadequate. one participant states: “but, even still...i feel personally insecure...am i trying enough or do i have enough skills and experience to...try to promote things that are actually working, or am i just going to kind of do what i can.” advocates struggle with feeling ill-equipped to carry out their work for a variety of reasons such as being discouraged by the magnitude of the issue, or lacking the resources, patience, or emotional energy advocates need to continue their work when facing barriers. additionally, many advocates do not having direct contact with survivors, but instead work in fundraising, events planning, administrative work, or community education. advocates understand that due to the effects of the psychological and physical trauma experienced by survivors and threats of retaliation from traffickers, many organizations seek to protect survivors’ identities and privacy by limiting direct access. advocates who have limited access to survivors and survivor’s input feel a tension because advocates do not know how organizational decisions are viewed by survivors and feel a general disconnection from the individuals they are assisting. advocates, specifically those without direct contact with survivors, struggle to stay emotionally connected to the cause while immersed in the administrative details of running a program, planning an event, or fundraising. organizational. participants do not have enough organizational resources and note the need for more funding. they describe how difficult it is to obtain grants that then restrict their ability to fully serve trafficking survivors due to red tape or restrictions on who can be assisted. other organizations that did not have an established office location struggle finding spaces for their teams to meet on a regular basis or host events to raise awareness. logistically, organizations that rely on unpaid volunteers have difficulty coordinating the volunteers’ variable work schedules. furthermore, advocates experience difficulty maintaining a consistent base of volunteers, specifically in a transient urban city like chicago. some advocates are frustrated with “poorly run” organizations or leaders who lack organizational skills. when information about their work, partnerships, or events are vague or when leaders fail to translate information into specific tasks, advocates feel the leadership lacks organization. advocates note how a lack of planning and research by organizations results in events being unsuccessful, actions that are insensitive to survivors, or volunteers feeling like their time is being wasted. one individual states, “we don’t meet regularly...i find when we do get together, there’s a lot of time wasted.” this advocate does not believe that the organization adequately utilizes staff and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 10 volunteer time and this may be a contributing factor to the organization’s inability to maintain a consistent volunteer base. indeed, advocates share how the organization’s poor management decreases volunteer involvement as leaders fail to respond to volunteer inquiries in a timely manner and fail to keep in regular contact with their volunteers. participants are less committed to organizations that they believe to be “poorly run.” they feel a tension between commitment to the cause and frustration of working with organizations. another organizational level challenge is collaboration with other community-based organizations, which is demonstrated in a lack of communication from partner organizations, feeling of isolation from others, and restrictive bureaucratic structures within and between organizations. for example, one advocate expresses frustration with a lack of communication between her organization and the partner organization when planning an event when she states: like we’re partnering with them...we’re providing volunteers, and i don’t know anything about it, how can i...help them...be successful?…but i don’t know anything [about the event]...and we’re partnering with them, you know? advocates also cite challenges such as gaining entry into other organizations for education or fundraising purposes, specifically schools, community centers, and religious organizations. system-wide societal and cultural challenges. advocates who are working to end trafficking encounter beliefs and attitudes about the problem of trafficking, which impact the support and capacity of advocates to carry out their work. participants cite challenges of social norms of masculinity, an oversexualized culture, myths about trafficking, and victim-blaming attitudes toward survivors. advocates reference popular movies (i.e., “taken,” “pretty woman”), television shows (i.e., “toddlers and tiaras,” “pimp my ride”), music styles (i.e., hip hop and rap), and subcultures (i.e., pimp culture, the american culture) as barriers to their work. these images perpetuate stereotypes and misinformation, desensitize youth, oversexualize/objectify individuals, and normalize violence. the phrase “sex sells” is repeated in multiple interviews by advocates noting how culture sexualizes women and glamorizes sex work. the negative impact of traditional gender norms is another theme and advocates note how these norms restrict men from talking about being raped or being trafficked. one participant who serves male trafficking survivors notes that men feel ashamed of being trafficked or raped because they think they should have been able to protect themselves: “because it’s like ‘what kind of man am i that this happened to me and i wasn’t able to protect myself or got myself into this situation?’” advocates note how young girls from disadvantaged populations may have family duties and expectations that force them to drop out of school and put them at a greater risk to be trafficked. these girls often have less economic opportunity due to leaving school, which can make them a target of traffickers working in their low-income neighborhoods: “low socioeconomic status in girls and how they’re dropout rates are insane...because they have to take care of their family. meaning their brothers and sisters…so their education is always in jeopardy because of various gender roles.” advocates link norms about gender with difficulties for survivors and barriers to collaborating with others in their advocacy work. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 11 advocates also face a challenge with individuals in their communities who are reluctant to recognize trafficking in the us or in chicago specifically. there a lot of people who don’t think it happens here or just you know they think of brothels in cambodia and they think of sweatshops in china and india and bangladesh and that’s about it. or you know prostitution in eastern europe or russia and that’s probably the scope of what they envision...in the media it has been painted as international. advocates encounter individuals who deny the existence of trafficking within the u.s. and they struggle to raise awareness and gain community support for survivor resources because of this attitude that trafficking “doesn’t happen here.” cultural attitudes toward survivors and other related topics, like sex work, rape, and gender norms make community members reticent to discuss and address trafficking in their communities. advocates note that because human trafficking is a complex issue, many people have difficulty understanding the role of coercion, control, and the effect of systemic abuse within trafficking. one advocate identifies this issue complexity as her largest barrier: i think the biggest barrier is having people understand that people do not enter on their own freewill...they are…persuaded and tricked and forced emotionally and physically...i think that a lot of times people don’t understand…“well, she’s the prostitute. she made herself…she decided to have sex for money…but no, you’re not looking at the fact that she was abused from age six, sexually by her uncle or whatever, and now she’s 14 and she has no other way of how to express herself but through sex and you know…it is a horrible cycle. so i think that is the biggest barrier for people to understand...i think even my own family members and friends, they don’t quite understand that, you know, to them it is a choice. but, what choice do you have when you are 12 years old? i think [this] is the biggest barrier. this tension is not just present in others, but advocates also note experiencing an internal tension over understanding the complexity of trafficking when assisting survivors who return to their trafficker or survivors who do not personally identify as a trafficking survivor. advocates state a lack of understanding about the complexity of trafficking as a challenge both to their efforts to advocate for survivors and to educate others about trafficking. additionally, a lack of information or misinformation is an obstacle for advocates. one source of misinformation is media images that perpetuate stereotypes or oversimplify the issue (i.e., focus on the rescue with no mention of the after-care services or process). media misinformation is a challenge because “what the media...shows and what movies show and...what other outlets show, isn’t wrong, it’s just never the whole picture.” across organizations and roles, advocates express a need for more credible research about trafficking and their advocacy work. other challenges include issues with the u.s. justice system, legislation, and politics. advocates working against sex trafficking are particularly frustrated with the lack of significant repercussions “for johns” and pimps. legislation loopholes and lack of sensitivity to trafficking are significant barriers to advocate’s work: and i mean i think when we look at our laws, that’s another barrier because while http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 12 we may recognize a trafficking situation if the state you’re in...if their law is written in a certain way where the language allows loopholes to allow a trafficker to...get out of the situation free then that’s going to affect how efficiently and how adequately we’re able to address trafficking in a state or in our community. participants talk about how gangs increase the risks of being trafficked and involve a sophisticated system that is often necessary for an organized crime like human trafficking. they describe how gang involvement in human trafficking is common in chicago, which may be because of the potential profit of human trafficking as a person can be sold multiple times while drugs are only sold once. trafficking is deeper than any one system, and advocates struggle to unpack the tangled roots of social class, racism, discrimination and neighborhood violence that interact to increase the vulnerability of certain populations. strategies victim-centered. advocates emphasize the need to be connected to survivor voice and victim needs. participants stress the use of empowerment and trauma-informed models of intervention. one strategy to empower survivors is asking for the input of survivors when forming and evaluating programs and campaigns. advocates state that survivor voice is key to the movement to end trafficking and that in their own work, seeking to understand trafficking from the words and stories of those who have lived the experience is essential: i think…the thing that i’ve found most effective is to always be…learning from women who’ve been in the life...or [who] have been trafficking victims, i think i…consider myself to be a very privileged lifestyle and there is no possible way that i can understand the complexities of being a trafficking victim. advocates benefit greatly from trainings conducted by survivors who encourage advocates to not force opinions or beliefs on survivors but to simply extend the offer of help. by staying victim-centered, advocates express that they counteract the control and abuse that many survivors have experienced, while also growing in their own knowledge and awareness. education. another strategy to overcome some of these challenges is education. advocates identify how, both personally and in their communities, education helps improve sensitivity to survivors. education helps unpack the complexity of trafficking to those who may oversimplify the issue. a key aspect of prevention is to teach children about coercion, specifically giving them a voice to share the challenges in their lives and neighborhoods by discussing instances of community violence or pressures to be involved in gangs. this may help identify children who are at-risk or may mitigate the impact of the violence through providing a safe space for conversation and dialogue. advocates also emphasize the importance of education in areas related to human trafficking like domestic violence, child abuse, and sexual assault. people’s attitudes towards these forms of violence may shape their response to survivors of human trafficking. one advocate shares that when she has heard harmful attitudes or myths her previous response would be anger; however, her strategy has changed: “i realized that the better thing for me to do is to provide education if they wanted it…invite them to come to events in the community that were being offered...places for them to learn more at their level of comfort.” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 13 creative strategies. advocates identify a variety of creative ways to overcome barriers. one advocate talks about the work of his organization to educate business owners in low-income neighborhoods about various signs of trafficking. these business owners are asked to track patterns that they observe of traffickers and then report their observations to law enforcement. this organization uses the “eyes and the ears of the concerned,” committed citizens in order to gain information to assist victims and prosecute traffickers. another advocate has designed a program to empower young girls through a yoga program focused on a positive self-image. other advocates discuss awareness-raising events like flash mobs and stage performances and fundraisers such as annual bike rides. being informed. when discussing strategies to overcome barriers, advocates emphasize the importance of connecting with organizations that are already working in the community: there are certain organizations in the city that are so well established that you don’t move forward until you contact them and get their support, and even on [specific program of an organization] like we wouldn’t be moving forward if i didn’t have the blessing of so many of our collaborators. not only is gaining the support of other organizations important, but so is doing one’s research and recognizing one’s own perspective or biases before acting. with larger systemic issues at play when advocating for survivors, it is crucial to be informed about the past and present climate of the community towards survivors and the organizations that seek to support them. discussion this study identifies personal, organizational, and system-wide facilitators, barriers, and strategies for advocates who are working to end human trafficking in the chicagoland area. across multiple levels, the data find that advocacy work is facilitated by personal support systems and collaborations with other organizations and the most prevalent barriers advocates experience are cultural attitudes and a lack of organizational resources. specific experiences of antitrafficking advocates using a social ecological model convey various strategies to overcome barriers and to continue to work against human trafficking, such as educating the general public and being victim-centered human trafficking advocates face a variety of personal factors that both help and challenge their work. findings from this study are consistent with killian’s (2008) findings that individuals who assist survivors of trauma need support systems, both personal and professional, and that spirituality is important for self-care and the continuation of their work. these findings about burnout, poor system responses, and collaboration issues with other organizations echoes research by killian (2008) and past research that has also found that advocates and helping professionals experience personal barriers, such as burnout, and organizational and systems barriers surrounding collaboration (payne, 2007). similarly, like the advocates in this sample, nurses who advocate for their patients note frustration with system responses and they experience personal barriers such as lack of time and a need for greater training and education to better assist their patients (hanks, 2007). individuals working to end human trafficking experience similar barriers and facilitators to helping professionals and advocates working with survivors of violence against women. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 14 consistent with past research on advocate experiences, non-profit and advocacy agencies often have a lack of resources and difficulty defining a clear mission for the organization (donaldson, 2007; trickett, 1996). funding and staff size are also two key factors that influence both the organization’s and the advocate’s effectiveness in responding to the needs of the community (donaldson, 2007). not surprisingly, advocates in the present study note that having well-trained staff is a facilitator to their work, while a lack of volunteers or funding is a challenge to their work. however, organizational collaboration is a key facilitator as collaborations across organizations that may join resources and advocates to create a community response to social issues (marullo & edwards, 2000; roussos & fawcett, 2000). future research with human trafficking advocates may assess the potential of a coordinated community response to human trafficking, much like those that have been done with other forms of violence against women (i.e., domestic violence; bouffard & muftić, 2007). community, cultural, and system-wide factors are also identified by anti-trafficking advocates in the present study. cultural myths, attitudes, and norms serve as challenges to social issues like human trafficking, and other research notes the impact of cultural attitudes, media, and current events on advocacy organizations (donaldson, 2007). research on public perceptions of human trafficking may be particularly relevant as the public decides whether or not to support the programs of human trafficking organizations. a lack of awareness may be related to students and professionals not taking part in public policy advocacy efforts within the field of psychology (heinowitz et al., 2012). much of the research on public opinion demonstrates that individuals recognize the severity of human trafficking and experience empathy towards survivors (houston, todd, & wilson, in press), but often struggle to understand the complexity or fail to reflect on the larger social inequalities that create vulnerabilities to being trafficked and may perpetuate the cycle of abuse (buckley, 2009; farmer, 2010; herzog, 2008; pajnik, 2010). the majority of these studies have been conducted internationally and future research should assess the public opinions and attitudes towards human trafficking in the u.s. limitations and implications the present study describes the experiences of 15 anti-trafficking advocates in the chicagoland area, and is not without limitations. first, the sample is predominantly white women and further studies should seek to incorporate greater racial and gender diversity. furthermore, the present study consists of advocates from five organizations working against human trafficking. a sample with a wider variety of organizations (e.g., those working against human trafficking and others who address violence against women) needs to be included in future research. future research may also look to expand the present study to a larger number of organizations or to advocates who are also survivors, especially given that the present study notes the importance of survivor voice in advocacy efforts. lastly, this study focuses solely on the chicagoland area. some of the factors that influenced advocates in chicago may be universally experienced in advocacy organizations; however, they may be unique factors that are influenced by geographic region such as the nature of human trafficking in a large urban area (i.e., advocates noted the prevalence of gang involvement). further research should explore if different geographic locations, such as more rural areas, experience similar (or different) barriers and facilitators. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 15 the present study has implications for advocates and organizations. for advocates, our findings point to the importance of intentionally cultivating passion and attending trainings that continue their education. advocates identify that continued education and staying close to the voices of survivors fueled their passion for advocacy. connecting to support systems and others working for the cause, balancing responsibilities, and connecting to their passion may be crucial self-care techniques that advocates should be mindful to employ. these may be particularly important for the longevity and impact of their individual and organizational advocacy. for organizations, these implications for advocates are also extremely important as longevity and impact are key concerns and they may benefit from cultivating the passion of their advocates to encourage sustainable and quality services. organizations may connect others working for the cause through collaborating with other organizations, which, as this study suggests, may be integral to their success as well. it may be beneficial for organizations to collaborate with diverse social issues that are related to human trafficking such as intimate partner violence and sexual assault in order to share resources, trainings and strategies for raising awareness about violence against women. future research would benefit from examining the impact of these collaborations and the elements that make them particularly successful. furthermore, research into the self-care strategies of advocates and how organizations may encourage or cultivate these strategies is crucial as the longevity and quality of advocacy and services is at stake when burnout is a higher risk. community psychologists are well-situated to assist advocates and organizations in the work to end human trafficking. organizations may benefit greatly from research and evaluation on their programs for survivors with a particular emphasis on the role of survivor-voice. survivor-voice is a key emphasis that advocates place on both their individual passion and the organization’s impact, thus community psychologists and their value of empowerment may be crucial to advocate for and implement survivorempowering strategies. furthermore, with training in participatory action research, community psychologists may be key partners to work against trafficking in order to facilitate empowering methods that incorporate multiple stakeholder voices across multiple levels to raise awareness and implement change. community psychologists should extend the present study to examine the cultural attitudes and myths that negatively impact survivors, advocates, and organizations in order to inform sensitivity trainings and community education that educate service providers and the broader community. community psychologists may also utilize the present study and future research on human trafficking to advocate for empowering and sustainable public policy efforts. through research, evaluation, interventions, and public policy, community psychologists have a key skillset that can be applied to address the needs of survivors and those who seek to assist them (i.e., advocates and organizations). conclusions this study contributes to the knowledge about community-based advocacy work to end human trafficking by informing advocates, community members, and organizations about the facilitators, barriers, and strategies suggested by those working in the field. the results of this study suggest that facilitators and barriers are experienced at multiple levels by advocates working to end human trafficking. by analyzing these factors from the social ecological model, the authors hope to encourage individuals and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 16 organizations to address factors at multiple levels. this study offers strategies to overcome barriers that advocates experience when working to end violence. the present study hopes to extend current research on advocacy work against interpersonal violence and to facilitate further research into the effectiveness of advocates’ work to reduce the effects of trafficking. references american psychological association, division 35: special committee on violence against women. 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(2007). barriers to nursing advocacy: a concept analysis. nursing forum, 42(4), 171-177. doi:10.1111/j.1744-6198.2007.00084.x heinowitz, a. e., brown, k. r., langsam, l. c., arcidiacono, s. j., baker, p. l., badaan, n. h., & ... cash, r. (2012). identifying perceived personal barriers to public policy advocacy within psychology. professional psychology: research and practice, 43(4), 372-378. doi:10.1037/a0029161 herzog, s. (2008). the lenient social and legal response to trafficking in women: an empirical analysis of public perceptions in israel. journal of contemporary criminal justice, 24, 314-333. doi: 10.1177/1043986208318228 houston, j. d., todd, n. r., & wilson, m. (in press). preliminary validation of the sex http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 17 trafficking attitudes scale. violence against women. farmer, m. (2010). human trafficking, prostitution, and public opinion in hungary: interviews with hungarian university students (master’s thesis). retrieved from ceu etd: www.etd.ceu.hu/2010/farmer_margaretclair.pdf ferraro, k. j., & moe, a. m. (2006). the impact of mothering on criminal offending. in l. f. alarid & p. cromwell (eds.), in her own words: women offenders’ views on crime and victimization (pp. 79-92). los angeles, ca: roxbury publishing. johnson, m., mcgrath, s. a., & miller, m. h. (2014). effective advocacy in rural domains: applying an ecological model to understanding advocates’ relationships. journal of interpersonal violence, doi: 10.1177/0886260513516862 killian, k. d. (2008). helping till it hurts? a multimethod study of compassion fatigue, burnout, and self-care in clinicians working with trauma survivors. traumatology, 14, 32-44. doi: 10.1177/1534765608319083 marullo, s., & edwards, b. 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(2005). the domestication of women: discrimination in developing societies. routledge. roussos, s. t., & fawcett, s. b. (2000). a review of collaborative partnerships as a strategy for improving community health. annual review of public health, 21, 369402. salamon, l. m., hems, l. c., & chinnock, k. (2000). the nonprofit sector: for what and for whom? (working paper no. 37). retrieved from the johns hopkins center for civil society studies website: http://ccss.jhu.edu/. sullivan, c. m., & bybee, d. i. (1999). reducing violence using community-based advocacy for women with abusive partners. journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 67, 43-53. doi: 10.1037/0022006x.67.1.43 trickett, e. j. (1996). a future for community psychology: the contexts of diversity and the diversity of contexts. american journal of community psychology, 24, 209234. u.s. department of state. (2010). what is modern slavery? retrieved from http://www.state.gov http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.state.gov/j/tip/what/index.htm http://www.state.gov/j/tip/what/index.htm http://www.state.gov/j/tip/what/index.htm support for mothers living in social exclusion and urban poverty maria suárez fernández1, bernardo turnbull plaza1, larissa adler lomnitz2, graciela polanco hernández1 key words: social support, exchange networks, poverty, family. author biographies: maría suárez, received her master’s and phd in psychology from the iberoamerican university in mexico city. she has spent several years as a teacher in the psychology department at the aforementioned university, teaching strategies for the prevention of mental health disorders to undergraduate students. together with her students, maria works to develop and apply preventative strategies aimed at promoting mental health within mexico city’s most povertystricken ravines. she has worked as a community counselor for 11 years, and her main interests are the development and care of communities who suffer from poverty in her country. bernardo turnbull, is currently a professor at the iberoamerican university in mexico city. he supervises a practicum in community psychology for ba students and teaches qualitative research methods for the psychology department doctoral program. he received his own doctoral training at the university of sussex in the uk from 1994 through 1998 and has published several documents based on his doctoral thesis about street children and the social interface they form with their helpers. his present research interests stress participatory and qualitative methods especially in the area of community health psychology. larissa lomnitz, has written seven books about network analysis. she is a professor at the national university of mexico (institute of applied mathematics), and has been invited to teach and give seminars at various universities such as 1 universidad iberoamericana 2 universidad nacional autonoma de mexico global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 columbia, the university of chicago, the american university; the hebrew university of jerusalem, wissenschaftskollegg at berlin, the university of notre dame, and the university of paris 3. in 1997, she was appointed an honorary doctor by the university of mass. (amherst) "for her distinguished contributions to latin america's social science." graciela polanco dr. polanco received her master’s and phd from the autonomous university of mexico (unam), with a specialization in psychotherapy in the central military hospital of méxico’s secretariat of defense. since then, she has conducted several investigations focused on transcultural psychology and immigration processes. she has received several national scholarships to further her studies abroad, as well as a research fellowship from oxford university, from 2001 to 2002. during her professional career, she has authored a plethora of research papers and book chapters in her field of study. she has received several honors and awards. for the last 13 years, she had dedicated her life to teaching psychology full time at the iberoamerican university in mexico city, and part time in her alma mater, the unam, as well as the research of mental health and immigration. recommended citation: suarez, m., turnbull, b., lomnitz, l., a., & polanco, g. (2017). support for mothers living in social exclusion and urban poverty. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(2), pages 1-15. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 support for mothers living in social exclusion and urban poverty abstract this article aims to construct a conceptual model of the “support” phenomenon reported by mexican mothers in a marginalized area of mexico city. through an extensive literature review, the authors´ ten years of experience in the area and four focus groups we found that the “support” reported by the participants displays common features with the concept of exchange networks studied by social anthropology and with the concept of social support from social psychology. the “support” reported by the participants differs from the concept of social support in the function that it performs of contributing to survival in conditions of urban poverty and social exclusion. the contribution of “support” to survival is the concept´s core category form which three dimensions stem: a) willingness to break social norms if an act of support demands it b) unbreakable family loyalty bound by obligation, and c) the mother as the principal source of authority. introduction in a community center in the ravines around mexico city, the term “support” is frequently used by clients receiving psychotherapy services. having detected that it represented an important resource for families, a more thorough investigation was conducted to explain how this plays a role in a mother refusing to report to the authorities that her son was being sexually abused. the mother argued that reporting it would risk losing the “support” of the alleged abuser – the boy’s uncle. the term “support” appeared to be, at the same time, both a risk and a protective factor. in light of this, the urgency to understand the rationale guiding this mother’s decision and the need to construct a conceptual model explaining this community resource became the main interest of the present research. a thorough understanding of “support” is needed in order to be able to implement interventions responding to the needs of the community in question. literature review after an extensive literature review for the construction of this theoretical framework, varying terms, concepts and approaches to explain the phenomenon were found. all of them shared elements however, none was sufficient to encompass the idea of “support” observed in the field. within these ideas are social support (barrón & sánchez moreno, 2001; castro, campero, & hernández, 1997; house, umberson & landis, 1988; thoits, 1982), social networks and informal exchange networks (adler lomnitz, 1975; belle, 1983; enriquez rosas, 2000). the following will explain the elements of these concepts; which do bring value to the theoretical framework of the observed phenomenon: “support.” there is no consensus on the definition of social support (barrón, 1996; castro et al., 1997; thoits, 1982). in 1982, thoits proposed the following definition for social support: “the degree to which a person’s basic social needs are gratified through interactions with others” with basic necessities referring to: esteem, affection, belonging, identity, security and approval. house (1981) defined social support as interpersonal transactions of one or more types: emotional interest or support, instrumental, informational or evaluative support. lin (1986) proposes three central elements of social interaction to define the concept of social support: (1) that these interactions be real or perceived, (2) that they be provided by the community, social networks and friends and (3) that they serve instrumental or expressive functions. with no consensus in terms of definition, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 there is also no consensus on how to measure the effects of support on health, which could be studied as a direct or mediating effect. the direct effect has to do with belonging to a network, and therefore with the social integration provided by that network (cohen & syme, 1985). when that direct effect is measured, the expectation is that social support provides an individual with a generalized sensation of positive affect, stability, purpose, belonging, security, identity and recognition based on his or her ability to conform with the norms established by the group (cassel, 1976; as cited in cohen, uderwood & gottlieb, 2000; cohen, & syme, 1985; ; cohen & wills, 1985; sluzki, 1996; thoits, 1982). the mediating effect comes into play when the person finds him or herself facing a stressful life event which provokes a readjustment in his or her life. in this case, the people who provide the support activate a series of actions in order to reduce the impact associated with the event (barrón, 1996). from the study of social anthropology, informal exchange networks are characterized as support structures where an exchange of goods, advice, information, loans of money and services takes place (adler lomnitz, 1975: 1998; gonzález de la rocha, 1986; stack, 1974). the majority of authors identify the family group as the principal source of participation in these networks (adler lomnitz, 1975, 1998; medellín fontes, rivera heredia, lópez peñaloza, kanán cedeño and rodríguez orozco, 2012; palomar & cienfuegos, 2007; rivera gonzález, 2006; stack, 1974). multiple studies show that in order to produce these reciprocal exchange relationships, the possibility of reciprocation must exist on both parts, as well as some minimum amount of material and emotional goods (adler lomnitz, 1975, 1998; enríquez rosas, 2000; gonzález de la rocha, 1986; madariaga orozco, abello llanos, sierra garcía, 2003; myers, 1993). the definitions of social support from social psychology do not take into account the survival element that adler lomnitz (1975) posits in terms of informal exchange networks among the poor. the need for survival when facing scarcity and economic crisis modifies social support as conceptualized by theoreticians, as the dimension of material exchange takes on vital importance. the decision to participate or not in a network goes beyond questions of health and well-being and back to the satisfaction of basic physiological necessities like having shelter and food. as a first step towards understanding the “support” phenomenon, the following working definition was formulated to corroborate data generated in the field: “support” is the result of interaction between persons with the aim of meeting basic emotional and material needs. it is governed by existing loyalties between family members with mutual obligations and its function is to contribute to survival. the mexican family leñero (1998) identifies three basic components of the mexican family: ties based on bloodlines, affinity relationships stemming from marriage and, unity based on living in the same residential space. in terms of family loyalty, boszormenyi-nagy and sparks (1984) suggest that to the extent that a person trusts he or she is being cared for, when he or she feels vulnerable and unable to care for him or herself a tie of loyalty is forged which will connect people for life. studies about the mexican family find that blood ties through three generations (parent-child-grandchild) take priority over affinity ties (spousespouse) (adler lomnitz & pérez lizaur, 2006; leñero, 1998). as far as the power structure inside the impoverished mexican family is concerned, there are two levels: one formal;in which authority is held by the father, and one real; in which the mother exercises power although it is not explicitly recognized as such (leñero, 1983, 1998). poverty and social exclusion currently, poverty is understood as the absence of basic capabilities which enable an individual to insert him or herself into http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 society by means of the exercise of will (sen, 2010). these capabilities also have to do with access to stable, paid employment, decent housing, quality education, health services, and efficient transportation. an individual who does not have access to cover his or her basic needs is incapable of taking an active role in the social and political life of his or her society. in this way, one consequence of poverty is social exclusion (meseses falcón, 2011; sen, 2010). the subjects of this study belong to mexico’s poorest socioeconomic levels, classified as c-, d+ and d according to the mexican institute of social research (2014). this socioeconomic level means that the largest percentage of the household income is invested in food, transportation, and services, an average of 6 to 9 years of formal education, rigid gender stereotypes, high incidence of single mothers, and more than one family living in the same plot of land. methods subjects were mothers living in social exclusion and urban poverty in mexico city, invited to participate by age group according to the family life cycle. age groups were: 15-20 years old, corresponding to the stage of parenting small children; 21-35 years old, the stage of parenting school-age children; 36-55 years old, the stage of parenting adolescents and in some cases grandparenting; and 55-70 years old, now grandmothers and greatgrandmothers. each group had a different number of participants, between three and eight. four group interviews were conducted in which interviewers inquired what these women define as support. the selected approach consisted of collecting information from the groups according to the guidelines of interviews previously conducted. the interviewers were community counselors with vast experience working with the community. the guideline for the interviews included open ended questions referring to: what did they understood by “support”; did they give or received “support”; what happened if they did not give “support” when asked for it and when they did not received it; if it was the same for men and women; if they thought it could be harmful in any way; if they would keep supporting a member of their family if he or she denounced an illegal act of their son to the authorities. personal invitation letters were issued. participants were informed that the interviews would be recorded, and the results would be used for research purposes, with their identities protected. all participants signed an informed consent form. the four focus groups lasted approximately an hour and a half each. the information analysis began with the first focus group and continued as all focus groups were conducted, until theoretical saturation was reached. interviews were read using comparative methods and ideas were identified in order to form categories. afterwards, relationships were sought between categories; identifying the central category. all these steps were carried out without following a specific order as it was required to backtrack and move forward depending on the emergence of relevant information in the eyes of the researcher. the final step was to try to integrate the categories based on coherent connections which would lead to an explanatory model of the “support” phenomenon. in the end, a conceptual diagram was created to describe the phenomenon (corbin & strauss, 2008). results following the data analysis, the following five categories were identified based on the study’s purpose: the family as a source of support, the nature of this support, its contribution to survival, family loyalty and the mother as authority and transmitter of norms of support. these categories were then divided into others, all of which are explained below. family as a source of support “support” for these women has to do with belonging to a family group. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 “until now we have been, thank god, a close family which has supported each other at all times.” the nature of the support reciprocity when one makes the decision to support, this is done with the consciousness that one is investing in a system of favors. in this system, one can be certain that in the future, one will be called upon to provide support or will require it. “because they ask me a favor and i do them a favor and vice versa.” motivation for support in some cases, subjects say they give support out of generosity or caring for family members, at times they do it out of commitment and obligation, and finally, they say their desire to support is based on the suffering they have experienced. “because sometimes it’s like another responsibility to support a sibling… i have to support him because in a while i will need him.” temporary nature the women are willing to wait and be understanding when support is not received in a timely manner, although they recognize this can be painful. “…and she asks me again for support and well, i can just speak for myself and i’m not like that, and if she did this for me, i will give her support in return.” types of support these can be divided in three groups: economic, unpaid work and moral. the types of support identified range from the most basic like having a place to sleep, food to eat, or even company and advice. “it depends on the support, because if it’s economic support, i can’t really… but if it’s that someone had an accident, well, i can stay all day in the hospital, you go rest. there are different types of support, because if it’s economic, there i can’t… but if it’s making sandwiches, or taking care of lunch or taking care of the kids, there i can help.” it is interesting how these women talk about generosity when they are asked about support, and they say they do not expect anything in return, yet upon analysis well-defined guidelines were detected; determined by the mother. “i have two that live with me and they say, ‘mom, i’m going to pay the electricity bill, property taxes and water bill.’ they give me $400 pesos, twice a month… and my daughter also helps me, and my son-in-law sends groceries.” contributing to survival as these families face poverty, the lack of an active support network can even put their members’ lives at risk. families with active support networks, when faced with situations of great vulnerability, are able to move forward with greater ease. “my husband had an accident and could not work for a month and i was pregnant…. so my brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law helped us a lot…. they were the ones who brought us milk and diapers…. and my mother…brought us groceries and things to eat.” there are narratives of mothers who did not have the support of family members, and in these cases it becomes evident that the absence of support networks can lead to the deaths of the most vulnerable family members. “my sister has had a lot of serious things happen… her five-year-old son was run over and died… her other son, the older one, was assaulted…. he was stabbed 48 times… and later her son had an accident … he went down the ravine… and he slipped …. my sister came home from work… the boy died then… no one helped except her; alone… she had to be strong….” “we were a family of six brothers and sisters…. my sister…. she was the youngest, the xocoyolt… i was seven… my mother made me take care of her, change her http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 diapers, feed her… i got distracted, playing... my little sister died.” loyalty blood relationship vs. affinity to blood relatives, loyalty is unshakeable. this loyalty obligates them not to abandon members of the family network, while in the case of relatives based on affinity (daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, parents-inlaw, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, etc.) the obligation to, and interest in providing support is on a lower level. “a husband can send you packing at any time; your family will always be there.” trigenerational family it is accepted for three generations of a family to live on the same property. children or grandchildren add on rooms at the top of the home. in these arrangements, it is common to find grandparents living on the ground floor and children or grandchildren building additions upstairs. “mine lives upstairs. he’s independent. he has his two bedrooms, living and dining room upstairs. he added on. because he told me, ‘i’m going to rent something.’ i told him, ‘don’t rent, and add on here.’” living on the same property as parents, even if relatives do not share common areas, strengthens loyalty between parents and children and puts a couple’s relationship at a relative disadvantage. in this type of living arrangement, the loyalty to parents is primary and loyalty to partner is secondary. the strong ties of loyalty towards blood relatives, causes conflict between partners. “my mother was very sick at the hospital and i couldn’t visit her, my husband said it was ok to visit my mother but my motherin-law did not agree ……… i cried for many days because i could not see her” the mother continues to have an important role. children, either out of generosity or obligation, support their mothers economically even if they have to hide it form their partners. “my son who is married gives me money in secret, never in front of her (his wife).” ties of loyalty weaken when grandchildren/children (third generation) gain control over decision making or economic assets. “so we agreed, because we siblings are very united, and my eldest brother said, ‘let’s help chuchito,’ and i said, ‘why? so his children can keep bankrupting him? there’s no use…. giving him money, things, would be giving them to his children, and his children are a bunch of parasites.” the threat of being left out of the network forces members to offer support, even when they are not in favor of doing so, which means that in the majority of cases, it is not a satisfactory experience for them. “it makes me angry that my sister leaves late, at 12:00 p.m.…. she says she’s going to work and she leaves her kids all dirty….. i spend the whole day with them.” mother as authority and transmitter of rules of support the mother is the first reference point for support. “i feel more support from my mother than from my girlfriends.” through their behavior, mothers model the way in which the rest of the family members should participate in supportgiving activities. “they see how you offer support and so they help, too.” “whenever i needed something, she [my mother] was always there; she even lost her job to be with me.” within the family, the mother is the one tasked with transmitting and communicating the norms of support, and supervising to see that they are carried out. by communicating needs between different family members, the mother activates the networks. “so i talked to my son-in-law and i said to him, ‘pedro, can you give my daughter your http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 twin bed?’ and he said, ‘yes, yes i will give it to her.’” frequently, these women exercise their authority to activate the network between family members. this decision can cause discomfort for the others, as in some cases it can mean sharing smaller spaces, diminishing their ability to buy material goods or causing them to take on new responsibilities. “mariela helped me a lot when i had to take my father, so that i wouldn’t have to take a taxi, she told me, and ‘i’ll take you’…. she didn’t like it but she did it for me.” gender upon analyzing the data from all groups, one can infer that the women are much more rigid and strict amongst themselves in terms of support. within their narratives there was no instance of a man being left out of the support network. in fact, the women said that even if the support were not reciprocated, they would continue supporting the men. however the data revealed that in certain situations women were excluded from the network. women seem to be responsible for building and directing their own support network, or contributing in a significant way to the network created by their mother while men are seen as participants and beneficiaries. the man is supported unconditionally, but not the woman, as she is expected to be the one offering support. when the network is not activated participants shared narratives in which they and their children were left out of the blood-based support system. these were the only circumstances in which they related that support was cut abruptly and these women had to move forward on their own, in most cases working two jobs and raising their children at home without supervision. the data showed that the support network does not activate in cases of domestic violence, whether because the woman’s story is in doubt or because the woman must endure violence as a consequence of her ill decision in choosing that partner. “in my case, when i decided to leave my exhusband, my family did not support me at all. they didn’t believe me… i had to leave alone with my children, with the 20 pesos i had in my pocket.” these mothers, upon deciding to leave their partners, leave behind the support system of their family of origin and create a strong sense of loyalty with their children through whom, when possible, they build a new support network with themselves at the center. “when i am tired of working and i have to get ready… for the next day’s sales, my eldest tells me, ‘i will cut the limes.’… and the youngest says, ‘mommy, i put away the clothes, now i’m going to sweep,’ or they tell me, ‘mommy, go on to bed now.’” types of support according to gender men provide more economic support and women help more with work and moral support. nevertheless, there are also cases in which the woman helps economically when she has a job. “men can help with money and women with their hands.” women participate more frequently in the networks. “all my sisters are there helping my mother who got sick … it’s really sad to see that we are ten siblings and my brothers do not help at all. as men, they do not provide support...” in general, women reported having received less support growing up than men. “my mom also supported the men because they are going to bring home their wives and they need more space. they are the owners of the home and the women have nothing.” survival ethics in order to carry out this study, it was considered necessary to investigate the ethical reasoning that leads to a decision about whether or not to support family http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 members. to reach this goal the following questions were asked: “if your compadre3 who is a police officer, catches your child or your sibling doing something illegal, what would you expect him to do?” or “if your compadre and your child work for the same business and he catches your child committing some illegal act, what would you expect him to do?” or “if your compadre were to report or turn your child in, would you still invite him to family gatherings?” in some cases, women agreed that the compadre’s responsibility was to report the person or turn the child in, but they said that it would be for the child’s own good. in other groups, they agreed that family should come first and that the compadre should inform the family before turning the person in. “i think that the compadre can also say, ‘sorry, but he made a bad choice and i am going to turn him in.” “i say, if it’s my child, i would talk to my compadre and say, ‘you know what, please just look the other way, give him a chance, but if my child makes the same mistake again, then go ahead.” “with how things are now, you give them some money and they keep quiet.” in all the groups, the women agreed that if the compadre decided to turn the child in, they would not invite him to family gatherings. the consequence of not supporting the group is one’s exclusion. “you would lose all trust.” when there is a serious problem with a family member and the best thing for that person would be, for example, to put him/her in rehab, report abuse, etc., the mother takes into account the risk to the group’s survival. it is apparent that these mothers have adequate moral development; however, they make difficult but practical 3 the compadre is a term used to describe a substitute parent invited to participate in the bloodline family exchange network based on a relationship of trust and closeness (lomnitz 1975). decisions with respect to the family group’s well-being. “my father is an alcoholic, and we were going to send him to rehab, but since he also helps us a lot, a lot. if we put him in rehab, he is not going to support us.” discussion the results demonstrate that subjects share a collectivist ideology which is particular to the mexican family (inglehart, 2004). the results also show that the primary source of support continues to be the family (adler lomnitz, 1975;1998; medellin fontes et al., 2012; palomar & cienfuegos, 2007; rivera gonzález, 2006; stack,1974). this study indicates that “support” is the principal resource mothers turn to, so support from relatives continues to be a way in which poverty is confronted (adler lomnitz, 1975, adler lomnitz et al., 2006; herrera lópez, 2010). this support shares theoretical elements with the exchange networks posited by adler lomnitz (1975) such as mutual help based on trust and the network’s role in contributing to survival. because of this, exchange networks continue to apply as a resource to face poverty, contrary to what some authors have suggested (enríquez rosas, 2000; gonzález de la rocha, 2001). “support” as referred to by subjects is understood through social psychology as social support. this study’s contribution to social psychology is the importance of “support” as means of survival for the population in question. this “support” is characterized by the importance of economic or material aid, which is scarce for the population studied. the function of contributing to survival is shown in figure 1 as the central category governing decision-making. there are three dimensions that depend on this function, and those are: http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 figure 1. dynamic integration between core category, dimensions and sub-dimensions family loyalty which creates obligation the survival ethics according to which people are willing to break social norms the mother as the principal source of authority, maximizing her role as protector roles, structures and limits to the support network the results show that the mothers are the ones in charge of modeling “support” behavior, activating networks, deciding whom to support and whom not to support and exercising their authority to ensure the norms are carried out. in other words, the mother’s role includes convincing, helping and forcing others to share duties, offer support or exchange favors (adler lomnitz, 1975, gonzález de la rocha, 1986, 2006). the role of the network’s members is to follow the norms even when they go against the members’ individual interests and incur a high price in terms of their own growth and personal development. a younger sister might be asked to quit school to take care of her dying grandmother; a teenage boy might drop out of school to bring income to the household if his uncle got sick or lost his job; a wife might receive even less money to feed her children if her mother in law demands economic support from her husband; a father might not go to rehab in order to keep providing; a child might endure sexual abuse to protect his mother and siblings. for the family as a whole, the benefits of pertaining to a network outweighs the individual costs the members might endure. the structural composition of the network favors, first of all, blood relatives because they have the highest degree of trust (adler lomnitz and pérez lizaur. 2006). the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 primary network is made up in most cases of mother/grandmother, children and siblings, whether or not they live on the same property. in second place, and with less importance, come spouses, partners, siblings-in-law, parents-in-law and friends. the trigenerational living arrangement (parent-child-grandchild) take priority over affinity ties (spouse-spouse) (adler lomnitz & pérez lizaur, 2006; leñero, 1998). these loyalty relationships between mother and child put spouses or partners at a disadvantage. children show loyalty to their mothers, sometimes without the knowledge of their partners. these arrangements, which promote well-being, are not a panacea and also have costs for network members, like having one´s in-laws imposing in personal and family decisions. over the years, women who succeed in building strong networks with their children, if fate allows, will hold power over the family network, with all the associated responsibilities. as a process of natural selection, the most capable woman will maintain control of the distribution of support. family loyalty as an obligation to break with social norms the certainty that the family support network will respond when needed has to do with a high degree of perceived social support. this certainty offers individuals the benefits of the direct effect of social support (cassel,1976, cited in cohen et al,2000; cohen & syme, 1985; cohen & wills 1985; sluzki, 1996; thoits, 1982). the decision to support can spring from caring or an obligation felt to network members. there is also a motivation to support based on one’s own experience of suffering. boszormenyinagy et al.,(1984) suggests that to the extent that a person feels cared for in a trustworthy manner when he or she feels vulnerable and unable to care for him or herself, an unbreakable loyalty tie is developed which links people for life. the strong emotional connection generated through suffering between mother, children and siblings is what later confers authority on the mother in her own network, based on her adult children’s loyalty. these experiences of support through the suffering of survival generate loyalties which form the base of the collectivism that emerges in scenarios of poverty. the family loyalty which springs from suffering is knitted together from the inside of the network and will not become an accepted group norm, reinforced by the mother, until later on. within the obligatory nature of support, motivation is found to be anchored in the loyalty created during the network’s development as well as motivation rooted in the need to belong to a support system. this need is based on the understanding that not offering support will lead to exclusion from the network. this is why, although occasionally one offers support without agreeing and/or one has to assume costs on an individual level, one understands that noncompliance is not an option, as it could imply even higher costs for the individual. the obligatory nature of support is a function of the impossibility of surviving alone in a context which does not provide what is necessary for subsistence. the obligatory nature of support gives members the confidence that the network will respond when necessary. these networks act as a sort of insurance against the unemployment that results from informal labor relationships. the networks offer certainty within the family system, which is the only institution the members perceive as sure and trustworthy. these mothers, guided by the desire to ensure their family’s well-being, have to make decisions based on survival ethics, which creates a different way of solving problems from a place of scarcity. guided by the principle of the greater good, these mothers are willing to allow their own suffering or the suffering of some family members, as well as “looking the other way” in order to maintain the survival status quo. they have an adequate moral development; they recognize that a child who behaves badly deserves punishment; they have a clear ability to discern between good and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 bad; nevertheless, in practice, they can´t afford to lose a provider, whether that is because he needs to go to rehab or because he has broken the law. contribution to survival these family support networks provide the individual with benefits as a direct effect. they offer belonging and family identity and also allow for the efficient use of resources and a reduction in the burden of daily chores (cassel, 1976; cited in cohen et al., 2000; cohen & wills 1985; thoits, 1982; sluzki, 1996). in addition, networks offer a mediating effect as they activate in times of crisis (castro et al., 1997; cohen & syme 1985; wei-qing et al., 2009). the study of social support is a complex phenomenon associated with an individual’s health (anderson, 199; cassel,1976; as cited in cohen et al., 2000, 1985; maulik, 2010) and the absence thereof with illness (barrón, 1996, barrón et al., 2001; house et al., 1988). in this study, we found that the impact of social support is more relevant than previously described. according to our data, the lack of support can lead to death. our findings show that when these women do not have access to networks, they face a higher probability of experiencing the death of someone within their family. this is the result of not having the economic or social resources to cover basic needs. types of support important differences exist in terms of types of support pertaining to gender. this creates significant dilemmas, as men, regardless of their ability or employment status, are seen as potential economic providers, in situations in which economic support is scarce. this means that men are supported more, their shortcomings condoned and certain maneuvers are conducted in order to prevent them from leaving the network. exclusion from the network it is interesting to note that the women did not directly share any experience in which they had decided not to offer support. nevertheless, an analysis of the data showed two situations in which the network does not activate. the first situation in which the network does not activate has to do with the failure of the loyalty system in families with adult children. this happens when people perceive that the child of the supported person is taking advantage and using resources improperly without taking into account the norms of “support.” the second situation has to do with domestic violence, in the face of which the network does not activate. women narrated experiences in which they were excluded from their network upon suffering domestic violence. this can be explained under the survival principle through which it is expected that women will bear up under mistreatment by their husbands. the network of the family of origin is not in a position to absorb a single mother who, in the best-case scenario, would bring in minimal resources to provide for her children. choosing a partner unwisely and not being able to keep that partner represents a failure in terms of family loyalty, because the woman herself witnessed how her own mother made efforts to help her family get ahead while experiencing scarcity. in this case, the mother of higher status presents her daughter with one option: to leave the family network and start a new life without the support of her family of origin. this difficult decision for the mother in charge of the “support” system, to exclude a woman from the network, is a clear example of the high price women pay for the survival of the group. in general, women who participate in the network receive fewer benefits and perform more sacrifices for the family’s subsistence. not until they exercise power will they appear in a higher position in the family hierarchy, above other members, including men. reaching a position of power is an arduous task for women. once a woman holds authority within the family system, she does not have the luxury of losing a man, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 since, as previously mentioned; men represent economic providers in situations in which money is lacking. the results of this study conclude that social support for mothers living in social exclusion and urban poverty is the result of interaction between blood relatives. this interaction is governed by the mother who maximizes her role as protector, contributing to the survival of network members. this network has norms of loyalty and obligations of mutual reciprocity, in which certainty exists that one will both require support and be called on to provide support at some time. these norms are based on a survival ethic under which members are willing to break social norms. types of support are: economic support, unpaid work and moral support. within the networks flexibility exists in terms of temporality, which makes the network relatively durable. community service providers must be aware of this family dynamics when implementing programs as early dropout or resistance to change might be embedded in this obligation to belong to a network. if the service provider promotes health and wellbeing form an individualistic rationale, they might achieve their clients to advance in their personal development without being aware of the implications this might have in the long run. the service provider must seek to work with clients respecting these culturally built mechanisms that have proved to be of value when scarcity is the norm. more research is required to further generalize these findings. references adler lomnitz, l. 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(2006). crisis y refuncionalización de las redes de reciprocidad familiares: el caso de sectores medios en la ciudad de méxico. economía, sociedad y territorio. vi, 21. 87-118. doi:111/11162105 http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://habitat.aq.upm.es/boletin/n49/acmen.html http://habitat.aq.upm.es/boletin/n49/acmen.html global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 sen, a., (2010). la idea de justicia. méxico: santillana. sluzki, c. (1996). la red social: frontera de la práctica sistémica. españa: gedisa. stack, c. (1974). all our kin: strategies for survival in a black community. n.y: basic books thoits, p.a. (1982). conceptual, methodological and theoretical problems in studying social support as a buffer against life stress. journal of health & social behaviour. 23(2), 145-159. wei-qing, c., oi-ling, s., jia-fang, l., cooper, c.l., & phillips, d.r. (2009). work stress and depression: the direct and moderating effects of informal social support and coping. stress & health: journal of the international society for the investigation of stress, 25(5), 431443. http://www.gjcpp.org/ exploring community psychology value congruence in academic settings olya glantsman and leonard jason1 keywords: value congruence, community psychology, values, job satisfaction, organizational commitment author biographies: olya glantsman, is a senior professional lecturer at depaul university and a director of the undergraduate concentration in community psychology and a co-coordinator of the m.s. in community psychology. her research interests include cultural diversity, improving academic environments for students and faculty, community psychology values, and the teaching of psychology. leonard a. jason, is currently a professor of psychology at depaul university and the director of the center for community research. jason is a former president of the division of community psychology of the american psychological association. jason has edited or written 30 books, and he has published over 800 articles and 100 book chapters. he has served on the editorial boards of ten psychological journals. jason has served on review committees of the national institutes of health, and he has received over $46,500,000 in federal research grants. recommended citation: glantsman, o., & jason, l. (2020). exploring community psychology value congruence in academic settings. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(4), 1 14. retrieved day/month/year, (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: olya glantsma, depaul university, 990 w. fullerton ave., room 3110. email: oglantsm@depaul.edu. 1 depaul university http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:oglantsm@depaul.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 exploring community psychology value congruence in academic settings this study focused on the relationship of value congruence between the individuals who belong to the field of community psychology and their workplace in relation to the workrelated outcomes in an academic setting such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and willingness to recommend one’s workplace. 735 academic members of scra were identified and sent an email requesting their participation in this study. results showed that departments rated higher on community psychology values had a greater number of faculty possessing similar values employed in those departments. in addition, better value fit predicted higher job satisfaction scores and higher organizational commitment scores, as well as a stronger willingness to recommend the department as a good place to work. at the same time, results provided a better understanding of the concepts of job satisfaction and organizational commitment in the academic settings. furthermore, the findings highlighted the importance of values in relation to “organizational culture” beyond those strictly related to work/job. community psychology the roots of community psychology are in different parts of the world, while the field’s rapid growth spurt occurred in the us during the 20th century. the context of the 1960’s played a major role on the way the field has been shaped. while the antecedents of community psychology vary, most community psychologists agree that the field can be best defined by its values (kloos, hill, thomas, wandersman, elias, & dalton, 2012; moritsugu, duffy, vera,& wong, 2019). according to kloos et al. (2012), us-centric values that guide the field include “individual and family wellness, sense of community, respect for human diversity, social justice, empowerment and citizen participation, collaboration and community strength, and empirical grounding” (p. 26). similarly, jason, glantsman, o’brien, and ramian (2019) list respect for diversity, active citizen participation, grounding in research and evaluation, interdisciplinary collaboration, sense of community, empowerment, policy, promotion of wellness as important principles that shape and drive the field. jason et al. (2019) also suggest that the field has three recurring themes: prevention, social justice, and an ecological understanding of people within their environments. in 2009, community psychology values were examined through a survey completed by the attendees of the society for community research and action (scra) biennial conference. specifically, the conference attendees were provided with a survey asking them to identify top three values of community psychology that drive their research and teaching. this examination yielded fourteen highly rated community psychology values including: (1) social justice, (2) respect for diversity, (3) empowerment, (4) collaboration, (5) ecological perspective, (6) empirical grounding, (7) sense of community, (8) strength-based approach, (9) citizen participation, (10) prevention, (11) working with marginalized populations, (12) action research, (13) second order change, and (14) program efficacy. community psychology is a relatively new field, having been established in the us in the 1960s. as of december 2019, there were over 1,200 members of the society for community research as action, the field’s professional organization. practitioners make up a large group of these members. there are currently 18 undergraduate, 19 masters, and 30 doctoral programs related to community http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 psychology offered in the us (scra, 2019). however, the need to expand the field has been highlighted in numerous journal articles and conference presentations. one way to do this is by having more community psychology faculty in as many psychology departments of colleges and universities as possible, thereby allowing departments to create and offer community psychology courses and programs to train those interested in both academia and practice. this will allow for a more diverse training with a focus on the ecological perspective, preventative approach, and social justice orientation (jason et al. 2019). however, the question is, when a faculty member joins a department that has little or no community psychology faculty representation, will that individual be satisfied with and committed to his or her workplace? if not, the individual is more likely to leave, which means the department will not have representatives of the field or offer courses in community psychology and, thus, will not attract potential community psychology faculty and students. thus, it is necessary to explore whether the make-up of the department affects the current and perhaps even potential faculty who will train the future generations of community psychologists, both academics and practitioners. one way to measure the effects of the departmental values (i.e., environment) on the faculty (i.e., individual) is to use the person-environment fit measure that looks at the fit between the person’s values and the values of the setting they are in. person-environment (p-e) and personorganization (p-o) fit according to person-environment (p-e) fit theory, individuals are naturally drawn to settings that reflect components of their personalities, including values, which are relatively stable systems (jin & rounds, 2012; lusk & oliver, 1974) and which may shape and influences one’s behavior (england, 1967; rokeach, 1973). additionally, when there is compatibility between one’s personality characteristics and his or her situation, an individual tends to experience more positive affect such as happiness, joy, enjoyment, and pleasure, and less negative affect such as depression, unhappiness, frustration, anger, and worry (diener, larson, & emmons, 1984). compatibility between one’s personality characteristics and his or her setting may also be translated to the workplace in a form of person-organization (p-o) fit (amos & weathingtin, 2008). cable and judge (1996) suggested that potential employees’ perception of fit depends on the match between their perceptions of values of the organization and their own values. when such a match between employees' and an organization values exists, the values are said to be congruent. an individual’s fit (i.e., congruence) with a work environment has been shown to affect work-related attitudes and behaviors (boxx, odom, & dunn, 1991; ren & hamann, 2015; saks & ashforth, 1997). according to schneider’s (1987) attractionselection-attrition (asa) framework, value congruence is related to the type of organization an individual will choose (i.e., attraction), get hired by (i.e., selection), and remain at (i.e., attrition). specifically, schneider (1987) suggested that individuals may be inclined to choose an organization whose goals, culture, structure, and processes match their personality. furthermore, the author suggested that individuals will be selected by the organization based on the set of specific characteristics of those individuals that are perceived as desirable by the organization (i.e., recruiters, employers). finally, according to schneider (1987), individuals who do not fit a work environment are more likely to leave it. when individuals seek employment, they recognize an organizational culture (i.e., characteristics such as what the organization rewards, supports, and expects) and use these characteristics to choose an organization whose goals, culture, structure, and processes http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 match their personality (schneider, 1987). thus, individuals try to find a match between their personal values and the values of the institutions in which they choose to work (chatman, 1989, 1991; judge & bretz, 1992; tom, 1971). additionally, those individuals who do not perceive value congruence with their organization are at a higher risk of turnover (amos & weathington, 2008; cable & judge, 1996; o’reilly, chatman, & caldwell, 1991; ren & hamann, 2015). job satisfaction and commitment furthermore, an individual’s fit with a work environment has been shown to affect individual characteristics, such as workrelated attitudes and behaviors (e.g., job satisfaction and organizational commitment) (boxx et al., 1991; saks & ashforth, 1997). job satisfaction includes employee feelings about both intrinsic and extrinsic elements of his or her job (howard & frink, 1996). job satisfaction measures indicate the employees’ affective responses to their job (i.e., the extent to which individuals like or are satisfied with versus dislike or are dissatisfied with their jobs). organizational commitment includes believing in and accepting the goals and values of the organization one is a part of, a willingness to exert significant effort on behalf of the organization, as well as a strong desire to stay a member of an organization (beasley & jason, 2015; meyer & herscovitch, 2001). typically, measures of organizational commitment require employees to respond to statements or questions that represent their beliefs and attitudes about their relationship with the organization for which they work (fields, 2002). therefore, when it comes to workplace congruence, individuals tend to report being more satisfied with and committed to work settings that match their own values and those individuals who are more satisfied with and are more committed to the organizations tend to perform better, which in turn, increases the organization’s effectiveness (adkins, ravlin, & meglino, 1996; amos & weathingtin, 2008; arciniega & gonzalez, 2005; bretz & judge, 1993; cable & judge, 1996; chatman, 1989, 1991; kristof, 1996; mathieu & zajac, 1990; meglino, ravlin, & adkins 1989; o’reilly, et al. 1991; reb & hamann, 2015; verquer, beehr, & wagner, 2003). rationale while much work on organizations focuses on performance and profitability ideals within an organizational context, the community psychology tenet, through its focus on wellbeing and psychological needs of people, can bring a humanistic perspective into the study of organizations, including academic institutions (boyd & angelique, 2002). given the value-driven nature of the field of community psychology (fryer, 2008), scholars found a need to expand traditional conceptualization to examine how community psychology values influence individuals who belong to the professional organization of the field and who work in academia. additionally, it is important to examine whether the asa framework translates to academia in relation to specific values. thus, if the values of the organization (i.e., university/college department) match those of the individual (e.g., community psychologists), the person may be more likely to report higher satisfaction and higher commitment to his or her job. specifically, community psychologists within an academic setting might be more satisfied with their jobs, as well as be more committed to their workplace, if they believe there is a better match between their own values and the values of their department. in turn, high value congruence with the workplace might also be positively related to positive organizational outcomes, such as better performance. finally, because many community psychologists spend at least part of their life within an academic setting, it is important to study the construct of community psychology value congruence that explores the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 relationship between faculty and their departments in academic settings. thus, this study focuses on the relationship of value congruence between individuals in the field of community psychology and their workplace (i.e., department) in relation to the work-related outcomes in an academic setting (i.e., job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and willingness to recommend one’s workplace. we hypothesized that (1) departments that will be rated higher on the community psychology values survey will have a higher number of faculty who report stronger community psychology values, (2) participants who report better scores on the community psychology person-organization fit (cpv p-o fit) survey will report higher scores on the job satisfaction and on the organizational commitment scales and will report a stronger willingness to recommend their department as a good place to work. method research participants & procedure participants this study focused on those who hold a professional position (i.e., faculty and staff) in academia. the criteria for inclusion in the study required membership to the professional organization society for community research and action, and currently working and/or teaching at a higher education institution in the united states. those participants who did not meet the criteria of being an academic or residing in the u.s. were excluded. the final sample consisted of 217 participants. the majority of participants (70.2%) were white, 9.6% were black or african americans, 9.6% were hispanic/latino/latina, 5.1% were asian, and 5.1% were reported to be other. the majority of participants were married (65.7%), 22.2% were single/never married, 8.6% were divorced and 1% was separated. procedures in the fall of 2011, we obtained a list of all members of scra through the scra’s website to help identify a pool of faculty from which to sample. names of 1,357 members of the society for community psychology research and action were identified. those individuals whose affiliation was clearly identified as non-academic or international were excluded from search (n = 64). the researchers were able to obtain 735 emails. the total number of the society for community research and action members who responded to the survey was 217, which is a return rate of 32% and was 18% of the total scra members that year. twenty-two surveys (10% of the total surveys returned) were excluded because the participants did not meet the criteria of being an academic. thirtyone surveys (14%) were incomplete and, thus, were not used in all analyses. the final sample consisted of 107 females and 88 males, which brought the return rate down to 27%, though it is unclear how many of the non-responders were academics and how many were not. the mean age of our sample was 44.09 years (sd = 3). each participant was contacted via email. the email included an introduction from the researchers, a brief description of the study, and a link to study questionnaires. in addition, in the email, the researchers informed all potential participants that their participation was completely voluntary and that individual responses were going to be held in strict anonymity. clicking on the survey link took the participant to the survey sharing website (limeservice.com). the last item on the survey asked the participants to provide the researchers with contact information of any additional individuals who might be interested in participating in this study. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 after initial contact, 49 emails were returned indicating a non-existent account, eight individuals identified themselves as nonacademics, and one person asked not to be contacted again. forty-three participants contacted the researchers either via email or in person indicating that they have completed the survey. at least two weeks following the initial contact, the remaining 634 individuals were sent a reminder email. measures the first portion of the survey collected individuals’ demographic information for 217 participants. participants were asked to identify their sex, age, ethnicity, marital status, and highest degree earned. in addition, they were asked to what extent they identified with being a community psychologist, whether or not they hold a community psychology degree, to what extent they are involved with the society for community research and action, whether they have taught at least one community psychology course in the past three academic years, their employment status (i.e., full vs. part-time), how many jobs in an academic setting they held since receiving their graduate degree, their tenure at the current position, the type of institution they are a part of (i.e., private faith-based, private, public, community/junior college, four-year undergraduate institution, college/university with graduate programs, professional school, and other), the type of college their department is a part of, the type of department they are a member of, and the types of degrees in community psychology offered by the department (i.e., none, ba, ma, phd, other). the community psychology values person-organization fit survey participants also completed the community psychology values person-organization fit (cpv p-o fit) survey, specifically designed for this study. the cpv p-o fit survey measured how individuals rated themselves (i.e., individual value ratings) and their department (i.e., departmental value ratings) on a number of community psychology values. specifically, the participants were provided a list of 14 community psychology values and were asked to rate themselves and their department on such values. the community psychology values included: (1) social justice, (2) respect for diversity, (3) empowerment, (4) collaboration, (5) ecological perspective, (6) empirical grounding, (7) sense of community, (8) strength-based approach, (9) citizen participation, (10) prevention, (11) working with marginalized populations, (12) action research, (13) second order change, and (14) program efficacy. as stated previously, these particular values were selected on the basis of responses to an open-ended survey asking the participants to identify the top three values of community psychology that influence their research and teaching. the survey was given to the attendees of the society for community research and action (scra) biennial 2009. to calculate value congruence, for each value item (e.g., social justice, respect for diversity, etc.), the individual value rating was subtracted from the departmental value rating. absolute values of these scores were calculated and summed up. the value congruence between a participant and department was assessed. higher scores on cpv p-o fit survey indicated greater distance from zero and thus, less fit. in order to test the relationship between ratings of the department on the community psychology values and the number of faculty who hold similar values, a portion of the cpv p-o fit survey that describes value makeup of the participant’s department was used. participants were asked to answer this question: “in your opinion, what percentage of the members of your department will score high on the values you have used earlier to rate your department?” responses could range from “0%” to “100%.” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 it needs to be noted that level of cpv p-o fit was a measure of distance, with higher scores representing greater distance between one’s own values and the values of the department (i.e., worse fit) and lower scores representing smaller distance between one’s own values and the values of the department (i.e., better fit). cronbach's alphas for the 14 personal and 14 departmental values items of the cpv p-o fit survey were .76 and .91 respectively. job satisfaction survey the michigan organizational assessment questionnaire (moaq) (cammann, fichman, jenkins, & klesh, 1983) was used to measure general job satisfaction. the moaq measures the perceptions of organizational members. we replaced the word “organization” with “department” given that the authors have explicitly stated that the term “organization” could be replaced with a more appropriate term. instead of leaving a space for the participant to insert an organization’s name, the phrase “your college/university” was used. for this study, the three-item subscale of the moaq was selected to measure satisfaction with the social dimensions of one’s job and organization. satisfaction was rated on a 7-point likert-type scale (1 = strongly disagree; 7 = strongly agree). sample items included: all in all, i am satisfied with my job; in general, i don’t like my job (r); and in general, i like working here. for scoring purposes, participants’ responses to all of the items within a satisfaction scale were averaged to yield an overall score. items denoted with (r) were reverse-coded (e.g., 1 = 7; 7 = 1) before averaging the overall score. internal consistency (alpha) for the threeitem subscale of the moaq was .77 (cammann, et al., 1983) and ranged from 0.67 to 0.95 (hochwarter, perrewe, ferris, brymer, 1999; mcfarlin & rice, 1992; mclain, 1995; sanchez & brock, 1996; siegall & mcdonald, 1995). the subscale of the michigan organizational assessment questionnaire that measures satisfaction with the social dimensions of one’s job and organization consisted of three items and appeared to have good internal consistency, α = .91. commitment survey a portion of the tcm employee commitment survey (meyer & allen, 1997; 2004) was used to assess participants’ organizational commitment. the tcm employee commitment survey measures three forms of employee commitment to an organization: (1) affective commitment (based on desire), (2) normative commitment (based on obligation), and (3) continuance commitment (based on cost) (meyer & allen, 1997). the three scales of the survey, the affective commitment scale (acs), the normative commitment scale (ncs) and the continuance commitment scale (ccs) are well-validated. specifically, according to allen and meyer (1990), acs “correlated positively with six different types of organizational socialization programs and negatively with having an innovative role orientation within the first 6 months of entering an organization” (as cited in fields, 2002, p.5). given that we were interested in organizational commitment we used only the affective commitment scale of the survey as it measures an individual’s desire to stay in an organization rather than his or her obligation to stay. the revised version of the affective commitment scale includes six items. commitment was rated on a 7-point likerttype scale (1 = strongly disagree; 7 = strongly agree). sample items included: i would be very happy to spend the rest of my career with this organization, i really feel as if this organization’s problems are my own, i do not feel like ‘part of the family’ at my organization (r), i do not feel ‘emotionally attached’ to this organization (r), this organization has a great deal of personal meaning for me, and i do not feel strong sense of belonging to my organization (r). for scoring purposes, participants’ responses to all of the items within a commitment scale were averaged to yield an overall score. items denoted with (r) were reversed and re-coded (e.g., 1 = 7; 7 = 1) before averaging the overall score. the final http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 score could range in value from 1 to 7 with higher scores indicating stronger commitment. prior research on the affective commitment scale (acs) has ranged from 0.77 to 0.88 (allen & meyer, 1990; cohen, 1996, 1999; cohen & kirchmeyer, 1995; hackett, bycio, & hausdorf, 1994; meyer & allen, 1997; meyer, irving, & allen, 1998; somers, 1995; somers & birnbaum, 1998). in the current sample, the affective commitment subscale had good internal consistency, α = .89. willingness to recommend in addition, the participants were asked to indicate their willingness to recommend their department, assessed with the questions, “how likely would you be to recommend your department to your friends as a good place work?” willingness to recommend was rated on a 5-point likert-type scale (1 = not recommend; 5 = recommend strongly). using the same question, cable and judge (1996) found that p-o fit perceptions significantly predicted participants’ willingness to recommend their department to others. in addition, wanous and colella (1989) found a large percentage of new job applicants were referred to the organization by current employees, and those individuals who were then hired showed better performance and lower turnover (as cited in cable & judge, 1996). statistical analyses to examine relationships among the variables of interest, pearson product-moment correlations were computed. results as indicated in table 1, there were eleven significant correlations. there was a moderate positive correlation between the level of department’s community psychology values and the willingness to recommend one’s department as a good place to work. there was a moderate negative correlation between the level of cpv p-o fit and the willingness to recommend one’s department. in addition, there were moderate positive correlations between the willingness to recommend one’s department and the level of job satisfaction and the level of organizational commitment. in addition, there was a moderate negative correlation between the level of organizational commitment and the level of cpv p-o fit . additionally, there were moderate positive correlations between the level of organizational commitment and the level of department’s community psychology values and the level of job satisfaction. table 1 correlation matrix between the measures of values and work related outcomes measures 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 personal values .10 .22* .01 -.01 -.08 2 departmental values -.85** .25* .49** .39** 3 cpv po fit -.25* -.52** -.44** 4 satisfaction .52** .62** 5 commitment .68** 6 willingness to recommend department note: *p < .05. **p < .001 (2-tailed) furthermore, there was a strong, negative correlation between the level of the department’s community psychology values and the level of cpv p-o fit. increases in the level of the department’s community psychology values were correlated with http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 increases in the level of community psychology values fit (i.e., a smaller difference between one’s own values and the values of the department). because of the strong correlation between the scores on the cpv p-o fit survey and the department values, department values were not included in any regression examining value fit, as was originally proposed. furthermore, from the theoretical perspective cpv p-o fit was a better measure of one’s value fit than the departmental scores. regression analyses we conducted a linear regression to examine the first hypothesis, with the department’s values score (measured by a portion of the cpv p-o fit survey) as the independent variable and the number of academic faculty with community psychology values as the outcome variable. higher departmental scores on the cpv-po-fit survey [m = 3.54, sd = .76] predicted greater number of faculty possessing similar values [m = 58.23, sd = 24.29], β = .50, t(168) = 7.40, p < .001. the overall model fit was r2 = .25, f(1, 168) = 54.77, p < .001, indicating that about one quarter (25%) of the variance in the number of faculty in one’s department that possess similar values was explained by the department’s community psychology values scores. the second hypothesis explored how much of the observable variability in job satisfaction scores can be attributed to the level of cpv po fit. a hierarchical linear regression model examined whether lower averaged difference scores on the cpv p-o fit survey (i.e., better fit) predicted higher job satisfaction scores beyond personal community psychology values. specifically, personal community psychology values scores and the scores for the value fit (i.e., the averaged difference between the personal values and the departmental values) were entered into the regression to examine how well this variable predicts satisfaction scores, while controlling for the level of personal values. higher scores on the cpv p-o fit survey [m = 1.08, sd = .71], predicted higher job satisfaction scores [m = 5.69, sd = 1.43]. about seven percent of the variability in job satisfaction was explained by the cpv p-o fit, β = -.26, t(166) = -3.41, p < .05. the overall model fit was r2 = .07, f(2, 166) = 5.84, p < .05. a hierarchical linear regression model was created to examine whether better fit, as measured by the cpv po fit survey (i.e., smaller averaged difference between the department and the individual), predicts higher organizational commitment scores beyond personal community psychology values. better value fit, as measured by the cpv p-o fit survey [m = 1.08, sd = .71], predicted higher organizational commitment scores [m = 4.38, sd = 1.40]. about 28% percent of the variability in organizational commitment was explained by the cpv p-o fit, β = -1.05, t(166) = -7.98, p < .01. the overall model fit was r2 = .28, f(2, 166) = 31.84, p < .001. the fourth hypothesis predicted that better fit, as measured by the cpv p-o fit survey (i.e., smaller averaged difference between the department and the individual), will predict higher recommendation scores. better fit, as measured by the cpv p-o fit survey (m = 1.08, sd = .71) was a significant predictor of the likelihood of recommending one’s department as a good place to work, m = 3.78, sd = 1.14, β = -.44, t(163) = -6.35, p < .001. the overall model fit was r2 = .29, f(1, 163) = 40.38, p < .001. about 29% of variance in the willingness to recommend one’s department was explained by the scores on the cpv p-o fit survey. discussion the findings have important implications for the field of community psychology and particularly to those who practice in the field. given that faculty members with similar values are attracted to departments with a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 higher number of individuals sharing their values, academic settings with little or no faculty members with community psychology values are less likely to attract community psychology faculty. these settings will thus have fewer individuals capable of teaching community psychology curriculum or disseminating community psychology values to such departments and practice competencies to their students. furthermore, those members of scra who find themselves in academic settings which do not match their values will be less likely to recommend their workplace to colleagues, thus not attracting potential scra members to their departments. this, in turn, will hamper the department from increasing its level of community psychology values and, potentially, attracting more members of scra. thus, based on these findings, those members of the scra who find themselves in academic settings with a low level of community psychology values might need additional support from other sources such as professional organizations (e.g., scra), in order to ensure that these individuals remain in such settings and raise awareness about the field. in particular, such organizations can provide support that emphasizes the value fit for those individuals beyond their workplace (e.g., scra councils and interest groups such as the practice council and the council on education, listserv, conferences, committees, etc.). additionally, the results suggested that the attraction-selection-attrition (asa) theory works with values of the field of community psychology. departments rated higher on community psychology values, as measured by the cpv p-o fit survey, predicted greater number of faculty possessing similar values employed in one’s department. in addition, better value fit predicted higher job satisfaction scores and higher organizational commitment scores, as well as a stronger willingness to recommend their department as a good place to work. findings further supported the positive relationship between value congruence and job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and willingness to recommend one’s workplace. the same set of issues regarding the fit is relevant to both applied as well as academic settings. these findings suggested that the asa theory, usually used in discussion of non-academic settings, translates to academic settings. in addition, these findings provide a better understanding of the concepts of job satisfaction and organizational commitment in academic settings. findings also highlight the importance of values in relation to “organizational culture” beyond those strictly related to work/job. limitations this study had several limitations. for instance, our conclusion about the study’s return rate was limited by the fact that it was not possible to obtain the contact information of every member of scra and not possible to identify those individuals who are currently employed in an academic setting. that is, there is a chance that some of the individuals who had neither responded to the survey nor contacted the researchers had been in nonacademic settings and did not qualify for the study. furthermore, those who are less satisfied with their workplace may have been more overwhelmed and less likely to notice or respond to emails. however, they may have been more likely to pay attention to emails regarding the values they share. therefore, generalizability could have been compromised. future directions previous research also suggested a relationship between length of time in an organization and person-organization fit (holland, 1985). for example, individuals with low tenure who had high value congruence had higher social satisfaction compared to those with low value congruence. there was little difference in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 satisfaction compared to those with high tenure (adkins et al., 1996). this suggests that those individuals who are new to a workplace that does not share their values may be at a higher risk of social dissatisfaction compared to those who have been in the department longer. future studies should examine the relationship between work adjustment and community psychologists in academia as well as applied settings. furthermore, given that the duration of time one is in a setting may also impact job satisfaction, future research in this area should utilize a longitudinal design to provide further insight into satisfaction of community psychologists within an academic setting. additionally, future studies might explore a more comprehensive perspective on value congruence. for example, value fit between members of a department could have important implications for job satisfaction and organizational commitment. previous research has indicated that value congruence in the workplace may be split into (1) values between co-workers and (2) supervisors. though both types of value congruencies have been found to have an effect on the individual’s job outcomes, there is no research that explores the interaction of the different types of value congruencies within academia. moreover, future research should focus on exploring the difference between perceived versus actual values. specifically, there may be a difference between the values that are publicly put out by the organization (e.g., mission statement) and those that are being implemented (e.g., faculty and stuff often participate in volunteer work in accordance with the value of giving back to the community). the current study only focused on the values of the field of community psychology. in future research, competing values such as meritocracy, competition, selfreliance should be examined. inclusion of such values (i.e., beyond community psychology values) may be a better predictor of job satisfaction and organizational commitment. finally, future studies can focus on value congruence within non-academic settings. this will help us understand the unique needs for support for practitioners who have been trained in community psychology related fields as they join workforce. specifically, how working in organizations that do not share community psychology values affects these individuals’ satisfaction and productivity. references adkins, c. l., ravlin, e. 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(1989). organizational entry research: current status and future directions. in g. r. ferris & k. m. rowland (eds.), research in personnel and human resources management (vol. 7, pp. 59-120). greenwich, ct: jai press. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/education/academic-programs/ http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/education/academic-programs/ microsoft word 2012-012-final-20140204.docx effects of participation in community activities on self-efficacy of japanese junior high school students mari yoshinaga1,yoshika takeda2, isami kinoshita2 1laboratory of clinical and community psychology, showa pharmaceutical university, tokyo, japan 2department of landscape architecture, graduate school of horticulture, chiba university, chiba, japan running head: japanese children and youth in community corresponding author: mari yoshinaga professor, laboratory of clinical and community psychology showa pharmaceutical university higashi-tamagawagakuen 3-3165 machida, tokyo 194-8543, japan tel: +81-042-721-1546 fax: +81-042-721-1546 e-mail yosinaga@ac.shoyaku.ac.jp keywords: community improvement; participation; self-efficacy; youth, children; design prof. mari yoshinaga, ph.d., clinical-community psychology, showa pharmaceutical university, japan yoshika takeda, a graduate student, environmental science and landscape architecture course, chiba university, chiba, japan prof. isami kinoshita, ph.d., environmental science and landscape architecture course, chiba university, chiba, japan recommended  citation:  yoshinaga, m., takeda, y., & kinoshita, i.  (2014).  effects  of  participation  in   community  activities  on  self-­‐efficacy  of  japanese  junior  high  school  students,  global  journal  of   community  psychology  practice,  5(1),  1-­‐12.  retrieved  day/month/year,  from   (http://www.gjcpp.org/).   global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   effects of participation in community activities on self-efficacy of japanese junior high school students abstract evaluating how participating in various experiences affects young people is important to promote further participation in community practices. we examined the effects of participation on junior-high school students’ self-efficacy and motivation towards community-improvement activities: of 114 students from a junior high school (study 1) and 10 voluntarily participated in a park-design project (study 2). the experience of participation even in small-scaled contributed to increasing the self-efficacy of the participants and especially enhancing their motivation with regard to community empowerment. keywords: community improvement; participation; self-efficacy; youth, children; design 1. introduction in various parts of the world, the participation of children in city design has become increasingly common and desired. for example, unicef promotes children’s participation to make cities friendlier and more sustainable by promoting local good governance under the child-friendly city program. the international secretariat for child friendly cities was created at the unicef innocenti research centre in florence in september 2000. in a child friendly city, children are active agents; their opinions are taken into consideration in the decisionmaking processes of building or rebuilding environments, constructing political systems, and enforcing education. however, the development and requirements for children’s participation have been directly affected by the changing nature of childhood, as children’s lives have become more structured and controlled (francis & lorenzo, 2002). furthermore, the conceptual framework for the establishment of greater independence for children has been fragile (valentine, 2004). one of the obstacles in realizing youth independence is how adults view children and youths. despite the dominant view of youths as troubled and in need of numerous services, youths are competent citizens who can cultivate change throughout communities (checkoway et al., 2003). although negative beliefs about children and youths have been widespread among japanese adults recently, certain changes to this view might be starting to appear. in the past decade, japan has made progress in promoting child and youth participation. two movements have arisen that have seen significant participation from children and young people: one is based around the crc, which is focused on keeping japan in step with the international community, while the other is based around increasing emphasis on citizenship in japanese communities (kinoshita, 2007). with regard to the latter movement, the participation of children and youths is an important consideration. for instance, a system of children’s ombudspersons has been developed to work in tandem with citizen’s ombudspersons across various communities. furthermore, a number of local governments have accepted the political principles of child-friendly cities. the view that children’s right to participate in community actions is a basic human global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   right that is capable of becoming a resource for community improvement has also become more widely held. thus, we have reached a stage where we must consider the quality of the participation experiences among children and youths. another important role for youth participation is its ability to empower them, help them exert agency, and develop their personalities and abilities. the concept of empowerment refers to the strengthening of marginalized people by allowing them access to the decision-making and structures of civil society. in considering child and youth empowerment in light of this original meaning, we should take into account not only the promotion of their autonomously motivated contribution to the community but also personality development, with a focus on certain aspects of their mental wellness such as self-efficacy. checkoway and richards-schuster (2003) said that participation can have psychosocial benefits for youth and that it promotes their personal and social development, including their sense of efficacy, their interpersonal competencies, and their social connectedness with other youths and adults. in a case study conducted in a japanese community, yamashita (2007) described that small but significant changes in the informal ways that children relate to adults in their daily lives may be more important for establishing a more participatory community culture than short-term participation events designed by adults. yamashita analyzed participation on two axes: one axis charted the size of the participating body, ranging from individuals to groups, while the other axis charted a scale of participation, ranging from daily activities to special situations. in his book from unicef, hart suggested ladder of participation diagram to serve as a beginning typology for thinking about children’s participation in projects (hart, 1992). he called the lowest rung of the ladder as manipulation and the highest rung of the ladder as “child initiated, shared decisions with adults. according to the viewpoint of yamashita (2007), hart’s ideal model of participation can be considered as the largest-scale practical model that remains feasible for certain situations, while daily participation on a much smaller scale could be easily arranged to improve the small-scale connections between children and the rest of the community. furthermore, in daily life, youths can easily participate and exert autonomous thinking compared with taking part in the more manipulated participation inherent to large-scale projects. nevertheless, more case studies are required in order to construct a new theoretical framework fitting the current situation surrounding japanese youths’ participation. the results of research among oecd countries in 2007 by the unicef innocenti centre showed that japanese youths felt lonelier and were less comfortable in their daily lives than those in other countries (unicef, 2007). this report make us aware of japanese youth’s difficult situation. it seems that the youth’s lack of satisfaction, in another words, youth’s feeling of empty life might arise from their unstable identity. feelings of satisfaction or confidence often accompany with the establishment of identity. thus, children and youths should be given opportunities to design community public works to give them a chance to establish their identities. therefore, it is necessary to identify the factors relevant to the establishment of identity among children and youths through their participation experiences. in this study, we decided to use a scale of selfefficacy known to be associated with the motivation and adaptation of youths to school life in japan (ministry of education, culture, sports, science and technology, 2007). the concept of self-efficacy is global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   defined as the conviction that one can achieve the best possible results through one’s performance (bandura, 1977). self-efficacy beliefs are created and developed as young people interpret information from four sources, which bandura (1995) claims are responsible for people’s self-efficacy levels: (a) enactive mastery experiences, (b) vicarious experiences, (c) verbal persuasion, and (d) physiological and affective states. the most influential of these is how they interpret the results of their own previous attainments, that is, their mastery experience (usher & pajares, 2008). mastery experiences prove particularly effective in establishing self-efficacy beliefs when individuals overcome obstacles or succeed on challenging tasks (bandura, 1997). regarding young people’s selfefficacy, research has focused primarily on academic performance, while none to our knowledge has examined the relationship between participatory experiences and self-efficacy. we also thought it necessary to examine the effect of community experience on the motivation of youths to take part in community activities in the future, so we investigated the relationship between participation and community empowerment consciousness among youths. although local governments throughout japan have started to plan child-friendly programs and to allow youth participation in planning community activities, there might be a gap in the presence of such programs between developed and developing communities. thus, we conducted our research in an area where community youth empowerment has been strong among residents since the 1980s, which would allow us to accurately obtain the relevant facts for discussion. we conducted two studies on this issue. study 1 (s1) used a cross-sectional design focusing on junior high school students engaged in various community activities either for school requirements or selfmotivated. study 2 (s2) used a retrospective design focusing on ten young people who had the chance to participate in a park design project in the past. the research site and key outcome variables (self-efficacy as proposed by bandura [1977] and community empowerment awareness) were common to both studies. our goal was to illustrate how community participation reinforces self-efficacy beliefs and motivation to engage in future community improvement activities among youths. 2. subjects and method 2.1 study site we distributed self-administered questionnaires to and conducted interviews with junior high school students in the areas of m and t (treated as one community in this study) in the ward of setagaya in tokyo, where a community development program has been active since the 1980s. the characteristics of this community were described in detail in kinoshita (2007). this community has been putting a lot of effort into urban planning. their methodology has involved combining the collective will of residents and their activities and the viewpoints of children and youths. in 2005, the pupils of the local elementary school cooperated with residents and the local government to design a park, which they named tanuki no ponpo park. the project was called project t; the participation of the children was seen as very positive and the project was given imprimatur by growing up in cities (guic; http://www.unesco.org/most/guic/guicmain.htm), a unesco project organized by dr. robin moore in global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   2006. dr. moore is a member of the guic unesco-sponsored, international participatory action research team. the members of project t were invited to give a presentation at the guic+10 conference in canada in 2006. project t is considered significant because it is not often that child participation can be realized from the first to the final stage of an urban planning process. the present research was conducted after the park project had been completed, when the members of project t had entered junior high school. thus, we targeted junior high students as study subjects, including the members of project t. 2.2 subjects s1: in september 2008, we distributed written questionnaires to 376 students from a junior high school attended by former members of project t (number of returned questionnaires: 344; return rate: 91.5%). after excluding subjects with missing data, we chose to include only students in their second year, to match the ages of subjects in s2. finally, we excluded eight students who were also included in s2, giving us a total of 114 subjects in s1. for these students, we examined the associations between various community activities and self-efficacy beliefs and community empowerment. s2: in march 2008, either interviews or mail questionnaires were completed by 11 students who had helped design tanuki no ponpo park and were present at its completion as autonomous volunteers. the present study was conducted one year after the completion of the park in 2007. we received 10 responses (return rate: 90.9%). these students had been involved in all stages of the planning process of the park, including making a scale model of the park, altering the model according to consultations with various prospective users, and seeing the proposal passed and enacted. they also painted the monument at the gate of the park. by comparing self-efficacy and community empowerment between s1 and s2, we examined the impact of a past community participatory experience on these two constructs. 2.3 measurement and analysis the questionnaire included items on subjects’ participation in local community activities, scales of self-efficacy, and scales of community empowerment consciousness through the process of community identity formation. first, the self-efficacy measurement established by kano, hirata, and nakano (2000) was used in this study; this was based on bandura’s work and was a revised version of sherer et al. (1982). it included 10 items, as follows: “plans are always achievable”; “i am quite reluctant to initiate plans”; “i take no action when i think it is difficult”; “i persevere even after making mistakes”; “i am reluctant to act even with clear goals”; “i keep trying until i accomplish something”; “i tend to give up”; “i act quickly”; “i am inspired by mistakes”; and “i get anxious about whether a task is possible.” the students answered these items on a 4-point scale ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” higher scores indicated higher levels of self-efficacy. community empowerment consciousness items were adapted from the scale by shimoyamada (2006), which was developed in reference to israel, checkoway, schulz, and zimmerman’s work (1994) and has been used to measure the association between participation in community activities and community identity among elderly people. for this study, we reconstructed the scale using seven items, as follows: “i contributed to society”; “i obtained new information”; “the project reflected my own opinion”; “i felt accomplishment”; “i gained global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   experience applicable for the future”; “i met people with a wide range of interests”; and “i felt trust towards other participants.” these items were also rated on a 4-point scale, as follows: “truly so,” “quite so,” “not so,” and “not at all.” the community activities that the subjects engaged in were also identified by providing them with a prepared list of activities from which they chose those that applied to them. in addition, we asked subjects questions on their psychophysiological conditions and about the community members that the subjects trusted; however, these two factors were not analyzed in the present study. the means of each questionnaire item and the mean total score for all the items together were analyzed as continuous variables. a student’s t-test was performed to compare the means scores of each scale. in cases where unequal variance was likely, we adopted welch’s t-test. in the cross-tabulation analysis, when the sample size of a cell was under five, we used fisher’s exact test to analyze significance. for all statistical calculation, spss version 15.0 (2006) was used. 3. results 3.1 actual participation experiences of junior high school students table 1. overview of surveyed students group characteristics n gender method general junior high school students 114 male: 52 quantitative/ questionnaire study 1 female: 62 cross-sectional park design project participants 10 male: 1 quantitative/ questionnaire study 2 female: 9 qualitative/ interview table 1 shows the number of students surveyed (s1: general junior high school students; s2: park development participants), who were divided into two categories by gender. table 2. actual participation of junior-high school students in community activities in s1 (n = 114) activity male female total proportion gender difference community sports programs such as swimming, baseball, or soccer 34 27 61 53.5% x 2 = 5.4, p < 0.05 work experience 37 54 91 79.8% x 2 = 4.5, p < 0.05 cleanup activities 19 36 55 48.2% x2 = 5.3, p < 0.05 voluntary activities 14 23 37 32.5% ns assisting at survival camps 2 6 8 7.0% ns assisting at children’s halls 3 15 18 15.8% x2 = 7.2, p < 0.01* assisting in community emergency drills 2 4 6 5.3% ns boy or girl scouts 3 2 5 4.4% ns any activity 33 35 68 59.6% ns  *: p value was calculated using fisher’s exact test. the actual participation of junior high school students in local community activities (n = 114) is shown in table 2. we found that 59.6% (n = 68) of students took part in some kind of community activity. the majority participated in a work experience program as part of their school curriculum. work experience and cleanup activities are often practiced as part of the school curriculum, so the proportion of participants who were involved in them was high. in addition, voluntary activities were sometimes conducted as part of a school-coordinated program, or another program that students had elected to join. furthermore, community sports programs such as swimming, baseball, or soccer are popular in most japanese communities, whether rural and urban. survival camps are summer-holiday camping activities aiming to teach children about disaster prevention, and are held in an elementary global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   school gymnasium where a number of community members in the neighborhood come to participate along with the junior high school students. “assisting a children’s hall” involves junior high school students by making them leaders in the children’s hall that they used to attend as elementary school students, where they assist staff by leading younger children in camp activities. senior supervisors of these halls are high school students, university students, or working adults. each age group has a different role in the program and the groups nurture and support each other. in japan, the children’s hall is considered an important system for young people, as it gives them a place to belong and a way to feel involved. we found gender differences in the activities that students participated in across the sample. save for in sports programs and boy/girl scouts, girls were much more likely to participate in community activities. as for the level of involvement in these activities, students reported being the most involved in children’s halls, survival camps, and community emergency drills, which were very autonomous experiences. in contrast, because work experience and cleanup activities are regular programs that students are required to take part in for school, their autonomy was seldom considered, meaning that the children were not as invested in such programs. 3.2 participatory experience and self-efficacy first, we investigated gender differences in the mean self-efficacy scores, finding no statistically significant difference between male and female students: the mean score for male students was 23.3 (sd = 4.5) and the mean for female students was 24.4 (sd = 4.1). thus, we combined the genders for the subsequent analyses. table 3. participatory experience and self-efficacy: means for group 1 (g1: students without participatory experiences) and group 2 (g2: students with at least one experience) group mean sd t p community sports programs such as swimming, baseball, or soccer g1: 53 22.9 3.6 -1.9 ns g2: 61 24.4 4.8 work experience g1: 23 23.1 4.5 -0.8 ns g2: 91 23.9 4.3 cleanup activities g1: 59 23.6 3.8 -0.2* ns g2: 55 23.8 4.5 voluntary activities g1: 77 23.1 4.4 -2.3 p < 0.05 g2: 37 25.0 4.1 assisting at survival camp g1: 106 23.6 4.3 -1.0 ns g2: 8 25.1 5.2 assisting at children’s halls g1: 96 23.1 4.2 -3.5 p < 0.01 g2: 18 26.9 4.0 assisting in community emergency drills g1: 108 23.6 4.4 -1.3 ns g2: 6 26.0 3.7 boy or girl scouts g1: 109 23.6 4.1 -0.3* ns g2: 5 24.8 8.6 *: t-value was calculated using welch’s t-test. in table 3, differences in self-efficacy between the groups with different participatory experiences are indicated. group 1 (g1) included students who had not participated in any community activities and group 2 (g2) included students who had participated in at least one activity. the students in g2 showed higher self-efficacy scores overall. however, the sample size for these two groups was so imbalanced that we first had to examine the variance of each group; noting that the variance was unequal, we adopted welch’s t-test to allow accurate comparison of the scores. regarding the effect of depth of involvement in the participatory activities on self-efficacy, we compared the scores of students involved in the park design project from s2 and students from s1 who had no participatory experience. the mean score for students global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   in s1 was 23.7 (sd = 4.4), while that of s2 was 26.3 (sd = 2.7; t = -1.8). thus, we observed no statistically significant difference between them. then, we compared s2 subjects with s1 subjects who had participated only in cleanup activities, where independence was low. the 55 students who had participated in a cleanup activity had a mean score of 23.9 (sd = 4.9), compared with the same mean for s2 as above (t = -1.6). 3.3 participatory experience and community empowerment awareness table 4. participatory experience and formation of community awareness: general junior high school students (s1: n = 114) and park design project participants (s2: n = 10) group mean sd t p contributed to society s1 2.2 0.9 -6.1 * p < 0.001 s2 3.3 0.5 obtained information s1 2.4 1.0 -4.7 * p < 0.001 s2 3.3 0.5 reflected own opinion s1 2.0 0.8 -5.0 p < 0.001 s2 3.4 0.5 felt accomplishment s1 2.8 1.1 -11.6* p < 0.001 s2 4.0 0.0 gained experience applicable to the future s1 2.7 1.0 -8.4 * p < 0.001 s2 3.9 0.3 met people with a wide range of interests s1 2.5 1.1 -7.9 * p < 0.001 s2 3.8 0.4 felt trust towards other participants s1 2.4 1.0 -5.3 * p < 0.001 s2 3.3 0.5 *: t-value was calculated using welch’s t-test. in order to examine the reliability of the scale that assessed students’ community awareness, which was originally developed for this study, we calculated the cronbach’s alpha value. the value was 0.914 for the whole sample. table 4 shows the level of community awareness according to the different types of participation. then, utilizing all of the items, we investigated how aware students were of their accomplishments. we compared the students in s2, who had participated in the park development program, with those in s1 who had participated in some form of community activity. the results revealed that s2 students showed greater awareness across all items. however, the sample size of these two study groups was so imbalanced that we again compared their variance and employed welch’s t-test. figure 1. differences observed in community empowerment awareness scores between the two participatory experience groups. comparison of each score of the subjects who had only participated in cleanup activities without much independence and each score of park design project subjects in s2, who had highly independent experiences. bars indicate the means of each score for the questionnaire items with asterisks indicating statistically significant differences between groups; *: p < 0.05, **: p < 0.01, ***: p < 0.001. when we compared the mean community empowerment awareness scores of s1 students who had taken part in only the cleanup activity with those of s2, we again found that s2 students showed higher mean scores for all the items, as indicated in figure 1. in brief, the level of independence in the participatory experience influenced students’ community empowerment awareness. 4. discussion 4.1 self-efficacy among junior high school students global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   bandura (1995) proposed four types of experience that improve self-efficacy: mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and emotional arousal. in the present study, we focused on assessing how students’ direct experiences affected their self-efficacy. in previous studies on vicarious experience, some researchers have tried to apply the concept of self-efficacy to people’s experiences in career paths, and found that a simulated career experience, such as a short occupational program at a medical camp, increased the self-efficacy of junior high school students (speight, rosenthal, jones, gastenveld, 1995; brown & lent, 1996). the present study elucidated that it was important to have various types of experience in addition to such work experience for the development of especially high self-efficacy. students who participated in some form of community planning project, such as those in s2, tended to show higher self-efficacy scores compared with students who had no participatory experience (s1); however, this difference was not statistically significant. we believe that the establishment of a park and monument in their neighborhood offers a constant reminder to these children of their successful experience, which would lead to higher self-efficacy. thus, it can be said that participation in environmental improvement influenced both the selfefficacy and motivation of these students to contribute to the community, which could lead to the development of talented and devoted individuals who will be able to shoulder the futures of their communities. self-efficacy was found to be related to behaviors and experiences other than community design, such as academic performance (caprara et al., 2008), sports (munroe-chandler et al., 2006), and making career decisions (brown & lent, 2006). the present study provides results for further daily community activities such as voluntary activities and assisting in children’s halls or survival camps. on the other hand, cleanup activities and sports had no significant relationship with self-efficacy level. on this point, we must consider two possible explanations. first, we could interpret the result such that self-efficacy increased far more in voluntary activities and assisting because these activities are more related to overcoming obstacles, cooperating with friends, and receiving support and feedback from seniors on their performance, which could all serve to enhance the establishment of their independent identities. the second explanation could be that when a person has initially high self-efficacy, he or she would be more likely to and more effectively participate in particular activities with strong motivation. in other words, we must consider the possibility that participants in s2 and g2 had initial high self-efficacy. we cannot ignore the possibility that youths with high selfefficacy would prefer to participate in specific activities that are in line with their independent identities. in order to clarify this point in future research, we should conduct questionnaire surveys both before and after participation. nevertheless, we emphasize that for true participatory experiences, there was a hint of an association between participation and level of self-efficacy. when a person has low self-efficacy, he or she tends to avoid taking the necessary measures to solve the problem even when he or she recognizes what the problem is. self-efficacy determines both the extent to which a person can make an effort to accomplish something and the degree to which one can endure stressful situations. the effect of self-efficacy on motivation and action is important in considering young people’s motivation to be involved with their surroundings. thus, we should accumulate more data on the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9   association and concrete mechanism operating between self-efficacy and community participation. next, we must carefully consider the quality of participation. as mentioned above, students engaged in autonomous participation in voluntary activities and assisting with children’s halls appeared to exhibit the highest levels of self-efficacy. this suggests that it is important for young people to be satisfied with their level of participation like the park or monument as the visible outcome or a feeling of being trusted by adults. furthermore, adults are responsible for managing expectations and faith in self-developed plans among children to protect their self-efficacy. as suggested by hart (1997), participation has different stages, like a ladder. this study investigated whether there is any difference in self-efficacy between “true participation,” where participants suggest ideas and accomplish a plan, and participation under the direction and guidance of adults. activities that were required by the school curriculum were considered to be under the direction and guidance of teachers. in contrast, as yamashita (2007) indicated, daily participatory experiences, such as assisting in survival camps and children’s halls, were considered more independent. these latter activities appeared to have the greatest effects on the self-efficacy of youths. to strictly examine the impact of quality of experience on self-efficacy, we suggest conducting a prospective study. 4.2 type of participatory experiences among japanese urban-dwelling junior high school students first, we describe the actual participation of junior high school students (s1) in local community activities in table 2. the high level of participation in a number of voluntary experiences reflects the influence of regional characteristics such as active community development activities and orientation, since children also have a strong interest in safe, secure community development. moreover, recently, japanese beliefs regarding childhood development have led to an increasing focus on extracurricular activities, a situation that is reflected in the observation that more than half of the subjects in s1 participated in sports programs. furthermore, the proportion of students who participated in cleanup activities and work experience as part of their school activities was also high. we also observed that the children’s hall (as described in the results section) is an important way to give young people a place to belong by encouraging highly involved participation, and where the staff support autonomous activities for different ages. the unique characteristics of this area, as described above, appeared to enhance the proportion of participating students. a nationwide survey conducted by the japanese government in 2005 (http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chuky o2/003/siryou/06032317/002/001.htm) showed that the proportion of the students in elementary school who had some kind of communication with adults in the neighborhood was less than 1% on both weekdays and weekends. thus, taking part in community activities offers children the chance to communicate with people belonging to different age groups, with whom they seldom connect, which seems to be common throughout contemporary japan, though especially prevalent in urban areas. through communication with older people, youths can learn values. a previous study noted that children who played more in streets, vacant lots, marketplaces, and parks than indoors had a greater ability to cope with social relationships (yoshinaga, yokoyama, & kinoshita, 2009). therefore, just as playing in the town lets children meet neighbors and develop their global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  10   ability to communicate with other people, participation in the community lets young people talk and directly connect with adults. 4.3 the association between participation and community awareness finally, we consider the motivation of youths to engage in community activities. when we compared the community awareness scores of s1 and s2, we found that s2 students showed higher scores for all the items than s1 students. thus, it was clear that the experience of voluntary, true participation significantly increased the motivation and interest of youth in community activities. the results further suggest that participation in the local community contributes to community awareness. the community atmosphere created by engaged residents can encourage youth participation, as can evidence of the results of this participation, such as real projects like tanuki no ponpo park. our results indicate that participation induces a deep interest in community development. however, there are limitations in giving all youths sufficient opportunity to participate in designing their community. especially for those at the bottom rungs of the ladder, it is important for students to ascend the levels of participation. the efforts of local communities to encourage the participation of children and young people are needed, although it should be noted that there are differences in how participation benefits these children, which is arguably dependent on the quality of the participation. conclusion we found that junior high school students participated in a variety of community activities. aiding in a park development project or assisting in children’s halls and community survival camps, which we considered examples of small-scale “true participation” as per the “ladder of participation” created by hart (1992), seemed to increase the selfefficacy of junior high school students. furthermore, participation in community activities appeared to increase students’ awareness of their community; thus, engaging in true participation, even on a small scale, appeared to increase awareness far more than engaging in mandatory participation. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank the wonderful students who participated in project t and the mosaic club at mishuku elementary school, as well as their remarkable teachers, for answering the interview questions. in particular, we would like to thank mr. inagaki and mr. umedu, for sharing with us their time, their insights, and some treasured materials such as pictures. we wish also to thank the students of mishuku junior high school for taking part in our questionnaire survey. in addition, we are grateful to the members of the play and town research society in ikejiri children’s house for their warm suggestions about the accomplishment of this study. references bandura, a. (1977). self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. psychological review, 84, 191–215. bandura, a. (ed.). (1995). self-efficacy in changing societies. cambridge & new york: cambridge university press. bandura, a. (1997). self-efficacy: the exercise of control. pp. 79-113, new york: freeman. brown, s., & lent, r. (1996). a social cognitive framework for career choice counseling. career development quarterly, 44, 355–367 global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  11   caprara, g.v., fida, r., vecchione, r. del bove, g. vecchio, g.m., barbaranelli, c., & bandura, a. (2008). longitudinal analysis of the role of perceived self-efficacy for self regulated learning in academic continuance and achievement. personal determinants of academic achievement. journal of educational psychology, 100, 525534. francis m., & lorenzo, r. (2002). seven realms of children’s participation. journal of environmental psychology, 22, 157-169 checkoway, b., richards-schuster, k., abdullah, s., aragon, m., facio, e., figueroa, l., reddy, e., welsh, m., & white, a. (2003). young people as competent citizens. community development journal, 38(4), 298-309 checkoway, b., & richards-schuster, k. (2003). youth participation in community evaluation research. american journal of evaluation, 24(1), 21-33 hart, r. (1992). children’s participation: from tokenism to citizenship. florence: unicef international child development centre. hart, r. (1997). children’s participation: the theory and practice of involving young citizens in community development and environmental care. london: earthscan israel, b.a., checkoway, b., schulz, a., & zimmerman, m. (1994). health education and community empowerment: conceptualizing and measuring perceptions of individual, organizational, and community control. health education quarterly, summer;21(2): 149-70. japanese ministry of education, culture, sports, science, and technology. (2007). occurrence of communication difficulties among pupils and students and the suggestion to guide them. retrieved from http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/houdou/20/08/08 073006.htm. kano, t., hirata. y., & nakano, t. (2000). natural play experience’s effects on psychophysiological condition. research on outside activities, 4(1), 39–50. (in japanese) kinoshita, i. (2007). children’s participation in japan: an overview of municipal strategies and citizen movements. children, youth and environments, 17(1), 269–286 sherer, m., maddux, j. e., mercandante, b., prenticedunn, s., jacobs, b., & rogers, r. w (1982). the self-efficacy scale: construction and validation. psychological reports, 51: 663-671. shimoyamada, a. (2006). the process of establishment in community empowerment. community psychology, 9(2), 149–163. (in japanese) speight, j. d., rosenthal, k. s., jones, b. j., & gastenveld, p. m. (1995). medcamp’s effect on junior high school students’ medical career selfefficacy. career development quarterly, 43, 285–295. spss (2006) spss 15.0 command syntax reference 2006, spss inc., chicago ill. unicef. (2007). child poverty in perspective: an overview of child well-being in rich countries. innocenti report card 7. florence: unicef innocenti research centre. usher, e. l., & pajares, f. (2008). sources of selfefficacy in school: critical review of the literature and future directions. review of educational research, 78, 751-796. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  12   valentine, g (2004). public space and the culture of childhood. ashgate publishing limited, (translated into japanese by kubo, k. akashi publishing limited, 2009) yamashita t. (2007). establishing opportunities for children to initiate participatory activities: the kinshai-campus project. children, youth and environments, 17(1), 287-301 yoshinaga, m., yokoyama, a., & kinoshita, i. (2009). the play in the town and its psychological impacts on children’s daily life and health condition. japanese journal of school health, 51, 183–192. (in japanese) global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  1     global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 the system: a multilevel social service simulation by gregor v. sarkisian1 keywords: community psychology practice competencies, service simulation, social power, ecological perspectives author biography: gregor v. sarkisian, ph.d ., is an associate professor in the master of arts in psychology program and teaches in the applied community psychology specialization at antioch university los angeles, ca, usa. email: gsarkisian@antioch.edu. author acknowledgement: i would like to extend a special thanks to linda spence, m.s.w. her expertise in professional training and multiple rounds of feedback supported the development of this simulation exercise to be facilitated by a broader audience. this exercise was inspired by a poverty simulation owned by the missouri association for community action (“maca”). the kind permission of maca for the right to publish this exercise is gratefully acknowledged. the poverty simulation may be licensed from maca at: http://www.povertysimulation.net. recommended citation: sarkisian, g.v. (2017). the system: a multilevel social service simulation. global journal of community psychology practice, 8 (1), pages 1-32. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). 1 antioch university los angeles http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:gsarkisian@antioch.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 the system: a multilevel social service simulation abstract community psychology practice competencies emerged in an effort to provide guidance to the field of community psychology and training programs seeking to provide students with meaningful opportunities to develop a depth and breadth of practice skills. as a teacher of community psychology practice over the past eleven years, the author has consistently faced challenges in teaching the ecological perspectives, listed as number 1 under foundational principles – “the ability to articulate and apply multiple ecological perspectives and levels of analysis in community practice” (dalton, & wolfe, 2012, p. 10). this paper describes a multilevel social service simulation exercise as a teaching tool for community psychology practice competencies within an academic setting. the simulation focuses on ecological perspectives and the role of social power dynamics in systems change. suggested curricular content is also included to follow the simulation debriefing. simulations provide participants the opportunity to learn material through enacting a scripted experience with varying degrees of improvisation. they also allow for the exploration of complex systemic and group dynamics as a means of priming students for new experiences (e.g., see wolff & sarkisian, 2013, for a community coalition simulation) and paradigms such as the ecological perspectives and the role of social power dynamics in systems change. one of the difficult tasks for making this paradigm shift is the ability to make space for ecological levels (e.g., micro, meso, macro) beyond one’s physical location and type of activity. the typical bias of students when first exposed to this shift is a tendency to focus exclusively on a micro, individual or intra-psychic level. understanding the ecological levels of analysis can serve as a building block to learning how the principles of ecology operate across levels. an understanding of the ecological perspective can also serve as a building block in developing a critical awareness of the role of social power dynamics in systems change. while these building blocks can best be achieved through experience over time, the social service simulation described below has been found by the author and his students to be an effective tool for a training level of exposure in ecological perspectives, social power theory and systems change. development the development of this exercise occurred over ten years through the author’s own praxis experience as a children’s social worker and then as a doctoral student in community psychology. in the early 1990’s, after first being exposed to community psychology, the author worked as a child protective service worker in south los angeles which provided many opportunities to experience systems changes and interface with social system players – clients, workers, supervisors, administrators, service providers, etc. in the mid 1990’s, the author was in his doctoral program developing his understanding of both ecological perspectives and social power/empowerment through courseand fieldwork. the author participated in the community action poverty simulation(http://www.povertysimulation.net/), now owned by the missouri association for community action (2002), as part of a psychology and public policy course late in his doctoral program. while the author found http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the exercise to be greatly beneficial for the purposes of raising awareness to the circumstances of living in poverty and the difficulties in meeting basic survival needs, he believed it could be further developed to better reflect ecological perspectives and systems change. he developed the system: a multilevel social service simulation and since its initial development in 2005, the author has run this simulation ten times with master’s level students and five times with doctoral level students training in community psychology practice. the system the overall goal of this experiential learning exercise is to provide participants with a shared experience and then incorporate curricular content for ecological perspectives (i.e., levels of analysis and principles of ecology) (vincent & trickett, 1983; and nelson & prilleltensky, 2010) and social power (lukes, 1974; & gaventa, 1980; pilsuk, mcallister & rothman, 1996) into the context of the participants’ shared experience. finally, because the nature of the exercise involves negative impacts to clients, data from the california child welfare system (casey family programs, 2012; california department of social services [cdds], 2014a; cdss, 2014b) are utilized to reinforce the ecological perspective and provide participants with factual information on the impact of social service systems on clients. the specific learning objectives include providing a common experience of: 1. the variety of activities that exist at different ecological levels of analysis within social service systems; 2. how change can occur from one ecological level to another in social systems; and, 3. how the three dimensions of social power can manifest into human behaviors in social systems. how the system works in this social service simulation, participants are divided into three groups – clients, workers and supervisors. each group operates to get their needs met – supervisors translate state law into agency-prescribed procedures that workers must follow in service provision, workers provide services to clients using agency-prescribed procedures, and, clients complete tasks to meet their needs for survival – all through scripted roles. the materials include enough supplies for a total of 12 participants 4 participants in each group. however, the simulation has been run with as little as 8 participants and as many as 20. the simulation focuses on how a fictitious state assembly bill at the macro level forces change at the meso (adoption of new procedures by workers) and micro (interactions between workers and clients) levels. the specifics of the fictitious bill are as follows: assembly bill (ab) 637, the welfare service improvement and parent safety act. this bill represents the state assembly’s attempt to reorganize resources within the social service system while also cutting 45% of its total budget. ab 637 creates two major changes in how benefits are distributed to clients: (1) all cash benefits to clients will be cut from $800 to $400 dollars a month. the $400 in savings will be diverted to training and the development of a specialized unit of social workers to assist youth in transition out of foster care; and, (2) bus passes will only be issued to clients with court-ordered drug testing upon proof of a negative drug test in the form of documentation issued by the corp comp drug testing company. clients with a positive drug test will lose their bus pass privileges for a minimum of 1 month and will only be issued a bus pass in the future upon presentation of a recent negative drug test. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 clients who do not have court-ordered drug testing are not affected by this change. at three points in time after the simulation begins (2, 4, & 6 minutes), system changes are initiated by supervisors, impacting workers then clients. the simulation runs until clients have completed all of their tasks or when it becomes clear that clients cannot accomplish any additional tasks (typically 45 minutes after the simulation begins). clients and workers remain unaware of the fictitious bill until after the simulation is over through debriefing. instructions to facilitate and debrief the simulation the facilitator should possess expertise in mediating and diffusing conflict as well as advanced organizational skills to run the simulation smoothly. appendix i includes detailed instructions for facilitating this simulation – preparation (including number of participants & materials), beginning the simulation, briefing participants by group before the simulation, and the facilitator role during the simulation. appendix ii includes a checklist and all of the materials needed to conduct the simulation with a total of 12 participants. these include: materials checklist, role scripts, referrals to parenting and anger management, welfare checks of $400 and $800, bus passes, drug tests results, and social service station signs. appendix iii includes instructions for debriefing after the simulation and curricular content with discussion questions using material from the simulation and the state of california child welfare system to reinforce learning ecological perspectives and the role of social power in systems change. summary community psychology practice competencies are often difficult to learn through a lecture and discussion format. this article describes a simulation to teach ecological perspectives and the role of social power in systems change as an alternative to traditional teaching approaches. the simulation is followed by a debriefing and curricular content on ecological perspectives and social power with illustrative examples from the simulated experience and factual examples from the california child welfare system. however, factual examples could be substituted if one is facilitating the simulation in a different region or state or country. references california department of social services (2014a). chronology of child welfare services. retrieved 25/05/2016 from: http://www.cdss.ca.gov/cdssweb/res/pd f/chronology.pdf california department of social services (2014b). facts at a glance. retrieved 25/05/2016 from: http://www.cdss.ca.gov/cdssweb/res/pd f/factatglance.pdf casey family programs (2012). child welfare financing (2012). retrieved 25/05/2016 from: http://www.childwelfarepolicy.org/maps /state?id=5 cornell empowerment group. (1989, october). empowerment and family support. networking bulletin, 1(1), 1-23. dalton, j. & wolfe, s. (2012). competencies for community psychology practice: draft for review. the community psychologist 45(4), 7-14. gaventa, j. (1980). power and participation. in power and powerlessness: quiescence and rebellion in an appalachian valley (pp. 3-32). chicago, il: university of chicago press. lukes, s. (1974). power: a radical view. london: the macmillan press ltd. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 missouri association for community action (2002). the community action poverty simulation. retrieved 05/2016 from: http://www.povertysimulation.net/ nelson, g., & prilleltensky, i. (2010). community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and well-being (2nd ed.). palgrave macmillan. [isbn: 978-0-23021995-3] pilsuk, m., mcallister, j., & rothman, j. (1996). coming together for action: the challenge of contemporary grassroots community organizing. journal of social issues, 52(1), 15-37. vincent, t. a., & trickett, e. j. (1983). preventive interventions and the human context: ecological approaches to environmental assessment and change. preventive psychology: theory research, and practice, 67-86. wolff, t. & sarkisian, g. v. (2013). community coalition simulation: experiential learning of community psychology practice competencies. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), xxxx. retrieved 12/5/2016, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 appendix i facilitator instructions estimated time for set up, briefing, and simulation: 1.5 hours estimated time for debriefing & content delivery: 1.5 hours before you get there. develop familiarity with materials. read through the simulation materials to develop an understanding of participant roles, how system change will occur, and how one will facilitate conflicts, if necessary, that are likely to emerge between clients and workers. number of participants and materials. print materials to accommodate the number of participants in the simulation. the simulation was developed with 12 participant role scripts. however, the simulation has been run with as few as 8 participants and as many as 20. there should always be a minimum of 4 clients and more client roles can be added. note that client c plays an adaptive role and acts unlike the other clients. if there are less than 12 participants, one participant can play multiple supervisor or worker roles but combine supervisor roles before combining worker roles, and, do not combine the transportation and drug testing roles of workers or supervisors. once all materials and role scripts have been printed, corresponding supplies are stapled directly to participant role scripts. and, role scripts indicate on the top which materials come with that role. for example, the supervisor for the department of human welfare should have $400 checks stapled to their role script. room layout. be sure that you have a sufficient space to accommodate four tables, one for each work station, and chairs for client and worker participants. figure 1 illustrates a suggested layout for tables and chairs by the three types of roles (clients, workers and supervisors). briefing participants on client, worker and supervisor roles before the simulation begins, the exercise is introduced, participants are grouped into client, worker, and supervisor roles – each group is taken outside the room, provided with their role, asked to read their role and then asked if they have any questions. then each group is told not to discuss the briefing or their role with anyone when they return to the main room. to begin briefings, read this passage to participants: “before we begin today’s exercise, i’m going to split the class up into three groups. first, i’ll need four volunteers.” the first four volunteers will be the clients, the second set of four volunteers will be workers, and the third set of four volunteers will be supervisors. each group should be taken out of the room and briefed in an area where the rest of the participants cannot hear the briefing. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 figure 1:suggested room layout client briefing (client role scripts: client a, client b, client c, and client d): “during this exercise, you will be playing the role of a client in the social service system. each of you will have a variety of tasks to complete in a limited amount of time. it is important that you complete your tasks in the order they are presented on your script. please read your role script and let me know if you have any questions. when you return to the main room, please do not discuss your role with anyone else.” be sure that clients understand that they have to try to accomplish everything on their list in the specific order on their script. and, be sure that client c has seen the note on their script that says they will not follow the order in the script. the clients and facilitator re-enter the room. the facilitator asks for four additional volunteers and exits the room with them. worker briefing (worker role scripts: department of human welfare, department of transportation, corpcomp drug testing, department of children and family services (dcfs)) “during this exercise, you will be playing the role of a worker in the social service system. each of you will be interacting with clients to assist them in getting their needs met. you may table 1, welfare office table 3, department of children and family services t ab le 4 , c o rp c o m p d ru g t es ti n g t ab le 2 , t ran sp o rta tio n o ffice worker worker w o rk er w o rk er client client c lie n t c li e n t supervisor s u p erv iso r s u p er v is o r supervisor http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 also be approached by a supervisor who may direct you to change how you interact with clients. please read your role script and let me know if you have any questions. when you return to the main room, please do not discuss your role with anyone else.” the most complicated scripts are for the roles of the dcfs worker and corpcomp drug testing worker. the workers and facilitator re-enter the room. the facilitator asks for four additional volunteers and exits the room with them. supervisor briefing (supervisor role scripts: department of children and family services (dcfs), department of human welfare, department of transportation, corpcomp drug testing) “during this exercise, you will be playing the role of a supervisor in the social service system. each of you will be interacting with workers and driving changes through the system. please read your role script and let me know if you have any questions. when you return to the main room, please do not discuss your role with anyone else.” once the supervisor of dcfs has read their role script and the facilitator has addressed their questions, send the supervisor of dcfs back into the main room. with the remaining three supervisors (human welfare, transportation, drug testing), review the sequencing of systems changes. “it is important that you initiate system changes in a specific order. the time provided on your script is a guideline. there will be a total of three system changes. the first change will be initiated by the supervisor in the department of human welfare (approximately two minutes into the exercise), the second change will be initiated by the supervisor in the department of transportation (approximately four minutes into the exercise), and the third change will be initiated by the supervisor from corp comp drug testing (approximately six minutes into the exercise).” be sure that the three supervisors are aware of who is making change first, second and third so that they can follow each other’s lead. after the three briefings have been completed, the room is reconfigured; the four worker station signs are taped to tables, the tables are positioned as a large rectangle so that the clients are on the inside with chairs (similar to waiting room) and the workers are facing the clients with a chair on each side of the table (see figure 1). supervisors will start or eventually enter the room and be seated furthest from clients, behind the workers. the facilitator then explains that clients are in the waiting room, workers are at their work stations, and supervisors are or will be in the “back room” area behind the workers. to begin the simulation, read this passage to participants: “we are going to engage in an exercise to simulate the complex nature of social systems. this experience will be structured by various scripted participant roles. because this is a timelimited experience, scripts have been developed to guide the process of the exercise. thus, it will be important for you to follow your pre-scripted role as closely as possible. during this exercise, participants will sometimes experience strong emotional responses. remember that is an exercise. be respectful, be creative in taking on your role, and, we will be sure to spend time at the end of the exercise to discuss your reactions and how ecological perspectives, social power, and systems change played out. we will stop in 45 minutes to an hour. please stay in your role until i stop the exercise. ready…begin!” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 during the simulation: three systems changes will occur over the course of the exercise moving from supervisors to workers to clients at 2min, 4min, and 6min intervals into the exercise. the facilitator should monitor the three changes below to ensure that they occur in this specific order: change 1, 2 minutes after the exercise begins: supervisor, human welfare, $800 client checks replaced with $400 checks. change 2, 4 minutes after the exercise begins: supervisor, transportation, bus pass contingent upon clean drug test with written documentation. change 3, 6 minutes after the exercise begins: supervisor, drug testing, drug testing documentation now provided to clients for bus passes. conflict: the facilitator should be aware of conflicts and intervene as a security guard to mediate conflicts before they become disrespectful. the simulation is stopped once clients have accomplished everything they can on their list or it becomes clear that there is little else that can be done by clients. typically, 45 minutes from the start of the simulation. after the simulation. immediately after the simulation is concluded, participants are asked to give a round of applause to themselves and their colleagues. the participants take a break and reconvene to process the simulation and incorporate course content related to the simulation experience. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 appendix ii simulation materials the system: a multi-level social service simulation materials not included: tape to secure social service station signs blank file folders for dcfs worker. four pens for workers. four tables and enough chairs for the number of participants in the simulation. materials checklist (1) participant role scripts if there are less than 12 participants, one participant can play multiple administrator or worker roles but combine administrator roles before combining worker roles, and, do not combine the transportation and drug testing roles of workers or administrators. client role scripts (4 total) worker role scripts (4 total) supervisor role scripts (4 total) (2) materials for workers and supervisors materials should be fastened directly to participant role scripts before the exercise using a paper clip or stapler. worker, department of human welfare four $800 checks worker, department of transportation four bus passes worker, department of children and family services (dcfs) eight referrals 4 parenting and 4 anger management supervisor, department of human welfare four $400 checks supervisor, corp comp drug testing four drug test results (1 per client, letters a, b, c, d) materials for room four social service station signs (welfare office, transportation office, corp comp drug testing, department of children & family services) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 client a script during this exercise, your role will be that of a system client. the letter “a” above, next to the word “client” will serve as your identification. you will have a limited amount of time to accomplish all of the tasks on your “to do” list, in the order specified below. you will accomplish each task at the designated station. • go to dcfs to visit with your caseworker and figure out what else you have to do before your case can be closed. feel free to act angry with the caseworker as you have now been in the system for 2yrs and you still don’t understand why your children are not back home with you. • go to the corpcomp drug testing facility to see if you passed your recent drug test. you will need to be sure that they send the results to dcfs so you’re in compliance with the court. • go to the transportation office to pick up your monthly bus pass. • go to the welfare office and get your monthly check. you are expecting to receive $800. this money barely covers your monthly expenses of $500 for rent and utilities and $300 for you and your kids to eat. client b script during this exercise, your role will be that of a system client. the letter “b” above, next to the word “client” will serve as your identification. you will have a limited amount of time to accomplish all of the tasks on your “to do” list, in the order specified below. you will accomplish each task at the designated station. • go to dcfs to visit with your caseworker and figure out what else you have to do before your case can be closed. feel free to act angry at the caseworker as you have now been in the system for 6 months and you still don’t understand why your case has not been closed. • go to the corpcomp drug testing facility to see if you passed your recent drug test. you will need to be sure that they send the results to dcfs so you’re in compliance with the court. • go to the transportation office to pick up your monthly bus pass. • go to the welfare office and get your monthly check. you are expecting to receive $800. this money barely covers your monthly expenses of $500 for rent and utilities and $300 for you and your kids to eat. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 client c script during this exercise, your role will be that of a system client. the letter “c” above, next to the word “client” will serve as your identification. you will have a limited amount of time to accomplish all of the tasks on your “to do” list, in the order specified below. you will accomplish each task at the designated station. • go to the corpcomp drug testing facility to see if you passed your recent drug test. you will need to be sure that they send the results to dcfs so you’re in compliance with the court. • go to dcfs to visit with your caseworker and figure out what else you have to do before your case can be closed. feel free to act angry at the caseworker as you have now been in the system for a year and you still don’t understand why your case is not closed. • go to the welfare office and get your monthly check. you are expecting to receive $800. this money barely covers your monthly expenses of $500 for rent and utilities and $300 for you and your kids to eat. • go to the transportation office to pick up your monthly bus pass. note: you will not follow the order of tasks to be completed above. you will immediately go to the welfare office once the exercise begins to get your $800 check. you will then go directly to the transportation office for your bus pass. then, you will decide which of the remaining tasks to pursue and in what order based on how quickly (i.e., which line is shortest) you can accomplish them. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 client d script during this exercise, your role will be that of a system client. the letter “d” above, next to the word “client” will serve as your identification. you will have a limited amount of time to accomplish all of the tasks on your “to do” list, in the order specified below. you will accomplish each task at the designated station. • go to the corpcomp drug testing facility to see if you passed your recent drug test. you will need to be sure that they send the results to dcfs so you’re in compliance with the court. • go to the transportation office to pick up your monthly bus pass. • go to dcfs to visit with your caseworker and figure out what else you have to do before your case can be closed. because you have been using crack cocaine for the past 10 years you will need to act confused and re-ask every question after it is answered by your caseworker. you vaguely remember hitting your child a few years back but you are unclear about the specifics. you were also abused as a child and were in the dcfs system from ages 6 to 18. • go to the welfare office and get your monthly check. you are expecting to receive $800. this money barely covers your monthly expenses of $500 for rent and utilities and $300 for you and your kids to eat. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 worker script department of human welfare materials: $800 welfare checks your role during this exercise will be to provide clients with their monthly welfare check. you will need to see the top of the client’s script to verify their identity before providing them with their check – client a, client b, client c, client d. checks are stored in the back room. every time you go to the back room you are distracted for about 30 seconds before returning with one check at a time. when the exercise begins, you will be at the front desk. every time 5 minutes passes, go to the back room and take a break (i.e., sit far behind the table and pretend to be reading). after 1 minute, return to the front and continue issuing checks. all clients receive $800 unless otherwise directed by your supervisor. if your supervisor directs you to do something differently then you will need to follow her/his orders or you will be fired – and you really need this job. $800 $800 $800 $800 $800 $800 $800 $800 $800 $800 $800 $800 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 worker script department of transportation materials: bus passes your role in this exercise is to provide clients with their monthly bus pass. the current protocol is to verify the client’s identity via the top of their role script. all bus passes are stored in the back room. once you have verified the client’s identity through seeing their client letter designation (a, b, c, or d), go into the back room and spend about a minute looking for their bus pass. return and provide the client with their bus pass. it is possible that there could be a change in protocol but that would come from your supervisor. bus pass good for 1 month bus pass good for 1 month bus pass good for 1 month bus pass good for 1 month http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 worker script corpcomp drug testing during this exercise, your job will be to provide clients with their drug test results. the current protocol is to release the information only to clients. thus the client will have to show you the top of their script to verify their identity (i.e., as client a, client b, client c, or client d). when a client asks to see their results, walk to the “back room” to find their file. take at least 30 seconds minute. when you return you provide the client with a verbal result and let them know that the official result will be faxed to their dcfs worker. drug test results client a – not in yet, check back in 5 minutes positive for methamphetamine client b – negative client c – not in yet, check back in 5 minutes – in 5 minutes, negative client d – positive for crack cocaine it is possible that the protocol for how you operate will change. the protocol can only be changed if your supervisor directs you to do so. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 worker script department of child and family services (dcfs) materials: referrals to anger management and parenting, pen, case file folders your role in this exercise is to provide case management services to clients. before speaking with any client they will need to present you with their identification (letter of client on client script – a, b, c, or d). when a client comes to see you be sure to: • spend at least 1 min. reviewing their case file before letting them ask questions. • notify them that you are still waiting to hear about their drug test results and can’t give them any “for sure” answers until you receive the fax with the test results. if the client provides you with a test result, laugh, and say that you must receive the results directly from the testing facility. • if they become even remotely angered by your responses, provide them with a referral to an anger management course in a calm, condescending tone. • explain to them that they need understand that they “must accomplish” all of the case plan goals set by the court orders (see below) before they can be reunited with their child/children.” if they don’t have a copy of the court report, you can mail them one. then, read the notes below to let clients know what needs to be done to get their case closed: short-hand notes of court orders client a – test negative for drugs, provide safe home environment for children (neglect), notify client a what is missing from their file – missing: certificate of completion for parenting course supposedly completed 8 months earlier. client b – test negative for drugs, provide safe home environment for children, participate in and obtain certificate of completion for parenting course (neglect) – issue referrals for parenting and anger management when you meet with client b. client c – test negative for drugs, provide safe home environment for children (neglect) notify client c what is missing from their file – missing: certificate of completion for parenting course supposedly completed 6 months earlier. client d – test negative for drugs, provide safe home environment for children, participate in and obtain certificates of completion for parenting course and anger management course (physical abuse/neglect) – issue referrals for parenting and anger management when you meet with client c. • try to set up an appointment in one month with them to make a home visit to assess child safety. once the meeting is scheduled, abruptly tell them you are late for a meeting with another client and you will see them in a month. stand up, shake their hand, and send them on their way. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 client referral date: ____________ parenting class effective parenting specialists (800) 444-7777 dcfs worker signature: _______________ client referral date: ____________ parenting class effective parenting specialists (800) 444-7777 dcfs worker signature: _______________ client referral date: ____________ parenting class effective parenting specialists (800) 444-7777 dcfs worker signature: _______________ client referral date: ____________ parenting class effective parenting specialists (800) 444-7777 dcfs worker signature: _______________ client referral date: ____________ anger management class anger management specialists (800) get-calm dcfs worker signature: _______________ client referral date: ____________ anger management class anger management specialists (800) get-calm dcfs worker signature: _______________ client referral date: ____________ anger management class anger management specialists (800) get-calm dcfs worker signature: _______________ client referral date: ____________ anger management class anger management specialists (800) get-calm dcfs worker signature: _______________ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 supervisor script department of child and family services (dcfs) during this exercise you will play the role of a supervisor for the county department of children and family services (dcfs). your primary responsibility in this exercise is to develop policies into practices that are carried out by dcfs workers who work under your authority and provide clients with referrals to needed services in the community and ensure parent compliance with court orders and agency-prescribed case plans. earlier today when you were occupied with dcfs worker crises approving detention and placement paperwork, you missed a conference call with your local assembly member and senior leadership of the dcfs discussing the implementation of assembly bill (ab) 637, the welfare service improvement and parent safety act. you know that the bill represents the state assembly’s attempt to reorganize resources within the social service system while also cutting 45% of its total budget. and, you heard that there was going to be some benefit to dcfs. your next call with them is later this afternoon so you figure you can catch up with them then on any changes or they would have contacted you outside the call. before the exercise begins, sit behind your dcfs worker. you will monitor their behaviors from afar during the exercise and answer any questions the dcfs worker may have. do not interact directly with system clients. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 supervisor script department of human welfare materials: $400 checks during this exercise you will play the role of a supervisor for the county department of human welfare. your primary responsibility in this exercise is to develop policies into practices that are carried out by workers under your authority who provide monthly checks to clients. earlier today you were on a phone call with your local assembly member and senior leadership of the welfare department discussing the implementation of assembly bill (ab) 637, the welfare service improvement and parent safety act. this bill represents the state assembly’s attempt to reorganize resources within the social service system while also cutting 45% of its total budget. ab 637 creates two major changes in how benefits are distributed to clients: (1) effective today, all cash benefits to clients will be cut from $800 to $400 dollars a month. the $400 in savings will be diverted to training and the development of a specialized unit of social workers to assist youth in transition out of foster care; and, (2) effective today, bus passes will only be issued to clients with court-ordered drug testing upon proof of a negative drug test in the form of documentation issued by the corpcomp drug testing company. clients with a positive drug test will lose their bus pass privileges for a minimum of 1month and will only be issued a bus pass in the future upon presentation of a recent negative drug test. clients who do not have court-ordered drug testing are not affected by this change. before the exercise begins, position yourself outside of the room. two minutes into the exercise you will enter the room and call a meeting (go and get them) with your welfare worker. instruct them to close their work station, bring the remaining client checks, and follow you outside the room. once outside the room: • you will then notify your worker that, effective immediately, they will be providing a monthly check of $400 instead of $800. • take their remaining checks of $800 and provide them with checks for $400. • then, instruct the worker to go back and open their work station. do not accept anything but full compliance from your worker. once the worker returns to their station you will sit behind them and be sure they are implementing the policy correctly. interact with system clients only if you have to. you know that clients will be angry with these changes and you want to be sure that you worker is up this difficult task. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 $400 $400 $400 $400 $400 $400 $400 $400 $400 $400 $400 $400 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 supervisor script department of transportation during this exercise you will play the role of a supervisor for the county department of transportation. your primary responsibility in this exercise is to develop policies into practices that are carried out by department of transportation workers who work under your authority and provide bus passes to clients. earlier today you were on a phone call with your local assembly member and senior leadership of the transportation department discussing the implementation of assembly bill (ab) 637, the welfare service improvement and parent safety act. this bill represents the state assembly’s attempt to reorganize resources within the social service system while also cutting 45% of its total budget. ab 637 creates two major changes in how benefits are distributed to clients: (1) effective today, all cash benefits to clients will be cut from $800 to $400 dollars a month. the $400 in savings will be diverted to training and the development of a specialized unit of social workers to assist youth in transition out of foster care; and, (2) effective today, bus passes will only be issued to clients with court-ordered drug testing upon proof of a negative drug test in the form of documentation issued by the corpcomp drug testing company. clients with a positive drug test will lose their bus pass privileges for a minimum of 1month and will only be issued a bus pass in the future upon presentation of a recent negative drug test. clients who do not have court-ordered drug testing are not affected by this change. before the exercise begins, position yourself outside of the room. four minutes into the exercise you will enter the room and call a meeting (go and get them) with your transportation worker. instruct them to close their work station and follow you outside the room. once outside the room: • you will then notify your worker that, effective immediately, they will have to see the written drug test results before they can issue a bus pass to clients. • after they see the written drug test result and confirm it is negative, they can then issue a bus pass to clients. • workers may not provide a bus pass to a client with a positive drug test under any condition. • then, instruct the worker to go back and open their work station. do not accept anything but full compliance from your worker. once the worker returns to their station you will sit behind them and be sure they are implementing the policy correctly. do not interact directly with system clients. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 supervisor script corpcomp drug testing materials: physical drug test results during this exercise you will play the role of a supervisor for the corpcomp drug testing company privately contracted by the county of los angeles. your primary responsibility in this exercise is to develop policies into practices that are carried out by corpcomp drug testing workers who work under your authority and provide drug-testing services to system clients. earlier today you were on a phone call with your local service system administrator and senior leadership of the corpcomp drug testing company discussing the implementation of assembly bill (ab) 637, the welfare service improvement and parent safety act. this bill represents the state assembly’s attempt to reorganize resources within the social service system while also cutting 45% of its total budget. ab 637 creates two major changes in how benefits are distributed to clients: (1) effective today, all cash benefits to clients will be cut from $800 to $400 dollars a month. the $400 in savings will be diverted to training and the development of a specialized unit of social workers to assist youth in transition out of foster care; and, (2) effective today, bus passes will only be issued to clients with court-ordered drug testing upon proof of a negative drug test in the form of documentation issued by the corpcomp drug testing company. clients with a positive drug test will lose their bus pass privileges for a minimum of 1month and will only be issued a bus pass in the future upon presentation of a recent negative drug test. clients who do not have court-ordered drug testing are not affected by this change. before the exercise begins, position yourself outside of the room. six minutes into the exercise you will enter the room and call a meeting (go and get them) with your corpcomp drug testing worker. instruct them to close their work station and follow you outside the room. • you will then notify your worker that, effective immediately, they will need to change their protocol and provide written drug test results. • then, provide the written drug test results to the worker and instruct them to go back and open their work station. do not accept anything but full compliance from your worker. once the worker returns to their station you will sit behind them and be sure they are implementing the policy correctly. do not interact directly with system clients. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 official test results corpcomp drug testing client a positive: methamphetamine official test results corpcomp drug testing client b negative official test results corpcomp drug testing client c negative official test results corpcomp drug testing client d positive: cocaine http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 station 1: welfare office http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 station 2: transportation office http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 27 station 3: corp comp drug testing http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 28 station 4: department of children and family services http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 29 appendix iii debriefing, curricular content and discussion questions debriefing. to begin, participants are invited to share their experience of the simulation. the facilitator then reads the fictitious assembly bill ab 637 and asks the participants who were supervisors to read aloud the systems changes they created from their script. next, workers are asked to read their roles from their script. finally, the clients are asked to read their role scripts. deconstruction. next, the simulation is deconstructed using the levels of analysis, the principles of ecology and social power. these conceptual tools and theory are defined and illustrated in the context of the simulation experience. finally, the principles of ecology are further explored through using real policy changes to illustrate a more accurate depiction of the ca child welfare system. if facilitating this exercise in a different state or region, similar information should be accessible from government and/or non-profit websites. below are notes on how the simulation relates to conceptual and theoretical content as well as how ecological perspectives can be illustrated through the actual ca child welfare system. ecological perspectives levels of analysis (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010) macro level collective values represented by politicians are developed into laws and policies that provide guidance for addressing social issues through state and federal programs and funding to support these programs. assembly bill (ab) 637, the welfare service improvement and parent safety act (fictitious). this bill represents the state assembly’s attempt to reorganize resources within the social service system while also cutting 45% of its total budget. ab 637 creates two major changes in how benefits are distributed to clients: (1) all cash benefits to clients will be cut from $800 to $400 dollars a month. the $400 in savings will be diverted to training and the development of a specialized unit of social workers to assist youth in transition out of foster care; and, (2) bus passes will only be issued to clients with court-ordered drug testing upon proof of a negative drug test in the form of documentation issued by the corpcomp drug testing company. clients with a positive drug test will lose their bus pass privileges for a minimum of 1month and will only be issued a bus pass in the future upon presentation of a recent negative drug test. clients who do not have court-ordered drug testing are not affected by this change. meso level from ab 637, policy is developed into agency-prescribed procedures by supervisors that serve organizationally mandated obligations that workers have in their interactions with clients. administrators direct supervisors to train and enforce new procedures. supervisors train workers in new procedures and enforce that workers follow agency-prescribed procedures. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 30 changes in procedure needed to occur in all four offices based on the 2 changes at the macro level. unplanned systems glitches at the meso level: changes only occurred in three offices due to a communication breakdown in dcfs – supervisor missed call and worker never accepted drug test in writing from client. the timing of change was late for the drug testing office – after the transportation office changed their procedure. and, no administrators were available to assist supervisors in implementing policy into practice. micro level clients and agency workers interact within and outside of the agency-prescribed procedure. workers and clients did not anticipate any of the changes and seldom do. ecological perspectives principles of ecology (vincent & trickett, 1983; nelson & prilleltensky, 2010) interdependence in simulation: macro-meso-microassembly bill (ab) 637, the welfare service improvement and parent safety act (fictitious) (macro), alteration of practices in four offices (meso), change in amount and process of receiving benefits for clients (micro). in reality: macro-meso-micro – foster care independence act (1999) chaffee act – state can double number of transitional living programs and extend medicaid until age 21 (california department of social services [cdds], 2014)1. community based programs are developed twice as many youth have access to independent living program services http://www.cdss.ca.gov/cdssweb/res/pdf/chronology.pdf adaptation in simulation: client c – not following rules. have participant playing role of client c read script. in reality: macro level – foster care independence act (1999) chaffee act – society’s (government’s) response to the unmet needs of children in long term foster care emancipating from the system with no or minimal preparation for post-high school plans – higher education or trade school, career, employment skills, etc. – and evidenced by growing rates of unemployment, incarceration and homelessness among youth emancipating from long term foster care (cdds, 2014)1. http://www.cdss.ca.gov/cdssweb/res/pdf/chronology.pdf cycling of resources in simulation: decrease in monetary benefits and condition of negative drug test limiting ability to receive bus pass for clients, increased resources to train and hire dcfs workers to assist emancipating youth. in reality: in fall, 2012, california spent $3,926,431,373 on child welfare expenditures (macro) (casey family programs, 2012). http://www.childwelfarepolicy.org/maps/state?id=5 http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.cdss.ca.gov/cdssweb/res/pdf/chronology.pdf http://www.cdss.ca.gov/cdssweb/res/pdf/chronology.pdf http://www.childwelfarepolicy.org/maps/state?id=5 global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 31 review facts at a glance document to see the extent to which children benefit on the micro level (cdss, 2014)2. http://www.cdss.ca.gov/cdssweb/res/pdf/factatglance.pdf succession in simulation: outdated bureaucratic governance structure operating from deficitand needs-based models of behavior change that emerged in the 1970s. in reality: review chronology of child welfare services (cdds, 2014)1 http://www.cdss.ca.gov/cdssweb/res/pdf/chronology.pdf discussion question: given the way things played out in the simulation, how could thinking ecologically (levels of analysis and principles of ecology) benefit policymakers in developing laws that promote individual empowerment and community well-being? http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.cdss.ca.gov/cdssweb/res/pdf/factatglance.pdf http://www.cdss.ca.gov/cdssweb/res/pdf/chronology.pdf global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 32 social power (lukes, 1974; & gaventa, 1980; pilsuk, mcallister & rothman, 1996) in the system resources (use of resources to improve, bargain, reward, and punish) in simulation: state (physical) custody of child and ability to limit visitation and terminate parental rights. welfare payment reduction. loss of bus pass due to positive drug test. agendas (shaping forms of participation) in simulation: court orders, mandated referrals, bureaucratic governance structure. policy from assembly bill 637 welfare service improvement and parent safety act (fictitious) cutting welfare check to increase number of social workers. policy from assembly bill 637 welfare service improvement and parent safety act (fictitious) making bus pass a condition of sobriety (i.e., negative drug test). ideology (shaping the definition/understanding of public issues and influencing ideology) in simulation: ideological (non-fact based) beliefs of status quo dictate systems change. development of laws, policies, practices, behaviors and reactions. learned helplessness and hopelessness about changing one’s or others’ situation. discussion question: given the way the system simulation played out, what changes could be made to resources, agendas, and ideologies to promote opportunities for clients to become empowered (using the definition below)? empowerment is an intentional, ongoing process centered in the local community, involving mutual respect, critical reflection, caring, and group participation, through which people lacking an equal share of valued resources gain greater access to and control over those resources (cornell empowerment group, 1989). http://www.gjcpp.org/ photovoice as a research-intervention tool for youth neighborhood activism in societally vulnerable contexts giulia guariso virginia paloma samuel arias rocío garrido manuel garcíaramírez università cattolica del sacro cuore, italy universidad de sevilla, spain keywords: activism, empowerment, neighborhood, participation, photovoice, psychological sense of community, youth author biographies: giulia guariso is a community psychologist form the catholic university of milan and member of the italian society of community psychology (sipco). she is currently specializing in systemic psychotherapy at the mara selvini palazzoli school and her interests include transcultural psychology, building of cultural adolescence identity, maternity and education strategy of immigrant women, and acculturation psychology process. over the past years, giulia has also acquired extensive experience both in research and field work whit fragile communities, with a special focus on the development of families ties in fragile contexts. virginia paloma, ph.d., is professor of community psychology at university of sevilla, spain. she is a staff member of cespyd, the center of community research and action at university of sevilla. her research interests include the keywords of activism, liberation, resilience, empowerment, social change, well-being, and social justice in contexts of cultural diversity. she is currently leading a multidisciplinary partnership with the aim of constructing a multilevel, systemic, and dynamic model of migrant well-being which will permit to guide social interventions and public policies. in the context of the humanitarian crisis of refugees in europe, she is interested in the development of capacitybuilding programs addressed to professionals to respond to the mental health’s needs of this population. samuel arias sánchez, phd. is assistant professor in the department of social psychology at the university pablo de olavide, in seville. he has a master in human resource management, a master of advanced studies in global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 brain and behavior and a master in organizational and work psychology at the university of seville. he is also part of the human activity laboratory of the university of seville and has published several articles and book chapters about different topics such as autobiographical memory, culture, education and work activity. rocío garrido is a community psychology doctoral student at the university of seville, spain. her dissertation entails defining and promoting cultural competence from a social justice perspective at different levels (i.e. individual, organizational, community and socio-political). she is member of cespyd, the center of community research and action at university of seville, where she has been granted a scholarship to work as a researcher in the department of social psychology. her interests are research-action related to complex migration flows, wellbeing and empowerment. manuel garcía-ramírez, ph.d., is professor of community psychology at university of sevilla, spain. he is the coordinator of cespyd, the center of community research and action at the university of sevilla and the founding co-director of the master in international migrations, health and wellbeing at this university. his research interests have been focused in the development of community-based participatory research (cbpr) initiatives aimed at ensuring equitable conditions toward migrants and ethnic minorities in europe in the fields of health, public policy, integration, and reception processes. recommended citation: guariso, g. paloma, v., arias, s., garrido, r., garcíaramírez, m. (2016). photovoice as a research-intervention tool for youth neighborhood activism in societally vulnerable contexts. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(3), pages 1-18. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). author notes: this research project was funded in part by a grant from the ministry of science and innovation of spanish government (psi2011-25554). we would like to express our gratitude to both the young people who participated in this study and sergio cruz-pozuelo for his valuable collaboration as art therapist during the intervention process. correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to giulia guariso, department of psychology, università cattolica del sacro cuore. largo gemelli, 1. 20123 milano, italy. e-mail: giulia.guariso@fastwebnet.it http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/) mailto:giulia.guariso@fastwebnet.it global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 photovoice as a research-intervention tool for youth neighborhood activism in societally vulnerable contexts abstract teenagers who live in vulnerable neighborhoods have a higher probability of entering into a vicious circle where they suffer the consequences of an unfair structure and, at the same time, contribute to the maintenance of it. a researchintervention with photovoice was carried out with youth from a vulnerable multicultural neighborhood on the outskirts of seville (spain). the objective was to increase the teenagers’ neighborhood activism through an increase in their psychological sense of community, forecast of future participation, and empowerment. young girls with different cultural roots, between the ages of 13 and 18 years old participated. after the photographs were taken by the participants, a space was opened for reflection on the strengths and challenges of the neighborhood. the photographs were worked on using artistic techniques to express the desired changes and then the group discussed how to make effective changes. lastly, the extended community was involved through a photography exhibition. we measured the variables of interest through a prepost questionnaire given to the participant group and to a comparison group. complementary, narratives which emerged during the meetings were analyzed. participants increased their level of psychological sense of community and their wish to participate in the future, but continued with the same level of empowerment. theoretical contributions and useful suggestions for researchintervention with photovoice are discussed. although people’s daily lives today are more frequently spent in dispersed settings, neighborhoods maintain an important role as a point of reference for the construction of the inhabitants’ personal and social identities and for satisfying their need for a sense of belonging (tartaglia, 2006). furthermore, neighborhood conditions significantly impact the level of activism and well-being of their inhabitants. vulnerable neighborhoods characterized by the insufficient provision of resources and services limit the wellbeing and endanger the identity construction process carried out by teenagers (rankin & quane, 2002). communities with high levels of crime, drug dealing, and other indicators of low quality of life are indeed typically characterized by minimal neighborhood activism among youth (kelly, 2009). it appears therefore necessary to find appropriate research-intervention methods to prepare teenagers with the ability to increase their neighborhood activism in order to change those elements of their environment which impede their well-being. using the photovoice methodology, this research-intervention experience aimed to increase the level of youth neighborhood activism in a multicultural societally vulnerable neighborhood in the outskirts of seville (spain). this study defines neighborhood activism as the process in which teenagers work towards change in neighborhood conditions (gilster, 2012). photovoice is a researchintervention strategy whereby the participants take photographs that are later used as stimulus for group reflection on the strengths and challenges of their neighborhood for promoting both an individual and a social change (nicotera, 2007). this study understands that the environment http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 in which everyone lives exercises significant influence over individual behavior. at the same time, the individual can change the environment in which he/she is placed, in a relationship of reciprocal influence (balcazar et al., 2012; paloma & manzano-arrondo, 2011). from this perspective, photovoice emerges as a strategy to facilitate the youth’s awareness about the influence the neighborhood exerts on their life and to fuel youth neighborhood activism for the transformation of the environmental conditions. in what follows, we contextualize this study by showing the situation of “su eminencia” neighborhood in southern spain as a vulnerable context for young people. we then expose the theoretical basis upon which this study is constructed. later, we present the methodology carried out and the results obtained. we conclude by discussing the main theoretical contributions that emerge from this pilot study and useful suggestions for future researchintervention with photovoice. an overview of su eminencia as a vulnerable neighborhood the neighborhood “su eminencia” is located in the capital of andalusia (seville), the southernmost region of spain. the neighborhood originated in the 1940s, a time when a strong influx of migration was reported from diverse provinces in andalusia and from portugal towards the andalusian capital. following those changes, the urbanization of the city’s periphery grew in a rapid and disorganized manner, creating a labyrinth of narrow streets built from recycled materials, without any hydraulic, sewer, or electricity systems (torres, 2005). not until the 1960s, and thanks to a strong mobilization of the inhabitants, did local administration provide connections to the city’s sewer and electricity systems. in the last few years this neighborhood has received a high percentage of migrants coming mainly from bolivia, colombia, china, morocco, and romania (torres, 2011). in fact, the neighborhood can be recognized by the diverse number of commercial activities that migrants manage in this area of the city. eighteen percent of households in the “su eminencia” neighborhood are in a situation of exclusion (ayuntamiento de sevilla, 2012). among the most relevant problems in the neighborhood are the lack of economic resources, unemployment, an uneducated population, widespread drug dealing, drug addiction, and crime (torres, 2011). these conditions are associated with a psychosocial profile in which teenagers often perceive themselves as victims of uncontrollable superior forces, lack confidence and the ability to gain competence to achieve success in life (moane, 2003). furthermore, this experience usually produces conformist behavior, passivity, and a life based on the present moment (martín-baró, 1987). thus, the experiences lived in disadvantaged neighborhoods can become naturalized and interiorized by the younger generations, undermining their membership in community organizations (wilson, 2000). accordingly, putman (2000) notes that “people with lower incomes and those who feel financially strapped are much less engaged in all forms of social and community life than those who are better off” (p. 193). as a consequence, the inactive behavior of teenagers contributes to the maintenance of the neighborhood’s vulnerability, thus hindering their ability to leave this vicious cycle of oppression. these circumstances require researchintervention processes that break this vicious circle through a transformative process where teenagers become active agents of change in their environments. given the relationship between neighborhood inequity and well-being, neighborhood activism presents an important form of participation to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 address neighborhood problems (gilster, 2012). we propose the photovoice strategy to fuel the involvement of youth in vulnerable neighborhoods. photovoice to promote youth neighborhood activism photovoice is a research-intervention strategy whereby, through the use of photographs taken by the participants, group reflection on the challenges and the strengths of their community is promoted with the goal of setting in motion individual and social change (nicotera, 2007). wang and burris (1997) define photovoice’s main objectives as: to allow people to understand the strengths and challenges of their community, to encourage group dialog and reflection about the challenges identified, and to favor processes of change in the community through the involvement of participants. photovoice has been used in different contexts, involving participants from different genders, ages, nationalities, and cultural backgrounds (baker & wang, 2006; killion & wang, 2000; oliffe & bottorff, 2007). photovoice allows the collection of important data on how places are experienced by people, thanks to the group reflections on the dynamics of life in these spaces. furthermore, photovoice can increase the involvement and the collective interest in the community’s issues by inviting people to become advocates for their own and the community’s well-being (wang & burris, 1997). overall, photovoice helps to find out and activate the youth’s awareness of their community and to give them the possibility of making their voice heard and to take action in their environment. for these reasons, community researchers have used the photovoice methodology as a research-intervention tool (e.g., wang, morrel-samuels, hutchison, bell, & pestronk, 2004; wilson et al., 2007; strack, magill, & mcdonagh, 2004). to our knowledge, only one other study implemented in southern spain has used photovoice methodology among young people (soriano & cala, 2014). different from that study, our work uses photovoice methodology with art therapy technique, showing how different art practices can be combined in an innovative way to achieve the goal of promoting youth neighborhood activism. neighborhood activism is defined as the process by which teenagers work to bring change to the conditions of their neighborhood (gilster, 2012). the importance of this process for youth goes beyond the immediate impact of their actions, as it provides them with opportunities to acquire significant civic and social skills critical to navigating and transforming their environment in adulthood as well (kelly, 2009). many studies have confirmed that neighborhood activism is related to the concepts of psychological sense of community, community participation, and empowerment (garcia, giuliani, & wiesenfeld, 1999; prezza et al., 2001). these are strongly interrelated through ties of mutual influence and are essential elements for ensuring the well-being of individuals and communities. a psychological sense of community refers to “a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together” (mcmillan & chavis, 1986, p. 9). several studies have underlined the importance of a psychological sense of community related to the neighborhood in the transitional adolescent stage (pretty, conroy, dugay, fowler, & williams, 1996). cicognani, zani and albanesi (2008) concluded that psychological sense of community showed a positive correlation with the youngsters’ involvement in the community. photovoice promotes the reflection and expression of the teenagers’ points of view about their neighborhood, allowing http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 the respective challenges to be heard, and increasing awareness of the strengths available in the community. sharing experiences in the group facilitates the creation of a sense of emotional closeness and a stronger sense of belonging to the neighborhood. community participation is defined as people “actively belonging to formal and informal groups and making use of community organizations” (cotterell, 1996). that is, community participation is a deliberate process, free and collective, which generates new relations aimed at achieving goals shared by the different actors involved. community participation is considered the engine of change and transformation for individuals and communities (montero, 2006). in such contexts, friendships and social networks stimulate the development of competencies and resources, which cannot be acquired from familial or domestic environments (cotterell, 1996). dumont and provost (1999) observed that participation in the community prevents negative effects of stress and is correlated with reduced involvement in violent acts at school. moreover, it can also moderate the effects of poor family relationships by providing a structure for increased supervision (vieno, nation, perkins, & santinello, 2007). community participation seems to be an important mechanism for empowerment development as participants can gain experience organizing people, identifying resources, and developing strategies for achieving goals (aguiar, 2013; zimmerman, 2000). photovoice creates a space for collective reformulation of problems and possible solutions, being a vehicle to favor critical awareness and to increase community participation in order to enact positive change in the neighborhood. empowerment is defined as a multidimensional process which increases the power of individuals, by using the abilities they already have in their lives, in the groups to which they belong, in the community of which they are part, to react and act in the most appropriate way relative to what they define as important (rappaport, 1987). zimmerman and rappaport (1988) stated that being involved in the decision-making process about neighborhood’s issues or participating in grassroots organizations could develop a sense of efficacy in the context and foster growth in personal and community empowerment. gilster (2012) suggests that working for the good of the neighborhood is associated with having a sense of control over one’s life and the social context in which one lives. during the photovoice process, teenagers participate in activities addressed to the extended community where they have the opportunity to communicate their ideas to improve the neighborhood. participants tend to have an active role, taking a first step in experiencing the power of action and modifying their environment. this type of experience usually has an effect on the level of empowerment in teenagers. method participants eight young women between the ages of 13 and 18 from a low socioeconomic status participated in the researchintervention’s participant group. five of them were spanish, two moroccan, and one peruvian. eight young people also participated in the researchintervention’s comparison group. participants in the comparison group had similar age and socioeconomic status as participants in the intervention group. all participants attended a grassroots youth organization called “el escalón salesiano” in the su eminencia neighborhood. on the basis of what emerged from the organization’s staff during the planning phase, we decided to focus on the point of view of young womenas this group seems to have fewer opportunities to influence their http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 neighborhood, despite their higher chance of living permanently in the community. the organization primarily targets children and teenagers between the ages of 4 and 18 and offers them a vast portfolio of educational and leisure activities with a high participation rate, ensuring the existence of a wellestablished connection with the community. our research team developed a strategy to access potential participants based on showing attractive announcements on the organization’s walls and asking the organization’s leaders about their collaboration in accessing interested young people in our project. participants were rewarded with certificates of participation and with the possibility of winning a camera for making the most representative photograph of their neighborhood. instruments a self-report questionnaire was administered to both the participant and comparison group twice: before and after the photovoice was implemented in the participant group. the questionnaire was composed of the following variables. personal profile. the following data were asked for in the beginning of the questionnaire: age, gender, cultural origin, and years of residence in the neighborhood. psychological sense of community. this variable was measured through the sense of community index (sci-2; chavis, lee, & acosta, 2008). the scale is composed of 24 items and is divided on four subscales: reinforcement of needs (“being a member of this community makes me feel good”), membership (“i can trust people in this community”), influence (“i have influence over what this community is like”), and shared emotional connection (“i expect to be a part of this community for a long time”). the scale is a likert-type response with five options (from 1, strongly disagree, to 5, strongly agree) and shows an internal consistency with a cronbach's alpha value of .85. forecast of future participation in the neighborhood. this variable was evaluated through a reformulation of the items of the sub-scale community participation from the perceived community support questionnaire (pcsq; herrero & gracia, 2007). the subscale is composed of five items and measures the level of involvement in the neighborhood’s activities that people would like to do in a proximal future. some items are “among my plans in the short-medium term i hope to collaborate more in organizations and associations in my community” or “among my plans in the short-medium term i wish to collaborate in some social or civic groups in my community.” the scale is a likerttype response with five options (from 1, strongly disagree, to 5, strongly agree)and shows an internal consistency with a cronbach's alpha value of .85. empowerment. this variable was measured through the perceived control scale (israel, checkoway, schulz, & zimmerman, 1994). the scale is composed of 12 items at the individual (“i have control over the decisions that affect my life”), organizational (“i can influence the decisions that this organization makes”), and community levels (“i can influence decisions that affect my community”). the scale is a likert-type response with five options (from 1, strongly disagree, to 5, strongly agree) and shows an internal consistency with a cronbach's alpha value of .85. procedure for the implementation of this project, a collaborative relationship was established between community psychologists from both the coalition for the study of health, power, and diversity from the universidad de sevilla (garcía-ramírez, albar, & paloma, 2010) and the università cattolica del sacro cuore, and practitioners of the grassroots youth organization “el escalón salesiano.” the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 plan of the project was negotiated with the members of this organization, according to action-research guidelines and community psychology values (suarez-balcazar, harper & lewis, 2005). photovoice was carried out through a research-intervention process over five months. three formal meetings and multiple informal encounters with the participants were held as well as a final exhibition open to the entire community. the meetings, which took place at the youth organization, were led by two facilitators and one observer in charge of taking notes on salient events. the first meeting included administration of the pre-test, the research team members’ and participants’ introductions, and an explanation of the objectives and planned activities. a group walk was conducted throughout the neighborhood. while participants talked informally with research team members, each teenager used her own cellular phone equipped with a camera to take photos of the neighborhood. the choice to use an instrument owned by the participants was made based on the desire to make them aware of the resources in their possession. at the end of the meeting, the participants were invited to collect and send to the research team, via “what’s app” or e-mail, photos capturing the neighborhood’s strengths and challenges. our purpose was to favor a deeper personal exploration of the aspects dealt with in group and to facilitate continuity in the second meeting. the second meeting aimed to gather the stories which were spring-boarded from the photos previously made, with the intention of developing individual and group critical thought regarding the neighborhood’s challenges, and at the same time reinforcing the participants’ awareness of their role in the community. a focus group was established for that purpose, guided by questions as proposed by the showed method (wallerstein, 1987): “what do you see in the photo? what is really happening here? how do you think it influences your lives? why do you think this situation (strength or challenge) exists? what do you think you can do about this situation?” afterward, an initial selection of the most meaningful photos took place, and each participant gave them a title. the objective of the third meeting was to reflect on changes participants would like to see in the neighborhood and what actions they could take to set those changes in motion. two community arttherapists were involved in this phase, making it possible to integrate arttherapy techniques into the photovoice process. the participants were given the task of creating, on a poster board, the front page of a newspaper with articles related to positive changes happening in the neighborhood. facilitators encouraged participants to use several clippings provided and their own photos about the neighborhood. they painted over their photos to better express the ideas they wanted to convey. at the end of the meeting, each participant showed the group her own piece and explained her ideas on how to enact the desired change. the proposals were then discussed by the group. the meeting ended with planning the final exhibition. the final exhibition took place during the youth organization’s party at the end year. the event was attended by more than 100 visitors, among them the participants’ families, local representatives of the area, and community neighbors. using posters located at the sides of the photography exhibition, a space was created where the visitors could express their own opinions regarding changes they would like in the neighborhood and what they themselves could do to enact these changes. during the party the participants had the task of showing and explaining the photos to the visitors, and then inviting them to leave their opinions and vote for the most http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 meaningful photo. this activity was planned in order to give the participants an opportunity to show their abilities to the extended community, to communicate to others their experiences and reflections, and to encourage these teenagers to become active agents of change in their own community. the high level of participation at the final exhibition gave the photographs great visibility and provided an intense exchange of opinions regarding the represented themes. finally, the post-test was administered, and the awards were given to participants: certificates of participation to all participants and a camera to the teenager who earned the most votes for their photo from the community. the three formal meetings were audiorecorded, and the transcribed narratives were analyzed with atlas-ti software (version 6) by the research team. with the purpose of evaluating the evolution of the variables of interest during the meetings, the verbatim transcripts were analyzed using the following categories: “psychological sense of community”, “future participation”, and “empowerment”. additionally, the research team analyzed the 37 photographs produced by the participants as well as the impressions reported by the extended community during the final exhibition. the purpose of the analysis was to understand the community’s impressions about the neighborhood and the effect of the photovoice process at a community level. in addition, measurements through the questionnaire were taken before and after the photovoice implementation to evaluate the effects of the researchintervention on the grade of youth neighborhood activism. an experimental social innovation (hazel & onaga, 2003) was carried out through which the photovoice was implemented in the participant group and compared with a comparison group. this means that assignment to the comparison condition is nonrandom, but both the participant and comparison groups are similar in terms of socioeconomic status, race, gender, age, etc. quantitative data were analyzed using the software spss (version 20), through a non-parametrical statistical contrast of pre-test and a posttest with a comparison group, specifically the wilcoxon-mann-whitney test, which is more accurate than independent samples student’s t-test for the characteristics of the sample. results results are ordered by the theoretical variables of interest related to youth neighborhood activism, i.e., psychological sense of community, forecast of future participation, and empowerment. both the quantitative and qualitative data are shown, which bring light to participants’ experiences in relation to each of these variables during the photovoice process. table 1 shows the descriptive and contrast analysis for each variable, in function of the group (participant or comparison), and the moment of evaluation (before or after the photovoice implementation). in a previous phase, the wilcoxon-mannwhitney test confirmed how significant differences between the participant and comparison group in either variable of interest did not exist before the photovoice implementation (analysis are not shown). this indicates participants were similar in variables of interest before the intervention. psychological sense of community data related to psychological sense of community show significant differences between before and after the photovoice implementation in the participant group (see table 1). this means that, while for the comparison group the mere passage of time does not generate any change, the members of the participant group reached a greater psychological sense of community during the program of intervention (from 2.60 to 3.08 points). due to the design of evaluation, these http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 pre-test post-test z p participant group psychological sense of community 𝑋 (s) 2.60 (0.79) 3.08 (0.44) -1.99 .02 n 8 6 forecast of future participation 𝑋 (s) 3.03 (1.16) 3.87 (0.59) -2.00 .02 n 8 6 empowerment 𝑋 (s) 3.07 (0.71) 3.13 (0.60) -.42 .34 n 8 6 comparison group psychological sense of community 𝑋 (s) 2.82 (0.56) 2.76 (0.67) -.14 .44 n 8 8 forecast of future participation 𝑋 (s) 2.18 (0.74) 2.20 (1.00) -.11 .46 n 8 8 empowerment 𝑋 (s) 2.70 (0.65) 2.88 (0.85) -.32 .38 n 7 8 table 1: descriptive and contrast analysis on the variables related to youth neighborhood activism for both the participant and comparison group, before and after the intervention through photovoice note: analysis from wilcoxon-mann-whitney test (two-tailed test). changes are attributable to the influence of the photovoice process on the participants. complementary to these data, a similar finding emerged from the qualitative data. the analyses of the 37 photographs and the codification of the narratives made it possible to identify what the participants considered their community’s main strengths and challenges. the photographs showed the places of community life; the narratives expressed the actors and plots of these places. participants were encouraged to be aware of those things that characterize their neighborhood. this allowed participants to notice the key effects their place of residence has on their lives and to reinforce the sense of belonging to their community. the main themes arising from the photographs are presented below. community strengths. the majority of strengths identified by the participants refer to (a) the community’s public services, (b) the gathering places, and (c) the fact that they are a multicultural community. one of the neighborhood’s most important public services is the public library, which was recently built and is used especially by the local youth. also, the new subway stop in the neighborhood has given their inhabitants connection to the rest of the city. from the descriptions of the photographs, the importance of the subway stop was not only as a way to move from place to place faster, but also a way to guarantee nighttime connection http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 and create new leisure opportunities for youth. the importance of gathering places derives from the awareness that they are places where one can experience reciprocal trust and sharing, thereby contributing to social networks in the community. a photo showing the neighborhood café was described by a participant as “a little place, but where there’s always a great atmosphere”. in relation to green areas in the neighborhood, another participant told us, “in this photo we see el pruno park, which i think is amazing […] many people go there, kids can go, even really little ones […] there’s an association of parents who take responsibility for cleaning it, who have keys to it.” in relation to the fact of being a multicultural community and, as a consequence, having the opportunity to enjoy numerous and diverse religious gatherings, participants clearly expressed a sense of social cohesion and sense of belonging. they are proud of being an “international neighborhood”, where people think of their neighbors as sources of support. participants feel the neighborhood has the capacity of integrating culturally diverse neighbors, and they all recognize themselves as “people from su eminencia”. the neighborhood’s catholic procession (a religious tradition during easter week), which is well-known and admired from other areas in the city, has a great influence on the teenagers. a participant expressed her feelings in this way: “seeing the people who came [to the procession] made a strong impact […] it cheered me up a lot because i was at the procession, and it’s really nice that the believers have the virgin in their blood.” community challenges. the majority of challenges identified by the participants refer to (a) the high rate of unemployment and the neighbors’ economic problems and (b) the drug dealing and addiction by the neighborhood’s young people. accordingly, many of the neighbors expressed challenges during the final exhibition similar to those declared by the teenagers. related to the unemployment problem, one photo showed a man inside a dumpster with the “intent of finding something to sell”. photovoice fueled a high awareness of the state of need of many of the neighbors due to an increase in unemployment. in the face of this situation, participants declared a compassionate feeling towards their neighbors. as a participant expressed: “i understand that he’s needy, he doesn’t have anything else, and he’s looking for something to sell because he doesn’t have a job... what they [the government] should do is give an opportunity to so many people who don’t have jobs, who can only get something to eat out of the trash.” in spite of such phenomena mainly affecting the adult sphere, the awareness of such precarious situations emerged as a latent worry which is reflected in the teenagers’ perspective of future. a photograph showing an abandoned building with syringes was selected by the participants as a symbol of the drug-related issues characterizing their neighborhood. a deep awareness emerged from the photovoice meetings about the neighborhood’s “drug areas”. the use of drugs is viewed by the participants as both a cause and an effect of the lack of employment. the teenagers thinking about the drug addicts as “needy people” did not lead them to judge severely, but, by contrast, they revealed a high level of empathy towards them. as one participant defended: “they aren’t bad people, there are good ones and bad ones […] i really pity them and i put myself in their position and i’d feel terrible too in their place. people who get mixed up in drugs do it because something http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 has happened to them. it isn’t just a bad habit, but because a person isn’t very strong, or also because they don’t know how to deal with things.” forecast of future participation concerning the quantitative data, contrast analysis showed that after the intervention, significant differences existed in the degree of forecast of future participation depending on the group. after the intervention, the participant group presented a greater interest to be involved in activities that help to improve the neighborhood, in comparison to the participants from the comparison group (from 3.03 to 3.87 points; see table 1). these results seem to be attributable to the influence of the intervention. the qualitative data refer to the increase in critical thinking among the participants about the neighborhood’s challenges as a first step to want to be involved in the process of change. in relation to the neighborhood’s dirtiness, the neighborhood is not regularly served by the city street cleaning service and, to deal with the large quantity of garbage, the inhabitants burn the dumpster contents causing foul fumes. in words from a participant: “it’s also a fact that there are only two dumpsters and before there were a lot of other ones, and the street cleaners come, at most, two times a year. they just don't come. they come when they feel like it. sometimes they come and sometimes they don't.” to face this situation and others, participants expressed their interest in initiatives focused on themes such as cleaning up the streets and respect for parks. in general terms, a participant stated the group’s feeling: “what we want is for people to take care of the neighborhood, young people should do their part, and say how they can help, give their opinion”. participants’ interest in using community activities to improve their neighborhood was fueled by the interchange of opinions they had with the neighbors during the final exhibition. among the activities people wanted to do in the shortmedium term were to separate the garbage and recycling, not litter, not graffiti the walls, not break objects that are for public use, smile at everybody, live harmoniously with neighbors, learn to share, know how to be content with oneself, work together towards the same goals, and get coordinated to change and improve the neighborhood. empowerment from the contrast analyses, no significant changes were found between “before” and “after”, inside the group of comparison or inside the participant group (see table 1). for this variable, changes did not take place in the participant group as a consequence of photovoice implementation. during the photovoice process, the participants expressed a notable vitality in putting forward proposals to improve the neighborhood; however, narratives suggest that gaining awareness of one’s own potential to enact change needs a more specific intervention and a longer period of time to be affirmed as a transformative competency. in this sense, there was a tendency among the participants to contemplate the involvement of institutions as a first step towards resolving the neighborhood’s challenges. in relation to the meetings’ recordings, a participant told us: “you know what you could do with this video? take it to the mayor and to the people who fix things […] so that they will see what the neighborhood is like”. on one hand, this could imply the desire to denounce the identified issues; on the other one, this could infer a behavior of delegating problem resolution to adults and the authorities. by further exploring the problem of the presence of drugs in the neighborhood, the possibility of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 fighting it, and the desire to make oneself useful in that respect, a similar sense of impotence emerged regarding the ability to do something effective: “if i could do something for the drug addicts i would do it”. although participants increased their conviction about the possibility of overcoming difficulties, the photovoice process was not useful for giving them a clear direction to transform their desires of change into concrete actions. participants do not feel that they themselves are capable to overcome their neighborhood’s challenges. as a consequence, attitudes of impotence and demands directed to powerful people to fix their problems exist in the teenagers. at the conclusion of the project the participants were asked if they felt the photovoice process had provoked any changes in themselves. the response was unanimous and affirmative. some replied that the project “made them see things in a different way”. other participants replied that, thanks to an increased awareness of the strengths they can rely on, they themselves will be the ones to influence their neighborhood. however, the intervention failed in its objective of increasing the empowerment level of the participants as an essential element for neighborhood activism. discussion the research-intervention process carried out in this study through photovoice increased the level of psychological sense of community and the wish for future participation in a group of teenagers who live in a vulnerable, multi-cultural neighborhood of southern spain; however, their degree of empowerment did not change. this pilot study followed a researchintervention approach, where the diagnosis of the situation of teenagers who live in a vulnerable neighborhood met with an intervention aimed at increasing the participants’ neighborhood activism. for this reason, this study considered the research process not to be a simple collection of data, but also a stimulus for sharing impressions about their own neighborhood, for the development of critical reflection about their community, and for the reinforcement of hope in the possibility of bringing about change. an evaluation design with data collection from diverse sources, i.e. through a triangulation process with quantitative and qualitative data, was used to assure the intervention’s effects. as a consequence, photovoice was demonstrated as a tool capable of opening up new opportunities for increasing neighborhood activism among young populations and thus, breaking the vicious cycle of vulnerability by transforming neighborhoods into fairer ones. results suggest that teenagers from the participant group reached a greater degree of psychological sense of community through the intervention program than the comparison group. this result is consistent with previous findings in the literature that showed young people involved in producing awareness for action in their communities developed a strong sense of community and responsibility to others (wong, zimmerman, & parker, 2010). the photovoice process allowed participants to think critically about the challenges of their neighborhood and to give value to its strengths, favoring the development of a deeper sense of community. this process made possible the transformation of individual photographs into a group product that gathered the vision of the teenagers in relation to their neighborhood. in relation to community participation, after the intervention the participant group presented a greater interest to be involved in activities that help to improve their neighborhood compared to the comparison group. this result is in line with the 2007 study carried out by foster-fishman and colleagues, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 which found that people who recognize both the neighborhood’s strengths and challenges are more likely to participate in neighborhood change strategies. using the neighborhood’s detailed picture made together by the teenagers, participants were called to imagine the desired changes they would like to see in their environment and to reflect on their role in that transformation process. photovoice triggered a process of raising-consciousness about their neighborhood, thus provoking a renewed interest in their social sphere and nurturing the desire to actively be a part of it. significant changes were not obtained in regard to the empowerment of the participant group. although the photograph exhibition was organized with the objective of increasing the teenagers’ sense of power to act and change the neighborhood, the results suggest that was not enough. as suggested by wong, zimmerman, and parker (2010), this may be explained because the type of researchintervention process carried out. the authors show that adult-driven interventions, although able to impact a number of dimensions of youth development, might not increase their level of empowerment. this pilot study did not include a young-driven process, since the young community was not involved during the planning of the intervention program (that is, the decision-making or agenda setting process was defined with the organization’s staff, but not with the young people). the dynamic of positive feedback that could flourish between youth neighborhood activism and the transformation of vulnerable neighborhoods is of great interest for community researchers. teenagers can be made aware that the cause of several of their problems is not inside them, but produced by their environment. in this case, young people can develop neighborhood activism, perceiving themselves as empowered persons with the possibility of influencing their future. through their community participation, together with others in the same situation, they can transform those contextual conditions that impede their well-being. these changes in the neighborhood would contribute to opportunities for youth to meet their needs and reach well-being. likewise, the perception of being an active and integrated member of the community has a positive influence on one’s selfimage, self-esteem, and personal control, helping to break the vicious cycle of oppression (cowen, 2000). this study suggests that photovoice could be a useful tool that contributes to work in this direction; however, this study has several limitations. first, the modest number of participants in this study cannot be generalized to include all sections of youth residing in the “su eminencia” neighborhood. however, the use of a small group was fundamental for obtaining these results because it made possible the creation of a protected space which facilitated the expression of thoughts and emotions. the sharing of experiences inside a group allowed for the activation and discovery of previously unknown individual and community resources and favored processes of reassigning meaning to the experience itself. in addition, the participants’ involvement during the meetings allowed for the breaching of delicate themes such as drug dealing which, although recognized by all, are often not openly dealt with. second, the results regarding empowerment suggest that for future research-intervention, it could be interesting to increase the active presence of youth during all phases of the process. in addition, it is necessary to include some proposals of concrete actions to carry out with the teenagers. in this way, young people will be able to experience the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 possibility of change and to feel like they themselves have the power to make small changes in their environment, thus increasing their degree of empowerment. beyond activities for raising awareness about how their neighborhood is, its influence in their life, how they would like their neighborhood to be, and how they could change their environment to reach that goal, future interventions could offer concrete channels of action on how to make these detected changes a reality. more focused, participative, and longer lasting interventions are necessary to internalize all suggested. this pilot study suggests the use of artistic tools can make it possible to imagine alternative ways to be around others, such as creating and giving new meaning to the participants’ experiences in the community (daher & haz, 2011; slayton, 2012). the active participation shown by the extended community at the final photography exhibition demonstrated photovoice’s generative powerto involve vulnerable communities in acts of participation. photovoice’s attractiveness hooked the participants and encouraged a part of the population reluctant to open themselves up to the outside world to get involved. during the photovoice process, they had the chance to express for the first time their own ideas and feelings through photographs and art. the use of research-intervention through photovoice is an innovative and flexible tool able to trigger a process toward gaining awareness of their vulnerable context’s strengths and challenges, evaluating their own role in the environment’s dynamics, and leading to an increase in youth neighborhood activism aimed at transforming the neighborhood into a fairer one. references aguiar, j. 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(2000). empowerment theory: psychological, organizational, and community levels of analysis. in j. rappaport and e. seidman (eds.), handbook of community psychology (pp. 4363). new york: kluwer /plenum. zimmerman, m.a. & rappaport, j. (1988). citizen participation, perceived control, and psychological empowerment. american journal of community psychology, 16 (5), 725-750. http://www.gjcpp.org/ the application of the community psychology practice competencies for community consulting practice in the u.s. by susan m. wolfe1 and ann webb price2 keywords: community psychology practice competencies, consulting, community psychology practice author biographies: susan wolfe is a senior consultant at cnm connect, a nonprofit that provides capacity building services to nonprofit organizations where she provides evaluation support through workshops, coaching and consulting, and third party evaluation services. before joining cnm connect, susan was ceo of her own community consulting company for over 5 years. she has also held research and program positions and provided consulting services to education, government, health care, and mental health services organizations. susan has published articles in peer reviewed and other venues and presented numerous times at national, and international conferences. she is co-editor (with victoria scott) of “foundations for community psychology practice” published by sage publications, and co-author (with ann price) of a book on community consulting to be published by oxford press. susan received her m.a. in ecological psychology from michigan state university, and her ph.d. in human development from the university of texas at dallas. dr. ann price is president of community evaluation solutions, inc. an evaluation firm she founded almost 13 years ago. prior to working in evaluation, ann worked in substance abuse addiction treatment and prevention. today, ann and her team conduct evaluations in many areas including mental health, substance abuse, tobacco prevention, youth development, foster care advocacy, early child care and learning, education and dropout prevention, and public 1 cnm connect 2 community evaluation solutions, inc global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 health. much of her work is with community coalitions and collaboratives. current clients include samhsa funded drug free communities, georgia alcohol prevention programs and nonprofits including the association for public health nutritionists, hemophilia of georgia and the georgia family connection partnership. prior to ces, dr. price worked as a senior data analyst at icf macro. ann is an active member of the american evaluation association and served as co-chair of the community psychology topical interest group for 3 years. she is also active in the atlanta affiliate of aea. she has taught at the aea/cdc summer institute and at scra’s first summer institute in 2015. she and susan wolfe will be publishing a book on practicing in the community in 2017 as part of scra’s book series.she earned her doctorate in community psychology from georgia state university and an m.a. in clinical psychology from the university of west florida. she lives in alpharetta, ga with her husband and two of her three children. ann enjoys traveling, hiking, reading and cooking. recommended citation: wolfe, s. and price, a.w. (2017). the application of the community psychology practice competencies for community consulting practice in the u.s. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(1), pages 1-14. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the application of the community psychology practice competencies for community consulting practice in the u.s. abstract this article describes many of the competencies used for consulting with communities in the united states. it includes a description of each competency, how each is used, and tips for developing them. the article begins with a definition of community psychology consulting and how it is different from business or other forms of consulting. the different levels of competence and the interdisciplinary nature of the competencies needed for working in communities are discussed. the article maintains that all community psychology consultants need expertise in foundational competencies such as sociocultural and crosscultural competence and commitment to improving public welfare and social and racial justice. the extent to which community psychology consultants need expertise in other competencies, such as community program development and management, community and social change, and community research, depends upon the type of consulting practice they will have. there is considerable overlap in competencies required for community psychology practice and those required for social work, public health, public administration, and other fields. therefore, community psychologists interested in pursuing a career in community consulting might take courses or get additional training in other fields. introduction in 2012, the society for community research and action’s task group on defining practice competencies presented a set of 18 community psychology practice competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012). they described three levels of competence – exposure, experience, and expertise – and suggested that graduate students should at least be exposed to all the competencies during their training. furthermore, the task group recognized that graduate programs would likely vary as to which competencies they emphasized. in 2015, community psychology: foundations for practice was published (scott & wolfe, 2015). the book describes many of the competencies and their application and provides recommendations for developing them. this article will include information about developing and using competencies commonly employed in community consulting in the united states. we derived the competencies from literature and our own and other community psychology consultants’ (cp consultants) experiences. definition of community psychology consulting viola and mcmahon (2010) defined consulting as “using your expertise . . . to help clients . . . achieve their goals” (p. xvii). a distinguishing feature of cp consultants (versus other types of consultants) is their disciplinary orientation and their approach. first, cp consultants are accountable to the community served rather than the contracting organization. second, cp consultants consider processes and outcomes within the context of larger systems, even when they are working with a single organization. third, cp consultants are skilled at working with larger systems to promote systems level change. fourth, cp consultants maintain a collaborative relationship that recognizes the focal organization or community members’ expertise rather than a hierarchical “expert” to “consultee” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 relationship. finally, cp consultants recognize that changing outcomes does not always require changing individuals. community change more likely results from changes to the larger systems in which individuals operate. the objective of this article is to demonstrate how cp consultants in the united states may apply the community psychology practice competencies and competencies from other fields to cp practice. we began with the 18 community psychology practice competencies and then incorporated competencies from other disciplinary fields, such as evaluation (american evaluation association, 2016), public health (the council on linkages between academia and public health practice, 2014), social work (council on social work education, 2015), and public affairs and administration (naspaa commission on peer review and accreditation, 2014). level of competence the type of competencies and level of expertise that practitioners need to develop depends primarily on their work settings and the type of work they do. we agree with the scra task group that all cp consultants should have exposure to these competencies during graduate school. we contend that experience and expertise are needed only for those competencies that will be applicable in their practice. for example, some practitioners working for the federal government may spend little or no time working in individual communities. instead, they spend much of their time engaged in research or policy-related work. they may work to gain experience and expertise in research and policy and not focus at all on competencies relevant to building community. alternatively, practitioners working more closely with or in communities are likely to be engaged in capacity building, coalition development, and program evaluation and therefore focus their development on those competencies. like the cp competencies, public health defines three levels or “tiers” of competence, with a focus on concrete application rather than extent of knowledge (the council on linkages between academia and public health practice, 2014). tier 1 is entry level, tier 2 is program management/supervisory level, and tier 3 is senior management or executive level. the council on linkages between academia and public health practice’s (2014) description of the competencies provides details regarding what a public health professional should be able to do at each of these levels. for example, when defining the sub-competency for financial planning and management, tier 1 is “contributes to development of program budgets,” tier 2 is “develops program budgets,” and tier 3 is “develops organizational budgets.” these specific descriptions are useful for individuals to understand where they fall on the continuum. they are also useful for employers to determine the level of competency needed for a specific position. the interdisciplinary nature of competencies in our work as cp consultants, we regularly work with individuals who were trained in other disciplines. this has provided us the benefit of learning methods and skills from other fields, including social work, public health, business, and public administration. based on our observations, we have found that several other disciplines share competencies with cp. for example, social work competencies share many similarities to cp and public health competencies (council on social work education, 2015; the council on linkages between academia and public health practice, 2014). perhaps the greatest difference between cp competencies and social work competencies is the focus on and intervention with individuals and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 families. knowledge and skills at these levels can be useful for cp consultants who work with programs that target individual level behaviors or to deepen understanding of individual and family level influences on groups, neighborhoods, and communities. this level of knowledge is also useful for program evaluation consulting with organizations that provide programs targeting individuals and families. similarly, cp consultants trained in clinical/community psychology or human development focused programs develop some level of knowledge and experience with individuals and families. interpersonal skills such as those taught in social work or clinical psychology programs can benefit the cp practitioner in specific ways. ultimately, all interactions are interpersonal. community group members often have strong emotions about community issues, and conflict is not uncommon. clinical skills are useful in dealing with interpersonal dynamics in groups and communities. cp consultants focusing their practice on evaluation or consultation with organizations providing clinical or child development services would also benefit from clinical training and experience. cp consultants who want to increase knowledge and skills focused at the individual level might consider a minor or cognate in individual and/or family focused discipline (e.g., human development, social work). in addition, cp consultants might collaborate on projects with social workers, developmental psychologists, or clinicians to learn from their approaches. additional experience can be gained through reading materials, training programs, or social work or clinical psychology continuing education (ceu) training or workshops. cp consultants may not gain individual and family therapy expertise, but they will deepen their understanding of individual, family, and group dynamics. this can help them to better understand the services with which they are evaluating or consulting. competencies common and necessary for all cp consultants: the foundational principles in this section of the article we will describe the competencies that are common across all types of cp consulting. they correspond closely to the cp practice competencies’ foundational core competencies. they represent the underlying values and perspectives that define community psychology. the cp practice competencies include sociocultural and cross cultural competences; ecological perspectives; empowerment; community inclusion and partnership; and ethical, reflective practice. because these competencies are foundational and integral to what defines and differentiates cp consulting practice from other types of consulting, cp consultants might strive to develop an “expertise” level for each of these competencies. they are woven through all of the work in which cp consultants engage. evidence suggests that they are well-integrated across cp training programs, further supporting their importance. eighty percent of students responding to a community psychology graduate education survey reported that training for these competencies is available in required coursework or integrated into multiple aspects of graduate training (connell et al., 2013). these competencies represent both a knowledge base and a values orientation. while most community psychologists will be at least at the “experience” level for foundational principles, progression to the level of “expertise” requires continuous development throughout one’s career. cp consultants develop competence through experience with a variety of situations and community engagements, coupled with selfreflection and feedback. for example, while sociocultural and cross-cultural competence http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 skills and knowledge may be initially taught through books, workshops, or classes, they are strengthened through experience in communities, self-discovery, and reflection of personal biases and feedback from peers or community members. how competent cp consultants become in working across a variety of cultures is associated with the extent to which cp consultants engage with individuals and groups who are not from the same socioeconomic or cultural background as themselves. based on our experience as cp consultants, we would add one additional competency – commitment to improving public-welfare and social and racial justice. a recent article published in nonprofit quarterly (wolff et al., 2017) describes a set of six principles for collaborating for equity and justice. while this article is primarily focused on building collaborations to create sustainable social change, the principles presented may be applicable to cp consulting practice in general. for example, principle 1 is to explicitly address issues of social and economic injustice and racism. engagement in cp consulting requires that the consultant not ignore or avoid these issues wherever they are uncovered, but to be forthcoming and explicit in bringing them to light. when institutional and interpersonal racism are aspects of the context that are complicit in perpetuating the problem at hand, they cannot be ignored if the cp consultant is working to produce real and lasting change. the consequences of ignoring complex and pervasive issues of race and class are real and have devastating consequences. for example, the fact that racism is a contributing factor for low birthweight and subsequent infant mortality disparities has been documented for over a decade (collins, david, handler, wall & andes, 2004). despite mounting supporting evidence, the primary intervention mode via “evidence-based programs” is to provide individual case management services focused on “fixing” the mothers rather than addressing root causes, including racism. thus, at the same time infant mortality is declining in the u.s., the racial disparities are increasing (rossen & schoendorf, 2014). in 2013, the infant mortality rate for white mothers was 5.1 deaths per 1,000 live births. for black or african american mothers, the rate was 10.8 deaths per 1,000 live births. being a cp consultant provides opportunities to advocate for social justice and racial equity. for example, susan was invited to participate in the local health needs assessment process where she collaborated with others to consistently mention racism as having an impact on the local health disparities that were found. the resulting report includes mention of racism as a factor. while it is not action, it has at least made it into print and brought the issue to the table, which is a start. cp consulting practice related competencies the extent of expertise developed for the competencies described in the remaining sections are optional. their importance depends upon the type of work in which the cp consultant is engaged. cp consultants are encouraged to identify those that will be used in the type of work they do, and then focus on gaining experience and expertise in those areas. leadership and management the cp competencies include community leadership and mentoring to community members and organizations. drawing upon the public health and evaluation competencies, we have added supervisory and human resources knowledge and skills, and having financial management competence and business acumen (the council on linkages between academia and public health practice, 2014; american evaluation association, 2016). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 cp consultants use community leadership and mentoring competencies to help community leaders and members identify and develop their own leadership potential. this requires sharing what you know about community leadership and working collaboratively with community leaders and members to determine how to best apply these skills within their context. becoming expert in community leadership and mentoring is often developed through observation, being mentored, and experience. individuals who want to build this competence should identify and work with someone who has demonstrated expertise by effectively promoting and supporting leadership among community members. ann often is asked to mentor students or is contacted by students seeking internship experiences. she has also provided coaching to new evaluators. she focuses discussions and practice opportunities for new evaluators and students on many of these competencies (environmental perspective, interpersonal skills, capacity-building, etc.). within the community coalitions and collaboratives with whom she works, ann tries to temper her leadership abilities and encourage community leaders and members to identify and develop their own leadership potential to achieve the goals they have for their community. ann’s goal is to build capacity in individuals with whom she works and the communities they serve. community psychology curricula typically do not include financial planning and management, and this was not included among the original 18 cp practice competencies. the competency defined for public health includes skills such as implementing policies and procedures; developing and managing program and organizational budgets; evaluating program performance and using evaluation results; preparing and approving funding proposals; managing personnel; and establishing performance management systems. aea describes the “management domain”, which represents the logistical and business aspects of evaluation and lists similar skills. we have added these competencies to cp consulting because they are often relevant, whether cp consultants have their own practices or are working within an organization. even community psychologists who do not engage in consulting, such as university faculty, researchers, or other practitioners, may benefit from having these skills. for example, a university faculty member who receives a large national institutes of health research grant will need to develop a budget, manage the project, hire staff, and monitor the project’s performance. even though one of us has her own consulting business and one of us works as a consultant in a nonprofit organization, we both frequently use these skills for our jobs and for working with other organizations. the executive directors of the nonprofit organizations we both consult with are primarily concerned with the business aspects of their organizations. when we complete an evaluation project for them, our recommendations need to consider available financial and human resources so they are realistic and actionable. when we are having such conversations with executive directors during the consultation, it helps that we understand what they are talking about when they begin discussing the business aspects of the programs we are evaluating (e.g., budget, staffing, other resources). cp consultants can develop their financial planning and management skills in various ways. when working in organizations and with community programs, cp consultants should become familiar with their budget and ask questions about how it was developed. nonprofit organizations often publicize their annual reports, where they highlight the various revenue streams that contribute to their budget. cp consultants would benefit from continuing education in financial and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 human resources related topics. a few cp consultants have found it beneficial to obtain a master’s degree in business or public administration or at least take basic accounting or other business-related courses. many have learned these skills through employment as staff or managers in nonprofit organizations. professional organizations, such as the american evaluation association, sometimes offer pre-conference workshops on the topic. we have also found books that were helpful in setting up and working on the business aspects of consulting (e.g., barrington, 2012). even if you establish a consulting business and hire experts to assume these responsibilities, it is important to possess a basic understanding of your own so you can be assured the experts are doing their jobs correctly. community program development and management the group of competencies related to community program development and management is composed of program development, implementation and management, prevention and health promotion, small and large group processes, resource development, and consultation and organizational development. program development, implementation and management includes being able to assess community issues, needs, strengths, and resources; create and sustain inclusive partnerships; and develop programs to address community issues and systems change. these activities include conceptualizing the theory of change and creating a program logic model; designing activities and program components in a way that will produce desired changes; developing and executing an implementation plan; ensuring the program fits the culture and context; and ensuring sustainability. as evidenced by the growing membership in the american evaluation association’s community psychology topical interest group (aea cp tig), many cp consultants engage in program evaluation. additional experience and expertise in developing, implementing, and managing programs is helpful. actual community program experience and having expertise with the realities of program management contributes to the ability to offer practical, useful, and realistic evaluation recommendations and to assist community-based organizations to implement findings-based changes. working with community-based organizations may involve helping community organizations to write grant proposals and other resource development related activities. cp consultants with program management and implementation expertise are particularly suited for facilitating program design and writing the evaluation sections of grant applications. being able to assist organizations to write clear objectives, develop a comprehensive work plan, write a clear need statement, describe collaborative partnerships, and prepare a program budget are in-demand skills. consultants with program development and management expertise can use their experience to help organizations make a more practical case statement to strengthen the proposal. understanding the requirements, styles, and formats expected by different funding sources and having experience writing to each audience can be valuable to help community-based organizations secure much-needed funding. whether cp consultants need to develop prevention and health promotion experience or expertise depends upon the type of work the cp consultant is pursuing. if the cp consultant plans to engage in evaluation, policy initiatives, or work with preventionoriented programs, expertise in prevention and health promotion is necessary. prevention is a key theme within community psychology; therefore, most anyone who has trained in a cp graduate program likely is well-grounded in knowledge of the topic. if a cp consultant is working with prevention http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 programs in some capacity, the consultant will need expanded knowledge of prevention theories and programs in the specific area in which they are working. in addition to the theoretical understanding, learning about the various approaches utilized, applications across topic areas, and prevention specific research evaluation methods is also important. we frequently use our small and large group processes competencies and experience. such skills are applicable to gather data via focus groups and community listening sessions and to facilitate small workgroups, committees, and larger coalition meetings. when teaching capacity building workshops or conducting other training, small group process management skills are useful to facilitate discussions and group exercises. these skills are best learned through observation of a skilled facilitator and through practice. consultation and organizational development skills are often needed to build community and organizational capacity. competencies under this umbrella include the interpersonal skills needed to engage in a trusting and collaborative relationship with the client, and an understanding of group and organizational dynamics and functioning. for example, nonprofit organizations do most of the heavy lifting in terms of social service and social change in communities. understanding how nonprofit boards work, nonprofit funding streams, and the local nonprofit culture is important to provide capacity building services in a way that benefits the client. a survey of graduate students indicated that they perceive they are receiving insufficient education in these areas (brown, cardazone, glantsman, johnson-hakim, and lemke, 2014). at the larger level, understanding the dynamics and culture of the various communities at several levels is also helpful. the application of ecological theories and the ability to see how these theories apply to the local culture, relationships, and overall community functioning is fundamental to being able to facilitate organizational and community capacity for change. although we might expect cp students to have some exposure to these concepts and gain some experience in their practice through case studies and supervised internships, reaching a high level of expertise in this area requires experience. throughout their careers, and especially early in their careers, cp consultants should seek mentoring of more experienced practitioners. many community consultants find it helpful to identify a community of practice of other consultants. for example, the scra practice council hosts peer consultation calls once a month, which serve as a community of practice, offering guidance and support. community and social change competencies related to community and social change include many of the 18 core competencies described by dalton and wolfe (2012), especially the ones described above. more specifically, community and social change are related to the specific competencies of collaboration and coalition development; community development; community organizing and community advocacy; public policy analysis, development, and advocacy; and information dissemination and building public awareness. all these competencies have at their core the specific skills needed to work with community groups, from the envisioning phase of a community change initiative to helping community groups define common goals and act to achieve them. ideally, community change efforts focus on systems level change, often through policy change. furthermore, community and social change is often achieved through the effective use of communication and information dissemination. take for example an intervention that seeks to decrease underage drinking. one approach would be to implement a substance abuse intervention http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 unit into every 9th grade health class. another approach might take a community perspective. for example, drug free communities, or dfcs, are funded by the substance abuse and mental health services administration (samhsa) and emphasize environmental change strategies (increase barriers, change policies, change the physical environment) to reduce underage drinking and substance abuse. communities are encouraged to look at local data to determine the community factors that lead to underage drinking. one community may find that youth drink because they have easy access to alcohol because local stores fail to card teens. another community might discover that many parents host parties where alcohol is served, especially around prom or graduation. these communities may implement very different change strategies based on the needs of their community. the community that finds local stores fail to card underage youth may partner with law enforcement to train store owners and increase monitoring of underage liquor sales. the community where adults’ provision is an issue might choose to implement a positive social media campaign that encourages parents and other adults not to serve alcohol to teens. the role of cp consultants working with each of these communities would be to facilitate the translation of the research findings into action and to help build community collaboration. there has, of late, been an increasing emphasis on “collective impact” and a focus on developing community coalitions using this model (kania & kramer, 2011). research and practice with community coalitions have demonstrated that developing effective community coalitions is much more complex than the five conditions described in the collective impact model (wolff, 2016). over the last decade, coalition experts have demonstrated the complexity of bringing together groups of individuals with common yet disparate interests to unite to solve a common problem (wolff, 2010; butterfoss & kegler, 2002). cp consultants with a deeper knowledge of this complexity may find themselves in the role of organizer, expert consultant to, or evaluator of community coalitions. developing coalition expertise requires grounding in the body of work that has evolved through community psychology, public health, social psychology, and other disciplines to better understand group processes, political dynamics, and other related behavioral phenomena. participating in and observing the formation, development, and maintenance of coalitions and receiving mentoring from more experienced cp consultants is perhaps the most useful thing a cp consultant can do to develop expertise. public policy analysis, development, and advocacy are useful skills for cp consulting if you are engaged in social change efforts. as an analyst with the u.s. department of health and human services office of the inspector general, susan gained skills for researching laws, regulations, and policies. since then, she has used these skills in various ways as a consultant, including reviewing internal policies for one organization to assess the extent to which they incorporated the requisite laws and regulations. advocacy skills have also been useful in our practices. for example, as a consultant to maternal child health programs, susan has been asked to assist with visits to state and national elected officials to provide information to inform their votes on selected issues. she was also active in a state coalition to advocate for funding for women’s health services. while these activities are not directly related to her consulting practice, the funding she advocated for was needed to support the programs she has been working with and to reduce the focal problems in her community. ann has provided white papers and data briefs that community coalitions have used to educate state and local government politicians about youth substance abuse. through her work with http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 foster care advocates, ann has helped shaped the focus of an education advocate program that supports children in foster care. the program logic model identified problems within the education and court systems that negatively impact children in care (cic). because of the pilot program and evaluation, the department of child and family services and georgia casa (court appointed special advocates) implemented specific training programs for caseworkers and casas and are actively working to support positive educational outcomes for cic. community research two core competencies make up the community research domain: participatory community research and program evaluation. cp consultants often use a participatory approach to research by working with community members to define research questions, to ensure questions are contextually appropriate, and to determine that the measures used to assess them are appropriate to the community. participatory approaches require shared power. the cp consultant must assume a position that is equal to that of community members. this is a much different approach than that taken by more traditional researchers whereby the researcher is expert and community members are “research subjects.” research can also be useful to provide information needed to identify needs and resources, deepen understanding of an issue at hand, and for organizational and community planning. for example, wolfe and colleagues (2013) used the public health perinatal periods of risk (ppor) framework to analyze and use data to better understand birth and infant health outcomes (peck, sappenfield, & scala, 2010). this six-stage approach is designed to follow the public health planning cycle and mobilize communities to act based on outcomes of the analytic phase. results of data analysis using the framework were presented to the san antonio healthy families network (hfn). the hfn used them to develop action plans to address high rates of low birthweight and infant mortality. based on our experience, a review of the websites of many of the organizations that employ cp consultants, and the increasing aea cp tig membership, we believe that program evaluation expertise is often a core service of current cp consulting practice. whether working with coalitions, building organizational capacity, or developing programs, evaluation expertise is required. development of this expertise begins in the classroom, where students learn about evaluation theory and the various types of evaluation. engagement in program evaluation in community-based settings often requires adapting classroom learning to accommodate real issues, such as access to data, resource limitations, or stakeholder constraints placed on programs or organizations (e.g., funders, board members, other organizations). community research and program evaluation includes partnering with community stakeholders to ensure the evaluation is designed so that results are useful to improve community outcomes. for example, logic models ideally are designed with community members and consider the community context in which the social problem exists. cp consultants who focus on evaluation may also have intervention design expertise. the cp consultant may use a systems perspective to design the intervention and evaluation. ideally, community members may assist in data collection and even the synthesis of findings. this helps ensure community buyin. many community-based organizations, especially smaller nonprofit organizations, do not have the funds to hire an evaluator. they also lack the expertise to design, implement, and analyze and report evaluation findings. thus, cp consultants may find themselves http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 providing training and other capacity building services. much of the evaluation and community-based research education received in graduate school involves learning sophisticated models and design and analysis using comparison or control groups and longitudinal designs. most of the evaluation being done in communities is on a much smaller scale and requires a much simpler approach. building capacity within community organizations involves ensuring staff understand how to set goals and develop indicators and benchmarks, define simple data collection and analysis methods using spreadsheets, and teaching staff how to compute percentages to determine whether the program met its benchmarks. discussion the wide range of competencies needed for cp consulting reflects the complexity of work in communities. the u.s.-based community psychology practice competencies provide a good start toward determining the types of competencies needed for cp consulting; however, a review of competencies from other fields suggests that there are additional competencies and approaches that may be useful. for example, the inclusion of more financial and management competencies would be helpful for all community psychologists -practitioners and academics. although there is considerable overlap in the cp practice competencies and competencies defined for other fields, there are also distinct differences. these similarities and differences, taken together, highlight the value in engaging in interdisciplinary practice and suggest that cp students may benefit from cross-disciplinary training. this can be accomplished either through minors or cognates in other fields or continuing education training after graduation. professional societies, such as the american evaluation association, include continuing professional development as a core competency. we agree that all cp consultants and practitioners should engage in continuous professional development throughout their careers. methods and knowledge in many of the areas in which cp consultants work are consistently evolving, and consultants who do not engage in ongoing professional development do a disservice to the organizations and communities with whom they work. each of us has developed and used the competencies consistently throughout our careers. susan wolfe’s career and competencies development progression has been documented in several publications (wolfe, 2000; wolfe, 2014; wolfe, 2017). her documented progression demonstrates the evolution of skill development through employment experiences, formal education, continuing education via workshops and conferences, and reading. admittedly, some of it was accidental and facilitated by chance, but most of it was purposeful. while cp provided most of the core competencies needed for her work, she has found that training provided through other disciplines, including organizational and developmental psychology, business, and public health has added substantively to her tool box. prior to consulting susan held a wide variety of positions in health care, social services, government, and education. one of the most relevant observations is that similar techniques existed across contexts, but they were often labeled differently. likewise, ann webb price has had a similar evolution of skill development through formal education, experience, and continuing education. ann’s earliest education and experience was in clinical psychology. after obtaining her master’s degree, she worked for several years in private practice and several local treatment facilities for addicted adolescents. after witnessing the devastating effects of addiction on families and youth, including the death of several teens following discharge, ann was left with a profound frustration with medical and individual http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 approaches. her education as a community psychologist provided a foundation in systems level change; program development and evaluation practice sustains her cp practice. like susan, continuing education and work on these core competencies is vital to her continued development as a professional. in summary, the cp practice competencies provide a reasonable framework for cp students and early career professionals to guide their education and professional development if they are interested in engaging in consulting. this is true whether cp consulting is part of the other work in which they engage, or if they are full-time consultants, independently employed or working in other organizations. however, they are not inclusive of all competencies – personal and professional – that cp consulting practice requires. while we view the development of the cp practice competencies as an important step toward more clearly defining the field and establishing criteria for graduate education, the field would likely benefit from reexamination and expansion upon the cp practice competencies. additionally, we would encourage faculty to advise students who are interested in practice careers or community consulting to take courses, minor in, or even get an additional master’s degree in other fields such as public health, social work, public administration, or business. at the very least, individuals who would like to pursue cp consulting should be mindful and strategic about building their expertise in relevant competencies. references american evaluation association (2016). aea evaluator competencies: draft 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(2015). community psychology: foundations for practice. sage publications: thousand oaks, ca. viola, j.j. & mcmahon, s.d. (2010). introduction. in: j.j. viola and s.d. mcmahon (eds.) consulting and evaluation with nonprofit and community-based organizations. jones and bartlett publishers, boston, ma. wolfe, s.m. (2017). going solo: community psychology as a small business. in: j. viola and o. belyaev-glantsman (eds.). careers in community psychology. oxford university press. wolfe, s.m. (2014). the application of community psychology practice competencies to reduce health disparities. american journal of community psychology, 53, 231-234. wolfe, s.m. (2000). research and evaluation consulting. journal of prevention and intervention in the community, 19, 21-27. wolfe, s.m., bellinger, k., howard, r., mangla, a., & ritter, j. (2013). samhd ppor stages i through iv. unpublished white paper prepared for the san antonio metropolitan health department, san antonio, tx. wolff, t. (2016). ten places where collective impact gets it wrong. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(1), 113. retrieved 03/21/16 from http://.www.gjcpp.org. wolff, t. (2010). the power of collaborative solutions. jossey bass: san francisco, ca. wolff, t., minkler, m., wolfe, s.m., berkowitz, b., bowen, l., butterfoss, f.d., christens, b.d., francisco, v.t., himmelman, a.t., & lee, k.s. (2016). collaborating for equity and justice: moving beyond collective impact. nonprofit quarterly, 23(4), 42-53. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://ssir.org/articles/entry/collective_impact http://ssir.org/articles/entry/collective_impact https://naspaaaccreditation.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/naspaa-accreditation-standards.pdf https://naspaaaccreditation.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/naspaa-accreditation-standards.pdf https://naspaaaccreditation.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/naspaa-accreditation-standards.pdf http://.www.gjcpp.org/ the application of the community psychology practice competencies for community consulting practice in the u.s. abstract this article describes many of the competencies used for consulting with communities in the united states. it includes a description of each competency, how each is used, and tips for developing them. the article begins with a definition of community ... introduction definition of community psychology consulting level of competence the interdisciplinary nature of competencies cp consulting practice related competencies leadership and management community program development and management community and social change community research discussion references global journal of community psychology practice tools of the trade the community tool box, a comprehensive tool and a sample of what you will find there: community assessment methods conducting a swot analysis by christina holt and tom wolff the community tool box, http://ctb.ku.edu, is a free, online resource for those working to build healthier communities and bring about social change, offering thousands of pages of tips and tools for taking action in communities. the vision behind the community tool box is that people — locally and globally — are better prepared to work together to change conditions that affect their lives. the community tool box covers core competencies for community practice such as community assessment, planning, intervention, evaluation, and advocacy. under continuous development since 1994, the community tool box is widely used in teaching, training, and technical support. the team’s aspiration is to make it easier and more likely that people bring about change and improvement and further social justice. created in 1994 by partners at the university of kansas and collaborating organizations including active members of the society for community research and action, the community tool box is a free, online resource of more than 7,000 pages. with a creative commons license to encourage widespread use, and currently available in english, spanish, and arabic, the community tool box contains educational modules, toolkits, troubleshooting guides, and evidence-based practices for building healthy communities and creating social change. the community tool box is widely accessed, with more than five million user sessions annually from 230 countries around the world. this capacitybuilding resource is used by a variety of people and organizations to enhance their community psychology practice skills in community assessment, planning, intervention, evaluation, advocacy, and other competencies. the community tool box content is organized by five key functions: 1. “table of contents” presents content as an online book with 46 chapters and over 300 sections or lessons containing practical, step-by-step guidance. community-building skills covered relate to different competencies, including, among others, assessment (e.g., conducting focus groups), planning (e.g., developing vision and mission statements), leadership (e.g., building commitment), advocacy (e.g., using personal testimony), and evaluation (e.g., using feedback to improve the initiative). each section, http://ctb.ku.edu/ http://ctb.ku.edu/en/tablecontents/index.aspx global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 following a consistent format, includes detailed “how-to” descriptions, examples, points to review, and training materials. 2. “do the work” contains toolkits with succinct how-to outlines for 16 core competencies, including creating and maintaining coalitions, assessing community needs and resources, developing a strategic plan, developing an intervention, enhancing cultural competence, evaluating the initiative, implementing social marketing, and planning for sustainability. each toolkit contains a checklist with just-in-time reminders of what is involved in the task, as well as real-world examples, tips and tools, and links to additional resources. 3. “solve a problem” features 13 troubleshooting guides that address common dilemmas faced in community work, for example: “there is not enough community participation,” “we are facing opposition or conflict,” or “there is not enough improvement in outcomes.” each troubleshooting guide includes questions for analyzing the situation; for community participation, “have we made the participation and involvement more rewarding or attractive?” or, for facing opposition, “do we know what tactics they are using to oppose us?” each guide also includes links to relevant resources for solving identified issues, such as the community tool box sections on honoring community champions or learning about opposition tactics. 4. “use promising approaches” provides links to databases of evidence-based practices for addressing specific community problems or goals. it links to both comprehensive databases (e.g., centers for disease control’s community guide, cochrane and campbell collaborations), as well as categorical databases for what works for addressing specific issues (e.g., child and youth development, education, health promotion, prevention of substance abuse). 5. “connect with others” provides ways to network with others involved in community work. it includes an “ask an advisor” service by which community tool box users can ask specific questions of experienced community members and experts about issues relevant to their community work. numerous members of the society for community research and action have volunteered to serve as community advisors through “ask an advisor,” helping disseminate the field’s knowledge to the broader public. since 2007, the community tool box team has used google analytics to provide information about site usage and to inform site design. analytics provide information such as number of unique site users, site content viewed, and length of time spent on site. google analytics data show that chapter 3, the community tool box chapter on community assessment, is the most in-demand area of the site. http://ctb.ku.edu/en/dothework/index.aspx http://ctb.ku.edu/en/solveproblem/index.aspx http://ctb.ku.edu/en/promisingapproach/index.aspx http://ctb.ku.edu/en/connect/index.aspx global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 in this article we share the listing of these chapter 3 resources. as you look at the sections, you may recognize many of the tools you use every day. below are the sections/tools in chapter 3. chapter 3: assessing community needs and resources  section 1. developing a plan for assessing local needs and resources  section 2. understanding and describing the community  section 3. conducting public forums and listening sessions  section 4. collecting information about the problem  section 5. analyzing community problems  section 6. conducting focus groups  section 7. conducting needs assessment surveys  section 8. identifying community assets and resources  section 9. developing baseline measures of behavior  section 10. conducting concerns surveys  section 11. determining service utilization  section 12. conducting interviews  section 13. conducting surveys  section 14. swot analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats  section 15. qualitative methods to assess community issues  section 16. geographic information systems: tools for community mapping  section 17. leading a community dialogue on building a healthy community  section 18. creating and using community report cards  section 19. using public records and archival data  section 20. implementing photovoice in your community  section 21. windshield and walking surveys  section 22. using small area analysis to uncover disparities  section 23. developing and using criteria and processes to set priorities http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources/swot-analysis/main http://ctb.ku.edu/en/community-tool-box-toc/community-assessment/chapter-3-assessing-community-needs-and-resources-0 http://ctb.ku.edu/en/community-tool-box-toc/community-assessment/chapter-3-assessing-community-needs-and-resources-4 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http://ctb.ku.edu/en/community-tool-box-toc/community-assessment/chapter-3-assessing-community-needs-and-resources-84 http://ctb.ku.edu/en/community-tool-box-toc/community-assessment/chapter-3-assessing-community-needs-and-resources-88 http://ctb.ku.edu/en/community-tool-box-toc/community-assessment/chapter-3-assessing-community-needs-and-resources-93 http://ctb.ku.edu/en/community-tool-box-toc/using-small-area-analysis-to-uncover-disparities http://ctb.ku.edu/en/node/4750 global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 within chapter 3, one of the most popular assessment resources covers how to conduct a swot analysis. below, we share “how-to” information for conducting a swot analysis as it appears in the community tool box. for additional details, examples, and a free downloadable and adaptable powerpoint presentation, please see http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-andresources/swot-analysis/main. from community tool box chapter 3, section 14: swot analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats  what is a swot analysis and why should you use one?  when do you use swot?  what are the elements of a swot analysis?  how do you create a swot analysis?  how do you use your swot analysis? change is an inevitable part of community organizing. if you know how to take stock of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, you are more likely to plan and act effectively. swot provides a tool to explore both internal and external factors that may influence your work. what is a swot analysis and why should you use one? swot stands for: strength, weakness, opportunity, threat. a swot analysis guides you to identify your organization’s strengths and weaknesses (s-w), as well as broader opportunities and threats (o-t). developing a fuller awareness of the situation helps with both strategic planning and decision-making. the swot method was originally developed for business and industry, but it is equally useful in the work of community health and development, education, and even for personal growth. swot is not the only assessment technique you can use. compare it with other assessment tools in the community tool box to determine if this is the right approach for your situation. the strengths of this method are its simplicity and application to a variety of levels of operation. when do you use swot? http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources/swot-analysis/main http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources/swot-analysis/main http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources/swot-analysis/main http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources/swot-analysis/main http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 a swot analysis can offer helpful perspectives at any stage of an effort. you might use it to:  explore possibilities for new efforts or solutions to problems.  make decisions about the best path for your initiative. identifying your opportunities for success in context of threats to success can clarify directions and choices.  determine where change is possible. if you are at a juncture or turning point, an inventory of your strengths and weaknesses can reveal priorities as well as possibilities.  adjust and refine plans mid-course. a new opportunity might open wider avenues, while a new threat could close a path that once existed. swot also offers a simple way of communicating about your initiative or program and an excellent way to organize information you've gathered from studies or surveys. what are the elements of a swot analysis? a swot analysis focuses on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. remember that the purpose of performing a swot is to reveal positive forces that work together and potential problems that need to be recognized and possibly addressed. we will discuss the process of creating the analysis below, but first here are a few sample layouts for your swot analysis. ask participants to answer these simple questions: what are the strengths and weaknesses of your group, community, or effort, and what are the opportunities and threats facing it? internal external strengths weaknesses opportunities threats if a looser structure helps you brainstorm, you can group positives and negatives to think broadly about your organization and its external environment. global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 positives negatives  strengths  assets  resources  opportunities  prospects  weaknesses  limitations  restrictions  threats  challenges below is a third option for structuring your swot analysis, which may be appropriate for a larger initiative that requires detailed planning. this "tows matrix" is adapted from fred david's strategic management text. strengths 1. 2. 3. 4. weaknesses 1. 2. 3. 4. opportunities 1. 2. 3. 4. opportunity-strength (os) strategies use the strengths to take advantage of opportunities 1. 2. opportunity-weakness (ow) strategies overcome weaknesses by taking advantage of opportunities 1. 2. threats 1. 2. 3. threat-strength (ts) strategies use strengths to avoid threats 1. 2. threat-weakness (tw) strategies minimize weaknesses and avoid threats 1. global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 4. 2. listing your internal factors: strengths and weaknesses (s, w) internal factors include your resources and experiences. general areas to consider:  human resources staff, volunteers, board members, target population  physical resources your location, building, equipment  financial grants, funding agencies, other sources of income  activities and processes programs you run, systems you employ  past experiences building blocks for learning and success, your reputation in the community don't be too modest when listing your strengths. if you're having difficulty naming them, start by simply listing your characteristics (e.g., we're small, we're connected to the neighborhood). some of these will probably be strengths. although the strengths and weakness of your organization are your internal qualities, don't overlook the perspective of people outside your group. identify strengths and weaknesses from both your own point of view and that of others, including those you serve. do others see problems--or assets--that you don't? how do you get information about how outsiders perceive your strengths and weaknesses? you may know already if you've listened to those you serve. if not, this might be the time to gather that type of information. see related sections for ideas on conducting focus groups, surveys, and listening sessions. listing external factors: opportunities and threats (o, t) cast a wide net for the external part of the assessment. no organization, group, program, or neighborhood is immune to outside events and forces. consider your connectedness, for better and worse, as you compile this part of your swot list. forces and facts that your group does not control include:  future trends in your field or the culture  the economy local, national, or international  funding sources foundations, donors, legislatures http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources/conduct-focus-groups/main http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources/conduct-surveys/main http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources/conduct-public-forums/main global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8  demographics changes in the age, race, gender, culture of those you serve or in your area  the physical environment (is your building in a growing part of town? is the bus company cutting routes?)  legislation (do new federal requirements make your job harder...or easier?)  local, national or international events how do you create a swot analysis? who develops the swot? the most common users of a swot analysis are team members and project managers who are responsible for decision-making and strategic planning. but don't overlook anyone in the creation stage! an individual or small group can develop a swot analysis, but it will be more effective if you take advantage of many stakeholders. each person or group offers a different perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of your program and has different experiences of both. likewise, one staff member, or volunteer or stakeholder may have information about an opportunity or threat that is essential to understanding your position and determining your future. when and where do you develop a swot analysis? a swot analysis is often created during a retreat or planning session that allows several hours for brainstorming and analysis. the best results come when the process is collaborative and inclusive. when creating the analysis, people are asked to pool their individual and shared knowledge and experience. the more relaxed, friendly and constructive the setting, the more truthful, comprehensive, insightful, and useful your analysis will be. how do you develop a swot analysis? steps for conducting a swot analysis:  designate a leader or group facilitator who has good listening and group process skills, and who can keep things moving and on track. global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9  designate a recorder to back up the leader if your group is large. use newsprint on a flip chart or a large board to record the analysis and discussion points. you can record later in a more polished fashion to share with stakeholders and to update.  introduce the swot method and its purpose in your organization. this can be as simple as asking, "where are we, where can we go?" if you have time, you could run through a quick example based on a shared experience or well-known public issue.  depending on the nature of your group and the time available, let all participants introduce themselves. then divide your stakeholders into smaller groups. if your retreat or meeting draws several groups of stakeholders together, make sure you mix the small groups to get a range of perspectives, and give them a chance to introduce themselves. o the size of these depends on the size of your entire group – breakout groups can range from three to ten. if the size gets much larger, some members may not participate.  have each group designate a recorder, and provide each with newsprint or dry erase board. direct them to create a swot analysis in the format you choose-a chart, columns, a matrix, or even a page for each quality. o give the groups 20-30 minutes to brainstorm and fill out their own strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats chart for your program, initiative or effort. encourage them not to rule out any ideas at this stage, or the next. o remind groups that the way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. refinement can come later. in this way, the swot analysis also supports valuable discussion within your group or organization as you honestly assess. o it helps to generate lots of comments about your organization and your program, and even to put them in multiple categories if that provokes thought. o once a list has been generated, it helps to refine it to the best 10 or fewer points so that the analysis can be truly helpful.  reconvene the group at the agreed-upon time to share results. gather information from the groups, recording on the flip-chart or board. collect and organize the differing groups' ideas and perceptions. o proceed in s-w-o-t order, recording strengths first, weaknesses second, etc. global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 o or you can begin by calling for the top priorities in each category -the strongest strength, most dangerous weakness, biggest opportunity, worst threat--and continue to work across each category. o ask one group at a time to report ("group a, what do you see as strengths?") you can vary which group begins the report so a certain group isn't always left "bringing up the end" and repeating points made by others. ("group b, let's start with you for weaknesses.") o or, you can open the floor to all groups ("what strengths have you noted?") for each category until all have contributed what they think is needed.  discuss and record the results. depending on your time frame and purpose: o come to some consensus about the most important items in each category o relate the analysis to your vision, mission, and goals o translate the analysis to action plans and strategies  if appropriate, prepare a written summary of the swot analysis to share with participants for continued use in planning and implementation. more ideas on conducting successful meetings can be found in community tool box resources on conducting public forums and listening sessions, conducting focus groups, and organizing a retreat. how do you use your swot analysis? better understanding the factors affecting your initiative put you in a better position for action. this understanding helps as you:  identify the issues or problems you intend to change  set or reaffirm goals  create an action plan as you consider your analysis, be open to the possibilities that exist within a weakness or threat. likewise, recognize that an opportunity can become a threat if everyone else sees the opportunity and plans to take advantage of it as well, thereby increasing your competition. finally, during your assessment and planning, you might keep an image in mind to help you make the most of a swot analysis: look for a "stretch," not just a "fit." as radha balamuralikrishna and john c. dugger of iowa state university point out, swot usually reflects your current position or situation. therefore one drawback is that it might not encourage openness to new possibilities. you can use swot to justify a course that has http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources/conduct-public-forums/main http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources/conduct-focus-groups/main http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/structure/training-and-technical-assistance/retreats/main global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 already been decided upon, but if your goal is to grow or improve, you will want to keep this in mind. summary a realistic recognition of the weaknesses and threats that exist for your effort is the first step to countering them with a robust set of strategies that build upon strengths and opportunities. a swot analysis identifies your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to assist you in making strategic plans and decisions. resources ku work group for community health and development. (2015). chapter 3: assessing community needs and resources. lawrence, ks: university of kansas. retrieved april 14, 2015 from the community tool box: http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-ofcontents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources ku work group for community health and development. (2015). chapter 3, section 14: swot analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. lawrence, ks: university of kansas. retrieved april 14, 2015 from the community tool box: http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-andresources/swot-analysis/main quality guide: swot analysis is a helpful guide from management sciences for health and united nations children's fund. mind tools: swot analysis provides a quick overview of swot david, f. (1993). strategic management, 4th ed. new york, ny: macmillan publishing company. jones, b. (1990). neighborhood planning: a guide for citizens and planners. chicago and washington, dc: planners press, american planning association. http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources/swot-analysis/main http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources/swot-analysis/main http://erc.msh.org/quality/ittools/itswot.cfm http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newtmc_05.htm global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 acknowledgments continuous work on the community tool box (from 1994 to present) has been sustained by funding and support from many dedicated groups and individuals, including funding from the robert wood johnson foundation and kansas health foundation, and ongoing support from the ku work group. the community tool box is a public service of the work group for community health and development at the university of kansas http://communityhealth.ku.edu/. the authors would also like to acknowledge the contributions of our many partners and colleagues, including those at the ku work group and throughout the world, who have helped to build and sustain the community tool box. community tool box team members include: stephen fawcett, ph.d. , kansas health foundation professor, applied behavioral science and director, work group for community health and development; jerry schultz, phd; co-director, work group for community health and development; christina holt, ma; associate director, community toolbox services; vincent francisco, phd; associate professor, dept of public health education, university of north carolina at greensboro; tom wolff, phd, president, tom wolff & associates; and bill berkowitz, phd, associate professor of psychology, university of massachusetts lowell. http://communityhealth.ku.edu/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 infusing community psychology practice competencies into doctoral training gabriel p. kuperminc wing yi chan scot seitz christyl wilson georgia state university keywords: community psychology practice competencies, education, doctoral training author biographies: gabriel kuperminc is professor of psychology and public health at georgia state university where he directs the doctoral program in community psychology. he is currently conducting two federally funded evaluations of youth mentoring programs. he directed the evaluation of georgia basics, a federally funded program of screening, brief intervention and referral to treatment (sbirt) for alcohol and drug use in healthcare settings. he consults on youth development and substance abuse prevention with various organizations, including the national mentoring resource center, the canadian women’s foundation, the georgia governor’s office on children and families, and the centers for disease control and prevention. dr. kuperminc is associate editor of the journal of adolescent research and was recently appointed as action editor for the journal of community psychology. he is a fellow of the american psychological association, the society for community research and action, and the society for applied anthropology. wing yi chan is an assistant professor of psychology at georgia state university.  her research focuses on promoting positive youth development among adolescents and young adults from diverse backgrounds.  her most recent research examines how civic and political participation can prevent problem behaviors and promote successful transition to adulthood.  for example, her recent projects investigate how to encourage immigrant adolescents and college students to engage in civic and political activities.  her work also addresses the development, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 implementation, and evaluation of school-based interventions (e.g., mentoring, servicelearning) designed to promote academic success. scot seitz, is a doctoral student in the community and clinical psychology program at georgia state university. mr. seitz has conducted research in both public health and community psychology. as an undergraduate at emory university, scot’s research focused on the transmission of infectious nematodes and viruses in the united states and bolivia. after teaching sixth grade science for two years as a teach for america corps member, scot became interested in the design and evaluation of positive youth development programs. currently, he is working with gabriel kuperminc to evaluate a youth mentoring program, a positive youth development afterschool program, and a teen pregnancy and hiv/aids prevention program. as a former educator and current graduate student, scot is also interested in creative approaches to graduate student training in both community and clinical psychology. christyl wilson  is a doctoral student in the developmental psychology program at georgia state university. prior to graduate school, christyl was a teach for america corps member and taught elementary school for 3 years. she is interested in positive youth development, education, and youth program evaluation.  currently, christyl works with dr. gabriel kuperminc to evaluate a group mentoring program and a sexual health intervention for youth. recommended citation: kuperminc, g.p., chan, w.y., seitz, s., and wilson, c. (2016). infusing community psychology practice competencies into doctoral training. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(4), pages 1-24. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 infusing community psychology practice competencies into doctoral training abstract since 2008, the georgia state university doctoral training program in community psychology has made several modifications to coursework requirements, qualifying examinations, community practicum requirements, and advisement processes. recognizing that graduates pursue trajectories ranging from independent consulting practice to academia, the primary goal was to provide greater flexibility in shaping training to match the types of careers that students envision. accordingly, the community psychology practice competencies and the closely aligned community psychology value proposition provide a useful framework for helping guide students and advisors in selecting relevant coursework and field experiences that match the students’ training goals. in this paper, we focus on two specific areas in which we have infused the competencies. the first area is practicum field-work, for which we have created a process built around the value proposition: students identify a potential field experience, work with community contacts to develop a statement of work focused on building experience and expertise in as many as four competency areas, and negotiate relevant deliverables. the second is advisement: students are asked in their year-end progress reports to reflect on the extent to which they have gained experience with each competency during the year, and to identify a subset of focal competencies to gain experience and expertise in the coming year. with their advisors, students can then use this information to map out and modify their training plans. the paper describes the materials we have developed and provides preliminary quantitative and qualitative information about how the use of the competencies is beginning to benefit students, advisors, and community partners. we describe successes and challenges we are encountering and conclude with the next steps we anticipate in the evolution of our training program. since 2008, the community psychology doctoral program curriculum at georgia state university (gsu) has undergone a series of modifications that reflect our faculty’s vision of aligning the training we provide to the wide range of career paths that our students pursue after graduation. a set of 18 core competencies associated with community psychology practice in the united states (dalton & wolfe, 2012; wolfe, chien scott, & jimenez, 2013) informed some of these modifications. in this article, we discuss how the community psychology program at gsu has begun to incorporate these competencies into the curriculum. we also present a case study to illustrate how a focus on competencies can enhance students’ applied field experiences (kuperminc, 2011). the refinements to our curriculum were motivated by a shift in the composition of the faculty and a recognition that we needed to attend to the diverse interests of our students, preparing them for careers both within and outside of the academy. the need to train students for jobs outside of the academy has ignited rigorous discussion within the field (dalton & julian, 2009) and the discussion has been fueled in part by dziadkowiec & jimenez’s (2009) summary of results from a survey of graduate training programs conducted by the society for community research and action’s (scra) council of education programs and the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 practice group (now recognized as the practice council). those authors concluded that many community psychology programs did not have specific criteria in place to evaluate their training of practitioners. instead, programs tended to emphasize skills that are closely aligned with the work of academic community psychologists, such as program development and applied/community research, but underemphasize skills that more closely characterize the work of practitioners in the field, such as collaboration, consultation, and advocacy. building on the results of the survey and expertise of community psychology practitioners, the task group on defining practice competencies developed a set of 18 competencies to promote more comprehensive and meaningful training in community psychology programs. these core competencies encompass five domains (displayed in the results of table 3). in parallel to the development of the core competencies, ratcliffe and neigher (2010) spearheaded an effort to develop a “value proposition” (p. 5) in order to communicate in practical terms the types of knowledge and skills that community psychologists can offer to a wide range of community settings. by emphasizing what community psychologists do, the value proposition, therefore, offers a means of marketing community psychology competencies to an external audience (see table 1). community psychology skill sets 1. plan and conduct community-based applied research. 2. evaluate programs/services. 3. incorporate psychological, ecological and systems level understanding into holistic, sustainable community development processes. 4. contribute to organizational assessment, program planning and development. 5. locate, evaluate, and apply information from diverse information sources to new situations. 6. facilitate small and large group processes. 7. communicate effectively; disseminate information in both technical and lay language with diverse stakeholder groups. 8. build community and organizational capacities. 9. build and maintain collaborations with a network of clients, communities, organizations, and other involved professions. 10. apply leadership, supervisory and mentoring skills. 11. develop organizational and community resources. 12. develop additional skill sets, consistent with individual interest and organization needs. table 1: summary of community psychology value proposition competency-based graduate training in community psychology the development of community psychology practice competencies has occurred in the context of a broader movement within professional psychology toward identification, training, and assessment of competencies as a means to ensure high quality in the delivery of human services (kaslow et al., 2004). while recognizing a longstanding resistance among community http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 psychologists to the adoption of rigid accreditation requirements for professional practice in the field (dalton & julian, 2009), proponents of the competencies have argued for the need to identify and articulate a core set of skills and competencies that offer a “clearer and consistent understanding of the qualities of a community psychologist that could enhance the ability of the field to advertise for jobs and market graduates” (wolfe et al., 2013, p. 2). accordingly, the practice competencies have been seen as offering guidance for the training of effective practitioners and for defining and marketing the field to potential consumers and community partners. it is with these dual objectives of articulating a coherent framework to guide training and communicating the value of our work to external audiences that gsu began to infuse the competencies into its doctoral program. the context at gsu the 30th anniversary celebration of gsu’s community psychology program in 2013 offered an opportunity to reconnect with alumni, primarily through personal contacts and social media. we have been able to gather current or recent employment information for 61 alumni who earned a ph.d. either in community psychology or our dual community-clinical program from 1996 through 2015, including 43 graduates of the community program and 18 graduates of the clinical-community program (see table 2). among the community program graduates, 28% (n = 12) were most recently employed in academic positions (including tenure track and non-tenure track teaching or research faculty positions). largely due to gsu’s location in atlanta, a similar proportion community (n = 43) clinical community (n = 18) total (n = 61) ƒ % ƒ % ƒ % academic 12 28% 4 22% 16 26% government/public health 13 30% 1 6% 14 23% community practice 18 42% 2 11% 20 33% clinical practice 0 0% 11 61% 11 18% table 2: types of employment among current or recent ph.d. graduates (30%, n = 13) of community graduates were in government/public health positions, typically serving as behavioral scientists at the centers for disease control and prevention. the largest proportion (42%, n = 18), were practitioners employed in positions that included community consultation, program development, or evaluation. among the 18 graduates of the clinical-community program, the largest proportion was employed in clinical practice (61%, n = 11), in positions that often included some engagement in community consultation, program development, or evaluation. the others were employed in academic/clinical settings (22%, n = 4), community practice settings (11%, n = 2), and government/public health settings (6%, n = 1). this snapshot of alumni underscores the need for a flexible curriculum that can prepare students for a broad range of professional career paths. in discussions of how best to maintain a coherent program that offers comprehensive training in the field and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 empowers students to take greater control over the direction of their training, our faculty agreed that it would be important to shift some of the responsibility for choosing courses and practicum field placements to students and their advisors. the competencies could then be used as a framework to help students, in consultation with their advisors, to be more intentional about identifying and working toward their unique training goals. the competencies also offer a framework for ongoing reflection about the extent to which students are gaining exposure to, experience with, and expertise in (kloos, 2010) the areas of competence they view as most critical to their professional development. infusing the competencies into advisement and the practicum experience as we considered the ways in which we could infuse an explicit use of the competencies, we quickly realized that it would be necessary to adapt them to recognize skills associated with doing clinical work in community settings that characterize the training of our dualdegree clinical-community students. moreover, we recognized that we might also need to further adapt the competencies to account for specialized skills that align with careers at the intersection of community psychology and public health. while such adaptations will likely evolve over time, we settled on three areas in which to begin introducing the competencies in our curriculum: the introductory course that all doctoral students take their first year, student annual reviews, and practicum field placements. in the paragraphs that follow, we describe the steps that we have taken to date, and offer some preliminary lessons learned by summarizing results of data that we have gathered and providing a brief case example. introductory course students take an introductory course in community psychology during their first semester in the doctoral program. one way of introducing the competencies has been to assign students to learn about the career of one or more community psychologists, either through readings (e.g., kelly & song, 2004; song & kelly, 2008) or through making direct contact with a practicing community psychologist via a resource provided by the society for community research and action (scra, 2016). in preparing a presentation to the class, students are encouraged to delve into and reflect on the salience of various competencies for different career paths. annual review students are required to complete an annual report each spring, summarizing their accomplishments during the year. the student’s report is then used for discussion during a formal advisement meeting and in the preparation of an annual assessment of student progress. as part of this assessment we incorporated a simple survey, asking students to (1) indicate the competencies they have been exposed to during the past year, and (2) select up to 5 competencies that they would like to gain experience with during the upcoming year (see appendix a). the former provides our faculty with information that can help assess areas of strength and gaps in the overall training program, and the latter provides a starting point for discussion between advisors and graduate students about course selection, the types of field placements to pursue for required practica, and other activities related to the students’ training. table 3 shows results from the 2015-2016 academic year annual report survey. not surprisingly, the majority of students reported exposure to most of the competencies listed in the area of foundational principles, although only about one in three students reported exposure to #4: community inclusion and partnership. similar to findings in dziadkowiec and jimenez’s (2009) report, students in our program were more likely to report exposure http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 competency exposed in past year % focus for next year % foundational principles 1 ecological perspectives 18 0.78 5 0.22 2 empowerment 12 0.52 8 0.35 3 sociocultural and cross-cultural competence 18 0.78 4 0.17 4 community inclusion and partnership 8 0.35 5 0.22 5 ethical, reflective practice 17 0.74 1 0.04 community program development and management 6 program development, implementation, and management 7 0.30 6 0.26 7 prevention and health promotion 8 0.35 9 0.39 community organization and capacity building 8 community leadership and mentoring 9 0.39 4 0.17 9 small and large group processes 7 0.30 2 0.09 10 resource development 11 0.48 1 0.04 11 consultation and organizational development 15 0.65 3 0.13 community and social change 12 collaboration and coalition development 6 0.26 4 0.17 13 community development 6 0.26 3 0.13 14 community organizing and community advocacy 8 0.35 5 0.22 15 public policy analysis, development, and advocacy 5 0.22 5 0.22 16 community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness 13 0.56 3 0.13 community research 17 participatory community research 6 0.26 6 0.26 18 program evaluation 12 0.52 9 0.39 additional competencies 19 clinical community competency 4 0.17 6 0.26 20 other skills 2 0.09 6 0.26 21 other academic research activities not captured above 12 0.52 2 0.09 table 3: exposure to competencies in past year (check all that apply) and focus for next year (select up to 5). annual review survey responses for 2016 (n = 23). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 to many of the competencies associated with applied research (e.g., program evaluation) and academic community psychology. nearly all of the descriptions of “other” types of competencies involved training in advanced methodology and statistics, such as geographic information systems and multilevel modeling. further analysis of these data revealed that students in our dual clinicalcommunity program (n = 9) reported exposure to fewer competencies (m = 6.56, sd = 3.05) than did other community students (n = 13, m = 9.77, sd = 5.28).1 also, 1st and 2nd year students (n = 7) reported exposure to a higher number (m = 9.14, sd = 4.98) of competencies in the past year than did 3rd and 4th year students (n = 10; m = 8.40, sd = 4.58) and students in their 5th or higher year (n= 4; m = 5.75, sd = 4.11). reflecting the diversity of career paths that we expect our students to pursue, students highlighted a wide range of competencies that they wished to pursue in the upcoming year, which were distributed across all 18 competencies. practicum students in our doctoral program are required to complete 3 semester-long practica in community settings. the vast majority of practica are unpaid; however, when funds are available, it is acceptable for students to be compensated for their work. whereas faculty have ongoing relationships with various community organizations, students have the freedom to negotiate practicum experiences with organizations and community settings of their choosing. in order to communicate the type of work that our students can complete, our faculty’s task was to develop materials that would describe potential practicum activities in a language that would be meaningful for various community agencies, and for community partners with whom we do our work. for this 1 given that these data reflect responses from all of the students who were currently in residence at the purpose, we felt that the language of the competencies contained too much professional jargon and technical terminology to be accessible to many community partners, and concluded that the language used in the value proposition (ratcliffe & neigher, 2010) would be more useful. using this language, we developed materials to assist students in presenting themselves to community agencies and negotiating a feasible project that would produce concrete and meaningful deliverables. we developed a flowchart outlining the steps that students would take to identify a site and negotiate terms of a practicum project (see appendix b). we also developed a one-page flyer describing the types of “services” that our practicum students are able to provide (see appendix c). in addition, we developed a statement of work listing items in the value proposition that would be the focus of students’ practicum work, a format for detailing a work plan with a timeline and expected deliverables, and a form for obtaining formal agreement among the student, advisor and site supervisor (see appendix d). we reviewed materials from practica completed from 2014 to 2016. practicum placement settings varied from clinical settings and trauma centers to local evaluation firms and community organizations. students engaged in different types of practicum activities including analyzing data, performing needs assessments, facilitating psychosocial support groups for adolescents, designing outreach efforts, developing surveys, and conducting field observations. table 4 presents a summary of the knowledge and skill areas endorsed by 12 students that completed community practica between 2014 and 2016. the most common knowledge and skill areas involved applied research, including program university, and the small sample size, we did not conduct statistical analysis of group differences. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 evaluation, organizational assessment, and dissemination. less frequent were knowledge and skill areas that involved community capacity building and community development. a case example a new relationship formed with one community organization, the international rescue committee (irc), offers a case study of one setting in which this practicum process has been successful. irc is an international refugee resettlement organization that has offices across the globe. irc’s atlanta office is the largest resettlement agency in the state of georgia. representatives of irc contacted our program chair and expressed an interest in developing a partnership with the community psychology program. they were especially interested in evaluation of their various resettlement programs to document longterm success. faculty met with representatives of irc and learned more about the needs and strengths of the organization. after a careful discussion, it was agreed that the practicum program was the best way to provide needed services and to develop a long-term partnership with irc. subsequently, we invited irc to come to one of our brown bag meetings to discuss possible practicum opportunities. prior to their presentation, faculty shared the newly updated statement of work and the value proposition document with irc and explained to them details of the practicum requirements, the skills of our students, and the training provided by our program. after a representative from irc presented at our brown bag meeting, several students expressed interest in working there and one was able to arrange a practicum project for the following semester. using the value proposition document and statement of work, the student negotiated with her site supervisor to develop a project, a timeline, and a list of deliverables. the project addressed the following competencies: #1 (plan and conduct community-based applied research), #2 (evaluate programs and services), and #5 (assessment of organization or community). specifically, the project involved developing logic models for each of irc’s four programs and focused on delivery of health services, economic empowerment, case management, and community engagement. irc wanted to use the logic models to aid subsequent grant seeking and program evaluation. the student, along with her faculty and site supervisors realized that substantial stakeholder involvement would be necessary if the student was to complete such an ambitious project in a single semester. the student was able to meet multiple times with the directors of each program within the organization. reflecting on the experience, the student wrote the following: i … learned that, as an evaluator intraining, i have a lot of knowledge and insight to offer to these program managers. the leadership team did not perceive the same amount of overlap and integration between services and programs as i, an outsider, did. i was impressed by how much each program had to gain from one another and i was excited to cast light [on the areas of overlap]. i feel like this helped in creating a … paradigm shift among the leadership … [toward] building bridges more. as is evident in the logic models, each program director and… program … [is] essential in accomplishing each goal. although each goal may have a point person and many different funding sources which force programs into silos, i saw the leadership team begin to emphasize program integration and communication more each time i spoke with them. although my job was to create logic models for the irc, i feel that i also helped improve their sense of community among the program http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 knowledge and skill areas number of times endorsed 1 plan and conduct community-based applied research  includes planning studies and participatory community research 3 2 evaluate programs and services  develop evaluation designs  collect, analyze, report and/or interpret evaluation data according to professionally-accepted standards 10 3 sustainable community development  work with a community to develop a vision and take actions to achieve it 0 4 program development, implementation, and management  design, implement, and sustain culturally and contextually appropriate programs in collaboration with stakeholders 3 5 assessment of organization or community  assess organizational/community needs, strengths, and resources 7 6 build community or organizational capacities  empower community/organization to develop sustainable leadership and capacities 1 7 develop organizational or community resources  identify resources and challenges at multiple levels  help integrate the use of human and material resources, including community/organization assets and social capital  search for, select, and write grants 3 8 apply relevant information to new situations  locate, evaluate, and apply relevant information from diverse sources to new situations 5 9 facilitate small and large group processes  partner with groups to enhance their capacity to work together productively 1 10 community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness  communicate information to various stakeholders  disseminate information in both technical and lay language, as needed 5 11 build and maintain collaborations  facilitate inclusive coalitions with stakeholders  maintain a network of clients, communities, organizations, and other involved professions  assist in negotiating goals and mediating partnerships around a particular issue 1 12 apply leadership, supervisory, and mentoring skills  collaboratively lead with individuals and groups  supervise others through a strengths-based framework  support individuals as they identify personal strengths and community resources 2 13 public policy, analysis, and development  create or analyze public policy  translate research findings into useful recommendations for policy 4 14 direct services provision  provide psychoeducation  conduct psychological services or assessments 2 15 other  please specify: 2 table 4: exposure to knowledge and skills during practicum experience (mark up to 4) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 i feel that i also helped improve their sense of community among the program directors. for the past few months i’ve served as a bridge between the programs and now it seems that they want to build some [bridges] of their own. to ensure that our newly developed practicum process is useful for the community partners, we also requested feedback from the site supervisor who worked closely with the student. prior to participating in gsu’s practicum, irc had recently identified a new strategic plan. thus, the leadership team at irc was looking for students to help with evaluating the feasibility of the strategic plan. together, the site supervisor and the student decided that developing logic models to identify how each program area is related to the overall strategic plan would be a helpful product for the organization. the site supervisor was complimentary of the process through which the student articulated skills that she expected to acquire. she found the skills very relevant to the organization’s work. she also noted that many of the leadership members felt that they had the opportunity to learn new skills while working with the student. she said, “program evaluation, facilitation of planning, and others are concrete skills that few leadership team members have experience with or have the capacity to do well, and it was a huge benefit to have the student identify what needed to be done and lead the facilitation.” finally, the site supervisor suggested that more frequent check-ins with the student’s gsu advisor would be very helpful to ensure that the organization meets the needs of the students. overall, both the organization and the student found the newly updated practicum experience helpful and effective. the organization received a final product that met their shortand long-term needs. also, the statement of work and the checklist of skills assisted the organization to develop a feasible and meaningful practicum experience collaboratively with the student. the updated flowchart also makes the negotiation process more transparent and manageable for the student. more importantly, the student reported feelings of competency and accomplishment because the student was able to initiate and document concrete changes within the organization. conclusions and next steps we have found many aspects of the cp practice competencies and the value proposition to be helpful in our annual review and practicum processes. incorporation of the cp competencies in the annual review has encouraged students to reflect on their career goals and the specific training they want to receive before graduation. in addition, the value proposition has been especially useful for guiding students’ decisions about the types of practicum experiences they want to pursue. further, the value proposition enables us to communicate effectively the “services” that our practicum students can offer to community organizations, and enables students and their community partners to establish clear expectations about practicum projects and deliverables. although we have found the competencies to be helpful, we also identified challenges to effectively using them for our annual review and practicum processes. specifically, in the first year that we began incorporating the competencies into the annual review, students reported wanting to focus on most or all of the competencies during the next academic year (even though students were asked to limit their selection to only 5 competencies that they wanted to emphasize during the upcoming year). unfortunately, without greater focus on a smaller number of competencies these ratings offered little guidance to advisors for recommending coursework or practicum placements the students could focus on during the upcoming year. it is possible that the wide range of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 competencies was overwhelming to students and they had difficulty determining which competencies were most important for their career goals. as the competencies are further developed, it may be useful to further delineate foundational, core, and specialized competencies (kaslow, 2004). the current competencies list includes a set of five foundational principles. these foundational competencies represent the basic values and perspectives that all community psychologists should possess (e.g., an ecological perspective, ethical and reflective practice). for the remaining competencies, it may be helpful to differentiate between core and specialized competencies. core competencies represent knowledge, attitudes, and skills that should be developed by all community psychologists, although individuals will develop each of the competencies to varying degrees (e.g., program evaluation, consultation). finally, specialized competencies are required for work in specific subspecialties of community psychology (e.g., community organizing, academic community psychology). this categorization of cp practice competencies may help students focus on a more targeted set of competencies in their graduate training (specifically, the foundational and core competencies along with a select few specialized competencies). in addition, categorizing competencies as foundational, core, and specialized would be useful in identifying the unique strengths of graduate training programs. it is likely that most graduate programs already emphasize the foundational competencies; however, given the relatively small size of most programs, it is unlikely that every program will be able to cover all of the specialty areas represented in the field. further elaboration of the competencies has the potential to enhance the “truth in advertising” that applicants seek as they search for graduate programs that can best serve their professional goals. dzidic, breen, and bishop (2013) critiqued the focus of the competencies on specific knowledge, attitudes, and skills rather than on the orientations and values that community psychologists should embody. they argued that the competencies should be “positioned as tools for understanding, rather than as understandings” (dzidic et al., 2013, p. 2). the distinction between foundational, core, and specialized competencies may provide a structure to address dzidic et al.’s concern. specifically, the foundational competencies can represent community psychology orientations and values (e.g., empowerment perspective, appreciation for diversity) whereas core and specialized competencies can emphasize specific community psychology knowledge and skills. although the foundational competencies may need to be revised (e.g., adding certain virtues that community psychologists should embody), the distinction between foundational and core/specialized competencies can help clarify our “way of being” and our “way of doing” (dzidic et al., 2013, p. 6). such further differentiation of the practice competencies could also be useful for graduate training programs by specifying the broad orientations and values that should be fostered as well as the more specific knowledge and skills that should be developed by students. in addition, the cp competencies may have been more useful in our annual review process had we asked students to indicate the level of training they sought for each competency. kloos (2010) introduced an approach to rating the level of exposure, experience, and expertise that students obtain. when completing the annual review, students could indicate the level of exposure, experience, and expertise they hope to receive for each competency, thereby allowing students to express their interest in a wide range of competencies while also http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 specifying the degree to which they want advanced training. in conclusion, gsu’s initial steps to infuse the competencies into doctoral training in community psychology have emphasized familiarizing students and faculty with the competencies and to begin using them as a framework for guiding individual and program-wide decisions about training. we believe that these initial steps have been successful in that they provide students and advisors a clear and common language for identifying goals and tailoring coursework and field experiences to students’ professional goals. a next step is to refine the processes for assessing students’ achievement of the competencies while they are in graduate school and tracking the critical areas for ongoing professional development once our students move on to their careers. references dalton, j., & julian, d. 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(2004). competencies conference: future directions in education and credentialing in professional psychology. journal of clinical psychology, 60(7), 699–712. http://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.20016 kelly, j. g., & song, a. v. (2004). introduction. journal of prevention & intervention in the community, 28(1–2), 1–14. http://doi.org/10.1300/j005v28n01_01 kloos, b. (2010). creating settings for training in collaborative community practice. the community psychologist, 43(2), 10. kuperminc, g. (2011). heeding the call to develop a model of professional training in community psychology. the community psychologist, 44(1), 17–19. ratcliffe, a., & neigher, b. (2010). what is a community psychologist? why should i hire one? the community psychologist, 43(2), 5. society for community research and action. (2016). connect to a practitioner. retrieved may 27, 2016, from http://www.scra27.org/what-wedo/practice/connect-practitioner/ song, a. v., & kelly, j. g. (2008). introduction. journal of prevention & intervention in the community, 35(1), 1–9. http://doi.org/10.1300/j005v35n01_01 wolfe, s. m., chien scott, v., & jimenez, t. r. (2013). community psychology practice competencies: a global perspective. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), 1–9. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 appendix a annual review survey: community and community-clinical competencies below is a list of competencies for community psychology. the purpose of this list is to help you identify competencies that you have been exposed to and those that you want to focus on next year. please indicate the competencies that you have been exposed to in the past year by checking boxes in the first column. the past year includes the current spring semester and the past fall and summer semesters. you may have been exposed to the competencies through coursework, research, and/or practica and other applied activities. for instance, many first-year students are usually exposed to many competencies through the introduction to community psychology course, whereas fifth-year students may have been exposed to only a few competencies throughout the past year. please also indicate up to five competencies that you would like to focus on throughout the upcoming year by checking the boxes in the second column. this includes the upcoming summer, fall, and spring semesters. note: the below competencies were adapted from the competencies of community psychology practice (http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/practice/18-competencies-community-psychologypractice/) competency select each competency that you have been exposed to during the past year select no more than 5 competencies that you want to focus on throughout the upcoming year 1. ecological perspectives  apply ecological perspectives  identify processes of interdependence, resource exchange, adaptation and succession in settings  use an ecological level of analysis □ □ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/practice/18-competencies-community-psychology-practice/) http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/practice/18-competencies-community-psychology-practice/) global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 2. empowerment  utilize a collective empowerment perspective  support marginalized communities in their efforts to participate in community decision-making and to gain access to resources  develop genuine and inclusive partnerships with community members and organizations □ □ 3. sociocultural and cross-cultural competence  value, integrate, and bridge multiple worldviews, cultures, and identities  analyze social inequality and power imbalances  assess power dynamics and use this assessment to support community building and advocacy  understand how one’s assumptions affect partnership with community □ □ 4. community inclusion and partnership  support representation and respect for all community members  encourage divergent perspectives on community and social issues  facilitate empowerment among those with less power in the community □ □ 5. ethical, reflective practice  continually reflect on how your values and life experiences influence your work  identify and address your own ethical issues □ □ 6. program development, implementation, and management  assess community strengths and needs  develop inclusive and sustainable partnerships with stakeholders and community members  design, implement, and sustain culturally and contextually appropriate programs in collaboration with stakeholders □ □ 7. prevention and health promotion  implement programs that embrace a prevention and health promotion perspective  identify resources and challenges at multiple levels □ □ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 8. community leadership and mentoring  develop trusting relationships with community leaders and members  collaborate with individuals and/or groups to enhance their capacity to lead effectively  support individuals as they identify personal strengths and community resources  teach and facilitate critical reflection among community leaders and members □ □ 9. small and large group processes  work with community groups to enhance their capacity to work together productively □ □ 10. resource development  identify and integrate the use of human and material resources, including community assets and social capital  conduct needs assessment of community and/or organization  utilize knowledge from assessment to seek funding and to develop programs needed by community □ □ 11. consultation and organizational development  assess organizational needs and resources  develop partnership with members  facilitate learning, planning, and decision-making □ □ 12. collaboration and coalition development  facilitate inclusive coalition to represent all segments of the community  assist in negotiating goals and mediate partnerships to achieve collective actions  maintain partnerships with all members and stakeholders of the community □ □ 13. community development  work with a community to develop a vision and take actions to achieve it  facilitate and/or enhance community efforts to identify needs and goals  empower community to develop sustainable resources and leadership □ □ 14. community organizing and community advocacy  work collaboratively with community members to improve community conditions through organizing and advocacy  assist members in creating sustainable systems change □ □ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 15. public policy analysis, development, and advocacy  create or analyze public policy  build and sustain effective relationships with policy makers and elected officials  translate research findings into useful recommendations for policy □ □ 16. community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness  communicate information to various segments of the public in order to strengthen competencies and awareness, or for advocacy  tailor information to different stakeholders for their use □ □ 17. participatory community research  collaborate with community partners to plan and conduct research  employ diverse research methods to meet and address the needs of the community  take contextual influences into consideration when analyzing data  communicate the research findings to community members to help them pursue community goals □ □ 18. program evaluation  partner with community members to promote program improvement and program accountability to stakeholders and funders  transfer knowledge of evaluation to community members  conduct evaluations that adhere to professionally accepted standards □ □ 19. academic research (activities not captured above) □ □ 20. community-clinical competency: therapy, psychological services, or assessment skills  conduct psychological services or assessments □ □ 21. other (please specify in the box below)  e.g., specific methodological skills such as hlm □ □ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 appendix b flowchart for the practicum process contact site or organization identify a site supervisor identify a site supervisor pick a site or organization resources for identifying a practicum site include faculty, other students, the completed practicum list on d2l, your own experience and interests. complete a statement of work work with site supervisor and faculty supervisor. must be signed by all three parties register for the practicum: complete “request of authorization to register for psych 9970” form and obtain program chair’s signature. turn form in to kristy hill so that you can be authorized to register identify a faculty supervisor typically your primary advisor contact your advisor http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 appendix c community psychology practicum georgia state university (rev. 11/2015) what is the community psychology practicum? the community psychology practicum enables current doctoral students to work with community organizations for at least one academic semester (fall, spring, or summer). the doctoral student can offer a range of services including:  evaluation of programs and services  development and/or implementation of programs  resource identification and acquisition, including grant writing  development of needs assessments  public policy analysis and development  building and maintaining collaborations  community education  direct services provision  planning and conducting communitybased applied research how can i work with a community psychology practicum student? 1. inform the director of the community psychology program that you would like to work with a practicum student (see contact information below). please include a brief description of your organization, the type of work that would be involved in a practicum, the expected time commitment (usually an average of 8-10 hours per week during the fall and spring semesters or 16-20 hours per week during the summer), and contact information for the person that interested students should contact. 2. interested students will communicate directly with the contact person. 3. select a student to work with (either informally or through a formal interview process). 4. meet with the practicum student to complete a statement of work document. this document will outline the formal expectations of both the site supervisor and the practicum student. the final version will be signed by the student, the site supervisor, and the student’s faculty advisor at georgia state. who do i contact if i have additional questions? please contact the director of the community psychology program, dr. gabriel kuperminc (gkuperminc@gsu.edu or 404-413-6281), with any additional questions. you can find information about georgia state’s community psychology program at http://psychology.gsu.edu/graduate/areas-of-study/community-program/. you can find information about the field of community psychology http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/whatcommunity-psychology/ . http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:gkuperminc@gsu.edu http://psychology.gsu.edu/graduate/areas-of-study/community-program/ http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/what-community-psychology/ http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/what-community-psychology/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 appendix d practicum statement of work community and clinical-community practica revised february 2015 the write-up for the statement of work (sow) has three components. although they are described in a ‘linear’ order, completing these components may require some negotiation and multiple iterations before arriving at a final sow. students are encouraged early to allow sufficient time prior to the semester in which the practicum will be completed. 1. site information after the student has a preliminary discussion about the practicum idea with the faculty supervisor, she or he should go to the practicum site and complete the site information section with the principal on-site contact. the student then discusses the completed form with the faculty supervisor to obtain the information needed to assess the knowledge and skills that will be gained through the practicum experience and write up a project description. 2. assessment of knowledge & skills based on conversations with the site supervisor, the student will complete an assessment of knowledge and skills. the assessment is used to help the faculty supervisor to determine whether the site and expected experience meet the practicum requirement. 3. project description upon discussion with site supervisor and faculty supervisor, student will write a description of the proposed project. it should be approximately one page long. it should include responsibilities of the student (including time commitment and on-site hours, etc.), the gsu supervisor, and those at the practicum site as appropriate. the project description should also include a timeline with due dates and descriptions of deliverables that are part of the student's responsibilities. once approved by the faculty supervisor and agreed upon with the site supervisor and the student, the three parts of the statement of work (i.e., site information, assessment of knowledge and skills, and project description) should be signed by all three parties (student, faculty and site supervisors), indicating their agreement regarding the nature of the practicum and its expectations. the final statement of work document with signatures should be emailed to the site supervisor, faculty advisor, and community program chair. the signatures can be electronic, or a scanned copy of the signature page can be included. the student must also complete a registration form to be signed by the community program chair. for clc practica, the form must also be signed by the director of clinical training or his/her designee. note that the registration form is due 1 week prior to the fee deadline each semester. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 statement of work community and clinical-community practicum student name check one: community practicum or clinical-community practicum i. site information date completed: semester/yr of practicum: fall spring summer / year title of practicum project, if applicable: name, address and website of practicum site/organization: mark an “x” to indicate practicum type (see community practicum policies): research applied name of gsu community faculty sponsor/supervisor: what will be your role(s) at this placement: supervisee consultant estimated number of hours per week required by this practicum project: name, title, phone number and e-mail address of on-site practicum supervisor/client: http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 ii. assessment of knowledge and skills fill in the table with assistance from your on-site supervisor/client. mark up to 4 activities (by placing an “x” in the boxes in the second column) that will serve as your primary activities during the practicum. knowledge and skill areas* primary activities for the practicum (mark up to 4 by placing an “x” in the below boxes) 1. plan and conduct community-based applied research  includes planning studies and participatory community research 2. evaluate programs and services  develop evaluation designs  collect, analyze, report and/or interpret evaluation data according to professionally-accepted standards 3. sustainable community development  work with a community to develop a vision and take actions to achieve it 4. program development, implementation, and management  design, implement, and sustain culturally and contextually appropriate programs in collaboration with stakeholders 5. assessment of organization or community  assess organizational/community needs, strengths, and resources 6. build community or organizational capacities  empower community/organization to develop sustainable leadership and capacities 7. develop organizational or community resources  identify resources and challenges at multiple levels  help integrate the use of human and material resources, including community/organization assets and social capital  search for, select, and write grants 8. apply relevant information to new situations  locate, evaluate, and apply relevant information from diverse sources to new situations 9. facilitate small and large group processes  partner with groups to enhance their capacity to work together productively 10. community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness  communicate information to various stakeholders http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23  disseminate information in both technical and lay language, as needed 11. build and maintain collaborations  facilitate inclusive coalitions with stakeholders  maintain a network of clients, communities, organizations, and other involved professions  assist in negotiating goals and mediating partnerships around a particular issue 12. apply leadership, supervisory, and mentoring skills  collaboratively lead with individuals and groups  supervise others through a strengths-based framework  support individuals as they identify personal strengths and community resources 13. public policy, analysis, and development  create or analyze public policy  translate research findings into useful recommendations for policy 14. direct services provision  provide psychoeducation  conduct psychological services or assessments 15. other  please specify: *the knowledge and skill areas were adapted from the community psychology value proposition and the competencies for community psychology practice we are always interested in new practicum opportunities for students. if this site needs expertise or offers opportunities that are not part of your practicum, please make a note below. notes: http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.scra27.org/files/4513/9007/7333/evidence_based_cp_value_proposition__final_20110829.pdf http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/practice/18-competencies-community-psychology-practice/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 iii. project description describe your responsibilities (including time commitment and on-site hours, etc.), and the responsibilities of the gsu supervisor, and those at the practicum site as appropriate. include a timeline with due dates and descriptions of deliverables that are part of the student's responsibilities. you may attach additional documents if needed. deliverables table (you may use this table or attach a separate table): key deliverables date due comments 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. additional notes: signatures: student: date: site supervisor: date: gsu faculty supervisor: date: http://www.gjcpp.org/ infusing community psychology practice competencies into doctoral training competency-based graduate training in community psychology the context at gsu infusing the competencies into advisement and the practicum experience a case example conclusions and next steps below is a list of competencies for community psychology. the purpose of this list is to help you identify competencies that you have been exposed to and those that you want to focus on next year. please indicate the competencies that you have been exposed to in the past year by checking boxes in the first column. the past year includes the current spring semester and the past fall and summer semesters. you may have been exposed to the competen... please also indicate up to five competencies that you would like to focus on throughout the upcoming year by checking the boxes in the second column. this includes the upcoming summer, fall, and spring semesters. note: the below competencies were adapted from the competencies of community psychology practice (http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/practice/18-competencies-community-psychology-practice/) global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 thinking through our processes: how the ucsc community psychology research & action team strives to embody ethical, critically reflexive anti-racist feminist praxis by regina day langhout1, erin r. ellison1, danielle kohfeldt2, angela nguyen1, jesica siham fernandez3, janelle m. silva4, david l. gordon, jr1, and stephanie tam rosas1 keywords: community psychology practice competencies, ethical and reflective practice, research & action team, critically reflexive anti-racist feminist praxis author biographies: dr. regina langhout is a professor of psychology and the provost of oakes college at the university of california santa cruz. her research focuses on critical empowerment in educational and neighborhood settings. her primary research takes place in elementary schools and neighborhoods that serve working class and working poor african american, latinx, and white students. she uses a participatory action research (par) paradigm to critically examine schools and neighborhoods. in her spare time, she enjoys cycling, hiking, cooking, and playing pokémon go. erin rose ellison received her ma in community development and planning at clark university in 2005, and is a doctoral candidate (abd) in social psychology at the university of california, santa cruz. her research interests include: community organizing, theories of empowerment, liberation psychology, solidarity and intergroup collaboration, prefigurative politics, and youth development in community and school contexts. she is currently an organizer and legislative policy analyst for the uaw 2865, the union representing over 14,000 studentworkers across the university of california system. dr. danielle kohfeldt is an assistant professor of community psychology at california state university long beach. she earned a b.a. in psychology and english literature from the university of san diego, an m.s. in social work from san diego state university, and a ph.d. in social psychology from uc 1 university of california, santa cruz 2 bridgewater state university 3 santa clara university 4 university of washington, bothell http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 santa cruz. as a social-community psychologist, danielle is interested in empowering contexts that support members of subordinated groups as social change agents. her program of research focuses broadly on formal and informal learning environments (e.g., after-school programs, community organizing groups) and how these settings facilitate or hinder individual and collective empowerment and well-being. much of her work is community-based and often combines arts-based methods and action. angela nguyen, m.s., is a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the university of california, santa cruz. her research centers the experiences within vietnamese american refugee and im/migrant communities. she also examines the ways in which the specific historical and political contexts for when and how different groups leave vietnam and enter the u.s. influence life narratives, oral histories, and community engagement. dr. jesica siham fernandez received her phd from uc santa cruz. she is currently a post-doctoral fellow in the international youth organizing study (cuny), and an adjunct faculty member in the ethnic studies department at santa clara university, where she teaches courses on race and ethnicity, community-based research methods, and chicana/o/latina/o studies. her research documents sociopolitical citizenship and critical compassionate practices and embodiments of citizenship among young people of color. her pedagogy strives to challenge students to approach learning in critical and self-reflexive ways. the goals of her scholarship and pedagogy are one and the same: to engage in a praxis of solidarity for justice-oriented social change. dr. janelle m. silva is an assistant professor of community psychology at the university of washington bothell. her research explores the potential for schools to facilitate student interest in diversity, social justice, and social action. her recent work has examined the tensions of creating student-driven clubs in hostile environments and how college curriculum can be used to develop a sense of community on a diverse campus. david l. gordon, jr., mssa, is a third-year doctoral student on the community psychology research and action team at uc santa cruz. he completed his undergraduate studies in psychology at case western reserve university (cwru) in cleveland, oh, before continuing on at cwru to receive his master of science in social administration degree. after briefly working as a counselor and social worker, david began attending uc santa cruz, where he currently studies the impact of various forms of implicit communication on youth empowerment in elementary school settings. stephanie tam http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 rosas, m.a. is a social psychology doctoral student at the university of california santa cruz. she currently co-coordinates an after-school youth participatory action research program. her research has focused on youth participatory action research, empowering settings in schools, positive discipline, and critical reflection. she is also interested in research on diversity education, power sharing processes, social and emotional learning, parenting, gender socialization, and research accessibility. recommended citation: langhout, r.d., ellison, e.r., kohfeldt, d., nguyen, a., fernandez, j.s., silva, j.m., gordon jr., d.l., and rosas, s.t. (2016). thinking through our processes: how the ucsc community psychology research & action team strives to embody ethical, critically reflexive anti-racist feminist praxis. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(4), pages 1-11. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). acknowledgements: the authors thank hafsa mohamed and robert majzler for their incisive comments on an earlier version of this paper. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 thinking through our processes: how the ucsc community psychology research & action team strives to embody an ethical, critically reflexive anti-racist feminist praxis abstract co-written by eight people, this paper describes how the ucsc community psychology research and action team (cprat) organizes itself in weekly group meetings and how this structure is an attempt to embody an ethical, critically reflexive anti-racist feminist praxis. first, we outline the community psychology core competency of an ethical, reflective practice (dalton & wolfe, 2012). we offer a friendly amendment to consider an ethical, critically reflexive anti-racist feminist praxis. second, we discuss how we organize cprat meetings to uphold these ideas. we describe our current structure, which includes personal and project check-ins, rotating facilitation, and attention to broader professional development issues. third, we provide two examples to illustrate our process: (a) why talking about poop matters in addressing imposter syndrome and (b) getting our team on the same page regarding a research site. we end the paper with a description of a “rough edge,” or an area for growth in our praxis. the ucsc community psychology research and action team (cprat) began in 2006, when regina (hereafter, gina) moved to uc santa cruz as an assistant professor. in this paper, we describe how cprat works to embody the core competency related to ethics. first, we outline the community psychology core competency of an ethical, reflective practice (dalton & wolfe, 2012). we offer a friendly amendment to consider an ethical, critically reflexive anti-racist feminist praxis. second, we discuss cprat’s organization as a critically reflexive antiracist feminist space. we summarize how our meetings have changed over the past 10 years as well as our current structure. third, we provide examples to illustrate our process of: (a) personal check-ins and (b) how our team came together to address challenges at one of our research sites. finally, we end with a description of a “rough edge,” or an area for our growth. core competencies and an ethical, reflective practice some community psychologists have been interested in developing core competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012; nelson, poland, murray, & maticka-tyndale, 2004) while others question the usefulness of such a framework (dzidic, breen, & bishop, 2013). yet all seem to agree that community psychology educational programs should assist students with engaging in ethical and social justice oriented community-based research. since at least the 1980s, some have discussed the importance of reflexivity, examination of privilege, and self-discovery as central to ethical practices and accountability (dalton & wolfe, 2012; lykes & hellstedt, 1987; nelson et al., 2004; serrano-garcía & lópez-sánchez, 1991; watts, 1994). a recent discussion of competencies, written by the society for community research and action’s (scra) committee on education programs and community psychology practice council task group, describe “ethical, reflective practice” as foundational and as a core competency (dalton & wolfe, 2012, p. 11). the authors argue that community psychologists must ‘‘articulate how one’s own values, assumptions, and life experiences influence one’s work, and articulate strengths and limitations of one’s own perspective’’ (p. 11). this is needed for http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 accountability and ethical improvement. we agree that this process is foundational to and for community psychologists, yet we offer a friendly amendment to this competency. we urge the field to consider an ethical, critically reflexive anti-racist feminist praxis as a core competency. a critically reflexive anti-racist feminist praxis is situated within an episteme of relatedness (montero, 2007) and therefore helps to hold us accountable to other researchers, our community collaborators, and ourselves. indeed, reflexivity alone has not transformed the role of the university-based researcher (lykes & crosby, 2014). a critically reflexive anti-racist feminist praxis, however, may provide a more generative framework. it demands that we interrogate entanglements, contradictions, complications, and our web of relations among research team members, community-based collaborators, and in ourselves. the rationale for this interrogation is so that we can hold fast to the idea that we all have intersectional positionalities, desires, and histories, which we must consider if we are to create socially just change (anzaldúa, 1987/1999; fine, 1994; langhout, 2016; lykes & crosby, 2014; torre, 2009; torre & ayala, 2009). we therefore suggest the following friendly amendment to competency 5: ethical, reflective practice critically reflexive antiracist feminist praxis: in a process of continual ethical improvement, the ability to identify ethical issues in one’s own practice, and act to address them responsibly, in relation with others, and in ways consistent with liberatory practices. to articulate how one’s own values, assumptions, structural privileges and marginalizations, and life experiences influence one’s work, and articulate the strengths and limitations of one’s own perspective. to develop and maintain professional networks for ethical consultation and support. our argument for this shift to an ethical antiracist feminist praxis builds on the work of feminists of color, who have argued for decades for a critically reflexive praxis, particularly for those engaged in community work with subordinated groups (anzaldúa, 1987/1999; anzaldúa & moraga, 1981; collins, 2000; hurtado, 1996b). this is particularly valuable for communities of practice, such as research teams, where privilege can manifest in ways that undermine the overall project (hurtado, 1996b). as gloria anzaldúa (1987/1999) argues, to engage in this praxis means that one must both hear and listen to the “clash of voices” for transformation to take place. that is, an anti-racist feminist reflexive praxis helps root our practice within the hyphens, in-between spaces, and from critically engaged subjectivities, as we strive to collaborate in liberatory ways (anzaldúa, 1987/1999; fine, 1994; langhout, 2016; torre, 2009; torre & ayala, 2009). striving toward a critically reflexive antiracist feminist space we endeavor to create a critically reflexive anti-racist feminist space. we want our space to recognize our intersectional positionalities, desires, and histories, and to root our practice from in-between spaces. therefore, one important practice is to carve a space where we maintain ourselves within the academy. in meetings, this often takes shape as checkingin about our lives, including topics not directly related to research. thus, we often share what we are feeling in our bodies. this brings our whole selves into the space and reminds us that our bodies are a site of examination for our work. this is vital because ethics is about what is rational, and also what is connected to and felt in the body (anzaldúa, 1987/1999; torre & ayala, 2009). beginnings the phd program in which i (gina) was hired was a social psychology program organized around social justice. although a community psychologist was on faculty years ago, there http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 were no current cpists, or cp graduate courses. it was important to me that my graduate students receive social-community psychology training. also, i wanted my team to meet to draw upon the wisdom and experience of each member (lykes & hellstedt, 1987; sarason, 1972). accordingly, graduate students, undergraduates and i met together for the first three years. after some trial and error, we jointly constructed the space to include personal check-ins (a time for each person to talk about what they desired), project check-ins (a time to discuss field-based research), and focused on foundational readings for community and social psychology. my goals were to reduce hierarchies and fixed power structures, and to build a shared theoretical foundation for a new research group, while attending to theoretical traditions within the ucsc psychology department. therefore, this was new terrain for all of us. for some of us, this structure worked well. for others, the space was charged. some graduate students found it comforting to have the undergraduates present as they struggled with imposter syndrome. others felt responsible for their undergraduates’ contributions, and that they should opine brilliantly in front of undergraduates, which was difficult as they struggled with imposter syndrome. some felt tokenized because the space was about 66% white and they were latina. additionally, attempting this more horizontal structure within the hierarchy of academe, many of us felt frustrated with navigating two white undergraduate men who talked a lot, despite our interventions. eventually, some graduate students came to me and requested the undergraduates be disinvited so that we could focus on their professional development. although this proposal made me and graduate students uneasy because it seemed to reify structural power, and would mean leaving some social positions out of our knowledge construction, i agreed because i thought the group was coming to a common theoretical foundation, and was also frustrated with the expressions of white male privilege in the space. current structure currently, i (gina) meet weekly with all graduate students in a group and individually as needed. separately, graduate students meet weekly with undergraduates on their team. considering graduate student meetings (the focus of this paper), we each facilitate at least one week each quarter. we spend the first hour on check-ins taking turns discussing how our week has gone and/or upcoming issues. each person shares as much/little as they desire. for project checkins, each graduate student can discuss their project(s) and receive feedback from the group. during the second hour, the facilitator uses the group in ways that person deems most useful, including practice job talks, feedback on paper drafts, talking through data coding, and discussing research possibilities. professional topics might include creating a syllabus, navigating job interviews, or other skills graduate students feel are needed. our bodies, our critically reflexive antiracist feminist selves: two examples thinking critically about our bodies and processes is a way to make ourselves visible, which means taking ourselves and accountability seriously (collins, 2000; langhout, 2016). feminists of color have argued that rendering our identities invisible can lead us to ignore/overlook the struggles of our collaborators’ social groups (anzaldúa, 1987/1999; anzaldúa & moraga, 1981). in order to do socially just work, therefore, acknowledging our lived experiences and differences is essential to our growth, including as a collective. making ourselves visible also helps us remember that community psychology competencies are contextualized, relational, and process focused (dzidic et al., 2013). therefore, our capacity building must be multi-sensory if we http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 are to engage deeply in social justice (nelson et al., 2004; thomas & mulvey, 2008). in this section, we describe two examples of our critically reflexive anti-racist feminist praxis. why talking about poop matters: using checkins to address imposter syndrome for years, i (danielle) have been plagued by what i refer to in polite company as a “nervous stomach,” resulting in “digestion issues.” in lab meetings, which convened on wednesdays at mid-morning, my predictable stomach rumbles and growls elicited laughter and curiosity from others. these moments sometimes served as comedic relief during tense conversation, or provided a reason to excuse myself momentarily. they also served as a reminder that our intellectual work is not separate from our corporeal presence, despite the notion (often critiqued by feminist scholars) that “professional performance… is premised on headwork, on a disembodied authority dependent on the cartesian split of mind/body common to western epistemology” (bartlett, 2005, p. 199). weekly personal check-ins were an opportunity to talk openly about poop (among other things), which subvert the pretense of bodiless intellectuals. it is a not so well-kept secret in academia that many of us struggle with digestion issues. indeed, when i dared broach the subject with others, the customary response was inevitably, “me, too!” as i neared my dissertation defense gina passed down her "eating for ibs" (irritable bowel syndrome) cookbook, which she had received from a tenured ucsc professor. in cprat meetings, the shared experience of managing unpredictable bodies within the cartesian academic context, and identifying malfunctions of those bodies, led to confessions of other maladies – an expanding catalog of stress-related afflictions that had been exacerbated by or begun while in graduate school or as an assistant professor. some include: acid reflux, insomnia, hair loss, weight gain, weight loss, autoimmune disorders, bruxism (clenching and grinding of teeth that can result in headaches, jaw and tooth pain, and cracked teeth), nausea, tendonitis, and back, neck, and shoulder problems. the cartesian mind/body split is not performed successfully by all bodies. as bartlett (2005) reminds us, “the privileging of mind over matter, of disembodied knower, actually presumes a straight white (able) male body” (p. 197). thus, academics unable to embody the straight, white, able-bodied male are hyper-visible within the academy, as they contradict the social identities presumed representative of the intellectual. as community psychologists operating reflexively, we are called to recognize our subjectivities and identities, or our embodied selves. acknowledging that we have bodies and corresponding physical functions is a mode of integrating our minds and bodies. as hurtado (1996a) writes, “successful [feminists of color] negotiators avoid the bifurcation that has been documented in the psychological literature as being the cornerstone of the difference between women and men" (p. 387). talking about our bodies, including how they suffer, resists bifurcation, as we recognize that knowledge production is always situated within raced, gendered, and classed bodies (hurtado, 1996a). i consider the public discussion of bodily functions, including poop, a kind of personal “anecdote, or gossip, as a counterdiscourse” that disrupts conventions around what it means to be an academic; conventions that have historically excluded people like those of us in cprat (i.e., first generation/working class, women, people of color; bartlett, 2005, p. 195). what is striking about cprat personal checkins is how commonplace the experience of illhealth (digestion related or otherwise) is among us. talking about poop matters here, because it calls attention to the prevalence http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 and ordinariness of illness, and in doing so makes the personal political. the impact of these conversations extends beyond simple rapport building or creation of a “safer space” to discuss crude topics. attempts to relate to one another in anti-hegemonic ways, however, are always negotiated. given the diversity in ages, genders, races, ethnicities, and class statuses, the sharing of life experiences can be complicated. i (janelle) joined cprat during my last two years of graduate school. i was not accustomed to sharing personal experiences in a space where everyone was essentially a stranger to me. i resisted check-ins, often limiting my responses to one or two sentences. i made a considerable effort to get to know other students on cprat, but i was unsure “why” we were sharing. my lived experiences had made me cautious in regards to trusting people in power, particularly those who come from dominant social groups. i constantly pushed gina regarding her racial and ethnic identity because i needed to know that she was aware of her positionality before i could share aspects of myself in a space where i had less power. this was an area of growth both for me and cprat. over the years, we have learned to acknowledge differences, positionalities, and to recognize discomfort. we must continue to allow for those entering cprat to be resistant to the group’s dynamics and for all of us to grow in our understanding of how transformative spaces can be uncomfortable when we are accustomed to traditionally organized spaces (aime, humphrey, derue, & paul, 2014). from an anti-hegemonic perspective, the structural incorporation of personal checkins and its ability to affirm values of relatedness allows for ways of being, knowing, and doing typically marginalized by the predominantly independent, white, middle-class values embedded in the everyday practices of u.s. institutions of higher education (stephens, fryberg, markus, covarrubias, & johnson, 2012), and “the western academic traditions, discourses, and structures that reproduce historical power hierarchies intertwined with the legacy of colonialism” (reyes-cruz & sonn, 2011). when i (angela) first joined cprat, the meetings had already transitioned into the current structure. it took years for me to warm up to everyone and claim my voice within this space, but it was the practice of personal check-ins that allowed for this process to happen. this practice continues to validate my sense of cohesion and belonging as a developing scholar-activist and “historical being whose life is developed and fulfilled in a complex web of social relations” (martín-baró, 1994, p. 109), both inside and outside the academy. as is the case with many first-generation, working-class, im/migrant, and/or students of color with significant ties and obligations to their home communities (gordon, 2002), navigating the cultural norms and power dynamics of the various spaces i am obliged and privileged to participate in for my studies, whilst negotiating the meaning of these experiences in relation to my home community, has proved daunting. as a vietnamese american woman who grew up within an interdependent, refugee community context, facing the demands of the academy and its sterile environment for my family while being away from them takes its toll on my well-being, and physically manifests itself as chronic insomnia. the additional burden of imposter syndrome would halt my progress altogether. yet, hearing about the struggles (poop-related or otherwise), strategies, and quirks of others in cprat, i can reaffirm three things: 1) research and professionalization are developmental processes; 2) my personhood in relation to my home community can be acknowledged as integral to the scholarly work i produce; and 3) others in cprat are also dynamic human beings who can be engaged with as such. i feel encouraged to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 exist and participate as a whole person. for me, the personal and the professional are integrative, not bifurcated (hurtado, 1996a). my identities and lived experiences directly inform my research, and the labor of research has bearings on my daily living. i therefore make little distinction between personal and project check-ins, and often communicate them as one. by hearing how others experience challenges and problem-solving together, i likewise feel enabled to share my own struggles and seek support. this carries forward beyond the weekly group meetings, through informal one-on-one and small group conversations, which are as important as our collective meetings. institutionalized attention to scholar-activists as dynamic and relational beings is pertinent for community psychologists and community-based researchers, who may be more likely to risk burnout from intensive work demands. therefore, check-ins allow us to inhabit inbetween spaces where we can recognize both the hegemony and generative potential within the academy and communities with which we collaborate. getting onto the same page: how cprat comes together when needed over the first seven years at our elementary school research site, we engaged undergraduate students as research assistants [ras] in a youth participatory action research (ypar) project. i (jesica), like other graduate students, trained ras on the ethics and values of ypar with youth. ras had experiences that informed their ways of interacting with youth. every fall we familiarized ras with literatures on ypar, youth empowerment, and critical youth studies. we also oriented ras to the history of the program, including the sociocultural context of the school and community. we made every effort to prepare the ras before they entered the school context; however, we always, unsurprisingly, experienced challenges. our ypar program sought to create a space for young people to critically learn, grow, and meaningfully engage. therefore, we did not encourage disciplinary practices from traditional classroom environments, as they did not align with our goals of fomenting empowerment. yet we were often perplexed when ras used these practices to get students to participate/focus, or when ras provided almost no boundaries for youth. our intention is not to place blame on the ras, youth, or even ourselves, but to demonstrate how engaging in the community, while upholding community psychology values including feminisms and anti-racism, is a complex task that requires an ongoing ethical and reflexive praxis of thinking through our values, actions and practices. during my (angela’s) third year as a graduate coordinator for the ypar program, our team faced challenges that hindered our growth and progress. multiple ras experienced recent deaths of close friends, and our team encountered events at the program that we were unprepared to handle professionally or emotionally (e.g. one youth’s disclosure of experiencing violence). gina and i also identified the following issues: 1) our team feared reproducing dominant child-adult relations, which led to a disorganized ypar space that led to 2) too much time focusing on behavioral issues; 3) a need to further develop the ras’ understanding of the connection between theory and practice in ypar; and 4) a need for more practical, hands-on skills training. beyond a sense of responsibility and commitment to the youth and ras, i was concerned by the vulnerability of my own well-being and what that meant for the program. i communicated my concerns to gina, indicating the issue was likely our team’s insufficient experience but also my exhaustion. i felt relatively safe sharing these feelings because of the relational dynamics within cprat, which, as previously mentioned, acknowledged me as a whole http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 person. as such, i did not perceive the temporary limits to my developing capacities as threats to the validity of my academic existence, but rather as an opportunity to seek support. gina responded to my concerns by pooling the strengths and resources from members of cprat to organize a workshop for ras. one training component included a workshop on positive discipline (pd). i (stephanie) provided this training due to my expertise in pd. positive discipline includes five core criteria: 1) developing a sense of connection 2) mutual respect and encouragement 3) a focus on long term effectiveness 4) social and life skills development and 5) opportunities for youth to discover their capabilities (dreikurs, 1971; lasala, mcvittie, & smitha, 2013). respect is a leading principle of pd, especially for youth who have less power in relation to adults. respectful communication is encouraged through connection while still maintaining boundaries (nelsen, 1987). setting boundaries kindly and firmly, a central pd practice, involved research team self-reflection on our positionality as adults in relation to the youth. in this way, we worked with ras to develop their critically reflexive anti-racist feminist ethics as we discussed our raced, classed, gendered, aged bodies and how they related to those of the youth. for example, during the training, the research team practiced tone of voice, body posture, and other nonverbal cues to communicate respectfully and firmly; being firm was challenging for most ras, many of whom were young women. developing greater awareness through role playing and discussing patterns connected with gender socialization was a way for adult team members to feel more confident to practice, informed by social structures, and a desire for liberation, our work with young people andcritique and build their youth-work skills. in this way, we disentangled “firm” from “oppressive,” and connected life experience, rough edges: some places for growth organizational power structures: what’s a community psychologist to do? all of us are concerned about power, oppression, and liberation, and like others, we have a critique of how hierarchies often impede social justice (aime et al., 2014; williams & lykes, 2003). many of us were therefore happy to eschew a hierarchical team structure and to strive instead for something more horizontal. yet, as should be clear from our decision to disinvite the undergraduate research assistants, we have not implemented horizontality, but we have not implemented a rigid hierarchy either. what we have settled on, for now, is a heterarchical structure. heterarchy is a system consisting “of an interconnected and overlapping network of components that operate dynamically to both emerge from and govern the interactions of constituent components’’ (tebes, 2012, p. 25). heterarchy implies an adaptive system that changes based on demands. at different points, different system components might express expertise and power depending on system needs and component resources (aime et al., 2014). in this way, heterarchy facilitates the development, communication, and participation of its components (tebes, 2012). heterarchy is therefore about relationships, interdependence, and collaboration and is, therefore, well aligned with an ethical and critically reflexive antiracist feminist praxis. this shift toward heterarchy, in the form of distributed responsibility, tasks and reasoning, is advantageous to the construction of academic knowledge (dunbar, 2000; stokols et al., 2004). further, a heterogenous group (in terms of research backgrounds, experience, and social locations) can be beneficial for distributed collaboration under certain conditions (dunbar, 2000). high levels of social support and shared values can promote effectiveness http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 in collaboration, yet a considerably diverse group with competing goals can inhibit heterarchical ideals (dunbar, 2000; stokols et al., 2003). it is important to reiterate that cprat members occupy different positionalities and thus have differing experiences of psychological violence within and outside of the academy (e.g., racism, sexism, classism), and differing access to resources including knowledge, social and cultural capital. i (erin) experience the cprat setting as having the potential for resources to be dynamic and collective. yet our collectivity is also in the context of individual competition over scarce resources given the context of academe (e.g., a spot on one of gina’s funded research programs, competitive fellowships, and gina’s time, attention, and recognition). further, gina cannot shift her responsibility for our training or her ability to influence our lives. heterarchy is only possible if those in the system view power as dynamic and view shifts in the expression of power as legitimate (aime et al., 2014). the ability to uphold heterarchy is one of our “rough edges,” and one we experienced as we wrote this paper. specifically, we had disagreements when writing parts of this paper, which resulted in a long conference call where we asked another member of our research team, who is not an author on this paper, to facilitate the call. how we are positioned partly influenced how much or little each of us was willing to disclose during the call. this example is a reminder that when considering social systems, the hierarchical structures within which cprat is embedded pose challenges to shifting expressions of power, and thus some social relationships are less dynamic than others. conclusion when i (david) returned to graduate school, my sister gave me a set of juggling balls, to exercise a different part of my brain. i laughingly said that it seemed fitting for graduate school as i was adjusting to having to juggle many responsibilities. as i have spent time at this university and in cprat, this analogy is perhaps more fitting than i originally ascertained. at any given time, i must give attention to and accommodate for my multiple identities and positionalities. unlike the juggling set given to me, each of these positionalities has its own facets and characteristics. to give greater weight to any without accounting for the others is to risk falling out of balance. as an ethical scholaractivist, i must “articulate how [my] own values, assumptions, and life experiences influence [my] work” (dalton & wolfe, 2012, p.11). to ethically collaborate with my colleagues and with the greater community, though, this is not enough. i must also be able to understand how my identities and positionalities impact my relationships with others in consideration of their own multifaceted experiences. if we are to truly collaborate, to juggle life with others, we must be attentive to the experiences and positionalities of those with whom we are collaborating. in a movement toward a critically reflexive anti-racist feminist praxis, we consider not only the complex nature of our own experience, but also that of those with whom we practice. references aime, f., humphrey, s., derue, d.s., & paul, j.b. 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(2003). bridging theory and practice: using reflexive cycles in feminist participatory action research. feminism & psychology,13(3), 287-294. http://www.gjcpp.org/ microsoft word jean rhodes_celebrating our evolving_formattedfinal.docx celebrating our evolving, interdisciplinary, contextually-embedded field jean e. rhodes university of massachusetts, boston keywords: theory, science, community psychology, framework, interdisciplinary author biography: jean e. rhodes is the frank l. boyden professor of psychology and the director of the mentor/umass boston center for evidence-based mentoring. rhodes has devoted her career to understanding and advancing the role of intergenerational relationships in the social, educational, and career development of disadvantaged youth. she has published three books (including stand by me: the risks and rewards of mentoring today's youth, harvard university press), four edited volumes, and over 100 chapters and peer-reviewed articles on the topics related to positive youth development, the transition to adulthood, and mentoring. rhodes is a fellow in the american psychological association and the society for research and community action, and was a distinguished fellow of the william t. grant foundation. she serves as chair of the research and policy council of mentor: the national mentoring partnership, is a member of the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation research network on connected learning and sits on the advisory boards of several mentoring and policy organizations. dr. rhodes obtained her doctorate in clinical psychology from depaul university and completed her clinical internship at the university of chicago. recommended citation: rhodes, j.e. (2016). celebrating our evolving, interdisciplinary, contextually-embedded field. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(2), pages 1-4. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). correspondence should be sent to jean e. rhodes, department of psychology, university of massachusetts, wheatley hall, 04,0148e, boston, ma. 02125-3393, jean.rhodes@umb.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 celebrating our evolving, interdisciplinary, contextually-embedded field what use is a theory if it cannot describe, explain, specify, and predict phenomena of interest? applying this metric, jason, stevens, ram, miller, beasley, and gleason (2016) demonstrate the limits of three of the foundational theories of community psychology. the challenge for these and other theories stems from the field’s complexity and multiple levels of analysis. consequently, many of the defining constructs (e.g., neighborhood, social ecology, empowerment) are insufficiently specified and tested. developing a stronger, more predictive theoretical base for the field, the authors argue, will depend on shared conceptualizations and greater precision in the measurement of its core constructs. the key to all of this is specification. in fact, jason et al. (2016) use the terms “specification,” “specify,” and “specific” 29 times, as in “the goal for community psychology theories should ideally specify what specific aspects of context influence what specific aspects of individuals. furthermore, possible specific mechanisms by which this occurs should be articulated …” (p.21). with this sort of specificity in place, researchers can develop the shared vocabulary and tools that are needed to conduct rigorously controlled studies that advance theories and explore the underlying processes governing change. they can also examine, with far greater precision, the ways in which these processes are shaped the by contexts in which they unfold. such an approach would better align community psychology with other psychology disciplines, most of which have evolved toward far greater rigor and specification over the past half century. yet, in light of the inherently interdisciplinary nature of community psychology, its attunement to evolving societal issues, and its broad, multi-level foci, one could argue that community psychology may never yield to the rigors and conventions of traditional psychological inquiry in ways that produce a distinct unifying theory. most of the core values and beliefs that first galvanized community psychologists were derived from a complex of disciplines that preceded it. indeed, long before the first psychologist ever set foot on the shores of swampscott, massachusetts, the fields of anthropology, education, social work, urban planning, sociology, law, political science, and economics had developed rich traditions and frameworks for studying communities, power relationships, and social change. the three prominent theories highlighted in the jason, et al. (2016) piece were built on a foundation that was laid by theorists in other fields and speak to the issues and anxieties of their day. for example, many of the core tenants of empowerment theory can be traced to the black power and activist social work movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s (solomon, 1976). interestingly, it was also informed by conservative political sociologists, peter l. berger and richard neuhaus (1976) who, in an influential american enterprise pamphlet, first highlighted the importance of “mediating structures” global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 in the form of families, churches, neighborhoods and voluntary associations as an antidote to big government. this emergence of empowerment theory to explain and justify the politics of collective power and government restraint aligns with perkins’s (2009) observations concerning the intractable links between community theory and the political landscape from which they emerged. and this sort of inflection will continue to shape how we conceptualize communities and power relationships. as we struggle with unprecedented income inequality, sociological and economic theories of social capital, access, and discrimination are likely to continue to dominate the theoretical landscape of community psychology. rather than despair at the derivative and contextually inflected nature of the theories, we should more fully embrace our rich and responsive interdisciplinary history. sociologist john hall (1999) described a “pandisciplinarity” (p.179) characterized by an emergent network of communication, unevenly tied together by nodal connections among discourses, practices, and procedures of translation that push back the frontier of any absolute differend. knowledge produced by way of culturally coherent practices of inquiry and their contestation can result in more than storytelling, even in the absence of an encompassing pure reason. (p.179) as a field, we may never compete with the rigor and specificity achieved in the more decontextualized psychological disciplines. but this does have to consign us to inferiority or irrelevance. instead, our unique strength lies in our openness to diverse disciplinary perspectives, a sensitivity to the diverse and shifting contexts of social behavior, and the innovative strategies that can flexibly explore social behavior at multiple levels of analysis (perkins, 2009; shinn & rapkin, 2000). global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 references berger, p. l., & neuhaus, r. j. (1977). to empower people: the role of mediating structures in public policy. washington, dc: american enterprise institute. hall, j. r. (1999). cultures of inquiry: from epistomology to discourse in sociohistorical research, (pp. 173, 179, 259-61). cambridge: cambridge university press. jason, l. a., stevens, e., ram, d., miller, s. a., beasley, c. r., & gleason, k. (2016). theories in the field of community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice.7(2). pp. 1-27. perkins, d.d. (2009). the death of community psychology (& the development of community research & action) in the united states: issues of theoretical, methodological, & practical diversity. in c. vazquez rivera, d. perez jimenez, m. figueroa rodriguez, & w. pacheco bou (eds.), international community psychology: shared agendas in diversity. (pp. 285-314). san juan, pr: actividades de formacion comunitaria. shinn, m., & rapkin, b. d. (2000). cross-level research without cross-ups in community psychology. in j. rappaport & e. seidman (eds.), handbook of community psychology (pp. 669695). dordrecht, netherlands: kluwer academic publishers. solomon, b. b. (1976). black empowerment: social work in oppressed communities. new york, ny: columbia university press. putting the puzzle pieces together: identifying gaps and highlighting assets for public and private entities to develop obesity programs and direct best practices in egypt hana shahin keywords: obesity, ecological framework, obesity programing and interventions, recommendations for obesity programming, and egypt. author biography: hana shahin, community psychologist with a master’s degree from the american university in cairo (auc) and a master’s degree from wichita state university. she has had over ten years of experience with youth development and cross-cultural understanding, and community development organizations. currently, she is a doctoral candidate at wichita state university and a freelance consultant in community psychology, organizational development, and capacity building. she has been a trainer and mentor for the lazord fellowship among other international organizations. additionally, she worked on civic engagement and cultural project with the john d. gerhart center for philanthropy and civic engagement and the goetheinstitut. hana is currently an associate researcher at the civic engagement institute (cei) and the co-chair of the community psychology practice council of the society for community research and action. recommended citation: shahin, h. (2020). putting the puzzle pieces together: identifying gaps and highlighting assets for public and private entities to develop obesity programs and direct best practices in egypt. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(1), 1 20. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: hana shahin, ma, doctoral students, wichita state university psychology department. 1845 n. fairmount, box 34 wichita, ks 67260. email: hxshahin@shockers.wichita.edu. acknowledgments: the author would like to thank dr. rhonda k. lewis for her constant support and supervision to finalize the publishing of this article. her support, comments, reviews and insightful suggestions of the manuscript are the reason for the completion of this article. the original study was supported by dr. carie forden and dr. amy carillo; i am grateful for all their efforts, motivation, continuous support, guidance and patience. without them i could not have imagined going through this journey. http://gjcpp.org/ mailto:hxshahin@shockers.wichita.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 putting the puzzle pieces together: identifying gaps and highlighting assets for public and private entities to develop obesity programs and direct best practices in egypt abstract worldwide, obesity is a growing epidemic and a leading non-communicative disease. egypt has high levels of obesity, which is causing harm to both individuals and society. this study aimed to collect data on available programs and interventions, to assess gaps and explore assets and challenges to obesity programming in egypt. the purpose of this article is to examine obesity from an ecological perspective, direct practical work related to obesity to help fill these gaps. semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 participants from 22 different organizations, including ministries, governmental, nongovernmental, international organizations, and for-profit organizations. finally, participants provided their personal recommendations for combating obesity in egypt. the findings from this research showed that there is a lack of nationwide programs and services that tackle obesity; however, there are some minor activities and services that tackle other health issues related to obesity. this information is beneficial to connect programs and build coalitions. participants related their challenges to mainly contextual and ecological factors and recommended collaboration, partnerships and multi-sectorial programs on a mass scale including national campaigns to get obesity recognized and on the national agenda. recommendations can help develop prevention strategies that are tailored to the socio-cultural and economic context of egypt and similar countries. obesity definition, consequences, and prevalence obesity is a condition of excess body fat (ravussin & swinburn, 1992); an imbalance between calories consumed and calories burned (zulet, berkenpas & martinez, 2005). obesity and overweight are usually mentioned together, as obesity is an advanced stage overweight. defined by the national institute of health (nih) as a body mass index (bmi) equal to or above 30. earlyonset obesity may lead to physical and psychological co-morbidities, while it contributes to non-communicable diseases (ncds) such as type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and some types of cancers (summerbell et al., 2005; who, 1997). obesity is linked to some mental health problems, such as eating disorders and low self-esteem (seo & sa, 2010). obese children and adolescents are prone to physical health problems (agency for healthcare research and quality (ahrq), 2013), as well as have a greater chance of becoming overweight or obese adults (georgetown university center for aging, 2002; lawlor, smith, & o’callaghan, 2007; singh, mulder, twisk, van mechelen, & chinapaw, 2008). no matter the stage of development, obesity both affects the quality of people’s lives and may also shorten their lives (sturm, 2002). more so, the stigma regarding weight is both societal and selfimposed (major, eliezer & rieck, 2012); and becomes a physical and psychological threat to a person’s health. also, stress contributes to overweight and obesity, as well as being a consequence of obesity and overweight (becton, shatat, & flynn, 2012; pervanidou & chrousos, 2011). conclusively, obesity burdens countries’ health systems with direct http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 and indirect costs (colditz, 1992; withrow & alter 2010). worldwide, obesity is growing, it is considered an epidemic and a leading noncommunicative disease (alpert, 2009; international association for the study of obesity [iaso], 2010; kime, 2008; owen, martin, whincup, smith, & cook, 2005; summerbell, waters, edmunds, kelly, brown, & campbell, 2005; world health organization [who], 2000). the percentages of obesity rose from 5% to 10% for men and from 8% to 14% for women between 1980 and 2008; and affects approximately 20-50% of children and teenagers (cosoveanu & bulucea, 2011). that is concerning because overweight and obesity are linked with more deaths worldwide than being underweight (who, 2009), and are rated as the fifth leading risk for global deaths (who, 2008). obesity is highly prevalent in egypt (asfaw, 2006; atinmo, mirmiran, oyewole, belahsen, & serra-majem, 2009; ellabany & abdel nasser, 2006). the estimated prevalence of overweight and obesity (bmi ≥ 25 kg/m²) is 61-70% of the whole population aged 20 and above. research indicated that 65% of males and 76% of females aged 15 and above to be overweight and obese. as for obesity alone, 18-22% of males are obese while 39-48% of females are obese (ellabany, & abdel nasser, 2006; iaso, 2012; who, 2010). also, obesity is one of the top contributors to the national mortality and morbidity of egyptians along with other noncommunicative diseases (ncds). chronic ncds cause 41% of all mortality in egypt (fao, 2006). ncds are reported to be the main cause of morbidity and mortality in eastern mediterranean countries and are emerging as a major health problem in egypt. this is alarming and calls for action, not only in egypt but in neighboring countries and worldwide. alas, research in egypt has been focusing on the prevalence of obesity and not on causes or solutions. yet, it is important to move away from victim-blaming and target the issue from an ecological perspective. using the ecological framework by prilleltensky, nelson, and peirson, (2001)adopted from the ecological systems developed by bronfenbrenner (1977), we can look at the issue from a more holistic perspective. the ecological framework suggests that a person does not exist alone but is a part of a community and society and that as researchers design interventions we must understand and accordingly make changes that would reach the individual through their micro, meso, exo and macrosystems in which they live. the microsystem consists of the direct structure around a person’s life for example, their family, neighborhood, and school. this is where the person’s eating habits are established, and nutrition education classes are related to obesity could be beneficial. the macrosystem relates to the culture, media influences, policies of the country that influence the behaviors of the individual. an example would be creating policies to change the fat content in school lunches or increase physical activity in the school curricula to address obesity in egypt. the systems between micro and macrosystem are the mesosystem and exosystem, these relate to the linkages between systems. the exosystem relates to an individual’s microsystem and another setting such as local government and the school lunch program or grocery store’s program to purchase healthy snacks. the mesosystem targets the connection between all the layers between an individual’s unhealthy or sedentary lifestyle and the school system and between local resources in the community. obesity in an ecological framework although research on obesity in egypt is mainly focused on the prevalence of obesity, the following section will explain the factors that contribute to obesity. to adequately address the issues faced in egypt regarding http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 obesity, an ecological framework will guide this research on the following dimensions: the individual, the microsystem (school and family) and the macrosystem (society and culture). obesity on the individual system focuses on biological and physiological characteristics. however, although there are biological influences on a person’s weight (farooqi, 2006; hu, 2008), genetics alone cannot explain the growing epidemic of obesity worldwide (hu, 2008; veerman, 2011). furthermore, other individual factors contribute to a person’s state of obese. these factors include nutrition and physical activity, changes in lifestyle, and activity level– the fundamental principle of the energy balance equation (who, 2000) –as well as level of education. the more educated the lower the probability of obesity (devaux, sassi, church, cecchini, & borgonovi, 2011). supposedly, education provides more knowledge and greater access to health-related information, which motivate and improve self-control (devaux et al., 2011). yet, it is still prevalent among the educated and wealthy in egypt; 40.9% of wealthy higher educated women and 53.9% of wealthy uneducated women (aitsi-selmi et al, 2012). a microsystem level of an individual shows that family plays are role in obesity as the major contributor to most habits related to eating (epstein, 1996). egypt being a collectivistic society and family being a major contributor, the effect of family is great on obesity. obese parents tend to over nourish their children (sobko, svensson, ek, ekstedt, karlsson, johansson, cao, hagströmer, & marcus, 2011). in 2000 around 47% of children in egypt received more than 100% of their recommended daily allowance (rda) compared to 14% in 1995 (fao, 2005; hassan, moussa, & ismail, 2005). additionally, family stressors, like the lack of mental and physical stimulation and financial constraints, lead to biological effects or negative health habits (garasky, stewart, gundersen, lohman, & eisenmann, 2009). appropriately, the family can adjust and alter the home environment and lifestyle to mitigate obesity (golan & crow, 2004). as for school and university, children consume between 19 to 50 percent of their daily calories at school (gleason & suitor, 2001), and the availability of foods and beverages high in sugar adds to the highcalorie consumption of the students (frumkin, 2006). likewise, university students may experience some changes during their first year of college including weight gain due to the transition (hajhosseini, holmes, mohamadi, goudarzi, mcproud, & hollenbeck, 2006; hudd, dumiao, erdmann-sager, murray, phan, nicholas, & yokozuka, 2000; racette, deusinger, strube, highstein, & deusinger, 2005). on the macrosystem level, there are multiple socio-environmental factors like food subsidy and availability that affect obesity in egypt (fao, 2006; traill, 2006; larson, story, & nelson, 2009). there is a significant relationship between the subsidized balady (pita) bread and the bmi of egyptian women (asfaw, 2007); the lower the price due to subsidy, the higher the bmi. modernization and globalization have also led to dietary changes as a result of the emergence of fast food and energy-dense foods in egypt and the surrounding countries (fao, 2006; traill, 2006; larson, et al., 2009). factors contributing to obesity in egypt are similar, if not the same, like other countries. most impactful is urbanization; which translated into the sedentary nature of jobs, the rise in “energy-saving” devices, the speed and convenience of driving rather than walking or biking (traill, 2006; who, 2003). the cultural context also plays a role in obesity, whether that being obese was an indicator of wealth exhibited around the waist (renzaho, 2004) or ‘plumpness’ being as a sign of beauty and larger-sized women were generally accepted in egypt (jackson, rashed, & saad-eldin, 2003). contradictory, media has a role in feeding the misconceptions about thinness by portraying women with unattainable sizes for the normal population as the symbol of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 beauty and desirability (cohen et al. 2005). yet, it is also important to note that media reinforce the stigma of obesity by their popular advertisements showing how weight is all about personal control (geier, schwartz, & brownell, 2003). excess consumption of food or discouraging physical activity is also incorporated in the media, which affects people’s weight gain (glanz, sallis, saelens, & frank, 2005; glanz, sallis, saelens, & frank, 2007; grier and kumanyika, 2008). all these factors on the different ecological levels contribute to obesity and accordingly, interventions need to target all levels and systems. consequently, organizations on different levels and in all sectors should be involved in efforts regarding obesity. to know how much a country is working on an issue, it is important to see how its organizations are contributing to solving the issue. not only the efforts of the government or policy changes and the public sector efforts, but also efforts of organizations of the private, for-profit, and non-profit sectors. the study the aim of the study was to identify gaps and assets of obesity interventions in egypt. this was done through mapping available programs and interventions and collecting information about activities, interventions, or programs done in the past five years, were ongoing or were planned for the next five years. ultimately to explore best practices and challenges to obesity programming and provide recommendations for practice. based on the current literature, the main broad research questions were: (1) what factors, such as assets and resources, contribute to the availability of obesity programs, initiatives, and policies in egypt? (2) what are the challenges faced when providing obesityrelated programs, initiatives, and policies? methods participants semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 staff working in or who are members of 22 organizations from the private/forprofit, public, and nonprofit sectors. in three organizations, interviews were conducted with more than one official, and three participants covered the work of two different organizations each. organizations were chosen based on their potential relevance to obesity and participants were asked about their activities in all egyptian governorates. the participants provided information about 10 for-profit organizations; a pharmaceutical company, a fast-food chain, a food production company, an individual initiative providing diet foods, a physical education private academy, a chain of gyms, private sports and fitness therapy centers, fitness programs and physical activity initiatives, and a sport promotion services company. seven civil society organizations were a part of the study; three egyptian organizations, two united nations agencies, and two international organizations. five national governmental organizations; the ministry of health, the ministry of youth and sports and its subordinate organizations, the national research center, an egyptian university of physical education, and the national nutrition institute. recruitment of participants a list of major organizations was put together to include organizations from the public, private and non-profit sectors. participants from an initial list were contacted and others were further interviewed based on the snowball sampling approach. through personal connections members who are a part of these organizations were contacted. initially, the plan was to conduct 15 interviews but due to personal connections and participants willing to help out, 25 participants were recruited. these participants were contacted through a phone http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 call or e-mail followed by a phone call. in one case, a participant personally connected the researcher with another participant to give more information about the work the organization was doing. all initial participants who were contacted responded because they have been referred through a common contact, and social relationships are very important in egypt. knowing that the researcher was contacting them based on someone’s referral higher the chances of getting responses from participants. as the study is exploratory, and the list of potential organizations was preset, the researcher tried to reach respondents in these organizations through social connections and not simply send out emails and wait for the response. all participants contacted were reached and interviewed. interview procedure one pilot interview with a key informant was conducted followed by 25 interviews of 22 organizations at the participants’ offices, and three interviews by phone. the interviews lasted from 15 minutes to a little over an hour. participants answered in english and/or arabic, mostly a mixture of both. accordingly, direct quotes are difficult to publish. the semi-structured interview responses were audio-recorded with participant approval, table 1 illustrates interview questions. a data collection sheet was used to record the answers to the interview, as well. measures interview questions were developed based on the literature review. they were designed to elicit assets and challenged and a database of the prevention and intervention programs in egypt relating to obesity. this information aims to highlight the gaps in the services and programs on ecological levels and geographically. interviews were composed of eight main questions with follow up questions. table 1. interview questions 1. how has your organization addressed obesity, if at all? what have been done regarding obesity in your organization, internally (for the employees) and externally (for other communities)? internally, externally, program, policy 2. so has there been any efforts regarding obesity interventions in the last 5 years by your organization? a) if yes: how was it designed? what were the objectives? how long have they been going? who is the target audience? type? activities? scope of the initiative? where was it conducted? challenges and assets? were they evaluated? b) if notwhat is hindering you from starting a program/ initiative? 3. what issues have negatively affected your work in obesity? what challenges have you faced in your work on obesity? 4. what are your future plans to work on obesity? if yes what are they? 5. what are the resources or assets (e.g. funding, policy change, facilities, etc.) that you think can benefit obesity interventions? how can they be obtained? 6. what has helped you in your work on obesity? what contributed to the success of your activity? 7. who are other organizations working on obesity in egypt that you know of? how do you know about them? what are they working on? 8. do you know of other people working in obesity that i can interview? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 data analysis all interviews were transcribed from recordings or notes. a thematic analysis was conducted, and the themes were extracted for each question and a codebook was created. data were organized under the questions and then divided by codes. each code/category was examined to determine consistency among the text within the code, and codes were adjusted when necessary (de negri & thomas, 2003). the initial codebook was composed of ‘middle-order’ categories (dey, 1993), meaning that the codes were further developed to include more details as the process went on. the final codebook was created through merging similar codes or the alteration of some codes. data was sent to a fellow community psychology researcher to test for inter-rater reliability. consistency was shown between raters and there were no discrepancies. results the results of the study include information about the interventions and programs implemented by the different organizations and individuals that were interviewed. the data included obesity-specific interventions as well as related efforts such as nutrition education or wellness initiatives. after analysis, the data collected was organized by age of target audience, geographical location, and gender; according to their ecological levels to identify the gaps in service. the information was organized by intervention, scope, timing and duration, and target audience. specific data of the programs by the different organizations are published in a thesis (shahin, 2015). for the purpose of this paper, it is important to note that most organizations did not target obesity directly and only 11 organizations had set plans; like the national multi-disciplinary nutritional strategy. most initiatives did not have reducing obesity as one of its goals. further gaps that were identified are the location and availability of the interventions; such as being centralized in the larger governorates and not accessible to everyone. interventions were mainly in cairo and alexandria, or through governmental health clinics that may reach some smaller governorates. furthermore, interventions were more targeting females than males. focusing on challenges and assets, the main and subthemes are presented in the table below. the themes were these broad themes across all organizations interviewed. while the data of the interventions were specific to the egyptian setting, the challenges, and assets, however, are more generalizable to different settings and areas, and can be seen as complementary in many cases. table 2. demonstrates the different subthemes and exemplars of these subthemes that are under the two main theses; challenges and assets. most challenges are on the macro, meso and exo systems; cultural habits and misconceptions, lack of awareness and education about nutrition and health, the political situation in egypt, environmental factors, facilities, and infrastructure and financial expenses and funding. mostly, the egyptian culture and societal habits, in addition to misconceptions about nutrition and exercise, were viewed as the main contributors to obesity and to the low number of activities and services provided to combat it. these misconceptions include viewing fatness as a sign of wealth and incorrect information about nutrition and health practices. also, unhealthy cooking techniques, such as overcooking vegetables so that they lose their vitamins or overconsumption of carbohydrates. additionally, participants explained that there is a misconception that being healthy and having a nutritious diet is perceived as a luxury or means to lose weight and not a lifestyle. furthermore, the lack of physical literacy is related to low engagement in physical activity. gender roles also contributed to low physical activity, as one http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 participant said: “women thinking that they should not lift weights or they would look manly, [and] men who think aerobics is just for women; cultural misconception of fitness in general.” also, modernization and the sedentary lifestyles adopted by the general population was mentioned. modernization was explained as the use of energy-saving devices, cars, and elevators. also, working mothers who cannot breastfeed for the entire first six months because they must go back to work deprive infants of proper nutrition and adds to the epidemic. program-specific challenges are least mentioned and would fall in the microsystem. table 2. themes and prevalence: challenges and assets themes/codes subthemes times mentioned exemplar extracts challenges cultural habits and misconceptions 28 misconception unhealthy lifestyle and habits modernization and sedentary lifestyle lack of culture of sports lack of awareness and education about nutrition and health 16 neglect of general health practices lack of awareness of healthy choices and practices inability to read food labels lack of demand for health education not joining initiatives and services fad services in the fitness education section lack of nationwide programs, initiatives and campaigns political situation in egypt 10 safety concerns change in the government general atmospheres destruct some plans environmental factors, facilities, and infrastructure 16 urbanization introduction of energy-saving gadgets school canteens availability of unhealthy foods subsidized energy-dense commodities lack of compliance with labeling policies lack of existing entity to supervise quality assurance and monitors health-related endeavors lack of availability or access to facilities such as sports facilities, school nutrition clinics, and health promotion centers lack of appropriate sidewalk space or infrastructure difficulties in complying with nutritional plans http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 financial expenses and funding 18 media poverty and food safety national agenda, interest and strategy low quality of services provided by personnel in the field quality 9 fad of dietitians disregard of research outcomes and recommendations service and program specific challenges assets partners, networks and relations 22 collaboration with the government subordinate organizational cooperation networks and partners internationally and locally human resources and manpower 16 knowledge and experience program and services programs and services 14 facilities and fixed assets 13 support 11 support from the community they work in family and friends beneficiaries’ momentum incentives in-kind support referrals and reputation 7 financial assets 3 research 2 conducting research existing research media participants were also asked about resources or assets that they think can benefit obesity interventions and how can they be obtained. here are their recommendation; nutrition education (n = 17), policy and governmental action (n = 16), multi-sectorial programs and partnerships (n = 11), media as a channel of communication (n = 11), physical activities and sports practices (n = 10), health and sports education (n = 10), facilities and infrastructure (n = 6), funding and budget allocation (n=4). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 discussion the data showed that there is a lack of focus on obesity; which may be related to the continuation of the spread of the epidemic. organizing the interventions based on purpose, ecological levels and geographical location, highlighted the lack of adequate obesity interventions in egypt. gaps are showing that obesity is not on governmental agendas and the political situation is causing harm to the interventions. most programs and strategies, as stated in egyptian literature, are geared towards malnutrition rather than obesity, because the focus is mostly on stunting and malnutrition, while under-nutrition is no longer the major concern (fao, 2006). also, current efforts are inadequate for addressing the problem. participants stated that there is a lack of nationwide programs, initiatives, and campaigns; in addition to the lack of knowledge and awareness of the public related to obesity interventions. most interventions are in major governorates. outreach and availability almost all programs and services are available to both men and women with more focus on females yet does not guarantee that they are successful or reach the females because of cultural barriers and norms. accordingly, the gaps are not the only reason for the inefficiency of programs but there are other challenges that need to be addressed. these challenges include cultural misconceptions and barriers, that can be overcome by awareness spreading. another challenge is poverty and food safety; which need a more collective approach that is multilayered. policy can also help with overcoming infrastructural challenges and controlling the media to stop feeding the misconceptions about thinness and reinforce the stigma of obesity and promoting unhealthy foods and eating habits. also, implementing the policies is necessary to decrease the violation of policies controlling food products. location and availability of interventions addressing the location of the interventions is important because it can show how distributed they are. most programs were in major cities and so do not meet the greater need all over the country; still, minimal outreach to the rest of the country is through governmental programs. although they do not target obesity directly, these outlets and great outreach can be utilized in the fast dissemination of future programs. the map only demonstrates potential outreach of programs and services (figure 1), but not the actual impact of these activities and can be used to further plan distribution and outreach strategies for new programs or activities. figure 1. map of egypt the biggest challenges that participants have mentioned were the cultural habits and misconceptions. these include unhealthy lifestyles and habits that encourage high levels of calorie intake. also, modernization and sedentary lifestyle have contributed to the egyptian society’s activity levels, negatively. that in addition to the lack of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 culture of sports and the lack of awareness and education about nutrition and health. participants believe that people are unaware of healthy choices and practice and neglect their general health; which makes it harder for the interventions to be effective and have people stick to them. additionally, since the revolution in 2011, the political situation in egypt has been putting some strains of non-profit funding; which has affected some programs. also, some safety concerns and changes in the government ever since has added to a general atmosphere that destructed some plans. service and program-specific challenges furthermore, interventions and services, as well as being stated by participants, are fragmented or targeting factors of obesity, without a holistic view. there is a need for programs to be multi-faceted interventions. furthermore, many are targeting the individual and do not look at obesity from a multi-systems approach. accordingly, and based on literature, strategies need to be geared towards the family, the community and the government. also, stakeholders and the targeted population should be included in planning and creating healthy environments. children’s activities provided are not enough to prevent obesity as they are not combined with home or community, services to the family as a whole prove to be most effective (campbell sahin-hodoglugil, & potts, 2006). furthermore, school canteens and snacks in the neighborhoods are adding to the children’s malnutrition and can lead to obesity (hadley et al., 2010); and school snack provided in government schools is not enough to deal with malnutrition. accordingly, policy changes that affect school canteens and school lunches are needed in egypt. also, the focus on the individual may foster stigma and prejudice against obese and overweight people as having poor health and character. teasing about weight is associated with low self-esteem and suicidal thoughts and attempts, while the emotional factors that come with obesity were not targeted in any of the programs and services. also, services and programs in egypt are not on the macrosystem level and have not become national movements or achieved public consensus. they are mainly about fortifying certain foods that deal with malnutrition and benefit a certain segment of the population. these fortified foods are likely to contribute to obesity. yet, the newly introduced national surveillance system has the potential to be a great asset. unfortunately, research suggests that the benefit of surveillance is still debatable (folta et al, 2006), and its potential hazards have not yet been fully studied. there is a lack of interventions that worked on the meso or exosystem levels. yet give room for improvement and collaboration between and within the different systems provide healthier nutritious diets are possible. additionally, societal issues like poverty, physical infrastructure, different subcultures, and availability and access to foods are not considered. most remarkably, generalizability, quality, and consistency of programs are jeopardized due to the lack of resources to expand. this calls for collaboration and collective impact initiative as none of the programs or initiatives work on multiple ecological levels. the community context should be essential to obesity prevention since there are risk factors related to eating and activity levels which affect the larger population. nonetheless, adding a community activity component helps the effectiveness and reach of programs (huhman & patnode, 2013). assets participants have mentioned many assets that can be utilized to counter challenges and also fill the gaps. human resources and manpower were mentioned in challenges as well as assets. there is a need for proper training and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 supervision to be able to capitalize on such assets and benefit from human power in implementing programs and spreading awareness. media and social media were also mentioned as challenges but also as a major asset and channel of communication; a great way to reach out and spread information, including social media. research, although unused many times, and research outcomes were considered an asset. most interestingly, participants mentioned partners and networks as a potential asset, especially with different organizations on multiple levels. supporting partnerships and networks are evident for the benefit of collaborations. these assets have been explained as what kept the interventions going. yet, for these interventions to spread and to enhance their effectiveness, participants agreed that obesity needs to be put on egypt’s agenda. this would encourage cooperation between different sectors. these assets require a strong network and cooperation among different organizations to magnify the effect of the services provided. also, spreading awareness to the general public and changing misconceptions about nutrition and exercise are essential to enhance the effectiveness of the programs. if the assets of the different organizations, be it their human resources, partners, services or reputation, are combined and enriched through collaborations and partnerships, the would help in combating obesity. outreach and macrolevel initiatives seemed to be the major challenges, yet the organization saw that their services and people are an asset. accordingly, getting the different organizations to cooperate and including the government and its networks, would help overcome these challenges. recommendations individual-level interventions. research recommendations align with the findings and participants’ recommendations. in egypt, research about malnutrition, anemia, and stunting is more prevalent. obesity research and interventions are needed in egypt and need to be on all ecological levels. as mentioned, macro-level factors have been the most commonly mentioned challenges, and accordingly, the focus should be on this level. interventions and programs should be context sensitized and adapted to the egyptian culture and it is very crucial to identify the factors contributing to obesity (salazar-martinez et al., 2005). cultural and normative views of healthy weight and thinness need to be addressed to protect people from eating disorders (cohen et al., 2005). the focus needs to be on obesity as a public health problem and not just a problem of individual health (atinmo et al., 2009). thus, the findings of the study recommended interventions that moved beyond an individual level intervention and focused more on the micro and macro systems approach. micro-systems interventions. participants restated the need to spread awareness of obesity to develop a healthy culture. inserting some changes in the culture and promoting healthy living should encourage more people to commit to and benefit from the services. this corresponded with research and recommended programs to be culturally sensitive to be able to adapt to the norms of the community and their view of a healthy body. furthermore, the formation of safe environments in the microsystem is needed to reduce stigma. also, an inclusive social ecological approach needs to be adapted to prevent people from using fashionable weight-loss diets (cohen et al., 2005). interventions need to be more healthcentered and focus on shifting towards healthy behaviors to improve overall health and well-being (bacon, klein, van loan, derricote, gale, kazaks & stern, 2002). the focus should be on self-acceptance and a healthy lifestyle (bacon, et al., 2002). likewise, participants, as well as previous literature, recommend the direction of the focus to be put on health education. nutrition http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 education is recommended to change and control obesity, and promote sustainable healthy life changes (asfaw, 2006; atinmo et al., 2009; iaso, 2010; traill, 2006). additionally, education through media, where the media encourages healthy food, active lifestyles and discourage sedentary lifestyles and unhealthy eating habits (the national academy of science, 2013). services need to start in the schools and with children and mothers. school canteens and school lunches need to be modified (hadley et al., 2010) through policy changes. services should be provided to the family are the most efficient (campbell et al., 2006). universities are a potential venue for implementing health and wellness programs to encourage physical activity and a healthy lifestyle, promoting obesity prevention (ferrara, 2009). promoting healthy foods and encouraging physical activities should be incorporated in addition to health education (the national academy of science, 2013). programs should implement a therapy/counseling component (hadley, et al., 2010) to be able to target the different needs of the individual and promote physical and mental wellbeing. macro-level interventions. again, participants’ recommendations and literature encourage taking a systems-level change approach, incorporating multiple stakeholders and addressing needs on multiple levels (national academy for science, 2013). these recommendations support multi-sectorial programs to be executed on a mass scale including national campaigns; a collaboration between governmental, nonprofit and the private sectors (hsc foundation, 2009). additionally, efforts should have centralized leadership for coordinating the planning, implementation, and evaluation of obesity prevention efforts across the country (national academy for science, 2013). some stated that the government should take a centralized role in developing comprehensive multidepartmental initiatives and obesity programs; especially obesity prevention programs targeting children. additionally, communities need to be incorporated into health promotion and obesity prevention. relatedly, relevant policies need to be incorporated on the national strategy level and obesity needs to be on the government’s agenda (hsc foundation, 2009). a policy monitoring system is also needed to ensure policy-making processes and content and provide data to examine progress in obesityrelated policy-making (national academy of science, 2013). the creation of sports facilities and infrastructure to promote physical activity, such as bicycle lanes, was also recommended by participants as part of the governmental initiatives. to conclude, participants and literature recommend interventions and programs to be implemented on multiple ecological levels and include multi-sectoral stakeholders from all sectors and the community. these interventions need to be focusing on changing cultural misconceptions and behaviors through education and changes in the infrastructure, as well as policy changes and community efforts. most importantly, the interventions need to be collaborative, community-based and culturally adapted to egyptian society. limitations and further research although the study included more participants than anticipated, the small sample size can be considered as one of its limitations. besides, the target group was composed of only high officials and the top leaders of the organization may have been a further limitation, since they may be far away from the details and on the ground implementations of the programs. another limitation would be that all interviews were conducted in greater cairo. moreover, generalizability is limited due to the nature of qualitative research (gobo, 2003). qualitative research was needed due to the scarcity of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 the information regarding data on obesity interventions in egypt and was essential to build rapport with the targeted organizations. conducting interviews and building personal relationships was beneficial to the cultural context of egypt, however, due to the specific nature of the research topic, it was limited. lastly, it is not clear if the saturation of all key stakeholders in egypt was reached and more research is needed to include more stakeholders. further research can improve on the limitation by including more organizations and also asking the public about their awareness of the issue, the needs, and assets. a study on the general population is beneficial to assess the cultural misconceptions that seem to be the major challenges stated. additionally, assessments of the general level of awareness and education related to health and wellness are needed. a study that encompasses a larger pool of participants from all governorates of egypt is needed to be able to provide more information about interventions all over egypt. the diversity of the participants’ roles and positions in the organization is also needed to get into the intricacies of the activities, challenges, and assets. furthermore, evaluations of the existing interventions and programs are needed to be able to improve on them and assess further needs. devotion to research and respect for research recommendations needs to be further developed in egypt. research is needed to identify the individual and environmental causes of weight gain and poor nutrition (hadley, et al., 2010). research on the interventions and combination of interventions that are successful needs to be inventoried. implications the data collected can be used to benefit the field of obesity, can be built on, and most importantly calls for more research and attention to the cause of obesity as a growing epidemic. the assessment of program assets, challenges, and what they can offer is of value to new initiatives. the recommendations of the participants and the study should be useful to the organizations interviewed and others dealing with obesity and overweight. yet, they opened up more room for questions and research in the field of obesity than they have answered. although services and programs collected may not be directly targeting obesity, they may be directing small changes on the ecological levels around the issue that may positively affect it. the limited findings on obesity interventions call for further interventions and initiatives in the field in addition to further research. further research; especially impact analysis and evaluations of the programs, to fully understand the challenges and assets, is needed. conclusion obesity has become an alarming epidemic in egypt by causing harm to both individuals and society. programs that target a small portion or just one aspect do not effectively combat obesity. ecological and communitybased solutions need to be implemented to combat obesity a growing epidemic. a combination of diet modification, in addition to increased physical activity and behavior therapy, can be effective (national institute of health, 2000). key elements for effective programs working on preventing obesity need to be considered. there is little focus on obesity in egypt. there is a strong need for obesity prevention programs. recommendations from research should be taken into consideration. there is some hope regarding the new national strategy for nutrition. collaboration in obesity prevention programs, nationwide campaigns and having obesity on the government’s agenda is of utmost priority. obesity has become an alarming epidemic in egypt by causing harm to both individuals and society. programs that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community 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(2002). the effects of obesity, smoking, and drinking on medical problems and costs. health affairs, 21(1), 245-253. summerbell, c. d., waters, e., edmunds, l., kelly, s., brown, t., & campbell, kj. (2005). interventions for preventing obesity in children. cochrane database system reviews, 3 (3). ternouth, a., collie, d., maughan, b. (2009). childhood emotional problems and self-perceptions predict weight gain in a longitudinal regression model. bmc medicine, 7, 46. traill, b. (2006). trends towards overweight in lowerand middle-income countries: some causes and economic policy options. fao food and nutrition papers. retrieved: http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/a04 42e/a0442e0x.htm. veerman, j.l. (2011). on the futility of screening for genes that make you fat. plos medicine, 8(11). wang, f., wild, t., kipp, w., kuhle, s., &veugelers, p. (2009). the influence http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/a0442e/a0442e0x.htm http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/a0442e/a0442e0x.htm global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 of childhood obesity on the development of self-esteem. statistics canada 20(2). retrieved from http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82003-x/2009002/article/10871eng.pdf. withrow, d., & alter, d. a. (2010). the economic burden of obesity worldwide: a systematic review of the direct costs of obesity. obesity reviews, 12(2), 131-141. world health organization (who). (1997). obesity: preventing and managing the global epidemic. geneva: world health organization. world health organization (who). (2000). obesity: preventing and managing the global epidemic (no. 894). geneva, switzerland: world health organization. world health organization (who). (2003). global strategy on diet, physical activity and health. retrieved from www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/en /. world health organization (who). (2008). world health statistics 2008. geneva, switzerland: world health organization. world health organization (who). (2009). global health risks mortality and burden of disease attributable to selected major risks. geneva, switzerland: world health organization. world health organization (who). (2010). world health statistics 2010. geneva, switzerland: world health organization. zulet m. a., berkenpas m. e., & martinez, j. a. (2005). comparison of dietary approaches to treat obesity based on the different carbohydrate/fat content: impact on weight loss and lipid profile. current nutrition & food science, 1(1). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-003-x/2009002/article/10871-eng.pdf http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-003-x/2009002/article/10871-eng.pdf http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-003-x/2009002/article/10871-eng.pdf http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/en/ http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/en/ reducing stress and preventing anxiety in african american adolescents: a culturally-grounded approach w. lavome robinson jocelyn r. droege mary h. case leonard a. jason depaul university, chicago, il, usa keywords: anxiety, african american adolescents, psychopathology prevention, stress author biographies: w. lavome robinson, phd, abpp is a professor of clinical and community psychology at depaul university. she has developed a culturally-adapted stressreduction preventive intervention to attenuate anxiety among african american youth. dr. robinson is currently principal investigator on an nichd-funded violence prevention grant for urban african american 9th-graders, with co-i len jason. jocelyn droege, ms is an advanced graduate student at depaul university. she has been working with drs. robinson and jason on an nichd-funded violence prevention grant for urban african american youth. mary case, phd works with dr. robinson on initiatives to improve outcomes for urban african american adolescents. she is currently in private practice. leonard jason, phd is a professor of clinical and community psychology at depaul university. he been working on a nichd grant with dr. robinson for the past few years on violence prevention with urban 9th grade youth. author note: we sincerely thank the adolescents who participated in this project and we greatly appreciate the collaborative efforts of our participating high schools and their school-based health centers. this research was supported by grants from the national institute of mental health (grant number mh63230) and the national institute of child health and human development (grant number hd072293). recommended citation: robinson, w.l., droege, j.r., case, m.h., jason, l.j. (2015). reducing stress and preventing anxiety in african american adolescents: a culturallygrounded approach. global journal of community psychology practice, 6(2), 1-12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org). global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 2 reducing stress and preventing anxiety in african american adolescents: a culturally-grounded approach abstract evidenced-based and culturally adapted stress-reduction interventions for urban african american adolescents who are at risk for anxiety and other problems related to stress are needed. this study presents intervention components and preliminary outcome findings of a culturally adapted stress-reduction intervention for urban african american adolescents. preliminary findings support the efficacy of the intervention to reduce anxiety and enhance general cognitive competencies, such as coping strategies, self-efficacy, and positive thinking, among participants, in comparison to controls. clinical implications of the stress-reduction intervention for the prevention of psychopathology, particularly among african american adolescents, are discussed. the link between stress and anxiety during adolescence is well established in the research literature (mclaughlin & hatzenbuehler, 2009; nugent, tyrka, carpenter, & price, 2011). however, along with the stress associated with the general demands of adolescence (copeland-linder, lambert, chen, & ialongo, 2011), african american adolescents are particularly vulnerable to stress-related adverse outcomes like anxiety because they reside in low-resourced neighborhoods at disproportionately higher rates than adolescents of other ethnic groups (murry, berkel, gaylord-harden, copeland-linder, & nation, 2011); consequently, they are challenged by multiple chronic neighborhood stressors, such as poverty and community violence, at rates that surpass those of other adolescents (murry et al., 2011). furthermore, african american adolescents must contend with the negative psychological impact of racial discrimination (gaylordharden & cunningham, 2009). in the wake of the 2015 racially-motivated shooting massacre at the emanuel african methodist episcopal church in charleston, south carolina, that left nine african american church members dead and one wounded, it is understandable that emotional strife, including anxiety (schmitt, branscombe, postmes, & garcia, 2014) and fear (jones, lee, gaskin, & neblett jr., 2014), are realistic negative consequences of discrimination. the distinct and unique context created by discrimination also contributes to the development of problem behaviors like aggression (jagers, sydnor, mouttapa, & flay, 2007). anxiety limits a child’s sense of what behaviors he or she can engage in to address an anxiety-provoking situation, making him or her more likely to respond aggressively (kashani, deuser, & reid, 1991). research supports a link between anxiety and reactive relational aggression in girls and boys (marsee, weems, & taylor, 2008). further, in addition to the risk for developing aggressive behaviors, adolescents who develop anxiety disorders are at increased risk of developing other clinical disorders and problem behaviors, as young adults, including major depressive disorder (cummings, caporino, & kendall, 2014), substance use disorders (o’neil, conner, & kendall, 2011), suicidal behaviors (hill, castellanos, & pettit, 2011), and educational underachievement (mojtabai et al., 2015). in précis, african american adolescents growing up in low-resourced urban neighborhoods face extraordinary challenges (goldner, peters, richards, & http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 3 pearce, 2011) that can lead to anxiety and other consequent adverse outcomes; as such, the need for effective and culturally-grounded anxiety preventive interventions for these adolescents is crucial. adolescents who reside in low-resourced neighborhoods are likely to feel that they have limited options in terms of how to respond to stressful and anxiety-provoking situations, in part due to limited or ineffective coping skills (robinson, brown, beasley, & jason, in press). research supports that coping strategies employed by adolescents to effectively manage stress may positively impact their overall psychological adjustment and symptoms of psychopathology (compas, connor-smith, saltzman, thomsen, & wadsworth, 2001). adaptive coping strategies augment personal competencies/resources, by mobilizing thoughts and behaviors that promote resilience against life’s stressors (compas et al., 2001). although the need for evidencebased interventions that can effectively bolster adaptive coping skills to manage stress and reduce anxiety for african american adolescents is apparent, the extant research literature, relative to these types of intervention programs, is sparse. past studies intervening in the deleterious effects of anxiety, among african american adolescents, have had small sample sizes (ginsburg, becker, drazdowski, & tein, 2012), and they have not employed randomized designs. further, the reported intervention studies have not focused on coping with stress to prevent anxiety (cooley-strickland, griffin, darney, otte, & ko, 2011), and most studies have not been culturally grounded. of exception, the anxiety preventive intervention reported by cooley and colleagues (2011) was a cultural adaptation of a cognitive-behavioral intervention that focused on anxiety reduction; culturally grounded cognitive-behavioral interventions have been found to be exceptionally effective for african american youth (wilson & cottone, 2013). the limitations of current intervention studies argue for the urgent need of more culturally-sensitive research, intervening in the deleterious effects of anxiety among african american adolescents. the a-cws: a cbt culturally-adapted intervention a well-researched stress-reduction program for adolescents, the adolescent coping with stress course (cws), was developed and empirically validated by clarke and lewinsohn (1995), primarily working with adolescents who were of european descent and suburban. clarke and lewinsohn’s prevention intervention was a 15-session model, grounded in the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy (cbt). cbt is based on the theoretical premise that cognitions significantly impact one’s emotional and behavioral reactions to environmental cues (gonzález-prendes & resko, 2012). the theoretical framework of the cws was multifactorial and included: (a) reducing negative cognitions, (b) acknowledging and identifying risk factors and stressors, and (c) developing/enhancing resiliency factors (e.g., coping skills and high self-esteem). robinson and case (2003) developed a culturally-adapted version of the original cws (clarke & lewinsohn, 1995), based on rosselló and bernal’s (1996) framework for culturally-adapting evidence-based interventions. additionally, the cws was adapted to promote more general stress reduction related to the socioecological stressors faced by african american youth residing in urban, low-resourced areas. the modified, culturally-relevant stress-reduction intervention was called the adapted-coping with stress course (a-cws). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://link.springer.com/search?facet-creator=%22kimberly+d.+becker%22 http://link.springer.com/search?facet-creator=%22tess+k.+drazdowski%22 http://link.springer.com/search?facet-creator=%22jenn-yun+tein%22 global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 4 adaptations reflect the cultural context of low-income, urban african-american adolescents. based on input from focus groups with a representative sample of adolescents, curriculum examples were adapted to represent stressful life events characteristic of the day-to-day experiences of the youth. further, while many of the parents of the sample of adolescents possibly were currently or previously depressed, their diagnostic status was unknown, as with the clarke and lewinsohn (1995) study. therefore, stress reduction elements of the intervention geared toward preventing genetic and family predispositions for depression were modified to the prevention of stress-related outcomes associated with elevated and chronic environmental stressors, often typical for low-income, urban african american adolescents. for cultural consonance, proper names used throughout clarke and lewinsohn’s (1995) original curriculum were replaced with ones more recognizable to urban african american adolescents. also, multimedia approaches (e.g., music or film clips) were included in parts of the curriculum, to reinforce some of the program concepts in a culturally relevant manner. session overview the a-cws consists of 15 weekly 45-minute group sessions. it is recommended that groups are comprised of no more than 8-10 students. the general weekly format includes: (a) review of the prior week’s topic and home activity; (b) interactive discussion of the weekly topic; (c) behavioral group activities; and (d) assignment of the home activity. session 1: getting to know each other. group members are introduced to the facilitators and to one another. they engage in an icebreaker activity designed to encourage interaction between group members and to provide the opportunity to learn something about each other. group members are given a description of the program and the group guidelines are reviewed (e.g., focus on the positive, honor each other’s privacy, respect each other). students are provided an activity book with in-session and home activities. students are asked to generate three goals for the group as a home activity, to be discussed at the next session. session 2: stress: what is it and what can we do about it? session 2 aims to improve students’ abilities to identify stress and become aware of its consequences. sources, examples, and experiences of stress are discussed. facilitators are provided a list of culturally and contextually consistent causes of stress to supplement the discussion (e.g., neighborhood violence). students are asked to provide examples of negative outcomes associated with too much stress, and they are introduced to the mood diary, which is a seven-point scale designed to help promote awareness and tracking of students’ feelings. session 3: negative emotions and what cause them. the definition and causes of negative emotions are discussed. students are encouraged to share their viewpoints. cofacilitators present a culturally-relevant vignette to the group about a hypothetical african american student who experiences stressors and negative emotion. as a group activity, students are then asked to identify stressors from the vignette, designed to be relatable to the students’ experiences, label the student’s emotional reaction, and identify whether her reaction seems believable. strategies are introduced to help students restructure cognitive distortions that can lead to negative emotions (e.g., thought-stopping and increasing positive self-talk). as a home activity, students are asked to identify and document stressful situations that occur over the week, including strategies that helped to relieve that stress. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 5 session 4: identifying positive thoughts. description and identification of positive thoughts, using scenarios, are discussed with students. an ideal ratio of two-to-one positive to negative thoughts is recommended to the group as an aim. students engage in a positive thinking exercise, during which students are provided a list of culturally-relevant scenarios related to neighborhood violence, playing a sport that they do well, schoolbased interactions, etc., to help them generate positive thoughts about themselves and/or the situation; they are encouraged to share these with the group. one in-session activity allows students to practice imagining themselves in their favorite place and students are asked to discuss the positive thoughts that they have in response to that activity. students are asked to then document positive thoughts that they have during the week, as their home activity. session 5: identifying negative thoughts. students are provided examples of culturally and contextually tailored negative thoughts (e.g., “the world is a dangerous place and there is no way to be safe,” “i’m scared,” “why do so many bad things happen to me?”) and are engaged in activities to help identify negative thoughts in different scenarios. additionally, students determine the ratio of positive to negative thoughts. consequences of negative thoughts are discussed and the thought-stopping technique is practiced in session. for the home activity, students are asked to document their negative thoughts during the week and determine their ratio of positive to negative thoughts. session 6: “two to one” and positive thinking is the winner! the strategy of countering negative thoughts with positive thoughts is presented as a way to control one’s thoughts. the benefits to using positive counter thoughts are discussed. students are given the chance to identify negative thoughts from culturally relevant illustrations and brainstorm about which positive thoughts might be best to use as counter-thoughts. illustrations include scenarios such as a teenager watching her brother get arrested; another scenario involves the experience of an african american teenager who believes that he is being followed around a store by an employee while he shops. a group activity allows students to apply the positive counterthought technique to a worrisome personal situation. students are asked to document negative thoughts, followed by positive counter-thoughts that occur during the week, for their home activity. session 7: now that you’re an expert in positive thinking. students complete an insession activity to practice eliminating their most common negative thoughts. students also practice replacing negative thoughts with positive counter-thoughts. at this nearhalfway point, students are encouraged to give feedback about how they are feeling about the program. session 8: sharing the wealth: helping others with positive thinking. students engage in an exercise to write down one positive statement about each person in the group. students read aloud their positive statements about one another, followed by an assessment of their mood in response to giving and receiving positive personal statements. session 9: take a break from stress. students are taught how to schedule a break from stress, as another strategy to help reduce emotional distress. healthy activities in which to engage and cues to remember to take a break are discussed. students practice a relaxation technique in the session and assess how they feel afterward. session 10: recognizing self-defeating thinking: why would i think that way? students learn about various forms of selfhttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 6 defeating thoughts and their consequences. strategies to challenge negative thinking are discussed. examples are given to the group to help students identify and challenge selfdefeating thoughts. session 11: the defeat of self-defeating thoughts. this session serves as a review of the various forms of self-defeating thoughts. a matching activity gives students additional practice identifying different forms of selfdefeating thoughts. an illustration is provided to allow the students further practice identifying and challenging self-defeating thoughts, in a student-relevant scenario. session 12: the c-a-b method. the c-a-b (i.e., consequence-activating event-belief) method is described as an approach to analyze negative feelings. this process helps students understand that the cognitions (beliefs) that occur after certain activating events lead to feelings (consequence). the three components of the c-a-b method are broken down, defined, and discussed to facilitate students’ understanding of the process. the c-a-b method is demonstrated through verbal scenarios and illustrated examples that are culturally grounded. session 13: dealing with activating events. two types of activating events are discussed (i.e., those that can be changed and those that cannot). students learn three strategies to cope with activating events (i.e., change negative thoughts about the activating event, be better prepared to cope with activating events, and avoid the activating event). illustrations and other examples give students the opportunity to strategize about the best way to handle activating events. session 14: more c-a-b practice. this session focuses on relaying how and when to use the c-a-b method in real life situations. students are given the opportunity, in session, to get feedback from other students about how they handled or could have handled their personal real-life stressful situations. time is spent discussing students’ reactions to challenges and successes, in applying the c-a-b method to their lives. a student-selected stressreduction technique is practiced, in session, to help students become accustomed to the strategy, so that they may use it in their everyday lives. session 15: first aid for future stress. this last session helps students brainstorm about possible upcoming stressors, large and small, and generate plans for dealing with those stressors. students are given time to process thoughts and feelings about the group ending. this session has greater flexibility and less structure than previous sessions. emphasis is placed on continuing to apply what was learned in sessions, outside of the group format. students and facilitators say their goodbyes. facilitators comment about student progress and interact with students; students each share something they enjoyed about the group. each student receives a certificate of graduation. the present study the efficacy of the adapted intervention, the a-cws, was tested against a standard care control condition, using a randomized controlled design. standard care for the control participants consisted of one-to-one sessions to help them learn strategies to manage their stress; these sessions were provided by social work staff at the student’s respective on-site school-based health center. the researchers hypothesized that adolescents who participated in the a-cws would report lower levels of anxiety and show greater improvement in their (a) adaptive coping, (b) positive thinking (c) selfefficacy to cope with depressive cognitions and feelings, and (d) dysfunctional attitudes, relative to those in the standard care control condition, at post assessment. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 7 methods participants participants (n = 758) were predominantly female (60%; n = 450) and african american (91%; n = 686) and they were in their 9th, 10th, or 11th grade year, across four public high schools located in a large metropolitan city in the midwest (see table 1 for a summary of demographic characteristics). the average rate of participation was 73%. all participants qualified for free or reducedprice lunches, based on their family income. depaul university institutional review board approved all study procedures. additionally, written informed consent was obtained from the parent/caregiver and written assent from the student. variable n (%) gender male female age 14 15 16 17+ race african american other/missing 301 (40%) 450 (60%) 82 (11%) 234 (31%) 289 (38%) 151 (20%) 686 (91%) 72 (9%) table 1: demographics of sample most participants were ninth graders, with participation rates ranging from 79% (i.e., ninth graders) to 61% (i.e., 11th graders); the average rate of participation was 73%. the variation in participation by grade is likely explained by the student dropout rates for the participating schools. the drop-out rates for the schools in which the present study was conducted ranged from 24-31%, well above the average city-wide dropout rate of 16%. at the age of 16, students were no longer legally required to attend school, contributing to substantial increases in dropout rates and poorer school attendance after the age of 16. thus, participation rates for the older, 11th graders was lower than for the ninth grade participants. measures demographic status was assessed by a 15item self-report questionnaire. the questionnaire assessed participants’ age, gender, ethnicity, church attendance, family size and composition, in addition to parental employment and income level. the state-trait anxiety inventory – trait anxiety subscale (stai-t; spielberger, gorsuch, lushene, vagg, & jacobs, 1983) was used to assess trait anxiety. items of the 20item, 4-point likert scale (1 = not at all; 4 = all of the time) assess the frequency of feeling calm, tense, upset, etc. the stai-t has demonstrated good reliability (α = .79; spielberger et al., 1983). seven of the 12 subscales of the adolescent coping orientation for problem experiences (a-cope; patterson & mccubbin, 1987) were used to assess adolescents’ coping methods in response to feelings of stress (i.e., ventilating feelings, seeking diversions, developing selfreliance, developing social support, investing in close friends, engaging in demanding activity, and relaxing). the acope is a 5-point likert scale (1 = never; 5 = most of the time) with alpha reliabilities that range from .60 to .76, with most coefficients above .70 (patterson & mccubbin, 1987). the frequency of positive self-statements was assessed by the positive automatic thoughts questionnaire (atq-p; ingram & wisnicki, 1988). higher scores in the 30-item, 5-point likert-type (1 = never to 5 = all the time) measure indicate more frequent engagement in positive thinking. the atq-p has demonstrated good validity and reliability (α=.95; burgess & haaga, 1994). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 8 perceived self-efficacy to cope with depressive cognitions and feelings was measured by the depression coping selfefficacy scale (dcses; perraud, 2000), a 24item 100-point likert-type scale (0 = not confident, 100 = confident). higher scores reflect greater perceived self-efficacy to cope with depression. the dcses has demonstrated good validity and reliability (α = .93; perraud, 2000). the dysfunctional attitudes scale – short form (das-sf; weissman & beck, 1978) is a 9-item 5-point likert-type measure (1 = totally disagree; 5 = totally agree) that assesses dysfunctional attitudes associated with adolescent depression. higher scores correspond with greater dysfunctional attitudes. the das-sf has demonstrated adequate validity and reliability (α = .74) and is strongly correlated to the 20-item full version of the das (r = .93; andrews, lewinsohn, hops, & roberts, 1993). procedures participants were recruited from four public high schools and were randomized into one of two conditions: (1) the a-cws prevention intervention condition; or (2) the standard care control condition. participants were administered a survey that assessed thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and coping skills related to stress at preand post-intervention time points. intervention implementation. the a-cws intervention sessions were implemented in groups of eight-to-ten student participants. the sessions occurred during the students’ lunch period in the students’ respective schools. group facilitators, supervised by a licensed clinical psychologist, consisted of psychology externs with at least one year of experience in group therapy with african american adolescents. each of the four participating public high schools received a yearly $500 stipend to assist with costs pertaining to participation. intervention fidelity was assessed by senior research staff. a random selection of 30% of intervention sessions were rated on adherence to the acws leader’s manual, based on fidelity rating scales developed by clarke and lewinsohn (1995). results to ensure that the group sessions were conducted according to the leader’s manual, 30% of total sessions were randomly selected and observed by senior research staff; fidelity to protocol was 90%. analyses were conducted using only the responses of the african american participants (n = 686). analyses employed individual growth models, with initial status as a covariate; post measures of the outcomes were nested within individuals. person-level covariates included treatment condition, gender, and initial status of the outcome measure; wave was the only measurement-level covariate. the treatment effect of primary interest for these analyses was pre-post change on outcomes of interest for the intervention versus control conditions. results indicated several significant intervention effects, indicating adequate treatment adherence. controlling for baseline level of anxiety, the intervention group showed lower anxiety at posttest than the control group, t(179) = -2.48, p < .05. controlling for baseline levels, individuals in the intervention condition also evidenced improvements at posttest, relative to the control group, on the following mediators of depression: (a) adaptive coping, t(176) = 2.04, p < .05; (b) positive thinking, t(182) = 3.43, p < .001; (c) self-efficacy to cope with depressive cognitions and feelings, t(179) = 2.44, p < .05; and (d) dysfunctional attitudes (e.g., “if i fail partly, it is as bad as being a complete failure."), t(183) = -1.77, p < .08. the significant intervention effects on established mediators of depression suggest that the intervention also may have indirect http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 9 effects on depressive symptoms; there were significant correlations of symptoms of depression with (a) adaptive coping (r = -.43, p < .001), (b) positive thinking (r = -.49, p < .001), (c) self-efficacy to cope with depressive cognitions and feelings (r = -.19, p < .01), and (d) dysfunctional attitudes (r = -.18, p < .01). discussion adolescents, because of ongoing developmental challenges and underdeveloped coping strategies, are especially vulnerable to the negative outcomes associated with stress (compas, connor-smith, saltzman, thomsen, & wadsworth, 2001). african american adolescents who live in resource-poor neighborhoods, in particular, are challenged by multiple demands and, as such, cultural and contextual relevancy should be considered and integrated, when developing preventive interventions for these youth (robinson et al., in press). the present study provides preliminary support for the efficacy of a culturally adapted stress-reduction intervention, to improve emotional state and coping skills, within a sample of urban and low-resourced african american adolescents. the findings of this study indicate that elevated anxiety is preventable among lowresourced, urban african american adolescents. this is an important finding given that these adolescents confront many socio-ecological stressors, including discrimination, that place them at high risk for developing anxiety and anxiety-related problems (cooley-quille, boyd, frantz, & walsh, 2001). anxiety, a serious emotional problem independently, also is associated with impaired cognitive (e.g., difficulty concentrating, intrusive thoughts) and behavioral (e.g., impulsivity and aggression) functioning (cooley-quille et al., 2001; kashani, et. al., 1991; salihovic, kerr, & stattin, 2014). research supports that african american adolescents prefer using culturally-relevant coping strategies to manage their high levels of contextual stress and, thereby, attenuate internalizing symptoms, (gaylord-harden & cunningham, 2009). furthermore, research indicates that school-based interventions may be especially beneficial for african american adolescents (gaylord-harden, cunningham, & zelencik, 2011). school-based interventions are an effective and far-reaching tool to assist youth in refining their coping skills to manage stress; additionally, school-based interventions have been found to promote intervention attendance and reduce stigma associated with intervention involvement (stallard, simpson, anderson, hibbert, & osborn, 2007). further, culturally-adapted, school-based interventions, modified to be relevant and sensitive to specific ethnic/cultural groups, have been found to be more beneficial to ethnic minority groups than non-culturally adapted interventions (bernal, jimenez-chafey, & rodriguez, 2009; griner & smith, 2006). the a-cws is a culturally-adapted stress-reduction intervention that can be implemented within school settings and preliminary findings support that this preventive intervention provides african american adolescents with the necessary coping skills and competencies to manage stress and reduce anxiety. once an intervention has demonstrated efficacy, its effectiveness and ability to be sustainable become the next evaluative stages. the sustainability of the a-cws in communityor school-based settings, as administered by community members or school staff, should be assessed in future studies. future studies also should evaluate the effectiveness of the a-cws for reducing additional negative outcomes associated with stress, such as aggression and depression. additionally, larger sample sizes in future studies evaluating the a-cws would allow for more complex statistical modeling and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 10 examination of potential moderating/mediating variables that impact outcomes. one key question is whether or not the a-cws or other preventive interventions can actually attenuate the link between anxiety and aggression; to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no studies of such intervention effects have been conducted. such studies would be most informative to developing programs with far reaching potential for high risk african american adolescents. although many questions remain, the current study is an important first step in discovering innovative and far reaching approaches to anxiety prevention and related problems for high risk and underserved african american adolescents. references andrews, j. a., lewinsohn, p. m., hops, h., & roberts, r. e. 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(2014). under the surface of adolescent psychopathic traits: high-anxious and low-anxious subgroups in a community sample of youths. journal of adolescence, 37, 681-689. schmitt, m. t., branscombe, n. r., postmes, t., & garcia, a. (2014). the consequences of perceived discrimination for psychological well-being: a meta-analytic review. psychological bulletin, 140(4), 921. spielberger, c. d., gorsuch, r. l., lushene, r., vagg, p. r., & jacobs, g. a. (1983). manual for the state-trait anxiety inventory. palo alto, ca: consulting psychologists press. stallard, p., simpson, n., anderson, s., hibbert, s., & osborn, c. (2007). the friends emotional health programme: initial findings from a school‐based project. child and adolescent mental health, 12(1), 32-37. weissman, a. n., & beck, a. t. (1978). development and validation of the dysfunctional attitude scale: a preliminary investigation. wilson, c. j., & cottone, r. r. (2013). using cognitive behavior therapy in clinical work with african american children and adolescents: a review of the literature. journal of multicultural counseling and development, 41(3), 13014 http://www.gjcpp.org/ intervention in schools promoting mental health and well-being: a systematic review gina tomé, adriano almeida, lúcia ramiro, tania gaspar, margarida gaspar de matos keywords: pupils; mental health; health promotion; whole school approach; teachers; social competence author biographies: gina tomé, education psychologist, clinical and health psychologist, advanced specialty in psychotherapies and community psychology. master in behavioral and cognitive therapies, phd in educational sciences, specializing in health education by the faculty of human motricity (fmh, ul). pos doc researcher at fmh / ulisboa; researcher of the “social adventure” project team, in the mental health, resilience, personal and social skills promotion, adolescence risk behaviors promotion and prevention, adolescents peer group relationships, areas. coordinator of the es´cool project mental health promotion in schools / aventura social team, fmh / ulisboa. adjunct professor at the institute of educational sciences. adriano almeida, graduated in psychomotor rehabilitation and master's student in psychomotor rehabilitation at the faculty of human kinetics/university of lisbon, he is part of the aventura social (social adventure) project team as a researcher in the areas of education, family and mental health. researcher in institude of environmental health (isamb)/school of medicine/university of lisbon. lúcia ramiro, post-doctoral researcher at faculdade de motricidade humana/university of lisbon (fmh/ul); researcher at aventura social project and researcher in institute of environmental health (isamb)/ school of medicine/ university of lisbonin the areas of promotion of personal, social and emotional skills, health behaviour promotion and risk-behavior prevention in adolescence and youth, in particular sexuality and sexual health related topics. executive coordinator of a study entitled learning and well-being ecossystems at fmh. third grade and secondary school teacher at escola secundária poeta al berto, sines. tânia gaspar, director of the institute of psychology and educational sciences of lusíada university of lisbon. researcher of the aventura social (social adventure) project team and researcher in institute of environmental health (isamb)/ school of medicine/ university of lisbon, in the areas of mental health, school, family, promotion of personal and social skills, prevention of risk behaviors in adolescence and adolescents' relationship with the peer group. principal investigator of the health behaviour in school-aged children/world health organization (hbsc/who). margarida gaspar de matos, is a clinical and health psychologist, psychotherapist and full professor (with aggregation in international health) at the faculty of human movement, university of lisbon (ul). founder and coordinator of the aventura social team, she is also the coordinator of supportive environments group at the center for research on environmental health institute, faculty of medicine of the ul. member of the scientific committee of the emcdda (european global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 monitoring center for drugs and drug addiction), also integrates the board of prevention and intervention of efpa (european federation of psychologists' association) representing the portuguese psychological association and the steering committee of eupha/ caph (european public health association / child and adolescent public health). she is responsible for several national and international projects in portugal within the scope of promoting the health of children and young people. recommended citation: tomé, g., almeida, a., ramiro, l., gaspar, t., & gaspar de matos, m. (2021). intervention in schools promoting mental health and wellbeing: a systematic review. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(1), 1 23. retrieved day/month/year, (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: gina tomé, education psychologist, clinical and health psychologist, advanced specialty in psychotherapies and community psychology. email: ginatome@sapo.pt. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:ginatome@sapo.pt global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 intervention in schools promoting mental health and well-being: a systematic review schools have been identified as a main scenery for building social, emotional, and behavioural support among children because students spend a substantial amount of time there. this systematic review was developed and registered based on the prisma recommendations. the main objective was identifying school context interventions that focus on students’ wellbeing and mental health. this review refers to papers focusing on young people ages 0 to 18 years old who attend school and had been the target audience for mental health and wellbeing promotion interventions. inclusion criteria for this systematic review was that interventions must have been carried out within a school context. the results indicate that most studies (n=13; 68%) were conducted using quantitative methodology. the majority of articles intended to promote mental health in a school context, either involving the whole school or only students. results highlight the importance of the involvement of the whole school in order to better promote mental health and wellbeing. findings also indicate that after years of “stigma”, mental health has become a main concern in school-aged population. introduction schools have been identified as a main scenery for building social, emotional, and behavioural results because students spend a substantial amount of time there. the school provides a socialising context in which students are able to learn a range of life skills. the skills children and adolescents obtain from their time at school are associated with academic achievement. school is also considered an exclusive scenario within which young people’s social and emotional wellbeing can be promoted and critical skills for, work and life can be trained and learned (goldberg et al., 2019). school-based interventions yield most successful outcomes when they are integrated into daily practice and school culture, seek to engage all staff, reinforce skills outside of the classroom such as hallways and playgrounds, support parental engagement, and coordinate work with outside agencies, emphasizing the importance of adopting a whole school approach to improve the young people’s social and emotional skills development (barry & dowling, 2017; goldberg et al., 2019). according to the health promoting schools initiative (who, 1998), a whole school approach defines the entire school community as the unit of change and involves coordinated action between three interrelated components: 1) curriculum, teaching, and learning; 2) school ethos and environment; and 3) family and community partnerships. emotional health and wellbeing promotion are a primary aspect of the who’s health promoting schools initiative. according to the world health organization, mental health is a “state of wellbeing in which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stress of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her own community” (who, 2013). thus, it is assumed that adolescents wellbeing promoting requires the promotion of personal and social skills, transforming, especially the school environment, into a wellbeing environment, through the involvement of the community, family and everyone involved. cho & shin (2013) affirm that are many reasons why effective mental health http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 interventions for adolescents should be developed, including: 1) specific mental disorders occur at specific stages of a child and adolescent’s development, screening programs and interventions for such disorders can be targeted to the stage at which they are most likely to appear; 2) there is a high degree of continuity between child and adolescent disorders into adulthood, early intervention could prevent or reduce the likelihood of long-term impairment; 3) effective interventions can reduce the burden of mental health disorders on the individual and the family (cho & shin, 2013). there is evidence that mental health promotion programs in schools, especially those adopting a whole school approach lead to positive mental health, social and educational outcomes (barry et al., 2013). school-based programs can extent a large number of young people from different family backgrounds. baskaran, sekar, and kokilavani (2016) found that when student’s mental health needs are properly addressed, the likelihood of school success increases. according to the authors high quality, effective school mental health promotion has been linked to increases in academic achievement and competence; decreases in incidence of problem behaviours; improvements in the relationships that surround each child; and substantive, positive changes in school and classroom climates. so, the school context represents a natural and an interactive set of environments comprising both direct (e.g., family, peers, class, school) and more distal (e.g., cultural, political) settings (bjorklund et al., 2014). goldberg et al. (2019) consider that at school, skills are strengthened in noncurriculum-based ways through policies, social relations, whole staff training, organisational structure, and daily school activities that are planned to promote a positive school environment, which helps young people to develop positively across academic, social, emotional, and behavioural areas. embedding families within a whole school approach reinforces the complementary roles of families and educators and extends opportunities for learning across the two contexts. community partners provide links with external support and mental health services in the community, thereby ensuring there is access to services for students needing social and emotional support. preventive school-based interventions which reduce risk (associated with mental health) and enhance protective factors (that influence mental health) can limit the onset and progression of clinical disorder and promote good mental health. schools represent an effective platform for the delivery of universal programs available to all pupils. results found by hudson, lawton and hugh-jones (2020) suggest that school leadership is also the key construct to target at the outset in promoting the referred skills. this work intended to conduct a systematic review in order to identify the school context interventions which aim to promote students’ wellbeing and mental health. method this systematic review was developed and registered based on the prisma diagram. the prisma statement was developed by a group of 29 review authors, methodologists, clinicians, medical editors, and consumers. a consensus process that was informed by evidence, whenever possible, was used to develop a 27-item checklist and a fourphase flow diagram. items deemed essential for transparent reporting of a systematic review were included in the checklist. after 11 revisions the group approved the checklist and flow diagram(moher, liberati, tetzlaff, altman, & prisma group, 2009). the main objective was identifying school context interventions which focus on students’ wellbeing and mental health. search and sampling strategy in the research of school context interventions studies developed with focus http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 on youth wellbeing or mental health, three databases were searched: pubmed, scielo and web of knowledge. the review limited the year of publication to articles published between 2014 and 2019. to identify the publications to be included, the boolean terms and / or. were used. search terms included terms associated with the study population: “mental health” or “wellbeing” or “pupils” or “whole school approach” or “whole school” and search terms related to setting: “school-based intervention” or “school based”. search filters were also inserted: free full text articles, written in english, portuguese or spanish and limited to the population between 0 and 18 years old. criteria and data extraction process specific criteria for the inclusion of studies regarding school context interventions were based on the fulfillment of the following: (1) school-based intervention; (2) promotion of mental health and wellbeing student among students; and (3) whole-school. the verification of criteria fulfillment was performed and compared by four authors (g.t.; l.r; tg; a.a). data extraction was developed according to prisma diagram guidelines (moher et al., 2009). relevant data were extracted from the manuscript by three authors (g.t.; l.r; a.a.), who also performed their coding and were supervised by another author (m.g.m). disagreements were solved through discussion among the authors (85% agreements). data extracted included the following elements: author, year, study design, methodology (mixed, qualitative, quantitative), data type (focus group, interviews, survey, other), data source, duration of interventions, sample size, country and general recommendations. results literature search the diagram of the studies included in this systematic review is presented in figure 1. the research carried out returned a total of 1699 scientific articles relevant to this study, of which 1187 abstracts were accessed for eligibility after the exclusion of duplicates (n = 512). a total of 1114 articles were rejected after reading titles and abstracts. subsequently, a total of 73 articles were considered as potentially relevant studies, but after a careful analysis, studies that were literature reviews and articles that had no description of the interventions were excluded (n = 52). at the end, 19 articles were included in the present study. included study characteristics the characteristics of the 19 included studies are described in table 2. table 2 shows that most studies have quantitative methodology (n=13). participants differ in analyzed studies: whole school (n=6), only students (n= 7), and students and teachers (n=3) and miscellaneous (n= 3), e.g. only teachers (n=1), school and community (n=1) and staff (other education workers) and students (n=1). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 table 1 identification, screening, eligibility and included studies id en ti fi ca ti o n records identified through database searching pubmed (n=1512) scielo (n=64) web of knowledge (n=123) total records identified (n=1699) sc re en in g records screened for title/abstract (n= 1187) full-text articles assessed for eligibility (n=73) sc re en in g studies included in qualitative synthesis (n= 19) in cl u d ed duplicates removed (n= 512) records excluded at title and abstract level (n=1114) full-text articles excluded (n=52) reasons for exclusion: literature reviews; no description of interventions; http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 table 2 study characteristics reference design methods data type focus area sample students age duration results reported country general recommendations wu, y., chartier,m., ly, g., phanlouvong, a., thomas, s., weenusk, j., murdock, n., munro, g., & sareen, j. (2019) case study qualitative semistructured interviews mental health promotion whole school second and third cycle 4 months positive outcome canada the whole school approach to implementing was viewed as an acceptable and feasible way to extend the intervention reach in order to promote the mental health of youth. ford,t., hayes, r., byford, s., edwards, v., fletcher, m., logan, s., et al. (2019) randomized control trial (rct) quantitative survey classroom management skills teacher and students primary education 6 months positive outcome united kingdom independent blind observations and qualitative feedback from teachers suggested that teachers’ behaviour in the classroom changed as a result of attending training. eustache, e., gerbasi, m., severe, j., filsaimé, j., fawzi, m., raviola, g., et al. (2017) prospective quantitative survey mental health promotion teacher and students secondary education 3 to 4 weeks positive outcome united states this accompaniment approach to mental health task-sharing with teachers provided a schoolbased opportunity for students with mental health need to discuss http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 treatment and has potential relevance to other settings. kirkhaug, b., drugli, m., handegard, b., lydersen, s., asheim, m., & fossum, s. (2016) quasiexperimental pre-post study quantitative survey classroom management skills students primary education 8-9 months no positive outcome norway no differences were found in change between the two conditions from baseline to follow-up in externalizing problems, social skills, internalizing problems and closeness with teacher. the intervention condition did however show advantageous development in terms of studentteacher conflicts and increased academic performances. young school children with severe externalizing problems are in need of more comprehensive and tailored interventions. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 ojio, y., yonehara, h., taneichi, s., yamasaki, s., ando, s., togo, f., et al., (2015) quasiexperimental pre-post study quantitative survey mental health promotion students secondary education 2-weeks positive outcome japan knowledge and beliefs about mental health/illnesses and their treatment and also the intention to seek help and to support their peers with mental health problems were significantly elevated following the program. a concise program may have a significant effect on the improvement of mhl in secondary school students. gaspar, t., cerqueira, a., branquinho, c., & matos, m.g. (2018) quasiexperimental pre-post study quantitative survey social and emotional skills promotion students primary education, second and third cycle and secondary education 6 months positive outcome portugal the results reveal significant differences in the intervention group related to the competences before and after the intervention, namely in the interpersonal relationships and definition of goal related skills, while in the waiting list group there were no significant http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 differences in the moment before and after the intervention. nash, r., elmer, s., thomas, k., osborne, r., maclntyre, k., shelley, b., et al., (2018) quasiexperimental pre-post study mixed survey; focus groups mental health promotion whole school primary education 3 months positive outcome australia the protocol describes a solution to health literacy that is designed by a community in response to the specific health literacy needs of its members in their specific context. it will provide new opportunities for characters outside the health sector to contribute to awareness raising and supporting the health literacy of individuals. seeks to enhance the health literacy responsiveness of individuals, schools, families and communities. this multidimensional approach will translate into long term benefits. most importantly it will provide answers to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 inform collective health literacy solutions. with minor modification this protocol is scalable to multiple schools and transferable globally. kidger, j., stone, t., tilling, k., brockman, r., campbell, r. ford, t., et al. (2016) rct quantitative survey mental health promotion staff and students second and third cycle 2 weeks positive outcome england findings indicate that both the adult and youth courses were considered relevant to the mental health of both staff and students, and were effective at improving knowledge, attitudes, confidence and skills in supporting others. a peer support service was established in all intervention schools and was perceived to be helpful in supporting individuals in difficulty – for example through listening, and signposting to other services and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 raising the profile of mental health at a whole school level. barriers to use included lack of knowledge about the service, concerns about confidentiality and a preference for accessing support from pre-existing networks. bonell, c., allen, e., opondo, c., warren, e., elbourne, d., sturgess, j., et al. (2019) rct quantitative survey mental health promotion whole school second and third cycle 36 months positive outcome england the study provides the first evidence from a trial that whole-school interventions may work by modifying school environments and student relationships. jayman, m., ohl, m., hughes, b., & fox, p. (2019) quasiexperimental pre-post study mixed survey, interviews mental health promotion teacher and students second and third cycle 10 weeks positive outcome england findings from informants and self-reports identified significant improvements in total difficulties and on pertinent sdq subscales (e.g., emotional symptoms and peer relationship problems) at posthttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 test. comparison pupils demonstrated minimal change over time. thematic analysis of qualitative data supported the quantitative findings and provided valuable insights into experience. campos, l., dias, p., duarte, a., veiga, e; dias, c., & pallha, f. (2018) quasiexperimental pre-post study quantitative survey mental health promotion students second and third cycle 2 weeks positive outcome portugal significantly higher improvement in mental health literacy from pre intervention to follow-up. overall, “finding space for mental health” showed efficacy as a short-term promotion program for improving mental health literacy in schools. dray, j., bowman, j., campbell, e., freund, m., hodder, r., wolfenden, l., et al. (2017) rct qualitative survey mental health promotion whole school second and third cycle 4 months no positive outcomes australia there were no significant differences between groups at follow-up for three mental health http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 outcomes: total sdq, internalising problems, and prosocial behaviour. a small statistically significant difference in favour of the control group was found for externalising problems. findings highlight the continued difficulties in developing effective, schoolbased prevention programs for mental health problems in adolescents. yang, j., cervera, r., tye, s., ekker, s., & pierret, c. (2018) quasiexperimental pre-post study quantitative survey mental health promotion students second and third cycle 3 weeks positive outcome united states curricular-based efforts focused on mental illness in an alternative school setting are feasible and integrated well into general curricula. preliminary data suggest the existence of unique help-seeking barriers in at-risk youth. increased focus upon http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 community-based programming has potential to bridge gaps in translation, bringing this critical population to clinical care in pursuit of improved mental health for all. garmy, p., berg, a., & clausson, e. (2015) qualitative qualitative focus group mental health promotion students secondary education 10 weeks positive outcome sweden the school-based mental health program was perceived as beneficial and meaningful on both individual and group levels, but students expressed a desire for a more health-promoting approach. gigantesco, a., del re, d., cascavilla, i., palumbo, g., de mei, b., cattanco, c., et al. (2015) quasiexperimental pre-post study quantitative survey mental health promotion student --2 months positive outcome italy the results showed an improvement in self-efficacy in regulating negative affect, overall psychological wellbeing, and satisfaction with life. these results demonstrate that the programme produced significant positive effects on the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 mental health status of participating students. shinde, s., pereira, b., khandeparkar, p., sharma, a., patton, g., ross, d., et al. (2017) rct quantitative survey mental health promotion students secondary education 24 months positive outcome india the study demonstrated generally good acceptability and feasibility of the intervention, though the coverage of intervention activities was lower in the teacher delivery schools due to competing teaching commitments, the participation of male students was lower than that of females, and one school dropped out because of concerns regarding the reproductive and sexual health content of the intervention. this approach provides a framework for adolescent health promotion in secondary schools http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 in low-resource settings. kiviruusu, o., björklund, k., koskinen, h., liski, a., lindblom, j., kuoppamäki, h. (2016) rct quantitative survey mental health promotion whole school primary education 6 months no positive effects finland these first, shortterm results did not show any main effects on children’s socioemotional skills or psychological problems. this lack of effects may be due to the relatively short follow-up period given the universal, whole schoolbased approach of the program. the results suggest that the grade level where the intervention is started might be a factor in the program’s effectiveness. moreover, the results also suggest that for this type of intervention program to be effective, it needs to be delivered with a high enough dosage. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 hawe, p., bond, l., ghali, l., perry, r., davison, c., casey, d., et al. (2015) quasiexperimental pre-post study quantitative survey risk behaviors reduction whole school secondary education 24 months positive outcome canada a non-specific, risk protective intervention in the social environment of the school had a significant impact on a cluster of risk behaviours for girls. results were remarkably like reports from similar school environment interventions elsewhere, albeit with different behaviours being affected. it may be that this type of intervention activates change processes that interact highly with context, impacting different risks differently, according to the prevalence, salience and distribution of the risk and the interconnectivity of relationships between staff and students. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 morris, j., lummis, g., lock, g., ferguson, c., hill, s. & nykiel, a. (2019) quasiexperimental pre-post study mixed survey, focus group school culture promotion whole school and community --24 months positive outcome australia after a range of interventions, findings from both post-test surveys and qualitative data suggested a change in leadership style was a key factor of school cultural change across all factors. the study highlights a number of visible strategies that were employed to increase morale and improve staff wellbeing. notes: --means that this information is missing http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 the age range of students participating in the interventions also differs among analyzed studies: primary education (n=4), second and/or third cycles (grades 5 to 9) (n=7), secondary education (n=5), all school years (n=3). as for the interventions, the themes they addressed were: mental health promotion (n=14), classroom management (n=2), reduction of risk behaviors (n=1), promotion of school culture (n=1) and promotion of social and emotional skills (n=1); the types of interventions were training and implementation of mental health promotion programs (which included seminars, workshops, information sessions, among other strategies directed at participants) (n=19). considering the research characteristics among studies, case study/prospective (n=2), rct (n=6) and quasi-experimental pre-post study (n=11) were observed regarding study design as for the data collection procedure, it was verified that some studies use more than one data collection procedure, e.g., focus group (n=4), interviews (n=2) and survey (n=17). most interventions last less than 12 months (n=15) and are carried out in several countries: canada (n=2), portugal (n=3), united states (n=2), united kingdom (n=1), norway (n=1), japan (n=1), australia (n=3), england (n=3), sweden (n=1), italy (n=1), india (n=1) and finland (n=1) (see table 3) table 3 research characteristics among studies research characteristics n study design case study/prospective 2 rct 6 quasi-experimental pre-post study 11 methods mixed 3 qualitative 3 quantitative 13 data type focus group 4 interviews 2 survey 17 duration of the intervention ≤ 12 months 15 12 months – 24 months 3 24 months – 36 months 1 sample characteristics country canada 2 portugal 2 united states 2 united kingdom 1 norway 1 japan 1 australia 3 england 3 sweden 1 italy 1 india 1 finland 1 included sample characteristics papers selected for this review focused on young people aged up to 18 years old who attend school and had been the target for mental health and wellbeing promotion interventions. the interventions must have been carried out in a school context. main findings according to the presented results, it can be seen that most of the analyzed articles intend to promote mental health in a school context and the great majority (84%; n=16) reported positive outcomes. most of the studies (75%) involved either the whole school or whole school and community (n = 7) or focused only on students (n = 7). the majority (37%) of the studies (n=7) refer to grades 5 to 9, have a quasiexperimental pre-post study design (58%; n=11), used a quantitative methodology (68%; n=13), and last less than 12 months of intervention (79%; n=15). moreover, they were implemented in european countries (53%; n=10). these results show the importance of the involvement, not only of students and teachers, but of the whole school, in order to promote mental health and wellbeing in schools. they also highlight that after years http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 of “stigma”, mental health is a main concern in school aged population. discussion school-based approaches seem to be more effective when they include the entire school, when they use a social skills promotion model, when they include peer education, when they favour student participation and initiative, when they use interactive and participated methodologies, and when they last several years and become a part of school culture (person et al, 2012; jané.llopis, 2007; matos et al, 2012). it is also referred in literature that new programs should be integrated into previously existing ones, and partnerships and networking with structures within the community are encouraged. higher levels of participation are also advised, such as the ‘entire school’ and ‘entire community’ approach is associated with a public health perspective,based on positive psychology that privileges the development of positive traits (positive emotions, resilience and optimism) (lhopis-jané, 2005; matos et al, 2012). interventions that increase protection through protective legislation (price increase in specific products such as tobacco and alcohol) may be dissuasive for a while, but they only allow permanent positive changes within a “whole school, positive, global, participative framework, allowing for a comprehensive and concerted action.(corrieri et al, 2013). some authors argue that interventions must be systematically evaluated so that they may be presented as evidence based, and even when results point out that school and municipal intervention programs have no or little effect (which is already a progress compared with having no assessment), the implementation conditions must be checked, in particular the technician’s profile and experience, duration of the program, its supervision and how it was evaluated ( corrieri et al, 2013; stallard, 2013; matos, 2019). overall, programs applied in the area of mental health seem to have positive effects (but small). anxiety seems to respond better than depression. programs appear to function better when there is a medium level of depression, and boys and girls respond differently to these interventions (stallard, 2013). investigations on psychoeducation are understudied, and despite the fact that the school setting is ‘practical’, it is not yet clear if these interventions fit their setting. one of the reasons is the potential harmful effect of “stigma related to poor academic performance” that may put away students that do not like school (matos et al, 2016), or the fact that teachers may be themselves a source of problems in need for urgent action (tomé, matos, camacho & gomes, 2019). in the period included in the present systematic review, the situation is similar: schools seem to be a relevant context to implement programs in the area of mental health and well-being promotion, and it is commonly accepted that whole -school programs are the most effective. literature reviews on the effectiveness of intervention programs is undermined or at least biased by the fact that most of the noneffective programs tend not to be published. most of the interventions focused on students even if the recommendation was a whole school approach, which is a much more ambitious intervention design that most teams can’t afford. most of the programs lasted one year or less, when the previous recommendation was more than one year to allow for a change in the school culture. it is strongly recommended to implement school-based intervention programs in the mental health area, with a long-term followup, an effective monitoring of the quality of its implementation (and adequate training of the intervention team). an effective multi-source evaluation of the intervention should be included, along with family sessions. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 in the last five years, as a follow-up to less recent literature reviews, several authors (pearson et al, 2012; corrieri et al, 2013) pointed out the urge and relevance of interventions in the area of mental health promotion in schools. it is also quite plausible that most of the promotional programs are neither published nor adequately evaluated. this delays substantially the knowledge in these areas, even if it is generally agreed that it is difficult to fit the urges of the professionals in the field (a lot of work, low support and close to zero funding), and the requests for a quality scientific publication. two messages for the public policies: one is about cheering initiatives to design and implement mental health programs in school arenas and the other is about favouring the connection between professionals that undergo field interventions and researchers that can provide an adequate design, supervision, evaluation, data analysis and adequate dissemination. references barry, m.m., clarke, a.m., & dowling, k. (2017). promoting social and emotional wellbeing in schools. health education, 117(5), 434–451. barry, m. m., clarke, a. m., jenkins, r., & patel, v. (2013). a systematic review of the effectiveness of mental health promotion interventions for young people in low and middle income countries. bmc public health, 13, 835. doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-13835 baskaran, m., sekar, u., & kokilavani, n. (2016). pilot study of mental health programme on promoting mental health characteristics among adolescents in psg schools, coimbatore. international journal of nursing education, 8(4), 161-161166. doi:10.5958/09749357.2016.00145.8 bjorklund, k., liski, a., samposalo, h., lindblom, j., hella, j., huhtinen, h., santalahti, p. (2014). "together at school"--a school-based intervention program to promote socio-emotional skills and mental health in children: study protocol for a cluster randomized controlled trial. bmc public health, 14, 1042. doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-14-1042. cho, s. m., & shin, y. m. (2013). the promotion of mental health and the prevention of mental health problems in child and adolescent. korean j pediatr, 56(11), 459-464. doi:10.3345/kjp.2013.56.11.459. corrieri, s; heider, d. conrad i; heller, s (2013) school-based prevention programs for depression and anxiety in adolescence: a systematic review. health promotion international, 3, 1-15. goldberg, j., sklad, m., elfrink, t., schreurs, k., bohlmeijer, e., & clarke, a. (2019). effectiveness of interventions adopting a whole school approach to enhancing social and emotional development: a meta-analysis. european journal of psychology of education, 34, 755782. doi: 10.1007/s10212-0180406-9 hudson, k., lawton, r., & hugh-jones, s. (2020). factors affecting the implementation of a whole school mindfulness program: a qualitative study using the consolidated framework for implementation research. bmc health services research, 20(133). doi.org/10.1186/s12913-020-4942z. jané-llopis e.(2007). mental health promotion: concepts and strategies for reaching the population. health promot j austr,18(3),191-7. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 1 january 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 lhopis-jané, e., barry, m., hosman, c. & patel, v. (2005). what makes mental health promotion effective?. iuhpe, promotion and education supplement, 2, 9-25. matos, mg (2019). the dream teens: navigating life like a protagonist throughout adolescence. beau bassin: lambert academic publishing. matos, m. g., camacho, i., reis, m., tomé, g., branquinho, c. & ramiro, l. (2017). is truth in the eyes of the beholder? or are portuguese schools, as viewed by portuguese pupils, mismatching with what the educational system offers? vulnerable children and youth studies, 1-11. doi: 10.1080/17450128.2017.1363447. matos, m. g., gaspar, t., ferreira, m., tomé, g., camacho, i., reis, m., melo, p., simões, c., machado, r., ramiro, l., & equipa aventura social (2012). keeping a focus on self-regulation and competence: “find your own style”, a school based program targeting at risk adolescents. journal of cognitive and behavioral psychotherapies, 12(1), 39-48. moher, d., liberati, a., tetzlaff, j., altman, d. g., & the prisma group. (2009). preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and metaanalyses: the prisma statement. plos med, 6(7), e1000097. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1000097. pearson, m., chilton, r., woods, h., wyatt, k., ford, t., abraham, c. & anderson, r. (2012). implementing health promotion in schools: protocol for a realist systematic review of research and experience in the united kingdom (uk). systematic reviews, 1, 48. doi: 10.1186/2046-4053-148. stallard, p. (2013). school based interventions for depression and anxiety in children and adolescents. evid based mental health, 16, 60-61. tomé, g., matos, m.g., camacho, i., & gomes, p. (2019). promoting wellbeing and mental health in adolescents. cientific journal of neurology, 1(1), 2-7. world health organization (who). (1998). health promoting evaluation: recommendations for policymakers, report of the who european working group on health promotion evaluation. copenhagen: who. who (2013). mental health action plan 2013-2020. geneva: who http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/ 10665/89966/1/9789241506021_e ng.pdf http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/89966/1/9789241506021_eng.pdf http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/89966/1/9789241506021_eng.pdf http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/89966/1/9789241506021_eng.pdf settling in québec: exploring latin americans’ skilled worker’s personal projects floryana víquez, stéphane dandeneau, hugues leduc1 keywords: migration, settlement, latin american, skilled workers, personal projects author biographies: of térraba descent, floryana víquez, is currently completing her doctorate (phd/psy.d.) in clinical and community psychology at the université du québec à montréal. floryana’s research is focused on latin-american migration in québec, critical race relations and liberation psychology. her work aims to better understand the complexity of the settlement process and the impacts of everyday racism on latin-american immigrants. stéphane dandeneau, is currently a full professor in social psychology at the université du québec à montréal. after completing his phd in social psychology at mcgill university, stéphane worked on the roots of resilience project at the culture and mental health research unit, jewish general hospital during his postdoc. stéphane has broad interests in social psychology and social-cultural psychology and the underlying social cognitive processes of social resilience. his first line of research investigates the links between self-esteem, social stress, and attentional processes involved in perpetuating psychological insecurities. his research examines ways of teaching people with low self-esteem some "high selfesteem-like skills" such as inhibiting social rejection, which is shown to buffer against social and performance threats. his research also investigates sources of resilience and definitions of resilience from an aboriginal perspective using a community-based approach with the roots of resilience project. the current hegemony of individualistic conceptualisations of resilience in today's literature overshadows other, more ecocentric, conceptualisations. using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, the project aims to develop a more culturally appropriate model of resilience as well as showcase the many different facets of aboriginal people's strengths. recommended citation: víquez, f., dandeneau, s., leduc, h. (2020). settling in québec: exploring latin americans’ skilled worker’s personal projects. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(4), 1 20. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: floryana víquez, department of psychology, université du québec à montréal, 100, rue sherbrooke ouest h2x 3p2 montréal, qc. email: viquez_porras.floryana_maria@courrier.uqam.ca 1 department of psychology, université du québec à montréal http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:viquez_porras.floryana_maria@courrier.uqam.ca global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 settling in québec: exploring latin americans’ skilled worker’s personal projects every year, close to 63% of immigrants settling québec are skilled workers. québec’s migration policies select skilled workers based on their academic level, language skills, professional experience, and other qualifications. however, the goals, activities, and actions skilled immigrants must undertake to settle in québec have not been adequately researched. using the personal projects approach, we recruited 230 skilled immigrant workers from latin american countries to develop a better understanding of key aspects of skilled workers’ priorities after settling in québec. inspired by the settlement framework, an analysis of the participants’ personal projects revealed three main spheres of life: economic, social, and political. according to the everyday racism model, particularly the structural component, our findings reflect the limitations of québec’s migration policies in terms of access to jobs, education, and proper housing. lastly, this paper outlines the subcategories according to the participants’ gender and migration period. our findings indicate that participants prioritized the social and economic spheres overall—more importantly, they uncovered a paradox faced by recent skilled immigrants. even though they are targeted by québec’s immigration policies, these policies do not necessarily guarantee full access to the job market. introduction in québec, there is a shortage of labour in various fields, which is in part caused by the ageing population and the declining birth rate (demers and rabemananjara, 2018). if this demographic trend continues, there will be a labour shortage of nearly 363,000 workers in québec by 2030 (conference board of canada, 2007). one solution to cope with this problem is to target and attract skilled immigrants to come and settle in québec, which in fact is one of the province’s migration policies. officially, skilled immigrant workers are defined as: “immigrants whose skills respond to particular market needs and make it easier for them to find work” (gouvernement du québec, 2016). québec follows the integration model, shaped by interculturalism that promotes integration, interactions, and a common culture according to the interests of the majority (bouchard, 2015). québec has put in place numerous settlement policies to ensure that skilled workers have access to all services (shields et al., 2014; shields, drolet and valenzuela, 2016). according to the ministry of immigration, francisation and integration of québec, immigrants should come to québec because they will find good job opportunities and enjoy a great quality of life. the ministry also states that the province helps immigrants “push your limits and expand your horizons…. québec allows you to lead a full life” (gouvernement du québec, 2018). the strategy appears to work since every year as nearly 63% of immigrants arriving in québec are skilled workers. québec’s migration policies select skilled workers based on the applicant’s score on the selection grid, where they must score at least 50 out of a maximum of 59 points. this selection grid measures the following: 1) level of education and area of training; 2) work experience; 3) age; 4) knowledge of french and english; 5) capacity for financial selfsufficiency, among other family criteria. although québec’s migration policies seem to be attracting their targeted audience, immigrants often find themselves in less than ideal circumstances—especially in terms of accessing resources such as jobs and housing in québec. moreover, despite the fact that more than half of recent migrants are overqualified, their unemployment rate is http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 double that of canadian-born citizens (fields and yssaad, 2018). latin american skilled workers in québec latin americans compromise a significant proportion of skilled workers who have settled in quebec—in fact, close to 25% are latin americans (gouvernement du québec, 2016) and the latin american community is a sizeable demographic group that is growing rapidly. between 2006 and 2015, new arrivals from latin america who settled in québec accounted for half of all latin american immigrants admitted to canada overall. in that same timeframe, 17% of all immigrants in québec were born in latin america (armony, 2018). according to statistics canada (2019), they are classified as a visible minority, defined as: “persons, other than aboriginal peoples, who are noncaucasian in race or non-white in colour,”— thus highlighting the fact that one must take into consideration the role discrimination may play, if at all, in the migration process. latin american skilled workers are at the confluence of two interesting processes: on the one hand, one of québec’s skilled workers immigration policies gives priority to highly qualified applicants, and on the other hand, skilled workers often begin the migration process to achieve specific goals such as seeking a better life for themselves and their families or pursuing career opportunities (böhme, persian and stöhr, 2015; cai, esipova, oppenheimer and feng, 2014; vervliet, vanobbergen, broekaert and derluyn, 2014). it is therefore important to understand whether these two processes work in concert toward providing a meaningful migration and settlement process or whether other external factors hinder or undermine the migration goals of skilled workers coming to québec. the goals of migrant workers to better understand the settlement experiences of latin american skilled workers in québec, we propose a mixed method study of their goals and actions using the personal projects analysis (ppa) (little, 2017; little and gee, 2017). personal projects are defined as “the kinds of activities and concerns that people have over the course of their lives” (little, 1983, p. 1). they are projected actions that allow the person to give meaning to his or her experience and embody their most significant aspirations (omodei and wearing, 1990). these personal projects can range from chores and routine activities (e.g., taking the garbage out) to specific goals (e.g., finish my dissertation; have a child) and to more profound lifetime pursuits (e.g., identify the meaning of my life) (little, 2020). according to little (1983), depending on the aims of the research, personal projects can be analysed according to several different categories. some examples may include categories such as: academic, cultural, interpersonal, and vocational, among others. consequently, these categories are indicative of the life spheres prioritized by the participants at certain times in their lives. personal projects are interdependent planned actions within a particular context, whether it is physical, cultural, social, or historical (little, 2017; little and gee, 2017). research on personal projects has demonstrated the importance of certain factors in a specific environment and how these factors may affect the launch, continuation, and realization of these pursuits. for example, frost and leblanc (2014) have documented how stigma surrounding lesbian, gay, and bisexual people may negatively affect their family plans, harm their well-being, and impede the pursuit of their plans. in the current study, we have opted to highlight and examine the categories of the participants’ personal projects and the context in which they are pursued. by using the personal projects methodology, we can also investigate how the demographic http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 characteristics of the participants may influence their goals and priorities. we also intention to focus our investigation on how the gender and settlement stage of our participants (early or late) can influence the choice of personal projects and the characteristics of these projects. in this sense, the idiographic data shared by the participants will help us gain a better understanding of the types of goals that are prioritized by latin american skilled workers who settle in québec. the projects of the migrants who participated in this study reflect specific anticipated actions they plan to carry out as part of their immigration process as well as the categories that encompass these projects. analyzing skilled migrant workers’ personal projects is useful for this research because it gives us access to detailed and qualitative, information, which will deepen our understanding of their goals, and consequently, their settlement process. the settlement process for immigrants to québec settlement is defined as process, specifically “a continuum of activities that a new immigrant/refugee goes through upon arrival in a new country” (shields, türegün and lowe, 2014). the complexity of the personal projects and the processual nature of migration have led us to utilize the settlement framework to explore the experiences of latin american skilled workers in québec, particularly in terms of the government’s assertions when depicting and promoting québec as a better place. the settlement framework is an emerging framework that provides a better understanding of the early stages of the immigration process (bauder, 2012; fletcher, 1999; root, gates-gasse, shields et al., 2014). this framework sees immigration as a process with multiple dimensions and levels that encompasses all aspects of the newcomer's and family's lives (fletcher, 1999). this process is bidirectional: individual and societal adjustments are necessary for the newcomer and the host society to attain a certain sense of well-being. newcomers must undertake so many steps in their settlements process such as finding housing and employment, learning the language, or understanding the new cultural codes (fletcher, 1999; government of canada, 2017; valtonen, 2016). this framework emphasizes the fact that immigrants initiate various actions to meet their needs in multiple spheres of their lives (nayar, 2014) and it also supports the study of the migratory process as a path unfolding over time (bauder, 2012; noh, kim and noh, 2012; root et al., 2014). shields et al., 2014, propose a series of indicators to understand the adjustment of migrants in several spheres of life: social, economic, cultural, and political. for example, indicators of the social sphere include language acquisition, access to education, membership in a social network, the degree of social network diversity, and social inclusion. indicators in the economic sphere refer to access to housing, access to the labour market, and economic independence. indicators of the cultural sphere reflect the degree of adaptation to the lifestyle in the host society and the understanding of values and patterns of interpersonal relationships in the host society. indicators of the political sphere correspond to formal aspects such as the acquisition of permanent residency and citizenship status as well as civic participation (bauder, 2012; fletcher, 2009; shields et al., 2014). thus, this framework highlights the active role of the individual in the early migration stages as well as their access to the resources available in the receiving society. access to resources for immigrants at the intersection between the goals of the immigrant and the available resources within the receiving society, the notion of access to these resources comes into play. in the light of the everyday racism model (essed, 1991) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 we will try to discern the interaction between the participant’s goals and the notion of access to resources. the everyday racism model proposes to analyse how a receiving society conjugates interactional, cultural, structural factors in order to provide or limit access to available resources. this interdisciplinary model proposes to analyse situations of implicit discrimination in concrete social situations (essed, 1985). according to this model, lack of access or restricted access to resources that are widely available to some people, but denied to others, is a form of discrimination. the model of everyday racism provides a better understanding of the discrimination that specific marginalized groups (such as individuals labeled as a visible minority) face in various spheres of life: employment, housing, education, social life, and access to services. this model affirms that discrimination is built into and embedded in the structures of society—it is perpetuated by socialized beliefs and values, expressed, and lived on daily bases, and it is expressed through intentional and reflexive actions and practices. acts of discrimination occur in people’s daily lives and constantly reinforce inequalities between different ethnic groups (berman and paradies, 2010, essed, 1991). essed’s model is grounded in specific sociocultural forces that underpin and maintain discrimination. this model proposes to understand the phenomenon of discrimination through three societal components: the interactional component, the structural component, and the cultural component. the interactional component of the everyday racism model is related to the interactions between individuals. this component of the model explains how discrimination is expressed unfairly in daily behaviours and practices (priest, perry, ferdinand, paradies and kelaher, 2014). discrimination is found in unjust and aggressive interactions such as threats, insults, and micro-aggressions between marginalized groups and members of the dominant group, (berman and paradies 2010). these practices and actions have the effect of perpetuating the relations of domination and power, resulting in negative impacts on marginalized groups (feagin and eckberg, 1980). the structural component of the everyday racism model discusses factors such as restriction of access to resources, in particular, employment, education, and housing (essed, 1991). in general, visible minorities and other marginalized groups do not enjoy the same access to these resources valued by the host society. for example, individuals who belong to a marginalized group tend to have limited access to housing in privileged areas compared to those belonging to the dominant society. as a result, marginalized groups are more likely to live in deprived areas, thus affecting and possibly hindering access to education and employment (bonilla-silva, 2014; essed, 1991). access to employment is also limited by the stereotypes that prevail in certain societies. for example, when there are stereotypes of certain people not having a strong work ethic, or having limited skills and capacity, this could influence employers in a negative way. as a result, they may be less inclined to hire new arrivals from certain backgrounds (oreopoulos and dechief, 2011). the cultural component of the everyday racism model includes values, beliefs, and norms advocated by the dominant society (bonilla-silva, 2014; essed, 1991). discrimination is forged by the stereotypes about marginalized groups that exist in the mainstream society. it is a manifestation of a racist ideology inherent in a social system that serves to maintain pre-established social order (berman and paradies, 2010). discrimination is one of the elements of a system of oppression manifested in social structures: the media, literature, political discourse, and education. this system of oppression reproduces the inequalities that exist and lends them legitimacy. discrimination becomes a common affair, invisible, and tolerated by society (essed, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 2018). individuals are socialized in this system of oppression and thus, consciously or not, maintain inequalities and injustices (essed, 1991; 2018). there are numerous adverse effects on the health and well-being of individuals who must endure discrimination. it perpetuates oppression, domination, and power relations that have negative impacts on marginalized groups (feagin and eckberg, 1980). consequently, considering the aforementioned frameworks, personal projects are the projected actions that the participants expect to carry out to settle in québec. personal projects include several categories which characterize the priorities of the participants of the participants at a specific time in their lives. the categories of the personal projects are a reflection certain societal components—and are often an indication of the sociocultural forces at play that perpetuate discrimination. therefore, we propose to study the personal projects of latin american skilled workers recently arrived in québec in order to better understand the actions that constitute their personal projects as well as the categories that encompass these personal projects. this study involves investigating the priorities of the immigrants’ life spheres and examine to which settlement sphere their personal projects correspond, in order to better comprehend which societal component comprises their personal projects. this study also seeks to explore the differences and similarities in the personal projects according to gender and settlement stage (year of migration). we also seek to better understand how some goals are a reflection of participant’s aspirations, yet also a depiction of the access to certain opportunities available to them (or lack thereof) in their new context. method participants this study took place in the province of québec. participation in the study was voluntary, and the participants did not receive any remuneration and we ensured the confidentiality of data. to recruit participants and ensure that latin americans located everywhere in québec had access to the survey, we combined different strategies to obtain a more representative sample. we recruited participants via social media (facebook, twitter, and instagram) and via a radio show interview. a total of 230 latin americans (60.4% women, 39.6% men) who migrated between 2011 and 2017 as skilled workers participated in the study. age distribution was as follows: 10.9% are aged 18 to 30 years; 69.3% aged 31 to 40 years; and 20.9% are over 41 years of age. approximately 38% of the participants migrated between 2015 and early 2017, while 62% migrated between 2011 and 2014. measures the personal projects approach (ppa) this approach has been widely used to explore the goals of individuals (omodei and wearing 1990, lui and rollock, 2012; yiu 2013). drawing from idiographic and nomothetic data, the personal project analysis is a modular and flexible instrument that allows researchers to adapt it to their specific fields. personal projects methodology is useful in terms of integrating information about the person’s projected actions, his or her context, and their adaptations over time. this method invites participants to report their projects in three stages. first, after reading a list of examples, participants generated a list of up to ten personal projects in which they are currently engaged. secondly, participants rated each project (using a 5-point likert scale; 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree) on the following 10 dimensions: “this project is important for me” (importance); “working on this project contributes to making my life satisfying” (contributes to life satisfaction); http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 this project is stressful for me (stress); this project is difficult for me (difficulty); i am in control of this project (control); i am satisfied with my progress on this project (progress); this project is short-term rather than longterm (short/long term); i believe that i will eventually be successful with this project (outcome); and people who are close to me support me in my efforts to accomplish this project (social support); “my ability to pursue this project is hindered by discrimination” (discrimination in project). finally, participants classified their projects according to one of the following preestablished categories: participation in civic life; language learning; education; the sense of belonging; work; participation in cultural activities; participation in community groups, social and sports associations; family life; other. these categories were derived from the settlement process literature (bauder 2012, fletcher 2009, shields et al., 2014). brief inventory of thriving (su, tay and diener, 2014) this scale measures psychosocial well-being by integrating the notions of the sense of belonging and accomplishment. ten items compose this inventory, covering various aspects such as the sense of belonging and accomplishment, meaning of life and interpersonal relationships. these items are scored using a 5-point likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree). we used the spanish version that the authors made available on their official website. everyday discrimination scale (williams, yu, jackson and anderson (1997) this scale is constructed from the everyday racism model of essed (1990), it measures the discrimination that individuals experience on daily bases (de vogli, ferrie, chandola, kivimäki and marmot, 2007, lewis, yang, jacobs and fitchett, 2012, williams et al., 1999). researchers on discrimination in the latino community often use this scale (araújo and borrell, 2006, dawson and panchanadeswaran, 2010, reeve et al., 2011, benjamins, 2012, molina et al., 2013, lebron et al., 2014, halim et al., 2015). the scale has 10 items that will be scored using a 4-point likert scale (1 = never, 4 = very often). higher scores on the scale indicate that participants experience more discrimination in their daily lives (reeve et al., 2011). we used the spanish version used by dawson and panchanadeswaran (2010) in their study. procedure we developed an online version of the ppa and administered it via surveygizmo’s platform. we posted and shared the link to access the ppa on surveygizmo on several facebook groups. we identified these groups by running searches on facebook using the demonym of each latin american country followed by the keywords: “in québec.” these facebook groups are administered by latin americans in québec and most of the participants of these groups are also latin americans in québec. we posted the ppa link on daily bases until we surpassed the targeted sample size (n=200). once on the surveygizmo platform, participants had access to the description of the study, its goals, and its purpose. after providing their consent, participants first completed a short sociodemographic questionnaire (age, gender, and year of immigration). participants then completed the ppa procedure, and then completed self-report measures of brief inventory of thriving (su, tay and diener, 2014), and we used the spanish version that the authors made available on their official website. we also administered the everyday discrimination scale (williams, yu, jackson and anderson (1997) and we used the spanish version used by dawson and panchanadeswaran (2010) in their study. we then asked participants if they would like to provide their email address to be contacted for any follow-up studies. results http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 data preparation and analysis strategy: identifying primary categories prior to running our analyses on preestablished categories, we calculated the distribution of all the personal projects in all pre-established categories. to avoid losing statistical power for the analyses, the analysis was conducted on the five highest categories of projects. the five most prominent categories are, in decreasing order: a) workrelated projects (77.4%). the work category includes examples such as: encontrar un empleo que me haga sentir realizada [to find a job that makes me feel fulfilled]; encontrar un trabajo mejor remunerado [to find a better paying job]; encontrar un trabajo acorde a mi formación [to find a job according to my degree]; b) family-related projects (70.4%). some examples of family-related projects are: tener un hijo [have a child]; casarme [to get married]; comprar una casa [buy a house]; c) education-related projects (56.1%) some of the education-related projects that the participants mentioned are: hacer una maestria [get a master’s degree]; hacer un doctorado [get a phd degree]; terminar la especialización en la uqam [finish my postgraduate qualification at uqam]. d) belonging-related projects (44.3%); this category includes examples such as: hacer nuevos amigos [make new friends]; ciudadanía [citizenship]; integración completa a la sociedad quebeca [fully integrate the quebecker society]; e) language learningrelated projects (34.8%). some examples of language learning-related projects are: perfeccionar el francés [to perfect my french skills]; mejorar el inglés [better my english skills] the pre-established categories that did not meet the distribution threshold (and subsequently excluded from the analyses) were: participation in civic life (26.1%), participation in cultural activities (18.7%); participation in community groups, social and sports associations (11.3%). the final sample consists of 230 participants with a total of 651 personal projects. thematic analysis of primary categories we first conducted a thematic analysis of the personal projects, using the following steps: identification of themes that correspond to each sub-category, and classification of all the personal projects according to the preestablished categories. as shown in table 1, we identified 22 subcategories within the pre-established categories. we asked independent coders (a senior graduate psychology student and a researcher holding a ph.d. in community psychology) to review the list of the projects and assign each project to a subcategory. the inter-coder agreement between these content categorizations was 78%, with a cohen’s kappa of .76 (substantial agreement). the categories work and family were denser, and each consisted of six subcategories. the category belonging consisted of four subcategories. lastly, the categories of language learning and education consisted each of three subcategories (see table 2 for list of primary and their subcategories). we then calculated the distribution of the personal projects in all 22 subcategories and again found that some subcategories did not meet the distribution threshold for statistical power. to avoid losing statistical power for the analyses, the analysis was conducted on the two subcategories with the highest distribution of each primary category (10 subcategories in total). table 1 descriptive statistics of analytic sample of latin american skilled workers categorical variables n % sex female 139 60.4 male 91 39.6 migration year 2011 to 2014 143 62.2 2015 to 2017 87 37.8 age http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 18 to 30 25 10.9 31 to 40 157 69.3 41 and over 48 20.9 number of projects language learning 80 34.8 education 129 56.1 belonging 102 44.3 work 178 77.4 family 162 70.4 classifying subcategories within the settlement sphere model we followed a thematic categorization procedure to classify all the subcategories according to the spheres specified by the settlement approach (bauder, 2012; fletcher, 1999; root et al., 2014). personal projects were categorized as follows: 1) economic; 2) social; 3) political (see the settlement sphere column in table 2). eleven subcategories (out of twenty-two) belong to the social sphere, eight subcategories fit within the economic sphere, and two other subcategories are part of the political sphere. table 2 personal projects categories and examples project category project subcategory settlement sphere example language learning learn french social improve my french skills learn english social take english classes learn both social learn french and english education get another degree social finish my mba education for my children social think of my children’s education study social go back to school belonging social interaction social make new friends citizenship political pass the citizenship exam improve my living space economic move to another apartment drivers licence political get my driver’s license work find a better job economic find a job in my field of training have my own business economic have my own business find a job economic find a job retirement economic save for my retirement degree equivalency economic be part of the professional order of engineers economic stability economic get rid of my debts family buy a house economic buy a house to travel social travel to europe family reunification social bring my mother to canada have my own family social get married buy a car economic buy a car improve my relationship with my family social talk more often with my brother thematic analysis of personal projects according to the everyday racism model we conducted a thematic analysis of all the personal projects and identified the everyday racism model component that corresponds to the participant’s personal projects. our http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 analysis showed that the vast majority of personal projects mentioned by the participants corresponded to the structural component of the everyday racism model. most of the participants reported personal projects that accounted for their willingness to find a better job and to attain the same economic status that they had in their country of origin. for example: llegar a una libertad financiera real [achieve real financial freedom]; encontrar un trabajo relacionado a mi formación [find a job in my field]; volver a tener el estatus económico que tenía en mi país de origen [attain the economic status that i had in my home country]; encontrar empleo decente [find a decent job]. in general, participants also listed projects that indicate their motivation to access the education system in order to obtain their degree equivalency, or to go back to school. some examples are: solicitar la equivalencia de estudios [apply for the degree equivalency]; volver a estudiar [go back to school]; realizar un curso de teología [complete a theology class]. participants also identified a desire to improve their present housing conditions: comprar mi casa propia [buy my own house]; encontrar un buen lugar para vivir [find a good place to live]; vivir en un departamento mejor [to live in a better apartment]. main analyses all analyses were conducted using ibm spss 24 statistical software. univariate statistics were generated to explore all variables. multilevel analyses and repeated measures logistic regressions were used to analyse the data. for post-hoc tests, a bonferroni correction was applied to adjust for type 1 error inflation. participants’ personal projects we used a cochran’s q test to compare, for all main categories, the percentage of participants that mentioned at least one project of that category. the results show significant differences between some of the project categories, q (4) = 121.34, p < .001. as seen in table 1, work-related (77.4%) and family projects (70.4%) are similar and figure more prominently than education (56.1%), belonging projects (44.3%), and language learning (34.8%). personal projects within the settlement spheres we created three between-project variables that consisted of the subcategories of projects that represent each settlement sphere (economic, social, and political). to investigate the similarities and differences between life spheres, we compared the mean number of projects of each sphere using a multilevel analysis in which the projects are the units at level 1 and the participants are the units of level 2. the most prominent spheres correspond to the economic (m = 2.42, sd = .87) and the social (m = 2.38, sd = .87), and these two spheres are significantly more prominent (p < .05) than the political sphere (m = 0.22, sd = .87). distribution of personal projects according to the settlement approach we ran multilevel analyses to compare the number of projects in each life sphere. for this, we created two between-subject variables: gender and settlement stage (earlier settlement with migration during 2011-2014 vs. recent settlement with migration during 2015-2017). separate analyses were performed for each gender and each settlement stage. for both women and men, there were significant differences in the number of projects in each life sphere: women, f(2,278) = 181.02, p < .001; men: f(2,181) = 75.58, p < .001. more specifically, the most prominent spheres were the economic (women: m = 2.51, sd = 1.44; men: m = 2.29, sd = 1.42) and the social (women: m = 2.61, sd = 1.65; men: m = 2.02, sd = http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 1.79). the two latter spheres were significantly more prominent than the political sphere (women: m = 0.19, sd = 0.41; men: m = 0.26, sd = 0.44). settlement stage (earlier vs. recent) showed the same tendency, earlier settlement 2011-2014: f(2,286) = 149.93, p < .001; vs. recent settlement 2015-2017: f(2,174) = 98.76, p < .001). more specifically, the most prominent spheres were the economic (2011-2014: m = 2.32, sd = 1.41; 2015-2017: m = 2.58, sd = 1.46) and the social (2011-2014: m = 2.37, sd = 1.78; 2015-2017: m = 2.39, sd = 1.65), and these two spheres were significantly more prominent than the political sphere (20112014: m = 0.20, sd = 1.65; 2015-2017: m = 0.24, sd = 0.43). comparing personal projects according to gender and settlement stage we conducted cochran’s q tests with repeated measures logistic regression analyses to investigate the distribution of subcategories for women and men separately, and for early and recent migrants separately. figures 1 through 4 show the proportional distribution of subcategories, where an overlap of circles between two subcategories indicates a non-significant difference between the percentages of each subcategory. some projects, such as “to get a better job,” “to buy a house,” and “get another degree,” are equally relevant personal projects for both women and men as well as for participants that immigrated before 2014 and after 2015. in a similar manner, projects such as “having my own business,” “making new friends,” and “citizenship” are equally relevant for all participants. our findings also indicate that travel-related projects are significantly more prominent for women than for men, χ² (1) = 12.33, p < .001. our data also suggest that projects related to the subcategory of learning french are more prominent for participants who migrated more recently than for those who migrated before 2014, χ² (1) = 11.38, p < .001. figure 1. euler diagram of the percentages of the most prominent personal projects outlined by women participants http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 figure 2. euler diagram of the percentages of the most prominent personal projects outlined by men participants figure 3. euler diagram of the percentages of the most prominent personal projects outlined by participants who migrated between 2011 and 2014 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 figure 4. euler diagram of the percentages of the most prominent personal projects outlined by participants who migrated between 2015 and 2017 discussion work, education, and language our analyses of primary and sub-categories of participants’ personal projects and shows that work, education, and language are the most prominent priorities for our participants. the five main categories are consistent with research on the goals of individuals that migrated as skilled workers (berry, 1997; cai et al., 2014; porter, 2013). specifically, three of these categories of personal projects (work, education, and language learning) reflect the life spheres (social and economic) in which the participants act upon to settle in québec. these categories are also a reflection of the efforts that the participants have to make in order settle in québec and to fulfill their goals and aspirations. interestingly, women and men, as well as recent and earlier immigrants all share these same priorities—another indication supporting the fact that these aspects are at the core of the settlement process for latin american skilled workers across gender and time of settlement. encontrar un trabajo relacionado a mi formación (personal projects related to work). these projects fall in line with the claim that skilled immigrants seek better economic conditions (berry, 1997; böhme et al., 2015; vervliet et al., 2014). it also concurs with the aims of québec’s immigration policies to achieve economic growth by attracting skilled workers (cameron, 2016). however, most skilled immigrants with university degrees end up getting jobs that only require a high school diploma or less, resulting in a lower http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 income (blain, fortin, and alvarez, 2017; li, gervais and duval, 2006; hawthorne, 2015). furthermore, immigrants have higher rates of unemployment and underemployment than non-immigrants (premji and shakya, 2017; wassermann, fujishiro and hoppe, 2017). these work-related personal projects demonstrate that the participant’s pursuits within a certain context may not be aligned with the aims of québec’s immigration policies. the need to promote skilled migration is a priority at the government and policy level; however, unemployment rates reveal that employers may not necessarily hire skilled immigrant workers (eid, 2012). the lack of effective professional recognition by employers and professional orders also impedes immigrants in terms of gaining access to the job market (arcand, lenoir and helly 2009; béji and pellerin, 2010; chicha and charest, 2008). migration and settlement policies do not appear to have enough impact on the membership procedures of some professional orders. as a result, québec’s immigration policies might not translate into effective work policies that can guarantee skilled immigrants will have equal access to the job market. volver a estudiar (personal projects related to education). research on economic migration indicates that skilled workers often seek better academic opportunities for themselves and their families (böhme et al., 2015; vervliet et al., 2014). our data shows that participants identified projects such as getting another degree and ensuring a good education for their children. this subcategory of projects focuses on the importance of formal education projects for the participants and their families, a trend that will undoubtedly counteract the underrepresentation of first generation and recent immigrants in higher education (chassels, 2017; michalski, cunningham and henry, 2017). québec attracts and chooses skilled workers to migrate, in part, because of their professional training and diplomas. however, it seems that québec’s strategies to attract “the best and the brightest” (blain et al., 2017) do not necessarily translate into increased or better education opportunities for those who are recruited. these immigration policies rely on the idea that migration will bring a better quality of life (blain et al., 2017; hercog and sandoz, 2018). skilled immigrant workers then expect to migrate into a context that will offer equal opportunities for all members of the society, no matter their place of birth. having to get another degree in order to find work reflects the discordance between the initial reasons why the participants were chosen (migration policies) and the context (settlement policies) that in turn may hinder their full participation in public life (cameron, 2016). aprender el idioma (personal projects related to language learning). our data suggest that participants seek to improve their french and english skills. before becoming a québec resident, skilled workers must demonstrate language proficiency, yet these language skills are often not deemed sufficient for employment (kaushik and drolet, 2018; murphy, 2010). according to research on immigration and settlement, language skills are an essential factor to achieving social and economic integration (bousmah, grenier and gray, 2018; lacroix, gagnon and lortie, 2017). to be able to access the job market, immigrants must have full command of french and english (béji, 2014). in addition, reaching a high level of proficiency in both english and french languages can pose an additional challenge and is time-consuming as well. becoming fully trilingual (since the participant’s mother tongue is spanish) not only becomes a necessary condition to access education, but more importantly, to be able to play an active role in social spheres and to secure a meaningful career. accessing resources in québec analyses of the sub-categories of the “work” primary category show some of the difficulties when trying to access resources. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 once in québec, skilled workers face the consequences of the incongruities between the government’s discourses of integration and the reality of the demands and difficulties of entering the workforce. skilled latin american workers are often caught between migration policies and a reality that does not necessarily translate these policies into adequate settlement practices. settlement practices are guided by the immigration model promoted in each social context. interculturalism in québec aims to implement accommodations, maintain a collective language, and build a provincial culture strengthened by migrant’s cultures (bouchard, 2015; tremblay, 2010). our findings suggest that across all participants, the social and economic settlement spheres are the most prominent. these findings also suggest that participants still do not have access to a suitable job, nor do they have access to education or services to perfect their language skills, which would facilitate their access to fully participate in and contribute to the new host society. when examining our findings with the everyday racism model (essed, 1991), in particular, the structural component, our research reveals certain limitations, especially in terms of access to adequate jobs, the education system, as well as access to proper housing. participants also spoke about their desire to live in a nice place and find a better apartment—personal projects related to structural practices of exclusion that reproduce discrimination. in essed’s terms, the lack of access to the resources of a society is a pattern of discrimination. participants identified their personal projects which reflect the fact that they do not have adequate access to the resources available in québec. these personal projects exemplify the social conditions linked to oppression and exclusion that end up maintaining hierarchical relations (moan, 2003). according to the participant’s projects, they are subject to a type of discrimination grounded in the practices set by social institutions. this type of discrimination is also based on social conventions that involve patterns and procedures aimed at maintaining economic exploitation and social exclusion. economic exploitation accounts for low-paid labour and underemployment, and social exclusion ensures that social institutions are not a representation of cultural diversity (moan, 2003). although all of the participants of this study hold an undergraduate degree at minimum, they do not have a “decent job,” and are looking for a better place to live, and are hoping to become more qualified by going back to school. therefore, the personal projects of the participants reflect the mechanisms of oppression of economic exploitation and social exclusion. the paradox of skilled migration québec prioritizes skilled workers because their characteristics should, practically speaking, facilitate their full participation in society (armony, 2018; gouvernement du québec, 2018). however, recent migrants (5 years or less) have lower employment rates than other groups of immigrants; in 2017 the unemployment rate of québec’s recent immigrants was 9.6% compared to 5% for québec-born citizens (fields and yssaad, 2018). recent skilled immigrant workers face a paradox: they are targeted by québec’s immigration policies, yet these policies do not necessarily translate into full access to the job market. migration policies do not seem to result in effective public and private hiring policies—what’s more, there are not synchronized requirements to gain recognition of diplomas obtained abroad (fields and yssaad, 2018). therefore, québec might not be able to benefit from the skills of the chosen immigrants. consequently, skilled immigrants are not able to realize their full potential as suggested by the province’s official statement. in sum, personal projects reflect the goals and activities that individuals undertake to adapt and settle in the new society. research based http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 on the settlement approach suggests that the goals of recent immigrants reflect their needs and the pursuit of fulfilling specific life domains (kaushik and drolet, 2018; thomson, 2010). a large body of research shows that immigrants prioritize needs related to employment, education, and a sense of belonging (arcand et al., 2009; béji and pellerin, 2010; chicha and charest, 2008), our findings suggest that language proficiency is an additional priority—and additional challenge in the québec context. québec has specific sociodemographic needs and its immigration selection practices are designed to fill those needs. these selection practices aim to attract only qualified immigrants with a specific level of skills and training. these immigrants are expected to settle in a context where they are required to accept inferior jobs and lower salaries and they must adapt to a socioeconomic status that is not proportional to their education and work experience (blain et al., 2017; hawthorne, 2015; li et al., 2006). this is an indication that settlement policies might not translate into adequate settlement services, especially since some of the needs and goals of the participants may turn out to be more difficult to achieve (béji and pellerin, 2010, gauthier, 2016). if skilled workers find it challenging to achieve their goals of having a job commensurate with their skills, to have a better education, and to perfect their language proficiencies, then the migration policies of economic growth for québec might not be achieved either. methodological strengths and limitations the use of an anonymous online survey is one of this paper’s methodological strengths. by using the online version of the ppa on surveygizmo’s platform, the survey was accessible from cell phones, tablets, and computers. another methodological strength of this study is the sampling procedure. to ensure that latin americans living all over in québec had access to the survey, we combined different sampling strategies. as a result, this sampling procedure allowed for a more representative sample than other studies that rely on single procedures. another strong point in terms of our methodology is that this is the first investigation of latin american skilled workers with a ppa approach that has been conducted thus far, to our knowledge. nevertheless, this strength could also be a limitation as the online version of the ppa has not been culturally validated yet. furthermore the measures that we use were translated by other researchers. therefore, taking in consideration that the spanish language presents variations from country to country, we cannot assert that the vocabulary in the measures was standard enough for all participants. another limitation is that we worked with a convenience sample that is not representative of the latin american population in quebec. practice implications there are diverse implications for practice that stem from our study respecting services for disenfranchised populations. first, our study communicates for the first time the current state of the settle process of latin american skilled workers in quebec. therefore, our findings provide with first had data that could endorse the creation of advocacy and empowerment projects. second, our data could also provide with core subjects to address when counselling migrant groups for social justice. third, the personal projects methodology proved to be an efficacious approach to better understand the projected actions of our participants. this methodology could then become and intervention tool to access the goals as well as the hopes of migrants visible minority populations. conclusion despite the fact that québec does invest in the success of skilled workers, the paradox persists between the official discourse that is http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 4 december 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 supposed to aim for greater economic immigration and the difficult economic challenges faced by recent immigrants (béji, 2014). these results raise questions about this inconsistency in terms of québec’s need for skilled workers and how they attract skilled workers—especially in terms of encouraging immigrants to come to québec to find a good job and achieve their personal goals. nevertheless, future research could examine how this paradox affects immigrants and how it influences their settlement experience and overall well-being. focusing on one specific category of the personal project goals could also provide a deeper understanding of the people’s ambitions, struggles, or impediments to these achieving these goals—and thus provide strategies for overcoming these obstacles. we believe such research could help decision-makers frame immigration policies with a broader and more comprehensive understanding of the goals, aspirations and needs of immigrants who are selected through economic programs. references arcand, s., lenoir, a., & helly, d. 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(2019). visible minority of person. retrieved from http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p3v ar.pl?function=dec&id=45152 su, r., tay, l., & diener, e. (2014). the development and validation of the comprehensive inventory of thriving (cit) and the brief inventory of thriving (bit). applied psychology: health and well‐being, 6(3), 251-279. synnott, a., & howes, d. (1996). canada’s visible minorities: identity and representation (pp. 137-160). peterborough (on): broadview press. thomson, m. (2010). literature review: outcomes and indicators of welcoming and inclusive communities and workplaces initiatives. retrieved from: http://www.amssa.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/05/welcomebc _report.pdf valtonen, k. (2016). social work and migration: immigrant and refugee settlement and integration. routledge. wassermann, m., fujishiro, k., & hoppe, a. (2017). the effect of perceived overqualification on job satisfaction and career satisfaction among immigrants: does host national identity matter? international journal of intercultural relations, 61, 77-87. williams, d. r., yu, y., jackson, j. s., & anderson, n. b. (1997). racial differences in physical and mental health: socio-economic status, stress and discrimination. journal of health psychology, 2(3), 335-351. vervliet, m., vanobbergen, b., broekaert, e., & derluyn, i. (2015). the aspirations of afghan unaccompanied refugee minors before departure and on arrival in the host country. childhood, 22(3), 330-345. yiu, j. (2013). calibrated ambitions: low educational ambition as a form of strategic adaptation among chinese youth in spain. international migration review, 47(3), 573-611. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p3var.pl?function=dec&id=45152 http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p3var.pl?function=dec&id=45152 http://www.amssa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/welcomebc_report.pdf http://www.amssa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/welcomebc_report.pdf http://www.amssa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/welcomebc_report.pdf global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 leveraging community psychology competencies to advance medical education and improve obesity healthcare victoria c. scott university of north carolina charlotte keywords: community psychology competencies, continuing medical education, cme, healthcare systems, obesity healthcare author biography: victoria scott, ph.d., mba, is a community psychologist who has devoted her professional career to working with non-profit organizations to optimize their performance through consultation, education, research, and evaluation. dr. scott holds an academic appointment at the university of north carolina charlotte where she is an assistant professor of psychology. her research focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to improve healthcare systems and community organizations. she is particularly interested in promoting breastfeeding through hospital and workplace interventions, building organizational readiness for integrated behavioral health and primary care, and the science and art of quality improvement. in 2015, dr. scott received the society for community research and action early career award in honor of her commitment to developing and promoting the field of community psychology. she also received the don klein publication award to advance community psychology practice for her co-edited book: community psychology: foundations for practice, which aims to further the competencies of professionals who work in community settings. recommended citation: scott, v.c. (2016). leveraging community psychology competencies to advance medical education and improve obesity healthcare. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(4), pages 1-12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 leveraging community psychology competencies to advance medical education and improve obesity healthcare abstract in this manuscript, the author draws from her experiences on a south carolina educationalresearch obesity initiative to describe the important value that community psychology (cp) brings to medical education and healthcare organizations. the article describes the set of cp competencies that were most influential to the initiative and discuss how those competencies shaped the course of the initiative. more specifically, the author discusses: 1) how the use of a participatory action research approach helped ground project efforts in the practical realities of the participating practices, 2) how the team developed sociocultural and cross-cultural competence to better understand the complexity of weight-related issues in healthcare, and 3) how using an ecological perspective facilitated practice-wide improvements in obesity management. through a series of examples, the article highlights specific ways medical education organizations can leverage community psychology competencies to move beyond traditional continuing medical education (cme) methods. in her mid-50s, brittany woke up one morning and noticed a dull pain in her left knee. she shrugged it off and continued her weekday routine of getting ready for work. over the course of six months, the knee pain gradually intensified. brittany began avoid stairs and hills, which seemed to make her knees hurt even more. already obese and self-conscious about her weight, brittany noticed that she had gained eight pounds since her left knee started to hurt. after talking with a friend about the knee pain and her weight gain, she decided to schedule an appointment with her primary care doctor. brittany’s time in the waiting room was longer than she would have liked; however, her appointment with dr. bradley was quick and easy. he told her knee pain was a common symptom for persons who were heavy set, prescribed painkillers, and asked her to schedule a follow-up visit for two weeks out. brittany was not happy to learn that her weight was impairing her left knee, but she was glad to have a remedy for the pain. two weeks later, brittany had to reschedule her doctor’s appointment due to an unexpected change in her work schedule. dr. bradley was booked three weeks out, and so brittany scheduled to see another physician at the primary care practice. during the follow-up appointment, brittany met with dr. vera. she was surprised by dr. vera’s interest in her weight. dr. vera asked about her lifestyle, what she ate, the kind of neighborhood she lived in, and what she liked to do for physical activity. she asked brittany how she felt about her weight and how motivated she was to lose weight. although brittany was generally very private about her weight-related concerns, she found it surprisingly easy to talk with dr. vera. after the conversation, dr. vera gave brittany an exercise prescription and took her off the painkillers. dr. vera believed that brittany’s knee pain would dissipate with exercise and weight loss. brittany was relieved to be able to talk with a professional about her weight. she was unsure about stopping the painkillers, but excited about starting a swimming routine. one month later, brittany had dropped seven pounds she had almost lost all the weight that was put on since the knee pain started, but was frustrated to still have the pain in her left knee. she called the doctor’s office again. the receptionist scheduled her to see dr. bradley. during the appointment, dr. bradley was flushed with annoyance to learn that brittany http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 had stopped taking her pain medication. she proudly shared her new exercise regime and weight loss with dr. bradley. dr. bradley responded indifferently. he told brittany that she should stay on her pain medication if she wanted the pain to go away. he explained that trying to lose weight at her age was very difficult, and that most obese patients are not successful with maintaining weight loss. brittany left the doctor’s office feeling confused and deflated. should she bother to exercise? should she start her pain medication again? why were the doctors giving her such conflicting messages and prescriptions? nearly three-quarters of adults in the united states (u.s.) are overweight or obese, with obesity affecting more than one-third of this population (national center for health statistics, 2015). south carolina has the tenth highest adult obesity rate in the nation at 32% (levi, segal, rayburn, & martin, 2015). given the diverse set of medical problems associated with obesity, primary healthcare settings are critical for the successful proactive management of obesity; however, many primary care physicians report feeling uncomfortable or insufficiently competent to talk with patients about their weight-related issues (kaminsky & gadaleta, 2002; anderson et al. 2001; davis, shishodia, taqui, dumfeh, & wylie-rosett, 2008). for example, a study of 620 family physicians revealed that 51% felt they lacked the knowledge and skill to discuss weight-related behavior changes with their patients (huang et al., 2004). additionally, providers vary widely in their attitudes about obesity, including whether they believe their patients can successfully lose and maintain weight loss (anderson et al., 2001; block, desalvo, & fisher, 2003). as in the case with drs. bradley and vera in the opening scenario, disparate physician attitudes about obesity complicate obesity management and interfere with desired patient health outcomes. enactment of the patient protection and affordable care act (p.l.11-148) has catalyzed significant and rapid changes in the healthcare landscape in the united states. healthcare systems have elevated their interest in improving care quality, lowering healthcare costs, and achieving patient and population health outcomes (mann, 2010). in addition, rather than volume-based care models, pay-for-performance structures are now driving reimbursement levels as a means of promoting quality outcomes. to evolve with changing industry demands, healthcare systems across the nation are re-examining their practices and embracing alternative approaches. for example, services are shifting from provider-led to patient-centered care. healthcare settings are adopting and using electronic healthcare records to track and measure patient outcomes. and the philosophy of quality improvement and lean management is more vigilantly applied across operational levels. these sweeping changes are directly impacting medical education organizations, compelling medical educators to re-assess the way they go about their work and to question the adequacy of existing continuing medical education (cme) structures, supports, and methods for preparing physicians to provide safe, quality patient care. along these lines, medical educators are moving away from traditional approaches to education--where educational activities are largely didactic, episodic, in the classroom, and focused on the individual--to approaches that promote ongoing, team-based learning in settings that simulate or represent real work conditions. medical educators are turning to implementation science to better understand what educational interventions work where, when, how, and for whom (carney et al., 2016; price et al., 2015). they are asking fundamental questions about ways medical education can contribute to more meaningful educational outcomes. in tandem with these shifts has been an increased recognition of the value that interdisciplinary education and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 multi-organizational collaboration can bring to quality improvement efforts. in 2011, the university of south carolina school of medicine cme organization partnered with the medical university of south carolina cme organization to implement a multi-year educational-research initiative aimed to improve the quality of obesity healthcare. referred to as the south carolina initiative for quality overweight/obesity care (sciqoc), this pilot initiative was designed to move beyond traditional cme formats (i.e., didactic lectures, case conferences) toward an educational approach targeting organizational-level improvements. during this exploratory journey, the competencies of community psychology played a pivotal role in designing, planning, and implementing sciqoc. in this manuscript, the author draws from her experiences with sciqoc to describe the important value that community psychology (cp) skills bring to medical education and healthcare organizations. specifically, this article focuses on three community psychology competencies that critically influenced the course of the initiative: participatory action research, sociocultural and cross-cultural competence, and ecological perspectives. through a series of examples, the article highlights specific ways medical education organizations can leverage community psychology competencies to move beyond traditional cme methods. figure 1. sciqoc design http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 background: sciqoc participants and project design the obesity initiative included two primary care practices situated in urban settings of south carolina. at project start, primary care practice a included 15 clinicians, 24 clinical staff members (nurses, nurse assistants), and 15 patient service representatives (front staff). primary care practice b had 5 clinicians, 2.5 clinical staff members, and 3 front staff. sciqoc involved a two-stage assessment phase (exploratory assessment and needs assessment), followed by an intervention phase (see figure 1). the exploratory assessment entailed a literature review and separate focus groups with overweight and obese persons, community providers, and primary care providers not affiliated with participating practices. this preliminary assessment helped the sciqoc team understand issues from both a science (evidence-based) and local perspective. the needs assessment included: a) an obesity healthcare questionnaire administered to practice staff and physicians; b) a focus group involving clinical and administrative staff; c) a semi-structured interview with practice leaders; and d) an environmental assessment involving clinic setting observations, clinical mapping checklist, and patient simulations. the needs assessment aimed to identify practice gaps within each participating practice. additional information about the exploratory and needs assessment is provided in table 1. the obesity initiative was supported by grant funding from pfizer independent grants for learning & change (#034452). using a participatory action research approach to ground our work in the practical realities of participating healthcare organizations while a participatory action research design is more time-intensive than an investigator-led design, sciqoc leadership (pi and project director) believed it was essential to work closely with practice members in order to make meaningful local improvements in obesity healthcare. we actively turned to practice members for insights into the challenges of obesity healthcare and trusted they were best positioned to generate practical solutions to address existing local challenges. this section describes how we used a participatory approach across the phases of sciqoc. grant preparation. our engagement with the participating practices began during the grant preparation stage of the initiative. we met with practice leadership to address project issues such as: who will benefit from the obesity initiative and in what ways? what type of commitment is needed from the practices to improve obesity care quality? which members will actively champion the effort? what are existing and anticipated resource needs (staff, financial, technical)? how will interventions be sustained? during this early stage of engagement, we found that having pre-existing relationships with members of the practice facilitated open, frank conversations about ongoing challenges and limitations with addressing obesity. for example, practice members expressed concern about the weight of their own healthcare teams and how being obese could impact provider motivation to improve obesity care quality. assessment phase. upon successful grant funding, the sciqoc team worked with appointed practice members to determine questions for the assessment phase. for instance, to develop the focus group and interview questions, the sciqoc team drafted initial questions, which were sent to practice members for review. we used an iterative “review, discuss, refine” process to finalize the qualitative instrument. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 ex p l o ra t o ry asse s sm e n t method participant(s) purpose cp competency applied* literature review o na primary: to provide the sciqoc team with a comprehensive understanding of issues surround obesity and obesity healthcare; to be informed of evidence-based. approaches to obesity healthcare. secondary: to provide primary care providers with current information and best practices for obesity healthcare. 2, 3 focus group o overweight & obese adults o community providers o primary care providers from nonparticipating practices primary: to obtain current and well-rounded local insights about the state of overweight/obesity healthcare. secondary: to provide primary care participants with local experiences and opinions about obesity healthcare. 2, 3  characterized by an iterative process between information gathered from the literature review and focus group.  insights from multi-informant focus groups were triangulated to identify issues of convergence and divergence.  information from the exploratory assessment was organized by study key variables. n e e d s asse s sm e n t method participant(s) purpose cp competency applied* obesity healthcare survey o clinical staff o physicians to assess healthcare provider attitudes toward and experiences with obesity healthcare within each practice, and to identify barriers and facilitators to providing quality healthcare. 1, 2, 3 focus groups o clinical staff and administrative staff to learn about the primary care practice environment and patient flow process, as well as staff attitudes and experiential insights about the relationship between overweight/obese persons and the practice. 1, 2, 3 semi-structured interviews o clinical staff o physicians to learn about the primary care practice environment and to obtain a fuller sense of provider attitudes and experiences in relation to obesity healthcare. 1, 2, 3 environmental assessment o practice-level to learn about operational, sociocultural, and structural aspects of the practice. 1, 2, 3  developed based on insights from the exploratory assessment and in collaboration with practice members  used a multi-method, multi-informant approach  involved primary care practice participants in interpretation of the data * 1 = participatory action research, 2 = sociocultural and cross-cultural competence, 3 = ecological perspective table 1: summary of sciqoc assessment stages http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 to develop the obesity questionnaire, practice members and the research team pooled and reviewed survey instruments. questionnaires were vetted based on psychometric properties and alignment with the aims of the initiative. intervention phase. after analyzing the needs assessment data, the sciqoc team held a series of meetings with practice leadership and one in-person, practicewide meeting. the meetings involved discussions about the assessment data, selection of priority practice gaps, and review of evidence-based strategies and programs for addressing existing needs. the goal of the meetings was to determine the most fitting intervention strategies and/or programs for each practice based on its needs and capacities as well as the costs and benefits of the interventions. the process for choosing intervention strategies was highly collaborative, involving practice leadership, physicians, clinical staff, and administrative staff. during each meeting with practice members, sciqoc team members served primarily as facilitators. we listened attentively and guided the conversation per agreed upon meeting objectives. where useful, we researched and provided additional information. the process of sharing decision-making about the set of intervention activities was difficult for some members of the sciqoc educationalresearch team (comprised of individuals from the university of south carolina and the medical university of south carolina) who were partial to particular intervention strategies. this fostered emotional tension and short-term disengagement from select team members. as an educational-research team, we worked through this disruption by exploring the rationale and emotions underlying existing views. the open conversations provided discontent team members a fuller understanding of the distinction between participatory and non-participatory research approaches. the conversations helped sciqoc team members develop a better sense of what it “looks, feels, and sounds like” to share decisionmaking with members of the participating practices. later, into the intervention phase, the benefits of shared decision-making become apparent to those sciqoc team members who originally resisted the approach. overall, the participatory approach made it possible for both sciqoc team members and project participants to develop not only an intellectual understanding of issues, but also a socio-emotional understanding. the participatory approached helped us ground our efforts in the practical realities and emotional challenges of addressing obesity. working with practice members made it possible for interventions to be tailored specifically to the needs of each practice (rather than providing a standard, pre-determined educational program as is typically provided via cme). simultaneously, practice members gained a greater appreciation for data and were better positioned to make data-informed decisions. they were engaged throughout the initiative and had ownership over its trajectory. an unanticipated but celebrated outcome of the participatory approach is that it fostered opportunities for additional communication among healthcare team members, which improved patient coordination by surfacing practice gaps. developing and exercising sociocultural and cross-cultural competence to understand the complexity of weight-related issues in healthcare culture shapes our perceptions and guides human behavior. as a society, the u.s. has an individualistic orientation, prizing self-reliance, independence, and achievement. although a host of historical, contextual, and circumstantial factors (e.g., our upbringing, surrounding environment, access to resources and opportunities) influence obesity, it is often viewed as an individual-level issue. american society tends to blame obese persons for their weight-related problems. to improve obesity healthcare quality the sciqoc team needed to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 be conscious and transparent about our own views of obesity and obese persons. sociocultural and cross-cultural competence involves the ability to value, integrate, and bridge multiple worldviews, cultures, and identities (dalton & wolfe, 2012). from the beginning of sciqoc, the team committed to being open and honest with one another in our conversations. a critical first step toward fostering sociocultural and cross-cultural competence among the team was developing selfand collective awareness about our own views of obesity and pertinent associated dimensions of diversity (e.g., race, ethnicity, social class, locality). individually, each sciqoc team member completed a series of implicit attitudes tests on weight, race, and gender (see https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest. html). then, collectively, we discussed the results and implications of our biases for our work. we viewed biases as natural, but modifiable human tendencies. at project start, we also reflected openly on our assumptions about obesity and the local population. this process of conscious raising shed light on the boundaries of our socio-cultural knowledge and served as a springboard for the exploratory assessment with local participants. the sciqoc team was diverse in educational and training background. the team included a community psychologist (author), with training in business and clinical-community psychology; a political scientist; a health psychologist; a physician, and other individuals with backgrounds in the health and human services industry. all members of the leadership team were nested in continuing medical education organizations and responsible for any array of professional development activities. the team was also diverse in age (ranging from 25 to 70 years), gender, and race/ethnicity (asian american, jewish, ghanaian, white/caucasian). however, the team’s characteristics did not closely mirror the population of obese persons, who tended to be lower socioeconomic status and black, african american or latino/a. in preparing for the focus groups, we were sensitive to these differences and mindful of our “outsiderness”. we addressed this crosscultural challenge with humility and transparency. during the focus groups, we explicitly noted the cross-cultural differences, listened open-mindedly, and invited participants to “correct” our language where useful. to focus conversations on the issues (rather than persons), questions were largely framed in the third person (e.g., do you have a family or friend who sees the doctor because of weight-related problems? what are her/his experiences?). we found the use of a third person frame for raising questions to be highly effective for broaching sensitive topics relating to obesity. participants were eager to share stories about the weight-related healthcare experiences of their family and friends, and these stories naturally led to energetic discussions about personal challenges with weight-related issues (e.g., the stigma of being overweight; delays in seeking treatment for weight-related healthcare issues, such as diabetes or hypertension, due to fear of being scolded by one’s doctor about being overweight; balancing the desire to lose weight with concerns about losing friendships if one becomes thin). together, these methods fostered focus group conversations that were deep, generative, and meaningful. the sciqoc team viewed the development of cross-cultural competence as a “life-long” process. through this orientation, team members were encouraged to raise questions about race, weight, and other sensitive topics. we asked these questions not only of each other, but also of sciqoc participants (obese persons, community health providers, and primary care providers). such questions helped the sciqoc team understand the complexity of issues impacting obesity and obesity healthcare. for example, the process of open inquiry shed light on the central role of religion/spirituality in how some individuals viewed their weight (e.g., “this is the size god wants me to be”; “i leave my weight up to god.”). through firsthand accounts by both physicians and obese http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 patients, we also heard the need for greater sociocultural competence in obesity healthcare. physicians shared their discomfort with talking about weight, particularly with individuals of different races/ethnicities and gender. patients described physicians as lacking understanding of the patient’s culture and life circumstances. for instance, one african american patient explained that a physician instructed her to engage in vigorous cardio aerobics (e.g., running), which did not align with the patient’s lifestyle. she explained that it took 4-8 hours to have her hair done, and that having her hair done was expensive. vigorous cardio aerobics was not a viable weight management option because it would cause her to sweat and ruin the weaves in her hair. she also explained that her physicians never talk with her about her life and how her lifestyle affected her weight; instead, “they just tell me to lose weight”. we found these personal, sensitive stories were at the heart of knowing how to improve obesity care quality. such stories were elicited by broaching the range of sociocultural topics with an open-mind and listening with humility. we experienced an “easing in”, where the more we talked about the topics of race, social class, and weight, the more natural and comfortable the conversations felt. in the needs assessment stage of sciqoc we learned that cultural and racial biases about obese persons were pervasive within participating practices. these biases had never been explicitly discussed, although they would occasionally “slip out” in negative terms during conversations among providers. after the needs assessment, a practice-wide meeting was scheduled with each participating primary care practice to discuss assessment results and next steps. during the meeting, we invited practice members to reflect on how well the data mirrored the views and patterns of the practice. we listened with openness, while attending to the distribution of power within the room. we were mindful of the hierarchical structure of healthcare and how power structures could impact who had voice in the room. in hindsight, the method by which our team developed sociocultural and cross-cultural competence closely tracks with balcazar and colleagues’ (2009) training model for cultural competence, which begins at the individual level and expands outward. their model captures the following stages: desire to engage, development of critical awareness of personal biases toward others who are different, development of knowledge about issues of diversity and culture, development and practice of skills for working across cultural groups, and working toward organizational/broader societal support for cultural competence. as reflected in the developmental approach by balcazar and colleagues (2009), we found it was critical to foster sociocultural and cross-cultural competence from the inside out, starting with personal reflection (intra-study) and then engaging dialectically across the ecological levels. leveraging the systems perspective to facilitate practice-based improvement we entered this project with the premise that educating the healthcare team was necessary, but not sufficient for improving obesity care quality. individual experiences are embedded in a context, which influences behavior and outcomes (brofennbrenner, 1977; kelly, ryan, altman, & stelzner, 2000). patient healthcare experiences are shaped by the totality of their interactions with the healthcare practice. this includes tangible and intangible aspects of the healthcare system (e.g., ease of scheduling an appointment, layout of the waiting room, patient flow process, and adequacy of the healthcare equipment). our conversations with patients and providers during the exploratory assessment underscored the impact of contextual factors on both patient and provider experiences with obesity care. patients shared stories of feeling embarrassed when blood pressure cuffs were too small to fit around their arms and when exam room tables were not sturdy enough for their body weight. providers raised concerns about the location of the scales and questioned whether patients were http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 comfortable having their weight taken in such a high foot traffic area. to deepen our understanding of the practice environment, the needs assessment was designed to attend to operational, physical, and sociocultural aspects of the practices. serving as simulation patients, sciqoc team members participated in a doctor’s visit to get a feel for the patient flow process. we conducted onsite observations of practice activities. we also interviewed healthcare team members about the practice environment. this multi-method approach to studying the clinical setting helped us understand existing interdependencies (e.g., who talks to whom, who avoids whom, how administrative and clinical activities affect one another), how resources are allocated and used, power structures and dynamics, and the organizational culture (e.g., operating values, openness to innovations and change, accountability, and employee satisfaction and commitment). we learned about formal and informal processes for decision-making and how decisions were translated (or not) into implementation. taking a systems perspective and inviting involvement from all practice members helped us learn about the responsibilities of healthcare team members as well as their skills, talents, and interests. as the initiative moved into implementation, this knowledge was useful for ensuring we had the “right” members in the “right seat” on the “right bus”. by involving all practice members (rather than just physicians as is typical in traditional cme approaches), we obtained a well-rounded sense of the issues salient to obesity healthcare. as expected, we also found that practice-wide involvement during the needs assessment facilitated member engagement (buy-in) during the intervention phase. conclusion in the interest of moving away from traditional cme formats, sciqoc was a pilot effort to develop an educational approach that would result in more impactful and sustainable obesity healthcare outcomes for primary care practices. the three community psychology competencies (participatory action research, sociocultural and cross-cultural competence, and ecological perspective) described in this article were invaluable both for thinking “outside” and “inside” the box in terms of cme formats, clinical settings, and patient needs. working closely with the practices to design, plan, and implement the phases of sciqoc ensured that meaningful and relevant questions were being asked and that selected interventions “fit” the practice environment. the process of sharing decision-making over an extended period of time (approximately two years) provided members with multiple opportunities to reflect and weigh-in on obesity healthcare, which contributed to organizational readiness for engaging in selected interventions. the sciqoc initiative catalyzed a series of organizational improvements for both participating practices. primary care practice a:  the practice committed three staff members (quality improvement personnel, research assistant, and it manager) to develop and implement standing order (practice protocol) for obesity healthcare. as standing order for obesity increases consistency in obesity management across physicians and other healthcare team members, eliminating situations like that of the opening scenario where two physicians had contradictory approaches to managing the patient’s weight.  a two-day patient-centered communications skills training (i.e., motivational interviewing [mi] training) was held to increase self-efficacy and skill for communicating effectively with patients about weight-related issues. the primary care practice modified its hours of operation so all clinical and administrative staff could participate in the training. after the training, mi champions were identified and tasked with monitoring and evaluating http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 implementation. a contractual agreement was developed with the mi trainer for ongoing consultation. during the intervention phase we were deliberate about identifying personnel who could be specifically dedicated to planning, implementation, and evaluation activities. we were also intentional about ensuring these were members who were already embedded within and familiar with the practice. clear role expectations and leveraging intra-system resources was important for implementation and sustainability of activities. primary care practice b:  physicians revised an existing guideline for how to talk with patients about weight-related issues and adopted it for practice-wide use to give consistency to the way physicians address weightrelated issues. consistent messaging across physicians is especially important at this practice where patients may see different physicians across visits.  through the needs assessment, the practice discovered their scales were insufficient for weighing large-size patients and consequently purchased three high capacity scales.  practice members realized the value of measuring waist circumference (in addition to body mass index) for obesity management. consequently, staff were trained and provided with materials for measuring the waist circumference of overweight and obese patients. in addition to the practice improvements described above, members across both practices reported an increased understanding of general issues pertaining to obesity and obesity healthcare as well as an increased understanding of how their own practice was addressing obesity. practice members also reported being more aware of and sensitive to the needs of overweight and obese patients than prior to sciqoc. in sum, the obesity initiative helped participating practices make important strides in their efforts to improve obesity care quality. community psychology provides an array of competencies that generalize readily across settings and are highly suitable for working in dynamic, highly complex settings such as healthcare (kirk & neigher, 2013). our experience with sciqoc suggests that the competencies of community psychology (participatory action research, sociocultural and cross-cultural competence, and ecological perspective) are highly useful for designing alternative cme approaches and facilitating organizational level changes in primary care practices. to the author’s knowledge, this is the first article that examines how community psychology competencies can be practically useful for advancing medical education. through the examples shared, the author hopes this article sheds light on the value community psychologists can bring to medical education and healthcare organizations. references anderson, c., peterson, c.b., fletcher, l., mitchell, j.e., thuras, p., & crow, s.j. (2001). weight loss and gender: an examination of physician attitudes. obesity research, 9, 257263. balcazar, f.e., suarez-balcazar, y., & taylorritzman, t. (2009). cultural competence: development of a conceptual framework. disability and rehabilitation, 31, 1153-1160. block, j.p., desalvo, k., & fisher, w.p. (2003). are physicians equipped to address the obesity epidemic? knowledge and attitudes of internal medicine residents. preventive medicine, 36(6). 669-675. bronfenbrenner, u. (1977). toward an experimental ecology of human development. american psychologist, 32. 513-531. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 carney, p.a., crites, g.e., miller, k.h., haight, m., stefanidis, d., cichoskikelly, e., price, d.w., akinola, m.o., scott, v.c., &kalishman, s. (2016). building and executing a research agenda toward conducting implementation science in medical education. medical education online, 21. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/meo.v21.32405. davis, n.j., shishodia, h., taqui, b., dumfeh, c., & wylie-rosett, j. (2008). resident physician attitudes and competence about obesity treatment: need for improved education. medical education online, 13(5), 1-4. dalton, j., & wolfe, t. (2012). competencies for community psychology practice. the community psychologist, 45(4), 7-14. huang, j., yu., marin, e., brock, s., carden, d., davis, t. (2004). physicians’ weight loss counseling in two public hospital primary care clinics. academic medicine, 79(2), 159-161. kaminsky, j. & gadaleta, d. (2002). a study of discrimination within the medical community as viewed by obese patients. obesity surgery, 12(1), 14-18. kelly, j.g., ryan, a.m., altman, b.e., & stelzner, s.p. (2000). understanding and changing social systems: an ecological view. in j. rappaport & e. seidman (eds.) handbook of community psychology (pp. 133-159). new york, ny: plenum. kirk, m., & neigher, w. (2013). community psychology and the future of healthcare. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), 1-9. levi, j., segal, l.m., rayburn, j., & martin, a. (2015). the state of obesity: better policies of a healthier america 2015. trust for america’s health/robert wood johnson foundation. washington, d.c. mann s. (2010). implementation science: a yardstick for reform. aamc.org/newsroom/reporter/dec10/165666/ implementation_science-ayardstick_for_reform.html. updated 2010. (accessed may 23, 2016) national center for health statistics. (2016). health, united states, 2015: with special feature on racial and ethnic health disparities. hyattsville, md. price, d.w., wagner, d.p., krane, n.k., rougas, s.c., lowitt, n.r., offodile, r.s., easdown, l.j., andrews, m.a.w., kodner, c.m., lypson, m., & barnes, b.e. (2015). what are the implications of implementation science for medical education? medical education online, 20. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/meo.v20.27003. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/meo.v21.32405 http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/meo.v20.27003 victoria c. scott university of north carolina charlotte abstract figure 1. sciqoc design background: sciqoc participants and project design leveraging the systems perspective to facilitate practice-based improvement conclusion references facilitating community change: the community capitals framework, its relevance to community psychology practice, and its application in a georgia community ashley e. anglin author biography: ashley anglin, phd is the coordinator of the healthy communities program in the atlantic center for population health sciences at atlantic health system in morristown, nj. she collaborates with community residents and organizations to conduct research and develop programs that promote holistic wellbeing. author’s note: the author would like to share that she lived in rome, georgia for 18 years and has been extensively involved in the south rome redevelopment process. she was officially asked by members of the south rome redevelopment coalition to join their initiative as a community researcher and program evaluator in 2012. the author would like to acknowledge the community members who participated in this research and whose insights and opinions will help to create a positive future for south rome. in particular, she would like to thank jackie mcdowell, dean of education and human sciences at berry college; carol willis, director of the rome/floyd county commission on children and youth; cary ingram, pastor at lovejoy baptist church; phil wood, principal of south east elementary school; and melissa jones, past director of the south rome redevelopment corporation, who took an active role in making this research project possible. she would also like to thank and acknowledge the following organizations who sponsored this research: the society for community research and action (scra) community psychology practice council, berry college, the bonner center for community engagement, and the south rome redevelopment corporation. recommended citation: anglin, a.e. (2015). facilitating community change: the community capitals framework, its relevance to community psychology practice, and its application in a georgia community. global journal of community psychology practice, 6(2), 1-15. retrieved month/day/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org). global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 2 facilitating community change: the community capitals framework, its relevance to community psychology practice, and its application in a georgia community abstract this article aims to contribute to the discussion of holistic community development models by presenting and evaluating the community capitals framework (ccf; flora & flora, 2004) within the field of community psychology and within a georgia community. the ccf is a conceptual framework from the field of sociology that includes seven forms of community capital (cultural, natural, human, social, financial, political, and built). these capitals can be used to better understand how communities work and thrive through the identification of assets in each capital and the ways in which the capitals interact in specific contexts. focusing on the assets that generate community capital is the cornerstone of the ccf and plays a transformative role in the way that the planning and development process unfolds in community settings. this is shown in the case example of south rome, ga. results suggest that the ccf—especially when imbued with the values of community empowerment, diversity, and inclusion/participation—is a valuable tool for helping stakeholders approach community development from a systems perspective, combat hopelessness, and foster common language and plans for the future. introduction: the community capitals framework community development approaches are well suited to address multifaceted community issues that matter to local residents (e.g., dixon & sindall, 1994; sorensen, emmons, hunt, & johnson, 1998). communities represent complex, dynamic systems, and combining “community” with “development” adds to this complexity. therefore, models or frameworks are often used as a guide to assure that all stakeholders can engage in the process (i.e., by using common terms and setting common goals) and to provide a means of evaluating change as it occurs. there are many existing models for the community development process, and in choosing a model, stakeholders must assure that the framework is contextually appropriate and is able to facilitate concrete planning and next-steps, while also remaining flexible to the changing strengths and needs of the community (cavaye, 2006). this article aims to contribute to the discussion of frameworks for holistic community development by presenting and evaluating the community capitals framework (ccf) (flora & flora, 2004) as a guiding model and tool to facilitate community change. the discussion includes an exploration of the ways in which community psychology values and principles can complement and expand on the applied value of this framework and includes a case study that was conducted in a community undergoing a large-scale redevelopment initiative. the ccf is a conceptual framework— developed in the field of sociology and grounded in literature from multiple disciplines—for exploring the assets and resources present in communities that can be leveraged for change. the ccf is a tool to help researchers and community members approach community change from a systems perspective through the identification of assets in each capital (stocks of capital), how capital is invested within a community (flow of capital), and the ways in which the capitals http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 3 interact (emery & flora, 2006). broadly, community capitals are assets or resources that can be utilized to produce additional resources (flora & flora, 2013). focusing on the assets that generate community capital is the cornerstone of the ccf and plays a transformative role in the way that the planning and development process unfolds in community settings. conversely, focusing on the negative, with a list of problems and no easy solutions, is often overwhelming, causing community members to become resistant to change (emery, fey, & flora, 2006). when using the ccf as basis for community development, community members are encouraged to begin by identifying the positive aspects of their community, which can counteract the potentially negative conversations surrounding community change (emery & flora, 2006), and theoretically combat learned helplessness and hopelessness. these assets can foster positive community perceptions, empower community members, and start the process of planning for a better future. mapping community assets into groups creates community capitals that represent all aspects of community life. these capitals may be tangible (e.g., parks, businesses, roadways) or intangible (e.g., political influence, pride of heritage, norms of community service), and can be invested, saved, or depleted (flora & flora, 2004). communities invest capital when they use those assets to improve the community. capital can also be depleted or wasted. this might be the case when, in response to outside forces or through the influences of a few businesses, financial resources, time, and skills are invested to create a new strip mall that is not needed or wanted by community members; it therefore fails to contribute additional assets to the community. to better conceptualize the distribution of assets within communities, the ccf includes seven forms of community capital, discussed in detail in the following section. the seven forms of community capital the ccf includes seven forms of community capital—natural capital, cultural capital, human capital, social capital, political capital, financial capital, and built capital. specific examples of each form of capital summarized from the literature can be seen in figure 1. natural capital. natural capital consists of assets that are tied to specific locations and include geographic location, natural resources, climate, amenities, and natural beauty. according to ruggeri (2009), the existing definitions of natural capital can be broken down into four categories: 1) those that identify natural capital as a stock of resources used to produce market goods and services (e.g., european environment agency, 2007; world bank group, 2004), 2) those that add ecosystem services to the resourcesto-goods production (e.g., berkes & folke, 1992; hackett, 2001), 3) those that identify the spiritual and aesthetic aspects of the natural environment (e.g., gilpin, 2000; pearce, 1988), and 4) those that recognize the role natural capital plays in supporting life and survival (e.g., anielski & willson, 2005; olewiler, 2004). cultural capital. according to flora and flora (2013), “cultural capital determines what constitutes knowledge, how knowledge is to be achieved, and how knowledge is validated” (p. 55) through the community power structure (weber, 1947; williams, 2004). it includes the values, language, traditions, and world-views of community members and reflects the way people know and interpret the world around them based on their multiple cultural identities (e.g., harrison, huntington, & samuel, 2000; sen, 2000; williams, 2004). cultural capital is a practical resource as people use stories, rituals, symbols, and traditions to make decisions http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 4 and to pass on a legacy to their children, which is especially important because it directly affects the choices and opportunities that are available to youth in the community (flora & flora, 2013). human capital. human capital is comprised of the attributes of community members that can be used to develop and increase resources both within and outside of the community, including their ability to earn a living, strengthen sense of community, and contribute to community organizations, their families, and their own self-improvement (becker, 2002). these attributes include, but are not limited to, educational and technical skills, a healthy lifestyle, and personal attributes such as honesty, leadership skills, and work ethic (flora & flora, 2013). social capital. the connections among community members and organizations that allow people to come together to foster change (both positive and negative) are reflected in social capital (flora & flora, 2013). within the field of sociology, social capital has been explained in terms of norms of reciprocity and mutual trust (e.g., bourdieu, 1986; coleman, 1988). social capital can be built through the encouragement of community adaptability, responsibility, and initiative (flora & flora, 2013), and by promoting interactions that strengthen group members’ commitment to their group’s values and goals (coleman, 1988). political capital. political capital includes community members’ abilities to engage in community betterment and to make their voices heard regarding community issues (aigner, flora & hernandez, 2001; emery & flora, 2006). additionally, this form of capital encompasses organizations, connections, norms, and values that are officially organized into enforced rules and regulations. political capital reflects how power is distributed, and the access that community members have to organizations, shared resources, and power brokers (flora & flora, 2004). financial capital. financial resources that can be invested in community capacity-building to create new business, to accumulate wealth for future development, and to promote entrepreneurship, are the primary components of financial capital (emery & flora, 2006; lorenz, 1995). although the term financial capital often translates to money, money is not always financial capital and financial capital is not always money (flora & flora, 2013). financial capital does, however, consist of resources that are translated into monetary instruments, which means that they are highly liquid, or able to be easily converted into other forms of capital. built capital. built capital consists of the built infrastructure that supports all of the activities and capitals described above (flora & flora, 2004). built capital also facilitates production, through buildings (which enable companies to make retail products), roads (used in the transport of raw materials to a production factory), and power plants (flora & flora, 2013). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 5 figure 1. community capitals composition based on literature review community psychology and the ccf social justice and social change are primary concerns for the field of community psychology, and to address these issues practitioners need a detailed understanding of context and contextual issues, as well as methods that can be utilized to increase this understanding (foster-fishman & behrens, 2007). despite the attention that has been given to understanding context in the field, the abilities of many community psychologists still cannot address the growing need for transformative change within any given society (foster-fishman & behrens, 2007). research with the ccf is useful as it conceptualizes communities as dynamic systems comprised of community capitals, and the tracking of changes in capital assets over time has the potential to present an informative representation of systems change in progress. in addition, in the introduction to the american journal of community psychology special issue on systems change, fosterfishman & behrens (2007) state that based on current research, changes to discrete system parts may be an outcome of systems change efforts, but may fail to create sustained change in a system or alter the status quo. a change in one part of a system will only lead to large-scale change if that component also leads to change in other system elements; the parts of systems are interrelated and interdependent. therefore, the focus should be on “understanding and shifting the interdependencies within systems and the consequences of those interactions” (p. 194). the ccf is a useful tool to help community members visualize the flow of resources and set specific priorities. by mapping existing assets within each capital and evaluating these over time, community members can work together to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 6 explore which changes or interventions can have the greatest impact. finally, mental models, or cognitive frameworks, have also been found to play an important role in systems change efforts (foster-fishman & behrens, 2007). the ccf provides a conceptual framework that promotes systems thinking and helps to organize and identify common strengths. when thinking in terms of community capitals, all stakeholders speak a common language and their assets and suggestions can be more easily compared and discussed. the ccf can also shift thinking about how change should occur when community members see change as building community capital for the future. for example, instead of thinking only of discrete changes (e.g., the construction of the new school), stakeholders have a common mental model that allows them to think about the multiple ways in which that one discrete change may prompt further change (e.g., the growth in social, cultural, and human capital that results from the construction of the new school). it can also be useful to help community change agents identify other stakeholders that should be brought into the process. community psychology values: expanding the ccf beyond contributing to the common goals of community psychologists, the ccf is also compatible with the discipline’s values and can be enhanced through integration into the field. first, research with the ccf has the potential to promote empowerment and instill a pro-change community culture (emery & flora, 2006). research methodologies and techniques from community psychology, such as participatory action research (par), can be used along with the ccf to further the potential for empowerment. a characteristic of par is that it is a strengths-based approach that capitalizes on personal and relational assets and community resources (rappaport, 1994). in this way, the fundamental assumptions of par and the ccf are parallel when it comes to empowerment, suggesting a fruitful combination. specifically, these goals and strategies include diminishing the traditional researcher-participant boundaries present in psychological research, focusing on constructing individual and collective identities, creating of a common language between researcher and community (taylor et al., 2006), and adding elements of social action (lewin, 1946). second, the community psychology value of diversity can guide the community development process to ensure all voices are heard, included, and valued. though it is not directly addressed, the ccf assumes to some extent that resources are uniformly distributed in communities, waiting for residents to find and utilize them. however, valuing diversity means considering variation in perception, experience, and accessibility. from a community psychology perspective, exploring barriers to and diversity in community assets should be integral to the process (rappaport, 1994). third, the community psychology principles of inclusion and participation can be further infused with the ccf by assuring that all interested residents are invited to participate. by focusing on inclusion and participation, research with the ccf can lead to the creation of new settings and conversations. as will be discussed in the following case study, residents involved in community change efforts often join together in official or unofficial groups to continue the work and/or to connect on newfound mutual interests. case study: community development in south rome using the ccf the context of this case study is south rome, georgia, which is located in the larger city of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 7 rome, georgia, in the southern united states. south rome has a population of approximately 4,364 and the median resident age in 2010 was 34. within south rome, 37.4% of community members reported an ethnicity of white/non-hispanic, 55.3% black/non-hispanic, and 14.2% hispanic (higher than the city’s overall hispanic population of 5.3%). residents of south rome primarily live in rental units (52%) and of the 1,342 housing units, 1,222 were occupied as of 2010 (united states census bureau, 2010). when entering south rome, the historical legacy of the context is instantly apparent. this feeling of history is a true representation, as the housing within this community is the oldest in floyd county (the county in which the entirety of rome city is located). the median year of structure construction is 1949, compared to 1970 for the county and 1963 for the city. however, despite a history of prosperity, for many years the community had been in a state of decline in terms of the infrastructure and job opportunities, with a growing crime rate and poverty level. beginning in 2010, community stakeholders have come together to take action with the goal of transformative and sustainable community changes. as momentum for the redevelopment process grew, members of the south rome redevelopment coalition—which includes a resident advisory group, two local colleges, the neighborhood school, a school system, one national and three community organizations, and a state corporation— expressed the need for a framework to guide their program development, maintain a positive focus, foster community collaboration, and assure that they approach community change holistically. as with any community work, it is vital first to assess whether the methodologies, approaches, and tools considered for use are relevant to the context. this is often a difficult process, which involves significant, meaningful collaboration and a deep understanding of the cultural, historical, institutional, and sociopolitical forces that exist within a community. the assumption is that these forces can have a profound impact on diversity and group dynamics (harrell & bond, 2006) as well as on a community’s capacity for change (goodman, et al., 1998). therefore, before selecting an approach or tool to facilitate the redevelopment process, time was spent discussing the goals and aspirations of community members and change agents, and all those involved in the project spent time exploring and discussing the aspects of the community that make it unique. after much discussion, the ccf was selected by members of the south rome redevelopment coalition as the chosen framework for their efforts. the potential for the information generated through research using the ccf to be used for community action was enhanced by community stakeholders’ support of the ccf and the collaborative method in which it was selected. in order to sustain changes, community members need to have a sense of collective efficacy and hope that their community can experience positive change (foster-fishman, cantillon, pierce, & van egeren, 2007). these efforts and enthusiasm combined with the local knowledge of community members set the groundwork for using the ccf to facilitate the community change process. the process unfolds in south rome in order to explore the existing assets of the south rome community, the coalition developed a mixed-methods approach that involved conducting community workshops to uncover community assets and distributing activity books that consisted of both established scales that measure constructs proposed to be community capital components as well as open-ended questions http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 8 and activities related to each form of capital. representatives from several participating organizations recruited additional community residents by invitation. recruitment also occurred through recommendations by other participants (snowball sampling). a total of 38 community members participated in the workshops. the first workshop was held at berry college with student members of the south rome boys and girls club (six female and four male with a mean age of 15.87). the second workshop was held at the newly constructed etowah terrace, a housing development that caters primarily to low-income, retired adults. these participants ranged in age from 58-86 years (m = 65.8; 4 female and 4 male). the third and final community workshop was held at st. mary’s catholic church and was conducted predominantly in spanish, the primary language of all 10 participants (6 female, 4 male, with a mean age of 32.34). during the workshops, residents responded to the following prompts: 1) “think about a time that you were proud of your community (south rome). this can involve: people, places, activities, etc. please describe this time.” 2) “what about this time made you feel proud?” 3) “what do you value the most about living in south rome?” (for the stories of past success); and 4) “we would like to hear your story about what you would like the future of south rome to look like. share your short story here” (for stories of future aspirations). the assets and aspirations generated by community members were mapped onto the community capitals outlined by the ccf, providing a picture of what strengths the community has to work with when planning for the future. as an example, current assets and dreams related to cultural capital are presented in table 1. in addition to the workshops, community activity books were distributed to south rome community members, which consisted of several established measures that assess constructs related to each form of capital (see table 2), mapping activities, open-ended questions and listing of assets in each capital (basic definitions of related constructs were provided), and envisioning/story-telling activities. the coalition team felt that it was important to go beyond just using the ccf to facilitate the listing of assets and aspirations (those in figure 2). it was also important to include survey measures related to each of the capitals because the team realized that many community assets are inherent in individuals. for example, the environmental attitudes of residents are an important component of natural capital, but because they are implicit attitudes, they might not be readily accessible (see connectedness to nature scale). a total of 157 south rome residents completed the community activity books (107 female, 39 male, 1 transgender, 10 gender unreported). the diverse sample ranged in age from 12 -74 years (m = 34.22, sd = 16.44). the majority of participants identified as “black” (78.3%) followed by “caucasian/white” (8.9%), “multi-ethnic” (5.7%), and hispanic/latino/a (0.6%) and the reported length of residency ranged from .5 years to 64 years (m = 12.81, sd = 13.49). the mode level of education was “high school or equivalent” (47.1%), followed by “some college” (20.4%), and the mode area of employment reported was “student” (30.6%), followed by “unemployed” (15.9%). the median family income for the sample as a whole was $10,000-$19,999. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 9 workshop site cultural assets and dreams listed boys & girls club current assets first friday’s events with activities firefighter activities (firefighters put on presentations) sharing traditional food family cookouts sharing family values sharing childcare cross-cultural friendships dreams more diversity even more interactive things in the community where people can meet their diverse neighbors etowah terrace current assets historical legacy; south rome used to have a better reputation; dates back to the civil war and creek indians tomb of the known soldier; myrtle hill cemetery monument to kingfisher indian chief myrtle hill one of the seven hills carl dance, iron worker; worked at nobel foundry. his beautiful iron work and fences are all over south rome only jewish cemetery in rome many talented people; multiple ethnicities dreams build a positive reputation for south rome; we need to tell people our history we need arts/culture clean up around historic iron fences and put history back into architecture st. mary’s catholic church current assets multiethnic population dreams make community work projects to unite cultures have parades 5k’s and marathons christmas parade should go all the way to south rome publicize community events have information in both spanish and english table 1. workshop assets and dreams for cultural capital out of the total sample, 68.8% of participants generated one or more strengths for each of the community capitals (see figure 2), and all participants (100%) provided at least one suggestion for the future. community stories of past success and future aspirations were also grouped thematically to illuminate shared experiences and goals. for example, community members’ stories of past success were a wonderful reflection of what the community once was and what participants would like it to be again. these stories were encompassed by the themes of social events, helping behavior, safety through togetherness. when asked to share what they most value about the south rome community, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 10 the vast majority of participants mentioned their friends, family, and the sense of community they have developed. from these stories, it was clear that residents most value the social and cultural domains of their community and that building on these strengths is the key to future success. capital type scales overall neighborhood scale items mujahid, et al., 2007 natural connectedness to nature scale mayer & frantz, 2004 new environmental paradigm scale as adapted by gardner & stern, 1996 cultural public attitudes on higher education scale ncpphe, 2004 multigroup ethnic identity measure phinney, 1992 social sense of community index mcmillan & chavis, 1986 social capital questionnaire hjøllund & svendsen, 2000 human patient reported outcomes measurement information system national institute of health, 2010 cdc healthy day items: cdc hrqol– 4 cdc, 2000 political civic attitudes and skills questionnaire moely, et al., 2002 built home and community environment instrument keysor, jette, & haley, 2005 table 2. table of measures included in the community activity books as demonstrated by the variety of assets listed, stories told, and individual characteristics identified by this study, the ccf was effective in promoting holistic thinking and organizing community resources in this context. when the coalition first came together many years ago, it started by brainstorming existing resources. while this was a helpful exercise, the team was only able to identify 15 unique assets. by using this framework and by bringing in additional community members, the total number of assets listed soared to 754, 85 of which were unique (i.e., not duplicated across the capitals). additionally, these did not include those implicit attitudes and values uncovered by the activity book measures, such as environmental attitudes, the value of education, attitudes toward diversity, and social capital. many residents and coalition members directly expressed how by “thinking in capitals,” they realized just how many community strengths they had been ignoring. even more importantly, when we grouped the total assets together by capital a clear picture of how assets are distributed within the community emerged, highlighting strengths in natural and built capital and needs in human and political capital (see figure 3). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 11 figure 2. frequently mentioned assets in each capital in south rome as the process unfolded in the south rome context, the ccf became more than just a way to collect assets. it helped the community to set priorities and make plans for the future and it helped them to better understand how the community works as a system of overlapping and interacting capitals. once the workshops were completed and activity books were collected, community stakeholders worked together to analyze the results and to create action plans based on the findings. below is an example of a community priority and accompanying action steps developed by the coalition:  create programming aimed at bridging the generational gap in the community. o action items:  search for and contact local artists about participating in the south rome historical mural project. ideally, this mural would be the work of several diverse artists, and include both youth and adults. reach out to partner organizations or small-grant programs to discuss funding the supplies that will be used to create the mural once the new school has opened. also, coalition members should speak with etowah terrace [local retirement community] residents and other long-term community members regarding their interest in creating programming (e.g., storytelling days) to go along with the new mural.  contact anna k. davie, [local school] teachers, staff, and parents and etowah terrace residents and staff about their http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 12 interest in serving as the project coordinator for the intergenerational mentorship program. if multiple people are interested in serving, elections can be held. the elected coordinators at both sites should then meet with coalition members to discuss the vision for this program. additional leadership roles could then be established for those who expressed interest in helping with this initiative, but were not elected to the coordinator position. this priority emerged from discussion of the finding that older adults in the community remember the “old south rome,” when the community was thriving, while younger residents tend to see the community as static and unchanging. the stories of the older residents provide an example of what the community was and what it can be again. coalition members also saw the benefit to several capital domains of investing existing cultural capital embodied in the older adults through this programming: creating new connections between youth and adults (social capital), sharing the stories of the past (cultural capital), and supporting the school system and giving the youth a safe space to spend time after school (human capital). similarly, all six additional priorities set by the coalition were intentionally designed to take existing strengths and invest them to meet the needs of the community. lessons learned and suggestions for practice overall, one of the greatest strengths of the ccf is in its flexibility and compatibility with figure 3. community assets overall for south rome collaborative processes. it can be applied in multiple settings in a way that best fits with the needs and goals of community members. because the framework is accessible and includes a wide variety of domains, it facilitates the inclusion of a broad diversity of co-researchers and allows for the values of the community to drive the process. in the south rome community, the original plan was to only conduct workshops to discuss and list community capitals. however, based on their knowledge of the community and strong value of inclusion, two leaders at a local organization mentioned that not everyone in the community has time to attend a meeting, or may not be able to find someone to watch their children while they attend, and they should not be left out. by raising this issue, the community activity books were created. once work began on the activity books, others mentioned the need to assess residents’ internal strengths, so the survey measures were added. using the ccf does not necessarily require expert knowledge of research methods, but it does open the door for meaningful collaboration between researchers and community members where appropriate. the strengths-based focus of the ccf also provides added value to community change efforts by reframing the discussion. it is often very easy to make a list of “what’s wrong” in the community. the focus on the negative, 26% 13% 13%11% 13% 7% 17% natural cultural social human financial political built http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 2 october 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org page 13 with a list of problems and no easy solutions is often overwhelming, causing community members to become resistant to change (emery, fey, & flora, 2006). assets, on the other hand, foster positive community perceptions, empower community members, and start the process of planning for a better future. in south rome, when all of the assets were combined, the impact on all of those involved in the process was substantial. it renewed a sense of hope to see such a long list of what is going right in the community and it helped them to take their first steps in building on those strengths. however, when using the ccf it is important to think of it not simply as a way to create a list of strengths, but also as a way to collect and combine community stories in a manner that is inclusive of diverse voices and values the experiences behind residents’ perspectives. the stories, explanations, and experiences that accompany each asset are just as informative as the assets themselves. for example, in south rome one resident listed “churches” as an asset within natural, built, social, and cultural capital. when used only to calculate a variable or percentage, the perceived reasoning behind assigning “churches” to four different capitals is lost. however, combined with the stories and experiences of the community member, the way that “churches” can fit within multiple capitals was revealed. from this resident’s perspective, churches generate natural capital because they provide beautiful landscaping and places to sit outside; built capital because they support community activities and are, in many cases, historic buildings; social capital through their programming and events; and cultural capital by bringing together a diverse group of people. finally, the ccf can be more than a tool for collecting primary data when it is integrated into a long-term planning and evaluation process. in south rome, the continuation of this community-based research as an evaluation tool for the south rome redevelopment initiative as a whole has been useful to shed light on how and to what impact community change has occurred. the information collected through 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(2004). culture and community development: towards new conceptualizations and practice. community development journal, 39(4), 345–359. doi:10.1093/cdj/bsh031. world bank group, 2004. beyond economic growth student book. available online at: http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/englis h/beyond/global/glossary.html. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://factfinder2.census.gov/ http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/english/beyond/global/glossary.html http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/english/beyond/global/glossary.html the importance of considering local context when attempting to address human trafficking: a qualitative study with service providers and advocates in hawai‘i kristen d. gleason charlene baker alyssa carangan jared espinueva alma herreramendoza denali lukacinsky andreas remis university of hawai‘i at manoa alliant international university university of hawai‘i at manoa keywords: human trafficking, sex trafficking, labor trafficking, hawai‘i, immigration, qualitative analysis, public policy author biographies: kristen d. gleason, m.a., m.ed., is a doctoral candidate in community and cultural psychology at the university of hawai‘i at manoa, honolulu, hi, u.s.a. charlene baker, ph.d., is a professor of community and cultural psychology at university of hawai‘i at manoa, honolulu, hi, u.s.a alyssa carangan, b.a., is a graduate student at alliant international university, sacramento, ca, u.s.a. jared espinueva, b.a., graduated from the university of hawai‘i at manoa with a bachelor of arts in psychology alma herreramendoza, b.a., graduated from the university of hawai‘i at manoa with a bachelor of arts in anthropology denali lukacinsky, b.a., graduated from the university of hawai‘i at manoa with a bachelor of arts in psychology andreas remis, b.a., graduated from the university of hawai‘i at manoa with a bachelor of arts in psychology recommended citation: gleason, k.d. baker, c., carangan, a., espinueva, j., herreramendoza, a., lukacinsky, d., remis, a. (2016). the importance of considering local context when attempting to address human trafficking: a qualitative study with service providers and advocates in hawai‘i. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(3), pages 1-13. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/) global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 the importance of considering local context when attempting to address human trafficking: a qualitative study with service providers and advocates in hawai‘i abstract this study explores how challenges to addressing human trafficking are shaped by the local context in the u.s. state of hawai‘i. human trafficking consists of a variety of practices (e.g., sex trafficking and labor trafficking) and potential victims groups (men, women, and children of both international and domestic origin), all of which occur in hawai‘i. in order to explore the local context of trafficking in hawai‘i, semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with service providers and advocates (n = 13) from three islands (o`ahu = 6; maui = 3; hawai`i = 4). analyses of these interviews found that participants listed a number of challenges that were specific to the context of hawai‘i. challenges related to the unique local geography, cultural diversity, and sociocultural context, all of which may shape local practices and discourses related to human trafficking, are discussed. introduction human trafficking is an issue of national importance, but is also an issue that touches communities at the local level. this study sought to examine the local context of human trafficking in hawai‘i from the perspective of service providers and advocates. specifically, this study focuses on the unique challenges these stakeholders face in their efforts to address trafficking in the state. in the u.s., the last decade has seen the development of fairly comprehensive trafficking policy and interventions (brennan, 2010; destefano, 2007; potocky, 2010b); however, examining how these policies and interventions take shape within the local context is also important. one-size-fits-all approaches to human trafficking are not likely to account for local contextual variation. understanding the local context can better ensure that efforts to address trafficking are sensitive to the situational needs of different communities. literature review while practices of forced labor and forced prostitution are certainly not new, at the end of the 20th century these phenomena began to generate a new level of collective international concern, particularly regarding the ways they reflected the growing globalization of the world economy. migrants from developing countries sought access to job opportunities in more prosperous regions, and immigration policies tightened. this created new routes of irregular migration and a population of vulnerable migrants, some of whom began to fall prey to situations of forced labor or forced prostitution (caraway, 2005). additionally, the demand for cheaper products in developed countries, coupled with the move of corporate manufacturing overseas led to the flourishing of forced labor practices in some developing countries being used to manufacture products for these multinational companies (bales, 2004). perhaps in order to reflect this growing global character, in the 1990s advocates increasingly began giving these forced labor and forced prostitution practices the label of “human trafficking” (destefano, 2007). the term “human trafficking” can be confusing and covers a collection of phenomena that are at best loosely related. in the u.s., people can be trafficked in situations of forced labor or they can be trafficked in the sex industry (brennan, 2008). there are populations of both international victims of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 trafficking (non-citizens) and u.s. citizens who have been “domestically trafficked,” most of whom are women and girls who have been involved in the sex industry (destefano, 2007).1 currently, the major u.s. policy document defining human trafficking for legal purposes (victims of trafficking and violence protection act, 2000) considers any commercial sex act involving an individual under the age of 18 to be sex trafficking. this particular policy has produced a large group of young “domestic” trafficking survivors who may never have left their hometown. thus, the term “trafficking” can be confusing and problematic because it covers a wide range of activities (sex or labor) and a wide range of populations who may be vulnerable to exploitation (e.g., immigrant laborers, immigrant women and children, u.s. citizens in the sex industry, and homeless and runaway youth), all of which are present in the context of hawai‘i. given this variability, it may be misleading to refer to trafficked persons as a single “population.” research to date seems to reveal that, in fact, trafficking cases have been extremely idiosyncratic (e.g., bales & lize, 2005; brennan, 2005). trafficked persons and their traffickers have been demographically diverse in age, ethnicity, source country, and education. the ways traffickers have exploited their victims have also been extremely diverse, ranging from large groups of trafficked persons being forced into prostitution, panhandling, or factory or agricultural work to one or two trafficked persons being used as domestic workers or restaurant staff (bales & lize, 2005). in hawai‘i, one of the first trafficking cases to gain attention was a tongan pig farmer who exploited a handful of fellow 1 however, there have also been some cases of domestic labor trafficking. for example, bales and soodalter (2009) and destefano (2007) both describe a particular case in which african american homeless men were exploited in a forced labor situation. tongans to work on his pig farm and for his landscaping business (bales & soodalter, 2009). this variability limits the kinds of research that can be conducted, as often generalizability is illusive. brennan (2005) concludes that researchers can draw some “general portraits” based on these diverse cases of trafficking, but that “indeed, some trafficking cases are so vastly different from one another that it may not be instructive to draw many connections among them” (p. 39). gozdziak and collett (2005) noted that often because of the diversity and relative scarcity of trafficking cases, researchers are forced to choose between “an in-depth study of a particular geographic region” and “a more scattered approach.” in the case of the former, it is more difficult to draw generalizable conclusions; in the case of the latter, the diversity of detail and context may be lost. to date, much of what has been written about human trafficking in the u.s. has examined it at the national level and has been based on “official” cases that have been documented by the courts or in newspaper articles (bales & soodalter, 2009; gozdziak & collett, 2005; tyldum & brunovskis, 2005). many of these early studies were aimed at exploring the characteristics of trafficking, its victims, and its perpetrators (e.g., clawson, small, go, & myles, 2003; richard, 1999). understanding the needs of trafficking victims and how to meet those needs has been a strong focus throughout research efforts (e.g., aron, zweig, & newmark, 2006; clawson et al., 2003; coonan, 2004), as has examining the effectiveness of policy (e.g., bales & lize, 2005) and programmatic approaches (potocky, 2010a) to addressing trafficking. much of this research has documented a range of challenges to addressing human trafficking that seem fairly consistent across different sites in the u.s., including challenges related to finding appropriate housing for victims (clawson et al., 2003), challenges related to developing collaborative http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 relationships between services providers and law enforcement (bales & lize, 2005), and challenges related to locating victims of trafficking (clawson & dutch, 2008), among others. to provide a more in-depth and contextualized perspective, this study examined challenges related to addressing human trafficking in hawai‘i, with a focus on those challenges that might be unique to or magnified in the local context. the purpose is to illustrate the importance of considering the historical, geographical, and cultural context in which human trafficking exists and to bring this consideration to bear when implementing policies and practices designed to address the issue. what this kind of contextualized approach sacrifices in terms of generalizability, it makes up for in being able to identify areas on which local advocates and policymakers can focus their limited resources to address the reality of the challenges they face in their particular community. human trafficking in hawai‘i hawai‘i’s geography, the presence of several high profile trafficking cases, and its unique sociohistorical context make the state particularly interesting with regard to how local context may shape human trafficking. hawai‘i is geographically isolated from the mainland of the u.s. by thousands of miles of ocean. despite its geographical remoteness, hawai’i is not immune to the effects of human trafficking, and in fact, may possess some characteristics that make it particularly susceptible to trafficking. in the literature on human trafficking there often appears a list of regional characteristics thought to create increased risk for trafficking, including: tourist areas, areas with military bases, areas with large immigrant communities, border areas, major ports of entry, and areas conducive to interstate travel (clawson et al., 2003; richard, 1999). as hawai‘i meets several of these characteristics, most notably tourism, military bases, and large immigrant communities, it could be considered a “hot spot” for trafficking. indeed, hawai‘i has had a number of high profile human trafficking cases in the last 10to 15 years. in addition to the case involving the labor exploitation of tongan workers on the waianae coast in 2003 (mentioned earlier; bales & soodalter, 2009), local service providers also provided assistance to some of the victims, mostly chinese and vietnamese women, of a very large 2001 labor trafficking case involving an american samoa garment factory (bales & lize, 2005). most recently, in two separate labor trafficking cases, aloun farms (2009) and global horizons (2010) were accused of exploiting thai and vietnamese agricultural laborers on hawai‘i farms. the global horizons case was touted to be the largest labor trafficking case in u.s. history (the associated press, 2012). however, charges were dismissed in both cases (niesse, 2011; the associated press, 2012). in addition to several recent incidents of potential human trafficking in hawai‘i, a few aspects of the local sociohistorical context are worthy of note. hawai‘i, while having the full status of statehood since 1959, has had a complex history of colonization and exploitation. of specific relevance to human trafficking is the islands’ plantation era, in which tens of thousands of immigrant laborers were brought from japan, china, korea, the philippines, portugal, and other places to work on sugar plantations. much of hawai‘’'s current population is descended from members of this immigrant workforce who eventually settled and prospered in the islands. however, merry (1999), in analyzing historical legal documents from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, found that during this plantation era time immigrant and migrant workers often experienced problems with “low pay, grim working and living conditions, brutal treatment by lunas (overseers), and quasi-slave contract labor systems [that] drove each group of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 immigrants out of the plantations as quickly as possible” (merry, 1999, p.125). her analysis of these legal documents also highlighted the subtle ways the colonial legal system acted to uphold the power and rights of landowners at the expense of the various immigrant labor forces. thus, instances existed in the state's recent past of what might now be classified as labor trafficking. this is not to say all migrant labor practices during the plantation era of hawai‘i’s history were instances of human trafficking, or even that all were inherently exploitative, but the islands have a complicated history related to migrant labor. this complicated past provides a backdrop for and likely influences today’s conception of human trafficking in the islands. it is helpful to keep this history in mind when considering the preconceptions different stakeholders may bring to their discussions of human trafficking. given this history, it is unlikely that national discourse and policy related to human trafficking arrived in hawai‘i to find it a blank slate. methods this study examined the challenges of addressing human trafficking at the local level in hawai‘i by conducting qualitative interviews with local service providers and advocates. local service providers were chosen because they have a more sophisticated understanding of trafficking than the public and are influential stakeholders with regard to how local human trafficking policy is implemented. participants local service providers (n = 13) were interviewed from three different islands in the state (o‘ahu = 6; maui = 3; hawai‘i = 4). interviews were conducted in person from march to september of 2013 and were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. participants included advocates (n = 2) and service providers who have helped or are likely to help human trafficking victims with legal services (n = 6) or social services (n = 5). participants who had experience with or knowledge related to both sex trafficking and labor trafficking were recruited for the project (sex = 5, labor = 5, both = 3). the majority of the participants were women (n = 10). there was a wide range in the participants’ years of experience with human trafficking related issues. those on neighbor islands (hawai‘i and maui islands) had little direct experience with human trafficking because the relatively few trafficking victims identified on those islands were typically referred to o‘ahu for help. many of these individuals did have several years of experience in related areas, such as domestic violence or immigration relief services, but were fairly new to human trafficking issues. several participants, mostly located on o‘ahu, had been involved with human trafficking issues since shortly after the victims of trafficking and violence protection act (tvpa) was enacted in 2000. measures participants’ thoughts about human trafficking in the islands were solicited using semi-structured qualitative interviews. generally, the questions focused on how participants’ work in the area of human trafficking has changed over the years and their perspectives on what could improve their work in this area. several initial questions gathered background and contextual information, including “in what area of human trafficking do you have experience working?” and “how long have you been involved with human trafficking issues?” these initial questions were generally followed by questions asking participants about the challenges they face in their work with regard to human trafficking. follow-up probes related to challenges included questions about challenges specific to hawai‘i or to neighbor islands if these issues were not spontaneously mentioned. participants were also asked a series of questions exploring their ideas about how to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 best help victims of human trafficking, how to best prevent human trafficking from occurring in the islands, and what changes they have seen over the years in how human trafficking is addressed in the state. analysis each interview was examined using phenomenological qualitative analysis techniques (corbin & strauss, 2008). first, the interview content was grouped into four major a priori categories. these categories were based on the question structure of the interviews: 1) participant opinions about the best way to help human trafficking victims (helping) 2) challenges to addressing human trafficking in hawai‘i (challenges) 3) participant opinions about the best way to prevent human trafficking (prevention) 4) changes in how human trafficking has been addressed in hawai‘i (changes) after this initial coding according to broad interview question topics, each of the four major categories (helping, challenges, prevention, and changes) was analyzed using nvivo software to categorize the interview content into in situ themes and subthemes to systematically explore interviewee responses to the interview questions. this occurred in an iterative process; provisional themes and subthemes were developed and then refined as more data were analyzed. to ensure each theme and subtheme accurately reflected the content provided by participants to the maximum extent possible, each was reexamined, discarded, combined, or refined at multiple stages during the analysis process. of the four main a priori categories, the challenges category was the most robust, yielding multiple themes and subthemes. for this article, we have chosen to focus on understanding the specific challenges hawai‘i faces in addressing human trafficking (for a report detailing the findings on the full study, see gleason, 2015). results among a list of other challenges mentioned in the interviews, many of which have been cited in the literature (e.g., brennan, 2010; clawson et al., 2003), including difficulties maintaining continuous funding, lack of adequate emergency and long-term housing options, or issues related to effectively identifying victims, participants discussed three main challenge areas they thought were particular to the local context of hawai‘i: challenges of geography (n = 10), challenges of cultural diversity (n = 7), and challenges related to the sociocultural context of hawai‘i (n = 7). theme 1: challenges of geography hawai‘i is a chain of volcanic islands in the central pacific, about 2,500 miles of ocean away from california. seven of these islands are inhabited and are organized into five counties (the city and county of honolulu, maui county, hawai‘i county, kauai county, and kalawao county). many of the participants (10/13) discussed hawai‘i’s geographical context as presenting particular difficulties for trafficked persons and those attempting to help them. the fact that hawai‘i is a geographically remote set of islands creates a situation where: 1) patterns of both sex and labor trafficking are different from those in much of the u.s.; 2) trafficked persons and vulnerable populations are often isolated on a particular island; and 3) statewide collaboration is much more difficult, resulting in uneven policy implementation. differing patterns. because of its unique geography, several participants perceived the patterns of trafficking in hawai‘i to be very different from those on the mainland. one participant in particular noted the importance of considering how trafficking in hawai‘i may be different from many states on the mainland: http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 and we’ve found out also that trafficking differs between each cultural group, with labor or sex trafficking, and also geographically in the united states. what we’ve seen here does not join with sometimes what happens in the mainland united states. it’s different. and i think it’s taught us to look at each case on a case by case basis then. and, you know, the so-called experts on the mainland may not be so much experts here because it’s significantly different…i know when like mainland trainers come, law enforcement here doesn’t seem very receptive to what’s being taught because it’s not what they see here. this participant discussed the fact that whereas on the mainland many migrant workers come to the u.s. across the mexican or canadian borders, in hawai‘i, workers must fly in by airplane on either travel or agricultural visas. some then become undocumented by overstaying their visas, and many feel tied to the employers who sponsored their entry. thus, in hawai‘i, labor trafficking victims may fall prey to abuses in terms of how they were recruited to come work in the u.s., how they are treated by employers once they arrive, or whether they are coerced by threats related to confiscating documents or reporting lapsed immigration status. this kind of exploitation can be very subtle and is often difficult to recognize. additionally, sex trafficking in the islands may be different from other locations in that it is thought to involve the movement of victims between islands and between hawai‘i and the mainland of the united states. when these victims are moved off island, it poses a special challenge in that it effectively separates, often by thousands of miles, victims from their families and those who might try to help them. at least one participant also discussed the problem of sex tourism in the state. that hawai‘i’s economy is largely centered on tourism may make the state particularly vulnerable to sex tourism, which is thought to create a greater prevalence of sex trafficking. the passage above demonstrates the need to consider these local understandings of and experiences with human trafficking. if this kind of contextualized understanding is not demonstrated, local stakeholders may be less receptive to outside training, advice, interventions, and policy. “not an easy place to get away.” in addition to the potential for differing patterns of trafficking in hawai‘i, the experiences of trafficked and formerly trafficked persons in the islands is likely also impacted by the geographical context of the state. one major concern among interviewees was that in hawai‘i, in order to travel between islands, counties, or to leave the state, individuals must possess valid identification to pass through airport security. as many trafficked and formerly trafficked persons are undocumented immigrants or have lost their documents while being trafficked, they are vulnerable to being stranded on an island without the ability to leave. often the communities on these islands are small, and formerly trafficked individuals may have little opportunity to distance themselves, either physically or socially, from their traffickers. the limited ability of some immigrant workers in hawai‘i to leave the community in which they experienced exploitative practices is certainly an important challenge to consider when attempting to address human trafficking in the state. additionally, in both the areas of sex and labor trafficking, achieving post-trafficking anonymity in these small communities can be difficult for formerly trafficked persons. for example, according to one participant: i can say specific to hawai‘i, it’s an island. so trying to have safe houses with confidential locations is hard to manage. it’s hard for the survivors when they’re trying to get back on http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 their feet to be able to go anywhere without running into a customer or a pimp…it’s hard to separate yourself from it because it is such a small community here. this lack of anonymity can have serious consequences for the livelihood of formerly trafficked persons: and then the other problem is working. once they did get their papers, like, they’re certified and they got to go get their employment authorization, a lot of the farmers that could employ them are very leery about hiring former trafficking victims. ‘cause they weren’t sure whetherthey didn’t wanna get caught in being considered a trafficking operation. so we had a hard time sometimes re-employing them. uneven policy implementation. finally, as an island chain, hawai‘i faces unique challenges related to the distribution of resources among different islands. the “neighbor islands” of hawai‘i (hawai‘i, kauai, lanai, maui, moloka‘i, and ni‘ihau) are very different contexts compared the city and county of honolulu (located on the island of o‘ahu), the main hub of state policy and resources. the neighbor islands are relatively isolated rural communities, and much of the expertise, funding, service programs, and other infrastructure related to addressing human trafficking are located on o‘ahu. almost all of the participants from the neighbor islands (maui and hawai‘i islands) cited lack of resources as a big challenge facing those who would like to address human trafficking on neighbor islands. coordinating statewide attempts to address human trafficking has proven difficult because travel between islands requires airplane flights and is costly, time-consuming, and tedious. this often results in an uneven distribution of resources and knowledge centered on o‘ahu and leaves the rural neighbor island communities relatively isolated from the state human trafficking support and infrastructure systems. this uneven distribution of resources and knowledge has perhaps contributed to a widespread misconception that human trafficking does not exist in the state. while 11 of the 13 participants described the myth of “it doesn’t happen here” as a challenge to addressing human trafficking, this challenge seemed particularly acute on the neighbor islands. for instance, according to one participant: so i think other counties, i think if we send our prosecutor over and he says, “we don’t have this problem on [neighbor island x],” then we don’t get any information coming back, right? [interviewer: oh, okay. so you think at some level there’s an idea that there’s not that much human trafficking here?] on [neighbor island x] and other neighbor islands too. theme 2: challenges of cultural diversity another state-specific challenge is that the ethnic make-up of hawai‘i’s immigrant and migrant labor population is more diverse than the typical mainland state. squarely located in the middle of the pacific, hawai‘i is as likely to receive immigrant and migrant workers from mexico, southeast asia, east asia, the confederated states of micronesia, or other pacific islands. the confederated states of micronesia alone, which has an agreement with the u.s. government that enables its citizens to have unrestricted travel and residency in the states, is a collection of many small island cultures with several different languages. altogether, this diversity makes it difficult for service providers to access appropriate translation services, as well as for advocates to target effective outreach programs to the wide range of immigrant groups present in the islands. furthermore, it poses a challenge to service providers, who may not be knowledgeable http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 about the cultural practices, norms, and understandings of all the groups they encounter. this increases the chances of misunderstandings based on culture and language differences. one participant also discussed the particular challenge of sourcing social service workers and interpreters from small ethnic communities (such as those from micronesia) where either victims or traffickers may have some personal connection with potential interpreters: luckily we had a male person who spoke thai. he learned it in the peace corps, and so he was a neutral person. hawai‘i is kinda small and the people know each other. and so there’s a lot of stuff that people don’t wanna share. so the worker can learn a lot of information. and whoever that worker is hopefully doesn’t compromise confidentiality. and finding someone like that, that’s kind of neutral, is very difficult. theme 3: challenges related to sociocultural context finally, about half of the participants (n = 7) mentioned concerns related to having less institutional support for addressing human trafficking in hawai‘i than in other states. in several instances participants discussed concerns and observations that there was a certain level of acceptance of human trafficking-related practices (such as labor abuse, prostitution, or domestic violence) within some segments of the community in hawai‘i. one participant discussed how the definition of human trafficking covers a “range of activities [that] are broad and some would be more tolerated and some less tolerated.” if this is true, it is important to understand what practices may be more tolerated and why. trafficking-related practices with a level of acceptance by some segments of the community were identified in both the areas of sex trafficking and labor trafficking. with issues related to sex trafficking, several participants discussed the acceptance of prostitution in their communities and linked this to challenges in addressing human trafficking. for example: but it’s so normal or mainstream for men to go to the hostess bars. and i’m talking dignitaries. like, one of the challenges that we have with that, i feel like even our politicians, our cops, our prosecutors, go to hostess bars. now whether they participate in the ‘cause the hostess bars, it’s drink, you buy a girl a drink, she sits at your table, spend time together, that kind of thing. and then there’s the whole behind the scenes prostitution that’s going on. so some of our most, you know, high end of authority officials go to these bars and so it’s really that’s we don’t talk on [this island] about human trafficking. so they try to pass legislation for that [stiffer penalties for pimps], and it’s always opposed by the da’s office over there, which is, you know, just that’s the weird dynamic that i was talking about. like other [places]…on the mainland, the das were the ones that sponsored that legislation. like, they wanted to be able to impose stiffer penalties. but in hawai`i for some reason, they’re the ones that oppose the legislation. while these concerns were not present in every participant interview, a significant handful of participants did express concerns over the willingness of local authorities to address sex trafficking. whether these impressions are completely true or not, they represent a view that those in power have an interest in ignoring or denying human trafficking and related practices. concerns about the acceptance of certain trafficking-related practices were also present in the area of labor trafficking, and a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 few participants drew a connection between a potential acceptance of labor exploitation and the island’s plantation era history: but, my experience is that those law enforcement don’t realize that at all. they think it’s, especially in hawai`i, where most of our ancestors were plantation workers. they’re like, “hey if our grandparents did it, why not?” well, they weren’t happy and they were exploited too, you know...so yeah. um, law enforcement is not what they’re cracked up to be. they don’t see the seriousness. i’m assuming it’s the same for the labor department, that people are maybe willing to work for less money, harsh hours, harsh working, thinking, “well, my dad did it, my grandpa did it, so therefore why am i, what gives me the right to say it’s not right?” additionally, as hawai‘i is a relatively small community, often landowners and agricultural businesses can have prominent and powerful positions. one participant listed several large local agribusinesses and hotels rumored to have committed varying degrees of labor abuse toward their immigrant and migrant employees. even if authorities are not directly connected to these local businesses, there seems to be some suspicion that employers may have influence over them. while not mentioned by every participant, this concern that people in authority are not adequately addressing issues of human trafficking in hawai‘i was mentioned by at least one participant on each island. concluding thoughts for service providers, advocates, and researchers interested in addressing human trafficking, systematically considering the local issues that may influence either the actual trafficking practices or the local perceptions of those practices is critically important to understanding how to best leverage resources to help trafficked persons and prevent future trafficking. community psychologists are perhaps uniquely situated to respond to this need for highlighting and addressing local issues and perceptions related to human trafficking. three of our core competencies (“competencies for community psychology practice,” n.d.) are particularly useful in drawing attention to the need to consider local context when attempting to address issues of human trafficking. first, a strong focus on ecological perspectives can call attention to the multiple nested settings in which human trafficking is situated, thus helping stakeholders recognize that trafficking policies are situated both within a national legislative and political context as well as within a complicated web of local perceptions, policies, and politics. second, community psychology’s focus on socio-cultural and cross-cultural competence is useful for sensitizing researchers, practitioners, and advocates to the different ways local stakeholders, advocates, authorities, and potential victim populations might understand human trafficking. human trafficking, as a complex and multifaceted problem, tends to be viewed differently when understood through various cultural lenses. researchers and advocates will need to competently “bridge” these diverging viewpoints in order to address the issue. finally, as a highly charged and often politicized issue, human trafficking advocacy and research requires the core competency of ethical and reflective practice. to effectively navigate and bridge the many different local perspectives surrounding the issue of human trafficking, community psychologists will need to be adept at recognizing their own values and viewpoints related to these issues and to reflect on how to proceed in an ethical manner. in the case of hawai‘i, this kind of exploration has resulted in the consideration of unique challenges related to geography, cultural diversity, and sociocultural context. these http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 features likely shape trafficking practices (e.g., moving trafficked persons between islands) and victim experiences and needs (e.g., potential to encounter former traffickers in the community, restricted ability to travel), and thus must be taken into consideration when planning service provider responses and when implementing human trafficking policies in the state. in the local context of hawai‘i, the participants of this study highlighted several ways the patterns of human trafficking seen in the islands were different from those seen on the mainland. policymakers, service providers, and advocates in hawai‘i need to account for these differing patterns. in order to do this, it is critical to develop better coordination and more evenly distributed infrastructure to effectively address the problem of human trafficking across all of the islands. in particular, agricultural labor trafficking is a potential concern on several of the neighbor islands that heavily rely on farming industries (e.g., sugar, coffee, macadamia nuts). the authorities, service providers, and the general public on these islands would benefit from a more systematic attempt at disseminating training and information about human trafficking and from better coordination and communication with their counterparts on o‘ahu. dedicating more effort and funding to develop a better coordinated interisland antitrafficking system would have a number of benefits. first, with more support and training, neighbor island counties would be better able to locate and identify potential instances of trafficking in their rural and remote areas. second, interisland coordination among service providers could help relocate individuals and families who have experienced trafficking or other forms of exploitation, allowing them to achieve geographical and social distance from the communities in which they were exploited. and finally, a better system of interisland coordination would facilitate the sharing of resources and expertise related to the diverse cultural groups in the islands. for example, organizations that have cultivated ties to particular ethnic communities could be mobilized to help and support potential victims on any island in the state. one of the most significant concerns highlighted in this study was a failure or reluctance in some parts of the community to recognize the potential for human trafficking abuses. it can be difficult to advocate for victims and enact policy when much of the general public and those in power do not perceive a problem. when human trafficking is seen by the general public as rare instances of extreme abuse, it may be difficult for them to recognize the less extreme forms of abuse that are the products of exploitative contexts conducive to human trafficking. one way to address this problem would be to expand how the public views the problem, thereby generating more support for addressing human trafficking on all islands. identifying, targeting, and quantifying a range of abuses that particular vulnerable populations face would help advocates establish convincing need for intervention or change without being limited to discussing only those who have already presented as human trafficking victims. the vulnerable groups targeted for this kind of exploration could include specific immigrant populations, runaway or juvenile justice involved teens, and women in the sex industry. for example, zhang, spiller, finch, and qin (2014) examined the prevalence of labor trafficking and other labor abuses among a vulnerable population of migrant workers in the san diego area. in targeting a broad general population of vulnerable individuals, they were able to document the presence of a range of abuses, including but not limited to trafficking practices, experienced by these individuals. a similar approach to documentation in hawai‘i, gathering information from both immigrant groups and vulnerable youth or women presenting at http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 legal and social service agencies, could provide numerical data related to the exploitation these groups experience (trafficking and otherwise). this kind of research would make it difficult to continue deny the presence of trafficking in the islands, making it a powerful tool in garnering more support for addressing human trafficking. of course, there are many barriers to addressing these issues, including limited funding for trafficking-specific personnel and services and logistical issues related to coordinating across islands, among others. it is important to acknowledge the significant difficulties faced in addressing these recommendations. they are in no way meant to minimize the great work that has already been accomplished or the rather large hurdles that would need to be overcome to enact them. rather, the above recommendations represent suggestions for continued efforts to address human trafficking in the islands, with full acknowledgement of the effort and hard work that has already shaped trafficking services and advocacy in hawai‘i. references aron, l. y., zweig, j. m., & newmark, l. c. (2006). comprehensive services for survivors of human trafficking: findings from clients in three communities. urban institute: justice policy center. retrieved from http://www.urban.org/publications/411 507.html bales, k. (2004). disposable people: new slavery in the global economy (2nd ed.). berkeley, california: university of california press. bales, k., & lize, s. (2005). trafficking in persons in the united states (no. 211980). national institute of justice. retrieved from https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/gra nts/211980.pdf bales, k., & soodalter, r. (2009). the slave next door: human trafficking and slavery in america today (1st ed.). berkeley, california: university of california press. brennan, d. (2005). methodological challenges in research with trafficked persons: tales from the field. international migration, 43(1-2), 35–54. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.00207985.2005.00311.x brennan, d. (2008). competing claims of victimhood? foreign and domestic victims of trafficking in the united states. sexuality research and social policy, 5(4), 45–61. http://doi.org/10.1525/srsp.2008.5.4.45 brennan, d. (2010). thoughts on finding and assisting individuals in forced labor in the usa. sexualities, 13(2), 139–152. caraway, n. (2005). human rights and existing contradictions in asia-pacific human trafficking politics and discourse. tulane journal of international and comparative law, 14, 295. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 clawson, h., & dutch, n. (2008). identifying victims of human trafficking: inherent challenges and promising strategies from the field. department of health and human services, office of assistant secretary for planning and evaluation. clawson, h. j., small, k. m., go, e. s., & myles, b. w. (2003). needs assessment for service providers and trafficking victims. u.s. department of justice. retrieved from https://www.ncjrs.gov/app/abstractdb/ abstractdbdetails.aspx?id=202469 competencies for community psychology practice. (n.d.). retrieved november 18, 2015, from http://www.scra27.org/whatwe-do/practice/18-competenciescommunity-psychology-practice/ coonan, t. (2004). human trafficking: victims’ voices in florida. journal of social work research and evaluation, 5(2), 207– 216. corbin, j. m., & strauss, a. l. (2008). basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (3rd ed.). los angeles, calif.: sage publications. destefano, a. m. (2007). the war on human trafficking: u.s. policy assessed. new brunswick, new jersey: rutgers university press. gleason, k. (2015). exploring human trafficking in hawai’i from the perspective of local service providers: report to stakeholders. honolulu, hi: university of hawaii at manoa. retrieved from https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5 5491f3be4b00d6e0a60e6c3/t/55da609c e4b072906c9cf5d1/1440374940702/re port+to+human+trafficking+stakeholder s+final+20150811.pdf gozdziak, e. m., & collett, e. a. (2005). research on human trafficking in north america: a review of literature. international migration, 43(1‐2), 99–128. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.00207985.2005.00314.x merry, s. e. (1999). colonizing hawai’i: the cultural power of law. princeton, new jersey: princeton university press. niesse, m. (2011, august 5). aloun farms: charges dropped against sou brothers in hawaii human trafficking case. retrieved february 20, 2013, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0 8/05/aloun-farms-charges-droppedhuman-trafficking_n_919261.html potocky, m. (2010a). effectiveness of services for victims of international human trafficking: an exploratory evaluation. journal of immigrant & refugee studies, 8(4), 359–385. http://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2010. 522462 potocky, m. (2010b). the travesty of human trafficking: a decade of failed u.s. policy. social work, 55(4), 373–375. http://doi.org/10.1093/sw/55.4.373 richard, a. o. (1999). international trafficking in women to the united states: a contemporary manifestation of slavery and organized crime. center for the study of intelligence. retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/center-forthe-study-of-intelligence/csipublications/books-andmonographs/trafficking.pdf the associated press. (2012, july 21). human trafficking case dismissed against global horizons officials. the new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/u s/human-trafficking-case-dismissedagainst-global-horizons-officials.html http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 tyldum, g., & brunovskis, a. (2005). describing the unobserved: methodological challenges in empirical studies on human trafficking. international migration, 43(1‐2), 17–34. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.00207985.2005.00310.x zhang, s. x., spiller, m. w., finch, b. k., & qin, y. (2014). estimating labor trafficking among unauthorized migrant workers in san diego. the annals of the american academy of political and social science, 653(1), 65–86. http://doi.org/10.1177/0002716213519 237 http://www.gjcpp.org/ collective impact: operationalizing a framework to coordinate community services sara e. schlemper, julie m. kapp, sofia campos, riyad haq, and eduardo j. simoes keywords: maternal health; maternal-child health services; home visits; collective impact; health services author biographies: sara e. schlemper, mha is a graduate of the masters in health administration program at the university of missouri school of medicine. she served as a graduate research assistant on the maternal, infant, and early childhood home visiting program evaluation from 2015-2016. she is currently working as a patient coordinator helping to design and implement processes within the outpatient ob/gyn department of mount sinai hospital, which serves the publically insured population of new york city. julie m. kapp, mph, phd is an associate professor in the department of health management and informatics at the university of missouri school of medicine. she holds a masters and doctorate in public health, concentrated in epidemiology, from saint louis university. her research spans health program and policy evaluation, health promotion and disease prevention, and systems-science. she served as the lead on missouri’s maternal, infant, and early childhood home visiting program evaluation from 2015-2016. sofia campos, bsn, mph is a graduate of georgia university school of public health with a policy and management concentration. she served as an associate director of programs, project operation on the maternal, infant, and early childhood home visiting program evaluation in missouri from 2015-2016. sofia is currently an associate at icf in atlanta, georgia providing research, data, and evaluation solutions for domestic and international projects of leading public health agencies (cdc, samhsa, unicef). global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 riyad haq, mha is a graduate of the masters in health administration program at the university of missouri school of medicine. he served as a graduate research assistant on the maternal, infant, and early childhood home visiting program evaluation from 20152016. after his graduation, riyad went to the illinois health and hospital association for a one-year fellowship in administration and public policy where he developed tools to help hospitals collaborate to achieve collective impact against various social determinants of health. riyad is currently completing a second year of fellowship at vizient in the center for advanced analytics & informatics. eduardo j. simoes, md, msc, dlshtm, mph is chair and alumni distinguished professor in the department of health management and informatics, university of missouri school of medicine. he has a doctor of medicine (university of pernambuco-brazil), diploma and msc in community health (london school of hygiene and tropical medicine, university of london-england), and mph (emory university). previous notable appointment: director of the prevention research centers program at the centers for disease control and prevention, state epidemiologist in missouri. he served as the pi of missouri’s maternal, infant, and early childhood home visiting program contract from 2015-2016. recommended citation: schlemper, s., kapp, j., campos, s., haq, r., & simoes, e. (2017). collective impact: operationalizing a framework to coordinate community services. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(3), 1-9. retrieved day/month/year, from ( http://www.gjcpp.org/ ). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 collective impact: operationalizing a framework to coordinate community services abstract the maternal, infant, and early childhood home visiting (miechv) program provides comprehensive early childhood services. federal agencies emphasize coordination of stakeholders for systems-building. designing a well-coordinated system is complex. we reviewed miechv’s literature and program documents to identify communitycoordination infrastructure elements. we designed visual frameworks for each model to display infrastructure, components, and connections. in the independent point of entry model, families access services directly. in the coordinated point of entry model, a centralized intake and referral structure supports system coordination. in the collective impact model, relevant community stakeholders actively and collaboratively participate in service coordination. visual frameworks allow stakeholders to align on process and infrastructure of their programs to facilitate planning activities, use these frameworks to identify whether the model under which they operate is ideal, and then evolve their infrastructure. introduction in an international comparison, the u.s. falls short on many maternal and child health indicators. the u.s. has the highest infant mortality rates,1 our children are less likely to live to age 5 (1), and our rate of adolescent pregnancy is the highest among high-income peer countries (1). improving these health outcomes requires a greater emphasis on improving modifiable factors, which account for up to 50% of premature mortality;2-5 medical care only accounts for 15% of population health (6). home visiting services have a long history in the u.s., with some evidence of positive impacts on prenatal, post birth, and long-term health and behavioral outcomes of mothers and children in high-risk conditions (7). home visiting services became more common in the early 1900’s, primarily funded by philanthropic organizations and local government agencies (7). in 2010, the maternal, infant, and early childhood home visiting (miechv) program was created by the patient protection and affordable care act. the affordable care act authorization and funding level for five years of miechv was $1.5 billion (8). disseminated through the health resources and services administration and the administration for children and families, the miechv program is designed to improve maternal and early childhood outcomes by providing comprehensive services to at-risk families through evidence-based home visiting programs (9). the u.s. department of health and human services’ administration for children & families hosts a website home visiting evidence of effectiveness (homvee) that catalogs and describes evidence-based early childhood home visiting service delivery models (“program models”) in collaboration with the miechv program (10). miechv legislation announced that “coordination of services with other agencies has been an essential characteristic of state and local programs… (and) will be essential to effective, comprehensive home visiting and early childhood systems” (11). the coordination of stakeholders and services can produce efficient, effective service delivery; http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 reduce redundancy; and enhance systemic support for target populations (12). miechv local implementing agencies are called to work together with the other components of the system within their communities, in order to optimize maternal and early childhood outcomes. many state miechv programs believe that the most significant and feasible coordination effort concerns organizing the client’s point of entry (13). how to design and implement a wellcoordinated system is complex and, as yet, unclear. to support implementing coordination of services, we identified the operational practices of various miechv programs and created frameworks to visualize those practices. methods the theoretical basis for our approach is “collective impact,” as proposed by kania and kramer (14), given how omnipresent the concepts have become in community-based practice. “collective impact” is a buzzword among community-based organizations to reflect the inter-agency commitment of crosssector organizations toward a common goal, and is comprised of five conditions for success: 1) a common agenda; 2) a backbone support organization (a highly structured process managed by an umbrella organization); 3) shared measurement systems (ways success will be measured and reported); 4) mutually reinforcing activities; and 5) continuous communication (14). a google search of “collective impact” results in over 630,000 returns. while the collective impact concepts are not fully developed as a systems-approach (15), many organizations(16-21) and even communities (22) have developed an identity around collective impact. we reviewed publicly available miechv program documents and systems-building literature to identify intake and referral practices to develop model frameworks. to qualify as a model, the program must have been attempted in more than five states and/or communities throughout the united states. we based model frameworks on identified community service delivery components and practices: the providers in the program network (community service delivery organizations), the receiver (the family), “check point” institutions with whom a family would commonly interact (schools, hospitals), and connection activities among these components (initial contact, screening, intake assessments, referrals). check point institutions may be a part of the network; however, they tend to serve a distinct purpose in the coordination process as an optimal location for screening. we created diagrams using draw.io software. each model demonstrates our illustration of the interaction of the system with one family and how the coordination among stakeholders addresses that family’s needs. the red star indicates an initial contact of the family with the service delivery system. the light blue circle signifies a comprehensive, systematic assessment of needs. the green circle signifies a simpler, standardized screening activity that determines if there is a need for services. the dotted lines display the pathways of the case. for instance, a dotted line from the “school” to a central intake and referral organization signifies that the family’s case has been moved to the referral organization. red dotted lines signify that the path is not systematic (e.g. when a family reaches out to an agency). finally, blue lines indicate services that are delivered to the families from service organizations. because this study does not meet the definition of “human subjects research,” institutional review board approval is not required. results three common models emerged concerning service delivery coordination. figure 1 displays the coordination models. we define the independent point of entry (poe) model http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 as one in which the poe of a family is isolated to one organization, which does not systematically coordinate with other community service providers’ intake processes. the independent poe model represents a framework without a comprehensive, systematic service coordination among providers. service providers have organization-specific intake and referral practices that may lack coordination due to inconsistent knowledge concerning the specifics of the other organizations’ services. coordinated poe displays a system where services are coordinated by a central intake and referral structure, typically operated by a separate organization or a central data system. coordinated poe is designed to coordinate services by comprehensively identifying family needs; the missions, services, and activities of community organizations; eligibility requirements; capacity of each organization; and other considerations for suitability, including the evidence for the various models targeting a particular need. this model presents the systematic connection of services to families. if successful, agencies in the community would theoretically spend less time and resources recruiting and managing intake. this would result in reducing time providers spend answering calls, screening for services, and managing waitlists; reducing the number of times families are screened; and providing more logical service delivery, leading to better outcomes for families and optimizing total community resources by reducing duplication throughout the system (23). the collective impact model has emerged as a recognized approach for bringing stakeholders together to coordinate the assignment of complementary tasks for the purpose of achieving a common aim (12,14). ideally, the organizations participating in collective impact should offer complementary services (i.e. one might offer transportation services and another might connect clients with health care). to coordinate and align services, the organizations would regularly collaborate on placement of families and to satisfy five conditions that define this model: a common agenda, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, shared measurements, and backbone support (14). discussion miechv clients commonly have complex needs. we identified three operational models concerning service delivery coordination. the highest-level systems model is the collective impact model. families would benefit from collective impact interventions, which introduce coordination at the backbone support-level and attempt to provide a more comprehensive alignment of client needs with service foci. the burden of keeping track of services in the system does not fall on the family or one agency, but rather, that support is collaboratively built into the system. in order to achieve true coordination, the centers for disease control and prevention (24) suggest formal partnerships. structured partnerships can be used as a tool to build in ownership and contribute to the composition of meaningful networks. organizations in the collaborative effort should offer varying, complementary services (i.e. one might offer transportation services and another might connect clients with health care). collective impact in communities requires systems-level effort (15,25). collective impact also involves the systematic targeting of eligible clients. families seeking services may not be the ones that need services the most. thus, service delivery systems might reach target populations more comprehensively if processes were embedded into key community check point institutions (schools and health care organizations). health care organizations are especially well-suited to capture the miechv target groups given their focus on families with children prenatal to kindergarten entry. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 therefore, health care providers have the opportunity to serve a distinct purpose in the centralization and coordination of the intake process with the use of simple, standardized screening activities. planning for systems change requires that stakeholders first identify the root causes of problems. analysis of ‘the problem’ should be complemented by an assessment of the existing organizations, collaborations, and structural elements (e.g., other sectors, the public policy landscape) that have the potential to play roles in the effort (25). collective impact is fundamentally not about creating a whole new initiative, but rather connecting and strengthening existing efforts and filling gaps. the output of this landscape assessment could range from a simple list and description of the above elements, or it could be a more sophisticated “systems map” that visually depicts the relationships between the various elements”(25). regardless of the format, the goal is to identify current work that can be expanded. the initial planning for building collective impact in communities might include the following steps: 1. define a common agenda (14). because the miechv program required that states conduct a needs assessment to identify areas for miechv services, the common agenda is improving maternal and early childhood outcomes. 2. define the system. identifying community stakeholders and how they connect within communities allows miechv to understand which players address which needs, and how. 3. engage organizations toward collective impact perspectives. shift from a competitive stakeholder perspective to “we are critical participants and givers in this collective effort and we all need to contribute to making it happen” (26). 4. build conceptual models of the system. figure 1 contains models that describe service delivery systems. 5. compare the models with the real world. currently, many miechv communities operate as the first model, independent poe. 6. develop desirable and feasible interventions (mutually reinforcing activities (14)). these interventions might start with stakeholders: ● determining how much time each organization is capable of contributing to select responsibilities for eligible families and developing the infrastructure for that initiative (continuous communication (14)); ● identifying client information they are willing and permitted to share, and discussing data linkages to inform how client progress will be tracked across agencies (shared measurements (14)); ● aligning each agency’s intake criteria and capacity (to identify gaps and strengthen coordination); ● designating which stakeholder will support the coordination of services delivered to families (backbone support organizations (14)). visually displaying and comparing ‘current state’ to ‘future state’ coordination models may support miechv efforts to strengthen inter-agency coordination by providing a high-level awareness to stimulate thought around planning activities. we recognize there are a few limitations to this work. first, we applied our model frameworks to the miechv literature. we would welcome testing the replication of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 these ideas in both the miechv literature, as well as in broader community-based practice. to that end, future research would entail testing the efficacy and effectiveness of operationalized collective impact initiatives against the poe model to confirm improved outcomes. figure 1: models for coordination of services and stakeholders in early childhood, 20152016 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 implications for policy and practice what is already known about this topic? the miechv program points to coordination as a key strategy in early childhood systemsbuilding. systems-building approaches vary, but most agree that coordinating the public and private pieces in the system is a useful strategy. collective impact has emerged as a desired framework to achieve targeted outcomes, although in many cases remains a buzzword or theoretical ideal rather than an operationalized reality. what is added by this report? many miechv programs operate as independent poe models without a universal intake and referral process. miechv programs would be strengthened by taking concrete steps to implement collective impact partnerships to serve clients with diverse needs. what are the implications for public health practice, policy, and research? visualizing models of coordination frameworks allows programs to reflect on their current service delivery system. using the guidelines listed might be a practical strategy for communities who choose to move toward implementing collective impact. acknowledgements this project is supported by the health resources and services administration (hrsa) of the u.s. department of health and human services (hhs) under grant number d89mc2791501-affordable care act (aca) maternal, infant, and early childhood home visiting (miechv) program in the amount of $379,024 with 0% financed with nongovernmental sources. this information or content and conclusions are those of the authors and should not be construed as the official position or policy of, nor should any endorsements be inferred by hrsa, hhs, the u.s. government, or the missouri department of health and senior services. we are grateful to the missouri department of health and senior services’ miechv program leadership and project personnel for their diligent efforts in implementing this program. reference 1. institute of medicine. u.s. health in international perspective: shorter lives, poorer health. washington, dc: national academies press; 2013. 2. mokdad ah, marks js, stroup df, gerberding jl. actual causes of death in the united states, 2000. jama. 2004;291(10):1238-1245. 3. mcginnis jm, foege wh. actual causes of death in the united states. jama. 1993;270(18):2207-2212. 4. kapp jm, parker oliver d. the pursuit of longevity fuels the need for international life 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toolkit: tips on designing and implementing a coordinated entry system in your county. 2013. 24. office of public health preparedness and response. a structured approach to effective partnering: lessons learned from public and private sector leaders. 2013. 25. abercrombie r, harries e, wharton r. systems change: a guide to what it is and how to do it. 2015. 26. gaskin r. addressing pre-launch stakeholder concerns. 2015; https://collectiveimpactforum.org/communit y/addressing-pre-launch-stakeholderconcerns. accessed august 7, 2017, 2017. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://homvee.acf.hhs.gov/ http://www.collaborationforimpact.com/collective-impact/ http://www.collaborationforimpact.com/collective-impact/ https://collectiveimpactforum.org/what-collective-impact https://collectiveimpactforum.org/what-collective-impact http://www.vermontcollectiveimpact.org/2016-conference.html http://www.vermontcollectiveimpact.org/2016-conference.html http://www.unitedwayglv.org/see-the-impact/collective-impact http://www.unitedwayglv.org/see-the-impact/collective-impact https://www.strivetogether.org/our-approach/collective-impact/ https://www.strivetogether.org/our-approach/collective-impact/ https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/tools-resources/collective-impact https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/tools-resources/collective-impact http://slco.org/mayor/initiatives/collective-impact/ http://slco.org/mayor/initiatives/collective-impact/ https://collectiveimpactforum.org/community/addressing-pre-launch-stakeholder-concerns https://collectiveimpactforum.org/community/addressing-pre-launch-stakeholder-concerns https://collectiveimpactforum.org/community/addressing-pre-launch-stakeholder-concerns global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 sharing strengths and struggles in the classroom and beyond: results from the teaching community psychology survey mariah kornbluh, danielle kohfeldt, lindsay banks, and holly brott author biographies: mariah kornbluh, phd, is an assistant professor of community psychology at california state university, chico. she earned a b.a. in psychology from the university of california, santa cruz, and a ph.d. in ecological-community psychology from michigan state university. she also held a postdoctoral position at the university of wisconsin-madison in the department of civil society and community research. her research program focuses on engaging in community-based partnerships in order to examine pathways towards increasing children and adolescent health access, and civic development. she utilizes a participatory action research paradigm, and often employs mixed-methods and social network analysis. her recent work focuses on children’s understanding of inequality, housing insecurity, and the social politicization of underrepresented students through social justice efforts. danielle kohfeldt, phd is an assistant professor of community psychology at california state university long beach. she earned a b.a. in psychology and english literature from the university of san diego, her m.s.w. from san diego state university, and her ph.d. in social psychology from the university of california santa cruz. as a social-community psychologist danielle is interested in empowering contexts that support members of subordinated groups as social change agents. her program of research focuses broadly on formal and informal learning environments (e.g., after-school programs, community organizing groups) and how these settings facilitate or hinder individual and collective empowerment and wellbeing. much of her work is community-based and often combines arts-based methods and action. lindsay banks , is a master’s student at california state university, chico, studying psychological sciences. she earned her bachelor's degree from the university of california, santa cruz, in psychology, and intends to pursue her phd. she is currently http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 researching pathways to mental health issues in individuals who are experiencing housing insecurity. lindsay’s area of emphasis is prevention in mental health. holly brott, is a recent graduate of the psychological science master’s program at california state university, chico, and is currently employed as a research consultant. broadly, her research interests include multi-generational poverty, homelessness, and mental health. her current research focuses on the social-emotional and developmental needs of children entering the transitional housing environment, as well as demographic predictors to programmatic success within transitional housing programs. recommended citation: kornbluh, m., kohfeldt, d., banks, l., & brott, h. (2019). sharing strengths and struggles in the classroom and beyond: results from the teaching community psychology survey. global journal of community psychology, 10(1), 1 29. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 sharing strengths and struggles in the classroom and beyond: results from the teaching community psychology survey abstract research on the state of community psychology (cp) in undergraduate education is scarce. this lack of understanding within the discipline hinders the ability to learn from cp educators’ experiences and disseminate effective practices. to begin to address this gap, the current study distributed a survey to cp educators located within the united states, exploring the following questions: 1) what are the demographics, locations, and roles cp-related educators occupy, 2) what are the biggest challenges educators encounter in and outside of the classroom when teaching cp-related content, and 3) what additional resources/supports do educators need from both their institution and the larger professional field to deliver high quality cp educational experiences. responses from participants (n=44) highlight diversity in educators’ positions and geographic locations, as well as the prominence of a cp focus across departments. applying an ecological framework, findings indicate that educators encounter multiple systemic challenges while teaching cp-related content at the departmental, institutional, and local community levels. at a national scale, the political climate regarding public education also contributes to instructional barriers. assessment of resources regarding needed support systems and action within the field are provided. lastly, we stress the value of future research concerning faculty teaching undergraduate cp courses. introduction the teaching of community psychology (cp) has garnered well-deserved attention in recent years. for instance, the council of educational programs, an interest group within the society for community research and action (scra), published an article examining the core competencies in research and practice for training within graduate programs (christens, connell, faust, haber, & the council of educational programs, 2015). additionally, the 2017 scra biennial in ottawa, canada marked the formation of a new interest group focused on undergraduate student education. these efforts coincide with an increasing emphasis on the domains of service learning, civic engagement, and community-based partnerships within undergraduate education (bringle & steinberg, 2010; peterson, 2009; sandmann, thorton, & jaeger, 2009), all of which reside within the cp wheelhouse. as efforts build surrounding undergraduate education within cp, exploratory research is needed to better understand the professional landscape, challenges, successes, and experiences of faculty implementing cp pedagogy. ongoing research efforts are critical in beginning to document and disseminate effective practices. furthermore, exploratory inquiry fosters collegial selfreflexivity. thus, sharing information about the strategies, pitfalls, and challenges educators encounter in their profession can support cp junior faculty in navigating institutional challenges (e.g., documentation, tenure, promotion, etc.). lastly, as the field of cp pushes to increase diversity in representation, introducing non-traditional undergraduate students to cp concepts can undergraduate special issue http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 provide unique outlets and pipelines for further expanding the field. in sum, the value of this project is three-fold: 1) to learn from the experiences of and 2) disseminate the resources provided by this sample of cp educators (n = 44), as well as 3) to showcase the potential value of completing future comprehensive surveys of faculty teaching undergraduate cp courses. in the sections below, we highlight existing scholarship on cp education including breadth, training, and content. our review includes the number of universities offering cp-related courses, the types of cp-related courses offered, and prominent pedagogical challenges for educators in service learning courses. notably, existing literature addressing these topics is scarce, thus highlighting the importance of a needsassessment to map out the current professional landscape of cp in relation to undergraduate education. undergraduate cp courses data on the prevalence of undergraduate course offerings in cp-related content and programming is limited. aubry, sylvestre, and ecker (2010) compared the number of undergraduate cp courses offered in canada in the 2000s (i.e., 2008-2009 academic year) and the 1990s (i.e., 1992-1994 academic years). they identified a slight increase in the number of universities offering undergraduate courses as well as the number of courses offered (19 universities, 32 cprelated courses in the 1990s compared with 25 universities, 38 cp-related courses in the 2000s; see table 1). findings highlight the need to track the positions of cp faculty within the united states, and the number of programs offering cp courses. table 1. undergraduate community psychology courses offered decades comparison characteristics 1990s 2000s universities offering cp courses 19 25 # of courses offered 32 38 in terms of content, cp courses have predominantly focused on prevention, empowerment, and decolonization (barton et al., 1976; carolissen, canham, fourie, grahm, puleng segalo & bowman, 2017; sandler & keller, 1984), heavily implementing problemfocused learning, visual methodologies, program evaluation, and service learning practices (aubry et al., 2010; barton et al., 1976; carolissen, et al., 2017; dawes, 2018; sandler, & keller, 1984; schilts, harker, & gardner, 1977; strage, 2000; visser & cleaver, 1999). these courses are typically offered as upper division electives (i.e., an optional course for students in their final year) allowing for flexibility in instructor design and engagement (o’sullivan, 1993). one challenge identified in the communitybased and service learning literature that could also be present while teaching cprelated courses is time, as it can be difficult to adequately implement a community-based intervention within a single academic term (carolissen, et al., 2017; dawes, 2018). time constraints also impede the ability of students and faculty to build trusting relationships with community partners (mclean, johnson, eblen, 1977; o’sullivan, 1993). furthermore, cp-related courses can http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 current training and teaching cp content in the domain of undergraduate education. prior research indicates that faculty teaching cp-related courses were trained in clinical psychology. for instance, in 1978, andrulis, barton, and aponte surveyed all members of scra and found that while 95% of respondents held a phd in clinical psychology, 67% had never taken a cp course. over half of the respondents were white (95%), male (86%), and between the ages of 25 and 44 (66%). the field’s diversity has increased over the past several decades. according to the recent scra membership database, 34% of members have a degree with a specific focus in cp, 66% are white, and 29% identify as male (see table 2). however, survey data is limited concerning the demographics of faculty teaching cprelated courses (some of whom may not identify as community psychologists nor as a member of scra), thus further highlighting the need for survey research. be time consuming for instructors, requiring additional preparatory work, planning, and coordination, and may be particularly challenging for non-tenured faculty within departments that do not value these practices or provide relief time for service-learning. although the service-learning literature highlights the challenges of community-based engagement, further research is needed to explore the explicit challenges of educators teaching cp-related courses, as the methodologies, pedagogies, and values of cp differ from mainstream service-learning. faculty training and development in cp the question of who is teaching cp courses remains a gap in the current literature. notably, are faculty that are traditionally trained in cp the individuals teaching cprelated content? while research is limited on the professional training of instructors teaching cp-related courses, we compared data sources regarding scra membership and background as a potential proxy for table 2 scra member’s demographics 1978 vs 2018 (scra membership database & survey data) demographic 1978 2018 scra membership 2018 survey data race / ethnicity white: 95% white: 66% white: 76.09% black or african american: 10.87% asian: 4.35 % hispanic/latinx: 6.52% multiracial: 2.17% gender male: 86% male: 29% male: 32.61% transgender male: 2.17% female: 58.7% transgender female: 0% gender varian & non-conforming: 4.35% not listed: 2.17% psychology degree 95% clinical 34% community 80 % community http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 due to the scarcity of literature described above, an exploratory assessment of academic positions within cp in undergraduate education is needed to further understand the diversity of positions occupied by community psychologists (and those who identify with the field), the number of universities offering cp courses and the core challenges these educators face. notably, educators in departments without a programmatic cp focus may face additional barriers in course design, teaching, and required professional milestones for tenure. learning from educators’ narratives can help the field identify challenges, develop practices to bolster faculty success, and strategically disseminate high quality learning experiences and exposure of cp to diverse undergraduate audiences. in the section below, we discuss our own positionalities, and personal investment in understanding the field of undergraduate education within cp. positions of the authors as a collective writing group, we occupy multiple identities and spaces including: white, multiracial, cisgendered, feminist, jewish, women, as well as first generation academics (i.e., two of us are assistant professors, and two are graduate students). thus, we examine our results and findings with a specific lens, sociocultural background, and vested interest in furthering efforts to support junior faculty and graduate students interested in innovative teaching within the field of cp. all four authors currently reside in public, undergraduate, teaching-focused institutions; however, the first two authors have taught and trained in doctoral programs located within public research-focused institutions. furthermore, the third author pursued her undergraduate education within a research-focused institution. our positionalities provide a unique opportunity to examine the convening and contrasting experiences of teaching across diverse academic settings. as juniors within our own career trajectories, we aspire to document and disseminate knowledge that can inform and support other juniors in the field (i.e., assistant professors, graduate students) in content delivery, innovating teaching pedagogy, and navigating and persevering through institutional challenges. methods survey instrument the development of survey questions was informed by previous research from the cp teaching and service-learning education literature (e.g., aubry et al., 2010; barton et al., 1976; christens et al., 2015; sandler & keller, 1984; ward, 1998). questions were also based on the authors’ experiences as cp educators. an initial draft of the survey was sent to the scra council for educational programming and the scra undergraduate education interest group for review. the first two authors also piloted the survey with faculty colleagues and undergraduate and graduate cp students from their research teams. after integrating suggestions based on feedback from these groups, a final iteration of the survey was disseminated to participants electronically via qualtrics. the survey consisted of twenty-seven questions. survey questions captured basic demographic information, data related to professional training, and teaching context (e.g., type of institution, teaching load). in addition, the survey included six open-ended questions about core challenges faced in teaching cp courses (e.g., what are the biggest challenges to teaching community http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 psychology?), and needed supports (e.g., what additional supports or resources would help your teaching practice?). open-ended questions allowed for additional descriptive data to be captured surrounding participant experiences in teaching undergraduate cp content (see appendix a for the full survey). data collection a central goal of this manuscript is to explore the landscape of teaching cp with a particular emphasis on undergraduate education, thus we utilized a purposeful sampling approach. in line with these efforts, and in collaboration with scra, a survey was disseminated to faculty that teach cp and related course content within the united states. the survey link was shared via the american psychological association and scra listservs and sent to department chairs in psychology and related disciplines throughout the united states. in order to identify departments, a team of undergraduate students researched 4-year universities with a psychology major across the united states. in particular, students noted courses that may have a cprelated focus. the first and second authors reached out to department chairs of each psychology department via email. these emails consisted of a list of courses within the department that may have cp-related content and instructors. department chairs were encouraged to send the survey to faculty who teach cp-related content or identify with the discipline. the purpose of the survey was to better understand the diversity of courses, programs, and positions occupied by community psychologists, or those who identify with the field in order to gather insight on the following questions: 1) what are the biggest challenges encountered by educators in the classroom, 2) what additional resources/supports do educators need from both their institution and the larger professional field, and 3) what teaching resources (e.g., literature, films, class activities) do cp instructors consider essential to their teaching effectiveness? data analysis descriptive statistics for the demographic survey responses were calculated employing spss software. qualitative data analysis for open-ended response questions utilized thematic content coding (krippendorff, 2004). survey responses were exported into a spreadsheet. the two leading authors grouped similar themes and sentiments together, whereas the third author provided external validity checks. differences were resolved via discussion and consensus coding. notably, thematic salience was determined based on the prominence (i.e., 30% or more participants indicated a similar sentiment), as well as novelty of key ideas across survey responses (creswell, 2012). results the survey solicited a total of 44 responses. below, we highlight demographic information as well as open-ended responses concerning challenges and needed supports for facilitating high quality student engagement. participant demographics and teaching context to enhance the utility of our data for readers with interests in cp teaching experiences, we utilized an interactive data visualization software (power bi) to present information on participant demographics and their teaching context (to access these data, click here). unlike the static images typically used in publications, interactive visual displays allow readers to independently explore the data and identify patterns by simply clicking on a variable of interest. for example, page 1 of the data visualization – demographics & institutions – indicates that 23% of the http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyjrijoinjjhmzy4njytnmzkni00y2izlwjlmdetzjvjodc1yjiymdviiiwidci6ijrlowriymziltm5ngetndu4my04odewltuzzjgxzjgxowuzyiisimmiojn9 https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyjrijoinjjhmzy4njytnmzkni00y2izlwjlmdetzjvjodc1yjiymdviiiwidci6ijrlowriymziltm5ngetndu4my04odewltuzzjgxzjgxowuzyiisimmiojn9 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 example 1. unfiltered data example 2. filtered data http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 respondents reported working at an institution in the south (see example 1 below). clicking on the bar graph for the response “lone community psychologist in my department” will cross-filter the entire page (see example 2). subsequently, the data display indicates that of the 11 lone community psychologists, 40% of them reside within the south. filters can be cleared by clicking on the bar graph a second time. participant demographics. over half of the participants identified as female (59%), whereas fifteen participants identified as male (33%). one participant identified as transgender male, two as gender nonconforming, and two did not respond. in terms of race/ethnicity, thirty-five participants identified as white (76%), ten as black/african american (10.87%), two as asian/pacific islander (4.35%), three as hispanic/latinx (6.52%) and one as multiracial (2.17%). one individual did not reply. institutions. participants ranged in the geographic location of their academic institution, with thirteen located in the northwest (33.33%), twelve located in the midwest (30.77%), nine in the south (23.08%), and five in the northeast (12.82%). click here to explore data visualizations of respondent demographics in relation to institutional location. after extensive analysis with regards to duplication (i.e., identifying participation response patterns from the same universities), we were able to determine that respondents identified or were affiliated with 32 unique universities, and offered a total of 93 cp-related courses. in regards to geographic demographics, nineteen participants indicated that their institution was located in an urban setting (47.5%), sixteen in a suburban area (40%), and five in a rural region (12.5%). in terms of institutional focus, eighteen participants identified as working at an institution in which teaching and research were equally emphasized (41.86%), fourteen identified 1due to the small sample size, inferrential statistics were not performed belonging to a primarily teaching-focused institution (32.56%), and eleven a predominately research-focused institution (25.8%). click here to explore data visualizations surrounding institutional characteristics. participants indicated a sizeable range of perceived college student demographics. thus, a median is reported to indicate the mid-point of the frequency distribution (howitt & cramer, 2007). in particular, we were interested in examining the diversity of undergraduate students at each respondent’s institution, potentially highlighting the diversity of possible exposure to cp-related content. participants perceived 31% of their student body to be first generation, 30% eligible for the supplemental nutrition assistance program (snap—previously known as food stamps), 55% white/caucasian, 13.5% latinx/hispanic, 10.5% black/african american, 7.5% south asian/indian american, and 10% east asian/ asian american. in the context of university focus (i.e. research focus, teaching focus, or research and teaching focus), there was a slight difference in perceived first-generation students at the university. specifically, we found that faculty at teaching institutions reported a greater percentage of students’ whom were first generation (m = 49.28) as compared to research-focused institutions (m = 21.11)1. this finding highlights that cp educators at teaching-focused institutions may have greater exposure and interaction with first generation students. participant positions. at the time the survey was administered, the most commonly reported positions included tenure-track faculty, non-tenure track faculty, and current graduate students, with 69.76% of faculty holding a tenure-track appointment. of those, fourteen participants reported holding positions as assistant professors (32.56%), eight as associate (18.60%), and eight as full (18.60%). about a third (30.24%) of participants reported holding a non-tenure track position. five participants reported employment as an adjunct/lecturer (11.63%), http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyjrijoinjjhmzy4njytnmzkni00y2izlwjlmdetzjvjodc1yjiymdviiiwidci6ijrlowriymziltm5ngetndu4my04odewltuzzjgxzjgxowuzyiisimmiojn9&pagename=reportsection70f6fafed6bfadbfa7e3 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 three as non-tenure track assistant professors (6.98%), and three as graduate teaching assistants (6.98%). two identified with other position descriptions (4.65%). thirty-two participants (72.7%) reported receiving their training in cp, however, eight participants (18.18%) that did not have traditional doctoral training in cp reported having an advisor trained in cp and/or working on a research team with other graduate students trained in cp. these eight participants reported a background in health, applied or community-based research, and thus were determined by their department to be bestsuited to teach a cp course. notably, four participants did not respond (.09%). the length of time participants taught cp ranged from one semester to thirty-two years, with an average of 7.75 years. two and five years were the most common responses. in terms of frequency, sixteen participants reported teaching at least one cp course every quarter or semester, thirteen taught one class per year, and seven taught the course every two to three years. twenty-six participants reported teaching within a cpspecific program or department (60.47%). six worked in a department with others who identify as community psychologists (13.95%), whereas eleven noted that they were the only community psychologist within their department (25.58%). thirty-eight participants reported teaching undergraduate courses (65.52%), thirteen reported teaching doctoral students (22.14%), and seven teaching masters-level students (12.07%). click here to explore data visualization patterns regarding respondents’ academic positions, training, and teaching experience. course focus. thirty-four participants reported teaching an introduction to cp course, fourteen indicated teaching a community-based research methods course, thirteen a cp-focused project/field work, seven an internship program, four program evaluation, and four prevention and promotion. in addition, four reported teaching a course focused on social change/community organizing. additional courses taught by participants within the discipline of cp were: liberation psychology, community-based advocacy intervention, applied psychology, psychology and social justice, psychology of prejudice, psychology in the rural community, cp learning community, experience of intersectionality, human service program, political psychology, statistics in cp, and a clinical community course. typical class size consisted of twentyfive or fewer students, with ten participants reporting teaching a class of thirty-six to fifty, and four reporting a class size of seventy-six or above. faculty teaching graduate courses were more likely to report smaller class sizes (m =16-25 students) as compared to faculty teaching undergraduate courses (m = 26-35 students). additionally, participants teaching an introduction to cp course tended to report the largest class sizes with 10 respondents reporting a class size of 36-50 students, and 4 respondents reporting a class size of 76 or above as compared to other cp related courses (i.e., prevention & promotion, social change/community organizing, etc.) correlations and cross-tabs were performed examining gender, race and ethnicity in relation to teaching experiences (i.e. course loads, class size, etc.), however no significant trends were identified. click here to explore data visualizations of course characteristics (i.e. content, class size, expectations). challenges and needed supports data were collected concerning: 1) the challenges faced by educators, 2) the unique needs of faculty, and 3) recommended resources. challenges. participants were asked to report what they believed to be the biggest challenges in teaching cp. the 37 openended responses to this particular question indicated overlapping and intersecting challenges across a wide range of settinghttp://www.gjcpp.org/ https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyjrijoinjjhmzy4njytnmzkni00y2izlwjlmdetzjvjodc1yjiymdviiiwidci6ijrlowriymziltm5ngetndu4my04odewltuzzjgxzjgxowuzyiisimmiojn9&pagename=reportsection70f6fafed6bfadbfa7e3&pagename=reportsectiona58ccfc857928cd6e85d https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyjrijoinjjhmzy4njytnmzkni00y2izlwjlmdetzjvjodc1yjiymdviiiwidci6ijrlowriymziltm5ngetndu4my04odewltuzzjgxzjgxowuzyiisimmiojn9&pagename=reportsection70f6fafed6bfadbfa7e3&pagename=reportsectiona58ccfc857928cd6e85d&pagename=reportsectionf7ee686c4045dec44586 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 level contexts infiltrating the cp classroom climate. thus, we applied an ecological analytic lens to facilitate an application of systemic thinking in the context of cp teaching (bronfenbrenner, 2009). first, key interactions and tensions among institutional and departmental settings, as well as the larger community yielded notable barriers to teaching cp. we define this thematic trend as “navigating meso & exosystem challenges,” as responses highlight the interactions and conflicts between institutional, departmental, and community settings. another trend that emerged across survey responses was the existence of counteracting societal beliefs regarding individualistic thinking concerning curriculum and pedagogy, as well as certain students’ political orientations. we defined this categorization as “challenging macrosystem beliefs,” as cp educators must navigate the introduction of novel and challenging topics (e.g., systemic thinking, diversity in research methods, power and privilege). many of the challenges participants listed fit across categories. we focused on reporting how these challenges impact participants in each respective category (e.g., by reducing the quality of written feedback on student reflection papers). navigating meso and exosystem challenges. twenty participants reported substantial challenges in teaching cp courses at the institutional level, with one of the most frequently cited challenges focusing on deficits in infrastructure. as one survey respondent indicated: “not enough instructional time or time spent in the community.” these deficits included institutional demands for larger courses, a lack of adequate classroom space, a lack of campus resources for supporting students’ emotional well-being and mental health, and inadequate funding for community-based learning (e.g., for student transportation to partner sites, supplies for research or project related materials, etc.). participants reported that the combination of a large class size and the limited time available in a given term led to concerns that students would be unable to both learn and apply cp concepts in a substantive manner. these institutional challenges seemed to be amplified in courses integrating community-based learning or collaborative projects. educators indicated that institutional bureaucracy and policies often hinder effective teaching when said policies restrict the time and resources available to develop sustainable off-campus partnerships. for instance, one respondent noted the “university’s inability to see what needs to occur for effective community engagement.” at the departmental level, seventeen participants expressed multiple challenges, both within and outside of the classroom setting. for example, a significant challenge arises when departments are unable or not committed to consistently offering a cp course. this effect is further illustrated in the following quote: “the department does not promote the course...so enrollment is typically low. the low enrollment is interpreted by department heads as signaling the courses shouldn’t be offered, when actually students are unable to make informed decisions.” participants also noted that students often have difficulty connecting the content of a singular cp course (i.e., a course not housed in a program within their department) to the broader field of psychology. lastly, several participants indicated that working as the lone community psychologist within a department was an alienating experience. these participants expressed that most colleagues and students are socialized into post-positivist, individualistic approaches to psychology. when students do not see the paradigmatic and methodological diversity of cp reflected in other psychology courses, educators encounter a steep learning curve while teaching these concepts, and often http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 struggle to convince students and other faculty that cp-related approaches are both rigorous and valuable. at the community level, participants faced considerable challenges related to teaching service-learning and community-based courses. although not all cp courses involve such a component, many participants reported experience in this domain (n = 22). above all, identifying long-term, sustainable community partners whose work aligned with cp values (e.g., a justice-based rather than a charity-based approach to social problems) was among the most frequently cited challenges. participants also noted that this work necessitates considerable time and energy on their part: “need prep for before service can begin because of the additional requirements necessary before work can start.” participants also indicated practical challenges, such as competing student obligations and priorities (e.g., jobs, families, athletics, other classes, etc.), limited access to transportation, limited time to adequately prepare students to engage in service (e.g., fingerprinting, background checks, interviews), and lack of faculty time to allow for deep reflection in the classroom and to provide meaningful feedback to students. challenging macrosystem beliefs. the structure, requirements and sequence of courses within both undergraduate and graduate level programs translate messages regarding the value and importance of particular methods, paradigms, and disciplines within a field. eleven respondents expressed challenges regarding the implementation of curriculum. for instance, the position of a course within the curriculum map for a given major was perceived as an obstacle to effective teaching (e.g., course offered as an elective rather than required coursework). participants also indicated that some cp courses did not require the proper amount and/or type of prerequisites, creating a challenge for students who did not yet possess a conceptual foundation of traditional psychology concepts from which to compare cp paradigms and approaches. alternatively, participants indicated that some cp courses came too late in the major (e.g., a senior capstone), by which time students had already adopted a particular framework. “psychology majors come to the course with very individualistic, biological explanations for behavior and have narrow understandings of psychological science (i.e., as post-positivist; quantitative over qualitative).” pedagogical challenges related most frequently to the experience of teaching explicitly political courses that challenge conventional psychological science and overtly claim social justice values. participants reported their own lack of preparation to support students’ critical consciousness development, facilitate participatory dialogue and self-reflexivity, and foster a setting that values diverse perspectives while also staying true to cp values. these challenges were exacerbated when educators had no formal training in cp. additionally, participants perceived a lack of teaching resources available within the field (e.g., limited selection of cp introductory textbooks, difficulty identifying guest speakers, outdated teaching materials/activities). uniquely, seven cp educators also noted the challenge of student context, or the beliefs, values, and ideological perspectives students bring into the classroom. this array in political orientation and lived experience could be at times contentious, as noted in the following quote: “wide array of student experiences in the classroom from naïve white folks to queer folks of color already deeply engaged in community.” participants reported difficulty teaching within conservative political regions and institutions, where they struggled with student readiness and willingness to discuss issues related to power, privilege, and oppression. within the context http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 of the classroom, some participants reported confronting deep student resistance to cp values and intervention approaches. needed supports. participants provided a number of suggestions in the domains of needed supports and resources. these recommendations highlight multi-level ecological factors in regard to bolstering effective and successful cp teaching at the undergraduate level. first, in service of fostering individual capacity building and support networks, thirteen open-ended responses indicate a desire for additional teaching resources within the field of cp. as one participant noted: “descriptions of current cp initiatives around the world, and videos of community psychologists in action doing projects.” resources included in-class groupbased activities to apply core content to realworld scenarios, illustrative videos, additional textbooks, and greater sharing of resources between cp faculty (i.e., syllabi, tests, assignments, etc.). second, at the departmental and institutional level (i.e., meso, exo-system), twelve open-ended responses indicated a greater need for support in teaching cp. this sentiment is illustrated in the following quote: "departmental support...supervision of adjunct faculty who teach the course, funding for transportation to community settings or reliable skype with cases at partner institutions to discuss topics." in addition, suggestions included smaller class sizes to engage in pedagogy reflective of the field, reduced teaching loads, and additional resources (i.e., scholarships) to support community engagement and field-based research. third, six respondents noted that support and preparation is often necessary for instructors prior to teaching a cp course. additional suggestions encompassed providing students with exposure to cp in introductory courses (research methods, introduction to psychology), vetting guest speakers, and assistance with the logistics of securing internship placements for students (i.e., fingerprinting, transportation, and ethics training). lastly, in order to persevere in the context of recent macro-level politics, faculty noted the need for further discussion, strategies for, and examples of facilitating controversial yet pivotal topics in cp (i.e., power, oppression, systems change, etc.). this was especially the case for educators positioned within contentious class climates wherein students occupy polarizing political positions, geographic locations and identities in relation to power and privilege. this particular challenge is noted by one participant: "how do we handle white supremacist leaning students in the room with first-generation undocumented students of color safely?" suggested educational resources. a host of educational resources were provided by participants to support instructors teaching cp-related content. we provide an initial list of materials recommended by survey participants which included course textbooks, novels, articles, websites, and films (see appendix b). thirty-three respondents listed resources they considered “essential” to teaching cp. taken together, a wide array of literature and films were recommended, with a handful of texts repeatedly mentioned. the most frequently cited reading was william ryan’s (1976) blaming the victim (n=7), followed by peggy mcintosh’s (1988) white privilege: unpacking the invisible knapsack (n=5), and small wins: redefining the scale of social issues (1986), by karl weick (n=4). in addition to these titles, a number of authors were cited two or more times. these included various works by urie bronfenbrenner, michelle fine, leonard jason, jim kelly, geoffrey nelson, douglas perkins, isaac prilleltensky, julian rappaport, stephanie riger, edward seidman, beth shinn, paul speer, edward trickett, roderick watts, and marc zimmerman. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 discussion survey findings highlight the unique and diverse positions cp educators occupy (tenure track, non-tenure, and graduate teaching assistants), and the range of courses they teach. participants tended to be located in the west or midwest, and teaching in predominately liberal or politically-mixed communities. over a third of participants (17, 38.6%) indicated that they were not part of an “official cp program.” as the cp field continues to grow, it is critical to examine unique resources and needed supports of educators offering cp courses in non-cp specific departments, programs, and/or minors. for instance, open-ended survey responses suggest that many participants were unable to expose undergraduates to cprelated content until their junior and senior year. this often made it challenging for students to accept cp paradigms regarding scientific research, theory, and methodology that differed or critiqued “mainstream psychology.” furthermore, results highlight that faculty whom often identified as the “lone community psychologist” within their department tended to be located in southern, rural, and conservative communities. these trends highlight the potential need for contextually specific resources and supports for faculty occupying these particular environments. for instance, open-ended survey responses tended to indicate the challenges in teaching social justice-oriented content (i.e., allyship, power, privilege, etc.) to conservative classrooms. lastly, respondents teaching at teaching-focused institutions tended to report a higher number of firstgeneration undergraduate students. this unique student sample may require additional resources, supports, and considerations for faculty teaching cp, yet also offers a unique opportunity for historically underrepresented students to gain exposure to the field of cp. notably, the growing diversity in student demographics, and the discrepancy between students and cp educators in relation to race and ethnicity highlights the importance of educational efforts focusing on developing content that is reflective of the student body, as well as exposing historically underrepresented students to cp. open-ended survey responses highlight a host of challenges at multiple ecological levels in the context of teaching undergraduate cp courses. for instance, at the mesosystems level, participants described feelings of isolation, as well as lacking resources, or departmental supports for teaching cprelated content. in the context of the exosystem level of analysis, respondents encountered challenges in the policies, procedures, and rules governing their teaching (e.g., preparation time, travel funds, interactive classrooms, course size). notably, close-ended survey responses indicated that faculty at teaching institutions tended to have a higher teaching load, and larger class size creates additional challenges for developing and sustaining innovative and communityengaged curriculum. at the macrosystem level, respondents discussed challenges in teaching cp-content (e.g., theory, methodology, social-justice focus) that countered or critiqued traditional spheres of psychology. finally, we inquired about readings participants considered foundational to their courses. this information is vital to a field such as cp that aims to amplify diverse and underheard perspectives. upon examination, we found some consistency across participant recommendations. many of the most commonly cited readings were published decades ago, which speaks to their continued relevance. it is noteworthy that the vast majority of the authors mentioned, particularly those with multiple mentions, are white, and mostly male. there was a concerning dearth of scholarly recommendations written by women of color, despite their significant contributions to the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 field. a critical examination of the texts that comprise our cannon, and whose experiences and voices we center in our classrooms, seems warranted. implications and recommendations continuing to apply a multi-level ecological lens to the field, we propose strategies and resources at the micro, meso, and macrolevel. each of our recommendations are grounded in the challenges, successes, or suggestions from participants. recommendations at the individual level. given the experience some participants shared regarding feeling isolated or alienated, our research and experience highlights collaborative teaching as one potential strategy for combatting feelings of isolation (layne, ford, morgan, kenimer, 2002). educational research has documented the benefits of collaborative teaching (e.g., enhanced student learning, critical thinking, and developing practical skill sets) as well as faculty learning communities (layne et al., 2002; lester & evans, 2009; manthei & isler, 2011). thus, collaborative teaching or dialogue with social justice-minded colleagues may further increase the impact and scope of student learning, providing outlets for scholarship in cp pedagogy (see litchy, & palamaro-munsell, 2017; kornbluh et al., forthcoming), reducing the logistical and administrative responsibility bestowed upon one faculty member, and potentially bolstering institutional buy-in and support. the authors recommend that faculty interested in co-developing courses focused on community partnerships reach out to centers or institutions on campus engaged in service learning, civic engagement, and crosscultural efforts. these institutions can help foster faculty connections, locate community partners, and provide administrative support in the paperwork required when students engage in the community. these institutional bodies and centers may also be able to advocate for faculty release time, additional course credits, or additional monetary compensation for faculty taking on community-based service learning projects. in addition to connecting individuals to organizational resources, these interpersonal linkages between colleagues can further bolster cp teaching within the university. recommendations at the meso & exosystem. at a meso and exo-level, steps can be taken at the regional and national levels to further support faculty engaged in introducing cp to undergraduate audiences. at a professional level, the field can support junior faculty invested in undergraduate teaching pedagogy and scholarship in the research, tenure, and promotion process by providing outlets for publication concerning undergraduate teaching, pedagogy, and methodology (such as this special issue). thus, at an exo-systemic level, altering the publishing guidelines, policies, or outlets within cp peer-reviewed journals could provide further opportunity for professional development. for instance, space for one manuscript on undergraduate teaching could be allotted for each cp-related journal issue (i.e., the global journal of community practice, the journal of community psychology, the american journal of community psychology). recommendations at the macrosystem. third, challenging the dominant macro-level discourse surrounding the discipline of psychology can further support cp faculty in exposing undergraduate students to cp concepts early in their education. in a recent review, bauer and colleagues (2017) found that of 53 introduction to psychology textbooks, only 17% contained an adequate representation of cp. the authors suggest following-up with publishers engaged in revising current editions, as well as promoting textbooks that integrate cp content. to further normalize the relevance of cp as a subfield within psychology, the field http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 could also provide an introduction to cp video or a published supplemental chapter that faculty could then disseminate in psychology 101 courses. supplemental materials, talks, or textbooks that push beyond post-positivism and quantitative methods could also be offered for introductory research method courses. for instance, scra ought to develop a bank of community psychologists willing to engage in guest lectures (e.g., via skype) within traditional psychology courses (e.g., introduction, research methods, or other related sub-fields like social psychology, psychology of women, health psychology, etc.). additionally, scra could develop or regularly update a clearinghouse for teaching materials (including those that address service-learning, community-based research, etc.) for a range of geographical regions and class sizes. notably, the growing diversity in student demographics, and the discrepancy between students and cp educators in relation to race and ethnicity highlights the importance of educational efforts focusing on developing content that is reflective of the culture, background, and issues of the student body. efforts to strategically work with critical race scholars and ethnic studies departments could further enhance the quality and diversity of cp curriculum. in addition, survey findings indicate the potential growing need for faculty at teaching institutions to provide resources to first generation students. both efforts are important in fostering a pipeline of historically underrepresented future scholars who see themselves, their communities, and issues of importance to them reflective of and applicable in the field of cp. in order to further support such efforts, scra could fund a fellowship position, providing one or two faculty members taking the lead in such efforts (e.g., guest lectures, updating educational materials, and outreach) buyout or course relief time for a quarter or semester teaching load within their institution. these strategies could alter macro-level beliefs within the discipline of psychology regarding theories, perspectives, and research undergraduate students are exposed to in introductory psychology courses. such efforts could inform students’ decision-making processes in pursuing upper-level community psychology courses, thereby bolstering the capacity and readiness of undergraduate students. in sum, we identified several specific action steps for scra, and for those invested in undergraduate education, to push forward: 1) provide publication space regarding teaching methodology for undergraduate students in cp, 2) reach out to authors of psychology 101 textbooks and discuss incorporating cp into their more recent editions, 3) fund a fellowship for one to two faculty members interested in taking the lead in developing a clearinghouse of undergraduate teaching resources and support systems, and 4) conduct a survey every 5 years to further track the diverse locations, universities, and positions of cp-educators teaching undergraduate students. limitations this study has several limitations. first, the study consisted of a small sample size that was perhaps not entirely representative of the number of educators teaching cp-related courses thereby limiting the generalizability of the findings. participation was also restricted to 4-year colleges, thus limiting the perspective and voices of faculty at community, junior, or trade schools with a cp-oriented focus. second, the research team encountered challenges in identifying potential cp courses that were explicit in their course description and title when reviewing online university catalogues. thus, capstone or independent courses involving instructor discretion or autonomy may have actually encompassed cp content yet would not have been identified through the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 sampling approach. third, to preserve confidentiality, and support high response rates the research team did not solicit participants to identify their particular institutions or provide permission to compare their name to the scra membership listserv. this limited the ability to analyze differences between respondents’ supports and services in relation to their membership to scra. future research would benefit in comparing responses based on participants’ professional associations and networks in cp. fourth, the research team reached out several times through active listservs from the american psychological association, in particular, scra. however, faculty engaged in community-based action research or affiliated with cp may be active or professionally associated with different fields outside of psychology (e.g. social work, sociology, public health, etc.). additional strategies are needed to identify and solicit input from faculty and educators active in teaching cp content or related fields on an international level, thereby expanding the scope beyond the united states. these efforts may have further reach and yield higher response rates when surveys are solicited at regional and national conferences prior to registration. furthermore, strategic follow-up interviews varying participants by position, department, and focus will yield further information on the specific challenges, restrictions, and opportunities for educators in the various contexts of undergraduate education. lastly, follow-up surveys with students could elicit diverse information and counteract self-report bias regarding the challenges students perceive when taking cp courses. conclusion in focusing on undergraduate education in cp, this exploratory study addresses a glaring gap in the literature. notably, research is dated and at times non-existent concerning the identities of cp educators within undergraduate education, the challenges instructors encounter, and needed resources. furthermore, findings provide an understanding of the growing diversity in educator social location (i.e., race, gender, age), as well as geographic and institutional settings concerning undergraduate education within the field of cp in the united states. findings indicate the multi-level ecological challenges (i.e. departmental, institutional, local community, and the political climate at a national level) in implementing cp courses and pedagogy within the classroom. we can better support faculty in undergraduate education by investing in the development of additional educational materials, coordinating resources, and facilitating the scholarship of innovative teaching pedagogy and inquiry, thus providing resources across the multiple ecologies in which teaching occurs. ongoing evaluations and developmental needs assessments are vital within the professional field to adequately capture the teaching positions of cp within undergraduate education, as well as identify evolving challenges and emerging supports. arguably, documenting these changes can further enhance junior faculty members’ professional development within undergraduate education some of whom may be the only cp within their department as well as bolster the presence of cp within undergraduate education to diverse audiences and future career professionals. notably, future research and ongoing recruitment on an international scale is needed to inform these efforts, thereby providing a more nuanced picture concerning the ecological landscape of undergraduate education in the context of cp and allowing for more complex analyses (e.g., race/gender allocation in regard to teaching courses). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 perspectives on the training experiences and the training needs of community psychologists. american journal of community psychology, 6(3), 265-270. aubry, t., sylvestre, j., & ecker, j. (2010). community psychology training in canada in the new millennium. canadian psychology, 51(2), 89-95. barton, a. k., andrulis, d. p., grove, w. p. & aponte, j. f. (1976). a look at community psychology training programs in the seventies. american journal of community psychology 4(1), 1-11. bauer, h.m., glantsman, o., hochberg, l., turner, c., & jason, l.a. (2017). community psychology coverage in introduction to psychology textbooks. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(3), 1-11. bringle, r. g., & steinberg, k. (2010). educating for informed community involvement. american journal of community psychology, 46(3-4), 428441. carolissen, r., canham, h., fourie, e., grahm, t., pulengsegalo, & bowman, b. (2017). epistemological resistance towards diversality: teaching cp as a decolonial project. south african journal of psychology, 47(4), 495-505. christens, b. d., connell, c. m., faust, v., haber, m. g., & the council of education programs (2015). progress report: research competencies for community research and action. the community psychologist, 48(4), 3-9. creswell, j. w. (2012). qualitative inquiry and research design: choosing among five approaches. thousand oakes, ca: sage publications. dawes, n. p. (2018). embracing risk and promise for student engagement: incorporating experiential teaching methods in a cp course. journal of community practice, 26(1), 95-106. howitt, d., & cramer, d. (2007). introduction to statistics in psychology. pearson education: london, united kingdom. krippendorff, k. (2004). content analysis: an introduction to its methodology (2nd ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage. kornbluh, m., wilking, j., roll, s., banks, h., candela, j., & stone, h. (under review). learning and doing together: student outcomes from an interdisciplinary, community-based research course. submitted to the journal of community engaged scholarship. layne, j., froyd, j., morgan, j., & kenimer, a. (2002). faculty learning communities. in frontiers in education, 2002. fie 2002. 32nd annual (vol. 2, pp. f1a-f1a). ieee. lester, j. n., & evans, k. r. (2009). instructors’ experiences of collaboratively teaching: building something bigger. international journal of teaching and learning in higher education, 20(3), 373-382. lichty, l. f., & palamaro‐munsell, e. (2017). pursuing an ethical, socially just classroom: searching for community psychology pedagogy. american journal of community psychology, 60(3-4), 316326. manthei, j., & isler, j. (2011). co-teaching social research methods in a joint sociology/anthropology department. issues in interdisciplinary studies, 29, 40-66. mclean, c., johnson, j., & eblen, c. (1977). teaching community psychology to undergraduate students. journal of community psychology, 5(4), 313-318. o'sullivan, m. j. (1993). teaching undergraduate community psychology: integrating the classroom and the surrounding community. teaching of psychology, 20(2), 80-83. peterson, t. h. (2009). engaged scholarship: reflections and research on the pedagogy of social change. teaching in higher education, 14(5), 541-552. andrulis, d. p., barton, a. k., & aponte, j. f. (1978). references http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 sandler, i. n., & keller, p. a. (1984). trends observed in community psychology training descriptions. american journal of community psychology, 12, 157–164. sandmann, l. r., thornton, c. h., & jaeger, a. j. (2009). the first wave of community‐ engaged institutions. new directions for higher education, 147, 99-104. schilts, c.l., harker, p.c., & gardner, j.m. (1977). a comparison of the community psychology and medical models: teaching attitudes toward deviance to high school students. community mental health, 13(3), 268-276. strage, a. a. (2000). service-learning: enhancing student learning outcomes in a college-level lecture course. michigan journal of community service learning, 7(1), 5-13. the geniuss group. (2014). best practices for asking questions to identify transgender and other gender minority respondents on population-based surveys. los angeles, ca: the williams institute. visser, m. & cleaver, g. (1999). teaching community psychology: a problemsolving approach. teaching of psychology, 26(3), 219-222. ward, k. (1998). addressing academic culture: service learning, organizations, and faculty work. in r.a. rhodes & j.p.f. howard (eds.), academic service learning: a pedagogy of action and reflection (pp. 73-80). san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. author note our sincere gratitude goes to several people who supported this work: dr. jean hill, the scra council for educational programming, the scra undergraduate education interest group, and the research teams at csu chico and csu long beach. we are also very grateful to jason harris for his assistance with data visualization. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 appendix a. survey instrument q1. what is your gender identity?2 ▢ male ▢ female ▢ transgender female ▢ transgender male ▢ gender variant & non-conforming ▢ not listed (please describe): ____________________________ ▢ prefer not to answer q2. which of these bests describes you? please mark all that apply. ▢ white ▢ black or african american ▢ american indian or alaska native ▢ asian ▢ native hawaiian or pacific islander ▢ hispanic/latinx ▢ multiracial (having parents of more than one ethnic background) ▢ member of a group not listed above (please describe): ____________________ ▢ prefer not to answer q3. what region within the united states is your institution located? o south o northeast o northwest o midwest q4. which of the following best describes your faculty position? o graduate teaching assistant o adjunct professor/lecturer o assistant professor (non-tenure track) o assistant professor (tenure track) o associate professor (tenure track) o full professor (tenure track) o other (please describe): ________________________________________________ 2 gender and race survey response categories included an option that allowed participants to identify with a group not listed. we purposefully did not employ the term “cisgender” to allow for fluidity in individuals who may identify with a particular gender not of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 q5. how long have you been teaching community psychology? ________________________________________________________________ q6. how frequently do you teach community psychology? ________________________________________________________________ q7. which of the following best describes your university? o community college o 4-year university/college teaching emphasized o 4-year university/college research emphasized o 4-year university/college teaching & research emphasized q8. which of the following best describes the prevalence of community psychology faculty within your department? o we have a community psychology-specific department, and/or program. o while we don’t have a specific program, there are several professors in my department who identify as community psychologists. o while we don’t have a specific program, there are several professors on campus (not within my department) who identify as community psychologists. o i am the lone community psychologist in my department. q9. which of the following best describes the students you teach? please mark all that apply. ▢ undergraduate students ▢ graduate students (primarily obtaining their masters) ▢ graduate students (primarily obtaining their doctorates) their biological origin, as well as individuals who did not identify as gender binary (i.e. male vs. female). this particular approach is identified as a best practice within the literature in the context of gender identity (the geniuss group, 2004). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 q10. for the following categories, estimate the percentage of the student body within your university. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 first generation college student () eligible for food stamps () students of color () latino(a)/hispanic/latinx () black/african american () white/caucasian () south asian/ indian american () east asian/ asian american () q11. for the following categories, estimate the percentage of the student body within your classroom. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 first generation college student () eligible for food stamps () students of color () latino(a)/hispanic/latinx () black/african american () white/caucasian () south asian/indian american () east asian/ asian american () http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 q12. which of the following best describes the location of your college? o rural o urban o suburban q13. which of the following best describes the political climate surrounding the area (county-wide) in which your college is located? o predominately (>60%) conservative o predominately (>60%) liberal o mixed q14. which of the following are the community psychology courses you teach? please mark all that apply. ▢ introduction to community psychology ▢ community-based research methods ▢ program evaluation ▢ internship ▢ community psychology project/field work ▢ prevention & promotion ▢ social change/community organizing ▢ other (please describe):________________________________________________ q15. if you are teaching a service learning class, how many hours are required of your students to engage in the community? o 5-10 o 11-16 o 17-20 o 21-25 o more than 26 + http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 q16. what is the typical size of your community psychology course? o 15 or less o 16-25 o 26-35 o 36-50 o 51-75 o 76 or above q17. do you have graduate level training in community psychology? o yes o no display this question: if do you have graduate level training in community psychology? = no q17b. if no, how did you get interested in community psychology? ________________________________________________________________ q18. what is your typical course load (e.g. 2:1, & 4:4)? ________________________________________________________________ q19. what (if any) is your primary text for teaching “introduction to community psychology”? ________________________________________________________________ q20. what are the biggest challenges to teaching community psychology (i.e. consider departmental, structural, institutional, funding, and instructional, etc.)? ________________________________________________________________ q21. what additional supports or resources would help your teaching practice? ________________________________________________________________ q22. what are the essential readings you “must have” in your syllabus? ________________________________________________________________ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 q23 what is your favorite class activity, and why? please describe. ________________________________________________________________ q24. would you be willing to share the materials for this class activity with others? o yes (please provide an email address that you would be comfortable with the undergraduate interest group contacting you by) ________________________________________________________________ o no q25. what is your favorite assignment, and why? please describe. ________________________________________________________________ q26. would you be willing to share a write-up of this assignment with others? o yes (please provide an email address that you would be comfortable with the undergraduate interest group contacting you by) ________________________________________________________________ o no q27 voluntary: scra is hoping to gather a comprehensive list of undergraduate community psychology programs. if you don't mind please share your name, email address, and institution. o first name: ________________________________________________ o last name: ________________________________________________ o email address: ________________________________________________ o institution: ________________________________________________ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 appendix b teaching resources3 books & novels ehrenreich, b. (2010). nickel and dimed: on (not) getting by in america. new york, ny: metropolitan books. freire, p. (1996). pedagogy of the oppressed (revised). new york, ny: continuum. mcknight, j. (1995). the careless society: community and its counterfeits. new york, ny: basic books. putnam, r. d. (2001). bowling alone: the collapse and revival of american community. new york, ny: simon and schuster. ryan, william (1976). blaming the victim. vol. 226. new york, ny: vintage. steele, k. & berman, c. (2001). the day the voices stopped: a memoir of madness and hope. new york, ny: basic books. textbooks jason, l. (2013). principles of social change. new york, ny: oxford university press. jason, l., & glenwick, d. s. (eds.). (2016). handbook of methodological approaches to community-based research: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. new york, ny: oxford university press. kloos, b., hill, j., thomas, e., wandersman, a., & elias, m. j. (2012). community psychology: linking individuals and communities. belmont, ca: cengage learning. levine, m., perkins, d. v., & levine, m. (1997). principles of community psychology. new york, ny: oxford university press. nelson, g., & prilleltensky, i. (eds.). (2010). community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and well-being. new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. rudkin jk. community psychology: guiding principles and orienting concepts. upper saddle river, nj: prentice-hall; 2003. book chapters joffe, j.m. & albee, g. w. (1981). powerlessness and psychopathology. in justin, m., joffe & albee, g. w. (eds.) prevention through political action and social change (pp.53-56). thousand oakes, ca: sage publications. levine, m. & perkins, d.v. (1987). the love canal homeowners association: a grass roots 3 note: resources preceded by an asterisk are recommendations from the authors, not survey participants. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 27 community organization. in levine, m. & perkins, d. v., principles of community psychology (pp. 339-345). new york, ny: oxford university press. perkins, d. d., & long, d. a. (2002). neighborhood sense of community and social capital. in k.d. bess, a. t. fisher, c.c sonn, b. b. bishop, psychological sense of community (pp. 291-318). boston, ma: sage. seidman, e., & rappaport, j. (1986). framing the issues. in e. seidman & j. rappaport (eds.), redefining social problems (pp. 1-8). boston, ma: springer. stinger, e. t. (1999). principles of community-based action research. in e.t. stinger, action research (pp. 17-42). thousand oakes, ca: sage. weick, k. (1986). small wins: redefining the scale of social issues. in e. seidman & j. rappaport (eds.), redefining social problems (pp. 29-48). new york, ny: plenum press. articles albee, g. w. (1995). counselling and primary prevention. counselling psychology quarterly, 8(3), 205-211. case, a. d., & hunter, c. d. (2012). counterspaces: a unit of analysis for understanding the role of settings in marginalized individuals’ adaptive responses to oppression. american journal of community psychology, 50(1-2), 257-270. dalton, j., & wolfe, s. (2012). competencies for community psychology practice: society for community research and action draft. the community psychologist, 45(4), 7-14. foster-fishman, p. g., nowell, b., & yang, h. (2007). putting the system back into systems change: a framework for understanding and changing organizational and community systems. american journal of community psychology, 39(3-4), 197-215. goodstein, l. d., & sandler, i. (1978). using psychology to promote human welfare: a conceptual analysis of the role of community psychology. american psychologist, 33(10), 882. kelly, j. g. (1970). antidotes for arrogance: training for community psychology. american psychologist, 25(6), 524. kelly, j. g. (1971). qualities for the community psychologist. american psychologist, 26(10), 897. kelly, j. g. (1987). an ecological paradigm: defining mental health consultation as a preventive service. prevention in human services, 4(3-4), 1-36. kieffer, c. h. (1984). citizen empowerment: a developmental perspective. prevention in human services, 3(2-3), 9-36. miller, r. l., & shinn, m. 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(1988). white privilege: unpacking the invisible knapsack. websites community tool box: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/ask-an-advisor/qa/3472 http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/magazine/ghetto-miasma-enough-to-make-youhttps://ctb.ku.edu/en/ask-an-advisor/qa/3472 global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 29 * teaching tolerance: www.teachingtolerance.org *university of california berkeley (resources for community-based participatory research): www.yparhub.bekerly.edu *society for community research and action: www.scra27.org films cantor, s. (2012). tent city u.s.a. [motion picture]. united states: stick figure productions. duvernay, a., barish, h. & averick, s. (2016). 13th. [motion picture]. united states: forward movement, kandoo films. dyrness, a. (2003). madres unitas: parents researching for change. 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[motion picture] united states: miramax. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.teachingtolerance.org/ http://www.yparhub.bekerly.edu/ intersections of community psychology practice and higher education community engagement: an essay of core competencies tabitha underwood missouri campus compact, missouri state university keywords: higher education community engagement, community psychology competencies, community practice author biography: tabitha underwood, ph.d. serves as the executive director of missouri campus compact. she has worked in the nonprofit, government, and higher education sectors to foster community engagement and prepare  students for leadership within their communities. her research interests typically fall within the areas of community engagement, neighborhood interaction, community building, and sense of community.  tabitha holds a bachelor of science in psychology from indiana university and a  doctorate in community psychology from north carolina state university.  recommended citation: underwood, t. (2016). intersections of community psychology practice and higher education community engagement: an essay of core competencies. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(4), pages 1-12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 intersections of community psychology practice and higher education community engagement: an essay of core competencies abstract this reflective essay presents information concerning civic engagement related positions on campuses such as those within the realms of community service, service-learning, and community-based research and examines how these roles connect to the society for community research and action (scra) community psychology practice competencies. to illustrate these connections, i reflect on my experience in higher education civic engagement and compare the practice competencies to two new resources that outline competencies for civic engagement professionals. higher education civic engagement is proposed as a feasible career path for community psychologists interested in practice, based on the connection between the two fields. introduction as i reflect on my career thus far, i often wonder how my path appeared as it did. i have been working in higher education community engagement for the last 13 years, yet never expected to work in academia. throughout graduate school i had varying ideas of what it meant to be a community psychologist and where the field would take my career, which typically focused on community practice. i hadn’t realized there was an alternative to the trichotomy of research, academia, and practice; however, as a higher education civic engagement professional, i have managed to find a balance among these three roles. over the years i have been fortunate to work coordinating community-based internships, servicelearning, co-curricular community service, and leadership development programs based in social change. i played a part in community-based learning as a graduate assistant at a public university and as a staff member at a private college. for the last few years, i have served as a director of a statewide association dedicated to providing resources to campuses interested in furthering their civic engagement endeavors. i have worked directly with students and faculty and assisted with building institutions’ capacity for engagement. all of these roles have given me access to teaching, conducting research, and working directly with communities. this career path has allowed me to help students find their place in service to the community and help institutions in their role as responsible corporate citizens. as stated in a community psychology textbook, “community psychology is concerned with social and community problems, and with how social systems affect the lives of individuals” (dalton, elias, & wandersman, 2001, p.5). civic engagement refers to how higher education institutions utilize their resources and develop partnerships within social systems to solve community problems. for a formal definition, the american psychological association (apa) states civic engagement is “individual and collective actions designed to identify and address issues of public concern” (apa, n.d., para. 2). i see civic engagement as the action or practice component of our work as community psychologists. within higher education, civic engagement involves not just fostering the act of engagement, but also assisting students and institutions in developing an understanding of social issues and valuing the importance of such action. through these definitions and the community practice competencies promoted by the society for community research and action (scra), one can see a natural connection between the discipline of community http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 psychology and the profession of higher education civic engagement. as we continue to graduate individuals with master’s and doctoral degrees in community psychology, it is important to help them consider the various career options available to them within practice, research, and academia. another viable option has the potential to bridge all three of these realms: higher education civic engagement. i often consider this a career on the fringe of academia, dissimilar to traditional academic roles of faculty or research and somewhat set apart from traditional student affairs roles in areas such as student activities or residence life; a career that exists both within and outside of academia. civic engagement professionals bridge the community and academia, often living in two worlds with differing norms and culture (post, ward, longo, & saltmarsh, 2016). the purpose of this reflective essay is to illustrate the connections between community psychology practice and the field of higher education civic engagement, which navigates the norms and culture both within and outside of academia. in my experience, higher education civic engagement can also exist on the margins within some institutions due to lack of funding, inadequate staffing, and lack of understanding of its importance by administration; however, roles as civic engagement professionals are still a viable option for graduate students and early career professionals in community psychology. for the purposes of this reflection, i refer to civic engagement professionals as practitioners directing the community engagement of the campus who are distinct from faculty teaching service-learning courses or scholars exclusively involved in researching engagement. these practitioners are mainly staff members, though some may hold faculty appointments as well. they coordinate activities such as service-learning, volunteerism, outreach, community-based research, and much more. this essay shares the myriad of ways graduates can continue to realize their passions for civic engagement by combining the disparate tasks of research, teaching, and practice into one professional field. principles, competencies, and my own experience of the work are used to illustrate these connections. higher education community engagement background college student civic engagement began to gain momentum in the 1980s with the concept of civic engagement being raised to prominence in the 1990s (jacoby, 2009); however, higher education in america has a long history of a civic mission (jacoby, 2009; hoy & johnson, 2013). higher education now finds itself as a major player in turning around the civic disengagement in america and working with communities to improve quality of life (national task force on civic learning and democratic engagement, 2012). this sector carries with it the responsibility to educate students for civic and social responsibility, partner with local stakeholders to impact issues of concern, and serve as an anchor within a community. definition a variety of definitions are used to delineate higher education civic engagement (jacoby, 2009; levine, 2012). for the purposes of this essay, i refer to the carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching’s definition. the definition is quite broad, which allows for numerous incarnations of engagement and is used in their classification system, for which many campuses are striving. the carnegie definition reads: community engagement describes collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity. the purpose of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 community engagement is the partnership of college and university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity; enhance curriculum, teaching and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; address critical societal issues; and contribute to the public good (nerche, n.d.). there are a variety of ways to conceptualize this definition and translate it into practice. these include but are not limited to servicelearning, co-curricular service, advocacy, community-based research, philanthropy, political engagement, anchor strategies and town-gown relations, and shared economies. there is also more than one constituent group the profession seeks to engage. work is often concentrated on engaging college students; however, other practices have sought to engage faculty, staff, or whole departments within the community and much recent focus has turned to engaging institutions as a whole. at the core of these practices lies the formation of reciprocal partnerships between the institution and the community. roles of community engagement professionals the formulation of any particular job within civic engagement can vary by campus based on institution structure, need, and culture; however, common roles for professionals have recently emerged which include: institutional strategic leader, organizational manager, community innovator, and field contributor (mcreynolds & shields, 2015). an institutional strategic leader is someone who serves as a leader on campus to implement, support, and advocate for engagement across an institution. the organizational manager role entails proficiency in organizational practices and functioning. community innovator pertains to activities related to utilizing engagement to “educate students and impact communities” (p.12). a field contributor is involved in the support of civic engagement as a field of research and practice (mcreynolds & shields, 2015). relationship to community psychology practice community psychology “concerns the relationships of the individual to communities and society. through collaborative research and action, community psychologists seek to understand and to enhance quality of life for individuals, communities, and society” (dalton, elias, & wandersman, 2001, p.5). higher education civic engagement plays a role within this definition by seeking to help students, faculty, and institutions build their relationship with communities and by serving as the venue for collaborative research and action. a close form of civic engagementcitizen participationis even one of the seven core values of community psychology (dalton, elias, & wandersman, 2001). values service-learning, which is a component of civic engagement, is tightly linked to the values and principles of community psychology. elias (2008) stated: service learning focuses on the needs of communities in specific contexts; it is concerned with individual wellness, building strengths, fostering collaboration, promoting social justice, empowering participation, enhancing a sense of community, respecting diversity, and giving voice to the rarely heard and underserved (elias, 2008, p. 60-61). he goes on to state that “service learning operationalizes the values of community psychology” (elias, 2008, p.61). if service learning, or even civic engagement in general, is closely linked to the values of community http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 psychology, one would expect to see overlaps in the competencies of each field. competencies to compare competencies for civic engagement with those of community psychology practice, i examined two new publications in the civic engagement literature and matched them to the scra community psychology practice competencies (see dalton & wolfe, 2012 for detailed descriptions of scra competencies). one publication proposes a new competency model for civic engagement professionals; the other outlines roles and activities for professionals. this is my general analysis of the resources and not an empirical examination with triangulation. i reflect on what is presented by these authors in relation to my own experiences as a civic engagement professional, and thus my observations may be biased based on what i have experienced over the years. while civic engagement has been encouraged, supported, and even institutionalized within higher education for some time, there is a lack of scholarship pertaining to the competencies of civic engagement professionals (dostilio, 2016). new publications are beginning to shed light on the proficiencies needed to carry out the civic engagement work on campuses. in a forthcoming campus compact publication, dostilio (2016) developed a set of competencies for higher education civic engagement professionals. the research team utilized a comprehensive review of the literature to develop a set of knowledge, skills and abilities, and dispositions as competencies of the field and piloted it with current civic engagement professionals (dostilio, 2016). in another recent publication, a group of civic engagement professionals, working through iowa campus compact’s diving deep institute developed a new list of roles for the field based on discussion with current professionals and an analysis of job descriptions. they proposed a model of professional development that includes a listing of activities corresponding to novice, intermediate, and expert competency levels for each of the four roles of institutional strategic leader, organizational manager, community innovator, and field contributor (mcreynolds & shields, 2015). many of these activities, while not competencies in and of themselves, can be seen as behaviors that lead to or demonstrate varying levels of competency. community related competencies since community psychology pertains to the interaction of individuals and communities and the scra competencies are meant for community practice, i focus first on the competencies related to work that higher education does with communities. this sets aside those competencies that are more organizationally focused on building the capacity of the college and general practice within the institution. to me, three community-related scra competencies stand out within the civic engagement competencies and activities recently proposed: socio-cultural and cross cultural competence, program development, and community inclusion and partnership. socio-cultural and cross cultural competence cultural competence, defined by dalton and wolfe (2012) as “the ability to value, integrate, and bridge multiple worldviews, cultures, and identities” (p. 10), is evident in the civic engagement proficiencies related to an understanding of self in relation to the community and of the intersection of personal identity and engagement (dostilio et al., 2016). activities of civic engagement professionals also dictate that they develop a strong understanding of the community and the cultures with which the institution is working. they ensure programs and engagement opportunities are sensitive to culture both on and off campus and involve immersing oneself into the community to understand its context, history, and nuances http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 in order to inform practice on campus (mcreynolds & shields, 2015). program development, implementation, and management dalton and wolfe (2012) define this competency as “the ability to partner with community stakeholders to plan, develop, implement, and sustain programs in community settings” (p. 11). this competency is at the core of higher education civic engagement, since this work could not be accomplished without partnerships. its components of identifying needs and assets of the community and developing partnerships (dalton & wolfe, 2012) are evident in both civic engagement competencies (dostilio et al., 2016) and activities (mcreynolds & shields, 2015). these relationships are driven by partnership principles, which dictate reciprocity, mutual benefit, and shared goals (torres & schaffer, 2000) indicating the need to work with partners to develop programs together. community inclusion and partnership it should be of no surprise to civic engagement professionals that i find community inclusion and partnerships to be a prevalent theme for competencies in our field. community partnerships within civic engagement entail respect for community expertise and perspectives (dostilio et al., 2016) all elements that would require “the ability to promote genuine representation and respect for all community members, and act to legitimize divergent perspectives on community and social issues” as indicated in the community psychology practice competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012, p. 10). developing partnerships between higher education and the community involves understanding one’s own power (dostilio et al., 2016), working with the community to understand issues of concern, and continually assessing and maintaining the reciprocity within the partnerships (mcreynolds & shields, 2015). there can be many challenges to developing effective university-community partnerships, which require a civic engagement professional to be adept at navigating. for instance, the terminology often used for partnership and reciprocity reveal nothing of resident voice and control (stoecker, 2016). also, with much of the partnership work focused on collaborations with nonprofit organizations, one must consider how truly representative nonprofits are of those they serve and whether they are able to speak with the voice of those they serve (kelly & caputo, 2011; morton & bergbauer, 2015). competencies related to power structures and inclusion of residents/community members become important when working to overcome these obstacles. for instance, silka and renault-caragianes (2006) propose questions to ask in order to develop a research cycle through a universitycommunity research cycle, which have the potential to bring about tensions within the partnership. these include questions of how the research agenda is set, what the focus of the problem-solving will be, the purpose of the research, the methods to be used, ownership of data, review of findings, and what the timeline will be for the project(s) (silka & renault-caragianes, 2006). these questions are reflected in other critiques of community-based research (e.g., minkler, 2005), which require competencies related to responsibly developing and managing university-community partnerships. answering these questions through the research cycle requires competencies related to the “genuine representation and respect for all community members” (dalton & wolfe, 2012, p.10) empowerment and ecological perspectives the civic engagement publications touch on two other community practice competencies, empowerment and ecological perspectives. dalton and wolfe (2012) define empowerment as “the ability to articulate and apply a collective empowerment perspective, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 to support communities that have been marginalized in their efforts to gain access to resources and to participate in community decision-making” (p.10) and ecological perspectives as “the ability to articulate and apply multiple ecological perspectives and levels of analysis in community practice” (p.10). within the empowerment competency, civic engagement professionals should have a commitment to understanding power dynamics (dostilio et al., 2016); however, there is no indication of a focus on working toward empowerment in the community. one wonders if this absence is due to a focus more on charity than change, which has the potential to be devoid of concepts of empowerment. ecological perspectives is also touched on briefly through civic engagement competencies related to a knowledge of context and the community (dostilio et al., 2016; mcreynolds & shields, 2015); however, it does not appear to be prevalent, which seems strange given the emphasis we place on helping students understand root causes of issues. absence of competencies somewhat surprising is a lack of or little connection to the following community practice competencies: public policy analysis, development and advocacy, community organizing and community advocacy, community development, collaboration and coalition development, prevention and health promotion, and community leadership and mentoring. since our work as civic engagement professionals is geared toward working with communities to address issues, one would expect greater attention to a knowledge base of practice techniques. community organizing has even been proposed as essential to our work as professionals to move toward models of social change. stoecker (2016) recently stated “knowledge for community organizing is essential to all higher education civic engagement” (p. 105). within dostilio’s (2016) analysis, civic engagement professionals indicate that a knowledge of community and economic development should be added to the model. this inclusion could be due to the expansion of many community engagement endeavors from strictly social services to include more of a community/economic development focus (dostilio’s, 2016). the addition of this competency may shed light on the roles of community organizing and community development and how those competencies fit into our work as civic engagement professionals. organizational related competencies as mentioned above, i have illustrated those civic engagement competencies and activities directly related to work with and in the community outside campus; however, both of these newly created publications indicate there is a connection between even more of the community practice competencies, based on the work professionals perform within the organization (college or university). these connections are summarized below. much of the work of civic engagement professionals involves the following: serving as a civic engagement consultant to the rest of campus as well as other institutions and assisting the organization with developing its capacity for engagement (consultation and organizational development); fundraising and securing sustainable funding streams for campus civic engagement (resource development); communicating engagement’s value and advocating for it on campus and in the community (community education); and communicating with multiple constituencies, facilitating meetings, and resolving conflicts (small and large group processes) (summarized from dostilio et al., 2016; mcreynolds & shields, 2015). program evaluation is another competency addressed in both publications. competencies and activities involve knowledge of assessment and evaluation as well as the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 ability to carry them out. assessment and evaluation pertain to student outcomes, partnerships, and community impact. both publications also touch on working with the community in assessment and evaluation of programming, impact, and the partnership itself (dostilio et al., 2016; mcreynolds & shields, 2015). reflections of a civic engagement professional throughout my experience as a civic engagement professional, i have found all of the community practice competencies have a role to play in my work. as with many higher education roles, i am consistently developing, managing and evaluating programming, focusing on building organizational capacity, and maximizing resources. here i will limit my reflection to the two most prevalent competencies that may differ from other roles within higher education and make civic engagement professionals unique on campuses. these include ecological perspectives and community education. while i do not claim to be proficient or at an expert level of these competencies, i provide a reflection here of a foundation i have found particularly helpful within each of my jobs in this field. these do not necessarily align with the civic engagement competencies previously developed, but i find myself going back to them time and again. in many ways, higher education civic engagement is focused on mobilizing campus resources to work with communities addressing social issues. i have found it beneficial to understand that these issues exist and are affected by multiple ecological levels. when planning programming, one must consider at which ecological level(s) the programming is targeting the issue, which will also determine appropriate partnerships to develop. this perspective also comes into play when training or teaching students in civic engagement principles. this perspective assists me in moving students from addressing emergency individual needs to considering public policies and contexts that play a role in why the needs exist. the competency of community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness has also been a major component of my work. not every institution nor every individual at an institution supports extensive community-based learning. even if it is a pervasive concept on a campus, not all faculty, staff, or students know how to put it into practice; this takes educating and creating awareness for it. therefore, i have found civic engagement practice involves helping constituents both on and off campus understand what engagement looks like now, what its potential future may be, and how it can be incorporated into campus and community teaching, research, and practice. i often find myself working to convince faculty and staff of engagement’s potential as well as convincing the institution of engagement’s importance and that it should be supported and resourced. this work has also involved communicating with community organizations of engagement’s benefits and how to access it. agencies could have preconceived notions of what engagement should look like, which limits perceptions of the possibilities of working with institutions to the realm of traditional community service activities; however, with a little education about partnership possibilities and working with agencies to understand their needs and communicate the institution’s resources, one can work more toward a model of change instead of charity. observations what i found most striking in comparing the community psychology competencies with higher education civic engagement is the small focus on competencies related to knowledge of community practice. since our work as engagement professionals centers on such activities as building relationships with communities, developing partnerships, helping students and faculty engage with the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 community, it seems as if community practice competencies would be more pronounced, at least on an equivalent level as the more organizationally focused competencies. one would expect more connections to the competencies of community development, coalition building, community organizing and advocacy, public policy, empowerment, and ecological perspective; however, this may be the next phase of the civic engagement field. the future incorporation of these competencies into our work as civic engagement professionals could have profound positive effects. nevertheless, this omission of community practice elements leads me to three questions for civic engagement professionals: is community practice part of the work we do, and we just don’t talk about it enough to include in lists of competencies? is community practice a small part of our roles on campus, which would explain their paucity in the competencies? should community practice be part of our role, but we are not doing enough of it now to include it in current competencies? a new role for community psychologists higher education civic engagement can learn a tremendous amount from community psychology practice and the scra competencies specifically. in the last few years there has been a sense of stagnation in the field of civic engagement and a need for a renewed emphasis on the actual work we are doing with communities and within our institutions (saltmarsh & hartley, 2011). for instance, scholars have suggested a move away from traditional models of civic engagement as activity (i.e., community service, service-learning, etc.) toward democratic engagement which involves transforming higher education institutions to fulfill their democratic purpose (saltmarsh & hartley, 2011). this entails “reorienting the work from a vague emphasis on community involvement toward an agenda that seeks significant societal change” (saltmarsh & hartley, 2011, p. 4). another scholar suggests we move “institutional service-learning” (civic engagement) from a focus on student development to engaging students in social change, which helps to transform our work from charity to change (stoecker, 2016). these ideas have been taken one step further to suggest collaborative engagement be our next frontier, where we restructure our work with communities to focus on building community instead of partnerships (longo & gibson, 2016; stoecker, 2016). ultimately, we would be moving toward a full consideration of community benefit and impact. this renewed focus seems to take more of an ecological perspective through the emphasis on the integration of multiple voices, collaboration across sectors, assetbased work, and contextualized knowledge. it incorporates individual, institutional, and community levels within the understanding of social problems and strategies of working together toward solutions (saltmarsh & hartley, 2011). this type of work with communities also seems to suggest professionals would need to be competent in a variety of community practices such as community building, organizing, and empowerment. there are plenty of opportunities for community psychologists to utilize the competencies and proficiencies to enhance the social impact that higher education will have in the community and help civic engagement return to some of its original standards of practice. for instance, in 1979, robert sigmon proposed that servicelearning had three principles that should be followed. these included: “those being served control the service(s) provided; those being served become better able to serve and be served by their own actions; those who serve also are learners and have significant control over what is expected to be learned” (sigmon, 1979, p. 10). while these seem to be foundational principles, one wonders if we have strayed too far from them, with much of our work becoming devoid of concepts of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 empowerment and capacity building and more centered on charity (stoecker, 2016). there are a variety of reasons higher education may have forgone these principles including the theories used to define the field, the terminology used, the focus on students first, and the devaluation of politics and transformation within the community engagement sphere. stoecker (2016) suggests theories that have informed our work including communitarianism, social capital, asset-based engagement, and neoliberalism have focused on the individual (both students and individuals in the community) and are lacking in social justice and systems-level approaches. this has confined the field to charity. our terminology has also limited us. as can be seen in the mere definition of community engagement used by the carnegie foundation, community impact is somewhat minimized and the effects for the students and the institution brought to the forefront. indeed, much of our rhetoric in higher education community engagement has taken both community control and community impacts far from our main focus (stoecker, 2016; saltmarsh & hartley, 2011). starting with john dewey, whose theory is often used as the basis of the field, students and their learning have been the main focus of higher education community engagement (stoecker, 2016; saltmarsh & hartley, 2011). taken together, individualism and the lack of consideration for community have led the field to also become quite apolitical (stoecker, 2016; saltmarsh & hartley, 2011). this has left our institutions unwilling or unable to transform themselves for democratic practice and lead us deeper into the work of charity activities than true change within our systems, practices, and processes (saltmarsh & hartley, 2011; stoecker, 2016). community psychology practice competencies could address some of these barriers to help institutions transform themselves and become ready to truly partner with communities. specifically, training community engagement professionals in community inclusion, empowerment, and ecological perspectives can help institutions of higher education break away from community engagement’s individual nature, its focus solely on students before community, and its perspective that keeps the status quo of institutions devoid of critical analysis of their own policies and practices. a new amalgamation with the addition of community psychology values and competencies could strengthen the field, where we could return to sigmon’s principles and keep them at our core with the added principles of community psychology set forth by the society for community research and action, adding greater value and impact to civic engagement. challenges there are definite opportunities for higher education civic engagement to be a viable career option for community psychologists; however, for those graduate students or early career professionals considering this field, some barriers should be noted. every institution is different and not all professionals see the same set of challenges, so i present a word of caution in generalizing too far with the challenges presented here. for these, i reflect on my own work. working both in direct practice of civic engagement as well as at a level of support for professionals, there are three main challenges i see as relevant for graduate students and early career professionals to be aware of as they consider entering the field (for an example of further explication of challenges specific to civic engagement practice, see eby’s (1998) analysis reflection on service-learning and stoecker’s (2016) analysis for current engagement practice): (1) civic engagement can be a conglomeration of activities with no real focus. on some campuses, faculty, staff, and students are adding more and more service type activities without a central point of reference, such as an issue area or a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 particular community partner. the focus becomes the number of hours served or the number of students engaged (saltmarsh & hartley, 2011; stoecker, 2016). (2) at some institutions, much of the civic engagement work is more charity than change. while charity work is needed to address immediate needs, our work with our institutions cannot stop there. without an office or institution taking an ecological perspective, much student led engagement ends up materializing as donation drives, direct service to organizations addressing immediate needs, or raising awareness on campus of a particular issue that doesn’t have much actual impact. (3) civic engagement looks different on every campus and is valued differently on every campus. while higher education in general has a public purpose and campuses incorporate some form of engagement or citizenship into their mission statements, not all campuses provide resources for engagement at the same level and can vary widely in how much emphasis they place on it by incorporating it into core functioning. conclusion even with its challenges, higher education civic engagement is a form of community psychology practice that provides community psychologists a viable career option for combining research, academia, and practice. higher education civic engagement has become a professional field over the last few decades. large national organizations connect professionals to the latest trends in research and practice and provide for professional development within the field (jacoby, 2009; lambert-pennington, 2012; saltmarsh & hartley, 2011). many campuses also seek national recognition for engagement in the form of the carnegie foundation’s community engagement classification and must meet engagement requirements of regional accrediting bodies (jacoby, 2009). higher education civic engagement has been a lasting part of academia and should be taken seriously as a viable career option for community psychologists. community psychology as a discipline and higher education civic engagement as a career field both concern themselves with working with communities and therefore share some competencies of practice; however, there is much more that civic engagement can learn and gain from the principles and practices of community psychology to strengthen its efforts to create lasting change in communities and prepare students as our next generation of socially responsible citizens. community psychology can be a guiding light to guide civic engagement where it needs to go and better meet the demands of our communities. while civic engagement professionals may see themselves on the margin of academia, where they are not quite as academic as faculty yet somehow different from practitioners in traditional community settings, this profession provides community psychologists with opportunities to combine interests in teaching, research, and practice while living out their passions for working with communities. references american psychological association (n.d.). civic engagement. retrieved from http://www.apa.org/education/undergrad/c ivic-engagement.aspx. dalton, j., & wolfe, s. (2012). competencies for community psychology practice society for community research and action draft august 15, 2012. the community practitioner, 45(4), 7-14. dalton, j. h., elias, m. j., & wandersman, a. (2001). community psychology: linking individuals and communities. wadsworth/thomson learning. dostilio, l.d. (2016). planning a path forward: identifying the knowledge, skill, and http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.apa.org/education/undergrad/civic-engagement.aspx http://www.apa.org/education/undergrad/civic-engagement.aspx global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 dispositions of second generation community engagement professionals. in l.d. dostilio (ed.) the community engagement professional: attributes and explanations. (2239). project on the community engagement professional. boston ma: campus compact. dostilio, l.d., benenson, j., chamberlin, s., crossland, s., farmer-hanson, a., hernandez, k. … (2016). preliminary competency model for community engagement professionals. in l.d. dostilio (ed.) the community engagement professional in higher education: a competency model for an emerging field. boston ma: campus compact eby, j.w. (1998). why service-learning is bad. retrieved from https://www1.villanova.edu/content/dam/vi llanova/artsci/servicelearning/whyservicel earningisbad.pdf. elias, m.j. (2008). service learning, youth empowerment, civic engagement and the direction of community psychology research and action. the community psychologist, 41(¾), 60-70 hoy, a., & johnson, m. (2013). deepening community engagement in higher education: forging new pathways. new york, ny: springer. jacoby, b. (2009). civic engagement in higher education. concepts and practices, jossey-bass, san francisco. kelly, k., & caputo, t. (2011). community: a contemporary analysis of policies, programs, and practices. university of toronto press. lambert-pennington, k. (2012). deepening the culture of engagement in higher education. journal of public scholarship in higher education, 2, 7-11. levine, p. (2012). what is the definition of civic engagement?. retrieved from http://peterlevine.ws/?p=10357 longo, n.v., & gibson, c.m. (2016). collaborative engagement: the future of teaching and learning in higher education. in m.a. post, e. ward, n.v. longo, & j. saltmarsh (eds.). next generation engagement and the future of higher education: publicly engaged scholars (pp. 61-75). sterling, va: stylus publishing mcreynolds, m., & shields, e. (eds.). (2015). diving deep in community engagement: a model for professional development. des moines, ia: iowa campus compact. minkler, m. (2005). community-based research partnerships: challenges and opportunities. journal of urban health, 82(2), ii3-ii12. morton, k., & bergbauer, s. (2015). a case for community: starting with relationships and prioritizing community as method in servicelearning. michigan journal of community service learning, 22(1), 18-32. national task force on civic learning and democratic engagement (2012). a crucible moment: college learning and democracy’s future. washington, dc: association of american colleges and universities. nerche (n.d.). how is “community engagement defined”? retrieved from http://nerche.org. post, m.a., ward, e., longo, n.v., & saltmarsh, j. (2016). introducing next-generation engagement. in m.a. post, e. ward, n.v. longo, & j. saltmarsh (eds.). next generation engagement and the future of higher education: publicly engaged scholars (pp. 1-11). sterling, va: stylus publishing saltmarsh, j., & hartley, m. (eds.). (2011). " to serve a larger purpose": engagement for democracy and the transformation of higher education. temple university press. sigmon, r. (1979). service-learning: three principles. synergist, 8(1), 9-11. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www1.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/artsci/servicelearning/whyservicelearningisbad.pdf https://www1.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/artsci/servicelearning/whyservicelearningisbad.pdf https://www1.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/artsci/servicelearning/whyservicelearningisbad.pdf http://peterlevine.ws/?p=10357 http://nerche.org./ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 silka, l., & renault-caragianes, p. (2007). community-university research partnerships: devising a model for ethical engagement. journal of higher education outreach and engagement, 11(2), 171-183. stoecker, r. (2016). liberating service learning and the rest of higher education civic engagement. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. torres, j., & schaffer, j. (2000). benchmarks for campus/community partnerships. providence, ri: campus compact. http://www.gjcpp.org/ microsoft word 2014-intro-20140521_gt_updated.docx toward transformative change in community mental health: introduction to the special issue greg townley portland state university john sylvestre university of ottawa author notes: greg townley is assistant professor in the department of psychology at portland state university. his research interests include community inclusion of individuals with psychiatric disabilities, homelessness and housing interventions, sense of community theory and measurement, and social-environmental research methods. he is also involved in research and applied work with peer-delivered mental health services and is the co-chair of the scra self-help/ mutual support interest-group. email: gtownley@pdx.edu john sylvestre is associate professor in the school of psychology, and senior researcher at the centre for research on educational and community services, at the university of ottawa. his research interests lie in the study and the evaluation of community mental health programs and systems. his current research focuses on the study of families using homeless shelters, and people with serious mental illness living in independent community housing. he has been a senior editor of the canadian journal of community mental health since 2010. email: jsylvest@uottawa.ca keywords: transformative community mental health recommended citation: townley, g., sylvestre, j. (2014). toward transformative change in community mental health: introduction to the special issue. global journal of community psychology practice, 5(1), 1-8. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   toward transformative change in community mental health: introduction to the special issue community mental health systems, across the globe, have always been in a continuous state of evolution. for about 50 years in north america, beginning with the first steps toward deinstitutionalization and the beginnings of the community mental health movement, there have been efforts to create systems of support for people with serious mental illnesses to thrive in community life. community psychologists have been actively involved in these efforts, including george fairweather’s lodge program in the 1960s, ed seidman and julian rappaport’s work with the grow mutual aid organization in the 1980s, and sam tsemberis’ development of housing first in the 1990s. over the past decade or so, we have observed, internationally, various calls and plans for not only improving mental health systems, but also for transforming them. the call for transformation speaks to a lingering dissatisfaction and a desire for fundamentally different kinds of systems. still, many questions remain. what should a transformed system look like? what are the perspectives or values that should underlie it? do we need a single or a common system, or is there a need for many systems, informed by different perspectives and values? how can we promote transformative change and how would we distinguish transformative from merely ameliorative change? this special issue of the global journal of community psychology practice (gjcpp) aims to help further this discussion. certainly, in the contributions we have assembled here we can claim no clear or simple solutions. what we can offer are examples of the range of ideas, actions, and levels of actions that can be considered in the quest for transformed community mental health systems. in the following paragraphs, we sketch our initial thoughts on the historical roots, needs and the nature of transformative change. what is transformative change? transformative change is easier to define than it is to identify or to create. according to watzlawick, weakland, and fish (1974), first-order change is change that occurs within a system, but that leaves the system itself unchanged. it is change oriented toward improving how a system functions to produce outcomes, but that does not involve altering the fundamental assumptions or values of the system (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010). second-order, or transformative, change involves a more radical form of change that fundamentally alters a system. it can involve altering the values or assumptions of a system, as well as how power is located, flows or operates within a system (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010). nelson (2010) provided a description of the evolution of housing approaches for people with serious mental illnesses that illustrates the critical distinction between ameliorative change and transformative change. custodial housing (e.g., board-and-care homes) arose out of the need to quickly house individuals in the era of deinstitutionalization. this housing model focuses on care services, such as medication management and the provision of meals, but provides little in the way of active rehabilitation or support. further, staff in custodial housing retains power over residents, thus replicating key features of psychiatric institutions and representing neither ameliorative nor transformative change. supportive housing (e.g., group homes, halfway houses, congregate apartments) arose in response to the limitations of custodial housing. these settings typically provide rehabilitative support focused on the promotion of independence, adaptive functioning, and social skills. while this model was certainly an improvement over custodial housing, individuals had little control over where they live and with whom. some programs also required sobriety, compliance with treatment, or engagement with professional support programs as a condition for housing (nelson, 2010). thus, this model, when originally introduced, represented ameliorative change because, despite improvements in the living conditions of residents, they were still service recipients with limited control over their lives. in contrast, supported housing is independent housing marked by principles of consumer choice, communitybased housing, and the availability of flexible, individualized services with no requirements that residents be in treatment, sober, or asymptomatic; that is, individuals receive “housing first” (carling, 1993; nelson, lord, & ochocka, 2001; nelson, 2010; ridgeway & zipple, 1990). supported housing represents transformative change because it fundamentally alters the system of care. “patients” become tenants with rights; housing and mental health services are de-linked; housing is provided in normalized settings, thus combating stigma and isolation; and individuals are encouraged to become actively engaged in all facets of community life (carling, 1995; nelson, 2010). as this example illustrates, transformative change in the community mental health field entails fundamentally altering the focus, operations, and outcomes of a system that has too often been impotent to address the poverty and exclusion that characterize the lives of many with global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   serious mental illnesses. it would entail a shift from a focus on illness or disability to a focus on citizenship, from the acceptance of poverty to working toward sufficiency, from the experience of exclusion to norms of inclusion and participation, and ultimately from a state of oppression to emancipation. this change would come from a shift in power from service providers to consumers of services. it would also entail action on the longstanding observation that formal services are not the focus of recovery, but rather work in concert with informal support and other community resources and supports to support people in achieving the goals they hold for themselves (trainor, pomeroy, pape, & dewar, 2004). why transformative change? a remarkable observation over the past decade or so has been the number of national strategies that have been developed across a number of countries aiming to improve mental health systems. for example, in the u.s., the president’s new freedom commission on mental health report (2003) stressed the need for services to assist persons with mental illnesses to live, work, learn, and participate fully in their communities. in canada’s senate report on mental health, out of the shadows at last, called for the creation of the mental health commission of canada (mhcc) and charged it with three strategic initiatives: 1) developing a national mental health strategy; 2) conducting a ten year antistigma and anti-discrimination campaign; and 3) building a national knowledge exchange center on mental health (kirby, 2008; piat & polvere, in press). in 2012, the mhcc released a national strategy for mental health reform entitled changing directions, changing lives: the mental health strategy for canada (mhcc, 2012). the national service framework for mental health, published by the department of health in late 1999, set an ambitious ten-year agenda for improving mental health care in the uk. the recently established national mental health commission of australia (2012) aims to improve outcomes for people with a lived experience of mental illness, their families, service providers, and community supports. and, finally, the new zealand mental health commission (1998) has overseen a fundamental redirection of mental health resources away from hospitals and toward community-based services (rosenberg & rosen, 2012). these are but a sampling of international strategies that speak collectively to the dissatisfaction with the current systems and the programs they offer. at the same time, there has been a general dissatisfaction with exclusively top-down approaches to mental health reform and an increasing recognition of the importance of a consumer/ survivor voice in the system. this consumer voice is significant at both individual and collective levels. the consumer movement arose as a both a compensatory response as well as a form of resistance against a professionallydominated, inadequate and unresponsive system. despite significant improvements within the system, power is still located in professional hands. in order to achieve true transformation, we must move beyond merely involving consumer/ survivors as collaborators in changes processes to ensuring that they provide leadership at all levels of our efforts (piat & polvere, in press). the need for more transformative change is also found in the limits of the past and current perspectives that have informed the development of the western systems. notably, each of these perspectives has focused on individual-level intervention without a focus on broader system changes and empowerment. this is clear with older bio-medical and rehabilitative approaches, but also characterizes the more current recovery perspective. recovery emphasizes the unique and personal process of acquiring meaningful roles in the community (anthony, 1993). in its emphasis on personal experiences and goals it does not adequately consider that the struggles in recovery are not fully personal. because they are shared struggles among many people, the essentially individual-level, recovery and therapeutically oriented services are inadequate for wholesale improvements in people’s lives. how does transformative change happen? there are two broad perspectives on how transformative change happens (sylvestre, in press). the most common perspective is that transformative change is the product of planned change processes that involve efforts to analyse how a system functions, identify system weaknesses and inefficiencies, and change the system to improve its overall functioning. more transformative change processes can involve defining new visions or goals for a system and altering the system to bring it in line with this new vision and goals (sylvestre, in press). in contrast, a less common perspective emphasizes unplanned changes that are the product of small incremental changes over time that collectively lead to potentially transformative change (weick & quinn, 1999). this perspective, built on complexity theory, is less concerned with system level analysis and more concerned with the everyday and local interactions among individuals. this perspective focuses on the importance of novelty (such as new ideas or system challenges) that requires adjustment in the interactions across numerous actors in systems. these many adjustments, in the form of reflection, communication, joint problem-solving, and conflict, have the potential global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   to promote over time radical change that is unplanned, and unpredictable (sylvestre, in press). these change processes are not mutually exclusive, and within any system there can be planned and unplanned change processes underway. what is important is that processes are synchronous and ambitious, and that systems are not allowed to become paralyzed by historical antecedents, vested interests, and unsound assumptions. as we noted at the outset of this paper, western community mental health systems have been in a continuous process of evolution, and despite improvements, there is lingering dissatisfaction and widespread hope for more. working toward transformative change requires actions at multiple levels. from a planned change perspective it requires a bold vision that challenges systems to align in a radically new form. this type of change can occur at programmatic, local system, state or province, or national levels. this is exemplified in the national strategies we identified earlier, as well as in the many exemplars provided in this special issue. at the same time, it requires engaged, energized, creative and collaborative system players who reflect, share, discuss and debate ideas, new practices, and visions for community mental health. what is the role of community psychology in transformative change? according to kloos, ornelas, duarte, and nelson (in press), there is a long historical relationship between community psychology and community mental health. in fact, deinstitutionalization and the community mental health movement can be credited with spurring the emergence of community psychology. as psychiatric institutions began to downsize, the search for new community-based models of treatment and support began (kloos et al., in press). this new community psychology, with its concerns with how interactions between individuals and social systems produced health or illness, with its emphasis on prevention and social change, and with its dual clinical and research interests, was poised to make important contributions to the development of community mental health systems. according to kloos et al. (in press), the very principles and values of community psychology can help to inform a transformative change in community mental health systems. among these, they have identified the promotion of well-being and health; social inclusion community integration; a focus on strengths, opportunities, and resources; social justice; individual and collective empowerment; a concern with multiple types and level of power; individual and collective liberation; collaboration; ecological approaches, and research and evaluation. community psychology is particularly well-suited for transformative change efforts due to its focus on developing linkages between systems. by working at a meso-system level of analysis, community psychology can link individuals, microsystems (e.g., families, peer groups), organizations (e.g., mental health centers, job sites), community settings (e.g., neighborhoods), and macrosystems (e.g., societal attitudes toward mental illness and national policies) to help promote both individual and collective liberation and well-being (nelson, kloos, & ornelas, in press). recently, community psychologists and students have banded together to form the international network for transformative change in community mental health. along with this network is a forthcoming edited volume by nelson, kloos and ornelas that assembles examples of theory and practice testifying to the importance and achievability of transformative change. among other topics relevant to community mental health transformation, the text includes chapters on transformative policy change, social determinants of health, community integration/ inclusion, and transformative organizational change. the current special issue we are pleased that the gjcpp has agreed to publish this special issue on transformative change in community mental health. the current issue presents a diverse view of strategies for promoting transformative change from a diverse range of perspectives. in developing this special issue, we were sensitive to the need to identify theory, programs, and initiatives that stretch across ecological levels and that were written from the perspective of multiple stakeholders. taken together, articles included in this issue provide a broad view of how to move forward as we strive to create transformative change in community mental health. our call for proposals for this special issue asked for papers that discuss strategies for transforming mental health services and systems of care; propose new goals for mental health promotion and intervention; present methods and projects focused on promoting involvement and leadership of mental health consumer/ survivors in research and practice; compare mental health approaches in different cultural/ national contexts; and specify contributions that community psychology can make to community mental health. in response to our call, we received a total of 25 submissions. we invited 12 papers and one film that we believed showed the most promise to contribute to theory and practice on the topic of transformation in community mental health. contributors come from six different countries and represent a variety of perspectives, including individuals with lived experience of mental illness, practitioners, researchers/ academics, and students. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   the first five papers have broader foci and use literature reviews, case studies, and narrative approaches to describe transformative change strategies for individuals, organizations, communities, and systems. the first paper, by heather bullock, fredrik lindencrona, gary belkin, jane vanderpyl, nicholas waters, and kevin hennessy, describes the international knowledge exchange network for mental health (iken-mh) and examines the potential for enhancing systems-level change and implementation of evidence across regional and national jurisdictions. the authors present four case studies in diverse contexts to demonstrate the benefits of and mechanisms for implementing this international community of practice and knowledge exchange. their work suggests that knowledge exchange networks must focus on evidence (e.g., effectively capturing qualitative and informal experience of systems-change initiatives), context (e.g., working with communities to address their local needs), and facilitation (e.g., facilitating the identification of interventions and methods that increase capacity of individuals and organizations to use data and methods for program improvement) when working to effect systems-level change in community mental health. in the second paper, allison pinto combines key principles of infant mental health and complexity science and applies them to comprehensive community change efforts to articulate a new model for transformative change in community mental health. this new model, which incorporates community organizing, community data, programs, and policies, contrasts starkly with traditional strategies that focus primarily on developing well-coordinated formal service systems for young children. to illustrate this novel approach, pinto describes a program in sarasota, florida that combines infant mental health and complexity science to help facilitate community change. this case study serves to illustrate the importance of and strategies for cultivating the capacity of community members across a variety of sectors to be continually attuned and responsive to the potential of all members to become self-organized and to thrive. in the third article, jessica lee demonstrates how rhetorical theories of agency and persuasion inform community psychology approaches to support individuals in acute psychiatric distress. lee suggests encouraging more collaborative engagement between professionals and consumer/ survivors and articulates a transformed system of mental healthcare that is based in the community upon the principles of shared power and decision-making. in approaching transformative mental health system change, it is important that research tools align with core values held by community psychologies. the fourth paper, by tim macleod, presents amartya sen’s (1999) capabilities approach as a promising framework for outcome measurement congruent with the aims of transformative change. sen’s approach asserts that the freedom to achieve well-being is a moral imperative; and this freedom must be understood in terms of people’s capabilities, or opportunities, to do and be what they have reason to value. macleod compares sen’s approach to therapeutic and citizenship values espoused by community psychologists and uses housing first in the context of canada’s at home/ chez soi project as a case study to illustrate the types of capabilities-informed outcome measurements and indicators that should be utilized when implementing and evaluating transformative change practices in community mental health. in the fifth paper, chanté deloach and sujata swaroop highlight the historic disconnect between systems of mental health, as traditionally defined within a western context, and the experiences of marginalized and indigenous people around the world. the authors present case studies of traditional mechanisms of healing in pakistan, brazil, and zambia to highlight potentially transformative practices employed by communities often silenced in western-centric community psychology discourse. results support a community-based mental health promotion model that combines prevention and health promotion approaches; partnerships between professional allopathic service providers, paraprofressionals, and traditional health practitioners; and community engagement and political literacy as transformative agents for both individuals and communities. the next four papers present original empirical research in a variety of settings to address the importance of transformative change at the individual, community, organizational, and systems level. the sixth paper, by benjamin henwood, kelly melekis, and ana stefancic, discusses housing first as a fundamental shift in thinking about how to approach chronic homelessness. the authors use a case study approach and thematic analysis of accounts from 20 key stakeholder perspectives to investigate whether and how introducing housing first into a small, rural state within the northeast united states can affect the dominant institutional logic of how homelessness should be addressed. the authors conclude that introducing housing first can bring about reform to existing homeless and mental health service systems via its focus on consumer-driven care, a recovery orientation, and attention to basic human rights. still, practitioners must strategically consider implementation issues within the context of the existing service system to increase the likelihood that housing first approaches global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   will become a core and sustainable feature of institutional logic. the seventh paper, by stephanie farquhar, marianne ryder, robert lowe, and ted amann, also focuses on the role of housing in community mental health transformation. the authors utilize community-based participatory research (cbpr), a transformative practice in and of itself, to solicit information about personal experiences with housing, employment, and recovery programs among individuals utilizing a variety of service programs at central city concern in portland, oregon. results highlight the importance of involving consumers in the development, data collection, and analysis of research. further, findings present unique perspectives related to recovery, housing, employment, and suggestions for changes in service systems that better equip organizations to positively impact individuals and communities. the eighth paper, by thomas laporte, mason haber, damie jackson-diop, and brittany holt, also utilizes participatory action research and evaluation methods to examine transformative change efforts. the authors describe how appreciative inquiry and photovoice can be used to gather perspectives of transition-age youth (tay) on needs and aspirations, current responsiveness of their mental health programs and systems, and possible targets for improvements in programs and systems. the authors also outline the process of sharing tay perspectives with stakeholders to effect change through a video. suggestions are provided for how community psychologists can apply these complimentary methods to benefit tay and other populations facing challenges in their communities and health systems. the ninth paper, by maria jorge-monteiro, rita aguiar, beatrice sacchetto, maria vargas-moniz, and josé ornelas, uses a case study approach with eight in-depth interviews of diverse participants from the association for the study of psychosocial integration (aeips), a non-profit community mental health organization in portugal, to identify and describe empowering and community-oriented characteristics related to community mental health transformation. based on their findings, the authors suggest that peer support, participation in the community, and a strengths-based service orientation can promote transformative change for individuals; while ongoing partnerships with community-based supports, including landlords, neighbors, educators, and others, are necessary for transformative change at organizational and programmatic levels. the final three papers describe peer-facilitated programs and interventions situated at the individual and organizational level but positioned to profoundly affect communities and systems. in the tenth paper, vicky collins discusses the leadership, empowerment, advocacy project (leap), a supported education implemented at wichita state university in wichita, kansas. collins discusses the nature in which her own lived experience of mental illness, as well as the supportive classroom environment formed among peers in recovery, were vital program components that allowed students to gain a sense of community and cultivate skills to help them pursue advanced degrees and employment. collins describes the goals, structure, and outcomes of leap and suggests ways in which the program can be implemented in other settings. in the eleventh paper, jonathan delman, deborah delman, brenda vezina, and john piselli describe the development and impact of the “recovery learning community” (rlc) model, a regional network of peer support and education developed by peers in massachusetts and operated and staffed by people with lived experience of mental illness. rlcs are different from most peer-run programs in that they provide meetings and workshops across communities rather than in a single location. this better positions them to enhance the social integration of people with lived experience at the community level and promote more collaborative approaches to mental health service delivery at the organizational and systems level. the twelfth paper, by meghan caughey, presents the cascadia peer wellness program, a peer-facilitated program aimed at creating a culture of wellness within mental health organizations and systems. the program was informed by caughey’s own experiences as a consumer/ survivor and peer mentor, as well as her commitment to deep democracy, a belief system that is predicated upon equality, self-responsibility, and mutuality. the program trains and employs peer wellness specialists to partner with clinicians and other healthcare team members to assist in the recovery efforts of the people they serve. the paper outlines the creation and structure of the cascadia peer wellness program and presents suggestions for how the program can facilitate transformative change in this era of healthcare reform in the united states and other countries. finally, we have included a film directed by guillaume pégon and elodie finel and produced by handicap international. the film chronicles efforts to develop and support community mental health initiatives aimed at helping individuals regain a sense of self and community in the wake of the rwandan genocide. their work has enabled individuals and communities to recover and cultivate new opportunities for social participation and wellness in a post-genocide rwanda. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   conclusion as is evident from these brief descriptions of the articles and film included in this special issue of the gjcpp, there is energy, excitement, and momentum toward transformative change in community mental health. while in many ways, this work only starts to scratch the surface of how, why, when, and with whom change should and can occur, certain suggestions that are particularly relevant to community psychologists emerge. first and foremost, mental health consumer/ survivors should be involved in all aspects of research and practice related to transformative change. further, involvement must be meaningful and self-directed—not tokenistic. second, as a field espousing values of diversity and cultural relativity, we must continue to push ourselves to look beyond western-centric approaches to community mental health and be more inclusive of global perspectives and indigenous health practices. third, and related to this point, mental health service systems should complement rather than replace natural support systems already existing in communities. fourth, we must be committed to developing and sustaining linkages across systems and settings rather than allowing organizational and geographic boundaries to keep our work fragmented and piecemeal. finally, it is imperative that outcomes of transformed mental health systems are conceptualized in terms of optimal mental health, wellness, and thriving as opposed to merely focusing on psychiatric symptom reduction and health maintenance. the variety of perspectives, ideas, and actions presented in this special issue provide a starting point as we work to improve the lives, communities, and support systems of individuals who experience mental illness. we look forward to continuing this dialogue. references anthony, w.a. (1993). recovery from mental illness: the guiding vision of the mental health service system in the 1990s. psychosocial rehabilitation journal, 16(4), 11-23. carling, p.j. (1995). return to community: building support systems for people with psychiatric disabilities. new york: the guilford press. department of health. (1999). national service framework for mental health. modern standards and service models. department of health. kirby, m. (2008). mental health in canada : out of the shadows forever. cmaj, 178(10), 1320-1322. kloos, b., ornelas, j., duarte, t., & nelson, g. (in press). community psychology, community mental health, and the need for transformative change. in g. nelson, b. kloos, & j. ornelas (eds.) community psychology and community mental health: towards transformative change. society for community research and action book series. new york: oxford university press. mental health commission (1998). blueprint for mental health services in new zealand: how things need to be. wellington: mental health commission. mental health commission of canada. (2012). changing directions, changing lives: the mental health strategy for canada . calgary, ab: author nelson, g. (2010). housing for people with serious mental illness: approaches, evidence, and transformative change. journal of sociology & social welfare, 37(4), 123-146. nelson, g., kloos, b., & ornelas, j. (in press). elaborating a vision for transformative change in mental health. in g. nelson, b. kloos, & j. ornelas (eds.) community psychology and community mental health: towards transformative change. society for community research and action book series. new york: oxford university press. nelson, g., lord, j., & ochacka, j. (2001). shifting the paradigm in community mental health: towards empowerment and community. toronto: university of toronto press. nelson, g., & prilleltensky, i. (eds.). (2010). community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and well-being (2nd ed.). basingstoke, uk: palgrave. piat, m., & polvere, l. (in press). recovery-oriented mental health policies: implications for transformative change in five nations. in g. nelson, b. kloos, & j. ornelas (eds.) community psychology and community mental health: towards transformative change. society for community research and action book series. new york: oxford university press. president’s new freedom commission on mental health (2003). achieving the promise: transforming mental health mental health care in america. publication number sma-03-3832. rockville, md: us department of health and human services. ridgeway, p., & zipple, a. (1990a). challenges and strategies for implementing supported housing. psychosocial rehabilitation journal, 13(4), 115120. rosenberg, s., & rosen, a. (2012). it’s raining mental health commissions: prospects and pitfalls in global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   driving mental health reform. australasian psychiatry, 20(2), 85-90. sen, a.k. (1999). development as freedom. oxford university press. sylvestre, j. (in press). perspectives on transformative change in community mental health. in g. nelson, b. kloos, & j. ornelas (eds.) community psychology and community mental health: towards transformative change. society for community research and action book series. new york: oxford university press. trainor, j., pomeroy, e., pape, b., & dewar, g. (2004). a framework for support. canadian mental health association. watzlawick, p., weakland, j., & fish, r. (1974). change: principles of problem formation and problem resolution. new york, ny: norton. weick, k.e., & quinn, r.e. (1999). organizational change and development: annual review of psychology, 50, 361-386. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 challenges and strategies in promoting empowering academic settings for learning community psychology practice competencies gregor v. sarkisian and sylvie taylor antioch university los angeles keywords: community psychology practice competencies, community psychology professional and graduate education author biographies: gregor v. sarkisian, ph.d., is an associate professor in the master of arts psychology program and teaches in the applied community psychology specialization at antioch university los angeles, ca, usa. sylvie taylor, ph.d., is a professor in the master of arts in psychology program and is the founding director of the applied community psychology specialization at antioch university los angeles, los angeles, ca, usa. recommended citation: sarkisian, g.v. and taylor, s. (2016). challenges and strategies in promoting empowering academic settings for learning community psychology practice competencies. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(4), pages 1-13. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 challenges and strategies in promoting empowering academic settings for learning community psychology practice competencies abstract this article will provide readers with practical strategies to develop meaningful opportunities for students to gain experience with community psychology practice competencies in educational settings. first, the authors will provide a brief program profile to better understand opportunities students have to gain experience in competencies within the applied community psychology specialization at antioch university los angeles. next, challenges in teaching students to gain experience with community psychology practice competencies at the master’s level will be presented. finally, practical strategies for overcoming these challenges will be discussed. literature on training in community psychology emerged in the 1970s shortly after the field’s inception. these early models were either focused on training researchers (iscoe & spielberger, 1970) or research practitioners. writings on training for practice were formative in nature, conveying a theme of the incompatibility of community work within university structures (e.g., kelly, 1970; kelly, 1971; newbrough, 1972; & newbrough, 1973). most of the literature on training for practice since then has focused on models of training specific to individual programs (e.g., weinstein, 1981) with informative insights, but not necessarily knowledge that is transferable across programs, as there were no universally agreed upon criteria for a practice-focused education. in 2010, kloos proposed three levels of training that are useful for educators to articulate the depth of mastery in which students are trained – exposure, learning the value and applications; experience, supervised practice; and, expertise, multiple experiences over years in selected competencies – and provide a common language for educators to better understand training programs. in a previous article (taylor & sarkisian, 2011), the authors of the current paper articulated a values-driven pedagogy for students to gain a training level of experience (kloos, 2010) in community psychology practice at the master’s level within a clinical psychology program that may be transferable to similar programs but likely incomparable to doctoral programs training students to gain a training level of expertise in community psychology practice. the emergence of community psychology practice competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012) has provided educators with criteria (although not necessarily agreed upon) to critically reflect on curriculum and to develop existing or new opportunities for students to gain a wide variety of skill sets in community psychology practice. the authors of the current paper have utilized curriculum mapping (sarkisian & taylor, 2013) with students (sarkisian, et al., 2013) as a tool to assess practice competencies in the curriculum and to develop opportunities for students to gain exposure and experience with community psychology practice competencies. yet, many of the practice competencies are complex and dynamic in nature, presenting challenges to the process of teaching. academic institutions have fixed academic terms either in classrooms, or more recently, cyberspace-based, that are often incompatible with the types of field-based, community-driven projects that offer the best opportunities for students to gain exposure, experience, and expertise in community psychology practice competencies. in addition, college and university faculty may be limited in the range of practice competencies they can teach or supervise in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the field, and students may have limited formal exposure to the community psychology practice competencies. the purpose of the current article is (1) to develop a training context through a brief program profile, (2) to present challenges faced in the process of teaching practice competencies from a values-driven community psychology pedagogy, and (3) to present practical strategies used to overcome these challenges faced in the process of teaching. applied community psychology (acp) specialization program profile the applied community psychology (acp) specialization is a 17-unit optional course of study for master’s level psychology students at antioch university los angeles. acp student demographics to date, 125 students have completed the acp specialization as graduates of the master’s program. approximately 30 to 40 students are enrolled in the specialization at any given time. the majority of the students in the specialization are adult learners (mean age=37.5), primarily female (79.2%), and typically working in addition to attending school (52.3% full-time, 47.7% part-time). more than 55% of acp students self-identify as belonging to an ethnic minority group, with the majority identifying as africanamerican or black (34%), and nearly 21% identify as lgbtq. most acp students enter the program with prior experience in community work, but few have had formal training in community psychology or practice competencies. curriculum and community psychology practice competencies students complete an introductory community psychology course – community psychology: theories & methods; four core courses – community consultation and collaboration, program development and evaluation, prevention and promotion, and psychoeducational groups and in-service training development; a field study – field study in acp; and elective units in acp. see taylor and sarkisian (2011) for a complete description of the pedagogy – mentoring, student professional development and student empowerment – used to promote an empowering educational setting through the acp specialization. in the introductory community psychology course, students are exposed to all practice competencies through reading (i.e., dalton & wolfe, 2012) and class discussion, and students gain a training level of experience in ecological perspectives and collaboration. through supervised fieldwork in core courses and the field study course, students gain a training level of experience in foundational principles, program development, implementation and management, prevention and health promotion, small group processes, resource development, consultation and organizational development, collaboration, information dissemination and building public awareness, and, program evaluation. while each core course has a primary focus on one or two practice competencies (e.g., the community consultation and collaboration course focuses on the competency consultation and organizational development), all core courses include secondary foci on developing experience with other practice competencies (i.e., collaboration and small group processes). one of the benchmarks of acp is the inclusion of supervised fieldwork in the four core courses (in addition to the required field study) allowing students to gain a training level of experience with selected practice competencies. additionally, students often work in groups as consultation teams to further develop collaboration skills. fieldwork related to core courses the majority of students gain fieldwork experience collaborating with communitybased non-profit organizations and public http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 schools. the issues of focus for students tend to be tied to the course content (e.g., in the program development and evaluation course, students work collaboratively with the organization to develop an evaluation plan). the populations served and social issues addressed by these organizations vary greatly. in the community consultation and collaboration course, populations served by non-profit organizations have included: health of african-american families, empowerment of latina teens, mothers who were prostitutes seeking child reunification, youth and young adults emancipating from the foster care system, empowerment of transgender youth, seniors who identify as lgbt, people with hiv/aids, cultural enrichment opportunities for pilipino youth, and well-being of child caregivers to name a few. this variation reflects the diverse professional interests of students in the acp specialization. entry and non-entry into the applied community psychology (acp) specialization students enter the acp specialization in one of two ways. some students have knowledge of community psychology and elect to join the specialization upon admission to the master’s program, but many students learn about acp in the introductory community psychology course and decide to join the specialization when they see the curriculum and professional development opportunities resonate closely with their academic goals for professional development. once they complete the introductory community psychology course, they can proceed in completing the core coursework, field study, and electives. the introductory community psychology course is a requirement for all students in the clinical psychology master’s program and will typically include students who are not necessarily interested in community psychology content. these students complete 3 units of community psychology and 87 unit of clinically focused coursework, often leading to a strong bias toward reactive individualistic solutions to promoting well-being. challenges and strategies in promoting empowering academic settings these challenges and strategies were developed through the authors’ experience in teaching students who were interested, not necessarily interested and uninterested (at least initially), in community psychology content for the past 10 years. while students in the introductory community psychology course are provided with a training level of exposure to all practice competencies, students gain a level of experience in the practice competencies described in the acp program profile. the purpose of sharing these challenges and strategies is to provide practical support to teachers of practice competencies, especially those who may be new to teaching them or who are situated in similar programs hoping to provide students with a meaningful training level of experience with the competencies. challenge 1: embrace diverse learning styles and expand student potential students often arrive academically unprepared in terms of training in foundations of psychology, writing skill, and apa format. additionally, some students have more experience working in communities than others. in recognition of these variations, the following strategies are used to embrace diverse learning styles and expand student potential. strategy 1a: facilitating development of academic writing skills. in the introductory community psychology course (see sarkisian & taylor, 2010 for link to course syllabus), we have developed a detailed final paper rubric to improve clarity of expectations for students’ written work. additionally, we took a developmental learning approach to writing and broke the term paper into three manageable sections due as drafts weeks 3, 5, and 8 of a 10-week quarter. papers are http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 returned a week after they are submitted with comprehensive feedback based on the final paper rubric. students have a week to make revisions for each draft, receive an additional round of feedback, if warranted, and then have a final chance to make revisions before the final paper is turned in on the last day of class. students are only evaluated on the final product they submit the last week of class. in three of the core courses, students develop technical reports, while in the fourth students develop a psychoeducational group or inservice presentation along with the accompanying materials (e.g., curriculum, brochures, informational resources, etc.). the courses with technical reports utilize a similar – write, review, revise, repeat – process, with student groups submitting drafts for feedback before the final product is due the last day of class. materials developed for the psychoeducational groups and inservice training development course are also reviewed and revised throughout the quarter. through the provision of ongoing and timely written feedback during the term of a course, and over multiple academic quarters, we have seen many students advance their academic and professional writing abilities. strategy 1b: course projects. course projects involving multiple learning outcomes (e.g., oral presentations in class and with community partners, group-written technical reports, psychoeducational group and in service training materials – brochures, curricula, informational resources) provide students the opportunity to practice many of the skills needed in their community work after graduation – the ability to communicate with different audiences, write concise informative reports to different stakeholder groups, collaborate effectively, and develop and deliver training. strategy 1c: mentoring. while we certainly strive to mentor students in the more traditional academic activities such as grant writing, applying to doctoral programs, and publishing, we also spend a significant amount of time mentoring students interested in developing or supporting small community-based programs or becoming effective agents of change on small and large scales. part of our efforts to model an inclusive learning environment means that we can’t judge a student’s potential to be an effective agent of change solely on their academic and writing ability, especially when we know it often takes much more. students who may have limited potential to pursue traditional academic activities often possess skill sets (e.g., street credibility) that many academicians do not possess. and students with a history of low quality prior academic experiences typically require extra support with writing and socialization to the expectations of professional psychology and master’s level work. one of our graduates entered our program with a great deal of grass-roots community experience and deep experiential understanding of the transformative value of empowerment and community engagement. a life-long resident of one of the most densely populated, under-resourced communities of los angeles, he experienced life-long exposure to community and interpersonal violence, crime, dysfunctional schools, and inadequate housing. during his youth he had been involved in a gang, struggled with substance abuse, and had numerous entanglements with law enforcement. having sustained over a decade of sobriety and stabilized his own living situation, he came to our program eager to give back to the community in which he lived, very aware of the fact that he needed academic preparation in order to advance his goals and, “for a black man from the hood to be taken seriously by the powers that be.” for nearly a decade he had been running informal parenting classes and support groups for parolees striving to reengage with their children out of his apartment living room. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 his presentation was one of the bravado and overconfidence necessary to survive in a rough neighborhood. he would frequently arrive on campus blaring rap music, toothpick in mouth and hat on head. he struggled with writing in each of his courses, although at a visceral level he “knew” the material and understood it better than some of his more polished peers. he was escorted to the acp specialization director’s office by a member of the admissions staff, who informed the director that she needed to “take care of him.” thus began an 18-month journey of weekly meetings characterized by heart-to-hearts about academic writing and the expectations of a professional environment with respect to attire, engagement, and language usage. the process required deep mutual commitments between student and faculty to make up for years of “well-meaning” teachers and instructors who “let things slide” academically. a significant part of that commitment was one we took as a program to ensure that all students depart the acp with the requisite skills to work effectively in community settings and to carry themselves as professionals. sometimes this meant that 10 or 15 drafts of a paper would exchange hands until it was strong, well-written, and conceptually sound. as an alum of our program, he is now the director of a program at one of the flagship non-profit organizations in los angeles. strategy 1d: student interest as a catalyst for meaningful engagement in coursework and fieldwork. in the introductory community psychology course, we use an exercise to choose student groups where everyone is allowed to put a topic (i.e., social issue) of great interest on the board. then, students vote on the topic most interesting to them, and tally marks are made next to topics. the process of voting is repeated until there are at least two people associated with each topic. topics with no tally marks are erased from the board, and the student groups are formed. in the acp core courses, students choose the organizations with which to collaborate, reinforcing the idea of working on community issues of importance to oneself. students present a summary of their organizational contact and potential issues of focus to the class. thus, students are able to form groups based on their interest in working with a particular organization or population. challenge 2: facilitating conflict, unsafe moments, and a respectful space for academic debate and professional growth when a respectful atmosphere among students can be achieved in the classroom, the opportunity to move from conflict to constructive dialogue often follows. students often have limited conflict resolution skills. and students often carry an expectation that “safety” in the classroom is or can be a constant state. strategy 2a: managing inclusivity and safety in class. through modeling a respectful classroom environment, students are more likely to feel like their viewpoints are included and are more likely to engage in dialogue around values – including conflict of values – and more open to diverse viewpoints. in the introductory community psychology course, value conflicts often emerge and may grow from frustration to personal attacks or attacks on specific groups. ground rules for mutually respectful academic debate, class discussion, and conduct are articulated in the syllabus and reviewed the first day of class (see sarkisian & taylor, 2010 for link to course syllabus), yet conflictual situations often emerge due to the course content and varied perspectives of students. these situations require faculty intervention to stop a bad situation from getting worse, restore safety, model expectations for academic discourse, and have students practice. this is typically accomplished through (1) stopping the conversation or argument, (2) letting everyone take a moment of silence to reflect on the transaction(s) that occurred, (3) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 explaining how and when the conversation went from academic to non-academic, (4) explaining how the conversation could have been continued, often through restoring the focus on observable actions that can be critically examined, and (5) by providing students with an opportunity to continue the discussion. strategy 2b: reading and class discussion. it is often challenging for students, especially in the introductory community psychology course, to recognize and appreciate the positive elements of opposing views. we have had great success in beginning the process of helping students make space for this by discussing ryan’s (1994) fair play and fair share perspectives on equality in class – the idea that equality can have seemingly opposing definitions and the ways society rewards both views. strategy 2c: fieldwork supervision to support the development of confidence in developing practice skills. in the acp core courses, students are often fearful or have a low level of confidence whenever they are in a situation where they have to provide critical feedback to a collaborating community partner. this is common and natural as most of our students are new to community psychology, new to gaining experience with practice competencies, and new to acting in the role of a consultant. thus, we utilize supervision to provide support, modeling, and the opportunity to try out strategies. supervision will often include students practicing difficult conversations with collaborating community partners before they occur. for example, in one section of the program development and evaluation course, a student group was working with a local foundation to develop an evaluation plan for a youth mentoring program for teens in foster care that just completed its first year of operation. upon review of the program documents and informal interviews with program staff, it became clear to the student group that the stated problems of the mentoring program were likely due to no training for mentors, no training in or experience with the child protective service system or the populations served and problems they commonly experience, minimal articulation of the program, and no training in multicultural awareness – and all of the program staff were white and upper class. the group did not want to have this conversation, and the class was upset that the program was allowed to exist. after being told by their instructor that this was a great opportunity, they looked petrified. the student group was asked to list the assets the foundation brings to the table, and they could quickly list them – they want to help, they have resources, and they are open to learning. once the student group was able to make space for an alternative perspective (asset-based), they automatically shifted their strategy from program evaluation to program development – helping the foundation plan training for mentors in all the topics listed above and articulate program goals, objectives, and activities, as they were not yet ready for evaluation. next, they rehearsed the major talking points of the upcoming conversation with their community partner (i.e., the foundation) and became more confident in their new strategy after shifting perspective on their original assessment that the organization was doomed to failure. challenge 3: deepening understanding of the intersection of human diversity and social oppression in a program with a student body as diverse as ours, we are often confronted with students who possess a range of knowledge and experiences with issues of diversity and social oppression. at one end of the spectrum are students who have enjoyed a great deal of social privilege who often have a superficial understanding of diversity and the impact of social oppression. a number of our students http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 have a great deal of theoretical, academic knowledge with respect to diversity issues, theories of power and privilege, and social oppression – with lived experience ranging from none to a great deal. we also have many students who have extensive lived experiences of disempowerment, discrimination, and marginalization. the combination of these experiences, when revealed in class or during the course of collaborative project work, has the potential to create powerful learning experiences for students, faculty, and community partners. we encourage students to deeply explore these understandings. strategy 3a: reading, film, and class discussion. we assign readings and engage in class discussions using articles that illustrate the dehumanizing effects of social oppression on people from diverse backgrounds to raise student awareness of how social oppression manifests into often times well-intentioned but dehumanizing behaviors. these include:  lukes (1974) and gaventa (1980) – three-dimensional approach to social power.  freire (2005) – sadistic love.  sue, et al. (2007) – racial microaggressions in everyday life. we use the film, holding ground: the rebirth of dudley street (mahan, lipman, neuburger, & ragazzi, 1996) as a tool for understanding social ecology, diversity, and social oppression. the film chronicles the rebirth of a community through citizen action and engagement. the film serves as an important catalyst for discussion of how residents of poor, marginalized communities are disproportionately impacted by failed social policies and easily fall prey to community redevelopment initiatives that do not include local residents in the plans for the future. strategy 3b: fieldwork supervision. through supervision of student fieldwork with collaborative partners, faculty are able to utilize the experiences of student work groups in raising awareness of social oppression and diversity issues with the entire class. some of these methods include: confronting privilege directly, directing students to appropriate resources, helping students engage in difficult conversations with themselves or community partners, and modeling conflict resolution or reframing skills. challenge 4: raising awareness of the paradoxical nature of organizations, social systems, and institutions students often have a limited understanding of how organizations and social systems function and expect they operate in logical ways. when they raise their awareness of the paradoxical nature of how the collaborating community partners function, students often become frustrated in their process of accepting the world as it is, especially when their work involves balancing high hopes with planning realistic change efforts with community groups and organizations. strategy 4a: evidence of differences “you” can make. providing examples of acp student projects is an effective strategy to illustrate the very real ways in which master’s level students can enact their values through their work with communities. it also provides newer students with concrete examples of the scope of change they can expect to create during their time in the acp specialization. strategy 4b: reading and class discussion. through assigned readings and class discussion in the introductory community psychology course, we try to encourage students to shift from introspection to focusing on understanding community conditions and populations affected by utilizing outside resources. students who are not in the acp specialization often begin their approach by conceptualizing solutions with little or no information from outside sources. our challenge is to help students shift their way of thinking so they develop a deeper http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 understanding of the problem from multiple sources before conceptualizing how things could change. understanding the paradoxical nature and iatrogenic effect of service systems and treatment-only approaches helps raise student awareness of the complexity of the way things are in the world. some of our favorite resources for stimulating these discussions include:  ryan (1971) – blaming the victim.  seidman & rappaport (1986) – unexamined premises of social problem definition.  mcknight (1991) – the iatrogenic effects of social services on clients and communities.  freire (2005) – challenging the status quo through exploring the banking model of education vs. the problem posing model.  albee (1995) – the role of exploitation in preventing mental health problems.  weick (1986) – small wins to illustrate how realistic changes can occur. strategy 4c: structured fieldwork to purposefully shift the sand. the acp specialization is structured in such a way that students conduct fieldwork in all core courses and engage in real world learning. students quickly come to the realization that how things are done in the books is usually not how they are done in the real world. sometimes things change mid-course and without warning (e.g., programs close, leadership changes, newly identified information changes scope of work, etc.). these unplanned changes force students to develop their ability to adapt to new situations in the role of a consultant. while students choose the community partners they work with, the community partners identify the initial scope of work because we know consultants are not hired to work on issues they are interested in if they have little or no relevance to the community partner’s stated needs. we are most successful in our mentoring of students’ fieldwork when we adopt freire’s (2005) approach, valuing students as capable, competent learners who have the ability to problem solve and act effectively in community settings. strategy 4d: management of student fieldwork to promote the likelihood of a positive field learning experience. an important component to our supervision of students’ fieldwork is not letting them take on more than they can accomplish in a ten-week quarter. student workload is formalized through letters of agreement students develop with the community partners. letters of agreement begin as a conversation with community partners; students then develop a draft of their letter of agreement, and it is reviewed several times by faculty and the community partner before it is signed. with this structured groundwork, supervision can then shift to supporting students’ practice activities, especially when they are in the thick of confusion, anxiety, and uncertainty about aspects of their consultations with community partners. challenge 5: conceptualizing problems and solutions with an ecological lens because students are socialized and complete coursework and clinical training within the larger clinical psychology program, they often conceptualize problems and focus on solutions that are exclusively individualistic or psychological in nature. teaching the levels of analysis and principles of ecology (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010) in the introductory community psychology course is consistently a challenge. strategy 5a: conceptual tools. conceptual tools are useful in bridging the theorypractice divide. the levels of analysis and principles of ecology provide a useful structure, both in understanding the problem and in developing social change strategies. in the introductory community psychology http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 course, students discuss, develop charts of social issues using the levels of analysis and principles of ecology on the dry-erase board, and define the levels, illustrate principles of ecology, and propose multilevel change efforts to address a community issue in their term papers. in core coursework, such as the consultation and community collaboration course, students develop an ecoorganizational genogram (similar to a family genogram used in psychotherapy) to visualize how their community partner organization fits into a larger community context. understanding the larger context often leads to the tapping of previously overlooked community resources and conceptualizing solutions from an ecological lens. strategy 5b: experiential learning exercise. the system (sarkisian, 2016) is a multi-level social service simulation that provides students with an opportunity to experience the role of a client, front-line worker, or administrator in a changing system. the purpose of the exercise is to stimulate ecological thinking in the context of social power. after the exercise, a debriefing process occurs where students read their scripts and share their experience in their role. the system changers (i.e., administrators) describe their roles last, and through reading their scripts, reveal the driving forces of change that took place during the exercise. just as the students come to the realization of how oppressive social service systems can be, we shift our discussion to empowerment. strategy 5c: multiple supervised practice experiences. there is no substitute for practice. through the four acp core courses and field study course, students are guaranteed five structured learning opportunities to develop a training level of experience in ecological perspectives and other practice competencies over time. challenge 6: developing capacity to be an effective collaborator students sometimes have limited experience and skills in collaboration. students require the most support in developing this skill when fieldwork in the acp core courses nears the end of the quarter. we consider collaboration to be the glue that bonds the practice competencies taught in the acp specialization together. thus, practicing collaboration through experiential learning is part of every course – in class exercises, small group processes between students, field work in real world settings, facilitating experiences for students to develop new professional roles (e.g., consultant, evaluator), and training students how to utilize practical tools for community building. strategy 6a: small group processes. the group goals exercise (marrero & sarkisian, 2010) is used in the introductory community psychology course and several of the acp core courses. this exercise prompts students working in groups to collectively develop principles to guide their group process in successfully achieving various course outcomes (e.g., final paper, technical reports, class presentations, presentations to community partners). students rate themselves and their group partners at specific intervals throughout the quarter and have time to discuss their ratings, reformulate principles to guide group process, and raise their awareness of their work with other partners. strategy 6b: experiential learning exercise. the community coalition simulation (wolff & sarkisian, 2013) is an exercise that simulates the work of a community coalition facing many challenges. participants are provided roles and scripts and have the opportunity to practice collaborating under conditions that were based on real work with coalitions. this exercise includes follow up questions related to multiple practice competencies, but the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 focus of the simulated coalition’s work is on collaboration during the exercise. strategy 6c: facilitating opportunities for role expansion. by having students do all of the legwork in developing relationships and letters of agreement with community partners for acp core courses and field study, we have found students develop a stronger sense of responsibility and accountability that helps them develop their skills in collaboration. strategy 6d: facilitating opportunities to develop a training level of experience with practice tools that utilize collaboration and are relatively simple to learn and apply. two such practice tools include the tearless logic model (lien, et al., 2011) and the community narration approach (olson & jason, 2011). we have utilized these tools in the program development and evaluation course as well as in various acp elective workshops. conclusion the current article presents a program profile (i.e., student demographics, curriculum and community psychology practice competencies, fieldwork, and program entry/non-entry) to develop a training context within which faculty face challenges in promoting empowering academic settings. next, the authors presented six challenges and accompanying strategies they use to promote a training level of exposure and experience with community psychology practice competencies. (1) embrace diverse learning styles and expand student potential: 1a. facilitating development of academic writing skills; 1b. course projects; 1c. mentoring; and 1d. student interest as a catalyst for meaningful engagement in coursework and fieldwork. (2) facilitating conflict, unsafe moments, and a respectful space for academic debate and professional growth: 2a. managing inclusivity and safety in class; 2b. reading and class discussion; and 2c. fieldwork supervision to support the development of confidence in developing practice skills. (3) deepening understanding of the intersection of human diversity and social oppression: 3a. reading, film, and class discussion and 3b. fieldwork supervision. (4) raising awareness to the paradoxical nature of organizations, social systems, and institutions: 4a. evidence of differences “you” can make; 4b. reading and class discussion; 4c. structured fieldwork to purposefully shift the sand; and 4d. management of student fieldwork to promote the likelihood of a positive field learning experience. (5) conceptualizing problems and solutions with an ecological lens: 5a. conceptual tools; 5b. experiential learning exercise – the system; and 5c. multiple supervised practice experiences. (6) developing capacity to be an effective collaborator: 6a. small group processes; 6b. experiential learning exercise – community coalition simulation; http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 6c. facilitating opportunities for role expansion; and 6d. facilitating opportunities to develop a training level of experience with practice tools that utilize collaboration and are relatively simple to learn and apply. references albee, g. w. (1995). counseling and primary prevention. counseling psychology quarterly, 8(3), 205-211. dalton, j., & wolfe, s. (2012). competencies for community psychology practice: draft for review. the community psychologist 45(4), 714. freire, p. (2005). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum. gaventa, j. (1980). power and participation. in power and powerlessness: quiescence and rebellion in an appalachian valley (pp. 3-32). chicago, il: university of chicago press. iscoe, i., & spielberger, c. d. (eds.). (1970). community psychology: perspectives in training and research. new york: appletoncentury-crofts. kelly, j. g. (1970). antidotes for arrogance: training for community psychology. american psychologist, 25, 524-531. kelly, j. g. (1971). qualities for the community psychologist. american psychologist, 26, 897-903. kloos, b. (2010). creating setting for training in collaborative community practice. the community psychologist, 43(2), 10. lien, a. d., greenleaf, j. p., lemke, m. k., hakim, s. m., swink, n. p., wright, r., & meissen, g. (2011). tearless logic model. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(2), 1-12. retrieved 19/05/2016, from http://www.gjcpp.org/. lukes, s. (1974). power: a radical view. london: the macmillan press ltd. mahan, l., lipman, m., neuburger, j., & ragazzi, c. (1996). holding ground: the rebirth of dudley street. [n.j.]: new day films. marrero, l., & sarkisian, g. v. (2010). learning and teaching collaboration in the applied community psychology (acp) specialization. the community psychologist, 43(4), 15-16. mcknight, j. (1991). services are bad for people: you’re either a citizen or a client. organizing, sp/sum, 45-48. nelson, g., & prilleltensky, i. (2010). community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and well-being (2nd ed.). palgrave macmillan. [isbn: 978-0-230-21995-3] newbrough, j. r. (1972). community psychology. american psychologist, 27, 770772. newbrough, j. r. (1973). community psychology: a new holism. american journal of community psychology, 1, 201-211. olson, b. d., & jason, l. a. (2011). the community narration (cn) approach: understanding a group’s identity and cognitive constructs through personal and community narratives. global journal of community practice, 2(1), 1-7. retrieved 19/05/2016, from http://www.gjcpp.org/. ryan, w. (1971). blaming the victim. new york: random house. ryan, w. (1994). many cooks, brave men, apples, and oranges: how people think about equality. american journal of community psychology, 22(1), 25-35. sarkisian, g. v. (2016). the system: a multilevel social service simulation. manuscript submitted for publication. sarkisian, g. v., saleem, m. a., simpkin, j., weidenbacher, a., bartko, n., & taylor, s. (2013). a learning journey ii: learned course maps as a basis to explore how students learned community psychology practice competencies in a community coalition http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 building course. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), 1-12. retrieved 12/5/2016, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). sarkisian, g. v. & taylor, s. (2010). psy 545a community psychology: theories and methods (3 units). division 2 of the american psychological association, society for the teaching of psychology, office of teaching resources in psychology, project syllabus.http://teachpsych.org/resources/do cuments/otrp/syllabi/gs10community.pdf. sarkisian, g. v. & taylor, s. (2013). a learning journey i: curriculum mapping as a tool to assess and integrate community psychology practice competencies in graduate education programs. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), xx-xx. retrieved 12/5/2016, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). seidman, e., & rappaport, j. (1986). framing the issues. in e. seidman & j. rappaport (eds.), redefining social problems (pp. 1-8). new york: plenum press. sue, d.w., capodilupo, c.m., torino, g.c., bucceri, j.m., holder, a.m.b., nadal, k.l., & esquilin, m. (2007). racial microaggressions in everyday life: implications for clinical practice. american psychologist, 62(4), 271286. taylor, s., & sarkisian, g. v. (2010). applied community psychology specialization: seven year program review self-study (winter 2002spring 2009). antioch university, los angeles: authors. taylor, s., & sarkisian, g. v. (2011). community psychology values-driven pedagogy: the foundation for empowering educational settings. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(2), 19-30. retrieved 12/5/2016, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). weick, k. (1986). small wins: redefining the scale of social issues. in e. seidman & j. rappaport (eds.), redefining social problems (pp. 29-48). new york: plenum press. weinstein, r. s. (1981). teaching community intervention in a clinical program: reflections in the themes of supervision. american journal of community psychology, 9, 681-696. wolff, t., & sarkisian, g. v. (2013). community coalition simulation: experiential learning of community psychology practice competencies. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), xx-xx. retrieved 12/5/2016, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ gregor v. sarkisian and sylvie taylor antioch university los angeles abstract applied community psychology (acp) specialization program profile acp student demographics curriculum and community psychology practice competencies fieldwork related to core courses challenges and strategies in promoting empowering academic settings challenge 1: embrace diverse learning styles and expand student potential conclusion (1) embrace diverse learning styles and expand student potential: 1a. facilitating development of academic writing skills; 1b. course projects; 1c. mentoring; and 1d. student interest as a catalyst for meaningful engagement in coursework and fieldwork. (2) facilitating conflict, unsafe moments, and a respectful space for academic debate and professional growth: 2a. managing inclusivity and safety in class; 2b. reading and class discussion; and 2c. fieldwork supervision to support the development of confidence in developing practice skills. (3) deepening understanding of the intersection of human diversity and social oppression: 3a. reading, film, and class discussion and 3b. fieldwork supervision. (4) raising awareness to the paradoxical nature of organizations, social systems, and institutions: 4a. evidence of differences “you” can make; 4b. reading and class discussion; 4c. structured fieldwork to purposefully shift the sand; and 4d. management of student fieldwork to promote the likelihood of a positive field learning experience. (5) conceptualizing problems and solutions with an ecological lens: 5a. conceptual tools; 5b. experiential learning exercise – the system; and 5c. multiple supervised practice experiences. (6) developing capacity to be an effective collaborator: 6a. small group processes; 6b. experiential learning exercise – community coalition simulation; 6c. facilitating opportunities for role expansion; and 6d. facilitating opportunities to develop a training level of experience with practice tools that utilize collaboration and are relatively simple to learn and apply. references community-level resources bolstering resilience to hiv/aids: perspectives of middle-aged and older men who have sex with men living with hiv/aids renato m. liboro1, 2, tammy c. yates3, charles fehr2, george da silva2, francisco ibañez-carrasco4 ,5, andrew d. eaton6, daniel pugh5, 7, lori e. ross2, 4, and paul a. shuper2, 4 keywords: community-level resources, resilience, hiv/aids, middle-aged and older, men who have sex with men author biographies: renato (rainier) m. liboro, md, phd, is an assistant professor of the department of psychology of the university of nevada, las vegas (unlv), usa, and a collaborator scientist of the institute for mental health policy research of the centre for addiction and mental health, toronto, canada. he is also the director of the community health advocacy for minority populations, immigrants, and other newcomers, and their mental health (champion mental health) research lab at unlv, and the academic research involvement and engagement liaison of the lgbtq center of southern nevada. his community-based participatory research focuses on health disparities that impact the mental health and wellbeing of racial/ethnic and sexual/gender minorities, newcomers, older adults, and people living with hiv/aids and other hidden/episodic disabilities. tammy c. yates, is the executive director of realize, which hosts the secretariat of the national coordinating committee on hiv and aging, as well as the national community advisory group on optimal health and wellbeing in hiv. in 2015, tammy became the first black female executive director of a national organization in canada’s hiv response, as well as among canada’s national disability organizations. she has worked for over fifteen years in the field of program management. prior to joining realize, tammy was the national program manager of the united nations population fund (unfpa) trinidad and tobago branch office. she has extensive experience in gender and development, and sexual and reproductive health, including hiv/aids, having worked previously as a program officer with the secretariat of the caribbean regional network of persons living with hiv (crn+), and served as chair of the gender theme group of the united nations system in trinidad and tobago. she is a graduate of wolfson college, cambridge university, england, and the university of the west indies, st. augustine, trinidad. charles fehr, is currently a research assistant at the institute for mental health policy research at the centre for addiction and mental health, working as a peer researcher for the "older and tougher: gbmsm 1 university of nevada, las vegas, nv, usa 2 centre for addiction and mental health, toronto, on, canada 3 realize, toronto, on, canada 4 university of toronto, on, canada 5 universities without walls, toronto, on, canada 6 university of regina, saskatoon, sk, canada 7 casey house, toronto, on, canada global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 resilience against hiv/aids" project. he has a masters in applied social psychology where he focused on the effects of prejudicial attitudes and behaviors on members of the lgbtq community within the context of the workplace. he has previous experience conducting needs assessments and evaluations of student and health services. charles is a member of the re:searching 2slgbtq+ health team at the dalla lana school of public health of the university of toronto. he has also worked as a coordinator facilitating research on gbmsm health with the cruiselab team at factor inwentash, faculty of social work of the university of toronto. charles is interested in continuing to pursue research on 2slgbtq+ health outcomes and working in research administration. hivpositive for over 20 years, george da silva, has been a peer researcher since 2017 and a dedicated volunteer in the community for a very long time. he became a peer researcher so that he could share and utilize his own lived experiences, as well as listen and learn from others’ stories. he has been involved in numerous research projects that have been conducted through the centre for addiction and mental health, realize, the map centre for urban health solutions of st. michael’s hospital, and the university of toronto. these research projects have focused on a wide range of topics from hiv/aids to homelessness. francisco ibanez-carrasco, phd is an assistant professor at the dalla lana school of public health, university of toronto, a member of the canadainternational hiv and rehabilitation research collaborative (cihrrc) and a fiction/non-fiction author. his research focuses on physical and cognitive rehabilitation in the context of hiv, queer men’s sexual health, elearning for public health, hiv stigma, and autopathography (patientoriented medical narratives). andrew d. eaton, phd is an assistant professor at the university of regina’s faculty of social work, saskatoon campus. his research focuses on addressing complexities of living and aging and hiv/aids, including interventions to alleviate the burden of cognitive impairment and peer support to ease hospital discharge. his research has received funding from the canadian institutes of health research (cihr), the cihr hiv trials network (ctn), and the ontario hiv treatment network (ohtn). he is an ohtn endgame leader. he completed his phd and master of social work at the university of toronto. daniel pugh, msw, is a registered social worker, psychotherapist, and mental health clinician at casey house, the first and only stand-alone hospital for people living with hiv/aids in toronto, ontario, canada. he completed his master of social work from the university of toronto factor inwentash faculty of social work in 2015. as a clinical social worker and mental health professional, he is eager to refine a practice that is trauma informed, anti-oppressive, sex-positive, decolonized, and rooted in harm reduction. he incorporates and affirms these values into his practice as a result of engaging in theory and practice with clients, community, peers, colleagues, and evidence. lori e. ross, phd, is an associate professor in the division of social and behavioural health sciences, dalla lana school of public health, university of toronto. she is an established interdisciplinary scholar in the field of sexual and gender minority (2slgbtq+) health. her current program of research focuses predominantly on qualitative and mixed methods investigations of health determinants and experiences for diverse members of the 2slgbtq+ communities, as well as developing and evaluating interventions to address identified disparities. paul a. shuper, phd, is a senior scientist and section head in the institute for mental health policy research at the centre for addiction and mental health in toronto, ontario, canada. his research focuses on identifying and addressing the impact of addictions and mental health concerns on the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, particularly hiv. some of his current initiatives in this area include 1) an nih/niaaafunded rct that seeks to improve hiv pre-exposure prophylaxis (prep) treatment outcomes among gay and bisexual men by addressing underlying hazardous alcohol consumption, substance use, and depression through a brief e-intervention; 2) a cihr-funded initiative that examines alcohol’s impact on the pronounced hiv and tb epidemics among mineworkers in south africa; and http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.dlsph.utoronto.ca/faculty-profile/ibanez-carrasco-francisco/ https://www.dlsph.utoronto.ca/faculty-profile/ibanez-carrasco-francisco/ http://cihrrc.hivandrehab.ca/ http://cihrrc.hivandrehab.ca/ https://givingitraw.ca/ https://givingitraw.ca/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 3) a cihr-funded initiative that seeks to identify means of addressing alcohol, substance use, and mental health concerns among youth living with hiv in zimbabwe. based on his program of research, dr. shuper has served as a scientific expert in the area of alcohol and hiv for the world health organization. in january 2020, dr. shuper received an ontario hiv treatment network “innovator” award for his work in the field of hiv. recommended citation: liboro, r. m., yates, t. c., fehr, c., silva, g. d., ibañez-carrasco, f., eaton, a. d., pugh, d., ross, l. e., & shuper, p. a. (2021). community-level resources bolstering resilience to hiv/aids: perspectives of middle-aged and older men who have sex with men living with hiv/aids. global journal of community psychology practice, 12(4), 1 26. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: renato (rainier) m. liboro, phd, department of psychology, university of nevada, las vegas, usa. email: renato.liboro@unlv.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:renato.liboro@unlv.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 community-level resources bolstering resilience to hiv/aids: perspectives of middle-aged and older men who have sex with men living with hiv/aids abstract most prior research on resilience to hiv/aids has utilized quantitative tools (e.g., scales and surveys) to examine individual-level assets (e.g., self-efficacy, hope, optimism) that researchers believe represent or approximate resilience to hiv/aids with minimal consideration for the perspectives of men who have sex with men (msm), the population that has remained at greatest risk of, and the most impacted by hiv/aids in north america since the 1980s. the aim of this qualitative study is to identify community-level resources that bolster resilience to hiv/aids based specifically on the perspectives and lived experiences of middle-aged and older (mao) msm living with hiv/aids. employing a community-based participatory research (cbpr) approach involving the meaningful and active engagement of msm at multiple levels (i.e., as research team members, peer researchers, community advisory board representatives, community partners, and study participants), forty-one mao msm living with hiv/aids from ontario, canada, were included in the study’s semi-structured interviews. utilizing thematic analysis, four major themes were identified from the interview data: (a) the 2slgbtq+ community; (b) community-based not-for-profit organizations; (c) public health services; and (d) neighbourhood support programs. this article discusses the value of community-level resources as important additions to individual-level assets for bolstering resilience to hiv/aids, as well as the implications of the study’s findings and limitations for future hiv/aids services and research. since the beginning of the hiv/aids epidemic in the early 1980s, gay, bisexual, two-spirit, and other men who have sex with men (msm) have remained the population most affected by hiv/aids in canada (haddad et al., 2019; public health agency of canada [phac], 2013) and the united states (rhodes & wong, 2016; singh et al., 2018), and thus continue to be a crucial focus of population health and social science research today. most extant research on hiv/aids among msm has focused on msm’s increased risk of, and vulnerabilities to hiv infection; leading many researchers to call attention to the limitations of deficits-based research (halkitis et al., 2017; mcnair et al., 2018). for example, in their article discussing prevention research for gay and bisexual men, herrick and colleagues (2014) argued that interventions developed from strengths-based approaches may account for variances in health outcomes not identified in deficits-based research, and may very well increase participation of, and reach to, individuals who are most at risk. they pointed out that a resilience-focused approach to health disparities research among msm could contribute to improving intervention effect sizes, and promoting health further through the identification of new variables and mechanisms for health promotion that can be incorporated into hiv/aids interventions (herrick et al., 2014). in addition, herrick and colleagues (2011) described resilience to hiv/aids among msm as an “untapped resource” for behavioral intervention. they emphasized that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 harnessing naturally occurring strengths and resiliencies may further enhance already effective programs, which could provide additional effectiveness in reversing hiv transmission trends among msm. on the basis of a scoping review of strengthsbased approaches to two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (2slgbtq+) health research, colpitts and gahagan (2016) found the concept of resilience to be a key conceptual framework for understanding and measuring 2slgbtq+ health. like herrick and colleagues (2014), colpitts and gahagan (2016) championed the utility of resilience in health disparities research, particularly on different sexual and gender minority health foci (e.g., hiv/aids, depression, problematic substance use). resilience can be understood as “the element of risk being mitigated by protective factors to produce a positive outcome adjustment” (stewart et al., 1999). it commonly refers to the ability to recover from, withstand, or overcome significant illness, stress, or adversity (colpitts & gahagan, 2016). resilience has also been described as a “positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity” (luthar et al., 2000), and theorized by scholars both as “a trait and a process” (halkitis et al., 2017). in the context of living with hiv/aids, and for the distinct purpose of this article, resilience is defined and understood as the capacity to: (a) survive the clinical and social impacts of hiv/aids; (b) live full lives despite a chronic illness; (c) thrive despite challenges brought about by hiv stigma and discrimination; and (d) purposefully contribute to the goal of ending the hiv/aids epidemic. evidence for resilience among msm is widespread in both scientific literature and historical accounts of sexual and gender minority culture (colpitts & gahagan, 2016; herrick et al., 2014; herrick et al., 2011). it is well documented that experiences of adversity such as 2slgbtq+ discrimination, and marginalization due to hiv stigma, are associated with increases in co-occurring psychosocial health problems (i.e., syndemics) that affect each other adversely and synergistically (herrick et al., 2014; o’leary et al., 2014). despite this, research has shown that many msm exhibit resilience to both the effects of adversity, and the impacts of hiv syndemics (herrick et al., 2011), which has prompted researchers to study potential resilience factors (e.g., optimism, education) that may buffer against syndemics typically associated with higher rates of self-reported high-risk sexual behaviors and hiv infections (hart et al., 2010; o’leary et al., 2014; stall et al., 2003). resilience can be expressed at individual-, collective-, or community-levels (dulin et al., 2018; emlet et al., 2010; emlet et al., 2019; torres de carvalho et al., 2007). it has been described as a concept that is comprised of both individual-level assets (i.e., referring to internally held factors such as self-efficacy or coping skills), and collectiveor communitylevel resources (i.e., factors external to the individual, such as parental support or community-based organizations), which enable individuals to withstand or overcome challenges in their lives (dulin et al., 2018; fergus & zimmerman, 2005). while there has been some published research examining primarily individual-level (i.e., intrapersonal, interpersonal, and behavioral) intervention assets or attributes for promoting resilience to hiv/aids dedicated to the context of young msm (harper et al., 2014; rhodes & wong, 2016), there has been relatively little empirical research done to explore community-level resources for bolstering resilience to hiv/aids; particularly, research focused on middle-aged and older (mao) [i.e., 40 years and older] msm living with hiv/aids (phac, 2013), the subpopulation among all msm living with hiv/aids that to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 this day continues to be most affected by hiv/aids since the start of the epidemic (centers for disease control and prevention [cdc], 2016; cdc, 2019; haddad et al., 2019; phac, 2013). some researchers and community advocates have emphasized the importance of keeping in mind the resilience that mao msm have exhibited most of their lives in the face of institutionalized homophobia and ageism, mistrust of medical and social service institutions, mental health issues, and/or hiv stigma and discrimination in the healthcare system, as well as the community-level resources mao msm access and capitalize on to bolster their resilience to the clinical and social impacts of hiv/aids (brotman et al., 2003; emlet et al., 2010; emlet et al., 2019; genke, 2004; halkitis et al., 2017). related to this, the majority of research conducted on resilience to hiv/aids in the past decade has historically been quantitative studies that employed surveys, scales, and general measures to approximate the concept of resilience to hiv/aids, which were neither tailored for the context, nor developed with the perspectives and input, of people living with hiv/aids (plwh) (dulin et al., 2018; gottert et al., 2019). the aim of the qualitative study discussed in this article was to address these apparent research gaps – in partnership with mao msm, identify and examine community-level resources that bolster resilience to hiv/aids based specifically on the perspectives and lived experiences of a diverse group of mao msm living with hiv/aids. method for this qualitative study, a communitybased participatory research (cbpr) approach (israel et al., 1998) that emphasized the importance of community engagement, stakeholder partnership, and the greater and meaningful involvement of plwh in population health research (roy & cain, 2001; travers et al., 2008), was utilized. from the beginning of the research process, a collaborative relationship was established between the research team and the project’s primary community partner organization, realize(https://www.realizecanada.org/en/). realize is a community-based organization that fosters positive change for plwh and other episodic disabilities. with the support of realize, a community advisory board (cab), comprised of mao msm and providers from 2slgbtq+ agencies and aids service organizations (asos), was created to collaborate with the research team and community partners in order to identify and determine the study’s aim, methodology, and target population. the study’s aim, procedures, and intended conduct were reviewed and approved by the research ethics board (reb) of the centre for addiction and mental health in toronto, canada. peer researchers mao msm were meaningfully involved in the project in several ways. mao msm were involved as research team and cab members with the opportunity, agency, and autonomy to provide feedback and input at every stage of the research process. they were also involved as community-based organization partners supporting the study’s participant recruitment process; as study participants; and as peer researchers. in the context of the project, peer researchers were members of the research team from the community with lived experiences relevant to the study’s research questions. two peer researchers were screened, selected, and provided training and financial compensation while they actively participated in the recruitment, scheduling, and co-interviewing of study participants, as well as in the project’s data management, analysis, and knowledge mobilization stages. capacity-building aspects http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 in the data collection, analysis, and dissemination stages of the project were adapted from an existing published modular curriculum (eaton, 2019; eaton et al., 2018; ibañez-carrasco et al., 2020). the research team and cab members believed that these capacity-building aspects were very important to not only promote the meaningful and greater involvement of mao msm at risk of or living with hiv/aids in the project, but also increase opportunities to enrich all stages of the research process by incorporating the input of relevant stakeholders whose significant lived and work experiences were critical to achieving the study’s research aim and goals (ibañezcarrasco et al., 2019). table 1. participant characteristics (n = 41) characteristics n% age range 40 – 44 years old 7(17) 45 – 49 years old 8(20) 50 – 54 years old 10(24) 55 – 59 years old 7(17) 60 – 64 years old 5(12) 65 – 69 years old 1 (3) 70 years old 3 (7) identifies as gay 30 (73) bisexual 7 (17) two=spirit 3 (7) msm 1 (3) gender identity cis 40 (97) trans 1 (3) race/ethnicity aboriginal 2 (5) african/caribbean/black 8 (20) hispanic/latino 4 (10) white 17 (41) south/southeast asian 7 (17) west asian/middle eastern 3 (7) geographical location downtown toronto 30 (73) greater toronto area 8 (20) southwestern ontario 3 (7) participants study participants were recruited in accordance with recommendations from the cab members and different community partners. individuals were included in the study if they identified as msm, were 40 years of age or older, and already living with hiv/aids for at least one year. they also had to reside in central or southwestern ontario, canada, at the time of the interviews. prospective participants were invited to join the study using reb pre-approved ad flyers posted on the websites and at the premises of different 2slgbtq+ agencies and asos across ontario, and reb pre-approved email recruitment messages sent out through participating community partners’ listservs. forty-one mao msm living with hiv/aids participated in the study between february to june 2019. the participants represented a diverse group of mao msm living with hiv/aids in terms of age range, race or ethnicity, geographical area of residence, and other sociodemographic characteristics (table 1). procedures participants were co-interviewed by the first author and one of the two peer researchers in 1-1.5 hour long, digitally recorded sessions, either at the office of one of the two interviewers, or in a secure room of a community-based organization of the participant’s choosing. interviews followed a semi-structured interview guide, which was developed and finalized in collaboration with the cab members and community partners. the guide utilized primarily open-ended questions to: (a) explore the lived experiences of the participants as mao msm living with hiv/aids; (b) identify community-level resources that participants believed bolstered their resilience to the clinical and social impacts of hiv/aids; and (c) examine the reasons why participants http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 believed these community-level resources bolstered their resilience to hiv/aids. participants were sampled across central and southwestern ontario until data saturation for major themes was reached (i.e., no new information relevant to the major themes emerged as additional interviews were conducted). each participant provided informed consent prior to their interviews and received $25 as compensation for their time and participation. interviews were transcribed verbatim by the peer researchers, and the transcripts were then verified by the first author prior to the data analysis. analysis due to its inherent flexibility, thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006) was chosen as the method to analyze the interview data. it was deemed the best approach to fulfill the study’s aim because its epistemological and theoretical freedom allowed for a flexible examination of the different perspectives derived from the diverse interview sources. because of the significant likelihood that the project’s other research team members, cab members, and community partners would personally know many of the prospective mao msm living with hiv/aids who would participate in the interviews from their previous work interactions, the raw data were only made accessible to the interviewers (i.e., the first author and peer researchers). this decision was made to allay prospective participants’ reluctance and apprehensions on the possibility of being identified in the interview transcripts and further ensure privacy and confidentiality in the research process. the first author and the two peer researchers conducted the initial phase of the analysis. prior to coding, the first author read and reread all the interview transcripts to gain intimate knowledge of the data, and then chose 10 transcripts that would represent the data set in terms of participant characteristics, perspectives, and contexts (e.g., age range, race or ethnicity, geographical area of residence) for the two peer researchers to read and re-read. as separate coders, the first author and the two peer researchers identified initial codes, and then searched and reviewed for themes from the 10 representative transcripts. next, the three coders met and compared their initial codes and themes. together, they defined and named emerging codes, subthemes, and themes to create a codebook, which they used for the analysis of the remaining 31 transcripts. the three coders then independently employed selective coding on the remaining 31 transcripts using the codebook to refine the findings of the interview data in an iterative process. after this initial phase of the analysis, the three coders produced a de-identified report containing the themes, subthemes, and supporting quotes for the rest of the research team and cab members to review. at subsequent phases, the rest of the research team and the cab members reviewed the deidentified report with aggregated data, and provided feedback on the themes, subthemes, extracts, and overall quality of the report. this process was conducted using different techniques to establish credibility (i.e., source triangulation), confirmability (i.e., reflexivity, analyst triangulation), transferability (i.e. thick description), dependability (i.e. external audit), as well as uphold the trustworthiness and rigor of the study’s findings and analysis (lincoln & guba, 1985). while several themes were identified from the interview data during the analytic process, this article focuses specifically on themes pertaining to the community-level resources that participants identified and believed bolstered their resilience to the clinical and social impacts of hiv/aids. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 pseudonyms were used for each participant to maintain their anonymity and privacy. results four major themes related to communitylevel resources that bolster resilience to the clinical and social impacts of hiv/aids were identified based on the perspectives and lived experiences of the participants. the themes were: (a) the 2slgbtq+ community; (b) community-based not-for-profit organizations; (c) public health services; and (d) neighbourhood support programs. although some of the community-level resources that the participants identified were sources of emotional and social support for them, the resources described in this article were included in this section because they were primarily discussed by the participants as resources that bolstered resilience to the clinical and social impacts of hiv/aids in other specific ways, in addition to being sources of emotional and social support. the 2slgbtq+ community according to more than half of the participating mao msm living with hiv/aids, the presence of an established 2slgbtq+ community in toronto and the other urban areas in southwestern and central ontario at the time of their hiv/aids diagnosis was a huge resource for them in terms of overcoming the clinical and social impacts of hiv/aids. they revealed that from word-ofmouth spread of information in the 2slgbtq+ community, they were able to gather important facts on hiv; news on where to find family doctors, hiv specialists, and mental health professionals who could help them; and updates on clinical treatments and community services. the participants stated that aside from being a source of vital information, the 2slgbtq+ community was also a valuable resource in terms of different types of support during the early epidemic. many msm came together to assist and console each other; lesbian women stepped up to provide practical care; queer community members connected them to needed health and social services; and drag queens tirelessly raised funds. gary recalled, “we all became increasingly aware of how amazing drag queens are at fund-raising for causes in our community.” the 2slgbtq+ community also became a primary resource for socialization and social support. jonathan explained, “i gradually started coming out and disclosing my [hiv] status to people in the community. that was helpful, it started taking the pressure off [me]. i could just be myself with more and more people. they were supportive. there were lots of other queer folks around, including role models i could look up to. i started building my social network, and eventually, the majority of my friends were from the queer community.” members of the 2slgbtq+ community gathered together in solidarity to look out for each other, organize human rights campaigns, and advocate for their most basic needs, especially for those who were recently diagnosed with hiv/aids. these actions led to the creation of different activist groups, grassroots movements, local agencies, and service organizations in toronto, and eventually, across the province of ontario; all of which were dedicated to address the dire circumstances of msm living with hiv/aids at that time. the 2slgbtq+ community also gave the participants an opportunity to become productive despite their challenges and feel good about their productivity. pat recalled his earlier experiences in toronto, “i participated and did a lot of nonprofit work in the community. i http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 believed that was part of my therapy in getting over the loss [of many people to hiv/aids]. trying to give something back to the community. it was for my mental health. because i had education as an aboriginal person that many others didn’t, i always felt it was important to give back. i wanted to make sure aboriginal issues were brought forward in the community.” community-based not-for-profit organizations the second theme that was identified in the interview data as community-level resources bolstering resilience to hiv/aids based on the perspectives and live experiences of mao msm living with hiv/aids was communitybased not-for-profit organizations. there were two types of community-based not-forprofit organizations that participants pointed out and discussed in the interviews: (a) 2slbtq+ agencies, and (b) asos. even before they were diagnosed with hiv/aids, many participants were already accessing services related to hiv/aids (i.e., information, prevention programs, referrals) from both 2slgbtq+ agencies and asos. 2slgbtq+ agencies nearly one fifth of participant specifically mentioned how helpful 2slgbtq+ not-forprofit agencies in the community were over the years. 2slgbtq+ not-for-profit agencies increasingly provided much needed services and referrals to them, especially in the last thirty years. the 519 (known then as the 519 church street community centre) and the gay men’s sexual health alliance were repeatedly mentioned in a positive light by participants. among the services and programs these agencies provided, assistance with referrals to doctors and other healthcare and support services, information about hiv prevention, venues for stakeholder gatherings and meetings, and refugee and legal aid services, were the most singled out in the interviews. arthur described his earliest experiences with using the 519 as a resource: when i first arrived in canada from [country of origin], i got in touch with the 519. they hooked me up with legal aid, welfare, and where i could get medical attention. they gave me a bunch of references for places to go to get help. that meant a lot. they had programs for refugees to help newcomers with the process. there were meetings, and you were supposed to get a stamp, and that was supposed to prove that you were gay. eventually, the 519 was also a place i could go to meet people, get fed, and later, volunteer to keep busy. aids service organizations the most appreciated type of communitylevel resource that over 60% of the participants identified was asos. whether participants were from downtown toronto, the greater toronto area, or in other areas of southwestern ontario, many of them had a strong appreciation for the different services and programs that asos provided. many of the participants accessed services and programs from two or more asos. often, participants mentioned that availing of services in one of the asos led to services at other asos and agencies that provided help they needed to survive and thrive while they were trying to overcome the challenges of living with hiv/aids. the support groups and drop-in services of the different asos, in particular, were important resources for overcoming isolation and feelings of helplessness, which many participants experienced at different times over the years. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 over half of the participants from the study shared that at one point or another in their life, they accessed services from the aids committee of toronto (act), which they believed were very useful, if not essential (act continues to be one of the largest asos in central and southwestern ontario). for several years, act practically the only existing aso they could turn to after learning of their hiv/aids diagnosis. the services at act that they availed of the most included counselling, group programming, community health forums and workshops, financial assistance, income tax clinics, lunch programs, and referrals to other healthcare and social service providers. ricky recounted the different services at act that he and his friends used for many years, “act’s buddy program connected me with this guy that helped me get care in my home. we actually became friends as i became healthier throughout my whole ordeal. through the years, act has had all sorts of group programming my friends and i would join…many years later, i needed counselling and got that from act too. they also referred me to a rainbow [counselling] program at the centre for addiction and mental health…one thing that act actually specializes in is education. they always have different workshops and forums, if you’re interested in learning about new things.” half of the study participants also availed of services from the toronto people with aids foundation (pwa). many of these participants expressed appreciation for the more practical supports pwa provided, such as the food bank, assistance with applications to the ontario disability support program (odsp), community engagement programs, and access to therapeutic programs like massage therapy, physiotherapy, and acupuncture. jeremiah appreciated pwa’s practical programming, “i went to pwa for the first-time last year for information i needed about the odsp application. they guided me through all steps. it’s a very good organization!” nearly a third of study participants living with hiv/aids mentioned how casey house (formerly an aids hospice and now a specialty hospital for plwh) had either saved their life or provided them a new lease in life. jack shared in his interview, “i lived at casey house for eight months. they took care of me. they literally saved my life!” many participants stayed at casey house for some time primarily for convalescence, especially in their earlier years of struggling with the clinical impacts of hiv/aids, and several of them availed of wellness services at casey house such as yoga and meditation. many participants identified different types of resources from other asos that they also found helpful during their years of struggle, including: (a) research, information, and advocacy from the canadian aids treatment information exchange, the ontario hiv treatment network and the ontario aids network; (b) housing support from fife house; and (c) legal aid and support from the hiv/aids legal clinic ontario and prisoners with hiv/aids support action network. racial minority, immigrant, and newcomer participants, in particular, specifically commended ethno-specific asos for their work over the years, and these asos included the alliance for south asian aids prevention, asian community aids services (acas), black coalition for aids prevention, centre for spanish-speaking peoples, and latinos positivos. juan expressed his gratitude for the help he received when he first came to canada, “although they don’t have as much resources as the bigger asos, latinos positivos is really good for newcomers with language barriers and don’t speak english much.” jin http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 also had similar praise for another ethnospecific aso, “it’s great to go to acas. they have case workers who look like me and have the same or similar culture and language as mine. it makes it much easier to get help from them.” finally, the asos that were repeatedly mentioned by participants who lived outside of downtown toronto in appreciation of these asos’ diverse services and programs included the aids committee of cambridge, kitchener, waterloo, and area; aids committee of durham region; aids committee of york region [now cayr community connections]; hiv/aids resources and community health guelph; peel hiv/aids network [now moyo health and community services]; regional hiv/aids connection london; and the aids network of hamilton, halton, haldimand, norfolk, and brant. public health services public health services were the third theme that was identified in the thematic analysis of the study’s interview data. under public health services, two sub-themes emerged: (a) community health clinics and centres, and (b) excellent healthcare and service providers. these two sub-themes are discussed in the next sub-sections. community health clinics and centres approximately 40% of the mao msm living with hiv/aids who took part in the interviews shared with us how vital it was to their survival, health, and wellbeing to have access to community health clinics and centres. many participants mentioned that the hassle-free clinic in toronto was instrumental not only in providing the confidentiality they needed upon learning of their hiv/aids diagnosis, but also with getting through the earliest stages of their acceptance and adjustment to living with hiv. hassle-free clinic was an important resource not only in terms of ensuring confidential hiv testing, but also gaining counselling and information about hiv, doctors, specialists, and related services. donald narrated his first visit to hassle-free clinic and how his longstanding relationship with it began, “i was constantly working back then, feeling tired and fatigued, and getting colds. getting rid of one cold, then getting another one. yet, i couldn’t take time off work. that went on for almost a couple of years. then i thought, i should just get checked out. i learned about the clinic and anonymous testing from a flyer. i went to hassle-free, and that’s how i found out [about my hiv]. hassle-free gave me a booklet with a list of doctors. that’s how i got my family doctor. i see my doctor regularly, and i also go to hassle-free clinic if i think that something is not going well. i go to hassle-free clinic to get my test results. i also volunteer over there. i started volunteering because it was just easier to get my testing because l was there.” numerous participants also attributed the initiation and continuity of their hiv care to other community health clinics and centres such as sherbourne health, and the regent park, parkdale queen west, and high park community health centres. glenn described how his healthcare became more consistent because of his access to a community health centre, “i’ve been tied to a community health center for a while now, the one at regent park. they have a nurse practitioner, and my hiv doctor. i don’t know when he became my regular doctor. but they kept assigning me the same doctor. eventually, he took my http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 case. i have my family doctor for general things and my tb at regent park too.” excellent healthcare and service providers a third of the respondents profoundly and specifically expressed gratitude for the excellent care they received from the different healthcare and service providers over the years. on the top of their list of providers to thank are their family doctors. family doctors who were knowledgeable, caring, non-judgmental, and gay/bi-positive received the most praise. some participants said they had physicians who not only provided great health services, but also emotional support. francis praised his family physician, “my doctor’s the best! he’s very knowledgeable, goes out of his way to explain things to me, and he builds me up…” additionally, several respondents mentioned that it was a huge relief to have openly gay family doctors either because they had a better understanding of them and their coping strategies as patients, or because they did not have to explain or even guide their doctors in terms of what they specifically needed or wanted as msm living with hiv/aids. joseph talked about how he found his family doctor and stayed with him ever since: “i guess i was a little bit ahead of the curve back then. i sought out and found a gay doctor…he was the only resource [about hiv] that i had at that time. he’s the one who did the blood test. that’s when i found out about the hiv and he prescribed me my medications. back then, you had to decide to get tested on your own, no one would test for it unless you had a gay doctor. i’ve stayed with him ever since.” hiv physician specialists were also highly endorsed by participants as vital providers who gave them very specialized care. hiv specialists who were up-to-date on the newest hiv medications and treatments were most appreciated by participants who experienced aids complications at some point in their life, and who had nearly succumbed to their life-threatening conditions. a close second mention were psychiatrists/counsellors (from places such as st. michael’s hospital, david kelley 2slgbtq+ and hiv/aids counselling services, and mt. sinai hospital) who supported and promoted participants’ mental health, particularly when they experienced isolation, depression, and suicidal ideation. bryan described how counselling helped change his life, “when i tested positive, i would go to the clinic once a week for counselling. it was a very good program. she was an excellent counsellor. it was the kind of counselling i should have had when i was getting divorced. talking about my kids and my ex. i was comfortable. i could be honest and open, and nobody would blink an eye. i was just like everybody else. that’s why i say hiv was almost like a blessing because it opened up the doors to a lot of things in my personal life that i couldn’t talk about or do before.” a recurring comment was how much gratitude respondents had for kind and competent social and case workers who helped them pick up their lives by assisting them with odsp applications, transitional housing, job searches and applications, food security, referrals to healthcare and social services, and much needed socialization. psychiatrists, counsellors, and social and case workers were able to help the participants get through the darkest days of their lives. denis expressed his appreciation for the assistance he received from his case worker, “i had no support from my family. my case http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 worker and therapist were my only support. they got me stabilized with housing. that was a huge step.” neighbourhood support programs the fourth and final theme that was identified in the analysis of participant interviews was neighbourhood support programs, which included (a) homeless shelters and transitional housing, and (b) harm reduction and needle exchange programs, as community-level resources for bolstering resilience to the clinical and social impacts of hiv/aids. homeless shelters and transitional housing as mao msm living with hiv/aids, some of the participants found themselves in need of financial assistance and with very little opportunities to earn a decent wage after their hiv/aids diagnosis. some were let go from their jobs after incidents of inappropriate disclosure of their hiv status by others, some became too sick to sustain employment, and others lost the support of their families when they voluntarily disclosed their hiv status. participants shared stories about how homeless shelters and transitional/supportive housing such as seaton house, fife house, john gordon home, leap of faith together community services and mcewan housing and support services, fred victor, and salvation army provided them with shelter, housing, food, and other services when they were homeless, hungry, and could not catch a break after contracting hiv. for many of them, as msm struggling with the impacts of living with hiv/aids, these establishments helped them survive and get back on their feet. abraham described his experiences of being homeless, recovering from the complications of hiv/aids, and then having no place to live immediately after his recovery: it was eight years ago. it was hard as hell [being homeless]. you’re on your own. no one cares. no one bothers to say, “you need a helping hand?” nothing. a lot of homeless stuck together. we were like a family. we looked out for each other. i had to access a shelter. the first shelter i went to was a shelter for homeless people, and also people who were struggling with mental health issues. it was very difficult because i've never been in such a situation before. i later went to salvation army, and then to seaton house. at some point, i got really sick, and when i came out of the hospital, i had no place to go after recovering from a coma. eventually, fife house helped me with an apartment. without the housing support and the shelters, i wouldn’t have known where i would be. harm reduction and needle exchange programs although most did not go into detail about it, several participants felt that it was worth mentioning how important it was for their survival and recovery to have had access to harm reduction and needle exchange programs in the community, especially when they needed to get through their roughest moments. the participants expressed that these programs allowed them to overcome issues related to their substance use without fear of judgment or consequences. alex explained: i’m all for these programs. i was addicted for three years…maybe even five years. i used a couple of them. like the works…on victoria and dundas. when i was on the street, i used them a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 lot. they were pretty much easy to access. a lot of the girls and guys that work the streets, they know. we got free supplies when we were injecting meth. i had no idea i could get stuff i was paying for in shoppers drug mart for free. it never occurred to me. i am a pragmatist. if something works, and it reduces harm to a person, or limits the harm to them and the rest of the community…then it’s probably good. the needle exchange programs, they help prevent the spread of disease. i have hiv, but i can still get hepatitis b and c. discussion this is the first cbpr qualitative study to identify and examine community-level resources that bolster resilience to the clinical and social impacts of hiv/aids from the direct input, perspectives, and lived experiences of mao msm living with hiv/aids; the population that has been most affected by hiv/aids since the start of the epidemic in north america (haddad et al., 2019; phac, 2013; rhodes & wong, 2016; singh et al., 2018). during the analysis of the study’s interview data, four major themes were identified as community-level resources that bolster resilience to hiv/aids: (a) the 2slgbtq+ community; (b) community-based not-for-profit organizations; (c) public health services; and (d) neighbourhood support programs. although these different community-level resources may have been discussed in prior academic literature as factors that are relevant to the health and wellbeing of msm, this is the first time that mao msm living with hiv/aids have categorically and collectively classified them in an empirical study as resources that have bolstered their resilience to hiv/aids based on their personal perspectives and lived experiences. the rich descriptions and stories they shared serve as testimony to the value of these community-level resources in bolstering resilience to hiv/aids. because this study has directly verified and confirmed from mao msm living with hiv/aids themselves the significant value of these community-level resources as extraneous factors that bolster their resilience to hiv/aids, it is reasonable to propose that these community-level resources are important factors to consider in hiv care, programs, services, and policies, not only as resources that could be utilized to support mao msm living with hiv/aids in general, but more importantly from the standpoint of promoting health equity and addressing health disparities, be used to equitably support mao msm living with hiv/aids who may not possess inherent qualities or have as much access to individual-level assets for building resilience to hiv/aids compared to other people and mao msm living with hiv/aids. community-level resources for bolstering resilience to hiv/aids could serve as important factors for promoting equity even among mao msm living with hiv/aids themselves, who may not necessarily experience the same challenges and have access to the same individual-level resources. valuing resilience to hiv/aids in community psychology practice to promote equity among mao msm living with hiv/aids prior to this article, the vast majority of peerreviewed articles on resilience to hiv/aids has not explicitly defined ‘resilience’ in their discussions (gottert et al., 2019). for publications on hiv resilience research that have provided their definition of ‘resilience’, most described resilience only at the individual-level (e.g., psychological); with few including limited interpersonal-level resilience (e.g., social support). for a long period of time, there had been a predominance of quantitative studies using general measures of resilience to hiv/aids (mostly as assets related to individual http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 personality characteristics), which were not tailored to the contexts and needs of plwh as a community (dulin et al., 2018; gottert et al., 2019). scales and surveys on self-efficacy, hope, optimism, coping strategies, quality of life, stress, depression, and social support (dulin et al., 2018; earnshaw et al., 2015; emlet et al., 2013; emlet et al., 2017; fang et al., 2015; gottert et al., 2019; logie et al., 2014; sinclair & walston, 2004; spies & seedat, 2014; thurston et al., 2018), have been used by many researchers outside of community psychology to examine and circumlocutorily discuss resilience to hiv/aids, without directly taking into consideration the perspectives and lived experiences of msm living with hiv/aids from the community, especially mao msm living with hiv/aids, many of whom have remained resilient to hiv/aids the longest. although there are a few exceptions to this trend (emlet et al., 2010; gigliello & ackerman, 2019; harper et al., 2014), most prior studies have, at best, discussed resilience to hiv/aids based on measures of factors that researchers believed represented resilience of people to the clinical and social impacts of hiv/aids. despite the fact that most of these measures have been proven to have good psychometric properties (gottert et al., 2019), they also have a significant limitation that is very difficult to ignore. these measures have been used to examine factors that approximate resilience to hiv/aids; factors that have not necessarily been ratified or affirmed by the perspectives and lived experiences of the most relevant community stakeholders. at the core of the practice of community psychology is the imperative to value and utilize what is most useful and important to the relevant community stakeholders of the critical research focus being investigated. in terms of resilience to hiv/aids as a focus, many early conceptualizations have depicted it as a static, stable construct with limited attention paid to social context and broader systems that may bolster or hinder resilience across time and place (harrison & li, 2018). fortunately, more recent research studies on resilience to hiv/aids have begun to discuss the concept of ‘resilience’ beyond protective factors in terms of individual assets, personal characteristics, and social support (torres de carvalho et al., 2007), and have specifically incorporated in their discourse the merits of community engagement, participation, empowerment, and most relevant to the study discussed in this article, resources at the community-level (brennan et al., 2013; dulin et al., 2018; earnshaw et al., 2015; ebersohn & ferreira, 2011; emlet et al., 2010; emlet et al., 2019; gottert et al., 2019; kurtz et al., 2012; solomon et al., 2019). the interview participants of the study featured in this article have explicitly identified and described the 2slgbtq+ community, 2slgbtq+ not-for-profit agencies, asos, community health clinics and centres, excellent healthcare and service providers, homeless shelters and transitional housing, and harm reduction and needle exchange programs as vital community-level resources that have bolstered their resilience to the clinical and social impacts of hiv/aids over the years. hence, it is imperative for community psychologists to seriously consider and value these community-level resources in their practice, not only to help bolster the resilience of mao msm to hiv/aids, but also as factors that could potentially promote equity among all of them. community-level resources that bolster resilience to hiv/aids: implications for community psychology practice although not always necessarily from the specific viewpoint of a resilience framework, published academic literature has, in fact, extensively discussed the various communitylevel resources that have been identified and described in this article in relation to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 hiv/aids. together with existing literature on hiv/aids research, the findings and lessons learned from this study have specific implications for the practice of community psychologists whose work focuses on promoting the resilience and wellbeing of msm living with hiv/aids. the 2slgbtq+ community in different studies, the 2slgbtq+ community has been described as a networked community that in the last few decades has become a source of msm leadership, empowerment, and advocacy, especially for health promotion and services, and hiv research (gigliello & ackerman, 2019; landers et al., 2011; mcconnell et al., 2018; trapence et al., 2012). studies have found that access to the 2slgbtq+ community meant greater access to much needed resources for msm (meyer, 2015). research has shown the mediating role of an individual’s connection to the 2slgbtq+ community to both tangible and intangible resources against minority stress (mcconnell et al., 2018). the 2slgbtq+ community has been documented as a productive setting for overcoming adversity and building capacity and strengths (gigliello & ackerman, 2019); initiating campaigns and organizing activities for reducing sexual health risks and promoting hiv prevention programs (landers et al., 2011); and generating novel ideas for transformative change (meyer, 2015). perhaps more than other researchers and scholars from other psychology subdisciplines, community psychologists would be able to appreciate and support the intrinsic worth of promoting what the 2slgbtq+ community could offer to msm living with hiv/aids in their research and practice. community-based not-for-profit organizations within 2slgbtq+ communities, access to civil society and community-based not-forprofit organizations such as 2slgbtq+ agencies and asos have led to greater awareness of issues relevant to the larger community among msm (james, 2005); opportunities for community involvement (paceley et al., 2015); and avenues for developing self-esteem and social support networks (paceley et al., 2016). from the time they were first established in the early 1980s (poindexter, 2007), asos have been documented to be the most accessible resource in the community for dependable information and education on hiv/aids (huber & machin, 1995; kwait et al., 2001). asos have also become reliable hubs for acquiring information on, and referrals to, important services that msm at risk of or living with hiv/aids need (kwait et al., 2001); volunteering and promoting activism in support of increased funding for research on hiv/aids issues (flicker et al., 2009); and advocating for the greater and meaningful involvement of plwh in the development and implementation of research, services, programs, and policies that would impact their health and wellbeing (paterson et al., 2014; travers et al., 2008). based on the findings of this study, community psychologists could advocate for the establishment of more 2slgbtq+ agencies and asos in locations that need them the most, such as densely populated cities, rural and remote regions, and other underserved areas; conduct research on the potential benefits of creating different types of asos (i.e., large mainstream, service-specific, and ethno-specific or racial/ethnic minorityserving) in communities; and promote programs within existing 2slgbtq+ agencies and asos that the participants highlighted in their interviews as the most helpful and beneficial to them. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 public health services academic literature has long underscored the important role of public health services in supporting the health and wellbeing of aging msm. research has documented the significant value of community health clinics and centres in establishing the early diagnosis of sexually transmitted infections (stis), especially hiv, among msm (mayer et al., 2009). more importantly, research has shown that community health clinics and centres have been key to the promotion of greater accessibility to sexual health services (e.g., the provision of condoms, lubricants, and stis testing) and information (arreola et al., 2015); the asymptomatic screening of stis and the initiation of the continuum of hiv/aids care (e.g., diagnosis and referrals to treatment) among msm (hoover et al., 2010); and even the sustained engagement of msm in the healthcare system prior to an hiv/aids diagnosis, and its crucial link to subsequent positive hiv/aids care outcomes (axelrad et al., 2013). research has also shown the critical part that healthcare and service providers play in the provision of culturally competent hiv/aids care, particularly with the adoption of msm-affirming non-verbal communication; expression of respectful responses to hiv disclosures; and use of accepting and inclusive language in the healthcare and social service systems (brooks et al., 2018; quinn et al., 2015; rossman et al., 2017; rounds et al., 2014). particularly in light of the testimonies of the study participants, community psychologists could play a vital role in maximizing that critical connection between the importance of public health services in bolstering resilience to hiv/aids and supporting msm living with hiv/aids, who may not necessarily have the needed individual-level assets to thrive. neighbourhood support programs finally, scholarly publications have showcased the benefits of msm accessing neighbourhood support programs such as homeless shelters and transitional housing, as well as harm reduction and needle exchange programs. housing has long been considered a structural intervention with a substantial potential to reduce hiv risk and improve sexual health outcomes (kidder, wolitski, royal, et al., 2007). with housing programs, people at risk of or living with hiv/aids are more likely to use condoms and have a fewer number of sexual partners (marshall et al., 2009). housing has also been documented as an important mechanism for improving the health of homeless plwh, specifically in terms of supporting their medication adherence, and both their physical and mental health outcomes (kidder, wolitski, campsmith et al., 2007). notably, the feasibility and acceptability of modifying harm reduction strategies to the different contexts of msm have already been empirically established (rose et al. 2006), particularly in support of the efficacy and cost effectiveness of needle exchange programs (carrico et al., 2014; li et al., 2012). in their research and practice, community psychologists could purposefully highlight what may not be as immediately apparent to many users and providers of hiv services – that neighbourhood support programs such as homeless shelters, transitional housing, and harm reduction and needle exchange programs are integral to bolstering the resilience of many hiv-positive msm to the adverse clinical and social impacts of hiv/aids. conclusion this study adds important knowledge to current academic literature by identifying and determining specific community-level resources as valuable additions to the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 individual-level assets and interpersonal characteristics of msm for building and bolstering resilience to hiv/aids, particularly from the perspectives of the community stakeholders that have exhibited resilience to hiv/aids the most since the beginning of the epidemic in north america. however, it is necessary to acknowledge the study’s limitations. it is important to note that the majority of participants who shared their personal accounts in the interviews were from downtown toronto, and that the community-level resources that were identified in the interviews were accessible mostly in downtown toronto and the other major urban cities of central and southwestern ontario, canada. the most significant implication of this limitation, therefore, is that these community-level resources will likely only be able to bolster resilience among mao msm living with hiv/aids if they have easy access to these resources found in downtown toronto and other major urban ontario cities. this underscores the need for community psychologists to establish more advocacy and action for developing and establishing the identified community-level resources in more peri-urban, suburban, and rural areas to make such services more accessible to a greater number of mao msm living with hiv/aids. related to this, as canadians, it is important to note that the study participants have had access to publicly-funded healthcare and social services, which may not be the case for other mao msm living with hiv/aids who may be residing in locations without universal healthcare or health services. despite the large number and relative diversity of the study’s interview participants in terms of age range, race/ethnicity, and geographical location, the study has the same fundamental limitation that all qualitative studies have, which is that its data could not be statistically representative of the perspectives of all mao msm living with hiv/aids. for future studies on resilience of mao msm to hiv/aids, researchers could conduct quantitative studies that would complement the research aim and goals of this qualitative study. they could potentially use the study’s findings and analysis to develop and create new scales or measures that would examine the perspectives of mao msm on their resilience to hiv/aids and obtain results that would provide statistical significance and representation. researchers may also consider conducting mixed methods approaches that would follow up and capitalize on the findings of the study. this study establishes a foundation for future research on resilience to hiv/aids that distinctly builds on the invaluable perspectives and lived experiences of mao msm living with hiv/aids. funding this project received funding from the canadian institutes of health research operating grant – hiv/aids communitybased research program (funding reference # 156917), as well as salary support from the endgame student leader award in hiv and aging (efp-1100) provided by the ontario hiv treatment network. the authors of the article have no 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(2012). from personal survival to public health: community leadership by men who have sex with men in the response to hiv. lancet, 380, 400–410. doi: 10.1016/s01406736(12)60834-4. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.5172/conu.2013.44.1.99 https://doi.org/10.1080/09540120120057950 https://doi.org/10.1177/1073191103258144 https://doi.org/10.7326/m17-2082 https://doi.org/10.7326/m17-2082 https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2019-031262 https://dx.doi.org/10.1136%2fbmjopen-2013-004200 https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.93.6.939 https://doi.org/10.1080/09540121.2018.1446071 https://doi.org/10.1080/09540121.2018.1446071 https://doi.org/10.1590/s0102-311x2007000900011 https://doi.org/10.1590/s0102-311x2007000900011 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(12)60834-4 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(12)60834-4 global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 4 december 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 travers, r., wilson, m.g., flicker, s., guta, a., bereket, t., mckay, c., van der meulen, a., cleverly, s., dickie, m., globerman, j., & rourke, s.b. (2008). the greater involvement of people living with aids principle: theory vs. practice in ontario’s hiv/aids community-based research sector. aids care, 20(8), 615624. doi: 10.1080/09540120701661690. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1080/09540120701661690 community psychology practice competencies: some perspectives from the uk by jacqui akhurst1, carolyn kagan2, rebecca lawthom2, and michael richards3 keywords: community psychology competencies, critical community psychology, higher education author biographies: jacqui akhurst is a professor of psychology at rhodes university, eastern cape, south africa; having returned to the country to contribute to community psychology and community engagement after 12 years of working in the uk. she was formerly professor of community psychology at york st john university (uk), and in 2009 was the coordinator of a successful national proposal to the british psychological society (bps) for the formation of a community psychology section (cps). the cps launched in 2010 and she was the inaugural chairperson, 2010-12, and continued working on the committee until 2015. from 2011, she was also the bps representative on a european taskforce on community psychology, under the auspices of the european federation of psychological associations (efpa), and worked on the consequent standing committee, 2013-15. she was the convener of a national cpuk conference in york in 2007, which led to a collective press release, the “york poverty statement.” subsequently, she organized the biennial european (8theccp) conference for the european community psychology association (ecpa) in york in 2011, attended by over 200 people from more than 20 countries. being committed to the value of community psychology (cp), she is linked to a network of colleagues in south africa, the uk, ireland, italy, norway, germany, australia and the usa. carolyn kagan is professor emerita of community social psychology at manchester metropolitan university and a member of steady 1 rhodes university 2 manchester metropolitan university 3 edgehill university global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 state manchester. she is the past director of the research institute for health and social change at mmu. over the years she has worked on collaborative action research projects, many of them in partnership with the voluntary sector or with public services for vulnerable people. this work has exposed what life is like for people living in marginalised areas and precarious lives, and has informed and influenced public policy. she works mostly now as a community activist, struggling like many to weave a way through the paradoxes and contradictions of ideologically driven policies that both enable and disable community groups, and to develop collaborations and networks around active ageing, social justice and alternative social policies for a thriving and prosperous future within environmental limits. rebecca lawthom is professor of community psychology at the manchester metropolitan university, in the north of england, uk. she leads a centre for social change and community well-being and supervises research students around community psychological issues. she is a community psychologist and feminist and has worked on a range of funded projects and evaluations drawing on participative co-productive approaches. her recent research interests include community organizing, and learning disability in times of austerity. she has also worked on projects around forced labour and migration experiences. working in collaboration and drawing in community partners underpins the work. she is also the uk representative for community psychology in the european federation of psychologists' association.michael richards is a critical community psychologist and lecturer in applied health and social care at edge hill university, uk. his research interests involve working collaboratively with marginalized groups using different methods including, art, poetry, film, photography, and drama. his academic experiences are coupled with his extensive experiences of working in the community, and with professional organizations including social services, housing associations, youth projects, charities, schools and colleges. he has worked with the most marginalized people in society, including people labelled with learning disabilities, homeless people, offenders and victims of abuse in local contexts such as community radio, pubs and museums. his phd focused on the relationship between community psychology and disability studies, and his master’s degree is in community psychology. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 recommended citation: akhurst, j., kagan, c., lawthom, r., and richards, m. (2016). community psychology practice competencies: some perspectives from the uk. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(4), pages 1-15. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 community psychology practice competencies: some perspectives from the uk abstract within global north spaces, the outcomes-based approach to programme delivery in higher education and the focus on accountability in professional training has increasingly led to calls for competency frameworks to be developed. however, the paradigm underpinning competencies as applied in higher education needs further examination. this paper aims to consider the technicist roots of the concept and the translation of derivatives of behavioral economics to critical community psychology. we distinguish competences from competency, noting the potential risks of a fragmentary approach and the mismatch between individually-based assessments and the participatory and egalitarian principles espoused by community psychology. drawing from discussions and workshops with postgraduate students and community psychologists in the uk during early 2015, the contributions and distinctive nature of community psychology training in comparison with other disciplines will be highlighted. proposals for alternative frameworks will be explored, emphasising the need for these to incorporate flexibility and diversity, and to be more holistic (rather than atomistic, as lists of competencies often are); with emphases on community-based rather than individualised principles and values. consideration will also be given to capabilities that relate both to functions and to freedoms, and to more process-oriented qualities to enable ongoing development. the imperatives to foreground social justice and to enable reflexive thinking and action will be emphasised, leading to interactive and inclusive processes. introduction debates about the purpose of higher education (he) and its intrinsic worthwhileness have been eclipsed by a number of drives. in the uk, the widening participation agenda has enabled greater opportunities for access to he. at the same time, the neoliberal shift in the market positions students (and families) as consumers within a competitive market. the costs of investing in he in the short term and the longer term encourage “choice” of degree to be considered and is sometimes narrowly related to future employability. related to psychology as a choice, routes available for professional recognition in uk psychology do not extend to community – unlike clinical, educational, counselling, occupational, health, sport or forensic routes. each of these trainings require postgraduate qualification and practice engagement around a set of competencies. however, the paradigm underpinning competencies as applied needs further examination. this paper aims to consider the technicist roots of the concept, and it critiques the translation of derivatives of behavioral economics to community psychology. it is informative to first consider the philosophical perspectives that inform our teaching practices in relation to our students in community psychology. we draw from a number of particular traditions: • vygotsky’s (1962, 1978) notions of learners’ active roles in the construction of knowledge through the interaction of thought and language, highlighting that learning cannot be separated from the societal context in which it occurs; • humanistic ideas about the provision of enabling environments in which learners need to experience positive input to enhance their self-confidence (rogers & freiberg, 1994), http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 impacting the creation of optimal learning (entwistle, 2004); • the building of communities of practice (wenger, 1998; lawthom, 2011), where the role of reflection is central to promoting greater student involvement and activity leading towards more critical thinking; • and concepts from adult education (knowles, holton, & swanson, 2005), highlighting the developmental transition of the majority of our students from learning that has been “other”directed and more extrinsically motivated to becoming independent adult learners who are intrinsically motivated to learn material that is relevant to their lives and aspirations, both deepening their knowledge and understanding its applications by adapting to levels of greater autonomy. students learn best when they are interested in, and committed to, what they are learning (entwistle & mccune, 2013). we thus need to engage them in reflection on their motives and decisions. however, this focus on students must be firmly located within our societal contexts, since their learning is essentially socially rather than individually constructed (vygotsky, 1978). thus, we need to consider the balance of our focus on societal and individual needs, given the fundamental goal of critical community psychology (ccp), which is to create a more egalitarian society. kagan, burton, duckett, lawthom, and siddique (2011) outline ccp values as: social justice, stewardship, and community (through collaborative construction, celebration of diversity, and collective potentials ). students need to be enabled to contribute to society and their future workplaces as critical and concerned thinkers, invested in making a difference and working for change in the structures that perpetuate social inequalities. the learning environment is enabling when open communication is encouraged and relationships are based on mutual respect. this relates directly to the effects of communities of practice (wenger, 1998) that form, with a central focus on transformative learning for students. the learning community comprises educators (formally titled as lecturers) alongside students and community partners. if communities of practice are seen as aggregates of people who share doing, talking, beliefs, and values (i.e. practices), then participants learn through doing, becoming, and belonging (lawthom, 2011). reflective practice (gibbs, 1988; schon, 1983) plays an active role in enabling a different kind of learning where students are formatively supported and guided to gain insight into their activities and the subsequent consequences, feeding into explicitly encouraging students to develop their critical thinking (halpern, 2013) and leading towards critical pedagogy (giroux, 1997). further discussions of this learning context may be found in kagan, lawthom, siddiquee, duckett, and knowles (2007). a key feature is that our students learn by doing – they all work with a community partner on whatever change project that the partner identifies. the nature of the mechanisms that support this “doing,” in terms of building and maintaining partnerships is thus at the core of the work. it is therefore necessary to link the material to the students’ experiences, to encourage reflection that enhance students’ understandings and connects theory to practice (gibbs, 1988). as the professionalization of he has progressed in the past two decades, the requirements for educators to much more explicitly articulate what underpins course construction became important. this led to the development of ideas around “constructive alignment” (biggs, 2003), where course design is informed by a holistic approach based upon linkages between learning outcomes, assessment approaches, and learning activities. in the conceptualization of courses and curricula, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 the intended outcomes of students’ learning are the starting point, aligning modes of teaching, interactions, and assessment tasks to these outcomes. outcome statements thus “drive” the design and delivery of material and modes of learning. these developments need to be located in the era of increasingly neoliberal developments, both economic and social, influencing systems worldwide. the outcomes-based approach to programme delivery in he and the focus on accountability in professional training increasingly led to calls for competency frameworks to be developed (in order to better supervise and monitor performance?). whilst the outcomes-based approach was intended to promote a more “learner-centred” focus, it had the unintended consequences of systematising and contributing to more managerial oversight of practice. mccowan (1998) notes that when we introduce curricula based on competencies (such as the scra list as outlined by dalton & wolfe, 2012) we may be unaware that such curriculum paradigms are based on philosophical orientations with their own implicit value structures that are not those of community psychology. mcneil (2009) suggests that there are four paradigmatic curricula frameworks: 1. humanistic – education should provide students with a personally satisfying educational experience that results in a liberating process; 2. social reconstructionist – the stress is on societal over individual needs, creating a more egalitarian society; 3. academic – emphasis is within the organised fields of study of academic disciplines; and 4. systemic – structured, rational processes are used to achieve goals demanded by policymakers competency training thus fits the systemic paradigm – technical, efficient, rational and objective. the drive towards competencies in education derives from behavioral notions of skills acquisition. this movement first emerged in adult education in the usa (mclagan & bedrick, 1983) to enhance economic competitiveness through the training of workers (extended to the uk through the framework for vocational qualifications). it therefore had a focus on training rather than education; an approach that stresses and enables measurement, comparison, and assessment of behaviors that lie above or below an invisible line of expert-defined acceptability. of course, training in accuracy and proficiency is important in some aspects of some professions – we would not like to undergo surgery by someone who did not possess competency. however, in an aptly titled paper “monkey see, monkey do,” talbot (2004) offers a critique of a pure competency training and education in medicine. considering the list of competencies developed for discussion jointly by the scra council of educational programs and the community psychology practice council and published by dalton & wolfe (2012), we see the implied good intentions. however, there are risks of “buying into” a number of associated problems that do not cohere well with ccp principles and practice. the importance of context and situated knowledge is central here, since in the usa, community psychology is a recognised career track that students may choose. scra (2012) spell out and emphasise they are “not intended as standards for accrediting programs or licensing individuals. instead they provide a common framework for discussion of the skills involved in community psychological practice and how those skill scan be learned” (p3). whilst scra may not intend they be used for evaluation of accreditation standards, they will not be able to prevent this from happening. given this, it is also unclear why there is an insistence on naming the process and learning achievements as competencies, which can only serve to confuse in a field where competencies are understood as something different. more importantly it plays into the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 same thinking as competencies in other fields. in addition, dalton and wolfe (2012) goes on to suggest that mastery of competencies is possible at different levels – exposure, experience, and expertise. this is an “expert” notion of the community psychologist and does not sit easily with the notions of us all as learners and who, in practice, combine our knowledge with that of our community partners. thus, any expertise to emerge is via transactions and relationships, not through the embodied competence of the community psychologist. in addition, fryer and laing (2008) remind us of the context-specific nature of the ways in which we work, and how these might evolve. they emphasise the central need for praxis: where the different constituencies’ knowledge constructions and claims are assessed against a critical interrogation of whose interests are being served (by all parties) in the “pursuit of emancipatory process and just outcomes” (p. 12) to contest institutional oppression. although there is a clear history in competency-based training (mccowan, 1999), in the current political and economic context, such lists take on a different meaning. for example, with competence comes incompetence, static notions that contain implications about individual ability or lack of it. competencies as checklists imagine the ability as consistently there or not – rather than being present in particular contexts and situations. notions of competencies are part of the neoliberal agenda referred to earlier: they emerge from the deconstruction and commodification of practice into units of behavior that can be measured, assessed, and if, necessary, found wanting. a competency approach reduces learning to blocks of proficiency and feeds into an alienated engagement with learning. learning can be erroneously understood as a set of categories or blocks, rather than as an ongoing process. competencies become tick boxes and students learn only as much as is necessary to gain that tick. for example, in the uk, a competencies framework for professional psychologists was developed, against which the health and care professions council assess both training courses and individuals as fit and competent to practice. such practices risk leading to the fragmenting of practice, contrasting with ccp aims to be holistic (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010), and may result in expediency rather than keeping the focus on participatory work towards social justice. we thus need to ask the following questions: • who is this assessment for? • why is it necessary? the answer to the first is likely to be for employers, professional bodies, universities, even students. in response to the second, we feel that its purpose is essentially to underpin social competition, to assert expertise and superiority as in “i am more competent than you”; “this profession is more competent than that”; “this worker is more competent than the other”; “this university is more competent than those.” these claims are inextricably linked to market worth and the neoliberal agenda. moreover, the results will be individually-based assessments rather than the collaborative co-constructions inherent in the egalitarian values to which ccp aspires. in some spheres, a distinction is made between competencies, which are observable individually-focussed behavioral measures, and competences that focus more on areas of functioning and goal attainment and are thus less reductionist (winterton, le deist & stringfellow, 2005). these authors emphasise the interaction between people’s capacity to learn and situational opportunities to learn, so they view learning as more socially-constructed. they note that developing knowledge (know-what) and operationalising knowledge (know-how) are all prerequisites to developing competence and other social and attitudinal capacities. however, because there is http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 widespread confusion of the two terms, perhaps it is preferable to avoid them altogether? the questions raised above about the need for, terminology related to, and specific suggestions in the list prepared for scra (dalton & wolfe, 2012) are considered below, with reference to discussions that took place in three different uk contexts in 2014-15. in the three examples below, the opinions of various students and community psychologists are presented; both responding to the competencies debate as well as highlighting the contributions and distinctive nature of community psychology training. views expressed in three different uk contexts discussion in manchester 2015 a discussion about the competencies debate was convened in march, 2015 in manchester uk by the second author, then chair of the british psychological society (bps) community psychology section. it was attended by 16 people from the following groupings: community practitioners (with graduate degrees in cp), postgraduate students doing cp research though not necessarily with a psychology background, and academic staff members from different backgrounds but all with an interest in community psychology and social change. the academics present varied from novice to more experienced individuals. after a briefing that provided background information to the european federation of psychologists' associations standing committee for community psychology and the origins of the discussions in cp, an open discussion ensued. concerns were expressed about the technical nature of the concept of competencies: 1. that they derive from behavioral economics and that because they are judgements of individuals' performance and outputs (from a role management perspective), they are often static levels of skill attainment, rather than reflecting the dynamic and flexible nature of the applications of skills; 2. they are often reified once they have been established, thus lacking the flexibility needed in ccp work; and they may lead to checklist-based judgements being made, often in top-down evaluations; 3. they are thus designed with employers' interests in mind rather than from the perspectives of the person or community partners; 4. they may denote a form of professional elitism that is antithetical to participatory ccp principles. however, a number of more recent graduates spoke positively about what they had gained from their university-based master’s program studies, and how they recognise that their contributions to their workplaces are distinctive compared to those from other disciplinary backgrounds. one of the noteworthy features of ccp is its more inter/trans-disciplinary nature, especially compared to “mainstream” psychology. another is the valuing of close collaboration and the building of partnerships that enables theory to be applied in practice in community settings. furthermore, the encouragement of reflection and reflexivity leads to graduates valuing the deepening of insights and challenging of labels that cp promotes. it is the combination of the articulation of values, coupled with fields of interdisciplinary knowledge that underpin the key objectives and strategies involved for achieving social change, which in turn determine the unique skills sets of ccp practitioners, understood within particular social contexts and anchored by reflexivity . all those present at the meeting agreed that it is important that ccp is taught in universities, given its critical and researchbased approach. we acknowledge that it is important for graduates to be able to articulate what ccp is about, and that there http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 are pressures in he to use competence frameworks (perhaps more broadly capability-based and outcome-focused descriptors) in programme validations. these descriptions need to incorporate flexibility and diversity, and to be more holistic (rather than atomistic, as lists of competencies often are); with emphases on community-based rather than individualised principles and values. two masters level student cohorts’ responses to the scra list: table 1: scra draft community psychology competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012) these are some comments about the above list, drawn from discussions by the first author with two cohorts of uk students (2014 & 2015) who considered these as a means of assessing their ccp-related volunteering work. 1) the need for the sub-headings was questioned, since they seem to foundational principles 1) ecological perspectives; 2) empowerment; 3) sociocultural and cross-cultural competence; 4) community inclusion and partnership; 5) ethical, reflective practice community programme development and management 6) programme development, implementation and management; 7) prevention and health promotion community and organizational capacity building 8) community leadership and mentoring; 9) small and large group processes; 10) resource development; 11) consultation and organizational development community and social change 12) collaboration and coalition development; 13) community development; 14) community organizing and community advocacy; 15) public policy analysis, development and advocacy; 16) information dissemination and building public awareness community research 17) participatory community research; 18) programme evaluation http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 strive to distinguish elements that might be continuous with each other and encourage a “tick-box” approach. 2) the separation of some of the items appears artificial, since they are often interlinked in practice, especially if we are espousing “participatory practice”! (for example, how is “programme development …” different from “community development” and how is “information dissemination and building public awareness” separate from “participatory research” and “programme evaluation”?). 3) the 18 listed competencies seem to be conflating different cognitive “operations” (for want of a better word – perhaps they are also grammatically of different “orders”?). in the earlier days of the “constructive alignment” movement that specified learning outcomes and the links of those to module content in he, distinctions were made between learning for “knowledge,” learning of “skills” and the development and interrogation of underpinning “values.” it seems that these are being mixed in the above list. for example, when applied to numbers 1 – 5 in the list, “knowledge” might incorporate understanding of theories behind ecological approaches, aspects of the literature related to power, awareness of the need to be inclusive and to appreciate diversity, insights into the evidence to promote partnership-working, and being able to articulate ethical considerations or something of the constructs that underpin reflective practice. however, how does one a) turn this knowledge into skills that can be evaluated as “competencies” when translated into action; or b) measure in any form of accuracy the way that these are actually implemented in practice? also, why does number 3 list the word “competence”? 4) by the very nature of a number of the elements listed, there is an implicit “expert”-related approach implied. this is an “interventionist” attitude of a “professional,” implying a top-down or “outside-in” positioning, potentially encouraging a patronising stance related to having more power and imposing and managing programmes from the outside. 5) related to the previous point, if we do move to “operationalise” some of the elements listed, what gives us the right to think that we can “empower” or “develop” anyone or any group of people? certainly, we need to very carefully interrogate the operation of aspects of power in great depth, since there are so many aspects of our own “power” that are influential without our necessarily being aware of these (especially notions of various sorts of privilege that we take for granted); but we cannot presume to “empower” others (though we would hope that this might be an effect of collaborative conscientization and partnership-working towards greater advocacy). email interaction with recently qualified phd student in the transition to lecturer status to complement the discussions above, the fourth author was a more recent ccp phd graduate who had reflected on his training when he was asked to articulate what he believed his training had provided. this was in the context of applying for membership of the bps’s division of researchers and teachers in psychology (dartp), following their framework of evidence that he needed to provide. applying to be a chartered psychologist and relating competencies to community psychology http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 chartered membership of the bps in the uk is considered to be the “gold standard.” this standard expects psychologists who have chartership status to have the highest standard of psychological knowledge and expertise, demonstrating high ethical standards of practice, teaching, and research. to become a “chartered psychologist” there are two specific routes for eligibility, with slight differences for uk and non-uk applicants. route one (also known as the “traditional” route) is for applicants who graduate from an accredited uk undergraduate honors degree, which provides the foundation for graduate basis for chartered membership (gbc). in addition, the applicant would then have achieved a bps accredited postgraduate qualification and training in clinical, educational, counselling, health, occupational, or sport psychology, or a research doctorate in psychology. whilst the bps have a community psychology section, community psychology does not have the same accredited status as the aforementioned streams of psychology. instead, route two is the more realistic option to gain chartership if you have a community psychology background. following this route, you need to provide evidence of having met the criteria for gbc during your undergraduate honors degree, and having gained appropriate postgraduate knowledge with training and experience of teaching psychology. each application in this route is assessed individually through documented evidence in four categories (as noted below) along with references from two chartered psychologists. some examples from a successful application for chartership are provided below, with the evidence strongly rooted in community psychology practice and theory that had been undertaken: core competency 1 – transferable skills 1. an abstract was provided from a successful phd, which was a community psychology study. the title of the phd referred to community psychology specifically: “confessions of a community psychologist: the tale of a group of men challenging the perceptions of learning difficulties and health promotion” (richards, 2015). 2. an explanation was provided arguing that by undertaking a phd in community psychology, transferable skills were developed and enhanced. for example, the study applied different methodological approaches in that it was autoethnographic, participative, and reflexive, and ethical implications were considered. core competency 2 – professional attributes 1. two examples were provided of successful grant applications relating to community psychology orientated work, including a bps public engagement grant in 2013, which led to the development of eight radio shows in the local community with adults with learning disabilities. 2. a list was provided of partner organizations with which volunteering occurred. this involved being engaged in community psychology work, including work done with public and private sector organizations, with young offenders, people with learning disabilities, and other marginalised groups. 3. the training undertaken with organizations within the community was highlighted, both as a volunteer and paid worker, including person centred training, professional boundaries, and child/adult safeguarding. 4. evidence was provided of committee work within the bps, such as that in the community psychology section, and examples of working with colleagues from other universities. 5. evidence of work on a post-graduate teaching certificate, which was of importance because this is a teaching route to chartership status. core competency 3 – professional knowledge 1. a vignette described how knowledge and understanding of psychology was applied to teaching at university level, using http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 participatory approaches in work in the community. 2. certified evidence was provided relating to a bps accredited psychology course that had been completed, and explanations were provided of teaching on bps accredited courses. core competency 4 – professional skills 1. a list was provided of the 30+ international and national conferences, and similar events, where work had been presented relating to experiences working in the community, and where community psychological research had been undertaken. 2. a publication list was provided, highlighting publications that discuss community psychology. this successful application for bps chartership highlights that community psychological theory and practice can be related to the broader core competencies set out by the bps. discussion the three accounts above illustrate the nuances that need consideration in relation to the competencies debate. we are concerned about competencies when they are converted into lists by authoritative bodies, becoming atomistic and risking a prescriptive approach (even if that is not the intention). the third account provides an example of a more evidence-driven account of competence development, although it is still driven by the individual’s perspective rather than including accounts of community partners (though these were incorporated in some of the publications and the dissertation). in the discussion that follows, we summarise the critiques of the scra list of competencies and then make suggestions for more holistic and community-based considerations that are more interactive and inclusive, with social justice as a key element. the scra competencies list (dalton & wolfe, 2012) has been critiqued because • it appears “top-down” rather than emergent from collaboration with community partners, where we would want to know what is valued by the very people with whom we build various forms of partnership, especially in initiatives that have been judged by the people themselves to have been “successful” in meeting needs, solving problems or making some other progress towards change? • a number of the 18 competencies are difficult to measure/assess (for example, how does one assess “empowerment”; “ecological perspectives”; “sociocultural or cross-cultural competence”; “community inclusion”; and “small and large group processes”?). we therefore need to consider whether these are really competencies? • this competency-based approach fits a technicist “training” rather than a values-based “educational” framework (which would be far more discursive and rooted in ethics and philosophy); moving from a way of “doing” to a way of “being” (dzjidic, breen & bishop, 2013). • competencies emphasise an individual focus: any sort of (in)competency evaluation implies competition (and deficits) rather than recognising assets and strengths (a core aspect of community psychology principles). such lists do not allow for contextspecificity and the adaptations of skills that are necessary in the complex diversity of interpersonal interactions. • who does the evaluation? surely the best evaluation needs to be from our partners; but we also need to ask what the benefits are for them to be bothered with this, when they might often have much more pressing issues that need their energies? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 we argue that we need proposals for alternative frameworks, emphasising flexibility and diversity, with emphases on community-based rather than individualised values. thus, a possible way to build a framework is for students to critically reflect upon and analyse the ways in which the values of social justice, stewardship, and community (or solidarity) underpin their understanding and practice. regular reflexive group discussions based upon the exploration of these values enable trainees to articulate the application of these. although nelson and prilleltensky (2010) list the value of social justice along with self-determination and participation, kagan et al. (2011) elevate it to be the first of three central values in ccp. social justice is seen to be expressed in working for fairer allocation of resources, where equitable structures and processes enable people to live in peace, to have greater control and agency, and to be protected by legal rights. thus, ccp practitioners are concerned with social influence and political power and the impacts of these on individuals, advocating for non-discriminatory practice. this value category would thus include another of nelson and prilleltensky’s values: that of “accountability to oppressed groups” (p.35). kagan and colleagues (2011) describe the value of “stewardship” as the second core ccp value. stewardship is not regularly discussed within the field of community psychology, and is more generally found in ecological sciences. however, community psychologists are increasingly attending to this theme by taking on issues related to the environment and global climate change (see for example the special section on “community psychology and global climate change,” edited by riemer & reich, 2011). stewardship, is the duty to think about and look after the planet that we all share, and to “do things as right as we can” (kagan, et al., 2011, p. 38). this value frames critical community psychologists’ core responsibilities to: a) look after our world and the people in it, b) enable people to make a contribution to their world and gain a sense of belonging, c) not to waste things, lives or time, and finally d) think long term, and make things last longer than any one of us. each of these duties could be reflected in our praxis. stewardship therefore should be reflected in how we engage with communities and research. this value would certainly be difficult to operationalize as an individual level competency, although all actions can be assessed as to the degree to which they reflect this value; indeed, what is the point of values if not to direct action? the third core ccp value (kagan et al., 2011) is “community” expressed through ccp practice in the “collaborative construction of better lives, better societies” (p.38). thus, as an abstract noun, community articulates people’s hopes for acceptance, inclusion, tolerance and commitment to each other; but also recognises the need for balance between the “bonding” and “bridging” functions (putnam, 2000) of building both strong communities and encouraging openness to others. this value includes the work of ccp practitioners, in solidarity with those who are marginalised or oppressed in some way(s), to accompany people “in their quest for liberation and well-being” (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010, p.26). this encourages people’s expressions of their potentials but also acknowledges and works constructively where there are individual and collective weaknesses, tensions or conflicts. further, as both teachers and students, we enter an explicitly politicised educational environment where values, ethics, and moral positions are drawn out and discussed in connection with socially sensitive issues (such as disabilism, heterosexism, racism, sexism and so on). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 this often involves us as teachers exercising: ... forms of intellectual and pedagogic practice that attempt to insert teaching and learning directly into the political sphere by arguing that schooling represents both a struggle for meaning and a struggle over power relations … whose intellectual practices are necessary grounded in forms of moral and ethical concern for the suffering and struggles of the disadvantaged and oppressed (tierney & rhoads, 1993, p. 335). this politicization of the learning environment happens both in the classroom but also, often more deeply, in the community settings where we ask students to undertake placements. we therefore need to consider ways of illustrating these issues through deeply reflexive practices and accounts based upon a foundation of the pedagogical values explored in the first part of this article, including respect, equality, reciprocity, participation, and inclusion that enable the incorporation of different forms of knowledge. akhurst, solomon, mitchell and van der riet (2016) illustrate the way in which these values and their expression are developed through community-based learning and reflective practice, through the progression of students’ learning from undergraduate to postgraduate programs. dzjidic et al. (2013) emphasise a value ethic that draws from the reflexivity of the community psychologist. thus, we return to the focus on developing an orientation that fosters skills development through a process of reflective learning through action – a way of being, not a way of doing, where the focus is on “iterative-generative reflective practice and being attuned to underlying world-views and values, which then enables [them] to be receptive and responsive to the contextual requirements of the social settings in which we engage” (p 7). this implies the tolerance of ambiguity, to function in complex settings where uncertainty predominates, mediating between different elements of a system with deep sensitivities to power as it functions through people in different roles. it is thus difficult to agree what behavioral skills would be required by community psychologists. certainly all require a range of interpersonal skills, but these are not unique to community psychologists. from work as divergent as nursing and urban regeneration kagan has suggested (2007; and kagan & evans 1995) that interpersonal performance is highly dependent on the context – physical, organizational, historic, interaction and environmental – and that proficiency does not reside in the individual. it is also important to distinguish “single-loop” learning, obtaining knowledge to solve specific problems based on existing premises, and “double-loop” learning that leads to establishing new premises such as mental models and perspectives (winterton, ledeist, & stringfellow 2005). this appears to be a useful way to move away from the behavioral to the contextual. winterton et al. (2005) also suggest that interpretative approaches, derived from phenomenology, see competence not as a duality but as the individual and the activities forming one entity through people’s experience. thus, again emphasising the interactive social dimensions over the individually-located. elsewhere too we have urged an approach to life skills for intellectually disabled people that goes beyond embodied competence to capability. this recognises the fact that other people’s behavior, the construction of social settings and professionals and organizations in which they are embedded, and even the policies that promote assistance and integrated living have direct impact on people’s capabilities for living fulfilling lives (burton and kagan, 1995). the distinction between competence and capability is one that resonates with sen’s (1993) notions of capability (walker & unterhalter, 2007) recognising that freedoms are needed and linked to the development of capabilities. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 thus we suggest that all of the above need to be able to be taken into account in assessing community psychologists’ capabilities (if we are to do this at all!). perhaps considerations need to be given to the development of portfolios of evidence (especially including community partners’ voices) and to more holistic frameworks, with emphases on community-based rather than individualised principles and values. we therefore conclude that further discussion is needed about capabilities that relate both to functions and to freedoms (drawing on the work of sen, 1993; and nussbaum, 2011). this approach would imply more process-oriented qualities, enabling ongoing development in a framework rooted in ccp principles based on social justice, enabling reflexive thinking and action, and outcomes that are interactive and inclusive processes. flexibility needs to be built in, to enable contextual sensitivity, innovation, and improvisation. references akhurst, j., solomon, v., mitchell, c., & van der riet, m. (2016). embedding communitybased service learning into psychology degrees at ukzn, south africa. educational research for social change, 5(2), pp. 136150. biggs, j. (2003). teaching for quality learning at university (2nd edn). buckingham: the society for research into higher education and open university press. burton, m., & kagan, c. (1995). social skills and learning disability: a social capability approach (therapy in practice series). london: chapman and hall. dalton, j. & wolfe, s. (2012). education connection and the community practitioner. the community psychologist 45 (4), pp. 713. dzjidic, p., breen, l.j. & bishop, b.j. (2013). are our competencies revealing our weaknesses? a critique of community psychology practice competencies. global journal of community psychology practice, 4, (4), 1-10. retrieved from http://www.gjcpp.rg/ entwistle, n. j. (2004). approaches to learning and levels of understanding: influences and responsibilities. paper presented at enhancing learning skills at university conference, university college dublin, 11 november. retrieved from http://www.ucd.ie/lsu/entwhistle.pdf entwistle, n. j., & mccune, v. (2013). the disposition to understand for oneself at university: integrating learning processes with motivation and metacognition. british journal of educational psychology, 83, 2, 267-279. fryer, d., & laing, a. (2008). community psychologies: what are they? what could they be? why does it matter? a critical community psychology approach. the australian community psychologist, 20(2), 715. gibbs, g. (1988). learning by doing: a guide to teaching and learning methods. oxford: oxford centre for staff and learning development, oxford polytechnic. giroux, h. (1997). pedagogy and the politics of hope: theory, culture, and schooling: a critical reader. boulder colorado: westview press. halpern, d. f. (2013). thought and knowledge: an introduction to critical thinking (5th edition). new york: psychology press. kagan, c. (2007) interpersonal skill and reflection as the core of transformational change in regeneration? public money and management, 27, (3), 169-174. kagan, c., burton, m., duckett, p., lawthom, r., & siddiquee, a. (2011). critical community psychology. oxford: wileyblackwell. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.rg/ http://www.ucd.ie/lsu/entwhistle.pdf global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 kagan, c., & evans, j. (1995, reprinted 1996; 1998). professional interpersonal skills for nurses. london: chapman and hall. kagan, c., lawthom, r., siddiquee, a., duckett, p., & knowles, k. (2007). community psychology through community action learning. in a. bokszczanin (ed.) community psychology; social change in solidarity. opole, poland: university opole. knowles, m., holton, e. & swanson, d. (2005). the adult learner (6th edn). london: elsevier. lawthom, r. (2011). developing learning communities: using communities of practice within community psychology. international journal of inclusive education, 15, 1, pp. 153164. mccowan, r.j. (1998). origins of competency-based training. new york: centre for human development services, buffalo state college. mclagan, p.a., & bedrick, d. (1983). models for excellence: the results of the astd training and development competency study. training and development journal, 7, 10–20. mcneil, j. d. (2009). contemporary curriculum in thought and action. new york, wiley. nelson, g., & prilleltensky, i. (eds). (2010). community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and well-being (2nd ed). basingstoke, uk: plagrave macmillan. putnam, r. (2000). bowling alone: the collapse and revival of american community. new york: simon and schuster. richards, m. (2015). confessions of a community psychologist: the tale of a group of men challenging the perceptions of learning difficulties and health promotion. retrieved from http://espace.mmu.ac.uk/347051/ riemer m., & reich s. m. (2011). community psychology and global climate change: introduction to the special section. american journal of community psychology, 47, (3-4), 349-53. rogers, c. r., & freiberg, h. j. (1994). freedom to learn (3rd ed). upper saddle river, nj: merrill. schön, d. (1983). the reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. new york: basic books. sen, a. (1993). capability and well-being. the quality of life, 30. talbot, m. (2004). monkey see, monkey do: a critique of the competency model in graduate medical education. medical education, 38, 6, 587-592. tierney, w. & rhoads, r. (1993). postmodernism and critical theory in higher education: implications for research and practice, in j. smart (ed.), higher education: handbook of theory and research, (pp. 308– 343). new york: agathon. vygotsky, l. s. (1962). thought and language. cambridge, ma: mit press. (original work published 1934). vygotsky, l. s. (1978). mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. walker, m., & unterhalter, e. (2007). amartya sen’s social capability approach and social justice in education. new york, palgrave macmillan wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. new york: cambridge university press. winterton, j., le deist, f.d., & stringfellow, e. (2005). typology of knowledge, skills and competences: clarification of the concept and prototype. luxembourg: cedefop reference series, 64. http://www.gjcpp.org/ community psychology practice competencies: some perspectives from the uk keywords: community psychology competencies, critical community psychology, higher education author biographies: jacqui akhurst is a professor of psychology at rhodes university, eastern cape, south africa; having returned to the country to contribute to community psychology and community engagement after 12 years of working in the uk. she wa... community psychology practice competencies: some perspectives from the uk views expressed in three different uk contexts discussion in manchester 2015 discussion references microsoft word enmaryman et al the scra public policy committee in action final copy edit.docx the scra public policy committee in action: advocacy, collaboration, and capacity building j’vonnah maryman melissa strompolis kenneth i. maton douglas d. perkins wichita state university children’s trust of south carolina university of maryland, baltimore county vanderbilt university keywords: public policy, advocacy, scra, community psychology, society for community research and action, collaboration, capacity building author biographies: j’vonnah maryman is a doctoral candidate in the community psychology program at wichita state university and holds a masters of public health from the university of kansas. she is a member of the society for community research and action’s public policy committee. melissa strompolis, phd, is director of research and evaluation at children’s trust of south carolina, an affiliate investigator at the yvonne & schuyler moore child development research center in the college of education at the university of south carolina, and is past-chair of the society for community research and action's public policy committee. kenneth maton, phd, is professor in the department of psychology and affiliate professor in the school of public policy at university of maryland, baltimore county. he is past-president of the society for community research and action, and past-chair of its public policy committee. he is co-author (with keith humphreys, leonard jason, and marybeth shinn) of a forthcoming chapter on social policy for the handbook of community psychology and author of a forthcoming book, influencing social policy: applied psychology serving the public interest. douglas d. perkins is professor of human and organizational development at peabody college of vanderbilt university in nashville, usa. he is the founding director of the phd program in community research & action and also teaches in the masters program in community development & action and the b.s. track in community leadership & development. recommended citation: maryman, j., stromopolis, m., maton, k.i., perkins, d.d. (2016). the scra public policy committee in action: advocacy, collaboration, and capacity building. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(1s), pages 1-15. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 the scra public policy committee in action: advocacy, collaboration, and capacity building abstract interest in social policy work has been on the rise in the society for community research and action (scra). scra’s public policy committee aims to affect local, state, and national policy on topics relevant to community psychology through advocacy, collaboration, and capacity building. to communicate scra’s perspective on pressing social issues, the public policy committee created a policy position statement procedure to address ongoing problems and a rapid response action procedure for urgent matters (e.g., advocacy campaigns). options for dissemination of policy initiatives include the community psychologist (tcp), american journal of community psychology (ajcp), scra listservs, and others. examples of position statements approved or under development include mass incarceration, juvenile justice, immigration reform, and global climate change. examples of past rapid response actions include the areas of gun legislation, sequester cuts, and psychologists’ involvement in torture. to expand scra’s policy reach, scra has partnered with other organizations in capacity building efforts. for example, scra and the public policy committee partnered with the society for the psychological study of social issues (spssi) to conduct a short course in policy involvement and an advocacy training day on capitol hill (united states congress). finally, the public policy committee has engaged in strategic initiatives to increase the capacity of scra members to engage in policy and advocacy work. strategic initiatives include the annual scra public policy small grants program, student practicum positions on the public policy committee, surveys of scra membership regarding policy and advocacy engagement, and a policy track at scra biennial conferences. for at least ten years the society for community research and action has seen a rise in interest in social policy work (scra; division 27 of the american psychological association [apa]). this is evident in the significant increase in member involvement and policy activities undertaken. as past cochairs and a graduate practicum student of the scra public policy committee (herein committee), we will discuss recent efforts to affect policy change through advocacy, collaboration, and capacity building. recently, the committee embarked upon a number of new methods to spread the reach of scra’s policy influence. advocacy is an integral component of the work of the committee. through the creation of policy position statements for ongoing problems and rapid response action procedures for urgent matters, the committee is able to communicate scra’s perspective on pressing social issues and matters of public health and well-being. policy position statements provide summaries of scientific research and accumulated knowledge from practice accompanied by recommendations to policy makers and the general public (e.g., society for community research and action, 2013). the policy position statements and rapid global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 response actions are published in summary form in the community psychologist (tcp) newsletter. policy position statements are published in complete form in the american journal of community psychology (ajcp). policy position statements and rapid response actions can include advocacy campaigns to help achieve the desired changes. in addition to public policy statements and rapid responses, another important committee initiative to enhance policy influence, as well as contribute to capacity building, is the scra-funded policy small grants program, which is also open to applicants outside the united states. the committee increasingly explores ways to enhance capacity building and policy influence through collaboration with other groups. this has included, for example, partnering with the society for the psychological study of social issues (spssi; division 9 of the apa) to conduct a short course in policy involvement and an advocacy training day on capitol hill (united states congress) in washington, d.c. the committee has also worked with the national prevention science coalition, a group advocating for the governmental adoption of a prevention model for use in multiple domains of public policy. training is another way the committee builds capacity. the committee created a policy practicum program for student members of scra. the practicum goals are: 1) to provide opportunities for students to gain experience in a specified policy area, 2) to develop core competencies in public policy analysis, development, and advocacy, and 3) to develop a template that could be adopted and used by faculty of community psychology training programs to enhance policy experience. finally, the committee is developing resources that depict the critical components of a policy advocacy campaign. these resources will be available to students, faculty, professionals, and the public via www.scra27.org. in this paper we will discuss these recent developmental efforts of the committee to spread scra’s influence to affect change through policy, advocacy, collaboration, and capacity building in more detail. presented from the unique perspective of community psychologists, these efforts can be replicated by others wishing to advance learning and experiences around policy. but first, let us examine the relevance of policy work to community psychology. need for policy and advocacy work in community psychology policy making in the united states is not a simple task. bogenschneider and corbett (2010) assert that “policymaking is one of the most complex undertakings known to humankind” (p. 264). policy making is influenced by processes and procedures as well as evidence. the process occurs not in isolation but is influenced by an ecology comprising multiple phases, levels, domains, sources of power, and uses of evidence (aber, bishop-josef, jones, mclearn, & phillips, 2007; bogenschneider & corbett, 2010; kingdon, 1984; kraft & furlong, 2010; maton, humphreys, jason, & shinn, in press; phillips, 2000). the policy cycle can be activated on interrelated national, state, and local levels of government (kraft & furlong, 2010). the united states has seen a multitude of recent social policy issues at all levels of policy making of interest to community psychologists. these include federal policy seeking to provide equitable and universal health care coverage through the affordable care act; state legislation encouraging employers to “ban the box” (removing the criminal record check box from hiring applications), thus increasing opportunities for persons convicted of felonies to attain global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 gainful employment; and local ordinances to provide housing and, as appropriate, treatment for people who have been homeless or have suffered from addiction. no matter what the social policy issue, affected individuals, communities, and organizations, who may be powerless, oppressed, vulnerable, and lacking a “voice” or representation, may become willing partners in pushing their policy agendas forward. community psychologists are well positioned to assist in these efforts (maton et al., in press) and can help provide a voice and participatory mechanism for change for vulnerable individuals and populations. equipped with the values of social justice, empowerment, citizen participation, and research skills as well as an understanding of ecological frameworks, community psychologists strive to enhance the quality of life for individuals within communities. this work would be incomplete if it did not include advancing the work of policy and advocacy. advancing policy agendas is a critical mechanism to affect change at the population level (kingdon, 1984). the committee seeks to affect change through policy, advocacy, collaboration, and capacity building. initially named the social policy committee, it was created in 1989, by deborah phillips and brian wilcox, the first co-chairs. based on committee columns in the the community psychologist over the years, a primary activity of the committee until recently has been educational, informing members about social policy processes, social issues, policy developments, and the involvement of scra members in local, state, national, and international policy endeavors. a number of distinguished scra members, many of whom have been actively involved in policy change efforts, have served as chairs of the committee, including deborah phillips, brian wilcox, trudy vincent, andrea solarz, carolyn feis, anthony biglan, brian smedley, sarah cook, sharon portwood, steven howe, jennifer woolard, preston britner, joseph ferrari, steven pokorny, and nicole porter. it has taken decades for the committee to become as directly involved in advocacy efforts on policy matters as it is currently, but an early turning point was the 1997 biennial conference on community research and action, held in columbia, south carolina. at that conference, there were several symposiums held on policy work. community psychologists described their policy engagements at the local, state, and federal levels, related to a plethora of issues including child protection and support, community development, disability rights, hiv/aids and other global health policy issues, homelessness, juvenile justice, mental health, sexual violence, and welfare reform. what was most groundbreaking at that conference, however, was the open and lively debate at the heavily attended business meeting over whether scra should take a more direct role as an organization in policy advocacy. the most contentious issue raised was whether taking a public stand on controversial issues could be divisive to the organization or jeopardize its nonprofit status or its relationship to the apa. those questions still arise as institutional constraints, but have been substantially addressed in recent years by the committee creating clear, step-by-step processes for developing and vetting policy position statements and member calls to action requiring approval by the committee and scra executive committee, and informing the apa’s public interest government relations office (see below). global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 judah viola served as chair for several years, beginning in 2011, with the mission of reenergizing the committee. beginning in 2011, the committee embarked upon a number of new and challenging endeavors, including policy position statements, rapid response actions, and a small grants program, creating avenues to spread the reach of policy and advocacy work. over the past two years the committee has seen growth in its membership. currently there are 104 individuals who have joined the committee (i.e., added to the committee listserv), with 15-20 actively participating in monthly committee conference calls and/or email discussions. gaining experience in policy work can be challenging for community psychologists in both academic and applied settings, and opportunities for training future community psychologists in policy may be limited. before initiating steps to enhance capacity in policy analysis, organizing, and advocacy, the committee needed to identify and understand the needs of scra membership. in 2012, the committee conducted a survey of scra members (279 completed surveys, approximately 25% of those on the scra listserv) which found that respondents (74%) viewed integrating policy relevant coursework into graduate programs and providing workshops or training sessions at conferences (70%) as critical for building capacity around policy and advocacy work. respondents also felt that collaboration with a number of organizations to expand policy related activities was essential to scra’s mission. among those organizations were the society for prevention research (58% of respondents), spssi (57%), psychologists for social responsibility (53%), and the apa (51%; maton, strompolis, & wisniewski, 2013). the committee discussed these and related findings and identified ways to address the policy and advocacy needs of scra’s membership, including many of the initiatives discussed below. expanding our reach: building capacity for policy and advocacy work below we describe in more detail our efforts to build the capacity of scra members for policy and advocacy work. two primary methods used have been interdivisional collaborations and the development of task forces and working groups. interdivisional collaborations policy workshop on june 30 and july 1, 2013, the committee, spssi, the society for personality and social psychology (spsp), the society for environmental, population, and conservation psychology (sepcp), and the american psychology-law society (ap-ls), with financial support from an apa interdivisional grant, hosted a highly successful, wellattended policy workshop on capitol hill. the workshop included both communications and applications components. the communications portion (day 1) addressed the vital importance of effective translation of scientific findings for a variety of nonscientist audiences. this component featured separate sessions on how to communicate psychological research to the general public, to policy makers, and in legal settings. the applications component (day 2) focused on the myriad of ways that psychologists apply psychological research in community settings and in (federal) legislative realms. in addition, some of the other sessions on this day presented information on training fellowships sponsored by the apa and others, and also on policy careers in government, think tanks, and mission-driven advocacy organizations. the workshop also featured many networking opportunities during which participants with common interests could global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 meet and interact informally across divisions, career stages, and research and subdisciplinary foci. in particular, there was an opening reception, a group dinner, and group lunches and breaks between sessions. the workshop was highly anticipated and exceptionally well-received. the vast majority of the 203 applications were from highly qualified candidates. of the 44 selected participants, 41 accepted the invitation to attend. a total of 14 participants received travel scholarships from scra or spssi; thus, the vast majority of participants paid their own travel expenses and the registration fee ($150) in order to take part. our experience suggests there is a strong interest in this kind of training, especially among graduate students and early career professionals. in the short-term, attendees’ enthusiasm for greater involvement in policy work was clear. presenters were similarly enthusiastic about their participation. the committee believes the collaboration between the sponsoring divisions was positive, and that it will help build a strong foundation for future joint projects – including, potentially, apa convention programming and other joint meetings/workshops. advocacy training day on capitol hill the committee co-sponsored an advocacy training day on capitol hill, held on august 6, 2014. this event brought over 50 psychologists and graduate students onto capitol hill to lobby for paid family medical leave. the co-sponsors included spssi and the apa public interest government relations office (apa-pi). participants spent the morning in a training workshop during which they learned about the family medical insurance leave act (h.r. 3712/s. 1810) and about how to effectively advocate on capitol hill. they then spent the afternoon meeting with staff of their senators and representatives (a total of more than 75 different offices), asking them to co-sponsor the legislation using many of the arguments summarized in a leave-behind sheet provided by the trainers. figure 1: participants in advocacy training day on capitol hill the participants had a “fun filled” day of learning (see figure 1). as noted by one of the participants: “the training emphasized that it is possible to have fun while advocating for a good cause – and it was fun. as we left the training to head to our respective meetings, we were invigorated by the numerous psychologists, students, and affiliates who work to see that our research strengthens our society and directly benefits our people” (kurzbahn, buckingham, & mahdi, 2014, p. 14). this was a significant accomplishment for scra, the committee, and our partners, not only because we believe in the importance of the legislation (currently under consideration in congress), but also because of the experience we provided to our members, encouraging them to continue to engage in the legislative process. organizing the training day was a true act of collaboration between spssi, apa-pi, and the committee. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 the committee expects to work together with spssi to hold similar events in the future. tools for practice around the time the competencies for community psychology practice were released, the committee began strategic conversations to strengthen engagement within the committee by members of scra and to build the capacity of current committee members to take part in policy and advocacy activities. as part of this dialogue, the need was noted for policies and procedures for scra and committee members to communicate positions on important social issues and to draft calls-toaction. this resulted in the approval (by scra’s executive committee) of the policy position statement and the rapid response actions procedures. the procedures can be found at www.scra27.org/what-wedo/policy/, and they outline both the content necessary for position statements and callsto-action and the processes to gain approval for these activities. policy position statements communicate scra’s perspective on pressing social issues and matters of public health and well-being through the provision of clear, succinct summaries of scientific research and accumulated knowledge from practice (maryman, maton, & perkins, 2014). these statements offer recommendations that can be adopted by policy makers or the general public (see http://www.scra27.org/what-wedo/policy/policy-position-statements/). when issues are time sensitive, rapid response actions allow for the evaluation and adoption of actions that can be engaged in by the membership (maryman, maton, & perkins, 2014). calls to action that were submitted and approved by the committee and the scra ec have addressed sequester cuts (united states’ budget cuts to programs essential for the health and welfare of vulnerable citizens and communities), gun legislation (changes to united states’ gun control, safety, and research laws), self-help support groups (changes to apa policies and procedures on the inclusion of self-help support groups to improve health and wellness), and global violence against girls (implementation of international human rights standards). twenty individuals representing 16 states completed the call to action regarding gun legislation (tracking was not available for the sequester cuts). although scra members participate in other advocacy activities (e.g., calls-to-action from the apa), these rapid response actions were spearheaded by scra members. the committee is currently examining various call to action platforms to increase engagement with scra members and track call to action responses. small grants program with the development of community psychology competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012), policy and advocacy skills were formally recognized as part of community psychology practice. the public policy analysis, development and advocacy competency states that community psychologists should have “the ability to build and sustain effective communication and working relationships with policy makers, elected officials, and community leaders” (dalton & wolfe, 2012, p. 12). with the recognition of policy and advocacy skills as necessary for community psychologists, members of the committee realized the need for enhanced opportunities for scra members to engage in policy and advocacy work. the committee proposed and advocated for grant funds to support policy and advocacy activities of scra members. the committee secured $15,000 for annual grants to support policy and advocacy global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 activities of scra members and released a request for proposals for small grants worth up to $5,000. fifteen small grants have been awarded since inception of the program in 2011, three per year, totaling close to $75,000 (some proposals requested under $5,000). the projects funded by the committee’s small grants program represent the diversity of scra membership and their focus areas of interest. examples of funded projects include an evaluation of advocacy efforts of a nonprofit organization serving children and families in poverty (miles, 2011); creation of a public education and advocacy website on costs of incarceration (http://chicagosmilliondollarblocks.com/; lugalia-hollon & cooper, 2012); a multimethod approach to improving mobility of women experiencing homelessness (matson, 2012); an implementation investigation and intervention regarding the affordable care act (boyd, 2013); gender responsivity in the juvenile justice system (anderson & davidson, 2014); and an international examination of an anti-fracking movement in bulgaria (mihaylov, 2015). the creation of the small grants program has benefited scra in a number of significant ways. first, as the recognition of policy and advocacy skills as core competencies for community psychologists continues, many educational programs are looking for ways to engage community psychology students in the policy and advocacy arena. in fact, in the first five years of the small grants program, nine students have applied for and received grants for policy and advocacy work within and outside of academic institutions (out of 15 total funded grants). second, the small grants program has led to significant accomplishments for the grantees. for example, martínez (2012) provided two technical reports to the connecticut state department of education, presented the work at regional and national conferences, and submitted a publication to ajcp. additionally, strompolis and branham (2013) built advocacy capacity within a state-wide coalition in south carolina that led to the pledge by four legislators to introduce or cosponsor legislation to prevent child passenger injuries and fatalities. finally, the small grants program, beyond building the policy-relevant capacity of scra members, has provided an outlet to voice scra values within the policy and advocacy arena. student practicum the 2012 survey highlighted the need to increase policy skills among scra members. in part with that goal in mind, in early 2013, then-policy committee chair judah viola and melissa strompolis (then a student member and later chair of the committee) developed the public policy committee student practicum. the public policy committee student practicum was designed to provide scra students with opportunities to engage in policy and advocacy activities with structured support and guidance from identified members of the committee. students who are selected to participate in the public policy committee student practicum can receive credit from their academic institutions (community practica are often required by programs) and allow for the customization of policy and advocacy experiences that align with the students’ interests, goals, and desired experience. two students (taylor bishop scott from the university of north carolina-charlotte and j’vonnah maryman from wichita state university) were selected to participate in the inaugural practicum in 2013-2014 and were supervised by the co-chairs of the committee, doug perkins from vanderbilt university and ken maton from the university of maryland, baltimore county. the students engaged in a global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 number of activities, including an examination of social media in the policy and advocacy arena, contributing to tcp articles (see maryman, maton, & perkins, 2014; scott & wollman, 2014; scott & maryman, 2015), facilitating collaboration with other interest groups, and hosting a webinar to connect with other students interested in policy and advocacy. their practicum experience also afforded them the opportunity to serve as reviewers for the small grants program. the committee continued with the student practicum by selecting three students in the 2014-2015 academic year. these students contributed to the development of call-toaction procedures and policy position statements (mass incarceration and family detention). the committee is currently reviewing applications for the 2015-2016 academic year. task forces and working groups an integral aspect of the committee’s work is supporting, collaborating with, and helping to develop task forces and working groups to advance policy and advocacy priorities. some of the task forces and interest groups have completed or are developing policy position statements and/or rapid response actions. several of the task forces and interest groups are described below. collaboration with the national prevention science coalition the national prevention science coalition to improve lives (npsc) began as prevention scientists and advocates joined to pursue a common vision: the prioritization of proactive, prevention strategies in public programs and policies over reactive, treatment-oriented practices that tend to generate greater costs to human suffering and to taxpayers. npsc is a national network of researchers, policymakers, organizations, and advocates that focuses on three goals: 1) translational science in the prevention area, 2) enhancing prevention-related implementation and systems change, and 3) advocacy/policy to promote governmental adoption of a “prevention model” to reduce expenditures and benefit society (www.npscoalition.org). the npsc has developed a number of written products, including blogs and opinion editorials, as well as hosted a number of congressional briefings on capitol hill (learn more at www.npscoalition.org). scra policy committee member taylor bishop scott has been actively involved in the npsc and serves as the liaison between the committee and npsc. the npsc and committee work together on opportunities that arise based on common interests among members and the current political climate. for example, the groups share an interest in advocacy efforts for reauthorizing and enhancing the focus of empirical approaches in the juvenile justice delinquency and prevention act (see below), which has been the primary focus of robin jenkins’ work, who also serves as a member of the npsc and the committee. mass incarceration mass incarceration represents one of the most glaring and alarming problems in the united states and an area of interest to community psychologists. the united states leads the world in per capita prison population. in 2012, maton and perkins solicited a policy position statement on this issue, and keith humphreys responded by drafting an initial position proposal on reducing the size of the prison population in the united states. the committee enthusiastically approved the development of a policy position statement, and leadership was taken over by brad olson. brad proposed, formed, and leads a scra task force on mass incarceration (which was approved by both the committee and thenglobal journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 scra president fabricio balcazar). the work of the mass incarceration task force culminated in a well-attended participatory town meeting on the topic and statement at the 2015 scra biennial conference, and a collaboratively written, draft policy position statement. the statement covers many aspects of this complex problem. these include the degrading social, psychological, economic, and health effects of mass incarceration at the individual, family, and community levels; racial and other disparities in the criminal justice system (alexander, 2010); and specific policy recommendations at the federal, state (particularly important for criminal law), and local levels. the mass incarceration task force hopes to have the statement approved in 2015, published in 2016, and then begin a concerted advocacy campaign with help from the apa, spssi, and other interested organizations. global climate change in 2013, maton, perkins, and strompolis explored policy issues of mutual concern with spssi leaders. the discussions revealed that members of both organizations were interested in collaboration on climate change. prior to the discussions relevant work had already been conducted by members of the two divisions (e.g., american psychologist special issue, may-june 2011; a spssi policy statement; apa council resolution; and a special issue organized by scra environment and justice interest group members: riemer & reich, 2011). a collaborative global climate change group decided to focus not on policies to prevent or mitigate climate change (as they judged that “horse” to have already left a rapidly sinking “barn”), but instead to focus on policies and other ways to help individuals and communities adapt and develop resiliency toward inevitable climate change. the global climate change group developed a climate change adaptation theoretical model, reviewed past policy statements, and plans to develop a new policy position statement focused on individual, community, and societal adaptation to climate change. immigration there has always been interest among scra members about issues related to immigration. the committee’s new initiative to support policy position statements created an opportunity for pursuing this topic. the process started about a year ago and led former scra president fabricio balcazar to mobilize an effort to generate a policy statement on the topic. balcazar utilized the support of patricia esparza, a committee practicum student who was interested in the topic and brinton lykes, a colleague also interested in immigration. lykes brought to the team a very experienced immigration lawyer, jessica chico, and another graduate student, kevin ferreira. the group decided to focus the policy position statement on the incarceration of undocumented migrant families in the united states. a draft statement was review by the apa and approved by the committee and scra’s executive committee just as the obama administration was ordered by a federal court to close most of the family prisons that have been opened over the last few years. the work group will continue to watch this issue evolve and has submitted the policy statement to the ajcp. juvenile justice scra has a number of members with expertise and policy experience in the area of juvenile justice. several of them, led by jen woolard and committee member robin jenkins, are working on a policy position statement related to reauthorization of the federal juvenile justice and delinquency prevention act (jjdpa). first passed in 1974, global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 the jjdpa authorizes a nationwide juvenile justice planning and advisory system, including funding for delinquency prevention and improvements in juvenile justice system programs and practices. jjdpa was last reauthorized 2002, without major substantive changes. the last substantive reauthorization was in 1992, when a focus on racial disparities was added. the policy position statement will build upon the growing body of research-based knowledge in the juvenile justice area, including but not limited to, a focus on prevention, removal of juveniles from adult jails, improved mental health and substance abuse services, and racial disparities. community health workers since 2014, venoncia m. baté-ambrus has been participating on monthly committee calls to update its members on the status of community health workers (chw) policy. baté-ambrus serves as the link between the scra community health interest group and the committee. scra has a vested interest in the progress of chw policy development, especially in light of the committee’s and the ec’s approval of a rapid response action endorsing efforts to pass illinois house bill 5412, a bill to improve the illinois chw infrastructure by appointing an advisory board to make workforce development recommendations. the bill was signed into law by governor pat quinn on july 31, 2014. baté-ambrus currently serves as an unappointed, community representative on the illinois chw advisory board and a co-chair on its workforce development and behavioral health core competency workgroup. she co-authored an article in the july-sept 2015 volume of the journal of ambulatory care management entitled many ingredients, one sublime dish: the recipe for the passage of illinois hb5412 into law. batéambrus has also been the chief planner/coordinator of the region v great lakes chw summit held in chicago on oct 30-31, 2015. the summit convened chws and stakeholders from illinois, indiana, ohio, michigan, minnesota, and wisconsin who shared best practices, sharpened advocacy skills, promoted multicultural dialogue, and explored other ways to strenghten the chw workforce. letter to the apa on torture several scra members, including committee member brad olson, have been involved in efforts to reverse the apa’s policy on permitting psychologists’ participation in department of defense and central intelligence agency national security interrogations. although that has not been an issue the committee has been as directly involved in, if there is a call-to-action, rapid response action requests, or policy position statements developed, the committee will likely be drawn into those processes more deeply. recently, the ec sent a letter to the apa sharing the division’s concerns in response to the hoffman report (http://www.scra27.org/who-we-are/apa/), and brad and others were actively involved in advocacy activities at the apa convention that contributed to sweeping changes in apa policies and processes, including the banning of psychologists’ participation in national security interrogations. discussion – future directions within the policy arena, community psychologists have contributed to social change through effective relationship building, communication, strategic analysis, and use of research (maton et al, in press). each of these critical elements, in turn, has proved integral to the work of the scra policy committee. taken together, they have helped to promote a common agenda and a set of initiatives with the potential to global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 influence policies and practices that impact communities, groups, and individuals. the task forces, working groups, rapid responses, policy statements, grants, student practica, and other capacity building efforts described above have provided a number of opportunities for the public policy committee to expand its policy reach and impact. in the past, as with most voluntary groups, the activity level of the committee has waxed and waned depending on the interest of members and available time of the chair. the current committee is committed to maintaining and, if possible, increasing the momentum for scra policy and advocacy work and impact. one area for future work involves potential collaboration between the committee, the scra prevention and promotion interest group, and the npsc to support an effort to advance affordable care act regulations for nonprofit hospitals that require the hospitals to spend dollars on "community benefit" projects. the community benefit projects are not clearly defined but could present opportunities for collaborative work that incorporate policy and/or advocacy components. a second area is collaboration with the scra council for education programs (cep). cep is interested in enhancing the opportunities for graduate students in our training programs to gain further education, competence, and experience in policy work. the committee plans to work closely with and contribute to cep’s work in this important arena. to address the potential for these and related activities to “fall through the cracks”, the committee has identified liaisons (members of the committee) to contact and attend meetings of the npsc and cep. the liaisons not only report on activities of the groups but also identify areas for potential collaboration with the committee. yet another area representing both great progress but also future potential is the policy page on the scra website (http://www.scra27.org/what-wedo/policy/), which has been greatly improved as a resource for policy training and advocacy work, thanks especially to the efforts of michael brubacher and jean hill. some new web resources include: 1) autobiographical profiles, 2) success stories and advice from scra members engaged in policy work (particularly helpful for students and early career community psychologists), 3) a page of ideas and information on how to get involved and be an effective issue advocate, compiled by rebecca rodríguez and taylor bishop scott, 4) a video related to the scra policy position statement drafted by leonard jason, and 5) various links to important resources (e.g., information from past scra policy workshops, external policy websites and blogs, policy internships and fellowships, policy and advocacy terms and definitions, policy course syllabi, relevant books and websites, and the report of the 2012 survey noted above). similar to the npsc and cep, the committee has a liaison to scra’s website committee to assist with improvements for policyand advocacyrelated engagement. the committee also keeps the website as a regular agenda item to monitor and track ideas and changes. look for updates and new resources on the website in the future! most importantly, the committee needs members to step forward with ideas for policy initiatives, rapid response action requests, policy position statements, and capacity building opportunities. the committee’s future vitality and contributions to system and policy change will depend, as always, on the active involvement of a broad spectrum of the scra membership. to that end, committee members consistently seek global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 new opportunities to engage members to serve on the committee. this outreach includes responding to policyand advocacyrelated emails on the scra listserv, talking to interested members at regional and national conferences, and promoting the accomplishments and activities of the committee. come join us! conclusion policy research, analysis, and advocacy by individual community psychologists in the united states and around the globe have been going on for decades (maton et al., in press). that is why it is surprising that active policy work by scra as an institution is such a relatively recent phenomenon. the public policy committee was created many years ago--and has been moderately active at times (e.g., highlighting the applied policy work of tom wolff and others); however, it has never been active in a sustained fashion to the extent that has occurred over the past three or four years, starting with judah viola’s chairing of the committee. policy work is time consuming and can be thankless at times, but the rewards are great in terms of both personal and professional satisfaction, and include having an impact beyond the typical level of an individual study, program, or other intervention. influencing change at the community-wide, city, state, or national levels requires extensive effort and relationship building, collaborations with multiple groups, persistence, and a long-term time perspective. scra and all national and international community psychology organizations should be even more deeply and actively committed to such work over the long-term. the foregoing activities and resources provide some examples of how the committee is beginning to live up to that commitment. acknowledgements. the authors of this article would like to thank the following individuals for their review, thoughts, or contributions 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(2014). public policy committee collaborates with the prevention project. the community psychologist, 47(1), 23. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 society for community research and action—community psychology, division 27 of the american psychological association. (2013). the role of recovery residences in promoting long-term addiction recovery. american journal of community psychology, 52(3-4), 406– 411. strompolis, m., & branham, m. (2013). influencing prevention policy through effective communication. retrieved from http://www.scra27.org/whatwe-do/policy/policy-small-grantprogram/. local lessons: teaching place-based social justice through historical case analysis and service-learning benjamin c. graham1 author biography: benjamin c. graham, community psychologist and assistant professor at humboldt state university. he has worked as a researcher at the national center for ptsd, dissemination and training division and depaul university. his career path into community psychology began as a clinician and researcher (m.s. counseling psychology, uw-madison) promoting comprehensive, evidence-based approaches to school-based violence prevention in diverse school settings, first as a rotary ambassadorial scholar at the university of melbourne (australia), and eventually within the chicago public school district. these experiences inspired him to earn his doctorate in community psychology (depaul university), where his research focused on disability inclusion, community-based service learning, student health promotion, sexual and gender minorities, and psychological sense of community. his current research examines supports for sexual and gender minority communities, interventions to help student and nonstudent veterans, and the impact of service learning. recommended citation: graham, b. c. (2019). local lessons: teaching place-based social justice through historical case analysis and service-learning. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(1), 1 -24. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). 1 humboldt state university http://gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 local lessons: teaching place-based social justice through historical case analysis and service-learning abstract community-based service learning (cbsl) is a demonstrated pedagogical method for integrating theory and practice, transgressing ivory tower walls, and offering undergraduate students early exposure to real-world settings in which many wish to engage (bringle & duffy, 1998; hofman & rosing, 2007). teaching the history of specific social movements has been widely lauded among some educators as a component of education (teaching tolerance, 2018). while there have been a limited number of models proposed for integrating historical case histories into service learning (e.g., wade, 2007), none to date have incorporated specific community psychology features such as the competencies for community psychology practice (dalton & wolfe, 2012). this article will provide a four-step curricular design process for identifying local historical cases and developing pedagogical strategies for teaching students how to apply local historical lessons in addressing contemporary issues via service learning. using the historical case illustration of northern california’s ‘redwood wars’, the article demonstrates how historical local movements and contemporary social action can root students in their communities while learning important community psychology principles and concepts. introduction the california coastal redwood (sequoia sempervirens) would appreciate julian rappaport’s classic 1981 article, in praise of paradox: a social policy of empowerment over prevention. as the tallest living thing on earth, the coastal redwood exists in a paradox of scale: towering up to 380 feet tall, it has a root structure a mere 6-8 feet deep. its frame can weigh up to 4 million pounds, but its primary water source is fog captured on tiny needles no longer than a fingernail. the coastal redwood presents a paradox worthy of not simply praise. in the 1980’s-1990’s, the issue of saving ancient redwood forests prompted a social justice movement known as the redwood wars to protect the remaining privately owned ancient groves of northern california (u.s.a.) (speece, 2017). if the coastal redwood’s paradox is one of scale, the community organizer’s is one of power. the organizer’s individual vision must exist within the visions of many. reaching objectives and goals requires letting go of how they were initially formed and shaped. as rappaport (1981) adeptly observed, this re-shaping process must derive from where the true expertise of community problem-solving lies: among a community’s members and its (often complex) history. a powerful way to teach undergraduates in community psychology and related courses about the paradoxes and mechanisms of social change is to engage them in the realworld complexities--past and present--of their local communities. this article is not centered around the struggle to save the coastal redwoods of california, but rather the broader notion that we can learn social change by first understanding the struggles that exist geographically and historically under our feet, and then step solidly forward to create http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 change in the communities in which we situate ourselves. embodying the principles of community psychology, including the core competencies for community psychology practice (dalton & wolfe, 2012), this article presents an adaptable four-step framework for creating place-based learning structured around historical case analysis in undergraduate service learning courses. learning in place: local history, social justice, and service learning community-based service learning (cbsl) is a demonstrated pedagogical method for integrating theory and practice, transgressing ivory tower walls, and offering undergraduate students early exposure to real-world settings in which many wish to engage (bringle & duffy, 1998; hofman & rosing, 2007). derived from experiential learning theory (kolb, 1984), cbsl situates learning within the praxis of real-world experience and traditional academics. numerous studies have established the positive impacts of properly implemented cbsl, in areas such as civic engagement (deprince, priebe, & newton, 2011), multicultural skill-building (einfeld & collins, 2008), empathy (bernacki & jaeger, 2008), and adult volunteerism (bowman, brandenberger, lapsley, hill, & quaranto, 2010). evidence for the value of cbsl has been further supported by several metaanalyses (celio, durlak, & dymnicki, 2011; yorio & ye, 2012). teaching the history of social movements has been lauded among some educators as a vital component of broader education (teaching tolerance, 2018). goodwin and jasper (2004) define social movements as “conscious, concerted, and sustained efforts by ordinary people to change some aspect of their society by using extra-institutional means”. while there have been a limited number of models proposed for integrating historical case histories of social movements into service learning (e.g., wade, 2007), none to date have incorporated a specific community psychology perspective. additionally, when historical case analyses of social change is utilized, the focus is typically on well-known national and global activism (goodwin & jasper, 2004), rather than direct local action. there is a need for a method for designing pedagogical strategies that combine the power of historical case analysis with contemporary cbsl in the context of students' local communities in which they are a part. institutional and community context to illustrate the model described in this article, an example of its application will be shared. this model was developed as part of a semester-long undergraduate community psychology service-learning course in northern california. it involved a historical case analysis of the redwood wars as well as contemporary interventions in six nonprofit community organizations. the institutional context is a mid-sized, primarily undergraduate serving public university situated in humboldt county, california in the united states. the university is one of 23 california state universities. the psychology department is robust, with over 650 undergraduate majors, 12 full-time faculty, and four masters programs. however, community psychology is relatively unknown, and the current service-learning course was the first offered in the department in recent years. the past 10 years have seen demographic changes in the student composition (humboldt state university, office of institutional effectiveness, 2018). during this time the university has transformed from a mostly white, rural student body to a far more diverse one, approximating the overall demographics of the state of california. this specific csu university (humboldt state university) is designated as a hispanic-serving institution by the hispanic association of colleges and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 universities (“hispanic serving institution definitions,” 2019). this designation is given to universities where over 25% of student enrollment identifies as hispanic. all students in the course were psychology majors. demographic data was not collected for the 33 students. however, the demographics listed below are collected by the university and are specific to students majoring in psychology (humboldt state university, office of institutional effectiveness, 2018). the 2018 department student body is 54% pell grant eligible (a widely recognized proxy for low-income status), 59% first generation, and 72% female (28% male; intersex and transgender data are not collected by the university). students identify as 40% hispanic/latinx, 40% white, 4% african american, 3% asian american, 1% american indian, 5% multi-ethnic/racial, and 7% unknown/not reported. the university houses an office for community-based service learning, with two full time staff. additionally, the university has a community-based service learning taskforce (on which i (the author) serve as a member). the office was highly instrumental in developing site partnerships. specifically, they leveraged existing community relationships to secure 4 of the 6 sites, and worked directly with me to complete university paperwork related to off-site work (for instructors without such resources, see faculty toolkit for service-learning in higher education (community campus partnerships for health, 2007)). the course described was my fourth time integrating service learning into my undergraduate courses. as a lifelong practitioner of community-based applied psychology, i had worked or partnered with over a dozen nonprofit and governmental organizations prior to accepting my first tenure-track position mid-career (in fall 2016). while this did not dissolve the many challenges that come with communityacademic partnership, i believe it helped me orientate to connecting the students to sites. as a white, male-identified person living in a community that is 25.7% people of color (u.s. census, 2017), at a university where our student body is over 53% students of color (humboldt state university, office of institutional effectiveness, 2018), i felt it was critical to integrate multicultural and crosscultural research into the course, in new and expanded ways compared to my non-service learning courses. specifically, the topic of how student identity experiences interacted with the organizational culture and identity statuses of those working in and being served by the sites was an important area to create reflective space. this was done via small group discussions, individual reflection assignments, and ongoing class discussions. as with all communities, humboldt county has rich past and present social justice stories. historically, this has included efforts to protect the ancient redwood forest ecosystem, first by early preservationists purchasing land at the turn of the 20th century and then later through litigation and confrontation during the redwood wars of the 1980’s and 1990’s (speece, 2017). this struggle involved multiple stakeholders and interests, the four primary ones being environmentalists, multigenerational logger families, native american people (primarily from the hoopa, wiyot, and yurok nations), and the corporate interests of the timber industry. at the onset of the redwood wars, most ancient redwood forests and their ancient trees (some over 2,000 years old) had been either cut down or preserved within national and state park systems. the redwood wars era involved the struggle to protect the remaining ancient forests that were then privately owned. the story of the redwood wars involved a rich array of tactics, including strategies such as sabotaging the ability to cut trees (‘tree spiking’), human blockades of logging roads, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 local and national protests such as the redwood summer of 1990, dozens of legal challenges including the first use of the endangered species act, and multiple tree sits including julia “butterfly” hill’s two-year sit in a tree named luna (hill, 2000). the course in which the model was piloted was a semester-long undergraduate community psychology service-learning course. thirty-three students were enrolled, 30 of whom were junior or senior psychology majors. the service learning component involved 25 hours of service, completed during the semester. six sites took part, and included a racial equity coalition, k-6 school, community garden, mediation services nonprofit, disability arts center, and tiny house homelessness initiative. students were assigned to site-based teams of 3-6 students. the bridging of the historical case of the redwood wars and the contemporary cases of the sites (including the broader social issues each addressed) occurred through a set of activities and assignments described below. description of the model for purposes of this article, historical case analysis refers to the systematic study of a specific social justice movement, including its context, values/issues, key stakeholders, strategies/tactics, processes, and outcomes, with the intent of extrapolating this analysis to other contexts. it thus shares several features of case studies used in traditional psychological research (i.e., a single case with extrapolation of findings), but focuses on groups of people and multiple levels of analysis (bronfenbrenner, 1979). this includes the individual lives of leaders and influencers, the roles of organizations (and their interactions) within the movement, the locality in which the service learning is occurring (and how local action relates to the broader movement), and macrosystemic forces such as specific laws, policies, and social norms challenged or championed by the movement. the four goals of the model described here are to: 1) develop undergraduate knowledge of the structure, processes, and impacts of social justice movements through historical case analyses 2) anchor local service-learning experiences in deep knowledge of systems change from both historical and contemporary local perspectives 3) apply goals 1 & 2 to create meaningful change around contemporary issues in local communities 4) deepen how students and faculty understand a community psychology approach to pedagogy in psychology departments where the subdiscipline is relatively unknown what follows is a description of four steps in designing a place-based historical case analysis to be used in conjunction with contemporary cbsl courses, with an illustration of its application using the history of the redwood wars. the four steps include 1) learning and connecting to local history; 2) designing the module; 3) implementing the module; and 4) evaluating and improving the module. an implementation checklist is included at the end of each step for those wishing to design their own activity. step 1: learning and connecting to local history case illustration. for the current activity, the redwood wars of humboldt county were selected as a social justice topic, for several reasons. first, the region’s natural beauty, epitomized by the towering coastal redwood, is commonly cited as a reason students http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 decided to attend this remote, northern california university (81% of enrolled students come from outside the area) (humboldt state university, office of institutional effectiveness, 2018). second, the university in which the course was being taught was an epicenter for environmental activism during the period of the redwood wars, with university students being some of its primary participants. furthermore, multiple pedagogical resources exist in close proximity to the university, including guest speakers and historical archives. lastly, it is also a short drive from headwaters national reserve, the most identifiable outcome of the two decade-long struggle to save the remaining privately owned old-growth redwood forest. several books have been written documenting the redwood wars (bari, 1994; bevington, 2012; speece, 2017; widick, 2009). additionally, many know of the redwood wars through the publicity garnered by julia “butterfly” hill, an environmental activist who lived at the top of an old-growth redwood tree for 738 days (hill, 2000). in the selection of sources it was important to include perspectives of environmentalists, logging workers, and native american people. for this project, i selected excerpts from policy-oriented writings (bevington, 2012), hill’s (2000) autobiography, an essay on native american perspectives on national parks (dowie, 2011), and a 56-minute video the last stand: ancient redwoods and the bottom line (gutierrez, 2000). several resources were available in the local area during the design of this activity. a central figure to the redwood wars, darryl cherney, graciously agreed to guest lecture in the course, providing firsthand experiential knowledge of the struggle, the important role of judi bari (who has since passed away), and discussing the strategies and tactics employed by earth first! and other organizations. additionally, the headwaters forest preserve offers guided ranger tours (the preserve is otherwise off-limits to people), which allowed students the opportunity to see the area for themselves and learn from the local ranger (students were offered extra credit to attend the field trip). collectively, the key readings and inperson resources formed a viable modular curriculum for sharing the story of the redwood wars. general description. the first step is to identify and select a historical case study to delve into. local histories can offer rich examples for students, and can be found in all communities. depending on the location one is based, information on the social justice issue may be readily available or require a more purposeful investigation. this step is very much open to the creativity of the instructor, and can include diverse social justice histories spanning the breadth of community psychology. what is critical is that there is a clear ‘story’ to the social justice history, including identifiable goals, stakeholders, documented processes, and outcomes, with a preference for issues that can root in tangible ways in the local community. when a topic has been selected, the next step is to research the topic. this process includes identifying key sources, triangulating references, and reaching an adequate point of knowledge saturation appropriate for a brief undergraduate psychology curricular module. it is important to note that one does not need to develop deep historical expertise in all the nuances of the movement (although this can certainly benefit the process); what is critical is that enough of the story is told in a way that is comprehensive to the key features of the movement including its context, values/issues, key stakeholders, strategies/tactics, processes, and outcomes. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 an important component to this step is identifying the multiple perspectives, identities, and motivations involved in the social justice issue. for example, a local effort to provide affordable housing via rent control policies must take into account both the perspective of low-income families struggling to pay rent but also the needs of aging seniors who rely on tenants’ rent to remain in their local communities as the cost of living increases. as part of the process of researching the area, the instructor then identifies the key readings and resources to be shared with students so that they might adequately understand the historical case. given that this activity exists within a broader semester-long curriculum, the challenge is to identify enough sources to adequately share the nuances of the case without overburdening the students. a blend of reading, video and guest speakers can help to balance the sources of information and keep the activity on track. local allies should be sought out when possible and can include historical societies and museums, interdisciplinary collaboration with history departments, and local community organizations. when possible, it can be very useful to bring in guest speakers who were involved with the movement itself, or who represent other perspectives involved in its history. this can prime students for creating linkages to their sites. in the case illustration, when redwood wars lead organizer darryl cherney visited the class, he strongly emphasized the need to understand and see humanity in those you disagree with. this point later became a cornerstone for the student team placed at a racial equity coalition; in their work, they emphasized being able to understand the long, multigenerational rural history of white residents in humboldt and the need to create greater dialogue between the university and the changing landscape of a county once defined by the logging industry and its predominantly white workforce. implementation checklist:  gather sources  encompass multiple perspectives  contact local sources of knowledge  select course material step 2: designing the module case illustration. after selecting the sources of the modular activity, i dedicated two and a half sessions (80 minutes each, 200 minutes total) to presenting specifically on the redwood wars. this included both a 56minute video and the guest lecture by an elder from the movement, as well as two assigned articles (bevington, 2012; dowie, 2011) and one book (hill, 2000). the goal of developing undergraduate knowledge of the structure, processes, and impacts of social justice movements was operationalized by the key community psychology learning objective of understanding strategies and tactics used in community organizing. for this objective i used the framework outlined in kloos, hill, thomas, wandersman, elias, and dalton (2012); this chapter was part of the existing course readings and, in addition to other chapters from the text, provided a sufficient overview of community organizing which could then dovetail with materials specific to the redwood wars. its seven strategies of consciousness raising, community coalitions, social action, community development, organizational consultation, alternative settings, and use of technology, as well as policy advocacy, provided a useful framework for reaching this goal. in designing my assessment approach, i chose to create a series of interconnected, sequential assignments at individual, site team, and classroom levels that occurred across the second half of the 15-week course. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 this approach was an attempt to model ecological levels of analysis (bronfenbrenner, 1979) and deepen learning by having students visit and revisit the learning objectives through tasks novel to each level. tasks spanned the breadth of the course’s assignments, and included individual written input (via a quiz), a facilitated workshop using the whole class, a site team assignment and presentation, and an individual final paper. the set of materials can be found in appendix a. this approach worked well in this context, but it should be noted that the objectives of this model can be met with simpler assessment structures. for example, if modelling ecological levels of learning (i.e., individual/group/class) is not central to the goals of the activity, the core learning concepts could be integrated into a single presentation, paper, etc. general description. this framework offers a flexible set of guidelines in which a user can apply their expertise and judgement in designing their own historical and contemporary case analysis module. these general design principles are intended to guide an educator’s decision-making in this process. first, it is important to establish key community psychology learning concepts. the specific concepts will depend on the overall course goals and objectives, the nature of the historical case selected, and/or the instructor’s area of work. one recommended key learning concept is identifying strategies and tactics of social change, as it is action-oriented and helps students (especially students in traditional psychology majors) understand the sociopolitical and policy implications of social science research. however, many pathways exist for building linkages between local history and contemporary action across the rich set of community psychology concepts. next, it is worthwhile to assess service learning sites for linkages to the historical case based on objectives. students will ultimately identify and describe these linkages, but familiarizing oneself with these linkages ahead of time can help in determining how best to present the material. once the linkages have been appraised, the third component is to select a structure for the assignment and how it will integrate into the course grading structure. implementation checklist:  establish key community psychology learning concepts  assess service learning sites for linkages to historical case based on concepts  select structure of the assignment and integrate into course grading structure step 3: implementing the module case illustration. in the current activity, the primary concept was identification of social change strategies using the framework provided by kloos et al. (2012). appraisal of this framework occurred through items on the subsequent exam, but more importantly via reflection exercises, quizzes, and group products occurring at different points during the implementation of the module (see appendix a.). this allowed me to assess student learning and recalibrate how the material was being taught if students were demonstrating confusion on the different types of social change strategies. for example, as community development was not the most obvious of the strategies employed by the redwood wars, it became clear through these assessments that students would benefit from clarification on this strategy and how it differed from similar approaches such as community coalitions and social action. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 general description. putting the module into action will flow naturally from the module’s design. how this manifest will depend on the structure and components of the overall assignment, determined in step 2. while multiple assignments, like the individual, group, and class assignments presented here, are not inherently critical to the design, what is important to consider in step 3 is having a plan for monitoring the progress of student learning. this includes correcting the direction of learning if it becomes evident that core concepts are not being fully absorbed. this is why developing ideas about the linkages (while leaving room for new innovations from the students) is important in the success of the model. for each of the key community psychology concepts selected, it is useful to pre-plan appropriate assessment for each feature of the module. implementation checklist:  develop plan for monitoring progress  monitor and adapt activity as needed step 4: evaluating and improving the module case illustration. an evaluation of the model’s application is described in the next section. general description. the final step involves planning and conducting the evaluation of the activity, with a focus on refining it for future use. many of the general best practices for evaluating pedagogy apply, which will not be discussed in detail here (for examples, see savory, burnett, & goodburn, 2007). others may be unique to the features of the activities chosen in step 2. several features in evaluating the model include 1) soliciting student feedback on their experience; 2) appraising the history-contemporary link ; and 3) assessing key community psychology concept objectives. implementation checklist:  select and plan evaluation methods  collect data  analyze data and integrate into future implementation time allocation in creating and managing the model like any pedagogical strategy, it is good to consider the time involved, both for the instructor in preparing the activity and for students in terms of time in and outside of class. in terms of instructor time, the many design decisions described above when applying the four step model will influence the amount of time required. for my case illustration, i set aside time in the 6 months leading up to the course to collect and read key sources on the redwood wars. this involved a thorough read of approximately 500 pages from sources, as well as briefer scans of approximately a dozen articles and books. i also reviewed about 3.5 hours of video documentaries and short film clips. on a personal level, as a relative newcomer to the area and a city-dweller for all my life, the exercise held personal value as it helped me understand a new community that i have come to call home (at least during the academic year). as you consider your local issue and begin to triangulate sources, it may very well be that you may require less time to ascertain the main points of the story, identify guest speakers to engage, and explore potential parallels between the historical case and your service learning sites. my application of the 4-step model in class was on the more comprehensive and integrated end of the range of time involved, with elements of the activity present most weeks between weeks 6 and 15 of the 15week course. this allowed for a deeper integration of the redwood wars into our understanding of community psychology and our sites. however, it took up space where other community psychology topics or smallhttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 group reflections could have taken place. overall, material from the redwood wars, both in and out of class, comprised approximately 20% of the course material. overall students overwhelmingly supported the inclusion of the activity, with little to no pushback or resistance. however, a few students commented at the end of the semester that the unit could be shortened. based on my own reflections and student feedback (see below), i will in the future retain the strong, integrated approach but reduce the material to 15% of the overall course. evaluation of the case illustration this section provides evaluation insights on the model from three perspectives: students, site coordinators, and the instructor. as the original activity was not designed as an educational research project, these data can be considered formative toward the continued research and refinement of the model. student perspectives student data consisted of responses from the university’s standardized student evaluation form as well as a course reflection activity from the class. of the 33 students enrolled in the course, 20 submitted standardized student evaluations (61% of the class; the university average is 50% (m. le, personal communication, november 28, 2018)). since article preparation and irb review for use of this data occurred after the course, consent for use of the reflection activity was obtained after the semester had concluded. of the 31 students who completed this activity, 14 (45%) consented for their evaluation to be used. the other 17 did not respond to the email invite; no students actively refused. this low response rate may be in part due to the fact that the request occurred in the summer, after the course had ended and most of the students had graduated. all student voices presented here stemming from the reflection activity agreed to have their feedback incorporated, and the process was approved by the university’s institutional review board. the fourteen student responses were reviewed and thematically coded, generating the themes listed below. standardized course evaluation. the course evaluation included ten items structured on a 5-point scale from “hardly ever” to “almost always”, and explored student experience of the relevancy of course material, respect for diversity in class, critical thinking, and several other areas. results from the evaluation suggest that for the 20 respondents the course was a very positive experience, with rankings averaging 4.4 (sd = .9) and no item mean lower than 4.2. student reflection papers. during the course, students completed 5 reflection activities related to their site, the course material, and their own personal reflection. the final reflection included the prompt: “a feature of this course has been learning about the redwood wars of the 1980’s-90’s. at several points during the semester, we considered strategies based on the elements of community organizing described in the textbook. do you feel that learning in detail about the history of the redwood wars in humboldt county helped you to develop strategies for your site? in no, why not? if yes, why so? optional addition: what recommendations do you have for improving this portion of the course?” responses of the 14 students who consented to have their reflections used were content analyzed by the author. the themes are summarized below. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 knowledge of the historical case. exploration of the natural environment including the many nearby redwood forests is part of student life at the university. in their reflections, several students commented on how, despite their familiarity with the area, they had never heard of the redwood wars. thus, one of the themes was the role of the model in raising awareness around historical social justice events that had occurred locally. one student expressed, “it taught me about the redwood wars, a topic i knew nothing about before taking this class and which i never thought i would learn about in a psychology course”, and another reflected “if it weren’t for this class i wouldn’t have ever known about the redwood wars”. personal connection to site and local community. students frequently mentioned how the experience helped to personally connect them to the local sites, with reflections such as: “learning about the redwood wars helped when completing hours at my site. it helped to feel a greater sense of importance for the mission of the site as well as a greater sense of commitment and responsibility...learning about the history and mission of various [redwood wars] grassroots organizations and then connecting these concepts with my site was an important element of the experience.” one student described how understanding the redwood wars helped her better understand the culture of humboldt county and its residents. this student was placed at a site where they took phone calls from a diverse set of community residents seeking mediation services. in reflecting on the activity, they shared: “humboldt county has a rich history in community organizing that has been shown to be successful in environmental conservation. by understanding the history, i have been able to further understand the culture better and be able to apply this knowledge to find further connections when working at my agency.” another student remarked simply, “what was special about the redwood wars was that it happened right here in humboldt county, the community we live in.” while most in this theme discussed connections to sites, one discussed how understanding strategies of social change helped her in a conversation with a friend while crossing the university’s common space: “i was walking with a classmate through the quad during a rally when i heard them say, ‘i don’t understand why people do this it does not do anything… although the comment did anger me slightly, i took a deep breath and remembered what i had learned in my community psychology course. it was then i explained to her the concepts of community organizing and how much goes into making real changes for the betterment of our community.” linking social change strategies between historical case and service learning site. one of the primary objectives of the activity was to help students understand the linkage between strategies used in the past and tools they can use in the present. several students expressed a deepened understanding of this linkage, with specific examples such as “community coalitions were utilized by judi bari to arrange communication between earth first!, epic, and lumber unions. with the community garden we have coalitions with local growers, business owners, and university http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 affiliation to support the community collectively.” “darryl cherney’s emphasis on music and theatrics [during the redwood wars] really encouraged me to take the street theater outreach project more seriously.” other students spoke more broadly about the bridge between the two settings, such as one student’s reflection: “i think the redwood wars was a great example to use because of the fact that the redwood wars was a real issue in our university and community. drawing examples of the material covered in our book and lectures to issues that are very near and dear to the community put an emphasis on how we should approach our sites and members of the community.” other students reflected on how the linkage helped inspire them to take action in the community during the semester, including a “celebration of life” event for an africanamerican student who was murdered in our community on april 15, 2017 and whose legal investigation has been wrought with procedural injustices (whitford, 2018): all the social advocacy that has occurred from the redwood wars is very similar to that of our sites…i attended many events to be involved like the walkouts, marches, and celebration of life. this really made the lesson much more personal and more of an experience i was part of rather than something you hear of. recommended areas of improvement. several students responded to the optional prompt to suggest ways in which the approach could be improved. one student felt that there could have been more than one historical example to guide the design of interventions for their local site: “we were limited by the amount of examples from the redwood wars to draw from and explore. i would recommend presenting multiple examples of community issues to give a wider range of strategy uses and examples to draw from”. additionally, several students remarked that while they appreciated this activity it could have been condensed into a shorter time period. lastly, one student made the excellent recommendation that students begin service at their sites earlier in the semester so they could contribute more to their sites. site coordinators’ perspectives each of the six sites had a designated site coordinator, whose role was central to the success of the service-learning collaboration. it should be noted that the historical case analysis component of the course did not explicitly direct students to share historical insights with their sites, though this component did result in exploring/implementing specific contemporary site strategies. nonetheless, in this subsection it is worthwhile to share site coordinator perspectives on the servicelearning experience overall, including whether or not the redwood wars were discussed. approval from the university’s institutional review board was secured for surveying each site coordinator about their experience of the student service learning teams. of the six coordinators, all chose to participate in the survey, which consisted of 6 questions. the first asked “overall, how satisfied were you with the students’ contribution to your agency last spring?”, and was measured on a 5-point semantic differential scale of “not at all satisfied” to “very much satisfied”. coordinators were positive (m = 4.33, sd = .81), with the lowest ranking being a single neutral 3. the second question asked http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 coordinators to rate their agreement on the question “i would be interested in having another community psychology service learning team work at my site in the future.” all respondents answered positively (either 4 or 5) to this 5-point likert item (m = 4.66, sd = .52). two open-ended questions explored the impact of service-learners on the site. the first asked “in what specific ways did the students contribute to your agency?” site coordinators described several specific contributions, including teaching “k-2nd grade student lessons from the second step socio-emotional curriculum” and creating “a video,…posters, and interpretive materials for our alternative housing models, and researched and catalogued a homelessness criminalization timeline from 2010-2017.” other coordinators shared how students “provided community engagement, art assistance, and a great attitude”. one coordinator reflected the trust they felt in their student team’s performance: “because of the alignment of their values and their commitment, i felt confident in encouraging them to use and mature their judgement in deciding on the spot how to interact with callers…clients felt safe and began asking for the particular students with whom they’d begun a relationship.” the second question on impact asked “were there ways in which the presence of the students burdened the staff and/or presented problems for your agency?” all six statements reflected the sentiment that the overall experience was not burdensome, with only one citing specific shortcomings on the students’ behalf: “the lack of participation of half the students of the group felt like a burden.” other problematic factors mentioned was the coordination of student schedules (2 coordinators mentioned this) and lack of participation by the agency’s board members tasked with supporting the students. two questions inquired as to whether the site coordinators experienced or witnessed students linking the redwood wars to site strategies and tactics. in general, this was not the case. for the quantitative question “in your conversations with students during the semester, were the redwood wars (i.e., the environmental/timber conflicts in humboldt county during the 1980’s and 90’s) ever mentioned or discussed?” five sites answered “no” and one site answered “yes”. the second question allowed for a further extrapolation of how any mention played out, but no substantive responses were offered, reflecting the previous item’s responses. in sum, the site coordinators overall found the experience to be positive, valued specific contributions made by students, and would be very willing to work with courses in the future. several important barriers to successful cbsl were noted and are fairly common in the literature (seifer & connors, 2007), including coordination of schedules and having mixed staff/board support for the students’ work. the redwood wars themselves were overall not mentioned to site coordinators. this last finding is consistent with the design of the course, as this was not asked of students. however, multiple sites (in this data and in personal communication throughout the semester) did consider and use specific contemporary strategies generated by students. for example, one student team extrapolated the use of music and theater in the redwood wars (e.g., music during environmental rallies and dynamic interruptions of state assembly proceedings (speece, 2017)) to write a street performance theater script to raise awareness around free or low-cost mediation services. another group discussed how policy advocacy during the redwood wars helped inform how they could better leverage support for their schools’ integration of socioemotional learning curriculum. one important takeaway here is not so much to ensure mention of the historical case when http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 working at the sites, but rather challenge students to create these linkages earlier in the semester, such that the contemporary strategies could be shared and implemented more fully during the semester. author’s perspective in this final subsection of the evaluation, i would like to share my own assessment of how the model functioned, and where it should go from here. overall, i found the endeavor to be rewarding, and although a small handful of students were somewhat disengaged, the vast majority of the class was deeply involved with their sites and very passionate about the material. setting aside the more subjective personal meaning this course held for me (it was my first time teaching a dedicated community psychology course), there were several specific and practical aspects i realized in teaching it. one of the most central was the realization that community psychology—especially as an upper division course with a service learning component—can serve as an excellent segue into the world of work. needs assessment, organizational consultation, working with diverse staff, understanding grant-writing and the role of foundations, and other topics were taught in class and applied at their sites. i witnessed students eagerly adopt these skills, in ways that can inform their career aspirations. this i believe is a valuable aspect of service learning, especially at universities with majority first-generation college students navigating new career pathways. another reflection in the way the model was used during the semester was that the design effectively embodied many of the competencies for community psychology practice (dalton & wolfe, 2012). it incorporated the five foundational principles by offering students opportunities for community partnership aimed at empowering culturally diverse organizations through an ecological lens that includes selfreflection. central to its goals were the five competencies of community and social change, where students learned both historic and contemporary strategies for organizing, collaborating, and promoting the work of their community partner organizations. lastly, the use of the adapted 4-step evaluation model (linney & wandersman, 1991) offered students a unique and personalized experience with detailed program evaluation, a core competency to community research. whereas virtually all had taken a research methods course (this will be required in future iterations), multiple students independently remarked that this activity was the first time they had ever been asked to create or be part of an involved real-world program evaluation. this underscores the importance of challenging students to learn and apply real-world community research as part of their undergraduate education. while the core competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012) were in part designed to provide transparency of graduate training programs, linking undergraduate pedagogy to the competencies showcases the ability of undergraduate community psychology courses “to give community psychology away” to diverse undergraduates and their varied career pathways, while inspiring a subset to pursue community psychology at the graduate level. reflecting back, several things could improve the model. first, in listening to student responses i think the historical case analysis, while worthwhile, could be shortened. while the initial objective was to develop “deep knowledge”, the amount of time spent on the module could be condensed to make way for deeper application of key community psychology concepts to their service sites. second, i think the strategies for social change need to be more thoroughly explained to students, over multiple sessions. while a description from the textbook reading was http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 very useful as a framework, more operationalization of the specific strategies was needed during class to make the framework useable in a more involved way. future iterations will involve more direct source readings such as saul alinsky’s classic rules for radicals (1972) and newer works such as eric mann’s playbook for progressives (2011). another enhancement to the model would be to work closely with partnering organizations on the evaluation of strategy and its development, in terms of enacting social change for their sites. in several of the six sites, clear demonstration of application was present (e.g., creating a condensed local history summary of racial injustices for a racial equity coalition). providing more structure and monitoring in the future could help ensure that all sites receive similar level of results-based application of the historical strategy. this model can be further developed by studying it within the context of formal educational research. providing robust data on the unique contribution of the historical case analysis aspect of the activity would be of great value in deepening understanding of the student evaluation feedback. some research suggests cbsl can help improve student retention (bringle, hatcher, & muthiah, 2010). research into this specific service-learning module could help identify specific mechanisms for promoting retention, an issue of central importance to faculty, students, and administration. as a final reflection, all pedagogical designs are only as effective as the people who engage with them. the energy, openness, and optimism of the students and site staff involved in this iteration of the activity taught me once again how critical these features are to successful cbsl. more than a simple “thank you”, i wish to recognize how vital this ingredient is, for our or any iteration of community-academic partnership. conclusion when an ancient coastal redwood is abruptly cut down, a reaction within the trunk is triggered, sprouting up saplings along the circumference of the tree’s massive base. decades later, what results is a visually striking cluster of second-growth trees over a hundred feet high, circling the base of the former giant. contemporary action is indelibly tied to the past. whether undergraduates are attending college far from home or in their own backyard, understanding local histories of social justice issues within the context of service learning can help develop a sense of place, purpose, and agency for students studying community psychology. references alinsky, s. d. (1972). rules for radicals: a primer for realistic radicals. new york: vintage books. bari, j. (1994). timber wars. monroe, me: common courage press. bernacki, m.l., & jaeger, e. (2008). exploring the impact of service-learning on moral development and moral orientation. michigan journal of community service learning, 14(2), 515. bevington, d. (2012). the rebirth of environmentalism: grassroots activism from the spotted owl to the polar bear. (pp. 41-109, “never mind the nationals” essay). washington, dc: island press. bowman, n., brandenberger, j., lapsley, d., hill, p., & quaranto, j. (2010). serving in college, flourishing in adulthood: does community engagement during the college years predict adult well‐ being? applied psychology: health and well‐being, 2(1), 14-34. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 bringle, r. g., & duffy, d. k. (1998). with service in mind: concepts and models for service-learning in psychology. washington, d.c.: american association for higher education. bringle, r. g., hatcher, j. a., & muthiah, r. n. (2010). the role of service-learning on the retention of first-year students to second year. michigan journal of community service learning, 16(2), 38-49. bronfenbrenner, u. (1979). the ecology of human development. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. celio, c. i., durlak, j., & dymnicki, a. (2011). a meta-analysis of the impact of service-learning on students. journal of experiential education, 34(2), 164181. dalton, j. & wolfe, s. (2012). education connection and the community practitioner. the community psychologist, 45(4), 7-13. deprince, a. p., priebe, s. j., & newton, a. t. (2011). learning about violence against women in research methods: a comparison to traditional pedagogy. psychological trauma: theory, research, practice, and policy, 3(3), 215. dowie, m. (2011). conservation refugees: the hundred-year conflict between global conservation and native peoples. (pp. 1-22). cambridge, ma: mit press. einfeld, a., & collins, d. (2008). the relationships between servicelearning, social justice, multicultural competence, and civic engagement. journal of college student development, 49(2), 95-109. kloos, b., hill, j., thomas, e., wandersman, a., elias, m. j., & dalton, j. h. (2012). community psychology: linking individuals and communities (3rd ed.). belmont, ca: cengage learning. kolb, d. a. (1984). experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. goodwin, j., & jasper, j. m. (2004). the social movements reader: cases and concepts. malden, ma: blackwell publishing. hill, j. b. (2000). the legacy of luna: the story of a tree, a woman, and the struggle to save the redwoods. san francisco: harper press. hispanic association of colleges and universities. (2019). hispanic-serving institution definitions. retrieved from https://www.hacu.net. hofman, n. g., & rosing, h. (2007). pedagogies of praxis: course-based action research in the social sciences. bolton, ma: anker publishing company, inc. humboldt state university, office of institutional effectiveness. (2018). hsu fall semester enrollment, 1991present [data set]. https://ie.humboldt.edu/node/472 johnson, h.p. & wagner, t. (2002). the last stand: ancient redwoods and the bottom line. berkeley, ca: university of california extension center for media and independent learning. mann, e. (2011). playbook for progressives: 16 qualities of the successful organizer. boston: beacon press. linney, j. a., & wandersman, a. (1991). prevention plus iii: assessing alcohol and other drug prevention programs at the school and community level: a four-step guide to useful program assessment. rockeville, md: u.s. department of health and human services, office for substance abuse prevention. rappaport, j. (1981). in praise of paradox: a social policy of empowerment over prevention. american journal of community psychology, 9(1), 1-25. savory, p., burnett, a., & goodburn, a. (2007). inquiry into the college classroom: a journey toward scholarly teaching. san francisco: jossey-bass. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.hacu.net/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 seifer, s. d. & connors, k., (eds.) (2007). community campus partnerships for health: faculty toolkit for servicelearning in higher education. scotts valley, ca: national service-learning clearinghouse, 2007. http://www.servicelearning.org/file manager/download/he_toolkit_with _worksheets.pdf speece, d. f. (2017). defending giants: the redwood wars and the transformation of american environmental politics. seattle, wa: university of washington press. teaching tolerance. (2018). social justice standards. retrieved from https://www.tolerance.org/framewo rks/social-justice-standards. u.s. census bureau (2017). quickfacts humboldt county, california. retrieved from https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/f act/table/humboldtcountycalifornia/ pst045217. wade, r. c. (2007). community action rooted in history: the civiconnections model of service-learning (vol. 106). national council for the social studies. whitford, e. (2018, october 5). the murder of david josiah lawson. inside higher ed. retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/ne ws/2018/10/05/unsolved-murderblack-student-humboldt-state-raisesmany-questions widick, r. (2009). trouble in the forest: california's redwood timber wars. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. yorio, p. l., & ye, f. (2012). a meta-analysis on the effects of service-learning on the social, personal, and cognitive outcomes of learning. academy of management learning & education, 11(1), 9-27. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.servicelearning.org/filemanager/download/he_toolkit_with_worksheets.pdf http://www.servicelearning.org/filemanager/download/he_toolkit_with_worksheets.pdf http://www.servicelearning.org/filemanager/download/he_toolkit_with_worksheets.pdf https://www.tolerance.org/frameworks/social-justice-standards https://www.tolerance.org/frameworks/social-justice-standards global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 appendix a rubric for case example. [author’s note: this appendix consists of a combined series of documents used throughout the overall activity. the first document is directly below, and provides students with an overview of the four stages of the assignment. readers are welcome to use all or part of these materials with citation.] psych ###: community psychology historical and contemporary case analyses of social change in humboldt one of the main assignments for this course is the historical and contemporary case analysis project. for this assignment, we began by analyzing the historical case of the redwood wars in humboldt county. now, you and your site team will apply concepts from this analysis to issues currently facing your service learning site. finally, you’ll reflect individually on both cases and imagine ways you might get involved with future community issues of concern to you. this project is built around the following learning goals: 1) develop knowledge of the structure, processes, and impacts of social justice movements through historical case analyses 2) anchor your local service-learning experiences in knowledge of systems change, from both historical and contemporary local perspectives 3) consider how goals 1 & 2 can help you to create meaningful change around contemporary issues in your own community (as you define it) this project is designed to help us “learn under our own feet”, applying course concepts to how we understand our local partner organizations, the rich history that surrounds us here in humboldt county, and the social and community issues you hope to engage with in the future. this assignment will involve four stages, and take place on three ecological levels: 1. class (microsystem) 2. site team (microsystem w/i a microsystem) 3. individual (you!) the four stages are represented in the following figure: http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 [author’s note: stages 1 & 2 consisted of in-class activities and the individual and class level. stage 1 involved a quiz that challenged students to apply course material to in identifying strategies used in the redwood wars. the item read as follows: strategy identification & analysis select three of the eight of chapter 12’s strategies for social and community change (you can choose any of the three) that were employed during the redwood wars (reminder: community coalitions, consciousness raising, social action, community development, organizational consultation, alternative settings, use of technology, and policy advocacy) in column one, list the specific name of the strategy in column two, identify one specific example of the way this strategy was used in the context of the redwood wars. in column three, describe what you see as one strength of this strategy in achieving the goal of protecting the remaining ancient redwoods. in column four, describe what you see as one weakness or challenge of this strategy in achieving the goal of protecting the remaining ancient redwoods. in addition to being graded as a quiz, these responses were then pooled into a master document that was used in a class workshop in stage 2, where the class edited down the list to a single, comprehensive set of strategies to be used in stages 3 & 4.] stages 1 & 2 stages 1 & 2 were completed using your individual responses on the second part of quiz #1 as well as our in-class discussion distilling the main strategies utilized in the redwood wars. results of this process is listed below, and will be used for stages 3 & 4. stage 3: strategic analysis of your group activity (due ###) with lessons learned from the redwood wars, your site team will begin a group project in class on [date]. this session will consist of a group exercise with specific tasks for the week, and will culminate in a brief group paper that explores strategies for contributing to your site’s mission through the elements of effective community change (kloos et al., 2012). further instruction will be provided in class. stage 4: individual case analyses in social change paper (due ###) building off of stages 1-3, you will integrate the two case studies of social change (the redwood wars and your own site’s mission/issue) in a structured paper that will allow you to reflect on how course concepts apply to each, as well as a social/community issue of your own choosing. further instruction will be provided in class. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 stages 1 & 2 stages 1 & 2 were completed using your individual responses on the second part of quiz #1 as well as our in-class discussion distilling the main strategies utilized in the redwood wars. results of this process is listed below, and will be used for stages 3 & 4. how do each of the elements of community and social change apply to the redwood wars? elements of community change examples from the redwood wars (generated by class) community coalitions ● judi bari’s attempt to get environmentalists and labor unions to work together ● earth first! working in partnership with epic consciousness raising ● redwood summer ● outreach to college students ● specific protests against lumber industries ● use of music to raise awareness social action ● julia butterfly’s tree-sit ● tree-spiking ● forming a human chain to block pacific lumber trucks ● targeted civil disobedience (e.g., sitting in the office of pl and locking hands) ● occupying government buildings community development ● growing interest and support within the humboldt community ● arguing against clear-cutting as a means of preserving logging jobs for future generations organizational consultation ● legal expertise consulting with epic in use of the endangered species act ● recruiting journalists to share the story ● using expert witnesses in environmental issues alternative settings ● sitting/living in trees ● woody harrelson draping a sign on golden gate bridge ● earth first! occupying state capital in sacramento http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 use of technology ● use of technology during tree-sit to get the word out (e.g., calling a senator from atop of luna) ● role of technology in organizing groups and supporting community coalitions ● use of film and video (example: cherney’s “who bombed judi bari?”) ● using technology when events were happening in the moment (e.g., helicopter incident, when tree fell on protester) policy advocacy ● jbh negotiated directly at times with pacific lumber for an agreement on pacific lumber’s logging policies ● use of the endangered species act to protect forests (marbled murrelet) ● legal challenges to pacific lumber & maxxam ● petitioning forestry board meetings [author’s note: for stage 3, students consider the strategies used in the historical case and then generate similar strategies for serving the mission of their site.] stage 3: strategic analysis of your group activity due [date] – 30 points (grade by site team) with lessons learned from the redwood wars, your site team will begin a group project in class on [date]. this session will consist of a group exercise with specific tasks for the week, and will culminate in a set of 6-9 power point slides that explore how three of the elements of social change (kloos et al., 2012) can be used generate specific strategies to contribute to your site’s mission and/or address its current needs. we will meet in our site teams on [date]. using the list generated in class outlining the strategies used in the redwood wars (stage 2), your site teams will generate 3 new strategies that correspond to similar elements applied to your site. for example, epic used the endangered species act to slow down clear-cutting of old growth trees on privately owned land. a group advocating for homeless services (like [site name]) might use legal clauses from the city that state that the city must take action if the number of homeless people exceed a certain number. your group will be able to consult with the professor and tas during and outside of class. to complete this assignment, follow these steps: 1. meet with your site team and review the strategies generated by the class in stage 2. 2. identify three specific strategies that you think could be used in a similar fashion to help your site 3. specify in more detail what those three strategies would look like 4. decide who among your team will work on which part of the 6-9 power point slides (template is available on canvas and can be found on back of this form) 5. be sure that one of your team members submits the entire set of slides in a single electronic file by [date]. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 a template for the slides is listed on the opposite page and available in canvas. also, pages 3 & 4 contain a useful notes sheet for generating ideas to work on this week. how do each of the seven elements of effective community change (and the role of policy advocacy) apply to the redwood wars and your local site? refer to the table of the strategies generated by the class in stages 1 & 2 to develop your ideas. [author’s note: for this final activity, students write their own individual paper involving reflection and deeper analysis of their strategies identified in stages 1-3] stage 4: individual case analyses in social change paper (due ###) building off of stages 1-3, you are now ready to integrate the two case studies of social change (the redwood wars and your own site’s mission/issue) into a structured paper. the stage 4 project will allow you to reflect on how course concepts apply, and develop a four-step program http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 evaluation proposal for how you might enact the strategy you choose to help further social change at your site and in your community. start by reviewing your site team’s stage 3 list of strategies; you are free to use one of those, or come up with your own. in stage 4 you will develop these ideas deeper. this is an individual project but you are free to discuss and develop ideas with team mates. ● writing instructions: 1" margins, 12-point font, double spaced. see section descriptions for paragraph length. ● this paper should include a title page, paper body, and reference page that are all in apa format. for section 3, you can simply follow a format similar to the example found in chapter 13 (see below) this section should include the elements listed below. please organize this section under the following three sections (apa level 1 headings): strategy from the redwood wars proposed strategy for [site name] four-step evaluation of proposed strategy strategy from the redwood wars for this section, in approximately one page describe a strategy used during the redwood wars that you would like to borrow from by applying a similar strategy to your site. be sure to name the strategy (from the list used in this course). the goal here is to describe the historical action in more detail than stages 1-3. utilize the readings/class notes from the semester as well as your own research to provide thicker detail and description about the tactic as well as any historical events/facts relating to it. outside sources can include other books, documentaries, or websites. you can add specific details to “tell the story” of how the strategy was used. you should be able to find enough information to fill a page, but if you’re struggling you may also use this space to describe other historical examples of similar strategies (e.g., “similar to julia “butterfly” hill’s trespassing into a tree to underscore our collective ownership of the forest, rosa parks refused to leave her bus seat to represent our collective right to public resources free from segregation.”). bevington, d. (2012). the rebirth of environmentalism: grassroots activism from the spotted owl to the polar bear. (pp. 41-109, “never mind the nationals” essay). washington, dc: island press. cherney, darryl. guest lecture. dowie, m. (2011). conservation refugees: the hundred-year conflict between global conservation and native peoples. (pp. 17-22; “nature” essay). cambridge, ma: mit press. johnson, h.p. & wagner, t. (2002). the last stand: ancient redwoods and the bottom line. berkeley, ca: university of california extension center for media and independent learning. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 hill, j. b. (2000). the legacy of luna: the story of a tree, a woman, and the struggle to save the redwoods. san francisco: harper press. proposed strategy for [site name] in this section, describe the idea you have (or your site team had) for a concrete strategy to promote the mission of your service learning site. this strategy should be from the same “elements of social change” category as the strategy you analyzed from the redwood wars in the first section. provide enough detail so that the reader has a clear sense of what the strategy will entail, and how it will support the mission of your organization. you can complete this section in 2-4 paragraphs; just be sure it is clear and well-developed. four-step program evaluation lastly, you will design a proposed four-step program evaluation based on the frameworks presented in chapter 13. note that for this paper the word “strategy” will replace the word “program”. for an example of a completed four-step program evaluation, see chapter 13, pp. 434435. depending on the strategy you develop, completing this section may be relatively straightforward or require some complex thinking. start early, and if you find yourself getting stuck swing by my office hours or email me and we can strategize together. for this section, complete the framework found in chapter 13. http://www.gjcpp.org/ social problems are social: empirical evidence and reflections on integrating community psychology into traditional curriculum lauren b. cattaneo, rachel shor, jenna m. calton, kris t. gebhard, syeda y. buchwach, nour elshabassi, and stephanie hargrove1 author biographies: lauren b. cattaneo, earned her doctorate in clinical/community psychology from the university of maryland (college park) in 2001, and joined the faculty of the clinical psychology program at george mason university in 2003. dr. cattaneo’s interest in psychology centers on its relevance for addressing pressing social problems, which she explores through community-based work. within the area of intimate partner violence, dr. cattaneo’s research has focused on empowerment and survivor-centered practice. dr. cattaneo is also interested in the ways in which higher education can catalyze civic engagement. in addition to her mentorship of graduate students, she is active and innovative in undergraduate teaching: she is a trained inside-out instructor, and is collaborating to create an minor in social justice and to strengthen civic engagement curriculum at gmu. dr. cattaneo has won awards for excellence in teaching and mentorship from gmu and from the society for the psychological study of social issues. rachel shor, doctoral candidate in george mason university’s clinical psychology program and is currently completing her psychology internship with the ptsd clinical team at va boston health care system. she has focused on interpersonal violence and multicultural counseling, both as a doctoral student and as a trauma counselor. rachel received her master’s in counseling psychology at arcadia university. she was won several awards and received prior recognition for her teaching and clinical work, and was most recently awarded the wilbert j. mckeachie teaching excellence award, presented by the society for the teaching of psychology (division 2 of the american psychological 1 george mason university global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 association) in may 2018. rachel's current research investigates interpersonal dynamics of power, implicit social cognition, and help-seeking following a trauma.jenna calton , staff psychologist at the tree house child advocacy center of montgomery county, md. she specializes in delivering evidence-based trauma-focused therapies to youth and families and serves as the internship program director. dr. calton is also an adjunct clinical supervisor at george mason university’s center for psychological services. her research interests include ally development, intimate partner violence survivors’ perceptions of justice, and barriers to help-seeking for lgbtq-identified survivors of violence. dr. calton received her phd in clinical psychology from george mason university. she completed a psychology internship at children’s national health system in washington, dc, and she earned undergraduate degrees in psychology and women’s studies at the university of florida.kris t. gebhard (pronouns: they/them), came to the clinical psychology doctoral program after spending several years community organizing with trans, queer, and lgb+ communities in minnesota. kris is passionate about research that directly benefits communities who are historically and presently marginalized in the united states, and whose experiences have been under-researched in psychology, including transgender women, and lgbtq+ individuals. kris is currently engaged in research on masculinities relating to violence, seeking to better understand how to prevent male violence against trans women. kris’s work has found that shame-related responses to threatened masculinity appear to be key players in male violence (gebhard, cattaneo, tangney, hargrove, shor, 2018). kris’s dissertation seeks to further illuminate the role of threatened-masculinity shame in male aggression, to inform prevention efforts. in addition, kris is interested in other research that will benefit the lgb, queer, and trans communities, especially work on resiliency, community resiliency, and empowerment. syeda buchwach, clinical psychology phd student at george mason university. she earned her bachelor's degree in international economics and worked to support economic development in marginalized communities before pursuing a career in psychology. her past research experience includes co-parenting among latino and african american parents and help-seeking among asian/asian american students. as a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 volunteer program leader for the national alliance for mental illness, syeda is committed to promoting self-efficacy and community among individuals who have received diagnoses for chronic psychiatric conditions. she is interested in the development of accessible mental health resources for ethnic minorities through community-based initiatives, particularly within immigrant enclaves. syeda's current research involvements concern undergraduate civic engagement, domestic violence survivors' experience of public assistance, and community resilience among systemically marginalized groups. nour elshabassi, volunteer in the lab for community reach, a previous student in the community engagement for social change course, and a george mason university alumnae. after completing her undergraduate degree, she worked as a case manager for america works of washington, dc, assisting participants in the temporary assistance for needy families program with employment goals. currently, she is employed at community science, a community psychology research and development organization that contracts with nonprofits, government agencies, and foundations to achieve their mission of building healthy, just, and equitable communities. her research interests include exploring how social factors such as socioeconomic status, religious identity, education, etc. have contributed to the spread of diseases in the united states and abroad. nour is also interested in learning about resilience among vulnerable populations and how protective factors vary cross-culturally. stephanie hargrove, clinical psychology phd student at george mason university. her research interests are focused on culturally competent treatments for gender-based violence and factors that promote holistic healing. her clinical interests focus on helping black women and girls heal from traumatic experiences. stephanie would ultimately like to work with underserved communities as a clinician and she plans to use research to inform her practice and as well as develop prevention efforts, interventions, and influence policy. in 2017, stephanie was awarded the apa predoctoral fellowship in mental health and substance abuse services to further her efforts to serve underserved populations. personally, and professionally stephanie works to achieve the mission of the association of black http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 psychologists: “liberation of the african mind, empowerment of the african character, and enlivenment and illumination of the african spirit.” recommended citation: cattaneo, l., shor, r., calton, j., gebhard, k. t., buckwach, s., elshabassi, n., & hargrove, s. (2019). social problems are social: empirical evidence and reflections on integrating community psychology into traditional curriculum. global journal community psychology practice, 10(1), 1 – 29. retrieved day/month/year from, (http://gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: lauren b. cattaneo, department of psychology, george mason university, 4400 university drive, msn 3f5, fairfax, va, 22030. e-mail: lcattane@gmu.edu. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 social problems are social: empirical evidence and reflections on integrating community psychology into traditional curriculum abstract the paper will describe the development and impact of a course that exemplifies the principles and values of community psychology, but does so outside the bounds of a community psychology program or concentration in a large, diverse, public university. the class, community engagement for social change, has two aims: to teach undergraduates that social problems have social causes, and to engage students in a range of social problem-solving approaches that incorporate that understanding. it accomplishes these aims by introducing a “multi-level analysis” of social problems, using a case study of the social problem of poverty, and requiring that all students complete 20 hours of service in community organizations. the development of the class required strategic thinking and significant retooling in order to attract and promote learning across a broad range of students. it has now been offered each semester for seven years, and has evolved into an opportunity for the first author and her graduate students to integrate social justice-oriented teaching and research. for the past three years, the authors have been engaged in a longitudinal project evaluating the impact of the class on student outcomes. this paper provides an overview of this course, and describes lessons learned from two sources: (1) the experience of teaching and refining the class, and (2) the longitudinal dataset collected from students who did and did not take the course. data show that the class is effective in shifting attitudes both specific to poverty and more generally to social problems. results also show that implicit bias did not shift over the course of the semester, and that individual and systemic attributions for social problems are only moderately related. we hope that sharing our experience is useful to those interested in similar coursework in other institutions that lack an explicit focus on community psychology. the authors of this paper are faculty (cattaneo), graduate students (shor, gebhard, buchwach, hargrove), and graduate and undergraduate alumnae (calton, elshabassi) of a large, diverse university in the midatlantic region of the united states. the psychology department at this university does not have a community psychology curriculum or concentration at either the undergraduate or graduate level. our home doctoral program is in clinical psychology. 2 while we would like to be clear that the emphasis of our work is distinct from the emphasis of our program and department, we do not wish to convey that there is a lack of support for our work. to the contrary, the program and department have been positive about our efforts, and there are others in the department who consider social context and work with community organizations in various ways. while the department emphasizes the need for research and practice to go hand in hand – consistent with the tenets of community psychology – it is not primarily oriented toward justice or community wellbeing, nor does it require collaboration with community partners2. in this context, the first author developed an undergraduate course that embodies the principles of community psychology, both in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 terms of learning objectives and teaching strategies. the authors have worked together in the teaching and refinement of that course, as well as in research exploring its impact. our work has served as an opportunity both to teach community psychology content to undergraduates, and to integrate community psychology into our conversations and work more broadly. as suggested by lichty and palamaro-munsell (2017), the teaching of this course represents a key component of our community psychology practice, and we believe our experience has relevance for other psychologists who wish to infuse community psychology pedagogy into their teaching. in order to write this paper, the authors discussed our experiences teaching the class, analyzed and interpreted data together, and asked our undergraduate alumna author to comment on her experience as a student in the class. while the majority of the paper is the result of consensus within our group, we have noted our alumna’s comments throughout the paper, to make her unique perspective stand out in sharper relief. the overarching aim of this paper is to share the lessons we have learned in teaching and evaluating this course, in order to provide useful information for others interested in infusing the values of community psychology into contexts where the fit is not immediately clear. while our university serves both undergraduates and graduate students, this course serves undergraduates, and the implications of our work are relevant to primarily undergraduate-focused settings. before sharing those lessons, we will first describe the genesis of the course and give a brief overview of its content. overview of community engagement for social change when the first author joined the university as an assistant professor and began teaching the typical courses for a clinical psychologist (e.g., abnormal psychology), she noted a frequent narrative among undergraduates: people’s problems are of the result of bad choices. students often seemed to believe that those who commit crimes, live in poverty, misuse substances or otherwise violate the norms of “good” citizenship do so because of individual-level factors: they don’t work hard enough, they don’t know enough, they were raised without a sense of right and wrong. this kind of deficit-oriented thinking– in which problems and solutions exist within individuals is described by william ryan (1971) in his foundational book, blaming the victim, and it seemed to be alive and well in the general undergraduate population. a singularly individual-level view of social issues is problematic (e.g. velonis et al., 2015; whitaker & holum, 2015). perhaps of greatest importance, an individual-level view limits the avenues through which students might address social ills. psychology students are generally oriented toward helping others; if they learn primarily about individual-level causes of problems, they assume that the primary way to channel their wish to help is to work with individual people. they leave college unaware of a whole world of possibilities for change, which is a loss not only for them but also for the world into which we are releasing them. our university explicitly aims to graduate “engaged citizens” who are “knowledgeable of important issues affecting the world… and committed to building a just society” (george mason university, 2012). for students of psychology to be prepared to address the pressing issues of the day, they need a holistic view of those issues, and while there are many wonderful courses offered in the psychology department at our university, this broader perspective is not a main focus. this absence also affects students who do not lean toward blaming individuals but are unaware http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 of other explanations for social problems. for example, our undergraduate alumna author notes that before taking the class, she believed that people who are poor were not at fault for their poverty, but she was unsure why they were not at fault, or what to do about the situation. after completing the class, she recognized that while she had previously been aware that larger forces were at work, she had not understood the systemic mechanisms that perpetuate poverty or other social problems, and so she could not effectively communicate her perspective. a limited understanding of the source of social problems is particularly detrimental in the context of our diverse student body. our university hosts students of many races, ethnicities, nationalities, social classes, and life experiences. without the awareness that social arrangements systematically advantage some groups over others, students are illequipped to address the problems affecting their own communities beyond attempting to support the individuals affected by those problems; on a personal level, students from marginalized groups may be less likely to internalize experiences of discrimination if they are more aware of systemic influences (e.g. landrine & klonoff, 1996; puhl & brownell, 2003). thus, a narrow focus on the individual level is problematic both in terms of how students might think about the world at large and in how they might think about their own experiences. community psychology offers the broader perspective that is under-represented in general psychology curricula. it “goes beyond an individual focus and integrates social, cultural, economic, political, environmental, and international influences to promote positive change, health, and empowerment at individual and systemic levels” (scra, 2018b). the first author developed the course “community engagement for social change” in an effort to teach students to understand and apply this broader perspective. specifically, the course aims to complicate students’ understanding of social problems, and to engage them in addressing those problems based on that broader understanding. the class earns the standard amount of credits for our institution and meets on a typical schedule: twice a week for an hour and fifteen minutes. typical enrollment is between 25-35 students. using poverty as a semester-long case study, we employ the framework of a “multi-level analysis” (an adaptation of bronfenbrenner’s ecological model, e.g., bronfenbrenner & ceci, 1994, see figure 1), to guide students in analyzing the causes and effects of social problems at the individual, interpersonal, and social context levels. the latter is most important, because it is both harder to see and more pervasive, operating through broad influences like marketplace dynamics, policy, media, and cultural narrative. this methodology fits squarely within the ecological perspectives principle of community psychology. because the course also situates the understanding of poverty within a broader understanding of social class, it also builds competencies within the socio-cultural and cross-cultural competence principles of community psychology (scra, 2018a). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 figure 1. the multi-level model used as a framework for community engagement for social change. the model is based on bronfenbrenner’s ecological model (bronfenbrenner & ceci, 1994). a central piece of the class is the 20 hours of community service each student completes in a community organization that serves clients in poverty. in partnership with the organizations, we design these placements so that students have direct contact with clients. in class and through assignments, students integrate their service experiences with readings and exercises to shake up previous assumptions and try on a different way of seeing the world. consistent with the framework of community psychology, we do not minimize the importance of the individual level of analysis, but we broaden the lens to understand individual struggles, choices and resources within a larger picture. in the remainder of this paper, we draw from our experiences in a way that we hope informs others’ efforts. first, we articulate what we view are the key components of the course that make it effective. we will then describe a longitudinal study that tested the impact of the class, including the scholarship that frames it, the method and results of the project, and its limitations. finally, we integrate the results of the research with our experience in the classroom to generate recommendations for others interested in this kind of work. designing for impact: key components of the course the development and teaching of the course was initially the purview of the faculty member author (cattaneo) and the graduate student author who served as teaching assistant its first semester (now alumna, calton). over time, the course piqued the interest of other graduate students in our research lab, and they became both instructors and teaching assistants themselves. our undergraduate alumna (elshabassi) took the class the first semester it was offered, and returned after graduating to volunteer in our research lab. at least one of us has now offered the course each semester since spring 2012. there has been significant trial, error and refinement in the course over time. while we continue to discuss and revise, in our collective experience, there are a number of key components that are a consistent part of an effective semester. we drew these conclusions from experimenting with different strategies in the classroom over multiple semesters and reflecting on both systematic (e.g. evaluations) and anecdotal student feedback. socially just practice in the classroom given the nature of the material we cover and the likelihood that it touches on deeply held beliefs and personal experiences, it is possible for students to experience micro-aggressions in the classroom, to feel stigmatized as a member of a group that is being presented in a negative light (even if this is done with the best of intentions), or to feel that their experiences are ignored, if they are not part of the general story being told. in order for change to occur, students need to feel safe, valued and heard as they express their thinking, doubts and questions about material that can be emotionally loaded and/or personally painful. as articulated by lichty and palamaro-munsell (2017), in addition to shaping content, community psychology values have great relevance for structuring and facilitating the dynamics of the classroom in this vein. one such value is to acknowledge that as the person in the room in a position of power, one’s own identity plays a significant role in those dynamics. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 as a group, the instructor-authors represent social identities that are associated with privilege and with marginalization. four of us identify as white, one of us as african american, one of us as a second-generation bangladeshi american. five of us are cisgender heterosexual women, and one of us is genderqueer and queer. our experiences of social class are complex. graduate students experience a combination of financial strain and high educational status; they are aware that while they struggle financially, they possess a level of privilege through their status, and a safety net through the resources of their social network, that sets them apart from poverty status. one of us shifted from lower to upper middle class over the course of her upbringing, and two others experienced episodes of homelessness as young adults. the diversity of our group is helpful to us when we have discussions. when we are in the classroom alone, however, our experiences with privilege and marginalization interact with our teaching in varying ways. cultivating awareness of the ways in which our identities intersect with our teaching of this course is an ongoing effort, and we do not pretend to have found the answers to these complex issues. however, we have adopted several strategies that have seemed to increase the sense of safety and openness in the classroom. first, we discuss issues surrounding social identity, privilege, and marginalization with each other on an ongoing basis, supporting and challenging each other, and providing a space for us to practice difficult conversations. second, we collaborate with students to develop discussion ground rules at the start of each semester, allowing us to preview and normalize talking about difficult topics. third, we model a willingness to talk about our own social locations and potential blind spots throughout the course. for example, one instructor who experienced several months of homelessness shares this experience as a way of illustrating that one cannot “see” who falls in this category. we also model openness to feedback. in some cases, we identify students (through their writing, for example) who may benefit from one-on-one conversations with instructors to process class material or give feedback, and invite them to meet. we seek anonymous feedback from all students during the semester, and explicitly make changes in the classroom in response. fourth, we emphasize the importance of language to curb “othering” during the semester: we use person-first language (e.g. “people who are poor/experiencing poverty” rather than “poor people”) throughout the class, and take pains to use the pronoun “we” rather than “they” (e.g. “here is how we experience chronic stress…”) finally, we emphasize throughout the semester that in this course, students vary in whether they have personal experience related to the content. we are explicit that our aim is to create a set of common reference points for the class, and students are welcome to also share their own experiences if they like, but they are certainly not required to do so. these common reference points come from course content, community placements, and interactive exercises. we describe these aspects of the class next. course content during the semester, we aim for students to increase their awareness of systemic influences of poverty, and decrease their attributions of individual blame. there are several pieces of content which, based on our anecdotal experience and reading of student evaluations, have seemed particularly effective in facilitating these shifts. a ted talk describing the impact of the gap between rich and poor in the united states allows us to show that social arrangements vary in ways that have major implications for wellbeing (wilkinson, 2011). in a similar vein, chetty’s http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 groundbreaking work on social mobility shows that specific aspects of neighborhoods, such as education quality and racial integration, dramatically influence the ability of children to grow up and make more income than their parents did (opportunity insights, 2019). a podcast from the radio show this american life regarding housing discrimination shows the power of history and policy in shaping the ability to gain housing and grow wealth. readings from born on third base (collins, 2016) provide the perspective of an activist who grew up in extraordinary wealth, and communicate the ways in which cultural narrative shapes the willingness to change. finally, a profile of a mother working two jobs to try and support her children provides a close-in view of the ways in which policies influence individual experience (boo, 2001). another key to effective content is variety, as different modalities (readings, podcasts, graphics, interactive websites) are effective for different students. we also change content as the world and salient narratives change around us. community placements the most obvious way the course differs from others in the department happens outside the classroom. placements include homeless shelters and a variety of programs for families who are housing or food insecure, and roles include greeting residents at front desks, serving meals, tutoring, running teens’ groups, and assisting with job and housing searches. simply interacting with people who are struggling with poverty in the vicinity of our university is an eye-opener for some students. our undergraduate alumna author explained that her conception of poverty had been confined to developing countries; learning about poverty locally “blew [her] 3 at the beginning of the semester, we are clear with students that they should not pry into residents’ situations for their own edification. instead, we suggest that they remain open to mind.” this experience not only disrupted her belief about poverty in the u.s. but also was a powerful example of how poverty is made invisible. there is always a sizable group of students who express similar realizations at the end of the course; other students are well aware of poverty because of their own personal experiences. having all students serve at placements where they can personally witness the existence of poverty, regardless of their prior awareness, is one way we create a common set of reference points. the literature on service learning is clear that experience does not promote transformation on its own; structured reflection is key (e.g., kiely, 2005). structuring reflection requires both listening to students in class and anticipating what they will experience. in addition to gathering feedback and noticing trends informally, we conducted a qualitative study to explore which aspects of their placements they found “eye-opening” (shor, cattaneo, & calton, 2017). our findings suggested that these experiences can be transformative in multiple ways, and also identified themes. for example, we found that the majority of students (75%) who were placed in a homeless shelter had an “eyeopening” experience by learning about a resident’s life or history3, and that it was not necessary for a student to have repeated contact with the same resident in order to be emotionally or cognitively affected by that information. insights from this study have helped us to guide class discussions and design writing prompts. knowing which experiences tend to be eye opening also helps us have conversations with community partners about the structure of placements. as there is significant turnover of staff at our partner organizations, the nature of placements is dynamic. to ensure chatting if residents want to talk, and that they simply observe what is happening around them. students learn from these kinds of informal interactions. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 that the arrangement works for all sides, including the clients served at the organization, we review student experiences at the end of every semester and have conversations with our community partners before the start of each semester. in these conversations we ensure the placement meets our criteria (students have direct contact with clients; students volunteer 20 hours; we must give more to the organization in terms of student contribution than we take in terms of training and supervision) and make sure we are meeting the organization’s priorities and needs (including client wellbeing) as well. when the structure needs to change, we consider how this will influence students’ experiences, and revise our reflection activities as needed. common experiences inside the classroom during class time, interactive exercises have proven particularly useful as points of reference. we find that students point back to these experiences repeatedly over the course of the semester, and thus they seem influential in changing thinking. here we describe exemplars. why can’t pat read? to introduce the idea of a “multi-level analysis,” we use an exercise that makes those levels concrete. the instructor begins by telling the class that “pat” is in the 5th grade, but cannot read. the instructor then draws a stick figure on the board, and asks the class “why can’t pat read?” once students have generated a handful of reasons, the instructor chooses one, and applies the “5 whys” technique to it. this technique is used in multiple disciplines (e.g., business contexts; isixsigma, 2000) to identify the “root cause” of a problem. in this case, the aim is to brainstorm causes of pat’s problem that go beyond pat. for example, if students have suggested that pat’s parents did not teach him/her to read, the instructor asks, “why didn’t pat’s parents teach him/her to read?” after generating a few explanations from the class, the instructor will choose one, and ask again, “why?” the instructor repeats the “why” question five times. this technique yields a brainstorm that progresses naturally from explanations in pat’s personal world to the systems surrounding it (see appendix b). mapping out the multiple influences on pat’s problem illustrates several critical points. first, if we had stopped our analysis too soon, we would have missed some very important influences, particularly those that affect many pats, now and into the future. second, there are many places we can intervene, as reflected by the multiple nodes in the diagram, and where we attribute blame dictates how we apply resources to solve the problem. for example, if we believe that the problem is pat’s lack of motivation, we may focus on incentives and individual attention for pat. if we believe that teachers aren’t well trained, the solution might be for the school to apply for a grant to develop adequate training. if the source of the problem is a lack of a living wage, then political advocacy is necessary. by brainstorming causes and then using the resulting diagram on the whiteboard to discuss solutions, students can see which aspects of the problem are addressed or overlooked when we choose explanations at various levels. the mushroom exercise. two particularly abstract aspects of social context that play a role in the perpetuation of social inequities are cultural narrative and privilege; an interactive exercise has proven effective in communicating them (see appendix c for full description). in this exercise, the instructor organizes a competition in which some groups secretly have advantages over others. students are initially unaware the game is rigged, and the winners and losers are treated as if they earned their rewards and losses. both through the experience of playing the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 game and receiving the feedback from the instructor, students have an in-vivo experience of the power of the narrative of meritocracy. the feelings and discoveries in this exercise are useful reference points when these abstract concepts arise throughout the semester. connecting with the experience of being homeless. while students often have some experience with financial struggle or housing instability, it is less common for students to have experienced extended periods of homelessness, or to have panhandled for food. it is quite common, however, for students to encounter people who are panhandling in their daily lives. we add to our set of common experiences in the classroom near the end of each semester when we invite a speaker’s bureau from the national coalition for the homeless (nch; https://nationalhomeless.org). nch trains and coordinates a group of speakers who have experienced homelessness, and for a small fee, select two to come to a venue and tell their stories. students often find this to be the most powerful experience of the semester, as evidenced by their comments at the end of the course and in course evaluations; our undergraduate alumna author remembers details of the presenters’ stories six years after she heard them. the stories often involve the shock of becoming homeless, and the circumstances that led the presenter to lose the resources he or she had. in the most recent semester, one instructor received a card from a student commenting on all she had learned, but highlighting that she “never realized that just anyone could become homeless.” this statement suggests a loosening of the assumption that if a person is 4 as one example, an email from a former student the first author happened to receive while revising this paper includes this statement: “i believe that your class helped me grow not only as a student pursuing a career in psychology, but as a person as well. ever since your class, i have pushed myself to homeless, there must be something different about them. this panel would likely be impactful on its own, but we have added several reflections to tie it to course objectives. first, before the presentation, we have students reflect on experiences when they have encountered a person who is panhandling, and we have students do a free-write in response to the prompt: “when you see people who are panhandling, what do you think, what do you feel, what do you do?” we then use class discussion to connect this free-write to the interpersonal level of poverty by examining how we distance ourselves from others’ pain. this often links to students’ experiences and observations at their placements. when the guest speakers then describe how they felt invisible to passersby during their experience of homelessness, it has a much greater impact; students see their own role in these experiences. as with the other common reference points, we use these connections as touchstones throughout the remainder of the class. developing research questions about course impact over time we repeatedly noticed the impact the class had on students: we noticed it in the nature of conversations in class, from the comments students made on evaluations at the end of the semester, and from the contact we began to receive from former students in the class, telling us about its long-term impact on their thinking and career choices4. anecdotally, we were also aware of the challenges of teaching the class, and that not all students have the same experience as the ones who contact us. we became curious further analyze situations and looking at all the factors that could have led an individual to their specific situation. i have continued doing this not only in an academic sense, but in my own life as well.” these kinds of comments are common. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 about the impact of the course more broadly. in order to explore it we reviewed relevant scholarship and devised our own set of questions to build on the knowledge base. delving into the research literature, we discovered several overlapping bodies of scholarship relevant to courses such as ours. first, scholars have described the process of “transformational learning,” in which “previously taken-for-granted assumptions, values, beliefs, and lifestyle habits are assessed and, in some cases, radically transformed” (kiely, 2005, p.7). this kind of learning is prompted by a “disorienting dilemma” (brookfield, 2015; kiely, 2005) in which an idea or incident leads students to question their beliefs. the process is, unsurprisingly, acknowledged to be uncomfortable; in fact authors refer to “a pedagogy of discomfort,” in which “discomforting emotions play a constitutive role in challenging dominant beliefs, social habits and normative practices that sustain social inequities and in creating possibilities for individual and social transformation” (zembylas & mcglynn, 2012, p.41). we discovered considerable evidence that service learning courses, in which working in a community setting is part of the curriculum, have a positive impact on academic, civic, and social justice outcomes (e.g. astin et al., 2006; meta-analysis by celio, durlak, & dymnicki, 2011; mayhew & fernández, 2007). pulling together the threads from these bodies of work, theoretically, students encounter disorienting dilemmas in service learning courses that prompt shifts in their beliefs, promote deeper learning and create a greater likelihood of engaging civically in the future. in addition to providing a framework for the process of change we hoped for in the class, this literature helped us to identify a key outcome of that process as “civic 5 the measurement of social class in a college population, and modeling its influence on change over time, involves a level of engagement,” an umbrella term for the many ways in which students might become aware of and active in identifying and solving community issues (association of american colleges and universities, 2019). building on this literature, we wished to explore whether our particular course does in fact increase civic engagement through increasing awareness of systemic sources of social problems. we also aimed to add to the literature by exploring both implicit and explicit attitudes, and both attitudes targeted in the course and the broader social justice attitudes to which they might generalize. finally, while racial and ethnic differences are sometimes explored in the literature, social class is rarely a focus. because our course focuses on poverty, we felt this last omission was particularly important to address. through exploring these questions, we aimed to both fill gaps in the scholarship, and to inform our own teaching of this specific class. a quantitative test of the course’s impact with a grant from the spencer foundation, we conducted a longitudinal study comparing psychology majors who took the class to psychology majors who did not take it. we hypothesized that the course would change skills, attitudes and knowledge related to poverty in particular and social change in general, and that those shifts would then predict behavior change. we also explored the possibility that students’ social class might influence those changes5. participants were recruited at the beginning of the semester, took a baseline survey, completed a follow up survey at the end of the semester, and then took a final survey one year later. for the purpose of this paper, focused more tightly on the content of the course, we report complexity and explanation that precluded including it in this paper. in press and in preparation papers will fill that gap (e.g. cattaneo, 2016). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 the subset of changes that we hypothesized would occur during the semester. method participants and procedure. our public university is one of the most diverse in the region. it enrolls roughly 25,000 undergraduates, the vast majority of whom attend full-time. a significant minority (38%) report being first generation college students, and just under half identify as white (43%); the largest minority groups are asian (19%), black or african american (10.8%) and hispanic (13.5%). approximately 1,000 students are psychology majors. a total of 278 racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse students participated in the study, 113 of whom took the course (see table 1 for full sample description). we recruited students from the class and from department listservs, offering both pay and research credit for participation. of the 278 students who participated in the baseline data collection, 230 completed the survey at the semester’s end (99 students who took the course, and 131 who did not). these students did not differ from each other significantly in terms of demographics or their baseline scores on study variables with two exceptions: there were significantly more women in the control group than in the course (86% versus 74%), and those taking the course began with a higher score on the csas-connectedness subscale (see below; m=5.86 versus 5.66), suggesting that they felt a greater obligation to contribute to community. the parent study included a wide array of variables assessing student attitudes and behaviors. for this paper, we focus on a set of outcomes that are tightly related to the goals of the course. table 1 demographic characteristics of total sample (n = 278) variable n(%) age a 23.26 (5.52) female 227 (81.1) ethnic heritage european 102 (36.7) african 38 (13.7) asian 34 (12.2) hispanic 51 (18.3) middle eastern other 7 (2.5) 8 (2.9) multiple prefer not to answer 31 (11.2) 7 (2.5) employment status not employed 77 (27.7) part-time (<20 hours) 84 (30.2) half-time+ (21-34 hours) 73 (26.3) full time (>35 hours) 44 (15.8) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 born in the us 205 (73.7) both parents born in the us 131 (47.1) subjective social status a,e 4.56 (1.54) amean (sd) b 1 = no schooling, 2 = 1st-8th grade, 3 = some high school, 4 = finished high school, 5 = trade school, 6 = some college/associate degree, 7 = 4-year college, 8 = graduate school c neither parent attended college dself-reported importance of financial aid to ability to pay for school; 1 = very unimportant, 2 = unimportant, 3 = neither important nor unimportant, 4 = important, 5 = very important estudents were shown a picture of a ladder representing social status with the description: “at the top of the ladder (10) are the people who are best off – those who have the most money, the most education, and the most respected jobs. at the bottom (1) are the people who are the worst off – who have the least money, least education, and the least respected jobs or no job.” they were then asked to select the rung “where you think you stand at this time in your life, relative to other people in the united states”(adler & stewart, 2007). measures systems and individual responsibility for poverty scale. the systems and individual responsibility for poverty responsibility scale (sirp) was created by a subset of the authors for the purpose of evaluating this class (citation removed for blind review). it assesses attribution of blame for poverty in the united states using two subscales: systems blame and individual blame. items are statements about people in poverty with which participants agree to disagree on a 5point likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). for example, the item, “if you are motivated enough, you can get out of poverty” gauges individual blame, while the item, “if you are experiencing poverty in the united states, it is the result of problems in our economic system” assesses system blame. scores from the current sample demonstrate good internal consistency (individual blame scale: α = .86 [time 1], .88 [time 2]; systems scale α = .83 [time 1], .88 [time 2]). community service attitudes scale (csas). the community service attitudes scale (csas; shiarella, mccarthy, & tucker, 2000) measures the awareness of community needs and intention to help fulfill those needs through community service. for this paper we used two subscales: connectedness, or the sense of connection to the community (e.g., “i feel an obligation to contribute to the community”), and action, or the belief that community service can have an impact (e.g., “volunteer work at community agencies helps solve social problems”). participants were asked to indicate the degree to which they agree or disagree with statements using a 7point likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). scores from the current sample demonstrate good internal consistency (action scale α = .85 [time 1], .91 [time 2]; connectedness scale α = .91 [time 1], .93 [time 2]). civic attitudes and skills questionnaire (casq). in order to evaluate attitudes about civic engagement that are not specific to community service, we used the civic attitudes and skills questionnaire (moely, mercer, ilustre, miron, & mcfarland, 2002). for this paper, we focused on two subscales: political awareness (e.g., “i understand the issues facing this nation”) and social justice (e.g., “in order for problems to be solved, we need to change public policy”). participants are instructed to indicate the level to which they agree on a 5-point likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). scores from the current sample demonstrate acceptable internal consistency (political awareness scale α = .78 [time 1], .83 [time 2]; social justice scale α = .82 [time 1], .84 [time 2]). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 civic behaviors. our main hypotheses about behavior change focused on the follow-up one year after taking the course, drawing subscales from astin and colleagues’ longitudinal study of college student service learning and civic engagement (astin et al., 2006). most of these behavior changes cannot be assessed during the semester, because they are required as part of the course (e.g. volunteering or talking with others about social issues). however, the political expression subscale is relevant in a short time frame, as it evaluates behavior related to current events that is not required in the class (e.g., “have not bought something or boycotted it because of the social or political values of the company”). scores from the current sample demonstrate good internal consistency (α = .83 [time 1], .82 [time 2]). implicit association testclassism (iat-c). literature on social cognition is clear that explicit attitudes – those one can self-report on a survey – are only part of what drives behavior (greenwald, poehlman, uhlmann, & banaji, 2009; hofmann, gawronski, gschwendner, le, & schmitt, 2005). implicit associations are the “gut reactions” one has that are based on accumulated associations. for example, if one has repeatedly seen race and criminality paired in a particular way, one will retain that learned association, and that bias can drive behavior. the implicit association test (iat) was initially developed to test for racism, but it has been adapted to measure associations about other social identities. included in over 43% of implicit social cognition studies, the iat is the most commonly used measurement tool for implicit processes (nosek, hawkins, & frazier, 2011). we modeled the implicit association test classism (iat-c) that was used in the current study closely after the original iat (greenwald et al., 1998). the iat-c is a computer-based sorting task that requires individuals to rapidly match words in target categories (people living in poverty and the middle class) with positive and negative attribution labels. millisecond software's inquisit 4 web (inquisit, 2013) calculates effect sizes for participants based on latency response times and errors made during classification. we retained the effect sizes as our measure of implicit classism; they ranged from -1.67 to .28 at time 1 and -1.55 to .73 at time 2; negative values indicate stronger negative associations with povertyrelated targets; 0 indicates no preference between poverty and middle-class targets, and positive values indicate stronger negative associations towards middle-class targets. results as detailed in table 2, students who took the course shifted in their attitudes in the directions that are consistent with course objectives: compared to their baseline scores, at the end of the semester they blame individuals for poverty less, and they place more blame on systems. they report greater awareness of what is happening around them politically, and they express a greater commitment to social justice. they also view themselves as more responsible for acting to address community problems. for each of these scales, the change in students who took the course was significantly greater than any change in students who did not take the course, indicating that the class caused these shifts. there was one measure of attitudes on which students’ scores did not shift to a greater extent than students who did not take the class: their attitude toward community service as a way of addressing social problems. students who took the course did not change on two additional measures described above. first, students’ implicit bias did not change in a way that was significantly different than the control group. both groups’ scores increased, but there is no evidence that the class had an impact on this outcome. finally, students’ scores did not change on the measure of behavior we included (political expression. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 table 2 change in from time 1 to time 2 in students who did (cesc students) and did not (control group) take the community engagement for social change course (n = 230). measure control group (n = 131) cesc students (n = 99) group differences in change scores time 1 time 2 time 1 time 2 t(228) sirp-i 3.10 (.68) 3.09 (.71) 3.04 (.74) 2.48 (.73)** -7.26** sirp-s 3.43 (.65) 3.57 (.60)** 3.55 (.61) 4.06 (.61)** 5.24** casq-pa 3.21 (.70) 3.27 (.73) 3.22 (.67) 3.63 (.67)** 4.46** casq-sj 3.99 (.53) 3.99 (.52) 4.10 (.53) 4.42 (.48)** 5.27** csas-ac 6.07 (.53) 6.03 (.58) 6.15 (.54) 6.22 (.66) 1.66 csas-c 5.68 (.77) 5.66 (.84) 5.87 (.79) 6.01 (.82)* 2.10* cbs-pe 2.15 (.77) 2.14 (.74) 2.14 (.76) 2.20 (.73) 0.89 iat -.86 (.39) -.79 (.41)a -.85 (.33) -.75 (.40)b .53c note. all p-values refer to associated t-tests – either between time 1 and time 2 scores, or between the two groups’ change scores. sirp-i: systems and individual responsibility for poverty (sirp) scale – individual subscale; sirp-s: sirp scale – systems subscale; casq-pa: civic attitudes and skills questionnaire (casq) – political awareness subscale; casq-sj: casq – social justice subscale; csas-ac: community service attitudes scale (csas) – action subscale; csas-c: csas – connectedness subscale; cbs-pe: civic behaviors survey– political expression subscale; iat: implicit association test. *p<.05 **p<.01 an = 122 bn = 88 ct(208) limitations and future research directions before describing the implications of these results, some limitations to this study should be acknowledged. first, because of the sample size and diversity, the dataset is not able to isolate the experiences of meaningful subgroups of students. in particular, while forthcoming papers will explore the role of social class in students’ attitude and behavior change, these analyses will not capture whether such students experience distress in the course, nor will they explore whether our strategies for naming and navigating power and marginalization in the classroom are effective. future work could oversample or include focus groups to make sure the experience of subgroups is not hidden in the aggregate, and to evaluate strategies for facilitating a just classroom (lichty & palamaro-munsell, 2017). second, we did not find significant change in students’ scores on our behavior measure. it may be that the attitude shifts we found are slow to translate into behavior, or it may http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 simply be that behavior does not shift. another possibility is that the course is effective at changing behaviors, just not the ones included in the present analysis. our longer-term results will tell that story in part, but there may be other types of relevant behavior we simply did not measure. third, students’ attitudes about community service (csas-action) did not change. this subscale specifically measures attitudes about the need for and impact of volunteering for community organizations. students’ lack of change in this regard may have resulted from performing community service in tandem with learning about the complexity and scope of social problems. this experience may have left students feeling that community service, while necessary, is not likely to prevent large-scale problems like poverty from persisting. we did not measure this possibility. it is also possible that the null finding reflects a ceiling effect: students’ scores on this measure were already high – both groups were close to a mean score of six (out of a possible seven) at baseline. finally, it may be that change is complex. our undergraduate alumna author described the change in her thinking this way: i can volunteer and put in time and effort, but i am just one person in a complex web of problems and ultimately do not have the power to move the needle. however i do believe my experience in the class piqued my interest in conversations about topics like community organizing, civic engagement, the community and how they are all interconnected… after this class i am much more likely to engage when i hear those words. previously, those words would not have enticed me to engage further and would have repelled me. i had an uninformed understanding of ‘volunteering,’ i genuinely thought of it as so dull and just imagined picking up garbage on the side of the road (which is also impactful but not necessarily as enjoyable). my definition of civic engagement has become more complex as well as my understanding of community. previously, i thought of community as an abstract enormously complex concept that no one could ever make a change in. after my placements and engaging in the class, i realized community can be as small or large as a school or an entire school system. in other words, it may be that after taking the course, students have a more complex view both of “community” and of “service.” our measures did not capture this kind of change. this dataset is also limited by the nature of our placements. as described in detail below, the placements put students solidly in the “helper” role. ideally, placements would challenge that hierarchy by putting students and community members on equal footing, working toward a common goal (whitaker & holum, 2015). while we warn students about the risk of adopting a “savior” mentality, our dataset does not allow us to explore whether this admonition has impact, nor does it allow us to evaluate our placements relative to another model. we also do not have data on the impact of our work on organizations or on the clients the organizations serve. finally, this study did not explore mechanisms of change within the course. future work might systematically vary components of the course, such as the length, nature or necessity of a service requirement, and investigate the difference. general recommendations in this final section, we share lessons we have learned that might apply to a range of courses that integrate community psychology values. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 these lessons are derived from our discussions as instructors and students, as well as our data. make use of empirical evidence that supports community-oriented courses the central learning objectives of the course are to increase students’ understanding of the social causes of social problems, and to increase their interest and sense of possibility in addressing those problems. these objectives are consistent with community psychology competencies and with the goals of our university, which, like many other institutes of higher learning, aims to produce civically engaged graduates (association of american colleges and universities, 2019). by including a matched sample, results add to existing literature that attests to the effectiveness of coursework that incorporates service learning (e.g. celio et al., 2011), and community-based learning (whitaker & holum, 2015). compared to other students with the same major at the same institution, over the course of the semester, students shifted their attitudes about a particular social problem, and about social problems in general, including an increased sense of responsibility to contribute to the wellbeing of communities. others interested in making the case for such a course might rely on the evidence presented here and in the body of work on which it builds. connect with others doing social justice teaching teaching that delves into the causes, consequences and pathways to addressing social injustice has unique challenges and rewards. we have found it energizing and valuable to connect with others doing this kind of work. while for us, these conversations have been within our research team, the faculty author has also developed a faculty network. many faculty she has identified are not within psychology, but do work that is under the umbrella of social justice, and finding this community has made an inestimable difference in morale, sense of connection, and concrete ideas. disciplines in which she has found likeminded educators have included women and gender studies, sociology, criminology, and education. associations such as scra also have groups focused on teaching that can be a source of connection. finally, the scholarship connected to these issues is vast, and offers another way to connect and grow. find ways the course satisfies requirements, and be ready for variety in order to give our class broad appeal and consistent enrollment, the faculty member developed it to meet graduation requirements. first, it is a “synthesis” class, which includes the perspectives of multiple disciplines; all students must take one such course in order to graduate. second, it counts as “applied psychology,” which is a category from which psychology majors must choose a course. constructing the class in this way has ensured that enrollment will be sufficient to make the course run, and has also ensured that students will come to the course with a variety of interest levels and awareness. this variety is something to prepare for: the first iteration of the course overestimated the degree of students’ knowledge of relevant material, such that students reported feeling a bit lost and asked for more explanation of fundamental concepts. subsequent iterations were revised to include primers on the conceptual underpinnings of the course, such as wealth inequality, power, oppression, privilege, and social class. the first third of the class is now oriented toward “setting the stage” – providing the building blocks to discuss the causes and consequences of poverty at multiple levels. the need for this kind of primer will likely vary by institution. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 consider the specific attitudes that the course might shift our quantitative results underscore the differences among attitudes relevant to social justice, and suggest that changing one attitude does not necessarily mean another attitude will shift. in particular, in our dataset, systems and individual attributions for problems were not mutually exclusive. indeed, the correlation between the two was only moderate (-.3 at time 1, see table 3). students may understand that systems put particular groups at a disadvantage and may also believe that individuals are responsible for their own responses to those circumstances. in our experience, the vast majority of students endorse both beliefs simultaneously, and this paradox needs to be discussed openly in class. it is particularly important to discuss given the diversity of our student body; many students may be reflecting on their own ability, or the ability of their own communities, to make change given the enormity of the structural problems they face. in this case, system attribution can actually feel disempowering (shor, calton, & cattaneo 2018). this finding underscores the importance of supporting students in learning about not only risk but also resilience, and in identifying the many levers for system change. the non-significant findings in the longitudinal dataset also highlight the distinction between implicit and explicit attitudes. at face value, the lack of change in implicit bias may seem to contradict the desired effects of our course; however, this finding is consistent with other research on the intransigence of implicit bias (banaji, 2016). implicit bias results from associations made over long periods of time and is not mediated by conscious thought, so its failure to shift in response to one semester of exposure to other ideas is not surprising. after all, implicit associations as measured by the iat reflect how easily people make biased connections, but they do not reveal whether people endorse those beliefs. our finding highlights the value of making students aware that their gut reactions are unlikely to shift along with their carefully formed opinions. in other words, even after taking a course designed to deconstruct stigmatizing attitudes and beliefs, students may still experience aversion when they see someone who is panhandling. however, they can make a conscious choice about the behavior that follows that reaction. such choices are easier to make if students are ready for them. table 3 correlations for time 1 (n = 278) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1. sirp-i 2. sirp-s -.30** 3. casq-pa -.15* .06 4. casq-sj -.54** .50** .11 5. csas-ac -.09 .32** .16** .48** 6. csas-c -.13* .24** .35** .35** .65** 7. cbs-pe -.32** .23** .49** .25** .20** .28** 8. iata -.13* .09 .10 .03 .02 .09 .15* note: 1: systems and individual responsibility for poverty (sirp) scale – individual subscale; 2: sirp scale – systems subscale; 3: civic attitudes and skills questionnaire (casq) – political awareness subscale; 4: casq – social justice subscale; 5: community service attitudes scale (csas) – action subscale; 6: csas – connectedness subscale; 7: civic behaviors survey– political expression subscale; 8: implicit association test.*p<.05 **p<.01an= 274 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 pepare for student distress whether the information is new to students, or whether it provides new context for their own personal experiences, exposure to the details of social problems can be very distressing. in early iterations of the class, we most often learned about students’ distress in one of two ways – in their written reflections, when they repeatedly asked “but what do we do about all of this?” and in course evaluations. in an extreme example, one student shared in her course evaluation that the class triggered a depressive episode for her. we have learned to be intentional about expecting and managing this distress. several strategies have proven useful in navigating student distress. first, we prepare students for the experience by creating a shared vocabulary to describe it and providing opportunities to talk and write about it. on the first day of class, we introduce the concept of “creative maladjustment,” drawn from a speech by dr. martin luther king, jr. (1968). dr. king argues that there are some things “to which we should never become adjusted;” we explain that in class, through assignments, and through service at their placements, students are going to learn and reflect on things that make them uncomfortable. in line with work from transformative education scholars and community psychology pedagogy, our explicit aim is to not shrink away from that discomfort (langhout, 2015; zembylas & mcglynn, 2012). the “creative” component of the phrase is helpful here. the goal is not to drown in misery but, rather, to allow discomfort to fuel action. we explain to the students that a more complex understanding of a problem leads us to more solutions, not fewer. we refer back to this idea throughout the semester. by opening the door repeatedly to talk about discomfort, we both normalize it and identify it as a potential source of positive action. students are thus encouraged to stick with that discomfort when it arises, and are supported in finding ways to channel it. relatedly, a second strategy for handling students’ distress is to support their natural wish to take action. as instructors teach students about each level of the problem of poverty, they weave in exemplars of interventions that target that level, showing the class that there are many ways to contribute to solutions. instructors also talk with students, both individually and as part of class discussion, about what they might be interested in doing to intervene, given their own interests and strengths. for example, students have been interested in other courses they might take, places they might volunteer or work, groups they might join, and graduate school opportunities. even after the course is completed, some students approach their former instructors for guidance on utilizing their skills to address social problems. for example, our undergraduate alumna author graduated shortly after taking the course with a major in biology. she reported that she felt unfulfilled in her first job out of college and found herself reflecting on the course frequently as part of her thought process about what career direction might be meaningful. she contacted the course instructor two years after graduating and has since participated in the lab in various ways. while her professional trajectory is still evolving, she now works for a community psychology research and development organization that contracts with nonprofits, government agencies, and foundations to help build the capacity of disenfranchised communities. she identifies the class as the impetus for seeking employment that advances efforts to achieve positive social change. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 other students have described small actions they have taken throughout the course to channel their distress and increase their sense of agency, even temporarily. for example, students have reported providing meals to others, babysitting for a neighbor who cannot afford childcare, and lodging a formal complaint about a classist policy in a medical practice. other students have described their efforts to spread knowledge and decrease stigma by engaging in conversations or debates with friends and family about course topics. despite the knowledge that these actions are not solutions to the problem writ large, students report that the actions help them to continue learning without being overwhelmed by a sense that there is nothing they can do in the here and now. throughout the class, we share examples of ways to take action, large and small. prepare for instructor heart-work in langhout’s (2015) powerful paper about the role of emotion in scholar-activism, she notes that “social justice commitments often come from seeing a chasm between the activist’s values and the world as it is” (p.267). the course is one way that we, as scholar-activists, infuse our values and hopes for the world into our work. given that this work matters deeply to us, it is unsurprising that the challenges in the classroom – witnessing student distress, encountering resistance to change, hearing and managing micro-aggressions, wondering if one has navigated power dynamics well can lead to instructor frustration, sadness, and worry. anticipating this reality, we must, as langhout suggests, “build our heart muscles” (p.268). we have discovered several strategies toward this end, making our teaching of the class sustainable. one important strategy is to take a semester break from teaching this course from time to time and come back to it with fresh eyes. a second key strategy is to connect with others doing similar work, as noted above. a third strategy to sustain our energy in teaching is to recall the lessons we teach our students: it is normal to feel frustrated with the enormity and complexity of social issues. we remind ourselves to use our discomfort with student distress as fuel to develop more effective methods of teaching and facilitating change. similarly, it is useful to remember that students’ difficulties in the course naturally ebb and flow. to maintain confidence in the process of the course, several instructors have taken to reading older course evaluations, where students often detail the overall positive impacts the course has had despite their initial or intermittent challenges. finally, while it is wonderful to make teaching a component of one’s commitment to social justice, it is also helpful for it to not be the only outlet for this passion. the faculty author frequently reminds herself that teaching is about planting seeds – efforts may bear fruit later, or they may not. it is essential to have other plots in the garden as well. conclusion an unanticipated benefit of this course has been its profound impact on our lab. collaborating on the teaching of the course and on the project evaluating it has served as a point of connection and synergy for us. if we were in a program or department with a community psychology emphasis, this experience might be less influential. in our department, it provides a set of experiences, vocabulary, and conversations that support our social-justice-oriented work more broadly, and give a sense of legitimacy to our social justice identity. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 the course has also introduced us to scholarship we may not have accessed otherwise, giving us a common and growing lexicon on social problems and social change. as with any course, one never learns a topic so well as when one has to teach it. as instructors and tas of the course, we are immersed in the course content and continue to experiment with strategies to teach it well. when we use the terms oppression, privilege, deficit ideology, or social context, we have common definitions and reference points. this shared understanding informs both our conversations with each other and our contributions to other contexts where these issues arise, including classes in clinical psychology. finally, going back and forth between teaching the course and reviewing the data on its effectiveness has pushed the lab to wrestle with important questions relevant to community psychology pedagogy, including how to most effectively promote learning across students at varying stages of understanding and openness, and how to manage the emotional impact of the course material on students with a range of life experiences. this process has generated a sense of accountability in the classroom, as we are all aware of what outcomes are being measured. when instructors consider adding content or shifting a strategy, we refer back to the outcomes we know we are assessing and ask ourselves how the potential alteration will relate to what we hope to see. for all of us, this empirical approach to course instruction has generalized to our teaching of other subjects. like the social problems we teach our students about in class, the absence of formal community psychology programming at our university may be viewed as a structural barrier and as an opportunity to generate creative solutions to address public needs. this course was developed in the spirit of community psychology to help address a gap for our academic community within the bounds of available resources. in developing and effectively meeting course objectives, we have found a way to infuse community psychology content and practice into our undergraduate curriculum as well as our graduate students’ experiences. in so doing, we hope to arm our future graduates with the broader perspective needed to both diversify their scope of potential careers and meaningfully address social issues. references adler, n. e., & stewart, j. (2007). the macarthur scale of subjective social status. retrieved october 9, 2015, from http://www.macses.ucsf.edu/research/ psychosocial/subjective.php association of american colleges and universities. (2019). civic learning. astin, a. w., vogelgesang, l. j., misa, k., andserson, j., denson, n., jayakumar, u., … yamamura, e. (2006). understanding the effects of service-learning : a study of students and faculty. los angeles. banaji, m. r. (2016, june). lewin address: doing research on implicit social cognition and surprises along the way. keynote given at the society for the psychological study of social issues conference, minneapolis, mn. boo, k. (2001, april). working two jobs, elizabeth jones does her best for her family. but is it enough? the new yorker. bronfenbrenner, u., & ceci, s. j. (1994). nature-nurture reconceptualized in developmental perspective: a bioecological model. psychological review, 101(4), 568–586. brookfield, s. d. (2015). the skillful teacher (third). san francisco: jossey-bass. cattaneo, l.b. (2016, june). civic engagement and social class in college: whose http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 engagement are we facilitating? in l.b. cattaneo (chair), facilitating civic engagement through higher education: challenges and opportunities. symposium presented at the society for the psychological study of social issues conference, minneapolis, mn. celio, c. i., durlak, j., & dymnicki, a. (2011). a meta-analysis of the impact of servicelearning on students. journal of experiential education, 34(2), 164–181. http://doi.org/10.5193/jee34.2.164 collins, c. 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(2002). psychometric properties and correlates of the civic attitudes and skills questionnaire ( casq ): a measure of students ’ attitudes related to service-learning. michigan http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 journal of community service learning, spring, 15–26. nosek, b. a., hawkins, c. b., & frazier, r. s. (2011). implicit social cognitions: from measures to mechanisms. trends in cognitive sciences, 15(4), 152–159. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2011.01.0 05.implicit opportunity insights. (2019). the opportunity atlas: mapping the childhood roots of social mobility. retrieved january 5, 2019, from https://opportunityinsights.org puhl, r., & brownell, k. (2003). psychosocial origins of obesity stigma: toward changing a powerful and pervasive bias. obesity reviews, 4(4), 213–227. ryan, w. (1971). blaming the victim. new york: pantheon books. scra. (2018a). competencies for community psychology practice. retrieved may 25, 2018, from http://www.scra27.org/what-wedo/practice/18-competenciescommunity-psychology-practice/ scra. (2018b). what is community psychology. retrieved may 25, 2018, from https://www.communitypsychology.co m/what-is-community-psychology/ shiarella, a. h., mccarthy, a. m., & tucker, m. l. (2000). development and construct validity of scores on the community service attitudes scale. educational and psychological measurement, 60(2), 286– 300. shor, r., cattaneo, l., & calton, j. (2017). pathways of transformational service learning: exploring the relationships between context, disorienting dilemmas, and student response. journal of transformative education, 15(2), 156– 173. http://doi.org/10.1177/154134461668 9044 velonis, a. j., daoud, n., matheson, f., woodhall-melnik, j., hamilton-wright, s., & o’campo, p. (2015). strategizing safety: theoretical frameworks to understand women’s decision making in the face of partner violence and social inequities. journal of interpersonal violence, 088626051559895. http://doi.org/10.1177/088626051559 8953 whitaker, m. c., & holum, b. (2015). a community-based learning approach for changing students’ beliefs about poverty tools and strategies. understanding and dismantling privilege, 5(2), 57–81. http://doi.org/issn 2152-1875 wilkinson, r. (2011). how economic inequality harms societies. retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wil kinson?language=en zembylas, m., & mcglynn, c. (2012). discomforting pedagogies: emotional tensions, ethical dilemmas and transformative possibilities. british educational research journal, 38(1), 41– 59. http://doi.org/10.1080/01411926.2010 .523779 author note lauren b. cattaneo, department of psychology, george mason university; rachel shor, department of psychology, george mason university; jenna m. calton, department of psychology, george mason university; kris t. gebhard, department of psychology, george mason university; syeda y. buchwach, department of psychology, george mason university; nour elshabassi, community science, gaithersburg, md; stephanie hargrove, department of psychology, george mason university.jenna m. calton is now at the tree house cac of montgomery county, md. project supported with a grant from the spencer foundation. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 appendix a community engagement for social change course description typical enrollment: 25-35 students meetings: 1 hour and 15 minutes twice a week, 15 week semester course description this class explores influences on social problems and approaches to addressing them by drawing from the perspectives of multiple disciplines. by definition, a social problem is a problem that affects many people, but such issues are often viewed primarily as individuallevel problems that require individual-level solutions. in this class, students will learn to understand social problems and approaches to addressing them at both the individual level (typically the focus of fields such as clinical psychology and medicine) and the social level (typically the focus of fields such as community psychology, sociology, and public affairs). the class will achieve its goals through a semester-long case example of the social problem of poverty. we will explore this social problem through students’ service to community organizations, readings, class exercises and both written and oral projects. goals in this course, students will:  identify and understand the individual, interpersonal and social context levels of a social problem, drawing from the perspectives of multiple disciplines.  identify and understand approaches toward targeting different aspects of a social problem.  apply the above skills in oral and written products.  identify ways in which they might engage in addressing social problems that concern them.  complete a minimum of 20 hours of service to a community organization coordinated by the instructor and in the context of this service: o deepen understanding of a social problem through contact with both people it affects and people trying to do something about it; o provide concrete value to the community organization; o connect course concepts to concrete experiences. requirements: participation and preparation (35%) students are required to attend class (10%), and to complete exercises throughout the semester (10%). students are also required to read/listen to assigned material before class. preparation is evaluated by either a quiz or an entry in a critical reading journal each class (15%). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 27 connection papers (20%). students will write two three-page double-spaced papers that connect course material and experience at placements. final project (30%). students work in groups during the semester to analyze a social issue of interest to them, other than poverty. each student identifies a program or organization that targets that problem, and writes a 4-6 page paper using scholarly sources to conduct a multilevel analysis of the social problem and an analysis of their organization’s approach to addressing it. as a group, students construct a poster that provides an overview of their social problem and an organization that works to address it. during final exam time, there is a poster session in which all students share their work. service (15%): a fundamental goal and requirement of the class is to provide concrete value to our partner organizations in exchange for the experience we are gaining. the grade for this requirement is assessed at 2 points, according to completing orientation, required number of hours, and an ok from their supervisor, and then averaged. however, if students do not complete the 20 hours they cannot pass the class. topics covered and example content: what is service learning? (definitions, introductions to placements) understanding social issues through multi-level analysis (introduction of multi-level model, why can’t pat read?) setting the stage for our case study: wealth and power in the us (wealth inequality, defining building block concepts like power, privilege) poverty as a case study: what is it? (defining building block concepts like living wage, federal poverty line, class, classism) poverty as a case study: how do we understand social context? (minimum wage debate, housing, cultural narrative, social mobility, mushroom exercise) poverty as a case study: how do we understand the interpersonal aspects? (wealth inequality and interpersonal relationships, networks as stress buffers and drains, stigma, parenting, workplace) poverty as a case study: how do we understand the individual-level aspects? (wealth inequality and happiness; psychological and physical effects of poverty; strengths) identifying and addressing multiple aspects of social problems (nch speakers’ bureau; examples from news, according to student interest) extending our analysis to other social problems: mass incarceration http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 28 appendix b the 5 whys this technique is used to brainstorm the root causes of a problem. the technique can be applied in a group discussion setting, or with paper and pen. in either case, ask “why?” this fictional character struggles with that particular problem, and generate multiple possibilities. then, for each reason listed, ask why that reason exists and continue asking “why” at least 5 times. step 1 identify a problem. step 2 ask yourself, "why is it like this?" step 3 continue asking, "why?" at least 4 more times example: problempat is in the 5th grade and cannot read why? pat cannot read because his parents did not help him learn why? pat's parents did not help him because his parents were not home when he needed help why? pat's parents were not home because they were working so much why? pat's parents were working so much because they each needed multiple jobs to support the family why? pat's parents needed multiple jobs because the minimum wage where they live is not enough to support the family this process could be repeated for each of the reasons around the problem. more examples of applications of this technique can be found at: http://casachirilagua.org/meet-pat-a-5th-grader-who-cant-read/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc1292997/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 29 appendix c the mushroom exercise the course instructor (hereafter “facilitator”) introduces the activity under the guise of a teamwork exercise. teams of four to five students are told to gather in designated spaces which are placed such that students cannot hear or see what other groups are doing. the facilitator then tells students that they are competing for a prize. the facilitator asks each team to select a “translator,” and speaks to these students individually, out of earshot of the others. all translators are shown a large, colorful drawing of a mushroom and are told, “your task is to get your group to draw this mushroom, exactly like this picture.” unbeknownst to the students, each translator receives different instructions and materials. the team 1 translator receives working markers of the correct color, with no limits on communication; the team 2 translator is given some non-working markers and may only answer questions from their group rather than providing instruction; the team 3 translator is given mostly non-working markers of the wrong colors and is limited to yes or no questions, and so on. the facilitator walks around observing the students at work. when the first team finishes their drawing, the facilitator ends the competition, tapes each team’s drawings up for all to see and then “debriefs” the exercise by playing the voice of unjust systems. when team 1 shares about their experience, the facilitator compliments their “hard work,” “cooperation,” and “clear ability to communicate effectively.” as other teams share their experience, the facilitator comments on their performance using common cultural narratives that rationalize injustice by locating the responsibility for injustice in those experiencing it. for example, the facilitator might state to a group with a half-drawn design, “maybe if you had focused on the task at hand, rather than being distracted by the markers, yours would look as complete as team 1’s.” as students share, they start to realize they were given different instructions and materials; when asked, the facilitator denies any unfairness, stating, for example, “everyone was playing by the same rules.” the facilitator then asks, “who would like to fire me as your facilitator?” giving students the chance to “overthrow" the unjust leadership. the facilitator agrees to be fired and leaves the classroom, returning as the instructor. the instructor then begins a second debriefing, admitting that groups were given different instructions and materials, and asks the students questions to connect their experience with major course concepts. for example, each group is asked what assumptions they made about the exercise and about other groups. generally, students assumed that the competition is fair, and that they were given different supplies for a reason. as the instructor questions these assumptions, the class uncovers cultural narratives that undergird wealth inequality (e.g., people get what they deserve). students are asked to share how they felt at various stages in the exercise, and the facilitator connects these feelings with a discussion about unearned privilege, its reliance on cultural narratives, and other course concepts (e.g. internalized stigma). http://www.gjcpp.org/ a case study on undergraduate community psychology at a historically black college and university (hbcu) dawn x. henderson, pamela p. martin, and katina harris keywords: hbcus, community psychology, undergraduate students author biographies: dawn x. henderson, serves as a research associate in the center for faculty excellence at the university of north carolina at chapel hill. she is the codirector for the collective health and education equity research (cheer) collaborative and writes from the standpoint of increasing the scholarship of teaching and learning on undergraduate community psychology education at minority serving institutions. her broader research focuses on understanding the adaptive coping mechanisms racially diverse students engage across k-12 and higher education institutions in order to maintain well-being and persist through institutions. pamela p. martin, professor in the psychology department at prairie view a&m university. she also served as the associate dean in the college of juvenile justice and interim department head in the psychology department. before coming to prairie view a&m university, she served for two years as the chair in the department of psychology at north carolina central university (nccu). at nccu, she instituted the department’s branding message and the use of social media to help the department’s green efforts. she also increased the number of undergraduate and graduate students participating in research. starting her academic career at north carolina state university, she was the first african american female tenured in the department of psychology in 2009. for her outreach efforts in the raleigh-durham areas in 2008, dr. martin was inducted into the academy of outstanding faculty engaged in extension and engagement at nc state university. she holds a b.s. in psychology from university of south carolina, m.a. in psychology from north carolina central university and a ph.d. in ecological/community psychology and urban studies from michigan state university. after completing her https://www.cheercollaborative.com/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 graduate training, dr. martin was a national science foundation postdoctoral fellow at the programs for research on black americans at the institute for social research at the university of michigan. influenced by ecological theory, dr. martin is interested in examining the person-environmental fit between social institutions such as churches and behavioral outcomes. more specifically, her research investigates the role of theology in shaping the daily experiences of african americans. dr. martin seamlessly integrates her extension and engagement efforts with her teaching and research. not only does she engages in extension outreach activities herself, she also teaches students to do so, and inspires them to continue in that tradition after graduation. katina harris, fifth-year graduate student in the clinical psychology program. she received her b.a. in psychology from north carolina central university. her research has investigated religion, bullying, dropout prevention, academic outcomes, mental health, and telehealth. katina has conducted nearly 20 scholarly presentations on this research. her thesis project examined religion and mental health among emerging adults. recommended citation: henderson, d. x., martin, p. p., & harris, k. (2019). a case study on undergraduate community psychology at a historically black college and university (hbcu). global journal of community psychology practice, 10(1), 1 – 23. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org). corresponding authors: dawn x. henderson, phd, center for faculty excellence, university of north carolina-chapel hill. email: dxhender@email.unc.edu. pamela p. martin, phd, college of juvenile justice and psychology. prairie view a&m university, prairie view, tx 77446. email: ppmartin@pvamu.edu katina harris, b.a., college of juvenile justice and psychology. prairie view a&m university, prairie view, tx 77446. email: mrs.kdharris@gmail.com http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ mailto:dxhender@email.unc.edu mailto:ppmartin@pvamu.edu mailto:mrs.kdharris@gmail.com global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 a case study on undergraduate community psychology at a historically black college and university (hbcu) abstract historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) and the field of community psychology share a similar mission; they both serve individuals from backgrounds impacted by racism or other structural inequalities. consequently, undergraduate learning environments at historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) offer settings for applying community psychology pedagogy, discussing issues related to social justice, and exploring the empowerment of emerging adults. this article presents a case analysis of an undergraduate psychology course that models community psychology pedagogy implemented at an hbcu in the southeastern region of the united states. the review of course syllabi, a faculty reflection, and a focus group of undergraduate students at the hbcu revealed strengths and lessons learned in course implementation. reflections underscore the value of community psychology pedagogy; the discussion in this paper advocate for the increased integration of community psychology in undergraduate courses, particularly at hbcus. introduction for more than a century, historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) have served the educational aspirations of black/african americans. scholars advocate that hbcus prepare a significant number of black/african american students for leadership roles in industry and the professions, especially careers and/or service which contribute to community transformation (albritton, 2012; allen, jewell, griffin, & wolf, 2007; douglas, 2012; sydnor, hawkins, & edwards, 2010). the careers and research of hbcu graduates evidence their contributions to black communities directly; in particular, college-trained community leaders such as martin luther king, jr., huey p. newton, and marion wright edelman worked to dismantle inequality and document the structural perpetuation of poverty and racism (douglas, 2012). stemming from a historic mission to educate racially and economically marginalized groups, hbcus represent an enduring mission to higher education that challenges social inequalities (evans, evans, & evans, 2002). similarly, community psychology emerged from the protest movements that characterized u.s. popular culture in the1960s. a theoretical parallel of hbcus, community psychology aims to empower individuals of diverse backgrounds to address racism and other structural inequalities. as a result of this overlap, undergraduate courses at hbcus can provide a context for empowering emerging adults from racially marginalized populations to discuss and address issues related to social injustice. with hbcus continuing to enroll predominantly first-generation students and black/african american students in the united states (u.s. department of education, 2018), undergraduate courses can be a setting in which faculty can increase student engagement with the field of community psychology and shift student perspectives in ways that value ecological principles. such learning experiences can translate into increased engagement of underrepresented http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 minority students with community psychology. this paper aims to present a case study of an undergraduate course in community psychology at an hbcu using student and faculty reflections and reviews of course content and objectives. the authors include an overview of hbcus in the united states to outline a historical tradition of addressing social inequalities in the united states followed by a description of the context and course design. the faculty reflection provides insight into the pedagogy and course structure accompanied by feedback from students. integrating insight from faculty and students will bridge the gap between the academic motivations of undergraduate psychology students and applications of their learning. the analysis of the course reflections provides insight into student learning outcomes and the challenges in implementing a course in community psychology. discussion will center on the value of increasing the inclusion of community psychology in undergraduate courses at hbcus. an overview of historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) the significance of historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) to the black/african american community in the united states goes back to educating students in tumultuous political and social times (albritton, 2012; evans, evans, & evans, 2002). the majority of hbcus emerged after the end of the civil war in response to the widespread need to educate formerly enslaved black/african americans (allen & jewell, 2002). philanthropists and religious groups with support from the u.s. freedmen's bureau chartered hbcus; and, by the 1930s, there were more than 121 of these institutions. many hbcus aimed to prepare students to pursue careers in education and other liberal arts (dubois, 1903) or on agricultural and technical trades (washington, 1895). hbcus played a pivotal role in the early social mobility of black/african americans (u.s. department of education, 2018). between 1870 to the 1960s, hbcus served as the leader in producing black/african american educators, doctors, and other professionals needed in a highly segregated united states (allen et al., 2007; wenglinksky, 1996). hbcus met varying degrees of criticism. scholars who opposed classical education indicated that liberal arts curricula emulated white institutions; and, opponents of practical education pointed out that trade promoted skill sets for black/african americans only to continue to work for former plantation owners who wanted to rebuild the south (allen & jewel, 2002). private hbcus were under the control of and dependent upon white philanthropists or religious institutions (e.g., methodists; allen & jewel, 2002; allen et al., 2007). in contrast, public hbcus (especially land-grant institutions) were able to facilitate some shared governance as their missions focused on training in skills like agriculture, carpentry, and masonry (albritton, 2012; wenglinksky, 1996). hbcus faced many social challenges as critics challenged whites’ control over their administration and leadership in a time of hostile racial climate in the united states (albritton, 2012). by the end of legal racial segregation in public education and the passage of the 1972 basic educational opportunity grant program (i.e., federal pell grant), student enrollments at hbcus (whether private/liberal arts curriculum or public/trade-based curriculum) increased drastically. between 1976 and 2010, student enrollment at hbcus rose from 223,000 to 327,000 (national center for education statistics, 2018). hbcu graduates have gone on to become professionals and leaders in communities across the united states (allen et al., 2007; http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 wenglinksky, 1996). hbcus continue to enroll a significant number of first-generation students from economically disenfranchised communities (allen et al., 2007; albritton, 2012; douglas, 2012; sydnor, hawkins, & edwards, 2010) and graduate a higher percentage of black/african american students in stem disciplines at the bachelor’s level (national center for education statistics, 2004). hbcus account for 21.8% of bachelor’s degree conferred in psychology (national center for education statistics, 2004). hbcus remain a top producer of undergraduate psychology students considering only 87 of the 102 offer a bachelor's’ degree compared to more than 6,000 predominately white institutions (pwis). today, hbcus are beginning to see a more diversified student population. in 2016, roughly half of the hbcus had 23% of the student body, on average, self-identify as non-black (u.s. department of education, 2018). the relevance of community psychology to hbcus the mission of hbcus and community psychology’s adherence to principles of social justice may be particularly important to racially diverse students. community psychology education may be highly valuable and relevant to students attending hbcus (henderson, matlock, garrett, & clark, 2017; henderson & wright, 2015). previous research found offering an undergraduate course in community psychology increases students’ behavioral intentions to work in settings where they advocate for social justice (henderson & wright, 2015). several bodies of research reveal racially diverse students often possess a higher pro-social justice orientation when compared to their peers and choose hbcus for their strong commitment to racial advancement (garibay, 2015; johnson, 2017; mcgee & bentley, 2017). the work of lott and rogers (2011) suggest a belief in solving societal problems is a primary motivator for black/african american students pursuing the psychology major. several other scholars have noted a desire to improve structural inequalities in society often relates to college persistence and career choices among racially diverse students (garibay, 2015; gibbs & griffin, 2013). principles associated with believing in a just world, improving communities, and advocating for equity reflect similar motivations for scholars who have pursued community psychology (langhout, 2015; lichty & palamaro-munsell, 2017). community psychology remains underrepresented at the undergraduate and graduate level at hbcus. an initial google search using “hbcus” and “community psychology” revealed two universities offer a master’s program in community psychology, florida a&m university and texas southern university. a scan of undergraduate psychology programs across the 87 hbcus offering a bachelor’s degree revealed only three offered a course in community psychology. the longest standing community psychology graduate program at florida a&m university includes a program emphasis on increasing student knowledge of the cultural realities and experiences of black/african american communities (florida a&m university, 2018). the degree to which this program has translated into other hbcus' interest in similar programs or garnered undergraduate interests remains nonexistent. hbcus produce a significant number of black/african americans earning bachelor’s degrees in the field of psychology yet there is limited knowledge on the degree to which these students are exposed to community psychology. explanations for the oversight when it comes to the availability of community psychology courses at hbcus are speculative at best. perhaps faculty in psychology departments on hbcu campuses are unaware of community psychology as most departments offer subfields of cognitive, neuro, social and developmental psychology. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 in examining more than 350 undergraduate psychology programs across the nation, stoloff and colleagues (2010) previously found just about 14% offered a course related to community psychology. bauer and colleagues (2017) analysis of undergraduate general psychology textbooks revealed less than 30% reference community psychology. these findings suggest undergraduate students who attend hbcus may have limited or no exposure to the field. regardless of the explanations for the omission of community psychology, undergraduate students at hbcus who major in psychology remain unaware of the one field that potentially affirms their value orientation towards social justice. the disconnect between a students’ value orientation and undergraduate learning experiences potentially creates a gap in practical applications of their education and the discipline of psychology. method research design this research utilized a case study design to identify the characteristics of the undergraduate community psychology course and the experiences of students and faculty in the course. a case study explores both contextual data as well as participants’ experiences (merriam, 1998; yin, 2009, 2014). according to merriam (1998), a case study is an intensive, holistic description analysis of a bounded phenomenon. in this study, a community psychology course at an hbcu and students enrolled in this course represented the bounded phenomenon. the in-depth analysis of the course includes the integration of student perspectives enrolled accompanied by a reflection of course goals and activity from faculty and review of course content. the case study method seeks to provide a description of the context of the undergraduate course, pedagogy, and course experiences in order to understand the value of community psychology on the undergraduate learning experiences of students at an hbcu. context the study took place in the department of psychology at a public hbcu located in the southeastern region of the united states. this land-grant university received its charter in 1891 to offer separate higher education predominately for black/african american students. black/african american students comprise about 78% of the more than 12,000 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the university. the university ranks 6th out of the 102 hbcus in the united states in terms of “best” colleges and universities (u.s. news, 2019). psychology is the fifth largest undergraduate major at the university accounting for 11% of the total number of students enrolled in the top ten major programs. the psychology department offers a b.a. degree, which provides a diverse set of psychology courses and both basic and applied research. in fall 2015, the department aspired to develop a master’s program in health psychology and hired three faculty with backgrounds in clinical, community, and neuropsychology. the community psychology faculty submitted a proposal in fall 2016 to establish an undergraduate community psychology course in the psychology curriculum as a gateway course and to generate student interest in pursuing doctoral studies. the accepted proposal included a national analysis of community psychology courses offered at predominantly white institutions (pwis) like wichita state university, dupaul, and the university of south carolina compared to a limited number of hbcus to include florida a&m university. in spring 2018, 18 students enrolled in the first offering of the course and the majority were female (72%) and self-identified as black/african american (95%). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 course structure the faculty integrated a series of 11 selected readings from articles published in the american journal of community psychology, journal of community psychology, and by other community psychologists instead of a primary textbook. the selection of journal readings over a textbook stemmed from a desire to provide affordable resource options to undergraduate students who were primarily first-generation. furthermore, the faculty found community psychology textbooks lacked scholars who represented diverse ethnic identities. in contrast, selected readings included perspectives from black/african american, indigenous, southeast asian, and other scholars who conduct international research (see appendix a). the key themes in the course covered five competencies in community psychology: (1) ecological perspectives, (2) empowerment, (3) ethical and reflective practice, (4) prevention and health promotion, and (5) sociocultural competence. the course structure focused on dialogue and opportunities for students to improve oral communication and information literacy skills through group and individual presentations. required journal readings led to students submitting summaries, which included identifying challenging or interesting concepts as well as questions from the reading to pose to the class. the faculty devoted about 15-20 minutes of each course period for students to share summaries and answer related questions. in addition to taking notes from the lectures, students were also required to lead discussions on a social issue of their choosing (see table 1). the faculty created two assignments in the course for students to gain knowledge on how to conduct community research using a report format and a photovoice project (see appendix b). table 1 description of student, social issue project and identified ecological level # code city, state class major social issue topic ecological level 1 sr. psych female1 charlotte, nc senior psychology gun violence in schools exo-meso-micro 2 sr. psych female2 rocky mount, nc senior psychology post tornado efforts in guilford county meso-micro 3 sr. psych female3 ahoskie, nc senior psychology teacher’s income inequalities exo-meso-micro 4 jr. psych female4 richmond, va junior psychology child brides macro-micro 5 sr. psych male1 elizabeth city, nc senior psychology the effects of police in school exo-meso-micro 6 jr. psych female6 fayetteville, nc junior biology institutional racism macro-exo 7 jr. psych female7 washington, d.c. junior psychology forced female marriages macro-micro 8 sr. psych female8 morrisville, nc senior psychology a father’s story: in child custody exo-micro http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 battles 9 so. psych female9 littleton, co sophomore psychology mass incarceration exo-meso-micro 10 so. psych male2 lillington, nc sophomore psychology mental health in the black community exo-meso-micro 11 sr. psych female11 charlotte, nc senior psychology child abuse meso-micro 12 sr. psych male3 henderson, nc senior psychology structural barriers to women leadership exo-meso-micro 13 jr. psych male4 temple hills, md junior psychology the relevance of hbcus meso-micro 14 female14 rocky mount, nc sophomore psychology racism macro-mesomicro 15 female15 temple hills, md senior psychology sexism macro-exo pedagogy the racial identity of the faculty and value orientation align with pedagogical approaches that promote empowerment and equity in marginalized groups (levine, perkins, & perkins, 2005; lichty & palamaromunsell, 2017; rogers & mosley wetzel, 2013). dialogues and reflection used throughout the course focused on disrupting the power imbalance between students and faculty by affirming the cultural realities and experiences of students and positioning knowledge as a shared experience (au, 1998). on occasions in the course, the faculty would sit down in various places in the classroom in order to dismantle the perception of being the primary source of knowledge and shifting from being in the front or “standing over” students. the faculty would pose questions about topics to guide discussion and facilitate connections between new information and the personal experiences and knowledge of students (kalogirou & konstantinos, 2012) the faculty aimed to increase students’ agency by providing opportunities for students to critique content and frame community issues from an ecological lens (prilleltensky, 2001). faculty selected topics that incorporated students’ tacit knowledge with research on affordable housing, homelessness, and mental health in order to challenge students’ attitudes about social inequalities. practical experiences volunteering in the local community and identifying students’ needs on the university campus integrated in the course aimed to increase students’ behavioral intentions to redress inequalities. community engagement community engagement was an essential tenet of the undergraduate course (harkavy, 2005). the faculty used recommendations posed by zimmerman and colleagues (2013) to align community engagement assignments to the learning objectives in the course. the course required students to complete a minimum of 20 hours of service to either the university or local community. a group report assignment required students to research a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 community topic affecting a local neighborhood and complete a photovoice project (see table 2). in the report, students identified factors leading to the issue, which included topics like violence, incarceration, and mental health access. students were charged with identifying community organizations working to address the issues and including recommendations in their reports to improve awareness on the issue or promote an intervention. students completed interviews with residents and community leaders to inform their project findings. the faculty devoted class time to discuss the progress of the project and used tools to help students access community data related to their topic (e.g., u.s. census). additionally, students completed a writing reflection on their community service experience including an analysis of how the experience increased their awareness of community needs and how the service the student provided connected to those needs. table 2 description of research and photovoice projects topic description increasing awareness of food deserts the project included an analysis of food deserts in the county and community members’ perceptions. the project identified local efforts to increase community gardening, co-ops, and a farmer’s market. providing recreational spaces for youth the project included an analysis of current access to recreational space in a local community. the project compared other recreational opportunities and incorporated peer perceptions regarding places in their community that influenced their positive development. preventing gun violence among youth the project included an analysis of gun violence at the national and county level and community members’ perceptions. the project focused on the impact of gun violence on youth and their communities. increasing economic development and empowerment the project included an analysis of income disparities across households in a local community and access to black-owned businesses. the project identified local political leaders who are leading efforts to increase businesses and employment opportunities. disproportionate minority contact in the criminal justice system the project included an analysis of disproportionate minority contact (dmc) in the criminal justice system at the national, state and county level. members from law enforcement and community members providing their perceptions of dmc and personal accounts. the project focused on services needed to support formerly incarcerated members. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 participants and sampling the first author submitted and received institutional review board approval to conduct this study; fifteen student participants were recruited from the firsttime offering of the community psychology course. all students provided consent and received an overview of the study intentions. the study used purposeful sampling and participants represented different classifications and states of residency (table 1). this sampling technique was utilized to ensure the perspectives represented among the participants fostered shared experiences and opportunities to elaborate on ideas about experiences in the course. seventy-three percent of the student participants were female (n=11), and twenty-seven percent were males. fifty-three percent of the course were seniors (n=8); twenty-seven percent were juniors (n=4); and, twenty percent were sophomores (n=3). participants' residency included colorado, maryland, north carolina, virginia, and washington, d.c. nearly all students were psychology majors (93%). data collection and analysis data from students were collected using a focus group protocol; the design of the protocol adhered to principles of teaching and learning inquiry outlined in felton (2013). the design aimed to inquire into the shared learning experiences of students and perceptions of course structure (massey, 2011). students were organized into two small subgroups during the last week of class before final examinations; a faculty member representing the research team facilitated discussions through an online platform (i.e., skype). a graduate student and a faculty member represented the research team; individuals were not affiliated with the university and led all data collection and analyses. the research team included two women who self-identified as african american women. the faculty member, trained as a community psychologist and professor at the graduate and undergraduate level, served as the research leader. the graduate student identified as a clinicalcommunity psychologist. the focus group data went through several stages of analysis, including open coding and axial coding. the research team used inductive content analysis due to the dearth of knowledge on undergraduate community psychology education in an hbcu context. inductive analysis gleams data from the specific to a general narrative in order to gain insight from the perspective of those directly connected to the phenomena (massey, 2011). as the first step in the data analysis process, the research team reflected upon and shared their biases on the following: 1) undergraduate training in community psychology, 2) division 27’s outreach to minority serving institutions especially hbcus, and 3) perceptions of hbcus. the two research team members wrote memos immediately after the focus group, listened to audio recordings separately to identify codes, and continued to reflect on their biases to acknowledge where biases influenced both coding and theme development. more specifically, upon the transcription of data, the research team identified initial concepts. the team discussed preliminary thoughts about the data and initial concepts to address internal consistency. team members coded transcripts inductively to define codes and generate emergent themes independently. afterward, to confirm code structure, the team read the transcriptions in order to verify codes and make changes accordingly. the researchers repeated this coding process continuously until they agreed on themes that established consensus. finally, a third member of the research team conducted an audit trail to confirm trustworthiness and dependability of qualitative findings. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 reflections on the course it is important to acknowledge the faculty teaching the course and the majority of students enrolled in the undergraduate community psychology course self-identified as black/african american (95%). previous research indicates racially diverse students often possess a stronger orientation to social justice beliefs and community involvement compared to other students (garibay, 2015; gibbs & griffin, 2013). anchoring course reflections in the racial identity of faculty and students shed light into the overall motivations for teaching and enrolling in the course. a majority of students indicated enrolling in the course due to an interest in learning about community psychology, taking a course with the faculty of record, and gaining insight on whether the field would be an option for graduate school. the faculty designed and taught the class from the lens of critical pedagogy with the intentions to advance student knowledge in the field of community psychology and to think critically about issues related to social injustice (friere, 2002). the course focused on community psychology principles and topic areas addressing the competencies outlined by christens and colleagues (2015) (see appendix b). active learning strategies included case studies, facilitated discussion, and think-pair shares in the course. analysis of student responses indicates a majority perceived the class as "insightful, engaging, and motivating" and perceived the class improved their "critical and creative" thinking. alternative perspective of psychology the analysis of student responses in the context of course content revealed three major themes emerged in the course experiences. the first theme included how the course provided an alternative perspective of psychology. this theme, an alternative perspective, represents the examination of people in an ecological context and underscores the significance of understanding individuals nested in different settings. community psychology often provides an alternative perspective in psychology by broadening student perspectives beyond individual factors and mental health pathologies to focus on wellbeing and related social determinants (linney, 2000; martin, lounsbury, & davidson, 2004). most of the psychology majors shared they were unaware that a field in psychology examines human behavior beyond individual factors. students discussed how they were able to gain knowledge on how multiple systems influence human behavior. many mentioned how this course offered an alternative perspective compared to other psychology courses on campus or resonated with concepts learned in courses outside of psychology like political science and sociology. unlike other psychology courses which explored individual perspectives, this course examined community/group perspectives; and, an introduction to the ecological model changed how students thought critically about psychology. one male student stated: … the course provided a different perspective (interviewer: when you compare it to what?) other psychology classes would offer. i know because i practically took every psychology class that is offered on campus. this [course] looks at a community or group perspective, which caused me [to] think different[ly] [than] what i would usually…most courses focus on the individual level, but this course began to look at context looking at the other social-ecological kind of levels [such as] the micro to the macro.— senior, male 1 promoting an alternative perspective to psychology helped some students think about the important role the community plays on http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 the individual. when psychology students pursue graduate programs in fields that examine the impact of social factors on health and well-being, then an undergraduate course in community psychology may provide a foundational perspective. one female student shared: a lot of us psychology students want to [work] in public health and community health. …[for] all the students that i know that want to do those kind of jobs, this course really helps. i never found the kind of perspective that constantly [gets people] talking about globalizing and coming together…the individual just isn’t as strong as the community [which is] something i didn’t start preaching until after i had this class.—senior, female 15 empowered social change the second theme that emerged from our analysis is empowered social change. analysis of student responses and faculty reflection suggest the course engaged students in framing issues from first-order to secondorder social change. first-order change incorporates ameliorative strategies to social problems that emphasize effective individual and group efforts to traverse and function within social educational, governmental, and political institutions (linney, 2000). contrary to first-order change, second-order change uses transformative strategies that target oppressive social structures and attempts to organize individuals as well as groups to develop more equitable, effective social structures (martin, bowles, adkins, & leach, 2011). course content included journal readings and guided discussions on the role of students in driving social change. analysis indicates students began to think about strategies to change local, state, and national issues faced by communities of color. the faculty modeled empowerment practices by giving students the opportunity to identify a social issue to address and having students facilitate a discussion with the intentions to promote awareness of the issue or to promote a call to action. student interests drove the topics and provided them with a forum to educate others about an issue and propose a solution. one student mentioned: … my social issue of the day [was about what happened in] greensboro recently… a tornado hit. so, i was [more] focused on disaster relief; and, i went out into the community where a lot of the homes [had been] devastated. i provided resources for people to get involved so they could…bring donations [and] things of that nature…[i also studied] what other policies and procedures could help greensboro be more prepared for future, god forbid, future disasters.— senior, female 2 another student commented: i did my social issue on the connection between police and students within the school systems [to study] incidents going on in society [that are] causing tensions…[especially] how [students and police can] work better to cooperate.–senior, male 1 hbcus alignment with community psychology principles the third theme that emerged from the analysis was hbcus’ alignment with community psychology. particularly, we propose this theme speaks to how community psychology and hbcus both embrace a shared history of using education as a tool to increase individual and collective knowledge in transforming oppressive systems. for instance, as previously mentioned, hbcus continue to serve the educational aspirations of black/african american students and prepare graduates to become advocates and leaders (albritton, 2012; douglass, 2012; http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 sydnor, hawkins, & edwards, 2010). similarly, community psychology has promoted values congruent with hbcus’ foci such as cultural relativity, dismantling social inequalities, and advocating for social change (society for community research and action, 2018). analysis of the student reflections indicated the faculty's pedagogy played a significant role in facilitating the connection between the social justice aspirations of students and practical application. a student discussed: …i’m just gonna go off the top of my head to what i’m feeling right now. well, the class itself, i felt like is a big need on universities especially hbcus, concerning you know. uh, within the black community, we need a lot of community involvement to prosper in some shape or form. um, as far as future endeavors. at first, i wasn’t going into community psychology, but you know after working with dr. x and you know, she helping me understand community psychology a lot more especially in taking this class, uh, it helped me increase my ambition on getting my degree from community psychology. so as far as values, i want to help the community more so the class was very insightful on how to do that and which route to take.—senior, male 1 the students mentioned that many of them possess a strong desire to be more active in their community and to address some of the social challenges communities of color face. topics such as mental health, incarceration, and police brutality became central to discussions in the course. these collective experiences not only resonated with the students but also helped them form connections with their future aspirations. one female student commented: i think the class was really important because all of us want to get involved in some form of public service helping people. i think this class helped have a better understanding of the importance of getting to know the community that you’re trying to work in and help so that you can better know that community. i think we all kind of learned that; and that added value to not only our studies now, but [also] our future careers.—junior, female 4 discussion the review of course content accompanied by reflections from the students indicate undergraduate community psychology education is valuable to students attending hbcus. students used a variety of terms to describe the course including insightful, motivating, and relatable. the course structure provided space for students to question content and integrate common knowledge with content knowledge. one active learning strategy used in the course included the questioning method, a way to promote dialogue in courses by encouraging students to address two central questions, i.e., how does this concept apply to what they saw in their community and what relevance does the concept had to them (kalogirou & konstantinos, 2012). albritton (2012) argues hbcus often offer students learning experiences that value the cultural realities of black/african americans, induces positive racial pride and a larger sense of commitment to one’s communities. the analysis of course reflections suggests students gravitated to this kind of pedagogy and valued bringing in their cultural realities into the course. most of the students, if not all, had a desire to improve social institutions in the united states, whether that was in the criminal justice system or schools. many had a personal connection with the topic selected http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 for their social issue and the photovoice project used in the course. one student, who had recently lost two friends to suicide, was working through her grief while doing the photovoice project on mental health awareness. a reading selected for a course discussion, langhout (2015), prompted students to lead a discussion on the physical and emotional toll of social justice work. faculty and students were involved in a dialogue that acknowledged coping strategies students exercise in their daily lives and the value of self-care. the faculty acknowledges the course provided some flexibility to integrate pauses or divergence from the topical areas and discuss current events such as the shooting deaths of black men in the media and the students' well-being. pedagogy that constructs spaces for students to express their vulnerability may be a critical aspect of how to apply community psychology principles to well-being in teaching environments. these considerations in the course may have influenced how students perceived the professor and the course. findings from course reflections indicated the undergraduate students wanted to learn theories and skills that helped them develop interventions to social problems or tackle policies affecting their communities. the integration of selected readings and facilitated discussions by the faculty helped make connections between community psychology and career and personal interests for students. since many of the students expressed an interest in pursuing careers related to mental health the reading reyes cruz and sonn's (2011) led to a dialogue on decolonizing mental health and acknowledging how the mental health system often negates to acknowledge the sociohistorical context of communities of color. on numerous occasions, when students expressed their career interest the faculty member would relate their interests to theories and frameworks in community psychology. the course provided opportunities for undergraduate students to apply the content learned in the course to their local community and to propose potential solutions to issues such as food insecurity, incarceration, and gun violence. previous research indicates increasing opportunities for students to engage in community settings allows them to recognize inconstancy between applying theory to practical problems (schlehofer & phillips, 2013; zimmerman, kamal, & hannah, 2013). increasing applied experiences helps shift student thinking about what is actually possible in the real world in terms of addressing change. a previous analysis of black/african american students in an undergraduate community psychology course revealed community engagement experiences promoted a higher sense of global connectedness and advocacy (henderson et al., 2017). integrating community engagement and service into the undergraduate course may have not only broadened students' awareness of their local community but increased personal agency (meyers, 2009; stenhouse & jarrett, 2012). our findings also reveal the value the community psychology course offers to this hbcu and students. one student mentioned how the course inspired him to pursue a degree in community psychology and increased his desire to help the community more (senior, male 1). hbcus, similar to other institutions, seek to train students to enter the workforce and respond to societal challenges. hbcus need more opportunities to enhance educational opportunities for students that extend beyond social mobility and prepares them to be active agents in addressing systems' change (albritton, 2012; allen et al., 2007). hbcus must continue the legacy of preparing civil and human rights advocates and the next generation of research scholars who are working to reduce social inequities. increased awareness of community psychology at hbcus can enhance http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 community psychology pedagogy in undergraduate education as well as increase the pipeline of underrepresented minority students in doctoral programs. the findings from the analysis suggest such course experiences have practical benefits to the professional development of students and career interests. continuing this continued legacy can leverage increased collaboration between hbcus and the society for community research and action. we acknowledge some challenges in teaching the undergraduate course to students at the hbcu. students indicated they enjoyed the course but expressed that the course needed to extend across two semesters. requiring students to engage in the community as well as focusing most assignments on their experiences presented a challenge for the students. implementing community engagement without an established community partner served as a challenge to course implementation. henderson and colleagues (2017) indicate community partnerships with other organizations are critical in the undergraduate learning experiences at hbcus and provide a way to centralize student projects. the course in this study, alternatively, did not have an established community partner and students worked on several different topics rather than a central theme. the course was taught only a year after the faculty began their appointment at the university. increasing more planning time for the course and possibly extending the course across two semesters can potentially solidify community partnerships and centralized community engagement activities. the authors acknowledge this may be challenging considering the undergraduate course was an elective versus a major requirement; there is a strong push to reduce the number of hours needed to complete a psychology degree in the department of psychology at the university rather than increase them. limitations there are some limitations to the findings and paper. for one, the positive course reflections may be an indicator of a learning environment where faculty and students share similar racial identities. we acknowledge students and faculty were predominately black/african american. it is possible sharing similar racial identities allow faculty and students to build strong emotional connections and a sense of membership (albritton, 2012). these shared identities potentially influence the learning environment and students’ perceptions of trust when disclosing issues related to race and other intersecting identities. second, the power dynamic between the faculty and students may also influence student responses to the focus group questions. although the framing of the focus group protocol questions required students to think about the potential weaknesses and challenges in the course, students reported very minimal issues. it is possible responses may be biased by students’ belief the faculty would evaluate their performance in the course more favorably if experiences reflected positive responses versus negative ones. we acknowledge all transcripts were deidentified and the faculty member had no way to link responses back to individual students. we also acknowledge the conclusions generated from the student reflections are limited to the context of this university. the hbcu provided a broad range of racial identities for black/african american students but this paper did explore these differences nor aim to provide generalizations for students attending predominately white institutions (pwis). the findings from this course experience may not apply to other racially/ethnically diverse students or university settings. last, as mentioned, the value orientation of the faculty guided the pedagogy used in the course and structure of the learning environment. there may be something http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 unique about the faculty’s pedagogical approach and the ways they engaged with the students that we were not able to capture in this paper. we propose there is a need to conduct more research in the context of undergraduate community psychology education and scholarship devoted to the unique pedagogical practices community psychologist use in the classroom. conclusion this paper aimed to describe an undergraduate course in community psychology through a case study design at an hbcu. findings reveal the course was valuable to students and provided relevant experiences related to their future aspirations and career interests. findings suggest the undergraduate community psychology course provided opportunities for community engagement and students to engage a sense of agency in addressing community challenges. we propose increasing student engagement with community psychology at the undergraduate level has several benefits for black/african american students. undergraduate experiences potentially change how students think about their individual capacity to address systemic change and career identities. increasing opportunities for black/african american students to learn about community psychology may be a foundation for engagement in the society for community research and action and doctoral programs in community psychology. the society for community research and action has a strategic focus to increase the number of undergraduate students who engage with and learning about community psychology and the hbcu context may be one setting often overlooked. this paper positions the hbcu context as a critical setting to do more outreach and strengthen scholarly inquiry at the undergraduate level. references albritton, t. j. 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(2011). black mega-churches in the internet age: exploring theological teachings and social outreach efforts. journal of african american studies, 15, 155-176. martin, p. p., lounsbury, d. w., & davidson, w. s. (2004). ajcp as a vehicle for improving community life: an historic– analytic review of the journal’s contents. american journal of community psychology, 34, 163-173. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-0119181-2 massey, o. t. (2011). a proposed model for the analysis and interpretation of focus groups in evaluation research. evaluation and program planning, 34, 21-28. doi: 10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2010.06.003 mcgee, e. & bentley, l. (2017). the equity ethic: black and latinx college students reengineering their stem careers toward justice. american journal of education, 124,1-36. doi: 10.1086/693954 merriam, s. b. (1998). qualitative research and case study applications in education. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. meyers, s. a. (2009). service learning as an opportunity for personal and social transformation. international journal of teaching and learning in higher education, 21, 373-381. national center for education statistics. (2018). fast facts: historically black colleges and universities. retrieve from https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.as p?id=667. national center for education statistics. (2004). historically black colleges and universities, 1976 to 2001. u.s. department of education (nces 2004062). retrieve from https://nces.ed.gov. prilleltensky, i. (2001). value-based praxis in community psychology: moving toward social justice and social action. american journal of community psychology, 29, 747-778. reyes cruz, m., & sonn, c. c. (2011). (de) colonizing culture in community psychology: reflections from critical social science. american journal of community psychology, 47, 203-214. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-0109378-x rogers, r., & mosley wetzel, m. (2013). designing critical literacy education through critical discourse analysis: pedagogical and research tools for teacher researchers. new york, ny: routledge. schlehofer, m. m., & phillips, s. m. (2013). teaching experientially in the undergraduate community psychology classroom. journal of prevention and intervention in the community, 41, 5560. doi: 10.1080/10852352.2013.757978. society for community research and action. (2018). who we are? retrieve from http://www.scra27.org/who-we-are/ sydnor, k. d., hawkins, a. s., & edwards, l. v. (2010). expanding research opportunities: making the argument for the fit between hbcus and communitybased participatory research. the journal of negro education, 79 (1), 7986. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2567611 1 stenhouse, v.l., & jarrett, o.s. (2012). in the service of learning and activism: service learning, critical pedagogy, and the problem solution project. teacher education quarterly, 39 (1), 51-76. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=667 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=667 https://nces.ed.gov/ http://www.scra27.org/who-we-are/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 stoloff, m., mccarthy, m., keller, l., varfolomeeva, v., lynch, j., makara, k., simmons, s., smiley, w. (2010). the undergraduate psychology major: an examination of structure and sequence. teaching of psychology, 37, 4-15. doi: 10.1080/00986280903426274 u.s. department of education. (2018). historically black colleges and universities. retrieve from https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.as p?id=667 u.s. news. (2019). historically black colleges and universities. retrieve from https://www.usnews.com/bestcolleges/rankings/hbcu. washington, b. t. (1895). the atlanta compromise. retrieve from http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/39/ wenglinsky, h. (1996). the educational justification of historically black colleges and universities: a policy response to the u.s. supreme court. educational evaluation and policy analysis, 18 (1), 91-103. yin, r. k. (2009). case study research: design and methods (4th ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage publishing. yin, r. k. (2014). case study research: design and methods (5th ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage publishing zimmerman, l., kamal, z, & hannah, k. (2013). pedagogy of the logic model: teaching undergraduates to work together to change their communities. journal of prevention and intervention in the community, 41, 121-27. doi: 10.1080/10852352.2013.757990. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=667 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=667 https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/hbcu https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/hbcu http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/39/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 appendix a course schedule with selected readings week day in-class focus content assignments a framework for community psychology 1 t, 1/9 introduction, expectations, the journey here why community psychology? core values th, 1/11 principles & values of community psychology due: in-class 2-minute essay 2 t, 1/16 read 2-minute essay position, power, and privilege course reading: transforming community psychologys. riger completed 1/17 for class discussion th, 1/18 reading discussion understanding community group assignments (exchange & plan of action) values and principles of community psychology 3 t, 1/23 empowerment course reading: what’s wrong with empowerment? s. riger completed 1/24 for class discussion th, 1/25 reading discussion individuals and context course reflection 1 due: online, 11:59, 1/26 4 t, 1/30 racial and social justice course reading: understanding, resisting, and overcoming oppression: toward psychopolitical validity-i. prilleltensky completed 1/31 for class discussion th, 2/1 reading discussion inequality vs. inequity ecological principles 5 t, 2/6 ecological metaphor points of leverage th, 2/8 course discussion movie: gaining and holding ground: the rebirth of dudley street community research report topic due: in class, february 8th cultural realities http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 6 t, 2/13 pre (colonized) framework course reading: (de)colonizing culture in community psychology: reflections from critical social science-cruz and sonn completed 2/14 for class discussion th, 2/15 de (colonized) framework reading discussion “i am” my community due: online, 11:59 pm, friday 2/16 7 t, 2/20 dimensions of diversity course reading: empowering the silent ranks: the southeast asian experience completed 2/21 for class discussion th, 2/22 no class (online assignment) reading discussion course reflection 2 due: online, 11:59, 2/23 prevention and intervention 8 t, 2/27 types of prevention course reading: sociopolitical development-watts et al. completed 2/28 for class discussion th, 3/1 intervention skype speaker: regina jackson, director east oakland youth development center community research report progress report due: in class, march 1st t, 3/6 spring break th, 3/8 9 t, 3/13 theories of change course reading: beyond the colonial divide: african diasporic and indigenous youth alliance building for hiv prevention-wilson et al. completed 3/14 for class discussion th, 3/15 reading discussion sociocultural prevention and intervention methods in community psychology 10 t, 3/20 research methods in community psychology course reading: participatory action research.-baum et al. completed 3/21 for class discussion th, 3/22 reading discussion: photovoice-other methodologies http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 11 t, 3/27 youth participatory action research th, 3/29 community research report (in class) course reflection 3 due: online, 11:59, 3/30 resilience frameworks 12 t, 4/3 understanding stress & coping pt. 1 course reading: narratives of resistance: (re) telling the story of the hiv/aids movement – because the lives and legacies of black, indigenous, and people of colour communities depend on it. completed 4/4 for class discussion th, 4/5 reading discussion understanding stress & coping pt. 2 13 t, 4/10 resilience course reading: “it really takes a village”: a socio-ecological model of resilience for prevention among economically disadvantaged ethnic minority youth.henderson et al. completed 4/11 for class discussion th, 4/12 reading discussion survival vs. thriving resilience 14 t, 4/17 well-being course reading: considering community psychology competencies: a love letter to budding scholar-activists who wonder if they have what it takes-r. langhout completed 4/18 for class discussion th, 4/19 reading discussion community and social change 15 t, 4/24 community and social change pt. 2 th, 4/26 community report presentations peer evaluation course reflection 4 due: online, 11:59, 4/27 16 t, 5/1 community report presentations peer evaluation th, 5/3 community report presentations peer evaluation post assessment tuesday, 5/8 final community report uploaded into blackboard, 11:59 pm http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 appendix b description of core course assignments 1. i am my community: the purpose of this assignment is to allow students to locate two individuals in your community and interview them and identify similarities and difference. interviews must include individuals who are different from students (e.g., age, social status/class, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) and must connect their values, beliefs in the values and beliefs of others about community. 2. community research report: the purpose of this assignment is to allow students to gather data (qualitative and quantitative) in order to develop a community research report. the report provides the following: topic, an introduction, method, results, and recommendations. the method section should include the procedure outlining how you gathered data from interviews with residents/students, site observations, and obtained information from the census tract or another online outlet. results should include a summary of the issue, current barriers, and two models of successful programs around the issue. 3. photovoice project: the purpose of this assignment is to model photovoice methods using content from your community research report. wang and burris (1997) indicate” photovoice is a process by which people can identify, represent, and enhance their community through a specific photographic technique. as a practice based in the production of knowledge, photovoice has three main goals: (1) to enable people to record and reflect their community's strengths and concerns, (2) to promote critical dialogue and knowledge about important issues through large and small group discussion of photographs, and (3) to reach policymakers.” the final project included a presentation and a 4-minute video project. http://www.gjcpp.org/ microsoft word raymondlorion_theoriescommunitypsychologymatterwhy_formattedfinal.docx theories in community psychology: do they matter and why? raymond p. lorion towson university keywords: theory, science, community psychology, framework author biography: raymond p. lorion since receiving his doctorate in clinical and community psychology from the university of rochester in 1972, dr. lorion has been engaged in the design, conduct and evaluation of field-based studies focused on disconnected, troubled and under-achieving youth; overcoming obstacles to educational handicaps and effective learning including developmental disorders and ecological risks associated with high-minority, low-income communities marked by heightened exposure to pervasive community violence. dr. lorion and colleagues have developed and evaluated programs to engage communities in initiatives to optimize child and family development. the majority of this work focused on pk-12 settings, instructional staff, students, families and nearby school-communities. building on epidemiological evidence documenting risks for negative educational, emotional, and health (e.g., substance involvement; stds and adolescent pregnancy; and exposure to community violence), interventions were deigned, implemented and evaluated for their primary and secondary preventive impacts. since 1989, dr. lorion has served as editor-in-chief of the journal of community psychology. dr. lorion joined towson university from the university of pennsylvania to serve as professor and dean of its college of education (2004-2015). from 2006 2012, dr. lorion directed towson university’s cherry hill learning zone initiative focused on applying a comprehensive community-wide approach to turn around chronically low-performing schools in one of baltimore’s most economically challenged neighborhoods. in 2010, dr. lorion established the center for application and innovation research in education (caire) at towson and in july 2015 he moved from serving as dean to focusing full-time on caire’s continuing development. recommended citation: lorion, r.p. (2016). theories in community psychology: do they matter and why? global journal of community psychology practice, 7(2), pages 1-5. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). correspondence should be addressed to raymond p. lorion, towson university, 8000 york road, towson md 21252-0001, rlorion@towson.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 theories in community psychology: do they matter and why? jason, stevens, ram, miller, beasley, and gleason’s (2016) theories in the field of community psychology challenges community psychology to reflect on its scientific maturation. it is noteworthy that the title of their analysis refers to the field rather than the discipline of community psychology. typically, a field designates a line of inquiry or area of study within a recognized scientific and professional base of substantive expertise, i.e., a discipline. i would posit that a sine qua non of a science-based community psychology discipline would be foundational knowledge built upon accepted theoretical explanations of how the physical, psychosocial, political, economic, cultural, and related salient setting characteristics shape human behavior and well-being. jason et al. (2016) correctly question whether, after nearly a half century, the scientific community in general recognizes community psychology and the social scientific community specifically as a theory-based discipline. therein lies their question! to that the current discussion add my question i.e., do they matter and why? in the foreword that i prepared for jason and glenwick’s (2016) handbook of methodological approaches to communitybased research: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods, i stated: “much is said about the value of the methods for theory-building or confirmation without exactly identifying the theoretical base being referenced. now and again we see references to “paradigm” without exactly knowing what is paradigmatic about the work or feeling confident that the nature of a paradigm and the breadth of its scientific implications are applicable (kuhn, 1962). both “theory” and “paradigm” appear to be stated more as evidence that the work described is truly scientific rather than being presented as the foundation on which the accumulation of information is gathered and its contribution to the “work of normal science” demonstrated. (lorion, 2016). in recent comments before the society for community research and action (lorion, 2015), i examined the nature of community psychology and the intent of many of its adherents. specifically, dokecki’s (1992) discussion of the implications of macmurray’s (1957; 1961) analysis of the person-incommunity for locating community psychology along the continuum from science to practice led me to question whether our work has been driven primarily by pursuit of the underlying question “what do we want to know?” or rather by “what do we want to do?” obviously, these are not mutually exclusive but their differential emphases reflect our priorities. the pursuit of knowledge that expands understanding of targeted phenomena links us to the basic tenets of scientific study, i.e., increasing our knowledge of and ability to predict phenomena of interest be they in the physical or social realms. as discussed below, the acquisition of knowledge for the sake of enhancing our understanding of natural phenomena represents the essence of the physical sciences and, for many but not all, the aspiration of social scientists. by contrast, work responsive to “what do we want to do?” reflects, in my view, a prioritization of activism over science. so motivated, we engage in specified actions to achieve intended outcomes. this perspective prioritizes outcomes over information! reviewing the array of methodologically sophisticated chapters in jason and glenwick’s (2016) recent handbook, i found throughout echoes of earlier debates about community psychology’s relative obligations to society and science. these echoes reminded me that the seeds of community psychology were planted in the 1960s primarily by university-based clinical and social psychologists during the community global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 mental health movement’s emergence within the civil rights movement. the professional foci of our founders were catalyzed by substantial epidemiological evidence of inequities in access to mental health services; increasing demands for recognition and removal of substandard and discriminatory human services for minority and low-income groups; and emerging acceptance of the public health mantra that no disorders have ever been controlled through treatment but only through its prevention. for many of our forefathers, community psychology offered a professional pathway for addressing these inequities within the security of their academic positions. their early efforts altered when, how, and with whom one intervened in the development of emotional and behavioral disorders; sought to rebalance social and economic disparities through empowerment and asset-building initiatives; de-emphasized professional credentials and distinctions between service providers and recipients; and reconceptualized study subjects into participants, collaborators and even coinvestigators. those same elements led many in my generation to leverage our academic base to engage in applied work focused on reducing inequities and enhancing the effectiveness of educational, mental health and related health and social services for the indigent, the homeless, the abused and the substance involved. the societal concerns of that era allowed us to merge activism with empiricism and thereby contribute to the knowledge base that defines community psychology. viewing community psychology as built less from scientific curiosity than from social activism is not intended to diminish its importance or the impact of its efforts on mental health, social services, and understanding and engaging diverse communities. one need only recognize the role of leaders such as albee, cowen, sarason, bloom, levine, fairweather and newbrough to appreciate the challenges associated with introducing prevention concepts into mental health practices and focusing on ecological and developmental contributions to behavioral outcomes. i suggest that community psychology’s intent was to engage in actions that had the potential to change rather than study the status quo. its unstated assumption was that action would lead to understanding and results would inform theory. if accurate, this perspective hopefully provides context for why, after nearly 50 years, community psychology has no focusing theories! jason et al.’s (2016) call for theories produced at least 32 candidates but no “leading or central theories.” lewin (1951) oft-quoted observation that “there is nothing so practical as a good theory” notwithstanding, community psychology finds itself lacking such! rather we appear to have scores of theories attached to multitudes of phenomena with little consensus concerning their synthetic contributions to our shared ability to understand, predict and thereby gain some control over ecological influences on behavioral outcomes. reflecting on the nominees examined in some detail by jason et al. (2016), i would argue that none, including sarason’ s (1974) psychological sense of community, meet the scientific criteria for “theory” proposed, for example, by the american association for the advancement of science, i.e., “… a wellsubstantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. such factsupported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world” (cited in wikipedia). theories that would be central to scientific efforts in community psychology must describe, explain, and predict phenomena of interest. descriptions of these phenomena must be sufficiently consensual to inform hypotheses that have the potential to deepen and expand understanding. scientific theories are judged by their capacity to introduce control over target phenomena as evidenced by testable global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 predictions of the circumstances under which the phenomena occur. in all cases, theoretical explanations must be replicable as well as refutable, i.e., experiments must be designed in such a manner that contrary findings supporting the null hypothesis cannot be explained by the theory and procedures must be reproducible independently to establish the reliability of their findings. that evidence might render a theory false is an essential element of science! critics of psychoanalytic theory, for example, regularly argued that its capacity to explain any result undermined its scientific validity. reaction formation explained contrary behavior just as denial or repression explained other findings different from what had been predicted. each of the “major” theories selected by jason et al. (2016) must be examined for their capacity to confirm their validity by accurately predicting the circumstances under which intended outcomes will not occur. findings observed by one community researcher must be replicable by others using identical procedures, measures and comparable samples. therein, i suspect, lies a significant hurdle for community theories! in recent years, participatory action research, for example, has been encouraged as consistent with community psychology’s values to engage phenomena in their natural and genuine state. jason and glenwick’s (2016) recent handbook contain five chapters focused directly on this methodology (e. g., kral & allen, 2016; suarez-balcazar & balcazar, 2016); it is mentioned in far more! to the extent that community residents targeted for an intervention are actively engaged in its design, delivery and interpretation of findings raises questions about the replicability of those findings. do we know enough about the critical characteristics of settings that we can match communities without confounds? are those participating in our interventions or explorations as researcher and recipient so unique that their characteristics do not allow for cross-setting replication? can we repeat work within one setting with a second, third or fourth sample? can failure to confirm expectations be dismissed as reflecting the uniqueness of a setting and its participants? rather than present a laundry list of the limits of extant theories in community psychology, i repeat my opening question about the status of theories in community psychology, i.e., “do they matter and why?” does community psychology either want or need theory? reflect on the purpose of theory, i.e., to organize knowledge in a manner that is widely accepted; to clarify understanding sufficiently to offer control over phenomena verified through the consistent replication of predicted outcomes. at its most comprehensive, theory attains paradigmatic status (kuhn, 1972) and informs which questions are to be asked in which sequence through which empirical methods using which measures and analytic techniques. the value of paradigms is reflected in the breadth of their applicability and in their incorporation of prior and current findings into a whole that enhances understanding, control and prediction. each of these paradigmatic virtues are inherent to answering “what do we want to know?” yet has not community psychology focused on “doing” from the outset? has it not directed its efforts to reversing wrongs; reducing inequity; revising the balance of power and authority; and returning control to individuals; groups, neighborhoods and communities? if so, does the uniqueness of the situations in which it engages its professional knowledge and practice make these activities less scientific but more responsive and beneficial? from the outset, community psychology’s originators struggled to establish their academic bona fides before skeptical and even adversarial colleagues as they located their efforts away from campuses in “real” settings with “real” people confronting “real life.” one response to jason et al’ s (2016) inability to identify “leading or central” theories in community psychology is acknowledgement that their global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 absence is consistent with five decades of community psychology’s priorities, i.e., engaging with residents in their natural settings and circumstances to do with them what needs doing to improve their quality of life and increase their self-determination! thus, i encourage readers to delay arguments in support of one or more of jason et al’ s (2016) theoretical candidates until they have reflected on whether and why it matters. i urge them to consider how the results of the past 50 years would differ had our science and practice been paradigmatically guided rather than reflective of individual interests, immediate demands and obligating commitment to change! theories might still emerge that will lead to paradigmatic consensus. if they do, how will our research and practice change? my sense of our literature and practices lead me to counter lewin’s assertion that “there is nothing so practical as a good theory” with “there is nothing so necessary as effective practice!” references aaas evolution resources cited in wikipedia scientific theory, october 5, 2015. dokecki, p. r. (1992). on knowing the community of caring persons: a methodological basis for the reflectivegenerative practice of community psychology. journal of community psychology, 20, 26-235. jason, l. a. & glenwick, d. s. (eds). (2016). handbook of methodological approaches to community-based research: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. new york, ny: oxford university press. jason, l. a., stevens, e., ram, d., miller, s. a., beasley, c. r., & gleason, k. (2016). theories in the field of community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice. kral, m. j. & allen, j. (2016) community-based participatory action research. in l. a. jason & d. s. glenwick (eds). (2016). handbook of methodological approaches to community-based research: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. new york, ny: oxford university press. kuhn, t. s. (1970). the structure of scientific revolutions (2nd ed.). university of chicago press. lewin, k. (1951). field theory in social science: selected theoretical papers. new york: harper & brothers publishers. lorion, r. p. (2015) “what if a stich in time only saves six.” invited address to the society of community research and action upon receipt of the 2015 distinguished contributions to theory and research in community psychology. lowell, ma, june. lorion, r. p. (2016) foreword. in l. a. jason & d. s. glenwick (eds). (2016). handbook of methodological approaches to communitybased research: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. new york, ny: oxford university press. macmurray, j. (1957). the self as agent. london: faber. macmurray, j. (1961). persons in relation. new york: harper & row. sarason, s. b. (1974). the psychological sense of community; prospects for a community psychology. san francisco, ca: josseybass. suarez-balcazar, y. & balcazar, f. (2016) functional analysis of community concerns in participatory action research. l. a. jason & d. s. glenwick (eds). (2016). handbook of methodological approaches to communitybased research: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. new york, ny: oxford university press. microsoft word 2012-001-final-20120515.docx             community leadership scot d. evans assistant professor, department of educational & psychological studies school of education university of miami keywords: community leadership, case study, community psychology practice, community psychology praxis dr. evans’s current scholarly interests include researching and promoting the role of community-based human service organizations in the promotion of wellbeing, social change, and social justice. dr. evans can be reached by email at s.evans4@miami.edu.   recommended citation: evans, sd. (2012). community leadership. global journal of community psychology practice, 3(3), 1-6. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/).         global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012         global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   community leadership scot d. evans assistant professor, department of educational & psychological studies school of education university of miami abstract this paper draws on examples and stories to offer five basic assumptions for a humble model of community leadership. first, community leaders are agents of change. second, community leaders are driven by a set of core ideals and principles of community action. third, having or acquiring technical leadership skills or a formal position is not enough to make one an effective and transforming leader in communities. fourth, leadership in communities is more complex and beyond the efforts of any one individual charismatic leader. lastly, community leadership is praxis – action informed by practical wisdom and theory that is consciously reflected on in order to generate learning and new action.   introduction recently, a group of ladies mostly grandmothers at town park village in the overtown area of miami were concerned about safety and related drug activity in the neighborhood. they determined through a series of study circle dialogues1 that they could work together to address these concerns by starting with improved lighting. they organized to prepare a proposal to secure funds from some public and private sources and they held weekly fish fries to raise additional money. the group was successful in raising funds and getting the new lighting installed. the lighting has contributed to an increased sense of security for them and other residents. they shared their success with other communities and have remained together as a leadership group to build on this success and take on new challenges for the benefit of the neighborhood. (d. levine, personal communication, october 6, 2010). we think and talk about leadership in a variety of contexts: organizations, neighborhoods, communities, and societies. in neighborhoods and communities, we hope for local individuals who are willing and able to assume some responsibility for community betterment by being “out front” to ignite and facilitate action (chaskin et al, 2010). the modest example above highlights some basic assumptions                                                                                                                 1  a study circle is simply a small group of people who meet multiple times using a structured format to discuss a public concern and plan action. visit http://www.everyday-democracy.org for more information.     about community leadership that i will outline in this brief position paper. first, community leaders are agents of change. they want to make a meaningful difference on the social issues that are important to them and the communities in which they live. second, community leaders are driven by a set of core ideals and principles of community action. third, having or acquiring technical leadership skills or a formal position is not enough to make one an effective and transforming leader in communities. fourth, leadership in communities is more complex and beyond the efforts of any one individual charismatic leader. lastly, community leadership is praxis – action informed by practical wisdom and theory that is consciously reflected on in order to generate learning and new action. throughout this piece, i draw on examples and stories provided by a number of community partners and colleagues working in communities2 to build a humble model of community leadership for consideration. the purpose of community leadership is social change the purpose of community leadership is building power for social change; change in human or community conditions, social structures, dominant cultural beliefs, or prevailing practices (hickman, 2009). it is a collaborative, values-based process in                                                                                                                 2 special thanks to daniella levine, christine bird, elena christy, geoff nelson, brian christens, isaac prilleltensky, bob newbrough, rebecca toporek, tod sloan and john murphy for providing insightful examples and ideas for this paper. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012         global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   which people first recognize a gap between what “is” and what “should be”, then take purposeful action. like the women from town park village, people take on leadership roles in communities because they see that something must be done. they don’t like what they see and want to change it. leadership in this context is a collective effort to intentionally modify, alter, or transform the world around us. whether it is the first “small win” (weick, 1984) of bringing better lighting to a low-income neighborhood, the creation of new channels for community voice, or the transformation of an entire school system, community leadership is “a creative and generative act – literally bringing new realities into being through collaboration with others” (couto et al, 2002, p. 2). community funding agencies and private sector leaders often wish that grassroots community leaders were better followers who refrain from making them uncomfortable with their social change agenda. but community leaders are agitators and instigators of change. community leadership is not about maintenance of the status quo. they want transformation in societal institutions, and the emancipation of individuals and groups from disadvantage, exclusion, and oppression through citizen action within participatory democracy. community leadership promotes participatory democracy through people power, in which an everincreasing majority of ordinary citizens becomes involved in addressing critical social problems and leading social change (moyer, 1990). community leadership is about building power and civic capacity for change in communities. civic capacity exists in a community when a residents can influence important decisions made by external public and private sector actors and when the they can access economic and other resources to achieve its own agenda (saegert, 2006). core ideals and principles of action community leadership is a value-driven enterprise. many community change efforts are led by a crosssector group of leaders who come from all parts of the community and hold a range of viewpoints. however, community leaders are connected by the values of social justice (including promoting equality and fairness, as well as a respect for social difference), social inclusion, social selfdetermination, and social solidarity (butcher et al, 2007). these shared values are at the forefront of community leadership and inform desired ends as well as the process used to get there. community leaders take action using processes guided by principles of critical consciousness, empowerment, and collective action. critical consciousness is an understanding or awareness of one's social and political context, an increased sense of one's power to shape that context and a heightened disposition toward exercising that power. community leaders work with others to "enter more fully into their reality, know it better and transform it" (freire 1970, p.56). they seek change through organizing people with the aim to educate and activate as many of the participating interests as possible, give away as much credit as possible, and remain as invisible as possible as the community acts together. cuoto (1995) uses the term “citizen leadership” to describe leadership that facilitates organized action among people and groups traditionally underrepresented in official decision-making processes. it takes as its premise the dignity and worth of each individual regardless of race, age, gender, income, or any other factor. community leadership through organizing is a platform for the development of collective power, shared identities, mutual respect, political will, and the capacity for collective action (speer, hughey, gensheimer, & adams-leavitt, 1995; warren, 2001). technical skills are necessary but not sufficient leadership development in communities too often prioritizes the acquisition of technical skills and knowledge by community residents. indeed, a community leader is someone who is able to facilitate communities and groups to identify assets and needs and work toward meeting their goals. they help the community identify and make the most of their internal resources and acquire needed external resources. in order to do these things, leaders need many skills including interpersonal, communication, and organizational skills. they need to be able to define objectives and maintain direction, provide and maintain group structure, facilitate group action and task performance, and represent the group to external audiences. technical skills are important, and necessary, but not sufficient. if what we hope from community leaders is that they drive collective action, attention must be paid to the substance of community leadership (warren, 2001). one feature of substance is that they are able to imagine alternative social arrangements. one critical role of community leaders involves “communicating imagined futures and creating new meanings that inspire action” (hickman, 2009, p. 25). they energize persons, inspire confidence, demonstrate cultural competence, and illustrate how global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012         global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   resources can be allocated in new ways that solve problems, build on strengths, and meet needs. (murphy, 2010). this requires the ability to help others come to political judgment, that is to weigh alternatives, negotiate differences, analyze power dynamics, and strategize a course of action together (warren, 2001). they are attuned to issues of power and able to map the political terrain to achieve their goals. they examine the politics of resource distribution in the community with an eye toward exercising power in the interest of greater equity (b. christens, personal communication, october 4, 2010). a current example of the substance of community leadership is the initiative undertaken by dave lawrence in florida to create a children’s movement (http://childrensmovementflorida.org). lawrence developed a social marketing strategy to bring attention to children’s issues in florida. he created a bi-partisan movement, informed the public about the dismal state of affairs for children in the state, gathered support from media, and hopes to influence the legislative process by making children a priority in the state. he has a vision for what could be, he spoke out, organized opinion makers, developed clear goals, identified priorities for children, advocates for policy changes, and energizes action (i. prilleltensky, personal communication, october 4, 2010). dave lawrence is motivated by a concern for children and his community. the ladies of town park village were motivated by a concern for the safety of other residents and particularly the local children. community leaders are motivated by a concern for the community and “cold anger” at the injustice that its people suffer in communities (warren, 2001). this motivation is backed up by commitment. leaders are wiling to employ their talents in ways that benefit others and the community and that encourage others to play an active role. (chaskin et al, 2001) many community leaders endure heavy personal sacrifice to do this work. community psychologist and activist tod sloan alludes to this commitment and sacrifice when he shares another important quality of community leaders he calls “ubiquity”. they show up for every event that might be relevant to their main issue. they volunteer to do everything from grunt work to strategic planning, while shying away from taking on centralized leadership roles although they may have one or more of these. they understand that others need to see that all levels of work are important and valued, and they demonstrate this directly and with good spirit, using these opportunities to educate and motivate others. it is important to note that ubiquity has a down side: possible burnout. but the ubiquitous community leader also knows how to have fun and engage in restorative practices, so one will see him or her at fun and entertaining community events, dancing, singing, in costume, etc (personal communication, october 6, 2010). this leadership quality makes me think of one of our community partners daniella levine, president and ceo of catalyst miami in miami, florida. daniella is everywhere; she’s at every meeting and community forum related to the public concerns of her organization, she speaks in classrooms, at events and rallies, she shares resources and information on twitter, facebook, and blogs, and she’s often quoted in news articles and featured in opinion pieces – ubiquitous indeed! community leadership is a shared practice david johnston, recently installed as the new governor general of canada, describes leadership as the “recognition of the total dependence on the people around you”. (the globe and mail, 2009, july 27, 0:22). community leadership is a shared activity that requires a strong network of close, trusting relationships. it is a process, not a position, and is inclusive and accessible to all people with the motivation and commitment to action. community leadership requires attention to a network of actors and the other contexts in which a leader’s influence efforts take place (hickman, 2009). hickman (2009) points out the importance of “invisible leadership”: the “shared leadership processes in which peers lead and influence each other to achieve group goals, including decisions about who among them can or should provide visible leadership on behalf of the group” (p. 204). he uses the example of the civil rights movement and how, though martin luther king jr. and other ministers were the visible leaders of the movement, there was a cadre of invisible leaders many of whom were women who were the ones who initiated protests, formulated strategies and tactics, and mobilized other resources necessary for collective action (barnett, 1993). community leaders recognize that their role in creating change is not a way to increase personal power but rather a means to increase the number of their fellow-leaders in the interest of collective power (warren, 2001). the efficacy of community leaders comes from helping to shape a field in which others may participate (wheatly, 1992). burns (1978) uses the term “transforming leadership” to describe global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012         global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   engaging with others in such a way together they “raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality” (p. 20) so that fellow-leaders are engaged in collective purpose linked to social change. like the women from town park village, they share credit in the group, rather than having designated official leaders. sharing leadership and building fellowleaders is the key to sustainability in community action for change. leadership, at least initially, is important to inspiring and directing a community. but if growth is really going to emanate from below, leaders must be both organic to communities and unobtrusive. that is, these persons should be neither outsiders nor given special positions reserved for experts or other elites. through true leadership the need for leaders disappears, as communities recuperate their ability to become self-directed. (murphy, 2010, pp. 2-3) a colleague of mine shares a similar notion of leaders “disappearing” when describing the director of a local community center in madison, wisconsin a person he considers a community leader. this particular leader often fades to the background as the people that he is developing take on more prominent roles. in other words, his leadership role is less about his own visibility and more about catalyzing community leadership, more broadly. (b. christens, personal communication, october 4, 2010) unfortunately, this framing of community leadership is sometimes complicated by the fact that many communities have been conditioned to look to outsiders and experts for help. over time, their skills needed to achieve autonomy have atrophied due to years of exclusion, marginalization and neglect. this is exacerbated by the fact that in many current forms of community development, leadership is thought to best originate "from above" because a belief that local citizens lack the necessary talents and ambition (murphy, 2010). unfortunately, this belief can get propagated throughout communities so that residents become unable to see their own assets and power. a former student of mine shares a related experience of this working in kenya: when i travel overseas to work directly with the community i see my role more as a colleague and an equal however the community tends to put me more in a leadership role. i am approached for advice in areas i do not always feel equipped to advise. the leadership role is partly cultural, as it appears many villagers think that people from the west have all this knowledge that can solve a lot of their problems. (e. christy, personal communication, october 8, 2010) there is a potential role for so-called experts or power-holders in addressing social problems with community. warren suggests we need both “authority leaders” and ‘salt of the earth” leaders in order to make a dent in the wicked problems our communities face (warren, 2001, p. 213). both can work side by side; learn from each other, share responsibilities, burdens and credit. david lawrence, meet the women of town park village. community leadership as praxis finally, community leadership requires ongoing learning and flexibility as leaders work together toward a desired goal. former industrial areas foundation (iaf) director edward t. chambers suggests that the action taken by community leaders has a two-fold significance: 1) effecting results and 2) learning and growing in order to deal with increasingly complex issues and to win more substantial victories (as cited in warren, 2001). not action alone, but praxis – theoretically informed action that, in turn, is consciously reflected upon in order to learn, grow, and plan new action. learning results from “acting with feedback” (harman, 1998, pp. 193-194) continuously reviewing and reflecting on action while questioning and reviewing the action and underlying assumptions in light of new knowledge from experience and theory (butcher, 2007). the ladies of town park village celebrate, take stock, and learn from their victory, but we can be certain that they are not content to stop at better lighting in their neighborhood. there are bigger fish to fry; they want bigger changes. they are working together to build collective power for continued action to make their community better. they are community leaders – that’s just what they do. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012         global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   references barnett, b. m. (1993). invisible southern black women leaders in the civil rights movement: the triple constraints of gender, race, and class. gender and society, 7(2), 162-182. bedeian, a. g., & hunt, j. g. 2006. academic amnesia and vestigial assumptions of our forefathers. leadership quarterly, 17: 190-205. butcher, h., banks, s., henderson, p., & robertson, j. (2007). critical community practice. briston, uk: policy press. chaskin, r., brown, p., venkatesh, s., & vidal, a. (2001). building community capacity. new york: aldine de gruyter. couto, r. a., faier, e. a., hicks, d. a., & hickman, g. r. (2002). the integrated leadership project: gold team report. unpublished manuscript. freire, p. (1970) pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum. harman, w. w. (1998). global mind change. the promise of the 21st century (2nd ed.). new york: warner books. hickman, g. r. (2009). leading change in multiple contexts: concepts and practices in organizational, community, political, social, and global change settings. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, inc. moyer, b. 1990 the practical strategist: movement action plan (map) strategic theories for evaluating, planning, and conducting social movements. san francisco, ca: social movement empowerment project. murphy, j. w. (2010). leadership in communitybased development. unpublished manuscript, university of miami, miami, fl. saegert, s. (2006). building civic capacity in urban neighborhoods: an empirically grounded anatomy. journal of urban affairs, 28(3), 275-294. speer, p. w., hughey, j., gensheimer, l. k., & adams-leavitt, w. (1995). organizing for power: a comparative case study. journal of community psychology, 23(1), 57-73. the globe and mail. (2009, july 27). david johnston on leadership. retrieved from: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-onbusiness/the-rules/david-johnston-onleadership/article1232464/ warren, m. r. (2001). dry bones rattling: community building to revitalize american democracy. princeton, nj: princeton university press. weick, k. e. (1984). "small wins: redefining the scale of social problems." american psychologist, vol. 39 (issue 1), pp. 40-49. wheatley, m. (1992). leadership and the new science. san francisco: berrett-koehler. microsoft word 2013-002-final-20130925.docx recovery: re-establishing place and community resilience joseph o. prewitt diaz research center on psychosocial support in disasters author notes: requests for reprints should be sent to joseph o. prewitt diaz, research center on psychosocial support in disasters, alexandria, virginia 22312 jprewittdiaz@gmail.com keywords: recovery, place, community resilience recommended citation: prewitt diaz, j. o. (2013). recovery: re-establishing place and community resilience. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(3), 1-10. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 recovery: re-establishing place and community resilience the purpose of this review is to suggest steps in the recovery process to help victims reestablish place and build community resilience via an on-going, adaptive resilience assessment. the methodology consists of a review of the literature, case studies from recent disasters in the united states, and the authors’ prior experiences. the article demonstrates place and adaptive resilience as two integrated concepts that represent the desire of disasteraffected people to achieve their recovery. keywords: recovery, place, community resilience introduction as a result of major disasters in the us and around the world during the last decade, public and private (e.g., governmental, faith-based, and local) community agencies have attempted to formulate parallel structures to improve community resilience in the event of future disasters. recent research (connor, 2006; cutter et al., 2008; scannell & gifford, 2010) has suggested that disaster-affected people rely on place attachment to promote the reconstruction of their homes and neighborhoods. as they move forward, psychosocial support activities assist the victims in their efforts to identify bonds with their place and develop adaptive resilience. adaptive resilience is the capacity to stay active and moving forward toward improvement of the situation in spite of constant changes in the environment. ultimately, these activities contribute to alleviating suffering and enhancing resilience, thereby supporting the affected community members’ ability to face the future and improve wellbeing. this paper suggests steps in the recovery process that can help victims re-establish place and build community resilience via an on-going, adaptive resilience assessment. to accomplish this goal, this paper provides a review of existing literature and a description of some examples from my personal experiences after my active participation in the recovery efforts associated with low impact disasters (e.g., the northridge earthquake, the 2001 el salvador earthquakes, and the 2001 gujarat earthquake in india), moderate impact disasters (e.g., hurricane andrew in puerto rico and several floods in ohio and west virginia), and high impact disaster (e.g., the 1998 las casitas landslides in nicaragua, the bombing of the murrah federal building in oklahoma city, the 9/11 terrorists attacks, and the 2004 southeast asia tsunami). at the advent of the 21st century, disaster responders faced major challenges in their attempts to assist the survivors of major disasters (e.g., 2001 gujarat earthquake, 2003 bam earthquake, 2004 southeast asia tsunami, 2005 hurricane katrina, and 2005 pakistan earthquake). indeed, disaster-related mental health and psychosocial support needs were not considered traditional disaster response methods at that time; instead, traditional disaster response mainly focused on attending to basic needs. yet, massive disasters often involve dislocations, large numbers of casualties, and widespread human suffering, all of which can hinder the recovery process of disasteraffected people. this is quite concerning considering the fact that the traditional disaster response methods that were the sole focus at the beginning of this century are not designed to help victims psychologically heal from these catastrophes. spearheaded by the interagency standing committee (iasc, i.e., a representative group based in geneva with representatives from united nations [un] agencies, the red cross, and other nongovernmental organizations [ngos]), a group of concerned agencies began to explore the possibility of protecting the mental health of disaster-affected persons while addressing their psychosocial needs. in 2007, this group published guidelines to encourage humanitarian workers to become increasingly active in the protection and improvement of survivors’ mental health and psychosocial wellbeing in the aftermath of disasters (see iasc, 2010).these guidelines provided an overview of essential knowledge about mental health and psychosocial support (mhpss) in humanitarian emergencies. by using the term psychosocial, the iasc recognized the interconnection between psychological and social processes and the continual interaction and influence between the two in the recovery of disaster-affected people (iasc, 2010, p. 1). in 2008, the north atlantic treaty organization (nato) proposed guidelines for the psychosocial care of disaster-affected people. ultimately, these guidelines acknowledged that the means by which psychosocial responses to disasters are managed may be the defining factor that determines a community’s ability to recover. the restoration of the psychosocial fabric of communities and the protection of vulnerable people are important components of the facilitation of recovery (nato, 2008: pp. 1-8 and 19). moreover, the 2011 sphere handbook, which contains standards for humanitarian responses, was modified to include psychosocial support as an allencompassing issue. furthermore, this handbook global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 indicated that community self-help and social support are essential to the efforts to increase self-help and social support. additionally, this handbook indicated that community workers and volunteers who can support community members and provide psychological first aid when needed must be included in the efforts to provide psychosocial support (sphere handbook, 2011, pp. 334-335). in the us, the homeland security administration and its lead disaster agency, i.e., the federal emergency management agency (fema), have provided guidance through their emergency support functions (esfs) (fema 2008, 2010, 2011), which are based on lessons learned from hurricane katrina, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and super storm sandy, 2012) as evidenced by these documents, homeland security and fema have begun to identify strategies to foster the enhancement of community resilience and wellbeing in affected communities. yet, these approaches have not offered ways in which community assessment tools may open spaces and opportunities for disaster-affected people to gain an understanding of their place (i.e., what they had); the physical, ecological, and psychological loss resulting from the disaster; and the tools that they have at hand to move forward in the process to re-establish and recover their place, enhance resilience, and promote wellbeing. natural disasters – causing destruction of place major disasters instantly fracture social and psychological community networks. for example, this was clearly evidenced by the displacement and relocation of thousands after the oklahoma tornadoes in early may of 2013.when physical, social, or psychological place is destroyed, disaster-affected people grieve their place in ways similar to mourning a death. the loss of access to places of cultural and social significance and the resulting loss of connection to other affected people undermine a community’s ability to act, thereby exacerbating the grief. disaster-affected people often feel out of control and experience helplessness and vulnerability. trauma can cause people to see the world as threatening, which causes some to be drawn together in groups to help re-establish boundaries and structures, thereby creating a new sense of place. others feel estranged and want to be alone. traumatic events can either mobilize and strengthen or fracture a family, group, or a community (fullilove, 1996; norris, 2002). even when the individual reacts in a productive manner to the situation, a disaster typically disrupts and destroys lifestyles, places, and feelings of safety. disasters, both natural and man-made, have common effects; i.e., they produce trauma that changes the social and emotional lives of individuals, the resilience of families, and the cultural fabric of communities. these non-routine events cause considerable harm to the physical, social, and psychological environment. they occur across a defined time and place and can contribute to the collapse of individual and communal bases; moreover, they start a chain of events that triggers further events and responses, all of which may last several years (norris, 2002). during a large-scale disaster, such as hurricane sandy, the combined effects of the displacement of large numbers of people, the damage to the natural environment, and the destruction of the built environment can destroy the place and spirit of the people who have been deeply impacted. moreover, the reliability of social networks and the reliability of community support systems (e.g., the fire department, health facilities, and shelters) is almost always disrupted by such disasters (cutter et al., 2008). significance of place place is functionally defined as a collection of meanings, beliefs, symbols, values, and feelings that individuals or groups associate with a specific locality (williams & stewart, 1998). a disruption of place impairs an individual’s ability to integrate their past with their present life due to the lack of tangible social and environmental cues and symbols. this disruption of place may be manifested in the fracture of emotional bonds that people form over time; the loss of strongly held values, meanings, and symbols; the loss of the quality of place, which may be taken for granted until it is threatened or lost; the loss of place meanings that are actively and consciously constructed and reconstructed within the affected peoples’ minds; and/or the loss of shared cultures and social practices (fullilove, 1996). fullilove (1996) defined “place” as a setting where disaster-affected people feel that they have a good enough living environment. the perception of disaster-affected people is linked to the surrounding environment through the following three key psychological processes: attachment, familiarity, and identity. place attachment involves a mutual caretaking bond between a person and a beloved place. familiarity refers to the processes by which people develop detailed cognitive knowledge of their environs. place identity is concerned with the extraction of a sense of self based on the places in which an individual spends his/her life. each of these psychological processes (i.e., attachment, familiarity, and place identity) can be threatened by displacement; consequently problems associated with nostalgia, disorientation, and alienation may ensue (fullilove, 1996, p. 1516). in contrast, stedman (2002) studied the symbolic meaning of a place. the data from his study revealed the importance of symbolic meanings as an underpinning for the conceptualization of place satisfaction as an attitude toward a setting and the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 conceptualization of attachment as personal identification with a setting. in turn, attachment, satisfaction, and meaning all have independent effects on the willingness to engage in behaviors that maintain or enhance the valued attributes of the setting, i.e., adaptive resilience (cutter et al., 2008). loss of place taxes the physical, social, and psychological wellbeing of disaster-affected people. shalev and ursano (2003) indicated that physical needs, e.g., hunger, pain, or dehydration, can cause disaster-affected people to feel insecure and apprehensive about their future. loss of familiarity with pre-disaster social networks, community structures, and financial and personal resources (davis, grills-tequechel, & ollendick, 2010) disrupts social, communal, and regular daily living and generates distress. in fact, relocation is an assault to the territorial habits of humans. indeed, this forced separation uproots people from their cherished land, familiar environments, precious objects, and reassurances of life. uncertainty related to the source, force, and duration of a disaster can cause extreme distress, thereby feeding feelings of separation, disconnection, and detachment and the inability to resonate with others (mcfarlane & williams, 2012; norris, 2002; shalev & ursano, 2003). clearly, programs aimed at helping disaster-affected people to overcome these problems associated with the disaster and loss of place would be beneficial. psychosocial support and adaptive resilience psychosocial support programs involve communitybased activities that enhance adaptive resilience and improve community-wide wellbeing (iasc/mhpss, 2007; sphere, 2011). once the initial phase of the disaster response has established some stabilization amongst the disaster-affected people, the response program should engage them in actively exploring their place, where they have been, and what they need to do in the future. the conversations that emerge in this process serve as a therapeutic tool that brings people together, gives them space to share their stories, and permits the development of a road map to re-establish place and enhance resilience. however, note that the psychosocial needs of disaster-affected people vary. therefore, a critical step toward recovery is to determine the needs related to protective factors offered by the community, which can be delineated into the following three major areas: assets of the affected community, symptoms versus disaster/conflict generated problems, and the extent of stakeholder engagement. psychosocial assessment is a part of any psychosocial support program and involves a process of collecting, organizing, and analyzing information about a community. an adaptive resilience approach to psychosocial assessment helps build an understanding of a community’s vulnerabilities, resources, and adaptive capacities, all of which drive its response to change. in psychosocial support programs, the primary intervention focuses on getting disaster-affected people to communicate (e.g., individually or in small groups, such as focus or interest groups, or in larger community representative groups). this process is the foundation for psychosocial assessments. more specifically, information is systematically collected to create an overview of the history, livelihood, mores, and cultural nuances of the community. key informants and local leaders often emerge through this process and engage in conversations with formally appointed leaders, elected officials, and faith-based leaders. maguire and cartwright (2008) indicated that the process of adaptive resilience identifies the resources and adaptive capacity available to a community to overcome the problems that may result from change and works to build upon the inherent capacities of a community rather than only relying on external interventions to overcome vulnerabilities. this approach accepts that change is inevitable and unpredictable. rather than relying on external sources of strength and action to overcome issues, the resilience approach builds upon the capacities (e.g., resources and flexibility) that have already been established within a community. the resilience approach is balanced in that it includes both the vulnerabilities within a community (i.e., versus labeling an entire community as vulnerable) and the resources and adaptive capacities that enable the community to overcome these vulnerabilities and manage change in a positive way. a resilience perspective fosters an adaptive form of governance, which encourages the sustainable use of environmental and social resources (folke, 2006). moreover, a resilience based psychosocial assessment recognizes the inherent complexities and interactions between a community’s resilience, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity (who, 2012). furthermore, such an assessment also considers the fact that community perceptions vary according to the stage of recovery after a disaster. this type of approach generates richer and more useful data (cutter et al., 2008). moreover, an adaptive resilience perspective is able to capture the complexity that is inherent in human-environment systems and the social changes within those systems instead of attempting to control change (“listening to joplin—next steps,” 2012). additionally, the adaptive resilience perspective recognizes that change and uncertainty are inevitable and that communities are dynamic. for example, in the case of the recovery from catastrophic tornadoes in joplin, mo, the compilation of community ideas from affected and unaffected residents recognized change and the dynamism of the community in recovery. additionally, as previously implied, the adaptive resilience perspective allows for the assessment of global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 resources and adaptive capacities within a community, not just its vulnerabilities. for example, the citizens of joplin decided to “carve out an enclave to provide a respite from the complications and overstimulation of life” in recognition of their resilience (“listening to joplin report,” 2011). the collective activities of disaster-affected people and the surrounding community can point to the protective factors and social capital through which disaster-affected people can re-establish their physical, human, and psychosocial place. an example of this approach was evident in a community meeting held in joplin in the aftermath of the tornadoes that destroyed that small city on may 22nd, 2011. the tornado caused extensive damage and 161 deaths. in a blog dated october 26th, 2012, the blogger reported the following steps on the road to recovery in joplin: • formation of a citizens advisory recovery team to ensure all segments of the community were engaged in recovery conversations, sharing ideas, exchanging information, and working collaboratively; • development of a community recovery vision and supporting goals; and • compilation of all ideas in a booklet to be shared widely amongst internal and external stakeholders. recovery through psychosocial support long-term recovery programs must include the participation of disaster-affected persons who have been displaced as a result of the disaster (sphere project, 2011). these programs include psychosocial activities designed to re-establish place attachment. ultimately, psychosocial support is best defined as interventions that help disaster-affected people in the resumption of normal life by actively engaging in their recovery, thus promoting adjustment and resilience. oftentimes, these psychosocial activities focus on providing safe, secure spaces in the form of small group meetings where disaster-affected people can share memories of their place, what happened to their place, the consequence to them, and activities that will lead to the re-establishment of place. in such gatherings, small self-selected groups of disasterdisplaced people meet and begin the process of bonding with each other and their place. the common objective is to share an understanding of place attachment, place identity, ancestral ties, and the desire to return to their former place. the groups may begin to reflect and share their feelings of sadness and longing, feelings of love and pride, and how they define wellbeing in their place (brown, perkins, & brown, 2003; fullilove, 1994; relph, 1976; scannell & gifford, 2010).the second purpose of these small group meetings is to identify human resources, material resources, and common priorities in all sectors within the community. discussions within these smaller groups would probably focus on the following five areas:1) emotional support, 2) sharing information and affirming the value of family members and what they do, 3) sharing information about members belonging to a larger group for whom they have a responsibility and from which they can get something in return, 4) sharing information on evaluation to give members a sense of boundaries, and 5) sharing information indicating the importance of self-sacrifice for the benefit of others as a means of enhancing self-esteem and worth (mccubbin, mccubbin, thompson, han, & allen, 1997). core activities in psychosocial support programs psychological first aid is a valuable tool used in the psychosocial support activities to facilitate adaptive resilience. through the use of psychological first aid, friends, relatives, peers, churches, community groups, and external stakeholders usually provide support that enhances security and calmness while promoting active engagement in re-establishing place (sphere, 2011; hobfoll et al., 2007).connor (2006) found that individuals use positive emotions to recover from negative emotional experiences; therefore, psychological first aid should focus on generating positive emotions. moreover, the evaluation of resilience should focus on strengths and positive attributes, thus encouraging individuals to undertake more adaptive activities. ultimately, this will facilitate and enhance the capacity of all segments of the community to work together to identify their place attachment needs and define activities that will ameliorate the disaster-related condition of their place. the policies of fema and other governmental entities that exert influence at the community level must integrate adaptive resilience into discussions on re-establishment of the natural and built environments (cutter et al., 2008). the changes that occur within disaster-affected people as a result of their displacement and exploration of place attachment may actually serve to strengthen key relationships and systems that support spiritual, psychological, and social wellbeing. the identification of these positive forces is equally important in the effort to highlight processes that support adaptive resilience. however, disasterinitiated person-place bonds decrease with increased mobility. moreover, disaster-related environmental problems ultimately threaten connection to place (e.g., beach erosion, such as the impact of the surge in the rockaways, ny) (sanders, bowie, & bowie, 2003; scannell & gifford, 2010). nevertheless, the provision of training for local personnel and provision of space for psychosocial support activities to promote the capacity of disaster-affected people to increase psychosocial harmony and satisfaction often results in collaboration among the local personnel and disaster-affected people despite varying historical global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 experiences, values, and symbols (scannell & gifford, 2010). exploration of the importance of the social and physical place is also essential (scannell & gifford, 2010). people are usually attached to places that facilitate social, psychological, cultural, and spiritual relationships and foster group identity. for example, the rockaways in new york city is home to many firemen and policemen; moreover, the local population is predominantly irish catholic. therefore, part of identifying this area as home for these people is the connections they share with their neighbors in terms of employment and religion. psychosocial support activities should explore ties related to place, such as the neighborhood, barber or beauty shop, corner store, clubs, churches, or parks, while also considering the way that the residents’ common background plays into these ties. coping strategies directed at diffusing stress often lead individuals to seek support from others. decreased emotional or psychological distress improves psychosocial adaptation and increases higher subjective perceptions of wellbeing. cairney, boyle, offord, and racine (2003) suggested that disaster-affected people should contribute to the process to build social support networks used to meet their needs and the needs of their families. involving individuals, families, and organizations in the development and maintenance of social support networks in the community is essential to the social cohesion of place and to the spiritual and psychosocial wellbeing of individuals and groups. psychosocial activities provide the opportunity for disaster-affected people to use their social capital, i.e., to explore social networks and to transform themselves based on personal resources. social capital has been described as the density of civic associations and the levels of trust, norms, and sanctions within a given community (fine, 2001). social capital is related to place dependence. place dependence implies that disaster-affected people know and can organize the details and features of their environment (fullilove, 1996). disaster-affected people have an absorptive capacity, defiened as the ability tor ecognzie the value of new information, assimilate it, and apply it. this includes ecological, psychosocial, and built capital attributes. the absorptive capacity of disaster-affected people includes various adaptive behaviors, such as individual psychosocial characteristics, the ability to interact and engage with other disaster-affected people and outsiders, economic activity within a society, interaction with the natural environment, and the capacity to modify said environment. moreover, natural ecological features within a given place, such as forests, rivers, creeks, and open fields, provide health and wellbeing. psychosocial support activities that foster place attachment scannell and gifford (2010) define place attachment as a bond between an individual or group and a place. this bond can vary in terms of the spatial level, degree of specificity, and social and physical features of the place, and it is manifested through psychosocial processes. based on this definition, psychosocial support activities that foster place attachment can include: 1. enhancing the survivors’ capacity to prepare their own place development plan with strategies for implementation; 2. increasing the information base by mapping the place to consider natural systems, the built environment, and psychosocial systems in the area while identifying the available social and environmental capital; 3. facilitating the community’s decision making capacity by encouraging participation of all community segments; 4. enhancing negotiations and conflict resolution capacities for all disaster-affected people involved in the process; 5. facilitating involvement of other outside agencies or groups as needed to improve the psychosocial, cultural, ecological, economic, and legal environment in the target place within the larger community; and 6. designing and executing adaptive resilience projects. planning adaptive resilience projects is a “futuristic activity,” i.e., proactive and collaborative rather than reactive and sequential. the planning of these activities must include the details of timing, budget, and phasing. unfortunately, the surrounding chaos, suffering, and time pressures often associated with emergency settings push federal, state, and local agencies; ngos;faith-based organizations; and small community development programs to act quickly without taking time to learn about local beliefs and practices. consequently, many important opportunities to help disaster-affected people are lost while canned, culturally inappropriate programming may be imposed by outsiders (berke & campanella, 2006). indeed, the meaningful participation of disaster-affected people in the assessment, planning, and implementation stages of an adaptive resilience project are essential for the generation of appropriate activities, a sense of ownership amongst the disasteraffected population, and the increased likelihood of sustainability. planning and implementing culturally appropriate adaptive resilience projects proper planning and implementation of adaptive resilience projects can enhance the psychosocial competence of disaster-affected communities. good resilience projects involve a cycle where the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 community assesses, formulates, and evaluates the participatory interventions. moreover, these projects use cycles of response to ultimately recognize community resources and establish a “sense of place” for the survivors. as the community takes responsibility for identifying their own needs (i.e., by seeking indigenous solutions and engaging in solution-focused activities), the recovery and the achievement of adaptive resilience improves. the assumption for these projects is that “if the absorptive capacity is exceeded and the adaptive resilience process occurs, the disaster-affected people may be more likely to achieve a higher degree of recovery” (cutter et al., 2008, p. 603). to ensure that programming is inclusive, contextual, culturally sensitive, and appropriate, the following four key questions should be considered when planning action steps for disaster-affected people: · what do we want? the situation analysis should identify and define the specific characteristics and problems associated with a particular category of people. information collected from the community members for situation analysis and “problem definition” should be valid, reliable, and comprehensive. this qualitative and quantitative assessment technique identifies the response mechanism for the community resources and determines risks. the assessment process involves the whole community in the decision making process and encourages community members to take responsibility for any facility or service that may be installed in the future. community assessment sets the stage for the adaptive resilience project. before developing psychosocial support program activities, implementers and beneficiaries should define clear goals. · what do we have? knowledge about the capacity of the disaster-affected people and their resources, strengths, and liabilities is crucial. an analysis of such capacities provides insight into the community’s actual needs and resources, not their perceived needs and resources. · how do we use what we have to get what we want? after identifying the resources they have (e.g., manpower, tools, land, and built capital), disaster-affected people should use a participatory process to assess the utilization of these resources to achieve the desired results. the outcome of the assessment acts as a baseline for problem identification and measuring progress and is thus an element of community-based monitoring and evaluation. · what will happen when we act? the outcomes of the efforts are compared with the adaptive resilience project objectives (i.e., achieved or not). at the end of the psychosocial support activities, disaster-affected people learn that the conditions involved in developing an adaptive resilience project are dynamic, and the assessment of change will rely on spatial, social, and temporal scales. both the degree of recovery and the potential knowledge gained from the adaptive resilience exercise influence the state of the social, natural, and built environment (cutter et al., 2008). the planning and development of any adaptive resilience project should follow a basic outline. table 1 describes the basic steps that should be taken in the implementation of such programs. table 1: steps to be taken when developing an adaptive resilience project step results community mapping and analysis of potential problems a geographical delineation of the place, a better understanding of the problems, and an initiation for dialogue to strengthen affective bonds define goals clarity about what the disaster-affected people want to achieve for physical, social, and psychological improvement define objectives community members prepare a plan focused on the activities that the disaster-affected people want to develop define activities the disaster-affected people define who will work, the materials needed, the physical and financial resources available, and what resources are needed from external stake holders identify people responsible diverse members participate in various projects and responsibilities are clearly defined resources social capital is identified and engaged and the human resources to be developed in the project development process are identified establish time lines the timeframe during which the tasks/activities will be completed is identified follow-up assessment to ensure that all the specific tasks/activities are completed effectively and that the participants feel that they have made active contributions in order to assure a sense of ownership evaluation verify the activities and share with others (i.e., both internal and external stakeholders) what the disaster-affected people have achieved ultimately, developing a strategy involves determining the inputs that are needed to implement the project, defining the responsibilities of different groups or individuals, and specifying the roles filled by these groups and individuals in the project. moreover, a mechanism designed to measure the progress and feedback for activities should be developed. this may involve participatory assessment meetings in which the monitoring of data and further action plans are discussed. the completion of the resilience project must include celebrations with the participants, the community, and the supporting external stakeholders. the implementation and organization of community celebrations are hard work but important and vital parts of the mobilization. for the community, a celebration is an exciting break from the monotony of moving back from temporary housing and rebuilding. various modes of entertainment should be included in every celebration to show pride and wellbeing. the celebration is a turning point for the community to help them recognize that they have been victorious in accomplishing their project. this single step is significant in terms of the official recognition of the community’s adaptive resilience; the return of disaster-affected people to place; and the improvement in the quality of life, health, and wellness. moreover, it facilitates an open dialogue and efforts to resolve any potential issues that may arise in the development and re-establishment of place. case study: psychosocial support activities lead to adaptive resilience in the aftermath of the 2001 el salvador earthquake, the country was devastated, and multiple aftershocks impacted the psychosocial wellbeing of hundreds of thousands of disaster-affected people. a group of red cross volunteers was sent to the affected communities to conduct assessments. their task was to provide the space for affected people to initiate a dialogue and develop maps of the damaged structures, natural places, schools, churches, and community hangouts. the community was able to identify those who were emotionally affected in each household and suggest appropriate community-based activities. in one week, these small groups of volunteers had organized more than 120 places (i.e., neighborhoods), identified needed information, and facilitated a basic work plan developed by the disaster-affected people themselves with financial assistance of external stakeholders. moreover, based on these actions, the community members provided input for the funding process, and the community ultimately achieved its desired objectives. conclusion this review defined the nature of place and established that disasters tend to disrupt individual lives and the capacity of disaster-affected people to negotiate ways to re-establish place. the paper proposed that psychosocial support activities can be used to promote adaptive resilience; in turn, the disaster displaced persons could return to their original place or establish a new place and reestablish a sense of survival, security, support, and temporal or permanent continuity in their postdisaster lives. behavioral bonds established in the recovery process bring people together in places that supply necessities (e.g., food, water, shelter, and other resources). place permanency can be considered psychosocial or physical depending on the age, professional background, and interest of the people involved. place attachment keeps disasteraffected people focused on the goal of establishing place and enhancing their resilience. references berke, p. r., & campanella, t. j. (2006). planning for post disaster resiliency. the annals, 604(1), 192-207. breckling, b., müller, f., reuter, h., hölker, f., & fränzle, o. (2005). emergent properties in individual-based ecological models: introducing case studies in an ecosystem research context. ecological modeling, 186(4), 376-388. brown, b., perkings, d. d., & brown, g. (2003). place attachment in revitalizing neighborhoods: individual and block levels of analysis. journal of environmental psychology, 23, 259-271. cairney, j., boyle, m., offord, d. r., & racine, y. (2003). stress, social support and depression in single and married mothers. social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 38, 442449. calhoun, l. g., & tedeschi, r. g. (eds.). (2006). handbook of posttraumatic growth: research and practice. mahwah, nj: erlbaum. connor, k. m. (2006). assessment of resilience in the aftermath of trauma. journal of clinical psychiatry, 67 (2), 46-49. cutter, s. l, barnes, l., berry, m., burton, c., evans, e., tate, e., & webb, j. (2008). a placebased model for understanding community resilience to natural disasters. global environmental change, 18(4), 598-606. davis, t. e., grills-tequechel, a., & ollendick, t. h. (2010). the psychological impact from hurricane katrina: effects of displacement and trauma exposure on university students. behavioral therapy, 41(3), 340-349. federal emergency management agency. (2008). national response framework. washington, dc: fema and the department of homeland security. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 federal emergency management agency. (2011).a whole community approach to emergency management: principles, themes, and pathways for action. washington, d.c.: fema and the department of homeland security. federal emergency management agency. (2012). community resilience innovation challenges. washington, d.c.: fema and the department of homeland security. fine, b. (2001). social capital versus social theory: political economy and social science at the turn of the millennium. london: routledge press. folke, c.(2006). a resilience perspective enables an adaptive form of governance, which encourages the use of environmental and social resources in a sustainable way. global environmental change, 16, 253–267. fullilove, m. t. (1996). psychiatric implications of displacement: contributions from the psychology of place. american journal of psychiatry, 153, 1516-1523. hobfoll, s. e., watson, p., bell, c. c., bryant, r. a., brymer, m. j., friedman, m. j.,… ursano, r. j. 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(2008). psychosocial care for people affected by disasters and major incidents. brussels, belgium: nato. relph, e. (2008). place and placeness. london, england: pion publishers. sanders, s., bowie, s. l., & bowie, y. d. (2003). lessons learned on forced relocation of older adults: the impact of hurricane andrew on health, mental health, and social support of public housing residents. journal of gerontological social work, 40, 23-35. scannell, l., & gifford, r. (2010). defining place attachment: a tripartite organizing framework. journal of environmental psychology, 30, 1-10. shalev, a. y., & ursano, r. j. (2003). mapping the multidimensional picture of acute response to traumatic stress. in u. schneider (ed). early intervention for psychological trauma. oxford, england: oxford university press sphere project. (2011). humanitarian charter and minimum standards in disaster response. geneva: the sphere project. retrieved from http://www.sphereproject.org. stedman, r.c. (2002).toward a social psychology of place: predicting behavior from place-based cognitions, attitude, and identity environment and behavior, 34(5), 561-581. turner, r. (2012). the turner report (blog). joplin, mo. retrieved from http://rturner229.blogspot.com/2011_08_01_arch ive.html williams, d. r., & steward, s. l. (1998). sense of place. journal of forestry, 98, 18-23. world health organization & united nations high commissioner for refugees. (2012). assessing mental health and psychosocial needs and resources: toolkit for humanitarian settings. geneva: who. microsoft word intro to policy issue.gjcpp-final draft_formatted.docx community psychology and public policy: research, advocacy and training in international contexts douglas d. perkins manuel garcía-ramírez isabel menezes irma serrano-garcía melissa strompolis vanderbilt university, nashville, tn, usa, universidad de sevilla, sevilla, españa universidade do porto, porto, portugal universidad de puerto rico, río piedras, puerto rico children’s trust of south carolina, columbia, sc, usa keywords: policy, advocacy, international, collaboration, capacity-building author biographies: douglas d. perkins is professor of human and organizational development at peabody college of vanderbilt university in nashville, usa. he is the founding director of the phd program in community research & action and also teaches in the masters program in community development & action and the b.s. track in community leadership & development. manuel garcía-ramírez, ph.d., is professor of community psychology at university of sevilla, spain. he is the coordinator of cespyd, the center of community research and action at the university of sevilla and the founding co-director of the master in international migrations, health and wellbeing at this university. isabel menezes. has a phd in psychology from the university of porto and a habilitation in education sciences from the same university, where she is a professor in the department of education sciences. she teaches courses in educational research, educational, social and community intervention, citizenship education and political psychology. irma serrano-garcía is a retired professor from the university of puerto rico, río piedras campus. she holds a post doctorate in public policy from the harvard university graduate school of education, a phd in social-community psychology from the university of michigan. she has over 125 scholarly publications including journal articles, book chapters and thirteen books. melissa strompolis, phd, is director of research and evaluation at children’s trust of south carolina and is an affiliate investigator at the yvonne & schuyler moore child development research center in the college of education at the university of south carolina.? her evaluation and research focuses on prevention, child well-being and opportunity, and race equity. recommended citation: perkins, d.d., garcía-ramírez, m., menezes, i., serrano-garcía, i. & stromopolis, m. (2016). community psychology and public policy:research, advocacy and training in international contexts. global journal of community psychology practice 7(1s), pages 1-8. retrieved day/month/year, (from www.gjcpp.org). global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 community psychology and public policy: research, advocacy and training in international contexts abstract we introduce a special issue on public policy research, advocacy, and training by community psychologists that grew out of the fifth international community psychology conference held in fortaleza, brazil. two papers from portugal propose changes in sex education policies in schools and communities to promote adolescents’ rights and drug abuse policies based on decriminalization of use and possession, risk and harm reduction, and health promotion. an article from spain addresses transformative policies to reduce public health disparities for the roma population in that country. three contributions from brazil examine a landless workers movement popular education and agroforestry project to support children and adolescents’ rights and participation; another social movement to control public policy on youth and adult literacy and education; and racist environmental and natural resource policies that ignore the territorial rights of indigenous amazonian populations. a paper from chile describes the creation of a regular public forum to reduce stigma and promote human rights in community mental health care. another paper examines the development and presents examples of social-community psychologists’ involvement in policy work in puerto rico, the process of training students for this endeavor and how to improve training. finally, three articles cover recent trends in policy advocacy by community psychologists in the united states including its promotion and capacity building by the society for community research and action; using social media as a tool to enhance effectiveness of advocacy efforts; and an assessment of advocates’ and legislators’ capacity, knowledge, and perceptions of child injury prevention to inform policy change efforts. introduction to the special issue this issue arose from a symposium entitled “public policy and community psychology: methods of training, research and practice in different global regions” organized by the public policy committee of the society for community research and action at the fifth international conference on community psychology in fortaleza, brazil. that session explored the challenges of increasing both the frequency and the impact of community psychologists’ policy work around the globe. it followed up on a similar symposium held at the prior international conference in barcelona, spain in 2012, which led to a special issue of the global journal of community psychology practice (http://www.gjcpp.org/en/index.php?issue= 14) on international policy work (edited by ken maton). for this new issue we called for submissions on (1) training for policy work at any level: high school, college, graduate, adult volunteers, continuing education; (2) theory or research on policy issues or policy engagement; or (3) examples of advocacy practice or interventions for policy change. accepted full articles appear in english, portuguese, or spanish, but all include an english abstract. while the focus is on community psychology policy work in portugal, spain, brazil, chile, puerto rico, and the united states (u.s.), the policy targets vary from local to provincial to national to international. the collection of papers deals with the development of training and implementation global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 of policy research and advocacy by community psychologists, working with a wide variety of groups, including children, youth and adults. the papers also engage with diverse settings, from urban contexts to deprived urban peripheries and rural contexts, such as an agrarian reform settlement in brazil. additionally, there is a wide range of policy topics covered in this issue, including health, education, community development and the environment, and advocacy processes and capacity building more generally. health-related projects include liberalizing drug policies and school and community-based sex education policies in portugal, transformative policies to reduce public health disparities for roma communities in spain, and policy education and advocacy on child injury prevention in the u.s. state of south carolina. the stigma of mental illness is a global struggle (as is inclusion of mental health as a fully implemented part of health plans and policies) and chilean authors describe the creation of a regular public forum to reduce stigma and promote human rights in community mental health care. in addition to sex education, educational policies include a social movement to control public policy on youth and adult literacy and popular education among landless workers in brazil. community development and environmental policies include that same landless workers popular education project which also involves agroforestry and supports children and adolescents’ rights and participation; and another brazilian paper critiquing racist environmental and natural resource policies that ignore the territorial rights of indigenous amazonian populations. contributions that focus more generally on developing the capacity and effectiveness of policy research and advocacy by community psychology students and professionals include how training for policy work has improved in recent years in puerto rico and the u.s. along with ideas for making further improvements in promotion and capacity building for political work, such as the use of social media as a tool to enhance effectiveness of advocacy efforts. summary of articles in the “impact of public policy for the promotion of sex education: the portuguese case,” rocha and duarte use bronfenbrenner’s ecological model to frame their discussion (in portuguese) of changes in school-based sex education policies in portugal, revealing how chronoand macrosystem changes impact, both positively and negatively, at the mesoand microsystem levels. their analysis reveals how the apparently positive trend towards community partnerships does not guarantee the establishment of genuine collaborations between schools and community organizations, and might even reinforce a vision of sex education strictly as a health problem. as a result, they advocate for a broader vision of sex education that genuinely involves schools and communities in promoting adolescents’ rights to sexuality. in “the construction of public policy in the field of drugs: health standards, territorial pacification and low-threshold psychology,” mata and fernandes discuss (in portuguese) how public policies on drugs in portugal evolved from the understanding of drug use as a disease towards an emphasis on risk and harm reduction accompanied by the decriminalization of use and possession of all illicit drugs. similarly to the policies on sex education, this change also created the conditions for the development of community-based interventions in what the authors designate as “psychotropic territories.” the authors underscore the positive impact of these new policies that recognize drug users as actors in the development and implementation of health promotion interventions – an engagement that is reinforced by the option for a “low global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 threshold psychology” that values active listening and unconditional acceptance. however, they also point out the risks in terms of promoting a real community empowerment, given the depth and amount of social problems faced daily by these communities. in “the challenge of equity in health policies aimed at the roma population in spain” (in spanish) garcía-ramírez and colleagues examine how community psychologists have contributed to transformative public health policy-making. health disparities between the roma and the rest of the european population are viewed as a “wicked problem” (rittel & webber, 1973) and have led the international organization for migration to create the equi-health project (http://equihealth.eea.iom.int/) with the aim of reorienting health policies for the roma toward greater equity and social justice. outcomes of its implementation in spain include (1) making the strengths of community psychology more visible for use in public health policy innovations; (2) raising awareness of community psychologists’ commitment to assist oppressed groups; and (3) demonstrating community researchers’ ability to help improve health policies and their administration. the paper “community practice and the work of ’landless workers' movement’ (mst) with children and adolescents in ribeirão preto/sp brazil” (in portuguese) by ana paula soares da silva and colleagues considers another community in severe deprivation but in a rural context: an agrarian reform settlement of the landless workers movement located in the state of são paulo, brazil. the authors describe and discuss a five-year project of research group lapsape that involved training with popular educators with the goal to promote education policies that would support children and adolescents’ rights. the project involved participation of adults, children and adolescents in the agroforestry project of the settlement and resulted in actual changes in municipal policies. additionally, the authors discuss how this experience influenced the identity of popular educators as child educators and also the community perception of childhood and adolescence with a growing advocacy of children’s and adolescents’ rights to protection, education and participation. the focus of the paper “democracy, social participation and social control of public policy in brazil” (in portuguese) by burgos, coimbra and ferreira is the social movement of the forums for the education of young people and adults of brazil and their role in shaping state policies in the field of youth and adult education. despite literacy and the education of young people and adults being a public policy priority, there are still high levels of illiteracy among young people and adults in this region. the forums involve a diversity of individuals, from students to teachers or researchers, plus civil society organizations and municipal-level government agencies. the goal is to advocate for the improvement and implementation of youth and adult education policies, but also to exert a collective social influence towards these policies by discussing and pressing for changes. in this sense, the forums are a social movement committed to promoting the quality of youth and adult education. the paper “environmental racism and struggles for recognition of people in the amazon forest” by alessandro dos santos and colleagues (in portuguese) denounces how race and ethnicity have been a basis for inequality and discrimination in environmental public policies with severe consequences for the people living in the amazon. in fact, the management of natural resources has not taken into account the territorial rights of traditional amazonian populations, with severe consequences in terms of their access to land, their quality of life and environmental justice as a whole. this global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 is why environmental racism, as a counterhegemonic concept, can be useful for local populations and activists, but also for those involved in community intervention and public policy, as a marker for advocating the need for the recognition and the redistribution of environmental rights for traditional amazonian populations. in “anti-stigma practices as the linchpin of community work in mental health” (in spanish), chilean authors grandón fernández et al. address the human rights of psychiatric patients through a program designed to reduce the stigma of mental illness. a community mental health rehabilitation center runs annual destigmatizaton sessions aimed to generate reflection, debate and a space in which participants can synergistically share their experiences and ideas for fighting stigma and protecting the rights of people with mental illness. the program is based on qualitative research engaging the participation of local community members along with the center management team. the effectiveness of this inclusive model has been found through the documentation of experiences of discrimination and stigma and the promotion of clients’ rights; the creation of new spaces to promote human rights in mental health; and strategic alliances with health networks, higher education, foundations, and member organizations of people with psychiatric diagnoses. in “involving psychologists in public policy in puerto rico: processes and results” (in english), irma serrano-garcía and eduardo lugo-hernández describe how psychologists in the social-community psychology program at the university of puerto rico and the puerto rico psychology association (prpa) have become more systematically involved in policy issues. psychologists who do not participate in policy work gave one of three reasons: lack of time or lack of training or negative perception of party politics. but an increasing number of psychologists in puerto rico are engaging in public policy initiatives through collaborations with the prpa and other nongovernmental organizations and government agencies. although research was able to identify few graduate courses focused on policy analysis or advocacy skills, the authors provide information on ways psychologists and students have learned from individuals who serve as policy work role models and ideas for making policy training more systematic, and to increase and psychologists’ involvement in public policy. in “the scra public policy committee in action: advocacy, collaboration, and capacity-building” (in english), maryman et al. outline the increase in policy-related activity in recent years by the international, but u.s.-based, society for community research and action (scra). its public policy committee addresses local, state and national policies relevant to community psychology through the development and dissemination (through the community psychologist (tcp), american journal of community psychology, the scra website and listserv) of position statements, rapid-response calls to action on specific policy initiatives, and through advocacy campaigns. both the more deliberative position statements (which may be developed by special task forces, such as current ones on the problems of mass incarceration, immigration reform, and global climate change) and urgent calls to action are sometimes in collaboration with the american psychological association (apa), the national prevention science coalition, the society for the psychological study of social issues (spssi) and other apa divisions, or other organizations. the public policy committee also engages in advocacy training, student policy internships, and other capacity building activities, including a short course in policy work and an advocacy training day held at the u.s. congress (in concert with spssi). additional resources include the global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 annual scra public policy small grants program, scra member surveys on policy work, and a tcp column and conference track. one area needing further development in scra is international awareness and collaboration, and the policy symposiums at recent international conferences and these policy issues in the global journal represent efforts toward that development. in “using social media as a tool to complement advocacy efforts” (in english), scott and maryman provide a valuable review and analysis of how internet-based, interactive social network forums, such as facebook and twitter, can be leveraged by community researchers, practitioners and students to widely, immediately, and efficiently promote and mobilize advocacy campaigns and information. they note social media fits well with community psychology’s principles of citizen participation and empowerment, collaborative social change, social support, and sense of community. they add an important caution that social media is unlikely to be effective if it is the only tool used in a policy initiative; instead it should be used to amplify other political organizing strategies. a helpful appendix reviews the relative strengths and weaknesses of several popular social media platforms and tools. in “influencing prevention policy through effective communication with advocates and legislators” (in english), melissa strompolis and colleagues present an example of a statelevel (south carolina, u.s.) policy education campaign on the issue of child injury prevention as accidents are the leading cause of pediatric mortality in the state. the campaign and the survey they report were aimed, not at the general public, but at those with the most political clout: i.e., professional advocates, legislators, and legislative staff. respondents’ knowledge of injury prevention facts were surprisingly inconsistent, especially as one would expect advocates, law-makers and staffers to be well informed. this finding reinforces the need for effective and targeted education strategies as part of advocacy campaigns. fortunately, issue education is something nonprofit organizations of all kinds are allowed to engage in without having to worry about violating tax exemption rules. there is nothing like teaching a topic to learn it better oneself, so advocates and other staff who learn about the policy issue will build human capital and organizational capacity in the process. thus the statewide coalition the authors represent organized a training session on effective advocacy strategies and tactics, child vehicular safety laws, and legislative talking points. coalition members then used the information at a lobbying event organized at the south carolina statehouse, which led to pledges from legislators to introduce or co-sponsor child safety legal guidelines. conclusions the strong and encouraging response to the two international conference sessions and two special issues of this journal on public policy research, advocacy practice, and training by community psychologists around the globe, as well as the variety of examples in public physical and health, education, community development and environmental protection, demonstrate that policy work in community psychology is vital, vibrant and expanding, both geographically and topically. although this special issue samples policy issues and efforts by community psychologists in several different countries, it does not include important areas of policy work, especially inherently international policies, such as those affecting climate change and that provoke wars and widespread violence while causing extreme poverty that forces millions of people to be displaced and shortens the life spans of entire communities. the neoliberal, pro-global capital-market policies that are restricting services and rights of citizens are also an global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 example of this. we know that community psychologists are working on those topics with social scientists from other branches of psychology and other disciplines, and with policy-makers, professionals, and community activists and advocates. this special issue reflects the collaboration of colleagues from multiple disciplines worldwide. this has been possible thanks to the hosts of the international conference of community psychology. this conference is an example of how the alliance of societies and academies of community psychology around the world can provide a global perspective to the efforts that community psychologists make to promote public policies based on equity and social justice. so we hope all of those examples of international policy-focused collaboration receive the attention they deserve in this and other journals and conferences. we further hope that community psychologists around the world take encouragement from this issue and the various other resources identified in several of the articles to keep up the difficult, often frustrating, but ultimately crucial and rewarding work of influencing political solutions to community, societal, and international problems. editor’s note we thank all the authors who participated in this issue and the following anonymous reviewers for the thoughtful feedback that improved each paper: nydia cappas (puerto rico) jorge castellá sarriera (brazil) daniel cooper (united states) claudia de freitas (portugal) joseph durlak (united states) pedro d. ferreira (portugal) carlos gonçalves (portugal) leonard jason (united states) robin jenkins (united states) sónia kruppa (brazil) kenneth maton (united states) maria vargas moniz (portugal) verônica morais ximenes (brazil) conceição nogueira (portugal) josé ornelas (portugal) blanca ortiz torres (puerto rico) david pérez-jiménez (puerto rico) marco aurélio prado (brazil) fátima quintal de freitas (brazil) alicia rodríguez (uruguay) francisco javier saavedra (spain) yolanda suarez-balcazar (colombia & united states) tom wolff (united states) alba zambrano (chile) references burgos, m.p., coimbra, j.l., & ferreira, p. (this issue). democracia, participação social e controle social de políticas públicas no brasil: a experiência dos fóruns da educação de jovens e adultos do brasil / democracy, social participation and social control of public policy in brazil: the experience of forums for the education of young people and adults of brazil. global journal of community psychology practice. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 dos santos, a.o., martineli massola, g., galeão da silva, l.g., & parodi svartman, b. (this issue). racismo ambiental e lutas por reconhecimento dos povos de floresta da amazônia / environmental racism and struggles for recognition of the traditional amazonian populations. global journal of community psychology practice. garcía-ramírez, m., escobar-ballesta, m., lizana, t., & albar, m.-j. (this issue). el reto de la equidad en las políticas sanitarias dirigidas al pueblo gitano en españa / the challenge of equity in health policies aimed at the roma population in spain. global journal of community psychology practice. grandón fernández, p., dresdner vicencio, r., sanhueza vallejos, m., & vaccari jiménez, p. (this issue). prácticas antiestigma como eje articulador del trabajo comunitario en salud mental / anti-stigma practices as the linchpin of community work in mental health. global journal of community psychology practice. maryman, j., strompolis, m., maton, k., & perkins, d. d. (this issue). the scra public policy committee in action: advocacy, collaboration, and capacity-building. global journal of community psychology practice. mata, s. & fernandes, l. (this issue). a construção duma política pública no campo das drogas: normalização sanitária, pacificação territorial e psicologia de baixo limiar / the construction of public policy in the field of drugs: health standards, territorial pacification and lowthreshold psychology. global journal of community psychology practice. rittel, h. w. j., & webber, m. m. (1973). dilemmas in a general theory of planning. policy sciences, 4, 155-169. rocha, a.c. & duarte, c. (this issue). impacto das políticas públicas na promoção da educação sexual: o caso português / impact of public policy for the promotion of sex education: the portuguese case. global journal of community psychology practice. scott, j., t., & maryman, j. (this issue). using social media as a tool to complement advocacy efforts. global journal of community psychology practice. serrano-garcía, i., & lugo-hernández, e. a. (this issue). involving psychologists in public policy in puerto rico: processes and results. global journal of community psychology practice. soares da silva, a.p., bezzon da silva, j., amorim rosa, l., sbroion de carvalho, r., oliveira silva, a.c., & vieira, t. (this issue). prática comunitária e o trabalho do movimento dos trabalhadores rurais sem terra (mst) com crianças e adolescentes em ribeirão preto/sp brasil / community practice and the work of landless workers' movement (mst) with children and adolescents in ribeirão preto/sp brazil. global journal of community psychology practice. strompolis, m., branham, m., tucker, w., & aakjer, h. (this issue). influencing prevention policy through effective communication with advocates and legislators. global journal of community psychology practice. microsoft word esp2_grandon et al prácticas anti-estigma como eje articulador del trabajo comunitario en salud mental final-formatted.docx prácticas anti-estigma como eje articulador del trabajo comunitario en salud mental anti-stigma practices as the linchpin of community work in mental health pamela grandón fernández rafael dresdner vicencio marcelo sanhueza vallejos pamela vaccari jiménez palabras claves: estigma, derechos humanos, participación, salud mental comunitaria keywords: stigma, human rights, participation, community mental health autor biografías: pamela grandón fernández1psicóloga, profesora asociada del departamento de psicología, universidad de concepción. dirección: departamento de psicología, facultad de ciencias sociales, universidad de concepción, barrio universitario s/n, concepción, región del biobío, chile. rafael dresdner vicencio psicólogo, coordinador del centro de rehabilitación diurno “luz de luna”, unidad de psiquiatría y salud mental hospital las higueras. dirección: centro de rehabilitación, hospital las higueras, alto horno 777, talcahuano, región del biobío, chile. marcelo sanhueza vallejos licenciado en sociología usuario de salud mental, activista por los derechos humanos de los usuarios de salud mental, miembro de la agrupación de ex usuarios de salud mental (aesam). dirección: agrupación de ex usuarios de salud mental, argentina 96, san vicente, talcahuano, región del biobío, chile pamela vaccari jiménez psicóloga, profesora asistente del departamento de psicología, universidad de concepción. dirección: departamento de psicología, facultad de ciencias sociales, universidad de concepción, barrio universitario s/n, concepción, región del biobío, chile autor notas: agradecimientos especiales a las organizaciones e instituciones y personas que han hecho posible la realización de las jornadas anti-estigma a lo largo de estos años. citación: fernández, p.g., vicencio, r.d., vallejos, m.s., jiménez, p.v. (2016). prácticas anti-estigma como eje articulador del trabajo comunitario en salud mental. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(1s), 1-15. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org) global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 prácticas anti-estigma como eje articulador del trabajo comunitario en salud mental resumen el estigma es la principal causa de sufrimiento en personas que reciben un diagnóstico psiquiátrico. por esto el centro de rehabilitación diurno “luz de luna” se dio a la tarea de organizar anualmente las jornadas “anti-estigma”, cuyo objetivo fue generar un espacio de reflexión, debate y sinergia de experiencias sobre la forma de combatir el estigma y resguardar los derechos de las personas en salud mental. las jornadas se realizan bajo un modelo de investigación basado en la participación de la comunidad, que incluyen un equipo gestor y distintos actores locales. la información obtenida en éstas se analizó usando técnicas cualitativas. las jornadas han desarrollado diferentes productos y efectos que evidencian la efectividad de trabajar bajo este modelo inclusivo: generación de documentos sobre la discriminación, estigma y promoción de derechos; nuevos espacios de promoción de derechos en salud mental y alianzas estratégicas con redes sanitarias, de educación superior, fundaciones privadas y organizaciones de usuarios con diagnóstico psiquiátrico. . anti-stigma practices as the linchpin of community work in mental health abstract stigma is the main cause of suffering in people who receive a psychiatric diagnosis. hence, the “moonlight” rehabilitation center decided to annually organize the “anti-stigma” sessions, aimed to generate a reflection, debate and synergy space of experiences in order to fight stigma and protect the rights of people in mental health. these sessions are based on a research model of community participation that includes a managing team and different local actors. the information obtained in these sessions was analyzed by means of qualitative techniques. the products and effects that evidence the value of following this inclusive model have been developed: generation of documents on discrimination, stigma and promotion of rights; new promotion spaces of right in mental health and strategic alliances with health networks, higher education, private foundations and organizations of users with psychiatric diagnoses. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 ser etiquetada/o con un diagnóstico psiquiátrico significa un antes y un después en la vida de una persona. su propósito vital y relaciones sociales giran respecto a lo que se había trazado, provocando efectos negativos para sí y su familia; uno de esos efectos es el estigma. goffman (1963) define estigma como un atributo degradante que deteriora la identidad de una persona y la inhabilita para una plena aceptación social. el estigma refiere a etiquetamiento, pérdida de estatus y discriminación de una persona que presenta una característica evaluada como negativa por la comunidad (corrigan & o'shaughnessy, 2007; link & phelan, 2001). el estigma se relaciona con la identidad social y con la categorización que la sociedad aplica a las personas, donde el exogrupo u otredad es estereotipado y desvalorizado (link & phelan, 2001). el estigma hacia las personas con diagnósticos psiquiátricos se evidencia en conductas de coerción, infantilización y segregación (corrigan & o'shaughnessy, 2007; mestdagh, 2014). esto tiene diversas consecuencias para las personas entre las cuales están: disminución de oportunidades laborales y redes sociales, menor acceso a vivienda, atención de salud, restricción de sus derechos en función del diagnóstico, aumento de la vulnerabilidad social y disminución de la autoestima (arboleda-flores & stuart, 2012; mascayano, tapia, castro, mena & manchego, 2015; sharac, mccrone, clement, & thornicroft, 2010). el estigma afecta directamente la recuperación de las personas, entendida ésta como un proceso de reconstrucción de la identidad con apoyo del grupo social para dotar de significado sus experiencias vitales y adquirir control sobre su tratamiento (slade, leamy, bacon, janosik, et al., 2012). la recuperación permite que se pueda construir un proyecto de vida más allá del sufrimiento generado por un trastorno mental (bellack, 2006). para recuperarse es fundamental participar de la vida en comunidad, siempre que ésta valore a las personas diferentes. también es central que los servicios de atención en salud reconozcan la autoridad de los usuarios para decidir sobre vidas (slade et al., 2012). el advenimiento de un modelo de salud mental comunitaria (smc) propició el abordaje del estigma, estableciendo que la inclusión social de personas con diagnóstico psiquiátrico requería la apertura y respeto de la comunidad (ornelas, vargas-moniz, & duarte, 2010). por tanto, el estigma es un problema de salud pública que traspasa los límites sanitarios constituyéndose como una demanda de justicia social (corrigan, watson, byrne, & davis, 2005; stuart, 2005). en esta línea, se está trabajando desde un enfoque basado en derechos humanos, desarrollando intervenciones centradas en el empoderamiento de usuarios de servicios de salud mental y sus familiares (corrigan et al., 2010; programa de las naciones unidad para el desarrollo, 2000; warner, 2008;). la inclusión social y disminución del estigma implica así la recuperación de derechos y roles sociales de las personas (corrigan, 2002; saraceno, 2003). desde el ejercicio de ciudadanía que pueden ejercer las personas con diagnóstico psiquiátrico se disminuyen las asimetrías de poder y se desafía el estereotipo, favoreciendo la recategorización social de este colectivo (gaebel, ahrens & schlamann, 2010; sartorius et al, 2010). experiencias de programas de disminución del estigma, global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 señalan que las intervenciones más efectivas incluyen localidades específicas y sus actores sociales, pasando a incorporarse como prácticas estables del lugar (arboleda-flores & stuart, 2012). lo ideal es promover el contacto con personas que presentan un diagnóstico psiquiátrico de forma cooperativa, en igualdad de estatus y con apoyo de autoridades (szeto & dobson, 2010). en chile el año 2000 se promulgó el “plan nacional de salud mental y psiquiatría” que, basado en el modelo de smc, establece lineamientos y valores de una política pública en salud mental. a partir de ello se diseña un modelo de atención en red, llamado “red de salud mental y psiquiatría comunitaria” con enfoque biopsicosocial, territorial y comunitario, que promueve mejorar la calidad de vida de personas con diagnóstico psiquiátrico en su tratamiento, rehabilitación e inclusión social (ministerio de salud, 2001). el modelo de smc considera a la comunidad como generadora de recursos que debe aliarse con los técnicos para enfrentar sus problemas de salud, para lo que se requiere motivar la participación y empoderamiento de las personas (marcos & topa, 2012; storm & edwards, 2013). no obstante este cambio en las políticas, la incidencia de trastornos mentales en chile no ha disminuido, el presupuesto asignado a salud mental alcanza a 2,14% y las agrupaciones de familiares de los/as usuarios/as tienen escasa visibilidad en el modelo. en general, las personas ven limitada su participación y toma decisiones durante el tratamiento, no existen iniciativas legales que resguarden el ejercicio de su capacidad jurídica— como la tenencia de bienes—y hay un déficit en el desarrollo de políticas de inclusión educativa y laboral (minoletti, sepúlveda & horvitz lennon, 2012; observatorio de derechos humanos de las personas con discapacidad mental, 2014; organización mundial de la salud, 2014). resulta paradójico que pese a la instalación de un modelo de salud mental comunitario en chile se siguen reproduciendo y manteniendo la inhabilitación social y el estigma hacia las personas con diagnóstico psiquiátrico. esto nos indica que se requiere de mayores esfuerzos para que estos objetivos se transformen en acciones concretas (carrasco & yuing, 2014; ministerio de salud, 2014; valdés & errázuriz, 2012). en este escenario, surge la necesidad de implementar intervenciones anti-estigma bajo el enfoque de los derechos humanos, que promueva el bienestar y la libertad sobre la base de la dignidad e igualdad de todas las personas (organización de las naciones unidas, 2011), visibilizando al estigma y sus expresiones como prácticas opresoras. en este contexto, el centro de rehabilitación diurno “luz de luna” perteneciente al área sanitaria de la ciudad de talcahuano en la región del biobío en chile, se dio a la tarea de organizar anualmente las jornadas “antiestigma”. el objetivo de estas jornadas fue generar un espacio de reflexión, encuentro de experiencias y desarrollo de alianzas para buscar mecanismos que faciliten la inclusión social de las personas con diagnóstico psiquiátrico. las jornadas buscaban la validación de la otredad como factible y legítima, en donde el/la otro/a existe como sujeto de derechos. desde esta resignificación de discursos y acciones, se ha apuntado a posicionar al estigma como una limitación para la salud mental y el bienestar humano, indicando global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 que debemos transformar los contextos relacionales, fundamentalmente, en salud y educación. este artículo pretende socializar y sistematizar el trabajo realizado a partir del desarrollo de las jornadas anti-estigma, basadas en los derechos humanos, como eje articulador de prácticas socio-sanitarias. método se han realizado cinco jornadas desde el año 2011 hasta el 2015, basadas en el modelo de investigación basado en participación de la comunidad (ibpc). la ibpc enfatiza la inclusión de los miembros de la comunidad como participantes en todo el proceso investigador; identificar y definir el o los problemas, determinar las preguntas, elegir la metodología, recolectar y analizar los datos, implementar acciones y monitorear y difundir los resultados (stacciarini, shattell, coady, & wiens, 2011). el trabajo desde este enfoque se inició con un grupo gestor, que incluyó a diferentes actores sociales y que se encargó de desarrollar el proceso investigador (stacciarini et al., 2011). utilizamos este modelo por ser pertinente al propósito de las jornadas basado en una ética de la justicia y el empoderamiento de grupos marginados (blumentahl, 2011). para recoger y analizar la información, se utilizaron técnicas cualitativas que implicaron un análisis documental de la sistematización de las jornadas, los resúmenes presentados en las mismas y la evaluación de satisfacción hecha por los participantes. la sistematización se realizó en base a discusiones grupales del equipo, aplicando un análisis de contenido temático, narrativo e inductivo, donde las categorías definidas fueron consensuadas. también se establecieron conversaciones con agentes claves de las jornadas líderes de organizaciones. el uso de estos distintos métodos permitió triangular el análisis para fortalecer la credibilidad de la información obtenida. entre los organizadores destacan dispositivos de salud, asociaciones de usuarios y familiares de salud mental, organismos no gubernamentales, y universidades locales. son distinguibles dos etapas dentro de este proceso: desde la primera hasta la última versión las jornadas han tenido un desarrollo progresivo en la participación de la comunidad en su implementación. etapa i. origen de la iniciativa las jornadas nacen en el centro de rehabilitación “luz de luna,” perteneciente a la red de salud local, que trabaja en rehabilitación psicosocial de personas con diagnóstico psiquiátrico. la inquietud por abordar la discriminación y el estigma, se canalizó en “capacitar” a la comunidad en general y en particular a las personas más cercanas al tema como usuarios, familiares, funcionarios de salud y estudiantes universitarios, entre otros. esta tarea era relevante pues, por una parte, diversos estudios han señalado la importancia de abordar el estigma con los actores involucrados, como por la otra, en el centro de rehabilitación los usuarios manifestaban sentir discriminación social hacia ellos y sus familiares. la primera y segunda jornada fue organizada por el centro de rehabilitación diurno “luz de luna”, con apoyo del área comunitaria de la carrera de psicología de la universidad de concepción. se invitó a participar a organizaciones e instituciones ligadas al tema. en la primera el objetivo fue formar a los asistentes en la conceptualización e global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 implicancias del estigma. en la segunda, el foco fue el diagnóstico psiquiátrico y su influencia como constructor de discursos dominantes y la revisión e identificación de prácticas estigma/anti-estigma. durante la evaluación de estas jornadas surgió la necesidad de orientar el foco de trabajo hacia la reflexión en torno al tema, porque se constató que el trabajo antiestigma requería de la participación activa de los distintos actores sociales como miembros del equipo gestor local de su comunidad. este cambio implicó unir las lógicas de reflexión y experiencia de los usuarios y sus familias, con las de capacitación y formación, propias de equipos de salud mental, autoridades, docentes y estudiantes. a partir de lo conversado se acordó focalizarse en la salud mental en general y no solo en ciertos diagnósticos o condiciones psiquiátricas. esto estableció un puente entre distintas miradas que cruzan la salud mental y que afectan al estigma y la vulneración de derechos. etapa ii. asociatividad la tercera jornada fue la transición para el cambio de rumbo, incorporando nuevos actores locales. este paso estuvo relacionado con la elaboración de material donde se plasmaron valores, ideas y sueños en la lucha contra el estigma mediante el ejercicio colectivo de la construcción de una ley en salud mental. la cuarta jornada se centró en los derechos humanos en salud mental como tema pendiente en chile; en tanto la quinta abordó distintas perspectivas de trabajo en salud mental, sus tensiones y sus desafíos. en las últimas jornadas se incorporó el enfoque de derechos como parte medular del trabajo anti-estigma. esto fue posible porque el surgimiento del observatorio de derechos humanos de las personas con discapacidad mental de santiago, dio visibilidad al tema, lo que fue acogido a nivel local. con el paso de las jornadas se incluyeron en el equipo gestor organizaciones y personas consideradas como referentes en salud mental en el contexto local. en la medida que las tareas asumidas se desarrollaron de acuerdo a lo comprometido, el nivel de implicación de las personas aumentó. ya en la tercera versión, el espacio de las jornadas fue asumido como propio, lo que llevó a los participantes a proponer temas, intereses y sueños en la realización de la iniciativa. en la última versión, el proceso de colaboración gestado implicó que se sumaran, desde proyectos sociales a personas sin adscripción a una institución, a la organización (ver tabla 1). esto fue posible por la generación de confianzas en el equipo gestor, que tomó decisiones desde el ejercicio dialógico horizontal de incluir y hacer convivir las distintas propuestas y visiones sobre la iniciativa. lo anterior está inspirado en la propuesta de lograr unidad a través de la diversidad (schipani & freire, 1992). así se trabajó en base a acuerdos; se dio voz a todos los colectivos, se dividieron las tareas conforme a habilidades, contactos e intereses; se socializaron y sancionaron las actas de cada reunión y se generaron procesos de supervisión compartida de los avances y gestiones. esta posibilidad de diálogo intersectorial permitió generar distintas iniciativas locales; ahora el estigma y su disminución a partir de la defensa de los derechos de las personas, son un aspecto que se debate, enseña y aborda en diversos espacios sociales. las jornadas se convirtieron en un articulador local, con carácter dinámico que es propio de un colectivo social vivo. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 resultados los/as autores/as preferimos hablar de efectos pues estos aluden, desde nuestra comprensión, a una multiplicidad de consecuencias en distintos niveles y aspectos con potencial de réplica y re significación. hemos agrupado estos efectos en tres ámbitos: generación de documentos para combatir el estigma y promover los derechos en salud mental, generación de nuevas iniciativas de promoción de derechos en salud mental y generación de alianzas estratégicas. a continuación los presentamos: generación de documentos para combatir la discriminación y el estigma y promover los derechos en salud mental estos tienen como objetivo favorecer la agencia de las personas estigmatizadas y de la comunidad general entendiendo al estigma como fenómeno que atenta contra la justicia social afectando al conjunto de la sociedad. entre estos documentos contamos con: a) material informativo. trípticos informativos sobre las jornadas anti estigma, los cuales son usados para la promoción de derechos y difusión sobre el estigma en dispositivos de salud, organizaciones sociales, escuelas y universidades. b) sistematización de las jornadas. es un trabajo grupal final de conversación sobre los tópicos tratados. el escrito sistematizado se devuelve a los participantes para que puedan difundirlo (ver tabla 1). generación de nuevas instancias de promoción de derechos en salud mental. otro efecto relevante ha sido favorecer la conexión entre distintas organizaciones para la defensa y promoción de derechos humanos en salud mental. en este sentido, se han desarrollado las siguientes iniciativas: a) observatorio de derechos humanos en salud mental biobío. formado en la tercera jornada anti-estigma, donde los invitados del observatorio de derechos humanos en discapacidad mental propusieron formar una sucursal en concepción. la idea fue acogida por una diversidad de actores sociales, quienes se reunieron para dar cuerpo a una instancia local de defensa de los derechos en salud mental. esta iniciativa está actualmente en etapa de constitución legal. b) mesa territorial en torno a la discapacidad mental en talcahuano. gracias a las relaciones establecidas en la tercera y cuarta jornada, docentes de escuelas públicas se interesaron en trabajar con el área salud mental en talcahuano. a partir de ello se gestó “dementes territoriales” nombre de la iniciativa, que consiste en la formación de un grupo de trabajo intersectorial, constituido por múltiples agentes locales ligados al territorio que vela por la reinserción laboral y la educación social en estigma, derechos humanos y trabajo en red. el equipo tiene dos subgrupos de trabajo que desarrollan capacitación en estigma y derechos humanos, y establecen alianzas con entidades gubernamentales y no gubernamentales para la formación de la comunidad en temas de salud mental. c) fortalecimiento y emergencia de agrupaciones de salud mental a nivel local. se han constituido nuevas asociaciones en salud mental, entre ellas, las agrupaciones de usuarios “nuevo amanecer” y “el reencuentro” que se reúnen de forma semanal. también se han potenciado lazos entre agrupaciones de salud mental global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 jornada contenidos del documento difusión organizadores y participantes 1. “por un mundo donde todos cabemos” evaluación de la situación local en torno al estigma y la discriminación. enviada a los participantes y difundida en redes locales: agrupaciones de usuarios y familiares de salud mental y dispositivos de salud. 1.centro de rehabilitación diurna “luz de luna” (crd) 2.departamento de psicología de universidad de concepción (psicoudec) la jornada tuvo un número aproximado de 170 participantes 2. “contra la discriminación y el estigma en personas con diagnóstico psiquiátrico” revisión de las estrategias más efectivas para afrontar la discriminación y el estigma enviada a los participantes y difundida en redes locales: agrupaciones de usuarios y familiares de salud mental, dispositivos de salud y estudiantes de carreras de la ciencias sociales. 1.crd 2.psico-udec la jornada tuvo un número aproximado de 210 participantes. 3. “derechos y ciudadanía en personas con diagnóstico psiquiátrico” propuesta de ley de salud mental discutida enviada a observatorio de derechos humanos en discapacidad mental de santiago para que lo consideren en una propuesta de ley de salud mental al ministerio de salud de chile. compartida con los actores locales que la construyeron: estudiantes y docentes de universidades, agrupaciones de familiares y usuarios y dispositivos de salud. 1.crd 2.psico-udec 3.capacitación hospital las higueras 4.fundación rostros nuevos del hogar de cristo la jornada tuvo un número aproximado de 260 participantes 4. “derechos humanos, fortalecimiento e inclusión en salud mental. un tema pendiente en chile” generación de bosquejo original de manual de prácticas basadas en el quality rights de la oms. con acuerdo formal del área sanitaria de talcahuano de utilizar el bosquejo en la generación de una manual para su red de salud con compromiso de ser difundida con otras áreas sanitarias de la zona sur de chile, además de con la red educativa de talcahuano, junto a las redes mencionadas en los cuadros anteriores. 1.crd 2.psico-udec 3.rostros nuevos 4.departamento de psiquiatría y salud mental de la universidad de concepción (salud mental udec) 5.agrupación de exusuarios de salud mental (aesam) 6.departamento de psiquiatría y salud mental servicio de salud talcahuano (ssthno) 7.oficina de salud mental del área de salud local de la región del bío bío (seremi) la jornada tuvo un número aproximado de 300 participantes 5. “perspectivas institucionales y ciudadanas en salud mental. tensiones y desafíos de las prácticas basadas en derechos” generación de debates entre expositores y público en torno a 4 aspectos que influyen en las prácticas basadas en derechos humanos: las políticas y prácticas públicas, el ejercicio de la ciudadanía, los medios de comunicación y la investigación en salud mental difundida en otras áreas sanitarias de la zona sur de chile y santiago, además de con la red educativa de talcahuano, junto a las redes mencionadas en los cuadros anteriores. 1.crd 2.psico-udec 3.rostros nuevos 4.salud mental udec 5.aesam 6.ssthno 7.seremi 8.carrera de terapia ocupacional universidad andrés bello (unab) 9.proyecto “atina tomé por la inclusión” 10. personas naturales la jornada tuvo un número aproximado de 330 participantes tabla1. documentos de sistematización y organizadores de las jornadas anti-estigma global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 ya existentes con otras instituciones educativas y de salud favoreciendo el trabajo en red. d) generación del concurso de buenas prácticas inclusivas. en la tercera jornada anti-estigma surgió la idea de generar un concurso de buenas prácticas, para funcionarios de salud mental, agrupaciones, colectivos, familias, usuarios, ongs, fundaciones y corporaciones, entre otros. ello se realizó con el fin de favorecer la transversalidad de la temática de salud mental y dar espacios a otras voces que pudieran hablar sobre lo que constituyen buenas prácticas. actualmente existe el compromiso de incluir la iniciativa para el año 2016 como parte del trabajo del área comunitaria de la carrera de psicología de la universidad de concepción, dándole continuidad e impactando en la formación de futuros profesionales. e) conformación del colectivo de psicología crítica. producto de los vínculos establecidos a partir de las jornadas es que un grupo de estudiantes de carreras ligadas a las ciencias sociales en la universidad de concepción, conformó un grupo de “psicología crítica”, que tiene por objetivo la difusión de alternativas a la psiquiatría y la autoformación teórica e histórica en esta área. su trabajo se ha orientado a generar espacios de análisis y reflexión sobre salud mental, desarrollando foros y la primera “jornada local de antipsiquiatría y psiquiatría crítica” con participación de agrupaciones de usuarios y estudiantes de distintas universidades regionales. el trabajo de asociatividad ha sido posible gracias a la inclusión de distintos y nuevos actores sociales en cada jornada. muchas de las personas que inicialmente participaban como asistentes, gradualmente cambiaron su rol y se implicaron activamente en el tema. el diálogo generado en las jornadas facilitó la problematización de situaciones y el compartir vivencias, lo que dio un sustento común al malestar experimentado por los participantes. por su parte, los profesionales de la salud también pudieron visualizar las implicancias que esta forma de trabajo tiene para ellos y el estigma del que son objeto. este proceso de concientización compartido, donde es factible colocarle palabras al malestar y por tanto concretizarlo es, desde nuestra perspectiva, el fundamento para la acción colectiva. generación de alianzas estratégicas las jornadas han generado una red de organizaciones locales en pro de la disminución del estigma y en defensa de los derechos de las personas en salud mental. se han establecido vías de comunicación con distintos actores para el desarrollo de prácticas basadas en derechos y la implementación de políticas públicas en salud mental. estos vínculos traspasan lo local y a nivel nacional se realizaron conexiones con otros grupos como el observatorio de derechos humanos en discapacidad mental, el centro de acción crítica en salud mental, el colectivo “libremente”, el colectivo “locos por nuestros derechos”, la unidad de salud mental de la subsecretaría de redes asistenciales del ministerio de salud, entre otras. estos vínculos han favorecido el trabajo conjunto, específicamente de un documento de formación online sobre discriminación y estigma en salud mental para funcionarios de salud, el que está en global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 proceso de edición (dresdner & grandón, s.f). discusión la experiencia de las jornadas antiestigma, que nacen al alero de un centro de rehabilitación con enfoque de salud mental comunitaria, trasciende ese espacio y logra constituirse como eje articulador de múltiples iniciativas en salud mental. la necesidad de favorecer la inclusión social de usuarios, limitada por la discriminación y estigma, da cuerpo a esta iniciativa. en el curso de la misma, se han incorporado diversos actores sociales ligados o no, a la salud mental. el rigor metodológico está garantizado por un equipo gestor multidisciplinario y heterogéneo que recogió intereses, necesidades y propuestas sobre cómo trabajar prácticas antiestigma más allá de los afectados. el fundamento es la convicción de que todas las personas merecen ser tratadas de forma digna y sin etiquetas que coarten su participación en la vida social. en las jornadas se reconoce y aprecia esta vinculación entre derechos y salud mental y se posibilita identificar prácticas que vulneran derechos de las personas, afectando su calidad de vida y salud mental. las jornadas anti-estigma promueven el ejercicio de derechos de las personas con diagnóstico psiquiátrico, y permiten que la discriminación y el estigma se resignifiquen como problemas de justicia social (corrigan & o’shaughnessy, 2007; corrigan, watson, byrne & davis, 2005; stuart, 2005). la realización de las jornadas con un enfoque de investigación basado en la participación de la comunidad, se convierte en una práctica que fomenta derechos porque desafía a las lógicas duales para el logro de un resultado, ya que la planificación es en sí misma un resultado (bogart & uyeda, 2009; manzini, 2011; storm & edwards, 2013). este trabajo favorece el empoderamiento de los usuarios ya que fomenta relaciones basadas en las fortalezas y capacidades de los participantes para aportar a un proyecto colectivo. esto facilita la recuperación de los usuarios pues les permite percibirse competentes y miembros valorados de un grupo social (slade et al., 2012). los procesos de recuperación de las personas pueden ser construidos a partir del trabajo asociativo en una dinámica democrática. esto implica un desafío para los servicios de salud mental que deben buscar estrategias para generar contextos comunitarios empoderadores, fuera de las organizaciones de salud. otro efecto es el fomento de la asociatividad (ardila-gýmez, 2014), lo cual resulta novedoso ya que en chile se promueve la sociabilidad, que favorece la familiaridad entre las personas, por sobre la asociatividad que implica un objetivo de trabajo compartido (valenzuela & cousiño, 2000). estos resultados podrían ser explicados por el tipo de relación que se establece en el equipo gestor; interacciones horizontales, en las que se respeta la diversidad de opiniones y se tejen vínculos donde confluyen intereses comunes (bogart & uyeda, 2009). sung, mayo, ko, & lasley (2013) afirman que ello impacta en la asociatividad y en la incorporación de prácticas de cuidado colaborativo que fortalecen una comunidad o grupo psicosocial. en este sentido, el trabajo inductivo desde una lógica narrativa, genera nuevos discursos y escenarios de interacción que abren espacios de participación real, en los que las personas despliegan sus global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 potencialidades y reflexionan sobre sus logros (montero, 2006). otro aspecto destacable son las posibilidades de acción social que se alcanzan desde lo local. intervenciones sanitarias anti-estigma que logran convocar a distintos miembros de un territorio, pueden además de generar asociatividad, tener una mayor probabilidad de ser implementadas por organizaciones, instituciones y personas, y así pasar a formar parte de las prácticas locales. a partir de lo anterior, es que se recomienda trabajar desde lo local para incluir las prácticas anti-estigma como parte de los procesos habituales de las organizaciones e instituciones (arboledaflores & stuart, 2012; sartorius et al., 2010). nuestra experiencia ofrece sugerencias de valor para el desarrollo del modelo de smc en chile. investigaciones señalan que en los equipos de salud mental hay dificultades para implementar este modelo (carrasco & yuing, 2014; monreal, 2010), porque coexisten intervenciones con miradas exclusivamente biomédicas y patologizantes, con otras de corte comunitario y centradas en los recursos de las personas (carrasco & yuing, 2014). es frecuente que los intentos por incorporar a la comunidad en la gestión sanitaria sean infructuosos porque la participación es concebida de manera instrumental, es decir como una forma de generar beneficios para las instituciones, lo que invisibiliza al usuario (méndez & vanegas, 2010). en este contexto, el enfoque de derechos no es más que una mera abstracción que forma parte de la retórica en salud, pero que no se plasma en acciones concretas y cotidianas. nosotros hemos mostrado que es posible operativizar este enfoque a partir del estigma, ya que permite materializar los derechos de los y las usuarios de salud. el estigma es observado como una forma de relación y de diálogo donde unas voces se imponen sobre otras reproduciendo modelos de violencia estructural naturalizados en el tiempo (kelly, 2006). pensarlo así nos lleva a reflexionar sobre cómo el lenguaje verbal y no verbal encubre nociones sutiles de discriminación y cómo su problematización contribuye a generar espacios inclusivos y polivocales. consideramos que nuestro trabajo permite desarrollar praxis que devienen en efectos congruentes con la disminución de estigmas asociados a problemas en salud mental mediante el fomento de la asociatividad y el empoderamiento de usuarios. esto podría ser utilizado para el diseño de planes y programas más participativos, tanto a nivel internacional, como nacional, específicamente en el nuevo plan nacional de salud mental y psiquiatría que se está elaborando en chile. generar espacios de construcción de iniciativas locales en el ámbito de la salud mental, es un proceso que en sí mismo se convierte en una práctica anti-estigma y que a su vez promueve el surgimiento de otros escenarios socio-políticos de participación social. una de las principales limitaciones en nuestro trabajo es la falta de evaluación de la experiencia a nivel de los participantes. en futuras investigaciones sería conveniente poder conocer como estas iniciativas impactan en la subjetividad de los implicados y en sus prácticas cotidianas. igualmente sería necesario estudiar cómo estas instancias favorecerían transformaciones en las organizaciones, en términos de sus planteamientos, objetivos y formas de global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 trabajo; para ello sería conveniente el uso de técnicas cualitativas que aborden estos aspectos. otra limitación del trabajo, es que en las jornadas participan instituciones y organizaciones que promueven un modelo más comunitario de salud mental. será tarea futura por tanto diseñar una metodología que permita dialogar desde los derechos y en distintos niveles sobre cómo construimos prácticas anti estigma con una institucionalidad que trabaje desde un enfoque más biomédico. en este sentido, reconocemos limitantes para convocar a las jornadas a profesionales que no se sientan motivados por la temática, pues intervienen fundamentalmente desde un modelo biomédico, como podrían ser: psiquiatras, enfermeras y paramédicos. la inclusión de instancias que funcionen de manera más jerarquizada, implicaría el desafío de compatibilizar estas diferentes dinámicas y estructuras institucionales con otros ritmos de gestión y funcionamiento las jornadas anti-estigma han demostrado que otra forma de hacer las cosas es posible. al relevar la discriminación y el estigma como problema de justicia social, se visibilizan más claramente las estrategias de acción que podemos implementar para la igualdad y la equidad en nuestras relaciones sociales. desde esta modificación de paradigmas, que comprende al otro como sujeto de derechos, se abren por tanto nuevas propuestas para las intervenciones en salud mental. así, el estigma puede ser usado para operativizar el enfoque derechos, al concretizar en prácticas cotidianas el valor del otro como un igual. esto es posible gracias al fomento del empoderamiento y la asociatividad entre personas y organizaciones, lo que a su vez impacta en la recuperación de los usuarios y contribuye al desarrollo de una sociedad más inclusiva y diversa. referencias arboleda-flórez, j. & stuart, h. 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(2008). implementing local projects to reduce the stigma of mental illness. international journal for epidemiology and psychiatric sciences, 19 (1), 20-25 intersections of competencies for practice and research in community psychology by victoria faust1, mason g. haber2, brian d. christens1, ray legler3, & members of the council on education keywords: community psychology practice competencies, community psychology education, community psychology practice author biographies: victoria faust coordinates thrive wisconsin, a statewide health equity alliance that advances cross-sector understanding, alignment, and action around health equity. in addition to this role, she also manages community-based research and evaluation efforts for an initiative focused on the civic leadership of justice involved individuals in health-focused policy and systems change. she is a doctoral candidate at the university of wisconsin in civil society & community research and holds a masters of public administration. victoria's scholarship focuses on collective action in networks, multi-level empowerment and power, organizational and systems change, and participatory action and evaluation research to advance health equity. mason g. haber is the director of quality improvement and implementation at judge baker children’s center, affiliated with harvard medical school, and an assistant professor in research in the department of psychiatry at university of massachusetts medical school. dr. haber’s interests include community-based programs for older adolescents and emerging adults (or “transition-age”) youth with serious mental health conditions (smhc), including conditions involving trauma and co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders. additionally, he is interested in factors predicting successful transitions to secondary and post-secondary education of at risk adolescents and young 1 university of wisconsin 2 university of massachusetts medical school 3 national louis university global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 adults, including interagency collaboration and family support. dr. haber has extensive practice experience evaluating programs serving adolescents and emerging adults with smhc at local, state, and national levels, such as those in mental health settings using wraparound or intensive case management approaches, as well as school-based programs focusing on promoting positive development of these youth. brian d. christens is rothermel-bascom associate professor of human ecology at the university of wisconsin–madison, in madison, wisconsin, usa, where he is faculty director of the university’s center for community & nonprofit studies. he teaches in the ph.d. program in civil society & community research and the undergraduate major in community & nonprofit leadership. his research is on power and empowerment in policy and systems change efforts such as community organizing and coalition action. he works with community groups seeking to address inequities through changes to policies and decisions regarding transportation, food, education, community development, and corrections systems. he did his graduate work in community research & action at vanderbilt university. ray legler is an assistant professor of psychology in the school of social and behavioral sciences at national louis university in chicago. dr. legler earned his ph.d. in ecological/community psychology from michigan state university and has been working on urban youth and education issues in the chicago area for over 15 years. prior to joining the faculty at national louis, he served as director of research and evaluation at after school matters in chicago. dr. legler’s current research interests focus on community-based approaches to addressing and preventing urban poverty by building partnerships between high schools, post-secondary institutions, and businesses. recommended citation: faust, v., haber, m.g., christens, b.d., & legler, r. (2017). intersections of competencies for practice and research in community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(1), pages 1-13. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 intersections of competencies for practice and research in community psychology abstract the community psychology practice competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012) have helped the field of community psychology clarify the skills necessary to engage in community practice in our discipline and have begun to be used for designing curricula and other educational tools in community psychology training programs. many community psychologists, however, combine elements of both practice and research in their work, and research skills are less represented in the practice competencies than other types of skills. society for community research and action’s council on education recently developed a set of community psychology research competencies to provide additional depth of understanding of the types of skills and knowledge associated with rigorous and impactful research in community psychology. this paper describes the research competencies and their development and considers them in the context of the existing practice competencies in the interests of expanding the understanding of how research and practice intersect in our training programs and our work in both academic and nonacademic settings. an action-research cycle model is presented to help explain how practice and research competencies complement one another and how both are informed by a common set of principles guiding all the activities of our field. recommendations are then offered for integrating the research and practice competencies across practiceor research-focused training programs. introduction initially delineated through a collaborative effort of the community psychology practice council (cppc) and the council of education programs (now known as and referred to in this document as the council on education, or coe) (dalton & wolfe, 2012), the community psychology practice competencies (hereafter, practice competencies) are an important accomplishment for the field. prior to establishing the practice competencies, the field lacked a clear, widely accepted description of the specific skills that underlie community psychology practice and how to engage in them effectively (bloom, 1973). the development of practice competencies sought to identify and generate an appreciation for activities associated with community psychology practice. consequently, the list of competencies clearly prioritizes practice objectives. these competencies, as well as the work of the cppc more broadly, redressed a perceived imbalance between research and practice in training and professional development (dalton & julian, 2009). following their inception, the practice competencies have been used as the basis for resources and tools for educators, programs, and professional training activities in community psychology (e.g., connell, et al., 2013; scott & wolfe, 2015). many community psychologists combine elements of both practice and research in their health promotion, social action, and social change efforts, so it is not surprising that two of the 18 practice competencies explicitly address research or researchrelated activities (participatory research and program evaluation), and several others appear to verge on or relate closely to research-related activities (e.g., public policy analysis, development and advocacy). although not necessarily intended to focus on research competencies, the presence of these http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 research-related activities in the practice competencies points to the importance of research-related skills in community psychology as well as the connections between practice and research. they leave open opportunity for further definition of research-related skills and training objectives for the field, as well as further exploration of how these practice and research skills, activities, and objectives complement one another to help make community psychology a robust and impactful field. the strong impressions of such opportunity among members of the coe prompted discussions about articulating research competencies and whether developing such competencies could provide additional clarity and guidance for educational programs, students, and professionals in community psychology. we begin this paper with a description of the coe’s early pursuits in developing community psychology research competencies, which are based on qualitative analyses of interviews with selected community psychologists and presented in the appendix. we then build on our initial analysis and findings from these interviews, describing content on the relationship of practice and research and providing a conceptual analysis that highlights intersections and distinctions between the research and practice competencies. a modification of a longstanding model of the research-practice relationship – the action-research cycle – is offered to demonstrate how the activities and skills associated with the two lists of competencies complement one another in efforts for social action and social change sought by community psychologists. finally, we discuss relevance and implications for practiceand research-focused training in community psychology. developing community psychology research competencies early discussions within the coe about defining research competencies suggested a shared sense of the potential for these research competencies. in consultation with members of the cppc who had led the process of creating the practice competencies, the coe began gathering information on research competencies from existing relevant sources, such as rappaport and seidman’s (2000) handbook of community psychology and jason and glenwick’s (2012) methodological approaches to communitybased research, and coe members’ experiences from their own research and roles in various education programs. next, members of the coe conducted 19 semistructured interviews with senior and early career society for community research and action (scra) members, including scra fellows and recipients of the scra early career award, collectively offering a wealth of experience in both academic and practice settings. in developing the protocol for these semistructured interviews, the coe members realized that ‘competencies’, while perhaps helpful as a shorthand, was sometimes an awkward term for describing research. wellconducted research in community psychology involves not only specific skills in design and implementation, but also familiarity with relevant theory and perspectives. we asked respondents to identify such perspectives as well as skills they believed were important to conducting good community psychology research. adapting a gradient developed for the practice competencies, respondents were asked to indicate the degree to which, for each skill or perspective, community psychologists should seek to gain expertise (advanced proficiency or knowledge), or whether some level of experience (basic proficiency) or exposure (familiarity) might suffice. the diverse responses of the interview respondents reflected the many different research modalities that are employed in the community psychology field (jason & glenwick, 2016). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 coding and analysis of the interview data led to the identification of an initial list of skills and perspectives as well as a third category of “foundational” competencies, or areas articulated by respondents that encompassed both skills and perspectives or cut across multiple domains of the community research process (e.g., abilities to understand complex setting-level dynamics, to identify key points of leverage for maximum impact). the resultant list and the importance attached to list items by interview participants were discussed in a roundtable session at the 2015 scra biennial conference and summarized in a progress report in the community psychologist (christens, connell, faust, haber, et al., 2015). after these initial presentations, the coe team used feedback, results from additional interviews, and recoding of these and initial interviews to refine the wording and presentation of the competencies. a version of the list reflecting this additional work is included in the supplementary materials for this article. this document is living – the coe welcomes feedback to further refine the competencies and expects this initial list will continue to evolve. several points are important to keep in mind when interpreting the research competencies list. first, the competencies are designed to provide a framework for thinking about graduate and post-graduate training and education, but are not intended to serve as a basis for community psychology researcher certifications or accreditation of community psychology research training. the diversity of programs contributing to the competency list largely precludes generating one authoritative set of competency areas that could be applied to all types of community research training. given the methodological diversity present and valued in the field, we would caution against using our list to narrow the self-definition of researchers per methods (e.g., quantitative or qualitative only). additionally, these are not intended to be competencies for academics, and we do not equate research and academia. community psychologists around the world conduct research in a wide variety of settings, and this effort is in service of such work. finally, the research competencies presented in the appendix and discussed in this article were developed independently of the practice competencies; however, given the close relationship between practice and research in the field suggested by a consensus of community psychologists, many programs may be concerned with both and therefore might want to consider the ways they might complement or overlap with one another. practice and research domains and competencies as noted above, interview findings primarily provided material for the development of research competencies. in addition, subsequent analysis of interviews and findings consistently pointed to relationships between practice and research in the field. we discuss these connections further below. first, we consider how interview respondents related research and practice domains more generally. with this framing in mind, we then delineate relationships between specific research and practice competency areas and examine conceptual relationships between the two lists in more detail. relationships between practice and research domains one question almost universally considered in our interviews was the extent to which practice and research should be distinguished at all. to begin with, a broad definition of practice – essentially, coordinated, aimfocused action, or more colloquially “what community psychologists do” – clearly includes research (dokecki, 1996; hess, 2005). community psychologists quite deliberately “muddy the waters” regarding the research-practice distinction, based on the conviction that closely linking these activities conventionally considered to be http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 separate can advance shared values of the field. what many consider to be good research could be considered a form of practice. as one researcher we interviewed stated, “good cp work is based in practice and action. if you are a practitioner you still use research for practice and vice versa.” another memorably observed that seeing someone as a “researcher” and not a practitioner may be something of an insult: “i have frequently bristled when my community psychology colleagues have implied that those of us in academia aren’t doing practice when much of the research that we do is practice!” there were also concerns about the ways institutional constraints contribute to the separation of research and practice activities (e.g., the premium placed on publication in scholarly journals in many academic institutions). despite these arguments, a number of interview respondents distinguished between practice and research contexts by describing the types of skills and activities that might be applicable. for example, large group facilitation, logic modeling, or visual presentation skills might be relatively more important in practice contexts, whereas complex data analytic techniques, the collaborative identification of key research questions, and managing team science may be relatively more important in research contexts. some differentiated between skills associated with more generalizable versus local investigation, a phenomenon discussed further below, with some aligning local investigation more closely with practice (for competing views, cf. dzidic, breen, & bishop, 2013; hess, 2005). while certainly not universal, some interview respondents also suggested the style of communication differed in practice and research contexts, with practice-related communication tailored to needs of particular stakeholders and research for scholarly publication. a variety of tensions between value systems sometimes thought to be endemic to practice or research were also described, which played a role in interview respondents’ determination not simply of what to include, but also what would be elevated as essential in research versus practice (or, in the nomenclature of our competency development efforts, requiring “expertise” versus “exposure” or “experience”). these tensions included notions of validity (e.g., “participatory/local” versus “external” validity), “rigor” versus “currency” or utility, precision versus accessibility, emphasis of theory versus application, pluralistic and “blended” versus “pure” design. it was noted, however, that highly effective practitioners and researchers can navigate these tensions in their work such that values sometimes thought to apply to research can be applied to practice and vice versa. relationships between practice and research competencies interview respondents, as well as participants in our scra biennial conference session, made compelling arguments for the utility of delineating research competencies. while not the only reason, one purpose for doing so focused on evaluating or designing programs that may carry more practice or researchoriented training. choices of what to emphasize in professional and academic educational settings, both at the level of an individual student and of the training program, are necessary given the limited capacity of a given person or curriculum to convey mastery of the full breadth of skills required to be equally expert in both practice and research. even though most of our respondents believed one could reasonably distinguish between practice and research, and with caveats, it might be helpful to do so at certain points in early training, they felt a complete separation should be universally avoided. all in one manner or another cautioned against creating too a strong conceptual distinction between research and practice in developing the lists of competencies, and in so doing http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 misrepresenting or disrupting the close relationship of research and practice characteristic of the field. views were not uniform, however, on precisely how research and practice domains differed or intersected with one another. a comparison of the practice and research competencies highlights several relationships relevant to the field of community psychology and in particular educational and training programs. one is the close connection between the practice competencies’ foundational principles of practice and the aforementioned research perspectives. another is the presence of practice-related skills in research, suggesting various skills associated with practice are important to community psychology across practice and research contexts. lastly, there are new insights generated by the development of research competencies that are relevant for community change processes. foundational principles for community psychology ecological theories, theories of empowerment and power, theories of human well-being and flourishing, and critical theory were all recognized as important perspectives for community research. given that many of these theoretical frames were taken into consideration in the development of the practice competencies, it is not surprising that such research perspectives align with the practice competencies’ foundational principles. in fact, many of the practice competencies’ foundational principles were often cited themselves by interview respondents as important for research in community psychology. for example, analyses of power and interdependence was noted as essential to both equitable research partnerships and team science. similarly, ethical, reflective practice and exercising socio-cultural awareness were identified as fundamental to understanding how identity and group membership influence beliefs about knowledge creation and selection of research methodologies. theoretical approaches that underlie these principles also inform conceptual questions and frame knowledge creation through community research. for community psychology, therefore, it could be suggested that these principles and theoretical bodies of work taken together may be considered foundational to the entire discipline, rather than just for practice or research. practice-related activities in research competencies several research competencies identified include activities that overlap with those covered by practice competencies. this overlap suggests potential areas of skills pertinent across practice and research contexts in community psychology. comparing how these activities are framed in the practice and research competencies also suggests some differences in their application in practice and research contexts. for example, both the research competency capacity building with community partners and the various practice competencies included under the category of “community and organizational capacity building”, such as consultation and organizational development, involve supporting organizations and community leaders in identifying needs, assets, and goals. indeed, capacity building in a research context is similar in many ways to capacity building in a practice context in that it is an ongoing collaborative process of building trusting partnerships to enhance change efforts. in addition, the research competency focuses on developing a shared capacity to make the research process in particular useful for change through negotiations around identifying practice-based hypotheses that connect to broader theories of change and clarifying processes of knowledge production. relatedly, the research competency, collaborative research and inquiry also includes aspects of practice competencies under the heading “community and organizational capacity building” as part of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 research team collaborations. the practice of team science necessitates the identification of common goals among research partners, facilitation of collaborative processes, and cultivating the leadership skills of other collaborators, especially those partners newer to community research or coming from community organizations that are less familiar with incorporating inquiry into their social change work. this work can be particularly difficult when done across disciplines, paradigms, methodologies, and sectors, when good facilitation and wellmanaged group processes can make or break the impact that inquiry can have. despite their differences, practice-related activities related to capacity building, goal setting, asset identification, and team and process management are shared across practice and research competencies and could be a place of emphasis for the professional development of community psychologists who focus on either practice or research. new insights generated by research competencies given their intentional focus on strategies for inquiry in community psychology, the research competencies offer additional depth to the practice competencies of participatory community research and program evaluation. the practice competencies identify participatory community research as “the ability to work with community partners to plan and conduct research that meets high standards of scientific evidence that are contextually appropriate, and to communicate the findings of that research in ways that promote community capacity” (dalton & wolfe, 2012, p. 13). this description highlights the importance of using various methods appropriate for different contexts and purposes, without compromising scientific rigor. many of the research competencies bring an extended understanding to what is meant by planning and conducting research that meets high standards of scientific evidence through their focus on various approaches to research and methods for preserving rigor. research competencies related to research design are of particular significance, given the calls in community psychology for socially impactful research and the proliferation of complex methodologies that can capture context and contribute to social action in a variety of ways. participatory community research and program evaluation were both identified as specific research designs in interviews, with participatory design as an area in which community psychology researchers should show “expertise”. these were two designs among many used to generate impactful research. similar to the sentiment suggested in the practice competencies, interview respondents emphasized that design selection should not be an activity of the researcher alone, rather the various stakeholders involved in the study should also be shaping design and methods, particularly those most impacted by the research outcomes. the research competencies offer additional insight into which specific designs and methods might generate the type of knowledge in service of community and social change, be it in practice or research focused contexts. comparing the research competency of diffusion of information and innovation and the practice competency dissemination and building public awareness illustrates new insights into community research made clearer by the research competencies. these competencies are similar in that both identify the importance of tailoring information for diverse audiences. the spread of information in community research, however, is not just about translating and educating. the ability to establish findings that are communicable for different contexts is specifically connected to the design of research for these contexts, done in collaboration with partners. in this vein, one interviewee suggested that at the level of national policy and program design, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 experimental design, quantitative methods, and external validity are particularly important in order to convey information about community change models. at the state or local level, high quality quantitative research that draws on anecdotes can be particularly impactful. at the local level, participatory research that deeply engages individuals can be powerful, particularly when external validity is less of a focus. in addition, communicating effectively about research includes clearly articulating the limitations of research in considering implications for action. noting the connections between design and dissemination is important given that many interview respondents emphasized influencing public policy through communication and translation of research. they suggested that community psychology has long been able to translate and disseminate information to impact local programs and community systems, but has not been as effective at influencing policy on a broader scale. while the practice competencies include the ability to engage in public policy analysis, development and advocacy, designing research specifically in these venues differs. one interview respondent suggested community researchers need to be especially skilled in avoiding oversimplification when translating their work into practical terms and often can benefit from working with community partners to maintain a connection between research, policy recommendations, and social change efforts. two research competencies that bring additional depth and insight into research in community psychology beyond the researchrelated practice competencies are the connection of practical problems to critical questions and the critical development and application of theory. these competencies, along with the explicit discussion of perspectives, help connect research, including research-related activities done in practice contexts, to the foundational principles that undergird community psychology as a field. they contribute to the formulation of research questions that are specific enough to generate new insights into practical processes and still connect to large and complex theories of change used as foundations for social action. they also connect research in community psychology to discussions grounded in the philosophy of science, such as those highlighted in a recent issue of the global journal of community psychology practice (see jason, et al., 2016). applying some of the insights presented here to the concept of program evaluation can provide an example. program evaluation is considered a practice competency and was also identified by some of our interview respondents as research design. program evaluation may pertain to a particular program and context (specificity, locality), involves pragmatic research design, is sometimes not theory-driven, and can be reported in ways that may prioritize accessibility over precision (patton, 2008; scriven, 2016). at the same time, program evaluation should still be infused with theoretical relevance and rigor, speak to conceptual questions of the broader field, and explore or expand on models for community change and how aspects of the continuum, from microsystems up to social policy, influence people and vice versa. bridging program evaluation with key research competencies such as the connection of practical problems to critical conceptual questions, research design, and critical development and application of theory can breathe a different sort of life into evaluation that situates it in a body of knowledge about social action and social change. for example, research designs suited for capturing variability in application of a program model across settings (e.g., multi-level models) can provide opportunities to more rigorously examine the influence of settings on the “core components”, on central features of a model http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 (fixsen, naoom, blase, friedman, & wallace, 2005), or on its outcomes (e.g., koroloff, haber, and walker, 2016). in addition, innovations in research and inquiry themselves are also useful to disseminate. a complex multi-level intervention identified as an innovation in practice may have a parallel innovation in research designs developed to assess multilevel interventions. many community psychologists are on the cutting edge of applying critical perspectives, innovative mixed methods, and participatory research designs to address important social issues. there is a shared need to be able to communicate with others about both research and practice innovations across disciplines, with communities, and to policy makers. a new take on an old research – practice cycle with respect to the relationship between practice and research domains, several interview respondents suggested that the divide could be at least partly overcome through effective collaboration between those who identify as primarily practitioners with those who identify themselves as researchers. others proposed that an awareness of the diverse practice and research competencies and the relationships between them could assist in understanding what competencies offer practice and research domains. for example, action and practice should inform which questions are identified as important, how questions are framed, and selection of design and methodology, while strong research designs should be understood for their capacities to demonstrate the impact of interventions or influence social change processes. these discussions encouraged a melding of research and practice competencies in a way that still afforded the opportunity to consider distinct aspects of skill development and contexts for application of different competencies. the symbiosis described between practice and research, which indeed can be understood as a driving force in the discipline, resembles research-action cycles dating back to the action research and pragmatism of kurt lewin and john dewey (lewin, 1946; dewey, 1925). several of our respondents suggested this conceptualization, either using extant research-action cycle terminology or more informally in terms of mutually beneficial feedback loops, with research and practice activities enmeshed – at best strategically – in efforts for community change. a researchaction cycle offers a useful structure for considering the relationship between research and practice domains and the intersection between the research and practice competencies in service of community and social change efforts. figure 1 is an illustration combining both research and practice competencies in a single such cycle, reflecting the particular ways research and practice intersections were described in our interviews and outlined above. partnerships for social action and social change sit at the core of this cycle, shaping the basic purposes for research and influencing research and practice together. of note, some would take issue with characterizing research and practice as equal and mutually beneficial complements in this way, warning that doing so may constrain or undermine both. research, construed apart from practice, can reflect and benefit privilege and thus tends to support privileged points of view and not those of other stakeholders (dzidic et al., 2013). speaking to this critique, interview respondents often emphasized the role of the foundational principles in research and that they should be considered in each aspect of the research process. therefore, the relationship between the foundational principles for practice and the perspectives described above encircles the core of the research-action cycle. when combined with partnerships for social action http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 and social change, they together comprise the ethos and values of research-action cycles in community psychology. these central forces emanate outward and drive what questions are asked, who asks them, how knowledge is harnessed or created, and for what purposes. action and application encompass practice competencies such as program development, implementation and management, prevention and health promotion, community development, community organizing, and public policy analysis, development and advocacy. this image incorporates research competencies, such as connecting practical problems to critical conceptual questions and critical development and application of theory, that reinforce the role of theories, models, frameworks, and other conceptual tools in the cyclical relationship of research and practice in community psychology. in addition, the representation of them in a research-action cycle suggests further discussion about the value of theory to practitioners (and the value of practice-based theory). for example, the research-action cycle was mentioned by interview respondents in relation to particular research and practice competencies, such as the helpfulness of theory in crafting coherent explanations and predictions of events for the practice of policy advocacy. therefore, the notion of a cycle derived from our interviews is the central organizing concept for our proposed model for relating research and practice competencies. utility of competencies in a researchpractice cycle for educators and practitioners the delineation of research competencies to complement and expand on the existing practice competencies, the consideration of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 the relationship between practice and research, the analysis of the intersections and new insights generated, and the connections of the competencies in a research-practice cycle have implications for practitioners, researchers, and educators. for educators working to equip their students with appropriate research skills, the research competencies can serve as a template for reviewing graduate programs and assessing the extent to which coursework and experiences outside the classroom cover the various skills. faculty, program directors, and other administrators may wish to review program requirements and assess the extent to which community research perspectives, research design, data collection and analysis, and the meta-competencies for research are covered. relatedly, practice-focused programs may be interested in assessing the extent to which theoretical foundations of the discipline are understood and connected to effective practice frameworks or the degree to which students understand different research designs and their implications for using data in practice. this process may serve to identify areas of weakness in community psychology and community research and action education programs and provide direction for strengthening curricula. in addition to serving as a review template for education programs, the research competencies could be incorporated alongside the practice competencies into the conceptual foundation for designing community-based fieldwork, internships, and thesis or dissertation guidelines. the interlacing of these competencies may be of particular interest for designing learning objectives in structured progressions of community-based experiences. the foundational competencies relevant to both practice and research, for example, could be incorporated and analyzed at various times into practice-oriented or research-oriented community-based experiences. in addition, depending on the setting and the goal of the particular learning experience, theories and perspectives including empowerment, multicultural theory, and critical theory may be useful in conceptualizing the work. research competencies may be relevant to varying degrees at different stages of the experience. some students may focus on bringing data to bear on community issues or in community advocacy contexts, while others may be practicing elements of research design in preparation for theses, dissertations, or as leads in research projects. examples of the incorporation of both research and practice into fieldwork training can be found in the community psychology programs at depaul university and national louis university (nlu), both discussed in detail in a recent article on the implications of the practice competences for community psychology (sánchez, jimenez, viola, kent & legler, in press). at nlu, students engage in a series of guided, community-based experiences that allow them the opportunity to utilize both research and practice competencies. at depaul, students in both the community and the clinical-community programs are required to take a year-long fieldwork course that, while emphasizing practice competencies, allows for applied research opportunities such as program evaluation. from a practice perspective, the specification of research competencies provides clearer descriptions of the tools available for the community practitioner engaging in inquiry. for those practicing community psychology outside of an academic setting, the research competencies discussed here may suggest directions for professional development. further, the explication of research competencies may provide community psychologists in a variety of settings with ideas for fresh approaches to their community work. common areas of applied community work such as program evaluation, consultation, organizational development, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 community development and change, and resource development can all benefit when the community practitioner ensures that he or she is at least familiar with the breadth of skills identified in the research competencies and is comfortable using the appropriate research methods in the right situation. the practice competencies have been successful at clarifying the dimensions of community psychology practice, the skills necessary to engage in this practice, and a framework for practice and educational programming in the field. further building on the delineation of practice competencies, the coe encourages ongoing discussion of related, and intricately connected, research competencies. the intersections of the competencies highlight potential places of emphasis in academic programming and professional training that draw together instead of bifurcate research and practice for health promotion and social change. 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(1973). the domain of community psychology. american journal of community psychology, 1(1), 8-11. christens, b. d., connell, c. m., faust, v., haber, m. g., & the council of education programs (2015). progress report: competencies for community research and action. the community psychologist, 48(4), 3-9. connell, c. m., lewis, r. k., cook, j., meissen, g., wolf, t., johnson-hakim, s., … taylor, s. (2013). special report – graduate training in community psychology practice competencies: responses to the 2012 survey of graduate programs in community psychology. the community psychologist, 46, 5-8. dalton, j. & julian, d. (eds.) (2009). special section: infusing community practice into graduate training: broadening the conversation. the community psychologist, 42, 9-23. dalton, j., & wolfe, s. m. (2012). joint column: education connection and the community practitioner: competencies for community psychology practice. the community psychologist, 45(4), 7-14. dewey, j. (1925). experience and nature. new york: dover publications. dokecki, p. r. (1996). the tragicomic professional: basic considerations for ethical reflective-generative practice. pittsburgh, pa: duquesne university press. dzidic, p., breen, l. j., bishop, b. j. (2013). are our competencies revealing our weaknesses? a critique of community psychology practice competencies. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), 110. retrieved 6/27/15, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). fixsen, d. l., naoom, s. f., blase, k. a., friedman, r. m. & wallace, f. (2005). implementation research: a synthesis of the literature. tampa, fl: university of south florida, louis de la parte florida mental health institute, the national implementation research network (fmhi publication #231). hess, j. z. (2005). scientists in the swamp: narrowing the language-practice gap in community psychology. american journal of community psychology, 35(3/4), 239252. jason, l. a., & glenwick, d. s. (eds.) (2012). methodological approaches to communitybased research. washington, d.c.: american psychological association. jason, l. a., & glenwick, d. s. (eds.) (2016). handbook of methodological approaches to community-based research. new york: oxford university press. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 jason, l.a., stevens, e., ram, d., miller, s.a., beasley, c.r., & gleason, k.d. (2016). theories in the field of community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(2), 2-27. koroloff, n., haber, m.g., & walker, j. (2016). evaluating now is the time-healthy transition program systems change: processes & outcomes. paper presented at the 28th children’s mental health research & policy conference, tampa, fl. lewin, k. 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(2016). roadblocks to recognition and revolution. american journal of evaluation, 37, 27-44. http://www.gjcpp.org/ intersections of competencies for practice and research in community psychology abstract introduction references microsoft word porto2_artigo prática comunitária e o trabalho do movimento dos trabalhadores rurais sem terra 08 012016 revisto-formatted.docx prática comunitária e o trabalho do movimento dos trabalhadores rurais sem terra (mst) com crianças e adolescentes em ribeirão preto/sp brasil community practice and the work of landless workers' movement (mst) with children and adolescents in ribeirão preto/sp – brasil ana paula soares da silva juliana bezzon da silva leandro amorim rosa regiane sbroion de carvalho ana cecília oliveira silva thaise vieira palavras-chave: comunidade rural, infância do campo, reforma agrária keywords: rural community, country childhood, agrarian reform autor biografias: dr. ana paula soares da silva, coordenadora do laboratório de psicologia socioambiental e práticas educativas – lapsape, e professora de psicologia da faculdade de filosofia, ciências e letras de ribeirão preto – universidade de são paulo – ffclrp-usp. me. juliana bezzon da silva, colaboradora do laboratório de psicologia socioambiental e práticas educativas – lapsape – ffclrp-usp. me. leandro amorim rosa, pesquisador (nível doutorado) no núcleo de psicologia política puc-sp; colaborador do laboratório de psicologia socioambiental e práticas educativas – lapsape – ffclrp-usp. dr. regiane sbroion de carvalho, pesquisadora (nível doutorado) do laboratório de psicologia socioambiental e práticas educativas – lapsape – ffclrp-usp. dr. ana cecília oliveira silva, pesquisadora (nível doutorado) do laboratório de psicologia socioambiental e práticas educativas – lapsape – ffclrpusp. me. thaise vieira, colaboradora do laboratório de psicologia socioambiental e práticas educativas – lapsape – ffclrp-usp. autor notas: os autores agradecem o apoio financeiro às pesquisas recebido da fundação de amparo à pesquisa do estado de são paulo – fapesp, e ao projeto de extensão, financiado pela pró-reitoria de cultura e extensão da universidade de são paulo-usp. citar: soares da silva, a.p., bezzon da silva, j., rosa, l.a., sbroion de carvalho, r., oliveira silva, a.c., and vieira, t. (2016). prática comunitária e o trabalho do movimento dos trabalhadores rurais sem terra (mst) com crianças e adolescentes em ribeirão preto/sp – brasil. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(1s), 1-23. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org) global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 prática comunitária e o trabalho do movimento dos trabalhadores rurais sem terra (mst) com crianças e adolescentes em ribeirão preto/sp brasil resumo o artigo relata a experiência de prática comunitária do lapsape que, nos anos de 2007 a 2012, por solicitação do setor de educação do movimento dos trabalhadores rurais sem terra – mst, realizou atividades em um assentamento de reforma agrária, localizado na cidade de ribeirão preto, estado de são paulo, brasil. a atuação foi orientada pela perspectiva teórica e metodológica histórico-cultural, articulando conhecimentos da psicologia do desenvolvimento e psicologia social-comunitária. o objetivo da prática era contribuir para a formação de educadores populares, construindo com eles instrumentos para a atuação em diferentes níveis: organização e realização de atividades lúdicas e educativas com as crianças e adolescentes; construção de conhecimentos sobre a infância para proposição de ações de defesa de seus direitos junto a órgãos governamentais; envolvimento com as políticas de atendimento à educação das crianças e jovens assentados; integração das crianças ao espaço do assentamento da reforma agrária e ao modelo de produção econômica escolhido e em implantação pelos adultos. participaram aproximadamente dez adultos e quarenta crianças e adolescentes de diferentes idades (dos três aos 17 anos). orientou o trabalho o entendimento da necessária coconstrução e do aprendizado mútuo entre assentados e universidade. alguns dos eixos de trabalho desenvolvidos foram: o lugar da infância e da criança no assentamento rural de reforma agrária; direitos das crianças e adolescentes; brincadeiras; registro e memória; desenvolvimento infantil; educação do campo; relações campo-cidade; preconceito; sustentabilidade. por meio do trabalho com diferentes linguagens e métodos, houve a contribuição no empoderamento dos adultos para a organização de ações de luta pela melhoria das políticas de educação. destaca-se o protagonismo construído: na mobilização de adultos e crianças para combater os riscos no transporte escolar (o que resultou na visibilidade do tema na mídia, na conquista de melhores condições dos veículos e na contratação de adultos assentados para acompanhar o trajeto entre o assentamento e a escola); na luta pela inclusão, no planejamento orçamentário do município, de verba para a construção de escola no próprio assentamento; no envolvimento das crianças e adolescentes no projeto agroflorestal do assentamento. ressalta-se que a prática foi realizada em uma comunidade politicamente engajada, principalmente devido à história de participação no movimento social e à luta pela consolidação do assentamento de reforma agrária. nas avaliações conjuntas com os assentados, concluiu-se que a intervenção do grupo do lapsape contribuiu, num movimento gradativo, para a construção das identidades dos participantes como educadores infantis, bem como para a construção da autonomia em relação à argumentação, junto aos poderes públicos locais, a favor das políticas públicas que visem a melhoria das condições de vida das crianças e adolescentes assentados. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 community practice and the work of landless workers' movement (mst) with children and adolescents in ribeirão preto/sp – brasil abstract the aim of this article is to present the experience of community practice of lapsape in an agrarian reform settlement, located in the city of ribeirão preto, state of são paulo, brazil. the practice was conducted, during the years 2007 to 2012, at the invitation of the landless workers movement – mst. the cultural-historical psychological perspective and the link between developmental psychology and community psychology oriented the activities. the purpose of the practice was contribute to the work of popular educators, building with them instruments to act in different levels: organization of playful and educational activities with children and adolescents; construction of knowledges about childhood to propose actions of defence of their rights with government agencies; involvement with the policies of education of children and young people; integration of children into space of the settlement of land reform. ten adults and 40 children and adolescents of different ages (from three to 17 years old) participated of the activities. the comprehension of mutual construction and learning between settlers and university guided the practice. some of the principal lines of the developed work were: the place of childhood and of the child in the rural settlement; rights of children and adolescents; plays; registry and memory of the activities; child development; rural education; rural-urban relationships; prejudice; sustainability. through the deployment of different methods and languages, there was contribution to the empowerment of adults for the organization of actions for improvement of education policies. we highlight the role built in: mobilizing both adults and children to combat the risks on school transport (which resulted in the visibility of this topic in media, in the conquest of better conditions of vehicles and in the engagement of settlers adults to follow the path between the settlement and the school); the struggle for inclusion in municipal budget funding for the construction of the school in the settlement; and the involvement of children and adolescents in the agroforestry project. it should be noted that the practice was performed in a politically engaged community, mainly due to the history of participation in social movement and the struggle for the consolidation of settlement of agrarian reform. in the joint assessments with the settlers, we concluded that the intervention of the lapsape group contributed to the construction of the identities of the participants as child educators as well as for the construction of autonomy in relation to the argument in favour of public policies, aimed at improving the living conditions of children and adolescents from agrarian reform settlements. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 introdução ao longo da história do brasil, os trabalhadores rurais e agricultores familiares foram submetidos a condições insuficientes de acesso aos bens sociais e de produção. este processo é resultado de um projeto de desenvolvimento que privilegiou a concentração da propriedade da terra e de riqueza, expulsou do campo os pequenos agricultores e produziu desigualdades econômicas e sociais no campo e na cidade, assim como entre a cidade e o campo. as zonas rurais no brasil são as que concentram os piores índices de pobreza e de acesso aos direitos fundamentais. as políticas públicas para o desenvolvimento social e ambiental do campo brasileiro são escassas e enfrentam o desafio de lidar com o conjunto de precariedades historicamente acumuladas no que se refere aos serviços de saúde, educação, moradia, condições sanitárias e previdência rural. na análise da política agrícola direcionada ao setor rural (leite, 2012), evidencia-se a destinação de grande parte dos incentivos econômicos e de benefícios políticos aos médios e, principalmente, grandes produtores rurais representantes do agronegócio e, portanto, a preferência clara por um modelo de produção agrícola baseado no latifúndio e na agricultura de exportação em detrimento da agricultura familiar. como uma forma de resistência a estas políticas e tendo como luta principal a reforma agrária, o movimento camponês no brasil organizou-se, desde a década de 1940, em torno do que se denominou de ligas camponesas. este processo foi reprimido a partir de 1964, quando o golpe civil-militar instaurou a ditadura como regime político, que sobreviveu até final dos anos 1980. neste contexto, muitos militantes comunistas e de esquerda, entre eles lideranças camponesas de todo o país, foram perseguidos e mortos. a emergência dos novos movimentos sociais e sindicais brasileiros de luta pela terra se dá, principalmente, a partir da década de 1980. em 1984, é criado o movimento dos trabalhadores rurais sem terra – mst, o movimento social de maior capilaridade e expressão política no brasil. embora o mst tenha uma forte organização e uma visibilidade nacional, há vários movimentos sociais no campo brasileiro, a maioria de abrangência regional ou local, que pressionam o governo para a efetivação da reforma agrária por meio de ocupações em áreas que não cumprem a função social da terra. com a retomada da democracia e a constituição federal de 1988, os direitos à propriedade rural e a reforma agrária são estabelecidos como princípios atrelados ao cumprimento da função social da terra, a orientar as políticas públicas de redistribuição e democratização do acesso à terra e de construção da justiça social no campo. apesar dessa determinação legal, a maioria dos assentamentos rurais da reforma agráriai só é criada e consolidada a partir da pressão dos movimentos sociais (leite, heredia, medeiros, palmeira, & cintrão, 2004). as lutas pela reforma agrária confrontam a lógica dos grandes proprietários rurais, a caracterizar uma situação de constante conflito, tensão e morte no campo brasileiro. neste contexto, coexistem, geralmente em tensão, a agricultura pautada no agronegócio, na agroindústria e na produção para exportação, e a agricultura familiar, composta por grupos cujas identidades socioculturais são global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 diversas, como assentados da reforma agrária, ribeirinhos, quilombolas, entre outros. compreende-se que a reforma agrária brasileira e o desenvolvimento social do campo são princípios fundamentais para a transformação social e a emancipação dos povos historicamente subalternizados. hoje, no país, de acordo com o instituto nacional de colonização e reforma agrária – incra, há mais de 9.200 assentamentos rurais, nos quais vivem quase um milhão de famílias assentadas (incra, 2015). esta conjuntura coloca em evidência a constituição de novos sujeitos do campo, os assentados da reforma agrária, em suas demandas particulares, configurações de vida específicas, condições de trabalho próprias, produção, moradia, lazer e outras necessidades pessoais e coletivas. apesar desta complexa situação no campo, que compõe parte significativa das problemáticas e da realidade brasileira, a psicologia tem tido inserção pouco expressiva neste contexto (leite & dimenstein, 2013). no âmbito da psicologia comunitária brasileira, lane (1996, p. 26) defende que foram “os trabalhos comunitários desenvolvidos na zona rural, provavelmente os primeiros a falarem em comunidade”, por meio da criação de centros sociais com apoio da igreja católica e orientados pela ideologia do desenvolvimento de comunidade da organização das nações unidas – onu. para a autora, é somente na década de 1990 que são identificadas exceções a esta perspectiva, com alguns projetos que visavam a construção da autonomia e a crítica aos problemas derivados da contradição entre capital e trabalho no campo. freitas (1996), por sua vez, destaca, entre os trabalhos pioneiros em psicologia comunitária no brasil, aqueles desenvolvidos, nas décadas de 1970 e 1980, com comunidades rurais e urbanas na região nordeste do país, na universidade federal da paraíba. apesar de iniciativas e trabalhos pontuais em algumas localidades rurais, é apenas a partir dos anos 2000, provavelmente em virtude do processo de interiorização dos cursos de psicologia no brasil (leite & dimeinstein, 2013), que começa a aparecer um interesse maior da psicologia pelos espaços rurais e áreas de assentamento da reforma agrária. atualmente, há um movimento intencional de aglutinar os pesquisadores e psicólogos que atuam em contextos rurais (conselho federal de psicologia, 2013), a partir de diferentes temáticas, como por exemplo, saúde mental, cultura e processos identitários, relações ruralurbano, movimentos sociais do campo, práticas educativas e vivências intergeracionais. a aproximação dos assentamentos rurais partiu de um convite, feito por assentados da reforma agrária, para que a universidade de são paulo – usp, sob coordenação dos pesquisadores do hoje chamado laboratório de psicologia socioambiental e práticas educativas – lapsapeii, desenvolvesse atividades com as crianças e adolescentes em uma comunidade rural localizada na cidade de ribeirão preto, estado de são paulo, região sudeste do país. o convite nos comprometeu ética e politicamente com os assentados, desafiando a nossa experiência de atuação com formação e infância, acumulada pela pesquisa e intervenção em instituições e comunidades urbanas, desde o início dos anos 2000. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 as crianças do campo sofrem incidência dupla da ausência de políticas públicas. se as populações economicamente ativas do campo foram submetidas a usurpações que as impediram de ter acesso a diversos direitos para o desenvolvimento de suas vidas e de se inserirem nas relações sociais com dignidade, as crianças que vivem em áreas rurais sofreram e sofrem ainda mais, por serem invisibilizadas pelas ações do poder público e da sociedade de modo geral. as políticas públicas, quando existentes, relacionamse apenas com a vertente agrícola do campo, desconsiderando a dinâmica de recriação do rural, de construção de novas ruralidades e do campo como espaço de vida (carneiro, 2011), onde diferentes gerações constroem e depositam seus projetos de esperança, de presente e de futuro (cruz-souza, 2011; silva, 2014). as políticas públicas voltadas para a infância de modo geral, por outro lado, privilegiam as moradoras da cidade, dificultando o acesso das crianças de áreas rurais a direitos básicos como, por exemplo, a escola. por este motivo, pode-se dizer que as crianças brasileiras de área rural sofrem um processo duplo de invisibilidade, seja pelo pertencimento ao campo, seja pela questão etária e geracional. no caso das crianças vinculadas ao mst, destaca-se a vivência de situações de vitimização e de preconceito, uma vez que a imagem social deste grupo é, em grande parte, mediada pelos órgãos de imprensa, a caracterizá-lo no imaginário social como um grupo perigoso à ordem pública. é neste contexto amplo e complexo que se insere a atuação de nosso grupo. o artigo busca apresentar aspectos de uma experiência de prática social comunitária realizada com crianças e com educadores populares do setor de educaçãoiii de um assentamento rural de reforma agrária localizado no município de ribeirão preto, estado de são paulo, brasil. a atuação foi realizada num espaço/tempo específico da comunidade assentada, destinado à socialização e à educação não formal das crianças e adolescentes, sob a responsabilidade dos próprios assentados que, voluntariamente e de forma militante, realizam este trabalho estimulado pela coordenação do mst. o objetivo da atuação foi contribuir para transformações naquela comunidade no que se refere: às relações dos adultos com as crianças; ao acesso das crianças assentadas aos direitos sociais básicos; aos espaços da infância na localidade. o trabalho orientou-se por uma perspectiva ampliada de promoção do desenvolvimento rural que compreende a diversidade do campo e as necessidades específicas dos seus sujeitos em diferentes momentos do ciclo de vida. no caso dos adultos, focalizou-se na problematização crítico-reflexiva das práticas dos educadores populares naquela comunidade, na construção da identidade de educadores infantis – por eles denominados de “cirandeiros” (mst, 2004) – e no papel dos adultos como mediadores e apoiadores das crianças nos processos de luta por seus direitos. breve contextualização da comunidade compreendemos a comunidade como um espaço no qual se metaboliza a dialética entre o individual e o coletivo, caracterizado não por consensos homogeneizadores (sawaia, 2007) ou pela ausência de tensões, mas sim, como o local onde são desenvolvidos recursos pessoais e sociais para lidar coletiva e criativamente com tais problemas e conflitos, de forma a transformar a global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 realidade. o assentamento rural onde realizamos a intervenção, em sua história e organização, sintetiza tal concepção dinâmica de comunidade, a qual procuramos potencializar em nossas práticas. a área do assentamento era uma fazenda de monocultura da cana-de-açúcar, principal fonte da economia agrárioexportadora da região. a desapropriação da fazenda decorreu da pressão de vários atores sociais e envolveu aspectos ambientais e políticos. a iniciativa do pedido de destinação da área para fins de reforma agrária aconteceu em 2000, quando a promotoria de justiça do meio ambiente e conflitos agrários requisitou ao incra a desapropriação, devido elevado passivo ambiental e suspeita de improdutividade econômica. o movimento dos trabalhadores rurais sem terra – mst, que havia chegado à região em 1999, conhecendo o conflito ambiental instaurado, ocupou a antiga fazenda em 2003. vários foram os momentos em que experimentaram os conflituosos processos de reintegração de posse e embate com a polícia, até que a fazenda fosse desapropriada, por meio de decreto presidencial, em dezembro de 2005. neste processo, o mst contou com um amplo apoio de setores da igreja católica, sindicatos, ambientalistas e demais setores progressistas da sociedade civil. o assentamento rural situa-se em uma das áreas de recarga do segundo maior manancial de água doce subterrânea do mundo – o aquífero guarani – e, por esta particularidade ambiental, tem sua proposta de produção baseada em princípios ecológicos e no sistema agroflorestal. foram assentadas 550 famílias que hoje estão organizadas em quatro movimentos sociais e áreas distintas. o assentamento rural que realizamos a intervenção denomina-se “mário lago”iv e corresponde à área composta por 264 famílias. o setor de educação realiza um conjunto de atividades, dentre elas, a organização do espaço/tempo próprio das crianças e adolescentes – denominado pelo mst de “ciranda infantil” – e a formação dos educadores responsáveis por esses espaços (mst, 2004). as cirandas infantis são práticas comunitárias de educação dos filhos dos assentados e acampados. foram criadas em função da necessidade concreta de uma ação partilhada entre a comunidade e as famílias para apoiar a participação dos pais nas atividades do movimento e para promover um espaço que possibilite à criança o seu direito à educação e considere as especificidades da vivência da infância (mst, 2004). dentre os objetivos das cirandas infantis (mst, 2004), destacam-se: a organização de atividades nas quais as crianças sejam sujeitos do processo; o desenvolvimento da cooperação de forma educativa que construa a vivência de novos valores societais; a construção da identidade das crianças como membros do mst; a garantia da formação política e pedagógica permanente das educadoras e educadores infantis. no assentamento mário lago, a ciranda teve sua origem ainda na fase de ocupação da fazenda, em 2003. nossa inserção no projeto ocorreu a partir de 2007. em 2009, a ciranda do “mário lago” foi denominada de ciranda “rumo à liberdade”, após um processo de escolha de aproximadamente dois meses, promovido como parte das atividades de extensão do lapsape e protagonizado global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 por crianças e jovens no envolvimento de toda a comunidade. os objetivos do mst em relação às propostas educativas das crianças dialogaram com nossos princípios teóricos e metodológicos e nortearam a atuação comunitária realizada como uma forma de compartilhamento da compreensão dos papéis dos educadores, dos membros do lapsape e da promoção do espaço da infância no assentamento rural. os princípios teórico-práticos da atuação a atuação pelos membros do lapsape na ciranda infantil “rumo à liberdade” foi baseada predominantemente nas áreas de conhecimento da psicologia social comunitária e psicologia do desenvolvimento. desde a psicologia do desenvolvimento, nossa atuação teve como fundamento teórico-metodológico a perspectiva histórico-cultural, de cunho vigotskiano, o que orientou nossa concepção de sujeito, de desenvolvimento humano, de práticas socioculturais e educativas e, consequentemente, das relações interpessoais em contextos situados, incluindo nossas relações com a comunidade. mesmo reconhecendo as contribuições de autores da psicologia comunitária vinculados a diversas origens (reich, riemer, prilleltensky, & montero, 2007), as especificidades históricas e contextuais de nossa intervenção nos aproximaram dos referenciais latino-americanos. dentre nossos princípios orientadores podemos destacar: a concepção de sujeito dramático e concreto (vigotski, 2000); construção de um projeto que parte da demanda e da escuta da comunidade e a relação teoria e prática (campos, 2007); a construção de uma relação horizontal como princípio dialógico (mayorga, 2007); o reconhecimento da responsabilidade da prática psicológica no processo de promoção da comunidade e a potencialização de processos sociais comunitários no território (guareschi, 1996); o fortalecimento comunitário (freitas, 2010; montero 2006) e sua reflexão em consideração às relações geracionais; a contribuição ao empoderamento psicológico (menezes, 2010); a continuidade das atividades objetivando a autonomia (campos, 2007). a concepção de sujeito dramático e concreto: vigotski (1996, 2000, 2006) nos permite pensar os processos de constituição da mente como necessariamente caracterizados pela complexidade das funções psicológicas e de sua relação originária no seio de sociedades determinadas, histórica e culturalmente situadas, em tempos e espaços específicos. deriva deste entendimento uma concepção também complexa de sujeito, que interioriza as tensões vividas na trama social. o autor entende a personalidade por meio da metáfora do drama, que constitui o embate entre a razão e a emoção construído no jogo das relações sociais e dos papéis por nós vivenciados. uma vez que são tensos e contraditórios esses papéis assim como as relações sociais que os constroem, também a personalidade desta forma se constituiria, abrindo espaço para a concepção do sujeito dramático (vigotski, 2000). a perspectiva histórico-cultural, neste trabalho, é posta em diálogo com a psicologia comunitária a partir de seu posicionamento como uma abordagem teórico-crítica, carregando, do ideário marxista, a proposta de que o psiquismo global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 se dá de forma contextualizada, histórica e dialética, e apontando para a necessidade de comprometimento com uma práxis de transformação da realidade (ximenes & barros, 2009). essa abordagem é partilhada com outros autores da psicologia comunitária brasileira (brandão & bonfim, 1999). orientados por esta perspectiva, em nossa prática, a busca é sempre pelo encontro com o sujeito complexo, na dramaticidade da vida, e concreto, síntese de múltiplas determinações materiais e simbólicas. as identidades de cirandeiro e de assentado da reforma agrária são apenas algumas daquelas que compõem os sujeitos com os quais nos relacionamos, que dialogam, por exemplo, com suas identidades de filhos/filhas, esposos/esposas, pais/mães, membros de grupos religiosos, membros das classes desfavorecidas economicamente. é na trama desses papéis que os adultos incorporam a responsabilidade do conjunto da comunidade na participação da educação coletiva das crianças, a preocupação com a criança e sua formação como uma prática social compartilhada entre a família e o movimento social. isto inclui confrontos, conflitos e desacordos, entre eles e consigo mesmos, promovendo movimentos de empoderamento ou de estranhamento no que se refere aos próprios papéis de educadores populares e de representantes do movimento social nesta tarefa. concorre ainda com esta construção o fato de estarem construindo seus projetos de presente e de futuro buscando concretizar o assentamento em meio às inúmeras dificuldades materiais e ao tempo despendido na obtenção de renda para a sobrevivência. neste movimento, ocorrem processos de desenvolvimento diversos (relacionais, intergeracionais, grupais, identitários), caracterizados por idas e vindas, avanços e retrocessos, transformações e continuidades. desta forma, a atuação procura uma leitura atenta e constante do jogo dos papéis e do drama subjetivo dos participantes, a compreender as posições assumidas pelas e atribuídas às pessoas, marcadas por elementos afetivos, relações de poder, negociações carregadas de conflitos e permeadas por questões de gênero, classe e geração (silva, 2003). trata-se da leitura da qualidade concreta (politzer, 1998) e dramática do sujeito (vigotski, 1929). é o sujeito na concretude viva, emergente, que se expressa na prática comunitária da ciranda infantil. desde esta perspectiva, as dinâmicas em torno da mediação das crianças ao projeto de assentamento e aos princípios do mst ampliam-se para além de uma prática restritiva ao âmbito da educação; a formação de cirandeiros ultrapassa os limites de um projeto de formação de educadores populares. este processo ganha sentido apenas no conjunto da vida dos assentados, no projeto do assentamento, nas práticas e expectativas educativas que vinculam as gerações naquele espaço e na luta cotidiana para a sobrevivência e para a melhoria das condições de saúde, educação, habitação e sociabilidade da comunidade. o trabalho busca refletir com os próprios assentados esse processo, de forma a trazer para a consciência os constrangimentos e, principalmente, a identificação das potencialidades de suas ações e das ações com as crianças e adolescentes, de modo a também implicá-los e reconhecê-los como sujeitos ativos, ligados intergeracionalmente na construção da proposta do assentamento. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 além deste papel mediador, as ações educativas dos cirandeiros também foram concebidas como uma prática social mediadora da relação das crianças com o assentamento, ou seja, de apropriação de signos, de inserção no mundo mediada por diversos outros, de vinculação e pertencimento a um grupo cultural e, consequentemente, de apropriação de formas de pensar, sentir e agir próprios daquele grupo. são compreendidas como práticas de constituição de subjetividades e poderiam ser chamadas de coeducação pelo caráter de troca que as caracterizam. em torno dessas práticas, orbitam significações, valores, projetos de sujeitos e de sociedades em disputa. olhar para elas é colocar em relevo os processos relacionais e de desenvolvimento entre pessoas de diferentes gerações ou coetâneos. elas próprias caracterizam-se como elementos importantes na composição de uma situação social de desenvolvimento (vigotski, 2006) para crianças e adultos; comportam aspectos afetivos, motores, cognitivos, assim como intencionais ou não; conformam-se como um sistema de relações entre o sujeito e a realidade, com peculiares e especificidades nos diferentes períodos do processo de desenvolvimento. do ponto de vista metodológico, esses entendimentos implicam em iniciar o trabalho com as seguintes análises: do contexto da comunidade e do grupo; do cruzamento das histórias que compõem aquele socioambiente, articulando a história de vida dos sujeitos, a história do território (assentamento rural) e do movimento social (mst) e a relação entre essas linhas históricas. esse processo de análise histórica (diacrónica) e contextual (sincrônica) foi feito a partir de muitas visitas à comunidade em diferentes momentos da vida social, de entrevistas com os assentados acerca de suas histórias de vida e do território ocupado, de leituras de documentos produzidos pelo movimento social. ao longo de toda a intervenção e, principalmente, em momentos de início e de avaliação das atividades (que ocorriam conjuntamente com os assentados ao final de cada semestre), foram analisadas, em relação com as possibilidades e potencialidades para o trabalho coletivo com as crianças, as configurações subjetivas concretas dos assentados, o drama complexo em que se encontravam em cada momento na trama afetivo-cognitiva dos diferentes papéis. a construção do projeto a partir da demanda e da escuta da comunidade e a relação teoria e prática: a prática de contribuição na formação dos cirandeiros para a atuação junto aos direitos das crianças da comunidade do assentamento rural “mário lago” foi permeada pela escuta dos atores sociais, de seus desejos, necessidades, projetos e escolhas enquanto um coletivo, na busca de uma compreensão integral do sujeito e de suas demandas. a atuação só tem sentido se opor-se a um pacote pronto de conteúdos e técnicas. trata-se de uma ação formadora negociada com os envolvidos, em que a partir de suas concepções compreende-se o lugar por eles ocupado na comunidade. por meio dessa forma de atuação, que focalizou a participação ativa com ênfase no desejo e na voz dos participantes em todos os processos, privilegiou-se a valorização das competências, capacidades e potencialidades dos membros daquela comunidade (menezes, 2010). a intervenção nesta perspectiva se orienta a partir de uma práxis comunitária na qual teoria e prática são entendidas como indissociáveis (campos, 2007). os global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 conhecimentos dos universitários e dos assentados de reforma agrária dialogam com o objetivo de potencializar a prática de ambos, da qual advêm novos saberes e perguntas que, por sua vez, orientarão outras intervenções e reflexões. este princípio traduziu-se em estratégias metodológicas de planejamento inicial das atividades, realizado coletivamente por meio de dinâmicas que exploravam a dialogia da interação grupal, além da definição de prioridades que articulavam as atividades das crianças com a pauta do assentamento e do mst. as reuniões periódicas mantinham em constância a preocupação quanto à adequação das atividades às demandas dos assentados. a construção de uma relação horizontal como princípio dialógico: os contratos estabelecidos nas conversas iniciais e renegociados ao longo de toda a atuação buscaram intencional e, portanto, conscientemente, a manutenção de uma relação que questiona os poderes atribuídos social e historicamente cada papel dos participantes: adultos assentados; adultos da universidade; crianças e adolescentes assentados. esses papéis são significados por questões de classe e etárias, por relações entre o saber popular e o saber acadêmico. a consciência desta distinção e de sua tensão na construção da relação, antes de ser negada, era objeto das conversas entre assentados e membros do nosso grupo. a horizontalidade, contudo, foi entendida como um desafio e como uma utopia orientadora da inserção no campo, de forma a superar o “pseudodiálogo” (mayorga, 2007). as concepções sobre as formas de cidadania ou emancipação foram construídas conjuntamente durante o processo de nossas práticas. por outro lado, não foram negadas as diferenças existentes entre os universitários e assentados. ao contrário, tal diferença foi problematizada para potencializar a ação coletiva e superar instantes em que a relação de poder poderia estar centrada no nosso grupo. o reconhecimento da responsabilidade da prática psicológica no processo de promoção da comunidade: a atuação comunitária em um espaço e tempo determinados necessariamente implica em responsabilidades éticas e profissionais (guareschi, 1996), com os adultos e as crianças. a promoção da comunidade se realizou pela coconstrução dos saberes e práticas e por um posicionamento de desconstrução de hierarquias, sociais ou etárias. este duplo posicionamento problematizou a comunidade como um espaço em que os conflitos são também atravessados por questões etárias, por relações de poder diferenciadas entre adultos e crianças. esse princípio exigiu métodos: para explicitar os determinantes culturais que impedem que as crianças sejam compreendidas como parte fundamental na construção da comunidade e do espaço do assentamento; para questionar e refletir sobre as práticas dos assentados na relação com as crianças. jogos, histórias e dramatizações foram construídos para essa atividade reflexiva da própria práxis. a promoção da comunidade, desde uma perspectiva etária, passou a ser também um discurso dos assentados que começaram a defender junto a outros setores do assentamento que o empoderamento dos sujeitos no assentamento deve ocorrer independentemente do grupo geracional ao qual fazem parte. o fortalecimento comunitário: global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 partimos da definição de montero (2006) para quem o fortalecimento comunitário implica a construção conjunta de “capacidades e recursos para controlar sua situação de vida, atuando de maneira comprometida, consciente e crítica, para conseguir a transformação de seu entorno segundo suas necessidades e aspirações, transformando ao mesmo tempo a si mesmos” (p. 72, tradução nossa). a partir também do diálogo com os princípios de fortalecimento propostos por freitas (2010), nas intervenções, há uma preocupação constante com: a construção partilhada do sentimento de pertencimento e de comunidade; a sensibilidade e a conscientização dos determinantes sócio-políticos da situação vivida; o posicionamento crítico e histórico frente ao mundo, às relações rural-urbano e às relações geracionais, identificando os determinantes estruturais e conjunturais de sua condição; a capacidade de traduzir este posicionamento crítico em ações efetivas em direção da transformação numa perspectiva coletiva; a busca e o desenvolvimento de estratégias nas intervenções comunitárias que tragam resultados para as crianças, e não apenas individuais ou para os adultos. a estratégia inicial e permanente foi o forte investimento na construção de vínculos de confiança e na explicitação constante de nossos posicionamentos, o que caracterizou o desafio ético de conciliar a aproximação do grupo e a construção de uma relação pautada na sinceridade e na explicitação dos papéis inconciliáveis de assentados da reforma agrária e de membros do nosso grupo, de adultos e crianças. contribuição ao empoderamento psicológico: o empoderamento é entendido como um desenvolvimento interrelacionado das capacidades de autoaceitação e autoconfiança, compreensão social e política, e de envolver-se significativamente no controle de recursos e decisões de sua comunidade (menezes, 2010). na vivência prolongada com os assentados, o fortalecimento da identidade de educador popular atuou em outras esferas da vida afetiva dos sujeitos. isto se deu como uma produção paulatina, verificável nas verbalizações dos assentados que começaram a agregar, nas apresentações de si mesmos, a identidade de educador. também testemunharam transformações ocorridas em seus papéis e relações familiares, decorrentes deste fortalecimento, objeto da ação comunitária. a continuidade das atividades objetivando a autonomia: o desenvolvimento da autonomia (menezes, 2010) foi buscado considerando o aspecto intergeracional do grupo com o qual trabalhamos, ou seja, tanto dos adultos para atuarem na ciranda infantil com as crianças como na construção de estratégias de empoderamento das crianças para que sejam protagonistas em processos de reivindicação de políticas públicas e de melhoria do assentamento. campos (2007) defende que a problemática central da psicologia comunitária é a transformação de indivíduos em sujeitos. ou seja, as práticas nesse campo visavam potencializar a autonomia, a conscientização e a capacidade de atuar dos sujeitos (individuais e coletivos, adultos e crianças) em relação às suas condições de vida e, principalmente, em relação à nossa atuação. as atividades com o grupo de assentados adultos foram global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 mudando ao longo do tempo, em direção a maiores graus de organização e ação autônomas e autogestionárias, as quais pudessem sustentar suas práticas e reflexões na ausência de nosso grupo de psicólogos e universitários. a própria relação autonomia-dependência foi pautada em alguns momentos da intervenção, em particular quando, a partir de algum afastamento do grupo, as atividades com as crianças deixavam de ocorrer ou aconteciam com pouca reflexão e planejamento. a atuação comunitária na ciranda infantil “rumo à liberdade” a atuação, ocorrida de forma continuada, de 2007 a 2102, aconteceu basicamente aos sábados, com periodicidade semanal, em encontros na área coletiva do assentamento, na maioria das vezes no período da manhã. ao longo dos anos, participaram de cada encontro, em média, cinco profissionais da psicologia / membros da universidade, 10 cirandeiros e em torno de 40 crianças e adolescentes de 3 a 17 anos de idade. os encontros possuíam uma natureza não obrigatória sendo que a maioria das crianças e adolescentes tinha uma frequência ativa e alguns participavam mais de determinados períodos. o tempo era dividido em atividade planejada e livre, salientando-se, contudo, que as crianças não necessariamente eram cobradas para realizar as atividades planejadas, o que lhes dava alguma margem de autonomia para construir também alternativas no caso de não quererem participar das propostas estruturadas pelos adultos. ao longo dos anos, a atuação foi desenvolvida por meio de diferentes formatos bem como pela diversificação de atividades e temáticas. essas adequações foram feitas como resultado de uma ação organicamente vinculada às mudanças das demandas dos adultos e das crianças, à medida que a prática se desenvolvia. apesar das diferentes configurações, a metodologia contava sempre com uma estrutura básica que procurava atender às atividades: formativas dos assentados; com as crianças e das crianças; de formação dos membros do lapsape. as atividades com os assentados, partindo da reivindicação para se formarem como educadores populares, buscaram construir um caminho de gradativa aquisição de autonomia para o trabalho com as crianças, modificado sempre que havia uma expressão da confiança em si mesmos. a construção desta identidade precisava acontecer, uma vez que alguns assentados, com pouco domínio da leitura e da escrita, viam-se como incompetentes para mediar, no tempo e no espaço, as ações coletivas com as crianças. três grandes momentos podem ser identificados no processo das atividades com os assentados. no desenho inicial, as atividades eram feitas apenas com os adultos, que acreditavam ser necessária uma aproximação primeira com conteúdos relativos à infânciav para somente depois “colocarem tudo em prática”. neste período, não articulavam as atividades formativas com aquelas que já desenvolviam com as crianças desde o início do assentamento. a problematização deste modelo que separa a teoria e a prática, feita com os assentados, com o tempo, somou-se ao desejo, por eles manifestado, de uma ação direta com as crianças – um indício do embrião da identidade de educador. posteriormente, quando já se sentiam responsáveis pela realização dos global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 encontros com as crianças de modo a articular o momento formativo e o momento com as crianças, o investimento dos encontros priorizou as propostas para as crianças na ciranda e a sistematização de um projeto que assumisse uma concepção de infância e de criança na comunidade; isto conduziu às discussões sobre as condições concretas das crianças na ciranda no assentamento e o espaço que a comunidade desejavalhes construir. também foram discutidas temáticas que abordavam situações de preconceito às quais os assentados e as crianças eram submetidos fora do assentamento, responsabilizando-os para um trabalho de modo a fortalecer as identidades das crianças para o enfrentamento e a superação destas situações. foi destacado o preconceito sofrido no contexto escolar pelas crianças, que adotavam medidas para disfarçar as marcas de terra do trecho de casa para a escola. a temática do preconceito ganhou espaço quando as crianças do assentamento começaram a apresentar problemas na relação com outras crianças na escola e desenvolviam estratégias individuais para enfrentar situações do estranhamento do outro: choro; carregar sapatos adicionais para serem trocados quando chegava à escola; uso de sacos plásticos nas pernas; apelo ao confronto físico. reações que, por vezes, buscavam um distanciamento da identidade de sem terra e, por outras, procuravam mantê-la e defendê-la. nesta etapa, que durou aproximadamente de 2009 a 2010, temas relativos ao protagonismo infantil foram introduzidos nos encontros de discussão com os assentados adultos e com as crianças. as iniciativas de práticas coletivas de escuta das crianças sobre situações vividas na escola e sobre a própria ciranda – como, por exemplo, a promoção de assembleias e reuniões específicas sobre essas questões com as crianças – foram fomentadas na atuação com os assentados e acompanhadas por nosso grupo. por fim, como um terceiro amplo momento das atividades com os adultos, já entre 2011 e 2012, as necessidades de incorporação da criança ao projeto agroflorestal do assentamento traduziram-se na escolha deste modelo de produção como o eixo norteador das ações. foi construído um projeto de criação de um espaço coletivo de cultivo por meio do sistema agroflorestal, especificamente para o manejo das crianças e adolescentes, procurando envolver profissionais da área agrícola e ambiental, especialistas neste tipo de manejo. essa escolha sinalizou para uma integração das crianças como sujeitos do assentamento, possível de ser feita apenas porque já estava atrelada a uma concepção de criança como parte de um grupo. no processo de construção de si como educadores populares, a aproximação sucessiva, provocada pelas atividades crítico-reflexivas, produziu um olhar nos adultos que fortaleceu as proposições gerais do movimento social ao qual pertencem (mst), de inserir as crianças nas pautas de reivindicação do movimento e de melhorias das condições de vida no assentamento. nesse período, foram intensificadas atividades de reivindicação do mst, cruzando as ações e os conteúdos da produção conjunta do espaço de formação da ciranda com as ações que realizavam como membros do movimento social. do ponto de vista do lugar da criança na ciranda, introduziram, de forma ainda incipiente, a função do que denominaram de “cirandeiro mirim”, distribuindo parte das responsabilidades global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 dos educadores para as crianças na condução da própria ciranda. em todos os momentos, uma estrutura básica também era seguida: levantamento no início do semestre das demandas, dificuldades, potencialidades e desejos de ação com as crianças; desenvolvimento dos encontros com as crianças por meio de diferentes recursos; reuniões de avaliação do trabalho, principalmente ao final do semestre, com indicações para o semestre seguinte e com questionamentos sobre os caminhos da atuação, sobre os papéis de cada um e sobre as relações de dependência/autonomia em relação às nossas ações. todas as atividades, do planejamento à avaliação, implicavam em construir e operar com instrumentos e signos diversos, a fim de fomentar e de configurar uma base comum de conversa e de troca. recursos expressivos variados foram explorados, por exemplo: material gráfico, dramatização, leitura e confecção de textos ou portadores de texto, criação de estórias coletivas, confecção de cartas, confecção de objetos a partir de elementos naturais, recursos fotográficos, jogos criados com objetivos específicos, uso de bonecos, tapetes e objetos não estruturados. a ação privilegiou, portanto, a multiplicidade de linguagens, as diversas dimensões expressivas e possibilidades participativas dos sujeitos envolvidos. as atividades com as crianças tinham como eixo central a ludicidade e buscavam trazer para a ciranda temas relativos ao assentamento e às suas vidas, objetivando fundamentalmente que se apropriassem dos espaços, tempos e relações do assentamento. também o trabalho com múltiplas linguagens foi uma estratégia utilizada no engajamento das crianças nas atividades planejadas. os recursos para as ações com as crianças foram: desenho; dramatização; plantio de árvores; escrita de cartas; leitura de histórias e poesias; exibição de filmes; jogos; modelagem com argila; brincadeiras com brinquedos e objetos da natureza; construção de brinquedos e objetos a partir de materiais reciclados. as atividades podem ser consideradas de dois tipos: aquelas circunscritas ao espaço da ciranda; e aquelas destinadas a articular as crianças às ações do movimento social e do assentamento. no primeiro tipo, que concentra a grande maioria das atividades, em cada encontro, temáticas eram propostas por meio de algum recurso ou linguagem, visando fortalecer as identidades pessoais e coletivas e promover o desenvolvimento das crianças em suas múltiplas dimensões. compunham os conteúdos das atividades temas como: a descoberta da história de denominação dos núcleos onde moravam as crianças; vivências de preconceito; as minas de água no assentamento e problemas relativos ao seu uso; agrotóxico e produção agroecológica; riqueza ambiental no assentamento; sistema agroflorestal; espaços do assentamento; espaços da criança no assentamento. no segundo tipo, as atividades eram principalmente realizadas de modo a articular a ciranda às ações de reivindicação do assentamento e à pauta local e nacional do mst, na linha de empoderamento das crianças e de sua construção como sujeitos políticos. nesses momentos, as atividades eram planejadas para que a presença e a voz das crianças, de alguma forma, se fizessem presentes nessas manifestações. como exemplo, podemos citar: elaboração de cartas de reivindicação e panfletos sobre as global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 condições do assentamento; desenhos e redações como pressão para a construção da escola no assentamento; elaboração de músicas e de teatro para apresentação da ciranda em atividades coletivas do assentamento; registro fotográfico do assentamento para exposição na cidade. as cartas foram levadas por crianças e adolescentes, acompanhadas dos adultos, à prefeitura municipal, à promotoria de justiça, à agência financeira responsável pela liberação dos créditos da reforma agrária para a produção e para a construção das casas. algumas das demandas expostas pelas crianças nas cartas, por exemplo, foram: necessidade de instalação de energia elétrica nas ruas e casas do assentamento; necessidade de construção de cisternas e fossas sépticas; entrega de liberação de material para construção das casas; melhoria do transporte escolar e da estrada no assentamento. algumas dessas reivindicações reproduziam as pautas dos adultos, mas eram trazidas pelas crianças como uma ausência compartilhada com o conjunto dos assentados, que afetava profundamente suas vidas. outras reivindicações eram próprias do mundo das crianças e adolescentes, como a construção de um parque infantil, de um campo de futebol e de melhor estrutura no ponto do transporte escolar para se protegerem da chuva e do sol. em uma das atividades, as cartas foram redigidas como convite para que os moradores da cidade fossem conhecer o assentamento e foram entregues às crianças que estavam em um parque público municipal localizado na área urbana. em relação à construção da escola, durante muitos anos, o tema foi pauta do assentamento “mário lago” e dos outros três assentamentos junto aos órgãos governamentais. as crianças, que são transportadas todos os dias para as escolas da cidade, foram incluídas neste processo, tanto para compreender a discussão que os adultos faziam em torno da escola como para manifestar aos adultos a escola que gostariam que fosse construída no assentamento. uma das cartas foi entregue ao ministério público, que mediava a definição da área de construção da escola. instaurou-se uma agenda de luta pela inclusão de verba, no orçamento municipal, para a construção de escola no próprio assentamento. as condições do transporte escolar também foram objeto de ação das crianças com os adultos, cujas manifestações foram levadas ao conselho municipal de educaçãovi, ganhando visibilidade na mídia local (imprensa escrita e televisiva). algumas destas reivindicações foram conseguidas na ação continuada de luta do coletivo do assentamento, por exemplo, a conquista de melhores condições dos veículos para o transporte escolar e a contratação de adultos assentados para acompanhar o trajeto entre o assentamento rural e a escola, visando a segurança e o conforto das crianças no trajeto. foi também realizada uma atividade de fotografia para que as crianças registrassem as imagens que gostariam de apresentar em uma exposição na cidade. nessa ocasião, uma das fotos apresentava o poste de energia, acompanhada da fala de que estavam contentes com aquela conquista do assentamento. outras reivindicações, contudo, não tiveram sucesso; a construção da escola no assentamento continua ainda um sonho para as crianças e adultos. considerações finais o caráter prolongado de inserção na comunidade investiu na atuação com foco global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 no processo mais do que no resultado, sendo este um desdobramento da contínua reconstrução da vida comunitária e das demandas que se modificavam na medida em que determinadas conquistas eram alcançadas e o cenário socioambiental se transformava. durante tal processo, foi possível verificar, por diferentes manifestações e indícios, a potencialização do espaço social comunitário, segundo a concepção de guareschi (1996). as transformações processuais relacionadas a essa potencialização são relativas: à construção da identidade dos cirandeiros; à apropriação que as crianças fizeram da ciranda; à participação das crianças na conquista de melhorias do assentamento; ao papel dos membros da universidade. a promoção da relação intergeracional ocorrida na ciranda e da interação de crianças de diferentes idades impôs desafios para as propostas formativas e para a construção das identidades de educadores (adultos assentados), de membros de um movimento social de luta pela terra (crianças) e de supostos formadores (membros da universidade), constituindo uma ambiência de trocas e aprendizados cujas hierarquias de saber ou etária foram radicalmente questionadas. as ações da psicologia nesta experiência potencializaram um convívio social comunitário dentro do assentamento rural, reiterando a perspectiva de promoção das novas ruralidades como espaço de vida (carneiro, 2011). o principal objetivo foi contribuir para o fortalecimento do vínculo entre os sujeitos e o movimento social no qual eles militam e com a comunidade na qual vivem. as relações ali estabelecidas – mesmo permeadas por tensões e contradições – permitiram que adultos e crianças, a partir da reconfiguração das subjetividades e considerando as singularidades, pudessem protagonizar as ações coletivas, assim como o fortalecer suas atividades individuais e grupais por meio destas ações. dentre os resultados alcançados, destacamos crescente desenvolvimento e sensibilidade da comunidade para a questão da infância. ao longo dessa trajetória, podemos acompanhar as diferentes formas com as quais a comunidade se relacionou com a questão e como constantemente pautou e lutou pela efetivação dos direitos das crianças, de proteção, educação e participação. durante muitos momentos, os assentados mencionaram a importância da atuação no interior da ciranda e da vivência com os membros da universidade como parte do empoderamento dos adultos e das crianças em relação à postura diante da defesa das políticas públicas para a infância, o que foi trabalhado ao longo dos encontros de formação e nas atividades com as crianças, por meio do desenvolvimento de sentidos ampliados sobre os direitos das crianças e adolescentes. contudo, a inserção prolongada na comunidade, pela força que os vínculos construídos acabam assumindo, por vezes, comprometeu a leitura crítica que o lugar da universidade permitiria trazer no diálogo com os assentados. as configurações das relações entre comunidade e universidade, de longo prazo, poderiam ser objeto de pesquisas, uma vez que complexificam o fazer da psicologia comunitária a partir de demandas vinculadas a processos formativos, os quais necessariamente requerem um tempo prolongado para que global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 haja transformação nas práticas sociais e nas interações humanas. ressalta-se que nosso trabalho foi realizado em uma comunidade politicamente engajada, principalmente devido à história de participação no movimento social e à luta pela consolidação do assentamento rural de reforma agrária. entretanto, nas avaliações conjuntas, concluiu-se que a intervenção do grupo contribuiu para o processo de empoderamento da comunidade na defesa dos direitos das crianças, seja pela oferta de conteúdos e repertórios, seja pelas transformações produzidas pelo processo e pelas dinâmicas grupais. isso não significa dizer que as contradições e tensões foram superadas. a problematização da centralidade das atividades (se construídas predominantemente com as crianças, mais do que para ou por elas) ganhou espaço na medida em que avançava esse debate com os cirandeiros, evidenciando-se no plano discursivo; contudo, nem sempre se traduzia na sua efetivação em termos da organização das crianças e das relações com elas estabelecidas. este ponto indica para a necessidade de pesquisas que investiguem as dinâmicas sociais comunitárias que dificultam a construção de novas relações com as crianças e do reconhecimento de sua constituição como sujeito do espaço em que habitam. pode estar em jogo, neste processo, a produção de uma dicotomia entre os direitos de proteção e de participação das crianças, assim como concepções unidirecionais de socialização e de inserção da criança no seu grupo sociocultural. também as transformações nos papéis dos membros do lapsape foram intensas, desde o necessário aprofundamento nas questões relativas ao rural brasileiro à construção de recursos materiais mediadores das interações com os assentados, adultos e crianças. compondo a atuação, além da presença na ciranda, participamos de eventos diversos do assentamento, como: assembleias gerais; atos coletivos e reuniões de organização sobre a homologação dos lotes do assentamento e sobre a assinatura do termo de ajustamento de conduta, que definiu o sistema agroflorestal como um dos pilares da produção no local; festividades e comemorações; reuniões com os assentados nas negociações com os órgãos governamentais, no atendimento aos direitos das crianças à educação de qualidade, principalmente no que se refere à demanda pela escola naquele território, às condições do transporte escolar e à obtenção de vagas das crianças em creches e pré-escolas. vivenciar essas experiências com os assentados auxiliou na ampliação da compreensão sobre os sentidos da comunidade e sobre o papel e importância da ciranda na construção do assentamento e na vinculação intergeracional que ali ocorre. essa experiência de atuação comunitária acrescentou ainda muitos desafios aos modos como trabalhávamos em organizações urbanas, a demandar um constante processo de reflexão sobre o papel e os limites da nossa atuação, além da leitura acurada e da análise sensível na avaliação e reorganização de nossas ações de acordo com o momento vivenciado na comunidade, com os adultos, as crianças e com o movimento social. a imbricação de muitos dos pressupostos por nós adotados com os pressupostos do próprio movimento social, dificultam uma avaliação precisa sobre o papel da intervenção junto às ações naquela global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 comunidade assentada. pereira e guzzo (2014), também em trabalho realizado com crianças em assentamento de reforma agrária, convocam os profissionais a ocuparem tais espaços para a construção de práticas de conscientização e fortalecimento comunitário, mas, ao mesmo tempo, sinalizam como, muitas vezes, essas ações são avaliadas como militância e não como trabalho profissional. esta questão aponta para o tênue limiar que se estabelece na ação da psicologia comunitária de cunho transformador com as identificações hegemônicas que circulam no imaginário social acerca dos grupos que politizam suas causas e demandas. esse aspecto comporta problematizações que merecem investimentos futuros, a problematizar tanto as forças externas que atuam no julgamento da ação dos psicólogos como as tramas que se estabelecem entre eles e as pautas das comunidades vinculadas a movimentos sociais. de qualquer forma, podemos verificar que foi exatamente a junção de ambos os sujeitos, cimentada pelo compartilhamento de posicionamentos e pelo reconhecimento de lugares e funções distintas, que auxiliou a construção de um vínculo que serviu de fonte para a criação de espaços de potência e de nossa intervenção na busca de um papel de facilitador, que deu suporte à participação e ao protagonismo dos membros da comunidade, elementos característicos do fazer na psicologia comunitária (menezes, 2010). a intervenção descrita e analisada permite a reflexão sobre as potencialidades do trabalho da psicologia comunitária em comunidades rurais desfavorecidas economicamente, como um importante mediador da promoção da luta pelos direitos sociais básicos. a precariedade da oferta de serviços, assim como a lentidão no processo da reforma agrária, produz um permanente estado de luta, a demandar constantemente energias dos assentados na organização da comunidade para a defesa dos direitos coletivos. este aspecto concorre com as demandas da vida diária, com a necessidade de buscar alternativas para a sobrevivência e com as expectativas de construção de novas relações geracionais e com o ambiente natural, constituindo uma situação dramática que submete os assentados a processos bastante desgastantes pessoal e coletivamente, física e mentalmente. nesse sentido, aponta-se para a necessidade de políticas públicas que favoreçam o trabalho do psicólogo em equipes multiprofissionais que atuem em serviços de atendimento básico a esta população, por meio de políticas de educação (escolas nos assentamentos rurais), saúde (unidades de estratégia de saúde da família) e assistência social (centros de referência, fortalecimento de cooperativas e centros comunitários, por exemplo). a presença desses equipamentos na comunidade poderia produzir ações integradas e garantir o acesso aos direitos sociais básicos, como os citados neste trabalho, por exemplo, relacionados à infraestrutura, transporte e vagas em escolas próximas de casa. além disto, a intervenção relatada aponta para a necessidade de investigações futuras nesses contextos, de modo a explicitar as demandas próprias e específicas dessas localidades para a psicologia comunitária e os efeitos da ausência das políticas públicas na organização subjetiva de suas populações e grupos etários. por outro lado, também é necessária a investigação dos efeitos psicológicos de políticas específicas para essas populações de forma a evidenciar possíveis processos de global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 guetização e discriminação que as próprias políticas poderiam causar. é sabido que as políticas públicas podem ser elas mesmas produtoras de processos de exclusão. nossa atuação conduziu os princípios da psicologia comunitária para um campo de diálogo com as ações educacionais, geracionais e etárias, historicamente marcadas por hierarquias que desconsideram a criança como sujeito. tal perspectiva nos leva a compreender a contribuição de nossa atuação nos avanços comunitários nessas áreas, inclusive na compreensão da dimensão ética e relacional desta prática em psicologia (montero, 2008). esses desafios representam reflexões que corroboram com montero (2008) no que se refere à psicologia comunitária não apenas como um modelo de intervenção, mas como uma práxis de reflexão crítica sobre a participação em um momento da comunidade, como coconstrutora de propostas de transformação social. referências bibliográficas brandão, i. r. & bomfim, z. a. c. 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(2014). ciranda infantil, a educação das crianças “sem-terrinhas”: um desafio à psicologia. anais do xix encontro de iniciação científica; issn 1982-0178. politzer, g. (1998). crítica dos fundamentos da psicologia: a psicologia e a psicanálise. são paulo: editora unimep. reich,s. m.; riemer, m.; prilleltensky, i. & montero, m. (orgs.) (2007). internacional community psychology: history and theories. new york, usa: springer. sawaia, b. b. (2007). comunidade: apropriação científica de um conceito tão antigo quanto a humanidade. in: r. h. f. campos (org.). psicologia social comunitária: da solidariedade à autonomia. petrópolis, rj: vozes. silva, a. p. s. (2003). (des)continuidade no envolvimento com o crime: construção de identidade narrativa de ex-infratores. são paulo: ibccrim. silva, a. p. s. (2014). psicologia do desenvolvimento e psicologia socioambiental: interface a partir do contexto rural. relatório final de pós-doutorado, instituto de psicologia, universidade de são paulo – ipusp. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 vigotski, l. s. (1929). psicologia concreta do homem. manuscrito de 1929. educação e sociedade, 21(71), 21-44. ______________. (1996). teoria e método em psicologia. são paulo: martins fontes. ______________. (2000). a formação social da mente. 6ª edição. trad. josé cipolla neto, luis s. m. barreto e solange c. afeche. são paulo: martins fontes, 2000. ______________. (2006). obras escogidas iv: psicologia infantil. madrid: visor y a. machado libros. (original publicado em 1933). ximenes, v. m.; barros, j. p. p.. (2006). perspectiva histórico-cultural: que contribuições teórico-metodológicas podem dar à práxis do psicólogo comunitário? psicol. argum., curitiba, 27(56), 65-76. notas i “acampamento” e “assentamento” rural de reforma agrária são espaços/tempos que passam a compor de forma mais intensa o cenário rural brasileiro no final da década de 1980. o primeiro termo caracteriza a ocupação temporária de terras, organizada por famílias em um movimento social de luta pela terra, com o objetivo de conquistar a área. o segundo termo refere-se já à situação em que a terra foi legalizada para fins da reforma agrária. ii o lapsape, situado na faculdade de filosofia, ciências e letras de ribeirão preto (ffclrp) da universidade de são paulo (usp), foi criado em maio de 2015, resultado do desdobramento dos trabalhos do grupo até então denominado seiterra (subjetividade, educação e infância em territórios rurais e de reforma agrária). a expansão da atuação em comunidades não apenas localizadas em áreas rurais e o interesse em uma perspectiva com influência dos debates da relação entre sujeitos, comunidade e questões ambientais impulsionou a criação deste laboratório. fazem parte do lapsape alunos de graduação em psicologia, de iniciação científica, mestrado, doutorado e psicólogos e pedagogos já formados pelo grupo. iii os acampamentos e os assentamentos rurais vinculados ao mst estruturam-se em torno de setores e de uma coordenação geral. os principais setores são: saúde; segurança; esporte, cultura e lazer; finanças; secretaria; educação; produção (firmiano, 2009). os membros dos setores e da coordenação geral estão subordinados às decisões da assembleia geral, realizada periodicamente. além da organização social acima descrita, há a setorização relacionada à divisão espacial por meio de lotes individuais e de áreas coletivas, sendo que um conjunto determinado de lotes é considerado um núcleo, cada qual possuindo um representante na coordenação geral. todas as representações são igualmente compostas por homens e mulheres. iv mário lago foi um intelectual marxista e artista brasileiro com expressão nacional, vinculado a um ideário de esquerda. é uma prática do mst nomear os territórios por eles ocupados com nomes de personalidades associadas às bandeiras dos movimentos populares. v nesse primeiro momento, os temas abordados nos encontros basicamente trataram do resgate das brincadeiras na história de vida de cada um, do repertório de brincadeiras e da cultura popular na comunidade, além de discussões sobre infância e direitos da criança. vi instância de definição das políticas públicas de educação, o conselho municipal de educação é constituído por membros da administração pública indicados pelo poder público municipal e por representantes eleitos da sociedade civil e de entidades de classe vinculadas a área da educação. microsoft word jacobtebes_theoriesmodelsscience_formattedfinal.docx theories, models, and science in community psychology jacob kraemer tebes yale university keywords: theory, science, community psychology, framework author biography: jacob kraemer tebes is a community/clinical psychologist and professor of psychiatry (psychology), in the child study center, and in public health at yale university; director of the division of prevention and community research; and director of the consultation center. he also serves as chief psychologist at the connecticut mental health center and is editor-in-chief of the american journal of community psychology. his professional activities include research, practice, teaching, and administration, mostly related to issues of equity and social justice. his scholarship focuses on resilience promotion, the prevention of adolescent substance use, integrating cultural perspectives into practice and research, and the implications of philosophy of science for community research and community psychology. dr. tebes also trains and consults to public agencies and community-based organizations on program implementation and systems reform, and on building and sustaining evaluation capacity. finally, he teaches postdoctoral and doctoral fellows in community research and practice, and is the program director of a nida t32 postdoctoral research training program in substance abuse prevention. recommended citation: tebes, j.k. (2016). theories, models, and science in community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(2), pages 1-11. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). correspondence should be sent to jacob k. tebes, ph.d., division of prevention & community research and the consultation center, yale university school of medicine, 389 whitney avenue, new haven, ct 06511-2369. email: jacob.tebes@yale.edu. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 theories, models, and science in community psychology i appreciate the opportunity to comment on the paper by jason, stevens, ram, miller, beasley, and gleason (2016) entitled, “theories in the field of community psychology.” the authors tackle an important, but often neglected issue – the use of theories in science – and consider how well theories in community psychology advance scientific inquiry. jason et al. (2016) provide a valuable service to our field in their examination of theories in community psychology, and specifically, theories in three major areas: ecological theory, sense of community, and empowerment. their brief review of theory in each area provides a useful summary and a call to action for further specification of theory. they have started a conversation vital to our field’s future. despite my enthusiasm for several parts of their paper, i have a number of concerns. these include the authors’: 1) assumptions about contemporary science, 2) assessment of theories in community psychology relative to those in other fields in psychology, 3) overemphasis on theory as opposed to models in science, and 4) lack of attention to other epistemologies in community psychology that hold scientific promise for our field. i discuss each of these briefly below. assumptions about contemporary science the authors’ implicit view of science is based on a philosophy of science known as logical empiricism, which is a twentieth century adaptation and extension of nineteenth century logical positivism (tebes, 2012). logical empiricism replaced positivism because it offered a practical way – the (hypotheticodeductive) scientific method – to conduct science; in which a researcher begins with an a priori hypothesis derived from theory that is then tested inductively by observations made under specific conditions (mcguire, 1986). until about the 1960s, this was the standard way to do science, and was defensible in the philosophy of science. however, as philosophers noted at the time, this view assumed that observations were independent of theory, when in fact, they were constrained by the very theories they purported to test (popper, 1935/1959). kuhn (1962/1970) and other philosophers of science showed that theories, and the paradigms in which they were embedded, were shaped by extra-scientific factors – social, historical, cultural, and psychological forces – that influenced the norms and acceptability of a given theory among scientists. as a result, the implicit assumptions underlying the standard view of science based on logical empiricism were inherently flawed (longino, 2013). as gergen (1988) has noted, one cannot separate out “observational language from theoretical presuppositions” (p. 2) because theories determine “what counts as evidence, confirmation and discomfirmation” (p. 3). further, because words acquire meaning within specific contexts and theories are posited in language that is context-free, “there is no viable account of how it is that theories actually predict phenomena in nature (gergen, 1988, p. 3). thus, if observations and the language used to describe them are flawed representations of reality subject to extra-scientific factors, theories in science are an imperfect “house of cards” upon which conceptions of reality global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 are based. the above critiques are well known and have been made by philosophers of science (e.g., bhaskar, 1975; giere, 2006; longino, 2013; morgan & morrison, 1999), scholars in the social sciences (e.g., manicas & second, 1983; manicas, 2006; mcguire, 1986, 1989), and community psychologists (tebes, 2005, 2012; tebes, thai, & matlin, 2014; trickett & espino, 1994). i am sure the authors know them well. however, the authors’ extended discussion of reichenbach’s (1938) “context of discovery” vs. “context of justification,” and its central place in their argument, suggests that there is a disconnect between their knowledge of this history and its implications for the importance of theories in science, and in community psychology. the authors repeatedly return to the distinction made by reichenbach (1938) – that is, the context of discovery vs. the context of justification, which philosophers refer to as the dj distinction (hoyningen-huene, 2006) – as central to why theories in community psychology do not quite measure up as scientific. however, as philosophers since kuhn have maintained, this distinction is less relevant for theory and science if one accepts kuhn’s central thesis: that the practice of science is inextricably embedded in social, historical, cultural, and psychological factors (hoyningenhuene, 2006). for kuhn (1962/1970), the dj distinction is mostly a false dichotomy since the context of justification is just as embedded in extra-scientific factors as those that shape the context of discovery (hoyningen-huene, 2006; nickles, 1980). the authors are mindful of this issue, and cite work that has sought a rapprochement between the proponents and critics of the dj distinction (hoyningen-huene, 2006). the authors note that such a rapprochement seeks to establish a “normative perspective” among scholars for “the evaluation of scientific claims” (hoyningen-huene, 2006, p. 130). however, after summarizing the adequacy of theories in community psychology, they return to characterizing the dj distinction as one between conducting “exploratory” research vs. research that seeks to “develop a good theory” and that utilizes “rigorous methods” (jason et al., 2016, p. 18). consistent with kuhn and with other critics of the dj distinction, i would argue that both types of dj research – discovery and justification – are effectively exploratory and both use rigorous methods, depending on the context of inquiry and questions examined. status of theory in community psychology relative to theory in other fields in psychology another concern i have is that, when it comes to theory development, jason et al. (2016) hold community psychology to a higher standard than other fields in psychology. more specifically, if community psychology has yet to produce adequate theories for scientific inquiry, one must ask: compared to what? i give two examples to illustrate the complexity of answering this question generally for psychology, and specifically for community psychology. a well-developed theory in social psychology is the theory of planned behavior (tpb, ajzen, 1985), which is an extension of the theory of reasoned action (fishbein & ajzen, 1975). tpb stipulates that intention immediately precedes a given behavior and itself has global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 three intersecting influences: one’s attitude toward the behavior, subjective norms about the behavior, and perceived behavioral control (azjen, 2015). each of these influences is further affected, respectively, by one’s beliefs about the likely consequences of the behavior, normative expectations for others important to the person faced with the behavioral choice, and various factors that control effective behavioral performance. tpb has been widely studied in a variety of health contexts related to health behavior change and public health. its specificity has enabled the theory to be examined carefully in both cross-sectional and longitudinal observational studies as well as in randomized controlled trials (azjen, 2015; sniehotta, presseau, & araujasoares, 2014). the utility of the theory has had mixed assessments as a theory of behavior change, but it has been useful as a theory to specify conditions under which behavioral intentions result in specific behaviors (azjen, 2015; sniehotta et al., 2014). my guess is that jason et al. (2016) would regard tpb a theory to which community psychologists should aspire, and i would agree. in another example, in the fields of neuropsychology, physiological psychology, and cognitive science there has been considerable research conducted on the proposed theoretical principles of equipotentiality and mass action (lashley, 1929, 1950). mass action (lashley [1929] originally called it mass function) refers to the notion that the brain functions as an integrated system (mass action) in which specific neurons, when necessary, can take on functions ordinarily carried out by other neurons (equipotentiality). lashley based his theory on ablation studies of rats, and we now know that his observations were the result of how he measured performance; he used an approach that was standard at the time and produced results which challenged the prevailing models of the brain which emphasized localization of function (elliott & carson, 2000). nevertheless, lashley’s theory about equipotentiality and mass action in the first half of the 20th century was enormously influential theoretically in explaining how laboratory animals and some humans could recover specific functions, such as speech and language, despite having lesions in regions of the brain usually associated with those functions. however, as scientists were able to map brain functions with greater precision, the original principles were shown to have less utility because of previously unrecognized interconnections within the brain that accounted for the observed effects (elliott & carson, 2000). despite these limitations, the influence of lashley’s theoretical principles were considerable as scientists conceptualized the brain as an integrated neural network (hebb, 1949), and identified pervasive and distributed brain functions, including those for cognition, language, and action (hagoort, 2005; sporns, 2011; willems & hagoort, 2007). clearly, lashley did not have a fully developed theory of the brain in articulating his principles of equipotentiality and mass action, and once they were assessed using more varied measurement approaches, they did not survive what jason et al. (2016) would consider the context of justification. however, their influence as a model of brain function was quite global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 significant, and arguably, quite relevant to contemporary theories of the brain. their abiding influence represents the value of the context of discovery in science and how models of behavior can have enormous scientific influence, even in the absence of a well-articulated theory. in my view, jason et al.’s (2016) analysis of ecological theory is similar in many ways to lashley’s principles of equipotentiality and mass action. jason et al. (2016) summarize ecological theory as described by kelly (1968; 2006) as well as bronfenbrenner (1979), noting that kelly’s emphasis on interdependence, cycling of resources, adaptation, and succession provides somewhat greater specificity than bronfenbrenner’s embedded socio-ecological contexts for human development. however, for both aspects of ecological theory as used in community psychology, jason et al. (2016) correctly point out that this “theory” operates mostly as a “framework” because it provides a basis for specifying various models and hypotheses, but not specific predictions based on the theory. this is very similar to what lashley introduced to neuropsychology when he proposed a theoretical framework for the brain that described the two principles of equipotentiality and mass action. lashley’s framework was not a fully developed theory of the brain, but it stimulated subsequent productive science on the brain; ecological theory has had a similar impact on science in community psychology. overemphasis on theory as opposed to models in science the authors focus their paper on theories in the field of community psychology. however, in recent years, a number of philosophers of science (frigg & hartmann, 2012; giere, 2006, 2010; morgan & morrison, 1999; nersessian, 2006) have emphasized the centrality of models, even more so than theories, to advance science. although the authors make a case for the value of theory, i think much of what takes actually place in science – especially when doing research in what the authors would refer to as the context of discovery – involves conceptualizing and testing models. models represent some middle ground between theory and observation, are intended as representations of the world, and are usually tied to the contexts in which observations take place (frigg & hartmann, 2012; giere, 2006; nersessian, 2006). this view is consistent with jason et al. (2016), although to be fair, they did not go into any depth describing models. one value of models is that they are nonlinguistic; that is, they are less constrained by language as a representation of the world (giere, 1988; morrison & morgan, 1999). this allows models to transcend some of the limitations of language endemic to theory. as a result, models function as physical, graphical, mathematical, or computational depictions of the world (frigg & hartmann, 2012; haig, 2013; nersessian, 2006) that serve as autonomous agents between theories and observations to mediate their relationship (morrison & morgan, 1999). this affords scientists freedom to characterize the world apart from the language of theory (giere, 2010), thus producing more useful, accurate, and locally-grounded observations (dunbar, 1999; giere, 2010). examples of this are found in studies of how scientists think; global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 their use of model building through analogous reasoning and distributed cognition in teams illustrates how science advances in the context of discovery (dunbar, 1999, 2000; nersessian, 2006). since community psychology is centrally focused on action and inquiry that is culturally situated and local, and often involves participatory approaches with various stakeholders, a focus on modelbuilding over theory-building is likely to have significant benefits for advancing science. there are numerous successful examples of how such collaborative, culturally grounded research has advanced action as well as science in the field (allen & mohatt, 2014; andrews et al., 2012; brodsky, 2009; jason, 2013; tebes et al., 2014). lack of attention to other epistemologies in community psychology that hold scientific promise the authors’ scope was ambitious – theories in the field of community psychology – and so it is natural that they were unable to incorporate most of the relevant work related to their topic. one area that needs further consideration is other major epistemologies in community psychology and their implications for scientific inquiry. the term epistemology refers to how one comes to know the world and to make knowledge claims about it (tebes, 2005). i conclude this commentary with a brief discussion of this issue and its implications. as noted at the outset of this essay, the authors adopted a framework for science grounded in logical empiricism, a view no longer accepted by philosophers of science. what replaced logical empiricism in philosophy was various forms of realism (bhaskar, 1975; giere, 2006; harre, 2009; manicas & secord, 1983). this view holds that there is a reality “out there” independent of one’s construction of it (i.e., realism) and that the natural world, including human beings, can be known (albeit imperfectly) through direct engagement and observation (i.e., naturalism) (tebes, 2005, 2016). for scientists, the shift from logical empiricism has had little practical consequence; they retained the scientific method but accepted its philosophical limitations by adopting a pragmatic solution; that is, a stance that allows for theoretical and methodological pluralism in which no method or theory is considered, a priori, to be better than another (tebes, 2005, 2012). certainly scientists have their biases about which theories and methods they find most useful, but norms are generally established within each field for what constitutes scientific inquiry. within methodology, this pragmatic solution has come to be known as “critical multiplism” (cook, 1985; shadish, cook, & campbell, 2002). realist philosophies of science depart from the approach adopted by the authors because they do not regard explanation and prediction as the sine qua non of science, but rather, one component of a broader science that seeks to describe how phenomena interact in the world (manicas, 2006). theory directs the scientist “to provide an understanding of the processes which jointly produce the contingent outcomes of experience” (manicas, 2006, p. 1). in this view, understanding the interactions of various aspects of the world is what science is all about, and theories – in the natural and social sciences – determine where scientists should look. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 giere (2006)’s scientific perspectivism is another realist philosophy of science that further emphasizes how observations of the world are a distinctively human activity; they constitute a perspectival reality from the point of view of the observer, something i have written about elsewhere in describing perspectivism, which i have argued is a foundational, constructivist philosophy of science for our field (tebes, 2012, 2016; tebes et al., 2014). although the authors briefly summarize perspectivism in their paper, i believe they do not fully appreciate the implications of perspectivism for their thesis: that while science may include a focus on explanation and prediction, those are not its only or even primary purposes. the scientist seeks to construct a contextualized understanding of the natural world for various purposes, such as understanding and action as well as explanation and prediction. thus, the task for contemporary science is broader than it was for logical empiricism, and requires more pluralistic theories, models, methods, and voices. community psychology embraces a number of epistemological traditions relevant to this task that the authors do not address. along with perspectivism, our field also has strong philosophical roots in pragmatism, feminism, and critical theory, which elsewhere i have argued serve as foundations for a philosophy of science of community psychology (tebes, 2016). pragmatism (biesta, 2010; dewey, 1905; mertens, 2007; vanderstraeten, 2002) provides a basis for understanding meaning and action, including action research, mixed methods, and program evaluation (biesta, 2010; tebes, 2016). the interdependence in our field between practice and research or social action and science is consistent with dewey’s emphasis on action as the source of knowledge. feminism and critical theory have contributed essential frameworks, theories, and models to advance scientific understanding in community psychology, often in direct resistance to the standard view of science embodied by logical empiricism (campbell & wasco, 2000; nelson & prilleltensky, 2010; tebes, 2016). as a central foundation for community psychology, feminism’s contribution to our field’s scientific inquiry has emphasized situated knowing, participatory approaches, diverse methods, and action (bond, hill, mulvey, & terenzio, 2000; campbell & wasco, 2000; haraway, 1988; harding, 1986; lather, 1991; longino, 1990, 2013; riger, 1992). critical theory, as another philosophical foundation for community psychology, has focused on human experiences of power and oppression as well as resistance, emancipation, and liberation through individual and collective action (fox, prilleltensky, & austin, 2009; horkheimer, 1931/1993; martı´n-baro, 1994; mertens, 2007; nelson & prilleltensky, 2010; teo, 2015). each of these approaches has moved our field away from a logical empiricist approach to science to one that embraces catalytic or transformative change (lather, 1991; mertens, 2007). these four philosophical foundations for our field – perspectivism, pragmatism, feminism, and critical theory – have overlapping constructivist epistemologies with implications for science in community psychology (tebes, 2016). in future work, the authors may wish to incorporate these into their analysis, and discuss how each offers opportunities for global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 scientific theoryand model-building for community psychology. references ajzen, i. 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(2007). neural evidence for the interplay between language, gesture, and action: a review. brain and language, 101, 278-289. community psychology coverage in introduction to psychology textbooks heather m. bauer, olya glantsman, lauren hochberg, carleigh turner & leonard a. jason1 author biographies: heather bauer obtained a bachelor’s degree in psychology from depaul university, during which she began her interest in community psychology. olya glantsman, phd, earned a doctorate in community psychology and a graduate certificate in women’s and gender studies from depaul university in 2013. she is currently the director/coordinator of their undergraduate concentration in community psychology and a visiting professor in depaul’s psychology department. she also serves as an affiliate faculty member of the community psychology ph.d. program. dr. glantsman has been active in the society for community research and action (american psychological association, division 27) since 2002. her research interests include cultural diversity, improving academic environments for students and faculty, community psychology values, and the teaching of psychology. lauren hochberg is an intern at depaul university’s center for community research, and studies community psychology and sociology at depaul university. carleigh turner is a graduate of miami university, and currently a care advocate at gateway foundation & volunteer at depaul university community psychology lab. leonard jason is a professor of clinical and community psychology at depaul university. he is the director of the center for community research, where over 25 staff work on 4 nih-funded studies. 1 depaul university global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 recommended citation: bauer, h.m., glantsman, o., hochberg, l., turner, c., & jason, l.a. (2017). community psychology coverage in introduction to psychology textbooks. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(3), 1-11. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). author notes: address correspondence to leonard a. jason, center for community research, depaul university, 990 w. fullerton ave., suite 3100, chicago, il. 60614 http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/) global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 community psychology coverage in introduction to psychology textbooks abstract the field of community psychology is approximately 50 years old, and it has become an active and invigorating source of ideas (e.g., prevention, ecological theory, sense of community, empowerment, participatory-based research, providing care to marginalized populations, etc.) for the overall field of psychology. however, many undergraduates have never heard of this discipline in part because introductory psychology textbooks are not providing adequate coverage of this field. the current study examined 53 introductory psychology textbooks, published between 2010 and 2016, for their coverage of the field of community psychology. findings indicated that only 17% of these textbooks contained an adequate representation of the discipline of community psychology. the lack of adequate coverage of this field in most introductory psychology textbooks has significant implications for attracting undergraduates to this content area. fifty percent of the textbook authors responded to an email that provided them information regarding the current study, and many indicated that new versions of their textbooks could include information from the field of community psychology. this positive response suggests that many authors are willing to better represent the field of community psychology in their introductory psychology textbooks. in 1965, attendees of the boston conference on the education of psychologists for community mental health, commonly known as the “swampscott conference,” recognized the lack of adequate mental health services for the most vulnerable and marginalized populations; this was the birth of the field of community psychology in the us (anderson et al., 1966). this field incorporates ecological theory, research, and practice regarding contextual issues regarding the relationship and mutual influences between people and their social environments (kelly, 2006). community psychologists work to reduce stigma and oppression by providing those who are marginalized genuine opportunities to be involved as agents of change in their own communities (kloos, hill, thomas, wandersman, elias, & dalton, 2012). this discipline seeks to prevent adversities and promote wellness through building upon existing community assets and individual strengths (cowen, 1994). community psychology is deeply rooted in values including social justice, empowerment, and collaboration, which are used to address the issues and problems plaguing our society such as poverty, homelessness, and drug abuse (moritsugu et al., 2013). these ideas are summarized in the society for community research and action’s (scra, 2017) website that states: “community psychologists go beyond an individual focus and integrate social, cultural, economic, political, environmental, and international influences to promote positive change, health, and empowerment at individual and systemic levels.” however, if community psychology is underrepresented within introductory psychology textbooks, it could reduce the awareness and interest in this field of study among undergraduates. such underrepresentation could affect undergraduate students’ opportunities to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 learn of the potential within this field to better understand and ultimately help solve many social and community problems. undergraduates exposed to community psychology could use its principles in their future careers, and some might even decide to obtain further training in this discipline. evidence of underrepresentation there is evidence that the field of community psychology is underrepresented in introductory psychology textbooks. as an example, lucas, raley, washington, and blazek (2005) examined 57 full length and brief introductory psychology textbooks published between 2000 and 2003. the authors found that the term community psychology was used in only 21% (12 of the 57) of the textbooks. in an unpublished study, sarkisian and taylor (2009) evaluated 36 introductory psychology textbooks published between 2005 and 2009 for language clearly related to community psychology and found that only 31% (11 out of 36) of the textbooks included any language clearly related to community psychology. finally, griggs and jackson (2013) analyzed nine brief introductory psychology textbooks published between 2011 and 2013, and their article indicated no mention of the field of community psychology. two of the studies above are dated, as the study by lucas et al. (2005) examined textbooks only up to 2003 and sarkisian and taylor (2009) examined textbooks up to 2009. in addition, the griggs and jackson (2013) study only analyzed brief introductory psychology textbooks. there is a need to examine introductory psychology textbooks that have been more recently published. the purpose of the present study is to analyze the extent to which community psychology is mentioned in full length (as opposed to brief) introduction to psychology textbooks published between 2010 and 2016. in addition, the study investigated whether a textbook included an adequate discussion of the field. the results of this study provide upto-date information about the coverage of community psychology that is available to students through introductory psychology textbooks. methods materials the sample included 53 introductory psychology textbooks. each textbook was the most recent edition, published between 2010 and 2016. either a physical or electronic version of each textbook was reviewed. the electronic version of a textbook was accessed via amazon.com. procedure as an initial step, a list of the most recent editions of introduction to psychology textbooks was assembled. the list was generated using a broad search on google, and then using a more refined search on textbooks.com and amazon.com. some key words used to find textbooks on these websites were ‘psychology’, ‘introduction’, ‘understanding’, ‘discovering’, and ‘essentials’. next, a search was done on amazon.com to look specifically for an electronic version of each textbook. textbooks that did not have an electronic copy available online were requested through an interlibrary loan system at depaul university’s library. searching for references to community psychology once a textbook was secured, the book’s index was searched for the terms ‘community psychology’ or ‘community psychologist’. if either of those terms were listed in the book’s index, then the pages listing either term were read in their entirety. if ‘community http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 psychology’ or ‘community psychologist’ were not listed in the book’s index, then the book’s table of contents was reviewed to find information pertaining to the various subfields of psychology. if the book’s table of contents indicated that the book had information pertaining to the various subfields of psychology, then the pages dedicated to this information were read for reference to ‘community psychology’ or ‘community psychologist’. data were recorded regarding whether or not the book mentioned ‘community psychology’ or ‘community psychologist’. if either term was mentioned, then the location of either term as well as the description provided for either term were recorded. analysis of content next, the textbooks’ descriptions of community psychology were analyzed for whether they described essential aspects of community psychology, which included a number of terms such as: empowerment, providing care to marginalized populations, principles of ecological theory, prevention, collaboration, sense of community, participatory approaches, and improving the overall quality of communities (jason et al., 2004; kloos, hill, thomas, wandersman, elias, & dalton, 2012; moritsugu, vera, wong, & duffy, 2013). if a textbook included a discussion of the various subfields in psychology, to be counted as an adequate description, community psychology had to be mentioned and described alongside the other subfields in psychology. in addition, if an author mentioned community psychology in two different textbooks, both accounts of the descriptions of community psychology were recorded (e.g., king, 2015, 2016). examples of adequate descriptions of community psychology included the following: “improve the quality of relationships among people, their community, and society” and “create communities that support residents' needs” (king, 2016, p. 17); “work to create social and physical environments that are healthy for all” (myers & dewall, 2016a, p. 12); and “ensure that psychological services reach people who need help but tend not to seek it,” “prevent psychological disorders by promoting resilience and other personal strengths,” “work with community leaders and neighborhood organizations to improve stressful conditions that can cause psychological disorders” (bernstein, 2016, p. 6). results a total of 53 introductory psychology textbooks were analyzed for naming and describing the field of community psychology. only 14 of the textbooks, or 26%, referred to community psychology, but only 9 of the textbooks, or 17%, contained an adequate representation of community psychology. five textbooks that mentioned the term community psychology did not include an adequate representation or definition. for instance, three referenced community psychology in the appendix, one referenced the field in a chapter devoted to psychological treatment methods, and one referenced the field in a chapter devoted to other applications of psychology. table 1 presents the textbooks that were included in this study in chronological order according to their publication date. those that mentioned the term community psychology were highlighted in yellow. additionally, table 1 indicates which highlighted textbooks contained an adequate representation of community psychology. following this data collection, we contacted the authors of the introductory psychology textbooks and indicated the relatively low percentage of textbooks with any mention of community psychology. furthermore, we indicated a willingness to work with them on revisions of their textbooks if new ones were released (see appendix a). out of the 52 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 authors2 contacted, 26 (50%) responded to the emails. consequently, many of the authors indicated that new versions of their textbooks were being written, or would be in the future, or modules in current books could be written, and 58% (n = 15) were receptive to including information about the field of community psychology. here are a several of the written responses (permission was received from the authors to include these quotes in the article): “you make a compelling argument that intro texts should include material on community psychology” (j. nevid, personal communication, nov. 2, 2017); “thank you for bringing this to our attention, and we’ll definitely be in touch to make sure the definition/material is presented appropriately” (c. sanderson, personal communication, nov. 1, 2017); “…your criticism is well founded. admittedly, all intro psychology books are bursting at the seams, and already far too long, largely because we try to include far too much. but i very much agree that at least some representation of community psychology is needed, and that our book and most others have fallen short in that regard” (s. lilienfeld, personal communication, oct. 31, 2017); “some of my early introduction to psychology involved reading seymour sarason and other psychological scientists who discussed the importance of a sense of community and how people think, feel and act. please do send us as much material as you can think an educated person should know” (c.n. dewall, personal communication, oct. 10, 2017); “it is always a pleasure hearing from faculty about ideas for inclusion or correction. as you point out, we don’t say anything about community psychology but would be open to the possibility of at least a couple of sentences” (g.j. feist, personal communication, oct. 9, 2017); “so we are thinking that we would like to highlight this field, as it's been ignored until now, and the best way to do that would be in one of our features” (s. ciccarelli & n. white, personal communication, oct. 11, 2017); “…i would be very interested in reviewing any materials you want to share to help bring me up to speed” (l. freberg, personal communication, oct. 9, 2017); “what a good idea!...at a bare minimum we see ensuring that the material we described above is presented …differentiating the roles of social psychology, health psychology, and community psychology, as well as by explicitly recognizing community psychologists currently cited in the text. of course much more might be possible, depending on what your perusal of our materials suggests to you" (j. mitterer & t. martini, personal communication, nov. 8, 2017). discussion in summary, as shown in table 1, most introduction to psychology textbooks published between 2010 and 2016 do not contain any reference to community psychology. in addition, only 17% of the textbooks contained an adequate representation of community psychology. similar to the prior findings of sarkisian and taylor’s (2009), our study suggests that the field of community psychology is underrepresented in the most recent editions of introduction to psychology textbooks. on a more positive note, 50% of the contacted textbook authors responded to our email which described our findings. in addition to their responses, several of the authors expressed an openness to include community psychology content in future editions which was an unanticipated and welcome secondorder outcome of our study. 2 we were not able to find contact information for one of the textbooks. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 table 1. names and authors of introductory psychology textbooks coverage of community psychology content the essential concepts of community psychology were mentioned in at least several textbooks, and these descriptions included empowerment, providing care to marginalized populations, principles of ecological theory, prevention, sense of community, and improving the overall quality of communities. for example, present in king’s textbook were examples of providing care to marginalized populations: “providing http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 accessible care for people with psychological problems” and “cater[ing] to people who have traditionally been underserved” (king, 2016, p. 12 & 17). additionally, bernstein’s textbook (2016, p.6) explains that ensuring “psychological services reach people who need help but tend not to seek it,” and “work with community leaders… to improve stressful conditions that can cause psychological disorders”. it is apparent that there are at least some textbooks that provide both the community psychology term and an adequate description of the field. limitations future researchers could collect data on the overall popularity of each textbook in this study. doing so may provide a more comprehensible approximation of the number of students that are exposed to the field of community psychology in their introduction to psychology textbooks. it is also of importance to review textbooks in other subfields of psychology (abnormal, social, developmental) as well as other disciplines (social work, psychiatry. and public health) to evaluate their coverage of the field of community psychology. there is also a need to evaluate non-us based introduction to psychology textbooks in future studies. qualitative analyses of community psychology content would also add more rigor to future studies. finally, future studies could review materials to determine how well community psychology as a field is represented in internet social media sources. future directions community psychology’s future will be influenced by whether psychology textbooks and the media adequately reference this discipline. if students and the public are not aware of this field’s significant contributions to the resolution of social and community issues, practitioners and researchers will be less likely to be identified as possible collaborators when these issues are tackled by community groups at the local levels as well as within more policy domains (jason, 2013). thus, underrepresentation of community psychology in psychology introductory textbooks and a variety of media sources could lead to less opportunities for widely using the types of community-based research that exist within our field. as one possible action step, community psychologists might encourage the use of those introduction to psychology textbooks that do contain appropriate coverage of this field in their respective institutions and courses, and these are noted in table 1. we have sent positive and congratulatory emails to several textbook authors who have represented the field of community psychology extremely well, and these authors emailed us back their appreciation for this feedback. our group is also currently sending to authors, who expressed interest in more information about the field, definitions of community psychology as well as descriptions of possible jobs available for those trained in this area, which are located on the website of the society for community research and action (2017). in addition, during our interactions with publishers, there are also opportunities for us to encourage the adoption of community psychology material in a variety of dissemination products. as an example, recently, the psychology editor of a major publisher approached the last author with a request to write a textbook for the field of community psychology. this began a series of discussions, and the editor was very open to exploring opportunities regarding introducing the field of community psychology into two introductory psychology textbooks that were currently being written 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(2016). psych (4th ed.). boston, ma: cengage learning. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/psychology/clinical/?view=usa&ci=9780199841851 http://www.apa.org/books/4318003.html?cfid=2799889&cftoken=17302234 http://www.apa.org/books/4318003.html?cfid=2799889&cftoken=17302234 http://www.apa.org/books/4318003.html?cfid=2799889&cftoken=17302234 global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 rathus, s. (2011). psychology: concepts and connections (10th ed.). belmont, ca: cengage learning. sanderson, c., & huffman, k. (2016). real world psychology (2nd ed.). new york, ny: worth publishers. sarkisian, g. v., & taylor, s. (2009). what is community psychology: a content analysis of introductory textbooks. unpublished manuscript. summary available at: http://www.scra27.org/files/5713/8 999/1633/rating_of_community_psy chology_content_in_intro._texts.pdf schacter, d., gilbert, d., & wegner, d. (2010). psychology (2nd ed.). new york, ny: worth publishers. schacter, d., gilbert, d., wegner, d., & nock, m. (2015). introduction to psychology (3rd ed.). new york, ny: worth publishers. schacter, d., gilbert, d., wegner, d., & nock, m. (2014). psychology (3rd ed.). new york, ny: worth publishers. scra (2017). what is community psychology. available at: http://www.scra27.org/files/2913/8 991/6304/what_is_community_psyc hology_handout.pdf sharpsteen, d. (2012). clep introductory psychology book with online clep test preparation (2nd ed.). piscataway, nj: research & education association. wade, c., & tavris, c. (2016). psychology (12th ed.). upper saddle river, nj: pearson education. wade, c., tavris, c., & garry, m. (2014). invitation to psychology (6th ed.). boston, ma: pearson education. weiten, w. psychology: themes and variations (9th ed.). 2013. belmont, ca: cengage learning. weseley, a., & mcentarffer, r. (2016). barron’s ap psychology (7th ed.). hauppauge, ny: barron’s educational series. zimbardo, p., johnson, r., & mccann, v. (2016). psychology: core concepts (8th ed.). new york, ny: pearson education. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.scra27.org/files/5713/8999/1633/rating_of_community_psychology_content_in_intro._texts.pdf http://www.scra27.org/files/5713/8999/1633/rating_of_community_psychology_content_in_intro._texts.pdf http://www.scra27.org/files/5713/8999/1633/rating_of_community_psychology_content_in_intro._texts.pdf global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 3 december 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 appendix a dear: we are faculty members at depaul university’s psychology department, and are active members of the american psychological association’s division 27 community psychology. our field has a long history, emerging in the united states in the 1960s. our professional organization, the society for community research and action (scra), currently has 1,301 members. of those, 298 list an address outside of the united states. upon conducting a study on representation of our field in the introductory psychology textbooks, we were surprised to learn that most did not have any information about our field, and a few had only briefly mentioned it. we did notice that the research and ideas of community psychologists were cited, but they were not identified as being members of our field. for our field to be known by students taking introductory psychology courses, it is important to have some mention of what our discipline has offered to psychologists in terms of: prevention (versus treatment), competencies (versus weaknesses), collaboration across disciplines, ecological understanding of people within their environments, diversity, and community building as a mode of intervention. these concepts have provided psychologists a focus on new ways of thinking about contextual factors and how participants could be more involved in applied research efforts. community psychology also considers public health–based, systems-oriented, and preventive approaches to mental and physical difficulties. we wonder if you might be considering publishing a revised text in the introductory area, and if so, whether you might be willing to work with us in making sure the field of community psychology is adequately represented. we would be happy to provide you with any necessary materials including various versions of the definitions of our approach. we would be willing to provide content ranging anywhere from one paragraph to a module. please let us know if you will be interested and willing to work with us on this project. sincerely, olya glantsman, ph.d. (oglantsm@depaul.edu) leonard jason, ph.d. (ljason@depaul.edu) depaul university http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:oglantsm@depaul.edu mailto:ljason@depaul.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 learning community psychology practice competencies: student pathways through the applied community psychology specialization by huda bayaa, claire cahen, angela doss, rachel fusco, rebecca gordon, gregor v. sarkisian & sylvie taylor antioch university los angeles keywords: community psychology practice competencies, community psychology education, community psychology practice author biographies: huda bayaa, m.a., is a graduate of antioch university los angeles with a master's in clinical psychology and specialization in applied community psychology. currently, huda is a marriage & family therapist and professional clinical counselor intern. huda has focused on providing culturally and linguistically sensitive mental health services to the arab and muslim communities, including refugees and asylum seekers. her work has also strived to reduce the stigma around mental health services in her community and provide relevant interventions to refugees to alleviate the prevalence of mental health issues upon resettlement. she spent time working in refugee camps in the middle east where she taught english, ran workshops on civic duty and the use of social media, and provided capacity building services to local ngos. additionally, huda has worked on bringing refugee children from the middle east to southern california to receive medical treatment not available to them at home. claire cahen, m.a., is a ph.d. student in environmental psychology at the graduate center at the city university of new york, n.y. usa. she received her m.a. in psychology with a specialization in applied community psychology from antioch university los angeles in 2015. angela doss, m.a., is a registered marriage and family therapy intern and counselor-in-residence at the relational center (trc) in los angeles, california, where she provides counseling and psychoeducation to adults and adolescents of diverse cultural backgrounds. she specializes in food psychology, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 spirituality, trauma and chronic illness, as well as relational and community gestalt. angela leads groups and peers in specialized trainings and is a founding member of trc’s post-election alliance for civic engagement (p.e.a.c.e), which brings community members together for the common purpose of spreading empathy, bridging differences and inspiring leadership. she received her m.a. in clinical psychology from antioch university los angeles, with specializations in applied community psychology and spiritual & depth psychology. looking to build on her skills as a clinician and expand her work in the direction of nutritional psychology, angela is currently pursuing certification as a nutritional therapy practitioner (ntp). please visit www.angeladoss.com to learn more. rachel fusco, b.a., is a student in the master of arts in clinical psychology program specializing in applied community psychology at antioch university los angeles, ca, usa. rachel is expected to graduate in september 2017 and has spent the last decade building and managing non-profit programs that promote tangible social change for transition age youth. rebecca d. gordon, m.a., graduated from the antioch university los angeles with a specialization in applied community psychology in 2009. currently, rebecca is a senior experience researcher who works for adobe as a member of the creative cloud team, developing new software for creatives. adobe, san francisco, ca, usa. gregor v. sarkisian, ph.d., is an associate professor in the master of arts in psychology program and teaches in the applied community psychology specialization at antioch university los angeles, ca, usa. email: gsarkisian@antioch.edu. sylvie taylor, ph.d., is a professor in the master of arts in psychology program and is the founding director of the applied community psychology specialization at antioch university los angeles, ca, usa. recommended citation: bayaa, h., cahen, c., doss, a. fusco, r., gordon, r., sarkisian, g.v., & taylor, s. (2017). learning community psychology practice competencies: student pathways through the applied community psychology specialization. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(1), pages 1-12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:gsarkisian@antioch.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 learning community psychology practice competencies (cppcs): student pathways through the applied community psychology specialization abstract community psychology practice competencies provide a framework of skills students can learn to promote social change processes in communities. however, there is great overlap and cross-over of skill sets among some competencies. the complex nature of learning any competency will likely take multiple learning experiences to master and span years beyond a student’s exit from training to achieve expertise. programs training students in practice competencies can benefit from working collaboratively with students to better understand how students develop experience and skill in utilizing competencies across the curriculum. this article explores five narrative accounts of how students and graduates learned selected community psychology practice competencies through their training in the applied community psychology (acp) specialization at antioch university los angeles. students and graduates were asked to select a competency and write a two-page narrative of how they learned the competency through their training in the acp specialization. implications for academic program development and training in community psychology practice competencies are discussed. the applied community psychology specialization1 (acp) is a 17-unit degree option within the masters programs in psychology at antioch university los angeles. the majority of students in acp are pursuing a master’s in clinical psychology in preparation for licensure as marriage and family therapists, while students in the nonclinical degree options are planning careers in the non-profit sector or plan to pursue doctoral education in the future. a course, community psychology: theories and methods, serves as a prerequisite course to all core specialization courses. the core acp curriculum consists of four core courses (community consultation and collaboration, program development and evaluation, prevention and promotion, psychoeducational groups and in-service training development) 1 2010 outstanding program award, society for community research and action (american psychological association division 27) council of education programs. and field study in applied community psychology. students round out the specialization with electives that include courses in grant writing, asset-based community development, social justice advocacy, coalition building, empowerment and community practice, to name a few. in the community consultation and collaboration, program development and evaluation, and, prevention and promotion courses students work in collaborative teams on projects in partnership with communitybased organizations (non-profits, public schools, or city/county government). for each of these courses student teams serve as consultants to the organizations, working on a project identified by the organization as an area for further development and/or external input. these projects are closely supervised by program faculty who guide students through the process of developing a technical report for the organization to also be shared in class with peers. in the psychoeducational http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 groups and in-service training development course students work independently with a community organization to develop psychoeducational workshops for their clientele or in-service trainings for program staff. in this course students develop workshop content and resource material for participants. field study in applied community psychology often emerges from one of the projects in the core courses. for example, students might work with an organization to implement recommendations from a consultation, or finalize and deliver a psychoeducational program to an organization. the emergence of community psychology practice competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012) has provided training programs with an opportunity to become: (1) transparent about the skills students can expect to learn through specifying which of 18 practice competencies are offered; and, (2) specific to the depth of mastery students can expect to gain in practice competencies by articulating the levels of training – exposure, experience and expertise (kloos, 2010) for each that are offered. for more information about the utilization of community psychology practice competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012) in the acp specialization, see taylor & sarkisian (2011), sarkisian & taylor (2013), and sarkisian, g. v., saleem, m. a., simpkin, j., weidenbacher, a., bartko, n., & taylor, s. (2013). because the acp specialization is designed so that students gain a training level of experience, i.e., supervised practice (kloos, 2010), through multiple courses that include a fieldwork component, we were interested in learning about what students’ journeys look like over time. previously, faculty and students in the acp specialization have utilized curriculum mapping with selected community psychology practice competencies learned in one course (sarkisian, et al., 2013) but have not investigated learning competencies across the acp curriculum. this article explores five narrative accounts of learning a practice competency across the acp specialization. two students nearing completion of acp specialization coursework, two students nearing graduation, and one graduate of seven years all chose a practice competency and described how they learned the competency through the specialization in a two-page narrative. the purpose of this paper is to share student accounts of learning practice competencies through the acp specialization and identify implications for academic program development and training in practice competencies. narratives are presented in order of tenure in the acp specialization. prevention, a novel concept: huda bayaa while all of the concepts of community psychology are pertinent and critical components, for me, concepts around prevention and promotion offered the foundational basis on which to connect all of the other building blocks of community psychology into my work. working in community mental health, one sees the existence of cycles of violence, poverty and addiction that pervade many of the communities being served. often, interventions are occurring after the proliferation of these issues, rather than before. what i learned in prevention and promotion trained me to be able to identify some of the stressors and modes of exploitation the community i serve may be exposed to and weigh that against the prevalence of social supports, confidence and coping capacity to better ascertain the likelihood that maladaptive behaviors may develop. mental health tends to be a reactive practice in response to existing malady; prevention and promotion offers me the opportunity to conceptualize things from a position of empowerment rather than containment. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 prevention and promotion motivate the work around my desire to inform the arab and muslim communities of the vital importance of mental health, especially as an influx of refugees and asylum seekers who have experienced unspeakable atrocities arrive looking for the opportunity at a new life. with community psychology concepts, and prevention and promotion specifically, gauging strengths and limitations that exist in a community help to formulate what direction my work can take to provide the most fruitful and positive influence. one of the ways i can do this with the refugee and asylum populations is by assessing what sorts of social supports that they may have on arrival, consider the trauma or experiences they may have, and the linguistic, social, and job skills they hold. these factors, among others, can help guide the development of programs and policies that will make adjustment to life in the united states easier and more successful. when interviewing for traineeships, community psychology concepts played a key part in helping me secure an americorps trainee position doing the work i aimed to do. during that interview, i talked about my desire to create programs and workshops aimed at fostering greater understanding of what mental health and illness look like, but also at increasing social support and a greater sense of community. identifying and creating support systems and uplifting the individual to foster resilience have all been key pillars in the work i do. as we prepare to receive more refugees in the united states, the urgency in creating a plan to help safeguard against unnecessary strife and distress that communities may face becomes more imperative. making refugees’ transition into the united states as seamless as possible is a main priority of mine. there is a recognition of how distress can create barriers to their integration and to the community they resettle in. rather than wait for these issues to arise, i can begin to assess what potential stressors and social oppression they may face while i consider how to increase their selfesteem and coping skills through community support and psychoeducation. today, i am creating psychoeducational workshops utilizing prevention and promotion concepts along with the knowledge and experience i gained in other acp courses to make a lasting impact in the arab and muslim communities. the organization i work for recognizes the skills i have acquired in acp as valuable and has provided me with the support and leeway to develop programs and opportunities as a result. acp has given me not only the tools and experience, but also the confidence to go into my community and believe that i can be an agent of change. further, an emphasis on concepts of prevention and promotion has taken me out of the standard reactionary practice to a more proactive interventionist mindset. that is something i feel will be an invaluable resource for me and the communities i serve. prevention and health promotion: rachel fusco after nine years directing youth leadership programs in the nonprofit sector, i knew that prevention and promotion guided my work. i returned to school to study family structures, recognizing that working with teens in isolation does little if you cannot also engage their families. after discovering acp, i knew there was no other specialization for me. in prevention and promotion, i consulted with a small nonprofit dedicated to promoting literacy through after-school partnerships with public elementary schools in los angeles. i had previously volunteered as an “after-school reader.” as a volunteer with a background in program management, i was impressed with how successfully they ran their program with a bare-bones staff and a large volunteer base. i reached out to the director who was happy to have free http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 consultation work in exchange for a minimal amount of time on his end. during the consultation, my group observed an organizational structure that was a model of successful volunteer recruitment and retention. their processes and outcomes were entirely based on their volunteers. this worked well because the volunteers who were willing to lead were passionate about the organization, had expertise and free time, or wanted to grow new areas of expertise. despite the organization’s success, viewing the organization through theories of empowerment and sustainability left considerable room for improvement. my group reviewed research from a variety of disciplines and identified recommendations that would promote organizational capacity building. for example, the organization was diligent about keeping records but their volunteer staff prioritized scheduling the next reading events over analyzing the records, leaving the records untouched. additionally, despite the organization’s high rates of volunteer retention, they had limited resources, including staff to train, supervise quality, and ensure program success. lastly, while this organization received donations and secured grants in order to donate books to every child, family, and school they worked with, books were often sent home in english to families who spoke spanish at home. through our analysis, we realized that, while doing meaningful literacy work and philanthropy, this nonprofit perpetuated cycles of dependency. in our analysis report, my group identified structures and processes that would foster community empowerment and organizational sustainability. our experience was unique in finding an organization so willing to (1) share information and data to inform the creation of relevant recommendations and (2) implement the recommendations. within three weeks of sharing the report, the director informed us that our report helped convince the board of directors to recruit a second full-time staff person. while we recommended that any new staff members should be fluent in spanish, this was not posted in the job description. perhaps the nonprofit hired with that in mind, but we cannot know. nevertheless, our consultee reviewed our report and opted to implement our organizational capacity-building suggestions while community empowerment did not become an explicit priority. in my professional career and acp consultation opportunities, i have observed countless organizations focus on tasks and functionality at the expense of empowerment. yet, at the core of empowerment, community members shift from service recipients, or consumers, to valued contributors, or assets. after four consultation projects, acp has helped me connect my passions with my own assets while equipping me with valuable theories and practices to engage in truly transformative community work. collaboration: angela doss perhaps the feature of the acp courses that, for me, most palpably sets them apart from other courses in my degree program was their emphasis on, and expectation for, project collaboration – both inside and outside the classroom. collaboration is so intimate a part of the coursework, in fact, i found it equally as necessary to my learning about community psychology as the foundational ecological principles themselves. most relevant to my learning about the importance of collaboration were my experiences performing collaborative research-based work on issues of access to healthy foods (community psychology: theories and methods) performing collaborative consultation field work – for both a non-violent parenting agency (community consultation and collaboration) and a non-profit agency advocating for child caregivers of adults (program development and evaluation). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 the collaborative research required in the theories course meant that my group partners and i applied the basic ecological principles of community psychology theory directly to real-world issues and contexts. our research topic, which focused on rights and access to healthy foods, brought these principles to life in terms that felt especially meaningful to me. first, being able to select a topic that was personally relevant (as a type 1 diabetic already beginning to self-educate on how the intersectionality of food, environment and economy impacts overall well-being) was most beneficial to my learning. furthermore, having had both supportive and challenging perspectives of the other members of my research team meant that we were able to assist one another in achieving not only fair and thorough research, but also a more coherent, refined understanding of these foundational principles. in the latter two most relevant courses, it was the collaborative nature of the field work itself, culminating in the preparation and refinement of technical reports submitted and presented directly to agency leaders at project’s end that proved most valuable to my learning. the opportunity to consult directly with agency decision-makers and community members allowed me to gain insight on their perspectives, understand their needs in their language and from within their environment, observe how they adapt to ever-shifting and often limited resources, and grasp how intricately bound up those adaptations and resources are with various events across the three levels of analysis (i.e., micro, meso & macro) – while also collaborating with fellow students on my consulting team, was indispensable to my learning about the ecological principles of adaptation, interdependence and cycling of resources. drawing on ongoing exchanges with agency leaders, our team conceptualized and drafted an organizational empowerment genogram and a program impact logic model, including graphic images and flow charts detailing multi-level organizational relationships, programs, resource applications and intended outcomes. this real-world experience of collaboration allowed the refinement of ideas within and among the consultation team and provided the invaluable opportunity for feedback directly from organizational leadership. my community-based collaborative learning continues today as a counselor in residence and group facilitator working under supervision at the relational center in los angeles. i have selected an agency that is committed to promoting the foundational principles of community psychology toward social change, with particular emphasis on themes of collaboration (over competition and consumerism) and interdependence and community (over individualism and social isolation). my experience at this agency has been one of profound growth, support and shared leadership, as i collaborate with supervisors, fellow counselors, and community volunteers to create original psychoeducational group curriculum, peer trainings, and community organizing initiatives based on community psychology’s foundational ecological principles. i have also been challenging the dominant narratives that perpetuate cultural empathy deficits and social isolation. through collaboration, we are working to build bridges and strengthen bonds within and across our local communities. community and social change: claire cahen in my first course on community psychology, i was introduced to the ecological principle of cycling of resources. students in the class were divided into groups and asked to study a local social issue through the lens of community psychology; one of our tasks was to identify the ebb and flow of resources in the community/ organization we were researching. my group looked into the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 displacement of skid row residents in downtown los angeles. we noted quickly that, though financial capital was scarce in the indigent district, informal resources abounded. for instance, the city of los angeles had somewhat controversially declined to bring trash cans, bathrooms, and street sweeping services to skid row, causing a sanitation crisis so hazardous that the united nations called the calamity a human rights violation (lacan & dahmann, 2010; lacan, 2013). skid row residents took matters into their own hands. they set up an unofficial cleaning group that dispatched teams with brooms and trash bags daily (lacan, 2013). that image stayed with me. undeterred by lack of infrastructural support, skid row residents had drawn on their own resources to refuse to live in a dump. not until i took a workshop on asset-based community development did i begin to focus more systematically on informal resources and leaders. this workshop permanently altered the way i thought about community organizing, prompting me to unlearn “the needs perspective” i had always relied on (greens & haines, 2016). i learned first from my professor’s accounts of communities long defined in terms of what they lacked: skid row—the area with the densest population of homeless people in the country—was a good example. many of the articles i had read on the topic highlighted the resources that were absent from the neighborhood: bathrooms and trash cans, but also living-wage jobs and permanent affordable housing. few had drawn attention to the resiliency and ingenuity of residents who spearheaded projects like the neighborhood cleanup. the narrative of a community in need veiled what skid row residents had to offer and, in the process, veiled their humanity, therefore legitimizing their neglect. i was convinced that focusing on needs was no longer the right model for the community organizing work i hoped to undertake an applied asset-based community development and informal resources in all my subsequent fieldwork. for example, i facilitated an assetmapping exercise with the director of a program that promoted active transportation in a low-income neighborhood of color. the program recruited parents and senior citizens to serve as crossing guards and corner captains around a local school and also held regular parent assemblies to discuss safer driving practices. the organization’s work seemed ripe for the asset-based model, which could help residents further identify the gifts already available to them, rather than simply relying on formal governing structures to implement infrastructure improvements, like crosswalks and stoplights. it took both myself and the program director a few walks around the school to retrain ourselves to look for assets, as we had previously been focused on resources that were missing. we pinpointed an empty lot where we could place more bicycle racks, parks where we could hold outdoor lunches and classes, and recruited teachers who were willing to integrate courses about the neighborhood’s history into their curriculum. this asset mapping project morphed into a master’s document and ultimately laid the foundation for one of the most significant competencies i have gained as a community psychologist in training: looking for resources within otherwise overlooked settings. in all of my research, so-called “informal leaders and organizations” offered a wealth of knowledge on their communities and an even greater repertoire of solutions to social issues. as a community psychologist in training, i am uniquely positioned to support such organizations and people; and can make sure their work is known and funded. i am able to carry out my research in a way that builds on community member strength and innovation, rather than lack and need. empowerment: rebecca gordon i chose the acp specialization because i was interested in working with communities, and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 the core value of community psychology – to promote wellbeing – resonated with my own. the program encompassed all 18 community psychology practice competencies, but for this essay i will focus on how i gained competency in empowerment. i clearly remember being exposed to empowerment theory in my first quarter during a class which surveyed the theory and methods used in community psychology. i remember reading seminal articles by zimmerman (1995), gaventa (1980), and rappaport (1987), and being entranced. it made sense to examine power, because disempowerment seemed to be at the root of so many social ills. towards the end of the acp program in the community consultation and collaboration course, my classmate and i decided to consult with a large international resettlement agency that was having difficulty resettling iraqi refugees. we decided to conduct the consultation using empowerment theory because much of what our initial research revealed had to do with disempowerment. we designed the intervention to address power at each ecological level through a psychoeducational model we learned in a previous course. for the field study in acp, my classmate and i decided to write a paper on the intervention we developed for the refugee resettlement organization and submit it to the journal of muslim mental health. our professor, gregor sarkisian, joined as the third author – helping to mentor us through the process. i was able to further critically reflect on the application of empowerment theory during the process of working with my co-authors to prepare our manuscript for the peer review process. i graduated in the summer of 2009, and in the fall of that year our paper was accepted for publication (gordon, taylor, sarkisian, 2010). in the spring of 2010 my co-author and i presented the paper at the society for community research and action meeting at the eastern psychological association conference. i gained further competency in empowerment theory by presenting our intervention to academics and community psychology practitioners, and being able to hear and reflect on their feedback. currently, i am an experience researcher working for a large technology company. my role is to conduct research that helps my clients better understand the context, workflow, pain points, and needs of their current and future users in order to inform product strategy and development. in my work, i have espoused using empowerment theory to inform designing and evaluating digital experiences, which is a novel application of the theory. i presented on this topic at the tech conference south by southwest (sxsw), which took place in austin texas in 2016 (gordon, 2016). at each step of the way through the acp program i was able to gain competency in the foundational principles, and empowerment theory specifically. each activity within the acp program allowed me to build on my knowledge of empowerment enough to move to the next level of learning. i was able to move from understanding empowerment theory, to applying it, writing about it for publication, presenting it at a conference, and finally, utilizing it for a novel application. discussion the narratives of acp students and graduates share common themes yet their work in communities takes them on varied paths of learning, largely based on their interest in serving populations and programs for which they have a passion for making a difference. almost all students and graduates in this paper experienced a paradigm shift in how they think about social problems – e.g., shifting from a needsto assets-based perspective or shifting from reactionary to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 proactive measures – typically occurring in the introductory course (community psychology: theories and methods). another prevalent theme is that learning the practice competency was largely grounded in multiple collaborations with community partners and peers (students) through fieldwork. finally, participants acknowledged that they are confident in what they have learned but are still learning and developing their skills related to the competency. implications for academic program development and training in community psychology practice competencies the narratives presented in this paper raise an interesting question for the future development of academic programs teaching practice competencies: how does one evaluate learning practice competencies when the process is largely based in the context of fieldwork with different groups, purposes, and timelines? this is likely a question that each program will need to ask and answer on its own. given the unique training context of the acp specialization, discussion has begun about ways in which the acp specialization can provide meaningful feedback on the process of learning competencies through a student’s tenure. while we have been collecting data on outcomes through student portfolios completed in their last quarter, we have not been collecting evaluative data on the process of learning practice competencies. below, we describe four strategies that are being implemented or in consideration of being implemented in the near future to provide students with feedback on gaining experience with practice competencies. evaluation by individual instructor for a course. this is perhaps the most traditional strategy where the instructor uses criteria in the form of academic program and course outcomes to develop assignments that meet the course outcomes. ideally, practice competencies or content closely related to competencies are included in course objectives or outcomes. in the acp specialization, this includes delivering new material related to competencies, mentoring students in writing technical reports, supervising students’ fieldwork in class, and engaging in discussions and other written assignments to assess learning. through a student’s behavior in class, their writing, and other interactions, instructors evaluate student learning in a 10 or 15-week period of time. self and peer evaluation of collaborative skill development. because students work in groups in three of the four acp core courses, acp faculty have considered developing a measure of collaboration that we would have students use during the process of learning to receive feedback from group partners as well as at the end of the course. the idea is to provide students with periodic feedback about how their collaborative efforts are being perceived by colleagues so that they can use feedback mid course to improve their effectiveness. foster-fishman, berkowitz, lounsbury, and allen (2001) have provided an excellent framework of criteria from which to develop such a measure of collaborative capacity among students. in courses where students work in collaborative groups or in consultation teams, such a measure could be administered periodically through an academic term to group members who can rate themselves as well as student colleagues and provide a summative rating at the end of the term to count as part of a student’s grade for participation in the course. site evaluation by community partners. in fieldwork and courses that include fieldwork, obtaining feedback from community partners working directly with students can provide a real-world http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 perspective, especially to those students wishing to work as consultants. through developing an evaluation form to be completed by community partners, students can receive feedback from their community partners (i.e., potential employers) on both their skills during a consultation process as well as the usefulness of their final deliverables – e.g., technical reports, presentations, etc. angelique (2001) developed an internship site training form including goal attainment and general skills that could be adapted to a program’s specific needs in terms of feedback from community partners that would benefit their students in training. periodic feedback by the training program on skill development in practice competencies. ideally, students would be able to receive feedback from multiple sources and training experiences as they proceed through a program. if the focus of learning is on students’ development of experience and expertise in cppcs, and, we have strong anecdotal evidence that it takes years to develop a level of expertise in any practice competency, it makes sense to view the evaluation of students learning competencies with a longitudinal perspective. while this would likely not occur for every competency offered or in every course, it could be beneficial for training programs to develop evaluation methods that capture student development of knowledge and skill in selected practice competencies over the full length of the training program. this might include providing students with feedback outside of courses (e.g., every 1-2 terms) on the practice competencies that are a driving force or main focus of the program. for example, in the acp specialization, collaboration is a necessary process of every course providing a rationale to develop a measure based on collaborative capacity (foster-fishman, et al., 2001) that could be implemented in each course and reviewed with students periodically to further develop collaboration skills. conclusion this paper explores the complex nature of learning community psychology practice competencies. to illustrate the process of learning practice competencies, five narrative accounts of learning one competency are presented by students and graduates of the applied community psychology specialization at antioch university los angeles. common themes across learning competencies included pursuit of professional passion, engaging in paradigm shifts in problem conceptualization (from deficit to asset-based), the benefit of multiple field experiences, and the emergence of confidence through multiple field experiences. due to the context-specific nature of field work in learning practice competencies, multiple sources of evaluating how students learn community psychology practice competencies are recommended: course evaluation; self and peer evaluation of collaborative skill development; site evaluation of student work by community partners; and, periodic program feedback on skill development in selected competencies. references angelique, h. l. (2001). linking the academy to the community through internships: a model of service learning, student empowerment, and transformative education. sociological practice: a journal of clinical and applied sociology, 3(1), 3753. dalton, j. & wolfe, s. (2012). competencies for community psychology practice: draft for review. the community psychologist 45(4), 7-14. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 volume 8, issue 1 gaventa, j. (1980). power and participation. in power and powerlessness: quiescence and rebellion in an appalachian valley (pp. 3-32). chicago, il: university of chicago press. gordon, r. d. (2016, march). empowerment theory: defining the future of digital. south by southwest: interactive conference. austin, tx. gordon. r. d., taylor, r., sarkisian, g.v. (2010) psychoeducational workshops as a practical tool to facilitate resettlement with iraqi refugees and anchor relatives. journal of muslim mental health, 5, 82-98. green, g. p., & haines, a. (eds.). (2016). asset building community development (4th ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. kloos, b. (2010). creating setting for training in collaborative community practice. the community psychologist, 43(2), 10. los angeles community action network and los angeles community action network. (2013). the dirty divide in downtown los angeles: a call for public health equity. los angeles: la can. rappaport j. (1987). terms of empowerment/exemplars of prevention: toward a theory for community psychology. american journal of community psychology, 15(2), 121-148. sarkisian, g. v., saleem, m. a., simpkin, j., weidenbacher, a., bartko, n., & taylor, s. (2013). a learning journey ii: learned course maps as a basis to explore how students learned community psychology practice competencies in a community coalition building course. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), 112. retrieved 12/5/2016, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). sarkisian, g. v. & taylor, s. (2013). a learning journey i: curriculum mapping as a tool to assess and integrate community psychology practice competencies in graduate education programs. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), xx-xx. retrieved 12/5/2016, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). taylor, s. & sarkisian, g. v. (2011). community psychology values-driven pedagogy: the foundation for empowering educational settings. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(2), 19-30. retrieved 12/5/2016, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). zimmerman, m.a. (1995). psychological empowerment: issues and illustrations. american journal of community psychology, 23(5), 581-599. foster-fishman, p. g., berkowitz, s. l., lounsbury, d. w., jacobson, s., & allen, n. a. (2001). building collaborative capacity in community coalitions: a review and integrative framework. american journal of community psychology, 29(2), 241-261. dahmann, n. (2010). “los angeles: i do mind dying; reflections on urban revolution in downtown,” los angeles public interest law journal (2). 210-219. http://www.gjcpp.org/ microsoft word brianchristens_pragmatismpraxispredictivetheory_formattedfinal.docx pragmatism, praxis, and predictive theory brian d. christens university of wisconsin–madison keywords: theory, science, community psychology, framework author biography: brian d. christens is associate professor of human ecology at the university of wisconsin–madison, in madison, wisconsin, usa, where he is faculty director of the university’s center for community & nonprofit studies and teaches in the ph.d. program in civil society & community research and the undergraduate major in community & nonprofit leadership. his research is on power and empowerment in policy and systems change efforts such as community organizing and coalition action. he works with community groups seeking to address inequities through changes to policies and decisions regarding transportation, food, education, community development, and corrections systems. he holds a ph.d. in community research & action from vanderbilt university. his work has been recognized by early career awards from the american psychological association, the society for community research and action, and the society for the psychological study of social issues. recommended citation: christens, b.d. (2016). pragmatism, praxis, and predictive theory. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(2), pages 1-6. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). correspondence should be addressed to brian d. christens, civil society & community studies department, university of wisconsin–madison, 4155 nancy nicholas hall, 1300 linden dr., madison, wi 53706, bchristens@wisc.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 pragmatism, praxis, and predictive theory jason, stevens, ram, miller, beasley, and gleason (2016) invoke particular views of “true science” (p. 4) and “hard science” (p. 7) in their call for “more rigorous and predictive theory” (p. 21) in community psychology. they explain that a theory (as opposed to a framework or a model) makes predictions about causal relationships that are specific enough that they can be empirically tested and either verified or falsified under various conditions. they claim that by moving from frameworks guiding inquiry and action toward unambiguous predictive theories, the field will be “of greater value to the larger scientific community” (p. 3) and could “go a long way toward making significant progress in understanding how complex systems and the contexts in which people live can influence their lives” (p. 7). their article is valuable for the debate it will produce by staking out such a clear position on a topic on which, as the authors note, viewpoints vary. in my view, the central thrust of their article – away from a pragmatic action orientation to inquiry and toward testing of predictive theories – could actually hamper the field’s progress toward its goals, if adopted more broadly in the field of community psychology. as jason and colleagues (2016) note, a pragmatic approach to social inquiry represents an alternative to the type of predictive theory testing that they are encouraging. the pragmatic view can be understood through a statement like this: we can learn a lot that is useful through applied research that examines strategies for action in communities and settings, but we may, in the end, be unable to pin down many of the specific causal mechanisms at play in these complex systems. why on earth, you may well be wondering, would we prefer this pragmatic approach that seems to promise less clarity and precision? isn’t that just resigning ourselves to so-called soft science? to explore further, let’s look at an example. shape up somerville began in 2002 as a community-based environmental change strategy to prevent childhood obesity. the initiative galvanized local leadership to create changes in policies, systems, and environments throughout somerville, ma. these included changing the physical environment and transportation infrastructure to promote walking and biking, changing school food services, passing school wellness policies focused on physical activity and nutrition, creating a healthy menu certification program for local restaurants, and starting an annual 5k run and family fitness fair. parents and community members were directly involved in making many of these changes, and they were regularly engaged through local media and newsletters containing project updates, health tips, and coupons for healthy food. there were also individual-level behavioral interventions including new health curricula and regular clinical screenings of children, and targeted provision of services for those found to be at greater risk for overweight and obesity. a result of this multi-level community intervention was something incredibly rare in the contemporary u.s.: a reduction in childhood overweight and obesity at the population level in the city (economos, hyatt, must, et al., 2013). the initiative was adopted and sustained by the city after the initial funding period, and recent research indicates that not only has this initiative reduced childhood obesity, but it also had a similar effect on parents, even though adults were not the primary targets of the interventions (coffield, nihiser, sherry, & economos, 2015). global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 from some researchers’ vantage points, initiatives like shape up somerville are a bit of nightmare. it is nearly impossible to disentangle the effects of particular interventions. there is so much noise and contamination. how can we know exactly which of the many interventions were causally related to the outcome? an intervention science approach that prioritizes predictive theory would insist that we disentangle the initiative through testing of specific interventions on controlled populations and assessment of the effects on specific outcomes such as physical activity and nutrition. such an approach, proponents would claim, would be more rigorous, scientific, and likely to produce generalizable knowledge. instead, the key finding is that multiple changes, when accomplished through inclusive community action, can have the effect of increasing wellness at a population level. we can surmise that each of the interventions may have had some small independent effects, but the combination of interventions and the processes by which they were implemented was likely producing some sort of multiplicative and contagious effect in the complex set of systems that comprise the community. every one of the individual intervention strategies would be unlikely to have similar effects alone. counter to the intervention science view, it could be argued that this approach of combining research and action on multiple interventions and assessing effects at a population level is more “rigorous” and “hard” than randomizing controlled sub-populations. that point aside, i would argue that despite the lack of clarity on the specific mechanisms of causality, the results are more useful than controlled tests of discrete interventions for addressing the persistent social problem of obesity in other communities. an example with similar contours is provided in a position paper adopted by the society for public health education (sophe) (livingood et al., 2011). livingood and colleagues use the example of smoking cessation programs, which have been a topic of great interest in public health for decades. reviews have been published on evidence-based approaches to prevention and intervention. these have emphasized individual clinical and behavioral approaches. in contrast, they have largely neglected community and environmental change strategies. this is because the standards for evidence have been based on the reductionist model of testing hypotheses linked to predictive theory. this model lends itself well to testing for effects of individually oriented interventions in defined subpopulations2. policy, systems, and environment changes are meanwhile neglected because they range from extremely difficult to impossible to study in the ways that a predictive theory approach to science demands.3 yet, the widespread reductions in tobacco use are primarily attributable to such changes. livingood and colleagues point out that the prevailing paradigm in public health (which is similar to the predictive theory model advocated by jason and colleagues, 2016) “does not identify accurately what is most likely to have produced reduction in tobacco use—the major cultural change of denormalization and social intolerance of tobacco use. the profound impact of mediabased health education and promotion programs, and local community mobilization and advocacy for smoke-free environments, scarcely are represented in most reviews of the published scientifıc evidence” (p. 527). in fact, the authors argue that although the research-to-practice predictive approach will continue to serve researchers well in natural science disciplines, including some forms of medicine, “the application of this model to community problems reflecting complex social determinants and health disparities is likely to be far less effective. there is too little similarity in structure, culture, politics, economics, and function of communities and global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 their populations to suggest that an rct in one or more of them could produce highly generalizable results” (p. 528). interestingly, these authors conclude that what is needed is applied social and behavioral science that is conducted in ways more akin to engineering than to physics. jason and colleagues (2016) are clearly pushing in the opposite direction when they suggest that if researchers are not “engaging theory” in the linear science model that they describe, “their contributions are best categorized as an engineering endeavor rather than true science” (p. 4). is an applied approach akin to engineering really less “true”, “rigorous”, or “hard”? along with these sophe leaders and others (e.g., lewin, 1946), i often make the case that it is not. my sense is that a pragmatic approach is actually a more promising avenue for community research, both from a practical and an epistemological standpoint. social and psychological science operating in a reductionist approach has had scant success at predicting important social phenomena. this is in large part due to the fact that the objects of study are themselves influenced not only by their characteristics and experiences, but also by the multiple contexts in which they are interacting with others. and, are influenced by theories – their own and others. there is therefore at least one thing that we can predict with relative confidence: human communities will consistently evade precise and accurate predictions. in contrast, social science that has been conducted from a more holistic praxis orientation has often produced results that are both fascinating and influential, as in the shape up somerville example described above. forgive the lengthy quote, but urban planner bent flyvbjerg (2001) makes these points forcefully in the conclusion to his book making social science matter: first, we must drop the fruitless effort to emulate natural science’s success in producing cumulative and predictive theory; this approach simply does not work in social science. second, we must take up problems that matter to the local, national, and global communities in which we live… we must focus on issues of values and power like great social scientists have advocated from aristotle and machiavelli to max weber and pierre bourdieu. finally, we must effectively communicate the results of our research to fellow citizens. if we do this, we may successfully transform social science from what is fast becoming a sterile academic activity, which is undertaken mostly for its own sake and in increasing isolation from a society on which it has little effect and from which it gets little appreciation. we may transform social science to an activity done in public for the public, sometimes to clarify, sometimes to intervene, sometimes to generate new perspectives, and always to serve as eyes and ears in our ongoing efforts at understanding the present and deliberating about the future. (p. 166) flyvbjerg locates foundations for this view of social science as practical wisdom (which he calls phronetic social science) in ancient and contemporary european intellectual traditions. as with pragmatism, it is concerned with clarifying and adjudicating differences between competing guiding values for praxis. praxis, according to prilleltensky (2001), represents “the unity of theory and action” (p. 748) with the goal of “translation of ethical reflection and social research into social action” (p. 749). in the pragmatist tradition, it is through this reflective theory-in-action that we can learn the most about the human systems that we are trying to improve, and therefore do the most to improve them. although this is different from a vision of social and psychological theory that can reliably and accurately predict outcomes from specific interventions, it is not atheoretical, nor is it a rejection of the scientific method. to the global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 contrary, the most prominent pragmatists (james, peirce, dewey, mead, etc.) were selfdescribed radical empiricists. peirce advocated for the cultivation of an experimental habit of mind (bernstein, 1999). for a pragmatist, even though truth is always contextual and conditional, human intelligence can improve human conditions, and human intelligence is inherently scientific.4 i agree with some of the major points made by jason and colleagues (2016). we do need measures that perform as consistently and accurately as possible. we also need to build on the foundational concepts of our field like the ecological model, which i agree is useful but insufficiently specific for targeting research and action. i disagree, however, with jason and colleagues’ (2016) conclusions regarding theory and research on empowerment and sense of community. the disagreement has less to do with their specific points on those bodies of work (although i could quibble) and more to do with the claim that a theory should be evaluated solely or even primarily on the basis of predictions and testability. again from livingood and colleagues (2011): “this approach reinforces and reifıes prevailing linear approaches that make use of generalization from specifıc parameters but misses the mark of producing feasible, relevant, and politically acceptable solutions to real-world health problems intrinsically embedded in the widely varying complexities of behavioral, social, and cultural settings” (p. 526). the pragmatic and praxis-oriented approaches that community psychology has pioneered in previous decades have had an influence on fields like public health and education, which are increasingly embracing research designed to complement, illuminate, and improve community-driven systems change efforts. there is great opportunity for the field of community psychology to bring the tools, frameworks, and, yes, theories that it has developed into important conversations on policy and practice. it would be a sad irony from my perspective if the field now turned wholesale toward a reductionist social science prioritizing predictive theory. this has been a relatively fruitless and frustrating venture for other applied social sciences. yet, it also seems that this divergence between pragmatist approaches favoring a praxis orientation and more positivist approaches favoring a predictive vision of theory is a tension that has consistently animated the field. it is a potentially productive tension as we mix and match tools, research designs, theories, and frameworks to illuminate complex system dynamics and tailor actions to improve community life. notes 1several university of wisconsin–madison colleagues provided insightful feedback on a draft of this commentary: alex adams, amy hilgendorf, javier nieto, and randy stoecker. 2despite the feasibility of applying linear experimental methods to the study of individual-level human behavior, behavioral intervention effect sizes – even of “evidence-based” programs and interventions – tend to be quite small and contortions are often performed by evaluators to meet even generous thresholds for statistical significance (see gorman & huber, 2009). 3researchers lack the power to, for instance, randomly assign otherwise comparable communities to different policy or environmental conditions to test effects, as is possible with, for instance, students in different classrooms or patients in clinical settings. research on policy and environmental changes therefore tend to be less amenable to the type of a priori predictive global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 hypothesis testing endorsed by jason and colleagues. natural experiments, quasi-experiments, and fortuitous combinations of luck and clever research designs do nevertheless occasionally manage to produce compelling evidence for causality in systemic and population-level changes. 4i am not arguing that pragmatism, praxis, and phronetic social science are equivalents, but rather that they can be complementary perspectives for undertaking action-oriented research on community issues references altman, i., & rogoff, b. (1987). world views in psychology: trait, interactional, organismic, and transactional perspectives. in d. stokols & i. altman (eds.), handbook of environmental psychology. (pp. 7-40). new york: wiley. bernstein, r. j. (1999). praxis and action: contemporary philosophies of human action, second edition. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. coffield, e., nihiser, a. j., sherry, b., & economos, c. d. (2015). shape up somerville: change in parent body mass indexes during a child-targeted, community-based environmental change intervention. american journal of public health, 105(2), e83-e89. economos, c. d., hyatt, r. r., must, a., goldberg, j. p., kuder, j., naumova, e. n., . . . nelson, m. e. (2013). shape up somerville two-year results: a community-based environmental change intervention sustains weight reduction in children. preventive medicine, 57(4), 322-327. doi:10.1016/j.ypmed.2013.06.001 flyvbjerg, b. (2001). making social science matter: why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again. cambridge: cambridge university press. gorman, d. m., & huber, j. c. (2009). the social construction of "evidence-based'' drug prevention programs: a reanalysis of data from the drug abuse resistance education (dare) program. evaluation review, 33(4), 396-414. doi:10.1177/0193841x09334711 jason, l. a., stevens, e., ram, d., miller, s. a., beasley, c. r., & gleason, k. (2016). theories in the field of community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice.7(2). pp.1-27. lewin, k. (1946). action research and minority problems. journal of social issues, 2(4), 34-46. livingood, w. c., allegrante, j. p., airhihenbuwa, c. o., clark, n. m., windsor, r. c., zimmerman, m. a., & green, l. w. (2011). applied social and behavioral science to address complex health problems. american journal of preventive medicine, 41(5), 525-31. doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2011.07.021 prilleltensky, i. (2001). value-based praxis in community psychology: moving toward social justice and social action. american journal of community psychology, 29(5), 747-778. microsoft word esp1_garcía ramírez et al el reto de la equidad en las políticas sanitarias dirigidas al pueblo gitano en españa final-formatted.docx el reto de la equidad en las políticas sanitarias dirigidas al pueblo gitano en españa the challenge of equity in health policies aimed at the roma population in spain manuel garcía-ramírez marta escobar-ballesta tona lizana maría-jesús albar universidad de sevilla universidad de sevilla agència de salut pública de catalunya universidad de sevilla palabras claves: pueblo gitano, psicología comunitaria, gobernanza de la salud keywords: roma people, community psychology, governance for health, wicked problem autor biografías: manuel garcía-ramírez, ph.d., is professor of community psychology at university of sevilla, spain. he is the coordinator of cespyd, the center of community research and action at the university of sevilla and the founding co-director of the master in international migrations, health and wellbeing at this university. marta escobar-ballesta is a community psychology doctoral student in the psychology program at the university of sevilla, spain. her dissertation entails building capacity among multiple stakeholders in roma health policies. she is a staff member of cespyd, the center of community research and action at university of sevilla tona lizana is bachelor of medicine and bachelor of surgery from university of barcelona, specialized in the management of health services from london school of hygiene and tropical medicine. she is the director of the master plan for immigration and cooperation of the department of health of the generalitat of catalonia and the coordinator of the immigration program and international health of the public health agency of catalonia. maría-jesús albar is a ph.d. psychologist and nurse working as professor of the nursing department at university of sevilla, spain. she is a staff member of cespyd, the center of community research and action at university of sevilla and the founding co-director of the master in international migrations, health and wellbeing at this university. agradecimientos: la participación del autor y autoras en este artículo fue financiada por el ministerio de ciencia en innovación del gobierno de españa (psi2011-25554) y la organización internacional para las migraciones (oim, proyecto equi-health). el autor y autoras desean expresar su gratitud a roumyana petrova y mariya samuilova de la oim por su inestimable contribución durante la realización de este trabajo. citación: ramirez, m.g., ballesta, m.e., lizana, t., and albar, m.j.(2016). el reto de la equidad en las políticas sanitarias dirigidas al pueblo gitano en españa. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(1s), 1-15. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org) global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 el reto de la equidad en las políticas sanitarias dirigidas al pueblo gitano en españa resumen en este artículo abordamos la contribución de la psicología comunitaria en la formulación de políticas de salud pública transformadoras dirigidas al pueblo gitano. la brecha en salud entre la minoría gitana y el resto de la población en europa, ha conducido a la organización internacional para las migraciones a implementar el proyecto equi-health. su finalidad es redefinir las políticas de salud dirigidas al pueblo gitano desde los principios de equidad y justicia social. en españa, esto ha supuesto un proceso iterativo de cuatro fases: (1) encuadrar el problema, (2) construir capacidad de colaboración entre los agentes; (3) desarrollar conocimiento compartido, y (4) planificar acciones y fortalecer compromisos futuros. las lecciones aprendidas de esta experiencia permiten: (1) visibilizar las fortalezas de la psicología comunitaria en la innovación de políticas de salud; (2) crear conciencia sobre nuestro compromiso con los grupos oprimidos, y (3) responder científicamente a la gobernanza de la salud. the challenge of equity in health policies aimed at the roma population in spain abstract in this paper we address the contribution of the community psychology to the formulation of transformative public health policies for the roma. the gap in health between the roma and the rest of population in europe has led the international organization for migration to implement the equi-health project. its aim is to redefine public health policies addressed to the roma from the values of equity and social justice. in spain, it has entailed an iterative four stage process: (1) to frame the problem, (2) to build collaborative capacity among stakeholders; (3) to develop shared understanding, and (4) to plan future actions and strengthen commitments. the lessons learned from this experience allow to: (1) make the strengths of community psychology visible for the innovation of public health policies; (2) raise awareness of our commitment with oppressed groups; and (3) scientifically respond to governance for health. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 las inequidades en salud del pueblo gitano (pg) representan uno de los desafíos más complejos que afrontan actualmente las políticas públicas europeas de protección social. la evidencia muestra consistentemente que los indicadores de salud del pg son siempre peores que los del resto de la población debido a las precarias e injustas condiciones de vida que sufren (la parra, 2009). en la actualidad, doce millones de personas gitanas viven en europa, representando así la minoría étnica más numerosa y pobre—diez veces más pobre que el resto de la población (mckee, balabanova & steriu, 2007; parekh & rose, 2011). la mayoría tiene un bajo nivel educativo y vive en guetos o asentamientos; incluso cuando logran escapar del círculo de la pobreza, no consiguen mejorar su salud porque continúan atrapadas en el estigma y el silenciamiento (fésus, östlin, mckee & ádány, 2012). la ampliación de la unión europea con países con un alto porcentaje de población gitana (e.g., rumanía y bulgaria) fue la oportunidad para que en 2003 la comisión europea, el banco mundial y la open society foundations organizaran la conferencia “roma in an expanding europe: challenges for the future” (gitanos en una europa en expansión: desafíos para el futuro)i. el objetivo fue impulsar una década para la inclusión del pg (decade of roma inclusion 2005-2015)ii que redujera de manera efectiva la brecha que los separaba del resto de la población en los ámbitos de educación, empleo, vivienda y salud. a pesar de los esfuerzos realizados, las condiciones de vida del pg en europa siguieron empeorando y, en 2011, la comisión europea adoptó un marco que garantizase políticas nacionales de inclusión del pg (eu framework for national roma integration strategies up to 2020). a través de esta iniciativa, los estados miembros se comprometían a reforzar la legislación y apoyar a las autoridades regionales y locales para monitorear, compartir y fortalecer políticas integradoras. además, se subrayó la necesidad de diseñar estrategias para comprometer activamente a todos los agentes sociales en procesos que adaptaran las políticas a las condiciones locales (european commission, 2011). para asegurar el éxito de estos esfuerzos, la organización internacional para las migraciones (oim) ha impulsado el proyecto “equi health: fomentando la provisión de asistencia sanitaria para migrantes, la población gitana y otros grupos vulnerables”iii. su objetivo es garantizar el progreso en el acceso y adecuación de los servicios de salud al pg a través del fomento del diálogo y el desarrollo de capacidades entre múltiples agentes. para ello, se propone redefinir las políticas de salud dirigidas al pg desde los valores y principios de la equidad y justicia social. en este artículo presentamos el trabajo realizado por un equipo multidisciplinar nacido de la colaboración entre el centro de investigación y acción comunitaria de la universidad de sevilla (cespyd) y la oim para revisar la estrategia nacional para la inclusión de la población gitana en españa, en el área de salud (vea el informe completo en http://equihealth.eea.iom.int/images/nris_spain_fin al.pdf). la participación de profesionales de la psicología comunitaria en esta iniciativa ha permitido realzar el valor de esta disciplina en la gobernanza de la global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 salud. los términos “políticas” y “planes” se emplean de manera indistinta (en inglés, policy) para referir un curso o principio de acción adoptado o propuesto por una institución, organización o individuo. en primer lugar, argumentamos el fracaso de las políticas dirigidas a superar las inequidades en la salud del pg—las cuales serán definidas como un problema retorcido o wicked problem—y cómo la psicología comunitaria puede ayudar a afrontarlas. a continuación presentamos y describimos el modelo que hemos desarrollado en españa para redefinirlas y, finalmente, discutimos nuestros resultados con el fin de ayudar a futuros esfuerzos. problemas retorcidos, políticas sanitarias para el pueblo gitano y psicología comunitaria el fracaso de las políticas públicas que han tratado de corregir las inequidades en salud del pg puede explicarse desde su consideración como problema retorcido (en inglés, wicked problem). acuñado por rittel y webber (1973), este término refiere a aquellos problemas que no pueden atenderse exitosamente con aproximaciones lineales y analíticas debido a su naturaleza cambiante e imprevisible, lo cual los hace muy resistentes a cualquier intento de solución. en este sentido, las inequidades en salud del pg son un problema muy desestructurado, casi líquido. su naturaleza y extensión depende de quién, cómo, cuándo y dónde se define, de manera que los esfuerzos por caracterizarlo y acotarlo fracasan e incluso transforman su naturaleza original. acercamientos complementarios son incapaces de converger en una definición sólida que permita emprender acciones sostenibles. su abordaje supone una encrucijada donde múltiples agentes rivalizan por hacer valer sus propias prioridades—siendo la escasa sinergia entre ellas la causa de su irrelevancia. por ejemplo, está bien establecida la relación entre prácticas familiares machistas, abandono escolar precoz, maternidad adolescente y una precaria educación en salud sexual y reproductiva en mujeres gitanas (logar, rotar & maksuti, 2015). sin embargo, las políticas que se implementan perpetúan el ciclo de exclusión que pretenden combatir, ya que se enfocan en prevenir nuevos embarazos en madres multíparas en vez de promover una salud afectiva y sexual en adolescentes. además, las inequidades en salud del pg tienen una naturaleza implacable, persistente, capaz de fagocitar todo intento de solución. cambios que pueden resultar positivos para algunos grupos, son dañinos para otros. por ejemplo, la mayor movilidad proporcionada por la ampliación del espacio schengeniv no ha incrementado las oportunidades laborales del pg, sino que ha exacerbado el odio racial hacia ellos y ellas en el resto de países europeos (human rights first, 2008). como problema retorcido, las inequidades en salud del pg van a requerir que instituciones europeas, organizaciones de protección de los derechos humanos y civiles, y sistemas de protección nacionales y locales realicen un esfuerzo sostenido para asegurar planes públicos que las combatan permanentemente. estos esfuerzos requieren un compromiso entre los agentes sociales para desarrollar un conocimiento compartido que vigile, corrija y prevenga su exacerbación y global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 agravamiento. esto implica una visión pragmática del conocimiento (weber & khademian, 2008). es decir, las políticas destinadas a combatir las inequidades en salud del pg deben sostenerse en la conexión entre el conocimiento tradicional—las evidencias científicas—y lo que el pueblo gitano hace en un contexto concreto—las evidencias de la práctica. la misión de la psicología comunitaria es transformar realidades sociales desde la asunción de que están conformadas por políticas públicas que son mediadas por comunidades e individuos (bishop, vicary, browne & guard, 2009). por tanto, es nuestra responsabilidad empoderar al pg en la promoción de políticas de salud orientadas a superar las inequidades que sufre. la psicología comunitaria ofrece el marco adecuado para que el pg: (1) adquiera visibilidad política, (2) tenga oportunidades para involucrarse y comprometerse activamente en las políticas que les atañe, (3) asegure la rendición de cuentas en su implementación, y (4) sensibilice a quienes planifican sobre los efectos que dichas políticas tienen sobre sus comunidades (bishop et al., 2009; nelson, 2013). a partir de estos principios y valores, nelson (2013) ha acuñado el término cambio político transformador (cpt, transformative policy change) para referirse a cambios en la planificación pública que dan poder real a la ciudadanía para influir en las decisiones que afectan a sus vidas, al tiempo que incorpora la mejor evidencia científica disponible. por tanto, los cpt exigen involucrar activa y horizontalmente a los agentes sociales a partir de los siguientes principios: (1) los contextos de diversidad son escenarios caracterizados por perspectivas plurales. ni hay un único modo de análisis de la realidad ni una única solución que pueda dar respuesta a las necesidades e intereses de todas las personas (allen, todd, anderson, davis, javdani, & bruehler, et al., 2013). (2) las relaciones entre los agentes implicados son elementos centrales en la ecología del problema. cualquier variación en la naturaleza, intensidad y autenticidad de dichas relaciones afecta a los procesos y resultados. (3) los cpt son procesos de movilización comunitaria que comprometen personas, organizaciones e instituciones en la definición del problema, la identificación de soluciones y su implementación (garcía-ramírez, paloma, suárez-balcázar & balcázar, 2009). (4) los cpt reconocen que todos los agentes involucrados son parte de la solución del problema—o formarán parte del fracaso. sus prioridades deben asegurarse en términos de beneficios y distribución equitativa de las responsabilidades y recursos. redefiniendo políticas que desafían las inequidades en salud del pg a base de estos principios y tomando como guía la propuesta de petersen, janssen, van der sluijs, risbey, ravetz, wardekker y colaboradores (2012) para manejar la incertidumbre que resulta de estos problemas retorcidos, establecimos un modelo de cuatro fases para redefinir las políticas públicas que desafían las inequidades en salud del pg en españa (ver figura 1): (1) encuadrar el problema; (2) construir capacidad de colaboración entre los agentes; (3) desarrollar conocimiento compartido sobre el problema y sus posibles global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 figura 1. modelo de cambios transformadores de políticas de salud para el pueblo gitano soluciones; y (4) planificar acciones y fortalecer compromisos futuros. el encuadre del problema de las inequidades en salud del pg para encuadrar el problema de las inequidades en salud del pg se requiere conocer y analizar las definiciones existentes, las políticas que han tratado de resolverlas, las conexiones con otros problemas, así como hacer acopio de las evidencias, recursos disponibles y agentes sociales involucrados. a tal fin, constatamos que el reto de la organización mundial de la salud para los próximos cinco años es eliminar la brecha de 10 años que separa la expectativa de vida del pg con la del resto de la población (who, 2014). esta diferencia es atribuida a la alta prevalencia de enfermedades silentes, crónicas e infecciosas (e.g., diabetes, cardiovasculares, tuberculosis) y también mentales, las que nunca se diagnostican— o lo son en sus fases tardías (la parra, 2009; who, 2014). la obesidad es considerada una epidemia entre las mujeres gitanas quienes, además, sufren importantes problemas de salud sexual y reproductiva como consecuencia de que muchas de ellas nunca acuden a consultas de ginecología o participan en programas de cribado de cáncer de mama y cérvix (hajioff & mckee, 2000; la parra, 2009; parekh & rose, 2011). muchos niños y niñas no cumplen el calendario de vacunas y sufren problemas de desnutrición y malnutrición (la parra, 2009; who, 2014). estos ejemplos ilustran la permeabilidad e interacción de las inequidades en salud con otros graves global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 problemas del pg como el analfabetismo en personas adultas, el fracaso escolar, el desempleo a largo plazo (brüggemann, 2012) y los déficits estructurales y de servicios en sus barrios (who, 2014). todo ello pone de manifiesto que el fracaso en las políticas dirigidas a asegurar la integración y bienestar del pg fracasan como consecuencia de relaciones asimétricas de poder dentro del sistema público de salud (sps), de la sutil discriminación contra esta minoría entre los y las profesionales y la ciudadanía— que incluso llegan a sentir asco contra el pueblo gitano, deshumanizándolo (dalsklev & rønningsdalen kunst, 2015; la parra, 2009). la construcción de capacidad de colaboración entre los agentes implicados construir capacidad de colaboración entre múltiples agentes para desarrollar cpt requiere—además de recurrir a las mejores evidencias científicas— compromiso, cohesión y competencia de, y entre, todos y todas para definir una meta común, compartir una sólida hoja de ruta e implementarla (de freitas, garcíaramírez, aambø & buttigieg, 2014; nelson, 2013). con estos propósitos, realizamos un proceso iterativo de tres componentes. el primero fue la puesta en marcha de un proceso abierto de creación de una coalición entre todos los agentes implicados en la salud del pg en andalucía y cataluña—las dos regiones españolas con más población gitana. esta coalición estuvo compuesta por investigadores/as, planificadores/as de servicios, profesionales sanitarios, representantes sectoriales y de asociaciones gitanas, proveedores/as de agencias de servicios comunitarios y líderes de comunidad. el segundo componente consistió en un análisis participativo de los documentos “criterios y recomendaciones para evaluar el componente de salud de las estrategias nacionales de integración del pg” (who, 2012), las “recomendaciones del consejo de europa para asegurar cuidados de salud a la población migrante” (coe, 2011) y los compromisos definidos en la década para la inclusión del pgv. el tercer componente consistió en un proceso recursivo de scoping review que incluyó literatura indexada y no indexada, así como planes y políticas regionales y locales, comprendiendo el período entre 2005 y 2013vi. la meta del trabajo colaborativo fue contrastar el grado de sensibilidad y equidad de las políticas de salud dirigidas al pg y proponer acciones para superar las inequidades. el documento guía para la evaluación de las políticas fue el índice de equidad de las políticas sanitarias para el pg (roma health integration policy index, rhipex), que incluye una serie de indicadores agrupados en cuatro pilares (ver tabla 1): (1) titularidad del derecho a la asistencia sanitaria; (2) acceso al sistema de salud y sus servicios; (3) garantías sobre la calidad de los servicios; y (4) logro y sostenimiento de cambios. el proceso recursivo de scoping review nos permitió acceder a las evidencias científicas, así como a políticas y planes vigentes. para recoger las evidencias de las prácticas, la coalición fue la plataforma para realizar 33 entrevistas individuales y cuatro grupos focales: dos al inicio del proceso—en las que se definió la misión y se implementó el rhipex, y otras dos al final—en las que se decidió el plan de futuro. el documento final fue evaluado externamente en un proceso dirigido por la oim. posteriormente fue difundido entre todos los miembros de la coalición, global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 dimensión indicador descripción titularidad del derecho a la asistencia sanitaria requisitos para la obtención del derecho requisitos formales e informales para la población gitana nacional y extranjera para acceder al sistema de salud y sus servicios. incluye aspectos relacionados con el proceso de solicitud de la tarjeta sanitaria, de identificación y registro. copagos sistema de pago que la población gitana tiene que realizar para tener acceso a la atención médica. se examina la prevalencia de los pagos directos y los casos de exención (e.g., bajos ingresos o enfermedades crónicas). cobertura lista de servicios a los que la población gitana tiene derecho. distingue entre la cobertura para la población nacional y la extranjera. acceso al sistema de salud y sus servicios barreras de accesibilidad barreras que impiden el acceso de la población gitana nacional y extranjera al sistema público de salud. éstas pueden estar relacionadas con las costumbres gitanas o derivadas del propio sistema y sus proveedores. políticas destinadas a suprimir las barreras de accesibilidad políticas desarrolladas e implementadas por los planes locales, regionales o nacionales destinadas a hacer frente a las barreras de accesibilidad. estrategias de adaptación para suprimir las barreras de accesibilidad acciones específicas desarrolladas por los proveedores de los centros de salud u ongs para eliminar las barreras que dificultan el acceso de la población gitana a la asistencia sanitaria. mediación en salud aspectos relacionados con las tareas de mediadores en salud que trabajan con población gitana. garantías sobre la calidad de los servicios inequidades en salud identificadas por la estrategias nacional inequidades descritas en el plan operacional 2014-2016. políticas para hacer los servicios de salud más sensibles a la población gitana aspectos relacionados con la formación en competencia cultural de los proveedores de servicios. estrategias de adaptación de los servicios de salud y los proveedores/as medidas adoptadas por los centros y los proveedores para adaptarse a las características y necesidades de la población gitana española y extranjera. logro y sostenimiento de cambios el contexto político y económico de la nris capacidad del sistema de salud para lograr los objetivos del plan operacional de la estrategia nacional y cómo estos objetivos son modulados por las restricciones impuestas en el sps. asociacionismo, participación de la comunidad gitana nacional y extranjera relaciones entre la comunidad y gitana y las asociaciones, así como las relaciones de colaboración entre diferentes organizaciones y cómo estas contribuyen a la mejora de salud de la población gitana. colaboración entre agentes implicados sinergias entre las diferentes organizaciones y cómo estas contribuyen a mejorar la salud y el bienestar de la comunidad gitana. incluyen organismos locales, regionales y nacionales institucionales, instituciones sanitarias y académicas, asociaciones romaníes, organizaciones sociales y organizaciones no gubernamentales. promoción de la acción intersectorial sinergias entre los diferentes programas destinados a promover y mejorar el uso de los servicios de salud en el marco de la estrategia nacional. tabla 1. índice de equidad de las políticas sanitarias para el pueblo gitano (rhipex): dimensiones e indicadores. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 las agencias de servicios y la comunidad gitana. en las siguientes subsecciones se presentan las principales fortalezas y debilidades de las políticas actuales y las propuestas de cambio que se adoptaron para el futuro. el conocimiento compartido que promueve cpt para la salud del pg con el apoyo del software atlas.ti, dos juezas independientes analizaron, sistematizaron y clasificaron la información disponible siguiendo un sistema de categorías elaborado a partir de los componentes del rhipex y otras categorías emergentes. el informe final siguió la estructura del rhipex, cuyos principales contenidos referimos a continuación. titularidad del derecho a la asistencia sanitaria la actual política dirigida a superar las inequidades en salud del pg está diseñada sobre el principio de que la atención sanitaria en españa es gratuita y universal, sin distinción de origen étnico, estatus social o permiso de residencia. sin embargo, los recientes cambios legislativos (e.g., real decreto ley 16/2012vii) han restringido este derecho a quienes contribuyen al sistema público de salud a través de cotizaciones o a través de pago directo. estos cambios han afectado a la salud del pg de manera excepcional ya que una parte importante de esta población está desempleada o trabaja sin cotizar a la seguridad social. por otra parte, la adquisición de la tarjeta sanitaria— puerta de entrada al sistema—conlleva procedimientos burocráticos complejos y exigentes (e.g., documentar que se dispone de un domicilio fijo) que son barreras insalvables para que muchas personas y familias gitanas puedan hacer uso de sus derechos. acceso al sistema de salud y sus servicios la actual política no ofrece suficiente atención a las principales barreras que encuentra el pg para acceder a los servicios de salud. éstas están relacionadas con la cultura de cuidados del sps, la falta de ajuste de sus canales de comunicación y las derivadas de la discriminación institucional. el sps carece de sensibilidad cultural al no adaptar sus servicios a las necesidades de las minorías. además, los protocolos de acceso requieren que las personas usuarias conozcan su compleja estructura interna y una jerga específica. el pg frecuentemente carece de estos conocimientos lo que le dificulta seguir los procedimientos estipulados y navegar por el sistema. por su parte, el sps emplea estrategias comunicativas generalmente escritas (e.g., posters, websites, folletos) que agrandan la brecha con el pg. por tanto, estas barreras tienen un efecto multiplicador en la desconexión entre el pg y el sistema. si en unas personas aumenta la falta de identificación con el sps, el sistema y sus profesionales aumentan sus prejuicios sobre la imposibilidad de trabajar con ellos, resultando en un círculo perverso de discriminación. algunas estrategias se han implementado con el fin de superar estas barreras. especialmente relevantes son los programas de mediación en salud financiados por los gobiernos regionales e implementados por organizaciones sociales o entidades subcontratadas. estos programas buscan empoderar a las personas usuarias de etnia gitana promoviendo entre ellas el conocimiento de sus derechos y cómo navegar por el sistema. también se han ocupado de formar a quienes proveen servicios y en cooperar global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 con ellos y ellas para promover vías de acceso más amigables para el pg. garantías sobre la calidad de los servicios la política de la estrategia nacional de inclusión de la población gitana en españa para garantizar la calidad de las prestaciones enfrenta tres importantes amenazas: (1) la carencia de medidas para ofrecer servicios al pg extranjero, (2) un planteamiento exclusivamente biomédico y (3) unos objetivos que no están formulados de manera interconectada ni integrada con el resto de políticas. a pesar de estas amenazas, se han realizado importantes esfuerzos que deben optimizarse. a nivel político destaca el afán por desarrollar planes regionales para formar a quienes proveen servicios de salud, elaborar guías sobre los principales problemas de salud y de acceso al sps del pg y adaptar algunos servicios a sus necesidades. algunos centros sanitarios han hecho esfuerzos por asegurar y cubrir sus necesidades más urgentes (e.g., planificación familiar, comunicación médico-paciente, prácticas religiosas). estas adaptaciones las realizan proveedores/as que empeñan voluntariamente su tiempo en monitorizar y localizar a las personas usuarias, en ausencia de una política institucional que reconozca estos esfuerzos y asegure su continuidad. logro y sostenimiento de cambios las actuales políticas públicas establecen cómo fortalecer la participación del pg en el desarrollo de esas políticas y asegurar el trabajo intersectorial, multi-territorial y de colaboración institucional. sin embargo, aunque las evidencias y agentes consultados apoyan estos objetivos, llaman la atención sobre diversas fuentes de incertidumbre. en primer lugar, el actual contexto político y económico está caracterizado por dramáticos recortes en los servicios de salud, además de educación y empleo. en segundo lugar, es notable la falta de compromiso por parte de las personas responsables de las políticas y la carencia de un sistema de rendición de cuentas que sea efectivo. en tercer lugar, el movimiento asociativo gitano vive actualmente una burocratización creciente y tiene importantes dificultades para representar a las nuevas comunidades gitanas y liderar sus desafíos. estos fenómenos ocurren normalmente en conglomerados asociativos que rivalizan por obtener fondos, que deben mantener infraestructuras muy costosas y en las que la participación ciudadana es cada vez menor—e inexistente en el caso del pg extranjero. y, por último, se pone de manifiesto la falta de trabajo intersectorial y la fragmentación actual entre las políticas que promueven la integración y el bienestar del pg. planificar acciones y fortalecer compromisos futuros los agentes de la coalición han subrayado que las políticas que desafíen las inequidades en salud del pg deben ser procesos de innovación guiados por los siguientes principios: (1) deben involucrar efectivamente a todos los agentes y asegurar que todas las voces son oídas (de freitas et al., 2014); (2) asumir que las inequidades en salud del pg tienen una naturaleza interseccional, por lo que los cpt deben formularse desde una óptica intersectorial y sistémica; (3) la transparencia, permanente monitorización y rendición de cuentas deben articular los procesos de implementación de las políticas (mittelmark, 2001); (4) el rol de las personas promotoras de las políticas debe ser el de constructoras de global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 capacidad de colaboración entre agentes, lo que implica actuar como instigadoras, mediadoras y abogadas de la salud del pg (balcázar, garateserafini & keys, 2004); y (5) la eliminación del racismo institucional (griffith, mason, yonas, eng, jeffries, plihcik, et al., 2007). teniendo en cuenta estos principios, los cpt deben encaminarse a: (1) fortalecer la titularidad de la asistencia sanitaria del pg nacional y extranjero, defendiendo y garantizando este derecho a través de mecanismos manejables para el pg y eliminando procedimientos administrativos injustos que—en la práctica—conculcan su derecho a la salud. (2) asegurar la accesibilidad al sistema de salud, superando la idea de que equidad es sinónimo de igualdad en el acceso y estableciendo vías excepcionales que reconcilien los protocolos y prácticas con las situaciones de vulnerabilidad y movilidad que viven importantes sectores del pg. (3) garantizar la calidad de los servicios, redefiniendo el propio sistema desde un enfoque comunitario de la salud, que priorice la promoción y la prevención, incluyendo al pg—extranjero y nacional—en los planes y estrategias del sps, tanto como personas usuarias activas como promoviendo su formación como profesionales sanitarios. (4) asegurar el logro y sostenibilidad de los cambios, estableciendo mecanismos de fortalecimiento, revitalización y autocrítica del movimiento asociativo gitano, mejorando el trabajo colaborativo entre los distintos actores, y promoviendo el liderazgo y participación del pg. los cpt pueden beneficiarse del uso de las nuevas tecnologías en el ámbito de salud pública. basadas en el principio de “hacer para transformar” (montero, 2006), estas metodologías (e.g., plataformas en línea) no solo permiten el empoderamiento y la alfabetización en salud del pg, sino que también son un medio para compartir recursos y conocimientos, así como crear redes y trabajo colaborativo entre múltiples agentes (boyce, 2012; suárez-balcázar & garcía-ramírez, 2003). discusión aunque los resultados de nuestro trabajo sólo pretenden ser de aplicación al contexto en el que se ha realizado, ciertas lecciones pueden ser de utilidad para esfuerzos similares en otros contextos. en primer lugar, nuestra experiencia resalta que los cambios políticos transformadores son el resultado del empoderamiento de los agentes—es decir, su capacitación para la gobernanza de la salud. esto implica la incorporación de la acción colectiva a la definición e implementación de las políticas, la redistribución de recursos económicos, intelectuales, normativos y políticos, así como la evaluación de sus efectos en la salud a través de un análisis de las relaciones de poder (ottersen, dasgupta, blouin, buss, chongsuvivatwong, frenk., et al., 2014). por tanto, el pg se verá empoderado como legítimo agente político. esto implica cambios en la manera de pensar sobre su salud y en su derecho a disfrutarla de acuerdo a sus valores y tradiciones, la adquisición de habilidades y capacidades para protagonizar su cuidado, así como a llevar a cabo acciones que la garanticen cuando esté amenazada (balcázar et al., 2012; garcía-ramírez, hernández-plaza, albar, luque-ribelles & suárezbalcázar, et al., 2012). en segundo lugar, este trabajo pone de manifiesto el papel del psicólogo y psicóloga comunitaria para promover salud comunitaria y elaborar políticas. su papel debe ser entendido como el de global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 alguien que construye capacidad de colaboración entre agentes; alguien que tiene autoridad legal—capacidad reconocida por las demás personas—y que actúa investigando, innovando, comunicando, asesorando y fomentando alianzas. en definitiva, se convierte en un abogado o abogada social que sostiene su trabajo en la confianza y actúa como enlace entre todas las personas e instituciones involucradas (balcázar, et al, 2004; nelson, 2013). en tercer lugar, también se ha puesto de manifiesto la importancia de las organizaciones comunitarias como plataformas mediadoras. hacer valer estas estructuras como escenarios multiculturales empoderadores es un desafío para nuestro quehacer. estas organizaciones deben ser referentes para las redes de múltiples agentes, generando procesos ágiles para redefinir sus metas, sus servicios y procesos organizacionales ante nuevos desafíos, promoviendo relaciones recíprocas y horizontales, fomentando la capacidad para desarrollar nuevos roles y regenerando el liderazgo en las estructuras (suárez-balcázar, redmond, kouba, hellwig, davis, martinez, et al., 2007). finalmente, las difíciles circunstancias en las que vive el pueblo gitano deben conducir al psicólogo o psicóloga comunitaria—junto a todos los agentes sociales—a afirmar críticamente que la sociedad en su conjunto es responsable del sufrimiento que padece el pg, porque es causado por circunstancias que son evitables y que somos capaces de erradicar. en este sentido, debe incorporarse el análisis de la responsabilidad de las inequidades, erradicando la concepción falaz de que las desigualdades sociales matan cuando—en realidad—quienes matan son quienes se benefician de esas desigualdades (navarro, 2013). en definitiva, todos y todas tenemos la obligación de auxiliar al pg a vivir día a día, ayudarle a sobrevivir mientras encuentra significado, importancia y prosperidad en las comunidades (prilleltensky, 2014). estas tareas pueden parecer abrumadoras; sin embargo, los esfuerzos que estamos realizando en españa con el auspicio de la oim, son un ejemplo de cómo la ciudadanía puede comprometerse en la tarea de que el pg vea luz al final de un túnel de mil años de estigma. referencias allen, n.e., todd, n.r., anderson, c.j., davis, s.m., javdani, s., bruehler, v., & dorsey, h. (2013). council-based approaches to intimate partner violence: evidence for distal change in the systems response. american journal of community psychology, 52, 1-12. balcázar, f.e., garate-sarafini, t.j., & keys, c.b. (2004). the need for action when conducting intervention research: the multiple roles of community psychologists. american journal of community psychology, 33, 243-252. balcázar, f.e., suárez-balcázar, y., bibiana adames, s., keys, c.b., garcíaramírez, m., & paloma, v. (2012). a case study of liberation among latino immigrant families who have children with disabilities. american journal of community psychology, 49, 283-293. doi:10.1007/s10464-011-9447-9 bishop, b.j., vicary, d.a., browne, a.l., & guard, n. (2009). public policy, participation and the third position: the implication of engaging communities on their own terms. american journal of community psychology, 43, 111-121. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 boyce, n. (2012). the lancet technology. the lancet, 379. june 16. brüggemann, c. (2012). roma education in comparative perspective. analysis of the undp/world bank/ec regional roma survey 2011. roma inclusion working papers. bratislava: united nations development programme coe (2011). council of europe recommendations on mobility, migration and access to health care. recuperado de: http://bit.ly/rks2yd dalsklev, m. & rønningsdalen kunst, j. (2015). the effect of disgust-eliciting media portrayals on outgroup dehumanization and support of deportation in a norwegian sample. international journal of intercultural relations, 47, 28-40. de freitas, c., garcía-ramírez, m., aambø, a., & buttigieg, s.c. (2014). transforming health policies through migrant user involvement: lessons learnt from three european countries. psychosocial intervention 23(2), 105113. doi:10.1016/j.psi.2014.07.007 european commission (2011). an eu framework for national roma integration strategies up to 2020. recuperado de: http://eurlex.europa.eu/legalcontent/en/txt/pdf/?uri=celex:520 11dc0173&from=en fésus, g., östlin, p., mckee, m., & ádány, r. (2012). policies to improve the health and well-being of roma people: the european experience. health policy, 105, 25-32. doi:10.1016/j.healthpol.2011.12.003 garcía-ramírez, m., hernández-plaza, s., albar, m.j., luque-ribelles, v., & suárezbalcázar, y. (2012). building healthcare stakeholder coalitions: a community psychology approach to user involvement for migrant populations. in david ingleby, antonio chiarenza, walter devillé & ioanna kotsioni (eds.) inequalities in healthcare for migrants and ethnic minorities. vol. 2. cost series on health and diversity (pp. 188-204). antwerp/apeldoorn : garant. garcía-ramírez, m., paloma, v., suárezbalcázar, y., & balcázar, f. (2009). building international collaborative capacity: contributions of community psychologists to a european network. american journal of community psychology, 44, 116-122. griffith, d.m., mason, m., yonas, m., eng, e., jeffries, v., plihcik, s., & parks, b. (2007). dismantling institutional racism: theory and action. american journal of community psychology, 39, 381-392. hajioff, s., & mckee, m. (2000). the health of the roma people: a review of the published literature. journal of epidemiology and community health, 54, 864-869 human rights first (2008). violence against roma. 2008 hate crimes survey. human rights first. recuperado de: https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/wpcontent/uploads/pdf/fd-080924-romaweb.pdf la parra, d. (2009). towards equity in health: comparative study of national health surveys in the roma population and the general population in spain, 2006. madrid, españa: ministerio de sanidad, servicios sociales y equidad. logar, m., rotar, d., & maksuti, a. (2015). standpoints of roma women regarding reproductive health. bmc women’s health, 15, 38 global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 mckee, m., balabanova d., & steriu, a. (2007). a new year, a new era: romania and bulgaria join the european union. european journal of public health, 17(2), 119-20. mittelmark, m.b. (2001). promoting social responsibility for health: health impact assessment and healthy public policy at the community level. health promotion international, 16, 3. montero, m. (2006). hacer para transformar. el método en la psicología comunitaria. buenos aires: paidós navarro, v. (2013). what we mean by social determinants of health. in m.t. donohoe (ed.) public health and social justice (pp. 21-38). jossey bass-wiley: san francisco, ca. nelson, g. (2013). community psychology and transformative policy change in the neo-liberal era. american journal of community psychology, 52, 211–223. doi:10.1007/s10464-0139591-5 ottersen, o.p., dasgupta, j., blouin, c., buss,p., chongsuvivatwong, v., frenk, j., et al. (2014). the political origins of health inequity: prospects for change. the lancet, 383, 630-667. parekh, n., & rose, t. (2011). health inequalities of the roma in europe. central european journal public health, 19(3):139-42. petersen, a.c. janssen, j.p., van der sluijs, j.s., risbey, j.r., ravetz, j.a., wardekker., et al. (2012). guidance for uncertainty assessment and communication. pbl netherlands environmental assessment agency: the netherlands. isbn: 978-94-91506-59-8. recuperado de: http://www.pbl.nl/sites/default/files/c ms/publicaties/pbl_2013_guidancefor-uncertainty-assessment-andcommunication_712.pdf prilleltensky, i. (2014). meaningmaking, mattering, and thriving in community psychology: from cooptation to amelioration and transformation. psychosocial intervention, 23(2), 151-154. rittel, h.w.j., & webber, m. (1973). dilemmas in a general theory of planning. policy sciences, 4, 155-169 suárez-balcázar, y., & garcía-ramírez, m. (2003). internet y cambio comunitario en un barrio empobrecido de chicago. implicaciones para andalucía. apuntes de psicología, 21, 533-548. suárez-balcázar, y., redmond, l., kouba, j., hellwig, m., davis, r., martinez, l.i., & jones l. (2007). introducing systems change in the schools: the case of school luncheons and vending machines. american journal of community psychology, 39, 335-345. weber, e.p., & khademian, a.m. (2008). wicked problems, knowledge challenges, and collaborative capacity builders in network settings. public administration review, march/april, 334-349. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 who (2012). the new european policy for health – health 2020. recuperado de: http://www.who.int/workforcealliance /knowledge/resources/health2020_lon g.pdf who (2014). roma health report: health status of the roma population. data collection in the member states of the european union. recuperado de: http://ec.europa.eu/chafea/documents /health/roma-health-report-executivesummary-2014_en.pdf notas i briefing note conference: “roma in an expanding europe: challenges for the future” wwwwds.worldbank.org/external/default/wdscontentserver/wdsp/ib/2003/07/24/000012009_20030724095242/r endered/pdf/26415.pdf ii decade of roma inclusion 2005-2015 http://www.romadecade.org/ iii proyecto equi-health, oim http://equi-health.eea.iom.int/ iv “territorio que comprende a aquellos estados de la unión europea que han acordado la creación de un espacio común cuyos objetivos fundamentales son la supresión de fronteras entre estos países, la seguridad, la inmigración y la libre circulación de personas.” http://www.interior.gob.es/web/servicios-alciudadano/extranjeria/acuerdo-de-schengen v decade of roma inclusion 2005-2015 www.romadecade.org vi los miembros de la coalición y los documentos que fueron revisados pueden ser consultados en el documento progress report of the implementation of national roma integration strategies in spain http://equihealth.eea.iom.int/images/nris_spain_final.pdf vii real decreto-ley 16/2012, de 20 de abril, de medidas urgentes para garantizar la sostenibilidad del sistema nacional de salud y mejorar la calidad y seguridad de sus prestaciones. http://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=boe-a-2012-5403 microsoft word maton-v4i2-20130613.docx community psychologists in the policy arena: perspectives from four continents kenneth i. maton university of maryland, baltimore county corresponding author: kenneth i. maton university of maryland, baltimore county 1000 hilltop circle baltimore, md, usa 21250 maton@umbc.edu keywords: public policy, community psychology, international. recommended citation: maton, k. (2013). community psychologists in the policy arena: perspectives from four continents. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(2), xxxx. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/).     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   community psychologists in the policy arena: perspectives from four continents community psychologists working in the policy arena are uniquely situated to improve the quality of life for individuals, communities and nations. unfortunately, we know relatively little about the policy-related work community psychologists conduct in different parts of the world. this special issue represents a beginning foray into this area, encompassing six articles, one information brief, one commentary, and two book reviews describing the policy-related work of community psychologists in multiple nations across four continents. the articles in the special issue are based on presentations in two separate symposia conducted at the fourth international conference of community psychology (barcelona, spain, june 2012). the two symposia were “psicología comunitaria y políticas sociales: antecedentes, límites y posibilidades” (jaime alfaro, coordinator), and “influencing social policy: community psychology perspectives from four continents” (ken maton, coordinator). the work described in the six articles is diverse, encompassing techniques to influence problem definition (causal layered analysis; critical reflection), policy formulation (coalition building, social advocacy), and policy implementation (collaboration, participatory co-management). the policy areas encompassed include early childhood, climate change, family farming, health care, and youth disabilities. for the most part, the authors bring to bear a critical psychology perspective, emphasizing the need to challenge and contest vested interests and powers, and to support and mobilize citizens and disenfranchised populations. the authors attempt such work as players both within and outside the policy system. in several articles the historical, cultural, and political contexts of the countries within which policy work is embedded are made explicit, whereas in others they are in the background. throughout, the challenges, the importance, and the potential benefits of practice in the policy arena are abundantly clear. this is evident as well in the information brief included in this special issue, about the development of social consortia, and in the two policy books reviewed, which detail multiple perspectives on policy-related work as well as extended description and analysis of multi-year, multiple-level initiatives to influence policy. the first three papers in the special issue are conceptual and analytical in nature. the first paper, by jaime alfaro, examines the history, prospects and challenges for community psychology in the social policy domain. the paper, written in spanish, is titled “psicología comunitaria y políticas sociales: institucionalidad y dinámicas de actores" (“community psychology and social policy: institutional dynamics and actors.”) based on a review of the available literature from multiple continents, and drawn in part from a recent edited volume on the topic, the paper highlights the complexities of the social policy arena, involving multiple phases, levels, policy functions, and institutional actors. three dimensions of social policy are described: 1) function (i.e., ultimate social policy aim); 2) actors involved (i.e., government implementing authorities only vs. interest groups, policymakers, academics, etc.); and 3) decision making process (i.e., technical, rational choice vs. negotiation, conflict). community psychologists are viewed as having a distinctive and important role in defining problems and solutions, and vying for access and influence in the ongoing processes of negotiation and power enactment that characterize the policy arena. the second paper, by brian bishop, peta dzidic and lauren breen, uses causal layered analysis to provide a culturally anchored, multi-level analysis of the critical problems facing small family farmers in rural australia. the paper is titled, “multiple level analysis as a tool for policy: an example of the use of contextualism and causal layered analysis.” the authors make the case for the use of contextualist rather than positivistic research methods to generate the policy implications of complex social problems. they then describe a case study of the use of causal layered analysis, specifically examining qualitative interview data from rural family farmers at four levels of analysis. the result is an understanding of the problem that transcends the farm management policies generated by city-based policymakers, instead focusing on larger social, cultural and economic factors. based on this analysis, the authors emphasize the need to address changing values about rural and agricultural communities, and the need for family farmers and their communities to be directly involved in defining the problems that face them, and generating the policies to address these problems. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   the third paper, by thomas saïas and cécile delawarde, presents a critical analysis of the french policymaking structure, with specific focus on the area of preventive public health policies for children and families. the paper is titled, “the geometrical headache of french policies: can vertical cultures be tilted horizontally?” the first author has a policy insider perspective, working at the national level within a french governmental agency. historical and cultural analysis is brought to bear to reveal a governmental mode of operation that directly connects governmental programming to individual citizens, precluding any power sharing and influence at the community level. bringing to bear a critical psychology lens, the authors emphasize the need for a transformation in power relationships, such that local communities have decision making influence in the policy arena. in particular, their analysis underscores the critical importance of developing communitydriven, community development initiatives in france, above and beyond the current public health focus on individual level service provision. the remaining three papers present and analyze case examples in which community psychologists actively contribute to policy formulation and policy implementation. the fourth paper, by tom wolff, describes three separate case examples in the state of massachusetts in the united states aimed at improving health care access, equity, and quality. the paper is titled, “a community psychologist’s involvement in policy change at the community level: three stories from a practitioner.” the three case examples include working with local communities to build coalitions that enhance community health, working with citizen, health and governmental groups to enhance successful implementation of a new state-level law focused on health care access, and building the capacity of local communities to address social change issues such as systemic racism. the examples illustrate the central role that community psychologists and other community practitioners can play in engaging citizens and community groups as active participants in policy formulation and implementation. the paper views policy influence work as emerging naturally from the ongoing activities of the practicing community psychologist in community context, and the author encourages other community psychologists to write about their experiences in the policy arena. the fifth paper, by mark burton, describes two separate case examples, one a demonstration project that piloted changes in youth disability policy and the other describing activities to influence policies on climate change mitigation, both in the city of manchester, england. the paper is titled “in and against social policy.” mark uses a critical psychology framework informed by the tradition of critical social policy and latin american liberatory praxis. in the first project, the author is a policy insider, working for a government agency implementing the new policy, and in the second he is a citizen activist. the paper emphasizes the challenges involved in influencing social policy, in part due to the complex array of interests and social forces that constrain policy change. the successes achieved are noted as well. more generally, based on a critical psychology perspective, the need for continual reflection on the part of the community psychologist is emphasized. this helps to keep the interests of the disadvantaged central, thereby increasing the probability of bringing about transformative change and, conversely, decreasing the probability that one’s efforts serve to maintain the power and the influence of vested interests. the final article, by alicia rodríguez, presents a case example in which a community social psychology team from a local university contributed to the comanagement of a government-funded early childhood program in uruguay. the paper, written in spanish, is titled “la co-gestión de políticas públicas sociales entre estado y sociedad civil. el aporte de la psicología social comunitaria a la construcción del diálogo entre actores diversos” (“co-management of public social policies between state and civil society: the contribution of community social psychology to the construction of dialogue between different actors”). the first portion of the paper reviews the factors that led community social psychologists in uruguay to incorporate social policy in their training, research and practice. social policy is viewed as “a stage for the interplay of conflicting interests between actors with differing power resources, in the context of the capitalist state.” the case example focuses on improving participatory processes, including participation of the community, by working with multiple groups, including administrators, staff, and families, to enhance their individual and collective capacity. the author emphasizes that effective involvement in the policy arena requires a prior analysis of the “action field complexity”, and a resulting intervention strategy which is flexible and dynamic. the information brief, prepared by maritza montero, describes the development of social consortia in venezuela, a response to the difficulties of the state in implementing a social policy to provide housing to members of low-income communities. the title of the information brief is “social consortia: a partnership of community agents.” after a brief introduction which sets the social policy context, global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   maritza describes the structure of a social consortium, which involves collaborative relationships among multiple individuals and groups, including “internal agents” (citizens; stakeholders internal to the community), “external agents” (individuals or groups with needed expertise but external to the community, including community psychologists), and the state. maritza then presents a detailed case example of a social consortium, describing the development, functions, processes, and results of the catuche social consortium, the first of its kind in the country. citizen participation and control over key decision making functions are emphasized as central to the functioning of the consortium, as is active collaboration among all three sectors--internal agents, external agents, and the state. the commentary, written by irma serrano-garcia, highlights a number of the key themes in the articles and information brief. the commentary is titled, “social policy: the tightwire we walk.” irma specifically addresses the issues of subjectivity, context, research and the relationship with the state. concerning subjectivity, the commentary underscores the distinct perspective brought to the policy arena by community psychologists in different national contexts. specifically, outside of the united states there is a greater appreciation of the influence of policies in creating and reproducing the structure of social relationships in society, directly affecting the ways populations lacking power are viewed and the consequent universe of possible policy approaches. irma also underscores the need to further develop and utilize alternative (i.e., non-positivistic) research approaches, the centrality of citizen participation, and the inherent limitations of social policy as a vehicle for fundamental social change in the absence of countervailing, broad-based social movements. the first book review was prepared by loreto leiva. the review is of psicología comunitaria y políticas sociales: reflexiones y experiencias (community psychology and social policies: reflections and experiences), edited by jaime alfaro, alipio sanchez, and alba zambrano (2012). the book is primarily set in latin american context, and underscores the complex historical relationship between community psychology and state-based social policies in that region. the tensions and challenges for community psychologists who work in the public arena are highlighted, as are the specific community-based strategies and techniques used to work with community members in the context of state-sponsored programs. the first section of the book sets the stage by providing a history of the relationship between community psychology and social policy, and the possibilities for work in this area. the second section describes specific projects undertaken, including challenges faced, theoretical foundations, practical approaches, accomplishments, and reflections. the final section focuses on implications for community psychology training, organizational challenges, and future roles of the community psychologist. loreto concludes her review, “i invite you all to dive into this book, hoping that the community psychology principles presented will seduce you, and become a part of your work in the coming years.” the second book review was prepared by tom wolff. the review is of lenny jason’s book, principles of social change (2013). the book details lenny’s involvement over the years in multiple areas of social policy in the united states, at the local, state and national levels. the areas of social policy work detailed are youth tobacco prevention, chronic fatigue syndrome (a chronic health condition), and substance use recovery residences (oxford house). both research and advocacy are central to the social change efforts detailed. more broadly, the case studies are used to illustrate five broad principles of social change work: 1) determining the nature of the change desired; 2) identifying the power holders; 3) creating coalitions; 4) learning patience and resilience, and 5) measuring success. as tom indicates in the concluding paragraph of his review: “[len’s] description of the requirements for excellence as a change agent is…wonderful: he notes that these folks will need ‘passion, intuitiveness, endurance, and understanding of principles of social change.’” passion, intuitiveness, endurance, and understanding of principles of social change indeed are essential attributes for social policy change agents, given the many challenges to making a difference in this highly contested, complex, and multi-level arena. the current special issue highlights just a few of the ways in which community psychologists have worked to improve the quality of life in their communities, states, and nations through social policy-related activities. we look forward to many more accounts of the social policy related activities of community psychologists from different nations in the years ahead. we have much to learn from each other. microsoft word christopherkeys_cacophonymusictoourminds_formattedfinal.docx cacophony is music to our minds christopher b. keys depaul university keywords: theory, science, community psychology, framework author biography: christopher b. keys contributed to the coupling of community psychology and disabilities and to the study of empowerment, especially the empowerment of those with disabilities. with meg bond and irma serrano garcía, he edited the new handbook of community psychology. with lenny jason and colleagues, chris organized the two chicago conferences on community psychology research epistemology and methods and edited the two volumes that emanated from those meetings. chris has over 150 publications and has had external support for his work since 1973 totaling over 10 million dollars. chris is professor emeritus and former chair of the psychology departments at the university of illinois at chicago and depaul university. he is also the founding associate dean for research and faculty development in the college of science and health at depaul. a fellow of apa, mpa and scra, chris served as president of the society for community research and action. he has received the scra distinguished contribution to community psychology theory and research. recommended citation: keys, c.b. (2016). cacophony is music to our minds. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(2), pages 1-7. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). correspondence should be addressed to christopher b. keys, department of psychology, depaul university, 2219 n. kenmore ave., chicago, il. 60614. ckeys@depaul.edu. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 cacophony is music to our minds the clarity of a single note played beautifully can be a highlight of a musical performance. jason, stevens, ram, beasley and gleason (2016) do us a service by reminding us of the distilled clarity that arises from a pure note played well in community psychology. in science this can includes theory-based predictions that are tested and affirmed, or tested and either discarded or improved. such clear moments can be uncommon and are special instances of scientific progress. seeking such clarity of theory is important in advancing science. on the other hand, in my first year of college, an insightful music major commented that the history of progress in music appreciation is the story of listeners learning to appreciate new forms of dissonance. science is music to the ears and minds of researchers and is about many things. developing theory-based predictions that enable us to predict and control is an important one, but only one of many, as jason and his colleagues (2016) note. among others, science also aims to describe the previously undescribed, create and convey meaning, measure, heighten understanding, ascertain effectiveness and impact, and generate new ideas and directions for thought, research and action. community psychology in its growing yet brief history has been less about playing pure notes beautifully and more about creating dissonance and working to value the cacophony (beehler & trickett, in press). our progress in science has been more about adding voices and perspectives and less about focusing or limiting them (cf. gone, hartmann, & sprague, in press; miller & keys, 2001). jason and colleagues (2016) are accurate in their view of community psychology’s mindset often being regarded as less simple and more complex than theory, which provides clearly testable predictions. although they mention various functions of theory, they focus more traditionally on the value of precise prediction and control. with this classic focus they thoughtfully describe several popular theories in community psychology. they suggest a number of ways to enhance the rigor of community theory and research and in so doing make a valuable contribution. they make their point well, but could improve upon it if they did not cite sources construing scientific progress so narrowly. for example, i would question the divisive and limiting assertion that theoretical work that does not readily produce falsifiable predictions is a less acceptable form of science. for this brief comment i focus primarily on generativity as a one of several valuable functions of scientific theory that is given little attention by some of the sources jason and colleagues cite in defense of their position. traditional positivist and post-positivist approach privilege, prediction, and control as properties of scientific theory. to pursue these goals, researchers have tended to exert uncommon control by using laboratory settings, limiting the number of variables considered, and arranging or scripting human interaction (argyris, 1968). fidelity across subjects and trials is emphasized, not adaptation to varying life stories and local contexts. furthermore, the voice of the researcher is dominant and emphasized over opinions of community members. consistent with this approach, jason et al (2016) make common cause with those who emphasize elegance in simplicity as the goal for theory. complexity is seen as leading to indeterminate outcomes and is therefore valued less. in many studies the characteristics and goals that foster testable theories restrict what is examined and focus the researchers’ attention away from context. if this pursuit of clarity occurs in the service of seeking a false simplicity, it may lead us into theorizing about situations in which the global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 opportunity to create knowledge is constrained rather than enhanced. in developing his view of social constructionism, gergen (1978) argues that the best test of a good theory is not prediction and control – does it predict the outcome accurately – but rather its generativity, or what new fields of inquiry and action are opened by a theory. in a noteworthy article, diamond and morton (1978) found that the social psychological studies that were considered landmarks for opening up new areas of study were more widely cited than studies known for more rigorous controls. by gergen’s generativity standard, theories such as rappaport’s (1981) empowerment theory and zimmerman’s (2000) further development of it have been wildly successful in the field of community psychology. they have opened the topic of power, a central issue for human beings and their social organizations. their work helped to bring a central cultural issue of the 1960s, empowering those society had marginalized, into the academy for deep reflection and study. their efforts spawned considerable theory, research, and action concerning empowerment in community psychology and related fields like social work, political science, nursing, public health, and international development (keys, mcconnell, motley, liao & mcauliff, in press). the traditional researcher may give other properties of theories with generative potential less attention and instead consider them sources of error variance to control or eliminate in theory development and research design. these include dimensions of human diversity regarding race/ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, social class, and their intersections. moreover, they may include power relationships in the world at large and in research settings and relationships with community members more generally. finally, they may also include other variables of importance, yet often overlooked in research with human beings in highly controlled settings. consequently, the internal validity of traditional, theoretically driven research may be high but the external, ecological, and constituent validities of such research are not. hence, the results may not be readily generalizable to other settings and may not even be replicable in other laboratories. the theories that emerge from and are tested by such methods may relate to epiphenomena engineered in laboratory contexts but are rarely known in the world at large. while jason and colleagues (2016) steer their line of reasoning away from these pitfalls, they may still be present and so may create risks for researchers focusing too narrowly on rigor and prediction to the exclusion of other valuable properties of theory such as description and generativity. not only are there problems with a singleminded focus on simplicity to attain predictability, a progressively inclusive science like community psychology adds great value to our understanding of important, actual phenomena. by serving on an irb board for two years and living with people with disabilities for another two years, katie mcdonald developed the life experience, which along her research expertise enabled her to include both irb members and intellectual disability researchers together in a study for the first time. she was able to explore how irb members and researchers use their power to make decisions about including people with intellectual disabilities in research (mcdonald & keys, 2008). through studying over many years using qualitative, descriptive methods, gruber and trickett (1987) were able to identify the complexity of trying to empower students and parents as well as teachers in a school setting. this finding was not predicted, yet provided a powerful cautionary note. it illustrated how complex and challenging the seemingly simple process of empowering others can be. balcazar et al.’s (2012) account of how immigrant families empowered themselves was only possible because of the involvement of bibiana adames who as a global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 graduate student supported the families in many ways over several years. in each of these examples, the approach to research was to draw on the richness of life experience, including that of the researcher, and to use qualitative and at times quantitative methods to try to understand the experience, which had not been previously explored by researchers. such science seeks to understand people in settings not previously studied and thereby opens up new ground for study yielding important new insights and theories. this kind of inclusive, generative research is one of community psychology’s signature contributions. this comes less from a focus on the falsifiable predictions of one’s own specific theory and more from a focus on the depth of understanding of others’ reality. it takes the role of the participant-conceptualizer seriously and thereby enables the researcher to more fully describe the phenomenon of interest. it also leads readily to further scientific exploration and often to pragmatic involvement. generativity is not simply offering complexity for complexity’s sake, but rather helps us understand the phenomena of interest more thoroughly and often challenges the assumptions and theory from which simpler views arose. mcdonald and keys (2008) called attention to the need to examine how powerful individuals use their authority, a question largely overlooked in previous empowerment research. gruber and trickett (1987) raised the issue of the difficulty of sustaining the transactions that fostered the empowerment of groups previously not empowered. many of these transactions were not sustained and as a result, students or parents were only partially empowered at best. balcazar et al. (2012) showed how poor families with deaf children found strength by joining together. this strength grew when the parents were opposed and threatened by the established social service agency that had offered them their primary support, a somewhat surprising success for the parents. each of these studies opens up new avenues for study and theory by virtue of its generative approach and compelling findings. to this point i have suggested that testable theories with falsifiable predictions are the scientific equivalent of “clear notes” that have scientific value as jason et al. (2016) have maintained. however, the focus of community psychology has been less on playing and enjoying clear notes and more on better appreciating the cacophony of greater complexity offered by the entire orchestra. jason et al. (2016) offer a distillation of complexity into theory as an alternative to simple theory and this may be desired. however, there is always risk that such a focus will go down the path that it often has in the past, toward oversimplification. in appreciating cacophony lies the path to generativity, a highly valued goal of community science. to develop this point further, let me draw on my co-editors and my experience in reviewing over 60 chapters for the forthcoming handbook of community psychology (bond, serrano-garcía, & keys, in press a). this experience suggests rather strongly that community psychology seems to be evolving away from the traditional and the predictive and moving more toward the generative and exploratory in science. community psychologists are using theory and related research to better understanding the complexities of power, the impacts of oppression and the delights of liberation (bond, serrano-garcía, & keys, in press b; montero, sonn & burton, in press). these trends tend to be critical of current thinking and research and call for a reorientation of community psychology away from traditional scientific values and methods toward a more community-centered approach to theory and research. this kind of critical and liberating approach is profoundly generative. at its best, this approach may be transformative in that it gives voice to community members who have not been heard in the past regarding issues important to them. it may motivate community theorists global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 to attend more fully to the power structures that condition our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in society and provides science new perspectives and issues to consider. as jason and colleagues (2016) note, community psychology is moving beyond logical positivism and its immediate descendants. instead the field is considering social constructivism, perspectivism, pragmatism, feminism, and critical theory, among others, as it develops a rich mix of philosophies of science to support its complex, generative conceptual work (tebes, in press). also in the new handbook are trends toward more multi-level interventions, interdisciplinary collaboration, and voices from beyond north america. there are developments and applications of core concepts of community psychology like empowerment, prevention, social settings, community participation, and diversity (bond, serrano-garcía, & keys, in press b). it is possible for these trends to lead to more specific theories and falsifiable propositions to test. however, it seems more likely they will lead to greater awareness of the multifaceted qualities of community phenomena. this enhanced awareness may lead to more generative theory and exploratory studies of the relationship between factors at different levels of intervention, the psychological assumptions challenged by different disciplinary perspectives, and the application and further development of core concepts. on the whole these trends seem likely to make descriptions of greater complexity and may lead to more variability and less predictability and control. perhaps more precision will result in some cases. prediction, control, and other traditional scientific values clearly still have an important place in community psychology and can foster scientific progress by testing hypotheses that distill complexity into essential information in particular circumstances. nonetheless, the field is often better able to explore issues from a pluralistic approach to philosophies of science and method. as new factors are recognized, their generativity for new thinking, research and intervention seem likely to overshadow their contributions to prediction and control. the new handbook of community psychology considers a variety of research approaches, including those that would help with theorybuilding in the classic sense, such as hierarchical linear modeling and metaanalysis (bond, serrano-garcía & keys, in press). qualitative methods and participatory action research also are well-represented methods that may likely be used in pursuit of generativity and help expand our perspectives. diversity is another major theme in this handbook, with considerable attention given to conceptualizing crucial dimensions such as social class, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender, and race/ethnicity. attention is also devoted to examining interventions with specific groups including the impoverished, elderly, diabled, lgbt community, and african american youth. trickett and beehler (in press) make us aware that diversity challenges any simple, direct route to validating empirically based interventions, another traditional approach to creating knowledge that often has unrecognized limitations. an additional relevant handbook theme is the importance of context. community psychology has attended to context in multiple forms, perhaps more so than any other sub-discipline of psychology. the attention to context follows from community psychologists’ great concern with people in particular settings and as part of larger social units. situating people in context adds more layers to grapple with as we seek to describe and understand phenomena across settings and makes the goals of prediction and control more challenging. the challenge of describing and understanding multi-faceted interventions and their contexts with distinct groups is a major effort because there also has to be a focus on whether they are effective and provide empirical validation to global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 theories and interventions. this argument questions the adequacy of current evidence for interventions that claim to be empirically based and could be extended to challenge the adequacy of evidence for existing theories in much of contemporary psychology. to digress, it could be argued that the genius of generativity underlies both kelly’s antidote for arrogance (kelly, 1969) and rappaport’s rule (rappaport, 1981). by broadening our focus to consider other factors through generativity, we can readily adopt an ecological view of human beings. this view can be an antidote to arrogance that keeps us from assuming a self-satisfied stance about our capacities to create change. rappaport’s rule says: when everyone agrees with you, worry. a generative view would say if all agree, enough different people might not have considered enough different factors. it is time to broaden our approach and seriously consider alternatives as yet unexamined. the scanning of generativity may be as valuable, if not more so, than the testing of predictions. in closing, all of this is not to disparage the values of clearly stated theory and falsifiable hypotheses, but to place them in context and to say that they are not the be all and end all of scientific theory. as an integral part of community psychology, they have much to offer. however, if pursued single mindedly, they could function like a straitjacket for the scientific progress. other criteria for theory like generativity have great value as well. there would be little we could predict and then affirm or falsify if it had not been generated in earlier theory and research. jason et al (2016) argue prediction and control have not been the central focus for theory in community psychology and should be accorded more attention. our handbook editing affirms their premise by showing that prediction and control have not been the focus of community psychology in the past, are not its focus in the present, and not likely to be its focus in the future. however, the other contributions of community psychology theory seem underappreciated by jason, his colleagues and especially some of the sources they cite (jason et al., 2016). to harken back to the opening paragraphs, the clear note played well is part of many a wonderful musical composition that adds to the overall experience of listening to music, even as community psychology overall gives priority, as it should, to learning to appreciate the full orchestra playing greater and greater cacophony. references argyris, c. (1968). some unintended consequences of rigorous research. psychological bulletin, 70, 185-197. balcazar, f., suarez, y., adames, s., keys, c., garcia-ramirez, m., & paloma, v. (2012). a case study of liberation among latino immigrant families who have children with disabilities. american journal of community psychology, 49, 283-293. beehler, s. & trickett, e. (in press) community psychology misdirected? the case of evidence-based interventions. in bond, m., serranogarcía, i. & keys, c. (eds.) handbook of community psychology. washington, dc: american psychological association. bond, m., serrano-garcía, i. & keys, c. (eds.) (in press). handbook of community psychology. washington, dc: american psychological association. bond, m., serrano-garcía, i. & keys, c. (in press). community psychology for the 21st century. in bond, m., serrano garcía, i. & keys, c. (eds.) handbook of community psychology. washington, dc: american psychological association. diamond, s. & morton, d. (1978). empirical landmarks in social psychology. personality and social psychology bulletin, 4, 217-221. gergen, k. (1978) toward generative theory. journal of personality and social psychology, 36, 1344-1360. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 gone, j., hartmann, w. & sprague, m. (in press) wellness interventions for indigenous communities in the united states. in bond, m., serrano-garcía, i. & keys, c. (eds.) the handbook of community psychology. washington dc: american psychological association. gruber, j., & trickett, e. (1987). can we empower others? the paradox of empowerment in the governing of an alternative public school. american journal of community psychology, 5(3), 353-371. jason, l. a., stevens, e., ram, d., miller, s. a., beasley, c. r., & gleason, k. (2016). theories in the field of community psychology. the global journal of community psychology practice.7(2). pp. 1-27. kelly, j. (1970). antidotes for arrogance: training for community psychology. american psychologist, 25(6), 524-531. keys, c., mcconnell, e., motley, d., liao, l, & mcauliff, k. (in press). the what, the how and the who of empowerment: reflections on an intellectual history. in bond, m., serranogarcía, i. & keys, c. (eds.) handbook of community psychology. washington, dc: american psychological association. mcdonald, k. & keys, c. (2008). how the powerful decide: access to research participation by those at the margins. american journal of community psychology, 42, 79-93. miller, a., & keys, c. (2001). understanding dignity in the lives of homeless persons. american journal of community psychology, 29(2), 331-354. montero, m., sonn, c., & burton, m. (in press) community psychology and liberation psychology: a creative synergy for an ethical and transformative praxis. in bond, m., serranogarcía, i. & keys, c. (eds.) handbook of community psychology. washington, dc: american psychological association. rappaport, j. (1981). in praise of paradox: a social policy of empowerment over prevention. american journal of community psychology, 9(1), 1-25. tebes, j. (in press). foundations for a philosophy of science of community psychology: perspectivism, pragmatism, feminism and critical theory. in bond, m., serranogarcía, i. & keys, c. (eds.) handbook of community psychology. washington, dc: american psychological association. zimmerman, m. a. (2000). empowerment theory: psychological, organizational, and community levels of analysis. in j. rappaport & e. seidman (eds.), handbook of community psychology. (pp. 43-63). kluwer academic/plenum publishers, new york, ny. global journal of community psychology practice parenting groups, how long is enough? the efficacy of a community-run parents plus early years program as a preschool parenting intervention of modifiable duration aoife lonergan sarah-jane gerber university college dublin ireland adrienne streek fingal parenting initiative ireland john sharry parents plus ireland keywords: parenting intervention, parents plus, early intervention, behavioral difficulties, population approach, single session approach. author biographies: aoife lonergan is a psychologist in clinical training in university college dublin and worked as an assistant psychologist with parents plus. sarah-jane gerber is a psychologist in clinical training in university college dublin and worked as an assistant psychologist with parents plus. adrienne streek, ma is the coordinator of the fingal parenting initiative and holds a masters in child, family, and community studies from the dublin institute of technology (2012). john sharry, dpsych, is co-founder of the parents plus charity and adjunct senior lecturer at the school of psychology in university college dublin. authors’ note: the authors would like to thank the parents who volunteered to participate in the ppey program as part of the fpi. the data used in this study were collected in north dublin, ireland by program facilitators and were undertaken as part of the author’s ongoing evaluation of the ppey group. the fourth author is a co-developer of the ppey program, which is the subject of the study and could represent a potential conflict of interest. this study was funded by the parents plus charity and the fingal parenting initiative. recommended citation: lonergan, a., gerber, s., streek, a., and sharry, j. (2015). parenting groups, how long is enough? the efficacy of a community-run parents plus early years program as a preschool parenting intervention of modifiable duration. global journal of community psychology practice, 6(1), 1-13. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 parenting groups, how long is enough? the efficacy of a community-run parents plus early years program as a preschool parenting intervention of modifiable duration abstract evidence shows that low-intensity community parenting interventions are effective in addressing child behavioral problems. this study aims to examine the effectiveness of the parents plus early years (ppey) parenting intervention delivered as a single workshop or a seven-week course to a non-clinical community sample by trained preschool practitioners. a between groups, repeated measures, matched pairs design was used. 121 parents of preschool aged children participated in a ppey seven-week course (n=89) or a single workshop (n=32). participants were compared pre-intervention and seven weeks later on measures of child difficulties and prosocial behavior and parental satisfaction and stress. a paired samples t-test found that parents reported the seven-week intervention significantly improved child prosocial behavior. both group formats significantly improved child difficulties, parental satisfaction, and stress. the seven-week group demonstrated significantly greater improvement in parental stress and satisfaction than the workshop group. effect sizes showed that while both groups were beneficial, the seven-week group produced greater parent-reported gains. findings suggest that single session parenting workshops are beneficial, though the longer courses are likely to facilitate a greater magnitude of change. further study using a control group and follow-up testing is suggested. introduction behavior problems are the most common reason for referral to psychological and psychiatric services in childhood (national institute for health and clinical excellence, 2006). research suggests that parenting which involves inconsistent or harsh discipline, ineffectual commands, low warmth and punishment, and little positive parental involvement plays a significant role in the development and maintenance of child behavioral problems (campbell, 1995; hipwell et al., 2008). the shift from focusing purely on interventions targeting the child’s undesirable behavior to interventions focused on changing parenting behavior comes from the understanding that parents can act as agents of children’s behavior change (kaminski, valle, filene, & boyle, 2008). a meta-analysis of 30 parenting programs and 41 child-focused programs found that for children under the age of 12, parenting interventions were significantly more effective than child-focused programs (mccart, priester, davies, & azen, 2006). the majority of parenting programs adopt a behavioral and social learning approach, which argues that children and adolescents’ externalizing behaviors are attained and maintained through interaction and modelling from others in the environment (wierson & forehand, 1994). parenting interventions based on behavioral and social learning theories have been repeatedly shown to be effective in reducing child behavioral difficulties (chu, farruggia, sanders, & ralph, 2012). parenting programs are the most commonly used mode of intervention for addressing behavioral problems in children (carr, 1999). group-based parenting programs have been found to significantly reduce childhood behavioral problems, develop parenting competencies, improve parenthttp://jpubhealth.oxfordjournals.org/search?author1=joanna+ting+wai+chu&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://jpubhealth.oxfordjournals.org/search?author1=susan+p.+farruggia&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://jpubhealth.oxfordjournals.org/search?author1=matthew+r.+sanders&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://jpubhealth.oxfordjournals.org/search?author1=alan+ralph&sortspec=date&submit=submit global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 child interactions and prosocial behavior, and reduce parental stress (barlow, smailagic, ferriter, bennett, & jones, 2012; furlong et al., 2012). parent stress is significantly related to child internalizing and externalizing behaviors and could create a negative affective environment, which may sensitize children and have a deleterious effect on their social behavior (anthony et al., 2005). prosocial behavior is a significant socialization goal for many parents (knafo & plomin, 2006). parents’ warmth and use of reasoning, induction, and autonomy support as opposed to power assertive discipline are related to children’s empathy and prosocial behavior (clark & ladd, 2000). group parenting interventions have been found twice as effective as individual therapy in reducing behavioral problems in children (mccart et al., 2006), making them a cost effective way of meeting the needs of greater numbers of parents and children. parents plus program typically delivered over 8 to 12 weeks, the parents plus early years (ppey) program (sharry, hampson, & fanning, 2013) was developed as an intervention for parents of preschool children, aged 1 to 7 years, referred to child mental health services, with behavioral, emotional, and developmental problems. the ppey is one of three parents plus programs targeting different age groups, with corresponding programs for parents of 6to 11-year-olds (sharry & fitzpatrick, 2008) and adolescents aged 11 to 16 years old (sharry & fitzpatrick, 2012). the ppey is a manualized parenting course that uses dvd footage of real parent-child interactions. the program covers positive parenting topics (e.g., child-centered play and communication, encouraging and supporting children, helping children concentrate and learn) as well as positive discipline topics such as establishing rules and routines, managing tantrums, misbehavior, and solving problems. a number of studies have shown that the parents plus programs are effective in reducing childhood behavior problems and associated parental stress in clinical settings for a variety of age groups (e.g., behan, fitzpatrick, sharry, carr, & waldron, 2001; coughlin, sharry, fitzpatrick, guerin, & drumm, 2009; quinn, carr, carroll, & o’sullivan, 2007). in particular, the ppey program has been shown to reduce conduct problems, hyperactivity, and parental stress and to help parents move significantly closer to their goals when conducted in a clinical setting by mental health professionals (griffin, guerin, sharry, & drumm, 2010); however, many parents display limited attendance with clinic-based programs and are less likely to complete treatment (kazdin, mazurick, & bass, 1993), with some parents reporting feeling stigma attached to attending child and adolescent mental health services (bradby et al., 2007). to overcome these challenges, there is growing interest in delivering communitybased parenting programs (hand, ní raghallaigh, cuppage, coyle, & sharry, 2012; kilroy, sharry, flood, & guerin, 2011; mcgilloway et al., 2012). preventative versions of the parents plus program in the community have been found effective in improving parental stress and satisfaction and reducing parent-reported behavior problems in preschool and schoolaged children (kilroy et al., 2011; hand, mcdonnell, honari, & sharry, 2013). thorell (2009) found a community-based group parenting program significantly reduced child problem behaviors and parental stress for a non-clinical group, but not a clinical group in comparison to waitlist controls. in contrast, gerber, sharry, streek, and mckenna (2014 submitted) found that both a clinical and non-clinical group demonstrated significant improvements in parent-reported child and parental difficulties following a ppey group intervention. a possible explanation is that parents in thorell’s (2009) clinical group had higher levels of psychiatric problems and therefore may have experienced more difficulty with implementing the strategies taught in the program. these findings provide support for the utility of the global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 parents plus program as a preventative model of parenting intervention when delivered by varied professionals. by locating the training program to the community, it has the advantage of removing the logistic and psychological barriers that clinic-based programs may pose (thorell, 2009). a comprehensive population approach to promotion, prevention, and early intervention in mental health may be a way to meet the needs of non-clinical groups before more ingrained difficulties develop. a population approach to parenting interventions, unlike a clinical high-risk approach, involves the use of multiple settings, disciplines, and service delivery modalities across different tiers of need (sanders & prinz, 2008). an example of this approach is seen in the triple p parenting programs principle of program sufficiency by which parents differ in the strength of intervention they may require (turner & sanders, 2006). the effectiveness of triple p parenting interventions delivered as individual face-to-face, group, or selfdirected programs of different intensity have been demonstrated in numerous studies (sanders, 2008). while some parents and families require intensive interventions, there is increasing evidence that low-intensity interventions are also effective (lim, tormshak, & dishion, 2005; morawska, haslam, milne, & sanders, 2011). for example, following a single session community-based parent consultation, sommers-flanagan (2007) found that parents reported less stress and more competence handling their children’s behaviors. similarly, brief 2to 4-hour group interventions have been found to increase parents’ ability to build positive relationships with their children, reduce child behavior problems, and improve parental self-efficacy (morawska et al., 2011; lim, tormshak, & dishion, 2005). kling, forster, sundell, & melin (2010) compared the effectiveness of 11 parent management training practitioner-assisted group sessions (pmt-p) or a single instructional workshop followed by selfadministration (pmt-s) of the training material for parents of children with conduct problems. while both group formats improved parent competence and reduced child conduct problems, pmt-p was superior on measures of child conduct problems (kling et al., 2010). these findings have implications for large scale dissemination of parenting interventions through different means of delivery (kling et al., 2010). there is an urgent need to develop and evaluate brief, effective interventions that have the advantage of wider dissemination and access within the community (lim, tormshak, & dishion, 2005). the aim of this study is to compare the effectiveness of the ppey group parenting intervention when delivered as a sevenweek intervention or as a brief 2.5 hour group workshop to a non-clinical community sample. this study hypothesizes that parents whose children have difficulties in the normal range can benefit from the ppey intervention when delivered in a community setting. furthermore it is hypothesized that both a seven-week and a brief dosage controlled ppey group intervention will be effective in producing positive parent reported gains post intervention, with the former treatment of longer duration achieving greater gains. methodology design: this study employed a between groups, repeated measures, matched pairs design. participants were parents who either completed a seven-week ppey group or a single group workshop (2.5 hours). parent completed measures were collected at time 1, pre, and time 2, post intervention. matched participants were compared on post intervention strengths and difficulties questionnaire (sdq) total difficulties, prosocial behavior, parental satisfaction, and parental stress measures. global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 participants: as part of the fingal parenting initiative (fpi), a series of single session parenting workshops and seven-week parenting courses based on the ppey program were run throughout the fingal region of dublin, ireland. the programs were delivered in local preschools and community venues by trained childcare workers and community professionals. all facilitators attended a two-day training in the ppey program, received a full manual for program delivery, and attended monthly group supervision as the courses were delivered. the interventions were open to all parents and guardians of children aged up to 7 years within this region and did not operate on a referral basis. participants were randomly recruited through advertisements within participating early years and preschool services, at local primary schools, and through social media and relevant childcare committee websites. the current study compares the outcomes for 35 parents who attended single session workshops with a matched sample of parents who attended the full seven-week parenting course. participants in the sevenweek intervention were a subset of a previous study (gerber et al., 2014 submitted) as part of the fpi (n=363). of the 363 participants, 260 had sufficient data at time 2 to be included in the analyses. participants who did not complete data at time 2 were excluded from the final analyses, representing a drop-out value of 28%. these participants were matched with workshop participants (n=35) on baseline sdq total difficulties, prosocial behaviour, age of child, and gender of parent. this resulted in a sample of n=121, seven-week intervention (n=89) and dosage controlled workshop (n=32). all participants were mothers (mean age=35.65) of children aged between 1.80-5.60 years (m=3.47 years) (male n=67, female n=54). unmatched participants had 20 fathers present in the seven-week group and only 1 in the workshop group; these were removed to control for the influence of parent gender on outcomes. participants’ children held no mental health diagnosis and were not in receipt of clinical services at the time of this study. measures: the strengths and difficulties questionnaire (sdq). the sdq is a 25-item screening instrument assessing positive and negative behavior of children and adolescents aged 4 to 16 years (goodman, 1997). the questionnaire was completed by the primary caregiver. the sdq yields scores on five subscales: emotional problems, conduct problems, hyperactivity, peer problems, and prosocial behavior. scores from the four difficulties subscales are combined to provide a total difficulties score between 0-40. sdq mean total difficulty scores have been found to closely predict prevalence of clinical levels of child mental disorder at a population level (goodman & goodman, 2011). the psychometric properties of the sdq are well established with a high internal consistency and test-retest reliability and strong criterion validity for predicting psychological disorders (goodman, 2001). the kansas parental satisfaction scale (kps). the kps is a three-item measure of parental satisfaction with themselves as a parent, the behavior of their child, and their relationship with their children (james et al., 1985). parents respond on a seven-point scale ranging from “extremely dissatisfied” to “extremely satisfied”. scores of 15 or less indicate low parental satisfaction (decato murphy, donohue, azrin, teichner, & crum, 2003). the scale has good concurrent validity and has been found to have significant correlations with the kansas marital satisfaction scale and the rosenberg self esteem scale (.23 to .55) (james et al., 1985). the parental stress scale (pss). the pss is an 18-item self-report measure of parental perceptions of positive and negative components of parenthood (berry & jones, 1995). respondents agree or disagree with items in terms of their typical global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 relationship with their child on a five-point scale with the instrument yielding a total score ranging from 18-90. higher scores on the scale indicate greater stress. the pss has been reported to have high internal reliability and good convergent and divergent reliability (berry & jones, 1995). parents plus early years program. the ppey program (sharry, hampson, & fanning, 2013) was conducted over seven weeks or distilled into one 2.5-hour workshop for the dosage controlled group. the manualized program included positive parenting topics (e.g., child-centered play and communication, encouraging and supporting children) and positive discipline topics (e.g., establishing rules and routines, managing misbehavior, and solving problems) (kilroy et al., 2011). procedure this study was approved by the fpi and fingal children’s services committee. in conjunction with the fpi, two-day training workshops with an accredited trainer were offered to participating preschool and early years practitioners in the fingal childcare committee catchment area. each participant received the program manual, dvd, and information about the research protocol. facilitators were required to complete weekly self-evaluation checklists, planning and review forms, and attended regular supervision to ensure treatment fidelity. facilitators were encouraged to produce two personal video clips of a group session with reflective notes about their own practice for discussion at group supervision. forty-five ppey groups were delivered in various locations across the fingal region. all parents attending the ppey program were invited to participate in the research. each participant was given an information sheet outlining the purpose of the study, and if they agreed to participate, to sign an informed consent form. participants were then invited to complete the research measures before and after completion of the program. participants attended either the seven-week or the single dosage controlled workshop (2.5 hours) ppey group. parents attending the single session workshop completed post-intervention questionnaires seven weeks after the workshop to match the data collection time of the longer parenting course. attendance did not depend on participation in the research study. data were collated and analysed using the statistical package for social sciences (spss, v20). results participants who completed the seven-week ppey intervention were matched with dosage controlled participants who attended a single ppey group workshop on baseline sdq total difficulties, prosocial behavior, age of child, and gender of parent. participant demographics can be seen in table 1. table 1 matched participant breakdown seven-week group workshop group guardian type mother (n=89) mother (n=32) guardian age m=34.96 (sd=7.27) m=37.34 (sd=4.29) child gender male=55 female=34 male=12 female=20 child age m=3.38 (sd=0.96) m=3.70 (sd=1.08) the magnitude of impact of both interventions was compared using paired samples t-tests and effect sizes to identify how each group changed. a series of independent samples t-tests were conducted on all measures of interest, and identified no significant baseline difference between groups. the means (standard deviations), paired samples t-test results, and effect sizes are summarized for all measures in table 2. global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 table 2 summary of paired samples t-test results and effect sizes pre/post intervention seven-week group (n=89) workshop group (n=32) measure t1 mean (sd) t2 mean (sd) t value effect size t1 mean (sd) t2 mean (sd) t value effect size sdq total difficulties 11.08 (3.84) 8.80 (5.15) 5.442** .25 10.59 (3.78) 9.59 (4.22) 2.273* .14 prosocial 6.76 (2.03) 7.73 (1.84) -4.139*** .16 6.72 (2.18) 7.13 (2.02) -1.256 .05 pss 39.59 (8.11) 34.72 (7.68) 6.262*** .32 41.66 (8.43) 40.56 (8.44) 0.940 .03 kps 15.00 (2.44) 16.85 (2.51) -7.010*** .38 13.97 (2.49) 15.00 (2.43) -3.102* . 24 two tailed *p<.05, **p<.005, ***p<.0005 a paired samples t-test identified a significant decrease in the seven-week group’s total difficulties from time 1 (m=11.08, sd=3.84) to time 2 (m= 8.80, sd=5.15), t(88)=5.442, p<.005 (two-tailed), effect size .25 (large), partial eta squared. there was also a significant decrease in the workshop group’s total difficulties from time 1 (m=10.59, sd = 3.78) to time 2 (m=9.59, sd=4.22), t(31)=2.273, p<.05 figure 1. mean sdq total difficulties pre/post intervention (two-tailed), effect size .14 (large), partial eta squared. an independent samples t-test identified no significant difference between groups’ time 2 scores, p=.435. however, the effect size of the seven-week group (.25) is larger than the workshop group (.14). this represents a clinically relevant difference of .11 in magnitude of effect. a paired samples t-test identified a significant increase in the seven-week group’s prosocial scores from time 1 (m=6.76, sd=2.03) to time 2 (m=7.73, sd=1.84), t(88)= -4.139, p<.0005 (twotailed), effect size .16 (large), partial eta squared. there was a mean increase in the prosocial scores of the workshop group from time 1 (m=6.72, sd=2.18) to time 2 (m=7.13, sd=2.02), with a small effect size (.05). an independent samples t-test identified no significant differences in time 2 scores between groups p=.12 however, the effect size of the seven-week group (.16) is larger than the workshop group (.05), representing a clinically relevant difference of .11 in magnitude of effect 8 9 10 11 12 pre post sd q t o ta l d if fi cu lt ie s mean sdq total difficulties pre/post intervention 7 week workshop global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 figure 2. mean sdq prosocial scores pre/post intervention. two outliers were removed from the sevenweek group’s pss responses. a paired samples t-test identified a significant decrease in the seven-week group’s parental stress from time 1 (m=39.59, sd=8.11) to time 2 (m=34.72, sd=7.68), t(85) = p<.0005 (two-tailed), effect size .32 (large), partial eta squared. there was a mean decrease in the workshop group’s pss score from time 1 (m=41.66, sd=8.43) to time 2 (m=40.56, sd=8.44), effect size .03 (small), partial eta squared. an independent samples t-test identified a significant difference in time 2 pss scores for the seven-week group (m=34.72, sd=7.68) and the workshop group (m=40.56, sd=8.44), t(116)=-3.574, p<.05, effect size .09 (moderate), partial eta squared. the effect size of the seven-week group (.32) is larger than the workshop group (.03). this represents a clinically relevant difference of .29 in magnitude of effect. figure 3. mean parenting stress pre/post intervention six outliers were identified and removed from the seven-week (n=5) and workshop (n=1) groups’ kps responses. a paired samples t-test identified a significant increase in the seven-week group’s parenting satisfaction from time 1 (m=15.00, sd=2.44) to time 2 (m=16.85, sd=2.51), t(79)=-7.010, p<. 0005 (twotailed), effect size .38 (large), partial eta squared. there was also a significant increase in the workshop group’s parenting satisfaction from time 1 (m=13.97, sd=2.49) to time 2 (m=15.00, sd=2.43), t(30)=-3.102, p<.05, effect size .24 (large), partial eta squared. an independent samples t-test identified a significant difference between groups’ time 2 kps total scores. the seven-week group had a greater increase in parenting satisfaction (m=16.85, sd=2.511) than the workshop group (m= 15.00, sd=2.436), t(109)=3.511, p <.05, effect size .10 (moderate), partial eta squared. the effect size of the seven-week group (.38) is larger than the workshop group (.24). this represents a clinically relevant difference of .14 in magnitude of effect. 6.5 7 7.5 8 pre post p ro so ci al s co re mean prosocial scores pre/post intervention 7 week workshop 32 34 36 38 40 42 44 pre post p ss s co re mean parenting stress scale scores pre/post intervention 7 week workshop global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 figure 4. mean parenting satisfaction pre/post intervention. discussion the aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of the ppey group parenting intervention when delivered in a nonclinical community sample by trained preschool teachers and to compare the relative effects of a seven-week intervention and a single workshop (2.5 hours). this study hypothesized that parents whose children are within the normal range of difficulties would benefit from the ppey intervention when delivered in a community setting. furthermore, it was hypothesized that both a seven-week and a single dosage controlled ppey group would be effective in producing positive parentreported gains post intervention. the results of this study support these hypotheses. both community-run ppey group formats demonstrated improvements in parent-reported child total difficulties, prosocial behavior, parenting stress, and parental satisfaction. furthermore both ppey group formats significantly reduced parent-reported child total difficulties and significantly improved parenting satisfaction. this supports the findings of kilroy et al., (2011) that a preventative version of the ppey program in the community was effective in reducing parent-reported behavior problems in preschool and school-aged children and hand et al., (2013) who found the parents plus children’s programme delivered in community settings significantly improved measures of child behavior, parental stress, and parent satisfaction. these findings demonstrate that both the seven-week and single workshop ppey group intervention may be effective early interventions as part of a community-led approach to child and adolescent mental health. reaching sufficient numbers of parents in need with widely available, empiricallysupported parenting interventions requires a community-led population approach (hand et al., 2013). a population approach seeks to break down parents’ sense of isolation, increase social and emotional support from others in the community, and publicly acknowledges the importance and difficulties of parenting (sanders, 2008). the current study’s findings that both group formats improved parental satisfaction and stress demonstrates the ppey program’s ability to provide a source of emotional support for parents as they navigate the challenges of parenting. these findings in a non-clinical community sample are similar to those of thorell (2009), who found a community-based group parenting program was effective in reducing conduct problems, hyperactivity, impulsivity, daily problem behaviors, parental stress, and lack of perceived parental control for non-clinical groups. these findings highlight the importance of early community interventions over a short period of time as an option which can have significant positive effects on child behavior problems and parental well-being in non-clinical groups. on all measures used in the current study, the effect sizes showed that, while both groups demonstrated improvements in response to the ppey interventions, they did so to different degrees. the seven-week intervention demonstrated a greater, clinically relevant, magnitude of effect than the single workshop across all measures of interest. this suggests the magnitude of improvements gained from the ppey group is dependent on the intensity of intervention received, with the workshop 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 pre post k p s sc o re s mean kps score pre/post intervention 7 week workshop global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 group demonstrating dosage response effects. this supports the findings of kling et al. (2010) that a single instructional workshop was slightly less effective than 11 practitioner-assisted parenting sessions. although slightly less effective, a single workshop may still be a warranted alternative for some families as part of a cost effective first option in a stepped care approach (kling et al., 2010). the largest effect size for both groups in the current study was found for parenting satisfaction, suggesting both intervention formats were effective in promoting parenting satisfaction; however the largest difference between intervention effect sizes was for parenting stress, with results suggesting the seven-week ppey intervention was much more effective in reducing parenting stress than the single workshop. consequently, a single workshop may not be sufficient for parents experiencing high levels of stress. the findings of the present study are limited by a number of factors. as few fathers participated in the study, they were removed to control for the impact of gender. reyno and mcgrath (2006) suffered a similar limitation and argued that using maternal report measures to assess treatment outcomes may have resulted in a treatment bias effect. consequently, as only maternal parent data were used, the impact of the intervention cannot be generalized to fathers; however, the effects of treatment bias should be the same across the two intervention groups and therefore cannot account for the differences between groups. a second limitation of this study is the lack of a control group receiving no intervention, which limits clarification regarding dosage effects and what may constitute a hawthorne effect. finally, the lack of followup data means maintenance of gains over time cannot be assessed. further studies utilizing bigger groups of both mothers and fathers, a no treatment control group, and the collection of follow-up data would address these limitations. overall, the findings in this study demonstrate that both ppey interventions of different intensities are effective in promoting positive change in parentreported child difficulties, parent stress, and satisfaction, with the magnitude of change dependent on the intensity of intervention received. the large effect sizes found in the present study for both groups support the moderate to large effect sizes of the community ppey group in hand et al’s., (2013) study, indicating a practical application for the findings. the current study, combined with previous research, demonstrates that brief single session and group parenting interventions in community samples are effective in increasing parents’ ability to build positive relationships with their children, reducing parent-reported child behavior problems and use of dysfunctional parenting, and improving parental self-efficacy, satisfaction, and stress (sommers-flanagan, 2007; morawska et al., 2011; lim, tormshak, & dishion, 2005). this shows that minimal intervention parenting programs are effective in promoting positive behavioral changes in parents and children (reyno & mcgrath, 2006). by following the principle of program sufficiency by which parents differ in the strength of intervention required, this tiered approach can maximize efficiency, contain costs, avoid waste and over servicing, and ensure the program has wide reach in the community (turner & sanders, 2006). relevance for community psychology practice given that child and adolescent mental health services are unlikely to meet the needs of all children with mental health problems in communities, preventative and more accessible programs are needed (kilroy et al., 2010). possibly one of the most important tasks for the future concerns the role of family-centered research in the development of policy that effectively supports larger scale implementation of empirically-supported interventions (spoth, kavanagh, & dishion, 2002). the present study demonstrates that global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 by offering ppey interventions in the community, families may be afforded greater opportunities to receive early intervention in managing parent and child difficulties. this would reduce the barrier of long waiting lists for clinical intervention. a community, population approach requires the provision of brief, targeted support for parents with low to moderate levels of need to prevent the development of more significant problems (sanders, 2008). such interventions may be appropriate for contemporary families, who are balancing multiple responsibilities, such as single parenting and career demands (lim, tormshak, & dishion, 2005). by providing group ppey interventions of modifiable duration in the community, parents with these multiple responsibilities may be able to receive cost effective support based on their needs and their availability. conclusions the current study demonstrates that, given the lack of brief parenting interventions currently available and their apparent effectiveness, there is an urgent need to develop and evaluate brief parenting interventions that can be delivered in a timely and cost-effective manner. the present study greatly adds to the evidence base surrounding the efficacy of a stepped care, population approach to community ppey parenting interventions. in this way, the ppey program can utilize the minimum necessary intervention to effect early, positive change in parent and child difficulties – before they become more ingrained and difficult to treat. references anthony, l. g., anthony, b. j., glanville, d. n., naiman, d. q., waanders, c., & shaffer, s. 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(1994). parent behavior training for child noncompliance: rationale, concepts, and effectiveness. current directions in psychological science, 3,146–50. http://link.springer.com/search?facet-author=%22richard+l.+spoth%22 http://link.springer.com/search?facet-author=%22kathryn+a.+kavanagh%22 http://link.springer.com/search?facet-author=%22thomas+j.+dishion%22 http://link.springer.com/journal/11121 http://ccp.sagepub.com/search?author1=lisa+b.+thorell&sortspec=date&submit=submit nonprofit use of social media: insights from the field justin greenleaf fort hayes state univeristy keywords: nonprofit organizations, social media, social networking, technology author biographies: justin greenleaf, phd, is an assistant professor of leadership studies at fort hays state university, in hays, kansas, usa. he primarily teaches undergraduate courses on leadership theory and practice as well as team dynamics, and his areas of expertise are related to community psychology and leadership in the context of the community. justin’s research has focused on the practical application of leadership, which has included research on teaching and learning strategies as well as community impacts of service learning. he holds a ph.d. in community psychology from wichita state university. recommended citation: greenleaf, j. (2016). nonprofit use of social media: insights from the field. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(3), pages 1-16. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/) global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 nonprofit use of social media: insights from the field abstract this study focuses on social media use in nonprofit organizations and how nonprofits perceive and strategize about the use of social media platforms. the study was open to any nonprofit organization actively engaged in the use of social media and fifteen different nonprofit organizations were purposefully selected for inclusion in the study. through interviews with the social media strategists employed by the organizations, the researcher created a foundation for understanding perceptions of effective strategies for social media use in these nonprofits. while participants described a variety of social media platforms, discussion revolved primarily around the use of facebook and twitter. analysis of the data resulted in the formation of six themes that included: nature of social media, online/offline action, social media is social, strategic/data driven, authentic, and power of the story. together, these themes provide insights into how these organizations approached the use of social media. according to kaplan and haenlein (2010), “social media is a group of internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user generated content” (p. 61). these tools provide nonprofit organizations with opportunities for low cost and powerful connections with their stakeholders, and are especially relevant as use of social media is on the rise in both teen and adult populations (lenhart, purcell, smith, & zickuhr, 2010). at the same time, however, these connections also present new challenges and give a previously unprecedented level of control to the users (tredinnick, 2006; berman, abraham, battino, shipnuck, & neus, 2007). the goal of this paper is to examine how nonprofit practitioners perceive social media and strategize about the use of social media platforms. this study was open to any nonprofit actively engaged in the use of social media in an effort to understand how nonprofit use of social media might be similar or different from social media use in corporate and government organizations. to this end, the researcher investigated the following research questions. rq1: how do nonprofit social media strategists perceive social media platforms? rq2: what strategies do nonprofit social media strategists believe are effective for using social media? literature review several studies have been conducted on the perceptions and strategies related to social media usage. these studies span corporate, governmental, and nonprofit uses. a look at each of these sectors demonstrates some of the differences and help to set the stage for the work being presented. corporate research conducted on corporate use of social media suggests that corporations approach social media as a way to engage their consumers. interviews conducted by distaso, mccorkindale, and wright (2011) with corporate executives revealed that corporations recognize the importance of engaging on social media, especially where the consumers are engaging. however, the interviews also suggested that there were more questions than answers and called for training both on the social media tools http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 needed as well as how to measure their effectiveness. from a corporate perspective, there have been some attempts to better understand how to engage users on social media. for example, kietzmann, hermkens, mccarthy, and silvestre (2011) suggested seven functional building blocks of social media including identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, and groups. they proposed that, by analyzing organizations from these different angles, an individual could better understand the relationship between the organization and the social media tools they tried to utilize. additionally, hanna, rohm, and crittenden (2011) suggested that companies needed to approach social media as more of an ecosystem than a tool and provided several recommendations for engaging consumers. their recommendations focused on strategically understanding how each social media platform interacted with the organization to create experiences for their users that were unique and offered clear stories. while some of these strategies would likely be similar for nonprofit organizations, corporations have their own reasons for engaging on social media. for example, jung, naughton, tahoun, and wang (2015) described how firms used twitter to tweet monthly earnings reports opportunistically by only tweeting good news and not bad. asur and huberman (2010) described how corporate organizations attempted to utilize micro-blogging sites like twitter to predict box office revenues from movies prior to their release. these methods seemed to be consistent with the idea that the practical application of social media in business is to shape the opinion of consumers (mangold & faulds, 2009). methods like these suggest ulterior motives for engagement, and highlight a need for transparency that has begun to emerge in the corporate sector. for example, distaso and bortree (2012) surveyed 315 corporate communicators about their use of social media and all but two reported needing to use social media to show corporate transparency. participants in the study attempted to foster transparency primarily by using social media to share what the organization was doing and why. government government organizations also engage on social media for a variety of reasons. research on government use of social media has focused on ways to increase interaction among citizens and create transparency in government processes (jaeger & munson, 2010). in a study with over 250 government employees, picazo-vela, gutierrez-martinez, and luna-reyes (2012) attempted to understand the risks, benefits, and alternatives to social media use in the public sector. the findings of the study suggested that social media strategists in the government sector believed that social media use could improve communication and participation among citizens. additionally, they also recognized the importance of strategy and the need for change in existing government structures prior to attempting such a change. the role of social media in government has evolved from a simple online presence to a more interactive purpose that is ultimately aimed toward citizen collaboration. chun, shulman, sandoval, and hovy (2010) described two different stages of government use of the internet. the first stage was primarily focused on the dissemination of information and did little to engage citizens. the second stage, however, focused more on broad based involvement through the use of social media. while the authors note that this second stage is still evolving, they suggested that best practices in this stage will be centered on using social media to foster more of an open government that encourages disruptive innovation and shared governance. examples from the authors included using rss (rich site summary) for disaster news feeds, widgets (stand-alone, mini-applications embedded in a website) for lists of most http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 wanted individuals, and social networking sites for agency recruitment. this work suggested that using social media to primarily share information was less effective than using the tools to encourage widespread collaboration and engagement. this also illuminated one of the primary differences between corporate and government reasons for engaging on social media. while corporate focus is primarily on targeted audiences such as consumers, government focus is on maximum inclusion. this desire for inclusion brings many new issues to the forefront such as access inequality as well as issues of law and policy. for example, jaeger and bertot, (2010) described how the obama administration sought to increase transparency through egovernment. while that seemed to be a worthwhile effort, the authors described how there needed to be more work done to address issues related to internet access. they also described how the information needed to be designed in a way that made it not just available, but also usable by citizens. additionally, jaeger, bertot, and shilton, (2012) further highlighted the digital divide and stressed the importance of additional research on social media implementation, perception, and usage. nonprofit research on nonprofit strategies and perceptions has shown that nonprofits have a history of engagement on social media platforms. in a survey of 409 nonprofit public relation practitioners, curtis et al. (2010) found that all but five were using social media in some way to engage with their stakeholders; however, in a content analysis of facebook in 275 nonprofit organizations waters, burnett, lamm, and lucas (2009) found that nonprofits were primarily using social media for the disclosure of information. the authors argued that nonprofits were not taking full advantage of the benefits associated with social media. additionally, bortree and seltzer (2009) conducted a study using 50 facebook profiles from environmental advocacy groups to determine their dialogic strategies. the results of this study suggested that the organizations simply created a facebook profile, but failed to create any significant relationships on those profiles. a similar analysis of websites utilized by environmental nonprofit organizations in canada came to the same conclusion (greenberg & macaulay, 2009). these findings are consistent with research that has been conducted on nonprofit use of the social media platform twitter. by analyzing twitter feeds, waters and jamal (2011) found that of the top 200 fundraising nonprofits in the united states, 81 were actively using twitter to communicate with their audience. their findings also suggested that nonprofits were using social media (in the case twitter) primarily to engage in oneway communication. similar analyses of nonprofit twitter usage have also supported these findings (lovejoy, waters, & saxton, 2012; guo & saxton, 2014; lovejoy & saxton, 2012). more recent work by saxton and waters (2014) in which they analyzed content from 1,000 facebook updates from the nonprofit organizations suggested that stakeholders prefer messages that open dialogue between them and the organization. much of the research described above suggests that social media networks like twitter and facebook are not being effectively utilized. however, these findings are largely based on formal observations of social media usage from an outside perspective. while these efforts are helpful in forming an understanding of the use of social media in nonprofit organizations, they fail to capture the thoughts and perspectives of the practitioners who engage in nonprofit social media design. the purpose of this work is to present findings from qualitative interviews with social media strategists in nonprofit organizations. this is done in an effort to clarify perceptions of nonprofit social media http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 use and explore the strategies they use for engaging their stakeholders. method participants the study was open to any nonprofit actively engaged in the use of social media and the participants in this study were social media strategists in nonprofit organizations. for the purposes of this paper, social media strategists will be operationally defined as the individuals who are responsible for designing, developing, implementing, and monitoring social media efforts in nonprofit organizations. these individuals were purposefully selected because their work in using social media, from an outside perspective, appeared to be actively engaging the organizations’ stakeholders. this study included 15 participants (see table 1). participant title nonprofit organization social media strategist alex’s lemonade stand foundation communications and content manager americans for the arts senior manager of online strategy best friends animal society director center for civic leadership new media production coordinator convoy of hope social media strategist dosomething.org founder friends without borders outreach liaison love without borders foundation founder and ceo masrawyya director peace innovation lab at stanford marketing strategist rok ict director of online community share our strength associate director slow money community and events manager surfrider foundation online and media coordinator women for women international table 1: list of participants and titles in alphabetical order by nonprofit organization design this research used a descriptive qualitative analysis with data gathering and analytical methods inspired by grounded theory. the sampling method used in the data collection was a criterion sampling method described by creswell (2007). participants were initially identified through an internet search using websites that collected information about nonprofits (e.g. causes.com, topnonprofits.com, and others), and the criteria for inclusion in the study required that the nonprofits be actively engaged on social media platforms. active engagement was defined as having consistent interaction (e.g. continued engagement with their stakeholders) on twitter and facebook with an active followership. nonprofit social media http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 strategists who were engaged in this way were considered for inclusion in the study. the list of participants was not preselected, andnew participants were continually added until the data was believed to have reached saturation. . potential participants were contacted through email and, upon tentative acceptance, were sent information describing the study as well as a copy of the informed consent. the interviews were semistructured and typically lasted approximately one hour with the option of a follow-up interview not to exceed one hour. participants were interviewed over the internet using the skype voice-over-internetprotocol (voip) program, and the interviews were recorded and transcribed for analysis. efforts were made to select organizations that were diverse in size and reason for engaging. instruments participant interviews were semi-structured and guided by key questions that were designed to illuminate ways in which the participants perceived and strategized the use of social media in their organization. following the recommendations of creswell (2007), the questions were broken into three domains 1) the central question, 2) issue subquestions, and 3) procedural sub-questions. the central research question asked participants to describe their experience in using social media and was designed to help provide a broad overview of the perceptions of social media in the nonprofit organization. the issue sub-questions were designed to follow the central question and to examine more specific reasons the nonprofits chose to engage on social media platforms. these questions were primarily concerned with why participants chose to engage on social media and what tools they used. finally, the procedural sub-questions were designed to understand the process of using social media. these questions focused on the strategy of using social media along with the challenges, major events, and outcomes associated with the use of social media. data analysis analysis of the data was influenced by the recommendations of strauss and corbin (1990), using open and axial codes to describe the data that emerged from the transcriptions. the open codes represented the tentative ideas that emerged, and the axial codes represented connections between the open codes. analysis of the open and axial codes resulted in the creation of six themes that were used to describe nonprofit use of social media. for reliability purposes, a second coder was utilized in the data analysis. each coder reviewed and developed themes independently from the transcripts, using the constant comparative method described by glaser (1965). during the data analysis process the coders reviewed the transcripts as the interviews progressed and looked for significant statements, which were statements from participants that the coder believed had significance for understanding the way in which participants perceived and/or strategized about the use of social media. after the transcripts had been reviewed, the significant statements were coded, discussed, and combined to form the open and axial codes. codes were discussed until agreement was reached, and codes that could not be agreed upon were discarded. this continued until no new codes were found, at which point the information was deemed to have reached saturation. results and discussion as a result of the 15 interviews, 558 significant statements were extracted. of those 558 significant statements, 100 open codes, 32 axial codes, and six themes were developed. these themes represent a broad overview of how the social media strategists in the study perceived and strategized about the use of social media. a summary of the themes and examples of the axial and open codes has been provided in table 2. http://www.gjcpp.org/ theme example axial codes example open codes f nature of social media social media changes quickly; respect the medium focus of attention changes quickly; personal actions are amplified; engage where your followers engage; don’t try to recreate social media platforms; 218 online / offline action online action can influence offline action; offline action can influence online action; well thought through social media efforts can motivate offline action; offline action can inspire online action; real world events can lead people to engage online; 36 social media is social make engagements meaningful; don’t abuse the connection create a two-way street with followers; abusing your connection leads to a loss of followers; don’t do all the talking 84 strategic / data driven dedicated support for social media; data driven have a strategy for engaging your followers; social media efforts should be guided by data; monitor activity 152 authentic real; quality vs. quantity quality relationships are more valuable than quantity of followers; organic/quality growth is slow and steady 40 power of the story powerful stories thrive in social media action is often based on powerful stories; powerful stories gain attention 28 table 2: themes, example axial codes, and example open codes the codes and themes highlight some of the topics and ideas that emerged from the discussion with the nonprofit social media strategists. while the participants described a variety of social media platforms, the primary platforms discussed were facebook and twitter. the following is a more in-depth discussion of the findings in an attempt to provide a better understanding of each. theme one: nature of social media the first theme, nature of social media, was composed of 218 significant statements. the codes that emerged in this theme provided insights into the intricacies of working within the social media environment. this provided both a foundation for understanding work in the social media environment, as well as what should be expected from attempts to engage online. this included a focus on some of the ways in which social media tools have, and continue to, influence and impact the organizations. participants described respecting the medium, going where the people are, and the variety of uses for social media. with regard to respecting the medium, interview participants discussed at length the importance of treating each social media platform as a unique and separate entity from other social media platforms. to this end, the way that content was structured on each of the different platforms varied depending on the nature of the social media platform. for example, participants described the nature of twitter as being quick and short lived, so they global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 felt comfortable posting more frequently; whereas organizations using facebook would post more lengthy content less often. in the words of one participant, “...you have to respect each medium and treat it differently. we have a different strategy for something on pinterest than we would on facebook.” several participants described efforts to recreate the social media environment on platforms that they controlled and managed. the end result of these efforts was an extensive amount of time and effort with little to no interaction from the target audience. participants believed that the reason for this lack of success depended on a number of issues, but primarily because people were already engaging on established social media platforms (e.g. twitter and facebook). followers of the organizations did not want to sign up for another social media platform when all of their friends were already on the mainstream social media websites. one participant described the need to engage with followers in ways that they were already engaging, people don’t want to sign up for another thing; i hardly use [other social media]. i’m there but i’m not actively doing anything with it because it doesn’t really matter in the big scheme of things. so trying to recreate a tool that is already being used is unnecessary... while it was important to respect the medium and go where the people were, participants were able to use a variety of social media platforms to engage with their audiences. the primary platforms that were used by participants in this study were facebook, twitter, and youtube. participants described how certain populations and groups of people engaged more with specific social media platforms than others, while some groups utilized several at once. one participant commented, “...there’s so many different social networks out there to get involved with and just having a good sense of what you think is worth your time and what the return on investment is.” what became apparent through the interviews was not that the participants were using every social media platform, but that they were using the ones that were being used by the people with which they wanted to connect. in addition, participants described how they were able to integrate existing social media platforms into their websites to provide more customized content and opportunities for their target audiences. participants described various features of social media, the strengths and weaknesses of the features, and how those features provided opportunities. the strengths revolved around the sheer number of people who were engaging on social media and the wide reach of these platforms. the weaknesses discussed, however, focused on how to create authentic and meaningful connections with stakeholders in these virtual environments. the threat in attempting to engage was that, if done incorrectly, the participants in the study might alienate current and new stakeholders by turning them off to the organization. alternatively, the interaction of these strengths and weaknesses also created opportunities for developing new support as well as engaging individuals already committed to the organizations cause. for example, participants discussed the low cost and high impact of social media. participants described the opportunities they had to spread their message in ways that had never before been possible. one participant commented: this all can be done by a handful of people...with very few dollars. it’s not like you have to have tens of thousands of boots on the ground like we did in the 60s. it can be done by a handful of people with very few dollars and a little technology. participants also focused on how social media empowered the nonprofits and the people who followed them in a number of different ways. as one participant described, “i think http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 people are so empowered right now; they feel that social media empowers them and they are bought into making change in some way. whatever that might be, they won’t want to lose that right.” participants described how social media platforms were incredibly open to the public and gave everyone a voice to say what they wanted without the fear of traditional consequences associated with face-to-face interactions. participants believed this empowered the organizations by opening new avenues for engagement because everyone could contribute in some way, whether that was simply liking a status or organizing a local effort. it should be noted here that there were several modalities used in developing this sense of empowerment and engagement. while the initial connections were made using platforms such as facebook, twitter, and youtube, other forms of communication were also utilized to maintain and sustain contact with participants. these included, but were not limited to, integrating connections into more traditional forms of communication such as mail, email, text, and phone. another aspect of social media that was discussed by participants was how quickly the social media environment changed. this was true for both the social media platforms and the users that engaged on these platforms. from the platform side, it became apparent that new social media tools were emerging on a regular basis. this made it difficult to stay informed and aware of the most recent and effective social media tools. one participant commented, i just had to do a three year plan for social media and it’s kind of a joke because obviously facebook changes its layout and its rules every three months, and the same thing with twitter. it’s all constantly evolving and so it’s really hard to make plans more than three to six months in advance because something i think is going to be awesome might not even be an option next month. in addition, the existing social media platforms also changed on a regular basis making it challenging for individuals to continually use them effectively. the users of the social media platforms also shifted and changed attention quickly, which added a level of difficulty to the work of the participants. the way that social media amplified the message was another important component of understanding the nature of social media. in this respect, social media had a beneficial and detrimental side. social media allowed for the bolstering and emphasizing of important organizational ideas and offered instant communication, which was incredibly useful and helpful for the participants and their organizations. one participant described social media as, “...a tinder box. the potential for things to go viral and to catch on is really there, so whatever you do can become amplified in major ways. just by design there’s an incredible potential there.” however, the personal actions of the participants and their organizations were also under a new level of scrutiny and criticism regardless of how careful they were. participants shared that it was difficult to evaluate how a message would be received by both the stakeholders of the nonprofit organization as well as non-stakeholders. no matter how carefully they crafted their messages, they had no control over how the message would ultimately be interpreted, and negatively perceived messages could have consequences for the organization. the next discussion topic regarding the nature of social media focused on the volatility that seemed to surround the social media environment. in addition to changing quickly, many attempts to create change failed in the social media environment despite best efforts of the participants. what became evident was that reactions in social media were hard to predict. several participants commented on the term “going http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 viral” and being asked, or told, to make the organization go viral saying things like, ... [movements] seem to be started by some random event that really catalyzes people and gives people a lot of motivation to act, and you can’t predict that. they are almost like social epiphanies that happen, and it’s very hard to design those. all agreed that this was not something that could be controlled or even planned for and that any content placed on social media was no longer under the control of the person who posted it but by the people who viewed the content. this aspect of the nature of social media was further complicated by the fact that none of the participants thought of themselves as social media experts. many of the participants had success through trial and error and strongly believed that anyone claiming to be a social media expert would be questionable because social media cannot be understood at that level, yet. many of the participants compared social media to traditional media. several described it as just a different medium, but one that opened new opportunities to interact; whereas traditional media relied on interruption advertising (e.g. television commercials), social media provided an opportunity to interact with the user in a way that traditional media was unable to accomplish. the main difference here focused on the possibility of having a two-way connection with social media vs. a one-way connection with traditional media. these new avenues changed the way that the users interacted with the sender of the message. it was noted that much of the younger generation was engaging in non-traditional ways, and participants described the lack of necessity for traditional media in reaching their audience because their audience was completely online. one participant commented, i think this year [the organization] pretty much eliminated all print media advertising because they don’t have to use it; because their audience lives online. their average age of a person that interacts with [the organization] is 17 or 17 and a half. participants also described how it was easier to raise awareness and garner support for their causes because social media allowed them to reach new audiences and create new opportunities. at the same time, it allowed them to extend local expertise to different geographic locations without the challenge of having to travel around the world. for example, participants would often use social media platforms like facebook, twitter to establish connections between organizational experts and some of the more geographically distant parts of the organization. additionally, participants described how they would never have been able to have the kind of reach that they have now without social media, and often cited unprecedented support from individuals in various countries around the world with statements like, i’m always shocked to learn about our audiences on social networks. our third most popular city that interacts with us is paris, france. i just wouldn’t expect that at all, and we actually get a lot of comments from brazil and turkey and countries that we don’t even have chapters in. theme two: online/offline action the second theme, online/offline action, was composed of 36 significant statements. the codes that emerged in this theme focused on the relationship between how online actions can influence offline actions and vice versa. they also explored the nature of the relationship between online/offline engagements. the terms “action” and “engagement” were often used interchangeably and seemed to have a shared focus on connecting with others in a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 meaningful way to create change. this change often occurred online in the form of some virtual change (e.g. signing a virtual petition or spreading information), and offline in the form of physical action (e.g. attending an event or engaging in service). in conversations about online action influencing offline action, participants discussed their experiences in using social media in a variety of ways to engage people offline. this included using social media to publicize important issues related to the organization. additionally, social media was used to organize and communicate across factions when working to accomplish change. as one participant described, i soon found out [followers of the organization] were following whatever was happening [in the organization] through my profile, and the first step to change anything is to know that something wrong is happening. so they knew, and they got involved, and they started sharing... through the discussions, it became clear that the influence of social media was not just one way. participants described how offline action could serve as an example for online action. many participants discussed how they used work they were doing in their communities as sources of content in the online environment. additionally, work being done on a specific topic or issue could be utilized to engage others, especially if that work was inspiring. real world events also played a role in the mobilization of individuals through social media. participants described how some movements or change efforts occurred online solely out of reaction to a real world event. this led to the idea that offline and online action were not mutually exclusive processes. several participants described how they used online and offline action in complementary ways. one participant commented: i see [online/offline action] as a venn diagram or just concentric circles. as the program activity grows, awareness about it grows and the community discussing it grows. as the community discussing it grows, more people get involved and more people are able to take action steps. it also became apparent that followership online did not ensure offline action and that different people would engage in different ways, but should still be treated with the same respect and consideration that face-toface individuals would receive. finally, in an effort to create a beneficial relationship, participants described how it was important to do something that was not already being done, while making it easy for individuals to engage and by providing a range in levels of engagement. for example, one participant discussed organizational campaigns and how, as the social media strategist, they would offer different ways for people to get involved in the campaign. at the very basic level this included simply liking or sharing about the campaign. at the other end, however, there were also options for followers to become fully engaged and volunteer with the campaign based on their level of interest/passion. theme three: social media is social the third theme, social media is social, was composed of 84 significant statements. the codes that emerged in this theme focused on the idea that social media is about connecting with people in meaningful ways. participants described the importance of understanding that social media is social in nature, which had a number of implications for the participants as they sought to create change in the social media space. discussions around this topic primarily focused on connecting with people in meaningful ways while remaining active, but not abusing the connection to the followers. this included conversations regarding the danger in only pushing information out and never taking in information from followers. individuals who http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 followed the nonprofit organizations needed to feel like they had a relationship with them in which there was a two-way street for communication. part of building the relationship with the followers involved making the engagements meaningful, which included remembering important dates that followers cared about, creating content that was relevant to them, and rewarding engagement in some way whether it was tangible or intangible. this was often described as being work intensive, but critical in maintaining support from the follower base. one participant commented: i think the most important thing that we learned is that people want to know that there’s someone behind the curtain. people like to be talked to and they’re engaging with your brand because they really like you and because they believe in what you do. this also meant that not all of the content posted was specific to the organization or the cause that the nonprofit was working toward. in fact, some content had nothing to do with the cause, but was posted because followers would connect with a funny picture or a compelling statement or story. this specific idea primarily came from participant perceptions, but no tangible examples were shared to support this assertion. discussion with participants on this topic also focused on finding ways to remain active without abusing the connection to the audience. participants described how it was vital to post content on a regular basis in efforts to consistently engage with followers. at the same time, many of the participants targeted specific campaigns to selected audiences as much as possible to prevent overloading the pages of users who might not be impacted by the campaign. for example, an organization would not post news about a new state policy for oklahoma to their constituents in oregon. this was done primarily out of fear that including everyone would cause some followers to disengage from information overload. theme four: strategic/data driven the fourth theme, strategic/data driven, was composed of 152 significant statements. the codes that emerged in this theme focused on the need for social media to be implemented strategically. part of this strategy often included finding individuals with influence to support the cause. different participants had access to different individuals; whether they were local heroes or worldwide celebrities, their endorsements often provided helpful spikes in followership and spreading of messages. it was also important for the social media efforts to have someone who was dedicated to the support of the social media networks. having these individuals dedicated to the social media networks not only allowed the necessary time for cultivating relationships, but also helped create a singular voice for the cause or organization with which people could connect. it allowed the participants to continually focus on new ways to engage the users and try new things. in the words of one participant, “i’m fortunate enough to be the online voice for [the organization]. so that in everything i write, whether it’s a little tweet or a comment, i take that serious.” in addition to being dedicated to social media, the participants were also the ones who carefully thought through the content that went on their social media networks. knowing they would lose control once they posted the content, they carefully designed the content to be useable for their audience as well as audiences that were outside their target demographic. these efforts were often closely monitored by using free or low cost monitoring tools. the monitoring tools most commonly utilized by the participants in the study were google analytics and hootsuite because these tools provided the participants with a broad and comprehensive view of what was happing across all the platforms in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 which they were engaged. this allowed them to see the effects of their current content and adjust to make it better in the future. while all participants had unique strategies for tracking their users, they all used some form of tracking. as one participant commented, “i’m looking at metrics; i’m looking at engagement more than followers. followers are definitely something i still include, but i’m looking more for retweets, @ mentions on twitter, and facebook comments, likes, and shares, essentially.” theme five: authentic the fifth theme, authentic, was composed of 40 significant statements. the codes that emerged in this theme focused on the need for consistent and quality interactions on social media that were both inspiring and real. the need for authenticity stood out because influence in social media was based on the ability of the relationship between the social media strategists and the stakeholders to inspire others to action while being consistent in the way the audience is approached. participants described how it was their passion, or the passion of a group of people, that motivated others to get involved. at the same time, however, as they developed relationships with their followers, the followers came to know and appreciate them for who they were. if they tried to change their online personality at some point it became an issue because participants believed people could tell if they were being fake. part of this authenticity also came from the trust that was developed in the relationship. this trust was dependent on the relationship and the transparency of the work being done. participant comments around this idea included, “i don’t think the idea of manipulating anybody really works in social media. when something really does resonate with people and your friends start liking it, that’s when things really happen.” another important component of authenticity dealt with the issue of quality vs. quantity in relation to the followers. participants agreed that authentic growth was slow and steady over time, and that quality relationships were more valuable than the quantity of the followers. participants gave several examples of corporate sponsored campaigns that were highly successful at gathering millions of likes, follows, etc. only to see that when they asked for engagement there was no one there, as they never developed a relationship with any of these people. as one participant commented, they’re giving away a million dollars so you would think that, of course, everyone’s going to see it like we built these emotional connections and people want to win. the truth is that no one was emotionally connected to any of the people who were giving the money because no one organically cared. you can’t force people to care. followers in campaigns like these were only engaging because there was some tangible reward for a small action that they were willing to take, but they never engaged with the organization again. theme six: power of the story the sixth theme, power of the story, was composed of 28 significant statements. the codes that emerged in this theme focused on the power of stories, and the ability of stories to motivate and personalize issues in social media. in discussion with participants, there was strong agreement that stories played a special role in the social media environment. stories that were well constructed and powerful not only thrived in social media but could often be used to motivate people to take action. several individuals who were interviewed described how the organizations they represented were built upon the story of a singular person or event. even participants who did not have one primary story for the foundation of their cause found and utilized powerful stories within their work. as one participant described, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 what we still have to this day is we have a story and i truly believe in the power of the story…many great social movements are driven and motivated based on a series of stories or one single story and that’s what we have. these stories were powerful in a number of ways. first, stories spread easily over social media networks, and because these stories were so easily shared and spread, they gained the attention of large numbers of users. participants described how powerful stories were impactful and often served to narrow broad problems to something more relatable to the followers. one participant even went as far as to suggest that efforts in social media could not be successful without a powerful story. other comments focused on why stories worked so well in the social media environment as one participant commented, “what the technology does is takes all the friction out of organizing, it takes all the friction out of communicating and it rewards people who are very skilled at telling a story.” conclusions, recommendations, and limitations wilson, gosling, and graham (2012) described how much research on social media platforms has been conducted but that much remains to be done. social media platforms such as facebook and twitter are incredibly popular and provide a wealth of opportunities for research. however, these networks are complex and careful consideration must be given to how they are studied. understanding the strategy behind the content and how that content affects the relationship between the organization and the end user can be equally important to understanding the actual content. these interviews provided a number of interesting ideas about the perceptions and strategies of nonprofit social media strategists. in comparing nonprofit, corporate, and government strategies and perceptions there certainly seemed to be some overlap as the findings from this study echo other research not specific to nonprofits. while the discussion of the findings in this paper focuses mainly on the potential benefits to other nonprofits, they could also logically be applied to corporate and government organizations. for example, all shared a desire to connect with stakeholders, whether those individuals are consumers, citizens, volunteers, etc. there also seemed to be some agreement about the potential strengths and weaknesses in using social media. it was also interesting to see how the need for authenticity and transparency seemed to be a shared concern for the purposes of building and maintaining positive relationships. admittedly the challenges here may have been different depending on why organizations engaged. discussions with the interview participants provided some interesting insights into the role of social media. participants in the study suggested that part of the power of social media hinged around the ability to build relationships and inspire action. they described the importance of the two-way connection between the social media strategist/organization and the target audience. it was this intentional relationship building that seemed to set nonprofits apart from corporate or government organizations with respect to strategy. the participants in the study described a desire to develop personal relationships with their audiences for the purpose of making progress on topics of shared passion that would likely not be possible or desired for corporate and government organizations. there are a variety of applications for this research. from a practical perspective, these findings may be helpful for organizations (corporate, government, and nonprofit) who are considering engagement on social media. these organizations would ideally consider the insights from the participants in the study, and take them into consideration as they prepare, implement, and assess their own social media engagement efforts. from a research perspective, this study opens http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 avenues for further study. future research might focus on the methods used to engage on social media and whether or not those methods are effective. it would also be interesting to look more closely at the power of stories and the impact they have on engagement from stakeholders. other avenues might include looking at the relationship between online and offline influence and the role of transparency in the use of social media. this study was designed to take a broad look at how nonprofits perceive and strategize about the use of social media, and the themes that emerged from the study provide a foundation for understanding these perspectives. however, there are limitations associated with this study. participant selection, due to the nature of internet search algorithms likely excluded several potential candidates that would have been helpful in contributing to the understanding of nonprofit use of social media. additionally, given the broad parameters for inclusion and the limited number of participants, the findings presented in this paper are limited to descriptive and directional understanding of nonprofit perceptions of social media. while these findings are not generalizable, they do offer some interesting comparisons to previous work done on the perceptions of social media use. this analysis is just a starting point for understanding the relationship between nonprofit organizations and social media platforms. as these platforms continue to evolve, it will be important to continually study them and seek to understand the potential impact they have on both nonprofit organizations and those who would follow these organizations. references asur, s., & huberman, b. 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(2009). social media: the new hybrid element of the promotion mix. business horizons, 52(4), 357-365. picazo-vela, s., gutierrez-martinez, i., & lunareyes, l. f. (2012). understanding risks, benefits, and strategic alternatives of social media applications in the public sector. government information quarterly, 29(4), 504-511. saxton, g. d., & waters, r. d. (2014). what do stakeholders like on facebook? examining public reactions to nonprofit organizations’ informational, promotional, and community-building messages. journal of public relations research, 26(3), 280-299. strauss, a. & corbin, j. m. (1990). basics of qualitative research: grounded theory procedures and techniques. thousand oaks: sage publications. tredinnick, l. (2006). web 2.0 and business: a pointer to the intranets of the future. business information review, 23(4), 228234. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 waters, r. d., burnett, e., lamm, a., & lucas, j. (2009). engaging stakeholders through social networking: how nonprofit organizations are using facebook. public relations review, 35(2), 102-106. waters, r. d., & jamal, j. y. (2011). tweet, tweet, tweet: a content analysis of nonprofit organizations’ twitter updates. public relations review, 37(3), 321-324. wilson, r. e., gosling, s. d., & graham, l. t. (2012). a review of facebook research in the social sciences. perspectives on psychological science, 7, 203-220. http://www.gjcpp.org/ microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 222 the war without bullets: socio-structural violence from a critical standpoint david fryer1 and cathy mccormack2 charles sturt university, nsw australia easterhouse, scotland iii international conference of community psychology puebla, mexico, june 5, 2010.                                                                                                                           1 dfryer@csu.edu.au 2 poderuk@hotmail.com 223 the war without bullets: socio-structural violence from a critical standpoint. abstract for over a quarter of a century david and cathy have worked in separate, parallel but mutually supportive and stimulating ways, as community psychologist and community activist respectively, to collaboratively understand and contest socio-structural violence. each has focused in different but critically complementary ways on interconnections between poverty, inequality, unemployment and psycho-social destruction. as a community activist, drawing on her experience of popular education and radical politics, cathy characterised what was constituted by these interconnections as manifestations of “wars without bullets” waged remorselessly against structurally oppressed people, and to promote conscientization through popular education, theatre of the oppressed, film making, radical politics and accessible writing. as a community psychologist, drawing upon critical scholarship and radical praxis, david tried to develop the notion of a “war without bullets” in ways which would give it legitimacy within the rhetorical discursive practices of the establishment yet critically refuse individualism, psychologism and essentialism. both sought to deploy the notion of the “war without bullets” for progressive change. in this presentation, the discursive frame of reference of the “war without bullets” will be explicated, developed and critiqued. in doing so some advantages of long term collaboration between community activism and community psychology for effective thinking and action will be explored and debated. keyword: community activism, community psychology, war without bullets, popular education, critical academics. 224 la guerra sin balas: violencia socioestructural desde una perspectiva crítica resumen por más de un cuarto de siglo david y cathy han trabajado en formas separadas, paralelas, pero mutuamente respaldantes y estimulantes, como psicólogo comunitario el uno y como activista comunitaria la otra, buscando entender y enfrentar colaborativamente violencia sociestructural. cada uno ha enfocado en formas diferentes pero críticamente complementarias las interconexiones entre pobreza, desigualdad, desempleo y destrucción psicosocial. como activista comunitaria, extrayendo de su experiencia en educación popular y política radical, cathy ha caracterizado lo que constituyen estas interconexiones como manifestaciones de “guerras sin balas” realizada sin remordimiento contra gente estructuralmente oprimida. ella ha buscado promover concientización a través de educación popular, teatro del oprimido, creación de películas, política radical y facilitación de la capacidad de escribir. como psicólogo comunitario, por medio de posturas académicas críticas y de praxis radical, david ha tratado de desarrollar la noción de “guerra sin balas” en forma que le otorgue legitimidad dentro de las prácticas discursivas retóricas del mundo académico reconocido y a la vez rehusando críticamente el individualismo, el psicologismo y el esencialismo. ambos han buscado expandir la noción de “guerra sin balas” para lograr un cambio social progresivo. en este capítulo será explicado, desarrollado y criticado el marco discursivo de referencia del concepto “guerra sin balas”. en este proceso se explorarán y debatirán algunas ventajas de largo alcance de la colaboración entre activismo comunitario y psicología comunitaria en cuanto a pensamiento y acción efectivos. palabras clave: activismo comunitario, psicología comunitaria, guerra sin balas, educación popular, academia crítica. 225 the war without bullets: socio-structural violence from a critical standpoint “have we ever seriously asked what psychosocial processes look like from the point of view of the dominated instead of from that of the dominator?” (ignacio martín-baró in aron and corne, 1994: 28) “the vagaries of modern life are undoing and remaking people’s lives in new and ominous ways. the subjects of our study struggle with the possibilities and dangers of economic globalisation, the threat of endless violence and insecurity, and the new infrastructures and forms of political domination and resistance that lie in the shadows of grand claims of democratization and reform.” (biehl, good and kleinman, 2007: 1) how should socio-structural violence be understood and how should that understanding be progressively deployed? for over a quarter of a century we, cathy and david, have attempted to work in mutually supportive and mutually stimulating, if sometimes separate and parallel ways, as community activist and community psychologist respectively, in attempts to address this question. each of us has focused critically, albeit in different ways, on interconnections between material poverty, societal inequality, socio-economic policy and psycho-social destruction in attempts to understand and contest socio-structural violence. the standpoint from which this paper is written is fundamentally one of community praxis, a standpoint from which we seek to understand and contest both how societal constructions (such as unemployment, psychologically toxic labour market entrapment, poverty, inequality, disabling practices, psy-pharmacology, gendered, heterosexist and racist oppression, etc.) immiserate, destroy and obliterate, and to understand and challenge oppressive forms of psychology; to de-construct, de-legitimise and de-ideologise the socio-political processes through which oppressive ‘psy’ claims are given the status of ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’; to render transparent and accountable the subjective, material, institutional, societal, political and ideological ‘psy’ interests served by what is, and what is not, thought, said and done by all relevant subjects; to 226 engage in progressive social action interconnected to and simultaneous with emancipatory powero knowledge construction and legitimation and profound radical reflexivity; and to facilitate emancipatory process and outcome through progressive redistribution of social power, rather than collude with, or contribute to, reactionary notions of power as the property of an individual. as a community activist, informed by her reading of popular education, community activism and radical politics, cathy has for over quarter of a century witnessed each and every day a ‘war without bullets’ being waged remorselessly against herself and other structurally oppressed people: the poor, the ill, the unemployed, the disabled, the stigmatised, the marginalised and the simply different. cathy lives in one of the most notorious public housing schemes in europe (easterhouse, glasgow) which is characterised by what the establishment refers to as multiple deprivation in the form of unemployment, poverty, substandard housing, etc. and which has a fearsome reputation for gang violence. however, we both prefer to draw attention to socio-structural, political, ideological and psychological violence being directed towards the people of easterhouse, by means of policies which manufacture unemployment, inequality, material poverty, socio-economic apartheid, ghetto township status, etc. and knowledges which position the consequences of socio-structural violence as the fault of those at whom the violence is being directed. cathy has facilitated tenants’group activism, promoted popular education, deployed the theatre of the oppressed, collaborated in award-winning documentary cinema, accepted international speaking engagements and written powerful accessible prose exposing and contesting socio-structural violence. cathy’s struggle began in 1985 when she had felt so powerless to change the cruel reality facing her children and other people in her own community that she became more afraid of living than of dying. although her children were bouncing with health when they were born, as soon as cathy brought them home from hospital to her freezing-cold damp flat, her life became a constant battle for survival between her family and the fungus family. then, when britain was changed from an industrial to a money-market economy, cathy’s family were among the millions of working people deemed surplus to the requirements of capitalism who were thrown onto the unemployed-scrap-heap and forced to subsist on welfare. whilst mrs. thatcher kept talking about individual choice, the real choice cathy had to make was between feeding her hungry children or feeding her hungry fuel meter. 227 when cathy joined her community’s fight for justice she started to witness human suffering and hardship on a scale which she never thought she would see in her lifetime, except perhaps in time of war. then she realised that there actually really was a war going on, only this war was not being fought with tanks, bombs or bullets: this war without bullets was a social, economic, psychological and propaganda war against the poor: a war without bullets. as a research psychologist, informed by his reading of critical theory, community psychology and emancipatory pedagogy, david has for over quarter of a century – documented the everyday socio-structural violence which is unemployment and its roles in socially constituting misery, injustice and the destruction of individuals, families and communities. david has drawn attention to the gigantic numbers of people, globally, destructively caught up in unemployment; to the continued deleterious impact of unemployment even after re-employment; to the psychologically corrosive impact of the anticipation of unemployment; to the toxicity of unemployment for family members of unemployed people including their babies and children; to the oppressive impact of unemployment even on the non-unemployed people in communities blighted by mass unemployment; and to how participation in the so-called flexible labour market, with its generation of temporary, part-time, insecure, non-unionised, psychologically destructive sub-employment, is for many as psychologically toxic as unemployment. moreover, david has argued that the tsunami of misery, maiming and mortality which is the war without bullets has continued throughout labour as well as conservative government administrations in england and has been used as an instrument of economic and social control to control inflation. economists even have an acronym, nairu (non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment) referring to the level of unemployment necessary to control inflation and to discipline the working poor; and that mass unemployment serves the interests of the status quo in a range of ways because unemployment is constructed to be a condition so undesirable that noone wishes to become unemployed which all unemployed people wish to leave as soon as possible. mass, involuntary, unemployment socially constituted to be personally and socially destructive, guarantees there are potential workers willing to do the most boring, dead end, underpaid, temporary, insecure, unpleasant jobs (i.e. the ones being created in the so-called flexible labour market), functioning effectively as an incomes policy, because it guarantees that there are unemployed people competing for the jobs of the employed, thus facilitating employers in reducing wages and working conditions. unemployment serves the interests of the status quo 228 better to the extent that there are far fewer jobs than potential workers seeking them; that unemployed people are poverty stricken and have to go through intrusive and degrading rituals to get the pittance they get to keep them healthy enough to compete for work but not comfortable enough to have a viable alternative life style; that unemployment is a stigmatised condition with orchestrated campaigns by the media and politicians reinforcing the view that unemployed people are feckless, anti-social idlers living a life of luxury at taxpayers’ expense, fraudulently claiming income and two-timing the system; that unemployed people are associated with criminality through media reports of mentioning whenever criminals were unemployed; and crucially in connection with the psychological war without bullets, that unemployment is demonstrated to ‘cause’ mental ill health whilst mental illness is simultaneously socially constructed as frightening, dangerous and deviant and whilst psychologists promote ‘employability’, active labour market policies and individualistic cognitive interventions to ‘solve’ unemployment. catastrophic as the pogrom on the poor achieved through neo-liberal labour markets is, david has argued that the pathogenic labour market characteristic of contemporary post-industrial societies is only one of many powerful mechanisms through which ‘class-cleansing’ sociostructural violence is accomplished under capitalism in the 21st century. other mechanisms include: manufactured poverty and inequality; disabling practices; class, gender and white privilege. cathy’s rhetoric and david’s rhetoric are sometimes far apart in style but are essentially in agreement. for example, whilst cathy observes that few of her class mates from primary school are still alive, david draws attention to the final report of the world health organisation commission on social determinants of health (closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health (who, 2008), which makes it clear (in table 2.1) that for men life expectancy in one of the poorer parts of glasgow (the city where cathy lives) is at 54 years, nearly 3 decades shorter than life expectancy in one of the richer areas of glasgow, only a few short distance away. whilst cathy writes that “the wealth in this country is not trickling down from the rich but gushing up from the poor sods like us” (mccormack, 2009: 52), david quotes iris marion young (1988) that: “the injustice of class division does not consist only in the fact that some people have great wealth whilst most people have little and some are severely deprived. the theory of exploitation shows that this relation of power and inequality is produced and reproduced through 229 a systematic process in which the energies of the have-nots are continuously expended to maintain and augment the power, status and wealth of the haves”. whilst cathy writes: “our children . . . see that the people with the knowledge are the cause of their frustrations” (mccormack, 2009: 132), david argues that psychology (and the associated wider and deeper set of knowledges, practices, technical processes and discourses which constitute the ‘psy-complex’) is increasingly clearly part of the problem and that, despite rhetorics of social justice, empowerment etc., community psychology is as ideologically problematic as any other manifestation of ‘psy’. whilst cathy (along with allies) “began a popular education group in easterhouse, the popular democracy education resource centre”, and became involved in setting up the scottish popular education forum whose “aim was to bring about social change using popular education and try to build a social movement” (mccormack, 2009: 137), david has argued for the merits of ‘un-teaching’, critical pedagogy and praxis. positioning the carnage in our communities as a war without bullets may suggest the posing of new questions and answers: q: who are the enemy? a: the dead, wounded and traumatised are disproportionately amongst the most powerless who as non-producers and non-consumers are surplus to contemporary market requirements. mortality, morbidity and misery are greater the lower down the socio-occupational-class-povertypower hierarchy one goes and however one constructs it: by employment status, wealth indicators, inequality, educational level etc. (which are all proxies for relative powerlessness). q: what are the means of waging war? a: the ‘weapons of mass demoralisation’ (wmd) deployed include processes which generate psychologically toxic: inequality; poverty; inequality; unemployment; flexible labour market (insecure, unsatisfying, poorly paid, poor quality, stressful jobs); substandard or insufficient housing; stigma; social apartheid and mis-education for critical illiteracy. if this was a ‘war with bullets’, this weaponry would be banned under the geneva convention. q: what is the scale of the war without bullets? a: all out the chances of surviving the policy minefields in parts of the world are like the chances of walking blindfold through in a war zone 230 q: what is the goal of the war without bullets? a: full spectrum dominance3 through full spectrum governmentality. q: what are weapons of resistance? a: critique; answering back; subversion; solidarity; conscientization; praxis. q: from whom can we learn where has resistance been effective? a: de-colonisers4, emancipatory disability activists, community activists; critical theorists; feminists; queer theorists; trades unionists; anti-capitalists; anti-globalisation activists; popular educators; progressive journalists; anti-imperial intellectuals . . . anyone who is not complaint in the face of the war without bullets. q: who is waging the war without bullets? a: the war without bullets is not just a civil war of the ‘higher’ classes against the ‘lower’, or a war of the ‘state’ against sub-groups of its citizens; and whilst a war without bullets, a briefcase war, involves people drafting and enacting policy, relaying problematic discourses, the relays of structural oppression, including: politicians, policy makers; bureaucrats; researchers; teachers; lecturers; psychiatrists; psychologists; therapists; counsellors; social workers; journalists; street level bureaucrats, etc., from a critical standpoint, it is essential not to default back to psychologism or individualism by positioning the war without bullets as being intentionally                                                                                                                           3  “the  overarching  focus  of  this  vision  is  full  spectrum  dominance—achieved  through  the  interdependent   application  of  dominant  manoeuvre,  precision  engagement,  focused  logistics,  and  full  dimensional  protection.   attaining  that  goal  requires  the  steady  infusion  of  new  technology  and  modernization  and  replacement  of   equipment.  however,  material  superiority  alone  is  not  sufficient.  of  greater  importance  is  the  development  of   doctrine,  organizations,  training  and  education,  leaders,  and  people  that  effectively  take  advantage  of  the   technology  .  .  .  the  creation  of  a  force  that  is  dominant  across  the  full  spectrum  of  military  operations—persuasive   in  peace,  decisive  in  war,  preeminent  in  any  form  of  conflict”   (http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/jfq_pubs/1225.pdf).   4  “many  indigenous  communities  continue  to  live  within  political  and  social  conditions  that  perpetuate  extreme   levels  of  poverty,  chronic  ill  health  and  poor  educational  opportunities.  their  children  may  be  removed  forcibly   from  their  care,  ‘adopted’  or  institutionalized.  the  adults  may  be  as  addicted  to  alcohol  as  their  children  are  to   glue,  they  may  live  in  destructive  relationships  which  are  formed  and  shaped  by  their  impoverished  material   conditions  and  structured  by  politically  oppressive  regimes.  while  they  live  like  this  they  are  constantly  fed   messages  about  their  worthlessness,  laziness,  dependence  and  lack  of  higher  order  human  qualities.  this  applies  as   much  to  indigenous  communities  in  first  world  nations  as  it  does  to  indigenous  communities  in  developing   countries.  within  these  sorts  of  social  realities,  questions  of  imperialism  and  the  effects  of  colonization  may  seem   to  be  merely  academic;  sheer  physical  survival  is  far  more  pressing.  the  problem  is  that  constant  efforts  by   governments,  states,  societies  and  institutions  to  deny  the  historical  formations  of  such  conditions  have   simultaneously  denied  our  claims  to  humanity,  to  having  a  history,  and  to  all  sense  of  hope.  to  acquiesce  is  to  lose   ourselves  entirely  and  implicitly  agree  with  all  that  has  been  said  about  us.  to  resist  is  to  retrench  in  the  margins,   retrieve  what  we  were  and  remake  ourselves.  the  past,  our  stories  local  and  global,  the  present,  our  communities,   cultures,  languages  and  social  practices  –  all  may  be  spaces  of  marginalization,  but  they  have  also  become  spaces  of   resistance  and  hope”    (smith,  1999:  4).   231 waged by malevolent individual agents. as iris marion young put it: ‘oppression’ designates the disadvantage and injustice some people suffer not because a tyrannical power intends to keep them down, but because of the everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal society.” (young, 1988: 272). we are committed to working, collectively with others, to uncover the apparatuses, in the foucauldian sense, composed of interconnections of discourses, institutions, scientific statements, regulations, practices etc., which constitute ‘chronic socio-structural violence’ and through which the ongoing transfer of powers from have-nots to haves, from poor to rich, from lower class to middle is accomplished in neo-liberal societies. some of the most sophisticated, contemporary, post-foucauldian, work on subjectivity is currently being done by anthropologists and ethnographers like joao biehl (2005) who are extending and deepening our understanding of the process of subjectification, the genealogy of the subject, by painstaking investigation into “the ways in which inner processes are reshaped amid economic and political reforms, violence, and social suffering” (biehl, good and kleinman, 2007). from this perspective, the 'subjectivity of the unemployed' is both the means and the outcome of the construction, regulation and destruction of the unemployed person, accomplished through apparatuses (in the foucauldian sense) of interlocking discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements (including – of course ones produced by community psychologists), philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions functioning to produce governmentality working in the interests of the neo-liberal social order. rather than agency being positioned as restricted by depowering contextual structures, agency restriction is now positioned as a dynamic manifestation of violent auto-subjugation through the infolding of discursive exteriority. the contemporary world is replete with problematic subjectification, the psychological war without bullets, and we believe that things are swiftly going from bad to worse. the question for us is not whether socio-structural violence characterises contemporary western societies but through which apparatuses socio-structural violence is achieved in particular domains and its roles in those domains in rendering people governable through processes of violent subjectification. 232 references biehl, j. (2005). vita: life in a zone of social abandonment. berkeley: university of california press. biehl, j., good, b., & kleinman, a. (2007). subjectivity: ethnographic investigations. berkeley: university of california press. mccormack, c. (2009). the wee yellow butterfly. glenaruel: argyll publishing. martín-baró, i. (1994). writings for a liberation psychology. in a. aron and s. corne. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. smith, l. t. (1999). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. dunedin: university of otago press. world health organisation (2008). closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health. the final report of the world health organisation commission on social determinants of health http://www.who.int/social_determinants/thecommission/finalreport/en/index.html young, i.m. (1988). five faces of oppression. the philosophical forum, xix, 4, summer, 270290. 2012-lisboa-001-patients patients’ expectations and satisfaction with their health providers a. afkhamebrahimi, m. nasr esfehani iran university of medical science,tehran psychiatrc institute,mental health research centre afkhami@iums.ac.ir tel: +989121597189 the growing amount of research into patients’ expectations of medical consultations reflects the view of the patient as an active consumer rather than a passive recipient of care. patients’ care often diverges from their expectations in important respects. patients tend to receive more prescription and less information. the fulfillment of certain expectations has been related to satisfaction with the consultation that in turn would improve compliance. patient satisfaction is also correlated with the patient’s reported intention to change physician. the higher the perceived fulfillment of the expectation is, the higher the satisfaction is. when fulfillment is lower than the expectation, the greater the gap and the lower the satisfaction. today patient satisfaction is considered a key measure of quality of care and patients reporting higher satisfaction were more likely to have a higher quality of life. method 375 patients (220 women and 155 men) who were attending various internal/surgery clinics (expect for pediatrics clinic) at a large teaching hospital and consented to participate in the study were selected. the patients aged 18 to 79 with a mean age of 42.5 years old. the patients filled the following questionnaires: a one page demographic information questionnaire, the 28-item patients requests form which measures three forms of expectations: explanation and reassurance, emotional support and investigation and treatment. each item was rated on a 3 point scale (agree, uncertain and disagree) for “how much it applies to your visit today”, a satisfaction questionnaire which measures the patients’ satisfaction with their health providers on a three point scale of seven different aspects of satisfaction (including overall satisfaction and intention to change physician). the data transferred to spss for further analysis. results table 1, shows the comparison of the three expectations of the patients with anova method. significant differences were found in “emotional support” and “ investigation and treatment” expectations among patients. the post hoc analysis of the table 1 results showed that the patients of neurology and psychiatry clinics expected more emotional support from the treating physicians than the ophthalmology patients and the differences were significant. also the patients of internal clinics expected more investigation and treatment than ophthalmology clinic patients, and the differences were significant. table 2, shows the correlation between patients’ total satisfaction with adherence to therapeutic recommendations and intention to change doctor. there is a significant and positive correlation between patients’ satisfaction and therapeutic adherence and a significant negative correlation between satisfaction and intention to change doctor. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 4 december 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 table 1 the comparison of patients’ expectations in twelve clinics table 2 correlation of satisfaction with therapeutic adherence and intention to change doctor correlation satisfaction adherence change satisfaction 1 .216 .410 adherence .216 1 -.318 change -.410 -.318 1 discussion this investigation expands our understanding of patients’ unmet expectations for medical care. patients with wide variety of medical complaints may have common and different expectations of their health care visits, and are less satisfied with their medical visits when they do not receive such care. the common and most immediate post visit expectation for care of all the patients studied, was “ explanation and receiving information” which are consistent with other studies. need for information should be added to the health belief model originally formulated to explain preventive health behavior. it is not always enough to order and prescribe. diagnosis and treatments must be explained, options presented and management plans negotiated. our study and other studies have demonstrated the importance of providing information to patients. education may facilitate the technical aspects of the patients’ care as well as enhance the patients’ sense of personal control and social support. the results of this study suggest that the influence of others, a neglected element of the health belief model is worth further investigation. patients who desired and received certain elements of nontechnical care (counseling and emotional support) had higher visit satisfaction. our study and a number of other studies have found a significant relationship between patient satisfaction and the socio-emotional aspects of the physician’s behavior, such as their ability to express caring and concern for their patients. the significantly higher expectation for emotional support in patients of neurology and psychiatry clinics compared to other patients reflects the affective nature of those conditions. patients’ perceptions about receiving examinations, tests, medications or nondrug treatments were minimally associated with levels of satisfaction with physicians. patients of internal medicine clinic based their opinion about health providers on the technical rather than the nontechnical aspects of care, because they regarded the nontechnical types of intervention as more personal. dissatisfaction demands a change, such as a change of physician. patients who had recently changed physicians because of dissatisfaction with their care, were most likely to complain that their physician was too busy to talk with them and didn’t appear interested in them as people. patients were less likely to leave their physician because of concerns about the technical quality of the care that they were receiving. this study highlights the importance of teaching active-listening skills to general practice physicians. the doctors need to study and adjust their consultation styles to communicate better with their patients. it is entirely plausible that the results of this study might have been different if the patients had more serious illness or different types of settings were selected. laboratory tests and medications might have a greater impact on patient satisfaction in more seriously ill patients. this study emphasizes the potential importance of understanding patients’ expectations for maintaining patient satisfaction and controlling health care costs. false positively and cost-effectiveness patients are demanding diagnostic tests and therapeutic interventions that may not always be in their own interests, and society’s. if supported by larger studies, these findings suggest that more training in the elicitation and negotiation of patients’ expectations would be a worthwhile addition to the medical curriculum. v sos df mos f sig explanation bg 55.28 11 5.02 wg 1459.66 363 4.02 1.25 .25 emotional support bg 165.47 11 15.04 wg 2625.47 363 7.02 2.08 .02* investigation & treatment bg 100.94 11 9.17 wg 1689.20 363 4.65 1.97 .03* global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 just what community psychologists would do: a commentary on the special issues james h. dalton bloomsburg, pennsylvania, usa abstract the papers in these two global journal special issues focus on the 18 community psychology practice competencies proposed by the society for community research and action (scra) in 2012. in this commentary, i articulate some of my enjoyment in reading the articles in these special issues, share some thoughts on the history of the practice competencies, and propose some ideas for conversations that may be useful in their development over time. the scra practice competencies have been useful in opening conversations about how to articulate what community psychologists can do in working with community members, and about how to provide educational practices to prepare students for that work. these special issues build on the volume on community psychology practice edited by scott and wolfe (2015) and the earlier global journal special issue on international competencies (wolfe, scott, & jimenez, 2013). the practice competencies can be useful only if we consider them to be inevitably incomplete descriptions of community psychology practices – practices that are inherently dynamic, contextual, and valueladen. they can be useful only if we continually re-examine and revise them, and adapt them as needed for work in specific contexts. “just what community psychologists would do.” that was often my thought as i read the papers to be published in these special issues of the global journal of community psychology practice. what i mean is that these papers, despite differences in context, aims, and tone, struck me as exemplifying the distinctive strengths, values and practices of our field. not that everyone pursued their work in identical ways, but that everyone responded to the contexts of their work in a way that seemed to me to embody some essence of our field. whether that work occurred in community settings with students, in planning and implementing curriculum changes, in comparing differing conceptions of practice competencies, or when articulating vigorous disagreement with the whole idea of the scra competencies, the authors wrote from a point of view that typifies community psychology values. those multiple essences of community psychology are difficult to define succinctly, and perhaps go beyond words, but after you read these papers, ask yourself if you feel as i do. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 i felt this most vividly when i read papers that most evocatively presented participatory work with community members and students, often including students’ or graduates’ voices – especially the papers by dawn x. henderson et. al., victoria scott, tabitha underwood, regina day langhout et al., kelly collins et al., and huda bayaa et al. i also felt it when i read about opportunities for graduate students to learn practice skills in community settings, in planful and supervised ways, and in ways related to the foundational values of our field – especially the papers by bernadette sanchez et al., gabe kuperminc et al., greg meissen et al., gregor sarkisian and sylvie taylor, nuria ciofalo et al. and daniel clifford et al. the extension of the competencies approach to community psychology research (victoria faust et al.) immersed me again in the research side of our identity. the practice competencies also fit well with the work of three community health coalitions in the paper by jonathan scaccia et al. the value of multidisciplinary and international perspectives emerged in papers that compared the scra competencies to other systems of defining competencies or credentials for practice, in italy, canada, australia, spain, britain, and europe generally, and in social work and public health in the u.s. (in papers by susan wolfe and anne webb price, donata francescato and bruna zani, isidro maya jariego, and jacqui akhurst et al.). and i experienced one key essence of our field when reading papers critical of the scra competencies or their breadth of application (by jacqui akhurst et al.), or that suggested the need for amendments, extensions, additions or revisions, in papers by wolfe and price, kuperminc et al., francescato and zani, faust et al., and langhout et al. historical notes about practice competencies a note is in order here about the historical development of the scra competencies, and my limited role in that. the published history, especially surveys of students and practitioners, is covered well in articles by gabe kuperminc et al. and by susan wolfe and anne price, and others, in these special issues. i will give a personal account as i remember it. what is now the scra practice council originated the idea of practice competencies, the original draft of the competencies, and the related scra value proposition. it was avowedly not an effort to move toward accreditation of academic programs or licensure of individuals in community psychology. that had been firmly denied by the division of community psychology (now scra) in the 1980’s, and there has been no change in that position within scra. what the practice competencies were intended to do was to articulate the skills and approach of community psychologists (plural) in working with communities, organizations and policymakers. we hoped and intended that this would have two salutary effects: (a) to build the visibility of our field in society and in the employment market for graduates of our programs; and (b) to strengthen the ties between graduate education and the practice of community psychology. we did not claim that our field has a monopoly on these competencies. as wolfe and price point out in their article in these special issues, they overlap with the professions of social work and public health, and no doubt other fields. they also overlap with the skills of many community members and leaders, learned from lived experience. although i was not a part of the origination of the practice competencies, i became actively involved as chair of the scra council for educational programs, which worked with the practice council to draft and re-draft a list of competencies and work for adoption of a final draft by the scra executive committee. that put me in the role of wordsmith and editor/keeper of the various revisions as they were agreed upon throughout the process of consulting with practitioners, students, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 graduate programs, and finally the executive committee. one important outcome of this process was the delineation of the foundational principles at the beginning of the list. another important outcome, especially advocated by jack tebes in executive committee, was developing a related set of competencies for community research; i am gratified to see this work presented in the article by victoria faust et al. in these special issues. the practice competencies document, as approved by the scra executive committee, was then published as a joint column of the community practitioner and the education connection columns in the community psychologist in 2012; susan wolfe and i edited those two columns at the time, so we are often cited in references to that publication. two important parts of this history are the global journal special issue on international competencies edited by susan wolfe, victoria chien scott, and tiffany jimenez (2013) and the volume edited by victoria scott and susan wolfe (2015), community psychology: foundations for practice. there are a few things that, in looking back, perhaps i and others might have stated more clearly in our wordsmithing. these thoughts suggest possible revisions for the future in practice competencies conceptions and documents. one is that these competencies are designed to be examined, re-examined, adapted as needed to local contexts, and revised in the future. they comprise an “open-systems” formative document, to be discussed and revised over time, as collins et al. assert in their article in these special issues. (i wish i had thought of those terms back when we were wordsmithing drafts for scra.) i am certain that this assumption was there from the beginning, but we might have stated it more clearly and often. and i am very happy that many contributors to these special issues advocated additional competencies to consider, or described methods of adapting competencies in context for students in graduate programs. second, these competencies, admittedly decontextualized as concepts in a list, must be adapted and used in contextual ways. community psychology practice must be contextual and must also recognize how communities are dynamic and change over time. there will always be bridging to be done between our field’s foundational values and principles, the skills community psychologists use in our work, and the realities of community practice. the list of scra competencies cannot, by themselves, completely bridge that distance. that’s a good thing; that leaves us room to grow, understand, and develop our understandings of how best to partner and work with diverse community members in diverse contexts, and room to disagree and learn about how to do that. again, i am certain that this assumption was there from the beginning, but we needed to be clearer about that. third, as we did emphasize, the definition of these competencies for the field as a whole does not mean that every community psychologist must have expertise or even experience in all of them. moreover, graduate programs can choose which competencies they can best help their students develop, in their own contexts. i am happy to see, in several articles about graduate education in these special issues, discussions in graduate programs about what constitutes the emphases or “cornerstones” of their programs, while at the same time making very useful efforts to help students make empowering choices about their own skill development, choosing from the entire list of competencies. it is gratifying, in several articles, to read about uses of the practice competencies and value proposition in graduate program curricula and practice. it is especially gratifying to see that those efforts involve student voices and community partners. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 before i close these historical notes, i want to recognize the importance of jim kelly for our discussions about competencies for practice, at least in the u.s. from the early days (kelly, 1970, 1971) to recently (kelly, 2010), jim has advocated the importance of process, interpersonal skills, an ecological perspective, and what he called the “spirit” of community psychology. his manner as well as his writings embody these qualities. for me, discussions of community psychology practice and the processes of community work always bring jim to mind. thoughts on the future of practice competencies here i share some of my reflections about future conversations and changes to be consider in the scra practice competencies. these are tentative suggestions, and i make them with a sense of my own status and limitations. i have retired from teaching, and i was solely a teacher of undergraduates, not engaged in graduate education of future community psychologists for practice. i am not currently involved in scra committees or councils, and my own level of community practice is limited to volunteer work with a team providing workshops for community agencies. i firmly think the future of the practice competencies concepts and practices should be determined by practitioners, by students and faculty in educational programs, in consultation with our community partners, and through scra (see the kuperminc et al. and meissen et al. articles in these special issues for some ways to involve community partners). with that said, while reading the articles in these special issues, i have formed some thoughts about issues for these constituencies to consider. use them as you see fit. public policy first, i find it unfortunate that there was little attention in these papers to the competency of public policy analysis, development and advocacy (see table 1 of this commentary). i am not sure why. policy work is an area of long-standing and growing activity within scra. not every graduate program or every community psychologist performs this work, but several leading community psychologists do, and sooner or later just about all of us engage in some kind of advocacy about policy at some level. it is an important activity with its own skills to learn. i hope further discussions of practice competencies involve community psychologists writing about policy work. foundational principles second, i think we need to more clearly and firmly separate the foundational principles from the more skills-focused concepts that form the rest of the list. (kuperminc et al. suggest something similar; i recommend reading their discussion of this.) the concept of foundational principles emerged during the process of discussion and re-drafting, and i think now that we did not firmly enough articulate that these are basic value-laden principles, not just skills. perhaps scra should change the title of the list to practice principles and competencies. doing this would also require dealing somehow with a double meaning embodied in the foundational principle of sociocultural and cross-cultural competence. to me, in retrospect, there are two concepts here. one is something like valuing human diversity, a value principle with social and emotional aspects, regarding cultural and other differences within and between communities. reflexivity and awareness of one’s own privilege, position, and limitations of perspective and experience would fit here, i think, although perhaps these should be included under ethical, reflective practice or as an additional foundational principle. the other meaning is something like socialcultural competence: interpersonal skills in understanding differences, genuine listening to diverse views, communicating clearly one’s own perspectives and limitations, and working respectfully and effectively with http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 diverse persons and communities. one can certainly privately value diversity but not possess strong skills in these areas related to working with diverse populations. my suggestion is that valuing human diversity, or a similar term, be a foundational principle, as stated in many scra documents already. social-cultural competence would then join a later category of skills in the practice competencies list. a related issue involves how we define diversity: perhaps human diversity, perhaps cultural diversity, perhaps some more inclusive term. to me, that term should include a recognition of the influence of social-structural forces, not just cultural ones. kuperminc et al. suggest a further distinction, between core and specialized competencies. that might be a more difficult discussion, i imagine, although i am not the best judge. perhaps each student/practitioner and graduate program would choose for themselves, in their own contexts, what are core vs. specialized competencies for them. yet the kuperminc et al. discussion of this originated with an important experience to consider: in advisement with graduate students, advisors found that the entire list of 18 principles and competencies was overwhelming for students, especially early in their graduate education. prioritizing areas for the student’s focus in the coming year was challenging. something similar can occur in discussing community psychologists’ skills with community partners, employers, and colleagues outside our field. our attempt to offer organizing categories in the current practice competencies was not sufficient; perhaps these need revisiting. dialectics and conversations inspired by the article by kelly collins et al. in these special issues, i began thinking about conversations about practice competencies in dialectical terms – as conversations with two opposing perspectives, each of value, and with room for synthesis, “both/and” reasoning, and recognition of paradoxes. collins et al. proposed a dialectic of competencies vs. context, arguing that while community psychology practice must be contextual, consideration of scra’s decontextualized list of competencies could be helpful. they illustrated this with a description of a participatory approach to teaching and learning about practice competencies in a graduate course, led by chris keys. i highly recommend reading the collins et al. article. another dialectic may emerge in these conversations: whether to focus on general vs. specific conceptions of skills for practice. in isidro maya jariego’s article in these special issues about competencies in the context of education and practice in spain, he compared the scra competencies with the generic concepts relating to quality of psychological practice promulgated by the european federation of psychological associations (europsy). clearly they differ in level of generality and intent. the europsy concepts are defined across all types of psychological practice (clinical, health, educational, organizational), and are designed partly with accreditation and licensing in mind. the europsy approach provides little guidance for students or professionals about the specific knowledge, interpersonal skills, and relational processes needed to assess and understand communities, plan and implement community initiatives, and evaluate their effects. as a generic professional guide, it is limited in articulating value positions that might guide social and community action. the scra guidelines, in contrast, were developed to provide at least some guidance to students, academic programs, and community psychologists in choosing what skills to develop in order to work effectively with community members, organizations, and policy-makers. they are intended to be consistent with the shared values of community psychologists, and to help initiate consideration of specific values, issues, and dilemmas in specific contexts. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 however, maya jariego showed how the europsy approach has sufficient latitude to be used to describe community psychology practice. akhurst et al. did something similar in comparing generic british standards for professional psychology with the scra competencies. perhaps it is worth discussing whether a revised scra competencies list might focus on more general conceptions of competencies (not in foundational principles, but in the rest of the list). this also dovetails with the kuperminc et al. suggestion that we delineate core and specialized competencies, in addition to foundational principles. an advantage of more generic conceptions: there might be more room for contextual thinking about competencies, and for individual and program choices. a disadvantage: there would be less of an explicit bridge between foundational principles and what happens in community practice. finally, the critique offered by akhurst et al. raises two questions that we ought always to keep in mind: who controls the use of these competencies? who benefits from them? there are multiple answers to these questions. (one of my answers is that many students already seem to be benefiting from them.) yet we need to keep reminding ourselves of these questions. i am happy to see that this formative process of questioning and deepening our shared conceptions continues, and the articles in these special issues contribute to that growth. practitioners, academics, students, and citizens all can inform future conceptions of these competencies. references kelly, j.g. (1970). antidotes for arrogance: training for community psychology. american psychologist, 25, 524-531. kelly, j.g. (1971). qualities for the community psychologist. american psychologist, 26, 897903. kelly, j.g. (2010). more thoughts: on the spirit of community psychology. american journal of community psychology, 45(3-4), 272-284. scott, v. & wolfe, s. (eds.). (2015). community psychology: foundations for practice. thousand oaks, ca: sage. wolfe, s., scott, v. c. & jimenez, t. (eds.). (2013, december). community psychology practice competencies: a global perspective. global journal of community psychology practice. http://www.gjcpp.org/ james h. dalton bloomsburg, pennsylvania, usa abstract historical notes about practice competencies thoughts on the future of practice competencies public policy foundational principles dialectics and conversations references people who are homeless are “people” first: opportunity for community psychologist to lead through language reframing geraldine l. palmer1 keywords: public perceptions, homelessness, oppression and power, labeling, and community psychology author biographies: geraldine palmer, earned her ph.d. from national louis university, located in chicago, illinois in 2012. after serving for over two decades in the human services sector, primarily working with people who were homeless, she recognized much more work was needed to understand and dismantle systems of inequality that lead to social issues like homelessness. dr. palmer is the managing director of the community wellness institute, llc established as an umbrella for her community practice work. she is also an adjunct professor at adler university, the past chair of the cultural, ethnic and racial affairs council of scra, and the current vice chair of the city of evanston housing and homelessness commission. recommended citation: palmer, g. l. (2018). people who are homeless are “people” first: opportunity for community psychologist to lead through language reframing. global journal of community psychology practices, 9(2), 1-16. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: geraldine l. palmer. community wellness instittute. email: communitywellnessinstitute@gmail.com 1 community wellness instittute, lcc (cwi) http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:communitywellnessinstitute@gmail.com global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 people who are homeless are “people” first: opportunity for community psychologists to lead through language reframing "never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." margaret mead abstract the words or labels we use to define, describe and categorize people greatly influence public perception and attitudes. in turn, public perceptions and attitudes play an essential role in shaping policies and practices impacting numerous groups of people, including people who are experiencing homelessness. yet, and perhaps, inadvertently, we continue to use words that categorically label groups of people bringing back historical meanings of oppression and inequality. the purpose of this paper is to: (1) raise awareness that the use of the terms, “the homeless” and “homeless people” in reference to people experiencing homelessness, perpetuate oppression and inequality; and (2) call community psychologists to lead in transforming how we define, describe and categorize people experiencing homelessness. the author reviews literature that looked at historical connotations behind categorical labeling of people who were homeless and links this underpinning to the terms, “the homeless” and “homeless people”. a concluding discussion offers a language reframing model including using person-first language, as a methodology for influencing public perception and attitudes. introduction the words or labels we use to define, describe and categorize people greatly influence public perception and attitudes. in turn, public perceptions and attitudes play an essential role in shaping policies and practices impacting numerous groups of people, including people who are experiencing homelessness. yet, and perhaps, inadvertently, we continue to use words that categorically label groups of people, bringing back historical meanings of oppression and inequality. when a word or words that oppress are used, an individual is not merely assaulted, but the expression leads to the propagation of an entire population of people. vojak (2009) put forward that, words, explicitly labels, are seldom neutral, but are instead, inundated with meaning, power and status. mustafa (2011) pointed out, “the words we use, as well as, actions have an effect on the people around us, and that language has just as much of a role in contributing to oppression as anything else” (para. 6). williams (1976/1983, p. 24) argues that labels, negative or positive are constructed, shaped and reshaped by the dominant class with a particular social and historical context. this is important, as terms that describe and categorize people experiencing homelessness, such as “the homeless” and “homeless people” are widely used by those in the general public, helping professions, and in other fields; yet, reflect the core ideologies and economic interests of the dominant class. additionally, the psychological impacts of labels not only affect the recipients, but are not lost on policymakers, who enact laws, and the public, who most often decide how http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 community resources should be allocated. vojak (2009) added that, it is difficult for the hearers of labels, to not believe their validity. rich (2017) proposes that: by removing people and families from emotionally charged labels, we can then refocus our attention on remedying structural challenges—like a lack of affordable housing, challenges to accessing behavioral and mental health care, and racial inequalities that often make people unable to afford a home (para. 4). the purpose of this paper, then, is to: 1. rise awareness that the use of the labels, “the homeless” and “homeless people “perpetuate oppression and inequality; and 2. call community psychologist to lead in transforming how we define and refer to people experiencing homelessness. the author reviews literature that looked at historical connotations behind categorical labeling of people who were homeless and links this underpinning to the terms, “the homeless” and “homeless people”. in conclusion, the paper offers language reframing action steps, including using first-person language, as a methodology to influence public perceptions and attitudes about people experiencing homelessness. labeling theory a noteworthy point on the labeling theory, relative to this discussion, is, its sociological approach falls with society’s understanding of crime and deviance (bernburg & krohn et al., 2014, pp. 69-71). labeling theory suggest that, when an individual is negatively labeled (or considered deviant), then that individual will practice their new label/identify in ways that match the new label (asencio & burke, 2011, pp. 163-182). in developing the argument that deviance is socially constructed, labeling theorist have borrowed from conflict theory to demonstrate who is labeled, and why. the backdrop of this premise demonstrate that powerful people in society, are the ones who control the labeling process and use it according to their biases and interests. for example,from a critical race perspective, black/african americans are more likely than white/european americans to be labeled criminal or delinquent, as is people categorized as lower-class versus middle-class. their actual behavior has no relevance (p. 27). selected examples of this assertion are shown in table 1. table 1 labeling examples researcher(s)/author(s) examples (general and specific) sudder (2016, para. 14) black youths – whether guilty or innocent – were branded “criminal” and almost guaranteed a life tethered to the justice system baker (2013, para. 2 ) george zimmerman labeled 17 year old trayvon martin as “deviant”. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 hall, phillips and townsend (2015) “…data on studies seeking to understand perceptions of labels found that the use of the label “black” correlated with white/european americans’ views of a criminal suspect when that person is identified as “black” versus “african american.” heitzeg (2015) added that white criminality is primarily approached from a medical model. this becomes possible through a “white racial frame” which denotes “whiteness” as normative and white deviance as individual aberration or mental illness. contrariwise, the same white radical framework constructs blackness as synonymous with criminality (p. 197). categorical labeling embedded in labeling is categorical labeling that defines and classifies groups of people, often of a marginalized or inferior nature, deemed so, by the dominant group. the primary purpose of categories is to synthesize information and use it in making inferences such as predictions (rosch, 1978). yamauchi further posit that two core psychological suppositions allow for integration of information and certify the right to induce inferences: (1) matching characteristics between entities; and (2) evidence that exceeds an initial conclusion. these two components, yamauchi proposes, form an attribute-based similarity (p. 538). for example, we could conclude that people who live on the streets, based on tangible evidence, are homeless. we could also say that people who live in shelters are homeless, as well. therefore, the conclusion, people who live in shelters is reliable, comparable to, people who live on the streets. that is, if both people who live on the streets and people who live in shelters have (1) similar characteristics (e.g. no fixed residence) and (2) the enormity of the evidence of people who live in shelters, surpasses that, of the initial conclusion about people who live on the streets. a plethora of studies have ensued based on yamauchi’s attribute-based similarity theory. to this end, these studies have shown an association between attribute-based similarity and categorical membership (heit & rubinstein, 1994; lassaline & murphy, 1996; murphy & ross, 1994; osherson et al., 1990). in the field of social psychology, researchers have focused on similarities such as representative heuristics, prevalence in stereotyping and impression research (kahneman & tversky, 1973; shafir, smith, & osherson, 1990; duckitt, 1992; hamilton & sherman, 1994; stangor, 2000). while there are benefits of attribute-based similarities, such as helping us to understand how categories work, inductions about people that result in categorical labeling such as “the homeless” and “homeless people” often have long-lasting negative outcomes, that are difficult to take back, and result in structural systems of oppression (schneider & remillard, 2013; tsai, lee, byrne, pietrzak & southwick, 2017). rich (2017) noted that the use of the terms “homeless people” or “ the homeless” to define people experiencing homelessness, can sound more like we are “describing an intractable problem that is about people who are fundamentally different from us” (p. 1). rich argues that the way we discuss and refer to people who are homeless are equally important as efforts to find causes and end homelessness. the words we use to describe human beings in general, significantly affect our perceptions and attitudes about them, and moreover, labels generate emotional reactions that can create http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 barriers to understanding, as well as, reinforce stereotypes. atler (2010) noted that, categorical labeling is a tool that humans use to resolve the impossible complexity of the environments we grapple to perceive. additionally, similar to so many human faculties, it's adaptive and miraculous, but it also contributes to some of the deepest problems that face our species” (para. 2). jennifer eberhardt, a social psychologist at stanford, and her colleagues (2003) conducted a survey on challenges with labels. surveying white/european american college students, the researchers showed them pictures of a man whose race (based on skin color) was not easily detectable by the pictures. the man could have been in the black/african american category or white/european american category--common labels with connotations of what the terms mean. findings showed fifty-percent of the students responded the face belonged to a white/european american, while the other fifty-percent reported the face was that of a black/african american. in one portion of the experiment, the students were asked to spend four minutes drawing the face that sat on the screen in front of them. surprisely, even looking at the same face, at the same time, the students who were inclined to believe that race is an embedded human trait, not a social construct, drew faces that matched the stereotype associate with the label. thus, the racial labels served as the lens through which the respondents saw the face, and they were not able to perceive the face independent of the label (para. 4). thus, perceptions that are set up, or framed through language portray the stereotype associated with the label. it is this same premise that apply to people who are homeless. if asked to draw a “homeless person”, it is likely respondents in a similar study, would draw a person, probably identified as male, clothed in rags, dirty, and pushing a shopping cart down the street. yet, research (jones, 2012) put forward that nationally, two in five people experiencing homelessness work, even if they cannot afford market-rate housing (p. 5). darley and gross (1983) offer that race isn't the only label that shapes perception. in a classic study conducted by the researchers on labels and class, results showed similar effects as the eberhart study. some of the respondents were asked whether a young girl seemed poor or wealthy after watching a video of her playing in her neighborhood and reading a brief background sheet. the segment of students watched the girl playing in a low-income housing development (categorical label) and the parents were described as high school graduates with blue collar jobs (categorical label). the remaining students watched the girl playing as well, but in this study phase, she was playing in a treelined, middle-class (categorical label) neighborhood. her parents were described as college-educated professionals (categorical label). the respondents were then asked to assess the young girl’s academic acumen after seeing her replies to a series of achievementtest questions. the video depicted the girl responding inconsistently, sometimes answering difficult questions correctly, but then sometimes answering simpler questions incorrectly. thus, her academic capabilities, in reality, were difficult to discern. yet, this factor did not stop the students from using the actor’s socioeconomic status as a condition for academic ability. when the actor was labeled “middle-class,” the students reported she performed close to a fifth-grade level. when she was labeled “poor”, they believed she performed below at fourthgrade level. categorical labeling is a social construct, such as “race” used to separate people and exclude people who are different in some way from the dominant majority. for example, as “chattels” and slaves, black/african americans were separated; when the japanese americans were interred in 1942, they were separated. when people who are jewish were rounded up and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 interred in concentration camps, they were separated. native americans or american indians were in america before exploration and have been separated since that time (bosmajian, 1983). bosmajian argued that hitler’s ‘final solution’ appeared reasonable once jewish people were successfully labeled by the nazis as “sub-humans”, “parasites,” “vermin,” and “bacilli.” the segregation and suppression of black/african americans in the united states was justified once they were considered “chattels” and “inferiors.” the subjugation of the “american indians” was defensible since they were defined as “barbarians” and “savages… as long as adult women are “chicks,” “girls,” “dolls,” “babes,” and “ladies,” their status in society will remain “inferior”, such that, they will go on being treated as subjects in the subject-master relationship (p. 139). this author puts forward that, as long as people homeless go on being labeled “the homeless” or “homeless people”, they will continue to be treated as people who have no right to decent affordable housing and resources. contrarily, cognitive psychologists note that it would be impossible to register the information we process during our lives without the aid of labels like "friendly," "deceitful," "tasty," and "harmful." but it's equally important to recognize that the people we label as "black," "white," "rich," poor," smart,", "simple," and “the homeless”, may, at some point, seem blacker, whiter, richer, poorer, smarter, simpler (atler, 2010, para. ), or “more vagrant”? historical labeling of people who are homeless the literature has no known empirical studies or theoretical papers, clearly delineating the pathway from early ideologies and behavior, regarding people experiencing homelessness, to the specific labels, “the homeless” or “homeless people”. however, this paper asserts that these labels, continue to represent groups of people---who were excluded and ostracized, rather than individuals. when an individual is seen as an individual, no matter what social condition they may be experiencing, they are more often than not, referred to by their given or chosen name, not defined and categorized with labels. with this framework for context, the next section discusses the historical progression of labeling of excluded groups of people experiencing homelessness. replicating english vagrancy laws that were enacted to address what the public considered a crime, and perhaps more importantly, who the public viewed as criminals, america enacted its own set of similar laws as early as 1640. having a number of structures, vagrancy laws, were unique, targeting personal conditions, state of being, and social and economic status, rather than focusing on any particular conduct (kusmer, 2002). these laws later became the pervasive mechanism for maintaining hierarchy and order in american life. over time, vagrancy laws and application, targeted people who were homeless and/or poor, calling those in its path, “vagrants”, and also focused on labor activists, radical orators, cultural and sexual nonconformists, religious and racial minorities and civil rights protestors. by the mid-20 century, hundreds of thousands of citizens had been arrested based on vagrancy laws. yet, identifying what qualities brought the attention of the police which turned people into vagrants, has been difficult since its inception, painted with such broad strokes and no parameters (golobuff, 2018). rates of homelessness in america increased as a result of king philip’s war of 1675-1678, sometimes called the first indian war or metacomet’s (indian chief) war against native americans and their allies in new http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 england (kusmer, 2002). during the war, many dwellers in new england were driven out of their homes when towns were totally demolished and forced to seek shelter in the forests or coastal areas, and there they remained idle for some time. subsequently, laws were enacted to prevent “idleness” in the cities, and the term “idle people” became the label for people experiencing homelessness. as a result, people who found themselves homeless were made servants or indentured servants (kusmer, 2002). as rates of homelessness continued to rise, particularly in smaller towns, the label for people homeless became “hobos”, in reference to their temporary housing located near train tracks, where they hopped onto trains to various destinations (kusmer, 2002). further, kusmer put forward, after the american civil war from 1861 to 1875, which seriously perpetuated homelessness, large numbers of men formed part of a counterculture known as "hobohemia" all over the united states. this phenomenon resurged in the 1930s during and after the great depression. overall, the general public perceived homelessness as a moral deficiency or a severe individual character flaw even from those embracing a christian perspective. it was typically believed a good christian, within god’s grace, would naturally have their needs met. people outside of that grace somehow were deserving of their plight as god rendered justice accordingly and fairly (fischer, 2011). these historical labels discussed have a common denominator with “the homeless” and “homeless people”, such that, they continue to denote categories or groups of people who do not belong, are excluded and not fit for society. notably, social labels aren’t inherently damaging. when we describe someone as “right-handed” or “black/african american” this doesn’t denote a problem. however, as labels, they become deleterious when they are associated with negative characteristics, the product of social constructs. language framing: a system of oppression a brief review of margaret atwood’s (1986) the handmaid’s tale, provide a very useful framework for a discussion on the implications of language as a system of oppression. atwood’s work exemplifies that language enables power, and that the ruling class, whether gender, or race exploits language through censorship of literature and control of discourses to strengthen their leadership positions. in the tale, atwood uses words and sentence structure to demonstrate how a particular society is built on gender inquality found in authorative language of modern american culture. for example, the names that atwood uses for the characters (women) are actually labels denoting property: …handmaids’ names simply reflect which commander owns them. “of fred,” “of warren,” and “of glen” are collapsed into “offred,” “ofwarren,” and “ofglen.” the names make more sense when preceded by the word “property”: “property offred,” for example. thus, every time the women hear their names, they are reminded that they are no more than property” (p. 305). further, atwood calls a woman in the narrative without viable ovaries and who served no useful purpose for her society, “unwoman”. these women in the story were sent to the colonies (sites similar to plantations) or killed (p. 10). moreover, the term handmaid, was representative of women who did have viable ovaries. if these women conceived they continued on as handmaids. however, if after three houses they did not have a child, they were sent to the colonies or discarded permanently. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 what is particularly applicable to gender inequality or in this discussion, class inequality, (e.g. people who are homeless) is the premise that people, or the public, are prone to accept controlling language because in usage, much of the real meaning behind the words or terms, goes unnoticed. thus, the readers of atwood’s work are admonished to take a closer look at speech and word choices in general, in efforts to regain control over one’s own words and understanding, and the effects of power in using and understanding both. atwood argues that “as we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without integrating many of the elements found in the latter” (p. 305). language reframing: a system of liberation framework institute (2018) reported that the housing and homelessness sector must change the way it dialogues about homelessness, and the people it impacts, if the public is to be convinced it should end. the public takes cues from the more dominant group, and therefore, the framing of language become important in influencing viewpoints and attitudes. a study, conducted for opensource by frameworks institute interviewed experts on homelessness, and the public, in conjunction with an analysis of sector and media narratives. the results indicated that the public hold specific perceptions about who is homeless, as well as root causes. stakeholders in the sector and media play strong roles in supporting or refuting these perceptions. a key finding showed that any type of closed or limited view of homelessness and people homeless, prevent the public from perceiving homelessness as a broad social issue, and is no respecter of persons. if a closed viewpoint is adopted, a structural focus will recede, and blaming the person is forthcoming. closed viewpoints are put forward when the sector and media support and encourage narratives that tell fractured stories---this hinders wider social change action. a goal of talking differently about homelessness should be put forward in a way that deepens the public’s understanding, attract new allies, and foster demand for change. communication can be a factor in guiding media reports so it moves people to consider and support more of systems level change and solutions. it is also critical that communicators avoid inadvertently reinforcing unproductive attitudes and negative stereotypes, such as continuing to use terms that oppress, that hinder social change, and set the cause back. changing the way we speak about homelessness, and in discourse, and reference to people homeless can take place through careful and regulated messaging, that promote new ways of thinking. for example, stakeholders communicating a new message can widen the lens when sharing about people who are homeless, using first-person language. those on the front lines, such as social service agencies, community psychologists and the like must change the frames to foster new thinking about homelessness, and the people it impacts. the media will follow suit, and reinforce these new patterns of thinking. as one person with lived experience shared: “…i also make a habit of replacing ‘homeless’ with ‘extreme poverty’ when discussing the issue---particularly in u.s. culture. i do this because the stereotypes and misinformation about poverty in the u.s. have resulted in the majority of the public creating meaning for the word ‘homeless’ and assuming it is the denotation culturally. people are seen as part of the target group, not as individuals; there are very low expectations and fewer options and choices (nance, 2012, para. 8). recommendations for advancing language reframing work follows in the next section. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 person-first language model dickinson and maryniuk (2017) posit that language reframing is not new (p. 51). for nearly a half of century, psychologists, health professionals and the broader community have been, and are continuing to engage in discourse regarding language used in health care. these conversations included the movement in the early 90s of health literacy. a number of health care entities have joined this movement including american diabetes association and the obesity society. psychologists around the world are encouraged to improve, foster and engage in cultural competence and awareness in global communities, and people-first language can do that. developing cultural competence includes improving communication skills for better understanding diverse groups. further, the american psychological association (apa) advocates for people and person-first language to describe people with disabilities groups (christopher, wendt, marecek, & goodman, 2014; balcazar, suarez-balcazar, & taylor-ritzler, 2009). this author argues that community psychologists in partnership with u.s. social services agencies and international nonprofit government organizations (ngos) should adopt people-first language in academia and practice. contrasting views on people-first language. people-first language is not without its critics. some have objected that people-first language is awkward, repetitive and makes for tiresome writing and reading. vaughan (1997 para. 7) suggests that "in common usage positive pronouns usually precede nouns", "the awkwardness of the preferred language focuses on the disability in a new and potentially negative way". according to vaughan, it only serves to "focus on disability in an ungainly new way" and "calls attention to a person as having some type of 'marred identity'" and is relative to goffman’s (1963) theory of identify (para 7). further, in deaf culture, person-first language has long been rejected, but this is understandable. rather in the deaf community, deaf-first language is used as a source of positive identify. correct language for this group would be "deaf person" or "hard of hearing person". the phrase "hearing impaired" is not acceptable to most deaf or hard of hearing people because it emphasizes what they cannot do (national association for the deaf, 2014). additionally, rather than people-first language, identity-first language is preferred by many autistic people and organizations run by them (kenny, hattesley & molins, 2016). in any case, reshaping language can also serve to create spaces where empowerment, wellness and social justice, have room to blossom. the last sections of this paper highlights the results of a language reframing project, for a social services agency in chicago and points out similar work the noted salvation army has undertaken. this work serves as strong starting points for designing and implementing language reframing projects. language reframing strategies north side housing and supportive services, chicago, il recognizing that categorical labeling used toward people homeless may be seriously impairing their psychosocial wellbeing, dr. palmer, as the former executive director of north side housing and supportive services in chicago, put together a series of workshops in medical and health care facilities, in board development workshops, conferences, classrooms and other forums on the topic. the goal was twofold: (1) raise awareness of language and labeling and its negative implications; and (2) change language and labeling in discourse and in reference to people homeless, including in all marketing materials including websites and social media. to this end, without challenge, the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 agency adopted the following philosophy of care constructed and set in place by dr. palmer: context homelessness is not who people are, but a challenging societal issue that north side housing and supportive services and other agencies are working diligently to end. dignity & respect every person regardless of his or her situation deserves to be treated with dignity and respect potential of all & individuality everyone has an individualized optimal level of capacity. north side housing and supportive services ensures that our participants have what is needed to build their capacity to whatever their optimal capacity level is; no one person is the same and therefore goals are individualized and not generalized. empathy the value of a person at north side housing and supportive services is not measured by his or her situation at any given time, but by the very fact they are human beings (north side housing and supportive services, 2018). the salvation army, united states and global given the importance of perceptions, specifically with regard to people who are homeless, and understanding that how their clients see themselves based on the influence of service providers, the salvation army understood this philosophy impacts policy and funding. therefore, the salvation army removed labels and translated this into practical principles. it became critical for their staff to avoid seeing people through the lens of current and past housing challenges. further, the agency changed the language it uses, with the aim of treating people as active agents of their lives and members of society, rather than passive recipients of services (salvation army, 2018). these type of changes may be subtle, but they represent a shift in the ethos of services. specifically, salvation army staff no longer use terms such as “homeless people” as a primary way of referring to people using the services. this language systems change reflect a broader change in how services are provided to people. when consciousness is raised regarding language and labels used by service providers, and even policymakers, people needing and using services do not readily assume that needing assistance is defining a trait of the individual. moreover, removing labels more fully eliminates the ideology of blaming the victim, while supporting community psychology values and assumptions. opportunities for community psychologists community psychologists are often on the front lines in our communities striving to advance social change. they should move beyond theory and research to operate from a “grasstops” position. grasstops meaning having access to policymakers, program designers and administrators, where other stakeholders may not. their roles are to recognize people’s strengths and resources, work to break down existing social barriers, and emphasize empowerment and collaboration, among other functions (kloos et al., 2012). these roles are predicated on, and delivered in action through core values that all community psychologists ascribe to, and through these values, many engage in promoting change in systems, organizations, or communities. shifting from an individual perspective to a structural/ecological perspective is a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 fundamental framework of community psychologists (kloos et al., 2012). therefore, viewing language usage through a structural perspective is not far-reaching for academics and practitioners. language usage require community psychologists to think about how language is structured and applied as a system, particularly as a system of oppression, and how this system impacts the lives of individuals and families (p. 6). as communities come to believe that the problems it faces, are solvable and that they can do something about it themselves, they are less likely to blame individuals for social issues. this paper contends that one of our tasks as community psychologists is to support the premise that the inhumane uses of language needs interruption and commit to helping dismantle this system. to do so, a place to start is in partnership with social services agencies. social services agencies are on the front lines as well, working with, and for, people who are homeless, and have the infrastructure in place for getting out awareness campaigns and language reframing projects, at local and global levels. the following actions steps can be used as a model for a starting point for such a project. action steps for change 1. collect all types of secondary data on people-first language studies. this information can be accessed from numerous resources including research libraries, and other locations; 2. set up meetings with social services agencies that provide housing and homelessness services to present the potential language reframing project and propose collaborative partnerships; 3. work with agencies to hire or consult with community psychologists and/or communication experts on framing new, or revising existing philosophy’s of care; 4. use media including social services websites, the internet, and print, to frame the messaging and advance its visibility as widespread as possible; 5. abandon words in academic curriculum, journal publications and practice that denote superiority and exchange them for neutral terms such as “person” or “individual” rather than consumers, or for people-first language such as people who are homeless, or people experiencing homelessness; and 6. conduct empirical studies on the correlation of language change and psychosocial wellbeing of people impacted by such strategies, as well as the general public. conclusion language reframing or changing language, as a system, will be no easy task. for one, this system is very rarely, if at all, challenged. likely, an adaptation takes place, (e.g. selfidentity), in this case, people who are homeless, that signals efforts to regain some sense of power. however, often, this behavior further perpetuates the system, and rather than focusing on dismantling systems, people who are homeless, similar to other oppressed groups, are further ridiculed, blamed and stereotyped for their predicament. yet, advancing language reformations must continue to influence public perceptions. research has indicated that public perceptions and attitudes on homelessness and the people it impacts, has been influential in changes in policies, resources and services (tsai et al., 2017; tompsett et al., 2006). the largest changes are linked with increased http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 support for legally allowing people homeless to sleep in public spaces and panhandling. other changes show higher levels of compassion and less stereotyped perceptions (tompsett et al., 2006; tsai et al., 2017). quantifying public perceptions and attitudes are beneficial in linkages to directly influencing behavior. in essence, how we see someone shapes how we treat them. for example the more people feel compassion for people who are homeless, the more they donate money. if the media portrayed homelessness as getting worse, instead of better, and people could see there are more structural factors linked to homelessness, than individual deficits, sympathy likely increases. another example is, the public perception that most people who are homeless have severe mental illnesses and highly engage in substance use and abuse. yet, based on survey responses of people who are homeless, this viewpoint is not at all accurate (tsai et al., 2017). therefore, the more accurate facts are, that get publicized, the more the public will form perceptions and attitudes based on reality, rather than stereotypical and categorical labels, laden with negative associations. it is the hope of this paper’s author and community psychologist, that this paper will motivate other community psychologists and allies to explore the structural system of language and its relative, categorical labeling. in support of several core values of the community psychology field: empowerment, promoting individual health and well-being, respect for human diversity, and social justice, community psychologists will lead in dismantling language systems that harm. while reframing language may be a small step in advancing social change, this action could serve as a “tipping point” (gladwell, 2002). references alter, a. 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(2009). choosing language: social service framing and social justice. the british journal of social work, 39(5), 936–949. williams, r. (1976). key words: a vocabulary of culture and society. united kingdom: croom williams, r. (1983). key words: a vocabulary of culture and society. united kingdom: flamingo. yamauchi, t. (2005). labeling bias and categorical induction: generative aspects of category information. journal of experimental psychology. learning, memory & cognition, 31(3), 538-553. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.31.3.538 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice community service work and the virtues of apple trees: planting seeds of hope in the newtown victory garden august hoffman metropolitan state university – st. paul, mn author biography: august john hoffman is currently a professor of psychology at metropolitan state university. he earned his b.a. from uc santa barbara, m.a. from radford university in clinical psychology, and ph.d. from ucla in educational psychology. author note: the author would like to thank mr. cem akin and mr. rico montenegro and the fruit tree planting foundation for their support and contributions of the trees that made this community service project possible. recommended citation: hoffman, a. (2015). community service work and the virtues of apple trees: planting seeds of hope in the newtown victory garden. global journal of community psychology practice, 6(1), 1-12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 community service work and the virtues of apple trees: planting seeds of hope in the newtown victory garden abstract this study examined the reports of subjective experiences among eight individuals who participated in a community service work project by planting 60 fruit trees at the newtown victory garden. five students from metropolitan state university and three students from inver hills community college participated in a community fruit tree planting activity designed to honor the victims of the december 14, 2012 shooting tragedy at sandy hook elementary school in newtown, connecticut. after participating in the tree planting project, participants were administered a short survey (sandy hook victory garden community service questionnaire) that recorded their experiences while completing the community service project. the questions from the sandy hook garden community service questionnaire addressed several important themes relative to community development: 1) perceptions of the importance of the work being done and impact on community members, 2) previous volunteer work and experience in community development, 3) perceptions of “connectedness” with members of the newtown, connecticut community, 4) expected changes that were made during participation in this project, and 5) perceptions of making positive changes in the lives of the newtown, connecticut community members. the responses from the questionnaire were then analyzed thematically with respect to the four key domains of community service work from the community service attitudes scale (csas) (shiarella, mccarthy & tucker, 2010). results of the study and suggestions for future research are offered. introduction the topics of community service activities (i.e., establishing community gardens, fruit tree orchards, urban forestry projects, and memorial gardens) and civic engagement projects have increased in popularity recently given the numerous physical (jonasson, marklund, & hildingh, 2007) and psychological (alaimo, reischl, & allen, 2010; wakefield, yeudall, taron, reynolds & skinner, 2007) benefits associated with them. additionally, community service activities have been shown as instrumental in reducing ethnocentric ideology and improving interaction among ethnically diverse and traditionally polarized groups through the establishment of superordinate goals (hoffman, wallach, espinoza-parker and sanchez, 2009) as well as help communities recover from natural disasters and trauma (tidball, krasny, svendsen, campbell, & helphand, 2010; hoffman, wallach, & sanchez, 2010). the topic of “eco-identity” has been proposed by james kelly (1971) as a concept that describes how community psychologists and community activists must first identify the changing needs of the community in which they serve and step out of the professional roles that they feel most comfortable in. understanding the unique needs of each community is a preliminary step in the development of positive change and essential in making contributions to the residents within the community itself. global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 perhaps one unique advantage in the use of greenery in the practice of civic ecology and community service activities is the inherent intrinsic value and social capital they provide to those individuals who are involved in the process of creating a community garden or fruit tree orchard (alaimo, reischl, & allen, 2010). social capital has been described by many scholars and social scientists in several ways (putnam, 2000; gibson, 2007; hindman & yamamoto, 2011), but perhaps a common theme in describing social capital as it relates to community gardens and urban forests addresses the positive reciprocal relationship between community service activities and the information networks they provide within the community (skjoeveland, 2001). urban forests and community gardens also provide opportunities for individuals to engage with civic institutions that function primarily through democratic principles (putnam, 1993) and stimulate continued volunteerism in civic life. a unique reciprocal and positive relationship emerges when community members volunteer to participate in a community garden or fruit tree orchard program. as communities incorporate community gardens and fruit tree orchards in previously blighted areas (i.e., vacant lots), participants report feeling a greater sense of self-worth and pride in the work that they have accomplished in cooperation with other community members (hawkins, mercer, thirlaway, & clayton, 2013) as well as positive psychological effects involving mental health occupations (rappe, koivunen, & korpela, 2008; myers, 1998). additionally, a stronger sense of collective self-efficacy emerges when individuals realize that the goal of improving the physical and aesthetic appearance of their neighborhood is possible but only with the cooperation and help from other concerned residents. the establishment of urban forests within communities recovering from natural disasters specifically (such as hurricanes and floods) has been identified as a key element in the development of resilience and psychological growth among community residents (hull, 1992). the practice of planting trees has also been shown to provide community residents with both a unique form of spiritual value connected to those urban environments as well as a forum and gathering place for community residents to regularly meet while caring for the urban forest. similarly, research indicates that the development of community gardens and urban forests has therapeutic value not only with survivors of trauma and natural disasters, but also with those communities that have been impacted by unemployment and economic recession, improving psychological states of well-being (myers, 1998). urban forests transform unsightly, dilapidated neighborhoods with littered vacant lots into aesthetically beautiful and serene environments that may encourage renewed economic development (i.e., job skills training) and vigor (wakefield, yeudall, taron, reynolds, & skinner, 2007). the current study explored the participation of eight students alongside community members in a community service gardening and fruit tree planting ceremony at a location near sandy hook elementary school in newtown, connecticut. several community members, staff, and teachers from sandy hook elementary school identified a specific plot within a 200 acre park near the school and designated this area as “the newtown victory garden.”1 student participants and community members then identified the specific location where each different type of fruit tree (apple, cherry, peach and fig) would 1 for clarity, the community project title is newtown victory garden, but the questionnaire utilized to examine participant experiences is the sandy hook victory garden community service questionnaire. while the tragedy at sandy hook elementary school underscores both project and research, the entire newtown community is welcome to engage with the garden as installed. global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 be planted. the participants and community members each took individual turns in the process of digging and mulching as the trees were being planted. after the tree planting ceremony, the eight student participants were surveyed regarding their overall subjective experiences in working with community members during the tree planting ceremony, their perceptions about making a positive impact on the community during the tree planting ceremony, and their overall sense of connectedness to the community after the tree planting ceremony was completed (see appendix a). the newtown victory garden was chosen for this study because of the trauma inflicted on the community only one year earlier. on december 14, 2012, a lone shooter (name intentionally withheld) stormed sandy hook elementary school and murdered 26 victims. the purpose of the current study is to describe how a community service project conducted by student volunteers from metropolitan state university and inver hills community college helped to heal and rebuild the newtown, connecticut community by providing fruit trees to the community and planting them in a garden dedicated to the memories of the victims. community residents in the newtown, connecticut area as well as teachers and staff from sandy hook elementary school also participated in the community service tree planting project. this project is considered unique because it combined individuals from various locations throughout the united states (minnesota, california and wisconsin) to help individuals in a different community who were still healing and recuperating from this tragedy. method participants eight undergraduate students (three males and five females) from two institutions of higher education volunteered to participate in the newtown victory garden tree planting project. five of the participants were from metropolitan state university (located in st. paul, minnesota) and three of the participants were from inver hills community college (located in inver grove heights, minnesota). the ages of the participants ranged from 22 years to 43 years of age, with an average age of 32 years. six of the participants (two males and four females) identified themselves as caucasian american, one african american female and one native american male. each of the student participants volunteered to participate in the study and had limited prior experience in the development of a community fruit tree orchard. procedure during the week of october 4-6, 2013, eight participants volunteered to plant a variety of 30 fruit trees that included apple, fig, cherry and peach trees (several of the fruit trees were apple cultivars from the university of minnesota, including honey crisp®, snow sweet®, and haralson®; see figure 1). the newtown victory garden is located in the fairfield district of newtown, connecticut and expands over 200 acres over a site that once was a state-controlled mental health institution. within this 200-acre site, two acres were dedicated to the fruit tree orchard. figure 1. fruit trees (apple, cherry, fig and peach) that are now planted in the newtown victory garden. global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 on saturday, october 5, 2013, over 50 community residents of the newtown, connecticut community participated in the tree planting event. several community stakeholders including community leaders and selectmen (the equivalent of a publicly elected official such as a town mayor or governor) attended and participated in the tree planting event. a bronze plaque (see figure 2) was dedicated to the members of the newtown, connecticut community prior to the tree planting ceremony. the tree planting ceremony was organized by the fruit tree planting foundation, a non-profit tree planting foundation, and community residents worked in collaboration with the student participants from metropolitan state university and inver hills community college. figure 2. students participating in a community gardening program from metropolitan state university and inver hills community college (circa 2012). the bronze plaque pictured above is dedicated to the community of newtown, connecticut and the 26 victims of the tragedy at sandy hook elementary school. participants and community members were provided with a 30-minute orientation, including detailed instructions for how to plant the trees from two representatives of the fruit tree planting foundation, which donated the trees to the community. student participants then worked with different community members (typically 3 to 4 community members with each student volunteer) to plant each of the 30 trees. participants were provided with minimal equipment (i.e., a shovel and pick axe) to plant each tree, and also assisted with watering and setting up the temporary irrigation system. the irrigation system consisted of a polyurethane “gator bag” that was zipped around the circumference of the tree, and had several small holes that allowed water to slowly drip into the ground for maximum saturation to the soil. the gator bags were provided as a temporary watering system until the newtown, connecticut department of parks and recreation could install a permanent drip system device for each tree. the newtown victory garden community garden manager and local garden volunteers have since installed electronically controlled irrigation systems to each tree. during the tree planting ceremony, which lasted approximately three hours (11:00 am to 2:00 pm), the newtown department of parks and recreation employees helped to distribute the tools used to plant the trees, organize the student participants with community members during the tree planting process, and provided a shared lunch for those participating. participants and community members took turns digging and preparing each location where the trees would be planted. the active process of planting the trees took about 45-60 minutes, and very little was said by either the community residents or the student participants while each group planted their tree. at the end of the fruit tree planting ceremony, community members were given one fruit tree of their choice to take home and plant in their yard. subsequent to the tree planting project, each of the eight student participants were interviewed by the experimenter about their overall subjective experiences. the five questions contained in the sandy hook global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 victory garden community service questionnaire (see appendix a) were created by the experimenter. a thematic analysis summarized the perceptions and then responses were compared with the domains of community service work contained in the community service attitudes scale (csas), a highly reliable and valid measure that explores attitudes and perceptions addressing community service work activities (shiarella, mccarthy & tucker, 2010). the csas measures four important domains relative to community service work in general, showing very strong internal consistency. cronbach’s alpha reliabilities for each domain include: 1) overall importance of community service work activities (α = .83), 2) sense of personal responsibility and “connectedness” to community (α = .92), 3)understanding of disadvantaged groups and diverse groups (α = .84), and 4) likelihood of participating in future community service work activities (α = .93). results a thematic analysis was conducted comparing the responses of the participants to the csas domains of community service work. two of the four domains were supported by this thematic analysis of the interview data. domains 1 and 2 (overall importance of community service work activities; sense of personal responsibility and “connectedness” to community) were supported by participant comments, while domains 3 and 4 (understanding of disadvantaged groups and diverse groups; likelihood of participating in future community service work activities) were not as supported by participant responses. postexperimental interviews and comments summarized in a thematic analysis indicated that over 87% of participants reported a “positive experience” while completing the community service tree planting project. when participants were asked to rank their perceptions of importance (1 = least important to 10 = most important) regarding their community service work in the newtown victory garden, the mean score was 9.88 (sd = .343). while completing the fruit tree planting project, several of the community members who were directly involved with sandy hook elementary school (i.e., teachers) expressed their support and appreciation to the student participants. one of the teachers commented on the “therapeutic value” of planting and how it helped her to recover from the traumatic event. comments from the participants included: “overwhelmingly powerful” and “incredible experience to help so many people who we feel so close to . . . an extremely powerful experience to be able to help so many people who recently were just strangers to all of us!” another very positive component that the participants commented about was in what the fruit trees actually represented to the community members. planting trees in many cultures represents a life-giving and spiritual connection to others; it is a special form of support that community members can provide to those who are healing from personal and emotional trauma. one of the participants commented to the interviewer after the completion of the project: “the people here in newtown, connecticut will now be able to watch the trees grow and they will know that other people in minnesota really care about them. the trees will remind them of the special bond that we have now established between states.” the majority (85.7%) of the comments from question #1 of the sandy hook victory garden community questionnaire supported csas domain 1, addressing the overall importance of community service work activities. for example, several participants reported a desire to “make a difference in the lives of community residents” who were impacted by this tragedy and that they felt rewarded by their ability to help the victims global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 who were still suffering: “it was very rewarding to help a group of people who had suffered so much just a year ago . . . i haven’t had much experience with community gardening projects, but planting these trees made me feel as though i was doing something worthwhile for the community.” another participant indicated how rewarding the project was because of the important social and community ramifications of what he was doing: “i have never done anything like this before . . . it was great to see how the community opened up to us [student participants].” additionally, virtually all of the participants indicated in their responses to question #5 of the questionnaire that they felt they were making “significant changes” in the lives of the newtown, connecticut community residents which also supports csas domain 1 : “i think that the community will now have something to look back on and remember the victim’s families . . . the fruit trees will grow each year and make the community stronger” and “yes, definitely [we changed] the lives of the community by providing a memorial to the victims and their families.” a second domain of the csas: sense of personal responsibility and ”connectedness” to the community was also supported by several of the comments of the participants: “i really didn’t know what to expect from the community . . . there was so much media about people and media intruding on them, but when we got here it was totally acceptance [sic] of us . . . one woman i was working with said ‘we love you guys!’” and “the responses from the community were welcoming. i was made to feel like i was at home and that we were all making a difference in this community . . . my experiences will last a lifetime . . . one of the newtown, ct community residents came up to me and said: ‘sandy hook and newtown will remember you all forever!’” the third domain of the csas scale (understanding the needs of disadvantaged groups and diverse groups) was not supported by the comments from any of the participants. perhaps one reason why there were no comments reflecting a greater understanding of disadvantaged and diverse groups was due to the predominant homogeneity (caucasian) of the community of newtown, ct. similarly, none of the participants commented about their participation in future community service activities (likelihood of future participation of community service work activities). one explanation for this could be the remote physical distance of the project location and none of the participants expected to return to the newtown, connecticut area. several of the participants did comment on the positive changes that they were making and the overall positive impact they felt that they had on the newtown, connecticut community: “i think the biggest change for me was in knowing that we are sending a positive message to the community of newtown that people care and support them even through the most difficult times” and “for me . . . the newtown community garden provided hope for the people and that things can change for the better.” some of the participants also commented that creating a community fruit tree orchard had helped establish a living memorial to the memories of the victims: “i believe that we helped to carry on the memories of the some of the victims of the shooting . . . this will help the community for years to come.” discussion the results of the study show the numerous community and psychological benefits to individuals and communities recovering from natural and human-related disasters. perhaps most importantly this study identified the value and importance of collaboration and community support (i.e., urban forestry projects and community gardens) when global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 communities become impacted through disaster and traumatic events (natural or human-caused). when communities that have recently been impacted by traumatic events are provided with group activities to help rebuild their community, the ability to recuperate and heal is substantially improved. the dynamic relationship between direct and interpersonal involvement in community service work activities as well as the perceptions of the viability and importance of these activities are critical components that determines the frequency of future engagement in community service work projects. community psychologists may help communities in the wake of a natural or human-related disaster through the development of projects similar to community gardens and urban forests. many of the participants reported that they felt welcome within the community once they began the tree planting activity with residents: “the people within the community really made me feel welcome and at home . . . they could not believe that we had come from minnesota to help them in creating the newtown victory garden.” putting theory into practice is both a necessary and unique component of community psychology. a second area that explores the psychological benefits of community service work activities is the interdependency and sense of community connectedness that is achieved when groups of individuals work collaboratively for a mutually beneficial purpose. thus, community psychologists who are trying to improve the relationship between individuals and communities may want to focus on the development of a central community or civicrelated project (i.e., development of a community garden) that will help residents feel more of a sense of purpose for and better connected to their own community. the current study evaluated how participation in one type of community service activity (i.e., planting fruit trees in a community garden), can facilitate this sense of connectedness, purpose, and meaning even in a community that is still recovering from a national traumatic incident. the comments from the open-ended questions regarding the experiences that the student volunteers encountered in the newtown victory garden also strongly support the positive reciprocal value and importance of direct engagement in community service work activities. many of the residents of the newtown, connecticut community commented to the student participants during the project how “overwhelmed” they were at the outpouring of support they received from all participants in the tree planting ceremony. the tragic events of sandy hook elementary school in newtown, connecticut and columbine high school in littleton, colorado can teach observers several important lessons. the first is the inherent value and importance that community service work activities play in community health and growth. humans, throughout our evolutionary history, have prospered and developed robustly in those environments that provide community members with opportunities to work together in the development and improvement of the society to which they belong. in the wake of tragedy and grief, communities need direct contact and communication with others to facilitate the process of healing. a second related benefit of community service work activities is that with more direct and frequent contact with other community members, potentially serious problems that some individuals may be experiencing (i.e., the “red flag warnings” that almost invariably occur) will be noticed more readily, thereby allowing intervention to occur and minimize future risks of catastrophic behaviors. a sense of community global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 pride and connectedness with other community members helps to establish a close-knit and resilient population capable of supporting each other in even the most traumatic events. a final important lesson to be learned is that no matter how great a tragedy may occur within the human condition, those communities that embrace cooperative behaviors such as the tree planting ceremony in the newtown victory garden will always heal and remain resilient for future growth. limitations of the study and suggestions for future research the current study identified the relevance and community need for urban forests and green space memorials in the aftermath of crisis and disaster. perhaps the most important recommendation includes using a significantly larger and more diverse sample size (community members as well as student participants) when exploring the relationship between the four domains of community service work activities and participation in a community service project such as planting fruit trees. the current pilot study utilized eight student participants but in order to use a pearson correlation test a significantly higher sample (i.e., 100 or 200 participants) would be recommended. a second suggestion (related to the limited sample size above) addresses the specific question of who is actually interviewed after a tragic event has transpired within a community. the current study explored the responses of eight student participants from metropolitan state university and inver hills community college, none of whom were actually from the newtown, connecticut community (nor were they associated in any way with sandy hook elementary school). the choice not to include the newtown community residents in the interviews was intentional given the recency and sensationalized nature of the traumatic shooting on december 14, 2012, remaining sensitive to the fragility of some community residents. future studies addressing the psychological impact of a community urban forestry project may be conducted longitudinally over several years with interviews of actual residents who have been directly impacted by the disaster and subsequent intervention. a third and final suggestion for future research pertains to how the trees were actually selected for the fruit tree planting project. a total of 60 trees were donated as a gift from the state of minnesota and presented to the newtown, connecticut community as the fruit tree orchard was developed. perhaps future work addressing the psychological benefits of urban forestry may focus on providing community members with their own choice and opportunity to select their trees, during a town hall meeting or similar community gathering. some research has shown that specific trees (i.e., ornamental) used in urban forestry projects and community gardens may actually influence the healing process among individuals and communities impacted by natural disasters. for example, tidball et al. (2010) notes in the living memorial project of 9/11 that the u. s. forestry service utilized over 687 living memorial sites with a variety of ornamental (i.e., bonsai) trees. the purpose in selecting these ornamental trees was an effort to reflect the culture, ideologies, values, and resources that were endogenous to those physical locations impacted by some type of natural or man-made disaster. the current study implemented not ornamental trees but rather several varieties of fruit trees in the development of the urban forest in the newtown victory garden. the fruit trees included fig trees, cherry trees, peach trees, and a variety of different species of apple trees (16 different cultivars that originated from the university of minnesota, including honeycrisps, honeygolds, snowsweets, etc.). the fact that the global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 residences of each of the student volunteers (minnesota) matched the origins of the apple trees was no accident. each participant in the current study felt that by providing apple trees that originated in their own “home state” of minnesota the urban fruit tree orchard would be perceived as a more authentic and personal gift to a community still healing from a devastating loss. the fruits that will eventually be harvested may also yield positive and secondary psychological effects that literally help to nourish an individual who has been devastated by personal loss commonly associated with community disaster and crisis. it is the participants’ hope that the community residents of newtown, connecticut will be provided with healthy fruit for many years to come and that this garden will provide a sanctuary to the families of sandy hook elementary school. concluding thoughts this research identifies several important themes that are relevant to both current participation and the future practice of community service work activities. healthy communities are those that promote interdependent relationships, understanding and opportunities for growth for all inhabitants and residents. healthy communities also provide a voice for the underserved. inherent in the future of community service work activities is the welcome opportunity for collaboration for each member as well as a fundamental belief that all persons have potentially important contributions to make to their community. while tragedies and natural disasters can have a (temporary) devastating impact on the psyche of community residents, implementation of community service projects such as a fruit tree orchard or community garden can help societies reduce the long term negative impact of traumatic events references alaimo, k., reischl, t. m., & allen, j. o. (2010). community gardening, neighborhood meetings, and social capital. journal of community psychology, 38, 497-514. gibson, a. (2007). does social capital have a role to play in the health of communities? in reader in promoting public health: challenge and controversy. douglas, jenny (ed.); handsley, stephen (ed.); lloyd, cathy e. (ed.); spurr, sue (ed.); pp. 246254. thousand oaks, ca. sage publications. hawkins, j. l., mercer, j., thirlaway, k. j., & clayton, d. a. (2013). “doing” gardening and “being” at the allotment site: exploring the benefits of allotment gardening for stress reduction and healthy aging. ecopsychology, 5, 110-125. hindman, d. b. & yamamoto, m. (2011). social capital in a community contest: a multilevel analysis of individualand community-level predictors of social trust. mass communication and society, 14, 838-856. hoffman, a. j., wallach, j., espinoza parker, n. & sanchez, e. (2009). unity through community service activities: strategies to build ethnic and cultural divides. mcfarland publishers. hoffman, a. j., wallach, j. n., & sanchez, e. (2010). community service work, civic engagement and “giving back” to society: key factors in improving interethnic relationships and achieving “connectedness” in ethnically diverse communities. australian social work, 63(4), 418-430. hull, r. b. (1992). how the public values urban forests. journal of arboriculture, 18, 98-100. global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 jonasson, i., marklund, b., & hildingh, c. (2007). working in a training garden: experiences of patients with neurological damage. australian occupational therapy journal, 54, 266-272. kelly, j. (1971). qualities for the community psychologist. american psychologist, 25, 524-531. myers, m. (1998). empowerment and community building through a gardening project. psychiatric rehabilitation journal, 22(2), 181-183. putnam, r. (1993). making democracy work: civic traditions in modern italy. princeton university press. putnam, r. (2000). bowling alone: the collapse and revival of american community. new york: simon & shuster. rappe, e., koivunen, t. and korpela, e. (2008). group gardening in mental outpatient care. international journal of therapeutic communities, 29(3), 273-284. shiarella, a. h., mccarthy, a. m., & tucker, m. l. (2000). the development and construct validity scores of the community service attitudes scale. educational and psychological measurement, 60, 286-300. skjoeveland, o. (2001). effects of street parks on social interactions among neighbors: a place perspective. journal of architectural and planning research, 18, 131-147. tidball, k. g., krasny, m. e., svendsen, e., campbell, l., & helphand, k. (2010). stewardship, learning, and memory in disaster resilience. environmental education research, 16, 591-609. wakefield, s., yeudall, f., taron, c., reynolds, j. & skinner, a. (2007). growing urban health: community gardening in southeast toronto. health promotion international, 22, 92-100. appendix a sandy hook victory garden community service questionnaire open ended questions: 1. briefly describe your previous work in volunteer services to the community. what are your thoughts and feelings about participating in this unique community service activity in the newtown, ct. community? 2. how do think the newtown, ct community will respond to you and the other student volunteers in participating in the project? 3. briefly describe what kinds of changes you expect to make in participating in this community project: 4. do you feel that by helping the community plant trees in the sandy hook memorial garden you will have changed the lives of some of these community members? how so and in what way? 5. on a scale from “1” (least important”) to “10” most important, how would you rank to you personally the volunteer work you are doing in the newtown, ct. community? _______ “more than paint on concrete”: the winding path toward bike equity claire cahen antioch university keywords: equity, transportation justice, sustainability, community organizing author biographies: claire cahen is a student in the master's in psychology program at antioch university, los angeles, specializing in applied community psychology. she is a bicycle commuter and volunteer bicycle mechanic at a los angeles-based bicycle repair cooperative. her background is in union/community organizing and she has been involved in grassroots efforts to improve neighborhood livability in the greater los angeles area since 2009. recommended citation: cahen, c. (2016). “more than paint on concrete”: the winding path toward bike equity. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(3), pages 1-9. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/) global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 “more than paint on concrete”: the winding path toward bike equity abstract bike equity refers to the notion that traditionally marginalized populations face disproportionate barriers to being able to bicycle safely in the communities in which they live. notably, low-income us residents comprise the majority of bike commuters, and yet have less access to adequate bicycling infrastructure than their middleand high-income peers. this has resulted in disparate health, employment, and education outcomes and created an additional impediment to achieving neighborhood wellness. through a literature review and participant observation this article argues that bike equity should become a central tenet of urban sustainability, and discusses the limited empirical evidence of the best practices for promoting bicycling within marginalized communities. this review also suggests that bike equity is an area for future community psychology practice and research. in academic literature, three broad categories of bicycling scholarship seem to have emerged. the first category evidences the conflict between cyclists and motorists, and exposes the vulnerability of cyclists in cardependent metropolitan areas. articles belonging to this category focus on the bikephobia of many cities, and the lack of institutional support to keep cyclists safe (blickstein, 2010; willis, manaugh, & elgeneidy, 2015). they capture a vision that bleeds directly into a second form of bike scholarship, highlighting the convergence of cycling and activism during the large group bike rides known as critical mass. in critical mass, cyclists flood into city streets to reclaim public-serving space, and protest the aggression and inanity of automobile culture (blickstein, 2010; strauss, 2014). finally, a third branch of cycling literature within the field of public health, where cycling is touted as form of active transportation with clear salutary benefits (götschi, tainio, maizlish, schwanen, goodman, & woodcock, 2015). regrettably, the people who comprise the majority of cyclist commuters are invisible in this literature. these cyclist commuters do not ride on two wheels as a political statement; nor are they necessarily riding purely for the health benefits. and while they may bemoan the lack of cycling infrastructure, they also face myriad other obstacles to being able to use the bicycle as a safe method of commuting. most bicycle riders are actually transit takers who use cycling and walking as means to get to transit (kramer, lieberman, sadler, & zimmerman, 2015). recent joint reports funded by the center for disease control and prevention (cdc) and the american public health association show that people with low incomes actually “have the highest rates of bicycling and walking,” with the largest percentage being concentrated in populations where individuals make less than $10,000 per year (kramer, et al., 2015, p. 7). moreover, cyclists are also concentrated in immigrant communities and communities of color. a report published by the sierra club and the league of american bicyclists cites data indicating that twice as many immigrants commute by bicycle than u.s.-born individuals (league of american bicyclists, sierra club, 2015). similarly, africanamericans and asian-americans are the fastest growing population of cyclists: from 2001 to 2009, the number of bike trips doubled in the african-american community, and increased by 80% for asian americans (league of american bicyclists, sierra club, 2015). these statistics remind us that, though the bicycle can be a tool for sustainability, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 public health, and political action, it is first and foremost a low-cost mode of transportation. the cdc estimates that the yearly operating cost for a bicycle is $308, compared with $8,220 for a car. additionally, because riding does not require a license in many jurisdictions, it remains accessible to wider range of people (lieberman & zimmerman, 2015). consequently, teenagers, immigrants, day laborers, low-income, and homeless populations actually comprise the cycling (and walking) majority (lieberman & zimmerman, 2015). given the composition of the cycling and walking majority, public-serving space and biking/walking infrastructure is most severely needed in low-income communities, and, paradoxically, they are least likely to exist in these communities. the lack of sidewalks, stop signs, stop lights, bike lanes, bike routes, and bike parking in low-income neighborhoods creates additional barriers for the people who have no choice but to use human powered modes of transportation (kramer, et al., 2015). prompted by both climate change and perpetually congested traffic, cities across the country have begun to reinvest in cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, but such investment has been selective and concentrated in areas away from the actual cycling and walking majority. this majority remains as invisible in public planning and policy as it is in academic literature. inequity and bike equity to understand the notion of bike equity means to actively unpack what the neglect of the true cycling population has entailed. it also requires unravelling the layers of other systemic inequities that have become so entangled within the fabric of urban life that only truly ecological approaches can loosen the knots. this article begins this task of unpacking and unraveling, and seeks to increase visibility for the concept of bike equity. most of the findings discussed in this article are based on secondary sources, and extrapolated from reports generated by the cdc, the american public health association (apha), the sierra club, and the league of american cyclists. however, the evidence presented in these reports was also complemented by participant observation in the bike movement in los angeles. inequities in safety and public health to begin, it is important to elucidate the ways in which poor public planning and differential investment have rendered the roads less safe for cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists in lowincome communities. the cdc and apha found that large artery roads with speed limits well above 25 mph were usually designed to slice through low-income neighborhoods, and only 9% of streets in these areas had sidewalks. this rate nearly doubled in affluent areas (as cited in kramer et al., 2015). another report revealed: . . . low-income neighborhoods had twice as many intersections with major thoroughfares, requiring residents on foot to navigate highspeed, high-traffic zones. in addition, poorer neighborhoods had more fourway intersections, which lead to more injuries of people walking and driving due to the greater number of points of conflict. (as cited in kramer, et al., 2015, p. 17) the consequences of this planning have been fatal: a study of the 10 deadliest intersections in new york city showed that 9 of the 10 were near public housing. additionally, pedestrians in low-income communities were more than twice as likely to be hit in collisions with automobiles than their higher income peers (kramer et al., 2015). compounding inequities in built environments, racial bias is also a consideration. a recent study cited by the cdc suggested that drivers may have different reactions to pedestrians based on race; in this research, twice as many cars stopped for whites pedestrians in crosswalks http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 as stopped for african-american pedestrians (lieberman & zimmerman, 2015). the public health implications of lack of bikeability and walkability are tremendous. first, when infrastructure planning privileges automobiles, the air quality worsens. multiple studies have shown a correlation between poor air quality and both income as well as ethnicity. asthma, the most common respiratory disease resulting from pollution, was shown to negatively impact mental health and cause anxiety and depression (tibbets, 2015). second, a lack of publicserving infrastructure discourages active transportation, and, coincidentally, the obesity and diabetes crises have worsened. the most deleterious effects occurred, unsurprisingly, in low-income communities and communities of color (as cited in kramer et al., 2015). the rates of obesity reached almost 40% for both latino and africanamerican youth, and were actually 50% for latina and african-american girls (kramer et al., 2015). inequities also arise in terms of safety and the risk of community violence. though twice as many low-income children walk to school as middle-income children, the risk that lowincome children will be exposed to violence is much higher. the cdc/ apha report: a 2010 study showed that african american youth were more than twice as likely to be victims of serious violence as were white or latino youth and were at least 30 percent more likely to be victims of assault. the homicide rate for africanamerican youth was 14 times higher than the rate for white youth. (lieberman & zimmerman, 2015, pg. 7) though research has often focused on gangs as the source of community violence, police harassment remains a problem as well. in los angeles, day laborers report being stopped and ticketed for violations that do not actually exist in the law, such as not having registered their bikes or riding without a tail light (statute only requires a front light; a. mannos, personal communication, july 28, 2015). also in los angeles, the law regarding riding on the sidewalk is phrased vaguely, allowing police to ticket cyclists both for riding and not riding on the sidewalk (a. mannos, personal communicaton, july 28, 2015). finally, bike theft plagues cyclists in every city, and can morph into violent crime. a history of gang robberies on bikeways once left large segments of trails unused in los angeles (moilanen, 2000). these kinds of statistics help reinforce many parents’ fears of allowing their children to walk or bike to school, or to spend significant time outdoors. in one study, the apprehension (perceived or real) of community violence was one of ten determining factors that deterred outdoor physical activity (lieberman & zimmerman, 2015). funding inequities as mentioned earlier, cycling has enjoyed a kind of resurgence in recent years, and many programs have developed curricula to increase mobility in u.s. cities (league of american bicyclists, sierra club, 2015). however, funding for organizations working to increase the bikeability and walkability of cities is hardly equitable. this was a glaring issue to a community organizer in boyle heights, a low-income, predominantly latino neighborhood east of los angeles, who notes that, though natives of her city have organized the only all-women of color cycling group in greater los angeles, none of them received funding to do so. (r. contreras, personal communication, july 24, 2015). similarly, though los angeles is home to three institutionalized bike repair cooperatives, all are located in more affluent parts of the city. in contrast, two bike mechanics native to the low-income, africanamerican neighborhoods of leimert park and watts, respectively, are currently struggling to finance cooperatives in their http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 neighborhoods (a. neff, personal communication, july 24, 2015; sulaiman, 2015). one of them points out that his struggles are not rooted in a lack of interest; he frequently sets up shop at local parks in the open air, and regularly has 30 customers before he has finished installing his repair stand (a. neff, personal communication, july 24, 2015). unfortunately, this demonstration of need does not guarantee that the cooperative can be self-sustaining because the population he serves may not consistently have disposable income for bike repair, even at a very reduced fee. additionally, his neighborhood is so isolated from the rest of the city it is unlikely that he can count on a reliable flow of middle-income customers. without additional outside investment or subsidies, it is a gamble to invest in a lease for a permanent space (a. neff, personal communication, july 24, 2015). the most serious inequities in funding for mobility work stem from the disconnect between mainstream cycling advocacy groups and marginalized populations. mainstream cycling advocacy initially defined itself as a subculture grounded in both a love of bikes and a misguided belief that bicycling is primarily a recreational activity for upper and middle class populations (a. mannos, r. contreras, s. sulaiman, personal communication, july 24, 2015). the cycling advocacy movement, which is young and increasingly powerful, somewhat myopically advocated for bike lanes, bike shares, motorist education, and proper bike gear (e.g. helmets, reflectors, lights) as the pathway to change and safety (a. mannos, r. contreras, s. sulaiman, personal communication, july 24, 2015). while there is no discounting the importance of any of these measures, alone they are not sufficient or comprehensive enough to redress existing inequities. the current debate in los angeles over the institution of a helmet law, which would require all adults on bikes to wear helmets, captures the disconnect well. grassroots activists acknowledge that the powerful bike advocates promoting this law have good intentions, but they are failing to take into account its potentially oppressive effects. the law would legitimize over-policing cyclists who do not have helmets, that is to say, overpolicing those who cannot afford helmets (newton, 2015). after the law was proposed but not enacted, day laborers reported being ticketed for not wearing helmets even though the law did not yet exist (a. mannos, personal communication, july 24, 2015). the executive director of the los angeles bicycle coalition, tamika butler, was quoted in the los angeles streetsblog attempting to explain her reticence about the measure: “one of my fears with this particular proposed law is how will it be enforced? and who will it truly impact? and what are the stories are we going to hear?” (newton, 2015). her opposition is not to bike safety, but to the discriminatory law enforcement practices that have been perpetuated under the guise of bike safety. the people who have established themselves as stewards of the bike movement are not necessarily representative of the majority of cyclists, and this has caused some questionable public planning decisions. for example, long-time bike activists in the neighborhood of boyle heights (mentioned previously) note that the community was never consulted in the decision-making processes for increasing mobility in the neighborhood (e. huerta, personal communication, july 25, 2015). as a result, though more bike lanes were created, they were also placed on a 45 mph road that intersects with freeway exits; even skilled cyclists do not dare use this pathway. to celebrate the local latino culture, the city also designed what it called culturally-relevant bike parking infrastructure, but cyclists report that the odd shape of the rack makes properly locking up their bikes impossible (e. huerta, personal communication, july 25, 2015). even in a city like portland, which is consistently ranked as one of the most bikehttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 friendly cities in the u.s., similar inequities manifest for similar reasons. the city’s bike plan was adopted in 1996, and favored connecting affluent commercial areas of the metropolis to each other, thus further isolating low-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color. the city is now looking to adopt a new transit plan in 2015 with the hope that bike equity can be retrofitted into the built landscape and reconnect marginalized neighborhoods (kramer, et al., 2015). whether such retrofitting is effective remains to be seen. the reality is that large bike advocacy organizations have tended to focus little, if at all, on the concerns of low-income communities. recently, and only in select cities, some bike organizations are trying to compensate for this omission, but the notion of bike equity is new and still met with much resistance and little understanding. these data represent only a minute portion of the total evidence available, but underscore the necessity making bike equity known. simply stated, the myriad inequities lowincome communities and communities of color currently face in terms of access to safe routes, transit, livable communities, adequate housing, food, good schools, and hospitals are deeply interdependent and have inevitably resulted in inequities in terms of health. a recent harvard article posits that the risks of lack of physical mobility extend beyond health, to actual social mobility. of all the possible factors that impede upward social mobility, including crime, quality of public schools, and prevalence of two-parent households, lengthy commute times to work proved to be the most significant (chetty & hendren, 2015). bike equity recognizes the interconnectedness of the issues cited above, as well as of intersectionality of race, gender, income, ability, and sexuality; it does not want to homogenize the experience of cyclists, but does aim to equalize opportunities for mobility and active transportation. bike equity is rooted in an understanding of injustice and a vision that will not and cannot be realized without systemic transformation. working with bike equity drawbacks of bike equity work this vision is not easy to reconcile with the fact that “bikeability” and the creation of bike lanes has become a tell-tale sign of gentrification. in low-income neighborhoods with traditionally little public investment in infrastructure, drawing plans to build bike paths and bike parking can raise suspicions. will long-time residents of the neighborhood be able to afford to remain there long enough to enjoy the new designs? will making neighborhoods more walkable and bikeable increase the value of property in those areas and displace long-time inhabitants? studies have shown that the advent of light-rail trains in low-income neighborhoods usually coincides with drastic increases in rent, and, as a result, displacement of the very people who rely on light-rail trains (johnson & triplett, 2011). there is good reason to believe that bikeability can have the same effect, and, for this reason, it is important to develop comprehensive mobility plans that include the preservation and development of affordable housing. a community land trust in los angeles, called trust south l.a. has successfully drawn links to between the two issues, and worked through broad coalitions to tackle the problems in conjunction. the key to their success has been prioritizing housing first, and then lobbying the city’s large bike advocacy groups second, drawing plans to improve mobility in working class neighborhoods (trust, 2015). moreover, because of the aforementioned risks associated with biking and walking in low-income communities, launching programs to increase participation in active forms of transportation can also mean asking neighborhood residents to take serious risks. even when safe routes to school partnerships have been built, and safe http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 passages to and from schools have been established, accidents can and do occur. lieberman and zimmerman (2015) write: “in december 2013, a 15-year old girl was beaten and raped just a half block away from a safe passage route” (p.24). real-life application of these programs must include partnerships with organizations working to prevent community violence and road accidents in ways similar to programs advocating an increase in public-serving space which cannot occur without parallel efforts to prevent displacement. these kinds of efforts feed each other and mutually improve each other’s outcomes. for example, evaluation of a safe routes to school project in chicago showed that there was a 20% reduction in crime around safe passage schools (lieberman & zimmerman, 2015). potential benefits of bike equity work when conducted from an ecological perspective, programs that advocate for bike equity hold the potential to transform not only neighborhoods but also existing cycling institutions. seeds for such transformation have already been planted across the country. the league of american bicyclists and the sierra club (2015), two of the largest bike advocacy organizations, recently copublished a report titled “the new majority: pedaling towards equity.” this report notes the rise in the number of cyclists in communities of color, as well as the obstacles these communities face to riding safely. allison mannos, a community organizer, suggests that just a few years ago the term “bike equity” was still foreign to these groups, and the release of this kind of advocacy material marks a profound change (a. mannos, personal communication, july 24, 2015). however, the executive director of the los angeles county bicycle coalition tamika butler qualifies this statement substantially by suggesting that a lot of education work still needs to be done to convey what bike equity means and implies. for example, she describes “the new majority” as a misnomer since cycling has always been the most accessible mode of transportation in communities of color (t. butler, personal communication, 2015). the report urgently recommends prioritizing bike equity to avoid the risk of marginalizing the new majority – a conclusion that revises both the long history of cycling and already existing marginalization in communities of color. nevertheless, years of organizing to draw attention to “invisible bicyclists” (p.7) have translated to a concrete shift, and hopefully to a more culturally responsive bike movement. conversely, bicycling has been successfully built into community organizing campaigns for livable cities. perhaps the most salient example of organizing on two wheels is that of slow roll chicago, a program that not only takes residents through safe, slow community rides through the south side of chicago, but has also directly lobbied the city government for more cyclist and pedestrian infrastructure in that area of the city (kramer et al., 2015). cycling holds many possibilities as a schoolbased intervention, with the national safe routes to school program serving as the primary model. many parents allow their children to walk to school out of necessity, but are concerned for their children’s safety on the way to school. the program validates these concerns while offering a blueprint for action and asking parent, students, and school staff volunteers to facilitate using active transportation to school by establishing safer mobility practices (lieberman & zimmerman, 2015). they recommend creating biking and walking trains, which are medium-sized groups of people who walk and cycle to school together, as well as corner captains comprised of adult volunteers who stand on key corners and are available to keep a watchful eye on children walking to school (lieberman & zimmerman, 2015). different branches of the program have even reached out to small businesses surrounding schools and asked them to serve as safe havens where children can run in and ask for help if they http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 feel unsafe. the program acknowledges the interconnectedness of community violence, degrading infrastructure, and biking/walking inequity. it advocates for broad coalition building, as well as the grassroots education of cyclists and motorists. in this way, it galvanizes community support for bike equity (lieberman & zimmerman, 2015). the benefits of such work are multifold. safer routes to school can reduce absenteeism, and provide opportunities for natural mentorship. the health benefits are clear, and establishing corner captains and informal crossing guards helps reduce high-speed traffic and unsafe driving (lieberman & zimmerman, 2015). in cities like los angeles, where there is little if any training to teach motorists to drive alongside cyclists, the program begins to fill a much-needed instructional role. because safe routes offers participating schools federal funding, the cdc and apha emphasize that the program can also turn schools into the leaders of broad coalitions that rectify inequities. they can also be a vehicle through which violence prevention activities gain federal funding (lieberman & zimmerman, 2015). the role of community psychologists community psychologists can contribute to two primary areas of study where more data are needed. first, there has been little academic exploration of gendered bike inequities. “only 6% of women . . . feel confident riding on all streets with traffic” notes the league of american bicyclists report & sierra club (2015, p.6). the bike count conducted by the los angeles bicycle coaltion in 2013 showed that less than one in five cyclists were female despite the fact that most transit takers are female. since female ridership increases drastically on bike paths, it is likely that lack of safety deters women more than it does men (l.a. county bicycle coalition, 2013) although health discrepancies may also be a factor in the gender biking gap. both microand macrolevel studies are needed to determine the causes of this inequity, as well as best practices to rectify it. second, more research is needed to identify successful organizing practices that have promoted bikeability and walkability while also combatting gentrification. the field of bike scholarship is ripe for this kind of research: the urgency of climate change lends new urgency to everyday urban practices, and biking has emerged as a kind of archetypal symbol of urban sustainability. enough evidence has accumulated to make it difficult to refute the need to redesign u.s. cities to become more walkable and bikeable. yet, the question is whether the familiar white stripes of bike lanes will continue to serve as markers of wealth, serving only a few. “it’s about more than slapping paint on concrete and calling it a bike lane” repeated several activists throughout these interviews (r. contreras, a. mannos, a. lugano, personal communication, july 24, 2015). it is about whether the majority of cyclists will be acknowledged and consulted in the cycling boom we seem to be moving toward; it is about whether cycling will exacerbate or redress inequities. the answer has yet to be decided, and community psychologists have a chance to influence the outcome. references blickstein, s. (2010). automobility and the politics of bicycling in new york city. international journal of urban & regional research, 34(4), july 3, 2015-886-905. götschi, t., tainio, m., maizlish, n., schwanen, t., goodman, a., & woodcock, j. (2015). contrasts in active transport behaviour across four countries: how do they translate into public health benefits? preventive medicine, 74, july 12, 201542-48. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 3 september 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 johnson, g., & triplett, k. (2011). environmental justice and transportation: an analysis of public involvement at pennsylvania department of transportation. race, gender & class, 18(3/4), july 28, 2015. l.a. county bicycle coalition. 2013 los angeles bicycle and pedestrian count: who gets counted. retrieved july 28, 2015, from http://labike.org/2013labikepedcount0. league of american bicyclists, & sierra club. (2015). the new majority: pedaling toward equality. washington d.c.: league of american bicyclists. lieberman, l., & zimmerman, s. (2015). taking back the streets and sidewalks. safe routes to school national partnership: oakland, ca. moilanen, r. (2000, october 9). when crime trails off. los angeles times, newton, d. (2015, april 15). my interview with tamika butler: equity and social justice are rallying cries for lacbc’s new leader. message posted to http://la.streetsblog.org/2015/04/15/ my-interview-with-tamika-butlerequity-and-social-justice-are-rallyingcries-for-lacbcs-new-leader/. raj, c., & hendren, n. (2015). the impacts of neighborhoods on intergenerational mobility: childhood exposure effects and county-level estimates. unpublished manuscript. strauss, d. (2015). ridazz, wrenches, and wonks: a revolution on two wheels rolls into los angeles. (electronic thesis or dissertation). retrieved from https://etd.ohiolink.edu/. sulaiman, s. (2015, july 21, 2015). east side riders’ dreams of a bike co-op finally materializing in watts. message posted to http://la.streetsblog.org/2015/07/21/e ast-side-riders-dreams-of-a-bike-co-opfinally-materializing-in-watts. tibbetts, j. h. (2015). air quality and climate change: a delicate balance. environmental health perspectives, 123(6), 08/03/2015-a148-a153. trust south l.a. (07/17/2015). trust south l.a. retrieved 07/28, 20015, from http://trustsouthla.org. willis, d. p., manaugh, k., & el-geneidy, a. (2015). cycling under influence: summarizing the influence of perceptions, attitudes, habits, and social environments on cycling for transportation. cycling under influence: summarizing the influence of perceptions, attitudes, habits, and social environments on cycling for transportation., 9(8), july 28, 2015-565579. zimmerman, s., lieberman, l., kramer, k., & saddler, b. (2015). at the intersection of active transportation and equity. safe routes to school national partnership: oakland, ca. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://la-bike.org/2013labikepedcount0 http://la-bike.org/2013labikepedcount0 https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 overview of articles in the special issues james h. dalton bloomsburg, pennsylvania, usa below i provide a brief overview and commentary on each article in these special issues of the global journal of community psychology practice. in describing each article below, i have noted the practice competencies highlighted by the authors, and also listed in brackets any other competencies that seemed to me to be especially involved in their work. i also listed any proposed competencies specified in each article. see table 1 for a list of articles organized by competencies that each article covers. gabriel kuperminc, wing yi chan, scot seitz, christyl wilson infusing community psychology practice competencies into doctoral training competencies emphasized: all in this article, gabe kuperminc and coauthors describes how the scra practice competencies are used in the georgia state university phd community and clinicalcommunity specializations. the georgia state program adapted the scra competencies to fit its context, including some skills relevant to the training of clinical-community students and for those interested in public health and community psychology. kuperminc focuses on practicum fieldwork and on advisement as avenues for development of competencies. students complete three one-semester practicum fieldwork experiences, in which the student writes a statement of work to build experience and develop skills in as many as four competency areas, through a community setting identified by the student, and negotiates deliverable products related to this plan. this article includes appendices of documents for students that describe this process. in yearly progress reports to a faculty advisor, each student reflects on experiences with each competency during the year, and identifies a set of competencies to focus on in the next year. in a conference with an advisor, discussions focus on these learnings and plans. this article includes a survey completed by students for this process. kuperminc provides preliminary findings about the usefulness of the competencies for students, faculty, and community partners, and describes successes and challenges in this work. two strengths of this article are its detailed descriptions and materials of the practicum fieldwork and advisement processes, and kuperminc’s excellent suggestions for future revisions of the scra list. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 foundational principles 1. ecological perspectives clifford et al.; collins et al.; henderson et al; sanchez et al.; sarkisian; sarkisian & taylor; scott ; arcidiacono 2. empowerment bayaa et al.; henderson et al; sanchez et al.; sarkisian & taylor; scaccia et al. [collins et al.; scott] 3. sociocultural and cross-cultural competence collins et al.; henderson et al ; sanchez et al.; sarkisian & taylor; scaccia et al.; scott; underwood 4. community inclusion and partnership henderson et al; collins et al.; sanchez et al.; sarkisian & taylor; scaccia et al.; underwood [arcidiacono; scott] 5. ethical, reflective practice henderson et al; langhout et al.; sanchez et al.; sarkisian & taylor community program development and management 6. program development, implementation and management collins et al.; sanchez et al.; sarkisian & taylor; underwood [scott] 7. prevention and health promotion bayaa et al.; sarkisian & taylor; scaccia et al. [collins et al.] community and organizational capacity-building 8. community leadership and mentoring sanchez et al.; scaccia et al. 9. small and large group processes francescato & zani; sarkisian & taylor [arcidiacono; collins et al.; scott] 10. resource development sarkisian & taylor 11. consultation and organizational development bayaa et al.; sanchez et al.; sarkisian & taylor [francescato & zani] community and social change 12. collaboration and coalition development bayaa et al.; sanchez et al.; sarkisian & taylor; scaccia et al. 13. community development bayaa et al.; sanchez et al. [francescato & zani; henderson et al] 14. community organizing and community advocacy clifford et. al.; sanchez et al. [ francescato & zani] 15. public policy analysis, development and advocacy 16. community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness clifford et. al.; sanchez et al.; sarkisian & taylor; scaccia et al. [faust et al.] table 1: articles listed by practice competencies continued on next page http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 community research 17. participatory community research arcidiacono; faust et al.; francescato & zani; sanchez et al.; scaccia et al.; scott 18. program evaluation faust et al.; francescato & zani; sanchez et al.; sarkisian & taylor; scaccia et al.; wolfe & price additional proposed competencies competencies for community research faust et al. ethical critically reflexive anti-racist feminist praxis langhout et al. financial and management skills wolfe & price continuing professional development wolfe & price community profiling francescato & zani participatory multidimensional organizational analysis francescato & zani sociopolitical empowerment training francescato & zani table 1 (cont.): articles listed by practice competencies regina day langhout, erin ellison, danielle kohfeldt, angela nguyen, jesica siham fernandez, janelle m. silva, david l. gordon, jr., stephanie tam rosas thinking through our processes: how the ucsc community psychology research & action team strives to embody ethical, critically reflexive anti-racist feminist praxis competency emphasized: ethical, reflective practice proposed competency: ethical critically reflexive anti-racist feminist praxis the eight authors of this article, all members of the team named in the title, led by faculty member regina day langhout, have developed a small-group approach to reflective practice that clearly involves a process, practices, and skills for fostering reflection, reflexivity, mutual support, and attention to difficult issues and challenges. in this paper, the authors discuss the scra competency of ethical, reflective practice, and propose a more specific concept of ethical, critically reflexive anti-racist feminist praxis. they describe how the latter approach guides their team meetings, reflection and action. it is based on concepts of relatedness and accountability to team members, other researchers, and community collaborators. an additional basis of their work lies in the emphasis of feminists of color on listening to marginalized groups and experiences of intersectionalities. their practice within the team (faculty and graduate students) includes personal checkins, project check-ins, and an additional hour used as the (rotating) facilitator chooses (including research or other professional issues). in this article, student authors discuss the importance of the team’s wide array of topics that can be discussed, and the trust and affirmation of identities that grows from these discussions. other student authors described how the team together addressed problems in a participatory action research project. finally, the authors describe how dealing with the hierarchies, power http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 differentials, and multiple identities still present in the work of the team (always a challenge in academia) is an edge for growth for team members. two strengths of this article are its detailed descriptions of a participatory action research team in academia that also functions as a supportive space for its members, and its inclusion of personal student reflections. kelly collins, christopher keys, martina mihelicova, kris ma, nicole colon quintana, jordan reed, madison sunnquist, carolyn turek, and christopher whipple addressing the community psychology competency dialectic through participatory pedagogy competencies emphasized: ecological perspectives; sociocultural and crosscultural competence; program development, implementation, management [small and large group processes, empowerment, prevention and health promotion] kelly collins and co-authors address a dialectic inherent in considering community psychology practice competencies: competency vs. context. there is practical value in a set of consensually-defined skills of community psychologists, presentable in reasonably succinct form to employers, funders, and others outside our field. yet there has long been a reasonable fear that articulating and publicizing such a defined list of competencies could limit the development of the field, lead to static conceptions of competencies, ignore differences in social contexts, and limit reflection on issues of values and power. this dialectical perspective is a strength of this article, and suggests an approach to future discussions of the practice competencies. collins et al. explore this dialectic in the community psychology graduate classroom, using the approach of participatory pedagogy (originating in the pedagogy of paulo freire), and looking especially for areas where partial syntheses of this dialectic might emerge. the course professor, chris keys, asked students to suggest modifications in the course syllabus and suggest guest speakers, had students develop class activities and lead class sessions, and promoted an egalitarian classroom climate that encouraged reflection, engagement in learning, challenging of assumptions, and “ongoing development of one’s own imperfect ideas and process-based skills”. the inclusion of student voices in the authorship of the article illustrates one outcome of this approach, and is another strength of this article. collins et al. present three examples of topics addressed in the course: thinking ecologically about community programs; starting community program development; a diversity game to experience systemic inequity [i have shortened titles]. each student-led class session had defined purposes and goals, activities to foster experiential learning, and reflection on outcomes. this approach clearly involved critical reflection as well as fostering development of some of the process skills and critical perspectives central to the identity of a community psychologist in practice. the authors include an extensive appendix with resources for applying these approaches in class, and their discussion section provides reflection on limitations of their work as well as issues to be addressed for a truly dynamic, “open-system” approach to developing concepts of community psychology practice competencies. the authors’ conceptualization and exploration of this dialectic is a strength of this article. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 dawn x. henderson, jameika r. matlock, dayquan garrett, and christopher clark what does it mean to use competencies in “praxis” with undergraduate students in historically black institutions? competencies emphasized: community inclusion and partnership; ecological perspectives; empowerment; sociocultural competence; ethical, reflective practice [community development] dawn x. henderson described how she designed an undergraduate course in community psychology, at winston-salem state university, an historically black university, around the five foundational principles on the practice competencies list. a key element of the course involved working with her students and other faculty in community development initiatives in waughtown, a racially diverse, low-income neighborhood near campus. in class, her students discussed learning about their own status in terms of power and privilege. in waughtown, henderson and her students learned about social and economic forces affecting the neighborhood, attended neighborhood events, co-facilitated focus groups, and conducted a video project on sense of community there. she used a praxis approach: community experiences enriched student discussion and learning in class, which in turn enriched further community work. one key theme involved the importance of narratives in understanding both one’s own growth and that of a neighborhood. henderson notes how her own time and her students’ time in waughtown was limited, and community change is a slow process, yet the student narratives included in the paper make it clear that for these students, this was a transformative learning experience. in addition, their work illustrates steps toward learning another competency: community development. a strength of this article is the primacy of henderson’s personal experiences and voice, and those of her students. victoria scott leveraging community psychology competencies to advance medical education and improve obesity healthcare competencies emphasized: participatory research; sociocultural and cross-cultural competence; ecological perspectives [empowerment; program development, implementation and management; small and large group processes] victoria scott described her work with health care providers and patients in the south carolina initiative for quality overweight/obesity care. the initiative sought to develop new ways of providing medical education for patient-centered, culturally competent health care. scott’s team developed participatory action research processes for two primary-care settings in urban south carolina. each process involved exploratory assessment, a more structured needs assessment, and then an intervention phase in which researchers and providers worked together to develop and implement specific interventions to improve obesity care, tailored to each setting. this approach fostered genuine partnerships with staff and patients, and greater staff awareness of socio-emotional and sociocultural challenges in care for persons with obesity-related concerns. scott’s team worked to foster a group climate in which everyone’s implicit assumptions and biases about obesity and weight, as well as issues of race and social class, could be discussed and worked on together. both the assessment phases and the intervention phase illustrated how these three competencies dovetail nicely in practice. in addition, their work seems to me to actively involve at least three other http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 practice competencies: empowerment, program development, implementation and management, and use of effective small/large group processes. scott’s use of participatory processes in research and pedagogy, especially in health care, is a strength of this article. jacqui akhurst, carolyn kagan, rebecca lawthorn, and michael richards community psychology practice competencies: perspectives from the uk competencies emphasized: all from a perspective informed by critical community psychology, jacqui akhurst and co-authors critique the philosophical and political underpinnings of concepts of competencies in higher education. further, they question whether participatory practice and learning, and ideals of social justice, can thrive alongside initiatives that break the complexities and processes of community psychology work into specific competencies. akhurst et al. predict: “whilst scra may not intend they [the practice competencies] be used for evaluation of accreditation standards, they will not be able to prevent this happening.” moreover, they are concerned that explicit recognition and discussion of values will be lost among discussions of competencies. akhurst et al. also argue that the complexities of dynamic, participatory, egalitarian work within communities can be presented to employers and others in ways that provide alternatives to the scra list. this perspective needs to be considered; it represents one pole of a dialectic that collins et al. (in these special issues) call the “competency-context dialectic.” i don’t agree that the practice competencies will inevitably lead to accreditation of programs or licensing of individuals. scra is clear on this point. yet i also believe that all of us in the field would agree that the usefulness of these competencies very much depends on the contexts of their use, and that community psychology practice is indeed a set of dynamic processes, involving many factors besides skills (especially values and power). to me, there is a practical need to recognize important skill areas for practice, and a need to address the importance of values, assumptions, and contexts of practice. there is room for paradox and synthesis here. some areas of synthesis in this dialectic appear in these special issues. for instance, articles by collins et al., henderson, and scott provide examples of participatory practice and pedagogy integrated with selected scra competencies, and langhout et al. examine the scra principle of ethical, reflective practice from the perspective of a critical, reflexive, anti-racist feminist praxis. isidro maya jariego competencies for community psychology practice in spain: standards, quality and challenges in social intervention competencies emphasized: all isidro maya jariego, a community psychologist in spain, presents a set of community psychology practice competencies developed at the universidad de sevilla, and used with graduate students there. this set of specific competencies follows the generic format of the european federation of psychological associations (europsy). maya jariego also compares the europsy and seville approach with the scra practice competencies in the u.s. the europsy system is oriented to accreditation of professional psychologists across all specialties. it is thus generic in focus. its competencies include: needs analysis; goal setting; assessment of individuals, groups, organizations, or situations; development of services to be offered, planning and implementation of person-oriented, situation-oriented, or other http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 interventions; evaluation of interventions; and communication of outcomes. maya jariego presents examples of reports in this format for fieldwork projects by students at universidad de sevilla, which includes community and organizational interventions. those examples resemble similar fieldwork projects in community psychology by students in the u.s. maya jariego notes that the europsy approach “is particularly useful to promote student reflection on the professional role. however, it is an exercise in meta-cognition and sometimes students find it difficult to identify what skills are involved in the development of certain specific activities.” maya jariego concludes that both the specific approach to competencies by scra, and the generic europsy approach, modified to include community and organizational assessments and interventions, can be useful for community psychology. this article is valuable for its international comparison of approaches to defining practice competencies. a strength is that it recognizes both the differences and the convergences of the europsy and scra approaches. tabitha underwood a career on the fringe of academia competencies emphasized: ecological perspectives; empowerment; sociocultural and cross-cultural competence; program development, implementation and management; community inclusion and partnership tabitha underwood describes her 13 years of work in higher education civic engagement positions and university-community partnerships, which have provided her with a career involving teaching, research, and practice. civic engagement in higher education includes community service, service learning, internships, communitybased research, co-curricular service, political advocacy, and other forms of universitycommunity partnerships. (the actual nature of this work varies by university.) underwood compares recent descriptions of the most common professional roles of persons holding these positions with the scra competencies for community psychology practice, finding five areas emphasized or widely noted in both fields (sociocultural/cross-cultural competence; community inclusion and partnership; program development, implementation and management; empowerment, ecological perspectives). however, she also describes how a number of other scra practice competencies are inherent in higher education civic engagement work. two scra competencies have been especially valuable for underwood in her work: (a) ecological perspectives; and (b) community education, information dissemination and building public awareness. higher education community engagement positions provide a career alternative for community psychologists. from her seasoned perspective, underwood discusses the engaging and challenging aspects of this field for community psychologists. her firstperson account is a strength of this article. gregor sarkisian and sylvie taylor challenges and strategies in promoting empowering academic settings for learning community psychology practice competencies competencies emphasized: all foundational principles; program development, implementation and management; prevention and health promotion; small group processes; resource development; consultation and organizational development; collaboration and coalition development; information dissemination and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 building public awareness; program evaluation gregor sarkisian and sylvie taylor, faculty members in the master’s program in applied community psychology at antioch university los angeles, describe opportunities for learning the scra competencies in their program, as well as the challenges involved. students in the antioch program are primarily adult learners with prior experience in community work, principally women, often identify as a member of an ethnic minority group, and are usually employed outside the program (55% fulltime). through courses and supervised fieldwork, students have opportunities to develop to the experience level in most areas of the practice competencies, as students choose. these areas include the “competencies emphasized” list above, which are mostly in the categories of foundational principles, community program development and management, and community and organizational capacity-building. coursework prepares students to the exposure level in other competencies. four of the core courses have a fieldwork component; a required fieldwork course follows these. a theme of their article is that master’s programs can help students achieve the experience level of many competencies, leaving the expertise level to doctoral programs. students in the antioch program often face challenges in learning at the master’s level. an especially valuable part of this article is that sarkisian and taylor describe these challenges and faculty strategies for addressing them. the challenges for faculty include: (a) recognizing and embracing diverse student learning styles; (b) facilitating space for respectful academic dialogue and debate; (c) deepening understanding of human diversity and social oppression, especially for students with little lived experience with these issues; (d) raising awareness of the paradoxical nature of organizations, social systems and institutions; (e) enabling students to articulate an ecological perspective; (f) enabling students to become effective collaborators. sarkisian and taylor provide a variety of teaching, learning, and supervisory strategies for addressing each of these challenges. a strength of this article is its detailed descriptions of fieldwork experiences in a master’s program, and its attention to pedagogy. nuria ciofalo, susan james, and mary watkins reflections on the assessment of practice competencies competencies emphasized: all additional emphasis: qualitative assessment of competencies nuria ciofalo and co-authors teach in the pacifica graduate institute’s depth psychology program, in its community psychology, liberation psychology, and ecopsychology specialization that integrates these three fields. in their article, these authors describe their work of integrating the scra practice competencies with their program’s emphases on depth psychology and ecopsychology. these multiple emphases envision well-being at individual, family, community, environmental, and cultural levels. in their article, ciofalo et al. focus on the issues in developing qualitative assessments of student learning, using the scra practice competencies along with capacities based on depth psychology and ecopsychology. the program developed these assessments to reflect the program’s core values, and to recognize the complexities of cautiously assessing learning that is to be transformative, sustainable, and interdisciplinary. they used qualitative http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 research methods, including content analysis and narrative analysis, to assess students’ self-reflective essays, narratives that students provide in a yearly program newsletter, eportfolios, and video documentaries. faculty retreats periodically evaluated the meaning of these assessments, refined them for future assessments, and used findings from continuing assessments over time to refine the design and teaching of courses and fieldwork experiences. the authors describe and provide examples of the qualitative and quantitative assessments and analyses, and discuss the usefulness and limitations of this approach for the program’s mission. a strength of this article is its use of qualitative assessments and concern with using the scra competencies in ways consistent with program orientation and values. notes: the articles by akhurst et al., arcidiacono, ciofalo et al., kuperminc et al., maya jariego, meissen et al., and wolfe & price concerned the competencies list as a whole, and i only listed them here if they also emphasized specific competencies. if i believed that any article was especially relevant to a specific competency, but the authors did not explicitly include that competency in their discussion, i included it above in brackets. http://www.gjcpp.org/ overview of articles in the special issues james h. dalton bloomsburg, pennsylvania, usa see table 1 for a list of articles organized by competencies that each article covers. gabriel kuperminc, wing yi chan, scot seitz, christyl wilson infusing community psychology practice competencies into doctoral training competencies emphasized: all two strengths of this article are its detailed descriptions and materials of the practicum fieldwork and advisement processes, and kuperminc’s excellent suggestions for future revisions of the scra list. regina day langhout, erin ellison, danielle kohfeldt, angela nguyen, jesica siham fernandez, janelle m. silva, david l. gordon, jr., stephanie tam rosas competency emphasized: ethical, reflective practice dawn x. henderson, jameika r. matlock, dayquan garrett, and christopher clark victoria scott jacqui akhurst, carolyn kagan, rebecca lawthorn, and michael richards community psychology practice competencies: perspectives from the uk competencies emphasized: all isidro maya jariego competencies emphasized: all tabitha underwood a career on the fringe of academia gregor sarkisian and sylvie taylor nuria ciofalo, susan james, and mary watkins reflections on the assessment of practice competencies competencies emphasized: all microsoft word enscott & maryman social media to complement advocacy final-formatted.docx using social media as a tool to complement advocacy efforts j. taylor scott j’vonnah maryman university of north carolina at charlotte wichita state university keywords: advocacy; communication; empowerment; social media author biographies: j. taylor scott is a community psychology doctoral student in the health psychology program at the university of north carolina at charlotte. she consults on the communication strategies for the national prevention science coalition to improve lives and is a member of the society for community research and action’s public policy committee. her interests include child success and well-being, prevention of "rotten outcomes", and public policy and advocacy. j’vonnah maryman is a doctoral candidate in the community psychology program at wichita state university and holds a masters of public health from the university of kansas. she is a member of the society for community research and action’s public policy committee. her interests include connecting public health and community psychology strategies to address health disparities, program planning, and public policy and advocacy. recommended citation: scott, j.t., maryman, j. (2016). using social media as a tool to complement advocacy efforts. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(1s), pages 1-22. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 using social media as a tool to complement advocacy efforts abstract community practitioners must leverage a variety of tools in order to promote and advocate for social change. social media are relatively innovative tools for informing and mobilizing communities in an advocacy effort. as part of a coordinated effort, social media align well with the principles of community psychology by enabling individuals to contribute to participatory dialogue about social issues, collaborate on change efforts, and establish a sense of community. these tools can enhance supporters’ advocacy engagement and can help sustain efforts in the midst of inevitable challenges. however, social media alone are not sufficient for promoting social change, but should be used to enhance traditional organizing strategies. in addition to synthesizing literature across empirical and practitioner (e.g., communication consultants) sources, real-world examples are provided to illustrate how social media can enhance advocacy efforts. this article presents findings from an extensive literature review to serve as a resource for community practitioners on ways to enhance advocacy efforts with social media. introduction community psychologists engage in processes to transform and influence decisions within political, economic, and social systems. traditional advocacy approaches include establishing relationships with legislators, creating and disseminating research syntheses (e.g., white papers), developing policy position statements or fact sheets, and sharing information through media outlets (e.g., opinion editorials, press releases; maton, humprheys, jason, & shinn, in press). while these strategies have demonstrated effectiveness on local, state and national levels and in different policy domains, there is no true blueprint to moving social policy forward. public policies continue to be influenced by multiple factors (bogenschneider & corbett, 2010), which may vary depending on temporal context. for example, the widespread use of the internet has given rise to the “connected age,” as society has increased reliance on social media to communicate and build relationships with one another (fine, 2006). community psychologists must adapt to the evolving communication patterns of society and adjust their strategies according to the communication needs of society. agility and flexibility are essential because a stagnant organizing strategy will result in tepid support (fine, 2006; kanter & paine, 2012; satariano & wong, 2012). broadly defined, social media are a set of interactive digital tools that connect groups of individuals interested in dialogue or information (lovejoy & sexton, 2012). when used for advocacy, these tools help to build a network of supporters (see fine, 2006; lovejoy & saxton, 2012). social media are also referred to as web 2.0 because of their interactive capacity, and should not be mistaken for the world wide web, which does not enable interactions (edwards & hoeffer, 2010). there are numerous social media tools, including blogs, videos, and social networks (brunson & valentine, 2010; edwards & hoeffer, 2010; kanter & paine, 2012). each tool has unique features that have the potential to expand the reach of information across individuals, organizations, and communities, as communications can spread quickly among a vast group of people (bakshy, rosenn, marlow & adamic, 2012; fine, 2006; kanter & paine, 2012; satariano & wong, 2012). furthermore, social media expand the reach and inclusivity of an advocacy campaign by enabling supporters to global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 join a cause regardless of geographic location, timing, or disability (satariano & wong, 2012). although social media use has apparent benefits, many community practitioners are uneasy about how and when to leverage these tools in their work (brunson & valentine, 2010). community practitioners’ abilities to integrate social media in social change efforts may relate to the sprawl of the literature base across disciplines and between empirical and practitioner (e.g., consultant) recommendations. in an effort to improve community psychologists’ familiarity and comfort with social media, the following paper reviews diverse sources across disciplines to describe how social media can complement traditional advocacy and social change efforts. the present review informed the development of a conceptual framework to describe how advocacy-related goals and community psychology values can be supported by social media. the paper integrates examples of social media use in social change movements, largely focusing on the united states (u.s.) because of the availability of research and practice recommendations generated in this country. it is important to note that policy processes and civic engagement norms vary tremendously among political climates (e.g., social media use is constrained by government laws in many arab countries; ghannam, 2011), which may have an impact on the effectiveness of social media and advocacy strategies. as such, an effort was made to include examples of work across international boundaries; however, much more empirical work is needed to understand how socio-cultural and political contexts may play a role in shaping the successful use of social media in social change efforts. social media and advocacy efforts that use social media in isolation are not likely to be successful; however, social media can augment organizers’ existing strategies for communicating about public issues, building relationships and collaborations with supporters, and encouraging greater involvement among supporters (fine, 2006; kanter & fine, 2010). moreover, social media may supplement a range of offline tactics (e.g., events or protests; face-to-face community building; brunson & valentine, 2010; satariano & wong, 2012). offline strategies may be particularly important for engaging segments of the population who prefer traditional methods of communication (e.g. cell phone); however, traditional contact information (e.g., phone number, address) may be subject to change, and social media help overcome that challenge by increasing the number of available channels for communication (thackeray & hunter, 2010). overall, offline and online approaches should be used in combination to enhance the effectiveness of a social change effort. previous research has noted that the combined use of social media and traditional organizing approaches create a “hybridity between physical and virtual space” (penney & dadas, 2014, p. 80). this was exemplified in the occupy wall street (ows) movement, which utilized twitter, a micro-blogging social network site used for information sharing, to solicit donations for on-theground needs, extend the reach of information shared during meetings, and allow participation among those not able to attend events (penney & dadas, 2014). the need to incorporate both online and offline approaches was also demonstrated in an international effort aiming to create social change around the global youth hiv/aids epidemic (vijaykumar et al., 2014). similar to hybrid online/offline organizing, social media blurs boundaries with traditional media (e.g., newspapers) as it supplements conventional channels by widely disseminating traditional media and expanding information with comments and alternative perspectives (liang et al., 2014; penney & dadas, 2014). when used to augment advocacy efforts, social media can bolster outreach efforts by global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 spreading information about a cause, reinforcing relationships among supporters, promoting participatory dialogue between group leaders and supporters, and strengthening collective action through increased speed of collaborative communication. moreover, these tools are highly cost-effective, allowing advocacy organizations to do more for less (brunson & valentine, 2010; orbar, zube, & lampe, 2012). in the past, communication between constituents and politicians was limited to letters, phone calls, or face-to-face meetings. in the digital age, social media expand communication channels with public officials, many of whom maintain facebook and twitter accounts, by allowing constituents to send brief messages and share information about public concerns. furthermore, research suggests that the widespread use of social media among u.s. citizens provides an outlet for civic engagement. for example, a study conducted by the pew institute found that 60% of americans use social network sites, and 60% of those individuals (39% of all american adults) report using social media to engage in at least one civic or political activity, such as following elected officials, joining political or social issue groups, encouraging others to take action, or posting content or opinions about socio-political issues (rainie, smith, schlozman, brady, & verba, 2012). social media advocacy framework while social media technologies have the potential to increase communication with advocates (guo & saxton, 2013), effective social change efforts require considerable engagement and action among supporters (fine, 2006). engagement occurs incrementally, and social media offer a “foot in the door” by recruiting new supporters and providing opportunities to build relationships over time to gradually increase supporters’ engagement (fine, 2006). for example, supporters may become aware of a public issue via social media, but organizers must strive to convert this awareness into actions that support the cause. this incremental strategy aligns well with what kanter and paine (2012) characterize as a “ladder of engagement,” which depicts engagement as a continuum ranging in type and intensity. low-level engagement behaviors include “clicking” and sharing; moderate behaviors include participating in electronic calls to action (e.g., emailing a representative, signing a petition); and high-level engagement behaviors extend beyond the digital platform (e.g., volunteering, donations) and reflect the actions that social movements most strive to promote among their supporters. social movement organizers must build relationships with supporters over time to increasingly foster individuals’ contributions (fine, 2006; kanter & paine, 2012). it is important to note that participation in an online advocacy network can expand and contract, and individuals vary in the degree to which they participate. the most passionate members carry a heavy burden of operational tasks, whereas less engaged members are critical for sharing information widely with their own social connections (fine, 2006). less engaged members are also essential for developing new advocates because these individuals are ripe for potential engagement in future efforts. moreover, all levels of participation are essential (kanter & paine, 2012). the degree to which organizers are able to incrementally move supporters from awareness to action may be affected by a number of factors, many of which are unknown because of a lack of research on implementing a quality social media campaign. to help illustrate how social media can complement advocacy efforts and contribute to shifting policy priorities, figure 1 was developed by the authors to highlight key points found in the existing, albeit limited, research on implementing quality social media campaigns. the framework was largely informed by empowerment and organizing theories (kloos, hill, thomas, wandersman, elias, & dalton, 2012) and social media global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 consultant publications (fine, 2006; kanter & paine, 2012). it asserts that social media campaigns must be implemented with quality to contribute to increasing critical awareness about an issue, building relationships with diverse supporters, and mobilizing them for meaningful action (e.g., advocacy), which ultimately is expected to contribute to shifting policy priorities. figure 1: social media theory of advocacy and policy change these objectives align with empowerment theory by emphasizing processes and interactions that elicit critical awareness, opportunities for meaningful participation, a place for supporters to engage with one another in solidarity, and settings that enable genuine inclusivity in collective action (kloos et al., 2012). information about the qualities that contribute to a successful social media campaign is provided throughout this paper, beginning with digital strategies to enhance critical awareness about a social issue, and ending with strategies to address common challenges to social media engagement. it is important to note that while the conceptual framework presented in figure 1 is intended to provide a schema describing mechanisms for shifting policy priorities, processes that shape policy are rarely as linear as a conceptual model might imply. some social change organizations or groups may experience multiple iterations in processes, or observe reciprocal or reversal in the relationships among model components. for instance, multiple iterations and recursive cycles between critical awareness and relationship building may be required prior to engaging members in meaningful actions. similarly, many cycles of meaningful action are likely required before social change efforts are anticipated to have meaningful impact on policy priorities. the model is further limited by a lack of understanding about contextual influences (e.g., social issue, level of policy at which efforts target change, or cultural and political climate). in general, there is limited research to indicate under which circumstances specific strategies for social media advocacy may be most effective. despite limited research, a few studies have highlighted the importance of context. for example, different social change efforts, proposition 8 (i.e., concerning same-sex marriage in california) and ows exhibited different predictors of success on youtube. scripted proposition 8 videos were watched more often than live events or monologues; whereas, this trend was not apparent for ows videos, which exhibited relatively equal distributions of engagement (i.e., views, ratings, comments) across video types (e.g., borrowed content, scripted versus live content; vraga, bode, wells, driscoll, & thorson, 2013). another study examining participation in an international hiv social change effort identified contextual factors that influenced online and offline social movement participation, including internet access and usage, social stigma, and institutional trust (vijaykumar et al., 2014). overall, the conceptual framework oversimplifies processes that shape policy priorities through social media advocacy because it does not account for contextual influences and proposes a logical order that quality social media presence critical awareness relationship building action policy priorities shift global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 may not hold true in all circumstances. although flawed, the conceptual framework serves to organize key mechanisms found to contribute to social action and policy change. the sections that follow describe how processes pertaining to the framework are expected to mobilize a network of advocates, and additional limitations to the conceptual framework are further discussed. critical awareness engaging supporters often begins with awareness and interest in a cause, and increasing interest drives the desire to actively contribute. for instance, joining a facebook group or following a twitter feed enables the individual to learn more information about the issue and increase their interest in supporting the cause (kanter & paine, 2012). furthermore, the interest of a few core supporters can enhance information dissemination when messages about the cause are shared beyond the reach of the organization and among personal social networks (e.g., friends, followers). information shared outside the organization’s network increases the likelihood that new supporters find and join the cause (satariano & wong, 2012). additionally, messages that engage the audience in reflecting on the sociopolitical forces that underlie community issues can promote critical awareness, an attribute that may encourage citizen participation and empowerment (kloos et al., 2012). supporters can engage in advocacy efforts in small but meaningful ways, including sharing messages through digital networks, which may be valuable for increasing public awareness and maintaining public attention to an issue (brunson & valentine, 2010; lovejoy & saxton, 2012). in fact, some activists involved in the ows movement reported that sharing second-hand information on social media (e.g., re-tweeting on twitter) was an important aspect of participation because these actions helped to recruit on-the-ground support and create an alternative information network, which was critical due to the selective coverage provided by mainstream media (penney & dadas, 2014). although information dissemination is a critical component of an organized effort, this function alone does not promote action. information dissemination involves one-way interactions that provide information, but often do not actively encourage supporters to contribute (lovejoy & saxton, 2012). with that intent, it may be disappointing that information sharing is the primary purpose of nonprofit social media communications (guidry, waters, & saxton, 2014; lovejoy & saxton, 2012). nevertheless, informationsharing activities may inadvertently present opportunities for engaging supporters. for example, information sharing tweets may be more likely to be shared (i.e., retweeted) and generate conversations (i.e., two-way communications) than messages aimed at fundraising or event promotion (guidry et al., 2014). rather than focusing on engaging supporters in dialogue or action, information sharing has the potential to increase awareness about an issue, build support for a cause, and expand a digital network of supporters. for example, a 2010 targeted twitter campaign has been credited in the efforts of bahrain citizens who mobilized to push for the release of an internet blogger accused of conspiring against the country. the use of the twitter social network to raise awareness of the blogger’s arrest led to his release (ghannam, 2011). a network of supporters is an essential component of social media functionality, as it brings together individuals and organizations that may share information and collaborate in change efforts (fine, 2006). the efficiency of networks is not a digital innovation– networks have always been essential to social change (kanter & paine, 2012). ultimately, digital networks seek to recruit individuals who will engage at some level to support the cause. a trait that may be highly sought after is opinion leadership, the degree to which an global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 individual enjoys promoting and discussing news and information among friends and followers (park, 2013; vraga, anderson, kotcher, & maibach, in press). these individuals reportedly use twitter to express opinions, engage in political conversations, seek and share information, and aim to mobilize followers; therefore, these individuals may be critical to engaging individuals in public and political processes who are outside the reach of an organization’s network (park, 2013). another study found similar patterns of engagement among republicans seeking to lead opinions about climate change on facebook. opinion leaders tended to consume and post more information, and were more likely to rely on news sources than informal sources compared to non-opinion leaders (vraga et al., in press). in short, engaging individuals who enjoy sharing opinions about news and information may increase the likelihood that messages reach individuals outside an organization’s network. overall, a robust digital network efficiently increases the capacity for disseminating information (fine, 2006), which has the potential to increase the number of “voices” communicating about specific issues (guo & saxton, 2013). issues and ideas have the potential for spreading very quickly through online social networks (satariano & wong, 2012); therefore information (including multimedia) shared via digital networks contributes to the phenomenon of topics becoming “viral” or widely shared internet content. information sharing can increase public awareness about an issue, and may reach outsiders who may choose to seek additional information by connecting or following the cause via social media. consequently, a relationship with a new supporter is initiated, which can enhance the advocacy effort (biddix, 2010). relationship building widely recognized as valuable assets for shifting attitudes and behaviors (guidry et al., 2014), relationships contribute to advancing supporters’ engagement, moving them from “passive bystanders to active supporters, to evangelists for their causes” (kanter & paine, 2012, p. 174). relationships can be enhanced by the interpersonal capacity of social media platforms, which enable genuine dialogue (i.e., two-way communication) that helps to develop mutual understanding and relationships between stakeholders (guidry et al., 2014). due to increasing recognition of the potential for social media to enhance relationships between government leaders and citizens, arab leaders once hesitant about social media have begun using social media to engage in two-way communication with citizens by participating in question and answer sessions (ghannam, 2011). in addition to conversational capacity, social media can promote collaboration among individuals across geographic distances and collective action by managing volunteers and calling supporters to action (lovejoy & saxton, 2012). ows activists used twitter to connect with one another across the nation, which helped to develop relationships that were essential for communicating about processes, challenges, planning, and strategy development (penney & dadas, 2014). aside from building relationships in digital space, social media also have the potential to bridge online and offline interactions. relationships are strengthened by in-person activities. social media cannot completely replace the value of face-to-face-interactions; however, virtual spaces can augment relationships and enable supporters to participate in organizing processes quickly and inexpensively (fine, 2006). among ows activists, the relationships established through twitter were strengthened by faceto-face, on-the-ground interactions at events and meetings (penney & dadas, 2014). the value of face-to-face interactions should not be discounted, thus highlighting the need for multifaceted approaches to relationship building. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 corroborating that need are noteworthy limitations of social media for building relationships, as compared to face-to-face interactions that are known to help develop personal bonds and relationships (e.g., brady, young, & mcleod, 2015; christens & collura, 2012; hara & huang, 2011). online-only organizing efforts limit the degree to which some individuals can participate as some supporters may not want or know how to engage in digital spaces (brady et al., 2015). recognizing these limitations, in-person activities may best strengthen relationships with supporters and provide opportunities for involvement to those who are not digitally inclined. however social media plays a role by initiating relationships through information dissemination about the cause, bridges communication among constituents when face-to-face interactions are not possible, and encourages offline engagement by broadcasting involvement opportunities and events (e.g., penney & dadas, 2014). digital relationships certainly do not substitute those built in-person, but augmenting those face-to-face meetings with emails, online discussion lists, conference calls, video conferences, or blogs will allow for a great deal of information to be shared and input to be gathered quickly and inexpensively (fine, 2006). the next sections describe how social media advocacy efforts seeking to build relationships with supporters can be enriched using participatory approaches and by processes that encourage sense of community. these concepts align well with community psychology values and can be bolstered by social media (brunson & valentine, 2010; fine, 2006). participatory approaches modern-day communications are often antithetical to participatory methods, which frequently resemble dictation or information sharing rather than discussion or conversation. these tendencies may be an artifact of the broadcast era during which organizations began to expect others to listen, but were not expected to listen in return (fine, 2006). consequently, society has become accustomed to one-way, unbalanced, inauthentic relationships. the status quo of communications has contributed to a “listening deficit” among organizations, resulting in little or no effort being taken among organizations to listen and understand their constituents. this can be a serious pitfall because listening, rather than pushing organizational message and strategies, aids in mobilizing supporters to action (fine, 2006). organizations listen to constituents by inviting and reinforcing dialogue, and responding transparently, which signals that the organization cares about the constituent’s perceptions and experiences. organizations that listen are better able to identify the most salient issues for members of the community, which allows responsiveness to constituents by keeping a “finger on the pulse of the community” (guo & saxton, 2013, p. 64). this information enables organizational strategic improvements, and the process of responding to supporters’ questions, concerns, or suggestions has the potential to enhance supporters’ satisfaction, trust, commitment, and engagement in the cause (fine, 2006; kanter & paine, 2012). social media strengthen the capacity for interactive, two-way conversations (brunson & valentine, 2010; guo & saxton, 2013; fine, 2006; lovejoy & saxton, 2012) that have the potential to reinforce the gradual increases in engagement that kanter & paine (2012) suggest are necessary for promoting action among supporters. for example, twitter messages that aim to directly communicate and build a sense of community among supporters tend to be most successful at generating conversations compared to those that merely disseminate information (guidry et al., 2014). this suggests interactions using social media may promote a moderate level of engagement that is a critical antecedent to high-level engagement behaviors (e.g., global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 volunteering, responding to calls to action; kanter & paine, 2012). conversations can also be used to create meaningful opportunities for participation (e.g., involvement in deciding goals and activities), as opposed to impersonal invitations to join a campaign or give a donation. in this article, “meaningful participation” is defined as citizen involvement in decision-making and access to resources that inherently shift power from leaders to constituents (kloos et al., 2012). highly meaningful forms of participation include opportunities for members to contribute to the group’s identity, goals, activities, or other decisions and are essential for enhancing buy-in and increasing enthusiasm to implement strategies to achieve group goals (brunson & valentine, 2010; fine, 2006). these engagement strategies align with participatory values in empowerment approaches by decentralizing decision-making and allowing greater participant control over processes that define the problem, solutions, and methods for achieving social change (kloos et al., 2012). although some leaders may find it counterintuitive to relinquish some authority, decentralized organized networks tend to be most efficient and sustainable. in contrast to traditional top-down organizing methods, participatory engagement promotes voluntary action among supporters, which requires fewer resources to carry out social change strategies (fine, 2006). while the leadership role remains highly important for promoting a common vision and mobilizing the network of supporters, it is expected that the benefits of participatory approaches far outweigh the costs. the more the network is engaged in meaningful participation, the stronger the network becomes (fine, 2006). in general, decentralized networks are more adaptable and resilient to change because the organization does not become unstable if one or more leaders step down. furthermore, individuals increasingly expect to be involved in decision-making processes because the internet has begun to decentralize power in all aspects of life (beato, 2014), which makes decentralized advocacy efforts adaptive to the demands of modern society. decentralized, participatory governance structures can take several forms. as a case in point, an organization seeking to address street sexual harassment involved women in a participatory digital story telling process using an online forum (dimond, dye, larose, & bruckman, 2013). the process enabled participants to share sexual street harassment experiences, which in turn helped to redefine the problem as symptomatic of a greater social issue – the position of women in society. the process not only promoted critical awareness among participants, but also helped to fundamentally shift perspectives about the nature of the problem (dimond et al., 2013). women recognized that the status quo restricts women from recognizing the phenomena as problematic, pushing them to believe that sexual street harassment is something they “had to accept” and should “ignore it and walk quickly away” (p.6). when women recognized the collective problematic nature of sexual street harassment, they began to shift away from “victim blaming” to identify potential solutions and attempt actions (e.g., posting about issue on facebook; confronting harassers). some participants felt empowered in the process and sought to further their activism role (dimond et al., 2013). sense of community participatory strategies that empower supporters to make meaningful contributions to a cause (e.g., decision-making processes) can aid in the development of another community psychology value – sense of community, which is characterized by perceived similarity in identity, shared emotional experiences, and interdependence (e.g., fulfilling one another’s needs; sarason, 1974). for instance, participatory approaches that demonstrate an organization has listened to supporters’ ideas and concerns promote global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 trust and bonds among supporters (fine, 2006). additionally, virtual meeting spaces that invite members to discuss experiences help form interpersonal connections and generate shared emotional experiences (kanter & paine, 2012), which was demonstrated by the participatory storytelling approach described by dimond and colleagues (2013). in addition to participatory approaches, digital settings can promote sense of community by explicating group values, norms, and visions. this explication, in turn can strengthen identification with the group by enhancing perceptions that members are tied by shared beliefs, which was demonstrated in a study among university students in eastern china (zhou, 2011). recognition of shared values and social support between members can bolster empowerment and engagement among group members by enhancing solidarity, promoting individual participation, and encouraging a sense of collective efficacy characterized by confidence in working together to effect change (kloos et al., 2012). in the context of advocacy, group members are bound by shared values related to a social issue, which draws individuals to join a virtual group, but does not automatically engender a sense of community. social media can provide virtual homes where sense of community may develop (e.g., lovejoy & saxton, 2012; zhang, 2010), but a digital space is not sufficient for facilitating a sense of community and member commitment – organizations must actively support sense of community by providing opportunities for relationship development both online and offline (fine, 2006). organizations can create settings that promote solidarity by providing opportunities for meaningful interactions and participation (kloos et al., 2012); however, interactions among members are critical for generating shared emotional experiences and developing sense of community (fine, 2006). therefore, organizations cannot “create” sense of community without supporters’ participation because organizations cannot generate emotions (fine, 2006). as one example of an online activist group that successfully promoted sense of community among supporters, moveon.org used social media to disseminate information, involve supporters in activities, and facilitate interaction. continuous online communication among supporters eventually helped moveon to grow a sense of community (hara & huang, 2011). facilitating interactions and continuous communication among supporters can be aided by digital information and communication technologies. these interactions help to develop sense of community over time by engaging members in meaningful interactions with one another and participation in decision making (obar et al., 2012). these opportunities promote a collective identity, create bonds that mobilizing participants to engage in collective action, and generate commitment for sustaining those actions (fine, 2006; hara & huang, 2011; koh, kim, butler, & bock, 2007). additionally, ows activists reported that informal interactions via twitter promoted a sense of community and solidarity by creating bonds between activists, boosting morale, and bridging interactions with faceto-face events (penney & dadas, 2014). mobilizing action volunteering and other forms of high-level engagement are an ultimate goal of organizers so that supporters get involved and contribute to a cause (fine, 2006). however, some social science scholars are skeptical about the degree to which online communities can promote such meaningful contributions because social media activism may “cheapen” political engagement by engaging supporters in low-cost efforts, dispiriting the public when their efforts are ignored, or by crowding out higher levels engagement. this phenomenon has been termed “slactivism” (see karpf, 2010). global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 concerns of slacktivism parallel those described by robert putnam (2000), who noted that declining trends in political participation (e.g., voting, engaging in political activities) were primarily attributable to generational differences and evolving technologies (i.e., television). the digital age may also contribute to evolving trends in civic engagement; however, there is little empirical support to suggest that the internet contributes to lower levels of political engagement. in fact, internet users tend to be more politically engaged than noninternet users. a meta-analysis has suggested that the internet may modestly support offline political participation, particularly when individuals consume online news or information about public affairs compared to merely discussing political views (boulainne, 2009). there are additional data to support a link between internet usage and increased civic engagement, such as the finding that facebook users are more likely to vote than others (hampton, goulet, rainie, & purcell, 2011). this trend may extend beyond voting behaviors, as a nationally representative survey revealed that 82-85% of social media users are active in some kind of voluntary group or organization, which is greater than the 75% national average. in general, those who use social media are more likely to join civic efforts compared to those who do not use the internet or social media (rainie, purcell, & smith, 2011). in whole, studies suggest that social media and internet use may contribute to meaningful forms of offline engagement; however, the research is limited by a lack of longitudinal designs. the primary use of cross-sectional data cannot be used to ascertain a temporal sequence to suggest social media usage may increase civic engagement (boulainne, 2009). other studies connect social media or internet use directly with engagement in social change efforts and conclude that information communication technologies appear to provide opportunities for modernday civic engagement. facebook groups are one mechanism for disseminating information that engages individuals and promotes later action. for example, college students who participate in political discourse through facebook groups tend to be more engaged in offline political actions (e.g., calling an elected official; conroy, feezell, & guerrero, 2012). in general, social media are becoming a popular feature of political engagement among americans (rainie et al., 2012). additionally supporting the link between online information and offline action is a study that found online recruitment efforts were reportedly more successful than offline efforts for advancing organizational membership and attendance at offline political protests (gervais, 2015). studies regarding ows have reported similar findings about the potential benefit of social media to offline engagement. those who participated in the ows via facebook or twitter were more likely to participate in offline ows events compared to a non-ows control group, even after accounting for individual differences, such as willingness to get involved in politics. in essence, those who used social media for low to moderate online engagement in the cause were more likely to be highly-engaged through related offline activities (garcía albacete, theocharis, lowe, & vandeth, 2013). furthermore, some ows activists have reported intentionally using twitter as an “e-mobilization” tool to share information about offline protest opportunities and facilitate offline action. it is expected that the speed and widespread distribution of information via twitter may have increased turnouts at ows protests (penny & dadas, 2014). these studies highlight the potential for social media to encourage meaningful offline political engagement, but modest forms of online engagement should not be discounted. action can be as simple as signing an epetition (fine, 2006). e-petitions in particular have demonstrated that small, collective efforts of many individuals have the potential global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 to create substantial impact. petitions have been used for organizing social change efforts for centuries, but digital tools complement this traditional strategy by expanding the reach to additional supporters (beato, 2014). change.org (n.d.a), an e-petition giant, reported over 5,000 of their petitions in 2014 were victories (i.e., proposed action was accomplished). signers are notified of these victories, which has the potential to transfer an individual’s moment of attention into a sense of accomplishment (beato, 2014). a particularly noteworthy example was the petition begun by the parents of trayvon martin, which promoted an international movement for racial justice and inspired millions to take action (beato, 2014). the petition asked that charges be brought against the shooter; later on, a florida state attorney filed second degree murder charges (change.org, n.d.b). despite the potential for social media to mobilize supporters, nonprofits may infrequently ask supporters to respond to calls to action. a study of a random selection of social work organizations engaged in advocacy found that non-profit social work organizations do not fully utilize social media. only 8.1% of tweets sent out were intended to call followers to action, even though these types of messages were more likely than other types of tweets to be shared (i.e., retweeted) and engage supporters in dialogue with the organization (guidry et al., 2014). if it is expected that online engagement is an important predecessor to offline engagement, advocacy groups must strategically engage supporters through effective messaging strategies, and increase the usage of calls to action as a resource for doing so. challenges and considerations as asserted in the overarching framework, implementing a quality social media campaign that successfully engages supporters requires substantial planning. up to this point, the paper has described how social media may promote incremental increases in supporters’ engagement, starting with disseminating information about issues, increasing critical awareness, and nurturing relationships among supporters and the organization. successful social media campaigns manage these tasks in a way that propels supporters to become activists and substantially contribute to and sustain the effort. however, none of this can be achieved without recognizing the inherent challenges of establishing a quality social media presence. the first step to establishing quality is allocating sufficient resources. while social media can reduce the cost of information dissemination and engage supporters (hara & huang, 2011), developing a “free” account on twitter or facebook is no panacea. quality campaigns require concerted time and thoughtful consideration. organizations that successfully use social media typically spend about two and a half hours per week on facebook alone (satariano & wong, 2012). dedicated time is important for being able to cultivate legitimate conversations (guidry et al., 2014), yet organizations may lack the staff to focus on this effort. at minimum, organizations should designate a webmaster to monitor for spam and rude language to ensure that inappropriate posts are removed quickly (brunson & valentine, 2010). resources are also needed for engaging an audience by maintaining a flow of posts (brunson & valentine, 2010), subscriptions for services that collect important data to inform strategies, and for extending the reach of messages via paid content promotion. promoted content, an explicit cost, can increase the dissemination of key messages, which may be critical for a campaign looking to gain visibility, support, and traction quickly (e.g., beato, 2014). in short, social media may provide efficient means for accomplishing advocacy-related goals (obar et al., 2012), but are not “free” because organizations and advocacy groups must dedicate substantive resources toward the development of an global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 effective social media campaign (satariano & wong, 2012). staff time is a salient need considering the struggle among many online groups to develop participation among a core base of members (lampe et al., 2011). for example, the benchmark for moderate success is engaging approximately 2% of members in online participation (brunson & valentine, 2010). this level of engagement may be due to a lack of personal connection, which can hinder virtual organizing (obar et al., 2012); however, connections can be supported by staff capacity to respond to members and provide opportunities for interaction that promote sense of community (e.g., conversations about shared values), which may enhance digital participation (fine, 2006; zhang, 2010). challenges to establishing a strong quality social media presence extend beyond resources. effective messaging strategies are also critical to addressing engagement challenges. organizers should begin a strategic plan by determining which individuals are important stakeholders who can influence key decision makers, clearly defining a target audience (e.g., based on age, primary purpose of internet usage information or entertainment, the use of certain tools, frequency of social media use), and outlining measurable goals (satariano & wong, 2012). using age as an example characteristic for targeting an audience, literature suggests that older audiences are dutiful information receivers and tend to rely on credible sources of information that align with their social groups or parties (wells, 2014). in contrast, younger audiences are less likely to engage in civic organizations, expect to participate in information sharing, and typically base involvement on personal interests rather than affiliations. therefore, participatory approaches are particularly valuable for organizations seeking to build relationships with the next generation (wells, 2014). a well-defined target audience can also guide the use of certain social media platforms that range in capacities, including starting conversations (e.g., blogs, newsfeed, videos), building social networks (e.g., facebook, twitter), and collaborating (e.g., wiki boards, google docs; kanter & fine, 2010). the chosen platform must be user-friendly for the target audience to create a virtual setting conducive to developing social bonds that allow members to fulfill one another’s needs (brunson & valentine, 2010; zhang, 2010); therefore, understanding the technical capacity and communication patterns of the target audience may aid with the selection of a social media platform or range of platforms. there are many other considerations regarding the use of specific social media platforms or tools that are beyond the scope of this article; however, the attached appendix (appendix i) provides a brief overview of several popular tools to highlight strengths and weaknesses pertaining to advocacy efforts. in general, various social media tools offer different capacities that complement one another, which was demonstrated by organizers aiming to relocate the society for social work research (sswr) conference in congruence with a local boycott regarding worker pay and working conditions (brady et al., 2015). the effort leveraged a variety of digital tools, beginning with an e-petition that demonstrated support among 1,200 individuals in 15 countries, and recruited supporters in further digital communication. organizers reported that different forms of social media were complementary such that youtube videos were disseminated via facebook, blogs described issues and featured personal stories, twitter helped raise issue awareness and build community using a common hashtag, and facebook enabled dialogue and mobilized advocates in disparate communities. the range of tools enabled communication among diverse supporters with varying technological capacities and helped to build trust and rapport among global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 supporters over time. organizers concluded that online efforts led to boots-on-the-ground organizing regarding sswr policies intended to avoid similar situations in the future (brady et al., 2015). although many examples highlight the potential for social media to engage and promote action among supporters, it is not always successful at doing so. offline action requires effort, and sometimes discussions do not lead to action (hara & huang, 2011). more research is needed to explicate under what conditions and which social media tools promote meaningful, offline action among supporters of a cause. for instance, there is much to learn about how social media platforms can successfully engage individuals in participatory approaches because so few individuals participate in online communication forums (brunson & valentine, 2010). moreover, it is unlikely that social media interactions will be as effective for promoting policy change as those occurring face-to-face (e.g., lobbying online versus inperson; hara & huang, 2011). in general, social media may support a successful organizing effort, but may not by itself lead to sustainable, long-term changes. on-theground action is necessary (brady et al, 2015). it is also important to note that successful social media campaigns may be affected by qualities of implementation that are difficult to measure (e.g., effective messaging). very little is known about the effectiveness of implementation strategies for facilitating participatory approaches, sense of community, or meaningful action, or about contexts in which certain strategies are most effective for moving supporters from passive followers to activists meaningfully engaged in online and offline action. overarching suggestions from communication consultants include a number of generally effective messaging strategies, such as regularly posting positive, relevant, short and easy-toread messages; using personal stories over statistics; and providing links for more information (kanter & paine, 2012; kidwai & imperatore, 2011; kanter, 2011). nevertheless, much more research is needed to understand the qualities of implementation that may be most successful for engaging supporters and promoting action. limitations though the work described in this paper highlights potential strategies for engaging audiences, much of the cited research in this paper has yet to be replicated, may not be generalizable, and most often does not support causality of relationships because of a tendency to rely on cross-sectional designs. the conceptual framework is limited by the lack of research regarding contextual factors contributing to the success of social media approaches. furthermore, assumptions of the proposed, simplistic conceptual framework may be contradicted in some circumstances. for instance, assuming that information dissemination contributes to critical awareness and initiating relationships may counter instances where relationships are built prior to engaging an individual in an advocacy effort. in particular, strong relationships may enhance receptivity to critical messages regarding politically charged issues such as gun violence. the conceptual framework also assumes that supporters will engage in participatory approaches if there are opportunities. however, participation is often limited in online efforts (brunson & valentine, 2010) and these approaches may be most successful among younger audiences (wells, 2014), whereas some audiences may be annoyed by interactive approaches. additionally, this article describes sense of community as an asset for building an active network of supporters; however, sense of community may also reduce the likelihood of recruiting diverse supporters (kloos et al., 2012), which may be exacerbated by self-selected involvement regarding social causes that align with an individual’s narrow range of interests (hara & huang, 2011). additionally, global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 sense of community can contribute to a “deadening conformity” (pp. 28; kloos et al., 2012). in contrast to the framework’s assumption that critical awareness and relationships are the necessary ingredients for successful engagement, conformity has the potential to promote or discourage meaningful action. at worst, norms of inaction may suppress meaningful action among individuals, even among those with whom organizers have built strong relationships. future directions most work carried out by community psychologists, regardless of the extent of the research, consists of change efforts that are bolstered by data-informed quality improvement strategies. however, the need for evaluating social media advocacy efforts is heightened by the lack of empirical evidence that informs effective strategies or best practices. consultants suggest that organizers should learn what is effective and appeals to the target audience by testing and evaluating strategies in action (kanter & paine, 2012). this requires patience and willingness to experiment and adapt over time (brunson & valentine, 2010). there is an overabundance of potential indicators that can be collected by an array of digital tools (e.g., cyfe, hootsuite), which necessitates the prioritization and specification of measurable goals to inform evaluation methods. moreover, progress on goals must be reviewed frequently to inform improvements and efficient resource allocation. for a complete review of tools, metrics, and analytic approaches, including content analysis and social network analysis, see kanter & paine (2012). in general, social media provides valuable feedback on communications that are not available through traditional media (e.g., newspapers do not measure “likes”), which enables organizations to modify and adapt strategies (obar et al., 2012). conclusion although social media have become increasingly relevant to social change efforts, community practitioners’ use of digital tools should be guided by concerted strategies and carried out using dedicated resources. strategic planning begins with goal definition, as groups should consider what they hope to accomplish long-term, identify steps to move toward the long-term goal, and then match appropriate tools to meet those goals (satariano & wong, 2012). community psychologists must recognize that social media cannot be used in isolation, but should augment traditional advocacy techniques to adapt to the demands of our evolving society. these tools align well with empowerment, participatory approaches, and sense of community, which are foundational values of community psychology practice (kloos et al., 2012). although challenges are to be expected, community psychology values and strategies for continuous quality improvement can guide the effective use of these tools to adapt to the latest social trends. references bakshy, rosenn, marlow, & adamic (2012, april). the role of social networks in information diffusion. in proceedings of the 21st international conference on world wide web (pp. 519-528). acm. doi: 10.1145/2187836.2187907 beato, g. 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(2012). creating an online strategy to enhance effective community building and organizing. in minkler (ed.), community organizing and community building for health and welfare (pp. 269-287). new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. thackeray, r., & hunter, m. (2010). empowering youth: use of technology in advocacy to affect social change. journal of computer-mediated communication, 15, 575-591. doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2009.01503.x vijaykumar, s., wray, r. j., buskirk, t., piplani, h., banerjee, j., furdyk, m., & pattni, r. (2014). youth, new media, and hiv/aids: determinants of participation in an online health social movement. cyberpsychology, behavior, and social networking, 17, 488-495. doi: 10.1089/cyber.2013.0124 vraga, e. k., anderson, a. a., kotcher, j. e., & maibach, e. w. (in press). issuespecific engagement: how facebook contributes to opinion leadership and efficacy on energy and climate issues. journal of information technology & politics. advance online publication. doi: 10.1177/1461444813487962 vraga, e. k., bode, l., wells, c., driscoll, k., & thorson, k. (2013). the rules of engagement: comparing two social protest movements on youtube. cyberpsychology, behavior, and social networking, 17, 133-140. doi:10.1089/cyber.2013.0117 wells, c. (2014). two eras of civic information and the evolving relationship between civil society organizations and young citizens. new media & society, 16, 615-636. doi: 10.1177/1461444813487962 global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 zhang, z. (2010). feeling the sense of community in social networking usage. engineering management, ieee transactions on, 57, 225-239. doi: 10.1109/tem.2009.2023455 zhou, t. (2011). understanding online community user participation: a social influence perspective. internet research, 21, 67-81. doi: 10.1108/10662241111104884 global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 appendix i the following paragraphs review relative strengths and weaknesses of several popular social media platforms and tools. twitter strengths weaknesses • rapid information exchange via condensed messages that provide concise headlines and additional information via links (bonetta, 2009; penny & dadas, 2014). • messages may be monitored by antagonists to the cause (e.g., ows; penney & dadas, 2014). • a great resource for information exchange among scientists and the public (bonetta, 2009; liang et al., 2014). • brevity limits the ability to promote meaningful dialogue (bonetta, 2009; penney & dadas, 2014). • recruiting a relatively specific population of working professionals (satariano & wong, 2012). • presents technological barriers that may intimidate newcomers (brady et al., 2015). • few barriers to access, as anyone can access posts, even without an account or approved connections between accounts (penney & dadas, 2014). • it is uncertain whether or not twitter promotes substantive engagement; only a small percentage of users have been found to take meaningful action (satariano & wong, 2012). global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 facebook strengths weaknesses • provides a colossal social network (64% of u.s. adults use it); offers a large, diverse audience across a range of ages (brady et al., 2015; mitchell, kiley, gottfried, & guskin, 2013). • younger people often prefer other social media platforms (brady et al., 2015). • it can be used to expand the reach of inperson relationships (biddix, 2010) and to share news and information (mitchell et al., 2013). • accommodates social interest groups by providing virtual group spaces, which aid the development of a sense of community (kanter & paine, 2012). facebook groups can serve multiple purposes: • most newsworthy content consumed on facebook pertains to entertainment and sports (mitchell et al., 2013), which suggests that the virtual setting is infrequently used for information exchange about social issues, and is more often used for information individuals find personally interesting or entertaining. o enhance meaningful actions among existing supporters through private groups; in contrast, public groups may enable token support via affiliation and public endorsements, which reduces the likelihood of engaging in meaningful supportive actions (kristofferson, white, & peloza., 2014). o enhance critical awareness and outreach to prospective supporters through public groups that broadcast appealing and shareable content that reaches individuals outside the organization’s network (vraga et al., in press). • messaging strategies are particularly important because facebook uses complex algorithms based on individuals’ interests, behaviors, and interactions (e.g., “likes”) that influence what information is available (facebook, n.d.). in other words, if posts are not clicked, liked, or shared, fewer facebook users will view the post. • discussions essential to participatory approaches (brunson & valentine, 2010) are more easily facilitated than on twitter because there is no character limit. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 videos strengths weaknesses • visual media can deliver powerful messages and is more accessible than written dialogues for some individuals, particularly those with intellectual disabilities (brady et al., 2015). • although sites like youtube create their own social networks, video dissemination is enhanced by robust information sharing networks such as twitter and facebook. • can be used to illustrate a nonprofit’s work or share information about specific issues, which is sometimes carried out by interviewing key informants or experts (brady et al., 2105; vraga et al., 2013; satariano & wong, 2012). • limited technical capacity reduces ability to leverage videos frequently and effectively. videos require cameras, editing software, and significant time for editing video footage (brady et al., 2015). • there are noteworthy uses of video for enhancing critical awareness in social movements (e.g., ows and proposition 8; vraga et al., 2103). • public perception of accuracy and credibility of videos broadly (brady et al., 2015), which may hinder perceived credibility of video efforts intending to disseminate information. e-petitions strengths weaknesses • enhance democratic values by creating an “incredible megaphone for everyday people” (pp. 21) and empower users with opportunities to create and promote content of concern to community members (beato, 2014). • ability to build relationships with supporters via digital communities, as the e-petitions enable endorsements but provide fewer opportunities for conversations through groups than social networks such as facebook or twitter. • seek to enhance critical awareness about a cause within a specific platform’s network and outside the network by reaching potential supporters via other communication channels (e.g., facebook, email). • ability to mobilize action among supporters, as the primary function is to demonstrate support for specific social change actions. • capacity to collect information about supporters, an initial step to forming a network (beato, 2010). • capacities mirror the “foot in the door” approach for incrementally engaging supporters described previously (fine, 2006) by introducing an issue, attempting to build awareness, and recruiting supporters for future engagement. microsoft word jenniferneal_phenomenonofinterestframeworktheory_formattedfinal.docx phenomenon of interest, framework, or theory? building better explanations in community psychology jennifer watling neal michigan state university keywords: theory, science, community psychology, framework author biography: jennifer watling neal, ph.d. is an associate professor of community psychology at michigan state university. her research and practice has focused on applying social network theories and methods to explore the dissemination of complex school-based interventions and to understand the contextual influences of schools and classrooms on children’s social behaviors. she has published theoretical work focused on applying social networks to advance empowerment frameworks and the ecological systems framework. she is also interested in the advancement of social network data collection and analytic methodologies in the field of community psychology. jennifer received the 2016 society for community research and action early career award in recognition of this work. recommended citation: neal, j.w. (2016). phenomenon of interest, framework, or theory? building better explanations in community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(2), pages 1-6. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). correspondence should be addressed to jennifer watling neal, michigan state university, department of psychology, 316 physics rd. rm. 127a, east lansing, mi, 48824. email: jneal@msu.edu. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 phenomenon of interest, framework, or theory? building better explanations in community psychology theories are a fundamental part of research. they provide guidance for the development of research questions and testable hypotheses as well as inform study methods and designs. however, in this issue, jason, stevens, ram, miller, beasley, and gleason (2016) raise important questions including: are prominent “theories” in community psychology really theories? how useful are these “theories” for developing specific predictions and testable hypotheses? and, how can the field continue to develop and test theories that promote its agenda of social change? to answer these questions, jason et al. (2016) identify and evaluate three “prominent theories” in community psychology – the ecological perspective (kelly, 1968), psychological sense of community theory (sarason, 1974), and empowerment (rappaport, 1981). based on their evaluation, they “conclude that community psychology theories have tended to function as frameworks” (p. 2). that is, these “theories” provide general guidance for what elements to study but fall short of offering specific predictions about the relationships between these elements. jason et al (2016) conclude that the lack of predictive and explanatory theories in community psychology hinders progress in both the research development of explanatory mechanisms of social change as well as practice initiatives to promote social change. there are several major contributions of this paper. first, jason et al (2016) should be commended for raising a much-needed conversation on the importance of theoretical development in the field of community psychology. second, jason et al (2016) contribute to the field of community psychology by clearly defining the roles of frameworks and theories in the research process. third, jason et al (2016) highlight the importance of theory for meeting the practice goals of our field. in order to alter community contexts in ways that create positive social change, we must have good theories that provide explanatory mechanisms to inform intervention. however, despite these major contributions, in this response i contend that the “prominent theories” identified by jason et al (2016) were never intended to be theories in the first place. instead, the ecological perspective was always intended as a framework and both psychological sense of community and empowerment are more appropriately described as phenomena of interest in the field of community psychology. if we dig deeper into the community psychology literature, many specific theories have been applied. while jason et al (2016) are right to call for more application of theory in community psychology, i provide a more optimistic view of the field’s current use of theory. phenomenon of interest, framework, or theory? jason et al (2016) draw a clear distinction between the role of theories and frameworks in research. the goal of frameworks is broad description, and as jason et al (2016) note, a framework “informs researchers of the types of elements that are considered important avenues of investigation” (p. 8). theories are narrower and can be conceptualized as nested within frameworks. the goal of theories is “describing, explaining, and predicting phenomena” (jason et al., 2016, p. 4). more specifically, the goal of community psychology theory is to identify “what specific aspects of context influence what specific aspects of individuals” and to articulate the mechanisms by which this influence occurs global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 (jason et al., 2016, p. 35). this distinction between frameworks and theories is helpful. however, although implicit in their conversation, jason and colleagues (2016) did not explicitly note what ties a framework and a theory together: a common phenomenon of interest. phenomena of interest are broader than either frameworks or theories. indeed, if theories are nested within frameworks, then frameworks are nested within phenomena of interest. as defined by rappaport (1987), phenomena of interest are “what we want our research to understand, predict, explain, or describe” (p. 129). frameworks seek to describe phenomena of interest while theories seek to predict or explain them. while jason et al (2016) argues that common “theories” in community psychology are really frameworks, i suggest here that these “theories” were never intended to be theories in the first place. instead, some (like the ecological perspective) were always intended to be frameworks while others (like psychological sense of community and empowerment) are phenomena of interest. moreover, community psychologists have applied theories to help explain these frameworks and phenomena of interest (see table 1 for examples). prominent “theories” identified in jason et al. phenomenon of interest framework example theory example ecological perspective (kelly, 1968) people in context (trickett, 2009) ecological perspective (kelly, 1968) overpopulation & underpopulation hypotheses (barker, 1968; brown et al., 2007) psychological sense of community (sarason, 1974) psychological sense of community (sarason, 1974) four dimensions of sense of community (mcmillian & chavis, 1986) social closure/bonding ties (coleman, 1988; putnam, 2001; neal & neal, 2014; townley et al., 2011) empowerment (rappaport, 1981; 1987) empowerment (rappaport, 1981; 1987) levels of empowerment (zimmerman, 2000) power-dependence theory (emerson, 1962; neal & neal, 2011; neal 2014) table 1: distinguishing phenomena of interest, frameworks, and theories ecological theory jason et al. (2016) start their evaluation of “theories” in community psychology with the four principles of kelly’s (1968) ecological perspective: interdependence, cycling of resources, adaptation, and succession. while they describe the ecological perspective as focused on “how people become effective and adaptive in different social environments” (jason et al., 2016, p. 8), the phenomenon of interest is actually a bit broader. as stated by trickett (2009), “the ecological perspective provides a framework for understanding people in community context and the community context itself.” like jason et al (2016), trickett (2009) identifies the ecological perspective as a framework rather than a predictive theory. this framework keeps company with a number of other frameworks used in community psychology to understand people in context such as tseng and seidman’s (2007) systems framework for understanding social settings global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 or bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems framework. if we start with the broader phenomenon of interest that the ecological perspective is trying to explain – people in community context – we do not need to look far to find examples where predictive theories have been applied. for instance, in his overpopulation and underpopulation hypotheses, barker (1968) offered a theory about the relationship between the number of members in a setting, the number of roles in a setting, and member participation in that setting. in overpopulated settings where the number of members exceeds the number of roles, members are predicted to participate less in the setting. in underpopulated settings where the number of roles exceeds the number of members, members are predicted to participate more in the setting. these hypotheses have been tested in the community psychology literature, including recently within the context of consumer-run organizations by brown, shepard, wituk, and meissen (2007). psychological sense of community jason et al (2016) next evaluate sarason’s (1973) psychological sense of community as a potential “theory” in community psychology. however, others have described psychological sense of community as a phenomenon of interest for community psychology (e.g., riger, 1993). indeed, akin to rappaport’s (1981) definition of phenomenon of interest, psychological sense of community describes a feeling that individuals experience (e.g., interdependence with the community) that community psychologists would like to explain. in the community psychology literature, frameworks have been developed to help specify the dimensions or elements of psychological sense of community to which community psychologists should attend. for example, although mcmillan and chavis’ (1986) describe their four dimensions of sense of community as a theory, these dimensions are outlined with the primary goal of advancing community psychologists’ ability to operationalize and explore this phenomenon of interest. these dimensions could accurately be described as a framework that has informed the measurement of sense of community (e.g., peterson, speer, & mcmillian, 2008). beyond frameworks that inform the measurement of sense of community, theories can help explain the mechanisms by which individuals come to experience a sense of community. in particular, theories from the social capital literature on the role of network closure (e.g., coleman, 1988) or bonding ties (e.g., putnam, 2001) suggest that psychological sense of community occurs when individuals form tightly-knit, within group relationships (neal, 2015). these theories provide testable hypotheses that individuals who are situated in closed networks where everyone knows each other are more likely to experience high levels of psychological sense of community. community psychologists have begun to apply these theories in discussions of psychological sense of community (e.g., neal & neal, 2014; townley, kloos, green, & franco, 2011) although empirical tests are still needed. empowerment jason et al (2016) also evaluated empowerment as a potential “theory” in community psychology. however, from the onset, rappaport (1987) was clear that he viewed empowerment as a phenomenon of interest for community psychology, not a theory. in his own words: “a proper focus of theory for community psychology can be summarized, in a word, as empowerment. put in its simplest terms, empowerment is the name i give to the entire class of phenomena that we want our research to understand, predict, explain, or describe” (rappaport, 1987, p. 129). he then goes on to explore possible frameworks and theories that might address empowerment. since rappaport (1981, 1987) declared empowerment as a significant phenomenon of interest for global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 community psychology, others have developed frameworks to describe this phenomenon. for example, zimmerman (2000) delineates empowerment into empowering processes (i.e., activities that promote empowerment) and empowered outcomes (i.e., evidence of empowerment). moreover, he describes how empowering processes and empowered outcomes can be explored at the individual, organizational, and community levels. beyond these general frameworks, community psychologists have offered predictive theories for how to facilitate both empowering processes and empowered outcomes. for example, neal and neal (2011) employed social exchange theory – specifically emerson’s (1962) powerdependence theory – to clarify the role of power in empowerment and to make predictions about when individuals are most likely to experience power over resources (a common hallmark of empowerment, see riger, 1993). this theory suggests that an individual’s power over resources (and consequently, empowerment) can be predicted by two things: (1) does the individual have resources that others in his/her network desire? and (2) within a resource exchange network, how many sources do others have for this desired resource? when individuals have a resource that others desire and there are few other sources for this resource, they are predicted to experience higher levels of empowerment. moreover, neal (2014) recently extended this theoretical work to consider how powerdependence theory could be applied to understand and predict empowering settings. next steps for theory in community psychology research and practice if we first specify the phenomena of interest in our field (i.e., people in context, psychological sense of community, and empowerment), it is possible to dig just a bit deeper into the community psychology literature and locate the application of specific theories. this implies that the state of theory in community psychology may not be as dire as jason et al (2016) suggest. however, the conversation started by jason et al (2016) is still critical and offers important next steps for research and practice in community psychology. first, it is important for community psychologists to consciously distinguish between phenomena of interest, frameworks, and theories. each plays a specific role in informing our research and practice. phenomena of interest provide a focus for our work while frameworks help refine and describe this focus. theories offer the unique ability to predict associations between relevant constructs and to provide explanatory mechanisms for these associations. second, as jason et al (2016) argue, it is important to ensure that we intentionally move beyond applying frameworks to the application of theory in our research and practice. this application of theory is essential for explaining and predicting phenomena of interest. in the cases described in this reaction piece, community psychologists have applied predictive theories from other disciplines including environmental psychology (e.g., barker, 1968) and sociology (e.g., coleman, 1988; emerson, 1962). drawing on the contributions of other fields is appropriate given the interdisciplinary nature of our field (bennett, anderson, cooper, hassol, klein, & rosenblum, 1965), and community psychologists should carefully explore predictive theories developed in other disciplines that might help explain key phenomena of interest. however, as noted by jason et al (2016), community psychologists should also consider opportunities to develop specific theories when there is a void in the interdisciplinary literature. if we take deliberate steps to include theory in our work, we stand a better chance at building better explanations of the phenomena of interest at the heart of community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 references barker, r.g. (1968). ecological psychology: concepts and methods for studying the environment of human behavior (pp. 5-34). stanford, ca: stanford university press. bennett, c.c., anderson, l.s., cooper, s., hassol, l., klein, d.c., & rosenblum, g. (1966). community psychology: a report of the boston conference on the education of psychologists for community mental health (pp. 1-30). boston: boston university. brown, l.d., shepard, m.d., wituk, s.a., & meissen, g. (2007). how settings change people: applying behavior setting theory to consumer-run organizations. journal of community psychology, 35, 399-416. doi: 10.1002/jcop.20155. emerson, r.m. (1962). power-dependence relations. american sociological review, 27, 31-41. kelly, j.g. (1968). towards an ecological conception of preventive interventions. in j.w. carter, jr. (ed.), research contributions from psychology to community mental health (pp. 75-99). new york: behavioral publications. jason, l.a., stevens, e., ram, d., miller, s.a., beasley, c.r., & gleason, k. (2016). theories in the field of community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice. mcmillan, d. w., & chavis, d. m. (1986). sense of community: a definition and theory. journal of community psychology, 14, 6-23. neal, j.w. (2014). exploring empowerment in settings: mapping distributions of network power. american journal of community psychology, 53(3/4), 394-406. doi:10.1007/s10464-013-9609-z. neal, j.w., & neal, z.p. (2011). power as a structural phenomenon. american journal of community psychology, 48, 157-167. doi:10.1007/s10464-010-9356-3. neal, z.p. (2015). making big communities small: using network science to understand the ecological and behavioral requirements for community social capital. american journal of community psychology, 55, 369-380. doi: 10.1007/s10464-015-9720-4. peterson, n.a., speer, p.w., & mcmillan, d. (2008). validation of a brief sense of community scale: confirmation of the principal theory of sense of community. journal of community psychology, 36, 6173. doi: 10.1002/jcop.20217. putnam, r.d. (2001). bowling alone: the collapse and revival of american community. new york, ny: simon & schuster. rappaport, j. (1981). in praise of paradox: a social policy of empowerment over prevention. american journal of community psychology, 9, 1-25. rappaport, j. (1987). terms of empowerment/exemplars of prevention: toward a theory for community psychology. american journal of community psychology, 15, 121-148. riger, s. (1993). what’s wrong with empowerment. american journal of community psychology, 21, 279-292. sarason, s. b. (1974). the psychological sense of community; prospects for a community psychology. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. townley, g., kloos, b., green, e.p., & franco, m.m. (2011). reconcilable differences? human diversity, cultural relativity, and sense of community. american journal of community psychology, 47, 69-85. doi:10.1007/s10464-010-9379-9. trickett, e.j. (2009). community psychology: individuals and interventions in community context. annual review of psychology, 60, 395-419. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.60.110707.1635 17. zimmerman, m.a. (2000). empowerment theory: psychological, organizational, and community levels of analysis. in j. rappaport & e. seidman (eds.) handbook of community psychology (pp. 43-63). new york: plenum. global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 do others understand us? fighting game community member perceptions of others’ views of the fgc crystal n. steltenpohl, jordan reed, and christopher b. keys author biographies: crystal steltenpohl, is an assistant professor of psychology at the university of southern indiana. she holds an ma in applied psychology from southern illinois university carbondale and a phd in community psychology from depaul university. she is a co-founder of the online technologies lab, which studies the way people interact with and through technology. the online technologies lab received a scra community mini-grant in 2017 to conduct interviews at a fighting game tournament to explore fighting game community members’ sense of community, social responsibility, and reactions to other fighting game community members’ helpful and harmful behaviors. jordan reed, is a graduate student in the community psychology program at depaul university. he is a founding member of the online technologies lab, receiving a scra community mini-grant with dr. steltenpohl. he examines metastereotypes and community prototypes held by members of the fighting game community. christopher keys, is professor emeritus and former chair of the psychology departments at the university of illinois at chicago and depaul university. he was also the founding associate dean for research and faculty development in the college of science and health at depaul. a fellow of apa, mpa, and scra, chris served as president of the society for community research and action. he has received the scra distinguished contribution to community psychology theory and research. chris is a co-founder of the online technologies lab. chris enjoyed playing video games when his sons were growing up. recommended citation: steltenpohl, c. n., reed, j., & keys, c.b.(2018). do others understand us? fighting game community member perceptions of others’ views of the fgc. global journal of community psychology practice, 9(1), 121. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 do others understand us? fighting game community member perceptions of others’ views of the fgc abstract our perceptions of how well others understand us and our communities can affect how we see ourselves, as well as how we perceive and interact with others. community psychologists may be interested in examining community meta-stereotypes, or how community members believe outsiders see them. the current mixed-methods study asked fighting game community (fgc) members about their perceptions of outsiders’ understanding of the fgc. we collected data from 496 fgc members, who provided descriptions of others’ perceptions of the fgc, reasons these perceptions exist, and their reactions to these perceptions. the data supported our hypotheses that fgc members feel misunderstood by non-members; gaming affiliation and media affiliation each had significant effects on fgc members’ ratings of others’ understanding. nongaming media were perceived as exhibiting especially high levels of misunderstanding. respondents’ negative comments focused on non-gaming media’s overreliance on outdated stereotypes and lack of research into the community. recommendations for community psychologists, researchers, fgc members, and media outlets are included, which may allow various stakeholders to explore key issues and sources of friction. finally, future research directions are discussed. community psychology has struggled over the years to define community (krause & montenegro, 2017). there has been less attention to how community members see outsiders and believe outsiders see them. interactions with outsiders may influence the ways people think about and identify with their communities (haslam, oakes, reynolds, & turner, 1999; torres & charles, 2004). if community members feel misunderstood by outsiders, it may be due to members’ beliefs that others hold negative stereotypes of them. community meta-stereotypes are views held by community members about outsiders’ views of that community. meta-stereotypes can have a profound effect on individual ingroup members and interactions between groups (klein & azzi, 2001). in-group members can accurately identify meta-stereotypes (lichtenberger, 2004; saroglou, yzerbyt, & kaschten, 2011; torres & charles, 2004), but can also exaggerate or minimize others’ perceptions of them (saroglou, yzerbyt, & kaschten, 2011). either scenario—exaggeration or minimization— can have implications for group relations. meta-stereotypes play a significant role in the identity development of in-group members and can negatively affect self-perceptions (haslam, oakes, reynolds, & turner, 1999; torres & charles, 2004). negative metastereotypes are associated with anxiety and a decrease in self-esteem for in-group members, as well as intergroup tension (finchilescu, 2010; vorauer, main, & o’connell, 1998). how out-group members see in-group members is particularly relevant if the views of more dominant groups are affecting those from marginal communities. those in the margins are more likely to be influenced by those in power than the other way around (lammers, gordijn, & otten, 2008; vorauer & sakamoto, 2008) and are less likely to have their perspectives shared and known by others (dello stritto, loomis, & allen, 2012). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 one of community psychology’s enduring values is to help those be heard who often are not (bond, serrano-garcia and keys, 2017; society for community research and action, n.d.). therefore, it would behoove the field to understand the meta-stereotypes held by marginal communities with which we work. one community with much experience in dealing with meta-stereotypes regarding larger outside communities is the fighting game community (fgc), a sub-group of the larger gaming community where people play games involving combat, such as tekken, mortal kombat, persona 4 arena, and super smash bros. the fgc is a niche within the gaming community; games in this genre comprised only 6.7% of games sold in america in 2015, compared to the largest group, shooters, which comprised of 24.5% (entertainment software association, 2016). fgc members may find the perceptions of groups dominant relative to them—groups like non-fgc gamers or other, non-gaming individuals—relevant, and may be easily able to identify stereotypes these outsiders have about fgc members. virtually no gamer surveyed by dial (2013) believed violence and gaming are associated; however, they were aware others held those beliefs. parents tend to associate their children playing video games with more conduct and peer problems and less prosocial behavior, but their children do not make these same associations (lobel, granic, stone, & engels, 2014). being aware of these negative perceptions or stereotypes about gaming may affect players’ willingness to be associated with gaming communities. despite popular belief, online gaming may provide opportunities for shy individuals to generate new friendships and strengthen old ones (kowert, domahidi, & quandt, 2014). more specifically, the fgc may facilitate social interaction between players and allow for the formation of social capital among players from diverse backgrounds (kong & theodore, 2011). its roots in arcades may have created an environment inclusive of people of color (bowman, 2014). this inclusiveness is contradicted by games’ often stereotypical or racist portrayals of some of the otherwise diverse cast of characters (demby, 2014). moreover, tournament enrollment data suggest less than 5% of competitive fgc players are female (kong & theodore, 2011). a few well-known players have received attention for engaging in domestic abuse (schreier, 2013) or arguing sexual harassment is inherent to the fgc (hamilton, 2012), which may serve to reinforce negative stereotypes held by outsiders. some fgc members insist players who engage in these negative behaviors do not reflect fgc values and denounce both the players and behaviors, while others argue such behavior is inherent to the fgc and is why the community is not more diverse. regardless how accurate or inaccurate the fgc’s image is, this complicated image may have a stifling effect on the community. some women may feel less comfortable engaging with the fgc. then, some outsiders may view the fgc as inherently unwelcoming toward women. in turn, more women may become more uncomfortable with the fgc. the cycle continues, fulfills itself and strengthens. communities may hold different metastereotypes for different out-groups. nonbelievers may distinguish between the stereotypes catholics or muslims may have of them, if there is reason to believe those stereotypes would differ in content or severity. whether fgc members would distinguish between the stereotype(s) those in the wider (i.e., non-fgc) gaming community and non-gamers hold is unclear. however, an intuitive anticipation of experiences congruent with intergroup contact theory (pettigrew, 1998) suggests other gamers who do not play fighting games http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 may be seen as more understanding of the fgc than non-gamers. would fgc members differentiate between stereotypes they believe individuals hold and those held by the media? we may be able to infer their feelings from previous research. in interviews with fgc members, harper (2010) noted a “community perception of the press as insincere and lacking in genuine interest” (p. 65). some exasperation with games media may come from the gaming community’s frustration over the role and expectations of games journalists. some games journalists see themselves as traditional journalists, while others describe themselves as commentators or bloggers, who have a very different set of responsibilities to their audience (fisher, 2012). journalists tend to be held to higher standards accuracy and allowing all sides of an issue to be appropriately reported. in contrast, bloggers and commentators may have more leeway to be opinionated. to slightly modify a quote from the big lebowski¸ gaming-related bloggers and commentators are in a “better” position to respond to gamers’ critiques about fairness and completeness with, “yeah, well, that’s just like, my opinion, man” (coen & coen, 2009). gaming-related media may be considered ultimately more understanding than mainstream media. williams (2003) found time, newsweek, us world news & report, and the new york times have all historically characterized video games as a social threat (mckernan, 2013). on the other hand, kotaku (a popular gaming outlet) treated gaming as a valuable form of artistic expression and explored a broad range of gaming-related topics. kotaku presented critiques of the negative views about the gaming community held by influential public figures and institutions including politicians, academia, mainstream media outlets, and even other video game media outlets. fgc members may not trust non-gaming media due to the “games cause violence” narrative seen throughout media coverage of psychological research since the 1990s. the media often forms tenuous connections between video games and what sometimes feels like anyone who has committed a notable violent crime. mainstream news outlets suggested adam lanza, the gunman involved in the sandy hook massacre, may have been influenced by video games (orr & milton, 2013; twenge, 2012); others include red lake shooter jeff weise (de, 2005), aurora shooter james holmes (stevens, 2012), and rep. gabrielle gifford’s shooter, jared lee loughner (berzon, emshwiller, & guth, 2011). gaming news sites largely discount articles linking violent criminals to video games, and, unlike many mainstream media outlets, publish about studies with null or contradictory findings (karmali, 2013; schreier, 2015). taking all of this together, fgc members may feel more understood by individuals rather than the media. outsiders closer to the fgc (e.g. people who play non-fighting games) may be perceived as more understanding than those who do not play games at all. to this end, we designed an exploratory mixed methods study examining fgc members’ perceptions of outsiders’ understanding of the fgc. we hypothesize the following for our quantitative data: • fgc members do not feel understood by outsiders, and • fgc members perceive varying levels of understanding from outsiders, such that: o those with gaming affiliation are perceived as more understanding than those without gaming affiliation, and that individuals will be perceived as more understanding of the fgc than those with media affiliation. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 for our qualitative data, our research questions are: • what stereotypes do fgc members think exist for their community? • in the views of fgc members, do the stereotypes held by gaming group and by media group differ? put another way, for example, will the stereotypes about fgc members held by nongamers be the same as those held by the non-gaming media? • what reasons do fgc members give to explain why these stereotypes exist? • how do fgc members react to these stereotypes? based on our experiences with the fgc, we anticipate fgc members largely agree the stereotypes others have about their community tend to be negative, but these stereotypes may vary across groups. fgc members may believe gamers have fewer or less severe negative stereotypes of the fgc than non-gamers. moreover, we anticipate fgc members think individuals are less negative in their stereotypes than the media. we also anticipate fgc members have a variety of explanations for why these stereotypes exist, but negative motivations will likely be attached more readily to the general (non-gaming) media. lastly, we anticipate fgc members will vary on the perceived effects of these stereotypes on the community, but the effects will largely be negative. we spent time trying to understand various responses to previous research by harper (2010) to find the best ways to build trust between us and the various fighting game communities. complaints about harper’s research included the cost of his book ($125 at the time) creating access issues for fgc members, and a presentation title (“everything you always wanted to know about fighting games (but were afraid to ask)”) inconsistent with how fgc members perceived his and his co-presenter’s actual knowledge and understanding of the community (miller, 2013; newsman, 2013). in addition, some fgc members took issues with perceived confirmation bias and the way with which the presenters positioned themselves (as simultaneously experts and non-experts) relative to the community (a curiosity rather than a “community to be loved” (miller, 2013)). some fgc members also disliked statements harper had made that were perceived as him downplaying the significance his research (and by extension, the fgc) has to academia. while there were some positive reactions from community members (fgcrequiem, 2014), the negative reactions motivated us to ensure we were open with the community about our intentions, cultivated an understanding of the fgc’s culture and history, and remained as non-judgmental as possible. we are not members of the fgc, and we have sought to have an open and engaged stance toward the community. some fgc members have perceived our efforts to highlight how the fgc is a unique and meaningful community to be in good faith (dpu_fgc_study, 2017). methods participants we obtained 496 fgc member responses to an online survey. of these, 360 fgc members provided complete responses on quantitative questions about understanding/misunderstanding of the fgc, while 338 and 328 members responded to qualitative questions about what portrayals of the fgc are and what they think of these portrayals, respectively. respondents were on average 24.4 years old (sd = 5.15, range 18-41) and reported varying levels of time spent on video games in general as well as fighting games more specifically. on average, respondents have been playing video games for 18.89 years (sd = 5.32, range 0-37) and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 characteristic n (%) race/ethnicity white/caucasian 188 (37.9) black/african (american) 21 (4.23) asian 31 (6.25) middle eastern 3 (0.60) latinx/hispanic 37 (7.46) multiracial/ethnic 43 (8.67) decline to answer 173 (34.88) gender identity male 309 (62.30) female 15 (3.02) trans/non-binary1 3 (0.60) decline to answer 169 (34.07) sexual orientation heterosexual 262 (52.82) lesbian/gay 12 (2.42) bi-/pansexual 39 (7.86) asexual 3 (0.60) sexually fluid/queer 1 (0.20) decline to answer2 179 (36.09) disability status yes3 34 (6.85) no 292 (58.87) decline to answer 170 (34.27) education status no schooling completed 1 (0.20) kindergarten/nursery school to 8th grade 1 (0.20) some high school, no diploma 12 (2.42) high school graduate, diploma or equivalent 52 (10.48) some college credit, no degree 109 (21.98) trade/technical/vocational training 12 (2.42) associate degree 27 (5.44) bachelor’s degree 92 (18.55) master’s degree 17 (3.43) professional degree 3 (0.60) doctorate degree 2 (0.40) declined to answer 168 (33.88) location united states 270 (54.44) canada 21 (4.23) mexico 3 (0.60) south america 1 (0.20) 3 (0.60) 1 (0.20) 27 (5.44) 4 (0.81) asia africa europe4 australia/new zealand declined to answer 166 (33.47) table 1: demographic information of fgc members http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 1numbers on trans identity may be underrepresented; we did not specifically ask respondents if they identify as trans. 2if a respondent answered in a manner where it was not possible to determine their sexuality (e.g. “male” may be interpreted as “i am interested in males” or “i identify as male”), we placed them in the decline to answer category. 3of those who provided information on their disability status, the most common responses were add/adhd, anxiety, depression, and asperger’s, while the most common physical disabilities were deafness and visual impairment. 4we included russia as a european country. fighting games for 11.21 years (sd = 7.38, range 0-28). respondents were diverse on a number of demographic characteristics (see table 1). respondents interacted with their top community in a number of ways, including in-person gaming nights, streaming, and social media, each of which roughly three quarters of respondents used to interact with their communities. while our respondents came from a variety of specific game communities, the most popular responses were communities relating to fighting games like street fighter, super smash bros., guilty gear, and mortal kombat. instrumentation the first and third authors worked with fgc members to create an original online survey, which can be accessed on the open science framework (steltenpohl & keys, 2017). in line with creswell’s (2013) description of concurrent embedded strategies, we utilized quantitative data to explore outcomes (e.g. perceived understanding or lack thereof) and qualitative data to explore processes (e.g. perceived origins of misunderstanding, effects on community members). survey respondents were asked how well they thought fighting games and their communities are understood by four groups: other (non-fgc) gamers, non-gamers, games media (e.g. kotaku, polygon, ign), and other non-gaming media (e.g. cnn, fox news, bbc). responses were provided on a six-point bipolar scale: completely misunderstood (1), misunderstood (2), somewhat misunderstood (3), somewhat understood (4), understood (5), and completely understood (6). that is, higher scores denote greater understanding. respondents were also asked open-ended questions about what the portrayals of the community are and what they thought of these portrayals. as this study was exploratory in nature, the questions were framed broadly to prevent respondents from being led to specific response patterns. respondents were also asked the following open response qualitative questions: 1) please tell us more about your thoughts of others' understanding of the fgc. what are these other portrayals of the fgc? 2) what do you think of these portrayals? procedure after obtaining irb approval and support from an array of fgc members, we invited people with experiences with the fgc (positive or negative) to participate in the study via postings on social media (e.g. facebook, twitter, various fgc-related subreddits) and on gaming sites. respondents who identified their “top community” as anything other than a fighting game (e.g. league of legends) or who were under 18 were excluded from the sample, as we were primarily interested in the experiences of adult fgc members. adult members are likely http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 to be able to make a larger comparative time commitment to the community (when considering available leisure time) and are thereby likely to have relatively stable views and remain in the community in the long term. analysis for the quantitative analysis, we computed descriptive statistics (average, sd) for all four groups combined to examine whether fgc members felt understood. a within-subjects 2x2 anova was conducted to test the second hypothesis by comparing the effect of gaming affiliation (gamer, non-gamer) and media affiliation (individual, media) on fgc players’ perceptions of the group’s understanding of the fgc. in line with consensual qualitative research approaches the first author created a codebook using open coding and data reduction. the second author independently examined the data and checked his own understanding of the responses against the codebook (hill, thompson, & williams, 1997; williams & morrow, 2009). the first and second authors met to discuss codes until consensus was reached, with the third author acting as an outside auditor. the full quantitative analyses and qualitative codebook are accessible on the open science framework (steltenpohl, reed, & keys, 2017). further, to ensure the accuracy and credibility of the analysis, fgc members were invited to participate in member checks three times. when designing the survey, we asked several fgc members for feedback on question wording and relevance to community needs. we also shared initial results of the coding process with members to ensure the quality of the analysis. finally, we obtained feedback on our manuscript draft from several community members. researcher positionality. the three authors have varying levels of engagement with different gaming communities. the first author has been playing video games since she was four years old, has been involved with gaming-related forums since 2003, and has written for a few gaming websites; the second author plays a variety of video games and has been active on several gamingrelated subreddits; and the final author has had experience gaming with family members. while none of the authors identify as fgc members, the first two authors attended an anime fighting game tournament and the first author has personal and professional contacts within the community. all three authors believe communities should be allowed to speak for themselves, and have made concerted efforts not to overinterpret qualitative responses. having a member of the author team who was highly involved with gaming facilitated entry and participant recruitment. these different degrees of engagement also enabled the authors to view the fgc and the results from diverse perspectives that, taken together, yield valuable insights. results the quantitative findings for each hypothesis and qualitative findings for each research question are presented in order. hypothesis 1 states members do not feel understood by outsiders. based on the distribution and mean of the data, fgc members rated others’ overall understanding of the fgc somewhere between “somewhat misunderstood” and “misunderstood” (m = 2.63, sd = 1.35, 95% ci [2.57, 2.70]), in support of the first hypothesis. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 the second hypothesis states fgc members perceive varying levels of understanding from outsiders, such that: those with gaming affiliation are perceived as more understanding than those without gaming affiliation, and that individuals will be perceived as more understanding of the fgc than those with media affiliation. in support of hypothesis 2a, there was a significant main effect of gaming affiliation accounting for a small amount of variance in perceptions of understanding, f(1,359) = 38.90, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.026, such that fgc players perceived slightly greater understanding from gaming-affiliated sources than non-gaming-affiliated sources (table 2). table 2. repeated measures anova summary table source df ss ms f p η2 gaming affiliation 1 49.1 49.1 38.9 <.001 0.026 media affiliation 1 733.9 733.9 580.49 <.001 0.287 a x b interaction 1 5.4 5.4 5.94 0.004 0.003 residuals 1,436 1815.5 1.3 total 359 note. – ms = mean squares. as predicted in hypothesis 2b, there was a significant main effect of media accounting for a large amount of variance in ratings of understanding, f (1,359) = 580.49, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.287, such that those affiliated with the media were seen as less understanding than those not assumed to be affiliated with the media (table 2). in addition to the hypothesized quantitative results, there was also a significant interaction effect between the gaming and media factors accounting for a very modest amount of variance in ratings of understanding, f(1,359) = 5.94, p =.004, η2 = 0.003 (table 2, figure 1). other individual gamers were seen as the most understanding of the fgc, while non-gaming media was reported to to understand the fgc the least by a fair margin. using the language reflected in the survey, fgc members rated non-fgc gamers between “somewhat understanding” and “somewhat misunderstanding” of the fgc (m = 3.47, sd = 1.18, 95% ci [3.35, 3.59]). respondents felt non-gamers “somewhat misunderstood” the fgc (m = 3.23, sd = 1.37, 95% ci [3.08, 3.37]). respondents rated gaming media (m =2.17, sd = 1.01, 95% ci [2.06, 2.27]) as “misunderstanding” of the fgc, but reported non-gaming media misunderstood them the most, with a rating somewhere between “misunderstanding” and “completely misunderstanding” the fgc (m = 1.68, sd = 0.87, 95% ci [1.58, 1.77]). overall perceptions of understanding and meta-stereotypes. in line with research question 1 about what stereotypes fgc members believe exist of the fgc, our thematic analysis indicated respondents paid far more attention to negative rather than positive portrayals of the community. the following prominent subthemes emerged under negative portrayals: aggressively competitive, antisocial/jerks, childish, elitist/arrogant, isms (any comments relating to homophobia, sexism, racism, etc.), having no skill (the games do not require skill or the players do not have skill), and creating barriers to entry. other negative portrayal subthemes were: reduced legitimacy compared to other communities, negative generalizations (both general gamer and fgcspecific), players take the game too seriously for the games to be fun, players are violent/dangerous, fighting games are a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 waste of time, and general negative responses. a few other comments mentioned perceptions that the community is not diverse. responses usually mentioned at least one of these negative themes. another group of fgc members mentioned being completely invisible to one or more outside groups. in contrast, only a few responses indicated positive outside portrayals; subthemes were friendly/tight-knit (a possible alternative interpretation of perceptions around entrée), passionate (a possible alternative interpretation of tryhards), and general positive responses. like the frequency of positive responding, there were also few mentions of neutral or mixed portrayals. these portrayals focused on comparisons to esports and other activities or statements indicating the fgc was simply seen as a group like any other. figure 1. perceptions of understanding of the fighting game community note. responses were provided on a six-point bipolar scale from “completely misunderstood (1)” to “completely understood (6).” gaming affiliation. exploratory research question 2 concerns differences in perceptions of the fgc by various outsider groups. qualitative statements mirror the game affiliation effect hypothesized and reported above in direction and intensity. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 many respondents made distinctions between gamers and non-gamers, indicating those further from the fgc (the general media and non-gamers in this case) are less likely to understand the community. one fgc member stated, “non-gamers usually share the [negative opinion] of the mainstream media. lack of knowledge coupled with ancient stereotypes.” fgc members mentioned common meta-stereotypes including non-gamer and general media descriptions of players as being virgins, parents’ basement dwellers, low-lifes, and nerds. in contrast, gaming media (e.g. kotaku, ign) were seen in a mixed light. some comments painted a grim portrait, citing a history of misrepresentation of the community. as one respondent noted, “it's a real shame what the gaming media has done to set back gaming as a whole. colin cowherd [a former espn sports commentator who was known for making distasteful and controversial comments about esports and esports players] is a person who thinks of gamers as basement dwellers who never get out in the sun.” however, others said things were mixed but improving, with more accurate coverage from various gaming media sources. one fgc member stated: aside from the articles about evo [major tournament] that come around every summer, a majority of coverage the fc gets in gaming media is either about smash [a popular fighting game], or it’s criticism regarding some gender based social justice issue, either accusing the community of being sexist, or accusing developers of putting sexist characters/outfits in their games. on the bright side redbull [an energy drink company that has taken a recent interest in esports] has been writing really good fgcrelated articles [on their website, red bull esports] … few comments about non-gamers and nongaming media were positive. most respondents referenced use of outdated and inaccurate stereotypes of the gaming community or a lack of coverage: among nongaming media [the fgc is] portrayed just like any other e-sport, as nerds with too much time that don't get out much, but in fact the fighting game community is at best a reason to get out and be social with others at tournaments and events. the consensus among respondents was that those with no gaming affiliation do not know or care about the fgc, although a few mentioned this reliance on negative stereotypes seems to be declining with time. media affiliation. as reported in support of hypothesis 2b and in response to research question 2 about differences in perceptions of various outsider groups, fgc players perceived far greater understanding from individuals than from the media. some respondents highlighted the difference between “actual people” and the media: actual people are a little more reasonable [than the media]. at heart, eve[r]yone understands competition. it's in our nature to compete; fighting games, like chess, basketball, drinking games, allow us to express our competitive side in a more civilized way than simply screaming at one another and beating each other to death with sticks and rocks. as noted above, the most negative comments were directed toward non-gaming media, with respondents describing non-gaming media as being behind the times, associating the fgc with “violent nerds,” and positioning fgc members as wasting their time. one fgc member noted: other media always reports these games as a horrible thing to be introduced to people because of its violent nature. fighting games are usually depicted as extremely violent games because it's two people fighting each other, sometimes to death other times not. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 many will instantly believe, for those who have a poor perception of these games, that if one plays them they'll instantly become extremely violent and show off being very aggressive towards their family and peers. fgc members noted a general invisibility in the media, especially non-gaming media. as one fgc member put it, “other media... do they even know that fighting games exist?” fgc members’ beliefs about why portrayals exist. an exploration of research question 3 regarding why these portrayals emerged yielded four explanations: the fgc is different from other communities, lack of knowledge/understanding (almost universally applied to negative portrayals), shared understanding/values (almost universally applied to positive portrayals), and ulterior motives (specifically: agendas and favoritism). the explanations that the fgc is different from other communities and these portrayals come from a shared understanding/values were infrequently given and applied with some consistency across all target groups. the most popular explanation given was lack of understanding/knowledge, and it was also applied fairly evenly across all groups, regardless of understanding respondents felt any particular group was of the fgc. most interesting, however, was the claim of ulterior motives, which was far more likely to be applied to the media than to individuals. while individuals were often described as being ignorant or unaware of the community, the media was accused of being interested only in sensationalism and clickbait (articles containing little actual substance--or in some cases, misinformation--but have catchy titles intended to catch readers’ attention), with one fgc member going so far as to say, “it’s mostly fed by clickbait. fuck games media. kotaku especially.” another fgc member posited that “in the case of fighting game communities, acts of sexism [are] easy to sensationalize.” regarding bias and favoritism, fgc members noted a difference in the amount of coverage fighting games received in comparison to other (larger) gaming communities, for example rts (real-time strategy games; e.g. starcraft), fps (first person shooters, e.g. halo), or moba (multiplayer online battle arenas; e.g. league of legends). others noted the quality of reporting of negative events within these communities is also more lenient than reporting on similar events in the fgc. one fgc member asserted, when someone in the fgc makes a dumb mistake or says something repugnant, it is immediately looked at as a blemish on the community as a whole. we're held to the words that came out of aris's [a prominent fgc member who made sexist remarks] mouth some 4 years ago, meanwhile, professional cs:go [counter-strike: global offensive, a fps] players use homophobic speech almost constantly with no repercussions. there are no thinkpieces in major esports publications about how the cs:go competitive community needs to clean up its act, despite the callout for every hiding space being "gay spot" and players frequently calling each other "faggots." […] it's clear that the big money involved in cs:go allows it a level of legitimacy in the public eye that is not afforded to the fgc. fgc members’ responses to portrayals. regarding research question 4, respondents had a variety of responses to these metastereotypic portrayals. there are those who had negative responses; subthemes here included frustration, a feeling that things will not change, being sad or upset, and general negativity. as one participant put it, [these portrayals] are often infuriating because neither [the portrayals from those who play games nor those who do not] give a positive view of the situation. they assume we are cheaters or play bad games when they don't even know what they're talking about. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 a number of respondents indicated these portrayals hurt the fgc, namely by hurting the scene (e.g. making fighting games look boring, events not receiving enough coverage) or driving away potential and current members. one respondent shared, “the only one that really pisses me off is the media's portrayal, because i believe it's done maliciously, and i believe it has the potential to be harmful to both the gaming community and the gaming industry.” others expressed more neutral or mixed reactions. emergent themes here involved resignation (“i understand”), a desire for change, requests for outsiders to give the community a chance, minimization of the portrayals’ effects on the community, and statements assuming responsibility (either through stating it is the community’s fault these portrayals exist or by saying it is the fgc’s responsibility to make the community a fun place to be). the most popular responses—statements involving resignation and statements involving minimization— were almost antithetical to one another. few of these responses indicated a sense of responsibility for the perceptions. as one respondent put it, i feel like other communities only look at the face value of the community. they don't understand the core idea behind the games that they see. they only see a bunch of people yelling or getting excited over some stuff on a screen. which is completely understandable, don't get me wrong? i think that the community needs to make the information that makes these games exciting for the better players, made available in some way. whether it's books, or some online articles. i feel the current media sites do a horrible job at letting outsiders know of the information that actually could be available. again, the information that is available only gives a face value to the games being played or shown. this actually does not represent what really goes on in a game or a match being played. understandably, fgc members had positive responses to positive portrayals. positive responses fell under three main subthemes— the portrayals help the community (by attracting new players or changing perceptions about the community), the portrayals are improving, or general positive responses—with improvement being by and large the most common response among positive reactions. one fgc member said, as a young gamer, these portrayals used to bother me a lot. today, not so much. i think the negative portrayal of the fighting game community from non-gamers and other media will, in time, dissipate. as technology grows, and the generation of people who grew up playing these games become the leaders of today's general demographic and community, mainstream media will see an acceptance of the fighting game community. that's already happening today. beyond these reactions, fgc members commented on the accuracy of the portrayals. as might be expected, far more respondents felt the negative portrayals were inaccurate, although a few did comment the negative portrayals were accurate. as one respondent noted about perceived sexism and homophobia within the community, “i think it[‘]s shockingly accurate and we as gamers need to step it up and help become guides to getting involved, instead of gatekeepers against women/lgbtq+/etc.” one participant who self-identified as a trans lesbian woman shared a specific example where she was watching an online stream of a tournament where a woman was doing very well. the stream chat during this time was filled with memes about women, comments about “trannies,” and suggestions for the men not to bother because “her twitter says she’s a lesbian feminist.” the respondent stopped watching the stream, noting it was “discouraging and downright scary and having people also say ‘oh shes actually good’ hurts because there’s this huge ‘boys http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 club’ mentality and you won’t be able to fit in unless you got something to show.” she closes her statement noting this forces people to stay away from the community, which is not something she wants to happen. about a third of respondents who found negative portrayals to be inaccurate noted while there were “bad apples”—that is, people who fit these negative portrayals— these individuals were not representative of the fgc. these assertions were often followed by comments indicating these people ruin the fun for everyone. one respondent noted, “some think of the fighting game community as very toxic, douchey, or sexist. this is based off of a few occurrences that grow into blanket generalizations about our community. we are not hateful and we like to embrace everyone.” in contrast to the woman’s experience above, another woman noted, i think they are blown completely out of proportion. i am a woman, and the stereotypes of sexism in the community are generally exaggerated and only expressed by those who are not actually part of the community. like any community, most times the only things outsiders hear about are the negative experiences, and then they [are] blown out of proportion and repeated by people who don't know anything about the community themselves. even among respondents who felt these bad apples did not represent the community at large, a few did note the fgc “needs better pr” or does “little to prevent the negative way in which [fgc members] are portrayed.” discussion our quantitative hypotheses were confirmed in that: (1) fgc members generally consider their community to be misunderstood by outsiders, (2a) those with gaming affiliation were seen as more understanding than those without gaming affiliation, and (2b) individuals were perceived as more understanding of the fgc than those with media affiliation. we asked (1) what stereotypes fgc members think exist for their community, (2) whether these stereotypes differ by the group they were describing, and (3) what reasons fgc members give to explain why these stereotypes exist. we found fgc members’ opinions on gaming-related entities appear to be more positive in part due the perception of shared knowledge or values. fgc members report thinking gamers and gaming media were more likely than their non-gaming counterparts to understand competition and social norms like trash-talking. however, even other gamers were still seen as only between “somewhat understanding” and “somewhat misunderstanding” of the fgc. fgc members saw the media as misunderstanding them more than individuals. non-gaming media was seen as the least understanding group, and both gaming and non-gaming media were seen as motivated by popularity and monetary agendas to portray the fgc in a negative light. lastly, we asked (4) how fgc members react to these meta-stereotypes. while fgc members reacted in a variety of ways, many felt the fgc is hurt by negative portrayals, which they saw as largely inaccurate. given the niche status of fighting games compared to the larger gaming market (entertainment software association, 2016), popular beliefs about gamers more generally (dial, 2013), and media coverage (and lack thereof) of the fgc specifically (hamilton, 2012; schreier, 2013) it is not surprising fgc members feel generally misunderstood. more interestingly, the strength of negative metastereotypes and reasons fgc members gave for the existence of primarily negative portrayals differed across out-groups. those with gaming affiliation were seen as more understanding of the fgc than those without gaming affiliation. this gaming affiliation effect appears to be, in part, due to the belief some fgc members have regarding http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 shared experiences and values. this belief is in line with intergroup contact theory (pettigrew, 1998), but not with research done by sigelman & tuch (1997) suggesting the more contact the in-group had with the outgroup, the worse the in-group’s metastereotypes were. it is possible to reconcile these discrepancies if the fgc, being a subgroup of the gaming community, is perceived as more similar to—and having more similar experiences with—the general gaming community than other groups, like non-gaming media. for example, white and black university students may see themselves and their experiences as fundamentally different from one another, despite their shared status as university students. since the fgc is a subgroup of the larger gaming community and the two shares being stereotyped by outsiders, among other experiences, the larger gaming community may not be as much of an out-group as people who do not play video games. future research may test such a hypothesis. individuals may be perceived as more understanding because respondents felt a sense of control over changing those misperceptions, a sense they did not express with those affiliated with the media. in addition, media outlets reach more people and, given their negative portrayals of the fgc, are likely to disseminate more negative information about the fgc than individuals. on the other hand, it is not difficult to imagine a scenario where an fgc member explains fighting games to another person in a one-onone setting, possibly increasing the interest and understanding of the other party. however, it seems less likely fgc members believe a media conglomerate representative would be reachable for and also swayed in such a scenario. we also asked what reasons fgc members to give to explain why these stereotypes exist, as well as how they react to these stereotypes. the most popular reason given for why these stereotypes exist was ignorance, often due to a lack of interest or willingness to put forth effort into understanding the community and fighting games. as we have seen in previous research, many gamers believe media outlets may be motivated by money, misinformation, or popularity to misrepresent the community (walker, 2013). in short, there are three possible explanations for the media affiliation effect, namely, the greater availability and thus greater impact of media perspectives than those of individuals, the perceptions of a relative lack of power, and the perceptions of the media’s business motivations. study strengths to our knowledge, this is the first study to examine community meta-stereotypes in community psychology. given the centrality of the concept of community in community psychology, it is helpful to examine how members of communities, especially marginalized communities, believe they are being viewed by others. moreover, since the number of people who play games continues to grow, it is important for community psychologists to become more knowledgeable about this new ecology and the communities within it. this study is also, to the best we can determine, the first community psychological study of this rapidly growing gaming ecology and one of the first studies of any sort with constituent validity (cf. keys & frank, 1987) concerning the fgc. it also offers the first quantitative demonstrations of the gaming affiliation effect, the media affiliation effect, and their related interaction effect on understanding in meta-stereotypes held by people who play games. our study’s strengths draw upon our efforts to understand the fgc before designing our study. we spent time watching videos and streams of competitions, scouring news sites for news and thinkpieces about the community (and its responses to such http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 pieces), reading blogs and popular forums like shoryuken, and talking to fgc members. this allowed to us to design a study focused on issues the community found important, speak in a language we both would understand, and ultimately gain trust and make our entrée into the community easier. as noted above, we also engaged in member checks at various points in our research process by reaching out to fgc members about our coding scheme and initial results across our various projects, which appears to have been well-received by members of the community (dpu_fgc_study, 2017). these member checks were also instrumental in the creation of a follow-up study where we interviewed fgc members at an anime fighting game tournament (steltenpohl, 2017). we believe these efforts, along with the use of mixed methods to triangulate fgc members’ perceptions, improved the validity of our results. these findings support both empirical research (e.g. dial, 2013; fisher, 2012; harper, 2010) and our lived experiences within the gaming community at large. this study also contributes to the research done thus far on meta-stereotypes, much of which appears to have primarily focused on a specific community’s meta-stereotypes with regard to another, specific outside group (finchilescu, 2010; saroglou, yzerbyt, & kaschten, 2011; torres & charles, 2004). our results also suggest it would be wise for community psychologists to pay attention to the influence of the media in shaping communities and their perspectives. study limitations. of the 495 respondents who completed the survey, 135 (roughly 27%) chose not to provide responses for the quantitative questions, while 157 (roughly 32%) and 167 (roughly 34%) did not provide responses for the two qualitative questions. it is difficult to ascertain why respondents would not complete these questions. it is possible they only responded to questions they were interested in answering, as suggested by armstrong & overton (1977). given the proportion of missing responses, caution is suggested in generalizing too strongly from these data. it had likely not gone unnoticed we were not visible members of the fgc. prominent members of some fgc groups, as well as some gaming-related publications and businesses, did promote the survey, which likely modulated this perception, but it is possible some fgc members may have opted out of completing the survey, given the conflictual history between researchers and the community. given the blunt nature of many of the responses, we think any negative perceptions surrounding our intentions were likely no more than modest inhibitors. implications and future research future research may examine whether fgc members who are more aware of or apply negative stereotypes to the fgc identify as strongly as fgc members as those who are not as aware or apply the negative stereotypes less often (owuamalam & zagefka, 2011). fgc members understand many outsiders perceive the community as being sexist and homophobic. this awareness of outsiders’ negative stereotypes may affect how some fgc members—particularly those who identify with or are perceived to be a member of groups affected by sexism and homophobia—interact with the community. some fgc members seem to think negative stereotypes prevent people from joining the community, but negative stereotypes may also keep members in the community from fully participating. if being perceived as more inclusive is important to fgc members, they may have to make changes based on conversations they have within their communities about what may lead the fgc to be considered more accessible. one community “soft banned” certain sexy costumes for offline tournaments in the dead or alive community, viz., it was up to the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 discretion of the tournament organizer. this community voiced a desire for people to focus more on the gameplay aspect of the games and wanting to avoid pushing people away from trying the game (fahey, 2015). as expected, there were a variety of responses to this change. previous research suggests community members will respond more positively to internal changes when they can see the value in them (vakola, armenakis, & oreg, 2013). if fgc members value making spaces more inclusive and agree with the way in which these changes are made, they may respond positively. community psychologists interested in membership and community development may be interested in how community values and changing such values can affect participation and feelings of inclusion among newer and more established members alike. community researchers working with gaming communities may anticipate members’ perception of outsiders’ misunderstanding. they may need not only to invest time in understanding the community, but also to make explicit where they and the community share values and interests. researchers who have written on their experiences gaining entrée into communities have described the importance of aligning their own goals with the goals of the community, understanding the history of the community, and understanding community members’ regard for the research community (quandt, mcdonald, bell, & acury, 1999). researchers can facilitate community members’ comfort and willingness to participate in research through discussing project expectations and outcomes with community members, entering the community without preconceived notions, and expressing understanding and compassion without forcing it (matthew, 2017). like other groups, some fgc members also minimized negative stereotypes and the effects these stereotypes may have on their community. future research might explore how much a community’s sense of outsiders’ misunderstanding is influenced by how much control they feel they have over changing those misperceptions. this research could be particularly useful for those wishing for better relations with amorphous entities such as gaming and non-gaming media, which may be more difficult to access and persuade than individuals. fgc members—and members of other communities—may discount negative stereotypes held by those in the media because the media is seen as difficult to influence. on the other hand, fgc members may feel a greater impact from close friends or people they feel should understand them (e.g. other gamers) because of the possibility of changing their minds. this sense of efficacy could either change outsiders’ stereotypes of the fgc or minimize the negative effects of fgc members’ meta-stereotypes. community psychologists focus on a wide range of psychological phenomena, as our social world is incredibly complex, and recognize our own positions of power relative to the communities with which we work (dzidic, breen, & bishop, 2013). more specifically, it is important for community psychologists to understand the intricacies of community members’ meta-stereotypes, as it is likely perceptions apply to researchers. people who play games are aware others believe violence and gaming are associated (dial, 2013) and researchers have continuously asserted video games produce only negative results (american psychological association, 2005, 2013, 2015). given our commitment to participatory community research and empowerment (bond, serranogarcía, & keys, 2017; keys et al., 2017), community psychologists are in a good position to explore effects of metastereotypes on building relationships with those perceived as outsiders, and help communities design and implement strategies to change outsiders’ perceptions of their group, if that is what they desire. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 conclusion this study provides evidence metastereotypes exist within and affect the fgc. it also expands upon the literature by suggesting meta-stereotypes may differ depending on the out-group being discussed and encourages researchers to develop theory to include community metastereotypes. understanding meta-stereotypes from a community perspective allows us to anticipate challenges and opportunities with working with communities, particularly if they are marginalized or otherwise inhabit a niche. to the extent we can understand community meta-stereotypes and how they affect relationships with outsiders and within the community, we can also take them into consideration when working with and within communities to foster change. references american psychological association. 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(2013). newtown shooter motivated by norway massacre, sources say. cbs news. owuamalam, c.k., & zagefka, h. (2011). downplaying a compromised social image: the effect of meta-stereotype valence on social identification. european journal of social psychology, 41, 528-537. pettigrew, t.f. (1998). intergroup contact theory. annual review of psychology, 49, 65-85. quandt, s.a., mcdonald, j., bell, r.a., & acury, t.a. (1999). aging research in multiethinic rural communities: gaining entrée through community involvement. journal of cross-cultural gerontology, 14, 113-130. saroglou, v., yzerbyt, v., & kaschten, c. (2011). meta‐stereotypes of groups with opposite religious views: believers and non‐believers. journal of community & applied social psychology, 21, 484-498. schreier, j. (2013). top fighting gamer arrested for allegedly hitting his exgirlfriend. kotaku. http://kotaku.com/top-fightinggamer-arrested-for-allegedly-hittinghis-e-635549540 sigelman, l, tuch, s.a. 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(2012). colorado shooting: suspect enjoyed video games, movies, school friend says. los angeles times. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lano w/2012/07/colorado-shooterenjoyed-video-games-movies-schoolfriend-says.html torres, k.c., & charles, c.z. (2004). meta stereotypes and the black-white divide: a qualitative view of race on an elite college campus. du bois review, 1, 115-149. twenge, j.m. (2012). yes, violent video games do cause aggression. psychology today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/b log/our-changingculture/201212/yes-violent-videogames-do-cause-aggression vakola, m., armenakis, a., & oreg, s. (2013). reactions to organizational change from an individual differences perspective: a review of empirical research. the psychology of organizational change: viewing change from the employee's perspective, 95-122. vorauer, j.d., main, k.j., & o’connell, g.b. 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(2009). achieving trustworthiness in qualitative research: a panparadigmatic perspective. psychotherapy research, 19, 576-582. acknowledgements the authors would like to acknowledge joshua moore, mark belcher, and robert hubbs for giving feedback on the survey and for sharing the survey on social media. we also thank diehard gamefan, evansville esports, game informer, and others for publicizing the survey. thank you christopher shorten for helping with the data analyses, and to the online technologies lab for continued help with the project. lastly, we thank various fgc members on reddit and elsewhere on social media for providing ongoing feedback on our data analyses and interpretation of results. disclosure statement none of the authors have any commercial associations or financial interests that might create a conflict of interest in connection with this manuscript. corresponding author crystal n. steltenpohl, college of liberal arts 3046, 8600 university boulevard, university of southern indiana, evansville, in, 47712, cnsteltenp@usi.edu. steltenpohl, c.n., & keys, c.b. (2017). fighting http://www.gjcpp.org/ microsoft word serrano-garcia-v4i2-20130613.docx social policy: the tightwire we walk (a commentary) irma serrano-garcía social-community psychologist retired professor university of puerto rico post doc harvard university phd university of michigan at ann arbor special areas of interest include: social change and power relationships, creation of settings, program evaluation, participatory research, non-profit organizations, public policy and teaching. key words: community psychology, policy actors and roles, policy context palabras clave: psicología comunitaria, actores y roles en política social, context de las políticas sociales recommended citation: serrano-garcía, i. (2013). social policy: the tightwire we walk (a commentary). global journal of community psychology practice, 4(2), xx-xx. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 social policy: the tightwire we walk (a commentary) abstract the author comments on the issues that community psychologists encounter when faced with the need to intervene at the policy level as well as develop community psychology as a discipline. she focuses on issues related to subjectivity, context, research and the relationship with the state. she urges community psychologists to consider the limitations and successes available to those that intervene at the policy level. resumen la autora comenta sobre los asuntos que los psicólogos y psicólogas comunitarios enfrentan cuando necesitan intervenir en políticas sociales y a su vez interesan desarrollar el aspecto disciplinario de la psicología comunitaria. enfoca los temas de subjetividad, contexto, investigación y la relación con el estado. urge a los psicólogos y psicólogas comunitarios a estar conscientes de las limitaciones y los potenciales logros disponibles a aquellas personas que deciden intervenir a nivel de la política social. tightwire walking requires maintaining balance while moving along a tensioned wire between two points. in the case of community psychology this refers to the balance between our status as a discipline and a science and our social change goals. when we choose to engage in policy processes the tension increases and, as we shall see, our walk is burdened by areas of our expertise that are not yet developed or are compromised. community psychology since its origins has been concerned with human welfare and scientific development. some have espoused more treatment focused or secondary prevention efforts, others have focused on prevention and promotion all at diverse levels of intervention, but everyone is interested in improving human lives and, in some manner, increasing social justice. most are also involved in developing ways to understand the realities that surround our social problems, to develop and evaluate interventions that will change them and to contribute this knowledge to others. one of the intervention levels in which we engage is that of institutional/community change where social or public policy interventions belong. the six articles and one brief report included in this special issue of the gjcpp present diverse examples of policy work that confront us with various issues that must be considered and critically analyzed. all authors agree, with some caveats, that community psychology and social policy can contribute to each other; that our science can nurture interventions at this level and vice versa. all also agree that in the process of intervening at this level, community psychologists have contributed to policy makers’ knowledge of community development, empowerment, participation and evaluation research while community psychologists have learned more about political processes, institutionalization, negotiation and conflict resolution. finally, all converge in the belief that social policy processes have in many cases been examined simplistically, decontextualized and as if they were unitary and monolithic. the articles in this issue demonstrate the variety of efforts, issues and populations that have participated with community psychologists in these efforts and have in the process raised concerns with which we are burdened as we cross the wire. subjectivity one focus that i believe is lacking in most of community psychologists’ policy work in the u.s., and which is an important contribution from other borders, is the view of policies as creators and reproducers of subjectivity (alfaro, sánchez & zambrano, 2012; rodríguez, 2012; sandomirsky, 2010) not only do policies embody values, beliefs and meanings of a particular sociohistorical and cultural period but as a result they also influence the development of social relations among participants influenced by these policies. for example, if a policy related to homelessness presents its target population as incapable, dependent, mentally ill, and devoid of a future, it will create and reproduce this image of homeless people in those who interact with them, develop programs, and communicate to others their beliefs about this group. identifying these constructs that many times are hidden by good intentions and benevolent, palliative policies, understanding how they influence the way participants in the policy process engage each other, and intervening to change them so that they foster the values and goals of our discipline is global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 an important quest for community psychology. it will strengthen our science as well as our interventions. context various authors of the special issue emphasize the importance of context as it relates to policy work. this is discussed in terms of: a) the variety of actors that participate in the process and the roles community psychologists engage in, b) the research methods that have to be used or developed to deconstruct policies, to further alternatives and to evaluate success, and c) the interveners’ relationship with the state. actors and roles in the various projects that the authors describe actors include the affected populations (those towards which the policies are geared), different levels of government representatives (legislators, agency directors, municipal employees), non-profit and for-profit organizations, universities, networks, coalitions and consortia. community psychologists can be employed by some of these actors, work voluntarily with them or work as independent practitioners. from these vantage points they can be consultants, researchers, evaluators, advocates, community developers, political organizers, facilitators, educators, and trainers, and others. they can influence the policy process from the bottom-up or the top-down and participate in any or various steps in the policy cycle: definition of the problem, policy formulation, implementation or evaluation. each one of these levels has its own characteristics, power struggles, dynamics and aspirations. one challenge is to have the personal and professional tools and skills to work in these varied situations and settings. another is not only to understand the differences these contexts pose but to be able to maintain our course in the direction of respect for diversity, equity and participation. participation is a good example of a concept that can vary from context to context. for some of these contexts participation means voting in an election, for others it means communicating opinions, ideas and alternatives so that governmental officers may decide. another expression of participation is recruiting community members to deliver the services that the policy has proposed. further along are those that engage citizens in voicing their opinion, and also invite them to participate in the decision making process. and finally, there are even examples where community members define the project, make the fundamental decisions and manage the budget. which of these expressions of participation is possible in your context? are you content with the level of participation allowed? are there ways to increase it? is the group or community you are working with ready or interested in greater participation? if so, do they have the skills and knowledge that their participation requires? these are all issues related to a central goal of most of the projects our authors write about which you may be facing in your policy efforts. research paradigms and methods the walk between our science and our policy work would be less tense and much shorter if we heeded the voices of those who for years have been questioning our methods. various authors in this issue speak to the need for using research paradigms that contextualize the policy phenomena we are studying. they criticize the rigidity and lack of depth of positivism and evidence-based approaches. they signal the inability of these methods to grasp and explain the socio-cultural, economic, and community variables in which the policies are immersed. they suggest the use of multi-level analysis, participatory research, and stakeholder analysis, among others. others suggest innovative ways to disseminate results to the affected populations through games, role play, popular theatre, and collages, among other methods. this message is not new. criticism of positivism is a thing of the past (brown & tandon, 1983; feyerabend, 1978; guba, 1990; staller, block & horner, 2008). there are constructionist frameworks (holstein & gubrium,2008), pragmatic frameworks (fishman,1999), and critical theory alternatives ( fox & prilleltensky,1997), among others. although i can understand the social, economic and political forces that collide to maintain most of us in the positivistic path, it is hard for me to understand why it has taken most community psychologists so long to abandon, or at least, challenge and confront this paradigm. authors in this issue are unanimously agreed on the need for this shift. relationship to the state this issue, the state as context, is probably the greatest quagmire of them all. various authors state that policy is defined within the limits of the state, an assertion which is supported by the fact that all efforts described in these chapters included governmental players. there is no question about the fact that our research is mostly controlled at present by government and capital, particularly in a time of such economic scarcity in universities (buroway,2013). so the questions are: if working in the policy arena, is there any way of avoiding becoming an ideological agent of the state? will it always be necessary to compromise the ultimate goals of communities to obtain state support or at least to avoid its belligerence and control? burton suggests that we: a) develop an understanding of the structural and systemic power of capital and its ideological disguises, b) develop a process of reflection with the affected, c) make the effort to join in learning across contexts, and d) take global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 opportunities to contribute to the formulation of policy. i believe these are important steps which may increase the possibilities of influencing policy to respond to our communities, but i believe once in bed with government, there will be negotiation and, as various examples in our reading suggest, gains will be desirable, but more modest than initially expected. this will be particularly so if our livelihood, or that of others in the community, depends on these transactions. let me be clear. i am not saying we should not engage in this kind of intervention nor should we abandon our goals. i have seen policy measures ameliorate cancer, diminish hiv, foster community mental health models, improve public transportation, reduce crime, and on and on. i have participated at this level of intervention for years and have educated many students to so engage. in my opinion, however, policy work is not revolutionary work. we can further critical analysis, increase participation, improve people’s social conditions, develop community skills and empowerment, and attain other lofty goals. in the process we can learn, publish, educate others and even enjoy ourselves. and for many this will be more than enough. but if we want to walk off the tightwire to another different or new social order, that is not up to us. that is up to those who can no longer tolerate oppression and injustice, and whose struggle we can decide to join or not. references alfaro, j., sánchez, a., & zambrano, a. (2012) psicología comunitaria y políticas sociales: reflexiones y experiencias. buenos aires: paidós. brown, l. d. & tandon, r. (1983) ideology & political economy in inquiry: action research & participatory research jr. of app. beh. sc. 19(3), 277-294. buroway, m. (2013). redefining the public university: developing an analytical framework. recuperado en http://publicsphere.ssrc.org/burawoyredefining thepublicuniversity/ feyerabend, p. (1978) against method. norfolk, england: verso. fishman, d. (l999). the case for pragmatic psychology. new york, n.y.: n.y. university press. foz, d. & prilleltensky, i. (1997). critical psychology: an introduction. thousnad oaks, ca: sage. holstein, j. & gubrium, j. (2008). handbook of constructionist research. n.y.: guilford. guba, e. (l990) the alternative paradigm dialog. en e. guba (ed.) the paradigm dialog. (17-27). newbury park, ca : sage. rodríguez, a. (2012). aportes de la psicología comunitaria al campo de las políticas públicas sociales: el caso del uruguay. en j. alfaro, a. sánchez y a. zambrano (comps) psicología comunitaria y políticas sociales. reflexiones y experiencias. (pp.111-146) buenos aires: paidos. sandomirsky, m. (2010). de las políticas públicas a la construcción del sujeto de las políticas. en e. saforcada, m. de lellis y s. mozobancyk. psicología y salud pública. nuevos aportes desde la perspectiva del factor humano. (pp.7591) buenos aires: paidós. staller,k., block,e. & horner, p. ( 2008). history of methods in social sciences research. in s. nagy hesse-biber & p. leavy (eds.) handbook of emergent methods (pp.25-52). n.y.: guilford. microsoft word enserrano-garcía & lugo gjcpp special issue final_formatted.docx involving psychologists in public policy in puerto rico: processes and results irma serrano-garcía eduardo a. lugo-hernández university of puerto rico, río piedras campus university of puerto rico, mayagüez campus palabras clave: psicología y política pública, puerto rico keywords: psychology and public policy; puerto rico author biographies: irma serrano-garcía is a retired professor from the university of puerto rico, río piedras campus. she holds a post doctorate in public policy from the harvard university graduate school of education, a phd in social-community psychology from the university of michigan. she has over 125 scholarly publications including journal articles, book chapters and thirteen books. after her retirement, dr. serrano-garcía continues to publish about community psychology, social change, participatory research, public policy, program evaluation, university teaching and learning and is a consultant to non-profit organizations and universities. eduardo a. lugo-hernández: dr. eduardo a. lugo-hernández is an assistant professor at the department of psychology of the university of puerto rico, mayagüez campus. his research focuses on promoting youth participation in school action through communitybased participatory research. he is also interested in ways to promote psychologists participation in public policy. recommended citation: serrano-garcía, i., lugo-hernández, e.a. (2016). involving psychologists in public policy in puerto rico: processes and results. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(1s), pages 1-14. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 involving psychologists in public policy in puerto rico: processes and results resumen por muchos años la psicología en puerto rico se consideraba una ciencia positivista de intervenciones a nivel individual con una postura neutral hacia asuntos socio-políticos. sin embargo, en años recientes los psicólogos/as en la isla se han involucrado más en política pública. inicialmente este fue el resultado del trabajo de algunos pioneros/as. algunos esfuerzos sistemáticos han sido apoyados por investigaciones desde el área social-comunitaria de la universidad de puerto rico y por la asociación de psicología de p.r (appr). las investigaciones demostraron que la mayoría de los psicólogos/as que no participan en política pública, no lo hacen por: a) falta de tiempo, b) falta de adiestramiento y c) actitudes negativas hacia el proceso político partidista. ejemplos de la práctica surgen de esfuerzos individuales, organizaciones sin fines de lucro, de la appr, desde entidades gubernamentales y desde la práctica privada. son escasas las publicaciones sobre política pública. los estudios también revelaron que casi no hay cursos sobre el tema en los programas graduados ni énfasis en las competencias requeridas para estas tareas en el currículo. en este artículo a) proveeremos información sobre los esfuerzos para aumentar la participación en política pública de nuestros/as colegas, b) presentaremos ejemplos de investigaciones y proyectos realizados en puerto rico y c) discutiremos el adiestramiento disponible y cómo debe modificarse para facilitar el trabajo en política pública. abstract for many years, psychology in puerto rico was considered an individual-level positivistic science with a neutral stance towards socio-political issues. however, during recent years psychologists on the island have become more involved in policy issues. initially this was the result of the pioneering work of some individuals. more recently, systematic efforts have been supported by research within the socialcommunity psychology program at the university of puerto rico and by the puerto rico psychology association (prpa). results of these studies showed that most psychologists who did not participate in policy work had one of the following reasons: a) lack of time, b) lack of training, and/or c) negative attitudes toward party politics. however, there are examples of work in public policy as a result of individual efforts, from ngos, the prpa, governmental agencies, and private practitioners. regarding training, research demonstrated that there are hardly any courses on the subject in graduate programs, nor emphasis on the competencies required for the task in the available curriculum. there are also few publications about psychologists and public policy. this article will: a) provide information about the efforts that have led to increased participation of psychologists in policy work, b) present examples of research and projects carried out in puerto rico, and c) discuss the training available and how it should be modified to facilitate involvement in public policy. community psychology is committed to the pursuit of social change and social justice (serrano-garcía, carvallo, & walters, 2009). it pursues these goals through diverse and interlocking levels of intervention which include the individual, group, community, organizational, and policy levels. although the emphasis on policy is relatively recent, it has gained great momentum as one of the areas of disciplinary growth in the united states (maton, 2013; phillips, 2000). in puerto rico, psychology was considered an individual-level positivistic science, which should hold a neutral stance towards social and political issues. although some still think this way, much has changed including an increasing interest in policy. for many years there were isolated efforts to work at this level. these efforts have increased and have been spurred mainly by social-community and clinical-community psychologists. thus, the purpose of this article is to: a) provide information on efforts that have led to increased participation of psychologists in policy work, b) present examples of research and projects at this level of intervention carried out in puerto rico, and c) discuss training in public policy (pp). special emphasis will be placed on the roles community psychologists1 have played in this transformation. the article has various sections including a) a description of efforts undertaken in puerto rico to foster participation of psychologists at the policy level, b) a description of the research about pp processes and issues, c) examples of practice and specific efforts of the committee of psychology and public policy (cppp) of the puerto rico psychology association (prpa), d) training devoted to policy in graduate programs on the island, and e) recommendations for future development. the descriptions and analysis presented considers a pp process encompassing six phases: a) identification of the problem to be solved; b) analysis of its dimensions and complexities; c) formulation of a policy proposal; d) approval of the proposal at the executive, legislative, or judicial branch; e) implementation of the approved plan; and f) evaluation (dinitto & dye, 1987). this process can emanate from government entities (top-down) or from the citizenry, either individually or collectively (bottom-up; dobelstein, 1997). description of efforts to foster participation of psychologists in public policymodeling: individual efforts although most psychologists in puerto rico do not have policy training, there are several individuals who have immersed themselves in this arena. these precursors began their work before policy was conceptualized as a task for psychologists. some examples of early pioneers as well as current exponents are presented in table 1 (boulón-díaz, 2007; moreno-velázquez, justel-cabrera & massanet-rosario, 2007; roca de torres, 2007). these individuals serve as role models and provide evidence of psychologists’ competence for key roles within government. their contributions paved the way for other psychologists who want to assume policy as a possible area of intervention. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 name & specialty dates roles pioneers efraín sánchez hidalgo educational psychologist 1940-60 secretary of education milagros guzmán industrial psychologist 1970s director, central office of human resources, government of puerto rico gabriel cirino industrial psychology 1980s first president of the professional board of psychologists celia cintrón clinical/community psychologist 1980s implementation of community mental health center law caly rodríguez industrial/public health 1990s secretary of the family department recent exponents nydia ortiz pons 2009 administrator for the mental health services and against addiction administration salvador santiago clinical psychologist 2013 administrator for the mental health services and against addiction administration ( now a cabinet position) dr. marizaida sánchez clinical-community psychologist 2015 member, governor’s commission on early childhood dr. ángel w. colón social-community psychologist 2015 u.s. senate staffer table 1: pioneers and recent exponents of public policy efforts in puerto rico organizational efforts: the puerto rico psychology association psychology’s public policy efforts have been greatly advanced by the puerto rico psychological association (prpa). the prpa was established in 1954 and from the outset was involved in public policy processes, particularly guild issues. for the first 30 years, it advocated for laws to establish professional regulations and licensing at the puertorrican legislature. these efforts succeeded in 1983 (boulón-díaz, 2006). although this initial involvement emphasized professional interests, it set the stage for the global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 development of a professional identity that included a role in policy establishment and transformation. the 1980s was a decade of growth related to policy involvement for the prpa. at this time the association began providing expert testimony to the legislature on issues related to mental health, violence prevention, death penalty, psychologically healthy workplace strategies, psychologists in the schools, and lgbt rights and health, among others (appr, 2014). the manner in which the prpa managed legislative petitions for expert testimony was by identifying members that possessed expertise in specific areas. these members then provided written and sometimes oral testimony representing the organization. this process still solidifies the prpa’s sociopolitical role and provides important experiences for members in the policy process. the use of the media has been central to the prpa’s involvement in public policy. since the 1990s there has been a growing presence of the association in media outlets through newspaper interviews and columns about key social and political issues as well as radio and tv interviews. the association has also organized press conferences to present specific projects or to establish its position regarding specific social topics or government initiatives. the prpa’s growth in this area has been outstanding as prpa’s contributions are included in weekly media reports by various outlets (for examples see ayala, 2015; rodríguez, 2015; n.a., 2015). the growth in media contributions has been accompanied by a steady expansion in the prpa’s social media presence. the association now owns accounts on both facebook (https://www.facebook.com/asppr?fref=ts) and twitter (https://twitter.com/appr_pr) and an active web page (www.asppr.net). although the majority of the posts in social media are related to promoting the prpa’s activities, it also provides media coverage of policy related efforts. this wide visibility has served to continue validating the role of psychology in public policy. the increasing involvement of the prpa in public policy presented the need for the association to rethink its internal structure to respond to policy issues more effectively. hence, in 2007 the prpa created a standing committee on psychology and public policy (cppp) with the goal of streamlining its policy efforts and generating educational reform recommendations to train psychologists for this role. after its creation, the cppp has been responsible for dozens of expert testimonies, the creation of a public policy course syllabus, and two important initiatives, which we describe in the practice section: proposals without colors and a clean electoral campaign. unfortunately, in recent years, the cppp has had setbacks related to the availability of psychologists ready to coordinate its work. this has resulted in a regression toward old styles of policy analysis, centered around the association’s president. hence, the prpa needs to reevaluate its policy priorities and internal structure, which is sustained mostly by volunteers. another area of policy involvement for the prpa has been its participation in public demonstrations. some examples are its presence in manifestations against the firing of public employees, supporting students’ strike at the state university against a raise in tuition fees, and in favor of the release of puerto rican political prisoners. the prpa has had great success organizing and mobilizing its members and gaining international support for its positions. with this background in mind, the authors turn to reviewing the research done in support of and about public policy. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 research psychologists’ participation in public policy the first study of psychologists’ participation in public policy (pp) in puerto rico was carried out by the first author in 1983 and was sponsored by the american psychological association (apa). a survey was sent to all prpa members at the time (n = 300) and 35 psychologists responded of whom 82% reported participating in pp mainly in phases of problem identification and program evaluation. twenty percent provided expert testimony, and 18% performed research related to pp. a fascinating result was that 60% of participants believed their colleagues did not consider pp a legitimate activity. however, 89% believed psychologists’ participation in pp should increase (serranogarcía, 1983). this shed some light on our profession’s views about the legitimacy of pp as a potential role and the disparity between personal and group views on the issue. in order to evaluate changes over time, a follow-up study was carried out in 2004. this survey, sent to 516 prpa members, was able to recruit a larger sample (n = 86). results revealed that 55% reported participating in pp. the majority of those who participated engaged in problem identification (62%); the most frequent roles were providing expert testimony (32%), preparation of documentation (43%), and consulting (43% government and 38% non-governmental organizations). most (87%) had not received formal training in public policy. concerning the legitimacy of this role, 43% still believed their colleagues did not consider public policy work a legitimate activity. although this shows small attitude change in their views about participation in pp – probably as a result of the efforts previously summarized – the roles that individuals assumed tended to remain constant (serrano-garcía, rosa, & garcía, 2005). policy related research most psychological research is pertinent to public policy since it is used for problem identification and analysis. however, this article focuses on research explicitly labeled as public policy research published in all issues of the two major psychology journals in puerto rico as well as research carried out for theses and dissertations of the socialcommunity psychology program at the university of puerto rico. these journals are the focus of the review because they are the ones where psychologists on the island publish more frequently: science and behavior is published by carlos albizu university, a private phd granting institution, and the puerto rican journal of psychology (prjp) is published by the prpa. research articles that were identified refer explicitly to one of the six phases of the public policy process. results of the journals’ analysis are presented in table 2. both journals had a low percentage of public policy articles although science and behavior’s percentage is more than twice that of the prjp. in absolute numbers, the amount of articles about public policy is almost the same; in science and behavior the number has decreased in the last decade while in the prjp it has increased dramatically. articles focused on the same policy processes, and there were none related to policy approval. varied areas of interest have been studied although drug use and addiction, mental health, and participation in public policy2 are present in both journals. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 table 23: publications related to public policy (pp) processes in psychology journals in puerto rico we then perused master’s theses and dissertations of the social-community psychology program at the university of puerto rico. this program is the only program related to the discipline of community psychology on the island and the authors assumed that, as such, it would have a stronger emphasis on policy issues. the authors discovered 29 theses and dissertations that referred explicitly to public policy processes; their number increased as the decades ensued. problem and policy analysis were the most frequently studied processes and neither approval of measures nor implementation of policies were researched. most frequently studied topics included community mental health, community development and hiv/aids prevention (serrano-garcía, 2014; see table 3). the authors also examined methods most frequently used to carry out pp research both in the journals and in theses and dissertations. identified methods included: a) content analysis of agencies’ annual reports, laws and regulations, and patients’ records; b) literature reviews of policy models; c) epidemiological analysis of census data, police data, and department of health data; d) interviews, focus groups, and questionnaires for program participants and/or program staff; e) psychological tests related to mental health or children’s cognitive development; and f) case studies. it is apparent that the most employed method was problem analysis, which is consistent with the high levels of psychologists’ participation in the problem identification phase. however, through the decades, there has been a progressive diversification of methods and topics. journal total # of articles/# of pp articles pp articles per decades steps in policy process subject science and behavior 1985-2012 119/19=16% 1980s = 7 1990s = 8 2000s = 4 problem definition problem and ideological analysis implementation/ pilot program program evaluation elder’s institutions educational reform drug use and addiction health reform participation in pp mental health puerto rican journal of psychology 1983-2014 251/17 = 7% 1980s =1 1990s =2 2000s =14 crime/violence mental health licensing of psychologists drug use and addiction participation in pp environment global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 years steps in policy process subject 1980’s problem analysis civil rights; community development 1990’s problem/policy analysis formulation program evaluation community mental health; homelessness community development; hiv/aids prevention; women’s jails; conflict mediation centers; health and sexuality 2000 2014 problem analysis policy analysis formulation program evaluation prevention of juvenile delinquency; hiv/aids prevention, community development; schools and diversity training, mental health/community mental health; policy evaluation as process; drug use and drug addiction; policy effort in ngos; patients’ rights; homelessness environmental issueswater; participation in pp; participatory democracy table 34: policy studies in ma theses and phd dissertations of the university of puerto rico socialcommunity program in conclusion, policy research by psychologists is not frequent on the island but has been increasing steadily. most of it is unpublished or published in academic journals which are not usually a source used by legislators for their work. studies in puerto rico demonstrate that legislators rely on other sources – not professional journals for their projects (el nuevo día, 2013). topics that were most frequently studied are strongly related to social/psychological issues of relevance on the island including violence and crime, hiv/aids, mental health, and homelessness. more recent topics include psychologists’ participation in pp, environmental issues, and the participation of non-governmental organizations in public policy. research leads naturally to describing some policy work that has been implemented on the island. specifically detailed are two prpa projects, and other efforts by organizations and individuals. practice efforts of the prpa the first examples presented are two efforts spearheaded by the prpa: proposals without colors and a clean electoral campaign. proposals without colors was the first initiative of the cppp. it was a coordinated effort to provide public policy proposals from psychologists and psychology students to gubernatorial candidates of the 2008 electoral campaign. the initiative was announced in a press conference. public hearings to receive policy proposals were carried out in two regions of the island. these proposals were analyzed and streamlined by a group of experts from various disciplines in each content area: mental health, education, and violence. the resulting document was given to the four gubernatorial candidates (cppp, 2008). meetings with some of the candidates or with their staff were conducted and the document was presented to the country in another press conference. finally, the cppp evaluated how many of their proposals were incorporated into each global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 party’s platform. the inclusion of proposals varied across parties. as a result of this effort, the prpa received many communications from its members and individuals from other disciplines supporting the effort and lending legitimacy to the participation of the organization in pp processes. during the 2012 electoral process, the prpa implemented “campaña electoral de altura” (clean or respectful electoral campaign) to promote ethical standards for the political debate during the electoral process (pérez, rodríguez, & serrano-garcía, 2014). the campaign included a) a video spot published in social media and other outlets5 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ijl7xf dvsg), b) distribution of 5,000 flyers in all major cities with the expected ethical standards, c) meetings with gubernatorial candidates and/or their staffers, d) meetings with other professional organizations to gain their support, e) evaluations of gubernatorial tv debates, and f) newspaper columns. two editorials in the island’s most important newspaper supported the campaign. hence, for the past two elections the prpa has remained an important voice in public debate. efforts from non-governmental organizations community psychologists have also directed other major efforts on the island focused on fostering models of participatory democracy. one is led by cumbre social (http://cumbresocialpr.org), which facilitates people’s involvement in social problem identification, policy formulation, and implementation. the organization is currently heading participatory budgeting processes in two of puerto rico’s major cities. presently, there is another national initiative called agenda ciudadana or citizen’s agenda (http://agendaciudadanapr.com). this organization facilitates citizen’s participation in developing policies in education, health, environment, safety and security, and economic development. during the two past electoral periods they held popular assemblies around the island, which led to proposals for gubernatorial candidates. during the years between elections, they devoted much effort and resources to accountability of the entities that committed to furthering their proposals. efforts through private practice other community psychologists engage in problem definition, policy analysis, strategic planning, and program evaluation within their private consulting firms. one such firm is énfasis. community and social psychologists, as well as economists and planners, carry out research, organizational, and program evaluations; provide information to policy makers; perform economic analysis; develop strategic planning; and provide training (http://www.enfasispr.com). on the other hand coatti, inc. – which includes community, clinical and organizational psychologists in its staff – provides technical support, performs research, facilitates program development and strategic planning, provides training, and engages in program evaluation (http://coattipr.com). governmental programs community psychologists have also been active in creating and running governmental programs. the conflict mediation centers of the judicial branch are one example (http://www.ramajudicial.pr/negmed/centr os_mediacion/index.htm). these were created in 1983 and started with just one center in san juan. since then, they have flourished as a non-judicial alternative to solving civil disputes in 14 centers across the island. a similar effort was initiated in 1976 to create the centers for prevention of domestic violence, providing services to women and their children who are victims of domestic violence as well as to offer preventive services related to the issue (http://www.salud.gov.pr/dept-desalud/pages/unidadesoperacionales/secretaria-auxiliar-de-saludfamiliar-y-servicios-integrados/centro-deayuda-a-victimas-de-violacion.aspx). these global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 also began with one center and now have five around the island, where various community psychologists work. over all, many psychologists are now active in pp processes. community psychologists have played a leading role and many gain their livelihood in these endeavors. most efforts are spearheaded from within nongovernmental organizations, fostering bottom-up public policies. as with research, the prpa has had a vital role in promoting and legitimizing these efforts among all specialties. training if community psychologists want to increase the participation of psychologists in public policy, it is essential that students receive training related to these processes. serranogarcía and colleagues (2005) carried out a research project in 2004 to find out what, if any, preparation graduate students in psychology were receiving related to pp. this study had a qualitative component where psychology program curriculums were analyzed to identify public policy related courses and program directors were interviewed to gather their impressions about the importance of this content area. the authors identified only one graduate elective course offered at the socialcommunity psychology program at the university of puerto rico. when program directors were interviewed they stated that public policy should be taught in undergraduate and graduate programs but that it would be hard to integrate them in their curriculums as it is not a priority for accreditation (serrano-garcía, et al, 2005). a follow-up of this study was carried out in 2014 (serrano-garcía, 2014). only five of 20 graduate programs currently offer courses related to pp. some of the topics include labor relations, administration of mental health programs, and expert testimony in the courts. the upr program still offers an elective course in which few students enroll. program directors noted that students take courses outside of psychology, but hardly ever related to pp. although the program directors stated in 2004 that there should be more training in pp, there has been no increase in course offerings or other experiences in the ten years between these studies. efforts by prpa as with previous areas, the prpa has also contributed to training. once the cppp was created it set out to develop a model syllabus for a psychology and public policy course. this syllabus could be used by undergraduate and graduate programs to develop their own or to include the course in their offerings. the syllabus was presented to program directors and has been made available through the prpa. recently, the syllabus was first used to teach an undergraduate level course at university of puerto rico, mayagüez campus. twenty-four students were enrolled in the course and gave excellent end-of-semester evaluations. they also presented about their experiences in a political science conference. a modified version of the syllabus will also be used to teach a course at the graduate level for clinical psychology students at the ponce school of medicine and health sciences. the cppp also offered various continuing education courses to develop specific skills psychologists need to engage in public policy. these included media relations and effective communication, how to influence public policy, and stages of the public policy process. two members of the cppp also wrote a column for the prpa bulletin including a step-by-step guide about how to organize a press conference (figueroa & lugo, 2008). another strategy established by the cppp was developing a practicum site for social community psychology students who wanted to acquire experience in public policy. this hands-on experience allowed students to engage in various tasks including a) the development of a resource directory of psychologists who wished to contribute to prpa’s policy initiatives, b) aiding in global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 organizing press conferences, c) assisting in the preparation of press releases, d) creating fact sheets on various topics and e) identifying psychologists for the analysis of key legislation. conclusions and recommendations public policy participation, research, interventions, and training are all necessary if psychologists want to contribute to the goals of community psychology and to improve the world in which we live. these interventions should be guided by psychological expertise and values and should be supported by research from all specialties. they should not be seen as the exclusive purview of community psychologists. in puerto rico, psychologists have been increasingly augmenting their participation at this level of intervention. main forces leading to this increase have been a) the socialcommunity graduate program and its graduates, b) contributions from puerto rican clinical community psychologists trained in the united states who now work in puerto rico, c) research and its dissemination about psychologists’ participation in public policy, and d) the active role of the prpa, in particular its cppp. unfortunately, despite these advances, training programs still lag behind in providing the education necessary for engagement in public policy processes, although a few have initiated internships and created courses. there have been, however, some developments in continuing education sponsored by the prpa. the contributions of the cppp have varied depending on its leadership’s time, expertise and other resources. in order for psychology pp contributions to continue its growth, these challenges need to be addressed by the prpa. a first recommendation is related to training. strengthening training for work in public policy is essential. programs should start by creating awareness at the undergraduate level of the possibilities psychologist have to influence policy making while providing examples of success stories in the area. this can be done through specific courses like the one previously mentioned, workshops and symposiums where psychologists can share with students their experiences in public policy, and recommendations. graduate programs should include courses about policy issues and work but should also incorporate discussions of the implications of psychological research – of all specialties for analyzing social problems and developing, implementing and evaluating policy solutions. training programs should also identify practicum and internship sites related to public policy for their students. finally, it would be beneficial to research attitudes and skills necessary for policy work among students and psychologists. this would facilitate creating interest in working at this level as well as developing expertise in the field. another recommendation focuses on the importance of disseminating the work of successful role models and programs. there is a lot of concern and fear that devoting time, or one’s career, to policy is a lost cause due to the political culture and environment (díaz meléndez & serrano-garcía, 2012). if colleagues can see that there are many who have succeeded, and a sizeable number who make their living at this level of intervention, this could promote further engagement. this could be accomplished by conducting qualitative research to document the experiences of such individuals and organizing presentations at local conferences and university forums to dialogue with professionals and students about the experiences of psychologists in public policy. the prpa could also include brief biographies or interviews of successful individuals or descriptions of programs in the permanent column the cppp has in every issue of their newsletter. finally, the authors have demonstrated that the prpa has had a major role in promoting involvement in public policy by psychologist. however, the voluntary nature of the association challenges its leadership to think global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 creatively about sustaining its cppp. some possible strategies may be to 1) identify funds to provide a small financial incentive for possible coordinators, 2) create alliances with other professional organizations such that their policy work can be consolidated and not fragmented, 3) make policy a priority for all association committees, 4) reduce the workload for the cppp and make policy an institutional priority, and 5) limit the scope of their policy interventions. the latter would narrow the association’s interventions, but would enhance their effectiveness. this summary should provide evidence of the impact that professional organizations can have when they include policy work and training in their agendas. if these efforts are done in conjunction with other psychological, community and government organizations, chances for success increase exponentially and thus, should be promoted. community psychologists are particularly prepared to spearhead efforts in public policy (scra, 2012). as such they should continue leading the psychological discipline in these efforts, and gain support from other specialties and disciplines. lessons learned in puerto rico can serve as examples for other countries. if community psychologists are committed to social justice and change, they should continue to pave the road that has been initiated by many hard working, committed and successful colleagues. references asociación de psicología de puerto rico (appr) (2014). políticas institucionales de la asociación de psicología de puerto rico (2004-2013). [institutional policies of the puerto rico psychology association]. unpublished document. ayala, h. (2015, february 12). de la mano la perspectiva de género con la buena salud. [hand-in-hand gender perspective with good health]. diálogo, retrieved from http://dialogoupr.com/noticia/de-lamano-la-perspectiva-de-genero-con-labuena-salud/ boulón-díaz, f. (2007). la psicología como profesión en puerto rico: desarrollo y nuevos retos. [psychology as a profession in puerto rico: development and new challenges.] revista puertorriqueña de psicología, 17, 215-240. committee of psychology and public policy (cppp) (2008). propuestas sin colores. [proposals without colors]. san juan, pr. díaz meléndez, l., & serrano-garcía, i. (2012). ¿por qué un grupo de psicólogos/as no participa en política pública? [why a group of psychologists does not participate in public policy?] revista puertorriqueña de psicología, 23 (suplemento electrónico). http://reps.asppr.net/reps/vol_23__2012.html dinitto, d., m., & dye, t. r. (1987). social welfare: politics and public policy. new jersey: prentice hall. dobelstein, a. (1997). social welfare: policy analysis. chicago, il: nelson hall. el nuevo día (2013, november 10) ¿qué leen los legisladores? [what do legislators read? ] http://www.elnuevodia.com/videos/noti cias/politica/aqua©leenloslegisladoresvideo-152447/ figueroa, m., & lugo, e. (2008). organización de una conferencia de prensa: reto para la divulgación. [organizing a press conference: challege for dissemination] boletín asociación de psicología de puerto rico, 30 (3), 13-14. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 maton, k. (2013). (ed.) community psychology and social policy. global journal of community psychology practice, special issue, 4 (2) retrieved at http://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?iss ue=14 moreno-velázquez, i., justel-cabrera, j., & massanet-rosario, b. (2007). historia de la psicología industrial/organizacional en puerto rico: los primeros 35 años (19702005). revista puertorriqueña de psicología, 17, 389-419. n.a. (2015, march 4). asociación de psicología de puerto rico endosa proyecto de muerte digna. [puerto rico psychological association sponsors dignified death project.] metro, p.2. pérez jiménez, d., rodríguez medina, s. m., & serrano-garcía, i. (2014). campaña electoral de altura: fomentando la participación ciudadana desde una organización professional. [ethical electoral campaign: promoting citizen participation from a professional organization]. revista puertorriqueña de psicología, 25, 354-374. phillips, d. a. (2000). social policy and community psychology. in j. rappaport & e. seidman (eds.), handbook of community psychology (pp.397-419). ny: kluwer. roca de torres, i. (2007). algunos precursores de la psicología en puerto rico: reseñas biográficas. [some precursors of psychology in puerto rico: biographical review]. revista puertorriqueña de psicología, 17, 61-90. rodríguez, j. (2015, march 8). mejor talento humano en las organizaciones psicológicamente saludables. [better human talent in psychologically healthy workplaces]. el nuevo día, p. e-2. scra (2012). competencies for community psychology practice. http://www.scra27.org/what-wedo/practice/18-competenciescommunity-psychology-practice/ serrano-garcía, i. (1983). report on psychologists involvement in public policy: puerto rico. unpublished document. serrano-garcía, i. (2014, september). involving psychologists in public policy: processes and results. oral presentation at the international conference of community psychology, fortaleza, brasil. serrano-garcía, i. (2013). políticas institucionales de la asociación de psicología de puerto rico 2004-2013 [institucional policies of the puerto rico psychology association]. unpublished document. serrano-garcía, i, carvallo messa, v., & walters pacheco, k. (2009). reflexiones sobre valores en psicología comunitaria: adiestramiento ¿para qué?. [reflections about the values of community psychology: training for what?] in f. cintrón bou , e. acosta pérez, & l. díaz meléndez (eds.), psicología comunitaria: trabajando con comunidades en las américas.(pps. 227-254), san juan, p.r.: publicaciones puertorriqueñas. serrano-garcía, i., colón rivera a., & díaz meléndez, l. (2005). la psicología y la política pública: reto para el adiestramiento de profesionales en puerto rico. [psychology and public policy: challenge for the training of professionals in puerto rico] revista puertorriqueña de psicología, 16, 219-241. serrano-garcía, i., rosa rodríguez, y., & garcía pérez, g. (2005) psicología y política pública: 20 años después. [psychology and public policy: 20 years later] revista puertorriqueña de psicología, 16, 159-190. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 20166 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 notes 1 from this point on the article will refer to social and clinical-community psychologists as community psychologists. 2 this refers to the articles summarized in the previous section. 3 text in bold refers to subjects that repeat themselves in both journals. 4 text in bold refer to topics that appear in more than one decade. 5 this video received an award in the society for community research and action (scra) video competition at the 2013 scra biennial. it was edited by soélix rodríguez and irma serrano-garcía. microsoft word art francescato zani 2013 final trj.docx community psychology practice competencies in undergraduate and graduate programs in italy donata francescato, professor of community psychology, university sapienza, rome, italy email mc0938@mclink.it bruna zani, professor of social and community psychology, university of bologna, bologna, italy, email bruna.zani@unibo.it key words: empowerment, practice competencies, community profiling, participatory multidimensional organisational analysis, small group skills recommended citation: francescato, d., zani, b. (2013). community psychology practice competencies in undergraduate and graduate programs in italy.global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), 1-12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/).   global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/             page  2   community psychology practice competencies in undergraduate and graduate programs in italy abstract in this paper we discuss several community psychology (cp) practice competencies learnedin our existing undergraduate and graduate programs, which are similar to the ones taught in most international settings. we then describe some specific intervention methodologies that have been developed in italy and in europe. in the third part of the paper, we attempt to look at some of the challenges facing cp training programs in this time of crisis and uncertain future. key words: empowerment, practice competencies, community profiling, participatory multidimensional organisational analysis, small group skills introduction we strongly agree with the editors of this special issue that “the development of cp practice competencies is important for further defining the “professional identity and practices of community psychologists,” especially in this period of crisis in which paradoxically community psychology interventions are more needed than ever, but difficult to realize because of diminishing public funds (francescato & zani, 2010). students who take community psychology courses often discover a “different perspective" about what psychologists might be and do, but just as often they wonder if in graduate school they will finally learn the main skills they need for community practice. we think community psychologists have made considerable progress in developing theory. however, we have not been as efficient in teaching coherent methodologies about how we can promote empowerment at the individual, group, organizational, local community and macro social levels and therefore, have not sufficiently promoted the professional empowerment of community psychologists. training community psychologists to fare well as members of a professional minority is crucial. although community psychology has been growing in the last decades both as an academic and professional field, this branch of psychology still has a marginal status among psychological disciplines in all countries where it exists (reich, riemer, prilleltensky,& montero, 2007). sometimes community psychology students face disempowering settings. not only must they move beyond the worldview of traditional applied psychology, which emphasizes individualistic explanations of behaviour and individual strategies of change such as psychotherapy. they must also deal with the high status given in many psychology departments to neuroscientists and the biomedical framework, which is focused primarily on the genetic foundations of psychological processes. moreover, many european psychology degree programs fail to take into consideration that twothirds of their students are women, belonging to a population that the european union considers deprived of equal opportunities. in italy, females also have to overcome sexist socialization processes. women’s cultural heritage pulls them toward the “caring professions” and motivates them to “help people.” however, the same cultural heritage pushes toward the “privatization” of social problems. in fact, many young women are very interested in introspection and in interpersonal relations and most psychology academic training programs help them to look even more inwards: while our current university psychology majors offer dozens of subjects related to clinical topics, very few require students to take subjects such as contemporary history, women’s studies, sociology, political psychology or political science which could offer female students different perspectives. some cp practice competences we have developed in italy, do widen the horizons and offer students the opportunity to look at social problems from different viewpoints. hoping to contribute to the professional empowerment of female and male community psychologists , in this paper we will therefore first outline what cp practice competences are taught in our existing programs, which are similar to those taught in most international programs. we then describe some intervention methodologies that have been developed in italy and finally we attempt to look into the uncertain future. practice competencies similar to those acquired in international cp programs community psychology courses are taught in italy, both at the undergraduate and graduate level. the practice competences learned in most of these global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/             page  3   courses are similar to the ones acquired in many international programs. the main competence is variously called action research, or participatory action research. another frequently taught skill is program planning and evaluation. moreover students learn quantitative and qualitative data analysis. the depth at which these competencies are learned depends on the course level: undergraduate, master or doctoral programs. another core competence that is taught in all italian community courses is small groups skills. in fact, some courses are called “groups and community” to underline the importance given to understanding and empowering small groups. in community psychology, group skills are crucial since most of our interventions, from action research to program planning and evaluation, from consultation to empowering organizations and communities, are very often done in small groups. networking among groups to promote bonding and bridging also requires an understanding of small group processes. in some universities, empowering group workshops are offered face to face and online to help students to evaluate the weak and strong points of group functioning and to understand which functions assist group processes and tasks, and which hinder group development. students in these workshops also consider advantages and disadvantages of various methods of decision making, problem solving and conflict resolution. students are supposed to share these group skills with members of established community groups aiming to empower them to function even better to meet their goals. students also learn how to promote new self-help groups needed in the community and they learn to assist members in their first three or four meetings. finally, in most graduate programs student learn how to promote partnerships with public institutions at the regional and local level, and to network with unions, schools, police departments, and volunteer organizations of all kinds, to create and implement integrated intervention programs. competences developed by italian or european community psychologists in this section, we will briefly describe some theory driven intervention methodologies, which have been developed mostly in italy that can increase the professional competences of community psychologists. elsewhere (amerio, 2000, francescato & tomai, 2001; francescato, arcidiacono, albanesi & mannarini, 2007; francescato, 2007;francescato, 2008; francescato & zani 2010, ornelas, 2008; orford, 2008), researchers have described how european community psychologists have tried to develop some theoretical principles that should guide community psychology practice. cp interventions should: encourage pluralistic interpretations of social problems that integrate objective and subjective knowledge, and broaden the viewpoints from which a given situation can be considered. examine the historical roots of social problems and the unequal distribution of power and access to resources in the social context. give voice to minority narratives, and promote the production of new metaphors or new narratives that help “imagine” new scripts and roles for individuals and social groups. create ties among people who share a problem. identify the points of strengths to obtain a change. spread psychological knowledge and competencies. here we describe in some detail four specific intervention methodologies, which building on these theoretical premises are taught in some community psychology courses in italy. local communities are made up of individuals, families, small groups and organizations that can provide empowering experiences, but also hinder the empowerment of others, especially women and minority groups. first, we present community profiling and network building, and participatory multidimensional organizational analysis, which focus on both individual and collective empowerment processes. they increase the capacity to read power dynamics of contexts, seen from different perspectives, and to perceive obstacles and opportunities in each. they enable participants, especially women and minority members, to reach desired personal and social changes. then we discuss two other crucial methodologies aimed at planning the future and increasing personal social political empowerment: socio-political empowerment training and future labs. community profiling and network building this is a structured participatory action research, that can be used to find out what particular problems and strengths characterize a local community in the eyes of different groups of residents and what are their most desired changes. community profiling and network building, initially developed in italy by martini &sequi (1988), then modified by francescato, tomai,& ghirelli (2002) and further redefined in austria (ehmayer, reinfeldt,& gtotter, 2000), is a methodology that views a local community from different perspectives, which encourages pluralistic interpretations of local problems that integrate objective and subjective knowledge and allows interpretations of the specific issues. this technique integrates tools from different disciplines and activates forms of participation that acknowledge the importance of “local knowledge.” eight profiles global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/             page  4   are included. in five of them, “hard” data are generally available and gathered focusing on territorial, demographic, economic, service and institutional factors. three of the profiles are called “soft” because they are based primarily on anthropological and psychological perceptions and visions of the future of the community. community profiling has been used to enhance sense of community, social capital and participation in decision-making in local programs sponsored by the european union to promote better health (healthy cities). variation of this technique of community assessment has also been used to protect the environment (agenda 21) and to help local municipal officials assess the needs and wishes of community residents (de piccoli & lavanco, 2003; mannarini, 2004; prezza & santinello, 2002; santinello, dallago, & vieno, 2009; zani 2012). community profiling begins with the formation of a core group of citizens made up of at least one local expert for each profile, the community psychologists involved and representatives of the service agency or the political body sponsoring the research. this core group, through a brainstorming technique, performs a preliminary analysis, listing what they think are the strong and weak points of their community. they also furnish access to people who are interviewed as key witnesses. evaluations by these experts are then compared with the perceptions of the weak and strong points of the community identified by focus groups. focus groups are chosen to represent both dominant and marginalized community groups. to examine the anthropological, psychological and future profiles, we use a variety of more subjective small group techniques from community narratives to movie scripts. for example, one might ask different target groups to develop a plot for a movie script about their community based on issues uncovered in the five “hard” data profiles. they have to pick a genre of movie (e.g. historical, science fiction, comedy or detective) and come up with a title, a plot, main characters and dramatization, if they wish, for particular relevant scenes. most groups choose to present their “movie” in front of the other groups whose members are then encouraged to say what emotions they felt watching the performance. it seems that emotional sharing in a protected environment promotes bonding and bridging by building a climate of trust in which even conflicts can be openly expressed and accepted. during a final meeting of all the people who participated in the research, the interactions among main strengths and weaknesses that emerged from all eight profiles and priorities for change are discussed. developing the diverse specific professional competences (individual and group interviewing; facilitating focus groups through brainstorming and other creativity techniques; helping participants evaluate the emotions they feel toward their communities through movie scripts production and analysis; facilitating large group discussion and mediation among different groups, to promote the individuation of final change projects which can be empowering; etc.) required to perform community profiling and network building increases the professional efficacy of community psychologists. community profiling and network building moreover adhere to most of the theoretical principles that we believe should guide community interventions. they encourage pluralistic interpretations of social problems that integrate objective and subjective knowledge, and broaden the viewpoints from which a given situation can be considered: in fact they nudge participant to look at a community from eight viewpoints, each of which can examine a different aspect of the social problems and of the strengths to be found in the particular context. furthermore the first five profiles focusing on territorial, demographic, economic, service and institutional dimensions give more emphasis to “objective data” such as degree of air or water pollution, etc., while the last three, rely more on subjective data, on anthropological and psychological perceptions of residents and on their visions of the future of the community. it is in these last three profiles that in fact may emerge both old narratives on the historical roots of social problems and new narratives that give voice to minority viewpoints. new narratives help “imagine” new scripts and roles for individuals and social groups in the community. the entire process of community profiling encourages networking among different associations, institutions, small groups that create ties among people who share a problem and who can together, in the final meetings where results of the profiles analyses are discussed, identify the points of strengths to obtain a change. performing a community profiling can take from two to six months, depending on how many interviews are conducted with key community experts and how many focus groups of dominant and marginalized members of the community are included in the process. this intervention methodology can be taught in small groups, seminars or labs lasting about two months, and has been offered both online and face-to-face. case studies of different community profiling can be found in italian in several books and articles (de piccoli & lavanco, 2003;francescato, tomai, & ghirelli,.2002; francescato & tomai, 2002; lavanco & novara 2012; mannarini2009; martini& sequi, 1988, 1995; prezza & santinello, 2002;santinello, dallago,& vieno, 2009; zani, 2012).description of this methodology can be also found in spanish (francescato, tomai & mebane, 2006) and in english (francescato& ghirelli, 1992;francescato & tomai, 2001;francescato 2007; 2008; francescato 2010a). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/             page  5   participatory   multidimensional   organizational   analysis  (pmoa)   organizations are crucial for our wellbeing since most of us live a large portion of our lives in them. an empowering organization can increase: personal wellbeing, augmenting workers and service recipients’ knowledge of the various aspects of organizational functioning, and involvement in decision-making; relational wellbeing, improving communication among different stakeholders, promoting bonding and bridging social capital and giving voice to marginalized and less powerful groups; and collective wellbeing, when members of the organization become aware of political, economic and social forces impinging on their organization. also, frequently, one has to promote organizational as well as personal or group changes in order to implement durable modifications. therefore, several european community psychologists have attempted to develop strategies to promote organizational empowerment (francescato, tomai, & ghirelli 2002; stark 1996). one of these strategies (francescato et al. 2002, 2004, 2006a, francescato et al., 2010) is called participatory multidimensional organizational analysis (pmoa) and involves individuals on all hierarchical levels in a specific organization. for instance, students, parents, teachers, janitors and office staff from a school might analyze their organization across four dimensions (structuralstrategic, functional, psycho-environmental and cultural). these four dimensions are assessed on a continuum that varies from dealing with “hard” objective variables (market share, increase or decrease in number of students, legal forms, age and educational level of staff, etc.) to “soft” subjective perceptions (unconscious representations of work settings, attitudes toward power, intergroup conflicts, level of satisfaction, etc.). the core group starts a pmoa by having an experienced member narrate the strategic history of the organization (i.e., when it was born, what goals and visions it had, how strategic goals have changed over time). then members evaluate how their organization has fared, choosing various criteria with which to assess their organization’s performance in the recent past. sometimes, we divide the core group into smaller homogenous subgroups (students, teachers, parents, etc.) to see what each different subgroup selects as criteria for evaluation. then the subgroups come together and confront their visions. taking into consideration legal, economic and other structural limits, the core group defines strategic objectives for the immediate future and for next five years. then the functional dimension is examined by reviewing what tasks have to be completed to meet goals. we use different methodologies taken from sociology and organizational disciplines to examine activity flows and detect where problems and assets may lie. the competences needed to facilitate the analysis of the structural and functional dimensions include therefore the knowledge of some tools used by political scientists, economists, sociologists and management consultants. one of these tools for instance is “positioning” the organization, comparing it to similar organisations on a number of criteria. in for profit organisations the criteria are well established (for instance market share, sale volumes, etc.) and these data are continuously gathered and discussed. in non-profit institutions such as voluntary organisations or even schools, sometimes we have to spend quite a considerable amount of time brainstorming about possible criteria of comparison and give participants time to gather these kinds of data, which are not immediately available for evaluation. the professional competences needed in this part of the analysis are mostly based on small and large group facilitating skills, including the capacity to integrate different contributions coming from the various small groups, to mediate, to offer support and encouragement, to help participants verify suppositions through data analysis, to agree on what were the major strategic goals in the past and which ones should be chosen for the future. then the group examines the cultural or psychodynamic dimension using a variety of tools drawn from cultural psychology, cultural anthropology and socio-analysis. this dimension explores group and individual emotional variables that are often not consciously discussed. this is done by analyzing group drawings, recurrent jokes, pictures hung on walls, etc. to capture problemsolving styles, we again use the movie script technique, described in the community profiling section, only in this case the movie is about the target organization. the competences needed here are those acquired generally in clinical psychology, the capacity to detect the emotional meaning of non-verbal and verbal behaviours, to help groups face conflicts and arrive at some creative solutions, to explore the relationships between the type and contents of movie scripts, and drawings produced by the groups and problems and areas of strength of the organisation to which they formally belong. for instance if in a movie script is titled “titanic” or“ climbing mt everest” or “fun and games “we ask participants how their title may relate to the emotions prevalent in their work setting. or if only negative emotions prevail we may suggest to further explore some small positive emotions they experienced in their work. finally, the psycho-environmental dimension is explored which basically measures the fit between individuals’ expectations and organizational global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/             page  6   pressures. generally, we use tools drawn from organizational psychology to measure perceived leadership styles, communication and conflict resolution patterns. we use both group and individual interviews focused on exploring the congruence between individual preferences, competences and desires and the organisational functions to be performed to reach strategic goals, formulated during the analysis of the structural and functional dimensions. in some cases, each person gets to say what preferred function he/she may want to exercise in the future and whether he/she has the necessary skills to perform it and finally, how he/she may learn them. we also use organisational well-being scales to assess preferred and existing leadership styles, communication patters and conflict resolution strategies. here the competences needed are related to the ability to choose the best existing measures for the specific organisation we are working with, to analyze and report results, and to promote open discussion of divergent or minority opinions. after the various organizational actors have identified weaknesses and strengths in all four dimensions and the connections among dimensions -(for instance a lack of procedures on how to best go about a task -functional dimension) may have negative effects both in the psychodynamic dimension (workers feel anxious and confused) and in the psycho-environmental dimension (insufficient communication among colleagues)they formulate different narratives and preferred visions of the future. in this crucial part of the analysis community psychologists have to be expert in facilitating the identification by participants of connections between both problems and areas of strengths that appear in one dimension but may affect other dimensions. experience in conducting many organisational analyses in different work settings develops this specific competence as we describe in a book that include case studies in more than 50 small and medium business firms, public administration structures, and non-profit organisations (francescato, tomai & solimeno, 2008). at the end of the analysis, participants formulate plans to affect desired changes that can be achieved through the resources available within the organization. they also outline the problems or solutions that cannot be tackled without intervention at a different level. focusing on feasible change necessarily promotes empowerment and increases the capacity of organizations to foster creative change. evaluation of the efficacy of this tool has been carried out on more than 140 organizations ranging from unions to schools, from volunteer organizations to hospitals, from small family firms to governmental organizations.it takes at least 6 meetings, lasting about three hours each to conduct a pmoa. between meetings, normally scheduled every two weeks, members of the organisation can gather missing data. this intervention methodology can be taught in small groups, seminars or labs lasting about two months, and has been offered both online and face-to-face. more information about this methodology can also be found in italian, spanish and english in the following sources:francescato et al., 2004; francescato et al., 2006b; francescato, 2007, 2008, 2010a; francescato et al., 2007; francescato et al., 2008; lavanco & novara.2012; morganti, 1998; zani, 2012. socio-political empowerment training this intervention strategy integrates concepts and tools from the affective education movement and feminist consciousness raising groups, and is taught to both undergraduate and graduate students. in small group workshops, participants meet about ten times for three hours. students first participate in consciousness raising activities by exploring how their needs and wishes are influenced by mass media. in this setting, students talk about their favourite songs, movies, internet sites and what values they convey. they also discuss their political socialization in the family, peer groups and school. finally, they discuss political socialization that occurs through mass media. these workshops aim also to help students become aware of how different branches of psychology are mainly the product of specific historical weltanschauung and of the values and interests of their practitioners. students are invited to imagine themselves working as community psychologists in settings of their choice. in pairs, students have to reflect on whether they possess the skills needed to do their desired jobs. then students are asked to use the schema developed in the labs and in their community courses to detect the strong and weak points of the small groups of which they are members (family, class, work and/or volunteer) and how these groups impact on their personal, relational and collective well-being. then, they do the same using the pmoa schema for an organization of their choice. finally, using the profiling methodology discussed previously, they explore what they know and do not know about the community where they might want to work. they also discuss how the organization or community where they may work might be affected by broad cultural, economic and/or political changes. in the final two meetings, they assess the congruence between their desires and competences and what the outside world seems to offer and require as they identify priorities for personal change that they can manage on their own. for desired collective changes, they identify other people, groups and/or institutions with which they global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/             page  7   have to network to achieve these wider goals (francescato, 2010b). other italian community psychologists help students acquire competences in promoting the civic and political participation of young people, women and minority groups (zani, cicognani,& albanesi, 2011; zani, 2012 ). they use, for instance, a participatory action research methodology to train a small group of high school students, teaching them specific techniques like photo voice and team work. then these trained youngsters work with their fellow students in a peer-to-peer educational framework (cicognani & albanesi, 2013). another set of techniques can be used to activate empowerment processes in a participatory action research like the theater of the oppressed, the open space technology, the narratives lab (for a discussion and presentation of such techniques, see nicoli,& pellegrino, 2011). most of these competencies can be taught through computer supported collaborative learning as we have verified in several pilot studies available in english (francescato, porcelli, mebane, cuddetta, klobas,.&renzi,.2006b; francescato, mebane, porcelli, attanasio, & pulino, 2007b; mebane, francescato, porcelli, iannone, & attanasio,2008;solimeno, francescato, mebane, & tomai, 2008). these studies have been summarized in a chapter of a book in english available online (francescato, mebane, tomai, benedetti, & rosa, 2012).in fact, we strongly recommend that we take into account the opportunities provided by virtual communities to train community psychologists. these opportunities include teaching community psychology online to promote social capital and socio-political empowerment in educational and professional settings. in italy, we have an undergraduate degree in psychology, taught entirely at distance and community psychology was one of the courses included in the three year bachelor’s degree program. in several italian universities social networks and virtual communities have been chosen as potential intervention settings.(arcidiacono, procentese,& baldi, 2010; matteucci et al., 2011). future labs in some italian universities students are taught to organize and conduct future labs. in small groups participants first take part in a critical session, in which a social problem is selected and they are encouraged to explore all the possible negative consequences if the specific problem persists in time and to vent all their fears for the future. in a second “utopic” session they learn to explore through creative techniques, both verbal and nonverbal, all possible solutions to the problem, even the most unpractical ones. they discover and express their deepest desires. finally, in the last session, they try to integrate their desired changes with the possibilities existing in the contexts, finding the best possible solutions and, agreeing on some actions to be taken to begin to realize desired changes. for a description of different kinds of community labs focused on future planning see also:http://assr.regione.emiliaromagna.it/it/aree_attivita/partecipazioneinnovazione-sociale/comunita-equita/progettiinternazionali/community-lab/intro looking at the uncertain future to become empowered, young professionals need to learn modalities of intervention that can help them to be identified as “practicing community psychologists.” this will also allow them to earn a decent living. teaching action research, program evaluation procedures and data analysis (currently the common “practical” offering in most community psychology graduate schools) is important but not sufficient. these professional skills, in fact, are most useful to those who want to publish and pursue academic careers. the other practical competences described in this article are now being taught only in some italian community programs. we think they represent a step in the right direction to help community psychologists become respectedpracticingpsychologists. as we have argued elsewhere (francescato &zani, 2010) we desperately need them in our world today. the recent economic crisis has worsened the lot of the poorest and most marginalized groups of citizens, increased the number of people unemployed and underemployed, and augmented fears for the future in many segments of the population, living in contexts already beset by environmental, social and political problems (orford,2008; zani, 2003). as community psychology theorists have postulated, human problems have a social side, because most problems are born in social contexts and in them one can find the cultural and material tools to their solution, but they have also an individual side because it is a person who suffers and who must cope with them (amerio, 2000). given our hierarchical social contexts, which offer opportunities and obstacles in an unequal manner for different groups of persons, it is likely that most obstacles, and most suffering will be faced by less empowered groups, who will also have less access to services, have more health problems and suffer more family disruptions. moreover, more personal, interpersonal and family conflicts will erupt along social divides already pre-existing the present crisis: between natives and immigrants, women and men, young and old, who will be pitted against each other to compete for fewer resources, and will find it hard to live together. ‘living together’ in a peaceful and respectful way seems to have become the real issue global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/             page  8   and the challenge of the present days. the poor– rich, migrants–natives differences and the generational and gender gaps create multilevel problems that are best handled with a community psychology oriented approach. at the core of these divides there is the issue of how to relate to the ‘other’, how to build positive relations. these complex problems could best be tackled through community psychology interventions that are based on the guiding principles that problems have to be faced simultaneously on several levels since transactions among individuals and the hierarchical social contexts are multidirectional and occur at multiple levels (other individuals, small groups, organizations, local and virtual communities (francescato & tomai, 2001). community psychology programs, however, are less likely to be financed, deepening the social justice imbalance already prevailing in most european countries, including italy. in the near future community psychologists in italy will have to face some challenges which require us to act on many different levels, both within academia and within the profession: developing new strategies for securing funds, promoting innovative partnerships with other disciplines in academia and other stakeholders in the community and, above all, making our achievements more visible becoming more media savvy. to make community psychology more visible outside academia is particularly crucial in this period of economic crisis, since the way problems are tackled could be modified utilizing a community psychology perspective. in fact, community psychologists underline that structural and economic interventions, which are generally implemented when countries face economic crisis, are needed but are not sufficient. we have also to work with people, by rebuilding their trust, and rekindling interpersonal and social ties. community psychologists therefore, have to increase the visibility of data that evidence that policies and intervention based on community psychology's values of empowerment, participation and social justice produce more collective and individual well-being than those deriving from predominant neo-liberalistic, competition-oriented and consumerist values (montero & sonn, 2009). community psychologists need to become more media oriented, using radio, tv and above all the internet to make community psychology more known. how to secure funds through private and public new sources is another key issue. we still hope that the european union will keep financing action research in the health and social domains. the initiatives launched in the 7th framework programme still favour cooperative programs among european nations and their key concepts seem to be derived from community psychology basic principles; moreover all research programs have to show their social relevance. however, we need to find other sources of private funding besides the european union (foundations, unions, ethical banks, professional associations, etc.). making our discipline more visible could help in securing new sources of funding. how to exploit the opportunities provided by virtual communities to promote social capital is yet another challenge facing community psychology in general. different action studies have shown that integrating cscl (computer supported collaborative learning) and community psychology interventions can increase social efficacy, socio-political empowerment, bonding and bridging social capital in university and high school students (mebane et al., 2008; tomai et al., 2010) we need to study how belonging to facebook and other online settings affects the social capital of users, and how sense of community, and other key constructs can or cannot be applied in virtual communities. we need to provide compelling evidence that community psychologists have the competencies to tackle (with other professionals) today's complex problems. community psychologists should document that they can act as successful facilitators in increasing: (a) social ties and trust, and individual, small groups, organizational and community empowerment; (b) promoting active participation; (c) helping people solve conflicts constructively; (d) consolidating social networks and (e) promoting sense of community. references amerio, p. 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(2011) la partecipazione civica e politica dei giovani. bologna: clueb. microsoft word 2014-si07-20140519.docx listening to consumer perspectives to inform addictions and housing-related practice and research stephanie a. farquhar, marianne ryder, derek henderlong, robert a. lowe, and ted amann author notes: stephanie a. farquhar, phd, is associate professor at portland state university school of community health, portland, or, usa. email: farquhar@pdx.edu, phone: 503.725.5167, fax: 503.725.5100 marianne ryder, phd is an independent researcher and writer in portland, or, usa. email: marianneryder@gmail.com, 503-453-4778 derek henderlong, is a student of classical chinese medicine at the national college of natural medicine portland, or, usa. email: derekhenderlong@gmail.com robert a. lowe, md, mph is with the department of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology, department of emergency medicine, department of public health and preventive medicine, and the center for policy and research in emergency medicine, oregon health & science university, portland, or, usa. email: robertalowemdmph@gmail.com, 503 494-7134 ted amann, mph, rn, is a community research associate at central city concern, portland, or, usa. email: ted.amann@ccconcern.org, 503-200-3917 acknowledgments: research reported in this publication was supported by the national institute on drug abuse of the national institutes of health under award number #1rc4da029988 and the northwest health foundation. the content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the national institutes of health. additionally, thanks to rebecca allen and bethany ponichter for their assistance with the review of literature and editing. keywords: recovery, success, housing, integrated services, community-based research recommended citation: farquhar, s.a., ryder, m., henderlong, d., lowe, r.a., & amann, t. (2014). listening to consumer perspectives to inform addictions and housing-related practice and research. global journal of community psychology practice, 5(1), 1-14. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 listening to consumer perspectives to inform addictions and housing-related practice and research abstract the study, funded by the northwest health foundation of portland, oregon and the national institute on drug abuse (nida), was conducted as part of the hearth collaborative (housing, employment and recovery together for health). hearth, established in 2010, is a community-academic partnership involving partners from portland state university (psu), oregon health and science university (ohsu), and central city concern (ccc). using the approaches of community-based participatory research (cbpr), these diverse stakeholders collaborated to co-develop research of direct relevance to the local community and to national academic and policy communities. this study employed qualitative methods and community-based participatory research principles to solicit personal experiences with housing, employment, and recovery programs. we recruited interview participants via ccc-operated housing programs, including alcohol and drug free community housing (adfc), family housing, transitional housing, and non-adfc (low barrier) housing units. the manuscript presents interview themes based on the five broad categories of interview questions: housing, employment programs, recovery programs, definitions of recovery, and definitions of success. co-authors describe recommendations for practice and research protocol based on our findings. our results highlight the importance of involving consumers in the development, data collection, and analysis of research, and present the unique perspectives of those who experience homelessness, recovery, and the programs designed to assist them. keywords: recovery, success, housing, integrated services, community-based research in the homelessness and addictions recovery literature, few research studies develop the data collection protocol and interpretation of research results with input from those who are experiencing homelessness or recovery (coles, themessl-huber, & freeman, 2012). this study was unique in that we worked closely with individuals who had accessed homelessness or recovery programs in order to identify the best data collection methods to solicit personal experiences with housing, employment, and recovery programs. we collected this information, along with definitions of “recovery” and “success” from among individuals who were in recovery and/or formerly homeless (referred to as consumers). first, we summarize the most relevant methods and results from past community-driven research studies with homeless or recovering individuals. second, we describe our study with 16 individuals who accessed the homelessness and recovery programs of central city concern in portland, oregon. study findings present the unique perspectives of those who experience homelessness and recovery, and highlight the importance of including their voices in the development of research and programs designed to serve them. community-based participatory research among homeless and recovering population community-based participatory research (cbpr) scholarship draws attention to the distinction between community-placed (research conducted in a community or with community subjects) versus community-based or community-driven (research that is conducted in a power-sharing partnership between community and researchers) (minkler & wallerstein, 2008). the principal goal of cbpr is to apply knowledge and understanding of a given phenomenon to transform interventions and policy designed to create healthier conditions (israel, schulz, parker, & becker, 1998). a search of the literature conducted in consult with library faculty using medline, psycinfo, social services abstracts, and web of science revealed very few studies conducted with a truly cbpr approach that was grounded in shared decision-making and of equal benefit to all partners. yet, search results suggested that some level of participation of homeless and recovering individuals in research programs can improve the quality and relevance of health promotion programs (nyamathi et al., 2004). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 of the articles reviewed that drew upon cbpr principles, four addressed issues of homelessness and housing and included homeless individuals as members of the research team (henwood et al., 2013; greysen, allen, lucas, wang, & rosenthal, 2012; greysen, allen, rosenthal, lucas, & wang, 2013; nyamathi et al., 2004). two of these studies described the procedures followed during discharge from a medical facility and transition to a shelter. interviews with the discharged patients suggested that hospital providers should consider housing as a health concern (greysen et al., 2012; greysen et al., 2013). over half of the interview respondents (56%) were not asked about their housing status upon discharge and data revealed patient concerns about stigmatization from disclosure of housing status (greysen et al., 2013). another study noted a lack of hospital-shelter communication and coordination that would help to place discharged patients into safe housing (greysen et al., 2012). in a third qualitative and cbpr study regarding homelessness, henwood et al. reported the results from interviews with 15 tenants of a “housing first” program about management of chronic disease. recommendations included the need for integrated services in addition to housing and a call for participatory methods to engage tenants in decisionmaking (henwood et al., 2013). in the fourth study, nyamathi et al.’s focus groups with homeless and lowincome adults in los angeles investigated participation in hiv vaccine trials. results highlighted the need for researchers to hear and address community concerns early in the research process in order to address distrust of government and funded research (nyamathi et al., 2004). the literature search for cbpr studies uncovered even fewer studies on addictions recovery and employment among homeless individuals. in the four databases searched, we identified two cbpr studies focused on addictions recovery and employment (nyamathi et al., 2011; rebeiro, kauppi, montgomery, & james, 2012). a study with 24 homeless young adult participants looked at the efficacy of art messaging to communicate the dangers of drug and alcohol use. results of focus groups indicated that participants respond to messages that reinforce protective factors in addition to information about risks and consequences of drug use, and prefer content that is “personal, real, and truthful” (nyamathi et al., 2011, p. 14). rebeiro et al.’s research in ontario examined employment as a contributing factor in recovery. interview data emphasized the importance of collaborative partnerships between consumers, researchers, and service providers in an effort to create effective employment programs and improve health outcomes (rebeiro et al., 2012). in a separate and secondary review of literature, we searched for qualitative projects (removing “cbpr” as a search term) with homeless and recovering populations and found that qualitative methods varied widely with this population. eight studies conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews; one analyzed secondary interview data previously conducted for a different study (dodington et al., 2012); and one simply described “conducting interviews” (nettleton, neale, & stevenson, 2012). dashora, slesnick, and erdem (2012) conducted focus groups with homeless or recovering individuals. two studies (dordick, 2002; stanhope, 2012) included participant observation along with the structured interviews, and one study (dordick, 2002) included structured site visits. one notable methodological consistency is that the interviews for the studies were conducted by researchers, generally including one or more of the article authors, research staff, graduate students, or paid interviewers. only one study included interviews that were conducted by the consumers themselves, or the consumers accessing the housing or addictions programs (lincoln, plachta-elliott, & espejo, 2009). a summary of the reviewed studies suggests that intervention and program development for homeless and recovering individuals should: 1) allow homeless individuals to engage with and shape programs; 2) integrate psychosocial and lifestyle needs into programming, such as employment programs, housing and social support activities; and 3) tailor programs and services to fit individual needs. the study presented here fills a gap in the literature by offering an alternative model for conducting qualitative research on homelessness and recovery in that the consumers co-developed the interview protocol and questions, conducted the interviews, and assisted with analysis and interpretation of interview transcripts. given the dearth of qualitative and cbpr projects that truly partner with homeless and recovering individuals, the primary aim of this manuscript is to contribute to the limited literature on the methods used in consumerdriven studies and to increase our knowledge of consumer experiences. the primary research goals guiding this study included: 1) to understand how consumers describe “success” and “recovery” in their own words and using their own examples, and 2) to learn about the strengths and challenges of ccc programs and services from the consumers’ perspectives. hearth: community-based partnership hearth, established in 2010, is a communityacademic partnership among partners from portland state university (psu), oregon health and science university (ohsu), and central city concern (ccc). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 ccc is an internationally recognized organization that provides housing, employment, recovery and healthrelated services for persons experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness. guided by the principles of cbpr, these diverse stakeholders collaborated to codevelop research of direct relevance to the local community and to national academic and policy communities. the primary objectives of hearth include: to build the research-community partnership, to develop the capacity for research at central city concern, and to better understand the interaction of factors that impact homelessness and the recovery process. the impetus for this study grew out of the expressed interests of ccc staff and consumers. from 2011-2012, hearth project team members facilitated a series of meetings that involved other ccc staff, ccc consumers, and academic researchers. through these meetings, the team gained the perspective of staff and consumers on drug and alcohol programs, housing, economic stability, social support and health. less known was the way consumers defined and conceptualized success and recovery as they progressed through ccc programs. we agreed that additional qualitative information about consumers’ perspectives would help to inform local and national practices and policy. methods this study, funded by the northwest health foundation of portland, oregon and the national institute on drug abuse (nida, grant #1rc4da029988), was conducted as part of the hearth1 collaborative (housing, employment and recovery together for health). to assist with the project, two community research assistants (cras) were interviewed and hired from a group of ccc consumers who participated on the hearth consumer advisory board, a group established to guide hearth research projects. we selected the cras based on their first-hand experiences with ccc programs, their ability to work in a culturally competent and confidential manner, and their expressed interest in research and qualitative interview methods. the cras worked with project researchers and ccc staff to develop in-depth interview questions, recruit, schedule, and conduct interviews, and to assist with transcript analysis. the cras participated in a threehour training facilitated by the research partner. 1 this is not associated with the homeless emergency assistance and rapid transition to housing (hearth) act of 2009. training covered interviewing skills, methods to reduce respondent bias, research ethics and confidentiality, and included time to practice asking, and being asked, the in-depth interview questions. sample the cras and ccc caseworkers recruited interview participants via ccc-operated housing programs, including alcohol and drug free community housing (adfc), family housing, transitional housing, and nonadfc (low barrier or “housing first”) housing units. in keeping with standard qualitative data collection protocol, the number of participants interviewed was determined by two aims: (1) to include interviewees who are representative of the general ccc community in demographics and service experience, and (2) to interview a sufficient number of study subjects to achieve saturation. “data saturation” in qualitative research refers to the point at which data collection produces no new information and the researcher stops collecting new data. we recruited participants who represented over a dozen different housing, health, recovery, and employment programs because one of the primary goals of the interviews was to learn about a diversity of experiences from a range of programs and services. the criteria used to identify the 16 consumer participants required that they had participated in at least two ccc programs or services and had participated in these programs or services for at least six months in the past two years. (table 1 describes these ccc housing, employment, and recovery programs). among the 16 participants, with roughly equal numbers of men and women, several participants had lived in more than one type of ccc housing and at least one person had lived in housing offered by another organization. the average age of the 16 interview respondents was 46 years. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 table 1. description of central city concern (ccc) programs programs description ccc recovery center (cccrc) cccrc uses a multi-disciplinary approach and evidence based practices to provide comprehensive outpatient addiction care that includes acupuncture, peer mentoring and some receive help with housing. clean & safe clean & safe is an employment program that provides 6 months of mentored and paid work experience that fills a needed service in our community. community engagement program (cep) cep is a multidisciplinary recovery model designed to meet the needs of chronically homeless individuals with co-occurring mental health, addiction disorders and/or physical concerns. community volunteer corps (cvc) cvc is a work-readiness program that engages individuals in 80 hours of volunteer work over 3 months, where they build marketable skills and give back to the community. employment access center the employment access center provides multiple resource services and helps job seekers overcome barriers to employment. hooper detoxification & stabilization center hooper center provides medically-monitored detoxification and stabilization for individuals who resolve to address their drug/alcohol addictions. letty owings center (loc) loc is a residential addiction treatment program that provides a safe place for mothers to recover with their children, while being treated for drug addiction and alcoholism. old town clinic (otc) old town clinic offers comprehensive primary care, with integrated behavioral health services, for insured and uninsured (on a sliding fee scale) for nearly 3,000 people each year. old town recovery center (otrc) old town recovery center is a community mental health center providing outpatient mental health and addiction treatment program for adults with severe mental illness. puentes this culturally-specific program supports latinos in recovery and their families, by providing mental health and drug and alcohol treatment. recovery mentors program (rmp) an adjunct to outpatient addiction treatment, rmp clients are matched with individual mentors who verify that they maintain their commitment to intensive outpatient medical, chemical dependency and mental health treatment. interview protocol interviews were conducted between june-july 2012 at a ccc building or at a neutral location in downtown portland as agreed upon by the interviewer and consumer. before beginning the interview, cras described to the participants the purpose of the study, categories of interview questions, the benefits and risks of participation, and offered each participant a $25 gift certificate. interviews lasted between 30 to 60 minutes, and were taped with permission and transcribed. portland state university’s human subjects research review committee approved interview questions and recruitment protocol. there were five broad categories of interview questions: housing, employment programs, recovery programs, definitions of recovery, and definitions of success. question categories and wording were guided by three sources: 1. the research goals described previously (e.g., to learn about consumers’ assessment of services and programs), 2. the review of literature that suggested that the strongest programs are integrative and tailored to consumer needs, and 3. input from the cras. specifically, cras brainstormed with the co-authors general categories of inquiry and then helped the lead author refine interview questions to ensure they were clear and appropriate. some of the questions included: 1. what were your goals when you first started the program (employment, housing, or recovery), 2. how did the program help you to meet your goals, 3. what are the barriers someone might face trying to finish the program, 4. what does “success” look like, and 5. how do you define “recovery”? global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 participants also provided recommendations for strengthening access or program implementation. analysis the team used thematic analysis to review interview data and identify patterns of responses (braun & clarke, 2006). thematic analysis involves reviewing transcripts, becoming familiar with the data, identifying patterns in the data, and then developing themes based on those patterns. themes are ideas that occur numerous times across transcripts or data sets. in the research presented here, for example, one theme was the importance of integration of recovery, employment, and housing services. co-authors performed an initial reading of the interview transcripts, named patterns and developed a preliminary coding scheme. at this point, we met to discuss the codes, refined code categories, and identified themes across interviews. the first author, with assistance from the co-authors, prepared and presented summary results at two hearth advisory committee meetings and invited responses to the results from ccc consumers, staff, and academic researchers. this method of member checking, or sharing results and soliciting responses, is common in cbpr projects and can strengthen the accuracy of data analysis (patton, 2002). in the next section, we present the main themes from the 16 in-depth interviews, along with participants’ quotes that help to illustrate the themes. results recovery: “and for me, recovery meant changing everything.” participants were asked to discuss their recovery and to describe what recovery looked like for them. generally, the respondents did not distinguish between recovery from mental health disorders and recovery from addiction, but rather emphasized that recovery means being honest and true to oneself. most responses describing their experiences with recovery could be categorized as: actively participating in 12-step programs; making life changes and changing their ways of doing things; and working with or participating in ccc programs. other common responses related to the benefits of successfully moving towards recovery included: being part of a community; experiencing a sense of freedom; and discovering personal capabilities that they didn’t know existed. one person described the recovery experience: recovery for me is not just abstaining from using…it’s more being honest. not lying, like i was when i was in addiction. and just learning as much as i can, staying true to myself, so that i don’t have guilt, remorse and all that adding to it because that’s hard. because when you start feeling bad, that’s when you start, well screw it, you know. but for me, it’s just continuing to work on myself because i think it’s a work in progress … it is just continuing to grow and to learn and to move forward, and to abstain. recovery was described as “freedom” – freedom to make clear decisions, and to be involved in other ccc programs, to maintain employment, and to get “a better apartment,” per one respondent. another person described recovery as freedom from any type of addiction: “i’ve been sober now over three years, which is great…it’s a freedom. it’s not having that ball and chain of an addiction that can just take your life away from you. it kills yourself, mentally, physically and spiritually. and that’s for any addiction, drug, alcohol, whatever. you name it.” in addition to getting clean, many participants were interested in getting into housing, and for some, getting into housing programs required that they participate in recovery programs. some participants mentioned that people who took part in certain programs just to get housing were not likely to be successful. however, two participants who made this type of comment noted that they had taken part in programs only to get housing, and their goals changed as they became more involved in ccc programs and maintained their recovery. one participant described his experience in a comprehensive recovery program that included housing, employment, and mental health services. well, they supplied housing for me. you know, they gave me a housing voucher. and that was a major thing because of my homelessness. and it really began to make me feel a little bit more normal. it made me feel more grateful, i think. and it began to give me hope that….going back to school was possible. many participants reported changing goals over time and as they participated in various programs. in general, participants’ goals became more ambitious as people achieved their immediate goals of finding a safe place to live, employment, and then realizing that there were many other resources available. a respondent discussed how success in recovery expanded his perspective of what was possible. well, initially it was just to not drink, to stay sober. now that i’ve been in it for a while my goals are now to get employment, and to get out of this housing and into my own apartment so i can have my son. when discussing how recovery programs helped them meet their goals or supported recovery, several global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 consumers reported that ccc recovery programs gave them “the tools” to pursue recovery. most referenced specific 12-step programs including alcoholics anonymous (aa) and narcotics anonymous (na). those who mentioned 12-step programs talked about “working the steps” and staying sober and clean one day at a time. some participants mentioned other mechanisms such as counseling, acupuncture and treatment for physical and mental health issues in relation to recovery. and then also the programs they have, like the acupuncture, the healing power, the qigong. and i also want to do like the art journal…. and you just can’t lose in there. everybody, from the pharmacist to the people that answer the phones, i think somebody special picks them out for that place because they’re all awesome. several participants mentioned that the caseworkers involved in recovery and medical clinics were very helpful. caseworkers and ccc staff helped participants learn about available programs, access programs, and offered caring and compassionate treatment. some participants sought help from ccc to address other mental and physical health issues in addition to addiction issues. the consumer participants were generally satisfied with the treatment they received and the range of programs available. they gave me tools. you know what i mean? they gave me an understanding that there could be a life without drugs. the one-on-one counseling that i got over there, the group counseling that i got over there. again, this is my first recovery program and i came in very, very confused but very, very willing…they gave me a way out. comments were positive about the programs, yet a few consumers mentioned that the programs could be stricter and that they could recruit more staff to reduce wait time. the suggestions for improvement mirrored those offered while discussing housing and employment: “i think the (recovery program) needs to be a lot more strict. i think it’s too forgiving.” housing: “to have a place to shower, a place to eat, a place to sleep, a place to just feel comfortable” while we did not collect additional demographic data on our interviewees in an effort to protect their anonymity, we present demographic and self-report data from a recent ccc consumer census survey to provide the reader with a general description of the ccc client base from which participants were recruited (see table 2). table 2. demographic and self-reported measures from ccc census survey total characteristic no. (%) __________________________________________________________________________ gender reported 393 female 149 37.9 male 238 60.6 transgender 2 0.5 don’t identify a gender 4 1.0 ethnicity reported 376 hispanic, latino 17 5 non-hispanic, latino 359 95 race reported 379 american indian/alaskan native 50 13 asian 17 4 black or african american 53 14 native hawaiian or pacific islander 3 1 more than one race 33 9 white 305 80 self-reported health reported 380 excellent 26 7 very good 74 19 good 133 35 fair 102 27 poor 45 12 self-reported homelessness reported 382 currently homeless 93 26 not currently homeless 289 74 global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 when cras asked consumers about their initial goals when they entered their housing program(s), some of the participants mentioned that their goal was to simply get into housing and get off the streets. yet, participants most frequently mentioned the goal of “staying clean and sober” and recovering from addiction. participants who had lived in or were living in clean and sober housing felt that living in this type of housing facilitated their recovery. when discussing how a particular housing program helped meet their goals towards recovery, participants noted a variety of factors, including: having a place to live and getting away from the influences of the streets; living in a clean and sober environment; the importance of rules and accountability for behavior; and, the support they received from caseworkers, ccc staff, and other community members. a longer term goal was to get permanent housing outside of ccc facilities. some of the frequent responses, or themes, are further described below. several people mentioned the necessity of “getting off the streets” and discussed how difficult it was to find a job, to start or maintain recovery, or to avoid being depressed without having a decent place to live. this was described as: you can’t do much living on the street, you know, because...living in the street, you’re going to probably never stay clean or dry because it’s depressing… and if people get depressed and down about that…they can’t be successful without housing. for many, moving off the street and into housing was their primary goal for getting involved with ccc programs. a participant in family housing, in which children can reside with their parents who are at risk of homelessness or in recovery, noted: (it) helped us to have a place to shower, a place to eat, a place to sleep, a place to just feel comfortable…we tried (doing these things) when we were homeless, you know… but it’s so hard when you don’t have a place to shower and have your clothes clean, and have a place to eat and a place to just be comfortable and get adequate sleep, and just be fully rejuvenated through your day and everything. so it’s really helped us to feel comfortable and…and be ready for our day every day. participants mentioned that housing provided a sense of safety or a stable foundation from which to begin their recovery process. feeling safe also translated as feeling supported by other residents and the housing community. you know, it’s a very controlled environment and i like that. so that didn’t bother me a lot. but i loved it because it was just very safe to me. and i felt safe. and i felt like i could let go. and i felt like i could explore, you know, get to explore who i am there. also, some of the other women that i was in treatment with were in the building so it provided a good atmosphere of support. some participants had been in relationships with users, or had been living in home environments where other people were using, and they did not feel that they could maintain recovery in these environments. one person noted: “i came from a place...a crack house, a place where they were shooting heroin on a daily basis. i made it the first seventy days in my recovery there. had it not been for supportive (clean) housing … i don’t know if i would have stayed clean.” the fact that ccc provided clean and sober housing arrangements helped many people maintain recovery, as did being held accountable for certain behaviors in those particular units. …having the accountability (in family housing) of who i was interacting with as a way to limit my associations or any temptation present. i felt really safe because it was so controlled. there were so many rules. so i definitely wouldn’t change anything about the rules. interview respondents described the important role of case managers who live in the buildings in terms of the on-site support and encouragement they provided. case managers, i think, are very important for this program to be successful. they’re usually right in the building where you live. housing and those case managers, i think are the base, the roots for success because i don’t think…you can have housing, but i don’t think without a case manager, and having the follow up program, i don’t think many people would be successful. although all of the participants noted that they were grateful for the ccc housing options, and few offered suggestions for improving housing programs, there were areas that participants identified as barriers to participation or that could be strengthened. these responses ranged from finding some way to reduce the waiting lists for housing to being unhappy about other people breaking the rules or using alcohol/drugs where they were not allowed. but like, i’ll come home at night and there will be like homeless people just hanging out outside, and like people getting drunk and yelling. and it’s like; you can’t do that in a normal house. in a normal apartment, you can’t be like outside drunk and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 drinking and being disruptive. so i don’t understand why it should happen here. one participant called for stricter consequences for people who broke the rules and felt that there were not enough restrictions: “(it could be better) if the staff watched people and if they were more strict on like what was allowed here.” employment: “i’m starting to pay back some of my wreckage.” not surprisingly, the primary goal of employment program participants was to find work. many also stated that their goals were to learn how to find and apply for paid work, because they had been out of the job market or did not own the equipment needed for job searching. okay, my goal was to work, for sure. it was just to work. i had looked for jobs. i’d been looking for about three months. i was very discouraged. i hadn’t worked in five or six years, probably more. you know, throughout my addiction, i never had a steady job. so i had a big gap to explain, and i wasn’t finding nothing. i was really discouraged…my goal was to work… just to work, obtain employment. some participants modified their goals and their approaches to employment after having some success in recovery or employment programs. a few participants reported that finding work and gaining some control over their finances and working situations provided them with an enhanced sense of self. this, in turn, increased their broader career or life ambitions. so i started, you know what i mean, becoming a productive member of society…i pay rent. i’m starting to take care of my fines. i’m starting to pay back some of my wreckage. i’m starting to learn how to manage money. i like never missed a day. you know what i mean? so i mean, it was great…it started the ball rolling of all those fears you have when you’re just coming alive again. all participants in job programs appreciated the range of support available and the assistance and instrumental support provided by the job counselors. this assistance included working with the participant to identify job possibilities and help with resumes, following up with potential employers after the participant completed an interview, providing referrals to a program, and finding clothing suitable for job interviews. when discussing how jobs programs helped them meet their goals or support recovery, participants noted a variety of factors, including the following: learning how to search for work; access to equipment and supplies; assistance from counselors with job search activities; and their own expanded ambitions. several discussed the positive experience of mentored work opportunities with a public sanitation and safety service. ccc employment programs provided access to the equipment that participants needed to conduct successful job searches, including computers, printers, faxes, phones or a number for potential employers to call and leave messages. well, first i was using their (employment program) computer, right, because they had computers there and you could access…employment job listings. and i didn’t have a computer. so i’d go there and use the computer, and you could pull up some lists. job counselors helped participants write resumes, provided references, and in some cases even took participants to job interviews. they provided information on educational and vocational programs and provided job leads when participants successfully completed job training programs. one participant described how a counselor, “hooked me up with this guy … took me for an interview to a couple places…and he helped me find a job.” another participant described his experience with the employment access center, a resource center with specialized programs to assist homeless individuals by identifying and teaching the vocational and social skills needed to find and sustain full-time employment. you get that specialist that works just specifically with you. and they’re really good about, hey, let’s build your resume. and you can be like, well, i don’t have anything to put on a resume. i don’t have any work history. and they’re like, oh, yes you do. you know, so they really get to know you and build on the tools that you don’t even realize that you have, or the skills that you don’t even realize that you have. consumers’ responses to questions about employment services and programs were overwhelmingly positive, but there were some suggestions for improvement. a couple of participants mentioned that some programs were too lenient and didn’t consistently hold workers accountable or expect high performance. okay, so some of the people just think of it as like a freebie job, you know. and that was hard for me because they didn’t take it seriously, or they didn’t do work. or they didn’t work at all…and the way the program is set up, they just kind of watched. you know what i mean? you’ve got to do something pretty heinous or bad to get fired, or to get reprimanded. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 success: “just that feeling of happiness, and just knowing that you’re going to be okay and your family is going to be okay.” interview participants were asked to discuss personal “successes” and to define what this term meant to them. responses fell into the following categories: achieving goals, finding a job, or going to school; recovery and maintaining sobriety; feeling happy and safe; and, possessing a willingness to change. one person noted that: “success for me right now would be to stay clean and to become employed. and find a job that i like and that i can support myself and my son in an apartment, and my dog.” it became clear that all participants agreed that in order to be “successful” or find “success” they must be in recovery or taking steps towards recovery: you can’t have success without recovery. recovery is the foundation, the cornerstone, the anchor, the framework, the roof, everything. and success can build on and around that. but that, at the very least, is the most important thing. how much money i have, how much food i have doesn’t matter. where i live doesn’t matter. i got to stay in recovery and stay sober so i have a happy life. and success, for me again, is going back to that, be willing to learn and be willing to be willing. another person mentioned the relationship between recovery and success, “i think that if i had stayed clean and not used for a day then i’m super successful.” feeling safe, housed, and less vulnerable to dangerous situations was another common theme mentioned when participants talked about what success felt like. “success has many faces, but most of all success is just peace of mind, for me. you know, having a safe place to live is… just acknowledging that it’s a safe place and that i need it, is successful for me. i lived my life very dangerously for a long time, and didn’t value myself and didn’t value life.” most of the 16 interview participants noted that ccc’s integration of services and programs contributed to their success. for example, they described being safely housed in a ccc housing site while accessing employment assistance and getting medical and dental care from a ccc clinic. participants stressed their gratefulness for the multiplicity and integration of programs that ccc offered and the range of services provided. despite the recognition that external circumstances or conditions may make it difficult for some to be successful, when discussing what is required for success the most common responses included reference to two individual-level traits: “being willing to change” and “personal motivation.” people who don’t blame others and accept their faults, try to fix them and move on. people who are willing to change, because we obviously…weren’t doing such a good job before. discussion despite the consistency in themes across interviews, consumers shared very different personal stories to illustrate their experiences of recovery and success. what became apparent during analysis of the transcripts was that participation in ccc (or other) programs and services is one small step towards a lifetime of selfwork and growth. for one respondent his initial goal was simply “to stay sober” and now his goals are “to get employment…and (get) into my own apartment.” others shared that recovery is a liberating move towards a better life, but that the better life required a lot of patience and, at times, felt unattainable. the discussion section highlights four core features that should be considered when developing programs and policy designed to foster consumer success: type of housing, structured programs and staff support, integrated care, and personal experiences of recovery. type of housing one of the central threads throughout the interviews was the important role of housing in recovery and feeling successful. interview results suggested that regardless of the type of housing (e.g., family, transitional, adfc), simply having shelter and feeling safe can lead to an increased sense of self-worth and the ability to maintain employment, recovery, reintegration, ties to family, and so forth. two of the studies reviewed highlighted similar findings as they expanded their definition of “homelessness” beyond categories of place or time to include the psychosocial effects of being homeless. power and french (1999) described homelessness as more than just the lack of a safe and secure accommodation. they argued that homelessness has as much to do with social exclusion as with bricks and mortar. in this regard, housing has the potential to provide social connections and a sense of security that enables individuals to pursue loftier goals and maintain sobriety. what we learned during this study was that regardless of how one defines homelessness, and regardless of the criteria used to decide whether someone qualifies as “homeless”, there is consistency in the lived experiences and emotional states associated with being without safe, accessible, and permanent shelter. of the qualitative studies reviewed most of the definitions provided drew upon the basic definition that kidd (2003) provided in his study of street youth as having “no fixed address.” tsemberis and asmussen’s (2008) definition described homeless people as occupying global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 specific places and referred to persons “who live on the streets, parks, subway tunnels, and other uninhabitable public places” (p. 114). in their study of coping strategies among a rural homeless population, hilton and dejong (2010) used a more inclusive definition that included people who are living outdoors, in public places, in cars or other substandard dwellings, in shelters or other homeless service programs. regardless of the location, participants generally reported similar experiences with homelessness. much of what we discovered in the housing and recovery literature (and then probed for in our interviews) addressed the comparative effectiveness of housing first versus treatment first programs (lincoln et al., 2009; padgett, stanhope, henwood, & stefancic, 2011). the treatment first approach typically provides temporary housing or shelter, with the requirement that consumers take part in treatment programs in order to be placed into more permanent housing arrangements (lincoln et al., 2009). this housing model has been criticized for creating additional hardship for homeless people unable to maintain sobriety; in response, some advocate for the housing first approach, which does not require participation in treatment programs as a condition for long-term housing (lincoln et al., 2009; padgett et al., 2011). one study that compared the outcomes of consumers reported that treatment first participants were more likely to have higher rates of substance use than housing first participants (padgett et al., 2011), and that housing first participants were more likely to remain in their programs and used fewer substance abuse services. the authors concluded that a housing first approach can help support housing stability for those suffering from serious mental illness because they are not at risk of losing housing due to substance use. results from the study presented here identified housing as a key variable in successful recovery. for some, housing is a means to recovery. although consumers who were interviewed for this study generally favored alcohol and drug free community housing, consumers on the hearth advisory committee were more divided, a controversy reflected in the literature. the research literature and national conversations about types of housing and recovery generally focus on the dichotomy of housing versus treatment first, while ccc specifically emphasizes the importance of community by referring to their clean & sober housing as alcohol and drug free community housing. ccc does not require sobriety to access employment, housing, acupuncture, or other types of services that could benefit a sober or non-sober individual. in ccc’s experience, there are people who are not in treatment but who feel safer in adfc housing. other people may be coming off the street seeking housing with a specific goal of getting off drugs and alcohol. for them, their housing first choice is to be in adfc housing because it gives them the extra support they need to succeed. the ccc executive director often refers to a “housing choice” model that focuses on what the individual consumer is trying to achieve rather than the model the program identifies with. whether sobriety or housing happens first is up for debate and consumers argue that there is no one path that fits all. importance of structured programs and staff support throughout the interviews, participants discussed how ccc programs’ structure and rules supported their recovery and promoted personal accountability. participants frequently mentioned the benefits of carefully “working the steps” of aa and na-type programs, and six of the participants referred to their participation in a 12-step recovery program. very few residents resented the rules and structure of programs and residents of clean and sober housing, for example, wanted more enforcement of the rules and structure. these findings somewhat contradict lincoln and colleagues’ (2009) study on safe haven residents, which suggested that successful programs include “rules and nonrules, respect for independence, and staff treating residents as adults” (lincoln et al., 2009, p. 240). the authors reported that residents felt the rules limited independence and had “concerns about feeling supervised by staff” (lincoln et al., 2009, p. 240). some ccc participants noted that the rules provided them with a sense of safety: …having the accountability (in family housing) of who i was interacting with as a way to limit my associations or any temptation present. i felt really safe because it was so controlled. in addition to a call for structure, a related recurring theme was appreciation for the quality and consistency of support from ccc staff, including on-site case managers, employment counselors, and health providers. this is similar to a typology presented in white and kurtz (2006) that listed the various roles of the addictions recovery support specialist to include outreach worker, motivator, ally and confidant, truthteller, role model and mentor, planner, problem solver, resource broker, companion, advocate, educator, community organizer, lifestyle coach, and friend. padgett and henwood (2012) recommend that providers “meet clients where they are,” and discussed that staff respect and pay attention to individual stories and personal traumas. this type of tailored and healthy connection between staff and consumers was mirrored in interview transcripts. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 integrated care nationally, ccc programs are recognized for their innovation in bridging addiction treatment, housing, and employment services. as a community-academic partnership, hearth has started to explore why ccc programs work, and what it is about integration of services that can help facilitate consumers’ sense of success and recovery. in addition to the study reported here, the partnership is pursuing funding to examine the many dimensions of self-sufficiency among consumers, the association between acupuncture and recovery, the role of housing in facilitating maintenance of chronic disease, and the physiological effects of stress associated with homelessness. it seems that there is a momentum -perhaps a transformative movement -to provide a more integrated model of care and services to homeless and recovering individuals (kurtz, in press). white and davidson (2006) argue that we are witnessing a push for programs that include recovery, housing, peer support, mental health, and employment services. several major national reports, including the institute of medicine report on improving the quality of health care for mental and substance-use conditions (2006), make a case for conjoining services into a more comprehensive model of care. subjective vs. “objective” quantified experiences of recovery this study presents consumers’ perspectives using their own words, which are not always consistently (or, accurately) captured in quantitative surveys or via provider records. by asking about, and listening to, consumer experiences and suggestions, we gain a richer understanding of needs and the types of policies or programs that are likely to support recovery and success. dordick (2002) examined the attitudes toward recovery held by staff and residents in a transitional housing program. they reported that staff and residents felt strongly that recovery was more accurately measured by “attitude and outlook” rather than by any standard objective measure such as consecutive months or years of not using substances. when consumers were asked to define success, answers included meeting subjective criteria related to personal goals, recovery, housing, jobs, family, self-sufficiency, safety, peace of mind, and just being alive. these results are similar to kidd’s (2003) study of street youth, which reported dimensions of recovery that included social support, self-worth, decreased reactivity to others, hope, pride, decreased anger, non-conformity and spirituality. furthermore, defining recovery is more complicated than simply eliminating use of a substance. recovery as supported in the mental health and addiction literature, and further supported by the participants’ comments, is about finding purpose, hope, and community (white & davidson, 2006). it should be noted that ccc uses the term “recovery” very broadly and often uses the term “recovery model” to include all ccc services that contribute to a healthy and functioning individual. the underlying principle with this broad definition is that regardless of whether the condition is addiction, mental illness, or a medical condition, people can recover from any condition that has hindered their ability to function at their highest level. conclusions there are several mechanisms through which a consumer and ccc staff-driven project transforms individuals, organizations, and practice. at the individual level, participation in hearth has the potential to give consumers an opportunity to verbalize their stories and influence the project partners to study what matters to them. at the organizational level, this study can serve to remind service providers and policy makers that housing programs do more than get people off the street – they provide a base level of security that people require to seek bigger, bolder personal change. for those who work with people with addictions, this study offers different ways to think about “success” and “recovery;” the processes are complicated and this study challenges us to think beyond dichotomist definitions (e.g., you’re homeless or you’re not). finally, the principles of cbpr as applied in this study have the power to democratize research with homeless and recovering populations by including them in each phase, and it offers an alternative way of assessing consumers’ realities and priorities. we were able to demonstrate that it is certainly possible and even desirable, to conduct consumer-driven research while retaining high academic and ethical standards. rigorous, academic, theory-driven research and community-based principles that call for inclusion and shared power are not at odds. rather, the consumers’ experiences and perspectives strengthened all aspects of the research process—from developing the initial research questions, to finalizing the language used to collect data, to analysis and interpretation of results. references braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77-101. doi:10.1191/1478088706qp063oa coles, e., themessl-huber, m., & freeman, r. (2012). investigating community-based health and health promotion for homeless people: a mixed methods global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 review. health education research, 27(4), 624-44. doi: 10.1093/her/cys065 dashora, p., slesnick, n., & erdem, g. (2012). understand my side, my situation, and my story: insights into the service needs among substanceabusing homeless mothers. journal of community psychology, 40(8), 938-950. doi:10.1002/jcop.21499 dodington, j., mollen, c., woodlock, j., hausman, a., richmond, t. s., & fein, j. a. 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(2006). linking addiction treatment and communities of recovery: a primer for addiction counselors and recovery coaches. pittsburgh, pa: ireta. addressing the community psychology competency dialectic through participatory pedagogy by kelly collins1, christopher keys1, martina mihelicova1, kris ma1, nicole colónquintana1, jordan reed1, madison sunnquist1, carolyn turek1, christopher whipple1 keywords: community psychology practice competencies, pedagogy, dialectic, training author biographies: kelly collins is a graduate student in the community psychology program at depaul university. she received her b.a. in psychology with a minor in women’s and gender studies from michigan state university. her research focuses on violence against women and homelessness. she is interested in community engagement and improving systems and policy through multidisciplinary collaboration. chris keys has been teaching community psychology to graduates and undergraduates for over four decades. he has used participatory teaching methods in community, clinical, social and organizational psychology courses and as a finalist for a university-wide teaching award for one of his participatory courses. he helped develop and directed community-organizational, community-clinical and free-standing community psychology doctoral programs at the university of illinois at chicago (uic). he also helped develop an undergraduate major in applied psychology which included a gateway course in community psychology. he helped found an undergraduate concentration in community psychology and contributes to doctoral programs in clinical-community and freestanding community psychology at depaul university. he has served as treasurer and chair of the council of community psychology program directors, forerunner of the scra council of educational programs, and as chair of the council of training councils. martina mihelicova is a graduate student in the clinicalcommunity psychology phd program at depaul university. martina is involved in 1 depaul university global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 conducting qualitative research with various communities, including people experiencing homelessness, homeless service providers, and rape crisis workers. through communitybased research, martina works with and learns from people experiencing trauma and barriers to recovery, including stigma, lack of services, poverty, and staff turnover. she is also committed to supporting direct service providers in light of the impact of trauma exposure on well-being. kris (pui kwan) ma is a third-year doctoral student in the clinicalcommunity psychology program at depaul university. she received her bachelor of social science’s degree in psychology in 2013 from the chinese university of hong kong. her current research centers on addressing health and mental health disparities in underserved communities. she aims to design culturally responsive behavioral health interventions for racially and ethnically diverse communities. she is also keen on developing evidence-based public health interventions to reduce physical comorbidities among individuals with mental illness. kris recently worked with a community mental health clinic to examine the effectiveness of the wellness intervention in a primary care-behavioral health integrated care setting for asian americans with mental illness. nicole colón-quintana is a graduate student in the clinical psychology phd program at depaul university. currently, her research centers on understanding the relationship between language fluency and depression in low income, bilingual minority youth. in her community, nicole serves as a youth mentor and family counselor for spanish-speaking families. she also works as a group therapist in chicago public schools, teaching coping skills to middle school students who experience depression. nicole is interested in advancing evidence-based treatments for youth and families from different socioeconomic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds. jordan reed is a 3rd year doctoral student in the community psychology program at depaul university. his current research interests relate to the experience of first-generation college students, and increasing empathy for persons experiencing mental health issues through the use of computer simulations. madison sunnquist is a doctoral student in depaul university’s clinical-community psychology program. her research interests relate to stigma reduction and access to quality health care for individuals with invisible chronic illnesses. she hopes to utilize participatory research to inform policy decisions that would provide more support and resources to individuals with these illnesses. carolyn turek is a graduate student in the clinical psychology phd program at depaul university. her http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 research interests include family management of chronic childhood illnesses, family health behaviors, and the role of stress in chronic illness management. christopher whipple is a graduate student in the community psychology doctoral program at depaul university. his research interests include community and school-based prevention programs for adolescents, specifically prevention programs aimed at violence and substance use, and novel recovery programs for individuals with substance use disorders. recommended citation: collins, k., keys, c., mihelicova, m., ma, k., quintana. n.c., reed, j., sunnquist, m., turek, c., and whipple, c. (2016). addressing the community psychology competency dialectic through participatory pedagogy. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(4), pages 1-68. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). acknowledgements: we would like to thank our classmates, michelle gilchrist, juline girts, carlos luna, amy rhodes, and kurtis simonich, for their contributions to the class sessions. we also thank tom wolff for his helpful editorial comments. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 addressing the community psychology competency dialectic through participatory pedagogy abstract ongoing discussions persist regarding the potential usefulness and/or harmfulness of a defined set of core competencies in the field of community psychology. the competency thesis is that identification of core competencies can help define the field and distinguish the capabilities of community psychologists (dalton & wolfe, 2012). a set of competencies has implications for training and education, including clarity regarding what skills current and future students can expect to learn and what community psychologists may be expected to do. however, others have criticized the nature of standardized competencies. presenting the antithesis to the competency thesis, dzidic, breen and bishop (2013) question if compartmentalized competencies focus too much on static, individually oriented skills. they may distract from considerations of context, ethics and power within the dynamic ecologies of community psychology practice. community psychology education and training programs are challenged with exposing students to a variety of central competencies while preparing them to engage in valuebased research and practice in context. this article focuses on three applications of participatory pedagogy within the classroom that sought to synthesize the dialectic between core competencies and values-based, dynamic community psychology practice. instructional materials for all three sessions are appended both for readers’ perusal as examples and for possible future adaptation and use in other community psychology courses. participatory pedagogical approaches seek to foster student engagement, reflection, and collaboration to promote critical thinking, knowledge application and problem solving. in so doing, participatory pedagogy can bridge the gap between competencies and context, and offer at least a partial synthesis for the competency dialectic in community psychology education and training. the society for community research and action (scra) released the first public draft of core competencies for community psychology practice in 2012 which identified 18 core competencies for the practice of community psychology (cp) (dalton & wolfe, 2012). the identification of core competencies has helped define the field and describe the skills of trained community psychologists. the set of competencies stimulates dialogue regarding the roles and contributions of community psychologists, and provides a framework for informing fellow psychologists, colleagues from other disciplines, and potential employers about effective cp practice. the set of competencies has important implications for cp training and education. those interested in cp training can use the list to gain a clearer idea of what community practice involves, in turn promoting their ability to set developmental and career goals. the set of competencies can also be used to systematically review, tailor and enhance graduate education curricula and teaching strategies (dalton & wolfe, 2012; hazel, 2007). notwithstanding the benefits of core competencies for community psychology practice, there remain a variety of challenges when it comes to teaching these skills, especially within a classroom setting. some http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 have expressed concern about the set, based on the inherent qualities of traditional competencies as relatively static and siloed individual abilities. for community psychologists, competencies that are decontextualized may create a disconnect between the idea of the competencies and the process of their ethical application in community-based practice (dzidic, breen, & bishop, 2013). of concern is the risk of educational programs teaching cp competencies as static, procedural goals that can be mastered quickly with limited reflection and attention to context and values. therefore, in contrast, cp training and education programs that actively involve students in the development of competencies in use best prepare students for the complexities of dynamic practice in community settings. while it is recommended that, at a minimum, students are exposed to each of the core competencies and taught relevant ethics and potential applications, dalton and wolfe (2012) acknowledge that it would not be likely for graduate programs to provide indepth training, such as supervised practice in the form of fieldwork over time, for the entire set of competencies. rather, the set is intended to outline what cp can look like, recognizing that cp practice is inherently situated within complex, ever changing ecological realities. thus, cp education and training programs are challenged with exposing students to a variety of central competencies at a conceptual level, while also providing opportunities for students to use their developing competencies in dynamic contexts and to reflect critically on their use. hazel (2007) explains the need to develop alternative teaching and learning strategies that provide an education that “focuses not just on content, but also on process, the process of practice as well as the process of learning” (p.85). to help accomplish the substantive and process goals of cp training and education (dzidic et al., 2013; hazel, 2007), this article suggests the use of participatory pedagogy in cp classrooms. the authors begin with an overview of participatory pedagogy and discuss the potential value of this approach within cp training. we then provide three examples of applications of participatory pedagogy within the classroom that sought to constructively synthesize the dialectic between core competencies and values-based, dynamic community psychology practice. teaching core competencies through application of participatory pedagogy freire (1972) asserts that traditional pedagogy is founded on passive listening and storing deposits of knowledge that stifles students’ ability to critically think in a way that limits their opportunities to apply information to understand reality. constraining critical thinking and application of knowledge impedes students’ ability to transform knowledge into creative solutions and actions. research indicates traditional pedagogies produce lower rates of information retention, ability to apply knowledge to novel situations, critical thinking, and problem solving. when compared to increasingly popular participatory and collaborative classroom formats, traditional pedagogy also yields lower levels of motivation, attitude change and peer collaboration (eagan, stolzenberg, lozano, aragon, suchard, & hurtado, 2014; fink, 2013; johnson, johnson, & stanne, 2000) in contrast to traditional approaches, participatory pedagogy redefines the student’s role from a passive listener and optional discussant to an active participant in the teaching and learning process. it encourages thinking deeply and critically, reflecting on and sharing experiences and prior knowledge, solving problems and actively applying new knowledge gained through course content (auerbach, 1993; faust & paulson, 1998). siemens (2008) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 describes participatory pedagogy as “one that does not fully define all curricular needs in advance of interacting with learners...multiple perspectives, opinions, and active creation on the part of learners all contribute to the final context of the learner experience” (“a pedagogy of participation,” para. 4). participatory pedagogical approaches can provide a framework to help bridge the gap between the theoretical knowledge and static understanding of the competencies with the dynamic skills needed to practice cp competencies within active community settings. if the set of core competencies provides substance for cp courses (cf. the competency thesis above), the application of participatory pedagogy can provide dynamism and context to the learning material to address the concerns of stasis and decontextualization (cf. the antithesis above) suggested by dzidic and colleagues (2013). the synthesis achieved through participatory pedagogy lends itself to the critical examination of social issues and cp theoretical foundations, and deep understanding of community psychology readings. this participatory synthesis also provides opportunities for collaborative learning with colleagues, problem solving related to community concerns, and reflection on the values and ethics of community-based work. this article discusses the application of participatory pedagogy within a graduate community psychology course. it explores three illustrative examples of studentdesigned sessions that promoted participatory, collaborative learning concerning competencies in community psychology. these examples are followed by a discussion of the benefits and challenges to teaching cp competencies using this pedagogical approach, and potential use of these activities in other undergraduate and graduate courses. instructional materials for all three sessions are appended for readers’ information, adaptation and use in other courses. illustrative examples of participatory pedagogy and cp training: our community psychology course the community psychology course discussed is a graduation requirement for community, clinical-child and clinical-community psychology doctoral students, and is optionally available to graduate students in various other graduate programs (e.g., education, counseling, general psychology) at depaul university. the instructor (chris keys) and the students met in the classroom for one and a half hours twice weekly throughout the 10-week academic quarter. the purpose of the course was to introduce students to major theories, research studies, and interventions within the field of community psychology. the course syllabus explained that, core values in community psychology include “awareness of strengths, prevention of problems and promotion of health, empowerment of those who are oppressed, valuing of diversity and difference, appreciation of ecology, community ties and context, community participation in research, and the use of multiple levels of analysis to understand social issues.” from the first day, the instructor approached the seminar course as a collaboration between all students and himself. for example, he asked students for feedback on the syllabus content, encouraged students to suggest alternate reading assignments, and sought student recommendations for guest speakers whom they would like to have visit throughout the quarter. students were encouraged to tailor writing assignments, discussions, and the large final project to their individual areas of interest (e.g., chronic illness, at-risk youth, violence against women) to maximize the application and relevance of learning material. the following three examples are of participatory student–generated sessions, in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 which student planning group members used course materials (viz., assigned readings) to promote learning of cp core competencies as both content and processes (cf. auerbach, 1993). generating, facilitating and participating in sessions provided students an opportunity for meaningful engagement to conceptually learn about cp competencies while also building the skills needed for practice (dalton & wolfe, 2012; dzidic, breen, & bishop, 2013). it also gave them experience in empowerment as instructors for their session. while each of the three groups approached the sessions differently, there were common, active learning experiences present in all three sessions. in terms of preparation, three class sessions of reading and discussing a cluster of individual articles on focal topics preceded each of these three student-created and led participatory sessions. the sessions encouraged critical thinking, reflection, and collaboration and multi-way learning among students. students engaged course content in a meaningful way that reinforced, challenged, and integrated their own prior knowledge, as well as that of their peers. incorporating opportunities for students to engage with others as both learners and teachers allowed students to practice competencies related to forming and participating in groups that work together as equals, acknowledging that everyone has valuable expertise to contribute. the class pursued collective goals that neither individuals nor a single group could accomplish alone. these process skills prepare students to effectively practice competencies such as community inclusion, partnership, and collaboration, ethical reflective practices, and small and large group processes (dalton & wolfe, 2012). at the same time the activities sought to foster other process-oriented skills as outlined by dzidic and colleagues (2013) including an engagement in lifelong learning, humility, and fostering participatory approaches. engagement in life-long learning promotes humility as learning in these sessions did not focus primarily on learning the definitions of experts, but privileged the ongoing development of one’s own imperfect ideas and process-based skills in ways that encourage growth over time (dzidic et al., 2013). in addition to these shared benefits, each session synthesized learning particular course content with activities that promoted process-oriented skills. these distinctive elements are highlighted below; for details on how each of these sessions was conducted, see appendices a, b and c. these materials can act as examples to help students develop their own participatory sessions. in addition, they may highlight specific elements that are important to participatory learning, or may be more closely replicated as detailed in the appendices. given the substantial benefits to students of conceptualizing, designing and conducting their own sessions, we recommend that option. example session 1: thinking ecologically when applying cp concepts to community programs purpose and goals. the first session was relatively cognitive in emphasis. it addressed the competency category of foundational principles more heavily than other sessions, especially the ecological perspectives competency. it aimed to develop students’ ability to apply ecological perspectives in complex community contexts and strengthen their theoretical understanding of cp concepts. this section of the course covered a wide range of diverse cp foundational concepts including: (1) feminist approaches, (2) critical community psychology, (3) physical environment within social ecology, (4) cultural competence, and (5) social support, social capital, and sense of community. students were asked to collaboratively define these major cp concepts, and then explore applying each within the ecological context of a communityhttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 based intervention or prevention program. students were encouraged to consider factors at multiple ecological levels, how they relate to the cp concepts listed above, and how they might impact the design and implementation of the program. in addition to exposing the students more fully to the cp concepts listed, this session provided the opportunity for students to practice dynamic applications of the ecological perspective competency. the ecological perspective competency is defined by dalton and wolfe (2012) as the ability to, “articulate and apply multiple ecological perspectives and levels of analysis in community practice (p. 10).” the overall goals of the session were for students to be able to: (a) define major concepts in community psychology, (b) consider how the presence or absence of these concepts may impact program effectiveness based on factors at multiple ecological levels, and (c) think about how the incorporation of the concepts might be prioritized given the ecological context of the program. for more detailed information and instructions on example session 1, please see appendix a. development and implementation. during session development, the facilitating group organized students into smaller groups based on research interests (e.g., at-risk youth, chronic health issues). relevant samples of actual community-based programs were selected for each small group, such as the healthy environments and response to trauma in schools (hearts), a program that “aims at addressing the impact of community and family violence on children through a trauma-informed, school-based prevention/intervention” (ucsf hearts program, 2015). by exploring a sample program in their area of interest, students were better able to integrate their previous knowledge with the five cp concepts (i.e., feminist approaches, critical community psychology, physical environment within social ecology, cultural competence, and social support, social capital, and sense of community) being presented and then apply an ecological perspective. student leaders used small and large group processes. the session began with the small groups coconstructing definitions of the five cp concepts. the small groups all came back together as a one large group and worked together to finalize definitions of each cp concept. this cognitive group activity provided the opportunity to conceptualize, to hear how others defined each concept and to practice collaborative decision making. each small group was provided information regarding their assigned sample program (e.g., hearts). in order to explore potential applications of cp concepts with consideration of context (dzidic et al., 2013), students were asked to become familiar with the details of the program (e.g., population served, programmatic principles or theory, intervention goal or outcomes). then they considered ecological factors at macro-, mesoand micro-levels impacting the program (e.g., geographic location, public policy, interactions with additional systems such as public schools). within small groups, students were asked to collaborate to identify: (a) which of the five cp concepts were present and absent in their intervention, (b) which would be beneficial and feasible to incorporate based on the ecological factors influencing the program and why, and (c) how they could go about incorporating the concepts. during small group discussions, facilitators engaged with the groups to ensure that the activity’s purpose was understood and to answer any questions. the class session concluded with a large group discussion of each small group’s experiences during which facilitators asked broad questions that created a space for reflection. sample questions included, “after thinking about applying these concepts to actual interventions, do you think differently about these concepts? if so, how?” “what thoughts did you have about intervening at http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 different ecological levels of the project?” this large group reflection was an opportunity for students to expand their understanding of how the various concepts could be utilized in diverse, multi-level ecologies. group members openly reviewed their collaboration process and rationales, including ethics involved in deciding how to prioritize application of concepts given the dynamic, multi-level context of the community programs. outcomes and reflections. while working to deepen their understanding of diverse cp concepts, students found the session activities exposed them to thinking ecologically. they gained introductory experience with the foundational competence of articulating and applying an ecological systems perspective to a community-based program. participants mentioned that collaboratively describing and defining the concepts at the beginning of the session helped them feel more comfortable and prepared to discuss application to interventions. additionally, working together in both small and large groups helped diversify the activities and made it easier for each person to have a chance to share their ideas. it promoted a process competence— employing group-based skills such as articulating a point of view and building consensus (dalton & wolfe, 2012). session facilitators also engaged in learning by listening to conversations, answering questions, and asking questions to encourage further critical thinking. by reflecting on the multiple contextual factors at macro-, meso and micro-levels that created barriers or facilitators to incorporating the cp concepts, students learned that there was no one-sizefits-all formula for application. the session leaders encouraged critical self-reflection of values and assumptions to prepare students to think about and apply context dependent cp concepts in diverse ecologies. example session 2: simulating the start of community program development purpose and goals. this next participatory session focused more on process issues. in particular, the emphasis was on the second major competency category, community program development and management. the centerpiece of this session simulated the initial planning stages of an intervention, in which students took on roles as various stakeholders. see appendix b for more details on how to conduct this session. after two weeks of reading and discussion on prevention, promotion, and empowerment, students used this role-playing activity to integrate these principles in a real-time scenario situated within a community context. the session also helped to develop skills needed for the initial stages of program development, implementation and management within a collaborative group setting. as defined by dalton and wolfe (2012), this competence includes the ability to, “partner with community stakeholders to plan, develop, implement and sustain programs in community settings” (p. 11). this experiential activity aimed to highlight: (a) processes and skills related to assessing “community issues, needs, strength and resources” (dalton & wolfe, 2012, p.11), (b) collaboration-related challenges in designing an intervention with diverse stakeholders, and (c) practical issues in identifying and acting in accord with community psychology values and ethics in developing and implementing interventions. development and implementation. the student developers of this group activity were inspired by a class reading, ready, willing, and able: developing a support system to promote implementation of school-based prevention programs (flashpohler, meehan, maras, & keller, 2012). this article described a process to determine school readiness for the implementation of new programs or initiatives. brainstorming sessions by the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 planning group resulted in the decision to facilitate a dynamic practice scenario in which class members were assigned roles as community psychologists, school administrators, teachers, or parents. class members were divided into three groups: community psychologists, a cross section of individuals from a well-resourced school, and a cross section from an underresourced school. each class participant was given confidential information on his or her specific role that included a title (e.g. school principal, teacher, research assistant, etc.), background history, and motivations related to the intervention. to mimic the realistic challenges and advantages of collaborating with groups of diverse stakeholders, the scenario incorporated power dynamics and varying perspectives. additionally, each school team was given information on their strengths, weaknesses, and resources. after each class member read these documents, the facilitators informed the class that the schools had each applied to work with the group of community psychologists to implement a school-derived intervention. unfortunately, the community psychologists could only work with one school. next, the community psychologist group interviewed teams from both schools to get acquainted with each school’s stakeholders and assess each community’s needs and readiness for the intervention. subsequently, the team of community psychologists selected a school with which to work. the selected school and the community psychologists then collaborated to develop an intervention and create a plan to implement it. the other school that was not selected was instructed to do the same solo, i.e., without the assistance of the community psychologists. each of the groups, the school solo group and the school with community psychologists group, presented their final intervention to all. then the facilitators asked probing questions to encourage participants to reflect on their roles and personal reactions at various stages throughout the scenario. participants discussed challenges and solutions when collaborating with diverse groups of community partners and the importance of including these diverse perspectives. they also explored the ethical complexities of assessing community needs and readiness, and whether they incorporated aspects of prevention and/or promotion in their interventions. the team of community psychologists was asked if and how they empowered the school team, and the nonselected school was asked to reflect on how their non-selection empowered and/or disempowered them. if these concepts of empowerment and/or prevention were not applied, class members were asked to reflect upon the challenges they faced in incorporating them. outcomes and reflections. overall, this activity was well-received by class members and led to rich discussion about the nuances of collaborating with community stakeholders to assess community needs and resources and plan, develop, and implement a community-based program. the role-playing allowed the students to consider multiple worldviews and experience the complex nature of starting community program development. the session encouraged students to examine how empowerment and prevention may be used in schools to help students achieve goals. at the same time, students considered the complexity of addressing ethics in this dynamic community context; specifically, students reflected on complicated ethical decisions in choosing which school to work with. they considered a variety of factors such as available resources, and how, if it all, the community psychologists could also empower the unselected school. this process fostered understanding of some of the contextual facilitators and barriers associated with community participation and intervention development. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 additionally, because empowerment and prevention were not explicitly discussed when the scenarios were initially presented, students could reflect upon how an intervention development process could unintentionally fail to incorporate these values. thus, the activity underscored the need for purposeful group planning in order to successfully incorporate the concepts learned in the classroom when working in the community. example session 3: using a diversity game to experience systemic inequity and build sociocultural and cross-cultural competence purpose and goals. the previous two sessions focused on learning concepts and applying theories in dynamic community contexts. the first more cognitive session emphasized the readings and thinking about their use ecologically. the second more processoriented session emphasized development of a community prevention program in a school, using the readings as a resource. building on these successful experiences, the third session took learning to another level – an experiential simulation of systemic inequality. modeled from the television game show jeopardy, a diversity game tested students’ knowledge of course content within a simulated systemic dynamic of privilege and oppression. the ultimate goal was to build students’ sociocultural and cross-cultural competence by grounding their understanding in the experience of inequity in the diversity game followed by reflection on the presence and impact of the structural power imbalances in the game. these power differences exemplified the need for community inclusion and partnership and bottom-up approaches in cp. specifically, the session sought to develop students’ ability to “analyze social inequality and power imbalances,” and to articulate “how the dynamics of culture, privilege and power influence interactions within the community context in which one is working, including one’s own interactions.” (dalton & wolfe, 2012; p. 10). instead of presenting students with paradigms of diversity, this participatory approach allowed students to experience diversity, oppression and privilege in their own ways. then they generated a wide variety of ideas on the topic that guided the discussion in a beneficial path for their learning. the same perspective speaks to the value of community psychologists encouraging indigenous interventions. participating community members drive these interventions rather than having others impose novel, extracommunity interventions that may challenge the community’s culture (kelly, 1988). development and implementation. the facilitation group was comprised of four students from various ethnic and academic backgrounds (puerto rico, hong kong, united states and mexico; clinical psychology program, community psychology program, and counseling program). the purpose was to question the dominant narratives in society about diversity and identify other neglected worldviews (dzidic et al., 2013). as members of minority race and ethnicity groups, student planners’ own experiences spoke to how society promotes the value of diversity yet avoids the inconvenient truth of the systemic inequality and stereotypes faced by oppressed populations. inspired by jane elliott’s blue eyes/brown eyes exercise on race and discrimination (byrnes & kiger, 1992), we invited our class to play a jeopardy-like game with assigned roles associated with unearned privileges or disadvantages assigned at random for each student. to simulate power imbalances and systemic oppression in this activity, we assigned disadvantages (e.g. language restrictions, disability) and unearned privileges (e.g. earn twice as many points as others) to each student. we also prepared candies as resources that were unevenly distributed through an unfair reward system. the instructions of the game were also http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 carefully designed to represent a dysfunctional system characterized by power imbalances, inequities, and a lack of opportunities for collaboration. when the game began, each class member was given a card and instructed to silently read their role description. see appendix c for details on playing the diversity game including suggested role characteristics. the class was briefed on the instructions of the diversity game. parallel to jeopardy, the class could choose questions from one of the four categories; the diversity game categories were: 1) advocacy, 2) acculturation, 3) oppression and 4) multicultural competence. these topics had been considered in the readings during the previous two weeks of our class. each category was comprised of ten questions, ranging from 100 points (the easiest question) to 1000 points (the hardest question). during the game, multiple forces were in play to simulate the dynamic context of systemic inequality. first, students might employ strategies to circumvent their own or a classmate’s disadvantage in order to answer questions. for example, one student was assigned to a disadvantaged role of not pronouncing any words with a letter “c”. she chose to write the answer on a piece of paper in order to avoid saying the word “advocacy”. second, group leaders who facilitated the game had the highest authority, and they could change their power influences from time to time to illustrate the dynamics of shifting power. in the above example, group leaders might or might not accept the student’s workaround answer such as one written on a piece of paper. third, aspects of the unfair scoring and rewarding systems were sometimes made explicit to enlarge the inequality effect. for example, everyone could see that the person who answered the question correctly received candy and that one privileged student received candy after any question was answered correctly or incorrectly by anyone. others did not receive any candy. fourth, barriers to understanding and communicating among group members were deliberate. for example, one disadvantaged member had to turn his back to all other players and the diversity game board. class members played the game for about 35 minutes until they were clearly expressing some frustration about the inequities. a 35-minute discussion was held after the game ended. group leaders debriefed about the design of the simulation activity and each class member revealed their role descriptions. all shared observations and reflections about their experiences. potential parallels between game processes and cp practice were discussed. these included reflecting upon their worldviews and assumptions, considering the intersections of culture and systematic inequality, and implications of understanding cross cultural competence as a value that requires reflexivity (dzidic et al., 2013). for instance, how was participants’ experience similar to or different from the reality in which people of diverse backgrounds were living? how did multiple worldviews, cultures and social identities play a role in class members’ interpreting of their experience? the class further discussed diversity at two levels: diversity at the individual level – how their own unique role descriptions affected the way they participated in the game; and diversity at the contextual level – how the structure and norms of the game affected the way they participated. these discussions helped students think about and experience diversity, and relatedly inequity, as rooted in both individual and context. outcomes and reflection. this activity turned out to be a remarkable learning experience for both the planning team and participants. participants rapidly developed strong feelings towards their roles and the differential treatment they received during the game. for those who had unearned privileges, they were either answering the questions http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 comfortably or not doing anything (e.g., there was one participant whose unearned privilege was earning extra points for any correct answer question he gave. he thought this unfair and therefore answered very few questions). for those who were assigned disadvantages, frustration was clearly seen on their faces when they knew the answer to questions but could not answer. they also shared their surprisingly intense experience of “learned helplessness” in face of their limitations in game participation. the frustration was an important take-away message about how difficult it may be for people who have knowledge that may be of value to a community, but lack a platform to have their voice heard and share their knowledge with others. on the other side, group leaders learned that their leadership was powerful enough to change the power dynamics – either perpetuating the oppression or redefining the status quo – to determine the outcomes for each participant. by simply making instructions that privileged some students while oppressing others, and implementing game instructions and rules inconsistently, the facilitating group created unfair dynamics that clearly worked in favor of the privileged. overall, the simulation of systemic inequality inspired each one of us to think how diversity and power are intertwined with our lives and allowed us to discuss these issues from various perspectives. discussion the set of core competencies for community psychology practice help to define and move the field forward, and serve as a useful guide for training and educational programs (dalton & wolfe, 2012). the question remains, however, of how to “walk the talk”; that is, how cp training and education programs can effectively combine core theoretical knowledge with skills training needed in the dynamic context-dependent practice of community psychology (cf. hazel, 2007)? when teaching community psychology in a classroom setting, participatory pedagogy provides a tool for bridging the disconnect between competencies and applied practice, the static and the dynamic. in this article, we have outlined three examples of participatory student-generated sessions that incorporated cp core competencies as both content and processes (cf. auerbach, 1993). in all sessions, the student planning group members created, planned and implemented an intervention activity and facilitated group interaction. class members took part in the activities providing valuable contributions as participating members and facilitating leaders. everyone involved reflected on their experiences as part of each session and its meanings for the planners and participants. the first relatively cognitive session worked to strengthen students’ ecological thinking and sought to enhance their knowledge of multiple cp theories (viz., feminist approaches, critical community psychology, physical environment within social ecology, cultural competence, social support, social capital, and sense of community). at the same time students were exposed to and experienced the process of articulating and applying ecological systems perspectives within specific community settings (dalton & wolfe, 2012).they considered how multilevel ecological factors in real examples of community-based programs would impact their desire and ability to incorporate these cp theories, and reflected on the complex process of context-dependent application. in the second process-oriented session, the focus was on the dynamic environment of the simulated community setting. in it, students applied the community psychology principles of prevention, health promotion, and empowerment in a role-play concerning the initial stages of community program development. they practiced the nuanced processes of meeting with community stakeholders to assess community needs and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 resources and to start planning a communitybased program. the session showed how the ethical application of cp principles and theories may be neither readily predictable and nor clearly right and wrong, given the multitude of dynamic factors in a given community setting (dzidzic et al., 2013). the third experiential session on diversity created a simulation of systemic inequality to build students’ experience of and their ability to analyze injustice (byrnes & kiger, 1992). students reflected on how their privilege and oppression influence their attitudes and interactions in the diversity game context of the structural power imbalances. ultimately, they identified the need for community inclusion and partnership and bottom-up approaches to “value… and bridge multiple world views, cultures and identities” (dalton & wolfe, 2012, p. 10) we offer these three sessions as examples of teaching that move away from both the traditional pedagogy that freire (1972) critiques and the static view of competencies that dzidzic et al. (2013) deplore. however, we value identifying the talents of community psychologists even as we strongly appreciate the dynamism of the field and the evolving nature of its practice and contextualism. by themselves these kinds of active sessions may provide part of a valuable beginning to community psychology graduate education and training (cf. faust & paulson, 1998). we believe these sessions are likely to be successful learning opportunities when students develop and lead class activities as well as participate in them. however, even when successful, such sessions only expose students to community psychology competencies and offer a modest amount of experience enacting them. thus, they introduce the competencies but are insufficient in and of themselves for providing adequate experience and developing meaningful expertise. other innovative approaches to classroom learning and beyond are needed to develop competencies (fink, 2013; hazel, 2008; johnson, johnson & stanne, 2000; siemens, 2008). high quality fieldwork, practice and research experiences with excellent mentoring in community settings over significant periods of time are also essential (serrano-garcía, pérez-jiménez, & rodríguez-medina, 2017; dalton & wolfe, 2012). implications for community psychology training and future research the establishment of a well-defined set of cp competencies for practice enables cp students to set developmental skill and career goals. the set provides a framework for educators and encourages ongoing discussion of how these skills can best be taught within cp educational and training programs (dalton & wolfe, 2012). the application of participatory pedagogy in cp classrooms promotes the aforementioned benefits while honoring the qualities of processoriented virtue competencies outlined by dzidic and colleagues (2013), such as reflexivity and humility. moreover, the dynamics of participatory pedagogy encourage the students to understand the flexible nature of competencies as ever evolving (viz., living, changing and acquired throughout the entire course of one’s career). such dynamic, reflective practices also situate future community psychologists to identify important emergent competencies in the field; that is, competencies not yet articulated by dalton and wolfe (2012) that in time become increasingly recognized and important. having an open-system view of competencies will help community psychologists keep abreast of new developments and update the list of competencies to be current and relevant for different people and contexts (dalton & wolfe, 2012). while a great amount of work has been done to develop a useful set of competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012), there is still more work to do including: 1) define community http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 psychology practice both across and within graduate programs without restrictive standardization or accreditation, 2) identify and communicate pedagogical approaches for effectively incorporating core competencies within training and educational programs, and 3) evaluate graduate programs’ ability to successfully prepare students for community psychology practice. serrano-garcía, pérezjiménez, & rodríguez-medina’s (2017) thoughtful overview of educational methods, programs and curricula in community psychology offers a valuable point of departure. future research may explore benefits and limitations of participatory pedagogy compared and contrasted with traditional pedagogical approaches, such as lecturebased learning, within cp classrooms. it would be beneficial to determine empirically if and how participatory pedagogy is an effective approach for increased understanding and application of core competencies as emergent, contextual, and value-based. moreover, is it differentially effective for different sets of competencies (e.g., those addressed in research and evaluation courses versus group process and fieldwork courses)? finally, through followup with previous cp graduate students, it would be beneficial to explore how types of learning in graduate education have impacted community psychology practice. limitations and strengths notwithstanding the value of the approach illustrated in this article, our examples of participatory pedagogy in a community psychology course are not without limitation. firstly, these three sessions were limited primarily to the context of one classroom, teacher, and set of students. we also successfully shared the diversity game in a participatory session at the 2015 midwest eco-community psychology conference. based on these experiences we have seen how participatory pedagogy in the classroom can mirror the dynamism of community psychology practice in local organizations and communities. thereby the quicksilver of community competencies in use becomes evident and the complexity of their use more obvious. at this point, participatory pedagogy needs to be implemented and studied more broadly in diverse settings, such as larger undergraduate courses, to yield a better understanding of its potential usefulness and challenges. it is important to synthesize the dialectic and thereby bridge the gap between content and process, static and dynamic, and competence and context in all areas of community psychology training and education, including both the classroom and the community (e.g., fieldwork, service based learning). we hope our positive experiences will encourage others to use and study the impact of participatory pedagogy to bring these competencies to life within community psychology learning environments. references auerbach, e. (1993). putting the p back in participatory. tesol quarterly, 27, 3, 54345.byrnes, d. a., & kiger, g. (december 01, 1992). prejudice-reduction simulations: ethics, evaluations, and theory into practice. simulation & gaming, 23, 4, 457 dalton, j., & wolfe, s. (2012). competencies for community psychology practice: society for community research and action draft, august 15, 2012. the community psychologist, 45(4), 7-14. dzidic, p., breen, l. j., bishop, b. j. (2013). are our competencies revealing our weaknesses? a critique of community psychology practice competencies. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), 1-10. retrieved 08/08/2015, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). eagan, k., stolzenberg, e. b., lozano, j. b., aragon, m. c., suchard, m. r., & hurtado, s. (2014). undergraduate teaching faculty: the 2013–2014 heri faculty survey. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 faust, j. l., & paulson, d. r. (1998). active learning in the college classroom. journal on excellence in college teaching, 9(2), 3-24. fink, l. d. (2013). creating significant learning experiences: an integrated approach to designing college courses. john wiley & sons. flashpohler, p., meehan, c., maras, m., & keller, k. (2012). ready, willing and able: developing a support system to promote implementation of school-based prevention programs. american journal of community psychology, 50, 428-444. freire, p. (1972). pedagogy of the oppressed. transl. by myra bergman ramos. herder and herder. hazel, k. (2007). infusing practice into community psychology graduate education. the community psychologist, 40(2), 81-88. johnson, d. w., johnson, r. t., & stanne, m. b. (2000). cooperative learning methods: a meta-analysis. university of minnesota, minneapolis: cooperative learning center. retrieved from www.cooperation.org/pages/cl-methods.hkelly, j. g. (1988). a guide to conducting prevention research in the community: first steps (vol. 6, no. 1). psychology press. serrano-garcía, i., pérez-jiménez, d. & rodríguez-medina, s. (2017) educating community psychologists in a changing world. in bond, m., serrano-garcía, i., & keys, c. (eds.) handbook of community psychology. washington, d.c.: american psychological association. siemens, g. (2008). new structures and spaces of learning: the systemic impact of connective knowledge, connectivism, and networked learning. paper presented for universidade dominho, encontro sobre web 2.0, braga, portugal, october 10. retrieved from http://elearnspace.org/articles/systemic_ impact.htm society for community research and action. (2015). competencies for community psychology practice. retrieved from http://www.scra27.org/what-wedo/practice/18-competencies-communitypsychology-practice/ ucsf hearts program: healthy environments and response to trauma in schools. (2015, july 16). retrieved october 03, 2016, from http://coe.ucsf.edu/coe/spotlight/ucsf_heart s.html http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/practice/18-competencies-community-psychology-practice/ http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/practice/18-competencies-community-psychology-practice/ http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/practice/18-competencies-community-psychology-practice/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 appendix a: example session 1 a participatory session exploring major topics in community psychology kelly collins, martina mihelicova & carolyn turek the participatory session presented below has been used successfully within the context of a graduate-level advanced community psychology course at depaul university taught by dr. chris keys. graduate students kelly collins, michelle gilchrist, martina mihelicova, kurtis simonich, and carolyn turek, developed and conducted this session. sequence of contents overview context purpose objectives preparation session development materials needed procedure and timeframe presentation instructions (see appendix a for simplified activity outline) appendix a.1: community psychology topics and readings appendix a.2: session outline appendix a.3: topics handouts appendix a.4: intervention handouts intervention group 1: at risk youth/trauma intervention group 2: chronic illness intervention group 3: cultural diversity and mental health http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 overview context the exercise presented above has been used successfully within the context of a graduate-level advanced community psychology course at depaul university. the course was comprised of 14 masters and ph.d. candidates in various fields (e.g. community psychology, clinical psychology, and counseling psychology). the course sought to introduce students to the main principles and primary readings in the field of community psychology. students entered the course with varying degrees of understanding and exposure to the field of community psychology. purpose the purpose of this activity was to engage students in thinking ecologically as they engaged in critical reflection on community psychology topics from an ecological perspective. they used an ecological lens to apply what they have learned through readings to sample community interventions. students would be able to: (a) summarize major topics in community psychology, including feminist approaches, critical community psychology, physical environment within social ecology, cultural competence, and social support, social capital, and sense of community (note that any topics may be used), (b) begin to parse out the presence or absence of major topics in existing interventions and their ecology, (c) consider how the presence or absence of topics in interventions might impact the effectiveness of the intervention given multi-level ecological factors, and (d) think about how changes to interventions based on these topics might be prioritized given the intervention’s ecology. this session encouraged collaboration and two-way learning among students, and for students to share and reflect on their previous knowledge and experiences that informed their understanding of the topics present in course reading. the exercise was created in order to foster classroom engagement and to bring together main ideas from various course readings. the exercise was carried out midway through the academic quarter and sought to examine five course topics in a participatory context. at this point in the quarter, students had a good understanding of basic community psychology principles such as the ecological perspective. the activity encouraged students to think about course topics and applications of the ecological perspective in applied settings and to integrate various ideas from selected course readings. we encourage interested readers to adapt this activity for use with important topics from other readings. objectives 1. apply ecological perspectives to real-life community intervention examples. (examples were drawn from a variety of interest areas, tailored to the interests of students in the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 course. note: by this point in the term, students had made their interests clear in class discussions and assignments.) 2. engage with course readings on a deeper and more applied, dynamic level using an ecological lens. consider five specific topics from course readings: 1. feminist perspectives and approaches 2. critical community psychology 3. physical environment within social ecology 4. culturally appropriate/competent approaches 5. social support, social capital and sense of community 3. think critically about course principles, such as the ecological perspective and cultural competence, considering practical challenges (and solutions) to the application of community psychology principles given the ecology of community contexts. preparation session development 1. created a google doc on which we posted the various readings we would cover in our presentation a. this was important because it established a way for us to begin contributing before we met as a group, enabling us to hit the ground running and basically finish our presentation in one meeting b. readings are included for this particular course (note: readings may be adjusted to fit any course description. the following are simply suggestions fitting with the depaul advanced community psychology course syllabus; see appendix a.1 below for readings within each topic): i. topic #1: feminist perspectives and approaches ii. topic #2: critical community psychology iii. topic #3: physical environment within social ecology iv. topic #4: culturally-appropriate/competent approaches to community psychology v. topic #5: social support, social capital, and sense of community 2. each planning group member posted their summaries/notes/interpretations for each reading a. this was important because it: i. helped hold each member accountable for readings ii. gave everyone the ability to share their interpretation of the readings, potentially start conversations to make sure we were all on the same page http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 3. we spoke briefly in class to mention various ideas we had, and designate time outside of class to meet a. this was important because it gave us some sense of where we wanted to go with the presentation (because we had so much creative freedom), and helped us get on the same page or understand where each other was coming from to some extent 4. at that meeting we collaborated to: a. identify underlying topics of the various readings, altering the scope so that we had a manageable number of topics b. define each topic (to some extent) c. decide to use an ecological lens for examining the topics and its application d. decide we would divide classmates into teams based on shared areas of interest and give them sample interventions to work with (we wanted to make the presentation and activity personally relevant to each member of the class). e. worked together to find these interventions and pull key info about them f. decided to have classmates identify and apply the topics to apply to their intervention g. developed summaries of each intervention and “questions to consider” to put on handouts for each group h. discussed the presentation organization including timing and which team member would present each piece materials needed • access to blackboard, whiteboard, or projector • internet access • readings from which to draw topics • packets detailing real-world interventions to be analyzed by students (ideally, relating to students’ areas of interest) o note: you may reference and/or use the attached “handouts” (appendix a); however, please properly cite this data. information was taken from various websites describing community interventions. procedure and timeframe presentation instructions (see appendix a.2 for simplified activity outline) activity 1 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 a) begin by dividing the class into groups of 3-4 people according to their research interests and/or personal experience in accordance with the population/focus of the intervention. a. students were also told they could switch groups if they preferred. b) pass out the ‘five topics’ handouts (see appendix a.1) a. students were asked to take 10 minutes to define a list of topics within their small groups. i. topics included: (a) feminist perspectives and approaches, (b) critical community psychology, (c) physical environment within social ecology, (d) culturally appropriate/competent approaches, and (e) social support, social capital, and sense of community. c) next we went through a powerpoint presentation (appendix a.3) with basic definitions of each topic, encouraging each small group to contribute their understandings and interpretations to the definition. activity 2 d) after defining the topics, pass out the ‘intervention example’ handout (appendix a.4) to each respective group. a. the task was to become familiar with the intervention by reading the description on the sheet and access additional information on the internet, if desired. i. students were asked to identify ecological elements of the intervention (e.g., what are the intervention settings (e.g., school, clinic, shelter)? in what geographic location (e.g., urban, suburban, rural)? with what populations?) b. the groups were asked the following: i. “which topics are already present in your intervention?” ii. “which topics aren’t?” iii. what are important ecological factors to consider for this intervention? c. during small group discussions, session facilitators engaged groups to ensure that the activity purpose was understood and to answer any questions. d. students were given 15 to 20 minutes to do this and allow the class to use any of the class readings or the computer as a reference guide. e) next, the larger class came back together to discuss the interventions. a. first, the session facilitators described the interventions so that the entire class was familiar with each of the three interventions. b. the facilitators asked small groups to reflect the presence or absence of the five topics with the large group. activity 3 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 f) after this discussion, students broke back into their small groups and were asked to consider applying each topic within their intervention a. working as a group, students were encouraged to critically consider which topics would be beneficial to incorporate and which would be more difficult to include given the ecology of the intervention. b. they were given 10 minutes. g) this was followed by another 5-10 minute large class discussion. a. during the class discussion, groups were asked to reflect on how certain topics were easier or more difficult to incorporate based on the ecological factors of the intervention. b. each group was asked to share what revisions they would make to the intervention and its ecology. discussion questions h) for the remainder of class, facilitators allowed space for the class members to answer the discussion questions below and create a dialogue to reflect on the process of this collection of activities. a. what topics did you leave out and why? i. how were these decisions impacted by factors at different ecological levels? b. your funding has been cut and you must choose only one topic to address in your program. i. which do you choose and why? ii. how were these decisions impacted by factors at different ecological levels? c. after thinking about applying these to actual interventions, do you think differently about these topics? d. how did it feel to work together to make decisions within your small groups? the large groups? e. how would implementing these topics influence your methodological choices and/or your ability to evaluate the effectiveness of your intervention? i. how were these decisions impacted by factors at different ecological levels? f. how would you engage community members and or key stakeholders in order to develop these topics in your interventions given its ecology? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 appendix a.1: community psychology topics topic #1 --feminist perspectives and approaches campbell, r., greeson, m. r., bybee, d., & fehler-cabral, g. (2012). adolescent sexual assault victims and the legal system: building community relationships to improve prosecution rates. american journal of community psychology, 50(1-2), 141-154. doi: 10.1007/s10464-0119485-3 bond, m. a., & mulvey, a. (2000). a history of women and feminist perspectives in community psychology. american journal of community psychology, 28(5), 599-630. doi: 0.1023/a:1005141619462 topic #2 --critical community psychology fryer, d., & fagan, r. (2003). toward a critical community psychological perspective on unemployment and mental health research. american journal of community psychology, 32(1-2), 89-96. doi: 10.1023/a:1025698924304 topic #3 --physical environment within social ecology kloos, b., & shah, s. (2009). a social ecological approach to investigating relationships between housing and adaptive functioning for persons with serious mental illness. american journal of community psychology, 44(3-4), 316-326. doi: 10.1007/s10464-009-9277-1 topic #4 --diversity in community psychology theory and research sampson, e. e. (1993). identity politics: challenges to psychology's understanding. american psychologist, 48(12), 1219. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.48.12.1219 keys, c. b., mcmahon, s., sánchez, b., london, l., & abdul-adil, j. (2004). culturally anchored research: quandaries, guidelines, and exemplars for community psychology. in jason, l. a., keys, c. b., suarez-balcazar, y., taylor, r. r., davis, m. i., durlak, j. & eisenberg, d. (eds.), participatory community research: theories and methods in action (pp. 177-198). washington, dc, us: american psychological association. topic #5 -social support, social capital, and sense of community http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 cline, r. j., orom, h., berry-bobovski, l., hernandez, t., black, c. b., schwartz, a. g., & ruckdeschel, j. c. (2010). community-level social support responses in a slow-motion technological disaster: the case of libby, montana. american journal of community psychology, 46(1-2), 118. doi: 10.1007/s10464-010-9329-6 xu, q., perkins, d. d., & chow, j. c. c. (2010). sense of community, neighboring, and social capital as predictors of local political participation in china. american journal of community psychology, 45(3-4), 259-271. doi: 10.1007/s10464-010-9312-2 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 appendix a.2: session outline activity 1 1. divide into small groups 2. complete 5 topics handout (appendix a.1) in small group (10 minutes) 3. discuss and define topics as a class (appendix a.3) activity 2 4. pass out ‘intervention example’ handout (appendix a.4) 5. small groups identify ecological factors of intervention and consider the presence of absence of each of the 5 topics (15-20 minutes) 6. larger class comes back together to discuss the interventions and their ecologies activity 3 7. small groups critically consider which topics would be beneficial to incorporate in their intervention and why (10 minutes) 8. large class reflects on challenges and utilities of incorporating various topics given the ecological context of the interventions discussion questions 9. large group continue to engage in sharing and critical reflection of session http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 appendix a.3: topics handouts topics in community psychology feminist perspectives and approaches critical community psychology physical environment within social ecology culturally appropriate/competent approaches social support, social capital, and sense of community ecological perspective including relevant factors at different levels micro meso macro http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 27 appendix a.4: intervention handouts intervention group 1: at risk youth/trauma healthy environments and response to trauma in schools (hearts) children may experience a variety of trauma that affects their success in schools. experiencing trauma may, in turn, be associated with long-term consequences, such as dropping out of school, which can increase risk of imprisonment. ucsf has partnered with the san francisco unified school district (sfusd) to implement the healthy environments and response to trauma in schools (hearts) program. hearts aims at addressing the impact of community and family violence on children through a trauma-informed, school-based prevention/intervention. the intervention includes three pieces: (1) therapeutic interventions, skill-building groups, and class presentations on coping; (2) providing training to parents and school staff, including teachers, such as psychoeducation, skillbuilding workshops, trauma background and trauma-informed practices training, and addressing staff burnout; (3) improving policies and procedures (e.g., discipline policies.) soure: ucsf hearts program: healthy environments and response to trauma in schools. (2015, july 16). retrieved october 01, 2016, from http://coe.ucsf.edu/coe/spotlight/ucsf_hearts.html link to anecdotes: http://coe.ucsf.edu/coe/spotlight/ucsf_hearts_story.html questions to consider: • where has this intervention been implemented? how would you characterize these ecologies? o in what settings (e.g., school, clinic, shelter)? o in what geographic location (e.g., urban, suburban, rural)? o with what populations? ▪ ages? ▪ genders? ▪ ethnicities/cultures? ▪ sexual orientations? ▪ disabilities/abilities? • how is the intervention designed and implemented? o what are the programmatic principles/theory? o what are the activities/elements (e.g., one-on-one mentoring, group therapy, online modules)? http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://coe.ucsf.edu/coe/spotlight/ucsf_hearts_story.html global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 28 o what are the intended outcomes/goals of the intervention? • what are specific strengths and weaknesses of the intervention? o what are parts (i.e., core components) of the intervention that must be implemented and/or should not be adapted? o what are parts of the intervention that should be removed or adapted? o what ecological factors affect the intervention, its success and its shortcomings? • of the five topics from the readings, which can or should be applied to your intervention? o how can the topic be applied? o why is this topic important to incorporate? o what ecological factors facilitate and which inhibit your application of this topic? • which topics are more difficult or cannot be applied to your intervention? o why can’t this topic be incorporated? or why doesn’t it make sense to incorporate this topic? how does ecology play a role in these considerations? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 29 intervention group 2: chronic illness sandy lake health and diabetes project a multifaceted diabetes prevention program implemented over the past 20 years in a remote fly-in first nations community in northern ontario, canada. the intervention seeks to: 1) determine the prevalence of diabetes; 2) describe biological and lifestyle factors associated with diabetes; 3) develop culturally appropriate intervention strategies based on ethnographic data; and 4) provide a model intervention strategy that could be replicated in other first nations communities. the intervention involves: a school-based diabetes curriculum for children in grades 3 and 4; a diabetes radio show; and community activities aimed at increasing awareness and prevention of diabetes. the program was developed and monitored through a collaborative partnership between the community and academic researchers. pre-test/post-test evaluation findings report an increase in healthy eating intention, healthy dietary preference, knowledge of health and nutrition and curriculum material, self-efficacy to eat healthy food, increase in dietary fibre and a decrease in screen time. no difference was found in intake of dietary fats although participants had a better understanding of the consequences of high-fat diets. source: sandy lake health and diabetes project. (n.d.). retrieved october 01, 2016, from http://cbpp-pcpe.phac-aspc.gc.ca/~cbpp/public/wp-content/themes/wet-boew306/printinterventions.php?pid=9880 link to article and anecdotes: http://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/diseases_cures/2010/03/31/inside_sandy_l akes_fight_with_diabetes.html questions to consider: • where has this intervention been implemented? how would you characterize these ecologies? o in what settings (e.g., school, clinic, shelter)? o in what geographic location (e.g., urban, suburban, rural)? o with what populations? ▪ ages? ▪ genders? ▪ ethnicities/cultures? ▪ sexual orientations? ▪ disabilities/abilities? • how is the intervention designed and implemented? o what are the programmatic principles/theory? o what are the activities/elements (e.g., one-on-one mentoring, group therapy, online modules)? http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/diseases_cures/2010/03/31/inside_sandy_lakes_fight_with_diabetes.html http://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/diseases_cures/2010/03/31/inside_sandy_lakes_fight_with_diabetes.html global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 30 o what are the intended outcomes/goals of the intervention? • what are specific strengths and weaknesses of the intervention? o what are parts (i.e., core components) of the intervention that must be implemented and/or should not be adapted? o what are parts of the intervention that should be removed or adapted? o what ecological factors affect the intervention, its success and its shortcomings? • of the five topics from the readings, which can or should be applied to your intervention? o how can the topic be applied? o why is this topic important to incorporate? o which ecological factors facilitate and which inhibit your application of this topic? • which topics are more difficult or cannot be applied to your intervention? o why can’t this topic be incorporated? or why doesn’t it make sense to incorporate this topic? o how does ecology play a role in these considerations? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 31 intervention group 3: cultural diversity and mental health youth partners in care: depression treatment quality improvement (ypic/dtqi) youth partners in care--depression treatment quality improvement (ypic/dtqi) is a 6-month quality improvement intervention to improve depression outcomes among adolescents by increasing access to depression treatments, primarily cognitive behavioral therapy (cbt) and antidepressants, in primary care settings. ypic/dtqi is a collaborative care model in which mental health is integrated with primary care. the main elements of the ypic/dtqi model are teamwork between specialists and generalists, case management by care managers, and patient education and empowerment. organizations implementing the program receive professional development and training, as well as manuals for clinicians and care managers to improve coordination and guide treatment planning and delivery. patient education brochures are also provided for participating youth and their families. link to study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15657324 source: intervention summary youth partners in care--depression treatment quality improvement (ypic/dtqi). (n.d.). retrieved october 03, 2016, from http://legacy.nreppadmin.net/viewintervention.aspx?id=282 questions to consider: • where has this intervention been implemented? how would you characterize these ecologies? o in what settings (e.g., school, clinic, shelter)? o in what geographic location (e.g., urban, suburban, rural)? o with what populations? ▪ ages? ▪ genders? ▪ ethnicities/cultures? ▪ sexual orientations? ▪ disabilities/abilities? • how is the intervention designed and implemented? o what are the programmatic principles/theory? o what are the activities/elements (e.g., one-on-one mentoring, group therapy, online modules)? o what are the intended outcomes/goals of the intervention? • what are specific strengths and weaknesses of the intervention? o what are parts (i.e., core components) of the intervention that must be implemented and/or should not be adapted? o what are parts of the intervention that should be removed or adapted? o what ecological factors affect the intervention and its success and shortcomings? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 32 • of the five topics from the readings, which can or should be applied to your intervention? o how can the topic be applied? o why is this topic important to incorporate? o which ecological factors facilitate and which inhibit your application of this topic? • which topics are more difficult or cannot be applied to your intervention? o why can’t this topic be incorporated? or why doesn’t it make sense to incorporate this topic? o how does ecology play a role in these considerations? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 33 appendix b: example session 2 simulating the start of community program development madison sunnquist, chris whipple & jordan reed session context purpose objectives34 procedure and timeframe timelinetotal time: 75-85 minutes activity 1 activity 2 activity 3 activity 4 activity 5 activity 6 activity 7 reflections appendix b.1: readings appendix b.2: class handouts session context the following activity engages students within a classroom setting to better understand the process and difficulties of initiating collaboration to develop community-based intervention programs. the exercise simulated the development of prevention programs for neighborhood schools. each student was given a role to play either at one of the schools, (e.g., parent, teacher, administrator, or student), or as part of a community psychology team of consultants. each school identified their readiness to develop a prevention program and presented some program ideas to the community psychologists. community psychologists evaluated each proposal and determined which school they would assist. this participatory activity has been used in an advanced community psychology course. the course was taken by graduate students within community, clinical, and counseling programs. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 34 this exercise can be used in community psychology courses, courses on prevention and health promotion, or any course discussing community collaboration. in addition, small changes may be made to content to permit use in other situations. purpose the purpose of this session was to help graduate students in an advanced community psychology course understand and apply community psychology competencies, including primarily community program development, and small and large group processes. activities were designed to help students understand the complexities of applying these competencies in community collaborations due to issues of power and context. through discussion, students reflected upon the types of decisions they made and whether their decisions were consistent with community psychology competencies and ethics. objectives a. to integrate community psychology competencies especially those regarding the initiation of community program development through role-playing activities b. to understand the influence of power, diverse perspectives, and context on perceived prevention/promotion intervention viability c. to understand the challenges of collaboratively planning and designing an intervention and skills to overcome these challenges d. to identify obstacles in advocating for the adoption of community interventions and possible solutions e. to discuss practical issues in applying community psychology competencies and ethics in developing and implementing interventions. preparation a. readings (listed in appendix b.1) covered topics including prevention, promotion, and empowerment. b. materials used in the activity can be found in appendix b.2. c. students were assigned a role either as a stakeholder within either school or the community psychology team. a. role play guidelines for each school stakeholder included a description of the school the student is to represent, a description and background of the role they are to play, and a school readiness assessment for the school. b. students assigned to the community psychology team receive information about their specific roles, the center they represent, school readiness assessments for each school, and areas to consider during the interviews with stakeholders. procedure and timeframe a. overall instructions http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 35 i. to begin, facilitators give an overview of the activity, including the following information: following the framework established in flashpohler et al. (2012), two schools are interested in working with a group of community psychologists to develop a school-based prevention program for their students. they are preparing for their presentations to the researchers. each student will be given a role to play at one of the schools or on the community psychology team. students read their background information and behave accordingly. each school group will be given time to discuss the intervention they would like to develop and their strategy for presenting this information to the community psychology team. one community psychologist will meet with each group and hear their proposal. the psychologists will then discuss which school will receive their support. b. steps for the procedure i. after introducing the activity, hand out the role play instructions to students. roles may be given randomly, or facilitators may strategically place roles depending on desired outcomes and class dynamics. members from each "school" should then get together to start activity 1. timelinetotal time: 75-85 minutes introductory statements: the facilitator assigns (randomly or otherwise) each class member a role and provides them with the appropriate role description (in appendix b.2). the facilitator notes that class members should “get into character” to portray their assigned role as accurately as possible. to model enthusiastic adherence to assigned roles, the facilitator may wish to portray a role as well. after allowing class members to read silently about their role, the facilitator directs them to move into their assigned groups: smithsonian elementary, field elementary, and research team. the facilitator states that the two schools are both interested in working with a group of community psychologists to develop a school-based prevention program for their students. to demonstrate their ‘readiness for intervention,’ they have been preparing for presentations to the researcher team. the facilitator informs the class that they will undergo a series of tasks and reflective discussions for the remainder of the class period. the facilitator proceeds to introduce the first session. activity 1: 5-10 minutes task: discussion among members of each group. groups are prepping for meetings where the community psychologists will ask them questions to determine which school is most “ready, willing, and able.” school groups discuss how to present themselves, their school and their program ideas and community psychologists discuss selection criteria, based on the article by flashpohler et al. (2012). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 36 activity 2: 5-10 minutes task: one community psychologist meets with each school group to ask the questions they discussed to assess “readiness.” they will have very limited info on the schools before meeting with them. activity 3: 5 minutes task: community psychologist group determines which school will be awarded the opportunity to participate. 1. school groups evaluate the questions they were asked did they properly assess the schools’ capabilities? were there any capabilities you have that didn’t come out in the interview? any weaknesses? 2. community psychologists: did power dynamics between the two of you influence which school was chosen? to what extent? activity 4: 10 minutes task: come together as a group: community psychologists announce “winner”. everyone comes out of character and reflects on the process so far what has been easy, surprising, challenging? other reactions? announce next series of tasks: develop a research proposal. non-selected schools have decided to do their own research project as well. selected school will work with the community psychologists. will be interesting to see if working with the community psychologist group impacts the process and if so, how. 3. since these schools are in the same community, and there are limited resources, how might this affect empowerment? would one school’s grant lead to the other’s disempowerment? 4. what ripple effects might the school’s grant have in the community? activity 5: 15 minutes task: groups try to agree upon a research question, components of intervention, and how to measure outcomes (this outcome variable could tie to the prilleltensky (2012) article) activity 6: 20 minutes http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 37 task: each group presents their study, and talks about aspects of the experience that were helpful or challenging 5. did your group include aspects of prevention, promotion, and empowerment? why were any excluded (if they were)? 6. what level of intervention(s) did you decide to do (e.g. community, individual, etc.)? what outcomes are you measuring (e.g. individual, relational, organizational, societal)? 7. did power dynamics among members of the group determine which intervention(s) you choose? elaborate. activity 7: 15 minutes full group discussion prevention/promotion: 8. why is prevention often overlooked in research funding? how can we work to tailor prevention grant applications to be competitive? 9. what are the pros and cons of developing comprehensive prevention or promotion programs? 10. how do we define health? how did you define it in your conversations? did it play a role in your interventions? empowerment 11. how do we define empowerment? how did your conversations today lead to empowerment / disempowerment? of whom? 12. how can we focus comprehensive interventions on providing people with more control over their lives? 13. do changes in empowerment of one group always require shifts in power between groups? 14. when increasing empowerment in interventions, is there a type of power we should focus on developing over another? what are the advantages/disadvantages? (e.g., power to, power over, power from) readiness for intervention 15. how did you assess each school’s readiness for intervention (directed toward those with consultant roles)? how ready did you feel your school was for intervention (directed toward school-based roles)? 16. was your assessment of readiness for intervention impacted by issues of power or context? 17. how might assessing readiness for intervention affect empowerment? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 38 reflections the exercise went well in class, and received both positive and negative responses. the role playing engendered identification with community partners and appreciation of the personal disappointment with being passed over for partnership when in need of help. this experience will help students to empathize with community partners. the scenario also allowed students to consider many diverse concepts and synthesize how these considerations may apply in practice. finally, the exercise raised a more in-depth discussion about prevention, empowerment, readiness for intervention, and the community psychologist's role as students shared their experience roleplaying. there were also negative responses. some students found portions of the exercise, such as the interview between the community psychologist and school personnel, difficult to conduct in character. also, the time constraints of the discussion sections were sometimes too short to allow for full discussion of topics. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 39 appendix b.1: readings albee, g. w. (1982). preventing psychopathology and promoting human potential. american psychologist, 37, 1043-1050. durlak, j. a., taylor, r. d., kawashima, k., pachan, m. k., dupre, e. p., celio, c. i., ... & weissberg, r. p. (2007). effects of positive youth development programs on school, family, and community systems. american journal of community psychology, 39, 269-286. weissberg, r, kumpfer, c, & seligman, m. (2003). prevention that works for children and youth: an introduction. american psychologist, 58, 425-432. flashpohler, p., meehan, c., maras, m., & keller, k. (2012). ready, willing and able: developing a support system to promote implementation of school-based prevention programs. american journal of community psychology, 50, 428-444 prilleltensky, i. (2012) wellness as fairness. american journal of community psychology, 49, 1-21. zimmerman, m. a. (2000). empowerment theory: psychological, organizational, and community levels of analysis. in j. rappaport & e. seidman (eds.), handbook of community psychology. (pp. 43-63). kluwer academic/plenum publishers, new york, ny. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 40 appendix b.2: class handouts group: smithsonian elementary (4 group members) smithsonian elementary is a school that serves k-5th grade. it is situated in a middle-upper class neighborhood in a large city. neighborhood children, as well as selected students with high test scores, can attend. before the start of the current academic year, the school district boundaries were changed to include students from a neighboring district with high levels of crime and lower socioeconomic status. the school has adequate government funding and also receives frequent donations from wealthy parents. most students’ parents are heavily involved in their children’s education and often volunteer to help with school activities. role: principal you have been the principal of smithsonian elementary for the past 20 years, and you are proud of the quality education that your students receive. you know that the new students joining your school district came from an under-resourced school and many are below grade level due to their previous school’s lack of resources. you feel strongly that your efforts this year should focus on these new students, as you believe that other students already have the resources they need to succeed. school readiness assessment: collected data (smithsonian elementary): • staff survey completion rates: 80% • readiness assessment tool score: high o this measures the school’s capacity/ability to implement a program • collective efficacy scale score: medium o this measures teachers’ ability to work together • strengths-based practices inventory: medium o this measures positive/supportive practices among staff members • percentage students on free/reduced lunch program: 15% • budget: $500,000 to be measured during interviews with schools: • commitment to the planning process • commitment to implementing an evidence-based program • strength of school’s argument http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 41 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 42 group: smithsonian elementary (4 group members) smithsonian elementary is a selective enrollment school that serves k-5th grade. it is situated in a middle-upper class neighborhood in a large city. neighborhood children, as well as selected students with high test scores, can attend. before the start of the current academic year, the school district boundaries were changed to include students from a neighboring district with high levels of crime and lower socioeconomic status. the school has adequate government funding and also receives frequent donations from wealthy parents. most students’ parents are heavily involved in their children’s educations and often volunteer to help with school activities. role: teacher representative you have been a teacher at smithsonian for 10 years, and you have received many awards for your teaching. you are accustomed to teaching gifted and advanced students, but 20% of your class this year is behind their grade level. you are not quite sure how to effectively cater to the needs of your full classroom, as the majority of the students in your class have advanced knowledge of the subjects you teach. you are having challenges keeping advanced children interested while trying to help other students understand more basic concepts. you know that your fellow teachers are facing similar situations, so you think the school should provide additional training opportunities to address this challenge. school readiness assessment: collected data (smithsonian elementary): • staff survey completion rates: 80% • readiness assessment tool score: high o this measures the school’s capacity/ability to implement a program • collective efficacy scale score: medium o this measures teachers’ ability to work together • strengths-based practices inventory: medium o this measures positive/supportive practices among staff members • percentage students on free/reduced lunch program: 15% • budget: $500,000 to be measured during interviews with schools: • commitment to the planning process • commitment to implementing an evidence-based program • strength of school’s argument http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 43 group: smithsonian elementary (4 group members) smithsonian elementary is a school that serves k-5th grade. it is situated in a middle-upper class neighborhood in a large city. neighborhood children, as well as selected students with high test scores, can attend. before the start of the current academic year, the school district boundaries were changed to include students from a neighboring district with high levels of crime and lower socioeconomic status. the school has adequate government funding and also receives frequent donations from wealthy parents. most students’ parents are heavily involved in their children’s educations and often volunteer to help with school activities. role: parent representative your child was placed in this school due to very high test scores and has recently been complaining to you that the coursework is too easy and the teacher is moving too slowly through the material. you and many other parents are concerned that your children’s education is being sacrificed for the sake of other students. many parents are angry, as they feel their children worked hard to place into a selective enrollment school, but are not reaping the benefits of their hard work. you want the school to create more challenging courses, and many parents have informed you that they will cease donating to the school if these courses are not implemented. school readiness assessment: collected data (smithsonian elementary): • staff survey completion rates: 80% • readiness assessment tool score: high o this measures the school’s capacity/ability to implement a program • collective efficacy scale score: medium o this measures teachers’ ability to work together • strengths-based practices inventory: medium o this measures positive/supportive practices among staff members • percentage students on free/reduced lunch program: 15% • budget: $500,000 to be measured during interviews with schools: • commitment to the planning process • commitment to implementing an evidence-based program • strength of school’s argument http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 44 group: smithsonian elementary (4 group members) smithsonian elementary is a school that serves k-5th grade. it is situated in a middle-upper class neighborhood in a large city. neighborhood children, as well as selected students with high test scores, can attend. before the start of the current academic year, the school district boundaries were changed to include students from a neighboring district with high levels of crime and lower socioeconomic status. the school has adequate government funding and also receives frequent donations from wealthy parents. most students’ parents are heavily involved in their children’s educations and often volunteer to help with school activities. role: school psychologist you are the sole school psychologist at smithsonian, and you have noticed that many incoming students did not receive the testing (for learning disabilities, adhd, etc.) they needed due to the resource limitations at their previous school. you recognize that conducting necessary testing in a timely manner is imperative to the children’s success. unfortunately, you know that it will be impossible for you to do this alone, and you would like the school to pay for outside psychologists to help you conduct the testing and implement any individualized education plans (ieps) or 504 plans needed for all children to have an appropriate learning experience. school readiness assessment: collected data (smithsonian elementary): • staff survey completion rates: 80% • readiness assessment tool score: high o this measures the school’s capacity/ability to implement a program • collective efficacy scale score: medium o this measures teachers’ ability to work together • strengths-based practices inventory: medium o this measures positive/supportive practices among staff members • percentage students on free/reduced lunch program: 15% • budget: $500,000 to be measured during interviews with schools: • commitment to the planning process • commitment to implementing an evidence-based program • strength of school’s argument http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 45 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 46 group: field elementary (4 group members) field elementary is a neighborhood school that serves k-5th grade. it is situated in a neighborhood of lower socioeconomic status that has high rates of violent crime. attendance rates are low, as students sometimes report difficulty getting to school due to safety concerns. because of low attendance and community-level stressors, students have historically performed poorly on standardized tests, and the school is at risk for losing funding. despite these challenges, most parents are actively involved in their children’s education. the parent-teacher association is working hard to try to increase attendance and determine what resources could reduce some of the students’ stressors. further, a student was recently interviewed by a popular blog, and his positive statements about the school’s principal garnered national attention. because of this publicity, the school has received a donation of $500,000 and wants to determine how to best use it to facilitate the students’ education. role: principal you are focused on creating a learning environment that empowers both teachers and students. you have won many awards for your school leadership, and you strongly believe that empowered teachers lead to empowered students. in other words, your priorities focus on providing teachers with the resources they need to be most effective. you would like to use the donation funds to raise teacher salaries and attract new, talented teachers to work at your school. you are a strong figure in your school system, and you routinely stop your students in the hallway to ask them about their short-term and long-term goals and how their actions today have contributed to achieving those goals. you believe this practice helps keep your students focused on learning. school readiness assessment: collected data (field elementary): • staff survey completion rates: 90% • readiness assessment tool score: medium-low o this measures the school’s capacity/ability to implement a program • collective efficacy scale score: high o this measures teachers’ ability to work together • strengths-based practices inventory: high o this measures positive/supportive practices among staff members • percentage students on free/reduced lunch program: 40% • budget: $500,000 to be measured during interviews with schools: • commitment to the planning process • commitment to implementing an evidence-based program http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 47 • strength of school’s argument http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 48 group: field elementary (4 group members) field elementary is a neighborhood school that serves k-5th grade. it is situated in a neighborhood of lower socioeconomic status that has high rates of violent crime. attendance rates are low, as students sometimes report difficulty getting to school due to safety concerns. because of low attendance and community-level stressors, students have historically performed poorly on standardized tests, and the school is at risk for losing funding. despite these challenges, most parents are actively involved in their children’s education. the parent-teacher association is working hard to try to increase attendance and determine what resources could reduce some of the students’ stressors. further, a student was recently interviewed by a popular blog, and his positive statements about the school’s principal garnered national attention. because of this publicity, the school has received a donation of $500,000 and wants to determine how to best use it to facilitate the students’ education. role: teacher representative you have taught at field elementary for the past 20 years, and you take pride in your school, its principal, and your students. one of the most challenging aspects of your job is keeping all of your students up-to-date on class material due to frequent absences. you also feel pressure to cater all aspects of your lessons toward topics on standardized tests, as the school frequently risks losing funding due to low standardized test scores. you believe that your students would learn more if you had more freedom in your lesson plans, and you would like the school to use the donation funds to provide struggling students with individualized tutoring to help them keep up with classwork. school readiness assessment: collected data (field elementary): • staff survey completion rates: 90% • readiness assessment tool score: medium-low o this measures the school’s capacity/ability to implement a program • collective efficacy scale score: high o this measures teachers’ ability to work together • strengths-based practices inventory: high o this measures positive/supportive practices among staff members • percentage students on free/reduced lunch program: 40% • budget: $500,000 to be measured during interviews with schools: • commitment to the planning process • commitment to implementing an evidence-based program • strength of school’s argument http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 49 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 50 group: field elementary (4 group members) field elementary is a neighborhood school that serves k-5th grade. it is situated in a neighborhood of lower socioeconomic status that has high rates of violent crime. attendance rates are low, as students sometimes report difficulty getting to school due to safety concerns. because of low attendance and community-level stressors, students have historically performed poorly on standardized tests, and the school is at risk for losing funding. despite these challenges, most parents are actively involved in their children’s education. the parent-teacher association is working hard to try to increase attendance and determine what resources could reduce some of the students’ stressors. further, a student was recently interviewed by a popular blog, and his positive statements about the school’s principal garnered national attention. because of this publicity, the school has received a donation of $500,000 and wants to determine how to best use it to facilitate the students’ education. role: parent representative you and other parents are worried about the safety of their children in getting to school. many students must rely on public transportation, and some must wait outside in the cold for busses to arrive. you would like the school to help implement community-level interventions to make the neighborhood safer, and you also want the school to provide convenient bus service to all students to help them travel safely to school. school readiness assessment: collected data (field elementary): • staff survey completion rates: 90% • readiness assessment tool score: medium-low o this measures the school’s capacity/ability to implement a program • collective efficacy scale score: high o this measures teachers’ ability to work together • strengths-based practices inventory: high o this measures positive/supportive practices among staff members • percentage students on free/reduced lunch program: 40% • budget: $500,000 to be measured during interviews with schools: • commitment to the planning process • commitment to implementing an evidence-based program • strength of school’s argument http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 51 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 52 group: field elementary (4 group members) field elementary is a neighborhood school that serves k-5th grade. it is situated in a neighborhood of lower socioeconomic status that has high rates of violent crime. attendance rates are low, as students sometimes report difficulty getting to school due to safety concerns. because of low attendance and community-level stressors, students have historically performed poorly on standardized tests, and the school is at risk for losing funding. despite these challenges, most parents are actively involved in their children’s education. the parent-teacher association is working hard to try to increase attendance and determine what resources could reduce some of the students’ stressors. further, a student was recently interviewed by a popular blog, and his positive statements about the school’s principal garnered national attention. because of this publicity, the school has received a donation of $500,000 and wants to determine how to best use it to facilitate the students’ education. role: school psychologist you know that students in your school have high levels of stress, due in part to neighborhood violence and guardian financial difficulties. you believe the school should hire additional psychologists to provide individualized help to students facing these large life stressors. school readiness assessment: collected data (field elementary): • staff survey completion rates: 90% • readiness assessment tool score: medium-low o this measures the school’s capacity/ability to implement a program • collective efficacy scale score: high o this measures teachers’ ability to work together • strengths-based practices inventory: high o this measures positive/supportive practices among staff members • percentage students on free/reduced lunch program: 40% • budget: $500,000 to be measured during interviews with schools: • commitment to the planning process • commitment to implementing an evidence-based program • strength of school’s argument http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 53 group: research team (2 group members) the center for excellence in education (cee) is a research center situated at a major public university. the cee is comprised of community psychologists, former education professionals (e.g. teachers, principals, school psychologists), and research assistants working to gain experience prior to graduate school. most staff have extensive experience in implementing and evaluating school interventions. the director of the cee is a tenure-track faculty member in the university’s department of psychology. he recently read flashpohler’s 2012 article entitled “ready, willing, and able.” he has decided to use the data collected from the criteria mentioned in the article (attendance at a request for proposal meeting, completion of a readiness assessment, and completion of a planning grant) to select a school with which to partner for the cee’s next grant application: role: principal investigator (director, cee) you have worked at your university as a tenure-track faculty member and directed the cee for the past five years. this year, you are up for tenure. your teaching reviews have been mediocre, so you know that you need an especially strong line of research and funding in order to get tenured. the funding of your current grant is about to end, so you want to apply for a large grant that implements and evaluates a school-based intervention. you know that being awarded this grant would significantly increase your chances for tenure, so you have decided to adhere closely to flashpohler’s criteria; you believe that working with a school that is very “ready” would make the grant much more attractive to funding agencies. further, a successful intervention would increase the odds of obtaining future grants. school readiness assessment: collected data (smithsonian elementary): • staff survey completion rates: 80% • readiness assessment tool score: high o this measures the school’s capacity/ability to implement a program • collective efficacy scale score: medium o this measures teachers’ ability to work together • strengths-based practices inventory: medium o this measures positive/supportive practices among staff members • percentage students on free/reduced lunch program: 15% • budget: $500,000 collected data (field elementary): • staff survey completion rates: 90% • readiness assessment tool score: medium-low http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 54 o this measures the school’s capacity/ability to implement a program • collective efficacy scale score: high o this measures teachers’ ability to work together • strengths-based practices inventory: high o this measures positive/supportive practices among staff members • percentage students on free/reduced lunch program: 40% • budget: $500,000 to be measured during interviews with schools: • commitment to the planning process • commitment to implementing an evidence-based program • strength of school’s argument http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 55 group: research team (2 group members) the center for excellence in education (cee) is a research center situated at a major public university. the cee is comprised of community psychologists, former education professionals (e.g. teachers, principals, school psychologists), and research assistants working to gain experience prior to graduate school. most staff have extensive experience in implementing and evaluating school interventions. the director of the cee is a tenure-track faculty member in the university’s department of psychology. he recently read flashpohler’s 2012 article entitled “ready, willing, and able.” he has decided to use data collected from the criteria mentioned in the article (attendance at a request for proposal meeting, completion of a readiness assessment, and completion of a planning grant) to select a school with which to partner for the cee’s next grant application. role: research assistant you have been working at cee for about six months after obtaining a bachelor’s degree in psychology. you hope to attend graduate school and would like to study school-based interventions. you really would like to study under roger weissberg for your doctorate in community psychology, so you really want this new grant to include a social-emotional learning component, as you know it would enhance your application. you think this would have a positive impact on any school you chose, so you hope to convince your pi to include this component. school readiness assessment: collected data (smithsonian elementary): • staff survey completion rates: 80% • readiness assessment tool score: high o this measures the school’s capacity/ability to implement a program • collective efficacy scale score: medium o this measures teachers’ ability to work together • strengths-based practices inventory: medium o this measures positive/supportive practices among staff members • percentage students on free/reduced lunch program: 15% • budget: $500,000 collected data (field elementary): • staff survey completion rates: 90% • readiness assessment tool score: medium-low o this measures the school’s capacity/ability to implement a program • collective efficacy scale score: high o this measures teachers’ ability to work together http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 56 • strengths-based practices inventory: high o this measures positive/supportive practices among staff members • percentage students on free/reduced lunch program: 40% • budget: $500,000 to be measured during interviews with schools: • commitment to the planning process • commitment to implementing an evidence-based program • strength of school’s argument http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 57 appendix c: example session 3 the diversity game nicole colon quintana and kris ma2 the participatory session presented below has been used successfully within the context of a graduate-level advanced community psychology course at depaul university taught by dr. chris keys. this game is for educational use only and is not affiliated with jeopardy!® or sony pictures digital inc. jeopardy! is a registered trademark of jeopardy productions, inc. ©2005 jeopardy productions, inc. all rights reserved. contents context purpose objectives preparation readings covered materials a. role play instructions b. worksheets c. other materials procedure and timeframe overall instructions procedure a. time allotted b. instructions c. questions for participants d. facilitator tips overall discussion principles to highlight brief commentary on how the exercise went in our class and anywhere else it has been used appendix c.1 suggested role characteristics 2 clinical psychology graduate students, depaul university. original materials created with support from carlos luna and amy rhodes. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 58 appendix c.2 sample facilitator role definition record appendix c.3 the diversity game slideshow overview context a. what context the exercise has been used in i. this exercise was developed for a graduate course in community psychology and has been used to teach about diversity, systemic inequality, and community intervention development. b. when to use the exercise i. this exercise can be used in any course or seminar intended to foster a discussion about diversity, culture, politics, and/or systemic inequality. purpose to create a virtual reality wherein participants can experience all elements of systemic inequality through a jeopardy-like diversity game objectives a. to recreate an experience of systemic inequality. b. to use the individual and collective experiences as a platform for discussion about culture, inequality, and other systems as appropriate for the class or seminar. c. to use the questions related to the game as a way of reviewing important concepts related to the overarching topics under discussion in the class or seminar (e.g., community psychology, multicultural psychology, sociology). preparation readings covered no specific readings are required for this exercise. however, it is recommended that the facilitators conducting this activity have some knowledge on diversity issues and systematic inequalities. it is helpful if students participating have done some reading on diversity and power issues. some recommended readings include: american psychological association. (2012). crossroads: the psychology of immigration in the new century. report of the apa presidential task force on immigration. washington, dc: author. balcazar, f. e., suarez-balcazar, y., adames, s. b., keys, c. b., garcía-ramírez, m., & paloma, v. (2012). a case study of liberation among latino immigrant families who have children with disabilities. american journal of community psychology, 49, 1-2. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 59 birman, d., trickett, e., & buchanan, r. (2005). a tale of two cities: replication of a study on the acculturation and adaptation of immigrant adolescents from the former soviet union in a different community context. american journal of community psychology, 35, 1-2. birman, d., & simon, c. d. (2013). acculturation research: challenges, complexities, and possibilities. apa handbook of multicultural psychology. washington, dc: american psychological association. dowrick, p. w., & keys, c. b. (2001). community psychology and disability studies. journal of prevention & intervention in the community, 21, 2, 1-14 jason, l. a. (2012). small wins matter in advocacy movements: giving voice to patients. american journal of community psychology, 49, 307-316. materials a. role play instructions i. facilitators should take on specific roles during the game (see appendix c.2). recommended roles include: 1. game host (reads questions and keeps track of points), 2. monitor 1 (makes sure all participants are adhering to their assigned role), and 3. monitor 2 (determines how each participant will be rewarded for his or her response to each question). i. depending on the facilitator’s intent, monitor 2 may reserve the right to augment unfair treatment by making unilateral decisions regarding point distribution. monitor 2 may also control the way participants interact with each other. the goal is to recreate different types of systemic injustices and elicit frustration among the players. monitor 2 also keeps and distributes rewards (e.g., pieces of candy). ii. participants will also play specific roles. a. the facilitator prepares cards ahead of the game and hands out the cards to participants at the beginning of the game. each card contains a characteristic that either limits the individual’s participation or enhances the individual’s chances of scoring points. participants should not share their card with others. suggested characteristics are provided (see appendix c.1). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 60 b. worksheets i. no worksheets are required for this exercise. the facilitator may decide to distribute a worksheet with discussion questions at the end of the game. ii. participants may receive handouts detailing the main points of the presentation at the end of the game. c. other materials i. the use of technology is recommended. a powerpoint presentation with the questions in jeopardy! game format makes the game more engaging and real. (see appendix c.3 for sample slides). ii. a white board and markers for score keeping. iii. cards with each participant’s characteristic and brief instructions. iv. candy or other type of reward for participants. procedure and timeframe overall instructions facilitators prepare cards with each participant’s characteristic ahead of time. each participant is assigned a characteristic that determines the way the individual can play the game. participants are instructed not to share what they read in their card. a diversity game modeled on jeopardy is played and participants are encouraged to demonstrate their knowledge about a specific topic. the host and monitors make sure all participants play according to their characteristic and enforce rules. at the end of the game all discuss their experience as participants and ways in which the game depicts reality. issues about diversity, community action, inequalities and other forms of social/psychological outcomes are discussed. procedure a. time allotted i. the game may be played at different time lengths. a suggested total time of one hour and 30 minutes is described: 1. introduction: 10 minutes 2. diversity game: 35 minutes 3. discussion: 35 minutes 4. closing remarks: 10 minutes b. instructions script i. we’ll be playing a diversity game modeled on the tv show jeopardy! you will raise your right hand to answer a question, and your answer should be posed in jeopardy! format (i.e., “what is…?” or “who is…?”). for example: i. question: the father of psychoanalysis http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 61 ii. answer: who is sigmund freud? ii. you will have one minute to answer the question, and you may check your notes! iii. the first person to answer a question correctly gets a piece of candy. we’ll keep score, and the player with the most points at the end will receive a bigger reward! iv. you will each receive a card with instructions you are not to share the instructions on your card with anyone. you may not comment on the instructions on your card. if you have a question about your instructions, raise your hand and we’ll speak with you in the hallway. v. once we begin to play the diversity game, you cannot comment on how anyone else is playing the game. vi. any questions before we hand out the cards? i. suggested instructions: “as a reminder, you must wait your turn to play. once the facilitator tells you it is your turn to play, you must select a category of questions. there will be a number of categories from which to choose. you must also select a score level. for example, you may choose to play “category 1” for 500 points. the facilitator will read the question and you must answer in jeopardy! format to get a point. participants who answer correctly get another chance to play. if a participant gives an incorrect answer, it is the next participant’s turn to play.” c. questions for participants i. what was the characteristic on your card? 1. how do you feel about your characteristic? 2. how did your characteristic affect the way you played the diversity game? ii. what were some of the issues with the diversity game as we played it? iii. if participants tried to form alliances or help each other during the game, discuss: 1. how alliances can form when we take note of others’ experiences and strive for social justice. 2. how we naturally try to level the playing field when we witness injustice. 1. do we try to level the playing field when we witness injustice? if so, how? if not, what is going on? iv. how social and political systems may perpetuate such inequalities and prevent empowerment. v. if privileged participants (i.e., those without limiting characteristics) decided to share their assets: 1. why did you decide to share your assets? 2. how does just sharing a “piece” perpetuate inequality? 3. how can we change the system so that we don’t have to redistribute assets among each other? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 62 vi. if participants did not object at any point of the game: i. why did you not revolt? ii. what kept you going? vii. if you could change one thing about the game, what would it be? viii. if designed for a community psychology course: 1. think of the game and try to develop an intervention from a community psychology perspective. (invite participants to think about the need for interventions that address systemic issues and to draw parallels between the game and real life problems, such as systemic racism, that can be addressed by community psychologists). 2. discuss the importance of ecology and the role of indigenous leaders in intervention design. 3. why is it important for the community psychologist to take the role of the participant-conceptualizer, instead of the expert? 4. how do we engage oppressed populations in our research, interventions and/or policies? 5. how can diversity enhance our approach to systemic inequalities? b. facilitator tips i. if possible, have a list of the participants and their assigned characteristic handy during the game. this facilitates the monitoring process (see appendix c.2). ii. if participant names are not available or unknown because the activity is taking place at a conference or other setting where the facilitator is unfamiliar with participants, he or she may use any of the following strategies to keep track of assigned characteristics: seat participants strategically, use name labels, or assign a prop to identify participants by their assigned characteristic. overall discussion principles to highlight a. how characteristics may limit and or enhance an individual’s participation in social processes. b. the importance of changing systems instead of promoting temporary remedies. c. the importance of using diversity as an asset for social justice. d. the importance of developing bottom-up approaches in community interventions. e. for community psychology courses or seminars: the role of the community psychologist in the development of ecologically sound interventions. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 63 brief commentary on how the exercise went in our class and anywhere else it has been used this exercise was first introduced by graduate students in a community psychology course, with the intent of taking issues out of the book and into their classmate’s hearts. the game was born from a desire to foster learning by experiencing. although seemingly simple and far removed from real-life circumstances, the exercise proved to be a powerful teaching tool. all participants experienced the crude reality of systemic inequality and were able to draw parallels to real-life circumstances. the game fostered a profound debate regarding the untapped benefits of diversity and why common approaches to inequality often fail. it also gave all participants an opportunity to experience for a brief time what different underserved, underrepresented sectors of society face on a daily basis. this game was first disseminated at the midwest ecological-community psychology conference held at the university of wisconsin-madison in october 2015. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 64 appendix c.1 suggested role characteristics 1. earn reward every time a person answers 2. earn an extra 50% of the scores each time a person answers 3. earn only half of the score for each answer 4. no limitation 5. cannot raise hand to answer 6. cannot face the board 7. can only answer in spanish 8. can only answer every other question 9. cannot pronounce letter "c" 10. can only answer with five words. 11. will receive reward regardless of answer 12. receives reward every time someone gets a wrong answer 13. can only use hand gestures to respond 14. can only answer questions in one category 15. can not participate in the game http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 65 appendix c.2 sample facilitator role definition record student characteristic 1 john earn reward every time a person answers 2 william earn an extra 50% of the scores each time a person answers 3 anne earn only half of the score for each answer 4 sophia no limitation 5 carlos no limitation 6 melanie cannot raise hand to answer 7 susan cannot face the board 8 emily can only answer in spanish 9 peter can only answer every other question 10 sam cannot pronounce letter "c" http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 66 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 67 appendix c.3 diversity game slideshow http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 68 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 69 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 70 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 71 http://www.gjcpp.org/ acknowledgements: we would like to thank our classmates, michelle gilchrist, juline girts, carlos luna, amy rhodes, and kurtis simonich, for their contributions to the class sessions. we also thank tom wolff for his helpful editorial comments. addressing the community psychology competency dialectic through participatory pedagogy abstract teaching core competencies through application of participatory pedagogy illustrative examples of participatory pedagogy and cp training: our community psychology course example session 1: thinking ecologically when applying cp concepts to community programs outcomes and reflections. while working to deepen their understanding of diverse cp concepts, students found the session activities exposed them to thinking ecologically. they gained introductory experience with the foundational competence of articula... example session 2: simulating the start of community program development implications for community psychology training and future research the establishment of a well-defined set of cp competencies for practice enables cp students to set developmental skill and career goals. the set provides a framework for educators and encourages ongoing discussion of how these skills can best be taugh... limitations and strengths notwithstanding the value of the approach illustrated in this article, our examples of participatory pedagogy in a community psychology course are not without limitation. firstly, these three sessions were limited primarily to the context of one class... session context purpose objectives preparation procedure and timeframe timelinetotal time: 75-85 minutes introductory statements: activity 1: activity 2: activity 3: activity 4: activity 5: activity 6: activity 7: reflections appendix b.1: readings appendix b.2: class handouts context purpose objectives preparation readings covered materials a. role play instructions b. worksheets c. other materials overall instructions procedure a. time allotted b. instructions script c. questions for participants overall discussion principles to highlight brief commentary on how the exercise went in our class and anywhere else it has been used appendix c.1 appendix c.2 global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 integrating the 18 community psychology practice competencies into doctoral education by greg meissen1, kyrah k. brown2, ashlee lien3, michael lemke4 keywords: community psychology practice competencies, graduate education, curriculum building author biographies: greg meissen, ph.d., is professor of psychology and coordinator of the community psychology doctoral program at wichita state university where he teaches community and organizational development and community leadership. he was instrumental in creating the free standing community psychology phd program and the apa accredited clinical-community program at wsu serving as their first coordinator from 1994-97. wichita state was awarded the scra excellence in education award in 2015. greg has also had faculty appointments at the harvard school of medicine and boston university and served on the surgeon general’s council on self-help and public health. in 1985 he founded the self-help network as a statewide self-help group clearinghouse and research center where it has grown into the wsu center for community support & research into a statewide and national resource for community-based initiatives where he served as director until 2008. he has received over 30 million dollars in grants from the national institute of mental health, kansas health foundation, administration for children and families, wt grant foundation and samsha, and has published in the american journal of community psychology, journal of community psychology, new england journal of medicine, social work, and psychiatric services. greg was a co-founder and co-chaired of the scra community psychology practice council, has chaired 1 wichita state university 2 cnm connect 3 state university of new york old westbury 4 texas a&m university http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 the scra council of education programs and has served on the executive committee of scra. he has received the scra john kalafat community psychology practice award and the scra award for distinguished contributions. a native kansan, greg has been involved in a number of kansas health foundation and kansas leadership center initiatives, is a kansas health foundation leadership fellow and received the kansas community leadership award in 2010. dr. kyrah brown holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from spelman college and a doctorate in community psychology from wichita state university. kyrah is an outcomes, evaluation and technology consultant at cnm connect where she applies her training in community psychology to build the evaluation capacity of community-based nonprofits and agencies. kyrah’s research is focused on improving maternal and child health outcomes among populations of color. more specifically, she is interested in the impact of evaluation capacity building within maternal and child health programs and organizations on health outcomes, and understanding and intervening on life course determinants of health among women of color to eliminate disparate maternal and infant outcomes. dr. ashlee lien is an assistant professor of psychology at state university of new york – old westbury. after graduating from wichita state university in 2013, she moved to new york and has focused on integrating an understanding of the dynamics of power and inequality into her teaching, with the goal of promoting social justice and community engagement. ashlee is also the assistant coordinator for the research aligned mentorship program, a new program funded by the department of education. ashlee’s research interests include the impact of societal privilege, perceptions of equality, the development of innovative teaching methods, and understanding first generation college students. her current projects include mixed method approaches to understanding the experiences of first generation college students who are nearing completion of their undergraduate degrees. michael lemke, ph.d. a graduate of wichita state university’s community psychology program in 2013, michael is currently a clinical assistant professor in the department of health & kinesiology at texas a&m university. michael is also the associate director of the complexity & computational population health group at texas a&m university, where he integrates his community psychology background with complex systems science approaches to understand and intervene in population health. broadly, michael’s research is focused on alleviating health disparities; more specifically, much of his work delves into http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 chronic syndemics among commercial drivers, immigrant workers, and rural minority populations. synergistically integrating community psychology and complex systems science, several of these efforts use community-based system dynamics modeling to uncover the nature of these disparities and identify high-leverage intervention points. recommended citation: meissen, g., brown, k.k., lien, a. & lemke, m. (2017). integrating the 18 community psychology practice competencies into doctoral education. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(1), pages 1-20. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 integrating the 18 community psychology practice competencies into doctoral education abstract the establishment of the 18 community psychology practice competencies created the opportunity for faculty and students at wichita state university to review the well-established curriculum that had served our doctoral program in community psychology. further, the development and discussion around the 18 competencies within the field energized us and created curiosity about what our program could be. in a participatory manner involving students, faculty, and alumni, a town hall meeting and a survey were conducted within wichita state university’s community psychology doctoral program to assess the current coverage of the 18 competencies and the desired level of coverage of the competencies in the future. with this data, a retreat involving all faculty and students of this program was held, focusing on the strengths of the program and a vision for graduates of the future. this retreat resulted in student and faculty engaged work groups around curriculum and qualifying exams, which were intentional in including the 18 competencies as guiding principles. the student and faculty curriculum work group conducted a curriculum mapping process that identified which competencies were focused on by particular courses, including which of the 18 competencies were taught in existing courses and what new courses might be offered to address the remaining competencies. the curriculum work group made recommendations that included greater or less emphases on competencies in particular courses, along with adding two classes: seminar in social policy & advocacy and seminar in community leadership. the qualifying exam work group focused on studentselected competencies that aligned with career aspirations, substantially changing and, we believe, enhancing our qualifying exams. the 18 community psychology practice competencies have provided benchmarks for the community psychology doctoral program at wichita state university, which has improved our academic quality while allowing greater flexibility for students in the pursuit of their community psychology research and practice careers. the process of development and adoption of the 18 community psychology practice competencies, through the collaborative efforts of the community psychology practice council and the former council of education programs (now simply the council on education) within the society for community research and action (scra), created nearly a decade of national discussion, refinement, and consciousness-raising as the field approached its 50th anniversary (dalton & wolfe, 2012). community psychologists and scra have been known for innovation within the field of psychology and the american psychological association (apa), but unlike most sub-fields within psychology, community psychology had neither formally identified nor recognized the skills and competencies of the practice of community psychology (berkowitz & scott, 2015). scra made it particularly clear that as division 27 of the apa it was not going to review programs and would never consider any form of accreditation, and neither would apa. thus, once the 18 competencies were adopted by scra, the society encouraged community psychology graduate programs to consider a self-study curriculum review in an effort to reflect these 18 competencies. the establishment of the 18 competencies raised the awareness of wichita state university (wsu) faculty and students regarding the well-established curriculum that had served the wsu doctoral program in community psychology well for over 20 years. more importantly, the development and discussion around the 18 competencies within the field energized us and created curiosity about what our program could be. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 history & context the psychology department at wsu started one of the first master’s programs in community psychology in 1972 in response to student interest in social justice and community-based issues at the university, the wichita community, and nationally (hermann, 1992). as part of the community psychology master’s program, the center for community support and research (formerly selfhelp network) was founded in 1984 and was dedicated to creating and sustaining positive change, working with self-help groups, peer-run organizations, non-profits, faith-based and community-based organizations and coalitions this institution has recently been restructured into the free-standing wsu community engagement institute. the master’s program in community psychology operated successfully for 20 years. when wsu began to form doctoral programs campus-wide the community psychology program and the wsu clinical psychology master’s program were integrated at the behest of the wsu administration in 1991. an innovative, community-based doctoral program in community-clinical psychology was developed (meissen & slavich, 1997), inspired in part by jim kelly’s (1990) thinking that mental health systems could be positively impacted by community psychology graduate education that did not focus on individual clinical intervention but had expertise in mental illness. during the first years of this integrated community-clinical program, some graduate students gravitated toward work on community-based issues, including but not limited to mental health, while others primarily wanted to be able to pursue licensure as clinical psychologists but this systems-focused model simply would not allow apa accreditation. in 1999, the integrated community-clinical model evolved into a thriving free-standing doctoral program in community psychology and a clinicalcommunity psychology doctoral program which received apa accreditation in 2005. the 90-credithour, free-standing community psychology doctoral program had an ecological and prevention focused and “action-research” driven curriculum with a year-long community-based practicum that was consistent with the field in the 1990s. an undergraduate certificate in community psychology was also implemented in 2002 as a 1518-hour program which could be taken not only by psychology majors but any undergraduate or graduate student at wsu. the certificate program includes a semester-long 10 hour/week practicum in a community-based organization. wichita is the largest city in kansas with a metropolitan area population of nearly 700,000 in a rural state of less than 3 million people. wichita is an “oasis” of services with all the assets and problems of an urban community, while being home to a surprisingly diverse population that provides a rich setting for the work of community psychologists. the wsu community psychology doctoral program is a respected partner in the human service, non-profit, and government sectors locally and state-wide. the evidence for how successfully current and former graduate students enhance the health and well-being of their communities shows in the many and diverse organizations eager to pay for graduate practicum, hire our graduates, and partner with the wsu community psychology program in communitybased interventions and research often funded through grants secured by joint applications. while there was considerable innovative work in wichita and kansas by those in the community psychology program actively involving graduate students both in and outside of practicum, the curricular framework established for the wsu community psychology doctoral program in the early 1990’s remained unchanged. graduate courses had evolved with updated readings on original topics of importance to community psychology (e.g., ecological theory, empowerment, prevention) and these seminars added new topics that were not as common in the1990’s (e.g., policy, advocacy, leadership). however, in a very “noncommunity psychology” manner, the faculty who often worked with community-based organizations around bold organizational and community change operated with a “if it’s not broken don’t fix it” mentality around our own program and curriculum. the establishment of the 18 competencies raised the awareness of faculty that we were stuck in regards to our own http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://communityengagementinstitute.org/about-us/history http://communityengagementinstitute.org/about-us/history global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 curriculum, and gave voice to students—especially those who had been involved in the national effort around the 18 competencies. an “immunity to change” (kegan & lahey, 2009) among wsu faculty was deep-seated, reinforced through structural barriers (e.g., 17 signatures needed for even minute curricular changes), along with the responsibility for changes in current courses and the burdensome work associated with developing new courses. faced with decades of curricular stagnation, we modeled the type of work many of us do with coalitions and secured an outside facilitator (tom wolff) to manage a town hall meeting, with key stakeholders focused on how to think about the 18 competencies in wsu’s community psychology doctoral program, especially in our curriculum. the 18 competencies gave us a yardstick by which to compare our current curriculum to others and gave us criteria for a desired outcome. finally, we were approaching ourselves like community psychologists would, with the help of an experienced community psychology practitioner in tom wolff. community psychology curriculum town hall meeting faculty and current students gathered for a town hall meeting in april 2012, where tom wolff facilitated a discussion of the 18 community psychology practice competencies. this meeting featured an enthusiastic and engaging conversation focused on the common goal of developing the best community psychology curriculum and program possible. most attendees were already very familiar with the 18 competencies, as wsu faculty and students had been actively involved in the development and advancement of the competencies through the scra community psychology practice council and the council for education programs. everyone had read early drafts of dalton & wolfe’s (2012) article, which was also shared prior to the town hall meeting. we knew the 18 competencies, yet we also knew that no curriculum or program could realistically graduate people with “expertise” in all 18 competencies (hakim, 2010; kloos, 2010). after discussion on what each of the 18 competencies stood for, students were asked to put a “voting dot” to indicate the extent to which the wsu community psychology curriculum addressed each of the 18 competencies, using the following indicators suggested by kloos (2010): 1) expertise; 2) experience; 3) exposure; 4) not at all (see figure 1 & 2 below that show how this “tool” could be used in other graduate programs). it was emphasized that participants were rating the degree to which the curriculum delivered these levels and not their own individual proficiencies (see figure 1). once everyone had placed their “voting dot” in one of the four categories for each of the 18 competencies, wolff facilitated a “make meaning” conversation, noting that, overall, the 18 competencies were similar in the “exposure” and “experience” level (see figure 1). at the same time, 15 of the 18 competencies had three or fewer who rated the curriculum at the “expertise” level, with eight of those competencies receiving no votes for “expertise” (see table 1). there were relatively high levels of “experience” regarding the research competencies of “program evaluation” and “community based participatory research,” along with “collaboration & coalition development,” “community inclusion and partnership,” “program development, implementation & management,” “ecological perspectives,” and “empowerment.” following this initial discussion of the current curriculum in light of the 18 competencies, students were asked, “if we really got it right in five years, what levels of 1) expertise, 2) experience or 3) exposure would the wsu community psychology curriculum provide?” (see figure 2). once everyone had placed their “voting dots” in one of the three categories, a conversation about the gap between the current curriculum and desired curriculum took place, which first focused on the desire to move from “exposure” to higher levels of “experience” and particularly higher levels of “expertise” (see table 1). there was pride in the high levels of “experience” in “program evaluation” and “community-based participatory research,” but a conviction to move to “expertise” (minkler, 2012). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 figure 1: town hall meeting “voting dot” results for community psychology competencies figure 2: town hall meeting “voting dot” results for community psychology competencies comparing now (2012, at left) & future (2017, at right) expertise experience exposure community psychology competencies 2012 2017 2012 2017 2012 2017 ecological perspectives 1 7 8 6 6 2 empowerment 0 4 8 11 6 0 sociocultural and cross-cultural competence 6 9 6 6 6 1 community inclusion and partnership 1 1 11 11 3 0 ethical, reflective practice 8 9 3 3 3 1 program development, implementation and management 0 10 11 4 3 0 prevention and health promotion 6 10 4 2 5 1 community leadership and mentoring 3 5 6 9 6 1 small & large group processes 0 3 0 10 10 2 resource development 0 4 9 10 6 0 consultation and organizational development 2 4 8 4 4 2 collaboration & coalition development 0 8 10 4 3 2 community development 0 5 3 5 7 2 community organizing and community advocacy 0 6 6 6 4 1 public policy analysis, development and advocacy 1 3 4 11 6 1 information dissemination and building public awareness 0 5 5 6 9 3 participatory community research 3 10 11 5 2 0 program evaluation 2 13 11 3 2 0 table 1. town hall meeting “voting dot” frequency counts for community psychology competencies http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 there was also conviction that many of the 18 competencies that produce change in communities and organizations needed to move to “expertise” by 2017 to maximize the ultimate impacts of wsu graduate students. a particularly important insight was the variability across students in terms of what they desired in terms of “expertise” for their careers. the overall conclusion was that our curriculum needed to be thoughtfully updated in a participatory manner that included faculty, current students, and alumni, providing flexibility for individual students in their pursuit of experience and expertise in different competencies. after the town hall, a commitment was made to conduct a survey asking the same questions that would also include alumni. another recommended next step was to have a retreat to go from data and ideas to action. one student commented, “we need to do whatever is necessary to move the program and curriculum to be contemporary and relevant much like the community-based practice and research of our faculty, students, and alumni.” a commitment was made to conduct the survey of alumni as soon as possible, to make data available for a retreat that included all faculty and students. survey of program faculty, students and alumni an anonymous survey (administered electronically) was conducted which more formally assessed the same two questions asked at the town hall meeting about the extent to which the 18 competencies were addressed by the curriculum and the extent to which they should be addressed in five years. the survey included all faculty (n=4), current students (n=17), and the alumni from the doctoral program who had graduated in the previous 10 years (n=29). all expertise experience exposure community psychology competencies 2012 2017 2012 2017 2012 2017 ecological perspectives 44.5% 68.0% 37.0% 32.0% 18.5% 0% empowerment 21.9% 44.5% 40.6% 33.3% 37.5% 22.2% sociocultural and cross-cultural competence 18.8% 42.3% 31.3% 50.0% 46.9% 7.7% community inclusion and partnership 31.2% 59.3% 34.4% 29.6% 34.4% 11.1% ethical, reflective practice 15.6% 44.4% 37.5% 37.1% 46.9% 18.5% program development, implementation and management 34.4% 48.1% 59.4% 40.8% 6.2% 11.1% prevention and health promotion 31.3% 48.1% 43.7% 37.1% 25.0% 14.8% community leadership and mentoring 6.3% 29.6% 53.1% 59.3% 40.6% 11.1% small & large group processes 21.9% 26.9% 40.6% 57.7% 37.5% 15.4% resource development 3.1% 37.0% 40.6% 48.2% 56.3% 14.8% consultation and organizational development 21.9% 33.3% 43.7% 55.6% 31.4% 11.1% collaboration & coalition development 15.6% 40.7% 46.9% 48.2% 37.5% 11.1% community development 9.4% 44.4% 37.5% 44.4% 53.1% 11.1% community organizing and community advocacy 3.1% 40.7% 34.4% 48.2% 62.5% 11.1% public policy analysis, development and advocacy 3.2% 29.6% 19.4% 59.3% 77.4% 11.1% information dissemination and building public awareness 9.7% 26.9% 35.5% 62.0% 54.8% 11.1% participatory community research 35.5% 68.0% 45.2% 24.0% 19.3% 8.0% program evaluation 42.0% 65.4% 38.7% 37.8% 19.3% 3.8% table 2: results community psychology competencies survey as seen by faculty, students, and alumni http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 four faculty and 17 current students responded (100% response rate), and 22 of 29 alumni responded (76% response rate). respondents were asked how well the wsu community psychology doctoral program curriculum addressed each of the 18 competencies using the same indicators: 1) expertise; 2) experience; 3) exposure (see table 2). respondents were then asked for each of the 18 competencies: “if we really got it right in 5 years, what levels of 1) expertise, 2) experience or 3) exposure would the wsu community psychology curriculum provide for each of the 18 competencies?” this data generated much discussion among faculty, students and especially local alumni about what we were doing well and what was missing from our curriculum or was not covered adequately, and further generated a call for action at the upcoming retreat (see table 2). first ever wsu community psychology program retreat a “mission possible” retreat was held on january 24, 2013 facilitated by barry carroll, a local community partner and certified “master facilitator” with extensive experience working with coalitions and nonprofits doing visioning, strategic planning, leadership development, and team building. full and unguarded participation in this retreat really required objective, external facilitation. carroll fulfilled that role for us, and in exchange (rather than seek funding through the university) we agreed to perform a similar objective, external facilitation role for bike-walk wichita, the local coalition for which carroll served as president of the board. the retreat was held off campus in the community room of natural grocers; instead of catering lunch we asked everyone to contribute to a “community salad” from natural grocers to show our appreciation for the free use of their meeting space. despite the scheduling difficulties in finding a date and time that accommodated over 20 busy people, it was especially important to have all current students present, especially advanced students as they had experienced the whole of the curriculum. with the insights from the town hall meeting and the survey, this inaugural wsu community psychology retreat included all faculty and current students, and focused on how to infuse the 18 competencies into our curriculum and program. the retreat focused on the strengths of the program and a vision of graduates of the future; students were given a strong voice by focusing on 10 years in the future through facilitation techniques often used with coalitions that leveled power and influence, such as “sticky note” callouts that allowed anonymity and use of small group deliberations (see figure 3). further, faculty were in their own breakout group, which granted student breakout groups stronger voices as we came to consensus on questions and issues (see appendix 1: facilitation planner “mission possible”). figure 3. “sticky note” call-outs during “mission possible,” the wsu community psychology doctoral program retreat the recently revised vision and mission statements of the wsu community psychology doctoral program were reviewed and reaffirmed: http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 vision “the community ph.d. program at wsu aspires to be a comprehensive and sustainable ph.d. program that graduates highly competent community psychologists with a balance of community research and practice competencies taught by nationally recognized faculty with high levels of research accomplishment, excellent teaching ability and who are deeply involved at the urban, community, state and national level.” mission “the mission of the community psychology ph.d. program at wsu is to recruit, educate and graduate undergraduate and graduate students who have achieved the competencies of community psychology in order to engage in collaborative research and practice with community stakeholders to enhance health and well-being of their communities.” during the facilitated retreat, we also reviewed and accepted guiding principles for the day and beyond from the four agreements by don miguel ruiz (1997) that included “1) be impeccable with your word, 2) don’t take anything personally, 3) don’t make assumptions and 4) always do your best.” our work for the day was guided by four important questions: 1. why does our program exist? 2. what are we doing right? 3. what is your status quo? 4. what are next steps to bridge the gap between status quo and the desired future for the program? the retreat was a major step in overcoming decades of resistance to change in our curriculum and program: it was successful, fun, energizing, and provided both focus moving forward and initial conclusions. of the 18 competencies, there was a consensus that the four cornerstones of the wsu community psychology doctoral program would be: 1) ecological perspectives; 2) sociocultural and cross-cultural competence; 3) prevention and health promotion; and 4) program evaluation. four faculty and student-engaged work groups were created, dedicated to deliberately using the 18 competencies in addressing the following domains: 1) curriculum, 2) qualifying exams, 3) practica, and 4) electives. concrete next steps were identified, with corresponding deadlines and designated work groups consisting of volunteers excited about each group’s particular focus. even though work group participation was entirely optional, most students signed up for at least one work group. using established community development and coalition techniques (e.g., commitment agendas, guiding principles), roles were established (e.g., facilitator, scribe, scheduler) for each work group and their first two work group meetings were scheduled. a second retreat was scheduled to provide each work group a deadline for proposals and recommendations. the activities are discussed in depth for the curriculum and qualifying exam work groups, which were the most powerfully impacted by the 18 competencies. community psychology curriculum work group the curriculum work group used the data from the survey, insights gained at the town hall meeting, and information from the retreat to frame a curriculum mapping process (sarkisian & taylor, 2013). syllabi from the current community psychology required courses were reviewed in consultation with faculty teaching these courses and students who had recently taken the courses. the curriculum work group, consisting of advanced students who had taken most or all of these courses and one faculty member, analyzed the information using the tool below filling in each box with either a “yes” if competency was covered or meaningfully addressed or “no” not addressed or minimally addressed (table 3). the five existing required community psychology courses were found to be either “overextended” and attempting to cover more material than prudent, or so tightly focused that there were missed opportunities to address other relevant competencies (see table 4). based on this work and the recommendations provided from faculty, students, and alumni, the existing five required seminars were revamped to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 focus on greater depth and experience with fewer, more relevant competencies. furthermore, two new courses were developed to address competencies not adequately covered but thought to be especially relevant to the developing field of community psychology and the desire of doctoral students to cover these competencies. existing course names and numbers community psychology competencies psy940 seminar in communityclinical psy941 applied research in community settings psy942 seminar in community & organizational intervention psy943 seminar in prevention psy945 seminar in diversity & cultural competence foundational principles ecological perspectives empowerment sociocultural and cross-cultural competence community inclusion and partnership ethical, reflective practice community program development program development, implementation and management prevention and health promotion community and organizational capacity-building community leadership and mentoring small & large group processes resource development consultation and organizational development community and social change collaboration & coalition development community development community organizing and community advocacy public policy analysis, development and advocacy information dissemination and building public awareness community research participatory community research program evaluation table 3: community psychology practice competencies covered in graduate curriculum courses the goal was to provide in-depth exposure to all 18 competencies, along with the development of expertise and experience in many others. students in the apa accredited clinical-community doctoral http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 program are required to take the seminar in community psychology and the seminar in cultural diversity, plus two additional community psychology seminars of their choice, which previously meant selecting 2 of 3 remaining community psychology seminars. the addition of two core courses extended the selection to 2 of 5 remaining community psychology seminars, existing courses competencies covered psy940 seminar in communityclinical psychology 1. ecological perspectives 2. empowerment 4. community inclusion and partnership 5. ethical, reflective practice 8. community leadership and mentoring 12. collaboration and coalition development 14. community organizing and community advocacy 15. public policy analysis, development and advocacy 17. participatory community research psy941 applied research in community settings 18. program evaluation psy942 seminar in community & organizational intervention 6. program development, implementation and management 8. community leadership and mentoring 9. small and large group processes 10. resource development 11. consultation and organizational development 12. collaboration and coalition development 13. community development 14. community organizing and community advocacy 15. public policy analysis, development and advocacy 16. community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness psy943 seminar in prevention 7. prevention and health promotion psy945 seminar in diversity & cultural competence 3. sociocultural and cross-cultural competence table 4: the 18 competencies mapped to existing curriculum http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 current and future courses competencies covered psy940 seminar in community-clinical psychology 1. ecological perspectives 2. empowerment 4. community inclusion and partnership 5. ethical, reflective practice psy941 applied research in community settings 5. ethical, reflective practice 17. participatory community research 18. program evaluation psy942 seminar in community & organizational intervention 6. program development, implementation and management 10. resource development 13. community development psy943 seminar in prevention 6. program development, implementation and management 7. prevention and health promotion psy945 seminar in diversity & cultural competence 3. sociocultural and cross-cultural competence 14. community organizing and community advocacy new seminar in community leadership 8. community leadership and mentoring 9. small and large group processes 11. consultation and organizational development 12. collaboration and coalition development 14. community organizing and community advocacy new seminar in public policy & community advocacy 14. community organizing and community advocacy 15. public policy analysis, development and advocacy 16. community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness table 5: revised core community psychology curriculum http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 providing more diverse options for the clinical community students. the community psychology curriculum at wsu has been successfully and extensively revised, with two new required community psychology seminars through the type of student-engaged process, which is rare in academic settings. qualifying exam work group the community psychology qualifying exam structure and process had been in place since the late 1990’s with the establishment of the freestanding community psychology doctoral program, which naturally did not reflect the current 18 community psychology practice competencies. these qualifying exams consisted of essay questions divided into four half-day components: 1) the dissertation topic area of the doctoral student, 2) community psychology interventions, 3) core community psychology, and 4) community psychology ethics. except for the dissertation topic component, qualifying exams contained the same questions for all students taking the exams in the academic year, and primarily covered information from the required seminars. one student commented; “quals are a two-day ordeal that asks over and over, ‘what is community psychology?’” the qualifying exam work group took information from the retreat, going beyond the desire to reflect the 18 competencies by also making them more customized to the specific competencies that reflected individual student emphases. review of previous qualifying exams, understanding how other doctoral programs in community psychology administered qualifying exams, and discussion among faculty and students produced a revised qualifying exam that was consistent with the changes in the curriculum and reflected the 18 competencies of community psychology. the revised community psychology qualifying exams were divided into three components including: 1. dissertation topic area of the doctoral student, 2. four cornerstones of the wsu community psychology doctoral program, which are grounded in the competencies of a. ecological perspectives, b. prevention and health promotion, c. program evaluation, and d. sociocultural and cross-cultural competence. 3. individualized student domain of emphases, which cover at least three community psychology competencies beyond the cornerstones and determined by the doctoral student. thus, the revised qualifying exam format allows greater customization around each student while also allowing focus on the cornerstones of the wsu community psychology doctoral program. conclusion the 18 community psychology practice competencies provided a vision for the community psychology doctoral program at wichita state university, which has improved our academic quality while allowing greater flexibility for students in the pursuit of their community psychology research and practice careers. there were challenges during this process around engaging all stakeholders, maintaining genuine and strong student engagement, overcoming complicated university barriers to change, and especially maintaining momentum and accountability over a long period of time. however, we have highlighted several strategies that we believe helped make this effort successful including a collective commitment from students, faculty, and alumni using participatory techniques; using diverse data sources to make informed decisions; leveraging human and material resources with partners; and creating a culture of honesty, inclusiveness, and respect. this collaborative work also produced some unintended positive impacts. the wsu community psychology doctoral program was awarded the scra excellence in education award in 2015, in part because of the contemporary curriculum and revised program influenced by the 18 competencies. graduate students, encouraged by their successful engagement in revising our program, developed the community psychology association to intentionally engage undergraduates around issues on the wsu campus http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 which is described in this special issue of the global journal (clifford, et al., 2017). in our recent successful apa accreditation of our clinicalcommunity doctoral program, the revised curriculum offerings were noted as positive— particularly in genuinely addressing the clinicalcommunity model outlined in our application for re-accreditation. community psychology is a recognized part of wichita state university and the wichita area, and the process and results of revising our program into a more contemporary and relevant structure influenced by the 18 competencies has taken that success to the next level. references berkowitz, b. & scott, v. c. (2015). a vision for community psychology practice (410-434). in v. c. scott & s. m. wolfe (eds.), community psychology: foundations for practice. clifford, d., freund, n. m., douglas, j. a., siwierka, j., turosak, a., lewis, r. k., drum, j., ojedaleitner, d., sarionder, r., chinnes, a. c., & keller, p. (2017). using the community psychology competencies to address sexual assault on a college campus. global journal of community psychology practice, 8. (http://gjcpp.org/) dalton, j. & wolfe, s. (2012). competencies for community psychology practice. the community psychologist, 45, 7-14. hakim, s. (2010). community psychology. idealist.org. hermann, d. (1992). history of the wichita state university psychology department. kegan, r. & lahey, l. l. (2012). immunity to change: how to overcome it and unlock the potential in yourself and your organization. boston: harvard business press. kelly, j. g. (1990). changing contexts and the field of community psychology. american journal of community psychology, 18, 769-792. kloos, b. (2010). creating settings for training in collaborative community practice. the community psychologist, 43(2), 10. meissen, g. j., & slavich, s. (1997). doctoral education in community-clinical psychology. journal of prevention and intervention in the community, 15, 31-43. minkler, m. (2012). community organizing and community building for health and welfare. rutgers university press. ruiz, d. m. (1997). the four agreement: a practical guide to personal freedom (a toltec wisdom book). san rafael, ca: amber-allen publishing, inc. sarkisian, g. v., & taylor, s. (2013). a learning journey i: curriculum mapping as a tool to assess and integrate community psychology practice competencies into graduate education programs. global journal of community psychology practice, 4. (http://gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 appendix 1: faciliation planner community psychology phd program “mission possible” originally implemented january 24, 2013, 10am to 4pm natural grocers community room purpose/objectives of the meeting what do we want to accomplish? • hear from students & faculty about our program • understand our current situation • create a vision for the future of our community psychology doctoral program • next step/first step planning on important components of our program • how to get the work done • celebrate background/planning notes • six hour session [10 am – 4pm] • four faculty & 15-16 students preparing for the meeting preperation lunch: community salad bowl served snacks & table snacks post all pre-made flipcharts so they can be seen by everyone needed materials – page 1 environment theme x other please specify: “mission possible” equipment large flipcharts large easels mini-me flipcharts tape x blue tape scissors x other please specify: tape or cd “mission impossible” theme song http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 facilitator notes who time/ format activities process notes/related materials greg barry ashlee barry barry volunteer flipchart 9:00am 10:00am 10:10am 10:15am 10:30am room set up & food introduce barry w/credentials and that not only is he going be facilitating our day but also teaching us about facilitation, retreats, strategic planning, etc as we go with some simple de-briefs as this work today embodies one of the things that we do as community psychologists play “mission impossible theme” with instructions from the president of united states wsu how we will work together today and some great lessons for everything: four agreements 1. be impeccable with your word 2. don’t take anything personally 3. don’t make assumptions 4. always do your best what is our “mission possible” really? first, what is our situation? 1. why does this program exist? 2. what are we doing right? 3. what is the status quo? are we happy with our current vision & mission statement? • agenda posted • do all pre-made flip charts • play “mission impossible” tape • large group conversation • vision & mission statements • record on flip chart (premade) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 facilitator notes who time/ format activities process notes/related materials charlie barry volunteer themers 10:40am 11:00am share vision of president john bardo good to great: think ahead to 2023, imagine those excited 1st year folks, those cocky 2nd year folks, those confident 3rd students & those focused 4th year students. and, we had just received the scra best phd program in all of community psychology • how would they describe our community psychology phd program? • what does our program look like? • what skills do students have? • what does our curriculum look like? • what is our process/progression/protocol look like? • what kind of jobs are our graduates getting? • if we really, really got it right in10 years, what would it look like? (individual sticky note process with theming) barry teaches this is modified swot analyses and why important • questions on premade flipchart • stick on news print • theme on newsprint barry teaches the importance of a shared vision, a “north star” for the process of change and adaptation http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 facilitator notes who time/ format activities process notes/related materials rhonda sharon barry 11:45pm noonish 12:15pm lunch barry ask rhonda, chair of council on education & sharon, co-chair of the council on community psychology practice and both members of the executive committee of the society of community research & action (scra) review of 18 community psychology competencies • why are these important • no one program can focus on all of them • review what we already think about how we cover & could cover the competencies • are we all clear on what each of the competencies are generally time to get concrete and understand the work ahead • looking at where we are right now (status quo=good) and when we are established as great in 2013 what do we need to do right now, what are the first steps: group discussion small groups: 3 student groups 1 faculty group http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 facilitator notes who time/ format activities process notes/related materials barry barry everyone 1:15pm 1:30pm 2:30pm 3pm what changes to our curriculum do we need to make in the next 1-2 years to address our vision of the future and the 18 competencies rank. • 15-20 minutes then call outs • ?? minutes of group discussion conclusion: what do we need to do right now? break what changes to the structure of our program do we need to make in the next 1-2 years to address our vision of the future and the 18 competencies. • 15-20 minutes then call out • ?? minutes of group discussion conclusion: what do we need to do right now? first step/next step planning • how will we get this work done? • first step/next step planning • work groups celebrate small groups use mini-me to record desired changes flip chart conclusions small groups: 3 different student groups 1 faculty group small groups use mini-me to record desired changes flip chart conclusions barry teaches the importance of leaving a retreat with next step/first step plans – otherwise the retreat was fun but not productive record next step plan http://www.gjcpp.org/ integrating the 18 community psychology practice competencies into doctoral education integrating the 18 community psychology practice competencies into doctoral education history & context community psychology curriculum town hall meeting figure 1: town hall meeting “voting dot” results for community psychology competencies survey of program faculty, students and alumni four faculty and 17 current students responded (100% response rate), and 22 of 29 alumni responded (76% response rate). respondents were asked how well the wsu community psychology doctoral program curriculum addressed each of the 18 competencies usin... first ever wsu community psychology program retreat figure 3. “sticky note” call-outs during “mission possible,” the wsu community psychology doctoral program retreat vision mission community psychology curriculum work group qualifying exam work group 1. dissertation topic area of the doctoral student, conclusion references microsoft word 2014-si09-20140519.docx what transformation? a qualitative study of empowering settings and community mental health organizations maria f. jorge-monteiro, rita aguiar, beatrice sacchetto, maria j. vargas-moniz, and josé h. ornelas ispa-instituto universitário author notes: maria f. jorge-monteiro, ma, bsw, is phd candidate in community psychology at ispa-instituto universitário; rita aguiar, ma, is phd candidate in community psychology at ispa-iu; beatrice sacchetto, ma, is phd candidate in community psychology at ispa-iu; maria j. vargas-moniz, phd, assistant professor at ispa-iu; josé h. ornelas, phd, associate professor, director of community psychology department at ispa-iu corresponding author: maria f. jorge-monteiro address: rua jardim do tabaco, 34, 1149-041, lisboa, portugal telephone: 00351962475195 email: maria_monteiro@ispa.pt keywords: empowering community settings, mental health, transformative change, case study recommended citation: jorge-monteiro, m.f., aguiar, r., sacchetto, b., vargasmoniz, m., & ornelas, j.h. (2014). what transformation? a qualitative study of empowering settings and community mental health organizations. global journal of community psychology practice, 5(1), 1-13. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   what transformation? a qualitative study of empowering settings and community mental health organizations abstract this article is based on empowering settings research and has a two-fold objective: to propose an adaptation of the empowering community settings framework to community mental health organizations practice to foster recovery and community integration; and to discuss how the adapted framework is a relevant tool to challenge community mental health transformation at multiple levels of analysis. the current study was anchored in a larger qualitative research project. it used a case study approach, with 8 in-depth interviews with diverse participants from one community mental health organization. the adapted model proved useful to guide transformational practice in community mental health programs and for evaluation of organizational empowerment and multilevel community-oriented interventions. suggestions and implications for future research are also presented. keywords: empowering community settings, mental health, transformative change, case study introduction presently, mental health and rehabilitation programs in the community still follow institutional-medical intervention approaches that perpetuate the separation of people who experience mental illness, from the rest of the population. striving for the development of organizational models that facilitate improvements in community mental health programs, the present study is based on empowerment/community-oriented approaches that challenge structures and processes within mental health programs (nelson, lord, & ochocka, 2001a, 2001b; ornelas, duarte, & jorgemonteiro, in press). research findings indicate that psychological empowerment processes tend to unfold as individuals participate in empowering community settings (aber, maton, & seidman, 2011; christens, peterson, & speer, 2011; rappaport, 1981). therefore, community mental health organizations (cmho) may be conceptualized as mediating social structures where individuals can be exposed to empowering relational processes (christens, 2012; maton & salem, 1995; nelson, et al., 2001a). trickett (2011) emphasized the setting as a goalfocused community resource where people share stories, gather opportunities for personal growth, participation and access to organizational goods. in that sense, a setting is itself a resource for empowerment. relational environments may also be considered as a process of co-empowerment characterized by mutual learning and influence (bond & keys, 1993; rappaport, 1987). the present study was informed by the empowering community settings (ecs) framework presented by maton (2008), which encompasses organizational characteristics, psychological mediators and organizational dimensions that impact individual development and community betterment domains. the ecs model includes six organizational factors: 1) a group-based belief system that inspires changes at various levels, which is strengths-based focused and is goal-oriented;2) a set of core activities that should be engaging, with high quality and requiring active learning;3) a relational environment providing significant support and sense of community;4) an opportunity role structure highly accessible that offers challenging opportunities;5) a leadership structure that is inspirational, shared and committed; and 6) a maintenance and innovation feature, based on capacitybuilding, bridging and that impacts the external environments in the community. based on a body of literature about current transformative challenges in mental health, the ecs’ framework, described above, was adapted for this study (see appendix). in the first section of this paper, the authors present a review, covering literature from community mental health, the empowerment movement, and core values and principles of community psychology, whose contribution may shift practices in mental health systems. this review was used to create a customized application of ecs to community mental health. in the second part, based on the adapted framework, we present the results from a case study, designed to explore both the presence of transformative characteristics through, which the setting empowers their members, and also impacts community and societal change. finally, we discuss how the empowering setting model may lead to cmhos global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   transformation at various levels, particularly in fostering recovery and community integration. theoretical and empirical influences for ecs in community mental health international research and practice in mental health, as well as socio-political changes, have challenged the established aims, vision and outcomes of mental health systems. in this article, empowerment is simultaneously the means and the goal for mental health transformation. empowerment relates to an alteration in power-relationships and in conditions of access to organizational and community resources. important contributions began with the patients’ liberation movement (chamberlin, 1978, 1984) and the independent living movement (ridgway, simpson, wittman, & wheeler, 1994) advocating mental health users’ rights. earlier published accounts by mental health advocates stated that the adoption of an empowerment orientation would represent a shift in mental health programs rendering them transformative in the lives of people with experience of mental illness (chamberlin, 1997; fisher, 1994). research with consumer-run organizations (cro) and self-help initiatives suggests that participating in strengths-based settings with challenging roles, results in greater empowerment among members(brown, 2009; fisher & spiro, 2010; nelson, ochocka, janzen, & trainor, 2006; segal, silverman, & temkin, 2011). this is congruent with the empowerment concept as a multilevel construct characterized by participatory processes over time, through which individuals, organizations, and communities gain greater control, efficacy and social justice(rappaport, 1987). community-based research evidence suggests that psychological, social and civic empowerment increases across levels and forms of organizational and community participation (christens, et al., 2011; maton & brodsky, 2011). the empowerment-related processes and outcomes within the various domains and levels that were described by zimmerman (2000),should be addressed by community mental health interventions that intend to transform the lives of people who experience mental illnesses. nelson, et al. (2001b) articulated an empowermentcommunity paradigm to address conceptual limitations present in the traditional paradigm in mental health by delineating strategies and processes across policy, organizational and individual levels, directed to enact the involvement and participation of people who use mental health services. the position and role that a person who experiences mental illness should play in the mental health system is also a core issue of the recovery vision in mental health change (anthony, 1993; brown, 2012; fisher, 1994). empirical evidence suggests that most people with mental health issues undergo a journey of personal recovery, challenging traditional perspectives that view persons with an experience of mental illness as being dependent on support and unable to achieve adaptive functioning and high quality of life (davidson, harding, & spaniol, 2005; davidson, sells, songster, & o'connell, 2005). the recovery perspective as a life experience, requires coordinated efforts from mental health advocates, policy makers, service providers and researchers in mental health system transformation (davidson, ridgway, kidd, topor, & borg, 2008; jacobson, greenley, breedlove, roschke, & koberstein, 2003; piat et al., 2009). because recovery is not symptom remission, but rather a process concerned with life goals, hope in the future, individualized supports and user empowerment, mental health advocates have acknowledged the community context as the best setting for it to flourish (davidson, 2007; deegan, 2005; lovejoy, 1982; ornelas, et al., in press). the community integration principle is another relevant element to change mental health practice by creating opportunities for a “full life in the community”, and the exercise of citizenship through access to fundamental rights (nelson, et al., 2001b; ornelas, et al., in press). this dimension stresses the efforts of fostering connectedness with and the use of natural resources in the community (newberry & strong, 2009; townley, miller, & kloos, 2013; ware, hopper, tugenberg, dickey, & fisher, 2007). community integration has been conceived as a multidimensional concept with interrelated physical, social, and psychological components (wong & solomon, 2002).however, living outside the hospital or using community facilities is not enough to be considered integrated in a community(lemaire & mallik, 2005). it is necessary to advance a more transformative vision of community integration.davidson, ridgway, wieland, and o'connell (2009) promoted the adoption of the capabilities and human rights’ perspectives to enlarge that vision. the capability standpoint values personal agency, and the diversity of options in social contexts(davidson, et al., 2009; ornelas, et al., in press). another transformative issue to challenge mental health programs is the multilevel intervention due to the assumption of the interdependence between individuals, programs and systems involving radiating effects of one level on the others. trickett and schensul (2009) stated that the multilevel interventions tackle social change by developing interventions at different ecological levels global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   in the community. ecological interventions are therefore critical in order to sustain innovation and change in mental health interventions. in closing, the empowering community settings’ theory, developed by maton (2008), offered the current study a salient template to explore and to incorporate the transformative features of interventions that will challenge the practice of traditional community mental health organizations(davidson, et al., 2009; fisher & spiro, 2010; nelson, et al., 2001b; ornelas, et al., in press). aeips organizational setting the associação para o estudo e integração psicossocial (aeips) is a private non-profit, mental health, community-based organization in portugal, founded in 1987 by a group of users, families and professionals. it is inspired by empowerment and community approaches, facilitating the implementation of strengthbased services for people with mental health challenges. although the setting and related socio-political context are detailed elsewhere (ornelas, vargas-moniz, & duarte, 2010), we present here a summary of its main features. aeips’ programs address individuals’ needs and expectations through access to natural contexts with the general population, and to varied community resources and domains, such as education in regular schools, employment in the mainstream labor market, and the participation in regular social roles and activities as full citizens. the community integration process consists of bridging and bonding social relations and networks, fostering more inclusive, supportive and diverse communities (ornelas, et al., in press). this cmho has more than two decades of experience influencing policy on de-institutionalization in portugal, advocating for the perspective and role of people who experienced mental illness in the mental health system, (e.g., hosting the empowerment and mutual help centre and the national network) and promoting innovative programs like the independent living and housing first approaches (ornelas, et al., 2010). the comprehensive participatory organizational processes across the setting are also a fundamental aspect of this community mental health organization. due to the co-existence of both individual and collective empowerment, including community betterment and social change as described by maton (2008), aeips was considered for the current qualitative analysis. based on a previous brief review of transformative challenges, from community mental health and from community psychology basedknowledge, we address the following questions: 1) how to adapt the ecs framework to community mental health practice that is oriented towards recovery and community integration?; 2) what empowering characteristics derived from the ecs-cmho contribute to a transformative change at the individual, program and systems levels of analysis? method participants the participants included 4 program users, 2 staff members, and 2 program administrators. the users were randomly selected from a general list of 93 participants from a previous quantitative study. the following inclusion criteria were used: a balance of men and women; minimum 2 years of participation in the organization; not hospitalized. service users were 2 women and 2 men, with ages ranging from 30 to49 years; and with 1 to 6 years of participation in the setting. each of the users that participated received an incentive of 6€. two staff members were randomly sampled from a list provided by the organization. inclusion criteria were a minimum 2 years of working in the organization, and a full-time contract. two additional informants at the program administration level were selected and interviewed as well. staff and program administrators were female, with ages between 29 and 48 years; and between 6 to 26 years of collaboration. research approach for the purpose of this study, an instrumental single case-study approach was used in order to provide indepth answers to the research questions (stake, 2005). the research team sought to triangulate information from semi-structured interviews with service users (u), staff members (s), and the coordinator and one board member as program administrators (a), to explore meaning through different perceptions or program stakeholders(patton, 1990). the construction of the interview guide involved several meetings of the research task group, composed of university-based researchers, staff and users from aeips. the researchers adopted the peer debriefing and support strategy proposed by padgett (2012). the task group critically reflected on the contents of the guides and their relation with goals, logical sequence and analyzed the language adequacy and contextualization concerns (trickett & espino, 2004). we conducted oneon-one interviews at the organizational setting of the participants and ranged from 30 min to 1hr 30min. at the opening of the interview, the participants provided written informed consent and completed a demographic questionnaire. separate interview guides for staff and administrators were created for this qualitative study. the semiglobal  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   structured interview guides were based on the literature review, in order to mirror the conceptual research framework on empowering characteristics (e.g., goals, shared mission, how theory relates to practice, member participation, nature of relationships, and influence) through open-ended questions. the same interview questions were also customized for program users. however, the user interview guide also added questions to capture program-related gains in housing, relationships, physical and mental health, and participation. all interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim and personal identifying data was deleted for its use in the analysis stage. in the results section the quotes presented were translated from the original in portuguese into english. data analysis the authors developed a coding grid, based on the literature review and logic model, to identify the fundamental empowering characteristics of transformative community mental health settings. the coding grid was based on the four core components presented in the ecs model: group-based belief system; core activities; relational environment; and role opportunity structure. data on maton’s ecs components, such as leadership and setting maintenance, were not considered for this study. however, two particular themes, the external and policy influence, were included in the grid due to their relevance for the present discussion. this approach required several team meetings for critical reflection, discussion and consensus, in order to achieve a successful adaptation. the trustworthiness of the codes and their definitions were determined by cross-checking among researchers, through an iterative process that generated the final version of the grid. data analysis also followed an interactive, back and forth, cycle among analysts(braun & clarke, 2006; miles & huberman, 1994).two research analysts coded independently the eight interviews, line by line, and a third one joined for auditing process(padgett, 2012). the empowering characteristics were highlighted and coded with the respective label. the credibility of analysis was assured by analytic triangulation, discussion of discrepancies, explaining how and why the interpretation was arrived at, until reaching a consensus was reached about the best code (braun & clarke, 2006). in order to discuss results at multiple levels of analysis the authors created new codes for individual, program and system dimensions. this phase was also subjected to credibility and trustworthiness steps. data were again transformed and condensed in new content tables, independently, and compared by research members for this aim. results highlights of key empirical findings are presented by empowering characteristic and across ecological levels of analysis according to the adapted framework to community mental health organizations (ecs-cmho). group based belief system the “group-based belief system” category’s findings included the presence of a recoveryoriented vision that values the access to the community’s natural resources, such as employment or housing. challenges facing the individual level were expressed in the words of one user:“[the organizational values] that people who experience mental illness are included in society, not living institutionalized in the hospital ... which gives hope to people with mental illness that they can achieve recovery and they can reach the same rights as the so-called normal people…” (u). values and goals were also shared among all members of the setting, and the locus of intervention was clearly the community/social context as these participants vividly expressed: recovery is (…) a new life experience anchored in experiential knowledge and… that’s one of the key principles … it also relates to empowerment, as the possibility for people to identify resources, to be able to assume their responsibilities and freedoms and to search for resources that make sense (...) this has to do with employment, education, housing, political participation and with citizenship(s) in this category, at system level, data reveals the organization external influence in the community and social contexts. one program administrator affirmed that: [organizational influence is] visible in policy change, (…) through the presence of the ideals of people with mental illness in public reports and legislation, like the mental health plan (… ) we were also contacted by the mental health department to collaborate with the closure of the miguel bombarda hospital1 (a) core activities participants’ testimonies grouped in a “core activities” category revealed a transformative impact in the                                                                                                                           1 hospital miguel bombarda was a former central psychiatric hospital in portugal. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   individuals’ lives through valued and challenging opportunities, like:“(…) the association’s supported employment program has given me a new comfort ... i didn’t know how the job market worked, and so i felt more supported” (u); and “[a milestone] was the constructing my portfolio in the training for employment integration, because it was an opportunity to increase awareness of my course of life ...” (u). at the program level, transformative features were related to the ecs issue of meaningful and congruent practices when associated with the individualization of the users’ needs and objectives, because “[through] the individual support program,(…) defining the objectives collaboratively… the goals that one person wants to achieve … which resources can be mobilized and also by assessing the fulfillment of the project” (a). collaboration was noted in the discourse of interviewees by examples of individualized supports, setting governance and maintenance, and participatory evaluation processes: “it’s ... a collaborative role (...) we have to have the notion that both knowledge and experience [from users] are as important as professional knowledge” (s); or also that “this organization has this kind of action of an ongoing self-assessment, asking families, participants, professionals, about what can be changed and what can be improved” (a). potential effects at the systems level were focused on situating the interventions in community environments beyond the organizational setting and in breaking barriers to mental health users’ participation and community inclusiveness: [supported employment] has this goal of helping people return to employment or access employment ..., so we are talking about regular companies; ... we have the supported education service, with this same philosophy and principles of bringing people back to schools, to regular universities (s) relational environment the “relational environment” category provided evidence for impacts at an individual level through peer and natural social supports where life experiences are shared and valued: “[milestones] … a person who belonged to that group [welcoming committee]2… who helped me … to meet people, introducing me, showing me how this house works” (u), and also from mutual help initiatives. partnerships with the university also appeared to be                                                                                                                           2  program  activity  designed  to  welcome  new   participants  in  the  organization.   significantly empowering at the program level:“the academy has also a fundamental role here. this link of aeips with ispa [university] improves the work methods and the building of skills (...) through that research and action endeavor...” (s). an identified transformative theme at the system level was the ongoing connections with community resources located outside mental health system, such as schools or companies that appeared as the main sources of natural support for people in the setting. one participant stated: “the approach is always contextual, natural, so we use natural community resources” (a). this idea was reinforced by another program level representative “community integration implies establishing constant bridging with community resources, with local companies, with schools, with local governments, with training centers, with all the sites where the participant is involved” (a). opportunity role structure the data included in the “opportunity role structure” category, emphasized accessible and varying demands and opportunities for individuals within the setting. both users and staff members highlighted the value of participation and accessing capacity-building opportunities: “i’ve already done two thematic debates of my exclusive authorship ... and ... i use to present thematic debates previously scheduled” (u), or “… the continuous training, every week, for staff, student internships, and participants [users], who want to attend” (s). in this category, the presence of transformative evidence at the program level was based on the participants’ discourse as related to members’ involvement across organizational structures and processes: “our association is constituted by families, professionals and by service users (...) they all are in the governing bodies (...) we always had this concern of having them as representatives in the governing bodies” (a). finally, themes at the system level also highlighted organizational members’ external influence, through the existence of opportunities for community participation within and beyond the setting, which informed a potential radiating process over resources and policies, as it is noted in this statement: [ceam] it is a users group that generated much change inside [the organization] and outside... also in terms of public policy, they are consultants in the policy reform of mental health services (...) and they continue to give their testimony, at universities, they are invited to conferences, too… (s) global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   discussion with the present study we learned that the development of empowering interventions with community mental health organizations promotes change towards recovery and community integration across multiple levels. first, this research was guided by an adaptation of the ecs framework, which is presented in the appendix section. based on the literature review, it was found to be a viable tool to assess empowering processes across ecological levels in community mental health organizations. it also helps to guide service transformation towards recovery and life in the community, namely valuing a recovery and community oriented vision beyond traditional mental health systems; focusing the individualization of users’ needs and goals; participation opportunities; and entering community-valued contexts such as housing and employment (maton, 2000, 2008; nelson, et al., 2001b; ornelas, et al., in press). second, evidence for transformation at the individual level of analysis, using the ecs-cmho framework, highlights a shift towards a strengths-based approach rather than the “deficit approach”(ridgway, 2005). the underlying empowerment-based and recovery-oriented vision was consistent with the transformed identity from user to citizen (davidson, et al., 2009; fisher & spiro, 2010). this vision is applied through the individualization of interests and objectives, enhanced connectedness, and access to meaningful social roles and activities in community natural contexts (ware, et al., 2007). additionally, peer support initiatives and availability of opportunities for people who experienced mental illness, to collaboratively participate across ecological levels, emerged as significant for personal achievement and empowerment (bond & keys, 1993; maton & salem, 1995). these findings are congruent with the process of member gains in psychological empowerment, social empowerment, and civic empowerment—essential components of empowering community settings, as suggested by maton and brodsky (2011). at the program level, transformative empowering characteristics were mainly anchored in the community orientation of the intervention through ongoing partnerships with multiple resources outside the mental health system, including landlords, neighbors, school teachers, and others. in line with a contextual paradigm, rather than designing alternative and separated settings, the interventions should be community-situated and the interaction among community members should be collaborative(trickett & espino, 2004). furthermore all these potentiate the access to regular community contexts and to change them. at the program level, collaboration was found to provide a pervasive structure for every dimension and goal of the setting, where all members were considered resources(brown, 2009). collaboration was present in processes such as governance and maintenance, interpersonal support and external contacts, which were relevant to achieve the organizational purpose (bond & keys, 1993; seidman & tseng, 2011). another transformative characteristic is the continuous participatory process of evaluation and research (fetterman & wandersman, 2005; suarez-balcazar & harper, 2003). the use of collaborative research methods such as community based participatory research, as well as the development of long-term community-university research partnerships by cmho’s, may lead to transformative efforts and outcomes (minkler & wallerstein, 2003; suarezbalcazar et al., 2004). creating opportunities for direct interpersonal contacts, through the participation of people with experience of mental illness in community settings, will be effective for the promotion of user empowerment and community change (janzen, nelson, trainor, & ochocka, 2006; trickett, 2009; zimmerman, 2000). the promotion of capabilities and social inclusion also presents new challenges and demands new practices from professionals and cmhos (fisher & chamberlin, 2005; newberry & strong, 2009). main themes for transformation at the system level were related to direct intervention outside the setting domain and in higher levels of analysis within and beyond the mental health system. core features were related to linkages and with the radiating effect of setting members in utilizing those external resources, reflected in the clearance of barriers to community integration in those contexts(lemaire & mallik, 2005; ornelas, et al., in press). results also revealed direct interventions at the public policy level, not only through the implementation of quality program content, but also with the users’ access to political decision levels(fisher & spiro, 2010; janzen, nelson, hausfather, & ochocka, 2007; nelson, et al., 2001b). davidson, et al. (2009)suggested that a transformative shift can only occur when people who experience mental illness are active participants in changing surrounding conditions and personal lives. adopting such an empowering philosophy in their vision and practices, cmhos may help promote agency, empowerment, recovery, and even community betterment. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   additionally, the present study also illuminated the presence of several contributions from the community psychology field that enhanced the ecs-cmho by endorsing the collaborative approach in interventions as a core empowering structure across ecological levels and domains (bond & keys, 1993; trickett & espino, 2004). collaboration was embedded in the professionaluser relationship, not only in the definition of individual user interests and objectives, but also in service activity within and outside the setting. the establishment of a continuous process of research and action appeared as another empowering feature in organizational setting. the research partnerships between community organization and university can be catalysts for a continuous cycle of reflection and practice and members’ achievements (suarez-balcazar, harper, & lewis, 2005). data also revealed significant evidence for multilevel interventions within but also across maton’s domains of individual wellness and social change to enhance empowering settings at the policy arena. the dual nature of the studied setting, operating simultaneously at different levels and multiple domains, appeared to be empowering in and of itself in terms of transformative change (schensul & trickett, 2009). this focus is highly relevant for sensitive social themes, such as mental health challenges, helping to achieve sustainable social transformation and prevent backlash effects from the introduction of innovative efforts(maton, 2000). in light of our study limitations, future research should continue to develop and confirm the validity of the ecs-cmho framework as a resource for transformation and for evaluation across different organizations in the mental health field. also, for purposes of cmho efficacy in promoting better lives in the community for people with lived experience of mental illness, we should find further longitudinal evidence regarding which particular features of empowering programs influence individual outcomes on psychological empowerment, mental health recovery, and community integration; and also which features determine transformative change at the social and policy level. acknowledgments this article was supported by fct ptdc/psipcl/113301/2009 & fct-bd/65518/2009. references aber, m. s., maton, k. i., & seidman, e. 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(pp. 43-63). dordrecht netherlands: kluwer academic publishers. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  12   appendix ecs framework for community mental health organizations (ecs-cmho) empowering organizational characteristics adaptation to cmho settings group-based belief system inspires change salient goals 1. recovery promotion (focusing on personal goals, support networks, rediscovering yourself) 2. community integration and participation promotion 3. empowerment and emancipation promotion 4. transformed identity: user to citizen clear means 1.community integration at community natural resources 2. community orientation 3. community mobilization 4. collaborative approach 5. action/research strengthbased member-asresource 1.all members (participants, staff, families) collaborate by organizing activities and services 2. contribute with opinions/suggestions beyond self shared vision 1.theoretical framework 2.shared service mission 3. shared goals and values larger purpose 1. policy influence 2. social change/innovation core activities engaging meaningful 1. individualized projects through individual support 2. challenging activities in the community 3. emphasis on choice congruent 1. defining individual paths and goals 2. emphasis on diversity active learning feedback 1. activities evaluation by the participants 2. collaborative service evaluation 3. collaborative evaluation of individualized project reflection 1. individual and group meetings for critical reflection 2. shared testimonies quality content 1. supported education 2. supported employment 3. independent housing and supports 4. other individual projects in natural contexts 5. physical health relationships 1. staff as mediators of the integration process 2. equitable and co-empowering relationship 3. collaborative relationship relational environment support system multiple domains and sources 1. local community context (city halls, social security, etc.) 2. mental health services 3. regular educational contexts 4. regular labor market 5.graduate school/academia *external influence 1. impact on community stakeholders caring relationship s peers 1. mutual help groups 2. peers activities 3. family mutual help group mentors 1. inspirational members senseofcom munity within setting 1. shared norms and history of the organization 2. feeling of belonging beyond setting 1. ongoing relationships with people outside the organization global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  13   appendix ecs framework for community mental health organizations (ecs-cmho) (c) empowering organizational characteristics adaptation to cmho settings opportunity role structure pervasive many roles at multiple levels participants and families can: 1. promote activities 2. take responsibility for service activities 3. be formal members 4. be members of the governing bodies 5. participate in general assemblies 6. peer specialists in staff teams highly accessible varying demands 1. different roles according to members’ potentials encouraged/ challenged 1. opportunities for the exercise of challenging roles multi-functional use, develop skills 1. participants growth 2. continuous training voice influence to social change 1. service representation and dissemination 2. advocacy 3. anti-stigma campaigns 4. peer movements adapted from maton (2008) * external influence on community resources was added to relational environment for present study purpose. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 competencies for community psychology practice in spain: standards, quality and challenges in social intervention isidro maya jariego universidad de sevilla keywords: community psychology, competencies, spain, europsy author biography: isidro maya jariego, doctor in psychology, is associate professor at the department of social psychology at the university of seville (spain), and director of the laboratory of personal networks and communities. he was founder and coordinator of the master in psychology of social and community intervention (2010-2013) and coordinator of the doctorate program “community and social intervention” (2007-2013). editor of the journal redes, revista hispana para el análisis de redes sociales since 2002; his main interests are social network analysis, cultural diversity and community intervention. recommended citation: jariego, i.m. (2016). competencies for community psychology practice in spain: standards, quality and challenges in social intervention. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(4), pages 1-15. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). correspondence should be addressed to isidro maya jariego, departamento de psicología social, universidad de sevilla, calle camilo josé cela s/n. 41.018 – sevilla (spain). isidromj@us.es. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:isidromj@us.es global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 competencies for community psychology practice in spain: standards, quality and challenges in social intervention abstract in this paper, competencies for community psychology practice are examined within the spanish context, based on the experience of a master in psychology of social and community intervention in the university of seville. the list of competencies was developed specifically for monitoring the practicum of master students, and it was developed in a portfolio format, following the usual pattern in the european accreditation process "europsy," designed by the professional associations of psychology. the portfolio consists of 29 generic professional competencies, grouped in seven blocks: needs specification, evaluation, product development and services, psychological intervention, assessment of psychological interventions, communication, and enabling competencies. at the national level, we analyze the impact that the new system of training and accreditation of psychologists who perform health activities is having on the professional recognition and the role of community psychologists. at the international level, we compare the europsy proposal with the list of 18 competences proposed by dalton and wolfe (2012) and approved by the society for community research and action, apa division 27. finally, we discuss the advantages and limitations of a generic model of competency assessment, focused on the professional practice of psychology. europsy is a system of accreditation of professional psychology in europe, which has been implemented since 2010 with the coordination of the european federation of psychologists' associations (efpa). the european certificate of psychology aims to improve standards of professional practice, increase transparency and facilitate internal mobility of professional psychologists (lunt, peiró, poortinga & roe, 2015). europsy is based on a shared competencies model that contributes to greater convergence in the training of psychologists and serves as a guide for the evaluation of professional practice. it is therefore a tool that promotes the search for common standards and a shared definition of the profession of psychology in europe (peiró & lunt, 2002). currently this recognition system is used in 20 countries, while 36 members of the efpa approved their implementation and are eligible for the application of the certificate. one of the central elements of the europsy system consists in defining core competencies that professional psychologists should develop. those competencies include both the actual psychological content of the professional practice as well as the general capabilities that allow providing effectively a professional service of any kind (europsy, 2015). the european certificate distinguishes four professional contexts: namely, clinical and health psychology; work and organizational psychology; educational psychology; and "other" (to be specified), among which may be included psychology of social and community intervention. there are also two types of expertise currently recognized by europsy that result in specialization: psychotherapy and work and organizational psychology. in both cases (the professional contexts and specialties) the profile of community research and action appears to be less established in the professional field. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 in the master in psychology of social and community intervention at the university of seville (spain) we carried out one of the first experiences in implementing the europsy model of competencies in the field of community research and action (mayajariego, 2009). specifically, we rely on the "guidelines for the evaluation of skills through supervised practice" designed by professional associations of psychology in spain (consejo general de colegios oficiales de psicólogos, 2008) to propose a monitoring system of the practicum in community intervention for master’s students. in this case, the europsy model provides the generic competency framework, while the guide of the master specifically adapts the content to the characteristics and usual activities of psychologists of social and community intervention1. thus, it was intended to fill a gap in the definition of professional profiles of psychology and thereby contribute to greater recognition of this area of practice. in this article, we briefly describe the use of the europsy competencies model in the training of psychologists of social and community intervention, from the specific case of the university of seville (spain). the european accreditation model is compared with the 18 competencies for community psychology practice recognized by the society for community research and action (scra) (dalton & 1 the master in psychology of social and community intervention was designed following the requirements of the accreditation system of academic titles during the course of 2008-2009. the official title was established by the agreement of the council of ministers of 12 november 2010 (boe of 16 december 2010). the university of seville published the curriculum of the master with the resolution of 20 july 2011. the guide for supervised practice was applied experimentally during the first three years of implementation of the title (2010-2011, 2011-2012 and 2012-2013). wolfe, 2012). this allows us to reflect on the international validity of the 18 core competencies as well as the need to strengthen the role of the community psychologist in europe. the professional competencies of psychology in the europsy certificate the europsy model proposes 20 primary competencies and 9 enabling competencies in the professional practice of psychology (table 1). the primary competencies correspond to the workflow of psychologists in a sequence in which a) the customer request is received, b) evaluation or diagnosis are performed, c) services based on psychological theories are developed, d) interventions are designed and implemented, e) the actions carried out are valued and, finally, f) the results are reported (europsy team, 2009, cited in peiro & tetrick, 2011). this is a generic framework of capabilities that are deployed specifically depending on the professional context of intervention, whether this is clinical, educational, organizational or otherwise. the model implies the classic cycle of action research (lewin, 1946), with a process of planning, action, and observation. secondly, enabling competencies are general skills that contribute to the proper exercise of any profession. professionals benefit from proper career planning, as well as the ability to stay current in their discipline knowledge, to develop relationships with colleagues or clients, and to reflect on professional practice itself, among others. although they are not competencies specific of the psychologist, they are considered also necessary for professional practice. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 professional roles primary competencies goal specification needs analysis goal setting assessment individual assessment group assessment organizational assessment situational assessment development service or product definition & requirements analysis service or product design service or product testing service or product evaluation intervention intervention planning direct person-oriented intervention direct situation-oriented intervention indirect intervention service or product implementation evaluation evaluation planning evaluation measurement evaluation analysis communication giving feedback report writing enabling competencies professional development professional strategy continuing professional development professional relations research and development marketing and sales account management practice management quality assurance self-reflection table 1. the 29 competencies of psychologists in the europsy model source: europsy (2015), <http://www.europsy.cop.es/>. the competencies of the european certificate of psychology not only differ in content from the skills recognized by the scra (dalton & wolfe, 2012), but also in the assumptions and mode of operation. specifically, the europsy model, unlike the 18 competencies of the scra, (1) proposes generic skills of professional psychology, which develop transversely in different contexts of application, (2) is designed as part of a system of accreditation and professional recognition, and (3) includes some skills applicable in any professional activity (not only for psychologists). this http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 makes it a meta-model that needs to be completed with the content that refer to a practice and a specific intervention context. the guide for supervised practice in psychology of social and community intervention the european certificate of psychology establishes as a requirement the realization of "at least one year of supervised professional practice full time, or equivalent." it is a form of professional training that can be performed as part of the external practices of the degree in psychology or working under the supervision of a licensed psychologist. in this context, the general council of associations of psychologists published three "guides for supervised practice" to monitor the practical training of psychologists in the clinical, educational and organizational fields (consejo general de colegios oficiales de psicólogos, 2008). each is a portfolio with concrete examples illustrating the type of activities, methods, and common strategies in each application context. both psychologists in training and supervisors can use it as a model for detailing the activities they have done, justify the procedure followed in professional practice, and provide evidence of its realization. in the master in psychology of social and community intervention we used this model as an assessment tool for students' practica (maya-jariego, 2009). thus, we developed a "supervised practice guide" in the specific field of social and community intervention, which was lacking at the national level. the document consists of 29 examples, one for each competence, in which a) the activity is described, b) recipients and context of realization are indicated, c) the procedure followed in practice is explained, d) the results obtained are summarized and e) evidences of performing the activity are provided. to illustrate, in annex i we present seven examples (one for each specific professional role and one referring to the enabling competencies, previously presented in table 1)2. the guide for supervised practice defines, through examples, the role of the community psychologist, and serves as a learning and accreditation tool. specifically, the portfolio (1) illustrates with examples what is the work of the community psychologist, (2) allows selfassessment of the skills required for professional practice, and (3) facilitates the use of the guide of competencies for the accreditation process. during the first three years of implementation of the master, between 2010 and 2013, the guide for supervised practice demonstrated its applicability in a variety of contexts of intervention, such as:  initiatives to promote health, centers of drug prevention,  programs for the rehabilitation of women victims of maltreatment,  the center for refugees,  community development projects, intervention with families and minors  programs for citizen participation and volunteering, among others. the guide is particularly useful to promote student reflection on the professional role. however, it is an exercise in meta 2 the full document in spanish, with 29 examples, is available at: http://personal.us.es/isidromj/php/wpcontent/uploads/2009/06/practicumeuropsy-comunitaria.pdf http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://personal.us.es/isidromj/php/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/practicum-europsy-comunitaria.pdf http://personal.us.es/isidromj/php/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/practicum-europsy-comunitaria.pdf http://personal.us.es/isidromj/php/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/practicum-europsy-comunitaria.pdf global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 cognition and sometimes students find it difficult to identify what skills are involved in the development of certain specific activities. in fact, self-assessment is a key enabling competence, which affects learning ability based on experience, among others. the 29 examples of the guide for supervised practice refer to activities such as assessment of social needs, analysis of community readiness, social skills training, initiatives for community prevention and promotion, program evaluation and enhancement of the sense of community, among others (maya-jariego, 2009). that is, they are broadly in line with the contents proposed in the list of competencies of the scra (dalton & wolfe, 2012). the examples of the guide of supervised practice include activities such as community programs development and management, initiatives for social change, and community research. therefore, even taking as starting point a generic framework of capacities and referring to the european context, when we descend into community settings, the contents of the spanish case are comparable to the proposal from scra, and rather similar. strengthening the role of the community psychologist in spain the training of community psychologists usually puts the emphasis on the evaluation of contexts, intervention at multiple ecological levels, and collaboration with the community (mayajariego, 2016). the area has been adequately described by the "seven core values" of social justice, wellness promotion, sense of community, respect for diversity, empowerment, collaboration with the community and empirical basis (kloos, hill, thomas, wandersman, elias & dalton, 2012). it has consolidated as a pragmatic space, in which converge the design, implementation and evaluation of effective actions with empowerment, participation and community fit strategies. all these descriptors are conveniently represented in the 18 competencies of scra (dalton & wolfe, 2012), and in the 29 examples of community intervention according to the europsy model (mayajariego, 2009). in addition, community action research has helped to enrich the roles of psychologists, incorporating the role of change agent, working in collaboration with the community. hence in the two lists of competencies the participant-observer role as well as the development of horizontal relationships with the community are included. similarly, both make reference to the ability to set up collective empowerment dynamics and to promote the capabilities of groups and communities. this innovation in the role has been called "community approach" and has extended to areas such as nursing and public health, among others. in a way, this can be considered a contribution from community psychology to psychology as a whole, as well as to other disciplines. however, the professional profile of the psychology of social intervention appears to be in a permanent process of redefinition. in fact, the proposal of the master of the university of seville emerges as an effort to equate social intervention with other areas of psychology. both in the "practice areas" of europsy as in the "supervised practice guides" of the associations of psychology in spain, it seems to be an area with less tradition than clinical, educational and organizational psychology. in spain, the incorporation of new professional accreditation systems has reopened the debate on the role of the community psychologist. specifically, new norms and laws that introduce regulations for professional practice of psychologists http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 in the health field were adopted3. to carry out its work in the public health system, professionals must now have the title of specialist in clinical psychology or make the masters in general health psychology. in this context, the concerns of professional associations to get recognition in the health system for professional psychology has left in the background the needs of other professional profiles. for example, some psychologists with a community or social action profile have been forced to clinical specialization or to complete their training in health psychology in contexts where social needs require other roles and professional profiles. in this context, skills inventories are of great value in preserving and in the institutionalization of a professional profile that, during the last decades, has been giving a response to community needs in a pertinent and effective manner. both the definition of professional profiles by associations of psychologists in spain4, as the european standards of accreditation and the list of 18 competencies of the scra 3 the law on health professions (lops) in 2003 left the psychologists practicing in the health sector in a legal vacuum. to resolve this, the public health act 2011 and subsequent regulations introduced new regulatory developments for professional practice of psychologists in health, such as the need for clinical/health specialization. this situation was developed in: maya-jariego, i. (2014). regreso al futuro: el perfil del psicólogo comunitario y de la intervención social. published in e-voluntas, retrieved 10/6/2016: http://evoluntas.wordpress.com/2014/06/15 /regreso-al-futuro-el-perfil-del-psicologocomunitario-y-de-la-intervencion-social/ 4 the profile of the psychology of social intervention according to the professional association of psychologists of spain was defined in: https://www.cop.es/perfiles/contenido/is.htm are antecedents that can contribute in this regard. coda in sum, community psychology (a) has a defined professional profile, characterized by the intervention in multiple ecological levels and collaboration with the community; and (b) has led to the development of effective strategies for prevention and promotion. in fact, community psychology (c) has introduced innovations in the role of the psychologist as a change agent in the community, and contributed to the formalization of an approach that has spread to other disciplines. this profile (d) appears adequately represented by inventories of competencies of the scra and the european certificate europsy showing their applicability in different international contexts. so (e) both lists can contribute to strengthening the role of the community psychologist in its regional reference space. references consejo general de colegios oficiales de psicólogos (2008). el modelo de competencias del certificado europsy en la formación del prácticum de psicología. comité nacional europsy: madrid. dalton, j. & wolfe, s. (2012). joint column: education connection and the community practitioner. the community psychologist, 45 (4), 7-14. europsy (2015). europsy. european certificate in psychology. available in http://www.europsy.cop.es/ [retrieved 10/06/2016] europsy team (2009). europsy european certificate in psychology regulations revised. brussels: mimeo, efpa. kloos, b., hill, j., thomas, r., wandersman, a., elias, j. & dalton, j.h. (2012). community psychology. linking individuals and http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://evoluntas.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/regreso-al-futuro-el-perfil-del-psicologo-comunitario-y-de-la-intervencion-social/ http://evoluntas.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/regreso-al-futuro-el-perfil-del-psicologo-comunitario-y-de-la-intervencion-social/ http://evoluntas.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/regreso-al-futuro-el-perfil-del-psicologo-comunitario-y-de-la-intervencion-social/ https://www.cop.es/perfiles/contenido/is.htm http://www.europsy.cop.es/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 communities. wadsworth: cengage learning. lewin, k. (1946). action research and minority problems. journal of social issues, 2 (4), 1540-4560. lunt, i., peiró, j. m., poortinga, y. & roe, r. a. (2015). europsy: standards and quality in education for psychologists. göttingen, germany: hogrefe publishing. maya-jariego, i. (2016). ecological settings and theory of community action: “there is nothing more practical than a good theory” in community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice, 7 (2), 16. retrieved 24/06/2016, from <http://www.gjcpp.org/>. maya-jariego, i. (2014). regreso al futuro: el perfil del psicólogo comunitario y de la intervención social. publicado en evoluntas, consultado el 10/6/2016: https://evoluntas.wordpress.com/2014/0 6/15/regreso-al-futuro-el-perfil-delpsicologo-comunitario-y-de-laintervencion-social/ maya-jariego, i. (2009). guía europsy para la evaluación de la práctica supervisada en psicología de la intervención social y comunitaria. en facultad de psicología (ed.). v curso-encuentro sobre docencia. sevilla: fénix editora, pp. 66-108. peiró, j. m. & lunt, i. (2002). the context for a european framework for psychologists’ training. european psychologist, 7 (3), 169-179. peiró, j. m. & tetrick, l. (2011). occupational health psychology. in martin, p., cheung, f., kyrios, m., littlefield, l., knowles, m., overmier, b. & prieto, j. m. (eds.). the iaap handbook of applied psychology. wiley-blackwell, pp. 292-315. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://evoluntas.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/regreso-al-futuro-el-perfil-del-psicologo-comunitario-y-de-la-intervencion-social/ https://evoluntas.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/regreso-al-futuro-el-perfil-del-psicologo-comunitario-y-de-la-intervencion-social/ https://evoluntas.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/regreso-al-futuro-el-perfil-del-psicologo-comunitario-y-de-la-intervencion-social/ https://evoluntas.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/regreso-al-futuro-el-perfil-del-psicologo-comunitario-y-de-la-intervencion-social/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 annex i: examples of competences in the europsy guide for supervised practice example 1 goal specification interaction with the client to define the objectives of the service to be provided. need analysis obtaining information on customer needs using appropriate methods. clarification and analysis of the needs to a point that may significantly determine actions to be performed. content an interview with officials of the health service of an autonomous region was conducted to define specific training activities for social workers in primary care. training needs were identified and new areas of action were defined. recipients managers of health services of an autonomous community (central services). date and duration september 2008, 2 hours. procedure the procedure was to gather information on customer needs. information on the number of social workers in health services was collected, as well as on their incorporation into primary care teams at health centers, specific action in poor districts and the perceived problems in the management of these professionals. in addition to specifying training needs, the interview canvassed other needs that were not explicitly mentioned in the initial customer request. results training needs were specified and new intervention needs detected. some difficulties were discovered in the specification of the role of social workers in the primary care teams, compound by several professionals. also the need to know and share effective strategies for community health intervention was established. evidences outline, and report of the interview. other examples of activities for the acquisition of the competence  interview with the coordinator of education of a town that wants to implement a program of community prevention in the schools of the city.  meeting to determine the training needs of the family treatment teams. source: maya-jariego (2009), type a. competence a1. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 example 2 assessment determine relevant characteristics of individuals, groups, organizations and situations using appropriate methods. situational assessment perform appropriate assessment to study situations through interviews, surveys and other appropriate methods and techniques in a relevant context for the requested service. for example, analysis of the community environment of a health center. content evaluation of social needs of african immigrants in a region of the south of spain. recipients directorate of migration policy of the autonomous community. date and duration project of one year, 1993. procedure several research and needs analysis actions are launched:  evaluation of perceived needs: representative survey of the population of african immigrants living in the autonomous community.  evaluation of policy needs: mail survey to key informants (representatives of associations, municipalities and trade unions with programs aimed at foreign population).  focus groups with local population to assess attitudes toward the immigrant population.  ethnographic study of different cultural communities. results the study compares perceived and normative needs, with quantitative and qualitative methodology. it takes into account host and immigrant population opinion. data are available on collective care programs. the needs of recent immigrants, related to the migratory project are identified: obtaining savings and improving material living conditions. the difficulties of the regulatory context and legal regulations are examined, as well as its impact in the process of psychological adjustment and social integration of immigrants. a description of the problems of the immigrant population is provided, establishing intervention priorities. also an inventory of resources for social integration of the group is made. contexts and communities at high risk are identified. evidences final report with the study results. questionnaires, interview guide, data analysis. other examples of activities for the acquisition of the competence  resource assessment of the educational community in a town of 50,000 inhabitants, before launching a drug abuse prevention program.  analysis of a neighborhood's community readiness for the implementation of a program of primary prevention of drug abuse. source: maya-jariego (2009), type b. competence b4. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 example 3 development developing services or products from psychological theories and methods to be used by psychologists or by the clients themselves. service or product design designing or adapting services or products in accordance with the requirements and restrictions and taking into account the context in which they are used. content design and development of educational activities of social skills training and drug information. recipients students of secondary education. date and duration three-month project to develop educational materials. procedure the contents of prevention according to the theory of reasoned action are defined. materials are designed for educational activities in class: drug information, health consequences of drug abuse, social skills under the influence of peers, self-esteem, and so on. results finally a material with 50 exercises and educational activities in classroom for drug prevention is edited. the material incorporates a "teacher's guide". evidences educational material. other examples of activities for the acquisition of the competence  training to work cooperatively in groups. a guide for each group dynamics is developed.  adaptation of a sense of community scale to the study of immigrant communities.  development of a multimedia for training in intercultural communication skills, for managers who travel to international destinations. source: maya-jariego (2009), type c. competence c2. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 example 4 intervention identify, prepare and implement appropriate measures to achieve the objectives. direct situation-oriented intervention applying intervention methods that directly affect selected aspects of the situation following the intervention plan in a relevant context for the requested services. for example, implementing new tools, methods, procedures or programs, changes in the community environment, etcetera. content promoting a sense of community in a neighborhood. recipients neighbors. date and duration project of six months. first half of 2009. procedure the sense of community scale by mcmillan and chavis is applied, before and after the intervention. some activities to develop community networks are carried out. leisure activities among residents of the neighborhood are also implemented. key players are involved in the development of personal networks and collaboration on shared purposes. it implements a campaign to publicize the characteristic features and strengths of the neighborhood. it launches a discussion forum on the neighborhood. it launches a prize for entrepreneurial initiatives to promote neighboring behaviors. results significant differences in social cohesion indicators of the scale of sense of community in the two moments of evaluation. evidences results report. blog chronicling the neighborhood activities. photographs and videos documenting community activities. materials of the advertising campaign. other examples of activities for the acquisition of the competence  promotion of associations in the roma minority.  campaign to promote community norms against tobacco abuse. source: maya-jariego (2009), type d. competence d3. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 example 5 evaluation establishing the adequacy of interventions in terms of compliance with the intervention plan and achievement of the set goals. evaluation analysis carrying out the analysis in accordance with the evaluation plan, and drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of interventions in a relevant context for the service demanded. for example, analyze the effectiveness of a particular community intervention. content analysis of preventive intervention in a medium-sized town. recipients applicators of the program, and program coordinator. date and duration course 2006-2007. procedure risk behaviors and reference groups are identified. from the results, highrisk groups for future interventions are selected. the effectiveness of intervention in promoting healthy habits and reducing the prevalence is analyzed. lessons learnt by participants about the effects of drug abuse on health are assessed. specific measures are taken on the changes in attitudes towards drug abuse, intention of consumption, and health beliefs. changes in consumption patterns are also analyzed. the improvements in program implementation are registered. results results obtained in the analysis. evidences result report or evaluation report. other examples of activities for the acquisition of the competence  analysis of the effectiveness of community promotion activities in posttraumatic stress indicators of residents in a shelter for refugees.  evaluation of sociability in a nursing home. source: maya-jariego (2009), type e. competence e3. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 example 6 communication provide information adequately to customers in order to meet the needs and expectations of those customers. giving feedback provide feedback to customers using appropriate oral and/or audiovisual means, in a relevant context for the service demanded. for example, give oral feedback to an individual client or make a group presentation. content provide feedback on indicators of community readiness, as well as the analysis of the professional role of social workers in primary care. recipients primary care social workers in a region. date and duration september 12 2007. procedure observed levels of community readiness are described in the survey, making comparisons by province and by type of health facility. it is proposed to discuss in group interpreting these results: what is the context in each province that may help explain the differences, how you can work in contexts with lower levels of community readiness, and so on. then the difficulties of incorporating social workers in primary care teams are presented. different types of roles of social workers (v. gr. community approach versus biomedical model of services) are described and discussed with attendees. professional strategies are defined to improve the location of the social worker in the health system. results presentation of the results of the survey. decisions on the professional future. evidences file with the presentation of the results. results report. other examples of activities for the acquisition of the competence  present results to volunteers participating in needs assessment prior to designing a new strategic plan for volunteering.  feedback session with teachers to present the evaluation report to the teachers that have implemented an educational program for preventing drug abuse. monthly newsletter with "assessment notes" for program applicators, reporting levels of program implementation in each class and school.  managing a mailing list communication between the applicators of a program. source: maya-jariego (2009), type f. competence f1. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 example 7 enabling competences skills related to professional activity in general. professional relations establishing and maintaining relationships with other professionals and relevant organizations. content maintaining relationships with other professionals in the field of social services: psychologists, social workers, community nurses, sociologists, educators, and so on. recipients colleagues and other professionals of community intervention. date and duration variable, depending on the calls of other entities. procedure attend multidisciplinary conferences. seizing opportunities to contact multidisciplinary committees. establish relationships with other professionals in social services center. participate in virtual communities in the area of social services. results developing relationships with other professionals of the sector. evidences minutes of the meetings. certificates of congress attendance. messages of participation in virtual forums. other examples of activities for the acquisition of the competence  attend to specialized professional meetings.  offer internships to faculties of psychology, to relate to the academic world, with future graduates and other professionals of psychology. source: maya-jariego (2009), enabling competences. enabling competence 3. http://www.gjcpp.org/ competencies for community psychology practice in spain: standards, quality and challenges in social intervention microsoft word 2012-003-final-20120521.docx global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 commentary to “lobbying for endorsement of community psychology in australia” donata francescato professor of community psychology ,university sapienza rome, italy mc0938@mclink.it can the australian struggle also happen in italy? the struggle to have community psychology endorsed as one of the recognized psychological specialization among the health professions could not happen in italy in quite the same form, since in our country the most prestigious professions (doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers etc.) are regulated through “professional orders” , which are instituted through specific laws passed in parliament. university graduates aspiring to practice one of these “legalized” professions must pass a special examination (similar to the bar exam for lawyers in the united states) to become members of the professional order. different professions can create scientific or professional associations, which have less prestige and power than professional orders. in fact, many requests by professional associations to become an order often remain in the form of proposed laws for years in the italian parliament. in italy, a big battle, which required most of the same lobbying described by our australian colleagues, actually took place in the seventies and eighties to obtain the passage of this kind of law. they were years of intense debate, and of open conflict with the medical order. psychologists had to gain the approval of most parties to try to have the law passed. the italian scientific psychological association (sips), which had less than a thousand members in the sixties grew tremendously after the first college degrees in psychology were instituted in 1970 at the university of rome and padova; and students, mostly female, flocked to them. in the seventies several laws were passed aimed at moving educational, social and health services from secondary and tertiary prevention to primary prevention, encouraging citizen participation, and networking among services. all these laws provided new job opportunities for psychologists who were looking for new professional roles. in this climate, in fact i published, under the sponsorship of augusto palmonari and bruna zani, social psychologists from the university of bologna, who had invited me to hold a seminar on my experiences in community psychology in the united states12 the first italian article (francescato 12!for more information in english on the development of community psychology in italy 2007 a), on community psychology, which was entitled: “community psychology: a new role for psychologists?” the late seventies and early eighties saw the birth of community psychology in italy, the first books were published (francescato 1977b, palmonari and zani 1980) and community psychology became a division of sips, in 1981. in the early eighties there was still no public university training in community psychology, but the new division of sips, of which i was the first national coordinator, promoted theoretical seminars, training sessions, debates and annual conferences, and the division grew to have as many as 300 members including teachers, social workers, and other non-psychologists interested in community psychology. we allied ourselves with social and clinical psychologists in academia to obtain the introduction of community psychology in the psychology degree programs. it took several years of lobbying because then the italian university system was very centralized and the introduction of new subjects had to be approved not only at the university level, but also at the national level. for years i taught informally community psychology contents in a course called, “personality investigation techniques”, while other italian psychologists taught cp in the their social psychology or clinical psychology courses. only in 1985 i became the first professor in community psychology. after much struggle in 1986 a major national reform was passed, which changed from four to five years, the academic degree granting programs in psychology: cp was finally formally introduced as a fundamental discipline and began to be taught in all major italian universities offering a new degree in clinical and community psychology. both academic and professional psychologists lobbied together to get legal endorsement for the profession and finally in 1989, the italian parliament passed law number 56, which created the professional order of psychologists. after winning the battle for the creation of the order, sips decided to terminate its existence. in see reich, riemer, prilleltensky, & montero, 2007; vazquez rivera, 2010 and francescato 2007 and 2008).! global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 its place the italian association of psychologists (aip) was created with experimental, clinical, work and organization, health, social, developmental and other divisions. community psychologists decided instead to create an independent organization and so sipco (italian society of community psychology) was born in 1994. most italian psychologists work in private practice as psychotherapists; community psychologists work in the third sector in cooperatives, volunteer organizations and in the territorial services of public health organizations, where they are hired as psychologists, the professional title protected by the order of psychologists. in contrast to the australian experience, italian psychologists are not hired formally as clinical or community or health psychologists. in italy, a national law passed in 1978 as a major health reform, requires psychologists to be present in what are called “territorial services” which include mental health centers, and a variety of services that cater to the needs of women, children, people with handicaps or of people with behavioral problems such as drug abuse, alcohol, abuse etc. however, not all territorial services have full time psychologists on their staff because every italian region has its own specific law, which may “permit” but not “require” hiring of psychologists. furthermore, to cut surging health expenses in the last decade, no new hiring have been allowed. only hiring pro –tempore (for definite periods ranging from a few months to two years) have been permitted to substitute psychologists on maternity or sickness leave. most psychologists were hired by these territorial services in the 70’s and 80’s, but are now reaching retirement and are not often being replaced. the situation is even worse for psychologists who want to work in hospitals. very few regions have laws that require the presence of psychologists among hospital staff, mostly permit the employment of psychologists, but do not make it compulsory to do so. so the actual number of psychologists present in italian hospitals in 2007 varied widely ranging from 276 in lombardy, where the law does not require but permits the presence of psychologists in hospitals, to one in the southern region of molise. the order of psychologists has now about 90,000 members, about one third of all psychologists in europe. the phenomenal growth of psychology in italy has created new problems since more than a third of psychologists are unemployed, underemployed or employed in jobs which do not involve professional psychological skills. so italian universities are now pressured to cut the number of students they admit in psychology for undergraduate and graduate training. this year for instance, the university of sapienza at rome, where i teach, which in 1970 instituted the first psychology degree in italy, has cut by one-half his maximum student enrollment in its undergraduate three-year bachelor degrees. in general, university funds also have been cut for doctoral programs. advantages and disadvantages of community psychology association (sipco), not formally connected to organized psychology (aip) if one chooses as a criterium the number of members, creating a separate community psychology association (sipco)not connected with aip, has been a disadvantage. while the old division of community psychology within sips reached a maximum of 400 members under the coordination of marco traversi (prematurely deceased after having done a wonderful job of spreading cp among professionals), sipco members have been fewer, ranging from 50 to a 100, and they have been mostly academics and graduate students, from 1994 to the present. however, the decision to create a separate association sipco has allowed community psychology a certain amount of visibility and given it the freedom to promote yearly seminars and conferences on topics of specific interest for community psychology such as empowerment and self-help, community psychology and politics, adolescents needs and social service, intercultural issues and empowerment, and europeanmediterranean intercultural dialogue. sipco has held biannual conferences in prevention for schools and communities and also promoted the birth of the first italian community psychology journal, it also publishes a newsletter and has a site (http://www.sipco.it). among the most important achievements of sipco is the organization of the first european congress of community psychology in rome in 1995, where the european network of community psychology (encp) was created and a european perspective to community psychology began to emerge (francescato and tomai 2001). encp promoted the foundation of the european community psychology association (ecpa) in 2004. italian community psychologists have developed and refined a variety of tools to deal with social and human problems and to promote empowerment at the individual, group, organizational and community levels. among these are: (a) community profiling and network building to identify strength and problem areas of a local community, along eight profiles, and to promote broadly networked community projects (francescato, 2007; francescato, solimeno, mebane, & tomai, 2009; martini & torti, 2003); (b) multidimensional organizational analyses to global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 empower people working in organizations, to detect interconnections among points of strengths and problems areas along four organizational dimensions, and to plan desired organizational changes (francescato, 2007, 2008; francescato, tomai, & solimeno 2008; and francescato, mebane, benedetti, rosa, solimeno, & tomai 2010); and (c) affective education and empowerment training, to help people belonging to the same small groups to improve their group skills, solve conflicts and create a mutual help climate (francescato 2007; francescato, solimeno, mebane, tomai, 2009. all of these participatory intervention strategies use among other tools, personal, organizational, social and media narratives (francescato, 2007, 2008, 2010; martini & torti, 2003. other instruments include: mediation strategies for handling conflicts among family members and social groups, and ways to promote and support both conventional and new forms of civic and political participation, as well as to promote self-help groups (cicognani & zani, 2009; zani 2012). several italian community psychologists have made important theoretical contributions, integrating constructivist and neopositivistic perspectives, or revisiting the theoretical frameworks of latin american writers who focus on a critical analysis of reality and on action aimed at social change and the transformation of existing power relations (amerio, 2004; zani 2012). francescato, tomai, and ghirelli (2002) have formulated some guiding principles for a ‘theory of practice’ that outline how community psychology views the interaction between person and context, considering the complexity of the social system, focusing on protective factors and on the crucial role of personal and social narratives and on the link between individual empowerment and collective political struggle (francescato, arcidiacono, albanese, & mannarini, 2007). some italian researchers have redefined key concepts such as social capital and sense of community underlining also the dark side of these phenomena. people can have a strong sense of community and high social capital but be very hostile to newcomers, or they can have a high sense of belonging and still have negative emotions toward their community, and mistrust local institutions and other citizens (arcidiacono & procentese, 2005; cicognani & zani, 2009; marta & scabini, 2003). others have re-examined the various historical meanings of ‘community’, from those rooted in a territory to virtual online communities (francescato, tomai, & mebane, 2006; mannarini, 2009; mebane, francescato, porcelli, iannone, & attanasio, 2008; reich et al. (2007), and vazquez rivera (2010)). sipco also tried to promote academic cp in italy, but with mixed results. since the late 90s, various major legal reforms have taken place in italian universities, granting them much more autonomy than in the past. this led to cp being taught in several universities as part of widely different psychology degree programs, focused on clinical, social, educational and work psychology. the drawback has been that while from 1986 to 1995 cp was a compulsory subject for all clinical and community psychology 5-year degree students, the new reforms created two levels of degrees: a threeyear undergraduate and a two-year master degree program, in which universities were free to offer or not to offer community courses. so community psychology disappeared in some curricula and prospered in others. for instance, lecce, torino and palermo promoted the first interfaculty community psychology doctoral program was opened, which trained several young community psychologists. now this doctorial program has been closed, so graduate students now learn community psychology only within social, educational and health doctoral programs. today community psychology is taught in about 30 undergraduate and master level degree programs, but as several senior community psychologists have retired in torino and lecce, or are near retirement, and few new university positions have been created, the prospects for community psychology in italy are not too bright. now, there is no public doctoral program in cp, and there are only scant opportunities for some professional training in cpin only one of the more than 300 private post graduate schools, who train for four years psychologists with a master degree to become therapists (aspic in rome offers a training in both psychotherapy and community psychology). c p remains a minority subject both in academia and in professional areas. community psychologists are less likely to be supported in psychology departments, since attention and funding are going increasingly to neuroscience. moreover, as state funds for education are cut because of the financial crisis, the field is getting even more marginalized within psychology departments. the interdisciplinary attitude of cp has a detrimental effect on its institutionalization as a psychological sub-discipline. the site of the national order does not even mention community psychology among the professional areas of employment. we have no reliable data today on how many community psychologists actually work in italy. we know for certain we will have to lobby as hard as our australian colleagues and be very creative in the next few years if we want cp to sail over troubles waters in italy. global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 the paradox of community psychology in italy today: more and more needed and less and less offered in this period of crisis elsewhere (francescato & zani 2010) we have outlined how the recent economic crisis has worsened the lot of the poorest and most marginalized groups of citizens, increased the number of people unemployed and underemployed, and augmented fears for the future in many segments of the population, living in contexts already beset by environmental, social, political and financial problems such as found in italy. as community psychology theorists have postulated, human problems have a social side, because most problems are born in social contexts and in them one can find the cultural and material tools to seek their solution, but they have also an individual side because it is a person who suffers and who must cope with them. given our hierarchical social contexts, which offer opportunities and obstacles in an unequal manner for different groups of persons, it is likely that most obstacles, and most suffering will increasingly be faced by less empowered groups, who will also have less access to services, have more health problems and suffer more family disruptions. the worsening of the crisis in europe has already increased in the last two years personal, interpersonal and family conflicts along preexisting social divides: between natives and immigrants, women and men, young and old, who are now pitted against each other to compete for fewer resources, and find it harder to live together. the poor–rich, migrants–native differences and the generational and gender gaps create multilevel problems that would be best handled with a community psychology oriented approach.. these complex problems could best be tackled through community psychology programs that are based on the guiding principles that problems have to be faced simultaneously on several levels since transactions among individuals and the hierarchical social contexts are multidirectional and occur at multiple levels (other individuals, small groups, organizations, local and virtual communities (francescato & tomai, 2001).cp programs, however, are less likely to be financed, deepening the social justice imbalance already prevailing in most european countries, especially in countries beset by heavy national debts such as italy. to make cp more visible outside academia is particularly crucial in this period of economic crisis, since the way problems are tackled could be modified utilizing a cp perspective. in fact community psychologists underline that structural and economic interventions, which are generally implemented when countries face economic crisis, are needed but are not sufficient. we have also to work with people, by rebuilding their trust, and rekindling interpersonal and social ties. community psychologists therefore, have to increase the visibility of the evidence that policies and intervention based on cp's values of empowerment, participation and social justice produce more collective and individual well-being than those deriving from predominant neo-liberalistic, competition-oriented and consumerist values. community psychologists need to become more media oriented, using radio, tv and above all the internet to make cpmore known. we need to provide compelling evidence that community psychologists have the competencies to tackle (with other professionals) today's complex problems. community psychologists should document that they can act as successful facilitators in increasing: a) social ties and trust; b) empowerment of individuals, small groups, organizations and communities; c) active participation in local communities and politics; d) constructive solution of conflicts; e) consolidation of social networks; and e) the sense of community. the decrease in the socio-political empowerment of european youth is particularly troublesome for cp, which is becoming all over the world mostly a female profession (mebane, 2008; vazquez rivera, 2010). cp unites clinical psychology's traditional concern with the welfare of the individual with an interest in the legislative and political processes that create the conditions in which individuals live. however, the increasing feminization of psychology students may make it harder to get them interested in cp. women's cultural heritage pushes them toward the ‘caring professions’, while the same cultural heritage coupled with the present individualistic weltanschauung pushes them toward the ‘privatization’ of social problems, and furthers their interests toward clinical psychology. in spite of changes promoted by feminism, italian women, for instance, are still less likely than men to be actively interested in politics or to become activists in political parties and movements, and much less likely than men to occupy top positions in most fields (gelli, 2009; mebane, 2008) moreover, in most italian degree programs, psychology majors are offered dozens of subjects related to clinical topics, yet very few require students to take courses like contemporary history, sociology, economics, political psychology or gender studies, which could provide opportunities for students to understand the relevance of politics to their professional careers and their personal lives. therefore, we may in the future fail to have an adequate number of motivated female students, who will choose cp as their global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 specialty. and obviously we need to recruit more males in psychology. we need to promote interdisciplinary endeavors, to better identify our unique contributions and areas of theoretical and methodological overlaps with other disciplines. to enhance the academic standing of community psychology, we have to develop innovative strategic alliances and create joint programs with other disciplines (not only sociology or pedagogy but also political science, urban planning, architecture and economy). we have to improve graduate training giving students practical opportunities to become skilled not only in action research and program evaluation, as now occurs in most programs, but also in intervention methodologies at the individual, small group, organizational and community levels (francescato, 2007; reich et al., 2007). at a more general cultural level, support for the values of social justice and equality is dwindling, compared to the seventies and early eighties when cp first developed in italy. then, political and social engagement was favored by the existence of a huge variety of social movements fighting for collective goals. today individualism prevails; thanks to popular media programs, which glorify values of individual success, the restless pursuit of visibility, money and entertainment. is cp then going to die or become hopelessly marginalized in these troubling socio-economic, cultural and academic contexts? undoubtedly in the near future cp in italy will have to face besides the problems already outlined other challenges which require us to act on many different level. we also need to evaluate more the efficacy and efficiency of different action strategies, and to develop methodologies which are also more respectful of the decision-making capacities of the people we work with. we have to overcome the gap between academic and professionals. many psychologists and other professionals work in health and social services, in organizational and community planning or in human resources departments using cp tools but having almost no contact with academic cp. how to secure funds through private and public new sources is another key issue. we still hope that the european union will keep financing action research in the health and social domains. however, we need to find other sources of private funding besides the european union (foundations, unions, ethical banks, professional associations, etc.). making our discipline more visible could help in securing new sources of funding. how to exploit the opportunities provided by virtual communities to promote social capital is yet another challenge facing community psychology in general. different action studies have shown that integrating cscl (computer supported collaborative learning) and community psychology interventions can increase social efficacy, socio-political empowerment, bonding and bridging social capital in university and high school students (mebane et al., 2008; tomai, rosa, mebane, d'acunti, benedetti, & francescato, 2009). we need to study how belonging to facebook and other online settings affects the social capital of users, and how sense of community, and other key constructs can or cannot be applied in virtual communities. references amerio, p. (2004). problemi umani in comunità di massa: una psicologia tra clinica e politica. (human problems in mass community: a psychology between clinic and politics). torino: einaudi. arcidiacono, c., & procentese, f. (2005). distinctiveness and sense of community in the historical center of naples: a piece of participatory action-research. journal of community psychology, 5, 1–8. cicognani, e., & zani, b. (2009). sense of community and social participation among adolescents and young adults living in italy. in d. e.dolejšiová, & m. a.garcía lópez (eds.), challenges for citizenship, citizenship education and democratic practice in europe (pp. 100–113). strasbourg: council of europe publishing. francescato, d. (1977a) psicologia di comunità: un nuovo ruolo per lo psicologo? ( community psychology: a new role for psychologists?) giornale italiano di psicologia, 1, 11-63. francescato d. (1977b) psicologia di comunità. (community psychology) milano, feltrinelli. francescato, d. (2007). community psychology core competencies taught at the undergraduate and master's level in some italian universities and in most non-academically based master's program. the community psychologist, 4, 49–52. francescato, d. (2008). to give psychology away takes a lot of theoretical and practical training. the community psychologist, 1, 41–44. francescato, d. (2010). salient characteristics of european community psychology: past achievements and future challenges. in c.vazquez rivera (ed.), international community psychology. shared agendas in diversity (pp. 68–103). san juan: cirec, university of porto rico. global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 francescato, d., & tomai, m. (2001). community psychology: should there be a european perspective? journal of community and applied social psychology, 11, 371–380. francescato, d., tomai, m., & ghirelli, g. (2002). fondamenti di psicologia di comunità. principi, strumenti ed aree d'intervento. (foundations of community psychology. principles, tools and areas of intervention). roma: carocci. francescato, d., tomai, m., & mebane, m. (2006). psicologia comunitaria en la ensenanza y la orientacion. madrid: narcea. francescato, d., arcidiacono, c., albanesi, c., & mannarini, t. (2007). community psychology in italy: past developments and future perspectives. in s.reich, m.riemer, i.prilleltensky, & m.montero (eds.), international community psychology. history and theories (pp. 263–281). new york: springer. francescato, d., tomai, m., & solimeno, a. (2008). lavorare e decidere meglio in organbizzazioni empowering e empowered. (working and deciding better in empowering and empowered organisations). milan: angeli. francescato, d., solimeno, a., mebane, m. e., & tomai, m. (2009). increasing students perceived political empowerment through online and face to face community psychology seminars. journal of community psychology, 37, 874–894. francescato, d., mebane, m., benedetti, m., rosa, v., solimeno, a., & e tomai, m. (2010). empowering students, teachers, non-teaching staff and parents in a troubled high school through community psychology multidimensional interventions. global journal of community psychology practice, 1, http://www.gjcpp.org/en/vol1 francescato d and zani b (2010) community psychology in europe: more needed, less wanted? journal of community & applied social psychology, 20, 445-54. gelli, b. (2009). psicologia della differenza. (psychology of gender differences). milano: angeli. lavanco, g. (2001). oltre la politica. psicologia di comunità, giovani e partecipazione. (beyond politics. community psychology, young people and participation). milano: angeli. mannarini, t. (2009). la cittadinanza attiva. psicologia sociale della partecipazione pubblica. (active citizenship. the social psychology of public participation). bologna: il mulino. marta, e., & scabini, e. (2003). giovani volontari. impegnarsi, crescere e far crescere. (young volunteers. getting involved, growing and promoting human growth). firenze: giunti. martini, e. r., & torti, a. (2003). fare lavoro di comunità. (community work). roma: carocci. mebane, m. (2008). psicologia delle pari opportunità. (psychology for equal opportunities). milano: unicopli. mebane, m., francescato, d., porcelli, r., iannone, a., & attanasio, c. (2008). evaluation of the efficacy of affective education online training in promoting academic and professional learning and social capital. international journal of human– computer interaction, 24, 1–19. reich, s., riemer, m., prilleltensky, i., & monterom. (eds.). (2007). international community psychology. history and theories. new york: springer. sanchez vidal, a., combrano costanzo, a., palacinm. (eds.). (2004). psicologia comunitaria europea: comunidad, poder, etica e valores. european community psychology, community power, ethics and values. barcelona: universitad de barcelona publicacions. tomai, m., rosa, v., mebane, m., d'acunti, a., benedetti, m., & francescato, d. (2009). virtual communities in school as tools to promote social capital with high school students. computers and education, 52, 14–39. vazquez rivera, c. (ed.). (2010). international community psychology. shared agendas in diversity. san juan: cirec, university of porto rico. zani, b., & cicognani, e. (2010). evaluating the participatory process in a community-based health promotion project. journal of prevention & intervention in the community, 38, 55–69. zani, b., & palmonari, a. (1980). manuale di psicologia di comunità. (handbook of community psychology). bologna: il mulino. zani b (ed) (2012) psicologia di comunità prospettive, idee, metodi (cp prospectives, ideas and methods) rome: carocci. exploring sense of community as a predictor of critical consciousness among youth in ukraine mazna patka, jen wallin-ruschman, adam murry, and natalya minich author biographies: mazna patka, is a community psychologist living in kenya. jen wallin-ruschman, earned a doctorate in applied psychology with a concentration in community psychology from portland state university. she is an assistant professor at the college of idaho. adam t. murry, is an assistant professor of psychology at the university of calgary. the primary focus of his work is on participatory research methods with indigenous communities and organizations. natalya minich, obtained her phd in ukrainian literature. since 2005, she has been teaching at onat in ukraine. her primary areas of interest are modern literature and english as a second language. recommended citation: patka, m., wallin-ruschman, j., murry a., & minich n. (2018). exploring sense of community as a predictor of critical consciousness among youth in ukraine. global journal of community psychology practice, 9(1), 1 17. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 exploring sense of community as a predictor of critical consciousness among youth in ukraine abstract this article furthers our knowledge of critical consciousness (i.e., perceived inequality, egalitarianism, sociopolitical action) by testing an expanded model of critical consciousness development that hypothesized relationality (i.e., sense of community) as a predictor of critical consciousness and exploring it in an understudied region (i.e., ukraine). while our united states -based measures yielded factor structures that are not comparable to the united states, we found that sense of community is marginally significantly related to egalitarianism and perceived inequality, but not significantly related to sociopolitical action. we also found that women and ukrainian speakers were more likely to experience sense of community and ukrainian speakers were more likely to be involved in sociopolitical action. we discuss implications for research and theory. critical consciousness (cc), a concept originally introduced by paul freire (2000), is a process of critical thinking, reflection on social injustices and inequities, and taking action to address those injustices (e.g., sociopolitical participation). it posits that change is a dialectic process involving reflection and action to address societal inequities. cc allows youth to understand their connection to societal problems, and feel equipped to challenge systems that promote and sustain injustices. starting with the pioneering work of freire (2000), one of the central arenas in which cc is studied and promoted is through both formal and informal education settings. freire’s (2000) approach to education was to eliminate the banking system of education. instead of a linear, one directional transfer of knowledge, freire (2000) offers a dialectic approach or praxis in which both teachers and students provide information from their realities, both parties reflect on the information, engage in dialogue, take action, and then recreate information, leading back to reflection. the process of cc is dynamic and continuous, making it difficult to conceptualize and measure. however, projects to enhance critical consciousness with youth are being undertaken on a global scale in both formal and informal education settings. in order to know if these projects are effective, an assessment instrument for cc is helpful (diemer, rapa, voight, & mcwhirter, 2016). however, the field grapples with cc measurement because there is still a debate about the number and type of components that make up cc (jemal, 2017). most cc scholars agree on a cognitive and behavioral/action component of cc (jemal, 2017), while some scholars also include a third component often related to motivation or efficacy (jemal, 2017). in our study, we seek to expand our concept of cc by understanding the role of relationality in cc development. the second author developed a theory of the role of emotions and relationality in cc development, rooted in the work of feminist and social movement scholars, which we explored among ukrainian youth. herein, we present our rationale for understanding the role of relationality when examining critical consciousness, a discussion of the measurement of cc and the ukrainian context in relation to cc development. beyond the individual: understanding the role of others as a part of critical consciousness the idea that sense of community (soc) may lead to enhanced cc could be connected back to the consciousness-raising groups of the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 second wave of feminism in the us (ferree & hess, 2000). these groups were rooted in the idea that by joining together and engaging in dialogue, the personal could become political, an aspect of the cognitive component of cc. feminist and social movement scholars (e.g., boler 1999; polletta 2002) have developed a nuanced understanding of how relationships are an important driver of consciousness raising and engaging in critical action. for example, developing cc involves seeing the world in new ways and taking action towards amending injustices. but standing against societal norms is scary and potentially harmful. both of these may stand in conflict with an individual’s previous socialization, existing relationships, and/or work or education environment. in other words, cc development can be risky. some of this risk may be mitigated by relationships that are rooted within a similar understanding or way of being in the world (boler, 1999). using these literatures, we propose that relationality is meaningfully related to cc and that certain types of relationships and communities (e.g., supportive, open, dialogue oriented, solidarity based) are important to the three subcomponents of cc. while more cc scholars (e.g., christens, winn and duke 2016; jemal, 2017) are starting to acknowledge the role of the collective, groups, community, and relationality in cc, this line of thought has not been clearly defined. often this aspect of the cc model is a brief addendum where it seems to matter but there is not much specific testing or even theorizing of when or how it impacts cc (wallin-ruschman, 2018). our model of cc development sees relationality within a community as a driver of cc development. groups with a higher level of sense of community are thought to share more experiences and engage in more meaningful dialogue, both of which are thought to facilitate cc development. we discuss our model in an article addressing similar research in iran (wallin-ruschman, patka, & murry, 2018). the qualitative work on which this study is based found that “relations seem to help work out ambivalence and ambiguity through engagement in discussions and shared experiences” (wallin-ruschman, in press, pg. 18). a follow up mixed-methods study, also conducted within higher education in the united states, found that a driving factor influencing cc development was the importance of community (wallin-ruschman, allegood, grim, & langston, 2016). some aspect of belonging to a group seems to help facilitate cc development, at least in the united states higher education context in which they have been explored. (pg. 44). when in a community, individuals may be able to shift blame from themselves to social structures, a fundamental aspect of cc (summers-effler, 2002). changing the way in which one thinks involves breaking from the status quo, which can be difficult, particularly if the status quo is meeting some of an individual’s needs (summers-effler, 2002). summers-effler (2012) suggests that the emotional energy obtained through group interactions and collective identity can begin to fulfill these needs and begin to shift awareness from the individual to the collective. benefit from the status quo would be more the case for individuals with more privileged identities and thus provides some grounds to contribute to the ongoing discussion in the literature of the differences of cc in more marginalized versus more privileged groups (jemal, 2017). for privileged youth, cc development promotes understanding of how social injustice operates and ways in which all people can promote a just society (watts, diemer & voight, 2011). thus, it is imperative that attention be devoted to ways of enhancing the ability of youth to think critically about the world, their status in it, and how to make the world a more equitable place. we argue that when individuals are a part of a community where they feel belonging, solidarity, and support they can better engage http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 in the dialogue and praxis that leads to cc. in a recent review of the cc literature, jemal (2017) noted the importance of group identity in cc and argued that “group identity and a sense of community provide support and acceptance from others who are also struggling (hatcher et al. 2010)” (pg. 617) which may lead to cc development. measuring critical consciousness scales provide an immediate assessment of where individuals are on the continuum of cc, and may be used to measure changes in cc after they have been exposed to practices intended to facilitate its growth. for decades quantitative research on cc was limited, and relied on proxy measures (diemer, rapa, park & perry, 2017). until recently, no scale specific to cc existed. the first scale appeared in 2014, and since then four scales have been developed to measure the degree of cc of individuals, although each approaches the measurement of cc from different perspectives. a full discussion of these scales can be found in diemer et al. (2015). despite the initial excitement in having a quantitative measure of cc, each scale has substantial limitations (diemer, mcwhirter, ozer, & rapa, 2015; wallin-ruschman et al, 2018). in an area of study that is still debating the component parts of cc (jemal, 2017), over relying on conceptualizations of cc as laid out in the various measure may stunt development of the field. cc literature, like much of western psychology in general, has tended to focus on the individual without attention to their social context. like gilligan’s (1982) critique of kohlberg’s concept of moral development, we hold that the cc literature has similarly been limited by a masculine perspective that emphasizes the cognitive and the individual (carlson, engebretson & chamberlain, 2006; freire, 2000; wallin-rushman, 2014; 2018). this focus is also reflected in the measures of cc. some cc scholars have started to explore a facet of relationality (i.e., social support) by examining support for challenging social injustice, which has found that support for challenging social injustice is positively related to critical reflection (o’connor, 1997; mustakova-prossardt, 1998), but it is not always related with sociopolitical action (diemer et al., 2006; diemer & li, 2011; morsillo & prilleltensky, 2007). jamel (2017) argues that “the development of critical consciousness is theorized to occur when people are socially supported to explore and challenge social inequity (diemer et al. 2006; diemer and li 2011; freire 1973; ginwright and james 2002; giroux 1983; green 2009). supportive contexts may encourage the development of perceived capacity that one can make a difference and seems to foster engagement tin sociopolitical action (diemer et al. 2009).” (pg. 614). for example, interventions designed to enhance cc are generally group or community based and the literature indicates that schools, as well as parents, community groups, and peers, play pivotal roles in developing cc (e.g., diemer, kauffman, koenig, trahan, & hsieh, 2006). however, measurement of cc currently does not take this into account (diemer et al., 2016). while relationships (both between peers and between a mentor and mentee) are thought to be important to the process of cc development, few have explored the possibility that community may be an actual component or predictor variable of cc. while none of the three existing scales perfectly match our model of cc (i.e., none include emotions or relationality) we used the critical consciousness scale (ccs) developed by diemer and colleges (2017) because the critical reflection and critical action components most closely aligned with our theoretical conceptualizations. the ccs includes questions related to gender-, race-, and class-based inequities and participation in raceand gender-based activism (diemer et al., 2015). further, the scaling of the ccs allows for understanding the different http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 components of cc and not just one overarching cc construct. none of the three existing measures of cc include a relational or emotional dimension. thus, we used a measure of soc, specifically the sense of community index 2 (sci-2; chavis, lee & acosta, 2008), as a proxy for a relational dimension of cc. little research has empirically examined the measure’s factor structure (rivera-segarra, rivera-medina & varas-diaz, 2016). however we chose the sci-2 because it has been used internationally with some success (chavis et al., 2008) and our data was collected internationally (i.e., ukraine), which is currently unexplored in terms of cc research. further, cc is context specific and thus we sought to measure relationality within the specific context in which cc was being measured the university setting. recent research suggests that relationships with classmates and instructors can be important components of cc development (wallin-ruschman, 2014). while some qualitative studies have pointed toward the importance of relationality in cc development, there has been little discussion of this concept in regard to modeling or measuring it as an aspect of cc. christens, winn and duke (2016) suggest that relational empowerment may offer a useful area of modeling the role of relationships in cc. earlier, christens (2012) outlined a model of relational empowerment and suggested that soc and the relational dimension of empowerment share some important conceptual overlap. however, he also argues that soc is not an explicitly political concept, as is empowerment. the soc model (mcmillan & chavis, 1986) on which the sci-2 index is based (chavis et al., 2008), measures four dimensions: membership, influence, fulfillment of needs, and emotional connection (chupuer & pretty, 1999). this model of soc overlaps well with the model of emotional and relational cc development driving this study. we set forth to examine the relationship between soc and cc among youth to explore cc development. we conducted the study in ukraine, a country in which, to our knowledge, no work exists on cc. ukraine is an eastern european country that gained independence in 1991 with the dissolution of the soviet union. ukrainian is the official language, although the population of ukraine is made up of various ethnic groups with ukrainians (77.8%) and russians (17.3%) being the largest groups (cia factbook, n.d.). our data was collected in the city of odessa, a russian speaking city which is often referred to as an “international city” given its ethnic diversity. we believe that assessing cc among ukrainian youth is of particular importance given the current conflict between ukraine and russia. amidst the conflict, there is increasing consciousness about ukraine’s sociopolitical context and both nationalist and pro-russian activism. however, information on critical consciousness in ukraine is not available. while it would be beneficial to have conducted a qualitative study to explore critical consciousness in ukraine first, our ukrainian colleagues are not trained in qualitative research. therefore, we opted to utilize one of the new us based measure to explore critical consciousness in this distinct context. international cc interventions are not uncommon, and being able to measure the impact of an intervention is ideal. we felt the opportunity to begin to test the ccs in an international setting was a good starting point to exploring the use of the scale outside the us. the present study contributes to theory on cc by examining the role of relational variables (i.e., soc) on its development, and to cc research in general by extending its use to a ukrainian context. we sought to examine (1) is the factor structure of ukrainian cc and soc comparable to the structure identified in the united states?, (2) does soc predict cc?, and (3) how do demographic differences affect cc and soc among students in ukraine? http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 method participants the total sample was made up of 106 first year university students in odessa, ukraine. participants were enrolled in a university that specialized in training students in telecommunications. at the time of data collection (may 2015), the university had approximately 300 first year university students. notably, ukrainian primary and secondary school is made up of 11 years of education, and a bachelor’s degree typically requires four years of education. all students were between the ages of 17 and 20 years (m = 18.02, sd=.69). the demographic composition of the sample is reported in table 1. notably, the average monthly salary in ukraine was 5337 uah in june of 2016 (trading economics 2016). table 1. demographics by percentage and number of participants. demographic variables (n=106) %(n) gender male 49.1 (52) female 50 (53) nationality ukrainian 79.8 (87) russian 8.3 (9) native language ukrainian 42.2 (46) russian 52.4 (56) language used at university ukrainian 6.4 (7) russian 86.2 (94) english 1.8 (2) living situation with family 51.37 (56) university dormitory 39.4 (43) rented apartment 3.7 (4) mother’s highest level of education secondary school 7.3 (8) vocational school 36.7 (40) university 53.2 (58) father’s highest level of education secondary school 5.5 (6) vocational school 45.9 (50) university 45 (49) parents combined monthly income in ukrainian hryvnia ($1 usd = 25.05 uah) less than 3000 uah (less than $119.76 usd) 9.2 (10) 3000 to 6000 uah ($119.76 to $239.52 usd) 46.8 (51) 6000 to 10000 uah ($239.52 to $399.20 usd) 17.4 (19) 10000 to 20000 uah ($399.20 usd to $798.40 usd) 13.8 (15) 20000 to 30000 ($798.40 usd to $1197.60 usd) 3.7 (4) 30000 to 50000 ($1197.60 to $1996.01 usd) 0.9 (1) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 procedures institutional review board approval was received prior to conducting the research. however, institutional review boards or its equivalent do not exist in ukraine, so approval from the university’s vice rector in international relations, responsible for all international cooperation, was sought and received. given that odessa, ukraine is a russian speaking city, all research materials were translated into russian using established procedures to ensure cultural and linguistic equivalence (liang & bogat, 1994). first, a bilingual russian and english speaker translated the english measures to russian. then, the translated russian measures were back-translated into english by a person who did not conduct the initial translation. we compared the original english measures with the back-translated english measures to determine whether each item retained its meaning. all items were deemed to be equivalent to its original meaning. we surveyed students within the classroom setting and we asked all first year students to participate; none declined participation. participants were offered extra credit points toward their final grade in the class. however, points awarded for participation were low; thus, non-participation did not significantly impact student grades. all participants first received an information sheet and, when they agreed to participate, they were given the survey measures to complete. participants completed the measures anonymously and independently and submitted the completed survey on a desk in the front of the classroom. measures in addition to the demographic questions, we administered two surveys: ccs (diemer et al., 2017) and the sci-2 (chavis et al., 2008). the ccs (diemer et al., 2017) is made up of 22 items measuring three subscales. the first subscale measures perceived inequality (eight items), as measured by the perception of socioeconomic, racial/ethnic, and gendered constraints on educational and occupational opportunity. the second subscale, egalitarianism (five items) measures endorsement of societal equality within society. the last subscale measures sociopolitical participation (nine items), which is self-reported participation in social and political activities to change perceived inequalities. higher scores on each ccs subscale reflect a greater degree of endorsement on the given reflection (subscales one and two) or action (subscale three). validation work by diemer et al (2017) demonstrated good fit for the proposed 3-factor structure within a high school student sample in the us, with each sub-scale showing good internal consistency using cronbach’s alpha (i.e., perceived inequality, ɑ = .90; egalitarianism, ɑ = .88; sociopolitical action, ɑ = .85). the sci-2 consists of 25 items and is based on mcmillan and chavis’ (1986) theory of sense of community, which is made up of membership (six items), influence (six items), reinforcement of needs (six items), and shared emotional connection (six items). one additional item (i.e., how important is it to you to feel a sense of community with other community member?) is intended to be a validating question; however, 15 participants did not answer this question. data was not missing for any other items in the sci-2. the sci-2 subscales have shown good reliability with cronbach’s alpha (α) coefficient scores between .79 and .86 in previous studies, including international samples (chavis et al., 2008). higher scores on each sci-2 subscale reflect a greater degree of the given subscale. we could not find any validation studies to date that were specific to the sci-2. validation work on the sci-1 generally showed poor fit for the proposed four factor structure, but did offer some evidence of model invariance across time when models were nested within students (flaherty, zwick, & bouchey, 2014). part of our contribution in this project is to evaluate whether or not the singleor fourhttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 factor structures proposed by chavis et al. (2008) are tenable. analysis to test whether soc impacts cc we ran two structural equation models using maximum likelihood estimation in r version 2.14.1 (r development core team, 2011) using the lavaan package (rosseel, 2012), where sense of community predicted critical consciousness sub-scales: perceived inequality, sociopolitical action, and egalitarianism. the first model included only variables of theoretical interest; the second model included demographic variables for age, gender, language, income, father’s education, and mother’s education to test and control for the effect of individual differences. the addition of six covariates strained the power of our analysis given our sample size and our model fit. therefore, results are reported for a reduced second model, one that achieved good model fit and included only covariates with at least marginal significance. statistical significance was interpreted at the conventional alpha of .05, although due to our small sample size relationships of marginal significance are also reported (α =< .10). results research question 1: factor structure critical consciousness: a confirmatory factor analysis showed poor fit for the prescribed three factor structure (χ²(206) = 423.10, p < .001; cfi = .74; tli =.71; rmsea = .10; srmr = .10). a principal components analysis using oblique rotation on the correlation matrices revealed the data contained six components with multiple cross-loading items. after removing cross-loading items, the proposed three factor structure fit well (χ²(45) = 336.60, p < .001; cfi = .98; tli =.97; rmsea = .04; srmr = .05) indicating that with minor revisions the scale held up in our international sample. however, unlike previous studies none of the sub-scales significantly correlated with each other or loaded significantly on a higher-order factor of critical consciousness. additionally, while perceived inequality and sociopolitical action correlated near zero (r = .06, p = .21), egalitarianism, albeit non-significantly, correlated negatively with perceived inequality (r = -.20, p = .12) and sociopolitical action (r = -.07, p = .35). this is in line with the conclusions drawn by diemer and colleagues (2015), who suggested that egalitarianism represents more so the endorsement of an “ideal state” rather than a critical reflection on real conditions of inequality; they also contend that the ccs subscales are distinct enough to be considered separate subscales. therefore, sub-scales of critical consciousness were not thought to represent an overall latent variable and were treated as separate constructs. the internal consistency (i.e., cronbach’s alpha) of the remaining items by sub-scale were above the conventional cut-off of .70 (john & benet-martinez, 2000) at α = .81 for perceived inequality (5 items), α = .78 for egalitarianism (2 items) and α = .74 for sociopolitical action (3 items). sense of community: a confirmatory factor analysis modeling the four-factor structure on a higher order latent variable of soc revealed extremely poor fit (χ²(248) = 563.70, p < .001; cfi=.67; tli=.63; rmsea=.11, srmr=.16) and a four-factor structure without a higher-order factor was nonpositive definite. a principal components analysis using oblique rotation on the correlation matrices showed that there were six components with eigenvalues over one, multiple items cross-loaded on more than one component (> .40), and few loaded according to their prescribed factors (~11 of 24 items). these results lead us to conclude that the scale does not function adequately within the international context regardless of whether the four factor or single factor structure was utilized. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 we surmised that the structure of our data did not match the originally proposed structure due partly to problems with the scale itself (chipuer & pretty, 1999), but also as a result of the particular community we sampled (i.e., the university community). for instance, the second component included items such as “i can recognize most of the members of this community” (loading = .91), and it is not likely that people would recognize most individuals in a university, outside of one’s major area of study, classrooms, or dorm setting. similarly, the third component included items such as “people in this community have similar needs, priorities, and goals” (loading = .78), which is true to the extent that everyone attends the university for an education and to better their future, but beyond the university such statements are not likely to be true given the diversity of students’ needs, priorities, and goals for the future. therefore, for the purpose of we took items that loaded on the first component only (>.40), minus items that cross-loaded on other components (>.40), as this component seemed to represent the sense of community concept articulated in the literature. for example, the highest loading item was “being a member of this community is part of my identity” (loading = .81). only three items remained using this standard. models containing only three items are considered “just-identified models,” that by necessity show perfect fit in confirmatory factor analyses due to the equal number of variances/co-variances and the parameters to be estimated (kline, 2016). the internal consistency for these items was α = .70. research questions 2-3: sense of community and individual differences on critical consciousness model 1 tested whether soc predicted perceived inequality, sociopolitical action, and egalitarianism without covariates. the model fit the data well (χ² (62) = 69.07, p = .25; cfi= .98; tli= .98; rmsea= .03; srmr= .08), however none of our predicted relationships were statistically significant by the conventional level (α = .05). sense of community was marginally statistically significant on perceived inequality (β = -.24, p = .07) and egalitarianism (β =.23, p = .07), such that reporting feeling a soc predicted a decrease in perceived inequality and an increase in endorsement of egalitarianism (see table 2). soc was not significantly related to sociopolitical action (β =.07, p = .59). model 2 included the same predictions and latent construct definitions. however, we controlled for individual differences in sense of community, perceived inequality, egalitarianism, and sociopolitical action through demographic covariates: age, gender, and language. model 2 fit the data reasonably well (χ² (89) = 108.75, p = .08; cfi= .95; tli= .93; rmsa= .05; srmr= .08). the marginally significant relationships between sense of community and perceived inequality (β = .24, p = .08) and egalitarianism (β = .24, p = .07) remained, as did the non-significant relationship between sense of community and sociopolitical action (β = .09, p = .48). statistically significant relationships were identified between gender and sense of community (β = .39, p = .002), and between language and sense of community (β = -.25, p = .05) and language and sociopolitical action. coefficients revealed that women were more likely to experience a sense of community than men, and that russian speakers were less likely to experience a sense of community or be involved in sociopolitical action than ukrainian speakers. in addition, a marginally significant relationship between age and sociopolitical action was also found (β = -.21, p = .07), where older participants were less likely to be involved in sociopolitical action than younger participants (see table 3). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 table 2. unstandardized, standardized, and significance levels for model 1 (standard errors in parentheses; n = 106) parameter estimate unstandardized standardized p measurement model estimates perceived inequality cc2 1.00 .57 na poor children have fewer chances to get a good high school education. cc4 .82 (.18) .56 < .001 women have fewer chances to get good jobs. cc5 1.34 (.24) .82 < .001 poor people have fewer chances to get good jobs. cc6 1.04 (.20) .68 < .001 certain racial or ethnic groups have fewer chances to get ahead. cc8 1.22 (.23) .75 < .001 poor people have fewer chances to get ahead. egalitarianism cc10 1 .65 na it would be good if groups could be equal. cc11 1.48 (.86) .98 .08 group equality should be our ideal. sociopolitical action cc17 1 .81 na contacted a public official by phone, mail, or email or tell him/her how you felt about a particular social or political issue. cc19 .71 (.14) .70 < .001 worked on a political campaign. cc21 .47 (.09) .63 < .001 signed an email or written petition about a social or political issue. sense of community soc1 1 .47 na i get important needs of mine met because i am part of this community. soc4 1.67 (.43) .75 < .001 being a member of this community makes me feel good. soc12 1.62 (.42) .76 < .001 being a member of this community is a part of my identity. structural model estimates sense of community → perceived inequality -.12 (.06) -.24 .07† sense of community → egalitarianism .09 (.05) .22 .07† sense of community → sociopolitical action .05 (.10) .07 .59 note: statistical significance at p < .05 is marked with a single asterisk (*), marginal significant is marked with a cross (†). model 1 fit = χ² (62) = 69.07, p = .25; cfi= .98; tli= .98; rmsea= .03; srmr= .08. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 table 3. unstandardized, standardized, and significance levels for model 2: with covariates (standard errors in parentheses; n = 99) parameter estimate unstandardized standardized p measurement model estimates perceived inequality cc2 1.00 .54 na cc4 .86 (.21) .56 < .001 cc5 1.45 (.29) .81 < .001 cc6 1.09 (.24) .65 < .001 cc8 1.41 (.28) .78 < .001 egalitarianism cc10 1 .78 na cc11 1.08 (.33) .85 < .001 sociopolitical action cc17 1 .77 na cc19 .79 (.15) .73 < .001 cc21 .49 (.10) .65 < .001 sense of community soc1 1 .53 na soc4 1.41 (.31) .70 < .001 soc12 1.66 (.36) .85 < .001 structural model estimates sense of community → perceived inequality -.14 (.08) -.24 .08† sense of community → egalitarianism .08 (.05) .24 .07† sense of community → sociopolitical action .08 (.11) .09 .48 age → sense of community -.07 (.21) -.04 .75 age → perceived inequality .03 (.11) .03 .77 age → egalitarianism .02 (.07) .03 .80 age → sociopolitical action -.32 (.18) -.21 .07† female → sense of community .48 (.16) .39 .002** female → perceived inequality -.12 (.08) -.16 .12 female → egalitarianism .07 (.05) .17 .11 female → sociopolitical action -.04 (.11) -.03 .74 language → sense of community -.30 (.15) -.25 .05* language → perceived inequality .03 (.08) .05 .66 language → egalitarianism .04 (.05) .10 .37 language → sociopolitical action -.27 (.12) -.25 .03* note: statistical significance at p < .05 is marked with a single asterisk (*), marginal significant is marked with a cross (†). model 2 fit =χ² (89) = 108.75, p = .08; cfi= .95; tli= .93; rmsa= .05; srmr= .08. discussion the present study sought to address three aims: (1) is the factor structure of ukrainian cc and soc comparable to the structure identified in the united states?, (2) does soc predict cc?, and (3) how do demographic differences affect cc and soc among students in ukraine? our analyses indicate that the factor structure of ukrainian cc and soc is not comparable to the structure identified in samples from the united states. more specifically, the ccs (diemer et al., 2017) subscales did not function as subscales in our analysis, and were therefore treated as separate constructs. similarly, the soc-2 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 measure was problematic in ukraine, failing to resemble the proposed structure in any regard, so we used only select items as a unidimensional measure. we also found that soc was not significantly related to sociopolitical action, but it was marginally significantly related to egalitarianism and perceived inequality. furthermore, our analysis indicates that women were more likely to experience soc when compared to men and ukrainian speakers were more likely to experience soc and be involved in sociopolitical action than russian speakers. while marginally significant, we found that younger participants were more involved in sociopolitical action than older participants. to our knowledge, no other study has examined cc and/or soc in ukraine. given the lack of knowledge of our constructs of interest in ukraine, we believe it was appropriate to explore cc and soc using usbased measures. however, it is possible that the us model of cc and soc did not fit in ukraine because they may be defined differently in ukraine. the dialogic and intersectional nature of cc and soc mean they are each context specific. individuals may be marginalized in one setting and more privileged in another. our model of cc development predicts the possibility that cc may vary from setting to setting. while education settings have been a historical area for the enhancement of cc through critical pedagogy, a more traditional education setting may stunt cc (diemer & li, 2011). while the shinn, ezeofor, smith, welch, & goodrich (2016) measure of cc was not yet available when we collected our data, it seems to offer a promising avenue for exploring intersectionality in cc research. given our aforementioned discussion, the measures we utilized have theoretical limitations and present limitations within the united states (see diemer et al., 2014; chipuer & pretty, 1999). when discussing the recent development of the three measures of cc, including the ccs used here, diemer and colleagues (2015) conclude “the extent to which the ccs…comprehensively measure cc across all social identities or domains cannot be assumed, and assessing the domain specificity of these new measures of cc is an important avenue for further exploration. (p. 10).” we recommend further testing of the ccs in ukraine coupled with qualitative research to explore the role of context in cc. the wide variability of constructs within the three recently developed scales of cc show that the concept is still under-theorized. both within and outside of the field of psychology the process of cc development and structure of cc is still debated (jemal, 2017). while a measure of cc is needed to assess the effectiveness of projects designed to enhance cc, the current measures, including the ccs may need alteration. for example, a primary area of current activism centers around sexual orientation and this is not included in the ccs critical action subscale. further, the egalitarianism questions have behaved problematically in other research (dimer et al., 2014). the egalitarianism sub-scale questions (e.g., it would be good if groups could be equal, group equality should be our ideal) seem to represent an ideal of society, as opposed to a realistic view. further, the items could be seen to be related to a “color blind” ideology, which is not reflective of cc. while diemer and colleagues (2015) state “presumably, high egalitarianism scores would be associated with the endorsement of progressive social policies” (p. 817), agreeing that equality is good is not the same as supporting progressive social policies that may involve acknowledging and giving up privileges these are much more advanced skills. belief in equality does not necessarily translate into a complex and nuanced view of social, political, cultural, and historical constructs that created inequality nor efficacy and action to overturn these structures. finally, the egalitarianism questions seem to reflect a simplistic interpretation of cc that has a likelihood of facilitating socially desirable responses and a ceiling effect in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 pre-post measures. in other words, young people today may be likely to agree that equality is good, but this does not necessarily tell us anything about the more complex thoughts and actions involved in cc. the critical action subscale of the ccs does not include individual level actions (jemal, 2017) and rather focus entirely on collective action. while collective action is a core component of critical action, individual action may be the only possible action in highly controlling or repressive settings (wallinruschman et al., 2018) or among youth (shinn et al., 2016). soc based on the university community showed a decrease in perceived inequality and an increase in endorsement of egalitarianism and no relationships with sociopolitical action. based on our model of the process of cc development, it was expected that a higher level of soc and its associated emotional closeness would facilitate a higher level of perceived inequality. the finding of the opposite relationships combined with a higher level of endorsement of egalitarianism (which our model does not see as reflective of cc) suggests that generic soc is not a good predictor of any subset of cc. however, an alternative explanation is that the logic of how soc was to influence cc may have been misguided. for example, it was presumed that a heightened connection with others would make an individual more cognizant of unequal advantages/disadvantages between themselves and others or between groups in general. it is possible that participants used an in-group as a mental referent that was fairly homogenous and that feeling a soc with that in-group served as a buffer to feelings of discrimination or inequality. if this was the case, we would expect individuals without a soc, who are isolated or ostracized, to be more sensitive to perceive inequality. while unexpected, this finding does fit with the context specific nature of understanding cc development: “cc develops within the specific contexts that shape and constrain individual lives (freire, 2000). it follows that levels of cc vary not only from person-toperson, but also within an individual across different domains” (diemer et al., 2015, p. 3). culture influences how people understand community and how one’s soc is measured (chipuer & pretty, 1999; rivera-segarra et al., 2016). thus, soc will differ from setting to setting (hill, 1996). further exploration of soc both in ukraine and in educational settings can enhance the understanding of this concept and further knowledge of its utility in understanding cc. our finding that women experience higher levels of soc than men is consistent with prior research examining soc and related concepts (e.g., social support) with gender differences. generally, women tend to provide and use social support networks more than men (ptacek, smith & zanas, 1992). women tend to also have stronger social support networks (denton et al., 2004) and report feeling loved more than men (nakhaie & arnold, 2010). more specifically, when looking at university student samples, women report higher levels of social support than men (day & livingstone, 2003; nicpon, huser, blanks, sollenberger, befort, & kurpius, 2006; olson & schultz, 1994). given that our results are consistent with past research findings, it may be that women are socialized differently than men where women are taught to confide in others while men are expected to be independent (day & livingstone, 2003). thus, it is possible that relationality is more important to women’s cc development when compared to men. this finding mirrors gilligan’s (1982) model of moral development, which also focused on women, and found that for them morality was more a matter of interdependence and care as compared to kohlberg’s model of independence and justice. in practice this finding furthers our understanding of the contextual nature of cc development. those wishing to facilitate cc development may need to consider the gendered ways in which connection and social support manifest differently both within and between men and women. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 1 june 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 we also found that russian speakers experience lower levels of soc and are less engaged in sociopolitical action when compared to ukrainian speakers. the data was collected in a russian speaking city, so we would have expected russian speakers to experience higher levels of soc when compared to ukrainian speakers. however, our results may be more telling of the sociopolitical context. data was collected shortly after the ukrainian territory of crimea was annexed to russia, and in reaction it is possible that ukrainian speakers sought solidarity among each other. alternatively, it may be that ukrainian speaking students come from villages and small towns outside of odessa, and therefore seek companionship with ukrainian speaking students. limitations a major limitation of this study was the use of measure developed with a united states sample and which was (to our knowledge at the time of data collection) previously untested in an international setting. it is hard to unpack the meaning of our results with this added constraint. our study was also limited by our small sample size of 300, thus limiting the power of our analysis. like any study, there are limitations to what we can conclude from our analyses. as stated earlier, the factor structures of the ccs and soc-2 are not equivalent to the structure found in the united states. given the problematic nature of both measures, numerous items were dropped from each measure. for example, the soc-2 was made up of three of twenty-four items for our study. given the limited number of items used to measure each construct (i.e., sociopolitical action, egalitarianism, perceived inequality, soc), our measures may not represent all facets of each construct. specifically, in regard to the soc-2, we used the university community as the referent community, which may be too large. university students may not be familiar with all students on a large campus serving both undergraduate and graduate students. thus, it may be fruitful to use a smaller community referent (e.g., dormitory residents, student organization members, classroom) so that participants are at least familiar with community members. this finding may be particularly relevant to those within higher education striving to build community among a large diverse campus. even small campuses (e.g., 600-900 students) may be considered quite large compared to the smaller groups within which soc is often studies and measured. it is also possible that the ccs and soc-2 measures missed important dimensions of cc and soc, including those important to the ukrainian cultural milieu. qualitative research can aid in the discovery of such aspects. additionally, according to watts and colleagues (2011), cc has not yet fully developed given the limited amount of empirical studies examining cc. second, we did not employ random sampling, but our response rate of 100% may help bolster confidence in the findings for the population sampled. also, participants may have felt the need to provide socially desirable responses. however, all participants were assured confidentiality and anonymity, which may help reduce social desirability bias. given that measures assessing cc grounded in ukrainian culture do not exist, the present study makes an initial contribution to our understanding of cc among youth in ukraine. the results provide an understanding of college youth in ukraine in relation to cc and soc, and encourage future investigation to identify dimensions of cc important within a ukrainian context for the creation of culturally grounded instruments and interventions. the present results and discussion also point out recommendations for future 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(2011). critical consciousness: current status and future directions. new directions for child and adolescent development, 134(1), 43-57. doi: 10.1002/cd.310 http://www.gjcpp.org/ microsoft word 2014-007-final-20141210.docx a qualitative exploration of counseling student development through community outreach rachael d. goodman jessica a. vilbas reston n. bell george mason university author information: rachael d. goodman, ph.d., lpc, is an assistant professor in the counseling and development program at george mason university in fairfax, virginia, usa. email: rgoodma2@gmu.edu jessica a. vilbas, m.ed., is a doctoral candidate at george mason university in fairfax, virginia, usa. email address: jvilbas@masonlive.gmu.edu reston n. bell, ncsp, ph.d., is a post doctorate fellow at george mason university's center for psychological services in fairfax, virginia, usa. email: restonbell7@gmail.com keywords: community outreach, multicultural competence, social justice, qualitative research recommended citation: goodman, r. d., vilbas, j. a., & bell, r. n. (2014). a qualitative exploration of counseling student development through community outreach, global journal of community psychology practice, 5(2), 1-10. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume'5,'issue'2' dec'2014' ' global'journal'of'community'psychology'practice,'http://www.gjcpp.org/'' page'2' a qualitative exploration of counseling student development through community outreach abstract community outreach and service learning have been shown to facilitate counseling and psychology student development. community outreaches conducted from a liberation psychology-based perspective are particularly effective in terms of promoting multicultural competence and social justice ideals and actions among outreach participants. using qualitative interviews of students participating in a local community outreach, the authors explore student development with a focus on multicultural and social justice practices. the authors discuss the implications for facilitating community outreaches based on the data from student participants. keywords: community outreach, multicultural competence, social justice, qualitative research community-based outreach and service learning projects are well established as meaningful ways in which to facilitate the development of skills for counseling and psychology students as well as other human service professionals (barrow, 2008; burnett, hammel, & long, 2004; goodman & west-olatunji, 2009a, 2009b; hagan, 2004; musucci & renner, 2000; roysircar, gard, hubbell, & ortega, 2005; west-olatunji, goodman, mehta, & templeton, 2011). outreach and service learning projects in local communities have been suggested as a way for counseling training programs to better infuse multicultural and social justice training throughout the curriculum (bemak, chung, talleyrand, jones, & daquin, 2011; nilsson, schale, & khamphakdy-brown, 2011). community outreach led by counseling and psychology faculty can also link underserved communities with desired services and university partnerships (bemak et al., 2011; goodman & westolatunji, 2009b). community outreach ranging from service learning to post-disaster counseling have been shown to increase students’ cultural awareness, critical thinking, advocacy skills, and socio-political awareness (e.g., goodman & west-olatunji, 2009a; murray, pope, rowell, 2010; roysircar et al., 2005). a greater understanding of how these outreach projects impact students is needed in order to expand and continue their infusion within training programs. further, there are a number of barriers to conducting outreach, including a lack of knowledge about how to best conduct outreach that facilitates student development and that provides services that do not further marginalize communities. as such, this study explores the experiences of counseling students during a local community outreach project, with particular attention given to student development and implications for conducting community outreach. background community outreach and service learning counseling and psychology educators, as well as other human services professionals, use service learning to offer students the opportunity to learn about day-to-day realities and responsibilities of working in a community or school setting (arman & scherer, 2002). community outreach and service learning can provide services to the communities, while also engendering two critical aspects of counselor development: multicultural competence and social justice awareness (goodman & west-olatunji, 2009a; murray et al, 2010; nilsson et al., 2011; roysircar et al., 2005). multiculturalism is now well established as a critical part of counselor training. sometimes called the fourth force in counseling, multiculturalism established that counselors must develop awareness, knowledge, and skills about their own and their clients’ cultural worldviews (pedersen, 1990, 2008). more recently, a fifth force in counseling and psychology has emerged – social justice (ratts, 2009). social justice counseling attends to the systemic and sociopolitical issues that impact clients and communities, as well as examines the multiple facets of identity and the impact of oppression and marginalization (lewis, lewis, daniels, & d’andrea, 2011). furthermore, social justice involves social action, meaning that counselors and psychologists engage in activities to address systemic oppression, disrupt harmful social structures, and advocate for policies and practices that promote equity (prilleltensky, 2001; vera & speight, 2003). given the importance of counseling students developing cultural and social justice competence, counseling and psychology training programs have an obligation to provide training that facilitates this development (bemak et al., 2011; chang, crethar, & ratts, 2010). community outreach is a promising way to promote student development related to multiculturalism and social justice, including social justice and advocacy (barrow, 2008; murray et al., 2010), multicultural counseling competence (burnett et al., 2004; roysircar et al., 2005), or both (goodman & west-olatunji, 2009a; nilsson et al., 2011). although community outreach offers opportunities to facilitate student development, engaging in such endeavors presents several challenges. students often find themselves confronted with issues that impede their ability to offer appropriate services. for example, simply sending students out to “volunteer” in the local community may perpetuate further marginalization of people based on gender, race, global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume'5,'issue'2' dec'2014' ' global'journal'of'community'psychology'practice,'http://www.gjcpp.org/'' page'3' sexual orientation, class, or ethnicity (masucci & renner, 2000). challenges may also arise when the expectations or needs of the community being served are not aligned with the abilities, purposes, or perspectives of the students and outreach project managers. community members may also have concerns regarding students’ abilities to make meaningful contributions given the time limitations of many outreaches (burnett et al., 2004). for instance, burnett et al. (2004) found that a 6-week community outreach timeframe was too short for students to have an in-depth experience. in a study by murray et al. (2010) students reported that organization was a primary challenge during outreach; students had difficulty making time for the project, desired more structure on-site, and wanted better communication among volunteers and faculty supervisors. towards liberatory community outreach as noted, there remains a danger that students and faculty from universities seeking to conduct community outreach will be ineffective in their outreach and even, perhaps unintentionally, contribute to the marginalization of communities (west-olatunji & goodman, 2011). this may occur when university collaborators fail to understand and address the confluence of power dynamics, sociopolitical context, and community wellness (prilleltensky, 2008), or when university partners are focused on serving their own needs instead of those of the community. as such, the use of liberation psychology (martín-baró, 1994) and critical consciousness theory (freire, 1970) as a lens for conducting community outreach assists university partners in expressly attending to social justice issues and generating a collaborative partnership in which the community’s needs are central to the outreach process. as watts and flanagan (2007) wrote, “liberation psychology differs from conventional u.s. psychology in its emphasis on human rights and social equity. exposing social injustice, creating just societies, promoting selfdetermination and solidarity with others, ending oppression (and healing its effects) are core tenets” (p. 780). the fundamental goal of liberation psychology is the awakening of critical consciousness in the individual or group (freire, 1970; martín-baró, 1994). critical consciousness involves developing awareness and understanding of the sociopolitical environment and oppression through selfreflection and dialogue, and then taking action against this oppression, or praxis (freire, 1970; watkins & shulman, 2008). counseling and psychology practitioners from this liberatory perspective are acutely aware of the sociopolitical environment and they work collaboratively with clients and communities to address injustice and promote wellness (prilleltensky, 2001; prilleltensky & prilleltensky, 2003; watts & flanagan, 2007). as such, the current study utilized a perspective based on the principles of liberation psychology and critical consciousness (freire, 1970; martín-baró, 1994; watkins & shulman, 2008) when conducting and supervising a community outreach with master’s level counseling students. using qualitative interviews, the authors examined the experiences of students, specifically in terms of their multicultural and social justice development. further, the authors were interested in understanding the experiences of student volunteers in outreach in order to improve outreach supervision and organization for future projects. methods the south falls outreach project (all names are pseudonyms) was created as an opportunity for master’s level students in a counseling program to volunteer in the local community and to develop their multicultural and social justice counseling skills under faculty supervision. the three sites were nuevo dia immigration and language center, south falls historical society, and south falls outof-school suspension program. students committed to volunteer at the site for at least one semester, either as a part of an advanced counseling course or independently. student volunteers were provided with regular supervision in small groups by one or both of the counseling faculty members. supervision focused on conducting the outreach from a collaborative, critically conscious perspective (freire, 1970; watkins & shulman, 2008) in which volunteers: (a) did not impose their own agenda on the community, (b) sought to adhere to the cultural norms and expectations of the community, (c), were self-reflective about their own biases and concerns, and (d) attended to issues of social injustice. after obtaining human subjects review board approval, the second and third authors (both doctoral counseling students) recruited participants among students who were participating in the south falls outreach project. the purposeful sample included 8 master’s-level students enrolled in the counseling program. see table 1 for information on the participants. table 1. demographic participant data name race/ ethnicity age gender location credit hours completed maria hispanic 26 female il 36 ariana white 37 female il 26 natasha black 50 female il 18 sarah caucasian 30 female ss 15 michelle asian 24 female ss 31 tonya african american 23 female hs 10 ashley caucasian 49 female hs 42 kara white 35 female hs 24 note. participant names are pseudonyms. locations are as follows; il = nuevo dia immigration and language center, ss = south falls out-of-school suspension program, hs = global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume'5,'issue'2' dec'2014' ' global'journal'of'community'psychology'practice,'http://www.gjcpp.org/'' page'4' south falls historical society the second and third authors conducted two semi-structured individual interviews with the participants, one at the beginning and one at the end of the outreach. the initial interview protocol included questions about participants’ interests, expectations, and anticipated challenges. the final interview protocol included questions about participants’ overall experiences, personal and professional impacts, and the impact on their multicultural competence and social justice counseling knowledge or skills. the interviews were transcribed verbatim by the authors and checked for accuracy by another author. data analysis the authors used a critical realism perspective to ground their data analysis. this perspective combines ontological realism and epistemological constructivism, positing that reality (including meaning, culture, and processes) exists, although it is not directly observable but seen through one’s own perspective (maxwell, 2012, 2013). thematic coding of the interview transcription content was used to condense data into themes for interpretation and understanding of social phenomena (creswell, 2008; zhang & wildemuth, 2009). first, all three authors read through the data at least two times to conduct a preliminary exploratory analysis (creswell, 2008). each author made notes and highlighted phrases that were representative of the participants’ experiences and development during outreach (maxwell, 2013). the authors then created a preliminary list of themes and agreed upon 12 themes to use for coding the data (creswell, 2008). next, the authors independently coded the data and then met to review the coding. to increase trustworthiness through investigator triangulation (schreiber & asner-self, 2011), a text segment was considered to be reflective of a theme if two of three authors agreed. investigator triangulation also helped ensure consistency since fatigue and changes to theme definitions can occur subtly over time (zhang & wildemuth, 2009). findings analysis of the interviews resulted in 12 themes that were situated in three overarching categories (see figure 1): outreach site experiences (participants’ interactions and involvement at the community outreach site), personal and professional development (participants’ growth both personally and as a future counselor), and structures of outreach (participants’ experiences with the organizations that facilitated or managed the outreach). below, we discuss each theme and identify the overarching category or categories. figure 1. themes as situated within the three overarching categories that influenced the community outreach experience. community outreach 25 figure 1. themes as situated within the three overarching categories that influenced the community outreach experience. ! ! ! structures of outreach outreach site experiences personal & professional development • challenging preconceived notions! • positive emotional reactions! • racial identity development! ! • exposure to cultural differences! • cultural connections! • social justice awareness! • development of counseling skills: (a) outreach and traditional, (b) “real world” application! • negative emotional reactions! • supervision! • control vs. flexibility! • university-community partnerships! • university management! • organizational management! global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume'5,'issue'2' dec'2014' ' global'journal'of'community'psychology'practice,'http://www.gjcpp.org/'' page'5' category: outreach site experiences exposure to cultural differences. several participants noted that participation in outreach offered opportunities for them to interact with people from cultural backgrounds that they would not otherwise come in contact with. participants alluded to how their new awareness of cultural differences changed their perspectives. michelle (interview 1, ss) said: i didn't really have interaction with…deep interaction with african-americans until i [did] this volunteering opportunity, but i get to know that … background information and why they're really suffering, although i can't really generalize their situation to the whole black america situation. but, yeah, i was able to deepen my insight and the importance of being open. cultural connections. participants discussed the importance of culture in counseling outreach and communities, and noted their desire to be inclusive and to connect with clients across cultures. for instance, tonya (interview 2, hs) spoke of the importance of learning how culture and traditions interact; she noted that doing so allowed her to “see the person as a whole” and develop rapport within the outreach site. participants noted that understanding the cultural backgrounds and practices of the individuals with whom they were working was critical to connecting and building working relationships. social justice awareness. participants noted the systemic barriers faced by their clients and discussed the emotional damage and differential outcomes that they perceived their clients experienced through instances of “invalidation,” “marginalization,” and unfair treatment. for instance, sarah (interview 2, ss) found that the african american middle and high school students at her site were experiencing discrimination at school. she discussed one teen who was suspended several times because he “was getting made fun of and … no one at school was realizing that he was the subject of these fights because he was so much bigger [than other students].” she continued: “[talking to students] really like made me feel like kids are not getting equitable [treatment].” participants frequently observed differential outcomes of students, neighborhoods, and marginalized ethnic groups as compared to more affluent, predominantly white areas of the county. participants were especially surprised and frustrated that clients sincerely desired to create change, but lacked access to power and resources necessary to do so. category: personal and professional development development of counseling skills. participants made reference to: (a) the opportunity to engage in the “real world” application of classroom knowledge, as well as; (b) their acquisition of both outreach specific and traditional counseling skills. sarah (interview 2, ss) stated: i think it was almost, like, it is exactly what we learn, what we talk about in our classes…it was like our class [came] alive.… but for someone like me, who doesn’t have a lot of exposure to [counseling] except for when i’m in school, i felt like it was so beneficial. some of the counseling skills participants noted were: conducting client conceptualizations, building rapport, developing empathy, neutrality, reflecting, and listening. they also noted the development of skills specific to outreach counseling, such as conducting counseling outside of an office and going out into the community or finding other ways to access clients through casual conversations or activities to build rapport. category: structures of outreach university-community partnerships. participants discussed their awareness of issues related to the partnership between the community organizations and the university, including how this relationship positively or negatively impacted the outreach. in the initial student interviews, many participants voiced concerns pertaining to the university-community partnership, including having clearer expectations and specific responsibilities to be delegated to the students before outreach began. for instance, ashley (interview 1, hs) said, “i really feel like there needs to be some type of protocol for students to know what exactly is expected.” this concern appeared to dissipate as the outreach continued, with participants focusing less on the need for structure and guidelines in their second interviews. university management. participants commented on management by the university of the outreach project, and generally wanted more clarity about their role and the expectations from the university organizing the outreach. while the participants were glad that the university was providing the opportunity to students, they noted struggles in setting up times for supervision, expressed frustrations with communication between the university and the students who were participating in the outreach, and wanted more communication from the university. organizational management. participants’ discussed their awareness of issues related to management of the agency, including the importance of good management, the complexity of management issues, and the impact on service delivery due to management problems, such as communication and disorganization and limitations of the space or facility. participants expressed frustration with lack of organization and lack of follow through by some organizational leaders. some participants also expressed empathy when they noted the challenges faced by community organizations. ariana (interview 1, il) noted: “i think that’s why it’s so unorganized – because they just don’t have enough man power.” participants also noted challenges due to organizational management expectations global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume'5,'issue'2' dec'2014' ' global'journal'of'community'psychology'practice,'http://www.gjcpp.org/'' page'6' and beliefs, including asking participants to engage in counseling practices that were beyond their skills level. in some cases, organizational management did not seem to understand counseling, and asked participants to engage in tasks that were counter to their roles (e.g., having teachers sit in on counseling groups, being asked to discipline children). categories: outreach site experiences and personal and professional development challenging preconceived notions. by engaging in the outreach, participants questioned the assumptions they had about their clients, as well as the beliefs that participants believed their clients held of them. participants found that client receptivity to services, client attitudes, and client needs were different than they initially anticipated. participants were initially apprehensive about working with clients and held some negative assumptions about the clients’ interests and character traits. after spending time with the clients, however, participants expressed finding them to be “nice” and possessing interests that were similar to most people, challenging the assumption that clients would be very different from themselves. further, participants noted that the actual needs, expectations, and demographics of the community were different than what they had anticipated prior to the outreach. positive emotional reactions. many participants shared positive emotional reactions, including feeling inspired or transformed during the outreach, that were linked to their outreach site experience and their own development. ariana (interview 2, il) stated: it's a perfect project and one that i hope we continue because we got to be leaders. i feel like we got to take our mission [of social justice, leadership, and multiculturalism] out to the community but to also bring that experience back [to the university]. participants’ positive feelings were linked to the applied nature of the experience and their opportunities to develop as professionals and engage with diverse clients at their sites. racial identity development. participants noted development in terms of their own racial identities, including reflecting on their own race and/or reflecting on how clients might potentially perceive their (the participants’) race. tonya, an african american female working with african americans, reflected on her race and how she identified racially and culturally with individuals at her site. for some white participants, reflecting on racial identity generated some apprehension. for instance, ariana (interview 1, il) was concerned that clients would “immediately” judge her because she was one of the only “white female” volunteers at her site that served people of color. she did not want to be seen as a “white lady coming in and trying to change everything up.” overall, participants’ racial identity development appeared to be impacted by engaging in outreach with individuals in communities that were both similar to and different from them. categories: personal and professional development and structures of outreach negative emotional reactions. negative emotional reactions were noted in terms of participants expressing feelings of fear, anxiety, discomfort, or frustration associated with outreach. negative emotional reactions were often associated with participants’ development as counselors, including worries about their counseling competence. for one participant, sarah (ss), although she expressed feeling “stronger” at the conclusion of the outreach process, in her first interview she said, “i feel like i have so much to learn…. it just makes me anxious to know that there is so much more that i have to learn and that i'm not in the full capacity to help them.” participants also had negative emotional reactions related to structures of outreach and project management. while they were frustrated with lack of organization and communication initially, many developed greater empathy for the organizations’ challenges and understanding of the outreach process over time. categories: outreach site experiences, personal and professional development, and structures of outreach supervision. supervision helped in the development of counseling skills, flexibility, and sense of competence and satisfaction, which allowed participants to debrief and work through their emotional reactions pertaining to outreach. all but one participant communicated that supervision was an integral aspect of their outreach experience. participants noted that supervision helped provide direction, purpose, and clarity; some participants found the supervision helped them emotionally and with self care. maria (interview 2, il) said that supervision “was pretty much, letting all that out. because i guess [the outreach experience] was very heavy for me to handle all that.” overall, supervision appeared to be critical in guiding participants in their roles and also helping them process their own reactions to the experience. control vs. flexibility. in the initial interviews most participants discussed a desire for more control. some voiced the desire to impose their own agenda during counseling sessions or outreach in general, which was often paired with limited flexibility. kara (interview 1, hs) said, maybe i’m better at working towards [goals] than going into this kind of obscure environment that has a lot of needs but none of them are specific. and once we started to work towards one [goal], it would kind of change direction and i got frustrated with that. however, participants’ flexibility seemed to increase over time and appeared to be related to their sense of satisfaction global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume'5,'issue'2' dec'2014' ' global'journal'of'community'psychology'practice,'http://www.gjcpp.org/'' page'7' and competence. flexibility allowed participants to expand their view of their role as outreach counselors, and to use situations that might be frustrating as opportunities to assist the community and to build rapport. discussion the results of the study are consistent with previous research findings on outreach in two primary ways. first, hands on experiences in outreach aid students in skill development and increase their confidence in terms of applying classroom-based knowledge. in particular, students developed outreach counseling skills (e.g., flexibility), which are critical to reaching marginalized populations and working in non-traditional counseling settings (lewis et al., 2011). second, results of this study are consistent with previous research that shows engaging in outreach or service learning promotes multicultural competence and social justice (e.g., goodman & west-olatunji, 2009b, nillson et al., 2011; west-olatunji et al., 2011). it appeared to be particularly salient that participants were volunteering in communities with members who were culturally different from the participants because this facilitated cross-cultural experiences and exposure to cultural differences. these interactions also prompted participants to think more deeply about their own racial identities, which promotes cultural competence (sue, arredondo, & mcdavis, 1992), and challenged their preconceived notions or stereotypes, which may promote social justice awareness through the deconstruction of their assumptions (martín-baró, 1994; watts & flanagan, 2007). as noted, multicultural and social justice counseling competencies are imperative, and counseling outreach embedded in training programs offers a way to facilitate this growth beyond what is possible in coursework alone. by embedding outreach within counseling and psychology training programs, more counseling students could graduate with these important skills. if counselors and psychologists are going to meet the needs of diverse communities, it is critical that they are able to operate outside of one-to-one office-based counseling sessions (lewis et al., 2011). in terms of participants’ emotional responses, participants’ early reactions were characterized by negative feelings but shifted to more positive feelings by the end of the outreach. gaining experience and processing these experiences in supervision appeared to facilitate this shift. it appeared that the desire to control when feelings of discomfort or confusion arose was common among the developing counselors. however, over time, as participants appeared to relax their desire to control, they noted relief and more positive feelings and perceived themselves as more effective during the outreach process. outreach appears to be particularly useful at challenging students to encounter – and hopefully move through – the discomfort associated with common counseling problems, such as lack of control, personal insecurities, or difficulties with organization structures. outreach may intensify these experiences, and thus may help participants develop skills that can be applied in other settings. concerns about the structures of outreach were also related to these negative emotional reactions and provided additional challenges for participants. negotiating roles is an integral part of community outreach and may be challenging. thus, participants wanted more explicit directions from the community organizations and the university. while this may imply the need to provide more concrete guidelines and structures in order to decrease participants’ discomfort and role confusion, social justice focused counseling and outreach need to be flexible in order to respond to the needs of the community (vera & speight, 2003). the results of this study point to the possible tension between remaining flexible and providing structure during outreach. the results of the study indicated that supervision was a particularly critical aspect of participants’ experiences. supervision offered a safe space where students were able to share, process, receive feedback, and focus on self-care. therefore, supervision can shape participants’ outreach experiences and promote the development of counseling skills. supervision also serves a guiding role in terms of the framework used in the outreach; in this case, the findings reflect students’ movement towards critical consciousness and ideals consistent with a liberatory perspective (e.g., new awareness of social justice and personal racial identity). finally, as compared to some outreaches that have been studied, this community outreach was local and did not have extensive time requirements. however, the benefits to participants were consistent with more intense outreaches. this indicates that even small, limited experiences can be of benefit. such outreach experiences offer the opportunity to link classroom knowledge to “prepractica” type clinical experiences for ongoing, meaningful development. recommendations the results of this study suggest that outreach should be infused in counseling training programs and related disciplines. regular outreach within local communities should be an ongoing opportunity for students within such programs. the infusion of outreach in training programs is particularly important because it is a skill that students need to develop to reach marginalized populations (lewis et al., 2011). partnerships with community organizations can be developed so that there are standing relationships and so that students have such opportunities throughout their programs. given participants’ expressed concerns with time and difficulty managing multiple commitments, a limited time commitment by individual students could be considered if the outreach can still meet the needs of the organization, perhaps by balancing the short individual time commitment with a longer-term university or program commitment. global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume'5,'issue'2' dec'2014' ' global'journal'of'community'psychology'practice,'http://www.gjcpp.org/'' page'8' outreach project organizers interested in developing multicultural and social justice competence should select outreach sites where students will interact with diverse individuals. exposure, when it is not voyeuristic, can assist in breaking stereotypes and increasing awareness. supervision can play an important role in this process by focusing on diversity and sociopolitical issues. supervisors can ask students to reflect on their own culture and the role of culture in the community. supervisors can also help students to identify the sociopolitical factors impacting the community. supervisors should take into account students’ prior experiences and their level of awareness in order to provide developmentally appropriate supervision. the results of the study generated a number of recommendations related to facilitating community outreach. in terms of project management, there is a need for university partners to provide clear information about student and supervisor roles. the current project was intended to be collaborative and flexible, so that some students were volunteering on their own while others were doing so as a part of a class. this generated anxiety and confusion among students, pointing to the need to balance flexibility and inclusion within the outreach structure. similar concerns were salient within the management of outreach sites. one of the strengths of a community outreach that utilizes a liberatory framework is that it emphasizes responsiveness to the needs of the community. developing and revising an outline of expectations could be a collaborative task undertaken with students included in this process. supervision should also focus on developing an understanding of the challenges faced by community organizations so that participants can develop empathy and reduce frustrations about the sometimes ambiguous roles and changes that occur within the site. supervision, which most participants in this study found to be critical to their experience, should be a central component of community outreach. university organizers could consider having supervision available both on-site and offsite. in the current study, supervision was offered at the university and was scheduled at times that were as convenient for participants as possible. however, there remained challenges in terms of scheduling; participants appeared to be adding the outreach experience onto already overloaded schedules, which also meant that sometimes they were unable to attend supervision. this is a concern, since supervision is important not only to the participants’ experience and development, but also to ensuring that the outreach services provided to the community are meaningful, effective, and socially just. in future outreaches, supervision sessions at the university for similar projects were offered in person and via conference call. the conference call format appeared to increase participants’ attendance but reduced participation during supervision: the processing (e.g., verbal disclosures and discussion) seemed to be more limited as compared to in-person sessions. other possible solutions include offering supervision at multiple times or holding supervision sessions on-site. additionally, outreach supervisors should be aware that throughout the outreach process participants may react negatively to various aspects of outreach and may need assistance in working through their emotions. supervision needs to focus on issues of control so that the frustration associated with organizational or university management does not cause participants to become ineffective and inflexible, thus losing motivation or even harming the relationships with community members. supervisors need to be aware of the emotions that arise for participants related to structural aspects of outreach. bringing outreach challenges to the attention of the participants and acknowledging them as a common aspect of outreach may help participants to better understand the process and overcome potential problems. the results of the study indicated that students engaged in deconstructing sociopolitical injustices and acknowledging marginalization experienced by their clients, an important aspect of critical consciousness and liberation psychology (freire, 1970; martin-baro, 1994). while participants developed knowledge around injustices experienced by communities, there was limited discussion that focused on strengths or aspects of resilience among community members. within liberation psychology (martín-baró, 1994), counselors and psychologists facilitate exploration of strengths within marginalized communities that might have been lost or ignored, and which can then be used as ways for overcoming oppression and moving towards praxis. outreach coordinators and supervisors as well as training programs can prompt discussions about community strengths among students both prior to the outreach and during the outreach process. supervisors can help illuminate how communities have persisted despite difficult conditions and oppressive systemic forces. participants should identify these collaboratively with community members during outreach to deepen and clarify their understanding. finally, counseling and psychology training programs should incorporate opportunities for students to explore not only their racial identity and its development but also develop a deeper familiarity with the literature on the racial identity of other racial groups. it is important to incorporate teaching points that speak to the variability that is present among all racial and cultural groups, which is an aspect of preventing stereotyping and generalizing. additionally, students should be given the opportunity to challenge some of the faulty beliefs and preconceived notions that they have acquired through exposure to individuals from diverse backgrounds. the current outreach triggered initial exploration of these issues, which needs to be continued in training programs and should not stop at the end of an outreach experience. global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume'5,'issue'2' dec'2014' ' global'journal'of'community'psychology'practice,'http://www.gjcpp.org/'' page'9' in summary, the results of this study confirm previous research that counseling and psychology students can benefit from community outreach in terms of their development as counselors. participants appeared to develop greater multicultural and social justice counseling skills, as noted by their discussions about racial identity, crosscultural experiences, and social justice awareness. this study also points to the challenges of conducting outreach, including emotional reactions such as anxiety and the tension between the desire to be in control and the need to remain flexible. further, analysis of the data suggests that the variability and imprecision inherent in the structures of outreach contributed to anxiety, but may also have helped participants develop outreach skills, such as responsiveness. supervision was a central point that almost all participants indicated significantly impacted their experience. as such, outreach coordinators seeking to engage in community outreach may be able to leverage supervision as a means for ensuring social justice perspectives and for facilitating student development from a liberatory framework. references arman, j. f., & scherer, d. 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' ' global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 access to indigenous and allopathic medicines: a systematic review of barriers and facilitators caroline ouellet, thomas saïas, vanessa sit, lise lamothe, michel rapinski, alain cuerrier, and pierre s. haddad keywords: systematic literature review, traditional medicine, indigenous, healthcare access, ethnomedicine, aboriginal. mots clés : revue de littérature systématique, médecines traditionnelles, autochtones, accès aux soins de santé, ethnomédecine author biographies: caroline ouellet, m.sc holds a master's degree in nutrition and is currently completing a phd and a psyd in community psychology at the université du québec à montréal. recipient of a scholarship from the canadian institutes of health research institute of indigenous peoples' health, her research focuses on the accessibility, namely barriers and facilitators, indigenous peoples encounter accessing allopathic and traditional health care and social services in northern quebec communities. her expertise also focuses on knowledge transfer and exchange. thomas saïas, dr. saias is currently associate professor of community psychology at the university of quebec at montréal. he has been working in the field of prevention for the last 15 years. he developed several public-orientated services of prevention targeting early childhood adversities. in quebec and in france, he is involved in several research projects aiming to identify the facilitators for the success of public (governmental) preventative interventions. he is head of the “epione: public health-community health” research team. vanessa sit, registered nurse, ph.d. candidate at the université de montréal school of public health specializing in healthcare management. i am interested in understanding the combination of indigenous medicine and allopathic medicine in indigenous communities in northern quebec. lise lamothe, ph.d. professor at the department health management, evaluation and policy school of public health of the université de montréal. her research interests are on the governance and transformation of health organizations. more specifically, she studies the professional dynamics associated with the transformation of health organizations in various clinical contexts, notably issues raised by multimorbidity. also, she studies the dynamics associated with mergers of organizations, the formation of networks of services and the structural effects of ntic in care and services processes. michel rapinski, is a phd student at the université de montreal and université de guyane. his research areas and interest are multidisciplinary, focusing on ethnobiology, ethnomedicine and health, namely diabetes. since beginning his master’s degree, he has worked with various communities throughout quebec and french guiana. alain cuerrier, researcher at the montreal botanical garden and writer, dr. alain cuerrier earned his phd in plant systematics (university of montreal with one year at harvard university) before switching to ethnobotany in 2001. he participated at global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 the creation of the first nations garden in montreal as well as in laquenexy (france). since then, he has started ethnobotanical and ethno-ecological projects with the palikur, cabécar, squamish, inuit, innu, naskapi, and cree people. alain cuerrier is a member of the plant biology research institute, adjunct professor at university of montreal, member of arcticnet, and quebec centre for biodiversity science. he has been vice-president of the natural health product research society of canada from 2010-2013 and is now past president of the international society of ethnobiology. dr. alain cuerrier has published more than 8 books on plant uses by first nations and inuit of canada. pierre sélim hadda, is a tenured professor in the department of pharmacology and physiology at the université de montréal, where he obtained his phd degree in 1986 and returned as an independent researcher in 1990. he has authored over 140 peer-reviewed publications, two-thirds of which about natural health products (nhp). in 2003, he successfully built the canadian institutes of health research team in aboriginal antidiabetic medicines, a multidisciplinary group of researchers studying the antidiabetic potential of plants used by the first nations of canada in their traditional medicine, which he still leads today. dr. haddad is recognized nationally and internationally for his work on nhps and functional foods in the context of metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes. in may 2014, he received the prestigious neil towers award from the nhp research society of canada in recognition of his significant contribution to the field of nhps. finally, in 2015, he was appointed to the advisory board of the american botanical council. recommended citation: ouellet, c., saïas, t., sit, v., lamothe, l., rapinski, m., cuerrier, a., & haddad, p. s. (2018). access to indigenous and allopathic medicines: a systematic review of barriers and facilitators. global journal of community psychology practice, 9(2), 1-38. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). corresponding authors: caroline ouellet, department of psychology, université du québec à montréal. 100 rue sherbrooke o montréal, québec, canada. h2x 3p2 montréal http://communautaire.uqam.caouellet.caroline.3@courrier.uqam.ca http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ http://communautaire.uqam.caouellet.caroline.3@courrier.uqam.ca global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 access to indigenous and allopathic medicines: a systematic review of barriers and facilitators abstract background: globally, indigenous peoples are the victims of social inequalities in health. their state of health is much lower than the health of the general population. colonialism, living conditions and access to care are the main determinants of observed health conditions. the scientific objective of this systematic literature review is to study the facilitators and barriers to access healthcare for both, traditional and allopathic medicines. methods: an inclusive search of electronic databases (e.g proquest, ovid, medline, cinahl plus, cochrane library, apapsynet, psyinfo and sociological abstracts databases) of the past 20 years was performed. we retained studies discussing (1) traditional medicine (tm) or allopathic medicine (am) or both and occurring (2) within indigenous population worldwide. we made no distinction between research carried out in rural as opposed to urban areas. results: a total of 45 studies published between 1996 and 2016 met our inclusion criteria and this speaks to the high interest and contemporary pertinence of accessing both systems of healthcare for indigenous populations worldwide. our thematic analysis enabled us to group barriers and facilitators into five categories, namely related to personal, relational, cultural, structural and policy components. as far as barriers and facilitators are concerned, the category that encompasses the most themes is the structural category. conclusions: mutual respect, trust and understanding of each other’s modalities is essential to offer the best healthcare options from both am and tm to indigenous peoples and hence pave the way to reducing health inequities. wellness and strengthbased approaches must also be favoured. résumé problématique : mondialement, les peuples autochtones sont victimes d’inégalités sociales en santé. leur état de santé est largement inférieur à celui de la population générale. le colonialisme, les conditions de vie et l’accès aux soins sont les principaux déterminants des états de santé observés. l'objectif scientifique de cette revue systématique de littérature est d’étudier les leviers et obstacles à l'accès aux soins de santé autant pour les médecines traditionnelles qu’allopathiques. méthodes : une recherche approfondie de bases de données électroniques a été effectuée http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 sur une période de 20 ans, notamment les bases de données proquest, ovid, medline, cinahl plus, cochrane library, apapsynet, psyinfo et sociological abstracts. nous avons retenu des études portant sur (1) la médecine traditionnelle (mt) ou la médecine allopathique (ma), ou les deux, et survenant (2) au sein de la population autochtone du monde entier. nous n'avons fait aucune distinction entre les recherches effectuées dans les zones rurales ou urbaines. résultats : au total, 45 études publiées entre 1996 et 2016 ont répondu à nos critères d'inclusion, ce qui témoigne de l'intérêt élevé et de la pertinence contemporaine de l'accès aux deux systèmes de soins de santé pour les populations autochtones du monde entier. l'analyse thématique a permis de regrouper les obstacles et les facilitateurs en cinq catégories, à savoir les composantes personnelles, relationnelles, culturelles, structurelles et politiques. en ce qui concerne les obstacles et les facilitateurs, la catégorie qui englobe le plus de thèmes est la catégorie structurelle. conclusions : le respect mutuel, la confiance et la compréhension des modalités des uns et des autres sont essentiels pour offrir les meilleures options de soins de santé à la fois des am et tm aux peuples autochtones et ainsi ouvrir la voie à la réduction des disparités sur le plan de la santé. les approches axées sur le bien-être et la force doivent également être privilégiées. introduction as for indigenous populations across the world, each indigenous community in canada has a unique heritage, often its own language and cultural practices as well as spiritual beliefs . likewise, indigenous peoples have experienced many traumatic events, notably related to colonization. such colonization has had a major influence on the health of indigenous peoples and its impacts continue to be profound (australian law reform commission, 1986). in many instances, treaties have been signed to establish diverse forms of relationships between governments and indigenous people, rarely to the advantage of the latter. in many countries that have been colonized, notably by eurocentric powers, several changes occurred. for example, indigenous were forced to settle down; education was enforced and european culture was mandatorily taught; indigenous peoples were forced to embrace a new culture and hide their traditions where medical professionals provided acute care; medical clinics were built thus forcing indigenous to become dependent of the system (furniss, 1999). often, discrimination and racism are still rampant. the colonial trauma associated with the memory of past mental, physical and sexual abuse in several communities is still present today. despite such trauma, indigenous people have demonstrated outstanding resilience (fleming & ledogar, 2008). through such colonization, a “western” or allopathic healthcare system was also gradually introduced in indigenous communities in replacement of indigenous traditional medicine (tm; both defined in the next section). despite the efficacy of modern medicine, the health status gap, between indigenous and non-indigenous populations, is often increasing year after year, as is the case in canada (frohlich, ross, & richmond, 2006; santé canada, 2016; world health organization, 2008). modern medicine may be efficient for several conditions but it is not http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 always adapted to meet indigenous needs. for instance, canada’s indigenous population faces serious health-related challenges, including higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes (t2d), tuberculosis and suicide (government of canada, 2013; harris, bhattacharyya, dyck, naqshbandi hayward, & toth, 2013; l. kirmayer, simpson, & cargo, 2003; l. j. kirmayer et al., 2007). although their life span has increased, health canada reports that indigenous people still die at a younger age than the general population (statistics canada, 2015). health issues are similar to other indigenous population in the world (pink & allbon, 2008). moreover, health inequalities persist despite public health efforts, such as prevention programs for tobacco, cancer screening and improved nutrition and physical activities targeting specific indigenous health issues (government of canada, 2015, 2016). several reasons can be brought forth to explain the greater prevalence of physical and mental health problems amongst indigenous populations. these include social determinants of health (poorer housing, lower income, education and other conditions), genetic and environmental factors, as well as more problematic access to proper healthcare services (adelson, 2005; anand et al., 2001; cameron, del pilar carmargo plazas, santos salas, bourque bearskin, & hungler, 2014; reading & wien, 2009). many of the former factors can be related to the consequences of colonialism as already mentioned above. it is therefore highly desirable to find novel ways to improve the health status of canadian indigenouss and, especially, to do so in a culturally appropriate manner. in this context, indigenous traditional medicine (tm) offers a promising avenue to explore. this also resonates with the call for greater autonomy and self-governance expressed by several canadian indigenous populations in the context of healthcare (inuit tapiriit kanatami, 2016). nevertheless, accessing healthcare that involves the use of both medicines, be it in an integrative or parallel fashion, has been problematic in terms of definitions as well as implementation into practice. indeed, in canada, there are no guidelines for offering indigenous tm to indigenous canadians alongside or within the current healthcare system. our own research group, the canadian institutes of health research team on aboriginal anti-diabetic medicines (cihrtaam) has been working in a close relationship with first nations of canada since 2003 to identify plants from their traditional pharmacopeia with anti-diabetic potential (harbilas et al., 2009; martineau et al., 2006; spoor et al., 2006). this work was initiated to counter the fact that, in the absence of scientific evidence, doctors and public health officials are reluctant to use indigenous tm, notably medicinal plants, as a means of treatment. despite considerable indigenous knowledge (often weakly recognized by “western” institutions) and additional scientific evidence generated through research (eid & haddad, 2014; guerrero-analco et al., 2014; haddad et al., 2011; ouellet, harbilas, garofalo, levy, & haddad, 2016), there still exist several challenges toward the development of new policies, service programs and healthcare delivery that would promote improved access to indigenous tm. in this context, it is important to first consider the key factors that intervene in the access to indigenous as well as allopathic medicine. indeed, few studies have systematically explored the barriers that impede such access as well as the factors facilitating it. the purpose of this paper is thus to systematically review international articles identifying and discussing barriers and facilitators related to the use of allopathic healthcare, traditional healthcare, or both, among indigenous populations. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 methods research question and definitions the research question for this systematic literature review was: what are the barriers and facilitators to access traditional healthcare or allopathic healthcare among indigenous populations? for the purposes of this review, traditional medicine (tm) is defined by who as “the sum total of the knowledge, skills, and practices based on the theories, beliefs, and experiences indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and mental illness” (world health organization, 2013). am refers to biomedicine, modern medicine or conventional medicine (dupuis, 1998). it differs from tm in its commitment to diagnosis, treating patients using objective and progressive science (kaptchuk & miller, 2005). in am, medical knowledge is considered more reliable when tested under controlled experimental conditions even though clinical observations are still valid (bell et al., 2002). literature search strategy the literature search was performed on several databases, including proquest, ovid, medline, cinahl plus, cochrane library, apapsynet, psyinfo and sociological abstracts databases. results were limited to works in french, english and spanish languages, with a publication date up to june 3rd, 2016. table 1 presents the various keywords that were used in the literature search. the focus was put mainly on indigenous medicines such that traditional chinese, ayurvedic, unani, siddha and other established health system modalities were not included. table 1 terms/keywords used in search strategy step keywords syntax 1 aboriginal therap* 2 african traditional medicine 3 alternative medicine 4 arabic medicine 5 australian traditional medicine 6 complementary medicine 7 complementary therap* 8 complementary medicine and therap* 9 east asian traditional medicine 10 faith healing 11 folk medicine 12 holistic medicine 13 indigenous medicine 14 latin american traditional medicine 15 native american traditional medicine 16 oriental medicine 17 shamanism 18 tibetan medicine 19 traditional medicine http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 20 bush medicine 21 ethnomedicine 22 traditional heal* 23 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 or 11 or 12 or 13 or 14 or 15 or 16 or 17 or 18 or 19 or 20 or 21 or 22 syntax 1 24 allopathic medicine 25 western medicine 26 biomedical health service* 27 mainstream health service* 28 dominant health care 29 non-traditional medicine 30 24 or 25 or 26 or 27 or 28 or 29 syntax 2 31 23 or 30 32 aboriginal 33 native 34 first nations 35 first nation 36 first people* 37 indigenous 38 inuit 39 inuits 40 inuk 41 cree 42 maori 43 metis 44 american indian* 45 native american* 46 eskimo* 47 32 or 33 or 34 or 35 or 36 or 37 or 38 or 39 or 40 or 41 or 42 or 43 or 44 or 45 or 46 syntax 3 48 31 and 47 49 health care model* 50 organizational model* 51 integrat* care* 52 integrat* health care* 53 health care system* 54 health care framework* 55 intercultural health care* 56 integrat* medicine 57 health service 58 health services 59 mental health service* 60 49 or 50 or 51 or 52 or 53 or 54 or 55 or 56 or 57 or 58 or 59 syntax 4 61 31 and 47 and 60 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 eligibility criteria we selected eligibility criteria in order to form an analytical corpus that includes the widest possible scope of research and to provide an overall picture of the literature on barriers and facilitators intervening in the use of traditional medicine, allopathic medicine or both types of medicines. we retained studies discussing (1) traditional medicine or allopathic medicine or both, and occurring (2) within indigenous populations. this brought forth studies concerning indigenous populations situated principally in the americas, in australia/new zealand as well as in africa. it is noteworthy that these regions of the world have been colonized by eurocentric powers and, as such, offer a reliable basis on which to compare results. we made no distinction between research that was performed in rural as opposed to urban areas. selection of relevant literature a total of 1898 articles were identified with our broad search criteria. as shown in figure 1, those duplicates were removed, this number was reduced to 1290 articles. we focused our study on articles published after 1996 in order to focus on changes that have occurred in the last 20 years. this narrowed down the search results to 845 articles. relevant papers were then selected by scrutinizing the titles of the 845 works. we retained articles (1) where titles concerned barriers and facilitators toward the use of available or non-available healthcare among indigenous populations or articles (2) having the potential of discussing such barriers and facilitators. we excluded articles pertaining to unique medical treatments, specific molecules in pharmacology and book pages classified as articles. this resulted in the exclusion of 698 articles, leaving a total of 147. a second reviewer (t.s.) selected one database and performed the same screening process on 90 randomly selected articles, retaining the same selection of articles than the first reviewer (c.o.), thereby confirming the soundness and reliability of the procedure. an additional 102 articles were found not to be relevant after reading their abstracts. we retained articles where abstracts dealt with barriers and facilitators toward the use of available or nonavailable healthcare among indigenous populations. we excluded articles related to demographic studies, symposium summaries, training documentation on western medical treatments and agriculture of medicinal plants. we also removed one russian and one german article, classified as english, that were not excluded while searching through databases. this yielded a final selection of 45 articles that form the object of our analysis. data analysis a first reading of the 45 articles was carried out in order to grasp the general content of each text. to facilitate the processing of the data, microsoft excel was used to construct a table whereby a first and then a second categorization of data was carried out. all studies retained in this review were placed in random order. two researchers (c.o., t.s.) reviewed the selected extracts to define a common categorization strategy. coding was performed based on the thematic analysis of braun and clark (2006). through a six-step process (familiarity with the corpus, code generation, theme generation, theme refining, theme definition and data report generation), the objective is to highlight all the themes addressed in selected articles until saturation of the topics occurs; the process generating a thematic tree gathering all the categories and sub-categories evoked. recurring themes were classified into a pre-existing coding grid concerning either tm or am on the one hand, and barriers and facilitators to their access, on the other. initial categories were then determined on the basis of all the important elements present in the table. a second categorization was conducted on themes to reach a tighter level of category. this process http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 was repeated until the superior categories could no longer be amalgamate. figure 1 summary of the procedures used for selecting articles for the systematic review results selection of relevant articles, themes and categories the selection process presented in figure 1 yielded 45 articles that met the inclusion criteria on barriers and facilitators toward the use of tm and am among indigenous populations. a thematic synthesis of barriers, facilitators as well as solutions and recommendations identified five broad categories that reflect personal, relational, cultural, structural and policy components. these modulate barriers to the access of either am or tm as well as factors that facilitate such access. it should be noted that studies differed in their experimental protocols and research questions. nevertheless, in the following analyses of the results, themes in each category were organized in descending order of their frequency of occurrence. you will find in appendix 1 the list of works used for this systematic literature review http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 table 2 barriers to the use of allopathic medicine (biomedical health care system) category theme references personal barriers personal beliefs against biomedical system 2,7,8,16,18,19,30,35,44 poverty 6,8,16,41,43,18,35 dissatisfaction with treatment outcomes 8,18,34,35 resistance to change while implementing new practice 30 health professional’s limited knowledge about allopathic medicine 35 unease in the hospital setting 39 unease with doctor's gender 18 relational barriers difficulties in communicating with health professional (verbal or nonverbal miscomprehension/too rapid pace of conversation) 1,10,13,35,39,40,41,42,43 difficulties establishing patient-health practitioner relationships 2,8,18,19,28,41,43,44 racial tension 18,35,41,45 too little/limited time with health provider 8,18,40 cultural barriers different sociocultural belief systems and cultural background between health care providers and recipients 1,2,4,7,8,16,18,19,30,35,38 ,39,41,42,44,45 lack of adequate cultural training for health professionals 1,4,13,32,39,40,41,42,43,4 4 fear of side-effects of medication/intervention 2,9,19,28 not alignment with healer's beliefs and perception 9,37 culturally inappropriate care/compromised cultural safety 41,43 lack of indigenous cultural settings/unfamiliarity navigating in the system 42,44 fear of community judgement toward the choice to use allopathic medicine 2 structural barriers long distance from home – no access to care 2,5,6,12,16,19,32,35,39 high cost of treatment and medication 2,6,12,16,19,32,34,41 lack of options/ non-offered practice 2,5,32,35,38 long wait to see health professional / overcrowded 2,18,42,43 lack of adequate medical equipment / undersupplied 2,4,32,38 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 inconvenience of the clinic hours of operation 19,32,39 lack of financial means to deliver care 1,32,41 lack of health care insurance/ineligibility to care 8,18,19 communication illiteracy/monolingual e.g. difficulties filling out forms 18,41 administrative heaviness of health system (redtape) 2,44 communication – translator’s inadequacy or unavailability 1,41 limited amount of staff 19 unreliable communication system to reach patients at home 41 non-adaptation of the health care system 41 scientific studies are not translated to clinical practice/policies 41 insufficient indigenous people work in the clinic 42 heavy staff turnover 43 impersonality of treatments 1 policy barriers social inequity (inequitable treatment regimes for indigenous and non-indigenous patients) 6,8,16,41,43,18,35 inefficient funding model 1,32,41 ineffective mechanisms to implement indigenous health framework 41 ineffective model of care 41 indifference/discrimination of health authority 41 * refer to appendix 1 for the full list of studies cited in the table. table 2 presents the barriers to the access and to the offering of allopathic healthcare. a total of 42 themes were determined by matching synonyms. these were divided into the five aforementioned categories of barriers. personal barriers to accessing am the first category related to personal barriers. in this category, the most cited reason for not using the biomedical healthcare system is personal beliefs/attitudes against the biomedical system that can hinder a person’s use of the offered healthcare. such beliefs/attitudes often stem from less than optimal experiences with the healthcare received, including racism in the case of indigenous populations (contextualized further in the discussion section). the second most cited reason is poverty. poverty includes lack of money to pay for healthcare and medication, lack of means to transport sick people to the closest clinic, and impossibility to miss a day of work to attend an http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 appointment, to name a few. another cited personal barrier is the dissatisfaction with treatment outcomes, ranging from difficulties following the recommended treatment to major side effects resulting from its use. other barriers for the access to medical care from the patient’s perspective include unease with the hospital setting and unease with a doctor’s gender, notably when the doctor is from the opposite gender. in terms of the offering of care, a personal barrier is the health professional’s limited knowledge about the culture he is working in, about particular disease prevalence or pattern associated with indigenous communities, and about specific treatments to help patients. a general barrier influencing the access and the offering is the resistance to change, the difficulty in trying out new avenues in healthcare. relational barriers to accessing am in the relational barriers category, the most influential barrier to the access and to the offering of allopathic healthcare relates to difficulties in communication. communication problems include verbal miscomprehension because patients and health practitioners do not always speak the same language, the too rapid pace of conversation for patients, the incomprehension of technical medical vocabularies and the cultural miscomprehension of nonverbal gestures. in addition, difficulties in establishing relationships between patients and health practitioners may influence the access to healthcare for communities. limitations in the time spent with the healthcare provider as well as racial tensions are other relational barriers encountered. cultural barriers to accessing am nineteen studies (42%) from this systematic literature review fall into the cultural barriers category. sixteen studies (36%) mentioned different sociocultural belief systems and cultural background between providers and recipients of care as the main barrier to the access and the offering of biomedical healthcare. this is rooted in historical trauma, whereby the biomedical system is seen as an extension of colonization; with dominance of staff over patients causing a feeling of alienation. the lack of adequate cultural training for health professionals is mentioned as one of the main cultural barriers. the lack of indigenous cultural settings inside clinics and the unfamiliarity with the healthcare system are also mentioned. another encountered barrier is culturally inappropriate care. cultural protocols are unknown or not respected. this jeopardizes the cultural safety sought by patients. resistance to using the biomedical system may also come from the community traditional healer’s negative beliefs and perceptions toward the biomedical system. patients may fear side effects if they use allopathic treatment. that fear may be influenced by the community’s beliefs against the biomedical system as well as previous negative experiences for the patient himself, a relative or a close friend. patients may also apprehend the community’s judgement if they rely on allopathic care; they may feel embarrassment from the community in choosing to consult. structural barriers to accessing am the largest category in this table encompasses structural barriers. in this category, the most cited reason for not using the biomedical system is remoteness; the long distance from home to access healthcare. travelling outside their communities to access pharmacies or other modern healthcare services is demanding for elderly people, sick patients and pregnant women. the second most cited barrier is the high cost of medical consultations and medication. certain individuals lack health insurance, have difficulty accessing insurance or are not eligible for it. on the other hand, certain healthcare practices may not be offered in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 communities, clinic staff may not be able to meet the patient’s need and services may have been removed from remote communities to relocate them in urban centers. in other cases, clinics or hospitals lack adequate medical equipment or are undersupplied. other structural barriers include the limited number and heavy turnover of the staff. this entails overcrowded clinics, causing a long wait to see health professionals, as well as unprepared health professionals working in an unfamiliar setting. patients also complain about the insufficient amount of indigenous people working in the clinic, the impersonality of treatments and the fact that health practitioners do not always agree when the whole family wants to be present during a consultation. in terms of communication, a translator’s inadequacy or unavailability causes problems when there is a language barrier. another communication problem is the lack of adaptation of the system when illiterate or monolingual patients must fill forms for their registration (forms being in an unfamiliar language). it also becomes a communication problem when staff tries to reach patients by phone or mail in remote areas where telephones and addresses may not exist. patients fail to receive information about their appointments and they are blamed for not showing up. other barriers to the access of care relate to the hours of operation of the clinic; these may be incompatible with everyday obligations or conflict with indigenous traditional activities. other structural barriers relate to the heavy administration of the health system, the lack of funding for health services and infrastructure and the fact that scientific findings are not translated to clinical practice/policies. policy barriers to accessing am in the policy barriers category, the most frequently mentioned barrier is social inequity. studies mentioned inequitable treatment regimes for indigenous and nonindigenous patients, reflecting the discrimination of health authorities toward indigenous communities. another barrier stems from the allocation of insufficient funds to implement culturally adapted allopathic care and a true indigenous healthcare framework. finally, the allopathic model of care prioritizes diagnosis and treatment instead of focusing on prevention programs. table 3 barriers to indigenous traditional medicine category theme references personal barriers personal beliefs against traditional medicine 2,8,11,30,35,37 patient or healer limited knowledge inappropriate use or dosage / unsafe practice 2,12,20,36 health problem is not a priority for the healer or not perceived as being problematic 2 erroneous teaching 20 resistance to change 30 healer’s lack of skill about business administration and financial engagement 32 bad reputation of the healer 9 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 relational barriers negative promotion of traditional medicine 11 cultural barriers acculturation / beliefs against tm 2,8,11,30,35,37 marginalization/stigmatization of tm 11,21,26,33 loss of knowledge and interest in traditional medicine 12,19,27,37 ignorance of tm from biomedical system/staff or unfamiliarity 20,21 vision of tm as complementary or last resort resource 13 usage is taboo/secret for the user 16 sick patient living in the healer's house 34 structural barriers informal training to become a tm practitioner 3,11,24,32,33,36 lack of /limited funding from the health care system 3,16,26,28,30,38 lack of research on traditional medicine effectiveness and safety 2,10,11,21,33 unpaid healers or inconsistent payment 3,34,38 long distance from home – difficulty accessing medicines (products/treatments/healers) 7,12,26 harmful procedures 9,11,28 effort/time to prepare traditional remedies 10,12 gap between policies and practices 15,16 regulation: increased cost of care and therapy 15,34 minimal structuring of tm 1 seasonally unavailable traditional medicines 7 scientific studies are not translated to clinical practice 11 unpredictable schedule from healers 26 high cost of treatment 36 policy barriers non-regulated health workforce 3,6,11,24,28,32,33,34,35,37 dominance of biomedical system 19,21,26,34,41 biopiracy/no knowledge protection 34,37 many interpretations of tm/definitions 21 policies encourage drug prescriptions 10 regulation: loss of freedom / lack of control 15 * refer to appendix 1 for the full list of studies cited in the table. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 barriers are also met when populations consider using indigenous traditional medicine. table 3 presents a total of 39 themes uncovered when identifying the barriers that pertain to the access and to the offering of traditional medicine, again taking into account synonyms. it also groups these themes into the same five categories used for allopathic medicine. personal barriers to accessing indigenous tm in the personal barriers category, the most cited reason for not using the biomedical system relates to personal beliefs against tm. this includes health practitioners who are against tm and forbid its use by their patients, patients who fear side effects or have superstitions, and some groups who try to undermine or suppress tm (often on spiritual grounds). the second most cited personal barrier for not using tm stems from the fact that, as in other treatment modalities including am, some practitioners are not always fully competent. hence, studies mention the patient or traditional healer’s limited knowledge about the appropriate use of the medicine, the inadequate dosage while treating a condition or an unsafe practice leading to more harm. other barriers include the health problem not being a priority for the traditional healer or that he does not perceive it as being problematic thus pushing the patient to seek help from the allopathic medical system. some traditional healers might decide to withhold treatment depending on the patient’s age. it was also mentioned that traditional healers may have received erroneous teachings leading to mistakes in his practice. additionally, some traditional healers may lack skills in business administration and financial engagement and this may interfere with their capacity to maintain a functioning practice. a final personal barrier influencing the access and the offering of tm concerns the resistance to change or the difficulty in trying out new avenues in health. relational barriers to accessing indigenous tm two relational barriers were identified in the literature. firstly, the bad reputation of a traditional healer, may hinder his practice thus limiting the access to tm in a community. secondly, the negative promotion of tm by health practitioners and community members convey ideas that undermine tm practice. cultural barriers to accessing indigenous tm in the cultural barriers category, the most influential barrier is the cultural background of users, non-users and health practitioners. indeed, health practitioners may not have been exposed to traditional medicine before beginning their practice because of cultural differences. this ignorance of, or unfamiliarity with, tm often characterizes the biomedical system or allopathic health practitioners and may thus explain the bias that they can develop against tm. such a context can also contribute to the negative personal beliefs cited above. the next two barriers were cited equally in the literature. the first one refers to the loss of knowledge and interest in traditional medicine that is often observed in younger generations or can be related to the communities’ proximity to hospitals or urban centers, which offer choices of treatment from the dominant system. the second one may derive in part from the former since it concerns the marginalization and stigmatization of traditional medicine. consequently, tm may also be seen as a complementary or a last resort resource and its usage considered taboo or kept secret. in some cultures, sick patients may actually stay in their traditional healer’s home. this may discourage some individuals from consulting traditional healers. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 structural barriers to accessing indigenous tm as was seen with allopathic medicine in the previous section, the structural barriers category comprises the largest number of identified themes. in this category, two reasons were cited most frequently for not accessing/offering tm. the first relates to the training of tm practitioners that is considered informal. the second concerns the lack of, or limitations in, financial resources of the healthcare system to include tm in their services. close third is the relative scarcity of research about the effectiveness and safety of tm, making the latter less “trustworthy” than the dominant biomedical system. these three themes may explain why allopathic practitioners may be reluctant or unable to send patients to the “other system”. several themes were noted that referred to the payment of traditional healers. one barrier is the high cost of treatments that cannot be afforded by the population. another barrier relates to the patient’s inconsistent payments to the traditional healer, which make traditional healers’ living difficult. to be noted, in some cultures traditional healers do not get any money for their services while in other cultures they receive payment only if the patient is healed. another mentioned barrier is the traditional healers’ unpredictable availability, which makes it difficult to consult them. in remote areas, traditional healers may live on the land, forcing patients to travel long distances in nature to access treatment. similarly, the population may not have access to the appropriate traditional preparations, as some plants are only available seasonally. also mentioned, the effort and time it takes to prepare traditional remedies may discourage some patients. on an organizational level and when available, scientific studies are not translated to clinical practice, which affects the gap between the generation of knowledge and the establishment of policies and practice guidelines. in parallel to this last consideration, some communities are weary about tm becoming more regulated. this could modify or limit its practice and cause the cost of care and therapy to increase. policy barriers to accessing indigenous tm in the policy barriers category, more than 15 studies (33%) mention a non-regulated health workforce as the main barrier to the access and the offering of tm. this theme encompasses the absence of legislation, policies and accreditation for the practice of tm, including the practicing traditional healers themselves, their treatments and the natural products used. in parallel, the culturally dominant biomedical system strongly encourages drug prescription and compliant use. biopiracy is another barrier mentioned that refers to policy or lack thereof. international efforts have been made to improve the protection of traditional knowledge, such as the nagoya protocol (secrétariat de la convention sur la diversité biologique, 2012). nonetheless, information about tm must be shared with caution since the application of such guidelines is not uniform on an international level. furthermore, tm is very diverse and often specific to certain indigenous groups or even communities, making it difficult to establish a uniform policy in its regard. as mentioned with structural barriers, communities also fear that with regulation, traditional healers and patients may lose their freedom of choosing what suits them best and traditional healers may no longer have full control of their practice. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 table 4 factors facilitating the use of allopathic medicine (biomedical system) category theme references personal facilitators patients’ satisfaction of treatment 8,42 positive treatment outcomes 18 relational facilitators good patient-health practitioner relationship 8,23,31,32,39,42,43,44 iterative dialogue 5,23,32,39,43,44 referrals from/to healers 28,33 practitioner self-disclosure 31 adequate amount of time spent with health professionals 33 health practitioner bonds with community 1 cultural facilitators cultural adaptation of tools and programs 1,27,28,39 positive cultural background toward biomedical system 8,44 origin of modern drugs (plants) 11 incorporation of indigenous traditional practices into biomedical system 39 structural facilitators proximity of/exposure to care 1,7,13,23,39,42 presence of indigenous staff 1,3,29,31,39 low cost of treatment / free health care 2,7,12,18,39 patient-centered care 32,33 modern use/science establishing efficacy 7,12 long shelf life of the medication 7 modernization of health care 19 possibility of home care 28 incentive to come at the clinic 39 adequate environment 43 easy use of treatment 2 privacy of treatment 2 availability of supplies 7 policy facilitators dominance/power of biomedical care 7,12,26 * refer to appendix 1 for the full list of studies cited in the table. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 as illustrated in table 4, a total of 26 themes were uncovered when determining the facilitators to the access and to the offering of allopathic healthcare. categories similar to the ones used to present barriers were selected. personal facilitators to accessing am patients’ satisfaction with treatment is mentioned as a key personal facilitator for seeking services from the allopathic system of medicine. this satisfaction derives from encountering friendly and caring staff as well as spending enough time with the healthcare professional. positive treatment outcomes, such as one reducing pain, are often cited as a second factor facilitating the use of allopathic medicine. relational facilitators to accessing am in the relational facilitator category, the most influential positive factor that was identified relates to the establishment of a good relationship between the patient and the healthcare practitioner. when a good relationship is established, patients perceive that practitioners are more caring. they may also feel recognized and respected as another culture, which helps establish trust. some patients report that they spend an adequate amount of time with the health professional; this eases the creation of a good relationship and increases attendance to appointments. the second most cited facilitator is the iterative dialogue that can occur between the patient and the healthcare practitioner. as nicely exemplified in an australian context, this process can yield “effective and respectful communication (that) allowed murri clients to be more informed and empowered so they could make knowledgeable decisions” (kendall & barnett, 2014). a practitioner’s selfdisclosure about aspects of his private life can help to bridge the gap between patients and health practitioners. moreover, bonds often develop between a health practitioner and a community as time spent in a community increases. another facilitator to engage into allopathic care exists when a reciprocal referral network is established between traditional healers and health professionals. cultural facilitators to accessing am in the cultural facilitators category, the most frequently mentioned facilitator is the cultural adaptation of healthcare tools and programs. indigenous patients understand and collaborate better with a program when the tools are adapted to fit the community’s needs (abbott, 1998). patients who are more familiar with or culturally adapted to the biomedical system more easily make use of it. another facilitator is the incorporation of indigenous traditional practices into the biomedical system. sharing circles, smudging, ceremonies, sweat lodges and working with an elder can be offered to increase the comfort and familiarity to better suit the patient’s needs. additionally, knowing the origin of modern drugs can facilitate their use. several modern drugs are based on natural sources, many based on their use in tm (king, 2004). structural facilitators to accessing am in the structural facilitators category, the most explored theme is the proximity to the clinic and exposure to care. communities are more likely to use services when they are offered nearby. treating ill patients directly in their home is also mentioned as a facilitator. hiring indigenous people was likewise highly mentioned. patients feel more comfortable when they recognize themselves in the staff but also in an environment where indigenous artifacts can be shown. in some settings, incentives such as snacks are offered to attract people to the clinic. the low cost of treatment or free healthcare also increases the access to services. additionally, availability of supplies, including medication, facilitates the uptake of allopathic medicine. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 another facilitator is the care centered on patients, which increases patient satisfaction. they (nurse practitioners) provide individualized care focusing on both health problems of the individual and effects health problems have on families (nzimakwe, 1996). allopathic treatments are seen as easy to carry, to use and to conceal, allowing greater privacy; for example, oral contraceptives versus a traditional plant preparation (agadjanian, 1999). on the other hand, the long shelf life of a medication allows patients to take only a portion of the prescription, keeping the unused portion for future manifestations of the disease. the modernization of healthcare enables more patients to be reached (for instance, through telehealth) (arora, kurji, & s. tennant, 2013) and diseases to be treated more efficiently. the efficacy of modern medicine and scientific studies establishing the latter are not only seen as facilitators for the patients to use its services, but also for governmental entities to set appropriate policies. policy facilitators to accessing am the dominance of the biomedical system and its power represent the major policy facilitators mentioned in relevant studies. this can simply reflect the fact that by being dominant and powerful, allopathic healthcare is, in principle, indeed accessible to indigenous populations. this must obviously be nuanced by all the barriers covered in preceding sections. table 5 factors facilitating the use of indigenous traditional medicine categories themes references personal facilitators healer’s knowledge 3,9,19,30,32,36 patients’ satisfaction of treatment 8,15 previous positive experiences 15 relational facilitators iterative dialogue 5,23,32 establishing a good patient-healer relationship 5,6,8,23,29,32 shared stakeholder participation at various levels of health care organization 7,26 communication verbal comprehension – language 9,32 dissatisfaction with patient-health professional relationship 10,13,15 referral from a trusted one 15,26 taking/making referrals from/to health professional 26,28,33 cultural facilitators positive cultural background and beliefs toward traditional medicine 3,7,8,11,12,15,19,25,28,31 ,32,38 traditional teaching 5,2,24,28,29,38 cultural safety and preservation of social identity 5,19,28 integration of traditional practice into the academic field 11,23,24 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 growing interest in ethnomedicine and traditional medicine 12,37 connected to nature / natural 19,39 working with knowledge holders 20,35 respecting traditional healing protocols 20,26 incentive to pass on knowledge 37 structural facilitators staff nationality / hiring native people 1,23,29,31 proximity of care / knowledge’s holder / availability of treatment 2,16,19,21,26,30,32 confidentiality 2 independence from health authority / autonomy / empowerment 3,15,19,26,33 associations of healers/traditional practitioners 6,22,28,30 fewer side effects than medication 9 low cost of treatment 9,10,12,16,21,32 proximity of traditional material/medicine 9,12,19,21,26 care centered on patients 10,23,28,33 effectiveness/efficacy known for generations 10,15,16,19,21,38 reduction of biomedical side effects 15 safety 15,33 first or only source of care 15,16,19,21,32 failure of biomedical system 15 research in tm fields 21,25 subsidized care (funding/payment/salary) 26,28,29,35 program operation and coordination 26 recruitment of healers/knowledge holders 26,35 treating patient at home 26,28 policy’s facilitators healers/knowledge holders’ accreditation/licenses 6 intercultural health framework 11,23 legislation practice / treatment 11,13,14,28,37 recognition of tm into social / biomedical sciences 21 legislation intellectual property rights 37 * refer to appendix 1 for the full list of studies cited in the table. table 5 presents the factors mentioned in studies that facilitate the access to and the offering of indigenous traditional medicine. a total of 43 themes were identified and are grouped in the same five categories as in other tables. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 personal facilitators to accessing indigenous tm in the realm of personal facilitators, the traditional healer’s training and knowledge about traditional practices is brought forth most frequently. while offering a greater variety of care, an effective traditional healer is also perceived to work for the community and not for himself (moorehead, gone, & december, 2015). this potentially contributes to the patient’s satisfaction and their positive experiences with traditional treatments, both mentioned as key facilitating factors. relational facilitators to accessing indigenous tm the establishment of a good relationship between the patient and the traditional healer stands out as the most important factor in the category of relational facilitators. the traditional indigenous healer uses good communication methods, reassurance, sympathy, and empathy, […] (nzimakwe, 1996). moreover, iterative dialogue between patients and traditional healers was mentioned in several studies; it not only allows more comprehension about the patient’s life but also generates a better understanding about his possible health problems. generally, the traditional healer and the patient share the same language, which helps them to understand one another. when the referral to a traditional healer comes from a trusted person, community members are more likely to use his/her services. additionally, dissatisfaction with allopathic health professionals may encourage a patient to turn to indigenous tm for healthcare. studies further uncovered that a health system is perceived as stronger if it involves referrals among traditional healers and health professionals (mignone, bartlett, o'neil, & orchard, 2007). collaboration among traditional healers and health professionals reinforced the trust toward health practices in the community (mignone et al., 2007)). the better understanding of tm by communities, healthcare professionals and government entities requires that all stakeholders participate at various levels of service organization. […]. the cases suggested that when indigenous entities are involved in organizing health care there was an impact in reducing barriers to access and increasing user satisfaction (mignone et al., 2007). cultural facilitators to accessing indigenous tm in terms of cultural facilitators, several studies highlighted the importance of positive cultural background and beliefs toward indigenous traditional medicine. individuals access tm more readily when it is part of their culture or when they are exposed to it in their lives. moreover, choosing indigenous tm can symbolize a reaffirmation of social identity, all the while providing individuals with a culturally relevant healthcare environment. the sharing of traditional knowledge, through teachings (notably identifying medicinal plants and learning how to prepare remedies from them) can be very empowering for patients. it also connects individuals more with nature and contributes to the upkeep of the knowledge. medicinal plants are often both nearer and more readily available, and that reality shapes social identity and choice. plants are part of the culture (gold & clapp, 2011). interacting with knowledge keepers, by itself, was found in a few studies to reinforce the offer of and improve the access to tm. indeed, knowledge keepers can support academic and medical staff to include tm into scientific and clinical settings, while ensuring traditional healing protocols are being respected. two studies noted that the growing interest in ethnomedicine and tm contributes to a greater demand for it, as well as calls to regulate it. one study mentioned that some communities could even offer incentives to favour the passing on of traditional knowledge. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 structural facilitators to accessing indigenous tm a large number of structural factors were brought forth by several studies to highlight their role in facilitating access to tm. the proximity of care, which includes where the knowledge is located and the availability of treatment, was mentioned most frequently in the reviewed studies. it makes sense that the closer the treatment modalities are from home, the higher is the probability to consult. some traditional healers even visit their ill patients at home. similarly, the traditional material or medicines are often geographically close to communities; some plants actually growing in backyards. several studies noted that tm might represent the first, or sometimes the only, source of healthcare available, notably in remote communities. low cost of tm consultation and treatment, combined with the fact that its efficacy has been known for generations, are also seen as factors facilitating the use of tm. many patients feel safer to use tm and perceive that its usage conveys fewer side effects than allopathic medication or even reduces the side effects of biomedical treatments. likewise, failure of the biomedical system may influence people to use more tm. certain studies mentioned that indigenous tm often offers patient-centered care, which increases patient satisfaction with tm, such positive experiences building confidence towards its use. also, some patients feel that tm offers more confidentiality, since seeing a traditional healer is more discreet than sitting in the waiting room of a biomedical clinic. some traditional healers mentioned that non-regulated traditional practices maintain a distance from the health authority, providing more autonomy and empowerment. the context in which tm is offered can also influence its uptake. associations of healers or traditional practitioners can provide a greater sense of professionalism. likewise, it helps when healer’s recruitment (is) based on social standing in the community and (they) must abide by a code of conduct (manitowabi & shawande, 2013). hiring indigenous people in clinics as well as subsidized care, such as programs funding tm and the traditional practitioner’s salary, can ease the use to tm for healthcare. for tm to operate properly implies a good coordination job and ensuring that (indigenous) protocols are followed (manitowabi & shawande, 2013). research in the field of tm builds the scientific evidence for safety and efficacy, thus allowing greater acceptance of tm practices. policy facilitators to accessing indigenous tm in terms of factors concerning policy, a good number of studies highlight the legislation of tm practice and treatment. the legislation of tm can take many forms depending on communities’ needs. for instance, traditional practitioners may be delivered practice licences to increase their recognition. intellectual propriety rights related to indigenous traditional knowledge must also be taken into consideration and has been addressed by the convention on biological diversity (cbd). the cbd explicitly acknowledges indigenous and local communities’ contribution to biodiversity conservation, calls for respect and support for their knowledge, innovations and practices, and confirms indigenous peoples’ rights over the knowledge they hold. the cbd also calls for fair and equitable sharing, on mutually agreed terms, of benefits arising from the use of genetic resources and associated knowledge (timmermans, 2003). the creation of an appropriate intercultural framework can facilitate reciprocal knowledge exchange between tm and am systems. finally, the recognition of tm by social and biomedical sciences can improve its accessibility. discussion the purpose of this research was to systematically review barriers and facilitators http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 that have been brought forward in the literature concerning the use of tm and am by indigenous peoples. a total of 45 studies published between 1996 and 2016 met our inclusion criteria and this speaks to the high interest and contemporary pertinence of accessing both systems of healthcare for indigenous populations worldwide. our thematic analysis enabled to group barriers and facilitators into five categories, namely related to personal, relational, cultural, structural and policy components. in the personal realm, studies highlighted individual beliefs and perceptions as well as experiences and outcomes with either system of healthcare; discrimination and racism unfortunately still playing an important role. as expected, when these are negative they impede the use of a given system and when they are positive, they contribute to enhance access to the same. similarly, positive or negative perceptions concerning the quality of practitioners themselves, be it in am or tm, directly influence an indigenous person’s decision to make use of that medicine or not. on the other hand, poverty stands out as a more specific and recurring barrier that prevents individuals from accessing am. on the next level, relationships between patients and practitioners play a key role in helping individuals establish trust and decide which system to turn to. the ease or difficulty with which a practitioner can communicate and interact with his/her patient is a key determinant; language being the first and foremost component to consider (moerman, 2007). as will be discussed further in the next section, cultural differences or similarities also impact patient-practitioner relationships negatively or positively; racism being particularly, and understandably, the worstcase scenario. on another hand, the more time a practitioner devotes to the patient, the better the latter’s inclination to use the system to which the former belongs. in this context, tm generally fares better than am and this can involve the use of iterative dialogue. interestingly, cross-referral between am and tm practitioners favours the use of the system being recommended; with tm additionally benefiting from referrals of trusted individuals. as mentioned above and encountered in a large number of studies, cultural divides represent the major barrier for indigenous patients to choose and access am. they often face an am practitioner lacking cultural training, evolve in a setting (clinic, hospital and so on) devoid of indigenous references and must navigate in a complex healthcare system (forms to fill, moving between departments and so on), not rarely in a language other than their own. the physical, mental and emotional disorientation and distress that can ensue, especially in the context of ill health, compromises the indigenous patient’s feeling of safety. hence, it follows that the putting in place of culturally adapted practitioner training, healthcare programs, tools and services in am greatly favour its choice and access by indigenous individuals; as does providing help to navigate the healthcare system. despite such efforts, several indigenous patients may still prefer, or wish to access, tm. indeed, it resonates with their beliefs, reinforces their cultural identity and is more connected to nature. for others, on the contrary, tm can clash with their beliefs (notably religious, for instance in regards to more ceremonial parts), be seen as marginalized and its practitioners or treatments considered unreliable. this may be related to the loss of tm knowledge and its alienation, notably through colonization. according to our thematic analysis, components belonging to the structural category account, by far, for the largest number of factors influencing positively or negatively the selection of, and access to, either am or tm by indigenous peoples. the structural category encompasses financial resource allocation as well as the roles, tasks http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 and responsibilities of practitioners intervening in the delivery, coordination and administrative oversight of healthcare in am. structural components also take into account rules and procedures. using a different worldview and different terminology, such considerations may nonetheless be applied, at least in part, to tm. however, it is important to note that the establishment of rules and procedures are often elaborated and mandated by governing instances or professional associations that belong to the dominant system rather than to indigenous ones (atleo, 1997; castellano, 2004; spak, 2005). in this context, many indigenous patients find it difficult to choose and access am. this is generally related to its high cost (services and treatments), to the limited equipment or offer of healthcare services, or their remoteness from communities. overcrowding, long delays to access health professionals, inconvenient clinic hours and side effects of drugs also contribute. conversely, am is chosen and accessed much more readily when it is close, affordable and notably involves indigenous staff; reaffirming cultural and relational facilitators discussed above. technological advances and scientific support for the safety and efficacy of am diagnostic and treatment modalities (surgery, drug-based therapies) also contribute to its significant positive outcomes. in terms of tm, the most important structural barriers that were brought forth in several studies have to do with the lack of trust toward practices and practitioners, notably due to the scantiness of scientific evidence and informal training. this is especially true for indigenous individuals who have little knowledge of, or have been acculturated from, tm, as discussed above with cultural barriers. on the other hand, tm is often considered as proximal, accessible, affordable, safe and effective, as attested by often long historical use. in some settings, it may represent the first or only source of primary healthcare, especially in remote communities or while out on the land. other significant structural factors facilitating the selection and access to tm include the existence of traditional healer/traditional practitioner associations and their independence from mainstream health authorities. not only does this raise the confidence level toward tm but it also fosters autonomy, empowerment and selfdetermination for indigenous peoples. in contexts outside the focus of this systematic study, tm is often recognized for its holistic approach toward health and wellness, as well as its celebration of strength and resilience (andersson & ledogar, 2008; currie, wild, schopflocher, laing, & veugelers, 2013; heavyrunner & sebastian morris, 1997). in contrast, the dominant am is generally based on a more reductionist, diseaseand symptom-based approach, albeit there is a growing movement toward more holistic integrative medicine (aronowitz, 2001; giordano, boatwright, stapleton, & huff, 2002). finally, components related to healthcare policies can influence indigenous individuals in their choice and access of am and tm. indeed, policy generally emanates from the conjunction of cultural, societal and structural priorities and constraints. it is therefore not surprising that social inequities – that is, inequitable healthcare for indigenous versus non-indigenous populations – are considered by several studies as the major barrier preventing indigenous patients from having optimal access to am. this is exacerbated by unfavourable social determinants (low income, poor housing, limited education, trauma from colonization and so on) that constitute greater challenges to the health and wellbeing of indigenous people, as discussed in the introduction section of this review. the dominant am healthcare system may sometimes appear to be indifferent or it simply fails to provide sufficient resources (financial and human) or implement http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 indigenous health frameworks. access to tm by indigenous patients is likewise severely limited by the lack of policies to regulate and properly fund its “workforce” (traditional practitioners). indeed, the dominant system (and, to a certain extent, acculturated indigenous people themselves) can see the establishment of a regulatory framework as a positive way to render tm more “trustworthy”. however, traditional practitioners are quite wary of losing the essence and the control of their own healthcare modalities. recognition of tm by social and biomedical sciences represents a promising avenue, as does the establishment of intercultural frameworks such as integrative healthcare policies. in this context, the previous work of our research group contributed substantial scientific evidence in support of the antidiabetic activity of medicinal plants of the traditional pharmacopeia of the eastern james bay cree nations of canada (fraser et al., 2007; meddah et al., 2009; ouellet et al., 2016). despite this, great challenges remain to translate such findings into policies that will improve access to safe and efficacious tm for indigenous diabetics. limits although we tried to capture a broad span of studies to inform on barriers and facilitators influencing access to tm and am in indigenous populations worldwide, our literature sample captured principally works concerning such populations in the americas, in australia/new zealand and in africa. hence, we acknowledge the fact that the statements that we make are not necessarily generalizable to all indigenous populations. however, the indigenous populations concerned by our study have all been colonized by eurocentric powers and may thus share a similar context related to tm and am. moreover, this study does not distinguish whether care is available in rural or urban settings. barriers and facilitators are expected to be different in both locations. however, the purpose of the study is to highlight as many topics as possible in order to better understand the access processes that indigenous people face. finally, all results cannot be generalized throughout all communities. for example, access to healthcare in villages that are located far from an urban center might not be the same as villages nearby in those areas. also, laws and rights for indigenous population differ in each country, influencing the access to healthcare. conclusions the current systematic review covered the literature of the past 20 years and identified a large number of key components that influence indigenous individuals in their selection and access of am and tm healthcare systems. barriers and facilitators were successfully grouped into five major categories encompassing personal, relational, cultural, structural and policy factors. power imbalances between am and tm systems as well as the cultural disconnect of am represent major challenges. likewise, tm practice and practitioners stand a lot to gain by improving their perception and appreciation by am stakeholders as well as some of their fellow indigenous patients. mutual respect, trust and understanding of each other’s modalities is essential to offer the best healthcare options from both am and tm to indigenous peoples and hence pave the way to reducing health inequities. wellness and strength-based approaches must also be favoured. disclosure the authors declare no conflict of interest. references abbott, p. j. 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(2005). the position of indigenous knowledge in canadian comanagement organizations. anthropologica, 233-246. spoor, d. c., martineau, l. c., leduc, c., benhaddou-andaloussi, a., meddah, b., harris, c., . . . joly, e. (2006). selected plant species from the cree pharmacopoeia of northern quebec possess anti-diabetic potential. canadian journal of physiology and pharmacology, 84(8-9), 847-858. statistics canada. (2015). life expectancy. in s. canada (ed.), https://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/89645-x/2010001/life-expectancyesperance-vie-eng.htm. templeman, k., & robinson, a. (2011). integrative medicine models in contemporary primary health care. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.canada.ca/fr/sante-canada/services/sante-premieres-nations-inuits/promotion-sante/prevention-suicide.html https://www.canada.ca/fr/sante-canada/services/sante-premieres-nations-inuits/promotion-sante/prevention-suicide.html https://www.canada.ca/fr/sante-canada/services/sante-premieres-nations-inuits/promotion-sante/prevention-suicide.html https://www.canada.ca/fr/sante-canada/services/sante-premieres-nations-inuits/promotion-sante/prevention-suicide.html https://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/89-645-x/2010001/life-expectancy-esperance-vie-eng.htm https://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/89-645-x/2010001/life-expectancy-esperance-vie-eng.htm https://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/89-645-x/2010001/life-expectancy-esperance-vie-eng.htm global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 32 complementary therapies in medicine, 19(2), 84-92. doi:10.1016/j.ctim.2011.02.003 timmermans, k. (2003). intellectual property rights and traditional medicine: policy dilemmas at the interface. social science & medicine, 57(4), 745-756. doi:10.1016/s0277-9536(02)00425-2 tsey, k. (1997). traditional medicine in contemporary ghana: a public policy analysis. social science & medicine, 45(7), 1065-1074. doi:10.1016/s0277-9536(97)00034-8 waldram, j. b. (2013). transformative and restorative processes: revisiting the question of efficacy of indigenous healing. medical anthropology, 32(3), 191-207. doi:10.1080/01459740.2012.714822 walker, r., cromarty, h., linkewich, b., semple, d., st. pierre-hansen, n., & kelly, l. (2010). achieving cultural integration in health services: design of comprehensive hospital model for traditional healing, medicines, foods and supports. journal of aboriginal health, 6(1), 58-69. world health organization. (2008). closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health. final report of the commission on social determinants of health, geneva: world health organization. world health organization. (2013). who traditional medicine strategy: 20142023. who library cataloguing(http://apps.who.int/iris/ bitstream/10665/92455/1/9789241 506090_eng.pdf?ua=1), 5. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/92455/1/9789241506090_eng.pdf?ua=1 http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/92455/1/9789241506090_eng.pdf?ua=1 http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/92455/1/9789241506090_eng.pdf?ua=1 global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 33 appendix 1 list of works used for the synthesis reference number authors papers used for the systematic literature review 1 (abbott, 1998) abbott, p. j. (1998). traditional and western healing practices for alcoholism in american indians and alaska natives. substance use & misuse, 33(13), 2605-2646. 2 (agadjanian, 1999) agadjanian, v. (1999). women's choice between indigenous and western contraception in urban mozambique. women & health 28(2), 1-17. 3 (ahuriri-driscoll, boulton, stewart, potakaosborne, & hudson, 2015) ahuriri-driscoll, a., boulton, a. stewart a, potakaosborne, g, hudson, m. (2015). mā mahi, ka ora: by work, we prosper traditional healers and workforce development. the new zealand medical journal, 128, 3444. 4 (alarcón, astudillo, barrios, & rivas, 2004) alarcón, a. m., astudillo, p., barrios, s., rivas, e. (2004). política de salud intercultural: perspectiva de usuarios mapuches y equipos de salud en la ix región, chile. revista médica de chile, 132(9), 1109-1114. 5 (anderson, pakula, peters, schroeder, & smye, 2011) anderson, j. f., pakula, b., peters, v., schroeder, l., smye, v. (2011). strengthening aboriginal health through a place-based learning community. journal of aboriginal health, 7(1), 42-53. 6 (babis, 2014) babis, d. (2014). the role of civil society organizations in the institutionalization of indigenous medicine in bolivia. social science and medecine, 123, 287-294. 7 (balilla, mchenry, mchenry, parkinson, & banal, 2014) balilla, v. s., mchenry, j.a., parkinson, p.a., parkinson, r.m., banal, d.t. (2014). the assimilation of western medicine into a semi-nomadic healthcare system: a case study of the indigenous aeta magbukun, philippines. ecohealth, 11(3), 372-382. 8 (broad & allison, 2002) broad, l. m., allison, d.m. (2002). nurse practitioners and traditional healers: an alliance of mutual respect in the art and science of health practices. holistic nursing practice, 16(2), 50-57. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://europepmc.org/search;jsessionid=19d5759c1dfe7c700d4e12ffc40ebf03?query=auth:%22boulton+a%22&page=1 http://europepmc.org/search;jsessionid=19d5759c1dfe7c700d4e12ffc40ebf03?query=auth:%22stewart+a%22&page=1 http://europepmc.org/search;jsessionid=19d5759c1dfe7c700d4e12ffc40ebf03?query=auth:%22potaka-osborne+g%22&page=1 http://europepmc.org/search;jsessionid=19d5759c1dfe7c700d4e12ffc40ebf03?query=auth:%22potaka-osborne+g%22&page=1 http://europepmc.org/search;jsessionid=19d5759c1dfe7c700d4e12ffc40ebf03?query=auth:%22hudson+m%22&page=1 global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 34 9 (bruun & elverdam, 2006) bruun, h., elverdam, b. (2006). los naturistas-healers who integrate traditional and biomedical explanations in their treatment in the bolivian health care system. anthropology and medecine, 13(3), 273-283. 10 (burke, clayson, & wong, 2003) burke, a., clayson, z., wong, y-y. (2003). traditional medicine in china today: implications for indigenous health systems in a modern world. american journal of public health, 93(7), 1082-1084. 11 (caceres guido, gaioli, macchi, quattrone, & ribas, 2015) caceres guido, p., gaioli, m., macchi, a., quattrone, f., ribas, a.. (2015). the state of the integrative medicine in latin america: the long road to include complementary, natural, and traditional practices in formal health systems. european journal of integrative medicine, 7(1), 5-12. 12 (calvet-mir, reyesgarcia, & tanner, 2008) calvet-mir, l., reyes-garcia, v., tanner, s. (2008). is there a divide between local medicinal knowledge and western medicine? a case study among native amazonians in bolivia. journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine, 4, 18. 13 (carrie, laird, & mackey, 2015) carrie, h., laird, s.n., mackey, t.k. (2015). integrating traditional indigenous medicine and western biomedicine into health systems: a review of nicaraguan health policies and miskitu health services. international journal for equity in health, 14, 129. 14 (duarte-gómez, brachetmárquez, camposnavarro, & nigenda, 2004) duarte-gómez, m. b., brachet-márquez, v., camposnavarro, r., nigenda, g. (2004). políticas nacionales de salud y decisiones locales en méxico: el caso del hospital mixto de cuetzalan, puebla. salud pública de méxico, 46(5), 388-398. 15 (evans, duncan, mchugh, shaw, & wilson, 2008) evans, a., duncan, b., mchugh, p., shaw, j., wilson, c. (2008). inpatients' use, understanding, and attitudes towards traditional, complementary and alternative therapies at a provincial new zealand hospital. the new zealand medical journal, 121, 21-34. 16 (fink, 2002) fink, s. (2002). international efforts spotlight traditional complementary, and alternative medicine. american journal of public health, 92(11), 1734-1739. 17 (gallagher, kehoe, & mendez, 2015) gallagher, j., kehoe, t., mendez, j.k. (2015). the first nations health authority: a transformation in healthcare http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 35 for bc first nations. healthcare management forum, 28(6), 255-261. 18 (gamlin, 2013) gamlin, j. b. (2013). shame as a barrier to health seeking among indigenous huichol migrant labourers: an interpretive approach of the "violence continuum" and "authoritative knowledge". social science and medecine, 97, 75-81. 19 (gold & clapp, 2011) gold, c. l., clapp, r.a. (2011). negotiating health and identity lay healing medicinal plants and indigenous healthscapes in highland peru. latin american research review, 46(3), 93-111. 20 (hartmann & gone, 2012) hartmann, w. e., gone, j.p. (2012). incorporating traditional healing into an urban american indian health organization: a case study of community member perspectives. journal of counseling psychology, 59(4), 542-554. 21 (hollenberg, zakus, cook, & xu, 2008) hollenberg, d., zakus, d., cook, t., xu, x.w. (2008). repositioning the role of traditional, complementary and alternative medicine as essential health knowledge in global health: do they still have a role to play? world health & population, 10(4), 62-75. 22 (keshet & poppergiveon, 2013) keshet, y., popper-giveon, a. (2013). integrative health care in israel and traditional arab herbal medicine: when health care interfaces with culture and politics. medical anthropology quarterly, 27(3), 368-384. 23 (kent, 1999) kent, h. (1999). the yukon takes native health a step further at whitehorse hospital. canadian medical association journal, 161(10), 1312. 24 (kesler, hopkins, torres, & prasad, 2015) kesler, d. o., hopkins, l.o., torres, e., prasad, a. (2015). assimilating traditional healing into preventive medicine residency curriculum. american journal of preventive medicine, 49(5 suppl 3), s263-269. 25 (king, 2004) king, s. r. (2004). phytomedicine, public health, and traditional healers: health care at the crossroads of the earth and sky. journal of alternative and complementary medecine, 10(6), 921-923. 26 (manitowabi & shawande, 2013) manitowabi, d., shawande, m. (2013). negotiating the clinical integration of traditional aboriginal medicine at http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 36 noojmowin teg. the canadian journal of native studies, 33(1), 97-124. 27 (marsh, coholic, cotemeek, & najavits, 2015) marsh, t. n., coholic, d., cote-meek, s., najavits l.m. (2015). blending aboriginal and western healing methods to treat intergenerational trauma with substance use disorder in aboriginal peoples who live in northeastern ontario, canada. harm reduction journal, 12. 28 (mignone et al., 2007) mignone, j., bartlett, j., o’neil, j., orchard, t. (2007). best practices in intercultural health: five case studies in latin america. journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine, 3(1), 31. 29 (moghaddam & momper, 2011) moghaddam, j. f., momper, s.l. (2011). integrating spiritual and western treatment modalities in a native american substance user center: provider perspectives. substance use & misuse, 46(11), 1431-1437. 30 (moorehead et al., 2015) moorehead, v. d., gone, j.p., december, d. (2015). a gathering of native american healers: exploring the interface of indigenous tradition and professional practice. american journal of community psychology, 56(3-4), 383-394. 31 (napoli, 2002) napoli, m. (2002). holistic health care for native women: an integrated model. american journal of public health, 92(10), 1573-1575. 32 (nzimakwe, 1996) nzimakwe, d. (1996). primary health care in south africa: private practice nurse practitioners and traditional healers form partnerships. journal of the american academy of nurse practitioners, 8(7), 311-316. 33 (templeman & robinson, 2011) templeman, k., robinson, a. (2011). integrative medicine models in contemporary primary health care. complementary therapies in medicine, 19(2), 84-92. 34 (tsey, 1997) tsey, k. (1997). traditional medicine in contemporary ghana: a public policy analysis. social science & medicine, 45(7), 1065-1074. 35 (walker et al., 2010) walker, r., cromarty, h., linkewich, b., semple, d., stpierre-hansen, n., kelly, l. (2010). achieving cultural integration in health services: design of comprehensive hospital model for traditional healing, medicines, foods and supports. journal of aboriginal health, 6(1), 58-69. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 37 36 (audet et al., 2012) audet, c.m., blevins, m., moon, t.d., sidat, m., shepherd, b.e., pires, p., vergara, a., vermund, s.h. (2012). hiv/aids-related attitudes and practices among traditional healers in zambezia province, mozambique. journal of alternative and complementary medecine, 18(12), 1133-1141. 37 (timmermans, 2003) timmermans, k. (2003). intellectual property rights and traditional medicine: policy dilemmas at the interface. social science & medicine, 57(4), 745-756. 38 (waldram, 2013) waldram, j. b. (2013). transformative and restorative processes: revisiting the question of efficacy of indigenous healing. medical anthropology, 32(3), 191207. 39 (arora et al., 2013) arora, s., kurji a.k., tennant, m.t.s.(2013). dismantling sociocultural barriers to eye care with teleophthalmology: lessons from an alberta cree community. clinical & investigative medicine, 36(2), 5763. 40 (baines, 2012) baines, d. (2012). working with patients who are also seeing a traditional healer. journal of cancer education, 27(1), 9-11. 41 (durey & thompson, 2012) durey, a., thompson, s.c. (2012). reducing the health disparities of indigenous australians: time to change focus. bmc health services research, 12, 151. 42 (n. hayman, 2010; n. e. hayman, spurling, & white, 2009) hayman, n. (2010). strategies to improve indigenous access for urban and regional populations to health services. heart, lung and circulation, 19(5), 367-371. hayman, n. e., spurling, n.e., white, g.k. (2009). improving indigenous patients' access to mainstream health services: the inala experience. the medical journal of australia, 190(10), 604-606. 43 (jowsey et al., 2012) jowsey, t., yen, l., ward, n., mcnab, j., aspin, c., usherwood, t., scipps team. (2012). it hinges on the door: time, spaces and identity in australian aboriginal health services. health sociology review, 21(2), 196-207. 44 (kendall & barnett, 2014) kendall, e., barnett, l. (2014). principles for the development of aboriginal health interventions: culturally appropriate methods through systemic empathy. ethnicity and health, 1-16. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 9, issue 2 november 2018 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 38 45 (o'sullivan, 2013) o'sullivan, b. (2013). considering culture in aboriginal care. canadian medical association journal, 185(1), 2728. http://www.gjcpp.org/ from passive recipient to community advocate: reflections on peer-based resettlement programs for arabic-speaking refugees in canada joel john badali1, santiago grande2, keghani mardikian3 keywords: refugee, settlement, group support, peer support, mental health, empowerment, arabic, community psychology, social work author biographies: joel john badali is a law student at mcgill university, and former research and evaluation coordinator to carizon family and community services. he obtained his master in community psychology from wilfrid laurier university in 2014. santiago grande immigrated to canada in 1988. he was born in an indigenous community in el salvador and his family later migrated due to the civil war. in canada, he worked with immigrants and refugees through mosaic counselling and family services. he obtained a master of social work degree from wilfrid laurier university. currently he works at renison university college in waterloo, canada. keghani mardikian, born in syria, immigrated to canada from armenia in 2006. keghani holds a bachelor of arts from the state university of yerevan, armenia. she holds the master of social work degree from wilfrid laurier university. currently she is a family violence treatment specialist at family and children’s services of the waterloo region. mardikian works with individuals and couples, mainly to address adult conflict and trauma issues related to childhood, and also delivers the caring dads program in partnership with john howard society. recommended citation: badali, j., grande, s., & mardikian, k. (2017). from passive recipient to community advocate: reflections on peer-based resettlement programs for arabic-speaking refugees in canada. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(2), pages 1-31. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). 1 carizon family and community services, mcgill university | université mcgill 2 renison university college 3 family and children services of the waterloo region http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 from passive recipient to community advocate: reflections on peer-based resettlement programs for arabic-speaking refugees in canada abstract the current study explores the impacts of peer support programs on recently resettled refugees to canada. this research uses qualitative data that was collected from service users as part of a broader formative evaluation of a regional mental health initiative, the promise of partnership. this initiative arose from a need to proactively address the resettlement issues experienced by refugees in the region of waterloo. the analysis focusses specifically on the impacts to refugees involved in arabic-speaking peer support groups as understood through the theoretical framework of the ecological model. findings from the analysis locate key benefits to participants across the interpersonal, organizational, and community levels of the model, revealing the interwoven and impactful nature of peer support amongst participants and their broader community. given the unprecedented influx of syrian refugees to canada, we argue for the continued implementation of peer support groups as a source of mental wellness promotion, empowerment, and a broadened sense of community. introduction canada has a relatively recent history of supporting the mental health of refugees (canadian task force on mental health issues affecting immigrants and refugees & beiser, 1988). in light of the on-going resettlement of refugees from syria (canada, 2015), the mental health commission of canada has called for refugee supports that focus on promoting social integration while simultaneously preventing future mental health problems (agic, mckenzie, tuck, & antwi, 2016). the current research pertains to an investigation of group support programs for arabic-speaking refugees developed as part of an inter-organizational regional mental health initiative, the promise of partnership. although similar peer support programs for refugees exist in canada, research on participant experience is limited. this research seeks to determine the impacts of refugee peer support groups on its participants and identify the broader implications of the program among refugees in the waterloo region and in canada. a review of current literature on peer support programs, in addition to other modalities of group-based programs for refugees is first discussed. an organizational overview then introduces the main service provider of the peer support programs and its community partners, and is followed by a description of the project’s rationale, its socio-political context, and the guiding research question. second, the authors position themselves within the context of the organization and the current research, identifying tensions in evaluator research and exposing potential conflicts of interest. the methods used to conduct the evaluation are then articulated. finally, the key findings of the research are presented; the implications of which are discussed in terms of the peer support program’s capacity for social intervention and its limitations. the peer support model http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the implementation of peer support groups is increasingly common in the fields of social work, health care, and counseling (cohen & graybeal, 2007; mead & macneil, 2006). according to mead, hilton, and curtis (2001), peer support programs are used to create a new cultural context for healing and recovery. members of these groups, often having been faced with social and cultural ostracism, are capacitated through a shared understanding of the impact of their experiences in order to engender personal, relational, and social change. peer support has therefore tended to engage a broader understanding of mental health and recovery; eschewing the medical model that has dominated mental health care policies (harp, 1987, p. 20-21). for the purposes of the current research the definition of peer support by mead et al. (2001) is adopted: peer support is a system of giving and receiving help founded on key principles of respect, shared responsibility, and mutual agreement of what is helpful. peer support is not based on psychiatric models and diagnostic criteria. it is about understanding another's situation empathically through the shared experience of emotional and psychological pain. (p. 135) the peer support model accordingly promotes the holistic well-being of participants; focusing on their ability rather than illness or their disability; aspects which are instead resonant of the medical model (adame & leitner, 2008). peer support programs have furthermore been characterized in the mental health care field by a desire for social justice and the promotion of an understanding of social and 4 for criticisms of this “silo” approach to refugee mental health, see for example: marsella & yamada, environmental factors that contribute to participants’ distress (mead et al., 2001). the peer support model has been implemented in various settings and with disparate groups. peer support programs have for example; been adapted to caregivers of stroke patients, hiv-infected adolescents (funck-brentano et al., 2005), cancer patients (ussher, kirsten, butow, & sandoval, 2006), breast-feeding mothers (dennis, hodnett, gallop & chalmers, 2002), and geriatric staff (davison et al., 2007). however, peer support groups and even more broadly group-based supports for refugees remain largely elusive. peer support and refugees a review of the literature concerning peer support reveals that refugees have only exceptionally been implicated in research involving group-based programs. using databases such as jstor, sage publications, mcgill university library’s world catalogue, and google scholar, journal articles were identified using combinations of the search terms “refugee” and either “group support”, “peer support”, or “mutual aid.” the resulting search yielded a dearth of literature relevant to the current research, suggesting that research is lacking in the area pertaining to refugee peer support. the review of the literature revealed that research has predominantly examined the refugee experience using therapeutic models focusing primarily on the psychopathologies of participants, for instance with regard to post-traumatic stress disorder and psychiatric harm4 (see kira, ahmed, mahmoud, & wasim, 2009; crumlish & o’rourke, 2010; drožđek & bolwerk, 2010). furthermore; existing research on refugee group-based programs in the literature has neither explored peer support nor the challenges associated with resettlement 2007; watters, 2001; bracken, giller, & summerfield, 1997. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 through group-based modalities. group therapy programs for example, are common among refugee youth; especially through artsbased techniques (rousseau et al., 2007; schwartz & melzak, 2005; tyrer & fazel, 2014). on the other hand; researchers and practitioners acknowledge the emerging importance of community and broader social context in group-based therapy, advocating for an ecological dimension in contemporary refugee mental health programs (kira, ahmed, wasim, mahmoud, colrain, & rai, 2012). by contrast with the literature reviewed; the program explored in this research utilizes a peer support model and is motivated primarily by issues related to resettlement and mental health promotion rather than psychiatric illness. research on group-based supports explicitly for refugee resettlement or mental health promotion is even sparser. among this limited body of research breton (2000) explored a hispanic women’s support group for refugee and immigrant women in toronto, providing a qualitative analysis of the structural issues facing these women such as employment barriers and inadequate access to social services for domestic abuse. nevertheless, these support groups focused on “mutual aid” and the support women derived in assisting each other; for example in obtaining counsel from government-funded legal aid programs. behnia (2003) also explored group support through a twelveperson sample of refugees in ottawa belonging to various “community peer groups”, such as sewing and bible-reading groups. these participants were enthusiastic 5 a masters of social work thesis also explored informal community supports through the networks created by urban refugee youth in quebec (plotkin, 2014). 6 glassman and skolnik (1984) further provide an account of a group program in new york city that brings together south-east asian refugee men and women in groups of ten in settings such as schools about their participation in peer groups and recommended the continued formation of groups exclusively for survivors of war. thomas, clarke, and krolizak (2008) also explored peer-based interventions for hivpositive caribbean immigrants as means of promoting healthy sexual behavior.5 meanwhile, group work with refugees has been encouraged as a modality for offering social services by the united nations high commission on refugees ([unhcr] in glassman & skolnik, 1984, p. 47). the unhcr suggested group support offers the capacity to create an informal learning environment, promote a mutually-supportive atmosphere, and act as a substitute for refugees’ home communities.6 yet glassman & skolnik (1984) found that the implementation of any such group support programs and the realization of their potential have been underwhelming in the field of refugee resettlement, a predicament that has been echoed more recently (mcbrien, 2014, p. 214; young & chan, 2014, p. 42). in addition, behnia (2003) cites gaps in knowledge around social support systems for refugees with specific reference to the rudimentary research available on peer support groups. despite the lacuna of research on groupbased program for refugees, group programs themselves and specifically peer support models have been employed in practice with newcomer communities. for example, british columbia immigrant settlement services created women’s peer support groups focused on developing support networks, gathering information and resources, and dispelling refugees’ sense of isolation.7 the and churches. the program integrates esl (english as a second language) classes with two hour sessions focused on cultural orientation (e.g. how to use 9-1-1, and learning about halloween) and discussions about their resettlement experiences. 7 immigrant and settlement services of british columbia [issbc]. immigrant women’s peer support program. immigration and settlement http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 metropolitan community church of toronto offers a monthly one-hour peer support program with the aim of building refugees’ social networks while addressing issues related to social services and financial needs.8 similarly, a peer support program for lgbtq refugees focusses on supporting community networks among refugees; offering topical information sessions on issues such as employment and healthcare.9 the interagency network for education in emergencies has also implemented peer support programs for refugees in guinea.10 overall, the review of the literature exposes not only a general lack of research on peer support programs with refugees nationally and internationally, but moreover, calls from community leaders and academics to more readily implement such programs. organizational overview and community partners services of british columbia. retrieved may 10 2017 from https://issbc.org/programs/settlementservices/immigrant-womens-peer-support-program/ 8 metropolitan community church of toronto. refugee peer support group. metropolitan community church of toronto. retrieved may 24, 2017 from http://www.mcctoronto.com/ministrymeetings/refugee-peer-support-group-2 9 self-help resource centre. the 519 church street community centre – lgbtq refugee support. selfhelp resource centre. retrieved may 24, 2017 from http://www.selfhelp.on.ca/2014/10/the-519-churchstreet-community-centre-lgbtq-refugee-peer-support/ 10 inter-agency network for education in emergencies [inne]. peer groups for refugee adolescents. inter-agency network for education in emergencies. retrieved may 10 2017 from http://toolkit.ineesite.org/toolkit/ineecms/uploads/1 040/peer_groups_refugee_adolescents.pdf 11 the organization’s mandate is to provide comprehensive and integrated approaches to the delivery of community services in the area of family support, financial counselling, and mental wellness. carizon specializes in children's mental health, youth engagement and development, family violence services, individual and family counselling, parental the promise of partnership (pop) is composed of several service-providers, but is primarily supported by the non-profit registered charity carizon family and community services. carizon is a multiservice community organization committed to improving the future of individuals and families through supportive, therapeutic, and preventative programs.11 the promise of partnership began in april 201112 as a partnership between carizon and reception house waterloo region13, in kitchener, ontario, arising from a need to better address the mental health concerns and settlement issues of refugees in the region of waterloo. it builds upon a working relationship between the two organizations that had existed for numerous years. throughout the denouement of the project, several other service providers have also become involved both as direct participants in the project’s initiatives and as stakeholders in the project’s support and education, credit counselling, workplace resilience, settlement support and community wellness. some of their services include programs related to domestic violence prevention (family violence project), child and youth development (pathways to education), and programs for newcomers and refugees (promise of partnership). for more information, see www.carizon.ca. 12 the authors would like to acknowledge, and are grateful for, the project funding provided by citizenship and immigration canada (under contribution agreement s143924013). 13 reception house waterloo region (rhw) is a community-based organization that provides temporary accommodations to newly-arrived government-assisted refugees (gars). their programming is supported by citizenship and immigration canada and centres on orienting and assisting refugees in their adjustment to living in canadian society especially within their first month of settlement, while assisting them in finding permanent accommodations and building skills necessary for navigating the canadian healthcare and financial institutions. rhw does not focus on refugees’ settlement needs related specifically to mental health. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.carizon.ca/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 outcomes in the refugee community.14 these organizations include: family and children services15, waterloo region district school board16, the kitchener-waterloo multicultural centre17, focus for ethnic women18, canadian mental health association19, and the waterloo regional police service20. these affiliated organizations both refer clients to, and receive referrals from, mental health workers and counsellors associated with the promise of partnership at carizon. upon referral to the promise of partnership, clients are seen by a mental health worker for an intake appointment and can then be entered into a peer support group. 14 these community-level partnerships aim to build the community’s capacity to respond to newcomer mental health needs, particularly among refugees resettling in the kitchener-waterloo community. they also aim to raise community awareness about the needs of refugees while developing collaborative approaches to effective and inclusive mental health service delivery. 15 family and children’s services of the waterloo region (facs) offers assistance and information for child welfare, family support, and fostering programs for family and children. its mission is to work with the community to protect and support children, strengthen families, and develop a caring environment for children. facs has a statutory responsibility to protect children in danger of physical and emotional harm. see https://www.facswaterloo.org/ 16 the waterloo region district school board (wrdsb) represents all public elementary and secondary schools (e.g. middle schools and high schools) in the region of waterloo. participating elementary schools in the school district house programming for youth participating in pop programs as well as teacher training and knowledge dissemination events for esl teachers. see http://www.wrdsb.ca/ 17 the kitchener-waterloo multicultural centre is a non-profit organization, housed in kitchener, offering services free of charge to newcomers in the region, providing translation services, support with financial needs, employment aid, and counselling. see http://www.kwmc.on.ca/ the peer support programs the peer support programs at carizon focus on supporting participants’ resettlement process and promoting their mental wellbeing. consistent with the literature on peer support programs (mead et al., 2001), and specifically their implementation with refugee groups (berger, 1999), the current program is well within the parameters of similar groups offered for newcomers in terms of their setting, duration, and content. the program is twelve weeks in duration; participants meet once a week at carizon’s downtown location.21 two to three cycles of the program are offered each year depending on funding; typically including between 8 to 18 focus for ethnic women (few) is a not-for-profit agency housed in employment ontario that is committed to improving the lives of newcomer women and supporting them in achieving employment opportunities. few’s services are free and include services such as career counselling, skillsand customer service-training, and job search assistance. see http://www.few.on.ca/ 19 canadian mental health association (cmha) is a national non-profit organization that supports people from diverse backgrounds who have experienced, or are experiencing, mental health issues. the waterloowellington-dufferin branch of cmha offers services in kitchener, waterloo, and cambridge, providing full care systems for addictions, mental health, and developmental needs. see http://www.cmha.ca/ 20 the waterloo regional police service (wrps) provides policing services to waterloo, kitchener, cambridge, and the townships of north dumfries, wellesley, wilmot, and woolwich. a core value of the wrps is community diversity and wrps is represented by its officers at various cultural celebrations events throughout the year such as chinese new year and the ertugrul education society events. see http://www.wrps.on.ca/ 21 complementary programs such as community outings and an arts-based program may have additionally brought together some of the peer support participants beyond the hours of the peer support programs themselves. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.wrps.on.ca/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 14 men or women between groups. each session runs for two and a half hours, although sessions would commonly last up to three hours. similarly, peer support programs deliberately occur in not-for-profit settings such as community centers, schools, and churches; occasionally a professional is invited to talk about particular issues (berger, 1999; behnia, 2003; mead and macneil, 2006). peer support programs in the literature reviewed were between ten and twelve weeks in duration, for an hour or two per session; although some occurred on a continual or walk-in basis22. consistent with the objectives of peer support programs; the programs are discussion-based and encourage the active listening and sharing of lived experiences while a facilitator moderates discussions, and introduces topics or guests speakers from the aforementioned partnering service providers (mead et al., 2001). the program creates opportunities for participants to build their social support networks, share their stories, learn about community services available to them, and address issues related to acculturation. in accordance with recommendations for implementing group support programs with newcomers, the program is facilitated by a native arabic-speaker and further provides separate groups for women and men (berger, 1999, p. 145-46). sessions focus on a variety of topics such as discussing cultural norms, learning about the role of various service 22 these programs would allow participants to join at any time rather than delimiting the program to a prescribed number of weeks. 23 this distrust was palpable from the primary researcher’s experience as participants at first questioned whether he was sent on behalf of the federal government and whether the groups had come under its scrutiny. 24 according to citizenship and immigration canada, a refugee is defined as someone who meets the criteria set forth in the united nations 1951 geneva convention relating to the status of refugees or providers in the region, and building emotional strength through the group’s understanding of trauma and exchange of coping strategies. sessions are intentionally informal as a perceived distrust of professionals is prevalent among refugee service users, including those in group programs23 (mead & macneil, 2006; behnia, 2003; berger, 1999). the facilitators in the current program also attend to the stigma attached to mental health issues with respect to the newcomer community. in this context, building not only a trusting a relationship between clients and facilitators, but bonds between groups members was imperative to ensuring participants could feel comfortable discussing mental health. rationale an overview of the refugee24 population is presented for both canada and the waterloo region25. historically, refugees have represented a disproportionally higher number of the newcomers in the region of waterloo compared to the national average (region of waterloo, 2009). between 1996 and 2008, 7,105 refugees settled in the region of waterloo (region of waterloo public health, 2009), making up 22.6% of the region’s newcomer population intake during that period; while refugees26 represented less than 11% of newcomers for national intake in the same period (canada, 2008). the current syrian refugee crisis has further led to an found to be needing protection based on risk to life, risk of cruel and unusual treatment or punishment, or in danger of torture as defined in the convention against torture (citizenship and immigration canada, 2012, p. 120) 25 the population of waterloo region (composed of the cities cambridge, kitchener, and waterloo, and surrounding counties) as of the 2016 census is 535, 154. (statistics canada, 2017) 26 for years 1996-2008, 141,146 refugees were settled in canada (united nations high commissioner for refugees, n.d.). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 unprecedented increase in arabic-speaking refugees both nationally and internationally. in canada, 40, 081 syrians refugees arrived between november 4 2015 and january 29 2017 (canada, 2017a). they are composed of a combination of privately sponsored and government-assisted refugees all of whom acquire permanent residency status in canada upon arrival. locally, as one of six ontario reception centres, the waterloo region is a hub for the resettlement of government-assisted refugees. during the same time period, 1495 syrian refugees were admitted in the waterloo region (canada, 2017b27). this intake of refugees is a significant increase in view of archival data on refugee claimants in canada and the waterloo region. between 2003 and 2012, the national annual intake of refugees peaked at 36,768 claimants in 2008 and steadily declined to 20,461 refugees in 2012 (canada, 2012). the waterloo region experienced corresponding annual fluctuations receiving a maximum of 344 refugee claimants in 2004 and declining numbers in more recent years; representing 0.2-1.4% of the national intake of refugees (canada, 2012). however, in the most recent data collected by immigration, refugees and citizenship canada (ircc, formerly citizenship and immigration canada), the number of refugees settled in the waterloo region between january 2015 and march 2017 represented the fifth largest intake among census metropolitan areas in the province of ontario (canada, 2017c28). during this period, the waterloo region received 1,700 of the 14,345 governmentsponsored refugees resettled provincially. 27 calculated by using the total sum of gar, psr, and mixed visa refugees admitted across the following three listed communities “waterloo”, “kitchener”, and “cambridge.” 28 the most current data available from ircc, updated april 13 2017, using dataset: “canada moreover, the distress experienced by refugees in canada associated with their resettlement is well-documented. refugees experience settlement challenges stemming from factors such as mental health issues and systemic discrimination (beiser & hou, 2006), in addition to institutional barriers such as lack of access to essential health and social services (beiser, 2005; mckeary & newbold, 2010), challenges in the education system (kanu, 2008), and difficulty obtaining employment and housing (carter & osborne, 2009). given the large increase of refugees in the waterloo region, appropriate and effective settlement services and access to them are especially critical to manage and prevent the settlement challenges common to the canadian refugee experience. yet, research on community-based supports for resettlement and group-based mental health promotion among refugees is scarce rendering the potential impacts of such initiatives on these communities uncertain. in view of the continued syrian conflict and consequent influx of arabic-speaking refugees, culturally-relevant support programs are increasingly necessary to promote refugee wellness and prevent mental health issues. given the mental health commission of canada’s recent emphasis on wellness promotion among refugee communities (agic, mckenzie, tuck, & antwi, 2016), peer support groups offer a promising and timely approach to supporting refugee resettlement. this research addresses the paucity of evidence supporting peer support programs and thus aims to explore the impacts of peer support on arabic-speaking refugees in the waterloo region. the guiding research question is therefore framed as admission of resettled refugees by province/territory and census metropolitan area (cma) of intended destination and immigration category” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 follows: what are the impacts of peer support groups on the mental well-being and general resettlement experiences of refugees? the framework used to guide this research further interprets this question along four dimensions— the individual, interpersonal, organizational, and community levels—the analysis of which is discussed in the following section. methods positionality program evaluation is generally used in social intervention programs to measure the extent to which programs or their initiatives achieve their intended purpose and to guide recommendations for further actions within the program (milstein & wetterhall, 2000). however in making such assessments there exist inherent issues and conflicts of interests related to who conducts the evaluation and how it is conducted. the authors seek to explicate the potential issues confronted in the evaluation that yielded the current data by locating themselves in the context of the research and by shedding light on the decision-making in the evaluation and their personal motives. as carizon’s research and evaluation coordinator, the first author has a vested interest in ensuring the project runs smoothly and likewise, the freedom to choose an appropriate assessment method. however, in the context of evaluation, this prerogative may intentionally or unintentionally cause interpretation biases on various levels of the project. for example, data collection methods may be selected that highlight only the positive outcomes of the project while neglecting the negative outcomes of the project. findings from qualitative analyses may also be presented more favourably because of the researcher’s latent determination for the project to achieve its purpose. however, this research strives for transparency in the data collection methods by taking precautionary steps throughout the analysis, for example by engaging in memberchecks following focus groups and interviews, and by iteratively reviewing the findings with the two co-authors; themselves former peer group facilitators. although it is impossible to mitigate all biases, taking steps to acknowledge them allows the reader to critically understand the research and deduce their own interpretation. the authors acknowledge the importance of culturalsensitivity in the broader evaluation and research methods employed, especially as the first author is not a newcomer to canada (although the second and third authors are newcomers to canada – a refugee and an immigrant, respectively). despite the first author’s superficial distance from the issues being explored by this research, the research is motivated by a desire to both improve the provision of mental health services to refugees in the region of waterloo and promote equal opportunity for those who have been, or continue to be, marginalized in canadian society. additionally, all authors have a vested interest in generating knowledge not only to build on the project’s strengths but also to provide a critical lens to the programs and suggest areas for improvement. finally, while the two coauthors are motivated by their lived experiences of resettlement in canada, the first author acknowledges his privilege of not having been displaced and instead is motivated by the personal friendships with newcomers and refugees in the community. all authors, by the very nature of working with displaced peoples, have found that their experiences further encourage their belief that, as a pluralistic society, every person in canada has the right to accessible and culturally-attentive social and mental health services. the ecological model the findings from this research are understood through the ecological model; http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 which positions the individual within successively nested layers of their social environment (bronfenbrenner, 1977). the individual is understood through the interwoven mosaic of their interpersonal relations within their immediate community (microsystem), the interrelations among the organizations and people in the individual’s microsystem (mesosystem), and the community and social structures—formal or informal—which affect the individual but do not necessarily encompass them such as government agencies or informal social networks (exosystem). the final layer of the ecological model consists of the overarching political, cultural, and economic systems (macrosystem). the ecological theory is often applied as a framework for community health promotion and to promote a nuanced understanding of the social determinants of individuals’ wellbeing (stokols, 1996; nelson & prilleltensky, 2011, p. 79). this contextual approach is consistent with the mental health commission of canada’s recommendations for an integrated response to refugees’ mental health. the commission asserts that canada’s refugee mental health initiatives must prioritize addressing the social and institutional challenges of settlement thereby preventing future mental health issues (agic et al., 2016, p. 6). an ecological approach to understanding the peer support groups is appropriate for very reason that the ecological model positions the individual at the confluence of many interacting “socio-physical” factors; thereby acknowledging the joint influence of intrapersonal and environmental factors on their well-being (stokols, 1996). indeed, practitioners have encouraged an ecological understanding of the impacts of group-based programs on refugee participants rather than focusing solely on individual psychopathologies (kira et al., 2012). accordingly, the ecological model promotes the necessary theoretical understanding of the social and environmental factors contributing to the refugees’ aforementioned resettlement challenges. the congruence of the contextual approach of the peer support model (mead et al., 2001) and this program’s multi-dimensional approach to resettlement issues justify the adoption of the ecological model. the structure of the ecological model therefore informs the organization of the findings by locating the impacts of peer support through the multiple levels of participants’ social ecology. data collection and sources a definition of program evaluation is first provided to contextualize how the data collected is understood. program evaluation has been defined as: “the use of social research methods to systematically investigate the effectiveness of social intervention programs in ways that are adapted to their political and organizational environments and are designed to inform social action to improve social conditions” (rossi, lipsey, & freeman, 2003). accordingly, this evaluation employs a systematic collection and methodical analysis of data procured from the program’s refugee clients and collaborators through focus groups and interviews. focus groups were conducted to collect qualitative data on refugees’ experiences with peer support programs in 2014. as a new program, data had not yet been collected on refugees’ experiences with the programs and focus groups provided an open-ended format from which to critically understand their experiences. the use of focus groups is further supported by the fact that qualitative data can help inform areas for quantitative assessment and future evaluation (creswell, 2013). focus groups were chosen in lieu of interviews with the refugee participants because the group format puts less pressure on the individual to participate, and may http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 potentially avert the participant’s discomfort from being in a one-on-one setting which could compromise the counselor-client relationship they have with carizon. given that peer support is predicated on group discussion, a focus group is opportune for data collection because focus groups locate the “interaction in a group discussion as the source of the data” (p. 130, morgan, 1996). focus groups also give a “voice” to, and empower marginalized groups giving participants greater control over when they would like to speak (magill, 1993; nicholscasebolt & spakes, 1995). in contrast, interviews were collected with individual service providers. interviews in this instance were advantageous both practically because service providers are at different locations across the region, and methodologically because service providers attend separate peer support sessions and provide services or information distinct from other agencies. the experience of service providers was thus connected neither to their participation in the peer support group, nor to their work with other agencies, rendering a focus group between service providers inefficacious. focus groups a convenience sample was used for the focus groups. facilitators from both the men and women’s support groups asked participants attending their session to participate in a focus group after their session the following week. the facilitators of both the men and women’s groups were further instructed to ensure that the six participants selected for the focus groups’ were generally representative of the service users who attended the program and capable of participating in a focus group. many of the participants of the peer support programs expressed interest; however, each focus group was limited to six participants due to limitations within the evaluation’s human resources and scheduling constraints. the facilitators hence provided the evaluator with the contact information (i.e. telephone numbers) for six participants who they felt would provide a broad range of perspectives from the program. additional participants’ contact information was provided in the event that the proposed participants were not available. the guidelines for selecting participants at the facilitator’s convenience is an approach that “reflects the range of participants and sites that make up the population so that others outside the sample might have a chance to connect to the experiences of those in it” (seidman, 2006, p.55). convenience sampling was justifiably used to give voice to the diversity of refugee peer support participants and even those who are not participants to the program. remarkably, several of the focus group participants shared that they had been personally asked by other peer group members to convey to the evaluator the experiences of those peers who were nonparticipants to the focus group. in addition, a convenience sample was proposed by the facilitators given that they were in a position to determine whether a participant would be emotionally prepared to share their experience independently without potentially causing further distress to the participant. although it remains an obvious possibility that the programs’ facilitators would be able to deduce who had attended the focus groups, the evaluator ensured that participants were aware that their conversation would remain confidential and that only the evaluator would have access to the data collected from focus group. participants were reminded by the interpreter that their participation had no bearing on their relationship with any service provider. their participation and responses would remain anonymous and their names would not be used in the transcription of the documents. participants were provided with a copy of the consent form and the contact information for the evaluator and carizon http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 counselling services in case they required immediate attention or support with regard to their participation in the focus group. the focus groups were conducted with the help of an experienced arabic-speaking interpreter, who was hired for the purposes of the focus groups from the kitchenerwaterloo multicultural centre. the interpreter was provided with a copy of the focus group protocol several days prior to the focus group and both provided feedback and requested clarification on the content of the questions for the purposes of the clarity of their translation. for the focus groups, the interpreter and evaluator met with the participants at carizon’s main location in a private room. participants, the evaluator, and the interpreter were seated around a large square table providing a comfortable distance between participants. refreshments were also provided and accessible to participants throughout the focus groups. immediately prior to the focus groups, informed consent statements written in english were read aloud in english by the evaluator and translated verbally into arabic by the interpreter. following any clarifications requested by the participants, they each signed a consent form. the interpreter provided translation services for both focus groups, during which the evaluator posed questions in english in accordance with the focus group protocol and asked further probing questions as necessary throughout the group’s discussion. the interpreter relayed the evaluator’s questions in arabic to the participants and translated back to the evaluator, in english, what participants had said one-by-one, asking participants to pause 29 one of the anticipated participants did not attend the focus group, hence the group was composed of five men. 30 age is expressed in mode and range because the demographic questionnaire requested participants’ age as a categorical variable (i.e., what is your age? when necessary in order to accurately articulate what they had said. participants responded primarily in arabic although some chose to occasionally respond in english. focus groups were audio recorded with two audio-recording devices positioned at opposite ends of the table to enhance the overall collection of data, serving to later remind the evaluator of the group dynamics and aural cues suggesting agreement among the group or the tone of the conversation. the focus groups generally concentrated on participants’ experiences with the peer support programs, their needs, and their settlement experiences so far in canada. for example, a question in the focus group protocol is “overall, what do you think the refugee community gets out of the group support programs offered through the promise of partnership?” an additional question was asked in the women’s focus group, “in what ways have group support programs supported or not supported your mental well-being as a woman? men’s focus group five refugee men participated in the focus group.29 participants’ were between the ages of 21 and 65, among whom three participants reported their age to be between the ages of 36 to 45.30 all participants reported having a high school education while three participants reported having either a university or college education. four participants had at least one child, and four participants indicated their marital status as “married” while one participant was “single.” participants had been settled in canada for 19-25, 26-35, 36-45 etc.). the decision to include age as a categorical variable in the questionnaire was to minimize the identifying information asked of the participant given the necessary sensitivity to their personal circumstances. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 between one and three years and had attended a mean of 11.4 sessions. the duration of the focus group was roughly two hours. women’s focus group six refugee women participated in the focus group. three participants were between the ages of 26 and 35, two participants were between the ages of 36 and 45, and one participant was between the age of 46 and 55. four participants reported having a high school education and two participants reported having a university or college education. two participants each reported either being married, single, or single with children. participants had, on average, two children. participants had been in canada for between one and three years and had attended a mean of 10.5 sessions at carizon. the duration of the focus group was slightly more than two and half hours. interviews interviews were conducted with representatives from agencies partnering with carizon through the promise of partnership (pop). the agencies represented five service providers31 in the region of waterloo that provide services directly to refugee and newcomer communities. similar to the convenience sampling technique described above, the pop coordinator provided the contact information of the service provider representatives who were directly involved with the program. the selection of participants to reflect this particular criteria is reflective of a snowball process wherein the researcher’s social and professional networks are employed in providing a sample that meets the required professional profile (warren, 2001). eight interviews were initially requested via emails 31 these organizations include: family and children services, canadian mental health association, the to these representatives. all interview requests were accepted with the exception of one representative who declined because of their change in position within the organization and consequent disengagement from the pop. interviews were conducted by the evaluator in-person and in english at the location of the service provider. the interviews primarily explored aspects of service coordination through the pop however, for the purposes of this research, only data from responses to three pertinent questions were analyzed from a section of the interview related to resettlement and mental health programs. for example, a question asked was, “what impacts have the group support programs had on participating refugee clients?” interviews were conducted in english and audio-recorded, and generally endured between forty and ninety minutes. analysis a qualitative grounded theory paradigm was adopted in the analysis of each unit of data followed by a general inductive analysis in conducting a thematic analysis. qualitative research assumes that the researcher plays a direct role in social inquiry, ascribing meaning to their collection of data from people in particular settings (cresswell, 2013, p.44). grounded theory explicitly recognizes the researcher as the interpreter of the data gathered, building a theory around a socially constructed reality and providing a “meaningful guide to action” (corbin & strauss, 1998, p. 12). the initial units of data – two focus groups and seven interviews – were first transcribed onto a computer word processor. for each unit of analysis, a preliminary three-stage analysis process of line-by-line open-coding of the transcripts was performed. the opencoding was conducted in order to break down city of kitchener, focus for ethnic women, and waterloo regional police services http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 and reduce the data. during open coding, “data are broken down into discrete parts, closely examined, and compared for similarities and differences. events, happenings, objects, and actions/interactions that are found to be conceptually similar in nature or related in meaning are grouped under more abstract concepts termed ‘categories’” (strauss & corbin, 1998, p. 102). open-coding was concluded when there was an exhaustion of sources, a saturation of categories, or the emergence of regularities in the data. second, axial coding was used to identify the interconnected categories of codes “whereby data are put back together in new ways after open coding, by making connections between categories” (strauss & corbin 1990, p. 96). third, a thematic analysis of the categories was performed to identify emergent themes across the focus groups and interviews.32 a general inductive approach was used to categorize themes according to the levels of the ecological model. an inductive approach “primarily uses detailed readings of raw data to derive concepts, themes, or a model through interpretations made from the raw data by an evaluator or researcher” (thomas, 2006, p. 238). furthermore, a general inductive approach is used in evaluation research where data analysis is guided by evaluation objectives, yet the establishment of transparent links between these objectives and qualitative findings is necessary. key findings individual-level impacts 32 researcher memos were also used during the preliminary analysis in order to keep track of ideas and thematic developments related to the codes and their relationships to broader themes and categories. impacts of the support groups on the individual-level (i.e., direct impacts to participants) are presented in relation to three themes that emerged for both men and women. these three over-arching individual themes are relational impacts, social impacts, and the development of a resilient mindset; although an additional theme reflective of uniquely the women’s focus group is also included. relational impact the participating men and women discussed the relational impacts of peer support, emphasizing their sense of relief from negative emotions stemming from past trauma and subsequent resettlement. the refugee men in particular derived comfort from feeling like they could relate to, or empathize with, one another through a group setting. a participant, derek33, shared, “it was very beneficial for myself […] hearing about others’ experience that remind us of maybe family members face the same thing or witness it, or some other individual, so it was a good experience. it touches us really deeply. that’s why it was very beneficial and improving; healing someone from inside especially.” similarly, the refugee women discussed the impact of participating in the group support programs in terms of relational support arising from building community and empathy. for example, the women discussed past experiences and current challenges through which they could emotionally relate to and support one another. as joanne disclosed: with this sessions, i feel that they are my family, i can talk to them if i feel 33 each participant was given a pseudonym to ensure confidentiality http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 sad or sick, and so they are keeping the community and the socialization. as well, they [peer support sessions] make us more closer even with the community so many people we didn’t know before but now because we are suffering from the same problem we feel us as a family. the women also talked about a feeling of “stress relief” associated with peer support, alice explains “you can’t even imagine what the relief we have when we are here, how we are really very comfortable; it’s a stress relief for us; it’s kind of like we are feeling very positive energy.” some participants related the impact of peer support to alternative forms of community support available in their home country insofar as helping them through emotional difficulties. for example, matthew compared his experiences with the group to spiritual or religious supports he previously frequented, “everybody needs the emotional support, it might come at any stage like emotion drops suddenly in anybody’s life so it’s really important because before it was through churches, through mosques, this kind of support.” social impact participants relayed the impacts of group support in terms of progressing in their settlement and regaining a sense of sociability. the men explained that given the amount of time spent in group sessions every week, their core social foundation changed drastically because they could rely on seeing each other at regular intervals and develop a network of peers. the women likewise reflected on the importance of regular meetings and were impacted by the sense of community they gained from peer support groups, despite the challenges they were facing through settlement and with their past trauma. for example, participants discussed exchanging organizational skills that assisted their settlement and general mental wellbeing in addition to knowledge about citizenship or administrative issues and canadian customs. men and women also expressed that the selfconfidence they built through group support programs reassured them of their capacity to contribute in their community. the interpreter explained a participant’s point of view, “joanne used the arabic expression, ‘if you don’t have something, you cannot give any’, so if you don’t have the care, or somebody taking care of you, you cannot give back. when i am at the group sessions, i found those kinds of things, so that’s why now we can give back even more and in a better way.” hence, both men and women experienced social impacts as a result of their participation in peer support groups. development of a resilient mindset participants expressed the development of a “resilient mindset.” through the peer support programs men and women began thinking positively about their future and developing coping strategies for settlement-related stressors such as anger. participating men expressed resilience both through the belief they can “deal with failure and learn from it” and by “not giving up.” participants further felt that they emerged more hopeful about their settlement despite their circumstances. the development of positive-thinking is reflected by matthew, “again about failure […] when you come to canada like it’s kind of a spirit’s coming flying with lots of energy and suddenly facing those problems which is not expected, it’s kind of feeling down, from up to down, so the group was helping me to focus on how to get up, like, especially how to get up again.” women found that the group support sessions fostered their mental well-being through strategies related to positivethinking; in addition to anger management. for example, the women cited benefits from http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 learning strategies such as breathing techniques and remaining calm in order to diffuse their anger. farah clarified, “they teach us how to be calm and how to understand that person in front of you; they will do some exercise with us, like physically or breathing, the way how to breathe and to relax.” participants also developed positivethinking about their future and framing their experiences dialectically, for example by viewing personal failures as opportunities to learn. mallory, expressed this hope as, “we felt that it’s true like, it’s not the end of the world, but we have a lot coming, we can create something better than what we have.” affirmation of gendered identity finally, the women’s focus group discussed the impacts of group support unique to their experiences as refugee women. participants found the support groups empowered them to reclaim their identities and aspects of their lives as women that they felt had been previously neglected. participants elaborated that, because of their past trauma and recent resettlement, they had forgotten about feminine aspects of their lives. in veronique’s words: unfortunately, we forget even about our identity because of the challenges especially as single moms; we have all of the responsibilities on us, but back home i felt that i was strong, but then coming here facing everything by myself, i found myself weak— so now we say even with the challenges, the responsibilities, we have forgotten even about the feminine. participants appreciated discussions centered on their unique challenges as refugee women and found the group’s focus on self-care reinforced their sense of collective and individual self-worth. a participant described 34 one participant shouted, “we are women!” how the emphasis on them as women in the group programs served as a reminder of their gendered identity34. deda explained on behalf of the group, “the group programs; they are focusing on us, but they’re not at all forgetting at the back; we are single moms with these sorts of challenges. the sessions are getting at the whole package.” the findings from the women’s support group highlight the empowerment experienced by refugee women, an impact that resonated particularly among single parents. microsystem: familial and interpersonal impacts two themes emerged related to the impact of peer support on participants’ interpersonal relations or their microsystem. impact on families’ well-being men and women cited that their participation in peer support positively impacted their children and partners. participants specifically discussed their sense of ableness to provide for, and support, their family through settlement, while the positive changes participants observed in their own mental wellness were reflected in the wellbeing of their children. some participants shared parenting strategies they developed to cope with family stressors unique to refugees’ circumstances. for instance, mothers in the women’s focus group discussed the difficulties associated in raising a child alone, and expressed that the support groups not only helped them respond to their child’s needs but also provided them with time to focus on their personal mental well-being. the stress of supporting a child was conveyed by mallory as follows: (interpreter providing pretext: and it’s not only for her, even for her daughter, because she is a single mom and she http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 said that it’s [the group support program] reflecting even if her 13 year old has a problem she can even solve it now.) if i have like something personally, i have a family with kids if they are facing even something wrong with school and with the kids, i can deal with it now. the impact on familial well-being was echoed by service providers who had interacted with participants as well. a service provider remarked that the group support programs fostered a sense of community that resonated in their relationships at home. natasha surmised, “i think one of the impacts is that it creates a family situation, so, in this neighbourhood you have a lot of single parents particularly moms, so what we’ve noticed […] when you are positively engaging in group support, i think that plays out at home.” both participants and service providers observed direct impacts to refugees’ well-being on a familial level as a result of group support programs, with particular benefits experienced by singleparent families. demystification of community services hearing other participants discuss their interpersonal experiences with community services had a positive impact on peer support group members. service providers discussed the notion of “demystification” as the ability to create an understanding among refugees about the purpose of various services available to them in the region. according to service providers; refugees’ understanding of some service providers were justifiably burdened by past experiences and traumas, however interservice provider communication and collaboration in the group support programs helped mitigate some of the misunderstandings present in the refugee community. a service provider discussed the importance of demystifying services in relation to difficulty navigating various systems as a newcomer: [resettlement] creates obviously a great deal of anxiety for anyone, but in particular, for individuals who may not be familiar with the nature of the systems that they’re involved with […] it is confusing for anyone, let alone for somebody who may not speak the language. so that’s what i mean by demystifying, it is a very complicated web of systems. (james) the clarification of the purpose of service providers through partnerships in the group support programs helped reduce some anxiety associated with services offered, for example, by family and children services and waterloo regional police services. participants likewise described that the groups helped them feel more comfortable approaching other services providers by hearing from each other’s experiences and making personal connections with guests of particular group support sessions. thus, the peer support program demonstrated impacts related to the interpersonal relations developed by other refugees and community partners through the clarification or demystification of regional services. participants’ “microsystem” further intersects with the impacts occurring at the various additional levels of the ecological model such as the mesoand exosystem. mesosystem: the interface of peer support and impacts in the immediate community impacts from peer support groups emerged at the level of the mesosystem, through the various interactions of the elements comprising individual participants’ microsystems such as their family and immediate community. these impacts were evidenced, broadly through three themes: 1) parasocial support 2) the development of employment capacity, and 3) contributions to local community development. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 parasocial support participants were impacted by the indirect effects of peer support on their immediate community. participants discussed how the group support programs impacted their family and friends through the sharing of the participants’ knowledge and insight about mental well-being that they had gained in peer support programs. the impacts on people other than the direct recipient thereby provide additional, “parasocial”, benefits to non-participating refugees. consider the experience of derek: what keeps us coming is the very strong benefit, improvement in ourselves as well as for me, you can see strongly even when i share it outside [the program] with the family, they can share it with friends who cannot reach the services, but they can even share it so it’s impacting other people as well, so this good benefit it’s reflecting other people through us. participants also expanded on the parasocial impacts of group support to their children. for example, learning about strategies for coping with failure enabled clarence, a refugee father, to support his children through their own experiences with social barriers in their daily lives. he described his experience as follows: after the fact [i.e. a particular group session], i went home and talked to my son, like, about this failure course and how to deal with it, how to pass through it, so it’s reflecting this way… even, i was saying, that it’s reflecting in the way we talk to the kids because it’s giving us ways to, of how to, go through and discuss with our kids even. several participants also found that their distant relatives (i.e. family who are not living in canada or remain in their home country) observed positive changes in participants’ attitudes and behaviors; an observation communicated to them through conversations with their family back home. moreover, participants’ relatives felt comforted by the improvement participants noticed in their own mental health since joining the group program and the positivity they relayed about their experience with group support. these participants also described that their families, despite being removed from any direct participation, nonetheless felt reassured by the group support program and its impact on the refugee participants, as one participant added, their family knew that “she was going to be okay.” taken together, the impacts on participants’ immediate family and peers supports the program’s ability to extend its benefits to the mesosystem, or the interpersonal relations of other refugees in the community, and even abroad. building community employment capacity participants discussed the impact of the peer support in terms of gaining employmentrelated skills and knowledge. they viewed these skills as valuable to building their prospects for future employment and helping them cope with their personal stressors once in the workplace. several specifically expressed that the knowledge they gained at the sessions helped them understand how to seek employment. for example, participants found that the group helped facilitate discussions about gaining skills and experience relevant for obtaining employment and addressed the cultural nuances, and myths, surrounding employment in the region. participants also expressed a sense of self-agency in their ability to gain education and were motivated to pursue their career aspirations. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 an interview with a service provider from employment ontario’s focus for ethnic women found that the program helped initiate participants’ interest in their employment options and prepared them mentally and emotionally for the workplace. cassandra explained, “they [the peer support programs] meet with clients, they get together, they talk about different issues in their daily life and from that, if there’s a need for employment, to see a counsellor, or have a health problem or a housing problem or any other issues, they work with them, different agencies, to see where they can get help.” peer support can therefore prepare participants with the necessary “soft” skills for employment while identifying and coordinating support services in the mesosystem to optimize refugees’ success at obtaining and retaining employment. contributions to local community development participants disclosed that the peer support programs encouraged them to contribute to the local community through volunteering, and finding employment. a refugee woman, veronique, explained: “so when you treat the inside, it reflects all sorts of you. the more we connect with people, we will know more about the community, so we will be more knowledgeable with the community so we can even help out in the future time. this can treat as much as the country gives us, we would like to give back.” participants also relayed that the self-esteem they gained from group support helped them feel more confident in their cultural competency and ability to navigate the local job market. as alice explained, “even giving us confidence in ourselves to even be open to work, for example volunteering, to have the strength to do it, to take this step, to look for a job even sometimes they give us resources, so we can start.” indeed, some of the participants reported they were already volunteering at schools and libraries; refugee men also framed their desire to work in terms of being able to “give back” and contribute to the canadian economy. in addition, a service provider from the waterloo region police services found that the groups opened dialogues with critical services to the community by building “outreach capacity” which fosters transparency and trust between refugee communities and service providers via members of the group support programs. group support therefore contributes to the development of local communities in which refugees live and also bridges refugee communities with services providers in the region. exosystem: impacts to institutional relations between service providers and their provision of services to refugees impacts to the exosystem, or the broader social structures which affect participants, are demonstrated by peer groups’ impacts on institutional levels such as service providers’ relations to refugees and changes to service provision patterns. first of all, participants of the group support programs developed an informal community network through the personal connections they developed with one another, which decreased their selfreliance on formal mental health supports. this community network was described as a source of peer support and resource-sharing that participants felt had the capacity to assist them in their settlement process beyond the program’s duration. specifically, participants discussed that the mental well-being support groups fostered a sense of community and trust amongst themselves, thereby diminishing their reliance on formal mental health supports such as medical doctors, counsellors, and psychologists. in addition, a few participants suggested that they were able to discontinue using medication for depression. joanne offered the following explanation for her new found ability to selfcare, “the support groups helped me find a better way to care for myself. as a single http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 mother, i felt for me like here i have no family […] but with this sessions i feel that they are my family, i can i can talk to them if i feel sad, if i’m sick, so they are keeping the community and the socialization.” from the perspective of local agencies, one service provider further explained that the awareness of various service providers engendered among refugees and discussions about their services helped optimize service coordination while ensuring refugees understood their purpose— because it’s a program where they’re supporting involvement with other community partners, […] that opens the door to get to know the family and children services, and know that the services exist to families in case something happens, you know, they can get support from other community partners too. another service provider from cmha suggested that the support groups focused clients and agencies on the services available to them in the region and build support systems that are local to them: instead of going to toronto or somewhere else, it kind of brings us back, okay, there are also valuable people in the region and there is valuable knowledge in the region being recognized and exchanged […] they bring the attention to what we already have here. peer support programs therefore demonstrate community-level, or exosystem impacts through changes to service provision patterns and the reduction of strain on formal 35 campbell & murray (2004) assert “psycho-social changes need to be accompanied by real changes in a community’s access to power and resources. this argument goes hand in hand with community health services engendered by informal community networks. discussion the discussion first highlights evidence supporting the project’s impacts in terms of ameliorative and transformative changes, then situates the findings from the peer support programs through communityoriented outcomes, and finally proposes recommendations for subsequent research while providing insights for other service providers both regionally, and nationally. first, the authors must address the obvious limitation of the analysis of peers support among refugees. the sources of data used do not and potentially cannot address the impacts to the macrosystem of the ecological model. the highest level of the model, the macrosystem encompasses the economic, cultural, and political systems in which individuals are embedded (bronfenbrenner, 1977). peer support groups are inherently limited in their capacity to effect such broad, and perhaps aspirational changes. first, peer support groups as demonstrated by the findings affect primarily refugees, their peers, families (i.e. the microsystem), the relations within their community (i.e. the mesosystem), and the relationships between community service providers (i.e. the exosystem). these connections preclude the broader canadian population whose engagement could be influential in generating broader social or political change, for example through advocacy or critical consciousness-raising (dittmer & riemer, 2012). with respect to wellness promotion, critical community psychology focuses on aspects of mental health beyond psychosocial processes35, paying attention instead to the psychology’s on-going debate about the most appropriate level at which to pitch attempts to generate social change in the interests of facilitating health-enhancing community contexts” (p. 9). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 political and social structures underlying community health (campbell and murray, 2004). particularly among marginalized communities lacking in political power and resources (campbell and murray, 2004) underline that changes to policy necessitate alliances and partnership with “powerful actors and agencies.” (p. 11) for example; consider the aforementioned systemic issues facing refugees such as housing discrimination, racism, poverty, and employment barriers (beiser & hou, 2006; mckeary & newbold, 2010; carter & osborne, 2009). these issues remain concerns that necessarily implicate a broader group of stakeholders than solely participants and service providers involved in peer support programs in order to effectuate political and social change. the ecological framework was therefore inherently limited in providing impacts to the macrosystem level, an area that future programs and research alike could address. ameliorative and transformative group support the multi-level impacts of group support programs reflect outcomes to refugee mental wellness that are potentially both ameliorative and transformative. ameliorative change represents outcomes that are beneficial to individuals in the shortterm but that do not necessarily cultivate systematic changes on political and institutional levels required for sustained social change (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010, pp. 156-59). transformative change represents a societal shift in attitudes that can manifest itself through societal and institutional levels, for example through changes in public policy. both aspects are important and even complementary in the field of mental health and prevention (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010, pp. 208-09). first, ameliorative changes are discussed before examining transformative changes. ameliorative changes from the group support programs were evidenced through the social and relational impacts individually experienced by program participants. participants were also supported by the interpersonal connections and empathy they developed from hearing others’ lived experiences. these processes are documented in psychiatric settings wherein peer support has been found to engender participants’ empathy through the feeling of a common experience. this understanding is conveyed through the “universality” of meaning that participants develop through their shared group interactions (yalom & leszcz, 2005, p. 6). participants further disconfirm the belief that they are alone in their suffering, developing a mutual sense of trust and support (beiling, mccabe, & antony, 2006, p. 14). this finding is consistent with the little research available on group-based supports for refugees. for example, behnia (2003) found that community peer groups addressed participants’ isolation by helping them realize they were not alone in coping with their problems; enabling them to identify with others. in the context of refugees’ secondary migration (i.e. migration to other communities within their host country), simich, beiser, and mawani (2003) found that affirmation of shared experience also led to refugees seeking social supports in other regions. the refugees in the current peer support program share the validation experienced by other peer support groups and also had their sense of isolation mitigated by refugees in their sense of belonging (mead et al., 2001). describe that “peer groups specifically create a ‘milieu’ for participants who experienced social isolation and an inability to share their experience to meet others with similar experiences, generating a sense of belonging.” this sense of shared identity and belonging is a concept resonant of psychological sense of community. psychological sense of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 community infers the perceived connection of an individual to their community and has been defined as “a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members' needs will be met through their commitment to be together” (mcmillan & chavis, 1986). participants of the focus groups relayed that their shared histories and social challenges allowed them to feel connected to one another. glassman and skolnik (1984) have similarly identified the need for regaining a sense of belonging in order to foster community among south-east asian refugees. moreover, sense of belonging as a key component of citizenship and immigration canada’s mandate and data collection with immigrants (painter, 2013; statistics canada, 2015). refugees’ sense of belonging could be a key indicator of wellbeing for future program evaluation because it has been linked to civic and social participation, and life satisfaction (chavis, lee, & acosta, 2008). the development of a resilient mindset further solidifies the positive, albeit ameliorative impact of peer support. resilience in psychology typically refers to the ability to “bounce back” from adverse emotional or social circumstances (tugade & fredrickson, 2004). although the literature on resilience as a protective factor is much too large to adequately discuss here, the cognitive and behavioral changes evidenced through peer support are demonstrative of participants’ resilience to social adversity. for example, the perception of being able to both better manage distress and adapt to personal failures are illustrative of participants’ resilient mindset. the development of this mindset further reflects “community resilience” – the ability of individuals and their families to “fit” with their environment (van breda, 2001, p. 159-60), a concept itself resonant of the ecological model and moreover, community psychology theory (nelson and prilleltensky, 2011, p. 79). martin-breen and anderies (2011) identified that programs bolstering resilience “foster existing relationships, in families and communities, rather than ‘come to the rescue’ when acute adversity strikes.” communities and families are resilient systems; policy that respects them, rather than tries to control them, can significantly affect positive outcomes” (p. 35). the current program leveraged the refugee and service provider communities, demonstrating correspondingly positive impacts to participants’ resiliency. for example, the findings also indicated impacts not only on the individual level, but in the interpersonal and community relations of participants’ microsystems. finally, resilience has been connected to the growing body of literature surrounding post-traumatic growth and the capacity for trauma to bring about positive changes to cognitions (tedeschi & calhoun, 2004; weiss & berger, 2008). the participating refugees similarly demonstrated positive cognitive changes through the resilient mindset they engaged as a result of the peer support program. individual level impacts also resonate with previous research on the acculturation of refugees in group-based programs. for example, participants gained an understanding of norms and social skills needed to integrate in their new culture, generate hope, and self-confidence; processes which glassman and skolnik (1984) have found to be empowering to the individual. berger (1999) has perhaps politicallyincorrectly labelled this process the “all-inthe-same-boat” phenomenon; finding that participants shared experience in acculturation alleviates their feelings of pain, helplessness, guilt, anger, and frustration, and also helps them regain a sense of identity (p. 143). the psychosocial impacts of peer support are equally resonant of group therapy whereby the opportunity to belong to an informal social network diminished http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 participants’ isolation, and validated their feelings of confusions, shame, and anger (shulman, 1993; leader, 1991). despite the sense of community and shared psychosocial impacts fostered through peer support, these outcomes represent ameliorative and not transformative change because they reflect changes to individual well-being rather than changes to structural levels of society. on the other hand, transformative change was evidenced through community capacitybuilding. community capacity-building refers to “the identification, strengthening, and linking of your community's tangible resources such as: local service groups, and intangible resources like community spirit” (ontario healthy communities coalition, n.d.). community capacity-building is a transformative outcome of peer support that was supported by refugee participants’ sense of empowerment, their development of resilience to adversity, and their feelings of self-agency. for example, the refugee women expanded their community networks through peer support, and learning to navigate settlement issues themselves while turning to each other for emotional support. furthermore, participants were motivated to gain employment and pursue post-secondary education, having been linked to various educational and leadership programs that promoted their sense of ownership of their careers while teaching them to set goals and encouraging them to explore their career and personal aspirations. the implications of community capacity-building are important for sustaining refugee mental wellness beyond the duration of the peer support programs. indeed, mead et al. (2001) suggest: peer support, therefore, becomes a natural extension and expansion of community rather than modeling professionalized caretaking of people defined as defective. […] they (peers) naturally come to understand their problems in the larger social and political context from which they emerge, rather than pathologizing themselves. peer support is a simultaneous movement towards autonomy and community building (p. 8). the turn to social and political context is reflected in the changes participants experienced not only in their empathy with one another, but in their integration within community and institutional settings. the microand mesosystem impacts that were highlighted in the findings such as refugees’ participation in the community and service provider linkages may therefore translate to community capacity-building, while potentially decreasing the burden on formal health care providers. in fact, peer support programs have been suggested as means of reducing people’s dependence on professional supports (mead et al., 2001, p. 24). the development of community capacitybuilding might also be demonstrated by the relationships of trust created between refugee service users and service providers. the peer support programs fostered a sense of trust between refugee participants and regional service providers, the impact of which service providers suggested even extended to other organizations in the region. the findings exposed the development of not only participants’ local networks, but also participants’ capacity to act as community leaders for other refugees in the region. participants engaged refugees who were nonparticipants to the program in their learning through the dissemination of both resettlement strategies they developed and the knowledge they gained about community service providers. similarly, behnia (2003) found that participants of peer support revealed that their informal networks were one of the primary pathways through which they learned about mental health services. transformative change is demonstrated by http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 this ripple effect of refugees’ peer support and their changing attitudes about, and relationships to, service providers in the region. the ripple effect of peer support (i.e. parasocial support) may be an unintended benefit of peer support programs that can promote mental wellness in the community by preventing issues before they occur. preventative intervention likewise addresses mental health issues before they occur, or reduces their severity, through health promotion, strengths-based approaches, and the development of protective factors (mrazek & haggerty, 1994). the prospect of refugees supporting each other instead of government-designated services is itself transformative and supports further inquiry into knowledge dissemination and mobilization strategies for the broader refugee community. future evaluations could thus gain valuable insight from the effects of group support on non-participating refugees in the community. overall, peer support provides evidence of ameliorative and transformational changes not only through the enduring multi-level impacts of group programs but by the momentum generated in the community’s capacity to respond to refugees’ settlement needs. next steps community capacity-building could be further leveraged through the continued implementation of peer support programs, however with the addition of past participants as facilitators in the program. similar “mutual help”-based programs are 36 big brothers big sisters of canada. http://www.bigbrothersbigsisters.ca/ 37 youth assisting youth. http://www.thepeerproject.com/ 38 diversecity: community resources society. child and youth mental health: refugee peer support program. retrieved may 25 2017 from employed for example with alcoholics anonymous and psychiatric survivor programs, both of which demonstrate impacts comparable to peer support programs such as participant self-efficacy (tonigan, connors, & miller, 2003) and supportive relationships (nelson, ochocka, griffin & lord, 1998), respectively. another model for community capacity-building that merits consideration is a mentorship model such as that used by big brothers big sisters of canada36 or youth assisting youth37. already, similar programs that employ oneon-one peer mentoring exist for refugees. a peer support program in british columbia for example, matches refugee youth with trained peer support workers.38 in addition, ottawa community immigrant services organization has recently begun one-on-one partnering between syrian refugees and newcomers with arabic-speaking volunteers.39 the concept of peer mentorship was evoked by refugee participants themselves. participants of both the men and women focus groups suggested that the group support sessions ought to incorporate participants from past sessions in their future programs thereby promoting sustained mental well-being for themselves and incoming refugees. derek offered the following recommendation for the program which resonated with other participants as well: i would like to offer a suggestion and that it would be great even from the facilitators if they can keep us as a group and use our benefit from the groups for other people, we can share our stories, our kind of before and http://www.dcrs.ca/pdf/cymh%20refugee%20peer %20support%20brochure%20final.pdf 39 canadian broadcasting corporation [cbc]. (2016, december 18). syrian refugees get help from not-sonew newcomers. canadian broadcasting corporation. retrieved may 10 2017 from http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/syrianrefugee-peer-support-ociso-1.3899757 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 after stage and how we benefit from these groups because really these groups have had a very big direct effect on us which is why we’d love to keep in touch not only like for a certain time but we would like to keep in touch and become even a part of it. the interest in other forms of group support and the incorporation of past participants warrants further exploration of community capacity-building through mentorship and peer-support models. the recent reports by the mental health commission of canada and camh echo this need for community-centred supports (agic, mckenzie, tuck & antwi, 2016; centre for addiction and mental health, 2016). despite the ingenuity and resourcefulness of refugees, behnia (2003) cautions that refugees are not capacitated with the resources to implement peer support groups without the support of community partners. however, the expanision of group-based mental well-being supports is evidently vital in light of the continued influx of arabic-speaking refugees. in summary, peer support for refugees reveals promising avenues for promoting positive settlement experiences, and preventing future mental health issues. the impacts of peer support programs are testament to the community capacity already existing among refugees resettled to canada. in implementing similar programs, a semistructured approach to peer support programs, as evidenced in the review of the relevant literature, is critical. allowing the time for participants to organically create connections, but also providing targeted activities and topical information sessions, provide the necessary social environment for group bonding and mutual support. in doing so, building on partnerships with service providers is essential to creating exposure to available community supports, which can lead to for example, the demystification of services. furthermore, practitioners should consider not only the diversity of the refugee community, but the strengths participants bring to the group. peer support however is not a replacement for mental health services – suffice to say – as the psychosocial needs of refugees are complex and one program cannot be expected to be a panacea for all settlement issues. continued engagement with individuals in the community, traumainformed practice and facilitators, and checking-in with peer group participants are recommended. insofar as the impacts of peer support in the current research demonstrate, there are innumerable practical benefits to refugee peer support. the implementation of peer support programs, although relatively informal and demanding little in the way of resources, offers immense potential to communities resettling refugees. acknowledgement the authors would like to acknowledge the contribution of stakeholders in promise of partnership project, especially the refugee community for their trust and commitment to improving the settlement process for newcomers to canada. their participation in the evaluation process and the knowledge and insight that they were able to share have been invaluable to this research. the contributions from the refugee community have further enlightened these authors to the diversity and admirable strengths of the refugee community in the face of adverse pasts and current circumstances. the many wonderful staff and service providers in the region are also to thank, in particular the incredibly dedicated and supportive staff at carizon who made the programs possible. the community relationships created through the promise of partnership reaffirm carizon’s commitment to improving the accessibility of culturally-appropriate and effective mental health supports to all peoples in the region of waterloo. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 references adame, a. l., & leitner, l. m. 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(eds.). immigrant and refugee students in canada (pp. 31-53). edmonton: brush education inc. http://www.gjcpp.org/ the community psychologist as a reflective plumber by caterina arcidiacono university federico ii, naples, italy keywords: ecological model, systemic approach, positionality, reflexivity, intersectionality, trustfulness author biography: prof. of community psychology, ecpa (european community psychology association) efpa (european federation of psychologists’ association)-standing committee on community psychology, email: caterina.arcidiacono@unina.it recommended citation: arcidiacono, c. (2017). the community psychologist as a reflective plumber. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(1), pages 116. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). mailto:caterina.arcidiacono@unina.it http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 the community psychologist as a reflective plumber abstract the article describes community psychologists’ competencies, emphasizing the importance of ecological and systemic perspectives that allow them to deal with individual psychological issues framed in social and cultural domains. furthermore, it gives evidence of the specific knowledge that the community psychology approach brings to the professional activity: its aims and methodologies. it also explains why individual and social values as well as fairness and justice are affecting psychological, social, and individual well-being. finally, it describes the community psychology backbone, depicting some peculiar competencies that characterize the interventions of community psychologists in various domains that allow them to use their psychological background in different contexts. these are entailed by the trip model, which presents trustfulness, reflexivity, intersectionality, and positionality as community psychologists’ core methodological acquirements as well as basic values. questioning community psychologists’ (cps) competencies is not only a theoretical issue but also a practical one that gives evidence of specific professional skills and training designs. do specific competencies exist? what are they? answering these questions helps define goals, methodologies, and tools to strengthen professional and social recognition. unfortunately, we are aware that community psychologists, in both the mainstream and their critical approach, face on the one hand a constant reduction in the number of academic positions and on the other the difficulty of identifying their own specific competencies. this state of affairs is widespread in many countries, not only in europe but globally. moreover, the actions of community psychologists does not appear to be a unique area of expertise in psychology, on neither an academic nor a practical level (reich et al., 2007; vazquez rivera, 2010). in a different vein, other approaches employ cp tools and often claim ownership of them. the job market does not recognize specific competencies, skills, and methodologies of cps; therefore, on the one side they are not fully considered psychologists, and on the other hand they are more generally included under the wide umbrella of social scientists. unfortunately, even clearly defined cp competencies (elias, neigher, & johnsonhakim, 2015; neigher, ratcliffe, wolff, elias, & hakim, 2012) do not explicitly relate and refer to the psychological background. consequently, social actions involving psychologists do not recognize their psychological roots, and all competencies are attributed to the general area of humanities or education. in fact, according to neigher et al. (2012), cps “apply well-established psychological principles and techniques, tested and proven in practice, to improve well-being and effectiveness at individual, organizational, and community levels” (2012, p.3), with explicit concern for social justice. however, the big effort of community psychology in defining its own values and goals leaves behind the competencies acquired in psychological training. therefore, the co-synergistic action of values, visions, and psychological backgrounds is underestimated. furthermore, social psychologists “must also deal with the high status given in many psychology departments to neuroscientists http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 and the biomedical framework, which is focused primarily on the genetic foundations of psychological processes” (francescato & zani, 2013, p. 1). for this reason, we must lay out the competencies and actions of psychologists who work in the social arena. this will help us better outline more opportunity to recognize their significant role and possible training opportunities and intervention strategies. along the same lines, we should be aware that many interventions that generally pertain to the field of community psychology involve experts and professionals with different backgrounds, including health educators, evaluators, sociologists, social scientists, and community workers. therefore, entering the debate on the quality and specificity of community psychology competencies, faced by the “practice competencies in community psychology and their application” (gjcpp 2016, 2017), notable issues of this journal, this article aims to address the following questions: 1. what are the roots and paradigms related to community psychologist competencies? 2. is there also interdisciplinary or transversal knowledge? 3. if so, what are the specific competencies to be found in this discipline? are community psychologists involved in specific activities? 4. how can we define which knowledge and actions characterize community psychology? roots and paradigms community psychology (cp) has its roots in the ecological paradigm (kelly, 1986; bronfenbrenner, 1979; prilleltensky, 2001, 2008, 2012; christens & perkins, 2008). it is well known that cp concerns the relationships of individuals with communities and societies at the intra-psychic, interpersonal, organizational, cultural, and political levels. therefore, cp is based on neither the individual nor the community but on their linkage. all these interactions between different domains exist in a systemic interdependence, although only some authors give specific evidence of it (e.g., kelly, 2006; murrel, 1973; stark, 2012). the cp vision has also tacitly acquired legacy from the systemic approach proposed by the models of bateson (1972) and von bertalanffy (1968). social events and individual determinants are intertwined: “multiple determination is characteristic of all biological fields. characteristically, every feature of the anatomy of an animal or plant and every detail of behavior is determined by a multitude of interacting factors at both the genetic and physiological levels; and, correspondingly, the processes of any ongoing ecosystem are the outcome of multiple determination” (bateson, 1972, p. 505). cp is aware that the complexity of social changes and social issues such as marginalization and social exclusion constitute relevant areas of study and intervention, and its contribution offers a specific approach by placing the individuals and, more specifically, the citizens at the center thereof. the scholarship of orford (2008), prilleltensky (2008), and the italian amerio (2000) is the bedrock of the importance attributed to social contexts: according to the latter, community psychology is the discipline that studies the ways in which mental and practical phenomena as well as behaviors reciprocally interact within the social context. this is done by linking the analysis of individual psychological processes with that of social dynamics (amerio, 2000). therefore, cp is the innovative paradigm of social psychology that best explains and makes the greatest use of the lewin’s basic formula stating that behavior is a function of the person and his or her environment (lewin, 1936). when we refer to context, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 we do so in its broadest sense: i.e. context – along with the opportunities it offers, the frame of relationships it weaves, and the material as well as the intangible characteristics that comprise it – is the underlying ground upon which it is possible to build up a well-lived existence. context, thus, is not a backdrop; it is indeed part and parcel of the very theatrical play in which social actors perform their lives. (arcidiacono & di martino, 2012, p. 63) in a critical approach, cp seeks to prevent or reduce the negative mental health consequences of our societal arrangements by working collaboratively at both the objective and subjective levels with persons, in their everyday community contexts, to increase their control over their lives by facilitating their competence to bring about social change. therefore, cp is the discipline that: • provides the basic assumptions for the study of social phenomena in relation to the living contexts of individuals. • places attention on the different interactions between individuals and their life contexts. • gives a voice to the experience of local people and promotes communication between different social and political actors. to this end, cp intervenes for social transformation to meet the needs and expectations of all social actors. • according to (hanlin et al., 2008), community psychologists are characterized by: o shared assumptions: the action of power and environmental influence on individual and social behavior; o values: the need to change the system of inequality (prilleltensky, 2001); o an ecological paradigm where “the ecological principles of interaction between populations and the community, eco-system and biosphere are analogized to the interaction of individuals with their community, environment, society and world” (hanlin et al., 2008, p. 525); and o goals: the action on social change (jason, 1991). however, it is evident that these dimensions can be shared with activists, other professionals, and even engaged citizens. thus, they are not the hallmarks of psychologists. at the same time, community psychologists integrate all this general knowledge into their wider psychological background. these are cps’ skills: they know about the individual psyche but include this knowledge in a wider and more integrated perspective. cps deal with emotions, beliefs, cognition, and conscious and unconscious knowledge as well as self-esteem, depression, rage, powerlessness, etc., but at the same time, they are able to place these dimensions in a wider – and contextualized – perspective. they tackle distrust, helplessness, and lack of social involvement while they strive to build social bonds. interdisciplinarity and transversal knowledge as well as needing to define cps’ assumptions, it is important to remember its interdisciplinary aspects. for instance, there is no explicit recognition of what has been borrowed by pedagogues (freire, 1970) and marxist sociologists (fals borda, 1979, 2001) regarding owned and shared thoughts, nor has the concept of capability proposed by nussbaum and sen (nussbaum, 2011; nussbaum & sen, 1993) – philosopher and economist, respectively – which enriches the basic cp concepts of empowerment and social agency. it is also not easy to understand how competence and knowledge of diverse professions interact in the communities of practice (wenger, 1998) and in service learning (zani, 2016). on these premises, monteiro and colleagues affirm the importance of interdisciplinarity in training in community psychology, highlighting the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 interaction with other fields of human sciences, particularly economics, sociology, and anthropology. the interdisciplinarity in community psychology could be established as a critical and political epistemological requirement, based on the principle of complexity (monteiro, campos, & figueiredo, 2016). definitions of these specific disciplinary competencies and the specific work contexts make it difficult to construct the dialectic between disciplinary competencies and their place in an interdisciplinary perspective. the risk is that the specificity of the single profession becomes flattened in a generic definition of social scientists. bosio and lozza (2013), from the catholic university of milan, state in reference to psychology, in the moment that a discipline opens itself up to a variety of professional opportunities, the chance of maintaining a privileged dominion over specific services and skills is reduced and the competition with professionals offering their selves for analogous services increases. (p. 683) this statement is even truer for community psychology, where the contribution of social knowledge causes one to lose sight of the complexity of the learned knowledge. if indeed society is a complex system (morin, 1976), we must also be aware of how knowledge and disciplines interact. therefore, i fully support the importance of transdisciplinary dialogue, but i do not agree that “the concept of community psychology is transdisciplinary by nature” (stark 2012, p. 44) as described in the last paragraph. cp has its own methodologies and competencies to share and help expand the wider scientific and social basket. methodologies and practical skills in 2012, dalton and wolfe proposed a guideline list of 18 competencies for practice. this was further discussed among scholars and professionals (wolfe, chien-scott, & jimenez, 2013), as well as within the society for community research and action (scra), and was granted approval by the scra executive committee. this has been a significant step in defining cp practice, but it leaves many questions unanswered. their short description of competencies is not directly connected with implications concerning methodologies and practical skills. as community psychologists, their list of competencies is part of what forms our discipline; however, this is not enough. the authors have clearly defined our main goals, but their descriptions do not state specific knowledge (tools and methods). context analysis, community building, group interventions, and many others are all activities likely to be employed by activists, social workers, pedagogues, and sociologists. what, then, are the cp hallmarks? by the same token, francescato and zani (2013) state that community psychologists “act as successful facilitators in: (a) increasing social ties and trust, and individual, small group, organizational and community empowerment; (b) promoting active participation; (c) helping people solve conflicts constructively; (d) consolidating social networks and (e) promoting sense of community” (p. 8). action research, program planning and evaluation, quantitative and qualitative data analysis, and networking with unions, i.e., organizations of all types, and promoting partnership with public institutions at the regional and local levels are all skills useful for the aforementioned activities, but they also belong to social scientists and sometimes even to social activists. furthermore, francescato and zani say, community psychology interventions should: encourage pluralistic interpretations of social problems that integrate objective and subjective knowledge, and broaden the http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://context.reverso.net/traduzione/inglese-italiano/leaves http://context.reverso.net/traduzione/inglese-italiano/unanswered global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 viewpoints from which a given situation can be considered. • examine the historical roots of social problems and the unequal distribution of power and access to resources in the social context. • give voice to minority narratives, and promote the production of new metaphors or new narratives that help ‘imagine’ new scripts and roles for individuals and social groups. • create ties among people who share a problem. • identify the points of strength to obtain a change. • spread psychological knowledge and competencies. (2013, p. 3) again, going beyond dalton and wolfe’s preliminary recognition of competencies, there is a need to define how cps pursue and reach these goals. first, it is to be remembered that the distinctiveness of community psychology as a discipline lies in its capacity to deal with psychological interventions in all environmental contexts, which considers not only the study of facts but also the meaning attributed to them and their significance at the individual and social levels: feelings, emotions, representations, attributions, and perceived and detected power. further knowledge is needed in designing interventions and taking action at the individual relational and community levels. cp backbone the backbone of community psychologist competencies concerns the following: 1) it involves knowledge about representations, emotions, attributions and stereotypes, symbols, and a sense of meaning. these competencies are rooted in the traditional psychological background that allows us to analyze people, places, and contexts based on the following: a) circumstances and social facts: socioenvironmental and structural data, i.e., community profiling (francescato & zani, 2013; arcidiacono et al, 2016) b) feelings and mental representations (i.e., the voice of passers-by, local people, institutional practitioners, social workers, citizens, and city users) c) identification of expectations and attributions d) representations and symbolizations (i.e., artwork, mottos, and key words) 2) it also entails emotions, relationships, representations, attributes, and management of power and its action, in both the treatment of individual cases and the management of institution-ordered interventions 3) it is specifically concerned with groups: group facilitation and inquiries through focus groups (procentese & arcidiacono, 2016) and participatory think tanks (arcidiacono et al., 2012). small-group managerial skills are therefore found among the competencies of community psychologists. they are “crucial since most of our interventions, from action research to program planning and evaluation, from consultation to empowering organizations and communities, are very often done in small groups” (francescato & zani, 2013, p. 3). psychological knowledge is thus acknowledged within the facilitation, directions, organization, and planning of group activities, and in this, psychology competencies facilitate and promote the participatory processes. furthermore, the knowledge involved in the psychological vision joins that of the construction of collective bonds and interactions. community psychologists are experts on the relationship between individuals and contexts while working as catalysts for social change (arcidiacono, 2013). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 this leads to the importance in community psychology of interventions for society, judiciary systems, and family and couple relationships. however, the question is whether only community psychologists have this competence. obviously, the answer is negative. however, i would ask, “what is the community psychologists’ unique competence?” i use the concept of uniqueness, attributing to cps the specific peculiarity of the ability to fit knowledge of the inner individual world to social issues, to connect feelings and places; emotions and organizations; and individual well-being and social settings. in fact, the psychological basic training that develops such competencies act as a tool to increase the social understanding and effectiveness of actions. therefore, it is not enough to point out that cps are trained in specific competences; they use the following: • participatory multi-faceted organizational assessment (pmoa), used to promote empowerment and organizational wellbeing. here, participatory competencies gained by the future labs approach proposed by stark (2012) are used to support workers in recognizing future aims and priorities for their organizational empowerment (francescato & zani, 2013; francescato & aber, 2015): • participatory community profiling, where contextual needs analysis is conducted with participatory procedures (francescato & zani, 2013; arcidiacono et al., 2016; arcidiacono, 2016). • participatory action research, where authors describe their specific participatory commitment (brydon-miller & maguire, 2009; bradbury, 2015; arcidiacono et al., 2015). • communities of practice (wenger, 1998), where their background in observational and relational skills makes a unique and distinctive contribution. • social change intervention and urban and environmental regeneration, where specific skills are competencies such as narrative interviews, photo-dialogues, visual tools, citizens’ exhibitions, and urban regeneration procedures. • this training is embedded in a theory and practice of social and individual interaction that makes cp professionals and researchers distinctive. values and method: the trip model in an attempt to focus the core competencies of community psychologists in a different approach related to tasks as well as methodological knowledge and values, i detected the following dimensions, trustfulness, reflexivity, intersectionality, and positionality, and (in a joint workshop with jacqui ackurst at rhodes university) named by its acronym this intertwined set of professional values and skills the trip model for community psychologists. trustfulness. the relational ethical perspective that cp pursues should lead professionals to create a setting of reciprocal trust and respect. fairness, respect, and equality are reference points (prilleltensky, 2012). these are specific features that increase professional effectiveness. it must, however, be pointed out that this is not related to a benevolent attitude but to the awareness that researchers in a trustful and participatory perspective need to have some specific skills related to interactional values. among these, it is worth noting the importance of shared discussions about goals and strategies. the following proposed strategies and interactive skills require attention: 1) restitution of results and discussion in a participatory way 2) discussion and shared building of interventions and future actions http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 3) data assessment and final participatory evaluation using qualitative and/or quantitative tools 4) development of competencies in assessment, communication, and dissemination. (arcidiacono, 2016) reflexivity. this is a central concept for postmodern science. it entails the skill to reflect on one’s own attitudes, emotions, and feelings toward a specific task, goal, context, or interrelation. it highlights the fact that subjectivity is a tool in the research process to achieve new levels of understanding, especially within a qualitative approach to research. in our experience, reflexivity is a basic requirement for group facilitation, participatory actions, and empowerment. it is also a basic skill for qualitative research in psychology (halin et al., 2008), developing interviewing competence and building competencies to conduct narrative interviews to discuss and improve the competence of researchers in using interviews (freda, gonzález-monteagudo, & esposito, 2016; arcidiacono, 2016; arcidiacono et al., 2016a; arcidiacono et al., 2016b). researchers’ self-awareness in the context of research and reflecting on positioning, including power within social/political/historical contexts, is a distinguishing competence of a cp. reyes cruz and sonn (2011) discuss it in detail using a cultural approach: as critical community psychologists, we are particularly interested in a decolonizing standpoint to culture that can disrupt essentialist understandings of cultural matters that have served historically to marginalize others. this standpoint brings into clearer view ways in which power/privilege/oppression are reproduced and contested through racialized and ethnicized practices and discourses; that is, how social inequality is maintained and challenged through culture. (p. 204) decolonizing, decolonization, and coscientization practices (burton, 2015; martin barò, 1994; reyes cruz, & sonn, 2011) have their basic support in reflective experience. there is much talk about the need for researchers to produce appropriate remarks and interactions and to write good minutes, developing the researcher's reflexivity and turning it into shared knowledge. from this perspective, i wish to focus on this issue. furthermore, reflexivity is a requirement for two additional skills: positionality and intersectionality. indeed, skills in reflexivity will develop special competencies in regard to otherness and diversity, dealing with the aptitude to reflect on how the role and function to be performed influences his/her actions and how the otherness of the other influences interrelation and social action, as the current text further examines. in fact, reflexivity is a major skill needed in dealing with differences. intersectionality is competence in conceptualizing the interrelationships of gender, class, race and ethnicity, and other social divisions. feminist and community psychologist michelle fine (2015) wrote about intersectionality as a tool that promotes “new understandings of self and others” (p. 9). in the same vein, nishida (2016) says “the concept of intersectionality is a way of understanding ‘the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations’ (mccall, 2005, p. 1711). this intersectional framework enables the acknowledgment of our multiple identities as well as the ways in which various social injustices are intertwined and interactively affect our daily lives” (p. 1). more specifically, according to okazaki and saw (2011), psychologycommunity collaborative projects in research and social action may benefit from attending http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 systematically to three broad sets of cultural ecological dimensions: race and ethnicity, culture, and immigration and transnational ties. fine and ruglis (2008) give evidence for an intersectional approach when, using mainly ethnographic material, they describe how ideologies about merit, deservingness, and blame drip feed into the souls of black students and demonstrate the deep penetration of youth dispossession through state-sanctioned policies. positionality. this dimension is concerned with how any particular person is situated in relation to an issue and is sometimes referred to as “standpoint epistemology” (kagan et al., 2011). this is not only a theoretical stance, as the development of specific competencies is required. a researcher should be concerned about the following: • how he/she writes memos and notes • how he/she carries out observational tasks (ethnographical or clinical approach) • how he/she carries out interviews and interacts with people and groups this competence is distinctively enhanced by the psychological training that has as a main goal self-questioning about feelings, thoughts, and desires concerning self and others and developing selfand social awareness as well as listening competencies. it develops observation, listening, interpreting, and decision-making competencies as core skills. the clinical and psychotherapeutic background is useful. all the aforementioned competencies enact social transformative practices to create processes of co-creation of contexts which enable the widening of frames of signification, as well as of affective, cognitive and action areas. (when we refer to ‘transformative social practices’ we mean community approach, systemic facilitation, psychotherapy etc.). taken together these practices operate on three planes of action/reflexivity: the pragmatic, the relational and the symbolic, which operate both as the context and the operational field at the same time. (fuks, 2016, p. 44) a further description of the trip model will be available in arcidiacono (2017, in preparation). cp psychologist as a “collaborative, reflective plumber” in 2012, during my undergraduate community psychology course, i held what i named a drawing-voice1 workshop, aimed at the acquisition of and reflection on the basic elements of the community psychology approach. the workshop was geared to students, with a particular focus on critical perspective, action research, and participatory action research. the workshop consisted of the following phases: a) creation of five-member groups to analyze educational content, mainly “what it means to you to be a psychologist”; b) discussion of preliminary findings in another grouping; c) drawingfocused key points; d) discussion about them in the classroom one more time; e) posting all drawings and beginning dialogues on facebook; f) discussion through reciprocal comments; and g) development of an intergroup dialogue outside the classroom through a self-run facebook group. the purpose was to deconstruct, negotiate, and reconstruct the meaning that young people today attribute to the role of the psychologist in modern society in regard to their expectations and educational path. the collective work was created by drawing 1 drawing-voice is an important supportive tool for defining conceptual dimensions through graphic representations and web sharing. it also provides the opportunity to share meanings and co-construct new viewpoints to bring about transformational and developmental practices (arcidiacono & carnevale in preparation). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 several pictures and finally reached the symbolization of the community psychologist as “a plumber” (see fig. 1). i was very surprised and inquired about the reasons for this metaphoric representation and they answered, a community psychology researcher is like a plumber. his/her competence is to observe, think, and question, sometimes facing difficult situations. the cps should be a watchful eye, always aware of contexts, emotions, and, above all, relations that are approached. (arcidiacono & carnevale, 2014) they always have a toolbox, which differs from that of a carpenter or an electrician, so it is specific. then, from a constructivist and systemic perspective, features were revealed as those of a profession capable of: 1) discovering, understanding, and then intervening and 2) conducting a needs analysis of the context, building and evaluating the best solution to propose and act upon. i would add here that he/she would be a “special plumber” because, unlike a normal plumber, the cp does not repair the broken pipe but calls in the owners and gives them the tools and the skills to repair it together. figure 1: the reflective psychologist (arcidiacono & carnevale, 2014) further specific competencies include dealing with intermediating and intermediate factors, as brett kloos and colleagues pointed out, emphasizing that special skills are needed in the intervention at the meso level (kloos et al., 2012; kloos, 2016). social workers are generally active in research and with individuals, but not especially in the interactions among groups and institutions. community psychologists are instead expert the collaborative and reflective plumber http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 in networking, building up communal knowledge, and sharing visions of different stakeholders. they are trained in relational and evaluation competencies, linking persons beyond an individual level. moreover, their actions enable better functioning of institutions to respond to the demand of the people. community psychologist as second (meta-) level expert our psychological background allows us to link different knowledge, thereby making the community psychologist a type of “secondlevel” expert. community psychologists, when constructing relations between different levels, such as in the ecologic model, actually place themselves as professionals at a meta level, which allows them to see through different levels and their reciprocal interaction. this is a competence that some may call linking science (stark, 2012), but in reality, it has its roots in the foundations of the aforementioned systemic approach. a competency unique to the community psychologist is the ability to help integrate the internal, social, relational, and cultural worlds in the strong framework of values that characterizes it. this further level of knowledge does not line up other different traditional disciplines in a row (psychology, sociology, organizational science, anthropology, art, educational science, social work, and social medicine), nor does it simply connect academics and practice or the past with the future in a prefigurative praxis (burton, 2015). rather, it refers to a systemic professional competency of a further level of meta-knowledge. we have, in fact, much more: a global multidimensional view and transdisciplinary sensitivity toward the interaction of specific knowledge, procedural methodologies, relational tools, and practical techniques, which all characterize our discipline as metaknowledge. we all eat, but we are not all theoretical or methodological experts in food science; we all talk, but we are not all scholars of language and communication, etc. it is right in their meta-dialogue competencies that community psychologists distinguish themselves from the activist or, the social worker. hence, cps are psychologists with a critical, systemic, and ecological approach to human behaviors and diseases. it is true that some of our competencies can be shared with other professionals; however, community psychologists’ action has specific hallmarks: an ecological perspective, a systemic approach to knowledge, and the ability to work and deal with both the inner world of individuals and group factors. furthermore, our competencies include the basic knowledge required to enable individual dimensions (i.e., emotion and motivation) to interact with social determinants, as well as to deal with individual and social representations, stereotypes, attribution, and prejudices. community psychologists are professionals who seek to tap into people’s minds and hearts collecting their mental representations of places and contexts in order to act together and make them arenas for justice, democracy, and togetherness. we can conclude that the major skill of community psychologists is the ability to analyze and intervene at the border between individual and social features. some of their competencies are shared with other professionals, but what makes them unique is the knowledge to deal with the mirroring of social events in individual lives and vice versa. in light of all this, the need to show our specificity as a discipline is significant and deserves all our attention. the current article sheds some light on this issue and supports community psychologists in better promoting their work and giving value to their competencies. acknowledgements i am grateful to dr. serena dinelli from the rome bateson circle for our fruitful discussions during the inception and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 throughout the writing of this article as well as to phd dr. salvatore di martino (leeds beckett university) and dr. francesca esposito (ispa, lisbon) for their precious suggestions and supporting advice. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 references arcidiacono, c., & carnevale, s. 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(1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge, uk: university press. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/donald_sch%c3%b6n https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/basic_books http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 wolfe, s.m., chien-scott, v., & jimenez, t.r. (2013). community psychology practice competencies: a global perspective. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), 1–9. retrieved from: http://www.gjcpp.org/ zani, b. (2016). iarslce (the international association for research on servicelearning and community engagement), italian network conference, università di bologna, 10 giugno, bologna. retrieved from: https://europeengage.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.psicologia.unibo.it/it/risorse/link/europe-engage the community psychologist as a reflective plumber by caterina arcidiacono university federico ii, naples, italy the community psychologist as a reflective plumber roots and paradigms interdisciplinarity and transversal knowledge methodologies and practical skills cp backbone values and method: the trip model cp psychologist as a “collaborative, reflective plumber” community psychologist as second(meta-) level expert acknowledgements references microsoft word jbarileasmith_ourtheoriesonlygoodasmethods_formattedfinal.docx our theories are only as good as our methods john p. barile and anna r. smith university of hawai‘i at mānoa keywords: theory, science, community psychology, framework author biographies: john p. barile john (jack) barile is an assistant professor at the university of hawai‘i at mānoa in the department of psychology. jack's research centers around ecological determinants of health-related quality of life. this line of research includes the study of individual level factors, such as socioeconomic status, age and ethnicity, as well as contextual factors, such as housing conditions and community violence. methodologically, jack is particularly interested in the use of multilevel structural equation modeling and quasi-experimental techniques to assess the impact of individual and community-level programs on quality of life outcomes. jack completed a two-year fellowship at the us centers for disease control and prevention after earning a doctoral degree in community psychology from georgia state university and a bachelor of science degree in health sciences from old dominion university. anna r. smith is a community and cultural psychology doctoral student at the university of hawai‘i at mānoa. her research interests include university-community partnerships, program development and evaluation, communities in disaster areas, and developing research methodologies that take an intersectional approach. recommended citation: barile, j.p. & smith, a.r. (2016). our theories are only as good as our methods. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(2), pages 1-5. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). correspondence should be addressed to john p. barile, department of psychology, university of hawai‘i at mānoa, 2530 dole street, sakamaki hall c404, honolulu, hi 96822-2294, barile@hawaii.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 our theories are only as good as our methods jason, stevens, ram, miller, beasley, and gleason (2016) argue that the vast majority of theories in community psychology are actually frameworks, while specific and testable theories remain scarce. suggesting that community psychology could benefit from such theories, the authors identify several impediments to theory development: researcher unwillingness, difficulty defining and operationalizing constructs, and difficulty capturing context. this response addresses the last challenge, highlighting the importance of using appropriate methods when developing testable theories. the difficulty is that context matters, and the vast majority of theories are conceived, tested, and “validated” within a single context – most often at the individual level. therefore, as the context changes, so must the theory and arguably, the methods. we propose that community psychology’s frameworks provide a useful starting point for theory development and increased focus on innovative methods that account for and measure context are a prerequisite to developing testable, ecologically relevant theories. community psychology has long been at the forefront of proposing comprehensive frameworks and/or theories that attempt to understand and address many types of complex social issues. what separates community psychology from other fields addressing these issues is 1) how we define the problem and 2) how we approach the problem. community psychologists tend to define the problem in a way that promotes social justice and recognizes personenvironment interaction, and approach the problem by targeting change at the appropriate level. it is our approach to capturing these phenomena that has limited our ability to develop established theories from our frameworks. many of these theories consider context and person-environment interaction, while they are measured and tested at the individual level, using individual-level methods. in other words, the field of community psychology has been successful in defining problems from an ecological perspective and directing interventions at appropriate levels but has failed to utilize methods that appropriately evaluate them. in 2005, luke illustrated the many ways in which community psychologists can and should capture context in their research. despite the publication of this now foundational paper, progress has been slow and many papers within the field continue to limit their analyses to the individual level, despite the development and availability of even more context-based approaches (e.g., multi-level latent class analysis). ultimately, community psychology’s methods still do not match its theoretical approach. this problem is not unique to community psychology. andrew hayes, a well-known methodologist within the field of communication, proposed the following explanation for the limited incorporation of multilevel approaches in research: to me, a plausible explanation is a lack of awareness of the statistical tools available rather than their lack of availability, combined with a dearth of good examples of multilevel research and analysis. although some may argue that the theoretical horse should pull the statistical cart, i argue that the horse and cart are mutually interdependent and should not be separated or ordered in terms of importance to the research enterprise. just as statistical techniques can help us to answer our theoretical questions, they can also contribute to the formulation of the substantive and theoretical questions we ponder. in other words, knowing what is possible global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 analytically can influence how we think theoretically. (hayes, 2006, p. 386) supporting this idea, anthony greenwald (2012) authored a striking paper that demonstrated a researcher is much more likely to be awarded a nobel award for contributions to method development than to a theory development. greenwald argues that both theories and methods are essential to scientific knowledge production but that methods often generate previously inconceivable data, which, in turn, can inspire previously inconceivable theories. we propose that comprehensive training in innovative methodologies tailored to the problems specific to community psychology research is critical to both the formulation and testing of comprehensive ecological theories. unfortunately, many community psychologists still are taught research methods that fall within the confines of traditional psychology, while the methods required to study community-based phenomenon are very different from traditional experiment-based psychology. if our goal is to develop ecologically valid theories, we must be able to pull from diverse sets of quantitative and qualitative methodologies that can capture this complexity. moreover, we should not try to win a game of chess with only one move. if we seek to transform our frameworks into robust theories, we must be able to leverage a wide range of tools that capture the complexities of the world in which we live. therefore diversifying the methodological portfolios of community psychologists may provide researchers the tools necessary to identify and validate theories relevant to the field. capturing context should include the use of creative quasi-experimental designs and statistical techniques that allow researchers to develop theories that match our methods. contrary to recommendations by jason et al. (2016), we caution community psychologists from relying too heavily on randomized controlled trials as a method to ensure scientific validity. when capturing context, randomized controlled trials become problematic because they attempt to control group assignment (e.g., who gets the intervention) within a very non-randomized environment. in fact, with the right methodological tools, quasi-experimental approaches can lead to more ecologically valid conclusions than experimental approaches largely because absent a randomized experiment, individuals selfselect into specific programs, relationships, and even neighborhoods. while the extent to which each of these choices are truly independent of one’s circumstances is debatable, randomized experiments are the only circumstances in which individuals’ choices are completely made for them. consider these conflicting examples of experiments on substance abuse treatment programs. both alcoholics anonymous (aa) and harm reduction approaches have been found to be effective for reducing substance abuse (moos & moos, 2006; marlatt & witkiewitz, 2002; montgomery, miller & tonigan, 1995). however, kownacki and shadish’s (1999) meta-analysis revealed that randomized trials, examining the impact of aa, found aa to be no more effective than alternative treatments, like harm reduction, and in some cases, aa appeared to lead to worse outcomes. but this finding may not suggest that aa is ineffective. instead, it is quite possible that when researchers randomized individuals to either an aa or a harm reduction approach without considering people’s inclination to choose the program that best fits their needs, neither program worked as well as if the same individuals were allowed to self-select into a program. if we were to rely solely on randomized trials to come to these conclusions, we would neglect the fact that individuals often choose the programs, settings, and even environments that best fit their needs. moreover, individuals and environments work in tandem and by global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 randomizing one or the other, we potentially ignore inevitable person-environment fit interactions that are critical to their success or failure. the consequences of limiting individuals’ ability to engage in the real-life experience of self-selection go beyond evaluating individual-level interventions (e.g., aa, harm reduction). in order for us to develop sound and ecologically valid theories, it is imperative that our studies appropriately mimic the conditions in which we live because without understanding the context, we cannot fully understand the mechanisms of change regardless if the study is a true experiment. robert sampson, a highly regarded sociologist, may have best summarized the limitations of experiments in social science research: experiments have long been cloaked in the mantle of science because of their grounding in the randomization paradigm, the putative cure for the ills of selection…as important as experiments are, however, they have tended toward individual reductionism and have obscured the causes of effects and operative social mechanism. any deep understanding of causality requires a theory of mechanisms no matter what the experiment or statistical method employed. estimation techniques, in other words, do not equal causal explanatory knowledge. (sampson, 2008, p. 227) sampson’s perspective reflects the need for innovative methodologies that result in a rich understanding of the contextual environments often disregarded in highly controlled experiments. community psychologists know that the same intervention is rarely effective in all settings, and therefore, if we want to move from conducting multiple, one-off examinations of specific interventions in specific contexts, without a generalizable theory, we will need to expand the methods that we use to capture the dynamic multi-level systems that characterize the ecological environments in which we live. we advocate increased emphasis on innovative and multi-level methods in community psychology graduate programs, conferences, and textbooks. ultimately, our theories – and practice – will only be as good as our methods. references greenwald, a. g. (2012). there is nothing so theoretical as a good method. perspectives on psychological sciences, 7, 99-108. hayes, a. f. (2006). a primer on multilevel modeling. human communication research, 32, 385-410. jason, l. a., stevens, e., ram, d., miller, s. a., beasley, c. r. & gleason, k. (2016). theories in the field of community psychology. global journal of community psychology and practice. kownacki, r. j. & shadish, w. r. (1999). does alcoholics anonymous work: results from a meta-analysis of controlled experiments. substance use & misuse, 34, 1897-1916. luke, d. a. (2005). getting the big picture in community science: methods that capture context. american journal of community psychology, 35, 185-200. marlatt, g.a. & witkiewitz, k. (2002). harm reduction approaches to alcohol use: health promotion, prevention, and treatment. addictive behaviors, 27, 867-886. moos, r.h. & moos, b.s. (2006). participation in treatment and alcoholics anonymous: a 16-year follow-up of initially untreated individuals. journal of clinical psychology, 62, 735-750. sampson, r. j. (2008). moving to inequality: neighborhood effects and experiments meet social structure. american journal of sociology, 114, 189-231. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 tonigan, j. s., toscova, r. & miller, w. r. (1995). meta-analysis of the literature on alcoholics anonymous: sample and study characteristics moderate findings. journal of studies on alcohol, 57, 65-72 microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 375 local editors profiles 376 eduardo almeida acosta obtained in 1976 a ph. d. in social psychology and personality at cornell university, ithaca, new york. he is a researcher on community psychology at the health sciences department of universidad iberoamericana puebla. he is a member of proyecto de animación y desarrollo, a. c. a ngo in san miguel tzinacapan, cuetzalan, puebla. in 1989 he founded at the northern mountains of puebla the comisión takachiualis of human rights. he has been professor of community psychology at the national autonomous university of mexico, at the autonomous university of puebla and at universidad iberoamericana puebla. he received in 2005 the national research award on psychology and also in 2005 the humanitarian international award granted by the american psychological association. he was the organizer of the third international conference on community psychology in june 2010. guillermo hinojosa rivero obtained a bs in psychology at universidad iberoamericana in mexico city. his master’s degree is in education from the university of washington (oregon). he has published 5 books in collaboration with other colleagues. he also has produced more than 20 articles on educational topics and on psychology applied to special education matters. from 1984 to 1990 he was a member of the national system of researchers (sni). at universidad iberoamericana puebla he teaches courses on statistics and methodology. he was director of research and graduate studies. from 2005 to 2009 he was the director of the department of human development sciences. he is presently professor at the continuing education office. he is in charge of the university program for elder people and of the community leaders training program. he has developed courses on computer assistance for rehabilitation of children with learning problems. he also designed electronic equipment for persons with brain palsy for using the computer even with limited and uncontrolled movements. oscar soto badillo was first trained as a medical doctor. he obtained a master´s degree on rural development at universidad autónoma metropolitana-xochimilco (mexico), and he is a doctoral candidate on “city, territory and patrimony” at universidad de valladolid in spain. from 1982 to 1996 he was a collaborator working with indigenous communities and guatemalan refugees in the south east of mexico. he has worked also with displaced people by the internal armed conflict in northern guatemala. between 1992 and 1995 he coordinated the refugees return to 377 new communities in the guatemala” departments of peten and alta verapaz. since 1996 he is a professor at universidad iberoamericana puebla. he has been director of the reflection and social promotion center (2001-2005) coordinating the university social service. presently he is professor researcher at the humanities department. he is also in charge of the alain touraine chair. he has published diverse articles in national and international journals and as book chapters. he wrote the book “anda y haz tú lo mismo” [go and do yourself the same]. he was the coordinator of the book “derechos humanos y globalización alternativa. una perspectiva latinoamericana” [human rights and alternative globalization. a latin american perspective]. gonzalo inguanzo arteaga is presently director of the department of health sciences at universidad iberoamericana puebla. he received a b.a. in psychology at the university of havana, cuba; and a m.a. in psychology at universidad del desarrollo del estado de puebla. he obtained his ph. d. in education at universidad iberoamericana puebla. he has carried out teaching activities since 1996 in different universities of cuba and mexico. he was a researcher at the national center of sciences of cuba from 1996 to 2000. in 2000 he received the national award from the academy of sciences of cuba for a study on children’s language development assessment. he has published articles in mexico, cuba and spain, particularly on topics related to children learning, validation of psychological instruments, neurologic development, and political culture of college students. maría eugenia sánchez y díaz de rivera is professor-researcher at universidad iberoamericana puebla. she obtained the doctorate in sociology at ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in paris. he was visiting professor at cornell university. she is a member of the national system of researchers, level ii. in 1973 she initiated a process of social transformation in an indigenous community in the northern mountains of the state of puebla, where she lived and worked for 15 years. she organized the alain touraine chair at universidad iberoamericana puebla in 2003. she has published several books and written articles in national and international journals. among her publications are: “interioridad y crisis del future humano” [interiority and human future crisis], “conocimiento y acción en tzinacapan” [knowledge and action at tzinacapan] in spanish and in french (2004, 2007), “ las universidades de américa latina en la construcción de una globalización alternativa” [latin american universities in 378 building an alternative globalization], “la veredas de la incertidumbre. relaciones iterculturales y supervivencia digna” (2005) [the paths of uncertainty. intercultural relations and dignified survival], “identidades, globalizacion e inequidad” (2008) [identities, globalization and inequity]. in 2006 she was awarded “la condecoration des palmes académiques” a recognition of her work by the french government. maría covadonga cuétara priede studied psychology at the autonomous university of puebla. she obtained a master’s degree on family orientation and a ph. d. in education at universidad iberoamericana puebla. her professional work has been carried out in the area of human development for more than 30 years. she has done research on specific educational problems. she belongs to different consulting councils and academic committees. she has been research professor at universidad iberoamericana puebla for the last 15 years and has worked in administrative endeavors. she has developed projects on curriculum design and on researchers training. she has organized on line courses, programs for continuing education, and teacher and research training. she has carried out training programs for in-service teachers. her main academic interest are on gender, families and life projects. presently she is in charge of psychology graduate studies and of the training of clinical psychologists. microsoft word porto3_mata_e_fernandes revisão final-formatted.docx a construção duma política pública no campo das drogas: normalização sanitária, pacificação territorial e psicologia de baixo limiar the construction of public policy in the field of drugs: health standards, territorial pacification and low-threshold psychology. simão mata luís fernandes universidade do porto autor biografias: simão mata psicólogo na norte vida – associação para a promoção da saúde. investigador externo do centro de ciências do comportamento desviante (cccd) da faculdade de psicologia e de ciências da educação da universidade do porto (fpceup). estudante de doutoramento da fpceup. luís fernandes prof. associado da faculdade de psicologia e de ciências da educação da universidade do porto (fpceup). diretor do centro de ciências do comportamento desviante (cccd) da faculdade de psicologia e de ciências da educação da universidade do porto (fpceup). citar: mata, s. fernandes, l. (2016). a construção duma política pública no campo das drogas: normalização sanitária, pacificação territorial e psicologia de baixo limiar. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(1s), 1-25. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org) global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 a construção duma política pública no campo das drogas: normalização sanitária, pacificação territorial e psicologia de baixo limiar resumo o presente artigo centra-se sobre a recente construção duma política pública em portugal no campo das drogas, cujos eixos fundamentais são a redução de riscos e minimização de danos (rrmd) e a descriminalização do consumo e da posse para consumo de todas as drogas ilícitas. daremos atenção ao primeiro dos eixos, dividindo a nossa análise em dois momentos: 1. a emergência e consolidação das medidas e estruturas de rrmd. relacionamo-las com duas crises: a crise sanitária aberta pela rápida expansão do vih, das hepatites b e c e da tuberculose em consumidores problemáticos; a crise das periferias, que trás para o debate público a figura do “bairro social problemático”, vulgarizado na linguagem mediática como “bairro das drogas” e representado como locus de insegurança. a rrmd teria assim como alvo prioritário concentrações de consumidores problemáticos situadas em comunidades urbanas ditas em exclusão, interpretando no terreno uma política alternativa ao modelo médico-psicológico da droga-doença e das terapias centradas na abstinência. estavam assim criadas as condições de possibilidade duma intervenção territorializada, proximal e de vocação comunitária. 2. num segundo momento ilustraremos a intervenção em rrmd através do trabalho levado a cabo por uma equipa de rua em territórios psicotrópicos da zona ocidental do porto. enquanto membro da equipa, um de nós elaborou um diário de campo entre 2009 e 2013, caracterizando os atores e territórios, bem como as principais áreas, formas e objetivos da intervenção. dedicaremos atenção especial ao papel do psicólogo numa equipa multidisciplinar e apresentam-se dois resultados da nossa experiência interventiva: 1) status dos atores e identidade de lugar nos territórios psicotrópicos; 2) aquilo que designaremos por psicologia de baixo limiar. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the construction of public policy in the field of drugs: health standards, territorial pacification and low-threshold psychology. abstract this paper focuses on the recent elaboration of a public policy on drugs in portugal, the main axes of which are risk and harm reduction (rhr), together with the decriminalization of use and possession for use of all illicit drugs. we will concentrate on risk and harm reduction, organizing our analysis in two stages: 1. the emergence and consolidation of rhr policies and structures. we articulate these processes with two crises: the public health crisis brought about by the rapid expansion of hiv, b and c hepatitis and tuberculosis in problematic drug users; the crisis of urban peripheries, which brings the "problematic council estate" or the "drugs estate" to the public debate, where it is portrayed as an insecure arena. rhr would thus have clusters of problematic drug users located in excluded urban areas as its main target. this is an alternative to the medical-psychological model based on understanding drug use as a disease and on abstinence-based therapies. this created the condition for a territorialized, proximal intervention of communitarian base; 2. on a second stage, we will illustrate the rhr intervention through work carried out by an outreach team in psychotropic territories in the west part of porto, portugal. as a team member, one of the authors wrote a field diary between 2009 and 2013, describing actors, territories, and the main areas, forms and objectives of intervention. we will pay particular attention to the role of the psychologist in a multidisciplinary team. two results are presented based on our intervention experience: 1) actors' status and place identity in psychotropic territories; 2) what we chose to call low-threshold psychology. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 introdução a forma como portugal tem vindo a construir uma política pública no chamado “problema da droga” desde que, em 2001, criou suporte legislativo para mudanças importantes na forma como respondia a tal problema tem sido alvo de atenção internacional. a comunicação social de vários países tem reportado aquilo que designa como “o modelo português”, e dirigentes do organismo público responsável pela implementação duma estratégia nacional no campo das substâncias psicoativas – o ex-instituto da droga e da toxicodependência, atual serviço de intervenção nos comportamentos adictivos e dependências – têm sido convidados a expor tal “modelo” em vários parlamentos nacionais e outras instâncias políticas. não é objetivo deste artigo expor o “modelo português”i ou mesmo saber se é realmente algo tão diferenciado doutras práticas que mereça tal epíteto, mas refletir sobre as condições que conduziram a mudanças importantes na gestão do “problema da droga”, nomeadamente na expressão territorial e comunitária que passou a ser parte importante desta gestão. assim, depois duma primeira parte em que analisaremos as condições de possibilidade de novas práticas interventivas em resposta a uma crise sanitária e socioterritorial, ilustraremos uma prática de redução de riscos e minimização de danos a partir do exemplo concreto duma equipa de rua que intervém em territórios psicotrópicos da zona ocidental do portoii. o nosso trabalho procurou uma caracterização do fenómeno droga em alguns bairros sociais da zona ocidental do porto: os bairros do aleixo, pinheiro torres, viso e ramalde. as nossas questões de investigação podem resumirse da seguinte forma: como se organizam atualmente as práticas de venda e consumo de drogas nesses territórios? como se operacionalizam algumas estratégias de intervenção comunitária realizadas junto de consumidores de drogas nestes locais? 1. emergência e estabilização duma política socio-sanitária: a redução de riscos e minimização de danos 1.1 a “crise das periferias” e as novas respostas de intervenção social e comunitária a evolução em direção a uma política pública no campo das drogas que tem em portugal como máximos expoentes a descriminalização do consumo de todas as substâncias psicoativas ilegais (decreto-lei 183 de 21 de junho de 2001) e os programas e estruturas de redução de riscos e minimização de danos (consagrados legalmente no mesmo decreto-lei) relaciona-se com um contexto de crise cuja expressão mostrou a necessidade urgente de mudanças. dita assim, a frase soa a refrão: a palavra “crise” tornou-se endémica e, como toda a palavra insistentemente repetida, perde precisão e, enquanto explicação dum dado estado da realidade, torna-se autoevidente e encerrada em si própria: por que estamos como estamos? por causa da crise. e por que estamos em crise? esta crise resulta do agravamento das anteriores, que resultam das anteriores – a crise seria pois um traço estrutural das sociedades capitalistasiii. assente que está a desconfiança em torno da palavra, digamos assim mesmo que é global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 uma dupla crise que nos ajuda a compreender o desenvolvimento das respostas interventivas que hoje englobamos na expressão redução de riscos e minimização de danos (rrmd). a primeira delas é sanitária e deve-se ao grande aumento de doenças infeciosas entre os consumidores de drogas, sobretudo os que utilizavam a via endovenosa (vih, hepatites, tuberculose); a segunda é conhecida dos especialistas da questão urbana e da sociologia da exclusão social como “crise das periferias”iv. por razões que não serão tratadas neste artigo, mas que investigámos ao longo das décadas de 90 e 2000 (fernandes, 1998; fernandes, 2002; fernandes & pinto, 2004; fernandes & ramos, 2010), as relações dos indivíduos com drogas ilícitas que se revelaram mais destrutivas, tanto para a sua saúde física e mental como para os contextos envolventes, aconteceram e acontecem ainda em zonas urbanas ou periurbanas de periferia desqualificada (nomeadamente os bairros sociais “problemáticos” ou “críticos”) e de espaços intersticiais de concentração de pobreza. é assim natural que a grande maioria dos projetos e programas de rrmd tenha sido implementada junto de indivíduos ou grupos em condições altamente precárias de vida. instalam-se preferencialmente junto do “suffering body of the city”, para tomar a expressão que le marcis (2004) usa a propósito das periferias de joanesburgo. analisando o crescimento exponencial do vih na população da cidade no período de 1990 a 2000, o autor fala numa distribuição urbana desigual do vírus, sendo o centro urbano claramente menos afetado relativamente às periferias. o “suffering body of the city” reveste-se dum duplo significado: por um lado, representa o caráter de distribuição desigual das doenças no espaço urbano, particularmente do vih, estando portanto as periferias em sofrimento efetivo; por outro lado, vem salientar a pouca capacidade desta população em recorrer aos serviços de saúde e à rede assistencial, estando por isso em sofrimento resultante dessa limitação. rubens adorno (2011) e taniele rui (2012) chegam a resultados muito semelhantes quanto a utilizadores de drogas da zona conhecida por cracolândia em são paulo, propondo a autora a expressão “corpos abjetos” para indicar o modo como os dependentes de crack mais estigmatizados carregam na sua aparência corporal a marca da adicção, das doenças infeciosas e da vida de rua e o modo como essa corporalidade “abjeta” é o elemento mais forte da estigmatização de que são vítimas. escrevíamos também nós a propósito do porto que “o fenómeno droga participa desse cenário de crise urbana, cruzando e sobrepondo na sua trajetória as trajetórias dos outros fenómenos problemáticos: sem-abrigo, prostituição de rua, imigração clandestina. este cenário de crise da urbe convocou a resposta rápida da intervenção social, que reagiu reativando a sua vocação de terreno, exercida agora sobre situações de emergência social caracterizadas pelo desabrigo” (fernandes, pinto & oliveira, 2006, p. 80) um dos temas mediáticos – mas também sociológicos e criminológicos – acerca das metrópoles é o da rua como palco da proliferação de novas marginalidades (errância associada à cada vez maior presença de migrantes clandestinos, de pessoas sem domicílio fixo, de pessoas a global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 viver na rua) e desvios (grupalidades juvenis desviantes, toxicodependentes de rua, com associação a pequena criminalidade e ao crescimento do sentimento de insegurança). perante a pouca eficácia das respostas institucionais convencionais confrontadas com estes novos fenómenos, a rua começa também, sobretudo a partir dos anos 90, a ser olhada como palco de intervenção aquilo a que genericamente tem vindo a chamar-se intervenção social de primeira linha ou intervenção de proximidade, de que são exemplo as equipas de rua a atuar junto de trabalhadores e trabalhadoras sexuais e/ou de toxicodependentes, os centros de abrigo/de acolhimento e os drop ins de baixo limiar de exigência. ao longo da última década do século xx vimos assim surgir em portugal, sobretudo nas suas duas metrópoles, agências de desenvolvimento local vocacionadas para respostas a variadas situações de risco social e psicológico. impulsionadas por medidas da europa comunitária que viabilizavam financeiramente a instalação de estruturas e a formação de equipas multidisciplinares, fizeram convergir nas suas intervenções as práticas do serviço social, da psicologia comunitária e da saúde pública. é também nestas agências de desenvolvimento local que surgirão os primeiros projetos de rrmd, ainda antes da existência de enquadramento legal que salvaguardasse medidas socio-sanitárias na altura tão polémicas como a troca de seringas, prática interventiva que desenvolveremos amplamente na segunda parte deste artigo. 1.2. rrmd e perturbação da estabilidade normativa a emergência da rrmd ao longo dos anos 90 pôs em causa a estabilidade normativa do dispositivo de “combate à droga”. tal estabilidade assentava nas ordens terapêutica e jurídica, laboriosamente construídas ao longo de todo o século xx (agra, 2009; romani, 1999; escohotado, 1989), e a ascensão das políticas de rrmd vem introduzir desordem neste status quo, que era marcado pela inoperância: consumos a aumentar, recaídas sucessivas nos programas terapêuticos, consumidores problemáticos longe das estruturas que lhes eram destinadas, aumento do controle policial e da população carcerária sem nenhum reflexo visível na redução da oferta e da procura, bem demonstrado pelo crescimento constante dos consumidores e dos mercados psicotrópicos. a troca de seringas é bem o símbolo da colocação em causa duma ordem terapêutica, em que os programas livres de drogas acreditavam que as psicoterapias convencionais podiam resgatar o toxicodependente à sua doença e conduzi-lo à cura, sem nunca porem em causa a sua ineficácia, sem nunca refletirem sobre o seu fracasso, que não se media apenas pelas recaídas mas pela quantidade de indivíduos que não acediam a estas estruturas. a perturbação da estabilidade dava-se, desde logo, ao nível da linguagem: tolerar em vez de perseguir, descriminalizar em vez de punir, olhar o utilizador como responsável por si e pelos seus atos em vez de o remeter para a posição passiva do doente à mercê da sua patologia, falar em “utilizador” em vez de “toxicodependente”. e progressivamente afirmava-se no terreno da política da global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 existência: o direito ao consumo em vez da obrigatoriedade da abstinência, o direito à participação nas decisões que implicassem a vida dos utilizadores, a argumentação que mostrava como uma boa parte dos riscos para o indivíduo e para a sociedade imputados ao consumo de drogas resultavam das próprias políticas proibicionistas (karan, 2005; labrousse, 2004; szazs, 1992). no final da década de 90 iniciavam-se os primeiros programas de substituição opiácea em meio prisional (barros, lucas & santos, 2010). e a metadona nas prisões foi bem o símbolo da colocação em causa duma ordem jurídico-penal que, desde o início dos anos 80, traduzia para o nosso ordenamento jurídico e para as nossas práticas policiais e carcerárias a war on drugsv. no início do milénio, tal como já referimos atrás, foram consagradas juridicamente as principais medidas de rrmd, criadas as comissões de dissuasão da toxicodependência e descriminalizado o consumo, originando uma grande curiosidade da comunidade internacional em relação ao que começou a ser conhecido como “o modelo português” (domostawski, 2011; greenwald, 2009). em síntese, a progressiva afirmação das políticas de rrmd teve um importante contributo para a reorganização do dispositivo da droga. para além da sua expansão de modo a assegurar a cobertura de todo o território nacional, este passou a incluir nas suas áreas de missão e nos seus planos de ação a rrmd, reconhecendo a insuficiência das respostas repressiva e de tratamento concebida unicamente no modelo medicopsicológico. mas sobretudo criou espaço para a intervenção de proximidade, para a ligação das práticas interventivas ao território, para a leitura contextual e comunitária dum problema que até aí era visto como resultando essencialmente do poder do químico sobre o indivíduo e das características intrapsíquicas deste. mas é preciso reconhecer que, em portugal, esta nova política de saúde, social e de afirmação dos direitos dos utilizadores surge praticamente só a partir do interior do dispositivo de intervenção, não tendo como protagonistas os próprios utilizadores de drogas, como aconteceu na holanda ou na espanha. de resto, não existia ainda nenhuma associação de utilizadores constituída em portugal que pudesse ter desempenhado esse papel.vi dito doutra maneira, a alavanca inicial não foi a proatividade os utilizadores a quererem tomar conta do seu próprio destino, a assunção sociopolítica das opções pessoais, do direito à gestão do corpo e do prazer mas a resposta à crise: da ineficácia do modelo da abstinência assente nas terapias livres de drogas, da prisão como estratégia de “combate à droga”, da periferia urbana degradada, do aumento do vih/sida, da hepatite c e da tuberculose. a rrmd não está isenta de ambiguidades e contradições: é de facto um novo modo de olhar os indivíduos que consomem drogas e uma nova maneira de lidar com a complexidade das adicções, ou é uma forma de controle de grupos e territórios vistos como problemáticos, uma espécie de pacificador territorial que desvitaliza o poder de denúncia que eles poderiam ter sobre a pobreza e a exclusão (ilundain, 2004)? trata-se duma gestão do conflito social que não visa em primeira instância melhorar a situação dos afetados mas conter a sua expressão na urbe mantendo-os num baixo potencial de global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 conflitualidade (romani, terrile & zino, 2003)? tissot e poupoeau (2005) alertam para o risco de a intervenção de proximidade constituir uma panaceia que apaga as desigualdades estruturais no território. puzzetti e brazzabeni (2011) são ainda mais contundentes e falam na psicologização do social, da assistência das populações de segmentos marginalizados com a retórica em torno do “apoio” e do “empoderamento” – porque a compaixão não tem inimigos... (inspiram-se na expressão “ethos de compaixão” de didier fassin para caracterizar certo tipo de intervenções sociais e comunitárias). 2. o consultório de rua e a psicologia de baixo limiar 2.1 breves notas metodológicas ilustraremos, nesta segunda parte do nosso exercício, o trabalho de rrmd levado a cabo por uma equipa de rua que faz intervenção em alguns territórios psicotrópicos da zona ocidental do porto: bairro do aleixo, pinheiro torres, viso e ramalde. esta equipa é constituída por uma assistente social (também coordenadora técnica da equipa), um educador de pares, um técnico psicossocial, dois enfermeiros e, depois da nossa saída em dezembro de 2013, por uma psicólogavii.a figura do educador de pares representa uma novidade trazida pela rrmd para o campo da intervenção nas drogas, pelo que convém esclarecer o seu papel. de acordo com broadhead, heckathorn, weakliem, anthony, madray, mills e hughes (1998, p. 43) um educador de pares no contexto da rrmd pode ser definido como: “a small number of community members, usually ex-drug users or injectors or people with street credentials, are hired to contact and work with drug-using members of their own community as clients”. quanto ao técnico psicossocial, é um professional com formação não universitária e que tem funções de coadjuvação dos outros profissionais. o principal objetivo desta equipa é o de atenuar ou reduzir os riscos e danos que resultam do consumo de drogas por parte dos utilizadores que recorrem a esses territórios psicotrópicos quer para comprar quer para consumir as substâncias psicoativas. essa intervenção tem como grande foco os utilizadores de heroína e de cocaína, uma vez que estas duas drogas possuem um maior protagonismo nos territórios considerados, sejam nas práticas que se relacionam com a sua venda sejam nas práticas que se relacionam com o seu consumo. um de nós, enquanto membro dessa equipa, realizou, entre outubro de 2009 e dezembro de 2013, um diário de campo que funcionou como uma âncora técnica e reflexiva para a intervençãoviii. os dados foram recolhidos através de técnicas de observação direta, quer na modalidade mais participada quer na mais distanciada, dos atores com que íamos contactando no decurso do nosso trabalho de redutores de danos. estivemos no terreno, para além do papel de interventores, inspirados por uma postura etnográfica no modo como olhávamos e fixávamos no diário de campo o contexto de que eramos também elemento ativo. temos verificado essa postura etnográfica noutros trabalhos que caracterizaram a expressão urbana e os atores sociais do fenómeno droga a partir destes dispositivos móveis (e.g. rui, 2012; global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 gomes & adorno, 2011; raupp & adorno, 2010; oliveira, 2009). os registos de terreno foram recolhidos durante o giro da equipa de rua pelos territórios e, posteriormente, organizados e inseridos no nosso diário de campo. numa fase posterior, quando o diário era já uma longa narrativa (não falamos no seu fim, pois é um instrumento em aberto, voltando-se a ele sempre que surja oportunidade de regressar ao terreno), procedemos à identificação dos principais conteúdos que emergiam da sua leitura sistemática. constituímos assim temas estruturantes da narrativa e sobre cada um deles produzimos uma síntese. dito doutro modo, se o texto do diário constituía uma escrita de primeira ordem, a produção dum texto-síntese a partir dos temas estruturantes constituía um texto de segunda ordem – o equivalente no método etnográfico aos resultados nas investigações mais estandardizadas. é justamente com alguns destes “resultados” que elaboraremos as próximas secções. 2.2 consultório de rua nos territórios psicotrópicos: o caso do rotas com vida a análise do nosso diário de campo bem como a nossa própria experiência interventiva na equipa de rua permitenos constatar que a intervenção realizada se organiza em dois grandes eixos. por um lado, realiza-se uma intervenção direta com os atores sociais ao nível dos territórios referidos e, por outro lado, um trabalho de acompanhamento de alguns utilizadores às diferentes estruturas da comunidade com quem a equipa de rua tem estabelecidos protolocos: hospitais (em particular o hospital santo antónio e hospital joaquim urbano), equipas de tratamento para as toxicodependências, laboratórios de análises clínicas, centros de saúde, loja do cidadão e centro de diagnóstico pneumonológico do porto (cdp – porto). estes dois eixos interventivos apresentam-se como complementares durante o trabalho da equipa de rua pois constata-se que os acompanhamentos realizados às diferentes estruturas da comunidade têm como base uma constante monitorização e avaliação das necessidades dos atores com que contactamos durante o trabalho de proximidade ao nível dos territórios. para este trabalho procura-se o envolvimento ativo dos utilizadores de drogas no desenho e na intervenção. a realização de focus groups com alguns atores da comunidade permitiu que os mesmos se pronunciassem acerca da intervenção que estava a ser realizada, contribuindo simultaneamente para a sua emancipação e optimização das estratégias interventivas. por outro lado, a permanência diária dos técnicos nos territórios onde os utilizadores protagonizam ação coloca-os no estatuto de atores sociais e não no de “doentes”, “pacientes”, ou “toxicodependentes”. a não exigência da abstinência de drogas como critério terapêutico inicial funcionou também enquanto estratégia de empoderamento levada a cabo pela equipa, devolvendo ao sujeito a responsabilidade pelo seu regime de utilização de drogas. esta postura interventiva assente no empoderamento dos consumidores de drogas com quem trabalhamos situa-nos ao nível de um dos princípios orientadores da rrmd enquanto prática de intervenção comunitária. segundo southwell (2010, p. 103): “people who use drugs need to become routine partners in harm reduction, supporting the identification, global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 development and promotion of harm reduction strategies”. na mesma senda, jorge e corradi-webster (2012, p. 41) referem a propósito da prática interventiva destes dispositivos móveis: “a prática no espaço da rua deve incorporar o saber, a experiência e a cultura das pessoas que o constituem e deve ser construída a partir de uma relação interpessoal baseada no vínculo, no acolhimento e na escuta qualificada”. ainda a este propósito, no documento de apoio ao plano operacional de respostas integradasix pode ler-se: “a adopção do princípio do empowerment, no contexto da luta contra a droga e toxicodependência, pode significar uma mudança de atitude face ao conhecimento, experiência, necessidades, aspirações e perspectivas dos “beneficiários” da acção, no plano individual (cidadão), no plano colectivo (agentes promotores de projectos), e no plano comunitário” (pori, 2008, p. 22). o modelo de intervenção diversificado e territorial no fenómeno droga tem assumido, no contexto brasileiro, a expressão “consultórios de rua”, sendo dispositivos de saúde pública que trabalham em territórios de comércio e uso de droga (e.g. jorge & corradiwebster, 2012; andrade, 2011; raupp & adorno, 2010; oliveira, 2009; lancetti, 2008; nery-filho, 1993). num primeiro momento usamos a expressão psicologia de rua no nosso diário de campo (por contraste com a psicologia de gabinete típica das intervenções clássicas), mas adotaremos agora a expressão consultório de rua. esses dispositivos de assistência têm como base a reforma psiquiátrica brasileira que emergiu nos anos 70 do século xx consolidando-se como política de saúde neste país nas décadas seguintes (pitta, 2011). de acordo com a autora: “já no final dos anos 70, o movimento pelas reformas na assistência em saúde mental caminhou junto aos movimentos sociais de usuários e familiares”. no mesmo sentido, ferreira (2004) refere que a 8ª conferência nacional de saúde, realizada em 1986, vem afirmar as bases da reforma sanitária brasileira que assentam em pilares como a universalidade, a abrangência e a democratização do setor, procurando reagir às políticas assistenciais de referência asilar. vejamos, já de seguida, como se organiza a intervenção da equipa de rrmd do rotas com vida com os utilizadores de drogas ao nível dos territórios que temos vindo a focar (2.3.). posteriormente analisaremos com maior detalhe os acompanhamentos de alguns desses utilizadores às diferentes estruturas existentes na comunidade (2.4.). 2.3. trabalho de rua nos territórios psicotrópicos parámos a carrinha no pt [bairro pinheiro torres] e a realidade apresenta-se-nos cada vez com maior regularidade: os mesmos atores nos mesmos territórios. uns vêm à carrinha pedir máquinasx, outros trocam as suas usadas e levam novas, outros pedem uma emprestada porque se esqueceram da sua. durante o trabalho, a conversa entre os utilizadores de drogas permanecem espontâneas. nem mesmo o facto de estarmos ali os condiciona. falam sobre a qualidade das bases e dos pacotesxi e sobre quem estava a vender melhor produtoxii hoje… (excerto de diário de campo, dia 16 de março de 2011) global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 nos baldios do aleixo temo-nos apercebido de algumas situações que na carrinha não conseguimos identificar. hoje verificamos que vários utentes tiveram dificuldades em colocar o caldoxiii na máquina visto que a “branca estava muito suja”. o dm pediu-nos mesmo uma máquina de propósito para passar o produto de uma máquina para outra limpa. o objetivo era fazer com que desaparecesse o pedaço de produto que não foi possível dissolver durante a preparação do caldo. (excerto de diário de campo, dia 10 de março de 2011) os excertos acima permitem-nos exemplificar o trabalho de redução de danos que é realizado. segundo lancetti (2008) trata-se de uma resposta interventiva territorializada focando-se num conjunto de consumidores de drogas que aprofundaram e intensificaram a sua trajetória de rua, apresentando um quadro de acentuada vulnerabilidade psicossocial e que não procuram os serviços de ajuda de forma autónoma. para atingir esse objetivo, o autor fala de uma territorialização da clínica sendo que essa territorialização deve passar pela sua desterriorialização, isto é, a desvinculação dos espaços onde normalmente ela se exerce (o gabinete, o hospital, o consultório). segundo o autor: “a consulta psiquiátrica, a entrevista psicológica e a visita domiciliar, os grupos terapêuticos e as oficinas de arte e de produção são recursos pobres para o atendimento de pessoas que não demandam, que não possuem cultura psi ou que se violentam de diversas formas” (lancetti, 2008, p.51). no caso do primeiro excerto, apontamos para a “regularidade da realidade” com que nos fomos confrontando no decurso do nosso trabalho de rua: “os mesmos atores nos mesmos territórios”. essa regularidade pode também ser tida em conta quando nos referimos à nossa intervenção. assim, esse trabalho inscreve-se num conjunto de práticas interventivas características da rrmd das quais destacamos a troca e distribuição de material de consumo esterilizado aos utilizadores de drogas (sejam folhas de papel de estanho para o consumo fumado ou kitsxiv de consumo para os utilizadores que fazem administração endovenosa de drogas), a sensibilização para práticas menos prejudiciais associadas ao consumo de drogas (seja ao nível da alteração da via de consumo, seja através da diminuição da dosagem administrada), bem como a promoção da adesão a programas de substituição opiácea. estas diferentes respostas fornecidas ocorrem em simultâneo e durante o período definido pela equipa para estar em determinado território, sendo providenciadas à medida que os utentes se vão aproximando da unidade móvel e vão abordando os técnicos da equipa. vejamos um excerto do nosso diário de campo que dá conta da pluralidade de respostas prestadas por parte da equipa de rua: hoje continuamos com o nosso trabalho de redução de danos nos bairros da zona ocidental do porto. no aleixo, tudo circula com a mesma regularidade. os atores aparecem na carrinha, uns trocando máquinas para o consumo injetado, outros pedindo prata para o consumo fumado, global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 outros preservativos e outros aparecem apenas para falar um pouco. (excerto de diário de campo, dia 9 de agosto de 2011) uma outra componente do trabalho de rua com utilizadores de drogas diz respeito à sensibilização para a realização de rastreios à tuberculose e ao vih, sendo uma das prioridades da intervenção da equipa. aquilo que parece ser um simples ato epidemiológico converte-se com frequência em oportunidade de intervenção psicológica: a dada altura do trabalho de rua chega a pc à carrinha, uma vez que tinha agendado um klothoxv para hoje. (…) a enfermeira explicava à pc que ia retirar uma gota de sangue do indicador, (…) dizendolhe que entre a retirada da gota de sangue e o resultado teria que esperar cerca de 20 minutos. perguntamos se conhecia os modos de transmissão do vih e ela disse: “sei que têm a ver com seringas”. conversamos sobre se teve relações sexuais desprotegidas e a resposta foi negativa. falamos sobre os consumos de drogas. disse-nos que “nunca picouxvi”. passados os 20 minutos a enfermeira referiu não existir nenhuma reação, o resultado foi negativo. (excerto de diário de campo, dia 23 de março de 2010) aquilo que parecia ser um tempo de espera morto é a oportunidade para uma intervenção psicológica, nomeadamente para poder trabalhar a adesão às terapêuticas tuberculostáticas ou para o vih, dada a grande dificuldade que estes utentes revelam na continuidade da terapêutica. até agora temos vindo a focar uma forma de trabalho de rua que se fixa nas imediações da unidade móvel ou no seu interior. no entanto, o trabalho nesses territórios não se esgota ou limita às imediações ou ao interior da equipa de rua. tal como refere o segundo excerto que abre esta secção, ao longo do nosso trabalho fomos constatando a necessidade de tornar a intervenção desenvolvida mais diversificada e abrangente. assim, desenvolvemos um conjunto de estratégias de rrmd que visavam a educação para práticas de consumo de drogas efetuados diretamente nos locais onde ocorrem estes consumos. vejamos de seguida excertos do nosso diário de campo que dão conta da intervenção que realizamos nestes locais: o ea acabou de consumir e chamou por nós. pediu-nos para chegar o balde (contentor para a troca de seringas) para perto dele porque tem bastantes hematomas nas pernas. diz-nos que tem dificuldade em mexer-se. deslocamo-nos com o balde para ele trocar as máquinas utilizadas e íamos conversando sobre as suas práticas de consumo. dissemos-lhe para desinfectar antes e depois do chutoxvii porque isso conduz a uma desinfecção nas zonas de injecção. aconselhávamos a evitar o consumo nas pernas, procurando outras zonas para administrar a substância. diz-nos, contudo, que é difícil, porque já não tem veias acessíveis (…) (excerto de diário global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 de campo, dia 25 de março de 2011) hoje deslocamo-nos novamente aos baldios do aleixo. quando lá chegamos, tivemos um primeiro pedido. o ld (…) falou-nos sobre a possibilidade de entrar em programa de metadona na carrinha do rotas com vida. conversamos com ele sobre isso. entretanto, o dm acabou por lhe desenrascar uma dose de branca e póxviii e ele preparava o caldo com ele. o seu medo era o de conseguir injetar à primeira. mas conseguiu. (excerto de diário de campo, dia 31 de março de 2011) começamos a frequentar estes locais após algum tempo de realizarmos trabalho de rua nas imediações da carrinha, indo um elemento da equipa (sempre acompanhado pelo educador de pares) para esses espaços enquanto que os outros elementos ficavam na unidade móvel a realizar o restante trabalho de rua. o trabalho do educador de paresxix facilitou o acesso da intervenção realizada pela equipa aos territórios psicotrópicos considerados, permitindo e facilitando os seus processos de empoderamento e de advocacy. a sua experiência adquirida nas múltiplas vivências como utilizador de drogas funcionou várias vezes como elemento formador de outros elementos da equipa técnica. foi-nos possível observar, nos contextos de consumo acima referidos, um conjunto de práticas de consumo de drogas que se revelam de elevado risco para a saúde do consumidor. dessas práticas destacamos a não utilização de “garrote” para a dilatação das veias de modo a evitar inflamações/hematomas localizadas no consumo endovenoso, a injeção de drogas nas extremidades do corpo (nomeadamente nas mãos e nos pés) comportando riscos na formação de necrose tecidular nessas zonas e podendo levar, nos casos mais extremos, à amputação da zona referida. no caso do consumo fumado, destaca-se a partilha de canecosxx entre outras práticas de consumo de risco para os consumidores. importa ainda referir que apesar de constatarmos a presença desses comportamentos de risco, pudemos também observar, por parte de alguns atores, comportamentos que evidenciam uma capacidade de gestão quer dos consumos (nomeadamente ao nível da quantidade de substância administrada e ao nível da forma de consumo) quer de gestão da própria abstinência. exemplificamos o que referimos com um excerto do nosso diário de campo: o mlf disse-nos nos baldios: “a razão de ser da minha toxicodependência é o primeiro caldo.” (…) disse-nos depois que quando está a ressacar pode ter pastilhas de metadona no bolso mas prefere aguentar a ressaca para depois obter maior prazer quando chutar heroína (excerto de diário de campo, dia 15 de março de 2011) o que o excerto acima nos mostra é que o indivíduo é ativo e constrói ativamente significados em torno do seu comportamento de consumo. como salienta southweel (2010, p. 101): “as such, people who use drugs can be defined as calculated risk takers. this challenges the orthodox addiction global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 archetypes that describe people who use drugs as victims either of substances with some type of pseudo-magical quality or of the ‘evil drug dealers’ who peddle these drugs (booth, 1997)”. a regularidade com que observamos estes comportamentos de autogestão da conduta adictiva nos utilizadores afasta-nos da ideia de que todo o utilizador é uma mera “vítima da substância”, ou vítima do “diabo do vendedor” de droga como refere a citação atrás. pelo contrário, ele apresenta-se como alguém que procura a maximização do efeito prazeroso da substância ainda que, por vezes, apresente, tal como referimos acima, comportamentos de risco de modo a atingir esse fim. assim, o objetivo da intervenção não se situa ao nível da abstinência de drogas mas antes na gestão do risco de consumo de substâncias de modo a diminuir as consequências negativas que resultam de algumas administrações de elevado risco para a saúde do consumidor. voltaremos a focar estes locais de uso de drogas na secção 2.5 deste trabalho uma vez que eles se mostraram como plataformas espaciais de elevada significação psicológica para alguns utilizadores. 2.4. acompanhamentos às estruturas da comunidade hoje deslocamo-nos ao bairro do aleixo com o objetivo de fazer o acompanhamento de dois utentes ao cri ocidental que tinham marcado previamente connosco essa deslocação. ao estacionar a carrinha na rua al no aleixo apareceu apenas o jp. o outro utente, o ja, não compareceu. esperamos um pouco para ver se ele entretanto chegava. não chegou. foi então que seguimos para o cri ocidental com o jp. (excerto de diário de campo, dia 20 de outubro de 2009) além do trabalho de proximidade que acabamos de exemplificar na secção anterior, a equipa realiza uma variedade de acompanhamentos de alguns utentes a diferentes estruturas da comunidade. a este propósito, domanico e malta (2012) referem a importância destas estruturas sóciosanitárias na progressiva aproximação dos consumidores de drogas à rede de cuidados, principalmente nos utilizadores com um acentuado afastamento em relação a ela ou que estabelecem com ela uma relação tangencial, apresentando dificuldades no acesso autónomo aos serviços de assistência e tratamento. os encaminhamentos realizados pela equipa de rua são possíveis devido à atuação concertada e integrada das respostas interventivas permitindo o funcionamento em rede com outras instituições e contribuindo para a criação de um diálogo comunitário constante entre as diferentes estruturas. esse trabalho em rede, funcionando numa lógica de aproveitamento das sinergias das diferentes instituições existentes, permite estar em congruência com o plano operacional de respostas integradas que defende justamente como um dos pilares interventivos a criação de parcerias entre as diferentes respostas. “a intervenção em rede traduz-se na activação e construção de parcerias para a intervenção, ou seja, acções conjuntas definidas e operacionalizadas por vários actores (individuais e colectivos) que têm um objectivo comum e que para a sua concretização partilham e disponibilizam global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 vários recursos (conhecimento, oportunidade, logísticos, financeiros, humanos, etc.)” (pori, 2008, p. 15). no mesmo sentido, ornelas (2004, p. 298) refere que: “community level interventions involve strategies for the promotion of individual change and a policy strategy aimed at creating change in environmental conditions. community iniciatives use mechanisms to bring about multi-component changes (ob. cit florin, 2002).” quando nos focamos nos acompanhamentos realizados às estruturas de tratamento para a toxicodependência verificamos que esse trabalho pode cumprir uma diversidade de objetivos. assim, podem ir desde consultas médicas e da restante equipa técnica para o acolhimento inicial do utente com a finalidade de iniciar terapêutica de metadona na nossa equipa, consultas médicas apenas para a revisão da dosagem de metadona em utentes que já se encontram a realizar essa terapêutica na equipa de rua em regime de baixo limiar, até consultas de psicologia e de serviço social num setting interventivo que não o setting de rua. analisaremos abaixo duas passagens do nosso diário de campo que ilustra o que acabamos de referir: na consulta de psiquiatria do cri ocidental, o psiquiatra conversava com o jp sobre a possibilidade dele vir a aumentar os consumos de cocaína mesmo tomando a metadona uma vez que esta apenas corta o efeito da heroína e não da cocaína. o médico prescreve-lhe dose inicial de 30 mg/dia, (…) aumentando diariamente numa proporção de 10 mg até às 70 mg. a toma das doses será diária e na equipa de rua do rotas com vida. (excerto de diário de campo, dia 20 de outubro de 2009) estamos no pt, cumprindo o horário neste território (10h3511h35). chega à carrinha o rf para tomar a dose de metadona, uma vez que é nosso utente deste serviço. diz-nos que quer que marquemos uma consulta para ele no catxxi, que quer ir para lá tomar a metadona. diz que lá lhe dão a metadona em pastilhas e aqui nas equipas de rua não. expliquei ao utente qual a diferença entre estar num programa de metadona num cat e numa equipa de rua, nomeadamente no que isso representa ao nível do controlo dos consumos de drogas. diz que se encontra abstinente e mesmo que não estivesse que esteve anteriormente no cat da feira e trocava as urinas só para não o chatearem (excerto de diário de campo, dia 08 de agosto de 2013) os excertos mostram as várias possibilidades que se colocam nos acompanhamentos: tanto se realizam em direção à estrutura de tratamento com o objetivo de que o utente seja aí acolhido e venha depois realizar as tomas diárias na equipa de rua (caso do primeiro excerto) como também se procede ao acompanhamento dos utilizadores a estas estruturas com a finalidade de que estes fiquem lá integrados em programas de tratamento. em ambas as situações conseguimos perceber que a equipa desempenha uma função de mediação entre estas estruturas e os utilizadores de global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 drogas. essa mediação revelou-se particularmente importante nos sujeitos que permanecem com um maior afastamento da rede de apoio. escrevíamos a dado momento no diário de campo que os acompanhamentos às estruturas existentes na comunidade procuram colmatar o hiato existente entre a população-alvo e essas respostas. os acompanhamentos dos utilizadores às estruturas implicavam momentos de espera até ao atendimento. a sala de espera constituía-se como um setting que possibilitava o começo da escuta terapêutica. vejamos o seguinte excerto do diário que dá conta disso mesmo: chegamos ao cdp na rua da constituição e o pv continuava impaciente. vi que o ns, outro utilizador de drogas que foi connosco, permanecia muito calmo, sentado numa cadeira da sala de espera do cdp, afastado de nós e com um livro de sudoku. sentei-me ao lado dele. pergunteilhe se ele gosta de sudoku e ele disse-me que sim, que enquanto joga é da forma que mantêm a cabeça ocupada e que isso lhe permite não andar a pensar em coisas que não deve, nos problemas dele. falou-me de alguns dados da sua história de vida. referiu-me que tem 24 anos, faz anos no próximo domingo (dia 21/02). é natural da ilha terceira dos açores. perguntei-lhe se tinha família cá e ele disse-me que sim, que parte da família está em vila nova de gaia (da parte do pai), e que outra parte da família (da parte da mãe) está nos açores. “eu fiz muita coisa torta doutor, tive oportunidades e deixei-as escapar” disse-me ele. (excerto de diário de campo, dia 19 de fevereiro de 2010) a esta escuta exercida no espaço da sala de espera chamamos, a dado momento do nosso diário de campo, como a psicologia de sala de espera. juntamente com a psicologia de baixo limiar de que falaremos adiante, constitui-se como um dos dois elementos-chave daquilo que designamos num primeiro momento como psicologia de rua – consultório de rua a partir de agora, adotando a expressão que tem vindo a ser proposta no brasil. todo o trabalho de proximidade que procuramos descrever sumariamente atrás apresenta um forte potencial para a construção de conhecimento no âmbito do fenómeno droga. o contacto direto com os utilizadores de substâncias psicoativas permite o acesso a zonas da cidade que têm permanecido esquecidas e alvo de diferentes processos de estigmatização. isto permitiu o acesso a níveis de expressão do fenómeno droga que permaneciam até aí desconhecidos ou mal caracterizados. procuraremos evidenciar isso mesmo na secção seguinte. 2.5 status dos atores e identidade de lugar nos territórios psicotrópicos verificámos a existência de três tipos de consumidores de droga que recorrem aos territórios psicotrópicos: os esporádicos aqueles que recorrem ao território psicotrópico espaçadamente. são também aqueles que fazem um consumo recreativo de drogas, os “consumidores de fim-de-semana”, como a eles mesmos se designam; os regulares aqueles que apesar de se deslocarem diariamente ao território psicotrópico não permanecem global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 nele ao longo do dia. muitas vezes a sua deslocação resume-se a ir “comprar produto”xxii. algumas vezes são indivíduos que trabalham, tendo de deslocar-se aos locais de compra nas alturas do início ou no final do trabalho, ou então na hora de almoço; os permanentes aqueles que estão mais tempo no território. é nestes atores que se verifica um enraizamento profundo ao lugar, sendo nele que o ator encontra as condições para experimentar uma determinada posição existencial. foquemo-nos agora nos atores que tipificamos como permanentes. é com eles que o vínculo com a equipa de rua se intensifica e desenvolve. para se adaptarem à expressão de rua do fenómeno droga, vão-se envolvendo numa série de atividades informais que aí existem. passamos a exemplificar com três tipos de atividades desenvolvidas pelos atores permanentes: os “capeadores” são os intermediários entre o vendedor e o consumidor. trabalham para um “patrão”, com um determinado horário que é cumprido de modo rigoroso. apregoam no bairro o nome do patrão para que os clientes se desloquem a ele e lhe comprem produto; o “vigia” é responsável pelo controlo das entradas e saídas do bairro, sinalizando com o grito “água” sempre que avista alguém que supõem poder por em perigo a atividade em curso, nomeadamente a polícia; os “enfermeiros” são indivíduos com um razoável domínio da técnica de injeção. devido a isso são solicitados para injetarem os que sentem dificuldade em o fazer. o pagamento pode ser feito em bases de cocaína, em pacotes de heroína ou em troca de material de consumo, o que também acontece com capeadores e vigias.xxiii acabamos de apresentar três atividades realizadas pelos atores que fazem desses territórios o seu quotidiano (os capeadores, os vigias, os enfermeiros). o desempenho das mesmas traduz-se num determinado status por parte desses atores. este desempenho assume um caráter rigoroso e é cumprido de forma zelosa por quem o executa. uma passagem do nosso diário de campo no bairro do aleixo dá conta do que acabamos de dizer através do comportamento do vigia do bairro: o dm vem trocar máquinas (seringas) à carrinha. está agitado. vejo que está sempre a olhar para a parte de cima do bairro, para controlar. como lhe é difícil trocar máquinas e vigiar, pega no balde de troca de seringas e puxa-o mais para cima do passeio. desloco-me com ele. coloca as máquinas enquanto eu as conto e ele vigia. retoma depois o “posto”. (excerto de diário de campo, dia 03 de outubro de 2013) em que é que este conhecimento dos territórios e dos atores é importante para a intervenção? o trabalho de rua da equipa, ao confrontar-se com essas dinâmicas dos atores sociais, inscreve no seu trabalho essas mesmas dinâmicas, tornando-as também como âmbito da intervenção. exemplificamos essa situação com uma passagem do nosso diário de campo quando queríamos acompanhar uma capeadora do bairro do aleixo ao cdp do porto e tivemos necessidade de ir falar com o dealer para quem esta utilizadora de drogas trabalhava: (…) ela acenava-me com a mão para eu ir falar com ele (com o patrão dela). assim o fiz. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 apresentei-me ao sujeito e disselhe que era importante a sc ir ao cdp, que era algo rápido e muito importante para a saúde dela. ele olhou-me e disse: “vá, vá, 20 minutos e tudo bem… (excerto de diário de campo, dia 18 de abril de 2011) pudemos ainda constatar em alguns atores em situação de sem-abrigo, uma organização personalizada do seu local de pernoita, construindo em seu torno uma determinada identidade de lugar. assim, verifica-se nesses locais, uma série de comportamentos por parte de alguns utilizadores de drogas que visam a personalização dos mesmos, como por exemplo a existência de pequenas pedras a rodear o local como que a delimitar um “espaço pessoal”, tapete de entrada, vários materiais (espelhos, cómodas velhas, cortinas, objetos de decoração) no cubículo, prateleiras ou pósteres: enquanto apanhávamos uma altura mais morta nos baldios vimos as recentes “modificações” que o nt fez ao seu cubículo. o nt apresenta agora um novo móvel com 3 prateleiras. apresenta também, à entrada, um balde para o licho. contêm pedras de vários tamanhos a criar um perímetro à sua “casa” e um tapete à “entrada”. (excerto de diário de campo, dia 12 de abril de 2011) o conceito de “psychological home” avançado no domínio da psicologia comunitária por sigmon, whitcomb e snyder (2002) foi particularmente importante na análise destes comportamentos. de acordo com os autores, este conceito envolve três componentes fundamentais: componente cognitiva – o sentimento de pertença ao lugar num determinado território tem como consequência uma orientação cognitiva no quotidiano do ator, levando a momentos “em casa” e “fora de casa”; componente afetiva bem visível através de uma conexão emocional partilhada entre os atores na mesma posição existencial e transgressiva; componente comportamental – existe um investimento comportamental por parte dos atores em organizarem esses locais de pernoita. o nosso trabalho com consumidores de drogas duras nos territórios psicotrópicos da zona ocidental do porto permite-nos verificar que esta identidade de lugar assume ainda mais importância quando o utilizador aprofundou o seu afastamento com a esfera escolar, laboral, familiar e encontra nestes locais o espelho de si e da sua conduta. diríamos que estes espaços se constituem como organizadores existenciais para sujeitos que fragmentaram as suas relações sociais. 2.6. o psicólogo no trabalho de rua a psicologia de baixo limiar lm: quanto aos jogadores da selecção, só gosto do cristiano ronaldo. (…) é um grande jogador e merece o dinheiro que ganha. (…) há muitos que fazem ainda menos que ele e também ganham milhões. em todos os clubes por onde passou era um grande jogador.(…) mas, resumindo, eu gosto é do meu beira-mar e do meu benfica, não gosto da seleção (excerto de diário de campo, dia 8 de agosto de 2012) durante a nossa intervenção fomos constatando que “a droga” se constituía simultaneamente como o principal definidor discursivo entre os técnicos global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 bem como o limitador das possibilidades discursivas do utilizador de drogas. se, por um lado, “a droga” explicava aos técnicos todos os problemas familiares, escolares ou de outro tipo que o indivíduo apresentava (mesmo quando esses problemas nada tinham que ver com a adicção propriamente dita) por outro, “a droga”, constituia-se também como o locus explicativo que o utilizador identificava e utilizava para enquadrar os problemas decorrentes da sua trajetória existencial. remetidos a uma posição passiva, incorporavam aquilo que os especialistas dizem que eles eram, confirmando portanto as definições que o dispositivo ia tecendo a seu respeito. apesar disso, a análise do nosso diário de campo, permitiu-nos constatar a possibilidade de construção de uma relação de confiança com os atores sociais no contexto da intervenção de rua, a partir de conversas sobre as banalidades da vida quotidiana e sobre assuntos que fogem ao usual “problema da droga”. a formação de uma relação sólida, de confiança e horizontal revelou-se como fortemente importante na construção dessa interação conversacional com os atores com que íamos contactando ao longo do nosso trabalho interação de tipo not knowing (anderson & goolishian, 1992). essa interação horizontal levounos a encetar um diálogo com os atores que extravasava o registo, diríamos, mais clínico, mas que era revelador da cosmovisão dos indivíduos sobre assuntos caracterizados pela não centração no tema da droga, contribuindo para a quebra do circuito fechado temático técnico-utilizador-técnico em torno da droga e suas peripécias de consumos e paragens. chamamos à interação de rua com estas características psicologia de baixo limiar porque, à semelhança da metadona que é dada no contexto da intervenção da rrmd, também esta psicologia está carregada de baixa exigência, pois não há nenhum tópico à priori que deva ser falado, todos eles são admitidos e valorizados, num clima de fluidez discursiva típica de quem quer ser ouvido como pessoa e não como toxicodependente. vejamos o seguinte excerto de diário de campo: estava a sair do aleixo e o mlf falava-me dos acontecimentos no egipto em port said, cujos incidentes no estádio envolveram o treinador do al-ahly manuel josé. “para que mundo estamos a caminhar, s.?” dizia-me o mlf. “quando iremos ter a paz no mundo?” continuava ele. recordava com ele alguns episódios desses em estádios de futebol, nomeadamente os acontecimentos da final da taça dos campões europeus de 1985 na bélgica, no estádio heysel, onde adeptos da juventus e do liverpool se envolveram em pancadarias culminando com a morte de 39 pessoas. o mlf expunha-me aquilo com algum pormenor (…) (excerto de diário de campo, dia 02 de fevereiro de 2012) a presença de um ou mais sujeitos nas imediações da carrinha da equipa de rua, nas horas “mortas” do serviço, apareceunos várias vezes como um pedido implícito por parte dos atores para que os víssemos como pessoas, não pelo prisma do utente que recorre ao serviço da equipa, mas para estabelecer connosco um contacto de outra natureza. vejamos um excerto do nosso diário de campo que dá conta do que afirmámos: global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 estava no aleixo a trabalhar quando o ld e o rd chegavam com a sua “princesa”, uma cadelinha que compraram por 5 euros no aleixo. enquanto o ld foi à torre comprar produto, o rd ficou com a princesa perto da carrinha. aproveitei e fui ter com ele e comecei a falar-lhe sobre ela. “até lhe fiz uma casotinha onde eu meti uma mantinha. às vezes estamos na cama e ela pede-me para ir lá fora fazer xixi. é novinha, tem um mês, mas é muito inteligente” dizia-me ele (excerto de diário de campo, dia 13 de junho de 2012) às mesmas conclusões tínhamos já chegado em trabalho de campo anterior, com toxicodependentes de rua no centro e zona histórica de guimarães: “ (…) a carrinha é também o espaço de sociabilidade que se cria em seu torno, importante para quem fragmentou as relações sociais, para quem se sente distanciado das estruturas formais para toxicodependentes (…) (fernandes & araújo, 2011, p.119). a nossa experiência interventiva permitenos constatar a importância do estabelecimento de uma interação técnica horizontal no trabalho de rua com toxicodependentes. para isso torna-se fundamental a diluição do “estatuto do técnico de saúde” na “pessoa do técnico de saúde”. se este requisito não for respeitado a intervenção poderá ficar refém daquilo a que carl rogers (1961/2010) chamou de “relações fabricadas”. diz-nos o autor a este propósito: “as atitudes que consistem em rejeitar-se como pessoa e em tratar o outro como um objeto não têm grandes probabilidades de servir para alguma coisa” (p. 72). a nossa experiência interventiva nestes contextos comunitários, marcados pela pobreza e pela invisibilidade social face à sociedade dominante, chama-nos ainda a atenção para o perigo do exercício de uma postura técnica demasiado explicativa em detrimento de uma compreensiva e de baixo limiar. verificamo-lo na primeira pessoa enquanto elementos da equipa de rua cujo trabalho aqui estamos a ilustrar: o exercício dessa postura técnica demasiado explicativa contribuía várias vezes para a manutenção de um discurso técnico-utente cujas dinâmicas assentavam num jogo de fintas e manobras assentes no “problema da droga”. quebrar esse jogo contribuía para quebrar também a clivagem simbólica entre equipa técnica e utilizadores de drogas com consequências na aproximação entre estes dois mundos. assim, a adoção de uma atitude incondicional positiva (rogers, 1942/1974) e a criação de uma atmosfera de horizontalidade com os utilizadores de drogas, revelaram-se como instrumentos úteis ao longo de toda a intervenção. a psicologia de baixo limiar mostrou-se também importante na aceitação do nosso trabalho junto dos consumidores de drogas com que íamos contactando, nomeadamente através da incorporação técnica do vocabulário dos territórios e dos atores (por exemplo, o termo “caldar” em vez de “injetar” ou o “dar na prata” em vez de “fumar”, “droga martelada” em vez de “droga adulterada”). em jeito de conclusão, terminamos com uma frase proferida por um ator enquanto fazíamos trabalho de rua e exercíamos essa postura interventiva de baixo limiar: “é com essa linguagem igual à nossa que nos sentimos global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 entendidos” (excerto de diário de campo, dia 29 de março de 2011). nota final mostramos, através do presente trabalho, como as mudanças operadas na política das drogas em portugal têm possibilitado uma nova forma de intervir sobre o fenómeno. se durante a fase da criação e instalação dos primeiros dispositivos de “combate à droga” estes laboravam sobretudo numa atitude de centralidade interventiva no “indivíduo-doente” ou nos seus microcontextos (agra, 1993; agra & fernandes, 1993), o desenvolvimento das políticas de rrmd contribuiu para uma abertura tanto no modo de olhar quem utiliza drogas como no setting e no estilo interventivos. essa abertura tornou viável uma intervenção de rua próxima das comunidades e atores, possibilitando que os espaços urbanos ditos “degradados” pudessem ser também lugares da escuta terapêutica em contextos marcados pelo sofrimento social. além disso, esta abertura às comunidades onde o fenómeno assume protagonismo tem permitido que os atores sociais locais tanto coletivos como individuais – nomeadamente os utilizadores assumam uma postura ativa quer na construção quer na implementação das práticas interventivas. para a assunção duma postura ativa dos consumidores de drogas muito contribuiu uma mudança na forma de o olhar, reconcetualizando-o como sujeito ativo e capaz de exercer uma atitude reflexiva acerca da sua posição transgressiva e existencial (agra, 1990). apesar de tudo, partilhamos com alguns autores (e.g. tissot & poupoeau, 2005; ilundain, 2004; romani, terrile & zino, 2003) algum ceticismo relativamente ao verdadeiro poder transformador e emancipador destas práticas interventivas de proximidade face aos problemas quotidianos que estas comunidades apresentam. criarão estas equipas de terreno as condições para a visibilidade de grupos que permanecem em situação de pobreza e “exclusão social” ou, pelo contrário, funcionarão involuntariamente como neutralizadores do “espetáculo da droga” que neutraliza o seu poder denunciador face às problemáticas quotidianas com que se enfrentam? apesar de não ter sido objeto do nosso trabalho responder a esta questão consideramos que a mesma é demasiado complexa para uma resposta simples, clara e conclusiva. mas talvez a sua importância e relevância científica e social nos sirva como guia de orientação para pesquisas futuras. referências bibliográficas adorno, r. (2011). atenção à saúde, direitos e o diagnóstico como ameaça: políticas públicas e as populações em situação de rua. etnográfica, 15 (3), 543567 agra, c. (1990). sujet autopoiétique et transgression. in f. digneffe (ed.) acteur social et délinquance. hommage à christian debuyst (34-42). bruxelas: mardaga edition agra, c. (1993). dispositivos da droga – a experiência portuguesa. in c. da agra (ed.) dizer a droga ouvir as drogas: estudos teóricos e empíricos para uma ciência do comportamento adictivo (2953). porto: radicário agra, c. & fernandes, l. (1993). droga enigma, droga novo paradigma. in c. da agra (ed.) dizer a droga ouvir as drogas: estudos teóricos e empíricos para uma global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 ciência do comportamento adictivo (5586). porto: radicário agra, c. (2009). requiem pour la guerre à la drogue: l’expérimentation portugaise de décriminalisation. déviance et société, 33, 27-49 anderson, h. & goolishian, h. (1992). the client is the expert: a not-knowing approach to therapy. in s. mcnamee & k. gergen (eds). therapy as social construction (25-39). london: sage publications andrade, t. (2011). reflexões sobre políticas de drogas no brasil. ciência & saúde coletiva, 16 (12), 4665-4674 agência piaget para o desenvolvimento (apdes) (2013). considerações gerais sobre o pnrcad (2013-2020) e recomendações no domínio das drogas em portugal. porto: apdes barros, h., lucas, r. & santos, m. (2010). sida em meio prisional. lisboa: fundação calouste gulbenkian broadhead, r., heckathorn, d., weakliem, d., anthony, d., madray, h., mills, r. & hughes, j. (1998). harnessing peer networks as an instrument for aids prevention: results from a peer-driven intervention. public health reports, 113, 42-57 domanico, a. & malta, m. (2012). implementation of harm reduction toward crack users in brazil: barriers and achievements. substance use & misuse, 47, 535 – 546 domostawski, a. (2011). drug policy in portugal: the benefits of decriminalizing drug use. warsaw: open society foundations escohotado, a. (1989). historia general de las drogas. madrid: alianza editorial fernandes, l. (1998). o sítio das drogas. lisboa: editorial notícias fernandes, l. (2002). acteurs et territoires «psichotropiques»: ethnographie des drogues dans une périphérie urbaine. déviance et societé, 26 (4), 427-441 fernandes, l. & mata, s. (2015). viver nas “periferias desqualificadas”: do que diz a literatura às perceções de interventores comunitários. ponto urbe – revista do núcleo de antropologia urbana da universidade de são paulo, 16 fernandes, l. & ramos, a. (2010). exclusão social e violências quotidianas em “bairros degradados”: etnografia das drogas numa periferia urbana. toxicodependências, 16 (2), 15-29 fernandes, l. & araújo, t. (2010). a vida do andamento. para uma caracterização dos consumidores problemáticos de drogas em guimarães. porto: fpceup fernandes, l., pinto, m. & oliveira, m. (2006). caracterização e análise crítica das práticas de redução de riscos na área das drogas em portugal. toxicodependências, 12 (2), 71-82 fernandes, l. & pinto, m. (2004). el espacio urbano como dispositivo de control social: territorios psicotrópicos y políticas de la ciudad. monografías humanitas, 5, 147-162 ferreira, g. (2004). reforma psiquiátrica: la ética de los derechos civiles. in a. vidal, a. constanzo & m. lois (eds.). psicología comunitaria europea: comunidad, poder, ética y valores (178-187). barcelona: publicacions de la universitat de barcelona global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 filho, a. (1993). la vie dans la marginalité ou la mort dans l'instituiton: étude sur quatre groups d´enfants et d´adolescents vivant de la rue a salvador de bahia (bresil) (tese de doutoramento). faculdade de antropologia e de sociologia universidade lumière, frança gomes, g., & adorno, r. (2011). tornar-se "noia": trajetória e sofrimento social nos "usos de crack" no centro de são paulo. etnográfica, 15(3), 569-586 greenwald, g. (2009). drug decriminalization in portugal – lessons for creating fair and successful drug policies. washington: cato institute ilundain, e. (2004). drogas, enfermedad e exclusión. can tunis (barcelona) como paradigma? humanitas, 5, 105-118 jorge, j. & corradi-webster, c. (2012). consultório de rua: contribuições e desafios de uma prática em construção. saúde & transformação social, 3 (1), 3948 karam, m. (2005). as leis e a política brasileira de drogas. comunicação ao i seminário nordestino de redução de riscos relacionados ao álcool e outras drogas. recife, 14-16 dezembro labrousse, a. (2004). la «guerra a la droga»: estado de la cuestión, humanitas, 5, 173-185 lancetti, a. (2008). clínica peripatética. são paulo: hucitec le marcis, f. (2004). the suffering body of the city. public culture, 16 (3), 453-477 oliveira, m. (2008). consultório de rua: relato de uma experiência (tese de mestrado). instituto de saúde coletiva universidade federal da bahia, brasil ornelas, j. (2004). participative democracy and comunity intervention. in a. vidal, a. constanzo & m. lois (eds.). psicología comunitaria europea: comunidad, poder, ética y valores (297300). barcelona: publicacions de la universitat de barcelona pitta, a. (2011). um balanço da reforma psiquiátrica brasileira: instituições, actores e políticas. ciência & saúde coletiva, 16 (12), 4579-4589 pussetti, c. & brazzabeni, m. (2011). sofrimento social: idiomas da exclusão e políticas do assistencialismo. etnográfica, 15 (3), 467-478 pori (2008). plano operacional de respostas integradas. lisboa: idt raupp, l. & adorno, r. (2010). uso de crack na cidade de são paulo / brasil. toxicodependências, 16 (2), 29-37 rogers, c. (1942/1974). psicoterapia e consulta psicológica. lisboa: moraes editores rogers, c. (1961/2010). tornar-se pessoa. lisboa: padrões culturais editora romani, o. (1999). las drogas – sueños y razones. barcelona: ariel romani, o., terrile, s. & zino, j. (2003). drogas y gestión del conflicto social en el cambio de siglo: nuevos sujetos, nuevos espacios de riesgo? (227-243). in c. agra, j. domínguez, j. amado, hebberecht, p. & recasens, a. (eds.). la seguridad en la sociedad del riesgo. un debate abierto. barcelona: atelier rui, t. (2012). corpos abjetos: etnografia em cenários de uso e comércio de crack (tese de doutoramento). universidade estadual de campinas, brasil sigmon, s., whitcomb, s. & snyder (2002). psychological home. in a. fisher, c. sonn & b. bishop (eds.) psychological sense of global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 community: research, applications, and implications. new york: kluwer academic southwell, m. (2010). people who use drugs and their role in harm reduction. in t. rohdes & d. hedrich (eds.). harm reduction: evidence, impacts and challenges (101-104). lisboa: european monitoring centre for drugs and drug addiction stover, h. & ossietzky, c. (2001). an overview study: assistance to drug users in european union prision. lisboa: european monitoring centre for drugs and drug addiction. szasz, t. (1992). nuestro derecho a las drogas. en defensa de un mercado libre. barcelona: anagrama. tissot, s. & poupeau, f. (2005). la spatialisation des problémes sociaux. actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 159, 5-9 notas i para uma análise mais detalhada do “modelo português” no campo das drogas ver, por exemplo, greenwald (2009) e domostawski (2011). a atenção internacional que ele tem merecido prende-se com a decisão política de despenalizar o consumo e a posse para consumo de todas as drogas ilegais e com a criação das comissões para a dissuasão da toxicodependência, que são estruturas de atendimento para consumidores que funcionam como uma instância de controlo social que pretende desencorajar os consumos sem conotar os seus utilizadores com a imagem do “criminoso”. ii utilizaremos ao longo de todo o texto o conceito de território psicotrópico (fernandes, 1998): o território psicotrópico funciona como um atrator de indivíduos com interesse comum num estilo de vida em que as drogas desempenham papel significativo. comporta-se como um behavioral setting, com um programa comportamental conhecido dos atores que o constituem e frequentam e que o protegem contra ameaças externas. iii a recorrência do termo no discurso está longe de ser atual. um dos livros inscritos na nossa história recente, considerado influente na preparação do clima para a revolução de abril de 1974 que devolveu o regime democrático a portugal, está povoado da palavra “crise”. referimo-nos a portugal e o futuro, de antónio de spínola, em 1974. iv para a precisão do conceito socioespacial de periferia, bem como para identificação dos elementos de crise que caracterizariam grande parte da periferia dos grandes conjuntos urbanos em múltiplas geografias ver fernandes e mata (2015). v para uma visão de conjunto das políticas de redução de riscos levadas a cabo em meio prisional nos países da união europeia ver stover e ossietzky (2001) vi a primeira associação de utilizadores de drogas – e até agora a única – teria o seu embrião em 2007 numa reunião no porto entre utilizadores de drogas e theo van dam, um dos fundadores da junkiebond, associação de utilizadores de drogas holandesa, e seria formalizada em 2010. notemos que a junkiebond negociou já em meados dos anos 80 do século xx com as autoridades sanitárias e municipais a criação dos primeiros programas de troca de seringas. vii trata-se da equipa do rotas com vida da associação norte vida – associação para a promoção da saúde. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 viii a nossa deslocação aos territórios foi dividida em três momentos: 1. outubro de 2009 – junho de 2010: cerca de 2 dias da semana; 2. fevereiro de 2011 – novembro de 2011: todos os dias da semana; 3. novembro de 2011 – dezembro de 2013: cerca de 3 dias da semana ix o pori é uma medida estruturante que faz parte da estratégia nacional de intervenção integrada a cargo do instituto da droga e da toxicodependência (idt) procurando potenciar as sinergias disponíveis no território, através da implementação de programas de respostas integradas (pri) (pori, 2008). a equipa de rua do rotas com vida está ao abrigo desta medida. x “máquinas”: termo nativo para designar seringa xi termos nativos para designar a cocaína e a heroína nos territórios psicotrópicos onde trabalhamos (“bases” – cocaína e “pacotes” – heroína). xii “produto”: termo nativo para designar as substâncias psicoativas. xiii “caldo”: termo nativo para designar a substância que resulta da preparação do produto psicoativo de modo a realizar a injeção. xiv cada kit contém duas seringas, dois reservatórios de água destilada para a dissolução do produto e dois filtros para filtrar as impurezas que resultam dessa preparação, uma carica para a preparação do produto para consumo e dois toalhetes de álcool para desinfeção do local de injeção. xv teste de klotho teste de deteção rápido vih. xvi “picar”: termo nativo que serve para designar uma administração endovenosa de drogas. xvii “chuto” termo nativo para designar uma administração endovenosa. xviii outra designação nativa para designar as principais substâncias psicoativas nos territórios onde fazemos a intervenção (“branca” – cocaína e “pó” – heroína). xix segundo o the centre for harm reduction do burner institute o educador de pares implica “o envolvimento de pessoas da mesma classe social, idade, estatuto social ou vivência cultural que se apoiam entre si, informalmente e formalmente sobre uma variedade de assuntos e preocupações específicas” (agência piaget para o desenvolvimento, 2013, p. 15). xx “canecos” termo nativo para designar o material usado no consumo fumado e de onde se realiza a aspiração do produto. xxi cat – termo que designa as estruturas de tratamento nas toxicodependências. trata-se de uma sigla que significa centro de atendimento a toxicodependentes. xxii “comprar produto” termo nativo que serve para designar a compra de substâncias psicoativas. xxiii a designação desses três tipos de atores – “capeadores”, “vigia” e “enfermeiros” – é fiel à linguagem nativa da nossa população-alvo. microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 1 international community psychology: community approaches to contemporary social problems. volume i. editor f. h. eduardo almeida acosta co-editors guillermo hinojosa rivero oscar soto badillo gonzalo inguanzo arteaga maría eugenia sánchez y díaz de rivera covadonga cuétara priede psicología comunitaria internacional aproximaciones comunitarias a los problemas sociales contemporáneos. volumen i. universidad iberoamericana puebla puebla, méxico. 2011 2 almeida, eduardo. editor international community psychology: community approaches to contemporaty social problems. volume i. i. t. copyright© 2011 by universidad iberoamericana puebla. all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the editor. isbn: published by: universidad iberoamericana puebla. first edition 2011. printed in universidad iberoamericana puebla blvd. del niño poblano 2901, unidad territorial atlixcáyotl, puebla, méxico 72197 telephone: +52 222 372 3000 you can order additional copies of this publication via the following email address: libros@iberopuebla.edu.mx ricardo escárcega méndez editorial coordination susana plouganou boiza editing monserrat torrejón machoro typographical ordering en portada: obra del mtro. josé valderrama izquierdo datos de la obra: título: “en todos uno”. – técnica: óleo sobre madera. – medidas: (0.21 x 0.40 mts). – número de obra: 512. – año: 2008. mail del artista: vi.art12@gmail.com colección: familia almeida sánchez diseño primera y cuarta de forros: josé valderrama izquierdo copyright© 2011 por universidad iberoamericana puebla. todos los derechos están reservados. la reproducción total o parcial de este libro, su tratamiento informático, su transmisión de cualquier forma o por cualquier medio, ya sea electrónico, mecánico, por fotocopia, por registro u otros medios está totalmente prohibida sin el permiso escrito del editor. isbn: publicado por universidad iberoamericana puebla. primera edición 2011. impreso en universidad iberoamericana puebla blvd. del niño poblano 2901, unidad territorial atlixcáyotl, puebla, méxico, 72197 teléfono: + 52 222 372 3000 puede ordenar ejemplares de esta publicación a través de la siguiente dirección electrónica: libros@iberopuebla.edu.mx printed and bounded in mexico impreso y encuadernado en méxico 3 international community psychology: community approaches to contemporary social problems. volume i. psicología comunitaria internacional: aproximaciones comunitarias a los problemas sociales contemporáneos. volumen i. editor f. h. eduardo almeida acosta co-editors guillermo hinojosa rivero oscar soto badillo gonzalo inguanzo arteaga maría eugenia sánchez y díaz de rivera covadonga cuétara priede 4 universidad iberoamericana puebla puebla, méxico. 2011 5 international editorial committee adrian fisher, victoria university (australia) vincent francisco, university of north caroline at greensboro (usa) guillermo hinojosa, universidad iberoamericana puebla (méxico) carolyn kagan, manchester metropolitan university (uk) francine lavoie, université laval, quebec (canada) josé ornelas, instituto superior de psicología aplicada, lisboa (portugal) euclides sánchez v., universidad central de venezuela, caracas (venezuela) maría eugenia sánchez, universidad iberoamericana puebla (méxico) alipio sánchez vidal, universidad de barcelona (spain) irma serrano-garcía, universidad de puerto rico (puerto rico) tom wolff, tom wolff and associates, inc. (usa) 6 contents dedication 9 acknowledgements 10 agradecimientos 12 foreword 14 introduccion 31 critical vision of community psychology 49 from complexity and social justice to consciousness: ideas that have constructed community psychology. 50 maritza montero universidad central de venezuela community social psychology as political education and awareness-raising: resistences and possibilities in everyday life. suggestions for a model of analysis. 76 maría de fátima quintal de freitas federal university of paraná, brazil thinking critically the theory and practice of community psychology. 99 esther wiesenfeld universidad central de venezuela 7 community psychology as a linking science. potentials and challenges for transdisciplinary competences. 130 wolfgang stark university duisburg-essen, germany health callenges to community psychology 144 well-being services for people with long term neurological conditions: co-researchers involvement in research, service design and development. 145 judith sixsmith manchester metropolitan university, england re-empowering family members disempowered by addiction: support for individuals or collective action?. 162 jim orford the university of birmingham, england the mental itineraries of the everyday lives of indigenous women linked to their partners excessive alcohol consumption. 174 guillermina natera instituto nacional de psiquiatría, méxico conducting research on homelessness in canada from a community psychology perspective: reflections on lessons learned. 192 tim aubry university of ottawa, canada 8 violence, attempts upon communities 220 the war without bullets: socio-structural violence from a critical standpoint. 221 david fryer and cathy mc cormack charles sturt university, nsw australia. building cultures of peace in the community life in the face of intensifying political violence in colombia. 232 stella sacipa rodríguez pontificia universidad javeriana, bogotá, colombia. reaping the whirlwind: xenophobic violence in south africa. 254 norman duncan university of the witwatersrand, johannesburg, south africa research and practice in the contact zone: crafting resources for challenging racialised exclusion. 271 christopher sonn victoria university, melbourne, australia cultures and communities 293 cultural factors and primary health care in cuba. a view from community practice. 294 alicia martínez tena universidad de oriente, santiago, cuba 9 community psychology and social problems in mexico. 312 eduardo almeida universidad iberoamericana puebla, méxico the syntax of present day society and the building of community life. 329 sigmar malvezzi universidade de são paulo, brazil countercurrent subject and community. 344 pedro trigo centro gumilla, caracas, venezuela local editors profiles 374 international editors profiles 378 authors profiles 385 10 dedication to all communities throughout the world. dedicatoria a todas las comunidades esparcidas por el mundo 11 acknowledgements this book is the first volume of two that will communicate the proceedings of the third international conference on community psychology celebrated in puebla, mexico, in june 2010. as such it partially represents the third international academic achievement of community psychologists from all over world. human beings from all the continents gave time and support to make the international gathering a success. we decided to offer in vol. i the presentations of the invited participants that were selected by the scientific international committee. but there were other important studies presented at the conference. a competent editorial team from puerto rico is now preparing vol. ii. here we want to thank the two local editorial teams, the one from puebla (mexico) and the one from san juan (puerto rico). we also have to mention and thank the members of our international editorial committee. they were important collaborators in the preparation of the conference, decisive in selecting the invited participants, and assuring the quality of their presentations. a special recognition is deserved by the 16 contributors of this volume. they volunteered their time and expertise preparing their keynote addresses and papers, delivering them, and going through the demanding experience of revising their texts and contributing to the editing of the book. their presentations were the backbone of the conference. to david fernández dávalos, president of universidad iberoamericana puebla who has been a permanent supporter of the academic celebration, motivating faculty members, students and administrators to be active in the organization of the conference, we give him a heartful thanks. three instances of the university were instrumental in the recognized quality achieved in the june 2010 international gathering and in the final preparation of this vol. i.: the department of human development, the department of social sciences and humanities, and the alain touraine chair. the members of the executive committee and of the puebla editorial committee belong to those instances. special thanks are deserved by mary paz cuahutle, maría guadalupe chávez, isabel vázquez, cristina fonseca, adelina quiroz, maría eugenia romero and guadalupe barradas for their support in organizing and following up many tasks before, during and in the preparation of 12 this first volume. we want to acknowledge the skilled translation work, written and oral, carried out by rossana dos santos, linda christianson, jean hennequin, cathleen pomaski, guillermo duque, mónica ayala and eduardo josé almeida sánchez. and finally we must recognize the artistic contributions of josé valderrama and carmen tiburcio. 13 agradecimientos este libro es el primer volumen de dos que comunicarán las memorias de la tercera conferencia internacional de psicología comunitaria celebrada en puebla, méxico, en junio de 2010. como tal representa el tercer logro académico internacional de psicólogos comunitarios de todo el mundo. seres humanos de todos los continentes brindaron tiempo y apoyo para hacer de este encuentro internacional un éxito. decidimos ofrecer en este volumen i las presentaciones de los participantes invitados que fueron escogidos por el comité científico internacional. como también hubo otros estudios importantes presentados durante la conferencia un competente equipo editorial de puerto rico está preparando el volumen 2. queremos reconocer y agradecer a ambos equipos editoriales locales, al de puebla (méxico) y al de san juan (puerto rico). también debemos mencionar y agradecer a los miembros de nuestro comité editorial internacional. ellos fueron colaboradores importantes en la preparación de la conferencia, decisivos en la selección de los participantes invitados y aseguraron la calidad de sus trabajos. un reconocimiento especial merecen los 16 autores de este volumen. aportaron voluntariamente su tiempo y su expertez preparando sus intervenciones, presentándolas y emprendiendo la exigente experiencia de afinar sus textos y contribuyendo a la edición del libro. sus presentaciones fueron la columna vertebral de la conferencia. damos un agradecimiento cordial a david fernández dávalos, rector de la universidad iberoamericana puebla, quien ha sido un sostén permanente de esta celebración académica, motivando a profesores, estudiantes y administrativos para participar activamente en la organización de la conferencia. tres instancias de la universidad fueron clave para lograr la alta calidad organizativa y académica lograda en el encuentro internacional de junio de 2010 y en la preparación de este volumen i: el departamento de ciencias para el desarrollo humano, el departamento de ciencias sociales y humanidades, y la cátedra alain touraine. los miembros del comité ejecutivo y del comité editorial local de puebla son parte de estas instancias. agradecimiento especial merecen mary paz cuahutle, maría guadalupe chávez, isabel vázquez, cristina fonseca, adelina quiroz, maría eugenia romero y guadalupe barradas por su apoyo organizando y realizando muchas tareas, antes, durante y en la preparación de este volumen i. queremos reconocer el competente trabajo de traducción, escrito y oral, realizado por 14 rossana dos santos, linda christianson, jean hennequin, cathleen pomaski, guillermo duque, mónica ayala y eduardo josé almeida sánchez. finalmente debemos agradecer las contribuciones artísticas de josé valderrama y carmen tiburcio. microsoft word gjcpp competencies proofs lb edit (1) final trj.docx are our competencies revealing our weaknesses? a critique of community psychology practice competencies peta dzidic, ph.d., lecturer, school of psychology and speech pathology, curtin university, western australia, australia. lauren j. breen, ph.d., senior lecturer, school of psychology and speech pathology, curtin university, western australia, australia. brian j. bishop, ph.d., associate professor, school of psychology and speech pathology, curtin university, western australia, australia. keywords: competencies; ethics; practice; values; context; indigenous and crosscultural psychologies; reflexivity recommended citation: dzidic, p., breen, l. j., bishop, b. j. (2013). are our competencies revealing our weaknesses? a critique of community psychology practice competencies. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), 110. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 are our competencies revealing our weaknesses? a critique of community psychology practice competencies abstract in this paper we argue that the focus on the development and application of practice competencies for community psychology runs the risk of being a distraction from good practice. we outline three areas that demonstrate the inherent flaws in focusing on traditional notions of competencies for community psychology – the limitations of competencies themselves, the schism between competencies and ethics, and the disconnect between competencies and applied practice. in opposition to traditional notions of competencies underpinned by positivist and mechanist notions, we propose that the distinction between virtue and procedural ethics provides a model for comparing and contrasting virtue and procedural competencies. virtue competencies provide an orientation and value-base that may be applied to any context in which community psychologists work; in this way, competencies may be positioned as tools for understanding, rather than as understandings. keywords: competencies; ethics; practice; values; context; indigenous and cross-cultural psychologies; reflexivity in this paper we argue that the focus on the development and application of practice competencies for community psychology is a distraction from good practice. however, before embarking on a critique of competencies for community psychology, we must first examine community psychology as a discipline. community psychology itself is contested; definitions of community psychology depend on time, geography, and context, and serve different purposes (fryer & laing, 2008) and its influences and applications are evolving (gridley & breen, 2007). for us, community psychology emerged primarily as an alternative perspective for training clinical psychologists in the united states. while the origins of community psychology are culturally and historically specific, the underlying value orientation broadly transcends space and time. crucially for us, community psychology is not static and does not refer to a body of theory and research. rather, it is an orientation shared between some professionals (mainly psychologists) to challenge the frameworks that support and define the status quo. it is a questioning orientation that is not specific to topic or discipline and reflects a willingness to examine phenomena in its broader contexts. we take this to be the essence of a contextualist approach. it is the orientation that led our forebears to doubt the utility of traditional clinical psychology in addressing mental health issues in the face of comparatively inadequate and structurally-unjust provision of resources. to us, community psychology is the ability and willingness to question what is the fundamental nature of current practices and question whose interests these practices serve. one of the most important worldviews of western societies like the united kingdom, united states, australia and new zealand is that communities are comprised of discrete and separable individuals (frie & coburn, 2011; sampson, 1989, 2000; sarason, 1981). this axiomatic, acknowledged assumption (as sarason, 1981, termed it) is so pervasive that, even in its revolutionary zeal, community psychology could only bring itself to be critical of mainstream individualised treatment, rather than reconceptualising its understandings of people. aspects of community change were operationalised in terms of social support and wellness. while the fledging discipline recognised the importance of a broader conceptualisation of people, as done in sociology, anthropology, history and politics, it stayed psychological, and thus inevitably, individualistic (e.g., speer et al., 1992). in this paper, we will not attempt to delineate more appropriate conceptualisations of people, but will explore how the unquestioning assumption of psychological individualism led to the framing of community psychological skill and knowledge in terms of competencies. we would suggest that the notion of competencies is inextricably linked with psychological individualism. competencies are measures of an individual’s abilities and as such are trait or formistic characteristics (altman & rogoff, 1984; pepper, 1942; tebes, 2005); thus, they are conceptually incommensurate with contextualism (pepper, 1942). what we will attempt to do is to provide a dynamic approach to community psychology skills and practice that is reflective of a contextualist core and does not confound formism and contextualism. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 what’s wrong with the focus on competencies? skills development is obviously important – community psychologists must be able to do things – but the focus on competencies is problematic because it is acontextual and bureaucratic. it loses sight of the bigger picture and is therefore reductionist. nelson and prilleltensky (2010) state “a contextual assessment is necessary to understand the subjective experience of the residents of a particular community” (p. 56). failing to recognise the importance of context, and practice as contextualists is antithetical to the principles of community psychology. competencies are static targets that do not reflect the dynamic contexts in which community psychologists engage. competencies wrongly imply that once a standard is met, the individual is therefore ‘competent’ irrespective of context. how is it then that we can propose working to a set of competencies? one way to view this issue is to invoke the difference between outcome and process. competencies, especially in its bureaucratised form, are inherently outcome and deficit-focussed whereas process skills involve dynamic context pattern recognition, as well as skills in intervention. kurtz and snowden (2003) introduced an ontological typology they referred to as “cynefin,” (a welsh word loosely meaning place or habitat), in which they distinguished between the known, knowable, complex and chaos. traditionally, mainstream psychology operates as if the only two domains are the known and the knowable. kurtz and snowden argue that the complex domain is not able to be investigated using traditional concepts of cause and effect, and thus not reducible to simpler propositions traditional in reductionistic science. they argued that the complex may have some regularities and these may allow patterns to be recognised. we would argue that this is the domain of the human sciences (polkinghorne, 1983), where practice wisdom is required (polkinghorne, 2004), where participant conceptualising is vital, and where ambiguity and uncertainty abound (bishop, sonn, drew, & contos, 2002). we see these complex and dynamic social systems as the domain of community psychology. recognising that social settings are necessarily complex and that intervention and practice are context-dependent is more than rhetoric. it requires us to let go the certainties of reductionist theorising and methodology. it challenges us to think about complexity in terms that are determined by the setting and not necessarily endorsed or coveted in traditional psychology. we need to recognise and emulate those who formed the foundations of community psychology, not in terms of what they did, but in terms of the courage they showed in challenging the status quo, and reflectively thinking about what we are doing and our places in the social structures. values and worldviews are at the core of the ‘new’ community psychology (bennett et al., 1966; nelson & prilleltensky, 2010). these values and worldviews need to be at the core of community psychology competencies. the dilemma for pedagogy is that these values and worldviews are best learned through experience and not direct instruction. there needs to be a process of development and refinement of these values and worldviews as they emerge and nurtured through reflection and reflective theory development. what needs to be at the heart of any consideration of competencies is that it is the ability to reflect and grow that is the competency, not the final values and worldview, per se. below, we discuss three areas to demonstrate the inherent flaws in focusing on competencies for community psychology and note that these criticisms are likely to be relevant to psychology as a whole. the limitations of competencies themselves community psychology practice competencies in effect construct community psychology. as such, we must ask: whose competencies are they? how are they derived? how are they used to determine who is (and by implication, is not) competent as a community psychologist? to what end? fryer and laing (2008) passionately expose the problems in taking united states-derived community psychology and transplanting it elsewhere: put bluntly, the usa has the resources and personnel to promote its community psychology in exactly the same way that it promotes its soft drinks industry, fast food industry and film industry. the ideological domination of community psychology by united statesian versions of community psychology is arguably just another manifestation of united statesian global military, economic, cultural and intellectual domination…. despite adoption of a progressive rhetoric, much us community psychology is individualistic, naively ethnocentric, increasingly formulaic, acritical and hardly distinguishable from the mainstream discipline, especially in practice. much of us community psychology is, in other words, effectively acritical mainstream psychology business as usual. (pp. 9-10)1 while other commentators might not argue the point as passionately, they have noted that community psychologies outside the united states tend to be influenced considerably by community psychology within the united states (fisher, gridley, thomas, & bishop, 2008; gridley & breen, 2007; gridley, fisher, thomas, & bishop, 2007). it is clear then that community psychology and its practice competencies serve a purpose, global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 privileging some accounts of the world while devaluating others. further, competency documents are responses to current problems but will likely themselves be problems in the future. thus, they create a situation whereby attempts to solve issues that we ourselves have proliferated could have avoided being created all together. competencies for community psychology create a curriculum based on expected proficiencies and educational stagnation where curricula fail to be adaptive, contextual, and innovative. psychological competencies are conservative and their interpretation and application is even more conservative (breen & darlaston-jones, 2010). curricula are necessarily non-adaptive as their establishment is based upon processes of reifying current practices and theories. furthermore, the creation of competency documents assumes that these ‘things’ maybe are teachable and assessable. the assessment of these competences requires dichotomous questions presented in checklists, rating scales, and are possibly accompanied by open-ended reflection questions allowing someone in authority to reflect upon the student’s ability to meet a stated competency (reflexivity addressed? yep. data saturation achieved? yep). tick-a-box assessment of practice competencies focusses on the mechanics rather than on philosophical or contextual concerns and are therefore mechanistic rather than cohesive. the schism between competencies and ethics there are parallels between the notion of creating competencies for community psychology and the current challenges that community psychologists often face when working within the parameters of ethical guidelines. the application of ethical guidelines within community psychology is often clouded by a range of uncertainties that come with engaging in complex social settings as opposed to the comparatively controlled environments of therapy or ‘traditional’ (experimental) research. the control and predictability that emerges with engaging with an individual, particularly in instances where people are decontextualised (such as a laboratory setting), makes contemplating the meaning of ethical practice a somewhat more literal process. practices, protocols and guidelines are more likely to have direct transferability. in fact, it is these settings on which ethical guidelines are modelled and developed and so it is only natural that they be of direct relevance and applicability. the relevance and applicability to community psychology is not readily apparent, forcing at times precarious interpretations of principles that are presented as fixed rights and wrongs. o’neill (1989) is credited as initiating the first critical discussion on the complexities of ethics in community psychology. all psychologists, irrespective of sub-discipline, are responsible for identifying and appropriately addressing ethical conundrums in action; what is different for community psychologists, however, is the range of factors within the community setting which make this process more difficult. the central question of o’neill’s thesis concerned the community psychologist’s engagement of multiple people and multiple settings at the one time, and he posed the questions: “to whom is the psychologist accountable, and for what?” (p. 324). these fundamental questions recognise that the impacts (negative or positive) of our work are not limited to individuals and communities in our direct contact. unlike a therapeutic setting between psychologist and client, the community engagement setting is not necessarily proximal. consider the following hypothetical situation: a multidisciplinary collaborative research project was initiated to address the issue of silenced poverty in agricultural-based rural communities. through its pilot stage, researchers explored a range of factors that contributed to the economic and social hardships experiences in one of the towns. the town was chosen due to a range of factors. it was not long before surrounding towns people were made aware of the social investment being made, but not to their town. while the research endeavour was defended, in that the programme would be ‘rolled out’ to surrounding communities, including theirs, the surrounding townspeople remained sceptical. unbeknown to the researchers, historically there has been strong competition within an extended family that dominated farming in the district. feuding between two of six siblings over property ownership had resulted in a social rift not only between the family members, but also between other families who sided with the respective siblings residing in their own town. soon, myths began to propagate as to why that particular town was chosen as the first town engaged, and not others, and the researchers were met with accusations of favouritism and bribery. in this scenario, unintended consequences emerged from the best of intentions, and presents as an inherent risk when engaging in community settings. procedurally, the research team followed all of the required ethical requirements. their failings, however, may be explained by their lack of immersion in the district prior to their identification of the pilot town. the relatively decontextualised approach to town identification (a desktop study of demographic and economic statistics) failed to capture the social dynamic which ultimately led to not only the ethical conundrum concerning which town received the programme, but an additional global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 ethical issue concerning claims directed at the integrity of the researchers and the research. the researchers abided by the relevant ethical guidelines and processes expected of them, making them ‘ethically competent’. however, this ‘ethical competence’ is based solely on procedural ethics – the policies and processes usually presented in the form of ethical guidelines (guillemin & gillam, 2004). by nature, procedural ethics are mechanistic and their use assumes a context that is controlled and clearly defined. it is assumed that we meet an ethical dilemma and time will stand still while we wrestle with the best way to deal with the situation. ethical examples used in teaching are based on the premise that complex, evolving, and dynamic situations can be reduced down to a simple duality. most of these examples involve two parties (typically individuals) and the question becomes what decision made by a professional will result in the least harm. procedural ethics serve the interests of researchers rather than the participants they research (prilleltensky, 1997; smith, 1999) and there are instances where adherence to the guidelines may be exploitative, particularly the uncritical application of western knowledge to research on, and not with or for, indigenous peoples (fielder, roberts, & abdullah, 2000). the following of these guidelines remains the dominant litmus test employed within psychology for defining ethical conduct. ethical practice within community psychology is clearly more complex. in contrast to procedural ethics are ethics in practice – the ways in which researchers and practitioners address (unanticipated) ethical issues as they arise (guillemin & gillam, 2004). most real situations, particularly those relevant to community psychology practice, involve multiple parties, all with different agendas and interests in an ongoing flow of social action. the social settings in which community psychologists engage are not clearly defined, nor are they based solely on place or locality. as such, attention to procedural ethics alone presents a redundant exercise given that the ethical guidelines that would presumably be used to appraise ethical competency are not the best fit for community psychology practice. given our knowledge of the complexity and diversity within and between communities and our lessons from endeavouring to employ procedural ethics in these settings, competencies appear counterintuitive to the realities of our work. like procedural ethics, competencies are relatively static, acontextual, and motivated by offering protection to the community psychologist, rather that the parties that the community psychologist engages. these motivations are unsuited to community psychology. the disconnect between competencies and applied practice a sound indication of the worth of competencies is their utility in promoting a field of practice. however, an outline of the history and development of community psychology in australia highlighted the paradox that bureaucratic forces intended to professionalise community psychology actually threatened its survival (gridley & breen, 2007). the recent publication of the extent of lobbying in which community psychologists engaged in order to have community psychology recognised as a legitimate area of practice in australia (see cohen et al., 2012) provides a clear lesson that, despite the development and use of competencies, community psychology is facing much bigger perils. community psychology needs to capture more readily the complexities and contexts of psychological phenomena. psychology in australia is monocultural (breen & darlaston-jones, 2010; riggs, 2004; sheehan, 1996), leading to the assertion that “there is no distinctive australian psychology but the areas reflect mainstream international psychological research” (garton, 2006, p. 9). psychology is predominantly a monocultural discipline (guthrie, 2004) and has been described as cultural malpractice (hall, 1997). community psychology in australia fares little better, with it being highly influenced by developments in community psychology in the us (gridley & breen, 2007). indigenous and cross-cultural psychologies provide a model for the ways in which competencies may be developed for and applied to community psychology practice. in australia, working with aboriginal and torres strait islander people is an example where ‘tick-a-box’ competence assessment does not and cannot work (purdie, dudgeon, & walker, 2010; vicary & bishop, 2005). rather, these forms of competence assessment are seen as incompetent as they perpetuate the status quo. somewhat paradoxically, indigenous and cross-cultural psychologies draw on competencies; however, there is a fundamental difference in the way competencies are conceptualised and used – within these contexts, competence is concerned with attitudinal as well as practical readiness. readiness in both its forms is based on a value set based on a critical consciousness. while competency assessment can be problematically mechanistic, the appraisal of cultural competence comprises knowledge of cultures, histories, and worldviews; the critical awareness of personal and discipline-based values and attitudes; and a repertoire of skills (garvey, 2007; ranzijn, mcconnonchie, & nolan, 2009). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 similarly, vicary and bishop’s (2005) model of cultural engagement privileged the examination of personal and professional biases, values, and assumptions before the development of an understanding of the culture of interest and its history. conceptualising competence more broadly than what people do and how they do it means that competence is identified as relevant in terms of critical self and disciplinary awareness as well as practical skill. competence in cross-cultural settings is dependent on contextualised thinking and action. forms of engagement, the development of areas of focus, choice of methodology and method, and data interpretations are predicated on the practitioner scrutinising the basic tenets of his or her practice. noteworthy also is the notion that cross-cultural competency is independent of individual context (e.g., a practitioner may be competent in one cross-cultural, social, or physical setting and not another) and as such competency development is not a distinctly linear process with a discrete or binary outcome but is instead reflective of the practitioner’s response to the situation at hand. here, the notion of ‘competence’ is something far greater. cross-cultural competence is not constructed as static or procedural; rather, it is a value ethic that calls upon the reflexivity of the community psychologist. cross-cultural competence extends traditional notions of competence by positing that procedurally ‘doing good’ is insufficient (e.g., attending training courses, engaging in consultation, abiding by specific ethics protocols). by following the unquestioned procedures of ‘doing good’, we are merely meeting the criteria deemed appropriate by the dominant group. crosscultural competence questions these dominant positions and worldviews, and instead requires that we do something to challenge colonialism (smith, 1999). failure to challenge the dominant paradigm is in itself oppressive, paradoxically reinforcing the structures and values that gave rise to the original injustice and oppression (sarason, 1981). ideally, when considering competencies for community psychology, we similarly should strive to avoid perpetuating the dominant position. by doing something, montero (2012) cites demo (1985) who reflected on the role of a researcher from a dominant community, stating: ... the researcher does not bring in participation, at the most, he [sic] motivates it, assesses it; he will never substitute the oppressed: he tends to be more in the order of the obstacles, than in that of the supports. moreover, there is no condition for being a participatory researcher in that one that does not recognize the oppressor within him/herself. in that sense, the practical ideological identification, is a hard conquest, that only a few achieve (p. 83). failing to recognise our relative position of power as community psychologists is fundamental to what cultural competence endeavours to challenge. having awareness is not something that can be appraised or assessed in the form that competencies are traditionally conceptualised. being culturally competent is not merely employing culturallyappropriate methodologies and practices, for example (‘doing good’); instead, it is about actively challenging the underlying systemic inequalities. traditional notions of competencies cannot capture the latter. conclusion: toward competent competencies in this paper, we argue that the development and use of competencies for community psychology, underpinned by positivist and mechanistic notions, is not conducive to the values or practice of community psychology. determining competencies runs the risk of reducing the complexity of what community psychologists do to disconnected soundbites of the activities, therefore decontextualising theory and practice. as we have established, the development and use of competencies for community psychology is predicated upon a series of assumptions that fail to trouble the established status quo. furthermore, they fail to account for ethics in practice. cleary then, determining competencies for community psychology appears counter intuitive to the disciplinary cause. the problem with the notion of competencies is that the focus is on outcomes rather than processes. the focus of educating and developing community psychologists should be on developing an orientation that fosters skill development through a process of reflective learning through action – a way of being, not a way of doing. learning through doing is an iterative process and enables two-way learning; both student and teacher, or practitioner and supervisor, benefit. as such, it is not competencies per se, but an orientation and valuebase that may be applied to any context in which we work. the social world is complex, largely chaotic, and changing (gergen, 1973). adopting methods that require the ability to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty means that the chaotic nature of the world and of community can be recognised and embraced, rather than searching for order and certainty. this means that theories and practices cannot be seen as immutable. the application of course structures and outcomes and professional practice guidelines needs to be flexible and able to resist reification and solidification. professionalism in community psychology means that we accept that the content of our theories and practices will change with each community with which we work, global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 but that processes by which we work will be based on concepts of uncertainty, change, and fluidity. returning to cynefin (kurtz & snowden, 2003; snowden, 2002) and the four domains of professional life – the known, the knowable, the complex, and chaos – competencies need to reflect the fact that the world is complex and sometimes chaotic and we need to be comfortable working in the zones of complexity and chaos. the competencies we need are the ability to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty. the ability to recognise uncertainty and to be able to function in poorlydefined or complex settings is a hallmark of a ‘good’ community psychologist. communities are necessarily complex and entering one requires an ability to recognise and acknowledge preconceptions about these people’s lives and the way the community functions. we need to see our actions as part of ongoing social action, and that we are only players and not arbiters of right and wrong; we just represent a specific value orientation. in contrast to mechanistic and reductionist competencies, community psychology requires models that move beyond pragmatic competencies towards applied, values-based understandings and that facilitate the building of a knowledge base in incremental steps and the ability to be able to invest energy into developing understanding yet not investing ego, so that when your representations and paradigms collapse, we are able to start afresh. community psychologists may position themselves as participant-conceptualisers, a term which captures the collaborative nature of social action and inquiry, in both participating and making sense of the interaction (bennet et al., 1966). by definition, this fundamental dual-role recognises that the learning (or conceptualising) in community psychology is done in the field through our engagement with others. it is through this process of learning by doing that we become competent. critical to the process of learning by doing is the ability to reflect continuously. self-reflection prompts us to consider ‘competence’ not as a list or set of expected actions, but rather a reflexive process comprising doing, reflecting on doing, and reflecting on reflection on doing (schön, 1983). the notion of iterative-generative reflective practice, with its emphasising on assertoric knowledge claims (polkinghorne, 1983) that acknowledge uncertainty and abductive reasoning (pierce, 1955), best captures this dynamic of continual discovery and development (bishop et al., 2002). within community psychology, notions of competency development for the field run the risk of yielding to its positivist heritage. rather, community psychology would benefit from iterative-generative reflective practice, and being attuned to underlying worldviews and values, which then enables the community psychologist to be receptive and responsive to the contextual requirements of the social settings in which we engage. the foundations of competencies require critical thought and consideration. competencies can run the risk of being reductionist, which is antithetical to the core values of community psychology. much can be learnt from the distinction between virtue and procedural ethics, specifically, that this distinction can be transferred to competencies for community psychology. we argue that if there is a place for competencies in community psychology, these should be based on virtues as opposed to procedures. fundamentally, virtue competencies would be based on an ethos and worldview as opposed to set parameters which stipulate ‘what’ competency specifically is. procedural competencies (based on the ‘what’) are static, acontextual and perpetuate passive as opposed to active, lifelong learning and critical thinking of the world and of our selves. in table 1 we illustrate the distinction between these two forms of competencies. table 1. a comparison between procedural and virtue competencies procedural competencies virtue competencies focus outcome process assessment definitive or dichotomous life-long learning and action motivation token; elitist genuine; humble development static (or at best, reactive) responsive; proactive reflexivity passive; limited to no self-reflection active; critical self-reflection role of values driven by parameters; value-less driven by an ethos; value-based role of context acontextual contextual role of power bureaucratic power; inequitable and hierarchical decentralised power; engaging and participatory note. the differences between procedural and virtue competencies are shown as dichotomies but we acknowledge that these differences may be on a continuum. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 the truism that community psychology should be based in the community sounds obvious, but the training in traditional psychology often leads to taking an individualistic and acontextual perspective (bishop, 2007; speer et al., 1992). essential then to the training of community psychologists is ‘learning by doing’ whereby both the supervisor and the student tackle new settings that require scoping, deconstruction, and intervention. the process of doing by learning involves substantive theorising (wicker & august, 2000), in which conceptual theory is integrated into the research as more is discovered about the context and the local social dynamics. using a role as an active mediator (throgmorton, 1991) or boundary crosser (sarason & lorentz, 1998) where the community psychologist is situated between the community, and policy makers and scientists, and whose role is to act as a translator and active manipulator of the power differentials between the community and the policy makers. this requires that the community psychologist is able to understand both the constraints and language of the community and also the policy people or scientists. it requires that the community psychologists submerge their professional identity to be able to work with both groups and to operate from a social justice perspective. the role then is one of a modest transdisciplinary professional (reich & reich, 2006). the transdisciplinary role requires that the community psychologists be familiar with both the knowledge and values of both the community, and the scientists and policy people, to a level where they can translate effectively, and to bring about subtle change. community psychology has the potential to undermine mainstream psychology theories and practices in reframing psychology from being psychology of the individual to being the psychology of people. we need to be able use competencies as tools for understanding, rather than as understandings. given this approach, a set of core procedural competencies should not be identified; rather, we propose a focus on virtue competencies. as we have shown, virtue competencies (as opposed to procedural competencies) provide an orientation and valuebase and may be applied to any context in which community psychologists work. when procedural, the focus on developing, refining, and using community psychology practice competencies provides a false impression of rigour. while it might bolster the professional identity and practices of community psychologists, the exercise is redundant in that it suits the bureaucrats rather than the community psychology practitioners or the communities they serve. procedural competencies are antithetical to the values of community psychology. virtue competencies provide a way forward by recognising the values of community psychology, the diversity of practice settings, and the roles of reflexivity and humility. notes 1. fryer and laing (2008) use the term ‘united statesian’ rather than american in order to differentiate community psychologies among the americas. references altman, i., & rogoff, b. 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(2000). working lives in context: engaging the views of participants and analysts. in w. b. walsh, k. h. craik, & r. h. price (eds.), personenvironment psychology: new directions and perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 197-232). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. microsoft word 2012-011-final-20130331.docx profile and predictors of voluntary civic engagement at a private university in egypt nadia haddara1 baland jalal1 gwendolyn d. anderson2 mona m. amer1 joseph m. simons-rudolph3 1the american university in cairo, cairo, egypt 2university of minnesota, twin cities, minnesota 3north carolina state university, raleigh, nc correspondence regarding the published paper can be sent to: mona m. amer, ph.d., psychology unit, the american university in cairo, 420 fifth ave., 3rd floor, new york, ny 10018 usa; e-mail monaamer@aucegypt.edu. tel: +(202) 2615-1832. acknowledgements: we would like to thank the gerhart center for philanthropy and civic engagement at the american university in cairo for their intellectual and financial support in developing this research. recommended citation: haddara, n., jalal, b., anderson, g.d., amer, m.m. & simonsrudolph, j.m. (2012). profile and predictors of voluntary civic engagement at a private university in egypt. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(1), 1-11. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   profile and predictors of voluntary civic engagement at a private university in egypt abstract this study explored the characteristics and predictors of university student voluntary civic engagement. it was conducted at a private university in egypt, a developing country where student volunteerism has the potential to significantly impact community development efforts. a total of 518 students responded to the study. consistent with previous literature, students who chose to participate in community service clubs were more likely to be female and religious. they moreover reported greater commitment to civic service as well as pride and commitment to the university. results suggested that volunteers fit an “egyptianized” profile with characteristics including: egyptian nationality, muslim religion, attending a high-school located in a less privileged rural governorate, graduating from an egyptian public school system, being more religious, and speaking more arabic than english socially. levels of depression did not differ between volunteers and non-volunteers; however, volunteers reported higher anxiety. suggestions for future research are offered and findings are discussed in terms of their significance for community practice nationally, regionally and globally. keywords: civic engagement; community service; civic service; egypt; university introduction persuading youth to engage in activities that allow them to give back to the community is a global mission shared by numerous schools, universities, youth centers, religious centers, community programs and community organizations. youth should be targeted by such institutions because they are much more likely to volunteer their efforts to help the community. for example, in the u.s. the growth rate of college student volunteers has more than doubled the rate of adult volunteers (dote, cramer, dietz, & grimm, 2006). moreover, research has shown the positive impacts of youth civic engagement on the community and discovered the individual advantages they obtain through their involvement. overall benefits to communities and larger society include fostering positive relationships between youth and community residents and cultivating a new generation of engaged and active citizens (mohamed & wheeler, 2001). community practitioners and organizations can directly benefit from youth engagement by expanding services beyond the capacity that paid staff can deliver, enhancing their visibility in the community, and forming new partnerships with other local organizations and institutions (naughton, 2000; urban institute, 2004). in egypt, where the present study was conducted, 62% of the overall population is 29 years of age and younger, yet only 2.3% of youth engage in volunteerism (population council, 2011). given the current socio-economic stressors in egypt and alarming poverty rates, student volunteerism in community practice can play a pivotal role for future reform, community development, and social change. therefore, it is important to examine the predictors and characteristics of students who have independently sought out volunteering opportunities so that community organizations and academic institutions can develop strategies to attract and engage more youth in community service. there are three main terms in the literature that are related to different types of student civic engagement. the term “community service” generally refers to voluntary or mandatory activities in service to a community that are not based on an academic curriculum. this is contrary to “service learning” which entails that service activities follow a curriculum or specific learning objectives in an academic setting (see national commission on service-learning, 2002 for further discussion of this topic). “civic engagement” on the other hand is a more comprehensive term that may include political participation, religious participation, volunteerism, philanthropy, recreational and cultural group participation (rose, 2006). for the purpose of this paper we will use the terms civic engagement, volunteerism and community service to refer to student initiated volunteer work, namely students engaging in community work through community service clubs on campus and/or through non-profit organizations in the region. the majority of previous research has focused on formal service learning opportunities, whereas research on student voluntary community service has been less common. some studies did not distinguish between the two types of engagement, and so whether or not the service in question was voluntary or a requirement (i.e. for a course/academic credit) was not always clear. despite the limited literature, some studies have begun to document the characteristics and predictors of students who choose to volunteer in community service, as well as the correlates of this community service. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   in these studies it was found that university students are more likely to volunteer if they are female (astin & sax 1998; cruce & moore, 2007; dote et al., 2006; fitch, 1991; marks & jones, 2004; serow & dreyden, 1990), have a higher socio-economic status (marks & jones, 2004; serow & dreyden, 1990), but are less materialistic (astin & sax, 1998; marks & jones, 2004; serow & dreyden, 1990), receive higher grades in college (serow & dreyden, 1990), are members of college organizations that encourage community service (e.g. student union and religious groups; marks & jones, 2004; serow & dreyden, 1990), and are unemployed (fitch, 1991) or work fewer hours a week (marks & jones, 2004). other important factors predictive of volunteerism include previous high-school community service (astin & sax, 1998; astin, sax, & avalos, 1999; berger & milem, 2002; marks & jones, 2004), higher religiosity (astin & sax, 1998; fitch, 1991; marks & jones, 2004; serow & dreyden, 1990), and a sense of responsibility for their community (hellman, hoppes, & ellison, 2006). almost all of these studies were conducted in the u.s. however, a study conducted at a university in jordan, an arabicspeaking country located in the middle east, also found that women were more likely to volunteer, with 92.7% of participants volunteering for religious reasons (al gharaibeh, 2010). research on the outcomes of voluntary community service and service-learning has confirmed that a multitude of positive psychological factors and educational achievements are associated with service. in a critical review, yates and youniss (1996) found that civically engaged youth are more empowered and have a higher sense of personal competency than youth not involved in the community. other positive outcomes of community service include improved academic performance (primavera, 1999; serow & dreyden, 1990), increased critical thinking skills (eyler, root, & giles, 1998), a greater sense of civic responsibility (astin & sax, 1998; primavera, 1999), and positive self esteem and self concept (astin & sax, 1998; hitlin, 2007; primavera, 1999). although these variables have been conceptualized as outcomes subsequent to the service activities, there may be a bidirectional relationship for some. for example, civic responsibility, previous academic achievement, and setting high academic goals may also predict future volunteerism among university students (cruce & moore, 2007; marks & jones, 2004). scholars have moreover found that volunteerism positively impacts a person's psychological well-being. most research concerning the effects of volunteering on psychological well-being has focused on older volunteers. this is most likely due to the substitution of community service for work in retired elders. in general, volunteerism in older adults has been associated with lower levels of depression (hunter & linn, 1980; kim & pai, 2010; lum & lightfoot, 2005; morrow-howell, hinterlong, rozario, & tang, 2003; musick & wilson, 2003; piliavin & siegel, 2007; wheeler, gorey, & greenblatt, 1998) and anxiety (hunter & linn, 1980). using a sample of individuals aged 25 or older, with an over-representation of those over 60, thoits and hewitt (2001) found that volunteering in the community significantly improved six aspects of well-being: happiness, life satisfaction, self-esteem, sense of control over life, physical health, and depression. another study found that a decline in depression level was seen in volunteers above 65 but volunteerism did not affect trajectories of depression in younger or middle-aged volunteers (kim & pai, 2010). as most research has been with older adults, further research is needed to explore whether the beneficial effects of volunteering on psychological well-being are found with university students. the fundamental aims of the present research were fourfold. the first was to determine the characteristics and predictors of volunteering at a private university in order to gain a deeper understanding of civic engagement in this context and discuss how results may be applied to community practice in egypt and the middle east. our study offered data from a different cultural context when compared to the aforementioned studies, the majority of which were carried out in the west, predominately in the united states. the second aim of the study was to examine the extent to which attachment to the local community (e.g., having extended in-state residence and ethnic/national/sociocultural ties) was associated with greater commitment to civic engagement. as such, this study sought to explore how greater attachment to the egyptian community (e.g., egyptian citizenship, muslim faith, high religiosity, studying in the egyptian educational system, speaking more arabic than english) may be related to voluntary community service. a third, related, aim was to look at attachment on a smaller scale, namely loyalty, pride, and sense of affiliation to the university. it was expected that students who demonstrated greater attachment to egyptian society and to the university would be more likely to volunteer as this could be indicative of a stronger bond and sense of responsibility for their local community. these factors go beyond the personal predictors explored in previous literature to consider issues related to sense of community. the final aim was to explore the relationship between voluntary community service and psychological well-being, specifically depression, global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   anxiety and stress. this final aim sought to determine if results found for older adults would also be applicable to university youth. method participants data was collected from 518 students enrolled at a private four-year liberal arts university in cairo, egypt. the sample contained students across university class levels including first year (12.5%), second year (18.1%), third year (23.7%), fourth and fifth year (24.5%), and graduate students (21.2%). the majority of the participants were women (67.6%), with the egyptian nationality (69.2%), and of muslim faith (75.8%). the mean age of total participants was 21.81 (sd = 5.65). our study focuses mostly on 19.1% (n = 99) of these 518 participants who were identified as being civically engaged, as defined by their involvement in voluntary, on-campus community service clubs. more details about the population as well as a comparison of civically engaged versus nonengaged participant characteristics can be found in table 1. instruments and assessment items socio-demographics and academic background. socio-demographic and academic variables included gender, age, nationality, religion, high-school location, type of high-school diploma, language spoken while socializing (amount of arabic versus english) and current grade point average (g.p.a.) on a 4-point scale. religiosity was measured by a single item asking participants to rate how religious they were on a scale from 1 to 10. this type of single-item scale has shown good reliability and validity for arab samples, including significant correlations with full-length religiosity scales (abdel-khalek, 2007). the high-school location item had four choices: 1) greater cairo, 2) alexandria, 3) another governorate in egypt and 4) another country. type of high-school diploma included seven choices: american high-school diploma, egyptian public education system ("thanaweya amma"), french baccalaureate, german abitur, igcse/gcse/gce (british educational system) and international baccalaureate. overall gpa was left open-ended. the language spoken while socializing item asked "what language do you mostly use while socializing?" and gave participants four options: 1) arabic, 2) english, 3) both arabic and english equally and 4) other. english is a second language in egypt and is spoken with variable fluency among most schooleducated egyptians. this question is important because it can be a very good indicator of type and/or quality of education, and, as a result, socio-economic status within egyptian society. table 1. characteristics of civically engaged and non engaged socio-demographics % civically engaged (n = 99) % non civically engaged (n = 419) % total participants (n = 518) total participants 19.1 80.9 gender female 78.8 65.0 67.6 male 21.2 35.0 32.4 nationality egyptian 84.2 65.7 69.2 egyptian – dual or triple nationality a 7.4 11.4 11.5 non-egyptian b 8.4 22.9 19.3 religion muslim 88.8 72.8 75.8 christian 6.1 19.5 17.0 jewish 1.0 0.2 0.4 atheist or agnostic 3.1 7.0 6.2 other 1.0 0.5 0.6 age: mean (sd) 20.48 (2.59) 22.12 (3.24) 21.81 (5.65) high-school location cairo 60.6 65.7 64.7 alexandria 5.1 2.6 3.1 another governorate in egypt 19.2 5.5 8.1 another country 15.2 26.1 24.0 high-school diploma type american highschool diploma 18.8 35.9 32.6 egyptian public education system 44.8 30.9 33.6 french baccalaureate 2.1 1.7 1.8 german abitur 1.0 3.0 2.6 igcse/gcse/g ce 29.2 24.5 25.4 international baccalaureate 4.2 4.0 4.0 language spoken while socializing arabic 42.9 33.2 35 english 13.3 27.6 24.9 both arabic and english equally 43.9 38.5 39.5 other 0.0 0.7 0.6 gpa: mean (sd) 3.34 (0.47) 3.23 (0.59) 3.26 (0.57) a these egyptian participants also had a second or third nationality, typically from usa, european nations, or arab nations. b non-egyptian participants had nationalities primarily in north america, europe, and arab nations. affiliation with university. the organizational identification questionnaire (oiq; cheney, 1982) was used to measure students’ sense of connection to the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   university. the scale consists of 25 items that assesses three components of organizational affiliation: a) sense of solidarity, emotional attachment, and pride; b) loyalty and support for the organization’s mission, and c) perceived similarity and shared characteristics with the values and goals of people in the organization. because the scale was developed for organizational settings, some items were modified to fit an academic setting. for example, the item “i am glad i chose to work for (company name) rather than another company” was modified to “i am glad i chose to study at (university name) rather than another university.” items were rated on a 5-point likert scale with a total possible score range of 25-125. high scores indicated a higher sense of pride and commitment to the university. cronbach’s alpha for this study was .89. civic responsibility. the self-efficacy toward service scale (setss; weber, weber, sleeper, & schneider, 2004) was used to determine attitudes towards civic responsibility and civic self-efficacy. this scale consists of 11 items and it assesses whether participants believe they should and can impact their community. a high score indicates that they believe this to be true. items were rated on a 5-point likert scale with a total possible score range of 11-55. an example item is: “i should volunteer my time to support my community.” cronbach’s alpha for this study was .92. psychological well-being. self-reported levels of depression, anxiety and stress were measured using the 21-item short version of the depression anxiety stress scales, which was developed for non-clinical samples (dass 21; lovibond & lovibond, 1995). this measure has been validated for use with arab populations (taouk, lovibond, & laube, 2001). participants rated how much statements applied to them over the past week with 0 = “did not apply to me at all” to 3 = “applied to me very much, or most of the time.” these included statements such as “i felt that i had nothing to look forward to,” “i felt i was close to panic,” and “i tended to over-react to situations.” there are three subscales (depression, anxiety and stress) with 7 items per subscale. each subscale is scored separately by adding up its items and multiplying by 2. the total possible score range for each subscale is 0-42. cronbach’s alpha for the subscales were: depression = .86, anxiety = .83, and stress = .87. procedures data was collected from a diverse student body including international students and egyptians who have lived in other countries. the primary language of instruction at the university is english. the campus has a student body of approximately 5,500 degree seeking students. convenience sampling was used to target undergraduate and graduate students at the university. a web-based informed consent form and questionnaire packet written in english was posted online and its paper-based equivalent was distributed on campus. to encourage students to complete the web-based version, announcements were posted on university student listservs. they were also sent to all university faculty to encourage their students to complete the study, and a facebook advertisement was purchased that targeted members of the university’s network (i.e., anyone who mentioned the university in their educational profile). to identify students who were engaged in voluntary community service, respondents were asked to select the different types of campus clubs and organizations (if any) they had membership in. this included: student union, academic, cultural, athletic, geographical/ethnic, conferences and community service clubs. those who selected membership in “community outreach and community service” clubs were classified for the purpose of this study as being civically engaged. another question on the survey asked students to estimate the number of hours per month that they engaged in community outreach or service outside of the university, whether through these clubs or other extra-curricular activities unaffiliated with the university. the mean score for those who were members of community service clubs was 15.7 hours monthly, whereas students who were not members of such clubs reported significantly less involvement in community work, at 4.7 hours monthly [t (507) = -6.47, p < .001]. this question validated the use of selfreported community service club membership as a way to distinguish between those who were and were not engaged in community service, and further indicated that the main method of voluntary community engagement for students was through on-campus community service clubs. there were 14 community service clubs at the time of this study, initiated and maintained by students. apart from receiving university funding, these clubs operate relatively independently of the university faculty, staff and administration. each club establishes its own leadership board and recruits members. each of the clubs targets a certain community or group of people in need, such as people living in poor neighborhoods and slum areas, children with disabilities, cancer patients, orphans, the elderly or refugees. the majority of the clubs are involved in community development, particularly economic and educational development such as offering micro-loans and teaching literacy and computer skills for vocational enhancement. another type of activity conducted by some clubs is to host events for the people they serve, such as funding global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   wedding ceremonies for orphans and designing celebratory events for cancer patients and the elderly. these clubs also raise funds and collect material donations for those in more urgent need. most of the clubs work in close contact with established nongovernmental organizations (ngo’s) in egypt, providing these organizations with active, motivated and committed volunteers. results characteristics of student volunteers chi square analyses were conducted to identify characteristics of community service volunteers. there was a higher proportion of women than men among student volunteers [ χ2 (1)= 6.96, p = 0.008]. egyptian nationals were more likely to be civically engaged than students with a dual nationality or non-egyptians [ χ2 (2) = 14.628, p = 0.001]. students involved in community service were also more likely to be muslim than other religions [ χ2 (1) = 11.08, p = 0.001]. although the largest portion of both student volunteers (60.6%) and non volunteers (65.7%) graduated from a high-school located in cairo, volunteers were more likely to have completed high-school in rural governorates (19.2%) than non volunteers (5.5%) [ χ2 (2)= 22.77, p< 0.001]. further, student volunteers were more likely to hold a high-school degree from the egyptian public school system compared to other highschool degree programs [ χ2 (2)= 11.58, p = 0.003]. finally, students who were civically engaged were more likely to speak mostly arabic or both arabic and english than mostly english [ χ2 (2) = 9.21, p = 0.003]. a two-tailed independent samples t-test found civically engaged students to be more religious than noncivically engaged [ t (508) = 4.21, p < .001]. another two-tailed independent samples t-test showed that civically engaged students did not differ from non engaged with respect to self reported grade point average (g.p.a.). table 2. results for independent samples t-tests civically engaged non civically engaged t-test variable m sd m sd t df religiosity 6.53 1.65 5.53 2.19 4.21** 508 academic achievement 3.34 0.47 3.24 0.59 1.605 501 depression 0.87 0.74 0.83 0.72 0.491 516 anxiety 0.91 0.65 0.72 0.69 2.43* 516 stress 1.34 0.74 1.18 0.79 1.890 516 *p < .05, **p < .01. relationship between civic engagement and psychological well-being two-tailed independent samples t-tests were used to compare the psychological well-being of volunteers versus non-volunteers. students who were civically engaged reported significantly higher levels of anxiety [ t (516) = 2.43, p = .02] compared to students who were not civically engaged. volunteers and non-volunteers did not differ in levels of depression or stress. predictors of voluntary civic engagement in an exploratory logistic regression analysis, we examined the combined contribution of gender, g.p.a., religiosity, sense of affiliation to the university, and civic responsibility on student civic engagement. as gender and g.p.a. did not contribute significantly to the model, they were excluded from the final model. significant independent predictors were religiosity [exp (b) = 1.25, b = .22, wald χ2 (1) = 10.88, p = .001], affiliation to the university [exp (b) = 2.16, b = .77, wald χ2 (1) = 12.07, p = .001], and civic responsibility [exp (b) = 2.76, b = 1.02, wald χ2 (1) = 24.05, p < .001]. the final three predictor model [ χ2 = 64.06 (3), p < .001] accounted for 19% of the variance in student civic engagement. table 3. logistic regression predictors of civic engagement variable β se wald or 95% ci p religiosity 0.22 0.066 10.88 1.25 1.093-1.418 0.001 university affiliation 0.77 0.221 12.07 2.16 1.398-3.326 0.001 civic responsibility 1.02 0.207 24.05 2.76 1.841-4.147 < .001 note. r2 = .189 discussion the purpose of this study was to examine the characteristics and predictors of students who chose to engage in voluntary community service at a private english-language liberal arts university in cairo, egypt. this study contributes to the literature in three main ways. first, it is one of the first studies examining the profile, predictors and impacts of volunteering to come out of the middle east and thus provides a new cultural perspective to the more western-dominated literature. second, it considers the influence of sense of affiliation with the nation/society, as well as the university, on civic engagement, which has not yet been adequately investigated. third, the study examines the effects of volunteering on psychological well-being in a younger generation, which is lacking in the literature. characteristics and predictors of voluntary community service similar to research conducted in the u.s. (e.g., astin & sax 1998), female gender and higher religiosity were associated with civic engagement. our results indicate that these predictors for student volunteerism may be consistent across both north american and egyptian cultures. as expected, higher levels of self-reported civic responsibility served as a significant predictor of global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   voluntary civic engagement. however, in contrast to studies in the u.s. (e.g., primavera, 1999; serow & dreyden, 1990), academic achievement, as measured by self-reported g.p.a., did not differ between student volunteers and non-volunteers. further research is needed to examine the linkages between academic performance and student activities, particularly with respect to voluntary community service. attachment to nation and society the findings lead us to draw the conclusion that students who choose to engage in voluntary community service tend to be more deeply rooted in traditional egyptian culture and society. compared to students who were not civically engaged, those who were members of community service clubs were more likely to be of egyptian nationality and to be of the majority muslim faith. they were more likely to have attended high-school in a rural or less affluent region of egypt and to have studied under the egyptian public education system. furthermore, they were more likely to report higher religiosity and to speak mostly arabic when socializing. it has been previously reported that egyptian youth from rural areas are more likely to volunteer than youth from urban areas (information and decision support center, 2010). the finding that civically engaged participants were more likely to have attended highschool in rural and less affluent regions of egypt suggests that volunteers have stronger ties to what it means to be “egyptian.” people living in these areas are often more conservative in cultural practices and tend to idealize egyptian customs and traditions. in contrast, egyptians living in the more affluent, urban cities such as cairo and alexandria – and who come from higher income families – are more likely to embrace and associate themselves with international culture, including following western trends in education, language, customs, ideology, fashion and entertainment. a related finding was that civically engaged students were more likely to have studied in the egyptian public education system, as opposed to the private foreign/international schools that have gained popularity in recent years. this finding augments the "egyptianized" profile we found among voluntary civic engagers. it should be noted that only about 30% of the student body at the university where this study was conducted comes from the egyptian education system. the majority of the students completed high-schools following western education systems especially the american diploma and british systems. at the university where this study was administered some of the students from rural governorates receive financial scholarships based on academic merit or financial need, and most of them are educated in the egyptian public school system. thus, our results suggest that students involved in voluntary service tend to be less privileged, which contrasts with literature from the u.s. (marks & jones, 2004; serow & dreyden, 1990). in addition, these results are especially interesting because community service is not a traditional component of the egyptian public education system or the general egyptian youth culture (population council, 2011). yet these students were more likely to volunteer than egyptian students who completed high-schools in other countries or at foreign-language schools located in cairo that offer international certificates (e.g., american diploma, international baccalaureate) in which community service is an integral component of the curriculum. this suggests that cultural ties and ongoing integration in the local society may be more predictive of continued civic engagement than exposure to formal instruction in civic engagement per se. additionally, it was not surprising to find that student volunteers had higher scores of religiosity and were more likely to be of muslim faith. this higher level of religiosity relates to greater integration in egyptian society because religion is very highly regarded in egypt, especially by those living in rural or less affluent urban areas. islam is the religion of the majority and it is deeply embedded in egyptian culture. it is also integrated in the egyptian education system both formally through an established religion class and informally through religious teachers and administrators. the connection between religiosity and community service most likely stems from the concept of sadaqa ("voluntary charity" in english) which is required and encouraged in the qur'an. the influence of islamic ideals on egyptian culture, and the tendency for the students in our study who are civically engaged to be muslim and highly religious, is another indication that these volunteers fit a certain egyptianized profile. lastly, participants who were civically engaged were more likely to choose "arabic" on the item in our questionnaire that asked what language they spoke socially. in egypt, english is the second language and is a mandatory subject in almost all schools grades k through 12. in some schools the main subjects, including mathematics, science, history etc. are taught in english. this translates into some egyptians speaking english while socializing. speaking only english during class time is required at most private international schools located in egypt. because tuition at these types of schools is high, students who attend these private schools tend to come from higher income families and, therefore, speaking mostly or only english global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   while socializing can be an indication of affluence and a proxy for international private school education. speaking english is also considered to be trendy by youth from a higher socio-economic status (ses). although the private university where this study was conducted draws most of its student body from the socio-economically elite – the majority of whom are english speakers who studied at international schools – students in our sample who engaged in community service reported preference for the arabic language when socializing. this again contributes to the profile of civic engagers coming from a more “egyptianized” background. sense of connection to university in addition to attachment to the larger egyptian culture, this study also explored attachment to the university as a potential factor associated with voluntary community service. affiliation with the university, which was indeed a significant predictor of student volunteerism in this study, may be interpreted as a form of place attachment. low (1992, p. 165) defines place attachment as "an individual's cognitive or emotional connection to a particular setting or milieu." it is also seen as “affective ties with the material environment (including) fondness for place because it evokes pride” (tuan, 1974, p. 93). having university pride and attachment may enhance motivation to take part in campus activities and be part of a team under the university name. then, the choice to become a member of a campus community service club as opposed to an athletic or academic club is likely due to the specific student characteristics discussed in this manuscript. the most attractive extra-curricular choice to an “egyptianized” student may be a club that fulfills the religious ideals of helping people in need while being integrated in the local community and actively generating real social change. however, further research would be needed to explore if attachment and sense of community on campus differentially impacts different types of student activities. at the university where this study was administered it was found that a high number of students (19.1%) were members of campus community service clubs. unfortunately, organized, funded community service opportunities in the country are scarce; although the number of ngo's has risen slightly in this past decade it is still far below international averages (world bank, 2007). this may be one explanation why a mere 2.3% of young people volunteer in egypt (population council, 2011). a comparatively higher percentage of students volunteer at the university where this research was carried out probably not because egyptian youth outside the university are disinterested or unmotivated, but perhaps due to the unavailability and/or unawareness of volunteer opportunities. in contrast to most universities in egypt, this particular university is one that fosters a volunteering attitude by encouraging involvement in and accommodating community service clubs and activities. this supportive environment allows these community service clubs to thrive on campus, increasing awareness of social issues and working to improve the circumstances of those in need. psychological well-being the final aim of this study was to explore the link between civic engagement and psychological wellbeing, specifically less depression, anxiety and stress, in younger volunteers. there was no significant difference in levels of depression between student volunteers and non-volunteers. further research on this age group needs to be conducted in order to confirm these results and also to understand why younger volunteers do not receive this particular benefit. research has considered the concept of social integration brought about by community service as an explanation for lower depression levels in older volunteers (e.g. musick & wilson, 2003; piliavin & siegel, 2007). if this is indeed the case, one possibility is that contrary to older adults and the elderly, youth have more opportunities and other outlets where they can establish social connections that will give them sufficient social support. the findings in this study moreover indicated that civically engaged students reported higher levels of anxiety, but not stress, compared to students who were not involved in voluntary community service. it is worth noting that a large portion of data for this study was collected during the final weeks of the semester and final examination period. it is possible that volunteers, who are involved with time-consuming projects during the semester, might face increased anxiety during examination periods and greater challenge balancing academic success with extracurricular service. this is especially because volunteers in the present study were involved in timeintensive service including initiating, directing, and managing all aspects of their community service organizations from the ground up. this is different from the north-american context in which opportunities for service tend to be institutionalized over time, established formally by the university, or practiced at already-existing youth centers and educational organizations. however, further research is encouraged to explore the relationship between anxiety and stress with voluntary service. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9   strengths and limitations intensive recruitment methods in this study were successful in producing a large sample, and the sample approximated the religious and national composition of the overall university student body. women were overrepresented in the sample compared to the actual percentage of female students at the university (53%). however, a higher response rate from women is not unusual in survey research (wiseman, 2009). although the study was generally representative of the students attending this particular university, it is in no way representative of the entire egyptian student population. being a private university, the majority of students are of a higher ses which is not the case at other egyptian public universities. furthermore, this university caters to the transnational culture, and consequently has a higher number of international students and egyptian students who lived in other countries or attended foreign-language schools than one would find at egyptian public universities. the results in this study are therefore comparable to the many other transnational private universities located in egypt and the middle east but not the public, governmental universities. the diversity of cultural and educational backgrounds of the respondents allowed us to explore factors that would not have been possible at universities with more homogenous student populations. for example, we were able to examine links between civic engagement and location of high-school, type of highschool education, and language spoken. however, further investigations, specifically at public universities and also across different types of universities, are needed to confirm our results. also, this study used convenience sampling; future studies should aim at using probability sampling to increase representativeness of the student population. implications and future research with the social and economic challenges facing egypt and the middle eastern region today, promoting social and community development through community service on a national scale can have a significant impact. this study identified a profile of the type of university student who is more likely to choose to volunteer in extra-curricular community service. this information can be useful to community practitioners and ngo’s that are seeking to recruit students as volunteers and university alumni as employed staff. many ngo’s working in the region are multinational organizations that tend to seek volunteers and staff from the english-speaking, foreign-educated, socioeconomically elite; results from this study indicate that targeting those from more culturally traditional and less privileged backgrounds might be a more effective approach. at the same time, given the salutary effects of civic engagement on youth development, it will be important to find ways to encourage other students to engage in service. further investigations should explore the reasons why students who were educated in foreignlanguage schools were not as likely to be civically engaged. considering that community service requirements are often interwoven in the curriculums and cultures of schools following the western education systems, it is surprising that graduates from such schools were not as involved in service after entering university. based on self-reported hours of engagement in community service, it did not appear that these students were significantly engaged in alternative forms of community service activities. further research is needed to confirm the results of this study at other transnational universities, egyptian public universities, and other universities in the region. unfortunately, structured youth volunteer opportunities are not common outside of the university environment, and public university missions and policies do not endorse community service. egyptian public universities often have student populations in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. therefore they do not have the financial capacity to support formal oncampus clubs and service-learning is rarely integrated in coursework. efforts should be made to facilitate volunteer opportunities at egyptian universities; perhaps nonprofit organizations and groups can themselves take the initiative to set up recruitment tables on campuses and to offer training in community practice skills. it would be useful to investigate egyptian university students’ intention to participate if community service opportunities were made available through the university. if the relationship between intention to volunteer and the “egyptianized” profile found in this study was confirmed at public universities, the potential for social change on a national scale would be momentous. this is because the majority of students studying at public universities fit the profile discussed in this paper. the percentage of students at public universities who would volunteer, if given the chance, would thus be expected to greatly surpass the 19% at the private university where this study was conducted. on a regional scale, the results of this study would interest the many foreign and international private universities throughout egypt and the middle east that could benefit from conducting similar research and, if results are consistent, introducing efforts to target the local students for recruitment to community practice. globally, it would be interesting to see if specific profiles such as the one found in this study exist in other countries or geographical areas, and to determine global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  10   which intrinsic and extrinsic motivators for civic engagement appear to be cross-cultural. in general, targeting students with known characteristics for recruitment is a powerful tool that community practitioners can make more use of. it can provide them with committed volunteer workers who do not drain monetary resources that could otherwise be used to enhance the lives of the people they cater to. the benefits of this relationship are reciprocal as community practitioners gain motivated individuals who are eager and capable of creating social change while volunteers obtain the many positive individual and interpersonal outcomes of engaging in community service. references abdel-khalek, a. m. 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(2003). volunteering and depression: the role of psychological and social resources in different age groups. social science and medicine, 56, 259-269. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  11   national commission on service-learning (2002). commission report: learning in deed. battle creek, mi: w. k. kellogg foundation. retrieved september, 2012, from http://servicelearningcommission.org/slcommission/re portopt.html naughton, s. (2000). youth and communities helping each other: community-based organizations using servicelearning as a strategy during out-of-school time. washington, dc: corporation for national service. retrieved from: http://www.nationalserviceresources.org/files/r1803youth-and-communities-helping-each-other.pdf piliavin, j.a., & siegel, e. 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(1998). the beneficial effects of volunteering for older volunteers and the people they serve: a metaanalysis. international journal of aging and human development, 47, 69-79. wiseman, f. (2009). the effects of the initial mode of contact on the response rate and data quality in an internet-based college satisfaction survey. methodological innovations online, 4(2), 12-20. world bank (2007), mapping of organizations working with and for youth in egypt. world bank capacity building and partnership program: cairo, egypt. retrieved from http://siteresources.worldbank.org/integypt/resour ces/youth_report.pdf yates, m., & youniss, j. (1996). a developmental perspective on community service in adolescence. social development, 5, 85–111. undergraduate community psychology research practice: the story of the community narrative research project at rhodes college elizabeth thomas, marsha d. walton, anna manoogian, anna baker-olson, bianca branch, adele malpert, karina henderson, and remi parker1 keywords: undergraduate research, community of practice, narrative author biographies: elizabeth thomas, is associate professor of psychology and plough chair of urban studies at rhodes college. she teaches undergraduate courses in community psychology, research methods, and urban studies, and she supervises students in engaged learning and research from introductory courses to senior capstones. her research with undergraduate students focuses on learning and civic engagement, the role of arts in community building, and participatory strategies for research and action. she is a co-author of the textbook, community psychology: linking individual and communities, currently in revision for a fourth edition. working in communities of practice with students and colleagues, she aims to build institutional capacity for engaged learning and scholarship as part of a liberal arts education. marsha walton, professor of psychology and blount chair of social sciences at rhodes college, where she teaches courses in developmental psychology, gender and sexuality studies, and qualitative/observational methodologies. in collaboration with undergraduate students and faculty colleagues, her research has examined personal narratives told or written by preschoolers, elementary and middle-school children, and college students. she is a co-author, with alice davidson, of conflict narratives in middle childhood: the social, emotional, and moral significance of story sharing. she seeks to understand the communicative practices by which individuals negotiate with others to make their 1 rhodes college global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 experiences meaningful in a cultural community. anna manoogian, j.d. candidate at boston university school of law. anna recently graduated from rhodes college in memphis, tennessee where she earned a b.a. in psychology and participated on the community narrative research team from 2016-2018. anna baker-olson, fourth-year undergraduate student at rhodes college. she will graduate in the spring of 2019 with a b.a. in psychology and political science, in addition to a minor in gender and sexuality studies. she has been a member of the community narrative research team for three years and is currently conducting honors research using this data in order to examine bonner students’ navigation of personal and societal boundaries during their community engagement. bianca branch, native memphian and senior at rhodes college majoring in psychology. she became a member of the community narrative research team as part of summer fellowship in 2017 and has since presented alongside her team at the 2017 ame conference in st. louis and in a community psychology webinar focused on undergraduate competences and practices. after graduation, bianca is considering a career in clinical counseling. adele v. malpert, doctoral student in community research and action at vanderbilt university peabody college specializing in education and youth development. prior to her graduate studies, adele earned a b.a. with honors (2015) in psychology from rhodes college. adele’s research centers on promoting positive youth development and youth voice through out-of-school time programming and youth participatory action research. additional research interests include: youth narrative and storytelling, attendance and engagement, community engagement, youth academic and professional development, and evaluation. karina henderson, alum of rhodes college, class of 2018. at rhodes she studied english literature and creative writing, as well as anthropology and sociology. additionally, karina served as a bonner scholar during her four years at rhodes. as a bonner scholar, karina worked with the refugee empowerment program and served as a rhodes bonner scholar intern her senior year. through the community narratives research project (cnrp), karina focused on understanding the relationships between bonner scholars and their mentors and supervisors. her involvement with the cnrp strengthened her passion for service learning and her work as a bonner scholar. karina now attends northwestern university, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 and is working towards receiving a master's degree in higher education administration and policy. remi parker, junior psychology major and religious studies minor on the premedicine track at rhodes college, memphis, tn. parker is also a bonner scholar recipient, which has enabled her to complete 280 hours of service per academic year, as well as two summers of service dedicated to her academic and personal interests, such as women’s reproductive health. through her service she has had the opportunity to write grants, act as a patient advocate and educator, work under both midwives and obgyns, and train as a birthing doula. these experiences as a bonner scholar guide parker in her contributions to the community narratives research team. recommended citation: thomas, e., walton, m. d., manoogian, a., barker-olson, a., branch, b., malpert, a., henderson, k. & parker, r. (2019). undergraduate community psychology research practice: the story of the community narrative research project at rhodes college. global journal of community psychology practice, 10(1), 1 22. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://gjcpp.org/). correspondence author: elizabeth thomas, ph.d., rhodes college, memphis, tn, 38112, usa. contact: thomase@rhodes.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 undergraduate community psychology research practice: the story of the community narrative research project at rhodes college abstract the community narrative research project (cnrp) is an undergraduate action research initiative focused on undergraduate students’ experiences of community engagement over time. at the center of the project is the collection and analysis of narratives written by bonner scholars at rhodes college over their four years working in memphis communities as part of their scholarship. this paper describes the participatory community research model that has evolved in the cnrp, including the voices of undergraduate student leaders in the bonner scholars program and undergraduate researchers in developmental and community psychology. we focus on the community of practice that has emerged in our team, and how this community grounds our interpretive and longitudinal analysis of the narratives we examine. our discussion of the data analysis process, including students’ engagement with coding and reliability, illustrates the methodological repertoire that undergraduates develop in a community of practice and that is scaffolded by more experienced faculty and senior student researchers. undergraduate students build the community psychology research and practice competencies that are often understood to be part of graduate student development. we are able to ask creative research questions informed by our unique and shared experiences, as well as our deep understanding of the data. we feature individual accounts by each of the six student authors to illustrate our research practice and share the experiences of team members. we offer practices that may be adapted to other undergraduate research contexts, and we discuss challenges and supports needed to sustain participatory action research with undergraduate students. over the last decade, community psychologists have elaborated an understanding of research and practice competencies for our field, as well as the types of academic training and field experiences students need to develop these competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012; haber et al., 2017). these conversations have largely focused on graduate education, describing effective models and generating ideas for building capacity within masters and doctoral programs (faust, haber, christens, & legler, 2017). here, in the story of the community narrative research project told collectively by undergraduate students and faculty on our team – and in individual accounts by team members – we extend this discussion to the development of research and practice skills in community psychology at the undergraduate level. we begin with a brief review of recent conversations among community psychologists that support our efforts to include undergraduate students as collaborators in a research project. following this, we describe how our research has evolved over five years, focusing on six features of our practice, and explaining how each of these has been enhanced by the inclusion of undergraduates on our research http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 team. for each of these features of the research, we include a personal account of one of our co-authors, showing how participation on the team has facilitated their own professional and personal development. we conclude with a discussion of challenges and supports needed to sustain participatory action research with undergraduate students. extending community psychology practice: undergraduate research opportunities the field of community psychology has much to gain from an increased focus on undergraduate research opportunities. research on undergraduate learning suggests that college students from many backgrounds are capable of and benefit from experiential learning in high-impact practices, including undergraduate research and capstone projects (kuh, schneider, & association of american colleges and universities, 2008). these experiential learning experiences may be supported and strengthened through mentoring and research collaborations. an analysis of a program whose strategy included efforts for cross-collaboration between academic departments and research teams and brought together faculty, undergraduate, and graduate students revealed positive outcomes for all involved (george, wood-kanupka, & oriel, 2017). for the undergraduate researchers specifically, their reflections suggest that this collaborative research opportunity led to an increase in faculty interactions as well as an increased interest and sense of competency in their academic field (george et al., 2017). despite accumulating evidence for beneficial effects, the mentoring relationships between faculty and undergraduate students that may promote undergraduate research opportunities face institutional barriers and are often undervalued. in many academic contexts, faculty mentorship of undergraduate students is considered an extra-role behavior that is often left out in terms of institutional recognition (deangelo, mason, & winters, 2016). even when undergraduate research mentoring is valued, as in the liberal arts college, models of undergraduate research in psychology and related fields may be quite narrow, excluding collaborative, interdisciplinary, and actionoriented research. engaged learning and scholarship with undergraduate students challenges norms at many levels within the academy, and excellence in this area is not formally recognized by our field of community psychology. community psychologists have increasingly recognized the need for greater attention to work with undergraduates in our field (jimenez, sanchez, mcmahon, & viola, 2016). more undergraduate students engaging with community psychology may strengthen the field as they move into graduate work in community psychology and allied fields. a greater number of those undergraduate students may develop and share skills, perspectives, and dispositions that influence a range of settings and the broader practices of democracy and civic engagement. most psychology departments do not offer undergraduate courses in community psychology, and the few who do offer only a single elective course (mcmahon, jimenez, bond, wolfe, & ratcliffe, 2015). and even with the call for a greater focus on undergraduate community psychology, the emphasis has been almost exclusively on strengthening the stand alone introductory community psychology course. we have much to learn from this focus on the introductory course, and from those who have outlined best practices in service learning and civic engagement as part of the community psychology course (bringle, reeb, brown, & ruiz, 2016). this important work has brought attention to ethical challenges we face as undergraduate teachers working for a socially just community psychology pedagogy http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 (lichty & palamaro-munsell, 2017). dilemmas faced by teachers and students around issues of power dynamics, privilege, and inclusion are ones that extend well beyond the introductory community psychology course and remind us that collaborative research at the undergraduate level is always about collaborative teaching and learning for all involved. as important as these discussions are, we believe that an exclusive focus on a single undergraduate course limits our potential for bringing committed new scholars into the field and for integrating community psychology ideals more fully with the rest of our discipline. we see the undergraduate community psychology research team as a way to deepen the undergraduate experience of community psychology beyond a single course to a multi-semester experience – one that allows us to more fully enact our philosophy of critical and experiential education and to experience an interdisciplinary community of engaged scholars made up of students, staff, and faculty. we also see this as a way to engage the larger conversation about research and practice competencies in our field and to expand the reach of community psychology approaches across sectors. for these reasons, we hope to contribute to a discussion of undergraduate community psychology practice by examining our multiyear undergraduate action research project at rhodes college, a national liberal arts college located in memphis, tn, usa. rhodes is largely residential, with 75% of its 2000 students living on campus. the majority of students are traditional-aged college students, and approximately 30% are students of color. the campus is known for its collegiate gothic stone buildings and its designation as an urban arboretum. it is located in the heart of the city of memphis across from a large urban park and just 10 minutes from downtown and the mississippi river. rhodes college has the carnegie community engagement designation, and many of our students are engaged in community service. while we are known for our service, we are still working to strengthen our models of community engagement and to better integrate engaged learning and scholarship with our academic program. the community narrative research project at rhodes college the community narrative research project (cnrp) is an action research initiative focused on undergraduate students’ experiences of community engagement over time. cnrp goals include contributing to scholarship in community psychology and community engagement, as well as advancing organizational learning and institutional change to better support campus community partnerships in our local context. at the center of the project is the collection and analysis of narratives written by bonner scholars at rhodes college over their four years spent working in memphis communities as part of their college scholarship fund. the bonner scholars program aims to provide college access to students with a passion for service and social justice by providing tuition scholarships. rhodes is part of a national network of 65 colleges and universities that are supported by the bonner foundation. the rhodes bonner program admits fifteen students each year; 85% of each class must have need for financial aid, as determined by an estimated family contribution at or below $6,000, and the number of students of color in each bonner class is typically twice that of the rhodes class as a whole. bonner scholars have a service requirement of 10 hours per week during the school year and two full summers of service. many scholars develop long term relationships and take on leadership roles through sustained engagement with community partners. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 we have chosen a narrative approach to our research with the bonner scholars, as it enables authors to tell their own stories and position themselves within relationships and communities. twice a year at bonner retreats, we have asked students to write and share narratives in response to prompts designed to elicit meaningful reflection. in the fall, we asked scholars to “please write about a situation related to your community service that felt particularly meaningful to you,” and in the spring, to “please write about a situation that felt particularly awkward and you were not sure what to do.” after four years of data collection in our crosssequential study, we have collected 406 stories from 123 bonner scholars. a. the weekly team meeting: building a community of practice our research team, which includes bonner scholars, faculty, and student researchers from several departments and programs at rhodes, works as a community of practice that meets one hour weekly for tea and roundtable discussions. lave and wenger (1991) first proposed the concept of communities of practice in relation to their situated learning theory, describing them as "groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise by interacting on an ongoing basis" (wenger, mcdermott, & snyder, 2002, p. 4). brought together by our interest in the bonner experience, as well as narrative and participatory action research, we routinely come together in community. shared rituals, including weekly check-ins and drinking tea together, provide a ground from which learners become teachers and shared expertise grows. a typical cnrp team meeting begins with each team member providing a brief personal update, often focused on challenges and accomplishments as well as general health and well-being. we move to a review of ongoing work and upcoming deadlines to ensure that we have a collective sense of priorities and goals for the team. for example, we may spend a few moments preparing a time line for submitting a conference abstract or developing an outline of responsibilities for a campus presentation. then we spend at least half of the meeting time discussing our understandings of the stories themselves and our goals for narrative analysis. we assign a designated note taker for all meetings and keep minutes in a shared secure folder. our discussion of the stories in team meetings typically focuses on one of the two to three discrete data analysis projects in process at that time. in 2018-2019, for example, one project examines how students narrate boundary crossings and a second project is coding narrative descriptions of collaborative agency. we are also currently categorizing stories by service site to examine experiences across community settings. these discrete projects develop out of the interests of individual team members. we propose potential research questions that emerge through individual close reading and analysis of the stories. the questions are then refined in our community of practice as multiple team members provide interpretations of the same stories, drawing on a variety of theoretical backgrounds and experiences. last year, for example, we became aware that members of the team were employing varied definitions of ‘power’ in their analysis of stories. we decided to read more about different theories of power, each of us in our own discipline, and come back to the team with a report about how power was conceptualized. an english major, a political science major, an economics major, an educational studies major, and a psychology major returned to the table prepared to explore how previous work on power in their own discipline might contribute to our http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 understanding of student accounts of their community service work. each of us found our own thinking broadened or nuanced by this discussion. for example, the developmental psychologist on the team, previously inclined to look for changes over time in expressions of self-efficacy and features of authorial voice, became much more focused on structural inequalities. having students read and explain the theories from within their discipline shows not only a respect for the student as a competent scholar within their field, but also an openness to the prospect of our project being changed by another discipline and by multiple forms of expertise. drawing on diverse knowledges and expertise, we identify key themes and ask questions of our narrative data. these are foundational research competencies that we hone as a team on a weekly basis (dalton & wolfe, 2012). remi’s account below illustrates this process of getting to know the stories, asking key questions of the data, and becoming a member of the community of practice through participation in weekly team meetings. becoming a member of the cnrp team: experience of a first-year team member and bonner scholar. as i (remi) first began to read through the narratives in my first semester as a member of the team, i truly began to recognize and appreciate the power of narrative, not only for understanding personal moral development and growth, but also issues of agency and power dynamics. during our team meetings, we typically discuss these elements in the narratives we have reviewed and collaborate on the interpretation of them and plan for future angles to explore. in my first meeting, i remember how fascinating it was to watch the upperclass bonner student leaders discuss with dr. thomas and dr. walton the progression of the research and future endeavors, with their contributions being truly valued by the professors. the openness and cooperation on the team created an inviting and respectful atmosphere for any ideas, which prompted me to engage more and provide insight from my personal bonner experience. as a bonner scholar myself, i am able to empathize with the authors’ sentiments and conflicts at their sites, as i have encountered similar incidents and struggles myself. to read that other bonners, at other service sites and in different academic classes, have felt similar emotions and have navigated comparable experiences evokes a communal spirit; it is consoling and encouraging to become aware of the community of service learners that can understand and guide me. this realization has led me to develop a research interest in exploring the community building powers of narratives. i am particularly drawn to analyzing how the language of narratives fosters this communal spirit. b. sharing power and expertise: sustaining a community of practice individual team members quickly move from an initial reading of a subset of narratives and a role on the periphery to become confident, contributing members of the community of practice over time. they shift roles by asking their own questions of the stories and creating meaning together with other more experienced members of the team. typically, as shown in appendix a, new student researchers are recruited in the spring and join the team at the beginning of the next school year. orientation to the team includes training in research ethics, orientation to qualitative data analysis software, and discussions of research epistemology and methodology. most student members of the team, by the end of a first semester of participation, begin to identify a specific focus and work to formulate a research question that can guide http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 their work in the upcoming semesters. at times, the entire team will turn our attention to one of these questions, and at other times pairs of students will work with slightly different questions. in their senior year, students often complete a senior seminar paper or honors thesis based on their multisemester research experience. while the team is made up of students and faculty, this division is not often a salient feature of our conversations, as each member of the team is given the same responsibilities and respect as every other member. by creating the space for collaborative work and power-sharing, professors engage in mentoring and facilitate collaboration between team members and partners. additionally, students take on a mentoring role. the emphasis on mentoring relationships between new sophomores joining the team and experienced senior team members provides a sense of continuity as the overall direction of the research project adapts to the ever-shifting makeup of the team. individual student projects are often influenced by earlier student projects. in sustaining a community of practice across multiple semesters, we are intentional about fostering community leadership and mentoring, a community psychology practice competency (dalton & wolfe, 2012). several student researchers on the team also participate in a research practicum in the psychology department, which brings together students from a variety of faculty labs and enables the students to receive academic credit for their undergraduate research. often, student researchers from the cnrp represent the only projects that use qualitative, longitudinal, and interdisciplinary methods in the psychology department. our ongoing work as a community of practice has challenged the norms for the department and the assumptions of several faculty in the department. it has been difficult at time to explain our work, but overall, we believe our sustained community of practice has led to greater support and understanding for the role of narrative, qualitative, and participatory research within the psychology department. the cnrp community of practice has been an anchor for many of us over time, as illustrated in anna’s account of her experience across multiple semesters. continuity and growing contributions: a third-year team member and graduating senior’s account. i (anna manoogian) found myself in dr. thomas’s community psychology course in the semester following a particularly rough first year of college. at the end of my semester, dr. thomas asked if i would consider joining the cnrp team. i was shocked that she would believe me capable of this opportunity as a second-year student. our team has engaged in weekly round table meetings since that time, through which i have more deeply come to understand the immense power of collaboration and my own strengths. my other teammates seemed genuinely curious about the insights i brought to these meetings and pleased with the quality of my work. slowly, i began to see my contributions through their eyes and eventually gained the confidence to work towards designing a project based on my individual interests. in many of my courses at rhodes, it seems that a considerable portion of the semester had passed before many students were comfortable enough within a course to openly contribute in meaningful ways. my three years on the research team provided a sense of cohesion to my undergraduate educational experience. our weekly roundtable meetings remained a stable fixture during some of the highest and lowest points of my college career. when i returned from a semester spent studying abroad, i nervously considered the possibility that i had lost a sense of where i fit in on campus. it was comforting to rejoin the team’s weekly ritual of discussing our research project over tea. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 the mentoring that i have received throughout my time on the cnrp undoubtedly shaped my time in college and my future plans as i prepare for law school this fall. c. data analysis: examining collaborative agency in the narratives and on our team while providing continuity and a sense of belonging for undergraduate team members, our community of practice enhances our data analysis as well. our work has largely proceeded in cycles: for each project, we begin with independent reading of subsets of bonner narratives, with a goal of understanding what the authors want us to know about their experience. as we have noted, these independent readings are enriched by weekly discussion of the stories in a research team constituted as an interpretive community, where we seek to illuminate multiple possibilities of meanings, and to notice not only what the authors have written, but what linguistic devices, and discursive frames they have used. part of our work is to notice what is not written, what experiences are not reported, and what seems to go undescribed by our authors. by analyzing our data in this way, we take advantage of our different experiences and forms of expertise. our current project dealing with collaborative agency was developed through this process. as we began the project of examining agency in the narratives, we noted the individualistic nature of many conceptualizations of agency, particularly in the psychology literature. in looking for an understanding of the concept that included community and collaboration, we turned to conceptions of collective agency and discovered raelin’s (2016) work on “collaborative agency.” in the bonner’s narratives we read accounts of dialogical, nonjudgmental inquiry in which the students and those they work with “display an interest in listening to one another, in reflecting upon perspectives different from their own, and in entertaining the prospect of being changed by what they learn” (raelin, 2016, p. 137). our work with the data regularly provokes an examination of our own process, and as we began to recognize the emergence of collaborative agency in bonner student narratives, we turned the lens on ourselves and examined our own process of establishing collaborative agency on our research team. going further, we began to consider struggles reported by bonner scholars crossing boundaries of social class, race, and other social locations as we also examined our own process of crossing boundaries often erected between faculty, student, and staff status at the college. as we studied collaborative agency, we recognized that the structure and trajectory of our project, in which outcomes have never been predetermined, embodied the openended flexibility that characterizes the practice of collaborative agency (raelin, 2016). while a set of conceptual questions guided the development of the procedure and structure of the team, the team has been able to freely explore the data, as opposed to performing a strict, open-and-shut analysis. this exploration has been a dialogical one. each individual brings a unique perspective to the table, but rather than remaining individual, that understanding may be taken on, reflected upon, and often adopted by others on the team. for example, our efforts to understand expressions of agency in the narratives regularly turned our attention to considerations of who held power or authority in the situations described by the authors. as we have engaged in these dialogues about our data, we are constantly made aware of the fact that the analysis we are performing is not a linear process, but rather follows a cyclical, winding path. the iterative nature of narrative analysis is inherently collaborative. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 raelin (2016) wrote that a collaborative effort is “seldom orderly; it is irregular and provisional. the activity chain may shift, may be broken, or may even end in an unresolved conflict as new structures, data, and relations become salient. however, activity may resume as participants decide whether or not to negotiate a new set of understandings to continue the effort” (p. 143). in order to engage in a collaborative effort then, we must be willing to confront and embrace uncertainty. raelin (2016) wrote that people freely engaging may “disrupt the efficient order of things or they may challenge individual security, but it is through the confronting of uncertainty that they recognize the interdependence of themselves and others” (p. 137-138). on our team, the activity chain has shifted, and the efficient order of things has been disrupted many times. the cnrp has developed and evolved, first looking at benefit finding in the narratives, then exploring civic identity, implications for service learning, boundaries, and power and agency. sometimes it feels as if each time we identify a new theme or possible area for exploration, we are set back in our analysis process. however, being open to these “disruptions” fosters an environment in which collaborative agency thrives, and it makes the data analyses richer in the long run. it is a balancing act, however, as we do need to move the work forward and finish discrete projects. college support for student summer undergraduate research fellowships has enabled us to move forward considerably. undergraduate honors research projects and the structures surrounding them, including college and department deadlines, have also been useful. anna baker-olson’s story below represents both forms of support and emphasizes the undergraduate student as collaborator and colleague. students as collaborators on the team: experience of a third-year team member. as part of my (anna baker-olson’s) summer work with the team, i had the opportunity to go to saint louis university and meet with their community engagement office and with dr. bryan sokol, a developmental psychologist who directs the program. his office had produced papers that we had read over the summer that spoke to some of the key connections we were seeing in the stories between agency and service learning, and dr. walton suggested that we should try to get a better understanding of their program and their approach to their scholarship. this made sense to me until she said that i should go to slu as part of my summer fellowship. i found the idea of going alone to represent the team and discuss our work with other “real” researchers to be very daunting. while i was used to being taken seriously within the confines of our team, i assumed that once we left the office or the campus, the task of discussing our work and exchanging new ideas with other scholars would be for dr. thomas and dr. walton. the trust and confidence with which they sent me to slu showed me that equal participation and collaboration extended beyond our team meetings not just in theory, but in practice as well. as a collaborator on the cnrp team, i have come to understand that being undergraduate students does not have to limit the kind of work we can do, and that we can both learn from, and contribute to, the research project at the same time. since that summer visit to st. louis, i’ve had the opportunity to develop and investigate my own question concerning the data, in preparation for an honors thesis. building on the team’s work around agency, i became interested in the way power and agency played out in the relationships between bonner scholars and patrons at community sites. in some stories, bonners would refer to patrons as friends, in others, bonners were harassed by patrons. sometimes moments of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 patron self-disclosure were reciprocated by the bonners, and other times the bonner felt uncomfortable. i became interested in investigating the ways in which bonners navigated relational intimacy in their service sites in a way that maintained personal boundaries while also performing the social justice work that inherently involves social boundary-crossing. d. building our methodological “chops”: reliability in an interpretive community undergraduate students can become collaborators and colleagues in community psychology practice and research, yet the training process is necessarily intensive and may not be supported fully by undergraduate psychology curricula. work with narrative data presents a different set of challenges to reliability and validity, for example, than the challenges faced by researchers who construct surveys or questionnaires that establish in advance the categories of responses that participants can make. interdisciplinary collaboration and perspectives have served us well. the methodological and epistemological questions that arise when we face these challenges with student researchers from different liberal arts disciplines have been important to our research process and to the professional development of student, staff, and faculty members of the team. several student members of our research teams over the past four years have been psychology majors, whose courses in statistics and research methods have encouraged them to think about inter-rater reliability and predictive validity, but these courses have rarely encouraged them to question the questions posed or the selection of possible responses imposed by the researchers. other student members of the research team have been english, educational studies, economics, political science, and urban studies majors. these students are learning different methods of inquiry and when such a diverse group sits around a table to consider how we will approach our data, we find ourselves discussing epistemological underpinnings of different research traditions. we are not just developing skills in research methods; we are investigating research methodologies. we have formed an electronic folder for a growing collection of articles we felt that we needed to read and discuss about the many ways that other researchers have worked with narrative and other free-response data. our methods have evolved as we revived these discussions every time seniors graduated and new students joined our team. faculty on the team (who do not graduate and get replaced) were tempted to see the repeats of these discussions as impediments to progress, but we have come to understand that regular discussions about how our methods of inquiry are related to our research goals and to our epistemological grounding have turned out to be a critical part of the research. as we focus our attention on more and more specific research questions, we attempt to identify recurring themes and to find ways to identify those reliably. although we do not conceive of our work as hypothesis testing, we do find it useful in some cases to count features of stories and to consider how those counts may differ at different points in the students’ college career or in different types of service activities. we attempt to ground this more quantitative work with an assessment of coding reliability. our approach to reliability, however, is guided by an interpretive bent. once we have identified features of the stories we wish to code (for example, an author’s concern with collaborative agency), we select a sample of stories and independently code for these features. discussion of our independent coding leads to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 the development and refinement of a written coding manual. see appendix b for an example of a coding manual that we developed for coding collaborative agency in the narratives. then we utilize the coding manual that we have developed to code an additional set of the stories. we bring these coded stories to a team discussion in which we identify all disagreements in our coding. these coding ‘misses’ are classified in three types. sometimes we find disagreements we call sleepiness errors, where all team members can clearly see which coder missed the feature we were coding. a second set of disagreements are a result of genuine ambiguity in the author’s narrative, where each coder can clearly see both ways of interpreting the text, and where we suspect that the author may have intended either meaning or may have been deliberately ambiguous. the third kind of coding disagreement occurs when we have not been clear among ourselves about what we are trying to do. category vagueness misses bring us to a recognition that we need to refine our thinking about what we mean by the categories we established. once a discussion of our interpretive differences leads us to clarify our categories, we select a new set of stories to code independently, and we repeat the above process. we continue to do this until none of our misses fall into the third category, and we are confident that our coding system is reflecting what we believe our authors are communicating in their narratives. the procedure described above is similar to procedures that psychologists often use to document the reliability of their analysis. our use of the procedure serves a different end; we seek to refine our understanding and to maximize the benefits that accrue from having members of our research team who approach the stories from different positions. with the exception of the occasional ‘sleepiness errors,’ we do not understand disagreements between independent coders to be reliability failures. we are respectful of genuine ambiguity in the stories our authors share, and we are respectful of the possibilities for multiple interpretations of various features of those stories. our practice of independent coding, followed by discussion of differences, repeats until we are satisfied that the differences among us have been discussed and incorporated into our analysis. the procedure is a hybrid of consensus coding and inter-coder reliability assessment. the procedures for assessing reliability refine our understandings as a team, and they rely on the strengths of individual team members. these themes are illustrated in bianca’s account, highlighting some of the struggles she faced to identify these strengths in her own contributions. in sharing this account, we emphasize the real challenges and investments made in an intensive process of becoming an experienced researcher and contributing member of an interpretive community. data analysis in an interpretive community: experiences of a second-year team member and graduating senior. my (bianca’s) experience as part of the cnrp has been one characterized by continual personal negotiation and reinterpretation. officially, i started working with data during a summer fellowship, but i began my introduction by joining the prior semester weekly research meetings to become more familiar with the team as well as observing their community of practice. during the summer, my peers and i began by trying to establish reliability coding for relational features within the stories and then moved into independent close reading. working with qualitative data was not only novel but so drastically different from the research methods employed in my previous research courses. as i began working, i found myself without a framework and unsure about how to approach analyzing the data. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 many days i walked away with more questions than when i began and few concrete results, or so i thought, to present at meetings. often, i was plagued by a feeling that i was not producing substantive work. truthfully, i was intimidated by how naturally my peer researchers discoursed with dr. walton and dr. thomas. they seemed so confident in their knowledge of the data and theoretical framework and their contribution was evident. i became dejected that my work and progress did not mirror that of my co-researchers and indicated so in my weekly fellowship logs. after one meeting, i broached my insecurities with dr. thomas and she shared a narrative of her own experience. this conversation reinforced my understanding that the very nature of this work is characterized and strengthened by the differences that each member brings. although my work may evolve differently, it is this difference that gives our work the nuance that is critical to its substance. dr. walton, dr. thomas, and the entire cnrp team helped me see that someone else's strength was not my weakness and that what made our work so diverse was that we each approached the process differently and that it was this dialogue of differences that brought greater depth and evaluation. our process of working with narrative data is not linear but is constituted by a continuous, reiterative process of interpretation, negotiation, and collaboration. this type of work naturally engenders a high level of interdependence on one’s co-researchers that is critical for creating an interpretive community that broadens the scope of our evaluation. throughout the summer, i learned to lean on my peers, to dialogue and value collaboration with my team, and to trust my own observations and knowledge about the stories. yet, it is important to note that this, like our work, is never complete but rather a continual process which i am constantly navigating. what i have come to appreciate most about the cnrp is that our team is a space of boundary crossing with traditional professor and student power dynamics in which students are encouraged to take ownership of the collaborative and creative process of shaping and evolving the research. e. our participatory model evolving over time the participatory nature of the cnrp is something that continues to evolve over time, and it has been a process of adaptation. bonner scholars are essential to the team, yet some students who have wanted to participate have also had multiple academic and leadership commitments that made it impossible to commit to weekly research practice and meetings. over time, we have created formal roles and they have become advisors and consultants to the project. we have also been intentional in assessing our practice over time. we rely on ongoing collaborative partnerships with multiple stakeholders and a model that promotes program accountability and improvement (dalton & wolfe, 2012). adele completed an honors thesis three years ago that identified strengths of our participatory model, but also a need for greater dialogue with the larger bonner scholar community. this honors project led to a number of improvements in our practice, including more meaningful engagement with the team. adele describes that project, and our evolution as a team, in the account below. reflections from the beginning of the project: a former team member and graduate student’s account. nearly 5 years after joining the cnrp team as an undergraduate student, and three years after leaving the cnrp to pursue a career in community psychology, i (adele) often find myself reflecting on the cnrp and its lasting effects on my personal and professional development. my experience in the cnrp was transformative and allowed me to build lasting connections between my http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 undergraduate coursework, research methodology, personal and professional relationships, and my emerging identity as an academic researcher. this transformational quality in my education was unique to the cnrp and emerged directly from the structure and methods of the project. the cnrp felt vastly different from my past experiences. the team-based structure and participatory methodologies of the team allowed me to shed disempowering roles of student or research assistant and take on the group’s shared role of team members. encouraged to openly share differences in understanding, values, and epistemology as they emerged in the research process, i became an active contributor to knowledge creation and an expert in my own experiences. i found myself engaging more meaningfully with faculty and staff, but most importantly with peers both within the research team and in the bonner program. i began to value other students as experts, and i recognized that our learning trajectories could run together rather than in parallel. as i grew aware of my own learning and transformation within the cnrp team, i also recognized that the project was having transformative effects on the individuals and groups around me. i became increasingly interested in studying the ways in which the narrative and participatory methodologies undergirding the cnrp were shaping project stakeholders (within the team, in connections with the bonner program, and in the university more broadly). i was encouraged to capitalize on this interest by completing an honors thesis to intentionally evaluate our practice. i conducted in-depth interviews with all members of the cnrp, focus groups with bonner scholars, and an analysis of bonner narratives to triangulate understanding of the effects of the project on learning. i emphasized connections between learning and action, identifying opportunities for cnrp methods to promote change within the team and the bonner scholars program. overall, findings identified strengths with the cnrp. however, findings also supported a need for stronger connection with the larger bonner scholar community. bonner scholar participants reported feeling disconnected from the research process, while bonner scholars research team members felt overconnected to the research process (e.g., uncomfortable about access to data about their peers, unbalanced power and knowledge about the research). when i presented my findings to the research team, they served as a catalyst for collaborative change. we began formal discussions with the bonner community to brainstorm effective ways to restructure our process, ultimately creating a new advisory board for the project. we also began to discuss future processes for reflexive practice within the cnrp, opening the door for future evaluative projects. for the first time in my academic history, i was able to envision both actual and potential impacts of my work. f. new forms of participatory practice adele’s honors project led us to create a new advisory committee that enabled bonner scholars to participate more fully in the research processes without working directly with data. in keeping with the community psychology practice competency of ethical reflective practice, we consulted with them extensively around data collection and the ethics of our practice (dalton & wolfe, 2012). confidentiality is something we have always taken very seriously. stories are stripped of the author’s name and assigned a number instead. but as new bonner scholars joined the team, we were not sure what measures would be adequate to make sure that students were not reading peer stories and identifying authors. the advisory committee helped us to think about an appropriate time delay, so that the stories we are reading are http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 not written by students currently on campus with us. the greatest aspect of the cnrp continues to be the diversity of the team. it is important to have bonner scholars on the research team, especially bonners who hold positions in leadership, such as the bonner senior interns. not only do bonners provide nuanced insight into the program, but they use the cnrp data to inform how they make steps to improve the bonner scholars program as a whole. challenges that students experience and observe in the sites of their community engagement emerge clearly in the narratives. yet the narratives do not provide instructions for how to address these challenges. this requires nuanced, contextual understanding. for example, sexual harassment emerged as an issue that many students grappled with in community sites. in the university context, there are clear policies and procedures that can be enacted to create safer campus climates and adjudicate violations. this is a much more complex thing to navigate with multiple community partners and sites, and it requires cultural humility and sensitivity. karina, a member of our research team and a bonner senior leader, shares how the work of the cnrp has been taken up by the bonner program in her account below. bonner student leadership: experience of a second-year team member and graduating bonner senior leader. due to confidentiality requirements, i (karina) was unable to read the narratives written by my current bonner peers. despite this, i found reading the narratives from past bonners helpful, more so than i initially expected. as a senior bonner intern, i have extensive knowledge of the nonprofits bonners work with in memphis. it was easy for me to recognize which service sites the bonners wrote about in their narratives, even when the site was not explicitly named. i became interested in looking at the ways in which bonners interact with their service sites and site supervisors. after reading only a few waves of data collection, i found consistent patterns of students at particular service sites having similar conflicts, typically conflicts involving site supervisors and/or the patrons. one such conflict concerned sexual harassment experienced by bonner students. as an intern, i used these patterns from past bonners to explore whether or not current bonners were having the same conflicts. many current bonners were experiencing or had experienced some form of sexual harassment or uncomfortable situation at the service site i recognized from the data. using the data as support, i was then able to work with the bonner director to develop programming to address the problem. together, we led a meeting for bonners to discuss how to report sexual harassment or assault on campus, as well as how to handle such a situation at their service sites. as a result of my work with the cnrp, the bonner scholars program will now have a mandatory training on sexual harassment and assault during first-year bonners’ orientation week. while such an issue should be addressed regardless of supporting data, the narratives made it easier to locate which sites were having the most problems. as a result, the bonner director knew which service sites to schedule meetings with to speak with their executive directors in order to further investigate the issues. our participatory model continues to evolve. since the bonner program at rhodes recently hired a new director, collaboration with the cnrp will give the new director a sturdy foundation. collaboration in the future will stress the importance of maintaining relationships with rhodes’s community partners. patterns in data have already indicated that there are common themes of satisfaction and dissatisfaction within specific service sites. support from the cnrp data on service sites has, and may continue to, improve the bonner scholars program’s relationships with its partners. finally, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 through the support of the cnrp, the college has evidence of the importance of the bonner scholars to the campus and the greater memphis community. challenges and supports needed to sustain our work karina’s student leadership provides an example of how the cnrp connects to organizational learning and change in our campus community. the cnrp continues to work with bonner staff and student leaders to strengthen community partnerships in memphis and strengthen support for the bonner scholars and the scholarship program at rhodes. yet sustaining the project can be a challenge. undergraduate students are often introduced to research or find their own interests in research as juniors or seniors. to faculty and students alike, it can feel like just as we get going, it is time for graduation. we are challenged to make sure that knowledge and skills that are developed in the team are passed down through peer mentoring and training. in the cnrp, for example, students on the team develop nuanced understandings around coding written narratives, and they come to make expert judgments around reliability issues. this expertise must be passed down in structured and regular practice between students to be a sustainable model for research. undergraduate research is valued at our primarily undergraduate liberal arts college. yet the models of undergraduate participation in research in our home department have not included qualitative methods or action research strategies. interpretive and participatory strategies, while core to the field of community psychology, challenge norms for faculty scholarship and undergrad psychology research at our institution. we have struggled to make our work legible to other faculty and students, and our curriculum currently is limited in how it prepares students to think about the practice of science in complex social and political contexts. our research methods courses utilize post-positivist epistemologies and value internal validity in laboratory experimentation above all other standards by which research may be judged. i (elizabeth) am the only community psychologist in the department, and i believe that the ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration between myself and a developmental psychologist (marsha), along with strong student leaders in the department, are making space for new conversations. i do not know that i could have facilitated this change on my own; i know it would have been lonely and isolating. as our team presents work at departmental research seminars and at national and international conferences, we are experiencing recognition and growing respect for the work. we feel hopeful that our department is becoming a more welcoming place for diverse research programs. larger institutional barriers to undergraduate action research exist as well. colleges and universities are deeply hierarchical, and our work presents challenges to existing structures. as community psychologists, we work in ways that include power sharing between professors and students and encourage collaboration over individual competition. additionally, there have been challenges related to turning the lens of our action research on our own campus. even as we generate insights that are deemed useful by stakeholders on the campus, there are role tensions when offering recommendations. the information we disseminate is not neutral, and it is certainly not perceived that way. as an associate professor and professor (elizabeth and marsha), we have some important protections. assistant professors and administrative staff are less insulated, and we know that at other institutions, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 sharing data about students’ experiences around power, race, and social class on campus has been perceived as threatening (langhout, 2015). assistant professors are told regularly to “wait” to do this kind of integrative work that combines engaged teaching and scholarship, even though this is the creative work that feeds our souls, pushes us to continue to learn and innovate, and contributes directly to setting and organizational change. student and faculty voices contributing to organizational learning and change within the university are both a challenge and opportunity. we are encouraged by community psychologists who are more frequently speaking about our own institutional hierarchies and structures and interrogating our own social positions and relationships within the academy (langhout, 2015; lichty & palamaro-munsell, 2017). universities themselves are community contexts that are critical as locations of knowledge production. we have a long way to go to more fully realize our potential as empowering settings and sites for enacting democratic practice. community psychologists have much to offer in interdisciplinary, campus-wide efforts to support learning and scholarship for social justice and change efforts. conclusion in our detailed account of our participatory community narrative research project, we offer perspectives and practices that may be adapted to other undergraduate research contexts. adaptation is a key theme of our work, as we continue to evolve our model over time. in the context of constant change, the community of practice serves as a center of gravity, providing continuity and a sense of belonging to the team and its mission. the multi-semester nature of the research project is key, and it has many benefits for students and faculty. moving beyond a single course enables us to live more fully our educational philosophy of shared critical and engaged inquiry. as a high impact practice, it enables strong contributions and supports an integrated academic identity for undergraduate students. for faculty, it provides a space for ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration and creates a sense of belonging for those of us who are the only community psychologist working in a psychology department or interdisciplinary program. our discussion of specific aspects of our data analysis process, including our work around coding and reliability, illustrates the methodological work that undergraduates can perform in a community of practice that is scaffolded by more experienced faculty and senior student researchers. typically understood as part of graduate student development, undergraduate students are able to ask creative research questions informed by their unique and shared experiences, as well as their deep understanding of the data. in the language of community psychology research competencies, they are able to develop foundational skills, as well as research design skills, data analysis skills, and research theories and perspectives. undergraduate students in community psychology should be recognized as knowledge producers, change agents, and leaders on campus, in communities, and in the field. references bringle, r., reeb, r., brown, m., & ruiz, a. (2016). integrating service learning into the curriculum: abnormal, health, and community psychology, pp. 95-118, in service learning in psychology: enhancing undergraduate education for the public good. washington, d.c.: american psychological association. doi:10.1037/14803-000 dalton, j., & wolfe, s. (2012). joint column: education connection and the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 community practitioner: competencies for community psychology practice. the community psychologist, 45, 4, 7-14. deangelo, l., mason, j., & winters, d. (2016). faculty engagement in mentoring undergraduate students: how institutional environments regulate and promote extra-role behavior. innovative higher education, 41, 4, 317-332. doi: 10.1007/s10755-0159350-7 faust, v., haber, m., christens, b., & legler, r. (2017). intersections of competencies for practice and research in community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice, 8, 1, 113. george, c., wood-kanupka, j., & oriel, k. (2017). impact of participation in community-based research among undergraduate and graduate students. journal of allied health, 46, 1, 15. haber, m., neal, z., christens, b., faust, v., jackson, l. wood, l., scott, t., & legler, r. (2017) the 2016 survey of graduate programs in community psychology: findings on competencies in research and practice and the challenges of training programs. the community psychologist, 50, 2, 12-19. jimenez, t., sanchez, b., mcmahon, s., & viola, j. (2016). a vision for the future of community psychology education and training. american journal of community psychology, 58, 339-347. doi:10.1002/ajcp.12079 kuh, g., schneider, c., & association of american colleges and universities (2008). high-impact educational practices: what they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. washington, dc: association of american colleges and universities. langhout, r. (2015). considering community psychology competencies: a love letter to budding scholar-activists who wonder if they have what it takes. american journal of community psychology, 55, 266-278. doi:10.1007/s10464-015-9711-5 lave, j., & wenger, e. (1991). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge, england: cambridge university press. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511815355 lichty, l., & palamaro-munsell, e. (2017). pursuing an ethical, socially just classroom: searching for community psychology pedagogy. american journal of community psychology, 60, 316-326. doi:10.1002/ajcp.12199 mcmahon, s., jimenez, t., bond, m., wolfe, s., & ratcliffe, a. (2015). community psychology education and practice careers in the 21st century. in v.c. scott & s.m. wolfe (eds.) community psychology: foundations for practice, pp. 379-409, thousand oaks, ca: sage. doi:10.4135/9781483398150 raelin, j. (2016). imagine there are no leaders: reframing leadership as collaborative agency. leadership, 12, 131-158. doi:10.1177/1742715014558076 wenger, e., mcdermott, r., & snyder, w. (2002). cultivating communities of practice: a guide to managing knowledge. boston: harvard business school press. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 appendix a student participation in the cnrp over time spring: recruitment of new members fall: orientation to ongoing projects work on ongoing projects, gain greater familiarity with data begin thinking about & developing own interests & questions develop and complete senior/capstone projects http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 appendix b collaborative agency coding manual i. coding process: begin coding by reading the entire story through, just listening to the author’s meanings. it is better not to code anything on the first reading. ask yourself what problems the author addresses in the story. what conflict, tension, discomfort, or uncertainty is driving the story? in a second reading, focus on the presence of collaborative agency as a frame or concern for the narrator. the author may or may not perceive collaborative agency to be achieved in the story. ask yourself: does this story concern itself with collaborative agency? after coding for the presence of collaborative agency framing in the story, note also the category of persons with whom the author is in relationship. place in one of two categories: students/bonner scholars community partners keep a paper copy of the coding instructions in front of you as you code, and stop to re-read them after every ten stories. (this is necessary to avoid drifts in the way we understand the categories.) please do not code when you are tired or distracted! make sure you take regular breaks and stay alert. make notes about especially difficult coding decisions and about especially atypical cases or interesting examples. note especially cases in which our coding system does not seem to ‘capture’ what is actually going on in the story – that is, where the authors’ key meanings seem to be misrepresented by our coding. these stories are very important to us, so hold them aside for discussion with the team. ii. coding definition: collaborative agency emerges in the coordinated activity of individuals with both shared and conflicting interests who engage in genuine dialogue. this dialogue includes sharing, listening, reflection, and a willingness to be changed by the communication. it is marked by a sense of intersubjectivity, shared commitments that are not superimposed by others, and perceptions of collective efficacy or group accomplishment. we will code for the presence of collaborative agency as a frame or concern for the narrator. the author may or may not perceive collaborative agency to be achieved in the story. 1. stories include a description of “we” or “us” – this is necessary, but not sufficient. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 10, issue 1 february 2019 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 2. stories include a discussion of how responsible and/or effective we are in pursuing our shared commitments, goals, or projects a. the author may be posing the questions, “can we really do this? can we be effective?” b. the author may be struggling over whether others share my sense of “we”-ness. “are we really in this together and accountable to one another?” 3. a story about a relationship with a single individual (e.g., how to define the relationship or what to do about the relationship) will not be coded unless the author is describing the relationship with an individual to illustrate a broader point about creating new forms of “we” relationships and new forms of collaboration or community. http://www.gjcpp.org/ microsoft word 2014-si02-20140521_gt.docx integrating complexity and infant mental health for comprehensive community change allison pinto sarasota community studio author notes: allison pinto, ph.d., is a neighbor of central-cocoanut and executive director of sarasota community studio in sarasota, florida, united states correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to allison pinto, sarasota community studio, 1216 central avenue, studio 101, sarasota, fl 34236. e-mail: allison@srqstudio.org. keywords: complexity, infant mental health, children, neighborhood, place-based initiative recommended citation: pinto, a. (2014). integrating complexity and infant mental health for comprehensive community change. global journal of community psychology practice, 5(1), 1-11. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   integrating complexity and infant mental health for comprehensive community change abstract efforts emerging throughout the united states and at the federal scale suggest that there is a readiness for new perspectives on mental health and community change. complexity and infant mental health have been developing as fresh orientations within the fields of systems theory and mental health, respectively. through sarasota community studio, residents of the centralcocoanut neighborhood in florida are now combining the key principles of complexity and infant mental health and applying them to place-based efforts to develop a new model for transformative change and well-being. this paper highlights features of the current u.s. policy landscape that signal a readiness to address community transformation, identifies key principles of complexity and infant mental health that make these orientations especially relevant to transformation, presents central-cocoanut as a community case example of efforts to apply complexity and infant mental health, and begins to explore the implications of a new model for transformation that is emerging at the neighborhood scale. keywords: complexity, infant mental health, children, neighborhood, place-based initiative townley and sylvestre (this issue) have issued a call for big ideas regarding transformative change and community mental health, and here in the united states the timing could not be better. there is a growing awareness of the need for transformation reflected in an increasing variety of local, state and federal initiatives focused on community-scale well-being. simultaneously, complexity and infant mental health have been developing as fresh orientations within the fields of systems theory and mental health, respectively. in the central-cocoanut neighborhood of sarasota, florida efforts are underway to combine the key principles of complexity and infant mental health and apply them to comprehensive community change efforts initiated at the neighborhood scale, in order to develop a new model for transformation and well-being. these efforts have implications for community mental health, both as a phenomenon and as a field. this paper will highlight features of the current u.s. policy landscape that signal a readiness to address community transformation, identify key principles of complexity and infant mental health that make these orientations especially relevant to transformation, present centralcocoanut as a community case example of efforts to apply complexity and infant mental health, and begin to explore the implications of a new model for transformation that is emerging at the neighborhood scale. signs of readiness u.s. policies relating to community and mental health communicate a growing desire to realize transformation. in 2010, the promise neighborhoods initiative was established by the u.s. department of education “to significantly improve the educational and developmental outcomes of children and youth in our most distressed communities and to transform those communities” by attending to the well-being of entire neighborhoods (u.s. department of education, 2013, “program description,” para. 2). this is part of the broader white house neighborhood revitalization initiative established to coordinate the place-based investments of various federal agencies including the white house domestic policy council, the white house office of urban affairs, and the departments of education, health and human services, housing and urban development, justice, and treasury (the white house, 2011). these federal efforts tend to emphasize the influence of formal services and systems on well-being, more so than the everyday actions of individuals and families in determining their own thriving. nonetheless, they raise awareness of the multiple, interdependent dimensions of well-being and the importance of neighborhoods as the primary geography of everyday life. they also operationalize the goal of working collectively to realize the well-being of everyone, not just a subset of the population. in 2013 the white house hosted the national conference on mental health. this marked a significant shift in the prevailing orientation, as mental health was now defined from a wellness perspective in terms of the ability of people to: “realize their full potential, cope with the stresses of life, work productively, and make meaningful contributions to their communities” (u.s. department of health and human services, 2014, “mental health and wellness,” para. 1). over the past year a national dialogue has been promoted as follow-up to this conference, with communities across the country global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   hosting local conversations to increase understanding about mental health and to generate community specific responses. while federal initiatives are but one strategy for broadscale change, they grow out of efforts that have been developing throughout the united states that increasingly recognize the importance of a positive orientation to mental health, an individual-in-community perspective, and transformation. in fact, over the past two decades, over ten billion philanthropic dollars have been devoted to place-based community change efforts with an emphasis on collective well-being (kubisch, auspos, brown, & dewar, 2010a). these investments and the ongoing local efforts they have fueled signal a continued thirst for big ideas around transformative change and community mental health. there is still a clear need for discoveries and inventions, however. kubisch and her colleagues note that none of the efforts to date can point to a geography where transformation has occurred, such that an area once characterized by suffering is now characterized by all-around thriving. there is not yet a single neighborhood that can make this claim. it is in this context that the development of a new approach to community mental health is now proposed, through the integration and application of complexity and infant mental health. the complexity orientation the theory and science of complexity can powerfully inform the development of communities (pinto, dutton & curry, 2008). when a community is conceptualized as a complex adaptive system, it is recognized as a dynamic network of diverse agents interacting with one another and the environment to co-evolve over time (agar, 2007). “agents” are the people, groups and other entities that are “autonomous,” in that they have the capacity to act and to change intentionally and thereby influence one another and the evolution of a system (maguire, mckelvey, mirabeau, & oztas, 2006). complexity emphasizes processes of self-organization among agents as the central means of fostering the ongoing health, resilience and hardiness of a system, whether that system is an individual, a family, an organization, or a community (capra, juarrero, & sotolongo, 2007). as each agent makes everyday decisions and takes action in relation to the recognized desires and needs of self and others (particularly others in closest proximity), and in relation to current environmental conditions, macro-scale patterns emerge. these patterns are a manifestation of the collective well-being of the community. although a “communiplexity” orientation may seem intuitive to people who focus on community organizing (pinto, et al., 2008), it typically requires an overriding of deeply held mental models about community development and systems change that have been imported from traditional social science and various fields of practice. traditional, “newtonian” science emphasizes linearity and assumes that a whole system can be understood through a detailed analysis of all its parts. traditional practice models reflect this orientation by emphasizing the development of elaborate master plans created by experts, followed by the disciplined implementation of these plans to achieve pre-specified outcomes. emphasis traditionally is placed on directing processes, preventing deviations from plans, eliminating environmental threats and maintaining stability (olson & eoyang, 2001). in contrast, a complexity approach assumes that causeeffect pathways are numerous and multi-directional and a whole system is more than a sum of its parts. because agents have autonomy and the environment is continually changing, individual and system behaviors are often unpredictable and uncontrollable. promoting the ongoing health and well-being of a system therefore involves facilitating its ability to self-organize in continually adaptive, flexible and responsive ways. it is about cultivating relationships, capitalizing upon diversity, facilitating the exchange of energy (in terms of information, resources and emotion), and ensuring sufficient feedback loops for ongoing reflection in order to adapt for perpetual goodness of fit (stacey, 2003). complexity recognizes that although steady states might occur, they are relatively rare and fleeting. usually communities experience dynamic states characterized by constant non-linear changes within a local “space of possibilities” (agar, 2007). as such, rather than focusing on states of equilibrium, it is helpful to define opportunities within the actual space that exists at various scales within inter-related systems of the community. finally, rather than assuming that efforts grow through a process of planned replication, it is useful to conceptualize community-wide change as a emergent process involving multiple agents interacting with a changing environment in response to an initial action. when this happens overall dynamics can change, yielding similar patterns across scales in the community. these are often described in complexity as “butterfly effects,” with tiny initiating events generating a re-organization of the entire system (kauffman, 1993; holland, 1995; maguire, et al., 2006). while complexity has been applied to understand and influence the development of a diversity of social systems, the field is not as far along in applying the concepts of complexity to social systems in which the agents are human beings. the dynamics of ant colonies, flocks of birds and schools of fish are often referenced in efforts to describe human complex systems (reynolds, 1987), even while assuming that the minds and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   relationships of human beings are profoundly more complex than those of other creatures. in the past decade there have been significant explorations of complexity as it relates to social science (sawyer, 2004; castellani & hafferty, 2009; agar, 2013) and organizational development (maguire et al., 2006; snowden & boone, 2007); however, there is still a need for much deeper understanding of the ways in which micro interactions within and among individuals relate to macro patterns at the community scale. how is it that people make decisions and take action relative to their awareness of the capabilities, needs, desires, and intentions of themselves and those around them, in an ever-changing environment? how does this happen in well-coordinated and continuously adaptive ways? this is the realm of mental health. the infant mental health orientation communities can be better understood as complex adaptive systems by incorporating insights from the field of mental health, but not just any theory of mental health is relevant and useful. the infant mental health orientation has much to offer as a way of better understanding the mental health of all people and social change processes at multiple scales, from individual and dyad to neighborhood and community. it provides a fundamentally positive definition of mental health, it recognizes relationships as critical to the emergence of mental health, and it accepts transformation as a central change process. these features combine to distinguish it from other theories. although researchers, practitioners and policy makers are mostly using concepts of infant mental health to promote the development of babies and toddlers in primary caregiving relationships, the mental capacities developing in infancy and early childhood are core capacities for human beings of all ages, and dynamics clarified within infant-caregiver dyads exist in relationship constellations throughout social networks. as such, the concepts of infant mental health can be applied to understand and promote mental health across the lifespan, and at the community scale. zero to three, the national center for infants, toddlers and families, defines infant mental health as the developing capacity to: 1) experience, regulate and express the full range of emotions, 2) form close and secure interpersonal relationships and 3) explore the environment and learn (zero to three, 2005). this definition reflects a recognition of mental health as a phenomenon that involves the dynamic interplay of emotions, relationships, and learning. it is a fundamentally positive definition because it is not about the absence of problems or symptoms but rather the presence and ongoing development of capacities. while this definition emphasizes emotions, the field of infant mental health recognizes that in order to manage and express the full range of emotions it is necessary to coordinate thoughts, feelings, behavior and physiology, in response to ever-changing relationships, environments, and emerging capacities (lillas & turnbull, 2009). this is referred to as “self-regulation” or “self-organization” of one’s internal experience. infant mental health recognizes that human beings do not come into the world with the capacity to self-regulate. rather, this is a capacity that develops over time through co-regulation with caregivers—particularly primary caregivers— beginning with everyday, moment-tomoment “micro-exchanges” between the baby and caregiver across various situations, as the caregiver attends to, understands, and responds to signals from the baby. caregivers are encouraged to “follow the lead” of the infant—to promote the baby’s developing capacity to regulate through emotional attunement and communication, reflective dialogue and meaningmaking, and an ongoing process of relational rupture and repair. caregivers’ capacity to organize their own internal experience affects their ability and availability to co-regulate with the infant, and vice versa, which means self-organization as the core capacity of mental health is fundamentally relational and networked (cooper, hoffman, powell, & marvin, 2005; siegel, 1999). patterns of thought, feeling, behavior and physiology emerge in response to one’s internal experience, to the presence and behaviors of others, and to changes— including stressors—in the environment (tronik & beeghly, 2011). as the baby’s network of attuned and responsive relationships expands, s/he develops “reflective function,” the ability to make sense of the mental states and motivations of self and others (fonagy, gergely, jurist, & target, 2002). mental capacities emerge such as response flexibility, empathy, and a sense of self (siegel, 1999). this also promotes the experience of mental health as defined by alan schore: “an intuitive sense of emotional security” that “comes from the inner, not necessarily conscious knowledge that during times of stress, one can cope, either by autoregulation or going to others for interactive regulation (schore, 2001, p. 4).” as babies explore their environments together with their caregivers and others and share in experiences of mutual curiosity, discovery and delight, these experiences elicit a range of feelings, contributes to the strengthening of relationships, and facilitates learning in all domains (gopnik, meltzoff, & kuhl, 1999). then as babies develop new capacities this fundamentally changes how they experience themselves, others and their environment, and as everyone responds and adapts to the newly emerging capacities of the baby, the environment itself changes. the baby, those around him or her, and the world they share transforms. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   the emergence of mental health is particularly clear during infancy because this is the earliest stage of life; however, the processes identified continue throughout the lifespan. although the infant mental health field is often simplified to the core messages of “the early years matter” and “invest early or pay the price later” (too small to fail, 2013; children’s defense fund, 2013), the emphasis on continual self-organization in and through relational networks across ever-changing environments over the fast-paced course of development is perhaps the greatest contribution of infant mental health to the broader field of mental health. when the orientation is extended to communities, such that people of all ages in a given network or geography are understood as continually selfand co-organizing their thoughts, feelings, behaviors and physiology, across changing environments and over time, this offers a psychologically elegant conceptualization of communities as human complex adaptive systems, and a way of understanding community mental health as a collective phenomenon. integrating complexity and infant mental health although complexity and infant mental health emerged from different fields of study with an initial emphasis on systems at different scales, there are striking parallels between the two orientations. both recognize selforganization as the core process of healthy development and well-being. both emphasize the agency of individuals while simultaneously recognizing that individuals are in relationship and interaction with others and mutually influencing one another through everchanging constellations of decisions and actions. both orientations appreciate that the environment is not merely “context” that impacts individuals, but that individuals also influence their environments, such that they co-evolve over time. both also recognize change as a process of transformation, whereby altogether new states emerge through phase transitions that are nonlinear, rather than through steady progression. while there are many parallels, these two orientations can enrich and inform one another as well. infant mental health has articulated a detailed description of the positive state of mental health as it emerges in the earliest stages of life, which can be further understood through complexity as an emergent phenomenon in human complex systems manifesting within individuals, dyads, families, neighborhoods and communities. the infant mental health field also has illuminated the interpersonal and relational processes and dynamics that are associated with the development of self-organization. these insights can be extended beyond the infantcaregiver dyad to further clarify dynamics in the networks of relationships that comprise and generate change in broader systems and whole communities. the ways in which self-organization and relationship are linked to ongoing processes of learning are also detailed in the infant mental health field, and the concept of reflective function could greatly deepen understanding of thriving in human complex systems. by emphasizing the autonomy of agents to make decisions and take action, complexity reinforces the notion that a person—even as young as an infant—is an active agent in his or her own development, with the capacity to be a significant changemaker in the systems and communities of which s/he is a part. complexity also elaborates on the mutual influence of agents and the environment, which suggests new ways of paying attention to how individuals— even very young individuals—affect their surroundings. finally, complexity recognizes that when transformation happens, change “catches and spreads” across scales, so it may be worthwhile to look beyond the primary system of focus to capitalize on opportunities to bring about positive change. these are powerful concepts when applied to community mental health. they suggest ways in which people are interdependent in influencing the mental health and wellbeing of themselves and others, especially those who are in closest proximity. this happens through everyday interactions rather than through expert directed and controlled processes, so the shared space of the neighborhood is particularly relevant as an environment where natural and frequent interactions are possible. connections across scales—from individuals to families to blocks to neighborhoods to cities to counties—create opportunities for changes to scale out or scale in, such that transformation of communities can be realized. a real-world application: the central-cocoanut neighborhood in sarasota, florida, efforts have been occurring over the past five years to develop an approach that combines the concepts of infant mental health and complexity for the sake of community change. by following the lead of babies and young children in the central-cocoanut neighborhood, residents and other community members are discovering ways to become more attuned, responsive and synchronized to promote the mental health and well-being of kids, the neighborhood, and the broader community. to give readers a sense of the central-cocoanut neighborhood, this is a 0.4 square mile neighborhood of 47 blocks and 2100 people located in sarasota, a city of 52,000 people on the gulf of mexico in southwest florida. over 300 residents of central-cocoanut are young children, of whom almost 200 are up to five years of age. the neighborhood is racially and ethnically diverse: over 50% of residents identify as black/africanglobal  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   american, 40-45% as white, and 10-15% as hispanic/latino. the dominant cultural identity of the neighborhood is black/african-american and this is the identity of over 70% of children living in centralcocoanut. these demographics make the neighborhood distinctive in sarasota, where the vast majority of residents are older adults and most identify as white. this is also a place where many residents face significant economic challenges, in a city that is relatively wealthy. the median family income in the neighborhood is $26,000, which is half the median income for all families living in the city of sarasota. it is a neighborhood where both child and adult residents express a desire to stay in the neighborhood, yet families often move due to poor housing conditions. centralcocoanut is also a neighborhood where children demonstrate that they are curious and hard-working, with a love of learning, yet less than one third are reading on grade level by third grade, compared to over 90% in other nearby neighborhoods, in a school district that prides itself on providing high quality education. many comprehensive community change efforts are initiated by professionals and formal institutions such as social service agencies or networks, schools, local governments or philanthropies—often by issuing calls for transformation at the city, county or regional scale, and then fortifying a designated “impoverished” area with programs and services intended to address unmet needs. in sarasota the beginning was different; efforts were initiated by neighbors watching and listening to babies and young children, with a desire to bring their shared neighborhood into focus in order to delight in it together. it started five years ago on 15th street when serendipitously a number of families with children moved in, including three families with babies. a new neighbor who was a clinical child psychologist and systems change practitioner by training (this author) had recently moved onto the block as well. out of a personal desire to become connected and attached as a neighbor, this author started spending time on the block with babies and young children, watching, listening and responding to how kids experienced and contributed to the rhythms of everyday life. soon it became apparent that in central-cocoanut, babies were often making the most of the neighborhood as a zone for exploration, learning and joyfulness in natural, every day ways. sometimes it was by tagging along with older siblings, cousins and neighbors to play in each other’s living rooms, kitchens, yards or at the park. sometimes it was by toddling after birds, lizards and neighborhood pups. sometimes it was by trying out new skills to “keep up with the big kids,” and sometimes it was just by being present in the emotional vibrancy of the lived experience on the block. in central-cocoanut many parents are comfortable giving young children the freedom to explore beyond their own home without being accompanied by parents, and also affording young children the opportunity to look out for their baby brothers, sisters and cousins. this makes it possible for babies and kids to self-organize their experience together on the block, with minimal direction or constraints set by adults. unlike schools or other formal settings, children in central-cocoanut do not organize themselves by age group; instead, babies and children of all ages experience the neighborhood together. often it is 6-, 7or 8-yearold children rather than adults who are tuning into babies, as fellow neighbors, finding ways to amplify their delight and soothe their distress as they participate jointly in the activities of daily life. often young children are the ones narrating the story of shared experience as it is happening, as they notice and comment on the signals babies are giving to communicate how they are responding. in these ways, mental health emerges moment-to-moment on the block. soon this author found herself seeking ways to reflect back to the children what she was witnessing. emotions, relationships and experiences were chronicled by the author and kids together, both through real-time commentary while participating in life on the block and through photos, stories, and blog posts. a coherent narrative of neighborliness began to emerge from these shared experiences and reflections. by the next summer, “neighborhood scavenger hunting” was invented as a way of harnessing kids’ everyday neighborliness. each week, a small group of children gathered with the intention of setting out to explore the neighborhood together on foot, scooter or bike, typically accompanied by one or several babies in strollers as well. the kids identified supplies to take along to aide in their explorations: binoculars and magnifying glasses, cameras and video recorders, notebooks and drawing pads, hula hoops, super balls, and dog treats, to name a few. they determined the route and where to stop along the way, fueling their curiosity on their own terms. as they meandered throughout the neighborhood, often for two hours or more, they chatted with fellow neighbors, visited local businesses, raised questions and shared knowledge, buzzed with enthusiasm and recorded their discoveries of anything they found to be remarkable. given that summer in florida is intensely hot and humid, the adventures required endurance too, and kids were often revealing character strengths like grit, adaptability, and cooperation as they self-organized to experience the neighborhood. by the end of the summer fifty kids had participated, and as the tradition has continued over the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   past five summers over 150 kids in central-cocoanut have become involved. by following the lead of kids who were taking seriously their identity as neighbors, this summertime activity turned into a playful yet rigorous approach to community-building and asset-mapping. in the “postseason” adult neighbors and members of the broader community were invited to “neighborkid dinners” hosted in neighbors’ homes, to review asset inventories of the neighborhood presented through the perspectives of the children, augmented with aggregate data from the u.s. census, the school district, the police department and other sources to generate a coherent profile of the neighborhood. neighbors reflected together on the information and discussed implications for the wellbeing of neighborkids and the neighborhood as a whole. in keeping with asset-based community development (kretzmann & mcknight, 1993), the question was not, “what can others do for us?” but rather “what can we do as neighbors?” the question was posed both to kids about themselves and each other and to adults, and the discussion was initiated and facilitated by fellow neighbors rather than people who are external to the neighborhood. the purpose was not to identify actions that everyone then must agree to carry out together, but rather for each person to become more aware of their capacity to take action, so that they might be more likely to contribute according to their own preferences and capacities. the notion was that once neighbors responded, it would become possible for others beyond the neighborhood—including professionals and agencies—to synchronize their decisions and actions with the efforts of neighbors. while some people were drawn to dinners and other small and large group gatherings to reflect and deliberate, many did not choose to participate in these ways, making apparent the need for other ways of circulating information and heightening awareness of ways to become attuned and responsive throughout the neighborhood. “exubernews” was launched as a monthly neighborhood newsletter, featuring and delivered by neighborkids. this included updates on the efforts and capacities of children and other neighbors as they were manifesting on the block, augmented with community data and framed in relation to community change. events and projects specific to the neighborhood were also developed in response to the discoveries and interests of the children, creating a variety of opportunities for neighbors and other community members to connect with one another and follow the lead of kids in central-cocoanut. activities included celebrating local civil rights history, entering (and sometimes winning) contests together, and participating in the progressive makeover of a neighborhood park. on each occasion news releases featuring the neighborkids were sent out to the local media, with television and newspaper coverage harnessed as another way of spreading the word of the changes that children and fellow neighbors were leading and experiencing. a story of cross-scale community change over time efforts on the block have become increasingly recognized as opportunities to create a neighborhood environment where it is the norm to tune in and respond to circumstances as they happen, with babies and young children contributing as active agents in any given response. here is a brief story to communicate what that looks like: one day after school a few neighborkids dropped by this author’s house to chat and have some tea. eight-year-old da'sean helped his baby sister up onto the couch to sit beside him and then picked up the newspaper and started reading the front-page story, which described an accident that occurred in a nearby public housing development. the story explained that while a six-yearold boy was playing outside in the courtyard at his grandmother's apartment complex, he came upon an electrical transformer box that was not properly locked. when he explored the box he got shocked with even more electricity than a person would receive if they were in the electric chair. immediately da’sean and his sisters expressed concern about the boy, and as they continued to read the article they learned that this was not the first time a child got injured at this transformer box; back in the 1970's, a 4year-old boy was hurt the same way. when their father came over to let them know it was time for dinner, he listened as the kids shared the story; to their surprise, he told them that the boy who was injured back in the 70's was actually their uncle. this knowledge made the whole situation feel that much more personally relevant to everyone. to let the six-year-old who got hurt know they were thinking of him, the kids decided to make a huge neighborhood card. word spread on the block, and soon ten kids were crowded around the kitchen table working on it together. after they all decorated and signed it, the kids took it around the neighborhood and others—both children and adults—signed it too. this is when they found out that another neighbor was actually the boy’s cousin. she told the kids that when they finished gathering signatures on the card, she would take it to their next family gathering to deliver to the boy in person. later that week neighborkids explored the neighborhood block-by-block to identify anything that looked like it might be an electric transformer box, in order to check with florida power & light to make sure all the boxes were safe so that no one else would get shocked when global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   they were exploring. they took photographs of all boxes they thought looked like transformers and when they got home they emailed the pictures to the electric company with a message asking for their help determining which of these were actually electric boxes, in order to check whether all were tested and cleared for safety. an update was posted on a neighborhood blog and the link was then emailed to individuals in local schools, organizations and government to help spread the word about the situation and the response the kids were leading. over time, similar cross-scale responses occurred in relation to various positive and negative circumstances associated with the mental health and well-being of kids and the neighborhood: the birth of a baby, a burned down house, a neighborhood award, a shooting, to name a few. each time, an effort was made to promote and chronicle the ways that kids and fellow neighbors tuned in and responded to the experience of one another, with people in groups and organizations beyond the neighborhood then alerted so that they too could become attuned and responsive. in neighbor-centric ways, efforts to become optimally self-organized as a broader community continued. sarasota community studio in january, 2013 a new phase of the resident-led efforts began. in response to four years of everyday communitybuilding by neighborkids, residents established sarasota community studio as a non-profit organization in a converted warehouse in central-cocoanut. it is a hub where neighbors come together to invent powerful approaches to community change and it is home to a “next generation” place-based initiative. place-based initiatives are comprehensive community change efforts that have been developing throughout the united states over the past two decades. they aim to bring about the overall thriving of all individuals and families in a designated neighborhood or geographically-defined community by ensuring that resources are relevant, sufficient, high-quality and wellconnected, in order to improve physical, social and economic well-being and associated conditions. residents are central to the change process, and community-building is critically important in addition to programs/services, policy/systems coordination, and data/evaluation to bring about comprehensive well-being (kubish, auspos, brown, & dewar, 2010b). the most promising examples today are referred to as “next-generation” place-based efforts, building upon lessons learned since the 1990s, with greater attention paid to issues such as: following the lead of residents as primary changemakers, addressing community power imbalances, promoting economic improvements without causing gentrification that forces current neighbors out due to rising housing costs and cultural bulldozing, and integrating place-based change with broad-scale systems reform (kubisch, et al., 2010a).  the place-based initiative launched in central-cocoanut is unique in that it is established, funded and led by residents who proclaim, “we aim to be the first neighborhood where every child and the whole neighborhood are thriving because together we are following the lead of neighborkids” (sarasota community studio, 2014, “home,” para. 1). thriving is defined in accordance with the wisdom expressed by neighborkids over the past five years: in terms of all children who live in central-cocoanut being happy and emotionally grounded, in loving relationships, learning, and contributing in a neighborhood where community well-being is reflected in housing, economics, social justice and the overall vibe. the studio itself is an open space with designated zones to reflect and promote the experience of kids and fellow residents as neighbors. wall-sized bulletin boards and postcard racks feature hundreds of photos reflecting the latest efforts in the neighborhood. a “map gallery” links this lived experience with aggregate data to make neighborhood-scale patterns of well-being visible. a workbench area surrounded by whiteboard walls is available to work together across ages in constructive ways, while a “living room” area furnished with couches and equipped with a projector and screen enable small group discussions and large group deliberations. since january 2013, residents of central-cocoanut have been teaming up with neighborkids to create a state of readiness for the place-based initiative through efforts in four domains: community-building, community data, “talent development” and communication/systems coordination. so far activities have included developing a neighborhood data profile, launching neighborhood reading and housing initiatives, championing social justice, hosting celebrations for the sake of continued community-building, and establishing a “neighborkid talent squad” to strengthen home-neighborhood-school connections for the sake of children’s learning. recently the broader community was invited to join neighbors in getting ready for the central-cocoanut place-based initiative as well by strengthening collaborative relationships with individual neighborkids and contributing agency-specific data for the neighborhood profile. the studio is open two afternoons each week for kids to continue initiating and leading efforts in each domain while adult neighbors work throughout the week to advance the work, and the ongoing contributions and perspective of neighborkids on the block are central and featured in all activities. neighbors are choosing to follow the lead of neighborkids in these efforts because children – global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9   particularly babies and young children -are now recognized as talented community changemakers due to their natural inclination to be curious, playful, social, joyful, story-telling, and boundary-crossing—the essential qualities not only of great neighbors, but also of social innovators. as neighbors come together around the talents and efforts of neighborkids, the mental health of children and residents of all ages is promoted by affirming and activating strengths, resonating with and reflecting emotional states, fueling curiosity, and strengthening relationships. this also makes it possible to better cope with stress and to develop personal strengths in order to be successful even in the face of chronic hardships. in these ways, the thriving of children and the neighborhood as a whole are expected to emerge, which in turn will generate knowledge, resources and hope that can be extended to the broader sarasota. it is worth noting that this community change initiative is currently limited to the 47 blocks of central-cocoanut due to a belief that this represents an optimal scale and geography to begin. similar initiatives often address an area that is much larger than a single neighborhood, or is determined by boundaries that do not reflect the way residents naturally connect with one another, such as zip codes, census tracts or school attendance zones. when residents are not within walking distance of one another or are not likely to encounter one another “on the block” for other reasons, this diminishes the capacity to connect as fellow neighbors and genuinely self-organize as a neighborhood. in order to remain resident-initiated and led, the place-based efforts of central-cocoanut remain focused on the hyperlocal community. this brief description has been provided to illustrate the ways in which infant mental health and complexity are being integrated and applied in central-cocoanut. the efforts seek to promote self-organizing in order to bring about the thriving of individuals, the neighborhood, and ultimately the broader community. residents – especially children – are encouraged to take up agency as neighbors, both to promote their (our) own selforganizing and to affect community change at the neighborhood scale. the network of relationships is strengthened, particularly among neighbors, through increased opportunities to be and do together “on the block,” with the intention of becoming more attuned and responsive by following the lead of neighborkids. care is taken to repair relationships when ruptures occur – both in relationships among neighbors and in relationships with people and groups beyond the neighborhood. reflective dialogue is promoted by creating and sharing thousands of photos and stories of everyday neighborhood experiences, along with visualizations of “big data” specific to central-cocoanut, in the context of sarasota and florida. the 47-block area of the neighborhood is taken seriously as an environment for exploration, discovery, connection, and learning, and as a critical dimension of the neighborhood system that both affects and can be affected by neighbors. data efforts are underway to spot and track signs of the mental health and well-being emerging at the neighborhood scale. these are the ways that neighbors are seeking to bring about the transformation of the place where they (we) live, for the thriving of all. implications for community mental health complexity and infant mental health when combined generate a reconceptualization of community mental health, with implications for the field. they offer a definition in terms of dynamic mental capacities, rather than emphasizing the absence of mental illness. they also provide a plausible theoretical rationale for the emergence of collective mental health and thriving through social networks, particularly at the neighborhood scale. when individuals are viewed as primary agents of change in promoting their own mental health and the significance of place is also recognized, then the critical importance of the neighbor identity becomes evident. how might collective mental health be more optimally promoted if professionals in the field of community mental health were to re-orient their efforts to follow the lead of neighbors in the communities where they work? how much greater a contribution would be possible if every community psychologist were to take up their identity as neighbor in the place where they live, in addition to their identity as professional? when babies and young children are acknowledged as primary change agents this has implications for the work of community psychologists as well. children can offer perspective, make decisions and lead action in ways that adults often cannot, especially when children are recognized as neighbors. coming together around kids provides ways to strengthen local networks of relationship and cultivate attuned responsivity, and is also less likely to be politicized or controversial than other community change approaches. when and how are child-oriented opportunities facilitated? when the neighborhood is taken seriously as a social system and environment, this has implications for interventions as well. when might it make more sense for interventions to occur on the block, rather than in schools, churches, libraries, social service agencies or community centers? how is the neighborhood environment addressed so that every aspect and feature promotes the mental health and well-being of residents? finally, when we understand transformation through the theories of complexity and infant mental health and hope to realize the thriving of all individuals, families, neighborhoods and the whole community, this has global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  10   implications for how we measure efforts and change. how are efforts connected and mutually influencing one another? how are they continuously adapting in response to changes at multiple scales, both intended and unanticipated? how are tiny initiating events being noticed and capitalized upon for the sake of transformation? these questions illuminate the need for increasingly sophisticated approaches to evaluation, which are already developing (westley, zimmerman & patton, 2006; agar, 2007), but will require significantly more support for implementation. opportunities for individuals to transform their own community, and their personal experience of well-being within their community, become more possible when the principles of complexity and infant mental health are combined and applied, especially when the focus is on neighborhoods. community mental health could embrace these insights to redefine the central purpose of the field: to cultivate the capacity of every community member to be continually attuned and responsive—to self, to others, and to the ever-changing environment—in order for whole communities to become self-organized and thrive. is this field ready too? references agar, m. (2007). rolling complex rocks up social service hills. emergence: complexity & organization, 9(3), 81-90. agar, m. (2013). the lively science: remodeling human social research. minneapolis: mill city press. capra, f., juarrero, a. & sotolongo, p. (eds). (2007). reframing complexity: perspectives from the north and south. mansfield, ma: isce publishing. children’s defense fund. (n.d.). be careful what you cut. retrieved from www.childrensdefense.org/becareful-what-you-cut. castellani, b. & hafferty, f.w. (2009). sociology and complexity science: a new field of inquiry. berlin: springer. cooper, g., hoffman, k., powell, b., & marvin, r. (2005). the circle of security intervention: differential diagnosis and differential treatment. in l.j. berlin, y. ziv, l.m. amaya-jackson, & m.t. greenberg (eds.), enhancing early attachments: theory, research, intervention, and policy (pp. 127 – 151). new york: guilford press. fonagy, p., gergely, g., jurist, e., & target, m. (2002). affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of self. new york: other press. gopnik, a., meltzoff, a., & kuhl, p. (1999). the scientist in the crib: what early learning tells us about the mind. new york: william morrow and company, inc. holland, j. h. (1995). hidden order. reading, ma: addison-wesley. howard, d. & stone, n. (2009). realizing the promise of promise neighborhoods. new york: the bridgespan group. kauffman, s. a. (1993). the origins of order. new york: oxford university press. kretzmann, j., & mcknight, j. (1993). building communities from the inside out: a path toward finding and mobilizing a community's assets. evanston, il: institute for policy research. kubisch, a.c., auspos, p., brown, p., & dewar, t. (2010a). voices from the field iii: lessons and challenges from two decades of community change efforts. washington, d.c.: aspen institute. kubisch, a.c., auspos, p., brown, p., & dewar, t. (2010b). community change initiatives from 1990 – 2010. community investments, 22(1), 8 – 12. lillas, c. & turnbull, j. (2009). infant/child mental health, early intervention, and relationship-based therapies: a neurorelational framework for interdisciplinary practice. new york: w.w. norton. maguire, s., mckelvey, b., mirabeau, l. & oztas, n. (2006). complexity science and organization studies. in clegg, s., hardy, c., lawrence, t. & nord, w. (eds.), the sage handbook of organization studies: second edition (pp. 165 – 214). london: sage publications. olson, e.e. & eoyang, g. h. (2001). facilitating organization change: lessons from complexity science. san francisco: jossey-bass/pfeiffer. pinto, a., dutton, t. & curry, h. (2008, april). communiplexity: a swirly goodness approach to community sustainability. paper presented at the first international conference on social entrepreneurship, systems thinking & complexity, garden city, new york. reynolds, c.w. 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(2011). building neighborhoods of opportunity: white house neighborhood revitalization initiative report. washington, d.c.: author. too small to fail. (n.d.). about us. retrieved from www.toosmall.org. tronick, e. & beeghly, m. (2011). infants’ meaningmaking and the development of mental health problems. american psychologist, 66(2), 107-119. u.s. department of education. (n.d.). promise neighborhoods. retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/programs/promiseneighborhoo ds/index.html?exp=0. u.s. department of health and human services. (n.d.). what is mental health? retrieved from www.mentalhealth.gov/basics/what-is-mentalhealth/index.html. sarasota community studio. (n.d.). home page. retrieved from www.sarasotacommunitystudio.org. westley, f., zimmerman, b. & patton, m. (2006). getting to maybe: how the world is changed. toronto: random house canada. zero to three. (2005). diagnostic classification of mental health and developmental disorders of infancy and early childhood, revised (dc:0-3r). washington, d.c.: author. art-therapy: qualitative-methodological proposal to work a sense of community in answer to healing intra-familial-conflicts arteterapia: propuesta metodológica-cualitativa para trabajar sentido de comunidad en respuesta a desahogar conflictos intrafamiliares angélica ojeda garcía, gabriela gonzález ruíz universidad iberoamericana, cd. de méxico keywords: art therapy, sense of community, family integration, group process, network support. palabras clave: arteterapia, sentido de comunidad, integración familiar, proceso grupal, red de apoyo. author biographies: angélica ojeda garcía holds a bachelor's degree in psychology, a master's and phd in social psychology from the national autonomous university of mexico, a master's degree in gestalt psychotherapy from gestalt university, a specialty in brief psychotherapy by the mental research institute (palo alto, california), a specialty in art psychotherapy by the mexican institute of art psychotherapy in mexico. she is a national researcher level i through the national system of researchers of conacyt. she is an academic and researcher at the iberoamerican university from 2004. her line of research focuses on the perspective of health in interpersonal relationships, which can range from the individual, the couple, and the family. in recent years she has carried out her field work with mexican migrants in the united states; through intervention with art therapy; facilitating the development of coping. angélica ojeda garcía tiene la licenciatura en psicología, una maestría y el doctorado en psicología social por la universidad nacional autónoma de méxico. global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 además cuenta con una maestría en psicoterapia gestalt por la universidad gestalt, una especialidad en psicoterapia breve por the mental research institute (palo alto, california), y una especialidad en psicoterapia de arte por el instituto mexicano de psicoterapia de arte en méxico. es investigadora nacional nivel i, por el sistema nacional de investigadores del conacyt. es académica e investigadora de la universidad iberoamericana desde 2004 al presente. su línea de investigación se aboca a la perspectiva de la salud en las relaciones interpersonales, que pueden ir desde la parte individual, la parea y la familia. en los últimos años ha llevado su trabajo de campo con migrantes mexicanos en estados unidos, a través de intervenir por medio de arte terapia y facilitarles el desarrollo de técnicas de afrontamiento. gabriela alejandra gonzález ruiz, phd in psychological research, iberoamerican university (universidad iberoamericana). master's degree in gestalt therapy, mexican institute of gestalt therapy. bachelor's degree in psychology, national autonomous university of mexico (unam). diploma course on "case study supervision seen from different theoretical models", ibero-american university. diploma course "psycological therapy centered around the person", unam. and a diploma course on psychological art therapy, mexican institute of psychological art therapy. twenty-four years of experience as a teacher in phd, master's degree and bachelor's degree levels, working at the ibero-american university, gestalt university and motolinia university. researcher in "project motherhood: moms working...paving roads towards community sustainability in 'el cilantro', santa fe", coordinated by angélica ojeda, phd at the ibero-american university. twenty-four years of experience of private practice as a psychological therapist. consultant of academic courses in human development, gestalt and gender studies. gabriela alejandra gonzález ruiz, doctora en investigación en psicología, universidad iberoamericana. maestría en psicoterapia gestalt, instituto mexicano http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 de psicoterapia gestalt. lic. en psicología, unam fes iztacala. diplomado “supervisión de casos desde diferentes modelos teóricos”, universidad iberoamericana. diplomado en "psicoterapia centrada en la persona", unam fes iztacala. y diplomado en psicoterapia de arte, instituto mexicano de psicoterapia de arte impa. veinticuatro años de experiencia en docencia a nivel de doctorado, maestría, especialidad, y licenciatura en la universidad iberoamericana, universidad gestalt y universidad motolonia. investigadora en el proyecto “project motherhood: mamás trabajando…forjando caminos hacia la sustentabilidad comunitaria en “el cilantro”, santa fe”, con la coordinación de la dra. angélica ojeda en la universidad iberoamericana. psicoterapeuta a nivel privado, con 24 años de experiencia, facilitando procesos terapéuticos con adultos, adolescentes y niños. consultora de cursos, talleres y diplomados en desarrollo humano, gestalt y estudios de género. recommended citation: ojeda, a. & gonzalez, g. (2017). art-therapy: qualitativemethodological proposal to work a sense of community in answer to healing intrafamilial-conflicts. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(2), pages 1-27. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 art-therapy: qualitative-methodological proposal to work a sense of community in answer to healing intra-familial-conflicts arteterapia: propuesta metodológica-cualitativa para trabajar sentido de comunidad en respuesta a desahogar conflictos intrafamiliares abstract sense of community can be the energy for making positive changes in a family and its relational dynamics with children in favor of subjective well-being. this study was done in the cilantro’s gully community, located in santa fe, mexico, where a group of mothers were evaluated through a community forum. they reported a number of concerns, including that their children after high school stop studying because they feel self-sufficient, they stop respecting parental authority, and, most seriously, they start to live outside the home potentially finding their way to vandalism in the community. their biggest questions were 1) what do we do wrong and 2) how do we educate them that the time comes when they do not listen to us? in addition, other problems such as family disintegration, difficulty setting limits, and loss of family interaction were mentioned. the rule of inclusion was they were moms with children of school age. using techniques adapted from art therapy, a 15 session workshop was conducted that included the participation of 10 community moms. the objective was to give them contention and find possibilities for action. through a qualitative methodology integrated by learning communities and with the help of the narrative technique, diverse interpersonal bonds were built in the group, characterized by: an attitude of belonging, reciprocity, a sense of community, and an internal relationship of functionality. the results showed that before starting the workshop there was no clear understanding of what it means to live in community or have a sense of community. the participants, through the narratives of their arts, integrated a different story of their daily life events, giving them a less traumatic and more positive meaning; they developed a better understanding of their family dynamics and relational with the children; as well as what it means to live in community, building a new meaning to their family and communal life; with this they initiated a series of attitudinal and behavioral changes in three of her daily contexts: as a woman (in the personal sphere), as a mother (in the family-social environment) and as a social representation of mother (in the community and cultural).it was concluded that having a sense of community is something that is built and is a key factor for the well-being of the family unit. resumen el sentido de comunidad puede ser el motor para desarrollar cambios positivos en la dinámica familiar y relacional con los hijos en pro del bienestar subjetivo para los participantes. el presente estudio se llevó a cabo en la barraca el cilantro ubicado en santa fe en la cd. de méxico, a partir de un foro comunitario se evaluó http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 un grupo de madres de familia, quienes reportaron una serie de preocupaciones, por ejemplo: sus hijos después de secundaria dejan de estudiar, se sienten autosuficientes y dejan de respetar la autoridad de las madres, pero lo más grave es que comienzan a hacer vida fuera de casa integrándose, en la mayoría de los casos al vandalismo de la comunidad. por lo que su mayor preocupación tenía que ver con la pregunta ¿qué hacemos mal, cómo es que los educamos que llega el momento en que no nos escuchan? aunado a ello, posteriormente se inician otros problemas como: desintegración familiar, dificultad para establecer límites, y pérdida de convivencia familiar. la regla de inclusión fue que fueran madres con hijos en edad escolar, previa a la etapa que ellas reportaban como problemática. usando técnicas tomadas de la arte terapia, se trabajó durante un taller de 15 sesiones, con un grupo de 10 madres, quienes se conocían por primera vez. el objetivo fue sólo darles contención y que encontraran posibilidades de acción. a través de una metodología cualitativa integrada por comunidades de aprendizaje y con ayuda de la técnica de narrativa se fue construyendo en el grupo lazos interpersonales caracterizados por: actitud de pertenencia, reciprocidad, sentido de comunidad y una relación interna de funcionalidad; lo que las llevo a transpolar estos sentimientos al exterior. los resultados mostraron que aunque al inicio no había una clara comprensión de lo que significa vivir en comunidad, las participantes a través de las narrativas de sus artes fueron integrando un relato diferente de sus sucesos de vida cotidiana, dándoles un significado menos traumático y más positivo; fueron entendiendo su dinámica familiar y relacional con lo hijos; así como lo que significa vivir en comunidad, construyendo un nuevo sentido de vida familiar y comunal; con ello iniciaron una serie de cambios actitudinales y conductuales en 3 de sus contextos cotidianos: como mujer (en el ámbito personal), como mamá (en el ámbito familiar-social) y como representación social de madre (en el ámbito comunitario y cultural). se llegó a la conclusión de que tener un sentido de comunidad es algo que se construye y es factor clave para el bienestar de la unidad familiar. introducción antes de iniciar con los antecedentes sobre sentido de comunidad cabe hacer algunas puntualizaciones sobre este escrito. en la literatura se reportan pocos estudios con fechas recientes que refieran cómo generar o construir un sentido de comunidad en comunidad. no obstante, en suma: 1) a lo largo del presente artículo se observara que el sentido de comunidad es un factor determinante para las acciones que se toman en beneficio de la comunidad; 2) sentido de comunidad es un constructo que refleja la funcionalidad de sus relaciones y fuerza de sus redes sociales de apoyo establecidas; 3) dicho constructo se construye a partir de un compartir significado, pero la realidad es que en la mayoría de los casos los integrantes de una comunidad ni se conocen, ni se reconocen como parte de la comunidad. aunque las referencias que fundamentan el presente artículo no son recientes, a raíz de la literatura este estudio busca responder a la siguiente interrogante: ¿será que hablar de sentido de comunidad es un término que no está de moda o es algo tan subjetivo que http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 depende de la persona y no del grupo que se ha dejado de lado del interés de los estudios con abordaje social? pregunta que en definitiva la presente propuesta refuta en su totalidad y se trata de remarcar la importancia de dicho concepto como la directriz de muchas de las intervenciones que las ciencias sociales pueden pronosticar e incidir a nivel de grupo. calvard (2015) ha estudiado los significados semánticos y metafóricos que tiene el concepto espacio o lugar en comunidad y encuentra que éstos son un referente para la construcción psicológica de sentido de comunidad. refiere que ambos términos por su definición asentada en una delimitación física puede intercambiarse y usarse de manera indistinta, lo que a su vez le da una fuerza semántica de unidad y familia, creando un lazo que une, es flexible, da seguridad, da fuerza a la comunidad, acerca, da pertenencia, permite movimiento y individualidad; así como relacionarse. con respecto a este último punto calvard profundiza e invita a reflexionar sobre cómo es que al interactuar en grupo, tales intercambios entran en un ritmo que pueden distinguirse en intensidad, frecuencia, calidad, tipo de involucramiento, entre otros y esto le suma un significado semántico de ser un espacio de: cooperación, recursos, redes de trabajo, apoyo, y de colectividad. luego entonces, concluye que el sentido de comunidad como una unidad espacio-lugar, es un referente psicológico para la construcción y satisfacción de muchas necesidades humanas, entre las que destaca la construcción de: la identidad, el apego, la autoestima y otras de tipo social como: la capacidad de interdependencia, el compromiso y sentido de comunidad en comunidad; punto final en el cual coinciden boyd y nowell (2014). por su parte socarrás (2004) amplía el significado semántico de comunidad y la define como un conglomerado social que requiere de establecer, construir y mantener relaciones interpersonales estratégicas para hacer de ella una unidad funcional en beneficio a sus integrantes y de todo el sistema, por consiguiente se le debe ver más allá un espacio geográfico delimitado. socarrás añade que para lograr relaciones de este tipo, el primer requisito es compartir: una historia en común, intereses, realidad espiritual y física, costumbres, hábitos, normas, símbolos y códigos, rituales, tradiciones, entre otros. a lo que coincide meza (2009) quien refiere que sin dichos elementos la identidad tanto personal como comunitaria se debilitan e impiden crecer como unidad de trabajo continuo. para gómez y hombrados (1988) el sentido e identidad en comunidad es una construcción de los significados de las cosas y de los estilos de vida cotidianos determinada por grupo de edad, contexto cultural y económico. estos concluyen que el trabajo en grupo no es más que una especie de trabajo, sino que son comunidades de interpretación y de resignificación de la vida cotidiana. son espacios que se implementan bajo una metodología de igualar directivas y espacios de expresión que incitan a la autorreflexión con la finalidad de generarles una sensación de retroalimentación de parte del grupo. el éxito de estos espacios de re-interpretación compartida como técnica se debe a que les permite a los participantes darse cuenta de aspectos como: • retorno y efecto que tiene su narrativa del "yo" frente a otros "mundos sociales" y, al mismo tiempo, que va hacia un "mundo de objetos" y sus propias experiencias, es decir, el "mundo subjetivo.” • poder que tiene la acción de reflexionar sobre la calidad de sus relaciones interpersonales y de vecindad, para describir: el apoyo social, la solidaridad, el intercambio mutuo, la ayuda http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 recíproca y el cuidado de los demás desde un punto de vista introspectivo. por lo que para generar un sentido de comunidad, calvard (2015) considera que un primer paso de acción es ubicar física y semánticamente a los integrantes de la comunidad y que expresen el significado que le dan a este espacio-lugar geográficamente delimitado en su vida y nos proporciona un diagrama de cómo estructurar este primer acercamiento (ver figura 1), el cual debe repetirse constantemente hasta que cada integrante exprese la satisfacción de las necesidades expresadas inicialmente, pues la satisfacción de ellas también es un reflejo y evidencia de hacer suyo el término de sentido de comunidad. jason, stevens y ram (2015) refieren que los factores que integran el sentido de comunidad son de alcance individual, micro y macro sistémico, dónde el primero no es otra cosa que un referente de construcción del yo o el “self”; el segundo refiere a la membresía de pertenencia y relación social; y el tercero es referente para la construcción de la entidad grupal (que marca las pautas para definir su organización interna y su propósito). por lo tanto, la comunidad es el lazo que conecta el bienestar físico y emocional del individuo con el bienestar social de la comunidad. resultados que coinciden con lo reportado por wang, nyutu, tron y spears (2015) al encontrar una correlación positiva y significativa entre sentido de comunidad con bienestar psicológico y con apoyo social en un grupo de esposas de militares que fueron separadas de sus esposos por un tiempo. figura 1. modelo cognitivo de organización del significado semántico de lugar para generar una sensación de continuidad y sentido de comunidad (calvard, 2015). en otras palabras, el bienestar psicológico de estas mujeres dependía en gran medida de la percepción de sentido de comunidad (r=.40, p=.01) y de apoyo social (amigos) y familia • ¿qué estoy haciendo aquí, en este lugar? generador de un estado de alerta, de atención y de poner al individuo en uun edo. de conciencia pen un tiempo presente… que conforma el self • ¿qué tipo de lugar es este y que puedo hacer aquí? genrador de un sentimiento de autenticidad y propósito de estar… que conforma la capcidad de socializar ¿qué tan importante es este lugar o espacio para mí? genrador de apego, empodera y da seguridad…que da la sensación de satisfacciön de necesidades bäsicas y primarias http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 (r=.46). un factor más que debe considerarse ampliamente al trabajar con grupos comunitarios, es reportado por omato y packard (2016), la generatividad, llamada así porque la alta percepción de sentido de comunidad conlleva a incrementar la productividad, la creatividad y la actividad en sus integrantes. factores, que ambos autores coinciden en que se pueden observar en las narrativas al expresar su sentido de comunidad. con lo dicho hasta aquí, parece que el poder semántico de vivir físicamente y geográficamente en comunidad, que ha sido reportado por los previos autores es novedoso. en la literatura se continúa ofreciendo estrategias que permitan trabajar la fuerza que da el trabajo en grupo pero desde recrear esa vivencia y no desde las implicaciones semánticas que pueden ser el motor de movimiento y sinergias grupales en beneficio comunitario e individual. de acuerdo con diener, oishi y lucas (2003) para poder alcanzar una comunidad funcional e ir más allá de su espacio físico y geográfico sus integrantes deben conocerla y hacer de ella parte de su identidad. luego entonces, la familia es el medio para transmitir los aspectos característicos que integran a la comunidad en cuestión. su valor como intermediario de la comunidad como unidad se debe a que juega un papel importante para la vida y el bienestar subjetivo de cualquier persona, ya que: • es el eje de organización prioritario de vida de cualquier individuo. • es el punto de confluencia de varios procesos sociales que le atañen. • es el punto de referencia en dónde se aprenden las maneras de responder ante las adversidades y desafíos de vida. • es el ejemplo de prácticas, reglas, parámetros y valores para darle orden y estructura a un proyecto de vida. • por consiguiente, es el centro de estructuración también para que todo individuo construya su sensación de satisfacción de vida y bienestar subjetivo (individual, familiar, social y comunitario). • es el medio para insertar a sus miembros en la sociedad y estructurar sus redes sociales de apoyo. • en ocasiones, también es el medio que dibuja el mundo exterior, pues le da ciertas interpretaciones a los sucesos de la comunidad y toma de ésta lo que cree que debe replicarse en las generaciones venideras. y por ello funge como el puente entre el individuo y la comunidad por medio de la vida familiar; de tal suerte que es el foco de atención y de estudio para muchos investigadores sociales (p.e.: diener, et al., 2003). no obstante, las demandas del mundo social son muchas, lo que ocasiona que en la mayoría de los casos se le dé más peso a éstas últimas y se deje de atender las que demanda internamente la familia, creyendo que la cuestión emocional es una situación de control personal, momentánea, pasajera que puede detener su expresión de manera voluntaria. diener, et al. (2003) refieren que todo bienestar -ya sea individual, familiar, social o comunitariose relaciona con estándares personales y es producto del balance que se hace de la percepción de emociones positivas y negativas que acompañan toda relación que se construye con los demás. además, es producto de una evaluación personal sobre bajas emociones negativas en comparación con la presencia de altas emociones positivas. en términos generales esta evaluación es conducida por la expresión de satisfacción o no con aquello que le sucede a su alrededor, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 con quienes son cercanos a ella/él y con lo que se tiene, lo que se ha logrado y lo que no se ha alcanzado. luego entonces, el buen funcionamiento, nivel de desarrollo, adaptación y bienestar subjetivo de la persona que exprese dentro y fuera del sistema familiar dependerá del nivel de balance resultante entre las cuatro comparaciones previas. así que mucho del enfoque del presente artículo retoma la estrategia de abordaje que en la mayoría de literatura; empezar por la comunidad, pero en esta ocasión ofrecemos un enfoque diferente –de espejopara poder entender las exigencias del sistema externo, al mismo tiempo que a las familias y sus integrantes que la conforman. los siguientes párrafos permiten ahondar en este último punto. por lo anterior, partimos de la idea de que estudiar a una comunidad significa estudiar a las personas y la interacción entre éstas. implica la comprensión del significado que le dan a su convivencia intrafamiliar e interpersonal con quienes conforman su sistema familiar, social y comunitario (córdoba, 2007). el enfoque de espejo para este autor es el proceso social del grupo que se construye a través del significado personal y subjetivo –de su “self”que nace cuando cada integrante comparte sentimientos y pensamientos desde la familia hacia la comunidad, sobre todo porque lo cree útil para consolidar al grupo, en respuesta a sentir perteneciente de él.. su contenido se distingue de cualquier otro porque hay narrativas que hacen referencia a: "yo", “yo como parte del grupo” y por ende, a su “identidad” e “identidad grupal.” lo que refleja sentirse parte de un todo y por ende, lo extiende en todo lo que hace y expresa en familia, grupos sociales y comunidad. jariego (2004) ofrece algunas técnicas de intervención-acción que permitan integrar los procesos de adaptación individual con los procesos de adaptación social-comunitaria. sugiere que dichas técnicas funjan como catalizadores de la participación y el cambio social desde ambos actores; el individuo y el grupo como unidad, entre ellas resaltan: ✓ realizar intervenciones enfocadas en la relación entre los individuos y su comunidad. ✓ compartir su sentir, su pensar en un ambiente de respeto pero para conocer y generar una sintonía en la comunicación del grupo de trabajo. ✓ una vez que con el trabajo del compartir se pueda instaurar un significado psicológico compartido de sentido de comunidad, generar el desarrollo de estrategias de promoción comunitaria. haciendo un proceso de análisis sobre el concepto, jariego (2004) refiere que el sentido psicológico de comunidad como una experiencia subjetiva de pertenencia, es decir, es el sentimiento o percepción de formar parte de un red de relaciones de apoyo mutuo de confianza (como se ha enfatizando que esto es un valor intrínseco en el trabajo con grupos y comunidades). se hace desde una valoración personal, a través de percibir una similitud con los demás en: reconocimiento, cierta voluntad de interdependencia (compromiso) con el grupo, permitirse sentirse parte de una estructura más amplia, estable y confiable (o sea, parte del grupo en cuestión). por lo anterior, identificar y/o fomentar un sentido de comunidad es de gran valor, pues no solo integra al grupo en general sino al individuo con el grupo, en este caso con su comunidad. de tal suerte que, el sentido de comunidad no son acciones, sino un sentimiento creado a partir de los otros y, compartido con quienes conforman el grupo en cuestión. ya mcmillan y chavis (1986) definen sentido de comunidad como: un sentimiento que los miembros tienen de pertenencia, de que los miembros son importantes para los demás y para el grupo, y http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 una fe compartida en que las necesidades de los miembros serán atendidas a través del compromiso de estar juntos. (pág. 9). según estos autores cuatro son los elementos que deben estar presentes para hablar de sentido de comunidad: la pertenencia se refiere a sentir que se ha invertido parte de sí mismo en la comunidad. la pertenencia delimita una frontera entre quienes sí pertenecen a la comunidad y los que no, brinda una experiencia de seguridad emocional, existe una inversión personal en la comunidad, además de permitir que los miembros se identifiquen con el grupo. la influencia se refiere al poder que los miembros ejercen sobre el grupo y viceversa. los individuos con un sentimiento más fuerte de comunidad son los más activos en las dinámicas del grupo y se convierten en un referente para el resto de participantes. la integración y satisfacción de necesidades es importante para tomar en cuenta el intercambio de recursos que existe en el grupo para satisfacer las necesidades de los integrantes, y se encuentra relacionado con los valores compartidos en el grupo y la cohesión de éste. una conexión emocional compartida, en la cual, los miembros reconocen la existencia de un lazo compartido. este vínculo es el resultado del contacto positivo prolongado y de participar de experiencias e historias comunes. potenciar a la comunidad en recursos personales con impacto en mejoras para el grupo como unidad. por lo que también resulta de suma importancia buscar, facilitar o promover la participación ciudadana-social. ramos-vidal y maya-jariego (2014) explican que la participación ciudadana es un mecanismo efectivo para reforzar la cohesión social y mantener unidos a los miembros de la comunidad. es un proceso en el cual los miembros de la comunidad se involucran en la toma de decisiones e intentan mejorar sus vidas involucrándose en organizaciones comunitarias. la participación debe ser entendida como un concepto dinámico, según señala giménez, al mencionar que participar es estar en el momento presente; así como ser parte de, de ser tomado en cuenta por y para; es involucrarse con el grupo, intervenir en lo que le preocupa y en el qué hacer para resolverlo, etc. la participación como proceso conlleva una acción transformadora, sobre todo cuando se incluye el arte, el cual tiene la característica de poder generar un pensamiento a partir de la emoción (carnacea, 2012). por otro lado, el mismo jariego (2004) refiere que la potenciación comunitaria como una estrategia fundamental para la transformación de una comunidad. ésta es un proceso que implica en su implementación y búsqueda de logro definir metas que redireccionen el cambio social. en otras palabras, la potenciación comunitaria es un proceso colectivo que se desarrolla “desde abajo hacia arriba” ya que es habitual y se origina en los grupos de base en la comunidad. en el estudio que aquí se presenta, este punto será abordado desde el rol social de madres; las participantes, ya que éste es un rol motivador, de lucha y constancia para lograr ciertas metas en lo que a la cultura mexicana se pueden delimitar como objeto de estudio. no obstante, según este autor la potenciación varía en función del contexto (se ve influenciada por la historia, experiencias y diversidad cultural). en ese sentido adopta un enfoque positivo, se enfoca en la adaptación y en la salud, no en la enfermedad. por otro lado, sustituye el rol del profesional y experto con la población por el de facilitador y confiere un rol activo a los participantes de la comunidad. córdoba (2007) refiere que una manera de facilitar estos procesos de transmisión significados y narrativas sobre sucesos cotidianos es a través del arte. aunque hay muy poca literatura publicada que avale este http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 punto, vale la pena decir que este autor enfatiza que toda narrativa apoyada por elementos visuales y en condiciones de estar frente del resto del grupo, toma una fuerza de entendimiento de asuntos personales por un lado. el hecho de verbalizarlo ante el resto del grupo, va construyendo la memoria de convivencia grupal y en las dinámicas de colaboración-participación e impacta en la formación de una identidad colectiva. a este proceso, le llama comunidades de interpretación, de proceso de re-significación o producción de significado. al describir y compartir significados, estos le brindan una cierta calidad homogénea al grupo y al mismo tiempo, permiten que los pensamientos y la ideología se consoliden, dando así unidad al grupo por el concepto de "identidad colectiva o de grupo.” son grupos que empiezan con ideas diversas pero que al ser confrontados por lo simbólico y significativo, produce una emoción e inspiran a la acción colectiva como un medio para responder a una necesidad común. al mismo tiempo que, para yanez la narrativa visual (la narrativa que se crea en función de una evidencia visual) conecta el significado de las cosas con la vida humana, por lo que la acción de describir la experiencia propia a través del arte es observar la vida de uno mismo en diferentes perspectivas. refleja de forma crítica las propias condiciones, al punto en el que el significado es realmente la emoción que trae al frente y permite repensarlas: el nacimiento de sueños, el reconocimiento de miedos y las complicaciones de acabar con ellos, así como el resurgimiento de esperanza, entre otros. en la literatura académica, 3 ejemplos nos ayudaron para integrar la presente propuesta. miret y jove (2001) realizaron un estudio en una comunidad educativa a nivel de educación básica para detectar necesidades y preocupaciones comunes entre los alumnos que estaban teniendo problemas en aprender por cierta inestabilidad emocional (según un reporte de sus profesores). implementando directivas con arte observaron que por compartir el mismo grupo de edad y año escolar los participantes del programa fácilmente le otorgaban un significado común a sus creaciones. al abrir dichas preocupaciones al grupo de trabajo, éstas se disipaban y con ello la construcción del motivo de participación en tal investigación cambió radicalmente de hacerlo por obligación a reconocer un cambio en la apreciación de su situación. desde entonces integran la modalidad "arte terapia para todos" para permitir fluir procesos grupales centrales de aprendizaje. villalobos (2015) argumenta que la práctica colectiva (grupal) es una metodología que se produce a partir del intercambio de experiencias individuales entre sus miembros para hacerlas experiencias colectivas. estos últimos pueden ser el catalizador del progreso social de su comunidad. en este punto, zalazar (2016) ofrece una visión muy puntual acerca de la modalidad grupal de taller y lo describe como un dispositivo positivo. él trabajó con un grupo de mujeres, entre los veinticinco y los cuarenta años, en lo que respecta a las asociaciones negativas que sentían sobre el “ser mujer” con arte terapia. contó con la presencia de siete mujeres. tuvo seis horas de duración, dividido en tres etapas y sesiones de trabajo. la primer etapa estuvo dirigida a volver figura lo que actuando como fondo se vinculaba a las trayectorias personales y colectivas en la construcción de los modos de ser mujer de cada una, a fin de visualizar las relaciones, entre los procesos y dinámicas del individuo con los factores familiares, transgeneracionales y socio-culturales (ciornair, 2005). para ello fueron desarrolladas distintas experiencias a partir de sus dibujos y la creación de muñecos como parte del caldeamiento realizado por el facilitador. este trabajo en la etapa inicial tuvo además por fin posibilitar en la siguiente fase el surgimiento más nítido del objeto muñeco al momento de su construcción y posterior puesta en juego en el grupo. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 la segunda parte del taller correspondió de manera específica a la construcción de los muñecos. la tercera y última etapa estuvo dedicada a la puesta en común: presentación desde los muñecos, recorridos del taller, etc., y al cierre de la experiencia. concluyendo, que al hablar de la construcción de género, siguiendo a gómez (2009) hay tres momentos que son relacionales y están dialécticamente comprometidos, a saber: el género expresado en los usos diferenciales de los espacios, en las distintas modalidades de apropiación del mismo y en las formas de experienciarlo. el género disputado, tal como es pensado, articulado y narrado desde el discurso y el género corporizado, encarnado. dimensiones que permitieron, como o reportan garcía casasola y sánchez-guzmán (2011) "del bosquejo de nuevas imágenes propias con las que identificarse positivamente y apropiación de un discurso subjetivo", despojándose de idealizaciones y mandatos respecto de lo que deben y pueden o no ser (p.92). ojeda y serrano (2008) también realizaron un estudio con mujeres de cádiz, españa, discriminadas y acosadas por su entorno familiar. los investigadores les dieron un lugar donde podían desarmar y reorganizar una serie de estructuras emocionales defensivas que solían mostrar su falta de autoestima y pérdida de identidad, permitiéndoles así la posibilidad de cambio y crecimiento personal. la arte terapia tiene un enorme potencial como catalizador y vehículo. a través del diálogo simbólico y significativo, les permitió situarse e integrarse en una situación de vida con significados menos traumáticos y más positivos. al enfrentarse a sí mismas y a sus circunstancias a través del arte, fueron conducidos a una pequeña luz que les mostró un primer y profundo proceso de reflexión y diálogo interno. entonces, el arte puede llevarlos a un segundo nivel relacionado con su situación y experiencias personales. cuando estas experiencias son comprendidas y asimiladas por el grupo, comienza una obra de observación, audición, análisis y compromiso, donde fluyen las exigencias, la prisa o la búsqueda de respuestas; se destacan a través de formas visuales, imágenes, palabras, huellas y movimientos. identificados estos aspectos, reforzaron su identidad individual. el objetivo de este taller no era buscar implicaciones colectivas o reconocer los aspectos sociales de estas mujeres. más bien, la relevancia se inclinaba a su pérdida de identidad, ya que eran homogéneas desde el principio. esta es una situación difícil que cuando se trabaja en grupos en condiciones de vulnerabilidad no es posible hacer homogénea, dando un mayor valor al proceso creativo impulsado por la educación en las artes. no está dirigido con la intención de reforzar los aspectos sociales. por su parte, omenat (2006) trabajó en la modalidad de taller con diferentes grupos de mujeres en situación de esposas de alcohólico a través arteterapia; que se han venido desarrollando desde 2002. refieren que debido a que se ha visto que tales mujeres entran a una dinámica que asumen e incluso sin cuestionarse si hay otra posibilidad de vivir algo diferente, es lo complicado que se vuelve entender su participación de dinámica familiar con un alcohólico y lo que pueden hacer para cambiarla, pues desde la sociedad el consumo de bebida en el hombre es normalizado; hecho que contribuye a que sea más difícil para los consumidores y familiares detectarlo; así como nombrarlo un problema. en el caso de la mujer, a su rol en este contexto le toca cuidar las relaciones afectivas dentro del hogar y con el esposo y si éstas no progresan, la consecuencia es que lo ven como un fracaso propio que las lleva a empezar a desconfiar de sus capacidades afectivas para dar y recibir; continúan viviendo pero con un sentimiento de fracaso y culpa, volcando toda la rabia de fracaso en sí mismas. luego entonces, ¿qué hacer entonces con todas las emociones que aparecen? en http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 ese sentido, los autores relatan que el grupo de mujeres tuvo la finalidad de ayudar su reconstitución cómo mujer y no cómo esposa del enfermo, madre de una dinámica familiar con un alcohólico, a través de explorar el mundo interno de cada una de las participantes y también establecer asociaciones entre lo individual, lo social, y sus vinculaciones con la cultura de género en “comunidad.” así el objetivo del estudio fue generar un lugar de encuentro regular que intentaba ofrecer comunicación, apoyo y revalorización personal a las mujeres. un acompañamiento en la expresión de experiencias y emociones a través de la creación artística. las mujeres iban identificando sus dificultades y recursos: había quien tenía más problemas para expresarse, otras para escuchar a las compañeras, unas preferían hablar, otras descubrieron que pintando se sentían mucho más cómodas, algunas mujeres supieron que necesitaban más tiempo que otras para confiar. durante el proceso aparecían temas que las unían como por ejemplo: las coincidencias como mujeres compañeras, madres e hijas. también la aceptación de las ausencias en el grupo que nos conectaban con los duelos de la vida cotidiana. en general eran mujeres que pasaban una situación de especial dificultad: la pérdida de un hijo, la enfermedad de una hija, entre otrs situaciones. eran amigas o conocidas de alguna participante y como ya he comentado, no precisamente miembros de la asociación de alcohólicos rehabilitados. en este período se produjeron mecanismos de idealización y fusión entre las mujeres. se sentían muy cerca y muy iguales y fue el momento en el que se empezaron a producir los cambios en las participantes que conformaban el grupo: a plantearse nuevos retos y a parir de que sus creaciones les devolvieron el sentirse mujer, su autoconfianza y con ello, sentirse pertenecientes al grupo y volver a empatizar con lo que sucede afuera de “casa”, con las demás del grupo y las problemáticas de la comunidad, integrando lo individual con lo social (omenat, 2006). en otro estudio, partiendo de la conceptualización que considera que una de las causas de desigualdad social que viven las mujeres en todo el mundo es la maternidad, sobre todo por la falta de apoyo de los esposos, o la sensación de que la experiencia no ha podido ser plenamente compartida/entendida por éstos, independientemente de las circunstancias. situación que hace que las mujeres se sientan ajenas o enojadas con sus parejas, teniendo que lidiar con los sentimientos de rabia que ello les genera (hogan, 2008); es que hauser (2016) desarrolló un grupo de trabajo, bajo el objetivo inicial de: ofrecer soporte emocional, de auto reflexión e intercambio de información sobre el parto, cuidados del bebé y crianza a un grupo de mujeres embarazadas y en etapa de crianza. no obstante, sus creaciones y sus narrativas obligaron a reformular los objetivos y el trabajo de intervención con base a: reflexionar sobre la identidad, el parto y la maternidad. mejorar la autovaloración y confianza en sí misma. expresar sus emociones y molestias físicas. reflexionar sobre las discriminaciones de género. concluyendo, el grupo para las mujeres fue un espacio para expresarse y reflexionar sobre sus miedos y ansiedades durante el embarazo, parto, situaciones de exclusión social, depresión post parto, desarrollo de los primeros vínculos con un bebé, experiencias de violencia de parte de la ex pareja y dificultades de adaptación a la maternidad. el cual con el acompañamiento del proceso creativo que ofrece la arteterapia, permitió a las embarazadas y mujeres en etapa de http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 crianza pudieran: 1) definir su relación con la maternidad, enfrentar las dudas, miedos, rechazos, contradicciones, las relaciones de pareja y la vida cotidiana. en otras palabras más profundas: reconocerse, identificarse, hacer descubrimientos, abordar problemáticas o conflictos y 2) redescubrir como mujer su capacidad autoconfianza, expresarse y empatizar con los demás. el valor simbólico que otorgan las imágenes creadas permite conectarse con su capacidad creativa como la estrategia para ir modificando cambios y enfrentar su vida. la presente investigación, cree firmemente que la dirección es importante desde el principio, ya que implica la definición de metas y objetivos específicos que permite centrarse en las relaciones interpersonales que están presentes en el grupo de trabajo. este es un aspecto esencial para poder producir cambios, como lo señalan varios autores (gómez & hombrados, 1988; córdoba, 2007). a pesar de que presentan proyectos con 11 a 15 sesiones, con 5 a 15 participantes, lo único que se puede concluir entre ellos es que el arte es un medio noble, no intrusivo y que permite el desarrollo y crecimiento de las personas, en especial, de aquellas que tienen una necesidad identificada y expresada. cuando se comparte y se desarrolla en un grupo, esta necesidad cumplirá con el objetivo de sus satisfacciones de una manera más efectiva y significativa, tanto en los aspectos individuales y sociales de la familia y la comunidad. como medio para alcanzar este lado potencializador de una comunidad y en este caso de un grupo de madres de familias, se decidió intervenir con técnicas de arteterapia. estas permiten, a través del diálogo sobre el producto de arte generado, una reflexión de carácter personal o grupal con la finalidad de generar un sentido de pertenencia. pues, estudios previos refieren que las historias compartidas y de participación activa entre los integrantes del grupo, son el medio para potenciarlos de manera individual hacia generar otras, como es la resiliencia familiar. la arte terapia, según martínez y lópez (2005) es una disciplina que trabaja de forma terapéutica utilizando medios artísticos, imágenes, el proceso creativo y el diálogo reflexivo para promover el cambio. el arte generado a partir de grupos colectivos, logra combatir la fragmentación social y resalta la participación social-comunitaria. su finalidad no es alcanzar un resultado bello. sino movilizar y lograr una transformación en torno a una preocupación y problemática, misma que en general es resultado de una comunalidad en el compartir significados, por lo que empatizar, solidarizarse y actuar como una manera de coparticipar con el grupo resulta ser el agente generador de un sentido de comunidad (carnacea, 2012). en todo grupo se debe crear un espacio en el cual no sólo sus integrantes puedan expresar sus propias emociones, sino también identificarse con los y las demás y aprender de las experiencias de las demás por identificación (ojeda & serrano, 2008). asimismo, agregan cómo a través de la simbolización compartida y el proceso de identificación por reciprocidad que se da entre los integrantes de un grupo, es que el arte –como intermediarioes el que funciona como agente de cambio. en ese sentido, el objetivo del presente estudio como un ejercicio de fase (según lo expuesto previamente por der kinderen & greeff, 2003) es empoderar al grupo de mujeres a partir de construir objetivos comunes y desde su rol materno, madre/esposa en su rol familiar y mujer, a través de re-significar la práctica de vivir y sentirse en comunidad, de crear en ellas una actitud, de ver posibilidades, de interesarse por las otras, de ayudarse, de apoyarse y facilitar el crecimiento del grupo. asimismo, a consecuencia de lo anterior, se espera que se logre un sentimiento de pertenencia, identificación colectiva y un vínculo creado a través de experiencias e historias compartidas. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 método participantes de acuerdo con freyermuth (2004) acerca de que las mujeres son un factor fundamental tanto en lo individual, familiar y social en lo que a bienestar se refiere de una sociedad, es que se decidió trabajar con un grupo de 10 mujeres, todas madres y residentes de una zona catalogada en pobreza extrema, según coneval conocida como “barranca el cilantro”, en santa fe. así como vale la pena aclarar que la conformación de fuertes redes de apoyo se basa en crear grupos de trabajo bajo características similares (en este caso madres de familia) son el punto inicial para construir un sentido de comunidad, más fácilmente se puede lograr sintonía comunicacional; además de que su establecimiento como unidad puede ser un factor de influencia para el desarrollo económico de alguno de los sistemas que integra (fukuyama, 2000; putnam, 2003) y también uno de los mejores predictores de felicidad y satisfacción con la vida (argyle, 1987; veenhoven, 1996). las mujeres participantes se caracterizaron por tener entre 24 y 35 años de edad con uno a cinco hijos entre “recién nacidos” y 13 años de edad. todas se dedicaban sólo al hogar, a la crianza de los hijos, y a cubrir todas las necesidades domésticas de higiene, alimentación y educación de estos. la asistencia de las mujeres fluctuaba entre mujeres a lo largo de 15 sesiones que cubrieron las dos fases previas al trabajo que aquí se reporta. diseño usando técnicas tomadas de la arte terapia se diseñó un taller de 15 sesiones, con dicho grupo de mamás de la comunidad antes referida, para que dentro del contexto de grupo de trabajo ellas encontraran un punto de apoyo que les permitiera reflexionar y hacer cambios en su situación de vida. instrumento para la recolección de datos se utilizó el método de construcción propuesto por la landgarten (1981), integrado por 5 etapas o fases que se describen a continuación: fase 1. evaluación inicial: esta fase comprende el proceso de diagnóstico, no en términos de buscar alguna patología, sino explorar y familiarizarse con el grupo de participantes en cuestión. en ella se utiliza alguna técnica de producción de arte, dónde el arte generado es cualquier producto en 2d que permite al participante expresar alguna necesidad individual o grupal. fase 2. planeación de las directivas mediante el diálogo: ésta es una fase en la que se promueve el diálogo entre el facilitador de proceso y los o las participantes, con la finalidad de entender en palabras de éstos últimos su sentir, su percepción y su contexto de vida. por otro lado, establecer una conversación “metafórica” que pueda retomarse para las directivas de arte en sesiones subsecuentes. una metáfora es cualquier palabra que condense cierto contenido en términos de emociones o sensaciones y que le haga sentido a todo el grupo. al mismo tiempo, reconocer entre el contenido del diálogo los mensajes tanto expresados como no expresados desde la interpretación que hace cada participante (o autor de su arte) desde su contexto. comúnmente a esta etapa se le conoce también como “el compartir” y se invita a que cada participante exprese su sentir y percepción. fase 3. manejo de las metáforas: la metáfora se convertirá en el medio estratégico para provocar la integración e identificación entre las participantes; al mismo tiempo será la confrontación y establecerá los lineamientos del camino hacia el posible cambio de una manera no directa. distinguir cuál es la metáfora adecuada para cada caso depende http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 de la escucha activa de la narrativa del mismo, así como del entendimiento del contenido del arte dado por su autor. fase 4. establecer las metas de trabajo con o sin fines terapéuticos: pues teniendo identificadas las necesidades o preocupaciones de las participantes, se podrán ir infiriendo las “directivas” subsecuentes para la intervención por medio del arte. la directiva es la meta que se busca, se crea en función de la necesidad a resolver. esto es, entendiendo el contexto grupal se genera la primera directiva, que en este caso fue: explorar su rol de mama en las participantes. a partir de los resultados de esta primera exploración, se saca la segunda directiva, en este caso fue fortalecer aquellos recursos que pueden facilitar un proceso de resolución e integración familiar. de los resultados de esta fase se obtiene la tercera directiva, que fue en esencia qué pueden cambiar, desde su rol de mamá y que ello sirva el medio para ofrecer a otras mamás de la comunidad. en este sentido, la arte terapia se va construyendo conforme se aplica, no se planea. una vez identificadas las metas de trabajo, éstas direccionan las acciones de las participantes hacia posibilidades de acción y/o fortalecen vínculos de apoyo como una estrategia valiosa que hace el cambio. de acuerdo a los datos que se van recolectando, se construye la secuencia del proceso. fase 5. cierre: en esta etapa, el facilitador deberá estar atento a integrar las reflexiones, los diálogos y las artes generadas por los participantes, de tal modo que éstas lleven a cada participante a: darse cuenta, a descubrir desde qué recursos se puede adoptar una nueva actitud (sobre todo de flexibilidad, apertura y cambio) y poner en práctica, por ensayo y error hasta que genere una nueva dinámica en la vida cotidiana. material para desarrollar las directivas de arte papel en tiras corrugado, “pritt”, pegamento líquido, tijeras, recortes de diversas imágenes de revistas, papel de colores, estambre, plumones de colores, brillantina, limpiapipas, retazo de tela, relleno para tela, esferas de unicel de tamaño mediano, plastilina de colores, silicón frio, telas de colores, listones de colores, alambre, papel corrugado, papel china de colores, y palitos de madera. procedimiento las sesiones se caracterizaron por un desarrollo regular, esto es, al inicio ellas expresan como les ha ido en la semana, cómo se sienten, que han descubierto de sí mismas en la dinámica familiar, expresando y compartiendo su sentir. de este mismo intercambio se construye la directiva a trabajar, surgiendo preguntas, dudas, inquietudes, temas que dan dirección al trabajo de arte terapia a través de los diferentes materiales que se presentan. las facilitadoras, logran encuadrar las directivas de acuerdo a la metodología planteada en esta fase para llegar a los objetivos previstos. las mujeres tienen libertad de elección de materiales y de expresión de su pensar y sentir, decidiendo hacer collage, pintura, dibujos, entre otros. es un momento de encuentro consigo mismas donde se ponen en contacto con sus necesidades, pensamientos y emociones logrando plasmar su “ser” y “estar”; iniciando un diálogo interno de reconocimiento y expresión. al finalizar esta tarea, logran compartir entre todas las mujeres su resultado de arte. tal como lo refiere garcía (2006) “es un tiempo para sentirse autora, reconocer los logros y las dificultades, escuchar comentarios de las compañeras y de la arte-terapeuta que le ofrecen otras miradas de su trabajo”; así por medio de sus narrativas, se pudo ir observando cómo el contenido de ella cada vez era más concreto (expresaban una sola idea), preciso y económico (decían lo que querían decir con el menor número de palabras) y, de expresión condensada – metafórica (de simbolismos generados por conectividad grupal). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 resultados los resultados se presentan por fase, según la metodología tomada del modelo de abordaje de landgarten (1981) de construcción y levantamiento de datos. fase 1: esta primera etapa se tomó como diagnóstico y etapa de evaluación, los datos generados de una fase de trabajo previo por medio de la técnica del análisis de una línea de vida generada por participante, en función de 3 preguntas: ¿quién te enseñó a ser mamá? ¿cómo eres cómo mamá? y ¿qué quieres cambiar para mejorar tu rol de mamá? en respuesta a la primera pregunta, expresaron patrones repetitivos de maneras que reflejan el cómo se construye la maternidad: “aprenden” a ser mamás en la práctica, cuidando a hermanos, sobrinos, primos porque no había nadie más. posteriormente porque se embarazan (no deciden embarazarse) – embarazos adolescentes. no logran terminar ciclos etapas infancia/adolescencia/adultez. se enamoran, sin pensar en las consecuencia y se dejan llevar en nombre del amor por las promesas e ilusiones que construyen como cualquier joven al lado de su ser amado, es decir. idealización del amor romántico y de pareja condicionado por los medios de comunicación. esto también podría denotar cierta infantilización de la relación de pareja. en respuesta a la segunda pregunta expresaron patrones repetitivos de maneras que reflejan el cómo se ejerce la maternidad: concepciones de género, la mujer es quien limpia, quien cuida a los hijos, administra el hogar, vela por la educación y nutrición de los hijos, la limpieza, el orden y la administración en la economía del hogar, etc. violencia familiar la mayor de las veces del hombre ejercida a la mujer. aunque hay algunos casos de mujer-mujer, incluso de madre-hija. esto denota problemas estructurales de violencia, relacionados con temas de pobreza, creencias de género, falta de oportunidades etc. a nivel nacional. el sentido de ser madre, donde la narrativa de las asistentes fue cargada de una emoción diferente al momento de compartir sus trabajos, cada una expresó entre risas y bromas la frustración y agotamiento que implica ser mamá. la forma interminable de quehacer que nadie aprecia, trabajos rutinarios que son necesarios, desgastantes y poco considerados importantes para la familiar tales como limpiar la casa, tener la comida preparada, lograr orden y pulcritud en su hogar, referían... “la labor nunca acaba y es poco apreciada por los miembros de la familia.” construcción de un estilo de crianza saludable. las mujeres sintetizaron los límites, la autoridad, el amor (corazón), sentimientos de enojo y frustración ante las obligaciones en casa, los cuales son los obstáculos que les impiden ser “mejores mamás aquí y ahora.” las mujeres coincidieron en citar la necesidad de regresar a los valores esenciales de la familia, evaluar la dinámica de ésta a través de lo que se necesita más de lo que se quiere, de lo que es correcto más que de lo democrático. siendo importante considerar esos aprendizajes significativos y positivos para ponerlos en marcha con sus hijos, evaluando que tal vez no fueron aprendidos de la mejor forma en su familia nuclear, y que ahora ellas tienen la posibilidad de http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 experimentarlos y enseñarlos con su propio estilo y, ¡sí enseñarlos!., no evitarlos, no anularlos por la experiencia personal que eso implique, si no ponerlos en un plano de acción como resultado inmediato al ser ellas las que enseñan con el ejemplo, las que modelan estos valores y actitudes desde su rol de ser madre. concluyeron que educar por medio de los valores es transmitir a la familia una saludable convivencia, al tener siempre presente por qué lo están haciendo. en respuesta a la tercera pregunta expresaron miedos, pero al mismo tiempo algunas posibilidades de acción y cambio desde este rol de mamá: se observó que las mujeres tenían dificultades en su situación familiar, expresaban frustración en ocasiones por su situación matrimonial, su ocupación en la casa y la pobre relación que mantenían con sus hijos. figura 2. carta escrita por una participante que refleja lo frustrada que se siente al no disfrutar su rol de madre y tenerlo que ejercer todos los días. conforme avanzaba el taller tomaron consciencia sobre sí mismas, sus posibilidades y habilidades de acción, tomaron decisión de ello en pro de facilitar mejoras en su persona o su familia (ver figura 2). fase 2: para poder planear las directivas se utilizó la técnica de la arteterapia grupal de “identificación de acciones por participantes.” la facilitadora había cuestionado a cada una de las asistentes en la exposición de su arte, puntualizando el simbolismo con el que había sido elaborado. y, fue aquí cuando se cuestionó de forma grupal a las mujeres… “todas han compartido la dificultad que tienen para poner límites o ser autoridad con sus hijos, además de restar autoridad a sus esposos ante los hijos, al no estar de acuerdo con la forma en que los reprenden, ¿cómo podrían cambiarlo?” se pidió que seleccionaran un solo color, dibujaran una problemática que en el pasado inmediato hubiese sucedido con sus hijos, algo que les produjera tristeza, enojo, miedo, frustración. se pidió que intentaran que fuera lo más claro posible, usando símbolos, no palabras. al finalizar el dibujo, se rotarían los dibujos con las demás participantes y cada una, utilizando papel albanene, terminaría el dibujo agregando o aportando cómo mejorarían ese conflicto expresado (ver figura 3). del análisis de las propuestas hechas por el resto del grupo, cada participante compartió el cómo ahora veía. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 figura 3. arte en 2d y modificado por otra de las participantes por medio de la técnica de apreciación y consejo por medio de añadir papel albanene; en cuyo caso manda el mensaje de que falta amor entre los miembros dibujados. de las opciones que reportaron como grupo permitieron ver que las intervenciones del resto del grupo fueron en función de: • aprender a respirar, tener paciencia, contar hasta 10 para aprender a reaccionar con mayor serenidad. • cuidar las palabras, el vocabulario, y el modo del cómo se reacciona ante alguna situación no esperada con los hijos. • cambiar la emocionalidad, el humor o incluir el amor en la relación reflejada, casi en su mayoría madre e hijos. fase 3: esta fase tomo relativamente un poco más de tiempo, ya que trabajar con metáforas no es un trabajo sencillo y mucho menos lo es analizarlas. se comenzó realizando una sensibilización, se les pidió que pensaran en una situación incómoda que hayan vivido y cómo se sintieron al no actuar como ellas hubieran querido, que identificaran en que parte de su cuerpo sienten esa emoción. posteriormente con el material brindado, se pidió que representaran esa parte del cuerpo que contenía tales emociones; así se les enseñó que era una metáfora y cómo ésta sintetiza muchas veces lo que se piensa, lo que se siente y da las posibilidades de acción (ver figura 4). figura 4. collage generado por una participante pero que representa el trabajo posterior a reflexionar sobre los miedos y buscar el cómo disminuirlos a través de definir un reto a seguir y miedo a vencer. los resultados permitieron observar que cada participante generó un símbolo de su mayor preocupación y necesidad por cambiar, el cual condensaba un cúmulo de sentimientos y emociones. así encontramos que: participante 1[p1]: “…dibuje un corazón que representa a mi pareja, no quiero que sea tan fuerte con sus palabras, es enojón quisiera cambiarlo que sus palabras sean más dulces hacia mí… hacia mi hijo, quiero que entienda que no es necesario ser tan duro….” participante 2 [p2]: “me gustaría tener más manos para hacer más cosas… además de darles de comer, ayudarlos con las tareas escolares… me gustaría poder realizar http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 actividades como el convivir con mis hijos, jugar con ellos… pues me lo reprochan.” participante 3 [p3]: “es una mano la mía hice una cara de malvada ya que yo tampoco puedo protegerme de mis reacciones de enojo… reconozco que puedo hacerme más agresiva, tengo que contenerme por ello cuando exploto me desbordo, los palos que le puse adentro de la mano representan esa dureza, enojo no controlado en mí… algo que me puede frustrar mucho… asumo una actitud de intolerancia y me pone muy mal.” participante 4 [p4]: “hice una araña que representa las situaciones incomodas en casa, ya que me dan mucho miedo y el ser madre es un reto y me causa miedo enfrentar algunas situaciones, estoy pasando una etapa muy complicada que está ya mermando mi salud, la araña representa cosas que he manejado de cierta manera como el tener una pareja que a veces es violento, inflexible, parte de mis culpas, cosas que uno va arrastrando y en los momentos de crisis sale para mí esa araña pierdo los estribos.” participante 6 [p6]: “no representé nada desde mí, pero me identifico con las dos manos y el corazón, las manos el esfuerzo que haces por la familia, la araña los problemas.” participante 7 [p7]: “es un corazón morado, porque es color que me identifica y tiene forma de angelito, pues representa la débil que soy para poner límites cuando se trata de mis hijos… si me ponen una carita o me ruegan tantito, accedo fácilmente” no obstante en general, en el compartir todas hicieron mención, más delante de: • una araña que simbolizaba los miedos de no lograr ver en los hijos todo el esfuerzo de querer ser buena mamá, o bien, de no tener ni siquiera ninguna evidencia de ello. • diversos corazones/manos gesticulados y que representaban o el sentimiento duro de la mamá que no permite falta de límites, o la carita de un angelito como reflejando la suavidad con la que si se trata de los hijos hay un exceso de permisividad y decidieron unir sus artes al de la araña, como símbolo central en el que gira toda la dinámica familiar y por supuesto su rol de mamá. • el trabajo de arte les permitió reconocer que todas son mamás, que sienten cosas parecidas y que al compartir en grupo logran reconocer lo que necesitan hacer, crear, construir e implementar aquello que les ha funcionado a las otras mujeres, incorporan herramientas de acción o pensamiento para lidiar con cosas simples y suficiente para generar cambios en su dinámica familiar. uno de los elementos más importantes por los cuales se logró un sentido de comunidad en el grupo de las mujeres, fue el hecho de que tenían en común, la experiencia de maternidad. fase 4: como esta fase es secuencia y resultado de la 3, se les pidió que ejemplificaran aquello que habían hecho consciente y que querían cambiar para mejorar en su rol de mamás, pues estaban en un proceso de aprendizaje para ello. la meta era que lo que describieran deberían llevárselo como tarea, para implementarlo en su casa, con su familia. los resultados permitieron ver que si bien la diversidad de flancos que una madre tienen que tener presentes y ver por ellos para que la familia se forme y funcione son muchos, casi casi se repitieron en cantidad como los expusieron en la fase de diagnóstico, a diferencia que en esta ocasión sus collages estaban más estructurados, e integrados, es decir, no se representaba ella como mujer con sus diferentes roles o papeles que juega dentro de la familia, sino ella en sus diferentes facetas familiares integrando a otros miembros de la familia, integrando http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 aspecto de cuidado personal, de convivencia familiar y de mejoras para la familia en general. los resultados ayudaron a redireccionar las acciones secuenciales hacia generar cambios en casa, desde su rol de mamá y sí construir el proceso de cambio para cada caso participante. para hacer cierre de esta última parte de la línea de la vida, todas las participantes identificaron y expresaron su sentido de ser madres ahora, reconociendo las ganancias de haber salido de sus casas y compartir sus propias experiencias con otras mujeres, logrando solidarizarse entre ellas, aportando y facilitando estrategias para resolver aquellas dificultades de sus vidas. todas las mujeres asistentes coincidieron que “la madre que pueden ser” ya está presente y está en un autodescubrimiento de sí misma, a través de sus compañeras que observan, refleja, acompañan y aportan a su sí mismo, logrando una comunión en el grupo de mujeres donde se espejean unas a otras en que implica ser mamá aquí y ahora (ver figura 5). figura 5. arte en 3d creado por todas las participantes, donde cada figura representa un miedo en particular y todas decidieron unirse al miedo que les pareció en común: la araña, la cual representa lo negro, lo obscuro, miedo al cambio. fase 5: las mujeres expresaron los cambios que lograron a partir de asistir al grupo y congeniar con sus compañeras. las mujeres del grupo compartieron la inquietud de otras mamas que se habían acercado a las protagonistas del grupo, para indagar lo que habían aprendido y el cómo lo habían logrado. el grupo comento de la importancia que ha tenido este “descubrimiento de ellas mismas entre ellas” y de lo relevante que sería lograr impactar en otras mamas. el conceso de mujeres se concretó, en hacer diferentes propuestas para invitar y beneficiar a más madres de familia. el sentido de comunidad se hizo presente. así, la siguiente directiva, se indicó crear un simbolismo que las identifique con otras madres de familia y puedan transmitirle los cambios que ellas han generado y continúan llevando a cabo en su casa y de esa forma invitarlas a participar e integrarse en una nueva etapa del taller en arte terapia para trabajar emociones (ver figura 6). su trabajo partió de las reflexiones generadas: p1: “he visto que puedo tener más paciencia para evitar enojarme con mis hijos en algunas situaciones que espero realicen y no llegan a concluir.” p2: “me he sentido más fortalecida, el aprender y poner en orden las ideas me ha hecho mucho bien. mi pareja ve el cambio en mí, estoy más cercana con mis hijos, mi dinámica familiar ha cambiado mucho… más tranquila, no me siento tan frustrada, me doy cuenta con lo que tengo cómo hacerlo mejor, el saber que yo decidí llevar así mi vida y el resultado ha sido lo que he construido y me falta mucho.” p3: “voy conociendo a mis compañeras y sé lo que cada una expresa, sus historias, lo que puedo aprender de cada una, por ejemplo: a tiene muy buena actitud, siempre está feliz, j; aunque es muy joven ha pasado por situaciones de dificultad pero lo está resolviendo, my; se me hace muy femenina, siempre está arreglada, m; veo que es muy amorosa con sus hijos eso http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 me gustaría manifestarlo así con los míos. p4: “he tenido cambios con mis hijos, me estoy acercando a ellos, al inicio les pareció extraño pero ya se están acostumbrando a mis muestras de afecto y les agrada yo sea así con ellos.” figura 6. poster creado por el grupo de mujeres las cuales se describen antes y después de haber tomado el taller como una manera de invitar a otras mujeres que podrían estar en sus mismas circunstancias. el cartel enfatiza: “date un tiempo” como una frase metafórica que construyen a través del taller y que expresa que en la reorganización personal está el cambio en la dinámica de vida. más adelante -como grupodecidieron invitar y atraer mujeres que puedan estar viviendo la misma situación por las que ellas estaban atravesando, platicarles acerca de sus experiencias y los cambios que las han beneficiado, a ellas y a su familia y propusieron hacer un mural o un cartel el cual se colocara donde pasará mucha gente y les llamará la atención. las madres, tras un momento de reflexión, decidieron hacer una creación a modo de invitar a las demás mujeres de la comunidad que se unieran al grupo: “la mujeres concretaron que al invitar a otras mujeres era una estrategia para estar más al pendiente de sí mismas y de los hijos. reconocer la importancia de mirarse a ellas mismas y facilitar a otras mujeres es generar un mayor valor consigo misma al aprender a valorarse, reconocer la fuerza para continuar, igual de efectivo que el regalarse cosas que las hagan sentirse.” las mujeres se mostraron participativas y receptivas a la propuesta, teniendo duda del qué y el cómo hacerlo. por lo que la facilitadora hizo énfasis “ustedes pueden organizarse para buscar y crear un simbolismo que las identifique con otras madres de familia y puedan transmitirle la forma en cómo han descubierto y logrado ciertos cambios con la familia. y de esa forma invitarlas a participar e integrarse en el trabajo que se realiza en el taller por medio del arte terapia.” se les proporciono diversos materiales donde ellas tenían que crear su arte en grupo: p5: “hay que elaborar una muñeca que nos represente a las mujeres, a nosotras como mamas, como cuando hice la muñeca que me representaba a mí misma con los cabellos parados.” p3: “hay que iniciar dibujando la cabeza de lo que sería la muñeca.” p1: “yo hago la blusa de la muñeca que están construyendo.” en grupo las participantes del taller fueron elaborando el cuerpo y la ropa de la muñeca donde se representaría a ellas como madres de familia simbolizando la construcción de ellas mismas como mujeres y madres de forma interna y externa; y las madres que son ahora que se encontraron así mismas. conforme iban avanzando en el trabajo se fueron organizando en la forma en que iban a ir colocando, de forma simbólica, la mujer que representa la muñeca, se designan tareas entre ellas para hacer las diferentes partes de su cuerpo. todas coinciden en expresar la necesidad que tienen de representar en su mirada esta interpretación de ellas mismas, por lo que deciden hacerla enojada, y con los brazos extendidos sobre la cabeza como un símbolo de desesperación ante las adversidades que ellas enfrentan cotidianamente, le colocan el cabello en forma http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 despeinada representando no saber actuar ante ciertas situaciones con los hijos, este es su primer acercamiento hacia ellas misma del cómo se vivían antes del taller. las mujeres participaron de forma activa. la dinámica en la construcción de este cartel fue de forma colaborativa. en cada sesión, eran distintas las mujeres que asistían y partían de observar que ya se había construido en el cartel y que faltaba o se podía agregar a este. la forma en que se involucraron las mujeres fue con distintos materiales, texturas, y colores que facilito la creatividad en la elaboración de éste. durante las sesiones, el diálogo y reflexión que se daba entre ellas era de intercambiar su experiencia de fin de semana con la familia, abordar temas de preocupación cotidiana como la dificultad de lograr que los hijos anotaran de forma correcta la tarea, dificultades económicas en la familia que se vivía día a día, los malos entendidos entre parientes, entre otros; el diálogo entre ellas fluía teniendo como particularidad que podía abrir cualquier inquietud o comentario, simplemente confluían en tiempo y espacio. al finalizar la elaboración del cartel, estuvieron presentes todas las mujeres participantes, para reflexionar en voz alta el significado que tenía para cada una de ellas el arte logrado en un sentido de grupo y comunidad, como de pertenecía e identidad con el grupo de mujeres madres de familia. cada una de ellas fue expresando su significado en el simbolismos que agrego al arte, como la sorpresa que vivió al dejar de asistir algunas sesiones y regresar a la elaboración del cartel y sentir que lograba encajar sin ningún problema en entender los símbolos que había puesto las compañeras con anticipación, así como planear la siguiente secuencia en la participación del contenido del cartel. p1. “me llamaba la atención como todas fuimos construyendo un cartel, cuando no logramos coincidir todas las ahora presentes para hacerlo. me sentí totalmente identificada con las imágenes que veía una sesión antes habían puesto mis compañeras. no me costó trabajo saber qué significaba y qué podía agregar.” p2:”fue muy fácil organizarnos, nadie impuso, sólo escuchábamos e íbamos colocando imágenes” p3: “todas sabíamos que esa mujer que representaba la muñeca éramos nosotras. así llegamos, sin buscar quien nos dijera que teníamos que hacer. y la sorpresa es que todas lo construimos a partir de nuestras propias experiencias y con el intercambio que hicimos entre todas.” p4:“además retomamos ideas de los mismos trabajos que elaboramos con anticipación. este cartel para mi representa un antes y un después. como llegue yo al taller y ahora como me siento con el grupo, con mi familia, conmigo misma, yo como mamá.” p5: “me da risa como me veía antes y ahora como me siento. afuera de la escuela me preguntas las mamas que hemos aprendido que me ven distinta. les platico todo lo que he aprendido, piensan que nos han dado charlas, y cuando intento explicarles me ven extraño.” p6:”gracias por todo lo que nos han enseñado. gracias por habernos brindado tiempo para que ustedes bajaran hasta la barranca para hacer este grupo.” el grupo se organizó y propuso colocar el cartel todas las mañanas a la entrada de los niños a la escuela, y retirarlo una vez finalizado el acceso. ya que consideraban que era la hora de entrada cuando más mamas había. está dinámica se hizo antes de las vacaciones invernales, para retomar el grupo a inicios del siguiente año. de sentido de comunidad tal y como se observó en la teoría, parte del sentido de la comunidad es tener un sentimiento de pertenencia, identificación colectiva y un vínculo creado a través de experiencias e historias compartidas. la tabla 1. representa ejemplos de las http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 participantes verbalizando el sentido de pertenencia. uno de los elementos más importantes por los cuales se logró un sentido de comunidad en el grupo de las madres, fue el hecho de que contaban con una experiencia en común, la maternidad. cada una de las participantes de forma individual y asumiendo el apropiarse de su experiencia, compartió sus vivencias como madre de familia, coincidiendo y asemejándose en experiencias que indicaban la falta de expertise y de aprendizaje previo en su rol materno, generando un sentimiento de identificación en el relato de cada una de las protagonistas, generando un sentimiento de solidaridad y cohesión en el grupo. por otro lado, a través del arte surgen experiencias en común, logrando de esta manera una identificación con la experiencia o la percepción de las otras integrantes del grupo al crear metáforas que al momento de ser compartidas dan un sentido de comunidad al grupo, creando un ambiente de seguridad y contención emocional importante para crear un vínculo entre los integrantes. es importante mencionar que en el grupo de madres se logró una unión y solidaridad entre ellas, un vínculo. gracias al cual han sido capaces de compartir experiencias difíciles que cada quien vivía por su lado y catalizarlas de una manera positiva y en conjunto. p1 p2 p3 p4 p5 “… ahora no me siento sola, soy parte de un grupo… el sentirme acompañada me ha cambiado la manera de ver las cosas…” “….he absorbido tanto de todas…me encuentro muy sensible” “…voy conociendo a mis compañeras y sé lo que cada una expresa… lo que puedo aprender de cada una” .”.hoy me he dado cuenta de que si se puede… gracias al grupo he podido ver los problemas de manera diferente” “yo no falto al taller pase lo que pase, he aprendido tanto… me sentía sola y veía mis problemas sin salida, ahora no sé cómo pero los veo diferente” p6 p7 p8 p9 p10 “para mí es un reto, he aprendido de todas y sobretodo de mí, me he puesto a prueba” “ahora ya no soy tan mano dura, he aprendido de a y de ustedes…es importante dejarlos aprender y no darle tanta importancia a una idea mía” “gracias a lo que he aprendido de todas me estoy poniendo el reto de dejar a mis hijos que se ensucien, porque he aprendido que la convivencia me ayudaría a poner límites con ellos y a conmigo” “me entristece que muchas mamás pretextan el quehacer de la casa y en verdad he aprendido que si te organizas se puede, yo he aprendido mucho” “yo dejo todo, este día comemos cualquier cosa pero con el taller he podido reflexionar cómo hacer para ser mejor mamá” tabla 1. verbalización del sentido de pertenencia http://www.gjcpp.org/ discusión con los resultados presentados aquí, se puede ver como la arte terapia como abordaje a través de técnicas que permiten generar nuevas narrativas, cuando éstas son consistentes con las narrativas del resto del grupo, comienza un profundo proceso de reflexión y diálogo interior en el trabajo simbólico y significativo que las sitúa frente a frente consigo mismas, con sus vivencias y emociones (ojeda & serrano, 2008). las participantes a través de expresarse en sus artes y de la sinergia que surge del trabajo en grupo fortalecieron fuertes vínculos entre ellas y a partir de estos decidieron salir en beneficio de toda la comunidad. ahora han iniciado una nueva etapa y han sumado otro rol a sus vidas cotidianas: promotoras de bienestar en pro de su comunidad y de las generaciones en edad escolar, dentro de la barranca del cilantro. en ese sentido, linesh (1988) refiere que los grupos generan un espacio para vincularse con otros y esto genera crecimiento. es gracias a este espacio que el beneficiario puede aclarar su identidad, al revelarse a sí mismo. cuando un grupo, dentro de una comunidad, alcanza estabilidad. comienza un proceso curativo entre sus miembros, esto es porque el sentido de comunidad, incrementa la fuerza y efectividad al provocar que cada miembro se comprometa con los demás integrantes del grupo. el sentido de comunidad va más allá de un espacio-físico como apuntalan varios autores (p.e.: boyd & nowell, 2014; calvard, 2015; socarrás, 2004); la cuál es indispensable para abordar familias en comunidad y, cuya construcción parte del compartir (gómez & hombrados, 1988; jason et al., 2015; meza, 2009; wang et al., 2015). finalmente, diversos autores (p. e.: córdoba, 2007; diener et al., 2003; jariego, 2004; omato & packard, 2016; thomas et al., 2011) coinciden en que el arte es un sentido social de pertenencia por medio de la participación en grupo, ya que permite que las personas se comuniquen, identifiquen aspectos comunes y trabajen en su identidad. de tal suerte que trabajar el sentido de comunidad funge como estrategia paralela de la incidencia de minimizar, en intensidad y por consiguiente el efecto, de los posibles conflictos intrafamiliares e intergeneracionales inconscientes en la dinámica familiar cotidiana. referencias argyle, m. 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(2015). development of a three-factor psychological sense of community scale. journal of community psychology, 93, 8, 973-985. linesch, d. (1988). adolescent art therapy. new york, new york: brunner/mazek. martínez, n & lópez, m. (2005). arteterapia, principios y ámbitos de aplicación: el arte como terapia en españa. fondo social de la unión europea: españa. mcmillan, b. & chavis, d. m. (1986). sense of community: a definit ion and theory. journal of community psychology, vol 14(1), 1-23. john wiley & son, inc. meza, g. (2009). comunidad y sentido de comunidad: la intervención del programa puente en seis familias en situación de extrema pobreza en la comuna de la florida. universidad de chile. facultad de ciencias sociales. escuela de psicología: santiago. miret, mª. a. & jové, g. (2011). arteterapia para todos: la clave está en la diferencia. arteterapia: papeles de arteterapia y educación artística para la inclusión social, 6, 13-32. ojeda garcía, a. (2015). manual para generar involucramiento en el trabajo con grupos por medio del arte. méxico: manual moderno/universidad iberoamericana. ojeda, m. & serrano, a. (2008). mujer y arteterapia, una visión sobre la violencia de género. papeles de arteterapia y educación artística para la inclusión social (3), 157-164. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=169016753015 http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=169016753015 global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 2 june 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 27 omato, a. & packard, c. (2016). the power of connections: psychology sense of community as a predictor of volunteerism. the journal of social psychology, 156:3, 272-290. doi: 10.1080/00224545.2015.1105777. issn: 0022-4545 (print) 1440-1183 (online). journalhomepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vsoc20. omenat garcía, m. (2006). arteterapia: una experiencia de grupos de apoyo a mujeres. intervención realizada en una asociación de alcohólicos rehabilitados. papeles de arteterapia y educación artística para la inclusión social, 1, 137148. putnam, h. (2013). meaning and the moral sciences. boston, london and henley: routedge & kegan paul. ramos-vidal, i & maya-jariego, i. (2014). sentido de comunidad, empoderamiento psicológico y participación ciudadana en trabajadores de organizaciones culturales. psychosocial intervention, 23 (3), 169-76. socarrás, elena (2004). “participación, cultura y comunidad.” en c. linares fleites, p. e. moras puig & b. bisel rivero (comps.): la participación. diálogo y debate en el contexto cubano. la habana. centro de investigación y desarrollo de la cultura cubana juan marinello, pp. 173 – 180. thomas, y., gray, m., mcguiny, s. & ebringer, s. (december 2011). homeless adults engagement in art: first steps towards identity, recovery and social inclusion. australian occupational therapy journal, 58(6), 429-436. veenhoven, r. (1996). developments in satisfaction research. social indicators research 37:1-46. villalobos, y. c. (2015). creación de experiencias colectivas a través del arte. tesis doctoral online: http://scholar.google.com.mx/scholar?q= arteterapia%2c+catal%c3%a1n%2c+20 15&btng=&hl=es&as_sdt=0%2c5. wang, m., nyutu, p., tron, k. & spears, a. (2015). finding resilience: the mediation effect of sense of community on psychological well-being of military spouses. journal of mental health counseling, 37, 2, 164-174. zalazar, e. b. (2016). mujeres manos a la obra. muñecos, imágenes, palabras, espejos. arteterapia. papeles de arteterapia y educación para inclusión social, 11, 87-96. issn: 1886-6190. http://dx.doi.org/10.5209/arte.54117 http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vsoc20 http://scholar.google.com.mx/scholar?q=arteterapia%2c+catal%c3%a1n%2c+2015&btng=&hl=es&as_sdt=0%2c5 http://scholar.google.com.mx/scholar?q=arteterapia%2c+catal%c3%a1n%2c+2015&btng=&hl=es&as_sdt=0%2c5 http://scholar.google.com.mx/scholar?q=arteterapia%2c+catal%c3%a1n%2c+2015&btng=&hl=es&as_sdt=0%2c5 angélica ojeda garcía, gabriela gonzález ruíz universidad iberoamericana, cd. de méxico abstract resumen introducción método participantes resultados tabla 1. verbalización del sentido de pertenencia discusión referencias microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 77 community social psychology as political education and awareness-raising: resistances and possibilities in everyday life suggestion for a model of analysis maria de fátima quintal de freitas1 post-graduate programme in education at the federal university of paraná, brazil (fupr) invited keynote address at the iii international congress of community psychology. puebla, mexico, june 3, 2010.                                                                                                                           1 fquintal@terra.com.br 78 community social psychology as political education and awareness-raising: resistances and possibilities in everyday life suggestion for a model of analysis. abstract in developing community work we have faced challenges and dilemmas relating to the involvement and commitment of different actors in the networks of community and everyday coexistence. although there has been an increase in sensitivity and motivation within civil society towards psychosocial practices in various community projects, this has not meant that participation – committed to social transformation – or awareness-raising – seen as a critical and political process – have been implemented and are guaranteed to be present in the above mentioned work. in the practice of community work, it can be seen that participation and awareness-raising constitute necessary psychosocial processes for the possibility of social transformation, starting from the networks of everyday life. it is the aim of this paper to deepen the analysis of the contents and meanings in the concepts of participation, awareness-raising and strategies for psychosocial survival, in order to support the realization of intervention-work that is committed to the concrete reality of the population and with political projects of transformation. there will be a search for the similarities, differences and intersections between these concepts according to the views of paulo freire on awareness-raising education, and ignacio martin-baró, as well as pointing to suggestions in the area of latin-american practices of community social psychology. with a view to a socially committed practice, we shall analyse the following conceptual axes: a) connections between knowledge-ignorance, loveunlove, hope-hopelessness present in the process of participation; b) society-culture-everyday life; c) education and community practices as forms of liberation (emancipation); d) possibilities for the praxis of maintenance and transformation. finally, a proposal is made for a model of analysis for everyday-life according to community social psychology, bringing together ideas from both authors and analysing the strategies for survival and resistance in everyday life that cut across our community practices. it is also the aim here to reflect on community practices as educational projects of social transformation, as well as on projects of popular education as possibilities for awareness-raising and participation in concrete life. 79 keywords: strategies of survival/resistance in everyday life; participation and processes of awareness-raising; exclusion, liberation (emancipation) and social transformation. 80 psicología social comunitaria como educación política y concientizadora: resistencias y proactividades en lo cotidiano. propuesta de un modelo de análisis. resumen en el desarrollo de los trabajos comunitarios en las últimas décadas, seguimos encontrando desafíos y dilemas, en particular con respecto al involucramiento y compromiso de los distintos actores en las redes de convivencia comunitaria y cotidiana. hoy en distintos lugares se observan programas comunitarios que expresan de alguna manera una sensibilidad y motivación de la sociedad civil para realizar trabajos dirigidos a la mejoría de la calidad de vida de la población. pero esto no significa que la participación comprometida con la transformación social y/o que la concientización, mirada como un proceso crítico y político en la vida cotidiana, se haya alcanzado en tales trabajos. se puede decir que los contextos actuales de globalización y las relaciones generadoras de exclusión han representado desafíos para el desarrollo de las prácticas comunitarias, que se expresan en términos de garantizar un camino para la transformación social juntamente con el fortalecimiento de las redes mínimas de solidaridad. ¿cómo implementar un proceso de formación epistemológica y política de los trabajadores comunitarios que esté, de hecho, dentro del paradigma de liberación de la psicología social comunitaria? ¿cómo desarrollar formas de resistencia a la opresión y a la explotación humana, junto con formas de afirmación de una vida más digna y justa? se pretende hacer una reflexión respecto a las certezas e incertidumbres que existen hoy con respecto a los avances y retrocesos de los trabajos comunitarios. así como también en relación a la formación exigida y necesaria para una “sensibilidad histórico-social” y una generosidad cotidiana. se analizarán los nuevos retos ontológicos planteados en términos de los contenidos políticos de solidaridad, lealtad, participación y concientización en la vida cotidiana de los agentes comunitarios externos e internos dentro de un proyecto de acción colectiva. se completará la reflexión con una propuesta de análisis en la que la psicología social comunitaria tenga también un carácter de educación política y concientizadora, según los principios de la educación popular y concientizadora de paulo freire. 81 palabras clave: practicas comunitarias transformadoras vs conservadoras; politización de lo cotidiano y educación concientizadora; formación político-metodológica en psicología social comunitaria.       82   community social psychology as political education and awareness-raising: resistances and possibilities in everyday life suggestion for a model of analysis when developing practices of community intervention that have a clear commitment to the emancipation and liberation of sectors of the population and peoples that are oppressed and exploited, certain psychosocial dimensions have proven themselves to be of crucial importance (escorel, 1999; freitas, 2003; lozada, 1999; montero, 2000; serrano-garcia, 1992). this has been seen to be the case throughout the projects developed in the area of community social psychology both in brazil and latin america in the last few decades. these dimensions relate to the dynamics inherent in community practices themselves, and appear in the interactions between the various participants in the projects, be they external (professionals) or internal agents (residents or participants in community groups) (montero, 2000; freitas, 1998, 2003). if the work of community social psychology has a clear commitment to the fact that populations, sectors and community groups ought to mobilise and organize themselves around their basic rights in order to build a fairer and more dignified life, it is important to analyse the meaning of some aspects present in people’s lives, and which can differentially affect their possibilities for action and community intervention (barreiro, 1985; martin-baró, 1989; freitas, 2000). through such analysis, the understanding of what happens with people in their day-to-day lives, of the meaning they give to their own lives and the kind of relation they establish with their fellowmen, can become a genuine ‘turning point’ for understanding why community practices succeed, or not, in the proposed direction (freitas, 1998, 2003, 2005; montero, 2000; martinbaró, 1987). it is this that allows us to understand to what measure the processes of awarenessraising and participation become susceptible to the events of everyday life, differently impacting on the people involved and pointing to possibilities, also differential, of success and failure in community projects (barreiro, 1985; flores, 1999; freitas, 2003; martin-baró, 1987; serranogarcía, 1991). hence, speaking of processes of awareness-raising and participation in the area of community work, leads us to think about the everyday strategies people use to affirm and confirm their selves, be it in actions and relationships, or in their beliefs regarding those relations and 83 inbuilt practices. in other words, it leads us to try and answer the big challenge, always present for each of us in our various practices in the community, and which is expressed for the moment by two important questions: 1) how to involve and commit people – professionals, residents, or participants in various community groups – in the community projects to be developed? however, even if it is possible to obtain this involvement, we come face to face with the other half of this challenge which is expressed in the second question: 2) how, then, do we maintain people doing what they are doing and, what is more, keep them in the belief that it is worth continuing to do what they are doing? that it is fair and correct (level of ethics and justice) and that it ought to be done (level of responsibility)? in reality it is these two key questions that directly lead us to think about what goes on at the level of practice and at the level of awareness. the first refers to ‘doing’ as such and to interventions in the community; the second is related to the psychosocial processes involved and the politicisation of awareness, as well as to the successes and failures of that same awareness, when the practice is implemented in community relations. although different sectors of civil society are effectively more sensitive to social problems, doing numerous voluntary work, and there is a certain, almost collective, ‘predisposition’ to help the poor and destitute, one cannot unfortunately also say that two relevant facts obtain: 1) one cannot say that there is an increase in the participation of people committed to social transformation and facing up to the exploitative conditions in which they live; and 2) neither can one say that those community projects have created processes of awareness-raising that imply a break with the forms of naturalizing everyday life and submitting to that exploitation. for this reason, the above questions become important since they allow us to analyse possible articulations that may occur between awareness and participation, so that we can understand the strategies used against (or, unfortunately, for) the means of alienation and domination of awareness. 84 with these worries in mind, a proposal for reflexion and analysis will now be advanced that covers three stages. in the first stage, some concepts will be recovered, assumptions and categories that are part of the proposals made by popular and emancipating education, in the philosophy of paulo freire, as well as in the perspective of the social psychology of liberation (emancipation), through the assumptions of ignacio martin-baró. in a second stage, an analytical proposal will be put forward regarding the connections and influences of these dimensions – of participation and awareness-raising – in the carrying out of work in the community. and, in a third stage, the aim is to thereby identify aspects and dynamics of everyday life that strengthen community practices within a transforming and liberating view of latin-american community social psychology. i. first stage: some concepts of popular education in paulo freire and the social psychology of liberation (emancipation) in ignacio martin-baró it is necessary here to quickly situate these two important researchers and social workers in the fields of popular education and psychology. maybe the best well known amongst them is paulo freire, the popular brazilian educator who argued for the ‘re-discovery’ and ‘repossessing’ of the world via the process of reading that world. he claimed that by reading the world one could recover it in its historical, political and socially transforming aspects (freire, 1974, 1976, 1979). for paulo freire (1970, 1974, 1976), the processes of raising-awareness take place in the intercession of the process of ‘reading the world and making culture’, within which men takes possession of his individual and social history. within the same perspective of socio-political commitment and existential involvement with the more disadvantaged and oppressed sectors of the population, we find the jesuit ignacio martin-baró, a social and communitarian psychologist. sadly and stupidly, he was brutally murdered on november 16, 1989. the work of ignacio martin-baró was always one of intervention from the concrete reality of the ‘simple’ people of his country, and registered a deep knowledge and empathy with the suffering of these people, hence positioning itself as a strong condemnation of human rights’ violations in el salvador. his proposals for intervention were guided by basic principles related to an understanding of the events in people’s everyday life, 85 through different group relations, forms of social inclusion and belonging in already existing groups and identities. in martin-baró, as well as in silvia lane (2000), we find the proposal to understand how macro-social dimensions affect what he calls the ‘human psyche’ (martin-baró,1987, 1989), and how the different forms of power manifest themselves in human relations. how did paulo freire and ignacio martin-baró understood certain fundamental concepts for the reflections here suggested? let us look at some of them. i.1 on the concepts of society and culture, circles of culture and group processes. regarding the concept and meaning attributed to the term ‘society’, paulo freire explains the different types of society and analyses them in terms of closed-society, transition-society, alienated-society, and open-society. these types of society refer to power structures more or less authoritarian and imposing that permit different degrees of civil action and participation. from there, he reflects on the types of awareness and education that would be found in each type of society, going from a more authoritarian education that generates submission, to a more critical education that values participation and different types of knowledge (freire, 1976). the analysis formulated by ignacio martin-baró, on the other hand, focuses on the capitalist modes of production and reproduction of social life, emphasizing the effects this has on people’s psychic structure and their everyday relationships (martín-baró, 1985, 1997). he also emphasizes the different tensions and conflicts that exist in society and which translate themselves in various forms of power and submission, thus generating different degrees of conformism and fatalism about social and political events. both, freire and martín-baró, understand society in its historical, dialectical aspects as well as in its ideological and economical conflict, thus revealing their roots in marxist thought. following from this we find in paulo freire a particularly important concept, one which is even included in his proposal for popular education. it is the concept of culture. when we compare its importance with martin-baro’s proposal, we can say that an equivalent concept here would be the understanding and analysis the author gives about society, regarding the later from a perspective of conflict and historical determination, and revealing the contradictions and repercussions in people’s psychosocial environment. for paulo freire culture is all that results 86 from human activity, from the “creative and re-creating [effort] of man, from his work aimed at transformation and the establishment of dialectical relationships with other men.” (freire, 1976: 41). in martin-baró we find the notion of understanding men in relation and as an actor and author of his own history, which is in turn manifested in real life relationships and not just in the relations between teacher-student. one can thus understand the emphasis given to the so-called circles of culture in the proposal of paulo freire, and which refers to the discussion and analysis of occurring situations, events and themes that are part of the student’s culture. these themes make up the contents of the process of literacy to be carried out, thus allowing the student to regain his self-confidence as author of his own history. already in martin-baró we can find the important role of group processes exhibiting a dialectical connection between power, doing (activity), and group identity (relative to the feeling of belonging to the group). this analysis allows us to understand the different ways of relating in concrete everyday life, rendering explicit various modes of conformism/non-conformism, submission/domination, naturalization/de-naturalization in everyday life. i.2 on the concept of education in both authors we find that it is through education that it becomes possible to understand the repercussions of different conceptions of men and society that are promoted by the dominant ideology. in paulo freire, education can be seen as a process of social change, in the full sense of the term. in martín-baró the emphasis falls on the identification of psychosocial phenomena that take place in daily relationships and which would, in turn, provide the basis for educational processes. and this would constitute the educational dimension of the community social psychology (martín-baró, 1987; freitas, 2005, 2007, 2008a, 2008b). i.3 on the concepts of awareness, alienation and (de)-naturalization of life. paulo freire links the contents of awareness with types of education: banking (and alienating) education together with intransitive awareness versus awareness-raising (and liberating) education together with a critical awareness. he speaks of the transition from naïve 87 awareness to critical awareness as a form of emancipation or liberation for men, and that this would happen through literacy (freire, 1974, 1976). in martin-baró, on the other hand, the emphasis is on the processes of naturalization and des-indoctrination of life. (martín-baró, 1987, 1989). he argues that it is in people’s concrete everyday life that de-indoctrination or breaking-away from the processes of naturalization and the form of power and oppression can take place. in doing this, new relationships of liberty and dignity can be strengthened through processes of participation and awareness-raising in everyday life. (freitas, 2005, 2007) a brief comparative synthesis of these concepts can be seen in figure 1.   figure 1: comparation between popular education (paulo freire) and social psychology of liberation (ignacio martín-baró) axes  -­‐  concepts   popular  education   (paulo  freire)   social  psychology  of  liberation  (ignacio  martín-­‐baró)         society   types  of  society:  closed  –  in  transition  –  alienated  –   open.     critical,  historical  and  dialectic  perspective.   capitalist  society  and    modes  of  (re)production  of   human  existence.   critical,  historical  and    dialectic  perspective.         men  and  society   men  creates  culture   men  builds  his  own  history.         culture  and   groups   circles  of  culture:  dinamics  of  educational  action  +   contents  of  reality   group  process:  power,  human  action  (activity),   psychosocial  belonging         education   dialectic  relation:  student-­‐teacher.   dialectic  relation  immanent  to  relationships           awareness-­‐ alienation   relation:  awareness  and  types  of  education   levels  of  transition  :  crítical  awareness  versus  naive   awareness.   content  of  human  relation  in  3  axes:   a) knowledge  –  ignorance.   b) love  –  unlove   c) hope  -­‐  hopelessness   human  relations:  processes  of    (des)naturalization  and   indoctrination.       analysis  of  human  relations  regarding:          a  ]  fatalism  and  conformism        b  ]  power  relations  and  oppression       practice and committment overcoming oppression, exclusion and dependence through literacy creation of educational and transforming actions community organization and mobilization. breaking-away from forms of oppression and exploitation.   88 ii. second stage: participation and awareness-raising in everyday life starting from community social psychology this seems to be the moment at which we can reflect on what makes people get involved and committed to community practices and pro-citizenship actions, independently of whether conditions permit this or not. the aim is to offer a plan of analysis that shows that there isn’t a direct relation between degrees of awareness and the kind of action to be carried out (independently of whether such action is more progressive or transforming). the proposal put forward here brings with it another topic of discussion that reveals the complexity of the process of awareness-raising, in particular when this is related to the processes of participation that can show paradoxes and contradictions in everyday actions. ii.1 main axes in the proposals made by paulo freire and ignacio martín-baró. what are the axes or fundamental pillars in the proposals made by paulo freire to the community social psychology perspective? paulo freire’s proposal involves three important axes within the requirement of considering men as a being in-relation and places himself at a certain point in each of three continuums: knowledge-ignorance; love-unlove; hope-hopelessness (freire, 1976, 1979).   figure 2: principal axes according to paulo freire love --------------------------------------------unlove knowledge --------------------------------------------ignorance hope ---------------------------------------------hopelessness   in the ‘knowledge-ignorance’ axis the emphasis is on the possibilities of knowing oneself, the world and life. in freire’s view, “there is no absolute ignorance or knowledge; there is only relative knowledge and ignorance” (freire, 1976:23). for us, in the practice of community social 89 psychology this means making explicit the type of authority and knowledge relation that obtains between the external agent and the community leaders or representatives when discussing and planning which actions are to be implemented. in the ‘love-unlove’ axis, the focus is on the meaning and bonds in the relationships that are established during the educational process. paulo freire refers to love whilst emphasizing the fact that human beings are essentially unfinished, and also to the nature of the exchange between one and another in the process of discovery: “it is false that love does not expect something in return… one loves insofar as one seeks communication, integration starting from communication with others. […] love implies fighting against selfishness. those who cannot love ‘unfinished’ beings cannot educate. there is no compulsory education, just as there is no compulsory love. he who does not love does not understand others; does not respect them. there is no education through fear. one cannot fear education if one loves” (freire 1976: 23-24). according to community social psychology this relation of ‘love-unlove’ would be translated into the emotional aspect of relationships, the meaning attributed to life and the beliefs that legitimize (or not) its doing (to love/not to love), its daily practice. in the ‘hope-hopelessness’ axis, one can find the dimension of possibilities for the future, be those about individual or collective projects. for community social psychology what is privileged here is also the future but with a focus on group and collective aspects; that is, one speaks here of political projects and their element of utopia. ii.2 a model of analysis in community social psychology. could we find a proposed synthesis that integrates – at the level of community work directed at social transformation the central axes of paulo freire’s awareness-raising education with the processes of awareness-raising in martín-baró’s social psychology of liberation (emancipation)? a proposal is here put forward for analysing the possibilities of action that can be said to exist at the intersection between these three dichotomies in paulo freire. there is a discussion of the possibilities for intersection between the processes of awareness-raising and the actions in the 90 everyday life. the aim is to understand the movements or possibilities that we can create for a practice of transformation in everyday life and work in the community, depending on which processes of awareness-raising and participation (specific to each sector or plane/level) the internal or external agents find themselves in when involved in community work or educational processes of emancipation. ii.2.1 community practices and everyday actions guided by the three axes. possibilities for action in community 1: axis love/unlove versus knowledge/ignorance. what balance and opposition could there be between emotion and knowledge in the development of community practices aimed at transformation? it is against the backdrop of mutual influencing between these two dimensions – the emotional aspects (represented here by the love-unlove axis) and knowledge (represented by the knowledge-ignorance axis) – that there will then be a discussion of the possibilities of attitude and action. the graphic illustration appears in figure 3. each one of the levels refer to a type of participation and psychosocial practice in everyday life. figure 3: panel of possible participations 1: axes  love/unlove  versus  knowledge/ignorance:   level 1 level 2 level 4 level 3 unlove love ignorance   knowledge   91   in level one (love-ignorance) we find an attitude of sympathy and closeness towards difficult and problematic situations, often guided by a certain affection that turns the situation or person into a target of sympathy or compassion. however, the little knowledge or disposition to face difficulties, or the lack of access to resources that allow one to understand the reasons for the problems that are experienced, doesn’t make it such that the sympathy or sensitivity towards those problems is sufficient for a meeting of alternatives and overcoming the precariousness of the situation. it is the case when people have the inclination and the motivation to do and help, however do not know ‘what to do’ or ‘how to do it’ since they lack the resources, tools and knowledge. in level two (unlove-ignorance) we come across a paradoxical possibility. on the one side there is the ‘disaffected’, who shows either little sympathy or little sensitivity towards the situation, neither getting involved or offering to do something to improve conditions. parallel to this, we see the same lack of knowledge regarding available resources and/or the situation, as also seen in level one. if on the one hand this may seem terrible, in the sense that it exposes certain attitudes of indifference towards social realities; paradoxically, on the other hand it can also indicate a certain degree of self-protection that the individual adopts when he feels impotent from lack of knowing what to do and how to do it. thence, we can understand why people often appear to ‘do nothing about it’. in level three (unlove-knowledge) we find a different possibility of acting and position oneself towards the world and life, and which also raises certain worries. we can find here authoritarian attitudes and relationships in which the decision regarding what to do and how to do it belongs to those in a position of superiority or power. emotional involvement, if there is any, may happen at the limit of fulfilling goals established by the knowledge dimension. in paulo freire’s proposal we find here, for example, the cases of banking education, or those cases in which professionals decide which projects and actions ought to be executed in the community, based on the knowledge they have and which justifies them in acting in this manner. in level four (love-knowledge) we find the attitude we expect when one aims to carry out actions that lead to overcoming conditions of oppression and exploitation, and also contribute for people once again believing that it is possible to change and improve their lives, and that it is possible to have rights and dignity. we find present here practices that are guided by knowledge, which is itself renewed and recreated at each stage of the work by the resources available to face 92 up to the problems, together with bonds of unity and partnership that permits all those involved to create a frame of reference and solidarity that helps them create strategies for collective survival in everyday life. ii.2.2 possibilities for action in community 2: axis love/unlove versus hope/hopelessness. one speaks here of the bonds of unity and affection, and the possibilities of a future or of projects that can be carried out and shared. one speaks of sensitivity towards another in direct relation with the utopia for the future. this is shown in figure followed.   figure 4: panel of possible participations 2: axes love/unlove versus hope/hopelessness: in level five (love-hopelessness) actions are guided by the bonds and connections that may already exist or which are currently being built in community projects and people's everyday life. meanwhile, the belief in the possibility that such actions will also lead to change is almost inexistent, as if there were no plans for the future. at the same time, to place oneself in this level indicates the existence of prime ground for the establishment of conformism and dogmas that replace belief in being able to change and alter one's life conditions. love level 5 level 8 hope  hopelessness   level 6 level 7 unlove 93 in level six (unlove-hopelessness) we are faced with a delicate situation regarding the possibility of actions that are conducive to change. in other words, people don’t believe that there is the possibility of a better future, and at the same time do not get involved nor do they worry about this or the existing situation. we thus have the right terrain for selfishness and isolated, short-term actions. this may then create another sort of insensitivity towards events and suffering in others’ lives, given that there isn’t a collective project or unity. in level seven (unlove-hope) we can find some perspectives on change, since there is some belief in the future. meanwhile, because there is no commitment or involvement in the situation or with people, this belief in the future seems closer to certain motivations present in a more immediate and individualistic perspective. the place of the other and his life are not included within the range of worries preoccupying those placed at this level. in level eight (love-hope) contrary to previous positions, we have the sector in which participation is implemented through commitment and involvement with the other, in such a way that bonds and feelings of belonging develop. we find here another section aiming towards practice in the community from a perspective of emancipation and social transformation. one could speak then about an element of utopia in community work and in human relationships in which feelings of belonging are encouraged. ii.2.3 possibilities for action in community 3: axes knowledge/ignorance versus hope/hopelessness. to conclude this reflection on the possibilities of action and the results they produce in terms of impact on awareness, we now have the sectors relative to practices placed at some point along the axis of knowledge-ignorance and the axis of hope-hopelessness. this can be seen in figure 5. 94 figure 5: panel of possible participations 3: axes knowledge/ignorance versus hope/hopelessness:     in level nine (knowledge-hopelessness) we find action that, albeit guided by some knowledge regarding reality or its determinants, comes impregnated with a certain hopelessness and disbelief. one may see a certain weariness when confronted with situations and the problems experienced, together with a vision or attitude that denote fatalism, in the sense that one no longer believes that there is another possibility or alternative; that there is a different future. this also points to the fact that information and knowledge, even if correct and precise, are not always by themselves capable of leading people to do things and to change their lives. there is also the need for some kind of project, as a source of motivation and organization pro-change. in level ten (ignorance-hopelessness) actions appear mediated by conformism in the face of the precariousness and adversity of the situation, together with a certain adaptation that permits one to face up to this state of affairs. on the one hand there is no collective project, and on the other there is no knowledge of what to do, which in turn results from either ignorance of level 9 level 10 level 12 level 11 ignorance knowledge hopelessness   hope   95 lack of access to information. we also find here a strong process of naturalization of everyday life: conformism and adaptation to existing conditions, as if they were immutable. in level eleven (ignorance-hope) on the contrary, there is motivation or possibility of change and future projects. however, ignorance or the lack of information and resources prevents this from happening: magical alternatives or one’s dependent on people that have such knowledge or resources are created; or still, projects may be so copious and generic – as the result of lack of knowledge about the real conditions that they become unattainable. in this way, a new circle of inevitability regarding concrete problems is generated, together with a certain dose of conformism necessary to make this way of life acceptable. in level twelve (knowledge-hope) we find the sector in which, through different forms of acting and participating, the dimensions that are complementary and which provide one of the pillars necessary for the possibility of change in everyday life come together. there is an alliance between the knowledge of all those who participate and are involved in a dialectic relationship of exchange and respect, and the projects for a better and fairer society in private and public life. we find here pro-change participation and the overcoming of forms of oppression and exclusion. iii. some reflections on the proposal put forward how are awareness-raising and participation articulated in ways of facing-up to and strategies for survival and resistance in everyday life? that is, how do we sever the relation between oppression and injustice that create forms of impotence and fatalism regarding life? it was in this perspective that a proposal was here put forward for an intersection between those bipolar axes, which also points to some psychosocial effects on actions. men, as a being-in-relation and acting in his daily life, is placed at some point along three continuums: knowledge-ignorance; love-unlove; hope-hopelessness. one can say that paulo freire presents us these continuums as having a certain parallelism between them. in doing this, the idea arises, for example, that if someone places themselves on the ‘love’ side, they will also end up placing themselves on the side of hope and knowledge; or, the other way around, siding with ‘unlove’ they would also side with hopelessness and ignorance, and this seems to indicate that there are no other possibilities and that human action does not involve dilemmas or paradoxes. 96 however, it is precisely with this dialectic of everyday attitudes – expressing dilemmas and daily standoffs that community social psychology has been confronted. it was in this sense, and with a view to understanding these challenges, that a model of analysis was suggested that brings together some links between paulo freire and ignacio martin-baró and adds, along the psychosocial dimension, the dilemmas, paradoxes and contradictions experienced daily in community work in the field of community social psychology. hence, in this context, the proposal put forward suggests that we think about the three continuums in terms of axes that intersect each other, rather than running in parallel. accordingly, in the perspective of the analysis here presented, each panel shows us how different types of participation and awareness-raising take place in everyday life, depending on which basic values are being considered. in each of these panels, one can find different types of strategy for survival, be they ones of resistance and negotiation, of facing-up to and overcoming, or submission and conformism to the ruling ideology and power. the intersecting axes, as shown in several figures, indicate different stages in the process of awareness-raising, which could be paired with the levels or degrees of awareness suggested by paulo freire. they also reveal possibilities for action, showing more or less accentuated degrees of conformism-resistance and transformation-maintenance. in proposing this way of understanding the possibilities for action in community and processes of awareness-raising involved, the aim was to make an analysis that allows us to capture the movements and variations in human action, as well as the motives responsible for such action. the contribution made by this analysis follows, in part, from the fact that during community practice various dilemmas and stalemates regarding “what to do” and “how to participate” present themselves in a particularly vivid way. and considering a more complex and challenging network of actions, there is the fact that community work involves at least a social ‘other’ and he, in turn, involves ‘various others’ that make up and integrate his community network with different forms of power and tensions. the network of tensions and action lived in the day-to-day has, therefore, a clear collective dimension, and for this very reason reveals the enormous challenges and dilemmas we face in order to help our community projects succeed, independently of whether people are aware of or defend their importance (freitas, 2005, 2008b). 97 in this discussion we have attempted to show that this relation does not always happen, in so far as there are contradictory attitudes, like those noted in the various panels analyzed, and yet even so people participate. for this reason, there are various situations in which sharing dilemmas and uncertainties does not always give us strength to participate and change, sometimes even producing the opposite effect. it was in search of a dialectic understanding of these paradoxes and dilemmas that a discussion was here made of actions in the various panels. the aim was primarily to bring 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(1992). intervención en la investigación: su desarrollo [intervening in research: its development]. in i. serrano-garcía y w.r. collazo (orgs.). contribuciones puertorriqueñas a ia psicología social comunitária [puerto-rican contributions to community social psychology] (pp. 217-282). san juan: universidad de puerto rico. microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 131 community psychology as a linking science potentials and challenges for transdisciplinary competences wolfgang stark1 organizational and community development laboratory department of educational sciences university of duisburg-essen germany iii international conference of community psychology puebla, mexico, june 3, 2010                                                                                                                           1 wolfgang.stark@uni-due.de; www.orglab.de 132 community psychology as a linking science potentials and challenges for transdisciplinary competences abstract in a globalized world, traditional values of community psychology, like community building, social change and empowerment, require more than working in a local community and/or improving the social situation of specific groups. while this work will remain an important core part of community psychology, the field of community psychology also should empower itself: by using its competencies to develop social innovations, focusing at emerging futures by developing shared goals (and take shared risks), and by collaborating with other disciplines, societal institutions, business companies or other actors in society in order to make a difference in the world. community psychology as a global academic field and a practical challenges has a rich history based on different disciplines, on various political and value backgrounds coming from traditional and industrialized regions and countries from all parts of the world. to use this richness, we have to start to learn from each other and to value different approaches. therefore, in the future, community psychology should focus both on macroand micro-issues of community analysis and community building, and it should develop its identity as a “linking science” fertilizing different approaches into a both overall and culture-specific approach of community-based research and practice. to achieve these goals, it will be important to elaborate and re-identify the “dsa of community psychology”: design skills to develop both strategicinnovative and creative abilities in order to nurture mutual knowing, awareness and playfulness, social skills to enhance the art of community building as a collaborative and empowering process, leading to social responsiveness and inclusion. action skills to learn how to co-create, implement and evaluate new concepts and social innovations to build communities in different settings. keywords: innovation, emerging frutures, micro and macro-issues, linking science. 133 psicología comunitaria internacional en el futuro: potencialidades y desafíos desde una perspectiva europea. resumen en un mundo globalizado, los valores tradicionales de la psicología comunitaria, como construcción de comunidad, cambio social y empoderamiento, requieren algo más que trabajar en una comunidad local y que mejorar la situación social de grupos específicos. aunque este tipo de acciones permanecerán como un núcleo importante de la psicología comunitaria, esta disciplina tiene también que empoderarse: necesita usar sus competencias para desarrollar innovaciones sociales, enfocándose a futuros emergentes desarrollando metas compartidas (y tomando riesgos compartidos), y colaborando con otras disciplinas, instituciones sociales, compañías de negocios y otros actores de la sociedad para aportar algo diferente al mundo. la psicología comunitaria como un campo académico global y de desafíos prácticos tiene una rica historia basada en diferentes disciplinas, en varios antecedentes políticos y de valores que provienen de regiones y países tradicionales e industrializados de todas las partes del mundo. para aprovechar esta riqueza tenemos que empezar a aprender unos de otros y a valorar diferentes aproximaciones. por lo tanto, en el futuro, la psicología comunitaria deberá enfocar situaciones de análisis y de construcción comunitaria desde temáticas tanto de nivel macro como de nivel micro. deberá desarrollar su identidad como una “ciencia enlace” fertilizando diferentes aproximaciones culturales, universales y específicas, de investigación y práctica basadas en comunidad. para lograr estas metas será importante elaborar y reidentificar el “das (diseño de acción social) de la psicología comunitaria”: habilidades de diseño para desarrollar capacidades creativas y de innovación estratégica para generar conocimiento, conciencia y actitud lúdica mutuos. habilidades para lo social, para impulsar el arte de creación comunitaria como un proceso colaborativo y empoderante que lleve a inclusión y capacidad de respuesta social. habilidades de acción, para aprender a co-crear, implantar y evaluar nuevos conceptos e innovaciones sociales para crear comunidades en diferentes escenarios. palabras clave: innovación, futuros emergentes, temáticas micro y macro, ciencia enlace. 134 introduction being a community psychologist always has been a quest for new ways to deal with psychosocial problems not only on the individual level, but also to look for potentials and challenges of people and social settings. community psychology also has been and will be in the future a quest for a political identity as a psychologist who wants to improve social justice and individual well-being in a complex world. that is why michael frese´s (2006)2 challenging question: “what if applied psychology mattered in the world?” fits perfectly if we ask for community psychology´s identity in a complex and globalizing world. frese stated that psychology today needs a currency that is as important and respected as money. therefore, psychology should develop well-being and happiness as a psychological currency in contrast to money and economic goods only. in order to achieve this, psychology needs to have an impact an all spheres of social life – community and social systems, economy, politics, etc. for the future of our world, well-being, individual and collective happiness and social justice will become important elements of a currency which should be more important than money. many multidisciplinary studies have shown that the key to individual well-being is maintaining social networks, community building, and enhance empowerment processes. therefore, asking “what if community psychology mattered in the world?” can show substantial categories for a social currency developed by community psychology (cp). based on this notion, this paper will try to make a point for a community psychology of the future, based on the idea of a linking science, using the knowledge and craftsmanship of different areas and disciplines, and the professional capabilities of specialist practioners as well as the practical wisdom of neighborhood groups and of everyday life. community psychology – concepts of a “linking science”. community psychology has had many origins before it has been called community psychology (bennett et al., 1966). to name a few: community organizing (alinsky, 1989) and                                                                                                                           2 michael frese, the past president of the international association of applied psychology (iaap), delivered this paper as a keynote paper in athens at the congress of iaap 2006. 135 the community mental health movement (bloom, 1973) in the us; conscientization (freire, 1996) and action research (fals borda, 1991) in latin america; marie jahoda´s (1972) groundbreaking long-term study on the effects of unemployment on the community or the italian democratic psychiatry movement (basaglia, 1968) in europe have influenced many community psychologists. equivalently, many political movements (civil rights, student´s movements of the 60s, women´s liberation, gay´s movements, equal rights for handicapped persons, survivors of psychiatric hospitals and many more) have had considerable impact on research and practice of community psychology. although the term “community psychology” has been developed in the us and still is being dominated by the discourse of the scientific community, we have to realize that there are many other developments in many parts of the world with different background and important contributions. if one compares community psychology to other psychological disciplines, the picture is quite a paradox: community psychology on the one hand looks like a small island of science and practice being not very influential within the large discipline of psychology; but at the same time discourses and research topics of community psychology seem to have a broad impact on many disciplines. one of the reasons for this paradoxical picture is the basic concept of community psychology: the field conceptually always has oriented itself towards a systemic view of social dynamics in the world by integrating individual and group levels, community, organizational and societal levels of analysis. because the concept of community psychology is transdisciplinary by nature, its identity bears a wide variety of regional and individual scholarly stories, and is trying to integrate personal value systems and scientifically based interdisciplinary research and practice within its boundaries. julian rappaport already in 1977 summarized the idea of community psychology: “...the real key to social change is in the attitudes, values, goals and politicaleconomic ideology and social policy of which institutions themselves are composed and on which organisations are based.“ (rappaport 1977: 180). but, although this systemic view is in the core of community psychology´s belief system and has been developed since 30-40 years, it never has grown to be dominant in teaching and research. having to survive in an academic world of distinct disciplines, there are only few consequences based on the systemic view of community psychology; quite the contrary, more than 80% of research and practice in community psychology still is restricted to individual or group levels. 136 especially today the transdisciplinary concept of community psychology has the potential to be one of the most powerful applied psychologies in civil society. by linking: v the strengths of different traditional disciplines (psychology, sociology, organizational science, anthropology, art, educational science, social work and social medicine) v the spheres of academic science and the practical areas, addressing real world challenges of our time. v and the analytical view on the past, and creative ideas for the future. community psychology is going beyond traditional applied sciences: it is not only applying scientific results for praxis, but adds new questions and ideas on individual, social and societal issues by using systematically a transdisciplinary approach. in order to unfold its potentials, a community psychology “linking science” wants to unleash itself from the limits of traditional academic disciplines and taxonomies: the social network and social support research already brought close collaboration between psychology, sociology and anthropology, and is also providing links to virtual networks in the world wide web which are relevant for social network research today, such as the complexity and global nature of today´s and tomorrow´s challenges on the micro-, mesoand macro-level problems of migration or demographic change and challenges of sustainability; but also the systemic patterns of today´s organizations or of modern medicine. all call for a transdisciplinary approach which is generally built-in to community psychology if we as community psychologists use its potential. community building in a civil society. in the process of globalization, one can find contradictory movements: the erosion of traditional community structures is alienating both individuals and social networks; at the same time, for many continuous change processes in social life, and meeting new people and cultures both in reality and the virtual world, is both a burden and a chance to discover new opportunities and to develop innovative ideas. by analyzing risks and opportunities of globalization, eminent scholars like anthony giddens (2001), zygmunt bauman (2000) or ulrich beck (2005) all agree, that active community building processes in order to develop a culture of “learning communities” will be indispensable to overcome the risks and dangers of globalization. castells´ 137 analysis (2000) of the “network society” already emphasized the need for a culture of community which both, on the local and the virtual level, will determine our future communication. here, a future community psychology has to readjust the traditional model of community as local neighborhoods towards a systemic view of the role of community building in organizations, (real and virtual) social networks on the local level and beyond, and on the level of civil society (citizen groups, local and global coalitions and alliances) (see senge, 1990; nelson & prilleltensky, 2004; wildemeersch & stroobants 2003). social networks, families, local communities and organizations (both companies and ngos) in europe will be challenged by continuing global migration processes, the need to adjust to considerable demographic changes and the quest for a new social justice in the world. and, if traditional structures are eroding, there will be an urgent need to develop common values in society together with all actors. for community psychology, therefore, it will be necessary to develop a new and enhanced identity based on the field´s core values which is able to meet the challenges of a complex and globalized world. the steps described below based on the guiding principles developed by an international group of community psychologist (adapted from wolff et al., 2006) may serve as a guideline for future research and action: • community psychology will become increasingly global in nature. this is why local communities are increasingly important because they are affected by global forces. community psychology must collaborate with communities so they effectively adapt to such changes. • a community psychology approach, by definition, must be an approach informed by multiple perspectives. thus, the future of community psychology will require partnerships with other disciplines and community stakeholders. community psychology will have to partner with others while maintaining its own unique identity. • community psychology will become more engaged in the formation and institutionalization of economic, and social policy. these policies will be based upon the values that are at the core of our discipline and will incorporate psychological principles. involvement with policy is consistent with community psychology’s ecological perspective on community which recognizes the importance of macrosystem factors, such as business and policy, on communities. 138 • community psychology will become a field of research and action that makes a significant difference on issues of social change by promoting social justice. social justice is defined as conditions that promote equitable distribution of resources, equal opportunity for all, nonexploitation, prevention of violence, and active citizenry. if the global, demographic and economic change we are witnessing is requiring a new perception of civil society, the role of community psychology is to initiate and maintain dialogue and mutual support with all actors interested in social change and social innovation. therefore, community psychology should start to be a real “linking science” by v discovering empowerment patterns between individuals, groups and social structures, not only in the neighborhood, but in all kind of settings where people work and live together (companies, virtual communities, social policy). v learning not only from the past, but sense emerging futures by learning across generations, cultures and institutions. v establishing new intersectoral alliances and test new forms of collaboration between different actors in society. v enabling mutual risk taking through experimental settings and program evaluation. this requires to add to “incremental”, step-by-step social innovations forms of profound, more “radical” social innovations for which collaboration with other disciplines and actors are needed. therefore the following section will show some exploratory fields of action and research to develop a “linking science” based on community psychology. concrete potentials of community psychology as a linking science can be shown in the following exemplars of transdisciplinary approaches toward community building. discovering empowerment patterns. the discourse on empowerment processes (rappaport, swift & hess, 1984) in community psychology has been influential for many practical areas in community mental health and social work, psychiatry, community development and organizational science. in social policy the concept of empowerment has been adopted in various legislations in europe and developed as a synonym for innovative approaches to social challenges and the growth of a consumerand prosumer-oriented civil society. to use the dynamics of empowerment processes in order to 139 enhance well-being and growth not only in individuals but also in social systems, it is important to link the different levels of empowerment (individuals – group – organization) (stark, 1996). empowerment as a concept has been adopted in various disciplines (sociology, management, software development, women´s studies…) (see as an example for many: dominelli, 1999). in order to understand the systemic potential of empowerment processes it may be helpful to analyze the patterns of empowerment developed in areas like the bop (base-of-the-pyramid)approach (hart, 2007) to develop social business (not only) in emerging markets (yunus, 2008). although the empowerment discourse has been extremely powerful in recent decades and had an impact not only on community psychology, but also on other disciplines and areas of work, the concept, from its start, still remains more as a professional attitude than a professional methodology or technique. a value-based approach may serve as an important basis to form a community psychology identity; in order to establish a technology for empowerment it helps to cross disciplinary boundaries: christopher alexander´s groundbreaking book “a pattern language” (1978) is one of the most influential books in architecture, but at the same time hides important basic ideas for community psychology on establishing and nurturing a community, and offers a technology based on the patterns approach which has the potential to serve as a general language for empowerment. the idea of a pattern language has been adopted in many disciplines (one of the most important being software development, which developed many ideas on participation processes both in technological and pedagogical settings). but it has a potential not yet discovered systematically: to link the wisdom of different disciplines in order to understand and practice the art of empowerment and community building from different perspectives and to develop its variety of potentials. douglas schuler (2008) and his publicsphere-project have started to develop a pattern language for organizing and community building which could ignite a move to develop a pattern language for empowerment and community building based on the scientific knowledge of community psychology together with other academic and practical fields. presencing – learning from the future as it emerges. the concept of “presencing” (senge et al., 2004) tries to expand our knowledge and praxis on community building by shifting our habit of learning from the past into an attitude of valueing the potentials within settings and to “create deep innovation through moving from 140 egosystem to ecosystem awareness” (scharmer, 2010). based on more than 250 interviews with global leaders the concept identifies what scharmer calls the “blind spot of leadership”. he argues to slow down current processes of decision making which most often stick to disciplinary and situational knowledge and to avoid “quick fixes” both in economy and social policy in order to regenerate sources of common creativity and inspirational self, to reframe values and beliefs on how things have to be and can be fixed, and to redesign global and regional policies in economy, ecology and human equity. to rediscover our personal and collective source of creativity and to avoid quick fixes by downloading old patterns, scharmer (2007) proposes a seven-step-process starting from identifying past patterns of problem solving, shifting one´s sense to new perspectives and a broader picture , identifying new potentials of collective creativity, crystallizing new vision and prototyping new ideas. this process structure and the built-in transformation could be a model of a community psychology learning journey integrating the body of community psychology research and practice together with the wisdom of other disciplines. it also integrates the views of major actors (economy – civil society – public institutions) in society and community building needed to develop a systemic approach toward challenges in the community. design thinking – experiential learning based on transdisciplinarity. one of the most radical transdisciplinary approaches on societal and community challenges originally has been developed as an integrative and systematic approach toward product and service design (brown, 2009). the 30-year experience of ideo (www.ideo.com) has led to a concept which not only has revolutionized innovation management in design, but also has considerable impact on a participative and transdisciplinary approach to address community challenges. starting at stanford university schools for design thinking since few years ago it has been spreading throughout the world exemplifying how transdisciplinary approaches can help to address social problems. the hpi school for design thinking at the potsdam university in germany, for instance, in its 1-year-program is collaborating with students and faculty from 25 universities, 40 disciplines and a growing number of companies and public institutions and community groups. small interdisciplinary student and faculty groups are addressing a series of 141 temporary design challenges culminating in a 12-week design challenge developed together with companies and public institutions. the concept of design thinking is a wonderful and impressive example of the potentials of a transdisciplinary approach toward social problems, developing a collaborative scheme for actors in society as well as linking different academic discipline and praxis. therefore, together with the two exemplars described before, design thinking also is an exemplar for bruno latour´s “reassembling the social” (2005), which expands john dewey´s idea of experiential learning (1938) into modern societies. perspectives for a future community psychology. traditional values of community psychology like social change and transformation and current challenges today require more than working in a local community and/or improving the social situation of specific groups. while this work will remain an important core part of community psychology, the field should empower itself, use its competencies to develop social innovations and look at emerging futures by developing shared goals (and take shared risks) by collaborating with other disciplines, companies, or other actors in society. community psychology as a field should focus on macroand micro-issues of community building together with various partners: this is why it is important to develop close ties not only with national and international community psychology groups in different parts of the world in order to develop a sense of cultural diversity, but also with other psychological and social science/social action networks and associations. and, given the political character of community psychology, the political arena is an important area to be engaged in. in europe, the european union and the european commission will be one of the most important partners to foster community building and a sense of community in our society. to support this movement and to strengthen the capabilities of each community psychologist, we should form transdisciplinary community interest groups (professional, student and practitioner groups) which will be able to maintain, and promote, the rich body of knowledge on community building and develop future questions which may be important for our society. we should invest in a joint education and practice in transdisciplinary community psychology in order to develop the idea of community psychology for young professionals in all areas and of 142 all disciplines. for this we can use and institutionalize a rich body of experience of community psychology programs in universities and schools all over europe. the time of an interdisciplinary community building and social innovation master program should come within the next years. these kind of programs could enhance the dsa-skills for a transdiciplinary future of community psychology: design skills will develop both strategic-innovative and creative abilities in order to nurture mutual knowing, awareness and playfulness. in social skills students and practitioners will experience the art of community building as a collaborative and empowering background, leading to social responsiveness and inclusion. action skills will focus on how to co-create, implement and evaluate new concepts and social innovations to build communities in different settings. dan stokols (2006) as one of very few community psychologists has promoted the idea of a science of transdisciplinary action research. given the global and complex nature of problems and challenges, this approach can use original strengths of community psychology and offer new potentials for the enhancement of the field as part of a transdisciplinary, and, consequently, political movement of social responsibility. to teach and research the dsa of community psychology, there is a need for adequate institutional facilities through which a science-society dialogue can be established. in a transdisciplinarity laboratory, scientists from various disciplines and non-scientists will cooperate for a certain period of time, aspire to a mutual learning process and conduct transdisciplinary research. references alexander, c., ishikawa, s. & silverstein, s. (1977). a pattern language. towns, buildings, constructions. new york: oxford university press. alinsky, s. (1989). rules for radicals. chicago: vintage books. basaglia, f. (1968). l´ístituzione negata. rapporto da un ospedale psichiatrico. torino: guilio einaudi. bauman, z. (2000). liquid modernity. cambridge uk: polity press. beck, u. (2005). power in the global age: a new global political economy. new york: blackwell. 143 bennet, c. et al. (1996). community psychology: a report of the boston conference on the education of psychologists for community mental health. boston: boston university. bloom, b. (1973). community mental health. morristown, n. j.: general learning press. brown, t. (2009). change by design: how design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. new york: harper collins. castells, m. (2000). the rise of the network society. new york: blackwell. dewey, j. (1938). experience and education. new york: kappa delta pi. dominelli, l. (1999). community, citizenship and empowerment, sociology. 33, 441-446. fals borda, o. (1991). action and knowledge: breaking the monopoly with participatory action-research. new york: apex press. freire, p. (1996). pedagogy of the oppressed. london: penguin education. frese, m. (2006). what if applied psychology mattered to the world? keynote address to the xxvi congress of the international association of applied psychology (iaap) athens, greece. giddens, a. (1999). runaway world. london: profile books. hart, s. (2007). capitalism at the crossroads. aligning earth, business, and humanity. upper saddle river, n. j.: wharton school publications. jahoda, m. (1972). marienthal: the sociography of an unemployed community. london: tavistock. latour, b. (2005). reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory. new york: oxford university press. nelson, g. & prilleltensky, i. (2004). community psychology. in pursuit of liberation and wellbeing. new york: palgrave macmillan. rappaport, j. (1977). community psychology. values, research, and action. new york: holt, rinehart & winston. rappaport, j., swift c. f. & hess, r. (eds.) (1984 ). studies in empowerment: steps toward understanding and action. new york: haworth press. scharmer, c. o. (2007). theory u: leading from the future as it emerges. society for organizational learning. cambridge, mass.: berrett-kochler publishers. 144 scharmer, c. o. (2010). the blind spot of leadership: how to create deep innovation through moving from egosystem to ecosystem awareness. presentation during the 2010 svn fall conference (www.presencing.com). schuler, d. (2008). public sphere project. consult info@publicsphereproject.org. senge, p. (1990). the fifth discipline. the art and practice of the learning organization. new york: doubleday. senge, p., scharmer, c. o., jaworski, j. and flowers, b. s. (2004). presence: human purpose and the field of the future. cambridge, ma: sol press. stark, w. (1996). empowerment. new concepts for action in the psychosocial arena. freiburg: lambertus. stokols, d. (2006). toward a science of transdisciplinary action research. american journal of community psychology. 38 (1-2) 63-77. wildemeersch, d. & stroobants, v. (2003). connections. active citizenship and multiple identities. in v. stroobants (ed). connections. active citizenship and multiple identities wolff, t. et al. (2006). scra proposes new core principles including vision statement. the community psychologist. 39 (4) 76-78. yunus, m. (2008). creating a world without poverty: social business and the future of capitalism. new york: public affairs books.               microsoft word 2014-si10-20140519.docx leadership, empowerment, advocacy project (leap): college education for recovery and transformative change in community mental health vicky lynn collins, lmsw, kcpm wichita, kansas author notes: vicky lynn collins, lmsw, kcpm, is a resident of wichita, kansas, usa and a person in recovery with thirty-seven years of lived experience dealing daily with mental health challenges. email: vlcollins1@cox.net keywords: supported education; empowerment; recovery; leadership; advocacy; alternative models of mental health services; mental health stigma and discrimination; consumers and higher education recommended citation: collins, v.l. (2014). leadership, empowerment, advocacy project (leap): college education for recovery and transformative change in community mental health. global journal of community psychology practice, 5(1), 1-9. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   leadership, empowerment, advocacy project (leap): college education for recovery and transformative change in community mental health abstract the leadership, empowerment, advocacy project (leap) students represented a heterogeneous groups of individuals commonly referred to as consumers/ peers who deal daily with severe and persistent mental health disorders and/or substance use disorders. they are often ostracized and marginalized and lack the same opportunities and supportive resources for advanced educational attainment as others. over three semesters, leap prepared students with knowledge and tools to develop leadership skills as future leaders and volunteers within the mental health community and the consumer movement. this radical strategy created recovery and empowerment by producing an optimistic future for students that reflects personal goals of improved quality of life, a reduction in mental health symptoms, and the achievement of valued social roles. keywords: supported education; empowerment; recovery; leadership; advocacy; alternative models of mental health services; mental health stigma and discrimination; consumers and higher education introduction cultural stigmatization contributing to self-stigma “as long as a society’s image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture does not long survive” (polak, 1961, p. 19). stigma and discrimination against consumers/peers challenged by mental health issues are symptoms of a diseased society. the history of stigma, so prevalent in western culture, can be traced back to ancient greece from the 5th century b.c. to the 2nd century a. d. when “madness” was defined as a mark of shame, degradation, loss of face, and humiliation (simon, 1992). today, common toxic labels, such as crazy, insane, nuts, loco, wacko, psycho, off your rocker, out of your mind, mental case, schizo, lunatic, and deranged are embedded in our language and culture and express social ridicule and degradation of consumers/peers. these globally accepted terms support beliefs and attitudes that individuals with mental health challenges are to be feared, labeled, despised, misunderstood, and denied the same rights and opportunities as others. the americans with disabilities act (ada) of 1990 claims that it recognizes and protects the civil rights of people with disabilities covering conditions such as emotional illness and learning disorders. congress states within the ada amendments act, which became effective on january 1, 2009, that “mental disabilities in no way diminish a person’s right to fully participate in all aspects of society, yet many people with physical or mental disabilities have been precluded from doing so because of discrimination” (ada amendments act of 2008, section 2a). individuals discriminated against in employment and education settings have often had little or no legal recourse. it is well documented that people with disabilities are disadvantaged socially, vocationally, economically, and educationally (e.g., baron & salzer, 2002; drake, skinner, bond, & goldman, 2009; stein, aguirre, & hunt, 2013). in order for individuals in the mental health system to be healthy, they need opportunities, valued social roles, and equality. empowerment means being fairly treated and having access to health care, education, employment, housing, citizenship, inclusion, civil rights, and social justice (corrigan & ralph, 2005). equality is an essential ingredient for hope and recovery. transformed identities are possible by being valued, included, respected, and heard. overview and description of the leap program program development the leadership, empowerment, advocacy project (leap) was developed to meet the needs of consumers/peers as an innovative supported education intervention for transformative change in community mental health services. mowbray et al. (2005) reported that campus-based supported education models contribute to significant increases in educational enrollment and competitive employment, and significant decreases in hospitalization. in addition to these goals, leap aimed to promote recovery, empowerment, and hope for individuals living daily with mental health disorders within our communities, our service systems, our nation, and our world. according to unger (1993), “the role of college student in our society is highly valued. the role of global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   mental health consumer is very devalued. with this change in role and identity, students realize they are not their illness, but functioning, productive members of the community” (p. 20). the entities involved with leap are the state of kansas, wichita state university, and the wichita state university center for community support and research (ccsr), (formerly known as the wichita state university self-help network center for community support and research). the collaboration had developed over many years of innovative projects serving kansans with mental health disorders. ccsr believed in the opportunities that leap offered to individuals with mental health disorders and how the impact of being college students would transform their lives. a team of four visionary ccsr co-workers designed and developed leap. the team members included a professor of community psychology at wichita state university who was also the director of ccsr, the assistant director of ccsr, and two employees with master degrees in social work. my role, as one of the team members with a master’s in social work and the only person with a mental health disorder, was to provide the perspective based on my experience dealing with my disability and managing the academic demands necessary to complete my college education. the team was an excellent mix of people and over time became very cohesive. the team anticipated that the two major challenges would be university approval and funding. however, in 2002, the state of kansas granted funding for leap, which paid for tuition, books, and supplies. for someone wanting to replicate the leap program in another university or community college setting, the challenges of university approval and funding may vary depending on the relationships between the state officials and the university administration. at a great loss for kansan consumers/peers, leap lost funding in 2007, after its last graduating class. the rationale for this decision by the state of kansas and ccsr was to transfer funding from leap to a new program for consumers/peers which created income to ccsr for services provided. this exchange of funding was no reflection on leap as an innovative contribution for transformative change in community mental health services. furthermore, although the leap program lost state funding, it nonetheless offers important suggestions for the advancement of supported education. what leap strived to achieve the development of leap started with a vision for how the quality of life for consumers/peers could be improved by providing a promising future. next, it was identified that people with mental health challenges lack opportunities and supportive resources for educational attainment, ultimately hindering their prospects for employment. the solution began to form by asking what needed to happen and how to make it happen. leap was a unique program that provided individuals with opportunities and supportive resources to compete and pursue equality for advanced educational attainment by being exposed to new and challenging ways of thinking about life and themselves. the shared challenges and life experiences among students created an academic environment rich with possibilities as students learned from each other about how to develop healthy boundaries to cultivate respectful and trustful relationships. as a result, students were empowered with increased options and choices that supported ownership and personal freedom. many students dependent on the mental health system for all their needs never learned that having a sense of ownership means they have a duty to protect and defend their boundaries by taking control of how people treat them. students acquired this knowledge and practiced these new skills, which resulted in the complex phenomenon of empowerment. students gained self-respect as they learned they have the same inalienable rights available to people without mental health disorders. the leap students gained awareness as they explored advocacy as a dynamic process with the power to endorse the rights perspective based on the belief that advocacy is meaningless without rights. students experienced profound insights as they identified and committed themselves to their core values and passions. they learned that their fundamental beliefs acted as guided principles that created a reflection of the most inner description of their character. in addition, students discovered that their core values influenced every aspect of life, served as a guide to action, empowered and motivated, made it possible to take positions on issues, and assisted in resolving conflicts and making decisions. leap provided peer support with warmth and positive self-regard. friendships cultivated among students mutual support and built self-respect, acceptance, tolerance, and admiration for one another. in addition, leap taught students how to develop skills which promoted independence. students gained or regained their feelings of humanity, which included personal worth, personal effectiveness, and personal value. the cohesiveness of the leap classes provided a safe place for mutual self-disclosure between students. this environment enabled students to identify with the same issues and concerns that produced emotional support and a sense of community. this experience taught global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   students about the importance of social skills. students learned they could connect with people and overcome the fear of rejection that had forced some to live a life of isolation. the fact that leap was completely campus-based promoted normalization and role transformation. with the focus on academia, students understood the boundary that i was their teacher and not a doctor, a therapist, or a case manager. leap followed some of the same principles and values highlighted in the supported education literature including: “hope” in which everyone was treated with respect and dignity; “normalization” by referring to consumers/peers as “students” and not as “patients” or “clients”; “selfdetermination” by providing information on campus resources and how to gain access; and “support and relationships” by encouraging students to take advantage of the opportunities to learn from each other and to form cohesive bonding between each other based on peer support (mowbray et al, 2005). the leap process leap was a three-semester college experience entirely located on the wichita state university campus for individuals challenged by mental health disorders. i taught the classes solo beginning with the fall semester in 2004 to the last graduating class of 2007. during those three years, i reorganized the curriculum and methods of teaching. the selection process used to recruit potential students was based on interviews and a point system with a (1) as unacceptable up to a (5) as very acceptable. the purpose was to measure strengths and deficits to determine if the consumer/peer was a good fit. the areas of concern included the following: communication skills, social skills, concentration skills, stage of recovery, coping skills with stress, coping skills with symptoms, medication stabilized, personal appearance, level of commitment, and how confident of being successful. the demographics of students were closely consistent throughout all of the classes. the majority of students were white and female with three to four males per class. all of the students were living below the poverty level and dependent on public transportation. as part of the summer session for the first two years of leap, local agencies provided internships chosen by students and were not limited to mental health. some students had good experiences with their agencies; however some students were treated like patients and not as interns due to stigma in the mental health system. it was decided by the team of instructors that the idea had not worked as planned, and it was discontinued. furthermore, during the first two years of the leap classes before i started to teach solo, the desks were set up in a circle unlike traditional classrooms with the idea that it would encourage face to face communication. with the insight and control of decisions that affected leap, i decided to leave the desks in a traditional style to prevent the conclusion that leap was like group therapy. beliefs in the importance of praise, celebrations and fun were recognized in the leap program. respect and sensitivity for confidentiality were the main ingredients that provided a safe environment for honest and open discussions. however, students were told that leap was a college class and that confidentiality could not be enforced. students were encouraged to share information about themselves based on their comfort level. students were informed of this on the first day of class along with a comfort contract developed by students. the lack of confidentiality enforcement did not hinder the openness shared in class discussions. leap students benefitted from peer support and mutual support as the focus remained on recovery. as students shared their recovery life stories, everyone was influenced to move beyond their challenges and to believe they could succeed in accomplishing more than they ever thought was possible. students earned a total of nine college credits in psychology and attended class for three hours per week over two days. they read the following five books with the assistance of audio recordings provided by the disabilities support services: the four agreements (ruiz, 1997); never fear, never quit (tye, 2004); the freedom writers diary (gruwell, 1999); who moved my cheese (johnson, 1999); and the day the voices stopped (steele & berman, 2001). in the fall and spring semesters, the students were required to write selfreflective, reaction papers related to the books on how the lessons impacted their attitudes about themselves based on past, present and future life experiences. as i tracked the quality of assignments, i was able to measure students’ level of knowledge gained which i used as an indicator of my effectiveness as a teacher. daily lesson plans were tailored from students’ feedback. i incorporated daily lessons into power point presentations with paper copies of the slides available for students. based on the students’ feedback, they believed this new strategy helped them to better grasp the knowledge and tools. i considered this a major breakthrough, and it inspired me to write power points for all of the class lessons. each semester of the leap classes followed a flexible syllabus. students performed well and met the expectation to attend the leap classes regularly with as few absences as possible. the dropout rate of students for the first class in the series was consistent. the new group of students started with twenty-five and by two weeks into the semester, three global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   to five students would withdraw from the class. students believed in the benefit from the same individuals present at each class which created opportunities to be more strongly bonded and committed to accountability with each other. some services i provided to students included the following: completing and submitting applications for admissions to the university; enrolling students for the classes; securing accommodations for students from the disability support services office; and completing financial aid forms for students wanting to continue their education. each new group of students started the first semester with a two-hour orientation facilitated by the assistant dean to the liberal arts college. the first class lesson included a discussion on important tips on how to survive the balance between college demands and their mental health. students were taught the value of pacing themselves to avoid an over load of stress which could cause a relapse or hospitalization, even if it meant taking longer to complete a degree. some minor tips included the amount of time students should spend studying per credit hour and the benefits of students exchanging phone numbers. the most important key to survival students learned was what to do about the class if their symptoms began to return. the first course of action students were instructed to take was to contact their mental health providers. next, to inform me of the situation so arrangements could be made for extra support to avoid falling behind with their homework. to satisfy the third and final semester of leap, students prepared and facilitated four workshop presentations at the 2007 annual kansas consumer recovery conference. they used power point presentations on the following topics: “learning, thinking, working styles;” “experience the liberation of learning how to defend and protect your boundaries while enjoying healthy relationships;” “people with a personal mission statement succeed in reaching their goals by empowering them on a journey of their choice;” and “mastering servant leadership takes a life time of commitment to serving others rather than satisfying individual wants and desires.” this experience was the first time students had ever stood in front of people in a packed room and made presentations. i operated the laptop to change the slides, and students worked together in teams that were divided among the four workshops. in class, students worked hard as they studied the information on each slide and were able to speak confidently about the topic rather than just reading the slides to the workshop attendees. i was proud of their courage and how well all of the students performed. facilitator perspectives on leap’s success if it had not been for the courage, commitment, and determination students invested in their battle against internalized self-stigma ingrained in their belief systems, the transformative change in their lives would not have happened. i credit leap’s effectiveness to the fact that i know what it takes to be successful in completing my master’s in social work and licensure from the state of kansas while being challenged by the diagnoses of schizoaffective disorder, a chronic rollcoaster ride of depression and anxiety; personality disorders; and a lifetime learning disability. in addition, my personal experiences with supported education for six years while completing my education influenced me to provide the necessary support and services for leap students to be successful. as a role model shaped by my lived experiences, i provided living proof, and this enabled students to believe that they too could succeed in fulfilling their academic goals and aspirations. this process promoted recovery and empowerment. in the beginning of the leap program, students were fearful of being in a college class on campus because they did not know what was expected of them and where they would fit among the other students. at the root of their anxiety was the uncertainty of placing their trust in me as a leader on an uncharted journey. at this point, it was crucial for me to be sensitive and to validate with acceptance their fears and emotions as i assured them their reactions were common among all students in college for the first time. although risky, students took the first step and faced their fears once they shared with each other about their painful lived experiences of isolation and being misunderstood. this interaction gave them peace with the knowledge they were not alone. after this major accomplishment, my intervention was to encourage and nurture students’ courage wherein i stated my commitment to being trustful, caring, competent, self-confident, knowledgeable, and open to mutual communication. after students’ anxieties decreased, they started to grasp the reality of being a college student rather than just a person with a mental illness. gradually, students started to believe in themselves with the confidence they could be successful in college despite a life with a false self-image imprinted within their belief systems due to societal stigma of mental illness. my next role was to support and encourage unconditional bonding between students and between students and myself. in the spirit of peer support, it was very important that i established the understanding that everyone would learn from each other which included myself as well. students trusted and respected my leadership. on one occasion, a student approached me about me working full-time without social security disability insurance and asked if i was afraid of getting sick again. my response was that after i completed my global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   education i wanted to work, as it had been twenty years and i was willing to take the risk. further, i told her that sometimes in life you have to take risks to reach your goals; if you never try, you will never know the accomplishments life offers. on another occasion, a student started a conversation about some personal issues unrelated to the class. i became aware that she was interacting with me as her therapist. my response was to set the boundaries as me as her instructor—not her doctor, therapist or case manager. later, she approached me and stated she understood the boundary that made the interaction beneficial as a learned experience for her. the only situation that caused notable conflict was the first class of the first semester when a student i had known many years ago started talking down to the other students like he was their superior. i observed the other students’ facial expressions; i knew this incident was about to blow up, and i had to take action so i asked him to leave the classroom. the student dropped the class the next day. two days, later my car was vandalized. despite this negative incident, the vast majority of students demonstrated appropriate boundaries and appreciated learning from me and from each other. a psychiatric challenge can cause people to struggle because the illness attacks the very center of their sense of identity. people in the mental health system continue to be in the role of patient/client. this injustice is extremely damaging because individuals receiving mental health services are victims forced into defeating roles that affect the basic understanding of the self. as the leap students began their healing process, they learned that when people are forced to accept a role, they adopt self-meanings and expectations to accompany the role. since society evaluates the role of students with positive regard when compared to a person labeled with a mental health disability, the person’s self-esteem is healthier which can improve quality of life. students were empowered by the selfverification that occurred and resulted in a transformation of their self-esteem and self-efficacy. furthermore, as students continued to develop a strong commitment to their new identities as students, the roles associated with that identity reinforced their valued status within society. the greatest life-changing impact students gained from the leap experience was the authentic practice of peer support in action. the vital center of leap as a radical strategy of consumers/peers pursuing a college education was the supportive interaction made possible by the shared challenges that cultivated collective empowerment and recovery. this powerful energy acted as an inspiration of hope rather than a hindrance to class dynamics. the similar challenges gave students a transformed perspective of mental health services by the shifted focus from the deficit model of illness to the strengths model. this transformed perspective enabled students to be active participants possessed with the natural inclination and capacity for righteous anger and community activism. the overall leap experience created opportunities for formal and informal mentored relationships and role-modeled relationships that benefited everyone even in ways unknown. the most inspired characteristic of the classes was the fact that although i planned the lessons, graded the homework, and assessed performance, the focus was on the commonality of the relationships where no one felt or believed they were better or worse than others. students were taught about the importance of respecting diverse perspectives as they recognized the richness individual opinions contributed to a better understanding of the self and others. consumers/peers try to cope by isolating themselves thinking no one could ever know what it means to live in their world. the burden was lifted as students learned they had more in common with each other than they could have ever imagined. the knowledge that they were not alone and isolated enabled students to take those first steps to exhibit leadership qualities, experience empowerment, advocate for self and others, protect and enforce their boundaries, listen to their inner voice, and learn how to trust and believe in their talents and gifts.   program outcomes some examples of long-term effects related to leap include the following: • one leap graduate completed her master’s degree; • four leap graduates completed their undergraduate degrees; • four leap graduates completed the peer support specialist trainings and are certified working in the mainstream of the mental health system; • five leap graduates as current or former directors/ officers on the board of directors for the consumer advisory counsel for adult mental health, inc. (kscac); • six leap graduates completed the kscac leadership academy for empowerment; • three leap graduates completed the kscac leadership academy for action; • fifteen leap graduates became active in leadership roles at the local kansas consumer run organization and the kansas consumer network; and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   • numerous students served as volunteers educating others about mental health in communities. there are also many observations on the program’s success based on conversations with leap students and observations of students’ behaviors. students enjoyed being on campus, and many visited the university even on days there was no class. students interacted socially with other students without mental health challenges at the student center, played pool table games, and enjoyed the bowling alley. this indicates to me that students gained a sense of belonging and acceptance. having the social support among the student population without stigma improved self-esteem, self-acceptance, and self-worth (unger, anthony, sciarappa, & rogers, 1991). i observed bonding, social support, and peer support among eight to ten students who gathered thirty minutes or more before class in an area with tables, chairs, and snack/soda machines across from the classroom. i joined the students and provided supported education support as i encouraged the formation of friendships. although we did not systematically track outcomes, future programs that replicate leap or conduct similar interventions should collect ongoing data about graduation rates, drop-out rates, recovery, social support, and community engagement. systematic research related to program development, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination would be very valuable. in addition, research is needed to determine potential program outcomes by comparing students’ assessments between semesters to detect any trends as related to the ability of leap to meet the expectations of the students. the following quotes from leap graduates help to sum up some of the program’s successes: “the leap class taught me many great things about education and leadership. i felt very comfortable working with an instructor in the leap class who also had a severe and persistent mental illness. the teacher was very dedicated to her work and taught me a lot about advocacy. it is important to get involved and to learn as much as you can about your goals in life to become a better person. it is never too late in life to do the things you want to do. you can accomplish anything you put your mind to.” “what leap has meant to me: when i enrolled in leap i was not in recovery. i was in limbo. through the leap class, i realized i did have potential as a human being. i began to feel empowered and worthwhile. leap taught me to reverse the drag of self-stigma. i am now off of disability and working full time as a certified peer support specialist. leap taught me how to be a leader and a role model working with individuals dealing with spmi [serious and persistent mental illness]. all of us including the instructor had spmi; but that did not stop us. i suffered from selfstigma so i had a difficult time getting through the classroom door. i made it and have forever been grateful.” potential for transformative change in students and communities leap encouraged students to embark on a journey of self-discovery and to believe in a future with challenging, meaningful, and rewarding goals. students were exposed to the potential of self-examination which they hopefully could use to gain inspiration for action and a sense of determination in the face of opposition. leap aimed to teach students lessons about combining their passions and core values to begin their fight against internalized stigma and discrimination, thus improving their quality of life. the leap experience was designed to stimulate growth in students’ leadership capacity by the enhancement and exploration of present and future skills, talents, and strengths. students were encouraged to believe they could be high achievers regardless of their mental health challenges. leap equipped students with insight to take back their power from the political system, the social system, the civil system, the labor system, the legal system, the educational system, and the mental health system. leap educated about how rights and their enforcement empower consumers/ peers. rights are at the heart of advocacy and the force that drives the advocate. lessons about “self-advocacy” provided students opportunities to learn about the process of speaking or acting on their own behalf in pursuit of their own needs and interests. students were taught that an increase in their knowledge would improve their ability to advocate for peers who are underserved and underrepresented. in addition, leap educated students about “citizen advocacy,” which hopefully equipped them with the necessary competence to pursue and protect the same civil rights available to people without mental health issues. finally, leap aimed to demonstrate the value of peer support and the capacity of others to strengthen people’s will, to supply the means to achieve, and to express optimism for the future. students were challenged to never underestimate the collective power of peers who are otherwise considered voiceless. as part of the evening celebrations at the 2007 annual kansas consumer recovery conference, the leap graduates were honored for their academic accomplishments on stage and received an engraved global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   plaque. i gave a speech to the audience, which was primarily consumers/peers, and shared in detail that recovery is all about self-determination and how the graduates were living proof of this. in my speech, i emphasized that leap was not just about grades and completed assignments; it was an experience that changed lives. furthermore, leap gave students the tools to take back their life when they faced the personal barriers that posed the greatest challenges to their self-determination. i praised the graduates for their courage to walk that journey of self-discovery and personal growth. they faced their fears without surrender; they worked to improve their self-esteem and self-confidence; they replaced negative self-talk with positive self-talk; they developed their coping and social skills; they became knowledgeable about their civil rights; and they changed their feelings of hopelessness into a life with purpose. my aspirations associated with what i have written in my own words testify to my beliefs about self-worth, self-respect, self-acceptance and humanity for individuals dealing with mental health disorders worldwide. being passionate about social justice in the face of stigma and discrimination is what drives me. the leap model can produce transformative change in community mental health by helping our communities gain a better understanding of the potential within individuals receiving mental health services to achieve more than was thought possible. the academic achievements of leap graduates disproved the myths that individuals living daily with mental health disabilities are so disabled that they are mentally impaired and limited in major life activities such as learning, reading, writing, concentration, thinking, communicating, and working. the leap graduates are the evidence that if given the opportunities and supportive resources for higher education attainment, they can do as well as people without mental health issues. over the years, many leap graduates have been encouraged to continue their college education. conclusions before leap, students’ common experience as individuals receiving mental health services had provided them with little insight regarding their rights and self-worth. leap taught students about social justice and how society is to be blamed for the injustice. as advocates with the tools and skills for leadership, the leap program inspired students to be agents for transformative change in the mental health system. through the process of healing and rebuilding, students were taught the skills to become empowered; the ability to reject how society justifies the practice whereby consumers/peers have been denied the right for consumer-driven mental health services based on recovery; the right for an adequate income from competitive employment; the right for decent housing in safe neighborhoods; the right for affordable health care; the right for inclusion to citizenship with social opportunities; the right to be informed and involved with equal power to enable them as contributors to their communities; the right to cast their vote with a voice to be heard; the right for opportunities to attain valued social roles ; and the right for participation in society on equal terms. while there have been some improvements, traditional mental health services offer persons with disabilities little to dream of, aspire to, or hope for. mental health advocates have fought hard for recovery-based services, but many providers and programs seem to believe that lifelong disability maintenance is a proper therapeutic goal. society’s beliefs are changing in a positive direction by challenging stigma and discrimination and by believing that a life of disability without hope for recovery is an unacceptable long-term view for any human being. in the hopeful words of stephen p. hinshaw (2007), “success rates for mental health treatments already rival those for heart disease and cancer in physical medicine, meaning that there is reason for considerable optimism. views of mental disorder that emphasize its hopelessness and immutability may eventually become relics of past ignorance.” (p. 228). references americans with disabilities act of 1990, pub. l. no. 101-336, 104 stat. 328 (1990). ada amendments act of 2008, pub. l. no.110-325, 122 stat. 3553(2008). baron, r.c., & salzer, m.s. (2002). accounting for unemployment among people with mental illness. behavioral sciences & the law, 20(6), 585-599. corrigan, p. w. and ralph, r. o. (2005). introduction: recovery as consumer vision and research paradigm. in r. o. ralph and p. w. corrigan (eds.), recovery in mental illness broadening our understanding of wellness. washington, dc: american psychological association. drake, r.e., skinner, j.s., bond, g.r., & goldman, h.h. (2009). social security and mental illness: reducing disability with supported employment. health affairs, 28(3), 761-770. gruwell, e. (1999). the freedom writers diary. new york, ny: broadway books. hinshaw, s. p. (2007). the mark of shame stigma of mental illness and an agenda for change. new york, ny: oxford university press. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9   mowbray, c. t., collins, m. e., bellamy, c. d., megivern, d. a., bybee, d., and szilvagyi, s. (2005). supported education for adults with psychiatric disabilities: an innovation for social work and psychosocial rehabilitation practice. social work, 50(1), 7-20. polak, f. t. (1961). the image of the future: enlightening the past, orientating the present, forecasting the future. new york, ny: oceana. ruiz, d. m. (1997). the four agreements. san rafael, ca: amber-allen. simon, b. (1992). shame, stigma, and mental illness in ancient greece. in p.j. fink and a. tasman (eds.), stigma and mental illness (pp. 29-39). washington, dc: american psychiatric press. johnson, s. (1999). who moved my cheese? an amazing way to deal with change in your work and in your life. new york, ny: putnam. steele, k. and berman, c. (2001). the day the voices stopped. new york, ny: basic books.   stein, c.h., aguirre, r., hunt, m.g. (2013). social networks and personal loss among young adults with mental illness and their parents: a family perspective. psychiatric rehabilitation journal, 36(1), 15-21. tye, j. (2004). never fear, never quit: a story of courage and perseverance special workbook edition. new york, ny: paradox 21 press. unger, k. v. (1993). creating supported education programs utilizing existing community resources. psychosocial rehabilitation journal, 17(1), 11. unger, k. v., anthony, w. a., sciarappa, k., and rogers, e. s. (1991). a supported education program for young adults with long-term mental illness. hospital and community psychiatry, 42, 838-842. microsoft word theorypaper_formattedfinal.docx theories in the field of community psychology leonard a. jason ed stevens daphna ram steven a. miller christopher r. beasley kristen gleason depaul university rosalind franklin university of medicine and science washington college university of hawai`i at manoa keywords: theory, science, community psychology, framework author biographies: leonard jason is a professor of clinical and community psychology at depaul university. he been working on a nichd grant with dr. robinson for the past few years on violence prevention with urban 9th grade youth. ed stevens is a graduate of the community psychology doctoral program at depaul university, and previously received his mba from the university of chicago. he is currently a project director/research associate at the center for community research, overseeing a nih funded study of social networks in recovery homes. his interests include methods, measures, and understanding personal change. daphna ram received her phd in developmental psychology from cornell university in 2011. she worked as a project director at the center for community research with dr. leonard jason and is currently the social development director at long beach job corps center. steven a. miller is an assistant professor in the psychology department at rosalind franklin university of medicine and science. he holds a ph.d. in social psychology, masters’ degrees in clinical psychology and statistics, and bachelors’ degrees in philosophy and psychology. steve is interested in the relationship between stable individual difference characteristics and emotional experiences, the application of quantitative and novel research methodologies to psychological problems, and the history and philosophy of science in general. most recently, he has been involved in making taxometric methods more accessible to psychologists. for over five years, he has also been involved in collaborative research with individuals in community psychology where he has ensured methodological rigor and contributed to conceptual global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 formulation of research problems. steve is also interested in helping the field of psychology to embrace methodology which promotes findings that are more likely to replicate. christopher r. beasley is an assistant professor in the department of psychology at washington college and principle investigator for the community engagement research team. he has a m.a in clinical psychology as well as ph.d. in community psychology. dr. beasley's research primarily investigates people's psychological and behavioral engagement in their communities. he has examined processes related to satisfaction, commitment, citizenship behavior, involvement, and tenure in mutual-help addiction recovery homes. dr. beasley also assists mutual-help organizations pursue their research objectives, forming a national community advisory board of oxford house addiction recovery home residents and alumni to guide research projects and fundraising for such inquiry. lastly, dr. beasley has written and presented on theoretical concepts such as person-environment fit and 3rd order change. kristen d. gleason recently graduated from the university of hawai‘i at manoa with a doctorate in community and cultural psychology. she is currently a project director at depaul university’s center for community research in chicago, illinois. her research interests include homelessness, human trafficking, and examining social issues in relation to the structural and systemic factors that sustain them. authors’ notes: our thanks to john light, david glenwick, richard boyd, diana ohanian for their helpful comments and suggestions. we appreciate support from the national institute on alcohol abuse and alcoholism (grant r01aa022763), the eunice kennedy shriver national institute of child health and human development (grant r01hd072208), and the national institute of allergy and infectious diseases (grant r01a1105781). recommended citation: jason, l.a., stevens, e., ram, d. miller, s.a., beasley, c.r., gleason, k., (2016). theories in the field of community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(2), pages 1-27. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). correspondence should be addressed to leonard a. jason, depaul university, center for community research, 990 w. fullerton ave., suite 3100, chicago, il. 60614 global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 theories in the field of community psychology abstract in this article, we review some of the key attributes of useful theories and assess whether these attributes are present in several prominent community psychology theories. the field of community psychology often deals with complex systems and attempts to create change through the use of multiple mechanisms. it has provided researchers new ways of thinking about contextual factors and how participants could be more involved in research efforts. however, this field has encountered significant challenges in testing and evaluating theories that involve system-level environmental change. it has struggled to establish consensus when operationally defining criteria and when creating reliable instruments for measuring theoretical constructs. we conclude that community psychology theories have tended to function as frameworks, which indicate important elements to examine, but do not specify relationships that can be used for explanation and are, therefore, too broad to make the types of predictions characteristic of science. because community psychology theories have often served as orienting frameworks, there needs to be more discussion about their usefulness, and whether community psychologists can develop more rigorous and specific theories. this has implications for formulating various practices and for discussions about how future research can better inform theory. theoretical issues abound in many areas of psychology. meehl (1978, pp. 806), one of the more vocal advocates of the importance of theory, has stated: “most so called theories in the soft areas of psychology (clinical, counseling, social, personality, community, and school psychology) are scientifically unimpressive and technologically worthless.” while this stance reflects a positivistic approach to psychology that is not necessarily embraced by all community psychologists, the charge is worth consideration nonetheless (kloos, hill, thomas, wandersman, elias, & dalton, 2012). it would be useful for the field to have a clear, shared understanding around the use of the term “theory” and when and how it applies to the work that we do. it is in this spirit that we explore some of the key “theories” used by community psychologists in order to assess whether or not they fit within the concept of theory as traditionally defined in scientific inquiry. in order to do this we must first trace the definition and use of the idea of “theory” in these terms and then we must determine which of them within the field of community psychology might be fruitfully analyzed using this rubric. defining and using theory in scientific inquiry according to kerlinger (1986), “a theory is a set of interrelated constructs (concepts), definitions, and propositions that present a systematic view of phenomena by specifying relations among variables, with the purpose of explaining and predicting phenomena” (p. 11). a hallmark of the scientific process is the development and testing of theories, and, consequently, those disciplines without good theoretical foundations are often seen as less rigorous or less valuable to the larger scientific community. theories allow data to be organized, systematized, and interpreted. some would argue that without theories it is harder to achieve progress towards useful accumulated knowledge. mcadams and pals (2007) state that: "theory is at the heart of science” (p 3), and feynman (1997) believes that if academics are not engaging in theoretical work, their contributions are best global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 categorized as an engineering endeavor rather than true science. of course, others would disagree with feynman’s (1997) assessment. in the field of medicine, for example, much occurs that is practical and contributes to the larger mission of both patient care and the development of new therapeutic methods. in fact, many medical discoveries such as the discovery of penicillin, which began the modern era of antibiotic development (colebrook, 1956), are the result of serendipity rather than programmatic theory-tested experiments. however, even within the more applied disciplines such as medicine, there are implicit theoretical models. for example, theoretical models regarding cell function, cell growth, and biochemical change have allowed scientists to develop interventions for a number of neurodegenerative diseases (sheikh, safia, haque, & mir, 2013). though there are distinctions between those who practice medicine and those whose research explicitly wields theory, many believe theories apply to both types of activities and, more importantly, are the driving force for innovations. it is even possible to argue that in any research or clinical practice, there is always a theoretical model in operation. criteria for evaluating theories theories serve three purposes—describing, explaining, and predicting phenomena (jiang, 1998). first, theories are used to describe a phenomenon. these descriptive processes are then used to explain why the phenomenon occurs, and this explanatory framework is then used in making inferential predictions. a well-formulated theory should also be able to explain the phenomena of interest and posit under which circumstances and conditions (people, settings, and times) a given set of propositions should apply. this provides a better understanding of the phenomenon of interest and allows for a more critical analysis. for example, affective events theory (aet; weiss & cropanzano, 1996) posits that affective behaviors (e.g., citizenship behaviors such as courtesy, conscientiousness, and sportsmanship) are directly related to affective experiences, while judgment-driven behaviors (e.g., leaving a setting) are indirectly related to affect through the attitudes (e.g. satisfaction and commitment) formed by such experiences. this distinction is a critical part of understanding the relationship between affective events and behavior, and this theory has been fruitfully applied to community settings (beasley & jason, 2015). according to reichenbach (1938), there is a distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. in the context of discovery, people describe what they have stumbled upon; whereas in the context of justification, they make predictions and then test these ideas in order to prove or disprove them. indeed, the prevalent practice of generating hypotheses and theories after the data have been analyzed (known as harking; hypothesizing after the results are known; kerr, 1998) has received quite a bit of critical attention. in these circumstances it is possible that one is only explaining phenomena through the lens of what is already known. feynman (1997) has described good science as a process of “bending over backward to show oneself wrong.” with harked theoretical explanation, there is an absence of such “bending over backwards.” as an approach to inquiry, it leans towards affirmation, risking a result that simply confirms what a researcher already believes to be true. this is reminiscent of meehl’s (1967) argument that psychologists’ reliance on post-hoc explanation of why phenomena did or did not occur obscures the field’s ability to assess why people function as they do. to counteract the bias of hark, some researchers suggest that theories need to be: 1) articulated (and perhaps hypotheses even registered before research is conducted) this is akin to nozek and bar-anan’s (2012) concept of open science and 2) tested a priori global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 so that one can see whether or not any given theory acts as a valid “inference ticket” for human phenomena. it should be noted that some have raised important concerns regarding the classic context of discovery/context of justification distinction (e.g., hoyningien-huene, 2006), but even while questioning the merit of such an unambiguous binary divide, most would still recognize the need for “a distinct normative perspective that aims at the evaluation of scientific claims” hoyningienhuene, 2006, p. 130). a major aim of this article is to attempt to apply some “normative perspective” regarding the use of theory to work in the field of community psychology and to generate what we hope will be a productive conversation around such aims. one such normative criteria often used in science is that good theories need to offer clear predictions regarding what should happen with new data, and these predictions should be capable of being rigorously tested and falsified (popper, 1968). according to borsboom (2013), “a good scientific theory allows you to infer what would happen to things in certain situations without creating the situations…theories should be interpreted as inference tickets.” otherwise, a theory is too broad to make the types of predictions characteristic of science. in making predictions about new data, theories provide insight into how human behavior works in systematic ways. ultimately, theories are part of the process where observations become evidence for generalizable knowledge, which can have useful applicability. theories also deal with falsifiability and utility (bacharach, 1989; huber, 2008; van de ven, 1989). finally, when using theories in research, investigators need to assess the applicability of a theory within a variety of contexts in order to describe the boundary conditions in which the theory predictions hold or do not hold. for example, under classical conditions, the theory of gravitation is correct. but, gravitational theory does not apply at quantum distances or extremely high energies—that is, there is no theory of quantum gravity. gravity applies very nicely when predicting motion of objects, but not under all conditions (i.e., air resistance of a dropped object must be considered). while the boundaries of the theory of gravitation seem quite obvious in this example, analogous boundaries are not always as clear in the theories often used in the field of community psychology. consider learning theory. skinner (1971) asserted that reinforcement is a key component of learning in both humans and pigeons. however, when attentional capacity is limited (e.g., by serious head injury, overwhelming environmental stimuli, intense emotional states), learning may not occur in the same manner. it is difficult to train pigeons to fight adversaries, as they may be evolutionarily hardwired for flight rather than fight. boundary conditions are one of the ways theories can be a basis for progress, and part of such advancement involves developing better understandings of when and how a theory does and does not apply to particular settings and circumstances. if bowlby (1969; 1980) had not proposed a clear theory that allowed for predictions and experimentation, ainsworth would not have made her discovery about boundary conditions. bowlby’s (1969; 1980) influential attachment theory within developmental psychology postulated that a relationship with a stable consistent caregiver is important for emotional development. ainsworth and bell (1970) tested this theory by observing parent-child interactions, and noticed that not all children reacted to separation from and reunion with their parents in the same manner. the relationship between children and their parents plays a significant role in children’s feelings of security. in other words, the theory did not apply universally and boundary conditions related to individual differences existed. although the primary purpose of theory is to explain current global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 phenomena and predict how things may behave in the future, some have used theory to explain and understand past events. there are other sets of criteria for theory assessment, that are beyond the scope of this paper such as importance, precision and clarity, parsimony and simplicity, comprehensiveness, operationality, empirical validation or verification, fruitfulness, and practicality (patterson, 1986). clearly defining theory in this manner is important because often “theory,” “model” and “framework” are used interchangeably; however, there are important differences in these concepts (see figure 1). a framework informs researchers of the types of elements that are considered important avenues of investigation. it largely performs the descriptive function of a theory with limited explanatory and/or predictive qualities. a well-known example is bronfennbrenner’s (1979) framework, which is made up of macrosystem, mesosystem and microsystem elements. however, because the terms macrosystem, mesosystem, and microsystem are not specific, the framework does not make predictions. in other words, without further refinement, this framework does not specify relationships that can be used for explanation and prediction. therefore, a framework could be described as a set of orienting principles which, however, require more specific definition, operationalization, and so on, in order to be applied in any given research or other circumstance. for example, bronfenbrenner’s (1979) framework can be used to specify and operationalize the proposition that proximal systems are likely to have greater impact on individuals than distal systems and investigations targeting these different levels of impact could be used to evaluate this very point. however, as it stands the framework itself simply points to multiple levels of influence. if researchers look backwards, bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems framework does seem to describe how some social systems work, but it is not specific enough to be testable in a rigorous sense. within one framework, often multiple theories can be derived, and often each theory might have several different models and accompanying hypotheses (see figure 1). figure 1. relationship among one framework, which might have several theories and models note: there may be one or more hypothesis within each model. in this figure for the sake of simplicity we only list two hypotheses per model. in the interests of clarity and consensus about the use of these terms within the field of community psychology, we intend to explore some of the classic “theories” which have been much beloved in the field. we consider the question of whether these theories might global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 be more productively classified and used as frameworks because they lack the ability to aid with the operationalization and prediction inherent to a definition of theory as classically used in scientific inquiry. frameworks are certainly important and useful, but thinking through how we as a field can more explicitly flesh out these frameworks into sets of testable theories would go a long way toward making significant progress in understanding complex systems and the contexts in which people live their lives. community psychology before applying this rubric to the major theories put forth in the field, it is important to situate the philosophy of science outlined above (and its core definition of theory) within the context of community psychology and practice. community psychology emerged about 50 years ago. as the field evolved, certain recurring themes also emerged: emphasizing prevention over treatment, highlighting competencies over weaknesses, collaborating across disciplines, exploring ecological understandings of people within their environment, promoting diversity, and focusing on community building as a mode of intervention (moritsugu, vera, wong, & duffy, 2013). these concepts focused on new ways of thinking about contextual factors and how participants could be more involved in research efforts. these concepts also concentrated more on public health systems and preventive approaches (kloos, et. al., 2012). at an influential community methods conference, tolan, keys, chertok, and jason (1990) responded to a multitude of issues facing the field of community psychology, and introduced a dialogue regarding criteria necessary to define research of merit as well as methodological considerations in implementing ecologically-driven research. participants at this conference appealed for the careful construction and testing of theory in community research (p. 226). a later community psychology methods conference explored the gap in the scientific knowledge and practice of community based research methodologies emphasizing participatory research (jason et al., 2004). theories of context and action for social change (lewin, 1946; vygotsky, 1981) have been part of the community psychology field from its inception and continue to be utilized [e.g., seidman’s (1988) theory of social regularities in social settings]. community psychology was founded as a discipline that is intended to combine a scientific orientation with collaborative social action in order to empower members of some community of interest and to help them improve their lives. this orientation results in some important differences between the “hard” sciences and community psychology, in that it takes account of the fact that humans are cognitive, agentic units, and cannot be acted upon as though they were inert objects. this implies that some level of collaboration will always be required to institute social change. additionally, this orientation has also sensitized the field to a need to listen to social actors, rather than to prescribe to them, which in turn has led to many insights regarding what life is like from the point of view of community members. however, these goals might run the risk of subordinating some potentially very important aspects of scientific development, including the development of theories capable of effectively describing, predicting, and explaining important phenomena. it is possible to think about different fields of psychology as having different goals. for example, developmental psychology aims to document and understand the changes in humans across the lifespan. the goal of community psychology has been expressed as an attempt to understand the ways that altering specific human contexts (and perhaps the relationship between people and their contexts) alleviates human suffering. although much of the explanation of individual difference “to date” has focused on genetics/nature and accumulated global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 experience/nurture, there may also be a significant amount of variance that can be accounted for by our interactions with our current environment. community psychology has much to contribute to this area, both in terms of theories to describe the impacts of context and environment, as well as reliable and valid measures to capture these complex phenomena. perspectivism the definition of theory described above springs largely out of a traditional western philosophy of science. not all community psychologists subscribe to this kind of logical empiricism as their guiding philosophy of science. in fact, many community psychologists focus on the idea that we need to identify and understand multiple perspectives on reality. this involves understanding the importance of multiple contexts including gender, race, age, sexual orientation, religion, and disability status. however, if taken to the extreme of considering each ecological setting to be unique with its own history and varying influences (as can happen with pure constructivism), there may be no generalizable principles that can be extended across settings (trickett, watts, & birman, 1994). an assumption of science is that there are some regularities in the world, and they are often stationary enough to have generalized meaning. if the randomness of diversity dominates human and community behavior, then theories have low value. however, as tebes (2005) points out, understanding how and why people’s perspectives differ and the situations in which perspectives arise allows a place for science and for conceptualizing theoretically in conducting scientific research. our definition of theory is largely couched in language of empiricism, but there are important reasons to consider other scientific perspectives, especially given community psychology’s goal of examining context. for tebes (2012), perspectivism suggests that all knowledge is dependent on the observer’s point of view, is imperfect and incomplete, and is subject to social and cultural influences. according to perspectivism, our knowledge emerges out of active engagement with the world. therefore, if there are multiple perspectives on “reality”, it may be best to simultaneously examine multiple theories. some ethnomethodologists and phenomenologists in the field of sociology would even go as far as to suggest there is no “science of human behavior” (ashley & orenstein, 2005). indeed, a sociological approach to critiquing knowledge can help us understand power, oppression, and action (berger, 1977; merton, 1968; strauss, 1997), recognizing that knowledge is both incomplete and dependent on culture and context. consequently, this raises the consideration that every culture, which logically implies every social system (even dyads or individuals as their constituent parts), is unique. perspectivism leads to not only metatheoretical considerations of power, knowledge, and diversity of perspective, but also methodological ones1. for example, neighborhoods are not static and do change over time. heller (2014) has indicated that the various impediments that communities confront, such as inadequate resources or insufficient technical knowledge, may require different strategies. tebes (2012) has argued for a pragmatic point of view: that evidence for “trueness” may be best obtained from a diverse set of mixed methods, one that includes the voices of multiple perspectives and forms of data. the challenge for this research is to consolidate, aggregate, and make sense of the multiple strands of evidence or data, and it may best be achieved at some meta-level of analysis. in a sense, we may be able to recognize different perspectives on “reality”, and yet still distill common elements, or predictable relationships among seemingly disparate elements. while this view acknowledges that often multiple and competing definitions of global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 human phenomena (along with inherent issues of power and privilege) are at play, it also proposes that at times it is possible to describe common elements that hold true across diverse contexts. it is with the intention of instigating a cohesive distillation of these common elements within the field of community psychology that we offer the following discussion related to the major theories in the field. central theories the question of which theories are central to the field of community psychology continues to be a subject of debate. the authors of this article recently posted the following notice on the society for community research and action’s listserv: “a group of us at depaul university are thinking about which theories are central to the field of community psychology. we would be interested in learning whether you use theories explicitly, and if you do use theories explicitly, what theories you use, and do you borrow them from other disciplines or are they from the field of community psychology.” the following 32 theories were mentioned: 1. kelly’s (2006) ecological theory; 2. rappaport’s (1981) empowerment theory; 3. sarason’s (1974) psychological sense of community theory; 4. bronfennbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory; 5. hawkins and catalano’s (1992) social development model; 6. dohrenwend and dohrenwend’s (1981) stress & coping model; 7. ryan’s (1976) blaming the victim; 8. martin-baro’s (1994) liberation psychology theory; 9. rogers’s (1959) helping relationships (empathy, acceptance/warmth, and genuineness); 10. irving yalom’s (2005) conception of therapeutic factors in group therapy (instillation of hope, universality, etc.); 11. habermas’s (1984, 1987) theory of communicative action; 12. marcuse’s (1969) critical social theory; 13. o’donnell, tharp, & wilson’s (1993) activity theory; 14. flay and schure’s (2012) integrative theory; 15. rawls’s (1971) social justice theory; 16. sen's (2009) social justice theory; 17. foucault's (1991) conception of power; 18. bordieus's (1986) theory of forms of capital; 19. foster-fishman, nowell, and wang’s (2007) system-theoretical work; 20. fishbein and ajzen’s (1975) theory of reasoned action; 21. ajzen’s (1991) theory of planned behavior; 22. rutter’s (1985) resilience theory; 23. weiss and cropanzano’s (1996) affective events theory; 24. barker’s (1968) behavior setting theory; 25. french, rogers, and cobb’s (1974) person-environment fit theory of stress; 26. biglan and sloane wilson’s (2015) behavioral systems science; 27. nowell and boyd’s (2010) sense of community responsibility concept and theory; 28. von bertallanfy’s (1969) open systems theory; 29. moos’s (1986) social context perspective; 30. argyris's (1993) organizational learning theory; 31. srivastval and cooperrider's (1986) appreciative inquiry theory; 32. spreitzer et al.’s (2005) socially embedded model of thriving. we were somewhat surprised by both the variety of theories being used as well as the fact there was little agreement for leading or central theories. because community psychology is concerned with many personal and social issues, perhaps the variety above is global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 more of a reflection of this breadth of concern than a symptom of theoretical fragmentation or lack of consensus. if one were to trace the origins of these theories, for example, it is possible that many have similar roots, or address different levels of abstraction (e.g., individuals vs. social institutions). in other words, it is probably not as though this field has 32 different explanations for essentially the same phenomena. among the responses, a few suggested that the field would benefit from more rigorously defined theories, framing rigor in terms of clarity of application, clarity of exposition, and lack of ambiguity in predictions. this article is a response to that challenge, attempting to analyze how successfully we have met this standard of rigor. we do not have the space in this article to review each of the above theories, so will we will focus our evaluation on several of the more prominent theories in the development of the field of community psychology, focusing on their testability and predictability. theories in community psychology in this article, we are attempting to assess theories in terms of what they currently do and what they are intending to do. while we do acknowledge that there are many in the field who would argue that employing theories heuristically is useful and that the “usefulness” of a theory often depends on what you are actually trying to do with it, we will suggest that the following theories could be more useful if progress was made in their ability to predict and describe phenomena more explicitly. therefore, below we review some of the key attributes of three prominent community psychology theories, and we explore whether these they describe, explain, and predict phenomena. ecological theory overview of ecological theory kelly’s (1968) ecological theory focuses on how people become effective and adaptive in different social environments. kelly proposed four ecological principles that serve as a theory for examining settings and behavior: interdependence, cycling of resources, adaptation, and succession. interdependence implies that change in one component of an ecosystem can change relationships among other components of the system. the principle of cycling of resources provides a guide for understanding how ecosystems create and use new resources. this allows us to determine how resources can be used more effectively in a setting and how additional resources can be generated. adaptation is defined by the way environments restrict, constrain, and shape peoples’ behavior, and how, in turn, the environments begin to also change due to the individuals within them. this concept implies that behavior that is adaptive in one setting may not be adaptive in others. it also points us toward trying to assess who participates in defining adaptive roles and in generating normative acceptance and support for a wide range of adaptive behaviors. finally, the principle of succession suggests communities are in a constant process of change, and over time, the demand for adaptive capacities changes. this theory has been used by community psychologists to understand behavior in interaction with social and cultural contexts. psychologists in other fields have independently explored a number of these domains. for example, social psychological theories often address issues of context [e.g., latané’s (1981) social impact theory]. however, in latané’s social psychological theory, the real-world interdependence or dynamics that are integral features of kelly’s theory are not present. for kelly, adaptation and succession are biological, dynamic processes that characterize social settings and human interactions. one example of community research using kelly’s theory is the work of quattrochi-tubin global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 and jason (1980), evaluating the success of a stimulus control procedure in increasing interactions among elderly participants in a lounge area of a nursing home. the intervention involved providing the residents coffee and cookies to see whether these resources would change their behaviors. several residents mentioned that they would hold a half-filled cup, even though they were not interested in drinking it, just to be part of the group. in addition to increasing interactions, the intervention effectively eliminated television watching, thus showing response generalization. the intervention also demonstrated interdependence- changes that occurred in one aspect of the setting influenced other aspects. for example, several group members began serving coffee to those who were physically unable to serve themselves. one woman even approached the nursing station to inform the aides of what a good time she was having serving the men. it appears that the refreshments represented an environmental support facilitating social activities and altruistic behaviors. for kelly, the ecological notion of interdependence helps highlight dynamic processes that often occur in our social and community interventions, as in the example of how small changes to the setting enabled several participants in the nursing home to become part of the group. evaluation of ecological theory aspects of kelly’s ecological theory have been evaluated using several diverse approaches. kingry-westergaard and kelly (1990) have suggested that multiple approaches are needed to understand complex qualities of relationships and systems. one key method for getting at these complex qualities involves the collaborative relationship between the researcher and the participants. this means that concepts and hypotheses are developed, tested, and evaluated by both the researcher and the participants. additionally, wandersman, chavis, and stuckly (1983) suggest that the characteristics of the individual citizens themselves (e.g., motivation to participate, available resources, level of training, and organizational characteristics) influence the level of citizen involvement. citizen participation in community interventions has potential for sensitizing, prioritizing, and sustaining research efforts. if the research lends itself to citizen involvement, then determining the best level and type of involvement is critical. according to kelly (2006), people interact with their environment through the four specific principles described above. these ecological principles focus on different aspects of the social context and behavior, and they also overlap and complement one another. in a classic study examining youth who transitioned into a new school, kelly (1979) found that boys with high preference for exploratory behaviors had more positive scores on adaptation measures in both of two schools, but that the “fluid” school where more students entered and left in a year, predictably facilitated more exploratory behavior. the findings of the study strengthened his view of ecological theory by showing that person-environment interactions were important, that adaption and change were ever present, and rates varied by individual differences and setting. on the other hand, because kelly’s theory provides for a large number of hypotheses or models, it is somewhat non-specific, and thus consistent with potentially quite a few rather different models. parsimony considerations might suggest simpler and more direct theories of person-setting interactions than this broad generalized construct of social ecology. it raises the following question: if this theory can generate a variety of quite disparate hypotheses, in what sense can any investigation inform the validity of the theory itself? for these reasons, we propose that kelly’s (1968) ecological theory is more usefully conceptualized as a framework than as a theory. though, it is perhaps more specific than bronfennbrenner’s (1979) framework global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 with respect to relationships between constituent elements and its ability to generate hypotheses. for example, kelly (2006) has argued for the power of social support, stating that “organizational resources were essential for my well-being” (p. 11). indeed, the role of support as causal and critical for good functioning is a specific prediction made from kelly’s work. frameworks are certainly useful tools, especially if they can be used to develop several interrelated models. a model is a set of hypotheses about a real-life situation (see figure 1); and kelly’s “theory” (or framework) could be productively developed into one or more testable models, each containing many hypotheses (jason, 1992). for example, one could test the hypothesis that actively participating in more community events leads to higher ratings of social support. in turn, greater social support (i.e., interdependence) could relate to greater well-being. assuming that social support and well-being can be observed in a suitably designed study, then, these two hypotheses create a testable model based on kelly’s theory. the primary role of theory in empirical inquiry is to suggest important research questions by hypothesizing mechanisms and making predictions. it is possible many community psychologists have used kelly’s ecological theory to explain what they have stumbled upon (i.e., reichenbach’s (1938) context of discovery). with this ideology, there may be a preference to explain afterthe-fact phenomena, and the danger here is that the investigator who has stumbled upon a concept in practice might overstate it as a theory. far too often, the theory is no more than an afterthought, as mentioned above, used to explain what the findings are rather than predicting what they should be a priori. therefore, we propose here that kelly’s ecological concepts are better characterized and used as a framework which can be employed as a guide to develop testable models. psychological sense of community theory overview of psychological sense of community theory another influential community psychology theorist was sarason (1974), whose insight was that a psychological sense of community was a feeling that emerged as a function of the interaction of the individual and the context. he described this theory as follows: “the perception of similarity to others, an acknowledged interdependence with others, a willingness to maintain this interdependence by giving to or doing for others what one expects from them, the feeling one is part of a larger dependable and stable structure” (p.157). this definition incorporates many key aspects of community psychology, such as the notion that an individual exists within a larger network and structure and that these individuals are interdependent. in particular, sense of community theory claims that if people feel that they exist within a larger interdependent network, they are more willing to commit to and even make personal sacrifices for that group. when this theory was initially proposed, there was considerable enthusiasm for the idea and it was soon considered one of the foundational constructs of the developing field of community psychology. while similar constructs have been proposed in other disciplines, none is a perfect match for sense of community. sense of community is feelings-based rather than based on a rational evaluation of the fulfillment of a person’s needs or aspirations. sense of community is more than the “cohesion” that is typically measured in industrial/organizational settings (e.g., kozlowski & ilgen, 2006), as cohesion is often market based, and it does not need emotional connection to accomplish tasks. sense of community is also more than the positive group feelings, such as “morale,” that are typically studied by positive psychologists (peterson, park, & sweeney, 2008). in addition, esprit de corps measured by global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 military psychologists (e.g., manning, 1991) focuses more on positive affect in military activities. in theory, the construct sense of community ambitiously attempts to describe both individual-level feelings of connectedness and the implications these feelings have on behaviors and settings as well as the reciprocal ways in which different settings can facilitate feelings of connectedness and related behaviors. but sense of community is an aggregate construct and not an individual measure, and the essential feature is how the members of the larger group or entity affect the individual feelings of community. like a flock of geese that flies as a unified entity, the collective assessment is critical. in essence, rather than assessing sense of community by one person’s observation, it is essential for there to be a representative sample of individuals to tap this construct. one could measure “one” person’s sense of belonging to a group, but this single observation would not capture the group’s sense of community. in practice, attempts to operationalize these concepts over the years have been met with various theoretical and methodological challenges. for example, sense of community has been variously conceptualized from place-based (locational) communities (i.e., neighborhoods) to more generalized and abstract communities (relational communities) (bess, fisher, sonn, & bishop, 2002; bishop, chertok, & jason, 1997), thus making the scope of measurement more difficult and less generalizable. this variety can introduce a level of imprecision if these differential applications of the concept are not explicitly outlined and investigated. furthermore, because the concept of sense of community attempts to capture interactions between different levels of influence (e.g., individual feelings, relational behaviors, and setting features), designing measures that capture this multidimensionality has also been difficult (jason, stevens, ram, 2015). in one attempt to further specify this complexity, brodsky, loomis, and marx (2002) have recommend that researchers begin to conceptualize and measure multiple senses of community. that is, the multiple possible nested settings that may each pose interrelated, but often different, senses of community. they postulated that the senses of community experienced in multiple settings likely interact with each other and that understanding a more complete constellation of sense of community would help to better understand sense of community in any one particular setting. for example, "when a researcher predetermines the psoc [psychological sense of community] target community, it is unclear if that community has the same salience and/or importance to all research participants. thus the aggregate community measure may be more meaningful as an indicator of individuals' commitment to the community, but be less useful as an indicator of individual outcome" (brodsky et al., 2002, p. 332). despite these challenges, community researchers have theorized and tested a number of scales aimed at operationalizing “sense of community.” perhaps, most notably, mcmillan and chavis (1986) proposed this construct to have four dimensions: membership, fulfillment of needs, shared emotional connection, and influence. moreover peterson, speer, and mcmillan (2008) developed the brief sense of community scale, an 8-item scale to measure these factors. in addition, bishop, chertok, and jason (1997) proposed an operationalization of sense of community using the constructs of mission, connections, and reciprocal responsibility. the corresponding measurement scale, the perceived sense of community scale, was intended to be less tied to geographic location (i.e., neighborhood) than previous scales. most recently, jason, stevens and ram (2015) have suggested that sense of community offers a unique information when examining an individual’s experience as part of a system. they conceptualized this experience as a result of an individual being part of three global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 ecological levels. the largest level is entity, the unit upon which the community is formulated (e.g., neighborhood, school, or organization). in order to tap into this domain, they incorporated items that refer to characteristics of the group, such as common goals, purpose, and objectives. the next level,, membership refers to the relationships between the members of the group (e.g., neighbors on a block, students within a school). finally, at the third and narrowest level, or “the individual,” is self, which assesses the meaningfulness, commitment, and emotional connection experienced by members. improving on prior attempts to capture sense of community, this representation of the construct has the advantage of providing a detailed perspective on the interactive relationship between an individual’s own experience within a group and characteristics of that group, attempting to capture how these aspects relate to his or her well-being. in a sense, this definition captures sarason’s quote referred to above, defining psychological sense of community as comprising multiple levels--a stable structure (entity), interdependence with others (members), and a willingness to maintain interdependence (self). evaluation of psychological sense of community theory capturing the essence of sense of community in valid, reliable, and generalizable terms has been challenging for community psychologists (e.g., nowell & boyd, 2010). while hundreds of research studies have utilized sense of community as a construct, people continue to develop sense of community instruments because of a dissatisfaction with current instruments. in other words, measurement issues include conceptual complexity, such as the empirical overlap between the 3 or 4 identified factors. brodsky et al.’s (2002) observation that sense of community operates at multiple levels explains why many measurement efforts have encountered conceptual problems when attempting to capture a group concept using individual level assessments. for example, mcmillan and chavis’ (1986) 4-factor structure has not generally been confirmed by factor analytic studies (chipuer & pretty, 1999; stevens, jason, & ferrari, 2011). when it has been confirmed, such as in peterson, speer, and mcmillan’s (2008) brief sense of community scale, the correlation of factors is so high that its use at the individual factor level is problematic. others have tried to reformulate the mcmillan and chavis model, such as when long and perkins (2003) retained three factors consisting of social connections, mutual concerns, and community values. the latent measurement model, however, did not translate into acceptable reliabilities at the subscale level. scales measuring other formations of sense of community, such as the perceived sense of community scale (bishop, chertok, & jason, 1997), while perhaps having more reliability, also have proved to be problematic in various ways (stevens, jason et al., 2012), as factor analyses revealed that negatively worded items loaded together. however, there has been recent progress on an instrument that is designed to capture the ecological structure of sense of community at three layers (jason, stevens & ram, 2015). using these three levels, the self, the interactions with others (membership), and the organization (entity), a brief 9-item questionnaire has been developed with good psychometric properties to assess sense of community. the preliminary evidence suggests that each domain is a necessary but not sufficient component of sense of community. for example, a person might experience a strong sense of entity, but not of membership or self, and in such a situation, he or she may not have a strong sense of community. jason, stevens and ram (2015) have found empirical support for such a conceptualization of sense of community with good measurement model fit and internal reliabilities, and the findings have now been replicated with a community sample and used to predict two recovery home phenomena of global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 house operations and member trust (jason, stevens, & light, in press). understanding the boundary conditions or limits of the sense of community concept is also of critical importance. further progress is needed in outlining the contexts in which this concept applies, such as whether different cultural communities may tend to variously weight different settings as more or less important in terms of sense of community (i.e., present different constellations of multiple sense of community) and what kinds of implications that has for the generalizable application of related measures. for example, gangs or violent extremist groups might have similar sense of community scores to those engaged in more positive activities such as team sports. in addition, sense of community is a state so it changes dynamically over time. it is also possible that different levels of sense of community might not be predictive of large behavioral differences (davidson & cotter, 1993). even if this is the case, however, the concept may still be predictive of important unusual behavior in specific contexts. as an example, during one summer in chicago when there was an extreme heat wave, sense of community may have been what motivated neighbors to check on single elderly people, saving many lives. however, from a theoretical point of view, having a more narrow and focused description increases the likelihood that one can directly test the theory, and that this can improve the creation of the measurement and the test. if addressed in future research efforts, better understanding the boundary conditions and magnitude of effect of the sense of community concept could aid in its use within the field as a predictive and explanatory concept. this would, of course, improve its standing as a clearly defined and rigorous scientific theory capable of capturing individual-context interactions in usefully replicable terms. in the prior section, we concluded that kelly’s theory might best be described as a framework. it is possible that, given the consistent past attempts at and the recent progress in operationalizing the construct, the sense of community concept may, in fact, meet the criteria for theory as defined in this article. however, we propose that by continuing to pursue valid and reliable measures of the construct and by better defining its boundary conditions, sense of community can be wielded more effectively and more rigorously as a theory in terms of satisfying minimum standards of prediction and control. empowerment overview of empowerment theory from the very beginning, rappaport (1987) stated that a theory of empowerment should be able to outline the limits of the construct and describe the range of situations in which it is generalizable. furthermore, rappaport (1987) indicated, community psychology as a field of study has reached a time in its development when theory must be proposed, tested, and modified. without theory, a field cannot long survive as a scientific enterprise. without theory the applications of a field must become increasingly cut off from the sharp edge of scientific critique. (p. 122) here we evaluate how well rappaport’s theory as it is used today has integrated these ideals. in 1981, rappaport wrote an influential article on empowerment theory titled: “in praise of paradox: a social policy of empowerment over prevention.” rappaport (1981) proposed a theory of empowerment that outlined 4 characteristics: 1) individuals can be viewed as complete entities having both needs and rights; 2) attention must be paid to paradox; 3) there are both divergent and dialectical solutions to social problems; and 4) there is a symbolic sense of urgency in understanding and solving social problems. in other words, people should not be viewed global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 unidimensionally. in addition, as there are myriad solutions and opportunities for solving community problems, it is not optimal to implement single-barreled solutions to most social issues. believing “theory is essential to the maturation of any field of serious scientific study,” rappaport (1987) later made a case for empowerment, and defined it in the following way: i have suggested that empowerment is a process, a mechanism by which people, organizations, and communities gain mastery over their affairs. consequently, empowerment will look different in its manifest content for different people, organizations, and settings… i suggested that a concern with empowerment leads us to look for solutions to problems in living in a diversity of local settings, rather than in the centralized single solutions of a monolithic "helping" structure, where help is considered to be a scarce commodity… (pp.122). in his 1987 article, rappaport expanded upon his earlier notions by providing an outline of “11 assumptions, presuppositions, and hypotheses built into a theory of empowerment” (rappaport, 1987, p. 139). these included: empowerment is a multilevel construct; the radiating impact of one level of analysis on the others is assumed to be important; the historical context has an important influence on the outcomes of a program; the cultural context matters; longitudinal research is desirable and perhaps necessary; empowerment is further a world view theory (e.g., participants are considered collaborators, and the choice of language is important); the conditions of participation in a setting predicts empowerment; an organization with an empowerment ideology will be better at finding and developing resources than one with a helper-helpee orientation; locally developed solutions are more empowering than general solutions; sizes of settings matter; and, once adopted, empowerment expands resources. according to rappaport, these assumptions suggest that the goal or dependent variable of our community interventions should involve empowerment. evaluation of empowerment theory we will first consider how well empowerment describes a phenomenon of interest, as well as the important question of whether a definition of empowerment is generally agreed upon. an initial question is how rappaport’s definition is different from agency, autonomy, volition, perceived control, and the self-efficacy of some action. rappaport (1987) does clearly put a great emphasis on the interaction of the individual and environment, yet does not clearly specify how to measure this construct. as a result, empowerment could be viewed as the ability to influence and organize people (christens, peterson, & speer, 2011), or as a process, as a psychological state, or as the act of giving someone power or being given power, or even all of these arguably distinct phenomena. if the fundamental description is variable and subject to different interpretations, this poses challenges not only in terms of measurement but also in terms of prediction and control description, which are the minimal standards of a theory. furthermore, by spanning ecological levels, there might be additional problems with the consistency of meaning. for example, an empowered organization might be very different than an empowered individual. one company might be empowered, in that it is very efficient and has a growing market share and power, and yet the experience of empowerment may be very different for an individual within that organization. that individual might feel unempowered if forced to meet unrealistic efficiency expectations, all in an effort for the overall organization to be perceived as empowered (particularly among the management). in other words, the core global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 definition of empowerment may be different at the organizational and individual level, and if general mastery and control over one’s future is the core construct, then this might be manifested very differently at different organizational levels. this is supported by zimmerman (1995) who asserted that “empowerment may be an open-ended construct that is not easily reduced to a universal set of operational rules and definitions…the measures we develop for one study may not be appropriate for another” (pp. 583). it could even be argued that empowerment really only makes sense for individuals, as it is ultimately a perception of efficacy, and organizations don’t have perceptions. therefore, if a construct’s definition is ambiguous, operationalizations of it are likely to be as well. although the foundation work for empowerment occurred over 30 years ago, there remains a need for a clear and consistent definition. for example, cattaneo and goodman (2015) used empowerment as the basis for understanding domestic violence practice, but also concluded there is a need for a consensus on the precise definition. hunter, jason, and keys (2013) focused on measuring empowerment within a specific population in a specific context, and found that the construct is so general as to impede accurate measurement. because it has been measured differently by different investigators, each with their own purposes, the criteria lack consistency, hindering its use as a theory for the field. if numerous researchers each have their own interpretations of the theory and develop their own measures, then accumulation of evidence for (or against) the theory is not possible. being stuck at a descriptive phase without a consensus definition thus limits the scope and impact of the theoretical construct because new evidence cannot easily be interpreted as supporting or refuting the theory. furthermore, the empowerment concept does not give specific directions or predictions regarding mechanisms. there is no systematic way of predicting or evaluating differences and likelihoods of outcomes (e.g., borsboom, 2013). therefore, from a theoretical point of view, rappaport has neither described the basic mechanisms at work, nor made predictions about how the context might alter this. although, more recently, researchers (e.g., christens, peterson, & speer, 2011) have attempted to make specific predictions regarding empowerment theory, there may be some debate about whether their predictive tests flow directly from that theory. this might also apply to peterson’s (2014) work on organizational empowerment (peterson & zimmerman, 2004) and measurement frameworks for empowerment at multiple levels of analysis (peterson, 2014). the theoretical foundation of empowerment would be sturdier and ultimately testable if empowerment theorists came up with a prediction regarding how empowerment might work in a given situation rather than saying there is no single way of empowering entities. this would allow for new hypotheses and new predictions. in summary, because the empowerment concept lacks a consensus definition/consistent formulation and does not at present have predictive capabilities, it does not meet the qualifications of theory as outlined here and might better be referred to as a framework. discussion when using theories in the way outlined in this article, different tasks need to occur at different stages of the theory development process, and the objective or goal of the research generally shapes the nature of the investigation. in the exploratory stage of scientific research and theory development, qualitative and mixed methods are often used in order to obtain rich descriptions of the phenomenon of interest. at the exploratory stage, it is critical to develop measures that correlate with each other, and this can be done with cross-sectional designs; hopefully these measures vary enough to be able to global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 capture change over time. it is not essential to make a causal argument at this point, but an investigator may make predictions from these data. during the next step of theory building and testing, the investigator may begin to make specific predictions. this may be done through longitudinal data, in order to determine a temporal sequence of cause and effect or through experimental data, to determine situational cause and effect. the theory is then put into practice, and its generalizability is evaluated. this process is iterative, and over time, boundary conditions emerge as certain propositions are found to be limited to specific people, settings and times. community psychology has often been characterized by exploratory research, which has an important role in describing a phenomenon and getting a conceptual handle on potentially important causal mechanisms. however, further development is required for making predictions regarding the phenomena of interest. the goal of exploratory research is to learn about a phenomenon without necessarily imposing a structure on it. information from this exploratory stage later informs a preliminary structure for this phenomenon, making it possible to come up with a model that describes how people do things in a particular way. this stage of exploratory research is akin to reichenbach’s (1938) context of discovery where the justification or falsification of theories is not yet central. it is not until one engages in the context of justification that a theory begins to form. in order to develop a good theory, at a starting point, one must also be concerned with the development of agreed upon and psychometrically sound measures and the utilization of rigorous methods to test employ those measure. this stage of theory development has occurred less often in the field of community psychology. there have been many challenges to the development and testing of theories for the field, and the concepts reviewed above all encountered significant obstacles to developing a consensus definition and measurement framework. in addition, it is possible that many theories within the field of community psychology are better characterized as frameworks, which do not specify relationships that can be used for explanation. there needs to be more discussion about whether frameworks are useful and how community psychologists can progress from frameworks to more rigorous theory. finally, the somewhat ideological nature of community psychology (putting great value on participatory research, attempting direct action to improve people’s lives, etc.) can result in less willingness to consider theory in the terms described here. community psychology is probably one of the more complex fields in the social sciences because it embraces multiple levels of influence rather than simple individual differences. this complexity has been a challenge for theory development and testing. community psychologists generate, accumulate, consolidate, and leverage knowledge based on evidence with the goal of improving peoples’ lives, especially those who suffer most from system-level forces. if some community psychologists feel that knowledge is unique and not generalizable, then these investigators’ function may be relegated to simply one of reporting. we as authors propose that significant progress toward this goal of helping to improve lives could occur with the more rigorous development and testing of theories. furthermore, we propose that experimental designs are the most effective tool in this process of theory testing (e.g., triple blind, randomized assignment, unbiased, longitudinal designs). weaker forms of theory testing (e.g. quasi-experimental—nonrandom assignment with controls) lack strong evidentiary power. even weaker designs (e.g., observational/cross-sectional) are more properly thought of as generally exploratory and if modeled a priori, at best weak evidence for confirming/disconfirming a hypothesis. if modeled ex-post, these global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 designs are really descriptive exercises speculating a path for future investigation. the incorporation of context in a theoretically meaningful way is another necessary ingredient for a fully mature field of community psychology. we are not always even aware of the potent effects of an individual’s context, and there is evidence that the environment can have profound effects on things that have been considered genetically derived. for example, ravelli et al. (1998) investigated prenatal exposure to famine when during the latter part of world war ii, the germans severely reduced food supply to the netherlands. prenatal exposure to famine, especially during late gestation, was linked to decreased glucose tolerance when the infants became adults. they concluded that poor nutrition in utero can lead to permanent changes in insulin-glucose metabolism, and the environmental effect of famine on glucose tolerance was especially important in people who later became obese. the importance of context is often not recognized or integrated in community psychology studies, as data is frequently obtained at the level of individuals. this suggests that the field is still at an embryonic stage of development. however, emerging work using theory related to dynamic systems does present an opportunity to systematically investigate settings. before community psychology really began to form cohesive ideas around contextual impacts, sociologists were attempting to develop theories and methods that capture social contexts. their sociology-of-knowledge theories are illustrative and have been used to understand people’s perceptions of reality, social change, and the role of social institutions (berger, 1977; merton, 1968; strauss, 1997). borrowing from these theories might help us capture a systems point of view. for example, whole network theoretical approaches can provide a relational map of some social ecosystems in cases where system-wide dyadic relationships may be exhaustively measured. dynamic theories of whole social networks focus on the mutual interdependence between relationships and behavior change over time, providing a way to conceptualize and empirically describe two-way transactional dynamics (jason, light, & callahan, 2016). yet, in defining and operationalizing constructs, we often find some of the most serious challenges to the field of community psychology, as illustrated with our discussion of empowerment. such issues occur in other fields as well, as criterion variance (i.e., differences in the formal inclusion and exclusion criteria used classify data into categories) accounts for the largest source of diagnostic unreliability (jason, & choi, 2008). criterion variance is most likely to occur when operationally explicit criteria do not exist for categories (spitzer, endicott, & robins, 1978), or when there are varying criteria for a phenomenon to be defined. when categories lack reliability, the upper boundary on the validity (i.e., usefulness) of a category is inherently limited. therefore, criterion variance occurs because operationally explicit criteria have not existed or there has not been a consensus among investigators for the criteria. for theory development, there is a fundamental need for the provision of operationally explicit criteria and reliable instruments to measure the phenomena. this is evident in heller’s (2014) argument about communities; there is often a lack of a clear theoretical statement about how communities should be conceptualized. part of the problem stems from the highly variable definition of “neighborhoods,” which can range from a block in a residential community to an on-line network. in addition, there are a number of mediators of neighborhood effects, including the quality of resources (e.g., libraries, schools, parks), level of community integration (e.g., members how know each other), and the quality of social ties and interactions. these debates about meaning and definition are underpinned by global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 important differences in perspective, and it may not always be possible to merge or align these differences. how communities and related constructs “should” be defined is a deeply cultural question, with many different answers. in specifying a universally applied definition for these phenomena, researchers run the risk of privileging one group’s definition over others. it then becomes an issue of who has the power to define these constructs. one of the strengths of community psychology is that we do ask those questions of science (i.e., who’s definition are you using? is this application of a “generalized” definition oppressive in that it privileges the ideas of the dominant group?). this may be some of the legitimate reasoning behind a reluctance to define some theories in the ways we have outlined. we recognize that these are important issues to consider and offer the above observations as one perspective that we hope will spur further thoughtful discussion around how we can engage in theoretical rigor while acknowledging the potential implications this has in terms of pitfalls related to power and privilege. the methodology that is used may naturally flow from theory, but this is only possible in the context of clearly articulated theory; it is necessary to succinctly articulate the measurement of a construct before a theory can be advanced, refined, or argued against. in the field of personality psychology, we have seen the evolution of the measurement of the “big five” over the 20th century and the appeal of this model has been largely due to development of measures; currently, there are full theories (e.g., whole trait theory, fleeson & jayawickreme, 2015) that are emerging that would not have been possible without the measurement work of the 20th century. the lack of such development is a primary criticism of the empowerment literature, in that the measurement of the constructs are still ill-defined and underdeveloped. there are several limitations in this article. for example, whereas others’ efforts identify issues related to a philosophy of science and related definitions of theory were empirical and conceptual (faust & meehl, 1992), our efforts within this article were to identity theories within the field of community psychology as well as to examine how well they allow us to more fully understand individual behavior by taking into account the context within which the person lives. in addition, in this article, we have not been able to examine all the relevant theories within the field of community psychology. conclusions the field of community psychology focuses on interesting questions and tries to understand them, with the implicit hope that as these relatively specific topics become better understood, that they will start to coalesce into larger structures. it is likely that many topics in community psychology will never coalesce around one theory, because they are, indeed, complex systems comprising multiple mechanisms of change. for instance, medicine as a clinical practice is based around biology, genetics, behavioral science, organizational theory, etc. when engineers design airplanes, they use results from fluid dynamics, electronics, computer systems, materials science, human psychology, etc. it might be a good idea to be open to this possibility in community psychology-that at its heart it is an area of study that brings together a variety of factors (and theories) affecting human behavior. a starting point for theory development in community psychology may still need to be at the descriptive level, where specification is about a particular population in a particular context, employing validated measures for the phenomena of interest. the field of community psychology will benefit from investigators using similar measures to assess particular theories, as well as the development of simpler and more direct theories of person-setting similarities. this global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 2 february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 consistency and parsimony will help the field develop and test theories allowing for prediction and explanation. there has been a reluctance to attempt the development of more rigorous and predictive theory, in part because it is not seen as a major goal, compared to taking action. however, there is no obvious reason why sound theory cannot be developed that accomplishes the empowerment and participatory goals of community psychology, but does so in a way that is scientifically rigorous. this, however, would require community psychology to evolve in a different direction, one in which the entire collaborative enterprise between community psychologists and communities is considered to be the object of study, with the success, or lack thereof, of an intended change as the ultimate outcome of interest. for example, we do believe that there is considerable potential for exploring the influence of contextual factors on human phenomena that incorporate how third-order change occurs and how it impacts communities. third-order change is an essential shift in the social fabric, whereby a community changes customary assumptions, worldviews, cause and effect relationships, and practices (bartunek & moch, 1987). communities in which third-order change occurs have developed a culture of continual questioning, constantly identifying problems and social precipitants to problems, implementing solutions, and engaging in ongoing process and outcome evaluations for these solutions. third-order interventions also have the potential to create unexpected positive changes, as settings develop new ways of viewing problems and functions (robinson, brown, beasley, & jason, 2015). while such change may be aided by or facilitate empowerment, third-order change is distinct in that it emphasizes a fundamental ongoing monitoring and change rather than emphasizing autonomy and self-direction. there is a need for theories to capture these types of phenomena, and a systems theory perspective that includes all these elements may be a promising approach. in addition, the goal for community psychology theories should ideally specify what specific aspects of context influence what specific aspects of individuals. furthermore, possible specific mechanisms by which this occurs should be articulated to serve an explanatory function to guide the development of meaning and evidentiary arguments for causality. notes 1two features of some recent literature in philosophy of science is especially relevant. first, the possibility of reliable testing of scientific theories (of whatever level of generality) depends on the availability of a suitable vocabulary of natural kinds: a vocabulary for describing the kinds, relations, magnitudes, etc. that are causally important factors in the relevant phenomena. this means that theoretical and empirical work in sorting out orienting frameworks is in fact absolutely central to scientific methods in general, not just in community psychology. moreover, the relevant causal factors may often turn out to interact with one another in complicated ways, thereby causing difficulty for researchers, theorists, and scientists in general (see boyd 2010; oyama 2000; wilson et al 2009). the issues community psychologists face may be typical in the sciences in general, in other words they are not peculiar to community psychology. second, the pluralism of competing approaches that seems to describe the scientific status of community psychology is also commonplace in science. in fact, it is almost certainly essential in most cases in which scientists sort out conceptual and methodological issues (see chang, 2004, 2012). references ainsworth, m. d. s., & bell, s. m. 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(1995). psychological empowerment: issues and illustrations. american journal of community psychology, 23, 581-599. microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 295 alicia de la c. martínez tena 1 universidad de oriente, cuba iii international conference of community psychology puebla, mexico, june 4, 2010. cultural factors and primary health care in cuba. a view from community praxis. abstract the changes and transformations in primary health care (phc) developed in recent years from the implementation of the model of physician and nurse of the family in cuba, must be supported by a shift in perspective and move from an eminently biologicist paradigm to a                                                                                                                           1 alicia@cnea.uo.edu.cu 296 biosociocultural paradigm. this makes it possible to explicitly situate the relationship between culture and health and explain the social and cultural factors related to healthy behaviors, and also to support interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies. the results presented in this paper corroborate the theoretical postulates of cultural anthropology, cultural sociology and medicine that argue that the gap between multidisciplinary health teams and social actors occurs, among other reasons, because of existing traditional cultural etiological models of health and disease. cultural differences could be addressed through knowledge of the patient's culture, his cultural practices and his links with family members and other stakeholders in the community. it allows the productions of a process that includes cultural communication, listening carefully the patient’s point of view rather than just ordering treatments that reflect scientific practices. the strategies and backgrounds presented in this study demand the presence of multiple perspectives and are very important to designing policies and models of intercultural health care to achieve satisfaction of patients, families and communities. keywords: primary health care, biosociocultural paradigm, culture, health, interdiscipline. 297 factores culturales y atención primaria de salud en cuba. una mirada desde la praxis comunitaria. resumen los cambios y transformaciones en la atención primaria de salud (aps) que han venido desarrollándose en estos últimos años a partir de la implementación del modelo del médico y la enfermera de la familia en cuba, tienen necesariamente que sustentarse en un cambio de perspectiva y transitar de un paradigma eminentemente biologicista a un paradigma biosociocultural. ello posibilita ubicar de manera explícita la relación cultura-salud para explicar los factores sociales y culturales asociados a las conductas saludables, así como sustentar los estudios en enfoques interdisciplinarios y transdisciplinarios. los resultados que se presentan en este artículo corroboran postulados teóricos de la antropología cultural, la sociología cultural y la medicina, que sostienen que la brecha entre equipos multidisciplinarios de salud y actores sociales ocurre, entre otras razones, por los modelos culturales etiológicos de salud y enfermedad existentes. las diferencias culturales podrían abordarse mediante el conocimiento de la cultura del paciente, de sus prácticas culturales y de sus vínculos con los miembros de su familia y otros actores sociales de la comunidad. esto permite generar un proceso de comunicación cultural que contemple: escuchar con atención y reconocer el modelo cultural del paciente más que indicar tratamientos terapéuticos que sólo reflejen conocimientos científicos. estrategias de este tipo y antecedentes como los que se presentan en este artículo exigen perspectivas múltiples y son importantes para diseñar políticas y modelos de atención intercultural en salud que logren dar satisfacción a las necesidades y expectativas de pacientes, familias y comunidades. palabras clave: atención primaria de salud, paradigma biosociocultural, cultura, salud, interdisciplina. 298 introduction during the early years of the revolutionary period in cuba, the integral polyclinic was created. it was defined as the basic unit of the national health system, which included all health activities within the assigned geographical area. at the same time the link between the polyclinic and other levels of care in the national health system was established and gave impetus to community participation through mass organizations.2 it was precisely in 1964 that the integral polyclinic emerged as the center of the activities in primary health care. polyclinics were organized before this, in some cases, using the old health houses. the label “integral” was not used at first. the term “polyclinic” was taken from units of service in european socialist countries, but they did not have the same function. several clinics in those countries were gathered in the same place (poly: pediatrics, internal medicine, clinical surgery, gynecology, dermatology ...), but the tasks of promotion and prevention were not performed, there as it was in our centers (rojas, 2004). the community polyclinics are the cornerstone of this system; there are 498 in the country, each of which gives service to 30 000 or 60 000 people. these polyclinics also operate as organizational nodes between 20 and 40 doctors and neighborhood family nurses’ offices and as research and teaching centers for medical, nursing and other health sciences. (luna, 2010). throughout the seventies, before the declaration of alma-ata in 1978, polyclinics were established and incorporated the program of family doctors and nurses in the mid-eighties. this made it possible to strengthen the capacity of the health system on prevention and analysis of community health and clinical services. in 1982, the need was raised for a general physician to provide services in different locations: a sugar mill, a boat, a school, an internationalist mission, or in a urban residential area. the new grogram was based on the designation of a physician and a nurse to take care of a number of families (approximately six hundred and seven hundred people) living in the same town or neighborhood. these professionals would combine the work in the community, in the hospital and in the office, and had to integrate into their practice the knowledge of the basic specialties (internal medicine, obstetrics, gynecology and pediatrics). the idea of the family physician had to to do with a complete and thorough knowledge of the environment and conditions in which people lived.3 299 in the nineties the program placed family physicians and nurses all over the country and managed to serve well over 95% of the population. in 2008, further changes were introduced in the primary care in cuba. since 2002, 241 polyclinics have undergone extensive renovation, a process that continues today. the purpose is to add services previously available only in hospitals. currently, the average polyclinic offers 22 services, including rehabilitation, radiology, ultrasound, optometry, endoscopy, thrombolysis, emergency services, orthopedics, clinical laboratories, family planning, dental, maternal and child health, immunization and care for the elderly and people with diabetes. (luna, 2010).the roles of the polyclinic and the offices of family physicians and nurses are also evolving. in this regard, dr. luna says: “since 2007, the polyclinics are expected to play a leading role in capacity building and quality control among health-related institutions in their communities. we have incorporated into our teams directors of pharmacies, nursing homes, maternity homes and others and we have also begun to offer more training to health workers from the federation of cuban women, professionalizing their work in the community". the interdisciplinary perspective in primary health care. primary care is the basic and initial level of attention. it which guarantees the globality and continuity of care throughout the patient's life, acting as manager, case coordinator and flow regulator. it includes research, health promotion, health education, disease prevention, health care, maintenance and restoration of health and physical rehabilitation. it requires a working concept that goes beyond the bounds of a profession, a field of knowledge and a scientific discipline. in cuba’s conditions, this concept acquires more dimensions if one takes into account the following elements: 1. the introduction of a new formula in the reorganization of the system as a result of the presence of more than 20,000 cuban physicians living abroad, mostly in africa and latin america. its characteristic feature is the rapid formation of new family physicians: "we are now training 42% more family physicians in order to meet all our commitments and to improve levels of patients’ satisfaction” (luna, 2010). 300 2. the changing nature of new health problems. urbanization, globalization and other factors speed the worldwide spread of communicable diseases and increase the burden of chronic disorders. 3. climate change and food insecurity shall have a major impact on health in the years ahead, so that the articulation of an effective and equitable response will involve huge challenges. 4. the development of interdisciplinary social sciences research within the framework of community development. 5. the presence of a variety of centers of studies and research whose results point to improving the quality of life for cubans. working for more than 25 years in cuban communities, through research focused on studies of cultural processes, has made it posible to introduce, validate and support the importance of the cultural perspective in social analysis. in the case that concerns the author of this paper the sociosemiotic concept of culture is a valuable tool for understanding the problems of health and disease. the socio-semiotic concept of culture for understanding the culture-health link in primary care. the analysis of contemporary processes in healthcare needs an approach that goes beyond disciplinary boundaries.the transformation of communication processes, the eating habits induced by the media, and the constant renewal of the social scene, lead to rethinking the traditional paradigms that are still being used to address health problems within the framework of community development. it is increasingly evident that contemporary cultural phenomena the emergence of the internet, the issue of consumption and its significance, the intensification of multicultural relations, the emergence of new cultural practices – demand to go beyond the traditional divisions and scientific methodologies, introducing new concepts and approaches to promote greater cultural and health dialogue clamored for by more and more voices from the communities and public institutions. 301 all of these elements require complex readings, interpretations that go beyond the alleged theoretical support provided by traditional paradigms, and therefore, highlight the need for greater presence of cultural discourses on the development of a healthier attitude. thus, it is necessary to weigh the subjective dimension represented by the area of structured and socially established consciousness with its particular set of distinctive symbolic codes with the necessary constitution of society’s critical sense (alexander, 2000). for the present case, the socio-semiotic concept of culture appears, then, as a useful theoretical approach for achieving a greater understanding of issues relating to healthy living in communal areas. this lies in an approach focused on a cultural analysis of health phenomena that are framed in the context of community development. an analytical perspective is here introduced which permits the affirmation that culture projects the area of priority of the symbolic dimensions, and therefore, this approach stands as a criterion for disease research and health prevention. in his book different, unequal and offline. maps of multiculturalism – (2004) néstor garcía canclini takes up in detail the issue of multiple definitions of culture. this text assumes a more inclusive concept of culture. this is because in the late 90's, important valuations were introduced, founded on the new contexts, in which latin american multiculturalism is produced and sustained by a significant scientific production, very diverse, beginning with its epistemic constructs. garcía canclini has pointed out that: as there are more sociological studies of culture and anthropological studies on cultural modernization, convergence is observed primarily with respect to the object of study. coinciding with other disciplines and trends in the social sciences, lingüistics, semiotics, communication studies, many anthropologists and sociologists now define culture as the sphere of production, circulation and consumption of significants. (garcía canclini, 2004: 233). in the work mentioned above, néstor garcía canclini makes an important contribution to cultural studies when he incorporates new trends. because of their importance, they are located in this section. 4 the first trend is one that sees culture as the instance in which each group organizes its identity. culture is presented in everyday use when it is identified with education, enlightenment, 302 sophistication, vast information. in this line, in the words of garcía canclini, culture is the accumulation of knowledge and intellectual and aesthetic skills. (garcía canclini, 2005: 30). in contrast to uses of culture that were held to establish the distinction between culture and civilization, another theory exists that suggests a confrontation of the pairs nature-culture and society-culture. there is a complex and intense, overlapping between social and cultural processes and one of the main thesis emerges: all social practices contain a cultural dimension, but not everything in these social practices is culture. the book of pierre bourdieu, practical reasons on the theory of action; the one of clifford geertz, the interpretation of cultures, and the one of jean baudrillard, critique of political economy of the sign, have shown from different scientific perspectives, the symbolic aspect of social life produced by culture. thus the world of meaning is attributed to culture. culture encompasses all the social processes of meaning, or stated in a more complex way, culture embraces all social processes of production, circulation and consumption of significance in social life (garcía canclini, 2005: 34). culture is the space of social reproduction and organization of differences. what epistemological implications are encompassed by this definition? what is its scope for the development of health research? what methodological tools does it offer to scholars, researchers, and technicians involved in the studies of primary health care? the sociosemiotic concept of culture is presented as social processes of what is produced, what is learned and what is consumed in social history. this procedural and changing conception of culture becomes evident when we study complex societies, not only from cultural production, but also from the established interconnections in the social fabric at the micro and macro levels. culture, undestood as the space of construction of meaning, prevents us from the uncritical use of words, especially those that have the ability to establish facts, as they are accompanied by coercive or persuasive actions. in short, culture as a concept is useful to name the whole process of production, circulation and consumption of meanings, with the following specifications: 1. culture and symbolic mediations play a role in structuring the functions of social and cultural practices. from this perspective, the instrumental resources offered by the concept are also presented as a dynamic knowledge area where codes, meanings and symbols underlie and structure society. this makes apparent changes, mobility and order, 303 that different individuals, groups and social classes incorporate in their worlds of feelings, perceptions, representations and imaginariums. 2. the symbolic dimension refers to field processes, as the processes involved in everyday life. cultural analysis is applied to the organized production of knowledge, information, images and speeches; it is also applied to the continued production of meaning at the level of everyday relationships and interactions located where individuals are involved with others and themselves. 3. symbolic production in private and public spaces is conditioned by the processes of the dominant social life, by a mode of production that organizes the development over time of a set of structured and contradictory social relations, or that organizes a social process in its development. the patterns of significance are elements of that process, and part of the dynamic and complex factors of social life, forming entities of meaning that participate in the general process of social production and reproduction. 4. in community frameworks where primary health care is established, individuals, families and social groups project their cultures, i.e., the set of meanings that guide a way to produce a reality suited to their interests, traditions, practices and representations.this accounts for the different and various explanations on behaviors and their interpretation. 5. the growing autonomy of specialized fields of symbolic production confines the spaces in which the struggle for social construction of meaning takes place, because if it is true that in capitalist societies the ruling class owns the means of production in the economic sense, and also most of the means of symbolic production, it should not to be thought of as an act of total and crushing domination. subaltern classes and groups are not totally without resources; capitalism, the logic of value, does not cover all areas of social life. 6. the analysis of culture, understood as a set of processes of meaning, can choose as the focus of its study the identification of situations of symbolic violence, that is when it comes to imposing the existence of a meaning on others. 7. cultural analysis can be translated into models of communication that would consider the meeting (horizontal, vertical or oblique) between subjects with different meanings on a single practice, object or cultural institution. the theoretical construction of horizons of interpretation would investigate the sociological origin of meaning, and question the 304 relationships established between individuals and social contexts in which they participate. if the above specifications are agreed upon, the necessary elements for designing a model of cultural analysis to understand the determinants of health are present. these include: a. a relational approach, because we are interested in studying situations where the processes of significance are transformed into symbolic violence: what happens between signs, meanings and interpretations? b. an inquiry into language, because language is an institutionalized power. c. contextualization, because the processes of meaning are embedded in specific contexts. temporal and spatial dimensions are not only criteria of delimitation but symbolic ordering constraints of the individual life, imposing timetables, rhythms and age groups, or establishing a distinction of places, regions and territories. d. diverse formalization procedures in order to study the internal structure of the processes of meaning, to know what is its capacity to symbolize. e. finally, a hermeneutic practice that allows rebuilding, creatively, the overall sense of purpose, practice or discourse analyzed. culture determines the socio-epidemiological distribution of disease in two ways, namely: ø from a local perspective, culture shapes the behavior of individuals that predispose people to certain diseases. ø from a global perspective, the political-economic forces and cultural practices make people act with the environment in ways that can affect health. all activities of our everyday lives are conditioned culturaly. culture shapes our behavior homogenizing social behavior and, in turn, making us distinguish differences and inequalities. therefore culture is a variable to explain these differences and inequalities at different levels of society. culture is a social construct, and therefore the habits that are constituted as cultural and socially acceptable norms also change. the more or less healthy behaviors acquire a different dimension in terms of social significance that they have at a given time. towards a proposal for a tool from cultural factors in primary health care. 305 one of the changes in primary care in cuba was the creation of multidisciplinary teams who used the philosophy of a comprehensive health care, understood as the effect of the interaction between biological, psychological, social and cultural factors. this implied the consideration, research, and intervention in all of these factors from the experience, knowledge and participation of different groups who influence the health-disease beyond the traditional health care concept. during the late 1980’s, the organization of interdisciplinary teams linked to social and cultural institutions began to be used on a more permanent basis. the more effective experiences have been in rural settlements, semi-urban and coastal areas of the municipality of guamá in the province of santiago de cuba, which are the initial points of reference from the universidad de oriente. the experiences and the subsequent development of social sciences at the faculty of social sciences at the universidad de oriente has enabled the introduction of a variety of alternative methodologies aimed at improving the quality of life of hundreds of families, groups and individuals of those areas of the eastern region of cuba. one of them is precisely the work with cultural factors. the incorporating of cultural factors in diagnostic health studies on primary care, report essentials of human behavior: they also endow greater integraly in their analysis, reflections, reviews and epistemological structures, complementing the studies of diseases that are the object of inquiry. cultural factors facilitate the perception of distinctive features that make up different human groups and settlements within the same geographic and social space. they also help to understand significant trends and explain possible links established between the actions of individuals and groups and social dynamics. cultural factors are not dimensions, or elements. they are defining conditions reported as essentials of human behavior. issues such as religion, customs and traditions provide a set of meanings that cannot be ignored in studies of health and disease (martínez and illescas, 2007). a deeper study of these meanings, leads to discern which factors are dynamic and which are static, taking as basic criteria the stability, permanence in time and rupture. thus, language and customs are part of the first group; communications and technology, of the second. 306 the use of these factors in health studies supports obtaining a summary of all the accumulated and socialized experience by different social groups, individuals and families in their daily lives.the new elements that are incorporated as a result of modernity, also express the levels of development of cultural values that are evolving. professional, administrative, technological and productive levels are carriers of new forms of cultural creation and reveal other ways of establishing relationships, new roles, attitudes and procedures; and therefore the new diseases that are contracted as a result of multiple interactions of human groups with their environment. the introduction of cultural factors also demands the incorporation of anthropological, sociological, psychological and semiotic perspectives in health studies. methodological approaches. the experiences presented are the results of a research paper prepared by the center for the integral development of culture5, that has studied since 1996, issues of culture and community development from a variety of disciplines. the methodological approaches. that are included, are results of interdisciplinary work that is being developed in several neighborhoods of the city of santiago de cuba, where the concepts of health and illness have had and still have significant presence. the aim is to provide a conceptual and methodological framework for working with the community, from the binomial culture-health. the tasks in the organization of work of the interdisciplinary team are: § recover the history of the group and make a diagnosis on the present situation, include new members and discover the degree of closeness and commitment to the community's health proposal. § promote interdisciplinary spaces where work will be focused on the difficulties and ways to resolve them. § analyze the daily difficulties, the obstacles to the realization of scheduled tasks, reviewing the slogans raised in team meetings. § record activities and projects and collaborate in setting priorities and planning activities. 307 § incorporate the cultural and historical dimension within the team in order to broaden its conception of the processes of health-disease-care. § encourage processes of reflection on the institution: its history, organization, policy, power relations. § provide information on the program area's population in terms of demographic composition, history, organizations, groups and institutions. § reflect on strategies of community work to coordinate externally. a model of analysis was drawn up which contains the theoretical dimensions and the analytical concepts for the explanation of health behavior and disease. the dimensions incorporate the socio-semiotic conception of culture; the cultural conception of health and the cultural conception of primary health care. the analytical concepts are: a) cultural practices, meanings and orality that correspond to the socio-semiotic conception. b) family, group, individual and community, that in turn, correspond to the cultural conception of health. c) concepts of cultural differences, inequalities and communication related to cultural competence. in regards to the community, this meant increasing the knowledge its history, its forms of organization, institutions, leadership, networks, forms of communication, existing logic, symbolic violence, orality. reflecting on the community and its relationships to the health center and taking into account the degree of approximation, images, expectations, experiences and applications in health care and programs, we sought to strengthen existing links and develop an appropriate methodology of work. categories to take into account secondary orality. rites. legends. magical-religious feast days. food traditions. feeding practices. use of technological devices. labor tradition. 308 forms and conditions under which commuters travel. social spaces created. consumption of green medicine. cultural practices associated with hygiene. sexual practices. use of fashion. community cultural dynamics. symbolic violence. patriarchal model. matriarchal model. socialized model of disease. family space distribution. social background and cultural consumption. shared symbols. methods and tools. on the theoretical level. the analysis-synthesis, for the purpose of the review of the literature and the development of synthetic ideas, as well as the historical-logical method. sociological and anthropological theories are used as methods. on the empirical level. the use of statistical inferences from existing documentation, and the application of tools developed from interviews, ethnographic methods and questionnaires on the basis of methodological triangulation in terms of data and techniques. the use of questionnaires for patients and people in the community. the use of records of observation in public spaces, of social, food, and health facilities. and also the use of conceptual maps. bridges of communication should be built between the different disciplines that share the space of primary health care, facilitating the exchange of knowledge based on respect for the diversity of views that flow into one complex and evolving subject; the utopia to which we have referred as multidisciplinary teamwork could then be possible. this would result in an improved quality of services provided to citizens, making the philosophy of a comprehensive health care a reality. disease and health are two internal concepts of each culture. to get a better 309 understanding of the prevalence and distribution of health and illness in a society, we need a comprehensive approach that combines sociological and anthropological issues in addition to biological and medical knowledge about health and disease. we also have to create networks and work with the concept of coordination at various levels of the local structure. notes 1. professor, center for integrated development studies of culture. faculty of social sciences. universidad de oriente, cuba. alicia@cnea.uo.edu.cu 2. a movement towards the development of primary health care was being implemented in close coordination with the ministry of public health (minsap) and driven by the activities of health education. it created the popular community actions. this was first expressed in the rural health posts of the volunteers of the national malaria eradication service (snep), and a little later with the health officers of the committees for the defense of the revolution and the health brigades of the federation of cuban women. the "schools of health" were created for them. community officials gave support for primary care services through the ministry of social welfare. 3. in september 1983, a document entitled "considerations about linking the health team to the block" stated the need to divide the population according to the political-administrative structures.two main objectives were pursued: focus on faster and more effective solutions to epidemiological problems and environmental health; and facilitate and promote the participation of mass organizations in healthcare in order to boost the role of local government bodies, strengthening the link between general practitioner and family groups organized in the community. thus, on minsap 10 doctors were selected to implement the pilot program. the polyclinic chosen was "lawton" in the township of ciudad de la habana because of the effective performance of doctors in that place and because of its geographical location and the characteristics of its population, mainly a working-class neighborhood. the three-month pilot study used a group of nurses who worked in the different sectors of the political-administrative division at the defence committees of the revolution (cdr). in this way, the basic unit of community health was restructured. 310 4. in the book “different, disparate and disconnected. map of multiculturalism”; garcía canclini proposes three key elements to address the issue of multiculturalism and globalization: difference, inequality and disconnection. he wondered not only how to recognize the differences and to correct inequalities, but also how to connect the majority of global networks. 5. center for integrated development studies of cultural development affiliated to the faculty of social sciences at universidad de oriente. the following academic programs were developed: master of community cultural development; ph.d. in sociological studies of culture; popular education diploma and community work. more than 500 professionals have graduated from these programs. culture and mentality of society in santiago was the topic of research. dr. martínez tena has received several national scientific awards for her research and teaching. references alexander, j. (2000). sociología cultural. formas de clasificación de las sociedades modernas. [cultural sociology. forms of classification of modern societies]. barcelona: anthropos. ander-egg, e. (1989). metodología y práctica del desarrollo de la comunidad. 10ª ed. [methodology and practice of community development 10th edition]. mexico city: el ateneo. espina prieto, m. p. (2005). re-emergencia crítica del concepto de desarrollo. in trabajo comunitario. selección de lecturas. [community work. selection of readings]. la habana: editorial caminos. expósito garcía, e. (1998). hacia una conceptualización del desarrollo. [towards a conceptualization of development]. trabajo inédito. [unpublished manuscript]. santiago de cuba: universidad de oriente. garcía canclini, n. (2005). diferentes, desiguales y desconectados. [differents, unequals and disconnected]. mexico city: gedisa. garcía canclini, n. (2004). los estudios culturales de los 80 a los 90: perspectivas antropológicas y sociológicas en américa latina. [cultural studies of the eighties and the nineties. sociological and anthropological perspectives in latin america]. in sociología de la cultura. compilación. [sociology of culture. compilation]. la habana: editorial félix varela. 311 garcía canclini, n. (1989). la crisis teórica en la investigación sobre cultura popular. [theoretical crisis on cultural popular research]. nuestra américa. 13 (1). garcía canclini, n. (1988). teoría e investigación en la antropología social mexicana. [theory and research on mexican social anthropology] cuadernos de la casa chata 160. mexico city: ciesas, unam. garcía canclini, n. (1990). culturas híbridas. estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. [hybrid cultures. strategies to enter and get out from modernity]. mexico city: cncagrijalbo. garcía canclini, n. (1999). la globalización imaginada. [imagined globalisation]. buenos aires: paidós. garcía canclini n. (1979). la producción simbólica. teoría y método en sociología del arte. [symbolic production. theory and method in the sociology of art]. mexico city: siglo xxi. garcía canclini, n. 1(995). consumidores y ciudadanos. conflictos multiculturales de la globalización. [consumers and citizens. multicultural conflicts in globalization.]. mexico city: grijalbo. hernández, n. c. (2005). trabajo comunitario. selección de lecturas. [community work. selection of reading]. la habana: editorial caminos. delgado garcía, g. (2005). antecedentes históricos de la atención primaria de salud en cuba. [historical antecedents of primary health care in cuba]. revista cubana de salud pública. 31(2). rojas ochoa, f. (2003). orígenes del movimiento de atención primaria de salud en cuba. [origins of the movement of primary health in cuba]. revista cubana de medicina general integral. 19(1) 56-61. rojas ochoa, f (2004). la atención primaria de salud en cuba 1959-1984. [primary health care in cuba 1959-1984]. conferencia leída en el simposio "mario escalona, in memoriam: teoría y práctica de la atención primaria de salud". [“mario escalona, in memoriam: theory and practice of primary health care]. la habana: escuela nacional de salud pública. [national school of public health]. june 11th. (accessed 19th may 2010). luna, c. (2010). la revolución de la atención primaria en cuba cumple 30 años. [thirty years of the revolution in primary care in cuba]. entrevista a la dra. cristina luna, directora 312 nacional de atención ambulatoria en cuba. [interview to dra. cristina luna. national director of mobile care in cuba]. (accessed 19th may 2010). más hernández, a. m. (1998). atención médica primaria en cuba: su organización y evolución histórica. [primary medical care in cuba: organization and historical evolution]. tesis de especialización. la habana: facultad de salud pública. martínez tena a. & illescas nájera i. (2007). los estudios de la cultura en el desarrollo comunitario. [cultural studies of community development]. santiago de cuba: monografías de la universidad de oriente. [universidad de oriente monographs]. microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 100 community social psychology in latin america: myths, dilemmas and challenges esther wiesenfeld1 institute of psychology, central university of venezuela iii international conference of community psychology puebla, mexico, june 3, 2010                                                                                                                           1 esther.wiesen@gmail.com 101 community social psychology in latin america: myths, dilemmas and challenges abstract latin american community social psychology (csp) is one of the few psychological disciplines that has had an autonomous development in our region. this development has been characterized by a theoretical, methodological and applied production derived from the diverse and complex problems in our context. the development includes academic and non-academic practices and products, as evidenced by numerous undergraduate and graduate university courses and programs in the field, as well as its multiple areas of application (health, environment, education, slums, disasters, public policies), processes (organization, participation, critical reflection, consciousness raising, leadership, empowerment, feeling of belonging, identity), scopes of action (governmental and nongovernmental organizations, health centers, educational institutions, community organizations, residential communities), populations (particularly socially vulnerable and economically disadvantaged groups), activities (research, intervention, evaluation, training, negotiation, prevention, conferences, publications). the increasing number and variety of activities undertaken by csp professionals provide support for a sustained growth of the discipline. however, has csp’s trajectory been in accordance with the needs, principles, values and goals that guided the field’s birth half a century ago? have csp’s accomplishments satisfied its founders’ expectations? what is the current pertinence of such accomplishments and of the elements which oriented their fulfillment, in view of rapid and continuous changes in virtually all society’s domains? have csp’s theoretical developments contributed to solve psychosocial problems it initially aimed to address? have methodological strategies employed, developed or adapted by csp been useful for understanding, managing and producing knowledge about the issues addressed? in addition, considering csp trajectory, can we refer at the end of the first decade of the millenium, to the same but grown up and established discipline, or are different csp’s emerging?, which are some dilemmas and challenges currently confronted by researchers, academicians, practitioners, advocates, whose timings, tasks and demands vary? are universities providing adequate training in terms of skills and tools for working with communities? which are some of the myths on csp that have emerged? finally, has csp contributed, both from inside and outside academy to ameliorate poverty in our continent? these, 102 as well as many other questions and answers coming from participants in the third conference will undoubtedly help to collectively strenghten old but still relevant directions for the discipline and to outline new ones, that will make us and the people we work with better human beings. keywords: community social psychology, latin america, myths, dilemmas, challenges. 103 psicología social comunitaria en américa latina: mitos, dilemas y desafíos. resumen la psicología social comunitaria latinoamericana es una de las pocas disciplinas psicológicas que ha tenido un desarrollo autónomo en nuestra región. este desarrollo se ha caracterizado por una producción teórica, metodológica y aplicada que ha sido el resultado de problemas diversos y complejos de nuestro contexto. el desarrollo incluye prácticas y productos académicos y no académicos, como queda evidenciado por numerosos cursos y programas universitarios de psicología comunitaria a nivel de pregrado y de posgrado, así como por sus numerosas áreas de aplicación (salud, medio ambiente, educación, barriadas, desastres, políticas públicas), procesos (organización, participación, reflexión crítica, concientización, liderazgo, empoderamiento, sentimiento de pertenencia, identidad), ámbitos de acción (organizaciones gubernamentales y no gubernamentales, centros de salud, instituciones educativas, organizaciones comunitarias, comunidades residenciales), poblaciones (en particular grupos desfavorecidos, social y económicamente vulnerables), actividades (investigación, intervención, evaluación, capacitación, negociación, prevención, conferencias, publicaciones). el incrementado número y variedad de actividades emprendidas por psicólogos sociales comunitarios profesionales provee el respaldo para el crecimiento sostenido de la disciplina. sin embargo puede cuestionarse: ¿ha sido congruente la trayectoria de la psicología social comunitaria con las necesidades, principios, valores y metas que guiaron su nacimiento hace medio siglo? ¿han satisfecho los logros de la psicología social comunitaria las expectativas de sus fundadores? ¿cuál es la pertinencia actual de esos logros y de los lineamientos que orientaron su realización, tomando en cuenta los cambios rápidos y continuos que experimenta la sociedad en todos sus dominios? ¿han contribuido los desarrollos teóricos de la psicología social comunitaria a resolver los problemas psicosociales que se propuso enfrentar inicialmente? ¿han sido útiles las estrategias metodológicas empleadas, desarrolladas o adaptadas para entender, gestionar y producir conocimiento acerca de las problemáticas atendidas? además, considerando la trayectoria de la psicología social comunitaria ¿podemos referirnos al fin de la primera década de este milenio, a la misma pero crecida y establecida disciplina, o están surgiendo diferentes psicologías sociales comunitarias? ¿cuáles son los dilemas y desafíos que enfrentan actualmente los investigadores, 104 académicos, practicantes y gestores que tienen tiempos, tareas y exigencias variadas? ¿están las universidades proveyendo formación adecuada en cuanto a habilidades e instrumentos para trabajar con comunidades? ¿cuáles son algunos de los mitos que han surgido a propósito de la psicología social comunitaria? finalmente, ¿ha contribuido la psicología social comunitaria desde dentro o desde fuera de la academia a disminuir la pobreza en nuestro continente? éstas, y muchas otras preguntas y respuestas que aportaron los participantes en esta 3ª conferencia ayudarán sin duda a fortalecer colectivamente las viejas pero todavía relevantes direcciones de nuestra disciplina y para formular nuevas que nos harán a nosotros y a la gente con la que trabajamos mejores seres humanos. palabras clave: psicología social comunitaria, américa latina, mitos, dilemas, desafíos. 105 introduction community social psychology (csp) is one of the few areas of psychology that has had an indigenous development in latin america that is, generated from the diverse and complex peculiarities and problems of our reality. almost four decades after its inception and having as guidance the commitment to contribute to reducing poverty, inequality and exclusion; academic and extra academic contributions in the field are numerous and represent a sustained growth of the discipline. but what have been the trends and scope of such contributions to the development of the csp? do they converge with each other? what have been the implications for the goals of the csp? are these goals still valid or should they be reformulated and why? in the first case, what changes would we have to enter into the discipline to deepen or broaden its impact? in the second case, how would they have to be restated? the answers to these questions are not simple or unique, nor do they obey the criteria of absolute or generalizable truths. they are like the discipline itself: complex, diverse, dynamic, and defiant. therefore we do not claim to answer them, but to share our outlook with the readers on these issues, whose systematization is regularly updated, product of a long practice that integrates teaching, research, action and reflection with students and colleagues. also, thanks to the invitation to participate in this symposium organized for the third international conference on community psychology. events like these deserve that we put our daily activities on hold in order to meditate and write about community experiences lived with its players and others associated with them, from different places (school, residential communities, government agencies), and whose speed, intensity, requirements and urgency leave little time for this vital work. i thank the organizers of this conference for inviting me and for the opportunity to update and write about what i will now proceed to present. the text is organized into two parts. the first part refers to some features of the latin american context, as a field of production of csp and the definition, purpose and development trends of the discipline. the second part focuses on a set of questions, ideas and proposals generated from the analysis of these trends and in general of contributions and latin american experiences with csp, which reinforce or rethink old ways and open new ones for our community psychosocial work and for the discipline itself.   106 first part 1. development context of csp: poverty in latin america. the purposes of psc are directly linked to the characteristics of the latin american context, particularly its conditions of poverty that direct psychosocial community work to economically vulnerable sectors of society. let us illustrate this situation with some recent data. on november 30, 2010, the report on the social panorama of latin america (cepal, 2010), based on the economic analysis of 19 latin american countries (argentina, the multicultural state of bolivia, brazil, chile, colombia, costa rica, ecuador, el salvador, guatemala, haiti, honduras, mexico, nicaragua, panama, paraguay, peru, the bolivarian republic of venezuela, dominican republic and uruguay), estimated that by late 2010 the number of poor in the region would be of 180 million, and of these, 72 million would be in a position of destitution. these figures represent 32.1% and 12.9%, respectively, of the latin american population and suggest a decline in poverty of 1.0% and of indigence of 0.4% compared to 2009, when the international economic crisis reversed poverty reduction levels for the 2003-2008 period. notwithstanding the estimate for 2010, in which inequality, in terms of the income of different socioeconomic strata, increased in the last decade (corporación latinobarómetro, 2009; eclac, 2008, 2009) and levels of poverty continue to be critical particularly in precarious urban settlements (eclac, 2009; unpd, 2009). the high growth rate and population density, with inadequate living conditions in these settlements, are a threat to the survival of its people and an obstacle for the development of countries (urban 21, 2000).the magnitude of this problem prompted the organization of the united nations to consider poverty reduction as a priority issue for policy in developing countries (the world bank group, 2004; undp, 2008) and promoted the development of the "millennium declaration”. this is an agreement in which the 189 countries that make up the united nations committed to joint efforts to build a safer, more prosperous and more equitable world and formulated an action plan to reduce the number of people living in extreme poverty (income less than one dollar a day) by 2015 to half of what it was in 1990, representing latin america and the caribbean’s 10.5 million people (unfpa, 2008; trigo, 2004). however, it is expected that only 7 latin american countries can achieve this (demian, 2008). 107 the complexity of this issue calls for a change in the conditions that sustain this state of affairs, from which the dominant model of science does not escape. in this regard, calhoun (2007) calls for more public social science in the sense of social relevance and interference in public affairs, in order to increase their social relevance at the same time as strengthening the discipline. csp is precisely an example of this alternative model of science due to the issues that concern it, the objectives and approaches, principles and values that guide it in order to achieve them. in line with this idea, several areas of knowledge and latin american and international organizations have recognized the contribution of community organization and participation, and of the empowerment and strengthening of the members of poor communities as key processes for overcoming poverty, which is fully in accord with the principles of the csp. 2. community social psychology: definition csp, in my view, is a discipline that seeks to understand and influence, from and with communities in areas, situations, conditions and psychosocial processes related to the quality of life of groups in situations of inequality and insecurity, in order for them to acquire or strengthen capacities and skills that will allow them to co-manage resources along with other actors in order to ensure decent living conditions, which coincide with the values of democracy. 3. csp: purposes. as suggested by the above definition, a central purpose in csp is to contribute to the fairness of oppressed and excluded sectors in society, promoting psychosocial changes of various types (affective, discursive, ideological, cognitive, relational, behavioral) on different scales (from micro to macro), environments (residential, institutional, academic, community), actors (government, civil society, community, professional). at the same time an attempt is made to consolidate the development of this discipline, which we have broken down into the following categories and purposes: 3.1 level or scale of change 3.1.1 macrosocial or level of social structure: facilitates the transformation from a state of dependency, inequality, exclusion, injustice, oppression, mainly related to the problem of poverty. 108 3.1.2 microsocial, or individual and human group scale: promotes psychosocial processes (collectively building awareness, sense of community, identity, shared emotional bonds, democratic leadership, organization, participation, increase in power) that promote the transformation of conditions that threaten social, community and individual welfare. 3.2 environment 3.2.1 residential: to achieve the transformation from socio-environmental and adverse residential conditions, primarily in precarious settlements (provision of habitable housing, services and infrastructure, food, education). 3.2.2 institutional: to influence government bodies, decision-makers and implementers of public policy, as well as others who perform community service or support communities to (re) conduct or enhance their resources and contributions to the satisfaction of the community. 3.2.3 academic 3.2.3.1 discipline: to build a discipline with relevance to the context, that is socially relevant. 3.2.3.2: paradigmatic: to take on alternative paradigmatic perspectives, consistent with the problems of the context and the goals of the discipline. 3.2.3.3 theoretical-substantive: to extend the conceptual framework toward approaches that address the processes, areas and actors required for the established target and generate knowledge that integrates different types of wisdom. 3.2.3.4 methodological-instrumental: to develop appropriate strategies and tools to approach issues and contexts. 3.2.3.5 information-divulging: to democratize knowledge in order to promote equity, justice and to strengthen disadvantaged sectors. 3.2.3.6 interdisciplinary: to expand comprehensive frames with interdisciplinary outlooks. 3.2.3.7 teaching: to take on community psychosocial work as an experience of lifelong learning, through training, reflection and exchange of knowledge and experiences. 109 3.2.3.8. ethical-political: to vindicate participation as a mechanism to influence decisionmaking, for the exercise of citizenship and the enjoyment of rights, beyond the satisfaction of needs. 4. trends in csp: what did we find? to refer to the trends of csp and to the correspondence between trends and the relevance of community psychosocial production in order to meet the demands faced by its practitioners, requires a rigorous and comprehensive review and analysis of the state of the art in this field as well as contextualizing this production. to fulfill part of this task, the review focused on csp works published in the proceedings of the inter-american congress of psychology in 2005, 2007 and 2009 (wiesenfeld and astorga, 2009), supplemented with information from text collections and latin american contributions to the area (alfaro, 2000; arango, 2007; de freitas, 1996; montero, 1984, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006; sánchez 2001; wiesenfeld and sánchez, 1995; serranogarcía and lópez m., et al. 1987; serrano-garcía and rosario, 1992; serrano-garcía, 2009). 51 articles were reviewed, 16 from 2005 (varas and serrano-garcía, editors), 17 from 2007 (saforcada, e., cervone, n, castella, j; lapalma, a. and de lellis, m. , compilers) and 18 from 2009 (cintrón, acosta, and díaz, editors). the review of these articles was undertaken considering: the type of work (theoretical or empirical), its theoretical foundations, methodology, participants and beneficiaries of the work areas or areas of performance and impact on community views and the community at large, and the type of relationship that this work maintains with the goals of csp. of the work reported on, 45% is theoretical and 55% empirical. at the theoretical level, it is evident a diversity of conceptual frameworks (social representations, psychoanalysis, theory of semantic networks and other cognitive models, gender studies, concepts of philosophy and sociology, including interdisciplinary approaches, among others), only a quarter of the articles (25%) is based on approaches such as social constructionism, traditionally regarded as characteristic of csp. for the analysis of the type of methodology used, out of 28 empirical studies presented, only 6 (21%) used participatory action research (par) or participatory research (pr), considered the most suited to the characteristics, principles and values of csp (suárez, 2005; sierra and reidl, 2007; zaldúa, sopransi, veloso and longo, 2009; estrada, 2009; echeverría, 110 castillo and cortés, 2009) and 22 (79%) used methodologies different from this methodological strategy. the works include among participants: individuals and / collectives (groups, organizations, geographic and functional communities), age groups ranging from infancy to older adults, healthy and diseased participants with various educational, social and cultural levels, caregivers and people needing care from others, among many others. the fields of inquiry and action with these participants included educational, labor, cultural, health, residential settings.(echeverría, castillo and cortés, 2009; de assis, biasoli and nunes, 2009; arnoso martínez, elgorriaga and otero, 2009; samaniego, antivero, bártolo, bonzo, stesh, domínguez, garcía, iurcovich and villegas, 2005; suárez 2005). the inclusion of this variety of participants and environments is suggestive of the usefulness of work incorporating the community dimension in order to understand, speak, and change the conditions, problems, needs and potential of a wide range of people and contexts. reflection on community issues, as part of the framework of analysis undertaken, emerged in response to some papers published in the reports/recollections, whose focuses seemed to deviate from the budgets and methodology of csp (for example, work was done with individuals rather than communities, methods used were quasi-experimental or statistical or manipulative rather than participatory, assessments or interventions consisted of individual interventions and not on the collective and active transformation of the participants) (samaniego et al., 2005; smith, 2005; auyón, estrada, grazioso, garcía, samayoa and peláez, 2009; domínguez, chambers and procidano, 2009). this overview led us to ask ourselves why they were included in these books and in response we identified the existence of different senses of community as well as possible connections between the work carried out with experimental and other approaches, and csp. thus, and without implying solidarity with the inclusion criteria of the work, in memories/recollections of 2005, 2007 and 2009, community is associated with: • concepts and processes of community psychology (empowerment, participation, communication, dialogue, etc.)(miranda, 2005; fuks, 2007; miranda, 2009). • diverse populations that benefit from community psychosocial work or on which the research was conducted, which are considered communities (schools, work groups, cultural groups, health organizations, geographical communities, etc.) 111 (ortíz, nieves, gómez and malave, 2005; peláez, 2007; de assis, biasoli and nunes, 2009). • subjects studied (youth, unmarried mothers, social participation, poverty, environmental impact, etc.) related to both the communal, as well as many other aspects of a social character, such as public policy, culture and development, among others (legaspi and aisenson, 2005; sierra and reidl, 2007; estrada, 2009). • instruments, diagnostic evaluations, concepts, and empirical knowledge related to the communities and stakeholders who care for them (samaniego et al., 2005; domínguez et al., 2009). • issues addressed by csp and other fields of psychology (political, clinical, counseling, environmental) or other disciplines (sociology, anthropology) (star and walters, 2005; maldonado, cayupil and maldonado, 2007; domínguez, torres, akemi, ciancia, hernández and pantoja, 2009). in summary, the review of the literature showed diverse contributions to the discipline and its development: concepts, relationships, methods, attention and problem solving, and other types of application of csp. thus, theoretical studies contributed to the discipline by emphasizing the importance of some concepts for csp (social memory), explored the tensions that exist between that which is social and which is community in what refers to csp (miranda, 2005), critical reviews conducted of iap ; showed tension between csp and clinical psychology and how psychosocial interventions can be made from psychoanalysis; explored areas that are currently of great interest to csp, such as public policy; and showed how the discipline is relevant to the development of these; emphasized the community and / or social dimension of some human actors (homosexuality, youth social networks); allowed for the update and reflection on the discipline or the making of further theoretical contributions (concerning values, participation, etc.). on its part, empirical research contributed to the discipline and its processes by strengthening or providing concrete tools to participants to solve problems (smokers, communities with health problems, unmarried mothers); to observe how ngos can aid in combating discrimination and stigma, and be a stage for emancipation and citizenship; to provide tools (inventories) that facilitate the identification of community needs and the implementation of 112 programs; to enable participatory processes, encouraging the exercise of power on the populations concerned in the studies, to produce empirical and / or theoretical information useful for the implementation of community strategies; to achieve changes in the quality of life of people (children with aids); contributing to the realization of interdisciplinary approaches; to provide concrete recommendations for poverty reduction. despite these contributions, the contents of most of these works did not pinpoint the theoretical contributions to the body of knowledge of csp and, as demanded by csp, their application, nor the advantages of using similar different or even incompatible research methods other than participatory action research which is the methodological strategy favored by csp. with regard to processes central to the discipline, such as community participation, their impact was not reported in terms of knowledge production and the changes that it hopes its implementation will provoke. for example, did the peoples' power increase? was the experience transferred to other situations, contexts or populations? was public policy impacted through participation? the same thing happened with the interventions reported. it was not easy to identify the level and type of change achieved for communities, for the discipline, or for other areas and actors. being that it is precisely change that is an essential purpose of csp. if we compare these results with those expected to meet the aims formulated for csp, we note that work was done mostly at the micro level, covering a range of participants and locations. the correspondence of these with the notion of community is compromised, as they do not provide rationale to justify such a choice. with regard to academic goals, one way or another the work as a whole did meet the expectations referred to in almost all sub categories of this target, (disciplinary, paradigmatic, conceptual, methodological, interdisciplinary, educational, ethical, political) this does not mean that every work included at least one or more of these categories or those who did had the scope and projection expected. we do not know if the type of information we’d like to see is missing due, among several options, to the lack of clear criteria for selection of the works or to the traditional manner of reporting scientific research and experiences, whose format requirements, guidelines, content, extension, undermine the rendering of the information that we demand. these uncertainties pose challenges such as that of promoting different, creative, accessible and understandable reports 113 that ensure greater and better disclosure of the efforts in their respective areas of activity and their diversification in terms of various audiences interested in the subject. now, on to the second part of this paper. part two: reflections, questions and proposals. in this section i discuss some essential components for the development of csp, and for the fulfillment of its goals including: community, actors, relationships and processes. i must warn, however, that supplemented with the reviews above, questions, reflections and proposals, are based primarily on our long coexistence with the discipline in combination with environmental psychology, academia, communities and various institutions and government teams. 1. the community. 1.1 the community and its forms of (non) existence: heterogeneous, diverse, invisible, homogeneous the references to community in literature, a sample of which is the review carried out, account for multiple uses of the term, as well as a variety of community types and differences among its members, with regard to their community life. this heterogeneity, however, does not include all those who are a part of the community. on the one hand, invisible sectors of the community (who do not lead or star in community processes, silent, dissident voices from leadership, those who do not participate in community activities), while on the other hand people with whom csp professionals typically work are designated in the community context as "the community", suggesting that this variable number of committed people who are always involved, represents the other members. this trend toward generalization not only distorts community reality by annulling the diversity of activities that constitute everyday community life, but also renders anonymous the protagonists that streamline processes and mobilize people; these are the people who show their faces in difficult situations. we believe that, on the one hand, this imbalance relieves community members of responsibilities when, either due to apathy, indifference, work overload, health reasons or whatever, benefit from the efforts of others. on the other hand, the imbalance at hand relieves leaders and external agents of responsibilities, who overlook or ignore the particular problems of those who feel inhibited or are not able to participate. 114 to recognize the intermittencies and fluctuations of the community will recover, in a conscious and critical manner, the amplitude of this central concept for the discipline and its processes, and therefore the scope of community work, and propose criteria to delimit it. we ask, however, what munitions, as thomas ibáñez would say (2001), we need to manage ourselves in multiple diverse and changing communities? 1.2 community limits: transcending the local. part of the community complexity has to do with its geographical boundaries. although the trend of csp has been to work with spatially bound communities, at a local and micro level, it is necessary to transcend to a higher level, without neglecting the micro. in this way, and to encourage the shift from the conception of the problems in the communities from individual to collective, we must also convene a reflection on the limits of these problems beyond the community level, promoting rapprochement between communities and community institutions with similar problems, transferring successful experiences and learning from them. doing so would facilitate meeting the goals of csp; however this requires that we ask: what have been the reasons that have hampered going beyond the performance scales of csp? 2. the actors and their variations: auto and hetero-conceptions. community psychosocial work calls for the interference of different actors, and the differences within and between them, resemble, in their specificity those considered for the community. thus we often refer to other agents involved with the communities, whether they are government, university or professional, negating their diversity and ignoring the transformations that are generated in the discussions, conversations, confrontations and negotiations within and between actors. in this way, each actor develops concepts about himself and others, influence the forms of relating and of interacting with each other and the rest of society. but how does the community actor build himself and other members of the community? how do the state, academia or others build him/them, assuming as we noted, their internal diversities? moreover, how is the csp professional given meaning in accordance with his/her workplace (government official or nongovernment agent, academic or activist or social advocate? what use does he give the tools 115 provided by the discipline to reconcile discrepancies in his environment and how does he move them to the relationship with others? and finally, how is the state conceived by different actors? 3. the actors and their (inter) relations. the various facets of community stakeholders are evidence of the plurality of modes of interacting conditioned by, among others, the knowledge or the (pre) judgment and direct or vicarious experiences with them. this kaleidoscope deserves that space be devoted to some of these actors and their (inter) relationships. 3.1 the third agent: (un) necessary and / or (un) desirable. the consideration of the government actor or third agent (wiesenfeld, 2000) ignored in the literature and csp projects is of great relevance for the discipline. first, the shortcomings faced by communities which are of particular interest to csp, are directly related to public policies formulated and implemented by these agents. secondly, self-management has been a process valued as a strategy for achieving the community's requirements and to strengthen its members, but it also means unloading its duties on those who have the responsibility of ensuring citizens' rights and in turn overloading those who already carry on the struggle for subsistence with responsibilities. viewed in this way, the interaction between third agent/community is evident. however, this co-implication is not easy, which is also obvious when considering what has happened in general terms on the government side and in the community. thus, social policies have failed to reduce poverty significantly, hence their effectiveness, and in general the state's role in its relationship with communities, leaves much to be desired and has encouraged the incredulity of this sector. the discontent of communities due to their long-standing unmet expectations has been manifested, among other ways, in historical claims to successive governments for their unwillingness to solve social problems, in distrust and rejection of these agencies and in the discredit of populist and interventionist measures. from the community side, community participation (cp) promoted by csp, has as one of its aims to influence those policies as a strategy for incorporating community perspectives on the public agenda and thus claim the satisfaction of their needs and other rights. however, cp has not made an impact at the public policy level, nor and has it made the other actors who share responsibility in solving social problems assume their functions in a co-managerial way. in fact, self-management remains the 116 predominant form in which the poor meet their needs, a sample of which is the large number of latin american people who self-construct their homes and reside in the so-called poverty belts. it is evident that, without diminishing the contributions made by csp, the psychosocial and community workers have a long way to travel, especially when there are even disagreements amongst ourselves concerning our performance, such as the questioning or the acceptance of handouts controlled by organizations following the institutionalization of service programs (krause jacobs and jaramillo, 1998; krause jacobs, 2002), or of forms of participation induced by the state, which distort the voluntary and emancipating character of the process (wiesenfeld and sánchez, 2009). this scenario raises several questions we must ask ourselves: how to address the relationship between state and community? does work with organizations that represent the status quo represent a betrayal of the principles, values and goals of csp? is the state or government entity always an opponent the community must resist or confront? in the case of venezuela, how to handle oneself before a state with emancipatory discourse similar to that of csp, but with actions judged to be contrary to these, from the perspective of government critics? how to position oneself with local government agencies, opponents to the central policy of the state, whose management is also presented as transformative, but is it interfered by the ruling party? is it possible or even desirable in the interest of csp goals, to avoid the link with this third agent? additionally, how can we make personal interests compatible with academic, professional, and community interests, that are not always in harmony? how to reconcile the ruling-opposition polarization within the same type of actor, such as csp professionals, who above such differences defend the means and ends of csp? how to exploit these differences in terms of training opportunities for our students? obviously this is an issue that in contexts such as those of venezuela, are part of everyday life. it is a challenge then, for our colleagues from other countries, as for those involved to make this situation visible so the solutions will benefit the education of critical and sensitive professionals, with broad perspectives and respect for differences and with tools to address them; and above all with the commitment to place ethics over ideology and personal positions in working with communities. moreover, if we return to the idea that diversity congregates in each sector, how to enhance the effectiveness of psychosocial processes that we promote in the communities 117 (addressing problems, creating awareness, participation, negotiation), with the third agent, to influence decision-making in that environment? if we intend to do it, it will not be the official discourse in favor of or against community participation which causes the desired changes, but the will and community mobilization in the conviction of the legitimacy of their demands and the strength of their actions. although the csp has had little foray into this field, we are not proposing something unprecedented. on the contrary, we are appealing to proposals from models such as participatory governance, or recent approaches to sustainable development that have been made from other disciplines and latitudes. in conclusion, the challenge we face is threefold: with the third agent, with the communities, with ourselves. and we ask ourselves why? let's talk about those who exercise csp. 3.2 the backward exclusion. a value that is shared in csp is inclusion. however, we have intentionally overlooked, reasoned and even reasonable, social sectors with features alien or contrary to the community focus of the discipline (e.g. dominant sectors considered the middle class, or which threaten community interests, such as government entities). in doing so however, are we not reproducing exclusion backwards? aren’t we condemning them as actors not susceptible to transformation? aren’t we underestimating our own potential influence to impact these sectors with influence on the circumstances of these communities? the inclusion of all stakeholders provides, in our view, access and understanding of their views and thus the advantages and difficulties coming from outsiders to the communities to achieve their requirements. this understanding also contributes to the formulation of proposals drawn on various perspectives and approaches to the same situation, based on knowledge of that set (brinton lykes, 1997). however, are all the relevant parties, or is even a single party, willing and interested in this listing? if not, how to neutralize the negative influences of these sectors in the promotion of community processes? and if so, what tools can csp provide to facilitate the implementation of inclusion without undermining the purpose of csp or affecting the interests of the community? if we believe in the possibilities of human change, why not extrapolate this belief to areas and sectors of society that like it or not impact the sectors we work with? 118 3.3 csp professionals and self-exclusion. another value that is shared on the csp side is positioning on the side of the need and who suffers it, although in a reasoned not unconditional manner. this bias involves committed subjectivities, as postulated by constructionist and critical approaches widely adopted by the discipline (wiesenfeld, 2000). however, paradoxically, professionals of csp have also been absent from our own reports (goncalves, 2006). they do not reflect the experiences of professionals as actors in the process they report. we do not relay the impact of experiences, learning or derivatives thereof; in short anything that positions or makes us visible in the literature. what accounts for this absence? why have we not problematized our silence? have we even noticed it? we believe this policy has to do partly with traditional forms of publishing, in which the author fades within his own narrative due to the requirements of the posting rules which respond to the criteria of traditional scientific paradigms. another possible interpretation is the isolation of our professional practice, which is paradoxical in a discipline oriented to building community with action, reflection and affection. in this regard, we have not generated sufficient space for dialogue and reflection with our peers on our concerns, achievements, difficulties, feelings that emerge in our work with communities. as the participatory action research strategy states, dialogue based on praxis and actions stimulated by group reflections are ways of enriching human beings, citizens, professionals and of contributing to the development of csp. why not then assume them for our own processes as a community? 3.4 the mutual idealization between professionals and communities. the principle of engagement with communities is a key issue in the bond of professionals with them. but their ways of interpreting and acting , both on the professional and community side are not without difficulty. in this regard we ask: what does commitment with communities mean? how do we handle it when we differ with the community's attitudes or actions, particularly those of its leadership? often the implementation of these principles is understood, from the professional, particularly the academic side, as a valuation and idealization of everything that happens in communities without problematizing or questioning it. this trend has to do with the glare of 119 novel contexts and experiences that inspire admiration and solidarity, and indeed often the desire to become "the other." this type of relationship leads to a kind of engagement in which there is a risk of ignoring, underestimating or dismissing scientific knowledge as trivial or disconnected from the realities of the community. in this regard, this way of bonding can lead to a kind of activist coexistence that can benefit the community as it has a trained resource unconditional to its requirements. however, the discipline loses valuable feedback and necessary reflection for its development and therefore optimization in the performance of its goals. this enchantment also has another side that is what happens from community members towards professionals, prioritizing the knowledge of the "expert", over their own knowledge, often arising from experiences other than those of the professionals. hence the importance of sharing the concerns raised in community work, in order to contextualize and understand individual perspectives and maximize their gains for the parties involved. 3.5 the academia-community relationship. professionals of csp assigned to academia face particular circumstances inherent in university regulations. 3.5.1 the time dimension or university-community time incompatibility. one of these circumstances relates to the incompatibility between academic and community times, which is the basis of the programmatic structure of the university curriculum of study. its organization in defined periods, is contrary to the dynamics of the everyday life of communities, where problems do not wait for the start of the semester to arise. in this sense, if community issues discussed with students and teachers respond to methods that allow us to identify, prioritize and address priority issues with a rationale in which academic time is not considered, then how to solve this time limitation, without affecting the community nor transgressing academic lapses? 3.5.2 dual loyalty. 120 on the other hand the academics engaged in the field of csp have a dual commitment: to the community and to teaching and knowledge production, which under the aforementioned demands put them in the face of the dilemma of how to facilitate community problem-solving or teaching and disciplinary development. in fact, analysis of the publications presented in the first part of this paper, as well as the results of previous and recent reviews (serrano-garcía, 2009) show the reports are mainly from teachers and university students who pursue studies linked to the community psychosocial area .these reports refer to the dissemination of successful experiences and to the positive side of experiences, leaving aside the difficulties and other collateral processes. reports did not include the implication of the research and / or intervention as far as the principles, values and goals that guide the discipline or the theoretical and methodological development of csp. 3.5.3 practicing professionals. on the other hand, productivity outside the academy is unknown, while the dynamics of this task leave little room for reflection, systematization and writing of articles or texts in the terms required by the literature to which we must add the possible absence of motivation of professionals in this activity. the implications of these works often remain in the memory of their actors, which creates a vacuum of information relevant to the development of the discipline. the above requires, firstly, the need to generate alternative formats for the development and dissemination of experiences in csp outside academia, and secondly to encourage creative spaces for dialogue between professionals working in different organizations. 4. notes and questions on other topics / goals. 4.1 on theoretical production and methodology: coherence between objectives and results the report of experiences without the reflective and theoretical counterpart, or theorizing on such experiences is responsible for another lack of information in publications in the area. we refer to the lack of theoretical production f derived from complying with the research-actionreflection-production of theory cycle, which characterizes the methodological strategy of participatory action research (par), favored by the csp. we ask ourselves, is it feasible to target the production of knowledge through the use of par, is this goal feasible for an academic 121 without sacrificing the products with which he/she is assessed in this environment? in this vein, what has been the effectiveness and contributions of methodological strategies employed in our discipline, such as par, in the light of the limitations exposed? how much of the theoretical production in csp comes from community involvement experiences of par? 4.2 participation in par. par poses co-research between researchers and community to generate knowledge sets of everyday situations that reflect and redefine, and on which we act based on their new significance. this cycle legitimizes the knowledge produced and increases the welfare of the community. but to what extent is such participation met? how many people participate, and who are they? are they representative of the plurality that characterizes an inclusive and democratic process? are those who yield or who do not have the role of key informants or leaders encouraged? 4.3 regarding the processes: involvement. participation (p) not only has been and remains a fundamental pillar of the community psychosocial task, but it has been assumed as the process for excellence in virtually all areas. p is the column that gathers, gives meaning and directs other processes that emerge and evolve concomitantly (sense of community, empowerment).compliance with the principles and guidelines of participation is a necessary condition for achieving the goals set by csp. however, like the notion of community, the use of the term participation has been distorted and extended to the point that it is considered a social value in itself, apart from a set of considerations that lead to increase the compliance of its postulates in our field (e.g. co-option). 4.4 interdisciplinary aspects. while there is a recurrent call for joint, inter, multi or trans-disciplinary projects, in practice this rarely materializes. at best, the limitations of the different fields of knowledge are recognized and professionals are called in which, according to the particular project promoters, may respond to particular requirements, by virtue of their expertise. in this regard, is there clarity about the reasons that demand cross-disciplinary endeavors, and on the constraints which remain an outstanding issue on our discipline's agenda? perhaps the answer to these questions can help 122 us either to initiate this work with greater certainty and conviction that so far has converted the terms that designate the work of more than one discipline as socially desirable. 4.5 uncertainty. uncertainty has become a serious problem that limits community work, particularly from academia, given that other institutions involved in community life usually do so with work commitments that involve some type of guarantees and compensation. this is not the case for teaching, research and / or community university practice in which the commitment is of another nature. circumventing community practice for the sake of preserving personal integrity, especially of our students, is legitimate and unquestionable. in fact, several colleagues have chosen to undertake practices in "safer" communities, thereby excluding many others, where the majority of its residents could benefit from this type of work. however, our commitment as citizens and social scientists interested in contributing to alleviate the problems of communities, of which insecurity is an important part, forces us to take on the challenge of community work in environments where our education and training can be useful. if we add the educational role of community work, in terms of awareness of students and teachers themselves about the existence of that other reality with enormous potential and strengths, our commitment increases. 4.6 csp and the model of sustainable development. a model that we believe shares many of the aspirations of csp is that of sustainable development, of which few professionals in our field have taken notice. in this regard, recently added dimensions of community sustainability highlight the subject area and focus for csp as a prerequisite for sustainable development. this is, therefore, a model that, incorporating precisely a community perspective, can help achieve the objectives of csp, many of them coincident with the millennium declaration, made by united nations (2008). in this vein, we consider that the possibility of sharing a common model with other actors and disciplines could help to overcome limitations of isolation from the disciplines and actors, for whom the encounter with others is represented as a loss rather than saving time, resources and efforts. this model, due to its nature calls for precisely such an encounter, and its purpose, inspired by the preservation of the environment, placed in a more neutral level in sectors whose radical views inhibits them from such encounters. 123 4.7 a closure that opens: crisis or legitimacy of csp: one or more csp? finally, where do trends identified with csp point to? can we consider the heterogeneity exposed, with its achievements and limitations as indicators of the richness of csp, of different csp’s that we have to make explicit or of a crisis of csp? can we interpret the diversity and divergence in trends in csp as a crisis of csp, in its approaches, methods, paradigms and goals, which have to do with the crisis 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[community intervention-transformation with social movements in buenos aires]. in f. cintrón, e. acosta y l. díaz (eds.). psicología comunitaria: trabajando con comunidades en las américas [communtiy psychology: working with communities in the americas]. (pp. 11-32). hato rey, puerto rico: publicaciones puertorriqueñas. microsoft word porto1_artigo advocacy e controle social fv-formatted.docx democracia, participação social e controle social de políticas públicas no brasil: a experiência dos fóruns da educação de jovens e adultos do brasil democracy, social participation and social control of public policy in brazil: the experience of forums for the education of young people and adults of brazil mirian patrícia burgos joaquim luís coimbra pedro ferreira universidade do porto palavras-chave: controle social, advocacy, movimento social, fóruns da educação de jovens e adultos, políticas públicas, relação estado sociedade civil key-words: social control, advocacy, social movement, forums for the education of young people and adults of brazil, public policy, state civil society relationship autor biografias: mirian patrícia burgos doutoranda em ciências da educação na faculdade de psicologia e de ciências da educação da universidade do porto; foi diretora do centro paulo freire – estudos e pesquisas por duas gestões consecutivas; foi representante do fórum da educação de jovens e adultos do estado de pernambuco, também por duas gestões; diretora do instituto paulo freire portugal; e formadora de professores e gestores da rede pública de ensino com o segmento da eja, desde 2001. joaquim luís coimbra professor associado da faculdade de psicologia e de ciências da educação fpce-up; diretor do curso de mestrado em educação e formação de adultos da fpce-up. pedro ferreira professor auxiliar da faculdade de psicologia e de ciências da educação da universidade do porto. citar: burgos, m.p., coimbra, j.l., and ferreira, p. (2016). democracia, participação social e controle social de políticas públicas no brasil: a experiência dos fóruns da educação de jovens e adultos do brasil. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(1s), 1-22. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org) global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 democracia, participação social e controle social de políticas públicas no brasil: a experiência dos fóruns da educação de jovens e adultos do brasil resumo o artigo apresenta o surgimento e a trajetória do movimento social dos fóruns da educação de jovens e adultos do brasil (fóruns da eja do brasil), a partir da década de 1990, como dispositivo de controle social exercido pela sociedade civil organizada frente às ações do estado nesse campo. a investigação analisa inicialmente a conjuntura em que surge uma nova e distinta compreensão e uso conceitual nas ciências sociais do significante “controle social”, dando ênfase à relação entre estado e sociedade civil no período da redemocratização brasileira pós-ditadura militar a partir da década de 1980. em seguida, o artigo situa os posicionamentos contemporâneos em torno dos conceitos “controle social” e de “advocacy”. tais conceitos têm suas expressões analisadas no contexto brasileiro e, mais especificamente, no campo da alfabetização e educação de jovens e adultos e em experiências de participação no movimento social que se organizou para intervir nesse campo. com um aporte teórico ancorado nas ideias de coutinho (2006), freire (1987; 2000; 2005), lima (2009), pontual (2008) e warren (2014), o estudo visa a identificar as conquistas, os desafios e as possibilidades dos fóruns da eja do brasil no campo das políticas públicas, como contribuição para a efetivação de uma sociedade justa, livre e pluralista, a partir do conceito freireano de participação. democracy, social participation and social control of public policy in brazil: the experience of forums for the education of young people and adults of brazil abstract this paper presents how the social movement of the forums for the education of young people and adults of brasil (forums eja of brazil) came to be and developed, from the 1990s on, as an instance of control of state actions in the field by organized groups of civil society. this research starts by analyzing the context how a new understanding and use of the 'social control' concept emerged, one emphasizing the control by civil society of state actions, in the redemocratization period, after the military dictatorship, and since the 1980s. it then situates those that are the contemporary understandings of 'social control' and 'advocacy'. these concepts are analyzed for the brazilian context specifically in the field of alphabetization and education of young people and adults and in experiences of participation in the social movement which organized to act in this field. with theoretical contributions anchored in the works by coutinho (2006), freire (1987; 2000; 2005), lima (2009), pontual (2008) and warren (2014), this study identifies the conquests, challenges and possibilities of the forums eja of brazil in terms of public policies, as contribution to the making of a free, fair and pluralist society, following the freirian concept of participation. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 introdução a educação de jovens e adultos (eja) é um direito subjetivo posto para o mundo desde a declaração dos direitos humanos, ainda na década de 1940 e que no brasil, mais recentemente, foi instituído com a constituição federal brasileira datada de 1988. “o dever do estado com a educação será efetivado mediante a garantia de: i – educação básica obrigatória e gratuita dos 4 aos 17 anos de idade, assegurada inclusive sua oferta gratuita para todos os que a ela não tiveram acesso na idade própria”; (artº. 208º. redação dada pela emenda constitucional n. 59, de 2009) brasil, constituição federal. esta emenda que considera o direito à educação básica e gratuita, independentemente da idade, de acordo com (lázaro, 2014, p.53), “resultou em um importante avanço para o segmento da eja”. em termos conceituais a partir da constituição federal de 1988 é declarado que a “educação de jovens e adultos” refere-se a todas as pessoas acima de 15 anos que não concluíram o ensino primário na idade “certa”. já a alfabetização de adultos, refere-se ao público de pessoas a partir de 15 anos de idade, cuja instrução esteja abaixo de um ano escolar. no brasil, a designada agenda neoliberal começa a ser efetivada a partir do governo collor, sendo retomada fortemente no governo fernando henrique cardoso (governo fhc) caracterizado, principalmente, por privatizações, pelo processo de retirada de legitimidade dos sindicatos e pela tentativa de desmoralização dos movimentos sociais, próprios desta revolução conservadora. marcadamente com este governo fhc, deparamo-nos com o descaso com o qual a eja foi tratada, tendo ficado de fora das políticas educacionais prioritárias deste governo. a política econômica de redução de gastos e atuação mínima do estado no setor educacional afetou contundentemente a eja. “de acordo minimalista, a política da eja se baseou em ações voltadas essencialmente para a alfabetização em uma perspectiva clientelista e compensatória” (paiva, 2006, p. 59). essa postura de descaso do estado para com a eja tornou-se, infelizmente, um forte exemplo que acabou por ser seguido pela sociedade. no brasil, nas duas últimas décadas tem havido uma discussão intensa em torno da eja. entre as várias pautas de discussão podemos citar a lei de diretrizes e bases da educação nacional (ldben nº. 9394/96). essa lei que integra a eja ao sistema formal como uma modalidade da educação básica, foi um importante passo para o seu reconhecimento como direito. a ldben em seu capítulo iii artigo 4º, repete o que é afirmado na constituição relativamente ao dever do estado para com a educação pública na garantia de ensino fundamental obrigatório e gratuito, inclusive para os que a ele não tiveram acesso na idade própria. nessa mesma linha de pensamento, em seu artigo 37 § 1º afirma que os sistemas de ensino públicos assegurarão gratuitamente aos jovens e aos adultos que não puderam efetuar os estudos na idade regular oportunidades educacionais apropriadas, consideradas as características do aluno, seus interesses, condições de vida e de trabalho, mediante cursos e exames. a década de 2000, mais exatamente a global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 partir do ano de 2003, destaca-se pelo forte investimento nas políticas públicas no campo da eja, como expressão e resultado do esforço político em atender à agenda de compromissos imposta historicamente pelos movimentos sociais. “a troca de governo em 2003 provocou uma mudança no foco da política educativa. o apelo à educação para todos é interpretado como direito de toda a cidadania à educação, independente da idade ou de outras variáveis (...)” (ireland, 2009, p. 51). até 2006, com a criação do fundef,i a eja era atendida por programas federais, estaduais e municipais, entretanto continuava fora da política de financiamentos do estado. a partir de 2007, a reforma constitucional que criou o fundef incluiu o financiamento da eja no conjunto das políticas para a educação básica, agregando progressivamente recursos para o material didático e literário, a merenda e o transporte escolar de estudantes da eja. (lázaro, 2014, p. 53) entretanto nos deparamos com dados apontados pela pesquisa nacional por amostra de domicílio pnad (ibge, 2013), que indicaram que o percentual de pessoas analfabetas no brasil girava em torno de 8,5% entre a população de 15 anos ou mais. em um total de 13,04 milhões de pessoas analfabetas, 7 milhões viviam na região nordeste. considerando apenas a faixa etária dos adultos com 25 anos ou mais, a taxa de analfabetismo, apontara 10,2%. a partir da análise feita nesta mesma faixa etária, constatou-se que 12,63 milhões de brasileiros não sabiam ler e escrever, o que indica que os resultados, a partir da publicação do fundef, não têm sido os esperados. pode questionar-se por que este direito, que está instituído e regulamentado, não tem sido respeitado e se figura, na maioria das vezes apenas no papel. o número é alarmante e revela-nos que o combate à privação dos direitos essenciais da vida precisa de avançar. essa condição de vida, postula lafer (2006), amparado nas reflexões de hannah arendt “(...) retira do homem (sic) a sua condição humana” sendo assim, tratado como “um ser descartável que pode ser trocado por outro, substituído ou igualado a uma coisa” (lafer, 2006, p. 22). por essas razões, podemos perceber que a realidade imposta à eja no brasil ultrapassa as questões legais. para esta modalidade da educação estão assegurados seus direitos legais acima apresentados; no entanto, isso não tem sido o suficiente para que estes direitos sejam efetivados: “assim o país ganha por um lado, ao ampliar direitos e conquistas, e perde-se em tergiversações por outro, ao não garantir as condições para que a sociedade como um todo experimente os ganhos educacionais (...)” (lázaro, 2014, p. 54). o brasil como berço da experiência revolucionaria no campo da alfabetização de adultos em 2013, o brasil comemorou os 50 anos da notável experiência de alfabetização de adultos realizada por paulo freire em angicos, no nordeste brasileiro, onde foram alfabetizados 300 camponeses em 40 horas. essa experiência se deu porque desde a década de 1950, quando da sua experiência no sesi, paulo freire percebeu que os adultos estavam sendo global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 alfabetizados da mesma maneira que se alfabetizavam as crianças. a sensibilidade e o sentido crítico desse educador apontavam que tal modo de alfabetizar os adultos era pedagogicamente inadequado por não respeitar as especificidades dos estudantes e por, entre outras coisas, os humilhar. em 1963, paulo freire vivenciou a aula inaugural dessa experiência, utilizando como tema central o conceito antropológico de cultura. os princípios científicos e filosóficos do seu método ancoravam e davam forma à sua proposta de uma educação crítica conscientizadora. gadotti (2014, p. 28), fazendo referência à obra do professor carlos alberto torres, afirma que “angicos não era apenas um símbolo da luta contra o analfabetismo no brasil, mas era um marco em favor da universalização da educação em todos os graus, superando a visão elitista”. nesta mesma perspectiva diz que “angicos foi a fermentação de um processo de mudança pedagógica, além de anunciar a possibilidade de mudanças políticas e sociais” ( gadotti, 2014, p. 31). angicos representa um convite para enfrentarmos, com mais urgência e responsabilidade, a situação de analfabetismo no país. mais de meio século depois, a experiência de freire é um marco pertinente na luta pelo fim do analfabetismo brasileiro. percebemos que no brasil ainda há instalada uma cultura de que investir na alfabetização e na eja é “doar” alguns “favores”, é usar da “benevolência”. em muitos casos, ainda se vêem os investimentos na eja como ações supletivas que se concentram, sobretudo, em anos eleitorais e pré-eleitorais. nesse sentido, nos parece urgente ampliarmos a compreensão de que, ao contrário do que está posto, investir nesse segmento da educação, além de ser uma obrigação dos governos, significa investir no desenvolvimento do país. reconhecer a relevância da eja é acreditar no futuro de cidadãos e cidadãs que podem contribuir de forma mais significativa com a construção social coletiva. a heterogeneidade é uma característica da eja. os jovens, os adultos e os idosos que buscam a eja integram o grupo dos “negros, quilombolas, do campo, sem terra, sem teto, sem universidade, sem transporte e todos os ‘sem’. sua proximidade, portanto, é com todos e todas aqueles e aquelas a quem foi negado o direito a ser gente” (arroyo, 2005, p. 3). assim, os sujeitos a quem se destina a eja estão nesse modo de inserção no mundo, homens e mulheres todos e todas inseridos e inseridas perversamente neste mundo, caracterizado pela precarização da força de trabalho, que tem implicações em todas as dimensões de suas vidas. o conceito de “educação ao longo da vida” além de ser norteador da eja também orientou os debates da conferência internacional de educação de adultos confintea vi. ele exige o empenho de todos os esforços educacionais para pôr em relevo a diversidade de saberes. estes devem incluir, entre seus objetivos, as competências requeridas pela sociedade, necessárias a uma construção da autonomia do educando e que facilitem a sua transição entre os vários níveis de ensino e reinserção em processos educativos formais e não-formais. de acordo com licínio lima, (2007, p. 14) a educação ao longo da vida: “(...) assumiu objetivos que visavam o esclarecimento e a autonomia dos indivíduos, bem como a transformação social através do exercício global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 de uma cidadania activa e crítica”. a educação, ao assumir-se para além da escola, situa-se no centro da vida cidadã, como uma prática que busca o conhecimento, a compreensão e a ação sobre o mundo. conhecer é transformarse a si mesmo e ao mundo em que se vive. diante do referido contexto de exclusão, a eja passa por transformações que se situam em nível de uma nova proposta de reestruturação na rede estadual de ensino, e vai até à instituição de diretrizes operacionais de âmbito nacional. também vêm acontecendo à esfera global discussões e redefinições dos rumos da educação de adultos, como demonstra a realização da vi confintea, uma conferência cujo objetivo foi “debater e avaliar as políticas implementadas em âmbito internacional para essa modalidade de educação e traçar as principais diretrizes que nortearão as ações neste campo” (lázaro, 2009, p. 5). realizada em 2009 em belém do pará, na região norte do brasil, a vi confintea, marcou a história das conferências internacionais de educação de adultos, entre outros motivos, por ter sido o brasil o primeiro país do hemisfério sul a sediar esta conferência, o que resultou para a nação, no saldo positivo da oportunidade histórica de poder envolver diversos atores da sociedade, governo e sociedade civil organizada num espaço de reflexão sobre a eja. permitiu também, durante os encontros preparatórios à vi confintea, um diálogo profícuo a nível nacional sobre as políticas previstas a serem implementadas no campo da eja, a fim de garantir acesso, permanência e qualidade social dessa modalidade da educação. o surgimento e atuação dos fóruns da educação de jovens e adultos do brasil a configuração da eja no brasil vem-se constituindo pelas ações de governo e pela participação da sociedade civil, notadamente, na área da educação popular. a instituição da eja como direito e campo de responsabilidade pública tem sido abraçada pelos movimentos dos fóruns da eja do brasil em meio a avanços e retrocessos. os fóruns têm a “sua origem em confluência com a atuação da sociedade civil na luta pelo direito à educação para todos, resulta[m] do fortalecimento da relação entre os protagonistas, objetivando a intervenção na proposição de políticas educacionais de jovens e adultos” (soares, 2004, p. 28). pelas razões da conjuntura do país na década de 1990, os fóruns iniciam sua história no brasil, quando da convocação da unesco para a realização dos encontros estaduais, recomendados pela comissão nacional de educação de jovens e adultos – cnaeja, face aos encontros preparatórios para a v conferência internacional de educação de adultos v confintea, realizada em hamburgo na alemanha, em julho de 1996, quando se coloca para o mundo que a eja corresponde ao “conjunto de processos de aprendizagem formais ou não formais, pelos quais as pessoas desenvolvem suas capacidades técnicas e profissionais, bem como as reorientam a fim de atender às demandas da sociedade” (unesco, 1997). os fóruns “iniciaram a organização de um movimento que pretendia estabelecer resistências ao desmonte do direito à educação, que havia sido conquistado no processo de transição democrática expresso pela constituição de 1988” (di pierro, 2005). aos poucos, todos os global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 estados e o distrito federal foram aderindo ao movimento. atualmente temos vinte e seis fóruns estaduais e um distrital da educação de jovens e adultos que compõem o fórum da eja do brasilii. os fóruns criaram um diferencial no tocante às práticas educacionais do país. a princípio havia um embate muito acirrado com os poderes constituídos/governos, no entanto, com o decorrer do tempo, o governo federal, sobretudo a partir de 2003, passou a reconhecer o fórum como um importante interlocutor na construção das políticas públicas para a eja. começou, então, a haver um diálogo sistemático com o movimento dos fóruns estaduais com encontros/reuniões técnicas regulares e até 2009 com um encontro a cada semestre. em 2010, houve uma lacuna nesta articulação com o governo, no que se refere à realização das reuniões ordinárias, talvez pela não realização do eneja neste ano e, pela própria reestruturação dos fóruns que passaram a ter encontros regionais intercalados com os nacionais. a partir de 2011 aconteceu em média uma reunião anual. os diálogos foram e continuam sendo, muitas vezes, tensos mas necessários, à construção de uma democracia participativa em nosso país. assim o fórum da eja do brasil composto por seus 26 fóruns estaduais e 1 distrital, conquistou lugar privilegiado para interferir nas políticas governamentais do ministério de educação através da secretaria de educação continuada, alfabetização, diversidade e inclusão mec-secad(i)iii. além disso, assumiu o lugar de interlocutor na linha do embate, da tensão, mas com a possibilidade de representação do segmento organizado da sociedade civil. o fórum busca contribuir para a construção de políticas públicas como pauta do movimento e dos profissionais da eja, num exercício claro da democracia que de acordo com o pensamento de paulo freire, só se faz, exercendo-se. é no exercício cotidiano que se faz a formação do cidadão. não se faz/vive democracia falando sobre ela. faz-se mister, vivência e, assim, exercício do controle socialiv das políticas públicas pelos fóruns da eja do brasil. os fóruns congregam diversos atores da eja: alunos, gestores, técnicos, professores, movimentos sociais e pesquisadores que pressionam por política pública para a eja. os fóruns consistem e constituem-se em uma demanda coletiva, representam, enquanto movimento social, uma instância de mobilização e discussão de políticas para a eja, e constituem-se com tempos de existência diferentes e com natureza, forma e processos de composição também diferentes numa instância coletiva para discussão e construção dos rumos da política. no coletivo dos fóruns da eja do brasil estão assentadas, além da sociedade civil organizada, representantes de diferentes esferas dos governos como as secretarias estaduais e municipais de educação. isto permite a estes sujeitos, a partir dos modos organizados de se “associarem” institucionalmente, o exercício de advocacy através de uma mesa permanente de diálogo e embate, também com os representantes dos governos, estrategicamente orientadas para a construção de planos de ação política que articulem mudanças reais e eficazes para este segmento da educação. esta possibilidade de diálogo entre estado e sociedade civil na proposição de políticas públicas para a eja é uma parte global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 importante do que os fóruns têm permitido fazer (um diálogo difícil, tenso, que não acontecerá necessariamente em todos os fóruns da mesma maneira nem nas mesmas condições). o que aproxima o coletivo dos fóruns estaduais e distrital enquanto coletivo é o desejo de trilhar um caminho diferente na construção da política pública para a eja. isso faz com que o diálogo crítico seja a marca dominante deste contínuo processo de negociação e implica coragem/disponibilidade para enfrentar os conflitos que são oriundos de cada um dos segmentos que compõem os fóruns da eja. o fórum da eja do brasil é uma instância que tem sua importância reconhecida pelo governo brasileiro na construção das políticas da eja, pelo que estão conseguindo construir em cada estado, pela sua intervenção direta na construção desta modalidade da educação. nesse intento, constitui-se um grupo de representantes por estados com sua organização definida, a fim de, coletivamente, se gerarem a mobilização e as ações necessárias que pressionem os governos e provoquem as transformações indispensáveis nas esferas públicas da eja do país. a relevância desse movimento tem sido reafirmada quando se observa a sua capacidade de articulação entre estados e com o distrito federal, através de uma comunicação em rede, cuja organização dos fóruns mantém desde a década de 1990: encontros municipais, estaduais, regionais e nacionais em interlocução com o mec-secad(i) e secretarias estaduais e municipais de educação. os desdobramentos dos encontros dos fóruns estaduais da eja ocorrem com os encontros regionais – ereja e com o encontro nacional da educação de jovens e adultos – eneja. a partir de 2009, com o objetivo de fortalecer o movimento, o eneja passou a acontecer a cada dois anos intercalando-se com o ereja que abrangem as cinco regiões do país: (norte, sul, sudeste, centro-oeste e nordeste) e que está atualmente em sua 3º edição. a primeira edição do ereja aconteceu no estado da paraíba (nordeste do brasil), em novembro 2010. a pauta principal foi avaliar a trajetória e a organização do movimento social dos fóruns da eja durante a realização do x eneja. esta avaliação fez com que o coletivo dos fóruns pudesse (re)pensar sua pauta de luta desde seu surgimento, cuja construção coletiva nacional acontece no eneja. a estratégia de avaliação, que permitiu ao movimento pensar respectivamente o que quer, como e onde deseja chegar, é um sinal de amadurecimento. avaliar a prática de construção coletiva dos fóruns estaduais, no processo de avaliação, proposição e acompanhamento das políticas públicas para a eja apontando desafios e avanços, fez com que o movimento mudasse as estratégias de sistematizar e propor ações de implementações de políticas durante as realizações de seus encontros estaduais, regionais e nacionais a partir do ano de 2011. os fóruns, utilizando de estratégias para democratizar o acesso ao movimento, têm procurado fortalecer a diversidade de sujeitos envolvidos nos fóruns. têm assim realizado seus encontros nacionais eneja em diversos estados do país e mobilizado um número expressivo de participantes fixos, visitantes e “curiosos” para conhecerem de perto como o fórum global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 se organizav. os encontros regionais e nacionais têm também mobilizado muitos “delegados” e convidados, tendo o mesmo cuidado de diversificar a localização de realização dos encontros, a fim de democratizar a participaçãovi. tais eventos se constituem como outro espaço democrático de exercício do convívio com as várias formas de conceber a eja, resultando na produção de discussões, avaliações, indagações e documentos propositivos de respostas às questões relevantes que necessitam de uma discussão no âmbito nacional. no final do eneja, um relatório é construído e encaminhado ao mec-secad(i), como reivindicação do movimento para implementação de políticas públicas no campo da eja, em todo o território brasileiro. outra ação relevante dos fóruns da eja do brasil, juntamente com algumas universidades públicas federais, o mec-secad(i) e a unesco, tem sido a realização dos seminários de formação dos educadores de jovens e adultos com sua primeira edição realizada em 2006, em minas gerais, sob o tema: “seminário nacional sobre a formação do educador de jovens e adultos”. um dos objetivos foi o de colocar a formação como uma das estratégias para se avançar na qualidade do processo e resultado da intervenção educacional. o segundo, realizado em goiânia, teve como objetivo, discutir os “desafios e as perspectivas da formação de educadores”; o terceiro, realizou-se no rio grande do sul sob o tema “políticas públicas de formação de educadores em educação de jovens e adultos”. o quarto, aconteceu no distrito federal em 2012, com foco na discussão dos “processos formativos em eja: práticas, saberes e novos olhares”; o quinto, realizado em são paulo em 2015, privilegiou o tema: “formação de educadores de jovens e adultos: em busca de sentidos na perspectiva da educação popular”. este último evento permitiu refletir sobre as especificidades da formação dos educadores de jovens, adultos e idosos. além disso, ele também possuía o intento de integrar experiências formativas, promover novas pesquisas, compartilhar resultados de investigações, de experiências de educação e formular propostas para promover à formação dos educadores da eja. damos relevo também à participação que os fóruns têm de maneira muito articulada na proposição, elaboração, acompanhamento e avaliação de vários documentos que são referências no campo da eja, tais como: lei de diretrizes e bases nacional, diretrizes curriculares nacional; diretrizes operacionais para a educação básica; documento preparatório para a vi confintea; marco da ação de belém – documento síntese que aponta o resultado desta conferência; plano de desenvolvimento da educação; documento final da conferência nacional conae; e plano de ações articuladas – par instrumento de financiamento das ações educacionais que atualmente contempla a eja via municípios. de acordo com ireland (2000) esses fóruns: (...) formam um espaço democrático, crítico e plural para a articulação, onde as principais discussões se centram na construção de políticas nacionais e locais para a eja, também propiciando oportunidades importantes para o intercâmbio de experiências nos campos da formação e metodologias. (ireland, 2000, p. 15) global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 assim, embora cada fórum estadual tenha suas especificidades, estrutura e tempo de criação diferente, todos se baseiam em uma articulação entre os diferentes segmentos comprometidos no campo da eja (o governo, as universidades públicas, as empresas privadas que atuam com a eja e no ensino profissional), que fazem parte do sistema svii. como esforço para envolver os educandos no centro do processo, damos destaque ao fórum estadual de pernambuco. em 2014, foi instalado o fórum regional dos estudantes da eja do agreste centro norte. este fórum realizou em 2015 seu segundo encontro onde a mesa de diálogo principal com o tema “educação transformadora: medo, ousadia e desafios” foi protagonizada pelos próprios estudantes. com essa ação, os estudantes, passaram da condição de serem “simplesmente” representados pelos membros dos fóruns, para se assumirem como sujeitos ativos do processo, dizendo, eles mesmos, as suas compreensões, necessidades, reivindicações e proposições sobre seus direitos. com esta experiência os fóruns vão criando um outro mundo possível e expõem à sociedade os seus anseios, ou seja, lutam contra as injustiças sociais, pelo seu espaço no mundo; deste modo, de acordo com freire, vão criando um novo mundo possível. pois como já nos alertava o autor, “o amanhã não é algo inexorável” (freire, 2000, p.23). afirma o autor “a prática política que se funda na compreensão mecanicista da história, redutora do futuro a algo inexorável, “castra”as mulheres e os homens na sua capacidade de decidir, de optar, mas não tem força suficiente para mudar a natureza mesma da história” (...).freire, 2003, p.13). de acordo com lima (2009) o fórum da eja de pernambuco: é um organismo de participação social em rede, com a finalidade de criar espaço democrático e plural de discussão, formação, informação e intercâmbio de experiências, agindo, também, no âmbito das políticas públicas de eja, no sentido de efetivação das mesmas. (lima, 2009, p. 20) pernambuco representa um lastro de conhecimentos, acumulados ao longo da história sobre, alfabetização e educação de jovens e adultos, que são extremamente reveladores da posição de vanguarda por parte do estado nesse campo. essa posição é reforçada por carvalho, ao prefaciar o livro “o fórum de educação de jovens e adultos de pernambuco – registros históricos”, quando afirma: o discurso da eja em pernambuco aparece como acontecimento discursivo nos anos 1960, com o movimento de cultura popular, aos quais diversos e diferentes educadores(as) se associam. dos anos 1960 para os anos atuais, educadores(as) como paulo freire, silke weber, joão francisco de souza, adosinda costa, paulo rosas, tereza barros, jacirema bernardo brilham na constelação discursiva que faz a história do conhecimento da eja. sujeitos coletivos como a rede de alfabetização de casa amarela, a secretaria de educação do estado, a secretaria de educação municipal do global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 cabo, secretaria de educação do recife, secretaria de educação de camaragibe, o centro josué de castro, o centro luiz freire, o núcleo de pesquisa, ensino e extensão em educação de jovens e adultos e em educação popular da ufpe, o centro paulo freire – estudos e pesquisas e outras instituições, entram na rede discursiva da eja e reconstroem e ressignificam os círculos de cultura, movimento popular de educação. nessa recriação desenvolvem formas singulares de dizer da educação de jovens e adultos (...). (carvalho, 2009, pp. 11-12) assim como acontece no fórum de pernambuco, os fóruns da eja pretendem ser não só mobilizadores da sociedade civil organizada, mas, sobretudo, colocar o educando como sujeito do processo. tal ação funciona como estratégia de controle social, com a finalidade de enfrentar vários problemas que afetam a eja no país, sejam eles no campo do analfabetismo, da qualidade social da alfabetização e eja, da subescolarização, do acesso, da permanência, e/ou da elevação da escolaridade. o poder de mobilização dos fóruns é consolidado com a experiência da rede de apoio à ação alfabetizadora do brasil (raaab) e também com a rede virtualviii que fortalece as coordenações nacional, distrital e estaduais, socializando informações e deliberações. a conquista de um lugar na comissão nacional da alfabetização e educação de jovens e adultos – cnaeja é um exemplo dos resultados expressivos desse embate. a reflexão acerca da eja, na perspectiva de compreender por que a educação, como um direito já instituído, não tem sido efetivado para todos os indivíduos, independentemente de seu tempo de vivência quer seja o da juventude, o da vida adulta ou o da velhice -, nos leva a refletir sobre as lutas empreendidas pela sociedade civil em prol dessa questão. controle social de políticas públicas de educação de jovens e adultos pelos fóruns da eja por excelência, o fórum da eja se constitui em um espaço de controle social e de investigação sobre os desdobramentos concretos da luta empreendida pela sociedade civil organizada para a efetivação do direito à educação para os coletivos sociais formados por jovens, adultos e idosos das classes populares. nesse sentido, a trajetória do fórum da eja, representada pela ação coletiva, assume como propósito central a definição de políticas públicas voltadas para a este segmento da educação. na história recente do brasil o conceito de controle social tem sido alvo de um processo evolutivo caracterizado por muitas discussões e mudanças. portanto, serão abordadas aqui, duas concepções distintas de controle social: a do brasil do passado, que entendia o controle social como ação do estado sobre os indivíduos como estratégia de manter a ordem social, ou seja, a sociedade “controlada” pelo estado em nome de uma harmonia social; e a recente, que está intrinsecamente articulada ao conceito de “espaço público” e ao de “democracia participativa”, cujos princípios foram firmados e alguns instrumentos assegurados na constituição federal brasileira de 1988. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 a expressão controle social tem origem na sociologia nomeadamente nos trabalhos de durkheim (e.g. durkheim, 1998) na forma como, a partir das suas preocupações com a coesão e integração sociais, se refere aos mecanismos sociais de reforço das normas sociais e de controlo das ameaças à ordem. o significado desta expressão não é no entanto unívoco e tem sofrido diversas alterações relevantes (alvarez, 2004). nas compreensões que emergem já no pós segunda guerra mundial sobressai a ideia do controle social enquanto algo que está associado à estratégia empregada pelo estado e pelas classes dominantes para estabelecer certa ordem social e para produzir uma sociedade na qual os indivíduos se afinem a certos padrões sociais, morais e políticos. esta compreensão disciplinar do controle social, importante por exemplo em foucault (e.g. foucault, 1977), liga o controle social a um conjunto de posições e imposições do estado e do poder exercidos sobre os diferentes corpos sociais. no brasil, a expressão controle social tem sido utilizada desde a década de 1980 com um significado particular em parte devido à forma como foi introduzida no próprio texto constitucional. aparece aí como sinônimo de controle (no sentido de fiscalização, verificação) dos/as cidadãos/ãs e da sociedade civil sobre as ações do estado, especificamente na forma como podem fiscalizar o cumprimento das obrigações que o estado se impõe (britto, 1992), o que tem consequências também no campo das políticas sociais, e desafia o conceito tradicional de democracia representativa valorizando elementos que a ampliam no sentido de uma democracia mais participativa (britto, 1992). ainda nesta direção, pontual (2008) destaca a constituição federal brasileira de 1988 em seu artigo v, que garante que “a participação contínua da sociedade na gestão pública é um direito assegurado, permitindo que os(as) cidadãos(ãs) não só participem da formulação das políticas públicas, mas, também, fiscalizem de forma permanente a aplicação dos recursos públicos”. a utilização da expressão com este sentido foi propiciada pela conjuntura de lutas políticas, pela democratização do país frente ao estado autoritário, implantado a partir da ditadura militar. coutinho (2006) elucida a conjuntura em que a expressão “controle social” passa a ser designada como controle da sociedade civil sobre as ações do estado, no contexto das lutas sociais em torno da redemocratização do país. o teórico afirma que a “sociedade civil” tornou-se sinônimo de tudo aquilo que se contrapunha ao estado ditatorial: essa identificação foi facilitada não só porque, na linguagem corrente, “civil” significa o contrário de militar, mas, sobretudo, porque, no período final da ditadura, até mesmo os organismos ligados à grande burguesia começaram progressivamente (...) a se desligarem do regime militar, adotando uma postura de oposição moderada. (coutinho, 2006, p. 46) o resultado desse processo, segundo coutinho (2006), foi uma interpretação problemática do conceito de sociedade civil: os pólos do par sociedade civilestado foram sendo interpretados como opostos, como havendo entre eles uma global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 cisão. coutinho (2006) reitera sua posição quando, sobre esta relação, diz: assumiu os traços de uma dicotomia marcada por uma ênfase maniqueísta (...) tudo o que provinha da “sociedade civil” era visto de modo positivo, enquanto tudo o que dizia respeito ao estado aparecia marcado por um sinal fortemente negativo; afinal, a sociedade civil era identificada em bloco com a oposição, enquanto o estado era a expressão da ditadura já então moribunda. (coutinho, 2006, p. 47) á medida que foram surgindo os movimentos sociais que se posicionavam em desacordo com os governos autoritários e com a ebulição política que acendeu a redemocratização do país, anunciou-se decisivamente uma definição política muito clara e acirrada entre um estado autoritário e a uma sociedade civil organizada que almejava mudanças significativas. os movimentos sociais no brasil surgem a partir de uma demanda social de base, e, portanto, em sua grande maioria nascem de baixo para cima com um perfil mais político. como exemplo citamos o movimento dos trabalhadores rurais sem terra – mst através de algo em torno de 1500 assentamentos. esse movimento, não só propõe como põe em prática uma nova proposta de sociedade, anunciando ao país, mesmo com pequenos passos e longas marchas, uma nova forma de convivência social. vale a pena salientar que a expressão controle social já foi marcadamente conflituosa no seio do próprio movimento social dos fóruns da eja, sobretudo, entre os anos de 2010 e 2011, época em que os fóruns tiveram a oportunidade de se debruçar com mais dedicação sobre essa temática através da participação no curso de gestão social de políticas educacionais em eja oferecido pela unesco/icae, o mec-secad(i), e a universidade de brasíliaix. outro forte indício da ação dos fóruns como mecanismo que nos remetem para o exercício de advocacy no brasil é a implantação da política pública intitulada agenda territorial de desenvolvimento integrado de alfabetização e eja (agenda territorial) criada no brasil desde o final de 2008 e posta em prática nos estados em diferentes momentos. esta política representa um importante instrumento de fortalecimento da eja tendo como objectivo promover o diálogo crítico entre os estados e os municípios através de comissões, envolvendo os diversos sujeitos que atuam no segmento da eja. esta ação de parcerias tem gerado tensões e, embora os fóruns sejam apenas um dos tipos de membros que compõem estas comissões por estado, têm conseguido impulsionar, em certa medida, o avanço das agendas territoriais, com permanente pauta de luta em defesa da eja frente às ações do estado. espera-se, desta esfera de parcerias, o esforço e pluralismo que essa diversidade de sujeitos representantes da sociedade podem oferecer como contribuição para que o país acompanhe sua colocação de desenvolvimento no ranking da economia mundial, também, no campo educacional. a eja apresenta característica intersetorialx, o que justifica o esforço do governo em manter uma rede de parcerias para que a eja se desenvolva no país de uma forma que possa garantir global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 acesso, qualidade social e elevação de escolaridade, alicerçada no conceito de educação permanente, o que significa aprender por toda a vida. de acordo com freire (1987) o sentido de aprender significa o movimento do sujeito no mundo e com o mundo, que implica a consciência da necessidade do conhecimento. o mec secad(i) tem insistido em mobilizar os estados e os municípios para participarem/atuarem/protagonizarem esta política pública territorial que visa a manter mesas permanentes de diálogo em torno da eja, construir um plano estratégico de ação, construir o diagnóstico da eja por estados – financiados pelo mec-secad(i), fortalecer o regime de parcerias entre os governos federal, distrital, estaduais, municipais, organizações não governamentais, sindicatos e movimentos sociais e como tal, modificar a realidade da eja no país (lima, correia, & burgos, 2014). a ação de cooperação entre as instituições envolvidas na agenda territorial está ancorada no conceito de educação que os fóruns defendem defendendo, além do direito à educação, outros direitos essenciais à vida. deverão também, estas comissões, sobretudo, propor alternativas para a eja. trabalhar a educação numa perspectiva intersetorial e de parceria implica compreender que a educação deve ultrapassar as vertentes do social e percebê-la como direito humano. esta estratégia do governo de estimular políticas de colaboração se faz mister, uma vez que o estado é um indutor das políticas e não o executor. sendo assim, os fóruns reconhecem a importância de manter esta articulação/diálogo, que é tenso, pois é tema de disputas permanentes e históricas sobre as condições necessárias à educação. entretanto, devido à diversidade de sujeitos estas agendas territoriais têm sido, um elemento político essencial de pressão/avaliação/proposição e uma forma de controle social das políticas públicas para educação de jovens e adultos pelos fóruns da eja. os fóruns da eja têm como principal característica a prática de advocacy, que, “na literatura dos movimentos sociais, refere-se às ações de defesa e argumentação em favor de uma causa social ou de uma demanda para a efetivação ou criação de direitos humanos” (warren, 2011, p. 69). neste sentido, os fóruns da eja do brasil têm se utilizado deste recurso dialógico para atuar coletivamente na defesa de um dos direitos essenciais á vida, o direito à educação para homens e mulheres jovens, e/ou adultos das classes populares. para tal ação, os fóruns se utilizam de diversas estratégias para ampliar o debate político para além das instituições governamentais, mobilizando diversos segmentos da sociedade ligados a esta esfera da educação, e estimulando estratégias de advocacy por entenderem ser um dos elementos legitimadores da democracia brasileira. este caminho legitimador de uma ação coletiva em busca de assegurar a igualdade de direito a este segmento da educação, exige da parte de quem o promove a disponibilidade para o diálogo crítico e, sobretudo, para reconhecer os sujeitos como “pares” neste processo para construir políticas públicas que atendam às demandas e às necessidades educacionais presentes. esse é um exercício que os fóruns têm feito: democratizar a democracia, o que implica global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 incluir vários brasileiros e brasileiras comprometidos e comprometidas em lutar por justiça social e pela efetivação do direito à educação para os jovens e adultos do país. neste sentido afirma urbinati, assim como o exercício da democracia, o advocacy atesta a tensão estrutural da deliberação democrática: interesses diversos (e muitas vezes rivais), diferentes visões subjetivas e aspirações competem em um espaço político aberto no intuito de chegar a uma decisão que não deve estar a serviço de interesses partidários nem encerrar a deliberação. (urbinati, 2010, p. 51) assim, os fóruns, por sua característica de denunciar, propor, avaliar e, sobretudo, intervir nas políticas públicas para este segmento da educação, interagindo junto ao governo em todas as suas instâncias municipais, estaduais e federal -, são considerados como um mecanismo de controle social, aqui entendido como uma conquista da sociedade civil, enquanto instrumento e expressão de uma democracia participativa que utiliza o diálogo e outras formas de pressão junto aos governos visando a transformação social. diante de um estado ineficaz e ineficiente no campo da educação de jovens e adultos, o trabalho de representação dos estudantes de eja que é realizado pelos fóruns da eja do brasil é importante sobretudo pelo acompanhamento das ações do estado que fazem e pelo modo como se batem para que estas resultem em benefícios para a população que demanda essa modalidade de educação e pelo modo como contribuem para a efetivação do direito explicitado na constituição federal de 1988, na lei de diretrizes e bases nacional – ldben 9394/96 e na lei que regula o fundef. o fórum da eja do brasil vem assim imprimindo esforços para que através de sua intervenção, e pela efectivação deste direito seja proporcionanda aos indivíduos uma forma de inclusão que é essencial ao exercício da cidadania e, que de acordo hannah arendt (2004) dará acesso a outros direitos. ou seja, o acesso à educação possibilita dar conhecimento ao cidadão do direito a ter vários outros direitos essenciais à vida e à participação social, cívica e política. nesse sentido, de acordo com pontual (2008) as ideias de participação e controle social estão intimamente relacionadas: por meio da participação na gestão pública, os cidadãos poderem intervir na tomada da decisão administrativa, orientando a administração para que adote medidas que realmente atendam ao interesse público e, ao mesmo tempo, poderem exercer controle sobre a ação do estado, exigindo que o gestor público preste conta de sua atuação. (portal da transparência governo federal). como uma expressão significativa do controle social tecido pelo movimento dos fóruns podemos citar, entre outros, o fato de este movimento não ter aberto mão do direito de participar ativamente da construção do documento nacional preparatório da vi confintea, por entender que se trataria de um global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 documento que pautaria a agenda da eja do brasil para os dez anos seguintes (2009-2019), e como tal, se fazia mister, garantir que fossem contempladas as necessidades reais desta modalidade de educação, e, sobretudo, as suas especificidades e singularidades. a atuação dos fóruns nos encontros preparatórios e a participação na vi confintea mostraram, tanto a força mobilizadora que têm em âmbito nacional, quanto a possibilidade de estabelecer um acompanhamento próximo das ações propostas pelo estado para este segmento da educação. como consequência desta ação concertada entre órgãos governamentais e organizações da sociedade, inclusive movimentos sociais, o documento base preparatório à vi confintea aponta várias recomendações aos fóruns da eja do brasilxi. concordamos com (lázaro, 2009, p.6) quando afirma que a construção da vi confintea no país “ desencadeou um rico e democrático processo de discussão e construção dos documentos básicos do país. durante os dois últimos anos o ministério da educação, em parceria em parceria com os sistemas de ensino e movimentos sociais vinculados à educação popular, promoveu 33 encontros preparatório à vi confintea – 27 estaduais, cinco regionais e um nacional. a partir desse amplo debate com a sociedade, no qual interagiram gestores, educadores, alunos, organizações nãogovernamentais e sindicais, universidades, coletivos e colegiados vinculados à educação, entre outros, foi possível obter um diagnóstico aprofundado e mapear a situação da eja em todo país. durante esses encontros congregaram-se forças sociais e políticas, debruçando-se, sobremaneira, nas questões prioritárias da educação de jovens e adultos. destes encontros resultou, também, a construção do documento “brasil – educação e aprendizagens de jovens e adultos ao longo da vida”, composto por três partes: diagnóstico nacional, desafios e recomendações para a eja. “o documento reafirma o compromisso político do estado brasileiro de avançar na garantia do direito à eja” (mec-secad, 2009, p.10) e aponta marcas expressivas da participação ativa da sociedade civil exercendo o controle social que resultou, entre outros, na construção de um diagnóstico aprofundado e no mapa da situação da eja em todo o país. pensar a sociedade civil organizada frente às ações do estado em busca de um direito público para homens e mulheres que vivem nas margens da sociedade é de fundamental importância para o reconhecimento da condição democrática. a partir destes argumentos, concordamos com raichelis (1998), quando concebe a constituição do “espaço público”: (…) sua constituição é parte integrante do processo de democratização, pela via do fortalecimento do estado e da sociedade civil, expresso fundamentalmente pela inscrição dos interesses das maiorias nos processos de decisão política. inerente a tal movimento, encontra-se o desafio de construir espaços de interlocução entre sujeitos sociais que imprimam global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 níveis crescentes de publicização no âmbito da sociedade política e da sociedade civil, no sentido da criação de uma nova ordem democrática valorizadora da universalização dos direitos de cidadania. (raichelis 1998, p. 25) esta interlocução dos fóruns junto ao mec – secad(i) antes, durante e após a vi confintea representa um importante passo na construção de políticas públicas de alfabetização e eja. torna-se agora necessário produzir resultados que ultrapassem a vi confintea, e se configurem como estratégias de fortalecimento e consolidação da política nacional da educação de jovens e adultos e como expressão do controle social dos fóruns frente às ações do estado nesse campo. a atuação da comissão nacional de alfabetização e educação de jovens e adultos cnaeja tem sido crucial nos debates, nas análises, nos encaminhamentos e nas orientações para as políticas públicas de educação de jovens e adultos, bem como para o posicionamento do país no cenário internacional. por exemplo, nos debates com o conselho nacional de educação – cne, que resultaram na resolução cne nº 3, de 15 de junho de 2010, que “institui diretrizes operacionais para a educação de jovens e adultos nos aspectos relativos à duração dos cursos e idade mínima para ingresso nos cursos de eja; idade mínima e certificação nos exames da eja; e educação de jovens e adultos desenvolvida por meio da educação à distância”. a participação do brasil na conferência latino-americana e na própria vi confintea foi marcada pela presença atuante dos membros da cnaeja e por uma parceria entre governo e sociedade civil, que resultou em destaque pela unesco da experiência brasileira como “exemplo” para os outros países. apontamos este fato sem a pretensão de acharmos que o brasil deve servir de modelo, tampouco, de termos a ilusão de que o país está em um patamar ideal. ao contrário! percebemos o movimento social do fórum como um povo que vive cada dia o exercício de tentar outra vez, do (re)começar a cada dia, a (re)construção de mais um passo em busca de uma cidadania ativa numa democracia participativa e, portanto, da construção de uma participação social pulsante. mesmo que isso ainda não seja o suficiente para resolver todos os problemas que acometem a eja no brasil, inspirados em (freire, 2005b) os fóruns lutam pelo direito de dizer a sua palavra, a palavra-mundo, a palavra-ação, e através dela dizerem os seus anseios, suas necessidades, as suas especificidades e, sobretudo, enquanto pares, partici(par). as experiências da atuação dos fóruns da eja no brasil demonstram que o exercício de participação social não é algo pronto a exercer. exige de quem o faz um tempo de aprendizagem. é necessário investir nesse exercício de aprendizagem. ou seja, estes espaços de diálogo sobre políticas públicas também se constituem como espaços educativos, propiciando o exercício da consciência crítica e igualmente contribuindo para que cada participante tome maior consciência de seu papel no mundo (freire, 2005a). conclusão as políticas são historicamente global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 construídas pelos sujeitos históricos. entretanto, os atores que compõem o fórum da educação de jovens e adultos do brasil entendem ser fundamental criar um elo entre a sociedade civil e o estado, a fim de possibilitar mecanismos de participação, essenciais para o acompanhamento, a fiscalização e, sobretudo, para a execução (com)partilhada das políticas públicas. a participação social além de legítima e legitimadora, porque inegavelmente fortalece a democracia, tem prestado notáveis serviços ao país. dando espaço ao exercício de uma cidadania ativa, desde o ano de 1990 os fóruns estaduais buscam soluções para enfrentar problemas educacionais no brasil. desde a década de 2000, mais especificamente a partir de ano de 2003, no brasil, a relação entre o governo federal e a sociedade civil organizada tem passado por algumas mudanças relevantes. facultou-se o diálogo com a sociedade em diferentes áreas do governo federal. ao longo deste período tem-se estabelecido diálogo com os diversos movimentos sociais, sobretudo, através da secretaria de participação social – órgão da secretaria geral da presidência da república do brasil. decisões estruturais têm sido geridas e analisadas junto à sociedade civil através de alguns canais de interlocução. esta experiência de participação social coroa o processo que se estabelece através da relação do estado com a sociedade civil, conferindo plena efetividade aos princípios da democracia participativa previstos na constituição federal. nesse sentido os fóruns têm-se organizado ao longo dos anos para acompanhar, propor e implementar políticas públicas para a educação de jovens e adultos juntos aos governos, assumindo-se para além da prática de controle social das políticas públicas, como co-responsáveis desses processos. como balanço histórico dos fóruns da eja, podemos perceber avanços no tocante à articulação entre os diversos sujeitos interessados, pessoas e instituições. percebemos também que, apesar de em algum momento o fórum ter estado menos ativo ou mais apagado, ao longo dos anos nunca deixou de existir e de pautar a eja como diálogo crítico. os fóruns mantiveram, também, ao longo de sua trajetória, acesa a discussão em torno da temática da eja como permanente pauta de luta, articulando-se e, transitando pelos diferentes setores da sociedade através das mesas de diálogo, transformando-os em espaços de formação continuada. este esforço ancora-se na vontade-ação expressa e exercida pelos seus membros em não deixar que a eja caia no esquecimento. mas, sobretudo, trata-se de lembrar permanentemente que a educação de jovens e adultos é um direito constituído e, portanto, precisa ser efetivado para todo e qualquer cidadão ou cidadã, independente de seu gênero, cor, raça, religião, idade e localização geográfica. vislumbra-se que um dia o brasil esteja em um patamar de investimento na educação, tão digno, que não tenha analfabetos absolutos e funcionais, subescolarização, baixa qualidade social da educação e que, portanto, estes fóruns possam figurar na história como um exercício de advocacy e de controle social que atingiu em sua plenitude seus objetivos. referências global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 alvarez, m. c. 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(2009). prefácio. in m. n. s. lima (ed.), fórum da educação de jovens e adultos de pernambuco: registros históricos (pp.9-15). recife: edições bagaço. coutinho, c. n. (2006). intervenções: o marxismo na batalha das ideias. são paulo: cortez. di pierro, m. c. (2005). notas sobre a redefinição da identidade e das políticas públicas de educação de jovens e adultos no brasil. educação e sociedade, 92, 11151139. durkheim, é. (1998). as regras do método sociológico. lisboa: editorial presença. foucault, m. (1977). vigiar e punir. petrópolis: vozes. freire, p. (1987). pedagogia do oprimido (17a ed.). rio de janeiro: paz e terra. freire, p. (2000). pedagogia da indignação: cartas pedagógicas e outros escritos. são paulo: editora unesp. freire, p. (2203) política e educação (7ª ed.) são paulo: cortez. freire, p. (2005). educação como prática da liberdade. rio de janeiro: paz e terra. gadotti, m. (2014). 50 anos de angicos: um sonho interrompido a ser retomado. educatrix, 4(2), 26-33. ibge (2013). pesquisa nacional por amostra de domicílio. pnad 2013. rio de janeiro: ibge. recuperado de http://www.ibge.gov.br ireland, t. (2000). a história recente da mobilização pela educação de jovens e adultos à luz do contexto internacional. alfabetização e cidadania, 10, 9-22. ireland, t. (2009). parcerias para políticas de aprendizagem ao longo da vida: uma perspectiva brasileira. in unesco (org.), convergência: ação educativa (pp. 45-64). belém: unesco. lafer, c. (2006). a reconstrução dos direitos humanos: um diálogo com global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 o pensamento de hannah arendt (6a ed.). são paulo: companhia das letras. lázaro, a. (2009). apresentação. in ministério da educação, secretaria de educação continuada, alfabetização e diversidade & ministério da educação, documento nacional preparatório à vi conferência internacional de educação de adultos (vi confintea) (pp. 5-6.). brasília: mec; goiânia: funape/ufg. lázaro, a. (2014). educação de jovens e adultos: conquistas recentes e desafios. revista educatrix., 4(2), 51-57. lima, l. (2007). educação ao longo da vida: entre a mão direita e a mão esquerda de miró. são paulo: editora cortez. lima, m. n. s. (2009). fórum da educação de jovens e adultos de pernambuco: registros históricos. recife: edições bagaço. lima, m. n. s., correia, m. z. s., & burgos, m. p. (orgs.). (2014). agenda territorial de desenvolvimento integrado de alfabetização e educação de jovens e adultos do estado de pernambuco: breve histórico. recife: editora: centro paulo freire estudos e pesquisas. mec-secad (2009). documento nacional preparatório a vi conferência internacional de educação de adultos: vi confintea. brasília: mec. paiva, j. (2006). tramando concepções e sentidos para redizer o direito à educação de jovens e adultos. revista brasileira de educação, 11(33), 516-566. pontual, p. (2008). desafios à construção da democracia participativa no brasil: a prática dos conselhos de gestão das políticas públicas. cadernos da cidade, 12(14), 7-26. portal da transparência (2004). controladoria geral da união. recuperado de www.portaldatransparencia.gov.br raichelis, r. (1998). esfera pública e conselhos de assistência social: caminhos de construção democrática. são paulo: cortez. soares, l. (2004). o surgimento dos fóruns de eja no brasil: articular, socializar e intervir. alfabetização e cidadania, n. 17, 25-35. unesco (1997). declaração de hamburgo: agenda para o futuro. brasília: unesco. urbinati, n. (2010). representação como advocacy: um estudo sobre deliberação democrática. revista política & sociedade, 9(16), 51-88. warren, i. s. (2011). “redes da sociedade civil: advocacy e incidências possíveis”. in: martinho, c. et.al. vida em redes: relacionamento e caminhos para uma nova sociedade. barueri: instituto c&a. warren, i. s. (2014). movimentos sociais e geração de novos direitos em tempos globais: o caso brasileiro. in m. g. gohn & bringel, b. m. (orgs.), movimentos sociais na era global (2a ed., pp. 115-146). petrópolis: editora vozes. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 notas i fundef fundo de manutenção do ensino fundamental e de valorização do magistério. instituído pela emenda constitucional n.º 14, de setembro de 1996, regulamentado pela lei nº 9424, de dezembro do mesmo ano e pelo decreto nº 2264, de junho de 1997. ii os fóruns estão localizados nos seguintes estados e regiões: sudeste: (rio de janeiro, minas gerais, espírito santo, são paulo); sul (rio grande do sul, santa catarina, paraná); nordeste (paraíba, rio grande do norte, ceará, alagoas, bahia, sergipe, pernambuco, piauí e maranhão); centro-oeste (tocantins, goiás, mato grosso, mato grosso do sul, distrito federal); norte: (acre, amapá, amazonas, pará, rondônia, roraima) e mais de 60 fóruns regionais. iii a partir de 2011 a secretaria de educação continuada, alfabetização e diversidade (secad) do ministério de educação, passou a adotar também o i de inclusão. atualmente adota-se a sigla secadi. iv no brasil, a expressão controle social desde a década de oitenta tem sido utilizada como sinônimo de controle da sociedade civil sobre as ações do estado, especificamente no campo das políticas sociais, desde o período da redemocratização nos anos oitenta. v os encontros nacionais aconteceram nos seguintes estados e anos que se apresentam: o i -1999 no rio de janeiro; ii 2000 na paraíba; iii 2001 em são paulo; iv 2002 em belo horizonte; v 2003 em mato grosso; vi 2004 no rio grande do sul; vii 2005 em goiás; viii 2006 em pernambuco; ix 2007 no paraná; x 2008 no rio de janeiro; xi 2009 no pará; xii 2013 na bahia; o xiii no rio grande do norte e o xiv 2015 em novembro de 2015 será em goiânia. vi o i eneja, em 1999, mobilizou 298 pessoas; o iii, em são paulo, contou com 1300 pessoas; o viii, em pernambuco, registra a participação de 598 pessoas; o ix, no pará, região norte do país, cuja participação dos representantes dos fóruns, também foi facultada ao fórum social mundial – fms e à vi conferência internacional de adultos, nesta mesma cidade e em datas muito próximas, contou com uma delegação de 510 pessoas; o xii, na bahia, com o número em torno de 500 participantes; e, por fim, o xv, que será em goiânia, em 2015, contará 440 participantes, entre delegados, representantes do ministério da educação e convidados. estes números mostram que, mesmo em diversos contextos sociais e políticos que acometem o país, como na atual conjuntura do brasil, crise política e econômica, o movimento dos fóruns, se mantém em seus encontros nacionais mobilizando instituições e pessoas para dar relevo à sua pauta de luta. vii como é o caso do serviço social da indústria -sesi, o serviço nacional de aprendizagem comercial senac, o serviço nacional de aprendizagem industrial – senai; o centro de integração empresa escola – ciee; ongs a exemplo do centro paulo freire – estudos e pesquisas, movimentos sociais; sindicatos dos professores; conselhos estaduais de educação; união dos dirigentes municipais – undime; união dos conselhos municipais de educação – uncme; secretarias municipais e estaduais de educação; e os estudantes da eja. contudo a presença do segmento dos educandos, principais sujeitos do processo, ainda é um desafio para todos os fóruns. viii portal dos fóruns da educação de jovens e adultos do brasil: fóruns eja brasil: www.forumeja.org.br. ix o curso de extensão para representantes dos fóruns e coordenadores estaduais da educação de jovens e adultos que tinham assento na agenda territorial teve como principal objetivo “formar sujeitos sociais da educação de jovens e adultos para que atuassem como multiplicadores de ações de gestão social de políticas públicas, com vistas a fortalecer a agenda territorial de eja, na perspectiva da formação de uma comunidade de trabalho/aprendizagem em rede em gestão da eja; delimitar os marcos estratégicos das ações da educação de jovens e adultos; propiciar espaços de reflexão, em ambiente virtual de aprendizagem e em momento presencial, para aprimoramento de conhecimentos e práticas de gestão social de políticas educacionais; favorecer a análise de experiências de gestão social de políticas educacionais de eja que global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 subsidiassem o plano estratégico da agenda territorial local”. além de facultar aos representantes dos fóruns e demais participantes a possibilidade de uma apropriação mais alargada da temática, a fim de empoderar os sujeitos para que melhor pudessem desenvolver seus argumentos em defesa da eja. x pelas características que envolvem este segmento da educação, se faz necessário, a interlocução com diversos ministérios e secretarias como, por exemplo: do trabalho e emprego, pois muitas vezes, a escola vai para dentro das empresas; da saúde – necessidade de exames oftalmológicos e oferta de óculos; de segurança – manter policiais nas escolas, tentando evitar o abandono pelos estudantes por falta de segurança; com estados e municípios por vezes a mesma escola atende a rede municipal e estadual de ensino no mesmo espaço físico e, neste caso, é importante esta parceria a fim de garantir acesso e permanência. xi “contribuir para maior divulgação e conscientização da população quanto ao direito à educação de jovens e adultos; mobilizar a sociedade civil para participar na construção, monitoramento, fiscalização e controle social das políticas públicas, em especial no que tange à educação para jovens e adultos; contribuir para a mobilização em torno de uma política nacional de valorização da eja; discutir e participar da formulação de políticas públicas elaboradas por conselhos de educação; estimular a criação de mecanismos de incentivo à entrada ou retorno à eja, em parceria com a comunidade em geral, assegurando a mobilização dos alunos na luta por seus direitos; fomentar a ampliação da participação de gestores públicos nos fóruns, contribuindo para efetivar o diálogo e promover a intersetorialidade; estimular a presença de representantes do movimento do campo nos fóruns da eja, fomentando a discussão da educação no/do campo nos fóruns; contribuir para a mobilização e fortalecimento das comunidades locais, estimulando a criação de grupos de apoio, centros comunitários e afins; apoiar reivindicações da união nacional dos conselhos municipais de educação quanto à criação de sistemas municipais e fortalecimento da autonomia financeira dos conselhos municipais já existentes; fortalecer o caráter formativo das atividades desenvolvidas pelos fóruns de eja; pautar a discussão da certificação de educandos da eja em eventos, seminários e encontros, estimulando que o conselho nacional de educação aprove parecer que trate sobre a temática e o documento marco da ação de belém, resultante desta mesma conferência” (mec-secad, 2009). microsoft word 2012-003-final-20120521.docx global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 commentary: lobbying for endorsement of community psychology in australia and the invisibility of community psychology in the united states sylvie taylor, ph.d. and gregor v. sarkisian, ph.d. antioch university los angeles the challenges faced by our australian colleagues raise a range of questions about the future of community psychology (cp) in contexts that have become increasingly focused on the legitimizing of academic programs and professions by bureaucratic governmental entities whose understanding of the disciplines and professions they seek to legitimize may be limited at best. more importantly, their struggle points to challenges within academic psychology, as cp continues to struggle for a place at the table of organized psychology. perhaps the greatest lesson in the narrative of this struggle was how some of the tools of the discipline were used to resolve what was perceived to be a crisis threatening the very survival of cp in australia. in the united states, cp has a long-standing history of invisibility within mainstream psychology. clinical psychology and its close cousin, counselling psychology, have dominated the realm of applied psychology for so long, that the lay public believes “psychology” to be synonymous with psychological distress, “mental illness” “counselling” and “therapy.” cp is similarly invisible within academic psychology, as evidenced by its very limited presence or complete absence from introductory psychology textbooks in the united states (sarkisian, taylor, & council of education programs, 2009) and as a domain of instruction in many psychology departments. this invisibility is compounded by the fact that community psychologists have articulated a paradigm whose assumptions and practices diverge significantly from traditional applied psychology in problem definition, levels of analysis, types of research, interdisciplinary ties, ethics, roles of then professional and service recipient, and the focus, timing, and type of intervention (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010). in many ways cp is additionally marginalized within the dominant traditional models of psychology because our work often focuses on working with people who are themselves marginalized by the social system and by traditional deficit-based approaches that have no models for effectively addressing the impact of social oppression or working beyond the individual to manifest change. the narratives of our australian colleagues beautifully illustrate how as a marginalized community, we as community psychologists, can use our own values, theories and methods to effect change for ourselves and cp. much of the work reported in the summary of activities reads like a textbook on community organizing and coalition building, illustrating along the way how bringing theory to practice is often fraught with unanticipated challenges. within the u.s., cp gained professional recognition through the society for community research and action (scra), division 27 of the american psychological association, yet we still remain invisible. with a membership approaching 800, and monetary resources, scra is in the best position it has ever been in to facilitate organized efforts to increase visibility of cp within the u.s. and internationally. recent developments within scra, such as the legitimization of the community psychology practice council (cppc) with voting power on the executive committee, the decision to hire an executive director of scra, or the recent development of the scra public policy committee, reflect steps toward greater inclusion and a more proactive focus. further, several councils of scra have already engaged in activities to raise visibility of cp. for example, the council of education programs (cep) has engaged in letter writing campaigns to text-book authors to lobby for greater inclusion of cp content in introductory psychology texts and has partnered with idealist.org to promote graduate education in cp at graduate school fairs with volunteers from scra sitting at tables and talking with fairgoers about cp and cp training. while these efforts are effective outreach on a small scale, they are ameliorative in nature, reaching one author or one potential student at a time. a transformative approach would focus efforts to raise visibility on a large scale, seeking to effect change on the macro level with entities such as the apa, the national institutes, text book publishers, university systems, and u.s. state and federal governments. challenging the dominant value on the deficitbased model and raising awareness of more inclusive and holistic approaches utilized by community psychologists among macro level entities would be a difficult endeavour. unlike our australian colleagues who were presented with a threat great enough to mobilize individuals into action, we in the u.s. have no such threat other than sustained invisibility in the shadow of a deficit-model. if the members of global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 scra believe that increased visibility is important for the field and the work is beneficial to communities, then they could mobilize to increase the visibility of cp. there is likely little doubt among community psychologists that the profession has the means to accomplish the desired end of increased visibility. however, there may be a concern that sustained invisibility, a threat associated with cp in the u.s. since its inception in 1965, would not be considered a threat but rather a comfort zone. while we cannot ensure that legislators, accrediting bodies, professional blocks, and our fellow psychologists know what cp is and how community psychologists work, we can, as a professional community ensure that we continue to create opportunities to educate them. additionally, we can engage in organizations, such as the scra, to facilitate large scale efforts targeted toward raising the visibility of cp through transformative approaches which best utilize its members and financial resources. references nelson, g., & prilleltensky, i. (2010). community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and wellbeing (2nd ed.). palgrave macmillan. sarkisian, g.v., taylor, s., & council of education programs (2009). rating of introductory psychology textbooks with community psychology content. the society for community research and action. http://www.scra27.org/resources/educationc/rat ingofcommunitypsychologycontentinintrotexts .pdf global journal of community psychology practice 1 empowering women through alternative settings: michigan womyn’s music festival charlynn odahl-ruan depaul university chicago, il elizabeth mcconnell depaul university chicago, il mona shattell depaul university chicago, il christine kozlowski chicago, il keywords: empowerment, healing, alternative settings, feminism, safe spaces, sexism, community empowerment author biographies: charlynn odahl-ruan, ma, is a clinical-community psychology doctoral student at depaul university in chicago; she received a master of arts degree in clinical psychology from depaul and a master of arts in counseling psychology from new york university. elizabeth mcconnell, ma, is a clinical-community psychology ph.d. student at depaul university in chicago. mona shattell, phd, rn, faan is associate dean for research and faculty development in the college of science and health, and professor in the school of nursing at depaul university in chicago. christine kozlowski, maat, mdiv, is an art therapist and educator who currently works with special needs children at a therapeutic day school in the chicagoland area. recommended citation: odahl-ruan, c., mcconnell, e., shattell, m., and kozlowski, c. (2015). empowering women through alternative settings: michigan womyn’s music festival. global journal of community psychology practice, 6(1), 1-12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 empowering women through alternative settings: michigan womyn’s music festival abstract sexism is a form of oppression impacting women in multiple spheres of their lives. the current study examines the michigan womyn’s music festival as an alternative setting in which attendees create a unique culture apart from dominant patriarchal systems. an ethnophenomenological approach was used to examine experiences of empowerment and healing among festival attendees. twenty women were interviewed at the festival and this data was analyzed using content analysis. the women-only, feminist space offered attendees both physical and emotional safety, which yielded healing. participants defied gender-prescribed roles through work duties, gender nonconforming dress, and festival events/ceremonies. the development of a “festival family” and close relationships within the festival, quiet times of introspection, and designated spaces of healing were empowering. results from this study add to the understanding of empowering settings and may inform efforts to create safe spaces for other oppressed groups. introduction all women face subtle and overt acts of sexism, but some groups of women who violate prescribed gender roles (e.g., lesbians, feminists, career women) experience additional discrimination due to what is called “backlash effect,” a negative evaluation and treatment of non-conforming women (rudman, 1998; rudman & glick, 2001). alternative settings to where oppressed groups can withdraw, even temporarily, from the oppressive dominant culture can offer a time of healing, empowerment, and critical consciousness raising that combats the internalization of dominant oppressive cultural norms. this study will examine one such alternative setting, the michigan womyn’s music festival (michfest), to determine which factors of the setting serve as empowering agents. history of the michigan womyn’s music festival michfest began in 1976 and takes place in the woods of michigan each summer, filled with music, camping, workshops, and ceremonies. the festival was the u.s.’s first women’s music festival and one of the first large showcases for openly lesbian artists, who were mostly operating outside of the mainstream music industry. the majority of attendees identify as lesbian, but the festival is open to all women-born (cisgender) women. michfest typically draws 3,000 to 5,000 women each year and reached a high of 8,000 attendees in the early 1980s. most attendees camp in tents but some come in rvs and motorized campers. each year women who volunteer to work “crew” arrive a week to a month in advance to build the physical structures and prepare the land for the festival. at the end of the festival, the physical infrastructure is torn down so that the land is returned to its natural state. all festival attendees are asked to volunteer for several “work shifts” (e.g., childcare, trash, and security). global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 sexism in the dominant culture the women who attend the festival frequently reject the gender roles prescribed by traditional gender role ideology, and, because of this, they face intensified sexistfueled acts of oppression and aggression (rudman, 1998; rudman & glick, 2001). described as “the systematic inequitable treatment of girls and women by men and by the society as a whole” (bearman, korobov, & thorne, 2009, p. 11), sexism ranges from egregiously hostile acts of violence against women, such as rape and domestic violence, to subtle daily instances of intimidation or condescension (benokraitis & feagin, 1995; swim, hyers, cohen, & ferguson, 2001). sexism is a form of oppression, which is psychological and political, internal and external (prilleltensky, 2008) and entails a state of asymmetric power relations where the dominating persons or groups exercise their power by the process of restricting access to material resources and by imparting to the subordinated persons or groups selfdeprecating views about themselves. brazilian humanitarian p. freire (1973), one of the early proponents of empowerment theory, advocated for liberating oppressed people through education and critical awareness (hur, 2006). settings such as michfest offer a space for education and consciousness raising. theorists argue that it is only when an oppressed group attains a certain degree of conscientization that resistance can begin (prilleltensky, 2008). liberation from oppression entails both freedom from oppressive external forces, such as gender discrimination, and freedom to pursue goals (fromm, 1965; prilleltensky, 2008) and ultimately involves dismantling oppressive structures through collective action (moane, 2003). empowerment, at its core, is about overcoming oppression. community psychologist j. rappaport (1981) describes empowerment as the possibility for people to control their own lives. empowerment is viewed as both an individual, or psychological, process (zimmerman, 2000; zimmerman & rappaport, 1988) and a group experience (chavis & wandersman, 1990). it is exercised at different levels of change, including that of individual, family or kinship group, organization, neighborhood, city or town, or the broader society. individual empowerment psychological empowerment is a combination of self-acceptance and confidence, social and political understanding, and the ability to be assertive in obtaining and controlling resources and making decisions (zimmerman & rappaport, 1988). personality and cognitive factors relate to psychological empowerment such as locus of control (rotter, 1966), self-confidence (larson, walker, & pearce, 2005), and self-efficacy (bandura, 1989). self-determination is often reported in the literature as the most crucial individual component to empowerment (hur, 2006; sprague & hayes, 2000). selfdetermination can be viewed in four dimensions: 1) constancy and perseverance, 2) the courage to take risks, 3) being proactive, and 4) voicing one’s opinion (boehm & staples, 2004). it is also one’s sense of autonomy and control over how one does her own work (deci & ryan, 1985). settings such as michfest can be psychologically empowering by building the self-efficacy of attendees and encouraging them to voice their opinions. the goal of individual empowerment is to achieve a state of liberation where one has the power to impact life, community, and society (hur, 2006). the dual characteristics of power and empowerment come from a combination of both internal and external factors; individuals internalize external values and beliefs about their place in society and their abilities (nelson & prilleltensky, 2005). additionally, power is the combination global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 of ability and opportunity to make changes and exert control (prilleltensky, 2008). living in unjust and oppressive circumstances can lead to psychological processes, such as feelings of helplessness, upward comparisons, and self-blame, that negatively impact personal wellness (prilleltensky, 2012). in the case of sexism, this can result in an internalization of sexism, where women begin to believe sexist messages about themselves and others. oppression can be internalized and the oppressed group feels inferior and helpless to alter their circumstances, assuming personal blame rather than seeing structural oppressive factors (moane, 2003). the development of critical consciousness (freire, 1973; kieffer, 1984) refers to individuals developing critical awareness about the causes of undesirable social conditions, the possibilities of change, and the importance of acting to transform the world. this is particularly important for an individual if they are to be able to present issues, lead groups, analyze problems, make decisions, and implement empowerment tactics (fawcett et al., 1994; serrano-garcia, 1984). group empowerment community empowerment refers to collective action by a community to improve the quality of life of the community. maton (2008) describes empowerment as a groups-based, participatory, and developmental process through which oppressed groups gain greater control over their lives and resources, acquire basic rights, achieve important life goals, and reduce societal marginalization. furthermore, maton (2008) describes empowering settings as having a belief system that inspires change, is strengths based, and focuses members beyond themselves. these settings have core activities that accomplish the mission of the setting and a relational environment that fosters social support, caring relationships, and a sense of community. foster-fishman, salem, chibnall, legler, & yapchai (1998) state that empowering community settings consist of group and strength-based goals; promotion of peer social support systems; and leaders who articulate vision, stand as role models, and socialize new leaders within the group. settings such as michfest have a unique culture, social support system, and sense of community that can foster empowerment at both the individual and group level. alternate settings as a means of empowerment sarason (1972) asserted the idea in his seminal book the creation of settings and the future societies that alternative settings can be an effective means to create social change. as a community psychologist, he became frustrated with efforts to change existing organizations and proposed taking a prevention attitude towards social change. therefore, rather than attempting to intervene to fix existing broken institutions, he suggested it was effective to just create new institutions. these alternative settings can meet needs not currently met in society, provide greater diversity of options, and be empowering for the people who are involved in them (sarason, 1972). additionally, alternative settings demonstrate a new social form that people can choose outside the established options (reinharz, 1984). michfest serves an example of an alternative setting and by examining the factors within that setting that empower its attendees, researchers can learn more about alternative settings and their impact. method the current study examines michfest as a type of alternative setting, where women have opted to temporarily remove themselves from the dominant culture to create a setting with a unique culture, set of gender expectations, norms, and values. the global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 purpose of this examination is to use qualitative methodology to describe the empowerment and healing experiences of attendees at the festival to learn which factors are most impactful in such a setting. though this physical setting is temporary, it has the potential to serve as a space for education, consciousness raising, relationship building, and empowerment for attendees. design an ethnophenomenological design was used to examine experiences of empowerment and healing among attendees at the michigan womyn’s music festival. ethnography focuses on members of a culture-sharing group (e.g., michfest) in order to identify and explore the meaning of these shared patterns (creswell, 2013). this study was part of a broader study that focused on feminism, multigenerational relationships, safe spaces, empowerment, and transgender inclusion at the festival. a team of four researchers immersed themselves in the culture of michfest by attending the festival in august 2013 and by using participant observation to document their experiences and observations. these experiences included attending workshops, concerts, work shifts, and informal conversations with other festival attendees. among the researchers, one had never attended michfest before, one had attended once, one had attended three times, and one had attended eight times. in addition to participant observation, data was collected by audio recorded interviews of festival attendees. members of the research team interviewed twenty women on-site at the festival. recruitment and participants participants were recruited through posting fliers around the festival, approaching festival attendees to ask if they would like information about the study, and through referrals by interviewees. the total number of women interviewed was 20. each participant was individually interviewed by one of the researchers. the mean age of participants was 45.2 (age range 28-68). the mean number of years of festival attendance was 12.15 (range 1 16 years). most (n=14) of the women identified their sexual orientation as “lesbian” or “dyke,” three identified as queer, one identified as bisexual, one identified as a “celibate lesbian,” and one identified as an “ex-lesbian queer.” three of the women identified as african american, 13 identified as white, three identified as bi-racial or multiracial, and one identified as hispanic/latina. of the 18 that reported being religious or spiritual, seven identified as purely “spiritual,” two identified as “eclectic” and named multiple traditions (e.g., wiccan and buddhist), four identified as “neo-pagan/wiccan,” one identified as “unitarian,” two identified as “buddhist,” one identified as “african methodist episcopalian,” and one as attending a “liberal church.” ten self-reported their political beliefs as being “very liberal,” one reported being “moderate liberal,” three reported being “liberal,” three reported other categories (e.g., radical, anarchist, or outside the spectrum), and three did not report or were unsure. procedures semi-structured interviews were scheduled at times and locations selected by participants. all interviews were conducted on-site at the festival, and sites included participants’ camping areas, community areas around the festival, and fields or lawn areas away from major festival activities. interview duration had a mean length of 54 minutes (range 19 minutes 139 minutes). before starting each interview, the researcher completed the informed consent process with the participant, including consent for audio recording. after consent, interviews began with an introduction of the seven major topical areas on the interview guide. first, global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 researchers asked demographic questions. second, participants were asked about their experience and history with michfest, including how long they had attended, if they had friendships or relationships with other festival attendees, how they describe the culture of michfest, and any memories or experiences at michfest that were meaningful to them. third, participants were asked about their experience of womanhood, including how they experienced womanhood at michfest and at home, how the community at michfest has shaped their view of womanhood, and how their experience as a woman was shaped by other aspects of their identity. fourth, participants were asked about their experiences of feminism and empowerment, including aspects of life inside and outside of the festival they found empowering and disempowering, how they defined feminism, and how they experienced feminism inside and outside of the festival. fifth, participants were asked about relationships with feminists of other ages, including if they felt connected intergenerationally, any changes they saw in the views of feminists of different ages, and how these relationships have shaped their view of feminism. sixth, participants were asked about their perspective on the inclusion of transwomen at michfest, including how they arrived at this perspective, what they thought the general opinion of women who attend michfest was, what conversations around trans inclusion had been like for them, and what they thought should happen around the issue of trans inclusion in the future. finally, participants were asked about how they experienced michfest as a temporary setting, including whether they experienced it differently than similar settings that are not so time limited and intensive, their experience of camping at the festival, how they deal with the transition home, and if they transfer aspects of their festival experience to their lives at home. results analytic strategy data collected from in-person interviews was analyzed using content analysis (burnard, 1991). to begin to form a coding structure, and in order to reach consensus, the first two authors coded one transcript for major themes of empowerment. after consensus was reached on that transcript, a code structure was developed for the authors to use with the remaining transcripts. the transcripts and coding structure were uploaded into dedoose, an online qualitative analysis software system, and then coded using the finalized code structure. the authors coded the transcripts and discussed any new codes. the authors placed these codes into initial thematic categories and then developed preliminary themes. these preliminary themes were discussed by the research team and then revised to form the final themes of the empowerment at michfest. the final themes of empowerment, as experienced by michfest attendees, include women-only safe space (physical safety), “dropping my armor” (emotional safety), defying gender-prescribed roles and duties, “festival family” and powerful relationships, unplugging from the world (lack of technology), and dedicated spaces for healing and ritual. women-only safe space participants felt safe at the festival in a way that they did not in their home communities because the festival was a women-only space. participants felt safe to explore their identities and express themselves more openly in public. this sense of safety extended to the children, with mothers allowing children to explore the grounds and to spend extended time with other families and children. this yielded greater independence and physical freedom for the children, particularly for girls whose global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 movements are often restricted for fear of predators. for festival-goers who were also survivors of sexual assault, the women-only space was healing because they could lay aside the vigilance they had developed as a result of the trauma. they felt safe from triggering events, which gave them freedom to be vulnerable and engage in a deeper level of introspection and healing. women expressed a freedom to explore their physical surroundings, without fear of violence: i think this is the only place that you can find just women and you’re just around women and you, it’s so safe and as a child abuse survivor and a rape survivor it’s safe. you don’t have to worry about any of your triggers being set off and you can just let yourself be open to healing, which i think is not available anywhere else. to participants, this safety was unique to their time at michfest and they used their yearly time at the festival as a healing time that carried them throughout the rest of the year. this women-only environment also allowed both adults and children to roam around the grounds in various states of undress. nudity is common at the festival and many women felt a sense of freedom and acceptance from seeing women of all ages and shapes walking about free from the body shaming that women in the dominant culture are often subjected to, particularly if they do not fit society’s idealized standards of beauty. young women in particular felt a sense of body empowerment and healing from seeing older women who acted accepting of their own bodies. dropping my armor michfest offers a general culture of acceptance, feminism, and affirmation among women who attend. this culture gave emotional safety for attendees, who often had to regularly defend their sexual orientation, feminist beliefs, or gender presentation in their regular lives. for women who do not conform to the patriarchal ideals of beauty (e.g., feminine dress, shaving body or face, being submissive or demure in appearance or attitude), both overt and subtle attack can be commonplace occurrences in their daily lives. this leads to a sense of needing to be on guard and to assume defensive postures. freedom from these attacks provided a space for them to explore their identities, beliefs, and wounds from past trauma or discrimination. the phrase “drop my armor” was used to describe the internal reaction to this sense of emotional safety: i come back…to breathe...each year i say i’m going to be open to the experience of this year and i can’t predict what that experience will be, but i know that i can have, you know six days where i can not be living in my head, not be living constantly with my armor on. that’s why i always come back. i can experience life differently. participants also noted the need to “put back on the armor” when they left the festival to protect themselves from vulnerability in the outside world. defying gender-prescribed roles and duties festival attendees are asked to engage in “work shifts,” and some attendees are involved in more long-term “crew” positions, where they are responsible for security, transportation, construction, sound and lighting, or other needed tasks. these duties often defy gender-prescribed duties, which allow women to explore roles and perform duties typically reserved for men: i got here and someone said, “hey, go build those steps.” and i didn’t know how to build the steps but someone trusted me to do it...i think that’s empowering just knowing that so many things we as women were taught we can’t do. or are not an global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 option, we actually do, above and beyond. i find [the labels] disempowering. i feel like it’s like breaking down. participants felt empowered by their involvement in a setting that was completely women-created and run: this is the place where i feel most powerful, most like i can do anything...there’s definitely something really exciting and empowering about the fact that everything here is created by women. built by the hands of women. all this stuff that we brought that we broke our backs for. we didn’t need any help with it. we did it ourselves with sweat and the muscle. that’s definitely part of what i love about being here is just that feeling of all this awesomeness i’m experiencing. yeah, this was created by women. only women. these gender-defying roles and duties gave them a sense of power and efficacy, causing them to question gender-prescribed limitations on roles and tasks they performed in their daily lives. “festival family” and powerful relationships many of those interviewed were long-time attendees and had developed close relationships with other women at the festival, which served as social support and accountability in their lives, even outside the parameters of the festival. the term “festival family” was used to describe these relationships, and indeed, for several older participants who had been rejected by their biological families after revealing their sexual orientation, this “festival family” had served the role that their families had previously occupied in their lives and gave them emotional support and affirmation: yeah, these women i will put my life on the line for. and i know they would for me too, we’re that type. but that comes, for me that comes from a background of losing my own family and haven’t seen my family in over 20 years. because of who i am. so, total rejection. and so i have all this love inside and many of us have experienced things like that. younger women were less likely to be completely rejected by their biological families for their sexual identities; however, they still noted that they felt a sense of family at the festival and considered the older women to be mothers and aunts to them and their children, and they relied on them for emotional support. unplugging from the world the camping environment gave the women opportunities for quiet reflection. most women could not get cellular reception within the festival grounds (though there were spaces in the parking lot where calls could be made). the positive aspect of this digital disconnection was that it allowed the attendees to “unplug” from technology and to engage in introspection, walks through nature, journaling, and quiet contemplation. women who came to the festival with partners noted that being away from technology was beneficial to their relationships: so the quality time and just the peace we can get here and just be away from ringing phones and texting and emails and work, definitely makes it so that we can just focus on each other. dedicated spaces for healing and ritual the festival offers spaces devoted to healing, such as workshops on sexual assault healing, sweat lodges, and rituals devoted to celebrating womanhood and sisterhood among women. the communal nature of healing spaces and normalization of seeking healing experiences for trauma and wounds had an empowering impact on the women by creating a collective safe space to process global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 trauma and wounds. there is a culture of ceremony around the idea of amazon women and the strength of women, including music, performances, and rituals: one particular opening ceremony where they were singing the song, calling all angels and i believe it was a couple of years ago...and they had women of every shape, size, color, age coming out wearing white and running through and at that moment, now i’m tearing up again just thinking about it like, i just, you know i couldn’t help but to cry because it was just such a cleansing and amazing experience because it was just, i mean that’s what i feel about fest, you know it’s calling all angels, calling all women, calling all, you know that’s what this is….that’s what this festival is about, that’s what this space is about. these events and ceremonies were places of healing from emotional wounds and were spaces of empowerment, where all women were celebrated as diverse, beautiful, and powerful. discussion and implications sexism pervades dominant culture, impacting women across multiple domains of their lives. women who do not adhere to traditional gender roles often face intensified acts of oppression and aggression as a result of noncompliance to gender norms (rudman, 1998; rudman & glick, 2001). michfest is an empowering alternative setting where these women choose to withdraw from the dominant culture for a week every year and to create a women-only setting formed on feminist beliefs with its own culture, traditions, rituals, and norms. the festival gives them a setting that is emotionally and physically safe. it offers both psychological empowerment by building a sense of efficacy and self-confidence (zimmerman & rappaport, 1988) and group empowerment by building relationships with like-minded women seeking to dismantle oppressive structures in the dominant culture (fosterfishman, et. al., 1998). the festival meets maton’s criteria for an empowering setting (2008) with its own strengths-based belief system that acts to inspire change in members. much of michfest culture was based around dianic and amazon ceremonies that celebrate matriarchal cultures and reject dominant patriarchal gender norms. women took on roles and duties that were contrary to dominant cultural gender norms and encouraged women to question gender-based social prescriptions and explore new roles and their identity outside options offered by patriarchal culture (reinharz, 1984, p. 329). this power to define their own gender roles and gain autonomy and control over their work and roles was psychologically empowering to the women (deci & ryan, 1985). the attendees also created a setting with unique norms of beauty and they celebrated women of all ages and sizes as beautiful, which counteracted that of the dominant cultural of idealized beauty. this led to a sense of psychological empowerment for attendees who gained a new sense of selfacceptance and confidence (zimmerman & rappaport, 1988). this also led them to question dominant standards of beauty in the patriarchal culture and led to emotional healing of wounds inflicted on them for not conforming to idealized beauty standards for women. as freire (1973) noted, empowerment is achieved through education and critical awareness, which were integral parts of the culture of the festival. consistent with what freire (1973) envisioned, by “dropping the armor” for one week each year and living within a unique alternative setting with its own counter-culture, michfest attendees global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 were raising critical consciousness about sexism and questioning the dominant culture in a way that gave them strength to resist internalizing oppressive messages throughout the rest of the year (prilleltensky, 2008). limitations and implications for future research michfest was often described by participants as being utterly unique. this uniqueness, while powerful to attendees, may limit the generalizability of our findings. however, due to the qualitative nature of the study, findings are meant to describe a particular alternative setting; they are not meant to serve as a definitive description of all alternative settings or factors that must be present in an alternative setting in order for it to be empowering. the very nature of alternative setting makes it more likely that each will be unique in some way. future research could examine additional settings and look for common features among them. addtionally, michfest lasts for only one week per year and includes a complete withdrawal from the dominant culture. it is possible that some of the empowering aspects of the festival (defying gender roles and duties, building strong social connections, and women-only spaces) could be replicated in other settings, such as weekly group meetings. however, without the intense immersive experience of a weeklong retreat, it is unclear whether these factors would have the same impact on participants. this study offers a snapshot view of participants’ experiences, but a longitudinal study of festival-goers would yield insights to patterns of attendance, the impact of repeat attendance, and whether participants recruit others to become involved in the festival. future research examining different types of alternative settings may clarify the impact of duration and intensity of the alternative setting on empowerment and healing. this study offers community psychologists insight into the setting characteristics that make this alternative setting empowering. these insights add to our understanding of empowerment and can inform our efforts in the field to construct and foster safe spaces for groups that are marginalized by the dominant culture. as existing literature on empowerment has been critiqued for its basis on traditionally masculine ideas of power and control (riger, 1993), this study’s focus on an explicitly feminist alternative community setting that focuses on empowerment for women is an important contribution. community psychologists working in practice with feminist groups may note whether similar themes arise in these settings. conclusions attending a women-only space devoted to feminist ideals was healing and empowering for attendees, andthe temporary nature of the festival did not seem to diminish its effect. they carried the empowerment, critical awareness of oppressive sexist culture, and emotional healing with them throughout the year, changing the way they processed daily acts of sexism and combatting the pressure to internalize oppression. all but one attendee stated that michfest was an utterly unique space for them. by examining this unique alternative setting, community psychologists, feminists, and those devoted to dismantling oppressive cultural systems learn more 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(2000). selfdetermination and empowerment: a feminist standpoint analysis of talk about disability. american journal of community psychology, 28, 671–695. swim, j. k., hyers, l. l., cohen, l. l., & ferguson, m. j. (2001). everyday sexism: evidence for its incidence, nature, and psychological impact from three daily diary studies. journal of social issues, 57, 31-53. zimmerman, m. a. (2000). empowerment theory. in handbook of community psychology (pp. 43-63). springer us. zimmerman, m. a., & rappaport, j. (1988). citizen participation, perceived control, and psychological empowerment. american journal of community psychology, 16, 725-750. 2013-004-final-20140205 community organizing: for resource provision or transformation? a review of the literature marcia rosalie hale university of california – los angeles key words: community organizing, empowerment, transformation, community psychology author biography: marcia rosalie hale, ma urban planning, marcierose@gmail.com, is a doctoral candidate studying conflict and community development at university of california – los angeles author note: this paper was presented at the international conference on race and community activism in edinburgh scotland, june 2013: “racism and anti-racism through education and community practice: an international exchange” recommended citation: hale, m. r. (2014). community organizing: for resource provision or transformation? a review of the literature. global journal of community psychology practice, 5(1), 1-9. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014       global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   community organizing: for resource provision or transformation? a review of the literature abstract community organizing was originally intended to be the most democratic form of activism, a tool to be used to empower the marginalized and voiceless, bringing people together to work toward a common goal. while the goals of organizing activities are diverse, they can be classified within two general objectives, the first of which is resource provision and the second, transformation. resource provision seeks to ensure that a community is provided with a resource it is lacking. transformative organizing includes but goes beyond the goal of resource provision, endeavoring to fundamentally change the community as well as larger structures to ensure the rights and liberties of groups and individuals, and to realize a more equitable distribution of resources and power. this paper explores those aspects that differentiate transformative organizing from resource provision and makes the case that individuals involved in organizing must experience personal transformation before we are able to fundamentally change external structures and systems, as the structures organizers seek to change dwell within the emotional and psychological lives of us all. key words: community organizing, empowerment, transformation, community psychology introduction in less than a century, community organizing has become a widely used tool that brings people together to work towards common goals. while the goals of organizing activities are diverse, they can be classified within two general objectives, the first of which is resource provision and the second, transformation. resource provision seeks to ensure that a community is provided with a resource it is lacking, such as jobs, education, or housing. transformative organizing, on the other hand, includes but goes beyond the goal of providing a specific resource, endeavoring to fundamentally change the community as well as larger structures to ensure the rights and liberties of groups and individuals, as well as to realize a more equitable distribution of resources and power. this review of the literature poses the questions: what are the similarities and differences between organizing for resource provision and for transformation? what are the factors that lead to organizing having transformative effects versus only providing a specific resource? and finally, what is needed for transformative community organizing to extend its impact? this paper begins with an introduction to community organizing, followed by an overview of its purpose. after a brief summary of the history of organizing, the two objectives of resource provision and transformation are analyzed through the works of multiple authors. transformation is then defined through the literature, namely works on empowerment. several critiques of organizing are examined, followed by an analysis of how transformative organizing can deepen its impact. while its origins are found in efforts to deepen social justice, today politicians and activists, conservatives and liberals alike, use community organizing towards a wide range of goals. organizing efforts have been similarly used to both dismantle and to bolster social justice goals, which aim to ensure an equitable distribution of resources and power. given the broad array of today’s community organizing activities, this literature review is focused on the history and analysis of organizing as it has been used towards the end of furthering social justice, rather than organizing that has been used for other purposes, such as political interests or by the labor movement. further, there is a close relationship between organizing and social movements, with movements often supported by organizing efforts. however, as the movement literature is also expansive, it is not treated in this review. what is organizing? at its most elemental, community organizing is the action of bringing people together, mobilizing communities to meet common goals. “community” here refers to a group of people with a shared interest, including spatial, political, social and economic interests. the literature provides definitions that clearly frame the goals and actions of organizing. orr (2007) defines community organizing as “the process that engages people, organizations, and communities toward the goals of increased individual and community global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014       global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   control, political efficacy, improved quality of life, and social justice . . . the central feature of community organizing is that it is a process and strategy designed to build political power” (p. 2). in building political power, organizing by definition restores rather than diminishes democracy and is collaborative and participatory; it is a bottom-up versus top-down approach (orr, 2007, p. 10). many authors distinguish between efforts labeled “community organizing” that originate from outside of the community, and “true” organizing that emanates from within. staples (2004) finds this distinction central to any definition of organizing and asserts that community organizing is as much if not more a philosophy than a method: “organizing is a bottom-up philosophical approach to social change, not simply a method to achieve it” (p. 2). in this philosophy, social change is achieved through organizing by harnessing and building on indigenous leadership and participation. seminal organizer, marshall ganz elaborates the role of organizers in his 2002 piece, “what is organizing?” leadership development is among the many tasks of an organizer; identifying, recruiting and developing leadership around which to build community is a primary goal of community organizing. organizers are leaders who facilitate the development of relationships, understanding and action so that they work in concert to support and mobilize collective action. they do this through motivating “action by deepening people’s understanding of who they are, what they want, and why” (p.16). organizers are leaders who take on the responsibility to act, as well as creating opportunities for strategic action. sen (2003) refers to community organizing as a “distinct form of organization building and social activism that grew in the united states mostly after world war ii” (p. xliv). traditionally, community organizing involves building membership organizations and often bringing together the membership of existing organizations. orr (2007) estimates more than 6,000 such organizations and lists the five leading national organizing networks as the industrial areas foundation (iaf), pacific institute for community organization (pico), the gamaliel foundation, and direct action and research training (dart), association of community organizations for reform now (acorn), and the center for third world organizing (ctwo) (p. 2). however, since the book’s publication in 2007, acorn was officially disbanded in 2010, following nationwide controversy generated by conservative activists. why organize? scholars such as orr (2007) situate community organizing within the contexts of equitable access and use of power, i.e. “engaging disadvantaged communities in order to achieve power” (p. 16). specific resources such as jobs, education and housing are also provided to communities as a result of organizing efforts. staples (2004) refers to the term “single-issue mobilizations,” coined by influential activist and researcher, gary delgado, to describe organizing that is done around a specific issue in a community, such as improving a road or resisting a factory that wants to locate in their area (p. 3). during his days as a community organizer, current united states president barack obama (1988) wrote about the relational and community-building aspects of organizing, as “it enables people to break their crippling isolation from each other, to reshape their mutual values and expectations and rediscover the possibility of acting collaboratively – the prerequisites of any successful self-help initiative” (p. 2). organizing in chicago’s inner city has resulted in more accountable schools; the establishment of job training programs; revitalization of parks; and reduction in crime and drug problems. additionally, obama (1988) notes, organizing efforts have allowed “plain folks . . . to access the levers of power, and a sophisticated pool of local civic leadership has been developed” (p. 2). power resulting from this pool of civic leadership has influenced policy at multiple levels, including local, state, and federal policies. sen (2003) recognizes significant federal policy gains to include the programs of the great society, the civil rights act of 1964, and the war on poverty (p. xliv). arguably the father of community organizing, saul alinsky envisioned the organizer’s role in the 1969 introduction to the vintage edition of his 1946 manifesto, reveille for radicals. alinsky (1989) defined the role of organizers as having “the job of organizing people so that they will have the power and opportunity to best meet each unforeseeable future crisis as they move ahead to realize those values of equality, justice, freedom, the preciousness of human life, and all those rights and values propounded by judeo-christianity and democratic tradition” (p. xiv). organizing has traditionally been used to build a power base to be activated toward the end goal of social justice. community organizing says delgado (1986), links the “provision of collective goods and services to geographically defined class interest; by so doing, they create new avenues for understanding power and inequality” (p. 40). organizing creates these new avenues by building consciousness through the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014       global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   demystification of “production and allocation of collective goods” and creating “replicable local organizations that encourage and validate a contradictory system of oppositional behavior” (delgado, 1986, p. 41). as will be discussed later, organizing for the allocation of a specific good is resource provision, while harnessing the process of reallocation to deepen the community’s understanding of the system, of power and inequality, and to build a “contradictory system of oppositional behavior,” is transformative organizing. history in her introduction to stir it up: lessons in community organizing and advocacy, sen (2003) dates community organizing back to the close of world war ii, however orr recognizes the roots of organizing originating in the settlement house movement of the late nineteenth century (orr, 2007, p. 4). whichever era you trace its roots to, organizing as a profession is correlated to the creation of the industrial areas foundation (iaf), founded in the 1940s by saul alinsky; the iaf is widely acknowledged as the first organizing network. in addition to creating this first network, alinsky is credited as the father of contemporary organizing due to having created and recorded models of organizing that were foundational to the literature, as well as standards and training programs which have established community organizing as a professional field. sen (2003) outlines the trajectory of organizing, beginning with alinsky’s work in the meatpacking and stockyards section of chicago. at the time, neighborhood divisions were often marked by european ancestry as well as religion, with polish, irish and other southern and eastern european immigrants facing job, education, and housing discrimination, alongside latino and african american communities. alinsky conceived of and built back of the yards neighborhood council, an organization that would bring together churches, labor unions, and service organizations as a united front used to pressure city hall into expanding social services and education. their efforts proved so successful that alinsky created the iaf in order to adapt and test the model in various other cities. the iaf was soon working with organizational leaders across the country. alinsky’s approach of unifying communities gained further popularity during the late 1960s when the iaf was called on to build organizations that would organize communities as an alternative response to racial riots and unrest. since its inception, organizing has evolved into varied models and approaches that have been adapted to a plethora of communities and needs. the varied approaches build on the work of alinsky who recorded his models and laid the ground for others to critique and adapt his methods to fit current dynamics and problems. the evolution of organizing will be summarized in the “critiques” section. provision versus transformation in their 1990 chapter “transformative populism and the development of a community of color,” kennedy, tilly and gaston explore the differences between redistributive and transformative populism. working in roxbury, then one of boston’s ghettos, the authors captured the tension between the two strategies for community development. redistributive populism they classify as having an end goal of resource redistribution. to meet this goal, non-class differences including race are suppressed in order to unite the people around “a least-common denominator program based on traditional ideology” (kennedy, tilly, & gaston, p. 302). transformative populism on the other hand has as its “central goal the transformation of consciousness through empowerment” (p. 302). transformative strategies are recognized as emphasizing diversity as well as supporting unity, and co-creating a derived ideology in the process of educating and mobilizing members. while wealth is the focus of redistribution in the first case, transformative populism seeks to redistribute power (p. 315). this classification provides the frame through which to analyze community organizing, namely the dual roles organizations can play of organizing for the provision of resources and also for transformation. resource provision includes both funds and services, while transformation can take place at the individual, community, socio-economic, and political levels; consciousness of the collective community and its individual members can be transformed, as can policy transform the political, economic or social structure of the country. the end result of transformative organizing is the redistribution of power, while organizing for resource provision seeks to secure a specific resource, often for economic or social improvement. delgado (1986) characterizes this division between goals as the struggle community organizations are facing in two arenas: “they pose demands for immediate economic improvements, in terms of the distribution of the social wage, and they demand democratic rights and liberties” (p. 40). here, delgado is pointing to the provision of resources to make immediate economic improvements, and structural transformation that would ensure that equal rights and liberties are extended to all. alinsky considered community organizing to be a radical and transformative activity, evidenced in his two famous works, reveille for radicals and rules for global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014       global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   radicals. however, as early as 1941 alinsky wrote about the necessity of improving the economic life of communities in order to create the foundation for significant change. in his signature prose, alinsky wrote: “the back of the yards neighborhood council concedes that constructive work within limits can be done without reference to the economy of the community. but until the economy of that community is significantly changed, until the problem of economic security is dealt with, one actually has the paper decoration one finds on the end of lamb chops – but no lamb chops.” (p. 806) resource provision towards the improvement of economic life is of obvious importance to communities. however, providing resources does not necessarily support either the growth or transformation of communities. smyth (2009) critiques the resources provision approach, as disadvantage is a socially, politically, and economically constructed phenomenon. simply providing more resources through the structures that create disadvantage will therefore only perpetuate disparity. further, resources can be provided that are barely related to the needs of the community (p. 11). smyth (2009) goes on to caution against community action that results in the cooption of member’s efforts by acting as a “progressive discourse to veil a costcutting agenda by the state,” which places the most burden and onus on the most disadvantaged (p. 12). in this, smyth foretells of the tendency government has to place responsibility on any party that steps forward. he further warns against shifting focus too far away from material inequities to goals of inclusion and engagement as we can lose sight of the contradictions that generate conditions of poverty and inequity (p. 17). organizing should therefore be aware of the need for resources, as well as for transformation of communities and larger structures. building community capacity should focus on leadership development toward political savvy; community power that brings residents and resources strategically together to analyze inequities and solutions; and social capital that bridges relationships in order to bring broad networks together for collaboration toward mutual goals (p. 19). organizing is transformative when it provides analysis and leadership skills to address the “underlying conditions producing debilitating inequities” (smyth, 2009, p. 9). of course, these “underlying conditions” are found in the systems and institutions that make up our economic, social and political systems and can be addressed to some degree through policy levers. however, the conditions also exist within the values and belief structures of individuals. transformative organizing then works to change “the nature of the relationships communities of disadvantage have over aspects of power in their lives” (smyth, 2009, p. 10). fisher and kling (1989) envision the task of organizers to be tying “people’s understanding of their grievances to an analysis that builds upon, and takes them beyond, the constituencies and communities with which they immediately identify” (p. 209). expanding the notion of community that one identifies with can thus change the relationship communities of disadvantage have to power. members begin to identify themselves not as being a part of a lower class or disadvantaged neighborhood, but of a broad community of people being affected by similar systems and policies. community consciousness can then replace class as the initiator of action and the flashpoint of social conflict (fisher & kling, 1989, p. 206). smock (2004) uses the term “transformative frames,” to describe this type of community transformation. citing snow et al., “transformative frames are collective action frames that redefine ‘activities, events, and biographies that are already meaningful from the standpoint of some primary framework, in terms of another framework’” so that participants can see circumstances from another view entirely (p. 231). this is important, as “in order to build a collective vision for long-term structural change, community organizations must help residents to develop the critical perspective necessary for understanding the connection between their everyday experiences and these broader structural dynamics” (smock, 2004, p. 231). connecting one’s individual reality with broader dynamics and encompassing systems provides motivation and tools for transformation: “ transformative frames provide residents with new lenses through which to make sense of their experiences – lenses that enable residents to perceive the connection between their own problems and broader economic and political arrangements and to conceptualize long-term structural solutions to these unjust arrangements.” (pp. 231-232) obama (1988) notes that both economic improvements and electoral politics can help to improve the lives of marginalized people (p. 1). however, alinsky (1941) asserts that while the economic life of a community must be improved if the community is to step into its own power and create significant and sustainable change, the only way to ensure that members’ rights are being met is through a community organization that is “built, owned, and operated by themselves rather than by outside interests” (p. 807). empowerment global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014       global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   a key concept in analyzing organizing’s impact on communities as transformative is whether or not the community and its members experience increased empowerment as a result of organizing efforts. like the term “organizing,” “empowerment” has wide and varied uses. however, social justice literature broadly and organizing literature more specifically harbors exacting authors who have explored the concept as it relates to the field. as the scribe and arguable creator of radical organizing, alinsky in the early 1940s distinguished between organizing for rights and favors, defining work done to further rights as empowering while organizing for favors risks the opposite effect. he asserted that communities should be empowered to fight for their rights rather than asking for favors. he describes the back of the yards neighborhood council as being formulated around “the concept of ‘rights’ as over and against the prevailing antiquated welfare motif of ‘benevolence’” (alinksy, 1941, p.807). through this lens, community organizing for resource provision can be seen as requesting favors of the “welfare motif,” rather than ensuring that equal rights and liberties are being extended to the community. this position critiques the systems, political, economic and social, as having failed to extend similar if not equal rights to all citizens and acknowledges that equal rights and liberties are a part of our constitutional contract. it would therefore be a transformative act of organizing to shift the consciousness of the community from asking for favors to knowing and fighting for their rights; being empowered to do so, the community then transforms the system to ensure the provision of rights and their associated resources, rather than asking for resources without the structural changes that would ensure sustainability of access and provision. in 1997, elizabeth rocha took on the task of attempting to define and map out empowerment. drawing from the conceptual framework of sherry arnstein’s “ladder of citizen participation,” rocha’s article, “a ladder of empowerment” provides a typology, “constructed with the intent of disentangling the web of conflicting empowerment theory” (p. 31). the article therefore serves to address concerns as to what exactly empowerment is and how an individual or community comes about it. rocha describes empowerment as one of many forms of the broader notion of power, and goes on to typologize the various experiences of power one goes through in becoming personally empowered, and then being a part of community empowerment. rocha characterizes five rungs or types of empowerment, beginning with the individual and ending with the community as the locus of power that has political influence. both rocha and alinsky mark the movement of consciousness, from the individual to the collective level, as the growth of empowerment. individuals are able to address those issues which affect themselves, and then those issues which affect their community, and lastly there is a linking of personal and communal issues to the broader community affected, nationally and internationally. the table below is a recreation of rocha’s ladder that describes the five rungs of empowerment: table 1. (cf. rocha, p. 35 – table 2) atomistic individual embedded individual mediated socio-political political locus *individual *individual *individual *community *individual *community *community goal *personal satisfaction *increased coping ability *personal satisfaction *competence in negotiating daily environment *knowledge & information for proper decision making *individual development *expanded access to community resources *expanded access to community services, goods & rights process *therapy *daily living skills *self-help *organizational participation *professional/ client relationship *organizational participation *collaborative grass-roots action *political action, voting, protest *political representation global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014       global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   power experience *nurturing support *nurturing support *direct & control self *support *strengthen self *control by helping *moralized action *support *strengthen self *influence, coerce others *together-ness *influence, coerce others *assertion smyth also distinguishes between different types of power, discriminating between relational and conservative power. relational power smyth characterizes as the ability to collaborate in order to accomplish a goal, versus conservative power, or power asserted over another. while conservative power seeks influence or domination over members or groups, relational power is the coherence of inclusion and participation that influences and motivates social justice. there is yet another primary marker for distinguishing empowerment. staples notes the importance of the participatory process and further asserts that for a community to be truly empowered, it must provide its own leadership. staples (2004) in fact places the source of advocacy as a definitional factor of describing organizing: “to the extent that non-members advocate on behalf of the community (e.g., advocates for youth), the process is not organizing, and to the degree that self-advocacy takes place (e.g., youth act on their own interests), organizing is taking place” (p. 2). similarly, the existence of a community-based, member organization that handles multiple issues and is recognized as representative of the community is another hallmark of participation and empowerment. however, it is important to note that external leadership and skills can be crucial at various points in the life of an organizing campaign, or a community-based organization. for instance, at the beginning of a campaign, especially if there is no existing organization, external leadership might be necessary to mobilize members and resources, as well as to create a campaign or organizational structure. the key to empowerment is the cultivation of indigenous leadership that will take over. community empowerment is then evidenced in the presence of sustainable, community-based organizations, member participation, self-advocacy, and indigenous leadership. analysis a range of authors from delgado to fisher and kling mark coalition building as a key factor for success in community organizing. yet because resources are scarce, there is much competition between organizations and organizing networks. competition pits organizing networks against each other as they vie for membership and resources; networks therefore seek out other progressive organizations to partner with but rarely work with each other (delgado, 1986, p. 42). while there are many organizational factors at the micro level that explain a lack of resources, the lack of resources available to both communities and organizations can be attributed at the macro level to the two systemic tensions of scarcity and exclusion. our current neo liberal agenda that prioritizes individualism and competition generates, for example, an education system in which those who cannot afford to pay are excluded from private education (smyth, 2009, p. 9). scarce resources are then shared within the public education system, limiting students’ access to mentoring, one-on-one attention, materials, and programs that would increase their lifetime opportunities. organizing efforts have seen some success at providing resources such as funding for education, housing and health care, as well as supporting the transformation of communities. however, most of us still live in a society where we face these core issues of exclusion and scarcity. stall and stoecker (1997) note that race, gender and class remain as barriers to inclusion, yet resources are scarce in most if not all communities (p. 742). even wealthy communities face the threat if not a current reality of water and clean air shortages, though for many communities the risk is markedly more severe than for others. much community organizing still exists within a competitive and individualistic paradigm; as noted by delgado, organizing networks seek collaboration with other progressive organizations but not with each other. competition between networks hinders larger collective mobilization toward systemic change. how then can we proceed to the next level of systemic or institutional transformation, which would transcend tendencies toward exclusion, competition and scarcity? i believe we must go deeper than community awareness, empowerment and action to the structural consciousness that still holds organizing within a paradigm marked by competition and individualism, scarcity and exclusion. to reach this depth, we must penetrate ourselves and identify where structural realities are held in our past experiences and current perspectives, and are therefore generating our future global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014       global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   realities. as saul alinsky wrote in 1946, “the structure will always be no more than a reflection of its substance” (alinsky, 1989, p. 40). the substance alinsky refers to is the people and the structure that of society. how then through organizing can we transform the substance, the people, ourselves? while organizing has held since its inception radical views of structural change, perhaps the vision of substantive change can reach further into the potential of the substance itself, the potential each of us as individuals hold to transform systemic patterns that live inside of us. organizers, both on the ground and those administrating organizations, hold inside of ourselves the systems and agendas of the structures that we have spent our lives within. values and belief systems marked by competition and individualism lead us to act unconsciously in ways that perpetuate exclusion and scarcity. organizations reflect the people who participate in and run them, and people are partial reflections of the systems that they were raised within. further efforts at transformative organizing would do well to predicate themselves on the continuing personal transformation of organizers and members. by becoming aware of the tendencies we have towards thinking in terms of scarcity and exclusion, we can create organizations and support community growth that reflects the values of social justice organizing, namely collaboration, participation, and a more equitable distribution of both wealth and power. organizers and their organization’s members can thus be seen as fulfilling the “great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well” (freire, 2000, p. 44). yet paulo freire (2000) warns that “almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed . . . tend to become oppressors. the very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped” (p. 45). freire describes this phenomenon wherein the oppressed becomes the oppressor as a stage within the evolutionary process of an individual who conceives of and struggles for freedom; identification with the oppressor is a stage in the evolution of consciousness, from oppression to freedom. here i argue that existential and concrete systems that have ordered and informed our thought structures rarely if ever by their own volition disappear or transform beyond recognition. our thought structures and patterned views of social, economic and political reality will remain at various levels identified with those of the “oppressor” unless and until we make a conscious and concerted effort to bring our awareness to the places in which the “oppressor” exists inside of our psychological and emotional structures. in the words of freire, it is in discovering ourselves to be “hosts of the oppressor” that we can contribute to the “midwifery of . . . liberating pedagogy” (freire, p. 48). in this case, liberating pedagogy is any process, method or practice that allows us to identify where the “oppressor” resides, so that we can conceive of visions of social justice, as well as strategies to reach it, that are more in line with freedom than with the old dynamics of oppression. by identifying where and how the systemic tensions that we hope to relieve through organizing efforts live inside of us, we can hope to engage in organizing that is more systemically transformative. summary resources are a necessary but not sufficient aspect of transformative organizing. communities must have resources and economic growth supports stable, healthy communities. however, resources provided through systems of oppression are likely positioned to perpetuate inequality. further, resources can be provided that are barely related to community needs. to be transformative, organizing requires participation from community members as well as indigenous leadership. organizing can then utilize the demystification of “production and allocation of collective goods” to build consciousness towards the end of generating contradictory systems that will oppose and transform those currently in place (delgado, 1986, p. 41). transformative community organizing differs from organizing for resource provision in that the goal is the redistribution of both resources and power rather than the redistribution of resources alone. transformative organizing empowers individuals and communities by fostering indigenous leadership and advocacy, as well as sustainable community organizations, which represent community diversity and needs, and are able to respond with analysis, action and leadership to meet those needs. individuals and communities thus empowered to acknowledge their position within broader systems, political, economic and social, can then act to transform those systems to ensure that equal rights and liberties are being extended to all. transformative organizing seeks to transform both the consciousness of the people and the structure of the systems we live within. many of the problems organizing in the u.s. seeks to solve are marked by the systemic tensions of individualism and competition. these tensions breed belief structures organized around notions of exclusivity and scarcity, structures that are contained within individual as well as the collective consciousness. as organizers, whether on the ground or global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   march  2014       global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9   in the office, holding formal or informal positions, we unconsciously bring these dynamics into our organizing efforts, evidenced by persisting competition and the absence of collaboration between large organizing networks. to fulfill the radical vision of structural change that organizing has held since its birth as a profession, perhaps what is required at the most fundamental level is personal transformation of individuals engaged at all levels of community organizing. for this, we must reach inside of ourselves and identify how structural realities are held in our values, belief systems, worldviews, actions and reactions. this call to action or next step in transformative community organizing requests that time and resources be allocated to the personal transformation of organizers and members; we need time and often guidance to identify where and how the systems we have lived within live inside of us. we can then as individuals, organizations, and communities see how systemic tensions are perpetuated, and engage in actions that will be deeply transformative. references alinsky, s. d. (1941, may). community analysis and organization. american journal of sociology. 46(6), 797-808. alinsky, s. d. (1989). reveille for radicals. (vintage books edition). new york: random house. delgado, g. (1986, spring). community organizing and political action. social policy, 16(4), 40-47. delgado, g. (1994). beyond the politics of place. oakland: applied research center. 1-43. feire, p. (2000). pedagogy of the oppressed. (30th anniversary edition), (myra bergman ramos, trans.). continuum international publishing group. 43-71. fisher, r, & kling, j. (1989). community mobilization: prospects for the future. urban affairs review. 25, 200-211. ganz, m. (2002, fall). what is organizing? social policy. 16-17. kennedy, m., tilly, c., & gaston, m. (1990). transformative populism and the development of a community of color. in j. kling & p. posner, (eds.), dilemmas of activism (pp. 302-324). philadelphia: temple university press. kennedy, m. (2006, winter). book review: democracy in action: community organizing and urban change. review of radical political economics. 151-154. miller, m. (1996) beyond the politics of place: a critical review. san francisco: organize training center. obama, b. (1988, aug. – sep.). why organize? problems and promise in the inner city. illinois issues. orr, m. (2007). community organizing and the changing ecology of civic engagement. in m. orr (ed.), transforming the city: community organizing and the challenge of political change (pp. 1-27). lawrence, kansas: university press of kansas. rocha, e. (1997). ladder of empowerment. journal of planning and education research. 17, 31-44. sen, r. (2003). stir it up: lessons in community organizing and advocacy. san francisco: josseybass. xliii-lxv. smock, k. (2004). democracy in action: community organizing and urban change. new york: columbia university press. 10-36 & 222-246. smyth, j. (2009). critically engaged community capacity building and the ‘community organizing’ approach in disadvantaged contexts. critical studies in education. 50(1), 9-22. stall, s., & stoecker, r. (1997). community organizing or organizing community? gender and the crafts of empowerment. a comm-org working paper. http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers96/gender2.html. staples, l. (2004). excerpt from “power to the people” basic organizing philosophy and goals. roots to power: a manual for grassroots organizing. london: praeger. 1-14. 2012-lisboa-002-empowerment empowerment – a relational challenge joão aguiar contact details: jfaguiar@netcabo.pt abstract empowerment promotion is a major challenge for community psychology. practitioners’ understanding of change processes and relationship building capacity are crucial elements for this. we reflect on some methodological and theoretical frames. we consider that the naturalistic paradigm and method can be applied to empowerment promotion, particularly if it is focused on creating change based on people’s voice, participation and actions (aguiar & moniz, 2006). besides, it helps to understand elements, boundaries and timings of change process. so, it can be a very useful method for action research. we believe that empowerment promotion is a relational challenge and that community development paths are based on relationship building, from the group to the community levels. it is a major challenge to promote empowerment, because to listen to voices of people, to understand their strengths, and to work with them in a cooperative way implies from the practitioners an understanding of empowering aspects of change processes and assuming a role of facilitator. the challenge practitioners face of combining top-down and bottom-up approaches is also an important aspect that have impact on individual, relational, organizational and community levels of empowerment promotion, where creativity play a special role. key words: empowerment; community empowerment this paper aims to bring together some basic and crucial elements for empowerment processes, linking individuals and groups towards community empowerment and community capacity. we discuss the relevance of relationships and the crucial role they play in integrative and empowerment promoting processes. this work is also a reflection of a community intervention on a small rural village that aimed to promote community change. we present some theoretical basis for the development of individual, group and community empowerment. empowerment promotion is a major challenge for community psychology. practitioners’ understanding of change processes and relationship building capacity are crucial elements for this. this work is based on a community intervention on a small rural village that aimed to promote community change. this project was built to promote free time activities for the village children (top-down approach) and to bring together the children, parents, schools, local administration and local organization so that together they could find out what they wanted to do for the lack of free time activities in the local area (bottom-up approach). we were able to conduct the research in such a way that we could deepen the understanding of community empowerment and its paradoxes and challenges and that empowerment promotion is a relational challenge and that community development paths are based on relationship building, from the group to the community levels. we share some of our findings. zimmerman (2000a) refers to 3 basic aspects of empowerment: participation, control and critical awareness. participation is the individual’s actions that contribute to community contexts and processes; global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 4 december 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 control is the effective or the perception of ability to influence decisions; and critical awareness is the ability to analyze and understand the social and political environment. these three aspects are crucial to understand empowerment’s theory and practice. those who participate in decision making and meaningful activities are likely to be empowered (chavis & wandersman, 1990; rappaport, 1981, 1987; wandersman & florin, 2000; zimmerman, 1990; zimmerman & rappaport, 1988), although simple participation is not a condition to develop psychological empowerment. edelstein e wandersman (1987; cit. in rich et al., 1995) stated that participation can promote empowerment, depending on the nature and the result of the experience. so, participation, according to eklund (1999), can be “marginal” (when people have none or little influence in the process), “substantial” (when people are involved in defining priorities and activities execution) or structural (when it is a comprehensive component of the project and an ideological basis for all activities). control comes with participation in collective processes and is the effective or perception of the ability to influence decisions, mobilize resources and solve problems, building an effective personal and group participation. control enables the participation process to be gradual and coherent to people’s critical awareness. this implies a redistribution of power (cf. riger, 1993), so the process can be meaningful and real, and participation can boost an empowerment process. critical awareness allows, trough participation and control, people to understand power structures, decision making processes, and how to influence decisions and mobilize resources (zimmerman, 2000a). these three aspects are crucial for constructive intern dialog and praxis, which are crucial elements for empowerment process (kieffer, 1984). constructive intern dialog means the internal contradictions that people should feel to respond, in their paradoxical learning process. praxis is a dynamic cycle of practice and reflection, at the core of empowerment, through which people find new understandings and action, making empowerment a transformative process through action (kieffer, 1984) – and an active process to structure identity. so, social relationships and formal and informal social support can play a determinant role for social integration to be as collaborative as possible, building individual freedom for action coherent to meaningful social relation and bondings, and consequently opening people’s minds to diversity. kieffer (1984) states that empowerment is a gradual process that takes different stages or “eras” towards participation and commitment, from entry – the initial exploration of authority and social norms; to progress – where peers and mentor support are important to develop critical awareness; incorporation – where organizational and political competencies and confrontation with activity takes place and where proactivity is developed; and commitment – where social action are brought to individual’s daily life structure. this means that empowerment is a gradual process that goes from marginal, to substantial and structural participation. therefore these stages are essential so that active participation can lead to continual community involvement and proactive leadership, building a future for themselves and to community. during this process, skills and competencies are developed, so one’s contribute can also be gradually more effective and structural. kieffer (1984) stands that empowerment is not about competencies, but it is about participatory competencies, which are a convergence of the practice of all aspects of competence. that means that empowerment is about proactivity and adequate participatory practices in community, which represents a major relational challenge: social interactions through collaborative relationships. community psychologists have stated that community contexts should promote interdependence and diversity (kelly, azelton, burzette & mock, 1994) as well as empowerment (maton e salem, 1995). maton and salem found 4 aspects in community contexts that promote empowerment: (1) a belief system that promotes growth, based on strengths and focused in something beyond the individual; (2) an opportunity to play a structural role that can be integrative, accessible and multifunctional; (c) a support system that can be inclusive, peer-based and that allows sense of community; and (4) a leadership that is inspired, talented, shared and committed to the context and its members. kelly, azelton, burzette & mock (1994) consider other aspects like experience interdependence, informal interaction, keep communication channels open, and space to reflection and integration. these contexts should also include face-to-face interaction that promotes the context, opportunity to apply skills that promote global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 4 december 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 cooperation, social norms where contribute is explicit (beyond he implicit), and valuing the group process. this perspective on individual, relationships and contexts are crucial for community psychologists. besides being facilitators for community change, community psychologists can be active players for relationships building – linking individuals and communities – and context building, promoting context’s dynamics, functions and meanings. this way, community change can be a consequence of community building. empowerment can be viewed at individual, organizational and community level (perkins & zimmerman, 1995; zimmerman, 2000a, 2000b). these levels are interdependent and in each one empowerment can be viewed as a process and as a result (zimmerman, 2000a). aguiar and moniz (2006) state a paradox of empowerment, particularly at collective level. the emphasis on problem solving and action can lead to faster results, although it can imply marginal participation of members – the focus is on results and it can lead to small wins, which are important to mobilize people in the long run, but it can decrease the opportunities for process ownership by members. on the other hand, the emphasis on people’s involvement can boost structural participation – the focus is on process, which can facilitate the ownership, although the risk can be the slower capacity to act, that can undermine involvement. empowerment interventions should embrace its paradoxical elements (rappaport, 1981). so, the challenge is to act and involve people and that requires a relational perspective and continual attention. so, collectively, there should be two parallel and complementary tracks, combining topdown and bottom-up approaches laverack & labonte (2000). maton (2000) states that these two approaches have advantages and disadvantages and that its combination allows long term change. all these aspects should be considered along the community empowerment continuum (rissel, 1994): from individuals, to small groups, community organizations, coalitions and political action – so that social movements can contribute to community empowerment and capacity, with the purpose of act collectively actions to address community issues and to build healthier and more prosperous communities. references chavis, d. & wandersman, a. (1990). sense of community in the urban environment: a catalyst for participation and community development. american journal of community psychology, vol.18, 1, 55-81. eklund, l. (1999). from citizen participation towards community empowerment: an analysis on health promotion from citizen perspective. dissertação académica apresentada à faculty of medicine of the university of tampere, tampere. kelly, j., azelton, l., burzette, r. & mock, l. (1994). creating social settings for diversity: an ecological thesis. in edison j. trickett, roderick j. watts e dina birman (eds.) human diversity: perspectives on people in context (pp.424-451). san francisco: jossey-bass. kieffer, c. (1984). citizen empowerment: a developmental perspective. in julian rappaport e robert hess (eds.) studies in empowerment (pp. 9-36). new york: the haworth press. laverack, g. & labonte, r. (2000) a planning framework for community empowerment goals within health promotion. health, policy and planning, 15 (3), 255-262. maton, k. (2000). making a diference: the social ecology of social transformation. american journal of community psychology, vol. 28, 1, 25-57. maton, k., & salem, d. (1995) organizational characteristics of empowering community settings: a multiple case study approach. american journal of community psychology, 23(5), 631-656. perkins, d. & zimmerman, m. (1995). empowerment theory, research, and application.american journal of community psychology, vol. 23, 5, 569-579. rappaport, j. (1981). in praise of paradox: a social policy os empowerment over prevention. american journal of community psychology, vol. 9, 1, 1-25. rappaport, j. (1987). terms of empowerment/exemplars of prevention: toward a theory for community psychology. american journal of community psychology, vol.15, 2, 121-147. rich, r., edelstein, m., hallman, w. & wandersman, a. (1995). citizen participation and empowerment: the case of local environmental hazards. american journal of community psychology, vol. 23, 5, 657-675. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 4 december 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 riger, s. (1993). what’s wrong with empowerment. american journal of community psychology, vol. 21, 3, 279-292. rissel, c. (1994). empowerment the holy grail of health promotion. health promotion international, vol. 9, 1, 39-47. wandersman, a. & florin, p. (2000). citizen participation and community organizations. in julian rappaport & edward seidman (eds.), handbook of community psychology (pp.247271). new york: plenum publishers. zimmerman, m. (1990). taking aim on empowerment research: on the distintion between individual and psychological conceptions. american journal of community psychology, vol.18, 1, 169-177. zimmerman, marc a. (2000a). empowerment and community participation: a review for the next millennium. in josé ornelas (ed.) ii congresso europeu de psicologia aplicada (pp. 17-42). lisboa:instituto superior de psicologia aplicada. zimmerman, m. a. (2000b) empowerment theory: psychological, organizational and community levels of analysis. in jullian rappaport and edward seidman (eds.) handbook of community psychology (pp. 43-59). new york: kluwer academic/plenum publishers. zimmerman, m. & rappaport, j. (1988). citizen participation, perceived control and psychological empowerment. american journal of community psychology, vol. 16, 5, 725-750. microsoft word v2i3-0001-ms final.docx self-reported needs of youth and families: informing system change and advocacy efforts katherine p. strater, melissa strompolis, ryan p. kilmer, james r. cook katherine p. strater, ba, is a doctoral student at the university of north carolina at charlotte. kpstrate@uncc.edu melissa strompolis, ma, is a doctoral student at the university of north carolina at charlotte. mstrompo@uncc.edu ryan p. kilmer, ph.d., is an associate professor of psychology at the university of north carolina at charlotte. rpkilmer@uncc.edu james r. cook, ph.d., is a professor of psychology at the university of north carolina at charlotte and president-elect of the society for community research and action. jcook@uncc.edu key words: mental health, needs assessment, focus group, system change, systems of care running head: self-reported needs recommended citation: strater, k. p., strompolis, m., kilmer, r. p., & cook, j. r. (2011). self-reported needs of youth and families: informing system change and advocacy efforts. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(3), 1-12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   december  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2  of  8   self-reported needs of youth and families: informing system change and advocacy efforts katherine p. strater, melissa strompolis, ryan p. kilmer, james r. cook abstract this study sought to explore caregiver-reported needs of youth and families receiving services within a system of care (soc). data were collected to augment the in-depth, standardized interview protocols that are part of the national evaluation of socs in order to identify gaps in the local delivery of services and supports to youth with severe emotional and/or behavioral disorders and their families. primary caregivers of youth receiving services within the soc were asked to report on the current need(s) of the youth and the current need(s) of the family. these open-ended responses were coded and examined for themes. the most common needs of the youth were services and life management, while the most common needs of the family were services and financial. focus groups conducted with youth and caregivers confirmed these themes. findings from this study shed light on the diverse needs of these families, indicate that families believe they are not receiving adequate supports and services, underscore that youth have distinct views, and highlight that providing a way for the typically disenfranchised youth and families to express their perspective is central to the functioning of socs. study findings were used by a local nonprofit organization to inform their advocacy efforts, and were incorporated into an enrollment process at a local mental health agency are part of a programmatic change pilot effort. introduction the system of care (soc) philosophy emerged in the mid-1980s to address the need for reform in child mental health (see, e.g., knitzer, 1982; stroul & friedman, 1986). in the decades since, the approach has become the central element of child mental health policy in the u.s. (hodges et al., 2010). funded currently via the federal children’s mental health initiative, socs have been developed around the country to address the diverse and multi-faceted needs of youth with severe emotional disturbances (sed) and their families. unfortunately, notwithstanding the federal dollars to support their development and implementation, and the manifold efforts to assess their fidelity of implementation (e.g., bruns et al., 2010), socs have often struggled to implement key components of the philosophy (cook & kilmer, 2004), and youth and families encounter difficulties in accessing and receiving needed supports and services. this study evolved out of a larger soc evaluation effort – it sought to assess the needs of youth and families enrolled in a soc. by shedding light on the needs of the youth and families, it aimed to inform system change as well as advocacy efforts to improve service provision and system function. at their core, socs seek to provide comprehensive networks of services and supports for children with severe emotional disturbances (sed) and their families. socs are designed to coordinate the efforts of multiple child-serving systems (i.e., mental health, child welfare, education, health, juvenile justice) and families’ natural supports in order to provide a continuum of care to youth and their families and eliminate gaps in service delivery. in these collaborative socs, plans of care are built on the existing strengths of the youth and family and tailored to their specific needs (see, e.g., huang et al., 2005; pumariega & winters, 2003; stroul & friedman, 1986). ideally, socs also reinforce the presence of natural community supports and resources and encourage families to utilize them effectively (pumariega & winters, 2003). the primary practice model within socs is the wraparound approach. wraparound refers to a set of practice principles and a flexible, family-centered process of developing plans of care that provide individualized services and supports appropriate for each family (see walker et al., 2004; see also vandenberg & grealish, 1996). as a primary component of wraparound, youth and families actively participate in multidisciplinary teams (i.e., families have “voice and choice;” the national wraparound initiative, 2011) called child and family teams (cfts), which coordinate care and support for youth and families (burns & goldman, 1999). in order to be effective, teams must elicit information about the youth’s and family’s ongoing and changing needs, especially during transitions such as those from formal service systems to community-based supports (e.g., walker et al., 2004). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   december  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3  of  8   research on the soc philosophy and wraparound approach has yielded mixed results (see cook & kilmer, 2004 for a review; see also bruns, sutter, force, & burchard, 2005; epstein et al., 2003; graves, 2005). the literature points to modest improvements for the youth and families involved (e.g., cook & kilmer, 2004; holden et al., 2003; us department of health and human services, 2003), but findings to date point to considerable variation in fidelity and implementation (cook & kilmer, 2004; kilmer, cook & palamaro munsell, 2010), with many communities struggling to adopt key soc components into practice (bruns et al., 2005; cook, kilmer, derusso, vishnevsky & meyers, 2007; epstein et al., 2003; walker & schutte, 2005). for instance, many cfts struggle to implement truly childand family-centered, strength based service plans (cook et al., 2007), and few incorporate natural supports into the plan of care or team meetings (cook et al., 2007; epstein et al., 2003; walker & schutte, 2005). although efforts supporting the assessment of socs’ fidelity have emerged (e.g., the national wraparound initiative, see http://www.nwi.pdx.edu/ ), there are not clear mandates to evaluate the processes and implementation of soc or wraparound. rather, congress has required that all federally-funded sites participate in the national longitudinal study, also known as the national evaluation of systems of care (national evaluation), to examine the effectiveness and impact of socs. the national evaluation assesses self-reported service utilization, satisfaction with services, and overall youth and family functioning. this evaluation includes regular, standardized interviews with youth enrolled in a soc and their caregivers, beginning at baseline (within 30 days of enrollment) and continuing with follow-up interviews every six months for up to three years. participants complete multiple self-report measures regarding service experiences and functioning of the youth and family. although the national evaluation assesses the strengths and limitations of existing services and can serve as an effective evaluation of “outcomes” by capturing multiple salient indicators (e.g., youth symptoms and impairment, youth behavioral and emotional strengths, caregiver strain, satisfaction with services), the protocol has gaps that warrant attention. notably, it lacks items that identify youth and family unmet needs or service gaps, as identified by those involved in the system. given the core tenets of the soc philosophy, it is particularly important to attend to the needs of the systemidentified youth, the family’s needs, and contextual influences on the youth’s adaptation, including the larger family environment and the family’s connectedness to the community (e.g., cook & kilmer, 2010a; 2010b; kilmer et al., 2010). in that vein, assessing the most pronounced needs of youth and families can provide them and their cfts with specific feedback regarding areas in need of attention in the plans of care, as well as identify gaps in system functioning. moreover, presenting the results of needs assessments within community and system contexts in which needs can be addressed can support the organization of services and inform well-targeted, community-based interventions (gabhainn, dolan, canavan, & o’higgins, 2009). thus, ongoing assessment of needs constitutes a critical component of adequate service provision and system function. the current study: context and rationale data for this study were collected as part of the local efforts to augment the national evaluation protocol for the soc in mecklenburg county, north carolina, an initiative known as meckcares. the study was initiated in response to informal observations by evaluation team members following the administration of interviews with youth and families. specifically, evaluation team members frequently noted that, during the standardized interviews, caregivers expressed frustration that their needs were not being met. these perspectives were not being captured by the standardized format of the national evaluation interview protocol. in response to both the local observations of unmet needs and the challenges with implementation identified in the extant literature, the evaluation team integrated additional items in the protocol to explore youth and family needs. the findings yielded from these needs assessment items were subsequently discussed with both caregivers and youth in focus groups. the sections that follow describe these processes and findings. method procedure this study draws on data collected from 2010-2011 via the national evaluation interviews of families involved in meckcares. the standardized, in-depth national evaluation protocol assesses child and family outcomes, service utilization, and service satisfaction. these face-to-face interviews are completed with caregivers and youth every six months for up to three years. caregivers received $30 global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   december  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4  of  8   visa gift cards each time they completed an interview and youth received $20 visa gift cards. participants participants included 216 caregivers (one per family) who provided responses to the interview items within each timeframe. participating caregivers included biological parents, foster parents, and adoptive parents, as well as service providers (group home workers, residential treatment staff, etc.). caregivers were selected to participate for a given interview timeframe if the youth had spent the majority of the previous 6 months in their home or facility. measure needs assessment. following approval of the university of north carolina at charlotte’s institutional review board, two qualitative items were added to the end of the national evaluation’s interview protocol in october, 2010: what do you feel your child is in most need of at the current time? what do you feel your family is in most need of at this current time? caregivers who did not provide a response initially were prompted to consider the question more carefully before providing “nothing” as their final response. given that these items were incorporated well into the evaluation period for this site, caregivers provided responses at varying time points for the interviews, from baseline through 36 months. caregivers were not limited to the number of needs they could identify for their children or families. interviewers recorded caregiver’s responses verbatim and prompted for clarification when necessary. after 100 responses were collected, two members of the evaluation team began the coding process. coding of needs data after caregivers’ open-ended responses were entered into a spreadsheet, two evaluation team members organized and condensed responses into overarching themes and applied category labels. the categories and responses were shared with the evaluation team for feedback and suggestions. based on this feedback, some responses were re-categorized and some categories were renamed. this process of team feedback and category modification was repeated once more to refine the organization of the data. while the evaluation team completed the data coding process, it was important to confirm that the caregivers’ responses were accurately captured and coded. as a next step, the evaluation team conducted a focus group with youth and their families to present the information, gather feedback on the responses and coding, and discuss how the information could be used. focus group the focus group was planned and executed in partnership with parentvoice, a local nonprofit organization that provides a range of supportive and advocacy services for families of youth with mental health challenges. parentvoice assisted the evaluation team by identifying potential youth and families, providing physical space for the event, and helping facilitate the focus group sessions. prior to contacting youth and families, the institutional review board of the university of north carolina at charlotte approved this work. youth and families were sent informational letters in the mail and were asked to call to confirm their participation in the focus group. they were provided with dinner and $30 visa gift cards for participating. after receiving an agenda, youth and families were provided with brief information about the needs assessment data collection, the coding process, and the purpose of the focus group. both youth and families signed informed consent forms to participate in the study. youth (n = 7) and their caregivers (n = 5) then separated so that the focus groups could be conducted independently. although presented in different formats (i.e., a powerpoint presentation for caregivers and multimedia for youth), both groups were asked a similar series of questions (e.g., what do you think about the categories? do the categories make sense? do you agree with the categories? are the categories similar to your current needs? what needs are you experiencing that are not on the list?). multiple evaluation team members were present to transcribe the discussion. at the end of the focus group, the evaluation team gathered the caregivers’ feedback about the focus group process. caregivers were asked to complete brief 14-item evaluation surveys that included two open-ended items (e.g., what suggestions or comments do you have regarding the information that was presented today?) and 12 likert-style items (e.g. the information about youth and family needs that was presented today accurately reflects my experience) to which caregivers rated how much they agreed or disagreed. results this work included three key steps: (1) assessment of caregiver-reported youth and family needs during global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   december  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5  of  8   national evaluation interviews; (2) collection of caregiver feedback regarding the needs assessment findings, groupings, and conclusions via a focus group; and (3) collection of youth feedback via a focus group. results will be presented in this order. needs identified by caregivers: qualitative interview items the 216 caregivers provided 394 total responses, and the coding process yielded ten categories from these responses. the most common caregiver-reported needs for youth were services (e.g., therapy, mentoring) and life management (e.g., social skills training, activities with peers, anger management) and the most common needs for families were financial (e.g., financial assistance, employment) and services (e.g., therapy or counseling, support services, respite care). table 1 lists the categories identified and the frequencies of youth and family needs reported for each category. examples of specific needs that fall under each category are provided in table 2. table 1 frequencies of caregiver-reported needs for the system-identified youth and the family by category category youth family total services 193 100 293 financial 41 122 163 essential 66 80 146 life management 122 3 125 education 114 9 123 intermediate 26 47 73 activities 43 27 70 nothing 11 54 65 family support 13 48 61 other 14 9 23 note. n = 216 caregivers. table 2, examples of self-reported youth and family needs across categories. category youth family services therapy, mentoring, counseling, independent living service therapy, counseling, emotional support, respite care financial financial assistance, employment financial assistance, employment essential clothing, shoes, housing housing, food, clothing life management activities w/ peers, social skills training, anger management coping skills, money management education tutoring, diploma, support from school tutoring, diploma intermediate transportation, child care for youth’s child, computer transportation, household supplies, household repairs activities extracurricular activities, community/neighborhood activities break/vacation, family activities family support contact w/ family, family communication/understanding family communication/ understanding, family support, parenting skills other improved self-confidence, structure general assistance, relief note. n = 216 caregivers. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   december  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6  of  8   caregiver feedback overall, participant caregivers expressed that the ten categories represented their own current needs. they agreed that services and financial needs are the most common and most important to address in the community. caregivers also confirmed that the categories identified by the evaluation team effectively described the individual caregiver responses. a common trend emerged from the focus group when discussing the services category. caregivers voiced frustration with the lack of availability and consistency of services, highlighting that services were not available, not affordable, or difficult to obtain for their children and families. others reported that even those services that were offered were not always available on a consistent basis. for example, one caregiver stated that, “my problem is tapping into the services.” another caregiver described the lack of availability of mentors by stating that: there’s no father figure or other family members at home. it would be a great opportunity for her to connect to a mentor.” finally, afterschool programs and extracurricular activities were noted by caregivers as largely inaccessible. they emphasized the need for affordable programs for their children. on the focus group evaluation, caregivers not only confirmed the categories discussed in the focus group, they noted the importance of the current research in addressing community issues. caregivers also indicated that they felt they had a voice in the focus group process and that holding more focus groups would be beneficial to improve the provision of services to their children and families. one caregiver in particular reaffirmed the importance of the focus group process: “it was really good information. it was good to see that meckcares is really trying to help their families.” youth feedback youth similarly confirmed that current needs were well represented by the data presented. youth also agreed with many of the categories derived by the evaluation team. however, in contrast to the caregivers’ focus group, youth believed that modifications should be made to some of the category labels. for example, youth believed that essential needs were better termed mandatory needs because youth perceived these as basic necessities for all people. youth also disagreed with the grouping of certain items within various categories. many of these disagreements were based on the participants’ experiences and preferences. for example, many participants saw completion of high school, transportation, and access to technology as belonging in the essential category. also diverging from their caregivers’ views (i.e., rating services and life management as the most common and important unmet needs), youth indicated that essential and family support needs were most important. youth emphasized that essential needs must be primarily addressed for all people, and that family support was most important once essential needs were met. finally, youth stated that different definitions of family were important to consider, for example, including foster families in the definition of a family. discussion the current study provided youth and caregivers the opportunity to voice their opinions about their needs, including available (or unavailable) services and supports within a soc community. the national evaluation of soc has not previously incorporated an assessment of current needs of its youth and caregiver participants, thus leaving families unable to express their voices on these important issues. the current study addressed this gap by examining caregiver self-reported needs of youth and families enrolled in the meckcares soc. the two brief items that were integrated yielded information beyond the standardized, required protocol, providing relevant data for system administrators and community stakeholders. notably, in a system designed to provide a comprehensive array of services and supports to the youth and families served, “services” were the primary caregiver-identified need for both youth and families. while these findings may not necessarily generalize to other sites, they suggest that steps such as building structures, dedicating resources to training, and even adding services do not necessarily translate into available, accessible, adequate, or effective services and supports for those in need. critically, they also highlight the need for ongoing evaluation of needs, processes, and outcomes within these system change initiatives. moreover, that caregivers also regularly reported needs that went well beyond traditional formal services (e.g., educational and life management needs for youth; financial needs of the family) is consistent with prior calls to attend to the broader ecological contexts of these children and families and address issues that may extend past the traditional purview of “mental health” (see, e.g., brashears, davis, & katz-leavy, 2011; cook & kilmer, 2010a; kilmer et al., 2010). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   december  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7  of  8   although limited by the relatively small focus group samples, the focus group findings affirmed caregivers’ perceptions of services and life management as the most common needs of their children. however, the youth differed on what they thought were their most important needs, indicating that essential needs and family support were of greatest salience. the youth focus group, in particular, helped draw attention to their distinct views and underscored the importance of including a focus group or other opportunity for them to provide their inputs. furthermore, the caregivers appreciated having a forum in which their voices could be heard. future research efforts could examine caregivers’ specific concerns about services. for example, it would be useful to determine which services are inaccessible or unaffordable and for what reasons, whether the quality of services is of concern, or whether families are aware of all service options. future research could also attempt to connect data regarding reported needs and, subsequently, the degree to which those needs have been met or unmet, with indicators of youth and caregiver functioning (see, e.g., kilmer & gil-rivas, 2010 for an example in another context). because these findings have neither been replicated nor linked to other measures of family resources, functioning, and the like, the present results should be viewed as preliminary and conclusions must be drawn with care. that said, notwithstanding those caveats, these results have potential implications for advocacy efforts and systems change. for example, the needs data can help guide future parentvoice efforts to concentrate on needs of the youth and families. in addition, the findings of this study, in combination with future research, could aid in the modification and implementation of services and programs. as one case in point, the results of the current study were presented to the meckcares community collaborative, a state-mandated decision making body, with a mission centered on making programmatic recommendations to enact systemic changes. in response to this data presentation, the categories from the needs assessment data were incorporated into the meckcares enrollment form for early identification of current needs of youth and families as part of a local agency’s pilot soc effort. such efforts have the capacity to inform the work of local child and family teams and improve the delivery of wraparound care planning and treatment. the project reported here was developed (after hearing repeated caregiver concerns about the system’s functioning) to help capture the views and voices of those involved in a local soc. such steps are consistent with the values of soc and are necessary to access authentic representations of typically disenfranchised families’ experiences (e.g., slaton, cecil, lambert, king, & pearson, 2011). indeed, working to address the gaps in standard evaluation protocols can increase the ecological validity of applied research and, in turn, contribute to well-targeted actionable recommendations to improve systems and benefit the youth and families served. references brashears, f., davis, c., & katz-leavy, j. (2011). systems of care: the story behind the numbers. american journal of community psychology. doi: 10.1007/s10464-011-9452-z. bruns, e. j., suter, j. c., force, m. m., & burchard, j. d. (2005). adherence to wraparound principles and association with outcomes. journal of child and family studies, 14, 521-534. burns, b. j., and goldman, s. k. (eds.) (1999). promising practices in wraparound for children with serious emotional disturbance and their families. systems of care: promising practices in children’s mental health, 1998 series, volume iv. washington, d.c.: center for effective collaboration and practice, american institutes for research. bruns, e. j., walker, j. s., zabel, m., matarese, m., estep, k., harburger, d., et al. (2010). intervening in the lives of youth with complex behavioral health challenges and their families: the role of the wraparound process. american journal of community psychology, 46, 314-331. cook, j. r., & kilmer, r. p. (2004). evaluating systems of care: missing links in children’s mental health research. journal of community psychology, 32, 655-674. cook, j. r., & kilmer, r. p. (2010a). defining the scope of systems of care: an ecological perspective. evaluation and program planning, 33, 18-20. cook, j. r., & kilmer, r. p. (2010b). the importance of context in fostering responsive community systems: supports for families in systems of care. american journal of orthopsychiatry, 80, 115123. cook, j. r., kilmer, r. p., derusso, a., vishnevsky, t., & meyers, d. c. (2007). assessment of child and family team functioning using the participant global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   december  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8  of  8   rating form. in c. newman, c. liberton, k. kutash, & r. friedman (eds.), 19th annual research conference proceedings: a system of care for children’s mental health: expanding the research base (pp. 317–322). tampa, fl: university of south florida, the louis de la parte florida mental health institute, research and training center for children’s mental health. epstein, m. h., nordness, p. d., kutash, k., duchnowski, a., schrepf, s., benner, g., et al. (2003). assessing the wraparound process during family planning meetings. journal of behavioral health services & research, 30, 352–362. gabhainn, s. n., dolan, p., canavan, j., & o’higgins, s. (2009). current practice in meeting child health needs in family support services: variation by service type and perspectives on future developments. child care in practice, 15, 109-125. graves, k. n. (2005). the links among perceived adherence to the system of care philosophy, consumer satisfaction, and improvements in child functioning. journal of child and family studies,14, 403–415. hodges, s., ferreira, k., israel, n., mazza, j. (2010). systems of care, featherless bipeds, and the measures of all things. evaluation and program planning, 33, 4-10. holden, e. w., santiago, r. l., manteuffel, b. a., stephens, r. l., brannan, a. m., soler, r., et al. (2003). systems of care demonstration projects: innovation, evaluation, and sustainability. in a. j. pumariega & n. c. winters (eds.), the handbook of child and adolescent systems of care: the new community psychiatry (pp. 432–458). san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. huang, l., stroul, b., friedman, r., mrazek, p., friesen, b., pires, s., et al. (2005). transforming mental health care for children and their families. american psychologist, 60, 615-627. kilmer, r.p., cook, j.r., & palamaro munsell, e. (2010). moving from principles to practice: recommended policy changes to promote familycentered care. american journal of community psychology, 46, 332-341. kilmer, r.p., & gil-rivas, v. (2010). responding to the needs of children and families after a disaster: linkages between unmet needs and caregiver functioning. american journal of orthopsychiatry, 80, 135-142. knitzer, j. (1982). unclaimed children: the failure of public responsibility to children and adolescents in need of mental health services. washington, dc: the children’s defense fund. pumariega, a. j., & winters, n. c. (eds.). (2003). the handbook of child and adolescent systems of care: the new community psychiatry. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. slaton, a.e., cecil, c.w., lambert, l.e., king, t., & pearson, m.m. (2011). what  a  difference  family-­‐ driven  makes:  stories  of  success  and  lessons   learned.  american  journal  of  community   psychology.   stroul, b. a., & friedman, r. m. (1986). a system of care for children and youth with severe emotional disturbances. (revised 1994 edition). washington, d.c.: georgetown university child development center, cassp technical assistance center. the u.s. national wraparound initiative, led by eric bruns, ph.d., janet walker, ph.d., trina osher, jim rast, ph.d. (2011). wraparound basics. retrieved from http://www.nwi.pdx.edu u.s. department of health and human services. (2003). cmhs national evaluation: data profile report. atlanta, ga: orc macro. walker, j. s., & schutte, k. m. (2005). quality and individualization in wraparound planning. journal of child and family studies, 14, 251– 267. walker, j. s., bruns, e. j., vandenberg, j. d., rast, j., osher, t. w., miles, p., adams, j., & national wraparound initiative advisory group (2004). phases and activities of the wraparound process. portland, or: national wraparound initiative, research, and training center on family support and children’s mental health, portland state university. microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 233 building cultures of peace in community life in the face of intensifying political violence in colombia stella sacipa rodriguez1 'social ties and cultures of peace' research group iii international conference of community psychology puebla, mexico, june 5, 2010                                                                                                                           1 ssacipa@gmail.com 234 building cultures of peace in community life in the face of intensifying political violence in colombia abstract the escalation of political violence, the extent of psychological trauma, the dehumanization, the naturalization of violence, institutional lying, and breach of trust are difficulties to building cultures of peace in colombia. their analysis and the experiences of communities of resistance and/or of peace, can lead to propose challenges that lead to manners of coexistence. keywords: violence, cultures of peace, community experiences, peace. 235 la construcción de culturas de paz en la vida comunitaria frente a la intensificación de la violencia política en colombia resumen la intensificación de la violencia política, la amplitud del trauma psicosocial, la deshumanización, la naturalización de la violencia, la mentira institucional, la ruptura de la confianza son dificultades para la construcción de culturas de paz en colombia. su análisis y las experiencias de las comunidades de resistencia y/o de paz, permiten proponer retos que conduzcan a caminos de convivencia. palabras clave: violencia, culturas de paz, experiencias comunitarias, paz. 236 introduction to ask oneself the question for the building of cultures of peace, in a country like colombia, involves thinking about the difficulties and challenges that it involves, and the idea of peace that we start from. in our research group, we have done this and have opted for welcoming the call for the creation of a global movement for a culture of peace and non-violence of the unesco (1999: 7-9), which states: "the culture of peace is peace in action ... it is a culture of life which is to allow the coexistence of different beings and to instill a new ethic of solidarity, listening, caring for others and responsibility, in an invigorated democratic society that fights exclusion and guarantees political equality, social equity and cultural diversity " ... culture based on active non-violence, on pluralism, "this global movement must be based on a very broad definition of the culture of peace, that is based on respect for human rights, democracy and tolerance .." we back the proposal of galtung, jacobsen & brand-jacobsen (2002) who consider the approach of opposition to peace must not be sought in war, but in violence, so that any definition of peace means the absence or reduction of all types of violence, either direct (physical or verbal), structural (avoidable deaths caused by social and economic structures), or cultural. this is why i enounce first the difficulties that hinder the creation of cultures of peace: difficulties that hinder the creation of cultures of peace. in colombia, over the years, there have been accumulating feelings of grief, anger and fatigue, caused by the prolonged armed conflict. those feelings combined with the lack of a healthy authority, able to settle conflicts by means of negotiation and routes of reconciliation have promoted confusion between healthy authority and authoritarianism, leading many colombians to opt for the latter. in many sectors that make up the colombian society, there are multiple pressures from various social sectors asking for options of force, pressing for the liquidation of the enemy in a vigorous and rapid way. 237 much of the anguished colombian opinion, desperate due to violence, and the numerous injuries that armed confrontation has brought to colombian families, has become polarized, it is deeply split and dreams of a quick definition, by means of weapons with the immediate termination of the war through total annihilation of the other, the enemy. today the military dynamics overwhelm the armed actors and permeate the whole of society, the logic of war cuts across all dimensions of life in the country, we live the militarization of everyday life, where the only way to tackle the other is in denial, making him an enemy, annihilating him symbolically or physically: it is the polarization (martín-baró, 1990) of relationships, a dynamics visible in the form of settling disputes in day to day life. the escalation of political violence in the past 22 years in the turf war for drug trafficking routes or land for national and multinational agribusiness has led to the forced displacement of 3,400,000 expressed by the current government director of social action in an interview (guardiola, 2010); or of 4,900,000 according to the consultancy for human rights and displacement (codhes). rojas, its director, noted (guardiola b, 2010) "10 percent of the total colombian population has been moved because of violence and that exhibits deep structural flaws. ... here is a true humanitarian tragedy... many people, long suffering the rigors of a dislocation that involves the violation of all their rights. " in addition, unhrc (2010) expressed "grave concern for the widespread practice of enforced disappearances (28000, officially recognized in the national register of missing persons) and the number of bodies that have been exhumed from mass graves ... the committee notes that the discovery of the graves has been based mainly on statements of demobilized paramilitaries and the vast majority of victims were tortured before being executed." additionally, the inhuman practice of kidnapping and extortion carried out by the farc is permanent and hurts many sectors of colombian society, as well as attacks on people who do not give up the right to their domain, in clear violation of international humanitarian law. in this regard, the human rights council of the united nations, (2010) in its annual report states: "the report shows how the internal armed conflict continues to pose many challenges for the country, including the total disregard for international humanitarian law by guerrilla groups. this situation is exacerbated by the violence against civilians carried out by 238 illegal armed groups in the demobilization process of paramilitary organizations, the nexus of armed actors with drug trafficking and the particularly severe impact of armed conflict on indigenous and afro-colombian communities ." (unhrc, 2010:1). the problem of political violence is such that in discussing the infringed people, sociologist pedro cortés (2005: 3) says, "violence has been so widespread that what one might ask now is: how many families are there that have not been affected?” people who have suffered forced displacement, the families of those who have disappeared, the abductees and their families, as well as victims of blackmail and extortion by armed groups suffer psychological trauma, a mental injury produced socially (martín-baró, 1990). the damage to the processes of life caused by armed fighting, being forced to witness torture and murder, the impossibility of understanding, of making sense of the situations generated by the armed actors impact the victims psychically and psychosocially (sacipa, 2001); where fear has become a psychological tool for social control, to generate submission and passivity (lira, 1991). the emotional suffering caused by the losses, by family fragmentation, sadness, shame, mistrust, uncertainty, personal devaluation, are made patent in the stories of displaced persons (sacipa 2003, 2007). it is clear that both those who commit violent acts as well as those who promote their implementation have been dehumanized. samayoa (1990) refers to dehumanization as the modification of cognitive schemes and patterns of conduct, which involves, among others, the loss or impoverishment of the capacity for lucid thinking, of the ability to communicate with accuracy, of sensitivity to suffering, of respect and of solidarity. this dehumanization is evident in a very unfortunate way in the confessions of demobilized paramilitaries2, in which they chronicle the cruel training they received 3 in violent practices such as the dismemberment of living peasants, playing with the severed head of the "enemy", drinking blood from the victims, killing deserters' friends, or removing children from the wombs of their mothers. 4 acts that horrify us and tell us about the "lack of reflection ... practices and exercises of the conditioning of the human conscience to kill ..." (angulo, 2007: 556) 239 but in contrast to these facts, we find that in many places, especially in cities, that people have been naturalized to violence. and it has to do with such a prolonged exposure to it. in this sense, a colleague of ours, mónica novoa (2010: 2) states: "there is no doubt, such a prolonged conflict resonates in various spheres of life, impacting how people perceive it in unusual ways, conceptualize it and act on the world we live in, to the point of "naturalizing" violence so much, that they may refer to themselves as happy. the happy planet index, hpi, published in june 20095 , pointed to colombia as the fifth among 143 countries, whose population more effectively aims for happiness, the people who at the same time live (or survive) in the midst of an armed conflict lasting more than 40 years”. the escalation of political violence is fed by structural violence and vice versa, the first driving peasants into the cities, which has increased the second, a situation that is even worse for those who have been uprooted, since according to the civil society alternate report to the committee on economic and cultural rights (2009: 3-4), "colombia is the second country in the region with the greatest inequality in income distribution, reaching a gini coefficient of 0.576. the tax system design is clearly regressive, with emphasis on indirect taxation of the population with low pay and the extension of exemptions to the taxes of higher income sectors" simultaneously with this, "the concentration of land ownership is very high and tends to increase: 0.43% of the owners own 62.91% of the rural land area, while 57.87% of the owners, have only a 1.66% of the land. despite the recommendation made by the treaty committee regarding the implementation of agrarian reform in colombia, a reverse land reform has been consolidated with a combination of legal and illegal means”. in this order of ideas, an editorial in the newspaper el tiempo (april 13, 2010)6, referring to the capture of farmers in antioquia and chocó, for the promotion and financing of paramilitary groups, said: “this is the 'paraeconomy' a name that could describe the cash, logistical, political and legal nexus that sectors in various regions of the country offer the leaders of the paramilitaries to commit their most heinous crimes against humanity." according to the newspaper, “the authorities accuse the alliance of agribusinesses with the paramilitaries operating in the urabá area of masterminding the murder and displacement of peasants 240 and afrodescendants, and the illegal appropriation of their land. and it further states: "it is undeniable that regional power and the capture of public funds, such as those for health, were not the only area that served these illegal armed groups to consolidate their reign of terror. employers, landlords and even multinationals paid for protection and ordered the paramilitaries to undertake the gruesome task of killing peasants and union leaders. also, many deployed a systematic dispossession of hundreds of thousands of hectares and the usufruct of them in activities such as mining, ranching, agribusiness, illicit crops and logging. " however, in the 90's, entrepreneurs, politicians and the military denied the joint activity with the paramilitaries. in fact, the common thing in many sectors of the colombian population in the last 22 years was the denial of these facts, denial tied to a great indifference for the victims who are mostly peasants, poor, indigenous and of african descent. “and that seemed not to affect other colombians. this indifference, this denial is also part of the psychological damage to those who have experienced war. not just the geographical distance of populations, it is the emotional distance; it is what the authors call a structure of feelings in societies, social practices that cause many colombians to be closer to other countries and continents, rather than to their national reality "(novoa, 2010: 21). martín-baró (1990: 30) states that lying is characteristic of war, "ranging from the corruption of institutions to deliberate deceit in public discourse, through an environment of suspicious lies with which most people tend to conceal their views and even their choices ". institutional lying was inherent in the assassination of presidential candidate carlos pizarro, leader of the m-19, who in 1990 made peace with the government of virgilio barco. after 20 years, the investigation was revived and also recognized that along with paramilitary chief castaño, retired generals and intelligence agents were involved7. another example of systematic concealment of reality (martín-baró, 1990) is constituted by extrajudicial killings of many young colombians. researchers angulo, zarama, and burgos (2009) noted: "false positives are cases where security forces perpetrated gross violations of human rights and made them appear as victories in the battle against guerrillas. victims are almost always dressed as guerrillas or buried in mass graves." 241 another lack of truth, is related to the demobilization of the paramilitaries, according to sanin gutiérrez (2010): "although the demobilization of 2003 had undeniable successes, important deterrents remained, -when coupled with drug funding sources, commanders who did not accompany the process and repeat-fighters were revived in so-called criminal gangs (bacrim in spanish)... it is not true that they are simple agencies of common criminals; they have political objectives, they demand functions of coercion and social control, and given their history they privilege their customers and their integration in regional life with stability imposed through violence. the bacrim retain multiple ties to state security agencies, as evidenced by the horror of so-called false positives. one might add that among their assets they have a series of links with the political system, offering them access to resources, security, well-located customers and a role in the establishment of regional order." the presence of this armed actor is confirmed by the peace community of san josé de apartadó, which in a statement on april 23 complained that it had been victimized by new paramilitary attacks on the 12th and 13th of april, when they threatened to exterminate it; and father giraldo, its pastoral companion and human rights defender in the communities, was threatened in graffiti that appeared in bogotá on april 23 as reported by the cinep (2010). the escalation of violence in colombia, is closely related to what jesuit alejandro angulo (2007) describes as "a serious crisis of ethics", which is very visible in the joint activity between politicians and paramilitaries, in what is called para-politics, with an absence of ethics, by which the ends of political control justifies the means. paramilitary leader vicente castaño, in an interview in 2005, stated: "there is a friendship with politicians in areas where we operate. there are direct relationships between commanders and politicians and the forming of alliances that are undeniable. the self-defense groups give advice to many of them and there are commanders who have candidates friends in the municipalities and corporations8.” another paramilitary leader, mancuso has repeatedly made patent a (2004, 2007, 2008, 2010) 9, connection to congressmen, mayors, governors and other political leaders who took advantage of the influence exerted by paramilitaries in the region for electoral purposes. similarly a former 242 senator under investigation stated in an interview in 2006 that almost all political leaders of the atlantic coast had accepted the paramilitary political project10. in my opinion the cognitive changes related to dehumanization (samayoa, 1990) appear to be functional in order to legitimize violent practices. a frightening example of this is the course called "why is it lawful to kill communists in colombia?" 11, which was taught to paramilitary groups by mr. noguera, deputy chair of the administrative security department, between 1998 and 2002, according to declarations made to the supreme court by paramilitary mancuso, which confirm the statements of another former paramilitary made in june 2008. now, the serious thing about this is that for many years it was common to hear many colombians legitimize political violence with claims such as: “if they have done something to the victims there must be a good reason for it”. the ethical crisis in justice is daunting, as expressed by jesuit javier giraldo (2009) in the letter of objection of conscience, which he submitted to the public prosecutor’s office posing the moral impediment that prevented him from attending a judicial proceeding. due to the fact that in the past, as a member of the pastoral group accompanying the peace community of san jose de apartadó, he collaborated with authorities striving to alleviate the suffering of victims and uncovering the truth. in his letter he tells how for 29 years, he saw how time passed without any progress, however the manipulation of the testimonies of victims, witness intimidation and even death of the complainants was visible. “it all reveals collusion between the military and judicial officials" (giraldo, 2009: 34) in practices at odds with ethics. the impunity alluded to by giraldo is also visible in the recovery process for displaced people. in the un in geneva, an expert from the committee on economic, social and cultural rights, denounced that "only 20% of claims concerning dispossessed land are investigated. what about the other 80%? there appears to be impunity for violators" 12. according to the annual report of the high commissioner for human rights on the human rights situation in colombia (march 2010), the ethical crisis also covers "the das intelligence agency dependent on the president of the republic, which had been under development at least since 2003 and had comprehensively and systematically undertaken a series of illegal activities directed against, among others, human rights defenders, political opponents, journalists and senior government officials, such as the vice president.” moreover, disturbing information published in the media indicated that even judges of the supreme court were under 243 surveillance. the human rights commission, a special spokesperson for the united nations and the un office in colombia were also monitored. these actions, in many cases, were designed to neutralize the work done by the victims, who were considered "legitimate targets" for being potential opponents of government policies ". by placing the spotlight, on the activity of this body it made persecution to difference very visible by a totalitarian position, characterized by a kind of thought unable to conceive diversity, and as suarez raised (2006: 86). "through the aggregation of meaning one seeks to legitimize the political persecution of individuals and groups who advocate moral, ethical, and political values that differ from dominant views.” sharing with angulo (2007) the idea that "ethics is the weaver of the fabric of solidarity that re-links human beings to each other and their environment" we have been particularly concerned regarding the fact that the government arguing the annihilation of the farc in the past eight years has led to an open armed struggle and invited citizens to participate in networks of informants, thus promoting the breakdown of trust in psychosocial interactions (sacipa, vidales, galindo and tovar, 2007) the democratic security policy reminds me of martín-baro’s (1990) approach, of what war brings to social relations: violence, polarization and lies. the formation of networks of cooperation or of informants engaging people from within the civilian population promotes that militarist dynamics overflow the armed actors and permeate the social group (sacipa, 2005). it is a war strategy that tears the social fabric, which destroys social bonds, in destroying the component of trust in the interactions that build civility. by establishing distrust as the basic principle of relationships it makes it impossible for there to be unprepared meetings between citizens. the relations between neighbors are a blend of suspicion and the presence of differences is considered an object of accusation, reinforcing intolerance. as martín-baró, the salvadoran jesuit and psychologist stated this exacerbates social polarization, that is the movement of groups toward opposite ends. there is a critical crack in the framework of coexistence. similarly, in various stages of daily life any difference is a threat, distrust is established as a basic principle of relationships precluding any encounter, leading people to forgo relationships that may be critical for them. because as castillo del pino noted (2000) trust is the basic attitude that governs all interactions. 244 building cultures of peace. as stated in the beginning, we are interested in building cultures of peace, and as scholars we think that "the political dimension of knowledge can be strengthened to counter the functionality of violence" by its deconstruction, and by the recognition, construction and implementation of proposals that offer alternative conceptual relationships, 'relational proposals involving different looks to build more purposeful realities', to make social change possible including structural transformations. we agree with maritza montero (1991: 38), that "the psychologist's role is essentially that of an agent of social change, committed to a project that seeks freedom, justice, equality, democracy and respect for human rights”. we welcome the approach of galtung, jacobsen & brand-jacobsen (1996) stating that peace, rather than a goal, is a process, a journey. it is the condition and the context of cooperation with which to transform conflict creatively and nonviolently . in this sense, in colombia there are experiences of resistance in the face of war. hernández (2002) says that probably the first experiences of resistance were born with the cric, the cauca's indigenous movement in the 70's, the organization that fought against the structural violence. it later became the origin of the experiences of civil resistance, such as the proyecto nasa, in 1980; the jambaló experience in 1988; and the community of la maría in 1989. indigenous resistance that is based on a deep sense of self-government, autonomy, respect for territory and cultural identity (cortés, 2005). rural communities have developed various peace initiatives such as the association of rural workers of carare (atcc) in santander in 1987; the popular consultation of aguachica in cesar in 1995; the experience of riachuelo in the municipality of charalá, department of santander in 1997; the municipal constituent assembly of mogotes in 1998; the communities in self-determination, life and dignity (cavida) in the cacarica in 1998; the experience of samaniego in nariño in 1998; and the experience of pensilvania, caldas in 1998. black communities resisting pressure and displacement caused by armed groups were organized in the peace community of the antioquia urabá and the chocano urabá in 1998, 1999. in them, as researchers, we found that "community establishes distance between all armed 245 actors, does not cooperate with them and does not allow them to stay inside" (sacipa, 2001). in this process communities generate participatory processes in its citizens about peaceful coexistence, and changing political culture. the program for peace, created by the society of jesus, in conjunction with the national secretariat of social pastoral activities of the bishops conference, developed the school of peace and harmony, and during eleven years of work was present in 49 church jurisdictions in an inclusive proposal and pluralistic education for peace. thus according to the school, "the church in colombia has played a crucial role in accompanying people and communities at risk and in some regions has been the only entity to do so" (2009: 17). the church and ngos, according to hernández (2000) are key factors in processes of resistance to war, they make it possible for the population to create alternatives to conflict, and support their mobilization and unity. the peace communities, to whose training these two institutions have contributed, are experiences of nonviolent civil resistance, which works on social reconstruction, the revival of confidence and developing solutions for those affected by violence and war. these communities silently helped to build local peace, resisting violence of armed conflict, often at the expense of their own lives and they have taught us that building peace is possible without resorting to the use of violence even in the midst of crossfire. as further action in the peace communities, cinep/ the program for peace, has had an important role. the society of jesus has accompanied several communities in the learning, organizational and educational process, as well as defended their rights when these are violated by those bearing arms. in our own experience in university work at the pontificia universidad javeriana, we accompanied a community organization (cedepaz) for three years and assisted in their choice of nonviolence. "supporting the process of their construction as an organization we feel they are citizens subject to law, in the building and autonomous self-management of their organization" (sacipa and tovar, 2004). now, faced with the escalation of violence, communities remain firm in their posture, and even though the indian shelters of tacueyo, toribio and san francisco, in northern cauca have been heavily affected by armed conflict, they persist in their decision, and in a communication to the public. they call "to all social and popular base organization, to all peoples 246 and communities to continue fighting tirelessly to defend the territory, to strengthen unity and peaceful resistance in defense of life "(indigenous council of tacueyo, 2010). working for the building of cultures of peace in colombia is essential at a time like the present, when the social fabric is increasingly fractured. the experiences of the peace communities, of the initiatives and experiences of peace and civil resistance have shown us the paths followed by the communities themselves as educators and caretakers of these processes in the field of popular organization, civic participation, community empowerment, with accomplishments that speak of the amazing human capacity for the renewal of hope, of the immense possibilities for social reconstruction. the intention is to not be anchored in the violence that causes suffering. it is to accompany those who suffer from political violence, yes. but the decision is to go beyond, to get glimpses of hope, to co-construct a life and use it as a useful tool in the generation of cultures of peace, because as montero noted (2007, 2009) liberation is necessarily a collective enterprise. in national politics, there is today a movement of thoughtful people from various sectors of the population, a movement that goes from authoritarianism to the authority exercised in a democratic stance, guided by the motto "life is sacred". it is a movement towards the recovery of ethics, which has, as its most outstanding element, the awakening of youth, that for the first time engages in politics, and changes ways of doing politics from a critical point of view. this allows us to glimpse the recovery of hope. it is useful to remind the analysis conducted by montiel and rodriguez (2009) concerning the pro-democracy movement in the philippines. although we note that in colombia in a strict sense there is no dictator because the president has been elected by a majority vote. but without doubt, it is a situation of authoritarianism that has promoted the death of thousands of people, and in a way similar to that of the philippines, in a sociopolitical movement that aims to change the authoritarian regime and care for life. now, to strive for peace involves facing several challenges. one of them is to think how to contribute to changing the personal and collective disposition, in other words to produce a movement of the attitudes that throughout our historical construction as a nation have led to a standing armed conflict, looking for alternatives to the concern expressed by unesco as follows: "the question is to spotlight the great challenge before us, namely: to begin the transition from a culture of war to a culture of peace" (unesco, 1999: 18). 247 a challenge for all social sciences, including psychology, it is undoubtedly to explore how to stimulate the transformation of thought in colombians about ways of resolving conflicts. in this sense cultural psychologist bruner (1990: 59) states: "the viability of a culture lies in its ability to resolve conflict, to explain the differences and renegotiate the community's meanings". zulueta (1980) emphasizes the importance for colombian society to learn to live peacefully, without waiting for the absence of conflict, without denying it, but on the contrary, recognizing it. as several historians have noted, the relations between human beings throughout history have been marked by war. it has been imprinted on the psyche, in the form of relationships, of building ties, in social dynamics. however, this is not a peculiarity of the colombian people; it is known worldwide that violence has marked history. however it is very noticeable that some people have managed democratic developments in social movements that have moved away from authoritarianism. it is vital that people in all sectors understand the responsibility of different actors in the current situation. here the question concerns how to promote transformations, changes in social groups, in people, so that responsibilities that historically have not been taken on shall go through a movement from denial to recognition. this raises the question of the ethical transformation of those who have consistently generated economic, social and political exclusion in colombia, those who have not led to favorable conditions for a just and dignified life for all colombians. the question relates to changing the etical position of those who claim to defend the colombian people, submerging them in pain and reproducing the anti-values of those they seek to remove from power, such as exclusion, disrespect for life and the annihilation of the other. there is talk of ethics training and guidance for colombian leaders in conducting, not only the position in relation to armed conflict, but in leading the nation. in this sense angulo (2007: 559) talks about ethics reform, saying that it "requires the beginning of a collective agreement, and this, in turn, implies a shared understanding of the terms at hand because the result of ethical agreement is a social contract, which is not limited to the formation of the state and the election of the government, but to be effective, it must cover all other human dimensions.” 248 notes 1. ssacipa@javeriana.edu.co 2. confessions of a paramilitary. morris productions, youtube, 2008. 3. testimony of a paramilitary. youtube, semana tv, january 2008. 4. confessions of paramilitaries (genocide). youtube, first impact program, december 2007. 5. can be found in the online version http://www.happyplanetindex.org/public-data/files/happyplanet-index-2-0.pdf 6. http://www.eltiempo.com/opinion april 13, 2010 7. see the full story in el tiempo, sunday, april 25, editorial policy, pp. 1-2. 8. see full interview in the magazine semana, edition no. 1205, sunday june 5, 2005. http://www.semana.com/noticias-portada/habla-vicente-castano/87628.aspx 9. the information can be found at: salvatore mancuso accused generals and congressmen via satellite declaration before the supreme court. el tiempo, september 26, 2008. http://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/justicia/2008-09-26/salvatore-mancuso-acuso-a-generalesycongresistas-en-declaracion-via-satelite-ante la-1 cut-suprema_4566861 -salvatore mancuso. knot agreement. jaramillo to a jail in the district of columbia. luis eduardo celis. monday, august 11, 2008. http://www.razonpublica.com/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=174 “i have for you the political tsunami” december 3, 2008. http://www.cambio.com.co/paiscambio/805/articulo-printer_friendlyprinter_friendly_cambio-4702581.html paramilitaries in congress. http://www.semana.com/wf_imprimirarticulo.aspx?idart=80748 01/08/2004 edition 1161. mancuso's testimony before the supreme court http://www.semana.com/noticiasjusticia/testimonio-mancuso-ante-corte-suprema/137877.aspx wednesday 21 april 2010. 10. in this connection see the article "40 congressmen signed autodefensas political commitment, miguel de la espriella recognized". political editorial, el tiempo, november 27, 2006. http://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/cms -3342872 11. http://www.semana.com/noticias-enfoque/dicto-catedra-llamaba-licito-matar-comunistascolombia/121251.aspx 249 12. colombia's displaced alarm the united nations, afp, 4 may 2010. http://www.univision.com/content/content.jhtml?cid=2387332 250 references acnur (2009). examen de los informes presentados por los estados partes en virtud del artículo 19 de la convención. observaciones finales del comité contra la tortura colombia. comité contra la tortura, 2 a 20 de noviembre de 2009 43° período de sesiones [examination of reports presented by the member states thanks to the article 19 of the convention. final observations of the committee 13 against torture. colombia committee against torture. 2-20 november 2009. 43rd period of sessions]. http://www.acnur.org/biblioteca/pdf/7710.pdf angulo, a. 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(1990). guerra y deshumanización: una perspectiva psicosocial. [war and dehumanization: a psychosocial perspective]. in i. martín baró (comp.) psicología 253 social de la guerra [social psychology of war]. (41-65) san salvador, el salvador: uca editores. sacipa, s., vidales, r., galindo, l. & tovar, c. (2007). sentimientos asociados a la vivencia del desplazamiento (colombia). [feelings associated to the displacement experience]. les cahiers de psychologie politique [en ligne], numéro 11, juillet 2007. url: http://lodel.irevues.inist.fr/cahierspsychologiepolitique/index.php?id=704 sacipa, s. (2005). acompañamiento psicosocial en un país en conflicto armado: una experiencia. [psychosocial accompaniment in a country involved an armed conflict: an experience]. xxx congreso interamericano de psicología. sociedad interamericana de psicología: “hacia una psicología sin fronteras”. june 27-30. sacipa, s. (2005). de la deshumanización a la reinvidicación de la vida en medio del conflicto armado. [from dehumanization to life claim in the middle of an armed conflict]. cuadernos de psicología, derechos humanos y psicología. (1) 75-82. sacipa, s. & tovar, c. (2004). acompañamiento psicosocial a una comunidad en situación de desplazamiento. [psychosocial accompaniment in a displaced community]. in terre des hommes, italia y unión europea (eds.) enfoques y metodologías de atención psicosocial en el contexto del conflicto socio político colombiano [approach and methodologies in the context of the sociopolitical colombian conflict]. (139-150). bogotá, colombia. sacipa, s. (2003). lectura de los significados del desplazamiento. [interpretation of displacement meanings]. in universitas psicologica. 2 (1) 49-56. sacipa, s. (2001). hacer la paz en medio de la guerra. [making peace in middle of the war]. ponencia en el 24 congreso de psicología política, méxico, julio. [paper presented at the 24th congress of political psychology. mexico city, july]. suárez, j. (2006). la totalización del significado: las políticas de la narratividad entre terrorismo y rebelión. [totalization of meaning: narrativity policies between terrorism and rebelion]. in universitas humanistica. 32 (61) 85-105. unesco (1999). movimiento mundial para la cultura de paz y no violencia. [world movement for a peace and non-violence culture]. quito: author. 254 zulueta, e. (1980). palabras pronunciadas al recibir el doctorado honoris causa en psicología, universidad del valle, cali, colombia. [lecture given at the honoris causa psychology title granted by universidad del valle, cali, colombia]. microsoft word 2012-003-final-20120521.docx global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 invisibility and informality in latin american community psychologist maritza montero universidad central de venezuela when tom wolff sent his message to me, inviting me to comment about the experience in australia, i immediately recalled the research carried out by irma serrano and i, about the histories of community psychologist in the twenty countries that compose that compose some two thirds of the america continent. in four of those countries (bolivia, cuba, honduras, panamá), finding psychologists working in community psychology was a hard task. much to our surprise we found that it is neither applied, not taught in panamá. while in bolivia, only recently it is beginning to be taught, but at the same time, a wonderful participatory and critical programme of research, has been carried out for more than 35 years, in indigenous aymará communities, by two psychologists: javier mendoza & mercedes zerda. as they work with, and for those communities, they were unknown outside the country and also within it. cuba and honduras presented histories of public policies and work in the field of community health. but also in countries where community psychology (cp) is known and where there have been academic programmes as far back as in the mid-seventies (i.e.: colombia or méxico), those pioneering initiatives have not survived, although in the same tenacious way of mendoza and zerda in bolivia, some admirable community psychologies have continued to carry on the stake. that is the case with eduardo almeida who for many years has kept a community programme also with indigenous communities in puebla, mexico, or jorge mario flores in guatemala and mexico, or carlos arango in cali, colombia. although the amount of information, and the degree of development in most of the countries in the region is not only important regarding practice and publications, and the fact that the action and research produced in the region has developed a paradigm from participatory action and research, nourished by theoretical roots coming from paulo freire’s adults education, from fals borda’s critical sociology, from marxian ideas (manuscripts, critique of german philosophy; gramsci´s works, philosophy of liberation (dussel, levinas)., and has created and submitted to the proof of practices , concepts and relationships, in many countries in the region cp is rather invisible or informal. that is: presented under the social psychology, or clinical psychology umbrellas or as an appendix of health programmes. the following examples, going from south to north, illustrate the point: argentina: as an academic discipline cp began to be developed in the early 90’s saul fuks & antonio lapalma (2011, 41-64), authors of quite a few researches and responsible for the chapter about the history of pc in argentina, began saying that “community participation is an emergent notion in social sciences”, and that its “instrumental use not always is sustained by the ecology of ideas” coming from cp. so it has a variety of uses, that deprives its content, forcing cp to keep retrieving its key concepts”, meaning that it has to be reconstructed once again (2011, pp. 56-57). they complain of the fact that “with the exceptions such as annual conferences, it has been impossible to gather community psychologists around common objectives” (p. 58), and they attribute at that lack of gremial support for the lack of cp institutionalization. i should bring up that fucks has had four about some 30 or more years a very successful community programme with a large low-income community, near the national university of rosario, where community stakeholders have been as engaged and committed as fuks. colombia: this one of the first countries to introduce a cp related programme, and as arango & ayala (2011, 139-155) have written, what they have to tell is “a history of invisibility” ignoring cp (p. 139). a strong and shocking statement, especially if one knows that colombia has hosted the two world symposia about participatory action research (cartagena, 1977 & 1987). they describe the programmes of the universities where they are professors (university of el valle and catholic university of comobia, respectively). in the first case (el valle), the pioneer programme is extinct, but arango has created a new one that he has labeled as cp of conviviality. the one at catholic university is rather new but it is thriving. a very interesting programme created by national open university (unad by the spanish accronym) is fascinating because it teaches people that got to communities in small places, very far away from the big cities, and teach, in a participatory way. more than 12.000 people have been trained, and to me it is a great job. but people at the unad feel that their work and their alumni are somehow considered as in a lesser position. invisible, although their institution is very formal, cp has been introduced by the colombian association of psychology faculties in the same division along with social and environmental psychologies; such union meaning that those three disciplines do not have enough “social weight “ as to be independent. global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 venezuela: my own country, one of the first to embrace cp has had a tradition of community work included in public policies. those policies have been carried out by a variety of professionals: architects, educators, engineers, economists, sociologists, social workers, physicians and since the 70’s, psychologists. but academia was rather late in 8understanding what was happening outside the campuses. i was a young teacher at the end of the 70’s, and i ignored that a cp existed, but along with my social psychology students we felt that we could not solve the problems happening outside the university, unless we approached the people suffering them. so we began going out, doing a lot of group dynamics (the only method helpful at the moment) and in 1979, at an inter-american congress of psychology, we discovered that what we were doing was called cp and there was a lot more in it. although by 1982 i had a written a definition of cp introducing not only control but also power, by and for the people, it was only in 1986, that i was able to create a cp undergraduate course, but, under the social psychology umbrella. no other course has been added after that one. there is the possibility to do a master in social psychology, with cp mention. in spite of that many good dissertation and theses in cp have been made; as well as ph.d. thesis. but cp has not formal recognition, yet, in the country, in spite of being one of the countries that has produced and is producing more contributions to cp literature, and that in central university has been produced a line of environmental cp. and there is a line of graduate studies in community clinical psychology at catholic university (created in 1999). el salvador: this country has an interesting history written by nelson portillo (2011, 213-233). cp was beginning to be developed in the late 70’s by marta mercedes moran, who for political reasons that led to a tragic civil war, she had to flee. as portillo says, that development was stopped because in the two main universities it was very much opposed due to the idea of a traditional-institutional vision that was considered useless. social psychology was not prepared to do the task and it was re-introduced in the early 90’s after the end of the conflict, being then considered as very useful to work in the country reconstruction. according to portillo it has been professionalized in the period between 1998-2002. mexico: in this country during the mid 70’s cp in the line of newbrough and other us pioneers began to be introduced in guadalajara by the iteso a catholic academic institution. at the same time a very unusual and interesting experience directed by emilio ribes iñesta, a conductist psychology was carried out in an institution dependent of the national autonomous university (unam). this experience demanded that all the education was to be practiced in the communities around the site (workers communities), but it lasted only five years, and soon it was reverted to traditional psychology with elimination of cp. recently (about five years ago), an undergraduate course in cp has been, for the first time created at the faculty of psychology of the unam. almeida & flores, authors of the chapter about méxico (2011, 277-304), have entitled it as the informality of community psychology in mexico. they consider that community orientation has been very important in mexico, but it has not been, so far, informalized. the terms community and community development, are key terms for social work; the concept of community is needed and used in many researches and practices; many institutions work for and in communities, and there are formal programmes in some universities (sinaloa, veracruzana, morelos, puebla, yucatán), obviously, research and practices have produced knowledge and theoretical studies, but as those authors say “it seems that pc will continue transforming itself in mexico, thanks to more non-institutional university experiences, but also thanks to the theoretical and methodological contributions from scholars who from their scientific and humanistic fields reflect and act in relation to community approximations to contemporary social problems” (p. 299). so, in spite of the slow attention towards formal cp, there is a future in the case. microsoft word 2012-003-final-20120521.docx global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 reaction to: lobbying for endorsement of community psychology in australia by cohen, dean, gridley, hogea, robinson, sampson, sibbel & turner in gjcpp “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” francine lavoie, école de psychologie, université laval, québec, québec, canada. francine.lavoie@psy.ulaval.ca marie-hélène gagné, école de psychologie, université laval, québec, québec, canada i would like to salute the dedication of all australians involved in this accomplishment. it is an important contribution to the affirmation of community psychology and we will all benefit. before commenting on the main issue, i want to acknowledge that we can learn many more things from their paper, amongst them: 1) lobbying is a useful tool, 2) our allies should be diverse and are not necessarily where we think they are at first; 3) timing is just about everything. their paper could be recommended reading for influencing policy because it helps us understand the collaborative process that is needed to influence policy decisionmaking and the necessity of informing and persuading. it is often debated whether gaining recognition by a national regulatory board is what needs to be prioritized to develop community psychology. for various reasons, few of us choose to undertake this quest. then something in our ecological niche changes that gives us the impulse to do so. in the province of québec (canada), we also chose to ask for official status from the ordre des psychologues de la province de québec (opq) which is the official provincial regulatory board for psychology, each provincial board in canada being independent. what stimulated our decision was a redefinition of the diploma of entrance to the practice of psychologist by the opq and a resulting reshuffling of many graduate training programs in the province. québec was one of the few canadian provinces that up to that point accepted a master’s as the diploma of entrance to the opq (with a generalist registration) but it was now to become a doctorate (ph.d. or d. psy). as we were already offering graduate training in community psychology in our department of psychology (the other university doing so being université du québec à montréal), we thought it wise to aim for the development of a fully independent program in community psychology and to ask for its recognition by the provincial board. the chairman of our department was a strong believer in the diversity of psychology and in the contribution of community psychology. our colleagues were less empathic but the three professors in community psychology saw this redefinition of programs as an opportunity. there are proportionally more than twice as many psychologists in quebec as in the other provinces of canada. this amounts to 7 150 psychologists, of which 75% are women. we thought that community psychology, with its values on social justice and empowerment, could earn its place. the opq has the mandate to certify the programs which correspond to standards ensuring quality of practice and protection of the population. if the doctoral program of a university is not on their list, its graduates cannot become members of the provincial board and thus are not allowed to use the designation psychologist. in québec, there is no endorsement of areas of speciality such as community psychology, clinical psychology, counselling psychology, etc., unlike australia, where nine areas are now recognized. if the faculty members interested in community psychology at université laval had not developed a fully independent doctoral program, the only path to become a psychologist and member of the opq, would have been to be a graduate of an accredited clinical program. organizational psychology faced the same problem community psychology did. the ph.d. program in research and intervention in community psychology at université laval was accredited by the opq in 2003 and community psychology was thus indirectly endorsed as an area of practice within the provincial registration system. so, are we happy? are we better recognized? at the provincial level, yes. at the local level, no. the proverb, "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" seems the perfect descriptive sentence from my point of view. i like the english expression but let us not forget that the first author may have been spanishmiguel cervantesor frenchnicolas boileau! i think that we, at université laval, simply choked on our pudding. two main ingredients were lacking: the support of our proximate community, our colleagues; and a proper global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 understanding of the lack of interest among students in what we were proposing in our program. it is easy to identify colleagues and students as responsible for our failure; things are more complicated than that, for sure. i would suggest that a lack of resources is the main explanation. having only three professors responsible for the program along with a few other collaborating colleagues, and with no possibility of recruiting additional staff, led to a restricted choice of courses and practica. the administrative requirements of the provincial board were also numerous and added to the work of the professors. the burden associated with the large number of students choosing the clinical program influenced our colleagues to concentrate on this speciality, which became nearly synonymous with the orientation of the whole department of psychology. we had gambled that the endorsement of community psychology by the opq would consolidate the intent of students and be an additional motivation to pursue a ph.d. in community psychology. we were wrong. our program is now suspended and we no longer accept new students. the only remaining accredited program in community psychology in the province of quebec is at université du québec à montréal. the coming years will show if they succeed in recruiting psychology students with social concerns. and this will remain also an important issue for australia. what were the positive aspects of being endorsed by the opq? i would suggest two aspects. first, it made us better as a program. we were invited to define the skills to be developed in the practica and in the internship and this led to lively discussions and finally got us involved in thinking more about the practical training of our graduates (lavoie & brunson, 2010). second, we contributed to our discipline of psychology as a whole through our criticism of the opq’s agreement manual on training: we repeatedly challenged the mandatory nature of a course in psychopharmacology for all psychologists and denounced the near omission in the manual of the importance of context and culture. yes, this is still possible in the 2010’s. as our australian colleagues wrote, "every 2-4 years there is a crisis in which community psychology needs to review its status." we have consolidated one area, the recognition by a regulatory board of the practice in community psychology. but "(…) the battle keeps needing to be fought" with new resources and a new generation. and by the way, we have other things to do…..to change the world. i raise my glass (of québec cider) to our australian colleagues and look forward to tasting their australian pudding. references lavoie, f., & brunson, l. (2010). la pratique de la psychologie communautaire. psychologie canadienne, 51(2), 96-105. doi : 10.1037/a0018085. microsoft word 2014-si05-20140528.docx community transformation and collective healing: lessons from pakistan, brazil, and zambia chante’ d. deloach, psy.d., antioch university los angeles. sujata regina swaroop, psy.d. the trauma center at justice resource institute author notes: dr. chante' d. deloach, psy.d. is director of the trauma specialization and core faculty in the department of clinical psychology at antioch university, los angeles. email: cdeloach@antioch.edu dr. sujata regina swaroop, psy.d. is program coordinator of project reach and postdoctoral fellow at the trauma center, a division of justice resource institute in brookline, ma, usa. email: sswaroop@jri.org keywords: global community, trauma, collective healing recommended citation: deloach, c. d., & swaroop s. r. (2014). community transformation and collective healing: lessons from pakistan, brazil, and zambia. global journal of community psychology practice, 5(1), 1-13. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 community transformation and collective healing: lessons from pakistan, brazil, and zambia abstract community psychology has long sought to be global in its scope and focus, particularly having liberation as a primary and overarching goal of the field. despite seeking to stand in solidarity with marginalized and disadvantaged persons, the field has been criticized as remaining largely western-centric in its worldview and epistemology. the historic disconnect between systems of mental health –as traditionally defined within a western context – and the experiences of marginalized and indigenous peoples around the world necessitates greater consideration of local methods of healing with greater accessibility, cultural credibility, and sustainability within local communities. in this article, the authors utilize traditional mechanisms of healing in pakistan, brazil, and zambia as case studies to advocate for a community based mental health promotion model that weds: 1) prevention and health promotion; 2) professional allopathic service providers partnering with paraprofessional and traditional health practitioners; and 3) community engagement and political literacy as a transformative and empowering mental health system of care that targets the individual and the community as source and location of intervention and healing. results are aligned with community psychology goals and intended outcomes and suggest an action-oriented model in which the community serves as actors in and agents of their own collective health and healing. keywords: global community, trauma, collective healing introduction community psychology has long sought to be global in its scope and focus and stand in solidarity with marginalized communities (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010). yet, the field has been criticized as remaining largely western-centric in its worldview and epistemology (see for example cruz & sonn, 2011). the historic disconnect between systems of mental health –as traditionally defined within a western context – and the experiences of marginalized and indigenous peoples around the world necessitates greater consideration of local methods of healing with greater accessibility, cultural credibility, and sustainability. in social contexts in which the experience of collective and intergenerational traumas are commonplace, culture and community are integral; the dialectic of oppression and liberation remain imperative to pathways to individual and collective health and healing. global community psychology is uniquely positioned to consider the complex interplay of these systems-withinsystems (brofenbrenner, 1979) and the community aspect of collective healing. thus, the purpose of the present exploration is two-fold: 1) to make visible the healing practices of communities often silenced in community psychology discourse and; 2) to discuss ways in which culturally distinct, community based methods of healing are being utilized within communities in pakistan, zambia, and brazil with little access to professional psychological services to transcend prevailing social conditions and transform individual and collective well-being. background: beyond diversity in community psychology it has been fifteen years since anthony marsella (1998) challenged community psychology to prepare for a multidisciplinary and multinational orientation that might redress its historic ethnocentric assumptions and practices. yet, while many community psychologists may include the term “globalization” in their research, there remains a dearth of work that is centered outside of a western worldview. a cursory review of community psychology literature demonstrates that the research is insular citing relatively few works of researchers outside of the u.s. even the notable and relevant contributions of frantz fanon, steven biko, or linda tuhwai smith to name but a few international scholars known for their contributions in liberatory community psychology. similarly, the field’s inclusion and work in diversity is limited with only 25% of publications related to diversity (martin, lounsbury, & davidson, 2004). however, inclusion of diversity variables alone does not indicate primacy of cultural context or more importantly, a culturally-centered analysis. kral and colleagues (2011) argue that, “while community psychology is at its core a contextual enterprise, it is a cultural enterprise as well” (p. 47). there have been recurrent calls for community psychology to better understand the context of diversity through the employment of cultural knowledge and methods (o’donnell, 2006; trickett, 1996). given its theoretical value on the principle of diversity, the absence of theoretical evolution in this area is remarkable yet incites opportunities to move beyond global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 rhetoric to greater understandings and incorporation of cultural episteme that may advance the stated goals of community psychology. global experience of continued colonization, oppression, subjugation, and general disempowerment, underline the relevance of community psychology imperatives and demonstrates the continued need for community mental health services. yet declining funding for community mental health services in the u.s. and the dearth of or limited access to professional services globally necessitates a widening perspective of ways to intervene and promote individual and collective well-being (nami, 2013). given the confluence of oppression, liberation, and community well-being, jones and colleagues state that transformative change in community mental health entails a “far-reaching social justice-oriented reconfiguration of traditional power hierarchies” and “will come from the historical margins, driven by traditional subjugated knowledges…” (jones, harrison, aguiar, & munro, in press, p.1). such a definition is clearly aligned with a global community psychology rooted in local cultural knowledge. introduction to case examples across the u.s. and indeed globally, communities have actualized ways to build upon local cultural, spiritual, and traditional health mechanisms to transform individual and collective health, even in the face of colonization, oppression, and few health resources. pakistan, brazil, and zambia are used as case examples given the authors’ work in these countries and with its citizens and expatriates. these countries share histories of colonization and economic volatility as well as have continued political and ethnic issues that affect individual and community mental health. while the countries have differing health resources, all of the countries boast rich cultural and community traditions that may serve as conduits of health and well-being. thus, each country will be presented as a case study in which the following is used as points of analysis: overview of the sociopolitical and ecological landscape of collective well-being in the country; profile of mental health within the country (using both western and local conceptualizations where warranted); availability of and access to western and traditional health services; and information on collaborations across allopathic and traditional or community medicine. while it is the authors’ intention to methodically present and analyze this data across all cases, the very nature of transnational work, particularly with lowresource countries with few mental health resources often precludes consistent data from being available. thus, inherent limitations to this work are that the analysis is limited by a) cultural variance across geographic boundaries; b) vast linguistic diversity which affects language around health (particularly mental health) in addition to languages of publication; and c) the lack of economic and academic resources to publish mental health related data in accessible sources. for these reasons, it should be noted that the authors have included data from both national and international sources. despite these limitations, the following examples of culturally distinct, community based ways of intervening offer insight into methods of galvanizing the strengths of local resources to increase access to care in low-resource settings. lessons from pakistan the islamic republic of pakistan hosts a diversity of ethnic, religious, and linguistic populations. the pluralistic nature of this society and its reliance on ethnic and sectarian alliances has fostered structural violence and largely contributed to the conflict-related trauma experienced by ethnic pakistanis and can be traced to this nation’s period of colonization (haleem, 2003). the colonial history of pakistan is complex and largely connected to british colonial rule of the south asian subcontinent (malley-morrisson, 2009). since the nation’s birth through the 1947 british partition of colonial india, pakistan has battled with neighboring nations over border disputes, confronted internal struggles rooted in linguistic and ethnic conflict, and negotiated against sectarian divide. the bloodshed and trauma endured during mass relocations of populations within pakistan during the partition of british india has recurred during multiple armed conflicts and geographic boundary negotiations (debnath, 2009; menon & bhasin, 1998; reidel, 2008). this bloodshed has continued through the thirteen year-long regional war in afghanistan. despite this significant national history of trauma, there exists little international awareness concerning overall health and wellbeing or local health service provision for this nation. current research and trauma recovery work with refugee and immigrant populations primarily uses western paradigms. given pakistan’s history of colonization however, applying western models of psychology to this national population without awareness of or respect for traditional healing methods may be perceived as an extension of ethnocidal policies and practices experienced during the british raj. health and psychological wellbeing in pakistan prevalence data regarding overall health and psychological well-being from a western epistemology is scarce. very little data is available on the mortality, morbidity, and service use of attenders of mental health services in pakistan (karim, saeed, rana, mubbashar, global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 & jenkins, 2004). farooqi (2006) found that of adult psychiatric patients the most prevalent western diagnoses comprised of affective disorders, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, somatoform disorders, and personality disorder or conduct disorders. other research studies conducted by mumford and colleagues (1997, 2000) suggest the overall prevalence of depression within the national population to be somewhere between 12.5-53%. overall trends suggest that rates of mental illness or distress are significantly higher in rural areas than with urban populations (mumford, saeed, ahmad, latif, & mubbashar, 1997). these trends may relate to lifestyle, available resources, or levels of poverty. similarly, a dearth of prevalence data regarding classification of problems commonly identified by pakistani native faith healers currently exists, despite the fact that the practice of native faith healing is highly adhered to throughout pakistan. saeed and colleagues (2000) found that native faith healers in pakistan typically identified saya, or the casting of a shadow by an evil spirit, to be the most prevalent disorder. other conditions include possession by jinn, or evil spirit and churail possession, or possession by demon. notably, the native faith healers identified 8% of attenders as suffering from purely medical problems and advised to seek health services. traditional and community health services available in pakistan religious healers are typically the first point of health care contact for pakistani persons with illness(es) and their families; this appears especially true for the mentally ill in pakistan (karim et al., 2004; farooqi, 2006). these patterns of healthcare-seeking can be explained by pakistani’s strong faith in religious healers. religion and spirituality are seen as central to understanding healing for many practitioners of islam (swaroop, deloach, & sheikh, 2014). islamic traditional healers incorporate both medicinal remedies and spiritual techniques into their practice (farooqi, 2006; inayat, 2005). consistent with this research, swaroop, deloach, and veeramasuneni (2012) found in their study with pakistani women displaced due to war and flooding that many women reported seeking assistance from both western medical providers and traditional faith healers who were reportedly more accessible. although native faith healers and spiritual leaders are most sought for mental health services throughout pakistan, additional forms of traditional healing are prevalent within this nation. traditional healers include a variety of local practitioners of ancient or herbal medicine such as the khalifs, gadinashins, aamils, magicians, palm readers, folk healers, pirs, imams, and hakims. recent research has indicated that in addition to islamic faith or spiritual healing, the most commonly used traditional healing practices in pakistan are homeopathy, naturopathy (tibb), acupuncture, chiropractics (jerrah), sorcery, and danyalism (farooqi, 2006). homeopathy is widely popular with the lowermiddle class of pakistan, presumably due to the belief that this type of medicine is more natural than western biomedical models, with fewer side effects. these healers have organized their own associations with corresponding teaching colleges and registration authorities (karim et al., 2004). hakims, or practitioners of ayurvedic medicine, have also formed their own association in pakistan. hakims are formally registered with the pakistani medical and dental council. community health recent initiatives also demonstrate local commitment to health and wellness within pakistan. the pakistani government has developed national health policy guidelines involving a community-based health worker program with lady health workers (lhws). through this program, women are trained to bring health information, basic healthcare, and family planning services to traditionally underserved areas within pakistan. according to who and the global health workforce alliance (2008), 96,000 lhws are involved in this initiative, bringing health education and service provision to their home villages. oxfam (2011) notes the implications this community medicine program has for the empowerment of pakistani women, asserting that women are more visible and mobile within the communities served by lhws. oxfam (2011) additionally noted the influence of a paid position on education, training, work experience, and increased decision-making power for lhws within their own families and communities. lhws in pakistan have forged relationships across class and caste barriers and have taken collective action against sexual harassment. while challenges for this program still exist, it is believed that this lhw initiative has built upon socioeconomic changes currently taking place within pakistan such as rapid urbanization, increased exposure to media, increasing acceptance of female education, and women’s increasing desire to work outside the home. partnering with traditional health practitioners given the paucity of data in relation to western nosology of mental health in pakistan along with the undeniable use of traditional healing methods for healing, farooqi (2006) and many others suggest that cooperation between pakistani spiritual healers and western health care professionals is highly needed. the growing number of lhw’s appears to also be a global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 potentially powerful avenue for collaboration, particularly regarding the mental health of pakistani women and children. while collaboration has yet to occur, such formal cooperation would acknowledge and build upon local strengths and resources connected to community wellness, empowering a population typically silenced in international discourse. in order for this cooperation to take place, western mental health practitioners including community psychologists must build an understanding of the lived experiences of pakistani populations as well as the power and potentiality of its community and spiritual resources to transform. this comprehension appears crucial given pakistan’s history of colonial subjugation, historical loss, and the continued deleterious effects of war and drone strikes. lessons from zambia zambia is a resilient country, one which emerged from over a hundred years of variations of british colonialism and continues to resist foreign control of its natural resources, particularly its copper production (eisa, 2006). yet, the natural resources and strengths of zambia can be overshadowed by the country’s host of social and economic issues. as one of the subsaharan countries most ravished by the hiv/aids pandemic, it is estimated that approximately 13% of the adult population is affected by the disease (although urban areas have infection rates as high as 20%) and 600,000 children have been orphaned as a result of the disease (unaids, 2012). the country has an alarming estimated age of mortality: 45 and 47 years for women and men respectively; the economic position of the country is equally concerning (who, 2009). while consistent data is difficult to procure, it is clear that unemployment remains a critical issue, particularly for youth in urban areas; the majority of the population lives below the national poverty line (ibid). neighboring conflict in the democratic republic of the congo and zimbabwe have led to forced migration across the borders due to the relative openness and safety of zambia. this has placed further strain on existing social structures (mayeye et al, 2004). health and psychological wellbeing in zambia the prevalence of mental health disorders in zambia is difficult to estimate given the lack of mental health infrastructure, but it is estimated that 20% of the population suffers from a diagnosable mental health disorder (simenda, 2013). many of those hospitalized for the most significant mental health concerns have comorbid neuropsychological issues secondary to hiv (ibid). primary issues affecting mental health include: hiv/aids; neuropsychological issues related to substance use, particularly alcohol and cannabis; marital and relational issues; gender based violence including rape; spousal homicide and exposure to other types of violent crime (mayeya et al., 2003; simenda, 2013). community health and local mental healthcare given the national prioritization of hiv/aids related care, mental health lacks national prioritization and access to mental health services remains difficult. to date, the majority of the limited services available are curative in nature focusing primarily on tertiary intervention (mwape, sikwese, kapungwe, mwanza, flisher, lund, & cooper, 2010). while accurate numbers of mental health providers is difficult to access, recent data suggests that there are a meager three psychiatrists and two psychologists in the entire country (simenda, 2013). clinical officers and lay counselors who receive brief training primarily in hiv counseling provide the few existing services. barriers to care are compounded by the fact that 60% of the population are estimated to live in rural areas, where there is an overwhelming dearth of access to health services, including mental health care. critics of zambia’s mental health system point to issues such as the now antiquated mental health disorders act of 1951 in which pejorative and stigmatizing language such as “imbecile” and “idiot,” remain part of the legislation (mwanza, cooper, kapungwe, sikwese, mwape, & the mhapp research programme consortium, 2010). while there is activism for contemporary legislation grounded in universal human rights and dignity, this legislation remains the prevailing law. in addition to needed legislation, much attention has been granted to zambia’s “brain drain” issue, namely the epidemic of trained healthcare providers and other professionals leaving the country. while few formal mental health services exist (as typically defined in the west), it is estimated that 70– 80% of individuals seeking mental health solutions consult traditional health practitioners before seeking help from allopathic practitioners (mayeya et al., 2004). this is aligned with local understandings of mental health. local terminology is often used to refer to mental illness such as: kufunta, ukupena, usilu and are pejorative in nature and rooted in the belief that the mentally ill have regressed into childhood, been possessed by a spirit, or caused by witchcraft (mayeye et al., 2004). thus, traditional mechanisms of healing may be preferred over western medicine. traditional healing in zambia while zambia lacks professionally trained mental health providers (by western standards), it has a vast association of traditional health practitioners. with over 40,000 registered traditional healers as part of the national thpz, traditional health practitioners global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 association of zambia as well as additional healers in the national council of ng’angas, it is estimated that there are 20 times more traditional health providers as there are allopathic providers of medicine (mayeye et al, 2004), particularly in remote areas where the need is highest. partnerships in health services and prevention efforts in an attempt to galvanize the strength of infrastructure and trusted accessibility of traditional healers, who, unaid, and the zambian ministry of health have partnered with thpz to advance hiv/aids education and treatment. globally, in public health traditional healers are being recognized as primary care providers (who, 2008) who benefit the health and well-being of the collective. such providers appear to be even more integral in communities where allopathic health provision is limited or inaccessible, such as in zambia. it is widely viewed that much of zambia’s health crisis is rooted in preventable illness, the country has and is witnessing wide spread advocacy for major transformation in its healthcare system and praxis (mwape et al., 2010). in a study of clinical officers and psychiatric nurses, participants noted that early detection and early intervention were among key steps necessary in transforming healthcare (ibid). outcome data from the collaboration between traditional health practitioners and allopathic providers is difficult to access and appears to still be in its infancy. yet, it is pertinent to the present exploration as it increases access and opportunity to promote health to the masses. the who’s declaration of the imperative nature of these partnerships and its emphasis on community based efforts to promote health is consonant with that articulated by zambian clinical workers. missing from these recommendations and zambian health discourse is the connection between social issues and individual health and well-being. for instance, there is evidence linking poverty with poor mental health outcomes (burgess, joyce, pattison, & finch, 1992; jarman, 1992). in noting the intractable relationship between poverty and mental health, ethel mpungu noted, “we need to be mentally healthy to get out of poverty” (irin, n.d.). yet, mental health has not been identified as one of zambia’s basic health priorities. lack of recognition of the social determinants of individual and collective health – including mental healthappears to only serve to further perpetuate the declining health of this nation. overall, the mental health situation in zambia is considered critical. clearly there is an urgent need for more mental health providers across all levels of training. this is a particular opportunity to train and cultivate african psychologists from an african psychological orientation. mpofu (2002) notes that “african psychologists [must]…disabuse themselves of assumptions of the ‘natural goodness’ or ‘innocence’ of western or mainstream psychological conceptions by: (a) engaging in serious intra-cultural debate with their client base (i.e., parents, children, community leaders) on psychological constructions relevant to the local communities, who invents the constructs, how the constructs evolve, in what settings, and for what purposes. they should also seek to understand how they could be better resources to children, families and communities who may be in need of psychological interventions as well as how to work collaboratively with traditional healers, spirit mediums, and prophets (p.184). the psychological community may learn from its public health counterparts by partnering with organizations such as thpz given their knowledge, expertise, and credibility. the number of traditional healers in zambia clearly surpasses the number of mental health providers who could feasibly be trained in the country in the near future. this is at once a sobering lesson and opportunity to work in more collaborative and strategic ways. lessons from brazil brazil, the most populous country of latin america, is a country of striking contradictions. a country lauded as being a “racial paradise,” is primarily comprised of indigenous peoples, individuals of portuguese ancestry, descendants of africans brought to the americas for enslavement, immigrants (and their descendants) from japan and the middle east, and those who identify as mestizo or of mixed ancestry (vargas, 2005). despite the description of racial harmony, brazil’s racialized history is complex rooted in an intractable dialectic of portuguese colonialism, enslavement of africans, mass violence and displacement of indigenous people, and continued racial and economic stratification that define brazilians’ social location. it is widely known that enslavement persisted in brazil until 1888 being the last country to eradicate slavery. this legacy continues as afro-brazilians continue to lack access to health care, education, and employment at the same rates of white brazilians (vargas, 2005). afro-brazilians are disproportionately targeted by police brutality, suffer disproportionate rates of hiv/aids and other preventable disease, have high rates of joblessness and poverty (vargas, 2005). the social location of afro-brazilians is juxtaposed against the economic and political gains witnessed in the global arena. brazil has seen consistent economic growth over the past decade surpassing the uk as the seventh largest world economy (world bank, 2013). despite what may be viewed as social and economic global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 gains, significant disparities in economics exist. recent data from the institute of applied economic research suggests that brazil ranks 148 in a group of 150 countries in its gini index, indicating an alarmingly high degree of social inequality (ipea, 2012). this inequality is even further pronounced across racial categories. health and psychological wellbeing in brazil these disparities are evident in health as well. brazil’s health minister publicly acknowledged the racism in brazil’s health system (osava, 2006). in the northeast region of the country which hosts the largest concentration of persons of african ancestry, infant mortality rates are double that of the south, endemic and transmittable diseases also occur at much higher rates in the north and northeast regions (pan american health organization, 2008). hospitals and access to medical care vary based upon location with greater access being in more highly populated areas, which are typically wealthier areas. depression rates in the country also appear to be associated with social class. there is increased incidence among the working class and economically impoverished groups while there are lower rates among the upper middle class (fregni, 2007). such health disparities are not surprising in a country that encompasses health as a constitutional right in light of its continued sorted racial praxis and economic stratification. community health and mental health system accessibility brazil’s mental health practice is also situated in its history and social context. there was an early community orientation toward health and education, advocacy against marginalizing and institutionalizing individuals with mental health and developmental challenges (minoletti, galea, & susser, 2012). brazilian educator paulo freire is probably best known for his work in liberatory education which served as a major contributor to liberation and critical psychology. brazil was also part of early regional efforts to increase integration of social and health care systems through the adoption of the local health systems model as well as the creation and strengthening of legislation protecting mental health rights (minoletti, galea, & susser, 2012). there has been mixed political prioritization and support for these efforts since that time. recent discussions of psychology in brazil indicate that the country is second only to the u.s. in number of psychologists. with over 140,000 practicing psychologists, brazil may surpass the u.s. in total number of psychologists in the future (hutz, mccarthy, & gomes, 2004). while levels of education, credentials, and licensure differ across countries, this trend is remarkable. it is noteworthy that despite brazil’s previous work in liberation education and psychology, present day training consists primarily of north american and european models of psychology and the majority of faculty training students were educated outside of brazil, primarily in the u.s. or u.k. (ibid). moreover, brazilian psychologists are most often employed in urban areas primarily in private clinic settings. given that a large percentage of brazil’s population reside outside of urban areas and are unlikely able to access private clinics, the limited presence of psychology to such private settings is concerning as it renders psychological services out of the reach of the masses. despite this trend, brazil stands in contrast to many of its latin american neighbors. brazil is one of only three latin american countries to make strides in transforming its mental health system. brazil developed a system of psychosocial care centers modeled after similar centers in italy specifically for individuals with severe mental health issues (minoletti, galea, & susser, 2012). in addition, brazil is part of a regional mental health network, redeamerica (ra), funded by the nimh, which seeks to promote community mental health services through the promotion of public mental health research, which is lacking in the region. particularly noteworthy is that one of the key premises of ra is that community based mental health services must be given priority and that it should include service provision in the communities in which affected individuals live. such efforts should be lauded as it aims to contribute to what is known about mental health and ostensibly can contribute to preventive and promotion efforts. it is evident that while there is investment in ra, the practice of psychology in brazil has moved from one centered in a transformative community agenda to one focused primarily on individual, tertiary treatment encounters most accessible by the elite. however, outside of the practice of (western) psychology, there are a number of other practices and structures in place in brazil that are also relevant to the present exploration. community health initiatives the unified health system or sistema unico de saúde (sus) was created in 1988 by the brazilian government. through the sus, interdisciplinary primary care teams consisting of a physician, nurse, nurse auxiliary, and a minimum of four community health workers from the local community visit households within an identified target area (generally 100-150 households) (minoletti, galea, & susser, 2012; vaz, goncalves, & abreu, 2013). recent estimates global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 indicate that there are over 250,000 lay community health workers in brazil providing monthly health visits (minoletti, galea, & susser, 2012). the range of services offered is vast including general health education, check-ups, minor medical intervention, as well as prevention and health promotion. while many of brazil’s largest cities have only implemented this model in recent years, the program is continuing to expand. it is unclear the extent to which mental health is included explicitly, yet this communitarian model presents a unique opportunity to introduce or strengthen mental health prevention and treatment efforts. given the community embeddedness of the community health workers, this is also a model that is likely locally sustainable over time. it is reported that the largest barrier is the human resources as many physicians and health workers lack the commitment to work in marginalized areas (minoletti, galea, & susser, 2012; vaz, goncalves, & abreu, 2013). thus, the dialectic of health disparities and social conditions remains inexplicably linked to economic investment as well as potentially internalized oppressive messages about subaltern members of a community. culturally and spiritually based health services with the rich cultural traditions of brazil, there are also existing cultural and spiritual communities and practices that serve as avenues for health and healing. specifically, brazil has a history of integrating spiritism within its psychiatric hospitals. spiritism is described as a science, philosophy, and religion and most frequently attributed to allan kardec in france (lucchetti, aguiar, braghetti, vallada, moreiraalmeida, & vallada, 2011). according to spiritist philosophy, some mental disease can have malevolent spiritual origin or is rooted in untreated issues from previous lives. there are a number of hospitals and treatment facilities associated with the spiritist tradition. while there is little available data, a recent study indicated spiritist hospitals accounted for 50% of psychiatric admissions in sao paulo (zapatelli et al, 2011). it is noteworthy that lucchetti and colleagues (2011) found consensus that spiritual interventions are not substituted for psychiatric treatment, rather serve as complementary treatment in spiritist hospitals. moreover, patients in spiritist associated facilities endorse a wide range of faith traditions. it is evident by the number of facilities that brazilians are open to spiritist hospitals and find the complement of western allopathic and spiritual interventions offered as beneficial. in addition to the spiritist tradition, candomblé, an afro-brazilian religion brought to brazil by enslaved africans primarily from west and west central africa remains a central spiritual practice, particularly for afro-brazilians (harding, 2000). historically, candomblé leaders have been not only spiritual leaders, but also served as activists and utilized their social capital to advocate on behalf of their communities. deloach and petersen-coleman (2010) found in their work with candomblé devotees that candomblé also served as a spiritual and cultural conduit of collective identity, health and healing. the researchers concluded that for favela residents, candomblé served as a trusted and accessible avenue of support and healing from trauma and resulted in greater sense of pride in their african ancestry and greater sense of community connectedness. given the prominence and location of terreiros (or place of candomblé worship), which are community-based settings, these were deemed to offer physical, emotional, and spiritual respite within the favelas. the location and structure of candomblé terreiros coupled with the psychological and spiritual benefits, uniquely position it for utility in community psychological efforts. more specifically, given the continued subjugation of people of african ancestry in brazil, candomblé appears to be a source of empowerment and serves as a community of resistance. shared lessons and implications for transformative change it is evident from the case examples presented that these communities have found effective ways to galvanize local cultural and spiritual traditions as well as allopathic medicine as a means of transforming community mental health and well-being. following are primary lessons emerging from these international examples of community health initiatives: 1. across settings, access to supports is increased when efforts are made to work within existing cultural and spiritual systems of care as well as using models of community health. it is clear from the examples provided that the path to transformative community mental health cannot merely be an increase in psychologists or mental health workers. the shortage of mental health workers in zambia is undeniably dire. yet, as witnessed in brazil, the increase in psychologists may not be correlated with declines in mental health issues or increases in collective well-being. in all of the countries noted here, large numbers of communities turned to traditional mechanisms of healing prior to, in lieu of, or in concert with western medicine or mental health. the vast network of community health workers in brazil and pakistan provide a striking example of how paraprofessionals are being trained to engage in prevention, promotion, and even intervention. while it is unclear the extent to which mental health is incorporated into this existing infrastructure, this offers an opportunity to galvanize these as resources for global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 mental health. 2. integrating psychology throughout interdisciplinary systems promotes community transformation. the presented examples of community health exemplify how interdisciplinary teams have been established and the international support for integrated mental health services. this is consonant with recent directions in the u.s. to create integrated medical teams more inclusive of psychology (bennett-johnson, 2012). as seen with the case studies, transformative community mental health must necessarily be local and participatory. participatory action is empowering and allows individuals to be actors in and agents of their own health and the collective well-being of their communities. montero (2009) speaks to the significance of participation: “an important characteristic of participatory methods fostering liberation is related to the role power plays within its goals. participation empowers the people and is also directed towards their conscientisation. . . its emancipative character is evidenced in its capacity to empower participants, strengthening their resources and developing their ability to acquire new resources and redefine themselves as able citizens with rights and duties and the capacity to defend their achievements and demand what is due to them. it is also a democratising instrument, as this type of collective action and reflection strengthens civil society” (p. 76) relatedly, while there was clear connection between mental health and other aspects of health in these models, there remains a disconnection from other necessarily intertwined systems such as education. given the role of education in transforming communities (see freire, 1972 for example), such an absence is conspicuous. moreover, education has been demonstrated to potentiate positive mental health outcomes and empower women and girls globally (unfpa, 2013); it is imperative that education be made more central as a source and location of prevention and intervention. 3. any community transformation and healing must necessarily consider macrosystemic interventions that shift the social landscape in which any community mental health would take place. as mentioned previously, all of the countries highlighted share histories of colonization and continue to struggle with social inequality largely related to ethnic and economic variables that may arguably extend from their colonial legacies. lacking in all of these examples is a clear articulation of community and political activism for social change to bring about collective well-being. it was clear in both zambia and brazil that issues related to mental health policy and legislation have been highlighted as necessary for advancements in community mental health. while such legislation is certainly beneficial particularly in advocating for the political and economic resources necessary to strengthen service provision, such efforts remain ameliorative at best. community and liberation psychologists have long decried the association between social conditions, liberation, and well-being (see fanon project, 2010). thus, community transformation and healing necessitates acknowledgement of this relationship and redressing the social conditions that give birth to many of the issues outlined. for instance, in brazil it is clear that much of the social strife and concomitant mental health sequelae disproportionately impact its afrobrazilian population. zambia has been an “independent” nation for less than 50 years, it continues to lack complete control of its own natural resources, and has been decimated by the hiv/aids pandemic. pakistan has its own legacy of colonialism, ongoing ethnic and religious strife, and continues to be disaffected by the regional afghanistan war. these complex sociopolitical conditions serve not just as the history but the present day milieu in which nationals of these countries live. to only advocate for treatment in such conditions renders practitioners complicit in neocolonialism and conscious participants in the medical industrial complex (fanon project, 2010). insofar as community psychology seeks to create and support empowered social milieus, such is the work of engaged global community psychologists. thus, these community examples also demonstrate that transformative community mental health must necessarily be decolonizing. given the histories of colonialism, it is remarkable that across all of these countries, indigenous and culturally grounded methods of healing continue to thrive. in zambia, the sheer numbers of healers (over 40,000) in thpz indicate that despite centuries of colonialism and current forces of globalization, cultural tradition remains powerful and salient. so much so that who and other international health organizations have conceded that it is most prudent to partner with zambian traditional health practitioners. similarly, there are related patterns with pakistani and islamic faith healers, brazilian spiritist hospitals, and followers of candomblé in brazil. not only are individuals and communities experiencing traditional mechanisms as being therapeutic and more accessible, their very presence in the face of global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 colonialism may demonstrate healthy political resistance and cultural continuity (deloach & petersencoleman, 2010). conclusion it is clear that there is much to be learned from the presented models of health. it is evident from the international examples provided that even within lowresource settings, communities engage in remarkable efforts to heal, restore, and transform. results lend support for a community based mental health promotion model that weds: 1) prevention and health promotion; 2) professional allopathic service providers partnering with paraprofessional and traditional health practitioners; and 3) community engagement and political literacy as a transformative and empowering mental health system of care that targets the individual and the community as source and location of intervention and healing. such a model would be participatory and decolonizing in nature. as demonstrated from community based methods of healing existing within pakistan, zambia, and brazil, transformative community based frameworks may include galvanizing extant resources or models of mental health, integrating local mental health services into educational systems, and engaging in community and political activism for social change to redress social conditions that undermine and negate empowerment, healing, and wellbeing. it is noteworthy, however, that while there may be points of convergence, allopathic and ethnomedicine or traditional healing models may be philosophically and/or epistemologically incompatible. it is not the intention of these authors to conflate or dilute the respective approaches, rather, to present the possibilities of collaboration in the interest of health promotion in low-resource settings. further exploration in this area is necessary to better explicate: the extent to which said collaborations are possible, existing barriers, and the ways in which such a model may potentiate community mental health. recommendations the purpose of the present exploration was to give voice to the transformative healing practices of communities that have historically been silenced in global community psychology discourse. given the dearth of research focused on community mental health in these countries, further research is sorely needed. pakistani communities are currently living within constant conflict, drone strikes, and have been plagued by multiple recent natural disasters. yet, much of this populations’ lived experience receives little international attention. thus, little is known about pakistani mechanisms of health and healing. hiv/aids continues to decimate zambia and the entire subsaharan region. three psychiatrists and two psychologists for a entire country that has seen its collective life expectancy cut in half is beyond what many western mental health providers’ comprehension. greater partnership with traditional practitioners as well as research regarding their identified needs to strengthen collective response is prudent. clearly more scholarly attention is needed to chronic grief/loss, advocacy for greater resources and current mental health legislation, as well as capacity building to support local sustainable programming. despite brazil having thousands of psychologists at its disposal, disparate social conditions create different castes in life with discordant health outcomes. further research on their community medicine model and 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(2011). panorama da saúde mental no estado de são paulo: leitos psiquiátricos e assistência extrahospitalar. retrieved from: http://www.saude.sp.gov.br/resources/profissional/ documentos_tecnicos/estudos_analises/panorama_s aude_mental[ionira].pdf microsoft word 2012-003-final-20120521.docx a rose is a rose is a rose...13 why community psychology needs to stand up for its endorsement on an interdisciplinary and societal ground wolfgang stark14 australian colleagues (cohen, dean, gridley, hogea, robinson, sampson, sibell & turner 2012), based on the struggle for endorsement of community psychology (cp) in australia, have initiated an important debate which goes beyond the issue of professionalisation of cp. the australian case raises issues on the professional and political identity of community psychology.15 based on the german experience, in this paper the process of traditional professionalization is challenged. the debate, which is going to be published in the next issue of the global journal of community psychology3, is summarized this abstract provided by cohen, dean, gridley, hogea, robinson, sampson, sibell & turner (2012): “in november 2010, the areas of practice known as community psychology and health psychology were endorsed by the australian health workforce ministerial council (ahwmc). this was a major reversal of the council’s earlier decision in april that year to limit the endorsed areas of practice to those represented by the other seven colleges of the australian psychological society. this paper describes the intense lobbying effort coordinated by the national committee of the australian psychological society college of community psychologists and their supporters, which was sustained over many months and led ultimately to a changed decision by the australian health ministers. the story is important for community psychology as it 13!gertrude stein ́s metaphor helps us to view things twice, at least...! 14!wolfgang stark, dr. phil. is professor of organizational and community psychology at the university of duisburg---essen in germany. he has been one of the founding members of the german association for community research and action (www.ggfp.de) in the 1980s and has been on the board of the european community psychology association (www.ecpa--online.eu) since its start in 2005. he served as president of ecpa 2007---2009 and is now member of the task force on community psychology oft he european federation of psychology associations (efpa). 15 i am grateful to the editors of gjccp for the permission to pre---print this paper in the ecpa newsletter 2012 demonstrates the power of collective, integrated and focused political lobbying, in this case to promote and to inform others of the key contributions of community psychology to health policy, illness prevention and primary care. without endorsement there would be little incentive for universities to offer postgraduate programs in community psychology, which would then choke the only pathway to future membership of the college, rendering it unviable. with no further training offered, and eventually no representative body within the aps, there would be direct implications for the sustainability of the whole discipline and practice of community psychology in australia.” (gjcpp 2012, forthcoming) the australian case provides a very good lesson for both the status and possible futures of community psychology as an academic discipline and a area of practice. although it is beyond my intellectual capacity to fully understand the differentiated and advanced situation of community psychology in australia, i would like to applaud the power and energy of my fellow community psychologists in australia! community psychology in australia, like in the us, is an important role model for other countries on the status we can reach with an idea of psychology that goes beyond the individual. this example also can give us insights about the potentials and pitfalls for community psychology as an idea and as a discipline. community psychology – the german experience since the rise of community psychology (cp) in germany in the late 70s, cp and community psychologists managed to be accepted as a field of psychology, but never reached formal endorsement4. in the late 70s and early 80s, a growing number of anthologies on cp have been published, in gradually launched a young and critical field within psychology at german universities. most of the scholars and practitioners have been connected to clinical psychology, some to social psychology. students have been drawn to cp because it provided a more holistic and critical approach to the problems and challenges of individuals, family and groups. there have been close links to other disciplines (sociology, political science, philosophy as well as social work, public health, community psychiatry) as well as to societal movements (feminist movement, psychiatric survivors) and to international movements (psichiatria democratica in italy). cp gradually developed some special programs on cp in universities (universities in munich, berlin, oldenburg, marburg). global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 28 but when the debate about psychological licensing started in germany in the 90s, german cp stayed back. although there has been considerable debate, for many german colleagues, cp always has been closer to other disciplines and movements (see above), than to traditional psychological field like clinical, social and the like. as a consequence, although german community psychologists formed their own association and institutionalized their efforts, the university programs were closed as soon as the faculty members originally launching the movement retired. what seems to be a strategic setback on the one hand, turns out to have some benefits on the second sight: today, despite the fact that all official community psychology programs in universities are closed, community psychology topics are more powerful than ever: community psychology in higher education is part of the curriculum in psychology in a growing number of institutions. concepts of community psychology like empowerment or social support have been adopted by classical disciplines like clinical psychology, social work, educational science and many others. patterns of professionalisation hence, analyzing the australian case from the background of our german cp history (and, of course, my individual professional and political point of view), it may be helpful (1) to identify some of the basic patterns of the australian cp experience, and (2) consequently, discuss some issues on the identity and development of the field called community psychology. at first sight, the australian case seems to illustrate the typical struggle for professional endorsement, which always means the struggle for public resources. as soon as public institutions are endorsing a disciplinary field or professional practice, public democratic reasoning leads to an obligation to offer public resources for professionalization to some extent – either to support schools and education, to reimburse services or even to include community psychologists into pension plans at the end of their career. therefore, one can see some basic patterns linked to each other in the case provided: 4 there have been parallel developments in other european countries like italy, portugal and britain which lead to more recognition in their professional communities (1) there are limited slices in the “public cake” and there should not be to many who want to eat from that cake, because it is rather shrinking than growing. this is a very basic pattern commonly used by politicians and public administrators all over the planet. it delivers the double---message: we have to stand together, because situation is getting worse: something is shrinking, and we don ́t have the power to do something against. 2) in this case, as a consequence, the “divide and impera”---pattern is applied: if endorsement of professional disciplines is limited, actors will fight each other to be part of the game and thereby forget to see the larger picture (what is really needed for individuals and society). this allows government/public institutions to avoid to start a debate or public discourse about societal problems being the real cause for individual/family/community problems needed to be addressed (you also could call this pattern the “governmental pattern” or “power pattern”); (3) community psychologists, although always struggling for the good and well-being of their clients/families in need/communities (and of course this is true respectively for all other psychological disciplines) have to realize that they are – in this case – part of the game. they are fighting for resources for their own discipline that they need in order to be helpful for families and communities in need and which is honourable and will be valuable for communities in need. at the same time cps tend to be part of the “individualization pattern”: as a discipline, although standing together as individual professionals, they tend to be individualized; as a consequence, societal problems tend to be treated as individual problems: that is why we need special disciplines and services. individualization both in professional and conceptual terms also bears the danger to somewhat loose contact to the original ideas of community psychology. (4) finally, it is always helpful to ask the “systemic question”: what is missing? in this case i could find a strong lobby of official representatives of the discipline, and even a strong alliance between students and faculty members of the colleges. but i missed a particular role for community members or maybe even community activists in the struggle. they seem not to play an active role in the struggle, although they should be one of the major actors in a political game that, at the end, is all about communities in need. so the question remains: what would community members and community activists say? based on these patterns identified (of course there may be more) one could state that the australian case on community psychology is a case on global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 29 professionalization of a field, which could be any field in modern societies (like clinical psychology, social work, but also architecture, financial accountancy, or cattle raising). in this view, this is not a case on community psychology at all, because similar processes on professionalization could happen elsewhere. community psychology beyond professionalisation as soon as we realize the implications of the process of (and struggle for) professionalization of cp, issues on the identity of community psychology both as a science an a practical field can be raised: if we share the vision of community psychology being one of the major psychological disciplines, cp looks like an island of science and practice being not very influential within the discipline of psychology. there may be ways to strengthen the process of professionalization, but both the australian case and the history of us---community psychology show that professionalization within the traditional structure of psychology bears the danger of loosing major parts of cp ́s identity: cp always has oriented itself towards a systemic view of social dynamics in the world by integrating individual and group levels, community, organizational and societal levels of analysis. this is why cp identity bears a wide variety of regional and individual scholarly stories, and is trying to integrate personal value systems and scientifically based interdisciplinary research and practice within its boundaries. this is in the core of cps belief system and has been developed since 30 years. especially today the transdisciplinary concept of cp has the potential to be one of the most powerful applied sciences in civil society, if not tamed by professional dynamics. by linking the strengths of different traditional disciplines (psychology, sociology, organizational science, anthropology, educational science, social work and social medicine), spheres of academic science and everyday community challenges of our time, and the analytical view on the past and creative ideas for the future, cp is going beyond traditional applied sciences: cp is not only applying scientific results for praxis, but can add crucial questions and ideas on individual, social and societal issues. by using systematically a transdisciplinary approach as a new challenge in science, strengthening its political power beyond academic and professional institutionalization, and integrating the “tacit” knowledge of the community and thereby consolidating its identity as a “real” participative science and practice, cp can go steps beyond professionalization. in order to unfold its potentials, cp as a linking science and practice (stark 2011) needs to unleash itself from the limits of traditional academic disciplines and professional taxonomies: the social network and social support research in the 70s already brought close collaboration between psychology, sociology and anthropology, and developed temptative links to virtual networks in computer science which are on stake today. the discourse on empowerment processes has been influential for many practical areas in community mental health and social work, psychiatry, community development and organizational science. in social policy the concept of empowerment has been adopted in various legislations and developed as a synonym for innovative approaches to social challenges and the growth of a consumer--and prosumer---oriented civil society. cps traditional values (like social change and transformation) and current challenges today require more than working in a local community and/or improving the social situation of specific groups. while this work will remain an important core part of community psychology, the field should empower itself use its competencies to develop social innovations and look at emerging futures by developing shared goals (and take shared risks) by collaborating with other disciplines, companies or other actors in society. references: cohen, l, dean, j, gridley, h, hogea, r, robinson, k, sampson, e, sibbel, a, & turner, c. (2012). lobbying for endorsement of community psychology in australia. australian psychological society college of community psychologists. global journal of community psychology practice, 4, 2012 stark, w. (2011). community psychology as a linking science. potentials and challenges for transdisciplinary competencies. in: almeida, e. et al: international community psychology: community approaches to contemporary social problems. university of puebla press, puebla, mx cultural-religious empowerment global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 reflections on the assessment of practice competencies competencies community psychology, liberation psychology, and ecopsychology specialization, m.a./phd depth psychology program, pacifica graduate institute by nuria ciofalo, susan james, and mary watkins1 at pacifica graduate institute keywords: program assessment; community psychology, liberation psychology, ecopsychology, pacifica graduate institute; scra practice competencies author biographies: nuria ciofalo, ph.d., is co-chair of the community psychology, liberation psychology, and ecopsychology specialization. born in mexico, she gained her b.a. and first m.a. in germany where she specialized in psychoanalytic theories, particularly jung and adler, and, her latter m.a. and ph.d. in a community focused psychology program at university of hawaii. from 1982-1987, she was a professor of psychology and chair of the psychology department for five years at university of xochicalco (mexico), for two summers in an m.a. psychology summer program at university of las americas. since her doctorate in 1996, she has worked in wide variety of research situations in the u.s. and mexico, training others to do research and managing and evaluating large-scale research projects. she has been a senior evaluation analyst at the california endowment. recent publications include: culturalreligious empowerment, popular power, and contra power: a demand for indigenous rights (2014). revista de psicologia social comunitaria 3 (2), and heroes and martyrs against alienation: growing up as puer and puella in post-modern society (2013). global journal of community psychology practice. susan james, ph.d., is co-chair of the community psychology, liberation psychology, and ecopsychology specialization and 1 in collaboration with cle students, faculty, and pacifica’s organizational learning office http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 a community psychologist and digital media producer. dr. james' work focuses on understanding cultural ecologies and disseminating social science research findings using visual design solutions and film, a practice she pioneered over a decade ago. james established innovative action research agendas and directed large-scale projects while holding senior positions at new york university, university of chicago, and the national center on addiction and substance abuse (casa) at columbia university. her own research focuses on structural violence as a determinant of wellbeing, and is published in american journal of community psychology and violence against women. she created research imaging productions, a research and design consultancy that conducts social research and produces digital communications products for the nonprofit sector. she earned a ba from sarah lawrence college and a ph.d. from new york university. dr. james has been a guest member of the psychology faculty at sarah lawrence college, and a faculty member in the department of africology at university of wisconsin-milwaukee. mary watkins, ph.d., is chair of the depth psychology program and serves as coordinator of community and ecological fieldwork and research in the community psychology, liberation psychology, and ecopsychology specialization. she is a clinical and developmental psychologist and was an early member of the archetypal/imaginal psychology movement. she has worked in a wide variety of clinical settings and with groups on issues of peace, diversity, social justice, reconciliation, immigration, and the envisioning of community and cultural transformation. she is the author of waking dreams, invisible guests: the development of imaginal dialogues, co-author of toward psychologies of liberation, http://www.pacificabookstore.com/against-wall-re-imagining-us-mexicoborder, andtalking with young children about adoption, and up against the wall: reimagining the u.s.-mexico border, and co-editor of psychology and the promotion of peace.www.mary-watkins.net recommended citation: ciofalo, n., james, s., and watkins, m. (2016). reflections on the assessment of practice competencies. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(4), pages 1-21. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.pacificabookstore.com/waking-dreams http://www.pacificabookstore.com/invisible-guests-development-imaginal-dialogues http://www.pacificabookstore.com/invisible-guests-development-imaginal-dialogues http://www.pacificabookstore.com/toward-psychologies-liberation http://www.pacificabookstore.com/talking-young-children-about-adoption http://www.pacificabookstore.com/talking-young-children-about-adoption https://webmail.pacifica.edu/owa/redir.aspx?c=nucit6dgbkbp-svqxajaedtqqy6xe9ilaeeroe5frzsinnuahf3tca..&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.mary-watkins.net%2f http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 correspondence should be sent to nuria ciofalo at nciofalo@pacifica.edu http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:nciofalo@pacifica.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 reflections on the assessment of practice competencies community psychology, liberation psychology, and ecopsychology specialization, m.a./phd depth psychology program, pacifica graduate institute abstract the framework of the comprehensive assessment plan of the community psychology, liberation psychology, and ecopsychology specialization of the m.a./ph.d. depth psychology program is guided by the values and goals set forth in pacifica graduate institute’s strategic plan. the practice competencies designed by the community psychology practice council and the council for education programs of the society for community research and action (scra – division 27, american psychological association) were integrated into the development of a rubric that includes particular competencies that are based on depth psychological and ecopsychological abilities, capacities, and sensitivities nurtured in our values and curriculum. this rubric was applied to praxis courses that are specifically oriented to the application of knowledge and competencies earned in theoretical courses. findings and reflections obtained from the application of the adapted rubric and narrative assessments were combined with the analysis of portfolios and video-documentation as testimonies of attained practice competencies. the assessment framework the community psychology, liberation psychology, and ecopsychology (cle) specialization of the m.a./ph.d. depth psychology program at the pacifica graduate institute has concluded its 6th year, and is actively evolving a participatory assessment and implementation plan that reflects its integrative values and goals. our curriculum strives to foster community psychology competencies, as well as depth psychological, ecopsychological, and racial and environmental justice sensitivities and competencies. this ambitious framework requires ongoing faculty and student efforts at articulating our mutual pedagogical goals and developing ways to assess our degrees for opportunities and challenges in achieving them. we are working both within the institutional assessment efforts of pacifica graduate institute and within the “guiding principles and competencies for community psychology practice” set forth by the society for community research and action (scra – division 27, american psychological association), and developed by the scra community psychology practice council and the scra council for education programs (elias et al., 2015, pp. 35-53; sarkisian et al, 2013; scra, 2012). furthermore, we have created additional assessment criteria developed primarily for the classroom from work that has recently evolved out of students of color and racial justice allies groups, as well as core values specific to our specialization that were developed with faculty involvement as a means to a valuesdriven pedagogy (taylor & sarkisian, 2011). the framework of pacifica graduate institute’s (pacifica) comprehensive assessment plan (cap) is guided by pacifica graduate institute core values: stewardship, integrity, service, eros, and consciousness (http://www.pacifica.edu/abouthttp://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.pacifica.edu/about-pacifica/core-values?highlight=wyjjb3jliiwidmfsdwvziiwiy29yzsb2ywx1zxmixq== global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 pacifica/corevalues?highlight=wyjjb3jliiwidmfsdwvziiwi y29yzsb2ywx1zxmixq==). in addition, this plan focuses on the attainment of the following goals: (1) strengthen and enhance academic rigor and vigor across all programs; (2) develop institutional assessment for improved planning and intervention; (3) continued assessment for organizational learning, and (4) resourcing of infrastructure to provide academic excellence. in order to be an integral and central part of organizational learning, assessment must go beyond compliance and invoke values of reflection, learning, commitment, and community, all of which are deep-seated in pacifica’s mission and values. as such, one of the most important objectives of the cap is to foster shared responsibility for and commitment to ongoing assessment and learning (fetterman et al, 2014; fetterman & wandersman, 2015). learning and assessment are a multi-faceted, multi-layered, cyclical, and systemic process with multiple, interdependent, and interacting feedback loops. the plan involves processes and structures working simultaneously on five related but distinct levels of learning and assessment: student, course, program, organization, and community—located both within each and across academic programs and embedded in the institution’s ecological context. assessment is conceived as a process of participatory learning, knowledge creation, and knowledge management, a process that is embraced by the organization and that is transformed into a reflective, collaborative, action-oriented, and incremental approach to improved program planning and implementation. this includes reflexive learning that fosters continuous, transformative, and sustainable educational excellence. the assessment strategy this cap strategy strives to create a solid and sustainable process of assessment ownership and buy-in. it is highly aligned with pacifica’s ways of knowing and utilization of learning for personal, social, and educational change, thus making it culturally compatible and increasing the probability of promoting its sustainability. further, it aims to facilitate the ecological/holistic growth of individuals, organizations, and communities, which are capable of their own self-transformation. it emphasizes the need to value existing individual and organizational knowledge and to practice it in community, incrementally, and cautiously. it is based on deep reflection of expected outcomes and the critical evaluation of its impacts to adapt knowledge for continuous self-driven, transformational learning. components of the cap the cap has four components to assess effective educational excellence: (1) student success (2) academic rigor and effectiveness (3) centralized data collection and management system (4) closing the loop: informed decisionmaking. each component has interdependent and interactive factors or subcomponents that enable or disenable the application of knowledge for program improvement. the plan warrants the assessment of such factors to plan for interventions. in this paper, we will focus on reflections of program learning outcomes as measured by an adapted clescra practice competencies rubric. we will share the additional competencies offered by our community and ecological fieldwork and research faculty advisors. lastly, we will briefly describe initial efforts at assessing competencies based on e-portfolios and video-documentation. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.pacifica.edu/about-pacifica/core-values?highlight=wyjjb3jliiwidmfsdwvziiwiy29yzsb2ywx1zxmixq== http://www.pacifica.edu/about-pacifica/core-values?highlight=wyjjb3jliiwidmfsdwvziiwiy29yzsb2ywx1zxmixq== http://www.pacifica.edu/about-pacifica/core-values?highlight=wyjjb3jliiwidmfsdwvziiwiy29yzsb2ywx1zxmixq== global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 the m.a/phd depth psychology program, community psychology, liberation psychology, and ecopsychology specialization (cle) at pacifica graduate institute this specialization is a bold initiative to forge interdisciplinary transformative approaches to the personal, community, cultural, and ecological challenges of our time. while grounding students in psychoanalytic, jungian, archetypal, and phenomenological lineages of depth psychology, euro-american depth psychological theories and practices are placed in dynamic dialogue with ecopsychology, decolonial studies, critical community psychology, and indigenous and liberation psychologies. to study community and ecopsychology in the light of liberation psychology is to commit to the exploration of the profound effects of injustice, violence, and the exploitation of others and nature on psychological, communal, and ecological wellbeing. it is a commitment to create paths to peace and reconciliation, justice, and sustainability (https://www.pacifica.edu/degreeprograms/ma-phd-community-psychologyliberation-psychology-ecopsychology ). depth psychological community/ecological fieldwork and research the m.a./ph.d. depth psychology program, cle specialization, is committed to a holistic understanding of psychological well-being, seeing individual, familial, community, environmental, and cultural well-being as inextricably interlinked. through community and ecological fieldwork and research, students work in the area of their calling, while deepening their ethical discernment, reflecting on their own positionality, widening their repertoire of dialogue and arts-based approaches, and gathering the theoretical insight and practical skills to conduct participatory action research and community and organizational program evaluation. praxis classes mentor students in innovative group approaches: council/circle, appreciative inquiry, theater of the oppressed, public conversation, open space technology, community dreamwork, liberation arts, restorative justice, somatic approaches to trauma healing, conflict transformation, and imaginal and ritual approaches to community health and healing. to hold in mind the intricate workings of psyche in the context of the complex dynamics of culture and history is a difficult undertaking. in this specialization, we also draw on theories, insights, and practices from critical community psychology, liberation psychology, ecopsychology, and indigenous psychologies. we are keenly aware of the importance of dialogical and interdependent relationships, consensus building, and the arts to developing critical resistance. in the fieldwork portion of this specialization, each student, in conversation with a fieldwork mentor, discerns the area(s) of their passionate interest, and engages in two fieldwork immersions (one each summer) to deepen their understanding of work being pursued in the area of their interest and to contribute to the ongoing work of their setting. during the second fieldwork experience, students are encouraged to engage in a piece of research, hopefully of a participatory nature, applying ethics and principles of research, and contributing to addressing an issue or concern which the community and they think is important to study. this work enables students to contribute and to hone research and program evaluation skills, including asset mapping and appreciative inquiry. students join in the work of ongoing community groups (see fieldwork manual). the assessment approach of fieldwork practice competencies methods cle’s assessment plan is implemented based on a multi-faceted, multi-layered, cyclical, and systemic process with multiple http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.pacifica.edu/degree-programs/ma-phd-community-psychology-liberation-psychology-ecopsychology https://www.pacifica.edu/degree-programs/ma-phd-community-psychology-liberation-psychology-ecopsychology https://www.pacifica.edu/degree-programs/ma-phd-community-psychology-liberation-psychology-ecopsychology http://www.pacifica.edu/images/documents/cle/community_ecological_fieldwork_areas_sites.pdf http://www.pacifica.edu/nh/2015_16_fieldwork_handbook.pdf global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 interdependent and interacting feedback loops. it involves assessment processes of structures working simultaneously on six related but distinct levels of learning, (1) student, (2) faculty, (3) course, (4) program, (5) organizational, and (6) community praxis (i.e. transformative practice) located both within each and across our specialization areas, including its ecological context (local and global community). the eighteen scra practice competencies were integrated into the development of a rubric that includes particular competencies based on sixteen depth psychological and seven ecopsychological capacities and sensitivities nurtured in our values and curriculum. the rubric was applied to the assessment of students’ competencies in several praxes courses. qualitative assessment included the reflection of practice competencies in student essays, stories published in newsletters, e-portfolios, and testimonies by means of narrative inquiry and video documentation. participants the co-researchers in this study were three fieldwork advisors, two class instructors, and fifty students engaged in assessing practice competencies during the 2012-2016 academic years. seventeen students in 2012, eleven students in 2013, and ten students in 2014 who were enrolled in the summer fieldwork i course and under the “phenomenology and communication of depth psychological, cultural, and ecological work” class were assessed by one instructors and three advisors applying a 45-item rubric in 2012-2013, and a revised 42-item rubric in 2014. in 2015, seven students engaged in these classes, five students who were enrolled in fieldwork ii and in a third year “participatory research practicum” class, their students’ peers, three fieldwork advisors, and two class instructors were engaged in this assessment applying the revised 42-item rubric. lastly, three core faculty conducted reflections on findings throughout these years. materials and procedures the list of the 18 scra practice competencies was slightly modified by separating item 12 into two items: 12: “collaboration” and 13: “coalition development.” the last adapted cle-scra rubric has a total of 19 scra items, and the additional 23 cle items—16 depth psychological and 7 ecopsychological competencies (see appendix b). the rationale was that building collaborations is an important practice competency that helps to develop more complex competencies such as coalition development. we considered that our curriculum may most likely provide skills in the former, particularly, at the master’s level, and that the latter may be obtained at the phd level—i.e., in the third-year classes and during dissertation research. with this rationale in mind, we reflected on skills developed in the first year of fieldwork compared with second year fieldwork and third year coursework. the cle-scra practice competencies rubric scale included three levels of mastery: (1) exposure: in core community courses, all students learn about the value of this competency and how it can be applied in community psychology practice. (2) experience: in selected courses, including supervised fieldwork, students can choose to gain supervised practice in performing tasks and actions related to the competency. (3) expertise: upper level students can choose competencies in which to develop further experience and attain a higher level of expertise. this might involve several field experiences over several terms or years. postgraduate experiences and continuing education allow further development of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 expertise in specific competencies. (scra, 2012, p. 9 cited in sarkisian et al., 2013, p. 2) not applicable (n/a): we added this column to the rubric in 2014 to indicate that the competency was not evidenced because the goals of the fieldwork project did not address it. the rubric was first created in 2012 with a total of 45 items and revised in 2014 with a total of 42 items (see appendix a). it was applied in the four praxes courses described above (see curriculum https://www.pacifica.edu/degreeprograms/ma-phd-community-psychologyliberation-psychology-ecopsychology/clecurriculum-overview). data obtained from various sources reporting on fieldwork competencies was used in this assessment and applied at different levels: (1) fieldwork advisors’ assessment of the students’ practice competencies evidenced in fieldwork reports utilizing the adapted clescra rubric; (2) fieldwork advisors’ overall narrative feedback; (3) students’ peer assessments of fieldwork presentations applying the rubric in two classes; (4) faculty’s narrative analysis of yearly newsletters, students’ portfolios, and a video documenting testimonies of students’ learning outcomes, and (5) self-evaluation of third year students’ reflection essays on their perceptions of attainment of practice competencies applying the rubric. quantitative data was analyzed using software to determine means. qualitative data obtained by means of students’ selfreflections was analyzed using content analysis (manual nvivo analysis), determining ranks based on frequencies of competencies cited under the rubric domains. in addition, narrative analysis of newsletter contents featuring student fieldwork was conducted applying the rubric based on faculty reflection. students were also invited to create e-portfolios and showcase their work as a tool of learning outcome assessment as well as career search. one student, who was part of our first-year cohort in 2012 when our specialization started, developed an e-portfolio that was used as a case study to reflect on the attainment of practice competencies. lastly, a video documenting testimonies of students was included in the analysis. data was triangulated to determine overall findings. quantitative findings fieldwork practice competencies assessment in 2012 and 2013 seventeen students in 2012 and eleven students in 2013, who were enrolled in the summer fieldwork i course and the phenomenology and presentation of depth psychological, cultural, and ecological work course were assessed on 45 competencies for community psychology practice. in 2012 and 2013, three fieldwork advisors assessed the students’ fieldwork reports. in addition, in 2013 the fieldwork coordinator and instructor of this class assessed the students’ presentations applying the rubric. figure 1 displays the range of the average scores for the 45 competencies combining years 2012 and 2013. the number of times a practice competency was reported is described inside the bars. overall, the competency score averages were much higher in 2013 than 2012. in 2012, the competency scores averaged 2.2 and in 2013, 2.7. in 2012, only four of the 45 competencies had averages 2.5 or greater; in 2013, only 10 of the 45 competencies had averages below 2.5. in 2013, no competency had an average score less than 2 but in 2012, 9 of the 45 competencies yielded average scores lower http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.pacifica.edu/degree-programs/ma-phd-community-psychology-liberation-psychology-ecopsychology/cle-curriculum-overview https://www.pacifica.edu/degree-programs/ma-phd-community-psychology-liberation-psychology-ecopsychology/cle-curriculum-overview https://www.pacifica.edu/degree-programs/ma-phd-community-psychology-liberation-psychology-ecopsychology/cle-curriculum-overview https://www.pacifica.edu/degree-programs/ma-phd-community-psychology-liberation-psychology-ecopsychology/cle-curriculum-overview global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 than 2. the low-rated (average scores between 1.7 and 1.9) competencies were: 10 (resource development); 11 (consultation & organizational development); 18 (participatory community research); figure 1: 2012 and 2013 fieldwork practice competencies. ns= students; fa= fieldwork advisors. 2012 ns= 17 and fa=3; 2013 ns= 11 and fa= 1 30 (critical awareness of ethnocentric tendencies through language, tone, and expression of entitlement – including subtleties); 33 (critical awareness of connection between exoticism and racism), and 34 (understanding of differences among invasive, participatory, respectful and trusting research and action process including but not limited to recording, filming and photography when developing a culturally sensible research protocol in interaction with community). in addition, 16 (public policy analysis, development & advocacy) and 19 (program evaluation) received even lower average scores between 1.5 and 1.7. the rubric with item/competencies descriptions and their averages for the two years is displayed in appendix a. what was striking about this data set was the large amount of missing data. the 2012 students averaged 28 evaluated competencies and 17 unevaluated competencies. the 2013 students averaged 18 evaluated competencies and 27 unevaluated competencies. faculty reflections in the 2012 and 2013 retreats faculty retreats were used to reflect on findings, particularly, on the average to less than average scores (items 10, 11, 18, 30, 33, and 34). resource development, consultation, and organizational development (10 and 11) are taught in courses placed at the end of the second year and in several other courses spread over the third-year curriculum. fieldwork presentations take place at the beginning of the second year, consequently, it is expected that these did not evidence application of these competencies. further, students had not yet been exposed to a series of content areas that could have given them the opportunity to develop competencies in intercultural research (items 30, 33, and 34). in addition, items 16 (public policy) and 17 (dissemination to build public awareness) only ranked average. we decided to review our curriculum and planned for integration of course content in these areas, as well as to expand international research opportunities. 6 11 18 10 5 3 10 24 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 1.5 1.8 1.8 2.1 2.1 2.4 2.4 2.7 2.7 3.0 # of competencies in range competency average score range cle fieldwork competency score range 2012-2013 2012 2013 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 among the highest-ranking competencies were those that dealt with ecological principles, empowerment, sociocultural competency, reflexive practice, small group processes, collaboration, self-reflexivity, building community capacity, legitimizing other ways of knowing, and various depth psychological sensibilities. the suggested findings appeared to be in alignment with the salience of the course contents and the kind of learning objectives emphasized in our curriculum. further, there has been an improvement in the degree of exposure to several practice competencies between year 2012 and 2013. we concluded that the fact that many of the added competencies were not ranked (left blank) could be an indication that they were not applicable to the goals of the fieldwork project. this fact also suggested the need to revise and reduce the items and to add an (n/a) rating. we invited fieldwork advisors to collaborate in the revision of the rubric. fieldwork practice competencies in 2014 in 2014, we added “not applicable” n/a due to the high number of missing data in the 2012-2013 evaluation. we revised the rubric eliminating items that had a high number of missing data scores. missing data may have occurred when evaluators did not rank a competency because it was not evidenced in the student's work. the evaluators (faculty and students) were instructed to mark n/a if the competence was not relevant to the topic of the fieldwork—instead of not ranking the competency at any level given it was not evidenced in their fieldwork reports or presentations. n/a data may indicate that: (1) the student's work did not evidence the application of the competency because the work did not require it (i.e., program development given the student's work is not addressing this as a goal of the project) or (2) the student did not use this competency because it was not yet delivered as part of the curriculum and at the level he/she was (i.e., first or second year). n/a scores were aggregated averaging student-by-competency ratings. we engaged fieldwork advisors in the development of a revised rubric with a total of 42 items. one instructor and the students’ peers rated the students’ fieldwork presentations in the second-year class. ten students received about 10 “expertise” assessments, 16 “experience” assessments, and 16 “not applicable (n/a)” assessments out of a total 42 possible assessments. appendix b describes the average scores for each item. there was again missing data. ten students were evaluated on 42 items and from these assessments, only 62% were actually recorded. of the 42 competencies assessed, 17 (38%) yielded n/a 50% or more of the time (corresponding to a number of 5 or more in the column labeled n/a). faculty reflections in the 2014 retreat almost all competencies had an average score of 2 or above with the exception of program evaluation under the community research competencies (see appendix b: item 19) and one under the depth psychological sensitivities (item 26). we recognized that students are exposed to foundations in qualitative research methodologies during the spring quarter of the first year, just before they embark on their fieldwork i in the summer. the fieldwork handbook instructs them to apply depth psychological sensitivities in their first fieldwork experience and to listen to the community voices without imposing their own research questions and intervention agendas. students are encouraged to apply research methodologies in their second fieldwork in a participatory and dialogical manner, exploring with community members’ questions of mutual interest and import. further, students are not exposed to evaluation methodologies before the spring quarter of their second year and just before their fieldwork ii. since these data represent assessment of fieldwork i practice http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 competencies, it is not surprising that these areas ranked low. as a result, we decided to conduct assessment of fieldwork ii. competencies that received average scores of 3 (expertise) are within the ecopsychological competencies (items 38; 40; 41, and 42) and one item (35) under the depth psychological sensitivities. these findings suggest that the 2014 curriculum allowed students to practice ecopsychological competencies that may have been reinforced in more than the one ecopsychology course offered in the first year. fieldwork practice competencies in 2015 during the 2015-2016 academic years, we engaged seven students involved in their first-year fieldwork, and five students involved in their second-year fieldwork who were also engaged in fieldwork presentation in two classes (2nd and 3rd year respectively). in addition, cle faculty reflected on findings and proposed both assessment improvements and curriculum review to strengthen praxis competencies in students the rubric was applied at different levels: (1) three fieldwork advisors assessed the fieldwork reports; (2) the two instructors of the courses in which students presented their fieldwork assessed the student products, and (3) students acted as peer reviewers and assessed their fieldwork presentations. ratings for all the competencies were given for each student by fieldwork advisors, faculty, and student peers. ratings were made on a scale ranging from 1 (lowest) to 3 (highest) whereas: (1) is exposure, (2) experience, and (3) expertise in the attainment of praxes learning outcomes. table 1 describes the findings. practice competencies fieldwork i fieldwork ii foundational practices (fp) 2.5 2.78 community & program development (cd) 2.2 2.52 community & organizational capacity building (cb) 2.3 2.6 community & social change (sc) 2.18 2.67 community research (cr) 1.97 2.62 depth psychological practice competencies (dp) 2.19 2.44 ecopsychological competencies (ep) 2.3 2.59 table 1: 2015 comparison of scores between fieldwork i (fi) and fieldwork ii (fii) ns=number of students; fr=faculty raters—fi: ns=7; fr=4. fii: ns=5; fr=5 (1) exposure (2) experience (3) expertise for each of the 5 fieldwork ii students there was one rating by a faculty and between 3 and 5 peer ratings. for each of the 7 fieldwork i students there were between 1 and 3 ratings by fieldwork advisors and one faculty, and between 9 and 11 ratings by http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 student peers. for each student, the advisor/faculty ratings and the student peer ratings under each competency were added and averaged. there were some differences between the ratings given by advisors, faculty, and the peers. however, differences were minimal. both scores (those given by faculty/advisors and the peer scores) were averaged to determine the overall score for each competency domain and competency. detailed scores for each of the competencies under fieldwork i and ii are reported in appendix c. findings suggest that practice competencies perceived by advisors and students did not improve considerably from those rated under fieldwork i to those rated in fieldwork ii. however, there are slight average improvements in fieldwork ii in all of the competencies except in the last two competencies under the ecopsychological competencies domain and the community research domain (see appendix c items 41,42 and 16)). the competency domain community research shows a low score under fieldwork i competency program evaluation (1.9) but an overall increased average in fieldwork ii. the last two competencies (41 and 42) of the ecopsychology domain had an average of 1.9 in fieldwork i compared with 2.6 in fieldwork ii, and 2.1 in fieldwork i compared with 1.95 in fieldwork ii respectively, suggesting a decrease of the last competency (42) in fieldwork ii however, in table 1 above, the overall score of the community research domain improved slightly in fieldwork ii (1.97 in fieldwork i and 2.62 in fieldwork ii). the overall score of the ecopsychology domain also showed a slight improvement (2.3 in fieldwork i and 2.59 in fieldwork ii). furthermore, both faculty and students perceived there was some curricular exposure to the practice of competencies listed under the two domains (research and ecopsychology) as evidenced in the students’ selected fieldwork reports and presentations. it is important to note that at the time of assessment fieldwork i students were exposed to only one ecopsychology and one foundations in research class—although research and ecopsychology are integrated into other classes. fieldwork ii students take second year classes specifically targeting the areas of ecopsychology and program evaluation in the spring quarter, (and in the third year fall quarter, after their fieldwork, a participatory research practicum). this may explain the lower scores under these two domains in the fieldwork i findings. faculty reflections in the 20152016 retreat overall, it is expected that after fieldwork ii students may gain more mastery in these competencies. we will follow up assessing practice competencies during the dissertation and writing phase to determine if these are strengthened at level 3 (expertise). however, as table i above suggests, the fact that 6 practice competencies’ domains were assessed at the experience level (2), one at the exposure level (community research under fieldwork i), and none at the expertise level (3) alerts us that we need to continue reviewing our curriculum and strengthening these competencies. we decided to expand this assessment with potential qualitative evidence of practice competencies through a content analysis of yearly newsletters, e-portfolios, and videodocumentation in which students showcase their fieldwork, recent publications, recent jobs and positions, recent grants, and scholarships. qualitative findings student reflective essays the analysis of 8 third-year student reflections applying the rubric during the participatory research practicum class in the winter quarter of 2015 was used to train students how to do content analysis of the gathered testimonies. the instructor http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 analyzed the stories applying manual nvivo procedures utilizing the rubric domains to code the narrative data. codes were ranked based on frequencies. table 2 describes the findings. the depth psychological competencies’ domain was reported most frequently (31 times). the second scra practice competencies’ domain most frequently cited was foundational principles with a total score of 23. the data suggests that students perceived the curriculum is mostly developing and strengthening depth psychological competencies, primarily, “their ability to listen to unconscious dimensions of individuals and frequency rank practice competencies domain frequency (times cited) 1 depth psychological practice competencies 31 2 foundational principles 23 3 socio-cultural and cross-cultural competencies 9 4 ecopsychological competencies 7 5 community research 4 6 community and organizational capacity building 2 7 community and/or program development 2 table 2: frequency of practice competencies’ domains in self-reflection essays number of students=ns; faculty raters=fr—ns= 5 and fr= 1 communities,” and “the capacity to listen into the margins of a situation, to those voices that have been marginalized, repressed, or silenced” (see rubric appendix b, dp items 20 and 31 respectively). in the quantitative analysis, this competencies’ domain received a score of 2.6 in fieldwork i and 2.7 in fieldwork ii. students also reported sociocultural and cross-cultural competencies as being cultivated in their studies and in their application in fieldwork settings (cited 9 times; rank 3). the fourth most frequently cited (7 times) competencies’ domain was ecopsychological competencies, particularly, “the capacity to listen to the built and natural environments” (ep item 36) and “care to pay attention to the history (natural and cultural) of a particular place under consideration” (ep item 37) (see appendix c). however, this competencies’ domain scored very low in the quantitative assessment—1.1 and 1.5 for fieldwork i and ii respectively. the less frequently cited competencies earned in the specialization were reported under community research (cr cited only 4 times); community and organizational capacity building (cab cited only 2 times), and community and/or program development (cd/pd cited only 2 times). it is important to note that community research also received a low score (1.8) under the quantitative data analysis. although findings are tentative given the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 small number (8) of student participants, results suggest the need to strengthen the latter practice competencies at least within this cohort. other qualitative data sources were used to determine if this perception is representative of all cle students. for this purpose, student work reported in our yearly newsletters, one e-portfolio, and a video documenting testimonies of perceived learning and praxis outcomes were used to complement the qualitative assessment. analysis of the newsletters since 2013, our specialization has published yearly newsletters for which we select student portfolios of work conducted during their fieldwork, and/or with community groups or organizations during the life of their studies. the selected themes of the students’ articles reporting on lessons learned from their fieldwork or continued community work were coded applying the rubric. it is important to note that this assessment is not representative of all the students’ work but was guided by pre-determined faculty criteria to select stories that may inspire and serve as models originating within the specialization. thus, the assessment already includes bias towards determining particular practice competencies. nonetheless, we found this approach useful for us to reflect on manifestations of praxis competencies and what we considered important. table 3 shows the frequency of competencies’ domains by publication year. the practice competencies’ domains that appeared most frequently reported in the students’ fieldwork stories published in the newsletters from 2103-2016 are: (1) depth psychological competencies (46), (2) foundational principles (40) (3) social change (33) these practice competencies are also among those most frequently cited or reported under the previous quantitative and qualitative analysis suggesting alignment of findings among different data sources. in order to strengthen our participatory self-assessment, we would like to hear from our readers and colleagues the kinds of practice competencies they perceive after reading our newsletters (https://www.pacifica.edu/degreeprograms/ma-phd-community-psychologyliberation-psychology-ecopsychology/clenews-andevents?highlight=wyjuzxdzbgv0dgvyil0=) example of a student e-portfolio one of our fifth-year dissertation students, shelly stratton, developed an e-portfolio in preparation for a practice competencies presentation at the 2013 scra biennial conference. the e-portfolio purports to evidence how practice competencies contained in the rubric are evidenced by the student’s work. we also viewed this approach as beneficial not only for program review purposes but for the students as eportfolios can be used for career search, such as sending a resume when applying for jobs or for career promotion placing it in a personal website. the e-portfolio was presented at this conference and feedback from participants and presenters was collected to improve our assessment approaches and tools (see https://pacifica.digication.com/shelly_strat ton_licsw2/welcome/published). we would like to invite our readers and colleagues to assess the evidence of competencies perceived in this student’s product and share your feedback with us. video-documentation in 2014 we created a video to share our curriculum and selected student work. the following link will guide you in determining the presence of practice competencies reported in the students’ testimonies. we look forward to receiving the appraisal of http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.pacifica.edu/degree-programs/ma-phd-community-psychology-liberation-psychology-ecopsychology/cle-news-and-events?highlight=wyjuzxdzbgv0dgvyil0 https://www.pacifica.edu/degree-programs/ma-phd-community-psychology-liberation-psychology-ecopsychology/cle-news-and-events?highlight=wyjuzxdzbgv0dgvyil0 https://www.pacifica.edu/degree-programs/ma-phd-community-psychology-liberation-psychology-ecopsychology/cle-news-and-events?highlight=wyjuzxdzbgv0dgvyil0 https://www.pacifica.edu/degree-programs/ma-phd-community-psychology-liberation-psychology-ecopsychology/cle-news-and-events?highlight=wyjuzxdzbgv0dgvyil0 https://www.pacifica.edu/degree-programs/ma-phd-community-psychology-liberation-psychology-ecopsychology/cle-news-and-events?highlight=wyjuzxdzbgv0dgvyil0 https://pacifica.digication.com/shelly_stratton_licsw2/welcome/published https://pacifica.digication.com/shelly_stratton_licsw2/welcome/published global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 your assessment in order to expand dialogue about improving and strengthening our students’ practice competencies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_co ntinue=576&v=6wrd46cpts8). practice competencies domain 2013 2014 2015 2016 total (all years) foundational principles 5 7 11 17 40 community and/or program development 2 3 4 11 20 community and organizational capacity building 1 1 4 9 15 social change 3 7 11 12 33 community research 4 4 8 11 27 depth psychological practice competencies 8 10 11 17 46 ecopsychological competencies 2 3 2 8 15 table 3: frequencies of practice competencies’ domain reported in the narrative analysis of newsletters conclusions and recommendations this study is tentative and has a series of limitations, particularly, given the small sample of students and faculty engaged in assessing the practice competencies, and the consequent need to use non-parametric, descriptive statistics, as well as qualitative methods that may not have yielded valid and reliable findings. however, it has allowed us to reflect on existing data patterns from diverse sources and triangulate findings. the cle-scra practice competencies rubric was a very useful tool to note gaps and opportunities in our curriculum and to deepen into indicators of the existence or lack of particular competencies. elias et al, (2015) pointed out: as no individual community psychologist is expected to possess or flawlessly execute all of the current 18 competencies (and those that will emerge in the future), practitioners will vary in their level of expertise competency by competency, based on education, training, personal values, and experience. . . . all practitioners should have been exposed to the competencies, and their underlying values and principles, at some point of their career and ideally during their graduate-level professional http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=576&v=6wrd46cpts8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=576&v=6wrd46cpts8 global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 training. however, the specific competencies they develop experience and expertise in are shaped by their training context, work settings, and lifelong learning that they pursue. the only exceptions to this line of thinking are the competencies considered foundational principles. (p. 48) overall, results from 2012-2016 showed a range between 2-2.8 (experience) in the attainment of foundational competencies suggesting that this requirement was met. this assessment allowed us to review our curriculum targeting the competencies that appeared less supported by our pedagogical interventions, and to reinforce those that appeared more strengthened. we hope to expand our participatory selfassessment by means of increased dialogue with the larger scra community and the global community at large, and look forward to your inspiring feedback and recommendations. references elias, m.j., neigher, w. d. and johnson-hakim, s. (2015). “guiding principles and competencies for community psychology practice.” in scott, v.c, and wolfe, s. m. community psychology: foundations for practice. los angeles, ca: sage. fetterman, d.m., kaftarian, s., and wandersman, a. (2014). empowerment evaluation:knowledge and tools for selfassessment, evaluation capacity building, and acccountability. thousand oaks, ca: sage. fetterman, d.m. and wandersman, a. (2005). empowerment evaluation principles in practice. new york, ny: guilford publications sarkisian, g. v., saleem, m. a., simpkin, j., weidenbacher, a., bartko, n., & taylor, s. (2013). a learning journey ii: learned course maps as a basis to explore how students learned community psychology practice competencies in a community coalition building course. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), 1-12. retrieved 5/5/2016, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/ ). society for community research and action (2012). competencies for community psychology practice: draft august 15, 2012. the community psychologist, 45(4), 7-14. taylor, s., & sarkisian, gv. (2011). community psychology valuesdriven pedagogy: the foundation for empowering educational settings. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(2), 19-30. retrieved5/5/2-16, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/ ). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 appendix a: 2012-2013 fieldwork i practice competencies assessment ns= students; fa= fieldwork advisors. 2012 ns= 17 and fa=3; 2013 ns= 11 and fa= 1 exposure (1) experience (2) expertise (3) foundational principle 2012 2013 1. ecological perspectives 2.5 2.6 2. empowerment 2.4 2.6 3. sociocultural & cross cultural competence 2.2 2.8 4. community inclusion & partnership 2.3 2.5 5. ethical, reflective practice 2.2 2.6 community & program development 6. program development, implement & management 2.2 2.0 7. prevention & health promotion 2.1 2.7 community & organizational capacity building 8. community leadership & mentoring 2.1 2.7 9. small group processes and large group processes 2.4 2.8 10. resource development 1.7 11. consultation & organizational development 1.8 3.0 community & social change 12. collaboration 2.3 2.8 13. coalition development 2.2 14. community development 2.0 2.0 15. community organizing & community advocacy 2.0 2.0 16. public policy analysis, development & advocacy 1.6 2.0 17. information dissemination & building public awareness 2.0 2.0 community research 18. participatory community research 2.3 19. program evaluation 1.6 3.0 depth psychological practice competencies 20. invite and listen to unconscious dimensions of individual and community experience through attention to dream, metaphor, image, and symbol 2.4 2.7 21. include the sharing of images as a medium for deeper communication between community members 2.2 2.3 22. learn to track the psychological and community effects of shared cultural experiences, mitigating against the disempowerment that ensues from the individualizing of distress 2.2 2.4 23. learn to attend to how the environmental /ecological context affects psychological and community well-being 2.5 2.4 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 24. ability to design and communicate about an image-based experience for a community group 2.4 2.3 25. track intrapsychic and interpersonal experiences that help one to discern the particularities of their vocational call to community engagement 2.4 2.6 26. learn to mentor community participants in emotional literacy 2.6 2.7 27. build skills for developing nonviolent approaches, particularly in postconflict contexts 2.3 multicultural practice competencies 28. recognition of status as other in multiple categories and self-reflection about meaning 2.0 2.8 29. critical awareness of protocol for varying roles: participant researcher, colleague, guest, and worker 1.9 2.8 30. critical awareness of ethnocentric tendencies through language, tone, and expression of entitlement – including subtleties 1.0 3.0 31. sensibility about local cultural values and behaviors 2.1 3.0 32. building and gaining trust/permission for collaboration versus making assertive demands 2.0 3.0 33. critical awareness of connection between exoticism and racism 1.9 3.0 34. understanding of differences among invasive, participatory, respectful, and trusting research and action process—including but not limited to recording, filming and photography—when developing a culturally sensible research protocol and in interaction with community 1.9 2.7 35. navigating cultural differences—including but not limited to food, transportation, and personal space 2.1 3.0 36. sensibility about time and scheduling 2.1 3.0 37. cultural cues for respect and deference 2.3 3.0 38. tolerating reasonable discomfort and managing illness or injury 2.5 3.0 39. challenges linked to poverty in diverse communities (electricity, water, plumbing, food sources, transportation options, roads, safety) 2.3 3.0 40. environmental/structural realities in other countries climate, insects, environmental toxins 2.0 3.0 41. awareness of existing community readiness 2.1 2.8 42. ability to build culturally, appropriate community capacity 2.4 3.0 43. ability to build culturally, appropriate and empowering, community partnerships 2.3 3.0 44. ability to share and co-construct knowledge with community members 2.3 2.7 45. ability to include and legitimize other ways of knowing 2.0 2.8 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 appendix b. 2014 fieldwork i practice competencies assessment ns=number of students; fr=faculty raters. ns=10; fr=4 exposure (1) experience (2) expertise (3) foundational principle (2.5) 1 2 3 n/a 1. ecological perspectives 2.2 0 2. empowerment 2.4 1 3. sociocultural & cross cultural competence 2.9 2 4. community inclusion & partnership 2.5 2 5. ethical, reflective practice 2.5 0 community & program development (2) 1 2 3 n/a 6. program development, implement & management 2.0 5 7. prevention & health promotion 2.7 7 community & organizational capacity building (2.05) 1 2 3 n/a 8. community leadership & mentoring 2.2 5 9. small group processes and large group processes 2.0 7 10. resource development 2.0 7 11. consultation & organizational development 2.0 7 community & social change (2.2) 1 2 3 n/a 12. collaboration 2.2 1 13. coalition development 2.1 3 14. community development 2.4 2 15. community organizing & community advocacy 2.1 2 16. public policy analysis, development & advocacy 2.2 5 17. information dissemination & building public awareness 2.3 3 community research (1.75) 1 2 3 n/a 18. participatory community research 2.0 5 19. program evaluation 1.5 6 depth psychological practice competencies (2) 1 2 3 n/a 20. ability to listen to unconscious dimensions of individual and community experience through attention to dream, metaphor, image, symbol, silence, gaps, and the unsaid. 2.0 3 21. sensitivity to shadow issues in groups and organizations. 2.0 4 22. capacity to invite and to communicate through artsand image-based experiences, including community visioning. 2.1 3 23. capacity to be aware of, to track, and to take responsibility for one’s own countertransference to an individual or group. 2.0 6 24. ability to track projective identification, and a capacity for counter projective identification. 2.0 9 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 25. ability to apply self-reflexivity re. identifying potential ethnocentric, racial, and class bias. 2.1 3 26. ability to listen for and open space for the multiple perspectives in a given group or situation. 1.9 2 27. ability to sustain a stance of multipartiality that welcomes divergent perspectives and does not seek to advance one’s own personal perspective. 2.3 4 28. ability to facilitate dialogical, empathic, horizontal, and democratic relationships marked by transparency and shared decision-making. 2.4 1 29. capacity to witness and bear conflict and dissent and to model nonviolent approaches, particularly in conflict and post-conflict contexts. 2.4 5 30. capacity to listen to symptoms in a person, group, or system, and to understand them as attempts at communication, often by that which has been denied voice. 2.4 2 31. capacity to listen into the margins of a situation, to those voices that have been marginalized, repressed, or silenced. 2.4 1 32. capacity to bracket premature understandings, pre-understandings, and prejudices that assimilate the new, the foreign, the surprising to what one already knows and understands. 2.3 4 33. capacity to place oneself alongside of others, in an apprenticing rather than a hierarchical, expert relationship. 2.8 1 34. capacity to move from the visible and the manifest, to the invisible and the latent, allowing one to “see through” or to deconstruct what has been taken-for-granted or normalized. 2.3 4 35. sensitivity to individual and collective trauma. 3 0 ecopsychological competencies (2.8) 1 2 3 n/a 36. capacity to listen to built and natural environments. 2.8 2 37. care to pay attention to the history (natural and cultural) of a particular place under consideration. 2.7 1 38. capacity to listen to the multiple voices comprising a place, including people, animals, and earth elements. 3.0 7 39. openness to experiencing and engaging-intellectually, emotionally, practically and spiritually-with the joy and pain of humans, other sentient beings and the rest of nature at this particular moment in evolutionary history (the sixth great extinction, the great turning, etc.). 2.6 5 40. seeing the environmental crises of our time in an interdisciplinary manner, connecting social, economic, political and cultural issues as they converge in the crises of our time. 3 8 41. understanding the role and characteristics of our species in the evolving story of life on this planet and in this cosmos. 3 8 42. becoming aware of and engaging with the multiple efforts currently underway to rapidly shift and heal the human-nature relationship and the psyche-nature relationship 3 8 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 appendix c. 2015 dpc 783 fieldwork i (fi) and dpc 883 fieldwork ii (fii) practice competencies students were assessed by faculty raters and they assessed each other. ns=number of students; fr=faculty raters. fi: ns = 7 and fr = 4; f ii ns=5 and fr=1 exposure (1) experience (2) expertise (3) foundational principle 783 883 1. ecological perspectives 2.45 2.65 2. empowerment 2.6 2.7 3. sociocultural & cross cultural competence 2.55 2.9 4. community inclusion & partnership 2.45 2.85 5. ethical, reflective practice 2.5 2.8 community & program development 6. program development, implement & management 2.25 2.6 7. prevention & health promotion 2.2 2.45 community & organizational capacity building 8. community leadership & mentoring 2.35 2.55 9. small group processes and large group processes 2.3 2.65 10. resource development 2.2 2.8 11. consultation & organizational development 2.35 2.65 community & social change 12. collaboration 2.35 2.85 13. coalition development 2.15 2.5 14. community development 2.3 2.75 15. community organizing & community advocacy 2.35 2.75 16. public policy analysis, development & advocacy 1.9 2.6 17. information dissemination & building public awareness 2.1 2.6 community research 18. participatory community research 2.05 2.75 19. program evaluation 1.9 2.5 depth psychological practice competencies 20. ability to listen to unconscious dimensions of individual and community experience through attention to dream, metaphor, image, symbol, silence, gaps, and the unsaid. 2.45 2.5 21. sensitivity to shadow issues in groups and organizations. 2.2 2.45 22. capacity to invite and to communicate through artsand image-based experiences, including community visioning. 2.4 2.5 23. capacity to be aware of, to track, and to take responsibility for one’s own countertransference to an individual or group. 2.2 2.5 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 4 december 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 24. ability to track projective identification, and a capacity for counter projective identification. 2.05 2.15 25. ability to apply self-reflexivity re. identifying potential ethnocentric, racial, and class bias. 2.35 2.5 26. ability to listen for and open space for the multiple perspectives in a given group or situation. 2.45 2.7 27. ability to sustain a stance of multipartiality that welcomes divergent perspectives and does not seek to advance one’s own personal perspective. 2.4 2.8 28. ability to facilitate dialogical, empathic, horizontal, and democratic relationships marked by transparency and shared decision-making. 2.35 2.65 29. capacity to witness and bear conflict and dissent and to model nonviolent approaches, particularly in conflict and post-conflict contexts. 2.45 2.7 30. capacity to listen to symptoms in a person, group, or system, and to understand them as attempts at communication, often by that which has been denied voice. 2.35 2.9 31. capacity to listen into the margins of a situation, to those voices that have been marginalized, repressed, or silenced. 2.4 2.7 32. capacity to bracket premature understandings, pre-understandings, and prejudices that assimilate the new, the foreign, the surprising to what one already knows and understands. 2.25 2.7 33. capacity to place oneself alongside of others, in an apprenticing rather than a hierarchical, expert relationship. 2.4 2.85 34. capacity to move from the visible and the manifest, to the invisible and the latent, allowing one to “see through” or to deconstruct what has been taken-forgranted or normalized. 2.45 2.5 35. sensitivity to individual and collective trauma. ecopsychological competencies 36. capacity to listen to built and natural environments. 2.6 2.8 37. care to pay attention to the history (natural and cultural) of a particular place under consideration. 2.5 2.8 38. capacity to listen to the multiple voices comprising a place, including people, animals, and earth elements. 2.5 2.65 39. openness to experiencing and engaging-intellectually, emotionally, practically and spiritually-with the joy and pain of humans, other sentient beings and the rest of nature at this particular moment in evolutionary history (the sixth great extinction, the great turning, etc.). 2.25 2.75 40. seeing the environmental crises of our time in an interdisciplinary manner, connecting social, economic, political and cultural issues as they converge in the crises of our time. 2.25 2.6 41. understanding the role and characteristics of our species in the evolving story of life on this planet and in this cosmos. 1.9 2.6 42. becoming aware of and engaging with the multiple efforts currently underway to rapidly shift and heal the human-nature relationship and the psyche-nature relationship 2.1 1.95 http://www.gjcpp.org/ microsoft word bishop-v4i2-20130619.docx   multiple-level analysis as a tool for policy: an example of the use of contextualism and causal layered analysis brian j. bishop, peta l. dzidic and lauren j. breen curtin university corresponding author: brian bishop school of psychology and speech pathology curtin university po box u1987 perth, australia, 6845 b.bishop@curtin.edu.au keywords: multi-level analysis, public policy, contextualism. recommended citation: bishop, b. j., dzidic, p. l., & breen, l. j. (2013). multiplelevel analysis as a tool for policy: an example of the use of contextualism and causal layered analysis. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(2), xx-xx. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/).         global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   multiple level analysis as a tool for policy: an example of the use of contextualism and causal layered analysis abstract in 1970 scribner described four types of community psychologists. despite social change being a common theme, the four types were differentiated by the extent to which they were inside government and organisations or outside, agitating for change. community psychology and policy change appear to be implicitly connected. despite this, engagement of community psychologists in policy change has proven to be minimal. distinctions between first (cosmetic) and second order (systemic) change (watzlawick, weakland & fisch, 1974) reflect the intractability of fundamental change due to deep systemic cultural influences, and should act as a motivator for community psychologists in the policy arena. we argue that psychology’s failure to adopt a multiplicity of epistemologies, in particular a contextualist epistemology, has meant that psychology, and particularly, community psychology has had limited impact. further, we argue the need to consider community worldviews and culture, in general, if we are to engage more fully in policy development and implementation. contending with the social issues relevant to policy settings requires an articulation of the worldview and cultural context. causal layered analysis, a futures methodology, has been adopted to allow a reflective and contextual approach to policy implementation and involves a structured layered deconstruction of social issues. an example of this approach will be highlighted with its application to the implementation of sustainable australian agricultural policy in the face of climate change. what is revealed is a psychological paradox involving the general endorsement of sustainable policy alongside cultural impediments to its adoption. community psychologists have a natural and important role to play in policy formulation, given our epistemologies, methodologies and motivation for genuine and transformative social change. keywords: multi-level analysis, public policy, contextualism. introduction public policy would seem a natural arena for community psychology. as phillips (2000) commented in her chapter on community psychology and effective public policies, the ecological, social action orientation of this sub discipline lends it to a special compatibility with the processes, orientations, and issues that characterised policy-making. yet, the presence of community psychology … in the legislative policy arena, while clearly discernible, has not been prominent (p. 414). this tension between the natural affinity of community psychology and policy and the reluctance of community psychologists to engage fully in the policy arena has reflected what appears to be an unresolved paradox. scribner (1970) described four roles for community psychologists, all of which reflect some degree of ambiguity in the essential nature of community psychology. these roles are – social movement psychologists, social action psychologists, new clinical psychologists and social engineers. these roles differ in scope, location, orientation and value systems. for example, the social movement psychologist, probably most common in the 1970s, is based in community organising and obviously is grounded in community. social action psychologists and social engineers are also concerned about social welfare policy and are more likely to be top down in orientation. the former are more likely to encourage community participation, or even just professional involvement, in developing and implementing policies and programs designed to promote human betterment. social engineers tend to be more technologically focussed and would be found more at the manipulative end of arnstein’s (1969) ladder of citizen participation. the new clinical psychologist should also be driven by policy issues as they sought alternatives to direct one-on-one work with clinical patients, as reflected in albee’s (1959) concerns about the resources implications of individual clinical practice. as a corollary of these roles, approaches to community psychology are varied and based on different conceptual and philosophical underpinnings. while these differences create healthy tension in the discipline, which encourages critical and reflective thought, the dominant position within psychology (e.g., individualism) is rarely questioned (burr, 2002; dashtipour, 2012, hayes, 2002; sampson, 1989, 2000; sarason, 1981). similarly, methodological approaches have been dominated by positivism. we will return to this issue later on. the emergence of community psychology, then, was based in recognition that psychology needs to be more proactive in community and societal interventions. the discipline was born into the new world of social global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   change of the 1960s and considerable social policy changes, including president kennedy’s legislative emphasis on community mental health. community psychology and community mental health emerged in the mid-1960s during a period of great ferment not only in the mental health field but in society at large. the successful civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s…having begun with the profound stimulus to social change provided by the supreme court’s desegregation decision in brown v. board of education, 347 us 483 (1954), became a model for others to use in attacking social inequalities in many areas of society… new kinds of questions regarding social problems and their solutions…were being raised. social change was so rapid and far-reaching that the limits of the social science concepts used to understand change were reached, making it difficult for science to keep up with the conditions it was studying. (levine & perkins, 1987, p. 46) the shift in conceptual framework from which community psychology developed cannot and should not be lost. as bennett (1965) wrote reflecting on the boston conference on the education of psychologists for community mental health (also known as the swampscott conference): the mental health frontier is shifting from the amelioration of illness to preventive intervention at the community level. community mental health was viewed as one aspect of a broader spectrum of psychological services which was promptly labelled "community psychology." reference was made to optimal realization of human potential through planned social action. community psychologists were characterized as change agents, social systems analysts, consultants in community affairs, and students generally of the whole man (sic) in relation to all his environments. (pp. 822-823) alongside the emphasis on an ecological perspective was the recognition that psychology needed input at levels other than the intrapsychic level. impact at macro and exo levels (bronfenbrenner, 1979) is implicitly oriented to policy and requires new skills and mindsets. the framing of community psychology in terms of social change required understanding and engagement in policy science. phillips (2000) argued that there were a number of reasons why community psychology did not fully embrace involvement in policy. one of the issues that she raised is that there was tension between the twin desires to be relevant and to be scientific. there appeared to be differing understandings involved in scientific research and application to policy. not only do these understandings differ conceptually but there appears to be an unwillingness of many community psychologists to forsake ‘pure’ research for application. moreover, bennett (1970) suggested that the nature of scientific psychology meant that it was not necessarily applicable to social policy issues. he stated: it would appear, paradoxically perhaps, that community psychology is applying the scientific method, rather than the scientific findings, of psychology to community problems. much of our laboratory research has not been relevant. practitioners search the literature in vain for validated techniques. they have had to invent their own procedures and courses of action. but the posture of enquiry, the concern for generalised knowledge, and the methods of theory building they learned in graduate school are directly applicable to community psychology. this is the education the conference [1965 swampscott] would transmit to another generation of students. (pp. 8-9) the above quote could be reframed in light of kuhn’s (1962) notion that science has a value and worldview basis. specifically, what bennett wrote could be considered to indicate that while the outcomes of much psychological science are irrelevant to policy areas, the scientific worldview that comes from engagement in science provides the conceptual framework for policy work. in other words, the methods of scientific psychology are appropriate; we have just been looking in the wrong place, as far as policy was concerned. we would make the argument that the generally accepted notion of science in psychology is only one of many, and that the problems encountered within community psychology in attempting to convert its science to policy has arose from the fundamental assumptions implicit in scientific psychology. we will argue that, by embracing alternative approaches to science, it is possible to apply a rigorous approach to policy areas that may not conform to the narrow definition of science that is embraced by much of psychology, but is consistent with a broad definition of science, as kelly (2003) and rappaport (2005) have pointed out. while positivism has been the dominant scientific epistemology for community psychology, many have questioned whether it was necessarily the best model suited to human science more generally (e.g., gergen, 1985; polkinghorne, 1983, 1988; rosnow, 1981; tebes, 2005; toulmin & leary, 1985). charles pepper (1942) created a typology of scientific approaches, each with its own philosophical underpinning. these were mechanism (positivism), formism (trait and individual differences), organicism (holistic global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   organic systems) and contextualism. altman and rogoff (1984) used pepper’s framework, integrated dewey and bentley’s (1946) notions of pragmatism, and provided details about how pepper’s typologies could be interpreted in a psychological research framework. altman and colleagues have written extensively about one of these epistemologies, contextualism, or as they term it, transactionalism (altman, 1992, 1993; altman, werner, oxley & haggard, 1987; werner & altman, 2000; werner, brown & altman, 2002). with its emphasis on people in context, contextualism appears particularly relevant to community psychology, especially in attempts to forge a legitimate policy role. despite altman and colleagues’ advocacy for the adoption of a contextualist position, there has been little adoption within community psychology. part of the reason is reflected in phillips’ (2000) arguments above. given the positivist pursuit of ‘hard science’ within psychology, contextualism rejects notions of cause and effect making it a less attractive epistemology for many in community psychology. another major problem, we would argue, is that contextualism has aspects that run counter to modernist ways of thinking. the rise of the hard sciences has been reflected in how issues are problematized and conceptualised in the broader society. as members of modern community we look for antecedent causation in the world around us. the impact of the period of enlightenment has meant that western people, in particular, have adopted a lay positivistic conception of the world. the contrast of epistemologies can be seen clearly in the debate about harm reduction policies and abstinencetreatment models in the drug misuse policy arena. this treatment approach is firmly located in positivism and is based on individualistic treatments which can lead to social categorisation and stigmatisation of users (lushin & anastas, 2011). this perspective is embedded in community concepts of cause and effect, deviance and labelling (bright, marsh, smith & bishop, 2008). harm minimisation is contextually based, is more complex and has emerged as a grass-roots movement in europe in contrast to mainstream community beliefs and existing broader social policy (bright et al.; lushin & anastas). in contextualism, people are not seen as discrete entities, rather they are conceptualised as sharing similarities and differences with others in their contexts (sharing differences is a fundamental aspect of diversity). altman and rogoff (1984) defined this approach as “the study of changing relations among psychological and environmental aspects of holistic entities” (p. 24). there are a number of features to this epistemological approach. firstly, in this approach it is assumed that the context, time and a person’s behaviours and actions are inseparable. altman and rogoff argued that this contextualism could be metaphorically represented by an “historical event” which involved behaviour which was purposeful, and meaningful. secondly, this approach also acknowledges that notions of change in any direction are a continual process of all psychological phenomena. third, it also focuses on the contemporary events, and determines the patterns and structure of phenomena. fourth, it argues for the use of multiple observers who participate in different contexts and who investigate the same event. the complexity of this approach lies in the first point. the notion that people are not separable from context is contrary to lay understandings of what it means to be an individual and the central assumptions within mainstream psychology (e.g., burr, 2002; dashtipour, 2012, hayes, 2002). this counterintuitive notion of people and context complicates research from a contextualist epistemology. even in this previous sentence it is linguistically difficult to describe people as part of context, rather than being separate from context. there are linguistic as well as conceptual difficulties in framing contextualism. while contextualism appears to be the natural scientific paradigm for community psychology, it has not been embraced as fully as it might. this appears to be a consequence of a resistance to consider and question the dominant positivistic position of cause-and-effect. this is ironic in that even given community psychology’s activist values and roles the discipline cannot divorce itself from positivistic methodologies and conceptualising. there is also the problem of conceiving of people as being part of context and not separable or meaningful outside of context. we strongly advocate a contextualist position, particularly given its relevance when considering complex social issues in the policy arena. a contextualist position gives the practitioner an episteme that acknowledges complexity, and combats superficial or first order social change (watzlawick, weakland & fisch, 1974). policy failings are more likely to occur when superficial solutions are posed; as community psychologists, we should be advocates of second order change, and a contextualist position gives practitioners the foundations for grappling with second order change. as community psychologists working in interdisciplinary teams, we have been privy to a range of ‘alternative’ research methodologies. in dealing with policy in the complex contextual domain, emerging patterns of change need to be recognised and monitored (becker, 2011; polkinghorne, 2004; kurtz & snowden, 2002). to achieve this it is essential that a multilevel approach is adopted. one such method is causal global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   layered analysis (cla; inayatullah, 2004). cla allows for deconstruction on a number of levels. more importantly, it not only addresses different levels but also different depths in terms of culture. the assessment of aspects of culture, both local and more broadly, is an important aspect of policy implementation. using cla allows us to address issues of second order change instead of first order change. for example, zepke (2012) examined the second order competing myths underlying academic freedom in new zealand using cla. causal layered analysis is both a theory of knowledge and a method for deconstructing complex issues according to four levels (inayatullah, 2004). each of the causal layers is summarised in the following table. table 1 deconstruction levels of causal layered analysis __________________________________________________________________________________ layer concern/foci __________________________________________________________________________________ litany issue presented as the uncontested truth, is superficial lacking depth, can result in a sense of helplessness or apathy social causal issues presented in terms of systemic and/or technical explanations worldview/discourse deeper, more complex understanding of the issue. relates to the meaning of the issue that is constructed. worldviews shape understanding, and by understanding a worldview, researchers are able to determine insights as to how an issue is socially constructed. discourses express a worldview through the sorts of words, terminology or phrases that are used. there may be multiple worldviews in evident in the one data set. myth/metaphor deep mythical stories and social/cultural archetypes, emotional experiences and responses to the issue. this is the most distal layer of analysis and is likely to require the greatest amount of analytical investment. __________________________________________________________________________________   it is natural to question the particular foci of the layers. we argue that they are defensible and adequately represent the intention of the analysis, that being to contest individualistic and surface levels of observations and conceptualisations of social issues. specifically, the methodology encourages an analysis of social issues beyond the litany and broadly parallels the ecological levels enunciated by bronfenbrenner (1977) and reiff (1968). cla was devised as a tool for analysing community workshops designed to determine future possibilities and alternatives to current social issues. the social issue under investigation is deconstructed according to a number of levels. inayatullah (2004) provided an example of a 1993 workshop on bangkok’s serious traffic congestion. the discourses were analysed at four levels – litany (the taken for granted ‘reality’ of the issues), social-structural (the social and structural causes underlying the current situation and possible changes), worldviews (the generally unacknowledged value system that frames people’s understanding of the world) and myths-narratives (the grand and community narratives that help give meaning to people and issues; mankowski & rappaport, 2000; rappaport, 2000; yoshikawa & olazagasti, 2011). in inayatullah’s (2004) analysis of the traffic problems besetting bangkok, he states that at the litany level the obvious problem was that of too many vehicles on the roads. at a social/structural level, it was suggested that engineering solutions might be found to better regulate traffic flows or build new roads. at the worldview level it was recognized that industrial and colonial values had led to centralization and the concentration of a large population in the capital, bangkok. the dominant myths were that ‘west is best’ and ‘bigger is better’. a short term solution was to develop public transport such as had been done in singapore. the medium term solution that was suggested was to encourage a return to valuing farming as a means of decentralizing. long term solutions related to what it meant to be thai and a re-visioning of thai cultural identity, especially in terms of the importance and status of rural activity. the re-visioning would mean that farming would be seen as an important aspect of thai culture and retention of people in rural areas would be achievable. cla was developed in the futures area and has attracted much attention in recent years. it has been used in a wide variety of fields. for example, robinson, kennedy, and harmon (2011) used cla to analyse occupational therapies for people with chronic pain. zepke (2012) and wildman (2010) global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   used cla to analyse pedagogy. natural resource management and climate change have been examined (e.g., ariell, 2010; barber, 2007; hofmeester, bishop, stocker & syme, 2012; kelleher, 2012; lederwasch, mason, daly, prior & giurco, 2011), as have china and east-west relationships (e.g., anthony, 2009; hoffman, 2012), the global financial crisis (inayatullah, 2010), dramatic story telling (head, 2012) and the very nature of science (turnbull, 2006). the theory articulated by inayatullah (2004) is more complicated than that presented here. inayatullah discusses methods for deconstructing social issues that involve what he calls a poststructuralist toolbox. current debates have extended the models (e.g., barber, 2010, 2011; hampson, 2010; reidy, 2007; slaughter, 2008). although the use of cla is well developed in futures research, we use it both as a methodology and also as a metaphor for understanding context. cla is used as a contextualist methodology based on the assumptions described by altman and rogoff (1984), dewey and bentley (1948), kingrywestergaard and kelly (1990), and tebes (2005). cla provides a means to address not only the observed act, but also the act in its social, political, historical and cultural context. using cla ensures that researchers examine not only what has happened and the social context in which action occurred, but it allows examination on the worldviews of the participants and the underlying aspects of culture. at this point, it may be useful to reflect on conducting a cla in its entirety. the metaphor of a microscope and multiple lenses can be applied to conducting a cla, and is a useful way to remember the overarching aim of the analysis. the process of conducting a cla is much like looking at a phenomenon under a microscope, with each layer comparable to different lenses of a microscope. this marks a strength for its adoption in contextualist research. each layer provides a different perspective to the same phenomenon being scrutinised. much like lenses, each layer gives a different level of depth. the first layer (the litany) can be considered the most superficial, or surface level interpretation and so is comparable to the first lens that would likely be used. the litany often consists of unorganised facts or observations. the second layer is the social causal layer and is concerned with systemic and structural influences. this is where policy debate is often located. the third layer (worldview discourse layers) provides even greater depth or clarity. the final layer (lens) gives the finest and deepest level of interpretation. so, much like how the lens used in a microscope increases in intensity resulting in greater clarity of the phenomenon, this is also the case with the layers of analysis. no lens or layer outweighs the other in level of importance; rather, they all contribute to building a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon being analysed. collectively these accounts make for a rich and indepth interpretation. these levels were characterised by barber (2010, p. 171) as being: * what we say (litany) * what we do (social causal) * how we think (worldviews & discourses) * who we are (myth & metaphor) it is this process of deconstruction according to multiple layers that gives depth beyond a typical thematic analysis. further still, comprehending the meaning within and between the layers makes for an analytical process of deconstruction and reconstruction. this final step in conducting a cla requires the researcher to consider the overall message or finding from the analysis in relation to their initial research question. this phase marks what futurists claim as ‘proposing alternative futures’, or in terms more readily accessible to psychology, it is when the problem is summarised and strategies proposed for its resolution. the reconstruction stage of the analysis is crucial to the analysis. it is where the researcher is able to tie together their findings across the layers to give a consolidated and defensible response to their research question. this is akin to pulling together what was identified with each lens of the microscope to convey a holistic and deep account of the phenomenon being investigated. one of the issues confronting those who adopt contextualism is the assumption of local specificity, or more broadly, the ontology of possible multiple truths. this would lead to a question of what can be learned from an analysis presented here of natural resource management issues in rural australia? what relevance do these findings have for community psychology in northern america, or elsewhere? paradoxically, we will suggest that there are generalizable lessons that may be applicable to other regions. one will be the methodology. more importantly, it can be argued that the notion of generalizability contains elements that are inherently positivistic (as do notions of reproducibility and authenticity when applied to qualitative methods). positivistic generalizability involves not just the ability to apply outcomes in differing localities; it also involves abstraction and reduction. generalisation in a contextual framework is quite different. contextualism retains complexity. we will make a case that there can be generalisation of the following exemplar of cla as part of the conclusions about the methodology. considering environmental governance and policy in rural settings global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   one of our earliest applications of cla as a methodology to deconstruct complex social issues was in partnership with government agencies and farmers in central new south wales (nsw), a state of australia. the aim of the research was to identify how communities and government agencies could work together to improve the environmental impacts of farming, especially given the impacts of global climate change. we sought to identify opportunities and impediments to the adoption of farming practices that could be more “sustainable”. we report one such cla workshop as an example of what can be done. method the workshop of 17 participants was facilitated by three staff members of csiro (commonwealth scientific and industrial research organisation, a federal government scientific organisation established in 1926), a facilitator who led the discussion, an observer and a recorder. the recorder was able to type extensive notes of the comments, almost verbatim. an audio recording of the session was made to contribute to the accuracy of the recorder’s notes. the facilitator asked a series of questions and prompts designed to elicit information about the litany (e.g., what type of farming practices are you engaged in?), socialstructural (what’s been the impact of the financial crisis?), worldviews (richard, you talked about sustainability as a european notion. could you tell us some more about this?) and myth-metaphor (if you wrote a book to describe your experience as a farmer, what would the title be?). the workshop transcript was analysed according to a two-step process. first, the transcripts were coded according to causal layer. this is a process of reading and re-reading the transcripts to identify utterances in the text that relate to a specific causal layer. for example, the use of a metaphor would be coded as relevant to the myth metaphor layer, or, reference to social structures such as family, the local community or government would have relevance to the social causes layer. this was followed by the extracts relevant to each causal layer being coded thematically. coding thematically within each causal layer allows for further deconstruction of the issue under investigation. more specifically, themes relevant to the litany layer provide an understanding of the overt or superficial way in which the issue is conceptualised. themes at the social causal layer provide an understanding of how the issue manifests and impacts on social structures such as families, friendship or working groups, and, community at large. themes at the worldview /discourse layer provide an understanding of the different worldviews and discourses that exist regarding the issue being investigated. this can include complementary and contrasting worldviews. themes at the myth/metaphor layer provide an understanding of the deeper and more complex ways in which the issue may be conceptualised. for example, it is not uncommon at this level for social archetypes, stereotypes, myths, ‘untruths’ and cultural stories to emerge related to the issue being investigated. the merit therefore for the contextualist researcher in adopting cla is that there is a deeper and more active deconstruction. the layers provide specific frames of reference which guide the analysis; however, the thematic analysis within the layers gives contextual depth and richness. as such, conducting a cla requires a first step of deconstructing an issue according to the specified layers of litany, social causal, worldview/discourse and myth/metaphor, followed by an in-depth thematic analysis within each causal layer. following the deconstruction of the issue, there is the opportunity for transformation. more specifically, it is argued that once there is a deeper understanding of the issue being explored, there is the opportunity for considering how the true issue at hand can be addressed. this allows second order change to be addressed (watzlawick et al., 1974). findings litany litany is the uncontested ‘facts’, or the superficial or overt conceptualisation of the issue. there was an overwhelming theme relating to the harsh realities of farming in the australian social, environmental and economic climates. in all, a vast range of farming hardships were reported by participants, dominated however by the farmers’ experiences of difficulty due to the long term drought experienced in their district. farmers made explicit connections between the drought and their ability to be ‘good’ land managers. with no rainfall, and with dams and creek lines drying up, it made watering stock and crops next to impossible for some farmers. for example, a farmer stated the following: h: seasons can make a good manager…and a good agronomist. good seasons even everyone out. success is hard without rain. social causal at the social causal layer of analysis, the same reflection of pressures on farming was evident; however, these were related more to the social ramification of these pressures than to the farmers’ ability to manage their properties effectively. for example in the following extract, the farmer laments about world wool prices in the context of the global financial crisis: global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   j: the prices for superfine wool are shocking. we have a friend with pretty good super-fine wool and he was devastated as he got half the amount per kilo this year. here, it illustrates how global financial issues can severely impact those at the local community level. such mammoth and complex challenges, such as global markets, were observed at the social causal layer as resulting in farmers feeling that they are at the mercy of social and economic systems. for example, one farmer reflected on experiencing a lack of control: c: doesn’t matter what you’re farming...your input costs are slowly going up but your income is fairly stationary. it puts the squeeze on, harder and harder. incidentally, this quotation is also relevant to the myth/metaphor layer of analysis (it puts the squeeze on harder and harder). here the metaphor is used to illustrate the social and emotional impacts of the global economy on the individual. building on this sense of a lack of control another farmer stated: g: the variables we can’t control. don might grow the best cattle in the world and do everything right with genetics and breeding but unless the market is having a good time he can’t get his rewards for the efforts he puts in, because the other person’s not in a position to buy. in this example, it is evident how the actions of a farmer at the individual level (illustrated through their farming practices) are inherently connected and dependent on the actions and decisions of others. this illustrates the system in which farmers operate and the social dependency they have on others to not only farm well, but make a living. with a lack of control comes uncertainty, as reflected on two other farmers: h: we just can’t keep budgets though. from year to year you don’t know your income. you do well one year and think you can buy that new ute [pick-up truck], then the next year you have a bad one and it takes 10 years to recover from it. you need to have three budgets: one for yourself, one for the bank manager and one for the accountant. and, a: you can’t plan as you don’t know what’s going to happen up here (rain). you can plan but you don’t know if it will come into fruition. worldview /discourse at the worldview/discourse layer, the dominant theme related to a ‘farming worldview’. farmers articulated that in their role, farming was more than tending the land and caring for animals. farming was identified as a passion, whereby they felt connected to the land, and, a level of responsibility to caring for it. it was this passion and connection that had kept them in the practice of farming despite the obvious economic and climatic pressures. one farmer described in the following quote a tension between loving farming and feeling as though this is something they were born to do, within the context of trying conditions. he reflects that there is a conflict between the heart (passion to farm) and the head (the reality that farming is currently risky and not overly viable financially). he stated: c: it is in our blood. there is something wrong up here (points to head). another stated: k: it’s the love for it. myth/metaphor at a deeper cultural level is the myth-metaphor level. these comments reflect deeper aspects of the local and broader culture and as such represent core aspects of local social functioning which are much less amenable to change. comments at this level were dominated by farmers’ reflections on the impacts of globalisation, and a move from buying local. there was a distinct message that farmers felt under siege by larger corporations, that farming was no longer valued as a family run enterprise and that there was the potential that due to these factors they could be the last generation of farmers in the district. a farmer reflected on trends of globalisation: k: it’s a worrying trend. 80% of the food [sales] is controlled by two supermarket companies and a lot of the produce is from overseas. what we don’t want is to rely on other countries for our primary needs; it makes us very dependent on other countries. other countries have subsidies to keep agriculture going but we don’t. beef into the states [usa] is one thing, there’s a flat limit… other farmers reflected on their concerns about globalisation, stating: m: go to the supermarket and the produce there is from all over the world – very little of it is local produce. g: i think food security will be a major issue especially with population growth. once the southeast asian population is too big and can’t feed itself they’ll look at our big open land and say “hey we could have a part of that”. everyone talks about this even playing field we’re playing on but we play on the bottom global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9   and everyone else is on top. [this comment elicited general agreement]. p: decisions…are made on the coast [cities] and you get little once you get over the mountains [into the farming areas]. it’s just getting worse and worse... in terms of infrastructure decisions that is not relevant to this area…people [agricultural advisors] not getting out of the office. g: a lot of people are selling up and leaving the land, a lot of big companies buying up land and getting bigger and pushing out smaller farms. in these quotations, the farmers provide their account of instances whereby global food production and selling patterns are changing the dynamic, affecting how people source their food and ultimately live their lives as traditional family run enterprises. there is a sense that they, as producers, are being threatened by an amorphous entity that is beyond their control. ‘globalisation’ as a term connotes enormity, and while it implies the potential of a global community, the construct in real terms depicts the removal of local power, control, decision making and inherently localism— all of which are prized within rural agricultural communities. transformation the above deconstruction illustrates the complex experience of being a farmer. ‘rural issues’ are complex and not constrained to the happenings within a rural community. from the above deconstruction, we can see that challenging experiences at the local level can be driven by global social changes. given this, there is a recurrent myth throughout the interviews relating to scale and power. we see that the myths are closely related to the social causal layer of the analysis, because the participants are reflecting deeply about their social circumstances. the farmers are reflecting on the power differentiation they feel that distances them (psychologically, socially and physically) from city power. to encapsulate their experience of being in a position of lesser power, they reflect on the social structure of rural communities and have adopted metaphors of scale (small and large), of force (being pushed out) and of inequality (challenging the construct of an even playing field). further, the farmers are acknowledging that there are myths associated with the value of their role within the broader society. thus, the connection between the social causal and myth/metaphor levels of this particular analysis is very pronounced. the connection is present because while issues regarding farmers’ relationships with the city people imply applicability to the social causal level of analysis, it is the farmers’ expression of their response to the dynamic which makes it appropriate for the myth/metaphor layer of analysis. they are actively challenging the negative constriction of their role and the myth associated with food production which makes globalisation the dominant belief. within australia there are three major providers which account for nearly 90 per cent of the market share. while there is considerable discussion about the influence of vertical integration of farm prices, this is far from simple (e.g., round, 2006; smith, 2006). there are tensions in the dynamic between city and farming communities, and this has implications for policy interventions, as policy, decision making and funding for initiatives are all determined within the city despite being enforced in rural communities (e.g., the current policy direction for sustainable farm management practice is through a federal government initiative called caring for our country, the program encourages sustainable land management, environmental stewardship, biodiversity and conservation management, commonwealth of australia, 2012). the implications of this are that greater ownership of changes in policy is necessary for their acceptance by the farming community. if we consider transformative futures for rural agricultural communities, these must be considered in light of these inherent tensions between decision makers and those who ‘receive’ the decision. understanding this dynamic, and determining appropriate strategies as to how this can be remedied, can be considered in terms of some of the fundamental principles within community psychology. for example, we argue for the importance of genuine engagement (rappaport, 1987), and of not only distributive but procedural justice (tyler, 1988). the possible transformation from disengaged and disempowered rural communities to ones that are actively, genuinely and meaningfully engaged in determining their future would benefit from the principles and practices of community psychology. given this, community psychology naturally has a place within the policy arena as we can assist as agents of change (aber, maton & seidman, 2011; jason, 2013). discussion: a place for community psychologists in the policy arena the deconstruction of the issue of land management in rural australia is clearly complex. it is an issue that is more far reaching than contending farmers have to make difficult land management decisions; their experiences, and the challenges they experience in being ‘good farmers’ relates to broader social, cultural and economic patterns and pressures. conducting contextualist research, specifically using cla as the method for deconstructing the social issue, meant that we were global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  10   able to comprehend the complexity of the issue. this method allows us to deconstruct and reconstruct the issue. it is a powerful methodology for policy development because it means that issues must be considered in all of their complexity. for example, why were farmers having so much difficulty managing their land? it was more than a drought issue, and more than a global financial issue, but, these are still fundamental issues for the farmers and have become the focal point for policy. however, drought policy is decontextualized, and historically has not been considered in its full complexity. fundamentally, the pressure experienced in farming communities also relates to a change in the perceived dominant value in farming. globalisation, and the emergence of large supermarket chains, super-corporately owned (as opposed to family owned) farms and a growing emphasis on importing products that are being grown locally is dramatically challenging farmers’ capacity to be ‘good farmers’. farming, as evident in the analysis at the worldview/discourse layer, is a part of their being, and being a farmer in australia has with it a particular cultural archetype. this, however, is being challenged by a consumerist value system, which ultimately threatens rural communities. as family farming becomes more challenging and less viable, so too the surrounding communities are under threat. this is an area in which community psychologists can and should be engaging, at multiple levels and in multiple ways. to recapitulate, altman and rogoff (1984) provided community psychology with a philosophical framework for understanding people and community. they used the work of pepper (1962), and dewey and bentley (1949) to provide a contextualist framework of transacting people as part of community. the positivistic notion of community comprising discrete and separate individuals was rejected, as was the organic notion of people in community. community is people and people are part of community. the people are not separable entities but share culture in which there are not interactions, but transactions. to quote dale berra talking about his famous father, yogi, “i am a lot like him, only our similarities are different” (cited in jones, 1994). cla can be used to look at where people have differences, where they share local culture and where they are part of a larger cultural group and also what makes them human. cla also offers the opportunity to recognise that transactions operate at a number of conceptual levels. people do not simply address litany layer issues, but their words have symbolic meanings that convey emotions and also deeper understandings of common history and community life. it allows us to see aspects of their lives that often well-disguised. as a method, it can help reveal what is not needed to be said along with what is said, and it is often what is not said that is reflective of culture and community. thus cla can be a useful tool in policy development as it allows acknowledgement of what is explicit, but also the implicit and tacit aspects of local and broader culture. it is critical that as community psychologists we have the appropriate tools in which to fully deconstruct complex social issues. entering into the policy arena, it is crucial that we understand social issues beyond the superficial. as evidenced in this analysis, farm management challenges are more complex than the decisions that farmers make on their properties. the challenges relate to larger social, cultural and economic factors, particularly around globalisation, and threats that farmers feel to being local producers. policy in this area needs to also think about changing values, particularly values directed towards rural and agricultural communities, and, the social and economic stressors that are placed on them. community psychologists have a natural and necessary place within the policy arena. being able to contend with social complexity, and to deconstruct social issues in their full provides a sounder foundation and opportunity for second order social change. acknowledgements we would like to acknowledge our collaborators and the community members who participated in this research. references aber, m. s., maton, k. i. & seidman, e. 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(2011). the neglected role of community narratives in culturally anchored prevention and public policy. in m. s. aber, k. maton, & e. seidman (eds.), empowering settings and voices for social change (pp. 173-192). new york: oxford university press. zepke, n. (2012). what of the future for academic freedom in higher education in aotearoa new zealand? policy futures in education, 10, 155-164.   microsoft word 2014-008-final-20141202.docx “i don’t like speaking spanish:” delayed narration in children of latino immigrants jana sladkova, ph.d. allyssa mccabe, phd, isabel cano university of massachusetts at lowell & danielle cole brandeis university keywords: narrative development, anti-immigrant environment, deportations, academic achievement, latino children of immigrants author notes: jana sladkova: jana_sladkova@uml.edu, university of massachusetts, lowell: dr. sladkova received her ph.d. in social psychology at the graduate center, cuny in new york in 2007 and has been working as an assistant professor of psychology at uml since 2008. she has focused on research related to various immigration issues, including journeys of undocumented migrants from latin america to the united states and impact of deportations on immigrant communities. allyssa mccabe: allyssa_mccabe@uml.edu, university of massachusetts, lowell: allyssa mccabe, ph.d., is professor of psychology at uml. she got her ph.d. in psychology from the university of virginia in 1980 and has published over a hundred scholarly pieces. she has written scholarly books and articles on children’s narrative development and a trade book for parents called language games to play with your child. among other projects, she has conducted interventions with both parents and teachers to improve children’s ability to narrate. isabel cano: isabel_cano@student.uml.edu, university of massachusetts, lowell: isabel cano, ma is a graduate from master's in community social psychology at uml. danielle cole: dcole23@brandeis.edu; brandeis university: danielle cole, ma, is a graduate from master's program of sociology at brandeis university. recommended citation: sladkova, j. (2014). “i don’t like speaking spanish:” delayed narration in children of latino immigrants, global journal of community psychology practice, 5(2), 1-10. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 2 dec 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 “i don’t like speaking spanish:” delayed narration in children of latino immigrants abstract the ability to tell a narrative upon entrance to kindergarten predicts expressive vocabulary and reading comprehension in fourth, seventh, and tenth grades. current pervasive anti-immigrant environments and law enforcement practices have been shown to have a detrimental impact on a variety of developmental phenomena of immigrant children. although it has not been extensively explored, narration ability may well be one of these, a gap this study seeks to address. the present study examined personal narratives of 14 children, aged four to ten, from spanish-speaking immigrant homes. results show that children’s narratives were considerably less well-structured than those of spanish-speaking or english-speaking monolingual age peers. a possible explanation is that current immigration policy, which emphasizes deportation, may influence parents behavior and their socio-economic status and interfere with their inclination to foster their children’s spanish skills and consequently with the children’s language and literacy development. keywords: narrative development, anti-immigrant environment, deportations, academic achievement, latino children of immigrants introduction there is much debate about the potential causes of low academic achievement of children of latino immigrants to the united states. acculturative stress, antiimmigrant sentiment, discrimination, ethnic stereotypes, lack of latino role models in school, and a push to speak english only are among the causes suggested by research. however, less is known about narrative development of young latino children (in spanish or english) and how that may contribute to potential delays in these children’s narratives. since the structure and complexity of childhood narrative ability has been shown to predict later literacy and reading development, we set out to investigate narratives of children of latino immigrants, whom we perceived to be growing up in contexts that would support their narrative development in spanish. impact of immigration policies on immigrant latino children. latinos now make up 22 % of all children under the age of 18 in the united states. a majority (52%) of the nation’s 16 million latino children are u.s.-born with at least one immigrant parent, typically a product of the 1980 immigration wave from mexico, central america, and south america (capps et al., 2007; pasell & cohn, 2010; passel, director & lopez, 2009). a few studies that have examined the effect of immigration on children have identified that immigrant children tend to have more behavioral problems and learning difficulties in school, which may be attributable at least in part to immigration stress. for example, they suggest that children who have immigrated, as well as us-born children whose parents have immigrated, may have greater risk in early childhood (ortega et al., 2009). a qualitative study found that most mexican immigrant mothers perceived their children as having significant communication delays. eamon (2005) claims that latino children and youth are disproportionately poor, which may also impact their development. they are also exposed to other kinds of developmental risks such as attending low-quality, segregated schools and residing in disadvantaged neighborhoods. in addition to those risks, latino immigrant children have been living in a largely anti-immigrant environment; one need only look at media and social stereotypes highlighting the “threat” of “job-stealing” immigrants that refuse to assimilate. this has been supported by research (eamon, 2005) that shows that socio-economic status, discrimination, hostile treatment by immigration officials, and residence in transient communities might lead to latino children of immigrants scoring lower on early academic achievement tests. thus, identifying factors related to development and academic achievement is important for latino children. a factor that both reflects and contributes to antiimmigrant sentiment is the high number of deportations that have taken place over the last ten years, especially during the first four years of the obama administration. many children of immigrants have experienced deportation in their family or their community. the increase in deportations was made possible by the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 2 dec 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 passing of a series of laws that made deportations easier. in 1996, the u.s. government passed the illegal immigration reform and responsibility act (iirira) and the antiterrorism and effective death penalty act (aedpa), which expanded both the categories of immigrants (documented and undocumented) who can be deported and the kinds of offenses for which they can be “removed” from the united states (sladkova et al., 2011). rosenbloom (2007) and baum (2010) point out that even legal permanent residents have been or could be deported for shoplifting, jumping turnstiles, drunk driving, urinating in public, forgery, receipt of stolen property, petty drug crimes, or nonviolent theft offenses often committed many years ago. as a result of the aforementioned legislation, between 2001 and 2010 approximately 2.8 million immigrants were deported from the u.s., the vast majority from latin america. in fiscal year 2012, ice removed 409,849 individuals (immigration and customs enforcement, 2011). increasingly, it is often parents of u.s. citizen children from latin american countries who get deported (us office of immigration statistics, 2010). even though both documented and undocumented immigrants can be deported, it is much more likely to happen to those who do not possess the required documentation. ortega (2009) reports that mexican children in both the undocumented and the documented categories were at greater risk of having a developmental problem compared with white children. undocumented families may be subject to additional stress due to increased marginalization because of their status or the threat of deportation, resulting in “lower rates of positive development-promoting activities in the family among parents born outside the united states” (ortega et al., 2009, p. 281). living and working in the us without authorization has profound consequences for immigrants’ physical, emotional, and financial health. kalil and chen (2008) reported that undocumented parents experience greater economic hardship, including food insecurity and social exclusion, when compared with their documented peers. arbona et al. (2011) found that undocumented adult immigrants experience the greatest levels of immigration-related challenges, such as social isolation, lower english proficiency, fear of deportation, and greater extra-familial acculturative stress (i.e., difficulties with employment, communication, discrimination, and legal status). the same study found that fear of deportation predicts both extrafamilial and intrafamilial acculturative stress (i.e., difficulties with behavioral and attitudinal dispositions among family members). brabeck and xu (2010), brabeck et al. (2011), and xu and brabeck (2012) found that parents with greater levels of legal vulnerability were more likely to report that detention and deportation policies negatively impacted their own emotional wellbeing and relationships with their children, as their ability to provide financially and access to services was impaired. (cavazos-rehg, et al., 2007; k. m. brabeck & j. sladkova, n.d.). parents’ undocumented status has consequences for children even when the children are us-born citizens because when parents are stressed and depressed, their parenting is compromised, and their children suffer. (conger et al., 1994; webster-stratton, 1990). children’s cognitive development (e.g., language, motor skills, and perceptual abilities) at 24 and 36 months was shown to be affected by conditions that were a result of their parents’ undocumented status, namely lower job autonomy, occupational stress, lower social support, and lower use of child-based care (yoshikawa et al., 2011). similar results were found by brabeck and xu (2010) who reported that parents’ legal vulnerability combined with the impact of policies on the family environment were the best predictors of outcomes for their children. short and long-term consequences for children following a parent’s arrest included anxiety, withdrawal, anger/aggression, clinginess, developmental difficulties (e.g., speech delay), and behavioral and academic decline at school (k. m. brabeck & j. sladkova, n.d.). suarez-orozco et al. (2011) found that many of the above-discussed stressors on parents are associated with lower achievement among middle and high school students. “during this period children develop new cognitive skills, including abstraction and reasoning, which may lead to social comparisons and a realization that their family is “different” (suarez-orozco et al., 2011). maturing perspectives may lead children to become aware of the legal status of their parents, and of the negative perceptions dominant society holds of their families (suarez-orozco et al., 2011). such developing consciousness about the implications of legal status may impact children’s self-esteem, effect academic performance and school belonging, increase anxiety, and result in other internalizing symptoms” (perreira, 2007; suarez-orozco et al., 2011; k. m. brabeck & j. sladkova, n.d.). all the above research suggests that latino children of immigrants are at high risk for cognitive and developmental delays. those who live in a family where at least one person is undocumented have even higher stressors and thus have higher risks. previous studies have not examined narrative and literacy development of this population which have been shown to effectively predict future literacy and academic success. the present study attempts to bridge this gap by assessing young latino children’s narrative development and theorizing potential causes for delays. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 2 dec 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 the importance and difficulty of maintaining heritage language in children as we have noted, latino children, many of whom are raised in low-income circumstances, often enter american schools speaking spanish and begin to acquire english from preschool on up. in the process, their competence in spanish becomes compromised and children become reluctant to speak spanish. this is known as a subtractive language-learning situation and may lead to negative cognitive effects and problems communicating with parents (baker & hornberger, 2001). in the united states, such occurrences have led many professionals to mistakenly blame bilingualism per se for the children’s difficulties (see mccabe et al., 2013, for a more detailed history of this). however we know from research in canada and europe (de houwer, 1999) that children from various ses backgrounds who are acquiring more than one language in circumstances that support their continued acquisition—circumstances known as additive language learning situations—view acquisition of multiple languages as a marketable skill (snow et. al, 2007). children in such additive situations develop a strong competence in both languages (de houwer, 1999). latino children’s reluctance to continue to speak spanish with their parents is undoubtedly the result of many factors. for instance, parents may unfortunately hear from professionals in the united states (e.g. teachers) that they should speak english with their children, not spanish. if the parent is not fluent in english, then the child will receive input that is neither of high quality nor consistent. hart and risley (1995) documented the fact that even monolingual parents from low socioeconomic backgrounds speak significantly less frequently to their children compared to those from higher ses backgrounds. in addition, the way that they speak to their children is less than optimal, with negative tone and dominant commands rather than the responsive, positively toned input that is known to facilitate children’s language acquisition (tamis-lemonda et al., 2001). latino parents instead should be informed that research finds that spanish language skills support the acquisition of english in complex ways (brisk & harrington, 2006). cummins (1979), among many others, has provided considerable evidence that children’s skills in their native language transfer to learning a second language. over the years, many have argued that the united states should actively support children’s bilingualism (eamon, 2005). one way to do this is to establish two-way bilingual schools (e.g. the amigos school in cambridge, massachusetts) which usually enroll a student body half fluent in one language (spanish), half in another (english), and offer instruction in each language for a certain portion of each day. such schools support both language-majority and language-minority students. under such circumstances, bilingual children can perform on par with monolingual children in both languages by the age of ten (fiestas & peña, 2004; gathercole & thomas, 2009; suarez-orozco, c. et al., 2008). unfortunately, the political climate of the united states remains conflicted and, in some cases even antagonistic towards such schools. the importance of personal narrative development one particular linguistic skill that children must acquire is the ability to tell a personal narrative; this has been extensively researched and verified over many years. a personal narrative is a description of an experience that really happened. personal narratives are very important for many reasons. they are the means by which children make sense of their experiences; with parents guiding them, children learn to understand how events are sequenced, as well as why people behave the way that they do. personal narratives are also the way that we connect with others, including friends and family, and both reflect and contribute to closeness with others (mccabe et al., 2006; mccabe & peterson, 2012; peterson et al., 1999). a key issue for the present project is the finding that a child’s ability to narrate upon entrance to kindergarten predicts second (griffin et al., 2004), fourth, seventh, and tenth grade (snow et al., 2007) reading comprehension, a critical component of academic success. much work on narrative development began by studying english-speaking children. children develop the ability to narrate beginning at about 27 months, when they typically tell one event (e.g., “i hi’ed the big boy,” meaning that the child had just said hello to a waiter). at three and one-half years they tend to tell two-event narratives. by four, they are telling many more events at a time, but they tend to jump around and leave things out—known as a leapfrog narrative. by five years, children at their best tell a number of events that comprise an experience, but they leave the narrative unfinished at the high point or climax, in what is known as an end-at-the-high point narrative. at six, children begin with an abstract (e.g., “did i tell you about the time i broke my arm?”) and go on to resolve their narratives in a classic fashion (mccabe, 1997). there is a growing amount of information on the ability of latino children to produce narratives. for example, low-income mexican-american children go through a developmental sequence similar, but not identical, to that of their english-speaking american counterparts (guerra, 2008). by the time these children were six and one-half years old, 77.6% told at lease one narrative with a classic highpoint story structure. barra and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 2 dec 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 mccabe (2009) examined four -to six-year-old lowincome chilean children’s narratives and found that while the younger group produced quite heterogeneous personal narratives, the older, kindergarten group, like their english-speaking counterparts, told chronological and end-at-high-point narratives. however, low-income indigenous or afro-caribbean costa rican six-to-nineyear-olds did not display such similar structure in personal narration. shiro (2008) found that six to 11year-old venezuelan children’s socioeconomic status had a considerable impact on the form of evaluation used in fictional, but not personal narratives, making personal narratives the more apt form of narration to be examined in low-income populations. in short, the present study seeks to examine the personal narration of low-income latino children in local environment that supports spanish speaking in order to determine their narrative abilities. method participants thirteen children (seven boys, six girls) between the ages of four and 11 years were recruited for participation with the consent of their parents in lowell, ma. all of the children had parents who immigrated to the united states from the dominican republic (n=1), columbia (n=11), or puerto rico (n=1). latin american immigrants, who comprise 22% of immigrants in lowell, come primarily from brazil, columbia, and the dominican republic, and colombians comprise 4.8 % of the population. a large influx of immigrants from latin america in the 1990s and later suggests that a significant proportion of these immigrants are undocumented (lotspeich et al., 2003). even though we did not ask for legal status, it is likely that some participants and/or their parents lacked required documentation at the time of this study. we had hoped for a higher number of participants but just before and during the course of the study a number of latino immigrants in lowell, including one of the childcare providers, were deported. afterwards, several parents who first consented to participate in the study withdrew due to fear of deportation. this was disheartening but not surprising given that immigrant communities in lowell and elsewhere have been living in fear (sladkova et al., 2011; thronson, 2008) and 409,849 were immigrants deported in 2012 from the u.s. (immigration and customs enforcement, 2011). recruitment children were recruited from a childcare agency in lowell, ma. table 1: participants gender age country of origin of parents male 7 colombia female 5 colombia male 7 colombia female 6 dominican republic male 5 colombia male 9 colombia male 6 colombia, brazil female 11 colombia female 9 colombia female 7 puerto rico male 5 colombia male 7 colombia female 8 colombia research assistants worked closely with childcare providers who facilitated parental consent. because of the general lack of trust of authorities in immigrants (sladkova et al., 2011) it took several weeks to gain confidence of the providers and develop a relationship with them. the colombian ancestry of one research assistant helped in this process. interviewing we used the conversational map (mccabe & rollins, 1994) to conduct the interviews, which took place at providers’ homes in a separate, quieter area from where other children were playing. in this procedure the interviewer gave a series of brief personal narratives, asked the child if anything like that ever happened to him or her, and followed up with only neutral prompts (e.g. repetitions of what the child says or “anything more,” “what else”, or “tell me more”). one or two research assistants (trained on the technique) conducted the interviews, initially using arts, crafts, books and toys to build rapport with the children. once the children assented to the interview, they were asked questions such as, “i usually get a shot when i go to the doctor’s office. did you ever get a shot in the doctor’s office?” each child could choose whether they wanted to be interviewed in spanish or english. at the end of each interview, the child returned to the rest of the kids in the particular childcare setting. each participating family received ten dollars, even if a child did not assent to be interviewed and childcare providers received a gift certificate to a local shopping center. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 2 dec 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 upon the completion of all interviews, they were transcribed by a professional transcription service. the research team double-checked the transcripts before delving into analysis. high point analysis high point analysis (hp) was developed by peterson and mccabe (1983) based on labov’s work (1972). labov’s analysis looks at how well personal narratives are structured as a whole around “suspension points” rather than around goals (mccabe & peterson, 1991). labov’s narrative analysis was developed for application to personal narratives. it breaks up individual narratives into information and evaluation, and considers the relative placement of such information (mccabe, 1997). the longest three narratives were selected for further analysis because length is a good predictor of complexity and we were interested in determining the upper bounds of children’s performance (peterson & mccabe, 1983). each of those narratives was classified as one of the following structures: classic pattern: the narrator may begin with an abstract (“did i ever tell you about when i broke my arm?”) or attention-getter (“you know what?”). the narrator then provides orientation information about who, what, when, and where some experience occurred, followed by a series of complicating actions that build to a high point (“you can’t believe the worst part.”), and then gives an additional series of events that resolve the problem (“i had to go to the hospital and get a cast on.”). ending-at-the-high-point pattern: the narrator gives a chronological sequence of events, as in the classic pattern above, but simply builds to a high point and ends the narrative. there is no resolution in this pattern. chronological pattern: the narrative is a simple description of four or more consecutive, but not causally related events (e.g., “we went to disney world. we rode on roller-coasters and ate ice cream. we saw mickey mouse.”). leap-frogging pattern: the narrator gives more than two complicating actions that are components of a single experience, but does not give them in chronological order and/or omits key events. in other words, the narrator jumps around and leaves events out. three-event pattern: the narrator tells us three events that constituted an experience. two-event pattern: the narrator only tells us two events that constituted an experience (e.g., “one time i tripped and fell.”). one-event pattern: the narrator only tells us a single event that constituted an experience (e.g., “i got stung on a trampoline, not on my foot, right here.”). we checked the reliability of the study by coding 15 % of the narratives independently by two members of the team. reliability was estimated by correlating these (r = .98, p < .0001). results table 2: results structure number percent 1 event 10 .3 2 events 7 0.21 3 events 4 0.12 chronological 5 0.15 end at high point 2 0.06 classic 5 0.15 all thirteen children preferred to at least begin their narratives in english even though they were given a choice, and only two of the children switched into spanish at some point in the interview. the interviews were conducted by a native bilingual (spanish and english) colombian in a predominantly spanishspeaking childcare site. discussion as reviewed in the introduction, there is abundant evidence in favor of maintaining a child’s heritage language. the children we interviewed not only came from spanish-speaking households but were cared for by native spanish-speaking providers and were interviewed by a native spanish-speaking bilingual interviewer. we had expected that under such circumstances, all or most of the children would respond in spanish. to our surprise, none of the children began the interview in spanish, and only two switched into spanish at all during the course of that interview. this could possibly be explained at least in part by the culture of fear instigated by massive deportations that have been taking place in the past four years as well as during the study itself. for example, one of the providers and a parent of two children were deported after we started the study. since latinos are the most targeted group of immigrants for deportations (simanski, 2012), the children may have associated spanish and latino culture with risk. although the interviewers were friendly and warm, they did come from a university, which represents a sort of authority for the children, and so they may have been mistrusted. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 2 dec 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 in many ways these children had additional conditions that are very supportive of maintaining spanish (e.g., visiting their country of origin and having people other than family members speaking spanish to them). for example, the oldest child, an 11-year old girl, went for a visit to colombia and described some pleasant things she did, but then went on to complain, “but the thing is i had to speak spanish all the time and i don’t like speaking spanish.” this reluctance to speak spanish despite strong support is particularly concerning given the second major finding, which is that these children produce narratives that are substantially less well developed than other poor latino children in a variety of contexts (cuneo et al., 2008). specifically, cuneo et al. (2008) found that 22.2% of dominican americans age seven to eight told stories that contained only one to three events and costa rican children told 16.7% of their stories in this minimal way, whereas our participants told 63% of their narratives in this manner. at the other end of the performance range, classic narratives were told by 28% of the dominicans and 27% of the costa ricans (cuneo et al., 2008), whereas only 15% of the narratives in this sample were classic. three out of five of those classic narratives were told by the 11-year old who “didn’t like speaking spanish” and who was several years older than the children in the other study. following is one of the best narratives produced by an eight year-old girl (i stands for interviewer and c for child): i: when the glass fell off the table, my juice spilled all over the place. have you ever spilled anything? c: i did. i: tell me more about it. c: so much – so much times. i: so much? c: yeah, maybe i just don’t remember. we at night i did, but it was a little bit so i just wiped it off the big table. i: you wiped it off? c: the paper. i: and what happened after that? c: ….and i don’t i don’t know. this narrative is an example of a two-event narrative. at the age of eight children are expected to produce lengthy narratives mostly in a classical form as described above. because of the links between narrative and literacy development reviewed in the introduction this presents many concerns in terms of the probable reading comprehension and ultimate educational accomplishment of these children (snow et al., 2007). in addition, written personal narratives are a part of high stakes testing in massachusetts beginning in fourth grade. if these children are not telling personal narratives now, they are less likely to be writing them well when required to do so by tests. subsequent narrative content analysis revealed two accounts of death, one of them narrated in a surprising detail for a seven-year old (i stands for interviewer and c for child): i: have you ever been to a hospital? c: i’ve been there but i—i— c: used to see like something— … c: i used to see somebody covered. i: yeah. c: they were zipped. have you seen those zippers that you cover somebody inside? i: i think so. c: like those mummy things? c: they’re like green yellow and black. i: yeah. c: it’s like he was, um, but he was very, very sick. he was in the hospital for very long and he – he’s in the dirt. he’s covered in the dirt. i: he is covered in the dirt? c: yeah because he died. narratives of dramatic occasions including death are not uncommon among young children. in another narrative, a five-year-old colombian boy told us: “my sister is in the sky because – no, i almost forget because i was here when she went to god.” this can be explained by the poverty these children live in as well as the instability of their situation, given the presence of deportations and frequent moves to new communities to escape the ice. conclusion in conclusion, the sample of low-income latino children in this study told narratives that were considerably less complex than other low-income monolingual latino children living in spanish-speaking countries. we have no reason to believe that our participants’ narration would be better had they chosen to speak in spanish; however spanish-english bilingual children’s narratives in spanish have been found to highly correlate in length and complexity with their narratives in english (mccabe & bliss, 2005). rather, we believe that these children are not receiving the high-quality input they need in english or in spanish in order to achieve literacy. this lack of input has also been found with monolingual english-speaking children from low-income backgrounds (hart & risley, 1995). in part it may reflect the fact that a parent has been deported and thus is not available to provide linguistic input. but the lack of linguistic input to these bilingual children seems also to reflect the peculiar and unfounded myth in the united states that parents should not speak spanish with their children or that their global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 2 dec 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 children should speak only english outside the home. were the children receiving the kind of high-quality input that their immigrant parents could provide in spanish, their narratives in either language would have been more complex due to the fact that linguistic skill transfers from one language to another (cummins, 1979). unfortunately, as one of our participants noted in the quote that provides part of the title of this paper, these children have already begun to eschew speaking spanish despite the fact that they have support in and outside the home for doing so. we hope that immigrant latino parents increasingly receive a different message: speaking fluent spanish to their children will benefit those children far more than speaking relatively less fluent english. references arbona, c., olvera, n., rodriguez, n., hagan, j., linares, a., & wiesner, m. 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(1983). developmental psycholinguistics. three ways of looking at a child’s narrative. new york: plenum press. peterson, c., jesso, b., & mccabe, a. (1999). encouraging narratives in preschoolers: an intervention study. journal of child language 26(1):49-67. rosenbloom, r. (2007). senseless deportations. the washington post, 25 march. shiro, m. (2008). narrative stance in venezuelan children’s stories. in spanish-language narration and literacy: culture, cognition, and emotion, eds. allyssa mccabe, alison l. shiro, m. (2003). genre and evaluation in narrative development. journal of child language 30(1):165-195. simanski, j. & sapp, l.m. (2012). immigration enforcement actions. washington, dc: office of immigration statistics. sládková, j., mangado, s. m. g., & quinteros, j. r. (2011). lowell immigrant communities in the climate of deportations. analyses of social issues and public policy 12 (1), 78—95 snow, c. e., porche, m. v., tabors, p. o., & harris, s. r. (2007). is literacy enough? pathways to academic success for adolescents. baltimore: paul h brookes publishing. suárez-orozco, c., yoshikawa, h., teranishi, r. t., & suárez-orozco, m. m. (2011). growing up in the shadows: the developmental implications of unauthorized status. harvard educational review 81(3):438-473. suárez-orozco, c., suárez-orozco, m. m., & todorova, i. (2008). learning a new land: immigrant students in american society. cambridge: harvard university press. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 2 dec 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 tamis-lemonda, c. s., bornstein, m. h., & baumwell, l. (2001). maternal responsiveness and children’s achievement of language milestones. child development, 72 (3):748-767. thronson, d. b. (2008). creating crisis: immigration raids and the destabilization of immigrant families. wake forest law review 43:391. us office of immigration statistics. (2010). immigration enforcement actions. washington, dc: department of homeland security. webster-stratton, c. (1990). long-term follow-up of families with young conduct problem children: from preschool to grade school. journal of clinical child psychology 19(2):144-149. xu, q., & brabeck, k. (2012). service utilization for latino children in mixed-status families. social work research 36(3):209-221. yoshikawa, h., godfrey, e. b., & rivera, a. c. (2008). access to institutional resources as a measure ofsocial exclusion: relations with family process and cognitive development in the context of immigration. new directions for child and adolescent development 2008(121):63-86. microsoft word 2013-007-final-20130930.docx the living room, a community crisis respite program: offering people in crisis an alternative to emergency departments michelle heyland, msn, apn, pmhnp-bc courtney emery, ma, lcpc mona shattell, phd, rn author notes: michelle heyland, msn, apn, pmhnp-bc, is faculty at rush university college of nursing in chicago, il, usa, and a psychiatric & mental health nurse practitioner at turning point behavioral health care center in skokie, il, usa. michelle_heyland@rush.edu courtney l. emery, ma, lcpc, is the assistant program director for the living room and community support services at turning point behavioral health care center in skokie, il, usa. mona m. shattell, phd, rn, is the associate dean for research and faculty development at depaul university’s college of science and health and an associate professor at depaul university’s school of nursing in chicago, il, usa. keywords: crisis, recovery, peer support, hospital diversion, emergency department diversion, emergency department alternative recommended citation: heyland, m., emery, c., & shattell, m. (2013). the living room, a community crisis respite program: offering people in crisis an alternative to emergency departments. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(3), 1-8. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 the living room, a community crisis respite program: offering people in crisis an alternative to emergency departments abstract objective: to describe the living room, a community crisis respite center that offers individuals in crisis an alternative to obtaining services in an emergency department (ed). methods: this article describes the problems individuals in a mental health crisis may encounter in traditional eds and explains how the living room addresses these problems. the living room’s development, setting, staffing and procedures are described in order to promote increased use of this type of program. results: in its first year of operation, the living room hosted 228 visits by 87 distinct individuals (termed “guests”). guests were deflected from eds on 213 of those visits – a 93% deflection rate. these deflections represent a savings of approximately $550,000 to the state of illinois since guests of the living room are overwhelmingly individuals with medicaid or no insurance of any kind. on 84% (n=192) of the occurrences in which guests were deflected from eds, they alleviated their crises sufficiently to decide to leave the living room and return to the community. these guests reported an average decrease of 2.13 points on the subjective units of distress scale. conclusions: community crisis respite centers such as the living room represent an important alternative to eds by remedying many criticisms of traditional eds made by individuals in crisis. outcomes from the living room’s first year of operation suggest that community crisis respite centers are cost-effective, effective in helping many individuals alleviate crises, and have the potential to decrease the use of eds for mental health crisis. keywords: crisis, recovery, peer support, hospital diversion, emergency department diversion, emergency department alternative introduction people in crisis, whether or not they have a diagnosed mental illness, are often faced with a dilemma at the height of their distress: do they stay at home and hope the intense emotions dissipate or do they go to a hospital’s emergency department (ed)? unfortunately, due to a lack of service alternatives in the community, many clients decide to go to local eds. once in the ed, individuals with mental illness are often met with frustration, disregard or minimization of symptoms (shattell, 2011). furthermore, their symptoms may be easily exacerbated because of the nature of eds: crowded, loud, and containing multiple and unsettling stimuli. clarke, dusome, and hughes (2007) examined the experiences of a general hospital ed visit by individuals with mental illness and identified several issues. the study reported participants saying they were not sick enough to receive priority triage, they experienced a lack of privacy in the triage area that exacerbated distress, and that the ed staff lacked the expertise to address psychiatric conditions. they also experienced shame or guilt for presenting to the ed and for having a mental illness. finally these participants reported that their families wanted to be more involved and supported during the time of crisis (clarke et al., 2007). studies identified what individuals find helpful during mental health crises. for example, clarke et al., (2007) reported that clients in crisis desire a safe place that is open around-the-clock and staffed with strong advocates. similarly, agar-jacomb and read (2009) concluded that clients in crisis sought a safe place with people who they can talk to and who can understand what they were going through. these clients also preferred access to trained professionals, autonomy, physical freedom, and respect (agar-jacomb & read, 2009). furthermore, clients described that in a time of crisis they need, “somewhere safe to go away from [their] normal life,” and, “someone to talk to but not in hospital” (lyons et al., 2009, p. 429). without such elements, a client’s psychiatric crisis may escalate. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 there is increasing recognition among mental healthcare professionals that improvements need to be made to current crisis intervention services. specifically, “alternatives to admission need to be seen as viable options that address concerns of families and individuals with mental health needs rather than be perceived as a ‘brush off’ of their concerns” (clarke et al., 2007, p. 130). the purpose of this paper is to describe one alternative, a community crisis respite program called the living room. we will report the development of the living room; the space, location, and funding; staffing; procedures; and preliminary outcomes related to treating emotional distress and diverting persons in crisis from eds. a community crisis respite program: the living room background communities have begun to implement programs that provide appropriate care to people in crisis and are a cost effective alternative to eds. one such initiative is a community crisis respite program called the living room. although community crisis respite programs of this type are relatively rare in the us they are increasingly recognized as an effective way to reduce psychiatric ed visits while improving outcomes for people in crisis. while a focus of the living room is to help those in crisis avoid using the ed, the service philosophy also embraces the recovery model. the concept of recovery “involves the development of new meaning and purpose in one’s life as one grows beyond the catastrophic effects of mental illness” (anthony, 1993). the living room reflects many of the recovery model’s concepts, including autonomy, respect, hope, empowerment, and social inclusion. the living room is named after the familiar home space and offers a safe destination for those in crisis. it is located in skokie, il, a chicago suburb, and is easily accessible via public transportation. the space is in the same building as a well-established and financially stable community mental health center; as a result, the location is readily identifiable to the public. the hours of the crisis respite center depend largely on need. for example, the living room selected its hours of operation (wednesday, thursday, and sunday from 38pm) based on the high volume of calls received on the community mental health center’s emergency services hotline. the time also aligned with those that area ed personnel reported as high volume periods of psychiatric visits. clients who utilize the living room are referred to as “guests” in order to communicate the intent of the living room to be a non-clinical environment with an inviting atmosphere. the use of the term is also meant to imply that services are person-centered. appropriate guests of the living room are individuals 18 years and older who are experiencing acute crises sufficiently severe that they are at risk for ed visits. examples include individuals who are experiencing suicidal or homicidal thoughts, panic attacks, situational crises, severe depressive symptoms, and psychotic symptoms. the living room is available regardless of where the person lives, their type of insurance coverage, and the exact nature of their crisis. individuals need not have a diagnosed mental illness to utilize the living room. the living room can comfortably accommodate up to six guests at any given time. the capacity is set at six to ensure that guests do not have to wait to meet with a mental health professional. minimizing wait time is important considering long wait times are among the biggest sources of dissatisfaction for people in crisis who visit eds (clarke et al., 2007). to date, no guests have had to be turned away because the living room exceeded maximum capacity. the living room was originally funded by a special projects grant from the state of illinois’ division of mental health (dmh); so unlike services delivered in eds, there are never any out-of-pocket costs for guests of the living room. in summer 2012 this special projects grant was renewed for a second year, but even with these monies the center staff realized that to ensure adequate long-term funding they needed to have additional revenue. to that end, for a subset of clients, the living room now bills medicaid or illinois’ dmh for crisis intervention services. specifically, medicaid provides reimbursement for medicaid-eligible clients of the community mental health center in which the living room resides. illinois’ dmh provides reimbursement for clients of the agency with no insurance of any kind. setting an outpatient mental health agency was the ideal setting for the establishment of the living room due to ease of access to professional staff and widespread familiarity with the agency. the environment of the actual space is warm and welcoming with carpeted floors, paintings (art) on the walls, comfortable furniture, and soft lighting. the environment was designed so that guests are likely to feel safe and not overwhelmed by excessive stimuli (e.g., television, radio or excessive number of people). the layout of the space ensures maximum privacy and includes a separate space for rest and relaxation. a psychiatric registered nurse who conducts client intakes uses a space away from the main meeting area. the nursing area utilizes a small private office that is carpeted and boasts only a bookshelf, desk, and chairs across the hall global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 from the living room. the nursing area allows for privacy and does not appear like a stark clinical exam room so as to not increase guest anxiety. staffing and roles the living room utilizes one counselor, one psychiatric registered nurse, and three peer counselors for staffing on a regular basis, all of whom have extensive experience working with persons in crisis. the counselor conducts an initial triage, determines whether the guest is safe to utilize the living room, and completes a petition in the event that a guest is at high risk of hurting himor herself or someone else and thus requires an emergency psychiatric hospitalization. the psychiatric registered nurse ensures that guests are medically stable with a basic set of vital signs and other health screening measures (e.g., glucose testing if symptomatic of hypoglycemia). recognizing that medical concerns can also be precursors to crises, the psychiatric registered nurse provides health and medication education to guests and also assists in therapeutic interventions. an integral part of the living room’s team is the peer counselors. peer counselors are individuals who have a mental illness but have achieved sufficient recovery to function as supports to those in crisis. prior to their employment at the living room, the peer counselors all had experience co-facilitating national alliance on mental illness (nami) support groups or they had equivalent training. after they were hired by the living room, the peer counselors received extensive training in crisis assessment, de-escalation, active listening, and operations of the living room. the peer counselors also attended an intensive peer support specialist training program sponsored by the depression and bipolar support alliance. peer counselors in the living room meet with guests to de-escalate crises and establish achievable short-term goals, develop safety plans, and teach coping skills. their ongoing professional development is facilitated through weekly individual clinical supervision with the living room’s program director (a counselor). individual clinical supervision provides an opportunity to learn new clinical skills, process the application of clinical skills to the needs of guests, and understand their own reactions to guests and other experiences within the living room. peer counselors have been shown to greatly improve outcomes for those in crisis because they meet the need to talk to someone who can truly understand the person in crisis (optum health, 2011; agar-jacomb & read, 2009). procedures when a guest initially arrives in the living room, the counselor triages the individual to obtain basic demographics, determine the nature of the guest’s crisis, and assess his/her level of risk (e.g., lethality of suicidal thoughts, plans, and intent). the triage form includes the subjective units of distress scale (suds), a self-reported measure of an individual’s level of distress based on descriptive definitions of what each number (zero through ten) represents in terms of distress level. this measure was selected because of its ease of use and documented reliability and validity (benjamin, o’neil, crowley, & beidas, 2010; furukawa, kessler, slade, & andrews, 2003; kaplan & smith, 1995; kessler, andrews, colpe, hiripi, mroczek, normand, walters, & zaslavsky, 2002; tanner, 2012). each guest is asked to rate his/her distress level upon arrival. this initial distress level helps the staff and guest determine the effectiveness of the living room (as it is compared to an exit distress level obtained at departure). the counselor also decides if the guest is appropriate for the living room. for example, the guest is deemed not appropriate if under the influence of drugs or alcohol. this assessment is made through guest self-report, observation of clinical signs and symptoms, and findings from the nursing assessment (e.g., dilated pupils and accelerated heart rate). in this case the individual is given a list of resources to utilize once they leave the living room. examples of these resources include local alcoholics anonymous/narcotics anonymous meetings, substance abuse treatment providers, and crisis hotlines. throughout the visit, assessment of the guest’s safety is ongoing. if at any point the counselor determines the guest poses an immediate and emergent safety threat to self or others, a petition for involuntary psychiatric hospitalization is completed and an ambulance is called to safely transport the individual to a local ed for further evaluation. if the guest refuses to leave in an ambulance and a petition has been completed, the police are called. if the guest leaves before the ambulance arrives, the police are also called to make every effort to locate the guest to ensure his/her safety. in the vast majority of cases, a petition is avoided because the guest stabilizes over the course of his/her visit in the living room. guests are never held involuntarily in the living room; therefore, chemical or mechanical restraints are never used. after meeting with the counselor, the guest meets with the psychiatric registered nurse for a basic health assessment because physical and emotional needs are often intertwined. the psychiatric registered nurse initially obtains the guest’s height and weight and vital signs (blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, and temperature). if the nurse determines that the vital signs are dangerously abnormal or the client is symptomatic of a medical emergency (e.g., chest pain and shortness of breath), the nurse calls 911 and the client is global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 transported to the nearest ed for medical evaluation. the nurse also answers any questions the guest may have regarding health concerns or medications. the nurse assists in de-escalation, empathic listening, support, and ensures that the whole person (mental and physical) is addressed. respecting autonomy, guests have the right to refuse a visit with the psychiatric registered nurse. however, under certain circumstances the guest is required to meet with the psychiatric nurse. for example, a guest must meet with the nurse if he/she is exhibiting emergent symptoms such as chest pain or a sudden and severe headache or if a guest has a sudden change in physical or mental status such as disorientation, confusion or difficulty speaking. following the meeting with the psychiatric registered nurse, the guest is paired with a peer counselor. the pairing process ensures each peer counselor has sufficient guest experiences and that the pairings are appropriate (e.g., a male guest with a known history of predatory-type behaviors would not be paired with a female peer counselor). the peer counselor and the guest discuss in-depth the nature of the crisis and coping skills the guest might use to decrease distress. the use of coping skills is considered one of the main pillars of the recovery model, encouraging the development of self-empowerment (anthony, 1993). two peer counselors may also work together with certain guests who are more complex or require greater immediate support. using knowledge gained through their own personal experiences with mental illness, peer counselors are uniquely positioned to offer support and empathy and to advocate for guests. guests can leave the living room at any time, exercising their right to autonomy (sans a completed petition for the guest). when a guest determines that he/she is ready to leave the living room, the counselor meets with him/her for a final assessment to ensure the guest is indeed safe to leave and to determine if the guest’s distress level has decreased. most guests come to the living room with the goal of avoiding an ed if possible, and they are able to make use of the services available to achieve this outcome. outcomes initial outcomes of the living room are positive. guests have been diverted from eds, the state of illinois has realized a cost savings, and guests have received care for their emotional distress as evidenced by the average decrease in suds scores. in its first year of operation, the living room hosted 87 distinct guests and a total of 228 visits. guests routinely come to the living room with the goal of avoiding an ed if at all possible. the living room is widely promoted to offer people in crisis an alternative to area eds. therefore, it is possible that if the living room did not exist, these guests would have elected to go to an ed. assuming this, guests were successfully deflected from eds on 213 of those visits – a 93% deflection rate. a deflection is defined by the living room as a visit that does not result in a trip to the ed and instead with the guest returning to the community when sufficient relief from distress has been achieved. the ed deflections represent a savings of approximately $550,000 to the state of illinois. guests of the living room are overwhelmingly individuals with medicaid or no insurance of any kind. each ed deflection represents a savings of approximately $2631, the difference between the average cost of a visit to a local ed for a psychiatric reason ($2900 on the low end of a six hospital range) and the average cost of a visit to the living room ($269). the average cost of an ed visit for a psychiatric reason is based on data provided by the illinois department of public health (illinois department of public health, office of policy, planning and statistics, 2010). the average cost of a visit to the living room is calculated to include staff time, materials, and a small share of the operating costs of the living room’s parent agency. most guests of the living room experience less distress by the end of their visit. on 84% (n = 192) of the visits in which guests were successfully deflected from eds, guests alleviated their crises sufficiently to leave the living room. these guests reported an average decrease of 2.13 points on the suds. on the remaining 9% (n = 21) of visits, guests were sufficiently stable to avoid ed referrals, but did not fully resolve their crises within the living room. in most cases staff in the living room linked these guests to longer-term treatment. anecdotal reports by the living room guests frequently express relief and amazement that such an alternative exists, as these quotes illustrate. “i am so glad i came here and that you are real and can relate to me. i’m sick of going to the er.” “at the er, it’s very frantic, there are no choices. here i was able to talk and calm down. i might have even ended up in the hospital for a week for saying i was suicidal, but here i could tell you and you gave me a chance to calm down without sending me to the hospital.” these statements describe the value of ed alternatives such as the living room. although preliminary outcomes of the living room are positive, research is needed to more systematically understand and evaluate this alternative treatment environment. a study is currently underway that aims to describe the environment from the perspective of persons who spend time there – guests and staff. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 conclusions emergency departments often provide inadequate services for people in crisis. persons in emotional distress frequently report negative experiences in such chaotic environments. conversely, ed staff may become frustrated with over-crowding and perceived “frequent fliers.” individuals with mental illness can be stereotyped as disruptive or dangerous, which may decrease the quality of care that they receive. such clients are acutely aware of how they are perceived in eds, and while they understand that eds are unlikely to meet their needs they see no other options. community crisis respite centers therefore represent an important alternative to eds. community crisis respite centers such as the one described here the living room remedy the criticisms of eds that people in crisis often voice by providing care that is immediate, client-centered, and recovery-oriented. furthermore, people in crisis who visit community crisis respite centers have better outcomes than those who visit traditional emergency departments (adams & elmallakh, 2009; greenfield, stoneking, humphreys, sundby, & bond, 2008). outcomes from the living room’s first year of operation suggest that community crisis respite centers are more cost-effective than traditional eds and that such centers are effective in helping many individuals alleviate crises without the use of eds. unfortunately, resources in the us to open such centers are not readily available. early outcomes in the living room should lend support for funding and allocation of resources to open additional similar programs. these outcomes suggest that such programs offer individuals in crisis more suitable interventions while saving money. at a time when overcrowding in eds is recognized as a national problem, this has never been more important. references adams, c.l., & el-mallakh, r.s. (2009). patient outcome after treatment in a community-based crisis stabilization unit. journal of behavioral health services & research, 36(3), 396-399. agar-jacomb, k. & read, j. (2009). mental health crisis services: what do service users need when in crisis? journal of mental health, 18(2), 99-110. doi: 10.1080/09638230701879227 anthony, w.a. (1993). recovery from mental illness: the guiding vision of the mental health service system in the 1990s. psychosocial rehabilitation journal, 16(4), 11–23. benjamin, c.l., o’neil, k.a., crowley, s.a., & beidas, r.s. (2010). patterns and predictors of subjective units of distress in anxious youth. behavioural and cognitive psychotherapy, 38, 497-504. doi: 10.1017/s1352465810000287 clarke, d.e., dusome, d., & hughes, l. (2007). emergency department from the mental health client’s perspective. international journal of mental health nursing, 16, 126-131. doi: 10.1111/j.1447-0349.2007.00455.x furukawa, t.a., kessler, r.c., slade, t., & andrews, g. (2003). the performance of the k6 and k10 screening scales for psychological distress in the australian national survey of mental health and wellbeing. psychological medicine, 33, 357-362. greenfield, t.k., stoneking, b.c., humphreys, k., sundby, e., & bond, j. (2008). a randomized trial of a mental health consumer-managed alternative to civil commitment for acute psychiatric crisis. american journal of community psychology, 42(1-2), 135-144. illinois department of public health, office of policy, planning and statistics (2010). average emergency department costs. springfield, il. kessler, r.c., andrews, g., colpe, l.j., hiripi, e., mroczek, d.k., normand, s., walters, e.e., & zaslavsky, a.m. (2002). short screening scales to monitor population prevalences and trends in nonspecific psychological distress. psychological medicine, 32, 959-976. lyons, c., hopley, p., burton, c.r., & horrocks, j. (2009). mental health crisis and respite services: service user and carer aspirations. journal of psychiatric and mental health nursing, 16, 424433. optum health (2011). hospital diversion services. golden valley, mn: optum health. shattell, m., & andes, m. (2011). treatment of persons with mental illness and substance use disorders in medical emergency departments in the united states. issues in mental health nursing, 32(2), 140-141. tanner, b.a. (2012). validity of global physical and emotional suds. applied psychophysiology and feedback, 37(1), 31-34. doi 10.1007/s10484-0119174-x global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 appendix images from the living room image 1. r and r room: the rest and relaxation room where guests can have added privacy or relax alone if necessary. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 image 2. one of the living room’s seating areas. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 image 3. the living room triage area and a seating area. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 image 4. street entrance into the living room. microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 175 the mental itineraries of the everyday lives of indigenous women linked to their partners’ excessive alcohol consumption guillermina natera1 ramón de la fuente muñiz national institute of psychiatry iii international conference of community psychology puebla, mexico, june 4, 2010.                                                                                                                           1 naterarey@yahoo.com.mx 176 the mental itineraries of the everyday lives of indigenous women linked to their partners’ excessive alcohol consumption abstract some time ago, a psychosocial research project was launched (1999) in an otomí community in the state of hidalgo to determine the dynamics of alcohol consumption. it was found, as in many places in mexico, that alcohol consumption is deeply rooted in culture and that it is a tradition, but also the cause of many social problems, which involve various spheres of everyday life. one of these is women’s everyday lives due to the violence and economic negligence inflicted on them, which produces emotional states of anguish, anxiety, physical and psychological malaise, which increases when they see how their partners’ health is affected as a result of alcohol consumption. can anything be done for them? do they want help? although women are not the only ones to suffer from this, since some children and parents are also affected, they are the main ones to feel the effects. as a means of supporting the family group, a brief intervention model was adapted as an alternative for providing support for the family. the results of the participation in the intervention program and the analysis of the narrations of this process expressed by women are presented in this paper. by mental itineraries, we understand the processes of psychological and cognitive changes undergone by these women in the search for an answer to a situation they could no longer tolerate, which plunged them into a state of crisis. this is analyzed from the theory of experience (turner, 1994; mier, 2001) and the ritual process (turner, 1969) understood as, a process of awareness different from previous ones, which makes it different from other similar events. it also drives them to seek help, even though this may involve dealing with cultural norms and patriarchal dominance. what changes an everyday experience for a woman who has tolerated a situation for a long time, suddenly turning it into a social drama that drives her to seek help? the anthropology of experience is based on how individuals experience their culture, in other words, how events are perceived by awareness. to document this experience, we not only recorded data but also cognition, feelings and expectations. studying this long-established, everyday situation that suddenly becomes a social drama requires examining all the stages in order to be able to reconstruct it. the social drama comprises four stages: rupture, crisis, readjustment and reintegration. lastly, the study proved the usefulness of 177 the intervention for indigenous communities, despite the fact that the model is counter-cultural, since it runs counter to the cultural habits of alcohol consumption and obedience in a highly patriarchal society that looks for victims and culprits as a means of dealing with situations that cannot be solved or understood. keywords: alcohol consumption, indigenous women, patriarchal culture, mental itineraries, symptoms reduction.           178 los itinerarios mentales de las vidas cotidianas de mujeres indígenas ligadas al consumo excesivo de alcohol por sus parejas resumen hace tiempo se inició un trabajo de investigación en una comunidad otomí (1999), del estado de hidalgo, con el objetivo de conocer la dinámica del consumo de alcohol. se encontró como en muchos lugares de méxico, que el consumo está arraigado en la cultura, es una tradición, pero también es causa de muchos problemas sociales, que implican varias esferas de la vida cotidiana. una de ellas es la vida de las mujeres por la violencia y la negligencia económica que se ejerce hacia ellas, que les produce estados emocionales de angustia, ansiedad, malestares físicos y psicológicos, que se incrementan de ver cómo se va deteriorando la salud de sus parejas por el exceso en la ingesta de alcohol ¿se puede hacer algo por ellas? ¿desean ayuda? aunque no es privativo de las mujeres este padecer, pues hay hijos y padres que también lo sufren, lo más común es que sean las mujeres. como una forma de apoyar al grupo familiar se adaptó un modelo de intervención breve, para ofrecerlo como alternativa para dar apoyo a la familia. resultado de la participación en el programa de intervención y el análisis de las narraciones de este proceso que expresaron las mujeres, es lo que se presentará en este trabajo. entendemos como itinerarios mentales, los procesos de cambios psicológicos y cognitivos, por los que transitaron estas mujeres en la búsqueda de una respuesta a una situación que ya no podían tolerar, que hizo crisis. se analiza esta desde la teoría de la experiencia (turner, 1994; mier, 2001) y del proceso del ritual (turner, 1969), entendida como un proceso de conciencia diferente a los anteriores, que la hace distinta a otros eventos semejantes, que les hace acudir a buscar ayuda aunque para ello tengan que enfrentarse a las normas culturales y la dominancia patriarcal. ¿qué hace diferente una experiencia cotidiana para una mujer que ha tolerado por mucho tiempo una situación y, de repente se convierta en un drama social que acuda a solicitar ayuda? la antropología de la experiencia lidia en saber cómo los individuos experimentan su cultura, es decir cómo los eventos son recibidos por la conciencia. por la experiencia nosotros no sólo registramos los datos, sino también la cognición, sentimientos y expectativas. este proceso es cotidiano y ancestral, en un momento se vuelve un drama social que exige, a manera de un 179 proceso ritual, pasar a la persona por todas las fases para poder reconstruirse. cuatro son las fases del drama social: la ruptura, la crisis, el reajuste y la reintegración. finalmente, se demostró la utilidad de la intervención para comunidades indígenas, a pesar de ser un modelo que podría considerarse contracultural por el quebrantamiento de los hábitos culturales del consumo de alcohol, y de obediencia a una sociedad altamente patriarcal, que suele buscar víctimas y culpables ante situaciones que no se pueden resolver o comprender. palabras clave: consumo de alcohol, mujeres indígenas, cultura patriarcal, itinerarios mentales, reducción de síntomas. 180 introduction the purpose of this study is to show the impact of a program designed for the relatives of alcohol consumers implemented in hñähñü indigenous communities in the mezquital valley in the state of hidalgo. it examines the various phases of adaptation of the model: the feasibility study, the adaptation of the instruments, the application of the model and lastly a preliminary qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the process followed by these women to make decisions and find new ways of coping with a relative’s problem of alcoholism. the valle del mezquital zone in hidalgo state (150 km from the capital of mexico) was chosen because various researchers at the national institute of psychiatry have undertaken several studies on alcohol consumption for the past ten years (garcía-andrade, et al., 2005), to understand and explain the high mortality rate from hepatic cirrhosis in the region –40 out of every 100,000 inhabitants, when the national rate is 21.7 (narro, 1994). alcohol consumption in indigenous communities is linked to cultural norms that form part of a historically constructed pattern of behavior, in a symbolic space used to mediate conflicts, political relations and friendship and reaffirm gender roles (corcuera, 1996; oechemin, 2004). the purpose of this study is therefore to examine alcohol consumption and its consequences in communities. inhabitants may feel that this practice is being threatened by a possible intervention that will lead them to reduce their consumption, as a result of which they may object to participating in the study. one should also recall that any health intervention is usually an extrinsic event, outside the autonomous development of the collectivity, which in turn disturbs a stable system. the intervention demands “the implementation of a framework of unusual norms in a universe that is already governed by rules, which necessarily creates an atmosphere of confrontation” (mier, 2002: 23-35). among the consequences due to alcohol abuse that have been reported, orford (1998, 2005), holmila (1994), natera (2007) and tiburcio (2007) have consistently documented those that affect family members, for whom no care is provided in hñähñü indigenous communities. the suffering of families that coexist with a situation of alcohol consumption is not dealt with, even though it is extremely common. 181 the intervention model developed is a brief intervention model, designed to support the families who experience the consequences of alcohol consumption. it focuses on the coping styles used by relatives to deal with consumption and comprises the following five steps: 1) listening to and understanding the relative's particular problem, 2) providing relevant information, 3) identifying and analyzing coping styles, 4) analyzing support networks and 5) referring individuals to sources of specialized assistance, if required, natera et al., (2009); tiburcio et al. (2009). the purpose of this model is to help the relative cope with the situation in different ways in order to encourage his well-being (orford, 2010). in order to implement this intervention model in the community, first of all, a feasibility study was carried out in the communities. the principal results of this study made it possible to clearly identify the challenges to be dealt with in the implementation of the intervention. among the difficulties identified were the predominantly patriarchal lifestyle into which power relations and the control of women are inserted through one of the main channels: gossip. women from these communities are not easily allowed to seek access to psychological care in which they will discuss a primarily male problem such as alcohol consumption. working in such small communities (with 300 to 900 inhabitants), the counselor must earn the trust of the persons he deals with and guarantee that he will not tell others about their problem. this is common among health workers who, with good intentions but fatal consequences, may utter phrases to the husband, such as “i’ve heard you're not behaving well at home,” or “i’ve heard you’re drinking a lot,” triggering acts of violence in men. another challenge, which is no small matter, is that alcohol consumption is perceived as a socially accepted and even desirable form of behavior among men that is inserted into everyday life as well as extraordinary events. at the same time, the culture of poverty and having a subsistence economy is a challenge to any intervention, since their scarce financial resources, time and physical energy are used primarily to satisfy their subsistence needs. these include food preparation, which often entails sowing, harvesting and preparing foods as in the case of making several kilos of tortillas a day, the main foodstuff, made from maize. taking children to school and bringing them back, dealing with community tasks, fulfilling the social programs assigned to them, for which they are paid, are all priorities, as opposed to investing money to go to an appointment to deal with their mental health. this often involves walking long distances or paying a lot for transport to get there, as a result of which mental health becomes an extremely secondary matter. there are also aspects related to the 182 difficulties of expressing their needs for care, since if there is a lack of services oriented towards their physical health, the situation is even worse for mental health. however, there was a consensus regarding the need for psychological support that would help them learn how to deal with their partners' excess alcohol consumption. since the original model was developed for the urban population (natera, mora, tiburcio, 2008), it was necessary to adapt both the language and the psychological instruments used to evaluate psychological malaise and the community’s representation of how to deal with a relative’s problem of alcoholism. the cognitive laboratories technique was used for this purpose (tiburcio, natera and garcía, 2009). the result was a manual designed for this population, which contains suggestions on how to cope with potential obstacles to its implementation that may arise (tiburcio, natera and medina mora, 2009). method participants a total of 60 women between the ages of 18 and 60 participated, all of whom are residents of the municipalities of cardonal and ixmiquilpan, in valle del mezquital, hidalgo. participants were divided into two groups of 30 each. the first group received the sessions and the second did not. all the participants were invited to take part in the intervention. those who agreed formed part of the intervention group while those who did not were assigned to the nonintervention group. materials and instruments three questionnaires previously adapted and validated for this zone by tiburcio (2007) were used. the scale of symptoms (srt), which reports the presence of physical and psychological symptoms associated with stress, the coping questionnaire (cg) to describe the coping styles used for dealing with consumption and the center for epidemiological studies depression scale (ces-d) to classify possible cases of depression. procedure 183 a quasi-experimental design was used, with an evaluation before the intervention and an evaluation 3 months later. the three instruments were used in both groups. intervention sessions were held in the respective community health centers although some sessions were conducted in the family's home. the confidentiality and anonymity of all the participants was guaranteed through informed consent. each person attended between 4 and 6 sessions, with an approximate duration of ninety minutes. the intervention ended once the patient said she was confident enough to use new coping styles and her support networks. results below are some of the preliminary quantitative and qualitative results. the former correspond to the application of the instruments before and after and a preliminary anthropological analysis showing part of the processes experienced by the women. the results of the group that did not receive the intervention were compared with those that did. a significant reduction in depressive features and in the number of physical and psychological symptoms was found in participants after the treatment. (figures 1, 2 and 3). figure 1. percentage of depressive features experienced by group before and after the intervention. 184 figure 2. percentage of depressive features by group before and after intervention. figure 3. psychological symptoms identified in groups of participants. ways of coping with the problem of alcoholism were found to be universal (orford, 2005). in other words, although these forms are very similar in the urban and rural zone, there are cultural, material and affective elements that make them have different expressions and alter the way they are understood. individuals nearly always request help to know “how to stop the other 185 person from drinking,” when the purpose of the intervention is to orient the intervention towards the relative’s concerns. an increase in independent coping, related to lower stress, was found. conversely, the group that did not receive the intervention not only remained the same but four months later, its situation had deteriorated, as regards both depressive features and physical and psychological symptoms (natera et al., 2010). what are the mental itineraries followed by those who suffer from having an alcoholic relative? initial stage: by mental itineraries, we understand the processes of psychological and cognitive changes undergone by these women in the search for a response to a situation they could no longer tolerate, which had plunged them into a state of crisis and expressed in phrases such as the following: i am condemned to live like this! i won't be happy until he stops drinking! i am worried…i have a lot of problems with my husband because he is an alcoholic! he arrives drunk and hits me! if only he stopped drinking! i want to die! no-one needs me! “he insults me, shouts at me, swears at me and my mother, which really annoys me." these were some of the most common phrases heard at the beginning of the interviews with relatives of alcohol consumers. they include stories with a great deal of violence and infidelity, as estela said, “now i know it’s the alcohol, he always used to come home drunk.” given that the perception of alcohol consumption is a behavior that is fully accepted by the community, relatives do not feel that they can complain, since consumers are the ones that must decide whether or not they stop drinking. thus, what triggers the process of seeking help is an associated problem. the only thing that explains why women seek and accept help now is because they are going through an experience (turner, 1994) understood as a process of awareness different from previous ones, which makes it different from other similar events. what makes this experience different is its scope and impact. the feeling of dizziness is what makes this event unique and different from others. this experience is shot through by the perception of pain, which has become the maximum offense, which is why they seek help. 186 following the intervention model, the first interview is a continuous narration of the itineraries of a multitude of scenes of suffering they have experienced, which form part of their everyday lives, where men’s alcohol consumption is a form of behavior that is totally accepted by the community. relatives do not feel they can complain since consumers are the only ones that have the power to decide whether or not stop drinking alcohol, even though the rest of the family suffers the consequences, such as violence and financial negligence. the possibility of a solution is focused on the consumer. these feelings and emotions may last between 10 and 20 years. women are not warned about the constant suffering they will experience from the time they marry. other community members do not take into account the fact that they will have to deal with this problem. as clementina says, “they knew he drank a lot but they did not tell me.” afterwards, she will have to bring up her children alone. “you know what you have to do with your daughters, i don’t know anything about that.” the husband is obviously not giving his wife power, but rather, avoiding responsibility. but she also suffers on his behalf, in the path of loyalties she has been taught to feel towards men. it hurts her to see her husband suffer and look down on himself, as when she says, "he only wants to drink, i don’t care what they do to him, they can throw him down a ravine." the lack of clear information about alcoholism still focuses on the fact that deciding to stop drinking is a sign of will. the drinker probably does not want to stop drinking, which he may use as an excuse for his behavior, but he may also be unable to stop drinking. second stage. as a result of the break, the crack and the crisis expand. in this itinerary, there is increased awareness, although this does not happen in the same way among all the interviewees, since it varies in intensity, space and time. the respondent continues a process of intervention focusing on cognitive and affective aspects and begins to see things differently. responsibilities are clarified and guilt is reduced. the respondent acknowledges the fact that the problem of alcohol consumption is the other person’s and that she has a responsibility to herself. asked whether she had refused to give her husband money, josefina replies: “to tell you the truth, i have refused to give him money because he’ll spend it on drinking.” this internal discourse, which women have never shared with other people and which confuses them about what they should do, combines with a series of feelings, such as anger, sadness and resignation, where guilt is present on an everyday basis. the woman feels guilty about having lied to a man, 187 her man! she begins a process of understanding and recognition of herself, and of realizing that refusing to give him money was not the wrong response. it is worth analyzing what would have happened if she had given him the money. what would the advantages and disadvantages have been? then, in the presence of the counselor who does not judge her but understands her, she realizes that this was the best decision. there is catharsis, relief and a self-evaluation that she did not make the wrong decision, that she was entitled to do so and that she made the right decision. she realizes that lying does not make her disloyal. instead, it allows her to reaffirm herself and strengthens her way of coping. she knows that she is doing the right thing and feels less guilty. part of this process involves recognizing her part of this process involves acknowledging her discomfort and relating it to alcohol consumption, having lived in suffering and isolation, in an attempt to conceal her problems. physical pain, intense headaches, concern, anger and nerves in the face of the uncertainty of what her relatives are going to say, relatives who no longer visit her because her husband is always drunk. she does not sleep because she is worried about not knowing where he is, because he has not come home. she gets frightened and becomes paralyzed and feels she cannot do anything. he threatens to leave but she knows he won't. once again, she takes stock of her health as a result of a problem for which she is not responsible. is violence a separate problem? as mentioned earlier, the women in the study now realize that, “now i know it was because of the alcohol.” a woman does not denounce her husband’s violence, because that would mean talking about alcoholism. it would make the problem visible because the process means that the whole family and community would find out. although paradoxically, she has threatened to denounce him because she knows that it is a crime to hit their daughters, “without doing anything, or in revenge for anything, just because he is drunk.” this is a problem that is associated more with justice than health. they realize that they have experienced loyalty that should no longer continue and that they have suffered a great deal. for example, clementina said: “there is a person who made me angry because he criticized him and i defended him,” but she does not care any more. third stage.reconstructive or delimiting action. there is no going back at this stage, because the woman is now aware of herself. this is when the intervention can achieve a transformation that runs counter to the prevailing culture. and so she restructures her thoughts by analyzing what she can choose. by reflecting on the advantages and disadvantages, she can 188 choose something new. “after the talks with the lady (the counselor) i calmed down and it was then that i thought about lots of options and decided to work to get on. i am still quite young…before i was destroyed, i wanted to die…eventually i plucked up the courage and said to my him (the husband) if you want to go, just leave and i stopped paying attention to him. i don’t want to sink now, i want to rise. he (the husband) also changed and learnt a lesson because of my attitudes and those of my children. if he became unpleasant he would have to go or i would…” we see how enthusiasm arises as another form of experience (turner, 1988) as she learns how to cope with the situation. lastly, the participant enters a phase of readjustment and reconstruction. formal and informal actions are oriented towards dealing with a certain type of crisis or legitimizing other means of reaching agreements and processes of reflection take place. the women acknowledge the strength they have acquired and evaluate their possibilities of negotiation and capacity for action. they can look at themselves to transform themselves into an active subject, by looking at the future without ignoring the past. they modify their personal and collective identities and resignify traditions. this last step is delimited by an action that shows the woman’s reconciliation with herself and her social reintegration. testimonials such as the one given below show that if women take the world into their hands, they become the subjects of their own lives. juana begins to acknowledge the fact that her children need her, that he is no longer that important and that she is entitled to be happy and to seek things on her own. several of them express themselves differently. “thanks to you, (the counselor) i have recovered my balance. things are different now because i feel happy and i thank you for your support. i am grateful to my daughter for having supported me too.” the process involves restoring the balance in herself and to a certain extent, the community. “i don’t want to die,” says juanita, as supportive links are formed. “now i know he won’t change, he’ll stop drinking when he wants to.” (rosa). or clementina who, during the process, decided to go to church to obtain support for her life and said, six months later: “now i realize he did not want me to go out, since i did not even go shopping…now they say that i’m in control, that i go around on my own…i say i don’t like to be insulted. if you carry on like that, i will continue fighting and you will find out that i won’t answer you back, i don’t want to fight. i don’t want to leave what i have found, i am happy to have become a woman; i don’t need to be a nun. 189 “he won’t do anything against me now, because if he does, i’ll sue him, if he dares.” months earlier, her husband had destroyed the kitchen when he was drunk, and “on that occasion (she said) i was frightened and cried but now i would defend myself.” all these changes have an impact on the community sphere, even if it is only in her circle. now her friends and neighbors say, “go and get that help, it has done her a lot of good.” so the community finds out that it can be helped in similar circumstances. the notion of their bodies is also resignified. “i won’t let him touch me or sleep with me,” says clara, which she confirms six months after the evaluation. discussion we tried to carry out an analysis with an anthropological rather than a psychological approach, which we still do not know if we have achieved. we think that this is a means of understanding the effects of alcohol consumption from a cultural point of view. an intervention can resemble a ritual while the stages in turner’s social drama provide the opportunity to explain women’s mental processes. since the last intervention, they have not been the same. they have learnt to face the world differently, they have acquired power over their own lives and hope that this learning will be interiorized and last. it has also caused an effect on the community, particularly because the place where the research was carried out are villages with 400 to 500 persons, so news about what happens to one person spreads quickly. nowadays, the intervention has been recommended to other people undergoing similar circumstances. lastly, it could be the transmission of an individual process to a collectivity. in the long term, the community could alter its relationship with the world through a new look at women’s lives, in this case, as regards their partners’ alcohol consumption and they realize that they no longer have to put up with the effects of alcohol consumption. at the same time, the study proved the usefulness of the intervention for indigenous communities, despite the fact that the model could be considered counter-cultural, since it goes against the cultural habits of alcohol consumption and obedience in a highly patriarchal society that tends to seek victims and culprits as a means of dealing with situations that cannot be solved or understood. 190 despite the limitations these women experienced in attending their appointments, they group studied here managed to go to them. they all completed their program, because in the last analysis, they feel better and know that this is good for them and their children. this is the only model that has been developed on the basis of direct experience of research with families. there is also scientific evidence of its effectiveness, which is one of its greatest strengths. the intervention achieved the desired results since it was able to give a person the tools for dealing with a relative’s alcohol consumption and proved particularly effective in reducing depressive symptoms and psychological and physical disorders. references corcuera de mancera, s. (1996). entre gula y templanza, un aspecto de la historia mexicana. [in between gluttony and temperance, an aspect of the mexican history]. mexico city: fondo de cultura económica. garcía-andrade, c., medina-mora, m. e., natera, g. & juárez, f. (2005). consumo de alcohol en comunidades hñähñü del valle del mezquital. retos para la atención del alcoholismo en pueblos indígenas. [alcohol consumption in hñähñü communities in the mezquital valley. challenges for alcoholism attention in indigenous peoples]. mexico city: secretaría de salud. [ministry of health] (36-42). holmila, m. (1994). excessive drinking and significant others. drug and alcohol review. 13, 431-436. mier, r. (2001). seminario, antropología de la experiencia. [seminar, anthropology of experience]. mexico city: enah. 191 narrorobles j., gutiérrez a., lópez-cervantes, m., phil, m., borges, g. & rosovsky h. (1992). la mortalidad por cirrosis hepática en méxico ii. exceso de mortalidad y consumo de pulque. [hepatic cirrosis in mexico ii. mortality excess and pulque consumption]. salud pública de méxico. [public health in mexico]. 34, 388-405. natera, g., tiburcio, m., garcía, e. & bernal, p. (2007). desafíos para la implementación de un programa de intervención relacionado con el consumo de alcohol en comunidades indígenas (1). [challenges for the implementation of an intervention program on alcohol consumption in indigenous communities (1)]. in l. echeverría, c. carrascoza, & l. reidl (comps.). prevención y tratamiento de conductas adictivas. [prevention and treatment of addictive behaviors]. (183-202) mexico city: universidad nacional autónoma de méxico. oechemin, g. (2004). seminario del dr. giménez. [dr. giménez seminar]. mexico city: unam, instituto de investigaciones sociales. orford, j. (2010). re-empowering family members disempowered by addiction: support for individuals or collective action. paper presented at the iii international conference of community psychology. puebla, méxico. orford, j. & copello, a. (2007). los familiares de personas con problemas de alcohol o drogas: estudios sobre un grupo marginado e incomprendido. [relatives of people with alcohol or drugs problems: studies about a marginalized and misunderstood group]. in l. echeverría, c. carrascoza, & l. reidl (comps.). prevención y tratamiento de conductas adictivas. [prevention and treatment of addictive behaviors]. (173-182). mexico city: universidad nacional autónoma de méxico. orford, j., natera, g., copello, a., atkinson, c., mora, j., velleman, r., crundall, i., tiburcio, m., templeton, l. & walley, g. (2005). coping with alcohol and drug problems: the experience of family members in three contrasting cultures. london: routledge. orford, j., natera, g., davies, j., nava, a., mora, j., rigby, k. et al. (1998). stresses and strain for family members living with drinking or drug problems in england and mexico. salud mental. [mental health]. 21, 1-13. tiburcio, m., natera, g. & garcía, e. (2007). laboratorio cognitivo: una metodología para la adaptación de material psicodidáctico en población indígena. [cognitive laboratory: a methodology adapting psychodidactic materials to indigenous population]. in l. 192 echeverría, c. carrascoza, & l. reidl (comps.). prevención y tratamiento de conductas adictivas. [prevention and treatment of addictive behaviors]. (203-222). mexico city: universidad nacional autónoma de méxico. turner v. (1988). el proceso ritual. [the ritual process]. madrid: taurus. turner, v. (1994). dramas, fields and metaphors. london: cornell university press. microsoft word 2014-si01-20140528.docx improving global knowledge exchange for mental health systems improvement heather l. bullock, fredrik lindencrona, gary s. belkin, jane vanderpyl, nicholas watters, and kevin hennessy author notes: heather l. bullock, msc, is director of knowledge exchange at the centre for addiction and mental health, toronto, ontario, canada. heather.bullock@camh.ca dr. fredrik lindencrona, licensed psychologist, phd, is manager of research and development at the national coordination strategy for mental health, swedish association for local authorities and regions, stockholm, sweden. fredrik.lindencrona@skl.se dr. gary s. belkin, md, phd, mph, is associate professor and director, program in global mental health, new york university school of medicine, new york, new york, usa. gary.belkin@nyumc.org dr. jane vanderpyl, phd, is research and evaluation manager at te pou, national centre for mental health, addiction and disability workforce development, auckland, new zealand. jane.vanderpyl@tepou.co.nz nicholas watters, is director of knowledge exchange with the mental health commission of canada, calgary, alberta, canada. nwatters@mentalhealthcommission.ca dr. kevin hennessy, phd, is deputy director of the center for behavioral health statistics and quality at substance abuse and mental health services administration (samhsa), in rockville, maryland, usa. kevin.hennessy@samhsa.hhs.gov keywords: knowledge exchange, systems change, implementation, evidence-based programs, network, policy recommended citation: bullock, h.l., lindencrona, f., belkin, g.s., vanderpyl, j., watters, n., & hennessy, k. (2014). improving global knowledge exchange for mental health systems improvement. global journal of community psychology practice, 5(1), 1-9. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2     improving global knowledge exchange for mental health systems improvement abstract policymakers globally are paying increasing attention to the challenges of providing more accessible and integrated mental health care. for transformative change to take place, thought needs to be given to the structure and form of evidence-informed change strategies at all levels: individual, organizational, community and complex, large systems. yet few frameworks specifically consider the transfer of evidence-based programs across jurisdictions at regional and national levels; most are focused on local service implementation. this paper examines how a specific analytical model developed to assess and develop knowledge exchange (ke) can be applied to regional and national ke initiatives. it specifically examines the efforts of the international knowledge exchange network for mental health (iken-mh), and the associated community of interest on change and improvement, to support mental health systems change at these levels. using a theoretical model, the promoting action on research implementation in health services framework (kitson, harvey, & mccormack, 1998, rycroft-malone, et al., 2002), we explore systems change efforts according to the constructs of evidence, context and facilitation. by matching some exemplars in the use of ke for mental health best practice against this model, the potential strategies of the iken-mh to assist transformational change emerge. keywords: knowledge exchange, systems change, implementation, evidence-based programs, network, policy introduction the global burden of disease attributed to mental illness and addictions presents the greatest disability burden on the planet (whiteford et al., 2013). recent estimates in europe show that the annual cost of the 14 most common psychiatric disorders amount to about 500-600 billion euros in total for 30 countries, including direct medical costs as well as non-direct medical costs and patients' productivity losses (gustavsson et al., 2011). this challenge has compelled governments across the globe to transform their mental health systems. the world health assembly recently directed who to identify a global strategy for closing treatment gaps and improving care (world health organization, 2013). the “globalization” of mental health as a focus of health policy and public health has uncovered long neglected structural deficiencies—on the capacity of delivery systems to markedly improve access and outcomes. countries and provincial/state governments have been creating commissions and developing policies and strategies to reduce the burden of illnesses and improve mental health. frameworks for systems change in health care often emphasize the need for multi-level approaches (e.g., ferlie & shortell, 2001), but mechanisms to improve learning and exchange about such strategies, while important, have largely been lacking. the international mental health policy community could do more to improve learning because: a) countries have placed limited attention on describing frameworks for planning and designing rational delivery strategies (belkin et al., 2012), b) the gap between evidence and its implementation within the field of mental health remains a key issue, with many implementation efforts not reaching their full potential (barwick et al., 2008; proctor et al., 2009), and c) the adoption of new knowledge into policy and practice is often slow and unpredictable (nutley, walter, & davies, 2007). all these contribute to the 8 to 20 year gap from the time the new knowledge is created to when it is used in practice (boren & balas, 1999; green, 2001). while creating better opportunities for international exchange could contribute to narrowing this gap, another challenge presents itself: successfully adapting evidence to context. currently, the processes by which evidence-based interventions are chosen for implementation and adaptation across national borders is often ad hoc (cuijpers, de graaf, & bohlmeijer, 2005). yet, the transfer and adaptation of evidencebased practices are affected by the context in which they are implemented. context has been cited as a major enabler or barrier to the success of change efforts in systems (kitson, 2009). previous research shows that (mental) healthcare systems are complex entities that require interventions aimed at systematic improvement (ferlie & shortell, 2001, belkin, 2012). the lack of a shared common language for research and practice relating to systems change is an additional barrier. in the health field alone, over 100 terms have global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2     been identified in the research literature that describe evidence-informed change efforts (mckibbon et al., 2010), and frequency of use varies by country and discipline. here we use the term “knowledge exchange” (ke) and have adopted the canadian foundation for healthcare improvement’s definition which frames ke as a collaborative problem-solving process between key groups such as researchers, policy makers, clinicians and service users. it involves interactions between these groups and “results in mutual learning through the process of planning, producing, disseminating, and applying existing or new research in decision-making” (canadian foundation for healthcare improvement, n.d. para 1). we use the term “implementation” to describe active strategies for installing evidence into practice (a sub-category of ke). given the current interest globally to create strategies to bridge the gap between knowledge development, policy formulation and service delivery in practice, we contend that it is necessary to create mechanisms that accelerate the sharing of change efforts and innovations across countries using evidence-informed theoretical and practical approaches. one solution is to invest in the development of international ke partnerships that are informed by tools and analytical frameworks that help make international collaboration for systems improvement more systematic. we contend that more explicit use and testing of ke models and change efforts at the systems level are necessary to spread learning and resources across the globe. the evidence base for effective ke is still emerging, and there is a need for continued, rigorous testing of related models and approaches. sustained transformational change can only occur when systems become better equipped to solve local problems using the best available approach, and guided by the priorities of the community. while we suspect that all transformed systems share some common characteristics, including evidence-informed approaches to care, and a recovery-orientation, our paper does not focus on any particularly described “end state”. instead, our contribution focusses on how systems can improve their capacity to achieve such transformational change once the political direction is set. in this paper we focus on one such partnership initiative, the international knowledge exchange network for mental health (iken-mh), and exemplar efforts at transformational change in the partnership countries. this paper is divided into three sections. the first section introduces the network and the conceptual framework upon which we build: promoting action on research implementation in health services (parihs). in the second section we use exemplars of systems level change efforts currently underway across a range of contexts, and explore the application of the parihs framework. in the final section we reflect on the opportunities and challenges that using such a framework presents when attempting to frame system level change initiatives. we conclude by identifying challenges and opportunities for practice, policy and research use that improve the manner in which evidence is implemented in mental health systems. overview of iken-mh in early 2012, the mental health commission of canada (mhcc), in partnership with the international initiative for mental health leadership (iimhl), a government-funded collaboration of eight countries (australia, canada, england, ireland, new zealand, scotland, sweden and the united states) sparked the creation of a mechanism to share best practices, knowledge and resources in the field of mental health. iken-mh aims to increase capacity for effective ke in mental health by connecting people, ideas, and resources. it works on a global level to improve health systems performance and effectiveness for those living with a mental health problem and their families/caregivers. iken-mh is currently supported by a steering committee and a membership of approximately 70 members. an inaugural meeting was held in canada in 2012, followed by a second meeting in in new zealand in 2013, where a work plan to foster opportunities for ongoing participation and sharing internationally was developed. the work will continue with a third meeting of iken-mh to be held in sweden in june 2014. the two primary tasks of iken-mh are a) to develop capacity globally to share promising national, regional and local innovative practice and systematic evidence on how to design, manage and transform mental health systems, services, and programs, and b) to create a community of practice for people with strategic roles in ke and systematic improvement to share learnings and collaborate across borders. the focus of this paper is on the latter task. building the network to support the network’s efforts, a small community of practice of active iken-mh members (cop) decided to explore the value of using a theoretical framework from the ke research discipline: the parihs framework. first identified by kitson et al., (1998) this framework posits: a) that “successful implementation is a function of the relation between the nature of the evidence, the context in which the proposed change is to be implemented, and the mechanisms by which the change is facilitated” (kitson et al.), and b) that these three domains are interdependent, need a similar level of attention and should be not be seen as a simplistic, linear causal chain but rather be addressed continuously global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3     and simultaneously. each of these domains and their sub-elements are placed on a continuum of “high” to “low”. parihs provided the iken-mh with a common framework from which to explore and understand the systems change efforts within iken-mh. according to parihs, the evidence domain is comprised of four types of knowledge: research, clinical experience, patient preferences and routine information. the more these sources are combined, the stronger the evidence. however, it is argued that whatever source of knowledge is drawn upon, it must be subjected to scrutiny and found to be credible (rycroft-malone et al., 2002). context is the broadest and least well-theorized domain (kitson et al., 1998, rycroft-malone et al., 2002). mccormack and colleagues’ (2002) concept analysis of parihs points to three aspects of context critical to successful ke: culture, leadership and evaluation. culture is understood as the way things are done in a service or system. leadership is understood to encompass style (command and control vs transformational), as well as the approach to teaching and learning (didactic strategies vs empowering strategies). the evaluation element is described as a reflexive practice that includes different types of information preferably considered together. contexts with a “strong” evaluation are marked by their production and use of feedback at several levels, acceptance and use of many different sources of types of information and the variety of evaluation methods and focuses (e.g. clinical outcomes, performance, economic and experiential). the third domain, facilitation is seen as a process whereby someone (i.e., the facilitator) undertakes action to make it easier for others to implement evidence into practice (harvey et al., 2002). which roles, skills and knowledge are needed under different conditions of evidence and context and when to help individuals, teams, organizations or higher-order system actors is then a focus for understanding facilitation. parihs as a framework to describe system level change initiatives we first reviewed the parihs framework for its potential as a conceptual framework to determine whether it is suitable to apply to change at the systems level (kitson et al., 1998; mccormack et al., 2002; harvey et al., 2002; rycroft-malone et al., 2002; rycroft-malone, 2004). we then explored the degree to which it applied and added value to describing and problem-solving large-scale ke efforts across a range of jurisdictions and contexts. four examples in which the authors have first-hand experience are analyzed with the help of the parihs framework and are presented here as exemplars. exemplars evidence for the past decade, the substance abuse and mental health services administration (samhsa) of the u.s. department of health and human services has fostered the growth of the national registry of evidence-based programs and practices (nrepp – www.nrepp.samhsa.gov). an exemplar of evidence in the parihs framework, nrepp is a searchable online registry of independently rated and reviewed mental health and substance abuse interventions. the purpose of nrepp is to assist the public in identifying scientifically based approaches to preventing and treating mental and/or substance use disorders that can be readily disseminated to the field. since its launch in 2007, nrepp has been increasingly recognized and used by international audiences. the registry currently contains over 300 interventions, with an additional 58 interventions under review or accepted for review. an average of 30,520 unique visitors access the nrepp web site each month, with more than 37,210 total visits, on average, logged each month. at the time of this review, more than half (157) of the 300 interventions in nrepp have been implemented internationally. a total of 113 countries are represented among the implementation sites, with 27% of these countries located in europe, 27% in asia and the middle east, 18% in north america and the caribbean (excluding the united states), 16% in central and south america, and 8% in africa. this suggests that there has been some success in adapting the interventions based on context, although to our knowledge, no research has specifically investigated the success of nrepp interventions as a whole across different country contexts or using the model presented by parihs. to improve the applicability of nrepp across a diverse array of contexts, officials from samhsa have been working closely with iken-mh as well as the iimhl to promote additional submissions from international sources, and discuss potential collaborations with iken-mh members that might expand the content of the registry to include information highlighting the emerging global evidence-base for systems change efforts in mental health. nrepp illustrates the active role that government can play in improving access to quality, reviewed evidence. however, its success in spreading nrepp programs to other countries and in other languages, suggests future global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4     attention needs to be paid to the context domain and how well these programs translate across different cultural and political contexts. context in sweden, the 5-year national coordination strategy for mental health takes a multi-sectoral approach that joins up national and relatively autonomous regional and local levels of service delivery. its vision is to develop a more coherent service system that can deliver better outcomes with a better use of current resources. according to the parihs framework, strengthening the culture for evaluation and improvement and promoting transformational leadership can be seen as active strategies to improve the context for uptake of evidence (mccormack et al., 2002). active engagement of senior decision-makers has been demonstrated to be a necessary ingredient for success in quality improvement efforts (for a review see kaplan et al., 2010). the program on social investments targets these decision-makers by introducing the question of how resources can be allocated to achieve the highest level of strategic efficiency. in line with recent thinking in human capital economics (for a review see heckman, 2008) the social investments program identifies active approaches to prevent future cost escalations when problems are addressed too late. one innovation is social investment funds where investment capital can be raised to support new and preventative intervention models, processes and strategies. the funds are channeled toward interventions and programs that could prove to have long-standing positive effects and positive cost-benefit calculations. a first achievement of this innovation has been to strengthen the active involvement of top management and politicians in requesting evidence and evaluation of mental health outcomes as well as understanding the need to achieve implementation success of funded mental health programs. sweden’s social investments approach to mental health system improvement targets efforts to the context domain of parihs, in part because of the strong emphasis on local communities directing the investments in ways that address their local needs. facilitation methods that can actively facilitate the uptake of evidence is the third and final dimension of the parihs framework. spark (supporting the promotion of activated research and knowledge) is a training approach developed by the mental health commission of canada (mhcc) that seeks to bridge the knowledge-to-practice gap and enhance capacity to understand and implement effective mental healthoriented ke initiatives. spark focuses on the knowledge and skills associated with ke by enhancing the capacity of knowledge users or brokers across canada to effectively implement ke activities. the goal of spark is to improve capacity for implementing effective ke practices in mental health, substance use, and addictions. specific objectives include: providing foundational knowledge required to develop the ke plan; providing a simple and easy-touse framework for conducting ke; and increasing cross-sectoral collaboration among researchers, policy experts, family caregivers, practitioners, and people with lived experience. there are two essential components of the spark training approach: the innovation to implementation guide (i2i) and the spark institute training. the i2i is a step-by-step guide for driving change using ke activities and forms the basis of the training. the i2i guide is built around the concept of innovation: products, actions, services or relationships that have the potential to enhance health outcomes. the guide illustrates how to move from innovation to implementation to achieve the desired outcomes of a project or initiative. the i2i guide is not meant to replace ke frameworks, but rather to facilitate their application through the development of a practical, action-oriented guide (lavis, robertson, woodside, mcleod, & abelson, 2003; stetler, et al., 2011). the spark training institutes have been held annually since 2012, and have hosted 119 canadian participants to date, from a range of sectors, including researchers, practitioners, policy/decision-makers, and mental health and addiction fields. integrating evidence, context and facilitation evidence exchange network (eenet) is an example of an initiative that has an equal emphasis on evidence, context and facilitation. in order to address the evidence needs of the mental health and addictions system (broadly defined) in ontario canada, the centre for addiction and mental health and their partners have developed an innovative provincial ke network. eenet brings together researchers, policymakers, service providers, system planners, persons with lived experience, family members and others to build a more evidence-informed system. the network defines “evidence” as having four components: research; expertise and tacit knowledge based on professional experience; lived experience of people and their families; and culture. this view of evidence aligns with the parihs framework, but has been broadened to include culture, which is of particular importance to indigenous communities. further work is needed to elucidate how culture can be used as a form of evidence, although some research has global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5     begun (e.g., smylie et al., 2004). currently, the network uses a range of tools and resources to capture these forms of evidence and encourage dialogue across them. to understand context in the application of evidence, eenet uses a menu of ke products and tools to capture local context and describe how evidence is adapted to local context, as well as providing supports for organizations to assess their inner and outer contexts to determine how they might improve the use of evidence. finally, and perhaps the most important element of eenet, is facilitation. the network employs a team of knowledge brokers and communication specialists (n=14) located across the province who are trained to support individuals, organizations and systems to cogenerate, exchange and implement evidence (for a description of knowledge brokers, see meyer, 2010). they bring a range of skills and tools to their work, including ke planning, partnership building, implementation support, clear language writing, and knowledge synthesis. they also employ communication vehicles to support them, including on and off-line strategies, such as social media (689 followers on twitter), websites (eenet.ca and eenetconnect.ca), webinars, and in-person events. currently, eenet has approximately 1460 members. it has produced 267 knowledge products and tools, there are 293 ontario researchers linked to the network, and network members have produced 34 blogs on topics of relevance to the evidence needs in ontario. the website receives an average of 1664 unique visitors per month. eenet’s online community (www.eenetconnect.ca) was launched in february 2013 and there are 1763 members, with 646 discussion threads and 397 calendar entries. through its activities, the network strengthens the evidence base by incorporating the knowledge needs of decision-makers in the system into evidence-generating activities. it also facilitates access to existing knowledge in ways that are tailored and accessible to its stakeholders. iken-mh allows eenet access to a global community that can support its evidence and implementation efforts. discussion the role of evidence in transforming mental health systems has mainly focused on the point of delivery to the end-user, i.e., evidence-based practices and programs (ebps). while more people now have access to ebps by this strategy, the success of the approach has been questioned since few programs get implemented in the way they are intended and thus, unsurprisingly, the effects shown in the efficacy trials are most often not reached in real-world practice. this underscores the need to consider the systems that underlie the practices themselves, and their role in transformational change. in addition to improving the research on how ebps can be transferred and scaled across settings, we advocate for a broader rethinking of what it takes to implement and share knowledge on how to manage delivery and systems change in mental health. this is work that all authors/cop members are currently engaged in, in their roles at an overarching systems and policy level in their respective countries. using parihs for this exercise opportunities and challenges because large-scale implementation efforts are relatively uncommon in any one country (particularly smaller countries), efforts such as the iken-mh provide the opportunity for systems leaders across countries to take advantage of the global community and thereby improve the quality of implementation efforts in their own countries. still in its infancy, ikenmh has already begun to confer some benefits to its members. the cop members from the founding countries have been meeting regularly and sharing experiences and challenges with various aspects of implementation, along the domains of evidence, context and facilitation (as described above), to more rigorously describe and learn what aspects of these early examples and attempts at ke are in fact doing, and how well. using parihs to structure that discussion and sharing around the work that goes on in and between the member countries in iken-mh has proven to be helpful. it brings a shared language and set of categories with which to understand the uses of ke to successfully share policy and practice experiences across the different countries. the use of parihs has, however, also pointed to some methodological challenges within the framework, and the limits of such frameworks for describing and supporting work at the systems level. first, our experience suggests it is problematic to rely on the strong-weak continuum when there is at least another force at work – resistance to attempts to transform systems. it is easy to see that practice environments identified as “strong” can be highly resistant to change as a result of introducing new evidence since they have arranged their well-functioning system around another understanding of what works. it is possible that those settings scoring “weak” on the different elements could be more inclined to accept a new way of doing things. thus issues of organizational ‘fit’ and adequate resources require more attention in line with what is known about resistance to change in practices and systems. another question concerns the driving forces behind the use of new evidence. this is addressed in the work on research utilization (nutley, walter, & davies, 2007). if global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6     a multi-level systems view is taken, it is clear that successful uptake of evidence is somewhat dependent on the perception held by those in power about the need and/or value of “evidence” for system improvement, as well as how aligned the new evidence is with their own values, beliefs or policy stance. certainly, both leadership at a strategic level and an evaluative culture are important. but the priorities of public and private commissioners of services may create either an important driver or obstacle for progress in this area. the current structural situation within the respective countries and sub-sectors, in terms of those who fund and direct the systems should be better understood to guide decision-making. at the level of the organization, these are contextual factors that need to be identified and taken into consideration when planning for change. however, at the systems level, these are critical points to address for any viable strategy to improve the uptake of evidence. thus we circle back to some of the initial observations and debate about parihs identified at the outset, and highlight limitations of the field of ke to guide actionable efforts for network improvement and exchange of knowledge for mental health care. namely, the degree to which the parihs model (and modeling in general) describes rather than solves the challenges presented by the key element of context, the tensions between local and generalizable knowledge and evidence, and the lack of detail around the facilitation domain and how (or if) it helps overcome these challenges. these limitations highlight the need to consider ke itself as a process of knowledge creation, not merely a conveyer or storehouse of knowledge. but it is precisely these limitations of the model that point to shared problems that should also be a focus of ke. some of these include: better characterizations of contextual features for implementation and effective management, how to broker and prioritize, when to apply local and generalizable evidence, and methods for facilitation that help accomplish both. one might see the active discussion of these issues as a sign of a vital mental health system able to transform to better cater to the actual and negotiated understanding of needs of individuals and appropriate interventions to address these given the local context. one future opportunity within iken-mh is to build and test systems level approaches to facilitation. there is a need to improve the “fit” between problem, context and facilitation method, and thus to learn which model works, when and where. one early iken-mh example of how an organization has successfully adapted a systems level change initiative in a new context is spark. the new zealand organization te pou (www.tepou.co.nz) was interested in spark (described above). the mhcc supplied te pou with all of the resources for spark, and supported contextual adaptation of the materials, as long as the i2i guide was not altered, and the original intent of spark wasn’t significantly altered where it was no longer recognizable from its original intent, efficacy, or purpose. the mhcc also worked directly with te pou to contextualize, shape, and deliver the spark training. spark new zealand consisted of presentations by national and international experts in ke and small group breakout sessions where fellows were able to discuss and develop their innovation plans with a mentor and their colleagues. the 19 fellows were various health professionals involved in universities, mental health, addiction and disability national and local health service providers. while the first spark new zealand is just concluding, all indications are that this was a successful adaptation that resulted in additional capacity building for ke in new zealand. another promising, and well-established, set of facilitation methods is quality improvement (qi) tools, a set of proven tools that are widely accessible to a range of individuals and health care systems actors. each of our exemplars has included qi tools. the suite of qi tools draws on operations research and management science, statistics, psychology, systems engineering, and iterative learning and uses features of traditional research methods (hypothesis testing and formulation, measurement construction). qi tools avoid such features of research (e.g., randomization, noniterative design, constraints on variation) that actually hinder adaptation to local contexts and environments. instead, qi rests on other methods of measurement and tests of change that rely on more iterative, rapid, sequential small sample-testing, driven by the knowledge of participants. these methods lead users to use local knowledge and describe the key context drivers to focus on in order to meet explicit aims. these tools have been applied to the purpose of healthcare improvement and spread of evidence-based interventions and designs for over 30 years (berwick, 2008; perla, provost, & parry, 2013). qi should be seen as a critical part of facilitation for mental health systems transformation. this is reiterated in a recent report that argues effective change requires quality improvement models to be based on networking structures (health foundation, 2014). the parihs framework, applied to efforts to network and leverage ke at national and regional levels for mental health systems improvement have helped illustrate a few core principles that can guide attempts to achieve sustainable capacity for transformational change. in order to help systems in our respective global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7     countries be better equipped to undertake such change the ke network should be sure to deliver on: • evidence: broadening the evidence concept and understanding what works to create transformative change. this includes strengthening the consideration of practice-based evidence and lived experience as contributing to high quality, usable evidence, and effectively capturing qualitative and informal experience of systems changes initiatives. • context: developing systems at relevant levels to become the drivers of their own transformation. this can be supported by investing in effective vehicles to share proven tools that increase the capacity of participating systems to evaluate and monitor implementation and attend to similarities and differences in local and regional context. • facilitation: documenting different models of systems level approaches to facilitation, and what model works best for the transformational need. this can be supported by identifying new interventions or testing of methods successfully applied to other fields (e.g., qi), that are effective at increasing capacity for organizations and systems to use data and methods for improvement, and creating a better understanding of what methods are most effective and when. conclusion the iken-mh, and particularly its cop, is becoming an important vehicle to facilitate dialogue and learning between countries on how mental health systems change can be driven forward by developing new practice and policies that can test out new innovations, or adapting what is working elsewhere. in this we welcome a close dialogue with colleagues in policy, practice and research. in our view the way forward needs to address a few critical challenges, and the field of ke may need bolstering to help us in our efforts toward transformative change in mental health. while we discovered limitations to parihs, those limitations, as well as the framework itself, substantially clarified and re-positioned the way this network is being designed, and its efforts and metrics of success, defined. this includes iken-mh embarking on an initial step to create a way to produce country or regional level reports about the state of support systems for implementation of evidence within the field of mental health among network participants. as global networking for mental health services knowledge and best practices increases, it would be valuable for that emerging work to refer to and evolve more detailed and useful ke frameworks with which to align and describe the expectations, goals, and success of such efforts. references barwick, m. a., boydell, k. m., stasiulis, e., ferguson,h. b., blasé, k., & fixsen, d. (2008). research utilization among children's mental health providers. implementation science, 3(19), 110 belkin, g. s., unutzer, j., kessler, r. c., verdeli, h., raviola, g. j., sachs, k., … eustache, e. (2011). scaling up for the "bottom billion": "5 x 5" implementation of community mental health care in low-income regions. psychiatric services, 62,1494-1502. berwick, d. m. (2008). the science of improvement. jama, 299(10), 1182-1184. boren, s. a., & balas, e. a. (1999). evidence-based quality measurement. journal of ambulatory care management, 22(3), 17-23. canadian foundation for healthcare improvement. (n.d. para 1). glossary of knowledge exchange terms. retrieved from http://www.cfhifcass.ca/publicationsandresources/resourcesandtool s/glossaryknowledgeexchange.aspx     cuijpers, p., de graaf, i., & bohlmeijer, e. (2005). adapting and disseminating effective public health interventions in another country: towards a systematic approach. european journal of public health, 15(2), 166-169. ferlie, e. b., & shortell, s. m. (2001). improving the quality of health care in the united kingdom and the united states: a framework for change. milbank quarterly, 79(2), 281-315. green, l. w. (2001). from research to "best practices" in other settings and populations. american journal of health behaviour, 25, 165-178. gustavsson, a., svensson, m., jacobi, f., allgulander, c., alonso, j., beghi, e., …olesen, j. (2011). cost of disorders of the brain in europe 2010. european neuropsychopharmacology, 21(10), 718-779. harvey, g., loftus-hills, a., rycroft-malone, j., titchen, a., kitson, a., mccormack, b., & seers, k. (2002). getting evidence into practice: the role and function of facilitation. journal of advanced nursing, 37(6), 577-588. health foundation. (2014). effective networks for improvement: developing and managing effective networks to support quality improvement in healthcare. london: health foundation. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8     heckman, j. j. (2008). schools, skills and synapses. economic inquiry, 46(3), 289-324. kaplan, h. c., brady, p. w., dritz, m. c., hooper, d. k., linam, w. m., froehle, c. m., & margolis, p. (2010). the influence of context on quality improvement success: a systematic review of the literature. milbank quarterly, 88(4), 500-559. kitson, a. l. (2009). the need for systems change: reflections on knowledge translation and organizational change. journal of advanced nursing, 65(1), 217-228. kitson, a., harvey, g., & mccormack, b. (1998). enabling the implementation of evidence based practice: a conceptual framework. quality in health care, 7, 149-158. kitson, a. j., rycroft-malone, j., harvey, g., mccormack, b., seers, k., & titchen, a. (2008). evaluating the successful implementation of evidence into practice using the parihs framework: theoretical and practical challenges. implementation science, 3, 1-12. lavis, j. n., robertson, d., woodside, j. m., mcleod, c. b., & abelson, j. (2003). how can research organizations more effectively transfer research knowledge to decision makers? the milbank quarterly, 81(2), 221–248. mccormack, b., kitson, a., harvey, g., rycroftmalone, j., titchen, a., & seers, k. (2002). getting evidence into practice: the meaning of "context". nursing, 38(1), 94-104. mckibbon, k.a., lokker, c., wilczynski, n.l., ciliska, d., dobbins, m., davis, d.a., haynes, r.b., & straus, s.e. (2010). a cross-sectional study of the number and frequency of terms used to refer to knowledge translation in a body of health literature in 2006: a tower of babel? implementation science, 5:16. 1-11. meyer, m. (2010). the rise of the knowledge broker. science communication, 32(1), 118-127. nutley, s. m., walter, i., & davies, h. t. o. (2007). using evidence: how research can inform public services. the policy press, bristol. perla, r. j., provost, l. p., & parry, g. j. (2013). seven propositions of the science of improvement: exploring foundations. quality management in health care, 22(3), 170-186. proctor, e. k., landsverk, j., aarons, g., chambers, d., glisson, c., & mittman, b. (2009). implementation research in mental health services: an emerging science with conceptual, methodological, and training challenges. administration and policy in mental health, 36, 24–34. rycroft-malone, j. (2004). the parihs framework— a framework for guiding the implementation of evidence-based practice. journal of nursing care quality, 19(4), 297-304. rycroft-malone, j., kitson, a., harvey, g., mccormack, b., seers, k., titchen, a., & estabrooks, c. (2002). ingredients for change: revisiting a conceptual framework. quality and safety in health care, 11, 174-180. rycroft-malone, j., harvey, j.g., seers, k, kitson, a., mccormack, b., & titchen, a. (2004). an exploration of the factors that influence the implementation of evidence into practice. journal of clinical nursing, 13, 913–924. smylie, j., martin, c.m., kaplan-myrth, n., steele, l., tait, c., & hogg, w. (2004). knowledge translation and indigenous knowledge. international journal of circumpolar health, 63 (suppl 2), 139-143. stetler, c. b., damschroder, l. j., helfrich, c. d. & hagedorn, h. j. (2011). a guide for applying a revised version of the parihs framework for implementation. implementation science, 6, 99, 110. whiteford, h.a., degenhardt, l., rehm, j., baxter, a.j., ferrari, a.j., erskine, h.e., … vos, t. (2013). global burden of disease attributable to mental and substance use disorders: findings from the global burden of disease study 2010. the lancet, 382(9904), 1575 – 1586. world health organization. (2013). 66th world mental health assembly, agenda item 13.3, comprehensive mental health action plan20132020. geneva, may 27. microsoft word 2013-004ccsi-20131018.docx community psychology and the future of healthcare chris michael kirk and william d. neigher atlantic health system morristown, new jersey author notes: chris michael kirk is director of mission development at atlantic health. william d. neigher is vice president and chief strategy officer at atlantic health. keywords: community psychology, health care access recommended citation: kirk, c. m., neigher, w. d. (2013). community psychology and the future of healthcare. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), 1-9. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 community psychology and the future of healthcare chris michael kirk and william d. neigher atlantic health system morristown, new jersey abstract healthcare reforms and market pressures are rapidly moving u.s. healthcare systems from volume to value, from traditional medicine to population health. in this environment, a new set of skills will be required for organizational success. we believe that community psychologists are uniquely positioned to contribute to these efforts. the purpose of this paper is to explore the relevant practice competencies in the evolving context of health care in the united states. the article summarizes some changes in the u.s. healthcare system, discusses key competencies needed for success and aligns them with competencies identified by community psychologists. using examples from a large healthcare system in the eastern united states, this article highlights ways in which the healthcare system of the future can benefit from the principles and skills practiced by community psychologists. keywords: community psychology, health care access healthcare in the united states is changing. the passage and implementation of the patient protection and affordable care act (ppaca) [p.l.11-148] is changing the incentive structure for healthcare delivery, moving healthcare systems toward an emphasis on prevention (koh & sebelius, 2010) and value based purchasing by payors. this move from reactive “sick care” to preventive health care, from volume (e.g. more tests = more reimbursement) to value (e.g. cost per episode of clinical outcome) is a fundamental shift for an industry that has been built around the “perverse incentives” of the fee-forservice system that rewards “how much care” over “how efficient and effective.” this fundamentally new and emerging dynamic demands a new set of skills for healthcare organizations, competencies that have not typically been emphasized in medical training and health care administration. importantly, many of the competencies of the emerging healthcare system fall within the set of skills and experiences common to community psychologists. as healthcare systems grow to emphasize prevention, promote patient empowerment, and impact health from multiple ecological perspectives, community psychologists are uniquely positioned to play an important role in this transition, with the opportunity to make a significant impact in the health status of communities. the purpose of this paper is to highlight the relevant community psychology competencies at play in the evolving world of health care, providing a brief theoretical overview and concrete examples from a large healthcare system in the eastern united states. moving toward population health management as illustrated in figure 1, the demands on the healthcare industry, initiated by health reform and market pressures, are causing a shift along two axes. in this model, health status on the x-axis presents the continuum of health, from terminal illness to thriving. the y-axis highlights the ecological context at which interventions may be targeted. these range from individuals to entire populations. what doctors and hospitals currently do can be plotted in the lower left-hand corner of the emerging healthcare model (figure 1). individuals with some degree of sickness are seen and treated. physicians are reimbursed for their ability to properly diagnose a patient and prescribe the correct course of treatments that will cure or heal, or provide palliative care (i.e. the right side of the model). while this paradigm is vitally important for those who are ill, the financial incentives have encouraged healthcare systems to put most of their effort, energy, and capital into a system designed to favor the highest end of the case mix index [i.e., resource intense care]. despite its successes, this model is incomplete and unsustainable. the ppaca increased access to affordable preventive services, holds accountable care organizations [acos] accountable for providing these services, and formed the national prevention council. this group produced the first national prevention strategy (national prevention global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 council, 2011), which represents a powerful tool for public health and healthcare organizations in thinking about chronic illness, health disparities, and patient empowerment within an ecological context. with medicare penalties for hospital re-admissions, shared savings models, and the widespread availability of “free” screenings, the incentive structure is changing incrementally toward preventive care as a more valuable component of healthcare. figure 1. emerging healthcare model population medicine and population health management a second shift is illustrated on the vertical axis of the emerging healthcare model (figure 1). the emphasis on prevention means that healthcare systems can no longer focus only on patients, but must turn their attention to populations as they assume financial risk for cost containment. this not-so-subtle change is moving healthcare systems into the community, not just to market services and perform generic screenings, but to create measurable change in the health status of the populations they serve. this move is precipitated by many factors including increased evidence for the sick well individuals populations groups organizations/ communities traditional   medicine population   medicine preventive  care population   health terminally  ill thriving global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 impact of the social determinants of health (braveman et al, 2011), emerging business models that emphasize shared costs and risk mitigation, and evolving demographics. while both areas comprising the upper quadrants of the model (figure 1) are grounded in an epidemiological science base, we distinguish between population medicine (upper left hand quadrant) and population health (upper right hand quadrant). population-based medicine is focused on identifying risk factors and finding new ways to manage chronic disease (peters & elster, 2002). the medicare shared savings program and accountable care organizations are grounded in this quadrant, trying to find cheaper and more effective ways to help patients and families, providers and insurers consume fewer inappropriate resources. in contrast, population health management takes a broader approach that includes prevention. defined as “the health outcomes of a group of individuals, including the distribution of such outcomes within the groups” (kindig & stoddart, 2003), population health’s focus on a broad range of “health outcomes” creates many opportunities for affecting the health status of populations, not just those who are sick. much of the recent emphases of public health institutions to improve the built environment (prevention institute, 2004), address health policy, and extend evidence-based primary prevention initiatives fit firmly within this quadrant. competencies for the next generation of healthcare delivery as healthcare shifts toward prevention and population health management, the competencies of the workforce must also shift. while there will always be a need for practitioners adept at the diagnosis of injury and illness, effective treatment planning and delivery, effective patient communication and regimen adherence, new competencies will be required. table 1 highlights the some of the key competencies needed for success within each quadrant. preventive medicine requires a set of competencies that are distinct from the daily practice of many physicians and other providers, and the policies and strategies of healthcare institutions, organizations and systems. while some practices do an excellent job, an emphasis on screening, immunization, and health education for patients has often been neglected, reduced to a difficultto-read flyer or a hurried conversation. the incentives of the traditional healthcare model did little to reimburse them to keep their patients healthy. by incentivizing preventive care, healthcare reforms are trying to push practices to adopt these competencies, and providers will have to adapt either by building these competencies themselves (e.g. valuing screening) or adding people to their teams who possess these skills (e.g. health educators). population medicine requires grounding in epidemiology and risk analysis combined with the ability to develop and apply interventions to help the chronically ill manage their diseases more costeffectively. table 1. competencies for each quadrant quadrant competencies traditional medicine • diagnosis • treatment planning • individual patient communication • outcomes measurement in quality and safety preventive care • screening • immunization and early intervention • health education/health literacy population medicine • risk analysis • management intervention development • patient & provider communication population health • community engagement and health literacy • prevention/health promotion intervention development • patient/community empowerment • value proposition to payors at the same time, institutions that work in population medicine must find ways to communicate effectively both to patients (or beneficiaries) and to healthcare providers, helping both groups understand evolving processes and take necessary steps to obtain more costeffective care. population health management, as defined here, requires three basic competencies for success. first, healthcare workers in this quadrant must find ways to engage the community, understanding that much of health and healing occurs outside of the medical environment. second, interventions (including policies, built environment, and programs) must be developed emphasizing primary and secondary prevention. without this investment, healthcare systems will have difficulty adjusting to the wave of people with serious, but preventable health concerns including diabetes and obesity. finally, population health management policy needs to embrace the values of inclusion and find ways to empower people to control their own health and wellness. we argue that community psychologists are global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 especially equipped to play a significant role in this shift toward population health. community psychology competencies recent efforts at defining a set of competencies for community psychologists have yielded a beneficial list of 18 skills that are common to the field (dziadkowicz & himenez, 2009, wolff, 2011). the goal of this effort was to highlight the unique contribution made by community psychologists, a field that is often unknown to many in the world of practice, and to construct and validate a value proposition to distinguish us among similar professions to prospective employers (elias, m.j., 2009). by outlining a set of competencies, the field can better inform the education and employment of community psychologists around the world. the 18 competencies can be divided into five categories: 1) foundational principles, 2) community program development, 3) community and organizational capacity-building, 4) community and social change, and 5) community research. while the contributions of community psychologists are not mutually exclusive from those of various theoretical orientations, the complete constellation of identified competencies highlighted have great use in various settings, including the emerging world of healthcare. as healthcare reforms push health systems toward population health, we believe that over the next decade healthcare may become an opportunistic workplace for community psychologists. these settings are inclusive of traditional and emerging stakeholders, encompassing hospitals and health systems, accountable care organizations, multispecialty group and primary care practices, payers [government and commercial], health policy organizations and foundations, public health organizations, and local, state and federal government agencies. atlantic health system (ahs) in northern new jersey is an example of a healthcare system that is already incorporating the skills and experience of community psychologists. serving a population of almost two million people, atlantic health system (ahs) is home to community psychologists in senior management, starting with the president and chief executive officer, the vp and chief strategy officer, and the director of mission development with responsibility for community health at the system and hospital level. listed as one of america’s top 50 hospitals in two specialties and with one of the largest medicare accountable care organizations in the country, ahs is poised to be a leader in the future of healthcare and the shift from traditional medicine to population health. table 2 lists the key community psychology competency groups with their application to healthcare settings and specific examples of examples of how ahs is applying these competencies within our settings. while much could be written on each of these initiatives, the purpose of this paper is to highlight alignment opportunities for community psychologists. foundational principles the foundational principles of community psychology include the “values and perspectives” that are common to community psychologists. these include: 1) ecological perspectives, 2) empowerment, 3) sociocultural and cross-cultural competence, 4) community inclusion and partnership, and 5) ethical, reflective practice. in the emerging world of healthcare, these principles are increasingly aligned with the needs of healthcare systems. for example, as the focus shifts from patients to populations, an understanding of multiple ecological levels is vital. further, the coming emphasis on prevention requires a passion to empower diverse groups of people to control their own health and healthcare. by holding and applying these values, community psychologists already speak the language that is currently being learned by many in the healthcare workforce. one area in which we are working to find ways to create empowering environments for our patients and communities is our health literacy initiative. defined as “the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services to make appropriate health decisions” (ratzan & parker, 2000), health literacy is a function of both the skills and abilities of individuals and the complexity of the healthcare system. in short, most healthcare communication is too complex for the average person and the outcomes associated with limited health literacy include hospitalization, emergency department usage, lower quality of life, and premature death (agency for healthcare research and quality, 2011). working with doctors, staff, and community groups, we are leading a system-wide initiative to create a more health literate healthcare system and to design community-based programs to increase health literacy in vulnerable populations (brach et al., 2012). the principles of empowerment and socio-cultural competence provide the framework for leading this effort, and our ecological understanding allows for the analysis of health literacy from multiple vantage points. combined with emphasis on shared decision-making and patient engagement, health literacy is a great opportunity for community psychologists to apply their foundational principles in a way that has the potential to dramatically affect the health of individuals and communities. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 table 2. community psychology competencies and healthcare applications cp competency group healthcare opportunities ahs examples foundational principles use ecological perspectives to guide shift to population health create opportunities to empower patients and community address disparities by emphasizing socio-cultural competence in healthcare atlantic accountable care organization health literacy initiative diversity councils community program development develop/implement evidence-based prevention/ health promotion initiatives to promote population health community health (irs community health regulations) community and organizational capacity building facilitate conversations around reform and organizational change build capacity of medical practices to emphasize prevention healing culture council community and social change form essential collaborations for affecting population health evaluate and advocate for health policy spread public awareness to increase access and prevent illness and injury community health needs assessment strategic partnerships (community organizations) community research conduct strengths-based, participatory research evaluate all programs adaptability model community program development community psychologists also maintain competencies in developing programs and preventive interventions. building on the strong value base of prevention and health promotion, community psychologists in the changing world of healthcare delivery have the opportunity to develop initiatives designed to keep populations healthier. as mentioned, these skills have not been consistently applied by those in traditional healthcare delivery. by bringing the ability to develop, implement, and manage evidence-based programs that will affect community health, community psychologists can provide a valuable service to healthcare systems. at ahs, we are realigning the departments of community health at each hospital with the national prevention strategy and the identified best practices in prevention and health promotion. in the past, much of hospital-based community health has been grounded in clinical practice (screenings, immunizations) and the marketing and public relations plan of the hospital. in contrast, we are setting up a process that emphasizes data-based decision-making, evidence-based best practices, and sets the metric for success as total population health. community psychologists who possess these skills have the opportunity to make a significant impact in community health departments in a number of delivery settings. we explore some of these opportunities next. community and organizational capacity-building healthcare systems range in size and scale, from small community hospitals to large national corporations, both not for profit and proprietary. regardless of size, leadership is challenged to move these organizations forward in order for them to survive in a world of value-based purchasing. building on the competencies of 1) community leadership, 2) small and large group processes, and 3) consultation and organizational development, community psychologists have the opportunity to shift organizations toward the future, engaging multiple stakeholders including patients, communities, organizations, staff, physicians, and payers. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 with the unanimous support of its board of trustees, ahs has recently changed the vision of our organization from an emphasis focused on nationally recognized quality medical care to an emphasis on community health: “empowering our communities of the healthiest in the nation.” more than just changing the vision, it is part of an effort to involve the system and the community in becoming directly involved in population health. more than 17,000 ahs staff, physicians, volunteers and board members will reach out to our communities in a multi-element initiative to engage them in proactive change. a media campaign asks the question “if you could do one thing, and one thing only to improve the health of your community, what would that be?” respondents will not only be asked to answer, but to become involved in the process. by participating in “community action teams” based on the priorities we received and consonance with a formal needs assessment survey by our community health committees at our individual hospitals [chna explained below], we hope to find more than one thousand new contributors to our efforts. at the same time, we are refocusing our efforts internally. in an attempt to become more patientcentered, we launched a system-wide healing culture council, designed to re-imagine and improve the patient experience (neigher and hakim, 2012). with extensive participation across all levels of the organization, this group has been able to identify areas for improvement and enact changes that are making ahs hospitals a better, more supportive experience for patients, families, and staff. examples include extending pet therapy [“healing paws”] to patients and staff [“ruff day”], healing messages for “on hold” calls, increasing access to integrative medicine services, encouraging “eye contact at eye level” for all patient encounters, more “quiet time” with subdued lighting on inpatient floors, increasing pastoral care availability, fostering better advance care planning, moving to unrestricted visiting hours 24/7, and a renewed emphasis on the healing arts. these are examples of how community psychologists can help build the capacity of organizations for a more patient and family centered environment. the ability to understand organizational culture, facilitate groups, and lead organizational development processes are critical success factors. community and social change to be successful in the future of healthcare, providers will have to look beyond the confines of their offices and hospitals to build solid partnerships with organizations across the communities they serve. only a small percentage of healing occurs in a healthcare environment. neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, playgrounds, and community organizations all have an impact on the health and well-being of the population. thus, to truly affect population health, healthcare systems must embrace an ecological understanding of the multiple determinants of health and build strong partnerships with organizations across the spectrum. the competencies here include: 1) collaboration and coalition development, 2) community organization, and 3) community education. the ppaca provided hospitals with a great opportunity to improve population health by engaging with the community. part of the act required non-profit hospitals to conduct a community health needs assessment (chna) every three years. while the requirements for this process are relatively open, one tenant is that hospitals must consult “community representatives” including those of low-income, minority, and/or chronically ill populations. while hospitals are not required to maintain long-term partnerships with these sectors, the mandate creates an opportunity in which those with the ability to effectively engage diverse community members, build coalitions, and establish collaborative partnerships can have a sustainable impact. at ahs, we are conducting chnas across the region and have designed a process to develop partnerships with a broad spectrum of community representatives at each of our sites. we are finding great opportunities to partner with faith communities, non-profit organizations, businesses, and schools. one of the brightest opportunities is an increased connection with public health partners. we are finding common values and goals with many of our partners in county and municipality-based public health systems and are exploring new ways to increase opportunities for collaborative and efficient interventions. community research healthcare systems are a wonderful natural laboratory for applied and translational research. while research has a mission-driven role in academic and teaching healthcare settings, community psychologists bring skills in participatory community research and program evaluation that have the opportunity to emphasize strengths, empower people, and create actionable change. at ahs, we are working on a series of research projects to inform medical practice and community health. for example, we are working to test a model of patient adaptability in multiple populations including surgical patients, medicare beneficiaries, and employees. as shown in figure 2 (neigher and hakim, 2012), this model defines adaptability as the ratio of resilience to global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 vulnerability. this research will be used to test interventions to build resilience in patients and communities, allowing hospital systems to move beyond solely risk-based assessment. other opportunities include evaluations of hospital initiatives and community-based programs. healthcare settings remain a critical environment for community research and should interest community psychologists who are passionate about improving health while adding to the research literature. conclusion the purpose of this paper was to highlight ways in which the competencies of community psychology are relevant to practice within u.s. healthcare settings. as shown, there is great overlap between many of the competencies that community psychologists embrace and the emerging needs of healthcare systems. we hope that in the future an increasing number of community psychologists will consider healthcare systems as a workplace setting, and believe that health systems (and the communities they serve) will benefit from the skills and values that community psychologists bring to the table. figure 2. adaptability model references agency for healthcare research and quality (2011). health literacy interventions and outcomes: an updated systematic review. washington d.c.: agency for healthcare research and quality, 2011. brach, c., keller, d., hernandez, l.m., baur, c., parker, r., dreyer, b., schyve, p., lemerise, a.j., & schillinger, d. (2012). ten attributes of health literate health care organizations. institute of medicine: washington d.c. braveman, p., egerter, s, and williams, d.r. (2011). the social determinants of health: coming of age. annual review of public health, vol. 32, pp 381 – 398. dziadkowicz, o. & jimenez, t. (2009). educating community psychologists for community practice: a survey of graduate training programs. the community psychologist, 42(4), 10-17. elias, m.j. (2009). employability and community psychology: why we need a value proposition. the community psychologist, 42(2), 1-4. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 kindig, d. & stoddart, g. (2003). what is population health? american journal of public health, 93(3), 380-383. koh, h.k. & sebelius, k.g. (2010). promoting prevention through the affordable care act. new england journal of medicine, 363, 12961299. national prevention council (2011). national prevention strategy. washington dc: u.s. department of health and human services, office of the surgeon general, 2011. neigher, w.d., and hakim, s.m. (2012). creating a sustainable “healing culture” throughout a healthcare system using community psychology principles as a guide. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(3), 1-29 (http://gjcpp.org/). peters, k.e. & elster, a.b. (2002). roadmaps for clinical practice: population-based medicine. atlanta, georgia: american medical association, 2002. prevention institute (2004). the built environment and health: 11 profiles of neighborhood transformation. prevention institute: oakland. wolff, t. (2011). developing the profession of community psychology practitioner. the community psychologist, 44(1), 12-13. microsoft word porto4_1-2016 impacto das políticas públicas_final-formatted.docx impacto das políticas públicas na promoção da educação sexual: o caso português impact of public policy for the promotion of sex education: the portuguese case ana cristina rocha cidália duarte universidade do porto palavras-chave: educação sexual, políticas, portugal, modelo ecológico keywords: sexuality education, policies, portugal, ecological model autor biografias: ana cristina rocha é investigadora no centro de psicologia da universidade do porto. é mestre e doutorada em psicologia pela mesma universidade. os seus interesses de investigação focam-se na educação sexual e no desenvolvimento psicossexual. tem também estudado o desenvolvimento profissional dos psicólogos. é ainda psicóloga no serviço de consulta de psicologia da faculdade de psicologia e de ciências da educação da universidade do porto. cidália duarte é professora auxiliar na faculdade de psicologia e ciências da educação da universidade do porto e investigadora no centro de psicologia da mesma universidade. os seus principais interesses de investigação centram-se na educação sexual e sexualidade ao longo da vida, nas relações de intimidade amorosa e psicoterapia de casal. é igualmente a coordenadora cientifica do serviço de psicoterapia da fpce. nota de autor: ana cristina rocha e cidália duarte, faculdade de psicologia e de ciências da educação e centro de psicologia, universidade do porto, portugal. este trabalho foi financiado pela fundação para a ciência e tecnologia, ministério da educação e ciência [sfrh/bd/74347/2010]. citar: rocha, a.c., and duarte, c. (2016). impacto das políticas públicas na promoção da educação sexual: o caso português. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(1s), 1-22. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org) global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 impacto das políticas públicas na promoção da educação sexual: o caso português resumo a europa é, provavelmente, o continente com a mais longa experiência no domínio da educação sexual. contudo, são as experiências desenvolvidas em território norteamericano que dominam os estudos de avaliação do impacto da educação sexual. segundo o gabinete europeu da oms, esta dominância deve-se, sobretudo, à ausência, na europa, de um processo de publicação sistemática das experiências e resultados nacionais no contexto internacional. é neste âmbito que nos propomos a partilhar o caso de portugal relativamente às políticas de promoção da educação sexual, com base numa perspetiva (bio)ecológica. portugal tem um percurso longo e algo errático neste domínio, tendo-se verificado, nas últimas três décadas, no plano crono e macrossistémico, notáveis mudanças ao nível das medidas políticas e legislativas, que culminaram na conceção da mesma como um projeto comunitário. no plano do exo-, meso e microssistema, estas mudanças refletem-se nas práticas. a percentagem de escolas portuguesas a implementar a educação sexual tem vindo a aumentar e, não obstante alguma variabilidade, há práticas em comum nas escolas, sobretudo no que respeita os papéis/funções desempenhados e os procedimentos de planeamento, implementação e avaliação. há também dificuldades comuns como: envolver a comunidade escolar, implementar a transversalidade, abordar a sexualidade de forma holística e avaliar adequadamente a educação sexual. estas dificuldades são potenciadas também por medidas politico-legislativas no domínio da educação, como corroboram as perceções da comunidade escolar e científica. ambas receiam, atualmente, que a sustentabilidade da educação sexual nas escolas enquanto projeto comunitário esteja em causa, devido às últimas políticas educativas. neste sentido, e com base em referências teóricas da intervenção comunitária, finalizamos este artigo apresentando uma reflexão sobre os desafios atuais no domínio, bem como um conjunto de propostas para ultrapassar os mesmos. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 impact of public policy for the promotion of sex education: the portuguese case abstract europe has probably the greatest experience in sexuality education. however, in the most recent research on its impact evaluation, the majority of studies focused on experiences in us territory. according to the european office of who, this dominance happens due to the absence in europe of a systematic publishing process of national experiences and results on the international context. therefore, we propose to share the case of portuguese policies in promoting sexuality education, based on a (bio) ecological approach. implementation of sexuality education in portugal has been long and somewhat erratic. at chronoand macrosystem levels, the last three decades have been marked by changes in policies and laws, and sexuality education has been view as a community project. these changes impact on practices, at meso and microsystem levels. the percentage of portuguese schools implementing sexuality education has been increasing and, despite some variation, there are common practices in schools, especially those related to roles/functions played by stakeholders, and planning, implementation and evaluation procedures. there are also common difficulties such as: low school community participation, cross-curricular teaching, too heavy a focus on health-related issues, and poor-quality evaluation. these difficulties are also maximized by the educational policies and legislation, and validate the perceptions of academic and scientific community. both fear that today the sustainability of school-based sexuality education as a community project is endangered because of the latest educational policies. so, in the end of this paper, we present an analysis of the current challenges in sexuality education, based on theoretical references of community intervention, as well as a set of proposals to overcome them. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 introdução ainda que em diferentes momentos, a educação sexual nasceu, em todo o mundo, por necessidades sociais despoletadas ora pela revolução sexual e pela emergência da adolescência, na europa ocidental dos anos 60/70; ora por prevenção epidémica do vih, nos anos 80/90, nos estados unidos da américa e, mais tarde, na américa latina, ásia e áfrica. as questões sociais, que marcaram o seu início, influenciaram também todo o seu desenvolvimento, acentuando diferenças entre continentes ainda na atualidade (ketting & winkelmann, 2013; who/bzga, 2010). na europa, após séculos de cristianismo, a sociedade, com a influência dos trabalhos desenvolvidos na sexologia (ex., havelock ellis, freud e kinsey), tornou-se menos repressiva (loeber, reuter, apter, van der doefx, lazdane, & pinter, 2010; who/bzga, 2010), evidenciando-se a necessidade da educação sexual formal. esta, tendo-se iniciado na suécia, em 1955, propagou-se por vários países do ocidente nas décadas de 70 e 80 e surgiu, no centro e leste europeu, apenas depois da queda do comunismo. ao longo das últimas décadas, por oposição ao que acontece nos estados unidos da américa, tem havido, na europa, consenso científico relativamente à abordagem holística, baseada nos direitos sexuais e numa conceção abrangente e positiva da saúde sexual, por oposição ao modelo moral e de risco implícitos na abordagem centrada na abstinência que predomina nos estados unidos da américa (ketting & winkelmann, 2013; sanchéz, 2005). contudo, a avaliação do impacto da educação sexual, com destaque para as meta-análises de kirby (2008) e da unesco (2009), é dominada por estudos em território norte-americano; o que, segundo o gabinete europeu da oms (who/bzga, 2010), evidencia a lacuna na documentação e partilha do trabalho desenvolvido na europa. perante esta lacuna, foi criado precisamente o gabinete regional supracitado, com o objetivo de delinear uma estratégia comum para a saúde sexual e reprodutiva. não obstante os esforços de homogeneização da educação sexual, nomeadamente através da publicação de guidelines para a sua implementação (who/bzga, 2010; 2013), a informação mais recente sobre o estado da educação sexual na europa foi publicada num guia de referência há aproximadamente 10 anos. ainda que este não se baseie em dados recolhidos no terreno sobre as práticas na educação sexual, demonstrou tanto a variabilidade entre países como a existência de pontos em comum. especificamente, este pôs em relevo países como frança, bélgica e portugal, que têm um longo percurso politico-legislativo no domínio e que, depois de terem tornado a educação sexual obrigatória nas escolas, reúnem esforços para a implementar efetivamente e ultrapassar dificuldades, algumas das quais também comuns a diversos países. portugal constitui-se, assim, um caso relevante para a análise do impacto das políticas públicas na promoção da educação sexual. implementação da educação sexual no contexto escolar português como referimos, o caso português inserese no contexto europeu, no qual, não obstante as diferenças politicolegislativas e práticas, a educação sexual tem sido perspetivada, por várias organizações e instituições, como uma responsabilidade de toda a comunidade escolar, apoiada por uma rede de global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 parceiros, e não como uma iniciativa individual, nomeadamente de um professor ou de uma organização nãogovernamental [ong] (ippf, 2010; unesco, 2010; who/bzga, 2010; 2013). é assim, colocando a tónica na comunidade e na rede de apoio, que a educação sexual deixa de ter como únicos alvos de mudança desenvolvimental os sistemas pessoais (do estudante) e passa a ser um projeto da comunidade e de intervenção comunitária no contexto escolar (campos, 1991). esta evolução no sentido da superação do viés individualista e intrapsíquico na psicologia, permeio do reconhecimento da necessidade de se intervir intencionalmente em dimensões contextuais, como advoga a psicologia comunitária (orford, 1992), foi acompanhada no domínio da promoção da saúde. iniciou-se na carta de ottava (oms, 1986), na qual se preconizou uma abordagem sociológica da saúde, e progressivamente se estendeu à educação para a saúde (mcleroy, bibeau, steckler, & glanz, 1988) e, ainda que menos frequentemente, à educação sexual, (eisenberg, madsen, oliphant, & resnick 2012).os princípios da rede europeia de escolas promotoras de saúde, que portugal integrou, refletem precisamente a adoção desta abordagem (european network of health promoting schools, who, & european commission, 1997). pelo contributo incontornável que deu para o estudo do desenvolvimento em contexto e, consequentemente, para a intervenção (psicológica) dirigida ao contexto (comunitário),a abordagem (bio)ecológica, desenvolvida por bronfenbrenner (1979, 2005), é bastante pertinente para a análise da educação sexual nas escolas. pois, esta abordagem não só permite sustentar a relevância e pertinência da educação sexual como um projeto comunitário, como permite também clarificar a natureza distinta, ainda que interrelacionada, entre o processo da sua implementação em contexto escolar e o processo inerente à própria educação sexual, abarcando a complexidade de ambos decorrerem em contexto. de acordo com a mesma, a educação sexual será um processo proximal estimulante do desenvolvimento psicossexual a decorrer no microssistema escolar ao longo do tempo. assim, enquanto interação recíproca entre, neste caso, principalmente estudante e meio ambiente, este processo proximal é influenciado por ambos. portanto, não é apenas o próprio desenvolvimento psicossexual do estudante que é influenciado pelo contexto imediato da escola e pelas influências e interconexões entre contextos/sistemas mais vastos, mas também a própria implementação da educação sexual em contexto escolar enquanto processo proximal. a implementação da educação sexual enquanto processo proximal, no que diz respeito ao contexto, é então influenciada: 1) ao nível do cronossistema, pela evolução histórica e pelas experiências prévias referentes à educação sexual e conceitos contíguos, especialmente em portugal e na europa; 2) ao nível macrossistémico, pelo repertório cultural e sistema de crenças vigente dos quais decorrem, por exemplo, as medidas políticas e a legislação; 3) ao nível do exossistema, pelas relações e processos que ocorrem entre as escolas e outras instituições (ex. ong, estruturas intermédias do ministério da educação e ciência [mec]); 4) ao nível do mesossistema, pelas mesmas relações e global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 processos, mas entre as escolas e contextos que incluem o estudante (ex. família); e 5) ao nível do microssistema pelas estruturas e processos na escola que, por sua vez, é um sistema com vários níveis interrelacionados e compostos por vários processos de regulação (ex. organizacional, interpessoal, intrapessoal) (bronfenbrenner, 1988; eccles & roeser, 2010). evolução das políticas públicas: crono e macrossistema o percurso da implementação da educação sexual nas escolas, em portugal, é longo, tem sido percecionado como errático, descontínuo e inconcluso (baptista, 2014), e está repleto de exemplos da influência de fatores alocados nos diversos sistemas ecológicos. entre o século xix e a revolução que pôs fim à ditadura, em 1974, na sociedade portuguesa, prevaleceu, resultado da forte influência da igreja católica, uma ideologia fortemente repressiva e fóbica relativamente à sexualidade que enfatizava valores como o da castidade (sousa, 2012). todavia, na década de 60, a influência da revolução sexual começou a fazer-se sentir, tendo-se fundado a associação para o planeamento da família [apf]. posteriormente, com o fim da ditadura, teve início uma progressiva reforma moral nas várias camadas da sociedade (vaz, vilar, & cardoso, 1996). como em muitos dos países do ocidente europeu, as primeiras medidas políticas para promover a educação sexual ocorreram na década de 70 através da criação da ‘comissão sobre educação e sexualidade’, que foi rapidamente extinta, mas também da nova constituição da república portuguesa, que criou a base jurídica para o início da promoção e educação para a saúde sexual no país. contudo, é da década de 80 que data o primeiro grande marco legislativo neste domínio: a lei nº 3/84 e a portaria nº 52/85. estas determinaram, respetivamente, a garantia do direito à educação sexual como componente do direito fundamental à educação, através do estabelecimento de programas escolares, e o regulamento das consultas de planeamento familiar e dos centros de atendimento para jovens (sousa, 2012; vaz et al., 1996; vilaça, 2013). contudo, esta lei não acarretou grande avanço e a educação sexual apenas passou a estar no centro da discussão novamente aquando do debate da lei de bases do sistema educativo em 1986 (lei nº 46/86), que, aliando os saberes académicos ao desenvolvimento pessoal e social, estabeleceu nos currículos escolares uma nova área de formação pessoal e social, na qual a educação sexual poderia ser incluída. esta nova área foi, porém, apresentada como alternativa à educação religiosa. já, nos anos 90, surgiram propostas para o programa da área de desenvolvimento pessoal e social, bem como diversas iniciativas por parte do ministério da educação, entre as quais o ‘programa de promoção e educação para a saúde’ [ppes] e a adesão à ‘rede europeia de escolas promotoras de saúde’. houve também, nesta fase, um esforço por uma articulação entre o ministério da educação e o da saúde (despacho conjunto nº 271/98) (sousa, 2012; vaz et al., 1996; vilaça, 2013). em 1995, a apf propôs uma parceria com o ppes que visava a realização de um estudo experimental em cinco escolaspiloto. não obstante nunca ter sido generalizado a outras escolas, devido a pressões das alas mais conservadoras, no global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 âmbito deste estudo foram elaboradas as orientações técnicas (marques, pereira, silva, vilar, & cadete, 1999), que vieram, posteriormente, a servir de base para as “linhas orientadoras da educação sexual em meio escolar”, assinadas pelos ministérios da educação e da saúde e pela apf, em 2000, no âmbito da publicação de nova legislação no domínio: lei nº 120/99 e decreto-lei nº 259/2000. esta legislação procurou garantir o desenvolvimento da educação sexual através da responsabilização das escolas pela sua integração no projeto educativo, que deveria ser concretizado nos projetos de turma, em colaboração com os serviços locais de saúde e as associações de estudantes e as de pais/encarregados de educação, i.e. atribuiu à educação sexual uma dimensão comunitária, assumindo que a mesma se desenvolve em contexto. reforçou também a abordagem dos conteúdos interdisciplinar e adequada à faixa etária dos estudantes, bem como a importância da formação de professores. ainda no final dos anos 90, o ministério da educação formou a comissão de coordenação da promoção e educação para a saúde, que envolvia as direções regionais de educação [dre], na articulação com o terreno (baptista & matos, 2011a; vilaça, 2013), reconhecendo, assim, a influência de sistemas mais distantes da escola. no início dos anos 2000, facilitou-se a implementação das ‘linhas orientadoras’ através da criação das áreas curriculares não disciplinares (decreto-lei nº 6/2001) e do estabelecimento de protocolos com ong, entre as quais a apf, que tinham como intuito o apoio por parte destas ao desenvolvimento da educação sexual em meio escolar. conquanto, a este período seguiu-se um desinvestimento na área entre 2003 e 2005, que findou com a criação de um grupo de especialistas, denominado por grupo de trabalho em educação sexual [gtes]. este foi justificado pelas dificuldades da aplicação da lei nº 120/1999 e documentos relacionados, assim como pela sensibilidade com que a temática era recebida na opinião pública, aludindo à polémica despoletada pelos mass media. este grupo, cuja missão era “estudar e propor os parâmetros gerais dos programas de educação sexual em meio escolar, na perspectiva da promoção da saúde escolar” (despacho nº19 737/2005), publicou dois relatórios principais, em 2005 e 2007, nos quais, de forma complementar, fez uma descrição das práticas no âmbito da educação para a saúde/sexual e da literatura científica relevante para a sua implementação em meio escolar. nos mesmos, sugeriu um conjunto de medidas a adotar com impacto desde o nível microssistémico escola ao nível macrossistémico ministério da educação. as recomendações do gtes estiveram na base da mais recente legislação portuguesa sobre educação sexual: a lei nº 60/2009 e a respetiva portaria nº 196a/2010 (baptista & matos, 2011b; vilaça, 2013). assim, segundo esta legislação, a educação sexual é uma componente da educação para a saúde a ser integrada obrigatoriamente no projeto educativo da escola ou agrupamento de escolas. as finalidades, os conteúdos mínimos obrigatórios ao longo de todos os ciclos e a carga horária mínima da educação sexual são também estabelecidos pela lei nº 60/2009 e devem ser cumpridos nas áreas curriculares não disciplinares e também transversalmente nas disciplinas. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 esta legislação estabelece ainda as funções do gabinete de informação e apoio. a nível microssistémico, a lei indica que um professor deve ser nomeado para coordenar uma equipa interdisciplinar, que é responsável por dinamizar a educação para a saúde/sexual. este professor-coordenador, cuja formação específica foi garantida pelo ministério da educação, usufruiria da redução da componente letiva, sendo a sua seleção baseada em critérios como a formação específica e a experiência no domínio da educação sexual. já o projeto de educação sexual de cada turma deve ser desenvolvido pelo conselho da respetiva turma, com destaque para os professores e o diretor da mesma. sem prejuízo do anterior, a legislação prevê o estabelecimento de parcerias e um papel ativo para a comunidade escolar, particularmente para as associações de pais/encarregados de educação e estudantes, reforçando assim o caráter comunitário do projeto. a nível mesossistémico, segundo esta lei, os encarregados de educação devem ser, no mínimo, informados de todas as atividades no domínio; e a nível exossistémico, as escolas devem ter o acompanhamento das unidades locais de saúde e podem ter ong, reconhecidas e especializadas na área, como parceiras. por fim, a nível macrossistémico, o ministério da educação é responsável por supervisionar, coordenar e avaliar a educação para a saúde/sexual nas escolas, bem como por elaborar relatórios de avaliação periódica com base, nomeadamente, em questionários realizados nas escolas. um relatório global sobre a aplicação desta legislação deveria ter sido realizado em 2011, dois anos letivos após a publicação da lei nº 60/2009. o mesmo só foi publicado no final de 2013 (matos, reis, ramiro, ribeiro, leal, & equipa aventura social, 2013). desde a publicação da lei nº 60/2009 e respetiva portaria, nenhuma medida política específica da educação sexual foi adotada. todavia, o mesmo não se sucedeu no contexto global da educação. as medidas no âmbito da revisão da estrutura curricular e da lei da autonomia acarretaram implicações diretas e consideráveis para a educação sexual. a chamada ‘instrução’ foi valorizada na revisão da estrutura curricular em detrimento da cidadania e do desenvolvimento pessoal e social do estudante. pois, o despacho nº 17169/2011, que finda a aplicação do documento ‘currículo nacional do ensino básico – competências essenciais’, terminou com a obrigatoriedade das áreas curriculares não disciplinares. a cidadania passou, assim, para o plano da intenção educativa, dependente do tempo/espaço que os agrupamentos de escolas lhe pretendam e possam conferir; já que o decreto-lei nº 139/2012 estabelece que “as escolas, no âmbito da sua autonomia, devem desenvolver projetos e atividades que contribuam para a formação pessoal e social dos alunos, designadamente a educação para a saúde”. conforme o estabelecido no despacho normativo 13-a/2012 sobre os mecanismos do exercício da autonomia pedagógica e organizativa, cada escola pode gerir os tempos letivos, a carga curricular de cada disciplina, assim como as ofertas curriculares obrigatórias ou complementares, mediante o crédito de tempos que lhe é atribuído. todavia, estes global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 créditos, por sua vez, dependem, entre outros, da progressão dos resultados escolares, da aferição dos resultados internos com os externos e do sucesso escolar alcançado pelos alunos. portanto, a autonomia que as escolas possuem é, na verdade, reduzida devido ao requisito de obterem determinados resultados que não dependem unicamente das ações sob o seu controlo (ex. sucesso escolar). há, então, uma negação da relação intrínseca entre saúde e educação, defendida nomeadamente pela oms e pela união internacional de promoção da saúde e de educação para a saúde [uipes] (2010), e uma negação da influência ecológica de outros sistemas que não o escolar no sucesso escolar. há também uma gestão centralizada e autocrática que não envolve efetivamente os profissionais do contexto na tomada de decisões, sendo que, como apontam foster-fishman e keys (1997), os contextos geridos desta forma tendem a resistir à mudança apesar das iniciativas transformadoras, como, neste caso, pretende ser a legislação da educação sexual enquanto projeto comunitário. naturalmente que a importância dos saberes académicos é amplamente reconhecida, mas não como um fim encerrado em si mesmo. estes devem ser integrados numa educação holística, que capacita os jovens com conhecimentos e competências que lhes permitam exercer a sua cidadania. neste seguimento, a atual lei da autonomia é implicitamente perversa, pois, se num primeiro momento assegura a autonomia das escolas para a definição das necessidades do seu contexto específico, num segundo momento impõe autocraticamente determinadas necessidades associadas aos saberes puramente académicos como prioritárias. assim, como salienta baptista (2014), esta legislação pode acentuar assimetrias entre escolas e comunidades, pois aquelas com resultados académicos satisfatórios poderão promover o desenvolvimento pessoal e social da sua comunidade e aquelas com resultados académicos insatisfatórios não o poderão fazer, contribuindo potencialmente para a pioria dos próprios resultados académicos. por conseguinte, o percurso evolutivo das políticas de educação sexual em portugal parece continuar a ser marcado por descontinuidades, como refere a autora supracitada, e ilustra a influência do cronoe macrossistema na implementação da educação sexual nas escolas. impacto nas práticas: exo-, mesoe microssistema escolar não obstante o aumento considerável do número de estudos dedicados à temática nos últimos anos, a informação sobre a implementação da mesma no contexto escolar português é ainda parca. ainda assim, a investigação tem sido unânime quanto à evidência dos efeitos positivos da educação sexual, sobretudo no que respeita as práticas de risco (ramiro, 2013; ramiro et al., 2011; 2014; reis, 2012; reis et al., 2011; 2013; sousa et al., 2007). concomitantemente, os estudos mais recentes focados nas práticas têm evidenciado procedimentos e fatores em comum, mas também variabilidade entre escolas (ex. alves, 2012; dias, 2013; gtes, 2005; 2007; leal, 2013; macário, 2010; matos et al., 2011; 2013; ramiro, reis, matos, & diniz, 2013, rocha & duarte, 2015a,b; rocha, leal, & duarte, 2015). a esmagadora maioria das escolas/agrupamentos leva a cabo a global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 implementação da educação sexual através da sua integração no projeto educativo no âmbito da educação para a saúde. a nível microssistémico, a sua implementação tem vindo a aumentar ligeiramente ao longo dos anos (abrantes et al., 2013; gtes. 2005; 2007; matos et al., 2011; 2013; ministério da educação, 2009; 2010; 2011); aliás um terço das escolas iniciou-a aquando da publicação da última legislação, o que evidencia a influência considerável dos fatores macrossistémicos (rocha & duarte, 2015a). cerca de 83% das escolas/agrupamentos cumpre a carga horária mínima estipulada por lei (matos et al., 2013). contudo, mais de metade destas não dispõe de orçamento para a educação sexual/saúde (matos et al., 2011; rocha & duarte, 2015a), que, não sendo crucial, é um fator facilitador da mesma (rocha & duarte, 2015b). de forma global, as direções nomeiam um professor coordenador, maioritariamente com formação na área das ciências experimentais, que coordena uma equipa, por vezes, multidisciplinar, mas que em apenas 42% das escolas integra o psicólogo (matos et al., 2013; ramiro et al., 2013; rocha & duarte, 2015a, rocha et al., 2015). o planeamento é da responsabilidade primordial desta equipa e desenrola-se de forma a que a educação sexual seja adequada ao contexto específico de implementação, ainda que este procedimento seja pouco sistemático. alguns estudos têm demonstrado precisamente que a participação da comunidade é baixa e que os procedimentos para a sua promoção são muito pouco regulares (ex. avaliação das necessidades e interesses) (alves, 2012; matos et al., 2013; rocha & duarte, 2015a; rocha, et al., 2015). assim, os objetivos e os conteúdos da educação sexual são estabelecidos sobretudo pela equipa de coordenação, que também é a principal responsável por selecionar a metodologia e as estratégias de implementação a serem posteriormente adaptadas a cada turma pelos professores. após a reforma curricular, especificamente o fim da obrigatoriedade das áreas curriculares não disciplinares, que eram, até 2011/12, o principal espaço de alocação dos conteúdos da educação sexual, a metodologia mais implementada passou a ser a transversalidade, sendo a educação sexual em cada turma dinamizada principalmente pelos professores (rocha & duarte, 2015a; rocha et al., 2015). todavia, vários estudos têm apontado para a dificuldade em conseguir-se uma total integração dos conteúdos da educação sexual nos curricula das diversas disciplinas, já que a transversalidade, por vezes, se aplica apenas às áreas disciplinares de ciências naturais, educação física e educação moral e religião católica (alves, 2012; dias, 2013; macário, 2010; matos et al, 2011; 2013; rocha & duarte, 2015a; rocha et al., 2015). não obstante as estratégias pedagógicas planeadas para o contexto de sala de aula atribuírem aos estudantes maioritariamente um papel ativo, as atividades extracurriculares, sobretudo as palestras e conferências, são também bastante utilizadas. estas constituem, quase exclusivamente, os únicos momentos de promoção da participação da comunidade, uma vez que a formação de agentes é também pouco regular (matos et al., 2011; 2013; rocha & duarte, 2015a; rocha et al., 2015). global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 adicionalmente, os estudos têm consistentemente assinalado um enviesamento, nos conteúdos abordados, no sentido da componente biológica e de uma perspetiva negativa e informativa da sexualidade, ainda que a natureza holística da sexualidade não seja totalmente negligenciada (alves, 2012; dias, 2013; macário, 2010; rocha & duarte, 2015a; rocha et al., 2015). portanto, no que diz respeito à implementação, as guidelines internacionais sobre o envolvimento da comunidade, a utilização de estratégias ativas, a abordagem abrangente e positiva da sexualidade e a alocação de espaço/tempo no curriculum escolar, não sendo completamente aplicadas, também não são totalmente descuradas. já a avaliação da educação sexual encontra-se ainda numa fase bastante incipiente. não obstante ser planeada, esta centra-se quase exclusivamente nos professores e abarca apenas indicadores como o número de horas lecionadas, a percentagem de atividades realizadas e o nível de participação e satisfação quanto às atividades extracurriculares (alves, 2012; matos et al., 2013; rocha & duarte, 2015a; rocha et al., 2015); excluindo, portanto, a avaliação do impacto e da eficácia da mesma nos estudantes, bem como nos restantes elementos da comunidade. no estudo sobre o impacto da legislação mais recente (matos et al., 2013), a generalidade dos agentes escolares inquiridos considerou a adesão dos professores e dos alunos à educação sexual muito boa, a adesão da comunidade escolar em geral satisfatória e a dos pais, respetiva associação e associação de estudantes oscilou entre satisfatória e fraca. resultados de outros estudos (alves, 2012; rocha & duarte, 2015a; rocha et al., 2015) corroboram a evidência de que não há o envolvimento de todos os agentes educativos, sendo que o dos alunos aumenta sobretudo aquando da fase de implementação. na verdade, apesar de cerca de metade dos diretores dos agrupamentos considerarem que a educação sexual tem sido progressivamente integrada na cultura das escolas, estes assinalam o envolvimento da comunidade como uma dificuldade, devida ao facto de não fazerem parte da cultura dominante nem a comunicação escola-pais, nem a comunicação e colaboração entre direções, professores e alunos. a cooperação das direções, a participação dos alunos no planeamento, a formação frequente de professores e o estabelecimento de parcerias com entidades externas foram as estratégias mais apontadas por estes para promover o envolvimento da comunidade (matos et al., 2013). todavia, ao nível do exossistema, apesar de ser uma prática bastante comum em 90% das escolas (dias, 2013; matos et al., 2011; 2013; rocha & duarte, 2015a; rocha et al., 2015), o estabelecimento de parcerias tanto tem sido reconhecido como um facilitador da implementação efetiva da educação sexual (rocha & duarte, 2015b), como também tem sido apontado como um obstáculo à participação da comunidade, uma vez que alguns parceiros não promovem e apoiam o envolvimento da comunidade, mas substituem-na executando o projeto sem a participação ativa da mesma (rocha, 2015; rocha et al., 2015;). ainda neste nível, as escolas sentem-se pouco apoiadas por parte das dre, desconhecendo, mais de um terço, global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 inclusivamente medidas de apoio por parte destas estruturas, o que justifica o baixo nível de satisfação relativamente às mesmas (rocha & duarte, 2015a). concluindo, os diversos estudos têm demonstrado que a implementação da educação sexual tem vindo a aumentar nos últimos anos, mas, além da variabilidade entre escolas, algumas dificuldades e fragilidades parecem persistir, entre as quais: dificuldades em descentrar-se da componente biológica da sexualidade, em implementar o modelo transversal, em promover a participação da comunidade, sobretudo dos pais e associações representativas, e em efetuar uma avaliação adequada. a equipa responsável pelo relatório já mencionado referiu-se a um “panorama nacional de grande esforço pessoal e profissional por parte de direções e dos professores” para fazer cumprir a lei (matos et al., 2013, p. 3) e, na sua análise global, apontando também forças, elenca várias fraquezas, algumas das quais corroboradas por outros autores (alves, 2012; dias, 2012; macário, 2010; rocha & duarte, 2015a; rocha et al., 2015). análise global do impacto das políticas a publicação da última legislação, que é do conhecimento de 96% das escolas, tem sido reconhecida por estas como um importante facilitador da implementação da educação sexual (matos et al., 2013; rocha, 2015), ainda que as mesmas a considerem, numa escala de 5 pontos, apenas 3.72 clara e 2.95 exequível (rocha & duarte, 2015a,b). para além da considerável percentagem de escolas que referem ter começado a implementar a educação sexual aquando da sua publicação (rocha & duarte, 2015a), não há forma de analisar, de modo rigoroso, o impacto da última legislação devido à escassez de dados científicos sobre a implementação da educação sexual nas escolas portuguesas. a evidência científica referente ao impacto das mudanças nas políticas educativas, em especial da lei da autonomia e da reforma curricular, é ainda menor, se não nula. na verdade, reduz-se atualmente à diminuição do número de escolas que deixaram de abordar conteúdos da educação sexual nas áreas curriculares não disciplinares (rocha & duarte, 2015a; rocha et al., 2015). ainda assim, quer os resultados da escassa investigação, quer a comunidade escolar têm evidenciado um impacto positivo, especialmente da legislação específica, mas também um negativo, em particular das políticas educativas posteriores (baptista, 2014; matos et al., 2013; ramiro et al., 2013; rocha & duarte, 2015a,b; rocha et al., 2015). com efeito, o macrossistema parece contribuir também para as principais dificuldades identificadas na sua implementação. pois, nos documentos oficiais nem constam os possíveis procedimentos para o envolvimento da comunidade, ainda que a responsabilidade da educação sexual lhe seja atribuída e a importância da sua participação seja salientada, nem o papel de cada agente é esclarecido, o que também se reflete posteriormente no estabelecimento de procedimentos a nível microssistémico, e no desempenho de funções por parte de parcerias e estruturas intermédias do mec, ao nível do exossistema (rocha & duarte, 2015a,b; rocha et al., 2015). efetivamente, um dos princípios básicos da intervenção comunitária é o de que o processo de planeamento se trata de uma análise do contexto realizada juntamente global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 com a comunidade e que culmina com a tomada de decisões num ambiente participativo, implicando, por isso, quer tempo para o cumprimento das diferentes fases inerentes, quer recursos humanos que funcionem como “ponte e não como trincheira” na promoção do envolvimento dos diferentes agentes educativos e, consequentemente, do desenvolvimento da comunidade (becker, edmundo, nunes, bonatto, & souza, 2004; illback, zins, maher, & greenberg, 1990; menezes, 2010; nelson & prilleltensky, 2007). contudo, segundo os estudos supracitados, na realidade, deparamo-nos com o seguinte: 1) a avaliação das necessidades é um procedimento pouco sistemático e, quando realizado, é levado a cabo apenas por um agente (equipa/professores da turma) junto dos alunos; 2) o psicólogo, um dos profissionais com um perfil a priori mais adequado para trabalhar com a comunidade, potenciando o seu envolvimento e os seus recursos, não é integrado na maioria das equipas coordenadoras do projeto e, quando o é, divide o seu tempo com uma multiplicidade de tarefas desfavorável ao tempo exigido para o estabelecimento das relações basilares da sua intervenção; 3) o professor coordenador é selecionado com base na formação específica e não nas suas competências, nomeadamente no que respeita, por exemplo, o exercício de liderança e influência e o sentimento de controlo e autonomia, elementos centrais na promoção da mudança em contextos institucionais (orford,1992); os parceiros perante as dificuldades da comunidade educativa em executar a legislação parecem substituir-se às comunidades, por oposição à constituição de uma parceria colaborativa e promotora do empoderamento da comunidade (fawcett et al., 1995; menezes, 2010; zimmerman, 1995). por isso, e tal como reflete a apreciação dos diretores relativamente à ausência de comunicação (matos et al., 2013), a comunidade não é envolvida “como agente ativo com voz, voto e veto”, mas sim “ como convidada, espetadora ou recetora de [supostos] benefícios” (montero, 2004, p. 67). naturalmente, não se identificando com o projeto, a comunidade participa pouco, como evidenciam os dados explanados anteriormente. da mesma forma, o macrossistema contribui para a centralização em determinados conteúdos, pois, ao contrário do recomendado pela comunidade científica (ex. gómez-zapiain et al., 2005; sánchez, 2005), a legislação não define nenhum modelo teórico que sustente a intervenção, nem contradiz a abordagem sanitarista e redutora, o que a par do número reduzido e do caráter impreciso dos conteúdos mínimos obrigatórios descentrados da perspetiva biológica e negativa da sexualidade, pode contribuir para o foco excessivo nestes conteúdos. concomitantemente, a transversalidade como única metodologia de integração da educação sexual nos curricula pode também contribuir para esta focalização excessiva na perspetiva biológica da sexualidade, pela sua redução à abordagem na disciplina de ciências naturais; sobretudo após o cancelamento da obrigatoriedade das áreas curriculares não disciplinares e da redução da componente letiva do professor coordenador, dificultando um planeamento dos conteúdos realizado com a comunidade, por falta de tempo para levantar as necessidades e partilhar global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 as decisões (menezes, 2010; nelson & prilleltensky, 2005). concomitantemente, a opção por não explicitar um modelo teórico e um quadro ético de referência é, por sua vez, uma medida que não contribui para a facilitação da aplicação do modelo transversal. pois, por um lado, suscita nos professores a incerteza sobre o que lhes é solicitado que executem e o receio de optarem por práticas eventualmente incorretas e que sobretudo fundamentem queixas por parte dos encarregados de educação, receios ilustrados no estudo de ramiro e colegas (2013), e, por outro lado, permite que os professores adotem precisamente práticas menos eficazes, que são caraterísticas de outras abordagens/modelos teóricos não congruentes com a abordagem holística advogada na europa, designadamente do modelo de risco. a focalização na vertente informativa e na componente fisiológica e negativa da sexualidade que, por sua vez, pode ter implícitos fundamentos da moral conservadora, ilustra a influência do modelo de risco. o vazio na atual legislação no que diz respeito ao modelo teórico e ao quadro ético, que deveriam fundamentar a intervenção, contribui, portanto, para a não homogeneidade entre as escolas relativamente a aspetos que não se tratam das especificidades do contexto/comunidade de cada escola, mas sim de evidências científicas sobre o que potencia a eficácia da educação sexual e da intervenção comunitária. todavia, a aplicação da metodologia transversal é também dificultada por outros fatores. apesar de ter vindo a ser recomendada quer em portugal (gtes, 2005; 2007), quer na europa (ippf, 2006), a transversalidade tem também sido reconhecida como um modelo exigente (parker, wellings, & lazarus, 2009). esta tem sido recomendada essencialmente pelas vantagens teóricas de naturalizar a abordagem da sexualidade, envolver intencionalmente todos os professores, inclusive os que creem não serem educadores sexuais, introduzir e alocar eficientemente a educação sexual no curriculum. todavia, estas vantagens teóricas têm colidido com barreiras práticas na sua aplicação, como: o perfil desadequado de alguns professores, agravado pela falta de formação específica ou pela ineficiência desta, a pressão para o cumprimento dos programas das disciplinas (tidas como essenciais), a desvalorização da educação sexual/para a saúde na avaliação das escolas, a responsabilização de todos sem clarificação dos papéis/funções de cada um, mas sobretudo sem a disponibilização das condições no que respeita a alocação de recursos humanos e de tempo/espaço para que a educação sexual seja desenvolvida, em rede, como um projeto da comunidade (fatores em grande parte da responsabilidade do mec e fora do controlo das escolas). estas dificuldades conduzem as escolas à realização de palestras por parte de parceiros para cumprimento das exigências legais (matos et al., 2013), incapacitando a comunidade (fawcett et al., 1995) e transformando a educação sexual numa área extracurricular, o que, segundo os resultados de um estudo de rocha e duarte (2015b) e a unesco (2010), é desfavorável a uma implementação mais efetiva da mesma. também a ausência de guidelines referentes aos procedimentos de avaliação da educação sexual, assim como o não cumprimento do legislado por parte do próprio mec (ex. atraso na avaliação global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 do impacto da última legislação), contribuem para a incipiência deste processo nas escolas, especificamente para que este se desenrole de uma forma desempoderante, uma vez que não assenta em princípios fundamentais como: a participação democrática, a melhoria e a pertença potenciada através da responsabilização da comunidade pelo mesmo (becker et al., 2004; illback et al., 1990; menezes, 2010). por fim, a insuficiência do apoio prestado pelas dre contribui igualmente para a variância entre escolas, já que ele próprio é pouco homogéneo, como sugerido nos resultados do estudo de leal (2013), que ilustraram diferenças estatisticamente significativas entre escolas pertencentes às dre do norte e de lisboa e vale do tejo. por conseguinte, não obstante o impacto globalmente positivo do trabalho levado a cabo pelo gtes e da mais recente legislação no domínio da educação sexual, algumas das medidas consagradas na mesma (macrossistema) potenciam fragilidades e dificuldades vivenciadas ao longo dos restantes sistemas ecológicos. estas dificuldades e fragilidades potenciadas pela legislação específica parecem ter sido agravadas consideravelmente pelo impacto negativo da escolha, por parte do mec, pela ‘dita instrução’ como um fim encerrado em si próprio, na reforma curricular e nas posteriores mudanças no sistema educativo, colocando em causa a sustentabilidade da educação sexual nas escolas portuguesas como um projeto comunitário. a avaliação realizada pela comunidade escolar aponta neste sentido, já que a mesma refere que a lei nº 60/2009 e a respetiva portaria foram facilitadoras, mas muito desenquadradas das políticas educativas posteriores (rocha, 2015). de facto, no estudo qualitativo apresentado no relatório sobre o impacto da legislação (matos et al., 2013), esta avaliação por parte da comunidade escolar é mais pormenorizada. assim, as direções das escolas dizem-se sobrecarregadas com tarefas administrativas para cooperarem mais na educação sexual, embora reconheçam que, quando esta faz parte das rotinas e é sistematicamente acompanhada pelos diferentes órgãos, a resistência dos professores, pais e alunos diminui, sendo a sua implementação mais bem-sucedida, o que reforça o princípio básico da intervenção comunitária de que os profissionais e agentes da comunidade têm de ser envolvidos nas decisões para resistirem menos à mudança (fosterfishman & keys, 1997; orford, 1992). por seu turno, os professores sentem-se também sobrecarregados, pouco valorizados e reconhecidos, lamentando que o fim das áreas curriculares não disciplinares, assim como a não redução da componente letiva do professor coordenador, os tenha levado à rentabilização da disciplina das ciências naturais/biologia para não comprometer o cumprimento dos programas das restantes disciplinas e ao estabelecimento de parcerias. os alunos reconhecem os obstáculos a uma maior participação da sua parte causados pelo calendário eleitoral e pela instabilidade da sua associação representativa e, lamentando a repetição de temas, mostram-se pouco crentes da transversalidade devido ao perfil de alguns professores. apresentam como propostas, nomeadamente, o recurso às novas tecnologias de informação e a participação de agentes global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 externos. os pais reconhecem os mesmos obstáculos relativos à sua associação, assim como as dificuldades inerentes a uma participação de pais que ultrapasse a resolução de problemas em exclusivo. na verdade, os discursos dos diferentes agentes parecem refletir um baixo sentido de comunidade enquanto conceito que assenta nas componentes de pertença, influência, integração e satisfação de necessidades, e conexão partilhada (mcmillan & chavis, 1986), o que pode concomitantemente ser causa e efeito da baixa participação da comunidade educativa em projetos como a educação sexual (ramos, 2008). na verdade, a variância evidenciada em estudos recentes (rocha & duarte, 2015a,b), a par das dificuldades em envolver a comunidade escolar, leva-nos a equacionar um eventual efeito perverso da lei nº 60/2009 na medida em que há a possibilidade de algumas escolas procurarem mais cumprir com os requisitos legais da obrigatoriedade da educação sexual, do que responder verdadeiramente às necessidades da comunidade escolar, como já equacionado por sousa (2012); já que a educação sexual está concebida na legislação como um projeto da comunidade, mas as condições essenciais para uma intervenção comunitária, i.e., uma intervenção que promova o envolvimento ativo da própria comunidade (menezes, 2010; ramos, 2008), não são asseguradas na mesma. neste sentido, também outros investigadores e os próprios dirigentes escolares receiam um retrocesso relativamente à sustentabilidade da educação sexual nas escolas (baptista, 2014; matos et al., 2013; ramiro et al., 2013; sousa, 2012). desafios atuais e propostas de ação promotoras da educação sexual em contexto escolar o panorama traçado anteriormente aponta para desafios na promoção da educação sexual no contexto escolar português, que não se restringem ao seu domínio específico, mas se propagam ao domínio lato da educação. essencialmente, identificamos na atualidade sete desafios interrelacionados e primordiais à educação sexual, nas escolas portuguesas. o primeiro não é específico da educação sexual, mas tem um impacto considerável na mesma e remete para a necessidade de valorizar o desenvolvimento pessoal e social dos alunos e das comunidades, reforçando a educação holística como forma de promover o empoderamento da comunidade educativa e envolvente (menezes, 2010; zimmerman, 1995). o segundo desafio atual resume-se à necessidade de assegurar as condições fundamentais para que a educação sexual se desenvolva efetivamente como um projeto comunitário, respondendo às necessidades específicas do contexto – comunidade, escola, turma – no qual se desenvolve, e não aos indicadores legais inscritos na lei nº 60/2009 (becker et al., 2004; menezes, 2010); e potenciando a participação dos agentes da comunidade, nomeadamente dos estudantes e dos encarregados de educação, através de estratégias que vão ao encontro das suas necessidades e interesses e que fomentem a sua participação ativa, o que implica trabalhar com eles desde a conceção do projeto (becker et al., 2004; illback et al., 1990). bastante relacionado com os desafios anteriores, o terceiro desafio prende-se global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 com a necessidade de potenciar o trabalho multidisciplinar através da complementaridade de saberes e competências dos diversos profissionais (rappaport, 2005), sendo a este nível essencial adequar o número de recursos humanos alocados à equipa de coordenação, os períodos de trabalho da mesma, bem como os critérios de seleção destes recursos e a sua formação, que deve ser adequada especificamente ao papel desempenhado pelos diferentes profissionais na educação sexual. também como forma de promover o empoderamento da comunidade (zimmerman, 1995), parece urgente aumentar a perceção de exequibilidade da legislação por parte da comunidade educativa – o quarto desafio. esta pode ser potenciada através de medidas de apoio mais próximo e homogéneo por parte das estruturas intermédias do mec, assim como da publicação de guidelines mais específicas que clarifiquem quer os procedimentos a adotar, especialmente no envolvimento da comunidade, na aplicação da transversalidade e na avaliação, quer o papel dos agentes educativos ao nível dos diversos sistemas ecológicos. providenciar condições estruturais que facilitem a integração da educação sexual no curriculum é o quinto desafio por nós identificado. este pode ser respondido através, especificamente da:1) operacionalização e implementação do modelo transversal, e da interdisciplinaridade, entre as quais destacamos a valorização da educação sexual/para a saúde na avaliação das escolas (como advogam a oms (1986) e a uipes (2010)), a inclusão dos seus conteúdos nos programas das disciplinas, a formação específica dos professores, a atribuição de tempo para o planeamento e a monitorização; e 2) criação/reativação da obrigatoriedade de espaços curriculares inteiramente dedicados ao desenvolvimento pessoal e social do estudante, como era suposto serem as áreas curriculares não disciplinares. por fim, os dois últimos desafios referemse aos conteúdos e à avaliação. relativamente aos primeiros, será importante descentrá-los da vertente informativa e da componente biológica da sexualidade, sendo a definição do modelo teórico e do quadro ético um contributo essencial, conforme advogado por gómezzapiain e colaboradores (2005) e sánchez (2005). no que concerne a avaliação, esta deve ser concetualizada como instrumento de empoderamento e, portanto de sustentabilidade da própria educação sexual e não de mero controlo, sendo essencial realizar-se a avaliação da eficácia e do impacto das atuais práticas como meio de análise do impacto das políticas atuais no domínio (becker et al., 2004; illback et al., 1990; menezes, 2010).a este nível, e como também sugerido por matos e colegas (2013), as entidades financiadoras de projetos de investigação e desenvolvimento, nomeadamente a tutelada pelo mec, podem ter um papel fundamental no apoio a projetos de investigação, com especial destaque para projetos de investigação-ação que potenciam a relação universidade-escola na construção multidisciplinar do conhecimento relativo a intervenções empiricamente validadas (oja & smulyan, 1989). assim, importa esclarecer que às propostas que associamos aos desafios elencados anteriormente, sobretudo às de definição de modelos e procedimentos, global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 não subjaz nenhuma recomendação no sentido da regulamentação de códigos de conduta obsessivos que tolham a autonomia e o poder de decisão das comunidades escolares, instituições parceiras e estruturas intermédias do mec. o que pretendemos são, antes, propostas de medidas políticas que potenciem precisamente quer a tomada de decisões por parte das comunidades escolares, tendo em vista a sua saúde sexual (who, 2006), quer o apoio às mesmas por parte de parceiros e estruturas intermédias do mec. referências abrantes, e., ladeiras, l., manso, m., & lima, r. m. 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(2013). perspectiva evolutiva das políticas e práticas de educação sexual na comunidade escolar em portugal. doxa, 17, 245-293. uipes (2010). promover a saúde na escola: da evidência à acção. retirado de http://www.iuhpe.org/images/pub lications/thematic/hps/evide nce-action_por.pdf who/bzga (2010). standards for sexuality education in europe: a framework for policy makers, educational and health authorities and specialists. cologne: who/bzga. who/bzga (2013). standards for sexuality education in europe: guidance for implementation. cologne: who/bzga. zimmerman, m. a. (1995). psychological empowerment: issues and illustrations. american journal of community psychology, 23, 581-599. microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 15 foreword the first international conference on community psychology, held at the university of puerto rico, campus río piedras, in june 2006, was a bold initiative designed to convene for the first time community psychologists from all over the world. the general topic was “shared agendas in diversity”. the conference was successful in deploying the diversity of community psychology agendas and in giving the opportunity to exchange the variety of experiences in which community psychologists were involved. the second conference took place in june 2008 in lisbon, portugal. the instituto superior de psicología aplicada was this time the convener. the leitmotif chosen was “building participative, empowering and diverse communities; visioning community psychology in worldwide perspective”. this time the purpose of the international gathering was to encourage community psychologists to build communities characterized by participation and empowerment, learning from the diversity of participants’ research and interventions. this conference was a second landmark in conforming and confirming the international status of community psychology. the third conference celebrated in june 2010 at universidad iberoamericana in puebla, mexico, focused on “community approaches to contemporary social problems”. it addressed the scientific and professional status of community psychology as an international endeavor from the perspective of the historical and sociocultural context of present day social concerns and as a multidisciplinary “linking science” able to afford an original and needed contribution to deal with them. community psychology worldwide has been relevant in relation to key sociopsychological issues in rich and disadvantaged nations confronted by psychologists since the mid-fifties of the last century. three important recent sources of international community psychology give the information to support this general overview: international community psychology: history and theories (reich et al., 2007); international community psychology: shared agendas in diversity (vázquez rivera, et al., 2009); and historias de la psicología comunitaria en américa latina. participación y transformación (montero y serrano-garcía, 2011). 16 in the 1950s and 1960s the key social psychological issues were how to attend the health and mental health needs of the world population (bennett, sarason, pichón rivière, moffat, cueli); and how to make relevant psychological contributions to solve development problems (fals borda, seaman, escovar). in the 1970s the concerns of community psychologists were how to attend to the needs of the poor, the minorities and the elderly. (bronfenbrenner, almeida, rappaport, kelly); and how to develop alternative sociopolitical strategies in the disadvantaged nations to end colonization and to improve the material and psychological human condition (freire, fanon, maurer lane, duncan). in the 1980s the issues raised were how to respond to the demands of gender equality and of the needs of the disabled (c. kagan, burton, francescato, bristo, ornelas); and how to confront the psychological hurdles to the democratization process of the world (martín-baró, montero rivas, seidman, maori psychologists, theology of liberation). in the 1990s the world was confronted with how to deal with the new epidemics (hivaids and others) and with the spread of drug addictions (serrano-garcía, pérez jiménez, medina mora, natera, orford); and also for ways to confront the psychological impacts of the economic impositions of the world financial institutions (zapatistas, dobles, bader sawaiia, freitas, fryer). in the 2000s new threats had to be envisioned: how to face the world’s natural systems degradation and the new technologies psychosocial consequences (mercado, montero y l. l., legewie, wiesenfeld, malvezzi, stark, v. francisco, voorhees, blanchard, obst); and how to fight for public policies beneficial to the well being of everyone, not only of the elites (l. t. smith, e. sánchez, sánchez vidal, sixsmith, sasao, miranda, aubry, zambrano). in the 2010s the world looks for ways to deal with migration and economic recession problems everywhere (papineau, nafstad, botchway, garcía ramírez, lundburg, wolff); and to confront the related psychosocial realities of domination, discrimination, exclusion and violence generated by the powerful capitalistic trend to give absolute priority to financial profits at the expense of the well being of humanity (trigo, moreno, sonn, vargas moniz, bauman, sacipa). the aforementioned issues are undoubtedly the main psychosocial concerns of the recent historical decades. this picture give the rationale behind the main theme for the third conference: community approaches to contemporary social problems. the focus was on economic polarization, interculturality, new technologies, and violence. the conference was 17 designed for contributing to the study of such topics. in this first volume of the proceedings the reader will find the texts of the 16 invited collaborators. the same topics certainly will be studied in the articles chosen for the second volume. given the importance of community realities, i.e. of interacting cognitive and emotional collective life situations, as a timely issue, these proceedings become all the more significant by providing additional background for this emerging international community psychology as a “linking science”. it has to be acknowledged that community psychology has been so far powerful in experiences, diverse in agendas, limited in theorizing and academic institutionalization, and scarce in communicating its findings. there has been an honest effort of deflating some of the current myths and misconceptions of community and about community psychology. the main issue for the social sciences from community psychology it is not the relation between the individual and society, but the relation between the individual, community and society. community psychology as a linking science, recognizing the diversity of its local or regional agendas, can help in studying and understanding social problems from their subsumed human relational realities. it can contribute also to the knowledge and comprehension of individual subjective and objective situations related to healthy and unhealthy behaviors and mental conditions. this is to say that the concept and reality of community imply not only a mediating role in the exchanges between the individual and society, but that it becomes, in some sense, a third important element in order to explain and understand the status and dynamics of the human condition: relationality, communication, conversation. when we speak of community in this foreword we refer to a form of group relationship based on a dynamic interaction relatively stable that includes strategies of conflict management and diverse levels of shared utopias. in other words we have in mind a collective process of an evolving system of stabilized relationships, of a dynamic network of communication, of a web of ongoing conversations among individuals in which they can find mutuality, affection and identity. community as relationality adopts different community structures according to historical and cultural circumstances and places. the third international conference on community psychology was designed to build knowledge on the way diverse community structures and experiences approach and confront the four main concerns of our times. 18 four sets of main issues. the contents of this book are presented in four sets of texts organized according to the subject matters developed by the collaborators: critical vision of community psychology; health as a community challenge; violence, attempts upon community life; cultures and communities. a) critical vision of community psychology four texts intend to raise questions from the previous development of the community psychology field: -­‐ in “from complexity and social justice to consciousness: ideas that have constructed community psychology” maritza montero attempts to build a theoretical system through the analysis of ideas that have contributed to conform community psychology as a way to study and offer solutions to social problems affecting communities, to achieve a better world. this text of the inaugural conference is an invitation to join the author in the unending and neglected effort to give better and richer theoretical foundations to our emergent science. -­‐ maría de fátima quintal de freitas develops a model of analysis in “community psychology as political education and awareness-raising: resistances and possibilities in everyday life”. the purpose is to offer an approach that makes possible its liberation paradigm. engaged participation in social transformation and raised awareness sometimes are taken for granted in community programs without taking into account the challenges and dilemmas encountered in the present contexts of globalization and exclusion. how to guarantee a way of social change strengthening the small networks of solidarity? how to involve? how to keep involved? -­‐ “thinking critically the theory and practice of community psychology”, this article by esther wiesenfeld presents a demanding agenda for the years ahead. community social psychology in latin america can be viewed as a psychological discipline with an autonomous development in the region. it includes academic and field programs, multiple areas of application, processes, scopes of action, populations, activities. the 19 discipline has been growing steadily. however, many questions have to be raised, in terms of initial values and expectations, its adaptation to society’s rapid changes, theoretical and methodological usefulness, new dilemmas and challenges, community myths, university training, relevance in the struggle to confront poverty. -­‐ a proposal to enlarge the field is offered by wolfgang stark in “community psychology as a linking science: potentials and challenges for transdisciplinary competencies”. community psychology must go beyond its traditional concerns and its focus on local communities. the idea includes collaborating more with other disciplines, societal institutions, business companies; learning from different cultural values approaches; focusing on macro and micro issues of community analysis and community building; developing its identity as a linking science. the message for community psychology coming out from these four presentations relates to the need to increase the theoretical activity in the field, to develop analytical skills and practices, to keep alive and alert the critical eye of the discipline, and to broaden the scope of its concerns as a scientific crossroads. in the inaugural address maritza montero develops the key idea of relatedness from which derives the notions of sense of community and of community identity. fatima quintal de freitas contributes to this position when she relates social change with individual involvement by creating small networks of solidarity. esther wiesenfeld manifests in her paper her concern about the inadequacy of community psychology as it is understood and practiced in relation to our societies rapid changes in a weltanschauung dominated by individualistic trends. wolfgang stark suggests the need of community psychology to develop its identity as a linking science by focusing on community as a catalyst of macro and micro social issues. 20 b) health as a community challenge recurrent themes, important for community psychology, are the difficulties endured by persons attempting to provide appropriate community health services and the ones suffered by people who receive such services such difficulties are presented in the next papers: a first theme is the well-being of people living with long-term neurological conditions; of families and communities affected by addictions; of indigenous women linked to an alcoholic partner; of homeless people from a first world country. another theme is the importance of listening to the cultural and circumstantial aspects of the affected. the third is the need for collaborative working between disciplines. -­‐ in “well-being services for people with long term neurological conditions: coresearchers involvement in research, service design and development” judith sixsmith affirms that community health services can enhance the well-being of people rather than simply reveal or address their health and social care needs. this chapter outlines the involvement strategies in services provided for people with long term neurological conditions refocusing service provider perceptions away from seeing this people as needy, or as problems to be solved and more towards people whose well-being can be improved with the support of professionals. the study includes coresearchers training. it presents reflections on the process of involvement in service design and delivery. -­‐ an enormous challenge for families and communities health and well being come from the millions of people whose lives are adversely affected by alcohol or drug addiction. having to cope with it can make it a highly stressful experience. in “reempowering family members disempowered by addictions: support for individuals or collective action?” jim orford presents a program of research that has explored in detail the nature of affected family members experiences and develops a method for helping affected family members in their own right. the research carried out in four countries has suggested the existence of a common core of disempowered experience with some cross-cultural variations. the supporting method emphasizes listening 21 carefully to families’stories, providing relevant information, discussing coping dilemmas and building social support. -­‐ guillermina natera has experienced that it is extremely difficult to modify patterns of consumption of alcohol in indigenous families and communities. however, these families suffer from poverty and from the consequences of the alcohol abuse of a relative, and usually they do not receive assistance. “the mental itineraries of the everyday lives of indigenous woman linked to their partners excessive alcohol consumption” describes a research project that studied women’s forms of suffering from this problem in a patriarchal world. it is difficult for them to tell others about their partner’s problem. a brief intervention model was adapted to help families. listening respectfully to the emotional malaise of the women enabled the researchers to discover their mental itineraries and to devise new coping strategies which led to a significant reduction of depressive, health and psychological symptoms. -­‐ homelessness is a major social public health problem affecting people all over the world. it affects also developed countries. it is defined as a living situation in which individuals and families are lacking permanent housing as a result of poverty and inadequate supports. in “conducting research on homelessness in canada from a community psychology perspective: reflections on lessons learned” tim aubry refers to two projects of research on homelessness within a community psychology perspective that were conducted in ottawa: a longitudinal study that followed a group of people who started out homeless for a period of two years; and a project for the development and dissemination of report cards on homelessness. some lessons learned were the need to expand research and advocacy efforts on homelessness, the need to develop them in collaboration with the community, the need to make a significant investment in dissemination of research findings. these four presentations offer new insights in dealing with community health problems. one important aim of community health psychology is to look for the well-being of people, beyond their problems. health hurdles affect not only individuals but also and significantly the 22 lives of the collectives in which they live. patriarchal obstacles and other cultural limitations can be overcome developing community innovative strategies. social public health problems are global in nature, research efforts about them most become important objects of public policies. judith sixsmith stresses the importance of addressing the problems of long term neurological disabilities not only as a social problem or as an individual impairment, but as a collective need for well being. jim orford and guillermina natera focus their papers in the same way pointing out to the addiction problems not as a general social plague or as an individual limitation, but as a source of distress for the family and the community. tim aubry’s work on homelessness has been concerned with it not as an abstract social problem, or as an individual situation, but as a community challenge to be addressed locally through adequate social policies. c) violence, attempts upon community life. this section includes papers from a symposium and a keynote invited address intended to catalyze critical conference debate in relation to violence. the question was how should violence be understood from a community psychology standpoint and how can that understanding be progressively deployed. the next four articles will talk, from the differing standpoints of the authors, about their violence-related work: socio-structural, political, xenophobic and racial violence. -­‐ in “the war without bullets: socio-structural violence from a critical standpoint” david fryer, a community psychologist, and cathy mccormack, a community activist, have worked in mutually supportive and stimulating ways to collaboratively understand and contest socio-structural violence. they focused critically on interconnections between poverty, inequality, unemployment and psycho-social destruction. the community activist characterized these interconnections as manifestations of “war without bullets” waged against oppressed people. she has promoted awareness. the community psychologist has tried to develop the notion of a “war without bullets” to give it theoretical discursive legitimacy. this chapter 23 presents the discursive frame of reference. long term collaboration between community activism and community psychology for effective thinking and action are discussed. -­‐ stella sacipa rodríguez is the author of “building cultures of peace in the community life in the face of intensifying political violence in colombia”. the purpose of the chapter is to think and build peace cultures by referring to the different challenges confronted by a country immersed in political violence, studying them through community psychology and political psychology. the author studies experiences from three sources: reports from religious organizations, research communications from the colombian “social links and peace cultures research group”, and reports from researchers working in non-psychological disciplines studying violence problems. the author points out the fascination for violence in colombia, the repressive actions conducted daily by the government, and the political system, as hurdles to achieve a culture of peace. -­‐ norman duncan’s paper “reaping the whirlwind: xenophobic violence in south africa” reports that this kind of violence did not disappear once the apartheid was over. the country was hit by waves of violent attacks against foreigners, mostly people of color and most of them poor. more than 70 people died and 120,000 were displaced. the intensity of, as well as the apparent motivation for this new violence came as a surprise to most. this chapter examines the causes of this violence. the paper explores potential contributions of community psychology in addressing xenophobic violence. -­‐ christopher sonn explores the challenges, tensions and possibilities for pedagogy and community research in contexts where relations are characterized by dynamics of dominance and subjugation in australia. in “research and practice in the contact zone: crafting resources for challenging racialized exclusion” the author draws on three areas of research and practice where he has been involved in examining responses to intergroup relations with a focus on identity construction. the author has 24 ventured far beyond the borders of community psychology to identify ways that maintain racialized oppression. some conceptual and methodological resources are discussed that have been helpful in making visible symbolic ways that keep intergroup relations characterized by race related privilege and power. regarding the many faces of violence manifested in recent decades, the four papers of the third section make it clear that they are usefully envisioned and confronted by focusing them from a community perspective. the “war without bullets” i.e. the socio-structural violence endured by the majority of people in the world can be fought according to david fryer and cathy mccormark through popular education and academic support at the local community level. the political violence experimented in colombia since the mid-fifties of the last century, and aggravated recently, has been studied and counteracted by local experiences originated in religious organizations and by interdisciplinary teams. stella sacipa reports her work as a community psychologist member of a research team targeting objectives of peace development at the community level. political violence is structural and rests on individual leaders actions, but a community intervention approach has been shown as an effective strategy. sometimes xenophobic violence seems to be averted when a whole country has defeated a generalized discrimination reality such as the apartheid. however, norman duncan’s paper reveals that the problem cannot be solved, until the seeds of xenophobia are uprooted culturally at the local communities level. christopher sonn’s keynote address make it explicit that racialized oppression and violence cannot be really confronted and overcome until symbolic collective ways of racialized intergroup relations are made visible. there are many faces of violence. in this book four of them are explored: violence related to poverty created by social structures, violence generated by protracted wars, a culture of violence perpetuated once colonialism is supposed to be over, subtle ways to maintain racialized oppression. community psychology contributes to uncover the psychosocial causes of violence, to build cultures of peace, to realize the profound seeds of violence created by long term colonialism, and to be alert not to reproduce, with maybe good intentions, racialized oppression. 25 d) cultures and communities community psychology takes into account the cultural diversity of the scenarios in which research, intervention, reflection and action occur. four papers refer to this heterogeneity dealing with community approaches related to different experiences: a new national program of primary health care, the family nurse and physician model, that takes seriously as basic the culturehealth relationships; the development of community psychology in a country characterized by strong indigenous cultures; the possibilities of community life in a contemporary culture gadget oriented; the needed change in the cultural paradigm of our times from an individualist one into a solidarity one as the only possibility for subject (social actor) development and the creation of community. -­‐ alicia martínez tena presents a multidisciplinary approach to understand the social and cultural factors linked to healthy and unhealthy situations and to describe the characteristics of the culture-health model of primary health care developed in cuba. regional cultural differences are considered in trying to visualize the way of life of the patient, his cultural practices and his links with the members of his family and with other social actors of his community. the article “cultural factors and primary health care in cuba. a vision from community practice” stresses the need to develop a cultural communication process including the practice of attentive listening, the recognition of particular cultural patterns of behavior, the negotiation of therapeutic recommendations. -­‐ in “community psychology and social problems in mexico” eduardo almeida affirms that indigenous cultures are the backbone of community life in mexico. years and centuries of intents to disappear the mesoamerican ways of life from the mexican population have failed. community psychology, as an emergent social science in mexico, cannot be understood without this background. psychoanalytic, behavioral, clinical, social and labor psychology approaches have been implemented to study and intervene with mexican populations as community experiences. the field in mexico has been informally evolving through the practices and thinking of mexican psychologists confronted by pressing social problems. 26 -­‐ the individualist culture that pervades the industrialized countries and that gradually becomes the pattern of life everywhere does not favor communitarian life. sigmar malvezzi stresses this point in “the syntax of present day society and the building of community life”. people are learning to depend on gadgets rather than on other people. that culture gives value and makes people dependent on sensations. another trait is the cult of the urgency, time and space are shrinking and people depend on the flow of conjunctures. these conditions nourish social sedentarization and individualization. however, communitarian life is the human condition. in it human beings find mutuality, affection and identity. in the war people face with their own conscience the most powerful weapon are reflexivity and affection, resources found in community life, not in gadgets. -­‐ “countercurrent subject and community”, the keynote address of pedro trigo, offered a radical program for community psychology. human subjects and humanitarian communities cannot flourish in a culture of individualism and corporativism which is the dominant trend in our times. to overcome this powerful culture it is required a critical mass of authentic human subjects immersed in non fundamentalist communities and in free associations promoting life and the recognition of others, particularly the poor. an experience of more than three decades living in poor neighborhoods of latin american cities made pedro trigo aware of the suburban culture of these populations that is characterized by the agonic conatus (struggle) for a dignified life, totally different from the individualistic conatus (struggle) to maintain oneself in the existence. poor people from the decaying urban suburbs are able to surmount a neglecting government, the lack of productive employment, and negative life conditions. in doing so they become extraordinary human subjects. the ecclesiastic communities of the poor favor this culture of conviviality where a communitarian tissue can be nurtured. the previous papers contribute to make explicit the cultural face of the community concept. alicia martínez tena describes the cuban health program as a new way to approach the 27 well being of the population by looking at health social problems not as national ones or as individual malaise. eduardo almeida stresses the importance of community psychology as a neglected scientific perspective to deal with the psychosocial problems of mexico. community life was, has been, and will be, a cultural trait of its identity. the roots of this affirmation can be found in the empirical fact of the indigenous cultures’ influence in all national ways of life. sigmar malvezzi’s paper uncover the reasons of much of the social problems of our times, pointing out that people from the rich nations and increasingly people from poor countries are disaffected with their societies and place their existential confidence more on gadgets than on persons. pedro trigo offers the most radical proposition in terms of achieving a human society integrated by fraternal human beings as subjects. the last four chapters of this book offer the possibility to see with different perspectives the cultural diversity of the studies and interventions carried out by community psychology: the beneficial effect of considering cultural factors in national health programs; the richness and fecundity of recurring to old and vulnerable cultural traditions to better understand present community situations and difficulties; the awareness of the prevailing culture of gadgets promoted by the uncritical use of the new technologies, and the promise of a more human life by promoting a community culture of mutuality, affection and identity; and finally the proposition of making a radical change of the predominant individualistic culture into a convivial culture able to create communities of dignified life for everyone. the pre-conference workshops a word of recognition is due, after this review of the 16 invited presentations, about the 10 pre-conference workshops conducted by 14 invited experts. dolores miranda and maría montero described the main theoretical and methodological characteristics of community psychology to the people in the workshop “training of community psychologists”. dolores and maría tried to develop the participants competencies in critical analysis, proposals of solution to specific community problems and evaluation of possible interventions. 28 irma serrano-garcia and david pérez jiménez provided knowledge and evaluation skills for people involved in community organizations. the workshop “community projects evaluation” included lectures and interactive activities for the participants. the workshop “ethical questions on community action”, conducted by alipio sánchez vidal, was designed to develop skills in dealing with ethical implications while working on difficult social problems during community interventions. the participants manifested great interest in the workshop “violence in couples’ affective relationships” given by leonor cantera. most of them were already immersed in programs of prevention and problem resolution regarding those violent situations. serdar degirmencioglu from turkey and jorge basaldúa from mexico discussed with the participants how to create favorable conditions for groups of young subjects’participation in community decisions. the workshop was titled “community action and youth”. jorge gonzález and josé amozurrutia studied with the participants “emergent communities of local knowledge” using cyberculture to achieve groups of distributed cognition. people worked on “community coalitions” with tom wolff to create healthy communities, developing the power of collaborative solutions in favoring social justice. “community profiling, networks and organizational analysis: tools to empower women and minority groups”, a workshops conducted by donata francescato criticized political ideologies of social dominance and focused empowerment processes for women and minority groups. the participants experienced creative tools such and novels, movies, jokes and narratives to explore affective dimensions. jaime alfaro insunza and alba zambrano discussed with the participants community intervention practices in programs of social policies. the workshop “public policies and community psychology” studied three spanish autonomic communities and three chilean localities in the araucania region. social movements of civil resistance, a key strategy for our contemporary problems was the object of the workshop “culture and active non-violence”. pietro ameglio discussed the gandhian program of “swaraj” (self-government) and of “satyagraha” (the power of truth) as a timely approach for a movement of peace, with justice and dignity. 29 homages the third international conference on community psychology honored with a memorial session two remarkable psychologists and a committed community activist. isaac prilleltensky presented the life and achievements of seymour b. sarason, an american psychologist whose groundbreaking work on social settings and their influence on individual problems helped establish the field of community psychology. sigmar malvezzi talked about silvia tatiana maurer lane, a brazilian psychologist who looked for a transforming social psychology able to confront the colonization and violent exploitation situations in latin america. to meet that challenge she proposed community psychology. eva gálvez member of a mexican ngo working with oppressed populations, recalled the committed life of alberta cariño, her companion in the struggle for emancipating people in an indigenous region, who was murdered while carrying vital supplies to a village controlled by brigands serving the political interests of a corrupt governor of the state of oaxaca. final reflections the third international conference on community psychology has afforded its modest but relevant contribution to the development of our field. although one is tempted sometimes to agree with the popular saying that there is nothing totally new under the sun regarding the human condition, particularly when one looks at the recurrent historical traits of irrationality, sickness, violence and discrimination, there are at least four problems in the contemporary world situation that have an impact on it, that differ in magnitude and complexity and that were addressed by the conference: the negative effects of globalization as economic polarization between the rich and the poor; the unequal distribution of the new technologies and their detrimental consequences of sedentarization and solipsism; the asymmetries in the intercultural relations incremented and intensified by the process of migration; and the almost unbelievable deployment of violence the world over. the realization of the third international conference in puebla was a redoubtable challenge. but it has been a community achievement adventure. we hope that this first volume 30 of the proceedings together with the second, now in preparation in puerto rico, could give witness to the progressive advancement of the international community psychology as a worldwide service contributing to enhance and dignify the life of every human being. let me recall at the end of this introduction the words of fernando pessoa that expressed the lively atmosphere of the third conference: of everything three things remained: the certainty that we were always starting again. the certainty that we had to go on. the certainty that we will be interrupted before we had finished. build a new path out of the interruption, build a dancing step, out of the fall, a ladder, out of fear, a bridge, out of dreams, an encounter, out of the quest. october 2011 eduardo almeida acosta editor 31 references montero, m. y serrano-garcía, i. (comps.). (2011). historias de la psicología comunitaria en américa latina. participación y transformación. buenos aires: paidós. 447 pp. reich, s. m., riemer, m., prilleltensky, i., montero, m. (eds.). (2007). international community psychology: history and theories. new york: springer. 443 pp. vázquez rivera, c., pérez jiménez, d., figueroa rodríguez, m., pacheco bou, w. y restoolivo, j. (eds.). (2009). psicología comunitaria internacional: agendas compartidas en la diversidad. san juan, puerto rico: programa de investigación y refortalecimiento comunitario, instituto filius, universidad de puerto rico. 591 pp. microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 313 community psychology and social problems in mexico. eduardo almeida acosta1 universidad iberoamericana puebla iii international congress of community psychology puebla, mexico, june 3, 2010                                                                                                                           1 eduardo.almeida@iberopuebla.edu.mx 314 community psychology and social problems in mexico. abstract community psychology has basically been an informal academic field of studies and practices. its roots can be traced to an implicit community psychology practiced by indigenous and rural populations since pre-hispanic times, through colonial rule, xix century republican regimes, post mexican revolution rural education programs and governmental and non governmental community development initiatives. the actual academic field of community psychology in mexico shows a scarcity of academic programs that have not had the opportunity to become firmly established in higher education institutions. the main sources of academic theory and practice in contemporary community psychology in the world have had limited influence in mexico. american community psychology with its strong clinical trend has been present but has not been the most important source of impact on mexican community psychologists. latin american community psychology with its contributions to confront the irrelevance of social psychology has also contributed to the development of mexican community psychology but its influence was not decisive and only recently fruitful exchanges have been established. the field in mexico has been informally evolving through the practices and thinking of mexican psychologists confronted by pressing social challenges they have been forced to face in their efforts to make psychology relevant and useful. mexican psychoanalysts tried to apply their expertise with marginalized urban settings. humanist psychologists looked for underserved populations to make explicit their professional commitment in serving humanity. behavior psychologists tried to devise a training curriculum centered on community service. clinical psychologists at unam were concerned about the problems of our people in the big metropolis and by the traumas caused by natural disasters. psychologists from all over mexico and from diverse academic subfields and traditions have been working hand in hand with anthropologists, sociologists, social workers, popular educators, rural experts, and all sort of fields of study, in confronting the problems generated by the unequal distribution of wealth, corruption, the literacy and digital gaps, the denial and discrimination of ethnic peoples, and the increasing violence endured by many people in different regions of the country. what will be the future of community psychology in mexico? what have we learned? what are our weaknesses and what 315 are our strengths? do we need a more formal training? do we need a formal employment market? do we have something specific to offer among the health, education and social sciences? what are our theoretical and practical inputs? we live in difficult times. community psychology will be more needed than ever. what should we do to make it relevant? keywords: historical roots, informality, relevance, community approaches. 316 contribuciones mexicanas de la psicología comunitaria a los problemas sociales contemporáneos. resumen la psicología comunitaria en méxico ha sido básicamente un campo académico informal de estudios y prácticas. sus raíces pueden encontrarse en una psicología comunitaria implícita practicada por poblaciones indígenas y rurales desde los tiempos prehispánicos, a través del periodo colonial, durante los regímenes republicanos del siglo xix, en programas de educación rural después de la revolución mexicana y posteriormente en iniciativas de desarrollo comunitario, gubernamentales y de la sociedad civil. el presente campo académico de la psicología comunitaria en méxico muestra una escasez de programas académicos que no han podido establecerse firmemente en las instituciones de educación superior. las principales fuentes de teoría y práctica académicas de la contemporánea psicología comunitaria mundial han ejercido poca influencia en méxico. la psicología comunitaria de los estados unidos, con su fuerte tendencia clínica, ha estado presente pero no ha sido la fuente de mayor impacto en los psicólogos comunitarios mexicanos. la psicología comunitaria de américa latina, con sus contribuciones para enfrentar la irrelevancia de la psicología social, ha también contribuido al desarrollo de la psicología comunitaria en méxico pero su influencia no ha sido decisiva y sólo recientemente se han establecido fructuosos intercambios. la disciplina en méxico ha ido evolucionando informalmente gracias a las prácticas y a las reflexiones de psicólogos mexicanos confrontados por desafíos sociales urgentes que han tenido que enfrentar en sus esfuerzos para realizar una psicología relevante y útil. psicoanalistas mexicanos han intentado aplicar sus conocimientos y habilidades para atender escenarios urbanos marginalizados. psicólogos humanistas han trabajado con poblaciones vulnerables para hacer explícito su compromiso profesional de servir a la humanidad. psicólogos conductistas se han esforzado por organizar el currículum académico centrándolo en servicio comunitario. psicólogos clínicos de la universidad nacional autónoma de méxico se han preocupado por los problemas mentales de la población en la gran metrópolis de la ciudad de méxico y por los traumas generados por desastres naturales. psicólogos de todo méxico, de diversas subramas académicas y tradiciones, han trabajado de la mano con antropólogos, sociólogos, trabajadores sociales, educadores populares, expertos 317 rurales, y académicos de muchos campos de estudio tratando de colaborar en la solución de problemas producidos por la desigual distribución de la riqueza y la corrupción, el analfabetismo y las brechas digitales, la negación y la discriminación de los pueblos indígenas, y la violencia incrementada que sufre mucha gente en diferentes regiones del país. ¿cuál será el futuro de la psicología comunitaria en méxico? ¿qué hemos aprendido? ¿cuáles son nuestras debilidades y nuestras fortalezas? ¿necesitamos una formación más académica? ¿necesitamos un espacio más formal de empleo? ¿tenemos algo específico qué ofrecer al concierto de las ciencias sociales, de la educación y de la salud? ¿cuáles son nuestros aportes prácticos y teóricos? vivimos en tiempos difíciles. la psicología comunitaria será más necesaria que nunca. ¿qué debemos hacer para volverla más relevante?. palabras clave: raíces históricas, informalidad, relevancia, aproximaciones comunitarias. 318 introduction community psychology, an innovative field of psychology worldwide, has special characteristics in mexico. as an academic field it is made up of rather informal studies and practices in the sense that they are not primarily related to teaching tasks and obtaining degrees. in mexico, however, it has strong implicit roots that date back to pre-hispanic times in which, for example, in the aztec empire on the one hand there was the state with the emperor and his politically-motivated cultural practices that we have all heard about such as the ceremonies in large temples and the historical accounts that have reached us. along with this there was the reality of the communities where the populations' daily life took place (soustelle, 1983: 25), a reality that we have less knowledge of than of the political practices at a more general level. during the colonial period and in the face of the control practices that were exerted on indigenous people by the conquerors, community life continued to be a fact of life that allowed these populations to survive in the midst of situations of exploitation, oppression, contempt and discrimination ( reyes garza, 2000: 75). following the independence and despite the attempt to create a republican nation imitating the french and american liberal proposal, the typical features of rural and indigenous life continued because important practices and experiences of community life remained (escalante gonzalbo, 1999: 59) .the attempt to make the indigenous people citizens, at the expense of ceasing to exist as such, failed. in the struggle for independence indigenous people and peasants did the job for the creoles, without really benefiting from the processes of independence. all the effort to create a country of mexican citizens tended to end the ethnic reality of indigenous groups (acuña, 1981). in the battles of the revolution, peasants and indians also developed the fundamental role. after a hundred years two realities remain: first, that they were the least benefited by the revolutionary movement, and second that they did not cease to exist as peasants and as indigenous peoples. the current reality is that the community life of these people is what has allowed them to survive (bennholdt-thompsen, 1998: 50) and what that allows them to envision a day when they can have access to a dignified life (jiménez, 2007: 77). 319 in short, what i will attempt to refer to is the existence, between peasants and indigenous people of mexico and numerous semi-urban and even urban populations, of locations, love, values and their own powers for a genuine community life. therefore we speak of an implicit community psychology (almeida and flores osorio, 2011). currently, at an academic level, there are only two universities in which to study a master's or doctorate in community psychology (flores mercado, 2009; illescas, 2003).these are two programs that have faced many problems in attempting to prevail for several reasons, including the myth of the lack of job opportunities for those who are dedicated to studying this field. at an undergraduate level, there are courses or subjects in which community psychology is taught, and even at the unam it exists as a terminal field (montero and varas díaz, 2007: 72).aside from these academic realities, community psychology survives thanks to psychologists of all specialties who undertake community work (almeida, martinez and varela, 1995). the contact of mexican community psychology with community psychology worldwide has up to now been limited and marginal; this has been the result of how it has developed in response to needs in the face of social challenges. there was some influence of american community psychology in the seventies in the past century thanks to an academic program that was established at the instituto tecnologico y de estudios superiores de occidente (iteso) in guadalajara. but very soon the program organizers realized that such oritentation as presented was not relevant to the communities in the area. then they supplemented it with an approach toward humanistic psychology (gómez del campo, 1994). on the other hand, latin american community psychology (marín, 1988), which developed in the seventies and eighties due to the attempt to make relevant a social psychology that was devoted to the study of abstract entities and to the influence of social scientists as important as paulo freire and orlando fals borda, was not a decisive influence on the beginnings of mexican community psychology. where does community psychology emerge from in mexico? mexican community psychology arises from the need to address social challenges by psychologists from different theoretical orientations. for example, orthodox psychoanalysts tried to apply their knowledge to meet urban marginality. thus arose the program known as psychocommunity (cueli and biro, 1975) which was developed by teachers and students from 320 the unam and the universidad iberoamericana in mexico city. the program is true social psychotherapy and is still relevant, albeit small, in various community experiences. as stated earlier, psychologists with a humanistic orientation such as juan lafarga and josé gómez del campo used the approach of carl rogers to address urban populations (lafarga and gómez del campo, 1992). at the national school of professional studies iztacala (enep-iztacala), behavioral psychologists developed the study plan for the major in psychology in terms of practices closely tied to community service in its area of influence (lozano treviño and lezama, 2003). unam clinical psychologists decided to complete the training of their students by connecting them with the searing realities of the marginalized urban environment (valenzuela cota, 1995). they also addressed the psychological problems of the university community, and played an important role in the response to psychological problems caused by disasters such as the earthquake that struck mexico city in september 1985. several social psychologists linked to the unam, to the universidad autónoma metropolitana iztapalapa campus, to the autonomous university of puebla and several other universities also began to develop a community psychology based on the theoretical positions they preferred such as the operational groups of pichón rivière, the aforementioned psychocommunity and the ecology of human development of urie bronfenbrenner (bronfenbrenner, 1979). in all these approaches to community there were interdisciplinary relations with social anthropologists, social workers, popular educators, rural experts, feminist sociologists, etc. in all, the target was oriented toward facing the social challenges of unequal distribution of wealth, corruption, illiteracy, discrimination and violence. this set of circumstances and needs is what the basis of mexican community psychology is and perhaps that's where their most interesting contributions emerge. what science are we talking about? ever since the seventies and perhaps the sixties there was plenty of talk about the intellectual and practical crisis of social psychology. this is mentioned now, not only in relation to this branch of psychology, but it can be said of all social sciences (bartra, 2009). in those years, sociology was a field of study which was highly sought by students. today, few choose it, due in part to the difficulty involved in a life devoted to researching social problems, instead of dealing professionally with the problems it studies. 321 the trends of capitalism after the fall of the berlin wall, neoliberalism and the scarcity of jobs in recent times have added to this intellectual crisis of social sciences. moreover, according to several experts in these sciences, the crisis has also been caused by the isolation of its practitioners, the lack of a critical sense with regard to one's own work and approaches of these fields, to the lack of communication, the fragmentation of many schools of thought and the jumble of theoretical papers without empirical support (bartra, 2009). in the face of this intellectual crisis, what can we say of a psychology which has been socially accused of being useless? just as for other social sciences, in psychology there is also a shortage of critical studies of the science itself as well as isolation and fragmentation. the excessively individualistic approach to psychology, that we have ironically sometimes called that of attention to the middle-class' neurosis, has prevented us from being aware of the country in which it develops, a country where mental health problems are of a more collective nature and are related to cultural and structural causes (almeida, 2011). this explains the reluctance of directors of many psychology schools and departments, throughout the territory, to make social psychology the orientation that corresponds to the needs of the country. psychology is currently the human and social sciences major with the highest demand by students because it allows them to orient themselves toward the performance of a professional practice (bartra, 2009) with little relevance in the social area. this explains the scarcely academic reality, in the curricular sense, of community psychology. what have the contributions of community psychology been? the origin of community psychology in mexico can be found in the response to social challenges. this has allowed it to have a path without as much fragmentation as other branches of psychology or that of other social sciences. educational psychologists, organizational psychologists, health psychologists, clinical psychologists and social psychologists have found themselves working side by side and face to face in trying to solve social problems in communities in which they have worked. the awareness of this non-fragmentation has not been assessed at its full potential. this is so because as in other social sciences there is a lack of criticality and assessment in its practitioners. 322 if something is unusual in community psychology it is its proximity to society. here one cannot apply the accusation of the remoteness of science toward the problem it intends to study. the proximity to society and the discretion of its actions however, have not allowed community psychology to become more visible in the perception that governments have had of its activity, even though many community psychologists work in government organizations or government programs. the designers of these programs and the bureaucrats, who control them, seldom realize the knowledge, skills and attitudes displayed by these community psychologists in undertaking their task in order to make the role they play be less of assistance. the work of community psychologists is seldom mentioned in the domesticated mass media which often takes on critical positions of resistance in the face of government aberrations. it is known that social sciences, particularly economics and political science, have focused on responding to issues of concern to the authoritarian governments that have characterized mexico (bartra, 2009). the work of community psychology on the other hand develops between alternative programs, with low visibility and low submission to the demands of the state. in academia, community psychology is presented as a marginal trend. community psychologists have had to achieve recognition by the usefulness of their work and products that have been achieved (pick and givaudan, 1999: 203). currently, the business environment is discovering the importance of the concept and reality of community for the organizational effectiveness of their companies. community psychology is characterized by its closeness to society, their experience of conflict, its low visibility, and scarce recognition. a venture of community psychology has been the quality of communication that has been developed between its experiences and its practitioners. it has been a venture because you cannot do community work in isolation, detached from real social networks in the environment in which it develops. very diverse meetings have been fostered to achieve the exchange of experiences (flores osorio, 2007; almeida and flores osorio, 2011). formal organizations have even been developed to make these efforts viable, such as pdp (promotion of popular development); anadeges (development and management analysis) or praxis (training program and response in action). to encourage this communication there have been attempts to create some publications, such as the newspaper "the other stock exchange", which reported many community experiences in the country. 323 at the autonomous university of puebla in 1992 the journal titled community social psychology was created (almeida, 1992), only four editions and one special edition were published up to 1995. it halted publication for lack of institutional support. on several occasions attempts have been made to try to revive it. following the 3rd international conference on community psychology, manuel martinez from the universidad autonoma de puebla was able to achieve the formation of an editorial board to re-publish it. final reflection what has been achieved? what has been learned through community psychology in mexico? what are its strengths and what were the difficulties in the community processes that it has promoted? how to encourage the development of the discipline in mexico? the main achievement of the path described is that community psychology has positioned itself as a theoretical and practical discipline that has its own significant contributions to understanding mexican social reality, to help improve the living conditions of its population in terms of social justice, respect and appreciation for cultural diversity and the democratization of its political processes. it is also a perspective with strong roots in the collective unconsciousness of the mexican people (almeida and flores osorio, 2011). historical and critical recovery of this path has uncovered the extent to which the contributions of the resilience of indigenous peoples and peasants in mexico offer novel approaches to a psychology that promotes a balance between body and spirit, the individual and the collective, dreams and reality (le clézio, 1988: 247). on the other hand the effort to locate community psychology with close by disciplinary approaches such as social work and clinic sociology has allowed us to detect the contributions of these disciplines to community development, the specificity of what is psychological in this task, the awareness that social change cannot be the monopoly of any praxis approach. community psychologists in mexico have to recognize the learning we have acquired from the contact and dialogue with the past and present of rural education (loyo bravo, 1985: 9), the people’s educational training offered by the crefal (crefal and oce, 2009), the daring critique of cidoc (gutiérrez quintanilla, 2007), the knowledge and assessment of the agricultural graduate school (sánchez quintanar, 2006), the fertility of the theology of 324 liberation (hernández avendaño 2006: 224), the vigor of the peasant movements (moguel, botey and hernandez, 1992) and the rebelliousness of women (marcos, 2008). the panorama of the many experiences of community psychology far and wide throughout the country is really impressive. almeida and flores osorio (2011) have made a first attempt to survey the vast field of commitment, action and reflection of a large number of mexican psychologists who have dared to work in a field that is distinguished by low pay, little recognition and involvement in the thick of life of communities. universities across the country have contributed to the strength of this process, not so much from the institutions but from the creativity of teams of psychologists who have been able to search and find rural and urban academic spaces to link psychology and community. from the unam (valenzuela cota, 1995), the uam iztapalapa (reid & aguilar, 1995) and the national institute of psychiatry (orford, 1992) there have been bodies established that have survived to address problems of community mental health, to deal with disasters and to address the terrible consequences of the unequal distribution of wealth. jesuit universities have struggled amid contradictions to put into action the preferential option for the poor (gomez del campo, 1994). if it were possible to delve into the complexity of mexican community psychology maybe one would be able to capture the fact that the greatest strength comes from the intricate network of colleagues and friends that has been woven over 50 years among its practitioners, based, like almost everything in mexico in the central region and spreading across the country. they would detect the social ties that bind, from community psychology at the universidad autonoma de puebla, the universidad autónoma de sinaloa, the universidad autonoma del estado de morelos, the universidad veracruzana, the universidad autónoma de yucatán, the instituto tecnológico de sonora, the center for food research and development of sonora, the proyecto de animación y desarrollo in puebla, the psychosocial space for community strengthening in chiapas, the universidad de la tierra, the instituto tecnológico de estudios superiores de occidente, the latin american universities and the universidad nacional autónoma de méxico... to this they have contributed their friendship, the exchanges of experiences, the meetings, and the conferences. the greatest difficulty in the process of community psychology in mexico has been the difficult of institutionalization of it for many reasons. the times have not been conducive to assess the professional dedication to the confrontation of social problems (correa, gonzález and mora lomelí, 1993). social psychology has rarely been the main focus of interest of academic 325 psychology in mexico, much less so has it been community psychology. the stronger orientations have been to the clinical, the educational and business. currently the two formal programs on community psychology have been greatly weakened because there is little student demand for them, the faculty has aged or retired, and institutions continue to bet on decadent neoliberalism. the field of community psychology in mexico needs to make more visible the reality of its work, to strengthen the strong national informal links and try to make them more institutional. it also requires it to be more open and bring its wealth of experiences and learning to the wide world. in the past nine years, the first decade of this century, international contacts with community psychologists in latin america have intensified thanks in particular to the congresses of the interamerican society of psychology, of psychology of liberation and of community intervention and praxis. at a global scale the contact has been through the international community psychology conferences, in san juan, puerto rico and lisbon, portugal. the one in puebla in 2010 has been a great boost in knowing what is being done in mexico. the immediate outlook for the future seems to be that community psychology will continue in mexico thanks to increasing non-institutional university experiences, or outside the universities, but also through theoretical and methodological contributions of scholars that from their scientific humanistic fields think and act in relation to community approaches to contemporary social problems. finally, i will refer to a text about history by historian edmundo o 'gorman, replacing community psychology where he speaks about history. the text is as follows: "i want a community psychology unpredictable as is the course of our mortal lives; 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(131-145). puebla, méxico: universidad autónoma de puebla y universidad autónoma de yucatán. microsoft word porto5_artigo racismo ambiental_fv-formatted.docx racismo ambiental e lutas por reconhecimento dos povos de floresta da amazônia environmental racism and struggles for recognition of people in the amazon forest alessandro de oliveira dos santos gustavo martineli massola luís guilherme galeão da silva bernardo parodi svartman universidade de são paulo palavras-chaves: psicologia comunitária, racismo ambiental, lutas por reconhecimento, amazônia. keywords: community psychology, environmental racism, struggles for recognition, amazon autor biografias: alessandro de oliveira dos santos: professor do departamento de psicologia social e do trabalho do instituto de psicologia da universidade de são paulo onde é responsável pela área de intercultura e raça-etnia. professor visitante do programa de pós-graduação em psicologia da universidade federal de rondônia, onde ministra a disciplina pesquisa psicossocial das desigualdades na amazônia. tem experiência nos temas: relações interculturais e étnico-raciais; desigualdades; direitos humanos; religiosidade; comunidades tradicionais; conflitos socioambientais; turismo de base comunitária; planejamento em saúde. gustavo martineli massola: gustavo martineli massola é professor de psicologia ambiental do instituto de psicologia da universidade de são paulo e editor da revista psicologia usp. atualmente, pesquisa a relação entre enraizamento territorial e participação política, especialmente em comunidades tradicionais brasileiras e áreas de ocupação na cidade de são paulo. luís guilherme galeão-silva: professor dr. do departamento de psicologia social e do trabalho da universidade de são paulo. pesquisador nas áreas de teoria crítica da sociedade, psicologia comunitária e reconhecimento. atualmente desenvolve pesquisa sobre conflitos, violência e memória em ocupações urbanas irregulares na cidade de são paulo. bernardo parodi svartman: professor de psicologia social e psicologia comunitária no instituto de psicologia da usp. atualmente investiga os temas da reificação e do desenraizamento, abordando também a forma pela qual os movimentos sociais da cidade de são paulo desenvolvem estratégias de resistência a esses problemas psicossociais. citar: oliveira dos santos, a., massola, g.m., galeao da silva, l.g., and svartman, b.p. (2016). racismo ambiental e lutas por reconhecimento dos povos de floresta da amazônia. global journal of community psychology practice, 7(1s), 1-20. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org) global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 racismo ambiental e lutas por reconhecimento dos povos de floresta da amazônia resumo o racismo é uma ideologia, uma forma de opressão e de violência. a categoria analítica raça-etnia tem se mostrado um indicador eficaz nas ciências humanas para avaliar o acesso aos recursos naturais pelas populações, o direcionamento de políticas públicas e a alocação de resíduos. na amazônia, os recursos naturais e as externalidades negativas produzidas no ambiente têm sido distribuídos ao longo do tempo conforme a raça-etnia das populações que vivem na região, estabelecendo uma relação inexorável entre acesso ao patrimônio ambiental, problemas ecológicos e desigualdades sociais. neste artigo, discutimos as lutas por reconhecimento de direitos territoriais e pelo manejo de princípios ativos (água, gás natural, pedras preciosas, entre outros) pelas populações tradicionais da amazônia (indígenas, ribeirinhos, quilombolas), sob a perspectiva do racismo ambiental. defendemos que a noção de racismo ambiental fornece uma linguagem compatível para compreender os conflitos socioambientais em curso na região, ao mesmo tempo em que se configura como um instrumento de advocacy capaz de influenciar na formulação de políticas públicas que efetivem e garantam os direitos dos povos que vivem na floresta. environmental racism and struggles for recognition of people in the amazon forest abstract racism is an ideology, a form of oppression and violence. the analytical category race-ethnicity has been an effective indicator in the human sciences to evaluate access to natural resources by populations, the direction of public policies and the allocation of waste. in the amazon, natural resources and the negative externalities produced in the environment have been distributed over time according to the race-ethnicity of people living in the region, establishing an inexorable link between access to environmental heritage, ecological problems and social inequalities. in this article, we discuss the struggles for recognition of territorial rights and the management of active ingredients (water, natural gas, precious stones, among others) by traditional amazonian populations (indigenous, riveraine, maroon), from the perspective of environmental racism. we argue that the notion of environmental racism provides a consistent language to understand the socio-environmental conflicts underway in the region, while it is configured as an advocacy instrument capable of influencing the formulation of public policies that enforce and guarantee the rights of people living in the forest. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 introdução a psicologia como ciência dedica-se, entre outras possibilidades, à investigação dos condicionantes e da psicodinâmica do comportamento e à produção de métodos e técnicas de intervenção sobre grupos e indivíduos. como profissão, surgiu atrelada à aplicação de testes voltados à detecção da anormalidade, da doença e do desvio e como modo de definir os parâmetros da normalidade, da saúde e da ordem. a invenção da norma via teste psicológico foi o ponto de partida para o estabelecimento da psicologia como tecnologia de regulação do comportamento humano e da presença de psicólogos em diversos espaços da vida social (grupos, organizações, comunidades) onde se faz necessária a administração de pessoas (rose, 2008). em termos gerais a psicologia tem refletido amplamente uma expressão de epistemologias eurocêntricas, não só por sua origem, mas por seu papel nas justificativas da dominação – como imposição e hegemonia de um único sistema produtivo e de interpretação de mundo – por meio da redução e naturalização dos problemas sociais como problemas individuais e particulares (tassara & darmegian, 1996). essa descontextualização, cultural, histórica e política, de suas teorias e pesquisas tem ajudado a endossar as desigualdades persistentes no planeta. no caso das populações autóctones ou tradicionais, aqui denominadas povos de floresta (indígenas, ribeirinhos, quilombolas), a universalidade abstrata do conhecimento psicológico tem cumprido um duplo papel de negarlhes, ao mesmo tempo, reconhecimento como sujeitos de conhecimento e de direitos. desse modo, mesmo as políticas públicas ambientais mais críticas voltadas a essas populações têm se apresentado, notadamente, apenas como ferramentas de controle das externalidades negativas e das consequências produzidas pela razão hegemônica na exploração do ambiente. destarte, no bojo da própria psicologia também têm se desenvolvido reflexões que problematizam seu papel na manutenção da ordem social vigente e que apontam para a possibilidade de que essa ciência e profissão contribuam para o enfrentamento da opressão na direção da emancipação de indivíduos e grupos. um exemplo ocorre na própria formação do campo da psicologia comunitária na américa latina, cujos principais autores apontam a necessidade da produção de um conhecimento capaz de oferecer repostas e contribuições para lidar com os problemas da região e superar a alienação de seus povos. montero (2005) e martin-baró (1986/2009) defendem que a longa história de escravidão e colonização deve ser tomada em consideração como o contexto social que alimentou e ainda influi sobre os mecanismos ideológicos e psicossociais que mantêm a opressão, o racismo e a hegemonia das epistemologias eurocêntricas na região. para martin-baró (1986/2009), por exemplo, uma psicologia latinoamericana que resolvesse o problema de sua falta de relevância social seria aquela capaz de desenvolver um conhecimento que pudesse ajudar o processo de libertação dos diversos grupos oprimidos ao longo da história global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 do continente. essa psicologia precisaria desenvolver a “recuperação da memória histórica” desses povos (p.195), algo que permitiria compreender como suas tradições e identidades formam um corpo de conhecimento fundamental no desenvolvimento de projetos efetivos de resistência política. o estudo e a valorização desse conhecimento seriam, por conseguinte, as características fundamentais dessa psicologia enraizada na discussão dos problemas atuais e relevantes da américa latina. nesse sentido, a psicologia comunitária apresenta necessariamente um núcleo histórico e regional ao lidar com problemas políticos contextualizados no espaço e no tempo. ainda assim, apesar da diversidade que caracteriza o campo e que é determinada pelo seu próprio objeto de pesquisa e atuação, pode-se afirmar que um dos elementos que confere identidade à disciplina é o estabelecimento de parcerias com comunidades para promover processos de transformação social, visando muito mais atuar sobre as raízes e as estruturas sociais que produzem e perpetuam as injustiças do que simplesmente promover uma melhor distribuição de recursos existentes (hale, 2014). o princípio ético da disciplina revela-se no objetivo explicitamente delimitado de se estudar os fatores psicossociais que apoiam e desenvolvem a autoorganização das comunidades, levando-as a identificar seus problemas e a construir suas estratégias de ação política. nesse sentido, privilegia-se atuações que tenham efeitos não apenas imediatos, locais e restritos, mas que promovam melhorias de médio e longo prazo e que articulem a dimensão local com uma dimensão política mais ampla (tanto nacional como internacional). objetivos que só podem ser alcançados quando as ações das comunidades são capazes de influenciar efetivamente as políticas públicas relacionadas aos problemas enfrentados (wolff, 2013). portanto, as relações entre organizações comunitárias, poder público e formulação/execução de políticas públicas configuram-se como um dos temas fundamentais do campo de atuação e pesquisa de uma psicologia comunitária de orientação crítica. na américa latina a psicologia comunitária surge no período das ditaduras civil-militares, conduzindo alguns psicólogos a discutir o contexto de negação dos direitos políticos e a estabelecer formas de pesquisa-ação ligadas aos movimentos sociais contestatórios do período (lane, 1996; sawaya, 1996; montero, 2008). a partir da redemocratização dos países latinos na década de 1980, novos desafios surgem para a psicologia comunitária na região (gohn, 2007). se no período das ditaduras civil-militares, as políticas públicas não se apresentavam como um campo de atuação e pesquisa, visto que não estavam preocupadas efetivamente com a democratização do acesso a direitos sociais e políticos, o período posterior abriu espaço para novas relações entre a psicologia comunitária e as políticas públicas (gonçalves & portugal, 2012). desse modo, em vários países, ao longo da década de 1990, a psicologia comunitária foi convidada a refletir sobre como os movimentos sociais e comunidades organizadas podem participar do desenho e gestão de políticas públicas e lutar por seus global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 direitos. a discussão sobre como participar do desenvolvimento, implantação e manutenção dessas políticas e quais fatores políticos e psicossociais podem favorecer essa participação torna-se um importante tema para o campo no século xxi (inzunza & constanzo, 2009). entretanto, assim como em outros continentes, os estados latinoamericanos estão inseridos em um contexto de capitalismo globalizado e neoliberal. e é nesta arena que a psicologia comunitária na atualidade tem revelado a importância das lutas por reconhecimento das novas organizações comunitárias e movimentos sociais na direção de uma efetiva democratização das políticas públicas. na atualidade, muitos desses conflitos estão localizados nas áreas rurais, e se expressam quando as comunidades tradicionais são ameaçadas com a perda de seus direitos territoriais e culturais em função da expansão de atividades econômicas ligadas ao grande mercado, como o turismo de massa, as atividades de mineração e o agronegócio, visando a exploração de recursos naturais desses territórios. as diversas formas pelas quais as comunidades tradicionais se organizam por meio de associações de moradores ou outras instâncias de representação e buscam enfrentar as injustiças e as ameaças a seu modo de vida, estratégias que envolvem a luta jurídica e política por reconhecimento de seus direitos territoriais, representam hoje uma importante dimensão psicossocial dos conflitos socioambientais presentes no território rural brasileiro e em especial no território amazônico. neste artigo teórico, produzido com base em revisão bibliográfica não sistemática da literatura de psicologia, em sua especificidade de psicologia comunitária, e na análise de dados de fontes secundárias (pesquisas, reportagens de jornais, sites eletrônicos e revistas) sobre a amazônia brasileira, discutimos as lutas por reconhecimento de direitos territoriais e pelo manejo de princípios ativos (como água, gás natural, pedras preciosas, entre outros) pelas populações tradicionais da amazônia (indígenas, ribeirinhos, quilombolas), sob a perspectiva do racismo ambiental. buscamos apresentar uma categorização dos conflitos socioambientais presentes na amazônia, descritos tanto na literatura científica como em fontes secundárias, com o objetivo de estabelecer relações entre a noção de racismo ambiental e lutas por reconhecimento no campo da psicologia comunitária contemporânea. defendemos que a noção de racismo ambiental fornece uma linguagem compatível para compreender os conflitos socioambientais em curso na região, ao mesmo tempo em que se configura como um instrumento de advocacy capaz de mobilizar as comunidades e de influenciar atores políticos institucionais na formulação de políticas públicas que efetivem e garantam os direitos dos povos que vivem na floresta. raça e racismo foi a partir da segunda metade do século xix até a primeira guerra mundial que o termo “raça” ganhou destaque inserido em um projeto de diferenciação de povos, nações e culturas. sua utilização neste período foi fruto de inúmeros fatores, entre os global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 quais “a reação conservadora e antiigualitária a todo um conjunto de valores em torno da revolução francesa” e “o romantismo inspirado por autores, sobretudo alemães, com ênfase numa relação estreita entre nação, povo e cultura e a consolidação dos impérios coloniais” (sansone, 2014, p.394). a relação entre este debate e as estratégias coloniais e escravistas nas américas, as quais marcaram profundamente o território aqui estudado, é de fundamental importância, especialmente se considerarmos, seguindo quijano (2005, p.228), que “a ideia de raça, em seu sentido moderno, não tem história conhecida antes da américa”. após as tragédias da segunda guerra mundial, assistiu-se a um esforço dos estudiosos, tanto na psicologia com nas demais ciências humanas, para extinguir o termo raça, desautorizando seu uso como categoria analítica. mas o início da guerra fria e dos processos de descolonização de países africanos e asiáticos somados à persistência do apartheid racial nos estados unidos e na áfrica do sul, mantiveram a atualidade do termo. para sansone (2014) foi-se criando uma polifonia de sentidos para o termo raça ao longo da história de modo que uma interpretação sociocultural foi substituindo outra de cunho mais físico-biológico, residindo neste uso “de alguma forma adaptável do termo raça, sua força e tenacidade ao longo do tempo” (p.397). a raça, por conseguinte, permanece como um constructo sociológico, efeito de discursos, e que só faz sentido em um determinado contexto histórico, articulado a uma teoria. trata-se de uma construção social que remete a discursos sobre as origens de um grupo com base em traços fisionômicos, transpostos para qualidades morais e intelectuais. também se incorporam discursos sobre o lugar de origem do grupo em questão. neste caso são discursos que remetem à etnia, ou seja, ao conjunto de indivíduos que histórica ou mitologicamente tem um ancestral, uma língua em comum, a mesma religião e cultura e compartilham o mesmo território (guimarães, 2003). no brasil, utilizar apenas o termo etnia para designar os negros e indígenas parece insuficiente visto que eles não têm o mesmo ancestral comum e seus antepassados vieram de vários territórios que se misturaram no país configurando um verdadeiro “caldeirão étnico”. por outro lado, é o termo raça que melhor permite falar das desigualdades no país, evidenciando diferentes experiências de nascer, viver e morrer conforme o pertencimento racial da população. por isso, neste artigo, sempre que possível, optou-se por utilizar os dois termos juntos, ou seja, étnico-racial. entendemos racismo aqui conforme define sansone (2014), ou seja, tratase do uso “da raciologia (um credo popular ou popular-científico) por parte de um determinado grupo para discriminar outro grupo por sua diferença supostamente ancorada na biologia” (p.404). o autor chama atenção para as especificidades do racismo operante nos países de colonização portuguesa, o qual denomina de “versão católico-latina do racismo” (p.404), e cuja força está centrada “na combinação intensa de intimidade-proximidade e violência mais que no binômio segregaçãodiscriminação”, (p.405) de maior global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 prevalência nos países de colonização anglo-saxônica. a manifestação social do racismo é a discriminação racial, ou seja, toda distinção, exclusão ou restrição baseada na raça-etnia e capaz de pôr em risco as liberdades fundamentais e os direitos em quaisquer esferas. a manifestação individual do racismo é o preconceito racial, ou seja, refere-se às percepções, atitudes e juízos preconcebidos a respeito de pessoas ou grupos de determinada raça-etnia e que não são facilmente modificáveis por apresentação de evidência contrária (santos, 2012). racismo ambiental x justiça ambiental o racismo é uma ideologia, uma forma de opressão e violência e o sustentáculo de um sistema de privilégios. a categoria analítica raçaetnia tem se mostrado um indicador eficaz nas ciências humanas para avaliar a distribuição de acesso aos recursos naturais pelas populações, o direcionamento de políticas públicas e a alocação de resíduos e lixo tóxico. o conceito de racismo ambiental surgiu no final da década de 1970 nos eua a partir da mobilização da população negra do condado de warren na carolina do norte contra um depósito de resíduos tóxicos. entre 1978 e 1982 constatou-se que três quartos desse tipo de aterro estavam localizados em locais habitados pela população negra, embora na região essa população representasse apenas 25% dos habitantes (pacheco, 2006). os ativistas de combate ao racismo ambiental nos eua passaram então a desenvolver nas décadas seguintes estudos para mostrar que a raça era um bom indicador geográfico de carga ambiental. por exemplo, as multas impostas por violações às normas ambientais em áreas habitadas pela população negra eram significativamente menores do que as aplicadas nos bairros habitados pela população branca (alier, 2007). nos eua, o racismo ambiental revela conflitos a respeito da localização de incineradores e a disposição de dejetos tóxicos (nucleares). acreditamos que a noção de racismo ambiental pode ser ampliada para todas as minorias políticas étnicoraciais do planeta que lutam contra a distribuição desigual de acesso aos recursos naturais e a exposição a diferentes formas de risco ambiental nas áreas em que vivem. e que tal noção é capaz de estimular um movimento global dessas minorias políticas em direção à justiça ambiental, interpelando a economia a uma adequação ecológica e a sociedade à busca por uma maior igualdade social. como diz herculano (2008): os vazamentos e acidentes na indústria petrolífera e química, a morte de rios, lagos e baías, as doenças e mortes causadas pelo uso de agrotóxicos e outros poluentes, a expulsão das comunidades tradicionais pela destruição dos seus locais de vida e trabalho (...) configura uma situação de injustiça socioambiental, que vai além da problemática de localização de rejeitos químicos e de incineradores da experiência norte-americana. (herculano, 2008, p.5) o que de fato é comum entre os eua e o brasil é que em ambos os países o global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 contrário do racismo ambiental significa justiça ambiental, ou seja, um conjunto de princípios capaz de assegurar que nenhum grupo étnicoracial sofra o efeito desproporcional dos impactos ambientais negativos derivados das operações do capital, das políticas e programas públicos ou da sua ausência. desse ponto de vista, racismo ambiental não se refere apenas às ações com intenção racista explícita, mas também àquelas que tenham efeito sobre os grupos étnicoraciais independente da intenção que lhes deu origem (pacheco, 2006; herculano, 2008). ora, sabemos que os conflitos socioambientais serão cada vez mais frequentes devido ao aumento da tensão pelo acesso aos recursos naturais e que a produção e circulação de mercadorias é o grande vetor de disputa pelo uso da natureza. entretanto, essa mesma produção de mercadorias opera sobre uma base material que não se expande e está distribuída pelo planeta com maior concentração nos países do hemisfério sul (ribeiro, 2010). por outro lado, nos conflitos socioambientais são possíveis diversos discursos de valoração. há os discursos desenvolvimentistas com predomínio do crescimento econômico como remédio à pobreza. há os discursos de compensação das externalidades negativas baseados em análises de custo-benefício (ecoeficiência). e há o discurso que clama aos direitos humanos, aos direitos territoriais e à sacralidade dos espaços de vida. todos são discursos socialmente válidos. mas, quem tem o poder de simplificar e sacrificar interesses e valores impondo um único discurso de valoração, como tem ocorrido com o discurso econômico? (alier, 2007). na amazônia, os recursos naturais e as externalidades negativas produzidas no ambiente têm sido distribuídos ao longo do tempo conforme a raça-etnia das populações que vivem na região, estabelecendo uma relação inexorável entre acesso ao patrimônio ambiental, problemas ecológicos e desigualdades. a noção de racismo ambiental pode auxiliar lideranças comunitárias, ativistas e pesquisadores da amazônia a sair do embate entre preservacionismo (no qual as atividades antrópicas são responsabilizadas pela degradação dos sistemas ecológicos) versus conservacionismo (no qual as atividades antrópicas são consideradas fundamentais para conservação dos sistemas ecológicos), em direção a um debate mais denso sobre justiça ambiental. pois o que está em jogo é como defender os direitos dos povos de floresta ameaçados atualmente por grandes obras de infraestrutura e propostas de reformas dos marcos regulatórios que os protegem. são povos que, apesar do pouco espaço ambiental que ocupam, têm gerenciado sistemas agrícolas e agroflorestais sustentáveis e cuja sobrevivência está ameaçada por indústrias poluidoras, grandes complexos energéticos e monoculturas destrutivas. esses povos têm melhores possibilidades de defender seus interesses no campo do não-econômico. ao enfatizar o racismo ambiental como instrumento de advocacy nos aliamos ao movimento global por justiça ambiental que prioriza a incomensurabilidade de valores na relação ser humano e ambiente. por exemplo, se uma mineradora é global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 responsável pela contaminação de uma comunidade quilombola com chumbo ela pode aplicar o princípio do poluidor pagador e compensar financeiramente o dano provocado. mas, o que significa infligir tal golpe à dignidade humana de um grupo ao lançar mão de uma agressão ambiental configurada por meio da discriminação racial? pagar uma multa nesse caso não dá o direito de repetir tal comportamento. isso porque não existe uma compensação real, visto que o dinheiro e a dignidade humana não são equiparáveis, ou pelo menos, não deveriam ser. conflitos socioambientais como expressão de racismo ambiental na amazônia a amazônia é a maior fonte de biomassa renovável e a mais importante bacia de água doce do planeta, além de possuir incalculáveis recursos agroflorestais, icitiofaunísticos e biotecnológicos (lira, costa, fraxe, & witkoski, 2014). o histórico de ocupação da amazônia brasileira desde o período colonial está ligado aos conflitos étnicoraciais. inicialmente, entre portugueses e indígenas para imposição do mercantilismo português com base na mão de obra escrava ameríndia. em seguida, durante a segunda metade do século xix, por conta da economia gumífera de exploração do látex, que atraiu migrantes de várias regiões do país, sobretudo do nordeste, cuja primazia na ocupação de terras desencadeou inúmeros conflitos com os povos de floresta. na segunda metade do século xx, por sua vez, a amazônia passou a receber grandes projetos intervencionistas da ditadura civilmilitar brasileira sem nenhum respeito pelos povos de floresta ou consideração pela vocação da região. nesse período o governo patrocinou a abertura de rodovias, projetos de exploração mineral e de instalação de fazendas agropecuárias e monoculturas agrícolas. tal falta de respeito e consideração, reflexo de uma história de ocupação ligada à escravidão e subjugação dos povos de floresta, fizeram da região um palco de conflitos socioambientais e de agressões a seus habitantes. em todos esses momentos históricos citados é possível notar como a exploração econômica e a dominação política na região esteve e ainda está atravessada pela dimensão étnico-racial: a classe dominante local é herdeira direta dos processos de colonização, e muitas vezes as políticas públicas foram executadas de forma a atender seus interesses e facilitar sua perpetuação no poder. os grupos explorados que sofrem os impactos dessa dominação estão representados nas diversas etnias indígenas autóctones, nas comunidades quilombolas que resistiram à escravidão e nas comunidades ribeirinhas formadas basicamente por trabalhadores e pequenos agricultores que se recusaram a participar do agronegócio como mão-de-obra contratada pelos grandes proprietários de terras. apesar das enormes diferenças entre esses grupos, pode-se dizer que desenvolveram uma cultura comunitária de resistência ligada à manutenção de suas tradições e de um específico manejo dos recursos naturais no território. mais recentemente, com a intensa disputa pelo território e pelo acesso aos recursos naturais, novamente os conflitos étnico-raciais estão em pauta, dessa vez com a retomada de global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 laços étnicos e a auto-atribuição de identidades protagonizadas pelos povos de floresta. ora, desde o período colonial a amazônia é tomada como fonte de matérias-primas. e para melhor vendê-la e explorá-la tem sido apresentada como habitada por populações não brancas devotas do extrativismo dos recursos naturais. essa vontade de manter os povos de floresta regredidos ao extrativismo revela mais os anseios da indústria farmacêutica e biotecnológica internacional, do que propriamente a capacidade desses povos de se desenvolver sem incentivo do mercado ou assistência do poder público. como diz souza (2002): o certo é que, se o extrativismo na amazônia não está morto, deve ser definitivamente erradicado por qualquer plano que respeite o processo histórico e a vontade regional. mesmo porque a amazônia não deve ser reserva de nada, nem celeiro, nem estoque genético ou espaço do rústico para deleite dos turistas pósindustriais. (souza, 2002, p.35) atualmente, além da pressão pelo extrativismo a amazônia brasileira figura como região de enorme potencial hidrelétrico e para expansão do agronegócio e da mineração. em seu interior faltam empregos, oportunidades de renda, serviços e equipamentos públicos, expressando um desequilíbrio entre o meio rural e urbano, o campo e a cidade, no acesso às políticas e serviços, semelhante ao de outras regiões brasileiras. em termos gerais, trata-se de uma região com “moderada” ocupação humana e “escassa” atividade econômica. embora seja preciso levar em conta que em função de sua enorme extensão territorial e seu passado recente, tenha uma ocupação extremamente diferenciada internamente (witkoski, fraxe, & cavalcante, 2014). é no interior da amazônia que vemos a luta dos povos indígenas, quilombolas e ribeirinhos para manterem suas terras frente à pressão pela exploração mineral e/ou instalação de hidrelétricas. a ironia é que foram esses povos, ao manterem um manejo adequado do ambiente, que permitiram a conservação da floresta, de modo que hoje muitos commodities e princípios ativos (água, gás natural, pedras preciosas, entre outros) se encontram em seus territórios. por isso, defendemos que o racismo ambiental é capaz de fornecer uma linguagem compatível para compreender os conflitos socioambientais no interior da amazônia. isso porque os mecanismos e processos sociais postos em marcha pelo racismo ambiental, ao naturalizar as hierarquias sociais, inferiorizam os grupos étnico-raciais ao ponto de tomar como espaços físicos vazios os territórios ocupados por esses grupos. como diz bullard (2004): o racismo é um potente fator de distribuição seletiva das pessoas no seu ambiente físico: influencia o uso do solo, os padrões de habitação e o desenvolvimento de infraestrutura. (bullard, 2004, p.57) global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 os conflitos socioambientais podem ser categorizados de várias maneiras, tomando como critério desde a fonte ou origem do ativo em disputa, como terras, minério ou a cultura de um povo (no caso de iniciativas de conversão religiosa, por exemplo), até o tipo de dano causado ao grupo afetado, que pode envolver sua saúde, sua identidade étnico-racial ou mesmo sua sobrevivência. uma percepção difundida sobre os conflitos socioambientais na amazônia toma como critério de categorização a atividade econômica geradora da disputa, e indica que, atualmente, a região apresenta conflitos em torno de três grandes eixos econômicos: geração de energia hidrelétrica, agronegócio e mineração. os grandes projetos de construção de usinas para a geração de energia hidrelétrica ganharam destaque em todo o mundo ao obrigarem o deslocamento de grandes contingentes populacionais e mudarem os ciclos dos rios em suas fases de enchente, cheia, vazante e seca. no estado de rondônia, por exemplo, as usinas de jirau e santo antônio produziram a maior cheia da história em 2014 destruindo mais de 50 comunidades ao longo do rio madeira – o que tem levado as populações tradicionais dos estados do acre, pará e rondônia a se organizarem para resistir a tais projetos frente a uma diretriz política de governo que tem transformado os rios da amazônia em máquinas de produção de energia. no que se refere ao agronegócio, por sua vez, é conhecido o fato de que parte significativa da perda de cobertura vegetal da amazônia devese nas últimas décadas à expansão da pecuária e de atividades como a sojicultura. ademais, há muitos anos, a mineração praticada em escala industrial ou artesanal vem sendo acusada pela degradação de imensas áreas no interior da floresta e pelo comprometimento do modo de vida de populações tradicionais. uma decisão recente da justiça federal em 2014, por exemplo, suspendeu 500 processos de pedido de autorização para exploração mineral em terras indígenas no estado do amapá. o pedido do ministério público federal, acatado pela justiça, argumentava que não havia legislação que regulasse esta atividade. mesmo assim, o departamento nacional de produção mineral manteve a análise dos pedidos, agora suspensa, numa ação que afrontava diretamente o sistema jurídico nacional. se esta categorização assim definida pode ser útil para a compreensão de muitos conflitos na amazônia, não deixa de ser parcial. a lista dos conflitos socioambientais envolvendo de um lado os investimentos econômicos ou do poder público e de outro os povos de floresta do interior da amazônia é imensa e variada. como exemplo, relacionamos a seguir alguns conflitos nos estados do acre, amazonas e pará: falta de atendimento à saúde das populações tradicionais; tráfico de cocaína alterando o modo de vida indígena; grilagem e falta de regularização fundiária de territórios de populações tradicionais; projetos turísticos de massa e de pesca predatória que afetam indígenas e ribeirinhos; implantação de gasodutos, obrigando ao deslocamento de populações tradicionais; biopirataria (porto, pacheco, & leroy, 2013). global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 nota-se que o cerne dos conflitos reside tipicamente na necessidade de expansão do grande capital, que precisa fazer uso dos recursos encontrados em áreas protegidas ou habitadas por populações tradicionais, as quais se colocam como obstáculos a esta expansão. paralelamente, as necessidades geopolíticas do governo brasileiro, vinculadas ao grande capital, implicam investimentos massivos que levam à alteração no modo de vida de muitas populações. neste cenário, a amazônia se oferece como fonte de recursos para a produção de mercadorias que, distribuídas no mercado global, torna a utilização econômica dos recursos naturais provenientes da região, hoje, um fenômeno de caráter transnacional. em outras palavras, não se pode identificar e compreender os conflitos socioambientais na amazônia como um fenômeno meramente local. os conflitos socioambientais têm hoje caráter global, especialmente em um momento no qual a globalização, tomada como a difusão para todo o mundo da cosmovisão e das instituições da civilização ocidental de base eurocêntrica, impõe-se rapidamente sobre as alternativas políticas locais existentes. esta globalização hegemônica, que apresenta uma visão de mundo particular como tendo validade universal e procura naturalizá-la, estabelece distinções hierárquicas entre povos ou países centrais – aqueles que estão na origem deste processo de expansão global – e povos ou países periféricos – que acolhem esta expansão ao custo do desaparecimento das alternativas culturais locais representadas por populações tradicionais cuja história e cuja cosmovisão é aniquilada no contato com as instituições culturais dominantes. processo que boaventura de sousa santos chama de epistemicídio, ou a “morte de um conhecimento local perpetrada por uma ciência alienígena” (sousa santos, 2005, p. 22) e que configura tais conflitos socioambientais como marcadamente centrados em disputas geopolíticas envolvendo culturas centrais e culturas periféricas. o caráter étnico-racial dos conflitos socioambientais não é fortuito, pode ser considerado uma consequência direta de sua configuração geopolítica em um mundo globalizado, e tem sido enfrentado em nível global, entre outras formas, por tentativas de criação de regras internacionais para proteger os povos não centrais frente a esta ação hegemônica. a expressão socioambiental deste tipo de desigualdade foi combatida, por exemplo, pela convenção 169 da oit (organização internacional do trabalho), que protege o território das populações indígenas, e pela convenção da basileia, que proíbe a exportação de resíduos tóxicos para áfrica. este fenômeno que opera em nível global opera também em nível local, com os territórios ocupados por culturas e povos tradicionais, cuja forma de produção econômica distingue-se daquela que rege a expansão do grande capital, sendo desigualmente atingidos por atividades econômicas predatórias ou pela desapropriação direta, com a expulsão de seus habitantes. não se trata neste caso de denunciar a ausência de compensação pelas externalidades ambientais expropriadas desses povos, mas de apontar que há um marcado global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 componente étnico-racial na própria ação de expropriação. nos estudos clássicos sobre o racismo ambiental, foi-se constituindo um forte argumento, calcado em significativas evidências empíricas, que conclui pela existência de um deslocamento geográfico tanto das fontes de recursos, buscadas cada vez mais nos territórios ocupados por grupos étnico-raciais definidos, quanto das áreas de descarte de resíduos. o reconhecimento da existência do racismo ambiental em outros lugares pode muito bem, por outro lado, tornar mais complexa a descrição do fenômeno. no caso da amazônia, o discurso que explicita o racismo ambiental o faz sob a bandeira dos direitos territoriais indígenas, quilombolas e das populações ribeirinhas. a ganância e o preconceito – ingredientes essenciais ao racismo ambiental – tratam o território como se ele fosse deserto de vidas. como se terra, água e floresta, os três habitats que delimitam os espaços de vida e trabalho das populações tradicionais na amazônia (witkoski, 2010), não fossem ocupados por seres humanos que ali nasceram e cujos ascendentes ali constituíram suas moradias, seus meios de sobrevivência, suas tradições, seus laços de parentesco e de amizade. em alguns casos, essa expropriação se dá de forma relativamente pacífica. a falácia do desenvolvimento e do progresso, aliada ao oferecimento de empregos temporários, transforma o assalto em uma forma de suicídio: as próprias populações tradicionais são convencidas a colaborar no desmatamento, na destruição da floresta, até mesmo no garimpo que envenenará suas águas. cumprida essa última parte de sua “função social” na ótica do capital, essas “subraças” podem ser “dispensadas”, o que no caso é sinônimo de expulsão sumária. quando resistem, os métodos mudam. e irão desde o uso da violência e dos “jagunços”, à compra de registros e autoridades, numa usurpação de direitos que é um verdadeiro escárnio à concepção de justiça (porto, pacheco, & leroy, 2013). lutas por reconhecimento dos povos de floresta o manejo do território e dos recursos naturais é o principal meio de manutenção e reprodução material e simbólica dos povos de floresta. a negação disso constitui uma afronta à sua capacidade de sobrevivência e uma desconsideração profunda de sua condição como sujeitos de conhecimento e de direitos, visto que a biodiversidade e demais riquezas da amazônia derivam diretamente do manejo secular desses povos sobre a terra, as águas e a floresta (lira, costa, fraxe, & witkoski, 2014). tais povos não são incapazes de se defender, pelo contrário, com base em uma perspectiva que assume a identidade étnico-racial como síntese de forças políticas e simbólicas que se produzem em uma determinada territorialidade (miguez, fraxe, souza, & witkoski, 2014), eles têm procurado reverter a contradição entre identidade dominante e identidade oprimida, por meio da afirmação de sua diferença e da construção de uma identidade como projeto político (castel, 1997), retomando antigos laços étnicos e se auto-atribuindo denominações como quilombolas ou ribeirinhos, por exemplo. a identidade hegemônica é constituída a partir de ideologias global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 como o racismo, que justificam a concentração de recursos materiais e simbólicos em determinado grupo social identificado a atributos valorizados abstratamente. ou seja, atributos como cor da pele ou origem ocidental passam a ser apresentados como pele branca superior a pele escura e origem ocidental superior a origem indígena. esse processo só se completa na instituição de uma identidade oprimida, objeto de preconceito e estereotipia. a construção de uma identidade política como reação a isso considera a singularidade forçada pela desigualdade como fator de reunião de forças contra-hegemônicas. é somente a partir daí que tem início uma luta por reconhecimento de direitos para além de uma igualdade abstrata, ou seja, considerando a noção de equidade. assim, a noção de reconhecimento articula a diferença e a igualdade de modos distintos conforme o contexto político. vale dizer: afirma a justiça da diferença onde a igualdade abstrata sustenta a injustiça e afirma a justiça da igualdade abstrata onde a diferença sustenta a injustiça (sousa santos, 2004, 2007). por exemplo, a igualdade abstrata de todos poderem comprar terras na amazônia é injusta com povos cuja posse da terra não está representada no mercado ou no estado ocidental. os indígenas têm um direito à diferença, às terras demarcadas, para além do mercado capitalista da compra e venda de terras, bem como têm uma posse ancestral da terra que não é representada nos cartórios imobiliários dos estados brasileiros. por outro lado, a diferença da posse de meios de coação e agressão por parte de grileiros de terras na amazônia exige a manutenção da igualdade dos direitos humanos à vida com vistas à proteção dos indígenas. desse modo, a luta por reconhecimento dos povos de floresta da amazônia revela uma importante dimensão psicossocial e indica a importância desse assunto no campo da psicologia comunitária contemporânea: ao mesmo tempo em que um grupo amplia sua visibilidade e inserção política na totalidade social, o faz à medida em que elabora e se apropria de sua específica história de resistência à dominação política e exploração econômica. as pesquisas nesse campo podem ajudar a compreender os diversos processos psicossociais e políticos nos quais a elaboração da história de dominação e de desigualdade como ponto de apoio da identidade não termine por isolar o grupo ou construir formas xenófobas de pertencimento, mas pelo contrário, permita trabalhar a dialética entre particular e universal conduzindo a uma inserção social que respeite a singularidade cultural e, ao mesmo tempo, garanta a universalidade dos direitos do ponto de vista de grupos historicamente oprimidos. ou seja, a partir do momento em que esses povos passam a caminhar na direção da conquista ou manutenção de seus direitos sociais e políticos, obrigam a esfera pública a lidar com uma forma concreta e particular de afirmação da universalidade dos direitos humanos. a essa dialética, repleta de contradições, soma-se a possibilidade de que os projetos éticos, políticos e espirituais desses grupos sejam respeitados e valorizados como possibilidades de redefinição das formas violentas pelas quais o grande global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 mercado tem assimilado territórios ocupados tradicionalmente e ancestralmente, configurando-se como um importante elemento constituinte dos novos processos de participação e de co-gestão de políticas de públicas. considerações finais neste artigo expusemos dois fatos fundamentais a respeito dos povos de floresta da amazônia. primeiramente, as principais transformações sociais e econômicas vividas por esses povos delineiam-se a partir de suas tentativas de resistência aos processos de dominação presentes na ocupação de seu território e à progressiva assimilação predatória dos recursos naturais à economiapolítica nacional e internacional. em segundo lugar, as políticas públicas formuladas, com raras exceções, não consideraram o processo histórico e os direitos desses povos, expressando basicamente uma contradição entre “proteger” ou “deixar matar” essas populações. esses dois fatos são complementares e determinam o campo de conflitos no qual os povos de floresta elaboram suas lutas por reconhecimento e contra o racismo ambiental. esses dois processos são opressores na medida em que não exprimem o conjunto de forças vivas do território e impedem os povos de floresta de influir sobre as decisões quanto ao uso dos recursos naturais (miguez, fraxe, souza, & witkoski, 2014). a noção de racismo ambiental pode ser um valioso instrumento de advocacy na luta por reconhecimento dos povos da floresta, ao permitir um confronto direto com as propostas desenvolvimentistas ou de defesa de compensação ambiental como forma de retribuição justa pelos danos causados às populações tradicionais. em contraposição a tais propostas, a noção de racismo ambiental aponta para a incomensurabilidade de valores presentes na relação entre ser humano e ambiente e, por conseguinte, à impossibilidade éticopolítica de que benefícios econômicos possam equivaler sob qualquer forma a dignidade e a vida humana. os valores implícitos às propostas desenvolvimentistas ou compensatórias vêm ditando as interpretações sobre os conflitos socioambientais na amazônia, articulando-se a políticas públicas que desconsideram as vidas humanas que ali desenvolveram sua história pessoal e coletiva e, muitas vezes, promovendo a cooptação das próprias comunidades locais em ações que degradam o local do qual depende sua existência digna. por outro lado, a noção de racismo ambiental fornece uma linguagem que permite articular politicamente as populações locais da amazônia, em uma ação de advocacy de caráter interno a essas próprias populações, capaz de fomentar seu protagonismo político, e de forma coerente com a história recente da psicologia comunitária latino-americana. isso porque, permite expressar com precisão uma concepção de justiça que toma em consideração as desigualdades sociais na elaboração de políticas públicas, vinculando diferenças materiais e igualdade formal de direitos – o que, segundo nos parece, constitui o sentido mais profundo da ideia de reconhecimento. recentemente, a psicologia comunitária na américa latina começou a investigar as relações entre formas de participação popular global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 e definição de políticas públicas. além disso, a psicologia comunitária também começou a tematizar em suas pesquisas e programas de formação como as lutas de organizações comunitárias se relacionam à discussão de questões ambientais, como a preservação de certos territórios e o uso sustentável de recursos naturais (watkins & ciofalo, 2011). no caso brasileiro, a história da psicologia comunitária no país (lane, 1996; gonçalves & portugal, 2012), revela que a disciplina dedicou-se inicialmente, sobretudo, à investigação de problemas urbanos, problemas surgidos em torno das lutas de um conjunto de movimentos sociais pelo direito à cidade e pela redemocratização política, fazendo com que a atenção dada às comunidades rurais e aos povos da floresta tenha sido menor se comparada com a produção de pesquisas em torno das questões urbanas. no entanto, a expansão do agronegócio e a integração de territórios ocupados por comunidades tradicionais ao mercado global, aliado a políticas de estado com grande impacto ambiental e social em áreas rurais a partir da década de noventa, tornou a temática cada vez mais relevante para esta área de conhecimento. esta nova conjuntura política da relação entre espaço rural, comunidades tradicionais, mercado global e estado, assim como o surgimento de novos movimentos sociais (principalmente articulados por meio de associações de moradores dessas comunidades tradicionais que lutam contra esses processos de dominação), colocam novos desafios para a psicologia comunitária, que começam agora a ser enfrentados, no sentido de fortalecer o brasil e as comunidades tradicionais que aqui vivem em direção a um desenvolvimento humano e social que permita superar as desigualdades persistentes no país. defendemos neste artigo que um dos desafios atuais encontra-se em incentivar a participação dessas comunidades tradicionais na construção de políticas de garantia de direitos sociais e territoriais, ao mesmo tempo que tais políticas reconheçam o direito à diferença e de proteção frente às ameaças ligadas aos interesses de exploração econômica da região. para que a psicologia comunitária possa oferecer contribuições faz-se necessário que os psicólogos investiguem com mais profundidade: a maneira pela qual as comunidades incentivam a participação de seus membros em lutas políticas para defesa do território e de sua cultura frente às ameaças advindas do grande mercado; como promovem um diálogo entre suas tradições e o corpo de conhecimento ligado ao direito e à participação política institucional; e como desenvolveram e mantêm formas de manejo dos recursos naturais que preservam o território que habitam (vale dizer através de formas completamente distintas de manejo em relação à lógica do agronegócio). a pesquisa deste conjunto de temas é essencial para o desenvolvimento do conhecimento e atuação no campo da psicologia comunitária no contexto político atual e no que se refere, em particular, ao território da amazônia, apontando grandes dilemas sobre os quais a psicologia comunitária deve se debruçar, como a luta pelos direitos das comunidades tradicionais pelo uso dos recursos naturais e o global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 papel da amazonia, como fonte de recursos, no mundo contemporâneo. o desafio que se apresenta nesse contexto é o de se produzir uma psicologia que seja fruto e legitimamente interessada no bem estar da população como um todo, e não apenas em uma pequena parcela que concentra os recursos e representa os colonizadores tanto por identificação como por ações que transferem riquezas da população para a acumulação internacional. é necessário estar com a comunidade em posição de igualdade com os saberes locais e estar preocupado com o fortalecimento do protagonismo local e com as lutas emancipatórias propostas por seus atores e não por uma escala de valores aparentada a um universalismo abstrato. este processo não pode ser realizado sem um diálogo que respeite a cultura e as tradições desses grupos. ao adentrar nessas comunidades o psicólogo comunitário deve valorizar esses conhecimentos, na tentativa de constituir um campo de composição entre os saberes populares e especializados, capaz de integrar leituras de mundo, da realidade e dos problemas vivenciados nas comunidades (santos, 2016). é sob essa perspectiva que sua atuação se torna possível diante do racismo ambiental: promovendo a articulação entre indivíduos e organizações do poder público e da sociedade civil. tal atuação deve propiciar um ambiente formador para todos os envolvidos, que permita a troca de experiências, facilite que as ações sejam elaboradas a partir da compreensão da realidade local e mostre os ganhos para os municípios e comunidades de se investir em ações de identificação e combate ao racismo ambiental. por conseguinte, uma psicologia comunitária engajada na emancipação psicossocial de indivíduos e grupos oprimidos precisa marcar uma diferença radical na epistemologia que represente a superação da justificativa da opressão por meio da ciência. uma nova ciência deve abarcar as epistemologias do sul, ou seja, ir ao encontro de formas de resistência e conhecimento que se oponham à dominação presente nas periferias do planeta. somente deste modo, o reconhecimento da epistemologia e da subjetividade dos povos de floresta pode se configurar como uma forma de justiça ambiental. referências bibliográficas alier, j. m. 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(2008). psicologia como uma ciência social. psicologia & sociedade; 20(2),155-164. sansone, l. (2014). raça. in: lívio sansone e claúdio alves furtado. (orgs). dicionário crítico das ciências sociais dos países de fala oficial portuguesa. (pp. 393-411). salvador: edufba. santos, a. o. (2012). superar o racismo e promover a saúde da população negra. in: paiva, v.; ayres, j. r. m. e buchalla, c. m. (orgs.). vulnerabilidade e direitos humanos. prevenção e promoção da saúde. da doença à cidadania. (pp. 145-163). curitiba: juruá editora. santos, a. o. (2016). atuação do(a) psicólogo(a) social na proteção de direitos de crianças e adolescentes de comunidades anfitriãs do turismo na amazônia. in: calegare, m. g. a. e higuchi, m. i. g. (orgs.). nos interiores da amazônia: leituras psicossociais. (pp. 229-248). curitiba: editora crv. sawaia, b. (1996). comunidade: a apropriação científica de um conceito tão antigo quanto a humanidade. in: campos, r. h. f. (org.). psicologia social comunitária – da solidariedade à autonomia. (pp. 35-53). rio de janeiro: editora vozes. sousa santos, b. (2004). reconhecer para libertar: os caminhos do cosmopolitismo multicultural. porto: afrontamento. ________. (2005). semear outras soluções. os caminhos da biodiversidade e dos conhecimentos rivais. rio de janeiro, civilização brasileira. ________. (2007). renovar a teoria crítica para reinventar a emancipação social. são paulo: boitempo. souza, m. (2002). amazônia e modernidade. estudos avançados; 16(45), 31-36. tassara, e. t. o.; darmegian, s. (1996). para um novo humanismo: contribuições da psicologia social. estudos avançados; 10(28), 291-316. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1s february 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 watkins, m.; ciofalo, n. (2011). creating and sharing critical community psychology curriculum for the 21st century: nainvitation. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(2), 9-18. witkoski, a. c. (2010). terras, florestas e águas de trabalho: os camponeses amazônicos e as formas de uso de seus recursos naturais. são paulo: annablume. witkoski, a. c.; fraxe, t. j. p., & cavalcante, k. v. (2014). introdução. in: witkoski, a. c.; fraxe, t. j. p. e cavalcante, k. v. (orgs). território e territorialidade na amazônia: formas de sociabilidade e participação política. (pp. 1117). manaus: editora valer. wolff, t. a. (2013). community psychologist´s involvement in policy change at the community level : three stories from a practioner. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(2), 2-12. microsoft word 2014-si03-20140519.docx moving beyond “better safe than sorry”: realizing community potential to transform approaches to psychiatric hospitalization jessica nalani lee university of houston author notes: jessica nalani lee successfully defended her dissertation, too much information: agency and disruptions of power in personal narratives of mental illness and suffering, for a phd in rhetoric, composition, and the teaching of english from the university of arizona. she will be joining the university of houston as a writing fellow/visiting assistant professor in fall 2014. email: jessicanalanilee@gmail.com keywords: mental health consumers/survivors, biomedicine, recovery-oriented care, psychiatric hospitalization, rhetorical agency recommended citation: lee, j.n. (2014). moving beyond “better safe than sorry”: realizing community potential to transform approaches to psychiatric hospitalization. global journal of community psychology practice, 5(1), 1-8. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 moving beyond “better safe than sorry”: realizing community potential to transform approaches to psychiatric hospitalization abstract this essay is composed of three parts to analyze how the field of community psychology can help transform aspects of psychiatric hospitalization that may inadvertently reify oppressive social constructs. i begin by describing approaches to treatment in psychiatric hospitalization that can unintentionally objectify the consumer/survivor and reinforce a standardized approach to treatment that disallows the empathy needed for an efficacious relationship between a healthcare professional and a consumer/survivor. in the next section, i examine how community psychology commitments are achieved through recovery-oriented care that challenges oppressive social constructs. in the final section, i consider the ways in which the rhetorical concept of agency might be enacted in the context of psychiatric hospitalization to create an environment that advances recovery-oriented care. keywords: mental health consumers/survivors, biomedicine, recovery-oriented care, psychiatric hospitalization, rhetorical agency the negative ramifications of psychiatric hospitalization are often justified with the reasoning that it is “better to be safe than sorry.” however, in a society that values independence and self-respect, the disempowering of the individual inherent in psychiatric hospitalization can work against the goal of preventing danger, with the “greatest risk for seriously mentally ill patients [being] not while they are in inpatient treatment. . . but after discharge [original emphasis]” (warner, 1995, p. 248). this essay is composed of three parts to analyze how the field of community psychology can help transform aspects of psychiatric hospitalization that may inadvertently reify oppressive social constructs. in the section that follows, i begin by describing approaches to treatment in psychiatric hospitalization that can unintentionally objectify the consumer/survivor and reinforce a standardized approach to treatment that disallows the empathy needed for an efficacious relationship between a healthcare professional and a consumer/survivor. in the next section, i examine how community psychology commitments are achieved through recovery-oriented care that challenges oppressive social constructs. in the final section, i consider the ways in which the rhetorical concept of agency might be enacted in the context of psychiatric hospitalization to create an environment that advances recovery-oriented care. defining roles and biomedicine this paper focuses on the hospitalization of psychiatric consumers/survivors, understood in this context as individuals who experience or have experienced intense mental distress. when referring to people struggling with mental health issues, i use the term “consumer/survivor,” the meaning of which is informed by nelson, lord, and ochocka (2001). nelson et al. (2001) described language and discourse as sociopolitical, explaining that those with mental health issues who have had experience with the mental health system often name themselves as consumers, survivors, or consumers/survivors, as opposed to using the terms “patient” or “client.” by referring to those who experience or have experienced intense mental distress as “consumer/survivors,” i seek to contribute to their empowerment. my critique of hospitalization for those undergoing mental suffering is not meant to advocate for the complete elimination of psychiatric hospitalization. rather, i seek to expand upon the ways in which psychiatric hospitalization works to minimize risk and aid mental health consumers/survivors in the recovery process. this paper responds to segal’s (1994) call for further study of the connections among compliance, persuasion, and rhetoric. i demonstrate the value of rhetorical appeal in the treatment of psychiatric consumers/survivors, arguing that consumers/survivors can be most effectively treated when knowledge informed by research as well as knowledge informed by personal experience are equally valued. advocating validating the opinions and perspectives of psychiatrically hospitalized consumers/survivors may seem unrealistic when one assumes these people are “irrational” due to an acute psychotic or manic episode. i would argue, however, that acute psychosis or mania in some psychiatric consumers/survivors is not a viable reason for precluding open communication with psychiatric consumers/survivors as a whole (rose, 2008). moreover, such open communication is suggested with a particular type of psychiatric global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 consumer/survivor in mind—those who can speak to issues of power in their daily experiences, and in retrospect comment on their experiences during acute episodes. in-patient psychiatric care can inadvertently objectify the consumer/survivor and reinforce a standardized approach to treatment that disallows variations on therapy plans as determined by an individual healthcare provider’s best judgment of the situation. in particular, in-patient treatment for psychiatric consumers/survivors can, unintentionally or deliberately, dichotomize understandings of experiences and situations as either objective or subjective. the dichotomization of knowledge as either objective or subjective is in part explained by foucault’s (1975) exposition of privileged forms of knowing and being. foucault (1975) analyzed medical discourse, tracing the ways in which the field’s approach to the concept of the individual as a relational being has evolved. specifically, foucault’s (1975) delineation detailing the medical field’s separation of knowledge regarding pathology from the individual characterizes the separation of objective versus subjective knowledge. in this instance, subjective knowledge refers to an individual’s perception of his or her experience, in contrast to objective knowledge understood as viewing the “overall” picture from a distance thus enabling unbiased and detached pronouncements. foucault’s exposition of the subjective and the objective also involves recognizing the medical field’s appreciation of the objective— detached and therefore scientific and closer to the “truth”—over the subjective—biased towards a particular viewpoint built upon mercurial emotions and therefore unreliable. according to cohen (2008), mental healthcare often echoes a favoring of the objective over the subjective as a result of its foundation in biomedicine. cohen (2008, p. 179) asserted that although options may appear to exist for the mental health consumer/survivor in terms of choosing a type of treatment, his/her level of engagement with staff, his/her acceptance of a particular diagnosis, and the specific health professionals he/she will work with, the reality remains that mental health consumer/survivor’s overall treatment will be informed by biomedical treatment. biomedical treatment is similar to a regard for the detached over the personal, as segal explained (1994). segal (1994) portrayed biomedicine as centered around, in part, the belief that illness and the illness experience are most effectively assessed and treated by focusing on the particular illness’ pathological characteristics that are organic in nature and that perform an intervention that cures the illness (1994, p. 93). this characterization of biomedicine highlights how the position of being a mental health patient necessarily requires assuming a generalized, “medicalized” identity, as disease is ultimately understood in terms of a pathological entity, translating the individual person’s experience of illness into medical discourse. derkatch’s (2011) explication of burke’s (1966) concept of terministic screens can be used to explain how the dichotomy between objective and subjective knowledge is reinforced in mental healthcare discourse. derkatch (2011) analyzed how burke’s (1966) concept of terministic screens, or the idea that the terms people use are inherently biased and thus taint their interpretations of the world around them, can be applied to recognizing and therefore accounting for the different priorities and perspectives that biomedical scientists and consumers/survivors, along with the practitioners who work beside them, bring to the healthcare encounter. derkatch (2011) explained that terministic screens for biomedical scientists are heavily influenced by language that pathologizes, as such healthcare professionals are predisposed by their training to translate patients’ and their practitioners’ subjective experiences of illness into the so-called objective medical terms of diagnosis (p. 136). in contrast, consumers/survivors’ and their practitioners’ terministic screens are mostly impacted by their personal experience with an illness (derkatch, 2011, p. 136). thus the disconnection between biomedical scientists and consumers/survivors and their practitioners affects communication down to the sentence-level, as differing priorities and perspectives can create a separation between groups even before they meet. terministic screens that both cause and reinforce the distance between the biomedical perspective and the subjective consumer/survivor and practitioner viewpoint also result in the invalidation of knowledge informed by personal experience. in rose’s (2008) commentary clarifying the involvement of mental health consumers/survivors in research, rose pointed out that the term “researcher” often screens, or excludes, mental health consumers/survivors, described as “users and survivors” by rose. in particular, rose (2008) contended that mental health users and survivors’ rational attempts to speak for themselves are thwarted by authority figures who see such users and survivors as a threat. rose accused such authority figures as primarily focused on the potential of mental health users and survivors to be “crazy, dangerous, unpredictable, [and] irretrievably mad” precluding any kind of wide-spread, generalized practice that would assume the dignity of those whose knowledge of mental health issues is rooted in personal experience. consequently, users and survivors who attempted to incorporate their personal perspectives into research and thus become “user researchers” (p. 640) were global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 subject to being viewed as contradictions (p. 642). moreover, the understanding of the user researcher as containing two disparate elements can be perpetuated by the consumer/survivor him/herself. rose (2008) revealed that many consumers/survivors could not trust their own accounts of past experience, believing that the fact they had undergone psychiatric treatment made them too ill to think rationally (p. 643). the connotations surrounding terms that perpetuate the dichotomy between objective and subjective knowledge are thus seen as pervasive, influencing the consumer/survivor to doubt his/her own self. parallel with biomedicine’s objectification of the consumer/survivor is the suppression of the subjectivity of the healthcare professional. returning to segal’s (1994) citation of stein’s (1990) characterization of biomedicine, segal also pointed out how biomedicine advances the belief that “medical science is and should be based upon rational, scientific, dispassionate, objective, professional judgment” (p. 93). the healthcare professional’s role is thus defined to embody rationality that is equated with detachment that itself is viewed as objective and therefore scientific. this separation is often purported to protect the mental health of those whose careers place them in direct contact with the pain and suffering of others on a regular basis. yet a consequence of this separation, segal (1994) contended, is a disparity between the healthcare professional and the consumer/survivor that remains even when both parties are friends and the consumer/survivor is him or herself a healthcare professional (p. 95). the consumer/survivor’s separation from the healthcare professional is integral to the biomedical model. the belief that a personal account of one’s illness must be measured against supposedly objective psychiatric diagnostic criteria aligns with foucault’s (1975) description of authorized forms of knowing. in particular, forms of knowing that view a situation from a distance are believed to enable unbiased conclusions, and are thus authorized over personal, subjective, and therefore biased ways of knowing. thus, complementary to the objectivity of the consumer/survivor, the subjectivity of the healthcare professional is effaced. an objective, or neutral, approach to healthcare is often believed to be necessary in order to reinforce standardized treatment. attempts to be detached, however, can cause healthcare professionals to become preoccupied with accounting for and suppressing any personal biases that may taint their objectivity. this preoccupation, in turn, can suppress the empathy needed for an effective healthcare professional and consumer/survivor relationship. in their narrative analysis of physician case reports detailing problems related to certifying a patient’s sickness, engblom, alexanderson, and rudebeck (2011) discovered that healthcare professionals’ attempts to remain neutral in content and form in their case reports made acknowledgment of the problem at hand less likely (p. 22). thus the healthcare professional foremost concerned with appearing impartial was more prone to employing unproductive interventions that primarily focused on the illness rather than the individual patient. engblom et al. (2011) concluded that further research on the impact of varying narrative structures on the perceptions of healthcare providers might promote additional reflection to challenge the prioritization of objectivity in clinical encounters. enacting community psychology commitments: recovery-oriented care the field of community psychology is advancing, in part, a more empathetic relationship between healthcare professional and consumer/survivor in its commitment to (1) collective action that works to disrupt inequality in the status quo and (2) the belief that the mental health of the individual is necessarily impacted by his or her social context (campbell & cornish, 2014). thus community psychology can be seen as set apart from other sub-disciplines of psychology in its active awareness of how the general discipline of psychology rarely considers and sometimes actually reinforces issues of power. similar to the distinction of community psychology from academic and professional psychology is the divergence between the concept of recovery according to the biomedical perspective versus that adopted by mental health consumers/survivors and psychiatric rehabilitation practitioners. from the perspective of biomedical clinical research, recovery from mental illness “is an absence of something undesired, such as illness or symptoms, or the removal of something that was not part of a person’s life prior to that illness, like medications or hospitalization” (davidson et al., 2005, p. 483). in contrast, mental health consumers/survivors and psychiatric rehabilitation practitioners believe recovery “remains possible even though a person’s condition may not change” (davidson et al., 2005, p. 483). this view of recovery most often involves “some component of acceptance of illness, having a sense of hope about the future, and finding a renewed sense of self” (davidson et al., 2005, p. 483). these fundamentally different notions of recovery seem to be based on a different conception of a person’s relationship to illness. in particular, i would characterize consumer/survivor and psychiatric rehabilitation practitioner literatures as representing the subjective, praxis component of mental health treatment. freire (1970/2010) explained “praxis” as theory in action, that is, reflection and practice (p. 125). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 freire noted that such reflection and practice were not to be understood as separate parts of a whole—rather, the processes of reflecting and doing happen simultaneously when enacting praxis (p. 128). praxis is therefore the simultaneous process of acting and reflecting. the continuous process of considering the ramifications of one’s behavior starkly contrasts with biomedical ways of knowing and being that frame healthcare in terms of generalization to fit a known pathology at the exclusion of the individual consumer/survivor’s unique understandings of his or her experiences. thus knowledge informed by biomedical, clinical research is separated from knowledge informed by the experience of both consumer/survivor and psychiatric rehabilitation practitioners who are conscious of the assumptions, practices, and technologies they apply to the clients they encounter. attempts to balance appreciations for both praxis and biomedical-oriented knowledges are enacted through recovery-oriented care. kidd et al. (2014) defined recovery-oriented care as “individually tailored, respectful of rights” and grounded in a consumer/survivor’s particular strengths in order to promote their involvement and give them hope (p. 221). kidd et al.’s (2014) characterization of recoveryoriented care emphasizes the concept of recovery articulated by consumers/survivors. in particular, kidd et al.’s (2014) description of recovery-oriented care and consumers/survivors’ concept of recovery both advocate treatment informed by consumers/survivors’ and practitioners’ subjective experience of mental illness. applications of recovery-oriented care through processes such as shared decision making balance praxis and biomedical-oriented research by advancing the collaboration between biomedical researchers and consumers/survivors and mental health practitioners. in particular, information technologies such as decision aids and electronic decision support programs combine knowledge gained through biomedical research and the knowledge of consumers/survivors and mental health practitioners. combining both sets of knowledges through such technologies, in turn, help busy healthcare professionals provide the kind of individualized treatment consumers/survivors desire (drake, deegan, & rapp, 2010, p. 7). a study on recovery-oriented care by kidd et al. (2014) demonstrates how such care advances these commitments of community psychology. kidd et al.’s (2014) research took place in the in-patient psychiatric setting and involved partnering individuals who had previously been inpatient clients of a large psychiatric treatment facility located in a canadian urban center with the staff of those inpatient units. the consumers/survivors of the psychiatric inpatient units delivered a yearlong series of talks to the staff. in addition to revealing information on how to best educate in-patient staff about recovery-oriented care, kidd et al.’s (2014) study was significant for the ways in which it empowered the consumers/survivors who served as speakers to the in-patient staff. kidd et al. (2014) noted that consumers/survivors described their role in the research as “a process of growing confidence, as they successfully engaged staff at a ‘human level,’ in effect recalibrating a relationship that had been characterized by a marked power differential” (p. 224). kidd et al.’s efforts to employ recoveryoriented care in in-patient settings thus enacted community psychology’s commitment to disrupting the “unequal status quo” as consumers/survivors became sources of knowledge for in-patient staff. recovery-oriented care can also be seen as enacting community psychology’s sensitivity to the ways in which a person’s nature is influenced by his or her social environment. kidd et al.’s research also revealed the ways in which recovery-oriented care necessarily involves the collaboration of biomedical research and praxis, as opposed to therapy solely focused on change rooted in the individual. kidd et al. (2014) recounted that: many staff members were struck by how the speakers regarded seemingly “insignificant things” as critical elements of recoveryfacilitating care. these included having a “human” connection with staff, having staff taken even a small amount of time to listen to a request or discuss a challenge, and having conversations with staff that extended beyond questions about medications and symptoms. (p. 224) consequently, staff members reported greater attempts to be more responsive to consumers/survivors’ concerns and noted positive outcomes from their efforts. such positive results included a decrease in actions taken by consumers/survivors due to frustration and the empowerment of consumers/survivors through treatment that directly acknowledged their concerns (kidd et al., 2014, p. 224). thus the implementation of recovery-oriented care involved the alteration of the inpatient psychiatric environment, as staff learned to engage consumers/survivors who were current inpatients in new, more collaborative ways. enacting community psychology commitments in psychiatric hospitalization: agency to advance recovery-oriented care in order to work toward a more collaborative engagement between biomedical research and the subjective experiences of the mental health care professional and the psychiatric consumer/survivor, it is global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 necessary to recognize such collaboration as taking place between unequal speakers. in particular, recognizing the marginalization of praxis-informed, subjective knowledge of both consumers/survivors and practitioners allows us to understand the nature of the authority imbued upon biomedical-oriented, objective research. correcting for the disparity between praxisinformed, subjective knowledge and biomedicalinformed, objective research, however, means resisting perpetuating the dichotomy between such knowledges. specifically, the theory of agency advanced by herndl and licona (2007) provides a framework through which to understand how the collaboration between unequal interlocutors might honor a praxis-oriented notion of recovery. this praxis-oriented notion of recovery that combines action and reflection, in turn, can implement recovery-oriented care that enacts community psychology’s commitments. as noted earlier, i believe the field of community psychology to be advancing, in part, the belief that the mental health of the individual is necessarily impacted by his or her social context (campbell & cornish, 2014). i see recovery-oriented care’s attempts to balance appreciations for both praxis and biomedicaloriented knowledges as enacting community psychology’s sensitivity to the intrinsic social factors of a single individual. herndl and licona’s (2007) theory of agency can be used to outline how praxis and biomedical-oriented knowledges might work together in its efforts to correct an understanding of agency that situates power within the individual and overlooks the myriad of material and textual influences that necessarily compose agency (p. 139). in order to enact this correction of the individual-social dichotomy, herndl and licona (2007) proposed three essential actions: first, we must sever the metonymic identity of agent and agency, as well as the metonymic identity of author with authority. second, we must reverse the order in which we think of these relationships; agency phenomenologically precedes the agent and authority phenomenologically precedes the author. specifically, we contextualize agents and authors as sites of an agency function and an authority function. . . . third, we must reveal the necessary, if also shifting, relationship between agency and authority. (p. 138) taken together, these actions serve to compose herndl and licona’s (2007) rhetorical theory of agency that works against the reification of the individual as the creator of agency or the specific holder of authority. herndl and licona (2007) argued that empowerment for individuals only occurs when such individuals engage relationally with others (p. 141). in particular, agency and authorship are interrelated, as with the knowledge of institutional or organizational practices comes the possibility to practice and formulate authority and agency through relationships (herndl & licona, 2007, p. 148). thus the collaboration of biomedical-oriented research and knowledge gained through personal experience can imbue each party with the knowledge necessary to “speak with authority and act with a potential for change” (herndl & licona, 2007, p. 148). given the complexities and inequalities inherent between knowledge based in biomedical research and knowledge based in personal experiences, what would long-stay in-patient treatment that balanced both research and praxis-oriented knowledge entail? based on my research of interventions in psychiatric hospitalization, i propose that in-patient treatment can balance both biomedical and praxis-oriented knowledge through open communication and an appreciation of the expertise of both the biomedical framework and praxis. these two characteristics, in turn, each fulfill components of the consumer/survivor, praxis-oriented notion of recovery: some component of acceptance of illness, having a sense of hope about the future, and having a renewed sense of self (davidson et al., 2005, p. 483). open communication can balance both biomedical and praxis-oriented knowledge. priebe et al.’s (2009) research on the impact mental health consumers/survivors’ experiences as in-patients can have on their overall prognosis demonstrated the impact open communication between mental health professional and consumer/survivor can have on the consumer/survivor’s acceptance of illness. in particular, priebe et al.’s (2009) research indicated a causal link between a consumer/survivor’s initial perception of his/her treatment and long-term outcome. priebe et al. (2009) conducted their research by collecting sociodemographic data and readmissions for 1,570 involuntarily admitted patients (p. 49). 50% of the involuntarily admitted patients were interviewed within one week of their initial admission, and of those 50%, 51% were re-interviewed after one year (priebe et al., 2009, p. 49). after one year, 40% of the re-interviewed sample felt their initial admission was warranted (priebe et al., 2009, p. 50). within the one-year followup period after the index episode, 234 patients, i.e., 15% of the total initial sample of 1,570 involuntarily admitted patents, were involuntarily readmitted and an additional 169 patients (11%) were voluntarily admitted within the same period (priebe et al., 2009, p. 50). from their interviews, preibe et al. (2009) determined that higher involuntary readmission rates seemed to be the result of patients who were initially less satisfied with their treatment, received government benefits, lived global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 with others and had an african and/or caribbean background (p. 49). conversely, involuntary psychiatric hospitalization was viewed more favorably in the longrun by those who were initially more satisfied with their treatment, were admitted when functioning at a lower level over all, and living alone (p. 49). priebe et al. (2009) concluded that, in involuntary psychiatric inpatients, consumers/survivors’ initial satisfaction with treatment affects their long-term prognosis (p. 49). priebe et al.’s (2009) findings are significant to understanding key points of intervention in psychiatric hospitalization, pointing out areas where reform might most positively impact a consumer/survivor’s recovery. in particular, when a consumer/survivor’s “initial level of satisfaction” is understood as directly related to his/her acceptance of having an illness, open communication between the mental health professional and the consumer/survivor can be viewed as a way to advance a consumer/survivor concept of recovery. priebe et al. (2009) have concluded that consumers/survivors should be asked to evaluate their treatment at the beginning of their hospitalization in order to foster an environment of open communication (p. 53). while priebe et al. (2009) acknowledged that there is little information on what, particularly, will help consumers/survivors better adapt to psychiatric hospitalization, they also noted that observational studies imply that such actions as “procedural fairness, comprehensive information, respect, empathy” and including consumers/survivors in treatment decisions correlate with consumers/survivors’ higher satisfaction with their treatment (p. 53). given that communication as early as admission can affect the overall perception, and therefore prognosis, of the consumer/survivor, the mental health practitioner’s prioritization towards communicating the biomedical-based research behind his or her treatment decisions with the consumer/survivor can thus contribute to an atmosphere conducive to a praxis-oriented notion of recovery that leads to an acceptance of illness. an appreciation of the expertise of both biomedical and praxis-oriented knowledge can also facilitate collaboration between them. drake et al. (2010) explained that the biomedical-based health care professional, or team of professionals, bring(s) expertise related to observing the mental health issue as a whole, keeping in mind multiple variables including “the health problem, the possible interventions, potential benefits[,] and risk of alternatives” (p. 8). the praxis-based consumer/survivor and practitioner, in turn, bring expertise through their personal experiences, “values, goals, supports, and preferences” (drake et al., 2010, p. 8). valuing experientially-based knowledge in conjunction with biomedical research can consequently imbue consumers/survivors with a renewed sense of self through the validation of their interpretations and experiences, thus leading to a sense of hope about the future. achieving a balance between praxis and biomedical oriented knowledge is not without its complexities, including, but not limited to, the complications of achieving agency in healthcare grounded in a biomedical framework. segal (2006) critiqued as oversimplified alternatives to the paternalistic biomedical framework that claimed to move from a “compliance” model to a “concordance” model. segal (2006) declared “concordance” to be merely “compliance” in disguise, accusing concordance theorists of being primarily focused on persuading consumers/survivors to follow the advice of their doctors, rather than creating space for consumers/survivors’ health preferences to be respected (pp. 82-83). while segal (2006) acknowledged that following the advice of doctors is necessary, she pointed out that this was not what concordance theorists such as marinker et al. claimed to be addressing: in advocating “concordance”. . . marinker et al. said they were “not simply offering an alternative, more politically acceptable way of talking about a technically difficult, and morally complex, problem”; rather, they said, they wanted “to introduce and urge a distinct change in culture, in researching and teaching about the relationship between prescribing and medicine-taking, between patient and prescriber.” (pp. 81-82) segal’s (2006) assessment of concordance ultimately judged the concept to be contradictory and deceptive in its intent for compliance (p. 81). consequently, segal (2006) called for more discourse on the relationship between “concordance and commerce, a frank view of strategies of patient persuasion, and a recognition that the taking and not taking of medical advice occur in a larger field of health beliefs, health economics, and health mores” (p. 92). by acknowledging the parallels between the proposal for balancing biomedical and praxis-oriented knowledge and moving from compliance to concordance, i recognize the need for further research on how recovery-oriented care might promote agency in the context of psychiatric hospitalization. in particular, i echo drake et al.’s (2010) observation that “barriers to shared decision making. . . need to be clarified by further research and addressed at many levels” including, but not limited to: “basic decision making science, clinician training, structural implementation, electronic infrastructure, [and] patient empowerment” (p. 11). this article invites more progressive/critical perspectives on the ways community psychology can advance global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 consumer/survivor empowerment in long-stay psychiatric hospitalization. integral to the healing process is the recognition that approaches to mental health treatment can be enriched by the intertwining and clear communication of biomedical-based and experientially-informed knowledge. analyzing the ways in which biomedicine’s designation of distance between objective and subjective knowledge pervades the rhetoric of mental healthcare reveals power dynamics that can unintentionally disempower psychiatric consumer/survivors and accordingly prohibit alleviation of their distress. mental health services are vital and therefore need to continue to be held to a high standard. psychiatric hospitalization does not have to consist of being locked up, treated as “other,” and deprived of agency. the field of community psychology is committed, in part, to (1) collective action that advocates for the rights of marginalized peoples, and (2) the belief that the mental health of the individual is necessarily impacted by his or her social context (campbell & cornish, 2014). these commitments advance treatments that move beyond the dichotomy of objective and subjective experiences, instead advancing an attitude towards care that enables coexistence. references campbell, c. & cornish, f. (2014). reimagining community health psychology: maps, journeys, and new terrains. journal of health psychology, 19, 3-15. doi: 10.1177/1359105313500263 cohen, b. m. z. (2008). mental health user narratives. new york: palgrave macmillan. davidson, l., o’connell, m. j., tondora, j., lawless, m., & evans, a. c. (2005). recovery in serious mental illness: a new wine or just a new bottle? professional psychology: research and practice, 36, 480-487. doi: 10.1037/0735-7028.36.5.480 derkatch, c. (2011). does biomedicine control for rhetoric? configuring practitioner-patient interaction. in j. leach & d. dysart-gale (eds.), rhetorical questions of health and medicine (pp. 129-154). ky: lexington books. drake, r. e., deegan, p. e., rapp, c. (2010). the promise of shared decision making in mental health. psychiatric rehabilitation journal, 34, 713. doi: 10.2975/34.1.2010.7.13 engblom, m., alexanderson, k., rudebeck, c. e. (2011). physicians’ messages in problematic sickness certification: a narrative analysis of case reports. bmc family practice, 12, 18-25. doi: 10.1186/1471-2296-12-18. foucault, m. (2006). psychiatric power: lectures at the college de france, 1973-74. (g. burchell, trans.). new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. (original work published 2003) herndl, c.g. & licona, a.c. (2007). shifting agency: agency, kairos, and the possibilities of social action. in m. z. thralls (ed.), communicative practices in workplaces and the professions: cultural perspectives on the regulation of discourse and organizations (pp. 133-153). amityville, ny: baywood pub. co. kidd, s.a., mckenzie, k., collins, a., clark, c., costa, l., mihalakakos, g., paterson, j. (2014). advancing the recovery orientation or hospital care through staff engagement with former clients of inpatient units. psychiatric services, 65, 221-225. doi: 10.1176/appi.ps.201300054 nelson, g., lord, j., & ochocka, j. (2001). shifting the paradigm in community mental health: towards empowerment and community. toronto: university of toronto press. priebe, s., katsakou, c., amos, t., lesse, m., morriss, r., rose, d., . . . yeeles, k. (2009). patients’ views and readmissions 1 year after involuntary hospitalisation. the british journal of psychiatry, 194, 49-54. doi: 10.1192/bjp.bp.108.052266 rose, d. (2008). commentary: madness strikes back. journal of community & applied social psychology, 18, 638-644. doi: 10.1002/casp.981 segal, j. (1994). patient compliance, the rhetoric of rhetoric, and the rhetoric of persuasion. rhetoric society quarterly, 23, 90-102. doi: 10.1080/02773949409390998 segal, j. (2007). “compliance” to “concordance”: a critical view. journal of medical humanities, 28, 81-96. doi: 10.1007/s10912-007-9030-4 warner, r. (1995). from patient management to risk management. in r. warner (ed.), alternatives to the hospital for acute psychiatric treatment (pp. 237-248). washington, dc: american psychiatric press. microsoft word alfaro-v4i2-20130613.docx psicología comunitaria y políticas sociales: institucionalidad y dinámicas de actores jaime alfaro inzunza universidad del desarrollo, chile jaime alfaro inzunza psicólogo de la pontificia universidad católica de chile. máster en intervención psicosocial de la universidad de barcelona. doctor en ciencias sociales y de la educación de la universidad de girona. académico facultad de psicología, universidad del desarrollo. su trabajo de investigación aborda temáticas relativas psicología comunitaria y el desarrollo de intervenciones en políticas sociales, así como el estudio de bienestar subjetivo en infancia y adolescencia. keywords: community psychology; social policies; community action in social policy palabras clave: psicología comunitaria; políticas sociales; acción comunitaria en política social recommended citation: alfaro, j. (2013). psicología comunitaria y políticas sociales: institucionalidad y dinámicas de actores. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(2), xx-xx. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   community psychology and social policies: actor dynamics and institutions abstract this article seeks to analyze the relationship between community psychology and social policy, given the growth in interest in their interaction, both in in terms of the issues covered (from mental health to social problems) and the regions concerned (north america, europe, and latin america). the article describes the experience of community psychology contributing to the phases of the social policy cycle; the effects of social policy on the development and institutionalization of community psychology in the university, as well as the risks and tensions of this relationship for our discipline. based on an analysis of the complexity of the contribution of community psychology to support the social policy process, the article proposes a framework for understanding this relationship that considers: a) the different institutional and regulatory frameworks that define policy, and the multilevel dynamics within which these are constructed, b) the role of multiple actors (governmental, professional, social and academic), and their influence, struggle, forms of interaction-negotiation and coalition, cultural differences and interests, as well as c) the process of encounter and debate among interpretations and frames of meaning, structured as contexts or open stages in which forces and political options (ideological and disciplinary) are displayed and materialized in processes of negotiation where the definition of problems and their solutions has particular importance. keywords: community psychology; social policies; community action in social policy psicología comunitaria y políticas sociales: institucionalidad y dinámicas de actores resumen se analiza la relación entre la psicología comunitaria y las políticas sociales, considerando su creciente ampliación en términos de los ámbitos (desde la salud mental a los problemas sociales) y respecto de las regiones en que se desarrollan experiencias (américa del norte, europa, latinoamérica). se describen las experiencias de contribución a las fases del ciclo de políticas sociales, los efectos de este vínculo sobre el desarrollo e institucionalización universitaria, así como la constatación de riesgos y tensiones para la psicología comunitaria. a base del análisis de la complejidad del proceso de contribución disciplinar a las políticas sociales, se propone un marco de abordaje de la relación que considere: a) los marcos institucionales y normativos diversos que delimitan las políticas, b) las dinámicas multinivel en que estas se construyen, c) el papel de los actores múltiples (gubernamentales, profesionales, sociales, y académicos) y sus luchas de influencia, sus formas de interacción-negociación y coalición, sus diferencias culturales y de intereses, así como c) los procesos de encuentro y lucha de interpretaciones y marcos de sentido, que se estructuran como contextos o escenarios abiertos, donde se despliegan fuerzas y opciones políticas, ideológicas y disciplinares, materializadas en procesos de negociación en los cuales tienen un valor relevante la definición de los problemas y sus soluciones. palabras claves: psicología comunitaria; políticas sociales; acción comunitaria en política social presentación a base de la exposición y análisis de las características contradictorias y tensionadas del vínculo entre la psicología comunitaria y las políticas sociales, se propone y fundamenta la necesidad de tener en cuenta aspectos institucionales propios de las políticas sociales, así como también aspectos relacionados con las dinámicas de actores sociales. esto se plantea en virtud de la importancia de estos en la configuración y organización de las políticas, que afectan y condicionan la inserción y participación de la psicología comunitaria en estos contextos. se parte de dos consideraciones básicas: (1) la constatación de las potencialidades y de la relevancia social y política de la participación además de la contribución de los psicólogos y psicólogas comunitarios en políticas sociales; (2) la importancia y el aporte que tiene para la disciplina el entender como también desarrollar líneas de investigación y abordaje de los límites, tensiones, riesgos que, según expondremos, se generan en el global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   proceso de inserción y uso de recursos conceptuales y técnicos en programas y políticas sociales. con este propósito, en un primer apartado se expone una revisión general de literatura respecto de: a) los períodos temporales y las regiones en que se ha reportado esta vinculación, b) los focos y ámbitos de intervención en que ha ocurrido el proceso de contribución e influencia de la psicología comunitaria hacia las políticas públicas y viceversa; y también c) la discusión respecto de la tensión y los riesgos que entraña el desencuentro entre las orientaciones y modelos de las políticas, las definiciones y los principios éticos y técnicos de la psicología comunitaria. en un segundo apartado, se expone una revisión de literatura producida tanto desde la psicología comunitaria, como desde los debates internos a las políticas sociales, que aportan elementos sobre las dimensiones que permiten comprender las formas, diversidad y particularidades de la relación entre psicología comunitaria y políticas sociales que se reporta en el apartado anterior. específicamente, se analiza la relevancia que adquieren: a) las nociones y funciones de las políticas sociales y los diversos marcos institucionales y normativos que las delimitan, y que están en su base; y b) los procesos de encuentro y lucha de interpretaciones tanto como de marcos de sentido que se estructuran como escenarios donde se despliegan fuerzas y opciones políticas, ideológicas y disciplinares. estas se materializan en procesos de negociación, en los cuales tienen un valor relevante el papel de actores múltiples (gubernamentales, profesionales, sociales y académicos cuyas luchas de influencia, formas de interacción-negociación y coalición son de gran importancia. psicología comunitaria y políticas sociales: trayectoria, contribución mutua y tensión el vínculo entre políticas sociales y psicología comunitaria aparece en la literatura sobre la disciplina como una dimensión relevante desde su origen, enlazada con el objeto y propósito de su intervención. según autores clásicos, como bennett, anderson, cooper, hassol, klein & rosenblum (1966) y rappaport (1977), y según revisiones más actuales relacionadas al tema, como las de phillips (2000), burton, boyle, harris & kagan (2007), y bishop, vicary, browne & guard (2009), la transformación de las políticas sociales en los años sesenta tuvo incidencia en el origen de la psicología comunitaria. esta vinculación histórica estaría relacionada con tres factores: a) los valores y encuadres básicos compartidos en el campo de las políticas sociales de la época y la psicología comunitaria (bennett et al., 1966; rappaport, 1977; phillips, 2000); b) la relevancia de las políticas públicas y sociales como componentes del objeto sobre el que actúa la psicología comunitaria (rappaport, 1977; phillips, 2000); y por último, c) al cambio en los objetivos profesionales y científicos que provocaron las políticas (bishop et al., 2009; serrano, colón & díaz, 2005; shinn, 2007). por otra parte, desde esta revisión de antecedentes, se desprende que este vínculo se incrementó hacia los años ochenta, y sobre todo los noventa, e incluyó no sólo dimensiones como la salud mental, tal como fue en sus inicios, sino que el conjunto de las áreas de la intervención social, a la vez que tuvo presencia en diversas realidades regionales. en el caso de norteamérica, varios autores (entre otros bishop et al., 2009; perkins, 1995; shinn, 2007) han establecido que la participación de la psicología y los psicólogos y psicólogas comunitarios se extendió hacia las acciones sociales implementadas en el marco de políticas públicas relativas a fenómenos sociales múltiples. del mismo modo, en europa, desde los años ochenta, los psicólogos y psicólogas comunitarios se habrían involucrado cada vez más en las acciones de política social y de los sistemas de servicios sociales, y en las múltiples problemáticas que abordan (burton et al., 2007). en américa latina, de igual modo, durante los años noventa, este lazo se habría extendido y consolidado en áreas de acción vinculadas con la pobreza y la desigualdad, entre otras (alfaro, 2007; arrieta & garita, 2012; freitas 2000; gonçalvez, 2010; krause, 2002; lapalma & de lellis, 2012; martínez et al., 2009; montero, 2010; rodríguez, 2012). junto a estas características, se ahonda además en el proceso de contribución e influencia mutua entre la psicología comunitaria y las políticas sociales. respecto de ello diversos autores y autoras destacan, en primer lugar, los aportes hechos a base de su condición de disciplina científica y, en segundo lugar, los aportes derivados del acervo conceptual y técnico de la psicología comunitaria. respecto del primero, habría aportado insumos de conocimiento científico en los distintos niveles o fases del ciclo de las políticas públicas, tales como la formulación, la fundamentación, el diseño, la ejecución, el seguimiento, la evaluación y la fijación de prioridades (bishop et al., 2009; ornelas, vargas-moniz & madeira, 2012; perkins, 1995; phillips, 2000; rappaport, 1977; rodríguez, 2012).en relación con el segundo, se establece un conjunto amplio de contribuciones referidas a dimensiones que incluyen la perspectiva ecológica (phillips, 2000; teixeira, loja, costa & menezes, 2012), el desarrollo de procesos participativos y de empoderamiento (bishop et al., 2009; burton & kagan, 2003; carvallo & serrano-garcía, lapalma global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   & de lellis, 2012; montero, 2010; ornelas et al., 2012; perkins, 1995; phillips, 2000; 2008), el trabajo en redes y coaliciones comunitarias (martínez & martínez, 2003), hasta una contribución metodológica (arrieta & garita, 2012; lapalma & de lellis, 2012). en cuanto a la incidencia de las políticas sociales sobre el desarrollo de la psicología comunitaria, en la literatura se discuten básicamente tres aspectos; (1) el encuadre de valores y discursos de las políticas, y particularmente, su incidencia sobre el marco de orientación de las diversas prácticas de intervención social posibles; (2) los campos de quehacer profesionales y áreas de desarrollo académico que las políticas sociales abren, es decir, al aumento de prácticas de aplicación y uso de recursos técnicos y conceptuales, y el consiguiente enriquecimiento y potenciamiento de la psicología comunitaria; y (3) como consecuencia de lo anterior, se habría producido y/o ampliado un proceso de institucionalización universitaria de la disciplina. el desarrollo de espacios de formación de pre y post grado, se vincula a la generación de mejores condiciones materiales para su desarrollo académico y de investigación disciplinar. sobre el primer nivel de esta influencia, burton et al. (2007), alfaro (2007), arrieta & garita (2012) y teixeira et al. (2012), entre otros, relacionan el proceso de desarrollo y cambio de las políticas sociales con la evolución de la psicología comunitaria. en lo que se refiere a las orientaciones de acción en la comunidad que pueden implementarse, se discute respecto del vínculo de éstas con las estrategias de desarrollo del país, afectando con ello directamente la práctica profesional de los psicólogos y psicólogas comunitarios. en este mismo sentido, autores y autoras como shinn (2007) y ornelas et al. (2012), entre otros, señalan que es fundamental considerar que las políticas sociales conllevan diferentes visiones o filosofías que inciden en las posibilidades que encuentran las acciones derivadas desde la disciplina. a tal punto que la existencia misma del campo comunitario como espacio de acción se ve afectado por el espacio que las políticas públicas le otorguen (alfaro, 2007; burton et al., 2007; rodríguez, 2009; teixeira et al., 2012). respecto del segundo nivel, basándose en planteamientos de autores y autoras como marcoux et al. (2009), dugravier et al. (2009) y rodríguez (2009), entre otros, podemos establecer que el proceso de contribución a las políticas sociales, que señalábamos antes, habría generado condiciones, espacios y oportunidades para el desarrollo de quehaceres y experiencias. así también habría permitido la puesta en uso de técnicas propias de la disciplina, en diversos campos, en acciones frente a distintas problemáticas, niveles de acción, áreas programáticas, y estrategias de trabajo que en su conjunto habrían repercutido en la psicología comunitaria, potenciando la diversificación, la innovación y el enriquecimiento de las prácticas profesionales y académicas propias de ésta. de esta manera se favorecen prácticas como: las de evaluación y el asesoramiento por medio de la investigación-acción; y la elaboración e implementación de políticas dirigidas a grupos en situaciones de vulnerabilidad y marginación, en ámbitos relacionados con la participación de asociaciones de usuarios, pacientes y familias. también se favorece la activación de procesos de cambio de las políticas sociales, mediante procesos de politización de la participación social y fortalecimiento de la sociedad civil en las políticas de pobreza y contra la exclusión. respecto del tercer nivel de influencia, la literatura revisada muestra, por una parte, una creciente demanda de psicólogos y psicólogas comunitarios, en latinoamérica, como en brasil (freitas, 2000; gonçalves, 2010), argentina (lapalma & de lellis, 2012), chile (alfaro, 2000, 2007; krause, 2002; martínez et al., 2009), uruguay (rodríguez, 2009), puerto rico (carvallo & serrano-garcía, 2008), costa rica (arrieta & garita, 2012), en europa y los estados unidos (burton et al., 2007; phillips, 2000; shinn, 2007) y en nueva zelanda y australia (gridley, fisher, thomas & bishop, 2007). lo anterior, enlazado con el uso del acervo de la disciplina (que ya señalábamos) a nivel legislativo y gubernamental, como base para el diseño de acciones, en todas fases del ciclo de las políticas, ha favorecido y repercutido sobre la institucionalización universitaria de la disciplina (alfaro, 2000; burton et al., 2007; krause, 2002; lapalma & de lellis, 2012; martínez et al., 2009; rodríguez, 2012). a la vez, como señalan autores como perkins (1995) y shinn (2007), entre otros, la participación en políticas sociales ha favorecido un mayor reconocimiento y validez científica, contribuyendo a un incremento de la calidad de la investigación y la pertinencia de su uso. se favorece, a su vez, un creciente apoyo público a la investigación, permitiendo innovaciones y avances en la medida que las nociones, ideas y estrategias se enfrentan al desafío de responder nuevas preguntas, y a la exigencia de integrar y dialogar con otras disciplinas, a la vez que se retroalimenta desde las experiencias de aplicación directa que enfrenta.. no obstante lo anterior, según recogemos de un conjunto de otros reportes, el vínculo entre psicología comunitaria y políticas sociales entraña tensiones, complejidades y vacíos. específicamente se reporta un conjunto de tensiones y desencuentros entre las orientaciones propias de la psicología comunitaria y global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   determinados encuadres de las políticas sociales, que afectan su vocación crítica y su capacidad para generar cambios sociales (freitas, 2000; krause, 2002; lapalma & de lellis, 2012; montero, 2010;rodríguez, 2009). esto limitaría la aplicación y uso efectivo de principios técnicos específicos propios de la psicología comunitaria, tales como la generación de participación social, el empoderamiento y el desarrollo de procesos bottom-up, en el marco de las políticas sociales (alfaro, 2011; alfaro & zambrano, 2009; bishop et al., 2009; burton et al., 2007; freitas, 1998, 2000; krause, 2002; lapalma & de lellis, 2012; montero, 2010; rodríguez, 2009). el análisis sobre esta situación de tensión y riesgo refiere a la presencia de determinados modelos de políticas sociales, caracterizados por sus formas asistenciales, paliativas, centradas en el déficit o compensatorias, que derivan de concepciones subsidiarias del rol del estado en materia de políticas sociales (giorgi, 2005; gonçalves, 2010; krause, 2002; rodríguez, 2009; teixeira et al., 2012). relevancia de la institucionalidad y la dinámica de actores en análisis del vínculo entre psicología comunitaria y políticas sociales de cara a comprender la forma y variación del vínculo que hasta ahora se ha presentado en la relación entre estos dos campos, con el objetivo de analizarlo y asumir una postura activa orientada a transformar e implementar un proceso de trabajo académico al respecto, revisaremos a continuación distintos aportes analíticos globales, tanto producidos desde la disciplina, como desde los debates internos de las políticas sociales. desde la psicología comunitaria se discute la necesidad de asumir que el conocimiento producido por si mismo no basta para sustentar procesos de influencia o de cambio de políticas públicas o sociales. en este sentido, perkins (1995) señala que el efecto del conocimiento científico sobre las políticas no es directo, e incluso tiende a ser débil, siendo simplista considerar que una utilización mayor del conocimiento social, de por sí, redunda de forma automática en una mejora en las decisiones del gobierno. solarz (2001) ahonda en esta consideración señalando que el obstáculo principal no es que la psicología comunitaria cuente o no con conocimientos que le sirvan de base para influir en las políticas sociales, sino que más bien el principal límite es la capacidad que se tenga de comprender las tensiones y dificultades para dialogar que se generan entre agentes de la disciplina y quienes formulan las políticas. en consecuencia, se requiere asumir que, en las negociaciones y gestiones de poder entre escenarios académicos y políticos, es fundamental comprender que no rige la lógica pura, sino que entran en juego elementos de interpretación que son mucho más relevantes a la hora de llevar adelante una propuesta. de esta manera, para pensar el cambio y la incidencia sobre las políticas. es necesario no sólo poner foco o énfasis en el conocimiento disciplinar, sino que es necesario asumir la complejidad del proceso de construcción de las políticas, y las especificidades de los distintos niveles de gobierno y de sus actores. en este mismo sentido shinn (2007) señala que aunque la psicología comunitaria puede influir, (puesto que aporta conocimientos en campos diversos), no es fácil que esto suceda, en la medida en que el conocimiento no se transforma automáticamente en cambios en la política y, por eso, debe atender también a la lógica de las políticas sociales. es interesante resaltar que desde el punto de vista de shinn (2007), para influir en las políticas el científico/a social tiene que involucrarse en ellas (“bailar con el monstruo”) asumiendo que en ellas operan ideas, valores y marcos interpretativos que deben considerarse, no soslayando las dinámicas y características de agentes, funcionarios y funcionarias y profesionales que hacen las políticas. por su parte, bishop et al. (2009) consideran que, para poder generar cambios en las políticas sociales, el psicólogo o psicóloga comunitario debe asumir su complejidad y deconstruirlas, determinando a quiénes afecta y estableciendo los contextos y cosmovisiones de las personas participantes desde una perspectiva multidisciplinaria. esto es, situar el funcionamiento de los grupos participantes en un marco local, social, histórico y político amplio, asumir que las burocracias son parte del proceso y reconocer la diversidad, de modo de incorporar todos los puntos de vista, incluido el de la comunidad. es decir, como señala perkins (1995), resulta fundamental que la psicología comunitaria esté familiarizada con las dinámicas políticas de quienes intervienen en este proceso. esto es, no sólo que conozca la organización o nivel concreto involucrado, sino los distintos poderes y niveles – ejecutivo, legislativo y judicial– que inciden en la formulación de políticas, como también las asociaciones barriales y vecinales hasta las agencias federales e internacionales. se deben considerar además las luchas y dinámicas de influencias en que están involucrados estos actores claves y su papel determinante, en las conexiones entre el contenido de las políticas y los programas y la teoría e investigación. resulta de gran relevancia asumir que la formulación de políticas es un proceso complejo en el que participan múltiples actores que poseen diferentes intereses. esto exige en consecuencia: involucrarse a lo largo de todo el proceso, desde su global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   formulación e implementación hasta su evaluación., trabajando en conjunto con profesionales, tomadores de decisiones y personas de la academia para transformar los discursos y la teoría en resultados tangibles y realistas en la prestación de servicios. asumiendo que los funcionarios y funcionarias del gobierno y los/as responsables políticos, por un lado, y los investigadores e investigadoras, por otro, pertenecen a dos culturas diferentes de manera tal que el éxito o el fracaso en la aplicación de la ciencia social depende de que los científicos/as sociales logren armonizar los conocimientos científicos y los intereses políticos, y viceversa, que los responsables políticos consideren la habilidad política y los objetivos de los científicos/as (perkins, 1995). en igual sentido phillips (2000) señala que la relación entre ciencia y política es compleja y denota una tensión múltiple; es de suma importancia entender la cultura política. así, desde este punto de vista, los problemas en el vínculo entre psicólogos, psicólogas y formuladores/as de políticas se explican en gran medida por el desconocimiento que tendrían los psicólogos y psicólogas comunitarios de las políticas públicas. este desconocimiento se puede dar en aspectos relevantes tales como entender las restricciones y límites que constriñen las políticas (presupuestos, presiones políticas, etc.), o la relevancia que tienen los marcos institucionales y normativos que las delimitan. estas dimensiones de complejidad, resaltadas desde el debate y reflexión de la psicología comunitaria, se clarifican y precisan si integramos algunos aportes del debate interno de las políticas sociales. un aspecto crucial es asumir que las políticas sociales no pueden entenderse como un campo neutro, inocuo, “transparente”, monolítico o estático, sino que deben concebirse como escenarios estructurados a partir de dimensiones valorativas que expresan los debates, tensiones ideológicas, políticas, conceptuales y técnicas. estas tensiones atraviesan las políticas e inciden en la concreción específica y operacional de cada uno de sus componentes, tal como se plantea ampliamente en los debates internos del estudio y análisis de las políticas sociales, según recogemos de autores como meny & thoeing (1992) y muller (2000). desde estos desarrollos las políticas sociales se estructuran como escenarios abiertos en los que se despliegan fuerzas y dinamismos sociopolíticos. a estos concurren también múltiples racionalidades y sistemas simbólicos, opciones políticas, ideológicas, técnicas y disciplinares, que se materializan en actores diversos entrelazados en procesos de interacción y negociación a distintos niveles. ahora bien, si hacemos un repaso global de esta literatura, se distinguen tres dimensiones o ejes de tensión y diversidad en las políticas sociales, relacionados con la noción de éstas, y con diferencias sustantivas en la configuración institucional y técnica que condiciona la implementación de intervenciones sociales en las que participa la psicología comunitaria. estas dimensiones resultan claves de tener en cuenta al analizar, investigar y orientar líneas de acción tendientes a potenciar este vínculo y favorecer la influencia de la disciplina. la primera dimensión, se refiere al continuo que se establece entre las nociones y la función o el fin último que orienta la política social, en el cual a su vez se distinguen cuatro polos o formas diferenciadas: (1) la primera considera que sus funciones son gestionar la asistencia y la protección social y resolver problemas sociales o dar respuesta a necesidades sociales. desde esta perspectiva, el rol de las políticas sociales es básicamente paliativo o compensatorio: intenta cubrir las necesidades de los sujetos que no están en condiciones de satisfacerlas a través del mercado o la familia, y están dirigidas (focalizadas) a los grupos sociales en situación de pobreza (abramovich, 2006; cepal, 2006; herrera & castón, 2003). (2) la segunda, supone plantearlas como una acción institucional funcional a los requerimientos y/o costos del crecimiento. el énfasis está puesto en el desarrollo de instrumentos o mecanismos de integración y cohesión social que permitan, por un lado, mantener la pertenencia a una comunidad sociopolítica, y, por otro, garantizar las condiciones de vida necesarias para sostener y promover el bienestar social de la población, con el objetivo de asegurar el orden, la gobernabilidad y la regulación de los conflictos sociales (herrera & castón, 2003). (3) la tercera, apunta a asegurar la reproducción y el desarrollo del capital humano necesario para el funcionamiento del todo social, a través de la promoción del bienestar y de la calidad de vida, para disponer de fuerzas productivas adecuadas a las necesidades de crecimiento económico (herrera & castón, 2003). (4) la última, implica concebir las políticas como instrumento de expansión de los derechos sociales, entendidos estos como un complemento y evolución que va de los derechos civiles y políticos a los sociales. estos, a su vez, están orientados y regulados por el desarrollo de ciudadanía, entendida ésta no sólo como la pertenencia del individuo al estado, sino más bien como resultado de un global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   complejo de derechos-deberes de los “sujetos de ciudadanía”, ya se trate de individuos o de actores colectivos (abramovich, 2006; cepal, 2006; herrera & castón, 2003). la segunda dimensión o eje se refiere al tipo de actores implicados en las políticas y a la relevancia de sus dinámicas de interacción y negociación, en las que se reconocen dos tipos básicos. (1) un primer tipo básico en el cual la gestión e implementación de políticas comporta una actividad de agentes gubernamentales, cuyo rol principal es tomar decisiones en materia de políticas sociales. además, se da aquí una separación nítida entre estado y sociedad y el proceso de gobierno es en esencia controlado unilateral y jerárquicamente por un solo actor, el estatal (braun, 1999; roth, 2008). (2) un segundo tipo básico en el que las políticas sociales son concebidas e implementadas teniendo en cuenta las dinámicas de negociación y las competencias y capacidades de los diversos agentes y actores que participan en ellas. estos incluyen tanto quienes hacen las políticas, los administradores y los técnicos sectoriales, como los colectivos sociales de interés, los expertos, los grupos académicos y los comunicadores, que integran redes, coaliciones y agrupaciones. se considera que todos ellos son interdependientes y aportan los conocimientos y los recursos técnicos y políticos necesarios para el desarrollo de las políticas en sus diversos niveles y fases (fischer, 2003muller, 2000; rein & schön, 1993; stone, 2001). la tercera dimensión corresponde a la relevancia que se le asigna a los procesos de negociación/discernimiento de significado respecto de las necesidades, problemas e intervenciones en el proceso de formulación, implementación y evaluación de una política. en esta se distingue: (1) un primer polo, donde las políticas sociales son concebidas e implementadas como procesos de elección racional que priorizan el conocimiento técnico objetivo y están orientadas a maximizar los beneficios a la hora de resolver los problemas sociales. desde este punto de vista, una política es un proceso sistemático y regulado de toma de decisiones técnicas frente a una realidad objetiva, a partir de procesos racionales básicos y conocimiento científico cierto y objetivo (braun, 1999). (2) un segundo polo, en el cual las políticas sociales se implementan y determinan a base de procesos de discernimiento social de conflictos sociales, concebidos como dinámicas de interpretación y negociación de sentidos, en el seno de las cuales los distintos actores se posicionan y organizan sus acciones. aquí, la política social es concebida como un proceso de diálogo, negociación y conflicto de marcos interpretativos o estructuras de significado de la realidad en donde se posicionan los actores sociales relacionados, que operan como principios organizadores que transforman la información fragmentada de una realidad o fenómeno social en un problema político estructurado y significativo (braun, 1999; muller, 2000; stone, 2001). conclusiones de lo expuesto surgen, al menos, dos conclusiones. en primer lugar, que las políticas sociales son un ámbito de interés y preocupación para la psicología comunitaria. se han desarrollado, y están en curso, líneas de análisis, de reflexión y crítica, que dan cuenta de sus contribuciones en distintos períodos y para diversas realidades regionales y colectivos académicos. a este respecto cabe resaltar que la psicología comunitaria posee un potencial de aporte a las políticas sociales, tanto en lo que respecta a sus recursos como campo científico, en relación con las distintas fases del ciclo de las políticas, como también respecto de sus nociones y distinciones característica de su acumulado conceptual y técnico. así como también en esta vinculación se enfrentan riesgos y tensiones necesarias de abordar y resolver. en segundo lugar, resulta evidente que las políticas no pueden asumirse como un todo monolítico y unitario que está al margen y no expresa los debates, tensiones ideológicas, valorativas, políticas, conceptuales y técnicas presentes en el todo social. dejar fuera de las políticas sociales estos múltiples procesos de interacción y negociación de sentidos y significados supone asumirlas sólo como un campo técnico que se ordena de manera neutral en pos del bien social general y donde prima la racionalidad. debemos, por tanto, trabajar en psicología comunitaria con y desde una noción de políticas sociales que considere al menos tres puntos básicos: (1) los modelos de referencia (nociones, modelos, etc.) son relevantes en su conformación. en particular, las funciones sociales de las políticas sociales, que son jerarquizadas en una determinada situación, integran combinaciones diversas entre distintas lógicas de asistencia y protección, de cohesión y control social y de derechos sociales y constitución de ciudadanía, que dan estructuras a órdenes institucionales, que sustentan y expresan nociones de estado diferentes. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   (2) los procesos generadores y estructuradores de políticas sociales incluyen múltiples agentes provenientes de diversas esferas políticas, institucionales, académicas, sectoriales. (3) los procesos de interacción y negociación entre estos actores, a base de sus marcos interpretativos, ideas y representaciones, son dimensiones básicas a la hora de comprender e incidir sobre las políticas sociales. las políticas sociales son una construcción social en la que los espacios de negociación, -técnica, teórica, ideológica y política-, son cruciales y en el que la psicología comunitaria y sus actores, tienen un campo por explorar y en el que participar. asumir esta relación supone atender y enfocar el trabajo, tanto en el campo de construcción teórica, análisis de problemas, diseño y observación de políticas, como en el del análisis de prácticas sociales de intervención, trascendiendo la sola referencia a las apreciaciones meramente conceptuales y considerando, por tanto, los contextos relacionales y de actores sociales de construcción y de implementación. referencias abramovich, v. 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(2001) investing in children, families, and communities: challenges for an interdivisional public policy collaboration. american journal of community psychology, 29 (1), 1-14. stone, d. (2001). policy paradox: the art of political decision making [3rd edition]. nueva york: ww norton & company. teixeira, p., loja, e., costa, e. & menezes, i. (2012). más allá del desierto: empoderamiento e inclusión en las políticas sociales en el dominio de la rehabilitación en portugal y en europa. en j. alfaro, a. sánchez, & a. zambrano (eds.) psicología comunitaria y políticas sociales: reflexiones y experiencias (pp. 289-310). buenos aires: paidós.   microsoft word 2011-0005-final-20120515.docx how communities can react to crisis: social capital as a source of empowerment and well-being c. serino, d. morciano, f. scardigno, a. manuti university of bari, italy c.serino@psico.uniba.it author notes: carmencita serino is full professor of social psychology at the university of bari. her main research interests are social categorization processes, intergroup relationships and empathy. daniele morciano is a phd student in psychology at the university of bari. his main research interests are social capital enhancement, learning chances and life-long learning. anna fausta scardigno is assistant professor in sociology of cultural and communicative processes at the university of bari. her main research interests are social capital enhancement, learning chances and life-long learning. amelia manuti is assistant professor in work and organizational psychology at the university of bari. her main research interests are work socialization of youth, meaning of working and social identification. key words: participative action, social capital, empowerment, active citizenship, theory-based evaluation recommended citation: serino, c., morciano, d., scardigno, f., & manuti, a. (2012). how communities can react to crisis: social capital as a source of empowerment and well-bing. global journal of community psychology practice, 3(3), 1-14. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 3 august 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 how communities can react to crisis: social capital as a source of empowerment and well-being c. serino, d. morciano, f. scardigno, a. manuti university of bari, italy c.serino@psico.uniba.it abstract within the post-modern scenario, largely characterized by a sense of diffused social uncertainty and dominated by the ghost of a wide spreading economical and social crisis, social capital, solidarity and social responsibility might represent concrete and efficacious tools to cope with the implications of such cultural drift. the present paper aims at arguing such position by accounting for a repertoire of “good practices” experienced in the south of italy, which have been read with theoretical and methodological lenses borrowed from social community psychology as well as sociology. the discussion will take into account two case studies (diffused guest house and urban laboratories) which are both representative in terms of social participation as well as in terms of social capital enhancement. indeed, all the accounted experiences have shown how the construction of solid and open communities could concretely contribute to enhance social capital as well as to contrast with the diffusion of narrow and conflicting ghetto-communities based on marginality and social uncertainty, which are source for self-segregation, social fragmentation and increasing powerlessness. 1. introduction our societies seem to be at a historic turning point requiring new visions and new skills. in particular, a different view of well-being, membership and interpersonal relationships seems to be required. in this paper we aim at emphasizing the role of social capital as a fundamental resource for coping with some crucial problems of our present days and to deal with the contemporary social challenges successfully. we will shortly recall, then, some examples: some cases where non-material goods (such as cohesion, sharing and participation) are mobilized, thus yielding positive social-economical effects too. sense of community and social capital are, in fact, essential resources in order to imagine new forms of human and social-economical development. social cohesion is a fundamental “protective factor” in our present collective transition. in this view, even the recent economic and monetary crisis could be reconsidered. a massive deficiency of cohesion, mutual trust, responsibility and solidarity can be pointed out in the recent difficulties of so many post-industrial societies. these resources, which can be developed only within (and by) forceful and inclusive social communities, are not always strengthened enough. the crucial importance of such non-material assets is often perceived too late, and only when they are going to get lost. thus, we need to find out and sustain all the efforts which are carried out in this direction, and which aim at developing (or even “inventing”) more satisfactory forms of human relationships, a new idea of individual and collective well-being. across the time, well-being research was more and more developed within social sciences and, in particular, within community psychology (noll,2002; helliwell, 2003). in a bio-psycho-social view, well-being is a complex, multifaceted concept, that includes people’s life skills, physical and mental health, as well as social connectedness and participation in the collective life. as we will further discuss beyond, well-being depends, also, on the communities’ characteristics (farrell et al 2004), which can strongly affect satisfaction and people’s global judgment about their own life. in other words, the general context and the quality of social relationships are essential determinants of subjective well-being, can affect people’s experience, and their long term evaluations to a relevant extent. from the community viewpoint, such variables as income levels, sense of security, social inclusion and diversity management are all expected to affect individuals’ well-being (hooghe & vanhoutte 2001). indeed, social capital too is a crucial component of well-being. research on the relationships between social capital and subjective well-being is not very extensive  (winkelmann, 2009) , nonetheless, there is a general agreement about this connection. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 3 august 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the concept of “social capital” is an elusive and multifaceted one, to be situated at the intersection of economics, sociology and community psychology (cox, 1997; baum, 1999; norton, 1998; perkins, hughey, speer, 2002). it describes some important resources of everyday life, namely good will, fellowship, empathy, and social unity (winter, 2000). as pooley et al. (2005) suggested, social capital is the essential “glue” that holds individuals together, and allows people to be connected. it can be conceptualized as all the interactions between individuals in a community: in this view, the relationships between people and systems are central to any contemporary definition of social capital. according to the authors, then, sense of community can inform social capital. from the social psychologists’ point of view, in fact, social capital calls into play the sense of community; the ways individuals interact and relate to each other in their communities. in many contemporary societies, an increasing “need” for membership and sense of community seems to take place. according to some authors (e.g.bauman 2001), loss of social cohesiveness, extreme individualism and a strong sense of insecurity can account for this renewed “feeling for community” in the post-industrial, global world. this is a relevant aspect of social life, which should be taken into account when considering the potential, as well as the risks, of the present time in many countries such as italy. not always, in fact, is a close-knit community also a healthy and productive one. to this aim some processes are required, such as enhancing social inclusion, avoiding discrimination, developing trustful relationships, perspective taking and empathy (serino & marzano, 2007; serino, 2009). social capital and sense of community are extraordinary resources for social life when they are intended to create larger social networks, to feed a basic set of shared meanings, values and feelings. new, original answers to the problems of our present transition are required: these answers call into play solidarity, social networks, innovation, caring of common goods, individual and collective empowerment. indeed, funds and policy decision making are needed to achieve effective solutions. not always however is there a direct relationship between money amount and project effectiveness. personal involvement, intrinsic motivation and shared values are even more important. these resources deal with social capital as well. according to pooley et al. (2005), social capital has been defined differently in different contexts, and, for this reason too, it is somewhat confusing and difficult to measure. as putnam (1993, 2000) put it, social capital deals with the impact of networks on individuals and communities. in operational terms, then, social capital can be defined by referring to the levels of participation in formal or informal networks. yet, it can also be assessed by referring to trust, that is by considering the degree to which the members of a given community believe people are trustworthy in general in everyday life. perkins (e.g., perkins et al., 2002) pointed out different measures of both individual and community-focused social capital, including such measures as trust in the community, neighbour support, community satisfaction, community place attachment, sense of community, and life satisfaction (see also prezza et al., 2001). social capital can generate economic resources, by promoting collective action in the public sphere and for the common good (bourdieu, 1986). there is, then, a complex interplay between social capital and participation (krishna, 2002). traditionally, social community psychology interprets participation as a construct that may promote empowerment of individuals, authentically considered as citizens through their participation in significant life experiences. in this vein, participation is a very relevant element for the circular interconnection between individual, social and communitarian dimensions of social life. nonetheless, this interconnection is bounded to the enhancement of competencies rather than of deficiencies: in other words participation could be best promoted by starting with the acknowledgement of the resources people own rather than of the resources people lack. the term empowerment exemplifies this process, which concretely allows people to increase their possibilities to actively control one’s own existence, by developing abilities useful to critically read social reality as well as to adopt the strategies which best suit personal and social aims. to this purpose, piccardo (1995) underlines how the concept of empowerment could be applied to many different domains: from the political one, to the medical one, to the organizational one, to the strictly psychological one. more simply, empowerment is the acknowledgement and the development of one’s own resources in relation to the knowledge people have of their own social context that is always addressed to personal and socio-political objectives. in this frame, the individual is not the single addressee of any empowerment intervention rather he/she is the main character of change. as a consequence, participation is a chance to experience inclusion thus developing some stimuli which could be useful to start a personal changing process. therefore, the concept of empowerment embraces both the individual, with his/her heritage of personal resources, motivations, beliefs, global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 3 august 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 competencies, and his/her participation to the communitarian context, meant as a space characterized by bounds and opportunities which at times could facilitate and at times could hinder participation. finally, empowerment is an ecological concept oriented to the contextual and relational comprehension of participation (rappaport, 1987; 2000). with special reference to social interventions addressed to youth, empowerment is adopted as an action of prevention and promotion of their active participation and of the consolidation of competences, abilities, and actions aimed at their personal growth and emancipation. within the last years, many action-research experiences and empowerment programs have attempted at increasing youth’s self-efficacy and personal power, as well as their ability in “reading” the social systems and understanding the bonds and opportunities they concretely supplied. these experiences of involvement and active participation have showed many positive results in terms of selfesteem, self-trust and sense of perceived competence. empowered young people have also contributed to increase the competences of the groups and of the networks they belong to, which in turn have supplied them many chances to grow up and to participate, thus creating a positive loop. in this sense, personal wellbeing could concretely transform into collective wellbeing not simply through social action but through the development of the whole community. in the perspective of social action, a community is meant as a context where inequalities and disparities in the distribution of power and resources are observed, where majorities and minorities compete with each other to gain leadership, where participation is aimed at purely instrumental objectives, such as the reversal of the power dynamics that are active. conversely, in the perspective of community development, participation is permanent since it is both the starting point and the tool for the maintenance and for the management of the change that allows development. the development of the community is thus meant as a basic process, aimed at creating the conditions for social development, thus acting on the participation of the whole community through local initiatives (mannarini, 2004; noto & lavanco, 2000). to this purpose, very relevant is the role played by policy and decision makers whose main task is to foster the problem solving process by encouraging self-organization. then, the development of the community represents a form of guided participation where individuals do have the power to think their own needs and to make them visible on the political and social scene, thus allowing to the institutional forces to formally engage themselves in listening and projecting solutions with the formal and informal resources which are even potentially available. as a consequence, the empowered community is a competent community: it owes all the human, material, cognitive elements which could allow its members to acknowledge and to satisfy their own needs. the empowered community has the power to generate alternatives and opportunities, it knows how and where to go to gain different kinds of resources, it manifests a cohesive and shared identity and finally it has good levels of self-esteem meant as optimism and motivation which concretely guide action. actually, empowerment is a construct that links individual strengths and competencies and proactive behaviors to social policy and social change. empowerment theory, research and intervention link individual well-being with larger social and political environment. theoretically, the construct connects mental health to mutual help and the struggle to create a responsive community. it compels us to think in terms of competence versus deficits, and strengths versus weaknesses. similarly empowerment research focuses on identifying capabilities instead of cataloguing risk factors and exploring environmental influences of social problems instead of blaming victims. empowerment-oriented interventions enhance well-being while they also aim to ameliorate problems, provide opportunities for participants to develop knowledge and skills (perkins & zimmermann, 1995; perkins, brown & taylor, 1996). in view of the above, the concept of community is also strictly linked to that of citizenship. within social sciences, active citizenship could be meant as “the ability citizens have to organize themselves in multifarious modalities, to mobilize human, technical, financial resources, to act with different strategies to guard rights, to practice powers and responsibilities aimed at the protection and at the development of common goods” (moro, 1998: 48). such effort is concretely translated into social action that is shaped by the exercise of responsibility and empowerment, meant as ability and engagement to weigh heavily on social reality, as taking charge of the community governance. in this perspective, social participation is meant as a modality through which active citizenship manifests evident connections with the construct of wellbeing, declined in its individual and subjective meaning as well as in its social and communitarian sense (keyes, 1998). as we already reminded above, there is a largely shared view (see also cicognani, 2005) according to which social wellbeing refers to the individuals’ perception about the quality of the relationships they have with the social context: different indicators, such as social integration, social contribution, social global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 3 august 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 acceptance, self-actualization, and coherence (which in turn become concrete through specific courses of action) describe this concept. according to this model, social wellbeing includes perceptions of one’s own relationship with the community, as well as more general opinions on human nature and on society in general (such as for instance, the sense of trust) which originates choices and options of sharing and participation. consequently, the main aim of social policies should be to promote the citizens social wellbeing through the warrant of the right/duty to participation and the strengthening of the sense of community. actually, participation is nothing but the engagement and the responsibility of the individual within a project which is aimed at fulfilling a collectively determined objective (wandermans & florin, 2000), an intentionally determined action that through collective mobilization is aimed at the improvement of the quality of local life (fosterfishman et al., 2001). participation is the essence of democracy but it is also the process, through which the community realizes itself, negotiates its identity and eventually transforms itself (campbell & jovchelovitch, 2000). it is an indicator of the social capital, a dimension of the civic sense and of the civic competence of individuals (youniss et al., 2002; da silva et al., 2004). according to the literature, three are the main features of participation (zani & cicognani, 2007): the ability to participate (i.e. in relation to gender, age, competence, etc.), the participation’s chances supplied by the context (i.e. degree of legitimating to participation, presence of formal and informal channels of participation, etc.) and the interest, motivation and engagement of individuals and groups (i.e. unfulfilled needs, perception of social differences, etc.), which is the actual pushing element of the whole process. indeed, a relevant issue connected with the dynamics of participation is how to motivate people to participate. some authors suggest to consider participation as a cyclic non linear and non sporadic process, which is rather oriented to stimulate a constant engagement through the creation of continuous chances of intervention (springett, 2001). others underline the importance to involve all individuals in each single phase of participative action and not only in the final evaluative phase as often happens (naylor et al., 2002). such effort leads to the creation and to the consolidation of a sense of community (sarason, 1974) meant as the perceived similarity and interdependence with the others, which allows people to relate each other by fulfilling the others’ demands as one’s own. in this vein, the sense of community is not simply the sense of belonging but also one’s own ability to act on the context by supplying a personal contribution which starts from the satisfaction of one’s own needs and leads to the emotive sharing of experiences and relationships which are at the basis of a common history binding the members of a community. 2. “treasure hunt”: in search of good practices in general, when focusing on empowering and social inclusion strategies in a given area, a wide range of ideas and actions in a number of different contexts can (fortunately) be observed. thus, even by a merely exploratory investigation like ours, a number of meaningful insights can be captured. in this paper, therefore, we will focus on some examples from a southern italian region, apulia, which is carrying out considerable efforts in terms of participation and inclusion policies, with a particular attention to the young people and immigrants’ conditions. two ongoing experiences will be shortly reminded here in some details. the former was set up in a small country-side town, and was promoted, in the first place, by a voluntary association. the latter was promoted by the apulia government and aimed to enhance young people participation and employment. we think that, even by means of limited expenditure, some positive and pro-active solutions can be provided for a number of social-economical problems. in several interventions, this was made possible by connecting and supporting different subjects, who co-operate in synergy with each other. according to nation and coll. (2003), an effective prevention program should be characterized by some essential conditions, such as: 1) multilevel, comprehensive forms of intervention; 2) different methods and interactive strategies; 3) sufficient “dosage”, timing and continuity of the intervention; 4) research-based/theory driven; 5) positive relationships: 6) ecological and cultural validity; 7) well trained and supported staff; 8) outcome evaluation. we think such criteria can be usefully employed in the analysis of a wide range of interventions and kinds of social action. some of the cases considered here seem to fit several of these criteria. they are also characterized by creativity, original ideas, participants’ active role, broad networks, relevant efforts towards wealth creation, job opportunities, and sustainability. we took into account some projects in which a less individualistic idea of well-being is put forward. by social inclusion and common goods protection, positive social-economical effects are yielded, such as waste reduction, increasing sense of security and satisfaction, wealth production, costs reduction, getting a job. thus, the links among well-being enhancement, empowerment and positive global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 3 august 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 consequences on the social-economical system can be displayed. table 1 shows how information was organized at a first step of our overview. we will then focus, shortly, on the two cases mentioned above. table 1 four cases in apulia: a schematic overview title goals goods and services network characteristics social-economical consequences albergo diffuso borgo tressanti immigrants assistance. favoring legality in agricultural employment improving intercultural communication medical and psychological care. job training. cultural activities. legal advice. aid to young people several cultural, religious and voluntary associations, trade unions, “food-bank”. red cross, local administrations, etc. improving legality, intercultural communication, sense of security. favoring sharp encounters between farms and workers. fighting against waste (through food bank) “d.a.l.i.l.a.” access facilitation of women and underprivileged subjects in the labor market data collection. “time bank” and creation of “complementary money”. job training. small business start-up. mutual and self aid promotion self-developing networks, trade unions, legal assistance favoring women employment. supporting cooperation. sustainability. start up of self-business projects “ortocircuito” setting up a vegetable garden, cultivated by those living in the district. re-qualifying peripheral city areas. favoring bio-diversity and natural food consumption developing social relations among inhabitants. empowering participation for old people, kids and families. favoring healthy behaviors. free and low costs distribution of natural food. improving the quality of city life local public administration, citizens associations, farmers associations connecting producers and population. enhancing healthy food consumption and reducing the costs. increasing the value of typical local products. urban laboratories of bollenti spiriti empowering youth as active citizens for setting up youth-led youth centres new youth centres aimed at providing integrated services for leisure (i.e. practicing and finding a hobby, meeting friends, surfing on the web etc.) and career support (i.e. vocational training, career guidance, enterprise creation etc.) in a same place. local public administration, youth associations, informal group, nonprofit associations growth of the youth centres as self-sustained enterprises operating in the youth work services, as well as in diverse creative sectors 3. holding immigrants and intercultural relations: albergo diffuso borgo tressanti in december 2007, originating from an already existing “st. joseph” centre for immigrants and persons in need (“borgo tressanti”: cerignola foggia, italy), the project of a “diffused guest house” for the immigrants and their families was launched, in collaboration with the local township and the regional government1. the purpose was to offer a decent accommodation to so many seasonal 1 comune di cerignola (fg), regione puglia, d.r. n. 1233, 8/4th, 2006). we thank dr. stefania scelsi who collaborated to the case description workers employed in the area, mostly in agricultural activities. a particular attention was paid to social integration and diversity management, by respecting the different cultures and religions and by encouraging the creation of intercultural sets. mutual understanding and warm relationships are observed between inhabitants and guests. these continue when the immigrants went back home: caretakers, for instance, are often invited (for wedding and other events in immigrants’ life). the guest house consists of 14 residential unities, for the immigrants and their families. in this way, they can live in a safe, healthy context. they are global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 3 august 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 saved from illegal hiring and from the hands of the opportunists taking advantages from their need condition. workers protection is ensured as well, in a context wherein compliance with rules is often disregarded. importantly, immigrants contribute to the costs, although to a very little extent: this is a way to encourage their involvement and support their self-esteem. the peak of attendance was observed in summertime, when the seasonal work is most required: during the three months of summertime, about 1400 to 1800 people (men, women and children) are settled at the centre, coming from several different countries. interestingly, the employers themselves are used to put in touch the regular immigrants who work in their company with the albergo diffuso staff, helping out immigrants in finding their accommodation. the guest house is one of latest achievements of the center. from the beginning, this one was intended to provide housing and support to abandoned children, coming from both eu and non-eu countries. the centre consists of apartments, a lodging house for foreign young women, and a two-storey building where several services are located (offices, auditorium, psychological and social services, classroom, computer hall, gym hall, infirmary, dining hall, kitchen, and television room). in the period 19982008 more than 400 immigrant children were settled at the center, coming from 31 different countries (the more represented ethnic groups are shown in table 2). table 2 children received at the centre: the most represented national groups country number of children albania 110 afganistan 45 kosovo 29 palestine 20 bangladesh 15 eritrea 13 morocco 12 children were coming from other countries too (romania, turkey, ethiopia, senegal, pakistan, iraq, ghana, nigeria, sri lanka, sudan, togo, tunisia, kurdistan, macedonia, ivory coast, egypt, iran, serbia, somalia, poland, india, bulgaria, mali, new guinea, etc.). different religious groups were present: muslims, catholics, greek orthodoxies, hindu, buddhists. in no way did the different religions yield problems or conflicts, whilst some truly miracles of integration and reciprocal acceptance were observed. a great attention is paid to education, health and careers counseling. legal and psychological counseling for young immigrants and their parents is ensured as well. in cooperation with the juvenile court, 117 teenagers were accompanied towards family fostering or job training. after job training, a certain number of young immigrants were hired with a regular contract in local farms and artisan companies. indeed, the social network around the centre got a great importance in order to achieve these results. who are in fact the subjects involved? the centre was created by a voluntary association at the end of nineties, during the social-political crisis in albania and other eastern adriatic countries. caring at different levels for kids and teen-agers was assured by the centre from the beginning. caretakers and personnel are represented by one general manager, one coordinator, three caretakers, one secretary, one social worker and one lawyer. they work 3 shifts, and at each time they complete a report on their activity. monthly, a meeting is held in order to plan the activities or discuss problems and solutions. although duties and job descriptions are clearly defined, the group is still a rather informal one, with strong internal cohesion, social sharing of emotions and values. an important network of different subjects allows the centre to pursue its goals: local authorities, hiring hall, enterprises, “banco alimentare” (food bank), red cross, trade unions, cultural associations and so on. thanks to these connections, several activities are carried out, such as: job training, legal protection, psychological aid, food dispensation to persons in need, medical assistance, shuttle service to and from the work place, courses, and summer holydays for children. we focused on this project by an exploratory study, mainly based on observations and semi-structured interviews to staff members. indeed, a better understanding of this experience and its consequences at a later time will be provided by further investigation. by referring to a little, peripheral community, to this village of the apulia countryside, however, our example points out the crucial role of creative networks in finding out possible solutions and changing problems into social and economical opportunities. this aspect was emphasized in our interviews. according to one person in charge, the “albergo diffuso” project was originated by an “inspired insight”, a “divergent vision” on intercultural relations and care-giving. the awareness of being involved in an innovative project was important to all participants, in terms of collective identity, motivation, internal cohesion, shared goals. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 3 august 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 4. empowered communities and youth active citizenship: urban laboratories of bollenti spiriti launched in 2006 by the apulia region in the south of italy, the regional youth policy “bollenti spiriti” funded the refurbishment of 132 abandoned buildings and the start-up of urban laboratories (uls) based on the integration between services for leisure, training, job and educational orientation, enterprise creation. overall, the apulia region provided 22 m/euro for the refurbishment and the start up of the uls. in this multi-site programme, the local authorities (town halls) could refurbish a public building on the basis of a program designed together with the local youth community (peer group, cultural or civic associations, recreational organizations, informal network, artists, creative practitioners and professionals). moreover, town halls were obliged to give the management of the laboratories to non-profit organizations for at least five years. the uls were located in each of the five provinces of the region and in more than half of the municipalities (local authorities). the approved projects were mainly those with an artistic focus (photography, multimedia, handicraft, theatre). however, there was a diffused trend to integrate artistic activities with vocational training services. thus, artistic activities had not simply a recreational nature but also professional training outlooks. the main aim of the laboratories was in fact to promote the transition from leisure to professional activity enhancing entrepreneurship. within the overall program, a special role was assigned to youth participation. this concept has recently become a key issue both for national youth policies as well as for the european commission (see for instance, walthers, 2006). however, different are the views of youth participation at the base of the several patterns of public intervention adopted by national and international governments. according to some public policies youth participation is framed within the issue of social inclusion, while according to others, it is assimilated to the concept of social empowerment. the first kind of public policies aim at answering to specific young people’s needs in education, in training and/or in job placement. these policies often provide top down interventions that are not really able to involve the targeted addressees (macdonald, 1998). conversely, some other public policies enhance youth participation as a basilar milestone of their actions, though often facing the following dilemma: can youth actually profit from a public program even if they do not take part to its design? (wildemeersch & weil, 2009). this was also the dilemma that the urban laboratory program of the apulia region wanted to take into account. for the first time, a program for local development pointed on the endogenous resources brought about by young people within the apulia region. in other words, through such investment public decision makers were promoting young people as a resource rather than considering them a social problem (iard, 2001). for this reason, the success of the program was strongly dependent from the exploitation of young people’s capabilities in each specific local context. in october 2009 the apulia region formally asked to the university of bari (department of psychology, section of sociology) to evaluate the outcomes of this programme. then, the evaluation aimed at helping the regional coordination of the program, taking into account the variability of the local projects, the stakeholders and the relational patterns between local and regional levels. more specifically, the regional policy maker was interested in knowing the possible actions that could improve youth participation in the implementation of the uls as to plan further specific project. in fact, in all the cases there was a history of youth participation in planning the uls and in building the youth partnership willing to manage them. therefore, evaluation focused on the youth participation processes already implemented. instead, it was not possible to evaluate the impact of uls’ services because only 7 laboratories were actually started up. a theory-based evaluation approach (weiss, 1997) was adopted aiming at helping the implementation process in the site where an ul was setting up. the main steps of the evaluation program were: the elicitation of the program’s theory at a regional level with its planned casual links; the identification of the casual links at a local level and the planning of some strategic actions at a regional level useful to improve those positive causal links. to develop the regional program theory, the official documents published by the policy makers were analysed. through this step of the analysis, some key-issues for the exploratory research were identified, mainly in the form of critical points and possible unwanted effects. after this action, 5 laboratories out of the 7 who had started activities were selected. this option was motivated by the consideration of the progress experienced by these laboratories within the implementation process. in each laboratory, focused interviews (merton et al. 1956) were conduced involving 5 representatives of management bodies, 4 representatives of local authorities and 1 urban planner, who was actually a social animator. the actors who can best contribute to the activation of the participation process were clearly identified in the regional program theory. as shown in table 3, youth participation was meant both as the involvement of young people in the decision-making process, but global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 3 august 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 also the sharing of the responsibility for the success of the project. in fact, the management of the laboratory was committed to youth organizations that also took the risk for any possible loss. each of the actors had a specific role, even if participation was stimulated by the multiple interactions between them. in the sample of laboratories analysed these different levels of participation interacted with each other producing a mutual increase of the motivation to participate. for instance, this was what happened when local youth associations stimulated the town hall to take part to the program or when the local youth network attracted other youth organizations willing to be acknowledged by town hall. table 3 actors of the participation processes phase actors role planning of the ul local administration (municipality) (public participation) decision to refurbish a building and to apply a proposal of ul urban planner, social planner, construction engineer, architect (expert participation) consulting for the local planning and the implementation of the ul informal group, no profit associations, professionals, enterprises (no formal youth participation) proposal of activities to do in the ul planning and implementation of the ul local youth network, joined by no profit youth associations (formal youth participation) advisory function implementation and management of the ul management body (youth participation in management) no profit partnership that won the public tender for the management of the ul youth partner of the management body (youth participation in management) youth organizations that implement specific projects together with the management body young users (group or individuals) (youth participation in using the laboratory) using the laboratory by themselves (i.e. internet café, library, self-management of spaces and equipment) or helped by experts (i.e. training, project working, job orientation) the analysis of the documents allowed identifying some causal links related to youth participation which could be resumed along with the three main steps of the implementation process: participation to the planning of the ul; participation to the implementation of the local plan; participation after the regional program. participation to the planning phase resulted in the identification of two intermediate events between the inputs of the program and youth participation (see chart 1). actually, even before the launch of the uls’ program, the regional staff had already undertaken some specific research actions to survey youth capabilities and to promote a young people’s web community2 and it also started a public communication campaign. 2 http://bollentispiriti.regione.puglia.it chart 1 the program theory: causal chain about “youth participation to the planning phase” together with these events, which are halfway between formal and informal, in the program theory there was also a rather normative event that played a very relevant role on participation. it was the imposition of participatory planning as an eligibility requirement in the regional call of proposals. however, confronting the results on going regional youth policy “bollenti spiriti” youth participation as an eligibility requirement youth participation already started las make participatory planning with young youth participation in planning global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 3 august 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 brought about by the field research, this event was less decisive considering the risk to allow a formal participation with a weak effect on the local policy decision. “these questionnaires and these focus group discussions were useful especially because they were requested by the call. i would have preferred to animate a bottom up process. in this way, even youth associations which are more resistant to participate would have done it (…) the local administration didn’t want to rock the boat and wanted to get involved in a traditional way so that young people could be just informed about what they were doing”. during the phase of youth participation to the implementation, the role of town halls was more decisive for almost all the intermediate events of the causal chain (see chart 2). in fact, town halls had to promote and to legitimate the local youth network, to involve youth in the executive planning, to complete the refurbishment of building, to select the management body. chart 2 the program theory: causal chain about “youth participation in the implementation of the local plan” finally, some favourable conditions for the continuity of youth participation are mentioned in the program theory. according to the theory, the management body of the laboratory was expected to be able to combine resources coming from different sources (public and private, profit and no profit, voluntary and paid work). more specifically, the management body had the responsibility to transform young people into professionals and entrepreneurs willing to invest for the development of the laboratory. in turn, the laboratories could supply paid service, could work together with other laboratories for fundraising and could involve local youth organizations for specific projects. chart 3 the program theory: causal chain about “youth participation after the regional program” basing on the results shown by the exploratory research run on the 5 laboratories some good causal chains were discovered, highlighting a rather evident autonomy of youth participation from town halls. some specific events could have contributed to shape this equal-terms relationship between youth, town halls and regional staff. nonetheless, town halls owe the decision-making power because of their property of the buildings where the laboratories were created, their political property of the project, their responsibility in refurbishment and in buying all the necessary equipment, their power to close the urban laboratories after five years. within the causal chain hypothesized by the evaluation, the local youth network (lyn) became a very important component of the local program. it was a formal body with advisory functions and was open to any kind of youth organizations. starting from the top of chart 4, there were three key events about lyn from which virtuous causal links have been generated. chart 4 causal chains towards a less dependency of youth participation from town halls participatory service in ul young enterpries and new professionals youth participation after the regional program paid services networks for new projects and fundraising transfering values in ul new fund (private, public) no profit and volunteer hr on going regional youth policy “bollenti spiriti” las networking youth participation already started youth local network youth participation in the implementation of the local plan building management networks participation in the management advising refurbrishment informal level of lyn cooperation yln-mb lyn as incubator of mb youths-experts interaction catching youths willing to invest in the future new youth associations and networks cooperation mb-local animators participation less conditioned by the town hall getting back informal relationships youths-regional staff interaction rules of participation formal level of lyn involvin unknown youths avoiding exclusions global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 3 august 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 a positive interconnection between the formal and the informal actions undertaken by the lyn had a positive effect on the third key event, which was the incubation of the management body during youth participation in the lyn. in other words, the definition of equal-terms relationships between young people and town halls was more likely where the action of the lyn was neither too formal, neither too informal. this means that lyn showed a good capacity to create norms and at the same time became a place for informal meeting and dialogue. this condition seemed to affect in a positive way the probability to generate a management body based on a strong participation of youth organizations. in fact, there was the risk that town halls would have selected a management body composed by outsiders with weaker relationships with local groups and associations of youths. each of the three key events started a specific causal chain. at a formal level lyn was a place where to agree norms of participation in the management of the ul. for example, in the lyn it was possible to identify the more effective method to involve the associations that are less popular and/or more isolated. furthermore, in the lyn it was possible to agree how to avoid the exclusion of some youth groups, especially of those where number and variety of participants were consistent. “the meetings in the local network were very serious and complicated (…). we tried most to reduce any abuse of power, thus we tried to agree the norms to enable every associations in the decision-making process” at an informal level, where lyn wasn’t perceived (or imposed) like the exclusive body of the participation, other participation processes came out. in other words, the lyn was a first chance to meet. afterwards other informal relations came up. for example, the meeting in lyn was a chance to getting back friendship or professional relationship. “the meetings for planning the laboratory was a chance to catch up with many friends that were working in the north or abroad…artists, architects” other kind of informal relations between young people and technicians helped to counterbalance the tendency of town hall to privilege the role of technicians during the refurbishment and the executive planning phases. in some cases, technicians received explicit suggestions from the parties interested in the management of the laboratory. moreover, young people needed a place where to meet and to design their project and proposals without the public actors. a certain degree of autonomy from the town halls was perceived also by the management body of the laboratory. for example, interviews revealed the need young people felt to have a direct relation with the regional staff, without the mediation of the town hall. in this case, the management body perceived the regional staff as a “third guarantee” to avoid the risk for a decreasing acknowledgment from the town hall, especially when there was a large acknowledgment from the youth community. in this respect, in some cases the regional staff was able to promote the laboratory even where the town hall was without a political government. finally, where the lyn was becoming a place able to virtuously interconnect formal and informal participation, the management body of the laboratory was more likely to be linked to the local youth community. where this happened, some interesting effects followed: new youth associations set up with the aim to enjoy the lyn, also as a combination between pre-existent associations; the absence of immediate benefit caught those young more willing to build the laboratory as an enterprise with self-financing capacities; youth organizations faced about their specific skills for the management of the laboratory. 5. concluding remarks a case study can provide a holistic understanding of the topic under consideration. of course, different research methods are to be integrated, in order to achieve a fine-grained comprehension of some particular variables. yet, when there is little control over the events and the real life context is on the foreground, a case study can provide a sensitive and insightful picture of a given phenomenon. case study, thus, can offer a training method, which may contribute to personal and professional development, as well as to problembased learning in a number of organizational and social contexts. in this view, our examples may suggest how individuals or groups get involved and display their ability to create and produce new projects based on common good caring and empowerment. at different levels, the two cases considered here are both intended to put forward some innovative perspective, where new solutions can be found out and the importance of non-material resources is emphasized. indeed, the two cases are quite different, and, also, they were observed and described in different times and in different ways. both of them, however, can highlight how, in a particular southern italian region, some complex problems can be faced with by encouraging communities’ creative involvement and participation, how and why these experiences were carried out? we tried to provide a first, provisional answer to these questions. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 3 august 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 our examples can offer a general outline about an empowering approach to some of the most crucial issues of our society. as a matter of fact, in the two cases discussed above, young people and immigrants are considered as being a great opportunity and a source of wealth, rather then a problem. attention is given to their potential and they are involved in the planning of new solutions, in providing new visions and new results. in particular, the first case (albergo diffuso) highlights the importance of social participation not only in creating concrete positive life opportunities for the more disadvantaged groups, but also in changing the cultural framework and in strengthening the connectedness of different actors and organizations in the wider social context. the enhancement of positive intercultural relations improves sense of security. work protection and lawfulness in such a difficult context as the farming one may yield an important contribution to the economy of the area. the purposes of this experience can be analyzed in terms of “contact hypothesis” (allport, 1954); “self categorization” (turner, 1987) and “multiple identities” (wellman, 1997; serino, 2011; serino & mc britton 2011). in particular, david wellman, drawing on both historical and contemporary american examples, pointed out the importance of “borderlands” and suggested these may encourage the flowering of inclusive, multidimensional identities. borgo tressanti with its “albergo diffuso” could become one of these “borderland” sites, wherein people may come to see one another as resources, and emerging rules for intergroup relations can be designed. by focusing on the albergo diffuso experience, we just wanted to show how, in a little southern italian village, the presence of immigrants can be transformed into an opportunity. ethnic and religion differences are treated as reconcilable and mutually enhancing, and participants are encouraged to invent inclusive common identities, to become “competent actors in more than one cultural world” (wellman, 1997,p. 16). this project needs, of course, to be monitored more systematically across the time. it displays, however, an effective commitment in protecting people in need, in favoring lawfulness and in managing cultural diversity, while aiming at teaching peace and politeness at the same time. economic and social interventions as well as the relationships in a given community can be ameliorated. in this way, the albergo diffuso experience might be in condition to yield several positive effects concerning transformative changes at individual and group level, as well as in the community at large. on the other hand, results coming from the second case study reveal the role played by public programs: they have been oriented to the enhancement of social participation of youth and to the multiplication of social capital, thus fostering self-entrepreneurship and self career management. in fact, the case of the urban laboratories in the apulia region brings our attention to an important mechanism associated with the youth participation in the implementation of services and activities for the youths. this mechanism is the combination of the start-up of a youth social movement and the building process of youth entrepreneurial skills. on the one hand, the public actor can activate youth participation basing on a ‘resource-based’ view of the young people. this also includes the ability to adopt a communication strategy that is in tune with the youth cultures. on the other hand, youth participation will be maintained if the program is able to find and improve youth skills for the management of the youth-work centre as a selfsustaining enterprise. the present contribution is still a merely descriptive one. our examples are just intended to point out some forms of social creativity by which individuals and communities can activate a virtuous circle in a bottom-up way. the cases discussed above suggest that different networks should be created and supported in order to influence the raising and distribution of resources. they also suggest how policy can stimulate and develop communities’ action not only by means of financial support, but also by enhancing social-psychological resources, in order to set up innovative strategies, and to cope with scarcity in effective ways. indeed the most challenging changes are to be verified in the long term: further longitudinal and follow-up analyses are needed, in fact, in order to put forward the structure of these cases and their specific implications for practice. yet, they suggest we can cope with present-day relevant problems by connecting people, by enhancing participation and networking: that’s what we can learn from the above examples. the bigger question is, of course, whether and how these experiences can be generalized and to what extent they can get persistence across the time. paying them attention and enhancing the actors’ selfawareness is one of the possible answers, however. inclusive, supportive communities are extraordinary places where new solutions to the crucial dilemmas of our present time can be found out, and people involvement in social life can be encouraged. we aimed at pointing out, in this line, some examples from apulia, a southern italian region that has been considered as a social and political “laboratory”, even on the national scene. references global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 3 august 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 allport, g.w. 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(2000). social capital and public policy. australia, melbourne: australian institute of family studies. youniss, j., bales, s., christmas-bales, mclaughlin, m., silbereisen, m., (2002). youth civic engagement in the 21st century, journal of research on adolescence, 12 (1): 121-148. zani, b., cicognani, e., (2007). partecipazione tra cittadinanza e sentimento di appartenenza alla comunità. in b. gelli (ed). le nuove forme della partecipazione (pp.39-55). roma: carocci microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 255 reaping the whirlwind: xenophobic violence in south africa norman duncan1 psychology, school of human and community development university of the witwatersrand, johannesburg south africa iii international conference of community psychology puebla, mexico, june 5, 2010                                                                                                                           1 norman.duncan@wits.ac.za 256 reaping the whirlwind: xenophobic violence in south africa abstract in may 2008, south africa was hit by waves of violent attacks against foreigners from the majority world. these xenophobic attacks resulted in the death of more than 70 persons, many injured and displacement of approximately 120, 000 people, all of them people of colour and most of them poor. while south africa has long been considered one of the more violent countries in the world, the intensity of, as well as the apparent motivation for, this ‘new’ manifestation of violence came as a surprise to most. based partly on the insights of frantz fanon and hussein bulhan, this paper examines the causes of this violence and argues that its emergence should not have come as a surprise. furthermore, the paper explores the use of a memory project as a necessary starting point in south africa for interventions aimed at addressing this violence. keywords: apartheid, racism, scapegoating hypothesis, violence, xenophobia. 257 cosechando el torbellino: violencia xenofóbica en sudáfrica. resumen en mayo de 2008, y en noviembre de 2009 sudáfrica fue golpeada por olas de ataques violentos contra extranjeros. estos ataques xenofóbicos produjeron la muerte de más de 70 personas, muchos heridos y desplazamientos de aproximadamente 120,000 personas, todas ellas gente de color y la mayoría de ellas pobres. aun considerando que sudáfrica ha sido catalogada como uno de los países más violentos del mundo, la intensidad y la motivación aparente para esta “nueva” manifestación de violencia causó un gran desconcierto. basado parcialmente en las intuiciones de frantz fanon y de hussein bulhan, este capítulo examina las causas de esta violencia y argumenta que su emergencia no debería haber provocado sorpresa. además este trabajo explora un proyecto de recuperación de la memoria como un punto de partida necesario en sudáfrica para intervenciones orientadas a enfrentar esta violencia. palabras clave: apartheid, racismo, hipótesis del chivo expiatorio, violencia, xenofobia. 258 introduction on the evening of 11 may 2008, in diepsloot, a township in the north of johannesburg, in the gauteng province of south africa, a mozambican migrant, ernesto alfabeto nhamuavhe, was torched alive while a group of south africans stood by laughing as he burnt to death (worby, hassim & kupe, 2008). in the public memory, it was this cruel and gruesome event, more than any other, which marked the unfurling of a frightening wave of xenophobic violence that was to engulf the south african landscape for several weeks thereafter (peberdy, 2009). not far from diepsloot, in alexandra, a township north-west of johannesburg, other groups of black south africans doggedly hunted down and indiscriminately attacked all people suspected of being foreigners. as the days passed, increasing numbers of people, including undocumented migrants, foreigners with legal residence status, and south africans who ‘looked foreign’1 fell prey to these groups. the most frequently proffered justification deployed by locals for these attacks was that foreigners were responsible for increases in crime and ‘stealing’ south africans’ jobs, houses and women(!) (human rights watch, 2010). by 15 may 2008, the attacks had increased in momentum and had spread to several other areas in the gauteng province, one of the northernmost and most populous provinces in south africa. and by 22 may 2008, the violence had spread to several urban areas in the rest of south africa (human rights watch, 2010). when, by june 2008, south africans took stock of the horrendous excesses committed in their name during the preceding month, it was reported that 120, 000 people had been displaced, 670 had been injured, 70 had been murdered and countless women had been raped (matsopoulos, corrigall & bowman, 2009; peberdy, 2009). en passant, as with other forms of collective violence, this spate of xenophobic violence intersected in telling ways with the familiar enactments of dominant forms of violence, masculinity and masculine power in the south african context. specifically, the perpetrators of these violent incidents were most frequently men and their victims often other men. indeed, the characteristics of those involved in these incidents in large measure mimicked the demographic features of those involved in other incidents of violence and intended injury in south africa (matsopoulos, myers, bowman & mathews, 2008). according to matsopoulos et al. (2008), not only are adult men and more 259 specifically black men more likely than other groups to be the victims of violence, they are also more likely to be the perpetrators of violence (cf. bulhan, 1985). initially, most south africans and south african institutions, including the south african academy, appeared to be caught completely off-guard by this outbreak of violence aimed at particularly african and asian foreigners. however, as various social scientists observed subsequently, this wave of xenophobic violence should perhaps not have been experienced as completely unexpected (peberdy, 2009). moreover, the surprise or disbelief expressed by many south africans, as gqola (2008) observes, may have been a function of a defensive ‘distancing’ manoeuvre on the part of political and social elites in post-colonial contexts aimed at showing that it is ‘them’ (i.e. the poor, blacks and other marginalised groups) who are responsible for this violence, not ‘us’ (cf. fanon, 1990). furthermore, as a reading of gqola’s (2008) analysis of the violence indicates, the surprise expressed by many in the wake of the events of may 2008 could also have been indicative of the latter’s attempts to ‘disavow [their] agency and complicity’ in the profound and unacknowledged problems facing south africa, due to current as well as past political practices (gqola, 2008: 211). arguably, this orgy of violent excess could have been predicted long before may 2008, if one considers the litany of incidents of violence against foreigners, which were reported with ominous regularity in the local media during the preceding years (see table 1 below). table 1. some incidents of xenophobic violence reported in between 1994 and 2007. in 1994, groups of south africans in alexandra participated in a violent campaign aimed at forcefully driving mozambican, zimbabwean and malawian migrants from the township, reportedly because the latter were reported to be responsible for the alleged increase in crime, unemployment and sexual attacks in the area. in 1996, a crowd of approximately one thousand south african inhabitants of an informal housing settlement attempted to drive all foreign nationals out of the settlement. two foreign nationals as well as two south africans were killed in the ensuing violence. in 1997, south african informal traders in johannesburg launched a spate of violent attacks over a 48-hour period against foreign national informal traders. the attacks were accompanied by 260 widespread looting. in 1998, six south african police officers were filmed setting attack dogs loose on three mozambican migrants while hurling racist and xenophobic invectives at them. in 1999, it was reported that six foreign nationals accused of alleged criminal activity were abducted by a group of south africans in ivory park, a township on the outskirts of johannesburg. one of the six managed to escape from the mob’s clutches, three others were seriously injured and two were reportedly killed by means of the notorious ‘necklacing’ method2. in 2000, two mozambican farm workers were assaulted by a vigilante group after they were accused of stealing. one of the workers subsequently died directly as a result of the attack. in 2001, residents of zandspruit, an informal settlement in johannesburg, set fire to the houses of hundreds of zimbabwean migrants forcing them to flee the settlement. in 2006, several somali shop owners were reported to have been forced to flee a township outside knysna in the western cape province, as a result of violent intimidation. in 2007, more than 100 shops owned by somali nationals in the motherwell area in the eastern cape province were looted during a series of attacks on african refugees over a 24-hour period. source: hill and lefko-everett (2008: 1-9) why these xenophobic attacks? during and in the aftermath of the xenophobic attacks of may 2008, south african social scientists appeared hard-pressed to explain why black south africans were turning on foreigners from the rest of africa and parts of asia with such fatal vengeance. some of the explanations proffered included the traditional (and somewhat less than useful) scapegoating and isolation 261 hypotheses, to which i will, in a moment, briefly turn my attention. firstly, however, a brief definition of xenophobia would be apposite. xenophobia is typically defined as the ‘dislike’, ‘hatred or fear of foreigners’ (harris, 2002: 169). importantly, however, as harris (2002: 170) correctly emphasises, xenophobia is ‘not just an attitude [as the standard definition of the phenomenon implies]: it is [also] an action’. as reflected by the incidents reflected in table 1 above, xenophobia invariably entails acts and processes of violence, physical, as well as psychological and social. furthermore, as also reflected by these incidents, in the south african context, xenophobia is not directed at just anyone. it is largely directed at people of colour. for this reason, gqola (2008) in fact argues that the predominant nature of the violence directed against foreigners in south africa in may 2008 was more than simply a case of xenophobia. it was also profoundly ‘negrophobic in character’ (gqola, 2008: 213; cf. fanon, 1990). scapegoating hypothesis. somewhat simplistically stated, the scapegoating hypothesis argues that xenophobia occurs when indigenous populations turn their anger resulting from whatever hardships they are experiencing against ‘foreigners’, primarily because foreigners are constructed as being the cause of all their difficulties. the traditional criticism directed at the scapegoating hypothesis of course is that it does not explain why foreigners are the group that is burdened with the hatred and abuse of autochthonous groups. more specifically, it does not explain why foreigners of colour in the context of contemporary south africa invariably bear the brunt of the prejudicial and murderous hatred of the local population. the following explanation also offered by various south african social scientists for the xenophobic violence of may 2008, perhaps partly addresses this lacuna. isolation hypothesis. the isolation hypothesis holds that the xenophobia manifested in may 2008 was a consequence of apartheid south africa’s isolation from the international community, and particularly the rest of africa. during the apartheid era, south africa’s borders with most of the 262 rest of the world were hermetically sealed, largely because apartheid south africa was considered a pariah state; and partly because the apartheid state viewed most foreign countries as a threat to both its racist policies and the political stranglehold that it exerted on south african society. the antipathy expressed by south africans towards other africans in recent years, the isolation hypothesis holds, is a residual effect of the internalised antipathy or hostility engendered by the apartheid state towards the external world. indeed, as morris (in harris, 2002: 172) argues, there is little doubt that the brutal environment created by apartheid with its enormous emphasis on boundary maintenance has impacted on people’s ability to be tolerant of difference. while there may certainly be some measure of truth in this argument, the question that it obviously raises is why this intolerance towards difference is largely expressed in relation to other africans and people of colour and not in relation to the europeans who have also flooded south africa buying up businesses and countless acres of property over the last two decades (cf. gqola, 2008). in addition to the above-mentioned hypotheses, the social sciences in south africa proffered various other explanations for the xenophobic violence of may 2008 in the aftermath of this violence. perhaps one of the more persuasive and increasingly cited of these relates to issues of poverty. endemic poverty. various researchers have commented on the fact that most of the xenophobic incidents that have plagued south africa before, during and after may 2008 consistently occurred in economically and socially depressed townships, which the south african historian, nieftagodien (2008) appositely refers to as the human ‘dumping grounds’ to which south africa’s ‘marginalised and alienated’ have consistently been consigned, both historically and in the present. indeed, as nieftagodien (2008) observes, alexandra, which initially was the epicentre of the xenophobic attacks of may 2008, is a township characterised by desperate and brutalising poverty. specifically, alexandra is a township where the overwhelming majority of a population of 350, 000 people live in makeshift shacks that are crammed into a mere 2 km2; a township with an unemployment rate of approximately 30 per cent and where 20 per cent of households subsist 263 on a paltry monthly income of zar 1,000 (i.e. approximately $128) or less. within contexts such as alexandra, nieftagodien argues, xenophobia is bound to find fertile ground; particularly because it is within such areas that the majority of job-seeking migrants invariably land up (cf. peberdy, 2009). indeed, as reported by the south african human sciences research council (hsrc, 2008), while quite high amongst the general population of south africa, anti-foreigner (and more specifically anti-african) sentiment is particularly pronounced in poverty-stricken urban informal settlements such as alexandra. nonetheless, it is worth noting that there are places in the world where people are as poor as and indeed poorer than the inhabitants of alexandra. yet these places have not witnessed the extremely high levels of xenophobia seen in alexandra and similar townships in may 2008. this, of course, alerts us to the probability that endemic poverty on its own cannot account for the xenophobic violence witnessed in south africa in may 2008. this leads to another explanation for xenophobia, which is related to the ‘endemic poverty’ explanation, and which links xenophobia to perceptions of relative deprivation; an explanation to which i will now briefly turn my attention. relative deprivation. perceived relative deprivation can be defined as ‘the subjective feeling of discontent based on the belief that one is getting less than one feels entitled to’ (de la rey, 1991: 40). importantly, and as pillay (2008) argues, it is not deprivation per se that evokes feelings of hostility towards foreigners, but perceptions of being deprived in relation to others. with a gini coefficient ranging between 0.68 and 0.70 over the last 20 years, approximately, inequality appears to have become increasingly entrenched in south africa, both within the general population and within racialised groups (hsrc, 2004; pressly, 2009). indeed, research cited by may et al. (2000) and pressley (2009) indicates that inequalities in income have become increasingly pronounced amongst blacks since 1994, and that they rank amongst the highest in the world. 264 of course, while the poor are becoming increasingly poorer, the new political elites have no compunction about demanding and obtaining obscenely high salaries and all the trappings of conspicuous wealth, even if this is virtually inevitably at the expense of the poor. in the face of the “naked display of self-enrichment” on the part of the new political and corporate elites, the response of “the marginalised, the unemployed … and the working poor” to their apparently unchanging plight, or to being left behind in the new south africa, is pervasive anger and resentment (pillay, 2008: 100). in a context in which xenophobic discourses are encouraged and reproduced by the ruling elite (see table 2 below for a range of statements attributed to various key role-players on the south african political landscape prior to may 2008), this anger and resentment are ineluctably directed at foreigners. moreover, migrants are infinitely easier targets than the new political and corporate elites who typically construct themselves as the allies and champions of the poor in south africa (see also peberdy, 2009). while certainly feasible, this explanation of course still does not account for why foreigners of colour and particularly african foreigners are the ones who bear the brunt of this anger and resentment. table 2. political discourses and xenophobia in 1994, the erstwhile south african minister of home affairs, mangosuthu buthelezi, declared in parliament: “if we as south africans are going to compete for scarce resources with millions of aliens who are pouring into south africa, then we can kiss goodbye to our reconstruction and development programme” (hill & lefko-everett, 2008: 1). in 1997, the then defence minister, joe modise, in a newspaper interview, argued that there was a link between the presence of undocumented migrants in south africa and crime in the country. also in 1997, mangosuthu buthelezi claimed that ‘illegal aliens’ annually ‘cost south african taxpayers billions of rands (hill & lefko-everett, 2008: 1). in order to drive home the point that south africa was ‘besieged’ by foreigners, the department of home affairs, in 2001, disingenuously claimed that there were more than 7 million migrants in south africa, despite having been alerted to the fact that the official 2001 census data 265 indicated that there were in fact fewer than 1 million documented foreign nationals in the country. source: hill and lefko-everett (2008: 1-9) to my mind, if one wishes to find a suitable explanation for the events of may 2008 one also has to examine the legacy of colonial and apartheid racism, because it is ultimately in this explanation that one will find the answer to the questions: why have africans and other people of colour been the inevitable targets of the xenophobic attacks of may 2008 and earlier, and why have these attacks been characterised by such brutal and inhuman violence? legacy of colonial and apartheid racism. various writers (e.g. gqola, 2008; harris, 2002; mngxitama, 2008; peberdy, 2009) argue that current manifestations of xenophobia should also be linked to the entrenched residual effects of colonialism and apartheid racism on the psyche of black south africans. specifically, it is argued that racism has been such a pervasive feature of south african society over more than three centuries and that it has had such a profoundly brutalising effect on south africans that it is improbable that south africans would not have internalised aspects of the insidious racist messages of the old colonial and apartheid orders of the abjectly ‘inferior’ black other and the ‘superiority’ of whites. according to this explanatory framework, therefore, it is infinitely less threatening to direct the disappointments and frustrations resulting from the unfulfilled promises of a new south africa at other blacks (and particularly blacks from the rest of africa), rather than whites. after all, blacks according to the racist scripts of the old order are deserving of such treatment. moreover, as peberdy (2009) observes, the old apartheid order, in keeping with its racist precepts consistently constructed foreigners of colour as unwelcome visitors (indeed, even africans born in south africa were constructed as unwelcome imposters) and white foreigners as (generally) welcome immigrants, and critically important for keeping the ‘black peril’ at bay. this legacy, she posits, lives on in current constructions of foreigners. 266 of course, formal apartheid is no longer a reality in south africa. however, as argued elsewhere (duncan, stevens & bowman, 2008), its legacy lives on, both through its ongoing material effects and through the intergenerational transmission of its damaging psychic legacy. nationhood and immigrants. peberdy (2009) intimates that the often violent antipathy expressed towards foreigners can be read against changing constructions of south african nationhood. indeed, she argues, that each re-definition of south african nationhood over the last century was accompanied by periods of pronounced processes of exclusion (and conversely, inclusion) in relation to foreigners – prescribing ‘who is allowed to enter and who is excluded from membership’ (p. 26). quoting cohen (1994), peberdy (2009: 26) argues that through these processes of exclusion, ‘a complex national and social identity is continuously constructed ... in its (often antipathetic) interaction with outsiders, strangers and foreigners’. indeed, she argues that foreigners often served as the foil for the development of new constructions or narratives of south african nationhood. of course, if we are to employ this explanation to account for the xenophobic violence of may 2008 and if we are to make sense of why this violence was directed primarily at people of colour, then we will have to employ it alongside the history of apartheid racism. why the extreme levels of violence witnessed? it is widely acknowledged that the autochtonous populations of developing countries tend to perceive migrants from poor countries very negatively. specifically, they most frequently perceive these migrants as taking away jobs from locals and being responsible for crime and violence. yet these negative (or xenophobic) perceptions seldom result in such wide-scale acts of interpersonal or intergroup violence as witnessed in south africa in may 2008 (matsopoulos et al., 2009). why was this hatred of the other (and, of course, the self as reflected in the other) expressed in this orgy of violence? in a recently completed paper titled, picking the eyes out of the country: contentious happenings, state power and south africa’s future, the historian, 267 john higginson (2010) provides us with a potential answer, or at least part of the answer to this question, when he observes, the ‘master narrative’ of south african history is the violence of conquest, the violence of frontier wars, the violence of apartheid and of the struggle against apartheid, the criminal violence of gangs and the ritualized violence of ... faction fights (2010: 102). south african history is indeed steeped and inscribed in violence. however, very important to note is that this violence was not simply physical. accompanied by a relentless negativisation and abjection of the other, it also had profound psychological effects, which are rarely considered to be worthy of any serious consideration in contemporary south africa. as we have argued elsewhere (duncan et al., 2008), until this psychological violence is comprehensively and systematically confronted and engaged with, it will perpetually continue to re-inscribe itself in the interpersonal and intergroup relationships in south african communities. indeed, as frantz fanon (1990), in wretched of the earth implies, if left unacknowledged, ongoing violence perpetrated by the former oppressed, will be inevitable, because the latter invariably realise that the violence of their past and the violence of their current circumstances ‘can only be called into question by absolute violence’ on their part. unfortunately, as also implied by fanon (1990), this violence is often directed at the self or at the self as reflected in the other. this observation is further developed by bulhan (1985: 143) in his frantz fanon and the psychology of oppression, through the distinction drawn between violence directed at exploitative institutions and the state and intra-community violence or violence directed at a similar other. those on the margins of society, bulhan (1985) argues, know that defending themselves against the quotidian assaults by broader society and callous governments invariably results merely in more intensified assaults. indeed, as bulhan (1985: 143)) notes, “the high proportion of prisoners of [their] ... class and color, the all-pervasive media and institutions of social control engender in [the marginalised] ... a sense of vulnerability”. thus, they avoid attacking the institutions and systems responsible for their hardship. however, while they believe that they are unable to defend themselves in the broader political, economic and social arena, they will defend themselves and exert whatever control they have over their own lives in the spaces that they construct as their own, namely their homes and neighbourhoods. “that is why”, as bulhan (1985, p. 143) argues, “the slightest challenge ... or offense” by those like him who inhabit these spaces, “push [them] to a volcanic eruption of repressed aggression”. 268 xenophobic violence and community psychology. as should be clear from the presentation thus far, the explanations for the outbreak of the xenophobic attacks of may 2008, on the surface, are complex and fairly diverse, ranging from the effects of scapegoating, isolation, relative deprivation, the politics of nation-building and the processes of otherisation peculiar to the south african context, to the direct effects of institutional racism, which persist to this day. nonetheless, as complex and diverse as what the explanations outlined ostensibly are, they are connected to each other by one common element, and that element is apartheid oppression and its ongoing impact on south african society. any intervention aimed at dealing with the xenophobia of the type that we continue to see in south africa will have to start with an engagement with the toxic legacy of apartheid. there are of course various interventions that could potentially be effective in this regard. however, the intervention that i would briefly want to introduce here is one on which i have been collaborating over the last two years, namely the apartheid archives project. this is an intervention that aims to understand the difficulties in living experienced by particularly the marginalised in south african society, not only through the present, but also through the past. moreover, it is an intervention that aims to obtain an understanding of current south african social problems through listening to the explanations of those directly affected by these problems, rather than condemning them out-of-hand, as many south african social commentators have been prone to do since may 2008. this intervention is of course strongly informed by the principles of community psychology, and particularly the notion that the most effective and most lasting solutions to communities’ problems emerge from an engagement with the understandings which these communities have of the genesis of these problems (see, for example, rappaport, 1981). of course, the opportunity to ‘call into question’ the violence of marginalised communities’ past (and present) through listening to their accounts of this violence may just serve as mechanism that could obviate the need to calling past and present inequalities and hardship into question through acts of violence directed at the self and the similar other. the apartheid archive project. 269 based in part on the assumption that experiences (and particularly traumatogenic experiences) from the past will constantly attempt to re-inscribe themselves in the present if they are not acknowledged and dealt with, this project aims to examine the nature of the violence of institutionalised racism of (particularly ‘ordinary’ black) south africans under the old apartheid order and their continuing effects on individual and group functioning in contemporary south africa. more specifically, the project aims to explore how earlier experiences under the old apartheid order currently mediate and continue to structure individual and group responses to the other. to this end, the project is in the process of collecting narratives of experiences during the apartheid period of both black and white south africans, of representatives from elites and marginalised social categories, of racist perpetration and victimisation, and of trauma and resilience. the aim is to collect as many narratives as possible over a three to five-year period from different sectors of south african society (but particularly from marginalised groups, such as the poor and the socially vulnerable, whose life stories are rarely incorporated into dominant historical accounts of the past). it is hoped that the generation of these stories will allow for processes of reflection on the part of south africans in ways that will allow us to engage with our past; and in the process to obtain some understanding of the ways in which this past continues to impact on the ways in which we relate to ourselves and others. of course, in relation to the problem of violence against foreigners it will be critical to pointedly explore south africans’ perceptions of how their past and present influence their responses to foreigners and the rights of the latter in south africa. i believe that this project will enable us to obtain a much more nuanced understanding of the types of violence that had been visited on south africa in may 2008, thereby affording us the tools to much more effectively deal with this violence currently besetting south africa and most frequently the poor and marginalised. given the unacknowledged legacies of our past that continue to cast a shadow over intergroup relations, this or other similar projects would be an essential starting point for any interventions dealing with the problem of xenophobia and xenophobic violence in south africa 270 notes 1 perhaps indicative of the ongoing influence of the old apartheid racial ideology, many south africans are persuaded that there are discernible differences between black south africans and other africans, with the latter perceived as having a darker skin tone! 2 this form of violence entails placing a petrol-doused tyre around the victim’s neck and setting the tyre alight. 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(2008). we are not all like that. race, class and nation after apartheid. in s. hassim, t. kupe and e. worby (eds.). go home or die here: violence, xenophobia and the reinvention of difference in south africa. (189-208). johannesburg: wits press. peberdy, s. (2009). selecting immigrants: national identity and south africa’s immigration policies, 1910-2008. wits university press: johannesburg. pillay, d. (2008). relative deprivation, social instability and cultures of entitlement. in s. hassim, t. kupe and e. worby (eds.). go home or die here: violence, xenophobia and the reinvention of difference in south africa (93-104). johannesburg: wits press. selecting immigrants. national identity and south africa’s immigration policies: 19102008. johannesburg: wits university press. rappaport, j. (1981). in praise of paradox: a social policy of empowerment over prevention. american journal of community psychology. 9 (1) 1-21. worby, e., hassim, s. & kupe, t. (2008). introduction. in s. hassim, t. kupe and e. worby (eds.). go home or die here: violence, xenophobia and the reinvention of difference in south africa (1-26). johannesburg: wits press. microsoft word 2012-008ccsi-20130622_final edits_lji final trj.docx a learning journey i: curriculum mapping as a tool to assess and integrate community psychology practice competencies in graduate education programs gregor v. sarkisian, ph.d., and sylvie taylor, ph.d., antioch university los angeles author notes: gregor v. sarkisian, ph.d., is an associate professor in the master of arts in psychology progam and teaches in the applied community psychology specialization at anitioch university los angeles, ca, usa. sylvie taylor, ph.d., is a professor in the master of arts in psychology program and is the founding director of the applied community psychology specialization at antioch university los angeles, ca, usa. the applied community psychology specialization was the recipient of the 2010 society for community research and action, award for excellence in education programs keywords: curriculum mapping, community psychology practice competencies, community psychology graduate and professional education recommended citation: sarkisian, g. v., & taylor, s. (2013). a learning journey i: curriculum mapping as a tool to assess and integrate community psychology practice competencies in graduate education programs. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), xx-xx. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 a learning journey i: curriculum mapping as a tool to assess and integrate community psychology practice competencies in graduate education programs abstract curriculum mapping is introduced as a practical tool for community psychology graduate and professional education programs to assess how their curriculum addresses community psychology practice competencies and to further develop their program. using the applied community psychology specialization as an illustrative case study, a six-step process for mapping curriculum to community psychology practice competencies is described. implications for academic program development and limitations to the curriculum mapping process are discussed. keywords: curriculum mapping, community psychology practice competencies, community psychology graduate and professional education curriculum mapping is an intentional, systematic process that results in a graphic representation (curriculum map) of the relationships between courses, instructional activities, student learning outcomes, program objectives, and program goals. the curriculum mapping process conceptualizes curriculum as a system, emphasizing the interrelationships between courses and their cumulative impact on student learning, achievement, and development (cuevas, matveev, & miller, 2010). a curriculum map, is therefore a visual representation of the curriculum, very much like a map of an unfamiliar country (harden, 2001). individual courses within the curriculum function like individual cities or landmarks on a traveler’s itinerary. each course contributes to the students’ learning much like stopping in different cities and towns on the trip provides the traveler with pieces of information about the country and its people. individual course syllabi, serve as the travel guides, describing what one should experience along the way, how long to stay, and how much to do in each place. academic advisors serve as tour guides, while program faculty serve as docents to student travelers. a well constructed curriculum map charts the educational journey of an academic program for its students, giving them clear information about not only what is expected in each course, but how each course relates to program goals and objectives, making explicit what they will learn, and how they will learn throughout their program of study. originally designed for use in k-12 education (english, 1980; jacobs, 1997; jacobs, 2004), curriculum maps initially emphasized what was actually being taught within a given academic program. a major pedagogical goal of the mapping process is to engage faculty (curriculum developers and teachers) in clarifying what they assume students are learning (the fictional or declared curriculum), the curriculum that is being presented to students (the real or taught curriculum), and what students actually learn (the tested or learned curriculum) (harden, 2001). mapping closes the gaps that often exist between these diverse curricula, providing faculty with tools to analyze program curriculum in order to identify missing content, necessary and unnecessary redundancies, proper sequencing of courses and learning experiences, and an integrated conceptualization of how each course contributes to student learning outcomes, program objectives, and goals. the end result of mapping is a curriculum that is more comprehensive, coherent, explicit, and transparent to all stakeholders (students, faculty, staff, administrators, accrediting bodies, members of the general public) involved in the educational process (harden, 2001). participation in the mapping process fosters greater collaboration and collegiality among faculty members (uchiyama & radin, 2009) and has been identified as a useful tool for program assessment and evaluation (armayor, & leonard, 2010; plaza, dragalis, slack, skrepek, & sauer, 2007). curriculum mapping has gained popularity in higher education during the past decade (cuevas, matveev, & miller, 2010; kelley, mcauley, wallace, & frank, 2008; driscoll & wood, 2007; maki, 2004; allen, 2004; harden, 2001) and has become a more prominent tool among professional and regional accreditation bodies. while curriculum mapping has been used primarily as tool by which to assess program objectives, mapping also has the potential to be a useful tool for programs wishing to align their curriculum with professional standards or competencies (kelley, mcauley, wallace, & frank, 2008). through shifting focus from program objectives, which will likely vary greatly between graduate and professional education programs, to global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 community psychology practice competencies, which are based on skills faculty in all programs teach, an opportunity for deeper understanding within programs and shared understanding across programs of how students learn community psychology practice competencies can emerge. community psychology practice competencies early in 2012, the society for community research and action (scra), council of education programs (cep)-community psychology practice council (cppc) task group on defining practice competencies completed a draft of eighteen competencies for community psychology practice that was recently endorsed by the executive committee of scra (society for community research & action, 2012). table 1 presents the eighteen competencies within five domains of community psychology practice. the intent of this document is to identify competencies useful in community psychology practice. through the use of curriculum mapping to assess community psychology practice competencies, graduate and professional community psychology education programs can: (1) develop a better understanding of how community psychology practice competencies are integrated in the curriculum; (2) integrate desired competencies not currently included in curriculum through developing current or new courses; (3) provide students with a road map of how they will learn community psychology practice competencies through their stay in the program; (4) provide an opportunity for faculty across programs to learn from each other and further develop pedagogy of community psychology practice; and (5) provide scra and the field of community psychology with an opportunity to better understand how students learn the practice of community psychology. table 1. competencies for community psychology practice (scra, 2012) foundational principles (1) ecological perspectives (2) empowerment (3) sociocultural and cross-cultural competence (4) community inclusion and partnership (5) ethical, reflective practice community program development and management (6) program development, implementation and management (7) prevention and health promotion community and organizational capacity building (8) community leadership and mentoring (9) small and large group processes (10) resource development (11) consultation and organizational development community and social change (12) collaboration and coalition development (13) community development (14) community organizing and community advocacy (15) public policy analysis, development, and advocacy (16) community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness community research (17) participatory community research (18) program evaluation in this paper, the authors describe how to use curriculum mapping to assess the degree to which academic program content aligns with these competencies and how the process of curriculum mapping can assist programs to identify competencies that are not addressed with adequate depth in their programs. the curriculum of the applied community psychology (acp) specialization at global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 antioch university los angeles is used as a case study to illustrate the process. the acp specialization is a 17-unit optional concentration that is housed within the master of arts in psychology programs at antioch university los angeles. students wishing to complete the acp specialization must successfully complete a lecturebased course, community psychology: theories and methods, which serves as a gateway to the acp specialization. the 17-unit acp specialization consists of four, 3-unit, core courses (community consultation & collaboration, program development & evaluation, prevention & promotion, and psychoeducational groups & in-service training development), each of which includes active consultation with community-based organizations, and collaboration with peers, to produce a variety of deliverables (i.e., technical reports that result from consultations, program development and/or evaluations, analyses of prevention and promotion based programming, and development of a psychoeducational or in-service program). in addition, students complete a 2-unit independent field study in acp which focuses on a community-based project of their choosing and are often extensions of projects undertaken in one of the core courses (e.g., implementation of recommendations made as the result of a consultation, delivery of a psychoeducational workshop series, etc.). the remaining three required units can be completed by taking workshops (i.e., day-long or multi-day courses that focus on special topics such as coalition building, public dialog facilitation, and social justice advocacy). a complete description of the acp specialization, the program philosophy and student professional development model is described in taylor & sarkisian (2011). six-step process of curriculum mapping to assess community psychology practice competencies the curriculum mapping process includes developing criteria by which to assess curriculum, developing categories and descriptors which represent the range of training opportunities for students, constructing the curriculum map tables, completing the curriculum maps through independent and collaborative faculty ratings, establishing reliability through obtaining student feedback, and sharing results. the process of curriculum mapping is collaborative. it is most effective when all program faculty are actively engaged, and is much more meaningful if students are included in the process (uchiyama & radin, 2009). syllabi, course materials, demonstrations of student learning, and teaching experience with the curriculum are primary sources of information to utilize in developing the curriculum maps. below, the six-step process is described using curriculum maps the authors developed for the acp specialization as a case illustration. table 2 presents the six-step curriculum mapping process. table 2. six-step process to map community psychology practice competencies with courses and curriculum in community psychology education programs (1) develop criteria to assess chosen curriculum (2) construct categories and descriptors for criteria (3) construct the curriculum map legends and tables (4) complete the curriculum map and collaborate with other faculty (5) include students to establish reliability (6) share results (1) develop criteria to assess chosen curriculum in assessing how selected curricula address community psychology practice competencies, the authors developed both general and specific criteria. these curricula included the gateway prerequisite course, community psychology: theories and methods, the four core courses – community consultation and collaboration, program development and evaluation, prevention and promotion, and, psychoeducational groups and in-service training development, and, field study in acp. a general framework was used to explore the level of training students receive by specific courses and community psychology practice competencies (kloos, 2010). to explore how our curriculum address competencies in a more detailed fashion, the analyses focused on the level of content delivery in each course, student learning activities, and demonstrations of student learning. global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 (2) construct categories and descriptors for criteria in order to capture the variation in learning opportunities, categories and descriptors for criteria were constructed to reflect the full range of learning opportunities provided to students in the acp specialization. for the criterion level of training, general categories described in the literature (exposure, experience, and expertise) were employed (kloos, 2010). table 3 presents the levels of training for the acp specialization required coursework by community psychology practice competencies. the legend at the bottom of the table provides the reader with a detailed description of the three categories which represent levels of training. table 3. levels of training for the acp specialization required coursework by community psychology practice competencies community psychology practice competencies community psychology: theories and methods community consultation and collaboration program development and evaluation prevention and promotion psychoed. groups & in-service training devel. foundational principles ecological perspectives empowerment sociocultural and cross-cultural competence community inclusion and partnership ethical, reflective practice exposure/experience exposure exposure exposure exposure experience experience experience experience experience experience experience experience experience experience experience experience experience experience experience experience experience experience experience experience community program development program development, implementation and management prevention and health promotion exposure exposure experience (experience) experience (experience) experience experience experience experience community and organizational capacity-building community leadership and mentoring small group processes large group processes resource development consultation and organizational development exposure exposure exposure exposure exposure (experience) experience (experience) experience experience (experience) experience (experience) experience experience (experience) experience (experience) experience (experience) (experience) experience (experience) experience (experience) community and social change collaboration coalition development community development community organizing and community advocacy public policy analysis, development and advocacy information dissemination and building public awareness exposure/experience exposure exposure exposure exposure exposure experience (experience) (experience) (experience) (experience) experience experience (experience) (experience) (experience) (experience) experience experience (experience) (experience) (experience) (experience) experience experience (experience) (experience) (experience) (experience) experience community research participatory community research program evaluation exposure exposure (experience) experience (experience) experience (experience) (experience) (experience) (experience) note: parentheses indicate that the nature of the course project may or may not include experience with the given cp competency. exposure, experience, and expertise categorize levels of these competencies (kloos, 2010). for each competency, this framework would involve: exposure: in core community courses, all students learn about the value of this competency and how it can be applied in community psychology practice. experience: in selected courses, including supervised fieldwork, students may choose to gain supervised practice related to the competency. expertise: upper level students can choose competencies in which to develop further experience and expertise. this might involve field experiences over several terms. for the criterion level of content delivery, four categories were used: introduces (i), emphasizes (e), reinforces (r), and applies (a). for the criterion student learning activities, five categories were global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 developed to capture the full range of activities by which students learn community psychology practice competencies in the acp specialization: classroom based learning (c), reading and applied research (r), group work (g), writing (w), and field learning (f). finally, for the criterion demonstrations of student learning, two categories were constructed oral presentation (o) and final paper (f). once categories were developed, descriptors for each category were constructed to reflect the specific range of associated activities. for example, with the criterion student learning activities, the following descriptor for the category classroom based learning was developed: lecture, discussion of readings and course concepts, watching and discussing relevant documentary videos, exercises to stimulate experiential learning, and group learning exercises that may involve role play, planning, or reflection. appendix 1 includes the curriculum map legend that provides detailed descriptions for each of the categories discussed above. (3) construct the curriculum map legends and tables once the criteria, categories, and descriptors have been developed, the legend for the curriculum map can be constructed. ideally, the entire curriculum map can fit on one page so as to illustrate a map of the entire program. the legend is helpful in providing explanations of abbreviated language that is used to express as much information as possible in the smallest amount of space (see appendix i). through listing the community psychology practice competencies on the left column and course names, criteria, and categories on the top row of a table, curricula can be assessed on each competency. (4) complete the curriculum map and collaborate with other faculty using syllabi, student work samples, teaching materials, teaching experience and learning experience, rate how each course in the curriculum provides students with exposure to the community psychology practice competencies. then, share results with your colleague(s), discuss your differences in ratings and work to reach a commonly agreed upon rating when differences emerge. discussing differences in ratings is always a learning experience for the authors because meaningful pedagogical discussions ensue where reflection on how student learning activities can be further developed within a holistic and purposeful framework. finally, because this is a reflective process, refinement of criteria, categories, descriptions, and ratings can be expected during each review cycle. table 4 presents a curriculum map of acp specialization required coursework by community psychology practice competencies (see appendix i for curriculum map legend). a rating of each course appears for the level of content delivery (lev), student learning activities (lea), and demonstrations of learning (dem) associated with the community psychology practice competencies. while the prerequisite community psychology: theories and methods course provides students with some level of exposure through introducing or introducing and emphasizing all community psychology practice competencies, the core courses and field study provide students a level of experience by incorporating fieldwork to integrate other student learning activities through practice with community based organizations. across core courses and the field study course, nearly all student learning activities and demonstrations of student learning include the application of the foundational principles – ecological perspectives, empowerment, sociocultural and cross-cultural competence, community inclusion and partnership, and ethical, reflective practice. table 4 can be found at the end of this article to allow for continuity of flow. in addition to the foundational principles, nearly all student learning activities and demonstrations of student learning across the core courses provide students with a level of experience in five additional competencies: program development, implementation, and management; small group processes; resource development; collaboration; and, information dissemination and building public awareness. expectedly, students gain experience in the competency prevention and health promotion in both the prevention and promotion and psychoeducational groups and in-service learning core courses. additionally, students gain experience in the competencies consultation and organizational development and program evaluation in the other two core courses – community consultation and collaboration and program development and evaluation. in accordance with the student-centered focus of the field study, any competency may be of focus, yet none are prescribed. while students receive a level of exposure to participatory community research in three courses and exposure to public policy analysis, development, and advocacy in two courses, the four core courses do not provide students with a level of exposure or experience in five of the community psychology practice competencies: community leadership and mentoring; large group processes; coalition development; community development; and, community organizing and community advocacy. global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 (5) include students to establish reliability students who have completed the courses under review are perhaps best equipped to provide feedback on how coursework has contributed to their development of community psychology practice competencies. this is a necessary step in establishing reliability through bridging the gap between the declared and learned curriculum (harden, 2001). students who have provided feedback have enjoyed the process, discovered more about how they learned community psychology practice competencies, and appreciated having input into further developing the acp specialization. there are a number of ways in which faculty can include students in this process. through a brief meeting, faculty can orient students to the legend and provide them with blank curriculum maps they could then complete and return in a follow up visit where similarities and differences from faculty ratings could be discussed. alternatively, a survey could be developed to include students and alumni. (6) share results one of the greatest benefits the authors have realized through the use of curriculum mapping is a better ability to promote transparency in teaching to the stakeholders of the program. the newfound understanding of the curriculum through engaging in this process has strengthened the ability of acp specialization faculty to effectively communicate the pedagogical approach as well as how and why courses integrate into a program of study. there are many ways in which to disseminate learnings to benefit the interests of students, colleagues, and the field. for example, educators might consider publicizing the community psychology practice competencies curriculum map. potential audiences and purposes may include (1) recruitment of potential students, (2) current students to facilitate increased awareness and ownership in developing competencies, (3) other graduate and professional education programs to improve shared learning, and, (4) the cep to build a better understanding of training in the field and ways in which scra can support new and existing programs. implications for academic program development curriculum mapping is a tool that can be used by program faculty and students to assess the extent to which their courses provide students with training in community psychology practice competencies. this process will likely validate program strengths through further developing a collaborative understanding of how students learn competencies. additionally, this process can assist programs in identifying competencies that are currently not addressed in adequate depth but represent areas of student or faculty interest, or, are in line with institutional or program goals. two areas in which the authors have observed benefits of the mapping process have been in course development and in cross-program partnerships and community collaborations. course development over the past ten years that the acp specialization has been in operation, the authors have developed workshops to provide students with a level of exposure and when possible experience in community psychology practice competencies not addressed in the core curriculum. the acp specialization offers 1 to 3 unit skills-focused workshops that provide exposure to competencies – e.g., community organizing, community coalition development, participatory action research – not covered in the core curriculum. since the authors’ recent development of curriculum maps to assess community psychology practice competencies, two competencies not covered in the curriculum were identified that are of great interest to students and faculty, and are consistent with program and institutional goals large group processes and public policy analysis development and advocacy. the authors plan to develop workshops in the near future that will provide students with a level of exposure and possibly experience with these competencies. cross-program partnerships and community collaborations the authors have long recognized the limitations of time and expertise as a core faculty of two, and have developed partnerships with faculty from other programs and community practitioners who often teach skills-focused workshops (e.g., grantsmanship for nonprofits). the curriculum map of community psychology practice competencies provides the authors with the information needed to identify and recruit faculty from other institutions or community practitioners to teach workshops that address competencies not covered in the curriculum. another strategy that has been used to supplement the acp curriculum is to partner and collaborate with community organizations to develop opportunities for students to gain hands-on experience in practice competencies. for example, the acp specialization has partnered with a community organization to develop an institute for public dialog, housed in the community, which provides training and opportunities for acp students to engage in the facilitation of large group process through public dialog. limitations to curriculum mapping while the authors have realized many benefits from engaging in the curriculum mapping process, two limitations of this tool have been observed. first, global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 without obtaining student feedback, very little can be understood about the “learned” curriculum. second, the predictive nature of the mapping process is limited greatly when student-developed learning experiences are the focus of study. the dialectic nature of the mapping process through engaging in curriculum mapping activities, faculty can improve their understanding of the interrelationships between courses and their impact on students’ learning. however, this work can only speak to half of the equation if one’s pedagogical approach posits that student engagement is meaningful to the learning process. efforts to include students in the mapping process have contributed to a more complete understanding of how students learn what they learn. this dialectical conversation with students at the level of curriculum can contribute to understanding what is most useful to students in learning cp practice competencies. student-developed learning experiences one limitation to the map-like, predictive nature of the curriculum map is in student-developed learning experiences. for example, with the field study course, students develop their own learning activities and work on projects in the field. within this type of studentfocused course structure, there is very little ability to determine which competencies will be of focus. yet, the inclusion of this opportunity on the curriculum map has also been observed to be of value to students. prior to developing the curriculum maps assessing competencies, students were not necessarily aware of the full range of competencies that they could develop. they now have a greater awareness of the flexibility and wide range of learning opportunities that have always existed. through maintaining program documentation on student-developed learning experiences (e.g., student portfolios, technical reports, reflective writing), faculty can learn which competencies are of most interest to students and provide future students with illustrative examples of how field study experiences have contributed to learning various community psychology practice competencies. conclusion the recent endorsement of a draft of eighteen competencies for community psychology practice has provided united states educators with a framework by which to better assess their curricula. should the sixstep curriculum mapping process described in this article be implemented by all united states graduate education programs in community psychology, it will dramatically increase transparency in the learning environment and greatly assist educators in preparing students 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(2007). curriculum mapping in program assessment and evaluation. american journal of pharmaceutical education, 71(2), 1-8. society for community research and action (2012). competencies for community psychology practice: global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 draft august 15, 2012. the community psychologist, 45(4), 7-14. taylor, s. & sarkisian, g. v. (2010). applied community psychology specialization: seven year program review self-study (winter 2002-spring 2009). antioch university, los angeles: authors. taylor, s. & sarkisian, g. v. (2011). community psychology values-driven pedagogy: the foundation for empowering educational settings. the global journal of community psychology practice, 2(2), 1-12. uchiyama, k., & radin, j. l. (2009). curriculum mapping in higher education: a vehicle for collaboration. innovative higher education, 33(4), 271-280. table 4. curriculum map of acp specialization required coursework & cp practice competencies community psychology: theories & methods community consultation & collaboration program development & evaluation prevention &promotion psychoeducational groups & in-service training development field study lev lea dem lev lea dem lev lea dem lev lea dem lev lea dem lev lea dem community psychology practice competencies foundational principles ecological perspectives empowerment sociocultural and cross-cultural competence community inclusion & partnership ethical, reflective practice i,e i,e i,e i,e i,e c,r,w,g c,r,w,g c,r,w,g c,r,w,g c,r,w,g o,p o,p o,p o,p o,p r,a r,a r,a r,a r,a c,r,w,g,f c,r,w,g,f c,r,w,g,f c,r,w,g,f c,r,w,g,f o,p o,p o,p o,p o,p r,a r,a r,a r,a r,a c,r,w,g,f c,r,w,g,f c,r,w,g,f c,r,w,g,f c,r,w,g,f o,p o,p o,p o,p o,p r,a r,a r,a r,a r,a c,r,w,g,f c,r,w,g,f c,r,w,g,f c,r,w,g,f c,r,w,g, o,p o,p o,p o,p o,p r,a r,a r,a r,a r,a c,r,w,f c,r,w,f c,r,w,f c,r,w,f c,r,w,f o,p o,p o,p o,p o,p a a a a a f f f f f p p p p p community program development program development, implementation & management prevention & health promotion i i c,r,w,g c,r,w,g o,p o,p e,r,a e,r,a c,r,w,g,f c,r o,p __ e,r,a e,r,a c,r,w,g,f c,r o,p __ e,r,a e,r,a c,r,w,g,f c,r,w,g,f o,p o,p e,r,a e,r,a c,r,w,f c,r,w,f o,p o,p (a) (a) f f (p) (p) community and organizational capacity-building community leadership & mentoring small group processes large group processes resource development consultation and organizational development i i i i i c,r c,r,w,g c,r c,r,w,g c,r __ o,p __ o,p __ __ r,a __ e,r,a e,r,a __ c,r,w,g,f __ c,r,w,g,f c,r,w,g,f __ o,p __ o,p o,p __ r,a __ e,r,a e,r,a __ c,r,w,g,f __ c,r,w,g,f c,r,w,g,f __ o,p __ o,p o,p __ r,a __ e,r,a e,r __ c,r,w,g,f __ c,r,w,g,f c,r __ o,p __ o,p __ __ r,a __ e,r,a __ __ c,r,w,f __ c,r,w,f __ __ o,p __ o,p __ (a) (a) (a) (a) (a) f f f f f (p) (p) (p) (p) (p) community and social change collaboration coalition development community development community organizing and community advocacy public policy analysis, development and advocacy information dissemination and building public awareness i,e i i i i i c,r,g,w c,r c,r c,r c,r c,r,w,g o,p __ __ __ __ o,p r,a __ __ __ __ r,a c,r,w,g,f __ __ __ __ c,r,w,g,f o,p __ __ __ __ o,p r,a __ __ __ __ r,a c,r wg f __ __ __ __ c,r,w,g,f o,p __ __ __ __ o,p r,a __ __ __ __ r,a c,r wg f __ __ __ __ c,r,w,g,f o,p __ __ __ _ o,p r,a __ __ __ __ r,a c,r w,f __ __ __ __ c,r,w,f o,p __ __ __ __ o,p (a) (a) (a) (a) (a) (a) f f f f f f (p) (p) (p) (p) (p) (p) community research participatory community research program evaluation i i c,r c,r,w,g __ __ e e c,r c,r,w,g,f __ o,p r r,a c,r,w c,r,w,g,f __ o,p __ r __ c,r __ __ __ r __ c,r __ __ (a) (a) f f (p) (p) note. elective acp courses which meet the 3-unit elective requirement are not shown in this table. appendix i curriculum map legend of acp core curriculum and community psychology practice competencies 1. level of content delivery (column 1): (lev) (i) introduces students are not expected to be familiar with the content or skill at the collegiate or graduate level. instruction and learning activities focus on basic knowledge, skills, and/or competencies and an entry-level complexity. (e) emphasizes students are expected to possess a basic knowledge and familiarity with the content or skills at the collegiate or graduate level. instruction and learning concentrates on enhancing and strengthening knowledge, skills, and expanding complexity. (r) reinforces students are expected to possess a strong foundation in the knowledge, skill, or competency at the collegiate or graduate level. instructional and learning activities continue to build upon previous competencies and increased complexity. (a) applies students are expected to possess an advanced level of knowledge, skill, or competency at the collegiate or graduate level. instructional and learning activities focus on the use of the content or skills in multiple contexts and at multiple levels of complexity. 2. student learning activities (column 2): (lea) (c) classroom based learning activities which may include lecture, discussion of readings and course concepts, watching and discussing relevant documentary videos, exercises to stimulate experiential learning, and group learning exercises that may involve role play, planning, or reflection. (r) reading and applied research activities outside of class which may include course reading, reading and research related to a group project or field learning experience. (g) group work activities outside of class which may include collaboration between student peers, sharing applied research to write papers, planning a powerpoint presentation, or, planning collaborations with community groups or organizations. (w) writing activities outside of class which may be related to a final paper, technical report, or project, and, are reviewed by the instructor several times during the term to provide developmental feedback. (f) field learning activities in the community which include meetings in community settings with personnel from community groups or organizations to collect information, consult, and collaborate to address the needs of community groups/organizations and satisfy course requirements. 3. demonstrations of student learning (column 3): (dem) (o) oral presentation of findings from a paper or technical report or project. (p) final paper which may consist of a research paper, technical report, or project. global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 the use of community psychology competencies in a fieldwork practicum sequence: a tale of two graduate programs by bernadette sánchez1, tiffeny jimenez2, judah viola2, judith kent2, & ray legler2 keywords: community psychology practice competencies, community psychology education, community psychology practice author biographies: bernadette sánchez is a professor of community psychology at depaul university. she conducts research on mentoring relationships and positive youth development among urban, low-income adolescents of color. her research is on the role of formal and informal mentoring relationships in youth’s educational experiences. bernadette also investigates the resilience of marginalized youth and issues related to race and ethnicity, such as racial discrimination and racial/ethnic identity. she authored literature reviews on the role of race, ethnicity, and culture in youth mentoring for the first and second editions of the leading scholarly handbook for youth mentoring. she has received funding for her research from private foundations as well as the national institute of child health and human development (nichd). she is also a member of the research board for the national mentoring resource center and received the 2014 ethnic minority mentoring award from the society for community research and action. tiffeny r. jimenez, ph.d., is an assistant professor at national louis university. she is a community psychologist, and assistant professor of psychology within the school of social and behavioral sciences. she is most passionate about creating more inclusive communities and socially just practices through organizational and community-level systems change; facilitating and evaluating coalition development; examining resource exchange sustainability, and developing 1 depaul university 2 national louis university http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 educational opportunities that promote systems leadership. she has worked and written most on various community-based research projects spanning social justice issues, including: coordinating a collaborative statewide cross-disability leadership training initiative, consulting on initiatives to change the culture of a university to be more supportive of women faculty in the stem fields, and conducting a collaborative network system analysis with a community-wide systems change initiative across a tri-county area assisting in the development of a data-driven capacity-building process to increase the knowledge of community members for restructuring a local human services system. she has recently published strategies for strengthening graduate programs in community psychology and to better educate for community psychology practice careers. she is most active in the society for community research and action and the american evaluation association. she is currently working to develop the infrastructure needed to support widespread community engagement across nlu and her most current work includes developing methods for assessing cultural communities. judah j. viola, phd, is dean of the college of professional studies and advancement at national louis university. he is also a community psychologist, and associate professor of psychology. judah’s research and advocacy interests involve promoting healthy communities and increasing civic engagement and prosocial behavior. judah has written most extensively on evaluation research including his book, consulting and evaluation with nonprofit and community-based organizations. his most recent writing project with oxford university press is an upcoming book on the diverse career paths in community psychology. he is active in the society for community research and action and the chicagoland evaluation association. judah serves on the executive committee of the consortium to lower obesity in chicago children. his recent community-based evaluation projects have explored neighborhood revitalization efforts with habitat for humanity, and restorative justice efforts of chicago’s safe schools consortium. judith a. kent, ph.d. is an associate professor at nlu, where she earned her doctorate in community psychology. she teaches in the community psychology program and co-chairs and teaches in the undergraduate psychology program. her http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 background is in language studies and instruction, culture, and cross-cultural communication. a main area of research interest is language and identity of emerging adults. she works with persistence of underrepresented students through higher education. kent is affiliated with pilsen neighbors community council of gamaliel of metro chicago and a member of the university round table of pncc/gmc, which is working on the development of a family college and career readiness program. collaborating with nlu colleagues in a study of community resilience as a buffer for adverse childhood experiences (aces), kent focuses on the language and cultural context. she is also interested in international community psychology and is collaborating with colleagues in florence, italy, where she had lived and worked prior to joining nlu. ray legler is an assistant professor of psychology in the school of social and behavioral sciences at national louis university in chicago. dr. legler earned his ph.d. in ecological/community psychology from michigan state university and has been working on urban youth and education issues in the chicago area for over 15 years. prior to joining the faculty at national louis, he served as director of research and evaluation at after school matters in chicago. dr. legler’s current research interests focus on community-based approaches to addressing and preventing urban poverty by building partnerships between high schools, post-secondary institutions, and businesses. author acknowledgements: we would like to thank the reviewers as well as danielle vaclavik and amy anderson who provided feedback on earlier versions of this paper. recommended citation: sánchez, b., jimenez, t., viola, j., kent, j., & legler, r., (2017). the use of community psychology competencies in a fieldwork practicum sequence: a tale of two graduate programs. global journal of community psychology practice, 8(1), pages 1-23. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 the use of community psychology competencies in a fieldwork practicum sequence: a tale of two graduate programs abstract the purpose of this paper is to provide a description of how the community psychology practice competencies are taught in the fieldwork practicum course at two phd programs in community psychology. an overview of the educational approach and program goals are provided as well as a detailed description of how the course instructors utilize the practice competencies in the practicum courses and the kinds of projects that students conduct to learn the competencies. comparison of the competencies addressed in each program and lessons learned are provided about program evaluation, graduate education training goals, and fieldwork sequence foci. the purpose of this paper is to present how two community psychology phd programs in the u.s. have used and taught the community psychology (cp) practice competencies in our curricula, particularly in our fieldwork practica courses. the two programs are at depaul university and national louis university (nlu) in chicago. each of our programs has used the practice competencies in a variety of ways, from using the list as a self-assessment tool for students to determine their strengths and limitations and guide their project selection, to faculty reflecting on the extent to which each competency is developed within our training programs, and to determine areas of improvement. further, depaul’s program is a traditional phd program while nlu’s program targets master’s level full-time professionals with strong community-based experiences, but with less traditional academic credentials. each program is distinct; a comparison of the fieldwork practica courses and the competencies addressed offers important lessons for education programs and training for the field. it is important to note that students in both programs gain exposure to cp practice competencies in other parts of our curricula, but we focus only on the fieldwork sequences in this paper. these sequences provide both depaul and nlu students the opportunity to apply what they learn in our curricula and to hone their cp practice skills. given the differences in the two graduate programs, the students who enter our programs and their career goals vary. nlu students tend to have more years of community and professional experience when they enter the phd program and already have established relationships in their communities. depaul students tend to be diverse in their experiences from students who enter the phd program immediately after receiving their bachelor’s degree to those who have been working many years as a researcher and/or practitioner. depaul graduates of the community psychology phd program pursue a variety of careers, with approximately over a third in practice/evaluation careers (e.g., consultants for nonprofits, evaluator at a nonprofit or governmental organization), over a third in traditional faculty positions, 20% in full-time research positions, and a few in staff/administrative positions at universities. about a third of depaul graduates from the clinical-community program are in full-time clinical careers, a third in full-time research careers, and a third who do about half clinical work and half research. approximately 80% of nlu students go into practice-oriented, non-academic positions (e.g., executive directors of and consultants for communitybased and not-for-profit organizations) working, for example, with homelessness, education, and youth. the fieldwork sequence not only increases depaul and nlu students’ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 proficiency in cp practice, but also positions them to become more marketable for a variety of careers. recent training in community psychology practice the role of a community psychologist is complex in that it depends on the integration of various values, competencies, and skills towards creating more just and fair societies (sarkisian & jimenez, 2011). whether working at a non-profit organization, a research institute, a university or a government setting, the integration of community psychology values and competencies into local cultural communities is critical to being more effective in facilitating, managing, or demonstrating the need for change. toward this end, it is important to examine how we prepare students for being effective community change agents and examine how we can better support them. there have been several surveys conducted across all levels of education in cp to assess the extent to which the scra practice competencies are emphasized by programs (brown, cardazone, glantsman, johnsonhakim, & lemke, 2014; connell, lewis, cook, meissen, wolff, johnson-hakim, 2013; dziadkowiec & jimenez, 2009; gatlin, rushenberg & hazel, 2009; neigher & ratcliffe, 2010). the survey findings provide insight to how students experience the learning of practice competencies across programs, and how students are trained on these competencies across the field. overall lessons learned across surveys include: 1) programs emphasize different competencies depending on their unique contexts, yet most tend to emphasize the ecological perspective and participatory community research; 2) doctoral programs tend to emphasize more research-based competencies; 3) students report they receive slightly less than what they prefer to receive in each of the core competencies; and 4) students reported preference for certain competencies that they were not yet learning, including consultation and organizational development, community development, resource development, prevention and promotion, and small and large group processes. in summary, it remains clear that while some programs are doing fairly well at training across certain competencies, there remain gaps in education. in order to intentionally support the training of more effective community psychologists, the practice competencies were developed so that educators are clearer about the content of their cp training curricula and to help them articulate how their programs help students learn certain practice competencies. although our field has a list of core practice competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012) that educators can use to plan, implement, and evaluate their programs, concrete examples of how practice competencies are addressed can be helpful. therefore, we provide case study examples of how our programs have integrated various community psychology practice competencies into our curriculum, particularly in our fieldwork practica courses. there are similarities across nlu and depaul in what practice competencies are emphasized in both our programs (see table 2). similar to the findings from previous surveys (e.g., brown et al., 2014), both of our programs emphasize certain competencies at the program level. for example, the ecological perspective is integrated throughout our curricula. other competencies are emphasized specifically in the fieldwork sequence. for instance, both depaul and nlu students learn ethical and reflective practice through assignments and discussions, take a course in program evaluation, and gain experience with consultation and organizational development. students in both programs also take a course in consultation, and they typically begin their fieldwork projects by learning about an organization’s needs and figuring out how to build http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 capacity. inherent in the focus on capacity building is an opportunity for students in both programs to gain experience with empowerment. other competencies are dependent on the nature of student projects at both universities. for example, some students get experience in prevention and health promotion; small and large group processes; resource development (e.g., grant writing); and/or collaboration and coalition development. next we provide an in-depth examination of how the cp practice competencies are taught in the depaul and nlu fieldwork sequences. depaul university as a case study depaul university has a clinical community psychology phd program that is 48 years old and a community psychology phd program that is 16 years old. the programs are traditional phd programs, and students are trained to become researchers, innovative designers of interventions, collaborators, educators, practitioners, and evaluators. training focuses on health promotion, empowerment, prevention and intervention, and evaluation at multiple ecological levels with diverse populations and organizations. students are also trained to conduct community-based research to understand and address social problems, and receive this training in their coursework, graduate assistantships, and in their theses, comprehensive projects, and dissertations. students are also trained to teach in university settings, to write competitive research grant applications, to present their research at local and national conferences, and to publish their research. an important focus of both doctoral programs at depaul is the fieldwork sequence. description of fieldwork sequence the fieldwork practicum course is part of a larger sequence in our graduate curriculum and is an opportunity for students to learn and apply cp practice competencies. graduate students in both the clinical community and community psychology phd programs are required to take three courses (i.e., advanced community psychology, principles of consultation, and seminar in program evaluation) before they enroll in the fieldwork practicum course3. the learning goals of the fieldwork course are to a) carry out a consulting project in which students apply the knowledge they gain in the community psychology curriculum, and b) gain entrée into a setting, develop collaborative relationships with staff, negotiate a contract, carry out a project, and write up and present a final product to a community agency. the fieldwork course is an academic yearlong course, and students spend 2-4 hours/week on their projects. community psychology phd students take the course in both their 2nd and 3rd years of graduate school (6 terms total), while clinicalcommunity psychology phd students take the course in only their 3rd year (3 terms total). during the year, students develop and implement a consultation project with a community organization, under faculty supervision, and with peer input. it is expected that the project is conducted collaboratively with a community partner and that the project adheres to 15 guiding principles, such as a) the project requires significant use of community psychology theory, values, and practice, b) the project is not primarily basic research, c) the student treats participants and/or clients ethically, and d) the host setting has the resources, motivation, and track record necessary to follow through on their responsibilities. fieldwork is a blended on-line and face-toface course. some of the class activities are done on-line while others are done face-to 3 students typically enroll in other cp relevant courses while they take the fieldwork practicum, such as grant writing, prevention & intervention, or public policy. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 face. for instance, assignments include private journals that are submitted on-line and online discussion boards to keep the instructor up-to-date on the progress of student projects, but to also reflect on the process of engaging in their projects, relationships they are developing, ethical practice, and how they are applying what they have learned in the graduate curriculum to their projects. in the discussion boards, students are asked to integrate community psychology theory and principles into their responses and in their feedback to peers to help them apply what they have learned in the classroom to the real world. course assignments also include a proposed project presentation, contract, mid-year progress report, final product, and final project presentation. face-to-face class meetings are held periodically in order to conduct presentations and to have group discussions about specific topics, such as how to document and disseminate evaluation findings to a lay audience. finally, the instructor has one required individual supervision meeting with each student per quarter, but students are free to meet with the instructor as often as necessary. students conduct a variety of projects in diverse settings, and their projects are typically program evaluation, program development, and/or grant writing. the instructor does not select the organizations or projects for the students in order to give them the flexibility and independence to select projects that suit their interests and skills. the majority of organizations that students conduct their projects with are community-based, non-profit organizations outside the university. however, about one student each year conducts a fieldwork project with an organization on campus. for example, a student conducted a process evaluation of a peer mentoring program for lgbtqa undergraduate students at depaul university. application of the practice competencies in the fieldwork course in the first week of the course, students are asked to complete a survey in which they assess their skill set for each of the scra cp practice competencies. for each competency, students rate their skills on a scale from 0 (entry/novice) to 6 (mastery/expert; see table 1). students then engage in an on-line discussion board in which they are asked to report strengths and limitations of their skill set based on their survey responses, and to discuss the ideal fieldwork project they would like to engage in during the school year and why. students are asked to use this reflection to help them determine the kind of organization and project they would like to carry out in the course. some students select a project based on their current strengths while others select a project based on their limitations. for instance, some students feel that they are stronger in program evaluation but want additional evaluation experience because they envision their future career involving this competency, and as such, they would like to gain as much experience as possible in evaluation. other students use fieldwork as an opportunity to learn a new competency. for example, a student dedicated her fieldwork project to developing infographics, a new skill, to disseminate findings of a recent evaluation she conducted with her community partner. at the end of the school year, students engage in a discussion in which they discuss the cp practice competency they selected and how their project helped them to improve that skill. students also talk about which practice competency they would like to develop the following year if they were to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 entry/novice proficient/skilled mastery/expert developing awareness / building knowledge limited repertoire limited experience unaware of potential problems unaware of questions to ask applying knowledge routinely basic repertoire moderate amount of experience solves problems as they arise aware of questions to ask and able to access resources to answer the questions using knowledge fluently and effectively advanced repertoire extensive experience anticipates problems before they arise poses questions to the field sought out for input table 1: rating scale used to assess students’ skills on the scra practice competencies at depaul university work with the same organization again by discussing the kind of project they would work on to help them develop that skill. these types of reflections are beneficial for getting students to be intentional in selecting experiences that help them meet their career goals. given that our curriculum does not adequately address every cp practice competency, giving students autonomy in project and site selection allows students to tailor their training experience towards their interests and towards competencies in which our program is weaker. there are some practice competencies that are taught in the curriculum, such as prevention, ecological principles, consultation, program evaluation, grant writing, prevention and intervention, empowerment, and public policy4. with the exception of ecological principles, we have 4 public policy is a new course in depaul’s curriculum as a result of a survey of graduate students about the scra practice competencies and which competencies students would like to gain more experience. public policy was determined to be a weak area in the curriculum but also a competency that many students desired more exposure and experience. dedicated courses on each of the other competencies. the competency of ecological principles is integrated throughout the curriculum and in much of the research that faculty do, which is consistent with previous research on the cp practice competencies and graduate training (brown et al., 2014). with regard to competencies in which the program is weaker, students are encouraged to seek coursework outside of the department or to gain experience in either fieldwork or through other work (e.g., research/evaluation projects). in the fieldwork practicum course, the competencies that students typically gain exposure to and/or experience in are ethical reflective practice; program development, implementation and management; consultation and organizational development; empowerment; community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness; and/or program evaluation; but this also varies by student project. students complete a journal entry and a discussion board post in which they write about ethical, reflective practice. further, every time students submit a journal to the instructor or meet with the instructor http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 face-to-face, they are asked to report any areas in which they need support, including ethical dilemmas. empowerment is also emphasized in the fieldwork course, particularly in their approach to working with the organizations. the instructor encourages students to “enact empowering processes through working in genuine, inclusive partnerships with community members and organizations” (dalton & wolfe, 2012, p. 10). students are asked to view the organizations and members as community partners with whom they collaborate. some students, however, report that this collaborative and empowering approach is difficult to do when they have little time to dedicate to the project or when the community partner really just wants them to do the project without much consultation from the community organization (i.e., when the community partner does not have time or the inclination to deal or work on an issue and wants the consultant to simply be an extra pair of hands; block, 2011). all fieldwork students are exposed to community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness. the instructor provides a workshop to students in which we discuss how to communicate evaluation findings to a community partner and the various ways to disseminate results (e.g., infographic, evaluation reports). in that workshop, students practice revising jargon-filled evaluation findings for a lay audience. they also learn the most effective ways to communicate survey findings in graphs and figures using strategies recommended by data visualization experts (e.g., evergreen, 2013). typically, at least a third of the class conducts a program evaluation. for instance, a student developed evaluation tools for a communitybased organization that serves adults who are homeless (see appendix i: case study #1). the student spent the whole academic year developing and refining the tools. first, she spent time with the organization staff determining what they wanted to evaluate and learning about the specific program to be evaluated. second, she developed process evaluation and outcome evaluation tools based on her conversations and meetings, which she shared with the staff for feedback. third, once she obtained their feedback, she participated in the program for a couple of days in order to observe the program in action. this experience was important because she learned that some of the evaluation questions did not apply as not everyone received all parts of the program. she also shared the survey draft with the consumers of the program who provided feedback on the wording of questions. fourth, she revised the survey based on her participation in the program and discussions with consumers. fifth, she shared the revised draft with program staff for additional feedback. lastly, she wrote a training manual for the staff on how to administer the survey to consumers and enter the data. thus, she took an empowerment approach by increasing the evaluation capacity of staff. a couple students each year gain experience in program development. for instance, a student developed the curriculum for a local peer mentoring program at a community based organization. in order to develop the curriculum, she spent time at the organization talking with staff about the program, reviewing documents about the mentoring program, and reviewing the literature on peer mentoring for firstgeneration college students. the student and the staff collaboratively developed the program goals and the general format for each mentoring session. these initial steps enabled her to write the curriculum, and she shared each session curriculum draft with staff and youth for feedback. some competencies are completely student dependent, such as participatory action research (par). for instance, a student gained experience and expertise in par (see http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 appendix ii: case study #2) by working with an alternative high school over a two-year period in which she collaborated with students on developing, carrying out and disseminating findings from a restorative justice par project. there are certain competencies in which our students at depaul typically do not gain experience in our fieldwork sequence, such as community organizing and public policy analysis, development and advocacy. although students have the opportunity to take a course in public policy at depaul, and thus gain exposure and experience in that particular course, perhaps these competencies could be addressed in the fieldwork sequence so that students could gain further experience and possibly expertise if the assignments and expectations in the course are changed. in sum, the scra practice competencies are used as a guide for students to select their fieldwork projects and to reflect on their professional development while in graduate school. online discussion boards and journal entries are used to help students develop their projects but also reflect on their competencies. students typically gain exposure to and/or experience the following competencies in the fieldwork sequence: ethical reflective practice; program development, implementation and management; consultation and organizational development; empowerment; community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness; and/or program evaluation, but this also varies by student project. the experiences that students gain in the fieldwork sequence also helps students network with community organizations and professionals, which sometimes lead to job opportunities, evaluation contracts, or dissertation projects. national louis university as a case study the nlu cp doctoral program is a newer program (7 years old) and is conceptualized as a community intervention in the chicagoland area, aiming to build a network of diverse, social change agents sharing the common values of the field. a unique aspect of this program is that most students are fulltime professionals in this metropolitan area practicing in cp-related or compatible fields, and they plan to remain in the area upon completion of their degrees. we hope our graduates will embody the core values of the field in the unique positions they hold within the local community. theoretically, values such as citizen empowerment, appreciation for diversity, promotion of sense of community, collaboration based on community strengths, and empirical grounding using participatory community research methods will all lead to more socially just practices and inclusive settings for the highly diverse communities of chicago. using this program logic, we place critical importance on learning the cp practice competencies, including consultation and organizational development, community development, resource development, prevention and promotion, and dynamics of small and large group processes. fieldwork and consultation course description nlu’s experiential fieldwork/consultation sequence is designed to give students an opportunity to learn about various communities they seek to work with while in the program and beyond. the sequence enables students to apply concepts learned in the classroom to real-world action projects that serve the local community. students gain hands-on community experience as they pursue personal learning objectives and professional development skills related to cp in a variety of settings (see table 2). while we view all of the scra practice competencies as critical competencies to be gained and refined http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 throughout the program experience, the competency of ethical, reflective practice is a main component and integral to the fieldwork sequence. across the entire program experience, there are four 10-week fieldwork courses spread across 18 months, and a 20-week culminating consultation project with a local organization. students engage in a minimum of five hours of fieldwork per week in tandem with other coursework. in blended face-to-face and online formats, instructors set specific fieldwork deliverables for the first four terms; students establish mutually agreed upon consultation deliverables with their partner organizations for the last two terms. in order to reflect on their fieldwork experiences and on their progress in the application of cp practice competencies, students write discussion-board posts and complete assignments for both instructor and peer feedback, engage in periodic face-to-face and virtual group sessions, and meet as needed with instructors individually to discuss questions or concerns. some of the fieldwork assignments align concurrently with other courses to provide content and experience that will bring synergy to the application of theory to practice. fieldwork i: personal-professional logic model this first fieldwork course encourages students to intentionally examine personal and professional goals as they relate to the broader community they hope to influence. students practice the sociocultural and cross-cultural competence by selfreflecting through a personal-professional logic model (see appendix v) and a cp consulting resume, considering the unique resources they bring to the community on their issue of interest, and identifying the unique, existing resources within the community. after this exploration, students identify organizations and people most important to connect with on the issue and then strategize about how to network with these individuals and build relationships with them. throughout this process, students learn professional development skills related to several core competencies including the ecological perspective, sociocultural and cross-cultural competence, community leadership and mentoring, and possibly community education. as students consider how best to present themselves to potential partners, they practice initial relationship development. other key deliverables for fieldwork i are the identification of two cp practitioners from the scra “connect to a practitioner” tool (http://www.scra27.org/what-wedo/practice/connect-practitioner/) and two representatives of potential local partner organizations. students contact one of each related to their interests. students share their logic model and resume with the cp practitioner, and they develop a rationale for connecting with the organizational representative specific to their needs and interests. while engaging in professional development opportunities, students also reflect on their networking and relationshipbuilding skills to understand more clearly how to connect assets more dependently in the future. fieldwork ii: the community profile the focus of fieldwork ii is the application of the ecological perspective in the assessment of students’ geographical community of interest. students develop the community profile, which provides an opportunity for in-depth learning about various communities for potential future collaboration. prior to engaging with a community, it is important for a community psychologist to learn about the structural, historical, economic, cultural, and programmatic context of a community area, and as a result, students spend time doing this as part of their assignment. working under the assumption that no sincere effort to address a social problem will occur outside of http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/practice/connect-practitioner/ http://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/practice/connect-practitioner/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 competency depaul: embedded within curricula nlu: embedded within curricula depaul: embedded within fieldwork sequence nlu: embedded within fieldwork sequence depaul: student dependent within fieldwork sequence nlu: student dependent within fieldwork sequence ecological perspective x x x x ethical and reflective practice x x x x program evaluation x x x x x consultation and organizational development x x x x empowerment x x x x sociocultural and cross-cultural competence x x x community inclusion and partnership x x community leadership and mentoring x x community development x x x community organizing & community advocacy x x x public policy analysis, development, and advocacy x x participatory community research x x x community education, information dissemination, building public awareness x x prevention and health promotion x x x x x program development, implementation, and management x x x small and large group processes x x x resource development (e.g., grant writing) x x x x x x collaboration and coalition development x table 2: practice competencies addressed in both programs the social, cultural, and political dynamics that exist in that area, students practice aspects of a variety of competencies as they meet the major goals of this course. the tasks associated with fieldwork ii involve several aspects of the core competencies besides sociocultural and cross-cultural competence, including resource development; collaboration and coalition development; community development; and public policy analysis, development, and advocacy. completing the community profile requires that students: a) learn how historical decisions regarding community development influence perceptions of and resources for their social issue (e.g., community and political lines drawn that have implications for developing and using social power or other resources), b) explore the various perspectives of the many stakeholders in that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 area on the issue, c) build relationships with the important key players and local leaders on the issue, d) identify the social and cultural capital that exists to address this social issue, and e) learn what programs, policies, coalitions, and funding sources exist to address the issue. students also work to understand the extent to which a community is ready to take action on the issue of concern to them and next steps while building a reputation for themselves as educated, respectful, and ethical collaborators on this issue. in addition, although not the primary purpose of this assignment, students reinforce their research knowledge by collecting and synthesizing relevant community data from a variety of sources (e.g., public records, websites, newspaper articles, in-person or phone conversations with community members, observations in the community). choosing one community of focus, students make a minimum of one personal contact; organize and condense large amounts of data collected, determining critical information for the profile; and practice clear and concise writing. although many of our students are already knowledgeable about the dynamics that perpetuate the issue of concern, this course ensures a more objective assessment of the cultural landscape of the issue before taking action. the community profile is then used as a resource for the development of later materials and assignments, such as the development of a prevention program, policy, or community intervention (e.g., a coalition) to address the social problem of concern. fieldwork iii: community and member leader profiles in fieldwork iii, students meet community members for further relationship building and future collaboration. this course has two points of focus: 1) the use of narrative interview approaches to enhance understanding of research projects, whether in the design, data collection, or interpretation stages of the process, and 2) informing students’ current research projects in a way that adds depth to that research, regardless of the stage. in meeting the goals of this course, students practice the competencies of participatory community research, community inclusion and partnership, community leadership and mentoring, and sociocultural and crosscultural competence. students gain experience in participatory community research by developing one leader and one community member profile reflecting the narrative of a community. students are challenged to connect prior learning from the qualitative methods and survey design courses to structure their interviews and develop quality questions based on an indepth interview guide. course instructors provide extensive advice and feedback on drafts of the interview protocol before students conduct and record in-person or telephone interviews. from the interviews, students learn aspects of a community and apply cp principles to make sense of their interviewees’ life stories, current roles in the community, work practices, and their perspectives on the future. as individuals and as part of organizations and communities, students reflect on aspects that may overlap with their own life and career goals. in addition to gaining experience in conducting qualitative interviews, students practice capturing relevant information in note taking, organizing and synthesizing large amounts of narrative interview data concerning interviewee experiences and their impact on who they are today, determining important pieces for each profile, and practicing clear and concise writing. students also collect contextual data from a variety of sources (e.g., public records, websites, conversations with community members, newspaper articles, observations in the community). furthermore, in multiple, brief http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 papers about their interviewees, students connect their findings to cp-related theories to explain and understand the perspectives of the interviewees. ultimately, they determine how to use this data to inform their own research projects. fieldwork iv and consultation: proposal and contract development / consultation experience by the time students begin fieldwork iv, they have a fairly clear understanding of their research area of focus and the community with which they will work, and they have built relationships with key community members. the goal of this 20-week course is for students to plan and carry out a cp project with a community organization. these projects may emphasize program evaluation, research, advocacy, non-profit management, social marketing, community organizing and development, or fundraising. the competencies that students gain in this practicum course vary. some students work on community leadership and mentoring; others focus on small and large group processes and resource development in their projects. the collaboration and coalition development competency is a focus of some student consultations; community development and advocacy is addressed by others. some students complete projects with a focus on community education, information dissemination and building public awareness; participatory community research, grant writing; and program evaluation. examples of consultation projects are the development of a community health coalition and the installation of a community garden (see appendices iii and iv: case studies #3 and #4). in collaboration with the partner organization and with significant instructor guidance and feedback, students develop a project plan for their community consultation. they draft and re-draft the proposal in collaboration with the instructor and organizational representative. in order to initiate the consultation period, students create and sign a contract or memorandum of agreement to add to the scope of work. at regular intervals throughout the consultation period, students are in contact with the instructor and peers through an online discussion board to report on their progress or on any problems that occur. in final presentations, student share the stories of their projects with classmates and future cohorts: how they used the knowledge and skills gained in the program to inform the project, successes, challenges, what they would do differently in the future, advice for the next group of students, and other lessons learned. a comparison of the fieldwork sequences and scra practice competencies in the two graduate programs there are multiple similarities and differences across depaul and nlu in the fieldwork course sequences and in the practice competencies emphasized in the sequence. students at both depaul and nlu select their own community partner organizations based on their individual interests and expertise. both programs use a hybrid online and face-to-face format for work done with instructors and classmates while they conduct their fieldwork projects. both depaul and nlu students submit progress and final reports and make presentations about their consultations. the fieldwork courses at both programs culminate into a final product that is provided to the community partner. finally, both of the programs use the fieldwork sequence as an opportunity to help students apply what they learn in the curriculum to the real world and to practice their competencies under instructor supervision and peer support. given that depaul offers a traditional phd education while nlu offers a more practice oriented phd program, the role of research is http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 different in each program. at depaul, students learn, apply, and gain expertise in participatory community research skills in multiple program requirements (i.e., methods/analysis courses, thesis, dissertation, comprehensive project, research assistantships with faculty, 3rd-year as the research year requirement). thus, the instructor does not teach any research skills in the fieldwork course nor require any assignments that utilize students’ research skills. it is expected that students will apply other scra practice competencies that they may not utilize in the graduate program. however, if students conduct a program evaluation project with their community partner, they will naturally utilize their community research methods and analytic skills they learned in other curriculum requirements. in contrast, nlu students do not have as many requirements or opportunities to learn or conduct participatory community research skills. thus, the nlu fieldwork sequence and student projects are directly tied to the program research path so that students better learn their research skills (preliminary research project building to the dissertation and parallel to coursework). another difference between the nlu and depaul fieldwork sequence is that nlu students spend more time on self-reflection as a professional and on researching their community site before conducting their consultation project. the nlu fieldwork sequence begins with discovery of self as a community psychologist, followed by community discovery and exploration for two terms, then by consultation proposal and contract negotiation, and ending with the 18week consultation project. nlu students spend a good deal of time researching the potential community before beginning the fieldwork project. in contrast, depaul students engage in some self-reflection in their journals to the instructor while they conduct their fieldwork projects. they also assess their own cp practice competencies as a form of self-reflection, to select their potential projects and to examine their own development over time after they engage in their fieldwork projects. depaul students also engage in self-reflection in other aspects of the curriculum (e.g., professional development seminar), but self-reflection is not necessarily tied to their fieldwork projects. given the nature of the depaul fieldwork sequence and that students conduct an academic-year-long project, students have less time to research their community site beforehand. however, some depaul students conduct their projects with community organizations with which they already have a prior relationship. other depaul students conduct both of their fieldwork years at the same community site and thus benefit from their earned trust and longer-term relationship. the benefit of nlu’s long-term relationship building, community researching, and self-reflection before engaging in their community consultation is that students may be able to conduct projects that are more fruitful or have fewer barriers. if a depaul student is working with a new organization, there is the risk that the community project will not work out as planned because of unforeseen barriers. the two programs share some cp practice competencies (e.g., empowerment, ethical and reflective practice). competencies that diverge in the two programs are, in part, reflective of the student populations, training goals, fieldwork course goals, and the nature of the programs. for instance, for nlu students focus on the combination of such competencies as sociocultural and crosscultural competence, ethical and reflective practice, community development, and prevention and health promotion reflects the self-discovery, awareness, and growth as community psychologists throughout the program, which concludes with their professional consultation. depaul students typically gain exposure to and/or experience http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 in the following competencies in their fieldwork sequence: ethical reflective practice; program development, implementation and management; consultation and organizational development; empowerment; community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness; and/or program evaluation. the fieldwork sequence is a culminating professional experience ending with a usable product that they present and give to their community partner and with a reflection on what they have learned from their experience. lessons learned and recommendations for community psychology education across the two programs based on our analysis of the application of the cp practice competencies in each of our fieldwork courses, we have identified practices that we would like to incorporate into our own programs that might also be helpful in other training programs. evaluation. it would be useful to conduct systematic evaluation of students’ learning of the cp practice competencies in the fieldwork sequence. perhaps instructors can administer a preand post-course assessment of students’ level of experience/expertise in each practice competency to determine which ones they learned in the fieldwork practicum. instructors should expect that students would only improve in some of the competencies depending on their specific projects. this assessment would also be helpful for students to reflect on their own professional growth and career goals and to determine next steps in their training plan. further, it would be beneficial to evaluate which competencies are used among program alumni in their current jobs so that faculty can understand the kinds of competencies on which students should be trained in order to make them competitive for the job market. training goals. determine the training goals of the education program and how students will learn the scra practice competencies. faculty should reflect on which scra practice competencies will be the focus of their program and the focus of their fieldwork sequence. once the practice competencies are determined, how will students be assessed on those competencies? approach to fieldwork sequence. determine the model for your fieldwork practica sequence. the models utilized in our fieldwork practica influence the cp practice competencies learned. for instance, the model at depaul is that the student acts as a consultant. this model is not well suited for all practice competencies or for all of our students’ interests. some students enroll in our program with a specific social problem for which they would like to create social change. they might be interested in influencing policy on a certain issue, but a community partner has not approached the student with that specific idea in mind. the philosophy in the fieldwork course is that the organization staff identifies the need and the student helps the organization to address that need. thus, staff members do not typically articulate needing assistance with a policy issue, but instead they request support on program development, grant writing or program evaluation. another way to conceptualize the fieldwork practicum is for students to select a cp practice competency (e.g., public policy advocacy), and then the student carries out a project with a community partner to fulfill that competency, whether an organization requested it or not. rather than allowing students to select their organizations for their fieldwork projects, another approach to the fieldwork practicum is for instructors to select organizations and projects for students to carry out in small groups in the course. the projects each year could build on one another, which would enable long-term relationships between the program and community organizations. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 ultimately, this approach could enable graduate programs, overall, to make a bigger impact. although at depaul the cp students may work with the same organization over a two-year period, the group model in which the instructor selects the projects and organization could have a bigger impact over a longer period of time assuming that the instructor works with the same organization for many years. disadvantages of this approach are that students might work on projects that may not interest them and that fewer cp practice competencies would be applied across projects. the long-term impact, however, might outweigh these disadvantages. conclusion no matter what careers students pursue when they graduate from our programs, many have expressed the importance of the practice skills they gained in their fieldwork projects, which they have utilized in their current careers. some of our students have also developed long-term collaborations with their fieldwork organizations as a result of their experience and projects in the sequence. other students have also learned about the kinds of careers or projects they do not want to pursue in their future careers, which has helped them to narrow down their career options. although there are improvements we can each make to our fieldwork sequence, this course is a strength in each of our programs. given that each of our programs do not provide students with the experiences to learn every cp practice competency, the fieldwork practicum is a great way to allow students to individualize their educational plans to gain skills in cp competencies they might not gain otherwise. references block, p. (2011). flawless consulting: a guide to getting your expertise used. jossey-bass: san francisco, ca. brown, k., cardazone, g., glantsman, o., johnson-hakim, s., & lemke, m. (2014). examining the guiding competencies in community psychology practice from students’ perspectives. the community psychologist, 47(1), 3-9. christens, b. d., connell, c. m., faust, v., haber, m. g. & the council of education programs (2015). progress report: competencies for community research and action. the community psychologist, 48(4), 3-10. connell, c.m., lewis, r.k., cook, j., meissen, g., wolff, t., johnson-hakim, s. (2013). taylor, s. special report – graduate training in community psychology practice competencies: responses to the 2012 survey of graduate programs in community psychology. the community psychologist, 46, 5-8. dalton, j., & wolfe, s. (eds.). (2012). education connection and the community practitioner. the community psychologist, 45(4), 7-13. dziadkowiec, o., & jimenez, t. (2009) educating community psychologists for community practice: a survey of graduate training programs. the community psychologist, 42(4), 10-17. elias, m. j., neigher, w. d., & johnson-hakim, s. (2015). guiding principles and competencies for community psychology practice. in scott, v. c. & wolfe, s. m. (eds.). community psychology: foundations for practice (pp. 35-62). sage publishing, inc., thousand oaks, ca. evergreen, s. d. h. (2013). presenting data effectively: communicating your findings for maximum impact. sage: thousand oaks, ca. neigher, w.d., & ratcliffe, a.w. (2011). back to the future, part iii. the community psychologist, 44(1), 13-15. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 sarkisian, g. & jimenez, t. r. (2011). guiding principles for education in community psychology research and action. the community psychologist, 44(4), 7-8. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 appendix i: case study #1 by danielle vaclavik, depaul university i worked with the ignatian spirituality project (isp) for my fieldwork project. isp provides free spiritual services to individuals experiencing homelessness, such as overnight spiritual retreats specifically geared toward the experiences of the homeless, especially those with drug and/or alcohol addictions. when i began working with isp, staff had verbal and written feedback that participants liked the retreats. however, isp requested an evidence-based system of evaluating and fine-tuning their retreats. i helped create a process and outcome evaluation plan for staff to pilot in their chicago retreats that would eventually be adapted to be used in 20 cities across the u.s.. i started with information gathering and relationship building. i met with multiple isp staff members and volunteers to discuss the organization’s goals and how they defined a successful retreat experience. i also reviewed the retreat manual and isp’s online volunteer training course. then i created a first draft of the evaluation protocols. this relationship building and information gathering stage taught me about the retreat, but also allowed me to gauge isp’s understanding of evaluation and statistics. having these conversations about their expectations and the limited understandings about evaluation early helped create an open dialogue throughout the partnership aimed at gathering useful and usable data. however, this dialogue did not come naturally. i learned through trial and error how to explain my rationale and process without using too much jargon. i realized i knew what i was talking about but i was losing my collaborator in the statistics. i had to take a step back to find different ways to explain my methods as well as spend time explaining concepts to help my community partner make informed decisions. it was difficult at first but the process of rethinking my common assumptions made me more competent in the statistics i was explaining and provided a better end product. after gathering as much information as i could, i attended a retreat to compare my evaluation plan against the actual retreat experience. engaging with participants of the retreat was extremely impactful on the final evaluation protocol and plan. participating in the retreat put a human face on the evaluation and demonstrated the potential impact of these retreats. however, it also demonstrated that the retreat manual, on which i had based my first draft of the evaluation tools, was less of a concrete structure and more of a loose menu of possibilities. this meant retreat experiences and content varied widely based on the volunteers and participants. thus, i revised the evaluation tools accordingly. i also learned the importance of valuing the expertise of my community partner while still providing the service i was brought on to do. i realized early on many of our disagreements revolved around me holding too closely to strict implementation fidelity and evaluation ideals and isp staff wanted to maintain the volunteers’ creative control at retreats. we were both right. they liked their loose structure because it “allowed the holy spirit to shine through their volunteers.” i liked my strict structure because it allowed for a cleaner evaluation. we found a middle ground and that provided a better product to evaluate the retreat experience. the final product of the fieldwork partnership was an evaluation protocol, including survey materials and a procedures manual, so that isp staff could carry out the evaluation themselves. during the year following the fieldwork partnership, isp performed a pilot evaluation using the evaluation at all chicago based retreats. based on the results of the pilot, changes will be made before it is implemented in other retreat cities the following retreat season. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 appendix ii: case study #2 by lynn c. liao, depaul university i conducted my fieldwork project at the instituto of justice and leadership academy (ijla) over a 2-year period where i conducted a participatory action research (par) project in collaboration with students and staff. ijla is an alternative high school in chicago, which operates on the principle that education is liberation and focuses on re-engaging out-of-school youth in a rigorous and social justice inspired program. this fieldwork project developed out of my interest in restorative justice in schools and the school's interest in documenting their restorative justice practices. i spent my first year of the project collaborating with 15 students and staff developing the restorative justice project advisory committee (rj pac). we met weekly during that year to a) create an acuerdos (group terms of reference), b) train students and staff on how to conduct research, and c) develop research questions. because of the participatory approach of the project and the time needed to gain the trust of students and staff, we spent a lot of time during this year getting to know each other and establishing the acuerdos so we were all on the same page about the process for conducting the research project and to ensure that students would be equal partners in conducting the work. the main scra practice competency that i learned this year was how to facilitate small group processes. i spent the second year of my fieldwork project conducting the par project with committee members. our project involved a) refining the research questions, b) designing the research methodology, c) further research training, d) developing a focus group protocol and short survey, e) analyzing data, f) developing a logic model, and g) designing a website that disseminated our findings (see http://ijlarjpac.wix.com/ijla-rj-pac). although my graduate program provides a lot of training on the scra practice competencies, community research and program evaluation, we receive less training specifically on par. given the social justice and liberation focus of ijla, i learned how to conduct a true youth par project during my collaboration with the school, staff and students. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://ijlarjpac.wix.com/ijla-rj-pac global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 appendix iii: case study #3 by estela melgoza, nlu for this consultation, the student collaborated with a chicago metropolitan hospital. the four points of focus for this project included 1) enhanced screening process for child abuse detection, 2) increased access to resources for families, 3) training for medical personnel on child abuse to increase detection, and 4) the hospital’s er role as a resource for surrounding communities. stakeholders identified three project goals, which were to 1) address child maltreatment through a multidisciplinary approach; 2) collaborate with surrounding community organizations and key stakeholders; and, 3) form a child abuse taskforce to enhance the hospital’s screening practice, develop a unified referral process, address early intervention and prevention, and increase community awareness and gain support from the surrounding communities. the student applied concepts and theories from community psychology such as ecological analysis, needs assessment, community profiles, collaboration, and systems change. she proposed tools used in community psychology, which were implemented in the project: a swot analysis and logic model for the child abuse task force. she noted that, among the aspects of the consultation that went well, the working group received buy in from the hospital and other agencies and that the group was able to tap into other existing collaborative groups. further, the group was motivated and task oriented and there was fair distribution of work in a positive working relationship with flexibility on both the part of the hospital staff and that of the student consultant. most importantly, the collaboration resulted in the accomplishment of an essential project goal: formation of the child abuse task force. project challenges, according to the student, included the initial slowness of the project start up and the amount of time and number of meetings the project required. moreover, few people were involved in the project, and it was challenging to involve additional medical personnel. lack of financial resources also proved a challenge. upon reflection of what the student would do differently in the future, she concluded that she would identify more resources within the hospital, evaluate the work plan periodically, and avoid additional tasks or projects not initially agreed upon. further, she would request video-conference and conference calls as opposed to in-person meetings, and, finally, consult with doctoral program advisors and classmates. she advised doctoral students preparing to embark on the consultation experience to anticipate more work than expected, develop a realistic timeline and expectations, expect changes as projects evolve, and commit to a meaningful project that can add to their expertise and experience. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 appendix iv: case study #4 by erika mingo, nlu working with little black pearl, an organization in chicago’s kenwood neighborhood devoted to integrating arts education with entrepreneurship and sustainable creativity, i had to bring along with me all that i learned in community psychology. this was not difficult; it is a part of who i am. i engaged the collaboration among little black pearl, comcast, and home depot in a way that each entity benefited from the experience. in addition, the project established of a sense of community, an ecologic model on many levels, and empowerment. the central component of the work was the creation of two garden spaces, already serving as a place for congregation, curiosity, pride, and comradery for those that had a hand in its creation. the garden gives from the population back to the earth in a way that is organic, sustainable, and a model for beneficial partnerships with the environment and the greater ecosystem. the ecology of the project was important. students gave their labor and gained a more beautiful environment. they worked together in ways that they themselves did not think possible; they came together, in the most unlikely groupings, to execute projects with pride. teachers helped children and community members navigate the space and distributed tools for project tasks. they gave and gained time with students outside of the classroom and shared in the collective goal on equal footing. parents gave of their time and energy and gained the opportunity to add value to their children’s learning environment; they worked alongside other parents, teachers, and community members, gaining a greater understanding of the environment in which their children are so deeply invested. comcast and its employees gave resources and time and gained the good will of the community as well as an opportunity to be part of a positive environment. the experience brought about shared ownership and a feeling of accomplishment for the group. there was a focus on the garden spaces, even during the graduation ceremony. in a speech, a student pointed to the garden and said “look what we have grown. look how we have grown. think about what will grow. think about how we will grow.” during the consultation, as the last class in an amazing program, students should enjoy themselves. this is easier said than done with looming dissertations, but this is an opportunity to test your skill, apply what you have learned, and gain valuable work experience – an exciting first step toward your emergence as practicing community psychologists. as individuals tasked with aiding in the pathfinding of an organization, project, or plan, it is essential that we, the very people brought on to assist, contribute positively to that which needs assistance. planning and preparation are key to any consulting endeavor. effective planning enhances your confidence and ability to execute your role well and develop methods for consultation long term. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 appendix v: personal logic model used at nlu this document provides a logic template to assist you in aligning your personal vision and resources with reaching your broader personal/professional and collective/community goals. in order for you to do this you will need to ask yourself several questions: 1) what is your vision and goals for yourself and why? 2) how will you go about reaching those goals? 3) what attributes or assets do you have or are connected to that you can build on to reach your goals? as you work on these activities and reach outcomes, your activities and goals may change. this is an inevitable aspect associated with engaging your process of inquiry as a community psychologist. therefore, we encourage you to treat it as a working draft and living document. see below for further instructions on how to complete your personal logic model. general goals attributes activities short-term outcomes long-term outcomes personal/professional personal/professional personal/professional personal/professional personal/professional individual hopes for your career strengths, resources, challenges, knowledge, skills, abilities, experiences what are you doing now (be specific, report tasks as opposed to the job title)? what will you be doing in the near future (again try to be as specific as possible)? fieldwork outcomes post phd outcomes community/collective community/collective community/collective community/collective community/collective hopes for impacting the community/society http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 8, issue 1 march 2017 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 further instructions for completing your personal logic model: 1. the interconnections between the columns should be clear and explicit. remember the if  then process to read logic models. it should be clear how activities will lead to outcomes. no outcomes should come as a surprise when reading left to right. 2. add more specificity you get beyond the first goal column, try to be concrete and specific as possible when describing yourself and what you will do 3. follow columns closely. for example, “attributes” should only include information about you as opposed to what you plan to so. 4. for the attribute column, people have a tendency to list their jobs or projects. however, it is even more helpful if the items in this column are presented as attributes, that is, strengths, challenges and skills that you have gained from your experiences. this allows the reader to clearly see your skills and areas to work on, as opposed to having to guess what it takes and what you’ve developed while doing x,y, or z work. 5. make sure outcomes are worded as outcomes. 6. ask yourself, “how are my activities leading to the development of this skill set or outcome?“ ask yourself this question for each and every outcome. 7. ensure you have parallel structure in your starting words within a column (try to be consistent in terms of tense, word endings, tense, short phrases vs. full sentences, capitalization etc…) 8. be more concise. when writing in bullets, better to use short phrases as opposed to full sentences. eliminate extra “fluff/filler” and connection words. 9. be sure to proofread. http://www.gjcpp.org/ appendix ii: case study #2 by lynn c. liao, depaul university microsoft word 2014-si11-20140519.docx peer led recovery learning communities: expanding social integration opportunities for people with the lived experience of psychiatric disability and emotional distress jonathan delman, deborah r. delman, brenda r. vezina, and john piselli author notes: jonathan delman is assistant research professor and the director of the program for recovery research at the university of massachusetts medical school, department of psychiatry, in worcester, massachusetts, 01655, usa. phone: 617-877-4148. email: jonathan.delman@umassmed.edu. deborah r. delman, cps* is the executive director of the transformation center in boston, massachusetts 02119, usa, deborahd@transformation-center.org. brenda r. vezina, msw, cps* is the director of the central massachusetts recovery learning community in worcester, massachusetts 01603, usa, brenda.vezina@centralmassrlc.org, john piselli, ma, cags, crc is the community coordinator of the metro-suburban recovery learning community in quincy, massachusetts 02169, usa, jpiselli@metrosubrlc.org. *cps -“certified peer specialist” keywords: psychiatric disability, peer, peer support, peer-operated, recovery, social integration, social network, social exclusion, mental health recommended citation: delman, j., delman, d.r., vezina, b.r., & piselli, j. (2014). peer led recovery learning communities: expanding social integration opportunities for people with lived experience of psychiatric disability and emotional distress. global journal of community psychology practice, 5(1), 1-11. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   peer led recovery learning communities: expanding social integration opportunities for people with the lived experience of psychiatric disability and emotional distress abstract social integration is the development of mutually supportive relationships with other community members. for people with psychiatric disabilities (pd) social integration is a critical aspect of mental wellness and recovery. while people with pd generally want supportive friends, their social networks tend to be weak, often limited to treatment staff and close family. the barriers to social integration of people with pd are often high, and include public discrimination, lack of confidence, and insufficient financial resources. in the united states, community mental health providers have focused primarily on illness management and have not successfully helped clients integrate socially. to fill that gap, people with lived experience of psychiatric disability have for many years established networks of peer support, including peer-facilitated groups. with the aim of enhancing that approach, peers in massachusetts developed the “recovery learning community” model, a regional network of peer support and education operated and staffed by people with lived experience, are distinct from most other peer run programs in that they provide meetings and workshops in various community locations, not only in a single location. in this article, we describe conceptually and with examples the significant impact rlcs have on both the social integration of people with pd and the delivery of mental health services in united states and internationally. keywords: psychiatric disability, peer, peer support, peer-operated, recovery, social integration, social network, social exclusion, mental health introduction while people with psychiatric disabilities (pd) benefit greatly from the development of large and supportive social networks, mental health providers have generally been unable to meet their social support needs. people with lived experience of psychiatric disability and emotional distress in massachusetts have tried to address these needs by developing and implementing regional networks of peer support, educational meetings, and recovery groups. in this article, we describe how the unique properties/characteristics of these regional “recovery learning communities” (rlcs) provide participants with substantive opportunities for social integration. social integration is the development of mutually supportive relationships with other community members (wong, matejkowski, & lee, 2010). research has shown that social integration for people with pd results in reduced symptomology, reduced rates of hospitalization, and higher rates of recovery (hendryx, green, & perrin, 2009). however, the weak social networks of people with pd are often limited to treatment staff and close family (wong, matejkowski, & lee, 2010). people with pd typically encounter high barriers to social integration (perkins & repper, 2013). these barriers include public stereotyping and discrimination, interpersonal social stigma, self-stigma, lack of confidence, and insufficient financial resources. family members often take on the responsibility of providing their loved ones with socialization opportunities, but are most frequently left with feelings of failure and despair (davidson et al., 2004). in addition, community mental health providers have not been effective in helping clients integrate socially (schutt & rogers, 2009). their focus on illness management and community stability has taken precedence over the attainment of a valued and fulfilling role in society. people with pd have for many years engaged in mutual peer support, through which people with similar difficulties share knowledge and experiences and thus help each other emotionally, practically, and socially. peer support can take place informally or in groups, which are often facilitated by an experienced member who works to facilitate an environment of empathy and non-judgment. in the 1970s and 1980s, peer led organizations, administratively and financially controlled and staffed by people with pd, emerged to develop and coordinate peer support programs and networks. (samhsa, 2011). these “peer run” organizations were uniquely capable of establishing a global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   recovery-oriented and psychologically safe culture in which peer support could thrive (ostrow & leaf, 2014). we are members of a larger group of people with mental health conditions living in massachusetts who have advocated that all services be recovery-oriented with a strong emphasis on peer support. we have all directed peer run organizations, seen the direct benefits they offer both staff and participants, and have had a significant role in the development of the recovery learning community (rlc) model. rlcs are regional peer run and staffed education and training organizations that offer peer support, peer education and public education activities. rlc community members broadly describe themselves as people with “lived experience” of “mental illness”, “emotional distress”, a trauma history, and/or the iatrogenic effects of treatment. thus, while we describe the population studied in the social integration research literature as the population studied“people with physical disabilities”, we describe the population that participates in rlc activities more broadly as “people with lived experience”.   we discuss below the basis and potential for the rlc model to promote social integration and transformative change in community mental health at various ecological levels.  to encourage innovation and research in this area, we also describe our conceptual framework on the impact of peer run rlcs on social integration and systems transformation. the social networks of people with psychiatric disabilities a social network is a construct with both structural and functional elements that describes a person’s relationships with others (wong et al., 2010). the structural element is composed of the network’s size, density and the frequency and intensity of contact. for people with pd, research has documented that larger social networks generally improve their sense of support and well-being (wong et al., 2010). the functional component of a social network includes social support, a person’s perception of and capacity for accessing emotional support, companionship, and direct assistance. people with pd appear to derive a sense of general satisfaction from regular contact with people, regardless of the solidity of those relationships. research demonstrates that the social support component has direct positive effects on a person’s health and well-being. social support acts as a counterbalance to stress, and for people with pd often results in symptom reduction, housing stability, and improved subjective quality of life and recovery (wong et al., 2010). social support is strongest when there is an interpersonal exchange of support and/or resources with others. when support is reciprocal in nature, the self-worth of a person with pd is enhanced by being a helper and not consistently the “helped” (kogstad, mönness, & sörensen, 2013). unfortunately, the social networks of people with pd tend to be weak. friends tend to drop away shortly after someone is diagnosed with “mental illness”, acts oddly, and/or loses his/her social status. a significant subset of people with pd experience ongoing social isolation, which potentially contributes to higher rates of disordered cognition, paranoia, and suicidal ideation (pevalin & goldberg, 2003). thus the social networks of people with pd are small and made up primarily of relatives and/or paid mental health workers (davidson et al., 2004). these interpersonal relationships of people with pd can be prominently one sided. clinicians are paid for interpersonal services that are not reciprocal, and parents often take on a primary caretaking and/or support role (davidson et al., 2004). attending programs or living in group homes may enhance social networks of people with pd through ongoing contacts with their peers (davidson et al., 2004). however, these limited social networks typically do not promote identity transformation beyond one’s psychiatric label, and can restrict opportunities for participation in broader community activities, such as gatherings not focused on mental health topics (ware, hopper, tugenberg, dickey, & fisher, 2007). people with psychiatric disabilities and the process of social integration social integration is the process through which an individual uses intrapersonal and external resources to develop a satisfactory social network (wong et al., 2010). to be socially integrated is to have an adequately sized social network that includes people without pd and contains supportive and reciprocal relationships. socially isolated people with pd generally want that social support and a wider group of friends (bradshaw, armour, & roseborough, 2007). the pathways to gaining social support may not always be obvious to people with pd, who may suffer from a loss of confidence due to living a life built around their diagnosis (livingston & boyd, 2010). economic, social and health care structures that categorize citizens based on labels and social class have set a precedent that excludes people with pd from society at large. people with pd struggle with developing social networks in part due to the societal and structural stigma associated with a “mental illness” label (livingston & boyd, 2010). people with pd are often stereotyped as irresponsible, disruptive, at fault for their adversity, and “lost causes” (perkins & repper, 2013). the unfounded belief that people with mental illness are inherently dangerous has been a causal element of social exclusion. for example, organizations offering volunteer opportunities (e.g., mentoring organizations) often screen out people with pd. employers in global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   particular may be reluctant to hire people with pd, and even religious and spiritual communities have been known to discourage their participation in favor of people with other kinds of disabilities. as such, there is a strong affective component of social exclusion that includes personal shame and a sense of disenfranchisement. another barrier to social integration for people with pd is that many are surviving on subsistence levels of income (if that), while they rely on modest government income support and health benefits (wong, et al., 2010). as a result, many people with pd do not have the resources necessary to obtain sustained access to many popular community based social activities, such as hobby clubs – if they can even afford the kind of attire that is necessary to be included socially within them (bradshaw et al., 2007). despite these barriers, many people with pd have successfully become socially integrated by taking on established adult social roles such as employee, student, advocate, club member, parent, religious/spiritual member, and romantic partner (bradshaw et al., 2007). the attainment of these roles is an ongoing process that often begins through interactions that involve not only reciprocity but also self-disclosure (davidson et al., 2004). reciprocity is more likely when people have shared interests and perspectives on life. self-disclosure enhances the likelihood of friendship by providing a level of interpersonal intimacy. what’s less clear is the capacity of community mental health services to promote meaningful social integration, and not only a support network but also friendship and bonding (kogstad et al., 2013). the mediating role of the united states mental health system the united states mental health system is not designed to effectively promote social integration, and in some cases it acts as a barrier (schutt & rogers, 2009). conventional approaches to mental health service delivery have often physically separated people with pd from others for extended periods of time. this includes multi-year stays in state hospitals, and housing in large residential programs and group homes. while these group settings can promote peer support and even camaraderie, this population reports high levels of loneliness and social isolation (davidson et al., 2001). mental health clinics have typically not provided direct assistance to clients to help them socially integrate (kogstad, et al., 2013). providers generally are focused on clinical stability, symptom reduction, and/or the attainment of income and housing supports. many such providers are concerned that social interactions outside the controlled mental health setting (i.e., with the general public) could be overly stressful and result in a “relapse”. a primary example here is the practice of clinicians’ discouraging people with pd from seeking and holding competitive jobs. this practice flies in the face of evidence supporting the capacity of people .3 with pd to engage in and derive psychosocial benefits from competitive employment (crowther, marshall, bond, & huxley, 2001). some providers have promoted social integration for their clients through preparatory groups and classes on symptom management, improved self-esteem, and social skill development. research has shown however that these indirect efforts do not enhance social networks (davidson et al., 2001). some psychiatric rehabilitation providers have aimed to create conditions for people to develop social skills, such as structured day programs, but the gains made within the program have not translated to more natural and unstructured community settings. because of the lack of social integration programming and success, the research on how people with pd successfully socially integrate is sparse (wong et al., 2009). the research does suggest that it is important to look beyond the traditional mental health system to more natural settings for social integration to occur (kogstad et al., 2013). peer support and peer run programs are recognized as important to improving rates of social integration. peer support and peer run organizations: toward mental health recovery and social integration with peer support, people with pd share common concerns and provide emotional support and coping strategies to manage and promote personal well-being. peer support presupposes that people with similar difficulties are more likely to relate to one another with empathy and validation. peer support has typically been provided through grassroots get-togethers of people who found that the clinical system did not offer them sufficient support for their wellness and recovery (brown, 2009). during the 1960s and 1970s, people with pd in the united states began to develop their own peer support and advocacy organizations as an alternative to “mainstream services”, which were seen as unhelpful, paternalistic, and at times hurtful (tannenbaum, 2012). these peer operated organizations were often incorporated as non-profits, with the majority of the board of directors being people with pd (samhsa, 2011). the most common peer-run programs early on were “drop in” centers, where people with pd could gather casually and socialize on a regular basis, without concerns about illness disclosure or employment status (brown, 2009). many peer operated organizations now offer education and advocacy training, specialized assistance for personal issues (e.g., personal finance, housing, medical care, etc.), warm lines (telephonic global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   peer support), and community connections (ahmed et al., 2012). as of 2005, there were over two thousand consumer-operated organizations in the u.s. (goldstrom, et al., 2005). only in the past decade have peer run programs been considered an important component of the publicly funded mental health system (ostrow & leaf, 2014). peer operated organizations were not designed only for people with pd to provide supports and services (ahmed et. al., 2012). people who invest their time to develop peer run programs have a shared and unconventional belief system, formed around the idea that recovery from mental illness is a reality and that it occurs through a community of staff/participant power sharing, self-determination, empowerment, and peer support. (nelson, ochocka, janzen, & trainor, 2006). this “radically” transformative programming requires that peers fully control program resources, unencumbered by conflicting agendas (chamberlin, 2005). thus, a peer run program operating within a larger organizational context may find it challenging to comply with organizational standards, such as job titles and pay rates that do not value the peer role. in addition, non-peer managers who oversee or share responsibility for “peer run” programs are usually risk averse, and may see peer innovators as “inexperienced” or irresponsible (chamberlin, 2005). even the possibility that management would veto a peer leadership programming decision or force a compromise in lieu of a new peer services approach (e.g., hearing voices support group) hampers peer driven innovation. along with attaining full administrative control, challenges to implementation are often based on insufficient funding. peer run programs have also consistently reported initial difficulties collaborating with providers who discount their value, and sometimes even their existence (tannenbaum, 2012). research supports the effectiveness of peer run programs in improving people’s lives, including improvements in coping skills, social support, community tenure, vocational status, and quality of life (samhsa, 2011). peer run services reduce the use of acute care service settings, such as hospitalizations and emergency rooms (nelson et al., 2006). brown (2009) posits that the positive atmosphere of a drop in center leads to members’ trying new activities, providing support to others, and developing friendships. peers adopt leadership roles within these organization as employees, peer facilitators, and/or as board members, and most frequently by taking responsibility for a project. peer programs provide an ideology of hope that serves as a basis for people to become active in their own recovery. social role models exemplify “hope”, and can spark a full exploration of one’s potential. peer programs offer a psychological sense of community for a person to explore that potential (nelson et al., 2006). within such organizations, participants safely engage in non-clinical peer interactions and relationships, and thus develop identities that are independent of and stronger than a diagnostic category/label. and as peers gain control over resources and establish more balanced connections with providers and systems leaders, they are better able to effect systems policy advocacy for funding and policy restructuring (ahmed et. al., 2012). with regard to social integration outcomes, studies report that active and sustained participation in peer run programs is strongly associated with larger social networks and increased social support, primarily within the peer community (nelson et al., 2006; schutt & rogers, 2009). some people taking part in the activities of peer run programs have reported developing the skills and confidence to join community groups, make friends, and re-connect with old friends (brown, 2009). however, the research is inconclusive on the overall impact of peer run organization participation on the development of non-peer social networks. the recovery learning community model in massachusetts, a new organizational model of peeroperated services and supports has emerged, in part to help people engage socially in a non-clinical setting. recovery learning communities (rlcs) are staffed by people with pd who, in concert with many volunteers, run regional networks of peer support, peer education meetings, and public education. rlcs are distinct from most other peer run programs in that they provide peer support meetings, classes and workshops in various community locations (as opposed to a single location). six rlcs, each spanning a different geographic region of massachusetts, serve populations that range from close to a million in the more rural western and southeastern regions to over 2 million in the densely settled eastern and northeastern suburban regions of the state. fundamentally, rlcs have five primary responsibilities: • mental health recovery network development and coordination; • peer support; • regional continuing education and training for peer specialists and providers; • enhanced information and referral including support for individual self-advocacy;     • regional systems advocacy. rlcs are open to any community member who is struggling with a mental health concern. they are also open to community members who have an interest in learning about mental health issues.  rlcs prioritize an organizational culture that extends a universal welcome to people in the general public as well as those who use mental health services or programs. learning and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   support opportunities are designed to be collaborative in all cases and are not “edited” in a particular way for a “mentally ill” population. this means that community members at large engage in activities just as they would through adult education programs, social clubs, or other groups that meet regularly. the rlc program design was created through a process of community organizing and needs assessment that was led by the statewide peer advocacy organization mpower1, along with other peer run entities in massachusetts. the group’s leadership noted that (mental health) “recovery happens locally” and that a person in recovery benefits from continuity of relationships (change planning team report, 2001, p. 3). leaders realized that discreet program locations, even if numerous, would not engage people who did not attend mental health programs or who were in hospitals. this recovery learning community model, developed by people with pd, was then procured by the state mental health authority through a competitive bidding process in 2005. to bring a decentralized model to life, rlcs engage in purposeful networking activity to form many different relationships with people and organizations present in their geographic regions. in addition, each rlc has one or more office spaces which operate as hubs for networking, and are called “resource connection centers” (rccs). rccs are locations where the general public can easily access rlc resources and often include computer access, drop-in support, resource libraries and volunteering opportunities. business and governance functions also occur at these leased, donated or bartered-for spaces. office hours may cover regular business hours or emphasize evening and weekend hours. using these rcc hubs as a base, the rlc develops weekly support meetings in libraries, shelters, coffee shops, state agency offices, church halls, community mental health program sites, hospital inpatient units, bookstores, food market community rooms, addiction recovery peer support centers, college student unions, and any other space where a collaboration is established. events are organized for artistic displays, performances, educational presentations, and celebrations. these events occur at a variety of locations such as the local performance hall, college auditorium, city or town hall, library, religious organization hall, mental health or public service agency space, local movie theatre/café or rlc space. meetings and events welcome the general public, and calendars for rcc-based and other activities are published monthly in print and on rlc websites.                                                                                                                           1  massachusetts people/patients organized for wellness, empowerment and rights   rlc activities are varied and examples are provided in table 1 below. the categories of activities, or types of participation, are drawn from the work of brown (2009), who reported that social integration for drop-in center members was achieved through interpersonal interactions, work opportunities, a positive atmosphere, and recreational activities. for the community-based rlcs, we added two categories: “community connections” and “classes/trainings.” table 1. the participation of people with pd in recovery learning communities (adapted from: brown (2009), p. 184) work activities recreation activities interpersonal interaction positive atmosphere community connections classes/trainings paid peer employment group facilitation preparation for peer specialist work office work (reception, email, fax) drum circle knitting circle latin karaoke recovery through music hiking workouts at the local gym summer cookout attending peer support meetings attending educaton/training events assisting a person in self-advocacy public speaking event coordination role modeling social support, recovery stories, shared experiences shared leadership community driven values and principles outreach visits to other organizations public service event participation group trips wellness recovery action plan (wrap) computer class financial peace addiction and trauma language classes (asl, spanish, english) rlcs receive funding from the state mental health authority for core staff, who are required by both the model and the funding source to be people with pd. the rlc staff structure includes a director who is responsible to community-wide governance and planning groups, and who supervises several coordinators who work twenty to forty hours per week. staff coordinators support clerical/administrative functions, regional peer support activities, community outreach and networking, training, communications and/or anchor activity in a geographic subarea of the rlc region. coordinators accomplish their responsibilities through a combination of personal task completion, coordination of volunteer activity, and supervision of people who may be engaged in just one to four hours per week to co-facilitate a support meeting or class. rlc community participants are trained and often paid to facilitate support meetings or a variety of classes. rlcs economize on mileage costs by recruiting facilitators who live close to the meeting site, and may pay mileage only when the facilitator must travel beyond a specified distance. rlcs set clear training, ethical, and performance requirements for facilitators, whether they are paid or volunteer. the rlc staff and leaders regularly orient all participants staff and volunteers to values and principles that guide ethical relationships and community interactions. all rlc staff are trained to support a person in taking action to support him/herself, and to resist the temptation to act on behalf of another person. to minimize the inevitable power imbalance between staff and participants, rlc staff and facilitators learn to present themselves holistically, inviting relationships of mutuality with participants by sharing their own experiences, vulnerabilities and successes. in addition, rlcs create opportunities for participants to take on leadership roles. rlcs also plan network priorities through a dynamic process of assessing the community’s need and passion for various initiatives, and then assessing available leadership and resources. rlcs gather input from participants, and hold open community planning meetings to set shortand longterm goals for the network. rlc participation is completely voluntary. the voluntary nature of the rlc model is founded on the belief that the awakening, sustaining and refining of self-agency is essential to mental health recovery. thus the respect for the choices a person makes (for example, toward or away from participation) is an essential and defining component of rlc organizational culture. thus, rlcs orient mental health professionals to introduce people to the rlc staff rather than to simply refer clients to the rlc. rlcs do not expect or welcome introductions, which disclose a person’s diagnosis or treatment goals, and instead expect to engage with a person around a mutual exchange of interests and ideas while orienting a newcomer to the options available through participation. rlcs do not document details of a participant’s interactions as a condition of funding. rlc leaders view of relationships and community in the context of the principle of “reciprocity.” thus, a business executive struggling with suicidal feelings receives warmth and wisdom from a person who is currently homeless but strong in internal safety. a local farmer drops by the rcc with baskets of vegetables that people take home and enjoy, and rlc participants global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   attend his mother’s funeral and sit with the man in his grief. a neighborhood senior center, concerned about depression in its community, invites rlc leaders to do a presentation, and a respected elder shares for the first time in public her institutionalization experience during the 1950s which opens a deeply moving conversation. rlc participants join a local substance abuse taskforce to coordinate efforts with town officials and the public health agency. they find themselves as lead presenters in a conference on trauma and recovery, and find a new venue to showcase a film they created on the topic. rlcs, social integration, and systems transformation our conceptual framework for how peer run organizations, particularly rlcs, can impact both participant social integration and mental health services transformation is described in table 2. the first column is a distillation of table 1’s categories of rlc participation, and the five columns flowing from that represent expected outcomes, from shorter to longer term. the descriptions of “intrapersonal outcomes” are based on the work of brown (2009). thus, rlc activities create opportunities for transformation to an identity that is more outgoing, conscientious, independent, and group oriented. through regular social interaction, members build role (social, coping, job) skills. naturally people reappraise themselves in relation to their self-esteem and optimism. to brown’s (2009) categories we have added “self-agency”, which is going beyond reappraisal to having the capacity to take action based on advancement in the other three intrapersonal domains. the interpersonal outcome domains are derived from several sources. brown (2009) uses the term “resource exchange” in reference to activities that permit a participant to take on role-related responsibilities, such as encouraging other people in attendance at peer centers to consider a paid position there or elsewhere. ware and others (2007) describe “active citizenship” as exercising one’s skills and abilities to actively engage in and influence life and society as full citizens. “social network” is the broadest description of an interpersonal domain and is discussed above. table 2. conceptual framework: rlc participation and social integration and community impact outcomes the impact of participation is mediated by several variables. for the participant, social integration is less likely when the person is experiencing prejudice and discrimination, has a high degree of self-stigma, and has heightend levels of depression and anxiety. rlc participation as discussed above offers a person people, places and activities to lessen these burdens. inter and intra personal changes and community impact. both intrapersonal and interpersonal outcomes are established in the rlc through support and education that includes alternative healing opportunities (e.g. yoga), stress reduction, mindfulness, financial wellness, health self-advocacy, wellness and crisis prevention planning, and computer skills workshops. visual arts and music naturally expand paths for connection and collaboration by deemphasizing verbal communication and by involving both audience and participants. rlc drum circles, rlc participation intrapersonal outcomes interpersonal outcomes community outcomes systems outcomes national/ international outcomes interpersonal interactions   positive atmosphere   community connections   work activities   recreation activities   classes/ trainings identity transformation   self-appraisal self-agency   role skills social network                     -­‐structural                                             -­‐support     active citizenship   resource exchange educated public   relationships change perceptions and judgments   normalization, disclosure in safety improved public mental health people with pd in  policy leadership   greater acceptance of provider disclosure   less reliance on acute care   greater reliance on social supports   enhanced rates of recovery meetings of community oriented organizations   research focus on community outcomes manual/ toolkit   increased knowledge of social int. and correct supports global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9   “open mic” events, art gallery openings and shows, music theory and guitar lessons, to name a few examples, are offered to the community at large and often feature performances and exhibits for the greater community. for example: joseph had great difficulty in social situations. after participating in a rlc drum circle for a few weeks, he accompanied other rlc members to a public drum circle. he found it to be an enjoyable experience and was able to look people in the eye. he now calls himself a “fanatic” about drumming and attends “every circle (he) can find.” he also now facilitates two drum circles himself in a mental health agency and an alcohol and drug rehab center. practical skills and self-advocacy are part of learning about choices that lead to strengthened social networks and community connections. people experience success at job searches and learn about electronic social media to communicate with family and to connect with old friends. financial peace class members successfully achieved their financial goals, which included reducing the interest rate on credit card debt, securing a car loan at an affordable rate, setting up a bank account for savings, and saving for presents for family members. dramatic examples of social integration occur among people who have been locked in a cycle of frequent hospitalizations. for example, at one rlc five people had been hospitalized from 60 to 120 days in a single year. each had accepted this cycle of hospitalizations as an inevitable part of dealing with an illness. hearing that recovery was possible at the rlc was new knowledge for them. support meetings facilitated from a stance of mutuality between facilitators and participants provided an opportunity to reappraise their ability to manage difficulties without hospitalization. engaging in rlc activities resulted in each person establishing or re-establishing social roles including “supporter,” “facilitator” and “leader.” as a result, transformational identity shifts became possible from “mental patient” to “grandmother,” “friend,” “cable producer,” “musician” and/or “poet.” each of these people was able to find and use a new way of thinking about her difficulties, use her expanded social network, and demonstrate agency in self-care so that going to the hospital was not necessary for long periods of time. for example, in 2011 marilee was hospitalized for over 80 days. in 2012 she began coming to the rlc and has been hospitalized once since that time. she wanted other people in her city to become aware of the hope for mental health recovery. with another rlc member she took a cable tv access course and is now producing cable access shows on mental health and wellness. in addition, she displayed her flute talents at rlc events, and was asked to perform at a city hall for over 140 people as part of a mental health awareness program. her interest in music revitalized, she tried out for and was accepted into a music collective that arranges performances at various community events. although there is a relatively high prevalence of serious mental illness within the united states, few disclose their conditions to others and many do not seek treatment. the stigma and prejudice accompanying mental illness often results in a loss of self-esteem (“internalized oppression”) and self-agency. the peer network model aims to stimulate conversations and relationships that break down this barrier of silence, ease the path to more conversations about mental health struggles, and break down the artificial barrier between those who are “identified mental patients” in the community and those who “can pass as normal.” peer network planners believe in the experience of mental health recovery that with greater self-acceptance there are new realistic pathways for increased quality of life and self-agency. at the same time, this networking model is expected to enrich the community at large by de-cloaking the experience of extreme emotional states, and by initiating broader community conversations where resourceful strategies, role modeling and support become increasingly available. by engaging with people who are suffering, other community members, mental health providers and policy makers collectively, rlcs are establishing a broader sense of community based competence to discuss and respond to mental health issues that occur regularly in community life. perhaps the most crosscutting theme in the prevalence of mental health issues in our society is not that the experiences are abnormal, but that people are generally uncomfortable and feel disempowered to discuss them and learn about healing. thus, the experience of hearing voices is more prevalent than one would believe because few discuss it in general public conversation. the experience of suicidal thinking and self-inflicted violence is rarely discussed, yet it is known to be fairly common, especially at specific ages within a variety of cultural groups. rlc conversations address all these topics, sharing tools and strategies, and the empathy that is needed for developing self-agency and connection. system, national and international impacts. the goal of system restructuring is to make a positive impact on the quality of life of people with lived experience and the community as a whole. the rlc model is designed to promote “radical” notions of recovery, peer support, and social integration of people with pd. one key method was identifying allies— within the existing service structure and within the broader community—where the network would be cooperatively involved with community groups, global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  10   professions and agencies to increase the areas where there is consensus around mental health issues. rlcs are at the forefront of understanding the prevalence and impact of trauma on high service use and early mortality. rlcs have been moving systems to a greater understanding that hope and personal relationships provide the foundation for mental health recovery. rlcs advocated to successfully initiate a peer operated respite center where alternative personal support is offered to people who stay overnight rather than be admitted to a hospital. while the massachusetts mental health authority currently promotes “person centered planning” and “recovery oriented programs,” many individuals who work within it remain unclear of exactly what that means and how to achieve it. rlc staff and participants provide experiential guidance through advisory boards and workgroups that focus on eliminating vestiges of a system that expected lifelong dependence. they also participate in a statewide policy committee called the transformation committee, which is charged with advising the state on integrating peer support roles and certified peer specialists in traditional services. rlc members meet with legislators to inspire them with the understanding of concrete positive outcomes when a program focuses on recovery and activates the person’s own energy for self-care. the rlc model itself works to break down barriers between services for addiction recovery, criminal justice, adults with physical disabilities, elders and youth. these divides, generated by funding silos and by negative societal stereotypes, are bridged by the relational community connections and system advocacy of rlcs. a unifying factor among these groups is the experience of trauma and marginalization, which can be addressed by personal empowerment and access strategies. there is great potential for the rlc model to have national and international impact through effective dissemination and research. beyond attending and presenting at conferences, we hope to conduct research on the effectiveness of rlcs, first by developing a manual and toolkit and then working with partners to collect and analyze data. ultimately, we aim to develop new knowledge for systems and policy leaders to establish effective methods of peer driven social integration and services transformation. acknowledgements we would like to thank the massachusetts department of mental health for its continued funding for rlc operations and development. in addition, we’d like to thank the university of massachusetts, department of psychiatry’s program for recovery research for supporting our initial research development on rlc operations and effectiveness. references ahmed, a. o., doane, n. j., mabe, p. a., buckley, p. f., birgenheir, d., & goodrum, n. m. (2012). peers and peer-led interventions for people with schizophrenia. psychiatric clinics of north america, 35(3), 699. bradshaw, w., armour, m. p., & roseborough, d. (2007). finding a place in the world: the experience of recovery from severe mental illness. qualitative social work, 6(1), 27-47. brown, l. d. (2009). how people can benefit from mental health consumer-run organizations. american journal of community psychology, 43(34), 177-188. chamberlin, j. (2005). user/consumer involvement in mental health service delivery. epidemiologia e psichiatria sociale, 14(1), 10-14. crowther, r., marshall, m., bond, g., & huxley, p. (2001). vocational rehabilitation for people with severe mental illness. cochrane database of systematic reviews, 2. davidson, l., haglund, k. e., stayner, d. a., rakfeldt, j., chinman, m. j., & tebes, j. k. (2001). “it was just realizing . . . that life isn’t one big horror”: a qualitative study of supported socialization. psychiatric rehabilitation journal, 24, 275–292. davidson, l., shahar, g., stayner, d. a., chinman, m. j., rakfeldt, j., & tebes, j. k. (2004). supported socialization for people with psychiatric disabilities: lessons from a randomized controlled trial. journal of community psychology, 32(4), 453-477. goldstrom, i., campbell, j., rogers, j., placklow, b., henderson, m., & manderscheid, r. w. (2005). national estimates for mental health mutual support groups, self-help organizations, and consumer-operated services. administration and policy in mental health and mental health services research, 33(1), 92–103. hendryx, m., green, c. a., & perrin, n. a. (2009). social support, activities, and recovery from serious mental illness. journal of behavioral health services and research, 36, 320-329. kogstad, r. e., mönness, e., & sörensen, t. (2013). social networks for mental health clients: resources and solution. community mental health journal, 49(1), 95-100. livingston, j. d., & boyd, j. e. (2010). correlates and consequences of internalized stigma for people global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  11   living with mental illness: a systematic review and meta-analysis. social science & medicine, 71(12), 2150-2161. massachusetts people/patients organized for wellness, empowerment and rights (2001). change planning team report. boston, ma nelson, g., ochocka, j., janzen, r., & trainor, j. (2006). a longitudinal study of mental health consumer/survivor initiatives: part 1—literature review and overview of the study. journal of community psychology, 34, 247–260. ostrow, l., & leaf, p. j. (2014). improving capacity to monitor and support sustainability of mental health peer-run organizations. psychiatric services, 65(2), 239-241. perkins, r., & repper, j. (2013). prejudice, discrimination and social exclusion: reducing the barriers to recovery for people diagnosed with mental health problems in the uk. neuropsychiatry, 3(4), 377-384 pevalin, d. j., & goldberg, d. p. (2003). social precursors to onset and recovery from episodes of common mental illness. psychological medicine, 2, 299-306. schutt, r. k., & rogers, e. s. (2009). empowerment and peer support: structure and process of self-help in a consumer-run center for individuals with mental illness. journal of community psychology, 37(6), 697710. substance abuse and mental health services administration (samhsa) (2011). the evidence: consumer operated services. http://store.samhsa.gov/shin/content//sma114633cd-dvd/theevidence-cosp.pdf, rockville, md. tanenbaum, s. j. (2012). consumer-operated service organizations: organizational characteristics, community relationships, and the potential for citizenship. community mental health journal, 48(4), 397-406. ware, n., hopper, k., tugenberg, t., dickey, b., & fisher, d. (2008). a theory of social integration as quality of life. psychiatric services, 59(1), 27-33. wong, y. i., matejkowski, j., & lee, s. (2010). social integration of people with serious mental illness: network transactions and satisfaction. the journal of behavioral health services & research, 38(1), 54-71.   microsoft word 2011-0009-final-20120515.docx   global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  1     is participatory research compatible with graduate research? reflections from three stakeholders lisa armstrong, ma colleen loomis, phd esperanza mairena-torres lisa armstrong, ma graduate from wilfrid laurier university, canada currently working with an international non-profit organization. colleen loomis, phd is an associate professor, wilfrid laurier university, canada esperanza mairena-torres is living in vancover, british columbia, canada currently working and saving to pursue post-secondary education in community development. keywords: youth participation; participatory research; autoethnography, reflexivity recommended citation: armstrong, l., loomis, c., & mairena-torres, e. (2012). is participatory research compatible with graduate research? reflections from three stakeholders. global journal of community psychology practice, 3(3), 1-10. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2     is participatory research compatible with graduate research? reflections from three stakeholders lisa armstrong, colleen loomis, & esperanza mairena-torres abstract graduate programs aim to train future researchers and practitioners in the values, skills and tools of their trade. this paper reports on the experiences of a graduate student, a youth co-researcher and a faculty supervisor while conducting thesis research within a community psychology master’s degree program. in a program that values research, action and social justice we reflect on our struggles to exemplify these values throughout the thesis process while complying with departmental norms and institutional constraints. we begin by summarizing the research project and how the co-researchers became involved. next each of us (the coauthors) provides our reflections on processes that occurred while conducting a participatory research project with attention to how it impacted us individually, each other and the research itself. introduction participatory research has been gaining popularity over the past 50 years (hall, 2005). yet for some graduate students participatory research feels out of reach and completing it in the 12 to 18 months of allotted time seems infeasible. this paper draws on the participatory process used in conducting a master’s thesis research project that investigated engagement with youth who are involved with gangs within the context of a community based prevention project.; the project defined youth as between 13 and 25 years of age and we use the same definition here. the research focused on the development phases of this prevention effort and sought to understand what youth engagement meant to the participants (service providers and youth) and what roles young people would have. the purpose of this article is to illustrate the struggles we (a former graduate student, a youth community collaborator, and a thesis supervisor) encountered while conducting participatory research within a master’s thesis, to evaluate the quality of related research processes and products, and to offer suggestions for how to conduct participatory research from within the constraints of a graduate program. these illustrations are from our personal reflections on, our successes, mistakes, and compromises as we conducted imperfect, yet workable, research collaborating with youth researchers during most phases of the research including data analysis. first, we briefly review the existing literature of other researchers’ reflections, the professional values of the field of community psychology, and characteristics and nature of participatory research. reflecting on our research praxis and learning from those of others can be a useful tool for strengthening our skills as researchers and the quality of future research, particularly when we examine our mistakes (sarason, 1995). a tool for self-reflection is autoethnography, the process of documenting one’s own experiences in the research process (ellis & bochner, 2000). from our colleagues’ reflections we have learned that it is possible for adult researchers to conduct participatory action research with children (e.g., kellet, 2010) and youth (e.g., chen, weiss, & nicholson, 2010) and we have seen how autoethnography can facilitate reflexivity for a graduate student to revisit her standpoint as it relates to and impacts collaborative research (langhout, 2006). these writings are select examples of the important role that reflexivity plays in our professional development. a gap exists in the literature on research reflections in the area of understanding the impacts of participatory research on community collaborators (goto, 2010) and student researchers. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2     collaboration with communities is one of the professional values of the discipline of community psychology as are empirical research and social justice, to mention a select few (dalton, elias, & wandersman, 2007; nelson & prilleltensky, 2005; society for community research and action, 2011) and researchers’ choices about when to collaborate are multifaceted. the decision to collaborate requires an assessment of potentially competing values, research questions and objectives, and feasibility. although collaboration is a professional value, it is neither mandated nor deterministic in how it is applied. each researcher makes decisions about when and how to collaborate. there are times when using this approach is inappropriate because “[a] collaborative relationship can be at odds with social justice” (isenberg, loomis, humphreys, & maton, 2004, p. 124). the value for collaboration should be weighed in the balance along with other values. when a collaborative method is warranted the next step is to decide which participatory approach is feasible to use. participatory approaches focus on collaborating with stakeholders so they may have a more active role in the process (patton, 2002); they are also resource intensive. these approaches include participatory research (pr), participatory action research (par), and community based participatory action research (cbpar); the later two focus on an action outcome in addition to co-conducting research with participants and community-based research is initiated from within a community rather than from outside (e.g., university-based researchers), or at least the community has a majority power in shaping research objectives and processes. participatory approaches, especially those with action in mind, often involve large groups of academics and community members and require a considerable time investment to ensure that all stakeholders are engaged and to use a democratic process for decision-making. this work also requires advisory committees, large budgets for honorariums, and several researchers. decisions about which type of pr to use are influenced and constrained by access to resources (time, money, skills, etc.), ideologies (e.g., how subjectivity/objectivity are understood by various stakeholders), and institutional factors. once a decision to use pr has been made researchers may draw on the many examples in the literature for engaging various populations in all or some of the research process (e.g., harper & carver, 1999; wilson et al., 2007). there has been growing interest in how to conduct collaborative research with youth (and more recently children), yet few studies have actively involved youth in the process of data analysis (foster-fishman, law, lichty, & aoun, 2010). each of us decides if conducting research collaboratively is warranted by the research objectives, consistent with competing values, and feasible. these decisions are particularly challenging for research projects with limited resources, which is often the case for an undergraduate or master’s student thesis. the student and her or his thesis supervisor face the responsibility of determining how pr will be implemented in a way that respects both the value of collaboration and the time constraints imposed by the university for completing thesis research. our reflections specifically address two gaps identified in the literature by engaging youth in data analysis and by reporting the impacts of participatory research on a youth community collaborator, from her perspective. to provide readers a context, first we summarize the research project on which we are reflecting; then, we describe how we collected data for this specific article (i.e., our reflections). we decided to write most of the remaining text in first-person voice from the graduate student’s perspective (first author) in order to provide a first-hand account for graduate students. before the beginning: how a co-researcher process developed in order to describe the research approach used in this master’s thesis, i must first describe how the idea for the method came to be. the master’s program in which i was studying required both a research and practical component with the option of combining the two (e.g., using the work completed in the practicum as a basis for a research project). i completed my practicum within a gang prevention project and chose to combine my practical and research requirements for my thesis with the project members’ support and consent. in this work i assisted with the youth advisory council (yac) where i met youth who were interested in the project. during this time i realized how difficult it is to find and engage youth, especially those whose experiences make them eligible for the project such as having active or former involvement with a gang. i became worried that there would be few youth participants in the project and in my proposed study about youth engagement. after discussing this concern with my peers and my thesis supervisor, i decided to invite some of the youth to participate as co-researchers as a way to increase the youth voice in the research and to global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3     increase the participatory nature of the study. upon reviewing the pr literature, i could not find an approach that was compatible with the context of my project. that is how the decision to use a coresearcher model came to be a part of my thesis. below is a summary of the development of my thesis starting with co-researcher recruitment and training, then data collection, data analysis, and dissemination. i chose to invite two particular youth as coresearchers for two main reasons. first because they were no longer involved with gangs and were living more stable lives. other youth who joined in the youth advisory council meetings did not participate consistently, did not have contact information or were dealing with more immediate concerns such as substance dependencies and housing issues, whereas the two i selected were finishing school, had places to stay (either with family or independently), as well as employment and support systems. second, both of these youth had been involved with gangs (as active members) in cities located outside the bounds of the project so their input had the potential to be distinct from the other youth participants. i met with each one individually to describe what the process would be like and both agreed to participate as co-researchers. another decision that had to be made once i invited co-researchers to my thesis research was whether or not they should also be participants in the study. on the one hand, since it was likely there would be only a few youth participants, the co-researcher’s voices could have added more youth perspectives, however, their input could have been conflicting because the co-researchers were at a different place in their lives. this different social status could have also led to a misrepresentation of youth opinions, as the coresearchers were ineligible to participate in the prevention project because of not having been in a gang in the region. based on this rationale, i chose not to invite them to be participants in the study but to incorporate their perspectives and reflections of their past experiences to improve the interview guide and data analysis. their perspectives were included in the paper as expert opinions. i met with the youth co-researchers several times before data collection in order to develop the interview guide and provide training on qualitative interviewing. i showed them a diagram of the research process that included the following steps: determining the interview guide, data collection, data analysis, report writing and dissemination. for the next step, all three of us met at the university campus to revise the interview guide and practice interviewing. the co-researchers gave input for the interview questions and we practiced interviewing each other and discussed qualitative interview techniques (open questions, open posture, probes, etc.). next we shared our availabilities and then i contacted the participants to set up interview times. note that i used a single case study design and conducted a census of the population of the prevention program so every stakeholder involved in designing the project was invited to participate. since i completed my practicum with the program, i was familiar to almost all of the participants. the service providers and youth were invited via email and the youth were also invited through personal messages entrusted with staff at the services the youth accessed. the participants (n = 12) included one member of the yac and 11 staff members. all of the interviews except one were recorded (i conducted a phone interview with one participant for her convenience). in total, the youth co-researcher and i interviewed four people and i interviewed eight people by myself. to improve the quality of the interviews, the thesis supervisor listened to the first two to give advice and feedback. the co-researchers and i also met 30 minutes before each interview to prepare any last minute questions and after each interview for 30 minutes to de-brief and discuss how we felt the interview went and how we could do better next time. after the data collection was completed one of the youth co-researchers moved to another city to pursue post-secondary education and was no longer actively involved with the project but received updates. i invited the remaining youth co-researcher to stay involved; she had co-conducted 3 of the 4 interviews i did with the youth co-researchers. she stayed involved and helped with the transcribing (she transcribed one interview, i transcribed nine interviews and an undergraduate volunteer research assistant transcribed two interviews), data analysis, and dissemination. (note that from this point forward in the text that the term “youth co-researcher” refers to the one particular youth who stayed involved in the research after data collection and is third author.) once i developed a codebook, i shared it with the youth co-researcher asking for her feedback. the questions i asked her included: does this sound accurate based on your experiences with the interviews? do the conclusion/implications i formed make sense based on your experiences with gangs? the youth co-researcher provided some feedback but overall felt the framework was accurate. the analysis global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4     process was not very participatory; mainly she provided her opinion of my work. her reflections on this process can be summed up with this quote from our reflection conversations (conducted for this paper) “did a good job, chose good quotes, i don’t know what you could have done better, it was organized”. throughout this entire process i was communicating with the thesis supervisor. during the initial stages of proposal development and the analysis phase we had standing weekly meetings otherwise we communicated periodically at certain check-in points such as when the first two interviews were completed and before my meeting to invite the youth coresearcher to participate in data analysis. once i defended my thesis, the youth co-researcher and i met to discuss how we could disseminate the information. after brainstorming ideas, we decided to share the information with the gang prevention project so that they could give feedback and potentially use the model in their practice. the youth co-researcher and i co-created a visual presentation to exchange information with the project team and presented it at a staff meeting. after the presentation there was a lot of feedback and interest in the information. how we gathered our reflections there are many approaches to recording reflections such as personal narratives like autoethnography (langhout, 2006; du preez, 2008) and autobiographical (du preez, 2008). we did not use either of those forms rather we decided to use our personal perspectives with and without gang experience and our responses to our own retrospective interview. the graduate student has no direct experience with gangs. she volunteered for four years with a homeless youth drop-in centre as a direct service provider where she met youth with similar life experiences as people who are involved with or at risk for being involved with gangs. the coresearcher was a former gang member. the supervisor has no direct experience with gangs. she has conducted a three-year, longitudinal study of juvenile crime enforcement and accountability, collaborating with a community-based program that diverted youth from a u.s. state justice system. in a semi-structured co-interview each person in the dyad responded to the same question. the graduate student determined a set of questions, shared the draft of questions with the thesis supervisor and then shared those in advance of meeting individually with the youth co-researcher and the thesis supervisor on several separate occasions. reflections during our reflective discussions we examined three main areas: the positives and negatives of the process; the impact of power differences and academic hierarchy on the process; and the impact of research on the graduate student, the youth coresearcher, the thesis supervisor, and the integrity of the research. reflections on the process. during our reflections on the process as a whole, we first discussed what went well. all three of us identified our communication strategies as vital to the success of the project. the youth co-researcher and i found text messaging each other to arrange meetings and keep up-to-date with each other as the most efficient, while the thesis supervisor and i used email and skype. we also identified that our having similar working styles and personalities facilitated our efficiency. i found it easy to develop relationships with both the thesis supervisor and the youth co-researcher and this quick transition to a comfortable relationship was an asset to this project that could not have been planned. each of us identified that we learned a lot from using the co-researcher method. the youth co-researcher pointed out that she gained knowledge about the research process, in particular about interviewing, transcribing, and how to translate a research project into a community presentation. she also learned how important organization was for research and professional settings like post-secondary school and job opportunities. i found having a co-researcher required a degree of comfort with conducting interviews, it required extra planning to arrange our schedules and it required more preparation in order to make sure we were all comfortable during the interview. the debrief discussions with both youth co-researchers after the interviews also forced me to create time to reflect on the impact of inviting coresearchers to participate in the research for my thesis. the thesis supervisor discussed what she learned from this process, particularly how she adapted her mentoring style to help me both as a master’s student and as a teacher for the youth researcher. all of us described the experience as a professional and personal learning experience. we each learned different skills: the youth co-researcher an introduction to research, the graduate student how to teach the skills, and the thesis supervisor how to global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5     instruct students in teaching a youth community researcher. the challenges that were encountered largely surrounded time and resources. some of the challenges the youth co-researcher and i faced were meetings being cancelled/delayed and minimal time for practice and training for interviews. i think i would have felt more comfortable if we had more practice time for interviews so the probes could have felt more natural. sometimes during the interviews, the co-researchers would read the list of potential probes instead of using them based on conversation. one suggestion that the youth co-researcher came up with to address this issue was to have regular meeting times to make it easier to remember and schedule other commitments, thus making more practice time for interviewing a possibility. this would also make it clearer if missed meetings were a matter of commitment or scheduling. resources were also a challenge. through our reflective conversation the thesis supervisor and i discussed the implications of not being able to offer the co-researchers adequate compensation. had i been able to offer payment comparable to minimum wage, it could have led to more commitment from both of the co-researchers and allowed them to increase this project on their priority list. an interesting personal struggle emerged regarding resources. the co-researchers and i met at coffee shops and i often purchased coffees and a small snack for both of us based on advice from a peer of mine who participated in participatory research. my peer suggested i purchase the coffee since i (likely) have more resources than the youth and it will feel more natural if we all have a drink. i struggled with the implications of this. would the youth feel indebted to me if i purchased their refreshments? does this act magnify our power differences? or is what my peer said true and it will just make things feel more comfortable? from past meetings with the thesis supervisor i knew she often pays for her supervisees or research assistant’s refreshments so i took this as a common practice and did purchase the coffee, however i always felt hesitation. i feel if i had been able to say “don’t worry this is covered by the project” that hesitation would be erased and my concerns mediated since it was money provided by a third party for research meetings. power differences and academic hierarchy. the youth co-researcher and i were both concerned with how the co-researcher arrangement was going to impact my grade. she shared that there were times when she could have handled more responsibility but was hesitant to bring this up. she was worried that her involvement might have a negative impact on my thesis; this was because there were times when she felt that she was not qualified to help with this project. all the while, i was also concerned with the impact of having a co-researcher on my thesis that would be judged by an academic committee. i worried about the impact of re-scheduling meetings with co-researchers on the timeline of my thesis and if the co-researcher’s participation in the interviews would negatively impact the quality of the data. the youth co-researcher and i agreed that one way to address this concern in the future is to have these reflective conversations throughout the process, specifically asking each other what is going well, what is not and potentially thinking about it separately and having specific questions that will be answered at the next meeting. this shared concern needs to be understood in context. a master’s thesis occurs under the supervision of a university professor within a department, within a faculty at a university. community psychology is one of the five subdisciplines in the department where i was enrolled and the number of graduate students is relatively evenly distributed amongst each area. this means that community psychology comprises only 20% of the department and the remaining 80% of the department conduct traditional, (mostly) lab-based research. the fact that the youth co-researcher and i were both concerned about the impact on grades identifies the barriers traditional university settings present for participatory research. there are many potential ways to address these barriers, such as creating a participatory stream where students can pay a different amount of tuition since their research will take longer. another way is to “showcase” more participatory projects and their value. impact on the youth co-researcher. during reflections for this article (i.e., after the thesis was completed) between the youth co-researcher and me, she identified two main impacts. the first one is that by participating in this project she was able to see how her past experiences as a gang member can be used to benefit a community. in the past she felt a lot of regret about her decision to be in a gang and focused on how challenging it was to make the decision to leave it. after she left, and before she became involved with this project, she was very driven to solve problems without violence and help others do the same. she also started exploring how to care for herself through her health and community global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6     involvement (such as volunteering). the youth coresearcher’s reflections on her experiences have helped her to grow as a person by prioritizing her values and morals, for example, to value her family with more communication and respect. by becoming involved with this project, she was able to act on her goal to help others by using her experiences. after her involvement with this project she feels as though it had to happen in order to get to a different stage of her life where she is able to use her experiences to help other people and the community. her involvement also allowed her to give a different voice to a stigmatized group. for example, gang members are often only seen in a negative light, whereas this role allows a positive light to be reflected from a former gang member. the second impact the youth co-researcher experienced was a change in how she viewed service providers. before her involvement with this project she viewed them as “just doing their job” and closedminded (they did not understand her experiences). after the interviews she felt as though some of the service providers did understand what youth in gangs were experiencing and that they had a lot of compassion for these youth. however, there were some service providers who exemplified her previous expectations. the youth co-research noticed that some service providers said contradictory things like they felt service providers should be there for the youth but that the youth should not be viewed as equals, and this made her feel doubtful of their true intentions. impacts on the graduate student. using a participatory approach shaped what i learned from the research process. one of the ways it impacted me was in terms of preparation because before we could start interviewing the participants, i had to coach the co-researchers about the interviewing process and answer any questions they may have. it also required me to be very reflexive and ask questions such as “how will the participant respond to this question differently if i ask it or if a co-researcher asks it?” one way i prepared was by creating a comprehensive list of potential probes so that the youth would feel prepared. meeting with the co-researchers was similar to my meetings with my supervisor; i went prepared with questions, seeking feedback and guidance and open to suggestions. given my multiple roles and the differences in experiences between the co-researchers, the thesis supervisor and me, there were ample opportunities for intergenerational learning. i was able to teach research skills and the co-researchers shared their opinions about the process to remind me that their concerns and my concerns are not the same. i was able to practice mentoring by engaging in conversations about stereotypes of gang members and the youth illustrated their awareness of racism and socioeconomic marginalization they experienced. my experience with participatory research is very different in practice than it is in theory and this does not limit its ability to have positive impacts. the youth co-research expressed having a very positive experience even though her participation in this was not fully participatory. throughout the process i wondered if i should have invited co-researchers or not. i worried i was adding too much extra work to their schedules, or that i was not sharing enough responsibility due to my concern with finishing my thesis in a timely manner. there were many times i felt that the research project might be considered tokenistic, so i tried to be as honest and clear with the co-researchers to limit this possibility (for example by using a diagram depicting various research steps illustrating where participation was possible). though this struggle is still not over i think having the experience of striving with it was very important. by completing this thesis i faced many (sometimes conflicting) expectations from my supervisor, from the department, from the ethics board, from the participants, from the co-researchers and from myself. struggling with and managing these kinds of demands is a skill that participatory researchers need to cultivate and for this reason, i think using a coresearch approach is beneficial for master’s students professional development. impacts on the thesis supervisor. as a mid-career researcher and thesis supervisor her role was more distant from the research process. she provided advice and guidance and did not engage in the research itself. this is common practice in this particular academic program where many students develop their own research projects rather than working within a project a faculty member has in progress. this practice also is common within larger research projects. in this case, the thesis supervisor shared that she missed an opportunity to engage with a new youth researcher and to learn from teaching a young community member. the thesis supervisor and the youth co-researcher met informally a few times when the co-researcher was meeting with me on campus or at my defence. she did not work directly with the co-researcher. the institutional ethics board asked for explicit terms of who would be involved and have access to data and everyone involved was trained in the canadian tri-council guide to ethical global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7     conduct of research with human participants. that being said, the thesis supervisor also expressed to me that learning outcomes may be enhanced when a learner is engaged with a near peer (vygotsky, 1978), as the teachers/students are closer in age and ability they provide more helpful and relevant insight and advice. i was a nearer peer to the youth co-researcher than was my supervisor. one potential disadvantage of having multiple skill levels of researchers is the additional level of hierarchy or bureaucracy that occurs, especially when senior researchers maintain decision-making power. depending on the mentoring style of the researcher, their involvement can help if s/he provides advice and guidance at appropriate times and in appropriate ways, but can hinder if the senior researcher micro-manages or provides input at inappropriate times (such as suggesting changing the method after or during data collection). (these issues were not part of my thesis research experience.) impact on the research. as previous literature has noted, there are many benefits of using participatory research (isenberg et al., 2004) including better research questions, more accurate analysis, and community credibility. community credibility was noteworthy for this project because the participants have the power to design how the prevention project operates and they were very inspired by the coresearcher model. by including co-researchers with my project the interview questions and analysis were infused with their input, which allowed a space for their experiences to impact others. overall, i think the quality of the research improved due to using the co-researcher model. recommendations the following recommendations are based on the experiences documented here and are potentially applicable to students, supervisors and co-researchers (community members) considering participatory research. communication, supervision, and time management. having clear communication was vital to my project. it would have been very difficult to arrange meeting times and interview dates with the youth co-researcher or meeting times with the thesis supervisor if i did not communicate with them via their preferred medium. additionally, being open about availabilities and desires to participate is also important. i found having a reasonable timeline with check points contributed to a smooth process. for example, the youth co-researcher and i checked in after each “section” – analysis, data collection etcetera to ensure that it was still reasonable for both of us to be involved. these three things (open communication, correct communication mediums, and timelines with check-in points) all contribute to an efficient process. reflecting on the role of academic supervision in research with co-researchers arguments may be made for their being more involved. for example, greater involvement by a supervisor may ensure that the research process is systematic and it may provide for additional learning outcomes. in the present example, we did not have any experiences or reflections by stakeholders to support that more supervisor involvement is recommended. the level of supervision was not an issue raised by any of the stakeholders, including the academic committee that examined the thesis and the community partners. from our experience, increased supervision can both strengthen and weaken impacts on education and the research (as mentioned above); further, as mentioned above, if a student’s study is not part of supervisor’s research program an additional recommendation is to be prepared for some meetings to be cancelled, delayed or unproductive. collaborating requires patience, but you should also know where your limit is, such as how many missed meetings are too many? i determined this along the way and although some projects may require pre-planned timelines, being able to respond to situations as they arrive and making context specific decisions was important for me and to the research. for example, at one point the youth co-researcher got a job and it became more difficult for us to meet regularly, however she remained committed so there were longer intervals between meetings but the communication, collaboration, and work continued. we also did not meet during regular office hours in order to accommodate her schedule. considering this, as i mentioned earlier, some institutional change may be required to accommodate this process. creating a stream in research programs that allows more time to be dedicated to relationship building and consultative meetings would create a space that is more conducive to participatory research. resources. i found it very important to know what resources were available before i began my research process. this permitted me to offer both coresearchers an honorarium up front that facilitated their determining how much time they committed. i noted what resources i wish i had to allow for future budgets to reflect more realistic costs. this is especially important as a means of highlighting the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8     differences in costs between traditional lab-based research and participatory research. time is also important to consider when conducting a master’s thesis. since participatory research often takes longer than non-participatory research, whether in a lab, survey, or observations; it may require students to extend their degree at their own cost. there are certain actions i did not think to do during my masters but these ideas could be beneficial to future students. they include creating two budgets: an idealized one where the co-researchers or participants are paid for all the time they contribute and another with the amount of an honorarium they will receive. this is one way to express to a department the need for more available funds for participatory research. additionally, whenever you (as a graduate student) do public presentations write to the department explaining that you are holding a public presentation about your research, this allows the department to see how your research sets a positive image of the university, increasing its value for the department and the university. this should not be considered personal bragging, but a tactic to increase funds for the participants and community members who are making this possible. dialogue about participatory research. in the program in which i studied there were several opportunities for reflection provided via thought papers and time in class. that being said, i think concentrated critiques of par were missing. although criticisms of par were brought up in class by peers and our professor, our text and readings focused on the positives. i feel articles similar to isenberg and colleagues (2004) should be included as they illustrate inherent flaws of pr. paradoxically, in a program that aims to develop and support critical thinking a homogenized environment where we do not critique community psychology values, research and practices seems to have emerged. there are a lot of buzzwords and feelings associated with “participatory research”, however, like the concept of “empowerment” we need to delve into its nuances and determine what we actually mean when we say participatory and why using this approach is important to research. most of our classes were framed in a par-first model, where par was considered the best way to conduct research; all other approaches were presented as falling short of the ideal. it would have been helpful to talk about how to create positive, productive, meaningful research that is not par. that being said, if students have not experienced participatory research then it may difficult to identify the nuances. there are two final points about what i have learned. one matter present during the entire time i was conducting thesis research was relationship building with the youth co-researcher, and like other relationships i needed to be aware of trust, common ground and other aspects of power. we only mentioned power in passing (for example, when dividing up work) and we did not have a specific conversation dedicated to it. as langhout (2006) points out it is important to understand where/how our various forms of power intersect and this is one area in which i could have improved. second, although resources may constrain the possibility for a master’s student to use a participatory research approach, it is possible to work with co-researchers in positive ways that are compatible with participatory methods, doing so provides opportunities to apply some of the par concepts and to learn from that experience. conclusion the thesis supervisor, the youth co-researcher and i worked together to create my final thesis report by each contributing our strengths. within this paper we offered our reflections on the co-researcher method used in my thesis. within the confines of graduate school regulations and culture, adapting aspects of par is one way to conduct research that is compatible with participatory methods. throughout this entire process, from writing the proposal to conducting the reflective interviews for this paper, i have struggled with an internal debate, wondering if inviting co-researchers was a good idea. the positives i considered were the increase of youth voice and people with lived experience in my project, the practical advantages for the project, and the favourable responses i received from both of the youth co-researchers. nevertheless, i worried about the amount of power that was shared as well as the level of change that could be created. the negatives included the inability to follow exactly a particular methodology, to provide enough time and space for the co-researchers to become critical actors, to make transformative change and the fear of tokenism that comes with knowing i have more power and thus the responsibility of sharing that power. the final questions i have not answered are is this tokenism? is it necessary to be transformative? and does participatory research operate as an all or nothing binary? i feel compelled to act. i feel i must have practical implication in all of my work. i know within academia it is possible to “get stuck” in debating the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9     merits of ontological and methodological perspectives, this is important for teaching and learning, yet we must also somehow incorporate the messy reality. we cannot allow ourselves to be stuck in the “paralysis of analysis”. it is our responsibility to put our education to work and determine if it is possible to conduct research that has positive impacts. references chen, p., weiss, f. l., & nicholson, h. j. (2010). girls study girls inc.: engaging girls in evaluation through participatory action research. american journal of community psychology, 46, 228–237. dalton, j.h., elias, m.j., & wandersman, a. (2007). community psychology: linking individuals and communities. california: thompson wadsworth. du preez, j. (2008). locating the researcher in the research: personal narrative and reflective practice. reflective practice, 9, 509-519. retrieved 11/09/2011, from (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623940802431499). ellis, c., & bochner, a. p. (2000). autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: researcher as subject. in n. k. denzin & y. s. lincoln (eds.), handbook of qualitative research: second edition (pp. 733–768). thousand oaks, ca: sage. foster-fishman, p. g., law, k. m., lichty, l. f., & aoun, c. (2010). youth react for social change: a method for youth participatory action research. american journal of community psychology, 46, 67– 83. goto, k. (2010) academic researcher’s roles in participatory action research, theory, development and the improvement of community-based health projects. global journal of community psychology practice, 1, 1-12. retrieved 11/09/2011, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). hall, b. (2005). in from the cold: reflections on participatory research from 1970-2005. convergence, 38, 524. harper, g.w., & carver, l.j. (1999). “out-of-themainstream” you as partners in collaborative research: exploring the benefits and challenges. health education & behaviour, 26, 250-265. isenberg, d., loomis, c., humphreys, k., & maton, k. i. (2004). self help research: issues of power sharing. in l. jason, c. keys, y. suarez-balcazar, r. tayor, m. davis, j. durlak, & d. isenberg (eds.), participatory community research: theories and methods in action (pp. 123-137). washington, dc: american psychological association. kellet, m. (2010). small shoes, big steps! empowering children as active researchers. american journal of community psychology, 46, 195–203. langhout, r.d. (2006). where am i? locating myself and its implications for collaborative research. american journal of community psychology, 37, 267274. nelson, g. & prilleltensky, i. (2005). community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and well-being. new york: pallgrave macmillan. patton, m. (2002). qualitative research and evaluation methods. california: sage publications. peshkin, a. (1988). in search of subjectivityone’s own. educational research, 17, 17-21. retrieved 21/01/2010, from (http://www.jstor.org/stable/1174381). sarason, s. b. (1995). school change: the personal development of a point of view. new york: teacher’s college. society for community research and action (2011). retrieved 23/10/2011, from (http://www.scra27.org/about). vygotsky, l. s. (1978). mind in society. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. wilson, n., dasho, s., martin, a.c., wallerstein, n., wang, c.c., & minkler, m. (2007). engaging young adolescents in social action through photovoice: the youth empowerment strategies (yes!) project. journal of early adolescence, 27, 241-261. microsoft word 2012-003-final-20120521.docx global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 36 further comments caterina arcidiacono president of ecpa (european community psychology association) member of the efpa taskforce on community psychology caterina.arcidiacono@unina.it the striking experience of the australian psychologists tell us about the importance of the advocacy and lobbying power in the pursuit of political and scientific goals; the role of agency as a behavioural attitude in social settings. this article tell also how important is the accurate description of events, relations, and interactions in the dissemination of a certain experience. the authors are, in fact, very detailed in the description of all the contacts, the connections and the networking they went through. it goes without saying that all their actions and reports are giving trust to every sort of collective and participatory political involvement. bravo! bravo! bravo! instead, there are hereby two loose ends which i would like to clarify: first and foremost, the difficulty for community psychologists to perform political purposes and foster social interventions being anchored in the clinical area. in effect, there is a real difficulty to be considered part of the psychological community when their own reference models embrace social, cultural and political perspectives. this is, in fact, a state of affaires which concerns the community psychology of many and different countries across the world. maton, perkins et al., emphasize the importance of a training faculty and student body from multiple disciplines. in their word: “moreover, over time we must move from occasional communications or collaborations with other disciplines to sustained, robust interdisciplinary or trans-disciplinary interactions in which new perspectives and knowledge about social problems and means to address them are developed over the longer term” (kenneth i. maton · douglas d. perkins · susan saegert community psychology at the crossroads, am j community psychol (2006) 38:9–21, p. 10). building contacts and involvement with professionals coming from diverse fields of research whom work in a multiplicity of community settings is, therefore, a key goal to pursue. prevention, promotion programs, program evaluation, action research, organizational and community consultation, community development, advocacy, policy analysis, and community coalition building are only a few of our activities which need the active involvement of many professionals and social actors. it is clear that we are promoting the interdisciplinary aspect of our discipline, but, in order to do it, we need first to define our specific psychological background. therefore, the main questions are: what is the “core business” of community psychologists? how to encourage the interdisciplinary development of this field of study and how to renew our definition of psychologists? or to put it better, provided that community psychology is an “interdisciplinary domain”, how can we define community psychologists itself? we should try to define both, our goals and our mission, without overlooking our peculiar competencies and tools. all these issues ought to be deepened in order to better understand and define the curricular training courses for community psychologists. it almost appears that the hallmark of social and community psychology is incidental for the official psychology. the social features ought to be, instead, part of the clinical background as well as pertinent to the psychologist training. this represents a great challenge at the “verge” between different methodologies and various approaches. now it is time not only to emphasize the collaboration needs but also to specify the specific competencies we put in the knowledgebasket of community psychologists. however, some of our colleagues share a different perspective, clearly stated by maton, perkins, and saegert: “the motivation to broaden our identity should be enhanced as we remember that many of the people doing community psychology related theory, research and action are not community psychologists, and that we cannot, by ourselves, make a difference in the complex, multi-leveled social problems, and the related social structural changes, that we so deeply care about. viewing ourselves as part of a global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 37 larger community of like-minded scholars and activists that encompasses multiple fields and sectors will help facilitate the interdisciplinary cross-fertilization, linkages and project teams that are so essential to our mutual visions and goals” (ibidem p. 20). the australian experience of our colleagues gives us an opportunity to re-open the debate on the future of our discipline. the second element which i would like to point out concerns the risk to not pay enough attention to the institutional contexts and as a consequence the possible actions for community psychologists result narrowed. by way of example, donata francescato in italy pushed through the teaching of community psychology as core curriculum for psychological degree courses. today, however, in order to create an european label with the promotion of the same formative courses for everybody, universities are providing social psychology european credit transfer system credits (ectsc), but without clearly specifying whether or not they correspond to community psychology. the main purposes of europsy should be to guarantee a level of education, professional competence, and ethical conduct to clients and employers; to facilitate the mobility and cross-border services of psychologists, to give psychologists an opportunity to gain continuing and specialized education throughout europe. instead, even though europsy represents the european qualification standard for psychologists the latter are giving no indications concerning the teaching of community psychology. all of which is bringing universities to reduce and sometimes even cancel the teaching of community psychology in order to be recognized from the europsy. the efpa (european federation of psychologist’s associations, see http://www.efpa.eu/) the organization ruling europsy procedure has also proposed a community psychology task force. european association of community psychology and various representatives of national associations are part of this taskforce. this represents an opportunity to collaborate with the europsy project and work on the inclusion of community psychology in university curricular. in this light, the actions of the australian colleagues are an encouragement to all of us as european community psychologists. microsoft word burton-v4i2-20130522.docx global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 in and against social policy mark burton manchester metropolitan university mark burton is an independent scholar-activist and also visiting professor, manchester metropolitan university. author note: some of this material was presented at the 4th international congress on community psychology, barcelona, spain, june 2012 keywords: social policy, critical perspectives.   recommended citation: burton, m. (2013). in and against social policy. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(2), xx-xx. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 in and against social policy abstract in order to consider the potential relationships between community psychology and social policy it is necessary to consider the contradictory nature of social policy in the modern state. following the tradition of critical social policy analysis established through the work of british writers on critical social policy from the late 1970s onwards, social policies will be considered as a hybrid between the role of the state in the service of capital and the realisation of emancipatory struggles by a variety of subjects (workers, women, disabled people, ethnic minorities, and so on). community psychology also reflects contradictions in the societies in which it is practised, with a similarly dual character both responding to emancipatory interests and at times transmitting the processes of control and recuperation by dominant social interests. putting together these two critically constituted elements, 'social policy' and 'community psychology', implies a continual process of reflection where the interests of the disadvantaged are ('analectically') kept central. i will explore some opportunities and traps of the social policy process through the experience of leading a demonstration project that piloted changes in disability policy in the uk, and as an activist trying to influence city policies on climate change mitigation. the relative autonomy of system levels will be explored in relation to the scope for and limits to change. some practical tools for maintaining an ethical clarity will be identified. keywords: social policy, critical perspectives.   resumen al considerar las relaciones potenciales entre la psicología comunitaria y la política social, es necesario tener en cuenta la naturaleza contradictoria de la política social en el estado moderno. siguiendo la tradición del análisis de la política social en la obra de escritores británicos sobre la política social crítica a partir de 1981, las políticas sociales se consideran como un híbrido entre el papel del estado al servicio del capital y la realización de las luchas emancipatorias por parte de diversos sujetos (trabajadores, mujeres, personas con discapacidad, minorías étnicas, etc.). la psicología comunitaria también refleja las contradicciones de las sociedades donde se practica, teniendo un doble carácter similar, porque tanto responde a intereses emancipatorios, como en ocasiones transmite los procesos de control y recuperación por los intereses sociales dominantes. unir estos dos elementos, la política social y la psicología comunitaria, ambos constituidos de manera crítica, implica un proceso constante de reflexión, donde los intereses de las personas afectadas son colocados 'analecticamente', en un lugar central. voy a explorar algunas oportunidades y trampas del proceso de la política social a través del ejemplo de mi experiencia como líder de un proyecto piloto que puso a prueba cambios en la política de discapacidad en el reino unido, y como activista pretendiendo influir en la política de nuestra ciudad, en la mitigación del cambio climático. se explora la autonomía relativa respecto del sistema, en torno a las oportunidades y límites para el cambio. identificaré algunas herramientas prácticas para mantener la claridad ética. palabras claves: psicología comunitaria; políticas sociales; perspectiva crítica introduction in order to consider the potential relationships between community psychology and social policy it is first necessary to consider the contradictory nature of each in relation to the modern state. it is worth noting that the nature of the state itself has been the focus of considerable controversy in theoretical analysis (for the classical marxian debate, see harvey, 1985; miliband, 1969, 1970; poulantzas, 1969; therborn, 1980). the view taken here is that to talk of the state is to describe a set of relations and processes, whereby social and economic interests compete for influence in the state nexus, and then exert influence on the rest of the society, using the resources that the state then affords them. it is the dominant social interests that exercise the most influence, but the process is not automatic, given that it is a field for contestation, and that the state enjoys a degree of relative autonomy. however it is not possible to generalise about the extent to which state power reflects a particular dominant social interest, without being explicit about the particular conjuncture of forces and relations that apply in a concrete context in time and space. we know that different states follow somewhat different models, and also that states from time to time undergo crises of legitimacy whereby the concordance between state power and the dominant social interests becomes dislocated, what gramsci discussed as a crisis of hegemony (gramsci, 1971). social policy and the state it is through the governmental organs of the state that social policy is formulated, agreed, operationalised and implemented. there are several potential levels, which differ somewhat in different countries and regions. british writers on critical social policy (e.g. gough, 1979, 2000, 2008; jessop, 2003; mishra, 1999) from the end of the 1970s onwards, following o'connor (1973), see social policies in terms of the interplay between the role of the state in the service global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 of capital and the realisation of emancipatory struggles by a variety of subjects (workers, women, disabled people, ethnic minorities, and so on). in this view the state reproduces the interests of the ruling class, but it does not do this mechanically or deterministically. rather, it is also responsive to what can be termed subaltern pressures, typically in the form of struggle and pressure from social movements that represent the interests of labour, women, ethnic groups, disabled people and so on. the state then is a site of conflict but also of negotiation and the resolution of conflict, both on a 'grand scale', as in the post-war settlement between capital and labour after the 1939-45 war, and at a more particular level, for example in the reforms to the mental health system over the post-war period. a consequence of this understanding of social policy is that concrete examples are inevitably messy, difficult to 'decode' in terms of the interests in play and the likely consequences of implementation. burton and kagan's (2006) analysis of policy for intellectually disabled people in the uk demonstrates this. that policy framework (department of health, 2001) involved an emphasis on employment, personalisation through market mechanisms such as personal budgets, but also an emphasis on the responsibility of a wider set of actors than the traditional health and social care sector to facilitate the inclusion and participation of intellectually disabled people in community places and everyday life. the policy stems from a blending of the social model of disability (barnes, 1998; chappell, goodley, & lawthom, 2001; goodley, 2001), produced through the organised action of disabled people, academics, family members, and some groups of professionals, with the neoliberal imperatives of marketisation and the conversion of social needs into sources of corporate profit (lister, 2005; pollock, 2004; whitfield, 2006; whitfield, d, 2010). this 'unholy alliance' was cemented by a romantic imaginary of intellectually disabled people and a downplaying of the collective dimensions of community life and participation. this policy mix did lead to some positive openings, including the establishment of multi-stakeholder boards to oversee implementation in each municipality, which included intellectually disabled people and family members. while this could and did lead to silencing through cooptation in some areas, in others it opened up policy and provision to improved public scrutiny and introduced new sources of imagination and challenge to the welfare bureaucracy. but the romantic simplification of the task of social inclusion, together with the increased reliance on the for-profit sector meant that some people who were difficult to include (because of the complexity of their needs) were excluded to congregate settings that on occasion had standards poor enough to allow abusive regimes and a national scandal (oakes, 2012). community psychology and the state community psychology too reflects contradictions in the societies in which it is practised, with a similarly dual character, both responding to emancipatory interests and at times transmitting the processes of control and recuperation by dominant social interests. at times it can unwittingly transmit or mediate the processes of control and recuperation by dominant social interests. examples are the promotion and facilitation of ‘self-help’ or the role of ‘civil society’ and third sector organizations in a context of welfare cuts and the state’s negligence of human need. yet community psychology at times plays a role in direct support of subaltern pressures for social justice and reform, facilitating social struggles and the emancipation of communities and oppressed and excluded groups. the distinction between ameliorative and transformative interventions (e.g., prilleltensky, 2001) pertains to this dual nature of community psychology. it can be difficult to disentangle these two tendencies, since in practice most community psychology interventions, like many social policies contain contradictory (recuperative and liberatory) elements. it is therefore important to understand that the processes by which social interests are reproduced do not form a mechanical causal chain between power and praxis, but are mediated socially in a variety of ways, symbolically, ideologically and through human interaction, which is itself characterized by both conflict and consensus. social policy, community psychology, state and society in dynamic interaction putting together these two critically constituted elements, 'social policy' and 'community psychology', requires an understanding of the processes of reproduction and transformation at play between a) the state and the power interests within it, b) social policy, at whichever level of the state system it is articulated (at local, regional, national or transnational governmental levels), and c) community psychological praxis, in relation to d) the interests of the affected, that is to say those who are typically the objects of social policy but who might be active subjects in community psychological praxis and sources of those subaltern pressures that act to transform and improve the response of the state to human need. in order that community psychology does not unwittingly become a tool of capital or other dominant interests we suggest the following: 1. an understanding of the structural and systemic power of capital and its ideological disguises. 2. a continual process of reflection, hand in hand with the affected: i.e. the “analectical” interrogation of policy and of community psychological concepts, techniques and methods, by and with those who are oppressed global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 and/or excluded. this concept derives from the systematisation by dussel (1985; see burton, in press; burton & flores, 2011) of the process of critical correction, through dialogue, of concepts, techniques and methods that arise from dominant (e.g eurocentric, oligarchic, technocratic) practices of social science, government, administration, etc. 3. making the effort to join up learning across contexts, projects and iterations of the policy process (kagan & burton, 2000). 4. taking opportunities to contribute to the formulation of policy, especially via action research or piloting of new approaches, while always being alert to their malign consequences and the corruption of principled interventions. the remainder of the article explores the above conceptualisation of the problem through two concrete experiences. both took place in the same period in the same city in the uk. the first builds on the discussion of disability policy above by means of an initiative to improve the processes and outcomes in the transition to adulthood of young people who are intellectually disabled. the second concerns a community psychological analysis of the relationship between environmentalists and local government (the “local state”) in relation to policy on climate change. in both the author was an actor and the narrative is a rational reconstruction that draws on documentation, personal notes, memory and discussion with other actors. example 1: transition to adulthood for intellectually disabled people becoming an adult is often a difficult time for a young person and their family. uncertainty about the future combines with the need to navigate and negotiate a variety of transitions: from school to work or more education, to greater independence in travel, relationships, a changing body and health and so on. but for a young person who is intellectually disabled, and their close family, all these passages are complicated by the need for help and support to both navigate and negotiate the changes and to make use of the new opportunities if and when they are accessed. in the context of a service system that is not usually responsive and creative enough in presenting information, facilitating growth and change, and offering necessary but sensitive support and care, the experience often becomes very bewildering and stressful; low expectations are often transmitted and embodied in the procedures followed and outcomes are often poor. this is very much the experience that intellectually disabled people, their families and their other allies recount, when they have the chance to explain how it is for them. the getting a life programme was an initiative of the uk government's office for disability issues. it ran from april 2008 to the end of march 2011. it was sponsored by four government departments: the department of health, the department for work and pensions, the department for innovation, universities and skills and the department for children, schools and families (now the department for education). this joining up of policy was in itself innovative. the initiative was conceived as a set of local demonstration projects, or pilots, in which active experimentation with new approaches would take place and lessons be learned prior to scaling up the innovations both locally and nationally. as the national programme got under way it increasingly focussed on how to help young people get (supported) employment. in manchester that was an important aspect since employment brings a number of other benefits (income, relationships, identity, status, learning and development, reduced reliance on others), but we worked on a number of other things too. table 1 (column 1) shows the goals of the local project. the project was managed by the author, then the head of the learning disability partnership, a virtual organisation based with local council's department for adult care but including sections of the local resources of the national health service. however the project entailed facilitating change beyond the limits of my his formal authority. a project manager (the post filled by a series of secondment from other organisations involved with the project) was responsible for day-to-day work and a board consisting of representatives of partner organisations, including activists from carers' and disabled people's organisations, oversaw the project. the project made progress on the majority of the formal aims (goal 2 was an exception). it did not attempt to change the overall system immediately but to demonstrate possibility and best practice with a sample of young people at various stages of the 'transition experience', especially through the use of individually tailored person centred action plans (goal 1). however, the project also created a change in the shared understandings of the participants and their organisations, something that has set the scene for a more ambitious follow-on programme, this time backed with government money (the project under discussion was based on using local resources more effectively and although advice was provided by central government, no financial assistance was given). the project was notable for the almost serendipitous way it fomented other related initiatives and attracted resources from sectors beyond the 'traditional' and specialist disability sectors. an example was a supported employment programme for significantly disabled young people based in a local general hospital and funded by the local further education (young adults) college, the hospital itself and an employment agency, with short term contributions global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 from the university (accommodation) and the local council (initial funding for preparation before the formal start). however, despite the successes of the project, it is possible to make a balance sheet of its successes in relation to its limitations, in relation to the overarching policy and ideological context. this is provided in table 1. table 1: outcomes of getting a life in context. goal successes challenges limit factors local (municipal) systemic (national) 1) every young person has a personal plan that everyone agrees with and works towards. • support structures created inside and outside the formal system, including led by families. • practices beginning to change in most agencies. • better plans for a proportion of people. • acceptance of new approach for next phase of policy implementation. • not yet available to all young people. • not always embedded into routine practices. • there are still separate agency plans rather than one shared plan updated and followed by all. • multiple demands of agencies limit interagency collaboration. • weak inter-agency coordination. • professional distrust of the voice of young people and families. • multiple agencies with diverse aims and governance. • the system is not designed to promote individually tailored solutions. 2) services to be planned and funded before people need them. • use of individualised funding helps circumvent rigidity of established provision. • high quality and effective inter-organisational innovations with different functions. • development of a methodology to match provision to need. • information on cohorts is not effectively shared to inform funding and planning decisions. • continued discontinuity at age 18. • pre-funded services remain inflexible regarding new aspirations and needs. • lack of planning and commissioning functions in some sectors and limited remit in others. • historical assumptions (expectations as to what's possible) based on past practices. • 'market failure': the market model deemphasises populationbased strategic planning, especially for minority /devalued / excluded groups. • separate national policy frameworks for children and adults, including entitlement criteria. 3) establish new ways of working and new responsibilities across the children / adults division. • new team established, working across the age divide. • reliance on temporary staff. • slow to adopt person centred inclusive philosophy. • overload of work. slow development of collaborative working with other agencies. • recruitment restrictions in response to budget cuts. • overload of public service resources / problems of boundary management. • dominance of bureaucratic model of care planning. • government's cuts to welfare system, in context of structural crisis of capitalism. • mutual isolation of policy areas. • ideology of rationing of support and care: system shift to “crisis gatekeeping” mode. 4) spread positive information about how young people can 'get a life'. • most success concerned employment: establishment of highly effective demonstration programme with particular organisations. • employer engagement directly with young disabled people. • clarity established with regard to necessary steps from school age onwards (“transition to employment pathway”). • only a minority of young people in supported employment. • review outcomes not routinely linked to a work future. • still need to publicise images of publicity more widely. • the (evidence-based) transition to employment pathway not being followed consistently. • a relative lack of emphasis on non-work related but inclusive outcomes. • lack of understanding ot the real needs and possibilities: torn between non-specialist senior management's relatively romantic and instrumental understanding of inclusion in employment and low expectations of some specialists. • government emphasis on employment inclusion motivated by policy of cutting benefits does not accurately identify the real support needs of severely impaired young people. • domination by a 'calvinist' work agenda (see aim 7. below). 5) strengthen the voice of young people and their families. • transition support group established and now run by parents. • aggregation and analysis of views from various self-advocates' • lack of personnel to collect and analyse information. • top-down policy and strategy formulation including a 'performance global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 goal successes challenges limit factors local (municipal) systemic (national) • a 'young people's parliament' established and linked to non-disabled youth. • parent carer network established. groups to inform strategic change. • not learning in a systematic way from young people's experience. • privileging of verbal communication excludes those with limited speech or language who nevertheless live experiences. • paternalistic 'we know best' culture. • strategic planning not set up to seriously use person-based information from 'the affected'. culture'. non needsbased drivers and criteria dominate so inquirybased approaches like the present programme are constrained by the overall policy mix. 6) get people jobs and focus on employment as a feasible goal for disabled young people (see also 4) above). • youth supported employment project (ysep) (saturday and after school jobs) established with temporary funding. • ongoing funding secured for supported employment/intern-ship programme (referred to in 4 above). • co-location of special education provision with mainstream schools and colleges –> more local access to support and vocational courses and inclusive options. • using funding for short breaks (respite care) used to fund jobcoaching. • ysep didn't receive permanent funding. • bureaucratic sluggishness and rules. • recession leading to reduction in supply of paid employment. • employers with reduced capacity to provide support to disabled workers. 7) learn from the project • findings fed back to government through regular meetings. • findings integrated locally into next phase (special education and disability pathfinder (department for education & department of health, 2012). • project lessons remain relatively marginal although spreading. • other agendas dominate in a time of cuts. • other agendas dominate in a time of cuts. • 'market personalisation' – tendency to regard personal budgets as the main tool for securing responsive and flexible support in context of neoliberal orthodoxy, so other lessons not likely to be assimilated. • “welfare calvinism” emphasis on getting welfare recipients off benefits and into (often poorly paid) employment. little room for highly intensive support models to support the transition to employment for severely disabled people. the analysis of successes and remaining challenges in the context of local and national policy contexts indicates that as in many such projects, some successes were achieved. some disabled young people gained access to options that would not have happened without the project locally or the programme nationally. however, these successes were fragmented and some of the difficult challenges remain– for example strategically planning resources on the basis of an emerging and changing pattern of needs and preferences. moreover, the dominant models mean that the system is already biased in favour of certain 'solutions' while some of the more collective planning models, developed for example with family activists, are less likely to be adopted on a widespread basis, maintaining the ideology of 'we know best' despite a rhetoric of consumerism. an example is the aim of personalisation: tailoring support systems to the individual's needs and circumstances, rather than expecting the person to fit in with a predetermined support option. this aim, however, in dominant policy is defined as, or reduced to, the spending of personal budgets: a market, or consumer, model, as if everything can be bought. finally the cuts to public services, a result in turn of the recession that began in 2008, and the longer term global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 recurrent crisis of capitalism, cast a dark cloud over any attempts to make a system more attuned to the needs and aspirations of one of society's most disadvantaged groups. indeed, the city council in question has had its budget cut by 25% due to the tory-liberal coalition government's austerity policy, disproportionately applied to the districts that voted labour. while these reductions might be a spur to more creative, community-based solutions, at this level they merely send the system into crisis gatekeeping mode, reducing radically its aspirations for inclusion and citizenship for severely disadvantaged groups. while the development of supported employment does mean that reliance on publicly funded provision is not necessarily the only option for young people reaching adulthood, it must be understood that this model is not cost-free as it requires a public subsidy, even though overall savings can be made in comparison to traditional provision (british association for supported employment, n.d.). nevertheless, the experience of the project indicates some room for manoeuvre. social policy is not entirely determined by the most powerful interests through the state, although they do exert a powerful influence. the task is to find ways of maximising the space for creative action, hand in hand with oppressed and excluded groups. the getting a life programme gave us such an opportunity to demonstrate a more sensitive way of planning with and for young people in order that as adults they might indeed 'get a life'. some of those lessons have been learned and integrated into the next iteration of the national policy process (department for education, 2012), even in the context of the present government's attack on welfare, and the contribution of the voices of parents and young people who are disabled has probably been a significant influence. figure 1 maps these conclusions. figure 1 summarises the material in table 1 and the text, demonstrating how such a project generates a space for experimentation with innovative and responsive social policy, a space where systemic enabling factors and constraints are played out. i use the term “intellectually disabled person/people” as the least worst way of identifying and referring to this group. this follows the social model that sees disability as not residing in the person but a social relation affecting those with impairments. this differs from typical north american usage, 'people 1 figure 1: analytic framework for contextual impact analysis of getting a life. a space is open to pilot innovation and challenge system limits. limiting factors • multiple demands on agencies • fragmented welfare system • professional socialisation / distance • lack of population-based strategic planning / reliance on market • “market personalisation”: promotion of individualistic solutions • welfare cuts / residualisation of welfare • ‘welfare calvinism’: cut benefits / get people into work – eclipse of complexity of need. aims: •an agreed and active plan for each disabled young person •plan and fund support arrangements before they are needed •establish new ways of working across adult/child divide •show how disabled young people can live life to the full – including working •get people jobs •strengthen voice and influence of young people and their families • share learning from the project enabling factors • perception that things don’t work • legal and policy focus on rights and anti-discrimination • pressure and activism and experience of families and other change agents • research evidence • policy of “joined up government” conclusions: • demonstrated a new approach • built a consensus • need for high aspirations • place in our community • adult citizens • whatever their disability • paid employment is a realistic option • everyone is different • different levels and types of support • importance of person centred plans • focus on what support the person needs • personalised planning • individualised funding (as one tool) • need to understand the needs of the population • plan and commission global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 with disabilities' which carries the implication that disability is an essential property of the impaired person. however the qualifier 'intellectual' does confuse the present usage, reintroducing a reference to the impairment, but improving the term would make for a longer and clumsy construction. example 2: climate change policy in a large city. to continue the exploration of the relations between social policy and community psychology in the context of the state, we will turn to a very different focus, that of the construction of policies for the mitigation of climate change at the municipal level. my involvement in this case was the rather uncomfortable one of being an activist trying to influence policies in the city administration that (until march, 2012) employed me, albeit on long-term secondment from the national health service, as a relatively senior (4th tier) manager: the learning disability partnership at its height employed 650 staff, two thirds of them local government employees. the intervention was not a community psychological one as such, but methods used for the facilitation of meetings of the social movement organisation involved would be familiar to many community psychologists, and techniques such as stakeholder analysis were also used. reflections made on group processes were also informed by social psychological understandings. it is also worthy of study as it illuminates some of the issues arising when social movements interact with state actors in the policy process. in february 2008, manchester city council (mcc) adopted a set of climate change principles which committed manchester to becoming a low carbon city by 2020 (mcc, 2008). this would mean that “manchester will be on track to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to a level consistent with keeping global temperature increases to below 2°c above preindustrial levels and will have adapted its economy, society and infrastructure accordingly – both to cope with the effects of inevitable climate change and to mitigate future emissions.” (mcc, 2009a). the 17 principles can be summarised in terms of 5 themes: • involves a wide range of partner organisations in direct action to reduce emissions and disseminate best practice, with the council in a leadership role; • enables ‘decoupling’ of economic growth from emissions growth; • helps to mitigate the practical and financial consequences to households and businesses of switching to lower carbon patterns of consumption of energy and other goods; • grows manchester’s skills, expertise and capacity base in energy and environmental technologies and builds climate change awareness into mainstream learning; • motivates widespread personal behaviour change towards lower-impact modes of living (summary from mcc, 2009a). the following january the council published a follow-up report, climate change call to action (mcc, 2009a). this report was produced as part of a uk government initiative whereby manchester would be one of three large cities with climate change action plans. the report, whose writing had been outsourced to a london based consultancy firm, received a cold reaction from the local environmental movement. it was considered weak and in some areas vague while there were some significant silences, not least the role of aviation in greenhouse gas emissions (the city council had a 55 per cent stake in manchester international airport). as a response, a coalition of activists was formed: “call to real action”. some were active members of local green organisations (friends of the earth and the green party in particular) but many were not affiliated to formal groupings. one activist, with a background in climate camp activism and current involvement in producing a fortnightly local newsletter on climate change and who has maintained an independent stance in the local political context, took a central role in bringing together the coalition. the goals of the coalition were to, 1) produce an alternative vision of what the council and the people of manchestercan do about climate change: reducing emissions and creating resilience. 2) produce a report, at least as detailed as call to action, by 31st march, 2009 3) adopt a maximally open and transparent process. call to real action proceeded through large, participative and open meetings and workshops which gathered and refined ideas. these were then written up by working groups focussing on various sections of the report (transport, aviation, food, business and economic development, and so on). these separate sections were then collectively edited (using a virtual platform) into a consolidated report, ready by the deadline. the process was in many ways a model of how to produce policy collectively, from a social movement. i should note that i only became involved at the large workshop event on march 7th. i had been working independently on a related project (burton, 2009) that focussed on the regional level and which had a wider scope than climate change mitigation and adaptation. my role with call to real action was that of contributing to the writing and collective editing of the alternative report and participation in the follow-up work of the coalition until it was wound up. the final 62 page report, also called “call to real action” (call to real action, 2009) was published on global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 time and presented to the council. it emphasised the need for actions that were sufficiently clear and strong, that were based on scientific knowledge about the city's emissions (including embedded, or outsourced ones) with measurable targets, that entailed a re-engineering of the city's economy and a rethinking of its economic strategy (based on the pursuit of economic growth), and that covered the 'no-go area' of aviation and the airport. it also emphasised the critical importance of engaging with manchester’s diverse communities both to communicate the proposals and also to develop them further with wide ownership. it suggested that the council should bring forward publication of its plan to before the international climate change congress in copenhagen, that november, to encourage other areas to take similarly bold steps. after some hesitation the council responded, to the surprise of the coalition, favourably. they invited representatives in for discussion and embarked on a participative process for constructing its climate change action plan. this proceeded from a participative workshop and then by working groups (i was a member of one of them) consisting of council officers, hired consultants (this time locally based), representatives from partner organisations (health services, development companies, universities, etc.) and social movement activists. the plan that emerged: “manchester a certain future“ (mcc, 2009b) was considerably stronger than the one that had looked likely to emerge following the appearance of “call to action” in january. the council took seriously the need for multilateral involvement and it set up a multistakeholder steering group (for the plan) and an environment advisory panel, of which i was a member, to advise the council's officers and elected members concerned with this topic. a certain future was launched by the then uk minister for energy and climate change, ed miliband, at an event chaired by one of the participants in call to real action. a commitment was made to total carbon footprint measurement (an important issue for economies like the uk where the process of deindustrialisation and outsourcing of production to production zones in the global south has reduced direct emissions – within the uk – while the total attributable emissions have increased rapidly. however, as with the other project it is important to make a balance of what has been achieved. this is presented in table 2 where the proposals of the three reports, call to action, call to real action, and a certain future are compared. it is clear that despite the adoption of some proposals from call to real action, the overall shape of the report is little changed. to illustrate, there remain two “elephants in the room”, economic growth and aviation. the overall economic model of global competition for economic growth is unchanged and the illusion is maintained, despite the evidence that economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions can almost certainly not be de-coupled (jackson, 2009; næss & høyer, 2009; victor, 2011). finally, it can be noted that the welcome to activists has acted to silence some of them as they have become implicated and embedded in the official programme. this seems to have happened in two ways. firstly some (former?) activists are now members of the city's a certain future steering group and thereby have responsibility for the implementation of the plan, which despite its fundamental shortcomings is one of the most ambitious nationally (an indication of how far away we are from the policy implementation necessary for climate safety). assuming a corporate responsibility tends to engender the auto-censorship of dissent. secondly, between 2009 and 2012, a wider grouping of activists became members of the council's environmental advisory panel. this did not function very well, certainly not as a way of effectively advising the council on environmental matters. the presence of such a forum though, could be interpreted as a “pressure valve” for criticism. as marcuse (1965, p. 134) put it, “the tolerance which was the great achievement of the liberal era is still professed and (with strong qualifications) practiced, while the economic and political process is subjected to an ubiquitous and effective administration in accordance with the predominant interests. the result is an objective contradiction between the economic and political structure on the one side, and the theory and practice of toleration on the other. table 2: comparison of the three climate change reports. call to action, january, 2009 call to real action, march, 2009 a certain future, december, 2009 (mcc, 2009a) the report emphasised, 1) strengthening capacity for climate change action at a city-regional (greater manchester) level, with a focus on contributing towards economic advantage and prosperity 2) delivering climate change action in (call to real action, 2009) the report made a large number of proposals, too many to list but it emphasised 1. the need for bold actions and avoidance of more demonstration projects: “the time has passed when iconic or exemplary projects serve any useful purpose .... for manchester to build an isolated urban turbine, or another low(mcc, 2009b) the report set two overall goals: 1) to reduce the city of manchester’s emissions of co2 by 41% by 2020, from 2005 levels. this equates to a reduction from current levels of 3.2 million tonnes per annum to less than two million; it also equates global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 call to action, january, 2009 call to real action, march, 2009 a certain future, december, 2009 the city of manchester with focus on 5 areas: 3) “get our own house in order:” report on council's own carbon emissions [already required by central government]. 4) promoting business and the city centre with emphasis on growth in highvalue, knowledge intensive businesses, building on the university sector and low carbon opportunities. 5) physical development and regeneration. maximising competitive advantage in the property sector. 6) engaging manchester residents in climate change action. to understand people’s circumstances and understanding of climate change and help elicit a shift to low carbon choices and behaviours. 7) mainstreaming climate change action into services. largely focusing on procurement and reducing need for travel. nine “catalytic actions” would provide impetus, begin to build transferable skills and knowledge – ‘learning by doing’ – and show leadership on some of the biggest challenges and opportunities climate change poses to the city. 1. to identify trailblazing major regeneration neighbourhoods in which to develop internationally recognised exemplars for socially, economically and environmentally sustainable place-making. 2. retrofitting manchester’s civic heritage [the town hall complex – a building with poor energy conversation characteristics]. 3. establish a business alliance for climate change action. [concretely a business summit would be called with an international speaker]. 4. low carbon energy infrastructure. do feasibility study of establishing a manchesterwide energy services company ... to supply low carbon and renewable energy across greater manchester. [action already planned by association of greater manchester authorities]. 5. low carbon communities. to encourage neighbourhood or community groups to identify opportunities across the city in which to pilot transformational low carbon communities. [concretely, it was proposed to run a symposium on neighbourhood climate change action.] 6. a climate-change ready local development framework, building on a commitment to repopulating the 'urban core' and achieving a more compact urban geography so that future economic growth is more sustainable. 7. the manchester prize: a prize to be awarded biannually to a range of designs for sustainable living at different scales. 8. greening the city: i-trees. a proposal for long-term investment carbon demonstration house, can have no effect on the citizenry or on advancing the zerocarbon agenda. activity of an altogether greater order of magnitude is called for”. 2. the need to adequately fund interventions to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions (citing work by the government's advisor on economics of climate change that a stimulus of some £m400 would be required). 3. the need to tackle directly the issue of economic growth: “the industrial revolution, born in manchester, launched the relentless growth of our economies with a reliance on the ever-greater use of coal, gas and oil. we know that we cannot go on like this. if manchester wishes to be a part of the post-industrial revolution, then it will have to challenge its own habits, hopes and vested interests.” 4. the need to tackle the emissions from flights into and out of manchester: “the council should stop expanding manchester airport. not shut it down, just halt its growth; cap emissions at manchester airport. mag can set an annually reducing cap on the co2 levels from the flights that it facilitates. it will be up to the airlines how they can accommodate this regulation.” “we recognise that the council is a stakeholder in the airport and this has up to now been a significant plank in the council and regional economic strategy. but let us be honest here and acknowledge that sadly there is no such thing as a green airport. the pretence that there can be undermines not only the catalytic actions but the whole call to action. we call for leadership, courage and genuinely new thinking in recognising the unsustainability of this approach.” “whilst the city council talk about strengthening local neighbourhoods, in practice they are too easily seduced by megadevelopments such as the recently-proposed airport city, which will encourage longerdistance commuting and undermine any carbon savings elsewhere.” “aviation: when you are in a hole, stop digging. freeze the expansion plans for airport city.” 5. the importance of adopting a bio-regional perspective that went beyond the conurbation and included parts of the rural hinterland in order to maximise options for food and energy production and to reduce unnecessary travel into the city. 6. getting its own house in order. a variety of proposals suggested how the council could do more to lead by example, they included, 1) makes a public commitment that its members and officers will, if travelling within 300 miles, avoid flying.... 2) explores teleconferencing as an alternative to long-haul travel. 3) discourages the use of car travel to and from work by its employees, by creating an aboveinflation charge for its car parking, that ratchets upwards. this money should be ... used to encourage more environmentally friendly means of transport. 4) institutes a “meat-free monday” in all its facilities, and encourages its partner organisations to do the same. meat is a major contributor to greenhouse gases. 7. committing to exceeding targets in government and (then thought to be pending) international agreements. to a reduction in per capita emissions from 7.3 tonnes to 4.3 tonnes per head. 2) to engage all individuals, neighbourhoods and organisations in manchester in a process of cultural change that embeds ‘lowcarbon thinking’ into the lifestyles and operations of the city. over 150 actions were identified with varying degrees of specificity, covering the five themes of living, working, moving, growing and adapting. notably, the proposals were seen to be the responsibilities of a variety of organisations, public, private and ngos. the approach now emphasised engagement and participation and a multi-sectoral steering group was established to oversee implementation in partnership with the council's environmental strategy performance board and a new environmental advisory panel. the report also committed to measurement on the basis of the city's total carbon footprint which includes all the greenhouse gas emissions, including those from aviation (now known to be around 17%) and those embedded in everything we buy. however, the report 1) continued to assume that economic growth can be made sustainable, now in denial of the available evidence to the contrary. indeed the city's strategy of competition in the global economy remained undisturbed. 2) using the argument that there is no internationally agreed means to apportion aviation emissions, excluded aviation from the action plan. 3) remained unclear as to how a broader movement in support of climate change action would be built. 4) continued to lack a bioregional perspective and continued to propose some small scale local actions that would be too small and slow to impact on the emissions problem. 5) was vague on how the 150 actions would lead to the desired emissions. in other words there was a gap in the theory of action and many assumptions were unstated. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 call to action, january, 2009 call to real action, march, 2009 a certain future, december, 2009 in greening oxford road, the busiest road corridor in the north west and a major gateway to the city centre. to establish a living laboratory, to study the impact of cc and adaptation interventions. 9. a green airport. an airport with zero carbon ground emissions. 8. a general emphasis on increasing local production, particularly of food. 9. a set of alternative catalytic actions was proposed, under the headings: economy, energy, engagement, food, international, planning, resilience, transport, water. 10. a very strong emphasis on public engagement, consultation, participation and the collaborative formulation of policy and action. this emphasised transparency and openness, using clear english, multiple channels of communication, public debates, the funding of local groups and networks in the green sector, and the encouragement of new ideas. in this second example, while it is not possible to be precise about the causal linkages, the anti-systemic movement, call to real action, was successful within certain limits in altering the city's approach to climate change adaptation. specifically, the plan produced following our intervention, and with our participation, was more ambitious and comprehensive than the previous document. its commitment to total carbon footprint measurement was an example of this, and this has since led to the production of very useful data (berners-lee, hatter, & hoolohan, 2011). the other major change was the very participative and open way in which the plan was produced: as one of the group members commented at the time: “they liked the way we worked but not what we had to say”. and this was accurate. while some movement was produced, and manchester has a better climate change action plan than it would have had without call to real action's intervention, it did not prove possible to mount an effective challenge to the two major ideological, but very real obstacles: the dogma of (“sustainable”) economic growth, and the privileged, central role of manchester international airport in the economy of the city and region. the former problem is now the focus of a new process of policy writing and campaigning by some former members of call to real action (see burton & steady state manchester, 2012), in the context of the current economic crisis. lessons from the episode described here are being taken into account in this new initiative. it should be noted that while this section has focussed on the linkages between the local state (local government), policy and a subaltern movement, the entire episode was also nested within a broader context at national and indeed international levels, again predicated on the assumptions of sustainable, or green growth and the precedence of the economy over the environment and society (for an alternative economic approach see daly & farley, 2011). an example was the way the uk government ignored the evidence-based recommendations of its sustainable development commission (jackson, 2009) to the effect that it was not feasible to reconcile economic growth with ecological and climate safety. similarly the entire post-kyoto process of international negotiation over climate-change mitigation (copenhagen, puebla, rio, doha) assumes that converting emissions and ecosystem services to tradeable commodities, within the goal of continued 'sustainable growth' is a desirable way forward (for alternative perspectives see lohmann, 2009; plurinational state of bolivia, 2011; solón, 2011; tricarico, & gerebizza, 2012). discussion and conclusions the writer's role was different in the two case studies presented here. the first, disability case was closest to the usual role of the community psychologist, although here i had rather more position power as a senior manager in the adult care system than might be typical of community psychologists. nevertheless, because this work went across a number of different agencies and systems my formal authority was certainly limited. in the second, ecological case, i had no formal position at all, but was one of a number of activists in a loose coalition: nevertheless i was able to call on my knowledge and skills as a community social psychologist and navigator of local government bureaucracy. the difference in roles in the two cases might suggest some caution in drawing conclusions. however, in each case i was a participant observer of a wider process which is the primary concern of this article: the interplay between the state, systemic power interests and pressure from subaltern actors. taken together, then, the two examples indicate that, it is possible to establish collaborative processes to debate, experiment with, and draft policy with state actors. both cases demonstrate sustained engagement and collaborative work exerting an influence on the content of policy. moreover, in such situations there is the possibility of policies becoming more suited to the needs of the people the policies will affect (disabled young people and their families, and current and future global populations, respectively). this is in large part a reflection of the relative autonomy that exists at the level of the state, and its constituent parts, including the 'local state', and which also extends to the ambit of policy. however, there are clear constraints imposed by global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 power interests at a variety of levels and these in turn reflect the struggle for power and influence in and over the state apparatus. in the disability case, those interests were manifest in the neoliberal premises that favoured a consumer-market model for personalising supports while sidelining collective, social, mutualistic approaches such as co-production (needham, & carr, 2009) or local area coordination (bartnik, & chalmers, 2007). in the climate change case, the dominant interests set limitations by ruling out of consideration two fundamentally critical questions, the economic growth / accumulation – global competition model for economic strategy, and more specifically the impact of aviation and the growth of the local international airport. in both cases there was also evidence of the silencing of activists, or at least of dissident views as a byproduct of their involvement and incorporation in the policy process. as such, policy innovations can become distorted, with over-emphasis on issues close to the interests of the dominant groups, at the expense of the interests of the subaltern groups (who in some cases can be a majority in population terms, as in climate change). community psychologists can therefore helpfully see their role as being both “in and against” social policy (london edinburgh weekend return group, 1979), working with the system but owing allegiance to those affected by the system rather than to the system itself. this involves playing the role of organic intellectual (gramsci, 1971) or engaged scholar (lykes, 2000), which should both subsume and extend the more familiar role definitions of scientist practitioner, reflective practitioner, responsible professional, etc. the lessons for community psychology practice can be summarised in terms of four postulates: 1) it is possible to facilitate worthwhile change in policy and its implementation, and in some circumstances these changes can be considerable, for example when we replaced the large institutions housing thousands of intellectually disabled people and developed inclusive community living. 2) but change will always be constrained, and at times will be severely compromised. in such circumstances there is a real danger that involvement in the process leads to the legitimation of something inadequate to the need, or worse. 3) it is rarely possible to know in advance how things will turn out. however an understanding of the interests at play, in the specific context, can help guide us. 4) to avoid losing our way and becoming incorporated in the game of the dominant classes, it is absolutely essential to keep the interests of the affected central (dussel, 1998; martín-baró, 1985, 1996), strengthened where possible by direct engagement and listening (in all senses of the word) so that a practical yet critical approach can be maintained. manchester community psychologists have used a number of practical tools and analytic frameworks for this, including boundary critique (kagan, caton, amin, & choudry, 2004; midgley, munlo, & brown, 1998; watson & foster-fishman, 2012), stakeholder analysis (kagan, burton, duckett, lawthom, & siddiquee, 2011: 151-3) prefigurative action research (kagan & burton, 2000), polarity management (johnson, 1992) and a tool for plotting interventions in terms of their scope and extent as a way of analysing the ameliorative-transformative balance (kagan, burton, duckett, lawthom, & siddiquee, 2011: 341-2). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 references barnes, c. 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(2010). global auction of public assets. nottingham: spokesman books. microsoft word scra minigrant-001.docx the community mini-grant was founded in 2010 with the intention of supporting small, timesensitive community-based projects that are consistent with scra’s mission, principles, and goals. we are happy to support the great work being done by scra members and their community partners, and even happier to be able to highlight examples of this work and share them with the gjcpp readership. below, dr. jordan lewis provides us with insight into the denali center, in fairbanks, alaska, and a description of the impact that community minigrant funding had on his work there. the denali center (http://www.bannerhealth.com/locations/alaska/fairbanks+memorial+hospital/programs+and+ services/long+term+care/_denali+home+page.htm) in fairbanks, alaska, is a long-term care facility that has a high proportion of alaska native (an) residents, including elders, who come from various tribal/rural communities throughout interior alaska and across the state. this facility is referred to as the model for delivering culturally appropriate long term care services in the state by other health and long term care providers in the state. the denali center has adopted the “eden alternative” philosophy and operates from an eldercentered approach and identifying what is important to the residents. the eden alternative (http://www.edenalt.org/) is a revolutionary approach to long-term care focused on creating an environment conducive to health and happiness. following the eden alternative principles with the intention of promoting a homelike atmosphere, the denali center is designed like a traditional neighborhood. the facility’s four patient wings – aspen way, birch lane, tamarack trail, and willow run – resemble individual neighborhoods, with staff assigned to each. birch lane and tamarack trail provide general long-term care while aspen way serves as the shortterm care unit and willow run cares for patients presenting with alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. the wings of the denali center incorporate unique architectural styles, plants, animals, and multi-generational interaction to bring a true sense of community to those who call it home. many of the activities at the denali center focus on “alaska native culture,” and the sharing of culture in a group setting that includes: • traditional alaska native music; • traditional and contemporary native dances; • videos (i.e., village documentaries, celebrations, world eskimo indian olympics, athabascan fiddle fests, etc.); • news (i.e., alaska native specific, village/regional corporations, denakkanaaga, inc.); • traditional native foods (i.e., moose, caribou, salmon, dried meats, berries, etc.); global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   • participation in cultural activities in community (i.e., weio, festival of native arts, potlatches, athabascan fiddle fest, north american race). these activities incorporate various aspects of alaska native cultures familiar to the residents and remind them of their family and communities and keep them connected to their culture, natal community, and home region (i.e, interior and northern alaska). the impetus for these activities came from realizing the importance of building relationships and trust; the importance of establishing and building rapport before providing care. alaska native elders communication patterns are different than “euro-american” patterns and it takes time and patience to gain their trust to provide quality care and these activities assist in this process. the denali center began incorporating these activities because they recognized that the loss of culture and community ties increases isolation, boredom, and grief. the purpose of these cultural activities includes: 1. supporting residents in transition to placement; 2. nourishing body and soul; 3. celebrating cultural wealth. based on the testimony from the residents, the impact of these activities has been positive. they have increased satisfaction with placement, increased involvement (participating in events, sharing ideas, recipes, etc.), and strengthened relationships between residents, family, and staff. the family members of these residents are happy with their family member’s involvement in the activities. they no longer view their family members as sick and dependent, but as active and healthy. mini-grant supported activities one of the main goals of the scra mini-grant was to develop a training manual documenting these cultural activities that promote physical and mental health, as well as ease the transition to institutional-based living. this manual is in its early drafts, and we are currently working on writing up native food recipes and common native phrases used in the facility setting to be included in the manual. our goal with this manual is to have it available to all long-term care and skilled nursing facilities within the state, as well as private homes that may, or currently, provide care to alaska native residents. it is our hope this manual will also serve as template for other tribal communities and facilities to model after throughout indian country; we plan on distributing it through the tribal long term supports and services conference and tribal health organization websites. in addition to developing the manual of cultural activities, we used mini-grant funding to assist us in collecting digital recordings of alaska native dances, songs, stories, and celebrations that will be uploaded onto the computer at the denali center. to make the digital recordings more accessible to the residents, we upgraded the denali center computer to include a larger touchscreen monitor with help from funding from the scra mini grant. once the computer was set up by the denali center it staff, it is used in settings throughout the facility that is accessible by the residents to enjoy videos and internet materials. for example, one of the first activities was watching the doyon shareholders meeting online. (doyon, limited, the native regional corporation for interior alaska, is a for-profit corporation with over 18,600 shareholders, and is global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   the largest private landowner in alaska. doyon operates a diverse family of companies and has built a strong reputation for innovation and technical expertise ) now that the computer is set up, we are working with the university on uploading the digital recordings into an itunes library created specifically for this project and we will continue to add to the library as we gather more digital resources from the university of alaska’s “project jukebox,” other alaska based organizations, and even family members and elders/residents themselves. the yup'ik group, pamyua, is just one of several great groups with whom we partner. you can learn more about this group and hear some of their music at www.pamyua.com. in regards to the interviews on the uaf project jukebox, we would recommend the following interviews from fairbanks, in particular the interview with howard luke. he is not a resident at the denali center, but is from fairbanks and is a very respected elder that most of the residents of the denali center and alaska know of. here is the link to his interview: http://jukebox.uaf.edu/fairbanks/html/hl.htm. the scra community mini-grant is currently considering new proposals for funding (average award: $1,200). all scra members are invited to apply for funding, in conjunction with their community and organizational partners. applications are available on the scra website, and are considered on a rolling basis until funding runs out; we expect to award 10 grants this year. for questions or more information, please email: scracommunitygrants@gmail.com microsoft word 2011-0004-final-20120515.docx no place like home: examining a bilingual-bicultural, self-run substance abuse recovery home for latinos richard contreras, josephina alvarez, julia digangi, leonard a jason, laura sklansky, inga mileviciute, elbia navarro, daisy gomez, sandra rodriguez, roberto luna, roberto lopez, sharitza rivera, gilberto padilla, richard albert, stephanie salamanca, & frank ponziano depaul university, chicago il, usa richard contreras, ph.d. rcontrer@depaul.edu is project director at the center for community research at depaul university in chicago, il usa josefina alvarez, ph.d.jalvarez@adler.edu is on the core faculty at the adler school of professional psychology in chicago , il usa julia digangi, ma jdigangi@depaul.edu is a clinical-community doctoral student at depaul university in chicago, il usa. leonard a. jason, ph.d. ljason@depaul.edu is a professor of psychology at depaul university and the director of the center for community research in chicago, il usa laura sklansky, inga mileviciute, elbia navarro, daisy gomez, sandra rodriguez, roberto luna, roberto lopez, sharitza rivera, gilberto padilla, richard albert, stephanie salamanca, frank ponziano are research assistants and recruiters at the center for community research at depaul university in chicago, il usa keywords: latinos, substance abuse, recovery, residential, culturally-modified acknowledgments: we appreciate the support of paul molloy and leon venable and the many oxford house members who have collaborated with our team for the past 15 years. the authors appreciate the financial support from the national institute on alcohol abuse and alcoholism (niaaa grant numbers aa12218 and aa16973). we would like to thank theodora binion taylor and fran bassett from the illinois department of human services division of alcoholism and substance abuse (dasa). without dasa’s participation, the opening of the latino oxford houses would not be possible. we appreciate dasa’s leadership to empower individuals with addictions to lead healthy and drug-free lives. requests for reprints should be sent to leonard jason, center for community research, depaul university, 990 w. fullerton ave., suite 3100, chicago, il. 60614. e-mail: ljason@depaul.edu recommended citation: contreras, r., alvarez, j., digangi, j., jason, la., et alia. (2012). no place like home: examining a bilingual-bicultural, self-run substance abuse recovery home for latinos. global journal of community psychology practice, 3(3), 1-9. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012       global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2     no place like home: examining a bilingual-bicultural, self-run substance abuse recovery home for latinos richard contreras, josephina alvarez, julia digangi, leonard a jason, laura sklansky, inga mileviciute, elbia navarro, daisy gomez, sandra rodriguez, roberto luna, roberto lopez, sharitza rivera, gilberto padilla, richard albert, stephanie salamanca, & frank ponziano depaul university, chicago il, usa abstract latinos often do not seek substance abuse services, and this might be correlated to the lack of culturally-modified substance abuse treatment approaches. oxford house is the largest self-help residential recovery program in the u.s., yet few latinos are among their current residents. in an effort to change this, bilingual-bicultural recovery homes were recently developed for latinos. this article describes the process in opening these bilingual-bicultural houses and how sociocultural factors such as the family, simpatía, and gender roles impacted the living environment of these houses. in addition, language is highlighted as a key factor to the comfort and success of latinos living in oxford houses. based on these experiences, the article addresses several obstacles/barriers that impacted this process and possible feasible solutions to these challenges. one challenge is the latino family system. while this may provide a supportive, cost-effective option for some; it can also perpetuate a cycle of codependence and substance abuse. introduction according to the u.s. census (2009), latinos make up 15.1 % of the population and are the largest ethnic group in the u.s. this growing and diverse group is comprised of mexicans (9.7%), puerto ricans (1.4%), and other latinos (3.9%). as the population grows, so too does their rates of substance abuse and dependence. for example, rates of illicit drug use among latinos increased from 6.2% to 7.9% from 2008 to 2009 (samhsa, 2010). however, due primarily to language and cultural barriers, latinos differ from other groups in their rates of seeking treatment, utilization of services, and length of treatment (alegría et al., 2007; lundgren, amodeo, ferguson, & davis, 2001; ojeda & mcguire, 2006). at present, latinos have been shown to underutilize substance abuse and mental health treatment services when compared to other ethnic groups (alegría et al., 2007; schmidt & weisner, 2005). one of the primary reasons for latinos’ underutilization of services appears to be the lack of culturally-appropriate programs (alegría et al., 2007). it is particularly unfortunate that there is a lack of culturally-specific substance abuse options because research indicates that latinos consistently report positive treatment experiences and are least likely to relapse when they receive treatment and support from individuals who are aware of their cultural values and beliefs (flicker, waldron, turner, brody, & hops, 2008; field & caetano, 2010). as the population of latinos who need substance abuse recovery options grows, culturally-appropriate treatment options become increasingly important. one such option may be oxford houses, a self-help recovery model, offering a drug-free environment for residents. research indicates that african-americans and european-americans have benefited from living in an oxford house for more than 30 years (jason, davis, ferrari, & bishop, 2001; jason & ferrari, 2010). results have shown that living in an oxford house is associated with positive changes in social networks and higher levels of abstinence over a two global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012       global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3     year period, compared to usual aftercare (jason, olson, ferrari, & lo sasso, 2006; jason, davis, ferrari, & anderson, 2007). despite the effectiveness of oxford houses as a recovery option, a study that examined 170 oxford houses throughout the country found that latinos represented only 3% of residents (jason et al., 2007). findings from qualitative research suggest that the underutilization of oxford houses by latinos may be due to several factors, including lack of knowledge about this program as well as language and cultural barriers (alvarez, olson, jason, davis, & ferrari, 2004). in order to address a lack of culturally appropriate substance abuse recovery options for latinos, male bilingual-bicultural houses were opened to create a culturally-comfortable environment. while language might be the most observable difference, these bilingual-bicultural oxford houses were designed to promote latino-centric values, like familism, simpatía, and personalismo. these values have been associated with latino culture and current literature indicates that integrating them in treatment interventions may be associated with greater retention and better outcomes (alvarez, jason, olson, ferrari, & davis, 2007). the purpose of the article is to depict the recent efforts to open male bilingual-bicultural oxford houses in the suburbs of chicago. furthermore, it addresses how specific cultural values have changed the living environment in these bilingual-bicultural oxford houses, while maintaining the integrity of the oxford house model. it is anticipated that the information provided in this article may assist others who may be considering opening similar bilingualbicultural recovery homes. opening a male bilingual-bicultural oxford house oxford house oxford house is a self-help, sober living environment that operates on a democratic basis. the main goal of oxford house is recovery from substance abuse. these houses are also financially self-supported. residents pay their equal share of the rent and other expenses (e.g., electric bill, cable bill). weekly business meetings are held in an oxford house in order to follow-up with the financial situation of the house. oxford house has no prescribed length of stay for residents. professionals are not directly involved with the houses, and residents must follow three simple rules: pay rent and contribute to the maintenance of the home, abstain from using alcohol and other drugs, and avoid disruptive behavior. violation of the above rules results in eviction from the house (oxford house, inc., 2008). there is a distinction between an oxford house and halfway houses. halfway houses have an active rehabilitation treatment program where the residents receive intensive individual and group counseling (hohman & gait, 2001). no such inhouse services are available for individuals living in an oxford house. rational for a male bilingual-bicultural oxford house male bilingual-bicultural oxford houses were created based on a national institute of health (nih) funded research project titled evaluating a bilingual voluntary community-based healthcare organization. the goal of this nih-funded project is to evaluate the effectiveness of the oxford house model with latino/a residents whose values, beliefs and behaviors differ depending on their level of acculturation. bilingual-bicultural oxford houses are promoted as latino recovery homes in which residents are 100% latino and can communicate in either english or spanish. residents have a choice to live in either a bilingual-bicultural or a traditional oxford house (i.e., non-bilingual-bicultural houses with people of varied racial backgrounds). latino/a residents, who agree to participate in the study, are interviewed before they enter either oxford house. residents are re-interviewed six months later to capture their experiences in the oxford house. in conjunction with depaul university’s research team, oxford house, inc. opened its first male bilingualbicultural oxford house in october, 2009 in the suburbs of chicago, and a second house was opened in may, 2010. selecting the location the process begins by selecting a location to open the oxford house. detailed instructions on how to open a house are in the oxford house manual (oxford house, inc., 2008). randy ramirez, a recruiter and the illinois representative for the oxford house, was the person responsible for opening the new bilingualbicultural oxford house under the guidance of leon venable. according ramirez, the first step was to find a house that provided an adequate living environment for six individuals to live together. other considerations included access to public transportation and jobs. in particular, this recruiter stated, “for (the latino house), you want to find houses that are in communities that are culturallysensitive or culturally-friendly. you want to make sure you set up in cities where they do not have any anti-immigration ordinances” (r. ramirez, personal communication, february 12, 2010). thus, locating global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012       global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4     houses in communities that would be more welcoming of latinos was an important consideration. efforts were made to open the bilingual-bicultural oxford house in or near a latino community. the goal was to allow residents access to bilingual social services, medical clinics, churches/religious organizations, and latino businesses. outreach the word outreach refers to the method of locating, contacting, and recruiting groups that are invisible, hidden, or otherwise difficult to engage (elwood, dayton, & richard, 1996). there are two common approaches used to recruit potential residents: passive and active outreach. passive outreach involves giving out information to the target population through various methods (e.g., flyers, advertisements) whereas active outreach involves direct contact with probable residents (e.g., presentations, telephone calls, interviews) (elwood et al., 1996). successful outreach strategies in order to access the target population, outreach was done collaboratively with a well-known latino substance abuse residential treatment agency. the relationship between oxford house and the latino substance abuse treatment agency represented a strong continuum of care in that individuals were able to graduate from residential care to a more independent living model (i.e., oxford house). the latino oxford house recruiter frequently gave presentations about the oxford house model to individuals who were in residential treatment, thus providing them with an aftercare housing option. one of the most effective outreach strategies applied in the context of this effort was regular visits to the treatment programs and other community based organizations to build rapport with the staff and program participants. for instance, our recruiter invited current latino oxford house residents to participate in our recruitment efforts. these current residents who accompanied the recruiter to various presentations were able to provide a contemporaneous perspective on what it was like to currently live in an oxford house. recruiting latinos treating potential residents in a culturally-sensitive manner can help break down barriers and increase the possibility of recruiting latinos (yancey, ortega, & kumanyika, 2005). recruiters need to be familiar with the traditions, customs, and rituals of those latinos they are attempting to recruit to an oxford house. the recruiter is the most important person in the outreach process. our latino oxford house recruiter is bilingual and bicultural who is culturallysensitive and able to establish a strong rapport with potential latino oxford house residents. in addition to identifying and maintaining contact with recruitment sites, the latino oxford house recruiter plays a key role in outreach as they develop and maintain a strong bond with oxford house residents. for example, our recruiter has been asked to transport residents to employment agencies, help residents obtain food stamps, or advocate to help a resident locate affordable outpatient substance abuse treatment. personal contact may be particularly effective for recruiting latinos as it provides the opportunity to build rapport and establish trust. personal contact and showing respect are consistent with traditional latino values that emphasize the importance of personal relationships and respect toward those in authority (skaff, chesla, mycue, & fisher, 2002). the oxford house model allows for close relationships to develop between recruiters and residents because recruiters are usually oxford house alumni who continue to stay in touch with the organization. according to a latino oxford house recruiter, the primary goal when interacting with potential latino residents is to decrease the level of mistrust. a key goal is to address any uncertainties about the oxford house model and how it works. it is crucial that the oxford house model and the recovery process be understood. an oxford house is a place where they will acquire their independence by getting a job and being able to sustain themselves in this home. furthermore, they must understand that an oxford house is an environment that promotes recovery and social support (g. padilla, personal communication, february 12, 2010). the interview and orientation process after a house is selected, the next step is to recruit potential latino residents who are in recovery. the selection process is done through interviewing. the language of the interviews is an important factor that has been shown to influence the effectiveness of interventions for latinos (griner & smith, 2006). prior to the opening of the bilingual-bicultural oxford houses, all oxford house interviews were conducted in english. thus, when there were spanish-speaking applicants, an interpreter needed to be present during the interview process. with the opening of the latino oxford houses, spanishspeaking latino applicants are now able to receive information about the oxford house expectations, rules, regulations, and guidelines in spanish. moreover, during the interviews, applicants are able to provide information that may be personal and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012       global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5     sensitive—such as their history of substance abuse, reasons for applying to oxford house, and their goal and desire to recover—without an interpreter. an additional component of the bilingual-bicultural oxford houses is that potential residents are interviewed by latino oxford house residents who understand their language/culture. latino residents and the job-seeking process oxford house residents are required to find and maintain a job and pay rent. residents who are unemployed are required to record their employment efforts in a job log which is reviewed at weekly business meetings. according to a latino oxford house recruiter, latino residents may have difficulty finding jobs due to lack of english skills, immigrant status, lower levels of education, and discrimination (g. padilla, personal communication, february 12, 2010). yet, several latino residents have found jobs within the first month of living in an oxford house. most residents that live in the bilingual-bicultural houses have found jobs according to their current skills. for example, they have obtained jobs in construction, banquet hall services, shoe sales, and hair salons. they found these jobs by referrals from other residents, visiting a former employer, receiving a tip at an a.a. meeting, searching online, and getting help from temporary employment agencies. cultural values and changes to the oxford house environment culture represents the language, religious ideals, habits of thinking, patterns of social and interpersonal relationships, suggested ways of behaving, and norms of conduct that are passed on from generation to generation (lu, lum, & chen, 2001). latino cultural values and beliefs will be present in a living environment where latinos/as reside such as in an oxford house. cultural values presented in the article are chosen because they were prevalent among the latino oxford house residents. furthermore, these are cultural values that were observed by the latino oxford house recruiter/representatives, research staff, and by means of informal discussions with latino oxford house residents. latino oxford house residents it is important to note that latinos are not a homogeneous group. in the united states, the latino population is comprised of individuals from 22 different countries, each embracing unique traditions, customs, music, dialects, and food. other important factors to consider are ethnic identity, cultural norms, levels of acculturation, gender, education, socioeconomic status, and immigration patterns, all of which are related to their belief systems and behaviors (wells, klap, koike, & sherbourne, 2001). although we use the term latino throughout the article, the majority of the oxford house residents are from mexico and puerto rico. language the most visible change seen in a male bilingualbicultural oxford house is the use of both spanish and english by its residents. according to oxford house representatives, the ability to communicate in english or spanish has helped individuals in the bilingual-bicultural homes adjust better to their new living environment. prior to the opening of the male bilingual-bicultural houses, it was reported by oxford house representatives that when latinos with poor english skills would come into the house, they were more likely to feel isolated and more frequently left the oxford house after short residencies. as research findings have demonstrated, latinos with substance abuse have better outcomes in culturally-modified residential programs than in traditional treatment programs (kail & elberth, 2003; o’connell et al., 2005; waters et al., 2002) personalismo and simpatía the value placed on personalismo and simpatía in interpersonal relationships is consistent with the collectivistic orientation espoused by many latinos (schwartz et al., 2010). trust is established based on the person’s behavior in a relationship and not on formal titles or background. for this reason, it is important for latinos to establish close and personal relationships  with those who will assist them in their recovery process.  simpatía refers to the value placed in latino culture on smooth and pleasant social relationships. it is the tendency to avoid conflict and promote harmonious interpersonal relationships by being agreeable and pleasant in character (santiagorivera, arredondo, & gallardo-cooper, 2002). since latino residents tend to hold a group-oriented mindset, they usually attempt to foster a stable environment and reach agreements on most things. in some cases, residents avoid expressing disapproval about something agreed upon by the majority of residents, and may be careful not to display any demeanor that could be perceived by others as a conflict. based on conversation with several of the latino residents, residents who live in the male bilingualbicultural oxford houses described their living environment as amiable and supportive. while these cultural values are perceived as positive attributes, they may interfere with the guidelines established by the oxford house organization. for example, there global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012       global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6     have been several situations where latino residents did not confront someone who may have been using illicit substances to avoid a conflict. according to the oxford house guidelines, it is required that residents who are using a controlled substance be asked to leave the house immediately. familism familism refers to the tendency among latinos to value family relationships. latinos have been shown to maintain contact with family and rely on family as a source of support (lugo steidel & contreras, 2003). the definition of family in the latino culture includes extended family, such as grandparents, cousins, uncles, and aunts (raffaelli, & ontai, 2004). individuals in a family are held together by common loyalty to each other, to their family name, and to the relationships they enjoy, as distinct from relationships with those outside the family. the oxford house model itself uses a support system that is very similar to the support seen in a family. according to the latino oxford house recruiter has observed latino residents in the male bilingualbicultural oxford houses spend a considerable amount of time with one another. at the same time, residents have invited their own families to visit their house in order to meet and interact with other residents. based on this observation, the integration of two families--the residents’ biological and their newly formed oxford house families—is common among latino residents. the experience described by a current latino oxford house resident highlights the presence of familism in the men’s bilingual-bicultural house. latino oxford house residents tend to make it a priority to be together physically and emotionally; they “check up” on each others’ job situations, and share food with each other instead of keeping their own individual supplies. it appears that family values, which clearly manifest themselves in a bilingual-bicultural oxford house, may play a crucial role in the recovery process. gender roles traditionally, a man must show that he is strong, and physically powerful. cultural lore would suggest that a true man should not be afraid of anything, and he should be capable of drinking great quantities of liquor without necessarily getting drunk (gonzalezguarda, ortega, vasquez, & de santis, 2010). in actuality, machismo is a complex construct that also refers to having pride in personal conduct, respect for others, love for family, and affection for children (galanti, 2003; gonzalez-guarda, ortega, vasquez, & de santis, 2010). the oxford house model embraces certain values of machismo, in that residents are generally employed and pay their fair share of the rent. learning to be responsible, maintaining a job, contributing to the maintenance of the house, and having healthy relationships with others are components of machismo that are supported in oxford house. according to several latino oxford house residents, many feel a sense of pride when they are able to gain employment and begin the slow process of financially supporting their families again. food overall, food serves to reinforce ties among residents while allowing them to express their traditions. as mentioned earlier, residents tend to share food and prepare meals for everyone. it appears that residents prefer sharing food and having meals together to strengthen relationships and promote cohesiveness. according to a latino resident at a male bilingualbicultural oxford house, the residents agreed to have breakfast together on sunday mornings, feeling that they needed more activities as a group. at another male bilingual-bicultural house, residents planned picnics together and held several cookouts during the summer. these cookouts also allowed them to invite their neighbors to the barbeques. sharing of food is a caring gesture and is used to strengthen relationships. lessons learned beginning in july 2009, outreach efforts began in an attempt to specifically recruit potential latino residents for oxford houses. as we witnessed the opening of these male bilingual-bicultural  oxford houses, many important lessons have been learned about latinos. specifically, there appears to be three central issues that one should be prepared to address when engaging in outreach efforts with latinos/as who may be appropriate for oxford houses: accessibility: as a minority group, latinos/as may have less familiarity with accessing services than other groups. when outreaching to latinos/as, it is important to engage in a candid discussion of issues related to their concerns and help latinos/as develop feasible solutions to address these challenges. likewise, it is important that they realize oxford house, regardless of their immigration or criminal background, is a real, fair and safe option for them. familism: this may be both a protective and a risk factor for latinos/as in recovery. because the latino family system can be extensive and insular, latinos/as in recovery may seek support global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012       global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7     from their family. while this may provide a supportive, cost-effective option for some, it can also perpetuate a cycle of codependence and substance abuse. in particular, latinas may have the most difficulty accessing oxford houses. for example, a latina may be reluctant to agree to live in an oxford house if her family does not agree with this idea; if a wife/daughter/sister does consent without discussing this with her husband/dad/family, they may assert authority and reverse the decision. linguistic and cultural accommodations: by virtue of living with a group of people, communication is essential to the success (or failure) of an oxford house. recent experiences integrating latinos into oxford houses have highlighted how important language is in the comfort and success of individuals living in oxford houses. while monolingual spanish speakers certainly indicate a preference for living with other spanish speakers, many bilingual latinos/as have indicated that they feel most comfortable in an environment which facilitates use of both languages. the elimination of language barriers make residents feel more empowered to share their experiences and support their fellow residents without the hesitancy of being misunderstood due to cultural differences. similarly, attention to cultural values in the day-to-day running of the house may facilitate retention of latinos/as, particularly for those individuals who identify more strongly with their cultures of origin. next step-female bilingual-bicultural oxford house thus far, the focus of this article has been on the opening of the two male bilingual-bicultural oxford houses. efforts are presently underway to open a female bilingual-bicultural house. although research indicates that latinas are less likely to use substances than latinos and other women in the u.s., the women who do use substances may experience similar problems to latinos and, in some cases, their need for treatment may be more severe (alvarez et al., 2004). as attempts are being made to recruit latinas for a potential bilingual-bicultural oxford house, it is likely that there may be many of the similar barriers that have prevented latinos from becoming oxford house residents. language, cultural, and gender specific barriers compound treatment disparities for latinas (alvarez et al., 2004).  another factor related to cultural values is the difficulty of ending relationships that might perpetuate an unhealthy lifestyle and low self-esteem (wong & longshore, 2008). it is hypothesized that a female bilingual-bicultural oxford house can meet the needs of latinas seeking recovery. the latina’s identity is closely related to her relationships with immediate and extended family members and recovery takes place within this extended network (black & hardesty, 2000). fortunately, an oxford house fosters the types of relationships that many latinas feel are necessary for recovery. support that resembles assistance from extended family members helps many latinas participate and follow through with treatment (black & hardesty, 2000). jason, olson, and foli (2008) reported that women living in oxford houses overcome obstacles to recovery by helping each other. fellow female residents provide “a type of unofficial and informal job assistance program,” connecting new residents with possible employment opportunities that they have personally encountered (jason et al., 2008). latinas may associate effective treatment outcomes to their relationship with a fellow recovering addict who becomes their close friend and someone they can trust (black & hardesty, 2000). furthermore, oxford houses are stable, safe environments in which women can live with their children. many women want their children to participate actively in their recovery process and report that their children serve as a motivation for participating in treatment. for example, some latinas rely on their children to notice their improvements and to encourage them to sustain their rehabilitation efforts (black & hardesty, 2000). thus, efforts to recruit latinas will emphasize the communal, familylike atmosphere of an oxford house. summary oxford houses offer a specific type of substance abuse recovery that is presently underutilized by latinos (jason et al., 2007). as a growing body of research highlights the need for culturally appropriate treatment options for substance abuse recovery, depaul university, in conjunction with oxford house, began to investigate oxford houses as a recovery option for latino men and women in need of sustainable, drug-free housing options (alvarez et al., 2009).  recognizing that cultural issues were a central challenge to recruitment and maintenance of latinos in oxford houses, various steps were taken to ensure the cultural sensitivity of the model. as delineated by this article, recruitment of latinos into oxford house has rested on: 1) recruiters who can increase trust and build a good relationship with potential residents; 2) relationships with widely recognized and trusted individuals or latino agencies/organizations. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  3,  issue  3   august  2012       global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8     through dedication, communication and culturally sensitive outreach efforts, male bilingual-bicultural oxford houses were established in illinois. these houses may be an effective option for latinos/as who are spanish-dominant and/or identify more strongly with their ethnic culture. bilingual-bicultural  oxford houses may provide a living experience that is more culturally-congruent with the needs of latinos/as. for example, these bilingual-bicultural  houses are more likely to use culturally-congruent communication styles, characterized by an emphasis on relationships, downplaying direct conflict in relationships in order to preserve harmony, and respect. while the road to recovery is littered with challenges, a bilingualbicultural  oxford house may help latino/as, who identify primarily to their culture, to remain abstinent.   references alegría, m., mulvaney-day, n., woo, m., torres, m., gao, s., & oddo, v. 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(2002). lessons in cultural competence: adapting research methodology for latino participants. journal of community psychology, 30, 305-323. substance abuse and mental health services administration (2010). results from the 2009 national survey on drug use and health: volume i. summary of national findings (office of applied studies, nsduh series h-38a, hhs publication no. sma 10-4856). rockville, md. u.s. census bureau (2009). u.s. census bureau, 2005-2009 american community survey. retrieved from www.census.gov. waters, j. a., fazio, s. l., hernandez, l., & segarra, j. (2002). the story of cura, a hispanic/latino drug therapeutic community. journal of ethnicity in substance abuse, 1, 113-134. wells, k., klap, r., koike, a., sherbourne, c., 2001. ethnic disparities in unmet need for alcoholism, drug abuse and mental health care. american journal of psychiatry, 158, 2027–2031. wong, e., & longshore, d. (2008). ethnic identity, spirituality, and self-efficacy influences on treatment outcomes among hispanic american methadone maintenance clients. journal of ethnicity in substance abuse, 7, 328-340. yancey, a. k., ortega, a. n., & kumanyika, s. k. (2005). effective recruitment and retention of minority research participants. annual review of public health, 27, 1-28. microsoft word rodriguez-v4i2-20130701.docx la co-gestión de políticas públicas sociales entre estado y sociedad civil: el aporte de la psicología social comunitaria a la construcción del diálogo entre actores diversos alicia rodríguez facultad de psicología, universidad de la república, uruguay keywords: community psychology; public policies; co-management state-civil society palabras claves: psicología comunitaria; políticas públicas sociales; co-gestión estado-sociedad civil recommended citation: rodríguez, a. (2013). la co-gestión de políticas públicas sociales entre estado y sociedad civil. el aporte de la psicología social comunitaria a la construcción del diálogo entre actores diversos. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(2), xx-xx. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   the co-management of social public policy between state and civil society: the contribution of social community psychology to the construction of dialogue between different actors abstract this paper presents the contribution of social community psychology (scp) to the development of understanding and participation in the context of social public policies (spp) that are co-managed between the state and civil society. we provide an analysis of the complexity of the socio-political setting, and the importance of considering psychosocial and subjective processes when aiming to strengthen the participation of civil society organizations (csos) and the population targeted by the policy. we present an intervention developed by the faculty of psychology at the university of the republic (uruguay) in a comprehensive care program for early childhood in poor areas, carried out by the provincial government of montevideo in partnership with csos. we describe and analyze the construction of the problem of the intervention and develop the methodological strategy carried out in that context, the techniques used and the results obtained, after explaining the concept of participation and co-management. in keeping with the construction of the problem, the methodological strategy was formulated following three purposes: (1) to integrate the different voices that constitute the program, (2) to build dialogic spaces, and (3) to alternate a look a the whole program with a focus on unique processes that were deployed in the various early education centers. we discuss techniques, tools and materials to promote collective and participatory work, to socialize and discuss the findings, conclusions and questions about participation in early education centers. we conclude that the contribution of the scp to spp requires consistency between an analysis of the complexity of the field and an intervention strategy that is flexible and dynamic. when there is an interest in developing a social policy that will strengthen participation and democracy, the association with potential contributions of scp is favored. however, this does not mean the absence of contradictions and conflicts in the process, some of which are expressions of the stress of a leftist government within the framework of a capitalist state. keywords: community psychology; public policies; co-management state-civil society la co-gestión de políticas públicas sociales entre estado y sociedad civil. el aporte de la psicología social comunitaria a la construcción del diálogo entre actores diversos resumen en este artículo expongo el aporte de la psicología social comunitaria (psc) a la comprensión y al desarrollo de la participación en el marco de las políticas públicas sociales (pps) que son co-gestionadas entre el estado y la sociedad civil. analiza la complejidad de ese escenario socio-político y la importancia de considerar los componentes psicosociales y los procesos subjetivos cuando se pretende fortalecer la participación de las organizaciones de la sociedad civil (osc) y de la población a quien se destina la política. presento una experiencia que consiste en una intervención desarrollada desde la facultad de psicología de la universidad de la república (uruguay) en un programa de atención integral a la primera infancia en sectores de pobreza, llevado adelante por el gobierno departamental de montevideo en convenio con osc. describo y analizo la construcción del problema de la intervención y como se desarrolla la estrategia metodológica llevada a cabo en ese contexto, las técnicas empleadas y los resultados obtenidos, luego de exponer la concepción de participación y de co-gestión de la que se partía. la problematización del pedido inicial conduce al abordaje de los distintos aspectos psicosociales involucrados, incoporando paulatinamente a los distintos actores del programa. en consonancia con la construcción del problema, la estrategia metodológica se fue formulando siguiendo tres propósitos: (1) integrar las distintas voces constitutivas del programa, (2) construir espacios dialógicos y (3) alternar una mirada de la dimensión del programa en su conjunto con la focalización en los procesos singulares que se despliegan en los distintos centros de educación inicial. se crearon técnicas, herramientas y materiales para promover el trabajo colectivo y participativo, para socializar y discutir los resultados, las conclusiones y las interrogantes acerca de la participación en los centros de educación inicial. concluyo que la contribución de la psc a las pps, requiere de una coherencia entre un análisis de la complejidad del campo de acción y una estrategia de intervención flexible y dinámica. cuando existe desde la pps la voluntad de profundizar la participación y la democracia, la asociación con los aportes potenciales de la psc se ve favorecida. sin embargo, esto no significa ausencia de contradicciones y conflictos en el proceso, algunos de los cuales son expresión de las tensiones de un gobierno de izquierda en el marco de un estado capitalista. palabras claves: psicología comunitaria; políticas públicas sociales; co-gestión estado-sociedad civil global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   introducción en la última década, la psicología social comunitaria (psc) en el uruguay comenzó a visualizar a las políticas públicas sociales (pps) como objeto de estudio y como un escenario en el que puede aportar conocimiento, ya no sólo en el nivel operativo, sino también en su diseño y gestión (rodríguez, 2009; 2012). en la trayectoria de esa disciplina en nuestro país, los psicólogos y las psicólogas identificados con ella, habíamos estado posicionados críticamente en relación a las instituciones gubernamentales, pasando por momentos de fuerte enfrentamiento. a partir del acceso al gobierno de un partido de izquierda por primera vez en la historia del país, inicialmente a nivel departamental de montevideo (año 1990) y luego a nivel nacional (año 2005), comenzaron a tenderse puentes de diálogo entre los principios ético-políticos de la psc y las perspectivas vinculadas al rol del estado y de la sociedad civil que tienen lugar en dichas administraciones. tal como hemos expresado en otro trabajo (giorgi, rodríguez & rudolf, 2011) los gobiernos progresistas “proponen un nuevo contrato social basado en la corresponsabilidad, para la cual estimularon la participación social en la búsqueda e implementación de respuestas a las graves problemáticas de exclusión e inequidad características de las sociedades posneoliberales” (p. 418). este encuentro, sin embargo, no es armónico. emerge una serie de tensiones que desafían a sostener una vigilancia permanente de la coherencia entre las acciones que los psicólogos y psicólogas comunitarios desarrollamos en el campo de las pps y la intencionalidad transformadora de la disciplina (alfaro, 2012; rodríguez, 2007; 2009; 2012; giorgi, rodríguez & rudolf, 2011). el presente trabajo tiene el propósito de mostrar el aporte potencial de la psc a la comprensión y al desarrollo de la participación en el marco de las pps que son co-gestionadas entre el estado y la sociedad civil. reconoce la complejidad de ese escenario socio-político y la importancia de considerar los componentes psicosociales y los procesos subjetivos involucrados en la pretensión de fortalecer la participación de las organizaciones de la sociedad civil (osc) y de la población a quien se destina la política. presento una experiencia que consiste en una intervención desarrollada desde la facultad de psicología de la universidad de la república, en un programa de pps llevado adelante por el gobierno departamental de montevideo. describo y analizo la estrategia metodológica desarrollada en ese contexto, las técnicas empleadas y los resultados obtenidos. la intervención se realizó desde la universidad de la república, a través de la extensión universitaria que, como expresión de sus definiciones doctrinarias, políticas, académicas y estratégicas, sustenta sus acciones en el compromiso con el abordaje de los principales problemas del país, en la pertinencia social del conocimiento que produce y en la jerarquización de procesos de enseñanzaaprendizaje desarrollados en escenarios concretos. de modo que docentes y estudiantes formamos parte de los escenarios de participación abordados. políticas públicas sociales y psicología social comunitaria martin de lellis (2006), tomando a subirats (1989) concibe a las políticas públicas como “un conjunto de iniciativas, decisiones, acciones u omisiones que adoptan el estado y las organizaciones sociales de manera simultánea o secuencial en el tiempo, tratando de resolver situaciones que dichos actores juzgan problemáticas” (p.126). las pps no las lleva a cabo exclusivamente el estado, sino que involucran también a la sociedad civil e incluso al mercado (alfaro, 2012). en la medida que hablamos de estados enmarcados en sociedades capitalistas, concebimos a las pps como un campo de fuerzas donde operan actores sociales diversos, con intereses en pugna y distintos recursos de poder (fleury, 2002). la resultante de estas luchas, depende del modo en que los estados, a través de los agentes y estructuras de gobierno, abordan la tensión y la contradicción entre garantizar la acumulación de capital y la pretensión de construir sociedades democráticas en las que no haya ciudadanos ni ciudadanas excluidos del ejercicio de sus derechos. también dependerá de las fuerzas que operen desde la sociedad civil organizada para avanzar hacia un mundo más justo e igualitario. siguiendo a giorgi (2006), las pps son reproductoras y productoras de subjetividad, no sólo porque expresan las creencias, los valores, los sentidos producidos en un momento socio-histórico dado, sino también porque, en tanto mediadoras entre lo macro y lo micro, participan de la configuración de las relaciones sociales en el ámbito de lo público y en la vida privada. construyen sujetos sociales (saldominsky, 2010) al tiempo que éstos operan en la manutención y transformación de esas relaciones. al materializarse en programas y proyectos sociales, se constituyen en complejos entramados de sentidos subjetivos (gonzález rey, 2008; 2011). comprender los sentidos que se configuran en cada escenario de pps, su articulación con lo macrosocial, su expresión diferenciada según la posición relativa que los actores participantes de la política adoptan, e intervenir en relación a ellos para favorecer cambios sociales que beneficien a los sectores más vulnerables, es una tarea de la psc en los escenarios sociales actuales. en otro trabajo (rodriguez, 2007) he planteado la preocupación por el vaciamiento de contenido global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   político que han sufrido conceptos esenciales a la psc al ser empleados por una pluralidad de actores con intereses diversos y contradictorios en distintos momentos del desarrollo capitalista de américa latina. eso ha ocurrido por ejemplo, con las nociones de participación y fortalecimiento, entre otras.partiendo de un posicionamiento estratégico en función de los particulares contextos sociopolíticos, la psc tiene mucho para aportar a este escenario, desde el paradigma de la construcción y transformación crítica (montero, 2004) que la sustenta. la co-gestión de políticas públicas sociales entre estado y sociedad civil: un campo propicio para el aporte de la psicología social comunitaria en los años '80, como el resto de latinoamérica, nuestro país asistió a una nueva etapa en el ciclo capitalista: el neoliberalismo. las dictaduras sufridas por varios países del cono sur, habían sido el instrumento idóneo para instalarlo a costa de la represión de la resistencia popular. los estados latinoamericanos enfrentaban críticas a su capacidad para administrar y distribuir los recursos en forma equitativa, lo que trajo como consecuencia propuestas de reducción del estado y de tercerización de los servicios sociales, transfiriendo su ejecución a las osc. sin embargo, en el debate entre cientistas políticos, algunas personas plantearon que más que reducir el estado se trata de repensar su papel, de manera que, sin abandonar su rol regulador, reconociera e incorporara a otros actores sociales capaces de llevar a cabo funciones asistenciales. en uruguay, el estado continuó jugando un rol activo en la regulación, financiación, coordinación y control de las respuestas a los problemas sociales (midaglia, 2001). en este marco, adquirió relevancia el desarrollo de un modelo de gestión basado en el establecimiento de alianzas entre el estado y las osc, donde el primero transfiere recursos, para que las organizaciones los administren en la ejecución de programas sociales. en general, el estado se reservó la función de diseño, planificación y control. las organizaciones complementan los recursos transferidos con esfuerzos voluntarios de sus integrantes puestos al servicio de la gestión. este modelo, que se ha extendido hasta nuestros días, encontró anclaje en nuestro país, en los modos de organización y participación de carácter territorial que, teniendo una larga trayectoria en uruguay -particularmente en montevideo adquirieron relevancia durante el gobierno dictatorial y en confrontación con él. se trata de comisiones vecinales o de fomento que fueron articulando acciones colectivas para resolver problemáticas barriales vinculadas al deterioro en la calidad de vida de la población. estas inicialmente enfatizaron su carácter “extra-estatal”, mientras que con la restauración de la democracia fueron tomando un rol relevante en la esfera política y en el desarrollo de las pps (claramunt, 2006) en forma simultánea y en directa relación con la tercerización de los servicios sociales focalizados, a partir de la segunda mitad de la década de 1980, la descentralización adquirió relevancia en nuestro país. los gobiernos departamentales incorporaron el desarrollo de programas sociales, trascendiendo las funciones tradicionalmente adjudicadas a los municipios. particularmente en el departamento de montevideo, estos procesos se expresaron en forma significativa a partir del año 1990, con la asunción del gobierno departamental por parte de la izquierda. el proceso de descentralización adquirió la intención de profundizar la democracia, buscando trascender la mera desconcentración de los servicios para tomar un sentido político en cuanto al desarrollo de mayores grados de participación social. ahora bien, las condiciones de surgimiento de un modelo de gestión de pps que involucra la asociación entre estado y sociedad civil, nos obligan a preguntarnos por sus intencionalidades y por las características que adquiere en cada coyuntura, evitando perder de vista el carácter complejo y contradictorio de un escenario sociopolítico así configurado. este modelo, ¿parte de un reconocimiento de la experiencia acumulada de las osc en el campo social?. las mismas ¿se constituyen en un sujeto colectivo con autonomía y capacidad de incidencia en el diseño de pps?¿permite esta forma de gestión desarrollar un modelo participativo que profundice la democracia en la implementación de las políticas incorporando una diversidad de voces? ¿qué papel tienen los principales interesados, o sea, las personas destinatarias de esas políticas? estas preguntas son pertinentes incluso, cuando dentro de los propósitos explícitos de la pps está el de promover la participación social y la construcción de ciudadanía, ya que con frecuencia y por distintas razones, hay una distancia entre discurso y acción. cabe preguntarse por los factores involucrados en estos procesos, por los obstáculos para su desarrollo y por sus reales alcances. se trata de interrogantes que la psc no puede soslayar, si quiere ser coherente con los principios que la sostienen. la alianza entre el estado y la sociedad civil para la implementación de pps, supone la configuración de un complejo escenario cuyos principales protagonistas son los actores estatales, las osc, los equipos de trabajo que tienen relación directa con la población, los destinatarios de los programas sociales y otros actores locales. en la interacción entre ellos opera una diversidad de intereses y racionalidades (burocrática, técnica, política, del global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   voluntariado y de las necesidades de la comunidad) (lapalma, 2001), roles, recursos de poder, distintas perspectivas conceptuales sobre problemas comunes y diferentes códigos. sus percepciones, creencias, atribuciones mutuas y significados, configuran sentidos subjetivos (gonzalez rey, 2008; 2011) que explican en buena medida los fenómenos que se producen. el modelo de gestión tiene eficacia en la producción de subjetividades, ya que genera singulares modalidades vinculares y construye sujetos sociales inmersos en la vida pública. en otros trabajos (rodríguez, 2004; 2009) he desarrollado los componentes psicosociales involucrados en este modelo: la identidad e historia de las osc y sus capacidades para constituirse en organizaciones-sujeto (schvarstein, 1992) en relación al estado, la tensión entre la lógica del voluntariado y la del trabajo asalariado que se establece entre las organizaciones y el personal contratado para implementar los proyectos, y la concepción y tipo de relación que ellas y los destinatarios de los programas establecen (asistencialismo o promoción de sujetos de derecho). hay que agregar el lugar material y simbólico que, a través de discursos y acciones, el estado otorga a la sociedad civil organizada y a la población a la que las políticas se dirigen. cuando la psc busca incidir en estos procesos, en consonancia con sus fines, procurará favorecer la escucha de las distintas voces, generar escenarios de diálogo horizontal entre los actores, promover procesos participativos genuinos, aportar al fortalecimiento de los sujetos en tanto sujetos colectivos y aumentar la incidencia de los principales interesados en la toma de decisiones que los afectan. en definitiva, buscará promover un modelo de gestión participativa de la pps. la concepción de participación y de co-gestión como dice ana gloria ferullo (2006) existe una relación directa entre participación y democracia, de modo que adjetivar a esta última de participativa supone profundizarla. la autora expresa: ... lo que está en juego en esta relación son las distintas formas de gobierno entre los hombres, es decir, la distribución y redistribución del poder en las tomas de decisiones que los afectan y las búsquedas de formas mejores para hacerlo mejores, fundamentalmente, en cuanto a los resultados de equidad distributiva de los bienes y servicios necesarios para la vida y, si es posible, tendientes a que cada vez esa vida sea más plena para todos los sujetos implicados (p. 33) la cuestión de la redistribución de poder, inherente a la participación, genera con frecuencia tensiones en el campo de las políticas públicas ya que supone para los actores e instituciones involucradas, una pérdida de cuotas de poder conquistadas o bien históricamente atribuidas, como en el caso del estado. coincido con ferullo (2006) que si bien la incidencia de los sujetos en la toma de decisiones y por tanto la capacidad de influencia en los demás actores es fundamental para producir cambios sociales, ello no excluye la importancia de la emisión de información (expresión de necesidades y opiniones) tal como ha sido jerarquizada en algunas definiciones de participación. siguiendo a la misma autora, quiero jerarquizar otros componentes de la participación social que se constituyen en instrumentos de comprensión y acción centrales en el caso que expongo más adelante. ellos son: a) la concepción de participación como proceso, cuyo aprendizaje está condicionado de manera compleja en cada contexto socio-histórico por factores institucionales, culturales y por las contradicciones inherentes a las relaciones de poder; b) la desmistificación de la participación en tanto la misma está lejos de constituirse en un proceso armónico, carente de conflictos; c) la importancia de la significación que los sujetos involucrados en un escenario de participación, atribuyen a la misma; d) la conjugación en todo proceso participativo, de la influencia en los otros y otras y de la afectación para los propios sujetos participantes en tanto aportan a la construcción de sus espacios vitales (ferullo, 2006). los procesos participativos se construyen en la vida cotidiana. su potencialidad de proyección al nivel macro-social frecuentemente se soslaya, quedando restringida a los límites de lo local, o incluso al plano personal o al de los pequeños grupos. una participación comunitaria que pretenda jerarquizar los impactos políticos que produce, debe considerar la interrelación entre los efectos que genera en las personas y en su entorno inmediato y su capacidad de trascender al nivel de lo público (rodríguez, haberkorn & cortázar, 2005). cabe hacer la distinción entre participación comunitaria, participación ciudadana y participación política. como dice sánchez (2000), frecuentemente estos términos se emplean en forma indistinta. según este autor, esa distinción se ha relacionado con la esfera en la que cada una de ellas se desarrolla y con los contextos específicos de su surgimiento. así, la participación ciudadana referiría al involucramiento de los sujetos en los asuntos públicos; la participación política estaría restringida a los órganos o procedimientos de intermediación en el sistema político (el voto y los partidos políticos); y la participación comunitaria global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   estaría ligada a una relación asistencial con el estado en la cual la comunidad busca gestionar los recursos para la satisfacción de sus necesidades cotidianas. la complejización de estas nociones permite ampliar su consideración, de modo que la posibilidad de incidencia en los asuntos públicos es un elemento central en todo proceso participativo, al tiempo que toda participación se entiende como política en tanto se relaciona con la concepción de sociedad, de sujeto y de las relaciones entre ellos y ellas (sánchez, 2000), y con las relaciones de poder que le son inherentes (ferullo, 2006). la dificultad de llegar a un acuerdo en la distinción entre estas modalidades de participación, es lo que ha llevado a ferullo a hablar de participación social en un sentido integral y por tanto abarcador de las distintas formas. la asociación entre estado y sociedad civil para el desarrollo de pps exige un tratamiento de la noción de co-gestión. según adela claramunt (2006) la misma alude a la toma conjunta de decisiones, la que supone “la superación de concepciones benefactoras y asistencialistas, involucrando a los propios ciudadanos y sus expresiones organizativas, en la toma de decisiones...” (p.117). ello supone romper con los dualismos dirigentes-dirigidos, sujetos creativos, pensantes que deciden-sujetos pasivos, ejecutantes, que obedecen. en una relación de co-producción se considera que los usuarios y usuarias de servicios públicos “tienen competencias para aportar en la calidad de los servicios que se producen, y la administración pública debe crear espacios en los que los usuarios se asocien para definir los problemas a tratar y buscar las soluciones” (claramunt, 2006, p. 106). sin embargo, las experiencias de co-gestión desarrolladas en américa latina, indican que la misma raramente adopta el sentido descrito, lo que se debe a distintos factores que tienen lugar en cada contexto en particular: la tendencia del estado a delegar la provisión de servicios a actores privados desentendiéndose de su responsabilidad, o por el contrario, el excesivo control y manipulación de la participación de las organizaciones sociales por parte del mismo. otras veces, están en juego las limitaciones que las propias osc y la ciudadanía en general experimentan en sus posibilidades de generar un posicionamiento autónomo en relación al estado. en nuestro país, estas experiencias, salvo excepciones, rara vez llevan adelante una codecisión sobre aspectos centrales de la política. más bien, las osc asumen la función de administrar los recursos que el estado transfiere y escasamente logran incidir en los diseños de los programas. cuando se trata de comisiones vecinales estos procesos se ven aún más acotados que en el caso de ongs con trayectoria en la gestión de programas sociales y con una mayor capacidad de influencia en el estado. una experiencia que ilustra el aporte de la psicología social comunitaria a la co-gestión entre estado y sociedad civil: la construcción del diálogo entre actores diversos el escenario de la intervención: el programa “nuestros niños” presentaré una experiencia desarrollada durante seis (6) años por un equipo de estudiantes de grado y docentes de psicología comunitaria de la facultad de psicología de la universidad de la república1 en el marco de un convenio entre la universidad y la intendencia municipal de montevideo (imm). se trata de un trabajo de extensión universitaria realizado con un programa de atención integral a la primera infancia, llamado “programa nuestros niños”, dependiente del gobierno del departamento de montevideo y cogestionado con osc. dicho programa, comenzó a funcionar en 1991 en el marco de una gestión descentralizada del gobierno municipal y con el apoyo del fondo de naciones unidas para la infancia (unicef). es coordinado por un equipo técnico central (etc) integrado por profesionales de distintas disciplinas (pedagogía, nutrición, psicología y trabajo social) dependientes de la imm. se implementa a través de centros de atención diurna (centros comunitarios de educación inicial, ccei) dirigidos en sus comienzos, a niños y niñas de 6 meses a 5 años y sus familias de sectores de pobreza socioeconómica, restringiéndose más adelante a niños y niñas de 1 a 3 años de edad. existen 18 ccei distribuidos en distintas zonas de montevideo, cada uno a cargo de una osc, en su mayoría grupos de vecinos y vecinas activos, comprometidos social y políticamente que ofrecen su esfuerzo y tiempo en forma voluntaria. mientras la imm transfiere los recursos para el contrato del personal de los centros y para los insumos materiales, y ofrece capacitación y supervisión a las osc y a los equipos de trabajo, las organizaciones administran los fondos provenientes del estado y de la comunidad, son responsables del vínculo laboral con el personal, del funcionamiento, mantenimiento y custodia del local y co-partícipes                                                                                                                 1 docentes: mónica cortázar, mónica da silva.victor giorgi, pablo haberkorn, laura lópez y alicia rodríguez. algunos y algunas docentes participamos durante todo el proceso y otros en alguna de sus etapas. los y las estudiantes de grado formaron parte del curso“técnicas de atención comunitaria”, del 5to ciclo del plan de estudios '88. cada año se incorporaron distintos estudiantes. participó también la compañía de teatro espontáneo de la facultad. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   con el equipo de educadores y educadoras en la planificación y seguimiento del programa. el equipo de cada centro (equipo técnico operativo, eto) está conformado por una maestra y educadoras capacitadas en la atención a niños y niñas pequeños, en general mujeres y jóvenes, seleccionadas preferentemente entre integrantes de la zona geográfica de influencia del centro. participa también una persona que elabora los alimentos que es considerada educadora nutricional. el equipo desarrolla un programa socio-educativo supervisado por otros maestros y maestras (maestros coordinadores, mc) que pertenecen a la imm. la tarea de limpieza y mantenimiento del local es realizada por parte de familiares de los niños y niñas, lo que frecuentemente es concebido como contrapartida por la atención recibida. los principios orientadores del programa “nuestros niños” se expresan en su plan de acciones y plan de operaciones (1990): “...(los ccei) ...se sustentan en la participación social, la co-gestión, la cooperación público-privada, la educación y la capacitación permanente y suponen el involucramiento de los ciudadanos en la toma de decisiones, dando lugar a procesos que promuevan integralmente al hombre y fortalezcan la construcción de ciudadanía” (p.11) esta formulación, coincidente con algunos componentes de la concepción de participación antes referida, se complejiza en la práctica en el encuentro con las restricciones propias de la dinámica de estos procesos. precisamente, adela claramunt (2006) realizó un estudio de este programa, con el objetivo de conocer las características de la participación en las políticas sociales descentralizadas desarrolladas en nuestro país a partir de los años 90'. llegó a las siguientes conclusiones: los procesos participativos estudiados encuentran limitaciones y están condicionados por la formación política y por las capacidades de las osc, ya que las mismas son “expresiones organizativas débiles” en su dimensión socio-política, lo que cuestiona las posibilidades de profundizar el carácter de la cogestión y el desarrollo de una descentralización democratizante. no obstante, se generan espacios para el desarrollo de la acción individual, social y política en un escenario en el que existen múltiples actores con una diversidad de intereses y aspiraciones sociales, y se visualizan modalidades diversas de circulación y de ejercicio democrático del poder. se tiende a promover en los usuarios un progresivo protagonismo a partir de “vivencias participativas y democráticas”, pero su desarrollo es contradictorio ya que convive con expresiones autoritarias provenientes tanto del estado como de la sociedad civil. siendo una experiencia innovadora que intenta romper con el patrón de la prestación de servicios a beneficiarios y beneficiarias considerados pasivos, enfrenta los desafíos inherentes al perfil de la población que atienden y a su capacidad de auto-organización y de co-gestión. se plantea una intencionalidad a futuro de avanzar en los niveles de autonomía de las organizaciones y de su capacidad de propuesta, fortaleciendo sus raíces barriales, al tiempo que los aportes estatales para el alcance de esos objetivos se califican como insuficientes, lo que conduce a la autora a preguntarse por las resistencias del estado a transferir mayor poder a estas expresiones organizativas. esta investigación es un antecedente clave para nuestro trabajo. el desarrollo de la intervención el siguiente cuadro sintetiza el desarrollo de la intervención en función de cuatro (4) aspectos: la construcción del problema y los contenidos trabajados, la estrategia metodológica y los actores involucrados, las técnicas empleadas y los resultados obtenidos en cada etapa.   global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   cuadro 1. desarrollo de la intervención año problema y contenidos estrategia metodológica y actores involucrados técnicas empleadas resultados 1er año papel de las osc en la co-gestión del programa. -acuerdos con el etc y con las osc en relación a la propuesta. -familiarización con el programa construcción de un perfil de las osc -relevamiento de la percepción de los distintos actores del programa sobre las osc -reflexión crítica participativa con las osc, acerca de su papel en el programa -relevamiento documental -observación -entrevistas -talleres: mapeo de actores y de relaciones; construcción imaginaria de escenarios futuros -caracterización de las osc -construcción de demanda con las osc -descripción comprensiva de su lugar en el programa -identificación de la tensión autonomía-dependencia entre osc y estado -visibilización de las condiciones para la constitución de las osc como sujeto colectivo. 2do año -papel de las osc y del estado en la co-gestión -procesos participativos en las osc -promoción de las osc en su constitución como sujeto colectivo (articulación entre las mismas) -reflexión crítica participativa con las osc, de su papel en relación a la comunidad y al estado -intervenciones en 6 osc y en sus respectivos ccei -observación participante -elaboración de afiches que muestran el papel de las osc en el programa. -representación de un litigio consistente en la discusión sobre la necesidad de permanencia o supresión de las osc -incorporación de un espacio de reunión entre las osc sin la presencia del estado -respuesta de la imm a algunos reclamos de las osc -identificación de componentes psicosociales involucrados en la relación osc-usuarios de los centros-comunidad. -identificación de los aspectos involucrados en la participación de las familias en los ccei y su impacto 3er año -qué es gestión y co-gestión -modelos de gestión -el papel de las familias en la gestión del programa y de los ccei -concepciones de participación -discusión del modelo de gestión del programa con todos los actores involucrados -momentos de trabajo con cada colectivo de actores -momentos de encuentro entre los distintos colectivos -intervención en 5 ccei -técnicas dramáticas -discusiones sub-grupales y plenarias -técnicas lúdicas (cacería, búsqueda del tesoro) -la imm propone un modelo de gestión participativo que involucra a osc, etos y familiares de los niños y niñas. -se incorpora la voz de las familias, la escucha y el diálogo entre distintos actores -identificación de obstáculos y facilitadores de la participación de las familias en el vinculo con los etos y de la hetero-geneidad de las concepciones de participación. -tensión entre el voluntariado de las osc y el trabajo asalariado del personal de los ccei 4to. año -participación de las familias en la gestión del programa y en los ccei -componente comunitario en el programa -reflexión crítica sobre el papel de los distintos actores en los procesos participativos -encuentros con familiares, organizados por regiones -intervenciones comunitarias en 5 ccei -el “juego de la participación” -lectura crítica de documentos -discusión en sub-grupos y en plenario -collage -material gráfico: “cuando la participación dice presente”. -las prácticas educativas en los ccei se analizan críticamente en forma conjunta entre los actores involucrados. -identificación del lugar de los ccei para las familias e incorporación de su opinión -profundización del diálogo entre distintos actores -jerarquización del componente comunitario en el programa 5to año -evaluación del componente comunitario en los ccei -evaluación del programa -escenario de cambios políticos en el país. -construcción participativa de indicadores de evaluación del componente comunitario con los distintos actores. -encuentros con cada colectivo de actores -sistematización de la información y elaboración de una propuesta de evaluación -intervenciones comunitarias en 3 ccei -respuesta a las preguntas: ¿qué no sabemos y queremos saber sobre el impacto generado por el componente comunitario en el programa? ¿qué interrogantes querríamos responder a través de un proceso de evaluación del componente comunitario? -juego del dominó -”participol” -identificación de los aspectos centrales del componente comunitario del programa -propuesta de indicadores para evaluar el componente comunitario: resultados e impactos alcanzados y medios para lograrlos -el programa es evaluado por los distintos actores -identificación de la necesidad de definiciones político-estratégicas para profundizar la participación 6to año -el componente comunitario en los ccei -la relación de los ccei con el resto del barrio -socialización de la propuesta de indicadores de evaluación -elaboración de una guía de evaluación -intervenciones comunitarias en 5 ccei -teatro espontáneo: devolución mediante escenas, se recogen resonancias y se escenifican -material gráfico: “reconociendo lo que hacemos. guía para la evaluación del componente comunitario” -experiencia de comunicación horizontal entre los distintos actores. la vivencia como lenguaje común. -guía de evaluación disponible -identificación del lugar de los ccei en los barrios. -identificación de los obstáculos para la toma de definiciones políticoestratégicas global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9   el problema de intervención y su proceso de construcción la intervención partió de un pedido del equipo político-técnico coordinador del programa “nuestros niños” (etc), dirigido a la facultad de psicología. el mismo expresaba la necesidad de fortalecer a las osc que, en convenio con la imm, gestionaban los centros (ccei). también plantearon el interés de promover y consolidar la participación de las familias de los niños y de la comunidad local en los mismos. a partir de este pedido implementamos una estrategia metodológica que involucró la problematización del mismo, lo que implicó que si bien inicialmente el sujeto de la intervención estuvo conformado por el conjunto de las osc, éstas debían ser concebidas como un nodo de una red en la cual su lugar y los avatares propios de su rol, adquirían sentido. progresivamente la intervención fue involucrando a los otros actores: mc que supervisaban el funcionamiento de los ccei, los etos de cada centro, y los familiares de los niños participantes. la estrategia se fue construyendo a partir de una sistematización, socialización y evaluación conjunta de los resultados obtenidos en las distintas etapas, realizando acuerdos sucesivos con los interlocutores técnico-políticos. la construcción del problema fue exigiendo la consideración de una serie de aspectos relevantes para la psc: las potencialidades y debilidades de las osc para constituirse en un sujeto colectivo capaz de incidir en la gestión del programa desde un lugar de autonomía (en el sentido del potencial que tiene la acción conjunta de las organizaciones en relación a objetivos comunes); el papel del estado como facilitador u obstaculizador de los procesos participativos, ya sea en su promoción o en el fortalecimiento de su continuidad; la participación de los usuarios de los servicios que se implementan; las percepciones y expectativas mutuas entre los distintos actores; la concepción de participación que construyen desde sus posiciones relativas en el programa. a modo de ejemplo, el término participación no tiene el mismo sentido para los distintos actores ni para un mismo actor en distintos momentos. las expectativas de participación en relación a las familias van desde la colaboración (económica y en trabajos de limpieza y mantenimiento), pasando por el involucramiento en la tarea educativa, hasta la idea de que ellas tienen que participar en la gestión de los centros y en la toma de decisiones. en un momento del proceso, la reflexión sobre los dispositivos necesarios para el desarrollo de una gestión participativa nos condujo a interrogarnos acerca del significado de la co-gestión para los actores involucrados en ella (osc y estado) y del alcance que se le pretendía dar. hablar de distintos modelos de gestión y de co-gestión del programa, permitió diseñar alternativas deseables, en donde se hizo visible la cuestión de la participación de los principales interesados (los niños y sus familias). poco a poco se puso de manifiesto la necesidad de abordar lo comunitario como componente trasversal a todo el programa, lo que desembocó en la propuesta de una evaluación sistemática de los resultados e impactos de dicho componente y del programa en su conjunto. así, se construyeron indicadores en forma participativa al tiempo que la evaluación se desplegaba. la estrategia metodológica en consonancia con la construcción del problema, la estrategia metodológica se fue formulando a partir de tres propósitos centrales: integrar las distintas voces constitutivas del programa, construir espacios dialógicos entre los distintos actores, y alternar una mirada de la dimensión del programa en su conjunto con la focalización en los procesos singulares que se despliegan en los distintos ccei. luego de una familiarización mutua (fals borda, 1959; montero, 2006) y del inicio de la construcción de demanda (rodríguez et al, 2001), instrumentamos una metodología que se configuró como una espiral que, además de involucrar progresivamente a los distintos actores, fue integrando tácticas y niveles diferentes. la estrategia articuló la intervención con cada colectivo de actores según su rol (actores estatales, osc, equipos y familias), y en otros momentos, con más de un actor focalizando en los vínculos y en la potencialidad del diálogo entre ellos. el trabajo con cada uno de los actores permitió identificar las percepciones específicas según su posición relativa en el programa y su papel en los procesos participativos. las instancias de encuentro entre ellos posibilitaron intervenir en los procesos comunicativos que se desplegaron, para los cuales los distintos códigos, la escucha y el entendimiento del otro, fueron fundamentales. a partir de consignas diferentes de acuerdo al rol de cada actor, y complementarias en tanto dirigidas a un objetivo común, se contemplaron las particularidades al tiempo que se provocó el diálogo. en ocasiones ese diálogo consistió en la posibilidad de preguntar sobre lo que no se conoce o no se comprende y en informar como contrapartida. otra veces, se trató de expresar la opinión en relación a un mismo tema. la pretensión de horizontalidad en el uso del derecho a la palabra, orientó la intervención, sin que ello supusiera desconocer los diferentes roles. en un programa de estas características el rol de los distintos actores debe pensarse en interdependencia con el resto. el rol específico es producto de las mutuas expectativas, de las adjudicaciones y de la autopercepción. el entramado y su dinámica se global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  10   consideraron en forma permanente en el proceso de intervención. la importancia de analizar y problematizar el tipo de vínculo que se construye entre los actores está en directa relación con la intencionalidad transformadora de la intervención comunitaria: dependencia-autonomía entre estado y osc; jerarquía-horizontalidad en la relación osc-eto; paternalismo/asistencialismopromoción/participación en la relación con la comunidad. cada una de estas zonas de relación, mereció un tratamiento particular durante el proceso, identificando su interconexión. al mismo tiempo, la estrategia consideró distintos niveles del programa: en algunos momentos se realizaron convocatorias “centrales”: todas las osc, todos los equipos de centro, todas las familias de los niños y niñas de los distintos ccei, todos los actores del programa. en otros, se hicieron encuentros por región para luego convocar instancias plenarias. simultáneamente se intervino en ccei seleccionados según criterios ligados a los objetivos de la intervención y a los resultados obtenidos en cada etapa. esto permitió articular una mirada del programa en su conjunto con la intervención en los procesos singulares de cada ccei y hacer visibles distintos niveles de pertenencia: en relación a cada centro, en relación a la región, o en relación al programa “nuestros niños”. partimos de la base de que los fenómenos macro vinculados al programa (diseño, avatares político-institucionales, coyuntura social más amplia) se encuentran contenidos en lo que sucede cotidianamente en cada centro, al tiempo que los procesos singulares otorgan insumos para las decisiones que se toman en el nivel central. la convocatoria por regiones permitía acompañar el proceso de descentralización de la imm y contribuir con el fortalecimiento del nivel local. las técnicas empleadas la necesidad de favorecer procesos colectivos de reflexión crítica, de promover la expresión de ideas, opiniones y vivencias, y la formulación de interrogantes y propuestas, llevaron a emplear una diversidad de técnicas participativas en distintos espacios y momentos de la intervención. la combinación de la palabra con la expresión corporal, el empleo de recursos simbólicos para expresar lo que se percibe, se espera o se teme que suceda, permite incorporar distintos lenguajes que enriquecen la producción colectiva. el perfil sociocultural distinto de los actores involucrados, los diferentes códigos que ello supone y las racionalidades diversas, nos llevó a hacer uso de técnicas que favorecieran procesos comunicativos eficaces. la necesidad de que la experiencia de encuentro dejara una impronta significativa y gratificante que instalara el deseo del reencuentro, nos exigió introducir un componente lúdico y de humor que favoreció la creación de un clima de confianza y espontaneidad. algunas de las técnicas puestas en juego, son las que se emplean habitualmente en las intervenciones comunitarias: para recoger información, como la observación y la entrevista; para facilitar la expresión de ideas y vivencias, como las técnicas dramáticas (escenas, estatuas, juego de roles) y las técnicas gráficas (collage, afiches, mapeos); y para trabajar con grupos numerosos, como las discusiones en pequeños grupos y la posterior puesta en común. también tuvimos que desarrollar técnicas para cumplir con los objetivos específicos y alcanzar los resultados esperados en distintos momentos del proceso. mencionamos algunas de ellas: -el juego de la participación. se empleó con los etos para abordar la participación de las familias en los centros. a modo de juego de mesa, con tablero y dado, cada equipo, a medida que avanza, se encuentra con afirmaciones, frases incompletas, textos breves e interrogantes sobre la participación, que debe discutir. -el dominó comunitario. se empleó con el grupo de familiares como insumo para construir una propuesta de evaluación del componente comunitario. en grupos, debían colocar las fichas relacionando sus contenidos a partir de la siguiente pregunta: ¿qué resultados esperamos del trabajo que se realiza en el centro al que concurren los niños, niñas y las familias? debía argumentarse la relación establecida entre las fichas que se asociaban, algunas de las cuales estaban vacías e invitaban a ser completadas. con el fin de socializar la información sistematizada para que las personas involucradas pudieran apropiarse de los resultados y como insumo para la replanificación en cada etapa, elaboramos materiales gráficos, de lectura ágil y de fácil difusión, y ensayamos otros modos de devolución que complementaron los informes escritos realizados cada año. a modo de ejemplo: -cuando la participación dice presente. por nuestros niños y también por nosotros mismos. es el nombre de un folleto que expone las actividades realizadas en una etapa de la intervención y los resultados obtenidos. se toman expresiones de las personas participantes y se usa la tira de historieta como recurso. también presenta las interrogantes surgidas ante la consigna: “todo lo que usted quería saber del programa nuestros niños y nunca se animó a preguntar”, la que motivó global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  11   un interesante diálogo entre las familias y representantes de la imm. -participol (único con nitrato de borrarme): empleando el humor como recurso de comunicación, se elaboró un material sobre participación con el formato de un prospecto de medicamento. se presenta el producto, se indican los mecanismos de acción, la posología, los efectos colaterales, las contraindicaciones y las precauciones. -reconociendo lo que hacemos. guía para la evaluación del componente comunitario. es un folleto que sintetiza el proceso de construcción participativa de indicadores de evaluación del componente comunitario. el mismo recoge el producto de las instancias de discusión partiendo de las siguientes interrogantes: ¿qué no sabemos y queremos saber sobre el impacto generado por el componente comunitario? ¿qué interrogantes querríamos responder a través de un proceso de evaluación del componente comunitario? se categorizaron los insumos obtenidos, lo que permitió construir distintas dimensiones de la evaluación y los correspondientes indicadores: de resultados, de impactos y de medios. -teatro espontáneo. se utilizó este recurso dramático para socializar los resultados de la evaluación del programa. la compañía de teatro espontáneo de la facultad de psicología, preparó escenas a partir de la evaluación realizada. luego de presentadas, las personas participantes debían relatar alguna anécdota o situación vivida. los actores y actrices montaban una nueva escena sobre la base del relato. el impacto vivencial producido permitió experimentar una comunicación horizontal, en la que el rol de cada persona en el programa no se constituyó en obstáculo. resultados y análisis entre los principales resultados del proceso de intervención desarrollado, destacamos: -la problematización del pedido inicial vinculado a las osc permitió visibilizar la interdependencia entre todos los actores involucrados y la comprensión de su papel en el complejo y dinámico entramado que se construye en un programa de estas características. -en el marco de esa interdependencia, se identificaron los obstáculos para que la relación entre las osc y el estado se constituyera en una efectiva co-gestión, o sea, en co-decisión. en el intento de superar esos obstáculos, se instrumentó un espacio de trabajo entre las osc sin la presencia de la imm. de mantenerse, permitiría concebir al conjunto de las organizaciones como sujeto colectivo autónomo capaz de ubicarse en posición de negociación frente al estado. ello exige la disposición y capacidad de las osc para transitar un proceso trabajoso y de largo aliento, y del estado, para legitimar y no resistir un proceso de tales características. -se desarrolló una reflexión crítica sobre el carácter de los procesos participativos, que permitió identificar facilitadores y obstáculos, el papel de cada actor en ellos, y movilizar prejuicios que operan como ruidos en la comunicación. el escenario de diálogo entre los distintos actores, provocado por los agentes externos, presenta un interesante potencial de cambio, ya que permite conocerse y reconocerse, interrogar y encontrar respuestas, y experimentar momentos de intercambio desde condiciones de horizontalidad que rompen con las relaciones jerárquicas naturalizadas. -cabe señalar una importante ausencia: la voz de los niños y niñas. la resignificación de esta experiencia nos permite reflexionar sobre el falso supuesto de que la participación es cosa de personas adultas, privándonos de la riqueza y potencial de la participación infantil concebida en clave de derechos. -se problematizó el tipo de participación de los usuarios y usuarias de los ccei, la concebida en los objetivos del programa, la esperada y la efectivamente realizada. ello implicó un corrimiento desde la queja por la no participación, pasando por la comprensión del carácter de los procesos participativos y de su impacto en los vínculos, hasta la visualización de los factores que favorecen su continuidad. -el debate sobre la posibilidad de que los usuarios y usuarias ocuparan un lugar protagónico en la toma de decisiones generó que los actores del estado formularan una propuesta de modelo de gestión participativa que involucraba a los diferentes actores: osc, etos y familias. una propuesta de estas características, novedosa en el concierto de políticas gestionadas entre estado y sociedad civil, exigía una profunda reflexión y análisis, cuyo desarrollo se hizo posible. sin embargo, también requería de la toma de decisiones por parte de los actores municipales para ponerla en práctica, lo que no aconteció. nos encontramos con algunos de límites de la intervención, con la dificultad de alcanzar consensos y tomar decisiones que incluyeran los insumos de la discusión. -el desarrollo de intervenciones en los ccei, permitió abordar la singularidad y hacer aportes específicos de acuerdo a las global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  12   necesidades y problemas de cada centro. estas intervenciones enriquecieron la comprensión de los sentidos subjetivos que se desplegaban en el programa en su conjunto. -la construcción participativa de indicadores de evaluación permitió elaborar un instrumento para la evaluación del componente comunitario disponible para los ccei, que puede ser transferido a otras experiencias de similares características. -enriquecimos el conocimiento sobre los procesos participativos involucrados en programas de pps co-gestionados entre estado y osc, alejándonos de la participación como constructo abstracto y ligándola a las particulares circunstancias políticoinstitucionales, a los sentidos subjetivos construidos por los actores involucrados y a los impactos que se van generando. se trata de una participación situada que tiene múltiples dimensiones, donde es fundamental considerar el papel que cada actor se asigna a sí mismo y a los demás, y las coincidencias y discrepancias en la concepción sobre la participación. el carácter situado de ésta también responde al sentido que adquiere en el programa no sólo en su discurso y formulación, sino también en las acciones que efectivamente se implementan o se omiten desde los decisores. -la realización de una intervención de estas características desde la universidad pública reafirmó su compromiso de socializar los conocimientos, al tiempo que les enriqueció al ponerlos a dialogar con las voces de actores diversos, políticos, técnicos y comunitarios. la sistematización de la experiencia, mientras ella se desarrolla, permite articular reflexión y acción y producir nuevos conocimientos. la participación de estudiantes posibilitó no sólo desarrollar un proceso de aprendizaje situado e integral, sino además formar profesionales capaces de actuar en los escenarios de la política pública. conclusiones el escenario de la pps es esencialmente complejo involucrando múltiples dimensiones, una variedad de actores y generando un campo de fuerzas convergentes y contradictorias. ello exige la instrumentación de una estrategia de intervención que contemple esa complejidad y permita desplegar las distintas voces, provocando el diálogo entre las mismas. requiere considerar simultáneamente los distintos niveles, el de la mirada global sobre el diseño y gestión de la política, el de los niveles intermedios de supervisión y control y el de los espacios singulares de implementación. para desarrollar intervenciones que favorezcan los procesos participativos en estos escenarios es necesario tener en cuenta: la heterogeneidad en los modos de concebir la participación por parte de los actores involucrados y en las expectativas vinculadas a su desarrollo; la tensión entre concebir la participación de los sujetos en la pps como derecho o como deber, los procesos subjetivos involucrados en la construcción de un sujeto de derechos en contraposición a un sujeto agradecido y a un sujeto asistido; el impacto subjetivo de las experiencias participativas y la importancia del porqué y el para qué (fundamento e intencionalidad) sobre el qué y el cuánto (tipo de actividad, cantidad de participantes y grado de participación) en cada contexto específico; la tensión entre instituir formas organizativas que efectivicen la participación en la toma de decisiones y el riesgo de burocratizar u obturar procesos esencialmente dinámicos, singulares e inciertos (rodríguez, 2009). más que crear formatos organizativos únicos para el desarrollo de la co-gestión, se trata de conducir la intervención a favorecer procesos que, en el establecimiento de vínculos sustentados en el respeto por la diversidad y en el análisis y autocrítica de las prácticas cotidianas, generen mayores grados de fortalecimiento individual y colectivos. los destinos siempre son borrosos y están sometidos a incertidumbre porque se construyen en el propio proceso y desde la inclusión de todas las personas y grupos involucrados (rodríguez, haberkorn y cortázar, 2005). cuando existe desde la pps una intencionalidad de profundizar la participación y la democracia, la asociación con los aportes potenciales de la psc se ve favorecida. sin embargo, esto no significa ausencia de contradicciones y conflictos. tal como lo expresamos en otro trabajo, entre la expresión de intenciones de transformación y su concreción operan complejos procesos políticos, económicos, comunicacionales, organizacionales y psicosociales que son interdependientes. (rodríguez, 2009). es imprescindible que la psicología social comunitaria siga avanzando en la comprensión y en la intervención en estos escenarios. referencias alfaro, j. (2012). posibilidades y tensiones en la relación entre psicología comunitaria y políticas sociales. en j. alfaro, a. sánchez y a. zambrano (comps.) psicología comunitaria y políticas sociales. reflexiones y experiencias. (pp.45-75) buenos aires: paidós. claramunt, a. (2006). participación en políticas sociales descentralizadas: el impacto en los actores sociales. buenos aires: espacio. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  13   de lellis, m. (2006). la psicología comunitaria en el ciclo de las políticas públicas. en m. de lellis y cols. psicología y políticas públicas de salud. (pp.125-186) buenos aires: paidós. fals borda, o. 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(2006). hacer para transformar. el método en la psicología comunitaria. buenos aires: paidós. rodríguez, a., giménez, l, netto, c., bagnato, m. j. & marotta, c. (2001). de ofertas y demandas: una propuesta de intervención en psicología comunitaria. revista de psicología, x (002),101-109. rodríguez, a. (2004). los grupos en la gestión de proyectos sociales. en f. berriel (comp.) grupos y sociedad. intervención psicosocial y discusiones actuales. (p.223-232) montevideo: nordan. rodríguez, a., haberkorn, p. & cortázar, m. (2005, junio). la participación comunitaria: entre discursos y prácticas. desafíos actuales. ponencia presentada en el 30º congreso interamericano de psicología-sipbuenos aires, argentina. rodríguez, a. (2007). desde la promoción de salud mental hacia la promoción de salud. la concepción de lo comunitario en la implementación de proyectos sociales, revista académica alteridad, 2, 28-40. rodríguez, a. 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(1992). psicología social de las organizaciones. buenos aires: paidós. kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 overview of this issue vincent t francisco keywords: community psychology, gjcpp, editorial author biographies: vincent t francisco is the lead editor for the global journal of community psychology practice, and professor of community health education at the university of north carolina at greensboro. global journal of community psychology practice volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 overview of this issue this issue of the global journal contains several very interesting articles on issues that are incredibly current. the first article is especially important in light of the implementation of the affordable care act in the usa, and community responses to health care access. the second article discusses community resilience in terms of place and adaptive resilience in light of disaster relief efforts and the recovery process that occurs in communities following disasters. a third discusses the implementation of an art therapy program among youth in terms of themes of heroism and honor in a multicultural environment. this innovative approach is discussed in jungian terms, with great relevance for a community psychology audience due to its liberation psychology and applied approach to early intervention. the fourth article focuses on the eco-community conferences, popular with graduate students throughout the united states. it provides a colorful narrative history, and helps us understand not only the evolution and progression of ideas in community psychology, but the incredibly important influence the leadership of graduate students provide as well. the fifth article in the list is a critical and thoughtful reflection on community based research and graduate training, focusing on lessons learned from two recent graduates of community psychology programs in canada. the final article in this issue is the summary of a symposium held at the 4th international community psychology conference in barcelona in 2012. this symposium discusses several international perspectives on intimate partner violence. the authors are from hawai’i and puerto rico, and provide a rich discussion on the nature of the problem in multiple ethnic contexts. in addition, there are two submissions that feature the work of scra mini grantees. one of them focuses on issues of rape and response on college campuses. this is a video presentation that is worth everyone’s time to watch (about 18 minutes long). the presentation is powerful and provides a thoughtful reflection on the issues and challenges of survivors. the second mini-grant presentation focuses on a community psychology approach to climate change on the island of tuvalu in the south pacific, and its affect on the residents there. we present three videos from the interviews conducted by jim kelly in the mid-1990’s. the first is a panel of women interested in feminist perspectives on community psychology and community research. the second is an interview with ed wellin, a sociologist and community-oriented anthropologist that spent considerable time studying community life in peru. the third is a panel discussion from the 1997 scra biennial conference on the social contexts of community psychology. more of these videos can be seen on our vimeo. com channel (http://vimeo.com/gjcpp/videos). we hope you enjoy this rich and diverse issue! http://vimeo.com/gjcpp/videos original research microsoft word 2014-si09-20140519.docx what transformation? a qualitative study of empowering settings and community mental health organizations maria f. jorge-monteiro, rita aguiar, beatrice sacchetto, maria j. vargas-moniz, and josé h. ornelas ispa-instituto universitário author notes: maria f. jorge-monteiro, ma, bsw, is phd candidate in community psychology at ispa-instituto universitário; rita aguiar, ma, is phd candidate in community psychology at ispa-iu; beatrice sacchetto, ma, is phd candidate in community psychology at ispa-iu; maria j. vargas-moniz, phd, assistant professor at ispa-iu; josé h. ornelas, phd, associate professor, director of community psychology department at ispa-iu corresponding author: maria f. jorge-monteiro address: rua jardim do tabaco, 34, 1149-041, lisboa, portugal telephone: 00351962475195 email: maria_monteiro@ispa.pt keywords: empowering community settings, mental health, transformative change, case study recommended citation: jorge-monteiro, m.f., aguiar, r., sacchetto, b., vargasmoniz, m., & ornelas, j.h. (2014). what transformation? a qualitative study of empowering settings and community mental health organizations. global journal of community psychology practice, 5(1), 1-13. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   what transformation? a qualitative study of empowering settings and community mental health organizations abstract this article is based on empowering settings research and has a two-fold objective: to propose an adaptation of the empowering community settings framework to community mental health organizations practice to foster recovery and community integration; and to discuss how the adapted framework is a relevant tool to challenge community mental health transformation at multiple levels of analysis. the current study was anchored in a larger qualitative research project. it used a case study approach, with 8 in-depth interviews with diverse participants from one community mental health organization. the adapted model proved useful to guide transformational practice in community mental health programs and for evaluation of organizational empowerment and multilevel community-oriented interventions. suggestions and implications for future research are also presented. keywords: empowering community settings, mental health, transformative change, case study introduction presently, mental health and rehabilitation programs in the community still follow institutional-medical intervention approaches that perpetuate the separation of people who experience mental illness, from the rest of the population. striving for the development of organizational models that facilitate improvements in community mental health programs, the present study is based on empowerment/community-oriented approaches that challenge structures and processes within mental health programs (nelson, lord, & ochocka, 2001a, 2001b; ornelas, duarte, & jorgemonteiro, in press). research findings indicate that psychological empowerment processes tend to unfold as individuals participate in empowering community settings (aber, maton, & seidman, 2011; christens, peterson, & speer, 2011; rappaport, 1981). therefore, community mental health organizations (cmho) may be conceptualized as mediating social structures where individuals can be exposed to empowering relational processes (christens, 2012; maton & salem, 1995; nelson, et al., 2001a). trickett (2011) emphasized the setting as a goalfocused community resource where people share stories, gather opportunities for personal growth, participation and access to organizational goods. in that sense, a setting is itself a resource for empowerment. relational environments may also be considered as a process of co-empowerment characterized by mutual learning and influence (bond & keys, 1993; rappaport, 1987). the present study was informed by the empowering community settings (ecs) framework presented by maton (2008), which encompasses organizational characteristics, psychological mediators and organizational dimensions that impact individual development and community betterment domains. the ecs model includes six organizational factors: 1) a group-based belief system that inspires changes at various levels, which is strengths-based focused and is goal-oriented;2) a set of core activities that should be engaging, with high quality and requiring active learning;3) a relational environment providing significant support and sense of community;4) an opportunity role structure highly accessible that offers challenging opportunities;5) a leadership structure that is inspirational, shared and committed; and 6) a maintenance and innovation feature, based on capacitybuilding, bridging and that impacts the external environments in the community. based on a body of literature about current transformative challenges in mental health, the ecs’ framework, described above, was adapted for this study (see appendix). in the first section of this paper, the authors present a review, covering literature from community mental health, the empowerment movement, and core values and principles of community psychology, whose contribution may shift practices in mental health systems. this review was used to create a customized application of ecs to community mental health. in the second part, based on the adapted framework, we present the results from a case study, designed to explore both the presence of transformative characteristics through, which the setting empowers their members, and also impacts community and societal change. finally, we discuss how the empowering setting model may lead to cmhos global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   transformation at various levels, particularly in fostering recovery and community integration. theoretical and empirical influences for ecs in community mental health international research and practice in mental health, as well as socio-political changes, have challenged the established aims, vision and outcomes of mental health systems. in this article, empowerment is simultaneously the means and the goal for mental health transformation. empowerment relates to an alteration in power-relationships and in conditions of access to organizational and community resources. important contributions began with the patients’ liberation movement (chamberlin, 1978, 1984) and the independent living movement (ridgway, simpson, wittman, & wheeler, 1994) advocating mental health users’ rights. earlier published accounts by mental health advocates stated that the adoption of an empowerment orientation would represent a shift in mental health programs rendering them transformative in the lives of people with experience of mental illness (chamberlin, 1997; fisher, 1994). research with consumer-run organizations (cro) and self-help initiatives suggests that participating in strengths-based settings with challenging roles, results in greater empowerment among members(brown, 2009; fisher & spiro, 2010; nelson, ochocka, janzen, & trainor, 2006; segal, silverman, & temkin, 2011). this is congruent with the empowerment concept as a multilevel construct characterized by participatory processes over time, through which individuals, organizations, and communities gain greater control, efficacy and social justice(rappaport, 1987). community-based research evidence suggests that psychological, social and civic empowerment increases across levels and forms of organizational and community participation (christens, et al., 2011; maton & brodsky, 2011). the empowerment-related processes and outcomes within the various domains and levels that were described by zimmerman (2000),should be addressed by community mental health interventions that intend to transform the lives of people who experience mental illnesses. nelson, et al. (2001b) articulated an empowermentcommunity paradigm to address conceptual limitations present in the traditional paradigm in mental health by delineating strategies and processes across policy, organizational and individual levels, directed to enact the involvement and participation of people who use mental health services. the position and role that a person who experiences mental illness should play in the mental health system is also a core issue of the recovery vision in mental health change (anthony, 1993; brown, 2012; fisher, 1994). empirical evidence suggests that most people with mental health issues undergo a journey of personal recovery, challenging traditional perspectives that view persons with an experience of mental illness as being dependent on support and unable to achieve adaptive functioning and high quality of life (davidson, harding, & spaniol, 2005; davidson, sells, songster, & o'connell, 2005). the recovery perspective as a life experience, requires coordinated efforts from mental health advocates, policy makers, service providers and researchers in mental health system transformation (davidson, ridgway, kidd, topor, & borg, 2008; jacobson, greenley, breedlove, roschke, & koberstein, 2003; piat et al., 2009). because recovery is not symptom remission, but rather a process concerned with life goals, hope in the future, individualized supports and user empowerment, mental health advocates have acknowledged the community context as the best setting for it to flourish (davidson, 2007; deegan, 2005; lovejoy, 1982; ornelas, et al., in press). the community integration principle is another relevant element to change mental health practice by creating opportunities for a “full life in the community”, and the exercise of citizenship through access to fundamental rights (nelson, et al., 2001b; ornelas, et al., in press). this dimension stresses the efforts of fostering connectedness with and the use of natural resources in the community (newberry & strong, 2009; townley, miller, & kloos, 2013; ware, hopper, tugenberg, dickey, & fisher, 2007). community integration has been conceived as a multidimensional concept with interrelated physical, social, and psychological components (wong & solomon, 2002).however, living outside the hospital or using community facilities is not enough to be considered integrated in a community(lemaire & mallik, 2005). it is necessary to advance a more transformative vision of community integration.davidson, ridgway, wieland, and o'connell (2009) promoted the adoption of the capabilities and human rights’ perspectives to enlarge that vision. the capability standpoint values personal agency, and the diversity of options in social contexts(davidson, et al., 2009; ornelas, et al., in press). another transformative issue to challenge mental health programs is the multilevel intervention due to the assumption of the interdependence between individuals, programs and systems involving radiating effects of one level on the others. trickett and schensul (2009) stated that the multilevel interventions tackle social change by developing interventions at different ecological levels global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   in the community. ecological interventions are therefore critical in order to sustain innovation and change in mental health interventions. in closing, the empowering community settings’ theory, developed by maton (2008), offered the current study a salient template to explore and to incorporate the transformative features of interventions that will challenge the practice of traditional community mental health organizations(davidson, et al., 2009; fisher & spiro, 2010; nelson, et al., 2001b; ornelas, et al., in press). aeips organizational setting the associação para o estudo e integração psicossocial (aeips) is a private non-profit, mental health, community-based organization in portugal, founded in 1987 by a group of users, families and professionals. it is inspired by empowerment and community approaches, facilitating the implementation of strengthbased services for people with mental health challenges. although the setting and related socio-political context are detailed elsewhere (ornelas, vargas-moniz, & duarte, 2010), we present here a summary of its main features. aeips’ programs address individuals’ needs and expectations through access to natural contexts with the general population, and to varied community resources and domains, such as education in regular schools, employment in the mainstream labor market, and the participation in regular social roles and activities as full citizens. the community integration process consists of bridging and bonding social relations and networks, fostering more inclusive, supportive and diverse communities (ornelas, et al., in press). this cmho has more than two decades of experience influencing policy on de-institutionalization in portugal, advocating for the perspective and role of people who experienced mental illness in the mental health system, (e.g., hosting the empowerment and mutual help centre and the national network) and promoting innovative programs like the independent living and housing first approaches (ornelas, et al., 2010). the comprehensive participatory organizational processes across the setting are also a fundamental aspect of this community mental health organization. due to the co-existence of both individual and collective empowerment, including community betterment and social change as described by maton (2008), aeips was considered for the current qualitative analysis. based on a previous brief review of transformative challenges, from community mental health and from community psychology basedknowledge, we address the following questions: 1) how to adapt the ecs framework to community mental health practice that is oriented towards recovery and community integration?; 2) what empowering characteristics derived from the ecs-cmho contribute to a transformative change at the individual, program and systems levels of analysis? method participants the participants included 4 program users, 2 staff members, and 2 program administrators. the users were randomly selected from a general list of 93 participants from a previous quantitative study. the following inclusion criteria were used: a balance of men and women; minimum 2 years of participation in the organization; not hospitalized. service users were 2 women and 2 men, with ages ranging from 30 to49 years; and with 1 to 6 years of participation in the setting. each of the users that participated received an incentive of 6€. two staff members were randomly sampled from a list provided by the organization. inclusion criteria were a minimum 2 years of working in the organization, and a full-time contract. two additional informants at the program administration level were selected and interviewed as well. staff and program administrators were female, with ages between 29 and 48 years; and between 6 to 26 years of collaboration. research approach for the purpose of this study, an instrumental single case-study approach was used in order to provide indepth answers to the research questions (stake, 2005). the research team sought to triangulate information from semi-structured interviews with service users (u), staff members (s), and the coordinator and one board member as program administrators (a), to explore meaning through different perceptions or program stakeholders(patton, 1990). the construction of the interview guide involved several meetings of the research task group, composed of university-based researchers, staff and users from aeips. the researchers adopted the peer debriefing and support strategy proposed by padgett (2012). the task group critically reflected on the contents of the guides and their relation with goals, logical sequence and analyzed the language adequacy and contextualization concerns (trickett & espino, 2004). we conducted oneon-one interviews at the organizational setting of the participants and ranged from 30 min to 1hr 30min. at the opening of the interview, the participants provided written informed consent and completed a demographic questionnaire. separate interview guides for staff and administrators were created for this qualitative study. the semiglobal  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   structured interview guides were based on the literature review, in order to mirror the conceptual research framework on empowering characteristics (e.g., goals, shared mission, how theory relates to practice, member participation, nature of relationships, and influence) through open-ended questions. the same interview questions were also customized for program users. however, the user interview guide also added questions to capture program-related gains in housing, relationships, physical and mental health, and participation. all interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim and personal identifying data was deleted for its use in the analysis stage. in the results section the quotes presented were translated from the original in portuguese into english. data analysis the authors developed a coding grid, based on the literature review and logic model, to identify the fundamental empowering characteristics of transformative community mental health settings. the coding grid was based on the four core components presented in the ecs model: group-based belief system; core activities; relational environment; and role opportunity structure. data on maton’s ecs components, such as leadership and setting maintenance, were not considered for this study. however, two particular themes, the external and policy influence, were included in the grid due to their relevance for the present discussion. this approach required several team meetings for critical reflection, discussion and consensus, in order to achieve a successful adaptation. the trustworthiness of the codes and their definitions were determined by cross-checking among researchers, through an iterative process that generated the final version of the grid. data analysis also followed an interactive, back and forth, cycle among analysts(braun & clarke, 2006; miles & huberman, 1994).two research analysts coded independently the eight interviews, line by line, and a third one joined for auditing process(padgett, 2012). the empowering characteristics were highlighted and coded with the respective label. the credibility of analysis was assured by analytic triangulation, discussion of discrepancies, explaining how and why the interpretation was arrived at, until reaching a consensus was reached about the best code (braun & clarke, 2006). in order to discuss results at multiple levels of analysis the authors created new codes for individual, program and system dimensions. this phase was also subjected to credibility and trustworthiness steps. data were again transformed and condensed in new content tables, independently, and compared by research members for this aim. results highlights of key empirical findings are presented by empowering characteristic and across ecological levels of analysis according to the adapted framework to community mental health organizations (ecs-cmho). group based belief system the “group-based belief system” category’s findings included the presence of a recoveryoriented vision that values the access to the community’s natural resources, such as employment or housing. challenges facing the individual level were expressed in the words of one user:“[the organizational values] that people who experience mental illness are included in society, not living institutionalized in the hospital ... which gives hope to people with mental illness that they can achieve recovery and they can reach the same rights as the so-called normal people…” (u). values and goals were also shared among all members of the setting, and the locus of intervention was clearly the community/social context as these participants vividly expressed: recovery is (…) a new life experience anchored in experiential knowledge and… that’s one of the key principles … it also relates to empowerment, as the possibility for people to identify resources, to be able to assume their responsibilities and freedoms and to search for resources that make sense (...) this has to do with employment, education, housing, political participation and with citizenship(s) in this category, at system level, data reveals the organization external influence in the community and social contexts. one program administrator affirmed that: [organizational influence is] visible in policy change, (…) through the presence of the ideals of people with mental illness in public reports and legislation, like the mental health plan (… ) we were also contacted by the mental health department to collaborate with the closure of the miguel bombarda hospital1 (a) core activities participants’ testimonies grouped in a “core activities” category revealed a transformative impact in the                                                                                                                           1 hospital miguel bombarda was a former central psychiatric hospital in portugal. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   individuals’ lives through valued and challenging opportunities, like:“(…) the association’s supported employment program has given me a new comfort ... i didn’t know how the job market worked, and so i felt more supported” (u); and “[a milestone] was the constructing my portfolio in the training for employment integration, because it was an opportunity to increase awareness of my course of life ...” (u). at the program level, transformative features were related to the ecs issue of meaningful and congruent practices when associated with the individualization of the users’ needs and objectives, because “[through] the individual support program,(…) defining the objectives collaboratively… the goals that one person wants to achieve … which resources can be mobilized and also by assessing the fulfillment of the project” (a). collaboration was noted in the discourse of interviewees by examples of individualized supports, setting governance and maintenance, and participatory evaluation processes: “it’s ... a collaborative role (...) we have to have the notion that both knowledge and experience [from users] are as important as professional knowledge” (s); or also that “this organization has this kind of action of an ongoing self-assessment, asking families, participants, professionals, about what can be changed and what can be improved” (a). potential effects at the systems level were focused on situating the interventions in community environments beyond the organizational setting and in breaking barriers to mental health users’ participation and community inclusiveness: [supported employment] has this goal of helping people return to employment or access employment ..., so we are talking about regular companies; ... we have the supported education service, with this same philosophy and principles of bringing people back to schools, to regular universities (s) relational environment the “relational environment” category provided evidence for impacts at an individual level through peer and natural social supports where life experiences are shared and valued: “[milestones] … a person who belonged to that group [welcoming committee]2… who helped me … to meet people, introducing me, showing me how this house works” (u), and also from mutual help initiatives. partnerships with the university also appeared to be                                                                                                                           2  program  activity  designed  to  welcome  new   participants  in  the  organization.   significantly empowering at the program level:“the academy has also a fundamental role here. this link of aeips with ispa [university] improves the work methods and the building of skills (...) through that research and action endeavor...” (s). an identified transformative theme at the system level was the ongoing connections with community resources located outside mental health system, such as schools or companies that appeared as the main sources of natural support for people in the setting. one participant stated: “the approach is always contextual, natural, so we use natural community resources” (a). this idea was reinforced by another program level representative “community integration implies establishing constant bridging with community resources, with local companies, with schools, with local governments, with training centers, with all the sites where the participant is involved” (a). opportunity role structure the data included in the “opportunity role structure” category, emphasized accessible and varying demands and opportunities for individuals within the setting. both users and staff members highlighted the value of participation and accessing capacity-building opportunities: “i’ve already done two thematic debates of my exclusive authorship ... and ... i use to present thematic debates previously scheduled” (u), or “… the continuous training, every week, for staff, student internships, and participants [users], who want to attend” (s). in this category, the presence of transformative evidence at the program level was based on the participants’ discourse as related to members’ involvement across organizational structures and processes: “our association is constituted by families, professionals and by service users (...) they all are in the governing bodies (...) we always had this concern of having them as representatives in the governing bodies” (a). finally, themes at the system level also highlighted organizational members’ external influence, through the existence of opportunities for community participation within and beyond the setting, which informed a potential radiating process over resources and policies, as it is noted in this statement: [ceam] it is a users group that generated much change inside [the organization] and outside... also in terms of public policy, they are consultants in the policy reform of mental health services (...) and they continue to give their testimony, at universities, they are invited to conferences, too… (s) global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   discussion with the present study we learned that the development of empowering interventions with community mental health organizations promotes change towards recovery and community integration across multiple levels. first, this research was guided by an adaptation of the ecs framework, which is presented in the appendix section. based on the literature review, it was found to be a viable tool to assess empowering processes across ecological levels in community mental health organizations. it also helps to guide service transformation towards recovery and life in the community, namely valuing a recovery and community oriented vision beyond traditional mental health systems; focusing the individualization of users’ needs and goals; participation opportunities; and entering community-valued contexts such as housing and employment (maton, 2000, 2008; nelson, et al., 2001b; ornelas, et al., in press). second, evidence for transformation at the individual level of analysis, using the ecs-cmho framework, highlights a shift towards a strengths-based approach rather than the “deficit approach”(ridgway, 2005). the underlying empowerment-based and recovery-oriented vision was consistent with the transformed identity from user to citizen (davidson, et al., 2009; fisher & spiro, 2010). this vision is applied through the individualization of interests and objectives, enhanced connectedness, and access to meaningful social roles and activities in community natural contexts (ware, et al., 2007). additionally, peer support initiatives and availability of opportunities for people who experienced mental illness, to collaboratively participate across ecological levels, emerged as significant for personal achievement and empowerment (bond & keys, 1993; maton & salem, 1995). these findings are congruent with the process of member gains in psychological empowerment, social empowerment, and civic empowerment—essential components of empowering community settings, as suggested by maton and brodsky (2011). at the program level, transformative empowering characteristics were mainly anchored in the community orientation of the intervention through ongoing partnerships with multiple resources outside the mental health system, including landlords, neighbors, school teachers, and others. in line with a contextual paradigm, rather than designing alternative and separated settings, the interventions should be community-situated and the interaction among community members should be collaborative(trickett & espino, 2004). furthermore all these potentiate the access to regular community contexts and to change them. at the program level, collaboration was found to provide a pervasive structure for every dimension and goal of the setting, where all members were considered resources(brown, 2009). collaboration was present in processes such as governance and maintenance, interpersonal support and external contacts, which were relevant to achieve the organizational purpose (bond & keys, 1993; seidman & tseng, 2011). another transformative characteristic is the continuous participatory process of evaluation and research (fetterman & wandersman, 2005; suarez-balcazar & harper, 2003). the use of collaborative research methods such as community based participatory research, as well as the development of long-term community-university research partnerships by cmho’s, may lead to transformative efforts and outcomes (minkler & wallerstein, 2003; suarezbalcazar et al., 2004). creating opportunities for direct interpersonal contacts, through the participation of people with experience of mental illness in community settings, will be effective for the promotion of user empowerment and community change (janzen, nelson, trainor, & ochocka, 2006; trickett, 2009; zimmerman, 2000). the promotion of capabilities and social inclusion also presents new challenges and demands new practices from professionals and cmhos (fisher & chamberlin, 2005; newberry & strong, 2009). main themes for transformation at the system level were related to direct intervention outside the setting domain and in higher levels of analysis within and beyond the mental health system. core features were related to linkages and with the radiating effect of setting members in utilizing those external resources, reflected in the clearance of barriers to community integration in those contexts(lemaire & mallik, 2005; ornelas, et al., in press). results also revealed direct interventions at the public policy level, not only through the implementation of quality program content, but also with the users’ access to political decision levels(fisher & spiro, 2010; janzen, nelson, hausfather, & ochocka, 2007; nelson, et al., 2001b). davidson, et al. (2009)suggested that a transformative shift can only occur when people who experience mental illness are active participants in changing surrounding conditions and personal lives. adopting such an empowering philosophy in their vision and practices, cmhos may help promote agency, empowerment, recovery, and even community betterment. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   additionally, the present study also illuminated the presence of several contributions from the community psychology field that enhanced the ecs-cmho by endorsing the collaborative approach in interventions as a core empowering structure across ecological levels and domains (bond & keys, 1993; trickett & espino, 2004). collaboration was embedded in the professionaluser relationship, not only in the definition of individual user interests and objectives, but also in service activity within and outside the setting. the establishment of a continuous process of research and action appeared as another empowering feature in organizational setting. the research partnerships between community organization and university can be catalysts for a continuous cycle of reflection and practice and members’ achievements (suarez-balcazar, harper, & lewis, 2005). data also revealed significant evidence for multilevel interventions within but also across maton’s domains of individual wellness and social change to enhance empowering settings at the policy arena. the dual nature of the studied setting, operating simultaneously at different levels and multiple domains, appeared to be empowering in and of itself in terms of transformative change (schensul & trickett, 2009). this focus is highly relevant for sensitive social themes, such as mental health challenges, helping to achieve sustainable social transformation and prevent backlash effects from the introduction of innovative efforts(maton, 2000). in light of our study limitations, future research should continue to develop and confirm the validity of the ecs-cmho framework as a resource for transformation and for evaluation across different organizations in the mental health field. also, for purposes of cmho efficacy in promoting better lives in the community for people with lived experience of mental illness, we should find further longitudinal evidence regarding which particular features of empowering programs influence individual outcomes on psychological empowerment, mental health recovery, and community integration; and also which features determine transformative change at the social and policy level. acknowledgments this article was supported by fct ptdc/psipcl/113301/2009 & fct-bd/65518/2009. references aber, m. s., maton, k. i., & seidman, e. 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(2007). connectedness and citizenship: redefining social integration. psychiatric services, 58(4), 469-474. doi: 10.1176/appi.ps.58.4.469 wong, y.-l. i., & solomon, p. l. (2002). community integration of persons with psychiatric disabilities in supportive independent housing: a conceptual model and methodological considerations. mental health services research, 4(1), 13-28. doi: 10.1023/a:1014093008857 zimmerman, m. a. (2000). empowerment theory: psychological, organizational, and community levels of analysis. in j. rappaport & e. seidman (eds.), handbook of community psychology. (pp. 43-63). dordrecht netherlands: kluwer academic publishers. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  12   appendix ecs framework for community mental health organizations (ecs-cmho) empowering organizational characteristics adaptation to cmho settings group-based belief system inspires change salient goals 1. recovery promotion (focusing on personal goals, support networks, rediscovering yourself) 2. community integration and participation promotion 3. empowerment and emancipation promotion 4. transformed identity: user to citizen clear means 1.community integration at community natural resources 2. community orientation 3. community mobilization 4. collaborative approach 5. action/research strengthbased member-asresource 1.all members (participants, staff, families) collaborate by organizing activities and services 2. contribute with opinions/suggestions beyond self shared vision 1.theoretical framework 2.shared service mission 3. shared goals and values larger purpose 1. policy influence 2. social change/innovation core activities engaging meaningful 1. individualized projects through individual support 2. challenging activities in the community 3. emphasis on choice congruent 1. defining individual paths and goals 2. emphasis on diversity active learning feedback 1. activities evaluation by the participants 2. collaborative service evaluation 3. collaborative evaluation of individualized project reflection 1. individual and group meetings for critical reflection 2. shared testimonies quality content 1. supported education 2. supported employment 3. independent housing and supports 4. other individual projects in natural contexts 5. physical health relationships 1. staff as mediators of the integration process 2. equitable and co-empowering relationship 3. collaborative relationship relational environment support system multiple domains and sources 1. local community context (city halls, social security, etc.) 2. mental health services 3. regular educational contexts 4. regular labor market 5.graduate school/academia *external influence 1. impact on community stakeholders caring relationship s peers 1. mutual help groups 2. peers activities 3. family mutual help group mentors 1. inspirational members senseofcom munity within setting 1. shared norms and history of the organization 2. feeling of belonging beyond setting 1. ongoing relationships with people outside the organization global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  13   appendix ecs framework for community mental health organizations (ecs-cmho) (c) empowering organizational characteristics adaptation to cmho settings opportunity role structure pervasive many roles at multiple levels participants and families can: 1. promote activities 2. take responsibility for service activities 3. be formal members 4. be members of the governing bodies 5. participate in general assemblies 6. peer specialists in staff teams highly accessible varying demands 1. different roles according to members’ potentials encouraged/ challenged 1. opportunities for the exercise of challenging roles multi-functional use, develop skills 1. participants growth 2. continuous training voice influence to social change 1. service representation and dissemination 2. advocacy 3. anti-stigma campaigns 4. peer movements adapted from maton (2008) * external influence on community resources was added to relational environment for present study purpose. microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 163 re-empowering family members disempowered by addiction: support for individual or collective action? jim orford1 university of birmingham, england iii international conference of community psychology puebla, mexico, june 4, 2010                                                                                                                           1 j.f.orford@bham.ac.uk 164 re-empowering family members disempowered by addiction: support for individual or collective action? abstract just under one hundred million is a conservative estimate of the number of adults whose lives are adversely affected by the alcohol or drug addiction of close relatives. including children in the figures would add tens of millions more. the particular qualities of the experience of having to cope with excessive drinking or drug taking in the family, in combination, can make it a unique and highly stressful and disempowering experience. a programme of research over a number of years has 1) explored in detail the nature of affected family members’ experiences, and 2) developed and evaluated a method for helping affected family members in their own right. work in mexico, england, among indigenous australians, and in different regions in italy has suggested the existence of a common core of disempowered experience for family members, with some cross-cultural variations. predominant cultural norms – individual, familial collective, or community collective – are amongst the factors that modify the core experience. a method of supporting affected family members – the 5-step method – has shown promise in a number of countries. its emphasis is upon listening carefully to a family member’s story, providing relevant information, discussing coping dilemmas, and building social support. the method is flexible enough to be used in brief forms (including booklet and web forms), with anyone affected by or concerned about another person’s addiction, and it can be used in a wide variety of settings including primary care and other community settings. examples will be given of the ways in which it can re-empower family members by building their confidence to cope effectively. keywords: empowerment, disempowerment, addictions, family members’ experiences, 5 steps method. 165 ¿re-empoderando miembros de familias desempoderadas por adicción: apoyo para individuos o acción colectiva? resumen un poco menos de 100 millones es un cálculo aproximado del número de adultos cuyas vidas son afectadas negativamente por el alcohol o por la adicción a las drogas de parientes cercanos. si se incluye a los niños en ese número habría que añadir decenas de millones más. las condiciones particulares de la situación de tener que enfrentar el beber en exceso o tomar drogas en la familia puede resultar en una experiencia de desempoderamiento muy singular y altamente estresante. un programa de investigación realizado a lo largo de numerosos años ha logrado: 1) explorar en detalle la naturaleza de las experiencias de los miembros de la familia afectados, y 2) desarrollar y evaluar un método para ayudar a esos miembros afectados en su vida cotidiana. trabajo desarrollado en méxico, inglaterra, entre aborígenes australianos y en diferentes regiones de italia ha sugerido la existencia de un cuerpo común de experiencias de desempoderamiento en miembros de las familias, con sólo algunas variantes transculturales. normas culturales predominantes – individuales, colectivas familiares y colectivas comunitarias – se cuentan entre los factores que modifican la experiencia central. un método de respaldo para miembros de la familia afectados – el método de los cinco pasos – se ha mostrado promisorio en varios países. hace hincapié en escuchar cuidadosamente el relato de un miembro de la familia, proveyendo información relevante, discutiendo dilemas de enfrentamiento y construyendo respaldo social. el método es bastante flexible como para ser usado en formas breves (incluyendo formatos de libreta y de red) con cualquier persona afectada por o preocupada por la adicción de otra persona. puede ser usado en una amplia variedad de escenarios incluyendo atención primaria de salud y otras situaciones comunitarias. se ofrecen ejemplos de las formas en que se puede re-empoderar a miembros de las familias, construyendo su certeza de que pueden enfrentar efectivamente el problema. palabras clave: empoderamiento, desempoderamiento, adicciones, experiencias de miembros familiares, método de los 5 pasos. 166 families and addiction: disempowerment on a large scale globally. it is well understood that the prevalence of substance use disorders is on a colossal scale – of the order of 15 million people with drug use disorders globally and 75 million with alcohol use disorders, according to the world health organisation (obot, 2005). what is not so well appreciated is the toll that such a problem, on such a large-scale, takes in terms of family health. this paper is about an experience that is shared by tens of millions of people around the world. it is the experience of living in a family in which one of the members of the family is consuming alcohol or taking illicit drugs to an extent that is seriously harmful to the family. the chief protagonists are the wives, husbands or partners, mothers or fathers, sisters or brothers, adult daughters or sons, aunts or uncles, and other close kin who are affected by the excessive drinking or drug taking. this group is referred to throughout the paper simply as family members. the problem drinkers or drug takers about whom they are concerned are referred to as their relatives. whereas the direct contribution of alcohol and drug problems to global ill-health is recognised, the indirect contribution to the global burden of ill-health caused by the stress on affected family members remains largely hidden and unacknowledged. that burden falls particularly heavily on women and increasingly in low to middle income countries. our research group at the universities of birmingham and bath in england, in collaboration with colleagues in mexico, australia and italy, has carried out a series of studies involving, between them, interviews with around 800 family members affected by their relatives’ alcohol or drug problems (orford et al., 2005, 2010a). although the experience of being such a family member varies in certain ways according to socio-cultural group and other factors, we have concluded that there is a common core to that experience which is recognisable everywhere. that common core of experience can be summarised as follows. family members affected by addiction face a form of chronic stress that impacts upon them at a number of different levels. it includes daily hassles of an unpleasant kind as well as relationships that deteriorate over what may be a very lengthy time span. the situation contains a number of threats, to oneself, the home, and the family, particularly to children, and perhaps to the whole community. there is much uncertainty for family members. part of that uncertainty is how to understand and account for the deterioration in family life which is happening, which appears to be caused by the excessive behaviour of a loved one who seems to be threatening his or her own health and well167 being as much as that of the family. how to respond to the relative and his or her drinking or drug taking, in ways that reconcile the needs of the family, the relative and the family member her/himself, poses a number of agonising dilemmas. should a family member put up with it, stand up to it, or withdraw and seek a degree of independence? those are perhaps the main options, but those apparently simple questions only begin to reflect the complexity of a family member’s struggles for meaning and action. that experience is very disempowering. affected family members talk about being worried, preoccupied with thinking about the relative and the problem, feeling nervous and panicky, irritable and quick tempered, low and miserable, annoyed and resentful. it is common for them to feel failures themselves or to feel de-valued. some say they feel alone facing the problem. others feel frightened. it is not uncommon to hear thoughts of suicide expressed. there are few things more demoralising than witnessing at close hand a person you love, whose life is closely entwined with your own, and who you know is capable of many good things, apparently being taken over by a seemingly senseless attachment to such a harmful form of consumption. this sense of demoralisation is compounded if, at the same time, the addiction poses a threat to the family member’s safety or is undermining of family functioning. culture modifies the core experience. the experience of being a family member affected by a close relative’s addiction might be called a ‘variform universal’, to use a term from cross-cultural psychology. despite there being a common, relatively invariant core to the experience, individuals, families and communities are positioned differently in relation to substance use and misuse, and their varying positions significantly modify the core experience (see figure 1). 168 figure 1: main modifiers of the core family member experience the core experience relationship to misusing relative culture: individual, familial or communal licit or illicit: traditional or recently introduced substances use pattern traditional vs modern family roles is modified by fm female or male family material circumstances one of the factors that we believe acts as a modifier is the traditional versus modern arrangement of marital and family roles. an illustration comes from one of our studies in england which was with sikh wives married to men with drinking problems. most were firstgeneration immigrants to britain, and all had had arranged marriages. on a cultural assimilation scale, wives reported eating mainly asian food, wearing traditional clothes, and speaking punjabi most of the time. most regarded britain as their home country, but many were still against intermarriage and felt different from indigenous english people. what they said about the ways they had coped suggested that most had moved from a position of inactive resignation to the problem, had often stood up to their husbands, for example by expressing anger towards them or by pouring their drink away, and had often achieved a measure of independence. the evidence showed, however, that despite these changes, they continued to show a relatively high level of 169 tolerance towards their husbands’ drinking. all the sikh wives continued to feel a sense of practical obligation toward their husbands that often involved behaviors that might be described as tolerant-sacrificing, such as cleaning up after them when they had been drinking or putting them to bed when they were drunk. our earlier work with white english and mexican family members had suggested at least five variations on the theme of independence. some of these seemed more possible than others for the sikh wives. for example, while ‘not worrying’ − one aspect of independence − was something that the sikh women said they were achieving to a greater extent than previously, ‘getting away’ and ‘doing what i want to do’ were limited. wives were not able to get out of the house for extended periods because of their duties as wives and mothers. although some wives had learned to put themselves before their partners, they still mostly continued to put the needs of other family members before their own (ahuja et al., 2003). a way of correcting the neglect of affected family members. many family members affected by addiction have told us in the course of our research that they had never previously spoken about the problem in the detail which the research interview allowed. most had received only minimal help from health or social services and it was not uncommon for the help or advice received to be described as having been unhelpful. on the basis of what we have learnt about the experiences of family members coping with addiction, we have developed an approach which we term the 5-step method (see figure 2). we have now used this method in a number of studies. three of our studies have taken place in the primary health care setting; the method is used by a variety of primary care health professionals, including doctors and nurses (copello et al., 2000, 2009). another of our recent studies focused on black and muslim families using ethnic minority community services (orford et al., 2010b). the method has been used in primary care, and other community care settings in mexico (natera et al., 2010) and in italy (arcidiacono et al., 2009). we believe there are a number of attractions of the 5-step method: it is a low cost intervention which can be delivered in a number of different formats and is easily adaptable for different primary care and community settings. 170 figure 2: the 5-step method for helping affected family members 1. listen non-judgementally 2. provide information 3. discuss ways of coping 4. explore sources of support 5. arrange further help as needed (including the involvement of the addicted relative) using standard questionnaires, it has been a consistent finding that family members’ symptoms of ill-health reduce following receipt of the 5-step method. more detailed analysis, based on interviews with participants in these studies, suggests that a number of transformations take place for family members, the principal ones being as follows: 1. focus on own life and needs. the most frequently mentioned type of change referred to is an increase in independence or distance from the relative’s problem drinking or drug taking. this is most commonly referred to in terms of an increased focus on oneself and one’s own needs. 2. being assertive. family members speak of being more assertive with their relatives, by communicating more directly with the relative than previously, by being more directive in arranging alternative activities, or by being firmer in maintaining a course of action. 3. calming down. family members explain how sessions have helped them become less emotional in their interactions with their relatives; finding a different way of dealing with the anger and frustration caused by the drug misuse, acting more calmly, and seeing the positive effects of this change on the drug user’s behaviour. 4. achieving a better understanding of the problem and seeing the links with one’s own health. family members speak of gaining an understanding about their relatives’ drinking or drug taking, or a realisation of the links between the drinking or drug problem and their own physical or mental health. an important element of this is experiencing a reduction 171 in self-blame: for having been a cause of the drug problem, for not having dealt with it, or for having taken action such as asking the drug-using relative to leave home. an example from the muslim arm of our ethnic minority study is that of a wife living with her husband and three children. her husband’s drug use, of over ten years’ standing, meant that they were struggling financially much of the time. her relationship with her husband, although basically satisfactory, at times left her feeling very low. she thought it had affected the children. she said she had no support from her in-laws. she was given a self-help manual in urdu which accompanied the 5-step sessions. as a result, she put in a lot of hard work in trying to help her husband reduce his drug use and successfully implemented some changes. she started to manage his heroin intake, helping him reduce his spending on drugs from around £100 a day to about £20. her husband started to take methadone. she also rebuilt connections with her in-laws. the home environment gradually improved and this had a positive effect on the children, reflected in their improved school work. from individual to collective action. but i want to bring this presentation round to an issue which is crucial to community psychology: how to foster collective action on issues which are more usually treated as individual, personal and private ones. the origins of the 5-step method lie in clinical and counselling work with people with problems of substance misuse, and dissatisfaction with the failure of that work to acknowledge the impact of such problems on family health. the work has largely been with individual affected family members. it is clear, however, that this work touches on issues that are of central interest in community psychology. for one thing our work with minority indigenous and immigrant groups has shown us how coping with alcohol and drug problems is both a personal-private and public-community matter. this forced itself on our attention in a study with aboriginal family members in australia. perhaps partly due to the more public nature of family life in remote indigenous communities in australia, and perhaps partly due to the controversial nature of alcohol policy in the northern territory – for example rural communities could opt to be ‘dry’ – during interviews with indigenous family members it was not possible to draw a clear line between private and public, personal and community. similarly, when interviewing affected family members in the pakistani-kashmiri muslim community in 172 england, a dominant theme was the large, close-knit family and community networks which existed, offering great potential for positive social support but at the same time threatening greater exposure and dishonour to the family. the majority of family members who have taken part in our studies have been women, most mothers and partners, but also including sisters, aunts and other female family members. the disempowerment experienced by women in our work – but also often experienced by affected male family members – and the re-empowering changes often associated with taking part in the 5-step method, appear very similar to those described by others who have contributed to work in community psychology, emancipatory public health, or women’s health studies. for example, the listening partners programme described by bond et al. (2000), for poor, rural mothers in the usa talks of, ‘… growth of self, voice, and mind among all participants…’, as a result of a programme of meetings using ‘reflective dialogue’ which gave participants the experience of expressing themselves, knowing that they have been heard, and seeing or hearing their own words reproduced and acknowledged. kar et al. (1999) reviewed reports of case studies from across the world in which women had been empowered in one of four areas: basic human rights, equal rights for women, economic enhancement, and health promotion. a conclusion was: several innovative and well-regarded community development models… hold that community empowerment, especially empowerment of women, is the key to successful programs for social change that affect the quality of life and health of poor and powerless families and communities. a question that remains for me, therefore, is how our programme, which also embodies empowerment principles and has the potential to empower large numbers of women (and men) affected by alcohol and drug misuse, can move towards a more collective, community-oriented way of working. interestingly, one of the 40 case studies of women’s empowerment identified by kar et al was mothers against drunk driving. other examples of collective action started by family members and others affected by substance problems include neighbourhood action projects and local or regional policy campaigns. an example of the former was voice of southmead, an action project in a relatively poor area of bristol, england. according to brent (2009), in the course of this project, ‘the concerns of the families of drug users moved into the public realm and were no longer treated as a private shame’. one of the interesting features of 173 that campaign was the involvement of men alongside women. an example of policy campaigning was provided by marshall and marshall (1990) in their book silent voices speak: women and prohibition in truk. during that campaign in the late 1970s to the mid 1980s women took the lead in maintaining a concerted and successful campaign, against considerable opposition, to have one jurisdiction in the pacific islands opt for ‘dry’ status. the challenge, if this type of work is to move from individual to collective action, lies in the largely hidden nature of the problem. in all our studies it has been difficult and time consuming to recruit samples. although the numbers of individuals and families affected are in the tens of millions world-wide, the problems remain largely private ones, unspoken about in public; the mothers, wives, fathers and other family members affected by addiction problems rarely have an effective collective voice. helping them find that voice remains a task for the future. references ahuja, a., orford, j. & copello, a. g. (2003). understanding how families cope with alcohol problems in the uk west midlands sikh community. contemporary drug problems, 30, 839-873. arcidiacono, a., velleman, r., procentese, f., albanese, c. & fioretti, g. (eds.) (2009). famiglie sotto stress: strategie per con-vivere con chi abusa di alcol e droga. [the family under strees: strategies to co-exist with alcohol and drug abusers]. roma, italy: unicopli press. bond, l.a., belenky, m.f. & weinstock, j.s. (2000). the listening partners program: an initiative toward feminist community psychology in action. american journal of community psychology. 28, 697-730. brent, j. (2009). searching for community: representation, power and action on an urban estate. bristol: the policy press. copello, a. g., orford, j., velleman, r., templeton, l. & krishnan, m. (2000). methods for reducing alcohol and drug related family harm in non-specialist settings. journal of mental health. 9, 329-343. copello, a., templeton, l., velleman, r., orford, j., patel, a., moore, l. & godfrey, c. (2009). the relative efficacy of two primary care brief interventions for family members 174 affected by the addictive problem of a close relative: a randomised trial. addiction. 104, 49-58. kar, s.b., pascual, c.a. & chickering, k.l. (1999). empowerment of women for health promotion: a meta-analysis. social science and medicine. 49, 43-60. marshall, m. & marshall, l.b. (1990). silent voices speak: women and prohibition in truk, iowa, usa. belmont, ca: wadsworth publishing company. natera, g. (2010). the mental itineraries of the everyday lives of indigenous women linked to their partners’ excessive alcohol consumption. paper presented at the third international conference of community psychology. puebla, mexico, june 2010. obot, i. (2005). foreword in j. orford, g. natera, a. g. copello et al. coping with alcohol and drug problems: the experiences of family members in three contrasting cultures. london: brunner-routledge. orford, j., natera, g., copello, a., atkinson, c., mora, j., velleman, r., crundall, i., tiburcio, m., templeton, l. & walley, g. (2005). coping with alcohol and drug problems: the experiences of family members in three contrasting cultures. london: brunnerroutledge. orford, j., velleman, r., copello, a., velleman, r., templeton, l. & ibanga, a. (2010a). the experiences of affected family members: a summary of two decades of qualitative research. drugs, education prevention and policy. 17(s1) 45-63. orford, j., copello, a., simon, a., waheed, h., fazil, q., graham, h., mahmood, m., mcneil, s. & roberts, g. (2010b). offering a service to bme family members affected by close relatives’ drug problems. in s. macgregor (ed). responding to drug misuse: research and policy priorities in health and social care. (164-178). london: routledge.     global journal of community psychology practice peace promotion among ethnically diverse youth: reflection on an agency’s vision monika allen janelle kwee marvin mcdonald trinity western univeristy – british columbia, canada keywords: peacebuilding, evaluation, reflective practice, critical systems heuristics, program consultation author biographies: monika allen, ma is a registered provisional psychologist in the department of psychiatry at the university of calgary. she graduated with a master of arts in counselling psychology from trinity western university. janelle kwee, psyd is a clinical psychologist and core faculty member in the master of arts in counselling psychology program at trinity western university. marvin mcdonald, phd is a faculty member in the ma program in counselling psychology at trinity western university. recommended citation: allen, m., kwee, j., and mcdonald, m. (2015). peace promotion among ethnically diverse youth: reflection on an agency’s vision. global journal of community psychology practice, 6(1), 1-14. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 peace promotion among ethnically diverse youth: reflection on an agency’s vision abstract ulrich’s (1983) critical systems heuristics (csh) is a viable tool for program development and community-based consultation, exemplified in the present reflection based on a consulting project with a youth camp program within a not for profit organization. the goal of the youth camp is to improve intergroup relationships in a canadian inner city community that has a significant newcomer population. this critique employs csh as a framework for facilitating professional engagement and dialogue among stakeholders. the analysis highlights factors relevant to the youth camp and more broadly discusses the role of utilizing csh in community psychology practice. introduction "reflection is an important human activity in which people recapture their experience, think about it, mull it over and evaluate it. it is this working with experience that is important in learning” (boud, keogh, & walker, 1985, p.19). this paper comprises a critical reflection from the first author’s position as a research consultant for the program referred to here as the youth camp (yc), an initiative of a provincial institute for community peacebuilding. social scientist werner ulrich’s critical systems heuristics (csh) (ulrich, 1983) approach is applied to the yc as a social system. as a philosophical methodology, csh directs professional development in applied disciplines, including, social planning and evaluation research (ulrich, 2010). using the yc as an example, this article highlights the benefit of using csh in the practice of community psychology. the csh paradigm provides methodological guidance, consistent with a transformative perspective, for researchers and evaluators working in culturally complex communities to challenge the status quo and further social justice (mertens, 2009). from this position, stakeholders are prompted to question their roles in uncovering implicit assumptions within the organization’s community. this paper and the application of csh is one such response. additionally, core to transformative research is a focus on individuals who are marginalized from mainstream society, which is true for the majority of participants in the yc (mertens, 2005). the yc initiative further corresponds with the transformative approach in that the program seeks to examine the differences correlated with power differential for these marginalized members of society. on another level, this critique addresses equality issues between those working within the agency. the transformative paradigm represents those working together for personal and social transformation; a fitting description of the members committed to realizing the vision of the yc (mertens, 2009). the decision to use csh was made while in a volunteer position with the yc following an observation that how researchers can most effectively work together with nonprofit groups needs greater understanding. this reflection, therefore, contributes to professional development for researchers and activists alike. the fundamental questions guiding this reflection are: 1) what is the yc’s ‘vision,’ and 2) how can the yc realize this more fully? other community researchers and program consultants can also benefit from the csh framework in promoting dialogue and reflective practice in community based organizations for social change. the discussion below briefly describes some background, including relevant terms, for the context of this csh analysis. specifically, the review includes global immigration trends global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 affecting the demographics of inner city communities, the yc program itself, and the csh framework. finally, the paper presents the authors’ reflections employing csh and discusses implications for practice, affirming the relevance of programs such as the yc and the value of employing csh in program consultation. the context: youth in diverse inner city communities global trends are lending to increasingly multicultural communities. in recent decades, approximately 20 million children have become refugees as a result of international war related conflicts (united nations international children’s education fund, 2009). many families flee areas of armed conflict and gain refugee status in countries foreign to them. newcomer experiences involve multiple stressors, such as social isolation, racial discrimination, language problems, and the stress of cultural adaptation (ehntholt & yule, 2006; kaplan, 2009), which are further intensified in the wake of traumatic experiences often endured by refugees (draguns, 1996). in this paper, the definition of newcomer includes immigrants and refugees who are new to the country within the last decade. furthermore, youth or adolescent refers to anyone between 12 to 18 years of age. in the psychosocial stage focused on establishing self-identity (steinberg, 2005), youth often experiment with various roles (guinee, 1998). being newcomer youth, often combined with identification as ethnic minorities, places this population in an increasingly vulnerable state. these youth may also experience added struggles in the process of formulating a consolidated ethnic identity. ethnic identity development ethnic identity is "an enduring fundamental aspect of the self that includes a sense of membership in an ethnic group and the attitudes and feelings associated with that membership" (phinney, 1996, p. 922). ethnicity refers to meaningful groupings of people who share a race and/or a culture of origin. tajfel (as cited by molix & bettencourt, 2010) noted that, “social identity is a part of one’s self-concept that originates from the knowledge that one is a member of a social group” (p. 513). molix and bettencourt observe that this type of group identity is beneficial for members of groups who are devalued in society, like ethnic minorities. ethnicity has been identified as an important factor in determining daily activities (frideres, 2009). though groups have unique histories and traditions, belonging to a group is universal (phinney, 1992). some tensions associated with minority youth are conceptualized using ethnic group identity theories. for example, unique problems, such as conflict between groups, arise when two different cultures, both with separate standards of acceptable behaviour, come into contact (klineberg, 1966). klineberg noted that some cases of delinquency can be attributed to cultural conflict. as will be explored, situating young people in an inner city environment with ethnic tensions exacerbates their developmental challenges. newcomer youth in canada research on factors affecting newcomer youth highlights that this demographic is often overlooked (centre of excellence for research on immigration and settlement, 2000), and there is a paucity of canadian literature on issues relating to newcomer youth (shakya, khanlou, & gonsalves, 2010). according to citizenship and immigration canada (2012), immigrants and refugees between the ages of 15-24 constituted approximately 15% of the permanent residents to canada, over the age of 14, that year. canada’s demographic is transforming with rising numbers of newcomers. while gang involvement is not characteristic of most newcomer youth, perceived discrimination and racism are not uncommon experiences for them. as noted in kanu’s (2009) study, newcomers faced academic, economic, and psychosocial challenges including global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 acculturation stress, lack of access to counselling, loneliness, and poverty. peacebuilding developmentally, youth are working to define their identities, including ethnicity. the inner city community where the yc takes place hosts an increasing number of newcomers, leading to a need for peacebuilding, a term adopted by the camp to denote healthy relationship building between ethnic groups. the term peacebuilding entered united nations (un) language in 1992 when then un secretary general, boutros boutros-ghali published an agenda for peace (1992). in this report, assisting in peacebuilding means, “rebuilding the institutions and infrastructures of nations torn by civil war and strife; and building bonds of peaceful mutual benefit among nations formerly at war; and in the largest sense, to address the deepest causes of conflict” (para. 15). lederach (1997), defined peacebuilding as: “a comprehensive concept that encompasses, generates, and sustains the full array of processes, approaches, and stages needed to transform conflict toward more sustainable, peaceful relationships” (p. 20). the youth camp the youth camp (yc) is a week-long summer camp program, which is an initiative of a community peacebuilding institute. the yc was implemented to address growing tensions, including violence, among inner-city youth comprised of various cultural groups including african, asian, métis, aboriginal, and european communities, many of whom are newcomers (institute for community peacebuilding youth peacebuilding, 2009b). in addition to offering a host of activities including sports, art, and music options, the yc carries out dialogue sessions to facilitate positive interaction amongst participants. the yc is organized by the director of the community peacebuilding institute and the yc’s project coordinator, funded by local non for profit organizations. activities and supervision are carried out by community volunteers from these organizations as well as former participants of the yc. given increased tension and violence between youth of different backgrounds, and a lack of trusting relationships, the groups are meant to be safe places where participants can explore and discuss identity issues. critical systems heuristics and the youth camp grove and zwi (2008) suggested that those involved in peacebuilding often lack appropriate tools for screening, monitoring, and evaluating their work, and that these tools should move toward examining processes and relationships within programs. denskus (2012) recommended the need for a qualitative methodology that exposes hidden assumptions and unexplored challenges within peacebuilding evaluation. much of the program evaluation literature makes minimal mention of incorporating critical reflections into related programs. the csh framework used in the ensuing systemic evaluation of the yc addresses this gap. in the framework of csh, the words critique or critical are not pejorative (ulrich & reynolds, 2010). rather, it is recommended that boundary critique be practiced as a reflective attitude, with the intention of facilitating understanding (ulrich, 2005/2012). the systemic aspect manifests by considering all those affected by the system in question. the main construct of this framework is that all problems, decisions, and actions rely on preexisting assumptions about the system. thus, organizational improvement should take into consideration the larger system (ulrich, 2005). heuristics means the art or practice of discovery (ulrich, 2002). in professional practice, this translates to identifying and exploring pertinent problem areas, assumptions, or questions. beckford (2010) suggested that the most beneficial aspects of csh include encouraging decision makers to self-reflect and promoting equality and dialogue among stakeholders, instilling critical reflection skills in each party. in summary, as a result of global migration trends, there are increased numbers of refugees global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 and adolescent newcomers in canada. communities need to respond to interethnic tension and violence among youth. there are relatively few interventions to facilitate peacebuilding between different ethnic groups, underscoring the need to support initiatives such as the yc. the csh provides a framework for engaging such initiatives in community-based consultation. csh as a method of reflective practice for program consultation the method for this consultation with the yc follows ulrich’s (1983, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2012) csh. put simply, ulrich’s framework is a suggestion for how to point out the underlying assumptions people hold in making everyday decisions. one of the core ideas in csh is that a table 1 csh boundary categories and questions sources of influence social roles role-specific concerns key problems motivation 1. beneficiary who ought to be/is do we (want to) see the intended client or beneficiary of s? 2. purpose what ought to be/is the purpose of s? 3. measure of improvement what ought to be/is our measure of improvement? power 4. decision maker who ought to be/is in control of s? 5. resources what resources ought to be/are controlled by the decision maker? 6. decision environment what conditions of success should rightly be/are controlled by third parties? knowledge 7. expert who ought to be /is contributing their experience and expertise? 8. expertise what kind of expertise ought to be/is consulted? 9. guarantor what ought to be/is regarded as assurance of successful implementation? legitimacy 10. witness who ought to be/is contributing their experience and expertise? 11. emancipation what ought to be/are the opportunities for interests of those negatively affected to have expression and freedom from the worldview of s? 12. worldview what worldview ought to be/is relied upon? note. s = system of concern. in this case it is the institute’s yc project and those involved and affected by the project. adapted from “critical systems heuristics,” by w. ulrich, and m. reynolds, 2010, in systems approaches to managing change: a practical guide, by m.reynolds and s. sue (eds.)., p. 244. copyright 2010 by springer. global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 system is defined by its boundary or environment and by its relationship with that boundary. ramage and shipp (2009) distill ulrich’s theory into simple language. ulrich (2005) used the term boundary critique to describe the process of systematically categorizing issues related to defining a system’s environment. this categorization is developed into twelve boundary categories (see table 1) that are grouped into four sources of influence: motivation, power, knowledge, and legitimacy. the categories correspond to twelve boundary questions. questions for csh are asked in two modes, asking what is actually the case in a situation and what ought to be the case. the is form requires determining the facts of actual situations: any observable result or consequence of an action or a possible side effect of a proposed action. the ought mode refers to the values of the system. the latter identifies the assumptions that influence stakeholder actions. the critique is developed by comparing responses, and this complete process is defined as the systemic boundary critique. data collection the data referenced in this paper is derived from the first author’s role as a research consultant with the community peacebuilding institute. the data includes yc documents, namely two annual reports, local media articles (see references), and a personal research journal, including record of in-person consultation and email correspondence. this consultation was carried out in over a period of one year, beginning in 2010, with the majority of the consultation occurring regularly a few months prior to the 2010 yc, and at least weekly closer to the start of the camp. consultation included meetings and interviews with yc staff and partners from the funding organizations as well as a review of one focus group involving yc volunteers. the data used in this analysis is an experiential record of a research consultant, which lends appropriately to a csh reflection. data analysis this analysis is conducted as a post hoc reflection. any differences between what is and what ought to be, for the yc, serve as general examples of the areas that could be presented for discussion in other organizations. the analysis is particularly advantageous for community psychologists who are currently working with agencies and are in ongoing relationships with the organization because they are in positions to discuss these themes directly with the appropriate individuals. in the case of the current analysis, researchers did share observations with key stakeholders of yc. however, given that the authors conducted the present reflection after having completed their time with the agency, there was ultimately limited dialogue between the authors and the agency. the purpose of sharing the analysis with others is to demonstrate a process that is ideally implemented during times of active working periods with organizations. the data, including the first author’s interactions with the organization, serve as a reference for answers to the boundary questions. four boundary issues, motivation, power, knowledge, and legitimacy, are explored by asking, or unfolding, a narrative via a set of 12 questions. refer to table 1 for a summary of the questions applied to the csh analysis. the aim of unfolding is to expose the selectivity of individuals’ reference systems (ulrich & reynolds, 2010): posing the questions exposes the assumptions that determine the stakeholders’ environment and ultimately their decisions. the questions are posed in the aforementioned is and ought modes. the analysis process entails systematically applying the csh questions to the various types of data, reflecting on key themes and including apparent inconsistencies, in order to formulate observations pertaining to the 12 question areas. for this reflection, each csh question was considered in turn by the principle investigator, who conducted an extensive review of each global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 source of data, outlined above. it is important to note that each data source was examined for its relevance to each question. thus, discrepancies between interviews with staff, program materials, and program participant opinions, are considered together as they speak to a particular question. moreover, this analysis process was conducted in the context of ongoing and regular consultation with the second author. a comparison of the respective answers helps to promote an increased awareness and clarity of the agency’s vision. the analysis process is not intended to yield purely objective answers, and is shaped inherently by the persons conducting the reflection. in the present reflection, the authors assert judgments, based on the available data, including any apparent tensions between stakeholder perspectives, and inextricably connected with the authors’ own values and assumptions, about what should be considered. identifying what is aims to be much more objective; however, it is limited to the scope of data available. consistent with the aim of csh to illuminate assumptions which may ultimately influence an agency’s capacity to realize its vision, researchers and consultants employing the csh are compelled to reflect on their own assumptions and biases which may influence their work. methodological rigour is enhanced by involving two or more consultants to be in dialogue while applying the 12 csh questions. results and discussion prior to unfolding the boundary questions, it is important to convey the system of reference for this evaluation (ulrich & reynolds, 2010). the intent has been to enhance the yc through program development to decrease adolescent identity conflict and to facilitate peacebuilding among inner city youth in the community. in relation to the analysis, ulrich and reynolds (2010) remind readers that “the point is not that we should claim we have the answers but rather, that we should uncover the inevitable selectivity of all our claims” (p. 254). through the process, one is made aware of and reflects upon assumptions. boundary questions are intended for a specific system of interest, in this case, the yc. stakeholders are those who are involved in and affected by the system, and identifying them helps to specify the scope and dynamics at work in the system at large. while stakeholders were outlined in an initial project report, the intention in the present manuscript is to present a reflection with relevance to other peacebuilding initiatives; therefore, names of stakeholders are omitted. referring to table 1 for the generically phrased questions, this section applies the questions specifically in relation to the yc. wording for the prompts was adapted from larsen (2011). researchers used the information available to them; as a result, some of the questions have brief responses. these responses are still included in the analysis as examples of what to consider and how to use the information available to address the questions. as the process of boundary questioning progresses, the paper outlines the rationale for and the natural flow from one question to another, as suggested by ulrich and reynolds (2010). thus, the numerical sequence in this presentation does not match the order in their presentation. the discussion integrated within the presentation of the results encompasses a comparison of both modes of analysis, yielding the critique aspect of the process. comparing the answers to both sets of questions provides a platform on which to recognize possible discrepancies between the real (is mode) and the ideal (ought mode) actions of the yc. it is necessary to consider all four sources of influence, which together, constitute the overall assumed reference system (ulrich & reynolds, 2010). the numbers represent the csh questions 1 to 12 as seen in table 1. the results begin with the boundary category that most directly relates to the vision for the system. global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 1. what ought to be and what is the stated purpose or vision of the yc? the stated objective of the camp is to “bring together three groups of youth (aboriginal, newcomer, and established) to provide a context and process that would give them the opportunity to build bridges of understanding and peace between them as individuals and as identity groups” (burns, williams, & pankratz, 2009, p. 4). the camp coordinator and director shared the additional goal of promoting intergroup relations so that the youth will promote change. desirable outcomes are further defined in the organization’s partnership agreement (institute for community peacebuilding youth peacebuilding, 2009a). in exploring responses to this question, a theme of desiring peaceful relationships between communities and individuals is clear. the stated purposes and objectives of the camp are consistent with what the vision ought to be, given their motivation for implementing the program. the response to this question leads to an inquiry of who ought to be the intended beneficiaries. 2. who ought to be and who are the yc’s beneficiaries or clients? that is, whose interests should be foremost considered? in relation to the camp’s vision, the camp participants, including aboriginal, newcomer, and established groups, and the inner city community, ought to be considered of highest priority in implementing the yc. this is the community in question and ought to be treated as the main beneficiary. overall, the camp participants are prioritized. there are also instances when funding agency requirements may compete with this priority. for example, funding agencies may request quantitative results, to determine whether or not funding will be secured for the future. according to some staff, these measures, including a survey, have been interpreted as discriminatory by some of the participants. upon determining the intended beneficiary, one can more easily determine the appropriate measure of success and improvement in the system. 3. what measures ought to be taken to assess whether the camp objectives are being met? or, expressed differently, how might the underlying values be given formal expression, quantitatively or qualitatively, through evaluation, to gauge improvement? in keeping with the stated goals of the program, the main beneficiary should be considered in determining the measure of success for the yc. feedback from campers through evaluations gauged in accordance with the yc’s vision and objectives, and observed changes in the community, would identify whether or not the purpose of the project is being met. further, the measures of improvement ought to correlate with the organization’s theoretical underpinnings. there are a host of theories stated to influence the yc. this theoretical foundation can serve a benefit to the camp and would be more meaningful if it is clearly incorporated into the evaluation. to date, the yc evaluation includes annual reports integrating survey responses and anecdotes from the participants. institute leaders are confident that the outcomes and impact are long-term and positive. this belief is based on observations made by the staff, comments from the youth, and the surveys. note that the team is appropriately focusing on the actions and the expressed experiences of the campers. these first three questions increase the transparency of the value basis of the system. the following is a brief discussion of critique and recommendations based on the answers to these first three questions. the yc documents include multiple statements of objectives, purpose, and vision. in comparing what the yc’s vision is and ought to be, there is a correlation; however, it may be beneficial to refine this with an explicit alignment with their theoretical foundations and means of evaluation. a coherent narrative of this evolution of theories would be valuable. for example, the vision statement could be distilled to bridging communities, building peace. the global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 mission could be uniting ethnically diverse youth to build healthy relationships and lasting change. it is advantageous to be explicit about goals and purpose, so that those involved can support a shared vision. the institute could hold an annual meeting to review the program’s mandate and to maintain open communication about any changes. having staff sign an agreement to the yc’s goals and vision would provide more unity among stakeholders as well. this lends to questions about the necessary resources for success. 4. who is and who ought to be in a position to make change for the yc’s program and resources? reporting and evaluation design is identified as the director’s responsibility. the yc coordinator is to be involved in decisions about evaluation methods as they pertain to camp logistics. in meetings and correspondence with the yc staff, researchers perceived a lack of clarity in defining roles; members voiced uncertainty about who is responsible for program evaluation. however, researchers also witnessed efforts to clarify responsibilities by individuals beginning to document roles and responsibilities. additionally, a partnership agreement, including clear decision making processes, has been created. it was also brought to the researchers’ attention that some of those in positions of power on occasion felt unable to make executive decisions. the one who ought to make the decisions ought to be the individual who is most competent in the area of interest and also who is ultimately held responsible for the program’s results. 5. what resources or conditions of success ought to be and what resources are controlled by the decision makers? the stated ultimate decision maker, in this case the director, ought to be responsible for financial capital, ensuring location for camp, accountability for camp volunteers and staff, and for general management. some staff appear to be responsible for aspects of the program that are outside of their area of expertise. for instance, staff have been involved in implementing research and program evaluation measures without understanding the details, allowing biases to influence these program elements. it is most valuable for the roles to be clear among staff and volunteers, and elicits questions with regard to areas outside of the decision maker’s control. this is posed to ensure levels of accountability and division of resources so that the responsibility does not all lie with one person to maintain a healthy decision making environment. 6. what conditions of success should be and what conditions of success are outside of the control of the decision makers? areas wherein the decision maker is not qualified or trained should require the involvement of additional expertise. the researchers were not exposed to this aspect of the decision-making environment. however, the director ought to have additional supports and access to program evaluation experts and design in order to fulfill his responsibility for the project’s evaluation. these questions regarding power basis lead to other areas of knowledge within the system. according to ulrich and reynolds (2010), “in an ideal setting, human ‘capital’ (embodying expertise) ought not to be under the sole control of the decision maker” (p. 261). the yc has stated roles and decision making guidelines, and the partnership agreement document is an example of what can be done for the other staff. it could be amended for use when new employees and volunteers become involved with the yc. the staff would benefit from developing a clear hiring process for new staff, and establishing this process would increase communication and collaboration among the staff, clarifying roles and responsibilities. 7. what information and skills ought the experts contribute and what do the experts contribute? on what expertise does the yc rely? the skills that experts ought to contribute include program global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 evaluation skills, and skills to facilitate effective communication between staff. at present, the yc relies on consultants and volunteers for these things. it may also be true that immediate assumptions are made about volunteer and consultant credentials. the yc uses the partner organizations’ connections to community programs to gain participants, but relies on volunteer research assistants and students for their research and for the evaluation portion of the project. 8. who should be and who is involved as an expert? trained professionals, who are competent in the areas that the yc requires support, ought to provide the expertise. this competence could be determined by demonstrating a history of previous success in the area of expertise, as well as recognizing the yc’s needs and having the resources to complete the task. in actuality, it appears that most are permitted to become involved in the program without screening. according to the institute’s website, expertise will be provided by funding agencies. this includes a combination of faculty, staff, and volunteers (institute for community peacebuilding youth peacebuilding, 2009b). researchers who specialize in challenges facing war-affected adolescents may be beneficial resources in developing a camp experience that meets the organization’s goals. additionally, the staff at the participants’ schools may provide expertise. 9. where ought those involved and where do those involved seek guarantees that their efforts lead to success for the yc? participant responses from camp experiences as well as observations from yc staff are used to assess success. the preand post-camp surveys are used to support the claim that the youth experience positive shifts in attitude (burns, williams & pankratz, 2009). although there is merit to these impressions, this does not address whether or not desired change is occurring within the larger inner city community. skilled evaluators ought to be responsible for exploring success. these questions facilitate transparency in the knowledge-basis of the system. reflecting on the agency’s sources of knowledge, it is evident that efforts are being made to secure specialized skill sets and effective guarantees of success for the camp. as is common with nonprofit organizations, funding may not always exist to hire experts or specialists. nevertheless, when assistants join the yc team there should be sufficient resources and stability to provide the needed support for these individuals. this may be, in part, why the initial program evaluation did not manifest as intended. it may be advantageous for the decisions makers to reference a project readiness checklist (government of ontario, 2006), to use as a guide in preparation for desired changes in the agency. for instance, some requirements include having clear goals in place, and perhaps more importantly, receiving support and commitment for the project, prior to beginning new projects within the organization. this final set of questions is intended to explore the legitimacy of the system considering wider spheres of human interests. 10. where ought and where does legitimacy lie? in other words, are those who are affected by the system given the opportunity to be agents of change? the legitimacy ought to lie with participants. the participants ought to have an influence on the camp’s design and speak up about their camp experiences. the degree of involvement for participants has been unclear with regard to how extensively their feedback is taken into account when considering future changes to the camp structure and implementation. efforts are being made to involve previous participants in program planning and yc leadership roles. global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 11. who ought to be and who is represented to voice the concerns of those affected by but not directly involved in the yc project? another way to pose the question is to ask who may consider themselves capable of making representations on those who may be negatively affected, and what justifies them to do so. as previously outlined, those involved include campers, the youth peacebuilding project, and the partner groups. some of the affected include the participants’ school communities and other community centres in which the youth are involved. this also includes families of the youth and possible faith groups to which the participants belong. they would make this claim on the basis of having regular interaction with the camp participants and on the premise that they have an experienced understanding of the daily struggles facing the youth. future generations of youth and families yet to arrive in winnipeg’s inner city could also be a voice for those who will be affected by the changes in the neighbourhood and changes among the youth. 12. what worldview ought to be and what worldview is relied upon? the worldview that ought to be represented is one that views all humans as equals and does not treat others differently based upon country of origin or ethnic identity. the surveys categorize youth according to ethnic and racial groups; this may be unintentionally marginalizing, contradicting the desired worldview for the camp. the yc’s actual underlying worldview is that increasing violence in this particular inner city is rooted in lack of trusting relationships between identity groups of youth. since being inspired by a similar program in the united states, many theories, such as redekop’s (2002) identity group theory, have come to influence the camp’s worldview. additional economic factors and multi-system factors that influence inner city resident challenges also ought to be included in the worldview. this last set of questions clarifies the system’s basis of legitimacy, specifically addressing worldview. summary and concluding comments in one-on-one clinical and counselling settings, it is often said that the person of the therapist is the primary tool for engendering the therapeutic change process. psychotherapeutic techniques, while not without importance, are secondary. the csh framework addresses a parallel assumption for organizations, which are agents of systemic change. it is not only the programs and activities corresponding to the formal organizational mandate, that matter, but the implicit assumptions determining the basic essence of the organization. exposing these assumptions through csh with the aim of refining and improving an organization’s capacity for positive change, offers a particular contribution to community psychology practice. csh is clearly limited in the scope of what it offers. while it does not provide a specific roadmap of how to reach certain goals and objectives, illuminating key questions and assumptions through the csh process provides a foundation for dialogue between stakeholders in order to subsequently make strategic plans within an organization. the steps of applying the csh questions to relevant data within an organization can be applied more or less formally, extensively, or systematically depending on the mandate of the reflective process. a consultant who becomes familiar with the questions of the csh boundary critique can incorporate relevant insights into other activities of program development. conversely, a csh boundary critique may be the sole focus of a particular program consultation. this integrated overview of the yc combines multiple data sources to organize observations around program priorities and values, formulating clarifying questions for stakeholders. the various recommendations for the yc, are the most relevant and practical, based on the organization’s current capacity and preparedness for change. the main purpose of this reflection is not to solve problems; rather, using csh raises global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 relevant questions (beckford, 2010). ulrich (2001) noted, “competence depends more on the questions we ask than the answers we find” (p. 6). the significance of the analysis is the usefulness of the emerging questions to help stakeholders clarify and prioritize. overall, the yc holds ambitious objectives and has been successful in implementing a camp experience for the system’s beneficiaries. the previous analysis highlights specific areas wherein they could focus for future program development. a possible longer lasting benefit of this work could derive from sharing the process of csh with stakeholders who may find the critique formulation useful in becoming more aware of assumptions and in reflecting on how these beliefs influence their decisions. this reflection serves as a helpful example of a practice that organizational stakeholders can engage, in their own reflections as professionals, within peacebuilding endeavours and other areas of community psychology practice. csh provides a set of tools to analyze experiences, and to unify implicit and explicit observations. for those working in community psychology and community development initiatives, reflecting on how an agency functions is a valuable tool for evaluation and program development.. this process embodies counselling psychology’s value of advocacy by joining with these activist groups to collaborate, support, and sustain social justice initiatives. this reflection can serve as a guide that others can apply and integrate as they cultivate professional competence and work toward healthy relations in their communities. global journal of community psychology practice volume 6, issue 1 june 2015 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 references beckford, j. 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(2009). children in conflict and emergencies. retrieved from http://www.unicef.org/protection/index_ar medconflict.html http://wulrich.com/bio.html microsoft word 2012-004ccsi-20130622 final proof ch final trj.docx building community practice competencies globally through the community tool box christina m. holt, stephen b. fawcett, and jerry a. schultz university of kansas bill berkowitz university of massachusetts lowell thomas j. wolff tom wolff and associates vincent t. francisco university of north carolina at greensboro author contact information: christina holt, ma, work group for community health and development, 1000 sunnyside avenue, dole center, room 4082, university of kansas, lawrence, ks 66045. telephone: 785864-0533. e-mail: cholt@ku.edu. recommended citation: holt, c. m., fawcett, s. b., schultz, j. a., berkowitz, b., wolff, t. j. francisco, v. t. (2013). building community practice competencies globally through the community tool box. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), 1-8. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/).   global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   building community practice competencies globally through the community tool box abstract people throughout the world are working together to improve conditions in which they live. although the issues and resources vary by context, what people actually do to effect change— core competencies of assessment, planning, action, evaluation, and sustainability—may be quite similar. to examine what competencies may be most valued in community practice, this report uses data analytics for what users are accessing in the community tool box http://ctb.ku.edu. this free resource for community health and development, with over 1.7 million unique visitors annually from over 200 countries, showed a six-fold increase in users during the past year (from november 2011 to november 2012). when we examined what users were accessing, the results showed greater interest in some particular competencies such as assessing community needs and resources, developing strategic and action plans, and enhancing cultural competence. patterns of use suggest that there may be core competencies valued by community members seeking to change conditions and outcomes that matter, which may help inform training and professional development for the millions of people worldwide working to promote health, human development, and social justice. keywords: global competencies, capacity-building tools, community practice, workforce development, dissemination, online tools, community tool box people joining together to take action on issues that matter to them; it happens each hour in every corner of the world. the issue addressed may vary—clean drinking water in kenya, drug free communities in new york, natural disasters in san salvador, violence prevention in los angeles, and educating women about hiv/aids in uganda (ctb community innovators, http://ctb.ku.edu/en/out_of_the_box/finalists.aspx accessed: december 2, 2012). those taking action include people with little or lots of formal education, from youth to elders, and those with formal positions of authority to the newly empowered. they come from and seek change in multiple sectors including government ministries, schools, health organizations, businesses, and ngos and community-based organizations. despite the differences in issues and context, there are many commonalities in what people do to take action. to illustrate, those working in the jikaze resettlement camp for internally displaced peoples in kenya began by listening to people’s needs and meeting with the village committee which was composed of house block leaders, community leaders, and elders (assessment). working with the village committee, the group planned relief and development projects including those related to housing, food, clean drinking water, and schooling (planning). working side-by-side, they organized themselves to build houses and engage in other development activities (action). the group used a poverty index to track the type, frequency and intensity of deprivations (in health, education, and standard of living) to help understand whether its programs led to improvement (evaluation). the jikaze group worked to keep its development efforts going including through sales of specialized produce to high-end restaurants in nairobi (sustainability) (http://ctb.ku.edu/en/out_of_the_box/finalists/finalist 5.aspx, accessed: december 2, 2012). our collective experience tells us that—whether in kenya or kansas—people taking action in communities need to be able to: a) assess what is going on, identifying community needs and resources; b) plan activities to achieve intended results, including what will be done and who will do it; c) act to change conditions by developing and implementing interventions; d) evaluate whether they are making progress, using the information to make adjustments; and d) sustain what is needed to meet their goals. although the issues and resources may vary from place to place, what people do—the core competencies—are quite similar. yet, the full complement of skills and competencies for collaborative action are rarely learned, even by those attending universities. in 1994, when our team began work on the community tool box, http://ctb.ku.edu/, we saw the opportunity to help fill this gap with a free internet-based resource that provided tools for learning and doing this work. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   now, almost 20 years on, the community tool box offers thousands of pages of educational materials used by millions of people in over 200 different countries (fawcett, francisco, et al., 2000; fawcett, schultz, et al., 2008). worldwide use is enhanced through both english and spanish (and arabic, by mid-2013) versions of the community tool box. data regarding what users are seeking to learn provides a window into what competencies are valued by people taking action around the world. this aim of this empirical case study is to better understand what skills and competencies for community action may be important to end users. we use google analytics to examine the distribution of user sessions by category of competence (e.g., community assessment, planning, evaluation). data from worldwide users of the community tool box were analyzed to see patterns of user choice, an indicator of the importance that end users place on particular competencies related to community work. community tool box as context guiding assumptions and values several assumptions and related values underlie the community tool box: 1) community problems can often be effectively addressed by community members and their allies; 2) to do so, community members will benefit from increased competency to act; 3) we can teach and stimulate use of basic community competencies over the internet, through online instruction; and 4) by so doing, we can potentially reach, teach, and engage many millions of people worldwide who would otherwise have little opportunity to learn and few chances to become involved in transforming conditions that affect their lives. recent global trends support at least the latter two assumptions. about one-third of the world’s population was internet users in 2012, more than five times the percentage in 2000. in the global south, roughly defined as asia, africa, latin america, and the middle east, such use grew by approximately tenfold according to internet world stats. our own global tool box traffic (from outside the united states) also has increased significantly, from 34% of all users in 2007 to 48% in 2012. the challenge for the tool box was and is to strengthen community competencies in real-world practice. historical development since its beginning in 1994, the community tool box was designed to build both individual and community competencies. this is reflected in our tool box founding vision of “people – locally and globally – taking action together to change conditions that affect their lives,” and in our original mission of “promoting community health and development by connecting people, ideas and resources.” a fundamental question from the start was how to convert that vision and mission into effective and efficient organization of content. content organization as the website developed, we organized content in two primary and overlapping ways. first, we compiled a list of specific skill areas (e.g., conducting listening sessions, identifying community assets), and created self-contained, step-by-step, how-to-do-it instructional modules for each one. we called these modules “sections.” we then organized these sections into content clusters (e.g., assessing community needs and resources), which we called “chapters.” then and now, these sections and chapters form the basis of our table of contents. toolkits: supports for core competencies in a parallel organization, we developed a list of key community competencies, to complement and supplement the sections and chapters. these core competencies are shared by many related disciplines such as public health, community psychology, and international development (e.g., barry, et al., 2009). based upon practitioner interviews, literature review, and our own collective experience, we arrived at 16 core competencies: 1.      creating and maintaining coalitions and partnerships 2. assessing community needs and resources 3. analyzing problems and goals 4. developing a framework or model of change 5. developing strategic and action plans 6. building leadership 7. developing an intervention 8. increasing participation and membership 9. enhancing cultural competence 10. advocating for change 11. influencing policy development 12. evaluating the initiative 13. implementing a social marketing effort 14. writing a grant application for funding 15. improving organizational management and development 16. sustaining the work or initiative for each core competency, we then provided a “toolkit,” a set of supports, for learning the basic skills areas. by clicking on a given competency, a tool box user will find an outline for how to build the competency, links to relevant tool box sections, and real-world examples underscoring application global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   with different issues and in different cultures and contexts. dissemination, translation, and cultural adaptation of course, it was not sufficient to create online content, whether in toolkit or other form. we needed to ensure that potential tool box users both knew about this content and could access it easily. in early years, most of our dissemination efforts took place in the united states; we spoke at conferences, wrote articles for u.s.-based journals, and distributed printed brochures through our own domestic networks (holt et al., in press). but gradually we saw that increasing percentages of users were coming from outside the u.s., and realized that linguistic access was also essential. only about 5% of people in the world speak english as a first language (though this does not reflect the percentage who understand written english). clearly, an english-only tool box would be a significant barrier to achieving worldwide reach. translation was therefore necessary – in particular, translation that could capture the needed subtlety of expression and adapt content to the specific cultural context. through efforts of grassroots volunteers, dedicated faculty and students, and eventually a modest grant from the robert wood johnson foundation, we arranged to have the tool box translated into spanish by native speakers. given the vast size of the tool box, this was an ambitious project, but a full spanish translation and light cultural adaptation of all tool box content was completed in 2009. a similar effort is now underway to translate and culturally adapt the tool box into arabic, through partnership with colleagues at the american university of beirut and the arab resource collective in lebanon, with a scheduled completion date of mid-2013. additional language translations are in the planning stages. in addition, collaborative planning efforts are under way by community psychologists representing different countries and regions to expand online instruction in competency-based community development, including but not necessarily limited to the tool box (berkowitz, fernandez, vargas-moniz, and vega, 2012). establishment and dissemination of competencybased content, however, are only initial steps. we need to learn more about what competencies are accessed and used in practice. this leads to the main purpose and contribution of this study. methods to help determine access and use of particular content (competencies) of the community tool box, we relied on website software. this software identifies unique visitors to the website and what content they accessed. every time a user clicks on a link, a new row is created in a log file (ascii data files) with different fields of information. available data include: a) the uniform resource locator (url; the information about what page on what website is being accessed), b) the date and time, and c) an identifier for the person that is accessing the website (the ip address). we used google analytics (http://analytics.google.com/) to determine how users were accessing the community tool box, and to allow for analyses involved in this investigation. rather than accessing the web logs directly on the website, a code was placed in the root director that allowed google to track accesses or “hits” to the website. every page has multiple hits possible, since it is composed of elements stored in different directories in the file structure of the website, or in a database that is accessed through programming on the web pages. because of the organizational structure of the internet, the absolute number of users is likely underrepresented by google analytics. however, this is less of a methodological problem in viewing trends since this consistent measurement approach was used throughout the study. in this study, we tracked visitor sessions, content accessed by the visitors, and the country from where they accessed the website over a recent 12-month period. we were also able to obtain information from site visitors’ browser settings that allowed us to know the native language set by the user. because of the organization of the community tool box, we could also obtain information about specific files that users accessed. we associated those files with competencies and keywords, allowing us a finegrained analysis of use. data from the 100 most frequently viewed resources within the tool box were used in this analysis. results figure 1 displays unique visitor sessions of the community tool box between november 29, 2011 and november 29, 2012. in november of 2011, hightraffic days brought more than 2,000 visitors to the community tool box site. typically, these were non-weekend days with peak days being monday and tuesday and decreasing over the workweek. as of the writing of this manuscript (december 2012), site traffic has increased to more than 12,000 visitors on global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   high-traffic days, with an all-time site high of 12,779 unique visitors (on december 3, 2012). this comprises an approximately six-fold increase in user sessions over a one-year period. this increase is correlated with efforts our staff took to enhance search engine optimization (seo) by manually adding keywords and descriptions to pages within the website. as a result, the community tool box will top 1.5 million visitors in 2012. figure 1. graph of unique community tool box visitor sessions per day over time between november 29, 2011 and november 29, 2012. examining data regarding unique visitor sessions for english and spanish versions of the community tool box shows similar patterns of usage. visitors accessing the english version of the community tool box represented approximately 84 percent of overall site users; visitors accessing the spanish translated and culturally-adapted version of the community tool box represent approximately 16 percent of overall site users. this represents a ten-fold increase in spanish visitors to the site in the past year. figure 2 displays user preference for specific content, an indicator of competency areas in which users seek guidance. the most popular content accessed by competency (related tool box chapter, section, or toolkit) were: 1) assessing community needs and resources (258,164 pageviews); 2) developing strategic and action plans (131,979 pageviews); 3) enhancing cultural competence (126,670 pageviews); 4) promoting interest in community issues (122,955 pageviews); 5) improving organizational management and development (89,262 pageviews); 6) evaluating the initiative (85,954 pageviews); 7) building leadership (71,802 pageviews); and 8) analyzing problems and goals (58,423 pageviews). other popular content included: 9) developing a framework or model of change (27,995 pageviews); 10) facilitation (25,329 pageviews); 11) developing an intervention (24,491 pageviews); 12) sustaining the work or initiative (18,817 pageviews); 13) writing a grant application for funding (18,762 pageviews); 14) increasing participation and membership (14,408 pageviews); 15) advocating for change (13,478 pageviews); and 16) creating and maintaining coalitions and partnerships (7,757 pageviews). the remaining pageviews were distributed among the many other topic areas in the 300 plus sections of the community tool box. 0 2,000 4,000 6,000 8,000 10,000 12,000 14,000 community tool box unique visitors sessions: 11/29/2011 11/29/2012 global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   figure 2. data on worldwide ranking of interest (pageviews) by core competency area (from 100 most frequently accessed pages on the community tool box). data displayed represents pageviews between november 29, 2011 and november 29, 2012. discussion this study examines building community practice competencies globally through the community tool box (ctb). these access data provide an indicator of skill areas sought by people taking action on issues that matter to them in communities around the world. these 16 competencies (toolkits) in the community 0 50,000 100,000 150,000 200,000 250,000 300,000 a ss es si ng c om m un ity n ee ds & r es ou rc es a na ly zi ng p ro bl em s & g oa ls d ev el op in g st ra te gi c & a ct io n pl an s d ev el op in g a fr am ew or k or m od el o f c ha ng e en ha nc in g c ul tu ra l c om pt en ce pr om ot in g in te re st in c om m un ity is su es b ui ld in g le ad er sh ip fa ci lit at io n d ev el op in g an in te rv en tio n in cr ea si ng p ar tic ip at io n & m em be rs hi p a dv oc at in g fo r c ha ng e c re at in g & m ai nt ai ni ng c oa lit io ns & p ar tn er sh ip s ev al ua tin g th e in iti at iv e im pr ov in g o rg an iz at io na l m an ag em en t & d ev el op m en t su st ai ni ng th e w or k or in iti at iv e w rit in g a g ra nt a pp lic at io n fo r f un di ng u ni qu e pa ge vi ew s type of competency assess plan evaluate sustain act global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   tool box overlap significantly with other lists of competencies for practitioners of community building and health promotion. for instance, they correspond closely with identified competencies in community psychology (society for community research and action, 2012) and the galway consensus for core competencies in health promotion (barry, et al., 2009). although the google analytics site usage data does not directly inform how the competencies are applied in communities, it does shed light on which materials are accessed via the web for enhancing competencies in community practice. additionally, the community tool box guestbook, http://ctb.ku.edu/en/guestbooklist.aspx, offers personal stories of use of the ctb submitted by people working in communities around the world who are taking action on various community problems and goals. disseminating competency-building resources to a broad and appropriate global audience can be a challenge. since the start in 1994, the ctb team has utilized traditional dissemination methods such as enewsletters, conference presentations, partnerships, and journal articles. ctb usage data show a dramatic increase in user sessions recently, a six-fold uptake in the past year, totaling over 1.7 million user sessions. recent marked increases in user sessions since summer 2012 are largely associated with the ctb team’s concentrated efforts to affect search engine optimization (holt et al., 2013, in press). this search engine optimization essentially involves manually adding keywords and content descriptions to our content management system, making it easier for internet search engines to “find” and display ctb content when people are seeking information about community practice. it is also important to note that translation and cultural adaptation reduce barriers to use, as suggested by recent spanish ctb usage data. since full publication of the spanish ctb in 2009, spanishlanguage usage has grown ten-fold, now accounting for 16% of all ctb site usage. this makes a case for extending the reach of the community tool box through further translation and cultural adaption. the ctb team’s aspiration is to partner with collaborators to make these free resources available in all major united nations languages. the most frequently accessed content areas of the community tool box overlap closely with core competencies in community practice. as illustrated in figure 2, a number of the top-accessed competencies relate to the action phase of community work; for instance, the skills of promoting interest in community issues and building leadership. the single most frequently accessed competency area was assessing community needs and resources, with over 250,000 page views, almost double the next closest section. this is not surprising since community assessment is required by many funders; and it helps lay the groundwork for other phases including planning, action, and evaluation. additionally, community needs assessments are being undertaken by public health departments wishing to meet newly established standards for accreditation by the public health accreditation board, and by non-profit hospitals engaging in community health needs assessments to meet new requirements laid forth by the affordable care act. these new consequences may be driving demand for supports for how to conduct community assessments. other top competencies, such as facilitation, are skills utilized during all phases of community work— assessment, planning, taking action, evaluation, and planning for sustainability. other topic areas of high usage (between 100,000 to 150,000 page views) included cultural competence and strategic and action planning. additional categories of high usage (between 50,000-100,000 page views) included the competencies of evaluation, leadership, organizational management, and analyzing problems and goals. these highly sought-out competencies are essential to community practice regardless of community issue or goal addressed, and the high level of demand may suggest that massive open online courses (moocs), graduate training, and professional development emphasize these skills more. conclusions reviewing data on how many people are accessing how-to materials for different community practice competencies helps us understand user interest. but, it is not a sensitive marker of learning. although the internet overcomes many barriers to access and cost, it needs to be coupled with models of training and coaching that engage people in learning how to apply these skills in their realities. technical aspects of the internet, such as search engine optimization, must be attended to for web resources to actually be accessed by users globally. language translation and cultural adaptation must be addressed if learning resources are to be available and appropriate, particularly if they are to serve those working in the poorest regions of the world. future aspirations include enhancing user engagement by integrating video supports, enabling peer-to-peer exchange, and developing additional ways for site visitors to interact meaningfully with the content. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   now almost 20 years on, our starting assumptions and values still guide the development and dissemination of the community tool box. feedback from users strengthens our belief that communitydetermined problems can be addressed by people working together. when community members have basic competencies—to assess, plan, act, evaluate, and sustain—they can change conditions and outcomes that matter. we can both teach and stimulate use of basic community competencies over the internet, using resources such as the community tool box. by so doing, working together, we can connect and learn with millions of people worldwide who are engaged in transforming conditions that affect their lives. acknowledgements continuous work on the community tool box (from 1994 to present) has been sustained by funding and support from many dedicated groups and individuals including initial funding from the robert wood johnson foundation and kansas health foundation,   and ongoing support from the ku work group. the community tool box is a public service of the work group for community health and development at the university of kansas http://communityhealth.ku.edu/. the authors would also like to acknowledge the contributions of our many partners and colleagues, including those at the ku work group and throughout the world, who have helped to build, translate, and sustain the community tool box. references barry, m., allegrante, j., airhihenbuwa , c., lamarre, m., auld, e., & taub, a. (2009). the galway consensus conference: international collaboration on the development of core competencies for health promotion and health education. global health promotion 16:05. doi: 10.1177/1757975909104097 berkowitz, b., fernandez, c., vargas-moniz, m., & vega, m. (2012, june). creating a global university for online learning in community development. roundtable conducted at the meeting of the fourth international conference of community psychology, barcelona, spain. ethnologue: languages of the world. (2013). retrieved from http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size fawcett, s. b., francisco, v. t., schultz, j. a., berkowitz, b., wolff, t. j., & nagy, g. (2000). the community tool box: a web-based resource for building healthier communities. public health reports, 115, 274-278. fawcett, s.b., schultz, j.a., francisco, v.t., berkowitz, b., wolff, t., rabinowitz, p. and oliverius, r.o. (2008). using internet technology for capacity development in communities: the case of the community tool box. in j. rothman, et al. (eds.), strategies of community intervention. (7th ed.) ny: eddie bowers publishing. google analytics. (2012). [graph illustration of unique visitor sessions]. audience overview data. retrieved from https://www.google.com/analytics/web/?hl=en& pli=1#report/visitorsoverview/a2580430w4859008p5004149/%3f_u. date00%3d20111129%26_u.date01%3d201211 29/ holt, c., fawcett, s., schultz, j., berkowitz, w., wolff, t., & francisco, v. (2013, in press). disseminating online tools for building capacity among community practitioners. journal of prevention and intervention in the community. internet world stats: usage and population statistics. (2012). retrieved from http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm society for community research and action. (2012). competencies for community psychology practice. retrieved from http://www.scra27.org/practice/documents/practc ompetenciestcpdraftaug2012docx work group for community health and development, university of kansas. (2012). community tool box. retrieved from http://ctb.ku.edu/   microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 272 research and practice in the contact zone: crafting resources for challenging racialised exclusion christopher sonn1 school of social sciences and psychology victoria university, melbourne australia invited keynote address presented at the iii international community psychology puebla, mexico, june 5, 2010.                                                                                                                           1 christopher.sonn@vu.edu.au 273 research and practice in the contact zone: crafting resources for challenging racialised exclusion abstract in this paper i explore the challenges, tensions and possibilities for pedagogy and community research in contexts where race relations have been, and continue to be, characterised by dynamics of dominance and subjugation. i draw on three areas of research and practice (i.e., developing pedagogy for anti-racism, partnering a community-based agency working to improve the lives of aboriginal and torres strait islander people, and researching immigrant settlements) where i have been involved in examining responses to intergroup relations with a focus on identity construction. based on this work, i have found myself venturing far beyond the borders of community psychology to identify multiple ways in which people negotiate racialised oppression. this writing has also helped in identifying the intricate ways in which research and practice can inadvertently contribute to oppression. as an example, i discuss whiteness studies and indigenous studies as part of this venturing. this scholarship has opened up valuable opportunities for me to enhance critical pedagogy and research, and examine the diverse responses to this area of research and pedagogy. i discuss some of the conceptual and methodological resources that have been helpful in making visible symbolic ways in which race related privilege and power continue to shape intergroup relations. i also discuss the importance of investing in different ways of knowing and doing as an essential political imperative for a progressive community psychology. keywords: colonialism, social identity, contact zone, history, racism. 274 investigación y praxis en la zona de contacto: construyendo recursos para desafiar la exclusión racista resumen en este artículo exploraré los desafíos, tensiones y posibilidades para una pedagogía e investigación comunitaria en contextos en los que las relaciones de raza han sido y siguen siendo caracterizadas por dinámicas de dominación y subjugación. me baso en tres áreas de investigación y práctica (me refiero al desarrollo de una pedagogía antirracista; al acompañamiento de una agencia asentada en comunidad que trabaja para mejorar las vidas de aborígenes y de isleños en el estrecho de torres; y a la investigación en una colonia de inmigrantes) en las que he estado involucrado examinando respuestas de relaciones intergrupales con un enfoque de construcción de identidad. a partir de estos trabajos me he encontrado aventurándome bastante lejos de las fronteras de la psicología comunitaria para identificar las múltiples formas como la gente negocia la opresión racista. este escrito me ha ayudado también a identificar las formas intrincadas como la investigación y la práctica contribuyen sin darse cuenta a la opresión. como un ejemplo discuto estudios sobre blancura (whiteness) y estudios sobre indígenas como parte de esta aventura. este trabajo académico me ha abierto oportunidades invaluables para realzar una pedagogía y una investigación criticas, y para examinar las diversas respuestas en esta área de investigación y pedagogía. discuto algunos de los recursos conceptuales y metodológicos que han sido útiles para hacer visibles formas simbólicas como privilegios y poder relacionados con raza y que continúan configurando relaciones intergrupales. también me refiero a la importancia de invertir en diferentes formas de conocer y a hacer de ello un imperativo político para una psicología comunitaria progresiva. palabras clave: colonialismo, identidad social, zona de contacto, historia, racismo. 275 introduction it goes without saying that the story i share here is not mine alone, but the product of ongoing collaboration. some of the ideas will appear in a collaborative with mariolga reyes cruz in which we articulate a decolonising standpoint in relation to studying culture in community psychology. over the last few years colleagues and i have been interested in explicating the tensions, challenges and possibilities for engaging in empowerment research and practices alongside different communities where the relationships between those communities are characterised by dominance and subjugation. some of this work has focussed on understanding the immigration and settlement experiences of different immigrant communities, including our own communities of origin, in australia (e.g., sonn & lewis, 2009). while in other projects we have concentrated on examining the ways in which aboriginal people negotiate the discourses of the dominant group (sonn, bishop & humphries, 2000) the dynamics of identity negotiation for white australians engaged in reconciliation (green & sonn, 2005): and, more recently, we have begun to explore the identity making processes for second generation members of ethnic minoritized communities in australia (ali & sonn, in press). at the heart of the different studies is a focus on understanding the complex dynamics of social identity construction within contexts that are characterised by social relations of domination and subjugation, especially where there is racialised oppression. while we recognise the complex and multiple ways in which oppression takes place, much of our focus has been on explicating the nature and functioning of racialised oppression. following fanon (1967, see bulhan, 1985) and hall (2000) we view social identity, based on race and ethnicity, as constructed within social/cultural/historical contexts via social and symbolic means. because of histories of oppression and colonisation these social and symbolic resources for social identity construction are unevenly distributed. social identity construction is an important site through which we can examine symbolic power and privilege afforded because of group members and how these are negotiated in everyday relations. in our understanding engaging with symbolic power is vital to disrupting the dynamics of oppression in intergroup encounters and contributing to transformative research and practice. 276 an aim of this work is to develop praxis and to contribute to the construction of community psychological approaches that can help expose and transform racialised oppression that continue to shape the lives of different groups in australia and elsewhere, and that can contribute to the capacity for self determination and voice. in pursuing this agenda we have found useful the critical and ongoing contributions of different authors in community psychology aimed at developing the transformative capacity of community research and action (e.g., montero, 1990; prilleltensky, 1994; rappaport, 2000; watts & serrano-garcía, 2003). however, like others (e.g., watts, 2009), i have found some of the taken for granted processes and assumptions of knowledge construction in community research and action limited. in this presentation, i overview some of our work including the challenges and tensions that have lead us to critical social science literature, in particular the writing on critical race theory, whiteness studies and indigenous studies that are helping us to articulate a decolonizing standpoint from where to engage with issues of identity within an awareness of a broader set of social, political, historical, economic arrangements. i start with some of the experiences and literature that have been helpful in theorising some of the challenges in negotiating dynamics of race in different contexts and settings. i then discuss some current work in partnership with a community development agency and use some of the issues that we have been exploring in efforts to engage in empowerment oriented work alongside aboriginal australians. i conclude the presentation by making connections with community psychology research and action. broader context: history of race relations. the history of relations between aboriginal and settlers has been marked by colonialism and the ongoing effects of oppressive race relations (glover, dudgeon & huygens, 2005). since settler arrival in 1788 different practices and policies had been in place that oppressed the aboriginal people. in the different states and territories these were nuanced. but, key policies and discourses ranges from protectionism to assimilation and later self determination. it was not until the late 1960’s and early 1970s that aboriginal people were recognised as citizens, and prior to this time they were counted along with the flora and fauna of the country. since that time there had been several significant inquiries and royal commissions that have highlighted the devastating impacts of colonisation and the ongoing oppression of aboriginal people. these 277 included an inquiry into the disproportionate number of aboriginal people who were dying in police custody, the practice of removing aboriginal children from families to be raised on missions and children’s homes and the successful challenge to the myth of terra nullius, the claim that australia was vacant when settlers arrived. out of these developments came several initiatives aimed to heal relations between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people including the process of formal reconciliation. in more recent times we saw further oppressive responses reflected in governmental interventions, known as the northern territory intervention, into issues of community dysfunction that arise out of colonialisation. suffice it to say that extreme disadvantage continues and racism still characterise the lives of aboriginal people in australia. the significance of race in australian relations is also evident in the histories of immigration. in the late 1800’s, australia, along with other british colonies, like south africa and new zealand initiated legislation to protect the interests of the white people in those countries. in australia, this was reflected in the immigration restriction act of 1901, which came to be known as the white australia policy (for an overview of race and racism in australia see hollinsworth, 2006). this policy favoured immigration from english speaking (that is white) countries. there were other means of control and exclusion in the different states. this policy was removed and replaced by multiculturalism in the 1970s. in more recent history we have also seen successive governments respond in extreme ways to refugees and asylum seekers as well as the construction and circulation of representations about muslim’s as barbaric, uncivilised and terrorists. these discourses are anchored in colonial histories (said, 1979). this is an abbreviated history of significant discourses and policy initiatives in australia that should suffice to show that race had always been foundational in the formation of australia as a nation state (see tascόn, 2004). the meanings of race has shifted over time, but as quijano (2000: 95) has noted “the meanings have historical continuity that can only be understood in relation to colonial histories of empires” . even though race has been debunked as a social construction, it continues to be significant in structuring people’s lives and undermining belonging (noble, 2005). cowlishaw (2000), for example, wrote that “race is more than a process of categorization”. in her view “it is also a way of life, a major element of a cultural domain in which relative status suffuses subjectivities and colors all social interaction”. while fine and weis (2002: 274) wrote that “race is a place in which post-structuralism and lived realities need to talk. race is a social construction indeed. but race in a racist society bears a profound 278 consequence for daily life, identity, social movements, and the ways in which most groups are seen as ’other’”. thus, in our work we have in part focussed on identifying and deconstructing racisms and colonialisms within research and practice and everyday lives. this continuity of racialised power relations in post colonial times, quijano refers to as the coloniality of power (see also grosfoguel & georas, 2000). in the next section, i want to offer some reflections based on my personal and professional journey, by inserting myself into the story. this approach is informed by the proposals of those in critical race theory who have been advocating for writing about lived experiences as a means to disrupt processes of othering (e.g., ladson-billings, 2003). moving racisms. “paying attention to the politics of location implies being aware not only of the anticolonial or antiracist position that one chooses in designating a mode of inquiry, but also of how those positions choose us as researchers” (mccleod & bhatia, 2009: 597) i emigrated from south africa to australia. as i got immersed in australian society, it became apparent to me that racism here was of a different kind. it was not a legal system anymore as it was in south africa during apartheid. racism was more subtle, emerging through discursive networks and the micro-politics of power. in south africa, i was labeled ‘coloured’ and positioned in-between black and white. the membership afforded me privileges while being discriminated against by the same people imposing marginality on me. in australia there was no such explicit hierarchy, yet, i was constructed as a racialized outsider in relation to an ostensibly 279 white majority as well as a different kind of black person in relation to aboriginal australians. for the last 16 years, i’ve worked in predominantly white academic settings as a researcher and educator in community psychology teaching mostly non-aboriginal students. i was already sensitive to how psychology and community psychology uses notions like race, ethnicity and culture to categorize groups often misrepresenting or not representing people like me. and for me, these omissions and misrepresentations became a key motivation for writing about the experiences about my community of origin and other communities marginalised by colonial practices in psychological knowledge production. the issues of intersections of colonialism and psychology became further complicated as i engaged with the writings of indigenous scholars in australia and aotearoa (often known as new zealand) (martin, 2003; oxenham, 2000; smith, 1999). they were writing back, writing about decolonization and anticolonialism, to assert indigenous ways of knowing, doing and being in the world. as i engaged in this work nagging questions emerged. what are the implications of these writings for my research and teaching? how would i engage in empowerment praxis when the dominant ways of being, knowing, and doing of the psychology and also community psychology is named as problematic? i began to explore possible answers through collaborating in projects led by indigenous australians, raising the stakes for our white colleagues and students in research and teaching settings. part of my work as an ally to indigenous australians has been to work with the centre for aboriginal studies at curtin university in western australia to incorporate issues of diversity into psychology courses and to research individual and community responses to oppression. i was learning about the history and continuing oppression of indigenous people and wanted be involved in responding without imposing my agenda. the writing and activities of colleagues at the centre and also the writing focused on indigenous australians rights to self-determination, made even more salient how some of the assumptions and theoretical tools that underpin psychology actually worked to silence and undermine indigenous voices (e.g., being trained as “expert” and “objective knower” of others, developing models privileging western ways of being and knowing, building theory based on core values such as individualism). the writing of linda tuhiwai smith (1999) from aotearoa was particularly challenging and helpful. she wrote about decolonising methodologies highlighting the importance of engaging with imperialism from the vantage point of the dominated. she argued that colonialism is a form of imperialism achieved 280 through control of culture, economics and education. knowledge and knowledge production is implicated in process of colonisation and as such decolonisation, in part, is about engaging with colonisation. one site for decolonisation is the very processes and practices of knowledge production and the creation of ways of doing and being that are empowering and ethical. the exchanges with indigenous australian colleagues and our shared experiences of racialisation, and the shared stories of colonialism across australia, south africa and new zealand, led me to turn the gaze away from a superficial understanding of the cultures of others onto examining one’s own culture in relation to other cultural groups (sonn, 2004). my discomfort recognizing the disempowering effects of the knowledge production practices of my discipline and from being othered in everyday settings moved me to problematize dominance and normativity. i began deconstructing dominance through research and teaching while affirming the cultural identities and aspirations of those silenced in australia’s eurocentric psychology. central to this shift was freire’s (1972, 1994; huygen & sonn, 2000) critical pedagogy, in particular the focus on deconstructing taken for granted social and political realities. for me, this meant a form of inversion, of shifting the gaze towards normativity because i was teaching ostensibly ‘white’ students. deconstructing normativity. the critical writings in whiteness studies and privilege are linked with the work on decolonisation. critical whiteness writers argue that whiteness signals “…the production and reproduction of dominance rather than subordination, normativity rather than marginality, and privilege rather than disadvantage” (frankenberg, 1993: 236). those who belong to this group are typically not asked to reflect on their cultural identities because their culture is the norm. thus, whiteness is often invisible; members are blind to the privileges that they have by virtue of their group membership. the invisibility of whiteness is what makes it so powerful; people are rendered blind to the ways in which culturally sanctioned practices can work in an exclusionary and often colonising manner. i am outside whiteness because i am a black person, an immigrant in australia, keenly aware of how racism is significant in the lives of people of colour. and yet, i belong to a white institution and have been trained in a historically eurocentric academic discipline. i am inside 281 whiteness too. my colleagues and the majority of the students in psychology programs in australia are ostensibly “white.” i had seen white colleagues “being helpful” without necessarily considering or understanding the different discourses that position non-indigenous people as helpers and indigenous people as requiring help and the implications of these for empowerment work. everyday we see how mainstream institutionalized systems in australia privilege the knowledge and tools of eurocentric psychology while looking suspiciously at indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing (dudgeon & oxenham, 1990). indigenous and non-white colleagues and i witness the ways in which some allies end up taking over spaces created for indigenous people often becoming recognized as experts on indigenous matters. there are other ways in which normativity and privilege are reproduced other than becoming experts on indigenous matters. based on a review of literature green, sonn, and matsebula (2007) identified three ways in which privilege is reproduced that are pertinent to understandings of cultural competence. these include: the construction of knowledge and history, determining national identity and belonging, and in anti-racism practice. in terms of the construction of knowledge and history there are core cultural anchored assumptions about self that all others are assessed against. for example, those in power also dominate discussions about who is civilised and who is uncivilised and what constitutes real and not real identity claims. race privilege is also reproduced in discussions about what it means to be australian and who can or can’t belong to the nation. ghassan hage (1999) used the work of pierre bourdieu to discuss the way in which white people in australia claim governmental belonging, which is acquired through the accumulation of cultural capital, the sum of cultural and symbolic resources including knowledge, and social and psychical characteristics. the sense of governmental belonging is reflected in white people feeling that they have the right to say who is welcome and who is not welcome in the country. in terms of anti-racism practice, white people often decide what is racist and what is not racism and they can also choose not to worry about racism, while racialised subjects do not have this choice. white people also have a choice and can focus on promoting tolerance, rather than disrupting systems of privilege. for example, at a recent national roundtable on racism towards indigenous australians held in 2009, i presented a short paper on whiteness and cultural competence. after the presentation groups of 5-8 people discussed the issues raised and then reported back. the response of the first table was interesting. the first comment was that 282 although they recognised the experience of indigenous people, they wanted to highlight that white people were also discriminated against in the 1930s and 1940s during the gold rush period. the whiteness literature is careful to acknowledge the contingent nature of privilege and that it is unevenly distributed and intersects with class, gender and age. one of the aboriginal participants responded to the comment made by the reporter stating that it was in itself a reflection of claiming a privileged position and it shifted the focus of oppression to the white experience, while also equating the colonisation of aboriginal people with experiences of early white settlers. a diverse group of colleagues – including aboriginal scholars – and i began to integrate as a key part of our race relations and psychology courses the history of race relations in australia focusing on indigenous writers. students were challenged to explore key concepts (race, ethnicity and culture) used in psychological research to examine difference to then turn to the whiteness literature shifting the focus from the “other” to their own group memberships. this turn, exposes taken for granted social positions and the privileges afforded because of those positionings. problematizing how the cultures of “others” are typically treated as static and antiquated was central; this served to reveal how understandings of self and others are produced through historically situated discourses, taken for granted knowledge and everyday practices within social and political contexts. ultimately, the challenge is to grasp the implications of those understandings for everyday interactions. teaching about whiteness to ostensibly white students has proven to be quite challenging. the notion of whiteness is contested by most students, and so it should be. typically the students’ initial response is to resist or reject the notion. the initial rejection, more often than not, is about equating whiteness with racism and they do not want to be seen as racist. the response is to disconnect from the history of race relations and engage in us/them constructions without considering the societal arrangements that whiteness speaks to. whiteness studies in essence provide a lens to turn the gaze. it requires that we have a clear understanding of power in the context of race relations and the various ways in which power is produced and reproduced through cultural resources and processes. in the next section i turn to some of the current work with a community cultural development agency with whom we are working to build community and to explore decolonising praxis. partnering canwa. 283 for the last 10 or so years i have been working with an arts based agency in western australia. i have been performing different roles from board member, researcher, and critical friend. the community arts network use arts and arts practice to promote community engagement and they also advocate for the development and inclusion of art and broader understandings of culture in community development and planning. since 2002, canwa has been consulting with communities and key stakeholders about to the viability of creating an indigenous arts and culture position in one of the shires in western australia’s wheatbelt region (waller & hammond, 2006/2007). suffice it to say that following consultative processes a unit was established with the aim to assist in aboriginal self determined cultural and arts development in one of the regional communities in east of perth in the central east or wheatbelt region of western australia. it is a small town with about 1180 people, which includes people living in the town and in the greater shire (abs, 2007). 118 people (about 10% percent) of the population are indigenous. this compares with an average aboriginal population of about three percent in western australia. i think it’s just a lack of understanding and ignorance from the wadjela [non-indigenous] community towards aboriginal people. aboriginal people are visual people. they like to be seen out in the streets. in terms of their drinking, there’s a core group of people who drink a lot in kellerberrin that may represent maybe 5, maybe 10% of people. that’s their choice. what it comes down to is choice, but don’t put all aboriginal people in the same basket. don’t paint us with the same brush because we’re all different; but that’s been the perception of the wadjela community. also that comes back to historical factors, historical things that have happened in the region. there’s been a lot of racial tension of course and with the previous government legislations and the stolen generation in the mission days for example. you know the power of men and particularly white men in communities quite often on councils, you’ll see a whole heap of white men in their 40s, 50s and 60s who sit on the council and these people are firmly entrenched with their views about aboriginal people and aboriginal issues (keith, aboriginal) race and whiteness in the contact zone. 284 as part of canwa’s ongoing engagement in ccd work in the wheatbelt, we have been accompanying the agency to report and evaluate some of its community based projects and also to contribute as reflective partners. one of the projects that we reported on explored the role of the arts in empowerment, canwa’s role in community empowerment and ways in which nonindigenous people can best support indigenous empowerment (green & sonn, 2008). here i want to illustrate some of the complexity of negotiating intercultural relations by reading into a social interaction within a workshop setting. in one project we explored the ways in which participation in the arts activities fostered empowerment, the role of canwa in empowerment and the possibilities for working together. here i use one extract from a conversation with a nonaboriginal woman who works for canwa and is an outsider to the community. she facilitated photography workshops as one of the activities community members identified as something they would like to do. the facilitator had been to the town several times as part of the broader project. conceptual framework. we conceptualised the workshop as a contact zones, which for pratt (1991: 33) is a “social space where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, a such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in parts of the world today.” in this space different stories and representations shape and influence our understandings of self and other. these representations can be understood as discourses which are “historically constructed regimes of knowledge. these include commonsense assumptions and taken-for-granted ideas, belief systems and myths that groups of people share and through which they understand each other” (mama, 1995: 98). mama further states that discourses position individuals in relation to one another socially, politically and culturally, as similar to or different from; as ‘one of us’ or as ‘other’ (mama, 1995: 98) and also inform how blame and merit is to be apportioned. people have different subject positions available within discourses and these can be contradictory depending on social and historical relations. furthermore, power is transmitted through discourses and dominant discourses exercise their hegemony by “resonating with and echoing the institutionalised and formal knowledges, assumptions and ideologies of a given social and political order.” (mama, 1995: 8). we have drawn on this understanding to explore the dynamics of identity and politics in the contact zone. 285 the extract is of course open to other readings, but in view of canwa’ work and the broader social/historical/economic context there are also limited readings. the extract is as follows: louise: she came in the morning with a six-pack of grog and cheekily said “do you want a drink?” and i said “no and i’m just not gonna see that. we’re just going to put that away and that won’t exist just for today” or something like that. interviewer: you said that? louise: yeah, and i carried on doing what i was doing and then she came back again and said “if you don’t want me to do this, if you don’t want me to drink or if i’ve upset you, i can go” and i found that sad and confronting and all those things because it wasn’t as if she was asking “am i allowed to do this?” or “will can wa do this if i do this?” or “will i get in trouble?” it was more like, “nah, i want to know what you think about me doing this” and i found that really sad and i don’t know why…. it was more like “do you care that i drink? do you care that i’m drunk at 10 o’clock in the morning?” as in “nah, as a person, do you care that me, as this person is doing this?” louise: i guess it was the disappointment, maybe fear, because there was an element of just a big reality so i guess the reality of it was just frightening for me. louise is challenged by the actions of one of the workshop participants, a young aboriginal woman. she does not know how to respond, but responds by refusing the request and ignoring the behaviour. the person comes back and asks louise to respond, to engage, to take a stance. louise feels sad and confronted. she is challenged by the fact that the young woman has brought her reality into the workshop and wants to know what louise, the outsider white women thinks and knows. the young woman knows of the stereotypes, the hegemonic discourses about aboriginal people and drinking on pay day. louise goes on to talk about her disappointment and fear, about having to see reality, the ‘real’ life for many aboriginal people outside of the workshop. she had to come to terms with her own position as a white woman, an outsider, and as a professional in the context of aboriginal marginality and white race privilege. following feldman (1992, as cited by watkins and schulman, 2008), in systems characterised by relations of domination and subjugation there can be distortions to what we see and do not see. not seeing beyond the workshop, the differential subject positions, histories and 286 lived realities that coalesce in the contact zone, can result in the reproduction of relations of domination and privilege. in this project, it had become essential to engage with canwa staff in critical discussions about taken for granted understandings about race, culture and ethnicity and how these are utilised in everyday discussions in australia and the effects on our relations. in this framework, race, culture and ethnicity are social constructions and ideological and generated within colonial histories, and, like others, we have argued that it is imperative to deconstruct racism, culture and ethnicity in everyday settings based on the understanding that these notions are central to ongoing coloniality. for louise this meant understanding marginalisation and social exclusion. the contact zone itself is the space within which identities and histories come into conflict. in australia, talk about race and racism has been repressed by the discourse of multiculturalism (riggs, 2007). in this country, we do not talk about racism and even deny prejudice and contest racism (rapley, 2001). but, for aboriginal people and people of colour racism is an everyday reality within the australian racial formation (paradies, harris, & anderson, 2008). the fact that we avoid talking about or naming ‘race’ as significant in the history and current social relations is problematic and does result in the reproduction of white race privilege in everyday settings, including in settings such as those constructed for positive community development projects. this excerpt reflects some of the tensions that arise when working alongside aboriginal australians in order to disrupt racism and contribute to empowerment. how do you empower in a colonised or post-colonising (moreton-robinson, 2003) space, where there is pain, frustration, complacency, racism? one of the critical elements here is that this research work has provided the basis for canwa to engage and reconstruct its own understandings of empowerment and intercultural engagement. this process of developing praxis is ongoing and has included restructuring the agency to now include at least 50% aboriginal staff members and putting in place relevant support systems for the staff members. canwa’s work continues, and there are important lessons to unpack further as they develop their praxis, which is part of our ongoing work. some of this includes the tensions between knowledge and history and the fear that stories will be appropriated. there are also understandings of aboriginality based on western discourses that continue to influence understandings and shape practices. but, what is clear so far is that lived experience in combination with critical theorising is an important epistemological position and central to a decolonising agenda. 287 summary and conclusion. as i reflect on the different paths of the journey, of weaving in and out of community psychology research and action literature, i often come back to one of the key aspirations: the inclusion of marginalised voices as central to deconstruction and reconstruction projects. for me this has meant grappling with notions like empowerment and social justice within a framework that recognises power, the sites and means for the reproduction of power and privilege in everyday settings, and the importance of understanding histories of colonialism in decolonisation efforts. community psychology is committed to social change. however, it has been necessary to venture beyond the boundaries of the discipline to develop resources for challenging racialisation. the writing from diverse areas that focus on decolonisation and that is written under critical race theory and whiteness studies have been extremely valuable in helping us articulate a standpoint from which we can engage in deconstruction, both as members of minoritised groups as well as in our roles as partners or allies to those who are excluded (reyes-cruz & sonn, in press). this is and continues to be a challenging task, but through critical reflective practice, we are creating resources to explicate the micro politics of race within a broader social, cultural and historical context. the writing in the areas i have identified above value lived experiences and critical analyses – the movement between being on the ground and theorising (fine & weis, 2007). it shares much in common with the critical writing in community psychology (lykes & moane, 2009; watts & serrano-garcía, 2003). central to this critical analysis is an understanding of historical memory or history of colonial relations within which racialising practices develop and engagement in reflexive practice. there is a focus on promoting voice and developing ways of knowing that disrupts the power of the expert knower. history and memory. history and memory are central to social change and in particular liberation psychologies. martín-baró (1994) argued that the recovery of historical memory is central to liberation psychology, while bulhan (1985: 277) argued that those who are oppressed have been denied 288 “individual biographies and collective history” and have been made appendages to the “biographies and histories of others”. we have drawn on the writing of liberation theorists as well as others (e.g., bhatia, 2007; quijano, 2000) to argue that it is essential to understand histories of colonialism and the continuity of colonial relations in our efforts to promote anti-racist and antioppressive projects in our personal and professional lives. in our efforts we have brought people with different histories together in the contact zone and utilised the writing by indigenous and black scholars as well as writing that deals with deconstructing normativity. we use this to facilitate de-ideologization and to create new subjectivities within limit situations (martín-baró, 1994). the processes of deconstructing racialisation and othering is challenging, but we have found it vital for countering the historical amnesia that is part and parcel of a liberalist agenda – an agenda that seeks to equalise future possibilities while denying historical and ongoing inequities in resources required for living. reflexivity. the very processes of knowledge construction is scrutinised for its disempowering effects, and there is recognition of the partiality of knowing. to this end, we also advocate an approach of situated knowing. some of this is reflected in our effort to challenge both whiteness and race and to recognise the differential power afforded because of our social group memberships. instead of an exclusive focus on the other, one also needs to ask reflexive and introspective questions about oneself – about the position one occupies in matrices of power and privilege and the extent to which such positions inform one’s practices, actions and beliefs. as such, i cannot claim to be non-racist if i am white, or non sexist if i am a male, but rather make non-racism and non-sexism a project within which i constantly re/situate myself, and within which i continuously take up a performative position. (laubscher, 2006: 211). the work in the contact zones departs from a dialogical orientation and commitment to the other. it is a praxis that is in line with the ethical positions articulated by different authors (bird rose, 2004; montero, 2007; 2009). in our context this means understanding and recognising that, as old settlers and immigrants, as people who share this land, with aboriginal people, we are all 289 positioned differently in relation to the legacy of colonisation and racism. while we are all positioned differently, as privileged or marginalised, or somewhere along this continuum, and we are all implicated in responding to the issues facing our communities. as part of this process we have focussed on examining dynamics of oppression as they occur in research, teaching and more recently partnering community based agencies by drawing on the writing from indigenous and other scholars who write from liminal spaces as well as the writing aimed at disrupting normativity. through this we endeavour to create spaces for relational and respectful engagement that does not only focus on the diverse other, but brings us into a mutual relationship aimed at disrupting racism (see laubscher, 2006). references bird-rose, d. 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(2009). whither feminist liberation psychology? critical explorations of feminist and liberation psychologies for a globalising world. feminism and psychology. 19(3) 283-297. mama, a. (1995). beyond the masks: race, gender, and subjectivity. london, uk: routledge. martin, k. b. m. (2003). ways of knowing, being and doing: a theoretical framework and methods for indigenous and indigenist research. australian studies, voicing dissent. new talents 21c: next generation australian studies. 76, 203-214. martín-baró, i. (1994). towards a liberation psychology. in a. aron & s. corne (eds.). writings for a liberation psychology: ignacio martín-baró (17-32). cambridge: harvard university press. 291 mccleod, c. & bhatia, s. (2009). postcolonialism and psychology. in w. stainton-rogers and c. willig (eds). the sage handbook of qualitative research in psychology (576-589). thousand oaks, ca: sage. montero, m. (1990). ideology and psychological research in third world contexts. journal of social issues. 36, 43 -55 montero, m. (2007). the political psychology of liberation: from politics to ethics and back. political psychology. 28(5) 517-533. montero, m. (2009). community action and research as citizen construction. american journal of community psychology. 43, 149-161. moreton-robinson, a. (2003). researching whiteness: some reflections from an indigenous woman's standpoint. hecate. 29(2) 72-78. noble, g. (2005). the discomfort of strangers: racism, incivility and ontological security in a relaxed and comfortable nation. journal of intercultural studies. 26(1) 107120. omi, m., & winant, h. (1994). racial formations in the united states (2nd ed.). new york, ny: routledge. paradies, y., harris, r., & anderson, i. (2008). the impact of racism on indigenous health in australia and aoteroa: towards a research agenda: discussion paper no. 4. auckland, n. z. cooperative research centre for aboriginal health. pratt, m. l. (1991). arts of the contact zone. profession. 91, 33-40. prilleltensky, i. (1994). the morals and politics of psychology: psychological discourse and the status quo. albany, n.y.: state university of new york press. quijano, a. (2000). coloniality of power and eurocentrism in latin america. international sociology. 15(2) 215-232. rapley, m. (2001). how to do x without doing y: accomplishing discrimination without 'being racist doing equity'. in m. augoustinos & k. reynolds (eds.). understanding prejudice, racism and social conflict (231-250). london, uk: sage. rappaport, j. (2000). community narratives: tales of terror and joy. american journal of community psychology. 28, 1-24. reyes-cruz, m. & sonn, c. (accepted for publication). (de)colonizing culture in community psychology: reflections from coloniality of power and other critical theories. american journal of community psychology. 292 riggs, d. (2007). introduction: critical race and whiteness studies in a postcolonising nation. in d. riggs (ed.). taking up the challenge: critical race and whiteness studies in a postcolonising nation (1-16). belair: crawford house publishing. said, e. w. (1979). orientalism. new york, n. y.: vintage books. sonn, c. c., bishop, b., & humphries, r. (2000). encounters with the dominant culture: voices of indigenous students in mainstream education. australian psychologist. 35, 128-135. sonn, c. c. (2004). reflecting on practice: negotiating challenges to ways of working. journal of community and applied social psychology. 14, 305-313. sonn, c. c. (2008). educating for anti-racism: producing and reproducing race and power in a university classroom. race, ethnicity and education. 11, 155-166. sonn, c.c. & lewis, r. (2009). immigration and identity: the ongoing struggles for liberation. in m. montero, & c. c. sonn, (eds). (2009). psychology of liberation: theory and applications. (115-134) new york, n. y.: springer. smith, l. t. (1999). decolonising methodologies: researching and indigenous peoples. dunedin, nz: university of otago press. tascón, s. (2004). refugees and coloniality of power: border-crossers of postcolonial whiteness. in a. moreton-robinson (ed.). whitening race: essays in social and cultural criticism. (239-253). canberra, australia: aboriginal studies press. waller, s. & hammond, a. (summer 2006/2007). the community arts network wa launches their indigenous arts and cultural development unit in kellerberrin. canwa cultural planning bulletin. 23(2) 8-11. watkins, m. & schulman, h. (2008). toward psychologies of liberation. houndsmills. uk: palgrave/mcmillan. watts, r. j., & serrano-garcía, i. (2003). the quest for a liberating community psychology: an overview. american journal of community psychology. 31, 73-78. watts, r. j. (2009). community psychology practice under extenuating circumstances: delivering social and intellectual product in the land of the dollar. in c. vázquez rivera, d. pérez jiménez, m. figueroa rodríguez & w. pacheco bou (eds.). international community psychology: shared agendas in diversity (383-402). san juan, puerto rico: universidad de puerto rico. o modelo comunitário de intervenção em saúde mental na era pós-hospitalar community psychology and social change: a story from the field of mental health in portugal josé ornelas associate professor research unit of psychology and health instituto superior de psicologia aplicada, lisboa – portugal jornelas@ispa.pt ; www.ispa.pt; tel: + 351 21 881 17 00; fax: +351 21 886 09 54 maria vargas-moniz lecturer and researcher research unit of psychology and health ispa/associação para o estudo e integração psicossocial lisboa – portugal maria.moniz@ispa.pt; www.ispa.pt; tel: + 351 21 881 17 00; fax: +351 21 886 09 5 teresa duarte ispa/associação para o estudo e integração psicossocial lisboa – portugal teresa.duarte@aeips.pt; www.aeips.pt; tel: + 351 21 845 35 80; fax: 351 21 849 81 29 key words: community support system; people with mental illness; empowerment; recovery recommended citation: ornelas, j., vargas-moniz, m, & duarte, t. (2010). community psychology and social change: a story from the field of mental health in portugal. global journal of community psychology practice, 1(1), 21-31. retrieved <date>, from http://www.gjcpp.org/. global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 community psychology and social change: a story from the field of mental health in portugal abstract a contextual and ecological intervention approach for people experiencing mental illness was developed with a primary focus on the mobilization of natural resources, the expansion of social networks and supports, and to systematically promote opportunities for activity within the community. the mutual help movement provided a major contribution to enhance and strengthen the social role of those experiencing mental illness. this social change process was inspired by empowerment theory and the goal of recovery through social and community participation. therefore we present a community-based intervention, based on the principles and values of community psychology, a program implemented during the last twenty years in the field of mental health that contributed to changes in the mental health system in portugal. a community-based support system has been organized to provide social supports in terms of housing, education and employment by enhancing the use of natural contexts, such as schools and businesses, and the diverse social resources available to the general public. introduction the challenge raised by the integration of people experiencing mental illness into the community receives valuable contributions from community psychology and related fields of study. of those contributions we place emphasis on the contextualist approach (kelly, 1987, 1990, 2006; segal & aviram, 1978; aubrey & myner, 1996), the social movement of community mental health (mosher & burti, 1989; levine & perkins, 1987, 2004), and mutual help (madara, 1986; rappaport, 1995). two additional pillars of research that influence the work include empowerment theory (rappaport, 1977, 1984; zimmerman, 2000) and the recognition of recovery reports of those with experiential knowledge of mental illness (deegan, 2002; chamberlin, 1997; ahern & fisher, 2001). in this presentation we aim to describe some of the contributions of community psychology over a 20 year period of growth in this field, and consolidation of a non-governmental initiative created to promote change in the mental health system in portugal. we begin with a brief story of the initial steps, and we seek to provide an overview of the progressive implementation of a community-based services program. we discuss how the specific contributions of community psychology were relevant for the formulation of strategic options, to provide context for the program (both the structures and activities), and the principles upon which the system was gradually completed. we recognize that this is an unfinished story, and the impacts of the changes observed still need to be investigated. such investigation can help us understand more fully the promotion of effective change on the mental health system of the country. throughout this paper, we refer to “users” as users of the mental health services. some countries refer to them as “clients” or “consumers”. social and political change in the mental health system in portugal during the 80’s, the mental health system in portugal was structured around large-scale psychiatric hospitals or psychiatric wards integrated in general hospitals, and also large institutional facilities managed by religious congregations. in 1987, through a small grant provided by the state mental health department to a psychiatric hospital, a small group of professionals began home-visits to identify people in the community who received treatment in the hospital and were discharged to the community of olivais lisboa. in march 1987, group meetings were held 3 times a week in a room provided by the local authority of olivais, for a group of four people with mental illness and their families. in october 1987, a group of twelve persons with mental illness, their families, a group of professionals and under-graduate students in psychology and other social sciences (political sciences; social work; art education), created a non-governmental organization named association for the study and psychosocial integration (aeips) to promote a community-based service system. during the last two decades, through the work of this organization (ornelas, 2002; ornelas, monteiro, vargas-moniz, duarte, 2005) there was an effort to synthesize the contributions of community psychology with inputs from psychosocial initiatives global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 in order to renovate the mental health system in portugal. applying a community model to treat people with mental illness, their families and support the professionals working with them, means defining their backgrounds, and to think about the specific roles each group plays in the development of a community mental health paradigm. overview of aeips for people experiencing mental illness aeips1 has served over 700 persons (70% men and 30% women). the vast majority diagnosed with schizophrenia (70%), and another group of people diagnosed with bi-polar disorder or other psychosis, and some people with a mixture of mental health illness, and a history of substance abuse. the ages of the patients range from 18 to 57 and the average age is 33 years old. the average time that patients received medical psychiatric support is 8 to 10 years and the majority received in-ward treatment. the participants of the aeips have a history of longterm unemployment, or lack professional workplace experience, and low or incomplete educational attainment levels with the exception of some university degree students, depending on the age at on-set of the reported problems. the majority receives social income (social pension, early retirements, other social revenues), but not enough to survive independently. most patients live with their families and lack the possibility of alternatives in terms of housing or other supports based on financial difficulties. reports of social isolation and stigma were found in a study reported in a trans-national research initiative by rego and vargas moniz2 (2007) with a group of people with mental illness (n=25). globally the participants reported that, they did not feel discriminated against, however high rates of perceived self-stigma were narrated in everyday life interactions such as “i do not trust that i am able to study or work,” ”i stop myself several times…”, or “i feel they avoid me!”; “… i was very discriminated against…”; “i haven’t made that many friends, after i was diagnosed…” 1 information available from the aeips annual reports 2 portuguese version of the indigo study developed in collaboration with the king’s college in london by g. thornicroft and n. sartorious family involvement. during these 20 years, the families were the major source of social and political support of this organization, as members of the statutory boards, and as political advocates for a community support system for their relatives. personal reports of high levels of stress, isolation and stigma, and a lack of recognition are also reported by the family members “we live in a cycle of sadness, and prejudice, we need to find others with similar experiences...someone that accepts us...and we need to find hope...so that we may feel stronger and provide support to others” (bruno-da-costa & manuel, 2005). therefore there was the need to enhance their social and political capacity, and simultaneously their social supports and their wellness (riebschleger, 1991, 2004). professional challenges. the challenge for professionals has been the application of the community psychology constructs, principles, and values in the context of a non-governmental community organization, namely the empowerment theory. moreover, the very idea of empowerment had also to be applied to the professionals themselves so that they may feel strengthened, valued, and able to anchor their practice in a set of values that accommodate for increasing participation levels of the people with personal experience of mental illness in the management and evaluation of the services provided. community model. the consistency of a community model meant the need to focus the community intervention through persistent involvement and participation in regular community contexts including the families, specialized services when required, but also the array of services and supports available for the general population, and particularly the social services or supports for those experiencing some sort of vulnerability. socio-political context. during the 20 years of implementation there has been a negotiation process, both with the governmental health and social welfare bureaus and private funders and/ or supporters. between 1990 and 1992, a commission was formed among governmental agencies where this organization was extensively interviewed during a set of hearings with a trans-disciplinary group that built the foundation for a legal document that was adopted in 1998 (407/98). in 1995, the ministries of health and social welfare officially recognized the importance of the need for mental health services and created a stable financial global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 agreement; prior to this supports were provided for the structures, but not for the operation of the service. from simple beginnings twenty years ago, the organization now has four locations in the city of lisboa. all operate with a combination of public grants (60%), and a combination of families’ contributions and private corporations’ donations (40%), serving 120 people with mental illness, their families, and a total of 30 support professionals, with a global budget of 1 million euros. as a result of this investment, we have the structures, the knowledge, the experience, trained professionals, and the commitment of the people with mental illness and their families to consolidate this change process. portugal is in a privileged position to avoid the deinstitutionalization phenomena observed in countries such has italy, united kingdom, and even in the united states, during the seventies and the eighties (mosher & burti, 1989; levine & perkins, 1987, 2004), that promoted public policies without a paradigm able to sustain the complexity of the social integration processes. we still live in a country with two systems in the field of mental health. they include the large psychiatric institutions, which have a larger part of the financial resources and a community support system; it is still relevant to present theory and practice to prepare the post-hospital era (ornelas, 2005). community psychology principles ecological approach. based on the contextual and ecological approach (levine & perkins, 1987, 2004; kelly, 2006), we were able to change the focus of the intervention from the diagnosis and deficit identification or confirmation to the observation of people with mental illness in context. through this observation we learned about the need to acquire “situated knowledge is knowledge derived from appraisals of persons in specific locales, settings and situations in which they are participants...” (kelly, 2006, p.189). we used this knowledge to understand how the community resources are used to expand the social networks, and keeps the person experiencing mental illness in a functional community setting. within this perspective, the main focus is the person’s integration into the community through physical presence, enhanced access to community resources, personal care, and active participation with family, friends and other social groups and contexts (segal & aviram, 1978; aubrey & myner, 1996). it is not exclusively the participation in services and resources specifically designed for people experiencing mental illness and their families. through the experience of implementing the principles and the practical guidance of community mental health we were able to validate basic human rights such as people, independently of any diagnosis or other vulnerability, should live in the community, even in crisis situations, maintaining access to the available resources (mosher & burti, 1989; levine & perkins, 1987, 2004). the community mental health movement advocates that if people have access to resources they may improve their lives, grow and strengthen themselves (levine & perkins, 1987, 2004). this thesis was confirmed with recovery reports about persistent engagement with support networks, mutual help groups, and involvement in diverse natural social contexts. social integration. the idea of social integration results from advocating that people with mental illness have access to the same housing, professional, and social contexts as any other person; that people have the right and opportunity to choose the location where they will live, work, or study and socialize, including people who do not experience problems for mutual benefit. therefore, services and supports need to be made available according to need and take into consideration that individual needs change over time (deegan, 2002; carling, 1995). mutual help. another source of learning came from the mutual help movement. this has been a major contribution for the enhancement and strengthening of the social role of those with a personal experience of mental illness. it may be defined as the voluntary gathering of people who share common experiences or problems and offer continuous and permanent support (madara, 1986). empowerment. this twenty year process has been built through the inspiration of the empowerment theory defined as the process by which individuals gain mastery over their lives (rappaport, 1977, 1984; zimmerman, 2000), or more recently as “the process by which individuals, communities and organizations gain mastery over their lives in the context of changing their social and political environments to improve equity and the quality of life”. (minkler & wallerstein, 2005, p. 34). the major challenge has been the application of this paradigm to the three main actors in this process: a) the people with a personal experience of mental illness, b) their families, and c) the innovation of role of the professional facilitating the whole movement global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 (ornelas, vargas-moniz and albuquerque, 2003; ornelas, 2002, 2005). recovery orientation. recovery represents another major challenge, because it means the planning and implementation focused on what may be defined as a process, an attitude…a way of facing the daily challenges...establish a renewed sense of integrity and personal purpose beyond the illness (deegan, 2002) or as “...regaining a sense of trust on oneself” (chamberlin, 1997, p.9). some perspectives on recovery recognize that it is possible through a process of personal strengthening, of control over the important decisions of one’s lives, participating in the life of the communities, through relevant professional, educational or family social roles (ahern & fisher, 2001). all of these contributions have been crucial to understand the social and political potential of community psychology to anchor concrete social change processes. the community program a community-based support system was organized to provide housing services, educational and employment enhancement through the use of natural contexts. these contexts include access to regular schools, particularly secondary schools and universities; access to companies in all economic sectors, as well as the diversity of social resources available for the general public. a) supported housing services inspired in the community mental health movement, in 1989 we created the first group-home in the community that provided a housing solution for four institutionalized people, three men and one woman with long-term hospitalization, but could not be discharged due to a lack of social supports. after three years the woman (when re-employed) decided to leave hospital care and live in the community. currently the organization owns three different spaces in the city of lisboa as housing alternatives for 21 persons who lack community supports, and all are used with many different profiles; for some it is permanent and for others it is a transitory experience, there are no time limitations, and in some situations they have worked as a crisis support and management context. the group homes have been crucial over these years to demonstrate that deinstitutionalization was not a myth or simply a movement or a social policy that went wrong in many countries. we were able to have personal reports of satisfaction and achievement (oliveira e duarte, 2006; homem, 2005), and comparatively lower rates of hospitalizations. building and generalizing supportive housing for a set of services and supports for people with mental illness, it is crucial to have investments in diverse housing options (brown, ridgway, anthony & rodgers, 1991) by providing group or individualized opportunities--including options for those who decide to live as partners. it is also relevant to structure housing support services, with specialized intervention professionals oriented towards the maintenance of the housing options in community contexts, even in crisis situations. the philosophy of these services is to permanently ensure efforts to keep people in contact with their relevant natural social and physical resources. the relevance of these supports may be corroborated by a monograph study by oliveira & duarte (2006), where the participants reported high rates of sense of community and stated that housing in community contexts contributed particularly for their personal recovery. this study also concluded that the length of time in the community was positively correlated with a greater sense of community, and the effective use of community resources. the participants reported (oliveira & duarte, 2006) that the housing experience has specifically contributed for their emotional and physical wellness. within those facilities there were opportunities for a continuous support practice in community contexts, access to peers and the development of group spirit, new friendships, access to job and education opportunities, a daily routine with concrete responsibilities, a sense of independence, and the possibility of interacting with diverse people. although we may consider a diversity of resources to be relevant for housing in the community, there needs to be flexibility to provide differentiated responses adaptable to individual need (vargas-moniz, 1999). from the research data available (e.g. brown, ridgway, anthony & rodgers, 1991), individualized housing solutions tend to increase satisfaction and effective integration into the community. therefore the next steps on the investment in this support program should proceed in this direction. b) the employment program one of the most relevant services provided within the organization is the supported employment program defined as a system to keep people with the experience of mental illness in the open labor market. this paradigm (brooke, inge, armstrong & wehman, 1997) states that a larger number of people achieve success through their professional integration, and global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 this is based on the premise that all individuals, despite their differences, should have equal opportunities to reach the labor market, and actively participate in society. this seems a simple and linear concept, but it makes a large difference when implemented. the professional areas of the 18 new opportunities created during the year 2007 (table 1), for each of the location identified only one person has integrated. training field company graphic design delikatesen gardening horto campo grande computers helpdesk mapfre insurance administrative cefipsi storage fnac alverca administrative fpcm human resources auchan maintenance zoo beauty adviser (1) administrative (2) marionnaud (1) french embassy (2) administrative sas orders for clients fnac chiado cashier and logistics fnac chiado car washing precision administrative centro comunitário accounts general electric administrative hospital cuf descobertas financial/ fiscal general electric administrative hospital cuf junqueira table 1 – new opportunities in 2007 of the opportunities made available: 6 were successfully completed, and 4 resulted in a working contract, 11 transitioned into training for 2008 and 2 were less successful 1 for health reasons and the other decided to go back to school. besides the 18 new opportunities in 2007, the working group also provided support to 13 employed participants, 8 of whom have been employed for over 3 years, and 5 signed new contracts during the year. supports for users. the supports provided include individualized meetings, support, and evaluation meetings within the company, group meeting at the aeips, and a monthly celebration dinner. on average each participant has 12 individual meetings (3 times a week) and weekly phone contacts. the support or evaluation meetings held in the workplace are for discussing problems or obstacles and are also used to sensitize employers and supervisors to accept difference and adopt anti-stigma procedures, and also aimed at progressively open the floor for a future contract. the weekly working group meetings have a plan, and are also aimed at supporting group members when they bring specific topics, or support needs. during 2007 the themes selected by the group, combined with demands or requirements related with the participation in partnerships and programs were peer supports, empowerment and recovery, the challenges of working as an integrated team, colleagues and supervisors, as well as conflict resolution. the rates of participation in these meetings are 64% of the working group members. the monthly celebration dinner is a highly appreciated activity by the members, because it is the recognition of the “small wins.” other activities of the working group also relevant to understand are the ecological contextualized approach and the empowerment strategies used within the program for the participation of the people with an experience of mental illness in the networks organized within the eu programs equal, implying trips to meetings or other events in paris, and northern ireland in 2007. c) supported education services with similar principles and premises the supported education paradigm has focused attention to the relevance of academic success factors (pomeroy & pape, 1999), therefore opportunities to return to school became a relevant programmatic element of the service system. people with the experience of mental illness often had unfinished degrees; so the opportunity to return to school to complete such degrees or diplomas was transformed into an element for the process of building individual social support systems. these initiatives impact the increase of job options, and for personal and family satisfaction. since 2000, the aeips program, supports in the educational area was provided for 350 people with an experience of mental illness. among them 250 participants were integrated in continuing education global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 27 programs (e.g. computers, languages) and 100 people in regular curricula from basic degrees to secondary and universities3 d) the users empowerment and mutual help movement the mutual help group is part of the empowerment process of the users, and according to coimbra and antunes (2005), the meetings are crucial as an opportunity for users to exchange about problems, experiences, deeds, thoughts and opinions; “...it is relevant for us to feel the affection and the good feelings of our peers”; “the strength, hope, and positive energy of a human environment”; “we learn to understand and respect others, and to recognize what is best for each of us”. besides the mutual help group, the organization facilitates the participation of people with mental illness in european and other international networks, and contributed to the progressive autonomy of the users/survivors’ movements. the emergence of a portuguese movement of people with the experience of mental illness as a part of this global movement has been happening, namely the participation of users in national and international events, the organization of meetings with representatives of several organizations, the publication of a newsletter, the contribution to international documents (e.g. the european commission green paper on mental health4) and now the process of creating an empowerment and mutual help centre open to all those in need of peer support in the field of mental health. it is crucial that people with mental illness control these organizations so that the community model is a reality, a concrete example is the role played by the mutual help groups. from collaborative research studies (ornelas et al., 2003; breda, ornelas, 2007), we were able to think about the results of the application of an empowerment philosophy. users reported the need to have greater control and responsibility over their lives; increase their participation in decision making processes within the organization; to play significant roles in service providing, management and consultant roles in services run by professionals. through these issues we may corroborate the concept 3 data gathered from the annual reports (2000 to 2006) 4 for more information: http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_determinants/lifestyle/mental/ greenpaper/mentalgpcontributionsen.htm#8 that increased participation and control among people experiencing mental health illness generates increased critical awareness, growth and recovery (ornelas et al., 2002). e) the role of the families over the past twenty years, family members have had the opportunity to participate in international initiatives, such as european projects (eg. prospect (2001-2004) an initiative supported by the european program leonardo da vinci), national and international events and meetings (eufami – european federation of the families of people with mental illness), organized a mutual help-group, and are also part of national family organizations. in a focus group held during 2006, which included parents and siblings of people with mental illness to discuss the current mental health system, the participants reported the need to develop a group of families supporting the community integration of people with an experience of mental illness. this group would advocate for access to alternative supports to psychiatric hospitals and other forms of involuntary treatment, and to promote human rights within a holistic perspective about mental illness. this group is also involved in a mutual-help dynamic with diversified groups and networks or platform for broader action for mutual benefit and political lobbying for community support systems. bruno-dacosta and manuel (2005), the members of the mutual help report that in the groups the role of families is valued, “we may play a crucial role on the integration of our family member...but we are not able to help anybody if we are desperate or depressed...you cannot give what you haven’t got”; “in the group we learn to be hopeful, that we are not alone, we transmit strength and even joy.”; “ we recognize that a mental illness situation has deep consequences in the family, it is a daily source of stress, because the illness never goes away”; “we are exposed to stigma and prejudice, therefore we must learn to take care of ourselves.” f) the professionals in community-based programs community-based services should promote participation in regular social activities, the maintenance of a network of social ties and interactions, including the reciprocity of social supports, the opportunities for debate and critical reflection, as well as the strengthening of the sense of community and belonging that are maximized by the direct contact with corporations, schools and other http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_determinants/lifestyle/mental/greenpaper/mentalgpcontributionsen.htm#8 http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_determinants/lifestyle/mental/greenpaper/mentalgpcontributionsen.htm#8 http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_determinants/lifestyle/mental/greenpaper/mentalgpcontributionsen.htm#8 global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 28 community contexts. the ability of the professionals to support this endeavor should be consistent with these challenges. multi-sector involvement. the implementation of a community model means expanding the intervention to wider social spheres; this implies the constant search for coalitions and alliances within the community to probe for answers to identify specific interests or the talents of users. to respond to the challenges and adjustments required as a result of the increasing user participation, there is the need to share power, provide opportunities for the active participation of users in terms of service organization and priorities definition, as well as access to training and information in continuing training programs. client involvement. another innovative domain for professionals is the support for exclusive responsibility by users, such as mutual-help groups, peer-support systems, access to significant role models, providing support services, and representing the organizations. the direct influence in the definition of priorities, and privileging collaborative research methodologies, enhancing qualitative aspects of empowerment and recovery, are crucial for the improvement of community-based services and supports. advocacy. professionals should also be advocates for the integration of people with mental illness in all sectors of society, corporations, schools, and facilitate the exercise of all their civic and political rights (e.g. political participation, access to legacies, having their bank accounts, life or health insurance, etc.). as change agents, the role of professionals is also to facilitate that services become more effective in terms of locating alternatives in the community, namely access to housing benefits or for the use of other community resources. in order to complement the community-based multiple support system, we have to include the advance directives for crisis support and intervention, the development of mechanisms and flexible supports for emergency situations to prevent hospitalizations or discord with family and other relevant social ties. discussion and recommendations in 2006, inspired by the new freedom commission, (usa, 2003); the report from the irish commission titled “a vision for change: report of the expert group on mental health policy (2004, ireland) and other initiatives, the portuguese government created a national commission for the reform of the mental health services. it was published in the official journal5 that included the representation of the community–based initiatives. within this commission, we had the opportunity to organize public hearings for users, families and professionals, so that representatives from the three groups would have the opportunity to present their specific needs, opinions and suggestions for change, and organize specific documents to be formally forwarded to the commission in order to contribute to concrete changes in the public policies in the field of mental health. further reflections on community psychology principles empowerment. considering that recovery oriented services (onken, dumont, dornan, ralph, 2002), tend to be more positive in terms of satisfaction, social participation, and effective integration of users it is recommended that among the service sectors there may be an opportunity for the debate and reflection aimed at this transition. the use of empowerment theory means that service delivery should be directly influenced by users, and that active participation may constitute the basis for the improvement of recovery outcomes. recovery and stigma. in an exploratory study by monteiro and matias (2007), with people with mental illness (n=15), 87% considers him or herself in recovery and 13% not yet in recovery, those in recovery reported the need of support by others, the recovery process requires courage, and it does not emerge naturally, it has to be built within a supportive context, and that recovery being a unique and very personal experience is available to all. however, participants consider that they will not be the same after this experience. considering the role of stigma (monteiro & matias, 2007), 83% reported that stigma is damaging for recovery. research in the field of stigma and mental illness tends to generate some controversy that requires further consideration. context is important. one of the major contributions of community psychology has been the emphasis that interventions should visualize individuals in context(s); therefore in the history of community mental health, the main settings to promote participation and wellness have been housing alternatives, access to educational facilities and employment opportunities. 5 for more information see despacho nº11411 may the 25th, 2006 global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 29 long-term view. it is possible that the long-term impact of the positive results in the three main areas (housing, employment and education) is strengthened by the effective and concrete control by users of services and resources. in a study by ornelas, moniz and albuquerque (2003), about empowerment and rehabilitation of people with mental illness, the participants (n=50) reported that although personal talents were identified, the rate of participation in the decision processes within the aeips program was rather low. with these results there were several changes in the overall organization program in response to user feedback. the users now participate freely in the internal continuing education program; have at least one, but normally two representatives in all meetings and organization boards, have developed a center for empowerment and mutual help, and continued the mutual help group that has been in place for the last decade. this increase in user participation and involvement has lead to a progressive betterment of results in terms of personal achievements and reported satisfaction. multiple systems engaged. this experience is an example of the importance of considering that mental health reform must include the general hospitals, the community health centers and the inter-sectoral public policies on housing employment and education all oriented towards recovery, and that is crucial to include evaluation systems by users. for the development of community-based services, there is still the need to develop financial supports for housing options, and access to resources for employment and education, as well as, the supports for the creation of peer-support and mutual help organizations exclusively lead by users. peer support. the relevance of peer-support may also be illustrated by the monograph study by breda and ornelas (2007) with a group of people with mental illness (n=55) reporting that the most relevant features of peer support were sharing information, leisure activities, emotional support and affection, and concrete supports in terms of studying or for the achievement at the work place. another relevant result includes the reciprocity of peer support, the study found that 75% of participants considered themselves as peer-support providers and receivers, and only 8% considered themselves to be essentially receivers. capacity building. for the training of human resources to perform the change process, three priorities may be identified: a) specific training in prevention and mental health promotion; b) training on empowerment theory both process and results; c) training in planning, implementing and evaluating community based programs. in a survey by fnerdm6(2007) about the training needs identified by the professionals involved in 15 organizations involved in community mental health programs (n=130) although issues concerning housing alternatives, individual supports and recovery; supported employment, and empowerment and community integration were identified as relevant domains, were not their first choices. the priorities identified were crisis management, psychosocial rehabilitation, anti-stigma interventions, and supports to families that are part of the classical community interventions in this field. therefore, the innovation in the continuing education programs or formal curricula for community interventionists is relevant to support the services change towards empowerment and recovery approaches. it is relevant to acknowledge that portuguese commission (2006), inspired on those of ireland and the united states of america, included the concept of recovery as an aim for the mental health reform; that users have the opportunity to have a permanent influence on services; that hospitalizations are in general hospitals or community health facilities; and that there is a strong need to increase the resources in term of housing as well as employment and educational support services and alternatives. lessons learned from our experience we were able to conclude that it is not enough to create community-based structures or services, we need a paradigm or model that is able to promote the development of new institutional or hospital-centered models, and that needs to be replicated in community interventions. following this political experience and the empirical data available we have been building some guidelines to support the emergence of new public policies in the field of mental health. there are three main lessons to retain about the validation or the quality criteria for the community mental health services. a community paradigm should observe three criteria, recognized to be essential to community psychology research and action that are 1) the attention to empowerment processes and results; 2) the presence of individual, 6 federação nacional das entidades de reabilitação de doentes mentais/ national federation of entities in mentally ill rehabilitation global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 30 organizational and community levels of participation; and 3) the accessibility to natural services and resources. to take forward the idea and practice of deinstitutionalization is a moral imperative for community psychologists, and was the basis of the emergence of the community mental health movement. we need to further expand the idea of diversity with the inclusion of the people with an experience of mental illness. we should lead this process and revisit the values to consolidate future interventions. references ahern, l. & fisher, d. (2001) recovery at your own pace, journal of psychosocial nursing 39(4): 22-31 ahern, l., & fisher, d. (2001) pace/recovery curriculum, lawrence, ma, national empowerment center aubrey, t. & myner, j. (1996) community integration and quality of life: a comparison of persons with psychiatric disabilities in housing programs and community residents who are neighbours. canadian journal of community mental health, 15(1), 5-19 brooke, v., inge, k., armstrong, a., wehman, p.,(1997). supported employment handbook: a costumer-driven approach for persons with significant disabilities, richmond: virginia commonwealth university, rehabilitation research and training center on supported employment. richmond. brown, m.a.; ridgway, p.; anthony, w.a. and rodgers, e.c.(1991) a comparison of outcomes for client seeking and assigned to supported housing services. hospital and community psychiatry 42 (11) chamberlin, j. (1997) a working definition of empowerment, psychiatric rehabilitation journal, 20, 43-46 deegan, p. recovery as a journey of the heart, in actas conferência de novos desafios na reabilitação de pessoas com doença mental. lisboa: aeips fisher, d.; chamberlin, j. (2004) pace/recovery through peer support, lawrence, ma: national empowerment center. http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_determinants/lifest yle/mental/greenpaper/mentalgpcontributionsen. htm#8 kelly, j. (2006) becoming ecological: an expedition into community psychology. new york: oxford university press leff, j care in the community – illusion or reality? london: john wiley & sons, ltd., 1997 levine, m; d.v. perkins principles of community psychology: perspectives and applications. new york: oxford university press, 1987, 2004 madara, e.j. (1986) a comprehensive systems approach to promoting mutual aid self-help groups: the new jersey self-help clearinghouse model. nonprofit and voluntary sector quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2, 57-63 minkler, m., and wallerstein , n. (2005) “improving health through community organization and community building: a health education perspective” in m. minkler (ed) community organizing and community building for health (2nd. ed.) new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, monteiro, f.j; matias, j.p, (2007) atitudes face ao recovery na doença mental em utilizadores e profissionais de uma organização comunitária: uma ajuda na planificação de intervenções efectivas? análise psicológica, nº1 série xxv – jan.-mar. lisboa: instituto superior de psicologia aplicada, pp. 111-125 mosher, l.r.; l. burti community mental health: principles and practice. new york: w.w. norton & company, 1989 oliveira; a.l.; duarte, t. sentimento psicológico de comunidade e recovery em residências comunitárias para pessoas com doença mental. monograph study. lisboa: instituto superior de psicologia aplicada (2007) onken, s.j.; dumont, j.; ridgway, p.; dornan, d.h. and ralph, r.o. (2002), mental health recovery: what helps and hide’s? a national research project for the development of recovery facilitating system and performance indicators, alexandria, va: national technical assistance centre for state mental health planning/ national association for state mental health program directory ornelas, j. (2002) uma década de reabilitação em portugal: desafios futuros, in actas conferência http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_determinants/lifestyle/mental/greenpaper/mentalgpcontributionsen.htm#8 http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_determinants/lifestyle/mental/greenpaper/mentalgpcontributionsen.htm#8 http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_determinants/lifestyle/mental/greenpaper/mentalgpcontributionsen.htm#8 global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 31 de novos desafios na reabilitação de pessoas com doença mental. lisboa: aeips ornelas, j. (2008) psicologia comunitária. lisboa: fim de século ornelas, j. (ed.) (2005) empowerment e participação das pessoas com doença mental e os seus familiares. lisboa: aeips ornelas, j.; m.j. vargas-moniz; m alburquerque (2003) empowerment e reabilitação de pessoas com doença mental, in m.á. verdugo alonso e f.b. urriés vega (eds.) investigación, innovación y cambio v jornadas científicas de investigación sobre personas con discapacidad. salamanca: amarú ediciones pomeroy, e.; b. pape (1999) “the school book: building accommodation in postsecondary settings for persons with mental illness” toronto: canadian mental health association rappaport, j. empowerment meets narrative: listening to stories and creating settings american journal of community psychology volume 23, number 5 / october, 1995 rappaport, j.; e. seidman (eds.) (2000) handbook of community psychology, new york: kluwer academic, 2000 rappaport, j.; r. hess (eds.) (1984) studies in empowerment: steps toward understanding and action. new york: the haworth press rego, i., vargas moniz, m.j. stigma and discrimination in mental illness. monograph study. portuguese version of the international study índigo in collaboration with the royal college of psychiatry london lisboa: instituto superior de psicologia aplicada (2007) riebschleger jl. (1991) families of chronically mentally ill people: siblings speak to social workers. health and social work may; 16(2) 94103 riebschleger, jl(2004) good days and bad days: the experiences of children of a parent with a psychiatric disability psychiatric rehabilitation journal volume 28, number 1 / summer 25 31 segal, s. & aviram, u. (1978) toward a community care system, in s. segal & u. aviram (eds) the mentally ill in communitybased sheltered care: study of community care and social integration. new york: wileyinterscience publication vargas-moniz, mj (1999) o suporte habitacional como estratégia de reabilitação e participação comunitária. in j. ornelas (coord.) actas conferência de conferência internacional novos desafios para a reabilitação das pessoas com doença mental. lisboa: associação para o estudo e integração psicossocial, pp. 94-99 zimmerman, m. (2000) empowerment, in handbook of community psychology, new york: kluwer academic, 2000 http://www.springerlink.com/content/104830/?p=250da79e6ad24b0389b5c12412ad503f&pi=0 http://www.springerlink.com/content/p42408wp3816/?p=f35fae2997304a43a04b71687102891e&pi=0 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&cmd=search&term=%22riebschleger%20jl%22%5bauthor%5d&itool=entrezsystem2.pentrez.pubmed.pubmed_resultspanel.pubmed_discoverypanel.pubmed_rvabstractplus d) the users empowerment and mutual help movement e) the role of the families madara, e.j. (1986) a comprehensive systems approach to promoting mutual aid self-help groups: the new jersey self-help clearinghouse model. nonprofit and voluntary sector quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2, 57-63 2012-lisboa-003-osonho global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 4 december 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 o sonho – a comprehensive intervention building on poverty fighting aguiar, j.; cardoso, f.; paz, p.; martins, a.; lopes, b. contact details: jfaguiar@netcabo.pt abstract “o sonho” (the dream) is a portuguese ngo that works in setúbal – a city 45 km from lisbon. since 2005 “o sonho” has been expanding its participation in community settings. in october 2007 “o sonho” made a protocol with the portuguese social security system, to work for a national poverty ending program – rendimento social de inserção (social integration income), aiming to promote labor, social and community integration of low income population. this program intends to build with families new tracks for their development, on employment, education, housing, health and civil rights and duties. intending to build a comprehensive intervention, we have been growing in the areas of microcrédit – building a coalition to give credit to promote self-employment; training – doing and promoting training on health promotion and prevention; food supplies and clothes – building coalitions in order to address serious hunger and poverty situations; and housing – promoting and developing mutualist solutions with families for access to houses. we stand for the crucial proactive role of individuals, families and communities in their own development, so we assume as core principles for intervention the trust relationship building; and the family’s capacity and autonomy in their integration process – promoting families’ participation and empowerment –, we base our efforts on finding ways to support people on creating new opportunities for using their strengths to grow out of poverty. we assume an active role on poverty ending and community development, focusing on social entrepreneurship and serving people in its most important development issues. we believe that this way of creating new supporting structures for and with the community helps to promote community development and systems change. key words: empowerment; community empowerment this paper intends to describe the growing strategies and the work that a portuguese non government organization (ngo) – “o sonho” (the dream) – has been doing in setúbal, a city 28 miles (45 km) from lisbon. dedicated to children activities, particularly to preschool and free-time activities for children, and inside poor neighbourhoods and close to rural communities in the boundaries of setúbal, this local organization started an entrepreneurial process aiming to promote development. we describe their community intervention growth process in this paper. since 2005 “o sonho” has been expanding its participation in community settings – it is representing part of the ngo’s from setúbal in the local council for social work (rede social), and also being part of its executive group. in october 2007 “o sonho” signed a protocol with the portuguese social security, to work for a national poverty ending program (“social integration income”), aiming to satisfy basic needs and to promote labor, social and community integration of low income population. its intervention was defined on a specific area, including urban area, social global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 4 december 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 neighbourhoods, and rural area. they started with a (team with 10 members) 10 members team and with the responsibility for 230 families and 720 people (responsible for 230 families witch means 720 people). this program intends to work with families helping them to build new tracks for their development, on employment, education, housing, health and civil rights and duties. the professional’s role is to negotiate integration process in these areas and to support and follow-up the families. that implies to do joint work with other community organizations, for instance schools, recreation activities organizations, rsi partners, educational system (like schools), health system, social security services, the employment and professional training local institute and local administration services. that implies that professionals must be aware of empowerment processes so the opportunities created can be matched with people’s voice and integration process. in so, this program aims to promote family’s autonomy not only at social integration level but also at economic level. “o sonho” stands for the crucial proactive role of individuals, families and communities in their own development, so assumes as core principles for intervention the trust relationship building; and the family’s capacity and autonomy in their integration process – promoting families’ participation and empowerment –, and bases efforts on finding ways to support people on creating new opportunities for using their strengths to grow out of poverty. for these strategies to be effective, the join work must be oriented to a community approach. that means that the professional’s role must be focused on a deepen knowledge of the community, and the crossing of resources and integration opportunities with people’s qualifications, needs and voices. working closely to families made the professionals realize that there were fewer opportunities for integration that were suspected. that fact boosted the organization to start an entrepreneurial process aimed to bring development opportunities to local area residents. the main difficulties found in facilitating integration processes were: lack of food supplies, personal belongings and assets (clothes, electric appliances, furniture, etc.), credit to start new businesses, educational opportunities. the main strategy used to create opportunities for local people were based on the establishment of strategic partnerships, as partnerships as are a good strategy to (berkowitz & wolff; cit. in wolff, 2001) partnerships were created to bring food supplies (with the “programa comunitário de ajuda alimentar a carenciados”); personal belongings and assets (with fundação portuguesa “a comunidade contra a sida”); for micro credit (with andc – associação nacional de direito ao crédito); for entrepreneurship training, it training, educational and professional training and education programs (fdti – fundação para o desenvolvimento das tecnologias de informação); and for basic literacy programs (education system services). about the results of such initiatives, they are expected to be more concrete in the beginning of next year. when the activities are expected to be in motion. nevertheless, this is a new reality for the organization and for its community, since this kind of resources and opportunities usually are not available in this particular geographic area. this local organization assumes an active role on poverty ending and community development, focusing on social entrepreneurship and serving people in its most important development issues. this model for intervention creates new opportunities at the local level, which is crucial to put in practice the social policies and social programs, and to allow new development perspectives for these communities. this is a vision for poverty alleviation through community development. nevertheless, resident involvement in agency is also important to create more lasting community change (association for the study and community development, 2007; foster-fishman et al., 2006; kubisch et al., 2002). therefore, there must be a deeper relation to residents, which means that those activities have to take place and time, to sustain its capacity, as well as new strategies adopted to promote other groups initiatives to build a more capable community – building community capacity for change. references association for the study and community development (2007). scope, scale and sustainability; what it takes to create lasting community change. association for the study and community development. available at http://www.communityscience.com/pubs/scope %20scale%20and%20sustainability%20report% 20final.pdf global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 4 december 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 foster-fishman, p., fitzgerald, k., brandell, c., nowell, b., chavis, d. & van egeren, l.(2006). mobilizing residents for action: the role of small wins and strategic supports. american journal of community psychology, vol. 38, 3/4, 143-152. kubisch, a., auspos, p., brown, p., chaskin, r., fullbright-anderson, k. & hamilton, r.(2002). voices from the field ii: reflections on omprehensive community change. the aspen institute. roundtable on comprehensive community initiatives for children and families. consultado em 27 de novembro de 2005 através de http://www.aspeninstitute.org/atf/cf/{deb6f227 -659b-4ec8-8f848df23ca704f5}/voicesiibook.pdf mattessich, p & monsey, b. (2004). community building: what makes it work – a review of factors influencing successful community building. saint paul, mn: amhers h. wilder foundation. wolff, t (2001). community coalition building – contemporary practice and research: introduction. american journal of community psychology, vol.29, 2, pp. 165-172. microsoft word saias-v4i2-20130515.docx the geometrical headache of french policies: can vertical cultures be tilted horizontally? thomas saïas & cécile delawarde paris, france thomas saïas, ph.d., is associated professor of psychology at université du québec à montréal (canada), research fellow at université paris-descartes (lpps, iupdp) and president of the french community psychology association. cécile delawarde, m.ps., is ph.d. candidate in mental health sociology at université paris-descartes (cermes3), paris, france. keywords: social policies, public health, communities, health promotion, social change, knowledge, france. recommended citation: saïas, t. delawarde, c. (2013). the geometrical headache of french policies: can vertical cultures be tilted horizontally? global journal of community psychology practice, 4(2), xx-xx. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   the geometrical headache of french policies: can vertical cultures be tilted horizontally? abstract french governmental policymaking operates by top-down processes of decision-making, jeopardizing all forms of power transfer and social transformation. the technocratic structure of public health promotes cost-effective, evidence-based curative and preventive strategies, focusing on individuals rather than on contexts. on the other hand, field workers, whose theoretical orientation is based mainly on psychoanalysis and individual clinical practices, are as reluctant as policymakers to move towards community practices and power sharing processes. this paper is based on our work as a community psychologist, working in a french governmental agency, and as a sociologist of mental health studying the processes of political decision-making in regard to preventive public health policies. the objective is first to reflect on the distinctive aspects of governmental policymaking in our country, and second, to underline the obstacles to and facilitators of success in our social policy-related work. in our context, we propose that community psychologists act in order to (1) apply social science knowledge and contextualize actions, with the intention to help political decision-making by including environmental, social and community variables in the definition of human processes and behaviors; 2) criticize the top-down decision-making process and the focus on the individual, by developing an interactionist model of knowledge evaluation, which would allow vertical understanding and decision-making to tilt horizontally, and 3) support people to create legitimate knowledge from their contexts rather than empowering them through psychological interventions. keywords: social policies, public health, communities, health promotion, social change, knowledge, france. introduction french governmental policymaking is characterized by ambivalence with regard to the inclusion of community dynamics in social, health and family policies. although multiple recent publications have acknowledged the importance of community-related practices (social inclusion, health promotion, community development, etc.) for reaching social objectives (e.g. centre d'analyse stratégique, 2009; délégation interministérielle à la ville, 2007), the structure of public services and political decision still relies on governmentally-led processes, where intermediate structures (such as associations, cities, etc.) can only have limited power. this lack of coherence between the political discourse (sharing power with communities) and the actual organization of the french system jeopardizes the possibility of a new social organization. in 2012, a symposium was organized by kenneth maton during the 4th international conference on community psychology in barcelona, spain, with the intention of highlighting similarities and differences in community psychology practices in the policy domain in countries from four different continents. this paper, based on our presentation, describes our work as a community psychologist, working in a french governmental agency (ts) and as a sociologist of mental health studying the processes of political decision making in regard to preventive public health policies (cd). specifically, we intend to reflect on the distinctive aspects of governmental policymaking in our country (france) and the obstacles to and facilitators of success in our social policy-related work. 1. the distinctive aspects of french governmental policymaking in social and health policies two elements are worth highlighting with regard to the french culture in social policies. first, the importance of the egalitarian structure of society and its impact on the processes of political decision, and second, the direct relationship between the individual and the state, ignoring the community level of decision making. 1.1 the french egalitarian culture global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   french democratic culture is quite recent. although the french monarchy itself ended in 1848, with the beginning of the second republic, the end of the second empire and the start of the third republic in 1870 initiated the last revolutionary republican movement, concretized by the fourth republic in the immediate post-war in 1946, and the fifth republic in 1958 which constitutes the current republican constitution of france. in 1946, the french government initiated what could be considered the most important welfare state system worldwide. this structure, although designed to promote the health of the most vulnerable populations, was set upon a traditional, vertical model, in which the state was directly responsible for the individual’s health and in direct contact with each citizen. the egalitarian model was then predominant (becker, 2005). the field of early childhood constitutes the most interesting example of this public health egalitarian paradigm. in 1945, the french government created the maternal and child protection service (protection maternelle et infantile, pmi), whose aim was to reduce child mortality through a universal prevention system, accessible to every new mother and her baby. nowadays, its missions have expanded, and the pmi now offers midwifery, child nursing and medical services, as well as maternal and child mental health assistance, specifically through home visitation. although these services still intend to reach all newborns and their mothers (and fathers), a recent evaluation of access revealed that less than 10% of families were accessing these services (dases 75, 2003). rather than focusing on reducing inequalities in access to health and social services by reaching individuals excluded from this system and modifying the institutional environments in order to provide more equal organizations, french public policies are now promoting the current system of universal prevention that favor people who can easily access these systems, creating thereby another form of inverse care law (hart, 1971). the egalitarian ideology in france can be seen as a positive force as well as a weakness. it is a positive force as it promotes the universality of a basic health service for an entire population. but, from a critical standpoint, it is also a weakness as it disempowers the communities, who remain dependent on governmental decisions. as a consequence this egalitarian system hinders the possibility of social change and a paradigmatical shift from equality to equity. in 1995, alain minc -a french economist wrote a report on equity for the government, arguing in favor of the development of an equitarian model to challenge the social consequences of the exclusive egalitarian political system (minc, 1995). following this publication, there was much criticism, linking it to an american (rawls’) model of public policies. hence, instead of initiating a debate on the meaning of social justice, which could have emphasized that the french system was orientated towards utilitarianism (e.g. nagel, 1973) rather than equitarian justice (rawls, 1971), the most confusing dispute began, leading to pointless discussion about the way to think about the organization of public space (dupuy, 1995). by promoting the technocratic structure of public health, the current system empowers bureaucratic engineering, which is translated in our day by multiple recommendations promoting evidence-based curative techniques and evidence-based preventive strategies (e.g. centre d’analyse stratégique, 2012; haute autorité en santé, 2005; ministère chargé de la santé, 2005, 2012; mission interministérielle de lutte contre la drogue et la toxicomanie, 2008). a recent study targeting french professionals’ views on the use of evidence-based “mental medicine” applied to parenting programs revealed that these technocratic powers -which were distributed within a broader public health paradigmwere in strong opposition to the anthropological, socio-political and interventional ethics of field professionals (delawarde, saïas, & briffault, submitted). regrettably, from our point of view, the disempowerment promoted by the technocratic world has occurred: although the democratic structure of our state is functional, french citizens appear to demand governmental interventions, rather than community development. the idea of a power transfer from state to populations/communities is universally interpreted as a possible withdrawal of governmental institutions, and the meaning of “community” is still interpreted as a neo-liberalist concept (for an illustration of the confusion, see giampino & vidal, 2009), sustaining individual interventions for individuals in the community, rather than interventions bv and for communities. hence, populations and professionals are wary about engaging in formal community practices that could inflect vertical, linear top-down decision making into power sharing processes. this cultural misinterpretation of community development jeopardizes the investment towards intermediate forces such as communities, within the broad field of health democracy. 1.2 the emphasis on the individual and the fear of community level interventions global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   between the state and individual level interventions, there seems to be no seat for community level interventions. it is only with huge difficulties that one can address the idea of a life within communities that can vary between communities, justifying adaptive and local policies. for example, the principal governmental actions (and economic investment) in the field of parenting and family policies are (a) the universal-local but governmentally-led health service, the pmi and (b) the wide range of family benefits (for a total budget of 50b€/year), resulting not in services, but in the direct economic dependence of families on the government. other local initiatives funded by public authorities (such as parent support groups, local associative actions, parent-child centers, etc.) are quite common and popular but remain disparate from one area to another, as (a) services do not benefit from a systematic qualitative evaluation process that would allow them to be identified at a national level and subsequently highlighted and (b) the contents of these services depend on individual initiatives. in any case, almost all of these local actions rest on structures that are administrated by practitioners. although these structures often include volunteer workers (see below), their culture is still based on psychological/social work models of intervention, with only a few of them run through a power sharing process that effectively includes community members. this emphasis on individual level intervention is particularly true within the field of health, prevention and health promotion. in contrast, french policies of the early 2000’s emphasized the necessity of sustaining the development of local initiatives in health and social development. within the national policies of local development (politique de la ville, which were developed in the 1970’s to fight social and urban discrimination,) jospin’s socialist government created in 2001 a local institution (ateliers santé ville) aimed at promoting global health within deprived territories (including, simultaneously, social, economic and health issues). however, these structures which are now 12-years old have not yet succeeded in their ambition to promote the co-investment of communities and public services, to create supportive environments or strengthen community actions (i.e., the two wings of the who ottawa charter, ((1986), which constitutes a key reference for practitioners from this field). these efforts remain dependent upon professionals, who still receive a mainstream education in health and social services, excluding community development and power issues as themes of interest. nevertheless, a positive perspective is worth noting. in france, there are 1,300,000 active associations or ngos and 13 million people are engaged at some point in these associations. 45% of french citizens over 18 are engaged--even by financial support--in at least one ngo and 32% of the french adult population participate directly in one or more ngos. the global budget of ngos in france represents 3% of the gdp (i.e. 70b€) (archambault & tchernonog, 2012). community actions through ngos, even though largely promoted since the 1901 law which regulates rules the associations in france, still lack recognition within the political world and are not socially valued as a mean of social change. the objective for french community psychologists is to actively advocate for the promotion of the existing associative world so it can become a real intermediate social and policy-relevant force. the main issue is not citizen mobilization toward a common policy objective, as this is already sustained by the associative world. our engagement consists in lobbying and acting within the political world to influence policy makers for whom power distribution is still seen as a threat. the objective is for citizens, practitioners and policy makers to be able to distinguish actions operated within the community (i.e., local public actions) and actions operated by and for the community. 2. what are the obstacles to and facilitators of success in social policy-related work 2.1. the key epistemic challenge what aspects of the policy world can community psychologists (and the broader critical community) address when conducting social policy-related work? our experience working in/for governmental institutions in the field of public health lead us to consider the importance of challenging the top-down process of decision-making, and the uniqueness of the evidence-based knowledge approach to policy decision-making. following the footsteps of many market economy democracies, numerous new policy initiatives have been taken in france during the last thirty years in order to rationalize the activity of health services. by implementing a system of classification of health services (“pmsi”, inspired from the diagnosis-related group1) in 1983 (mauroy’s socialist government), france has developed a system of activity-based                                                                                                                           1  see  www.ahrq.gov   global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   payment sustaining the general functioning of health services (le lay, launois, & chemali, 2006). in this system, prevention can only have a secondary role, behind more visible and financially attractive activities, and community actions cannot fit in this medical-centered model. to support this culture of efficacy and efficiency, policy makers are now referring to the broad field of evidence-based knowledge, which now supports most of the decision-making in public health and public mental health (delawarde et al., submitted). various reports aimed at health policy planners and practitioners have recommended developing, disseminating and implementing prevention and promotion programs for which public health benefits and cost-effectiveness have been proven by “the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence” found in the international scientific review of literature (world health organization, 2004, 2005). this new public health ideal is based on a specific conceptualization of (mental) health and (mental) disorders, new types of instruments, research, organizations, interventions and orientations (horwitz & wakefield, 2007) which are at the heart of multiple controversies and the creation of various action groups, regrouping practitioners, researchers and citizens (action group "no failing grade in conduct for three-year-olds", 2011; parazelli & dessureault., 2010; suesser, 2010). this public health perspective, relying essentially on a biomedical approach, has been criticized for neglecting socioeconomic, environmental, cultural and structural factors related to individual functioning. ironically, so-called “evidence-based” interventions focusing on individuals (the only level that allows systematic evaluation) and aiming at reducing individuals’ risk factors and promoting individuals’ strengths consistently refer to the ottawa charter’s values, arguing that promoting individuals’ competencies is the way to promote health in the general population. this reduction of (technocratic) communityorientated values such as those presented in the ottawa charter to individual-oriented actions is now common and reflects a major rhetorical problem that community psychologists must question and fight. we must address this process by emphasizing the importance of promoting human capital and ecological capital vs. economic capital and by looking at all epistemic challenges that arise from the power-knowledge irreducible link (foucault, 1975; fryer & laing, 2008). thus, the key challenge in our work as community psychologists or clinical sociologists is to address issues related to power and status quo through knowledge and to change our practices towards the production of knowledge from communities, rather than the use of pre-defined political and scientific knowledge to develop actions seeking to empower individuals within communities. 2.2. keys to success: focusing on knowledge shifting rather that acting upon mainstream models creating and bringing social knowledge as we have seen, the functioning of governmental institutions, often characterized by an active process of status quo, is organized so that technocracy is preserved (limiting actions to the mainstream models of public health, centralizing political decision making). power distribution to populations and communities is not a part of the agenda and consultation is preferred to co-decision. we reject the view that illness, mental illness or positive mental health conceptualizations can only be founded upon a unifactorial prism which can only be justified by the possibility of being evaluated. one could compare this positivist political attitude to the robert mcnamara fallacy2 : “the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. this is ok as far as it goes. the second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. this is artificial and misleading. the third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. this is blindness. the fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. this is suicide.” (quoted by handy, 1995 p.219) health and social science professional must make use of their status to challenge this power distribution. first, they can systematically add environmental, social and community variables to the conceptualization of human processes and behaviors, and second they can refuse to focus only on individual-level processes, which lead to groundless decisions. in this context, social science expertise appears necessary, beyond biomedical and epidemiological knowledge, in order to contextualize actions and help political decision making by taking into account the sociocultural environment. second, in contesting the ultimate top-down linear process of                                                                                                                           2 in reference to the 1960’s us secretary of defense robert mcnamara’s belief that success in war was quantifiable global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   public interventions, george albee and david fryer critically encourage the development of a public health psychology model, claiming that “[…] successful intervention in particular individuals with particular psychological and emotional problems has no real effect on the incidence, or rate of new cases, of these problems in the general population. psychotherapy and other forms of individual ‘treatment’ can sometimes reduce or eliminate phobias, anxiety, bizarre behavior, depression and social withdrawal in particular people but the rate of these conditions in the population does not reduce either, in fact they appear to be increasing […]because at least some kinds of psychological and emotional problems can be socially addressed they might be socially preventable”(albee & fryer, 2003) hence, the authors call for the development of public health (preventive) interventions in a sequential way that would start with actions targeting oppressive environments and ultimately, if not possible otherwise, by actions targeting individuals (see figure 1). the albee and fryer model constitutes a reference for critical professionals working for governmental health institutions. figure 1. albee and fryer’s public health psychology model (adapted from albee, g. and fryer, d. (2003)). promoting horizontal knowledge creation clinical sociologists and community psychologists must advocate to include co-elaboration of knowledge at the beginning of all decision-making processes. the first step consists of the systematic identification of the three-legged knowledge model that applies to most public health concerns. no model should be elaborated before all types of knowledge are investigated. qualitative methods addressing this specific evaluation are integral to community psychology and clinical sociology and rely on the values of community action: recognition of the oppressive power of “science”, social justice, active democracy, and related concepts. in public health institutions, in addition to the recommendation of “combining the support for policy priority-setting with the dissemination of tools and evidence-based knowledge” (jané-llopis & anderson, 2005, 2006), knowledge transfer through science-push models are promoted. such models suggest that scientific knowledge should be easily accessible to practitioners and decision makers, and that researchers should make this knowledge easily available. on the other side, public authorities advocacy for the development of science-pull models that would support policy makers and practitioners to answer specific problems is important for adding scientific knowledge to their understanding of specific situational contexts. community psychologists advocate for the development of an interactionist model of knowledge evaluation that effectively allows vertical understanding and decision-making to tilt horizontally (chagnon & malo, 2006). it supposes: to take into account all the strata of the ecological model of the targeted phenomenon (and the three legs of the available knowledge); strengthen the resistance of the host to the noxious agent reduce or eliminate the noxious agent responsible reduce or prevent transmission of the noxious agent to the host       global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   to analyze the interactions between all the engaged actors and generate (a) a common understanding of the targeted phenomenon and (b) the conditions for use of this common knowledge; to analyze the potential iatrogenic effects of the use of available knowledge and corresponding solutions on the targeted phenomenon; to make this process of analysis available to all actors. professionals’ roles should only be to support the elaboration of the common knowledge through the stimulation of the interaction. knowledge and learning are understood here as social and contextual processes that can only take place and make sense in the specific situation that requires new information to pursue specific objectives. knowledge is a social construct that should be linked with existing values and social structures which are legitimate in a specific context (hemsley-brown & sharp, 2003). this approach refers to the situated learning model (lave & wenger, 1991). 3. ‘knowledgementing’ vs. ‘empowering’ people: towards epistemological community practices with regards to what has already been pointed out, community psychologists and clinical sociologists must tackle knowledge-power issues in social politics as well as in local practices. in france, social work (rouzel, 2001) and psychology (nicolas, 2001) have been characterized by their affiliation to psychoanalysis and individual clinical practices. hence, and with regards to our cultural experience, field workers are as reluctant as policymakers to move towards community practices and power sharing processes. in the field of mental health, local practices are not based on communities. besides that, power issues are rarely addressed and mainstream mental health professionals constitute a powerful (medicine-like) lobby (saïas, delawarde, & briffault, submitted for publication), although they frequently use a critical rhetoric to address the influence of health politics on health economy issues and its consequences (e.g. gori & del volgo, 2009). ‘knowledgementing’, i.e., the co-production of legitimate knowledge, should be understood as a prerequisite for all interventions, but also as a mean to intervene. knowledge production is at the core of community psychology goals. as we use it, ‘praxis’ refers to an ongoing, irreducible, collective process through which is enacted, in one and the same process, ‘knowledgementing’ (the construction and legitimation of knowledge claims), ‘radical reflexivity’ (the bringing to awareness and critical problematisation of interests served by what is thought, said and done by all relevant parties), and ‘ideologically progressive social action’ (the pursuit of emancipatory process and just outcomes and the contesting of ‘external and internal’ institutional oppression (fryer & laing, 2008). community activists participating in the process of knowledgementing of communities must act to reveal knowledge from the ground up. this dynamic is opposed to both science-push and science-pull strategies, used to bring policymakers, researchers and practitioners together around mainstream actions. in terms of specific actions related to the knowledgement process implementation, there is a large literature on communities of practices (lave & wenger, 1991) as well as on knowledge building processes (chagnon & malo, 2006). most of these processes rely on socio-constructivist learning theories (piaget, 1936; vygotsky, 1934) and sociocultural learning theories (de laat & simons, 2002), where the professional’s is seen solely as a mediator between individuals and their environment, leading to knowledge creation. whereas social-constructivist perspectives make a distinction between individual cognitive activities and the environment in which the individual is present, the sociocultural perspective regards the individual as being part of that environment. its supporters point out that learning cannot be understood as a process that is solely in the mind of the learner (van boxtel, 2000). knowledge is distributed over mind, body, and its surroundings (hewitt & scardamalia, 1998) and is constructed in settings of joint activity (koschmann, 1999) (de laat & simons, 2002) hence, contextual learning strategies imply a series of tasks and activities that can be followed by moderators (professionals, of community members) in order to promote interactions between real-life knowledge, situated in environments and the tacit knowledge of the learners (see for example herrington & oliver, 1995). on the other hand, knowledgement, as knowledge production, can rely on knowledge building global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   strategies, aiming at empowering people so that they are “able to participate in the creation of new knowledge as a normal part of their lives” (scardamalia & bereiter, 2003). in this model, and relying on communities, individuals should be provided with already-known knowledge before being encouraged and supported to formalize their own tacit and experimental root-based knowledge, so that new knowledge can be created or existing knowledge modified (which “lives in the world”) (scardamalia & bereiter, 2003). again, an important literature has been generated in educational sciences to support practitioners and community members in their efforts to develop a knowledgment process. policymakers, researchers and practitioners’ interests, while different in appearance, share underlying commonalities as regards the knowledge-power issue. analyses of the activities of clinical sociologists and community psychologists must then focus on: the knowledgement process (vs. individual empowerment) the respect of the three-legged knowledge model (see figure 2), with a critical approach. from our point of view, criticism must not be applied as a means to deconstruct knowledge, but to analyze its construction, its use and the interests behind its use. hence, local practitioners, together with policymakers and researchers should be important targets for community psychologists. a critical approach to power issues should be developed in professionals’ education. knowledge revelation models should be promoted at all stages of the development of local practices. finally, community psychologists should address all ideologies and support knowlegement through a co-constructive collective praxis. figure 2. three-legged model of knowledge in public health in promoting social change as an objective for social policies, one last challenge is to shift from so-called direct “interventions” through mass campaigns to indirect interventions providing community activists with frames helping them knowledgementing and gathering people, acting and evaluating and, hence, acting against scientific and political oppression and disempowerment. conclusion: cleaning up our own backyard and going forward critically, but responsibly beyond our critical rhetoric, as community psychologists we must start by cleaning our own backyard(s). mainstream north-american community psychology has long been criticized by critical and radical community psychologists, contesting its monocultural vision and use of scientific knowledge uncritically, reinforcing oppression and discrimination (fryer & laing, 2008; nelson & prilleltensky, 2005). of note, most of the publications from the main society for community research and action (scra) journals refer to mainstream psychological models of intervention (health psychology, clinical psychology, social psychology). in these publications, community psychology shows little specificity with regard to any kind of critical or even ecological strategies of elaborating knowledge, intervention or evaluation. by modeling traditional knowledge practical experience sciences life experience   global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   june  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9   psychology and individual health promotion strategies, these practitioners and researchers reinforce what they claim fighting: disempowerment and oppression. not only is there the problem of how this field (community psychology) sort of manages to exist in psychology with the traditional remnants that are still there and the traditional ties to clinical and medicine that are still there in some sense, but how an academician with the kind of things that an academic needs to do could also be a community psychologist—it seems to me almost a total contradiction in terms. you have to satisfy being an academic, an entire list of things to do to get ahead. academics have been, as a group, as remote from the real world as any group you can think of. community psychologists, on the other hand, have a mission really in their life to be connected with the real world. to do both of those things at the same time is a hell of a difficult job (schneider, 2000). besides criticizing north-american community psychology, one should also be aware of the risks that critical and radical community psychology carry with their discourses. by radically contesting almost every form of active thinking or action, radical psychologists suggest that oppression starts with people speaking for other people. if this basic statement is contested, it may erode almost all possible actions. while looking for vertical structures to be tilted horizontally, one’s motivation must rise, individually (selfishly?), before being critically transformed and redirected ethically (e.g., towards knowledgementing processes). moreover, we have to be watchful that critical thinking does not stop us from changing social structures. without being cynical while looking to infiltrate mainstream places of decision, community psychologists must serve as critical partners on whom one can rely to improve social structures. this implies respecting (while criticizing) other epistemological approaches, and adopting pedagogical attitudes that allows starting where people are to bring them to a critical thinking. hence, it supposes sharing a common vocabulary and, from this, proposing other modes of thinking and, more importantly, other types of evaluation of community processes (evaluation allowing us to exchange with academics and policymakers): showing that community psychologists, even critical ones, are aware of social, economic and political considerations, looking beyond the simple political debate. these activities will continually question the place of community psychologists as researchers and activists, who should not fight about ideology, but only try to carry the voices of the people who are oppressed and disempowered, so they can be knowledgemented, and able to participate themselves in the political and policy processes. references action group "no failing grade in conduct for threeyear-olds". 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(2000). collaborative concept learning: collaborative learning tasks, student interaction and the learning of physics concepts: universiteit utrecht. vygotsky, l. s. (1934). thought and language. cambridge: mit press. world health organisation. (1986). the ottawa charter for health promotion. world health organization. (2004). prevention of mental disorders, effective interventions and politicy options. geneva. world health organization. (2005). promoting mental health, concepts, emerging evidence, practice. geneva. microsoft word 2012-008-final-20121210.docx construind viitorul lor propriu / building their own futures: making youth leadership development work in the republic of moldova sharon hakim and nadejda crigan sîngerei, moldova alexei buzu chişinău, moldova author note: sharon hakim is now a doctoral candidate in community psychology at wichita state university. this project was started during her service with the united states peace corps in the republic of moldova. nadejda crigan is the founder of the non-profit “ce este?” and is now a masters student studying economics in leuven, belgium. alexei buzu is the president of the non-profit “geronimo” and currently works in chisinau, moldova. recommended citation: hakim, s., crigan, n., & buzu, a. (2013). construind viitorul lor propriu / building their own futures: making youth leadership development work in the republic of moldova. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(1), 19. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 1 march 2013 global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   construind viitorul lor propriu / building their own futures: making youth leadership development work in the republic of moldova abstract since its break with the soviet union, the republic of moldova has faced a rocky path towards establishing a democracy and an active civil society. although many international aid organizations have stepped in to help, the country’s own youth have remained a mostly untapped resource in the process of rebuilding. the youth development approach recognizes youth as an asset to positive change at the community level. with that in mind, a ten session “practical leadership course” was developed for the youth of a small moldovan town. the course focused on essential skills for community activism and leadership, and was based on the principles of non-formal education and the “small wins theory.” the purpose of this project was to: 1) increase youth’s capacity to affect change in their local community, 2) increase youth self-efficacy, and 3) positively influence the beliefs that youth held about the future of their community and their country. surveys measuring youth beliefs and community involvement were administered preand post intervention, as well as at follow-up, one year later. results show that by developing and using community-based leadership competencies to create positive social change, youth increased their self-efficacy and became increasingly involved in their community. finally, several “real world” results of the course are discussed, including structural changes to community life that support youth involvement and leadership post graduation from the course. keywords: positive youth development, youth leadership, community change republica moldova a trecut printr-o perioada dificila in urma destramarii uniunii sovietice, urmind directia stabilirii unui stat democratic cu o societate civila activa. in procesul reconstruirii, tineretul ramine a fi o sursa nevalorificata cu toate ca multe organizatii internationale au acordat un anumit ajutor la nivel organizational. dezvoltarea tinerilor presupune recunoasterea acestui grup ca o valoare in procesul instituirii anumitor schimbari pozitive la nivel comunitar. luind in cosideratie aceasta realitate, cursul de “liderism practic” a fost elaborat pentru tinerii din localicatile rurale ale moldovei. obiectivele cursului s-au axat in jurul abilitatilor esentiale pentru activismul comunitar, avind la baza educatia non-formala si teoria de “cistig minim”. scopul acestui proiect a fost de a spori: 1) capacitatea tinerilor de a influenta schimbari in propriile comunitati, 2) eficacitatea proprie, 3) increderea tinerilor de a influenta pozitiv viitorul comunitatii si a tarii in care locuiesc. studiu cercetare evaluind opinia tinerilor si a participarii acestora in viata comunitatii a fost efectuat anterior si post interventiei, cit si dupa un an. rezultatele studiului arata o crestere a eficacitatii tinerilor si implicarii acestora in comunitate in urma dezvoltarii si utilizarii competentelor liderismului comunitar pentru a institui schimbari sociale pozitive. la sfirsit sunt prezentate rezultatele reale ale cursului, cuprinzind scmibari la nivel de structura a vietii comunitare care promoveaza implicarea tinerilor in urma absolvirii cursului. cuvinte chee: dezvoltarea pozitiva a tinerilor, liderismul tinerilor, schimbare comunitara youth development is an important goal for communities. including youth as contributors to community-wide development processes recognizes them as assets, and highlights the important role that they will have in the community’s future. localized development approaches aimed at improving conditions within a specific community recognize that people, youth included, have the “potential and capacity” to transform both themselves and their own situations when given a chance to develop the skills to do so (benard, 2007). moldova: a developing civil society the focus of this study is a small town in the republic of moldova. moldova is located in eastern europe, landlocked between present day romania and ukraine. since its independence from the soviet union in 1991, moldova has faced a rising tide of social problems including increases in poverty (it is currently the poorest country in europe), negative health indicators, and human trafficking (u.s. central intelligence agency, 2009, united nations development programme, 2011; winrock international, 2005). in the beginning of its independence, moldova’s newly formed democratic government was not equipped to handle these escalating problems, as minimal civic structure existed. today many moldovan citizens face constant economic pressure; migration abroad (legally and illegally) to find work is common. the country has global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 1 march 2013 global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   one of the highest net-migration rates in the world (u.s. central intelligence agency, 2012). in 2010, almost a quarter (23.2%) of moldova’s gdp came from remittances (world bank, 2010). although the remittances may help the country economically, there are strong social, societal and developmental costs to having such a high percentage of the country’s working age population living abroad (mansoor & bryce, 2007). one specific by-product of this economic situation, relevant to the current project, is the number of children growing up with less than adequate parental support and supervision. children, especially in rural areas, are increasingly being raised by grandparents, siblings, or other family members while their parents work abroad. a 2008 qualitative study conducted by unicef illustrated that there are significant gaps between adults’ and children’s views of the situations: adults see themselves as providing for the economic wellbeing of their family, while children experience a strong sense of non-economic deprivation (loss of social and emotional support). as a country, moldova has a long history of being dominated by other nations; the beginning of its existence saw rule by the romans, byzantine and ottomans. some scholars cite this continued external locus of control in governance as having a critical impact on the nation’s culture; today, many of moldova’s citizens can be characterized by a sense of learned helplessness (king, 2000). this is especially true of older generations. citizen attitudes towards the poor living conditions and persistence of corruption in the government are often summarized by the common saying “aşa e moldova,” or “that’s moldova” (transparency international, 2011). the underlying sentiment is acceptance, an expression of the belief that things will not change for the better. from the ground up: a focus on youth and local ownership the students currently in high school in moldova are the first generation to grow up in a democracy. because they are the first, they have few established avenues for interacting with their newly democratic government, and could benefit from local models of active community engagement to guide their involvement (current and future) and interaction with the government. in fact, in many communities, the same people who were in power during the communist times still hold powerful offices today. without the development and practice of civic leadership behaviors, there is little reason to believe that youth will become civically engaged as adults (flanagan & levine, 2010; smith, 1999; youniss et al., 2003). recognizing the need to show youth the paths that exist towards involvement in their local community, equip them with the skills to take action, and allow them the chance to develop the confidence to assert themselves, community members from the rural town of sîngerei came together to discuss what could be done. in the beginning the group had many focuses: starting a non-profit organization for youth, increasing attendance at the regional high school, reaching out to parents, changing community attitudes, etc. this “interest group” was formed by word of mouth, and included young people who had gone to college and returned to the community, parents of high school students, a few local teachers, and a peace corps volunteer. eventually, the group consulted with an already established moldovan youth development non-profit (o.n.g. geronimo) located near moldova’s capital city, and arrived at a common, worthwhile goal: youth leadership development. a positive youth development approach through focus groups conducted at the local high schools (n = 52) it was determined that youth in sîngerei were pessimistic about their future in moldova and about the state of affairs in their town, and felt like they could not change anything. (the phrase “aşa e moldova,” or “that’s moldova” was mentioned frequently). over 40% of them had at least one parent currently working abroad; 20% had not seen either of their parents in the past five years. the goal of this project was to determine if we could positively influence the youth’s attitudes about their future and the future of their communities by developing their capacity to affect change locally. therefore we created an intervention aimed at providing youth the opportunity to learn and practice leadership skills, which we hypothesized would enable the youth to participate more actively in their community. our intervention, called the “practical leadership course,” was designed and led by three young adults (members of the original group that came together to discuss youth issues in sîngerei) with continued consultation from youth members of the o.n.g. geronimo; the other members (teachers, parents, etc.) of the original “interest group” remained informed, but not involved. by teaching youth practical leadership skills, and showing them where they could use them in their local communities, schools, and day-to-day life, we hoped to convince them that change was possible, and more importantly, that they themselves were capable of bringing about the changes they desired. the ten week “practical leadership course” was based on non-formal education, which incorporated global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 1 march 2013 global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   learning-by-doing, recognizing that not all youth succeed in the structure of formal education, and not all talents can be developed in a formal setting (unesco, 2006). the intervention itself was driven by the need to be locally oriented, community sustained, replicable, and undertaken for a budget that was reasonable for the community. the leadership skills selected for youth to learn were based on the servant-leader model, encouraging service to others and one’s community, as well as understanding leadership as a behavior, not a position (greenleaf, 1970). integrated into the “practical leadership course” was the theory of “small wins,” the idea that small tangible victories can encourage long term participation, continued community activism, and a commitment to further leadership development (weick, 1984). as a part of our intervention, small (less than $10) grants were provided for youth-driven community-based projects to allow participants a chance to test their newly acquired skills within the supportive class environment. with this intervention, we hypothesized that acquiring competencies in core community leadership areas would lead youth to increased community participation, a more positive view of their future and the future of their community, and a higher sense of self-efficacy. lastly, we as organizers, viewed the youth as potential “changeagents” who, once equipped by the skills, could actively shape the future of their community. methods participants thirty-five moldovan youth completed the “practical leadership course” (out of the 38 who started the course). of the 35 participants, 22 were female and 13 were male, ranging in age from 14 to 18. thirty of the 35 were high school students, the other five were not attending high school and had not received their high school diploma. participants were from two different high schools within 10 miles of the town of sîngerei. all were moldovan citizens, although four individuals self-identified as russian over moldovan. youth were not compensated for their participation; nor did they have to pay to attend the “practical leadership course.” setting sîngerei is a small, rural town of 4,000 people in the north of moldova. although its official census is 4,000, approximately one-third of its residents (ages 18-64) are living abroad at any given time (mayor georghe broshavoski, personal communication, april 1st, 2007). it is isolated from larger cities and transportation to and from the village is limited. agriculture is the main source of income, but most of what is produced is consumed rather than sold or traded. the majority of the adult population works in two factories at the edges of the town. sîngerei was once thriving under the soviet union but is now struggling. many older residents wish for a return to the days of the soviet union and the town’s current public authority has a communist party orientation. cooperation with the local government for this project was difficult as they were not sold on the idea or methods, nor did they see it as a priority; eventually they allowed us to stage our intervention in the government-owned public library, which was not being used over the summer. this represents the limit of institutional support for our intervention during the first year of its implementation. intervention practical leadership course. the “practical leadership course” was based on both servicelearning and learning-by-doing models. its content and design was adapted from various sources including international youth empowerment guides published by unesco, as well as techniques used by other moldovan non-profits who work with youth. despite these resources, it is important to stress that the development of the course was bottom-up; we intentionally chose not to use a pre-established course because we wanted to present lessons that were both culturally applicable to the youth in our town, as well as grounded in the local context. the course itself consisted of ten interactive sessions covering topics such as teamwork, planning, community mapping, public speaking, problem solving, asset finding, and advocacy (for a full list of topics, see table 1; for a detailed example of how the individual lessons were designed and run, please see appendix a.) global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 1 march 2013 global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   table 1. practical leadership course: session topic(s) and objective(s) session topic(s) objective(s) 1 introduction to course, each other to increase understanding of the goals of the course to allow participants to get to know each other 2 what is a leader? to familiarize participants with leadership as a behavior to allow them to see themselves as future leaders 3 team work, group work and team building to develop a sense of community within participants to teach participants the ins-and-outs of group dynamics and roles 4 fundraising to introduce participants to fundraising techniques, sources of funding and resources in their own communities 5 the development of a project: ideas and locating resources to develop an idea for youth community-based projects to understand the brainstorming process for turning an idea into a project 6 the development of a project: planning and implementing to establish a process of turning an idea into an action plan 7 the community: local public administration, existing organizations, and community members to gain knowledge related to working within the system, with existing community organs, and attracting others to one’s cause 8 communication techniques, public speaking and networking to learn how to public speak, persuade, and relate to others. 9 engaging others and the concept of volunteering; advocacy; how to conduct an evaluation to understand the different types of volunteer work to develop knowledge and skills for organizing and working with volunteers to explore the idea of advocacy to gain knowledge about project evaluation 10 evaluations of community-based projects; coursework to gain experience evaluating others’ projects to have a chance to receive feedback for improving the projects implemented. throughout the course, students were given homework tasks, “real world assignments” to complete in their local communities and report back on. these included surveying the population, observing behavior in public spaces, interviewing local leaders, and implementing small outreach activities as a class. they were asked to report back on these assignments; student experiences were incorporated into weekly lessons. for each session, youth participants were broken into small groups (with the groups changing every time) in order to enable course facilitators to give more personal attention to participants. two facilitators led all 10 sessions of the class. one facilitator was native to the town sîngerei and the other was an american peace corps volunteer. both had previous experience in youth development work and were further trained by a moldovan non-governmental organization (ngo) in civic action and leadership within the current moldovan political climate; additionally guest facilitators were brought in as well. all lessons were conducted in romanian, which was the first language of 90% of the participants. although it was a large undertaking, the course itself had no direct funding; rather it operated on in-kind donations and volunteer hours. because of this, resources (printed materials, office supplies, props for lessons) were intentionally kept to a minimum. serving lunch to participants over the four hour course was our biggest economic challenge; this was initially covered by volunteers cooking at home and bringing food to the library, but as the course progressed and we made ourselves known in the community, several local businesses offered to provide snacks at no cost. while the overall volunteer hours needed to plan and implement the “practical leadership course” were not specifically recorded, we estimate that it took the equivalent of one full time employee during the four-month implementation period, and a half-time employee for the month leading into, and following the course. community-based projects. as the capstone of the “practical leadership course,” community-based projects were assigned to allow youth to directly apply their newly developed competencies to issues that matter to them in their local communities. the theory behind this aspect of the course was “small wins” — if the youth could successfully implement small community initiatives with the support of their classmates and facilitators, then they would be more likely to continue engaging in leadership initiatives in their communities in the future. to initiate the community-based project development process, participants were given a form for documenting and describing a problem in their community. during class sessions, participants used these forms to work on practical solutions, identify funding (if needed) for their proposed solutions, evaluate which community members and partners would be interested in contributing to the project, and develop volunteer recruitment strategies. action plans were created individually by students with the support of course facilitators; projects that were beyond the scope of our course were discouraged and participants were given guidance on finding a new, more realistic project. students helped one another with project implementation. examples of community-based projects that participants completed include installing garbage cans in parks, a positive graffiti campaign, and the creation of a regional youth newspaper. “grant funding” for selected community based projects that students completed came from the centru raional (equivalent to a county government body in the united states). instrument youth development questionnaire. this self-report measure, developed specifically for our intervention, consisted of 28 questions. the items on this questionnaire were developed by the course facilitators with the intention of assessing the potential impact of the “practical leadership course” on participants’ abilities and beliefs; the items were reviewed for clarity and purpose by members of the moldovan youth development non-profit, o.n.g geronimo. the youth development questionnaire was designed and administered in romanian; the 28 items were grouped evenly into four categories: 1) participants’ beliefs about the future of their country (moldova; α = .74), 2) participants’ beliefs about the future of their community (local; α = .83), 3) participants' assessment of their own leadership skills (α = .87), and 4) participants’ belief in their own ability to affect change in their surroundings (α = .69). examples of items included: “i see a future for myself in moldova,” “i can make positive changes in my school,” and “i consider myself capable of being a leader.” all items used likert-type scaling ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). reverse scoring was used when appropriate, with higher values indicating a more positive outcome. additionally, there were items assessing participants’ current level of community involvement and volunteer activity. procedure our intervention, the “practical leadership course,” took place in the sîngerei town library. participants self-selected, responding to flyers and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 1 march 2013 global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   announcements posted in sîngerei in the schools, at the discotec, the bar, and at the one internet cafe. a one-page application was required, however, all who applied were selected. there were no formal incentives for completing this program, but youth were alerted to the fact that through this course, they would have opportunities to meet with and interact with other youth in the community. the group met once a week on sundays. the first time the group met, introductions were made and a youth development questionnaire was administered. on each subsequent sunday the group met and went through one session/skill within the course. no technology was involved in the teaching, and all course materials for lessons and demonstrations were common objects, to keep the cost of the course down. at the end of every session there was time for feedback and evaluation. methods for collecting feedback included “vote with your feet,” “highs and lows” and “if i could change one thing, i would...”. because of the cost, and lack of access to a printer or copy machine, written evaluations were kept to a minimum. facilitators took the feedback into consideration when planning future sessions, and re-covered topics that were not fully grasped by participants. homework assignments required the students to go out into their community between classes. examples of homework assignments include interviewing their neighbors about community problems, and making a map of the best parts of their community. the intervention was implemented in four months, from may to september, and overlapped with the academic year by one week on both sides of the summer. two sundays were skipped for cultural and religious observations. the sessions ran from 9am to 1pm; lunch was provided for students. attrition occurred between the first and second sessions (3 students never returned; an attrition rate of 7.9%). no formal follow up was done to see why students dropped out of the course; informal discussions led us to believe that household obligations, religious observances, and distance traveled were all factors in attrition. attendance was mandatory at nine out of ten sessions in order to be included in this study. community-based projects, the practical application of the coursework, were implemented starting with the 6th session of the leadership course, and extended, in some cases, up to two weeks beyond the course. the youth development questionnaire was given a second time (post-test) to the entire group on the day of their graduation ceremony, which took place at the beginning of the school year, after the completion of both the course and the communitybased projects. also, an overall evaluation of the program (qualitative) was administered on the last day of the course, giving students a chance to critique the classes and techniques, and make suggestions for the future. the youth development questionnaire was given a third time (follow-up) to participants one year after completing the “practical leadership course” to determine if changes to beliefs and behaviors were sustained. results paired samples t tests were conducted to evaluate the following hypotheses: after engaging in leadership training, moldovan youth (n = 35) would 1) view themselves as more capable leaders, 2) have higher levels of perceived self-efficacy, 3) hold more positive beliefs about the future of their community, and 4) hold more positive views about the future of their country. after completing the “practical leadership course,” students rated their own leadership abilities significantly higher, t(34) = 2.11, p <.05, and experienced a significant increase in perceived selfefficacy, which was operationally defined as “belief in my own ability to make change locally,” t(34) = 3.01, p <.01. while there was a slight positive change in the average belief about the future of the community, it did not represent a statistically significant, nor a meaningful, change. neither was there a noticeable change in participants’ attitudes towards the future of moldova as a whole. table 2. results from the youth development questionnaire, three separate administrations.   pre   post   follow   up     m  (sd)   m  (sd)   m  (sd)   self  assessed   leadership   abilities   2.5   (3.5)   4.1   (2.8)   4.4  (3.1)   perception  of   ability  to  affect   change   2.6   (2.9)   4.7   (3.2)   4.8  (2.8)   positive  beliefs   about  the  future   of  my  community   2.8   (1.2)   3.0   (2.5)   3.0  (1.3)   positive  beliefs   about  the  future   of  moldova   2.5   (1.4)   2.4   (1.6)   2.2  (1.8)   global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 1 march 2013 global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   a follow up survey one year later (n = 28) showed that graduates of the leadership class reported a high level of community involvement (78% self reported that they spent 3-9 hours on average, per week, involved in community activities). pre-intervention, only one of the students reported spending any time engaged in “community activities or volunteering.” a mcnemar test was run to assess the significance of these changes in volunteering habits, x2 = 20.05, p<.01. of the 78% who now reported being active in their community, 100% acknowledged that their community involvement was mainly through the newly created youth leadership council, discussed in detail as a “real world result” of the leadership course below. sixty-seven percent of course graduates surveyed indicated that they had recruited more youth (that had not graduated from the class) to help with their community work. additionally, one year later, 34% of students (12 individuals) who completed the class volunteered to come back and help run the second iteration of the “practical leadership course.” in general, the findings supported our hypothesis that youth could obtain essential, community-based leadership competencies through the “practical leadership course,” and that these competencies would enhance their perceived self-efficacy/ability to affect change locally. however, the experience was not strong enough to alter their attitudes regarding the future of their community or country. further, the competencies taught in the intervention acted to enable and encourage higher levels of community involvement on the part of the youth. discussion after completing our “practical leadership course” and implementing their own community-based projects, students felt strongly that they could have a positive influence on their communities, knew specific ways in which they could make a difference, and were actively working to make that happen. our results demonstrate that development of leadership skills, coupled with opportunities to engage in community activities, can positively influence youth’s self-perceptions. this is beneficial as increased participation in community activities not only leads to more informed citizens, higher levels of social capital, and better communities, but actually helps those doing the volunteering themselves as well (kaye, 2001). additionally, previous research has found that skills, knowledge and attitudes developed within youth development programs like the “practical leadership course” will continue to influence the youth’s lives as stronger attitudes and beliefs will develop only over time with “on-going learning and practice” (holdsworth et al., 2005). although participation in the “practical leadership course” led to improved self efficacy, it did not significantly increase the participants’ views on the future of their community or country. it was our hope that increased self-efficacy would translate into the belief that an individual can shape his/her future in a positive way. however, it seems like the intervention, although powerful, was not strong enough to influence commonly held cultural beliefs (e.g. moldova will never change), a shared sense of learned-helplessness, or perceptions as to how bad the state of things in the country actually was. looking at these results, we found an interesting trend. in response to the question “can you see your future as an adult in moldova?,” more participants answered in a negative manner after completing the leadership course. our interpretation of this result is that youth, now empowered and active, believe that they do not fit into the current structure of moldova’s society, one that does not value activism nor citizen participation beyond the act of voting (king, 2000). the path that our intervention took: providing youth with a safe space and the tools to develop the skills they need to become active citizens, fits into an already established framework which demonstrates that marginalized or disenfranchised populations can be made to be and feel essential to society if they are provided with support to do so (ersing, 2008). the “small wins” approach we took with youth, supporting them as they completed manageable tasks that bettered their communities (the communitybased projects) allowed the youth to succeed, as well as gave the surrounding community a reason to start recognizing the youth’s potential, and viewing them as assets. one of the biggest challenges we had during this project was community-buy in; while they youth who participated were on board, their parents, and other community members constantly questioned the value of the course, and interrupted communitybased homework assignments to see what they were about. participants handled the situation well, patiently explaining the course and its purpose, over and over, to the citizens of the community who were slower to recognize its merit, and were not used to seeing this type of leadership activities. besides the changes in perceived self-efficacy listed in the results section, this project created several tangible by-products, worth discussing here. these “real world results” including the development of a “local youth council” and the implementation of a “training for facilitators,” were unplanned by facilitators at the beginning of the course, and reflect global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 1 march 2013 global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9   the extent to which youth participants were energized to create positive community change throughout the intervention. one could argue that these participantinitiated “real world results” underscore a limitation of the course itself: we focused on developing the skills and competencies of each individual youth, and did nothing to change the environment in which the youth lived. we energized them and encouraged them to participate in local government, but failed to attempt any ecological level changes that would have allowed the youth a place to utilize their skills in the real world. those in power in the town of sîngerei viewed the youth’s enthusiasm to help suspiciously, and an ageist attitude prevailed. therefore, graduates of the course acting as change agents, having been initially barred from formal systems within the town, opted to create their own spaces to use their newly acquired skills. local youth council after participation in the first “practical leadership course” in sîngerei, twenty of the thirty-five graduates formed a “local youth council” with the goal of representing and organizing the youth of their town. they recruited other youth who had not completed the course to join in the council as well. the youth council, now in its third year of existence, uses both advocacy and volunteering to raise the profile of social issues in their community and to attempt to change the predominant apathetic attitude of their parents’ generation. our follow up survey showed that one year after participants graduated from the practical leadership class, youth continued to be involved in a meaningful way in their communities. a large majority of the graduates of our leadership class (78%) were now volunteering, on average, 3 9 hours per week as opposed to the pre-intervention average of 0-2 hours per month; the majority of those hours reflect activities under the guise of the local youth council. further, youth demonstrated that they had incorporated ideas from the course content through the type of work their youth council was focused on, one year later: reaching across sectors for collaboration, energizing others, and finding resources in their community. students were now participating in higher level, issue-driven work (e.g. anti-littering campaigns) as opposed to surface level activities (e.g., neighborhood clean-ups, collecting toys for handicapped children) typical of new volunteers, which shows a well developed understanding of the principles of advocacy and community change. training for facilitators as a result of this sustained and enthusiastic community involvement and leadership on the part of the youth, a “training for facilitators” course was designed to teach interested course graduates how to run the future sessions of the “practical leadership course.” in this training course, session topics were covered in more detail with deeper theoretical backgrounds, and logistical planning and organizing were taught as well. twelve students (graduates of the leadership course) elected to go through this training in its first implementation. this training course has the goal of making the “practical leadership course” sustainable by ensuring it has a body of trained and competent facilitators and providing new participants with actual, accessible examples of youth community leaders. its effectiveness has yet to be evaluated, however, students who are past-graduates of the leadership course and who completed the “training for facilitators” course are now essential in the process of putting on the “practical leadership course,” which is currently in its fourth iteration. conclusion these results, however specific to the moldovan village we worked in, allow us to draw some conclusions about the benefits of participatory-based positive youth development. our original intentions in this community were to increase youth involvement and volunteering. although many national and international efforts in moldova are focused on strengthening its democracy, few take the competency building approach, and fewer focus on youth — citizens who are not even eligible to vote yet. by taking a competency development approach and providing opportunities to directly apply their skills, the “practical leadership course” allowed participants to develop the confidence and ability to not only become engaged in community efforts, but to initiate their own. recognizing youth as resources, with unique perspectives and assets, will aid community transformation efforts. helping people work towards solutions for their own problems ensures that positive development takes place, regardless of the immediate progress being made. limitations having tailored our intervention for rural moldovan youth, we cannot generalize these findings to other populations, nor can we assert that our model will work in other communities. however, others doing similar community work may benefit from our study and the lessons we learned about how to make youth participation work on a practical level. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 1 march 2013 global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  10   our intervention, the ten sessions of the leadership class including youth led community-based projects, is currently being recreated in three different places across moldova: one small city, one village, and again in sîngerei (under the leadership of pastgraduates). while the implementers will be different (we think it is important for the implementers to be in the community they are serving the entire ten week project, because a lot of the learning and student support happens outside the class period, and relationships with local public authorities are of the utmost importance), effort went into ensuring that the structure of the program would remain similar. before starting round two of this intervention, implementers met together to share materials, talk about the results of the course, and talk to youth who had completed it already. the theme of the discussion was “lessons learned,” having dual aims of insuring the intervention was successfully replicated and allowing the facilitators to actively make improvements and adaptations to the course, according to the youth feedback we had gathered, as well as the mood of their specific town. future research the “practical leadership course” was an innovative, community-driven project aimed at increasing the leadership abilities and practices of youth in a small town in moldova. now that it has been piloted, and the original “graduates” are running the course for a new generation of students, the timing is right for a more controlled study of the effectiveness of this intervention. additionally, future studies with this population could examine the emergence of the idea that newly empowered youth report that they cannot see their future, as adults, in moldova. research questions could look at what changes youth believe need to happen in order for them to be happy living and working in moldova. the gap between the possibilities that exist for them and the possibilities that youth desire needs to be explored in a more detailed manner. this is especially crucial if moldova wants to end its exodus, and start retaining its youth as they age into adulthood. references benard, b. (2007). the hope of prevention: individual, family and community. in l. cohen, v. chavez, & s, chehimi (eds). prevention is primary: strategies for community well-being (pp. 63-93). san fransisco, ca: john wiley and sons, inc. easterly, w. (2006). the white man’s burden. new york: the penguin press. ersing, r. (2008). building the capacity of youths through community cultural arts: apositive youth development perspective. best practices in mental health, 5(1), 26-43. flanagan, c. & levine, p. (2010). civic engagement and the transition to adulthood. the future of children. vol. 20, no. 1., spring 2010, 159-179. greenleaf, r. (1970). the servant as leader. indianapolis: the robert k. greenleaf center, 137. holdsworth, r., lake, m., stacey, k., & stafford, j. (2005). outcomes for participants in youth development programs: a report of a three-year longitudinal study. technical report. retrieved from youth research center: http://www.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/yrc/projects/ kaye, g. (2001). grassroots involvement. american journal of community psychology, 29(2), 269276, doi: 10.1023/a:1010382714491 king, c. (2000). the moldovans: romania, russia and the politics of culture. stanford, ca: hoover institution press. mansoor, a. & bryce, q. (2007). migration and remittances: eastern europe and the former soviet union. report prepared for the world bank, europe and central asia region. washington, dc: the international bank for reconstruction and development/the world bank. smith, e. (1999). the effects of investments in the social capital of youth on political and civic behavior in young adulthood: a longitudinal analysis. political psychology, vol. 20, no. 3, 553-580. transparency international (2011). corruption perceptions index. available at: http://www.transparency.org/research weick, k. (1984). small wins: redefining the scale of social problems. american psychologist, 39(1), 40 – 49. doi: 10.1037/0003066x.39.1.40 winrock international. (2005). women at risk in the republic of moldova. national representative survey. retrieved from moldova antitrafficking and gender network website: http://www.atnet.md/public/46/en/women%20a t%20risk_eng.pdf. chisinau, moldova: imas, inc. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 1 march 2013 global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  11   world bank. (2010). remittance flows in 2011: an update. accessed from the migration and remittances website: http://econ.worldbank.org/ united nations development programme. (2011). country profile: republic of moldova. retrieved from the international human development indicators website: http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/ unesco united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (2006). guidebook for planning education in emergencies and reconstruction. international edition. accessed from: http://www.iiep.unesco.org/. paris, france: international institute for educational planning. unicef united nations children’s fund (2008). the impact of parental deprivation on the development of children left behind by moldovan migrants. policy, advocacy, and knowledge management (pakm), division of policy and practice: new york. working paper, october 2008. u.s. central intelligence agency. (2009). republic of moldova. retrieved from the world fact book website: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/theworld-factbook/ u.s. central intelligence agency. (2012). country comparison: net migration rate. retrieved from the world fact book website: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/theworld-factbook/rankorder/2112rank.html youniss, j., bales, s., christmas-best, v., diversi, m., mclaughlin, m. and silbereisen, r. (2002). youth civic engagement in the twenty-first century. journal of research on adolescence, vol. 12, no. 1, 121-148. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 1 march 2013 global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  12   appendix a. example outline for “practical leadership course” sessions. session  3:  teamwork,  group  work,  and  team  building   time   topic/activity   materials/setting   9am  –  9:15  am   warm  up:  team  number  punch     team-­‐building  activity  that  works  on  communication,   coordination,  and  cooperation.     outside  –  on  library  lawn   2  pieces  of  rope,  single  pieces  of  paper  with  the   numbers  from  1-­‐30  written  on  each  (one  number  per   sheet  of  paper).  two  sets  of  numbers.   divide  students  into  two  groups   9:15  –  9:45  am   facilitated  brainstorm:  what  makes  a  good  teammate?   chalkboard/chalk   divide  students  into  three  groups  for  conversations   9:45  –  10:00  am   self  reflection:     what  “teams”  or  “groups”  am  i  part  of?     what  have  my  roles  been?   are  certain  groups/teams  easier  to  work  with?   allow  students  to  spread  out  into  individual  spaces.     10:00  –  10:30  am   student  report  back:  sharing  personal  insights     group  students  into  pairs,  start  with  one-­‐on-­‐one   reporting.  then  add  groups  of  pairs  together,  so   groups  of  four  share,  and  so  on,  so  that  everyone   becomes  involved  in  the  conversation.     facilitators  roam  room.   10:30  –  10:45  am   snack  break   10:45  –  11:10  am   activity:  “pen  chute”   groups  have  to  transport  a  pen  using  just  sheets  of  paper,   across  a  field.  before  the  game  starts,  instruct  one  student   from  each  team  to  be  “uncooperative”  in  achieving  the   team’s  goals.  debrief  this  at  the  end.     sheets  of  plain  paper  (one  for  each  person),  2  pens   divide  students  into  two  or  three  groups,  depending   on  number  of  participants.       11:10am  –  11:35   different  hats:  discuss  the  different  roles  individuals  can   play  within  a  group/team.     examples  include  leader,  facilitator,  time-­‐keeper,  task-­‐ manager,  devil’s  advocate,  optimist,  pessimist.     provide  students  with  sample  scenarios  and  allow  them  to   play/act  them  out,  rotating  roles  with  each  scenario.   hats/head  pieces  as  props  (not  necessary,  but  fun)   divide  students  into  three  small  groups;  one   facilitator  per  group   11:35  –  12:15   discussion:  benefits/drawbacks  to  group  work       large  group  together   blackboard/chalk   12:15  –  12:30   snack  break   12:30  –  12:45   team-­‐building:  the  blind  jedi   students  take  turns  being  the  “jedi”  –  teams  have  to  direct   blindfolded  jedi  to  find  his/her  weapon  and  successfully   “mark”  the  other  team’s  jedi.     two  “soft”  sticks  (nerf-­‐like)   two  cloths  that  can  be  used  as  blindfolds   outside  –  large  field   12:45  –  1pm   evaluation:  best,  worst,  most  useful   students  share  their  evaluations  of  the  course/lessons  for   the  day.     allow  students  to  stand  in  large  circle   microsoft word 2012-010-final-20121230.docx fostering critical thinking about climate change: applying community psychology to an environmental education project with youth livia d. dittmer and manuel riemer wilfrid laurier university author note: livia d. dittmer, psychology department, wilfrid laurier university; manuel riemer, psychology department, wilfrid laurier university. correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to livia d. dittmer, psychology department, wilfrid laurier university, waterloo, ontario, n2l 3c5. e-mail: livia.d.dittmer@gmail.com. recommended citation: dittmer, l.d., & riemer, m. (2012). fostering critical thinking about climate change: applying community psychology to an environmental education project with youth. global journal of community psychology practice, 3(x), 1-9. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   fostering critical thinking about climate change: applying community psychology to an environmental education project with youth abstract this article argues for the participation of community psychology in issues of global climate change. the knowledge accumulated and experience gained in the discipline of community psychology have great relevance to many topics related to the environment. practitioners of community psychology could therefore make significant contributions to climate change mitigation. to illustrate this assertion, we describe an education project conducted with youth engaged in a community-based environmental organization. this initiative was motivated by the idea that engaged and critically aware youth often become change agents for social movements. towards this purpose, rather than using mass marketing strategies to motivate small behavior changes, this project focused intensively on a few youth with the vision that these youth would also influence those around them to rethink their environmental habits. this project was influenced by five community psychology concepts: stakeholder participation, ecological and systems thinking, social justice, praxis, and empirical grounding. in this article we discuss the influence of these concepts on the project’s outcomes, as measured through an evaluative study conducted to assess the impacts of the project on the participating youth in terms of their thinking and action. the contributions of community psychology were found to have greatly impacted the quality of the project and the outcomes experienced by the youth. keywords: global climate change, environment, youth, education, community psychology over its years of existence, community psychology has taken on increasingly diverse social issues for research and intervention. as the world advances in complexity and new problems emerge, it is important that our discipline continues to be responsive to the needs of humanity through our selection of priorities for research and intervention. global climate change and the need for a shift toward a culture of environmental sustainability have been identified by several authors as prospective priority areas for community psychology (e.g., culley & angelique, 2010; riemer, 2010; riemer & reich, 2011; quimby & angelique, 2011). community psychology has the potential to play an important leadership role in developing mitigation strategies that are based on ecological and systems thinking and appropriately reflect the complexity of the environmental situation that the world faces today. in reflecting on existing efforts to address these environmental issues, we are reminded of einstein’s often quoted insight that the problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them. many psychology-informed behavior change strategies, for example, seem to accept financial and social status elements as essential to motivating individuals to make environmental choices, rather than challenging individuals in order to seek more complex methods of change that target other forms of motivation more likely to make significant impact (world wildlife fund [wwf], 2008). we agree with other authors (e.g., clover, 2002; harré, 2011; riemer, 2010; wwf, 2008) that an alternative approach is needed, one that reflects a more complex method of individual and social transformation. in this paper, we present an example of how community psychology theory and principles can be used to create an environmental change program that reflects complex systems thinking through the mode of education. mainstream psychology has focused much of its research regarding sustainability on the internal drivers of consumption behavior (uzzell & räthel, 2009). axelrod and lehman (1993), for example, identify three key factors associated with environmental behaviors: attitudes (“i believe, therefore i act”), sense of efficacy (“i can, therefore i act”), and motivation (“i desire, therefore i act”). these types of frameworks locate impetus for environmental change within individuals. from this orientation, methods are developed that apply marketing techniques, such as market segmentation and financial incentives, to motivate individuals to make small and painless life changes that are in line with society’s vision of green consumption (wwf, 2008). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   the assumption on which this strategy is based is that individuals choose to make change (or not to make change) based on what they think will maximize their personal benefit (wilson & dowlatabadi, 2007). this vision of human nature, however, fails to take into account the embeddedness of individuals in social, cultural, and political contexts (uzzell & räthel, 2009); the inclusive elements of self-identity that help individuals identify with external factors such as other people and nature (wwf, 2008); and individuals’ capacity to make sacrifices for the collective (nelson & prilleltensky, 2005). furthermore, the foot-in-the-door assumption, upon which these efforts are based, is that these simple changes must be the first priority before larger behavior changes can be encouraged: “...most of our consumer research points to the need for proenvironmental behaviors to fit within one’s current lifestyle, even if one might aim for more fundamental shifts over the longer term” (department for environment, food, and rural affairs [defra], 2007). observation of this strategy over the years of its use, however, have led to the conclusion that these small changes of specific behaviors, in actuality, “may serve to defer, or even undermine, prospects for the more far-reaching and systemic behavioral changes that are needed” (wwf, 2008, p. 5). thus, these changes are ameliorative at best but certainly not transformative, and therefore fall short of the level of change that is needed to mitigate climatic catastrophe (ipcc, 2007). the world wildlife fund (2008) suggests that for transformative change to occur, the underlying assumptions of materialism and individualism must be challenged. they propose that, in place of these assumptions, the ability to value others when making behavioral choices should be prioritized. this inclusive aspect of self-identity is undermined by the marketing approach, which encourages people to consider their consumer behaviors to be what define their identity, rather than intrinsic or morally-driven factors. a transformative process that changes this way of thinking would require “a re-examination of the relationships between people, and between people and the natural environment” (wwf, 2008, p. 8) in order to create a systemic approach to environmental involvement that reflects inclusive values. such an expanded vision would allow for the creation of a system better able to account for the heterogeneous mix of individuals’ attitudes and motivations regarding environmental choices (wilson & dowlatabadi, 2007) and the complexity of the human dimensions of climate change (hossay, 2006; oskamp, 2000; riemer, 2010; speth, 2008). in short, what is needed is a shift away from the limitations imposed by the marketing model and its simple approach, toward an approach that takes into account the complexities of the human response to the phenomenon of climate change. community psychology has a great deal to offer in conceptualizing and realizing this shift. despite the peripheral attention issues of global climate change have received by community psychology researchers and practitioners, the research interests, theoretical perspectives, and values framework of community psychology provide solid foundations for this focus to emerge (riemer, 2010; riemer & reich, 2011). riemer and reich (2011) argue that many research topics already of interest to community psychologists are closely linked to global climate change and that, oftentimes, efforts to create transformative change by addressing root causes of other phenomena would naturally lead to environmental factors. they explore immigration as an example of such a research topic, pointing to the connections between an influx of environmental refugees and resulting implications for issues related to sense of community, diversity, and social justice. efforts for transformative change would look to the root causes of this influx: environmental disasters. these authors also suggest that many theoretical perspectives of community psychology are synchronous with the needs incurred by our changing environment. the application of ecological and systems thinking, for example, is an area of strength in community psychology and would contribute a great deal to the analysis of environmental impacts on individuals, groups, and communities. riemer (2010) also highlights four values of community psychology, as identified by nelson and prilleltensky (2010), that could motivate community psychologists to care about environmental issues: the concern for individual, relational, and collective wellbeing; the fight for social justice; the efforts to address issues of power and oppression; and the prevention of conflict and violence. however, despite this clear interconnectedness, the available literature of our field lacks examples of applying community psychology principles, theories, and methods to environmental initiatives (riemer & reich, 2011). by presenting an example of an environmental action project informed by community psychology we hope to help fill this gap. critical consciousness workshops for youth this section explores the application of community psychology concepts and approaches to an initiative aimed at engaging youth in environmental action through consciousness raising and capacity building. this initiative was motivated by the idea that engaged global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   and critically aware youth often become change agents for social movements, including movements that work toward the cultural shift that is needed to deal with global climate change (karan, 1994; quiroz-martinez, wu, & zimmerman, 2005; youniss et al., 2002). towards this purpose, rather than using mass marketing strategies to motivate small behavior changes, this project focused intensively on a few youth with the vision that these youth would also influence those around them to rethink their environmental habits. in this section, we describe the intervention setting and the pilot research that preceded the main project, the main project goals, the research methods, and some of the project outcomes. throughout this section we make explicit the community psychology influences on this project. the main project intervention setting and pilot research reduce the juice (rtj) is a community-based, youthfocused, environmental organization currently based in waterloo region in southwestern ontario. it was initiated in 2005 as a youth-led organization, with the goal of contributing to climate change mitigation by engaging young people as agents of change. through summer projects, for which the organization hires several high school-aged youth to conduct community outreach, rtj has two primary goals: (a) to educate residents about environmental issues and motivate them to alter their environment-related behaviors, and (b) to empower youth to become community leaders and role models in creating a culture of conservation. they also work with high school teams on projects related to renewable energy during the school term. for example, a student group built a solar-powered vehicle with the help of engineering students from a local university. rtj is funded primarily through small project-based grants from different funding agencies and by partnering with local government organizations such as public health or waste management. our research team has worked with rtj since 2008 in several ways. first, we partnered in conducting a post-hoc evaluation of their regular summer program, which they had offered since 2005. this was partially done as a case study in a community psychology methodology course for which the second author (manuel) was the instructor and the first author (livia) a student. this evaluation included interviews with the rtj’s high school students and a survey with residents targeted by the students (this was our pilot research). through the interviews, it became evident that the students recognized the limitations of focusing on residents’ environmental behaviors without also considering other systemic levels that affect those behaviors (e.g., urban planning; riemer, dittmer, & klein, 2009). because of this finding, we proposed to the organization that this limitation could be addressed by creating spaces for the youth to learn about and discuss these other levels. together, the rtj team leaders and our research team developed a workshop series that would draw heavily on insights and tools from community psychology to raise consciousness about global climate change at multiple levels of analysis and build capacity for greater involvement in environmental issues. this project was implemented by rtj during their 2009 summer program. in order to learn about the effectiveness of these workshops from this specific case, we collected data from several sources (see below). in the summer of 2010 rtj repeated the workshop series with slight modifications but we did not collect additional data. one change in 2010 was the inclusion of a live video exchange with students in india who participated in a similar series of workshops. the partnership between rtj and our research group and our joined learning and development has led to an ongoing, large, multinational, longitudinal study, “youth leading environmental change,” which investigates the effectiveness of an environmental justice workshop for university students. the workshop consists of 10 two-hour topical modules and two live video exchanges. in this paper, however, we present what we learned from developing the original workshop series in 2009 and from the evaluative data we collected at that time. as described above, we designed the workshops to fill a gap in rtj’s largely individual-focused mode of operation by expanding the youths’ vision to include the multiple levels (government, businesses, peer groups, etc.) that influence environmental behaviors and the connections between these levels. the second component of the workshops’ message was that the forces that influence individuals can in turn be affected by the individuals themselves. this aspect sought to raise, through a process of critical reflection and discussion, the youths’ consciousness of the influence they can have on the multifarious forces that impact the environmental situation. the workshops were designed and implemented in partnership between the researchers and the rtj team leaders. this involved four steps: (a) an initial meeting to select the themes and develop content for each workshop, (b) preparatory meetings approximately two days before each workshop to clarify plans and establish facilitation roles for each portion of the session, (c) co-facilitation of the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   workshops, and (d) meeting after each workshop to reflect and document our learning. the final step sometimes only involved the researchers because of time constraints, but the team leaders would reflect independently through regular journal entries. each workshop was two to three hours long and focused on a contextual theme related to the issue of climate change. the themes were designed to increase in complexity over the summer and to build on each other conceptually. all four workshops involved five components: reflection on the previous workshop and recent rtj field work, introduction to the theme to be addressed, presentation of media related to the theme, discussion of the media and related ideas, and action planning. guest participation in discussions and interactive learning activities were also included. workshop themes workshop 1: consumerism. using consumer culture and its impact on the environment as an example, the first workshop provided an introduction to the purpose of the workshops and an orientation to the main tool to be used for critical consciousness raising: the ecological model (dalton, elias, & wandersman, 2002; kelly, ryan, altman, & stelzner, 2000). this model provided the youth with a conceptual framework and a common language to explore and discuss the complex interconnections between individuals’ behaviors and systemic influences at multiple levels of analysis. workshop 2: urban planning and design. this workshop addressed an issue that was commonly encountered by the youth in their interactions with residents: urban planning and design. the discussion included a focus on such factors as bike lanes and suburban sprawl, which were very relevant to rtj’s focus on promoting the use of nonor low-polluting modes of transportation. workshop 3: government and policy. the third workshop took a step away from residents’ proximal concerns to address the relationship between government policy and climate change. the content focused on the process by which legislation is developed and how individuals and groups can influence this process. the green energy act of ontario was explored to provide an example of these ideas in the context of the environment. workshop 4: environmental justice. the fourth and final workshop addressed the issue of environmental injustice: how those with the least power to create change in the environment are often the ones most impacted by its effects (hossay, 2006). this issue, which was quite distal from the youths’ everyday lives, was important to include because of the fact that these youth were all members of a privileged group and it is important for members of privileged groups to develop consciousness of their influence over issues that impact others’ lives (goodman, 2001). by critically examining and discussing examples of environmental injustice, this workshop was designed to help the youth understand the different actors and forces that sustain environmental injustice, and to begin to explore the role they could play in building a more just system. workshop components reflections on rtj field work. at the beginning of each workshop, the youth were asked to reflect on their fieldwork over the days since the previous workshop. this included reflection on how their experiences in the field related to the things they had learned in the workshops, following the principles of community-service learning (honnet & poulsen, 1989; jacoby & associates, 1996). media presentations. as a component of each workshop, a video or slideshow presentation was used to stimulate group discussions. topical group discussions. the main component of the workshops were the youths’ discussions, which were focused on the theme of each workshop and provided space for in-depth exploration of the topic and its potential integration into conversations with residents. in these guided discussions the youth were encouraged to use the ecological model to anchor their thoughts in systems thinking. co-facilitation approach. through their partnership, the researchers and the rtj team leaders provided structure and guidance for the workshop discussions, as well as contributing supplemental information and insights when helpful. interactive activities. interactive activities consisted of the ecological model discussion in workshops one, two, and three; a green energy act scavenger hunt in workshop three; and a guest presenter in workshop four. action planning. the final component of the last three workshops was approximately 30 to 45 minutes dedicated to planning for an action project to be carried out by the youth. the youth first decided together what action they wanted to take and then developed an action plan. the intention for the action project was for the youth to target something located on an ecological level beyond the individual (e.g., the community level). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   community psychology influences in designing and implementing this project, we, as community psychology scholars, drew heavily from community psychology theory and principles of practice. in this section, we discuss five community psychology concepts that particularly influenced this project: stakeholder participation, ecological and systems thinking, social justice, praxis, and empirical grounding. stakeholder participation. because this project had direct implications for the functioning of rtj and the achievement of its mandate, we considered it to be important that members of the organization be involved as much as possible in planning and implementing the workshops. indeed, one of the goals of the project was to contribute to the advancement of the organization itself by building skills and knowledge in team leaders to provide a broader scope of training to the organization’s youth employees. this is in keeping with community psychology’s conceptualization of power sharing in that through this partnership we sought to create opportunities and build capacity – two central features of power (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010) – of the team leaders to strengthen their organization and for the research team to implement an effective study of the project (described further below). the latter goal was supported through stakeholder participation by providing insight into the functioning of rtj and access to the strengths of the organization, gained through its experience working with youth. ecological and systems thinking. from a community psychology perspective, the purpose of the ecological metaphor is synchronous with the goals of the workshops: to build understanding about individuals within their contexts and to attempt to “change those aspects of the community that pollute the possibilities for local citizens to control their own lives and improve their community” (trickett, 2009, p. 396). the visual representation of multiple ecological layers (e.g., as depicted in dalton, elias, & wandersman, 2007, p. 18), was intended to facilitate the youths’ understanding of the complexity of primary and secondary causes of global climate change and increase knowledge about how strategies to address these causes need to consider this complexity. we used recycling as an example to demonstrate how our actions are influenced by family members, neighbours, city regulations and services, business practices, cultural values, etc. being able to map these multiple influences on a visual model, made this complexity less overwhelming. the ecological model and related systems thinking also influenced the way we selected the themes for this workshop series; we intentionally selected topics that related to multiple layers in the ecological model, including those that seemed far removed from individuals’ behaviors. social justice. an injustice inherent in the development of global climate change is that those countries that have contributed most to the problem are least affected by its negative impacts and vice versa (hossay, 2006). the participants of the workshops were all members of a privileged group that benefits from the production of green house gases (e.g., through increased personal comfort) without having to face the consequences of that production (at least not in the immediate future). jost and major (2001) discuss how the different life circumstances of people who are relatively privileged compare to those who are disadvantaged, which often results in advantaged people being oblivious of the challenges faced by others. by focusing on what nelson and prilleltensky (2010) describe as fair and equitable allocation of obligations in society, the workshops were intended to help the youth explore their role in contributing to environmental justice. praxis. in community psychology practice, praxis refers to the connections between theory and action (e.g., montero, 2008; partridge, 2008; prilleltensky, 2001). critical reflection on one’s actions using theoretical frameworks such as the ecological model ensures informed practice that has the potential for transformative change. this idea was applied extensively in the workshops; not only was there time dedicated in each workshop to reflect on how the concepts discussed in the previous workshop had been applied in their conversations with residents in the field, but the students also designed and began to carry out an action project during the workshop sessions. discussions were framed within this context of action and reflection in relation to the theory of each workshop topic. empirical grounding. as a scientific discipline, community psychology values strong empirical foundations for interventions and research (dalton, elias, & wandersman, 2007). the design of these workshops and the research plan were based on existing knowledge about youth engagement (riemer & lynes, 2011) and on previous pilot research with rtj (dittmer, wicks, & riemer, 2009; riemer, dittmer, & klein, 2009; riemer et al., 2009; riemer & patterson, 2009). the current workshop series was evaluated as well, which we present in the next section. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   evaluation of the workshops in this section we provide a brief overview of the evaluation conducted to assess the effectiveness of this project, including a summary of the methods, a description of the main relevant findings, and a short discussion. methods through a single case, holistic case study (yin, 2009), using variety of data sources, we worked with the two team leaders to collect data that would contribute to our understanding of the five youth participants’ experience in the workshops and the impacts of the project on their thinking and action. the two team leaders were university students who were hired by rtj to train the youth and accompany them in the field to visit local residents. in the summer of 2009, rtj hired five high school aged youth to work as student campaigners in their community outreach education program; all five of these students participated in the workshops and the related research. three were men and two were women. they ranged in age from 17 to 19. the students were recruited from a local high school. several forms of data were gathered for the purposes of this evaluation. data were collected during the workshop sessions, which were audio recorded; through follow-up, semi-structured interviews with each participant four to six months after the last workshop; through journals kept by the team leaders, who shared their reflections on the youths’ participation and their experiences in the field; through field observations, made by the first author, of the youth doing their community outreach; and, finally, through pre and post questionnaires completed by the youth, which assessed their general knowledge of environmental and social issues, their interactions with parents and peers in regard to various social issues (the parent and peers interaction scales; pancer, pratt, hunsberger, & alisat, 2007), and their previous involvement in various community service activities (the youth inventory of involvement; pancer et al., 2007). by collecting data from three perspectives (the youth, the team leaders, and the researchers), we sought to identify themes that would represent the key processes and outcomes of the workshops. the research ethics board of wilfrid laurier university approved the study procedures. key findings – critical thinking connected to the use of the ecological model as a tool for the workshop discussions, indicators of heightened critical consciousness were determined, for the purposes of this evaluation, to be expressions of critical thinking at systems levels beyond the individual. through data analysis, three forms of critical thinking emerged: systems thinking, reflective thinking, and empathic thinking. systems thinking. in terms of systems thinking, four of the youth felt that the workshops contributed to their understanding of the complexity of environmental issues, beyond the individual level. for example, gary (a pseudonym) expressed in his interview the importance of involving community in creating environmental change: ...some of the talk about how it was more useful to have the community do your work for you and have people from within the community working was really valuable to me...that really spoke to me because i’ve seen a lot of activism sort of stuff fail, i’ve read about it, because it’s just the types of groups trying to impose themselves on it without understanding the local community. systems thinking was also evident in the way the youth spoke about how they thought about their interactions with residents in their work with rtj. as discussed by paul in his interview: i mean lots of people in the suburban areas were talking about, you know, flexibility with the buses...way back when we were planning for creating suburbs and stuff like that we weren’t really thinking of public transportation as a surely viable option and it shows when you hear the concerns of the people. during the workshops, the youth identified factors at the level of the individual that influenced their environmental behaviors (e.g., how convenience, habits, and a desire for privacy affect people’s transportation choices) as well as certain factors at higher levels such as the presence of bike paths and accessible bus routes. with further guidance from the facilitators and feedback from each other, they were also able to identify more abstract forms of higherlevel factors, such as social norms, family rituals, and the influence of economics. the interactions between the individual and other ecological levels were also identified by the youth, acknowledging that higher levels (e.g., media) affect individual levels (e.g., sense of social status). the impact of the workshops on the youths’ thinking about systems levels was also noted by one of the team leaders in her journal, particularly the impact of this learning on conversations with residents: …it was definitely an eye opener [for the youth] into why certain issues are happening... when getting pledges and surveys the students end up global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   spending more time with the residents, and when i ask them why they took so long, it's because the students actually get into really good conversations with the residents about issues that i think the students are more knowledgeable on and more comfortable talking about now that they have been able to look at barriers and influences to certain issues, such as the [transit system] and biking lanes. awareness of the systemic levels that affect individuals’ environmental behaviors stands in contrast to the exclusive focus on individual-level influences that was evidenced through the pilot research. reflective thinking. three of the youth expressed reflective critical thinking in the context of conceptualizing environmental issues on higher systems levels during their interviews. alice, for example, reflected on the challenges of creating effective projects based on the experience of the group during their action project: “...it brought up some of the problems in actually implementing programs and logistics and stuff like that that a lot of people probably overlook when they’re initially planning something in their optimism.” also, paul provided an example of how the media component of the workshops caused him to become more conscious of how he thinks about the other media he is exposed to related to environmental issues: “i know not to believe everything i hear even, you know, watching the news... i know that being well informed is to have a better sense of what’s fact and what they’re just pulling out of thin air.” one of the team leaders described in her journal the importance of the reflection component of the workshops for the longterm impact of the content: “the reflection is really important… making the workshops not a one day event, but something that will hopefully stick with them for years to come.” the reflective thinking fostered by the workshops is a further dimension of critical thought that deepens the systems thinking component described above. empathic thinking. the third dimension of critical thinking found in the data was empathic thinking, which was discussed by three of the participants in their interviews. this type of consciousness was particularly related to the environmental justice themed workshop during which a media clip was shown that described the situation of an aboriginal community in sarnia, ontario that is being severely impacted by the toxic emissions of local industries. claire expressed in her interview how learning about this situation of environmental injustice affected her: “i’m more conscious of things that are happening, like this thing in sarnia too, that made me freak out a bit. i was telling my parents about it, how much there is air pollution, just because of that movie clip.” learning about this situation in sarnia also affected gary, who shared in his interview how this new information shaped his understanding of the state of environmental justice in canada: ...it shaped my perspective on discrimination against native people in canada because i guess i’d never really encountered that. i’d seen it as an artifact of the long past, like the pre-60s era...to see it so clearly and effectively documented in canada was so shocking to me. the dimension of empathic thinking provides further depth to the youths’ capacity for understanding the multiple dimensions and levels of climate change. key findings – critical action in addition to outcomes related to the participants’ thinking about environmental issues as social justice concerns, data also indicated that the workshops influenced the youths’ motivation to engage in environmental issues and their relationship with environmental change, both intra and interpersonally. motivation. one way in which the youth expressed that they felt motivated following their experience with the workshops was to take initiative to search out further information on their own and to inform others about environmental issues. seth explained in his interview how the environmental justice workshop motivated him to: become a bit more involved in certain things... i’ve been doing more research into the environmental policies of the canadian government and whatnot and sort of voicing my opinion more in class to try to get people involved in it. similar to seth’s actions to become more informed about canadian environmental policies, paul shared in his interview how in the future he intends to become an active environmental voter: i’ll definitely start paying attention a lot more than i regularly did... i’m going to try to get informed for voting in the future, you know, looking at their environmental policies is definitely something that i’ll start to do a lot more often. finally, claire shared in her interview how having access to further knowledge about environmental issues motivated her to live a more environmental lifestyle: global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9   it sort of really helped. just like the tiny things, like pumping up your tires and not going through a drive thru... since now i know it’s bad for the environment i won’t use it...it sort of really helped me in every-day life and i learned a lot about it too. this motivation to pursue further learning and action following the conclusion of the summer project and into their futures as adult citizens indicates a practical outcome of the workshops for participants’ involvement in environmental issues. relationship with environmental issues. the youth expressed that their relationship with environmental issues was altered in terms of their activities, their attitudes, and their plans for their future relationships with the environment. seth expressed in his interview how, in particular, he has become a more active environmental educator: i think it’s shown me more of an urgency to inform other people. i’d always assumed that people knew sort of the issues with global warming, but i’m starting to learn that a lot of people don’t and that’s not a good thing. this heightened engagement with environmental education identifies one dimension of a relationship with environmental issues. a further dimension of a relationship with environmental issues expressed by the youth relates to the capacity for systems thinking. gary described in his interview how the workshops helped him conceptualize the form of environmental action he hopes to pursue in the future on the community level: “...[the environmental justice workshop] started me thinking on i guess my current train of thought, like i was saying with community gardens, about working with marginalized groups and working from within the community more.” adopting environmental lifestyles by becoming active community workers and educators is a significant outcome of the workshops that has implications, beyond the youth themselves, for their interactions with others and with their communities. discussion the findings reported in the preceding section provide initial support for the ability of the workshops to raise critical consciousness of the multiple levels at work in issues of global climate change and to contribute to the participants’ active and critical engagement in environmental issues. in this section, we discuss the implications of these findings in relation to the community psychology concepts of ecological and systems thinking, social justice, and praxis. see table i for a summary of the connections between the evaluation’s key findings and these three community psychology concepts. table i. summary of connections between the evaluation's key findings and three relevant community psychology concepts community psychology concept evaluation findings key connections ecological & systems thinking critical thinking (systems) youth showed familiarity with the language and concepts of the ecological model and ability to conceptualize environmental issues at levels beyond the individual motivation youth expressed increased motivation to engage with environmental issues at levels beyond the individual relationship with environmental issues the youth expressed increased ability to take environmental action at levels beyond the individual, particularly sociopolitical actions social justice critical thinking (empathic) the youth expressed that exposure to information about environmental justice shaped their thinking about the injustices faced by others relationship with environmental issues the youth expressed attitudes, activities, and plans that were motivated by a concern for environmental justice praxis critical thinking (reflective, systems, & empathic) all three forms of critical thinking were contextualized within the youths’ personal experiences through reflection and discussion motivation the youth used reflections on their own learning to determine relevant actions they would be motivated to take ecological and systems thinking. the community psychology concept of ecological and systems thinking was reflected in the evaluation’s findings of critical systems thinking, motivation, and youths’ relationship with environmental issues. the use of the ecological model as a theoretical framework, which the youth learned to use with greater facility and complexity over time, seemed to provide useful and effective tools for thinking critically about systems levels beyond the individual. in particular, the youth global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  10   showed familiarity with the language and concepts of the ecological model and an ability to conceptualize environmental issues at levels beyond the individual. this indicates that the workshops were effective in helping the youth develop a pattern of critical thinking that fosters their ability to think of issues in terms of their full complexity. the participants’ increased familiarity with ecological levels seemed to influence the types of actions they were motivated to pursue because they reflected greater awareness of types of information and opportunities for action beyond the individual level (e.g., environmental voting behavior, seeking more information about canadian environmental policy) that the youth had not been sufficiently motivated to pursue previously. this also related to the participants’ relationship with environmental issues. motivation to pursue these types of activities suggested altered attitudes toward engagement in environmental topics; in this case the youth seemed to have developed keener awareness of the political, interpersonal, and community-based dimensions of environmental issues and their potential involvement in them. social justice. because of the framing of environmental issues in terms of social justice, the youth were exposed to information about situations of environmental injustice both globally and locally. several of the participants discussed the impacts of this information on their thinking about environmental issues. learning about the situation faced by people in the nearby city of sarnia (only 200 kilometers/125 miles away from waterloo) was described by the youth as being particularly powerful in the way it affected their thinking about the reality of environmental justice. framing the information as a social justice issue connected the students to the issue through an empathic response, such that they felt “shocked” and “freaked out” by the information. this was potentially more impactful than had the concepts been communicated as basic facts or information without the stories that accompanied them. the use of stories has been documented as being an effective tool in education; in terms of social justice and critical thinking, stories have “tremendous potential to engage students in sustained social critique if they are heard and considered” (enisco, 2011, p. 21). the personal connection with environmental justice experienced by the youth seemed to have influenced their relationship with environmental issues; their attitudes and plans were connected to a sense of “urgency to inform other people” and a desire to engage with marginalized groups in the community. praxis. the three components of critical thinking (systems, reflective, and empathic) identified in the data all provide evidence of a system of praxis, in line with freire’s (1970/2008) original conceptualization. the majority of the youths’ expressions of systems, reflective, or empathic thought were contextualized within their personal experiences and the discussion opportunities offered by the workshops. freire’s two aspects of praxis, reflection and action, were expressed by the youth in terms of how the opportunities to learn and discuss new issues in the workshops reinforced their action experiences, either within rtj when interacting with residents, or in their short-term and long-term personal lives when sharing these topics with others. in the short-term, the youth were provided with a cyclical, reinforcing process of reflect-act-reflect since time was provided in each workshop for discussion of how the previous workshop’s theme had become relevant in their work experiences. in the long-term, the youths’ motivation to do further research on environmental issues and to initiate conversations with others may continue this reflection-action-reflection process as they continue to develop their knowledge and skills. as such, motivation is likely to maintain this system of praxis as the youth engage in further action, reflection, and discussion related to environmental issues. conclusions the positive outcomes of this project were strongly linked to the contributions made by the concepts employed from community psychology. the five principles and practices integrated into the design and implementation of the education project – stakeholder participation, ecological and systems thinking, social justice, praxis, and empirical grounding – helped produce a high quality education program that impacted the participants’ thoughts and behaviors related to environmental issues. the project, guided by these concepts, also contributed to our partner organization, which continued to use the workshop content for training purposes based on the learning gained and capacity built during this project in 2009. finally, the process of explicitly linking theoretical concepts of community psychology to the practical work entailed by this project strengthened our conviction that we, as community psychology researchers and practitioners, have access to tools, resources, and knowledge that can make a significant contribution to the environmental movement. our ability to communicate complex issues in accessible ways, to engage diverse stakeholders in shared visioning, and to conceptualize action with a transformative potential are critical abilities in the search for environmental change strategies that go global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  1   march  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  11   beyond simple 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(2002). youth civic engagement in the twenty-first century. journal of research on adolescence, 12, 121-148. kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 reclaiming the village through education: re-awakening — tell your story sirena dieudonné keywords: narrative inquiry; storytelling; community practice; empowerment; resilience author biographies: sirena reneé dieudonné is a community psychologist working as an educator in the public-school system whose service includes both instructional and leadership roles. sirena believes her efforts in both of these fields seek to enrich and improve the lives of the students she serves as well as extend a service to the community. sirena has supported her students and the community in developing and delivering curriculum which is culturally conscious and specific to the needs of the students. sirena has served on and participated in joint district committees for discipline, special education, and the resilience team. sirena’s knowledge in the field is evidenced and supported by multiple certifications specific to special education, (learning behavior specialist, learning disabilities, and mental retardation) in both elementary and secondary education, child and day care services, art and principal certification. sirena holds a bachelor of arts and a bachelor of science degree in child and family from southern illinois university; a master of science in education, and a degree in special education from chicago state university. she is currently a doctoral candidate of community psychology at national louis university. sirena’s professional affiliations include the national society of leadership and success (nsls), council for exceptional children (cec), national education association (nea), society for community research and action (scra), psychologists for social responsibility (psysr), american evaluation association (aea), national association for the advancement of colored people (naacp), and the national urban league. global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 reclaiming the village through education: re-awakening – tell your story abstract how does one reclaim a village? this piece is about filling an empty space. a soul left to wither and die from knowledge stolen generations ago. i am only one person on a quest to reclaim knowledge meant to nourish my soul and generations to come. a journey which no one who has not experienced the emptiness, can understand. imagine, never at rest because of the yearn to learn, just who you are. so many souls left to wither away a slow and painful death. to die of starvation is a painful death. the pain from hunger, the body craving nourishment, yet none in sight. grabbing and clenching at your core leaving your body doubled over from pain. all life activity ceases to be carried out with clear focus because the nucleus of all human consciousness is centered around a basic need, nourishment. after all what is a body with no nourishment? an empty shell. the village, the place of protection and nourishment, once known is no more. this colonized environment has continued to snuff out the light of my people’s souls. the light has grown so dim we are losing control of who we once were, but there is power in our stories. we can keep our flames burning through our stories. sankofa, retrieve what was ours, go back, get your knowledge and return. reclaim the village. sankofa (pronounced sahn-koh-fah) is a word in the akan twi and fante languages of ghana that translates to “retrieve” (literally “go back and get”; san to return; ko to go; fa to fetch, to seek and take) and also refers to the bono adinkra symbol represented either with a stylized heart shape or by a bird with its head turned backwards while its feet face forward carrying a precious egg in its mouth. sankofa is often associated with the proverb, “se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi,” or “sankofa w’onkyir” which translates as: “it is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.”[1][2] it implores for africans to reach back into ancient history for traditions and customs that have been left behind. https://youtu.be/omfdleczdno original research conquering white supremacy with second-order change christopher corbett keywords: systemic change, community psychologist, root causes author biography: christopher corbett, is a nonprofit researcher and author of “advancing nonprofit stewardship through self-regulation: translating principles into practice” (kumarian press) which contains the illustrative bylaw provisions, along with many others. he is a member of arnova, istr and scra and has presented research at their conferences since 1994. recommended citation: corbett, c. (2023). conquering white supremacy with second-order change. global journal of community psychology practice, 14(3), 1 6. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: christopher corbett. email: chris_corbett1994@hotmail.com. republished from corbett, c. (2021). conquering white supremacy with second-order change. the community psychologist, 54(4), 1 -6, published on fall 2021, with the permission of the community psychologist (tcp). https://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:chris_corbett1994@hotmail.com global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 conquering white supremacy with second-order change as community psychologists (cps), we are trained with a unique set of values, skills and competencies. with that training, we are often able to understand community problems in ways others simply cannot, and we are often able to conceptualize or craft solutions others will never see. cps are also an optimistic lot. with that training, they very often are willing to confront the most complex, challenging problems communities face. given their values and training, with strong emphasis on primary prevention coupled with the critical importance of devising interventions that implement second-order change, and by applying their consultation skills, few problems go beyond what cps are willing and able to tackle. evidence of this is scra’s 2021 online conference. with its ambitious theme of “uprooting white supremacy” hundreds of cps have presented, or participated in, sessions on a wide range of topics that seek to debate, expose, solve or prevent many pernicious elements of systemwide racial bias and discrimination present today. the challenge ahead as idealistic, ambitious, and hopeful of an agenda as this is, much work lies ahead. as cps, the burden or responsibility remains to determine what it is that we can do, either individually, or with others, to gain incremental progress. what role, if any, lies ahead for me? can system-wide racial bias and discrimination be reversed or remediated where it is present, and prevented where it has not yet emerged? my answer is yes. with right understanding, and application of problem-solving methods and strategies, much incremental progress is possible. the preceding is predicated on application of cp principles, understanding root causes and systems that support the status-quo, and the application of second-order change solutions necessary for incremental and enduring change. what level of intervention? a first step in tackling a complex problem is to determine the level or levels of most effective intervention. one helpful method of identifying potential solutions is to disaggregate the issue or problem by sector. while there is not universal agreement on number of sectors, and researchers will quibble over the number, the three sector model has virtues of simplicity yet is capable of capturing the vast majority of formal and informal organizations that exist in society. for the purposes intended here, we will use the government, forprofit and nonprofit (or voluntary) sectors as highly inclusive of the various organizations within which systemic bias resides. with regard to the government sector, whether federal, state, or local levels, generally systemic bias problems and issues are primarily controlled, or remediated, through the elective and legislative process which lies outside the scope intended here. this leaves the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, capturing a very large portion of society’s institutions, as worthy targets of interventions designed by cps to remediate or prevent systemic bias and discrimination. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 where to intervene? considering the essential need for secondorder change, it is helpful to understand where exactly change may be directed to result in systemic change that is at least enduring, if not permanent. is there one intervention point, common to both for-profit and nonprofit sectors? the answer is yes; one intervention point common to both sectors are boards of directors. both for-profit and nonprofit organizations have board members where the former’s members are elected by stockholders, and the latter, by the membership, or other board members. a key question: how diverse are for-profit and nonprofit boards? some board data on diversity as usa today notes (j. guynn, march 16, b1), of 27,000 board members in the russell 2000 index, only 1467 or 5.4% are black. this exposes racial inequality at the top of corporate america. the article also reveals underrepresentation is even lower for black women. nor is usa today alone in reporting damaging diversity data. the new york times, reports despite years of efforts to diversify corporate boards, non-white board members went from 10% to 12.5% over five years. their reporter, peter eavis (september 16, 2020), reported black directors comprise only 4%, up from 3% in 2015. further, black women make up only 1.5% of 20,000 directors studied. it also notes board members have much power and that a “special board committee nominates new members” has the power to diversify boards by selecting non white-male candidates. reporting by both usa today and the new york times exposes the problem, and challenge, using data. both usa today and the new york times articles are long on criticism-yet lack action-based solutions. we are, however, pointed in the right direction given the noted source of power: the board of directors and “special board committee” that nominates. nonprofit board diversity with regard to nonprofit board diversity, according to board source (leading with intent, june 2021), its 2019 survey found a black board member level of 10% (p. 3). the report acknowledged high levels of dissatisfaction with the state of diversity, equity and inclusion (dei) among nonprofit executives, with 66% dissatisfied with the status-quo. the report further reported that only 29% of board chairs were satisfied their boards represented the communities they served. clearly, much progress is urgently needed on nonprofit boards as well. where to from here? many articles document lack of diversity on boards and excel at discussing the nature of the problem, urgent need for diversification, and, in some cases, the societal benefits of inclusion. while helpful in describing the problem, they fail to identify root causes and solutions. my purpose here: examine supporting data; root causes; and solutions for all for-profit and nonprofit boards in grave need of diversifying their organizations, while addressing the problem of external regulation. the “regulatory solution” dilemma as widely reported, the national association of securities dealers automated quotations (nasdaq) has proposed board diversity requirements, for companies on its exchange, by reporting race, gender, and lgbtq status, as self-disclosed by board members. also, it requires at least one woman and one from a racial minority or the lgbtq community--or to opt out. as reported by the albany times union (clare bryan, may 10), experts worry this proposal will inadvertently make matters worse by promoting more whiteness. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 moreover, as the article reports, the proposal has no requirement to elect a single person of color. the u.s. securities and exchange commission approved it on august 6 (ussec approval, august 6). this proposal illustrates the grave consequences of well-intended solutions, externally imposed, often directly or indirectly by government, that fail to remotely grasp root causes and the unintended consequences of solutions that stand to make matters even worse. while greater transparency externally imposed may reveal board composition, how will this move beyond superficial tokenism for boards not serious in the first place? as the article notes, there is a real risk of selecting “tokens”, for appearances sake, not giving them voice, nor valuing their views, resulting in window dressing. regulatory solutions often create false hopes and have unintended consequences that bureaucrats fail to grasp, or grasp but act solely on selfinterests. given the preceding, it is helpful and necessary to gain insight into root causes and identify systemic solutions, where proposed solutions are based on the board diversity practices of “a” rated nonprofits. that is, using self-regulation, internally imposed, rather than external regulation which may be cosmetic, voluntary or otherwise nonenforceable. root cause analysis the root cause is systemic board governance that consciously, or unconsciously, excludes minority candidates. the power to remedy lies at board level and boards will lie on a continuum, from opposed or highly resistant, to less resistant, or even welcoming a change in the status-quo. for boards that overtly favor a white or white dominant board, preserving the status-quo is the board’s prerogative. while they might favor token window dressing-they will refuse, or not readily enact, governance solutions to promote board diversification. in any case, there are systemic causes and diversity progress requires second-order systemic solutions that are enforceable by the board-not just cosmetic changes or wishful thinking. intervention point: board nominating committees the necessary intervention points are board nominating committees, where the power lies. the role they must play is first, to identify a diversity of candidates with requisite skills the board urgently needs and secondly, place that information in the board’s hands at the critical juncture when nominees are identified for approval by the board and/or other approving authority. boards approve nominations on regular term expiration schedule--but also intermittently when board vacancies occur unexpectedly due to unanticipated factors including illness or death, new work responsibilities, or performance dismissals to name a few. those unanticipated board nominations may occur, and be approved, with little or no notice, circumventing the best of intentions to pursue board diversification. both nomination junctures require intervention. illustrative bylaw provisions as a nonprofit researcher, i have examined the governance practices of “a” rated nonprofits as contained in their bylaws (corbett, 2011). while nonprofits need to diversify too, some have model provisions clearly designed to promote diversification. following are three illustrative bylaws designed to diversify boards and organizations that can be readily adopted by simple board motion. for enduring systemic change, focus must be on the nominating committee: http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 • the nominating committee shall evaluate and recommend candidates for the board and all committees. in evaluating candidates, consideration shall be given to (1) organizational needs, (2) board balance and diversity, (3) leadership ability, (4) availability to serve, and (5) other factors the board may specify including financial literacy. • the nominating committee when submitting nominations shall also report on the makeup of the board with regard to gender, race, and nationality. diversity shall also be considered in staff recruitment, and the president shall report annually to the board on the makeup of the staff. • the board shall fill all vacancies caused by resignation, removal, or death of any officer, board member, or nominating committee member upon recommendation of the nominating committee. (adapted from corbett 2011, p. 35; 2007). conclusion promoting board diversification through bylaws achieves second-order change. boards, operating with its nominating committee following very simple reporting requirements, at both nominating junctures, empower the board at critical times in the governance process. that is, such bylaw provisions empower boards not only to select from a diverse pool of candidates but annually monitor the whole organization. bylaws are approved, and are fully enforceable by the board, and achieve the potential of secondorder change-in contrast with “policies” that are malleable, changeable and often unenforceable. also, bylaw violation is a basis for termination. this approach avoids tokenism and enables the board to monitor and self-assess whether it is actually achieving progress in fulfilling its board approved diversity expectations. or, alternatively, empowers the board to implement necessary corrective action essential to achieve the board’s diversity prerogatives. compliance reporting enables enforcement (p.75-76). boards overtly biased are unlikely to embrace or approve such bylaws-but can, and should, be so exposed, and at the very least confrontedby any single board member given each member’s power to raise concerns for discussion and to propose new bylaws. moreover, if the confrontation is constructive, and the parties brought closer together, mutual adjustment becomes possible, as well as an evolution towards consensus on reforming the bylaws. the method identified here is designed to achieve structural change, through level iv consultation, identified as the highest or first choice of intervention and considering its prevention potential (parsons & meyers, 1985; 181,199). further, these bylaw provisions, if implemented and enforced, will alter “behavior settings” (moos, 1986; 214224), not only at the board level but across the entire organization, including all committees, by changing their compositions in a positive way, enabling many benefits of diversity and inclusion to be realized. community psychologists willing to take on dei advocacy directly through either nonprofit board service, or board level intervention as a paid or pro-bono consultant-have great potential to transform boards and organizations themselves, by strategically applying their values and skills to eliminate or mitigate both racial and gender bias at the organizations of their choice. cps can also building public awareness through community education and awareness, core competency #16, such as through op-ed publication to reach mass markets and many outlets where racial and gender justice is a high priority. as http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 illustration, usa today recently published my op-ed entitled: “sorry, but diversifying boardrooms does not go far enough” (corbett 2021). all the preceding illustrates the potential of cp consultancy as a highly valuable future training and education direction for the field with a focus on secondorder change. references corbett, c. (2021). sorry, but diversifying boardrooms does not go far enough. usa today regional network, august 5, 2021, b-1. corbett, c. (2011). advancing nonprofit stewardship through self-regulation: translating principles into practice. sterling, va: kumarian press/lynne rienner. corbett, c. (2007). preventing and remediating board bias in nonprofit organizations. poster presented at the annual conference of the association for research on nonprofit organizations and voluntary action, november 15-17, 2007 in atlanta, georgia. leading with intent. (june, 2021). board source index of nonprofit board practices. washington d.c.: board source. moos, r. (1986). the human context: environmental determinants of behavior. malabar, florida: krieger publishing. 5 fall 2021. parsons, r. & meyers, j. (1985). developing consultation skills. san francisco: jossey-bass. ussec approval (august 6, 2021). statement on the commission’s approval of nasdaq’s proposal for disclosure about board diversity and proposal for board recruiting service. printed august 7, 2021 from www.sec.gov. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.lohud.com/story/opinion/2021/08/06/diversity-corporate-america-does-not-start-end-boardrooms/5499370001/ https://www.lohud.com/story/opinion/2021/08/06/diversity-corporate-america-does-not-start-end-boardrooms/5499370001/ microsoft word 2014-005-final-20141210.docx adding to the hiv prevention portfolio – the achievement of structural changes by 13 connect to protect® coalitions kate s. chutuape, mph, adaline z. muyeed, phd, msc., nancy willard, ms, lauren greenberg, mph, jonathan m. ellen, md and the adolescent medicine trials network for hiv/aids interventions corresponding author: kate s. chutuape, mph department of pediatrics johns hopkins school of medicine baltimore, md 21224 phone: 202-255-4418 kchutua2@jhmi.edu author information ms. kate chutuape, mph, is project director for connect to protect® at johns hopkins university, school of medicine, baltimore, md, usa dr. adaline z. muyeed, ph.d., msc. is a senior epidemiologist and project director at westat in rockville, md, usa ms. nancy willard, ms, is a public health researcher at johns hopkins university, school of medicine, baltimore, md, usa ms. lauren greenberg, mph, is an epidemiologist at westat in rockville, md, usa dr. jonathan ellen, md, is protocol chair and president of all children’s hospital in st. petersburg, fl, usa key words: hiv prevention, adolescents, community mobilization, structural change, coalition funding: this work was supported by the adolescent trials network for hiv/aids interventions (atn) from the national institutes of health [u01 hd 040533 and u01 hd 040474] through the national institute of child health and human development (b. kapogiannis, s. lee)], with supplemental funding from the national institutes on drug abuse (k. davenny and r. jenkins) and mental health (p. brouwers, s. allison). connect to protect has been scientifically reviewed by the atn’s behavioral and community prevention leadership groups. recommended citation: chutuape, k., muyeed, a. z., willard, n., greenberg, l., & ellen, j. (2014). adding to the hiv prevention portfolio – the achievement of structural changes by 13 connect to protect® coalitions, global journal of community psychology practice, 5(2), 1-8. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume&5,&issue&2& dec&2014& & global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice,&http://www.gjcpp.org/&& page&2& acknowledgments the authors would like to thank vincent t. francisco, phd, university of north carolina at greensboro and mauri a. ziff, phd, for their invaluable advice needed to conceptualize and initiate this study. in addition, we recognize the significant contributions of bendu c. walker, mph, johns hopkins university school of medicine, marie alexander, bs, westat and james korelitz, phd, westat for their technical assistance and analytical support. in addition, the authors acknowledge the atn community advisory board and the youth who contributed to this study. we acknowledge the contribution of the investigators and staff at the following atn sites that participated in connect to protect: children’s diagnostic and treatment center (ana puga, md, jessica roy, msw, jamie blood, msw); childrens hospital of los angeles (marvin belzer, md, miguel martinez, msw/mph, veronica montenegro, julia dudek, mph); john h. stroger jr. hospital of cook county and the core center (lisa henry-reid, md, jaime martinez, md, ciuinal lewis, ms, antionette mcfadden, ba); children’s hospital national medical center (lawrence d’angelo, md, william barnes, phd, stephanie stines, mph) montefiore medical center (donna futterman, md, michelle lyle, mph, bianca lopez, mph); mount sinai medical center (linda levin-carmine, md, meg jones, mph, michael camacho, ba); tulane university health sciences center (sue ellen abdalian, md, sybil schroeder, phd); university of maryland (ligia peralta, md, bethany griffindeeds, phd, kalima young,ba); university of miami school of medicine (lawrence friedman, md, kenia sanchez, msw); children's hospital of philadelphia (bret rudy, md, marne castillo, phd, alison lin, mph); university of puerto rico (irma febo, md, carmen rivera rn, mph), university of california at san francisco (barbara moscicki, md, johanna breyer, msw, kevin sniecinski, mph) and university of south florida (patricia emmanuel, md, amanda schall, ma, rachel stewartcampbell, ba). network, scientific and logistical support was provided by the atn coordinating center (c. wilson, c. partlow) at the university of alabama at birmingham. network operations and analytic support was provided by the atn data and operations center at westat, inc. (j. korelitz, b. driver, r. mitchell, m. alexander, and d. monte). global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume&5,&issue&2& dec&2014& & global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice,&http://www.gjcpp.org/&& page&3& adding to the hiv prevention portfolio – the achievement of structural changes by 13 connect to protect® coalitions abstract opportunities to control risk factors that contribute to hiv transmission and acquisition extend far beyond individuals and include addressing social and structural determinants of hiv risk, such as inadequate housing, poor access to healthcare and economic insecurity. the infrastructure within communities, including the policies and practices that guide institutions and organizations, should be considered crucial targets for change. this paper examines the extent to which 13 community coalitions across the u.s. and puerto rico were able to achieve “structural change” objectives (i.e., new or modified practices or policies) as an intermediate step toward the long-term goal of reducing hiv risk among adolescents and young adults (12-24 years old). the study resulted in the completion of 245 objectives with 70% categorized as structural in nature. coalitions targeted social services, education and government as primary community sectors to adopt structural changes. a median of 12 key actors and six new key actors contributed to accomplishing structural changes. structural change objectives required a median of seven months to complete. the structural changes achieved offer new ideas for community health educators and practitioners seeking to bolster their hiv prevention agenda. key words: hiv prevention, adolescents, community mobilization, structural change, coalition introduction because human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) is primarily acquired through volitional behavior (e.g., unprotected sexual intercourse and needle sharing), prevention efforts have largely focused on modifying personal behavior to reduce risk of hiv exposure (coyle et al., 2006; peterson & diclemente, 2000; johnson, scott-sheldon, huedomedina & carey, 2011). however, as we progress further in the field of hiv prevention, complementary interventions that address the broader social and structural determinants of hiv risk, such as unstable housing, poor access to healthcare and economic insecurity, must be considered (raymond, chen, syme, catalano, hutson & mcfarland, 2014; dean & fenton, 2010; denning & dinenno, 2010). the national hiv/aids strategy acknowledges the role community and contextual factors have in enabling the spread of hiv, particularly in communities hardest hit by hiv where individuals may experience a myriad of debilitating issues that compromise their overall well-being (the white house office of national aids policy, 2010). of concern, 26% of all new hiv infections in 2010 occurred among youth ages 13 to 24 years and within this same age group, 60% of new infections were among african american youth and 20% were among hispanic youth (cdc, 2012; cdc, 2010). in response, structural change interventions that are focused on the physical, social, cultural, political, economic, legal, and/or policy aspects of the environment can play a necessary and significant role in addressing hiv acquisition and transmission (gupta, parkhurst, ogden, aggleton & mahal, 2008; frieden, 2010). unlike interventions targeting individual or group behavior, structural change interventions have the potential to be sustained over many years and can reach large groups of people. they don’t seek to directly influence the decisions or actions of individuals but rather attempt to modify the environment in which individuals live, work and socialize (sumartojo, 2000; blankenship, bray & nerson, 2000). the range of structural change interventions that have been adopted within hiv prevention is limited and has typically focused on influencing risk factors that are proximally related to hiv transmission and acquisition, such as mandatory condom use in bath houses and laws allowing clean needle exchange (abdul-quader et al., 2013; ko et al., 2009; sakondhavat, 1997). however, as the field moves toward addressing broader contextual factors that influence hiv risk, developing a deeper understanding of the types of structural change interventions that are feasible to achieve and the process involved can enhance the efforts of coalitions focused on community change. the purpose of this paper is to describe how 13 connect to protect® (c2p) coalitions located in urban areas across the u.s. and puerto rico were able to develop and achieve structural change interventions focused on hiv prevention for youth 12-24 years old by utilizing a community mobilization model. the findings are an intermediate step toward a longer term goal (not examined as part of this paper) of influencing hiv risk behaviors. this research sought to answer the following questions: 1) were coalitions able to achieve structural changes that met the study definition and, if so, what types of structural changes were achieved? global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume&5,&issue&2& dec&2014& & global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice,&http://www.gjcpp.org/&& page&2& 2) among the structural changes achieved, which community sectors (e.g., government, healthcare, education) were targeted (i.e., where did coalitions find opportunity and buy-in for structural-level change to be adopted)? 3) what level of community mobilization (e.g., amount of activity, number of people involved) was required to achieve structural changes? connect to protect® (c2p) in 2002, the adolescent medicine trials network for hiv/aids interventions (atn), a national institutes of health research network, initiated connect to protect® (c2p). the coalitions described in this paper are located in baltimore, md; los angeles and san francisco, ca; the district of columbia; chicago, il; miami, ft. lauderdale and tampa, fl; philadelphia, pa; new orleans, la; bronx and manhattan, ny; and san juan, puerto rico. with one paid coordinator, atn sites launched a local c2p coalition in 2006 with the primary focus being to advocate for structural level changes, defined as new or modified practices or policies that reduce hiv risk for 12-24 year olds. details related to coalition development and partner formation are provided in previously published papers (ziff, harper, chutuape, deeds, futterman, francisco & ellen, 2006; geanuracos, cunningham, weiss, forte, henry-reid & ellen, 2007; straub, deeds, willard, castor, peralta & ellen, 2007). a national coordinating center (ncc) provided technical assistance, training and support. the study was reviewed and approved by each participating atn site’s institutional review board and by johns hopkins university, the home institution of the principle investigator of the c2p study. methods development of “structural change objectives” coalitions used the vmosa strategic planning process of defining vision, mission, objectives, strategies and action steps. objectives were written using the smart format (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely) (fawcett, francisco & paine-andrews, 2000; kansas university work group for community health and development, 2007). a four-part definition was used to define and classify an objective as a “structural change:” (1) a new or modified policy, practice, program or change to the physical environment; (2) logically linked to reduction in hiv transmission or acquisition; (3) directly or indirectly impacts the target population; and (4) sustainable beyond the involvement of the coalition. to assist with developing structural changes, a c2p logic model depicted in figure 1 was created to illustrate the linkage between coalition objectives and the core risk factors contributing to hiv acquisition (e.g., number of sex partners, high-risk sex partners, and sex partner concurrency) and transmission (e.g., condom/clean needle use, sexually transmitted infection [sti] co-infection, and viral load) (may & anderson, 1987). the logic model was used initially during the coalition’s strategic planning meetings where local issues were identified and objectives developed. the logic model served as a mechanism to prompt coalition members to (1) review and understand the six primary risk factors that contribute to hiv transmission and acquisition (2) prompt brainstorming around hiv risks that youth experienced locally and (3) discuss solutions that could minimize or eliminate these risks, and ultimately lead to better health outcome. to encourage consideration of multiple targets for change, a list of 12 possible “sectors” was used to prompt coalition dialogue. sectors were derived from the community tool box and are classifications of various groups of organizations or people from the larger community into smaller groups represented by common social, political, economic, cultural, religious or other mutually shared interest. (kansas university work group for community health and development, 2007). analysis study sample and inclusion/exclusion criteria the study sample is the total number of objectives (n=245) completed by the c2p coalitions over five years. objectives were considered “complete” when a series of actions led to the adoption of the intended change (i.e., acceptance of a new policy) or integration of a new or modified practice by the entity, organization or system that was targeted. in total, the 13 coalitions initiated work on 522 objectives over the course of the study period; of these, 186 were ultimately discontinued by the coalitions and 91 were still active or pending at the close of the study period. discontinued and active objectives were not included in the analysis. data sources 14# # figure 1: connect to protect (c2p) coalition logic model figure 1 caption: the c2p coalition logic model depicts the steps contributing to the intermediate outcome of achieving structural changes via a community mobilization process. over five years, the c2p coalitions completed 245 objectives, 70% of which targeted structural determinants of hiv risk within the community, such as access to health and social services. partner concurrency high risk partners number of partners condom/clean needle use sti co-infection viral load # hiv acquisition (i.e., fewer/reduced risk partner) hiv transmission (i.e., use of condoms, clean needles, routine hiv testing) cc reduce rates of hiv health outcome behavioral outcome individual risk factors local problem statement root cause analysis sector identification objective development # # # strategic planning community mobilization completed objectives reduction in community risk conditions via structural changes intermediate outcome healthier options as “default” global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume&5,&issue&2& dec&2014& & global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice,&http://www.gjcpp.org/&& page&3& c2p coordinators completed study forms to track the status of the objectives (i.e., open, modified, completed or discontinued); describe action steps taken towards achieving an objective (action steps were defined as being sizable and significant with an outcome that supports completion of the objective); and identify the sector targeted to make the change and the number of existing and new coalition members responsible for completing an action step. description of variables type of objective in order to assess the success of c2p coalitions in achieving the study goal of identifying and achieving structural changes, we developed a dichotomous variable to represent the ‘type of completed objective.’ objectives directly seeking to modify individuals’ risk behavior (e.g., distribution of educational brochures) were classified as “individual changes” whereas objectives seeking to modify a program, practice or policy that influences a contextual feature of the community were classified as “structural changes.” a systematic review and cross-coding process involving study team members and in some instances, c2p coordinators, was used to classify the completed objectives. approximately 80% of the team’s coding was consistent. any inconsistencies resulted in follow up discussion, collection of additional information if needed, and a second review for consensus. we found it helpful to consider four questions to distinguish between ‘structural’ (s) changes and ‘individual’ (i) changes. first, does the objective work by distributing information or resources, such as brochures, to the target population (i) or does it affect a feature of the environment that affects risk level, such as a policy to require shelter beds designated for youth (s)? second, does the objective require the target population to make a behavior change to receive benefit of the change (i) or does the change target other individuals who influence the youth’s environment, such as teachers or providers (s)? third, does the scope of the objective affect a single entity (i), two or more entities (s) or a government system (s)? fourth, is the objective linked to a specific event, such as an annual conference, thereby suggesting an infrequent “dosage” (i) or is the objective tied to an ongoing practice or timeless change tied to the environment (s)? diversity of community sectors coalitions targeted various sectors of the community for change in order to address underlying issues related to hiv risk such as access to health care, housing security and prioritization of health department prevention funding. sectors targeted by the coalitions’ objectives were analyzed as a way to assess where coalition members were able to gain entrance and develop buy-in for their ideas. community mobilization variables in order to assess the level of community mobilization and engagement needed (e.g., people, resources and time) to achieve objectives, we examined five indicators that were captured as part of the ongoing documentation process. mobilization indictors included the action steps taken towards completing each objective, the number of people (“key actors”) who played a significant role in the completion of an action step, the number of new key actors joining the coalition’s work for the first time, the sector that key actors represented and the duration of time to complete each objective. recording the number of key actors was a proxy for measuring the levels of community engagement and the number of new key actors served as a proxy for determining the expansion of mobilization in the community (in contrast to relying on the same individuals to complete the work). univariate and bivariate descriptive analyses were run on all variables of interest to examine the overall profile of completed objectives and the comparison of the characteristics for individual versus structural changes. statistical tests of association were performed to investigate potential differences between individual and structural change objectives. fisher’s exact tests were used for categorical variables and non-parametric wilcoxon tests for continuous variables. results structural change objectives completed the majority of the objectives (172/245 or 70%) completed were classified as structural changes, while 30% (73/245) were classified as individual changes. within every coalition, there was significant focus on structural change objectives, which comprised 50% to 97% of each coalition’s total objectives. common types of structural change objectives focused on creating new linkages between two or more organizations to increase youths’ access to hiv or health-related services, modifying organizational policies to increase provider competency around youth and lgbt culture, modifying policies within schools, detention facilities and faith-based institutions to increase availability of hiv prevention resources, reducing barriers for youth seeking healthcare and modifying policies related to data collection and allocation of hiv resources. examples include establishing health and wellness centers at all public high schools in san francisco, eliminating parental consent requirements for individuals under 21 years who are seeking hiv/sti testing in puerto rico, mandating hiv risk reduction classes for all 9th graders in the district of columbia and establishing a state-level board to oversee mandatory cultural competency training for public school staff. additional examples of structural change objectives across four sectors (social service, global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume&5,&issue&2& dec&2014& & global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice,&http://www.gjcpp.org/&& page&4& schools, government and legal/justice) are provided in table 1. in general, objectives classified as individual changes sought to develop brochures, resource directories or websites, or were one-time events, such as a health fair. table 1: examples of structural change objectives by sector achieved by c2p coalitions (2006-2011) sector examples social service • two social service agencies located in neighborhoods with high sti/hiv morbidity rates provides ‘safe space’ for lgbt youth to socialize and access structured activities. • youth drop-in center, transitional housing program & agency serving minority youth partner to offer health screenings and support groups to clients. • homeless shelter employs a youth navigator to link youth to support services. • agency serving youth released from juvenile detention formalizes a hiv counseling and testing referral process with local hiv testing agency • children’s center collaborates with local health department and hospital to start offering free health screenings, including hiv counseling and testing, to individuals 18 years and older. • foster care agency provides hiv education to youth entering group homes. • staff of state-wide housing provider begins to receive annual training on lgbt issues. • aids service organizations serving high-risk youth with unstable housing will begin practice of providing hygiene kit to youth clients. • shelter links homeless youth clients with social services. schools • community college establishes a task force to assess and address students’ health needs. • state-wide aclu & statelevel department of education established an anti-bullying and harassment board to ensure statewide implementation of cultural competency training for school staff. • school district allows hiv/sti testing on school grounds. • school district opens wellness centers to provide health education services at all city high schools. • school-based health centers have a new protocol for linking hiv+ youth to care. • alternative school registered as an hiv testing site with the department of health. • public schools mandate hiv risk-reduction classes for 9th grade. • school district health advisory committee establishes a subcommittee to provide technical assistance to staff responsible for teaching the sexual health curriculum. • city teachers receive routine training on issues related to sexual minority youth. government • department of health surveillance office uses maps with geographic hiv/sti data to coordinate outreach and prevention efforts. • state aids administration collaborates with a hospital to coordinate state-funded hiv prevention services • code of state regulations now includes addressing needs and protections of sexual minority youth in group homes, independent living and treatment facilities. • office of aids programs and policies develops new protocols for: (1) referring hiv+ youth to care and (2) transitioning hiv+ youth to adult care. • department of mental health opens three satellite offices for youth. • local law amended to allow (1) allied health staff to offer hiv counseling and testing; and (2) youth under age 21 to receive hiv test without parental consent. • department of human services grantee funding is contingent on adherence to best practices for serving sexual minority youth. site monitoring visits include best practices checklist. • office of aids programs and policies offers youth specific training for hiv counseling and testing staff. • child and family services require foster care parents to receive training about sexual minority youth. • department of parks and recreation requires after school staff to be trained about sexual minority youth. • department of health clinics provide referrals for employment training to youth tested for hiv/sti. legal justice • department of health registers departments of juvenile justice and • depts. of juvenile justice and juvenile services link hiv+ detainees to medical care upon • department of juvenile justice offers hiv education to all detained youth. global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume&5,&issue&2& dec&2014& & global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice,&http://www.gjcpp.org/&& page&5& juvenile services as hiv testing sites. release. • dept. of juvenile services offers hiv testing when processing youth into detention. • at discharge from juvenile detention, youth are sent to medical services and receive hiv education discharge packets from trained medical staff. diversity of community sectors all of the 12 sectors were targeted by at least one completed objective; however the three most common sectors were social services (23%; 40/172), education/schools (22%; 38/172) and government (20%; 34/172), as illustrated in table 2. social service organizations typically included organizations providing basic needs, such as housing, hiv support services or job training, as well as those providing youth-oriented services (i.e., mentoring). the government sector included objectives targeting city agencies and offices, such as the department of health, department of child & family services, city council and the mayor’s office. the least common sectors targeted by coalition objectives were youth not representing a particular organization or agency, civic organizations, law enforcement, media, and parents/guardians/other family members. given the small number, these sectors are collapsed within the “other” category in table 2. community mobilization indicators for structural change objectives, a median value of three action steps was required to complete the objective. twelve key actors and six new key actors contributed to accomplishing the change. key actors represented a median value of three sectors. a median of seven months was needed to complete a structural change objective. key actor contribution to completion of individual changes was the only mobilization indicator that was statistically significant, with a median value of 10 key actors. discussion researchers have acknowledged the need for expanding the portfolio of hiv prevention interventions to address contextual factors contributing to hiv risk behavior (gupta, parkhurst, ogden, aggleton & mahal, 2008; prado, lightfoot & brown, 2013). structural change has been identified as a powerful and necessary complement to existing interventions. to be effective, however, the development of structural change interventions must be localized to the environmental context and include a diversity of community stakeholders to contribute to the process. unlike behavioral interventions targeting the knowledge, attitudes and skills of a specific cohort of individuals, structural change interventions target community systems and structures and thus have the potential for modifying the risk environment. expanding the range of structural changes for hiv prevention we present a community mobilization study that promoted the development and completion of 245 objectives with 70 percent identified as structural changes. the c2p process involving root cause analysis aided coalitions in thinking deeply and broadly about the types of structural changes that could contribute to meaningful change in their community (willard, chutuape, stines & ellen, 2012). one benefit of this approach was that coalitions often pursued multiple objectives targeting one goal, thereby increasing the likelihood of penetrating a defined problem. for example, one coalition identified a need to create better services and policies to support homeless sexual minority youth in the city. their discussion led to three root cause areas: lack of culturally competent homeless providers, limited safe shelter spaces and a need for supportive housing programs and funding for youth. this prompted the creation of four structural change objectives. three objectives targeted government agencies that oversee public shelters and foster care to ensure that, as a funding requirement, approved cultural competency practices are adhered to by case managers, housing staff and foster care parents. another objective formalized a shelter procedure to ensure that youth clients are actively referred to agencies that provide housing and support services for sexual minority youth. 17# # note: the category “other sectors” includes the following sectors: youth individuals not representing a particular organization or agency; civic organizations; law enforcement; media; parents/guardians/other family members; and objectives classified by the coalitions as “other sector.” # global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume&5,&issue&2& dec&2014& & global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice,&http://www.gjcpp.org/&& page&6& there was a learning curve for coalitions to move from considering behavior change outcomes (focused on individuals) to structural change outcomes (focused on community structures). we observed that it was challenging for coalitions to develop structural objectives that targeted risk factors linked to hiv acquisition (i.e., number of sex partners, high-risk sex partners and sex partner concurrency). examples of objectives that attempted to address these factors focused on creating alternative safe social spots for youth at a business, recreation center or school. some coalitions were able to work with a government entity, such as the department of recreation, to institute city-wide changes related to safe spaces. coalitions with a higher percentage of objectives classified as structural focused more on the government sector to make policy or practice changes, such as efforts by one coalition to advocate for hiv testing as part of the detention facilities intake and discharge process. whereas, coalitions that had a higher concentration of objectives focused on individual behavior change were more likely to target the social service sector. these objectives often involved providing education about where youth could receive testing, rather than creating more testing opportunities. while both approaches are important, the policy changes that target systems and agencies to deliver their care and services differently may ultimately have broader scope and impact, as well as potentially be more sustainable than those utilizing behavior change strategies. engaging a diversity of sectors addressing the myriad of social and structural factors related to hiv risk requires practitioners to look beyond the traditional hiv prevention and health service sectors. we found that one benefit of pursuing structural change is engagement of a diversity of sectors in the mobilization process. this has the collateral benefit of elevating the importance of hiv prevention among a broader array of community members and organizations and increasing awareness and acceptance of issues impacting at-risk youth. some sectors did prove difficult to engage (e.g., family members, unaffiliated youth) likely because they are not organized entities with formalized structures, practices and budgets in place. a sector such as media was more likely to be utilized by the coalition as part of a broader strategy to achieve an objective (e.g., hosting a press conference or meeting with a reporter to discuss coalition work) rather than as a target for change. within the social service sector, our study demonstrates a traditional focus on increasing access to hiv testing, condoms and educational resources with several objectives establishing unconventional venues, such as the public library, as places that began offering hiv-related services. other objectives within this sector sought to form a new partnership, such as uniting a cultural center with a service agency to offer hiv testing on routine basis. examples of objectives that moved beyond agency scope and were more likely to modify the contextual environment included statelevel coordination of state-funded hiv/aids prevention services for men who have sex with men and sexual minorities throughout central maryland. not surprisingly, the education sector was also a popular target for change. in this area, objectives included working with secondary schools to start teaching health education at an earlier grade (e.g., in 7th rather than 9th grade) and working with a board of education to permit on-campus hiv testing via a mobile testing unit. the majority of coalitions completed at least one objective targeting a government entity, which we found encouraging given the inherent challenges of influencing larger systems. community mobilization for hiv prevention coalitions often serve as effective vehicles for engaging in community mobilization by creating a framework for community stakeholders to actively pursue mutually desirable goals (roussos & fawcett, 2000; wolff, 2001). our findings show a low number of action steps needed to complete a structural change but a fairly high number of individuals (key actors) involved in completing action steps. this suggests that structural changes rely on engaging multiple stakeholders in the community in order to reach the “right” people, such as decision-makers, who can approve a structural change idea. the low number of action steps is unexpected and points to an issue of variation across sites as to which action steps were recorded in the study database. more action steps may have been completed by a coalition partner but not reported to the c2p coordinator for data entry. in addition, we would have assumed that structural change would require significantly more time to complete, given that structural changes often involve modifying organizational policies or altering the way business is conducted. while that may be the case for some objectives, we were encouraged to see that it took a similar amount of time to complete a structural change objective (seven months) as it did an individual change objective (six months). limitations we recognize that classification of the objectives as either “individual changes” or “structural changes” is subject to bias. there are no scientific benchmarks that clearly place an objective in one category or the other and our coding may not have adequately taken into account the full range of implications. however, we worked with concepts previously discussed in the literature, such as sustainability, and scope and barriers targeted, to better understand and describe what a community driven initiative may produce in terms of structural changes. furthermore, the full implications of completed objectives may not have been known at the time (e.g., how many and which sectors are ultimately impacted by change). also, this analysis does not present individual coalition results and, therefore, does global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice& volume&5,&issue&2& dec&2014& & global&journal&of&community&psychology&practice,&http://www.gjcpp.org/&& page&7& not fully represent the variation in local coalition capacity and achievement of c2p goals. finally, while we believe this research fills a gap in knowledge, we recognize that a next step requires examination of how structural change interventions may contribute to longer-term behavioral and health outcomes. conclusion opportunities to control factors that contribute to hiv acquisition and transmission extend far beyond individuals. the infrastructure within communities, including the policies and practices that guide institutions and organizations, should be considered crucial targets for intervening as public health professionals seek to expand their repertoire of hiv prevention strategies. through this research, a range of achievable structural changes emerged and provide a platform for communities to pursue a holistic hiv prevention agenda. references abdul-quader, a. s., feelemyer, j., modi, s., stein, e. s., briceno, a., semaan, s. horvath t., kennedy g., & des jarlais, d. c. 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(2012). bridging the gap between individual level risk for hiv and structural determinants: using root cause analysis in strategic planning. journal of prevention and intervention in the community, 40(2), 103-117. wolff, t. a practitioner’s guide to successful coalitions. (2001). american journal of community psychology, 29 (2), 173-191. ziff, m., harper,g., chutuape, k., deeds, b., futterman, d., francisco, v., & ellen, j. (2006). laying the foundation for connect to protect: a multisite community mobilization intervention to reduce hiv/aids incidence and prevalence among urban youth. journal of urban health, 83(3), 506-522. 2013-001accsi-20131015 community psychology practice competencies: a global perspective susan m. wolfe, susan wolfe and associates, llc victoria chien scott, empowering solutions, llc tiffeny r. jimenez, national louis university guest co-editors author notes: susan m. wolfe, phd, is the ceo of susan wolfe and associates, llc. victoria chien scott, phd mba, is the owner of empowering solutions, llc. tiffeny r. jimenez, phd, is an assistant professor at national louis university. keywords: community psychology, competencies, community practice recommended citation: wolfe, s. m., chien-scott, v., & jimenez, t. r. (2013). community psychology practice competencies: a global perspective. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), 1-9. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   community psychology practice competencies: a global perspective susan m. wolfe, susan wolfe and associates, llc victoria chien, empowering solutions, llc tiffeny r. jimenez, national louis university guest co-editors community psychology is a unique field of community science incorporating research and action that seeks to promote social change by challenging the status quo and promoting social justice. accordingly, within this special issue, we challenge our current educational practices in the belief that we could have greater impact if we were more intentional and consistent in the development of professionals of the field who work in more applied positions. it is within these action-focused positions that we expect to most affect change within communities. our educational opportunities in community-based research methods have been consistent across training programs; however, those competencies alone are not enough to create the change we wish to see. in addition to our desire to enhance educational opportunities for action-based community psychologists, clarifying the role of a community psychologist, and further creating and identifying employment opportunities for such community psychologists, are of equal importance. the role of community psychologists is not clear. while this lack of clarity has been argued to be an important aspect of the creativity inherent in the role of a community psychologist, clearer and consistent understanding of the qualities of a community psychologist could enhance the ability of the field to advertise for jobs and market graduates. developing a clearer understanding of the qualities of community psychologist will help everyone of the field to better understand what a community psychologist is and does. this level of clarity can provide a framework upon which to design curricula for students, and professional development opportunities for those already working in our communities. in response to the gap between existing educational opportunities and the competencies necessary to facilitate community change, the society for community research and action executive council recently approved 18 core competencies associated with community psychology practice in the united states (see dalton & wolfe, 2012). as these competencies were under development, there was some debate regarding the inclusion and exclusion of competencies, how the competencies may be used, and to what extent educational programs should be expected to provide students with opportunities to learn all of the competencies. discussions also included the extent to which these competencies, developed in the united states, were relevant to community psychology practice internationally. for this special issue of the global journal of community psychology practice (gjcpp) we invited community psychologists to discuss the role of community psychology competencies in their countries, particularly in relation to the conceptualization and enactment of education programs. responses were received from western australia, italy, egypt, and the united states. while this is by no means a representative sampling of community psychology education globally, we are hopeful that it will open dialogue and encourage more community psychologists to comment on how competencies may apply or not in other cultural contexts in the future. the submissions to this special issue provide insight into the range of considerations surrounding cp competencies and highlight their contextual relevance. the first three articles provide insight into competencies in other nations. the first, by peta dzidic, lauren breen and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   brian bishop of australia, provides a critical analysis of the core competencies recently developed. the authors present limitations of the competencies as currently constructed by those in the united states, describes how competencies as defined in the united states are not consistent with good practice of community psychology, and suggest that these current conceptualizations of competencies represent a rift between competencies and ethics. the authors conclude by presenting a case against what they describe as “procedural competencies” and propose an approach to competencies more focused on the values and practice of contextualized community psychology in action termed “virtue competencies.” perhaps most thought provoking about this article is the contention that reliance on such static competencies does not allow for the learning and skill development required of a community psychologist navigating in a complex and chaotic world that actually requires an ability to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty. the second article, by donata francescato and bruna zani describes specific intervention strategies that have been developed in italy and europe, and explores the challenges facing cp education in italy. the first intervention method is community profiling and network building which is a technique that allows students to explore a local community from different perspectives integrating both objective and subjective knowledge, while drawing on a variety of research methods. this intervention strategy encourages participants to look at a community from eight viewpoints, encourages networking among different groups, and identifies target points within the community for creating change. the second intervention strategy is multidimensional organizational analysis (moa) which engages members across an organization to analyze it on four dimensions – structural-strategic, functional, psychoenvironmental, and cultural. a third intervention strategy is socio-political empowerment training which aims to help students become aware of how different branches of psychology are the product of the historical zeitgeist and the values and interests of their practitioners. finally, they describe the use of “future labs” as an education/intervention strategy to encourage students to fully explore a social problem and brainstorm all possible solutions. these tools may be of great use to other cp education programs in various contexts. the third article, by amy carillo and carie forden illustrates how contextual factors, such as politics, social class, and cultural climate, influence the usefulness of the competencies in egypt. the article addresses each of the u.s. competencies, their relevance, and even appropriateness in egypt. overall, the authors conclude there is a need to emphasize different competencies, and to adapt some to accommodate eygpt’s cultural and political factors. however, the competencies are viewed as relevant, in general, and useful for developing the curriculum and setting goals for the master’s program. the authors also discuss how the competencies have been helpful for educating students about the practice skills they will gain through their graduate program. these international perspectives together provide ample food for thought for future development and dissemination of cp competencies as they were developed in the u.s. these perspectives also suggest that there is great potential for the field to continue to grow and develop with increased interaction between community psychologists internationally. we sincerely hope this is merely the first few of many international commentaries on the use and development of cp competencies moving forward. the remaining four articles are from the united states. the first of these, by christina holt, stephen fawcett, jerry schultz, bill berkowitz, thomas wolff and vincent francisco, describes global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   the community tool box (ctb), an online resource with step-by-step instructional modules for each of the 16 competencies. the authors used google analytics to examine the amount of traffic on the site, and explore patterns of user choices of the competencies. the results demonstrate the worldwide demand for competency building resources. the ctb has been translated into spanish (language and cultural translation) and 16% of site usage is on the spanish language site, suggesting that further translation and cultural adaptations in other languages would further extend the reach of this widely used tool. the second u.s. article, by chris kirk and william neigher, describes the intersection between changes in the u.s. healthcare system and the need for community psychology competencies to facilitate change. the authors show a direct relationship between the competencies that were defined by scra and application of the competencies within a healthcare setting. their goal is to encourage community psychologists to consider such settings for practice; however, it might also be beneficial to disseminate this article to health care institutions to demonstrate the added value community psychologists can bring to the effectiveness of their organizations. the last two articles from the u.s. are focused on community psychology graduate education. the first, by gregor sarkisian and sylvie taylor, describes the use of curriculum mapping to integrate the competencies into graduate education programs. this six-step collaborative process includes both students and faculty in the process. through this process, graduate programs can determine the extent to which they train students in each of the competencies, which courses they may want to further develop or add, and possibly identify faculty from other programs to partner with, or courses in other programs that are relevant. the second of these two articles, by gregor sarkisian, ameerah saleem, jeremy simpkin, ann weidenbacher, natalie bartko, and sylvie taylor, presents a case study of how students in one program learned the practice competencies. students collaborated with faculty to utilize course mapping, focus groups and reflective writing to gain a full understanding of how learning activities and class processes contributed to learning the competencies. this special issue also includes a tool developed by tom wolff and gregor sarkisian. the tool discussed is a community coalition simulation exercise, which can be used as a teaching tool in the classroom or in a community setting in an effort to learn more about complexities associated with collaborative change efforts and coalition building. as simulation participants take on roles on the simulated coalition, it provides them the opportunity to participate in group dynamics and observe how such dynamics are affected by a group of individuals who come together with a common issue as well as potentially different individual and professional agendas. finally, we also included a video. the video, working together: collaboration of 8 communitybased arts-informed research projects on homelessness, features members of a collaborative project that was completed in toronto, canada talking about their experience. this video is a good example of a core competency in action. in this video, members provided their insights into the collaborative, the projects, commitment to diversity and inclusivity, leadership, and pulling together many perspectives, time, negotiating power dynamics and the results achieved. the collaborative was comprised of eight different projects and members included people with direct experience with homelessness, community agency staff, artists and academics. the groups worked collaboratively to plan and implement a joint art exhibit where they also released a policy report with research findings and recommendations. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   the collection of articles demonstrates the utility of defining a set of community psychology practice competencies. they also illustrate how the relevance and utility of such competencies may vary depending upon the country and culture. additionally, the articles highlight the need to continue international dialogue on this topic which can facilitate sharing of tools and curricula across contexts. the first article points out how much of community psychology in this world is based in the u.s. model. in the future, ideally, through sharing of information and open dialogue perhaps the field will evolve to be representative of more cultures by adopting new competencies, developing new training models, and exploring alternative styles of practice. references dalton, j. & wolfe, s. (2012). joint column: education connection and the community practitioner. the community psychologist, 45(4), 7-14. microsoft word gjcpp article (ac) final trj.docx community psychology practice competencies in egypt: challenges and opportunities1 amy m. carrillo the american university in cairo carie l. forden clarion university author note: amy carrillo, department of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and egyptology, the american university in cairo; carie forden, department of psychology, clarion university. correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to amy carrillo, department of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and egyptology, the american university in cairo, 420 fifth avenue, third floor, new york, ny 10018-2729. email: acarrillo@aucegypt.edu keywords: community psychology, competencies, egypt recommended citation: carrillo, a. m., forden, c. l. (2013). community psychology practice competencies in egypt: challenges and opportunities. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), 1-12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/).                                                                                                                           1  the  authors  would  like  to  thank  mona  amer  and  students  of  the  community  psychology  program  for  their   contributions  to  this  paper.   global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   community psychology practice competencies in egypt: challenges and opportunities abstract the society for community research and action’s proposed competencies for community psychology practice are examined within the egyptian context, specifically from the perspective of a master’s program at the american university in cairo. while this program integrates most of the competencies into the curriculum, thesis, and internship opportunities, the emphasis on various competencies may differ from programs in the united states because the program is situated within a different cultural and political climate. many contextual factors impact competency training, including the current state of development work in egypt, political considerations with implications for safety, the lack of a clear public policy process, and language as well as cultural differences. sources of exposure, expertise, and experience for graduate students are discussed in regard to the five overarching competencies: foundational principles, community program development, community and organizational capacity-building, community and social change, and community research. the benefit of examining the competencies from an international perspective is also discussed. keywords: community psychology, competencies, egypt within the field of community psychology, and in particular within the society for community research and action (scra), there has been a growing body of literature aimed at establishing a set of competencies for community psychology training programs (meissen & hakim, 2011; sarkisian & jimenez, 2011; thomas, neill, & robertson, 1997; wolfe, 2011). the rationale for establishing these competencies includes creating concrete expectations of what skills will be learned in a particular program, educating communities about community psychology as a profession, and defining community psychology as a field (berkowitz, 2009; bond, hostetler, tran, & haynes, 2012; dziadkowicz & jimenez, 2009; stark, 2012; wolff, 2009). while there has been some discussion regarding the applicability of community psychology competencies across international settings, specifically in australia and new zealand (australian psychological society, 2010; university of waikato school of psychology, 2012), there is little information available on the appropriateness of these competencies for community psychology practice in other parts of the world. as faculty members2 at the american university in                                                                                                                           2  both authors are americans. at the time of this writing, the first author had lived in egypt for three years and the second author for one year.   cairo3 (auc), a private university in egypt, we are in a unique position to contribute to this discussion of competencies. in this paper, we address the applicability of the proposed competencies to practice in egypt. additionally, we describe how we tried to build these competencies into our newly formed master of arts program in community psychology. there are many similarities between our program and those in the u.s. however, due to cultural differences and a changing political situation, we face unique challenges in terms of the freedom that we have to practice various competencies, and the relevance of particular competencies to the present context. by sharing our experience, we hope to contribute to the understanding of how these competencies are practiced in diverse contexts. community psychology in egypt in egypt, psychology is an underdeveloped and frequently misunderstood discipline (mohamed, 2012), and community psychology is essentially unknown. the people who work in non-governmental organizations (ngos) and community-based                                                                                                                           3 founded in 1919, auc boasts as “the region’s premier english-language university” (see http://www.aucegypt.edu/about/pages/defaul t.aspx). in 2012, auc’s student population was 6,652, including both undergraduate and graduate students. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   organizations (cbos) typically do not have a psychology or social work background. despite the investment in developing and advertising our community psychology master’s program and its relevance to addressing local issues, many of our undergraduate students are not even aware that such a field exists or have misunderstandings concerning the field. therefore, we have much work ahead of us in educating egypt about community psychology and the role of community psychologists in this society. although community psychology is relatively unknown in egypt, the time may be ripe for it. the january 25th 2011 revolution began as a demand for “bread, freedom, and social justice” and led to the ouster of longtime president hosni mubarak and the establishment of free elections. while it has yet to be seen how the revolution will play out over the long term4, it nonetheless has created an opportunity for change that could be supported by community psychologists acting on values such as empowerment, respect for diversity, sense of community, and community collaboration. further, this time of change presents an opportunity, a “space-between,” to re-examine traditional paradigms. as naidoo (2000) points out in discussing the role of community psychology in post-apartheid south africa, community psychology has a history of emerging during times of political upheaval, because these times call the status quo into question. finally, as young people, our students may especially have a role to play in moving forward with positive change. prior to the revolution, youth were seen as young and naïve, while elders, especially leaders, were seen as possessing wisdom and deserving of respect. following the revolution, youth were seen as having a voice and capable of creating change in their society, while the rulers (or elders) were seen to be corrupt and undeserving of respect. this shift in the role of youth created conflict in society but also led to an empowered generation that desires to create change and is still hoping that change is possible. community psychology at auc due to the popularity of community development in egypt, many of our students enter the community psychology program with previous experience in program implementation, as they have often worked as a member of a community service student organization or as an employee or volunteer at one of the many nonprofit organizations in the cairo area. additionally, auc encourages community                                                                                                                           4  at  this  writing,  the  first  democratically  elected   president,  mohamed  morsi,  has  been  replaced  with   a  military  backed  interim  government.   engagement at the undergraduate level through community-based learning courses and civic engagement activities. therefore, students often enroll in the community psychology ma program with questions on how to meet the challenges that they are facing as part of their work life. they are eager to educate their friends and colleagues about best practices and the community psychology perspective. our program is designed to encourage students to practice in a way that is culturally appropriate in egypt while including the psychological theories and principles that are critical to a community psychology approach. the program aims to develop professional skills targeted at the organizational level and prepares students to find employment in a community setting. for example, while students take a course in applied research design and statistical analysis, this knowledge is generally used for community assessment and program evaluation purposes rather than social research. students also have the opportunity to collaborate with organizations located in cairo and have chosen to work with communities as part of their thesis projects. at the time of this writing, we have graduated our first class of five students and are currently working with a class of three. they are bright, inspired by the revolution, and eager to create social change. the auc student body is comprised of predominantly upper class egyptians, and our students generally reflect these characteristics in terms of the arabic they speak, their proficiency in english, which is excellent, and their world views that are more liberal compared to the average egyptian. in addition to egyptian students, we have also had two international students, one from kenya and one from the us. competencies while community psychology as a field is not well known, there are individuals and organizations in egypt working alongside communities to create a change in a manner that is consistent with community psychology principles. in terms of training, to our knowledge, the only professionals trained in community psychology are the faculty members working with our program and the students we have trained. clearly, our experiences color our perceptions and understanding of the way program competencies are implemented and the need for various competencies within the society. for example, as we have lived in the region for a short time, our understanding of the local community is created through discussions with students, our interactions in our travels, and work with community organizations, which include marginalized global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   populations such as refugees. thus, our understanding of how the community psychology competencies play out in an egyptian context will continue to evolve. in accord with scra’s competency proposal, our program exposes students to all of the competencies in various ways. in addition to exposure, students are also able to choose the competencies that are the best fit for them in developing additional experience and expertise in their year-long internship and thesis work. thus, as in all community psychology programs, there is great variation in the competencies that students actually develop some level of expertise. below, we discuss how we address each of the competencies in our program, and their relevance for community psychology in egypt. foundational principles the foundational principles are an integral part of the master’s curriculum. students are exposed to readings and examples highlighting each of the five foundational principles (i.e., ecological perspectives, empowerment, sociocultural and cross-cultural competence, community inclusion and partnership, and ethical and reflective practice). they are also given opportunities to engage in experiential learning in regard to several of the principles. ecological perspective. the ecological perspective (i.e., the importance of person-environment interaction) provides a foundation for the students’ understanding of community psychology and working in community settings. we introduce the ecological perspective through their required course work at the start of the program and continue to integrate ecological perspectives throughout their training. the ecological perspective is critical in understanding the etiology of community and social problems and providing sustainable solutions to these issues. students recognize that while incredibly challenging, an ecological approach is critical to positive change in their communities, and this is reflected in the fact that two students made an ecological analysis the central point in their thesis work. students are introduced to ecological research and theory in their first semester through a course entitled community psychology and systems theory. throughout the course, discussions revolve around applying theories to relevant topics such as the egyptian revolution, sexual harassment in egypt, and housing. as a final requirement, students demonstrate their understanding and mastery of ecological theory by articulating and applying a systems perspective to a social issue of their choice in a paper. similarly, in their second (and final) year, students are required to complete a paper in prevention and intervention in communities presenting an original prevention or intervention program that addresses a societal problem (e.g., sexual abuse or the poor quality of education in egypt) while maintaining an ecological focus. we have found the ecological perspective to be especially useful in assessing the integration of interventions. . for example, for her master’s thesis, one student conducted an assessment of unemployment programs in cairo and found that while overall, all ecological levels were being addressed, only a small minority of programs dealt with more than one level. further, there was not only a lack of coordination and collaboration between programs, there was also a real lack of awareness of what other programs are doing (fahmy, 2012). community inclusion and partnership. the importance of community inclusion and partnership is integrated into multiple aspects of the program. there is a special emphasis on practical skills in courses, such as community assessment and program evaluation, and internships that provide students the opportunity to work alongside communities as part of local and international organizations. in theory, community inclusion and partnership is at the heart of the community psychology approach. students recognize that community members are key to successful change and look to them as the experts in their particular situation. in practice, community inclusion and partnership can be incredibly challenging, even at the level of working with ngos or cbos. for non-egyptian faculty and students, the first lesson in sociocultural competence is that in egypt it is important to be sensitive to non-direct communication. often times, instead of directly saying “no,” a person or organization will simply not respond. this can lead to confusion regarding whether an organization is genuinely interested in working with a student and pursuing a particular project and having difficulty finding the time, or is just not interested and reluctant to say “no.” the language barriers between the supervisors and the community can be challenging, too. while many leaders of cbos, ngos, and international agencies speak english, and the students themselves usually speak both arabic and english, it can be very difficult to provide appropriate supervision to a student when all interactions with community members need to be translated. the political situation must also be taken into consideration. many organizations desire to be global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   associated with auc, as it holds some prestige an american institution, and this translates into expressed interest for collaboration; however, when public opinion of the us is low, organizations may distance themselves due to negative publicity. for example, after some americans who worked in ngos that had been accused of political interference were arrested, a student lost her internship placement because the ngo she was scheduled to work with felt the climate was not “conducive” to her planned project. as public opinion can change very quickly, the relationships that are made with communitybased organizations must be carefully monitored to ensure sustainability during difficult times. similar challenges are faced in working with community members who may not communicate directly, may be illiterate or speak a different language than english or arabic, or who may distrust outsiders. as an example, one student designed a photovoice project with landmine victims in a rural part of egypt (el gahri, 2012). his background in community psychology made him aware of the need for cultural sensitivity in dealing with a rural bedouin population. he also recognized the need to work through trusted community contacts, and tribal leaders as he was likely to be regarded with suspicion as an outsider from cairo. he collaborated with a local agency to set up the photovoice and invite participants, and respecting the cultural practices of the bedouins, he took special care to organize participant groups that were segregated by gender. while the first part of the photovoice project was quite successful, later changes in the political atmosphere, and a lack of direct communication about personnel changes in the collaborating organization made the completion of the project extremely difficult. while these types of difficulties can occur in working with community members in any country, they may present special challenges in egypt, which has a hierarchical culture with a centralized, bureaucratic government, and a history of repression and corruption. to achieve competency in community inclusion and partnership, students must learn to be especially flexible, creative, and patient as they partner with community organizations and the people they serve. examining this competency from an international perspective provides a broader understanding of the challenges that a commitment to community participation requires, and a stronger appreciation for the skills that are required to overcome them. sociocultural and cross-cultural competence. sociocultural and cross-cultural competence may look different in contexts around the world, and there is much to be gained from examining these concepts in an international framework. in egypt for example, there is a long and complex history of invasion and assimilation; its location at the borders of africa and the middle east has led to a substantial population of immigrants and refugees; and tensions exist between the muslim majority and the coptic christian minority, as well as between jews and arabs. among muslims and arabs too, there is diversity of religious and cultural practice. what it means to be “egyptian” is continually evolving. to what extent western theories of social identity, cultural competence, prejudice, stigma and discrimination apply here is unclear, and it is crucial that these concepts be critically examined as we seek to train students in this competency area. an additional issue in cross-cultural competence is that egyptian community psychologists are likely to be collaborating with western international agencies, and of course in this case, are attending an american university. thus, students must be trained in american/western definitions of professionalism, such as timeliness, preparedness, and follow-through. for example, one student’s internship placement in a german ngo led to some amusing discussions in the internship class about cultural differences in expectations about time. further, students attending auc, which is a private english-speaking university, are generally from the upper class and have different experiences, values, and ways of dress than the majority of egyptians. thus, there are unique challenges in educating students who are removed from the everyday experiences that many egyptians experience in their everyday lives. it is therefore necessary to highlight cultural differences in dealing with privilege by bringing to the forefront the overt hierarchical system of privilege that is an accepted part of egyptian society and comparing it to the covert privilege of other nations. however, in spite of these challenges, our students have demonstrated success in bridging differences and building rapport. through classroom interactions as well as internship work in the community, students recognize how to develop avenues for respectful dialogue through their own actions and learn to navigate difficulties using communication and persistence. the need for cultural sensitivity was apparent in a class project where students facilitated an appreciative inquiry at a sudanese refugee school and encountered challenges understanding the arabic that the sudanese parents spoke. additionally, part of the appreciative inquiry involved participants global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   sharing a time when they were very satisfied with their experience at the school. interestingly, none of the groups (teachers, parents, or students) articulated an experience in story form. instead, the participants described general aspects of the school that they enjoyed, such as friends, caring teachers, and strong communication. it was also difficult to know to what extent their positive answers were the product of cultural values of gratitude and politeness. ethical practice. ethical considerations are also less clearly defined in the egyptian context. ethics and professional issues are integrated into multiple aspects of the program, focused on exclusively in a required course, ethics and professional issues, and encouraged through consultation and support. in egypt, however, there are no overseeing professional networks for ethical consultation or support. as an american university, we expect the students to follow the american psychological association’s ethical guidelines; however, there are no binding ethical standards for practice in egypt. while ethical codes can be helpful for guiding professional practice, implementing an american set of guidelines in an international context may not be appropriate in all circumstances. developing ethical competency in an international context reminds us that we must teach students not only how to adhere to ethical guidelines, but also how to be sensitive to the values of local communities (rudkin, 2003). as an example, a student working with a local agency on his thesis project had the agency insist that participants be paid a small sum as they would be giving up the possibility of a day’s work in order to be involved in the project. this led to difficulties with the university irb, because it was seen as coercive to offer money to research participants with little income. the student and research supervisor needed to negotiate between the agency and the irb in working out a solution that was ethically acceptable to both sides. empowerment. the community psychology focus on empowerment provides some difficulties within the egyptian context, often related to politics. in egypt, community work is usually synonymous with charity work, and sometimes it is seen as a way to gain political power in a community. community members are typically described by organizations as “beneficiaries” rather than partners, participants, or even clients. the concept of empowerment has been slow to take hold and remains a challenging competency to develop in our students. before the january 25th revolution, empowerment was discussed as a part of required coursework in community psychology and systems theory and introduced through course readings. nonetheless, it was not encouraged in practice due to the potential for negative ramifications from political powers, who might perceive empowerment as threatening to the established economic, political, and cultural system (drolet, 2011). during the revolution however, diverse communities were united by a common vision and experienced a period of political empowerment. at the present time, it is unclear what the future will hold in regard to continued empowerment, especially in sectors outside of the political arena. at this writing, the country is still in a time of transition, the political climate has not yet settled, and the situation may remain unsettled for some time to come. while our students are not discouraged from participating in protests and a few were actively involved in the revolution, as a program we do not require or encourage students to participate in causes that may result in physical harm. thus, there are ongoing decisions to be made in regards to how empowerment will be taught to our students and the impact that it will have on both the community and our program. in addition to the general political concerns, there are concerns related to empowering specific populations, such as women, and the possible iatrogenic effects of such actions. indeed, anti-harassment protests in cairo have been met with harassment (egypt independent, 2012; “egypt women’s antiharassment,” 2012; middle east online, 2012; paraszczuk, 2012). such concerns about potential harmful consequences of empowerment are not unique to egypt. a multi-country study of domestic violence that included egypt (kishor and johnson, 2004) found that the relationship between women’s empowerment and increases in domestic violence victimization was complex and that it varied between countries. thus empowerment may require different approaches in different cultures, and examining it in an international context is likely to broaden our understanding of what it means to be “empowered.” for example, two students worked with a newly formed worker’s syndicate on the auc campus, helping the members to develop their organizational and leadership skills. one challenge they encountered in this work was that their efforts to encourage representation of women in leadership were met with great resistance from the women they were trying to involve. this forced the students to think more deeply about the nature of empowerment; should they support the women’s decisions to remain uninvolved or push them to change? while empowerment is approached cautiously, the word “empowerment” is used liberally in egypt by community development workers and others just as it global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   is in the us. programs and services that claim to “empower” people often do not engage in true empowerment approaches. the revolution provided a real life example of empowerment in action; however, the implications of the revolution for real democratic change in egypt remain to be seen. community program development program development, implementation and management. community program development is a critical skill in community settings. students gain an understanding of program development through required coursework that includes a communitybased learning component. guest speakers allow students to better understand the program development process and ask questions related to challenges in regard to development, implementation, and management. as part of the community-based component, students have designed projects or worked with local organizations to build program capacity. as we continue to reflect on our program and the best way to build competencies in the egyptian context, we have discussed moving toward increased training in needs and resources assessment. there is very little literature available that is specific to egypt, and ngos frequently request assessment when they work with us. therefore, students considering doing program development as their thesis project are encouraged to start at step one and perform an assessment using a strengths based approach. as an example, one student was interested in developing a program to prevent child sexual abuse, but it soon became clear that before she could develop that program, she needed to meet with community leaders to find out what they were doing and how they were approaching the problem. prevention and health promotion. egypt has a strong history of implementing prevention programs and has made significant progress in life expectancy and infant and maternal mortality in the last decades (world bank, 2011). communicable diseases have also declined and recent efforts are focusing on lifestyle issues, such as smoking and risky driving (world health organization, 2012). we build awareness of this competency through required coursework (e.g., community psychology and systems theory and prevention and intervention in communities) and guest speakers with the option for students to gain experience and expertise through internships and theses about prevention and health promotion design and implementation. developing competency in this area also requires an understanding of other competencies, as prevention and promotion work is most effective when it is done collaboratively, is culturally appropriate, and incorporates community participation. for example, a student who conducted her thesis research on drug and alcohol prevention in kenya assessed potential programs in terms of their cultural appropriateness and incorporation of community participation (kimunya, 2012). despite these strengths, prevention and health promotion can be challenging in egypt. convincing communities of the need to prevent problems can be a daunting task, especially in the face of overwhelming social issues and scarce resources. insha’allah, “if god wills,” is a phrase commonly heard in conversations and submission to god’s plan is the foundation of a religious life, an attitude that can work against taking preventative action. community and organizational capacity building community and organizational capacity-building is relatively common in egypt and sought after as a desired skill. students are exposed to various aspects of community and organizational capacity-building through their coursework, consultation to non-profit organizations, as well as provided opportunities to apply what they learned through course projects. those who are interested in gaining expertise in community and organizational capacity building are encouraged to design their master’s theses around collaboration and coalition development; public policy analysis, development, and advocacy; or information dissemination and building public awareness. although somewhat true in the us, a difficult aspect of coalition development in egypt is that many of the organizations also have political or religious affiliations, which impede collaboration. as one student found when she conducted her thesis research on the potential for collaboration among organizations working in a cairo community, a history of state security investigations (ssi) interference in local cbo and ngo activities, particularly in the work of islamic organizations, led these organizations to restrict their activities to food and monetary aid. this likely inhibited the formation of coalitions (el sayeh, 2012). in addition, political and religious affiliations can make organizations reluctant to work with organizations that hold opposing views. other factors affecting the development of coalitions include that the “teamwork” approach is not common to egyptian culture, and organizational competitiveness resulting from scarce resources leads to less willingness to work together. in spite of these challenges, progress has been made building collaboration among global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   organizations through the efforts of student led initiatives. consultation. students are often quite interested in developing consultation practices upon graduation, and there is a need for consultants to provide assessment, evaluation, and capacity-building skills to ngos and cbos. students are exposed to consultation through required courses, such as consultation to non-profit organizations, and may gain experience in consultation through class based projects or their master’s thesis. a challenge for american faculty who have experience with consulting in the united states, or who are using american consulting textbooks, is how to translate these consulting skills into an egyptian context. for example, egypt has a strong tradition of courtesy that may make it difficult to be open about controversial or competitive issues that have the potential to cause embarrassment. informal discussions may be preferred to formal reports (seefeldt, 1985). the complex nature of egyptian bureaucracy and the network of connections that are the key to navigating it is another challenging aspect of consultation practice, one which americans who are used to more transparency have little skill in. further, while we have a strong interest in providing students with training in consultation and organizational development, the time that it takes to organize with a community based training site and the difficulty in maintaining a time frame of work that is within the parameters of a semester (or even academic year) can be incredibly challenging. as we have learned over time, relationship building proceeds at a slow pace, repeated delays occur because organizational contacts have family emergencies, numerous religious and national holidays postpone action, and political unrest causes unexpected disruptions to work. resource development. students have the opportunity to gain hands-on experience doing resource development through required coursework, such as class projects in community assessment and program evaluation and prevention and intervention in communities and even their master’s thesis. developing resources can be especially challenging in egypt as community organization staff members are not generally english speaking and need access to resources in arabic that are appropriate to the context. to help fill this gap one resource development project involved a group of students creating a resource website for community-based organizations, which included many resources in arabic. to launch the website, community-based organizations were invited to attend an informational meeting explaining the purpose of the site and requesting feedback from the organizations on further development. students also have served as a resource to the community by organizing and conducting workshops for community-based organizations. group processes. multiple aspects of the program serve to provide students with exposure to as well as experience working with small and large group processes. the course community and group interventions, which is taken together with counseling program students, provides exposure to group development concepts and experience participating in a semester long therapy group. experience in community contexts is further gained through class projects, such as the appreciative inquiry conducted with a sudanese refugee school, internships, and thesis projects. for example, a student employed utilization-focused evaluation in her internship, and not only conducted focus groups as part of that, but formed and led an evaluation team at her internship site. community leadership and mentoring. training in community leadership and mentoring is available optionally through a student’s internship. they choose an organization, community leader, or an expert in their area of interest and work on a variety of projects including capacity building. for example, two students worked with a newly formed worker’s syndicate on the auc campus, helping the members to develop their organizational and leadership skills. community research program evaluation. program evaluation is in demand by organizations working in a variety of community settings to increase their appeal to local and international donors. moreover, evaluation is seen as a tool for increasing program effectiveness under the constraints of limited resources. this is especially important due to the cuts in governmental spending and slowed economic growth following the political transition, both of which have made for uncertain funding opportunities. students receive exposure to and some experience with assessment and program evaluation through a variety of required courses including community psychology and systems theory and community assessment and program evaluation. additionally, students may choose to gain expertise in evaluation as part of their internship or thesis work. while local organizations are usually aware of the need for program evaluation and desire resources, assistance, and other supports to support their monitoring and evaluation department, they typically develop the evaluation component following program development and may focus on tracking indicators of program output. although staff may have a desire to global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9   conduct more meaningful evaluations, they often do not know how to proceed. as a result, they are eager to have assistance from our students. three students conducted community assessments or program evaluations during their internships, and four conducted them for their thesis projects. participatory community research. although covered in course readings and explored during discussion especially in the course community psychology and systems theory, participatory community research has not been a focus of the program in the past (similar to empowerment), as it was potentially dangerous for a student to mobilize a community to research and take action on issues of importance. while the possibility of working with organizations that mobilize communities is available through required coursework, such as internships, the program does not require mandatory experience in participatory community research. however, we do include community members in community-oriented projects, and students easily embrace a community centered approach to research and action. in the coming years, participatory community research may become more likely, and students use collaborative methodologies such as appreciative inquiry, photovoice, and utilization-focused evaluation. however, we continue to weigh the costs and benefits for both the students and the community. one instance of these challenges was when a student’s photovoice project with a community on the northwest coast of egypt was continually delayed because of dangerous travel conditions and political issues. in addition, it was not possible for the american faculty advisor to accompany the student to the project site, because her presence would likely have made community members more reluctant to participate, and even might have put the students’ safety in jeopardy. community and social change training in community and social change faces similar difficulties as training in community research. theoretical exposure is common practice through coursework. however, experience may be limited to information dissemination and building public awareness. students interested in gaining expertise in community and social change may be encouraged to design their thesis around collaboration and coalition development. collaboration and coalition building. as mentioned previously, there is a lack of collaboration and coordination among ngos, cbos, governmental and international agencies, and so this is an area where capacity-building is sorely needed. our students are gaining experience in collaboration and coalition development primarily through their required thesis projects or internships. as many organizations are working separately on similar issues and often in the same sections of the city, there is a great need for collaboration and an opportunity for coalitions. three students in our first graduating class conducted assessments of the potential for community collaboration in their thesis work. while communication with the community is imperative to successful community collaboration, community education, information dissemination, and public awareness can be incredibly challenging in our context. as the official language of egypt is arabic, difficulties arise in translating words and phrases used in community psychology into the arabic language. for example, the word “coalition” in arabic is associated with the revolution and has a different connotation than community psychologists intend. therefore, care must be taken in determining the appropriate wording for raising awareness, disseminating information, and educating the public and community-based organizations about community psychology theories and approaches. additionally, as literacy levels vary by community, this must also be taken into account when designing awareness campaigns. community organizing and community advocacy. distrust for the foreign perspective can also make community education challenging. this is compounded in egypt by a xenophobic and antiwestern atmosphere that emerges during times of political unrest. western based charities and organizations have been accused of plotting to destroy or derail egypt’s political transitions, and several americans and foreigners have been arrested for allegedly being spies. while at times an outsider’s perspective is seen as beneficial and desirable, with such shifts and changes in the political sphere, organizations may distance themselves from american institutions, such as auc. an association with the west can cause turmoil and tensions and lead to questions regarding the community-based organization’s intentions in the egyptian society. additionally, community organizing and community advocacy must be done cautiously. while our students may participate independently, we have typically found community organizing and advocacy to be rather risky, as students have been detained in other fields (e.g., sociology) for simply collecting data within communities. with some frequency, auc administration has had to restrict community work out of concerns for student safety, again making it difficult to plan for course requirements that global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  10   include community experiences. however, some of our students are motivated to engage in these kinds of tasks after graduation, including a recent graduate who is now advocating for an anti-domestic violence policy. community education. community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness are included and integrated within multiple aspects of the program, including readings throughout the curriculum. one way to ensure that students gain experience is to arrange for students to do some activities on campus. for example, students collaborated with the campus counseling center to assess the impact of the campus smoking policy, make recommendations, and design an intervention to build awareness of the policy. many of our students also have experience working with community-based organizations to provide community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness as part of their personal employment or volunteer work and are aware of the difficulties faced by organizations in the region. finally, given our location in the middle east and the lack of knowledge that many american community psychologists have about the region and egypt specifically, we spend time educating the international community about the egyptian context. students are encouraged to attend international conferences as well as serve as international liaisons as a way to disseminate information about the community work happening in cairo. public policy. since the revolution, it has become clear what a critical role public policy plays in societal transformation, and it has also become clear that there is a great need for our students to have training in it. as our program does not offer a course in policy, our students are encouraged to take their electives from auc’s policy school. this arrangement is ideal for several reasons. first, much of the policy literature is in arabic and both students and faculty possess varying levels of arabic proficiency leading to difficulties even exposing students to policy. second, most of our students are not as interested in policy as development. finally, due to the political context, training students in public policy is difficult as the process has been a closed system in the past (i.e., limited to those with connections), and at this time the process of affecting policy is still unclear. during this time of transition, our focus has been on exposing students to public policy initiatives that have been successful in the us or with international policy initiatives and providing students with opportunities to discuss how these policies would need to be adapted to an egyptian context as well as the costs and benefits of doing so. one student’s thesis work involved an assessment of the implementation of gender mainstreaming in egypt, a un policy initiative (shash, 2012.) we have also on occasion invited local guest speakers who have been successful at policy change to discuss their work with our students. community development. another interesting issue in egypt is explaining how community psychology is different from community development and how community development using a community psychology perspective is different from traditional approaches to community development. as there is a large focus on community development both within the institution as well as in the community, clarifying how our training is both similar and different to others in the field can be a major challenge. additionally, offering students courses in community development is considered redundant as there are other programs offering training in this area. nonetheless, most of our courses focus on examples related to community development. additionally, internships and theses are often related to community development. while the community psychology master’s program was originally designed to develop the competencies of cbo staff working in development, the cost of attending a private institution such as auc is too great for many. however, the program continues to cater to those working in community development by providing workshops on topics of interest (e.g., evaluation) and partnering with auc institutions, such as the gerhart center, to provide trainings on needs assessment and asset mapping. conclusion examining the community psychology practice competencies in an international context broadens our understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced inestablishing a common approach to community psychology training. not only does such an examination allow us to see how the competencies play out in a variety of cultural and social contexts, but perhaps it can allow us an opportunity to add new competencies to the list. as our program grows and we implement community psychology more broadly in egypt (and elsewhere internationally), there will be an ongoing need to re-examine and possibly revise the competencies. our program at auc integrates many of the competencies into our curriculum and internship opportunities; however, the emphasis on various competencies may look different from programs in global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  11   the united states that function in a different cultural and political climate. the program exposes students to research and theory, which provides a foundation for learning experiences both on campus and in the community, and builds expertise in a variety of competencies based on student interest. nonetheless, there are unique constraints due to language, culture, and most of all, the political situation, which continues to remain unstable. we have found that community research and practice in egypt is evolving; however, there is much work still to be done. the community psychology master’s program at auc is one avenue for building community psychology competencies in students as well as raising awareness in the community about the benefits of a community psychology perspective. as we celebrate our first classes of students and continue to strive toward a new egypt, we reflect on the core competencies that will make our students successful whether it is in research or in practice. at this time, the competencies outlined by scra appear to be relevant in the context of egypt and are useful to the continual development of our master’s level training program. in egypt, we have found competencies to be useful not only in determining the core curriculum and developing goals for our program but also beneficial in educating students on the skill set that they will possess upon completion of the program. given the many areas of study available to masters’ level students we hope that the community psychology competencies will provide potential students with a clear picture of the practice skills they will gain through our program. students practicing community psychology both within the program and following graduation strengthen communities and organizations through capacity building, dissemination of knowledge and skills,, advocating a strengths-based perspective, and interacting in a reflective ethical manner. while these skills are often shared with other disciplines, the approach taken by community psychology is somewhat unique yet shared by community psychologists all over the world. the future for developing community psychology practice competencies in egypt remains to be seen. the country is still in a period of transition and shifts in the political sphere affect work in the community as well as relationships between cultures (i.e., american-egyptian). the potential for new opportunities exists but is not yet fully realized. as our program moves into the future, we hope to continue to attract more international students. these students help broaden our understanding of the competencies and force us to stretch beyond american and even egyptian perspectives. we also hope to draw in more professionals currently working in the nonprofit arena as these professionals have firsthand knowledge of how the competencies play out in community programs, and are on the frontline of creating change. as our program grows and diversifies further, we hope to continue to track the role of the competencies for education and the evolution of practice in egypt. references australian psychological society. (2010). college course approval guidelines for postgraduate specialist courses. retrieved from http://www.psychology.org.au/assets/files/apscollege-course-approval-guidelines-dec2010.pdf berkowitz, b. (2009). graduate training: an action agenda. the community psychologist,42(4), 18. bond, m. a., hostetler, a., tran, n., & haynes, m. (2012, spring). practice competencies and community social psychology at umass lowell. the community psychologist, 45(2), 7-11. drolet, j. (2011). women, micro credit and empowerment in cairo, egypt. international social work, 54(5), 629-645. doi:10.1177/0020872810382681 dziadkowicz, o. & jimenez, t. (2009). educating community psychologists for community practice: a survey of graduate training programs. the community psychologist,42 (4),10-18. egypt women’s anti-harassment march attacked. (2012, june 9). alarab online. retrieved from http://www.alarab.co.uk/english/display.asp?fna me=%5c2012%5c06%5c0609%5czalsoz%5c911.htm&dismode=x&ts=9-62012%2011:59:54 elghari, m. a photovoice needs assessment of egypt's landmine infected north west coast (unublished master’s thesis). the american university in cairo, new cairo, egypt. el-sayeh, s. (2012). community coalitions as a tools for fostering participatory development in urban informal settlements (unpublished master’s thesis). the american university in cairo, new cairo, egypt. egypt independent (june 6, 2012) anti sexual harassment protest harassed. retrieved from: http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/antisexual-harassment-protest-harassed global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  4   december  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  12   fahmy, h. (2012). a socio-ecological assessment of unemployment interventions in egypt: towards a comprehensive approach. saarbrucken, germany: lambert academic publishing. kimunya, f. (2012). gender differences in reasons for alcohol and drug use in kenya: implications for prevention. (unpublished master’s thesis). the american university in cairo, new cairo, egypt. kishor, s. & johnson, k. (2004). profiling domestic violence: a multi-country study. retrieved from http://www.measuredhs.com/pubs/pdf/od31/od 31.pdf. meissen, g. & hakim, s. (2011, fall). the future of community psychology training and education for practice. the community psychologist, 44(4), 5-6. middle east online (june 9, 2012). egyptian women sexually harassed at anti-harassment march. retrieved from: http://www.middle-eastonline.com/english/?id=52720 mohamed, w. m. y. (2012, march). psychology in egypt: challenges and hopes. psychology international. retrieved from http://www.apa.org/international/pi/2012/03/egy pt.aspxneigher&ratcliffe (winter 2011). naidoo, a.v. (2000). community psychology: constructing community, reconstructing psychology in south africa. inaugural lecture. university of stellenbosch. retrieved from http://sun025.sun.ac.za/portal/page/portal/arts/d epartments/psychology/staff/tnaidoo/ta b2/art1-inaugura-lecture.pdf paraszczuk, j. (2012, june 20). egyptian women battle harassment on the streets. the jerusalem post. retrieved from http://www.jpost.com/middleeast/article.aspx?i d=285619 rudkin, j.k. (2004). community psychology: guiding principles and orienting concepts. upper saddle river, nj: prentice-hall. sarkisian, g.v. & jimenez, t. r. (2011, fall). guiding principles for education in community psychology research and action. the community psychologist, 44(4), 7-9. seefeldt, f. m. (1985). cultural considerations for evaluation consulting in the egyptian context. culture and evaluation. new directions for program evaluation (25), 65-78. shash, f. g. (2012.) an assessment of the use of gender mainstreaming to promote equality in pre and post 2011 revolutionary egypt (unpublished master’s thesis). the american university in cairo, new cairo, egypt. stark, w. (2012). a rose is a rose is a rose…why community psychology needs to stand up for its endorsement on an interdisciplinary and societal ground. global journal of community psychology practice, 3(2) retrieved from http://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=12&a rticle=50 thomas, d. r., neill, b., & robertson, n. (1997). developing a graduate program in community psychology: experiences at the university of waikato, new zealand. journal of prevention & intervention in the community, 15(1), 83-95. doi:10.1300/j005v15n01_07 university of waikato school of psychology. (2012). community psychology intern handbook. retrieved from http://www.waikato.ac.nz/wfass/subjects/psychol ogy/commpsych/handbook/pgdippracpsychintern-handbook.pdf wolfe, s. (2011, fall). how many times have you explained what “community psychology” is? the community psychologist, 44(4), 9-10. wolff, t. (2009). a time for action: how to move forward based on the survey results. the community psychologist,42 (4), 17-18. world bank (2011). world development indicators. retrieved from http://data.worldbank.org/country/egypt-arabrepublic world health organization (2012). egypt news. retrieved from http://www.emro.who.int/egy/egypt-news/. microsoft word 2014-si12-20140528.docx creating deep democracy through peer wellness services meghan caughey cascadia behavioral healthcare author notes: meghan caughey, ma, mfa, is senior director of peer and wellness services for cascadia behavioral healthcare, portland, oregon. meghan.caughey@cascadiabhc.org keywords: peer wellness, peer support, deep democracy, recovery, mindfulness practice recommended citation: caughey, m. (2014). creating deep democracy through peer wellness services. global journal of community psychology practice, 5(1), 1-7. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 creating deep democracy through peer wellness services abstract as healthcare reform transforms systems of care, there is a compelling necessity for systems to value the contributions of persons with lived experience of psychiatric diagnosis. the concept of deep democracy, of non-violence in action, is consistent with persons who have lived experience leading healthcare reform and helping transform coercion and oppression into health and wellbeing. consistent with deep democracy and the creation of a “culture of wellness” for persons with mental challenges, a portland, oregon community behavioral healthcare program utilizes peer wellness specialists and initiates a new model of integrated care that values whole health. the cascadia peer wellness program utilizes the unique and powerful resource of persons with lived experience of psychiatric diagnosis by training and employing peer wellness specialists to partner with clinicians and other healthcare team members in order to help those they serve find their way to recovery. keywords: peer wellness, peer support, deep democracy, recovery, mindfulness practice i clearly remember how deeply shaken i was when the 2006 report from the national association of state mental health program directors came out saying that people with serious mental illness who are treated in the public system die an average of 25 years earlier than the general population (parks, svendsen, singer, & foti, 2006). i was diagnosed with schizophrenia when i was nineteen. when this report came out i had finally reached a place in my personal recovery that allowed me to work as a peer mentor in a community mental health program. i realized that during the four months i had been working at the program, four of my peers who had received services there had died prematurely. this felt very personal—like a body blow—and my response was to vow i would dedicate my work to ending premature mortality and improving the quality of life for those who have psychiatric disabilities. it is not enough for those of us with disabilities to do the hard work of creating our recovery and then to die; it is our equal right to live well and enjoy longevity. this basic right is accomplished within the context of an environment, which is imbued by “deep democracy”. deep democracy is founded upon a social agreement for community members to adhere to non-violence in language and behavior. i became convinced of the necessity of this as a way to escape my dismal pattern of violence and hospitalization. during this time, i acted out self-harm and found myself hospitalized against my will. my behavior was repeatedly controlled by mechanical and chemical restraints. i did not know that i had any power or responsibility to address my difficult emotions except by physically struggling. likewise, the hospital staff reinforced my beliefs that i had no control over my actions. this disturbing scene was to be repeated many times over many hospitalizations. finally, i reached a point where i saw that i would either have to do something different or live without my freedom. i had started meditating years before and finally became convinced that acting out violently was not consistent with my meditative experience. i was not sure if change was truly possible, but the alternative was no longer workable. i was no longer willing to live my life within the walls of an institution. my intention became to create a different life for myself, and i soon started seeing opportunities that became expressions of a nascent sense of empowerment and self-determination. a new locus of control started growing within me. this change was built upon a new choice to find non-violent ways to express myself; to express the seemingly bottomless sense of pain that had been with me for much of my life by making art rather than acting out. this then became the beginning of my recovery. i sought reinforcement for my changes within a buddhist community that supported my meditation practice. here, non-violence was the norm, and i eventually grew to regard it as my own. as my recovery strengthened, i started to look for opportunities to express myself through peer work where i could serve other persons who had lived experience of their own mental health struggles. through my work as a “peer mentor”ein a community mental health program, i sought to spread the idea that individuals have the ability to choose non-violence, even in the middle of our hardest struggles. i relied upon a number of tools, including the practice of mindfulness and the expression of feelings through my paintings and drawings. persons who have serious global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 mental health challenges need the example of others who may still struggle in their lives with their own mental health, but who are successful in creating their own fulfilling and gratifying lives. i created the peer wellness program so that my own journey of expressing my inherent wholeness might serve as a source of hope for my peers. deep democracy my own journey towards nonviolence set the stage for discovering the concept of “deep democracy” (gastil,1993). the environment where this deep democracy flourishes is predicated on the social agreement of all members to adhere to non-violent communications and behavior and is counter to coercion and oppression. there must be healthy alternatives to violent speech and other behaviors, even including violence towards our planet such as demonstrated by our slowness to mitigate global warming. deep democracy, then, is not a politic, but rather a farreaching belief system that is predicated upon equality, self-responsibility and mutuality. (bloom & farragher, 2013) the practice of deep democracy is multidimensional and is expressed throughout the multiple levels of analysis, including individuals, environments, organizations, and societies. the basic attitude of deep democracy is kindness and respect. the wellness model the wellness model sets the tone for the creation of deep democracy in behavioral health care. (caughey, 2011). it is a statement of belief of which the following tenets form a strengths-based platform of hope. upon this basis of hope, deep democracy may be founded. 1) it is a human right for persons with lived experience of psychiatric diagnosis to recover and be well, and expect to live a gratifying life without suffering preventable disease and premature death. even today, it is rather revolutionary to believe that one can recover from serious psychiatric disability. although the talk of recovery is widespread among mental health providers, the genuine belief that it is possible for the most complex and “disturbed” individuals is sometimes very challenging, even for the most “recovery oriented”clinician. 2) we have the ability to make choices that support our wellbeing, safety, and health. in order for those of us with mental illness to change in a way for which we can take ownership of our lives, we must be convinced that there are, in fact, choices for us and that the act of choosing belongs to us, not to our clinicians. further, we must have a basic sense of selfefficacy: the belief that we can impact both our own situation and also have some ability to shape our environment. 3) it is our right to have the support of a holistic health system in pursuing our optimum health. systems that are splintered into the rubric of behavioral health and physical health try to tear us into pieces, rather than support our healing. it is a human right to be treated such that individuals are recognized at a level of personhood, at which we are all whole instead of a jumbled collection of fragments. we are inherently whole at the deepest level of our being. when individuals engage a system from a position of intrinsic wholeness, the template for personal health is reinforced and made manifest. health systems that are grounded in a holistic perspective contribute to the well-being of both persons served as well as providers. also, just as we aspire for personal health in the holistic sense, we need to aspire for health of the systems that we inhabit. 4) systems that decree that we are “broken”rand need to be “fixed” by clinicians are oppressive and contribute to suffering and sickness. the belief that we are broken is a misperception in which the medical model has invested significant resources. we are not infected with the “germ”  of mental illness. if those of us who have mental health issues only believe that the path for our healing lies in the hands of our health providers, then we will never claim the power necessary for our healing that is so necessary for us to heal our systems. we do not need to be fixed; we are not broken. 5) if we try to push people into wellness and recovery, we are contributing to oppression. it is generally understood that people do not change significantly until they are ready to change, which usually requires an environment that supports belief in our healing. however, we must ask: how much of mental health treatment is predicated on the belief that if providers just push hard enough, then their efforts will be rewarded by a desired behavior? in fact, this situation is a sort of oxymoron: clinicians sometimes push us towards the goal, but at the same time, they are doubtful that we can ever make it there. if systems are focused on achieving their own outcomes without first asking individuals what they themselves desire, then the stubborn weight of those systems’ expectations bear down and stifle individuals’ own creative energy, which is also necessary in order for healing to be possible. 6) if mental health workers heal alongside the persons with whom they work and create healing relationships, then an opening for healthful lifestyle choices can be investigated and, in time, embraced. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 clinicians and consumers need to engage in a mutual fashion. hierarchies do not promote healing; they disempower the persons nearest the bottom while removing those at the top from honest reality. healing must be done between equals. as long as trauma is the leading force in many of our lives, we are hardly free to use our energy for being curious about what life would be like were we aware of our own beauty. however, in the context of safety and mutual exploration, trauma may be exposed much as the wizard of oz was exposed as a small, deflated man behind the great curtain. characteristics of deep democracy a healing environment and system (bloom and farrager, 2013) is characterized by a commitment to: non-violence. there is an agreement among all members that communication and interpersonal relating will be without violence. this means nonviolence of words and actions, either manifest or implied. equality. the playing field is level, and everyone has the expectation that they will be treated with respect and meaningful regard. autonomy. individuals have the power to determine what path is right for them. open communication. there is an agreement to engage one another and to do so with honesty deep listening between all persons within the system. every member is encouraged to use his or her voice, and there is equality in the importance ascribed to each. these concepts of deep democracy necessitate both the enlisting of and the listening to persons with lived experience of mental health challenges. deep democracy replaces systemic hierarchy with valuing diverse cognitive and emotional styles. this makes it possible to create new possibilities of what is possible for persons who are coping with their personal mental health challenges. consistent with behaving nonviolently, health providers do not define their roles as guarding control of individuals receiving services. controlling another’s behavior is oppressive, but creating an environment where all members are respected and empowered to express their personal and collective strength reframes the social roles of all involved. at the same time, regarding members from a whole health perspective rather than as limited to behavioral health helps create the possibility of deeper change. at present it is all too common for behavioral evaluation and treatment to take precedence over a way of relating that addresses the interconnectedness and synergy of all members of the community. if health reform tries only to remake the old ways of doing things, if it binds those of us who have psychiatric disabilities to the same old worn out definitions, it will surely fail, since the old ways are designed to uphold rigid inertia and illness not transformation and health. we need to drive a health reform that is truly about creating health and not just a ruse for perpetuating sickness. peer wellness specialists program the effectiveness of peer support in mental health settings has been well documented (daniels, grant, filson, powell, fricks, & goodale, 2010). a form of peer support: the peer wellness specialist program was originally created by the author of this paper in 2006 in benton county, oregon. in 2011, this author brought the training and program design to cascadia behavioral healthcare in portland oregon. now the cascadia peer wellness program is a robust example of how peer wellness specialists (pws) are creating a movement that has the ability to transform systems so that they are characterized by health equity and social justice. it is an exemplar model of how healthcare services are informed by deep democracy in the climate of healthcare reform. the journey of this movement begins with persons who self-identify as persons who have lived experience of a psychiatric diagnosis. peer wellness specialists (pws) do not usually call themselves “the mentally ill,” although this is the pejorative nomenclature that society reserves for them. instead, their self -conscious language choices reflect determination to use every opportunity to remake the status quo. the cpwp operates within the system of a community mental health organization and, most importantly, within systems that integrate behavioral and physical care. pws act from the position of believing they can effectively change the system from within. from the first day of the peer wellness specialist training, trainees relate to themselves and to one another not on the basis of their diagnoses, or of their woundedness, but from their strengths. they focus on how their personal attributes contribute to the training being a success. the 120-hour training is designed to be transformational. when trainees have reached the point of completion at the end of 18 weeks, they are more recovered than when they began. the concept of placing persons with lived experience at the forefront of healthcare reform acknowledges that this health disparity population is an outstanding resource for great energy and change. in the old order, these persons with lived experience of psychiatric diagnosis were typically regarded as liabilities and as vacuous consumers of resources. this dynamic change global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 is created when individuals are valued for all aspects of their personal struggles and triumphs. the pws trainees set personal goals for their own wellness and support one another in reaching these goals. there is a sharp recognition of how the medical model sometimes reinforces hierarchy and inequity for the persons being served; and pws commit to turning this around. by self-disclosing their own successes in confronting mental health issues and diagnosis, pws are able to relate in a way that serves as both a role model and as a source for hope. they do not infer that healing will come from sources outside themselves; rather, they strongly believe that people have within them the power and deep knowledge of their own path to wellness. furthermore, pws demonstrate how personal strengthsbased definitions can replace the pejorative, diseasebased diagnoses. generally, healthcare reform aims to be “person-centered.” peer wellness specialists go on step further and work to create a system that is “persondriven.” instead of service providers simply encircling the people they serve, pws support the active empowerment of individuals to determine and pursue what they need. the hub drives the wheel. this is to say that there is a great deal of collaboration and support in this self-driven model. it fundamentally shifts the loci of control to the persons receiving services. pws are not only allies to the individuals whom they serve, but they are also certain allies for the clinicians and other members of the healthcare team. each person’s role on the team is unique and valuable to the others. when pws first begin working within a program, side by side with clinicians, there may be initial confusion and lack of understanding of each other’s roles. however, after an adjustment phase, where all concerned are learning each other’s style of working, both the pws and clinical staff come to mutual appreciation. the clinicians find,, sometimes to their surprise, that pws have a unique and constructive frame of reference that has arisen from their own experiences and which can be the source of powerful supportive and therapeutic interventions. the inspiring journey that the pws trainees make towards their becoming full-fledged pws expresses the magnitude of the power inherent in belief and hope in the healing process. often, trainees find that they have exceeded their own expectations of themselves by overcoming years of maladaptive thought and behavior and breaking through to the creation of their own freedom. pws, who work in mutuality with their peers in treatment, provide a sense of hope that non-peer providers cannot replicate. intentional wellness and the role of mindfulness practice wellness arises out of personal and system intention. this implies that wellness does not simply happen; it is created. this occurs on a personal level by purposeful individuals; and at the systems level, it is created by the deliberate inter-connected actions of the system’s members. in order to intentionally create wellness, the practice of mindfulness may be employed. the practice of mindfulness at a personal level helps to clear away the “mind clutter”i(i.e., traumatic memories) so that a ground of wellness may arise. the value and communal practice of mindfulness at an organizational level reinforces the personal and collective intention towards wellness of community members and of greater systems. pws work with mindfulness to address their own issues of trauma. by strongly focusing on the present moment (having the “mind full” of the present), pws are able to move beyond the traumas of the past and fears of the future. pws have also brought the practice of mindfulness into the larger system by commencing meetings and groups with mindfulness practice. also, during meetings and classes, a “mindfulness bell” may be rung at random times signaling the participants to briefly cease their discourse and take a few moments to focus on their breathing and to center themselves. from the beginning of their training, pws practice mindfulness and are encouraged to develop a personal expression of its use. by carrying mindfulness to their own personal lives, they are able to utilize the practice creatively in service when supporting their peers. when endeavoring to assist anxious or panicking peers to calm themselves, the pws may use guided mindfulness techniques. another example of the use of mindfulness is found during the wellness support group known as the l.o.t.u.s. group (lifestyles overcoming trouble utilizing support). here, the pws facilitators have combined the practice of mindfulness with the practice of monitoring participants’ blood pressures. cardiovascular disease and chronic pain are very common problems that the practice of mindfulness can help to alleviate (kabat-zinn, 1982). at the start of the group, participants are taught by the pws to take their own blood pressure and then are led in a mindfulness exercise. after twenty minutes of focusing on the breath and using techniques that foster attention to the here and now, the participants again take their blood pressures. often the scores are improved at the second reading. participants are excited to see in real time how they are able to create their own heart health. the pws work from a position of mutuality and cultivate health literacy, empowerment and self-efficacy among all members of the group. this hands-on demonstration is preventive and healing both in physical and psychological domains. it is an example of how to impact the inequity and disempowerment that global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 persons with mental health issues face as a health disparity population. the fact that this group is peerfacilitated helps to underscore that wellness is a process that is open to all to engage in, regardless of the starting point. the pws model of care and healing the model of the pws workforce exemplifies how behavioral health and primary care can be integrated at the level of peer delivered services. pws are part of primary care health teams that focus on assisting persons who have complex issues and who rely on the emergency department and inpatient services for their care. pws do not psychopathologize others, but normalize complex situations and create the expectation that individuals can develop their own skills for selfmanaging their health issues. the peer wellness program is an alternative to oppressive systems of “care”aas it creates an environment that is conducive to deep democracy where everyone has an opportunity to express themselves and where the group listens to and values all members. one person who was working with a pws stated the supportive experience as follows: “i like working with you because you will always listen to me when no one else will.” creating a peer wellness program and lessons learned it is important to design peer workforces in an overall systems framework. adding peer-delivered service workers does not in and of itself transform a system. the inclusion of pws is a starting point, but there must be a genuine move from coercion and oppression of persons who have psychiatric diagnoses to a latent and manifest respect of all persons’aworthiness. in terms of workforce design, it does not work as well to simply hire a single “peer “in order to create effective peer services. the whole community must be addressed and pws must not be isolated from other pws in other parts of the organization. opportunities for mutual pws support must be created. we prefer to place at least two or more pws in each program, even if they do not work the same hours. also, it is important that pws are trained by persons who have lived experience and are themselves pws. the leadership of pws must be conducted by peers. more than two hundred twenty-five individuals have been trained as pws in oregon. cascadia behavioral healthcare currently employs more than twenty-five pws who are working with well over two hundred peers engaged in services. the goal is to have a significant percentage of the entire community behavioral health organization’s workforce be made up of persons who have lived experience of psychiatric diagnosis. the whole health team and treatment community must be involved and evolved if the pws are to succeed. commitment to success must be expressed at all levels of organizational leadership. conclusion although we seem to be in the early stages of healthcare reform, there is a critical mass that has risen to make real the hope for a socially just system where the activity of creation is the right and practice of all members. the building of deep democracy promises both health for individuals, as well as more healthy and health-supporting institutions. also, it is consistent with individuals engaged in social and environmental change. at cascadia the use of pws has increased the respect for persons receiving services. in oregon the valuing of persons with “lived experience” is growing. we must create the world in an intentional way that pushes no one out, but where we are all at home and our individual lives are valued by the whole. our current design of reform and movement towards development of deep democracy is just the beginning. we must constantly design a future where there is true inclusion and justice. in fact, we really must do this now. we cannot afford to push it off into tomorrow— too much is at stake. peer wellness specialists and persons with lived experience of mental health challenges are the advance guard. as the canaries rise up from the coalmine (perhaps now transformed into a goldmine) they must be free to fly and fill the trees with their song—although they are not really canaries; their truest nature is that of the phoenix. references bloom, s. l., & farragher, b. (2013). restoring sanctuary: a new operating system for traumainformed systems of care. oxford university press. caughey, m. (2011). personal accounts: making art, exploring madness. psychiatric services, 62(2), 126-127. daniels, a., grant, e., filson, b., powell, i., fricks, l., & goodale, l. (2010). pillars of peer support: transforming mental health systems of care through peer support services. rockville, md: substance abuse and mental health services administration. gastil, j. (1993). democracy in small groups: participation, decision making and communication. philadelphia, pa: new society. kabat-zinn, j. (1982). an outpatient program in behavioral medicine for chronic pain patients based on the practice of mindfulness meditation: theoretical considerations and preliminary results. general hospital psychiatry, 4(1), 33-47. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 kabat-zinn, j. (1993). psychosocial factors in coronary heart disease: their importance and management. in i.s. okene and j. okene (eds.), prevention of coronary heart disease (299-333). boston: little brown. parks, j., svendsen, d., singer, p., foti, m.e., (eds). (2006). morbidity and mortality in peoplewith serious mental illness (13th technical report). alexandria, va: national association of state mental health program directors medical directors council. microsoft word wolff-v4i2-20130523.docx a community psychologist’s involvement in policy change at the community level: three stories from a practitioner tom wolff tom wolff & associates, amherst, ma. tom wolff is a practicing community psychologist in amherst ma, usa. keywords: community psychology, policy change, practitioner stories. recommended citation: wolff, t. (2013). a community psychologist’s involvement in policy change at the community level: three stories from a practitioner. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(2), xx-xx. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 a community psychologist’s involvement in policy change at the community level: three stories from a practitioner abstract influencing social policy is a natural part of the everyday activities for community psychology practitioners working in partnership with communities. most dilemmas faced by communities not only have programmatic solutions but looking at the root causes of the issue we can also see the structural policy issues that require change. often our task is to build the capacity of the communities to become effective advocates involved with local office holders on issues requiring policy change. community psychologist practitioners frequently become involved in the world of policy. it is the reality of how one form of change occurs in communities. small “p” policies can mean negotiating the tricky waters among institutional players in a community. capital “p” policies are illustrated by community psychologists involved in advocating for specific policy or legislation on crucial issues. three examples presented in this paper illustrate the range of possibilities available for engaging in social policy change. they include building healthy communities coalitions, focusing in on a policy agenda on a specific issue (health care access), and building the capacity of local communities to address social change issues such as systemic racism. the paper encourages more community psychologists to write of their experiences in the pursuit of social policy change at the community level in order to learn how to be most effective in these roles and to learn about the range of possibilities. keywords: community psychology, policy change, practitioner stories as a practitioner of community psychology, policy change has always been an integral part of my work. influencing social policy can be a natural part of the everyday activities for community psychologists working in partnership with communities. most dilemmas faced by communities not only have programmatic solutions but looking at the root causes of the issue we can also see the structural policy issues that require change. often our task is to build the capacity and willingness of the communities to become effective advocates involved with local office holders on issues requiring policy change. community psychologist practitioners can find themselves quite comfortable being involved in the world of policy. it is the reality of how one form of change occurs in communities. small “p” policies can mean negotiating the tricky waters among institutional players in a community – the police chief, school superintendent, director of the mental health center, ceo of the hospital. capital “p” policies are illustrated by community psychologists involved in advocating for specific policy or legislation on crucial issues such as health care coverage, environmental pollution, school policies that lead to educational disparities for students of color, etc. increasingly, we are hearing of real world community psychologists who are also getting involved in capital “p” policy directly through politics. debbie starnes (2004), recent award winner for distinguished practice in community psychology, has been an elected city councilor in atlanta for years and describes this job as part of her community psychology practice. i inadvertently discovered a few years ago that i shared the distinction with thom moore, a community psychologist from the university of illinois, of being an elected school board member. i am sure there are numerous other examples of elected officials in the community psychology ranks. yet, until recently we have not said very much about this aspect of our lives. can something as seemingly “unacademic” as holding public office be seen as community psychology practice? much of my involvement in policy change, social change and advocacy comes from who i am both professionally and personally. this i believe is true for many of us who become community psychologists. i am a social activist and always have been, driven by a commitment and deep belief in the values of social justice and social change. this has carried me through many, varied movements in the us: starting with the anti-war protests in the viet nam era, involvement in civil rights struggles, and most recently in creating a peace commission for our small town. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 i am also a political animal. i’ve been an elected official to our local school committee (town of 2,000 residents). in volunteer positions in town i have also tackled local issues such as being a member of our school building committee for a new expansion to our school, and now being a leader in town efforts to create affordable housing. i was also chair of the town democratic committee (political party) for over a decade. as a community psychology practitioner i have always tried to integrate my political and social activism into my community psychology work (my guess is that this is true for many of us). in fact my career path could be characterized as constantly seeking positions that would allow me to integrate my social activist work and values into my job description. as a community psychology practitioner the most powerful way i have of conveying my policy work and beliefs is to share stories of that work. in this article i will relate three stories of my work in policy change in communities and how that work is embedded in the principles of community psychology: 1) healthy community coalitions and community advocacy; 2) health access networks – statewide advocacy on health access issues, and 3) boston’s center for health equity and social justice – work on supporting health equity coalitions in communities. community story # 1: healthy community coalitions and community advocacy i have spent a large part of my professional career building healthy community coalitions in communities. the healthy communities approach to improving people’s lives emerged from the world health organization’s ottawa charter (world health organization 1986). this powerful example of an ecological approach to improving health recognizes the interdependence of all the parts of a person’s life situation. in its ecological approach, healthy communities is a natural model for community psychologists and an excellent opening to policy level work in communities. basic to the healthy communities approach is “the process of enabling people to increase control over and to improve their health,” with health defined as a “resource for everyday life” (world health organization 1986).the healthy communities approach is a way of viewing health that differs radically from the individualistic, remedial medical services system that dominates in the united states (wolff 2003, 2010). the ottawa charter declares that the prerequisites for health are peace, shelter, education, food, income, a stable ecosystem, sustainable resources, social justice and equity (1986). it is important to remember that the research tells us that in the united states only 10 percent of people’s health is determined by access to health care (mcginnis, williams-russo, & knickman, 2002). the remaining 90 percent is explained by the social determinants of health, along with biological factors such as genetics. the world health organization’s list of the social determinants of health include stress, early life factors, social exclusion, work and unemployment, social support, addiction, food, transportation, social justice, and the social gradient (the social and economic circumstances that strongly affect health throughout life) (wilkinson & marmot, 2003).approaching health and quality of life issues from this ecological framework creates tremendous opportunities for community psychologists to make a difference. the ottawa charter opened up the possibility for me as a community psychologist to tackle the creation of a healthy community from avenues other than health care or even the traditional public health system. early support for the healthy communities movement in the united states was spread across a wide range of sponsors, including the world health organization, the united states public health service, and the national civic league (http://www.ncl.org). the partnership of the u.s. healthy communities movement with the national civic league, an organization whose theme is “making citizen democracy work,” encouraged a wide variety of players to enter the healthy communities arena. with the ottawa charter healthy communities had a clear mandate to work on policy change and advocacy, and with the national civic league we had a partner who could pave the way as the director of community partners, a program of the office of community programs of the university of massachusetts medical center we were committed to building capacity for communities in massachusetts. we developed and supported three specific geographically defined healthy community coalitions and expanded the healthy communities concept statewide to create healthy communities massachusetts. community partners provided training, facilitation, and guidance to 51 other cities and towns in massachusetts. the community example of the north quabbin community coalition illustrates how healthy community initiatives can create policy change. example: the north quabbin community coalition global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 for more than twenty five years, the people of the north quabbin region of massachusetts have been creating collaborative solutions for many community issues through the north quabbin community coalition (nqcc). the coalition serves a nine town area with approximately 30,000 residents. these communities have brought together diverse groups of people and institutions to solve seemingly intractable problems facing the area’s residents (http://www.nqcc.org/). this was community partners’ first coalition. when we started the coalition the area had been hard hit economically. during the 1980s, the formerly thriving mill towns of north-central massachusetts nearly died. in 1984, one of two large manufacturers in the north quabbin region closed, and many people were thrown out of work. at this bleak moment, the office of community programs was sponsoring two medical students in a community practicum in the north quabbin region. the students reported back the dire straits of the community and the office asked me, as a consultant, to help create a community coalition. we thought this was a short-term intervention. no one had any sense that we were starting a twenty-five-years-plus adventure (my consulting position evolved into being director of community development at the office of community programs). but we were about to discover something about each other and about the amazing process of building collaborative solutions. from the start, the goals of this coalition explicitly included developing an advocacy capacity in order to create policy changes. one of the coalition’s major policy accomplishments was the creation of community transit services. both the involvement of everyday citizens and the healthy community processes played into this policy change success story. the lack of access to public transportation had been identified as a major problem from the coalition’s first days. it limited access by residents to grocery stores, health care, social services, community college, etc. year after year, task forces tackled the issue without producing much change. transportation issues in this rural area seemed difficult if not impossible to fix. then the participants in the local literacy program, the north quabbin adult education center, became partners with the nqcc. together they created the north quabbin transportation co-op, which provided volunteer rides for those in need. the adults in the literacy program began to learn more than literacy skills. they also started to become active community members. they advocated for their needs with the coalition, and then with state and national legislators. their work resulted in policy and funding changes that helped create the region’s first-ever transportation system, one that connected the nine towns to the major cities to both the east and the west. the resources to make this transportation system happen came from policy changes in the form of committed resources at all levels. the local congressman identified federal resources. the state legislators found state resources. the regional transit authorities and towns came up with matching funds. within its first year, this system provided more than 23,000 rides. it delivered residents to doctor’s appointments, hospitals, community colleges, jobs, and grocery stores. the intractable problem of transportation that had plagued the area for decades and had kept it isolated was finally being resolved. the coalition and its grassroots partners had fixed the apparently unfixable, by working together on policy changes. advocacy has always been a significant part of this coalition’s work. the coalition has strived to make local change at the same time that it has promoted greater statewide changes that would improve local conditions. it has built strong relationships with local legislators, and its members regularly advocate for new services to the area and against cuts in local services. broadening the healthy communities work across the state in my work in massachusetts, working with community coalitions to build healthy communities (wolff, 2003), we were not only building local healthy community coalitions, we were also building the political support with legislators and state agencies to keep the coalitions going over time and move the healthy communities agenda forward. to this end we counted on state legislators as our crucial supporters, especially for funding and policy purposes. after the north quabbin experience we began two more coalitions across the state with the specific support and in one case at the request of a local legislator. these three legislators were key players in and supporters of the coalitions (interestingly, two of them were republicans, in a very democratic state). our relationship with the legislators grew consistently and slowly over twenty years. we would regularly invite them to coalition meetings to tell us what was happening on “the hill”, to hear the community’s concerns and to problem solve issues together. they were terrific advocates for new programs (i.e., domestic violence pilot projects, and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 rural transportation systems) and for fighting off funding cuts (i.e. closing of court houses, welfare offices). they were also our key financial support since they ear-marked specific funds to support the coalitions every year in the state budget. this was no easy task. each january, we would have a joint meeting with the state senators and representatives from each of the three coalition regions. between nine and twelve elected officials would sit with the coalition leaders and myself in an impressive room at the statehouse and review the coalitions’ accomplishments for the year and the strategies we would employ to get the funding passed in the budget. the legislators were our partners, we did projects together, they helped us with issues, and we honored them and provided them with forums and “hero” opportunities (meredith & dunham, 1999). at some point over these twenty years with the nqcc and community partners i became the chair of my town democratic committee, and attended the annual state party convention for many years. (our healthy communities work also had strong support from a number of republican legislators so this was by no means a strictly partisan lobbying effort). in the convention settings, these same legislators had the opportunity to see me as a political supporter, someone who would take their signature papers around, donate money etc. my involvement certainly did not hurt our community causes. this is politics with a capital”p”. it was an intimate part of the work to create healthy communities. this personal political role was distinct from my job, but it helped with some of the legislators to be seen as someone willing to work directly in the political process. although we never called it lobbying, the coalitions were always ‘educating’ our legislators on the key issues affecting our communities and training community members in the fine art of influencing legislation. it was central to many of our successes, including passage of a bill guaranteeing universal health care coverage for all children in massachusetts. (massachusetts legislation 1997 children’s health insurance program) over more than two decades, the north quabbin community coalition has addressed a wide range of issues. these include housing, economic development, youth development, racism, education, substance abuse, domestic violence, child sexual abuse, mediation, after-school activities, access to health care and dental care, and more. with that broad a reach—and with a philosophy that the group wants to engage the people most affected by the issue and those most able to help reach solutions—this coalition has had a positive influence on almost every aspect of the community and on a very large number of the area’s residents. the nqcc continues today as a vital force in the community. the coalition sees itself as the “kitchen table” around which the various sectors of the community gather to identify and solve problems. the nqcc demonstrates sustainability and longevity. having recently celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday (2009), it continues to thrive as a gathering place for the entire community. this coalition also provides support to neighboring communities that want to develop similar coalitions. my role with the nqcc evolved over the years. at the start i was the facilitator who gathered and mobilized the community and helped them create the vision and the mechanism of the nqcc. over time i was the consultant to the coalitions’ coordinator and a key partner in helping them find the needed financial resources to survive. what work in healthy communities illustrates about community psychology and policy change the first thing to note about the work in this example is that it involves a whole community. in community psychology we talk about ‘community’ all the time but usually dissect the community and work with some components of the whole. the work of healthy communities aims to engage all the sectors of the community and thus the policy change described is in that context. with the work of the nqcc the policy changes involved both local changes in local systems (health care access, transportation, etc.) and being part of statewide coalitions advocating for changes (welfare reform, health coverage, etc.). policy change was created by directly working with local legislators and also by building the capacity of residents to advocate for policy change. these were all roles i took on during my years working with the nqcc. local community psychology based community development and community organizing can focus on policy change and can create organizations that are positioned to become powerful forces for creating local and statewide policy change. much of this involves building the capacity of the organization to succeed in the policy change arena by training, modeling, and linking them to policy change opportunities. in the case of the north quabbin when first faced with the dire situation of a closed plant and sudden unemployment i could have promoted many solutions other than a communitywide development global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 approach (i.e. job counseling, services for the unemployed, etc.). knowing my community psychology values i instead suggested a community– wide ecological, preventive, organizing approach. advocacy and policy change were part of that approach. community story # 2: health care access networks over my years as a community psychology practitioner my most consistent policy focus was on health care access. working with local community coalitions, the communities always raised the issue of the uninsured as a major community issue, so our coalitions were always scrambling to find solutions for those residents without health care access. the coalitions helped develop health centers, low income dental centers, etc., but the real solution was in the creation of legislation and policies that would expand health access and create universal coverage statewide. so the community groups we created and worked with often were involved in joining statewide efforts advocating for universal access (wolff, 2010). while working at the university of massachusetts medical school (ummc) as the director of community development, on one occasion i arranged a meeting in western massachusetts for local health care providers on issues of health care access. we invited the boston-based statewide health care advocacy group, health care for all, to present. initially we thought our audience would want to work on matters of government policy, because we felt sure that people’s lack of health care resulted from the failure of the state and federal government to pass legislation expanding coverage to the uninsured. at the event, we learned from the people working on the front lines in health care, in advocacy and at health centers, that what they perceived was that we needed to first solve an information problem, not a policy problem. it turned out that the health centers and clients were not fully aware of what health programs were already in place. the audience wanted to focus on connecting those in need to existing programs rather than policy change. so we started there. we started with information exchange and made our way to policy change through that route. in response to this local expression of need, we created a small pilot project with ummc support and financial resources involving four part-time health care access outreach workers. we initially called these our “health care warriors,” because it was such a battle for them to get the most up-to-date information on eligibility and then also to disseminate it to those who needed it. in addition to the pilot project, we later applied for and received federal dollars for a rural health outreach grant. with this pilot program in place we began to gather these outreach workers and many other providers for a monthly meeting with health care for all, to simply share information and keep us all up to date. policy issues were naturally a part of these discussions. at this time we also joined a statewide advocacy effort to pass a children’s health bill that would provide universal health care coverage for all children in the state. the ultimate passage of this bill created a new environment in which mass health, the state medicaid agency, needed community help in order to reach its new enrollment goal – enrolling all children. for mass health/medicaid this focus on enrolling all children was a huge shift from being expected by the legislature and governor to keep enrollment numbers down. to meet the challenge mass health thought of launching a public relations campaign, but instead we lobbied for funding for minigrants to communities (ultimately getting $1million) for outreach workers of every stripe – culture, race, geography – and we succeeded. once the children’s health bill had passed, mass health turned to the medical school for help in enrolling all eligible children. our office was very well positioned and wrote a very short proposal with a relatively large budget (to support 60 meetings a year, etc.) and were funded. we then set up a system to encourage enrolling all kids by building collaboration among all the key parties, a variation of what we already did in western mass but now focused on the whole state. we called them health access networks (hans). the hans met in all six regions of the state and had 10 meetings per year in each region. managing and facilitating all this was quite a challenge for our small office. over the four-year span from 1998 to 2002, the health access networks (hans) brought the power of collaborative solutions to the pursuit of enrolling uninsured people in an existing patchwork of programs, connecting coverage with residents in need. the networks brought together people in the communities who were on the front lines enrolling the uninsured (community health workers from hospitals, health centers, and other organizations) with state agencies responsible for providing coverage (mass health–medicaid and the department of public health) and most critically a state health care advocacy group that tracked issues affecting the uninsured (health care for all). community partners, the organization that i had global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 founded, coordinated the effort by providing the glue—facilitation and direction for the meetings. the ultimate mission of the han meetings was to increase health care access throughout the state. our goals for the han meetings were to: exchange information about changes in programs and policies; share promising practices for outreach and enrollment; serve as a link, and feedback loop, between communities, state agencies, and institutions; advocate for policies that expand access and increase enrollment; and always to keep a focus on issues of culture and race in outreach. policy change was always the top priority. in every aspect of their work the hans illustrated the principle of taking action to address policy issues and of using appropriate social change strategies to modify regulations, laws and funding amounts. how did we do it? the meetings, based on the principles of collaborative solutions all had a similar rhythm and structure. people sat in a circle, with a designated facilitator. (between 20 and 60 people attended each meeting, with a total of 250 people attending one meeting each month across the six regions.) each meeting began with introductions, followed by updates from the communities. (by beginning with community members, we gave them, rather than the state agencies, the first access to air time.) these updates highlighted practices that had worked over the past month (such as passing out information at the town dump) along with those that had not worked (such as getting no response to a mailing sent out with electricity bills). the updates also included comments about gaps in coverage and the workers’ frustrations. we always highlighted areas where there was a need for policy changes. people from the state agencies gave updates. health care for all (hcfa), the advocacy organization, then had time to share updates in policies, practices, and legislation that were new or on the horizon. hcfa usually brought us an advocacy agenda. finally there was time to focus on a single topic or issue, or to have a presentation on a new program. the outcomes: when you look at the events in an individual meeting, they seem tiny. one person shares a grievance about paperwork. someone else passes along a compliment. yet another says, “let’s consider mental health” . . . or “transportation” . . . or “teen parents”. over time, though, the results of these interactions add up. they even produced major changes in apparently intractable systems. ingrained assumptions and behaviors changed in revolutionary ways. as they sat in a room together and solved problems all parties were able to change their views of each other. this increased mutual understanding and respect. it also prepared everyone to work together on the next difficult issue they determined to tackle. for example the relationship between the community outreach workers and the staff at mass health changed dramatically over the years. where they used to be adversaries battling over coverage for individuals, they became strong allies in making the system work. due to the han meetings, among other interventions across the state, massachusetts was number two in the nation in terms of success at enrolling children under the federally sponsored state children’s health insurance program (schip), designed to cover uninsured youngsters who did not qualify for medicaid. real enrollment numbers did increase. during the last year that i worked at umms, the han meetings took on the topic of outpatient access to mental health care. outreach workers had noted that they did not know where to send people who had serious mental health problems but no insurance for outpatient care. so we held six meetings across the state and discovered in black and white what we had known intuitively all along: there was no coordinated outpatient mental health system. we documented the comments made at the meetings and issued a report entitled a tangle of yarn. this report was similar to many others we had released. however, this particular information aggravated the commissioner of mental health, who let her ire loose on the vice chancellor of the medical school, who then let loose on me. after eighteen years at umass medical school, i was given three days to make the choice of resigning with a small severance package or being fired for acting against the school’s best interests. the medical school had hundreds of thousands of dollars of state contracts, and many of those were from the department of mental health. consequently, the vice chancellor was very concerned. as he saw it he could not afford to lose that business. my choices were very limited, so i resigned. i would not have predicted that this report would have been one that would cause so much trouble. while the work we did was often political and controversial, our goal was always to serve the best interests of the community and the state. many other projects we were working on at the same time contained more obvious potential for throwing us into the middle of controversy and battle. we were not reckless in the issues that we raised but we were guided by community psychology values of social justice. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 as community psychologist jim kelly has written, risk-taking is an integral part of this work: “risk taking in this context refers to being an advocate for real causes and helping the community move beyond its present steady-state” (kelly 1971, 901). what hans illustrate about cp practice and policy: the hans were designed explicitly to implement and modify policies around health care access. policy change was always the top priority. in every aspect of their work the hans illustrated the community psychology principles of taking action to address policy issues and of using appropriate social change strategies to modify regulations, laws and funding amounts. looking at the big picture, we learned that the fact that people were eligible for insurance was not the same as having those people enrolled in insurance. we discovered that when we celebrate legislative successes that expand health coverage, we should not assume that all those who are eligible for the new coverage will actually receive it (dechiara and wolff 1998). the work of the health access networks illustrates community psychology working at multiple levels of policy change: within state organizations, across the state, and on state money allocations. it is an example of a community psychologist taking action, and working for social change with a policy focus at multiple levels. the hans were set up and structured to focus on policy change and they succeeded in doing just that. they also illustrate the scra mission of “enhancing well-being and promoting social justice for all people by fostering collaboration where there is division and empowerment where there is oppression.” community story # 3: health equity and social justice a third policy story involves my recent work as consultant to the boston public health commission’s center for health equity and social justice (bphc). this work focused on health disparities, health equity, and racial justice. in the first two stories, my own organization initiated and managed the efforts described. in the work with the bphc, i was a consultant and trainer for their processes and programs. for six years, from 2006-2013 my work with this center has been an especially exciting engagement, with policy change regarding health equity driven by local coalitions and communities. the simple fact that a big u.s. city health department has an office named the center for health equity and social justice is surprising, and attests to the cutting-edge vision that is being manifested by the people in this organization. their efforts were led by nashira baril and her very talented and young staff (baril, 2011). an early video on the work of the bphc and their framework provides a good overview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcndzw-sjxu in the work with the bphc my role was that of consultant. in that role i was able to support this important work in social change through a) organizational consultation to their goals, mission and structure, b) specific training to the various sites on topics such as sustainability, and differentiating solutions that were policy solutions from program solutions, and c) ongoing coaching of individual coalition staff and the steering group, helping them set goals and manage barriers. this is an illustration of a community psychologist in a role as a consultant pursuing policy change. i began my work with this innovative grassroots program when it was called boston reach 2010 and focused on racial disparities in breast and cervical cancer survival rates for black women in boston. boston reach provides an excellent example of what a community can accomplish when it acknowledges the issue of racism in health and then creates a comprehensive social-change effort to address inequalities. the success of the boston reach allowed it to receive funding as a center of excellence in the elimination of disparities to fund and support seventeen other communities across new england that have followed their example and created community responses to promote health equity. as they expanded i became a consultant to many of these communities across new england. all of these new efforts were built around the following six key concepts. these concepts are all central to the center for health equity and social justice’s beliefs and are also illustrative of the best of community psychology principles. when i find community change efforts that are consistent with community psychology principles and values it allows for the full use of my consulting skills to support their efforts to accomplish their goals. 1. addressing institutional and structural racism the boston public health commission operates with an explicit understanding that racism is at the root of racial and ethnic health inequities. racism affects health directly by causing stress and anxiety, and it also affects health indirectly by its impact on the social determinants of health. every community that receives a grant, following the lead of the bphc global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 itself, engages in a three-day workshop on undoing racism for its core team and for community members. although the central role of racism in health disparities may seem obvious, the boston reach program was one of the few funded efforts in the nation that named racism as the issue and addressed it directly. my consulting work on this principle often involved supporting project staff in addressing the “push back” that they encountered when explicitly using the term ‘racism”. 2. focus on social determinants of health (sdoh) and in relation to racism and health as the reach 2010 group moved to become a center of excellence, they also expanded their approach to include an explicit focus on the social determinants of health. these social determinants are factors that have an exceptionally strong and welldemonstrated influence on health, such as education, socioeconomic status, housing, jobs, economic opportunity, transportation, food access, safety, environmental exposures, and so on. by looking at community health from the perspective of the social determinants, groups can examine the ways in which institutional racism plays out in each realm. (see figure 1). as the powerful film series “unnatural causes” makes clear, “your zip code may be more important than your genetic code in determining your health” (http://www.unnaturalcauses.org). this could be a wonderful phrase to summarize all of community psychology. on this principle my consultation was to the staff and their community coalitions on how the social determinants influenced health in their community. an ecological community psychology framework really was helpful to them. figure 1. baril et al 2011 3. grassroots community engagement the center’s approach is based on a core belief that grassroots involvement is essential to solving problems. barbara ferrer, the commissioner of public health for the city of boston, put it this way: “the role of a public health department is to create a space for residents to come together to define a problem, to define the solutions, and then enter into a dialogue with us—not the other way around. not we define the problem, we define the solution, and then we invite you in to help us implement the solution, which is what we’re most comfortable doing. we felt like part of the solution lay in being able to get a broad-based coalition that would tackle issues like racism. and that would bring together the provider community with the resident community to tackle those issues.” (boston public health commission, global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 2013). here i had to both push the community coalitions that consisted mainly of traditional service providers to reach out to the resident community, and also work with them to welcome the residents into their circle (not an easy task for many). 4. policy change the project has an explicit focus on creating longlasting policy and social change that will endure as a legacy in each participating community. this approach insists that communities explore policy changes that will improve community health, not just develop programs. thus all grant-recipient communities were required to develop and implement policy-based solutions for addressing racism and the social determinants of health. examples of success in local communities include: • creating zoning changes to allow for construction of a new supermarket in a lowincome community. video on the work of getting a supermarket into the neighborhood in springfield– https://vimeo.com/51135321. • successfully advocating with the governor for funding for summer jobs for teens. • working with the superintendent of schools to create an annual racial justice review of educational and disciplinary disparities in the schools for students of color. video on educational reform in worcester: https://vimeo.com/50828134. • creation of a food policy council by city hall. • city council creates areas where community gardens can be created for extended periods of time. all organizations in the jamaica plain coalition created and then had their agencies adopt a racial equity statement adhering to the principles of racial equity.my consultation on policy change involved helping the coalitions conceive of policy solutions to the racial inequities that they uncovered, and then developing appropriate policy change strategies ranging from working with political figures to community organizing. 5. focus on a shift from social service to social change for traditional nonprofit agencies that work with the center, the greatest challenge often was found in the explicit shift in focus from social service to social change. for example, the center is less interested in the creation of new education programs for black men at risk of diabetes than in promoting efforts that will change the institutional racism in housing, food access, and employment policies that put black men at higher risk for diabetes. for nonprofits accustomed to delivering social services, this was a huge change in emphasis. 6. collaboration finally, the center understands that in order to accomplish systems changes of this large scope a community must develop a broad-based coalition of residents, agencies, government, the private sector, and so on that will work together collaboratively. my expertise in coalition building was a great asset on this principle. together these six key concepts became a powerful force for transformative community change. this work is described in a new manual describing the work of the bphc center for health equity and social justice, “creating a health equity coalition: lessons from reach boston (2013; also in baril, 2011). one community’s story: the jamaica plain youth health equity collaborative how does this model translate into action in local communities supported by the bphc center? the bphc model becomes concrete in describing one local coalition that was being supported by the center. jamaica plain (jp) is a fascinating neighborhood in boston. it includes an affluent white community along with low-income black and latino communities — there are really two jps, the rich one and the poor one. accompanying this economic division are social and health inequities. to address the gap, the southern jp health center (sjphc) became the sponsor for the development of the jamaica plain youth health equity collaborative. the goals for the jp youth health equity collaborative were to: involve residents, organizations, and youth; examine health disparities; identify causes, including social determinants; create a common language and framework; and define and implement programs and change policies. my role with the jp youth health equity collaborative was to help design and facilitate their meetings, with a special emphasis on ensuring that the youth in the coalition were respected, engaged and active in the meetings. the staff had the health equity, youth development, and racial justice knowledge; i brought the coalition building and community development techniques and skills. in its first year of planning, the collaborative held a series of interactive youth health equity meetings, called “bucket meetings.” each bucket meeting engaged a cluster of young people and focused on one social determinant of health. the purpose of the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 meetings was to gather youth perceptions on that social determinant of health. collaborative members presented each small group of young people with a case example; the examples were variations on real stories about community members. the facilitators then asked the small discussion groups the following questions: what are the employment inequities for low-income african american/latino youth illustrated by this story? what is the role of institutional racism in the story? how will this affect the youth’s health? and what could we do about this? what possible action steps and strategies come to mind? the bucket meetings were well attended by jp young people, who had no difficulty addressing these questions, for each bucket. young members of the community implicitly understand the issue of social determinants of health and institutional racism. ultimately they choose to focus on youth employment. as part of the collaborative’s work on youth jobs, the group helped plan and took part in a youth-led protest rally at the state house urging the legislature to reinstate funds for summer jobs for young people. the orderly yet powerful rally of 700 young people caught the attention of both the media and the legislators. the money was re-instated, a significant policy victory. the project also issued a report on health in young people in jp, titled “02130 health and youth”. inside the report, each social determinant is examined, and the coverage includes youth stories, youth quotes, data, and ideas on what actions can be taken. the report is available on the bphc web site: http://www.bphc.org/programs/healthequitysocialjust ice/toolsandreports/pages/home.aspx as the work with the youth progressed, the southern jamaica plain health center brought together 16 youth, half of whom identify as white and half of whom identify as people of color, to participate in a year-long racial healing and reconciliation process. (see video in gjcpp http://www.gjcpp.org/en/photovid.php?issue=12&ph otovid=38). the remarkably skilled staff of the sjphc led this effort but reported the consultation that they received to be crucial to their success both in strategizing upcoming meetings, helping to facilitate meetings, and supporting staff. what the work with the bphc on health equity illustrates about community psychology and policy change: the bphc’s approach to the issues of health disparities makes a clear statement on the key role played by institutional racism in all the social determinants of health sectors. they follow this with actions to address policy change and societal change at the community level. this is a wonderful model for community psychology and for all those addressing racial health disparities. the communities and staff engaged in this work were deeply moved as illustrated in this video of project directors discussing how the experience affected them: https://vimeo.com/52888087 there is a striking similarity of six key guiding concepts of the center for health equity and social justice and basic community psychology principles. the principles that guide their work also parallel the six key community psychology principles i’ve written about in the power of collaborative solutions (wolff, 2010). (engage the full diversity of the community, encourage true collaboration, practice democracy, build on community strengths, take action for social change, engage spirituality as your compass for social change). the center’s work illustrates these six key principles in action. the consultation they received helped them to manifest their principles into real community and policy changes. the work of the jp youth health equity collaborative is especially noteworthy for putting youth at the forefront of the creation of community and social change. for community psychology this sets a model for supporting the next generation, our youth, to come forward and own the community change process by being the key players in it. conclusions: when we think of community psychology and policy we often think of academic researchers presenting research-based findings in position papers or legislative testimony. the work described in this paper presents an alternative model wherein the work of practitioners of community psychology provides examples of community psychology policy change. practitioners of community psychology can regularly engage in policy change. we have much to offer to such efforts through our roles as organizer, facilitator, energizer and coach while the community partners remain the decision makers. a root cause analysis on most community issues can highlight the underlying issues and allow for the creation of a social policy change agenda. this process is not often followed but is always available. following such a root cause analysis and development of a social change agenda the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 community psychologist practitioner must find the courage, support and avenue to pursue the change agenda which may frequently involve risks. or more likely the community practitioner will need to work with their community partners to make the decision to move forward on this more risky social change path. not all community partners are interested, willing or able to join in. however, a community psychologist’s role is to point out the social change policy options. the three examples presented in this paper illustrate some of the possibilities available for engaging as a community psychologist in social policy change including building healthy communities, focusing a policy agenda on a specific issue (health care access), and building the capacity of local communities to address social change issues such as systemic racism. these examples evolved over time and in all the examples the community psychologist was able to support these efforts at their various stages of development. on the personal side the work for me calls on my passion for social justice. over time doing the work has come with an understanding that it is indeed ‘political’. the process actively involves elected officials and government staff as partners not enemies; this can actually be a fun experience. on the other hand the work comes with risks. when at age 58 i was given three days of notice to leave a position i had had for 18 years, i was quite stunned and disoriented. i never felt that what we had done was deserving of the harsh response by the medical school nor was it wrong to issue the report. but at that point it was clear to me that working for social change in that position was over. so it was time to move on and make the best of it. there were many hard months ahead but i made a promise to myself to never work for another institution as an employee, and that has been a wonderful path. we need to encourage more community psychologist to tell of their experiences in the pursuit of social policy change at the community level in order to learn how to be most effective in these roles and to learn about the range of possibilities. by sharing these exemplars of policy practice we might inspire others and legitimize this important work. references baril, n., patterson, m., boen, c., gowler, r., & norman, n. (2011). the grantmaking model of a local health department. family and community health, 34 (18), 523-543. boston public health commission (2013). creating a health equity coalition: lessons from reach boston 2013.. this manual will be available at http://www.bphc.org/programs/healthequitysocia ljustice/toolsandreports/pages/home.aspx kelly, j. ( 1971). qualities of a community psychologist. american psychologist, 26, 897903. mcginnis, j. m., williams-russo, p, & knickman, j.r. (2002). the case for more active policy attention to health promotion. health affairs (project hope), 21 (1) (summer), 5-15. meredith, j., & dunham, c. (1999). real clout, the access project, boston: norris, t. & howell, l.f. (1999). healthy people in healthy communities: a dialogue guide. chicago: coalition for healthy cities and communities. starnes, d. m. (2004). community psychologist— get in the arena!!. american journal of community psychology, 33 (1/2), 3-6. wilkinson, r. g. & marmot, m.g. (eds.) (2003). social determinants of health: the solid facts. rev. ed. copenhagen: world health organization, regional office for europe. world health organization (1986). ottawa charter for health promotion. geneva: world health organization wolff, t. (1995). healthy communities massachusetts: one vision of civic democracy. municipal advocate, (spring) 22-24. wolff, t. (2003). the healthy community movement: a time for transformation national civic review, 92 (2) (summer), 95-111. wolff, t. (2010). the power of collaborative solutions: six principles and effective tools for building healthy communities. san francisco ca: jossey bass. websites: http://www.ncl.org http://www.bphc.org/chesj/pages/default.aspx http://www.unnaturalcauses.org microsoft word 2009-0021-final-20101122.docx   global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  32     the mobile♥care health project: providing dental care in rural hawai'i communities kaye lundburg, program director, mobile♥care health project, diocese of honolulu, roman catholic church of hawai'i carol r. ignacio, executive director, office for social ministry, diocese of honolulu, roman catholic church of hawai’i cheryl m. ramos, ph.d., associate professor, department of psychology, university of hawaii hilo key words: community psychology, community health, dental care, rural development recommended citation: lundburg, k., ignacio, c.r., & ramos, c.m. (2011). the mobile♥care health project: providing dental care in rural hawai'i communities. global journal of community psychology practice, 1(3), 32-36. retrieved <date>, from http://www.gjcpp.org/. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  3   january  2011     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  33     the mobile♥care health project: providing dental care in rural hawai'i communities kaye lundburg1, 2, 3, carol r. ignacio2, 3, 4, cheryl m. ramos5 1mobile♥care health project, 2diocese of honolulu, 3roman catholic church of hawai’i, 4office for social ministry, 5department of psychology, university of hawaii, hilo abstract this paper reports on the mobile♥care health project (mchp), a project of the office for social ministry (osm) of the roman catholic diocese of honolulu (referred to subsequently as “diocese”), which aimed to increase access to dental care for the underserved on the island of hawai'i. this paper describes the history of the project, challenges encountered in its development, short and long term goals set and accomplished, and the community-based dental care programs that were established as a result of the mchp initiative. introduction improving oral health has been established as a priority health initiative in the united states (u.s. department of health and human services, 2003). strategies employed to achieve this goal include the fluoridation of public water systems, oral health education, evidence-based dentistry, increasing medicaid benefits, increasing the supply of dentists who participate in medicaid, and using innovative approaches to deliver dental care. such approaches include the use of mobile dental units, teledentistry, and the use of non-dental health professionals to provide dental care services to underserved communities. (cohen, 2009; colangelo, 2009; fricton & chen, 2009). the need for increased access to dental care is most prevalent for those who experience economic, geographic, cultural, transportation, or medical barriers to care and who live in areas with limited provider availability. when compared to national statistics, the oral health for residents of the state of hawaii are among the poorest. those living in hawaii's rural neighbor islands1 report the greatest need for improved oral health and increased access to dental services. on the island of hawai’i nearly 55% of the residents of hawai'i island included among the underserved (hawaii primary care association, 2001). this paper reports on the mobile♥care health project (mchp), a project of the office for social ministry (osm) of the roman catholic diocese of honolulu (referred to subsequently as “diocese”), which aimed to increase access to dental care for the 1 'neighbor islands' refers to all islands in the state of hawaii excluding the island of oahu. underserved on the island of hawai'i. this paper describes the history of the project, challenges encountered in its development, short and long term goals set and accomplished, and the communitybased dental care programs that were established as a result of the mchp initiative. history in 1994, the osm organized and facilitated a community planning process on the big island of hawai'i as a result of learning that a homeless veteran died because he was unable to get dental care for an untreated tooth infection (okinaka, ramos, & ignacio, 2007). at that time the unmet medical and dental needs of the rural poor were identified as a priority concern. several possible solutions to this problem were discussed and explored but one suggestion rallied the most support as stated by one participant; “we need one of those mobile things that brings medical and dental to where we are”. the concept of a mobile health project was conceived as a result of this community planning process. osm took the lead in organizing this effort with the funding support of the county of hawaii, hawaii island united way (hiuw), local foundations, maryknoll fathers and brothers, sisters of st. joseph of carondolet, corporations, and the community. with broad community support, mchp was underway. in 1996 the first mobile unit, a thirty-seven foot winnebago fully equipped medical and dental van, arrived in hilo. the st. francis healthcare system joined osm to develop the project and to provide clinical oversight. in january of 1997, mchp began delivering services in west hawaii from the southermost communities in the ka'u district to the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  3   january  2011     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  33     communities of north hawaii. in 1999, a second mobile unit was acquired to deliver services to the underserved of east hawaii communities. it became apparent that the need for access to dental care was not only a critical need on the island of hawai’i but was also a critical need on other neighbor islands. in 1999 the maui oral health task force asked the mchp to bring mobile dental services to maui. osm responded and with the donation of a mobile dental van from hmsa and funding from the county of maui, mchp initiated services on the island of maui in 2000. challenges osm persevered through many challenges to meet the dental needs of the poor. however, although abundant in faith, osm lacked knowledge and experience in providing healthcare services and related operating issues. the county of hawaii awarded the grant for the acquisition of a mobile healthcare unit to osm with full knowledge and support of the diocese. however, as osm prepared to initiate services after two years of planning, support, and encouragement from the administrators of the diocese, osm was informed that the van couldn't be operated because the diocese’s insurance didn’t have a provision for malpractice coverage. shaken but still determined, osm contacted sr. beatrice tom osf, ceo of st. francis healthcare system who immediately agreed to partner with the diocese to provide the necessary clinical oversight. in 1996, with the mobile van and a clinical partner in hand, osm faced another challenge. they did not have operating funds to support the mchp operations and thus began an island-wide van tour to the catholic parishes on the island of hawai'i. they attended every weekend mass to share their mission of providing healthcare for the poor and asked parishioners for their financial support. parishioners responded generously by donating approximately $25,000 for the purchase of supplies and fuel for the van. a parishioner from st. michael the archangel parish in kona volunteered to become the van driver every weekend for three months. he did not ask for compensation. a very generous grant from the maryknoll fathers and brothers and from the sisters of st. joseph of carondolet provided additional initial operating funds that allowed mchp to begin providing clinical care to people in need in january 1997 for three days a week. the need for dental services was voiced strongly by consumers during the planning process of the mchp but osm was unprepared for the overwhelming response from those in need. people with acute dental needs began gathering on clinic days and waited patiently to be seen, sometimes waiting for several hours. many drove 100 miles and farther from their homes on the east side of hawai'i island to be seen by the dentist providing services on the west side of the island. it was clear that the level of service provided by the small mobile project was far less than the needs of the communities it served. more dentists and more funding were needed to expand services to five days a week. a proposal was submitted and approval was secured from the federal bureau of primary care to have hawaii island designated as a dental health professions shortage area (d-hpsa). this was the first d-hpsa designation for a neighbor island county in hawaii. maui and kauai counties have since received dhpsa designations as well. osm met with the state department of health dental division chief seeking his support by providing the project with a state dentist and operating funds. he ridiculed the project, saying it was impractical and suggested that the need for dental services on the island of hawai'i was overstated. it was suggested that osm go to the hawaii state legislature to ask that the state dental division be funded to re-open a state dental clinic on the island of hawai'i. osm responded by gathering other island advocates and convened a legislative forum in january 1998 to inform legislators of the serious unmet need for dental care on the neighbor islands. at that meeting the chief of the dental division stated that his budget provided direct dental services only on the island of oahu. the informal “tri-county oral health task force” then asked the hawaii primary care association (hpca) to convene the first strategic oral health planning process in 1999. partnerships the hpca meeting brought together individuals and organizations who committed their resources and became partners in the mission to deliver dental services to the underserved in hawaii neighbor island communities. st. francis healthcare system encouraged staff dentists to travel to the big island of hawai'i to provide dental care. media attention resulted in increased funding from the private sector for the mchp, with the hmsa foundation as the project's flagship supporter. in 1999 the county of hawaii awarded the mchp funds to purchase a second mobile van to expand services to communities in east hawaii. the hds foundation, hiuw, and hawaii community foundation (hcf) responded with funds to support this expansion. the mchp partnerships included: global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  3   january  2011     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  34     • the mission driven staff and the dentists from hawaii, maui and oahu, that traveled many miles and worked long days to bring dental care to those who had nowhere else to go. • the foundations, corporations and community organizations that steadfastly supported this work by providing the operating funding and support. • the religious communities and organizations that saw mchp as an opportunity to extend the mission of christ in serving the poor. • administrators and legislators in state and county government who supported initiatives for funding and legislation for justice. • parishes and private donors who responded with their financial support. • recipients of mchp dental services who kept the project grounded in its mission through the sharing of their stories, gratitude, and words of encouragement. goals and accomplishments for the past twelve years (january 1997 – 2009) the mchp has been a safety net provider of dental services for the low-income uninsured medicaid/quest2 population on the island of hawai'i, and on the island of maui from 2000-2003. those served include children, the physically disabled, the mentally ill, the impoverished elderly, the recent immigrant, the working poor, the homeless, and the unemployed. project goals were clearly stated at project start-up and much has been accomplished. immediate/short-term goal: provide direct services mchp provided services for over 18,500 patients, at a value of $1.6 million in uncompensated dental care, at clinic sites in pahala, oceanview, honaunau, kailua, kawaihae, kapa'au, waimea, hilo and pahoa on the big island, and in wailuku, kahului, hana, kihei, lahaina, pai'a and keanae on maui. until 2003, the mchp was the only safety net provider of dental care for the underserved on these islands. long term goal: systemic change in 1997, it was clear that mchp was an interim response to the immediate acute and urgent dental 2 quest, a program of the state of hawaii, provides health coverage through managed care plans for eligible lower income hawaii residents. care needs in hawai’i. however, what was also needed was a long-term solution to the systemic problems that resulted from years of inadequate funding and the low priority of dental health care in the state of hawai'i, especially in neighbor island communities. the mchp and its community partners raised awareness of the needs of the poor for access to oral healthcare with an emphasis on the needs of the neighbor islands. table 1 outlines the systems-level progress made from 1997 to 2009. the mchp supported the development and expansion of dental capacity in federally qualified health centers (fqhc) and community health clinics (chc) as a long-term solution to increase access to dental care for the underserved population. the grass roots efforts of community oral health task forces have begun to produce results. community health clinics on kauai, molokai, and in kea'au on the island of hawaii are currently providing dental services. the maui oral health clinic of the maui community college (mcc) school of nursing serves vulnerable populations in a stationary dental clinic and a mobile dental clinic using the van initially donated to osm by hmsa in the year 2000 (and later transferred to mcc in 2003). these clinics for the underserved are the first on the neighbor islands. other clinics are currently in operation at hamakua health clinic and west hawaii community health clinic on the island of hawaii, and at the community clinic of maui. these clinics are community based, and are situated in identified areas of poverty. hamakua health center received county funding for a new mobile dental van to develop a dental clinic at their sites in honokaa and kapa'au. the west hawaii community health clinic opened a pediatric stationary dental clinic for south kona in march 2009. the ownership and operation of the two mchp dental vans was transferred to the two clinics in to support and enable their plan of continued dental expansion in their areas of need. they continue to carry out the mchp mission of providing access to dental care for the underserved. they collaborate and partner with private and state providers of care to address the total healthcare needs of their patients. it is a mandate from the bureau of primary care that they include dental care in their menu of services and there are federal expansion funds to support this development. conclusion in the beginning the mchp was envisioned as a five year project. twelve years have passed and finally the permanent community-based health care global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  3   january  2011     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  35     facilities, as well as mobile dental units, are delivering much needed dental services in hawaii communities. when the mchp began providing medical and dental care for the underserved people of the big island of hawai'i in 1997, one question was frequently asked, that being “why is the social ministry department of the catholic church, the office for social ministry, with no experience in healthcare, involved in this project?” this question led the staff of osm and the mchp to reflect on their catholic faith and the work of father damien, one of the greatest servants of the poor in their faith tradition. they wondered if he was ever asked, “why would a foreigner with no healthcare experience choose to dedicate his life to the people with hansen’s disease in hawaii?” the answer to both questions, they imagined, was the same. it was a matter of putting faith into action, and the belief that all people have dignity and value,and by virtue of this fact deserve basic necessities of food, shelter, and healthcare. each clinic day, individuals served by the mchp came in pain and frustration, often presenting symptoms of dental infection and abscess attributed to years of no access to dental care. each would say “we have no place else to go” , the very same words that were likely voiced by those who faced hansen’s disease and to who father damien brought hope. in the year of father damien’s canonization, we reflect on the work of the mchp and are reminded that what began in faith and in response to a voice saying “we need one of those‘mobile things’ that brings medical and dental to where we are” has resulted in a tidal wave of change in how dental care services are delivered in neighbor island communities of the state of hawai'i. it is in the spirit of blessed damien and mother marianne cope, that the mchp was conceived and from which great change has come. table 1. systems-level progress. year 1997 year 2009 there was no unified voice for oral health access on the neighbor islands. today, the neighbor island counties of hawaii, maui/molokai, and kauai each have an active oral health task force and an oral health strategic plan. this tri-county group has been meeting since 1998 to share oral health initiatives on their respective islands, to examine barriers to service and to collaborate on strategies to improve access to care. policies have been changed and legislation has been passed because of this unified voice. mobile care has been a catalyst in the development of this voice. there were no (0) chc dental clinics on the neighbor islands of hawaii, maui, kauai, molokai and lanai today chc dental clinics on kauai (2), molokai (1), maui, (1) and hawaii (3) are open there was a critical shortage of dentists serving the low-income population on the neighbor islands. today there are partnerships with a dental residency program and with the us military that place dentists in chc dental clinics on the neighbor islands. hawaii dental licensing was a major barrier in encouraging mainland dentists to volunteer or contract to serve the low-income population in hawaii in community clinics. for 3 years, the tri-county oral health task force and the primary care association educated legislators on the need for dental license reform. in 2004 the legislature passed a community service dental license that allows dentists licensed in mainland states to practice in hawaii in chcs. today there are csl dentists serving in community health dental clinics and their affiliates on kauai, maui, hawaii, molokai and oahu. dental services for adult recipients of quest/medicaid were limited to emergency services. the restoration of adult dental benefits for quest recipients has been a tri-county oral health task force and the primary care association goal since 1999. in december 2006 medquest expanded the dental benefits for adults to include limited prevention, restoration and dentures. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  3   january  2011     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  36     references american dental association (2009). proceedings of the march 23-25, 2009 access to dental care summit, council on access, prevention and interprofessional relations. retrieved august 8, 2009. cohen, l.a. (2009). the role of non-dental health professionals in providing access to dental care for low-income and minority patients. dental clinics of north america, 53, 451-468. colangelo, g.a. (2009). innovations to improve oral health care access. dental clinics of north america, 53, 591-608. fricton, j. & chen, h. (2009). using teledentistry to improve access to dental care for the underserved. dental clinics of north america, 53, 537-548. hawaii primary care association. oral health 2001: a strategic plan for oral health in hawai'i. retrieved august 4, 2009 http://www.hawaiipca.net/programs/oralhealth/status oralhealth. okinaka, a., ramos, c.m., & ignacio, c. (2007). human services, in g. aguiar (ed) government in the countryside: politics and policies in rural america. dubuque, ia: kendall/hunt, 219-231. u.s. department of health and human services. (2003). national call to action to promote oral health. rockville, md: u.s. department of health and human services, public health service, national institutes of health, national institute of dental and craniofacial research. nih publication no. 035303, spring 2003. retrieved august 8, 2009 http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/topics/oralhealth/nati onalcalltoaction.html. microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 379 international editors profiles 380 adrian fisher is an associate professor in the school of psychology at victoria university (australia). his main teaching is in the graduate programs in community psychology and in supervising student research. his major research focus is in the psychological sense of community, how it can be used as an including or excluding factor, and concerns about its research methodology. adrian was born in perth, western australia and after a variety of work and travel adventures studied psychology at the western australian institute of technology (now curtin university). it was there that he was introduced to community psychology. from curtin, he moved to the university of illinois at urbana-champaign, eventually completing his master’s and ph.d. degrees. in 1989 he moved to melbourne to establish a cp program. this is the foundation of the program that operates successfully at victoria university. vincent t. francisco received his m. a. at the university of kansas in human development, and his ph.d. at the university of kansas in child and developmental psychology. he is associate professor with the department of public health education at the university of north carolina at greensboro. dr. francisco is primarily interested in research in community development, especially for the enhancement of community integration and support, and work toward empowerment of marginalized groups. he has considerable experience in the research and evaluation of community-based intervention programs focusing on adolescent development, reduction of risk for hiv/aids, teen substance abuse, assaultive violence, teen parenthood, and chronic/cardiovascular diseases. he also has considerable experience in provision of technical support for the development of coalitions. in his current position, dr. francisco works with members of ethnic minority communities and the general population to prevent a variety of problems in living. dr. francisco has experience in applied (participatory) community research, and in providing technical assistance and support for universal and targeted initiatives with communities including native hawaiian and asian american communities, native american reservations such as with the jicarilla apache tribe, african american communities such as mid-south chicago (bronzeville), as well as immigrant communities in the northeastern and midwestern united states. dr. francisco has worked with foundations, federal and state governmental agencies, and local community groups to affect health problems and economic disparities in the general population through the development of community prevention 381 initiatives. these initiatives include such diverse areas as primary prevention for juvenile justice, youth and community development, and support for healthy cities initiatives. guillermo hinojosa rivero obtained a bs in psychology at universidad iberoamericana in mexico city. his master’s degree is in education from the university of washington (oregon). he has published 5 books in collaboration with other colleagues. he also has produced more than 20 articles on educational topics and on psychology applied to special education matters. from 1984 to 1990 he was a member of the national system of researchers (sni). at universidad iberoamericana puebla he teaches courses on statistics and methodology. he was director of research and graduate studies. from 2005 to 2009 he was the director of the department of human development sciences. he is presently professor at the continuing education office. he is in charge of the university program for elder people and of the community leaders training program. he has developed courses on computer assistance for rehabilitation of children with learning problems. he also designed electronic equipment for persons with brain palsy for using the computer even with limited and uncontrolled movements. carolyn kagan is professor of community social psychology and a registered counselling psychologist and qualified social worker. she is director of the research institute for health and social change at manchester metropolitan university, uk, where the first action learning uk masters programme is community psychology is based. she works on critical action research projects in community settings (participatively where possible), both in the uk and overseas. her work is in pursuit of greater social justice with those marginalised by the social system, including people living poverty and disabled people. her work is value based, drawing on feminist and radical academic critiques and integrating ideas from environmental science, sociology, anthropology and critical systems thinking as well as from psychology. she has worked with disabled people for over 30 years. she has developed innovative community based projects which have pre-figured future practice and her work has contributed to uk and international service and policy development. most recently she has been involved in work on forced labour (modern slavery) with a view to gaining information that might influence international social policy and lead to more humane lives for migrant workers and expose the detrimental impact of globalisation in the face of neoliberal economic policies. she has supervised 24 doctoral students 382 working within these areas of interest. she has published widely in community psychology and disability, is a member of several academic journal editorial boards and was a founding editor of the international journal community, work and family which she co-edited for 12 years. her most recent work, written with colleagues at manchester metropolitan university is critical community psychology. francine lavoie, ph.d. is professor in community psychology at université laval, québec, canada. she received the first ph. d. granted by the université du québec. she is the pioneer of community psychology at québec. she joined the faculty of the ecole de psychologie in 1979. in 1992-1994 she received the prestigious grant of excellence of the québec council for social research (cqrs). since 1996 she is a fellow of the american psychological association and of section 27, the society for community research and action. over the years, she has received grants on marital violence, dating violence, and mutual aid groups. she has developed and evaluated two prevention programs on dating violence (viraj and passaj) for high schools students and has conducted the first research on dating violence in québec. she also documented sexual and physical violence in the inuit population of nunavik. her more recent work is on sexualized social activities and sexting in adolescence which could represent new settings for sexual coertion. josé ornelas is professor at instituto superior de psicologia aplicada in lisbon, since 1987. he has been director of college level studies on community development and mental health since 1998. since 2004 he is director of the master and ph. d. programs in community psychology. he received a ph. d. in psychology at boston university in 1984. a part of his doctoral program was carried out at mcgill university, in montreal, canada. in 1999 he obtained another ph. d. at the university of porto, in portugal. from 1984 to 1987 he was a professor at universidade dos açores. in 1987 he founded aeips the psychosocial studies and integration association, with a program for community integration of persons with mental disorders. in 1998 he also founded sociedade portuguesa de psicología comunitaria. he was the first president of the european community psychology association between 2005 and 2007. he belongs to scra, the society for community research and action, the 27th division of the american psychological association. he is a member of the editorial board of the journal of primary prevention, of the 383 journal of community and applied social psychology, and of análise psicológica. in 2006 he created the national protuguese commision for the restructuring of mental health services. in june 2008 he was the organizer of the 2nd. international conference of community psychology in lisbon. euclides sánchez has developed a remarkable trajectory as social psychologist for more than thirty years. he is an expert on research and solutions of diverse social problems using qualitative and action research methodologies. his areas of interest are public policies, environmental and social problems solutions, community agents training, community organization, research on social problems, projects design and evaluation. he has been professor at several venezuelan universities and visiting professor at academic institutions in mexico, argentina, puerto rico, chile, france and spain. he received his b. a. in psychology at universidad central de venezuela, his masters degree in psychology at the london school of economics and political sciences, and his ph. d. in psychology at universidad central de venezuela. in 2003 he received the psychology interamerican award, and in 2007 the environmental psychology interamerican award. maría eugenia sánchez y díaz de rivera is professor-researcher at universidad iberoamericana puebla. she obtained the doctorate in sociology at ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in paris. he was visiting professor at cornell university. she is a member of the national system of researchers, level ii. in 1973 she initiated a process of social transformation in an indigenous community in the northern mountains of the state of puebla, where she lived and worked for 15 years. she organized the alain touraine chair at universidad iberoamericana puebla in 2003. she has published several books and written articles in national and international journals. among her publications are: “interioridad y crisis del future humano” [interiority and human future crisis], “conocimiento y acción en tzinacapan” [knowledge and action at tzinacapan] in spanish and in french (2004, 2007), “ las universidades de américa latina en la construcción de una globalización alternativa” [latin american universities in building an alternative globalization], “la veredas de la incertidumbre. relaciones iterculturales y supervivencia digna” (2005) [the paths of uncertainty. intercultural relations and dignified 384 survival], “identidades, globalizacion e inequidad” (2008) [identities, globalization and inequity]. in 2006 she was awarded “la condecoration des palmes académiques” a recognition of her work by the french government. alipio sánchez vidal received a master of arts in psychology from the university of minnesota and a ph. d. at universidad de barcelona. he teaches there community psychology and ethics. he is the author of some 50 publications, three books on community psychology, one on social intervention ethics, one on applied social psychology. he is the co-author of four other books. he is a member of the european association of community psychology. his areas of interest are community intervention, the sense of community, social ethics and modern technology. in 2007 he published the book “manual de psicología comunitaria. un enfoque integrado“. he has delivered more than 75 courses at spanish, european and south american universities, professional associations, community organizations and government. he coordinated the master on community psychology at universidad de barcelona. he organized the iv european congress of community psychology. he is the organizer of the iv international congress of community psychology that will take place in barcelona in june 2012. irma serrano-garcía is presently professor at the psychology department and principal researcher at the “centro universitario de servicios y estudios psicológicos” at universidad de puerto rico, río piedras. she was the editor of the interamerican journal of psychology. she received a post-doctoral degree on public policies at harvard university. her ph. d. in social community psychology was obtained at the university of michigan. she has made more than 50 publications, including five books. she is a member of the american psychological association, the interamerican society of psychology and the psychological association of puerto rico. her areas of interest include social change and power relations, community development, participatory research, gender studies and hiv-aids preventionshe is a consultant of community based organizations and of governmental agencies. 385 tom wolff, ph.d. is a community psychologist committed to issues of social justice and to building healthy communities through collaborative solutions. a nationally recognized consultant on coalition building and community development, he has a lifetime of experience training and consulting with individuals, organizations, and communities across north america. his most recent book is the power of collaborative solutions published in 2010 by jossey bass/john wiley. his writings on coalition building include from the ground up: a workbook on coalition building and community development (with gillian kaye, 1996) and the spirit of the coalition (with william berkowitz, 2000). he has been a partner in the development of the community tool box (ctb.ku.edu), a website with 7000 pages of practical resources on community health and development. between 1985 and 2002, tom founded and directed community partners, a technical assistance and training program affiliated with the university of massachusetts medical school. it provided guidance and support in coalition building and community development. tom is a fellow of the american psychological association, which granted him its 1985 national career award for distinguished contributions to practice in community psychology and its 1993 henry v. mcneil award for innovation in community mental health. in 2000, he received the “for the people against the tide award from health care for all”, for his “outstanding efforts to energize and educate local communities”. exploring the roles of childhood trauma, psychological distress, and resource use in the context of a climate change-induced disaster savannah b. simpson, maria kornbluh, samuel d. mcquillin, & jyoti mishra keywords: climate change-induced disaster, childhood trauma, psychological distress, resource use, disaster preparedness, college students, 2018 camp fire author biographies: savannah b. simpson, is a doctoral candidate in the clinicalcommunity psychology program at the university of south carolina. savannah’s research program seeks to promote positive youth development and social change in formal mentoring programs, with a complementary focus on improving mental health outcomes among college students. by examining the intersections of mentoring relationships, cultural responsiveness, and well-being, her work aims to inform practices that foster resilience and psychological well-being in both youth and young adults. mariah kornbluh, is an associate professor in community psychology at the university of oregon. her scholarship explores how student-led research can inform school decision-making in effective and sustainable ways. samuel mcquillin, is an associate professor in school psychology at the university of south carolina. he is interested in how communities and schools can work together to help empower young people to succeed in school and in life. dr. mcquillin is particularly interested in how relationships between adult helpers and young people influence positive youth development. in his work, he hopes to improve these positive influences by equipping helpers with skills and practices gleaned from research evidence. dr. mcquillin also serves as a quantitative methodologist on a broad range of research projects. jyoti mishra, is an associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the university of california san diego. she global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 is the founder and director of the neatlabs and also the co-director of the university of california wide climate resilience initiative (https://www.climateresilience.online/). dr. mishra has research expertise in the study of climate trauma and resilience as well as scalable digital mental health interventions and precision psychiatry. her research has been widely featured in popular media, including features in cnn, time magazine, the bbc, npr, washington post, world economic forum, and scientific american, among others, and has also been cited by the national climate assessment as the first empirical evidence of climate disaster impacts on mental health and well-being. recommended citation: simpson, s. b., kornbluh, m., mcquillin, s. d., & mishra, j. (2025). exploring the roles of childhood trauma, psychological distress, and resource use in the context of a climate change-induced disaster. global journal of community psychology practice, 16(1), 1 15. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: savannah b. simpson, university of south carolina, email: sbs16@email.sc.edu. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.climateresilience.online/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:sbs16@email.sc.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 exploring the roles of childhood trauma, psychological distress, and resource use in the context of a climate change-induced disaster abstract aims: this cross-sectional study examined the relationship between childhood trauma and psychological distress (i.e., depression and anxiety symptoms) and the moderating role of resource use during and after the deadliest wildfire in california among a sample of college students. method: participants (n = 473) completed well-validated measures six months after the 2018 camp fire exploring retrospective childhood trauma, current psychological distress, and resource use during and after the fire. results: multiple regression and moderation analyses revealed that greater exposure to childhood trauma predicted increased depression and anxiety symptoms following the fire. however, using community-based (off-campus) mental health services during and after the fire buffered the effects of childhood trauma on depression and anxiety symptoms. conclusion: youth exposed to childhood trauma are more susceptible to depression and anxiety symptoms post-disaster, yet using community-based mental health services may protect against the development of aggravated symptoms with greater childhood trauma. introduction young adults are increasingly being exposed to environmental disasters (centre for research on the epidemiology of disasters, 2022). in fact, the severity and frequency of these disasters, particularly wildfires, have been on the rise due to climate change (jones et al., 2022). climate change appears to be leading to weather conditions that are more conducive to the occurrence and spread of fires. these conditions create an environment that facilitates the ignition, rapid spread, and difficulty in extinguishing fires (jones et al., 2022). consequently, the heightened occurrence of climate change-induced disasters presents significant threats to both physical and mental well-being (adams et al., 2022; lowe et al., 2019). when weather conditions become unfavorable, such as during long periods of extreme heat or flooding, it can create a range of challenges and hardships (cianconi et al., 2020). these conditions often disrupt daily routines, damage infrastructure, and pose threats to personal safety and mental health. as a result, the general population may experience increased stress levels and feelings of anxiety and/or depression due to these adverse circumstances (charlson et al., 2021; cianconi et al., 2020; crandon et al., 2022; to et al., 2021). however, for individuals who have pre-existing vulnerabilities like anxiety and/or depressive disorders, the impact of adverse weather conditions can be even more significant. exposure to extreme and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 prolonged weather conditions may further intensify existing emotional struggles, exacerbating symptoms and making it more difficult to effectively cope with mental health conditions (berry et al., 2010; taylor, 2020). individuals exposed to childhood trauma may also be significantly impacted by climate change-induced disasters given childhood trauma can increase vulnerability to the mental health effects of stressful life events (mclaughlin et al., 2010; silveira et al., 2021). childhood trauma, which encompasses experiences such as abuse, neglect, or witnessing violence, can have long-lasting impacts on individuals’ psychological wellbeing (downey & crummy, 2022). exposure to childhood trauma can lead to disruptions in typical developmental processes and can shape how individuals perceive and respond to subsequent stressors throughout their lives (dye, 2018). when individuals who are exposed to childhood trauma encounter climate change-induced disasters, the combination of their previous trauma and the overwhelming nature of the disaster can exacerbate mental health symptoms (silveira et al., 2021). moreover, climate change-induced disasters disproportionately affect individuals of lower socio-economic status (ses; lowe et al., 2019) and have a more pronounced effect on women, the young and elderly, and people of color (ibarrarán et al., 2009; tang et al., 2014). access to resources becomes particularly important for minoritized individuals, as they face additional barriers in recovering from the impact of climate change-induced disasters. this is especially crucial because the conservation of resources model suggests that the use of post-disaster resources, including mental health services, can act as a protective factor in mitigating distress (hobfoll, 1989). according to this model, distress emerges when individuals experience significant losses in tangible (e.g., money, possessions) and/or intangible (e.g., social support, self-esteem) resources. following climate change-induced disasters, significant losses are common, increasing the probability of experiencing distress (hobfoll et al., 2016). using post-disaster resources (e.g., disaster relief aid, counseling and psychological support, community support and engagement) can help mitigate distress by providing the necessary support, assistance, and coping mechanisms during the challenging aftermath of a disaster. in fact, there is typically an increase in use of mental health services following climate change-induced disasters (reifels et al., 2015). while there is extensive literature exploring the effects of climate change-induced disasters on the mental health of adults and children (charlson et al., 2021; crandon et al., 2022; lowe et al., 2019; to et al., 2021), there is much less research focusing on the impact of these disasters on college students. this research gap is important to address as emerging adulthood, the phase in which college students are typically in, is a critical time in development (wood et al., 2018). it is during this phase that individuals experience numerous transitions and challenges while shaping their identity and navigating their future paths. therefore, it is important to recognize that college-going youth also face significant hardship in the aftermath of such events, often relying on their communities for support (carales & lópez, 2022). gaining insight into the ramifications of climate change-induced disasters and the resources that students use can assist institutions of higher education in developing strategies to best support these youth. to effectively respond to emergencies and cater to the wellbeing of college students with pre-existing vulnerabilities, it is crucial to understand which post-disaster resources are beneficial. therefore, the current study examined http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 whether exposure to childhood trauma (before the age of 18 years) predicted psychological distress among a sample of college students living in close proximity to the deadliest wildfire in california, the 2018 camp fire; prior work has shown that this extreme event was a climate change-induced wildfire (duffy et al., 2019). we also explored the moderating role of resource use (e.g., mental health services, disaster relief aid, food pantry) by students during and after the fire. by examining these factors, the study aimed to shed light on the effectiveness of various resources in mitigating psychological distress and supporting college students with pre-existing vulnerabilities in the face of the climate change-induced disaster. given that prior literature indicates individuals with pre-existing vulnerabilities are more likely to experience mental health challenges following a disaster (berry et al., 2010; taylor, 2020), we hypothesized that participants who report increased exposure to childhood trauma will have greater depression and anxiety symptoms after the camp fire. we also hypothesized that the effect of childhood trauma on depression and anxiety symptoms will be moderated by student resource use during and after the camp fire (i.e., the relationship between childhood trauma and depression and anxiety symptoms is different for students who used resources). the current study offers a unique contribution to the literature by examining the intersection of mental health, climate change-induced disasters, and the role of resource use with a sample of college youth— an understudied population in this realm of research. method participants data were drawn from 473 college students within the california state university, chico’s department of psychology (n = 361) and basic needs program (provides disaster assistance to students; n = 112; see table 1) by convenience sampling. participants were recruited in chico, ca as residents were among those most affected by the 2018 camp fire (the center of the fire was 10 to 15 miles from chico). table 1 participant demographic characteristics (n = 473) variable % sex female 78.8 male 21.2 race white/caucasian 72.1 black/african american 4.1 native hawaiian/other pacific islander 1.6 asian 6.5 american indian/alaska native 0.8 biracial or multiracial 15.0 socio-economic status low affluence 2.1 lower-middle affluence 22.4 upper-middle affluence 48.6 high affluence 26.8 m(sd) age 23.11(6.22) procedure six months following the 2018 camp fire (spring 2019), california state university, chico students within the department of psychology and/or students enrolled in the basic needs program were invited to participate in the present study. online surveys exploring retrospective childhood trauma, current psychological distress (i.e., depression and anxiety symptoms), and resource use during and after the camp fire http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 were administered to participants once written informed consent was obtained. the study was approved by the institutional review boards of the university of california, san diego (irb#180140) and california state university, chico (irb#22838). measures demographics. participant age, sex, race, and ses were obtained. dichotomous codes were created to indicate participants’ sex (i.e., 0 = female; 1 = male), if respondents identified as white (i.e., 0 = no; 1 = yes), and if respondents were in the california state university, chico’s department of psychology or basic needs program (i.e., site; 0 = basic needs; 1 = psychology). ses composite scores (0 = low affluence to 3 = high affluence) were created with an adapted version of the family affluence scale (boudreau & poulin, 2008), which measures family wealth by ownership of objects of value (e.g., car, computer)— items were chosen with brevity in mind, given the large sample size and contextual constraints of data collection after a serious climate change-induced disaster. childhood trauma. childhood trauma during the first 18 years of life was assessed using the 28-item brief screening version of the childhood trauma questionnaire (ctq; bernstein et al., 2003). participants responded on a 5-point likert scale (1 = never true; 5 = very often true), and a mean score was calculated—higher scores indicated greater trauma (cronbach’s α = .92). psychological distress. to assess depressive symptomatology, the 9-item patient health questionnaire (phq-9; kroenke et al., 2001) was administered. on this scale, participants responded on a 4-point likert scale (0 = not at all; 3 = nearly every day) to assess the frequency of depression symptoms during the past two weeks. a total sum score was calculated, and higher scores indicated greater depressive symptomatology (cronbach’s α = .90). the 7-item generalized anxiety disorder (gad-7; spitzer et al., 2006) scale was used to assess gad symptom severity. respondents rated the frequency of the anxiety symptoms on a 4-point likert scale (0 = not at all; 3 = nearly every day), and a total sum score was calculated—higher scores indicated greater anxiety symptomatology (cronbach’s α = .91). resource use. to determine which resources participants used during and/or following the camp fire, participants checked all that applied from an 8-item resource list; this list was generated through soliciting feedback from university staff and community members. dichotomous codes were created to indicate resource use for the eight resource categories (i.e., 0 = no; 1 = yes). the list of resources included: counseling and wellness center (on-campus; 19.9% yes), wildcat food pantry (provides food and food benefit application assistance to students; 22.6% yes), wildcat rise fire recovery fund grants application (grant that supports students impacted by the camp fire; 13.7% yes), university housing office (4.4% yes), disaster calfresh relief (federal assistance program that provides food benefits to disaster victims; 4.2% yes), the federal emergency management agency (fema) disaster assistance (6.8% yes), other mental health services (off-campus; 6.6% yes), and other community agencies (5.1% yes). statistical analyses multiple regression analyses examined the effects of childhood trauma on depression and anxiety symptoms, while co-varying for age, race, ses, sex, and site. all covariates were selected a priori. to investigate the moderation effects of resource use on the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 association between childhood trauma and depression and anxiety symptoms, eight moderation analyses were performed for each symptom by resource use category. data were analyzed using ibm statistical package for the social sciences (spss) statistics (version 28) predictive analytics software and the macro process version 4.0 (https://www.processmacro.org/index.html) . results multiple regression analyses revealed, when co-varying for age, race, ses, sex, and site, greater exposure to childhood trauma was associated with increased depression (b = 3.40, se = .58, p<.001) and anxiety (b = 2.04, se = .55, p<.001; see table 2) symptoms. the model equations were also significant (depression: f(6,305) = 9.57, p<.001, r2 = .16; anxiety: f(6,306) = 4.88, p<.001, r2 = .09). moderation analyses were assessed using a bonferroni (family-wise error rate) adjusted alpha value of .006 per test (.05/8). moderation analyses indicated that the use of other (i.e., off-campus) mental health services buffered the effects of childhood trauma on depression (b = -3.81, se = 1.32, p<.001; see figure 1) and anxiety symptoms (b = -4.57, se = 1.26, p<.001; see figure 2), when co-varying for age, race, ses, sex, and site. these model equations were also significant (depression: f(8,303) = 10.79, p<.001, r2 = .22; anxiety: f(8,304) = 6.86, p<.001, r2 = .15). furthermore, both models showed that use of other mental health services predicted greater depression (b = 13.47; se = 3.18, p<.0001) and anxiety symptoms (b = 13.94; se = 3.03, p<.0001), indicating that individuals who use other mental health services appear to have greater depression and anxiety symptoms compared to individuals who do not use these services. all other resources did not significantly moderate the relationship between childhood trauma and depression and anxiety symptoms (all p’s >.05). table 2 summary of regression analyses depression symptoms anxiety symptoms variable b se p b se p overall intercept 5.55 2.41 .02 6.63 2.30 .004 age -.02 .06 .80 .01 .06 .89 racea .23 .80 .78 .03 .76 .97 socio-economic status -.65 .47 .17 -.57 .45 .20 sexb .03 .81 .98 1.08 .77 .16 sitec -.97 .91 .29 -.81 .87 .35 childhood trauma 3.40 .58 <.001 2.04 .55 <.001 note. a 0 = non-white, 1 = white. b 0 = female, 1 = male. c 0 = basic needs, 1 = psychology. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.processmacro.org/index.html global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 figure 1. moderation by use of other (i.e., off-campus) mental health services on the association between childhood trauma and depression symptoms figure 2. moderation by use of other (i.e., off-campus) mental health services on the association between childhood trauma and anxiety symptoms http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 discussion the current study examined the associations between exposure to childhood trauma and psychological distress (i.e., depression and anxiety symptoms) as well as the moderating role of resource use during and after the 2018 camp fire. findings suggested that college youth who have experienced childhood trauma may be particularly vulnerable to experiencing depression and anxiety symptoms following a climate changeinduced disaster. however, using communitybased (off-campus) mental health services shows potential for protecting against further exacerbation of symptoms. notably, individuals who accessed off-campus mental health services exhibited higher levels of depression and anxiety symptoms compared to those who did not access these services. this suggests that off-campus mental health services may contribute to the well-being of college youth by offering protection against symptom exacerbation, especially for individuals with high anxiety and depression symptoms and a history of childhood trauma. these findings are consistent with previous research showing that individuals with preexisting vulnerabilities are at an increased risk for psychological distress following a serious climate change-induced disaster (berry et al., 2010; taylor, 2020). our findings also align with prior research conducted outside the context of climate change-induced disasters, which shows that college students with a history of childhood trauma exhibit significantly higher levels of depression and anxiety symptoms compared to those without such exposure (bahar, 2023; chang et al., 2021; watt et al., 2020). college students often experience significant emotional and intellectual demands, which can create a range of physical, social, and emotional challenges (hubbard et al., 2018). as a result, college youth, particularly those with trauma histories, may be more susceptible to developing mental health issues during this period (sheldon et al., 2021). interestingly, while artime and colleagues (2019) observed that college students were more likely to use off-campus mental health services compared to oncampus mental health services, we observed the opposite trend, with greater use of oncampus mental health services. despite this, we found that off-campus mental health services showed a stronger protective effect against the worsening of depression and anxiety symptoms. this may be due to university counseling centers often being overburdened with a high volume of students seeking services, leading to short-term care (gallagher, 2015; ghetie, 2007). whereas offcampus providers may have more capacity to offer longer-term and more individualized treatment. future studies should continue to explore how community-level factors influence students’ mental health service use and outcomes, particularly following a climate change-induced disaster. research should also investigate how service accessibility and quality influence mental health outcomes to better inform the development of targeted, trauma-informed support systems both onand off-campus, in the context of such disasters. furthermore, this study builds upon previous findings by examining a less studied sample (i.e., college youth) and pre-existing vulnerability (i.e., childhood trauma) in the climate change-induced disaster literature, while co-varying for key demographic characteristics, and investigating the moderating role of resource use. the current study is also noteworthy as it was conducted shortly after a catastrophic climate changeinduced disaster and few studies like this exist. the findings emphasize the need for targeted interventions that prioritize the psychological well-being of college students. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 recognizing and addressing the specific needs and vulnerabilities of this demographic is crucial in developing effective strategies to mitigate the impact of climate changeinduced disasters on students’ mental health; addressing these needs in an evidence-based manner is becoming ever more critical for our society. overall, our study offers valuable insights into the associations between childhood trauma, psychological distress, and resource use in the aftermath of a climate change-induced disaster among a sample of college youth. by integrating these findings with the broader framework of community psychology and global climate change, we can gain a better understanding of the complexities that youth face after disasters and the potential for community-based interventions to support individuals during and after such events (riemer & reich, 2011). recognizing the inherent values of well-being and social justice within community psychology, future research must continue to explore approaches to address the consequences of climate change-induced disasters, with a simultaneous focus on fostering youth resilience and expanding equitable support systems (riemer & reich, 2011). these efforts will ultimately contribute to promoting a more sustainable and just future, recognizing the importance of employing college student samples as future generations who have the potential to impact climate change policy by exercising their electoral vote and collective climate action (mishra & ramanathan, 2023). limitations it is important to be cautious when generalizing our findings, given study limitations. first, our sample consisted of college students (the majority within the department of psychology), which indicates our findings are not representative of the larger population. however, it is important to recognize that emerging adulthood is a pivotal phase in the life course (wood et al., 2018), and this unique population should continue to be studied to better understand how climate change-induced disasters affect students’ well-being, while also acknowledging their resilience (kornbluh et al., 2022). future work with college student samples will need to consider not only access to post-disaster resources but also address issues of inequity to help inform institutions of higher education on the development of effective strategies for supporting all students, particularly those who may face additional barriers after disasters. second, most of our sample consisted of white college students, and we faced limitations when conducting analyses with each racial/ethnic group individually. small numbers of certain races/ethnicities hindered our ability to effectively analyze within-group differences using quantitative analyses in the present sample. nevertheless, we acknowledge that grouping unique races into one category obscures key differences and is an unideal method to recode race. to enhance the generalizability of this study’s findings, it is imperative that future research include carefully designed sampling methods and analytic approaches to encompass a broad spectrum of diverse and intersecting identities (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, age, education level, ses). this will allow for further development and expansion of the current findings. third, the current study employed a crosssectional design, which inherently limits the ability to establish causality or assess changes over time (mann, 2012). although students’ experiences with childhood trauma and their current depression and anxiety symptoms were assessed with well-validated measures, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 the findings are constrained to associations within this sample at a single time point. future research should prioritize longitudinal designs to help elucidate the temporal relationship between childhood trauma, mental health symptoms, and the buffering effects of resource use, especially in the context of disasters. such designs would allow for a clearer understanding of whether mental health symptoms emerge or worsen following a disaster or reflect pre-existing vulnerabilities. future studies should also use a mixed methods approach to increase the validity of the findings by combining quantitative results with the deeper insights gleaned from qualitative research (mckim, 2017). for example, a qualitative approach may shed light on why using communitybased (off-campus) mental health services significantly buffered the negative effects of childhood trauma on psychological distress compared to using the other seven resources (e.g., were off-campus mental health services more accessible and/or effective than oncampus mental health services?). qualitative research can also provide a platform for students to share potential challenges and barriers encountered in accessing postdisaster resources, uncovering the ways in which inequities can manifest for certain groups of students. additionally, due to the unexpected nature of the wildfire, we were unable to collect data on students’ mental health and/or resource use prior to the disaster. it is important for future studies to collect data on participants’ pre-disaster mental health vulnerabilities as well as resource use to mitigate the influence of these potential confounding variables and even to gain better insights on the importance of the continuum of care from preto post-disaster. often, climate change-induced disasters occur suddenly with little warning; therefore, collecting pre-disaster data can be challenging. however, having participants retrospectively report about their mental health prior to the disaster may be the first step in working to address this concern. notably, in this regard, our prior work has shown that mental health, cognitive health, and brain health are impacted in a graded manner based on wildfire exposure, with greatest impact on directly exposed individuals relative to non-exposed controls, and indirectly exposed individuals showing impacts in the middle of those two samples (silveira et al., 2021, grennan et al., 2023). these graded impacts based on severity of fire exposure suggest that the effects may be indeed disaster-related and not due to potential pre-disaster mental health. lastly, future research should use a longitudinal design to elucidate the long-term mental health impacts of climate change-induced disasters on college students. conclusion despite study limitations, our findings highlight the importance of supporting college youth mental health following disasters, particularly for students with preexisting vulnerabilities, specifically childhood trauma experiences. for this, universities may want to include concrete strategies for supporting students’ mental health in their emergency preparedness plans (e.g., psychological screening, documentation of vulnerabilities, issuance of resources) and speedily disseminate mental health resources to those who may be at heightened risk for mental health challenges following a disaster. future studies should continue to investigate the relationship between specific pre-existing vulnerabilities, like exposure to childhood trauma, and mental health outcomes after climate change-induced disasters. it is also crucial for future research to consider the use and impact of disaster assistance and emergency relief services for those affected by disasters. such research could inform university, state, and federal budgets on the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, 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(2015). patterns and predictors of primary mental health service use following bushfire and flood disasters. disaster medicine and public health preparedness, 9(3), 275-282. https://doi.org/10.1017/dmp.2015.2 3 http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-007-9129-9 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-007-9129-9 https://doi.org/10.1029/2020rg000726 https://doi.org/10.1029/2020rg000726 https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2022.2047706 https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2022.2047706 https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1525-1497.2001.016009606.x https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1525-1497.2001.016009606.x https://doi.org/10.1007/s40572-019-00245-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40572-019-00245-5 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.afjem.2011.12.004 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.afjem.2011.12.004 https://doi.org/10.1177/1558689815607096 https://doi.org/10.1177/1558689815607096 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0033291709992121 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0033291709992121 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000233 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000233 https://doi.org/10.1017/dmp.2015.23 https://doi.org/10.1017/dmp.2015.23 https://doi.org/10.1017/dmp.2015.23 global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 riemer, m., & reich, s. m. 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(pp. 123– 143). springer. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-010-9397-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-010-9397-7 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2021.03.054 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2021.03.054 https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18041487 https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18041487 https://doi.org/10.1001/archinte.166.10.1092 https://doi.org/10.1001/archinte.166.10.1092 https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-14-623 https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-14-623 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2020.102313 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2020.102313 https://doi.org/10.3390/bs11090126 https://doi.org/10.3390/bs11090126 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40653-019-00270-4 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40653-019-00270-4 microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 386 authors profiles 387 maritza montero rivas received a b. a. in psychology at universidad central de venezuela (1967). her m. a. in psychology is from universidad simón bolívar (1979). she obtained her doctorate in sociology at the université de paris, ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (1982). she is presently professor emeritus at universidad central de venezuela. she was cofounder of the master and ph. d. programs at universidad central de venezuela. she has been visiting professor at oxford university, london university and université de paris viii. she has been invited to give lectures at 14 venezuelan universities and at university and research centers in germany, argentina, australia, brazil, chile, colombia, costa rica, usa, ecuador, scotland, spain, france, wales, england, mexico, norway, paraguay, peru, puerto rico, uruguay. se has tutored 52 theses at b. a., m. a., and ph. d. levels. she actively participates in 7 psychological international associations. she has been a member of numerous editorial committees in several countries of the world. she has received diverse national and international awards: augusto de venanzi (venezuela, 1993); interamerican of psychology (puerto rico, 1995); national of social sciences (venezuela, 2000); peruvian forum of social psychology award (peru, 2003); honorary professor of san marcos university (peru, 2003); ppi-4 maximum level for a researcher at the venezuelian sciences ministry (2005). she has published numerous articles in national and international journals. she is the author, co-author and coordinator of 24 books. some of her recent books are “psychology of liberation. theory and applications” (2009) coedited with c. c. sonn, and “participación y transformación: historias de la psicología comunitaria en américa latina” (2011) co-edited with i. serrano-garcía. her main research areas are: epistemology of social psychology, community and political social psychology and discourse analysis. maria de fatima quintal de freitas received a b. a. in psychology at the university of sao paulo (1978). her master’s degree in social psychology (1986), and her ph.d. in social psychology are from the catholic university of sao paulo (1994). in 2009 she obtained postdoctoral degrees in community psychology from the instituto superior de psicología aplicada (lisboa) and from porto university (porto), both institutions from portugal. she is presently professor at universidade federal do paraná and founder/coordinator of the community psychology, health and education at universidade federal do paraná. she is a researcher at the national association of research and graduate studies in psychology. she was president of the 388 brazilian national association of social psychology. her teaching and research in community and political psychology working with excluded popular sectors and conducting community interventions and public policies projects. she has been visiting professor at universidad autónoma de madrid in spain, universidad nacional del mar de plata in argentina, universidade federal do spirito santo in brazil, center for rural development in zautla, mexico. she is the author of 22 scientific articles, 33 chapters in academic books, one book, and 8 presentations in congress proceedings. esther wiesenfeld received a bachelor of arts at york university (toronto, canada, 1973) and a b. a. in psychology at universidad central de venezuela (1982). her m. a. in social psychology (1985) and her ph. d. in psychology are also from universidad central de venezuela. she has carried out important posts at that university: coordinator of the m. a. in social psychology (1990-2002); head of the applied research department at the institute of psychology (1997-2002); representative of the psychology area at the graduate studies commission (2001-2005). she has published 5 books, and authored more than 100 articles in national and international books and journals. se has participated in scientific meetings and congresses in france, usa and argentina. she has been invited as lecturer at various universities: toulouse, france; belgrano and rosario in argentina; sao paulo and brasilia in brezil; santo tomás in chile; san carlos in guatemala; río piedras and ponce in puerto rico; san sebastián and autónoma de barcelona, in spain; iteso, unam, crefal, uaslp and universidad iberoamericana puebla, in mexico. she is an active participant in psychological and environmental associations. she has been a member of diverse editorial committees in england, spain, brazil and venezuela. she has received several awards: ppi-4 from the venezuelan ministry of sciences; three national awards on research on housing (1993, 1997, 1997); national award of social sciences (venezuela, 1998); interamerican award on environmental psychology (2007). her main research areas are: community, environmental and social psychology; housing; public policies; sustainability. she is an expert on research methodologies. she speaks english, hebrew and polish. wolfgang stark received his degrees from the university of würzburg (diploma in psychology) and technical university of berlin (doctorate). he has worked as a scientist at the max planck 389 institute for psychiatry and at the university of munich, as a grantee at various universities in the us, and as a senior scientist at munich´s self help resource center, before he accepted the professorship on organizational and community psychology at the university of duisburg-essen in germany. wolfgang stark is founder and director of the organizational development laboratory (www.orglab.org) based at the university of duisburg-essen in germany. he is specializing in community building and empowerment processes in organizations and society, and in organizational/societal learning and organizational culture by linking different disciplines and topics. his research focusses upon empowerment processes and quality management, corporate citizenship/corporate social responsibility, value-based management and organizational culture in profitand non-profit-organizations. he is a founding member and was president of the european community psychology association. he serves as a regular visiting professor at the “instituto superior psicologia aplicada” (www.ispa.pt) in lisboa (portugal) and on the board of the institute´s international master program in community psychology. in the years of 20012004 wolfgang stark served as the dean of the department for educational sciences of the university of duisburg-essen. he currently is head of the university´s center for social responsibility and service learning (www.uni-aktiv.org). his work received various awards – among others a “jimmy and rosallyn carter-campus community partnership award 2007” and “selected landmark in the land of ideas 2008”. judith sixsmith is professor of adult social care at manchester metropolitan university (uk) and professor of public policy, simon fraser university, vancouver (canada). she has been researcher at king’s college, london and at the institute of human ageing, university of liverpool. she has been very active as an international scholar and researcher. one project she has recently conducted is on ageing involving the uk, sweden, germany, latvia and hungary. other international activities have been carried out in belgium and pakistan. within the uk she has often taken a lead role in evaluating research projects, developing national strategy and being part of ethics committees. judith sixsmith received her b.sc. in 1979 from keele university, her m.sc. in environmental psychology in 1984, and her ph.d. in psychology in 1992 from the university of surrey. she has received several national and international awards. seven doctorates have been completed under her supervision, and four masters. she has an extensive 390 teaching experience since 1992. she is the author of 50 articles and book chapters, as well as 23 research reports. jim orford received (with honors) a b.a. on natural sciences at trinity hall, cambridge in 1964; a diploma on clinical psychology (1965) and a ph.d. in psychology at the london institute of psychiatry. he has been lecturer at the london institute of psychiatry and at the university of exeter. since 1993, he has been professor of clinical and community psychology at the university of birmingham. he is emeritus professor of clinical and community psychology, and head of the alcohol, drugs, gambling and addiction research group, at the university of birmingham, uk. alongside his main career interest in addictions, he has helped to pioneer community psychology in the uk and in europe generally. he was coordinator of the european network of community psychology when it transitioned to the european community psychology association (ecpa). his main written works include excessive appetites: a psychological view of addictions (2nd ed. 2001) and two community psychology texts: community psychology: theory and practice (1992) and community psychology: challenges, controversies and emerging consensus (2008). his main interests currently are: the effects of government-industry consensus over the liberalization of gambling; and reconceptualizing addiction, families and communities in terms of power. he is the author of 4 books and of numerous refereed journal articles. he has collaborated with “instituto nacional de psiquiatría ramón de la fuente” in mexico city. guillermina natera rey received a b. a. in psychology at universidad nacional autónoma de méxico (unam). her m. a. in social psychology was at universidad iberoamericana in mexico city. she obtained a master in sciences focused on education at die-cinvestav a research institution linked to the instituto politécnico nacional. she studied couples psychotherapy at the instituto mexicano de terapia de pareja, a. c. she is working towards a ph. d. in anthropology at escuela nacional de antropología e historia (enah). she is a member level ii of the national system of researchers (sni). presently she is the director of epidemiological and psychosocial research at the instituto nacional de psiquiatría ramón de la fuente (inprf). she is researcher in medical sciences “f” in the coordination of health institutes. she is professor and tutor at master and doctoral programs in the faculties of medicine and psychology at 391 unam. she has received awards for her research work: one granted by the health world organization (2007) and other by the inprf (2007). she has published more than 200 scientific articles. she has delivered more than 350 lectures at the national and international levels. she has published 3 books. she has been a representative of mexico at international organizations. her main interests are addictions, family, and intrafamilial violence tim aubry received a b. a. in psychology (with honors) at st. francis xavier university (1978); an m. a. in psychology (1981) and a ph.d. in psychology at the university of manitoba (1992). he has been professor of psychology at the university of ottawa since 1992. he was visiting professor at université lumière lyon 2 in 1999. he was named professor of the year at the university of ottawa in 2004. he is the senior editor of the canadian journal of community mental health. he has edited one book, seven chapters in books, and 39 papers in refereed journals. he is a full professor in the school of psychology at the university of ottawa. an established researcher in the fields of community mental health and homelessness, he co-founded at university of ottawa in 2000 the centre for research on community and educational services (crces). crces is a multidisciplinary research unit intended to conduct applied communitybased research that contributes to effective health and social programs and policies for marginalized populations. dr. aubry has consulted and collaborated closely on research projects with community organizations and government at all levels contributing to the development of effective social programs and policies. dr. aubry is a member of reach3, a pan-canadian network of researchers from five canadian cities, conducting research on housing, homelessness, and health. he is also a member of the national research team and the co-lead of the moncton site in the mental health and homelessness demonstration project of the mental health commission of canada. dr. aubry teaches graduate courses at the university of ottawa in community psychology and program evaluation. david fryer is currently professor of community critical psychology at charles sturt university, honorary senior research fellow in psychology at stirling university, scotland. he was president of the european community psychology association and professor extraordinarius of the university of south africa. in 2009 david was visiting professor at the 392 university of puerto rico. david is a former editor of the journal of community and applied social psychology and the author of many scholarly and research publications on community critical psychology. his current research interests are: unemployment, violence and praxis. stella sacipa rodríguez received a b. a. in psychology at universidad nacional de colombia in bogotá. she obtained a master’s degree on social communication at the pontificia universidad javeriana also in bogotá. she organized the “social links and peace cultures research group” at the same university to confront the challenges confronted by colombia, a country immersed on political violence. presently she is professor researcher at the psychology faculty of pontificia universidad javeriana in bogotá. she teaches and do research using community psychology and political psychology as academic approaches in building peace cultures. she keeps in touch with religious organizations involved in confronting violence and with academic institutions interested in the study of peace and violence phenomena. she has extensively written articles and book chapters on psychology and peace. norman duncan holds a professorship in psychology at the university of the witwatersrand, where he currently also serves as the head of the school of human and community development. he obtained his qualifications in psychology from the university of the western cape and the université paul valérie (montpellier iii, france). his research and publications are primarily in the fields of racism and community psychology. he has co-edited a range of volumes, including ‘race’, racism, knowledge production and psychology in south africa (nova science publications, 2001) and developmental psychology (juta/uct press, 2009). he currently serves as one of the lead researchers on the apartheid archives research project, a cross-disciplinary, cross-national study of the enduring effects of apartheid-era racism on people’s lives currently. since 2000 he has published 36 refereed journal articles, edited 11 books. he has been editor of the psychology quarterly, the journal of prevention and intervention in the community, and the south african journal of psychology. 393 christopher sonn received his b. a. at chisholm institute of technology, now monash university; a diploma on education at victoria college, now denkin university; a diploma of applied psychology and a ph.d. at victoria university, melbourne. he is a member of scraapa, and international researcher at the university of witwatersrand, south africa. he is the author of two book, four monographs, and numerous refereed journal articles and books chapters. he teaches in both the undergraduate and postgraduate programs at victoria university in areas of community and cultural psychology and qualitative research methods. his research is in the area of sense of community and intergroup relations and community cultural development. a major focus of his research is on understanding non dominant group responses to oppression and exclusion, including racism. christopher has investigated the adaptation of different immigrant communities to australia as well as the responses of indigenous australians to dominant group settings and stories. his focus is on understanding the multiple and often hidden resources and structures groups to help protect valued cultural identities, to resist oppression, and to make new communities. christopher has conducted research with the community arts network (western australia) exploring ways in which community arts and cultural planning can be utilized in community capacity building. he recently co-authored a report that focuses on the intersections between arts practice and community empowerment within the context of indigenous and nonindigenous partnerships. christopher’s work is published in international refereed journals and he recently coedited a book with maritza montero (venezuela) on psychology of liberation. alicia martínez tena received a bachelor of arts at universidad de oriente in santiago de cuba. her doctoral degree is from the university of moscow. she is professor and director at the center for community development in the social sciences faculty of universidad de oriente. she has tought courses on philosophy, sociology, artistic culture, cultural anthropology, sociocultural motivation, community studies. since 1986 she carries out research on cultural urban and rural communities problems. she is author and co-author of books and articles on cultural studies of communities. she is the coordinator of the doctoral program on sociology of culture. as an expert on culture and politics on development she has been invited to give lectures at universities in spain, france, dominican republic, venezuela, mexico and cabo verde. she has tutored numerous theses at the graduate level. she is the vice-president of the cuban permanent jurys granting doctoral degrees on communication and sociology. she has 394 been a member of graduate jurys in cuba and france. she was named honorary professor at the school of social work at universidad autónoma de sinaloa, in mexico. eduardo almeida acosta obtained in 1976 a ph.d. in social psychology and personality at cornell university, ithaca, new york. he is a researcher on community psychology at the health sciences department of universidad iberoamericana puebla. he is a member of proyecto de animación y desarrollo, a. c. a ngo in san miguel tzinacapan, cuetzalan, puebla. in 1989 he founded at the northern mountains of puebla the comisión takachiualis of human rights. he has been professor of community psychology at the national autonomous university of mexico, at the autonomous university of puebla and at universidad iberoamericana puebla. he received in 2005 the national research award on psychology and also in 2005 the humanitarian international award granted by the american psychological association. he was the organizer of the third international conference on community psychology in june 2010. sigmar malvezzi received a b. a. in psychology (1969), and a m. a. in social psychology at the catholic university of sao paulo. he obtained a ph.d. in organizational behavior at the university of lancaster in england. he received a post-doctoral degree on teaching at the university of sao paulo. he worked for a long time as researcher and professor at fundation getulio vargas in sao paulo. presently he is in charge as director of graduate studies in psychology at the university of sao paulo. he is visiting professor at icesi university in cali, colombia; at universidad de belgrano and universidad tecnológica nacional in argentina. he works as a consultant of diverse enterprises in brazil and in different parts of the world. recently he has collaborated as adviser with bric, the conglomerate of emergent rich nations (brazil, russia, india and china). his expertise as psychologist is centered on organizational and work psychology. his main academic and professional interests are organization, work, human resources, globalization and management. he has been invited as lecturer in france, portugal, usa, mexico, colombia, england, uruguay and argentina. he has authored some 40 scientific articles in books and journals. he has participated in diverse international congresses: 9 of his presentations have been published in the proceedings. 395 pedro trigo, s. j. is a venezuelan jesuit theologian born in spain. he studied philosophy and literature at the catholic universities of caracas and quito. he received a doctorate in theology at universidad de comillas (madrid, spain). from 1964 to 1966 he was working closely with mons. leónidas proaño in ecuador and he became committed to the church and pastoral work he was then involved with. in 1973 he studied with gustavo gutiérrez in lima, perou . he has been a teacher of latin american literature at high school and college levels. he practiced literary criticism for 15 years at reseña (a madrid publication) and at sic (a caracas publication). since 1973 he is a member of centro gumilla (a jesuit center of research and social action in venezuela). he has been professor of latin american thought at the philosophy department of universidad católica andrés bello (ucab). he presently is a theology professor at iter, an institution associated to the pontificial salesian university of rome and to the theology department at ucab in caracas. he lives in a popular parish in caracas and is involved in the life of christian popular communities. he has published 11 books dealing with theology, spirituality, anthropology and literature. in 2004 he published the book “la cultura del barrio” (city ward culture). microsoft word 2012-013-final-20131002.docx implications of community-based research for professional psychology training: reflections from two early career psychologists melissa tiessen1 and julie beaulac2 1 mcgill university, 2 university of ottawa author notes: melissa tiessen, department of psychology, mcgill university; 2julie beaulac, school of psychology, university of ottawa. melissa tiessen is now at the canadian psychological association, and julie beaulac is now at the weight management clinic, the ottawa hospital. please note that the views expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not represent the views of either of the organizations for which they work. melissa tiessen’s dissertation research was supported in part by grants from the canadian institutes of health research, institute of aboriginal people’s health (cihr iaph), and the network for aboriginal mental health research (namhr). a very special thanks to the members of the two participating communities (remaining anonymous for privacy reasons), in particular the youth. thanks as well to dr.donald taylor and dr. laurence kirmayer for their input and support as thesis advisors, and valued comments on early drafts of this article. julie beaulac’s dissertation research was supported in part by grants from the social sciences and humanities research council of canada and sport canada. a special thanks to community partners from the south-east ottawa community health centre, culture shock canada, and heron road community centre (who have given permission for their organization names to be used). in particular, thanks to madeleine brenning, marc-andré clément, sulaimon giwa, cybill mathelier, and kelli tonner. thanks as well to the young people involved in the hip-hop dance program and their parents. finally, thanks to dr. bob flynn, dr. michelle fortier, and dr. denise spitzer for their input and support as thesis committee members. special thanks as well to dr. tim aubry for his comments on a previous version of this article. correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to dr. melissa tiessen, canadian psychological association, 141 laurier avenue west, suite 702, ottawa, ontario k1p 5j3. e-mail: mtiessen@cpa.ca keywords: community psychology, community-based research, professional psychology, training, lessons learned recommended citation: tiessen, m., & beaulac, j. (2013). implications of community-based research for professional psychology training: reflections from two early career psychologists. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(3), 1-11. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 implications of community-based research for professional psychology training: reflections from two early career psychologists abstract community psychology (cp) has valuable philosophical perspectives and methodological approaches to offer the wider discipline of psychology, yet it remains underappreciated and often invisible in most professional training programs in psychology, including those programs intended to train in the areas of clinical, counselling, school, and neuropsychology. communitybased research (cbr) is one particular methodological approach within cp that has the potential to enhance standard research training experiences, as well as to enhance professional psychology training more generally. in this paper, we discuss the professional psychology training implications of cbr approaches, highlighting potential changes to the existing training structure that could facilitate wider access to training in cbr, and thereby enhance the competencies of professional psychologists. we also critically reflect on our experiences conducting our own cbr dissertation projects while becoming trained as clinical psychologists. we encourage other trainees, professional psychologists, and training programs to consider the merits of incorporating cp perspectives and approaches into their work. keywords: community psychology, community-based research, professional psychology, training, lessons learned community psychology (cp) is slowly gaining attention within the canadian psychology landscape; for example, the journal canadian psychology recently published a special issue on cp (nelson & aubry, 2010). the research approach and methods used within cp, such as participatory action or community-based research (cbr), qualitative research, and program evaluation are conducive to responding to the specific needs of a community (nelson & lavoie, 2010). cbr, a research paradigm commonly associated with cp, grew out of an increased recognition of the importance of social and macro-level factors as related to the well-being of individuals and communities, as well, as a response to the critiques of public health research methods, such as the separation of individuals from the larger context that influences their health and behaviors (critiques that could similarly apply to traditional psychological research; israel, schulz, parker, & becker, 1998). various approaches to cbr exist, such as community based participatory research, participatory action research, and action research. all share important commonalities (e.g., principles of collaboration, sharing power) and yet vary along a continuum (wallerstein & duran, 2003). for the purpose of this paper, cbr will refer to research that is “conducted by, for or with the participation of community members…community-based research aims not merely to advance understanding, but also to ensure that knowledge contributes to making a concrete and constructive difference in the world” (loka, 2002, as cited in flicker & savan, 2006, page 3).   cbr in canada has been informed by communitybased participatory research in the united states, such as by the work of barbara israel (roche, 2008). internationally, formal links between academia and the community have been evolving since at least the 1970s, with the emergence of participatory research in latin america and elsewhere (office of community-based research, 2009). a canadian network was formed in 2008, known as communitybased research canada. historically, two traditions have been discussed: the northern and southern tradition. the northern tradition stems from social science and action research of kurt lewin, while the participatory action research or southern tradition stems from liberation pedagogy and such scholars as paulo freire and his work with oppressed communities (pontes ferreira & gendron, 2011; minkler, 2005). currently within canada, universities and granting agencies are placing increased prominence on such partnerships emphasizing community service, responding to community needs, and cbr (office of community-based research, 2009). specific funding opportunities have also been implemented by federal granting agencies over the past decade, such as cura, the community university research alliance global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 program, formed by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada (sshrc) in 1999 (office of community-based research, 2009) and community-based research grants with the canadian institutes of health research (cihr; e.g., hiv/aids community-based research grant). consistent with these movements, cbr is on the rise (flicker, savan, kolenda, & mildenberger, 2008). despite the general growth of cbr, access to relevant coursework and applied experiences in cbr or cp as a psychology trainee in canada is limited, typically comprised of one or two course offerings total (if any) at most institutions, unless one completes training through one of the now only two freestanding cp university programs in canada. these include one french language program in quebec, at université du québec à montréal (uqam), and one english language program in ontario, at wilfrid laurier university (as noted in aubry et al., 2010, previously there was a second french language program at université laval but it is no longer accepting students). such opportunities are often even further limited as a trainee enrolled in a professional psychology program – that is, programs intended to train students in clinical, counselling, school and neuropsychology for registration as a practising psychologist. in our own experiences, only one of us (jb) completed any formal psychology graduate coursework in cp. a challenge we both faced (although for mt especially) was minimal psychology peer examples of cp or cbr, as well as difficulty locating and identifying with cbr examples in the literature – as this area of work is often conducted by non-psychologists and published in non-psychology journals (e.g., public health, sociology, etc.). the minimal exposure to such a significant research approach within our profession surely hinders the advancement of applied research in real-world settings by psychologists, as well as serves to limit their contributions to addressing social problems. objectives consequently, the aims of this paper are to: 1) highlight the implications of cbr for the broader professional psychology training community, notably ways in which professional psychology training can in fact be strengthened by incorporating training in cp, and 2) relate these strengths and implications to key observations gleaned from conducting our own cbr projects as professional psychology graduate students. our intention in providing examples of our personal experiences is to help bring these messages into a more psychology-relevant framework, as most existing cbr-related work has been discussed outside of psychology. we also recognize the disconnect between much of professional psychology and cp, and thus we purposefully hope to target this paper at the professional psychology audience, for whom this information may be more novel.  we appreciate that many of our observations will be familiar to individuals well-versed in cbr and cp – thus, our goal is to be critically reflective rather than to present novel research for the field of cbr, and more importantly, to share these experiences in the context of professional psychology training. as such, we intend to speak both to those researchers who are not as familiar with cbr or cp (who perhaps are facing some of the same challenges we were as newcomers to the field), and to those psychologists involved in professional psychology training. project backgrounds both of us actively sought out cbr projects primarily due to a desire to generate socially meaningful applied research. the first cbr project (mt) involved two geographically remote aboriginal communities in northern manitoba. a collaborative approach emerged as a result of an identified need to address aboriginal youth suicide in each of these communities. the partnership was developed over a couple of years between mt and representatives of each community’s health centres and band councils. additionally, the partnership was facilitated by previous contacts between community representatives and mt, within the context of a federally funded mental health services program for aboriginal people in manitoba. over time, the project focus shifted from aboriginal youth suicide to aboriginal youth well-being. the resulting study was two surveys assessing well-being, providing evidence for the pivotal role of community-level supports in aboriginal youth well-being (see tiessen, taylor, & kirmayer, 2009). the second cbr project (jb) involved a culturally diverse lower-income and resource-poor urban community in ottawa. a collaborative partnership arose in response to an identified need for greater accessibility (i.e., availability, relevancy, affordability) to physical activity for young people within this community. the partnership was developed over a couple of years between the university of ottawa and three non-profit community organizations: a community health centre, a hip-hop organization, and the city of ottawa. as a partnership, a needs assessment was conducted and in response to the findings, a new hip-hop dance program for young people aged 11 to 16 years was implemented and evaluated (see beaulac, bouchard, & kristjansson, 2009; beaulac, olavarria, & global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 kristjansson, 2010). despite the seemingly disparate contexts of these two cbr projects, the process of developing the partnerships and conducting the research was very similar, as were the contributions to our development as professional psychologists. implications of cbr for professional psychology training as a psychologist or trainee interested in cbr, there can be numerous barriers to pursuing such research. common barriers and facilitators to doing cbr have been well articulated elsewhere, and consequently this literature will not be repeated in detail here. interested readers are directed to these key sources in the literature for a further review. to summarize briefly, frequent challenges of cbr include: partnership, methodological, and broader sociocultural issues; time and resources, such as insufficient funding and institutional support for cbr; history of negative impacts from research and a corresponding legacy of mistrust of researchers. on the other hand, as noted above, cbr is a particularly valuable approach as it is associated with: more relevant research findings; improved recruitment and retention; increased quality and therefore internal and external validity of the research; better ability to capture the complexity of inequalities, and therefore, more likely to reduce inequalities; greater potential for increased community capacity; and, increased translation to action (see benoit, jansson, millar, & phillips, 2005; cardona, & joshi, 2007; fleischman, 2007; flicker & savan, 2006; israel et al., 1998; minkler, 2005; suarez-balcazar, harper, & lewis, 2005; viswanathan et al., 2004). a strong argument can be made that psychological researchers would benefit from training in cbr – and would make valuable contributions to the cp literature. yet, as noted, many graduates and trainees within the wider canadian psychology community have limited or no exposure to cp or to cbr (aubry, sylvestre, & ecker, 2010). one potential reason is that such training would likely require most training programs to make some perceived key adjustments, as the principles and practice of cbr can be quite different from those encountered by researchers engaged in academically-driven research. as well, psychology as a discipline has historically focused on individual-level factors, and the identification of pathology (versus strengths). cp, on the other hand, has more of a positive psychology orientation, which presents an additional paradigm shift for many psychology departments. furthermore, psychology in general faces particular barriers as it has historically been (and arguably continues to be) concerned with being regarded as a ‘basic science’. there are important differences between cbr and traditional scientific research in terms of ontology, epistemology, ideology, and methodology. traditional scientific research, which is typically associated with a positivist paradigm, assumes that there is one external reality that can be at least partially revealed by rigorously controlling for extraneous variables, emphasizes objectivity, and assumes that research can be value-neutral. also, traditional scientific research is directed exclusively by researchers. although cbr may be conducted from a number of paradigms, it has been suggested that critical theory and constructivism are most well suited to cbr. a critical theory paradigm assumes that there is an external reality but that it has evolved over time due to the influence of social-ecological factors, that interdependence exists between the researcher and participants and moreover, that the research process requires a dialogue between the researcher and participants, and that research is not value-neutral. a constructivist paradigm argues that reality is socially constructed and thus, multiple realities exist and can only be interpreted in the context of the relationship between researcher and participant (israel et al., 1998). some key values that are reflected in both the critical theory and constructivist paradigms include participation and collaboration, respect for diversity, empowerment, consideration of context, social justice, and action; these are consistent with the overarching values of community psychology (kloos et al., 2012). whereas traditional scientific research tends to use primarily quantitative methods in controlled laboratory settings, cbr research tends to use a variety of methods. in the case of cbr research coming from a constructivist paradigm, the methods would be primarily qualitative (e.g., interview, ethnography), while from a critical theory paradigm they might be quantitative, qualitative, or mixed (nelson & prilleltensky, 2005). regardless of the particular paradigm adopted, training in cbr would be a valuable complement for canadian psychology, and particularly so for professional psychology. some view scientific rigor or quality of research evidence as a key concern of cbr (roche, 2008), whereas others would argue that cbr enhances the scientific quality and facilitates a deeper understanding (horowitz, robinson, & seifer, 2009; minkler, 2005). in either case, psychological research could benefit from the contribution of cbr in the manner in which it facilitates translation to a real world context, thereby facilitating greater impact. with increasing importance being placed on translating evidence to practice and increasing the accessibility of research findings, it would appear global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 that psychology could gain by integrating the practice of cbr into the discipline as a research approach. professional psychology in particular has a responsibility to reduce the gap between research and practice in order to maximize impact on society (grimshaw et al., 2012). cbr has in fact been identified as a recommended area of competency for health professionals by the institute of medicine (gebbie, rosenstock, & hernandez, 2003). taking this point into consideration with those cited above, it is clear that cp and cbr offer unique opportunities for professional psychology training programs. as defined in the national mutual recognition agreement of the regulatory bodies for professional psychologists in canada (2001), core practice competencies of psychologists include skills in consultation, program evaluation, and interpersonal relationships – all of which can be well developed through cbr experiences. furthermore, as israel and colleagues (1998) have noted, key competencies of community-based researchers include the ability to engage in self-reflection, to be sensitive to power differences, to demonstrate respect for diversity, as well as to apply technical research skills. this description clearly mirrors the competencies expected of professional psychologists. these same competencies outlined for cbr and within the mutual recognition agreement of psychology regulatory bodies are also critically important to success in rapidly increasing inter-professional practice settings. consequently, training in cbr can be seen as another avenue for programs to integrate science and practice from the outset of training, increase diversity training opportunities, and ensure that students are being trained to meet the service needs of the public – which one could easily argue indeed necessitates training in community-based work such as cbr. in order for more programs to begin to incorporate cp and cbr approaches into their training curriculum, there are of course resource and system issues that would need to be addressed. as aubry, sylvestre, and ecker (2010) noted, there are few official cp training programs in canada. moreover, despite the expectations of the prevailing training standards, there are only a minority of clinical psychology programs in canada that offer any courses and training in community consultation and program evaluation (aubry et al., 2010). there are certainly mechanisms, however, to build greater cp and cbr capacity within psychology that would not require the creation of new standalone programs. for example, programs can offer credit for community service learning and/or community consultation practica, or for relevant coursework completed outside of the psychology program (e.g., qualitative research and program evaluation courses are commonly found within departments of education). online course offerings may also broaden students’ access to relevant coursework, which indeed provides a pivotal foundation on which to base any subsequent applied work in cbr. preferably, however, programs might consider hiring new faculty with training in cbr and cp, such that relevant courses can be taught in-house and students can be supervised within the discipline of psychology (aubry, sylvestre, & ecker, 2010). another important change required within psychology programs is that of increased recognition for students and faculty engaged in cbr, including course and teaching credits, and equitable standards for meeting tenure requirements considering the different context of cbr as compared to laboratorybased research. again, there exists as well considerable overlap in the objectives of cp and cbr and inter-professional education and practice. as inter-professional curricula become increasingly mandated within health-related disciplines across the country, this change could also facilitate greater training opportunities in cbr. indeed, cbr is an opportunity for psychological researchers to step outside of our often isolated research worlds, and ‘join forces’ with other disciplines. we are convinced that our own cbr experiences have enhanced our ability to conduct relevant and effective research endeavours, as well as to be more attuned clinicians. firstly, such experience with cbr has caused us to be keenly attentive to directly addressing the needs of communities, through gathering “consumer” input rather than personal research interests driving the research agenda, which may or may not be relevant to a community’s needs. secondly, we regularly find ourselves engaged in ongoing consideration of and reflection on biases, which also leads to an enhanced appreciation of “local” versus “expert” knowledge. this in turn enhances our ability to be responsive to individuals’ needs, and to experience increased objectivity, empathy, and respect for those with whom we work. furthermore, we are acutely aware of the importance of keeping goals realistic, whether in a research or a clinical context. finally, our cbr experiences very effectively drive home an awareness that research results will not be utilized without a relevant knowledge translation (kt)/dissemination plan and most critically, local project ownership. thus, we make a concerted effort to plan for kt and wide project ownership from the outset of any research planning. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 we also recognize how our training opportunities in cp and cbr have directly facilitated attainment of our professional positions since graduation. for jb, her cp and cbr training was invaluable to her recent clinical-academic position as a psychologist and assistant professor working in primary care, during which time her primary role included program development, evaluation, and consultation, with limited direct client contact. without training in cbr, she would have been unprepared for this consultant position, which seems to be the future role of many professional psychologists within the public sector in canada. similarly for mt, upon graduation she worked as well in a clinical-academic position, largely providing clinical consultation, training, and program development services to a large rural community mental health program, as well as liaising with multiple community-based mental health services partners. given these underlying similarities between how we have each been shaped professionally by our individual cbr training experiences, also gave rise to discussion and reflection on the key lessons we took away from this training. these conversations occurred after we each completed our cbr projects, when we were struck by the parallels in our experiences. to further elucidate the influence of our cbr experiences on our development as professional psychologists, we base the following description of our personal observations on a framework proposed by israel and colleagues (1998), highlighting three key categories of challenges within cbr, including: (1) methodological issues; (2) partnership-related issues; and, (3) broader social, political, economic, institutional, and cultural issues. reflections on community-based research themes 1) methodology: set realistic and flexible expectations our experiences: the importance of maintaining realistic and flexible goals was highlighted in various ways for each of us over the course of our respective cbr projects. for example, jb initially sought to conduct a randomized controlled trial of the new youth program, having been taught in her academic department that this was the gold standard of intervention research. community partners were very supportive of attempting this goal, although at the same time voiced their scepticism at its feasibility. in the end, the community’s wisdom prevailed and the project was revised to a more realistic pre-post nonexperimental research design. both of our dissertation projects also provided an illustration of the competing pressures when managing cbr initiatives, especially related to time and finances. for instance, for mt, stalls occurred due to province-wide political tensions, quite vocal prohibitions from other academics against the (perceived inappropriate) cross-cultural use of scales, and the delay of community visits because of both inclement weather and an airline bankruptcy (!). in contrast, for jb, notable timing and financial issues arose starting with pressure from the communitybased funder to initiate the project immediately upon receiving funding. once convinced of the importance of community involvement, there was then pressure to implement the program during ramadan, despite there being a significant portion of young people in the community who would then not have been able to participate. eventually, strong negotiation skills on the part of a community partner, in addition to a history of positive experiences between the community partner and funder, facilitated a more reasonable start date. reflections on setting realistic and flexible expectations: this first observation, regarding setting realistic and flexible expectations, likely seems quite obvious. however it is very easy as a new researcher or clinician, especially within cbr, to become afflicted by the desire to “solve all the world’s problems”. yet very quickly, cbr projects effectively drive home the importance of being realistic and flexible. as many avid travellers are aware, a rule of thumb when packing for a long trip is “take half the amount of clothes you think you will need but twice the amount of money.” a similar rule applies to research in general, and especially to cbr: to maximize the likelihood of a successful project, cut the goals in half but double the money and time required. moreover, given the significant differences between obtaining an academic degree/maintaining an academic position and meeting the needs of a community, cbr requires flexibility in order to balance competing demands. specifically, the demands of academia such as conducting rigorous and controlled research and publishing in peer reviewed journals may at times compete with community needs for transparency and active participation. even the process of acquiring ethics approval for a project can compete with the reality of cbr projects which may be conceptualized over a longer period of time with the input of multiple participants. for both of us, the key to arriving at mutually realistic goals was to engage in ongoing dialogue. indeed, a goal is more likely to be realistic if both the community and academic partners are global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 comfortable with the plan. we particularly encourage any interested newcomers to cbr within academia to set realistic expectations, as completion of degree requirements or advancement within academia depend on completing projects within a timely manner and on the production of knowledge dissemination within scholarly venues. it can be a challenge to balance the requirements of a cbr project that include lengthier start-up times to build relationships and negotiate the objectives and parameters of the project with the time-structured requirements of granting agencies and universities. additionally, for students in professional psychology programs, who are tasked with balancing the demands of research, coursework, and practical experiences, setting realistic expectations is of critical importance. this is true both for one’s research as well as when working with clients in therapy. from our perspective, one way to enhance the success of meeting these competing challenges, particularly as a student attempting to complete a thesis or dissertation or as an early career psychologist, is to become involved with an ongoing cbr project instead of developing a project from scratch, and/or to plan for a smaller project than would be expected of non-cbr research (e.g., smaller sample size, fewer studies). a smaller or ongoing project may lack freedom to research any topic or to acquire extensive skills in project management, yet more importantly it can offer an already established context and is likelier to have more realistic timelines, as well as greater financial and human resources and established relationships – a key aspect of cbr we turn to next. 2) partnership: clearly define each partner’s role and develop and maintain positive relationships and open lines of communication our experiences: for mt, positive relationships with some of the community members were already established before the actual research project began, which were instrumental in initiating and maintaining the project. however, there are aspects to building respectful, trusting relationships which are common across research endeavours, regardless of one’s prior contacts. for both of us, the development of relationships was accomplished over a number of months through letters, faxes, telephone calls, and inperson, in-community meetings and discussions with key community partners and various other community members. these contacts served to develop the research partnership as well as to define roles and priorities. when building relationships, we both recognized that there was no substitute for the value of informal encounters and activities. for each of us this occurred in the form of conversations with fellow travel passengers, hanging out at community centres, getting to know participants over a community meal, and just being seen in the context of the community. both of us invested significant time in learning about important community and youth issues, developing relationships with community members, and generally becoming a recognizable face. a similar iterative process was employed in developing the research instruments, in order to respect and benefit from the principles of community involvement and application of local knowledge. such steps are not normally necessary in university-based research, but proved to be crucial for each of our cbr projects. there value of simply “hanging out” was underscored for both of us when youth expressed excitement regarding our repeated presence in the community – for example, incredulously exclaiming to mt on an early community visit “you’re back?!” reflections on clear roles, positive relationships, and open communication: role definition and relationship development were key observations from each of our cbr experiences. indeed, the relationship between the researcher(s) and the community is the backbone of cbr, and a lack of clarity in roles is a commonly experienced challenge to doing cbr (flicker & savan, 2006). we both admit that the importance of formally defining each research partner’s role was primarily learned in hindsight by each of us. at the outset of our cbr projects, codes of research ethics specific to aboriginal health or cbr more generally were still in development, and consequently the need for a formal “contract” was less clear for either of us. informally, we each took similar measures as are outlined in these codes of ethics, to establish clear and transparent goals, and to build trust and respect. for example, the participating communities who were part of each cbr project gave their written consent and commitment to the research, and at the time, this informal method was acceptable. we both recognize now, however, that it is likely that a formal agreement outlining each party’s expected contribution could have facilitated the research process. in particular, this would have been an opportunity to be more explicit about ways to increase capacity building and to better integrate what was learned from the research results into ongoing community work. at the same time, it is important to remember that while documents can lay global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 the foundation for, and provide a useful record of the research relationship, they do not constitute the relationship. the ongoing, active negotiation of relationships between researchers and community partners is what matters most in the end. this issue must be given attention at all stages of the research process, not only at the beginning. we also note that it was not always easy to find ways in which to fully address each cbr guideline. for example, pragmatic issues of financial resources limited mt’s ability to directly contribute to capacity building in the communities. such challenges highlight the reality that while new cbr ethical guidelines represent a significant improvement over the practices of the past (particularly with aboriginal groups), they are still a work in progress. knowing what community-based research guidelines are is very different from knowing how to enact them, and from being able to do so. this is true for both academic researchers and community members. while codes of research ethics can provide appropriate directions, both parties in the research partnership need to know how to follow these directions and in the best ways possible. just as western-trained academics are learning how to engage in improved community-based research, community members must also have appropriate opportunities to learn how to engage in meaningful and beneficial research partnerships. such increased awareness can develop with time and experience, but can also be facilitated through various resources now available (for example, access alliance multicultural health and community services, 2011; the examining community-institutional partnerships for prevention research group, 2006). additionally, research guidelines must be considered within the appropriate historical, socio-political, and physical context, unique to each community, which is an important component of our final research theme. 3) broader issues: identify your personal biases and work to reduce power imbalances our experiences: power comes in a variety of forms, such as simply by virtue of taking on the role of a researcher (versus participant), through university affiliation, or particularly through access to money. for jb’s project, funding went through one of the community partners, which served to reduce the power imbalance (which typically favours academia) and also likely increased the sense of community ownership of the project. for mt, the issue of biases was underscored through contact with a young man working in one of the communities as a missionary. while on one hand the missionary was sharing positive messages with community members about the power of spiritual beliefs in well-being, on the other hand these messages could be construed as an imposition of outside views, with an uncomfortable connection to past colonization efforts. this meeting was an unexpected occurrence for mt, which contributed to many layers of self-reflection. reflections on recognizing biases and power imbalances: while the description above of our actual experiences is short, the theme of power and biases became a central lesson in both of our dissertation projects, and has been emphasized by other community-based researchers as well (e.g., macaulay et al., 1999; minkler, 2005; suarez-balcazar, harper, & lewis, 2005). continuously reflecting on the research process is a necessary ingredient for responsible and worthwhile cp, cbr, and, we would argue, for all psychological research. for example, some pivotal cbr questions include: who decides what is best for the community? how can one ensure that the person/people deciding are acting out of knowledge of what in fact is best? the answers to these questions are seldom clear or straightforward, and will be different for each community, thus highlighting the ongoing importance of reflection, particularly given that biases can exist in many forms; some obtrusively clear, while others so subtle one may not even recognize them. for example, western academia represents a specific way of thinking, which in some ways overlaps with, but in many ways is divergent from culturally-specific views of health and well-being, such as those of individuals from collectivist societies. furthermore, a psychological understanding of well-being is different from a sociological, medical, and definitely a traditional aboriginal understanding of wellness. similarly, an academic viewpoint can be quite different from an applied view (e.g., university versus hospital-based research). while differing viewpoints are not always incompatible, blindly accepting one as the sole explanation creates a very unbalanced situation. this is particularly true when one perspective is connected to a position of higher power or status (taylor, 2002), as is the historical case when comparing indigenous and western worldviews, or minority and majority groups in general. indeed, for many aboriginal people, colonization has resulted in a loss of independence and power, as well as the suppression, and often the eradication, of traditional cultural ways. certainly in some cases aspects of traditional cultural global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 identity remain, but often in a broken form, leading to a situation of cultural identity confusion (royal commission on aboriginal peoples, 1996). in various ways, the assimilationist policies of the canadian government (as well as the governments of other countries) have amounted to systematic efforts to undermine the autonomy of aboriginal people. the history of disregard for culture and autonomy experienced by these communities (as by many others) is mirrored by the history of aboriginal health research in canada. all too often in the past, outside researchers have played out the stereotype of “helicopter research”: dropping into a community, collecting data, and then flying out, never to be seen or heard from again (macaulay, delormier, cargo, mcgregor, & norton, 2002). outside researchers tended to use community research results to further their own careers, rather than to focus on the needs of, and potentially constructive outcomes for, the community. to some extent, this approach stemmed from the same government policies, which were responsible for the devastating historical effects of colonization for aboriginal groups across the country. as a result, much previous research on aboriginal populations, and likewise for many other historically disadvantaged groups, has not produced any benefit for communities, and instead has led in some cases to direct and indirect harm. for example, particularly with medically-based research, there have been reports of researchers using community members’ blood or tissue samples for purposes to which consent was never given and confidentiality was not respected (schnarch, 2004). furthermore, many research projects have focused solely on problem areas, perpetuating and even creating negative images of minority communities. taken together, these negative experiences have created a tendency in many communities to mistrust outside researchers and research projects in general. “we’ve been researched to death” is a common statement, which reflects the position of many aboriginal groups vis-à-vis research. fortunately, the past decade has seen efforts to improve upon this historical legacy of colonization and negligent research. one starting point has been the recognition that much previous research has in fact been carried out not by university-based researchers but by government officials (schnarch, 2004). there is a significant difference between government research, which has tended to be more on the side of data collection for surveillance purposes, and genuine applied research, especially research which reflects the priorities of aboriginal communities. furthermore, while certain communities may feel over-researched, many have under-benefited from previous research efforts. there are many gaps within the area of aboriginal health research, particularly in regards to research which speaks to community priorities. one of these key priorities is in the area of mental health, an area which has been much less researched, and to which psychology can make many valuable contributions. additionally, there is a pressing need in the current political climate for research that can provide concrete, objective information to support policy and program decisions. in other words, data is needed in order to access money and resources, which can be used to address important community issues. ultimately, cbr, and good research in general, require continued self-reflection from various perspectives —interpersonal, academic, cultural, religious, and historical. being aware of one’s own biases also encourages the maintenance of an open, tolerant mindset. for valuable research to be produced, it is crucial to stay open to both new ideas and new experiences. conclusion “doing respectful research in … communities takes more time, more money, and arguably, moral fibre.” (schnarch, 2004, p.84) conducting a cbr project, particularly as a student or newcomer to the area, can be a challenging yet exceptionally rewarding experience. in addition to the usual academic lessons obtained while completing a professional degree and/or conducting a longer-term program of research, cbr projects offer the opportunity to gain valuable experience working collaboratively in an applied context, which ideally can contribute to positive changes in individual’s lives – an aspiration that all professional psychologists share. furthermore, cbr methods are ideal for obtaining direct consumer input on important public health matters, such as improved access to mental health services and enhanced chronic disease management, priorities highlighted by the mental health commission of canada (www.mentalhealthcommission.ca). depending on the research question and context, cbr may not be the most suitable approach but it is an important approach that clearly provides many benefits to both researchers and communities, and thus ought to be taught and supported within the field of psychology more generally. there is much to be gained from approaching a program of research through a focus on a combination of: (a) relationships developed with community members, (b) an appreciation for the relevant historical and political issues, and (c) decisions based on respect for both global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 ethical guidelines and community needs. we strongly encourage students and training programs to make cp, and cbr specifically, a component of their professional psychology training. such steps can assist in carving out a more prominent place for community psychology within psychology as a whole, as well as contribute to professional psychology playing a more influential role in addressing the many contemporary social problems. references access alliance multicultural health and community services (2011). community-based research toolkit: resource for doing research with community for social change. toronto: access alliance multicultural health and community services. available from: http://accessalliance.ca/sites/accessalliance/files/ cbr_toolkit_jan2012.pdf aubry, t., sylvestre, j., & ecker, j. (2010). community psychology training in canada in the new millennium. canadian psychology, 51, 8995. doi:10.1037/a0018134 beaulac, j., bouchard, d., & kristjansson, e. (2009). physical activity for adolescents living in an underprivileged neighbourhood: views of parents and adolescents on needs, barriers, facilitators, and programming. leisure, 33, 537561. doi:10.1080/14927713.2009.9651452 beaulac, j., olavarria, m., & kristjansson, e. (2010). a community-based hip-hop dance program for youth in a disadvantaged community in ottawa: implementation findings. health promotion practice, 11 (supp 1), 61s-69s. doi:10.1177/1524839909353738 benoit, c., jansson, m., millar, a., & phillips, r. (2005). community-academic research on hardto-reach populations: benefits and challenges. qualitative health research, 15, 263-282. doi:10.1177/1049732304267752 cardona, m., & joshi, r. 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(2002). introduction to the theory and practice of participatory research. unpublished workshop ethics and practice of participatory community research. minkler, m. (2005). community-based research partnerships: challenges and opportunities. journal of urban health, 82 (supp 2), ii3-ii12. doi:10.1093/jurban/jti034 mutual recognition agreement of the regulatory bodies for professional psychologists in canada. (2001). retrieved from http://www.cpa.ca/docs/file/mra2004.pdf nelson, g. & aubry, t. (2010). introduction to community psychology in canada: past, present, and future. canadian psychology, 51, 77-78. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 doi:10.1037/a0019740 nelson, g. & lavoie, f. (2010). contributions of canadian community psychology. canadian psychology, 51, 79-88. doi:10.1037/a0017570 nelson, g. & prilleltensky, i. (2005). values for community psychology. in g. nelson & i. prilleltensky (eds.), community psychology. in pursuit of liberation and well-being (pp. 47-69). new york: palgrave macmillan. office of community-based research (2009). the funding and development of community university research partnerships in canada. evidence-based investment in knowledge, engaged scholarship, innovation and action for canada’s future. office of community-based research, university of victoria. retrieved from http://communityresearchcanada.ca/documents/c brfunding052009.pdf pontes ferreira, m. & gendron f. (2011). community-based participatory research with traditional and indigenous communities of the americas: historical context and future directions. international journal of critical pedagogy, 3 (3), 153-168. roche, b. (2008). new directions in communitybased research. wellesley institute. retrieved from http://wellesleyinstitute.com/files/newdirectionsi ncbr.pdf royal commission on aboriginal peoples. (1996). people to people, nation to nation: highlights from the report of the royal commission on aboriginal peoples. ottawa: rcap. schnarch, b. (2004). ownership, control, access, and possession (ocap) or self-determination applied to research: a critical analysis of contemporary first nations research and some options for first nations communities. journal of aboriginal health, 1, 80-95. retrieved from: http://www.naho.ca/jah/english/jah01_01/journal _p80-95.pdf suarez-balcazar, y., harper, g.w., & lewis, r. (2005). an interactive and contextual model of community-university collaborations for research and action. health education & behavior, 32, 84-101. doi:10.1177/1090198104269512 taylor, d.m. (2002). the quest for identity: from ethnic minorities to generation xers. new york: praeger. the examining community-institutional partnerships for prevention research group. (2006). developing and sustaining community-based participatory research partnerships: a skillbuilding curriculum. available from: www.cbprcurriculum.info tiessen, m., taylor, d.m., & kirmayer, l.j. (2009). a key individual-to-community link: the impact of perceived collective control on aboriginal youth well-being. pimatisiwin: a journal of aboriginal and indigenous community health, 7, 241-267. retrieved from: http://www.pimatisiwin.com/online/wpcontent/uploads/2010/jan/05tiessentaylorkirma yer.pdf viswanathan, v., ammerman, a., eng, e., gartlehner, g., lohr, k.n., griffith, d., …whitener, l. (2004). community-based participatory research: assessing the evidence. (summary, evidence report/technology assessment no. 99; ahrq publication no. 04e022-1). rockville, md: agency for healthcare policy and research. retrieved from: http://www.mycbpr.org/cbprproject/articles/ahrq-cbpr-assessingevidence.pdf wallerstein n, duran b (2003). the theoretical, historical, and practice roots of community based participatory research and related participatory traditions. (chapter 2, p. 25-46): in minkler m, wallerstein n, eds), community based participatory research for health. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 193 conducting research on homelessness in canada from a community psychology perspective: reflections on lessons learned tim aubry1 university of ottawa, canada invited keynote address at the third international conference on community psychology. puebla, mexico, june 4, 2010.                                                                                                                           1 tim.aubry@uottawa.ca 194 conducting research on homelessness in canada from a community psychology perspective: reflections on lessons learned abstract homelessness has emerged as a significant and enduring social problem globally in developing and developed countries. with is aim of promoting social justice and influencing public policy, community psychology has much to offer in terms of addressing this problem. the presentation will focus on research and on research and knowledge mobilization efforts on homelessness in canada of the keynote speaker that now spans over a decade. specifically, findings from intervention and observational studies as well as knowledge dissemination products including a short video and report card on homelessness will be presented. lessons learned from this work as a community psychologist will be discussed. keywords: homelessness, social justice, public policy, research, mobilization, knowledge dissemination. 195 investigación realizada sobre los “sin techo” en canadá desde una perspectiva de psicología comunitaria: reflexiones sobre los aprendizajes resumen la realidad de los “sin techo” ha emergido como un significativo y resistente problema social global tanto en los países desarrollados como en los en vías de desarrollo. con el propósito de promover la justicia social y de influir en la creación de políticas públicas la psicología comunitaria tiene mucho que ofrecer en cuanto a enfrentar este problema. esta presentación enfoca investigación y esfuerzos de movilización a partir del conocimiento sobre la realidad de los “sin techo” en canadá realizados por el autor durante una década. se ofrecen específicamente hallazgos de estudios de observación y de intervención, así como productos de divulgación de conocimientos incluyendo un corto video y tarjetas de informe sobre la realidad de los “sin techo”. serán discutidos los aprendizajes producidos por el trabajo de este psicólogo comunitario. palabras clave: realidad de los sin techo, justicia social, políticas públicas, investigación, movilización, divulgación del conocimiento. 196 introduction. thank you to dr. almeida and the organizing committee for the invitation to be a keynote speaker at the third international conference on community psychology. it is my first opportunity to attend this conference and i am heartened and impressed to see the extent community psychology is present in different corners of the world. two weeks ago from may 20th to may 22nd , 2010, we held our first national conference on community psychology in canada in my home city in ottawa. i find meeting academics, practitioners, and students committed to community psychology values and practice to be energizing – there is no better group of people in psychology to spend time with. so i am happy to be here today. let me first tell you a little bit about myself. i am a professor in the school of psychology at the university of ottawa. i was trained as a clinical-community psychologist. my research interests are in the areas of community mental health and homelessness. i became involved in the issue of homelessness 15 years ago when i approached to assist as a researcher a new local coalition in ottawa at the time, known as the alliance to end homelessness (ateh) in ottawa. the work i am going to present today is in the context of this collaboration and involves research and political advocacy. to begin this presentation, i am going to provide you with a definition of homelessness and describe briefly the context of homelessness in the developed world and in particular in canada. subsequently, i will present the work and findings from two research efforts in which i have been involved. i will finish the talk by providing an assessment of the contribution of these research efforts and the lessons learned from the work. definition and context of homelessness in developed countries. in a developed country like canada, homelessness is defined as a living situation in which individuals and families are lacking permanent housing as a result of poverty and inadequate supports (hulchanski, 2002). it is referred to in the literature as “literal homelessness” and includes people living on the street, people staying in shelters, and people living temporarily with friends or family (toro, 2007). homelessness has emerged as a major social problem in 197 developed countries across europe and in other parts of the world starting in the 1980s (shinn, 2007; toro, 2007). homelessness has emerged as a important area of interest to community psychologists working in developed countries. the work of paul toro and mary beth shinn, some of which has been published in community psychology journals, is particularly notable (shinn. 2007, 2009a, 2009b; shinn et al., 1998; shinn & weitzman, 1990; toro, 2007; toro et al. 1997; toro, trickett, wall & salem, 1991; toro & warren, 1999). why should community psychologists in developed countries like canada be interested in the issue? homelessness reflects a failure of social programs and policies that impacts the most marginalized groups in the population. as a result, new programs and policies are needed. moreover, the solutions to homelessness are political in nature requiring the mobilization of the community to achieve necessary policy changes. ultimately, homelessness is a social justice issue. given this context, community psychologists are well-equipped to contribute in an informed and effective manner to this major social problem in developed countries. homelessness in canada. canada is very large country geographically with a small number of people, namely 32 million people. it is considered a resource rich country. it is also a relatively young country of less than 150 years and has been populated by immigrants. it has a tradition of having progressive social policies such as universal health coverage, social welfare, and unemployment insurance; many of these policies were brought into being in the 1960s. despite its high standard of living and history of progressive social policies, there has been a dramatic increase in homelessness in canadian cities over the past 15 years (gaetz, 2010). estimates put the number of people in a year experiencing homelessness at anywhere from 150k to 250k. the growing population has been characterized by an increasing diversification in the population with it now being made up of single men, single women, youth, and families(gaetz, 2010). in 1998, the visibility of the problem and the overflowing situation in emergency shelters led the mayors of several large cities to declare homelessness a national disaster (federal canadian municipalities, 2000). twelve years later, the situation has only gotten worse (gaetz, 2010). 198 in trying to identify the factors contributing to increasing homelessness in canada, i find the analysis done by two canadian researchers, shirley roy and rock hurtubuise, as particularly helpful (roy & hurtubuise, 2007). specifically, they identify factors at three different levels as behind the growth in homelessness, namely structural, institutional, and individual. at the structural level, they identify the growing income inequality with an increasing number of people living in severe poverty, the decrease in affordable housing supply, and the decrease in income support. at the institutional level, they note deinstitutionalization in the mental health system that failed to support people with psychiatric disabilities now living in the community and child welfare policies that failed to assist youth transitioning from state care to living independently. finally, in the context of these institutional and structural factors, the combination of poverty with individual vulnerabilities like health problems, social isolation, family difficulties produce homelessness. gaetz (2010) and hulchanski (2002) in their analyses of the homeless problem in canada, highlighted the termination of spending on housing by the federal government in the early 1990s combined with a reductions in income support for low income canadians as the major factors fuelling the growth of homelessness in canada over the past two decades. together, these two factors have led to a growing number of individuals and families in the population who are unable to access adequate and affordable housing, placing them at risk of becoming homeless. the sub-populations most affected by this situation have been single parent families, visible minorities including aboriginal canadians, youth, and new canadians (gaetz, 2010). i live in ottawa, which is the federal capital of canada. it is a mid-size city with a population of about 1.1 million residents. ottawa has both anglophones and francophones living there along with an increasing number of new canadians. it has a stable local economy that has been largely recession-proof because of the presence of a large federal civil service. the ottawa population is also highly educated and the cost of living is relatively high when compared to other canadian cities. despite the relative wealth in ottawa, there has been a growing number of socio-economically disadvantaged individuals and families in ottawa (social planning council of ottawa, 2010). the current homeless situation in ottawa finds shelter operating beyond capacity (ateh, 2010). the climate in ottawa which includes cold nights during three seasons of the year requires use of emergency shelters. the one-year prevalence rate for shelter use has been 199 approximately 7500 individuals per year in the last two years (ateh, 2010). about 60% of shelter users are single men with the other part of the population including single women, youth, and families with young children. the average length of stay in our shelters in 2009 was 57 days (ateh, 2010). in 1995, a group of community agencies launched the ateh, a coalition now of over 70 community organizations, government, university researchers, and concerned citizens including people with lived experiences of homelessness intended to contribute to public education, facilitate and disseminate research, and engage in political advocacy surrounding the issue of homelessness. i became involved as a researcher since the beginning of the ateh in 1995. we have conducted a number of observational and intervention studies in collaboration with the ateh. i am going to talk about two of the studies. principles of conducting research within a community psychology perspective. before describing these studies, i want to briefly review the five guiding principles for conducting research within a community psychology perspective as elaborated by dalton, elias, and wandersman (2001): 1. community research is guided by community needs and interests. in other words, the research questions are formulated through a collaboration of community partners and researchers. in this way, the relevance and utility of the research is assured. 2. research is an exchange of resources between researchers and the community in which they are working. community partners bring to the research inside knowledge about the context in which they live. researchers contribute their technical knowledge of research to the process. 3. research is a tool for influencing political decision-making. this principle conceptualizes research as a tool that can and should be used for political advocacy purposes. 4. research should be conducted to evaluate community decisions, programs, and policies. in this context, research contributes valuable knowledge about how social problems like homelessness can be addressed in an effective manner. 5. research needs to produce products that meet the information needs of communities for decision-making and that communicate research findings beyond the academic world to 200 politicians, community leaders, community groups, and the general public. this principle expects community-based researchers to translate new knowledge gained through research for consumption and utility by non-researchers, especially for various stakeholders in the community responsible for solving social problems. as much as possible, these principles for conducting community-based research have guided our research on homelessness. in line with definitions of different types of social interventions according to dalton and his colleagues (2001), i would categorize our work as a form of policy research and advocacy in which we are trying to provide empirical information on the issue of homelessness that can be used for creating social change and contribute to the development of more effective social policies. panel study on homelessness in ottawa. one of the major studies we conducted in collaboration with the ateh was known as the panel study on homelessness in ottawa, a longitudinal study that followed a group of people who started out homeless for a period of two years. the objectives of the study were twofold: (1) to identify the resources and risks factors facilitating or impeding a person’s exit from homelessness, and (2) to examine the relationship between becoming re-housed and health. context and previous research. our rationale for conducting the longitudinal study on homelessness is that we believed along with our community collaborators that there were new insights to be gained by exploring the likelihood that homeless people with distinct characteristics will overcome their homelessness and achieve housing stability. longitudinal studies have been widely touted as an effective means by which to increase understanding of the differential ability of individuals and groups to exit homelessness and achieve housing stability (anderson & tulloch, 2000). to date, only a small number of longitudinal studies have tracked persons who are homeless over time to identify pathways out of homelessness (caton et al., 2005; cohen, ramírez, teresi, gallagher & sokolovsky, 1997; sosin, piliavin & westerfelt, 1990; piliavin, wright, mare & westerfelt, 1996; stojanovic, weitzman, shinn, labay, & williams, 1999; 201 wong, piliavin & wright, 1998; zlotnick, robertson and lahiff, 1999). these studies suggest that five sets of factors have been associated with the likelihood that a previously homeless individual will exit homelessness. these factors are: (1) demographic variables, (2) individual protective and risk factors, (3) economic resources, (4) social support, and (5) use of social services. female gender and a family status that includes children are demographic variables that have demonstrated a linkage with exits from homelessness (wong et al., 1998; zlotnick et al., 1999). protective characteristics of note have included employment history and a history of housing stability, whereas identified risk factors have been a history of homelessness, substance abuse, and health problems (piliavin et al., 1996; zlotnick et al., 1999). economic resources such as wages from work income, reliable social benefits, and subsidized housing emerged as being particularly important for homeless persons and families to become housed (caton et al., 2005; piliavin et al., 1996; shinn et al., 1998; wong et al., 1998: zlotnick et al., 1999). support from family and friends and use of social services has also been shown to be related to successful exits from homelessness (caton et al., 2005; cohen et al., 1997; zlotnick, tam & robertson, 2002). objectives and hypotheses. using a resilience perspective, the first objective of the study was to identify factors that affect homeless persons’ ability to exit homelessness and achieve housing stability. resilience is defined as the achievement of positive outcomes in the context of significant threat or severe adversity (luthar, cicchetti & becker, 2000; masten, 2000). although resilience is a concept that has been investigated most frequently in children and youth, researchers are promoting its applicability to studying the adaptation of adults who are facing adversity. in using resilience to examine the housing trajectories of persons experiencing homelessness, we have identified predictors of exits from homelessness based on research on becoming homelessness, insights from the relatively small amount of research cited above that has examined exits from homelessness and a list or protective, resilience-promoting factors emerging from international research on resilience (masten & reed, 2002). our choice of predictors also has been guided by examining variables that have potential practice and policy relevance to address homelessness. 202 our predictors are clustered as representing resources or risk factors. resources refer to a measurable characteristic in a group of individuals or their situation that predicts positive outcomes in the context of adversity (masten & reed, 2002). in contrast, risk factors are a measurable characteristic in a group of individuals or their situation that predicts negative outcomes (masten & reed, 2002). through the lens of a resilience model, we hypothesize that resources and risk factors will be predictive of an individual’s ability to exit homelessness successfully and attain housing stability. we are also interested in determining if specific demographic characteristics are predictive of success in leaving homelessness and thus will also examine the explanatory significance of sex, age, family status, and citizenship. based on resilience research which has characterized resources (flynn, ghazal, legault, vandermeulen & petrick, 2004), we identified three levels of resources that can contribute to exiting homelessness and achieving stable housing. the first,individual resources,are defined as the capacity of individuals to take advantage of opportunities leading to positive adaptation: employment history, educational attainment, history of housing stability, sense of empowerment. the second – interpersonal resources – are defined as opportunities relating to interpersonal relationships and include: size of social network, perceived availability of social support, and satisfaction with social support. the third – community resources – refer to different kinds of formal assistance available to individuals: income support, use of health services, use of social services, and living in subsidized housing. we predicted that greater access to these resources will be positively related to leaving homelessness and achieving housing stability. we also identified risk factors in the areas of health and substance abuse as playing a role in an individual’s capacity to overcoming homelessness. in particular, we predicted that physical and mental health difficulties and substance abuse problems will be negatively related to leaving homelessness. figure 1 presents the resilience model that was tested in the study. 203 resources individual employment history educational attainment housing stability sense of empowerment interpersonal size of social network availability of social support satisfaction with social support community income support use of health services use of social services subsidized housing risk factors physical health problems mental health problems substance abuse problems exit from homelessness improved health + + figure 1. resilience model tested in the panel study on homelessness in ottawa in addition to hypotheses related to the relationship of resources and risk factors to exiting homelessness, we also predicted that exiting homelessness would be related to improvements in physical health and mental health. an implicit inference of studies on homelessness is that stable housing is likely to have positive impacts on formerly homeless persons’ health. however, no studies have explicitly explored the relations between the attainment of housing stability for the homeless population and measurable health outcomes. past research has shown that people who are homeless are in ill health compared to the general population. homeless people have higher rates of illness, injury and hospitalization than the general population (beijer & andreasson, 2009; hwang, 2001). frankish, hwang and quantz (2009) describe a complex interplay between homelessness and health issues, where health problems can be both a contributor to and consequence of homelessness. living in crowded conditions in homeless shelters leads to the spread of infections such as tuberculosis, and homelessness presents barriers to treatment. homeless people have higher mortality rates than the general population, and higher rates of substance abuse and mental illness. substance abuse difficulties and poverty increase the risk of both 204 mental and physical health difficulties and homelessness. injuries and assaults are prevalent among homeless people (frankish et al., 2009). people who are homeless may face challenges to managing chronic health conditions such as diabetes or hypertension, and they are at increased of developing a wide range of serious health conditions. skin infections and dental problems are frequent, and homeless people may develop health conditions normally seen in much older people (frankish et al., 2009). we found in the panel study that our sample of homeless people had significantly higher rates of numerous chronic health problems including asthma, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, arthritis, back problems, and migraine headaches in comparison to the general canadian population (aubry, klodawsky, hay & birnie, 2003). methodology. the methodology for the project was developed collaboratively based on input from university researchers, community agency personnel, emergency shelter staff, and the city of ottawa’s housing branch. the study design involved two interviews with participants, a first interview conducted when people were homeless and a second interview approximately two years after the first interview. we sampled using stratified sampling procedures for single adults (i.e., based on length stay in shelters of shelter population in 2001 for men and women and based on citizenship for women in women’s shelter in 2001) and families (i.e., based on citizenship of shelter users in family shelters in 2001) staying in emergency shelters and population sampling for youth staying either in emergency shelters or using an inner city drop-in centre. the interview protocols for both interviews included quantitative and qualitative measures asking respondents about their housing histories, income histories, employment histories, social networking, living conditions, social services utilization, health status, health care utilization, substance use, and demographic characteristics. procedures for locating participants were developed and included obtaining permission from participants to contact family, friends, service providers, and the municipal office administering welfare benefits. a sample of 412 individuals who were homeless was interviewed in the first phase of the study, including 87 single men, 85 single women, 79 male youth, 78 female youth, and 83 adults in families. a total of 255 participants (62%) were re-interviewed in the second phase of the 205 study. the follow-up sample comprised of 43 single men, 55 single women, 49 male youth, 50 female youth, and 58 adults in families. findings. three quarters (76%) of respondents had been housed for 90 days or more at the time of being re-interviewed. the most common type of housing in which they lived was apartments (52%), followed by townhouses (17%) and houses (14%). seventy-nine percent of those who were housed rated the overall quality of their housing as being either “somewhat good”, “good”, or “very good”. virtually all of the families (97%) were housed. as well, among the subgroups, families had been housed on average for the longest duration (m = 646 days). in contrast, less than half of the single men (47%) had exited homelessness. single men had also been housed on average for the shortest duration of all the subgroups (m. = 265 days). the majority of families (78%) and over half of housed single women (51%) reported living in subsidized housing. no single men reported living in subsidized housing. based on the resilience model of resources and risks described above, a sequential logistic regression on housing status at follow-up found the following predictors of being stably housed for a period of 90 consecutive days or more at follow-up: 1. among demographic variables, younger age was associated with a greater likelihood of being stably housed at follow-up. women were more likely to be housed at follow-up than men. families showed a greater probability of being stably housed at follow-up than youth or single adults. 2. among individual resources, a higher number of moves predicted a greater likelihood of being stably housed at follow-up. as well, a higher level of personal empowerment was related to a higher probability of being stably housed. 3. interpersonal resources that included size of social network, perceived social support, and satisfaction with social support were not predictive of housing status at follow-up. 4. among community resources, accessing subsidized housing and having a higher level of income predicted a higher probability of being stably housed at follow-up. 206 5. risk factors that included the presence of physical health problems, mental health problems, or substance abuse problems (i.e., drug or alcohol abuse) were not predictive of being housed at follow-up. two hierarchical multiple regressions were conducted to examine whether housing status at follow-up predicted improvements in physical health functioning or mental health functioning. becoming re-housed was not associated with an improvement in physical health functioning or mental health functioning for respondents. however, housing quality as perceived by study participants was found to be a significant predictor of change in mental health functioning, with better housing quality at follow-up being associated with improvements in mental health functioning. in other words, participants who expressed higher levels of satisfaction with their housing at follow-up in terms of comfort, privacy, and overall quality were more likely to experience improvements in mental health functioning over the course of the study. the above represents some select findings from this study. two technical reports presenting all of the findings from this research (aubry et al., 2003; aubry, klodawsky, neimiroff, birnie & bonetta, 2007) can be accessed on the web at http://www.socialsciences.uottawa.ca/crecs/eng/pub_proj_reports.asp. implications for policy and practice. a number of program and policy implications are suggested by our findings: 1. it is clear in our findings that adults in families who experience homelessness in ottawa are successful at re-establishing their housing. it is important to note that individual in families represented a distinct subgroup relative to other subgroups, with their homelessness tied closely to economic difficulties (aubry et al., 2003). in this context, the fact that over three-quarters of families were living in subsidized housing should be regarded as a critical reason for the housing stability they were able to achieve at follow-up. 2. in contrast to adults in families, less than one-half of single men (49%) were housed at follow-up. given that the majority of individuals in the homeless population are single men, these findings suggest that a more concerted focus on them, involving different strategies than are currently used, are needed. affordability of housing appears to be a 207 particular issue faced by single men, as none of them reported living in subsidized housing at follow-up. as well, the importance of offering support in addition to housing, seems evident for many in this subgroup who experience significant health problems (aubry et al., 2003). 3. our findings also highlight the important role of subsidized housing in assisting formerly homeless people to successfully exit homelessness. in particular, participants in our study who accessed subsidized housing between interviews were more likely to be housed at follow-up. our study joins previous research in showing the difference that subsidized housing can make in helping individuals and families who are homeless become re-housed on a long-term basis (piliavin, entner wright, mare & westerfelt, 1996; stojanovic et al., 1999; wong, piliavin & wright, 1998; zlotnick et al., 1999). 4. our findings showed that, in addition to those who had access to subsidized housing, people with higher incomes were more likely to be housed at follow-up. the fact that economic factors and risk factors emerged as predictors of housing status highlights the importance of developing policies that will assist people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless to afford housing. a straightforward strategy towards this end is to increase income support benefits. almost 90% of participants in our study relied on social benefits as their sole source of revenue (aubry et al., 2003). 5. the provision of rent supplements enabling people on low income to access private market housing is another strategy that is indicated by our findings. economic resources, whether in the form of subsidized housing or higher income, is associated with exiting homelessness. research has shown that rent supplements are effective in assisting individuals with a history of homelessness to achieve housing stability, including people with severe mental illness (e.g., hulbert, wood & hough, 1996; shinn et al., 1998; sylvestre et al., 2004). 6. the perceived quality of housing at follow-up emerged as a predictor of improvements in mental health functioning over the course of the study. this finding indicate the need for policies which ensure that available affordable housing is of good quality in relation to safety, comfort, spaciousness, and privacy. 208 dissemination strategy. our partnership with the alliance to end homelessness in ottawa in conducting the study sensitized us to the need to communicate its findings in ways that are comprehensible and accessible to several critical targets beyond an academic audience. appropriate communication methods are essential to the effective translation of research knowledge into policy and practice. effective communication of research findings entails integrating and simplifying information so that it is accessible to the target audience, and may include multiple modalities to target different stakeholders (choi, 2005; graham et al., 2006). in order for research to affect policy, the research issues must brought to the policy agenda, and knowledge must be effectively and usably communicated to policymakers (choi, 2003; lavis, 2006). similarly, effective communication can bridge the gap between research and practice (choi, 2005; graham et al., 2006). over the course of my academic career, i have become more aware of the difficulties in transferring knowledge produced by research as an effective “story” for use by all types of media – print, tv, radio and the internet – so that research results, and how they can influence policy action, can be “heard” and understood. as a result, the completed project led to the creation of a number of innovative tools communicating findings in a clear and compelling manner to nonacademic stakeholders (i.e., citizens, policy-makers, politicians). these tools were: (1) a 12-page booklet presenting research findings in a "popularized" text format, (2) 11 videotaped interviews with persons who have experienced homelessness and are now housed twinned with commentary by the researchers who tied the narratives to the findings of the panel study, (3) a 16 minute video documentary entitled "from homelesss to home" in which three individuals tell their story about experiencing homelessness and becoming housed again and their stories are interpreted in the context of the panel study findings, (4) a twopart 30 minute radio documentary on the study that was broadcast on chuo, the carleton university radio station in ottawa, and (5) an article on the research that appeared in the on-line magazine (cult)ure. the 16 minute video documentary was shown as part of this keynote address at the third international conference of community psychology in puebla. all the dissemination products are available on the website of the ateh in ottawa at http://www.endhomelessnessottawa.ca/homelessness/homelessproject.cfm . 209 developing a report card on homelessness for ottawa. the second piece of collaborative research i want to present to you involves the development and dissemination of a report card on homelessness in ottawa. the first report card was developed in 2005, summarizing the situation in ottawa in 2004. since then, we have produced annually a total of six report cards. the report card is a product of researchers, community agency personnel working on homelessness, municipal employees, and concerned citizens who contribute as volunteers. copies of these report cards are available on the web at http://www.endhomelessnessottawa.ca/. literature review. prior to developing the first report card, we conducted a literature review on “report cards” (beaulac, goodine & aubry, 2004). in this literature, a “report card” has been defined as a tool that communicates information about key social, health, economic, or environmental conditions in a community (united way of america, 1999). over the past twenty years, report cards have been developed to summarize the state of affairs in a wide range of public policy areas, including the environment, education, fire protection, health and social welfare, economic development, government management, and fiscal policy (coe & brunet, 2006). report card can have a number of purposes including defining a community problem, tracking change, mobilizing community problem-solving, educating the public and increasing awareness around a social issue, advocating for policy changes, ensuring accountability, and promoting specific actions (beaulac et al., 2004). gormley and weimer (1999) identified three types of report cards: (1) scientific report cards that are based on data collected in a methodologically rigorous manner, (2) popular report cards that communicates relevant information clearly and effectively, and (3) hybrid report cards that combine scientific rigour with effective communication. the literature on report cards stresses the importance of the involvement of major stakeholders in developing a report card (fielding, sutherland & halfon, 1999; simmes, blaszcak, kurtin, bowen & ross, 2000). in the case of the report card on homelessness, these included researchers, personnel of community agencies serving people who are homeless, and 210 staff of the municipal government familiar working with relevant indicator data. specifically, a working group made up of representatives from these different stakeholders was formed by the ateh to develop the report card. in order to solicit input on the format and content of the report card, a consultation of representatives of the organizations making up the alliance was conducted (browne, beaulac, fuller & aubry, 2007). based on this consultation, the following central messages for the report card were identified: (1) homeless people are a diverse group made up of single adults, youth, and families, (2) homelessness is not a conscious choice or a lifestyle decision but rather a life crisis over which individuals and families have no control, (3) the reasons behind homelessness are first and foremost economic in nature, especially involving poverty and the lack of affordable housing; and, (4) homeless people live in very difficult circumstances and frequently need both housing and supports to re-establish their lives in the community. these messages were intended to challenge some of the public stereotypes about homelessness and the homeless population. a major goal of the report card was to describe homelessness in an accurate manner using credible data. based on the types of report cards described earlier, a “hybrid report card” emerged as the chosen model for the ottawa report card on homelessness. on the one hand, the report card was to serve as a formal means of monitoring and evaluating progress in ending homelessness in ottawa using reliable indicators; while on the other hand, in order to mobilize the community in addressing homelessness in ottawa, the document needed to be accessible to a wide audience, including the general public, politicians, decision-makers, and service providers. content of report card. the make-up of the report card was divided into three main sections. the first section presented indicator data as it relates to housing, income, and homelessness. the second section described programs and services in ottawa intended to assist people who were homeless or at risk of losing their housing. the final section presented recommendations for government and community members to effectively address homelessness. 211 the choice of indicators was based on availability and the need for data to be updated at minimum on an annual basis. table 1 presents a list of indicators with the data sources that have been used in the report card. table 1. indicators and data sources for report card on homelessness in ottawa indicator area indicator data source housing number of social housing units city of ottawa number on social housing waiting list by client group ottawa social housing registry number of rent supplement units city of ottawa number of supportive housing units supportive housing coalition rental vacancy rate canada mortgage housing corporation average rent for a 2 bedroom units income social assistance for a single person province of ontario average monthly # of ontario works cases city of ottawa minimum wage province of ontario cost of living increase statistics canada consumer price index homelessness number of different individuals using emergency shelters broken down by subgroups city of ottawa total number of shelter bed usage average length of stay in emergency shelters by client group grading process. the data in the first report card released in 2005 and based on indicator data for 2004 served as a baseline from which data in subsequent years could be evaluated. using letter grades, progress was evaluated starting with the second report card on homelessness in ottawa released in early 2006 and focusing on 2005 (alliance to end homelessness in ottawa, 2006). initially, an overall grade was assigned based on the following anchors for each of the letter grades: a = significant progress with percentage change on indicators of 15% or more; b = some progress with percentage change on indicators of 5% – 15%; c = no progress with percentage change on indicators of less than 5%; d = some loss with percentage change on indicators of 5% – 15%; e = significant loss with percentage change on indicators of 15% or more. beginning in 2006, grades were assigned for indicator data on housing, income, number of people homeless, and length of shelter stay. 212 a two-step process for assigning grades was used in which initially indicator data for different years was sent electronically to members of the steering committee of the alliance. in the first step, each member assigned grades independently. for the second step, these assignments were summarized and communicated at a meeting of the steering committee. at this meeting each member present provided a new grade publicly with justification. final grades were then determined through a consensus process. in 2009, it was decided the assignment of grades would be based beginning in 2010 on the extent progress was being made towards four key goals set by the alliance for ending homelessness in ottawa over a 10-year period. these goals were: (1) reduction of the number of people using emergency shelters to 2000 people per years (from approximately 7500 in 2009), (2) reduction of emergency shelter stays to 30 days (from an average of 57 days in 2009), (3) reduction of the number of households on the social housing registry to 4000 (from over 10,000 in 2009), and (4) having individuals and families living on low and fixed incomes to spend a maximum of 30% of their income on housing costs (alliance to end homelessness in ottawa, 2010). dissemination strategy. there are several steps that have been followed by the alliance to maximize the impact of the release of its report cards. specifically, a press conference is held the day of the release and the report card is made available on the web. the press coverage of the release has been excellent for each of the six years with news items appearing in local newspapers and on television and radio newscast. it has also resulted over the years in editorial pieces and columns. the alliance has for the most part successfully shaped the information and messages appearing in the media. generally, the media focus has been on the data rather than the grade assignment. the fact that the messaging based on the data communicated no progress in the first four years (2004 – 2007) and a worsening of homelessness in the past two years (2008-2009) has facilitated garnering media attention since they provided evidence of a “dramatic” nature that lends itself to criticizing government (coe & brunet, 2006). 213 shortly after the release, there is a mail-out of hard copies of the report card to local politicians at the three different levels of government (i.e., municipal, provincial, and federal) as well as relevant ministers in the provincial and federal governments. these mail-outs are followed with visits to these politicians to discuss the information in the report card and how governments can better respond to the issue. the report card always includes some very specific policy recommendations targeting especially housing and income support policies for consideration by politicians. conclusions. a key question that every community psychologist needs to answer: “is your research making any difference?” we have now completed the panel study that included the creation of the previously described knowledge transfer products. we have also put out six report cards reporting on six years of data from 2004 to 2009. the longitudinal picture available from the data published in these report cards enables us to track the progress that is being made in addressing homelessness in ottawa. figure 2 presents the number of different individuals who have used emergency shelters annually for each of those six years. figure 2. number of different people using emergency shelters annually in ottawa (20042009) 0 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 5,000 6,000 7,000 8,000 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 single men single women youth family members source: city of ottawa. note. 2004-2006 data standardized to 2007 & 2008 results. year ta1 214 as presented in figure 2, the total number of people homeless annually remained stable from 2004 to 2007, increased by about 500 people in 2008, and has remained at this level in 2009. overall, this data shows no progress over the six year period with some deterioration being evident in the past two years. as shown in figure 3, further evidence of the deterioration is evident in the monitoring of shelter bed use over the six years. figure 3. number of shelter beds used annually in ottawa (2004-2009). as presented in figure 3, shelter bed use has shown increased in the past three years as a result of more people staying in emergency shelters and for longer periods of time. at this point, despite being involved in a coalition whose objective is to end homelessness, we seem to be going in the opposite direction. despite this lack of progress so far in reducing homelessness in our city and our country, i continue to believe that community psychologists can and should play an important role in addressing homelessness. first of all, community psychology values an ecological perspective where the interaction of the person with his or her environment is used to analyze and address social problems. given the structural factors that are contributing to homelessness and requiring policy-level interventions, community psychologists are trained and well-placed to work at this level in addition to understanding the individual diversity that is characteristic of the homeless population. as well, homelessness is a complicated issue that requires collaborative efforts in communities including the engagement of the public to solve it. community psychologists have 0 50,000 100,000 150,000 200,000 250,000 300,000 350,000 400,000 450,000 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 bed nights source: city of ottawa. note. 2004-2006 data standardized to 2007& 2008 results. # of b ed s u se d year 215 the ability to do the kind of community organizing required to address homelessness, including contributing to political advocacy efforts through research. in terms of research, there is a need for quantitative population-level research that shows the diversity in the population and evaluates the effectiveness of programs and policies as well as qualitative story-telling research that provides a much-needed human face to the problem challenging common negative “victim-blaming” stereotypes about people who experience homelessness. ultimately, community psychologists can marry research, knowledge exchange, and political advocacy. lessons learned. in conclusion, what lessons can i draw from the research on homelessness in which i have been involved for over a decade? first of all, our work locally has been overly narrow constraining our ability to influence provincial and national public policy-making. we need to expand research and advocacy efforts so that they are much broader in nature. using bronfenbrenner’s model (bronfenbrenner, 1979), we need to move the focus from the mesoand exolevels to the macro-level particularly as it applies to the development of social policies that will address housing-related poverty. secondly, politicians, community groups, and the public are receptive and interested in research on solutions to social problems like homelessness. our challenge in conducting research on homelessness is developing it in collaboration with the community so that it is maximally pertinent and useful. as well, as researchers we are faced with the challenge of ensuring that findings are communicated in an accessible manner. thirdly, we have been very fortunate to have a productive collaboration with a very active community coalition of committed organizations. the collaboration has reflected an exchange of resources with researchers providing research abilities in exchange for in-depth knowledge about the issue, relevant research questions, and assistance with knowledge knowledge mobilization provided by community groups. fourthly, a significant investment in dissemination is required for research findings to be accessible to and used by the community. the emerging area of knowledge mobilization is an 216 important one for community psychologists to master. community psychologists are well-placed to be leaders in this area. finally, like many other social problems that are enduring, tackling homelessness 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(2003) disaffiliation, substance abuse and exiting homelessness. substance use and misuse. 38, 577-599. microsoft word 2009-0018-final-20110516.docx global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9       e ho´i i ka piko (returning to the center): positioning local culture in a global community psychology cheryl m. ramos, associate professor, department of psychology, university of hawai´i hilo, hilo, hi, usa key words: local culture, local community, local setting about the author cheryl ramos was born and raised on the island of hawai´i. she is an associate professor of psychology. acknowledgements: mahalo nui loa (thank you very much) to the following who reviewed and shared their mana´o (thoughts) on an earlier draft of this paper: pualani kanaka'ole kanahele, kekuhi keali´ikanaka´olehaililani, kalani makekau-whittaker, gail makuakane-lundin, cliff o’donnell, taupori tangaro. recommended citation: ramos, c.m. (2011). e ho´'i i ka piko (returning to the center): positioning local culture in a global community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(1), 9-17. retrieved <date>, from http://www.gjcpp.org/. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1     june  2011   global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  10   e ho´i i ka piko (returning to the center): positioning local culture in a global community psychology cheryl m. ramos, phd department of psychology, university of hawai´i hilo abstract as the demographics of communities become more culturally diverse, understanding the local cultural community context becomes increasingly important to community life and work. this paper presents an undergraduate community psychology course that positions local cultural and community perspectives alongside international and global perspectives. the author describes an undergraduate community psychology course that was developed as a part of a campus-wide initiative that aims to represent the native hawaiian culture and worldview across the curriculum. the course was designed around a framework that represented multiple layers or strands of knowledge representing the international, national, and local community worldviews. this paper describes the development of the local strand of knowledge which included 1) considering the cultural, historical, social, political, and environmental context of the local setting, 2) engaging and collaborating with local scholars and cultural practitioners, and 3) selecting resources representing the local cultural and community context as it relates to community psychology principles and perspectives. results of students’ course evaluations are provided and confirm the importance of including local cultural and community perspectives in community psychology courses. the application of the course development framework to other community contexts is discussed. introduction culture has long been a variable of interest in the social and behavioral sciences and has been recognized as an important theme in community psychology since its inception in the 1960’s. however, notions of culture have occupied a somewhat peripheral position in the field. the special issue on culture and community psychology recently published in the american journal of community psychology suggests that community psychology is experiencing a shift in regard to culture, what kral et al (2011) refer to as a “cultural turn” (p. 49 ), in which culture is being more explicitly incorporated into community psychology theories, research methods, and practice. they call attention to the fact that “culture is local while shaped by both inside and outside, even global forces” (kral et al, 2011, p.48). marsella (1998) emphasized the importance of understanding human behavior and experience within cultural context and called for a global-community psychology. o’donnell (2006) advanced the notion of a global community psychology in his presidential address at the society for community research and action 10th biennial conference. however, as we expand cultural community psychology at the global level, trickett (2009) reminds us that “[f]rom an ecological perspective, knowledge about the local community is prerequisite and prelude to decisions about what kinds of actions serve community goals and interests, and what individuals, groups, and social settings are most central to the action goal” (p. 347). bond & harrell (2006) suggest that the multi-layered cultural characteristics and diversity dynamics of every community need to be understood and considered within the community’s historical, socio-political context, and local setting. messinger (2006) emphasized that local context and history are vital to planning and implementing social programs in our communities. trickett (2011) implores graduate training programs in community psychology to “focus on how to develop intervention possibilities and professional qualities that prioritize understanding of the local context and culture as prelude to research programs and intervention possibilities” (p. 67). the challenge now before us is how to strengthen our courses and training programs with knowledge that draws from the local cultural community context. courses in community psychology have a broad body global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1     june  2011   global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  11   of literature to draw from to represent international and global cultural and community perspectives. published literature in this area reflects foundational principles and practices of the field that can be applied broadly to different cultural and community contexts. we also have a growing body of literature that represents community psychology principles and practices of different international community contexts (reich et al, 2007). but how do we represent the local culture and community context in our courses and training programs? this paper provides one example. it describes an undergraduate community psychology course that positions the local cultural community perspective as a central theme alongside national and international community psychology perspectives. the local cultural context is described as well as the process by which local scholars and cultural practitioners contributed to the course development process and content. local context culture and community are highly integrated concepts in hawaii and other culturally diverse communities. community life is a community of culture – it is not one of community to which culture is simply an add-on consideration. hawai'i’s social, economic, and political history draws attention to issues of power and social forces that impacted the native hawaiian culture, the development of the “local culture” in hawai´i, the emergence of american culture, and the acculturation/enculturation experiences of the people of hawai´i. the context within which people of hawai'i live is multi-cultural, multi-layered, and multi-positioned. people of hawai'i are influenced by and culturally positioned in reference to the native hawaiian host culture. they are influenced by their own ethnic culture to which many retain strong ties. they are influenced by the pan-ethnic “local culture” which has its roots in hawai'i’s multicultural immigrant sugar plantation history and the cultures of more recent immigrant groups. as citizens of the united states, residents of hawai'i are influenced by the national american culture. although the practice of community psychology in hawai´i is influenced by community psychology values and principles that are relevant to other communities in the united states, the cultural, social, and political history of hawai´i, as well as its geographic location, present a disconnect from the lived experience in the continental united states. as global citizens, hawai'i is influenced by the activities occurring in the broader international community. therefore, hawai´’s community psychology courses, training programs, and practice must consider and represent hawai´i’s multi-layered local cultural and community contexts. an undergraduate community psychology course was developed to position the native hawaiian culture and hawai'i cultural community context as central themes alongside broader community psychology perspectives. the course was designed around a framework that represented multiple layers or strands of knowledge representing inter/national, local, and personal community worldviews. the inter/national strand was represented by readings that described community psychology values, principles, and practices with global application, as well as specific international cultural and community contexts including the united states, aotearoa/new zealand, american samoa, and nicaragua. the local strand of knowledge, representing the native hawaiian culture and hawai´i community context, was developed by 1) considering the cultural, historical, social, political, and environmental context of the local setting, 2) engaging and collaborating with native hawaiian scholars and cultural practitioners, and 3) selecting resources representing the native hawai´i culture and local community context as they relate to community psychology principles and perspectives. the course engaged the students and instructor in an exchange of ideas and personal community experiences. students wrote reflection and application papers related to course topics, and participated in community activities through survey, interview, and service projects. local process the course was developed as a part of uluākea, an initiative of the kīpuka native hawaiian student center at the university of hawai´i hilo, which aims to represent the hawaiian worldview across disciplines. as stated in the center’s website “ uluākea is engaged in educating faculty, not simply as an academic exercise but rather in a long-term commitment toward embracing a hawaiian worldview and incorporating it as a part of their own. through this perspective, faculty will develop curriculum, teach, advise, do research, and serve the community. it is important to note that this is not a rejection of western theory, knowledge, and perspectives. rather, it is about centering hawaiian beliefs, ways of knowing, and worldviews and coming to know and understand theory, research, and other knowledge from hawaiian perspectives and in promotion of the health of the hawaiian environment” (kīpuka native hawaiian student center). the initiative had the support of the university administration and was led by native hawaiian global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1     june  2011   global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  12   scholars and cultural practitioners who invited faculty from the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences to participate. the author was invited to be a part of uluākea and chose to redesign her undergraduate community psychology course as a part of the uluākea initiative. the invitation for participation was a critical first step as it gave the author, and other faculty who are not of native hawaiian ancestry, the support and permission to represent the hawaiian worldview in their courses in collaboration with native hawaiian scholars and cultural practitioners. through interactive hands-on experiences, faculty learned about native hawaiian history, values, language, literature, protocol, and practices of hula, lei making, chanting, kite making, awa ceremony, and kihei (cape) printing. faculty visited and learned the significance of wahipana (sacred sites) in the local community. native hawaiian scholars and practitioners shared cultural knowledge and provided one-on-one consultation with faculty. throughout this process, faculty were reminded that they were the experts in their discipline, and were invited and encouraged to represent the hawaiian worldview as relevant to their discipline and courses. the staff of kīpuka helped the faculty to introduce their uluākea course to students at the beginning of the semester. in this way, the kīpuka staff visibly demonstrated their support, as native hawaiians, of the faculty’s efforts to represent the hawaiian worldview in their courses local content resources included in the course were selected to represent the native hawaiian culture and the cultural and community context of hawai´i in relation to principles, topics, and practices of community psychology. several parallels were found between values and principles of community psychology and the native hawaiian culture and hawai´i community experience, similar to the parallels between maori culture and community psychology that gregory (2001) described. for example, parallel themes between native hawaiian culture and community psychology include 1) the integral relationship between person and 'aina (the land), 2) the embeddedness of the individual within the ohana (family) and community, and 3) the importance of kokua (service), laulima (working together), and the reciprocal nature of relationships. resources also were selected to represent the community context of the pan-ethnic local culture. some of these resources are presented in table 1. table 1. resources of local cultural community context in hawai'i topic: introduction title: mauna loa and kilauea comment: this movie introduces students to pele on the island of hawai'i. it includes a video of dr. pualani kanaka´ole kanahele (wolftrap media, 2006b) and footage of past and recent volcanic activity to ground the community psychology course in hawaiian culture… “in the beginning”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3khvnr754o topic: introduction title: pele legends (pukui, 1996) comment: hawaiian legends describe the development of hawai'i island communities. topic: core values title: traditional hawaiian values” comment: in this chapter of his book entitled “ka lama kukui: hawaiian psychology” dr. william rezentes describes core hawaiian values (rezentes, 1996). topic: core values title: aloha is our intelligence – dr. manulani aluli meyer (the koani foundation, 2007). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xnbxvgbef0 comment: in this youtube video, dr. manu meyer discusses the core hawaiian value of aloha topic: ecological perspective title: you tube video kekuhi keali´ikanaka´olehaililani (wolftrap media, 2006a) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxi7sqoo1po global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1     june  2011   global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  13   comment: in this youtube video, kekuhi keali´ikanaka´olehaililani discusses the connection between psychological and physical/environmental landscapes from a hawaiian culture perspective. topic: ecological levels of analysis title: nā honua mauli ola (native hawaiian education council). http://www.olelo.hawaii.edu/olelo/nhmo.php comment: ‘ecological levels of analysis’ refers to the various systems that impact our lives: individual, microsystem (family, peers), organizations, communities, and macrosystem. the council provides guidelines (at multiple levels) for developing culturally healthy and responsive learning environments in hawai´i. topic: community research methods title: talk story: perspectives of children, parents, and community leaders on community violence in rural hawaii" (shibuya, affonso, & frueh, 2007) comment: this article presents a qualitative research study conducted on hawai´i island. topic: sense of community title: aunty mona malani (kama'aina backroads, 2007). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eub4ue4xvk comment: this video features a chat with a kupuna (elder) from laupahoehoe. topic: diversity title: “small kid time” comment: 5th and 7th grade class photos from the 1960’s illustrate acculturation and enculturation of children in the context of ‘local’ culture in hawai´i. topic: coping and social support title: hawaiian american families (mccubbin & mccubbin, 1997) comment: this article discusses the protective factors of hawaiian american families. topic: empowerment title: “re-placing hawaiians: empowering sense of place and identity in wai´anae (fermantez, 2009) http://kipuka.uhh.hawaii.edu/uluakea/media.html comment: dr. kali fermantez discusses the power of connecting to ancestral places as a way of overcoming marginalization of hawaiian's in their own homelands. topic: health care in rural communities title: the mobile♥care health project: providing dental care in rural hawai´i communities http://www.gjcpp.org/en/article.php?issue=4&article=18 in the spirit of blessed damien and mother marianne: mobile care health project http://www.gjcpp.org/en/photovid.php?issue=4&photovid=19 comment: this paper and video describe an innovative program for delivering dental care to rural communities on the island of hawai'i. title: cultural considerations in developing church-based programs to reduce cancer health disparities among samoans.(aitaoto et al. 2007). comment: this article describes a church-based intervention for increasing cancer screening behavior among samoans in hawai´i. title: hawaii cancer facts & figures comment: this document provides cancer incidence and mortality rates for the major cultural groups in hawai'i. topic: homeless in hawai´i title: (not) in my backyard: housing the homeless in hawai´i (modell, 1997) comment: this case study describes efforts to provide housing for the homeless in oahu. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1     june  2011   global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  14   topic: prevention title: 2003 hawai'i student alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use study http://hawaii.gov/health/substance-abuse/prevention-treatment/survey/report2003/index.html comment: this report presents results from the 2003 hawai´i student alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use (atod) study and describes risk and protective factors for atod at individual, peer, family, school, and community levels. topic: education title: expanding higher education opportunities in rural hawai´i communities (ramos, 2005). http://www.marshall.edu/jrcp/8_2_ramos.htm comment: this article describes a university-community partnership to increase access to higher education in rural communities of hawai´i. topic: program evaluation title: lanakila learning center http://lanakila.net comment: the lanakila learning center, is an alternative high school serving native hawaiian youth in hilo, hawai´i. student course evaluations an important component of uluākea is the ongoing evaluation of courses and the uluākea initiative as a whole. in addition to the standard university course evaluations, the community psychology uluākea courses were evaluated with respect to their uluākea content. uluākea course evaluations were distributed to students at the end of each semester. and addressed the: 1) native hawaiian content of the course; 2) representation of native hawaiian culture and perspectives in other courses; and 3) familiarity with native hawaiian culture. students also were asked to provide additional comments they had about the course. a total of 58 students were enrolled in the uluākea community psychology for three semesters. of these, 49 students completed course evaluations for a 84.5% completion rate. enrolled students included psychology majors, as well as those majoring in sociology, political science, administration of justice, and communication. of those who completed evaluations: 18% (9) self-identified as native hawaiian and 82% (40) as non-native hawaiian; 57% (28) were born in hawaii; and 57% (28) lived in hawaii for 16 years or more, 41% (20) for 10 years or less, and 1 student did not indicate length of hawaii residency. with respect to the course content, students agreed or strongly agreed that the examples used in the courses were appropriate to illustrate concepts (100%), the content contributed to their understanding of native hawaiian culture (94%), and the content clarified differences and similarities between western and native hawaiian values and perspective (88%) they became more aware of native hawaiian values and perspectives (92%), wanted to learn more about native hawaiian values and perspectives (80%), and the perspectives of other students helped them to appreciate different points of view (82%). most of the students (66%) were reasonably or somewhat familiar with native hawaiian culture before taking the course. only half of the students(51%) reported being exposed to native hawaiian culture and perspectives in one or two psychology classes, and 23% indicating that none of their psychology classes exposed them to these areas of study. most of the students (96%) believed it was very or somewhat important to learn about native hawaiian culture and perspectives. many of the students (43%) would like to see more modules that incorporate native hawaiian culture and perspectives in psychology classes; 49% also agreed as long as the modules do not interfere with the curriculum. written comments from students indicate that they enjoyed learning about hawaiian culture and considered integration of hawaiian culture into the course as appropriate and important. • it was interesting to see the viewpoints of other people and the connection between hawaiian culture and psychology. • i think learning about hawaiians and the culture is important for anyone who wants a career in psychology or social services in hawai´i since culture is crucial to practice. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1     june  2011   global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  15   • i applaud and appreciate your work on a personal level and the efforts of the entire group in incorporating native hawaiian culture in the curriculum. i found it very effective and appreciate the appropriate supporting material that was used to tie in community psychology concepts. • if we are going to work within the hawaiian community, we need to have knowledge about the culture. students stated that the native hawaiian culture should be incorporated into other courses. • i think increased awareness of native hawaiian culture, or any indigenous culture of a place, is important and should be further incorporated into all majors. • this was the first class that i had that actually incorporated any type of hawaiian content into the course. this was really important because this is hawai´i and the people and culture are very important. having it brought to the forefront ensures that it will continue to be addressed, discussed and kept alive. a few students found the hawaiian culture perspective interesting, but suggested that other cultures and worldviews be represented in the community psychology course. • i appreciate how the course incorporated hawaiian values and culture because it is very relevant to the environment. however, it’s still important to discuss other cultures and ideas. • although it is interesting to learn about the hawaiian culture perspective, university courses are in place to give people universal knowledge and should not be limited to one ethnicity, race, gender, etc. based on these results, the content of the undergraduate community psychology course was modified to incorporate resources relevant to other cultures in hawai´i (e.g. samoan) and other topics that are relevant to diverse groups (e.g. health care, prevention). conclusion as the demographics of communities become more culturally diverse, understanding the local cultural community context becomes increasingly important to community life and work. this paper presented a community psychology course that positioned local community perspectives alongside national and global perspectives. although the local strand of the course presented content that is most relevant to a specific context, namely hawai´i, the framework used to guide the development of this course is applicable to community psychology courses in other cultural community contexts. the local strand of knowledge in a different cultural community context could be integrated into a community psychology course and/or training program by 1) considering the cultural, historical, social, political, and environmental context of the local setting, 2) engaging and collaborating with local scholars and cultural practitioners, and 3) selecting resources representing the local cultural and community context as it relates to community psychology principles and perspectives. course and program evaluations would provide valuable and essential feedback about the relevance of course and program content to the local cultural community context being addressed. as we reposition culture from the periphery to the center of community psychology theories, research, and practice, we must consider the cultural community context from both local and global perspectives. we should immerse ourselves in the local cultural community context and learn from local cultural scholars, and practices. we would then be better able to incorporate content into our courses and training programs so that our knowledge base, skills training, and interventions are more appropriate and relevant to the local cultural community context. at the same time, we should not become myopic but rather maintain a view of the broader national and international landscape so that we can learn and benefit from the experiences and perspectives of communities in other parts of the globe. to remain relevant and effective as a field, and as individual agents of community change, we should position the local cultural community context as a central theme of our global community psychology. references 2003 hawaii student alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use study. retrieved july 28, 2009 from http://hawaii.gov/health/substance-abuse/preventiontreatment/survey/report2003/index.html. affonso, d.d., shibuya, j.y., and frueh, b.c. 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(eds.), home in the islands: housing and social change in the pacific (pp. 194-221). honolulu, hi: university of hawai'i press. native hawaiian education council (nhec) in partnership with ka haka 'ula o ke'elikōlani college of hawaiian language. nā honua mauli ola. retrieved july 28, 2009 from http://www.olelo.hawaii.edu/olelo/nhmo.php. o'donnell, c. (2006). beyond diversity: toward a cultural community psychology, american journal of community psychology, 37, (1), 1-7. pukui, m.k. (1996). hawai'i island legends. honolulu, hi: kamehameha schools press. ramos, c.m. (2005) expanding higher education opportunities in rural hawaii communities: lessons learned in a university-community partnership, journal of rural community psychology, e8 (2), 111. retrieved july 28, 2009 from http://www.marshall.edu/jrcp/8_2_ramos.htm. reich, s.m., riemer, m., prilleltensky, i., & montero, m. (eds.)(2007). international community psychology: history and theories. new york: springer. rezentes, w.c., iii. (1996). ka lama kukui, hawaiian psychology: an introduction. honolulu hi: 'a'ali'i books. shapiro, s. (1986). the neglect of asian psychology in the united states. psychologia: journal of psychology in the orient, 29, 10-17. sinha, d. (1994a). indigenous psychology: need and potentiality. journal of indian psychology, 12, 1-7. sinha, d. (1994b). origins and development of psychology in india: outgrowing the alien framework. international journal of psychology, 29, 695-705.. the koani foundation: voices of truth. aloha is our intelligence a visit with manu aluli meyer, february 5, 2007. retrieved july 28, 2009 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xnbxvgbef0. trickett, e.j. (2009). community psychology: individuals and interventions in community context. annual review of psychology, 60, 395-419. trickett, e.j. (2011). from “water boiling in a peruvian town” to “letting them die”: culture, community intervention, and the metabolic balance between patience and zeal. american journal of community psychology, 47, 58-68. wolftrap media (2006a). face of america: hawai'i kekuhi kanahele-frias interview, july 13, 2006. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1     june  2011   global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  17   retrieved on july 28, 2009 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxi7sqoo1po. wolftrap media (2006b). face of america: hawaii pualani kanaka'ole kanahele, july 14, 2006. retrieved from july 28, 2009 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3khvnr754o. perceived coalition functioning connect to protect® researcher-community partnerships: assessing change in successful collaboration factors over time mauri a. ziff1, nancy willard1, gary w. harper2, audrey k. bangi3, jason johnson2, jonathan m. ellen1 and the adolescent medicine trials network for hiv/aids interventions (atn)4 1johns hopkins university school of medicine, department of pediatrics, baltimore, maryland; 2department of psychology, depaul university, chicago; 3center for aids prevention studies, university of california, san francisco; 4supported by the national institute of child health and human development, with supplemental funding from the national institutes on alcohol abuse and alcoholism, drug abuse, and mental health. keywords coalition formation, researcher-community partnerships, successful collaboration factors, youth hiv prevention, structural change acknowledgements this research is funded by grant #u01 hd040533 from the national institutes of health through the national institute of child health and human development, with supplemental funding from the national institute on drug abuse, national institute on mental health, and national institute on alcohol abuse and alcoholism. connect to protect has been scientifically reviewed by the atn’s behavioral and community prevention leadership groups (cplg). the authors wish to acknowledge the input and support of atn and cplg leadership; the atn coordinating center; westat, inc.; connect to protect’s national coordinating center; participating atn clinical research sites; community partners; and youth involved in local and national community advisory boards. recommended citation: ziff, ma, willard, n, harper, gw, bangi, ak, johnson, j, ellen, jm and the adolescent medicine trials network for hiv/aids interventions (atn). (2010). connect to protect® researcher-community partnerships: assessing change in successful collaboration factors over time. global journal of community psychology practice, 1(1), 32-39. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 33 connect to protect® researcher-community partnerships: assessing change in successful collaboration factors over time abstract fifteen research sites within the adolescent medicine trials network for hiv/aids interventions launched connect to protect community coalitions in urban areas across the united states and in puerto rico. each coalition has the same overarching goal: reducing local youth hiv rates by changing community structural elements such as programs, policies, and practices. these types of transformations can take significant amounts of time to achieve; thus, ongoing successful collaboration among coalition members is critical for success. as a first step toward building their coalitions, staff from each research site invited an initial group of community partners to take part in connect to protect activities. in this paper, we focus on these researcher-community partnerships and assess change in collaboration factors over the first year. respondents completed the wilder collaboration factors inventory at five time points, approximately once every two to three months. results across all fifteen coalitions show significant and positive shifts in ratings of process/structure (p<.05). this suggests that during the first year they worked together, connect to protect researcher-community partners strengthened their group infrastructures and operating procedures. the findings shed light on how collaboration factors evolve during coalition formation and highlight the need for future research to examine change throughout subsequent coalition phases. introduction community coalitions play a role in addressing a broad range of complex public health concerns (e.g., roussos & fawcett, 2000). examples include asthma (peterson, lachance, butterfoss, houle, nicholas, gilmore, lara & friedman, 2006), pregnancy and parenting (tandon, parillo, jenkins, jenkins & duggan, 2007), and hiv/aids (ramos, hernandez, ferreira-pinto, ortiz & somerville, 2006). collaborative efforts such as these are often characterized by synergistic unions of varied community sectors including government, faithbased, families, business, and others (e.g., weiss, anderson & lasker, 2002). far from being static entities, community coalitions move through stages of change (i.e., formation, implementation, maintenance, goal achievement) and different factors may have an impact on coalition success at each phase (butterfoss, goodman & wandersman, 1993). there has been much written about what contributes to coalition success or failure. in their review of the extant literature published in the quarter-century from 1980 to 2004, zakocs and edwards (2006) summarize key factors as those related to governance procedures, leadership, active and diverse membership, collaboration, and group cohesion. despite the attention this topic has received over the last two decades, there is still much to be learned— particularly with regard to generalizability and change over time. in large part, these two aspects are challenging to study due to the nature of coalitions themselves. the considerable variability in goals, infrastructures, communities, and target populations (zakocs & edwards, 2006) make it difficult to generalize findings. additionally there are often significant barriers to examining change over time, including limited resources (e.g., lack of funding for long-term evaluation) and the reality that community coalitions are difficult to form let alone sustain (kadushin, lindholm, ryan, brodsky & saxe, 2005). successfully completed longitudinal studies unequivocally point to the need for further research. for instance, a seven-year (1995–2002) project funded by the centers for disease control and prevention involving teen pregnancy prevention coalitions in thirteen communities found that good coalition processes—though associated with shortterm success—did not appear to influence coalition survival (kegler, williams, cassell, santelli, kegler, montgomery, bell, martinez, klein, mulhall, will, wyatt, felice & hunt, 2005). such results underscore the value of assessing coalitions during various developmental stages; doing so will enhance understanding of how collaborative efforts evolve and are sustained. focus of the present study connect to protect® (c2p): partnerships for youth prevention interventions is a six-year community mobilization hiv intervention project initiated by the adolescent medicine trials network for hiv/aids interventions (atn). the atn is a collaborative network established in 2001 by the national institutes of health to implement clinical, biological, and behavioral research with youth at risk for or with hiv/aids. global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 34 c2p offers the opportunity to closely follow the formation, evolution, outcomes, and sustainability of fifteen community coalitions located in urban areas with high concentrations of youth hiv (see ziff, harper, chutuape, griffin-deeds, futterman, francisco, muenz & ellen, 2006 for project overview). each coalition aims to decrease hiv rates among youth1 by catalyzing community structural change. this strategy focuses on creating new or modifying existing policies, programs, and practices in ways that are expected to curb the spread of the disease. each coalition examines their city’s particular situation and determines which structural changes, taken together, are likely to ultimately have an overall impact on youth hiv rates. there are many examples; here we list just a few: altering local zoning to disrupt open-air drug markets, extending neighborhood clinic hours to include more youthfriendly hours, changing physical structures so that high-risk behavior is discouraged (e.g., install lighting in public areas where risky behaviors are known to occur), and improving provider testing and counseling practices. pursuing and achieving structural changes can take a great deal of time and other resources, thereby making ongoing successful collaboration among coalition members essential to the process. the goal of the present study is to shed light on how collaboration evolves during coalition formation stages. specifically, we examine changes in collaborative factors during the first year that the research site staff and their community partners worked together on c2p endeavors. methods atn sites: the participating clinical research sites are based out of universities and hospitals in baltimore, boston, chicago, fort lauderdale, los angeles, miami, new orleans, new york (bronx and manhattan), philadelphia, san diego, san francisco, san juan, tampa, and washington, dc. study population: the study population consists of the researcher-community partners from each of the fifteen coalitions. researchers include atn site staff such as adolescent medicine specialists, c2p project coordinators, and outreach workers. the number of staff members per site ranged from two to five, with an average of three. each site staff group established formal relationships with an initial set of local community partners (referred to here as “charter” community partners). for complete details on how site staff identified and established relationships with 1 for c2p purposes youth is defined as 12 to 24 years old. community partners, see straub, griffin-deeds, willard, castor, peralta, francisco and ellen (2007). to provide needed context for this paper we briefly summarize the main steps below. first, site staff worked to establish c2p’s presence in the community by participating in relevant local events and meetings, networking with leaders and gatekeepers, talking to adolescents and young adults for their perspectives, and so forth. second, while continuing to raise awareness of c2p in their respective cities, site staff assessed and catalogued existing local resources to better understand where, how, and when young people at higher risk for hiv are (or are not, as the case may be) reached. the work ultimately resulted in a printed directory of current resources for youth and those who care for and about them. third, site staff conducted in-depth interviews with a subset of the catalogued community resources. the interviews served two purposes: (1) they provided site staff with additional data on which entities may be a good fit as a charter community partner in terms of interest, experience, knowledge, time available, etc. and (2) the process provided a built-in opportunity to grow and strengthen relationships, regardless of whether the entity subsequently formed formal ties with c2p. when drawing up their lists of potential charter community partners site staff were asked to consider not only agencies and organizations, but also to think more broadly about particular individuals who may need to be involved during the early stages in order to help legitimize the coalition and create a groundswell of support.2 site staff approached those on their lists and, for interested parties, outlined initial expectations of community partners and discussed the various degrees to which they could be involved. entities and individuals who agreed to play a more significant role in c2p activities as a “main” partner (in contrast to those who wanted to participate in more of a supporting or advisory role) signed a memorandum of understanding that detailed partnership responsibilities at this level (e.g., attending meetings; identifying venues where youth can be reached for c2p activities; helping to increase buy-in and ownership from community members). overall, the number of charter community partners per site ranged from thirteen to twenty-one, with an average of nineteen. in response to a multi-factorial 2 examples include those who could provide clout at the grasstops level such as respected elected officials as well as those who could expand community buy-in at the grassroots level (e.g., well-regarded local clergy). global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 35 question, community partners described themselves as the following3: community-based organizations (e.g., agencies providing case management, mental health and substance abuse care centers; 67%); government agencies (e.g., health and housing departments; 13%); spiritual/faith-based institutions (9%) and others (e.g., after school programs, local bar/club owners; 17%). measures: the wilder collaboration factors inventory (mattessich, murray-close & monsey, 2001; see table 1) assesses the presence of twenty successful collaboration factors, organized into six domains: (a) purpose: defined as “the reasons for the development of a collaborative effort, the result or vision the collaborative group seeks, and the specific tasks or projects the collaborative group defines as necessary to accomplish. it is driven by a need, crisis, or opportunity” (p. 25); (b) member characteristics: consist of “the skills, attitudes, and opinions of the individuals in a collaborative group, as well as the culture and capacity of the organizations that form collaborative groups” (p. 14); (c) communication: described as “the channels used by collaborative partners to send and receive information, keep one another informed, and convey opinions to influence the group’s actions” (p. 23); (d) process/structure: refers to “the management, decision-making, and operational systems of a collaborative effort” (p. 18); (e) environment: “consists of the geographic location and social context within which a collaborative group exists. the group may be able to influence or affect these elements in some way, but it does not have control over them.” (p. 12); and (f) resources: “financial and human ‘input’ necessary to develop and sustain a collaborative group.” (p. 27). the items within each domain were rated on a fivepoint scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree. higher mean domain scores point to greater strengths in that area. 3 with a multi-factorial question respondents could identify themselves as fitting into more than one category if applicable. therefore, the total adds to more than 100 %. table 1. wilder collaboration factors inventory: domains and factors domain factors environment 1. history of collaboration or cooperation in the community 2. collaborative group seen as legitimate leader in the community 3. favorable political and social climate membership characteristics 4. mutual respect, understanding and trust 5. appropriate cross section of members 6. members see collaborative as in their self-interest 7. ability to compromise process and structure 8. members share a stake in the process and outcome 9. multiple layers of participation 10. flexibility 11. development of clear roles and policy guidelines 12. adaptability 13. appropriate pace of development communication 14. open and frequent communication 15. established informal relationships and communication links purpose 16. concrete, attainable goals and objectives 17. shared vision 18. unique purpose resources 19. sufficient funds, staff, materials and time 20. skilled leadership a range of practitioners have used the wilder inventory in applied settings to guide and improve collaboration (refer to mattessich, murray-close, & monsey, 1992). the inventory is applicable in the present study because it assesses our variables of interest; that is, those factors associated with successful collaboration. moreover, as the inventory’s results can provide useful information at all phases of a coalition’s development and functioning, it works will with c2p’s longitudinal design. procedures: sites were required to hold five meetings with community partners throughout the year (every two to three months). the meetings were intended to foster successful coalition building and included activities designed to reinforce a shared understanding of purpose and increase readiness to take on complex collaborative tasks (wolff, 2001). examples of meeting activities included: (1) debating city-specific youth hiv prevention needs and opportunities; (2) sharing information on community risks and protective factors; and (3) utilizing atnprovided instructional materials on topics such as selecting a decision-making model, building coalitions, and developing leadership. copies of the wilder inventory were distributed at each meeting (t1 to t5). site staff and their community partners confidentially completed the global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 36 inventories each time via paper and pencil and sealed their responses in unmarked envelopes. this process took approximately fifteen minutes. the sealed envelopes were subsequently mailed to johns hopkins university for data management and analysis. analysis in order to measure the internal consistency reliability of items within each specific domain on the wilder inventory, cronbach's alphas were calculated on the baseline scores (t1). cronbach's alpha is a coefficient of reliability/consistency that indicates how well a set of items measure a single uni-dimensional construct; thus the cronbach's alpha value increases when the correlations between the items increase. next, we examined whether time predicted mean domain scores (i.e., the association among all time points and domain mean scores) by conducting linear regression and general estimating equations (gee) to adjust for repeated measures. to determine whether the findings were a result of differential meeting attendance by community partners over the course of the year, we also did a sensitivity analysis. results the number of inventories completed at each time point, t1 to t5, is as follows (average per coalition in parentheses): t1, n = 196 (13.1); t2, n = 191 (12.7); t3, n =194 (12.9); t4, n = 145 (9.7); and t5, n = 139 (9.3). the coalitions maintained on average a 71% response rate from the first coalition meeting to the fifth meeting. [note: while it is difficult to predict why there was a gradual attrition of attendees, there are likely several reasons. we suspect that the earlier meetings drew some of the local leaders who contributed to providing clout, legitimacy, and broader community buy-in. their attendance and participation may not have been needed throughout the entire first year of the coalitions’ work. additionally, in the early phase of the coalition formation there is likely to be natural attrition and shifting of participants as the group more clearly defines its direction, intentions and roles of its members.] the majority of wilder inventory domains had alphas approaching or exceeding .80, indicating high internal consistency reliability: purpose (.75), member characteristics (.74), communication (.79), and process/structure (.82). the environment and resource domains had low alphas (.63 and .50, respectively) and thus were excluded from subsequent analyses. table 2 summarizes the domain mean, range, and standard deviation at each time point for the included domains. table 3 summarizes linear regression and gee results, which are significant for the process domain (p<. 05). the findings suggest that aspects such as decision-making opportunities and strategies, workload management, and understanding of roles and responsibilities improved over time. table 2. descriptive statistics (t1 to t5) domain [mean; range (std dev)] t1 t2 t3 t4 t5 purpose 24.8; 14-30 (2.77) 25.0; 9-30 (3.01) 25.0; 14-30 (3.06) 25.0; 16-30 (3.00) 25.4; 14-30 (3.18) member characteristics 35.2; 27-45 (3.71) 35.3; 12-45 (4.29) 35.1; 22-45 (4.29) 34.8; 26-44 (3.53) 35.6; 26-45 (3.82) process 37.8; 24-50 (4.58) 38.1; 16-50 (5.26) 38.1; 22-50 (4.80) 38.3; 28-50 (3.64) 39.1; 28-50 (4.98) communication 20.5; 11-25 (2.59) 20.5; 5-25 (3.03) 20.5; 10-25 (2.81) 20.6; 15-25 (2.33) 20.6; 9-25 (2.67) it is noted here that the composition of attendees at any given meeting may have differed, for any number of reasons (e.g., weather; out of town on business). thus, we conducted a sensitivity analysis to determine whether varying participation accounted for the findings shown in table 3. table 3. association between time and domain scores variable parameter est. 95% ci z pr > |z| purpose .09 -.06 .24 1.18 .2391 member characteristics -.015 -.16 .13 -.20 .8402 process .28 .01 .55 2.04 .0416 communication .001 -.11 .12 .02 .9858 first, we examined frequency of community partners’ meeting attendance (table 4). over 30 % attended one meeting, 43 % attended two to three, and approximately a quarter attended four or five. next regression analyses were conducted revealing results of the same effect size. this indicates that the findings summarized in table 3 are unlikely to be a by-product of different people sitting at the table throughout the year. table 4. frequency of meeting attendance global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 37 meeting count frequency percent 1 67 31.60 2 47 22.17 3 44 20.75 4 29 13.68 5 25 11.79 discussion we utilized the wilder collaboration factors inventory to examine if (and how) various domains considered essential for success changed over the first year researchers and community partners worked together on c2p endeavors. results across fifteen coalitions show that process/structure domain underwent significant and positive change. this is of import because it has been noted by others that building successful community coalitions is difficult because organizations of different sizes and affiliations often have problems working together (kadushin, et al., 2005). during c2p coalition formation stages, researcher-community partners succeeded in improving factors related to operational procedures and group infrastructure. this progress was likely facilitated by mandated meeting agenda items that required site staff and their community partners to discuss related aspects such as setting ground rules and guidelines. whereas process/structure appeared to evolve over time in year 1, changes in the other domains we examined—communication, member characteristics and purpose—were not significant. this may be a result of the selected instrument used to measure collaboration. alternatively, it is possible that changes in these three particular aspects as assessed by the wilder inventory simply may not have yet occurred. future analyses using additional time points will reveal whether (and at what stage of coalition development) shifts in these domains occur. along the same vein, process/structure may not show change in future waves of analysis. this is possible if, for example, the group feels that it has these types of aspects “ironed out” from the groundwork laid during the first year. such findings would be consistent with the notion that at each developmental stage different factors may be important for successful coalition functioning (butterfoss, et al., 1993). the relative stability in communication, member characteristics, and purpose may also be a function of mandated c2p protocol tasks. first, pre-partnership activities such as formalized processes and procedures and clarity on roles and responsibilities could have fostered stable communication ratings (foster-fishman, berkowitz, lounsbury, jacobson & allen, 2001). knowing that interpersonal relationships and a greater sense of inclusiveness have an impact on coalitions (suarez-balcazar, harper & lewis, 2005; wells, ford, mcclure, holt & ward, 2007), all sites were expected to foster effective communication before formally establishing any partnerships within the community (see straub, et al., 2007). second, the lack of change in the member characteristics domain is unsurprising given that during the first year coalition membership was, by design, largely fixed and generally consisted of site staff and charter community partners. this requirement stemmed from previous research supporting active involvement of organizational representatives prior to cultivating broad support from a wide range of community sectors (zakocs & guckenburg, 2007). and third, the c2p general mission and purpose was made clear to all participants before sitting at the table. at the required meetings each coalition was, however, encouraged to modify the mission so that it included language specific to their communities. this likely contributed to the trend of increased shared purpose. future considerations as described in ziff, et al. (2006), each c2p coalition is expected to grow from the initial set of charter community partners and site staff to involve more and a greater diversity of community sector representatives. admittedly, this can be a tricky endeavor. adding new participants may help increase ownership, boost trust and buy-in from the general community, and facilitate goal attainment. on the other hand, achieving synergy across diverse groups can be difficult and some experts suggest that smaller groups may in the end accomplish more (e.g., kubisch, weiss, shorr & connell, 1995). as outlined by straub and colleagues (2007), the c2p process attempts to address this by encouraging each coalition to maintain a core group of main partners who have designated roles, regardless of how or when the coalition as a whole expands; as new members do become part of the endeavor, new dynamics will be encountered. ratings of collaboration factors may therefore vary according to time spent in the coalition and other critical factors, such as how tasks are delineated and decisions are made. thus far, site staff members have adopted more of a leadership role (e.g., driving/executing many of the goals and activities) and community partners generally have played more of a consultative role (e.g., providing input and feedback on goals, activities, community perception). as the coalitions global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 38 firm their foundations and expand in size and breadth, it will be necessary for site staff and their community partners to revisit leadership models and to determine the best fit. as just one example, a coalition may strive for more distributed or shared leadership in hopes of increasing the chances of coalition sustainability. this change in dynamics will almost certainly affect perceptions of process/structure among the group. another consideration to be explored is that over a longer period of time, changes in collaboration factors may be non-linear. for instance, perceptions may fluctuate as the coalition achieves stated structural change objectives and then adds new ones that come with different facilitators and barriers. they may likewise vary non-linearly as some coalition members cycle in and out of the group as a function of coalition needs and/or natural attrition. conclusions and lessons learned the findings across all fifteen coalitions point to the importance of establishing methods for operating and managing researcher-community partnerships. central to this is having a stable set of core partners working together on these specific aspects throughout the first year. continuity and commitment of these partners are linchpins to building a coalition’s infrastructure; in turn, a strong infrastructure will buttress coalition growth. another decisive element is having a mechanism whereby process/structure (as well as other collaborative factors) are assessed over time. this will allow site staff and their entire group of community partners, whether filling main or other roles, to take notice of needed improvements and to make adjustments. researchers and community partners will have differing perceptions of process/structure aspects depending on the institutions and agencies they represent. we recommend that at the outset participants treat the coalition as its own separate organizational unit – one that requires its own organizational structure/processes. such an undertaking requires time and other resources, but the investment can help to avoid typical pitfalls young coalitions are prone to experience. attending to these rudimentary issues early on—and monitoring them and addressing needs for change over time – can foster the solid infrastructure needed for effective functioning and long-term survival, so that coalition members can better focus on the larger issue at hand: facilitating community structural change to protect youth from hiv/aids. references butterfoss, f.d., goodman, r.m. & wandersman, a. 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(2002). making the most of collaboration: exploring the relationship between partnership synergy and partnership functioning. health education & behavior, 29 (6), 683-698. wells, r., ford, e.w., mcclure, j.a., holt, m.l. & ward, a. (2007). community-based coalitions’ capacity for sustainable action: the role of relationships. health education & behavior, 34 (1), 124-139. wolff, t. (2001). a practitioner's guide to successful coalitions. american journal of community psychology, 29(2), 173-191. zakocs, r. c., & edwards, e. m. (2006). what explains community coalition effectiveness? a review of the literature. am j prev med, 30 (4), 351-361, doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2005.12.004. zakocs, r. & guckenburg, s. (2007). what coalition factors foster community capacity? lessons learned from the fighting back initiative. health education & behavior, 34 (2), 354-375. ziff, m.a., harper, g.w., chutuape, k.s., griffindeeds, b., futterman, d., francisco, v.t., muenz, l.r., ellen, j.m. & adolescent medicine trials network for hiv/aids intervention (2006). laying the foundation for connect to protect ®: a multi-site community mobilization intervention to reduce hiv/aids incidence and prevalence among urban youth. journal of urban health, 83 (3), 506-522. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=retrieve&dopt=abstractplus&list_uids=16840772&query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_docsum http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=retrieve&dopt=abstractplus&list_uids=16840772&query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_docsum http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.21.1.369 http://www.springerlink.com/content/104830/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/104830/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2005.12.004 domain factors environment membership characteristics process and structure communication purpose resources 2012-lisboa-004-migration migration and situated contexts: natives and maghrebian habitants of san marcellino (south italy) caterina arcidiacono, fortuna procentese, immacolata di napoli department of relational sciences, university federico ii, naples. caterina.arcidiacono@unina.it abstract literatures on ethnic identity and acculturation strategies integration, assimilation, separation or marginalization (berry,1997) have shown how host populations perceive migrants and that migrant populations may be viewed very differently by the majority group or the larger society. we could understand the complex interaction between individual factors, the individual’s belonging to a group, the intragroup and intergroup dynamics, while bearing in mind that at the same time the dimensions we have mentioned interact reciprocally within the group and with external groups. for this reason, we have conducted semi-structured interviews with inhabitants – natives and maghrebian – in an area in the territory surrounding naples where there is a mosque and which has a high density of various kinds of migrants. this self-descriptive tool of the interview aims at collecting information ranging from a description of oneself to a description of others and of the context. with relation to the aforementioned objectives, the participants were selected on the basis of a theoretical sampling: natives and maghrebian migrants with various characteristics and social roles, with and without reciprocal contacts. the interviews and the textual materials gathered were audio-recorded. they were transcribed and underwent qualitative analysis by means of the methodology of grounded theory. this is a “substantive theory”, which is derived via an inductive method from the study of a phenomenon, an explanation, an interpretation of a specific phenomenon which is particular because it is built by means of a theory (corbin & strauss, 2008). this study thus intends to identify classification systems which support the representation of the self and of others in terms of belonging or extraneousness in relation to contexts which imply various levels of sharing, participation and trust in order to promote forms of interconnection and planning involving the different cultures simultaneously present in a given territorial community. in this regard, recognising the reciprocal classifications enables us to investigate the elements which are supposed to be the basis of processes of integration. keywords: qualitative research, acculturation, contact hypothesis, intergroup relations, social categorization. literature on ethnic identity and inter group relations focuses on integration as the best strategy of acculturation in terms of well-being in the process of migrants’ adjustment to a new context. it increases social cohesion; avoids the development of racist attitudes in the receiving population; promotes symmetrical intergroup relationships (berry, 1997). we have learned that the perception of acceptance that migrants have of the hosting community is among the factors that promote the processes of integration (berry, 1997). a further factor consists in the realistic expectations that favor integration, differently from excessive expectations, which generate an adaptation that is not adequate. finally, global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 4 december 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 the social support received is of fundamental importance. the peculiarity of this approach is that it takes the hosting community into account in terms of reception and support, but it does not take into account the dimensions of reciprocity between natives and migrants and considers the latter to be figures who need help and not people able to offer knowledge and resources. we could, in fact, understand the complex interaction among individual factors, the individual’s belonging to a group and the intragroup and intergroup dynamics, while bearing in mind at the same time that these dimensions interact reciprocally within the group and with external groups. we have thus further developed berry’s acculturation model in the perspective of the mutual dynamic process between two groups, the foreigner and the host, considering the interpersonal and intergroup relations according to the model developed in the investigations by bourhis r.y., moïse l.c., & perrault s. (1997), barrette & bourhis, (2004). the dovidio, gaertner and saguy presentation and discussion of investigations of the common ingroup identity model show us the evolving nature of intergroup bias, illustrating the complexity of “we” in social attitudes and social changes (2008). within this frame of reference, recognising the reciprocal classifications enables us to investigate the elements which are supposed to be the basis of integration and difference. in these pathways the feeling of collective identity favors the building of a system of feelings of rapport which are functional in the sharing of a common situation and in a common opportunity for change. migration is conceptualized as an ecological transition that involves vast changes in contexts of interaction, in both values and social rules. this also has an effect on the status and social relations between natives and newcomers (martinez, garciaramirez & maya,2002). more recently, mantovani has emphasized (2008) that the study of reciprocal representations within a context, if it is carried out while maintaining the differentiated perspective ( the “we’s” and the “they’s”) necessarily leads to bringing elements of differentiation into focus. the research must thus be rooted in a common dimension to which the interviewed subjects can make reference and in which they can recognize themselves. in this direction studying migrant and native experiences in a shared and situated context becomes relevant. furthermore, within an ecological approach, we need to define research criteria and procedures which take into account the dimensions of relationship and of interaction among people who share the same community, and which consider the bureaucratic and material dimensions that have great relevance in the processes of acculturation. in this sense the process of integration into the local community is also the result of the influence of the context, of the social networks and of personal and group characteristics, in addition to the real relational and material resources which can be utilized by people who are part of a community (nelson & prilleltensky, 2005). our research goals also included the exploration of the ways in which these dimensions influence the processes of acculturation in a specific context. in particular, attention was placed on communication interactions among various actors of the same context for a mutual recognition and to create common spaces in order to identify strategies of integration. we then investigated intercultural experience in relation to italian and migrant contexts at micro meso macro levels (prilleltensky, 2008), namely: • context characteristics • interactions • neighborhooding • joint group • shared events • shared value actions using this perspective we have carried out a study directed towards understanding the dynamics of reciprocal recognition between residents and migrants on the northern shore of the mediterranean, within a community in an area in which there is the presence of migrants and of associative contexts within which interaction is possible between natives and foreigners. in order to understand the orientation towards reciprocal recognition and thus integrative action, this work has thus examined the aspects that contribute to perpetuating the difficulties and the dimensions that in specific contexts of social and political life are obstacles or resources in the process of interaction between italians and migrants. objectives the project deals with the predictive factors of social cohesion in multicultural contexts and the factors that global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 4 december 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 promote the integration of newcomers into the community. this study thus intends to identify classification systems which support the representation of the self and of others in terms of belonging or extraneousness in relation to contexts which imply various levels of sharing, participation and trust, in order to single out forms of interconnection and planning involving the different cultures simultaneously present in the given territorial community. in this regard, recognising the reciprocal classifications enables us to investigate the elements which are supposed to be the basis of pathways of integration and difference. in these pathways the feeling of collective identity favors the building of a system of feelings of rapport which are functional in the sharing of a common situation and in a common opportunity for change. context: san marcellino for the research we chose a context where we had previous significant contacts with people strongly involved in the local context and where there are associations that intend to use the results of our investigation. in san marcellino the research team have contacts, connections and interaction with key people of the area, associations, schools, and the local mosque active in the area. san marcellino is a municipality of about 11,000 inhabitants situated in an area that was originally dedicated to agricultural activities (strawberry, peach, and tomato crops), and today it is engaged in expansion of its service industries and the development of small businesses, in a territory that is difficult because of the presence of organized crime in control of the markets of labor and of contracts, as local newspaper reports demonstrate. it is an area that has a low cost of living: rents and the prices of consumer goods are lower than in the neighboring towns (errichiello, 2007). participants with relation to the aforementioned objectives, the participants were selected on the basis of a theoretical (intentional) sampling (corbin, strauss, 2008). as we were looking at an urban context, we followed martini and sequi’s model (1988) to identify the key people to interview. in fact, we paid particular attention to the choice of people to involve in the research process and to the specific citizens to contact. such criteria (arcidiacono, procentese 2008) allowed us to take into account the participation of citizens who, due to their variety of interests, were representative of the social actors in the local context. they were first of all chosen among the leaders of the so-called in community: politicians who manage power and representatives of social or cultural services, business and commerce; and from among the out community, such as powerless social minorities, people who offer assistance in informal ways, and minority or opposition politicians. the issue is then to purposefully select informationrich participants (patton,2002). the specific participants were the following: 13 key people in the context: 2 parish priests, the mayor, 2 key people in the islamic community (the imam and a labor consultant), 1 general practitioner, 2 school teachers, 1 psychologist from the social and health family center, 2 cultural mediators, 1 volunteer from the local parish and 2 volunteers from the associations. 9 italian residents of the town and its surroundings with and without contact with migrants, aged between 23 and 57 years, differentiated with respect to educational level, profession, and political and social participation. among those: 1 tobacconist, 2 shop assistants, 2 bartenders, and 4 people with no contact with migrants living in san marcellino. 8 migrants, with and without stay permits, who have migrated recently and not recently (at least 5 years), males and females of various ages (range from 2155), various conditions of marital status, of schooling and number of children; involved in associations, in mosque activity, and with no social activity. strategies of contact the first phase of the participative research project was the contact between the researchers, natives and migrants, a significant opportunity for the establishment of the co-constructed research environment. through listening and mutual knowledge, a relationship of mutual trust was built among the participants in the research project. in this sense, preliminary meetings took place through intermediary figures that enjoy the trust of the host community. these figures prepared the terrain for the preliminary meetings with other people known to be the most authoritative in the research context. the literature (hanlin, bess, conway, evans, cown et al., 2008; nelson & prillentensky, 2005) shows the need for prolonged preliminary contact, but if strong contact already exists with the key people in the territory, it may not be necessary to spend long periods of time in the research context. in our experience, the presence of bridging figures between the group of researchers and the area or context global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 4 december 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 investigated, was a preliminary aim, almost a prerequisite. this was accompanied by the search for experts, scholars and researchers who in various capacities were familiar with the territory studied and with the topic being investigated. thus, in building up the research team we preferred people involved in the local context, i.e., local researchers. in order to introduce the university team into san marcellino we invited the imam to the university and all the university researchers joined in the cultural parties and training initiatives in the local context. instruments a socio demographic form and semi-structured interviews ( legewie, 2006). in that research, the narrators were invited to explicitly reconstruct the situation and the experience as they saw them in the moment. for schütze (1983), the interview begins with narration as the starting point, and only following this are explanatory questions relating to that narrative asked. for legewie, schütze’s contributions are important, but it is of greater necessity for the interview to respond to the criteria of the communicative act set out by habermas (1981). the interview must be the expression of reciprocal consensus between the parties, and it must occur by virtue of an agreement of cooperation between the interviewer and the interviewee; for its success, the motivation and the cooperation of both are essential. therefore, for the success of the interview, the structural and personal preconditions that make mutual understanding possible are important. this self-descriptive tool of the interview aims at collecting information ranging from a description of oneself to a description of others and of the context. in order to learn about the different identities and the intergroup relations within a multicultural society, and in order to find out key factors of the process of integration of migrants and natives from a participative and situated perspective, the methodology of research explored the following particular processes: for the italians: the presence of migrants in the town (origin and characteristics), contact (occasional, cohabitation, work, school), the forms of interaction of the italians with the migrants (laws, norms and local customs) and of the migrants with the italians (adaptation, interaction, integration), reciprocal representations, common and/or shared experiences. for the migrants: the process of migration: the arrival in italy and the reason for coming, the processes and the experiences of arrival; the present situation; the contacts and the forms of interaction with the place, the institutions, the inhabitants; sharing of contexts and their perception; reciprocal representations, common and/or shared experiences in associations, with neighbours, in the workplace. for both groups, in the interviews drafted after the discussion and coding of the first interviews gathered, the focus was placed on the characteristics and particularities of san marcellino, on the modalities of life of its inhabitants and on the future prospects for individuals and for the community. the interviews and the textual materials gathered were audio-recorded, transcribed and underwent a qualitative analysis by means of the methodology of grounded theory. this is a theory which is set up by the researchers in the course of field research and on the basis of elements emerging during the carrying out of qualitative analysis. when we talk about theory we do not intend formal theories but a “substantive theory”, a theory which is derived via an inductive method from the study of a phenomenon, an explanation, an interpretation of a specific phenomenon which is particular because it is built by means of a theory. data analysis the process of codification, as defined by grounded theory, is a cyclical process, in that in the open, axial codification phase the researcher reverts from the raw data back to the concepts, to return again to the data in the selective codification phase. the coding is the core procedure of the group of researchers, who request discussion and share procedural decisions. as an example of a completed project, we cite the following procedural steps: first, three senior researchers and four junior researchers analyzed the textual material obtained from the individual interviews. in this first phase of interpreting the textual material, after reading and codifying only a few interviews, every researcher formulated their own suggestion for codification in the form of a memo. the first codifications thus obtained were discussed by the whole working group, which identified some shared codes to be attributed to all the textual material; the team then defined some theoretical macro-categories, concepts with which to analyze the general text. results global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 4 december 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 in order to analyze the processes of inter-relationship between italians and migrants and with the purpose of overcoming stereotypes and generalized representations, and of identifying shared processes and reciprocal inter-relationships, we chose as the context for inquiry a specific territory (the municipality of san marcellino in the agro aversano area) and a community (the maghreb muslims) that has a mosque in that territory. the mosque is a center which delivers services (emergency reception at night, hairdresser/barber, sale of foodstuffs, labor consultant), a place for entertainment (hall with tables and a refrigerator for cold drinks; speaker systems for parties) and for study (classes with desks and blackboard). it thus constitutes a place of visibility, also for the hosting community, which has received the mosque without any problems. the whole research project, the modalities of construction of local relationships, the organization of the research and the description of the modalities of the work, as well as the vicissitudes that accompanied the activities have been described in conferences (arcidiacono, procentese, bocchino 2008; arcidiacono, procentese natale, mahboubi, canfora 2008) and are the object of an article that is in press (arcidiacono, procentese, 2009). in this paper we limit ourselves to the description of some initial considerations, beginning from the interviews and the contacts we initiated in order to make them. expectations about italy: the opportunity to work from a first coding emerges, on the part of the migrants, a motivational dimension based on decisions that are not only individual but also family decisions, which induces one to think about the type of expectation of the migrants interviewed. in fact, they hope not only to be able to work and have better living conditions than those they had in their countries of origin, but they expect also to be able to support their families economically. as regards the territorial community in which they reside, the choice is linked to the presence of an informal organized network that favors the settling of new arrivals. in the case of the town of san marcellino, the community seems to have been chosen because it is perceived as being welcoming, similar to their culture, and because it offers opportunities to work. with regard to the ecological point of view, these expectations are a good beginning for assuming “non down” positions with respect to the local people. even if there is a paradox given by the illegality in which the migrants live, since many do not have a stay permit, and work without declaring it. this places them in a condition of asymmetry with respect to the local population and above all, they cannot make use of some rights, nor can they contribute to the improvement of social conditions. “it was a territory with almost no controls and with great tolerance and ignorance towards immigration, and then it became a place where it was easy to settle without any problems.” (the mayor of san marcellino). in fact, the imam states: “ with every legal directive for regulating the black market workers there is a turnover of the people present: many move towards the north of italy, which offers opportunities for legal work and thus the conditions to improve earnings and be able to have family members come to italy”. attitude of the local people towards maghrebian migrants from the interviews emerges a general negative stereotype of migrants, which is inserted in a double representation of them that alternates between seeing them as a danger (they get drunk, they steal, they are in organized crime) and as a resource (they are good workers and do the jobs that italians don’t want to do any more). the negative attributes refer mainly to migrants from eastern europe. in the descriptions the maghreb people do not have any particular attributes, and in the interviews of italians they are perceived as serious workers, even if socially it is as if they were invisible. as for the arab women who are housewives, but university graduates, a strong prejudice emerges about them: “when i talked with my neighbours, they used to say, ‘but did you go to school?’ and i said, ‘excuse me, i’m a university graduate!’ ‘but why are you a university graduate? a graduate?’ they don’t believe it, they find it strange, but why?” in coding the texts, the creation of categories seems to turn on the dimension of clean/dirty: “they come to your house and look at how clean it is, how orderly it is, they understand that we are people, too.” (interview a 3a, a muslim woman with a university degree in italy for 9 years with three children). “there are so many differences: city, country, … there is the difference between rich and poor … if you put them together, they cannot get along … they can never be friends … they say that one is dirty, that other one steals, one of them says that the other one has ‘got money’.” … the category of clean as social desirability and of dirty as a negative attribute is global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 4 december 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 often mentioned in the interviews, and the cultural meanings attributed to this double characterization should be studied more in depth. conditions of life and relationships with respect to their cultures, both the migrants and the natives interviewed have strong cultural identities that are expressed through traditions and religion. certainly a characterizing aspect of the family organization, which becomes an indirectly relevant aspect in the modality with which the foreign women approach the natives, is the supremacy of male decision power. with regard to the migrants, maintaining their culture of origin takes place through encounters with other fellow countrymen and above all through the mediation of the mosque present in the town of san marcellino. sometimes the italians participate in the activities organized by the community of migrants, but they remain suspicious in the reception of food-related and other customs. certainly the knowledge given by constant encounters with migrants favors a process of reciprocal knowledge and understanding even of respective customs. isolation and closed minds in general the relationships are characterized by reciprocal isolation (along the main street of san marcellino, on saturday italians and arabs go walking but do not say hello to each other and almost do not see each other) and distrust: “i would like to know them. but i think that they, too, are really afraid of us.” (male, 35 years old, aeronautics company, volunteer with caritas, interview 1i). for the most part “the only contacts that exist are imposed by circumstances” (woman, italian, inhabitant of a neighboring town). the asymmetry of relationships from the interviews carried out with italian social service workers emerges an attention on their part towards the migrants, oriented towards giving support in the areas of health, labor and bureaucracy. this on the one hand constitutes an important resource, but it seems to maintain a relationship of asymmetry between natives and migrants, as different groups in that no initiatives are thought of in which to favour reciprocal knowledge. as for the italians, it is clear from the interviews that they have shown themselves to be receptive in a dimension of offering help to migrants, but they do not seem to be interested in their culture. a first way that the migrants interviewed approach the natives is through the request for help; over time, through continuous contacts with some local people, relationships of reciprocal knowledge are created, which allows the migrants to make their culture known, as well. reciprocity in particular on the part of the migrant women, a meeting in the home is reported as the moment of reciprocal recognition. for men, the bar is equally the place for meeting and the way of measuring interaction; being invited to drink coffee together is something which, when it occurs, is welcomed with great pleasure and which in the north happens much less often, and is given as an example of how relationships with local people are good and of why many migrants prefer to stay in san marcellino rather than emigrate to northern italy. “in this little town the relationship is one of esteem and respect. there is perfect integration, i repeat, also because the parish priest has known how to work with the imam, establishing a relationship of perfect esteem. just think, last year the priest had an accident and almost lost his life and the imam together with a group of muslim immigrants went to visit him. and they prayed for him on the day of ramadan.” (int. 3, 1, woman who does volunteer work in the parish, member of the centerright wing party “polo della libertà”) insecurity, conflicts and negotiation in the face of the stereotyped vision of migrants as carriers of social insecurity, the migrants describe their insecurity in the local situation, in particular when they go outside the circuits of separation and of work. it emerges, for example, from the stories of italians and migrants that it is dangerous to walk in the evening, because there is the risk of being beaten or hit by a car. one of our students explains, however, that walking is almost a factor which indicates social vulnerability; a person who can will use a car always and in any situation; for this reason the migrants on foot or on bicycles, risk being the object of “jokes” (of being bothered and/or beaten up). a young man 18 years old who was used to spending time with the local young people tells why the territory is not safe for migrants: “you can never know what will happen. for example, one evening, during a walk with friends they say for fun: ‘oh, shall we burn this one up?’ and then they go and beat him global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 3, issue 4 december 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 up. it has happened to me lots of times! i used to go out with italians, they saw other italians and said, ‘let’s see if we can manage to beat them up’.” in another interview the imam told about when the local boys used to throw rocks into the mosque and the community photographed the guilty parties; later the parish priest contacted the families of the boys and without the intervention of the law (the police), the families of the local people went to the mosque to apologize, thus putting into action inter-institutional strategies for overcoming local conflicts through the intervention of social mediation. final remarks the muslim community presents itself as “low-key”. social invisibility as a group seems to be a strategy pursued with the local population. this could be considered as a strategy of integration, a sort of decategorization strategy for the reduction of intergroup bias, as some authors suggest (dovidio et al., 2000,2005; miller 2002). such a style of relationship is adapted, in any case, to the lifestyle of the local context, which is very closed in private life, characterized by the saying repeated again and again: fatti i fatti tuoi e campi cent’anni, “mind your own business and you will live a hundred years”. for that matter, as has been asserted by luqueribelles, herrera, garcia-ramírez, hernández-plaza, paloma et al, (2008), when migrants live in asymmetrical social conditions, separation is the acculturative strategy to achieve well-being. if separation is a defensive strategy in a territory that is considered hostile, in the agro aversano territory it could be said to be an element that migrants and natives have in common in their common perception of the local territory. finally, it is interesting to note that, when faced with the high level of interest of the national and local press in this time period in the events linked to crime in these territories because of the presence of groups involved in organized crime (the casalesi clan), in our interviews of italians and migrants, this subject is up to the present almost completely absent. sometimes it is hinted at or referred to, because it is recognized as having a function in the supply of labor and in protection against petty crime. at the same time, the territory shows, instead, a strong social life: the mosque acts as a social center, there are volunteer associations with deep roots, and the interinstitutional relationships are very active. the imam, the parish priest and the mayor act in synergy to solve problems; scholastic projects are realized within national projects that favor intercultural dialogue, the parish and the mosque co-operate with the municipal government for the realization of the festa della repubblica (republic day) in an inter-ethnic dimension. some strategies for resolution of conflicts already mentioned are emblematic as strategies of reconciliation put into action on a local level. a common superordinated identity which could act as a unifying element, does not seem to emerge, ,and there is evidence of a common social context in which both migrants and local people interact, that is a social space in which the aggregations take place by virtue of shared values. the new parish priest asserts, “i do not see racism towards the migrants, but i see instead forms of intolerance and lack of respect that are generalized in our context. the fact that san marcellino is full of migrants means that the people are receptive and willing… in these three months that i have been here, i have noticed many problems, but certainly not because of the migrants or the muslims!” from the analysis of the territory examined there seems to emerge in the context a multi-dimensional set of strategies for relating and acculturation: separation, social invisibility, mediation/negotiation, sharing of spaces and times (public holidays). from the interviews the activities of sharing are shown to be full of meaning in the politics of small daily events (coffee offered at the bar, the invitation to one’s home, the common group of friends), more than in organized local events (encounters at school, public festivities). the strategies of social mediation show the immediate effects of inclusive policies put into action by the local key people; these seem to be the most fruitful in the creation of integration and good living conditions at a local level. to conclude with the words of the mayor: “they tend to live all together. in this way they protect themselves from the outside world, which is us, because they have not been accepted yet. thus, here it is: we have gone beyond tolerance, we are experiencing successful hosting; but integration is still to come. these are key passages in order to have what i believe to be the future which must inevitably belong to us.” references arcidiacono c., procentese f.;(2008) grounded theory and citizen narratives in proceedings, in 7th international conference on social 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(1987). rediscovering the social group. oxford: basil blackwell. microsoft word 2014-si04-20140519.docx the capabilities approach, transformative measurement, and housing first timothy macleod wilfrid laurier university author notes: timothy macleod, ma, is a phd student at wilfrid laurier university, waterloo, ontario, canada. email: timothymacleod@gmail.com keywords: community mental health, capabilities approach, housing first, housing first, citizenship recommended citation: macleod, t. (2014). the capabilities approach, transformative measurement, and housing first. global journal of community psychology practice, 5(1), 1-10. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   the capabilities approach, transformative measurement, and housing first abstract transformative change to mental health systems involves transformation in how practices, policies, and research respond to the needs of individuals with psychiatric disabilities. this paper presents amartya sen’s capabilities approach as a promising framework for outcome measurement congruent with the aims of transformative change in mental health systems. in this paper, sen’s capabilities approach is contrasted with therapeutic and citizenship values as well as the housing first approach to housing. the capabilities approach is examined in detail with regard to outcome measurement. finally, this paper shows the value added of the capabilities approach to transformative mental health. keywords: community mental health, capabilities approach, housing first, housing first, citizenship proponents for transformative change in mental health systems advocate for meaningful changes to social responses for individuals with psychiatric disabilities in terms of practices, policies, and research (nelson, kloos, & ornelas, in press). in this paper i will present amartya sen’s (1999) capabilities approach, a perspective concerned with the measurement of welfare and global poverty reduction, as an important methodological tool for research that pursues transformative change in mental health systems. the goal of this paper will be to contribute to the nascent literature on capabilities and mental health by articulating how sen’s capabilities approach frames measurement and in turn how this contributes to transformative mental health. in making this case i will use housing first, with specific reference to the canadian at home/chez soi study (goering et al., 2011), as a concrete example of transformative mental health (nelson, 2010). theoretically, two arguments will be advanced: (a) that the capabilities approach synthesizes citizenship and therapeutic values and connects these values with outcome measurement (sylvestre, nelson, sabloff, & peddle, 2007; sylvestre, unpublished manuscript) and; (b) that the capabilities approach can make several important contributions to the housing first literature. in advancing these arguments i will start by defining and discussing citizenship and therapeutic values and relate these values to outcome measurement. i will present housing first as an example of transformative change in community mental health that synthesizes citizenship and therapeutic values in its outcome measurement and holds a strong congruence with the capabilities approach. i will briefly define the capabilities approach and review the existing literature on the capabilities approach and mental health. i will then present this approach as it relates to measurement. finally, i will comment on the value added of the capabilities approach to transformative mental health. citizenship and therapeutic values an important dimension of changing the status quo of mental health systems is the foregrounding of citizenship values in research, practice, and policy (sylvestre, unpublished manuscript). in a content analysis of mental health and housing literature, sylvestre et al. (2007) identify citizenship and therapeutic values as two dominant categories. citizenship values encompass access and affordability, accountability, housing rights, and legal security of tenure. therapeutic values encompass choice and control, quality, and community integration. in their review, the authors conclude that therapeutic values dominate the housing and mental health literature and that research focusing on how housing programs are actually delivered and experienced by tenants is needed to address this value discrepancy. sylvestre (unpublished manuscript), drawing on the work of hall and williamson (1999), has extended the conception of citizenship presented by sylvestre et al. (2007) and presented three conceptions of citizenship. the three orientations are: (a) legal citizenship (the nature of the relationship between individuals and the state); (b) normative citizenship (the interaction of citizens with civic, political, or social organization and processes); and (c) lived citizenship (the implications of citizenship in daily life). legal citizenship denotes the relationship of the individual to the state primarily through rights and responsibilities. rights ensure equal treatment and equal access to participation in political and civic life. responsibilities are less well defined. sylvestre (unpublished manuscript) draws on marshall (1950) to articulate three dimensions of rights: (i) civil rights – rights that are necessary for individual freedom, (ii) political rights – the right to exercise political power, and (iii) social rights – the basic provisions offered by the state to ensure a base level of social welfare and the ability of all citizens to act on global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   their rights. sylvestre argues that these rights are insufficient for citizenship and that often people with psychiatric disabilities are unable to actualize these rights. people with psychiatric disabilities routinely face constraints on their political and social rights and are often withheld the resources and opportunities that constitute social rights. sylvestre (unpublished manuscript) presents normative citizenship as participation in civic, political and social organizations. it is characterized by a set of practices as opposed to a legal status. normative citizenship presents “duty” as a key feature of citizenship and encompasses a notion of the “good citizen”. expanded conceptions of agency are likely important to people with psychiatric disabilities who may participate in social organizations like consumer run organizations that supplement traditional mental health settings. however, normative citizenship carries a particular vision of social participation that may paradoxically privilege better resourced groups and serve to mask underlying power dynamics and social inequities. this vision of social participation privileges participation in formalized public organizations as opposed to private or informal spaces. if individuals are unable to preform normative acts of citizenship they may not be seen as citizens. lived citizenship, for sylvestre (unpublished manuscript), draws on the expanded agency of normative citizenship but positions citizenship in the context of daily life and is concerned with both public and private realms. lived citizenship draws attention to informal social processes that often are important in how people with psychiatric disabilities negotiate experiences of discrimination and exclusion. substantively, lived citizenship shifts participation in public life from obligation, as in normative citizenship, to access to rights and opportunities. sylvestre uses supportive housing and housing first to demonstrate the implications of these orientations of citizenship for mental health research, policy, and action. combining both citizenship and therapeutic values have important implications for understanding expanding agency and participation in civic life (i.e., the normative and lived frameworks of citizenship). it is important to tie these value orientations to outcome measurement. for example, recent work linking neighbourhood characteristics to mental health outcomes (townley & kloos, 2011; townley, miller, & kloos, 2013) have both therapeutic and citizenship dimensions. on the one hand, this research measures the impact of environment on mental health and community integration, and is therefore aligned with therapeutic values. on the other hand, it is also aligned with citizenship values insofar as it is concerned with the physical, social, and psychological integration of individuals with psychiatric disabilities in neighbourhoods. this research utilizes outcome measurements that capture more traditional clinical measures in addition to expanding agency and civic participation. using frameworks of measurement that are capable of highlighting both therapeutic values (mental health outcomes, community integration) and citizenship values (participation, control, expanding agency) is important in representing the transformative aims of mental health intervention. outcome measurements, housing first, and values two important tools in advancing transformative mental health are conceptualization and measurement (wong & solomon, 2002). measurement is central to understanding how we classify psychiatric disability, how we frame the challenges associated with psychiatric disability, and, subsequently, how we attend to the needs of individuals who have psychiatric disabilities. measuring the most appropriate and relevant outcomes with the correct tools is essential for transformation in mental health systems. one prominent example of transformation to mental health systems is the rise of housing first (nelson, 2010). housing first has been transformational in both policy and practice domains. additionally, housing first foregrounds attention to outcome measurement that supports transformative change to mental health systems, as will be described in more detail below. housing first is an approach to housing for homeless adults with psychiatric disabilities that values consumer choice in housing and community based support with a recovery and harm-reduction approach. participants are given immediate access to precondition-free, scatteredsite housing in addition to flexible community based clinical supports provided by a different agency than the one that provides the housing (nelson, goering, & tsemberis, 2012). central to this transformational shift is the normative commitment that mental health service consumers can live independently in the community and make their own choices regarding housing and clinical service use (carling, 1995; tsemberis, gulcer, & nakae, 2004; nelson, 2010). the intersection of citizenship and therapeutic values is strongly reflected in the approach’s goals of community integration because it values the ability of adults with psychiatric disability to fully participate in civic life and find meaningful social, physical and psychological inclusion (carling, 1995; wong & solomon, 2002; ware, hopper, tugenberg, dickey & fisher, 2007; yanos, 2007). increasingly, measurement of housing first outcomes reflects both citizenship and therapeutic outcomes, often concurrently. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   the typical measurements of outcomes in housing first are largely therapeutic and comprised of emergency service utilization, incarceration, hospitalizations, and health, mental health outcomes and housing stability (aubry, ecker, & jette, in press; gaetz, scott, & gulliver, 2013; rog, 2004). housing stability marks a measurement that reflects a non-therapeutic outcome, housing tenure, but remains limited in its implication for measuring meaningful community integration or expanding agency (kloos & townley, 2011; townley, miller & kloos, 2013; yanos, 2007). more recent studies of housing first have included outcome measurements more inclusive of the lived experience of citizenship. a recent trial of housing first in canada – at home/chez soi – has tested the effectiveness of housing first in the canadian context (goering et al., 2011). at home/chez soi was a 5-year pragmatic, mixed methods trial of housing first across 5 canadian cities. approximately 5000 participants were randomized into either a treatment condition – stratified by high or moderate needs – or treatment as usual. this trial included outcome measurements that focus more rigorously on therapeutic and citizenship-based indicators and speak to the ability of individuals to find meaningful inclusion and participation in the community. these indicators include quantitative measurements of community integration, quality of life, independent living, recovery, meaningful activity, and housing stability and quality (goering et al., 2011). the breakdown of outcome measurement and citizenship and therapeutic values is presented below in table 1. this table highlights the representation of both citizenship and therapeutic values in outcome measurement and is intended as a heuristic for categorizing outcome measurements into specific dimensions of the two value orientations in a housing intervention. while at home/chez soi utilizes more progressive outcome measurement of citizenship we still lack a comprehensive framework for studying citizenship in housing. table 1. at home/chez soi outcome measures by value values and their dimensions/orientations measures therapeutic values choice and control independent living response to stress money management quality housing quality health and mental health quality of life community integration social inclusion meaningful activity citizenship values legal housing stability normative social inclusion meaningful activity lived independent living housing quality quality of life social inclusion meaningful activity housing first and the capabilities approach the measurement of outcomes in at home/chez soi, and the integration of citizenship and therapeutic values, is highly congruent with amartya sen’s capabilities approach, an economic framework focused on the measurement of social outcomes in global poverty reduction (sen, 1999). the inclusion of a broad range of indicators that assess social outcomes for adults with psychiatric disabilities provides a wide and nuanced lens through which we can understand wellbeing. in the sections below i will introduce this approach, review the literature on psychiatric disability and capabilities, and unpack this framework as it pertains to measurement. an introduction to the capabilities approach the capabilities approach is a model of human development advanced by both amartya sen (1999) and martha nussbaum (2000). given that the focus of this paper is measurement and outcomes, i will consider primarily the work of sen who has made the most substantive contributions to this domain. for a discussion of the contributions of nussbaum, see shinn (in press). a nobel prize winning economist, sen advances a notion of human development as freedom, and has developed a rigorous mixed methods econometric framework that promotes the expansion of freedom through “capabilities”. plainly stated, capabilities can be understood as the freedom of individuals to do and to be according to their own values given the resources available to them. it expands the definition of rights by focusing on achievements or consequences (nussbaum, 2000). some examples of capabilities that may be particularly relevant to individuals with psychiatric disabilities include achieving permanent housing, finding meaningful and permanent employment, and choosing one’s mental health services. sen’s framework deeply engages with the philosophical roots of economic measurement. sen argues that two philosophical frameworks – utilitarianism and deontology – have dominated debates about poverty and have guided the assessment of social outcomes. i will argue in the sections that follow that these two orientations have an affinity with citizenship and therapeutic values as presented by sylvestre et al. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   (2007). sen levies substantive critiques against both utilitarianism and deontology and introduces the capabilities approach as an alternate framework for conceptualizing and measuring poverty and assessing social outcomes. i will argue that sylvestre’s (unpublished manuscript) citizenship framework has an affinity with the capabilities approach. by measuring and assessing capabilities – what people can actually do, coupled with the choices they have available to them (freedom) – a notion of welfare is advanced that considers both agency and social structure. moreover, well-being is understood as multidimensional; it considers factors associated with quality of life, civic engagement, as well as traditional measures of income and access to health care. this framing is highly congruent with the at home/chez soi outcome measures that consider a broad range of indicators in assessing outcomes that reflect both therapeutic and citizenship values (i.e., health and mental health, housing tenure, quality of life, community integration, independent living skills, and choice) (goering et al., 2011). underpinning the capabilities approach is an orientation towards discourse ethics where sen suggests that individuals and communities should be given opportunities for participation to identify the capabilities that have meaning in their own contexts. the capabilities approach has been developed largely in the context of global poverty reductions, an example of which is the united nations human development index (fukuda-parr, 2003). the capabilities approach has emerged as a promising framework for considering the multifaceted issue of psychiatric disability and well-being in terms of measurement. the capabilities approach and mental health an important contribution to the development of sen’s capabilities approach is kukly’s (2005) use of this framework to explore welfare measurement for people with disabilities in the united kingdom. kukly’s shows that measuring welfare for people with disabilities is distorting because it does not account for conversion. the author shows that individuals with disabilities convert money into outcomes (i.e., housing, employment, well-being) differently than the general population because of disabling social structures. ware, hopper, tugenberg, dickey, and fisher (2007; 2008) have deployed the capabilities approach – drawing on both sen and nussbaum – towards conceptualizing quality of life and community integration for homeless adults with psychiatric disability who have achieved housing. these authors utilize the capabilities approach in analyzing qualitative data and articulating expanding agency for individuals with psychiatric disability. similarly, davidson, ridgway, wieland, and o’connell (2009) suggest that the capabilities framework is highly compatible with the recovery approach in that both frameworks pursue transformative change in the mental health system. the broader work on civil liberties and mental health undertaken by davidson has a strong affinity with the literature on capabilities and mental health (davidson, 2005; davidson, 2006; davidson et al., 2009; pelletier, davidson & roelandt, 2014). broadly this literature holds that mental health service delivery should begin with a restoration of citizenship rights and that programs should aim to expand agency in specific social contexts. shinn (in press) provides a thoughtful and thoroughly researched paper that describes in great detail the capabilities approach – as advanced by both sen and nussbaum – which she applies to supported housing intervention to highlight the contribution of this approach. this overview provides a good synopsis of the capabilities approach that is helpful in orienting mental health practitioners. the present article builds on shinn’s work by considering in greater detail the contributions of sen in relation to measurement. sen’s capabilities approach and mesausrement an important dimension lacking from the emerging literature on the capabilities approach and mental health is the articulation of sen’s measurement of social outcomes. in this section i will elucidate the capabilities approach’s contribution to measurement of social outcomes. in addition, i will locate therapeutic and citizenship values within sen’s framework. finally, i will comment on the congruence of the measurement of outcomes in at home/chez soi with the capabilities approach. the starting point for sen’s explication of the capabilities approach is a critique of two philosophical traditions that he suggests are dominant in the econometric measurement of poverty and assessment of social outcomes. the two traditions are utilitarianism – largely associated with british philosopher jeremy bentham working at the turn of the 18th century – and deontology – largely associated with contemporary american philosophers john rawls and robert nozick. in terms of citizenship and therapeutic values (sylvestre et al., 2007), legal citizenship has a strong affinity with deontology, while therapeutic values and lived citizenship have an affinity with utilitarianism. in the section that follows i will clarify these affinities. utilitarianism holds that social outcomes ought to be assessed in terms of their consequences. consequences should be intersubjectively observable and thus quantifiable. income or money has been the typical unit of analysis of utilitarianism in the measurement of global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   poverty. in assessing levels of poverty, for example, we might compare the income of individuals in addition to their consumption of various goods and services (i.e., food, clothing, housing, medicines). therapeutic values are largely concerned with the quantitative measurement of various inputs (clinical services, housing) on mental health outcomes (observable consequences) and community integration, and therefore have an affinity with utilitarianism. deontology is largely concerned with rights. deontology is a reaction to utilitarianism and holds that social outcomes should not be measured by consequences but by the rights and freedoms of individuals. put in concrete terms, deontology holds that social outcomes should be assessed by the equality of rights to basic freedoms (ie. private property, education). it is worth noting that rawls (1971) extends the conception of the equality of rights to a social circumstance in which inequality – social and economic – should be distributed for the greatest benefit of the most disadvantaged. this assessment of social outcome is congruent with utilitarianism in that it is concerned with broader social consequence. deontology has a strong affinity with citizenship values (sylvestre et al., 2007) and legal citizenship (sylvestre, unpublished manuscript) in that these frameworks are narrowly concerned with rights. legal citizenship, like deontology, does not consider the social consequences of rights. sen’s substantive critiques of both utilitarianism and deontology form the conceptual basis of the capabilities approach. where sylvestre et al.’s (2007) conception of citizenship and therapeutic values resemble both utilitarianism and deontology, sylvestre’s (unpublished manuscript) three-dimensional approach to citizenship significantly extends this framework. this threedimensional approach builds upon the earlier model of citizenship and therapeutic values. in the section that follows, i will present sen’s critiques of deontology and utilitarianism parallel to the expansion of citizenship values through sylvestre’s (unpublished manuscript) citizenship framework. sen critiques utilitarianism on the grounds that: (a) rights and freedoms are neglected (legal citizenship); (b) non-utility information is neglected (the lived framework of citizenship – participation in community life, freedom from discrimination), and; (c) conversion is not considered (individuals convert money and resources into outcomes very differently). for sen citizenship rights figure prominently in understanding the circumstances of poverty/disability with regard to the role of the state. in the case of people with psychiatric disabilities, for example, the legal right to housing (legal citizenship) is an important consideration neglected by utilitarian measurement (i.e., measuring housing tenure vs. legal entitlement claims). sen critiques the narrow concern of utilitarianism with observable consequences insofar as non-utility information – often the specifics of political and social processes that encompass lived citizenship – is ignored. for example, the ability of individuals with psychiatric disabilities to participate fully in community life is not an intersubjectively observable consequence. finally, sen highlights the problem of conversion with regard to utilitarianism. individuals will convert resources into outcomes very differently. sen cites the example of an individual with a stomach parasite who will convert a given quantity of rice into nutrition very differently than an individual without a stomach parasite (sen, 1999). in our discussion, individuals with psychiatric disabilities might convert vocational training into stable employment very differently than members of the general population who do not face the same systemic barriers (kuklys, 2005). sen’s critique of deontology is straightforward. he suggests that rights are insensitive to consequence and that non-violation of rights can exist in the context of widespread human suffering. sen levies the example of famine where historically regions facing hunger have been net exporters of food. in these circumstances, the non-violation of rights was connected to deleterious social outcomes (widespread mortality) (dreze, den, & hussain, 1995). the bottom line for sen is that rights should be associated with social consequence. in terms of citizenship values, the right to housing does not guarantee meaningful participation and inclusion in the community in which individuals are housed. it has been shown that individuals participating in housing first routinely face isolation (yanos, barrow, & tsemberis, 2004). it is important to link citizenship rights (entitlements to housing) with consequences (meaningful social connections and roles). the capabilities approach is a hybrid of both utilitarianism (therapeutic values) and deontology (legal citizenship) that attends to the critiques presented by sen and outlined above. this framework synthesizes therapeutic and citizenship values such that the operation of rights becomes sensitive to consequence. i have presented a visual representation of the capabilities approach below in figure 1. the main components of this approach are inputs, characteristics, conversion factors, actual and potential functionings, the capability set, well-being/agency, and participation. these inputs are presented in table 2. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   figure 1. values and the capabilites approach table 2. adaptation of sen’s capabilities approach to housing outcome measurement. elements of sen’s model definition of concepts measures values inputs/ characteristics/ resources consumable commodities (housing, education, food) and their characteristics quantitative measurement that specifies levels of consumption (length of housing tenure, participation in vocational training, dietary consumption) conversion factors – social processes social factors that influence how inputs are converted into wellbeing or functionings. qualitative components that gives social context normative citizenship, lived citizenship capabilities set the combination of functionings and participation the capabilities set is a basket of indicators that specifies the things that people can do and the choices that people make. mixed methods outcome measurement that reflects outcomes, choice, participation and values. therapeutic values, legal citizenship, functionings actual functionings denote the things people are able to do after inputs are converted. potential functionings refer to those things people can do but choose not to. participation participation normative citizenship, lived citizenship wellbeing/agency the ultimate outcome of the capabilities approach inputs refer to consumable commodities (housing, education, food) while characteristics specify properties relevant to wellbeing (shelter, skill development, nutrition). conversion factors are those factors – often social processes – that specify how inputs and their characteristics are translated into wellbeing. actual functionings are those things that people actually do after inputs are converted into well-being (being permanently housed, finding employment, being nourished), while potential functionings refer to those things that individuals could do, but choose not to (receive psychiatric treatment, participate in vocational training, participate in addictions treatment). capabilities – global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   taken together as the capabilities set – are the combination of actual and potential functionings, and they denote the importance of personal values and choice. put another way, the capabilities set is a multidimensional group of indicators that assess social outcome. well-being is a result of actual functionings, and also reflects capabilities and freedom of choice. agency reflects other freedoms not associated with wellbeing. finally, participation pervades the capabilities approach. sen does not specify a capabilities set precisely because it is a valuational exercise for individuals and communities to perform themselves and reflects the importance of choice and freedom (sen, 1999). key components of the capabilities approach and measurement in the sections above i have suggested that the capabilities approach synthesizes therapeutic and citizenship values. where the capabilities approach has a “value added” for citizenship and therapeutic values is in terms of measurement. to this end, there are three key components of the capabilities approach that clearly connect therapeutic and citizenship values to measurement. these three key components are conversion, participation, and capabilities. sen builds conversion directly into the model of capabilities so as to support his critique that utilitarian measurement ignores conversion. directing attention to the conversion of resources, like the conversion of education into capabilities such as stable employment, is important in highlighting the social processes that likely impact this conversion (kuklys, 2005). conversion speaks to both normative and lived citizenship which document the degree to which individuals participate in the civic organizations of the community and its daily social structures. these dimensions of citizenship are important in understanding how adults with psychiatric disabilities will or will not be able to convert something like education into stable employment. measurement of conversion is a good fit for qualitative research that tends to better capture context, particularly social processes. participation, including choice, is a key facet of the capabilities model presented by sen. participation and choice value non-utility information – one of sen’s substantive critiques of utilitarian measurement. participation is highly congruent with normative and lived citizenship and highlights the importance of the ability of individuals to participate in the civic and social structures of their communities. participation is difficult to measure but is nevertheless an important consideration in the research process. for example, ware, hopper, tugenberg, dickey, and fisher (2007, 2008) have used the capabilities approach to specify qualitative dimensions of recovery – or capabilities that are important to people with lived experience. implied in this analysis is that participation is a key component of recovery. recently, salzer, brusilovskiy, prvubettger and kottsieper (2014) published a validated quantitative measure of participation termed the temple university community participation scale which measures four social domains including domestic life; interpersonal life; major life activities; and community, civic and, social life. capabilities are the main unit of measurement in sen’s capabilities approach. capabilities highlight both rights and freedoms, and consequence. as such, capabilities respond to both sen’s critique of utilitarianism (that utilitarian measurement ignores rights and freedoms) and deontology (that deontology ignores consequence). in terms of values, capabilities encompass both therapeutic values – choice and control, quality, and community integration – and legal citizenship. capabilities ultimately translate into a robust basket of measurement indicators that reflect therapeutic outcomes (choice and citizenship outcomes) and legal citizenship (access to housing). in practice, capabilities encompass both the normative and lived frameworks of citizenship. for example, the outcome measurements of the at home/chez soi project might be considered a basket of indicators that are in line with a capabilities set in which we can observe the three oreintations of citizenship and therapeutic values. while the outcome measurements of at home/chez soi might form a capabilities set it, should be noted that both robust participation in the selection of capabilities by participants and attention to conversion are not clearly built into the at home research approach. transformational mental health systems and the capabilities approach in this paper, i have presented amartya sen’s capabilities approach as a hopeful approach for transformative mental health in terms of outcome measurement. i have shown how the capabilities approach incorporates sylvestre’s (unpublished manuscript) citizenship framework and argued that the capabilities approach is congruent with outcome measures in housing first through the at home/ chez soi project. transformation in mental health systems requires change in action, research and policy. the capabilities approach offers a powerful tool set to researchers seeking to measure outcomes relevant to individuals with psychiatric disabilities and in line with the goals of transformative mental health. in particular, the capabilities approach global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  5,  issue  1   june  2014     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9   highlights both social and political context, as well as citizenship values. the inclusion of the participation of people with lived experience in identifying capabilities opens up meaningful dialogue regarding which outcomes hold value in their lives. the focus on conversion in the capabilities approach operationalizes normative and lived citizenship values and provides researchers with a valuable tool in illustrating the importance of social and political context in outcome measurement. finally, capability measurement presents a robust set of indicators that encompass participation, choice and agency. references aubry, t., ecker, j. & jette, j. 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(2013). a little goes a long way: the impact of distal social support on community integration and recovery of individuals with psychiatric disabilities. american journal of community psychology, 52, 84-96. tsemberis, s., gulcer, l., & nakae, m. (2004). housing first, consumer choice, and harm reduction for homeless individuals with a dual diagnosis. american journal of public health, 94, 651-656. ware, n.c., hopper, k., tugenberg, t., dickey, b. & fisher, d. (2007). connectedness and citizenship: redefining social integration. psychaitric services, 58, 469-474. ware, n.c., hopper, k., tugenberg, t., dickey, b. & fisher, d. (2008). a theory of social integration as quality of life. psychiatric services, 59, 27-33. wong, y. l. i., & solomon, p. l. (2002). community integration of persons with psychiatric disabilities in supportive independent housing: a conceptual model and methodological considerations. mental health services research, 4, 13-28. yanos, p.t., barrow, s.m. & tsemberis, s. (2004). community integration in the early phase of housing among homeless persons diagnosed with sever mental illness: successes and challenges. community mental health journal, 40, 133-150. yanos, p. t. (2007). beyond ‘‘landscapes of despair’’: the need for new research on the urban environment, sprawl, and the community integration of persons with serious mental illness. health and place, 13, 672–676.     kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 history and reflections: ten years of the global journal friends and editors of the global journal history the global journal of community psychology practice started with three things: 1. a recognition of value in the boots-on-theground practice of community psychology, 2. the discovery of a gap not just in the literature cannon, but in access to important literature for practice, and 3. passionate people with the drive and commitment to rectify the first two things. scott and wolfe’s text community psychology: foundations for practice (2015) described the gjcpp’s origin story this way: the small practice-oriented group then decided it was time to pull scra [the society for community research and action] together around “practice,” so with the help of scra president carolyn swift (a community psychology practitioner), the practice group as they called themselves planned and conducted the first ever summit on community psychology practice at the pasadena biennial [conference] in 2007. the summit was a huge success with over 100 people coming a day early to the biennial. those attending were energized; they focused their energy on three directions—publication, training, and practice. these three remain the foci to this day many years later. over the next years this led to significant outcomes in each of the three areas …. publications: these last two decades also finally saw the production of publications by community psychology practitioners that were clearly focused on the practice of community psychology. the most significant triumph was the creation of the global journal of community psychology practice (www.gjcpp.org; vince francisco, editor), an international web-based journal appearing with about four issues a year beginning in 2010. circulation has grown rapidly to between 1,200 and 1,600 readers per issue in over 100 countries around the world, which makes the gjcpp in its first years competitive with other community psychology journals for readership. the history of this journal is one that mirrors the grit and determination of community psychology practitioners themselves. it is a substantial challenge to publish and run a journal with the resources and backing global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 of an established publishing company, and the founders of the global journal had only themselves and some generous initial funders. through persistence and long hours they created what readers see today: global content, intriguing ideas, unique practice orientation, and open access. these priorities from the last 10 years continue to drive the publication; they are the headlights that show the road ahead. reflections on 10 years of the gjcpp understanding history requires reflection on that history; current experience often clarifies the past in meaningful ways. several generous friends, editors, and contributors to the global journal were gracious enough to share their thoughts about where the journal started and where it is today. ____________________ we can see that the gjcpp began with a process that reflects the core processes of the field of community psychology practicea small group of folks who cared passionately about an issue (cp practice) organized, started to meet regularly and recruited other to join. this led to the cp practice group’s cp practice summit in 2007. the small publications work group that formed in pasadena ultimately led to the creation of the gjcpp, as the training work group ultimately led to the creation of the cp practice competencies. the core group that created the gjcpp included vince francisco (founding editor), victoria scott, greg meissen. bill neigher, and myself. as someone who was there at the start and continues on the board today, i can say that the gjcpp has gone beyond our dreams. i love that the journal has a wide range of formats: • traditional research and theory papers; • great qualitative papers describing a wide range of interventions – often focusing on significant community systems change; • tools for use in working with communities (tearless logic model, sustainability tools, coalition building simulations etc) that are some of the most frequently downloaded pieces • videos to accompany and illustrate the content of articles • special issues such as publishing the proceedings of international cp conferences • editorials i am especially pleased that we continue to have publications from authors from around the globe on a regular basis (though we always want more). the gjcpp has become one of the most prominent and well-read sources of information about cutting edge cp practice. we could not have done it without the creative support of cp practitioners from across the globe who work in a variety of settings – community, government, academia, etc. ; and the financial support of atlantic health, scra, wichita state u, and readers like you, and the guidance of our editorsvince francisco, scott wituk, and nicole freund. thank you all ~tom wolff ____________________ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 thomas l. friedman explains the thesis of his foundational book on globalization: “connecting all the knowledge centers on the planet together into a single global network” (2006, p8). maybe we added a small voice. well, for many of us on the early journey of gjcpp it was the “global” in our title that was really inspirational. thousands of journals worldwide, but with the challenges of access, cost, literacy, language and political barriers, and an awareness of community psychology barely registering in the u.s., why do this? credit the leaders for the vision to “start small, think big, and scale fast.” we could provide a “borderless” media outlet to communicate our field to an international audience, without much cost, include new voices as authors, and think hard about the cultural variables that would make the effort fair and impactful. pretty cool. i was involved early on as an organizational funder [atlantic health system, nj,] and later as an assistant editor and proud contributor. and from the scra executive committee briefing book from the 2011 midwinter meeting, here’s what the practice council listed as its first accomplishment: scra practice council activity and initiatives 2010-2011 activities implemented: #1 launching of the online global journal of community psychology practice happy first decade gjcpp; the best is yet to come! ~bill neigher ____________________ i am deeply grateful to the gjcpp for publishing my article people who are homeless are “people” first: opportunity for community psychologists to lead through language reframing. not only did i receive great reviews from the readers, but i consistently use it in classroom discussions on diversity, equity and inclusion. moreover, the article substantiates an ongoing language reframing campaign i initiated that influences my students, colleagues in academia, and practice. ~geraldine palmer ____________________ the gjcpp has been a major feature of my career. from the scra biennial in pasadena when we first discussed the concept in real terms, to a number of planning sessions we had on the practice council calls, to the working group meetings that enabled its creation, to all the other meetings where we continued to develop the vision with colleagues from many countries, and monthly working meetings where we crafted each issue, everyone who was a part of this effort contributed to ensuring its success. even our biggest critics, at the time, had the best of intentions in pointing out potential fatal flaws in our approach. some of them became our most significant contributors. the global journal became the best outlet for community psychology practice, and later became one of many such outlets. global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 it helped to define cp practice, as well as create an outlet for the creative and scholarly contributions of practitioners that otherwise would never have told the stories of their projects. the gjcpp is poised now to continue in a leadership role, with the best leadership team we’ve had. i can hardly wait to see all the upcoming issues and see where cp practice will take us. ~vincent t. francisco ____________________ we are in many ways similar to archeologists as we try to understand the customs, norms and values of individuals within contexts during different historical eras. our adventures of digging for insights are filled with unexpected discoveries, but this exciting process is often left out of our formal products, whether they be publications or policy briefs. our work also overlaps with anthropologists, as we search for understanding meaning by listening to people’s lived experiences in their own voices. yet our journey into the communities of others, and their reactions to our presence, is often eliminated by those who control vehicles of dissemination as they prefer the bare facts of hypothesis verification. we also feel kinship with the field of sociology, as the layers of meaning involving social justice can only be truly grasped by examining wider and more comprehensive system perspectives. and yet it is so much easier to examine individual-focused entities, stripped of their ecological validity, and such stories are far easier to communicate and find receptive scholarly audiences. some might think of us as soothsayers, detectives, explorers, or alchemists as we try to understand collaborations with communities, and we have sought vehicles that value opportunities to take risks and are open to our unorthodox storytelling. within the global journal of community psychology practice, we have found this oasis of intellectual freedom to tell the truth of what we witness. ~ leonard a. jason ____________________ practice. practice. practice. anyone who has tried to improve will quickly recognize the importance that mentors, teachers, and coaches place on practicing. practice is where we learn first-hand how our theories or ideas are implemented. practice is where we improve our skills by adapting to the ever changing environment. practice is often where we deepen our commitment to a cause or goal. practice also provides an opportunity for learning. that learning is certainly useful for those directly involved, but can ripple when shared with others who have similar interests. the gjcpp is one of the outlets where community psychologists and others can share, learn, celebrate, confront, and maybe even laugh about their practice. as an online, free to access journal it allows us to join (although from afar) the experiences of our colleagues by sharing articles, descriptions, photos, videos, and real-time conversations. what started as a small ripple of learning 10 years ago has grown to over 1,000 subscribers from across the globe. congrats to all those practicing. ~ scott wituk ____________________ global journal of community psychology practice volume 11, issue 1 january 2020 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 i truly appreciated the opportunity to think deeply and critically about the space my research team and i created, and to write about our process for the journal. writing the piece gave us the opportunity to reflect, and to have a funny, reflective, sticky, unsettling, and important conversation. it also opened up a space for other graduate students and faculty to talk with me about their research spaces as a setting, as well as what it means to be deliberative about the spaces we create, especially if we take the project of community psychology seriously. i look forward to continued conversations! ~regina langhout ____________________ we invite other reflections in the comments here, on facebook or twitter, and/or in emails to the editor (editor@gjcpp.org). over the course of this year we will continue to share these reflections and consider the implications for how to make the journal better. a fundamental gift in the history of gjcpp is the readers and contributors who have critiqued, helped, and given their time and wisdom to its development; more of this is invited and encouraged. the next ten years the above reflections clearly highlight that the mission of the global journal continues to be the foundation for what the publication is and what it continues to strive for: the global journal of community psychology practice is devoted to providing high quality and practical information on community practice. [. . .] the journal is committed to engaging and expanding the practice community and its broader social impact by offering a new opportunity for community practitioners of a variety of backgrounds and professional affiliations for collaborative development, to increase skills and to exchange information, ideas and resources. over the next 10 years, the global journal will continue to focus on what it does best: publish high-quality articles, tools, and nontraditional content that prioritize community psychology practice. within that focus, the evolution of gjcpp will see improvements in engagement opportunities for readers and authors, advances in technology and different ways of communicating valuable research/ information, growing global content and partnerships, and making it easier than ever to share content with others. please engage with the journal through article submissions, special issue proposals, new tools and videos, editorials, non-english editing and reviewing, social media expertise, and ideas big and small. our history belongs to community psychologists and activists, and so does our future. original research microsoft word 2009-0008-final copy-011310.docx academic  researchers’  roles  in  participatory  action  research,  theory   development  and  the  improvement  of  community-­‐based  health  projects     keiko  goto,  ph.d.   assistant  professor   department  of  nutrition  and  food  sciences   california  state  university,  chico     chico,  ca  95929-­‐0002   phone:  530-­‐898-­‐6767   fax:  530-­‐898-­‐5586   e-­‐mail:  kgoto@csuchico.edu         keiko  goto,  ph.d.  is  an  assistant  professor  at  california  state  university,  chico,  ca,  usa.       key  words:  par,  youth,  hiv/aids,  academics     recommended  citation:  goto,  k.  (2010).  academic  researchers’  roles  in  participatory  action  research,   theory  development  and  the  improvement  of  community-­‐based  health  projects.  global  journal  of   community  psychology  practice,  1(2),  1-­‐12.  retrieved  day/month/year,  from  (http://www.gjcpp.org/).     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 academic researchers’ roles in participatory action research, theory development and the improvement of community-based health projects. abstract this article examines the typology of participatory approaches used in a youth health project based on the author’s experience as a researcher and facilitator in the “what every adolescent has a right to know” initiative for hiv/aids prevention among youth. in this case study, timely feedback of academic research, which was conducted concurrently with the facilitation of the project, provided important insights that helped to better conceptualize the goals of the project and improved its functioning. furthermore, the academic research demonstrated that project participants emphasized one of three distinct types of par, variably emphasizing the research, education and action components of par to different degrees. this led to re-conceptualization of the initial theoretical model derived from the literature, and thus supported the academic goal of contributing to theory development in par. considering that there are many participatory projects in health and other disciplines, more empirical studies involving process examination of participatory projects may be helpful for academics and practitioners to theorize par in order to learn what works and what does not work in community-based projects. introduction participatory approaches aim to promote participation of people whose voice has not been heard enough even though they are often targeted by policies, programs or research. they attempt to help people reflect on the constraints of social structures that limit their selfdevelopment and self-determination (kemmis and mctaggart, 2000). while the popularity of participatory approaches is on the rise in international development and health projects, the effect of participatory approaches on people’s lives and society beyond the project or research framework is poorly understood (cleaver, 2001; flicker, 2008), it is partly because the process of a participatory approach in health projects has not been well examined. for example, the definition of “participation” in a participatory project, the purpose of using a participatory approach, and roles of various stakeholders (e.g. the community, funding agencies, academic researchers, the local government, ngos) in the participatory project, may not be discussed and negotiated among various stakeholders at the beginning of the project (guijt, 2001). this paper examines the typology of participatory approaches used in a youth health project based on the author’s experience as a researcher and facilitator. specifically, i present a case study in which timely feedback of academic research (data collection and analysis), which was conducted concurrently with a participatory project among youth, provided important insights that facilitated the goals of the project and improved its functioning in a health project through the re-conceptualization of participatory approaches. at the same time, the academic research led to re-conceptualization of the initial theoretical model derived from the literature, and also supported the academic goal of contributing to theory development in par. background participatory action research there are different types of participatory approaches that have been used by both global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 academic researchers and practitioners. participatory action research (par) is one of many participatory approaches that are widely used by academic researchers. par is particularly appropriate in situations where people want to make changes thoughtfully after critical reflection (kemmis and mctaggart, 2000). it aims to blur the lines between the “researchers” and the “researched” (hagey, 1997) and attempts to transform the theories and practices of researchers, practitioners and participants whose perspectives and practices may help to shape the conditions of life and work (kemmis and mctaggart, 2000). the core principles and values of par have been shared between a number of participatory research typologies (e.g., critical action research, feminist research, community-based participatory research) that have been identified and examined in health projects (holter and schwarz-barcott, 1993; hart and bond, 1996, kemmis and mctaggar, 2000; minkler and wallerstein, 2003). research is the main component of par. the literature on par describes a variety of modes of participation between researchers and research participants. some par projects are mainly conducted by academic researchers. in some cases a research team consisting of university researchers and community members employs conventional methods (interviews, surveys) to gather data from research participants, as seen in the participatory research with the disability community conducted by minkler et al. (2002). lately, some participatory tools such as “photovoice,” “walking and windshield tours,” “community asset maps,” “risk mapping” and “creative arts” have been introduced in par (wang, 1997; minkler and hancok, 2003). action is an important component in par following research. some observers have argued that academic researchers’ involvement may help the community to discover its assets or strengthen its capacity, contributing to innovative and effective actions (fals-borda, 1991; stringer, 1997, greenwood and levin, 1998; kemmis and mctaggart, 2000). some academic researchers work as facilitators or mediators to address problems and develop action (forester, 1999; ladipo, 2002; pelletier et al., 1999; minkler et al., 2002; castro et al., 2004). however, empirical examination of the actions resulting from academics participation is rare, despite the emphasis on the research-action cycle in the theoretical literature. furthermore, there is very little empirical evidence about whether and how academic research using more conventional methods, such as interviews and surveys, can contribute to effective project outcomes in a timely manner, although they have been proposed as effective tools (mcquiston et al., 2005). even though the par research identifies issues needed for action, action may not take place due to stakeholders’ diverse interests in those issues (baker et al., 2005). finally, critical thinking, advocated by freire (1973), has been recognized as an important process in par in the field of health education. it has been hypothesized that critical thinking is part of the educational process of the participatory approach toward empowerment and action (wallerstein 1992). however, cahill (2007) argues that participatory research may become “just some sort of set aside space for developing critical thinking and consciousness” (p. 28) without subsequent action for social change. thus, the definition and goal of par may not always be discussed and negotiated among researchers, participants and other stakeholders. participatory rural appraisal (pra)/participatory learning and action (pla) while par is often utilized by academic researchers, participatory rural appraisal (pra) or participatory learning and action (pla) have attracted agencies and ngos in the field of international development. the ideology of “poor and local people were the problem, and the problem was to be solved by education and the transfer of technology” has been questioned, and it is argued that professional or rich people need to “hand over the stick” to the poor or the oppressed (chambers, 1998). the characteristics of pra/pla include utilizing visual and artistic global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 tools, such as mapping and diagrams, in order for local people to “express, enhance, share and analyze their knowledge of life and conditions, to plan and to act” (chambers, 1994). this is quite different from participatory action research led by academic researchers who may not always emphasize the importance of participatory and visual tools. pra/pla is often used in the planning stage of a participatory project as research or assessment, and the results of pra/pla are used in the implementation stage of the project (action), in which local people are recipients/participants. there is also a growing recognition that pra/pla should be used during monitoring and evaluation, involving different kinds of stakeholders including local people (estrella, 2000). however, the modes of participation by local people in the planning, implementation, and monitoring/evaluation stages of a participatory project vary between projects (gibbon, 2000). critics of pra or pla argue that the manipulation by outsiders and local leaders often takes place in the name of “participation” (mosse 2001). it is argued that participatory approaches and methods represent “external interests as local needs, dominant interests as community concerns” (ibid, p 22). however, it is not clear whether shifting from local people’s partial participation to full participation positively affects people’s lives and society beyond project efficiency. as cleaver (2001) argues, evidence of the effects of local people’s participation in participatory projects is surprisingly lacking despite more than two decades of the implementation of participatory approaches. it indicates that there is a poor understanding of the process of participatory approaches including who participates with what extent and for what reasons in each stage of participatory approaches. to date, the typology of different participatory approaches has not been well theorized and understood. furthermore, although the evaluation of par has been documented in some studies (bagamoyo college of arts et al, 2002; sy-ar, 2004; maglajlic and tiffany, 2006), relatively little academic research has been conducted for the explicit purpose of contributing to theory building in participatory approaches for health. this paper examines the typology of participatory approaches used in a participatory project designed to inform hiv prevention efforts among youth. academic researchers’ roles in re-conceptualizing par and facilitating the use of different types of par were also examined by reflecting on my experience of assisting in the youth health project. the following empirical cased study is based on my ongoing participant observations of the project as a facilitator, as well as qualitative interviews i conducted as an academic researcher. case study: “what every adolescent has a right to know” (rtk) initiative overall roles of academic researchers in rtk my work was conducted as part of unicef’s “what every adolescent has a right to know” (rtk) initiative, which involved the youth community in fourteen countries on four continents facing different phases of the hiv epidemic. unicef sought the collection of source data for the production of the information package “what every adolescent has a right to know”, (rtk), which aimed to promote the healthy development of adolescents by providing basic facts and messages for the prevention of hiv/aids in a manner that ensures that young people not only receive accurate information but are also empowered to make informed choices (unicef, 2002). recognizing the importance of youth participation, rtk initiative planners selected par as the approach that would best engage young people themselves in the project and provided youth the opportunity to become researchers themselves and carry out research with other adolescents. as a researcher with expertise in par and pra at cornell university, the technical partner of unicef in this project, i provided technical assistance in par in a caribbean country that participated in rtk in order to ensure an effective participatory process and subsequent actions. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 orientation workshop and participatory action research by youth in the initiation phase of the project, i cofacilitated an rtk/par orientation workshop introducing the concept of par and par tools and techniques to youths who had been recruited to work on the project. the youth came primarily from local ngos and many were active as peer educators. the academic researchers served as facilitators, introducing par using generally accepted theoretical definitions of participatory research. the terms “participation”, “action” and “research” were discussed and defined with the youth. the specific objectives of rtk were then explored and linked to the concept of par. they youth also learned many visual and creative participatory tools that are widely used in pra/pla. this project was unique in that young people, instead of trained academic researchers, became participatory action researchers with support from adults. thus, it provided me with the opportunity to pay particular attention to the roles of different stakeholders in rtk, including youth researchers, youth research participants, unicef, ngo project managers, and academic researchers. following the workshop, i helped the youth researchers prepare to conduct two months of research. the objective of their research was to examine the knowledge and perceptions of hiv/aids and other topics such as violence, gender and livelihood among a diverse group of adolescents. four regional teams, representing different organizations located in different parts of the country, were established. the regional teams consisted of youth researchers, project managers, and other participants who were identified and recruited by the youth researchers. each team was assigned to conduct three sessions on three different topics, such as hiv/aids, violence, gender and livelihood. the data gathered by the youth researchers were compiled at the country level and were submitted to the unicef headquarters’ office. the teams then went on to plan and implement actions. in my role as a par facilitator i assisted in adapting and applying par to rtk stakeholders’ activities; facilitated interorganizational activities among rtk stakeholders; and facilitated the development of unicef’s rtk resource materials, including a country-specific par guide written in collaboration with young people. re-conceptualization of par and development of three types of par after the participatory research was completed by the youth, i interviewed 21 of the 23 youth researchers, 12 project managers, and 17 youth research participants. these were transcribed, and atlas/ti, a qualitative data analysis software program, was used to analyze the transcripts and field notes while the project was on-going. pre-identified and newly identified themes, such as perceptions of par among the participants, were examined, compared and synthesized across the interviews. preliminary findings based on the interviews were also shared with some of the study participants in order to validate them. the analysis of the interviews with the par youth participants, as well as extensive participant observations i conducted on a daily basis, revealed a heterogeneity of perspectives on par among youth. while they all felt that par was useful for their hiv/aids prevention work, within the group there appeared to be distinct perspectives, which were further refined by using a method called q methodology (goto et al., 2008). i have characterized these perspectives as follows: education-oriented par, research-oriented par and actionoriented par. action-oriented par is the most similar to the definition advanced by academic par researchers. some of the youth researchers perceived that par was an empowerment process for both researchers and participants and action needed to be taken based on par. on the other hand, some youth researchers thought par was a research tool for their needs assessment and program planning and the participants in par were perceived as informants (researchoriented par). lastly, some youth researchers, especially those who were active peer educators, saw it as an educational tool that permitted them global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 to interact with others in a more participatory manner (education-oriented par). learning about how youth researchers perceived the participatory action research they conducted in rtk also helped me further conceptualize the typology of par with focus on the following questions: 1) what are objectives of par activities?; 2) who feels a need for action before the initiation of par activities?; 3) who does research?; 4) what are roles of par researchers? what are the roles of community participants?; and 5) who takes action after par? some of the youth researchers did not have a clear idea about the objectives of the research. also, because the project was initiated by unicef, the youth researchers felt they were conducting “research-oriented par” for unicef. as a result, the results of the par research submitted to unicef were not utilized by the organizations the youth researchers belonged to. on the other hand, directly involving researchers in the process of par research as provided them with the great opportunity to explore different possibilities that par may offer to their organizations, such as education-oriented par and action-oriented par. introduction and use of three types of par with support from other researchers, i concluded that the orientation of individual youth researchers structured their interpretations of their research results and affected the actions that they fostered in their community organizations. without passing judgment on whether their interpretations of par facilitated or impeded their organizational effectiveness, i felt it would be useful for the individual youth researchers to become aware that there were other perspectives and orientations within the larger group. therefore, i developed a framework describing the three types of par derived from my analysis (see table 1). the first opportunity to introduce it to youth researchers was in a par training activity that was requested by youth action (pseudonym), one of the rtk participating youth community organizations. the staff members of youth action explored different scenarios regarding their objectives/goals, whom to involve in different stages, tool selection, and findings utilization in their own work context. because the youth involved as researchers were also experienced peer educators, they readily grasped the distinctions between the different types and applications of par and contextualized the typology with various exercises. they also learned that these three types of par were interrelated to each other and the initiation of “research-oriented par” or “educationoriented par” might feed into “action-oriented par” throughout the par process. table 1: three types of par actionoriented par researchoriented par educationoriented par objectives of par activities for community participants and par researchers to discuss and solve problems for par researchers to gather information from community participants for par researchers to educate community participants in a participatory way who feels a need for action before par activities community participants and par researchers want action par researchers want to improve their activities using research findings regarding participants’ needs, knowledge, etc par researchers want to educate them or facilitate their critical thinking about the topic who does research community participants and par researchers together par researchers par researchers the role of par researchers facilitators researchers educators/faci litators the role of community participants agents of change informants participants of educational sessions who takes action after the par activities community participants and par researchers par researchers (utilization of findings) community participants (share knowledge with peers, behavioral change, etc) par researchers (better facilitation) global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 youth action initially implemented “researchoriented par” using a condom mapping technique. the results of condom mapping informed the work of a government agency that sought to set up places where teens can go and feel comfortable to buy condoms. later, the three types of par were included in the par guide developed by the unicef country office, and youth action was featured as one of the leading organizations effectively using par in research, education and action without much technical support from other agencies. i continued to facilitate par-training activities with other youth community organizations. the teen aids network (pseudonym), which was initially using par exclusively for educational activities, expressed a desire to conduct youthto-youth par training for other members of their organizations who were not familiar with par. this time i played a role as a par advisor for the youth researchers. during the youth-toyouth par training conducted by teen aids network, the concept of three types of par and practical tools were introduced by youth who were experienced trainers and peer educators. using the three types of par framework, the youth researchers conducting the training emphasized the need to be clear about why and how par was being used as well as the objectives sought -the goals that groups hope to achieve by implementing par. at the end the training, the youth trainers expressed the idea that by teaching par to other members they had come to feel much more comfortable with implementing par themselves and had developed clearer ideas about what they could do using par in their organization. after the youth-led par training, teen aids network, which had initially used “educationoriented par,” conducted “action-oriented par” with other young people in the community without extensive technical support from project managers or academic researchers. teenage pregnancy had been identified as a critical issue by the community. in this youthled “action-oriented par,” youth participants decided topics and there was a strong emphasis on critical analysis of social factors for problem solving. after their analysis of data gathered within the community, the youth researchers in the organization took further action to solve the problem by creating a skit and presenting it to facilitate further discussions with adults in the community. conceptualization of three types of par in relation to health among youth i continued to examine the par process as an academic researcher by further interviewing the youth researchers and doing participant observations. my facilitation and observation of re-conceptualizing and utilizing par among the different youth organizations participating in rtk helped me further refine the relationships between the three types of par, expected par outcomes, and subsequent actions. interviews with the youth researchers, youth participants and project managers demonstrated diverse perceived outcomes of the par process based on their experience in rtk, described in detail somewhere else (goto, 2004). the participatory research in rtk, considered to be researchoriented par using visual and interactive tools, appeared to enhance the comfort level of participants and contributed to individual empowerment among participants. participants felt their opinions and experience were respected and appreciated during the par research, which made them feel comfortable and empowered with increased self-esteem. critical awareness of social factors affecting their lives and health was another perceived outcome of par, according to some of my interviewees. some participants mentioned that sharing their knowledge, ideas and values with other youth helped them think about their own lives and the lives of others. on the other hand, those who perceived par as “education” mentioned that factual knowledge and internalization of scientific knowledge was an important outcome of par for participants besides empowerment and critical awareness. furthermore, the youth researchers of teen aids network who were involved in youth-led “action-oriented par” thought participants gained skill development of critical analysis through their active participation in par. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 based on my interview analysis and observations of the subsequent actions by the youth organizations described above, table 2 summarizes the relationships between the three types of par, perceived par outcomes and subsequent actions. table 2: relationships between three types of par, expected outcomes and subsequent actions in rtk actionoriented par researchoriented par educationoriented par par outcomes for participants increased comfort level and intrapersonal empowerment skill development of critical analysis critical awareness of social factors affecting their lives increased comfort level and intrapersonal empowerment critical awareness of social factors affecting their lives and health intrapersonal empowerment factual knowledge and internalization of scientific knowledge possible critical awareness of social factors in relation to health type of subsequent actions by researchers collective action on social factors analyzed in par, influencing other stakeholders use of research findings for their program improvement use of research findings for influencing health services better use of par in peer community education type of actions by research participants join the collective action on social factors analyzed in par further participate in organizational /program activities talk to friends, family and community members join a community organization to learn more about health and/or become community educators the following key points emerged from my analysis: 1) education-oriented par can address context specific social issues, possibly using creative tools, facilitating knowledge internalization. 2) knowledge gained through education-oriented par may empower participants, which may help them learn more and/or assist their peers. 3) research-oriented par utilized for program improvement may increase critical awareness of social issues related to a topic such as hiv/aids. 4) research-oriented par employed for program improvement may contribute to improved health services for a broader public population, as observed in action by youth action. 5) actionoriented par may reach people who are not initially interested in the topic and may help participants to increase critical analysis. 6) action-oriented par may lead to the involvement of participants in collective action that addresses social issues within each context, as observed in actions performed by teen aids network. discussion this case study illustrates a process of timely feedback of academic research, which was conducted concurrently with a par project. this feedback provided insights that facilitated the goals of the project and improved its functioning in a community-based health project. at the same time, the academic research led to reconceptualization of the initial theoretical model, as well as theory building in the application of par for health promotion, thus supporting the academic goal of contributing to theory development in par. forester (1999), peters (2002a and 2002b), and greenwood and levin (1998) discuss the importance of the documentation of par processes for theory building. as described in the case study, documenting and analyzing the process of par in rtk enabled me to develop the three types of par and observe the use of that conceptual framework among youth. the framework consists of elements of par and pra/pla described in the introduction section. moreover, while some global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 might argue that conducting action-oriented par with the high participation of local people in each stage of the project is desirable in a “participatory” project, some socio-cultural factors, such as hierarchical culture, raised expectations for par, poor initial participation, gender biases, and heterogeneity of the community, are considered to be challenges (leurs, 1998). par is dynamic, and educationoriented par or research-oriented par easily becomes action-oriented par, or educationoriented par can become research-oriented par during the par activities. this relates to the argument by webler et al. (2001) that people define good participation differently, and it is important to “resist the temptation to strategize by advocating the process based solely on its ability to produce the ends you advocate” (p. 448). par advocates may promote the process that leads to collective action by participants, but the process may not allow everybody to be heard and to have a say in the outcomes of the process (ibid). thus, the three types of par may be used to facilitate the discussion and negotiation of objectives of par and roles of researchers and participants in both research and action, creating mutual understanding of the type of par and the mode of participation between researchers and participants. this case study also illustrates how three types of par appeared to contribute to par outcomes and subsequent actions in rtk (table 2), which may affect behavioral change for health. the relationships between par outcomes identified by my interviewees, such as critical thinking and empowerment, and behavioral change have been well theorized (wallerstein, 1992). furthermore, the three types of par can be an effective tool for refining the process that may lead to behavioral change for health. for example, while education-oriented par may work well for participants who follow the health belief model (becker, 1974), it may be inappropriate for others. for some, the specific emphasis on critical analysis for problem solving and subsequent action of engaging in action-oriented par may provide the path to behavior change. according to gillies (1998), there are no simple solutions or approaches to the promotion of health and it is important to conceptualize different paths leading to behavioral change and improved health at different levels. although my work did not attempt to measure the effects of par on individual health behavior, integrating my analysis of the three types of par (and my observations of subsequent actions) with the existing literature may help develop better conceptualization of the relationships among par, individual and collective action, and behavioral change for health. my study suggests that different types of par (education-oriented par, research-oriented par and actionoriented par) that were observed in the study may lead to behavioral changes through different paths. figure 1 shows the relationships between three types of par, subsequent actions and behavioral change/health improvement. the three types of par presented seem to play roles in developing different possibilities or paths for ultimate behavioral change. participants may change behavior through the process of education-oriented par, research-oriented par, or action-oriented par. therefore, the program needs to be comprehensive in order to provide the opportunity for synergistic effects throughout the collective effort. furthermore, because individual health behaviors are deeply embedded within social and cultural contexts, didactic and generic templates for health interventions may have limited impact on behavior change (maglajlic and tiffany 2006; johnson et al. 2008) and there is a need for cultural adaptation of participatory health interventions. further empirical studies are needed to examine the effects of different types of participatory youth projects on health related outcomes in different cultural contexts. participatory approaches, which rest on the creation of interactions between and across multiple levels and sectors, have been repeatedly proposed as a means of organizing social actions for health in a fashion that is more congruent with current understandings about the determinants of health conditions and the requirements for social change. the lack of empirical studies of the mechanisms of par is still a constraint to demonstrating the strengths and challenges of the participatory approach for global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 health. based on the case study and discussion presented in this essay, i conclude that examining the par process while providing technical assistance in adapting par to needs identified within specific organizational contexts can be one of the ways that academic researchers can contribute to both the theoretical and practical development of par for community action and health promotion. more empirical research on par in different cultural contexts is needed to further conceptualize the typology of par and discuss effective use of the typology for a better link between theory and practice. figure 1. relationships between three types of par, subsequent actions and behavioral change/health improvement acknowledgement i would like to express my gratitude to gretel pelto, david pelletier, jennifer tiffany, and the staff and participants of the unicef rtk initiative. references bagamoyo college of arts, tanzania theatre centre, mabala, r., & allen, k.b. 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(eds) community based participatory research for health. (p3-26) josseybass, san francisco. mosse, d. (2001). people’s knowledge, participation and patronage: operations and representations in rural development. in: cooke, b. and kothari, u. (eds). participation the new tirany? (p16-35) zen books, london and new york. pelletier, d.l., kraak, v., mccullum, c., uusitalo, u., and rich, r. (1999). community food security: salience and participation at community level. agriculture and human values, 16(4), 401-419. peters, s.j. (2002a). citizens developing a voice at the table: a story of educational organizing in contemporary extension work. journal of extension, 40(4). peters, s.j. (2002b). rousing the people on the land: the roots of the educational organizing tradition in extension work. journal of extension, 40(3). stringer, e.t. (1996). action research. thousand oaks, ca: sage. sy-ar, m. (2004) an evaluation of a par approach to involving youth in hiv/aids awareness campaigns in haiti. m.p.s. thesis, cornell university, ithaca, ny. unicef (united nations children’s fund) (2002). what every adolescent has a right to know. wallerstein, n. (1992). powerlessness, empowerment, and health implications for health promotion programs. american journal of health promotion, 6, 190-205. webler, t., tuler, s. and krueger, r. (2001). what is a good public participation process? five perspectives from the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 public. environmental management 27 (3), 435-450. microsoft word 2011-0003-final-20111117.docx       where in the world is my community? it is online and around the world according to missionary kids colleen loomis, phd & dana friesen, msw colleen loomis, phd is an associate professor, wilfrid laurier university, canada; and senior researcher of international dimensions of education, university of geneve, switzerland. dana friesen, msw is a social worker in toronto, ontario, canada with a specialization in community development. keywords: sense of community, missionary kids, third culture kids, online community, virtual community recommended citation: loomis, c., & friesen, d. (2011). where in the world is my community? it is online and around the world according to missionary kids. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(2), 31-40. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). acknowledgements: we acknowledge that this work would not have been possible without the participation of the members of the community and thank them for helping us to learn more about how to build community using the internet. this research was possible, in part, through faculty research funds provided by wilfrid laurier university and with additional funding for undergraduate science majors. finally, we thank creation.ca for assistance with the initial website development and tyla fullerton for providing feedback on an early draft of this manuscript, as well as the journal editors and the unidentified reviewers.           global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  2   december  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  32   where in the world is my community? it is online and around the world according to missionary kids abstract having physical access to a community and having a sense of community is not always an easy option for third culture kids (tcks) who live in a culture other than their parents’ native cultures such as missionary families and government and non-governmental agency workers located in various countries around the world. one tck stakeholder (a co-author) decided to practice creating community and research by conducting a participatory action research project with a goal of engaging a subgroup of tcks called missionary kids (mks) to meet online and to create a sense of community. participants (n = 20) ages 16 to 40 joined website discussions and influenced how the website was developed and operated in addition to allowing their online postings to be used as data to study sense of community among mks. data were analyzed using mcmillan and chavis’s (1986) four dimensions of sense of community: membership, bi-directional influence, needs fulfillment, and shared emotional connection. findings show that mks connected through the internet, developed a sense of community, influenced how the website functioned, took control of online community regulations and norms, and provided social support for one another. the website started in 2004 with two members and in 2011 had 1801 community members. findings have implications for expanding theories of sense of community and for practices to create and sustain online communities.   introduction the practice of community psychology involves engaging in communities, either communities we are already members of or those we are invited into to address a problem. our forms of engagement have historically been through in-person contact and phone and email communications as well as an occasional listserv feature for communicating. web-based material was largely used as an unidirectional, static, and informative tool until recent changes created the capacity for communications to be dynamic and interactive rendering the web as a multi-purpose tool for the work of community psychologists (brunson & valentine, 2010). this study reports on a participatory action research project (par) led by a former undergraduate student of community psychology (a co-author). she had an interest in practicing what she learned about sense of community to see if it could be built on the world wide web by, for, and with individuals who were formerly children of missionaries. she remembered sometimes feeling a lack of sense of community as an adolescent, and thought that this would give her a unique perspective on the situation. feeling a sense of community (soc) can be challenging for some children and youth who do not have opportunities to be part of one community due to parents’ work (e.g., military, diplomat, christian missionaries), resulting in feelings of isolation. being a newcomer in one setting and having absences from one’s home culture limits possibilities for developing social support and experiencing soc. in these circumstances, some youth seem to transcend local cultures (whether at home or away) or blend two or more cultures creating a third culture. third culture kids (tcks; useem & downie, 1976) are individuals who have spent a significant part of childhood living in a ‘host’ culture, as well as their ‘home’ or ‘passport’ culture (pollock & van reken, 2001; tamura & furnham, 1993). a key aspect of the concept of tcks is the temporary nature of living in other cultures and the possibility of relocation; even if one lives in a host culture for a significant part of life the family generally has intentions to return (or returns regularly) to the home culture. consequently, children of immigrants and refugees generally are not considered tcks. missionary kids (mks) often live in remote villages without easy access to familiar cultural resources such as customs in neighbours’ homes, schooling, and youth activities. consequently, mks are at risk for alienation from the host culture in which they live and their passport culture when they return. in both cultures, they have been labelled by some peers as outsiders based on social markers such as language (e.g., not knowing youth slang), clothing (not being aware of local norms), not understanding jokes, references to pop-culture, music, and so on. these relational aspects of group membership are expected because of sharing a common geographical (i.e., place-based) community, yet for some mks having a place-based sense of community is challenging. much research on mks is phenomenological in nature, exploring the production of meaning in global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  2   december  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  33   missionary families (bolhouse, 1999), and mks’ perceptions of their lifestyle (kim, 2001; whitfield, 2003). some research investigates childhood and adolescent transitions to and acculturation in a foreign or ‘host’ culture (nathanson & marcenko, 1995; werkman, farley, butler, & quayhagen, 1981), while other studies have focused on topics of re-entry and repatriation into the passport culture (collier, 2008; fray, 1988; schultz, 1985; sotherden, 1992). adjustment to post-secondary education as it relates to the tck re-entry process is an enduring topic of interest within mk research, as many tcks graduating from international high schools return to their country of citizenship to enroll in college or university (e.g., hervey, 2009; huff, 2001; moss, 1985; wrobbel, 2005). implicit in these studies is a concern for youths’ soc. in the extant literature soc is a psychological effect of being in relation with one or more groups that have communal characteristics such as sharing collective resources, responsibilities, experiences, and values as well as developing trust and spirit with a group (mcmillan, 1996). a frequently used conceptualization of soc (mcmillan & chavis, 1986) has four dimensions, with no particular developmental sequence specified: membership, bidirectional influence, needs fulfillment, and a shared emotional connection. this conceptualization exists in geographical communities (e.g., plas & lewis, 1996) such as a neighbourhood club and in relational communities and relates to youth participating in certain groups (obst & white, 2007; wrighting, 2006) such as a community of competitive chess players or young musicians. with access to the internet increasing in many parts of the world there is a possibility for individuals to create community in virtual contexts such as the online video gaming community, those who share professional interests, survivors of cancer, and many more. the history of online communities is relatively young, about 30 years, and the tools available for interaction are many and varied, changing business and personal communication, accelerating the speed of exchange and making information more easily and widely accessible to a larger audience (brunson & valentine, 2011): email, blog, chat (typing text), voice, video, social networking. a number of sites focus on unidirectional communications, which act as a consumption model providing information (spoel, 2008), while others facilitate dialogue and relationships with other individuals. it is the interaction with other humans via a computer that interests us as a possible resource for social and emotional support. a pioneer online community is well (whole earth 'lectronic link), launched in 1985. members of well and other early online communities reported that members developed close friendships (reid, 1995), provided emotional support and shared resources (rheingold, 1993; roberts, smith, & pollock, 2002). the use of online communities for social and emotional support is of particular interest to the helping professions and educators. mckenna and green (2002) found that the internet provides a central location or meeting place for individuals who are unable to meet regularly with similar others at a single geographical location and that online social support networks are beneficial for those who experience social anxiety or loneliness and time restrictions. several other studies examining social networks via the internet have found strengthened social support for online participants (barrera, glasgow, mckay, boles, & feil, 2002; kruger, maital, macklem, shriberg, burgess, & kalinsky, 2001; mckenna & green, 2002). online support forums have reduced stress among peace activists (kinnevy & enosh, 2002), single mothers, (dunham, hurshman, litwin, gusella, ellsworth, & dodd, 1998), women experiencing midlife transitions (bresnahan & murray-johnson, 2002), and those facing health-related challenges such as depression (salem, bogat, & reid, 1997) and alcohol addiction (klaw, heubsch, & humphreys, 2002). researchers studying distance education have found that it is possible to build a sense of community within a virtual learning environment (e.g., belanger, 2008; song, singleton, hill, & koh, 2004). taken all together findings from research to date provide evidence that the internet can be a medium for social support and sense of community. it seems to reason that children and youth of missionaries may benefit from social support via the internet. websites exists for tcks and mks, such as interaction international (www.tckinteract.net) and tck world (www.tckworld.com) that offer information. these sites do not provide social support or a platform for individuals to interact. another website, tckid (www.tckid.com), facilitates social support and information exchange opportunities but does not specialize in serving mks in particular. community-style websites for alumni of particular international or boarding schools provide a model for using the internet as a tool for a group of geographically diverse individuals to interact yet because these sites are restricted to those who attended certain institutions many mks are excluded. further, these sites do not have a specific intention of global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  2   december  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  34   engaging mks, in particular, to offer emotional and social support and to foster soc. in the present par study, we asked two research questions. can missionary kids come together via a website to create and sustain community? what are members’ experiences of soc in this online community? based on previous research findings, we expected that a sense of community may be developed online, however, there was not enough research evidence to predict sustainability of a virtual community, but we can explore the success of an online community using criteria offered by iriberri and leroy (2009) who reviewed studies of online communities across disciplines and concluded the following: “the most common metrics used in the empirical research we reviewed were “volume of members’ contribution and quality of relationships among members. researchers who focus on measuring success agree that, the larger the volume of messages posted and the closer members feel to each other, the more successful the online community becomes” (iriberri & leroy, 2009, p. 10). for the second research question, we expected to find at least some of the four dimensions in the mcmillan and chavis (1986) model of soc. overall we sought to address for, with, and by mks a problem of the absence of soc. this experience seemed to be unrelated to living in a home culture or elsewhere, and to address a common question by mks: “where in the world is my community?” method design and sampling we used a descriptive, one-group design with a par approach, which is the process of taking collective action to address a particular issue within a community (reason & bradbury, 2001) such that conditions are designed to produce a particular effect. a former mk (a co-author) and her peers performed the actions to build community via a website and they conducted research with an outsider (a co-author who is not an mk). community and research participants were recruited in the same ways through snowball sampling (patton, 2002) using email messages sent from an mk (co-author) to known mission organizations, international and boarding schools, tck and mk organizations, missionary member care agencies, and universities and colleges with large tck populations. individuals had the option of joining the community with or without participating in research; those who participated in the research part had a chance to win one of two $20 (u.s. dollar) gift certificates to amazon.com. sample participants and intervention description sixty individuals volunteered to participate in the study by signing a consent form and one-third of these became participants (n = 20) through contributions to the community dialogue used in the study. at the time of the study participants were geographically located on all continents except antarctica. the actions of building a virtual community (described below in procedure) and conducting research within it took place online via internet access. procedure before the beginning of this research study the primary objective (of the mk co-author) was to create a virtual space where mks may meet, socialize, and experience community with other mks (i.e., create soc), always with the intention that the website hosting this virtual space would be sustained indefinitely beyond the objective of researching soc. the research aspect of the par was conducted in order to assess if soc developed and if so to understand how the conceptualized four components by mcmillan and chavis (1986) function in a virtual community to create soc. the relationship between action and feedback on research was ensured by the primary stakeholder (who co-designed and co-hosted the website) moderating the site, collecting and analyzing data; her knowledge of both the action and the research created an automatic feedback loop from research findings into the design and functionality of the online community/website, supporting the goal of par. one of the first steps in developing the website was to find a name that incorporated the notion of a collective online meeting-place as well as the recognition of mks’ varied geographical locations. the website was named mkplanet. it was designed and developed with numerous resources and opportunities for member involvement that required the website be dynamic (rather than static), while at the same time setting up some restrictions to avoid abuse so the website began with rules developed by the second author who moderated all website activity to enforce the rules (this point is elaborated in the findings below). there are three conceptual areas of the website. first, there is a public area for general information (e.g., mk/tck-related articles, areas listing relevant web and print resources). second, is the center of the website that is a communal area where access to the forums is restricted to registered members only with virtual functions such as a large discussion forum, private messaging capabilities, designated locations global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  2   december  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  35   for members’ contributions (e.g., poetry, memoirs, and artwork), a community calendar, personal photo albums, personal journals, a recipe section, and profiles specifically designed to allow members to share their life stories. third, in order to comply with ethical issues of research with human participants, as controlled by a canadian institutional review board, a portion of the forums were set aside strictly for discussions related to this study. an announcement and pop-up box on the website invited mks to participate in the research. data were collected over a period of three months from material written by the mks who agreed to contribute to the research; most data were drawn from forum discussions, participants’ articles, poetry, and memoirs. data analysis the raw qualitative data were managed using the qsr nvivo software. in the first round of analysis online postings (i.e., text) were read and categorized by the mk stakeholder (a co-author) according to an a priori codebook comprised of mcmillan and chavis’s (1986) four elements of soc (membership, influence, needs fulfillment, and shared emotional connection); data that did not fit the codebook (e.g., mission experiences, critiques of the religion being raised in) were excluded from this study and used as part of another study on mk identity and experiences. because we were working with a particular theoretical framework the first step was completed alone. then, in keeping with the par approach (patton, 2002) we invited research participants to engage in the data analysis process; 5 of the 20 participants (three women and two men) were involved in this stage of analysis. in the next step, the team of researchers and participants read and coded the text, one soc theme at a time, looking for sub-categories within each of the four elements. for example, within the broad category of membership data were further coded. then, using a consensus approach, axial coding was performed where these sub-categories were condensed into meaningful units; this last step required multiple passes through the data. findings examining the first research question we found that an online community of geographically dispersed mks was developed for, by, and with their actions through a website that persisted for more than seven years, being launched in 2004 and growing from two initial members (coauthors) to 1801 members in 2011. analysis of text showed that all four components of mcmillan and chavis’s (1986) conceptualization existed in mkplanet. these findings are presented below in descending order from the most salient categories (based on the frequency of text members wrote) to the least salient, but still present: shared emotional connection, membership, influence, and needs fullfilment. shared emotional connection in mkplanet shared emotional connection was illustrated in six different ways. one way members connected was through what we call life updates. some mkplanet members posted updates on events occurring in their lives as a means of generating discussion, seeking advice, or finding others who relate to their experiences. members also posted minor events, such as daily activities and results of a recent school assignment (e.g., “i just ate a grilled peanut butter sandwich for supper and moved a drum set into our basement for the band we are putting together, and i also jammed with the guys: lots of fun.” participant 50). members often posted major situations occurring in their lives at the moment, such as an upcoming transition, (e.g., “please keep praying it looks like the time has come when we need to leave this church.” participant 59). the second way emotional connecting was demonstrated was through building connections, which refers to members learning about the mkplanet community and its members (e.g., remembering where other members have lived), familiarity with community milestones (e.g., “isn’t it a remarkable coincidence that i’ve made my 300th post on the same day that this site got it’s 300th member?” participant 49), and becoming familiar enough with other members to develop nicknames or terms of endearment for one another (e.g., “lil’ sis”, participant 59). another way that mks emotionally connected was with storytelling that developed a sense of camaraderie. for instance, responding to one member’s post about her childhood, a second member wrote the following response: “that brings back so many memories! not that i had a barbie car or anything just the playing outside, and pretending. oh the stories i could tell!” and “i both fit in everywhere (...), and yet truly fit in almost nowhere. i would wager that most of us in here know exactly what i mean without my needing to explain it which is why i love this place.” (participant 59). the fourth sub-theme of shared emotional connection that emerged was encouragement. in these instances members expressed concern, empathy, happiness, and similar sentiments saying, for example, “hey that was good!!! pick up your self-esteem there!!!” global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  2   december  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  36   (participant 47), and “don't ever be ashamed or scared to say what you believe!” (participant 59). another way of sharing emotions was with humour in the form of friendly competitions, playful teasing, for comic relief during intense discussions, or simply for the sake of sharing jokes. one member wrote in support of another member: “you're not that [weird] or out of kilter…!!! and if they still think you areit’s us two against [them]!!!!!!” (participant 47). another member wrote, “i’m definitely a cold blooded person. …transition from hot to cold is certainly not easy!!!!! this convo is so funny!!! it’s good to know there are others suffering out in the cold.” (participant 39). through the use of humor members expressed a side of themselves that seemed fun and genuine. the last component of shared emotional connection observed was vulnerability and openness. there was a level of emotional comfort that enabled members to share deeply personal experiences, beliefs, or emotions. one member shared about his battle with cancer, another person shared her feelings about an upcoming cross-cultural move, and another one spoke of the troubling conflict occurring within his church. some members also recognized the value of this openness. one member wrote: “this is so much fun. thanks you all for being there to meet and talk and have fun with!!!!” (participant 47). membership membership at mkplanet consisted of establishing a username and personal account information that then permitted access to the entire website (vs. visitors whose access is limited). beyond registering on the website, mkplanet members also created other forms of membership. four sub-themes of membership emerged. the first sub-theme we have termed ‘beyond the virtual’ because it captures members’ efforts at making virtual friendships tangible. one member wrote, “please keep me posted on a s/e reunion. …i’m in illinois and a trip to tennessee wouldn’t be too difficult” (participant 44). as alluded to in this quote, the most notable instance of this sub-theme was a 2005 ‘reunion’ that 13 members organized and attended in tennessee, united states of america. members’ words and conduct in the forums also served to personalize interactions. for instance, one person wrote jokingly: “right on! gives … virtual high fives with great gusto” (participant 59). this member communicated an action by using words over the internet. hospitality and inclusiveness were prominent features of the mk virtual community. the forum system assigned new members with the label “newbie” when first posting in the forum; this label was successively replaced with others as members made 50 or more posts, 100 or more posts, and so on. many established members posted welcoming messages, and many new members, in turn, expressed gratitude. members wrote messages such as, “welcome to our world, …! you ought to go to the newbies/intro section and tell everyone a bit about yourself! it is good to have you in here!” (participant 59) and “greetings and welcome…! i think you [will find] kindred spirits here.” (participant 59). a third component of membership was being an ambassador and recruiting others. one member commented: “[i] know several people who have lived there. i just [haven’t] been able to convince them to get on here.” (participant 50). a final theme of membership was shared goals and service. those who were most involved on the website took ownership of various aspects of the community. some, for instance, took leadership positions in the forums, while others shared in the task of organizing the 2005 tennessee reunion. influence in the context of the mkplanet community, members influenced one another through dialogue and the structure of the website itself because of the inexpensive and dynamic aspect of the internet. members contributed to community growth and change by giving their input on various websiteand community-related decisions, such as the creation of new forums dedicated to certain topics of interest (e.g., aviation and role playing games) and by being involved in the development of mkplanet’s policies and guidelines (e.g., prohibiting inappropriate language and use of the site resources). the care for providing a community without danger of interpersonal attacks went beyond policies to include practices. highly active members ensured that the community tone was positive and supportive. as one member wrote: “this is a safe place to [express], question, and learn. we are all out there on the fringe in one way or another anyway!” (participant 59). influence was also observed in members developing trusting relationships where suggestions or alternative approaches to responding to various situations occurred; on a number of occasions members responded to suggestions from other members by saying that they would consider a situation further. needs fulfillment mkplanet members also fulfilled each others’ needs as reflected in four sub-themes. the first subtheme in this category is guidance and advice, global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  2   december  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  37   referring to members exchanging advice on personal issues. one member introduced herself saying, “hii am an mk and just found out about this sitei seem to still be adjusting to the us after 2 1/2 years here and would love to hear how other mk’s are doing…” (participant 41). one notable conversation began when an adult mk, now a parent of mks, asked current mks for advice on how to support his children. this request for advice triggered a thoughtful conversation and seemed to meet the member’s need. members also shared advice on upcoming transitions, challenges with family life, and exchanged tips for procedures and functions of the website. as one member told a newcomer to the website, “if you [don’t] know how to or [don’t] know what to do just ask.” (participant 50). the third sub-theme of networking also met a need for community members as evidenced by their references to a vast interconnected network of people, places and organizations within a larger missions’ community. as one member commented, “i grew up in burkina faso, and was excited to see a bunch of you guys were from there.” (participant 37). mkplanet members helped one another with finding connections when needed. for instance, while one member was arranging the accommodations for an overseas internship, others were able to offer backup assistance. as one member wrote, “and if, for some reason it does not work out with this family please let us know. we can help find another host family for you if we need to!” (participant 59). the final sub-theme, members’ need for resources, particularly sharing information, was met within the mkplanet community. a common example would be making book suggestions, such as one member who wrote: “if you haven’t read the rani adventures ... by ron snell, you should..... it’s a highly humorous ... autobiography about growing up as a wycliffe/sil mk in peru” (participant 60). occasionally members exchanged financial resources or other materials between members via mail or in person. discussion this study serves as an illustration of how the work of creating community can be accomplished online and how participatory action research can start with one insider stakeholder identifying a problem, based on personal experiences and anecdotes in her social network, and it can be mobilized to a group of stakeholders. under the leadership of a mk (who was an undergraduate student interested in community psychology practices) geographically dispersed mks created and sustained an online community called mkplanet that started in 2004 with 2 members and in 2011 had over 1800 members. we use the term sustain to refer to its still being in existence. the life cycle of online communities is inception, creation, growth, maturity, and death. . . . [and the maturity phase is comprised of] regulations, subgroups, trust, and relationships” (iriberri & leroy, 2009, p. 14). findings from our study support an interpretation that mkplanet is in a stage of maturity. returning to iriberri and leroy’s criteria of successful online communities as “volume of members’ contribution and quality of relationships among members” we conclude that mkplanet is a successful online community. this virtual community is still active at the time of writing this manuscript. the website is replete with members’ contributions and the quality of relationships is high, as reflected in online exchanges and some members deciding to meet in person; this latter point also is an example of transitioning the “cyberspace into real space” (bresnahan & murray-johnson, 2002). these findings of social support via the internet are consistent with previous research of online support (e.g., mckenna & green, 2002). from this study we learn that mcmillan and chavis’s (1986) conceptualization of soc is relevant to virtual communities, with some variation in how membership, bi-directional influence, needs fulfillment, and a shared emotional connection manifest. for community members of mkplanet the most prominent dimension of soc is a shared emotional connection. this finding relates to chipuer and pretty’s (1999) definition of shared emotional connection, which states that it is “the emotional support stemming from the struggles and successes of community living” (p. 646). mks share struggles and successes too, but not those that come from living in geographical closeness with one another. concerning the dimension of membership, in the context of a website the term ‘member’ has a more technical sense, in that membership only requires registration at the website. thus it is possible for people to be members yet rarely or never interact within an electronic community. membership in an online community is also relatively simple to obtain. there are usually no fees or restrictions, and joining does not require the investment of time or resources. membership can also be completely anonymous, which is a characteristic unique to online communities not found in communities where members meet in person. members in this study go beyond being a registered member and develop membership through interpersonal interactions that include disclosing personal experiences, giving and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  2   december  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  38   receiving advice, and much more in the online community. intertwined in feelings of membership are aspects of the soc dimensions of influence and needs fulfillment. members influence one another through dialog and the website itself, which is made possible by the inexpensive and dynamic aspect of web development. members also influence each other with the tone of their interactions as well as the content such as providing personal guidance, advice, and sometimes tangible resources (e.g., lending money), information about mkplanet, suggesting changes to the website, and rules and rewards. proposed website modifications are discussed among the members before coming to a collective conclusion, and then when feasible the website administrator (an mk and a co-author of this manuscript) implements the changes. an important note is that this online community started with rules set by the community psychology practitioner (who is also an insider to the community) and progressed to decisions made collectively by the mkplanet community, and this change reflects a progression from a rules system to a reward system. this finding is consistent with iriberri and leroy’s analysis that there is a time for rules and a time for rewards in community building (2009). these characteristics of soc taken together suggest that trust is an important part of influence, for both members trying to influence others and for members to be open to being influenced. this finding is consistent with the conceptualization that trust is a necessary component of psychological sense of community (mcmillian, 1996). limitations the small sample size in this study is not representative of all mks, nor is it representative of all internet social support groups. findings are generalizable only to those individuals who selfselect to participate in mkplanet via the interactive, dynamic website. another limitation of the study is that we initiated the research at the outset of developing the website. if the study were to be conducted now with the website firmly established with over 1800 members the findings would probably differ. soc may look differently depending upon whether members actively participate in forming a community. also, this research is limited by the variable ways in which par was applied in the early stages and in systematically documenting how the feedback of information from research shaped future actions in the online community. one lead mk stakeholder had an idea and collaborated with another stakeholder and the two of them alone built the initial website and determined the functioning and rules. these initial actions did not include all the participants of the study. similarly, as text was exchanged on the website the lead mk stakeholder fed the information back to the virtual community for input and made subsequent changes to the website based on group input. this work was done iteratively and quickly multiple times; unfortunately, we did not take into consideration for this study to include these additional exchanges in the data analyzed. these limitations weakened our potential to see the full effect of par, yet may have accelerated actions taken, as often a leader is necessary for communitybased initiatives. other limitations of this study are issues of selfselection of participants and the timing and duration of the study. approximately one third of our sample participated in forum discussions, and only half of those participants were regularly and frequently contributing to the discussions. this lower participation rate may be an effect of labelling of the forum explicit for university-based research (from which data were collected) rather than framing it as the par that it was. as research online and participatory research are relatively new to commissions approving research conducted with individuals from a university we had some challenge with the wording of announcements for participating in research forums and it required an extra step to complete an online consent form. nonetheless, the 30% participation rate raises questions about the practical significance of these findings. so to explore this point further, another explanation for declining to participate in this online study may be an impression that participation would take more time, beyond time one has available to be online. although we were not permitted by the ethics committee to use the text exchanged on mkplanet by the 40 people who declined to participate in this study to analyze for group differences, we do have a sense of information exchanged among all members as one of us was the website moderator and this information is publicly available to both of us and everyone who is a mkplanet member. the impression left with us is that members who did not participate in the study have very similar postings to those that did. the fact that we had a 30% response rate in this case does not seem to suggest that other members are different from research participants in the ways in which they interact in this virtual community, perhaps the decision not to participate in research was due to time or some other variable unrelated to global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  2   december  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  39   sense of community. future research can benefit from investing more time up front in educating and working with ethics approval boards and making a stronger argument for consent to participate in research that is engaging, reflecting par, and creating ways for online interactions used for research purposes not to take more time than natural online interactions. implications and conclusions limitations withstanding, findings from this study have important implications for our practices as community psychologists to use the internet as a tool to develop a sense of community, particularly for those who are geographically scattered. these findings are specific to how soc develops in a newly formed virtual community. this study shows the ease and effectiveness with which members of a common group are able to connect regardless of location. recommendations for building an online community include choosing a distinct population (who have shared experiences though asynchronously and not in the same geographical place) and allowing community members a direct influence on how the website is designed in layout and in content. another important aspect was for the rules and regulations to be negotiated and when this happened a rewards system developed. a website developed with, for, and by mks can create a virtual community. mkplanet illustrates the development and continuance of a website created to promote a sense of community among a particular group of people with shared characteristics but many whom did not know one another before participating in this online community. this online community that started in 2004 has grown in both numbers of members and in level of activity by members. this study adds to the growing number of positive examples of virtual support communities, indicating that online support groups do indeed foster a sense of community and provide mutual support for regularly active members, specifically mks in the case of this study. we conclude that mcmillan and chavis’s (1986) conceptualization of soc can provide a basis for understanding sense of virtual community and that we need to build onto this model to account for certain aspects of soc that are quite distinct from in-person communities such as an increased focus on social interaction and an increased level of anonymity (mckenna & green, 2002). we started this article by asking the question “where in the world is my community?” and we end with a response. if i do not feel a sense of community with a local geographical community (e.g., with a neighbourhood where i reside or a school i attend) then perhaps i will find that my community exists virtually around the world. references barrera, b., glasgow, r. e., mckay, h. g., boles, s. m., & feil, e. g. 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(1993). re-adjustment of japanese returnee children from an overseas sojourn. social science and medicine, 36, 11811186. useem, r. h., & downie, r. d. (1976). third culture kids. today’s education, (september/october). werkman, s. l., farley, g. k., butler, c., & quayhagen, m. (1981). the psychological effects of moving and living overseas. journal of the american academy of child psychiatry, 20, 645-657.     microsoft word v2i3-0022-ms final.docx academic performance in middle school: friendship influences lisette t. jacobson, mpa, ma, phd(c) doctoral student in community psychology wichita state university wichita, kansas ljacobson@wichita.edu charles a. burdsal, phd professor, community psychology wichita state university wichita, kansas charles.burdsal@wichita.edu keywords: academic performance, peer relationships, adolescence, social support, adolescent high-risk behavior running head: academic performance: friendship influences recommended citation: jacobson, l. t., & brudsal, c. a. (2012). academic performance in middle school: friendship influences. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(3), 1-12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2  of  10   academic performance in middle school: friendship influences lisette t. jacobson, mpa, ma, phd(c) charles a. burdsal, phd abstract the results of the peer/performance relationship study build on previous research findings demonstrating relational significance of peer influences to academic performance during adolescence. whereas family, teachers, and friends play a significant role in a student’s academic career, extant literature about the relational dynamics between peers and academic achievement remains scarce. this study evaluated social support and negative interchanges in relation to self-reported grades in reading, mathematics, social studies, and science. additionally, students’ gender, race, and perception of a friend’s level of school interest were measured. the sample consisted of 321 participants in the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade from three medium-sized suburban, public middle schools in the midwest. social support and negative interchanges were measured by scales of the network of relationships inventory. academic performance was measured as a grade point average of the scores for the four academic subjects. results support the hypothesis that adolescents’ relationships with peers influence academic performance. specifically, the study’s outcome demonstrates that social support was significantly and positively related to academic performance. negative interchanges were not significantly related to academic performance. a positive correlation was found between level of school interest and academic performance. furthermore, gender differences were found among social support, negative interchanges, and academic performance. there were no statistical differences for race. altogether, these results are consistent with previous research findings and provide evidence for the importance of adolescent friendships and their impact on academic performance. introduction upon entry to middle school, young adolescents (age 11-14) experience an environment completely different from elementary school. for some, it provides an opportunity for a new start where they can focus on improving their academics, enroll in advanced courses, participate in extracurricular activities, and prepare for high school. others may view the transition from elementary to secondary school as more challenging such as forming new bonds and friendships. in addition to contextual influences, young adolescents experience a multitude of relational and cognitive changes associated with early puberty (wigfield & eccles, 1994; wigfield, eccles, maciver, reuman, & midgley, 1991; wentzel, 1998; wentzel, 1991). especially during the transition from elementary to secondary school, the self-system changes including an overall decline in self-esteem, competency beliefs, and self-perceived ability in various academic disciplines (wigfield & eccles, 1994; wigfield et al., 1991). specifically, eccles, midgley, and adler (1984) found that young adolescents adopt more negative views about themselves and school when transitioning to middle school. these changes in self-perception could be attributed to a different school and classroom environment as well as the biological and social changes related to puberty (wigfield et al., 1991; glover, 1999). against this background, the peer/performance relationship study (p/prs) examines the relationship between social support and negative interchanges to academic performance. the role of peers and associated risk and protective factors to academic achievement research findings show that peers exert considerable influence over the psychological well-being of young adolescents (juvonen & wentzel, 1996; roseth, johnson, & johnson, 2008; wentzel, 1993; wentzel, 1998; wentzel, mcnamara barry, & caldwell, 2004). because a comprehensive discussion of all risk and protective factors to academic achievement goes beyond the scope of this paper, only those factors pertaining to peer relationships and academic achievement are described. research demonstrates that students who have a reciprocated friendship in middle school show increased levels of prosocial behavior and academic achievement (wentzel et al., 2004). nelson and debacker (2008) found a positive correlation between adolescents who experience positive relationships with their peers and student global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3  of  10   achievement. specifically, students who perceive to be valued and respected by their peers are more likely to report adaptive achievement motivation (nelson & debacker, 2008). additionally, they reported that having a best friend who values academics also contributes to adaptive achievement motivation. in this respect, prosocial behavior as well as being valued, respected, and having a best friend serve as protective factors for academic achievement. other protective factors include connectedness to family or adults outside of the family unit, ability to discuss problems with parents, effective parental monitoring, involvement in social and extracurricular activities, commitment to school, and high iq (resnick, ireland, & borowsky, 2004). conversely, other studies indicate that students who associate with friends who reject school are more likely to perform poorly academically (veronneau, vitaro, pedersen & tremblay, 2008). nelson and debacker (2008) report similar findings when they found that having a poor quality friendship relates to maladaptive achievement motivation. most importantly, research findings demonstrate that adolescents who socialize and form friendships with deviant peers are at increased risk for developing a variety of psycho-social adjustment problems including substance use, youth violence, teenage pregnancy, and general school failure (centers for disease control and prevention [cdc], 2010; fergusson, woodward, & horwood, 1999). other risk factors include low socioeconomic status, poor parental monitoring, high levels of family disruption, and bullying (lipsey & derzon, 1998; resnick et al., 2004). altogether, the literature points to a number of risk and protective factors in relation to academic performance. the overall research effort has focused on high-risk behaviors, which could also be regarded as the “by-products” of deviant peer relationships (a discussion reserved for another time). more importantly, engaging in high risk behaviors does not prove causation to low academic achievement. further research is needed to determine whether the incidence of high-risk behavior leads to poor academic performance, whether poor academic performance leads to high-risk behavior, or whether some other factors not accounted for lead to either of these problems. peer/performance relationships during the late 1990s, researchers and academicians alike started considering a more integrative approach to the negative perspective of the self and overall school adjustment (juvonen & wentzel, 1996). juvonen and wentzel (1996) spearheaded this effort by looking into the social relationship processes including interpersonal relationships to understand an adolescent’s motivation to succeed academically. this study, the peer/performance relationship study (p/prs), follows the path that juvonen and wentzel started. the purpose of the p/prs was to enhance understanding of the nature of the relationship between peers and academic performance. it was hypothesized that adolescents’ relationships with peers were related to academic performance. the p/prs was based on existing research regarding friendships that adolescents develop and scales were extracted from the network of relationships inventory (nri) designed by wyndol furman (furman & buhrmester, 1985). in addition to benefiting the scientific community, the use of an instrument such as the nri with its strong psychometric properties make the outcome of this study valuable. in the adolescent and child literature, it is common that terminology with regard to the word “friend” is used interchangeably with the word “peer” (yu rueger, kerris malecki, & kilpatrick demaray, 2008). this study operationalizes the term “peers” as friends who are of the same or opposite gender; thus, peer relationships refer to specific relationships with friends that exist in and out of the classroom environment. method participants participants were recruited from the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade from three medium-sized suburban, public middle schools in the midwest. table 1 outlines the demographics of the sample population compared to each middle school. the sample consisted of 321 participants of which 156 were male and 165 were female. with regard to race, 265 participants (82.6%) were caucasian and 56 participants (17.4%) were non-caucasian. of the sample’s total male participants, 83.3% were caucasian (n = 130) and 16.7% were non-caucasian (n = 26). of the sample’s total female participants, 81.8% were caucasian (n = 135) and 18.2% were non-caucasian (n = 30). students from three separate grades were included in the sample: 41.4% were 6th graders, 31.2% were 7th graders, and 27.1% were 8th graders. the first middle school provided 13.7% of students to the total sample followed by 37.7% and 48.6% by the second and third middle schools respectively. table 1 demographics participants and middle school based on the 2008-2009 academic school year participants total enrollment middle school or p/prs white (%) black (%) asian (%) hispanic (%) multi-ethnic (%) american indian/alaskan native (%) males (%) females (%) free/reduced lunches (%) p/prs participants 321 82.6 0.9 1.6 3.1 10.6 0.6 48.6 51.4 middle school no. 1 629 87.6 1.3 0.5 3.7 6.2 0.8 51.4 48.6 28.9 middle school no. 2 435 91.7 2.1 0.7 3.7 0.9 0.9 52.2 47.8 28.7 middle school no. 3 516 88.0 51.2 48.8 44.0 note . statistical information regarding each middle school was extracted from the kansas department of education, 2010. figures for other racial groups besides whites at middle school no. 3 were not provided due to the kansas department of education's policy that prevents disclosure of personally identifiable student information for racial categories in which less than ten students are classified. this policy is based on the family educational rights and privacy act of 1974. procedure upon submission of signed parental consent forms, data was collected from 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students in late spring of the 2008-2009 academic school year for the first middle school and in late fall of the 20092010 academic school year for the second and third middle schools. during mid-afternoon, students took approximately 45 minutes to complete the questionnaire in the school’s cafeteria where teachers and/or administrators were not present. the author/researcher read the questions out loud to students who answered them with pencil on the paper survey provided to them. only those students who submitted signed parental consent forms were allowed to complete the questionnaire. students also completed a student consent form acknowledging that they understood the purpose of the study and its voluntary nature. measures the peer/performance relationship study questionnaire consisted of 52 questions; 44 questions were selected from the network of relationships inventory (nri) to measure social support and negative interchanges and 8 questions were created to measure academic performance. the subscales of companionship, instrumental aid, intimacy, nurturance, affection, and reliable alliance were based on weiss’s theoretical framework proposed in 1974 (furman, 1996). whereas weiss suggested that individuals search for specific social provisions in their interactions with others, other researchers found that interpersonal relationships not only vary along such dimensions as warmth, but also along conflict or negative exchanges (furman & buhrmester, 1985; furman, 1996). accordingly, the nri was further refined by the addition of the subscales of support, satisfaction, conflict, antagonism, criticism, dominance, and punishment (furman, 1996). the nri factors of social support and negative interchanges were developed through principal components analyses and have acceptable internal consistency (furman, 1996). at the start of the questionnaire, participants were asked to provide demographic information including gender, race, and grade. participants were then asked to identify the first name of a friend and instructed, verbally and in writing, that they could select someone who was their most important friend now or who was their most important friend earlier in the semester. participants could not choose a sibling, relative, or boy/girl friend even if this person was their best friend. furthermore, participants were instructed that if they would select a person with whom they were no longer friends, they had to answer the questions as if they were friends. self-perceived social support and negative interchanges. social support and negative interchanges were measured by subscales of the network of relationships inventory (nri) (furman & buhrmester, 1985). social support contained eight subscales including: (1) companionship, (2) instrumental aid, (3) intimacy, (4) affection, (5) admiration, (6) reliable alliance, (7) support, and (8) satisfaction. negative interchanges contained five subscales including: (1) conflict, (2) antagonism, (3) criticism, (4) dominance, and (5) punishment. each subscale contained a 5-point likert type question. a sample item from the questionnaire was “how much free time do you spend with this person?” upon which a respondent then selected an answer from the following anchors: 1 = little or none, 2 = somewhat, 3 = very much, 4 = extremely much, or 5 = the most. anchors for all subscales were identical. each subscale consisted of three items. table 2 shows that all subscales have adequate internal consistency. overall, social support and negative interchanges global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5  of  10   consisted of the average of scores for each subscale; average scores were computed separately for each subscale. table 2 cronbach's alpha for social support and negative interchanges variable cronbach's alpha social support 1. companionship 0.76 2. instrumental aid 0.79 3. intimacy 0.78 4. affection 0.82 5. admiration 0.84 6. reliable alliance 0.82 7. support 0.80 8. satisfaction 0.86 negative interchanges 9. conflict 0.74 10. antagonism 0.77 11. criticism 0.77 12. dominance 0.76 13. punishment 0.75 self-perceived academic performance. this construct was measured as an average of the scores for four academic subjects including reading, mathematics, social studies, and science. before computing the grade point average of the scores for all four subject areas, a student’s grade point average was calculated for each discipline separately. a student was asked to self-report his/her grades on reading, mathematics, social studies, and science for the last quarter and the subsequent quarter of the academic semester. when students reported their grades for the last quarter, they were instructed to report the grade for each subject as recorded on their most recent progress report. as the survey was administered past the midpoint of the subsequent quarter, students had adequate information regarding completed coursework to provide an accurate estimate of the grade they anticipated to earn during that quarter. then, a student’s grade point average for each subject was computed using both scores from the last and subsequent quarter. anchors for all academic subjects included the grades of a, b, c, d, or f. data analysis the relationship between social support and negative interchanges to academic performance was examined through the use of correlational analyses, specifically pearson’s correlation coefficient (pearson’s r). social support, negative interchanges, and academic performance in relation to gender and race were also investigated. results the data were initially screened and all values were within acceptable range, the means and standard deviations were plausible, and outliers were nonexistent. the distributions appeared normal. pairwise deletion was used to deal with missing data for all calculations. the relationship of social support and negative interchanges to academic performance table 3 shows the means and standard deviations for social support, negative interchanges, and academic performance. the relationship between these constructs is found in table 4. the strongest relationship was between social support and academic performance, r = 0.23 and r2 = 0.05. this is a small effect size and indicates that 5% of the variance of academic performance is accounted for by its linear relationship with social support. negative interchanges was not significantly related to academic performance. level of school interest was significantly related to social support, r = 0.16, but was not statistically significant for negative interchanges and academic performance. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6  of  10   table 3 factor m sd social support 1. companionship 2.99 0.86 2. instrumental aid 2.78 0.89 3. intimacy 2.79 0.97 4. affection 3.13 1.02 5. admiration 3.39 0.96 6. reliable alliance 3.63 0.96 7. support 3.18 1.01 8. satisfaction 3.99 0.91 negative interchanges 9. conflict 1.62 0.61 10. antagonism 1.75 0.75 11. criticism 1.48 0.63 12. dominance 1.87 0.70 13. punishment 1.47 0.63 academic performance 14. gpa reading 3.50 0.66 15. gpa mathematics 3.45 0.69 16. gpa social studies 3.43 0.70 17. gpa science 3.55 0.60 means and standard deviations for social support, negative interchanges, and academic performance variable interest in school social support negative interchanges academic performance interest in school social support 0.16** negative interchanges -0.07 -0.01 academic performance 0.10 0.23** -0.05 **p < .01 *p < .05 table 4 zero-order correlations for school interest, social support, negative interchanges, and academic performance variables social support, negative interchanges, and academic performance in relation to gender and race an independent samples t-test indicated that gender was significantly related to social support, negative interchanges, and academic performance (gender with social support: t(319) = -6.63, p < 0.01; gender with negative interchanges: t(319) = 2.56, p < 0.01; and, gender with academic performance: t(319) = 3.13, p < 0.01). cohen’s d for gender and social support was medium to large, d = 0.74. for gender and negative interchanges, cohen’s d was small, d = 0.29. for gender and academic performance, cohen’s d was small to medium, d = 0.35. table 5 shows the means and standard deviations for males (n = 156) and females (n = 165) in relation to subscales under social support, negative interchanges, and academic performance. girls scored higher than boys on all social support subscales whereas boys scored slightly higher on all subscales related to negative interchanges. under social support, the largest difference between boys (m = 2.78, sd = 1.02) and girls (m = 3.57, sd = 0.84) was for the subscale of support. the smallest difference between boys (m = 2.58, sd = 0.85) and girls (m = 2.96, sd = 0.88) was for instrumental aid. generally, girls scored highest on satisfaction (m = 4.23, sd = 0.77) and boys scored lowest on intimacy (m = 2.46, sd = 0.95). differences between boys and girls for scales related to negative interchanges were minimal. table 5 means and standard deviations for gender and social support, negative interchanges, and academic performance variable m sd m sd social support 1. companionship 2.78 0.89 3.18 0.78 2. instrumental aid 2.58 0.85 2.96 0.88 3. intimacy 2.46 0.95 3.10 0.89 4. affection 2.81 1.01 3.43 0.94 5. admiration 3.11 0.95 3.66 0.88 6. reliable alliance 3.38 1.01 3.87 0.85 7. support 2.78 1.02 3.57 0.84 8. satisfaction 3.74 0.98 4.23 0.77 negative interchanges 9. conflict 1.69 0.68 1.55 0.53 10. antagonism 1.80 0.75 1.70 0.74 11. criticism 1.57 0.68 1.40 0.58 12. dominance 1.98 0.76 1.77 0.63 13. punishment 1.54 0.72 1.40 0.53 academic performance 14. gpa reading 3.39 0.75 3.60 0.55 15. gpa mathematics 3.37 0.79 3.51 0.59 16. gpa social studies 3.31 0.76 3.51 0.63 17. gpa science 3.47 0.65 3.60 0.56 male female race was dichotomized into caucasian and noncaucasian. table 6 shows the means and standard deviations for caucasians (n = 265) and noncaucasians (n = 56) in relation to social support, negative interchanges, and academic performance. further examination of the data revealed that social support and negative interchanges in relation to academic performance were not significant for caucasians and non-caucasians. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7  of  10   table 6 means and standard deviations for race and social support, negative interchanges, and academic performance variable m sd m sd social support 3.23 0.80 3.24 0.74 negative interchanges 1.64 0.54 1.62 0.49 academic performance 3.48 0.51 3.50 0.51 caucasian non-caucasian discussion the results of the peer/performance relationship study (p/prs) are consistent with previous research findings that demonstrate a positive correlation between adolescents who experience positive peer relationships and academic performance (nelson & debacker, 2008; roseth et al., 2008; veronneau et al., 2008; wentzel, mcnamara-barry, & caldwell, 2004). similar to results reported by other researchers, the effect size between social support and academic performance in this study was small (r2 = 0.05). this small effect size is consistent with nelson and debacker’s findings (2008) who reported modest outcomes in the relationship between academic achievement and high quality friendships. erath and colleagues (2008) reported similar results as well. in their study, friendship support and mutual friendships were significantly related to academic competence with small effect sizes (r2 = 0.04 and r2 = 0.17 respectively). wentzel, mcnamara-barry, and caldwell (2004) also reported small to moderate effect sizes when they found that 6th grade students performed better academically when having a reciprocated friend. these findings lead one to question if small effect sizes indeed do matter. do they have cumulative effects over time as berndt & keefe (1995) claim or do we worry needlessly about the influence of adolescent friendships on academic performance? another interesting outcome of this study is that no statistical significance was found in the relationship between negative interchanges and academic performance. this finding is in contrast to findings reported by nelson and debacker (2008) and wentzel et al. (2004) who found that a poor quality friendship or no friendships are related to low academic performance. indeed, several studies show that peer victimization, defined as having negative peer experiences, results in decreased grade point averages (erath, flanagan, & bierman, 2008; juvonen, nishina, & graham, 2000; nishina, juvonen, & witkow, 2005). in light of this literature, the outcome of this study is shocking especially considering its large sample size. one would expect to see a relationship between negative exchanges and performance in the classroom, but none was found. last, a friend’s level of school interest was significantly related to social support, but was not significant for negative interchanges and academic performance. this means that when adolescents hang out with peers who like school, their social support network is strengthened or vice versa (as when an adolescent’s increased social support makes it easier to develop friendships with peers who like school). interestingly, veronneau and colleagues (2008) reported that adolescents who associate with friends who do not like school are more likely to perform poorly academically leading to academic failure. in light of their findings, one would expect to see that a friend’s level of school interest is related to academic performance rather than to social support only. however, the results of this study do not corroborate these findings. altogether, due to the correlational nature of this study, causation and direction of effects cannot be assessed. further research is needed to determine whether social support leads to high academic performance, high academic performance leads to social support, or other factors lead to high academic performance. above all, the outcome of this study shows that negative interchanges are not related to academic performance at all. this is an interesting finding considering the literature that focuses on low academic performance being associated with a variety of adolescent high-risk behaviors (fergusson et al., 1999; cdc, 2010). to date, there is no empirical evidence showing that high-risk behaviors cause low academic performance or academic failure (cdc, 2010). therefore, researchers should continue considering alternative factors that lead to high or low academic performance. the outcome of this study provides one of these alternatives: the nature of the relational dynamics of peers and academic performance. the findings of this study provide evidence for the importance of adolescent friendships with peers and their effect on academic performance even though the effect size was small. however, further examination into the nature of negative peer relationships and academic performance is definitely needed. effect of gender and race on social support, negative interchanges, and academic performance. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8  of  10   overall, gender was significantly related to social support, negative interchanges, and academic performance. girls scored higher on social support than boys whereas boys scored slightly higher on negative interchanges. specifically, both boys and girls scored highest on satisfaction indicating that both groups place a high value on satisfaction in their relationships. the largest difference in scores between boys and girls lay in the subscale of support followed by intimacy and affection. this finding may be interpreted in light of girls focusing more on relationships than boys who may focus on fewer defining requirements for a satisfying relationship. the smallest difference in scores between boys and girls was for instrumental aid indicating that both boys and girls view each other as resources for assistance. the differences between boys’ and girls’ scores on negative interchanges were minimal indicating that boys and girls have similar experiences within their relationships. after race was dichotomized as caucasian and noncaucasian, social support and negative interchanges in relation to academic performance were not statistically significant. this shows that regardless of race, students place high value on social support when performing in the classroom while allowing less interference from the negative interchanges they experience with each other. overall, this finding is somewhat unexpected given the literature that supports the stereotype that non-caucasian males in particular experience more conflict and appear to be more aggressive, which frequently lead to academic failure (cdc, 2010). one of the reasons for the outcome of this study could be because of its small sample size (n = 26) for non-caucasian male participants. limitations and future directions one of the limitations of this study points to adolescents’ self-reported scores. teacher and parent assessments were not included and should be addressed in future research efforts. additionally, the response rate was fairly low (20.3%) and this study’s generalizability is limited because more than 80% of students in all three middle schools were caucasian. interestingly, the middle school that provided the largest number of participants also had the largest proportion of students (44%) receiving free or reduced lunches, a federal indicator of poverty. the average per capita income in 1999 for all three school districts was around $21,086 compared to $20,008 for the nearest urban school district and $20,692 for the larger statistical metropolitan area (national center for education statistics, 2010). this indicates that the student body of suburban middle schools does not necessarily reflect middleto upper-middle class families. as most research in middle schools focuses on specific social groups, researchers expect to discover, and usually find, significant results. this study shows that students in suburban areas experience differences in academic performance as well. selection bias and instrumentation may have posed minor threats to the study’s overall results. the sample was proportionally overrepresented by the number of 6th graders (133 students), followed by 7th graders (100 students) and 8th graders (87 students). adjustment related issues due to the transitioning process from elementary to secondary school affect 6th graders more than 7th or 8th graders and this may have affected responses to the questionnaire. furthermore, as all students completed the questionnaire toward the end of the semester, testing fatigue may have been a factor in their responses. last, as this study was correlational in nature, a causal relationship between social support and negative interchanges to academic performance cannot be established. future researchers should also direct their attention to the use of qualitative methods such as focus groups. when used in tandem, it is thought that a mixed design approach adds strength to a study than either quantitative or qualitative research would do alone (creswell, 2008). based on this premise, focus groups with youth, parents, and teachers may be a nice follow-up to the results of this study and provide further insight into the needs of the target population.     conclusion altogether, these findings provide evidence for the importance of adolescent friendships with peers and their effect on academic performance. one major outcome of this study social support being significantly and positively related to academic performance is consistent with previous research findings. the other outcome – negative interchanges not being significantly related to academic performance – conflicts with current research findings. nevertheless, the results of this study serve as an important building block in the understanding of the relationship between adolescent behavior and academic achievement. it provides insight into the dynamics of peer relationships and their contribution to academic achievement. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9  of  10   references berndt, t. j., & keefe, k. 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(1994). children’s competence beliefs, achievement values, and general self-esteem: change across elementary and middle school. journal of early adolescence, 14(2), 107-138. wigfield, a., eccles, j. s.,mac iver, d., reuman, d. a., & midgley, c. (1991). transitions during early adolescence: changes in children’s domainspecific self-perceptions and general self-esteem across the transition to junior high school. developmental psychology, 27(4), 552-565. yu rueger, s., kerres malecki, c., & kilpatrick demaray, m. (2008). gender differences in the relationship between perceived social support and student adjustment during early adolescence. school psychology quarterly, 23(4), 496-514. microsoft word 2009-0001-final-20100827.docx global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13   knowledge transfer in community-based organizations: a needs assessment study christian dagenais, ph.d. université de montréal, québec, canada c. dagenais, is an expert in the field of evaluation research and knowledge translation, the discipline which he teaches at université de montréal. since 2002, he is the evaluation director of an organization dedicated to knowledge translation, le centre de liaison sur l’intervention et la prévention psychosociales (clipp). he continues to fulfill his function at the clipp ever since being hired in 2004 by the psychology department at the université de montréal. he is also the head of a team of researchers ardently invested in research on knowledge translation within their respective disciplines. the objective of this emergent research team is to develop the field of knowledge translation research through interdisciplinary and inter-university collaborations. key words: knowledge transfer, needs assessment, community-based organizations, research utilization recommended citations: dagenais, c. (2010). knowledge transfer in community-based organizations: a needs assessment study. global journal of community psychology practice, 1(2), 13-30. retrieved <date>, from http://www.gjcpp.org/. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 knowledge transfer in community-based organizations: a needs assessment study christian dagenais université de montréal, québec, canada abstract research-based knowledge remains relatively underutilized by social practitioners. many studies have shown that, in order to be used, research results have to be compatible with users’ needs and beliefs. the purpose of this needs assessment study was to identify the priority needs of community-based organization practitioners in terms of new research-based knowledge. the first phase of the study focused on a large-scale survey designed to identify what kind of information should be more available to practitioners. in this phase, we used concept mapping technology to construct a graphic representation of the participants’ main concerns. in the second phase, we conducted focus groups to develop a knowledge transfer strategy that takes into account the identified needs. introduction researchers, practitioners and decision-makers are placing increasing importance on the use of empirical evidence for the improvement of population health and well-being (mcqueen & anderson, 2000; nutley, walter & davies, 2007; newman, 2002). despite this trend, studies show that research-based knowledge remains relatively underutilized among practitioner and decision-making communities (brown, 2000). olsson (2007) reports that evidencebased practice not only encourages decisions that are based on the best available, valid, relevant evidence, but also synergistically combines this evidence with the practitioner’s expertise and with the values and expectations of those who receive care. optimal use of research findings is not possible without taking into consideration the needs, concerns, and degree of receptivity of the potential users of this knowledge (dagenais, 2006; hanney, gonzalez-block, buxton & kogan, 2003). however, information about the particular needs of cbo workers for new knowledge is practically non-existent. the community movement in québec has contributed significantly to the province`s history and evolution. distinct from government public services, community-based organizations (cbo) are established by citizens and aim to improve the lives of québecers. to be recognized as a cbo, an organization must satisfy four criteria: 1) be nonprofit, 2) be rooted in the community, 3) have an associative and democratic life, and 4) be free to determine its mission, approaches and practices. there are currently some 8,000 cbos in québec. together, they represent more than 35,000 workers and $720 million in annual funding. this article describes the methods and findings of a needs assessment study to determine the perceived need for new research-based knowledge by cbo workers in the province of québec (canada). we conducted the study with two objectives: 1) to identify the priority topics that could be the object of knowledge transfer (kt) for stakeholders in community-based organizations, and 2) to develop an appropriate kt strategy. research problem there is an emerging consensus in the scientific literature that efforts generally spent on making knowledge available are a necessary but insufficient condition for this knowledge to be actually used in practice (bero, et al., 1998; national center for the dissemination of disability research [ncddr], 1996a, 1996b; rubin, frommer, vincent, & phillips, 1998; weill, 1990). an examination of empirical studies on researchbased knowledge transfer identifies a myriad of conditions that facilitate the kt process. these may be grouped into four categories: (1) conditions associated with organizations: continuous support during implementation of the change (joyce & showers, 2002; nutley, walter, & davies, 2003); leadership of key players (fullan & hargreaves, 1997; nutley, et al., 2003; rohrbach, et al., 2005; walter, nutley, percy-smith, mcneish, & frost, 2004); organizational culture (armstrong & anthes, 2001; lachat & smith, 2005; nutley, et al., 2003; rohrbach, et al., 2005; walter, et al., 2004). (2) conditions associated with the kt strategy: involvement of potential users in research activities (barker, 2005; estabrooks, floyd, scott-findlay, o'leary, & gushta, 2003; huberman, 1990); formulation of explicit recommendations regarding actions to be taken (denis, 2000; hanney, gonzalezblock, buxton, & kogan, 2003; hughes, et al., 2000); dissemination, at an opportune time, of global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 answers to problem situations experienced by users (hanney, 2004; innvaer, vist, trommald, & oxman, 2002; jacobson, butterill, & goering, 2005; waddell, et al., 2005); sustained personal contact between the disseminators of knowledge and potential users (backer, 1991; hanney, et al., 2003; huberman, 1989; landry, amara, & lamari, 2000; ncddr, 1996b). (3) conditions associated with available resources: the material and time required (sleeter, 1992; walter, et al., 2004), human and financial resources (demers, 1997; mcqueen & anderson, 2000). (4) conditions associated with individuals: congruence between the needs of users and the characteristics of the proposed change (ncddr, 1996a, 1996b; rohrbach, ringwalt, ennett, & vincus, 2005); congruence between the proposed change and the values and beliefs of users (breslin, li, tupker, & sdao-jarvie, 2001; briscoe, 1991); the importance of taking the concerns of potential users into account when effecting kt (dagenais, 2006; elliott & popay, 2000; francis & perlin, 2006; hughes, mcneish, newman, roberts, & sachdev, 2000). the present study focuses on this fourth condition, as little information is available about the needs for new knowledge on the part of cbo workers. various kt models are described in the scientific literature. these models may be categorized in different ways and the literature abounds with a variety of nomenclature. the four most documented models are: (a) the science push or knowledge push model, which postulates that high-quality knowledge will, of necessity, be rapidly used (denis, lehoux, & champagne, 2004; landry, amara, & lamari, 2001a). this model is unidirectional, moving from the realm of research to intervention. the evidencebased decision making stream flows from this model. (b) the demand pull or problem solving model, in which it is users who formulate research requests in order to solve problems (denis, et al., 2004; weiss, 1980). according to this view, the use of research findings will increase when findings provide concrete answers to user questions. studies show, however, that this is not always the case and findings are seldom used when they do not fit user expectations (landry, et al., 2001a). (c) the dissemination model which promotes developing mechanisms to disseminate research findings at an additional stage that is integrated into knowledge production (landry, et al., 2001a). (d) the social interaction model, where exchange between researchers and users is bidirectional: they are equal partners (blackburn & demers, 1996). in this model, the more interaction between researchers and users intensifies and is regularized, the more knowledge is used (landry, et al., 2001a; landry, amara, & lamari, 2001b). each of the kt models is based on varying principles and mechanisms. each is generally associated with a particular field where it proves appropriate. for example, in the field of health, the science push model largely predominates. no kt model, however, has been developed for the field of cbo practice. method the procedure planned for this study began with preparatory activities to set up a monitoring committee and determine both the target population and the most appropriate methods. in the first phase (objective 1: identification of needs), we used interviews and concept mapping (cm) technology to identify priority needs in the selected organizations. in the second phase (objective 2: develop a knowledge transfer strategy), we validated results and identified the conditions for successful knowledge transfer by means of focus groups in each of the sectors and targeted regions. lastly, we submitted the findings to the monitoring committee for analysis and developed a kt strategy adapted to the realities of the community organizations. preparatory activities from the very outset of the project, we considered it crucial to identify partners who were central to the world of community organizations in order to involve them in the process. initial contacts targeted the centre de formation populaire (cfp), a key player in the field of training throughout québec, and relaisfemmes, a feminist organization whose mission is to foster social change and promote the rights of women and their organizations. research, training and joint action are the main mandates of relais-femmes. we also invited several other organizations working in the targeted regions or in cooperation with the sectors to take part in the project, including the regroupement des organismes communautaires de la région gaspésie-îles-de-la-madeleine (roc gîm), the regroupement des organismes communautaires autonomes jeunesse du québec (rocajq), the regroupement intersectoriel des organismes communautaires de montréal (riocm) and the regroupement des organismes communautaires de l’estrie (roc de l’estrie). note that each organization and community coalition received approval from its board to participate in the study. next, we invited several groups of organizations working in the targeted regions to join the project’s monitoring committee. the committee’s mandate was to monitor the study through each of its phases and to: global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 • support work planning; • validate strategic and methodological choices; • contribute to the identification of conditions for effective kt; • contribute to the development of kt strategies; and • contribute to the development of a dissemination plan for the results of the study. the formation of the monitoring committee made it possible to integrate key leaders in the community sector, as well as an academic with extensive research experience in the practices of community organizations, into the entire process. there are over 10,000 community-based organizations (cbos) in the province of québec. considering the areas of expertise of the center for liaison on intervention and prevention in the psychosocial area (clipp), the large number and variety of community organizations and, by extension, the diversity of the content to be transferred, the monitoring committee decided to concentrate on organizations in three intervention sectors: a) youth (e.g., youth centers, shelters, street outreach, advocacy), b) women (e.g., women’s centers, advocacy, women’s shelters, sexual abuse intervention), and c) the elderly (e.g., volunteer action centers, home support, advocacy). we initially approached the child/family sector; however, in consultation with the monitoring committee, we opted for the elderly sector instead. this change was due to the fact that organizations in the child/family sector had already been called on to take part in a number of studies in the two years prior and, in a change of reporting structure, were about to be assigned to a different government department. as well, when we contacted the regroupement des organismes familles du québec (rofq), it had just obtained funding for a knowledge transfer study that was already taking up a lot of practitioner time. all cbos in three representative regions were invited to participate. although the project initially targeted organizations in all regions of québec (n = 17representatives), the consultations we conducted led us to change our strategy and focus on three representative regions. these regions were strategically selected by the monitoring committee to reflect differences in terms of number of cbos, level of urbanization, and presence or absence of universities. with regard to this last criterion, we hypothesized that the presence of nearby universities might influence the level of need for research-based knowledge on the part of organizations in these regions. thus, region 1 (gaspésie-îles-de-lamadeleine) had fewer than 100 cbos, was located in a rural area, and had no university within a 500kilometre radius. region 2 (estrie) had between 101 and 150 organizations, was semi-urban and semirural, and was near a university. region 3 (montreal) had over 150 community organizations, and was located in an urban area with four universities. the targeted population for the study consisted of a total of 119 youth sector organizations, 117 women sector organizations, and 102 elderly sector organizations. the concept mapping technique (dagenais & bouchard, 2003; kane & trochim, 2006; ridde, 2008; trochim, 1989a, 1989b; trochim, cook, & setze, 1994) makes it possible to identify the primary components, dimensions, and particularities of a reality and to determine their relative importance (caracelli, 1989; daughtry & kunkel, 1993). the technique produces images that simultaneously represent the main concepts, ideas and dimensions at play, and their relative importance (fisher, 1990). it also fosters collaboration among participants, who remain involved throughout the process (daughtry & kunkel, 1993; trochim, 1989a, 1989b). our review of the literature on this method identified 145 articles published in peer-reviewed journals between 1985 and 2008. these articles cover 11 professional fields: health, mental health, general psychology, organizational psychology, industry, communication, education, social services, sociology, research and research methods. in the majority of these articles (55 articles: 37.9%), the technique was used to develop a theory or was applied in the context of program evaluations (31 articles: 21.4%). in 16 of these articles (n = 11.7%), concept mapping was used for the purposes of needs assessment studies. in the current needs assessment study, we used the technique to inventory participant viewpoints regarding topics that should be prioritized for eventual knowledge transfer. the technique also allowed us to identify regional differences and to compare intervention sectors. since the procedure is well described in the literature (dagenais, ridde, laurendeau, souffez, 2009, 2010; kane & trochim, 2006; ridde,2008), this article will only briefly describe the process and then concentrate on the findings. we applied the method in five steps for this study. in the first step, we inventoried the viewpoints of respondents on topics that should be prioritized for eventual knowledge transfer. this type of information gathering normally takes place during a brainstorming session. however, due to the number of organizations involved and their geographic locations, we used telephone interviews to gather this data. in the second step, we reduced the data on the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 numerous topics that were mentioned during the telephone interviews. in the third step, participants ranked the topics and grouped them into categories. we analyzed the data in the fourth step in order to produce the preliminary maps. lastly, in the fifth step, we used focus groups in each region to validate the content of these maps. confidentiality was maintained throughout this needs assessment study and all participants signed an informed consent form. step 1: the telephone interview. the purpose of the telephone interview was to inventory the opinions of stakeholders on the topics that should be prioritized for eventual knowledge transfer. each interviewee had to complete the following sentence: “it would be useful to your practice to have access to research results about subjects such as…”. step 2: data reduction procedure. we used a data reduction procedure to bring the number of topics mentioned during the telephone interviews down to a manageable size for generating concept maps. the first data reduction step allowed us to eliminate topics that were too vague, confusing or not relevant to the study (e.g., how to solve poverty?; new shortterm approaches: which are best?). a second data reduction step enabled us to eliminate duplications and merge closely related topics, and thereby reduce the list to 250 topics (e.g., dropout intervention and dropout intervention new practices). we used the third step to eliminate topics that occurred only once. finally, in the fourth step, we conducted a more detailed analysis of the topics and identified opportunities for merging similar topics (e.g., knowledge of youth interests and better understanding of youth). we then invited participants to validate these shortened lists. step 3: rating and grouping into categories. participants who had agreed to participate in this stage proceeded to sort (rosenberg & kim, 1975) the topics in such a way as to create distinct categories which each represented an idea or concept. respondents were allowed to create as many categories as they wished, but could not put the same topic into more than one category. they also had to rate each topic in order of importance on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 indicating the most important. step 4: data analysis and production of preliminary maps. after grouping the topics into categories, we developed a preliminary map for each sector and region. these concept maps were constructed using a series of three statistical analyses: 1. firstly, we subjected the categories of items created by each participant to a statistical analysis called multidimensional scaling. this analysis uses two-dimensional space on a graph to situate items in relation to each other, based on the strength of their association (fitzgerald & hubert, 1987; kruskal & wish, 1978). topics that are most closely associated are therefore near each other and the ones that are least associated are at opposite ends of the map. each point on the map corresponds to one of the topics that was retained. 2. secondly, we used hierarchical cluster analysis (borgen & barnett, 1987) to group topics representing similar concepts to participants. this procedure, which uses ward’s algorithm, permits any number of clusters to be created, from a hundred, which would represent each of the statements made, to a single cluster which would group them all together. 3. lastly, in the third stage of analysis, we calculated the average scores assigned to each topic in each category during the rating exercise that had been previously carried out. this average score determined the relative importance of the categories in participant opinion; it was transposed graphically in the form of strata. however, certain clusters contain more dispersed statements than others, and as a result they vary considerably in size. the size of clusters is not proportional to their importance; instead, their importance is represented by the number of strata they comprise. thus, the more important a category is, the more strata it will have. step 5: focus groups. we validated results during focus groups composed of a sample of respondents from each of the regions and sectors. the primary objective of these groups was to finalize the preliminary maps, that is, to validate the results, establish a consensus about the optimal number of categories that should be retained, and choose an appropriate name for each category. the consultations that were conducted via focus groups with participants from the three sectors and the targeted regions also served to acquaint participants with the conditions for knowledge use derived from the scientific literature in order to see to what extent these conditions would be applicable in cbos. two meetings with an expanded monitoring committee and a number of exchanges while this report was being prepared produced a series of recommendations about follow-up to this study. the culmination of this work, which was done in close collaboration with the main stakeholders, has made it global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 possible to propose a knowledge transfer strategy adapted to the realities of community groups. results objective 1: identify the priority topics that could be the object of knowledge transfer for cbos. this section is divided into three parts that respectively present the results for the youth, women, and elderly sectors. results for the youth sector it is important to point out that the methodology used caused the number of participants to decrease at each stage of the study (nested sampling). in total, 119 organizations were targeted, 72 workers agreed to participate in the telephone interviews, and 26 of them took part in rating the topics and grouping them into categories. eleven of these 26 participants were involved in the focus groups. a list of 427 topics was compiled from the telephone interviews for the youth sector. data reduction brought this number down to 96 topics. construction of the concept map a total of 26 participants rated and categorized the 96 topics on the final list. the statistical analyses used for concept mapping produced 11 categories. figure 1 presents these categories in the form of islands, whose height, represented by the number of strata, indicates the importance assigned to the topics that compose them. the categories “love relationships”, “school dropout”, “delinquency” and “mental health” were each assigned five strata, which means that participants attributed greater importance to these topics. the categories “organization of work”, “family relationships” and “assessment of practices” only had four. “mobilization of youth”, “addiction” and “sexuality/stds” had three strata. the category “cultural aspects” was deemed least important and consisted only of a single stratum. table 1 presents examples of the topics in each of these categories. figure 1. concept map for the youth sector (including the three regions). table 1 examples of topics by category and ratings for the youth sector global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 cultural aspects 34 active research on improving multi-ethnic practices 2.54 1 the needs of youth in multi-ethnic communities 2.46 mobilization of youth 69 reality of youth today: new needs of youth in terms of family, school, society 3.69 55 youth interests and vision of the future 3.35 27 involvement of youth in community organizations to which they belong 3.12 school dropout 3 causes and consequences of school dropout on the future of youth 3.73 5 prevention of school dropout 3.50 love relationships 23 how to help youth effectively manage love relationships and sexuality 3.88 48 dating violence: prevention 3.81 delinquency 7 delinquency prevention 3.88 18 street gangs: how to prevent criminality 3.65 family relationships 71 intervention with youth living with family conflict 3.46 37 parent-adolescent relationships 3.42 sexuality/stds 59 sexuality in youth: increasing precocity 3.54 39 risky sexual behaviour 3.38 mental health 67 intervention for moral and psychological distress in youth 4.04 70 self-esteem in youth 3.85 addiction 44 addiction: knowledge of new substances 3.58 94 responsibilization of youth regarding drugs 3.38 evaluation of practices 20 impact of the organization’s interventions within the community 3.85 29 how to apply theoretical knowledge to intervention 2.96 organization of work 68 burnout in community organizations 3.77 73 how to remain motivated as a community worker 3.38 validation of results by region there are numerous distinctions to be made about the different regions. as this study is first and foremost about priority needs for new research-based knowledge, only the categories considered most important by respondents will be dealt with here, i.e., those that had four or five strata. table 2 presents a comparison of the relative importance of the categories for each of the three regions. for region 1 (rural, remote from universities). when the mapping results were presented to a focus group (n = 11), participants found them to be very representative of the reality experienced in this region. in contrast to the interventions of organizations in other regions, which mostly focussed on target groups or specific problem issues, the work of these stakeholders tended to be more generalized; this explains why 10 of the 11 categories were all considered significant. participants emphasized there was a great need to acquire new knowledge about almost all of the categories mentioned, due to limited access to resources (training, universities or other) and the related costs. for region 2 (semi-urban, one university). in this region, 7 of the 11 categories were considered important. when presented with the results, focus group participants indicated that kt priorities should focus on mental health (due to limited access to training on this subject), assessment of practices, organization of work, and mobilization of youth. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 table 2 comparison of the number of strata by category for each region for the youth sector category names region1 region 2 region 3 love relationships 5 5 5 delinquency 5 5 4 mental health 5 5 organization of work 5 4 addiction 5 4 assessment of practices 4 4 mobilization of youth 4 4 school dropout 4 4 family relationships 5 sexuality / stds 4 cultural aspects 5 note. dashes indicate the data unreported. the low level of importance given to “school dropout” is explained by the fact that several youth centres have chosen to leave this type of intervention to schools. as for the “family relations” category, its low level of importance is due to the fact that the organizations do not work directly with families, but rather with youth. for region 3 (urban, four universities). in this region, only four categories were judged to be important. as it was impossible to form a focus group in the region, members of the monitoring committee were asked to validate the content of the map. all of the members found that the proposed concept map was a good depiction of the reality in this region. for example, the category “addiction” was deemed not important since organizations in the region have rapid access to information on this subject and, due to the local availability of a large number of specialized resources, they are able to proceed with referrals. in contrast, the category “cultural aspects” was assigned five strata, due to the multi-cultural nature of the region. results for the women sector in total, 117 organizations in the women sector were targeted and 66 of them participated in the telephone interviews. twenty-two participants took part in rating the topics and categorizing them. four people were involved in the focus groups. a preliminary list of 194 topics was compiled from the telephone interviews. about ten organizations then proceeded with team reflection and produced a collective response. this method of operating is characteristic of the culture of women’s groups. as a result of data reduction, the final list was shortened to 96 topics. construction of the concept map a total of 22 participants rated and categorized the 96 topics. concept mapping operations led to eight identified categories in the final map. figure 2 shows that the “domestic violence” and “studies and assessment” categories were deemed to be the most important and were composed of five strata. only the “masculinist discourse” category had four strata. the categories “women and minorities” and “organizations and approaches” were each given three strata, while “sexual assault” only had two. finally, less importance was given to the “health” and “living conditions” categories. table 3 presents examples of the topics grouped into these eight categories. validation of results by region as was the case with the youth sector, there were numerous differences among the various regions and only those categories deemed by participants to be most significant are treated here, namely those consisting of four or five strata. table 4 presents a comparison of the relative importance of the categories for each of the three regions. global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 figure 2. concept map for the women sector (including the three regions). for region 1 (rural, remote from universities). the only category deemed important by participants from this region was “masculinist discourse”, which had 5 strata. no other category was given more than 3 strata. the large number of participants in this region made it possible to compare the results obtained from two types of organizations in this sector, namely women’s centres and shelters; this was not possible in the two other regions. of the four categories judged important by one or both types of organization, only the “masculinist discourse” category was of comparable importance for participants. this finding highlights the fact that an analysis that is too global runs the risk of masking needs that are actually clearly identified. indeed, it is only by taking into consideration the type of organization to which the participants belonged that needs associated with the “domestic violence” category emerged for the shelters and those associated with “living conditions” and “organizations and approaches” emerged for women’s centres. for region 2 (semi-urban, one university).the results for this region go completely against those of region 1. in fact, whereas “masculinist discourse” was deemed the only important category in region 1, it was the only category not considered important in region 2. for region 3 (urban, four universities). participants in this region considered three of the eight categories to be very important. these were: “studies and assessment”, “domestic violence” and “women and minorities”. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 table 3 examples of topics by category and ratings for the women sector sexual assault 2 intervention following sexual assault 3.33 42 intervention to defend the rights of victims of sexual assault 3.06 masculine discourse 30 masculine groups: their real discourse and intentions 3.44 62 response to masculine discourse 3.39 living conditions 27 single-parent families and the parent-child relationship 3.22 48 new contraceptives and their effects on women’s health 2.61 health 46 medicalization and mental illness 3.22 76 eating disorders in women 2.89 organizations and approaches 13 working conditions in community organizations 3.28 28 management in a community organization 2.83 studies and assessment 90 how to intervene with the concurrent problems of violence and mental health 4.39 17 consequences of domestic violence perpetrated against women 4.22 31 impact of the feminist approach 4.17 domestic violence 81 domestic violence and mental health problems 4.17 26 intervention with battered women 4.00 15 consequences of violence on children 3.94 women and minorities 94 research on violence against women of various ethnic groups 3.61 1 aboriginal women and sexual assault 3.28 4 the needs of immigrant women 3.28 results for the elderly sector in total, 102 organizations were targeted, 70 of them participated in the telephone interviews and 21 participants took part in rating and categorizing the topics. three people participated in the focus groups. a preliminary list of 215 topics was compiled from the telephone interviews and then reduced to 96 items as a result of data reduction. for region 2 (semi-urban, one university).the results for this region go completely against those of region 1. in fact, whereas “masculinist discourse” was deemed the only important category in region 1, it was the only category not considered important in region 2. for region 3 (urban, four universities). participants in this region considered three of the eight categories to be very important. these were: “studies and assessment”, “domestic violence” and “women and minorities”. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 table 4 comparison of the number of strata by category for each region category names region 1 region 2 region 3 studies and assessment 5 5 domestic violence 5 4 women and minorities 4 5 masculine discourse 5 living conditions 5 sexual assault 4 organizations and approaches 4 health 4 note. dashes indicate the data unreported. results for the elderly sector in total, 102 organizations were targeted, 70 of them participated in the telephone interviews and 21 participants took part in rating and categorizing the topics. three people participated in the focus groups. a preliminary list of 215 topics was compiled from the telephone interviews and then reduced to 96 items as a result of data reduction. construction of the concept map a total of 21 people rated and categorized the 96 statements. seven categories emerged from the concept mapping operation, as shown in figure 3. the categories “informal caregivers” and “the organization” were considered to be the most important ones and had five strata. the categories “volunteerism” and “studies and assessments” had four strata. the category “health / mental health” only had two strata. finally, the categories “social problems” and “family relationships” were judged least important. table 5 shows a few examples of the topics in these seven categories. validation of results by region. as was the case with the previous sectors, there were numerous differences among the various regions and only the categories considered most important by participants are treated here, that is, those with four or five strata. table 6 presents a comparison of the results by region. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 figure 3. concept map for the elderly sector (including the three regions). table 5 examples of topics by category and ratings for the elderly sector studies and assessments 77 how to keep the elderly independent at home for as long as possible? 4.00 16 elderly men: how to reach out to them? 3.29 92 study on the interests and needs of the elderly from their viewpoint 3.29 health/mental health 53 intervention with people undergoing memory loss who are living alone 3.57 30 malnutrition in the elderly: how to confront and counter it? 3.33 25 how to do health monitoring with the elderly? 2.38 for region 1 (rural, remote from universities). in this region, the category “the organization” was composed of five strata, whereas the categories “informal caregivers”, “volunteerism”, and “studies and assessment” were only composed of four. based on the comments received, this map highlights both the fact that volunteerism remains a central concern for volunteer agencies in the region, and that the importance accorded to statements in the “informal global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 caregivers” category is consistent with that accorded to them elsewhere in quebec. for region 2 (semi-urban, one university). in the map for region 2, only the “informal caregivers” category had five strata. all the other categories were clearly less important and only contained one or two strata. this finding did not surprise focus group participants, as the topic was consistently raised at meetings of community organizations in the region’s elderly sector. the fact that various needs appeared to be less of a priority for the organizations in this region may be explained by the active presence of an institute of geriatrics which facilitated access to research findings. participation by community organizations in the regional prevention program also appeared to have satisfied certain needs. for region 3 (urban, four universities). for region 3, the category “the organization” was deemed to be the most important, followed by the categories “volunteerism” and “studies and assessments”. the map for this region corresponds to provincial trends associated with the realities experienced by organizations in this sector. however, focus group participants thought that an additional category should have been represented. in fact, “ethnic diversity” is a concern of organizations in this region, both in terms of recruitment and supervision of volunteers, and in terms of home services and the aging population in ethnic communities. objective 2: developing an appropriate knowledge transfer strategy for cbos the results of the meetings with the monitoring committee established that knowledge transfer in community-based organizations must respect several principles. any effort to transfer new knowledge must, of necessity, be based on respect for context, local dynamics, and the environment of potential table 6 comparison of the number of strata by category for each region category names region 1 region 2 region 3 the organization 5 5 informal caregivers 4 5 volunteerism 4 4 studies and assessments 4 4 health / mental health social problems family relationships note. dashes indicate the data unreported. users. also, such an effort must build on what already exists in these environments. the goal is not to remake the environment, but to recycle existing resources, expertise, and tools as a very first step. only then should one seek elsewhere for what needs to be added to the knowledge that is already available, though perhaps not always accessible. two meetings with the expanded monitoring committee and a number of exchanges at the time of writing the report resulted in the production of a series of recommendations for follow-up to this study. based on a set of recommendations made by the monitoring committee, we developed a kt strategy adapted to the realities of the given sectors and regions (figure 4). the strategy’s starting point is the groups targeted for knowledge transfer (who?), for whom a planned, systematic new knowledge needs assessment is carried out. the development of knowledge transfer activities (scenarios) flows out from a methodical examination of the users’ context. it is a matter of putting into practice the recommendations made by participants, namely: 1. identify training and transfer organizations working in the community action field; 2. establish collaborations with players on the ground, specifically to avoid duplication and competition among them; 3. systematically identify existing knowledge and tools at the local, regional and national levels; 4. identify, in databanks, programs or practices that have proved effective and could be transferred; global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 5. evaluate the effects of transfer efforts that have been made, i.e., test the strategy within the framework of a systematic evaluation of the results it produces. figure 4. knowledge transfer strategy proposed for community groups. discussion in this needs assessment study, we first identified the topics for knowledge transfer that were priorities for the stakeholders of quebec cbos in the youth, women, and elderly sectors. we then presented the results of the first phase to participants so they could validate them and suggest useful and relevant ways for optimizing knowledge transfer strategies that could be developed to respond to the needs that were expressed. we also used the consultations, conducted in the context of focus groups with participants from the three sectors and the targeted regions, to describe the conditions for the use of the knowledge presented above and determine to what extent these conditions would be applicable in the community sector. considering the great diversity of topics put forward by the participants in the three sectors and the three regions, the use of concept mapping proved a judicious choice. besides being an innovative and stimulating approach for participants, the technique is also more democratic, as it gives the same relative weight to each person’s point of view. it also has the significant advantage of presenting findings in the vocabulary of the principal stakeholders. lastly, the fact that participants were only asked one question allowed them to reply spontaneously and required very little of their time. several participants mentioned that they greatly appreciated this time saver. who ?? what needs? taking the users’ context into account identification of local, regional and national training and transfer organizations establishment of collaborations with players on the ground identification of existing know-ledge and tools at the local, regional and national levels identificatio n of promising practices for identified priority topics proposal of transfer scenarios 1. implementation of a pilot project 2. training in literature review 3. setting up a virtual library 4. experimentatio n, travelling interactive seminars a s s e s s m e n t global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 2 september 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 27 it is clear that by allowing regional and sectoral differences to be highlighted, this study has made it possible to learn something quite new. in fact, no study to date has produced results that permit efforts for knowledge transfer to be concentrated on the regions that most need them. the data on the modalities of transfer deemed most appropriate by primary stakeholders also make it possible to develop a kt strategy that is adapted to the particularities of each of the targeted intervention communities. the decision to conduct telephone interviews rather than a mail survey or brain-storming sessions proved to be advantageous. this approach avoided soliciting people whose responses would not have added anything new to the data and, at the same time, yielded very high response rates, even 100% in the case of the youth organizations. the strategy thus ensured a good representative sampling for the first stage of the study. representative sampling was, however, jeopardized in the subsequent stages, which limits the scope of certain conclusions. only three people in the women’s sector for region 2 ranked and categorized the statements for the concept mapping operation. low participation in the focus groups (50%) also prevented the results from being validated for these particular regions and sectors. it will, therefore, be necessary to conduct another type of validation for sectors affected by any knowledge transfer activities resulting from this needs assessment. our study allowed us, firstly, to develop collaborations with players on the ground in order to identify the priority needs in each of the intervention sectors and better understand the realities in the three regions. in the next step (phase 1), we will draw on this rich information to conduct a systematic review of user context and collate available information. this preliminary step is essential for the production of new knowledge and new transfer and training tools (components 1, 3 and 4 of the model). we will then (phase 2) identify and establish mechanisms enabling community organizations to access this information, with a focus on the realities of the various regions and the importance of collaboration with players on the ground (component 2 of the model). once we have identified and tested these mechanisms, we will experiment with mechanisms that ensure: 1) the strategic management of this information (updates, intelligence), and 2) sustainable and dynamic access for all community organizations throughout québec . in a third phase, we will field-test a knowledge transfer strategy in which accompaniment will be provided to ensure better integration of new knowledge on the management of community groups (a need that emerged as a high priority in our study). conclusion we conducted this needs assessment in collaboration with community-based organizations in three intervention sectors across three regions of the province of québec. it documented the magnitude of needs deemed to be priorities by stakeholders, and the need to implement a series of recommendations for appropriate follow-up to the study. this study on what constitute priority needs for the stakeholders of these cbos made it possible to: 1. confirm the scope of the needs for new researchbased knowledge by observing the number and variety of the prioritized topics; 2. identify important differences among the priority needs expressed in each of the regions; 3. emphasize the importance of adapting any strategies that are developed to the realities of each sector and region; the knowledge transfer strategy developed is based on recommendations from the focus groups and the monitoring committee. various elements must be taken into consideration, such as respect for context, local dynamics, and the environment of potential users. sustainable development in cbo practices involves identifying training and transfer organizations that work in the community field; establishing collaborations with grassroots players; systematically identifying existing knowledge and tools at the local, regional and national levels; and, finally, identifying, in databanks, the programs and practices with the greatest potential for dissemination. finally, the application of the transfer strategy developed in this study should be evaluated through a systematic assessment of the results it produces. references armstrong, j., & anthes, k. 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(1980). knowledge creep and decision accretion. knowledge: creation, diffusion, utilization, 1(3), 381-404. acknowledgements this needs assessment study would not have been possible without considerable support from a great number of players. the author wishes to thank: 1. the organizations in the youth, women, and elderly sectors who so generously participated in the various stages of the study and whose contribution lies at the very heart of the whole undertaking; 2. suzanne garon, professor and researcher at the université de sherbrooke, lise gervais, general coordinator of relais-femmes, marierenée tremblay, coordinator of regroupement des organizations communautaires de la gaspésie-les îles-de-la-madeleine, and bibiane roy, coordinator of the field project, as well as rené doré, trainer and head of research at the centre de formation populaire, and pierre riley, director general of the fédération des centres d’action bénévole du québec, members of the monitoring commmittee, who, by their judicious comments and knowledge of the field, validated and enriched each stage of the study; 3. paulette cummings, director general of the centre d’action bénévole de gaspé and michael stephens, co-director of the centre des organizations communautaires, for their contribution to the expanded monitoring committee; and 4. the ministère du développement économique et regional et de la recherche (mderr) for the financial contribution that permitted this study to be carried out. it goes without saying that the identification of the priority needs of community organizations and the development of a transfer strategy adapted to their reality would not have been possible without the sustained involvement and interest of various players (collaborators and community organizations). microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 146 well-being services for people with long term neurological conditions: co-researchers involvement in research, service design and development judith sixsmith1 research institute for health and social change elizabeth gaskell campus manchester metropolitan university hathersage road manchester iii international conference on community psychology puebla, mexico, june 4, 2010.                                                                                                                           1  j.sixsmith@mmu.ac.uk 147 well-being services for people with long term neurological conditions: co-researchers involvement in research, service design and development abstract this chapter outlines the involvement strategies used in a participatory action project conducted in the uk, together with co-researcher evaluation of their experiences, presents reflections on the process of involvement in service design and delivery and its impact on community coresearchers. the study was jointly commissioned by a primary care trust and a local authority adult social care department in partnership with researchers in the research institute of health and social care at manchester metropolitan university. the study, in line with the uk government well-being agenda (doh, 2007b), was designed to reveal the ways in which services provided for people with long term neurological conditions (ltnc’s) can enhance well-being rather than simply reveal or address their health and social care needs. in effect, this refocuses service provider perceptions away from seeing people with ltncs as needy, or as problems to be solved (by addressing their needs) and more towards people whose well-being can be substantially improved with the support of professionals. people with ltncs who were involved in this study included those with parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, stroke, dementia, epilepsy, motor neurone disease, muscular dystrophy, acquired traumatic brain injury among others with rare conditions such as lesch-nyham syndrome. the study took a participatory action research approach (kagan, burton and siddiquee, 2008) in which a key element was the input from the ltnc’s service user and service provider communities. the experiences of university and co-researchers have been traced in this paper, pointing to the importance of considering the short and long term implications of collaborative working and the impact this has on project outcomes and service design. keywords: involvement, co-researchers, service users, service providers. 148 servicios de bienestar para personas con condiciones neurológicas de largo término: involucración de co-investigadores en la investigación, en diseño y desarrollo de los servicios resumen este capítulo bosqueja las estrategias de involucración empleadas en un proyecto de acción participatoria realizado en el reino unido, evalúa experiencias de co-investigadores, presenta reflexiones acerca del proceso de involucración en diseño y realización de servicios y del impacto en los co-investigadores comunitarios. este estudio, acorde con los lineamientos del gobierno del reino unido acerca de la agenda de bienestar, se diseñó para hacer patentes las formas en que servicios dados a personas con condiciones neurológicas de largo término (ltnc’s) pueden realzar su bienestar y no sólo atender sus necesidades de salud y atención social. en efecto, esta estrategia re-enfoca las percepciones de los que dan los servicios para no sólo ver a las personas con nclt como necesitadas, o como problemas a ser resueltos (atendiendo sus necesidades) sino más bien como gente cuyo bienestar puede ser sustancialmente mejorado con el respaldo de profesionales. gente con nclt que participó en este estudio incluyó personas con enfermedad de parkinson, esclerosis múltiple, parálisis cerebral, derrame, demencia, epilepsia, enfermedad neuronal motora, distrofia muscular, daño cerebral traumático adquirido, entre otras, con condiciones raras tal como el síndrome de lesch-nyham. el estudio siguió una aproximación de investigación acción participativa en la que un elemento clave es la aportación del nclt usuario del servicio y las comunidades que proveen servicios. las experiencias de la universidad y de los co-investigadores se describen en este escrito, señalando la importancia de considerar las implicaciones de corto y largo tiempo del trabajo colaborativo y el impacto que éste tiene en los resultados del proyecto y en el diseño del servicio. palabras clave: involucración, co-investigadores, usuarios de servicios, proveedores de servicios. 149 introduction service user2 involvement in health and social care service design and delivery is now heralded as an integral part of service development with positive outcomes for service users, health and social care research and service provision in the uk (doh, 2006, doh 2005a,b). such involvement has underpinned attempts to develop ‘wrap around’ health and social care services which are responsive to the needs of the person and are delivered to improve their lives. the idea is based on a recognition that those people who are in need of health and social care support and who are often marginalized within official support systems have valuable knowledge and experience which can be used to create services which focus on improved well-being and quality of life (involve, 2007). this constitutes a move away from locating the basis of power over service provision with health and social care providers and into a more equitable relationship where both experiential and professional knowledge are both valued. however, this ‘personalisation’ agenda (doh, 2007a) tends, as it is conceptualized and implemented, to prioritize individual needs while often neglecting the holistic family and community context. moreover, as long as the focus of service provision remains on service user ‘needs’ elicitation, the difficulties of articulating those needs (for service users), and satisfying those needs (by service providers) alongside the general mismatch between perceived needs satisfaction, wellbeing and quality of life (hobbs and sixsmith, 2009) makes it a very difficult process to navigate. the involvement of service users in this process can shift the focus from ‘needs’ by unpacking the meaning of well-being in everyday life and coupling this more firmly with improving quality of life through service provision. however, the difficulties of service user involvement cannot be ignored. current, and predominant, rhetoric surrounding ‘involvement’ is unrelentingly positive, firstly centring on the notion that involvement is an empowering process for people whose voices are seldom heard within the service context and secondly producing more responsive, personcentred services. three key problems hinder effective involvement: firstly, people who receive services may have typically had little experience of participation in service design and so feel relatively inexperienced and lacking the requisite knowledge; secondly when service user                                                                                                                           2  the  term  ‘service  user’  is  preferred  here  to  more  recent  descriptors  of  ‘client’  or  ‘customer’  in  order  to  simply   signal  the  relationship  between  people  with  dementia  and  service  provision.  it  is  not  intended  as  an  holistic   concept  which  characterizes  a  person.     150 involvement has been undertaken it can take the form of ‘consultations’ which are little more than opportunities to be told about what will happen; or finally, the difficulties of living chaotic lives or with chronic ill health can preclude or dissuade people from engagement with often demanding participatory processes (see hobbs and sixsmith, 2009; woolrych and sixsmith, 2008). a further barrier to effective involvement lies in the relative lack of experience amongst health and social care professionals who have had little experience of involving service users integrally in their service design and development. this can result in feelings of disempowerment for both service users and providers and a breakdown in the involvement process (sixsmith, 2009). this chapter outlines the involvement strategies used in a participatory action project conducted in the uk3, together with co-researcher evaluation of their experiences, presents reflections on the process of involvement in service design and delivery and its impact on community co-researchers. the study, in line with the uk government well-being agenda (doh, 2007b), was designed to reveal the ways in which services provided for people with long term neurological conditions (ltnc’s) can enhance well-being rather than simply reveal or address their health and social care needs. in effect, this refocuses service provider perceptions away from seeing people with ltncs as needy, or as problems to be solved (by addressing their needs) and more towards people whose well-being can be substantially improved with the support of professionals. people with ltncs who were involved in this study included those with parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, stroke, dementia, epilepsy, motor neurone disease, muscular dystrophy, acquired traumatic brain injury among others with rare conditions such as lesch-nyham syndrome. the study took a participatory action research approach (kagan, burton and siddiquee, 2008) in which a key element was the input from the ltnc’s service user and service provider communities. participatory action research (par). the action oriented and participatory framework was adopted at the very outset whereby                                                                                                                           3  the  study  was  jointly  commissioned  by  a  primary  care  trust  and  a  local  authority  adult  social  care  department  in   partnership  with  researchers  in  the  research  institute  of  health  and  social  care  at  manchester  metropolitan   university.     151 people with a range of different ltnc’s as well as health and social care providers were recruited to participate in the study design and implementation. their participation continued into the realms of data collection, data interpretation, report writing and final presentation of results. the guiding principles of this participatory action research project were: • development of a partnership with shared vision and expectations. • equality of all stakeholders within the process. • open communication on all aspects of the research. • commitment to social justice for all. • support and training for involvement. • willingness by all concerned to allow the par process to facilitate change both in themselves and in service delivery. in particular, because of the intensive involvement both in the research process as well as input into service design and delivery, the support and training of co-researchers was of paramount importance. as such, the recruitment and empowerment of co-researchers was essential to successful completion of the project. involving co-researchers. the involvement of co-researchers was not a smooth process. the first difficulty arose with recruitment. for recruitment purposes, the local health and social care authorities provided a list of their service users so that the research team could independently initiate contact. a range of telephone, e-mail and face-to-face contacts were arranged to ask if they would be interested in forming part of the research team. unfortunately, these requests were met with suspicion and skepticism and no recruitments were made. they reported that while they felt involvement was a positive aim for service development, and that contributing to research was a necessary precursor to improving well-being through service provision, they ultimately were ill equipped to participate themselves because they felt: • inexperienced in service design and development, preferring to defer to the knowledge and expertise of service professionals. • they did not really understand what research was about and so were reluctant to commit to activity they were unsure they could handle. 152 • they had little to contribute from their own experience as service users. • they lacked the necessary skills, stating their embarrassment to speak in meetings, lack of confidence in discussing the issues they feel are important, frustration in not being listened to and inability to properly read and understand official document because of professional jargon. • they were unable to keep as fully informed as service professionals, thereby not having all the relevant information to make appropriate decisions. • they had no time, with most being devoted to getting on with the everyday tasks of living with a demanding and often variable ltnc. they also said that: • their communication and mobility problems would disqualify them from participation. • that no-one would listen to the result of the research or service design and development outcomes if they were involved. here, they felt that the work would have more credibility if it were entirely conducted by university experts. • finally, that former efforts of the local authorities to involve them in service design had previously been one sided and fruitless, particularly citing that service change would not happen because of bureaucratic barriers and cost. consequently, they argued that service user wishes realistically play no part in setting the agenda for change. this high level of negativity towards participation was based on health, psychological and social grounds as well as past experiences. in order to progress beyond these barriers a joint ‘consultation’ event involving health and social care personnel, university researchers, service users, their carers and family members. the aim was to present information about: • the national health framework for ltncs (set out in march doh, 2005, by the dept of health; doh, 2007c, 2008) and progress towards achieving its 11 quality requirements. • the research enterprise linked into the current research project aims and objectives. • the value of service user experience input into design and development. • the potential role of co-researchers. after presentations covering this information and follow on discussions, a series of workshops were conducted to establish: • the meaning of ‘well-being’ from participant perspectives. • how the well-being of people with ltncs can be measured. 153 this consultation event was effective in engaging service users in both the service development and research enterprise by ensuring they felt informed, understood how they could contribute and enabling them to experience participation in the research itself. evaluation of the event was extremely positive as service users felt for the first time that they understood that their participation had real value, their experiential knowledge was essential to effective service design and development, that university training and support would enable them to master any skills they would need but did not feel they possessed. most importantly, the workshop exercised convinced them that research was not only enjoyable, but equalized relationships between themselves as service user and service providers since both groups were new to research. in addition, service users felt they understood much more clearly that the nsf framework for ltncs could actually become a mechanism for improving their own lives, rather than simply more bureaucratic rhetoric with no tangible positive outcomes for everyday life. consequently, they wanted to see it implemented in ways which would benefit all people with ltncs. in effect, the consultation event motivated participation on grounds of: • knowledge gained • skills development • and desire for effective personal and social change the analysis of data collected in the well-being workshops was then produced in a short pamphlet (also made accessible to those with visual and auditory impairments). once this was distributed, service users felt their views had been listened to. in this way, the integrity of the research was established as a potential way forward to improve service provision and a number of volunteers voluntarily contacted the research team to begin work as co-researchers. in total, 6 service user and 4 service professional co-researchers were recruited as a result of the consultation event. this included managers and staff from physiotherapy and adult social care alongside those with parkinson’s disease, stroke and motor neurone disease and muscular dystrophy. empowerment within the co-researcher role. the initial welcome meeting with all co-researchers ended with service users requesting extra support be supplied to them independent from service provider co-researchers as they had 154 struggled to contribute to the meeting. in response, a series of service user workshop/training sessions were organized. the first workshop centred on the co-researcher role which resulted in the shaping of their own plan for this role. the second workshop focused on research as a process. interview evaluation of these initial workshops indicated that co-researchers cohered together as a social group with a shared vision, a joint purpose and a feeling of moving forward and contributing to the great social good of people with ltncs. their excitement, enthusiasm and acceptance of the value of different forms of knowledge were tangible. initial workshops with service users were followed by a further set of joint service users and service provider sessions concerning: 1) the study aims and objectives and how these might be achieved. intensive discussion on the nature of well-being suggested the inadequacy of framing this entirely in terms of need satisfaction. co-researchers felt that attainment of improved well-being depended on more than the satisfaction of felt needs (which they felt were difficult to conceptualize and articulate beyond the confinements of service oriented need assessments), and included the pursuit of personal goals and leisure opportunities. this session ended in the resetting the study objectives to more clearly fit the lives of people with ltncs 2) qualitative methodology, its aims and uses in researching well-being with people with ltncs. this produced co-researcher input into the design of the methodology (semistructured interviews) and the setting of interview schedules used to help people with ltncs tell us about their experiences both of well-being and service provision. three service user co-researchers then asked to extend their role to become interviewers and interview other people with ltncs. 3) a further training session was then conducted on ‘how to do interviews’ and was supported in face-to-face individual meetings between co-researchers and university research staff. this enabled training to reflect individual skills development. ten service user and 10 service provider interviews were subsequently conducted by trained coresearchers. 4) finally, a session overviewed ways of doing data analysis followed by two data analysis workshops in which co-researchers engaged in thematic analysis of transcribed interview data (re braun and clarke, 2006). this resulted in co-researchers contributing to the defining the concept of well-being and the most relevant indicators of service impact on 155 well-being in addition to direct involvement in the research work itself, two co-researchers elected to sit on the study advisory board, inputting to discussion about the project, problem spotting and solving, and guiding the research towards attainment of its aims and objectives. furthermore, 2 co-researchers were involved in the recruitment of the university research assistant in general, the involvement of co-researchers enriched the study by reinforcing the notion that: • a more experiential approach to understanding how people live their lives would be better able to highlight where well-being could be improved rather than relying on a needs assessment based approach. • well-being is an experiential rather than an articulated cognitive phenomenon. asking people directly about their well-being is likely to reveal only well known platitudes. in addition, well-being is framed as much more than satisfaction or pleasure (ie hedonic well-being), and encompasses personal development and the achievement of goals and engagement in life (ie eudaimonic well-being, see shah and peck, 2005; ryan and deci, 2001). • well-being is a highly complex concept (haworth and hart, 2007) it is not simply an individual issue but a family and community issue very much as prilleltensky and prilleltensky, 2007) point out in their well-being manifesto for a flourishing society. • it is difficult for people with ltnc’s to think beyond what services normally provide and to bring to the table those wider social, psychological and community based aspects of well-being these issues were all used to influence the conceptualization of the study as well as methods used, data analysis and interpretations. co-researcher reflections. ongoing research into the experiences of co-researchers was conducted throughout the study in order to focus on issues of power, control and the production of knowledge within the co-researcher context (see reason, 1994). this involved initiation of reflexive sessions with coresearchers, conducted on an individual face-to-face level. changes made to the co-researcher 156 role based on these reflections were accomplished within a cycle of research, reflection, action and change (kagan, burton and siddiquee, 2008). the reflexive process revealed that service user co-researchers had gained a good understanding of the complexities of research practice and procedure, knowledge of the constraints and opportunities surrounding service provision and confidence in their own ability to speak up at meetings inside and outside the context of the research. as stolle (2001) suggests, they had gained in negotiation skills (evident when one service user co-researcher re-engaged with local committee work), presentation skills (two co-researchers were involved in presenting the findings of this research at a local conference) and social skills (one co-researcher reported that she had been better able to deal with family issues as a consequence of learning about active listening and taking the other’s perspective). in this sense, a degree of capacity building for future involvement in local service provision and university projects had been achieved. moreover, coresearchers felt they could engage in critical thinking, by challenging their own beliefs, divorcing the discussion of contentious or sensitive issue from their own emotional responses and actively interrogating their own thoughts and those of others around them. they found benefit in the reflexive process itself, using this to understand more about their social positioning within service provision, family and community contexts. in terms of subjectivity, they felt more able to accept and make profitable use of their developing sense of self power in their everyday living environments. this was most evident when one co-researcher found employment having thought through the value of the skills she had mastered and her new found confidence in herself as a working class women with much experience to offer which she brought to bear in her job interview. both service user and service provider co-researchers described how they had used reflexivity in other areas of their lives, especially concerning their work and family situations. the co-researchers confided that the experiences they had encountered in the research had brought new meaning into their lives, staved off boredom and given them a broad social platform of concern. for some, this was one of the few times when they felt they mattered and could make a difference to the social fabric of their communities. benefits articulated by service provider co-researchers were a little less forthcoming. those articulated were: • a better understanding of the experiences of people with ltncs (this was the most widely cited benefit of involvement), 157 • clearer envisioning of the value o service user involvement in the design and development of services and • the necessity of thinking differently around service oriented promotion of well-being. in general, they felt they would be less dismissive on service user concerns in the future stating that they would prefer to think around ways to improve services rather than simply following tried and trusted techniques which were not always effective. they would, they felt, seek out service user input in the future. for them, co-researching had opened up a new way of thinking about implementing change. the difficulties of co-researching. despite the positive outcomes of involvement, a number of difficult issues arose for coresearchers and university researchers alike as sixsmith and boneham (2003) and kagan (2008) have found in previous work. for service user co-researchers these revolved around: • continuing to see university researchers as leaders of all aspects of research and as fountains of knowledge in the area and looked to them for validation. this happened despite repeated efforts at creating an environment of mutual sharing and learning. • dropping out. intensive individual contact was maintained with co-researchers alongside group meetings in which hospitality featured strongly (lunches, refreshments, social chit chat etc) in order to engage co-researchers with a strong commitment to the project. nevertheless, one co-researcher dropped out stating they did not have the time or energy required to participate and another dropped out on ill health grounds. in this project, the loss of two co-researchers depleted the human resources considerably, but was not critical to project continuance since both dropped out towards the end of the project. • disagreements between co-researchers created an antagonistic atmosphere and breakdown in communications halfway through the project. mediation between them, delivered via the research team, achieved some reconciliation but personal grievances remained. the bringing together of diverse people in a common project is not always guaranteed to create strong friendship bonds and the likelihood of dealing with difficult relationships should be factored into the involvement process. 158 • periods of ill health meant that promised work was not always completed (ie no planned co-researchers involvement took place regarding the carer intervewing). project researchers maintain contact on a personal basis where possible with people throughout any bouts of illness. this meant they could re-engage with the project when they felt better, if that was what they wished. • some reported that, at times, the stress of expectation (their own as much as unintended researcher based pressure) weighed heavily on them. some worried about influencing the design of services in ways which might result in poorer service provision for people with ltncs. others undertook research tasks with a work-like commitment, neglected other duties in their lives to fulfill their co-researching tasks. this created feelings of guilt because of relative neglect of family and friends. in these cases, researchers on the project acted as listening ‘buddies’ to help them see their work in a more positive light as well as to find a good balance between their commitments. • at times, co-researchers reported they felt undervalued because their work was unpaid, yet preferred to remain as volunteers to maintain an independent stance within the research context. while this ambivalence caused some tension at an individual level, independence meant co-researchers were free to leave the project or avoid undesired tasks. this issue of payment was problematic for the university research team who felt coresearcher work was of very high quality and deserving of payment. • finally, there was a feeling of emptiness when the project ended. here, the researchers were able to provide them with contacts to future project co-researching involvement in order that they continue their work within the health and social care and university settings. the problems encountered for service provider co-researchers were very different, as follows: • they felt all work on the project should be done within their office hours but struggled to create the time and space to conduct research tasks to the standard they felt was appropriate. negotiation with line managers helped to free time for research tasks. • there was some conflict between work roles and research learning. for example, involvement of service user voices in the project bore tangible benefits, yet this was not always undertaken in other domains of service provision in which they were working. this caused a degree of frustration and a feeling of inability to achieve the best outcomes 159 for service users. where such concerns arose, the research team talked though options for limited service user involvement and pointed to the use of involvement in future work. • some lack of motivation was experienced due to the burdens of an inflexible bureaucratic system and heavy work load. in these instances, the research team re-negotiated any coresearcher tasks to minimize their impact on work time and thus reduce such burdens. • perhaps the most problematic issue arose when co-researchers were distressed when analyzing their own service role in what could be rather depressing service users experiences. re-aligning their perceptions towards the aim of the project to improve wellbeing through service provision was critical to helping co-researchers to envision the benefits of such work. a number of disadvantages associated with involvement were experienced by the university researchers. in particular: • the intensive level of work needed to prepare training and support for co-researchers throughout was not fully anticipated at project outset. in addition, formal evaluation of co-researcher experiences constituted a small scale study in itself. nevertheless, intensive input was required to ensure effective involvement and this was prioritized over more administrative tasks. • researchers were sometimes exposed to upsetting situations where co-researcher illness or stress stimulated re-thinking of ethical issues about the rigours of participation in research, especially with people who are vulnerable to stress and ill health. in effect, researchers reported that the perceived benefits of involvement outweighed the felt disbenefits, but that they felt bound to support co-researchers in any way they could – often putting in effort in their own leisure time to smooth the process for co-researchers. • at times, researchers felt that the involvement process was beyond their current skill base. in response, reading around the process of service user and provider involvement was strongly encouraged so that learning from previous par projects could help guide decisions and actions. in hindsight, the project and the co-researcher process would have benefited from: • the creation of a forum or panel of co-researchers who could be consulted regarding their involvement in future university, local authority or national health service projects. • a more accurate anticipation of the time required to support involvement would have 160 made the whole process more manageable. • there is a need for timely up-skilling in training methods/ negotiation skills in order to ensure the smooth running of the co-research element of the study. • a buddying system could be implemented between co-researchers and research staff to address unrealistic expectations and increasing stress levels before they become problematic. this was done informally but did add to the university researcher workload • training in time management and counseling skills. in conclusion the co-research involvement of service users and providers were crucial to the success of the project in envisioning and recommending the design and development of well-being services for people with ltncs. many psychological, social and community benefits to such participation were realized and the increase in co-researcher skills and confidence were evident. however, problems of empowerment within the research and service context were encountered as the mapping of service change progressed. discussion, training and skills acquisition sessions were negotiated and facilitated with co-researchers with consequent positive and negative implications for the research design, data collection and analysis, and interpretation of findings. what was of paramount importance was the institution of the vision that co-researching was not just about bringing service users to the table, but equipping both service users and health and social care providers to discuss and work together on an equal basis. in this way, service user voices have been acknowledged and capacity building has progressed both within the community and in the service sector. this allowed service users and providers to relate together in different, more harmonious ways, involving openness, listening and attitude change (kagan, 2008) as well as learning from each other and influencing the research beneficially. the experiences of university and co-researchers have been traced in this paper, pointing to the importance of considering the short and long term implications of collaborative working and the impact this has on project outcomes and service design. 161 references braun, v. & clarke, v. 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(2008). understanding health and well-being in the context of urban regeneration: manchester case study. final report. 2013-003-final-20130926 heroes and martyrs against alienation: growing up as puer and puella in postmodern society nuria ciofalo pacifica graduate institute author notes: this paper is based on a project evaluation report submitted to dr. stewart sokol, phd, director of youth services, tarzana treatment center, los angeles, california on august 30, 2009. a first version of this paper was presented at the 118th annual convention of the american psychological association, san diego, california, august 2010. correspondence should be sent to nuria ciofalo, pacifica graduate institute, 249 lambert road, carpinteria, ca. email: nciofalo@pacifica.edu keywords: art-based education, art therapy, youth development, community psychology, depth psychology, liberation psychology, substance abuse, participatory action research recommended citation: ciofalo, n. (2013). heroes and martyrs against alienation: growing up as puer and puella in postmodern society. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(3), 1-8. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 heroes and martyrs against alienation: growing up as puer and puella in postmodern society nuria ciofalo pacifica graduate institute abstract an innovative art intervention program named art works was offered to 47 latino youths (ages 12-18) who were coping with chemical dependency and/or mental health illness. art works provided youth with a creative outlet to use art as a means for self-expression, self-awareness, and community involvement. a jungian approach to youth development was applied by which youth participants were empowered to become aware of their inner dialogue with and about youth and art was used as a vehicle for inclusion of the youths’ voices. this intervention promoted movement flow into the deeper knowledge and understanding of the archetypes at play, those existing in the colonizer/oppressor (the adult, the senex) and those existing in the colonized/oppressed (the youth, the puer and puella contemporaneous), as well as into their interplay and resolution. outcomes were measured by applying multiple methods and instruments: a youth empowerment pre-post test, progress/group notes, personal journals, art products, behavior observations, and the application of random drug tests. the participatory program evaluation engaged youth in continued critical self-reflection. the quantitative and qualitative findings suggest that participants manifested increased self-awareness, improved positive peer associations, and reduced drug abuse as a result of their participation in the program. at the conclusion of the program 64% of the participants tested negative in random drug tests. the youth art products showed a dramatic change in their content, namely, from obsessive drug related representations to colorful, abstract, and futuristic images. the implications for art-based interventions and related youth development are discussed. keywords: art-based education, art therapy, youth development, community psychology, depth psychology, liberation psychology, substance abuse, participatory action research introduction the current worrisome alarm of youth violence and suffering is calling for imperative action. the recent school massacre in newtown, connecticut on december 14, 2012 in which a 20 year old, young white man killed his own mother, 20 children, and six teachers and then committed suicide has intensively shaken our psyches in deep horror and sorrow. we need to innovate transformative and comprehensive interventions to heal the pervasive impacts of our increasingly alienating society on our youth. involving youth in art activities may be a promising strategy to promote inclusive dialogue about the factors and consequences of contemporary youth alienation that separate the individual and the collective psyche in inner and outer worlds. epidemic proportions of youths suffering from violence or substance abuse is wrongly conceived as an individual dysfunction without reference to what is happening in the outer world, in society, institutions, neighborhoods, and schools. innovative interventions need to be informed by psychological theories and methodologies that allow the targeting of the deeply embedded roots of the problem thereby facilitating the healing of wounds caused by societal alienation. art-based interventions that are informed by depth psychology seek to unite the inner and the outer world as a means to regenerate and re-discover “a centeredness of internal rhythm of being . . .(by which) a tattered self comes together and mends” (robbins & sibley, 1976; p. 21). in the outer world are the people, the objects, the messages, policies, and actions that validate the self. for example, jungian art therapists travel within these two worlds establishing therapeutic dialogues, recognizing the manifestation of archetypes at play. jung (1964) referred to the concept of the archetype as the instinctual, apriori images that have existed throughout time and space. archetypes are transcendental images of our collective unconscious that unite us and that promote self-realization. jung (1964) coined the term puer aeternus to represent the archetype of the eternal child embracing diverse forms, for example, the divine child, the godchild, the demon child, and the evil child. the puella aeternus (eternal girl) archetype has been recently studied by postmodern jungian scholars such as clarissa pinkola estes, linda leonard, marion woodman, and patricia reis. hillman (2005) considered that these archetypes represent a syndrome that increasingly becomes an unconscious antidote to the lifeless and mechanistic world of the negative logos that is manifested in today’s life philosophy of america. the logos is maintained by puer’s opposite, the senex, as the archetype of a wise and tyrannical old man or the adult. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the puer/puella and senex archetypal images seem amenable to promote in-depth dialogue with and about youth who become participants and co-researchers in the design, implementation, and evaluation of youth programs. art therapists and educators, who work with youth and who follow a depth psychological framework, acknowledge the presence of these archetypes in their collective unconscious thereby becoming aware of their own senex archetype as well as, of its projections that emerge from our own personal unconscious or our own shadows. responsible art therapists and educators become aware of their senex privilege to access critical, reflexive knowledge of the factors causing human and world suffering. lastly, this knowledge is translated into popular knowledge, disseminating and promoting equal access to it, allowing for liberating awareness that catalyzes holistic youth development and well-being. the puer and puella in post-modern society the puer and puella aeternus become contemporaneous in our post-modern society by means of their struggle against alienation. following jung (1957/1958/2000), we live in a society that has taken the place of god, causing individual atomization and submersion in mass consumerism, devoid of soul. jung considered that this type of society powerfully deprives the individual of moral decisions on how to live his/her own life and, as a result, the individual “…is ruled, fed, clothed and educated as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance to the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses” (p. 12). this creates a state of massmindedness in which the self cannot achieve individuation (self-realization) but it is rather forced into manipulative individualism for the sake of massproduction, accumulation, and mass-consumerism. it may be said that we have entered a state of what hillman (1975) called “de-personalization,” a loss of soul, a condition in which “ . . .the personal coefficient standing behind the ego and its relation with self and world is suddenly absent” (p.44). hillman considered that as a result, the gods become diseases in a suffering world. they are manifested in chronic disorders, occulted in misshapen, inhuman forms, in all forms of chronic diseases in individuals and communities. further, hillman added, because the puer gives us connection to the spirit, it is always concerned with the eternal aspects of ourselves and the world. when this concern becomes only-puer, exclusive and negative, the world as world is in danger of dissolution into the otherworldly. this danger is especially present in the psyche and history of this fraction of our era. therefore, it is of immense importance that the puer be recognized and valued for it carries our future—positive or negative. (p. 28) alarming chronic issues among youth have been reported as vandalism in the form of graffiti, substance abuse, relationship violence, eating disorders, and suicidal behavior. two issues of the american psychologists (2008, 2009) highlighted particularly youth violence and suicidal behavior as contemporary youth epidemics. current events alert us to digest painful massacres conducted by youth against youth. the current archetypal images of the puer and puella are depicted as the evil and martyr child rather than the divine child. this metamorphosis trembles our psyches. in our dearth, our panic, we repress the terrifying image of the evil child, the demon that threatens our well-established bourgeoisie and middleclass value standards. in responding to our complex, we repress the fear that threatens to unveil our shadows, filled with uncontrolled rage and sanctioned desires, and decide to harshly domesticate and punish our youth. our internal archetype senex reacts with a bitter scapegoat complex, charging projections of tyranny and rage, punishing and controlling the transformed dark puer and puella over and over again in our schools, our cities, and our homes. we lock them up in youth correctional facilities, treatment centers, and segregated neighborhoods. the latter sites are especially designed to vanish the most worrisome, most threatening, darker-colored puer and puella. the heroes when puer and puella revolt in evil rage against the brutal colonization and depersonalization, against the de-animation in the world and ourselves; against senex’s stigmatizations, scapegoat projections, and his everyday tyranny, our youths manifest their soul needs for liberation in diverse ways. in one of these ways, they transform into heroes. one example of this manifestation is witnessed when they raise their voices in the form of graffiti images all over our street-walls and private property. in city and soul hillman (2006) wrote: the soul wants its images, and when it doesn’t, it finds them, it makes substitutes, billboards and graffiti, for instance…the marks made in public spaces, called defacing of monuments, actually put a face on an impersonal wall of oversized statue. the human hand seems to want to touch and leave its touch, even if by only obscene smears and ugly scrawls.” (p. 116) the national institute of health (2009) stated that: “violence, and youth violence in particular, is a national public health issue in the u.s. indeed, homicide is the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 second leading cause of death of males aged 15-24, and females aged 15-24” (retrieved from: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files-archive/pa09-170.html#partii). dodge (2008) described the following, emerging metaphors in current times: • the super-predator: youths have been seen as severely morally impoverished, juvenile superpredators. the source and cause of the problem is seen as existing within the child. • the morally-ill youth: youth crime has been viewed as caused by a lack of religion and disadvantaged children at high risk were considered to be both genetically and morally defective. • contagious youth violence: criminal behavior is considered a “social contagion process.” as a result, violent youth need to be segregated to avoid further spread of the disease. • corrective surgery: the violent child’s defect can be corrected through surgical intervention. • the vaccine for violent behavior: a single environmental pathogen can be attacked by infusion of an agent (the vaccine) that will enable the organism to resist future threats for a period of time. • chronic violence as chronic disease: chronic disease manifests itself at early stages in the child’s life and it is a function of a combination of dispositional and environmental factors. (pp. 575590). most of these metaphors fail to place the manifestations of the contemporary puer and puella embedded within a context where massive alienation, poverty, unemployment, structural violence, lack of quality education, and quality foods are the norm. the martyrs in 2004, the substance abuse and mental health services administration (samhsa) reported that “combining data from the 2003-2004 samhsa's national surveys on drug use and health. . .1.5 million youths (6.1% youths aged 12 to 17) were classified as needing alcohol treatment in the past year. . . and about 1.4 million youths (5.4% aged 12 to 17) were classified as needing illicit drug use treatment in the past year” (retrieved from: http://oas.samhsa.gov/2k6/youthtxneed/youthtxneed. cfm). goldston et al., (2008) added that suicide is the third leading cause of death among adolescents, accounting for a greater number of deaths combined for 15-24 year-olds, based on data published by the center for disease control in 2006. remarkable gender and ethnic differences were found in several studies targeting suicidal behavior, suicide ideation and intent. for example, the rate of suicide deaths is 20 times higher among american indian/alaskan native males compared to africanamerican, latino, asian american/pacific islanders and white adolescents (ibid., 2008, pp. 14-31). the authors emphasized the fact that suicidal behavior and help seeking occur within a cultural context and that there is limited research and publications on successful, culturally compatible interventions in this area. it seems adequate to assume that in our contemporary, alienating, violent, and overly consume-oriented world created by senex (the adult archetype), our puer and puella seek to self-medicate and/or to escape through the use of alcohol and drugs or, if several intents have been unsuccessful, the only remediation remaining is to take their own lives, including the lives of others. the described archetypes of puer and puella contemporaneous depict narratives of structural (or systemic/institutionalized) violence in the form of violence towards the self, others, and the environment. such experiences consequently bring continuous trauma to the self. marc pilisuk (2008) added that, “on a daily basis, we live in ways that result in the violent deaths of vulnerable people, particularly children, as a consequence of how we exploit, consume, and dispose of the environment that sustains human life” (cited in hall, 2009). hall (2009) recommended that: if we want to promote children’s rights and to protect children from violence, abuse, neglect, and trauma, we need to take into account the ravages on children’s well-being of structural violence–the unjust, harmful, institutionalized inequalities of wealth, social status, and power that cause disproportionate death, disability, despair, humiliation, and heartache among the disadvantaged. structural violence is manifested in class and caste hierarchies, in the stigmatizing and oppression of minorities, and in the military, political, and economic exploitation of the poor. (retrieved from: http://psysr.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/childrenstructural-violence-and-the-uncrc-reflectionsfor-childrens-advocates/). our dark-colored, minority puer and puella are trapped in the battle against acculturation under which their identities, created in their own cultures of origin, experience colonization of new forms of thought, feeling, relating, and acting. in the disintegration provoked by fragmented and/or imposed processes of identity formation, these “ethnic” puer and puella end as martyrs in the hopelessness of ending the long historical forces of colonization, discrimination, and repression of diversity, or as heroes in order to protect the plurality of their selves. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 the praxis the concept of praxis is meant here as reflection and imagination, as a means of soul-making and knowledge generation from the bottom-up or the self, deepening into the manifestations of the collective unconscious, and as a means of giving voice to those who have been excluded from privileged dialogue. this concept concurrently implies action and intervention to treat the manifested symptom, the phenomena of disease, in order to heal the self and the community that we inhabit. praxis means to accept the plurality of images and identities with equal permission and access to liberating awareness of the conflicting drives trapped in the personal unconscious. it means to promote movement flow into the deeper knowledge and understanding of the archetypes at play, those existing in the colonizer/oppressor (in this case the adult, the senex) and those existing in the colonized/oppressed (in this case the youth, the puer and puella contemporaneous) as well as into their interplay and resolution. by the same token, we need to involve policy-makers and decision-makers in this endeavor with the goal of transforming the conditions that perpetuate misery into opportunities for liberation. one way to achieve this is through well-funded educational interventions. for example, jung proposed that education should spark the imagination with colorful finger-paints and rhythmic drums, with sensual and intuitive tasting not standardized and excluding testing (malchiodi, 2006); an education that reinforces the plurality of voices and possibilities of expression that opens up a multiplicity of fantasies; the force of the imaginal dimension to allow the soul and spirit to grow and develop (mayes, 2010). further, education needs to raise awareness of the effects that poverty and oppression have on the self; it needs to be liberating and use popular knowledge instead of imposing hegemonic knowledge (freire,1970/1989; shulman &watkins 2008). under this kind of education, our youth can be exposed to learning how to listen to their dreams and to find their own archetypes. an important task is to encounter the collective unconscious that will give them a transcendental sense of belonging to this world and a deep sense of community. youth need to continuously work on their dreams to expand consciousness, to learn how to develop hopeful dreams, to learn how to make them true, and to achieve transformation through selfknowledge and self-realization. adults need to transform their senex archetype into the archetype of a catalyzing mentor. in this way, we can become able to transform the previously mentioned senex-driven youth metaphors, from disease, from defeated heroes and martyrs, into self-knowledge and liberation. further, we need to raise consciousness of our conflicting shadows in which the god senex is trapped and release the destructive projections that we are imposing on our youth. targeting the structural causes of violence is an imperative task. one way of doing this is through dissemination of critical knowledge, transforming our privileges into accessible popular knowledge. in this way, our youth can become peaceful, emancipative activists, productive contributors, and friendly companions in our collective journey to heal the world. goals and design of the art works program art works was a new and innovative art therapy and educational program offered to youth (ages 12-18), who were coping with chemical dependency and/or mental health illness, at tarzana treatment center’s (ttc) youth outpatient program in los angeles, california. art works provided youth with a creative outlet that sought to enhance the therapeutic and educational environment to encourage healing through the arts. the program gave youth the opportunity to use art as an extension of self-expression and to raise critical awareness. it integrated art, imagination, reverie, dream work, reflection, awareness raising, popular education, and psychodrama as a means to promote liberating alternatives for our puer and puella contemporaneous. art works’ program goals were:(1) to engage at-risk youth in creative processes; (2) to teach youth fine art skills, and (3) to promote personal exploration of a new self concept facilitated by the enrichment of created work. the expected outcomes aimed to achieve a: (1) 60% increase in self-esteem, (2) 60% increase in positive peer associations, and (3) a 30% decrease in drug use (tarzana treatment center, 2009). these outcomes were determined based on evaluative learning from achieved outcomes of previous ttc youth programs. the author of this paper was the designer, facilitator, and evaluator of this intervention. based on ttc’s program outcomes the following learning objectives were added: • increased awareness of the deep self and understanding that behaviors are directed by internal and external meanings and messages; • self-awareness through imaginary self-expression and introspection; • sense of group belonging and cohesion through sharing stories of the deep self; • team-work and team identity that increase confidentiality and trust; • understanding that individual well-being interacts with the social context; • understanding the etiology of substance abuse and addiction; and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 • making healthy life decisions (ciofalo, 2009). art works overall expected outcome was youth empowerment. it was conceived under the search institute’s 40 developmental assets that include the assessment of: (1) social support (from family, schools, and organizations); (2) empowerment (youths feel safe and valued as resources and contributors); (3) boundaries and expectations (adult role models); (4) constructive use of time (creative activities, youth programs); (5) commitment to learning (engaged in learning); (6) positive values (caring for peers); (7) social competencies (i.e., interpersonal competencies); (8) positive identity (self-esteem, purpose in life, and positive view of the future), and enabling environments that promote positive youth development (retrieved from: http://www.search-institute.org/developmentalassets). research concerned with the concept of empowerment has concluded that it is a construct that encompasses several components (zimmerman, 2000). further, empowerment can be understood as a cause, a process, and an outcome. causes of empowerment may be located in the individual’s external or internal environment. processes of empowerment are the activities in which individuals engage that allow them to exercise the empowerment components. the outcomes of empowerment reflect the internalized empowerment causes, and the exercised empowerment processes manifested as psychological competencies that can predict mastery of targeted behaviors. for example, the ttc constitutes an external cause of youth empowerment. the art works program facilitated a process to exercise youth empowerment and the empowerment outcomes were those behaviors acquired as a result of participation. the program was designed under the socio-cultural acceptance model represented in figure 1. under this model, the holistic self is represented at the center. interventions that reinforce socio-cultural acceptance promote the expression of needs, fantasies, and desires by means of catharsis (i.e., the release of energy without repression). if the self feels safe and accepted, the individual will be able to engage in deep processes of reflection of existing assets and stressors in his/her life thereby promoting change. socio-cultural acceptance releases energy to create new alternatives, new fantasies, and desires that emerge from the deep self. in this case, the self-experiences expansion as a result of a constant and fluid flow of energy between the inner and the outer world. as a consequence, empowerment, self-determination, self-regulation, and creativity based on multicultural behavior standards are manifested into the outer world. in contrast, if the intervention promotes regulation by means of sociocultural rejection, for example, punishing youths if they express obsessive and addictive imaginary or bad language, the individual will hermetically close his/her inner circle and release accumulated energy in the form of repression, aggression, frustration, and escapism. as a result, substance abuse and antisocial behaviors will be manifested in the outer world. figure 1. the socio-cultural acceptance model the program design also included an adapted curriculum to promote youth empowerment and involvement in community development (ciofalo, 1997). the new curriculum integrated arts such as painting and drawing, journal writing, mask-making, storytelling, sharing dreams, future planning, and psychodrama activities to promote intrinsic self-growth and awareness of the deep self (ciofalo, 2009). under psychodrama approaches, art therapy adds ego support functions. a protagonist, who becomes the main actor of his/her inner world, is supported by auxiliary egos in “order to set the stage for neutralized energy” (robins & sibley, 1976, p. 31). auxiliary egos help the protagonist to become aware of deep conflicts and desires. during sessions the facilitator emphasized the importance of nourishing authentic images and fantasies that emerge from the deep self, such as the awareness of talents represented in dreams of what they want to become in the future, instead of absorbing the externally imposed images. further, the art works program integrated the work of david fontana (2004) entitled teach yourself to dream, that provides exercises and activities for a young audience to learn to global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 understand their dreams and to change images by means of active imagination and intuition. in addition, various cooperative learning structures were applied during the sessions (kagan, 1995). the final art products were displayed in an exhibit at the treatment center and shared with their families and youths who were attending other programs. lastly, a concluding, celebratory event consisted in a fieldtrip to the los angeles contemporary museum of arts. methods participants and procedures the youths who attend the treatment center are referred by the juvenile justice or the mental health systems and are mandated to receive mental health treatment for specific periods of time. a total of 47 youths of ages 14 to 18 were integrated in this program. almost all youths (95%) were latinos (n=44) from impoverished neighborhoods and about 21% (n=10) were girls. the remaining 5% (n=3) of the youths were caucasian and asian. three groups were formed. two groups were composed of an average of 19 youths. a third group was composed of 7 to 9 youths attending the ttc’s high school. each group participated in one-hour weekly sessions for a total of four months in the facilities of the ttc’s outpatient youth services. participatory selfevaluation applied psychodrama techniques to engage the youths into constant self-reflective activities at the end of each session (the closure). some of the sessions were videotaped and watched with the youth to promote critical reflection of constructive or destructive behaviors that were furthering or impeding the program process. this technique was used as a tool of both program intervention and self-evaluation. data collection and analysis outcomes were measured by applying multiple quantitative and qualitative methods and instruments. the quantitative instruments were a pre-post test that measured youth empowerment and a random drug test. the qualitative methods were analysis of progress/group notes, personal journals, art products, and behavior observations during the interventions. lastly, participatory evaluation of the program was applied with youth involvement. the pre-post empowerment test a pre-post test measuring youth empowerment was applied to the youths before and after the program. the test is an adaptation of an empowerment questionnaire developed and applied to measure youth empowerment in diverse cultural contexts (ciofalo, 1996). this instrument builds on the empowerment test developed by schwerin (1995) that combines scales of various instruments with acceptable validity and reliability. the adapted version applied in this study consists of 28 items that measure the following components/factors of empowerment: general self efficacy; self-esteem; group cooperation/participation; perceived competence; internal locus of control, and use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs (atod). examples of some of the items are: “i am responsible of whether or not i accomplish my goals;” “i enjoy having control over my life, and “i find it very easy to stay away from using drugs” (see appendix i). the journals all youths completed confidential journals. many of the group activities consisted of personal reflections that the youth could conduct in written or in drawing from. a total of 47 journals were analyzed by the program facilitator based on the themes, motifs, contents, and meanings of the writings and drawings compared to the expected program outcomes. the progress/group notes and observations after each session, the program facilitator recorded detailed descriptions of the process and outcomes and analyzed them based on the expected program outcomes. the art products the drawings, paintings, collages, masks, and any other art product such as psychodrama sessions were analyzed under depth psychological perspectives and methodologies. the analysis and interpretation of images and processes were based on the expected program outcomes. participatory self-evaluation the youths were integrated into constant self-reflective activities at the end of each session (the closure). in addition, specific activities encouraged them to evaluate the course of the program (what was working and not working and suggested recommendations) by means of mid-term and final tests and reflective entries in their journals. further, some of the sessions were videotaped and watched with the youth after some of the sessions to promote reflection of constructive or destructive behaviors that were furthering or impeding the process of the program. results results of the empowerment test are provided in table 1. although all of the 47 youths participated in at least 70% of all sessions, participation was not constant because new participants were frequently integrated into the groups. as a result, only data obtained from 12 participants who attended all sessions at the beginning and at the end of the program are reported in this table. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 there was no significant change between the pre and post measures among all the empowerment components. however, results are in the 1 to 3 score range as measured by a likert scale from 1 to 5, where 1 and 2 indicated manifestation of empowerment. reverse scoring was used to control for answers that were randomly given by participants. table 1. results of the empowerment questionnaire (1 and 2 = high degrees of empowerment) empowerment component pre-test score (n=12) post-test score (n=13) general self-efficacy (items: 1, 3, 4, 7, 9, 8) 2.6 2.6 self-esteem (items: 5, 6, 16, 20, 28) 2.8 2.7 internal locus of control (items: 2, 12) 2.6 2.6 perceived competence (6, 10, 11, 13, 21, 22) 3.1 3 participation cooperation (item: 8) 2.4 2.6 sociability trust (items: 15, 17) 2.1 2.6 alcohol tobacco and other drugs (atod) (items: 24, 25, 26, 27) 2.5 2.3 the lower responses given under perceived competence (3 and 3.1) may be due to the fact that many youths experienced anxiety that they may fail the juvenile court requirements such as the random drug tests. this may be considered a response to the experience of trauma (i.e., being arrested or incarcerated). in addition, 95% of the participating youths were from latino origin, and they came from impoverished and oppressive environments that do not provide them opportunities for growth and development and thus do not give them hope for change. particularly, it was impressive that 15% of the youths selected the 1 and 2 score (strongly agree or agree) to answer question #22: “i often question whether life is worthwhile.” answers to this test item were further analyzed in session discussions as well as individual conversations with the participants. this worrisome response calls attention to the need to preserve quality youth programs such as those provided by the ttc but also to implement environmental interventions that at least reduce (if not eliminate) the pervasive causes of poverty and social, economic, psychological, and political oppression. the drug tests revealed that of 47 participants, 28% (n=13) went from positive to negative drug results, meaning that they were consuming drugs before they started the program and that they stopped consuming drugs at the end of the program; 36% (n=17) started the program testing negative and were able to remain negative by the end of the program, and a total of 64% (n=30) ended the program testing negative. analyses of the journals, group observations, and drawings under content analysis techniques followed categorization of the youths’ narratives, observed behaviors, and images under the empowerment components addressed in the empowerment test such as, self-esteem, self-efficacy, locus of control, and group cooperation and participation, and the learning objectives outlined on page 13. results suggested that the youths developed increased self-esteem. several activities required that they described themselves or that they detailed their qualities. seventy-five percent of the journals contained positive descriptions about themselves as well as positive qualities. in addition, the drawings contained in the journals of 80% of the participants (n=39) revealed progress towards the development of new imaginary that was not related to the use of drugs, tobacco, and alcohol (see appendix, figures 2-16). in addition, the detailed description of the sessions suggested the gradual emergence of increased self-esteem among the youths who participated regularly in the program. as stated previously, 95% of the youths were latinos and several sessions evidenced the emergence of cultural pride as an asset for positive youth development and empowerment. for example, youths requested more mexican mythology books when the facilitator brought books of different cultures to instigate discussions about archetypes. further, their latest art products were colorful and dynamic paintings representing an open and promising view of their future (see appendix, figures, 15 and 16). an example of increased awareness of the interaction between the individual and the social self was evident when youths completed their collages selecting images from popular youth magazines and common media literature (see appendix, figure10). the participants were able to discern how mediaproduced images such as, alcohol, sexual scenes, guns, and a drastic bombardment of objects to be consumed, and how these images appeared in their own fantasies, expressed as “dreams” and “nightmares” (see appendix, figure, 11—note the reference to dionysus as the archetype of excessive drinking). further, participants developed positive relationships with each other during the group sessions and were supportive, cooperative, and respectful of each other’s stories of the deep self as evaluated by the number of times that youth cooperated in developing art products as well as the empathetic responses they gave during global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 sessions that required sharing of personal stories. lastly, the videotaped sessions demonstrated that participants were engaging in supportive behaviors and aware of how their behaviors influenced the course of the activities. for example, several youths engaged in collaborative paintings using one canvas as a group product; participants pointed at the behavior of others, who were being disruptive during sessions, and offered recommendations for process improvement. discussion the quantitative results, based on the small number of participants (n=12) who completed the empowerment test, did not report that the program had a significant impact on manifestations of empowerment. however, the results of the random drug test suggested that the expected program outcome of 30 percent reduced drug abuse was surpassed (64%). further, the involved youth successfully created new images and fantasies away from the substance abuse topic (see appendix, figures 2-16). these qualitative results seem to suggest that this intervention promoted the emergence of critical thinking and awareness of the oppressive environmental stressors that youths are facing and how these influenced their fantasies, dreams or nightmares, and behaviors. the key factors that seemed to have a positive effect on youth engagement in this program’s activities were the application of art therapy under the framework and methodologies of depth psychology as well as the use of popular education approaches. the latter allowed to adapting complex depth psychological language to make it easy and understandable for the youth. artbased interventions informed by depth psychology seem to promote the understanding of conflicts and resistances, and in sum, the dynamics of the deep self. they are culturally compatible and age appropriate interventions given that adolescents tend to express their inner world by means of symbols and metaphors. this program offered adolescents at risk opportunities for identity exploration as well as for the promotion of critical thinking in regards to the environmental factors that alienate them causing drug abuse and antisocial behavior. the youths were able to raise awareness of the oppressive roles that they may take—as heroes or martyrs— in response to an alienating, capitalistic, and consumerist culture. the supportive socio-cultural environment created during sessions (see figure 1) promoted trust and encouraged the youths to express themselves freely, allowing for catharsis of internal conflicts, awareness raising of behavioral consequences, and representation of alternative future scenarios. the findings suggest that this art-based, educational intervention promoted mainly an increase in self-esteem, positive peer interactions, and creative envisioning of a hopeful future. these outcomes have been abundantly reported in outcome studies of artbased interventions (see rapp-paglicci, stewart, & rowe, 2012; kang song & gammel, 2011; stevenson, 2011; rostan, 2010;anderson, walch, & becker, 2009; stinson, 2009; bianchi, 2008; wright, alaggia, & sheel, 2006; adams & luke, 2001; artusa, 2000; brice, 2000, and randall, dian, & miller, 1998). however, the achieved outcomes could be the result of the contribution of other services participants were receiving from the outpatient program or the result of other factors in their lives. these limitations are also considered in light that there was not a standard case comparison group. furthermore, the factor that the qualitative data was analyzed and interpreted by the creator of this art-based intervention poses a potential risk of introducing a biased perspective on the achieved outcomes. one challenge encountered with the implementation of this program was the constant integration of new participants into the groups and the effect that the newcomers had in those participants who were already attending the groups. for example, if more frequently participating youths were already developing new images and fantasies, other than those that expressed drug abuse motifs, the newcomers would start the intervention with obsessive drug use cravings, reflected in their drawings and group discussions (see appendix, figure 4). for the most part, the youths, who were already integrated into the group and who had manifested behavioral change, would start again expressing drug use fantasies and imaginaries. in such cases, the facilitator raised their awareness and “mirrored back” the progress made by other participants, comparing the art products of the newcomers with those of the more established participants. another challenge was group size. when groups had only 4 to 6 participants, the sessions were very intimate and thus, effective. also, the schoolbased group progressed quickly and the quality of the responses, dialogues, and introspective work that the youth was able to achieve did not occur in the other groups. one recommendation to increase the impact of this program is maintaining stable groups with the same participants throughout the program. this is a difficult task given the conditions under which ttc has to operate. many youths are required to do a specific number of hours ordered by the juvenile court or by government institutions and when these hours are completed, they leave treatment while new youths are sent to start treatment. this “moving group” situation is one with which ttc staff has to deal with every day. the final recommendation is that government and funders need to provide more resources to global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 institutionalize art-based interventions as ongoing healing, educational, and liberating strategies to promote holistic youth development in schools, treatment centers, and communities. references adams, m., & luke, j (2001). the heart project evaluation report. annapolis, md: the institute for learning innovation. anderson, s., walch, n., & becker, k. (2009). the power of art: the arts as an effective intervention strategy for at-risk youth. los angeles, ca: the california endowment. artusa. (2000). arts programs for at-risk youth: how us communities are using the arts to rescue their youth and deter crime. washington, dc: author. bianchi, j. (october, 2008). participation through an international exploration of young peoples’ construction of visual image and identity. international journal of art & design education, 27(3), 293-308. brice, h.s. (2000). artshow: youth and community development. washington, dc: partners for livable communities. ciofalo, n. (1997). youth development project: an interdisciplinary, participatory, community action-research curriculum. university of hawaii: center for youth research, social science research institute. ciofalo, n. (1996). community development initiated by the youth: an intergenerational and multicultural approach to community-based quality of life. ann arbor, mi: a bell & howell company. ciofalo, n. (2009). art works program plan and evaluation report. los angeles, ca: tarzana treatment center youth services. dodge, k. (october 2008). metaphors on youth violence. american psychologists, 63,7, pp. 573590. fontana, d. (2004). teach yourself to dream: a practical guide. san francisco, ca: chronicle books freire, p. (1970/1989). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: seabury. godston, d. b., molock, s. d., whitbeck, l. b., murakami, j. l., zayas, l., & nagayama hall, g. c. (january 2008). cultural considerations in adolescent suicide prevention and psychosocial treatment. american psychologists, 63(1), 14-31. hall, m. (2009).children, structural violence, and the uncrc: reflections for children’s advocates. retrieved from: http://psysr.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/childrenstructural-violence-and-the-uncrc-reflections-forchildrens-advocates/. hillman, j. (2006). city and soul. putman, ct: spring publishing. hillman, j. (2005). senex and puer. putman, ct: spring publications. hillman, j. (1975). re-visioning psychology. putman, ct: spring publications. holmes, d., & karp, m. (1992). psychodrama: inspiration and technique. london, england: tavistock & routledge. jung, c. (1964). man and his symbols. london, england: aldus books limited. jung, c. (1957/1958/2006). the undiscovered self. new york: new american library. kagan, s. (1995). an introduction to cooperative learning structures. san juan capistrano, ca: kagan cooperative learning. kang song, y. i., & gammel, j. a. (2011). ecological mural as community reconnection. international journal of art & design education, 30, pp. 266– 278. leventon, e. (2001). a clinician's guide to psychodrama (3rd ed.). new york: springer. malchiodi, c. a. (2006). the art therapy sourcebook. new york: mcgraw hill mayes, c. (2010). the organic infrastructure of transformative education. spring, 23, i, pp. 31-37. moreno, j. l. (1963). psychodrama. beacon, nj: beacon house. national institute of health. (2009). nih request for proposals on teen dating. retrieved from: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-filesarchive/pa-09-170.html#partii. rapp-paglicci, l., stewart, c., & rowe, w. (2012). improving outcomes for at-risk youth: findings from the prodigy cultural arts program. journal of evidence-based social work, 9,5, 512-523. randall, p., dian, m., & miller, c. (1997). artworks! prevention programs for youth and communities. washington, dc: national endowment of the arts and center for substance abuse administration. robbins, a., & sibley l. b. (1976). creative art therapy. new york: brunner/mazel publishers. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 rostan, s. m. (2010). studio learning: motivation, competence, and the development of young art students’ talent and creativity. creativity research journal, 22, 261-271. shulman, h., & watkins, m. (2008). toward psychologies of liberation. new york: palgrave macmillan publishers. schwerin, e. w. (1990). mediation and empowerment: citizen participation in conflict resolution. unpublished doctoral dissertation, university of hawaii at manoa. stevenson, l. m. (2011). creating destiny: youth, arts and social change (unpublished doctoral dissertation). stanford university, stanford, ca. stinson, a. (winter, 2009). a review of cultural art programs and outcomes for at-risk youth. best practice in mental health,5, 1, pp. 10-25. substance abuse and mental health services administration. (2009). national surveys on drug use and health. substance abuse and mental health administration. retrieved from http://oas.samhsa.gov/2k6/youthtxneed/youthtx need.cfm. tarzana treatment center. (2009). art works program. los angles, ca: tarzana treatment center youth services. the search institute. 40 developmental assets for adolescents. retrieved from http://www.searchinstitute.org/developmental-assets. wright, r., john, l., alaggia, r., & sheel, j. (2006) community-based arts program for youth in lowincome communities: a multi-method evaluation. child and adolescent social work journal, 23, 635–652. zimmerman, m. (2000). empowerment theory: psychological, organizational, and community levels of analysis. in r.j. rappaport & e. seidman (eds.), handbook of community psychology. new york, ny: kluwer academic plenum press. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 appendix i figure 2. journal drawing during the first sessions figure 3. animal image at the beginning of the program global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 figure 4. image of drugs of newcomers into already established groups global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 figure 5. animal image mid-program global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 figure 6. animal image mid program global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 figure 7. animal image at the end of the program global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 figure 8. archetype in a dream global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 figure 9. archetype in a nightmare global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 figure 10. nightmares global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 figure 11. archetype in a nightmare global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 figure 12. dreams global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 figure 13. dreams global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 figure 14. dreams global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 figure 15. future dreams at the end of the program global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 figure 16. future dreams end of program global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 appendix ii the empowerment questionnaire listed below are questions that ask for some basic information about yourself. your responses are confidential. try to be as honest as you can. please select the answer that best describes you. sometimes none of the answers will be exactly right, but pick the one that comes closest. please answer every question. example: i currently live in the state of california. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 1. i am responsible for whether or not i accomplish my goals. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 2. most things in my life are out of my control. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 3. life offers me many choices. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 4. it doesn’t really matter what i say because only the ideas of people with power are heard. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 5. i don’t really have many talents. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6. i am an important member of my community which is: my neighborhood ( ) my group of friends ( )other –please explain:------------------------------------------------------- strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 7. what i do really isn’t valued by the people who matter to me. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 27 8. to accomplish important goals, people must join groups who share their goals. please give example of groups you belong to:---------------------------------------------------strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 9. my problems are so difficult i feel i could not solve them. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 10. sometimes things just don’t seem worth the effort. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 11. i find it very hard to talk in front of a group. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 12. i enjoy having control over my life. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 13. i like to wait and see if someone else is going to solve a problem so that i don’t have to be bothered by it. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 14. when i get what i want, it’s usually because i’m lucky. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 15. the world in which we live is basically a friendly place. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 16. i tend to be shy. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 18. the future looks very disappointing. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 19. i often have the feeling that i am doing something evil. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 28 strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 20. i almost always feel sleepy and lazy. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 21. most of my teachers were helpful. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 22. i often question whether life is worthwhile. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 23. i believe people tell lies anytime to their advantage. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 24. i find it very easy to stay away from smoking tobacco. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 25. i find it very easy to stay away from drinking alcohol. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 26. i find it very easy to stay away from using drugs. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 27. i can resist peer or friend pressure to do things that can harm me or bring me trouble. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 28. i can create my own dreams and i feel confident that i can make them really happen. strongly agree agree neither agree nor disagree disagree strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 330 critical thinking on theory and practice of community psychology sigmar malvezzi1 universidade de são paulo, brazil iii international congress of community psychology puebla, mexico, june 3, 2010                                                                                                                           1 sigmar@usp.br 331 the syntax of present day society and the building of community life. abstract communitarian life is the human condition. in it human beings find mutuality, affection and identity – three of the fundamental resources they require to fulfill their existence. because of the span of resources communitarian life brings about it has not only proved along human history to be a condition that grants better quality of life but has also rooted the strategy of manufacturing cells (the main tool enterprises manage to face the fierce economic competition in the beginning of the xxi century). the structure of manufacturing cells is a technique which replaces the logic of the assembly lines by the logic of the communitarian life. notwithstanding this revival of community by the enterprises, the present day society has not spread the community model as its pattern of existence. conversely, that kind of use of the community model was neutralized by several factors, being one of them the steady production and innovation of all sorts of gadgets, which can and have been used to solve people’s problems and satisfy their needs, thus an stimulus for an individualistic culture. the dependence of those gadgets has created a culture in which communitarian life is not required because people learn to depend on gadgets rather than on other people. apparently, people do not need the community any more because being able to live alone, the other turns to be less important than the gadgets. that culture has been characterized by traits which being the social pattern of human life imposes hurdles to the development of the communitarian life. the first of these traits is the value given to and the dependence of sensations. this cultural trait has been an obstacle to community which is strongly dependent of affection. it is hard to think of a community grounded on sensations because the latter has to do with individuality. the second cultural trait is the loss of sensitiveness for the causality of things. the gradual but steady loss of confidence in the economic and political systems fuels the disappointment with the real word, a condition which according to desbarats (2009) fuels in its turn “the bulimia” of work and of causality. surrounded by technologies people have the perception of power and therefore become result directed rather than building of textures of causalities directed. community implies the sharing of work on the causes of both the events and targets. the third cultural trait is the cult of the urgency, a kind of recreation of the 332 non-temporal time. the conditions created by the economic competition within the context produced by technologies which shrink the time and the space impose the dependence of the flow of conjunctures. these conditions are easily seen in the “zappings”, “fast”, “spots”, “clips” and “just-in-time” patterns of social and individual behavior. the “24 hours” services confirm the non temporal time. today to be busy all the time gives meaning to the existence. how is it possible to build communitarian life when the prevailing cultural logic is the one of the flow of the conjunctures? the individual profile fueled by that culture discloses a person flexible, always rushing, with short term focus, reactive, authoritative, intolerant to frustration and to failure, unable to delegate and unmotivated to communitarian life. as such, that individual may be master of his/her time but is turned into slave of his/her desires. these conditions nourish the social sedentarization and the individualization. through the communitarian life people can learn that the mobile phone is a powerful weapon in the war to fight the economic competition as they can also learn that it is fragile as an instrument of emancipation. in the war people face with their own conscience the most powerful weapon is reflexivity and affection, two resources they can find easily in the communitarian life, not in the gadgets. keywords: communitarian life, individualistic culture, sensations, no causality, urgency, reflexivity, affection. 333 la sintaxis de la sociedad actual y la construcción de vida comunitaria. resumen la vida comunitaria es la condición humana. en ella los seres humanos encuentran mutualidad, afecto e identidad – tres de los recursos fundamentales que requieren para realizar su existencia. a causa del rango de recursos que aporta la vida comunitaria ésta no sólo ha probado, a lo largo de la historia humana que es una condición que ofrece mejor calidad de vida, sino también ha inspirado la estrategia de células de producción (la principal arma que las empresas gestionan para enfrentar la feroz competencia económica a principios del siglo xxi). la estructura de las células de producción es la técnica que remplaza la lógica de las líneas de ensamblaje por la lógica de la vida comunitaria. no obstante la revitalización de la comunidad por las empresas, la actual sociedad no ha difundido el modelo de comunidad como su patrón de existencia. conversamente, ese tipo de uso del modelo de comunidad ha sido neutralizado por varios factores, uno de los cuales ha sido la producción e innovación constante de todo tipo de aparatos (gadgets) que pueden y han sido usados para resolver los problemas de las gentes y satisfacer sus necesidades, volviéndose por lo mismo en el estímulo para una cultura individualística. la dependencia de estos aparatos ha creado una cultura en la cual la vida comunitaria no se requiere porque la gente ha aprendido a depender de los aparatos más que de la gente. aparentemente, la gente ya no necesita de la comunidad porque es capaz de vivir sola. el otro resulta ser menos importante que los aparatos. esta cultura se ha caracterizado por rasgos que siendo el modelo social de la vida humana impone obstáculos al desarrollo de la vida comunitaria. el primero de estos rasgos es la dependencia y el valor otorgado a las sensaciones. este rasgo cultural ha sido un obstáculo a la comunidad que depende fuertemente del afecto. es difícil pensar en una comunidad basada en las sensaciones porque éstas tienen que ver con la individualidad. el segundo rasgo cultural es la pérdida de sensibilidad en relación a la casualidad de las cosas. la gradual pero constante pérdida de confianza en los sistemas económicos y políticos impulsa el desencanto con el mundo real, una situación que según desbarats (2009) impulsa a su vez “la bulimia” por el trabajo y por la causalidad. rodeada por tecnologías la gente tiene una percepción de poder y por lo mismo llega a ser “orientada a resultados” más que a construir tejidos “orientados a causalidades”. comunidad implica el compartir trabajo en las causas de ambos, de 334 los acontecimientos y de los objetivos. el tercer rasgo cultural es el culto de la urgencia, una especie de recreación del tiempo no temporal. las condiciones creadas por la competencia económica dentro del contexto producido por las tecnologías, que encojen el tiempo y el espacio, imponen la dependencia del flujo de coyunturas. estas condiciones pueden verse fácilmente en el “zapping”, “fast”, “spots”, “clips” y “just-in-time”, patrones o esquemas de comportamiento individual y social. los servicios de “24 horas” confirman el tiempo no temporal. estar hoy ocupado todo el tiempo da sentido a la existencia. ¿cómo es posible construir vida comunitaria cuando la lógica cultural prevalente es la del flujo de coyunturas? el perfil individual impulsado por esa cultura es el de una persona flexible, siempre apresurada, incapaz de delegar y sin motivación para la vida comunitaria. como tal, este individuo puede ser dueño de su tiempo pero se vuelve un esclavo de sus deseos. estas condiciones alimentan la sedentarización social y la individualización. a través de la vida comunitaria la gente puede aprender que el teléfono móvil es un arma poderosa en la guerra o en la lucha por la competencia económica, pero también puede aprender que es frágil como un instrumento de emancipación. en la guerra que la gente enfrenta con su propia conciencia las armas más poderosas son la reflexividad y el afecto, dos recursos que pueden encontrar fácilmente en la vida comunitaria, más no en los aparatos (gadgets). palabras clave: vida comunitaria, cultura individualística, sensaciones, no causalidad, urgencia, reflexividad, afecto. 335 introduction community is a way of being-together related to both the sustainability and the quality of human life. this belief is supported by the traditional organization of most societies in small groups, such as the family, and in the centennial history of empirical data produced within both human and biological sciences. these two supports give consistency to the conception of communitarian life as a necessity and as a rich source of resources. innumerable studies on poverty, social peace, demographic reproduction, child socialization, mental health, well-being and the quality of life comprise data and discussions on the communitarian organization of the being-together, as another evidence of the presence of community as a fundamental human issue. unfortunately, it is not the need human beings have of communitarian life that defines the ways it evolves and the support it gets to be accomplished. the globalized society is a historical moment which has added new and harder challenges to communitarian life by removing from the context many of the fundamental elements the achievement of communities relies on (lash, 2007). the weakening of those elements has turned the development of communities within the globalized and competitive society dependent of the understanding of the syntax within which society is organized and managed (urry, 2005). the present chapter is an analysis of that syntax. it aims at exposing some of the boundaries and contingencies imposed by the globalization process to the accomplishment of communitarian life. the main question at stake in it is “what conditions globalization has created that affect the accomplishment of communitarian life?” through the answer of this question the identification of the grammar created by the globalized society is analyzed as part of the resources through which communities are built at the dawn of the xxi century. why is communitarian life a popular and traditional form of being-together? communitarian life consists of a particular way of being-together, or being-with. collective shared life has been present in societies since the most primitive days of men and women in this world. community is a transcendent form of social life for it puts the individual in a creative interdependence with the group. in it, individuals are “i” and “we” at the same time. in communities, people are not gathered as a sum but as a new collective being. the community has 336 been a human solution for the process of adaptation found in both, humans and many animal species such as fishes, insects and mammals. breeding and survival are related to the way the self-other relationship is molded. even a broad oversight of that phenomenon discloses two reasons rooting the choice of communities as a way of being-together. the first is the limited capacity of animals and humans to produce all the resources required for their survival, reproduction and development: thus they require cooperation. being-together is a condition which amplifies those required resources as strengthens the individual’s existence. according to cooper (interviewed by chia and kollinikos, 1998) the being-together in communities is so powerful that turns the action of “understanding” into the action of “interstanding”. the second reason is the persistence of the communitarian way of life (actually, its resistance) along the evolution undergone by both animals and humans, showing that community is an effective solution for the accomplishment of adaptation of individuals and of groups. both animals and humans manage their interaction with the world always looking for the best way to be-with and to explore each other’s resources. communitarian life has been the model chosen for millennia and is far from being overcome or set aside, even within the hard conditions imposed by the globalized world. in investigations of “why communitarian life has succeeded?” it will not be difficult to realize that such a form of being-together has to do with fundamental resources of life such as support, trust, preservation, sharing and well-being. in few words, communitarian life is an adequate setting for the accomplishment of the human condition for its capacity to optimize those resources, and thus fosters long term hope. within communities, individuals are preserved in their individualities, they find support in sharing activities with others and may get confidence and wings for the development of their potentialities. these conditions make communitarian life an object resistant to fragmentation and to disappearance. it accomplishes the well-known belief of gestaltism that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. if this belief this is true, the study of communities has challenged researchers because it requires steps beyond the functional question in such a way that the very understanding of the human condition is grasped as an object of study. that challenge stems from the several faces communitarian life has; it is like a polyhedron an object of several sides in which every side may provide information about itself and the others, to which it borders, but not really information about the whole. besides that, just as 337 gilles deleuze (1980) understood, communitarian life is a mesh of intertwined connections like a rhizome in which the starting and ending points mesh, turning the investigation of causes and consequences an ambiguous issue. accordingly, communitarian life can be applied and studied as a practical resource, as an economical condition, as a culture, as an ideology, as an expression of social life, as a context of reciprocity, as a network of psychological contracts, as a set of small groups and as a milieu of affection. each of these features is like a side of the polyhedron. as the polyhedron does not exist when one takes only a single or few of its sides, community ceases its existence if some of its several features are isolated from the whole. that is the reason why communities are a continuous process of rebuilding the being-together and require methodologies capable of grasping the whole. psychological contracts, identity and leadership are other concepts which share that sort of challenge with the concept of community. considering that theoretical background, it is not difficult to imagine a new track of issues and problems posed to communities by the changes fostered in society over the past four decades by the compression of time and space, as the main consequence of the spread of new tele-information technologies. these changes, today known as globalization, have created hurdles to the achievement and development of communitarian life, as anyone can observe in the difficulties met by communities such as the family to build itself as a community within the globalized context. these hurdles affect the background of communitarian life as shown in the next section. hurdles globalization poses to communitarian life. one of the most evident of these hurdles is the subjection of routine, social and affective lives to the determinisms of technology. technological procedures have become a mediator in the self-other relationship. information can flow between people without physical contact, be it through the eyes or the ears. since communities rely on symbolic interaction, the limitation of those resources of communication affects the way a group is managed and mastered by its members, as that has been evidenced in today`s team work. another hurdle is the culture of individualism and urgency which is creating the atemporal person. this person, as nicole aubert (2003) has beautifully analyzed, spreads fast. that person is fueled by a wide bombardment of information, made possible by the electronic 338 ubiquity produced mainly by the mobile phone. the a-temporal person behaves through “impulsive zappings” with a view to “spots”, “fasts” and “clips”, thus producing a new pattern of relationship with the other and the environment. within these new conditions it is easy for people to escape from the local context of their existence. a fundamental condition of communitarian life is swept away thus changing the way the individual is “i” and “we” at the same time. a third hurdle stemming from globalization is the fragmentation of life. the dealing with life, isolating its parts as fragments is an increasing trend in the production of manufactured goods and services. events and actions can be and have been detached from their contexts and organized separately. for instance, today the production of car and aircraft parts as well as banking activities are manufactured in hundreds of distinct places miles away from each other and put together by anonymous workers or by machines. much more radical than in taylor’s times, today people don’t know who may be involved in the production of the things and services they need nor can they see the several steps of the process through which they were made. to a certain extent, individuals are detached from the activities which are essential elements of the construction of reciprocity – another fundamental condition of communitarian life. yet another hurdle is the economic instability, which within the globalized context sets people miles away from the means required to balance their social and affective life. for the past two decades, several countries have undergone crises originating in events carried out in other countries. democracy, sovereignty and economic balance are not issues limited to the boundaries of a particular nation, but chiefly within a context in which the prevailing commercial pattern is fierce competition. within this context, it is hard to fuel communitarian life, for communities rely on stability and the variables directly related to the control of the latter in the hands of unknown individuals, most of the times constituting an elite group out of the reach of the community members. as mere ordinary and daily evidences of life in the globalized era, these hurdles reveal some challenges communities face to maintain their existence and development, within a grammar which challenges the possibility of production of some of their fundamental elements such as mutuality, justice and social economic stability. within the globalized context, that grammar has turned into a culture which is broadly named as the economy of quality (the prevailing economic model since the 1980s). the economy of quality has been the ambition of most nations and enterprises (malvezzi, 2010b). it became a general criterion for the assessment 339 of all sorts of outcomes, as a kind of dictatorship the world has hardly seen before. it is beyond any criticism since the things that have been done under its syntax are apparently moral and justified by the introduction of new technologies that amplify the control people have over the environment. on that rationality, most people today comply with the priority given to the system of production over the individual under the shelter of the quest for high quality standards for everything. the impacts of teleworking on families and small communities are undeniable evidence of the above referred to subjection. the economy of quality has tremendous potentialities as an applicable syntax to communitarian life but within the realms of both, an individualistic culture and the legitimacy of fierce and wild competition. it can hardly give any kind of support to communitarian life although it has been legitimized as the path for the development of society. in very simple terms, from the late seventies, the economy of quality has been fueled by a rationality which explores the potentials of objects, situations and events with a view to optimize both the resources and the results. that exploration within a fragmented context subjects the process of production to the mastery of the moral of results. according to that moral, any action which improves the results deserves approval, may get priority and therefore should be implemented. that rationality came to fit to the commercial competition and as such, evolved to require the highest performance standards and optimized results from both individuals and institutions. in it the individual is taken as a resource detached from the communitarian life to which he/she belongs. kallinikos (2003) conceived the worker into that grammar as the modular man (the lego man) since the individual is seen and appraised under the capacity of his/her parts to add value to the results. what matters is the part of the person that contributes visibly to the optimization of the results. the individual is paid, his/her skills rated and his/her results considered in relation to his/her results; not in relation to his/her person.the grammar produced by the economy of quality has fostered the culture of individualism, fragmentation and urgency which, allied to the easy access to technologies and other resources, has empowered individuals, enabling them to compete with institutions, such as their own families and communities. such a power is easily turned into several sorts of weapon. the society organized on those contingencies has been turned into a realm of paradoxes some of which can give a good sample to explain them all. never have workers been so required for the production of quality and never have they been so vulnerable. society stretches biological 340 aging at the same time that it anticipates economic aging. individuals are required to have a defined identity at the same time that they are asked to adapt and change who they are according to the requirements of the optimization of economical outcomes. these and other paradoxes reveal the fragmentation of the way society is organized just as people became familiarized with them. paradoxes hardly upset most people. in that society, consistency has become a short term feature, a condition which may fuel pragmatism and individualism as the prevailing elements of the xxi century cultural pattern. within that context the whole may be a mere sum of the parts and not a virtual and collective subject as it happens with communities. a very important feature of this contrast between communitarian life and globalization is in another paradox present in the relationship between self-managed teams and the creation of the nomad worker. the economy of quality has never stopped the quest for the exploration of the emerging potentialities present in the new technologies and the richness of teams. in the beginning of the new millennium, the outcome of that endeavor was clear: the replacement of the management of production through big organizational structures by the management of production through a network of projects. this new model of production of services and goods fostered the development of a new sort of production structure which has been named as the network of selfmanaged teams. in the present historical moment, this structure characterizes the highest managerial technology of production. today, most enterprises are constituted by and accomplish their mission through teamwork. the last figures disclose that about 80% of activities in enterprises are performed by interdependent teams and that most of the biggest enterprises are structured into self-managed teams. the figures also reveal that over the last two decades enterprises have switched the management of teams, from giving and accomplishing orders, to the foment of “shared occasioning”. virtually, everybody working in an enterprise performs through and belongs to one or more teams (the most important required skill). the increase of team work expresses slow but steady decentralization through self-managed teams. enterprises are evolving towards the building of interdependent autonomy through networks of project management. that kind of decentralization requires cooperation as the collective pattern of performance. cooperation is sap of communitarian life. self-managed teams work dependent on interaction and communication as their central managerial instrument because production relies on the integration of information. teams foster and carry out all sorts of information, scenarios and criteria confrontations 341 (discussions), negotiations, legitimacy and creation. members of self-managed teams are not confined to the role of mere executing hands but are fundamental creators of targets, producers of designs and executers of actions. individuals discuss, decide and perform. today, the more knowledge intensive is an enterprise, a department, or a project, the more it relies on decisions produced by shared knowledge created collectively through intense interaction and communication between its members. teams behave a socio-cognitive-operative-integratedsystems of cooperation, i.e., the very set of conditions of a communitarian life. working teams (as required by present day enterprises) are constituted by interdependent individuals performing tasks by complementing each other in the shared and synergistic endeavor to achieve the outcome. their effectiveness is the outcome of the sense of unity, the certainty and the reliance that all members are committed to the same targets (group process). teams integrate the diversity present in individual knowledge by creating common shared knowledge which is a fundamental support for the collective action required by the present day patterns of time and quality.the competence of those teams stems from the synergy of the individual`s cognitions and actions (a contingency hardly achieved by other means than leadership and cooperation). as socio cognitive-operative-integrated-systems, working teams are constituted as a synergic plural performance through the management of the group interdependence (the adaptation to the other) and complementarity (the recognition of the task performed by the other as a necessity). those events reveal that also enterprises are applying in a peculiar way the model developed by communitarian experience although they do not foster the development of the individual as subject (an essential feature of the communitarian model). the enterprise succeeds in building teams like communities although is limited in the construction of teams and individuals as subjects. differentiated from communities, enterprises hardly know how to apply leadership out of the authoritarian control such that happens in communitarian life. the power of leadership action is in the innovation (production of diversity) posed in the group process by challenging the cognitions of the group. as such a power, leadership innovates the prevailing rationality of the group by posing new designs and meanings for effective action. accordingly, leadership has a direct impact in three fundamental processes of the group synergy (chia, 1998). the first is the process of sensemaking which is the way the group differentiates and integrates the echo systems of meanings and values. teams are a meshwork of meanings and 342 values that ground the understanding of actions; leaders`actions have direct impact in the dynamics of the meanings. the second process is the networking which is the process of redesign of the complex structure of intertwined roles. teams are essentially a cobweb of social interaction organized by expectations of performance in relation to individuals who occupy a specific position in the group. leaders` actions promote legitimized changes in the cobweb. the third process is the enactment which is the means of fostering and molding collective performance. teams are a network of activities functionally integrated which as a whole produce the evidences that give empirical support for the validation of meanings, values and roles. leaders`actions also are a source of legitimized changes in that network. accordingly, the economy of quality is recreating the way of being-together applying the best instrument found in the communitarian model as far as these psychological processes are concerned in its external features. in fact, that new way is externally similar to a community but indeed most of self-managed teams are false communities because they do not care about the condition of subject and the pattern of reciprocity that true communities require. that false community is a condition of easy understanding. self-managed teams are correlated with the quality of those enterprises. following the continuous innovation and dynamic changes, performance relies less on tasks` characteristics than on subjective features such as the sharing of information, mutual trust and team synergic cohesion.the communitarian model is a strong instrument for the creation of socio-cognitive-cooperative-integrated systems as required by the accomplishment of the network of projects. in doing so the enterprise manages the mastery of the development of virtual and individual subjects (today restricted to the professional in charge of the strategic issues). one may call that hybrid model as a form of coconstruction which is a collective action grounded in “networked conglomerates” wherein individuals and groups share resources for compatible targets which are not necessarily shared nor function as a team, but actually the targets are fragmented. within co-construction conglomerates the prevailing syntax turns to be the one of effectiveness (the moral of results) together with the syntax of fear (the moral of escape) while communities work over the syntax of hope (the moral of ideals and solidarity). a particular outcome of the development of the economy of quality, that here is taken as the second feature of the economy of quality, is the transformation of workers into nomads. today, workers are nomads not because they move like bedouins and guaranís used to do, but 343 because the workplace undergoes continuous changes and so imposes on them the endless need of adaption to the context dynamics which margaret archer (2000) has named as emerging properties. since the individual is an outcome of the self-other relationship, those frequent changes in others as well as in the context make him/her change accordingly to adapt to the new contingencies – today mainly expressed through information. globalized working life is constituted by frequent changes in the demands of new skills, the setting of distinct references and need of new identities (malvezzi, 2010a). as any nomad, the worker is a vulnerable person since he/she faces an everlasting instability and for that he/she depends on his/her daily results. within the communitarian life the individual may not be as vulnerable since he/she is not only an “i” but is also a “we”. as happens with all nomads, the worker balance is continuously threatened. he/she requires continuous revalidation. these two conditions make him/her instable and vulnerable. he/she is challenged by an existential impermanence, having to administer his/her life through a troubled relationship with the environment. his/her life becomes a new paradox – the management of one`s own autonomy within a context which requires compliance with the prevailing culture and the demands of production. today, to face the paradox, workers have to struggle to keep themselves updated. this updating is, generally speaking grounded in several actions such as the construction of a personal plan of professional development, the engagement in social and professional networks and the mastery of the adaptation of his/her own professional identity. putting these actions into the jargon of present day culture, individuals are required to adapt, to develop, to have a wide range of alternative ways to follow, to be fast, productive, effective, resistant, competitive, successful, autonomous and committed. these features constitute the identity which is applied to all workers. if one fails in a single of these features, the risk of marginalization is always at one`s door. the quest for updating such an identity sets the globalized worker on the same track as other sorts of nomad life, which in its turn requires the being-together – collective competencies. the economic production has already solved that equation by creating the self-managed teams, as explained earlier in this chapter. the social and individual lives have not yet produced a solution for the quality of life in the globalized society. 344 conclusion in the globalization era, the building of communitarian life has proved to be a fundamental resource for the exploration of the emancipatory potentiality of subjectivity as a basic condition of the economy of quality of life. without emancipation quality of life can scarcely be considered. looking at self-managed teams, it is not difficult to find in them the main pillars (synergy, creativity, collective competencies and commitment) required by the achievement of quality in economic production. all these features have been ever present in communitarian life. may be the construction of communitarian life in the globalized society is not a matter of technologies or models, but of commitment to change society towards a sustainable human life by looking for the quality found in community. references archer, m. (2000). being human. the problem of agency. cambridge: cambridge university press. aubert, n. (2005). le culte de l’urgence. paris: flammarion. chia, r. (1998). exploring the expanded realm of technology, organization and society. in: chia, (editor) (1998). organized worlds. (1-18). london, routledge. chia, r. & kallinikos, j. (1998). interview with robert cooper. in r. chia (editor). organized worlds. (121-165). london: routledge. deleuze, g. (1980). milles plateaux. capitalism et schizophrenia. paris: edition de minuit. kallinikos, j. (2003). work, human agency and organizational forms: an anatomy of fragmentation. working paper, london: london school of economics lash, s. (2007). capitalism and metaphysics. theory, culture & society. 24 (5) 1-26. malvezzi, s. (2010a). o convivio entre gerações na empresa: diálogo, ou conflito? [get together between generations at the enterprise: dialog or conflict]. palestra proferida na fmu, são paulo, mimeo. malvezzi, s. (2010b). urgência, ajuda ou atrapalha? [urgency, aid or confusion]. revista de marketing industrial, são paulo, 47, 24-35. urry, j. (2005). the complexity turn. theory, culture & society. 22 (5) 1-14. microsoft word 2012-006ccsi-20130622_final edits_ljii final trj.docx a learning journey ii: learned course maps as a basis to explore how students learned community psychology practice competencies in a community coalition building course gregor v. sarkisian, ph.d., m. ameerah saleem, m.a., jeremy simpkin, m.a., ann weidenbacher, natalie bartko, and sylvie taylor, ph.d. antioch university los angeles author notes: gregor v. sarkisian, ph.d., is an associate professor in the master of arts in psychology progam and teaches in the applied community psychology specialization at anitioch university los angeles, ca, usa. m. ameerah saleem, m.a., is a clinical research professional who serves as a consultant for projects seeking to empower communities through the areas of education, entrepreneurship, and philanthropy in los angeles, ca, usa. jeremy simpkin, m.a., is a marriage and family therapist intern and registered yoga teacher who combines the two professions to promote the development of resiliency and overall well-being in los angeles, ca, usa. ann weidenbacher, is a student in the master of arts in psychology program, training in somatic-emotional approaches, trauma, and applied community psychology at antioch university los angeles, ca, usa. natalie bartko, is an advocate for nutrition and women’s health and is a graduate student at antioch university los angeles, ca, usa. sylvie taylor, ph.d., is a professor in the master of arts in psychology program and is the founding director of the applied community psychology specialization at antioch university los angeles, ca, usa. key words: student empowerment, curriculum mapping, community psychology practice competencies, community psychology graduate education and professional training, collaboration and coalition building recommended citation: sarkisian, g. v., saleem, m. a., simpkin, j., weidenbacher, a., bartko, n., & taylor, s. (2013). a learning journey ii: learned course maps as a basis to explore how students learned community psychology practice competencies in a community coalition building course. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), 1-12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 a learning journey ii: learned course maps as a basis to explore how students learned community psychology practice competencies in a coalition building course abstract this paper presents an illustrative case study of how students learned community psychology practice competencies. utilizing course mapping, focus groups, and reflective writing, students and faculty coded, analyzed and interpreted student data to better understand learning activities and processes which contributed to learning community psychology practice competencies in a coalition building course. a community coalition simulation and group work related to the final project emerged as two student learning activities that were found by students to contribute meaningfully to their learning three community psychology practice competencies: (1) ecological perspectives, (2) community partnership and inclusion and (3) collaboration and coalition development. the instructor’s modeling community psychology practice competency skills was also reported by students to facilitate their learning. key words: student empowerment, curriculum mapping, community psychology practice competencies, community psychology graduate training, collaboration and coalition building in the fall 2012 issue of the the community psychologist (tcp), a draft of competencies for community psychology (cp) practice was shared with the membership of the society for community research and action (scra) (scra, 2012). one of the purposes of articulating cp practice competencies is to promote the further development of educational and professional training programs. while there are legitimate fears, as in other professions (e.g., therapy or social work), that the competencies could be developed into rigid accreditation or licensing standards, this is not the stated intent of the competencies for cp practice: “these competencies are not intended as standards for accrediting programs or licensing individuals. instead, they provide a common framework for the discussion of skills involved in cp practice, and how those skills can be learned (scra, 2012, p. 9).” one of the immediate benefits for teachers of cp practice is a better ability to articulate a range of competencies students can develop in cp as well as the program opportunities and limitations to learn various cp practice competencies. scra also proposed three categories to describe the level of training to serve as a framework for graduate programs to more systematically describe opportunities for students to learn cp practice (kloos, 2010): • exposure: in core community courses, all students learn about the value of this competency and how it can be applied in community psychology practice. • experience: in selected courses, including supervised practica/fieldwork, students can choose to gain supervised practice in performing tasks and actions related to the competency. • expertise: upper level students can choose competencies in which to develop further experience and attain a higher level of expertise. this might involve several field experiences over several terms or years. postgraduate experiences and continuing education allow for further development of expertise in specific competencies (scra, 2012, p. 9). through articulating the level of training, graduate programs can be more specific in communicating with students about the depth of training they will receive in various courses or in an overall program. in training students to develop cp practice competencies, understanding the link between training (academic and field-based), student learning, and student outcomes is a challenging prospect. yet, there are descriptive and applied research methods available to study these relationships. one descriptive tool, curriculum mapping, has been used widely in higher education as a means of studying learning from a programmatic perspective. curriculum mapping is a process of developing a graphic representation to illustrate the relationships between program goals, objectives, student learning activities and outcomes, and, instructional activities (cuevas, matveev, & miller, 2010). the curriculum map serves as a tool to conceptualize a program’s curriculum as an interrelated system. while traditionally used as a tool to study program objectives, curriculum mapping can also be used to map how courses in a curriculum align with the cp practice competencies and incorporate levels of training (kloos, 2010) for courses within a global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 curriculum. an additional goal of the curriculum mapping process is to better understand the relationship between what faculty intend students to learn (i.e., declared curriculum), what is presented (i.e., taught curriculum), and what students learn (i.e., learned curriculum) (harden, 2001). through creating declared and learned course maps, faculty and students can construct a comprehensive curriculum map of how cp practice competencies are taught and learned in their program. another consideration in studying student learning is how to conceptualize and measure the acquisition of knowledge. habermas (1971) has articulated three types of knowledge applicable to the current discussion. communicative knowledge focuses on understanding social codes of accepted behaviors and beliefs which often vary across social settings and includes both the ability to understand and communicate (e.g., developing collaboration skills applicable to community based work). instrumental knowledge is utilized to act effectively in social settings and events to achieve observable results (e.g., writing a grant application and receiving funding). emancipatory knowledge is grounded in critical reflection on the relationship between self and sociopolitical environments. the element of social change in which individuals are able to overcome oppression through social action is at the heart of emancipatory knowledge (e.g., empowerment). while evidence of communicative knowledge can be assessed by experts in the field and instrumental knowledge can be assessed through objective evaluation methods, emancipatory knowledge is best assessed through the inclusion of the learner as a collaborative researcher. and, descriptive methods, such as interviews, journaling and conceptual mapping, are appropriate for studying emancipatory learning within the classroom and in the context of community based projects that expand beyond the classroom (cranton & hogan, 2012). the current paper utilizes descriptive methods consistent with evaluating transformative learning (cranton & hogan, 2012) to explore how students reported learning cp practice competencies in a community coalition building in community practice course in the applied community psychology (acp) specialization at antioch university los angeles (aula). acp specialization pedagogy and level of training through curricula the program pedagogy of the acp specialization is grounded in student empowerment which has shaped the structure of curricula for students to develop experience (kloos, 2010) with selected cp practice competencies. working in peer groups, students gain supervised practice experience performing actions, tasks and activities related cp practice competencies. acp student empowerment has been defined based on maton’s (2008) work to provide students with the underlying program delivery framework throughout the curriculum and has also guided the design of this study through including students as co-researchers to explore their learning process (taylor & sarkisian, 2011): a participatory, developmental, group-based process through which students achieve their academic goals, advance their professional development in the practice of applied community psychology, and, acquire valued educational resources to promote individual, organizational, and community well-being (p. 5). opportunities for student empowerment occur primarily in core coursework through supervised, group-based fieldwork with community based organizations. the level of training varies from exposure to experience with some students gaining expertise through field study (kloos, 2010; scra, 2012; sarkisian & taylor, in press). the acp curriculum consists of a gateway course where students receive exposure to all of the cp practice competencies (community psychology: theories and methods), four core courses where students develop experience in selected cp practice competencies (community consultation and collaboration, program development and evaluation, prevention and promotion, and psychoeducational groups and in-service training development), and a field study in acp in which students may receive exposure, develop experience, or, in some cases, expertise in student-selected cp practice competencies. students also have an opportunity to take elective coursework which may provide exposure or opportunities to develop experience with various competencies (e.g., community coalition building, grant writing, empowerment in community practice, asset-based community development) (kloos, 2010; taylor & sarkisian, 2011). community coalition building in community practice the community coalition building course introduces students to contemporary theory, research, practice and debate on community coalition building. the major goals of the course are for students to develop their understanding of how community coalitions are structured and function. an additional goal is for students to develop a better understanding of sustainable strategies to promote well being in communities. pedagogically, the course provides students with exposure to community coalition building (kloos, 2010). students learn the value of community coalition building and how it can be applied in practice, yet, they do not gain supervised field experience or expertise in the competency through this course. the activities implemented to promote student learning and demonstrations of student learning in the community coalition building course are presented in table 1. table 1. student learning activities and demonstrations of student learning student learning activities classroom based learning activities (c) lecture by instructor and guest speaker, class discussions, coalition simulation exercise, group work, coordination of field work, and presentation of final project. reading and applied research activities (r) reading text and academic articles, and, conducting research for the final project. group work activities (g) communicating with group members and coordinating research activities, which involved choosing text chapters and coalition organization for case study, dividing project responsibilities, creating a shared work plan, checking in with group members on process of work plan, sharing results and developing powerpoint presentation, presenting final project, receiving feedback, and revising final presentation. writing activities (w) writing final presentation collaboratively and revising project once feedback was received from instructor. field learning activities (f) conducting key informant interviews with agency representatives. demonstrations of student learning oral presentation (o) oral presentation of findings from collaborative research project on a community coalition. final presentation (p) final powerpoint presentation slides of collaborative research project on a community coalition after teaching the coalition building course in winter 2012, the instructor and students began engaging in a participatory process to explore how they learned cp practice competencies. they agreed to focus research efforts on one question: how did students learn cp practice competencies through a coalition building course? to answer this question, students and the instructor discussed different tools available to facilitate the exploration of how they learned cp practice competencies. the result was an exploratory case study design which used a combination of descriptive methods, consistent with evaluating emancipatory knowledge (cranton & hogan, 2012), to facilitate deeper exploration of the process by which students reported learning cp practice competencies. method participants four students who were classmates in a coalition building in community practice course in the winter, 2012 academic quarter participated in this study during the spring 2012 quarter. while two students (student 1 and student 2) had completed all of their coursework in the acp specialization, two students (student 3 and student 4) had not yet taken the gateway course or any of the core required specialization courses. the instructor has been teaching in the program for seven years and the acp specialization founding director has been teaching in the program for ten years. design and data collection using an exploratory case study design (patton, 1987), students and faculty utilized descriptive methods (i.e., course mapping, reflective writing & focus groups) to better understand the transformational aspects of learning cp practice competencies (cranton & hogan, 2012). thus, the focus was on the self-reported experiences of learning which are subjective, biased, and not necessarily generalizable to other students or training programs. in line with the acp student empowerment pedagogy and the cp principle of inclusion, students acted as collaborative researchers (taylor & sarkisian, 2011). students participated in course mapping, reflective writing, focus groups, coding and analyses of data. faculty participated in course mapping, facilitated the focus groups as well as students’ reflective writing, coding, and analyses of data. data to develop the course map templates were collected using the curriculum mapping process and templates described by sarkisian and taylor (2013). first, criteria, categories and descriptors were developed into student learning activities and student learning outcomes. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 next, students and faculty independently rated the course map for the coalition building course. both individually and through a focus group format, students and the instructor content analyzed (patton, 1987) data using the cp practice competencies and criteria from a learned course map legend as a broad framework. learned course maps served as a starting point to identify cp practice competencies that would be the focus for reflective writing on how students learned (harden, 2001). subsequent meetings between students and the instructor were used to conduct data coding, analysis, and interpretation. procedure during a fifteen-week period of time in the spring 2012 academic quarter, students, the instructor, and the acp specialization director participated in a series of activities to better understand how students learned cp practice competencies in the coalition building course. development of declared and learned course maps. using the six-step curriculum mapping process described by sarkisian and taylor (in press), faculty developed a course map for the coalition building course. (1) criteria were developed to assess curricula; (2) categories and descriptors for criteria were developed; (3) blank course maps were constructed by faculty; (4) faculty completed course maps; (5) student completed course maps; and, (6) faculty and students shared their results with one another. after the maps were completed, the instructor revised the generic curriculum map legend to reflect the actual (i.e., learned) student learning activities and demonstrations of student learning specific to the course (see table 1). selection of cp practice competencies. students and faculty met and discussed the similarities and differences between declared and learned course maps. students and the instructor reviewed the course maps and identified cp practice competencies in which students had meaningful learning experiences. through the first focus-group style meeting, three cp practice competencies (i.e., ecological perspectives, community inclusion & partnership, and, collaboration & coalition development) emerged as competencies for further refection and discussion (see table 2). below are the primary descriptions provided for each of the three cp practice competencies from the fall 2012 tcp (scra, 2012): • ecological perspectives: the ability to articulate and apply multiple ecological perspectives and levels of analysis in community practice (p. 10). • community inclusion and partnership: the ability to promote genuine representation and respect for all community members, and act to legitimize divergent perspectives on community and social issues (p. 10). • collaboration and coalition development: the ability to help groups with common interests and goals do together what they cannot do apart (p. 12).     reflective writing, coding, analyses and interpretation of data. using the student learning activities (i.e., classroom based learning, reading and applied research, group work, writing, and field learning) from the course map as a general framework, students engaged in reflective writing on how they learned each of the three selected cp practice competencies. because the exploratory nature of this exercise, students were encouraged to lead from their experience in their writing and refer to the student learning activities as an organizing framework. after all students completed their individual reflective writing, students and the instructor met and discussed the process of coding themes which illustrate a similar concept, issue, or idea (patton, 1987). students then individually coded themes and unique insights of their own writing and that of the other students. during the second focus group meeting, the instructor and students analyzed and interpreted data (i.e., students’ individual writing on how they learned the three identified cp practice competencies). to increase the credibility of data from students, faculty collected and combined the raw and coded data and distributed the document to students who then had an opportunity to correct, edit, or add any information (guba & lincoln, 1985). additionally, investigator triangulation was utilized through having (1) students, (2) the instructor and (3) the acp specialization director conduct independent data analyses prior to the second focus group meeting to utilize three different viewpoints of the learning process (guba & lincoln, 1985; patton, 1987). results first, differences between declared and learned course maps are described. next, the student learning activities and instructor classroom activities reported to have been influential in how students learned the three identified cp practice competencies are presented. supporting student quotations from reflective writing and a focus group are offered to illustrate the dynamic nature of their learning process and experiences. differences between declared and learned course maps table 2 presents the course map developed by faculty (i.e., declared course map) and maps developed by the four students (i.e., learned course maps) for the three cp practice competencies that were the main focus of this study. while demonstrations of student learning (oral presentation (o) & final project powerpoint presentation (p)) were rated nearly the same by students and faculty, there were differences in ratings for student learning activities (lea) (classroom based learning, reading and applied research, group work, writing, and field learning). table 2. learned course map of community coalition building workshop and three identified community psychology practice competences competencies for community psychology practice instructor & acp specialization director student 1 student 2 student 3 student 4 foundational principles lea dem lea dem lea dem lea dem lea dem ecological perspectives c,r,g,w o,p c,r,g,w o,p c,r,g,w o,p c,r,g,w o,p c,r o,p community inclusion & partnership c,r,g,w o,p c,r,g,w o,p c,r,g,w o,p c,r,g,w o,p c,r o,p community & social change collaboration c,r,g,w o,p c,r,g,w o,p c,r,g,w o,p c,r,g,w o,p c,r,f o,p coalition development c,r,g,w o,p c,r,g,w, f o,p c,r,g,w o,p c,r,g,w o,p c,r,f o,p note. lea, student learning activities (c, classroom based; r, reading and applied research; g, group work; w, wrting; & f, field learning); dem, demonstrations of student learning (o, oral presentation & p, final paper). see table 1 for full explanation of student learning activities and demonstrations of student learning. students identified student tenure in the acp specialization and prior experience with cp practice competencies before program entry as two viable reasons for the differences between learned and intended course maps. student 1 and student 2 had completed the gateway course and all four core specialization courses. as student 2 described, “i was introduced to ecological perspectives one year ago in my introductory community psychology class. these perspectives have been repeated throughout the program coursework, and each time i find new ways of understanding and applying these concepts.” student 3 had not completed the gateway course or any of the core courses but had prior experience in most of the cp practice competencies covered in the course. this became clear in class during initial discussions on ecological perspectives: while the professor was reviewing and diagramming the essential pieces of the ecological perspective for community psychology practices i was able to connect it with my previous study and practice of ecological principles in other disciplines and fields: game theory modeling, ecological dynamics; environmental studies, geographical and macro-scale epidemiological studies, cultural analysis and multi-level demographics (student 3). student 4 had not completed the gateway course or any of the core courses and did not have prior experience in most of the cp practice competencies covered in the course. yet, with quite varied levels of experience, all students reported feeling supported and being of support: throughout the class, students shared their learning with each other. this played out with more senior students sharing their knowledge of community psychology concepts as well as all students sharing aspects of their individual learning through discussion and the final project (student 2). in addition to ecological perspectives, students identified inclusion and collaboration as skills practiced in all learning activities as illustrated by the two quotations below: all of the student learning activities reflected the importance of community inclusion and partnership, as each assignment required members to voice their ideas, give and receive input to/from each other when offering our, and to share project responsibilities while also providing the space for each group member to head their portion of the final presentation (student 1). like other competencies, collaboration was practiced in an applied way across class projects, such that students were able to reflect on their own use of collaboration while they were studying coalition building. this was especially prevalent in the final project and evaluation of nami (student 2). while this overlap presented a challenge to examining concepts independently, as many of the cp practice competencies overlap or are applied simultaneously, investigator triangulation was utilized to minimize overlap between competencies and strengthen the credibility of the students’ selfglobal  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 reported learning experiences (guba & lincoln, 1985). below, for each of the three cp practice competencies identified by students as most relevant to their learning in the community coalition building in community practice course (i.e., ecological perspectives, community inclusion & partnership, and, collaboration & coalition development), two student learning activities (i.e., the community coalition simulation and group work related to the final project) emerged as influential in how students learned the three competencies. additionally, the instructor’s ability to model skills associated with cp practice competencies and to provide feedback after students engaged in practicing skills was reported by students to have a positive influence on their learning process. in students’ reflective writing and in the focus groups, student learning activities such as class discussions and readings were reported to have served valuable roles while other student learning activities, such as the coalition simulation, were reported to function as a catalyst to learning: “although i had an idea of what it entailed through selected readings, it wasn’t until we completed the simulation exercise that i had working knowledge of the term ‘coalition development’” (student 1). student learning activity: community coalition simulation one of the classroom-based student learning activities included a community coalition simulation, an exercise to simulate a coalition through guided role play with each student assuming a different role in the coalition (wolff & sarkisian, 2013). the coalition simulation exercise was conducted on the second-class meeting, after the class had discussed the four cp practice competencies below. the following quote from student 4 highlights how a combination of lecture and reading during the first day of the course provided her with a foundation in ecological perspectives from which to draw upon for the coalition simulation exercise: the levels of analysis were introduced to me at the beginning of the coalition building workshop. i was able to learn about the ecological system by taking notes through the instructor’s lecture. reading chapters one and two of tom wolff's power of collaborative solutions and the instructor’s lecture gave assistance to my understanding of the four principles of ecology. ecological perspectives. after the coalition simulation exercise was over, the instructor guided students through each ecological level of analysis and had them identify levels that were considered as well as levels that were overlooked in the work of the simulated coalition. through reinforcing the holistic exploration of the issues after the exercise, students were able to continue their exploration of solutions to problems within an ecological context. students found the application of the levels of analysis and principles of ecology after the simulation exercise helpful in reinforcing their prior knowledge of this foundational perspective, as student 2 recounts: “ecological perspectives were then applied in the coalition simulation, allowing us to see systemic dynamics in the process of bringing community organizations together to form a coalition”. additionally, the simulation afforded students an opportunity to explore and reflect on activities occurring on different ecological levels specific to their role in the exercise: through the experience of working in a small group (of student peers) … i internalized how the various ecological levels interface with and impact each other, e.g., what kinds of intended and unintended pressures came to bear and what kinds of roles people or groups took on or were forced into (student 3). the coalition simulation exercise was also reported to be helpful to students as they were provided with an experience of coalition building prior to beginning work on their final project which helped them to gain a more in-depth appreciation of the work they would soon be studying. community inclusion and partnership. students found community inclusion and partnership to be embedded in all student learning activities. student 1, student 3, and student 4 identified the coalition simulation as the main class exercise that emphasized the importance of community inclusion and partnership. they discussed how critical inclusion is to the process of a coalition, providing a more realistic view of the challenges which arise when trying to promote community change. additionally, the coalition simulation was an opportunity for students to practice enacting inclusion. the three quotes below illustrate how student 4 deepened her knowledge of community inclusion and partnership through participation in the community coalition simulation: inclusion and partnership were introduced to me when the class did a coalition stimulation exercise where we were participating in the practice of a coalition working together at hand. my character was a mental health worker that was very limited in her knowledge, expertise and resources which coordinated perfectly to my knowledge of community coalitions and partnership. by roleplaying we were exposed to the pressures of having different views and perspectives while all having one common goal in building a strong community. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 at the end of the exercise i was able to see the importance of people working together to give guidance, train, and facilitate the community to build a partnership that is able to make change. the exercise also gave a realistic view of the challenges that arise when trying to bring change to a community (student 4). collaboration and coalition development. the coalition simulation was also experienced by all students as simulating challenges of collaboration in coalitions. especially notable were difficulties in identifying causes or solutions to a problem when members of the coalition were anchored in different understandings of the issue that was the focus of the coalition’s work as the following two quotes illustrate: “i found collaboration and coalition development to be very challenging because it requires everyone pursue a common goal” (student 4). the simulation exercise and activities for the final project relied heavily on the ability to work together with group members. the simulation exercise showed how the term collaboration does not necessarily imply that individuals working together will be on the same page when identifying the cause and/or solution to a problem (student 1). additionally, students experienced various forms of exclusion which are commonly known to impede collaboration and coalition development. for example, student 1 and student 2 alluded to their experience of participation by other coalition members that was not necessarily genuine: “the coalition simulation also helped to demonstrate some of the difficult realities of the process (i.e., not everybody will contribute effectively)”(student 2). this exercise exposed me to a real-time scenario and process which was opposite of my initial expectations. the role-play exercise showed how representatives from participating organizations are sometimes mandated to attend meetings and therefore may not be willing to see issues from each other’s perspective. this disinterest is counter-productive to the coalition and collaborative process and was difficult to work around (student 1). silencing and finger pointing were also negative behaviors which resulted from interactions during the coalition simulation and mirrored negative processes found in non-simulated coalitions: from the simulation exercise, i realized that the silencing of a member or members of the group detracted from our ability to find solutions that worked for everyone and that addressed each person’s experience and needs regardless of what level they were at or perspective they brought (student 3). i played the role of a parent with a teenage son who constantly experienced problems with local police. it felt as though i was blamed for my child’s actions and that i was not seen as a responsible parent. this exercise also showed me how participants come into meetings with preconceived notions as to the cause and solution of existing problems in the community. most of our time was spent trying to define the problem, identify contributing factors and findcommon ground. it made me question how often participants attend coalition meetings without being fully invested in working together versus independently working to address community issues (student 1). while difficulties were experienced, toward the end of the exercise coalition members began to work more collaboratively to identify causes and solutions to the problems positive behaviors that were processed after the coalition simulation exercise and are illustrated well by student 3’s experience: “especially helpful was the dialogic constructive critiquing of the roles in the simulation and how that affected us personally” (student 3). participating in the simulation and afterward critiquing our roles and our personal reactions to the simulation helped me observe and experience the dynamics of work partnerships and what makes them work and what can make them not work so well. it highlighted the importance of not leaving out the lived, experiential knowledge of community members. we also discussed ways to notice who might be left out of the collaborative process and how to include them. the simulation made clear the need for good facilitation to stay on task and truly address the work of the coalition so that it is effective and inclusive (student 3). the coalition simulation exercise was an effective tool in invoking the lived experience of students as a catalyst to link course concepts to community processes associated with the three identified cp practice competencies. student learning activity: group work related to the final project group work related to the final project included communicating and coordinating research activities, dividing project responsibilities, developing and implementing a work plan, and, developing and presenting a final powerpoint presentation. students found their group work informative to developing their understanding of ecological perspectives, community inclusion and partnership, and, collaboration and coalition development – in both process and content. ecological perspectives. student work on the final project with the national alliance for the mentally ill global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 (nami) was observed by students to be a valuable opportunity to reinforce learning the ecological perspectives. for example, student 2’s observation summarizes how students experienced this reinforcing process: i found it useful to see how change has to occur across organizations in order for large-scale civic change to develop. the group work and writing for the final presentation also helped to reinforce my learning of the ecological perspectives by giving me an opportunity to apply the principles in analyzing nami. furthermore, i also had the opportunity to hear how other students applied the perspectives in their own analyses (student 2). additionally, for student 3, the field study aspect of the group work served to engage her interest in thinking ecologically: as opposed to seeing a domesticated version or reading about it, looking for these competencies in our case study of nami was like tracking an animal in the wild. field learning allowed for observing the interplay of several variables within the actual milieu of nami (student 3). community inclusion and partnership. the practice of inclusion was reinforced through collaborative work as a small group in developing a case study on a coalition operating in los angeles (i.e., nami). students were both practicing inclusion through their efforts as a small group and studying the inclusive practices of nami. the following quotes illustrate how the simultaneous practice and study of inclusion generated an opportunity for experiential learning and consciousness raising on issues related to inclusion: inclusion was a necessary element in the final project when we had to coordinate research and develop content for the presentation. also, in writing my section of the final project, i applied the concept of inclusion from wolff’s text to a discussion of nami and in providing recommendations for future growth (student 2). i found student 2’s comment that he learned about the process of coalition development in nami from other students’ presentations noteworthy because it re-connects with the principle of inclusion. inclusion is not just about what you give, but also allowing other’s to give and being receptive to those contributions. it is critical that each participant understand this when deciding to be involved with a coalition (student 1, focus group) student 3’s quote is particularly illustrative of how the multiple learning environments catalyzed into a consciousness raising experience: the interaction with each of my classmates to create and present a final case study supplied precious opportunities to recognize who we each represented in terms of power and privilege, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and background and to consciously learn more about how to respect those differences and similarities and legitimize our divergent perspectives as we worked toward a common goal of a presentation with perceptions and insights that we could not have achieved separately (student 3). collaboration and coalition development. students reported collaboration as an essential skill in planning and implementing activities related to the final project. student 1’s quote below represents the experiences of all four students in learning the value of common goals in collaboration and coalition development. i now have a better understanding of the collaborative process and do not expect it to be without differences in opinion or approach. the most important thing is remembering to guide the dissention back to a common goal (student 1). yet, each student developed unique insights into which collaborative activities contributed to their learning as the following three quotes illustrate: the group activities for the final project were more effective as a collaborative process. we proposed and selected organizations and divided responsibilities accordingly. we presented our ideas on how to complete the case study and what/how we wanted to contribute to the final project. each member managed their own portion of the project and provided updates regarding where they are in the process and what the next steps should be (student 1). we choose to have each group member contribute a part to an overall powerpoint presentation. in so doing the give-and-take of the group members in assembling the presentation, presenting it, and editing it created far more learning for me than if we had each written papers and submitted them individually for feedback from the professor. the need to bring all of our work together into one coherent whole called upon more small group skills than if each of us presented to the group individually. the process was full of hard work, serendipity, playfulness, concentrated focus, and nerveracking efforts; all important components of group work within community psychology competencies (student 3). in the classroom we were able to discuss what organization we wanted to research, break up what areas each of us were going to study and what was each of our expectations. this was also global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 shown in the group work activity, where outside of the classroom we were able to exchange emails and coordinate research such as conducting interviews at the organization we agreed to research. when communicating effectively we were able to provide a final presentation (student 4). group work activities related to the final project provided students with an opportunity to enact their value on inclusion and practice their collaboration skills within their group while the content of their final project focused on studying the coalition building efforts of nami within an ecological context. instructor activities: modeling of cp practice competency skills students found the instructor’s modeling of cp practice competency skills that were of focus in the course to be helpful to their learning. as the quotes below illustrate, students appreciated that the instructor was flexible, promoted a safe learning environment, and modeled the skills students were learning: it was very important that expectations for the functioning of the classroom and interactions for the class were set in place and modeled by the professor and that the professor actively sustained a container for all our interactions as we practiced and worked our way through the course material (student 3). the instructor modeled inclusion with the students in determining the outline of the lecture as well as tailoring the assigned work (student 2). the modeling of the professor of effective interpersonal skills, consensus building skills, conflict resolution skills, group decision-making skills, and meeting facilitation skills allowed me to observe how it was done and to feel safe and playful in practicing the skills myself with immediate supportive and corrective feedback when needed that did not damage my standing in the class or my secure connection with the professor or my classmates (student 3). discussion in this exploratory case study, learned course maps provided a jumping off point for students to identify three cp practice competencies for further investigation of how they learned through engaging in reflective writing, content analysis and interpretation of data. two notable differences in student ratings of course maps were attributed to student tenure within the acp specialization and prior experience with the cp practice competencies before program entry. these differences underscored the importance of the ability of the instructor to be flexible in the delivery of content and adapt material to the knowledge and experience of the learners. the instructor’s ability to model skills associated with the cp practice competencies students were practicing was also reported to be helpful to their learning process. empowering qualities of student learning activities two student learning activities (community coalition simulation & group work related to the final project) emerged as influential to students’ developing their understanding of three cp practice competencies (ecological perspectives, community partnership & inclusion and collaboration & coalition building). the coalition exercise exposed students to a simulated experience that allowed them to explore roles in which oppressed individuals work together to overcome obstacles to community well being. and, small group work related to the final project provided additional opportunities to critically reflect on their own collaboration skills as well as the role of nami in facilitating opportunities for well being among people with mental illness. both the community coalition simulation exercise and the group work related to the final project involved three activities connected to how students learned three cp practice competencies (ecological perspectives, community partnership & inclusion and collaboration & coalition building): (1) to read books and academic articles related to the course content – community coalition building in community practice; (2) to apply course content in a safe, respectful, and supportive group environment, and, give and receive feedback to refine newly applied skills; and, (3) to participate in a group process that is influenced by the lived experience of participants, increasing access to consciousness raising opportunities related to understanding and applying course material. the opportunity to experience multiple and differing group-process experiences related to the course material was reported by these students to serve as a catalyst to their learning cp practice competencies. this praxis experience was also reported by these students to have a reinforcing effect on learning and helped them to gain a better appreciation for the complexity of community work. implications for academic program development the findings of this study are consistent with the student empowerment focused pedagogy in the acp specialization (taylor & sarkisian, 2011). exercises such as the community coalition simulation and class projects that require students to work within a small group environment are ideal learning activities to provide meaningful exposure to coalition building and related cp practice competencies, especially when the structure and/or length of the course global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 prohibit opportunities for field learning in which mutually beneficial relationships can be developed between students and organizations in the community. in three of the four acp core courses, students work in groups with an organization for a ten week period and gain experience with cp practice competencies related to the course (kloos, 2010). are there other programs utilizing student learning activities such as these to provide students with exposure to cp practice competencies? there are likely many. developing a resource collection of student learning activities by levels of training – exposure, experience, expertise (kloos, 2010) on the education connection page of the scra website could be one method by which programs can begin sharing student learning activities by levels of training. and, there is already an infrastructure in place. limitations of the current study one limitation to the conduct of this study was the interrelatedness among cp practice competencies and the experience of multiple competencies being applied simultaneously or in such close proximity, presenting a challenge to studying cp practice competencies independently. although a small class size of four students allowed for a more in-depth view into accounts of how cp practice competencies were learned, the descriptive methods used in this study (i.e., course mapping, reflective writing and focus groups), while appropriate for evaluating transformative learning, are also subjective in nature and there is very little control for bias in students’ reported insights. additionally, the results of this study portray accounts of learning that are unique to the four students who participated in the course, limiting the generalizability of findings to other students or training programs. conclusion the recent articulation of a draft of cp practice competencies by scra has provided educators with a common framework to explore how programs train and how students learn cp related skills (scra, 2012). in this case study, students and faculty explored student reports of learning cp practice competencies in a master’s level psychology course designed to provide students with exposure (kloos, 2010) to community coalition building in community practice. declared (i.e., faculty) and learned (i.e., students) course maps (harden, 2001) were constructed to identify three cp practice competencies that were experienced by students to be embedded in the student learning activities and demonstrations of student learning, and, that they believed were meaningful to their overall learning in the course. using the learned course maps as a starting framework, students engaged in reflective writing independently. students and faculty then coded and analyzed data generated through reflective writing. a community coalition simulation and group work related to the final project emerged as two learning activities which students reported as meaningful to learning ecological perspectives, community partnership and inclusion, and, collaboration and coalition development. both student learning activities also provided students with opportunities to gain practice in applying course related material through work in small groups to deepen their understanding. finally, students reported the instructor’s modeling of cp skills to be supportive to their learning cp practice competencies. references cranton, p. & hoggan, c. (2012). evaluating transformative learning. in edward w. taylor & jack mezirow (eds.), the handbook of transformative learning: theory, research and practice (pp. 520-535). hoboken, nj: john wiley & sons ltd. cuevas, u. m., matveev, a. g., & miller, k. o. (2010). mapping general education outcomes in the major: intentionality and transparency. peer review, 12(1), 10-15. habermas, j. (1971). knowledge and human interests. boston, ma: beacon press. harden, r. m. (2001). “amee guide no. 21: curriculum mapping: a tool for transparent and authentic teaching and learning.” medical teacher 23(2): 123-137. kloos, b. (2010). creating settings for training in collaborative community practice. the community psychologist, 43(2), 10. lincoln, y. s. & guba, e. g. (1985). naturalistic inquiry. newbury park, ca: sage publications, inc. maton, k. i. (2008). empowering community settings: agents of individual development, community betterment, and positive social change. american journal of community psychology, 41, 4-21. patton, m. q. (1987). how to use qualitative methods in evaluation. newbury park, ca: sage. sarkisian, g. v. & taylor, s. (2013). a learning journey i: curriculum mapping as a tool to assess and integrate community psychology practice competencies into graduate education programs. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), xx-xx. retrieved from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). society for community research and action (2012). competencies for community psychology global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 4 december 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 practice: draft august 15, 2012. the community psychologist, 45(4), 7-14. taylor, s. & sarkisian, g. v. (2011). community psychology values-driven pedagogy: the foundation for empowering educational settings. the global journal of community psychology practice, 2(2), 1-12. wolff, t. & sarkisian, g.v. (2013). community coalition simulation: experiential learning of community psychology practice competencies. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(4), xx-xx. retrieved from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). zimmerman, m. (2000). empowerment theory: psychological, organizational, and community levels of analysis. in j. rappaport & e. seidman (eds.), handbook of community psychology (pp. 43-63). new york: plenum. critical conscientisation; linking insecurity feelings with structural oppression a case study of fisheries community of saribi and submander in the island of numfor, papua province of indonesia maria latumahina keywords: author biography: maria latumahina, is from west papua, indonesia. she has been actively advocating for social and environmental justice for more than twenty years. over the past decade she has been addressing issues of colonisation and internalised oppression among the indigenous people of this most eastern region of indonesia. recommended citation: latumahina, m. (2023). critical conscientisation; linking insecurity feelings with structural oppression a case study of fisheries community of saribi and submander in the island of numfor, papua province of indonesia. global journal of community psychology practice, 14(2), 1 9. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: maria latumahina. email: maria.latumahina@gmail.com https://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:maria.latumahina@gmail.com global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 critical conscientisation; linking insecurity feelings with structural oppression a case study of fisheries community of saribi and submander in the island of numfor, papua province of indonesia abstract many pioneers of critical pedagogy and popular education have suggested that a collective approach of critical reflection and action can help communities to develop a better understanding of their social realities and improve their well-being (paulo freire, 1972, anne hope and sally timmel, 1984, alastair mcintosh and matt carmichael, 2006). this approach of critical conscientisation that includes collective memory work and training for transformation, have been tested with members of fishing communities on numfor island in the indonesian province of papua. the results of this research are presented in this paper. the testimonies of participating community members suggest a causal link between their feelings of insecurity, structural oppression, economic policies that promote selfishness and fierce competition among individuals, and their own state of chronical poverty, indebtedness and dehumanisation. participating community members have identified their increasing dependence on government handouts and a lack of market access as the critical drivers behind the rise of jealousy, anxiety and corruption, and the decline of communal solidarity. these trends are perceived to have escalated the selling of land and the degradation of the natural resource base that are critical to their livelihoods and well-being. introduction the research presented in this paper was undertaken to inform approaches to community empowerment, in particular, to shape community organisational leadership in the context of a larger programme for small scale fishery improvement in indonesia. based on a case study in the villages of saribi and submander on numfor island in papua province, this undertaking discusses the factors that have contributed to emotional insecurity, including the ways in which they are expressed, and their impact on communities self-organising capacity. the case study has enabled participating village members to critically examine their own situation and link their personal issues and feelings of insecurity to structural factors of oppression. context papua province is located on the western half of new guinea island, bordering papua new guinea. its inhabitants, especially the indigenous part of the population, are generally considered the most deprived and poorest segment of the indonesian society. as pointed out in the research of perkumpulan satu kata (2019), an association of local researchers, this social stigma has shaped a negative identity of both individuals and collectives, and contributed to feelings of insecurity, shame, anxiety and jealousy. despite its autonomous status, which includes the right to lead its own development, papua continues to be one of indonesia’s poorest provinces (sumule, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 2005), and numfor island is no exception to this situation. numfor is an atoll surrounded by coral reefs that is located on the northern cost of papua province, facing the pacific ocean. it is part of the biaknumfor regency which also includes the islands of biak and supiori. the people of numfor are mostly of biak origins. over the past decades, the people of numfor have been facing coercive forces that have changed their identities and transformed their communal livelihood systems into a more individualistic, commercial and pecuniary local economy. this transition has increased the levels of poverty and led to social conflicts that have prevented people from organising themselves for the pursuit of a more desirable future (perkumpulan satu kata, 2019). saribi and submander are two neighbouring villages that are located on the island of numfor. these villages are mostly composed of poor subsistence households that struggle to pay for education and health. the local economy is highly dependent on the land and the sea. resource degradation due to destructive and illegal fishing, deforestation and unsustainable land-use practices is a major concern. harvests and returns from natural resources have been declining over recent decades, resulting in a perpetual dependency on imported staples and government subsidies. this predicament is made worse by limited market access. the only opportunity to sell village products is provided by an occasional stop-over boat that links these villages to buyers in the towns of manokwari and biak. unfortunately, the government cash transfer programmes and food subsidies around which village development is organised seem to have exacerbated these problems instead of providing solutions. the provision of village development funds has led to social conflict and corruption, and has become a source of stress, anger, jealousy and distrust among community members. the interviews conducted by perkumpulan satu kata in 2019 indicate high levels of insecurity and anxiety among community members for having to cope with such an unprecedented situation while also facing the deterioration of their resource base and life support systems. objective building on the baseline research conducted by perkumpulan satu kata (2019), this study aimed to support the community in understanding their predicament by expressing their feelings of insecurity and examining the contributing factors and their impact through a process of conscientisation. in his book pedagogy of the oppressed (1972), paulo freire described conscientisation as the process of raising people’s critical awareness of their social reality through both reflection and action so as to enable them to transform and improve their well-being. method general approach the study adopted an ontological approach that promotes the collaboration between the facilitator and the participants to examine the reality of their daily lives. previous interactions between the participants and the facilitator provided the foundation for an effective collaboration. the communities were informed in advance about the objective of this undertaking, namely, to uncover why and how their reality became the way it is. the study was based on a sample of ten volunteering participants, equally divided by gender. the feelings expressed by these participants were duly taken into account. as pointed out by yin (1994) and hammersley et al. (2009), case studies examine details within a specific context and may therefore be limited with respect to their representation of the wider situation. training for transformation (tft) the tft method is rooted in training manuals for community workers that were http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 published by anne hope and sally timmel in 1984 (nazombe, 2010). starting in kenya, hope and timmel developed and assembled practical and accessible training materials for leadership development in response to the struggle of marginalised people against apartheid in southern africa in the early 1970s (hope and timmel, 2014). tft manuals contain a number of tool sets, including the problem posing tool which was used in this case study. this method suggests the use of a code, which is defined as a concrete representation of a familiar set of problems, as a basis for a deeper, stepwise analysis (hope and timmel, 1984). this case study used indebtedness as a code for a deeper analysis of the local situation. collective memory work the collective memory work method was introduced by friga haugg and others in the 1980s, when it was developed in the context of feminist research and empowerment (clark, 2009). haugg’s approach emphasised the relevance of experience in shaping personalities. crawford et al. (1992) later strengthened this approach by elaborating theories on the intersubjective analysis of memories. based on the suggestion of onyx and small (2001) this case study adapted memory work method to include men, who experience economic, social and political pressures that are quite similar to those experienced by female community members. as argued by clark (2009), by sharing stories with others within a group and between groups, each person can recognize common social and cultural threads that can help to weave individual stories into a larger fabric and deeper understanding of social realities. clark’s argument also resonates with the point made by reed (2014) that authentic and honest personal stories can inspire political engagement. the case study encouraged the use of storytelling in line with the oral traditions of papuan societies, although haugg emphasized the use of writing and visualization in her own research (clark, 2009). the process started with an instruction for men and women to form a group of their own, followed by twenty minutes of silence to recall meaningful sounds and associated memories from their childhood. another twenty minutes were allocated to sharing these personal memories within the group, followed by an intergroup discussion. findings each method generated some distinct yet interconnected findings. training for transformation (tft) the group selected indebtedness as a basis for a deeper analysis. it displayed shared feelings of shame, guilt and hopelessness associated with the state of being indebted. some of the participants testified that they had unintentionally taught their children to lie to debt collectors so as to delay payments. thus, dishonesty became an accepted part of their interactions with others, contributing to the erosion of the social fabric of the community. others mentioned that they are indebted to a level at which they can no longer hope to have any freedom in their lives. a couple testified that they had to surrender their land, that is, the basis of their livelihood, to an outsider to whom they were indebted without any clear tenure agreement. the group analysed the main economic and social systems that created and perpetuated their indebtedness. without the necessary capital, assets or means of production to improve their well-being, they had to borrow money to procure fuel, fishing gear or other necessary inputs to pursue their livelihoods, and make ends means. having had almost no access to market could easily trap the community in a vicious cycle of indebtedness. another factor that is equally http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 driving indebtedness is the broken trust and lack of solidarity among the members of the community which prevents them from organizing and taking collective action to improve their situation. figure 1. a simple causal loop diagram on the factors of oppression created by the participants of the case study the participants have been able to identify and understand how various factors interact to create these predicaments. they concluded that the state of indebtedness is a major source of their own anxiety and shame that continues to erode the moral basis of their families. at the village level, this dynamic results in massive corruption, the selling of land, and the degradation of their natural resource base and life support systems. the result of these mutually reinforcing trends is a serious existential crisis. collective memory work in the women’s group the sounds of nature had strong connections with individual and collective emotions and memories. each female participant remembered the sounds made by the sea waves, the birds and the leaves in the forest and the garden, all of which triggered pleasant memories and emotions that stood in stark contrast to their current feelings of insecurity. the recollection of the sounds generated by the leaves in the garden and in the forest brought back joyful memories of being in nature when growing up and feeling safe in it. it created memories of an abundance of food and the associated feeling of safety, which stood in contrast to the current situation where forests and gardens have been degraded by unsustainable and destructive land-use practices. another shared memory was how they would play in nature while being nude without any fear of being sexually abused. the group claimed that this situation has now changed to the extent that young girls are scared of being left alone and anxious about their sexuality. a shared memory in the men’s group was the sound of their parents, especially of their mothers, and the feeling of security that it once bestowed on them. a man shared the memory of his mother comforting him and imitated the vocalisations that she had used when putting him to sleep in her arms. together http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 the group remembered and sang an old lullaby. discussion poverty as human reality has existed from time immemorial. it is an evident of an inability to meet fundamental human needs (banks, 2016) both physical as well as psychological therefore is multidimensional. there have been various emotional costs of being poor, such as the feelings of inferiority and shame that manifest themselves in the form of anxiety (underlid, 2007) and distrust. it distorts one’s perception of self-worthiness (rosado, 2006) as the state of being poor is attached to particular social perceptions and values. people fall under the category of being poor are perceived as incapable of determining their own destiny. all of these understandings are, to varying degrees, evident in the results of the case study. the level of anxiety that the people of numfor are suffering is not exceptional but a wider societal phenomenon of papua. anthropological research on the highlanders studying in the outer island such as at the university in north sulawesi discussed the feeling of shame among the students who, because of their inability to comply with a modern standard of living, are perceived as backward (munro, n.d). this perception came about because of a long process of change in the societal selfrealisation that began at some point in history. it has been shaped systematically from the time of pacification, marking the beginning of a systemic deconstruction of the melanesian self (rutherford, 1997) which has been advanced by protestant reforms of european christianity. the protestant sect of calvinism appears to be of particular relevance to the situation in papua, to where it was imported during the period of dutch colonialization. calvinism has been held responsible for the promotion of participatory democratic structures, as well as the advancement of capitalism (brink and hopfl, 2016). capitalism came and grew in papua through colonization that began with the arrival of dutch merchants and was advanced through the spread of christianity by two german missionaries, ottow and gessler, in the late 19th century. the early stages of christianisation, during which papua was referred to as the land of evil (rumere and onim, 2005), lawlessness and cannibalism (hitt, 1962). being subjects to dutch colonization, the people of numfor have shared similar oppressive and traumatic experience. this gave rise to the koreri countermovement which opposed the merits of obedience and discipline promoted by the early christian missionaries (ooesterwald, rutherford, 1997). during world war ii the islanders were exposed to severe violence under japanese rule. the ngo pacific wrecks (2019) describes how the island’s demography changed when japanese military brought in forced labourers from east java and other parts of indonesia. following the japanese rule, the american military occupied the islands and continued the system of oppression. following the end of world war, the papuans fell under the administrative authority of the indonesian government retaining and exercising the values and practise of oppressions. rosado (2006) concluded that oppression is the result of the combination of power and prejudice, which creates an interlocking system of domination and control which the government of indonesia is successfully enacting through the practice of controls over the means of production, the distribution of resources, immigration, and the institutionalisation of social norms and values (pouwer, 2019). the government’s extractive based economic growth policy is strongly associated with practise of colonisation (stott, 2011), further, compromises local economy and well-being of its majority ordinary people. coupled by lack of public service and the dysfunctional system of rural economy, the colonisation of the psychic space remains unchanged despite its development agenda. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 the participants reflections and analysis of indebtedness links their emotional brokenness with the structural and systemic failures of life supports system. the mentioned of guilty feeling having to encourage their children to tell a lie to the debt collector signaling a disassociation between the state of individuation or ability to tell right from wrong and the external pressures. all in all, reinforce the feeling of shame and inadequacy over the lack of economic progress and by that creating dependency. those who are in a position of insecurity and inferiority, inevitably tend to be dependent on other people to discard the devastating emotions (van de kolk, 2015) and therefore almost have no incentive to be critical about their reality (freire, 1996, hope and timmel, 1984). paving a way to chronic dependency, the government enforcing the policy of rural cash transfer programme injecting excessive amount of cash to rural communities. despite the seemingly endless effort to improve the monitoring system of the implementation of cash transfer programme in indonesia, the level of corruption among the village government remains of concerns (antlov et al, 2016). furthermore, the case study supports the observation made by hossain et al. (2012) that lack of oversight mechanism to the cash transfer programmes in this context have negative impacts on communities and their social cohesion and that lack of social cohesion reduces a community’s capacity for problem solving (field, 2008). the participants of the case study concluded that such interventions only serve to perpetuate their anxiety and preclude the re-building of a sense of identity and the trust that would allow them to organise and mobilise. the study has demonstrated that a better understanding of the structural nature of oppression can lead to a critical examination of the underlying politicaleconomic factors, and a proactive development of countermeasures such as the identification of the investments and assets that would be required for a more constructive engagement of the communities of saribi-submander in the market economy. this recognition and understanding are the first steps towards transformative action and positive change (mcintosh and carmichael, 2016). reed (2014) suggests that a recognition of emotions such as fear, anger, hope and love can be a starting point for social movements and empowerment. shared emotions can derive power within and power with to gear up political and social activism (emirbayer and goodwin,1996). conclusion the communities of saribi-submander seem emotionally insecure and inflicted with a negative self-image due to a long history of oppression. this hampers human development and the creation of social capital that would be necessary to mobilise community members to improve their wellbeing and escape poverty. further, the communities are confronted by a limited access to markets and corrupt village governance, including a lack of transparency in the management and disbursement of seemingly excessive village development funds. borrowing funds from local money lenders to make ends meet has unwittingly reinforced their emotional insecurities and negative self-image and trapped them in a state of perpetual indebtedness and under-development. high levels of anxiety, shame and hopelessness seemed to have reinforced high levels of dependency on a small elite of patrons who managed to secure control over government subsidies. this has created jealousy and distrust among community members, which further reinforces the trap, the decline of their living standards, and the degradation of their natural and social environment. the joint analysis of the psychological issues of community members points to the existing political and economic structures and development policies conceived by the centre, including village cash transfer programmes, as major contributing factors. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 the application of conscientisation methods has enabled the participating members of the community to recognize and understand the underlying structural causes of their situation and the ways in which they impact their lives. the poverty and oppression, and the resulting negative emotions and self-image experienced by the people of saribi-sukmander are not the inevitable outcome of geography or culture, nor are they the unintended side-effects of history or economic development. they are deliberate creations of human beings, which means that humans can change them if they are able to muster the will, courage and strength to do so. references antlov, h., dharmawan, l.,wetterberg, a. 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https://www.papuaerfgoed.org/files/rathgeber_2005_economic.pdf https://www.papuaerfgoed.org/files/rathgeber_2005_economic.pdf https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-2397.2006.00423.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-2397.2006.00423.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-2397.2006.00423.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-2397.2006.00423.x microsoft word 2012-003-final-20120521.docx lobbying for endorsement of community psychology in australia lynne cohen1, julie dean2, heather gridley3, rebecca hogea4, ken robinson5, emma sampson6, anne sibbel7, and colleen turner8 australian psychological society college of community psychologists abstract in november 2010, the areas of practice known as community psychology and health psychology were endorsed by the australian health workforce ministerial council (ahwmc). this was a major reversal of the council’s earlier decision in april that year to limit the endorsed areas of practice to those represented by the other seven colleges of the australian psychological society. this paper describes the intense lobbying effort coordinated by the national committee of the australian psychological society college of community psychologists and their supporters, which was sustained over many months and led ultimately to a changed decision by the australian health ministers. the story is important for community psychology as it demonstrates the power of collective, integrated and focussed political lobbying, in this case to promote and to inform others of the key contributions of community psychology to health policy, illness prevention and primary care. without endorsement there would be little incentive for universities to offer postgraduate programs in community psychology, which would then choke the only pathway to future membership of the college, rendering it unviable. with no further training offered, and eventually no representative body within the aps, there would be direct implications for the sustainability of the whole discipline and practice of community psychology in australia. 1 school of psychology and social science, edith cowan university, perth, wa. 2 school of population health,!university of queensland 3 school of social sciences and psychology, victoria university, melbourne 4 school of social sciences and psychology, victoria university, melbourne 5 school of psychology and social science, edith cowan university, perth, wa. 6 aps college of community psychologists 7 school of psychology and social science, edith cowan university, perth, wa. 8 broadmeadows uniting care, victoria. global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 lobbying for endorsement of community psychology in australia this paper describes the campaign that members of the australian psychological society (aps) college of community psychologists shared with members of the aps college of health psychologists, together with a host of supporters, following the 1 april 2010, when it was announced by the australian health workforce ministerial council (ahwmc, made up of all commonwealth (national) and state/territory health ministers, henceforth ‘the health ministers’) that there would be only seven endorsed areas of practice in psychology under the new national registration system for health professionals. the two areas of practice recognised by the aps, but not endorsed by the ministers were community psychology and health psychology. the ministers noted that their decision was “consistent with local and international categories for the psychology profession such as branches of psychology in western australia (wa), and the recently recognised domains of practice in the united kingdom” (ahwmc, 2010, p.1). the profession of psychology within australia now formally recognises nine areas of specialist psychological practice, as represented by the nine colleges of the aps: the aps colleges of clinical neuropsychologists, clinical psychologists, community psychologists, counselling psychologists, educational and developmental psychologists, forensic psychologists, health psychologists, organisational psychologists, and sport and exercise psychologists. ‘generalist’ registration (akin to licensing) as a practising psychologist does not require specialisation or endorsement of any one area of practice; in february 2012 there were 28,632 psychologists registered in australia, of whom 7550 (26%) held an area of practice endorsement (psychology board of australia, 2012). in november 2010, all nine areas of practice were endorsed by the ministers following a concerted campaign. it is important to clarify the links between the ministers and their regulators. australian psychologists are regulated by the psychology board of australia, operating under the auspice of the australian health practitioner regulation agency (ahpra), which in turn, is responsible to the health ministers. ahpra is the organisation responsible for implementing the new national registration and accreditation scheme (nras, henceforth ‘national registration scheme’) across the eight state and territory jurisdictions of australia, bringing together the functions of 85 separate health practitioner boards to ten national boards, covering 530,000 health practitioners (ahpra, 2011). prior to the formation of ahpra, and under the australian constitution, health practitioner regulation was the responsibility of the individual states and territories. following a joint decision by the health ministers, the national registration process commenced in 2008. although the decision to exclude community psychology and health psychology as endorsed areas of practice under national registration was formally announced in april 2010, it had been ‘in the wind’ for several months. the australian health ministers advisory committee (ahmac, made up of the director generals of health in each state, henceforth ‘advisers to the ministers’) had initially recommended that the health ministers endorse only four practice areas: clinical psychology, counselling psychology, forensic psychology and clinical neuropsychology, with the rationale being that these four were the most likely to represent areas within psychology which would need regulation to protect the health interests of the public. in retrospect, it might have been better for community psychology in australia had the endorsed areas of practice been confined to the context of direct health service delivery. had the initial recommendation been followed, then the sizeable minority of psychologists represented by the other five aps colleges would have represented a sustainable counterweight to the power vested in the four that were originally intended to be endorsed. this situation would then have been similar to the new zealand scenario, where only clinical, educational and more recently, counselling psychology are designated as specialist scopes of practice within their parallel registration system, with the remaining areas (known within the new zealand psychological society as institutes, more or less corresponding with the nine aps colleges) being content for now at least to be subsumed under the mantle of generalist psychological practice. the decision, however, to endorse seven areas of practice left the remaining two areas of practice in an invidious situation. it was fortunate that health psychology was also excluded, as the task might have been much more difficult had sport psychology been excluded (with an aps college as small in size as community psychology, with fewer than 100 members nationally at the time) or had organisational psychology been excluded, which was and is as difficult as community psychology to accommodate within a narrow framework of health global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 service delivery. although the number of trained or self-identified community psychologists in australia exceeds 250, about a third of those had elected to join the college. moreover, both community psychology and health psychology were well represented at senior levels within the aps national office, which helped to maintain the steadfastness of the aps to keep lobbying for all nine specialist areas, in keeping with its official policy that all the areas of practice represented by all nine colleges of the aps should be endorsed. the health ministers’ decision to endorse seven areas of psychological practice, rather than the four originally proposed, was associated with the political situation in wa, and as such was both political and pragmatic. wa was the only jurisdiction to have had a pre-existing system of specialist registration at the time of announcement of the areas of endorsed practice, with practitioners in these seven areas having been recognised by the wa registration board for many years as holding specialist title registration. no such system operated in the more populous states of victoria and new south wales, and specialist registration had indeed been abandoned in victoria during the 1990s, as having no demonstrable added value. but among wa psychologists, a major concern was that their specialist titles would be lost with the introduction of endorsed areas of practice, and a well organised pressure group had emerged in that state to advance the interests of specialist psychologists within the new national system. as wa had been the only state to have a preexisting system of specialist registration, its list of seven areas became the fallback position as the advisers to the ministers were pressured by the aps and other bodies to expand on the original four. hence, the wa health minister, the hon dr kim hames stated that approval for area of practice endorsement was based on maintaining consistency with wa’s seven branches of specialist registration, pending development of national criteria for assessing specialist registration proposals. it is interesting to speculate why the regulation system in the least populated state in australia was accepted without any supporting evidence from the six other states and territories. pragmatically, it would have been more difficult to completely remove the existing specialist status from wa psychologists than to ‘grant’ it to the rest of the country; and politically, at the time wa was the only state with a conservative government that needed to be accommodated by the federal labor government that was ultimately responsible for implementing the national registration scheme. so ‘endorsement’ was the compromise position; very few of the health professions were permitted to include specialist titles at all under the national registration scheme. in the section that follows, the authors have collated reports from some of the key individuals associated with the collective community psychology response to the health ministers’ decision to endorse seven areas of psychological practice, rather than all nine areas long recognised by the aps. these voices provide a narrative that should be understood within the political framework of australia, which is a federation of state and territorial governments, represented by the federal or commonwealth government based in canberra, australian capital territory, and also within the context of australian community psychology, which traditionally has been strongest in victoria, wa and queensland, where postgraduate courses are running or have run in the past. the appendix at the end of this paper summarises all the initiatives undertaken by different groups to obtain endorsement for community psychology. the college chair’s perspective lynne cohen it was shortly after i became national chair of the aps college of community psychologists, that the news of our failure to be endorsed by the health ministers was released by the psychology board of australia. this devastating information was set to unite a group of people in ways we could never have envisaged. once the disbelief had settled came the realisation that this could mean the demise of the college and community psychology in australia, as there would be no incentive for universities to offer postgraduate training programs, and the numbers of students electing to study community psychology would soon reduce to the stage where programs would be unsustainable. postgraduate students would be unlikely to elect a study pathway which would not lead to professional endorsement. a meeting was organised in melbourne, victoria to which members of the national committee of the college, (comprising the chair, secretary, treasurer, membership secretary, program accreditation and professional development convenors, state section and student representatives), and other interested parties were invited. i was extremely apprehensive prior to the meeting as there was little indication at that point of whether there was adequate support and motivation by the members to pursue endorsement. however it soon became apparent within a short timeframe that there was overwhelming support for developing a campaign global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 and not giving up in the face of adversity. i was also aware that the campaign would require coordination and monitoring across australia. leaders emerged from the different state branches and the entire operation was managed with precision by dr anne sibbel in wa. my role in the subsequent months became one of facilitation by writing and meeting with various members of parliament, using personal contacts to acquire support from international organisations, as well as government and non-government agencies with which we had previously worked and who supported the skills and competencies of community psychologists. a defining moment for me during this time was a decision that the committee had made to consider seeking expert advice from a professional lobbyist to assist us with our endeavours. an appropriate person was recommended and a meeting was arranged. it was after the meeting when i realised that all our members and supporters were already engaged in the activities suggested by the expert. i knew from that moment that we were taking the correct approach and that we were going to excel in at least trying to achieve our goal – the endorsement (and survival) of community psychology in australia. letters of support and cultivating champions anne sibbel national secretary of the aps college of community psychologists following the health ministers’ decision not to recognise community psychology under the national registration scheme, our national committee convened an urgent face-to-face meeting to put together our response to this decision. we agreed on a number of strategies (see appendix a), realising we needed a fluid process that was able to be responsive to future developments. letter writing and meetings with key decision makers to present our case for endorsement, to correct misinformation about what community psychologists do, and to cultivate support for our endorsement were two of these strategies. as a small college, we needed members of the various government committees who had the decision making power in this process to understand who we were, what we did and our unique contribution to the wellbeing of the australian population. in wa, we tried to arrange a meeting with health minister hames, but for “ordinary” people such meetings are usually booked months in advance, time we didn’t have. i mentioned our plight to a neighbour at our local residents and ratepayers association meeting. a few days later i was thrilled to receive an email from that neighbour asking if we’d like him to use his political connections to arrange a meeting for us with the wa shadow9 minister for health, roger cook. a few days later ken robinson and i met with roger at parliament house in perth. roger was sympathetic to our cause and seemed to have a good understanding of the situation but we weren’t sure how he could further help us. but sometimes luck can be on your side and you can be in the “right place at the right time”. just as we were about to close our meeting with roger, minister hames walked past where we were sitting. roger asked him over and introduced us. minister hames immediately told us he understood our situation; he was supportive of us being granted endorsement and suggested we needed to get similar support from ministers in the other states in australia so he would not be a lone voice on the council. this was our first breakthrough and we quickly emailed the news to our colleagues around the country. at this time we also decided to ask the organisations and companies we work for and with as community psychologists to write to the wa health minister in support of our endorsement, detailing value of the particular work we do. i approached the wa chamber of minerals and energy, the peak body representing the booming resource sector, to write on our behalf. the chamber is a high profile organisation that has the “ear” of government, with the impact of mining on the wellbeing individuals and communities often on the public agenda. a number of community psychologists work in this sector; my own work is with fly-in/fly-out workers and their families, and the chamber readily agreed to write in our support. the minister’s chief of staff replied to their letter within two weeks confirming the minister’s understanding of the situation and his support for community psychology, and suggesting that the chamber also write to the chair of the newly formed psychology board of australia. there were, however, several points in that reply that i thought should be clarified, so a couple of days later i decided to “cold call” the minister’s office and see if they would put me through to his 9 shadow ministers are members or senators from the opposition party who are given a ‘shadow’ portfolio with responsibility to scrutinise the work of a particular government minister/department. they have no official power, and may or may not be allocated the same portfolio should their party be subsequently elected to government. global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 chief of staff. i was also keen to see if they could advise us on further strategies. i dialed the number and expected the “gatekeepers” to deflect me elsewhere. however, i was very pleasantly surprised a few minutes later to be speaking with minister hames’ chief of staff. he gave me the opportunity to clarify the issues and then made some suggestions for future action. over the duration of the campaign, the chief of staff proved to be an extremely valuable ally – he provided information and advice that i’m sure was crucial to our ultimate success in the campaign – a champion indeed. brian english committee member of the wa section of the aps college of community psychologists i was always looking at the issue from two perspectives, first, as a negotiation, and second, from the need for diversity in our profession. the basics of effective negotiation require establishing any fair and reasonable benchmarks: from a procedural justice point of view what i thought was needed was a public statement to correct the information presumably used to justify the decision not to endorse community psychology hence our decision to write an open letter. from the perspective of the need for diversity within any profession, the fact that community psychology is relevant to mental health not only needed to be said loud and clear, but it needed to be said by the people and organisations that work with community psychologists (i.e., in most cases nongovernment organizations). i considered there was not much point in us making our own claims as others would simply point to self-interest, hence my strong advocacy for the ngos to say it. my psychologist partner kerry, and i initially drafted letters for ngos to write to the wa minister of health, which raised our profile. these were not chain letters, but individually crafted for each ngo, and for their ministerial recipients. later, when we started receiving contradictory and misinformed replies, for example, that the decision not to endorse community psychology and health psychology had been taken on the advice of the psychology board of australia to the health ministers, kerry and i spent three days researching and writing the draft open letter to all ministers of health across australia. after much email debate, input from the college committee members across four states and multiple redraftings, the open letter was sent to the ministers, as a strategy to resolve the misconceptions, factual errors and inconsistencies in reply we had received during the campaign. dances with bureaucrats emma sampson, co– chair of the victorian section of the aps college of community psychologists i agreed to follow-up with the victorian health minister, as part of our strategy to contact all health ministers to rectify incorrect information and put our case forward to ensure a corrective decision with respect to the endorsement of community and health psychology. the minister’s office replied promptly – “unfortunately the minister for health, hon daniel andrews mp, is unable to meet with you at this time. however, the minister would like for you to meet with his adviser, to discuss your concerns. [the adviser] will be in touch to arrange a convenient meeting time...” five weeks later, following numerous attempts to contact the minister’s adviser, heather gridley, victoria university community psychology student jacinta wainwright and myself found ourselves outside his office. by this stage it had become apparent that factually incorrect information, such as community psychology not having had specialty status in any jurisdiction in australia, had been used to justify the initial decision to exclude community and health psychology. furthermore, the broader context (that wa is not representative of the national context, and that the psychology board had actually recommended endorsement of both community psychology and health psychology) was being ignored, not to mention the contradictions with the government’s own health reform agenda that emphasised prevention approaches. the other ‘hook’ we had was a media release by david davis mp (the then victorian shadow health minister), showing his understanding of the issue and support for endorsement. he had met with heather and a senior health psychology colleague soon after the health ministers’ decision was announced, and was receptive to anything that might embarrass his ministerial opponent! along with the minister’s adviser, another bureaucrat attended our meeting; together they proceeded to question us about community psychology’s position. they had been involved in workforce sector reforms within the state, so were aware of the context and particularly interested in why community psychologists needed ‘endorsement’ and what the ‘public’ would lose if this area of psychology was not endorsed. global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 while as community psychologists we are used to ‘justifying’ our existence within the context of the broader psychology profession, i must say their phrasing (and directness) threw me a little. while not endorsing clinical psychology would have a direct impact on the quality of services for those with mental health issues (as put by the bureaucrat), community psychology is broader, less ‘client focused’ and more indirect in its processes and outcomes. for a minute i went blank it is funny how particular language or different ways of phrasing something can stop you in your tracks! i will also admit that i myself questioned our ‘need’ for endorsement throughout the campaign. was it necessary to insist on the specialist status of community psychology, given the values and philosophy that drive it? do we really want or need to professionalise community psychology? will it just make it more inaccessible to both students and the community? wouldn’t our efforts be better directed towards advocating for the rights of asylum seekers in the face of continuing detrimental immigration policies? of course, as heather has pointed out, it is about the recognition among nine specialisations (colleges) and for me the future of the victoria university course (masters in applied psychology – community psychology) – this had been my ‘way in’ to community psychology, and i didn’t want to see this opportunity lost for future students/community psychologists. in response to their questioning, we managed between us to quickly identify that without endorsement the preventative and strengths-based approaches taken by community psychologists would not be available to the public (phew!). heather pointed out that, particularly pertinent to the victorian context, victoria university currently hosts one of only two accredited programs in community psychology in australia, operating in a stream alongside the equally niche market area of sport and exercise psychology (which did receive endorsement). thus both streams of the program would be under direct threat if community psychology was not endorsed, which would represent a significant loss to the diversity within the psychology profession. they took note of this point. jacinta then provided an example of how studying community psychology had ‘added value’ to her career, providing her with a unique perspective in her work in the family violence field and enabling her to build on the skills she already had. they were particularly interested in our links with indigenous psychologists and communities. we explained that community psychologists are oriented to work with indigenous people and communities in ways that are effective and empowering, and following the meeting, we forwarded them a letter in support of endorsement by professor pat dudgeon aps fellow and chair of the australian indigenous psychologists association, outlining community psychology’s role in facilitating the change required to deliver equitable, accessible, sustainable, timely and culturally safe psychological care to aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples in urban, regional and remote australia. in a way only bureaucrats can manage, they didn’t give much away! we left happy with the case we had put forward but with not much insight into where it might lead! gaining the support of the profession the aps and broader psychology profession lent their support to our endorsement campaign. i was also armed with the task of putting together an article for inpsych, the bi-monthly aps bulletin that goes to all members. because the endorsement process (and lack thereof in our case) under national registration was related to the federal government’s health agenda, after collecting the stories of several community psychologists ‘in the field’, i familiarised myself with the national health and hospitals reform commission (2009) report. while i could easily promote community psychology and espouse its benefits to communities, it was important to align these with the government’s agenda. the resulting article discussed community psychology’s vital role in prevention and health promotion, in advocacy for minority groups and in fostering consumer involvement in health care – three goals of the national health reform agenda. see: http://www.psychology.org.au/publications/inpsych /2010/#jun2010 some general reflections the process has since had some unexpected outcomes, with community psychologists and community psychology graduates coming together as never before. the efforts to gain endorsement have also increased college membership by twenty-five per cent since 2010, with one prospective member commenting ‘i’ll have to join now, after that effort! i have learnt a lot about how decisions are made, and the importance of speaking to the ‘right’ people. having a committed group around the country also made an effective campaign possible, as did the constant email global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 contact, providing key pieces of information throughout the process. the student perspective rebecca hogea, postgraduate community psychology student, victoria university, melbourne. the community psychology postgraduate students at victoria university were concerned about the decision to exclude community psychology from the list of endorsed areas of practice. we were concerned about the continuation of one of the only community psychology programs in australia. we were equally concerned about whether this body of knowledge would be available to future students of psychology. on behalf of the current students, i wrote a letter to federal health minister nicola roxon explaining community psychology and its applicability in promoting wellbeing. i also mentioned my own journey to community psychology and how some students travel interstate (myself included) and internationally to study this course. we invited minister roxon to speak with students in her own electorate (which includes victoria university) about this issue. i received a reply on behalf of minister roxon declining the invitation to meet and assuring us that the course was fully accredited, which we already knew this was not our concern. in an attempt to correct the misunderstanding that students were concerned about their future registration as psychologists, i sent a second letter informing minister roxon that the decision to exclude community psychology from endorsement was based on incorrect information. i also highlighted that the focus of both community and health psychology was reflected in her government’s health agenda and reform plans. once again, on behalf of the students in minister roxon’s electorate i requested a meeting to discuss this matter in person. the final letter i received from minister roxon’s office once again declined the request to meet with her, but this time correctly acknowledged our concerns. we were informed that this matter would be discussed at the approaching health ministers’ meeting in november. we were pleased that our concerns were eventually understood and acknowledged with a promise of some action. the students wish to thank the college of community psychologists for their ongoing updates, information and documentation that supported us to continue correspondence with minister roxon. to our knowledge we were the only group that focussed our campaign on her as federal minister, while others approached the various state ministers. lobbying for support ken robinson, chair of the wa section of the college of community psychologists during late april 2010, shortly after the adverse announcement by the health ministers, professor lynne cohen and i enrolled in a lobbying workshop organised by the wa public health advocacy institute entitled ‘“how to lobby me” working with politicians – learn from the experts’. the advice had been forwarded by dr anne sibbel, who had received the information from her daughter, a research officer for a state politician. anne’s role as communicator and information forwarder was critical as she was able to tell us the progress of legislation both in wa and in other states. the workshop speakers were the hon jim mcginty, former state minister for health and attorney-general, federal government senator rachel siewert, dr janet woollard, independent state member of the legislative council, and mr peter tagliaferro, former mayor of fremantle. these speakers represented each of the three tiers of government in australia: federal, state and local. all advised that it was imperative to know and target your politician, to find out their background and what they stand for, to be clear on what you want, and what you want them to do. jim mcginty advised that it was important to make being persuaded desirable and to arrange third party support, such as the letter from professor pat dudgeon mentioned by emma sampson previously. in addition, he advised that it was important to keep repeating the same message, until you find that the message is repeated back to you, and to prepare information kits for speeches, press releases and other communications. senator siewert advised us to do our homework and find out what the political process was, to use local state illustrations, for example, research on suicide in wa regional communities, to ensure the information is accessible, and to consider what the opponents, in our case those people who would resist the endorsement of community psychology, would say and be prepared for that10. janet 10 there was not so much direct opposition to the endorsement of either health or community psychology, as resistance (for some understandable reasons) to a burgeoning of specialist designations global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 woollard advised using your local member as your lobbyist, as they are able to talk to the minister responsible on your behalf; she stressed that presentation is important and to ensure that the lobbyist is a good communicator, provides a clear rationale, with examples, and statistics, and leaves the politician thinking that they are now better informed. she emphasised that form letters and chain email should not be used, and that multiple, individually crafted letters were far more effective. finally, she advised that the help of the politicians lobbied should be acknowledged. at the end of the session, i asked for advice regarding the hiring of professional political lobbyists, and was advised by all four politicians that it was best for groups to do their own lobbying, as they had a much better appreciation for their particular political issue. both lynne and i relayed this advice to our national committee, which subsequently informed our national strategy, as well as our wa state strategy. at the national meeting convened by lynne cohen at the start of our campaign, i volunteered to investigate how to petition. initially, i considered a petition for the senate, which is the commonwealth upper house, and found i could run an online petition. most jurisdictions in australia have adopted the westminster system of bicameral representation, where legislation is enacted by the lower house, and reviewed by the upper house. under this system, petitions are far more effective addressed to the upper house. the national petition was important to raise the issue, and to demonstrate widespread support, given that the college of community psychologists had fewer than 100 members at the time, and might appear to be in a weak position to argue for its own relevance. it was important to address this misperception, and point out the broader implications of not endorsing community psychology, in that it addresses systemic change that is not necessarily considered in the approaches of other psychology specialities. by november we had generated nearly 3000 signatures to the online petition, which was remarkable. i quickly realised, however, that a second petition was required as legislation was going through each state house of parliament, and that the appropriate across the various health professions covered by national registration. and there was a sense from some quarters within the profession that endorsement of all nine areas might represent ‘a bridge too far’, so if a campaign was to be waged, we would have to lead it ourselves, in collaboration with the health psychologists. petition within wa was to its upper house, being the legislative council. although we generated far fewer signatures with the paper-based petition, it was important because it leveraged the role of the house of review in our state. the tabling of this petition raised the profile of our concerns among all politicians within the wa parliament, and forced me and anne sibbel to learn about government process, which proved important in our ongoing strategy and actions. in keeping with advice from the lobbying workshop, i lobbied alan plumb, who at the time was the chair of the aps wa branch, and a member of the wa psychology registration board. he is a prominent psychologist whom i convinced to write a letter of support to the hon. john hill, south australian minister of health, who is the chair of the australian health workforce ministerial council. alan’s support was important, because it demonstrated third party endorsement for our issue, and that our cause was not limited to the few members of the community college in wa. it showed that the wa psychology establishment was in sympathy with endorsement of both community psychology and health psychology. my final recollection is about using the information from the workshop in lobbying prominent wa health bureaucrats. with the wa section chair of the college of health psychologists, dr rosie rooney, i visited the wa representative on the health workforce principals committee, made up of senior public service officers representing each state in australia. this committee is the body that prepares and provides the enabling documentation to be considered by the advisers to the ministers, which then passes recommendations to the health ministers for their decision. the meeting and subsequent advice from this prominent public official was critical in advising our ongoing strategy. it was she who indicated that we had to lobby and be active in more states than just wa and victoria, and that it was essential to include queensland and, if possible, south australia. she further indicated that it was more important to “convince the organ grinder, rather than the monkey”, and therefore to concentrate our efforts on the relevant health ministers, their council chair, minister hill, and his principal adviser, rather than senior health bureaucrats like herself. her strong advice was to concentrate on the ministers, as they could either accept or reject advice provided to them. her advice was important as it ensured that members of our national committee would involve more states (heather’s global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 action with dr y, described later, and julie’s action with the queensland health minister) which i believe eventually made the difference to the decision to endorse community and health psychology. a particularly concerning comment this public official made was that that if the endorsement issue were to be raised with the health ministers, it would be likely referred back to the ministerial advisers to consider adding endorsements for community psychology and health psychology. this advice corroborated a letter we had recently received from minister hill which said that the ministers “recently decided to refer this matter for the consideration of the health workforce principals committee..." she explained that this particular committee was working on the new framework for endorsement which might take more than 12 months to finalise, and that progressing our case would probably have to wait until this process was established. this was the preferred option for ministers, as it would ensure would ensure that any success on our part would not form a precedent for other professions to make similar claims to endorsement. it seemed that after all our campaigning, all we would achieve was the opportunity to put our case forward whenever the new rules for endorsement would be established, at best in 12 months time. a glimmer of hope lay in her further advice that we had to show that both community and health psychology had been through a process of independent review to establish that they were, indeed, areas of practice that ought to be endorsed. when i reported this discussion back to the national committee, heather gridley indicated that community psychology had been confirmed as an area of specialist practice within victoria under its regulations in 1992, and had gone through a process of review sanctioned by its state government. in addition, heather pointed out that health psychology was one of the recognised areas under the recently established british health professions council. this was the evidence we wanted; we could demonstrate that both community psychology and health psychology had gone through independent review. the basketball mum’s story colleen turner, committee member of the victorian section of the aps college of community psychologists. my contribution to the salvation of community psychology was unexpected. heather gridley as campaign manager was keeping us up to date and i was trying hard to understand the complexities and circularities. i was prepared to write letters of support, and there was discussion of whether my organisation, and my program area of communities for children, would be willing to lend their official support to the campaign. amid all of this, jess my 11-year-old daughter joined a new basketball team, along with a team of parents i needed to meet and bond with, so while watching our girls run up and down and throw endless baskets i fell into conversation with sally’s mother (not the girl’s real name). we shared names, children’s schools and interests, and eventually our jobs… sally’s mum worked for the victorian department of human services. she had, i discovered, been one of the victorian representatives involved in drafting the new national legislation for health professionals’ registration. we had a fairly ‘robust’ discussion about the pros and cons of national registration and how that would affect existing structures and specialities. i think i expressed some scepticism about the efficiency of introducing yet another layer of bureaucracy, and relayed to her my limited understanding of the community psychology situation. then training ended and we all went home. i told heather about this chance meeting and she, true to the role of campaign manager, urged me to follow up with better information and more questions for this possibly influential person. and so the conversations continued over several weeks of training sessions until i reached the absolute limits of my understanding of the issues, which became more complex as we discussed them. sally’s mum’s opinion – as i recall it, because the bouncing noises were distracting – was that three or four specialist areas in psychology were enough, and that any more would be confusing to psychology consumers, whether they be individuals, organisations – or indeed communities. further she thought (bounce, bounce, good shot sally, good shot jess…) that enough concessions had been made to the aps by the expansion of the list to seven specialities (or endorsed areas of practice). all of this was logical and sensible. i gave my opinion that the most important thing for community psychology was maintaining the very different skill set through the continuation of specialist university programs. as i recall, sally’s mum was sceptical that refusing endorsement would mean the end of the programs. i confirmed that this was the case because one had already global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 ceased in wa11. but i couldn’t explain the hows and whys of the argument. so back to heather, who suggested she should have a conversation with sally’s mum. it had become clear at campaign headquarters that the basketball connection was important. sally’s mum had a pivotal role in working from and shaping the victorian government’s perspective, and ensuring her clear understanding of why community psychology mattered and how its exclusion from endorsement would impact on programs seemed vital. i admit that at this point i became quite hesitant – it seemed one thing to have general, if increasingly technical, conversations at basketball training and quite another thing for direct lobbying to take place. i worried that exploiting the random personal connection would be seen as unfair; i worried that sally’s mum would cease speaking to me at training, which might impact in turn on jess and sally’s incipient friendship, and so on… i eventually decided it was ok to lobby after sally’s mum advertised their school fete though the basketball email trail – wasn’t that a form of lobbying too? so i gave heather sally’s mum’s contact number, after warning her that heather might call. anyway, they then had a productive conversation including much history and much technical detail. the bit i remember hearing about is sally’s mum disputing that victoria had ever had specialist registration at all, much less for community psychologists. heather was able to quote the legislation almost verbatim, including the date the act was introduced (1987), the date the regulations were implemented (1992), and indeed, when it was repealed (2000) and specialist registration abandoned on the grounds that it was too much trouble to administer for too little 11 the postgraduate program previously offered by edith cowan university was not submitted for accreditation in 2010, soon after the original announcement that community psychology was not to be one of the endorsed areas of practice under national registration. this meant that there would no further intake of students into the program, as the school of psychology and social science reasoned that potential postgraduate students were more likely to choose a specialty which would gain them endorsement with the psychology board of australia. that decision has now been reversed and a new intake is anticipated in 2013. demonstrable additional public benefit beyond general registration of all psychologists. i don’t really know how far this series of conversations fed into the general mix of advocacy and information – heather believes it contributed to the general softening of attitudes towards psychology, and/or a better understanding at least of community psychology, within the bureaucracy overall. jess and sally still play basketball together, and i enjoy conversations with her mum about all sorts of things. some reflections every 2-4 years there is a crisis in which community psychology needs to review its status as a postgraduate course, as a practice speciality within psychology, as a subgroup of the aps. for me this process has continued for perhaps 15 years now. it’s interesting that the battle keeps needing to be fought, and a new generation of policy makers, educational institutions and internal aps management needs to be convinced of the difference, specialness and contributions of community psychology – and so far each time it happens i am persuaded to be part of the campaign. i do think it is important to maintain specialist training, even though i am no longer registered as a psychologist, and registration is not relevant to the work i do or to my professional identity as a community psychologist. dances with decision-shapers heather gridley, past chair and current victorian and national committee member, aps college of community psychologists what stands out from the campaign for me is the importance of the chain(s) of correspondence with the key decision makers and their advisers and gatekeepers. as they trickled in, the responses to brian’s much discussed, debated, and redrafted letter to each health minister were notable for their inaccuracies – it was tempting to use some of the more egregious examples to embarrass the minister concerned, but instead we simply used them as hooks for the next letter, email, phone call or, with luck, face-to-face meeting. ‘is the minister aware that there has been a postgraduate program in community psychology running successfully in her own electorate since 1994?’ ‘we are concerned that the minister appears to have been poorly advised; if he is unable to schedule a face-to-face meeting or phone call, is there a senior adviser on health workforce matters we could speak to…?’ we knew that the chair of the health ministers council was the south australian minister, and that global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 the head of his department was also chair of the ministerial advisers group. quite late in the campaign (october 2010), i was visiting adelaide, capital of south australia, for another purpose, and took the chance to stay overnight in the hope of arranging a meeting with either the minister or his chief adviser. we knew that both had been heavily lobbied by the health psychologists, who are strong in that state (where there are only two community college members). we had communicated with the health psychologists in south australia, and their advice was that they were not being heard by the minister or his chief adviser. and we had even heard the department head had expressed more comfort with the case for community psychology as a distinct area than with health psychology, which he found harder to distinguish from clinical psychology. so there was now a sense that all the lobbying had prompted some kind of rethink where it mattered, although the aps had been advised (similarly to ken) that there would be a 12 month delay before the ministers would be able to review their endorsement decision. and time was running out to reverse that position – the advisers to the ministers were due to meet at the end of october, the last opportunity for them to recommend that the ministers make a corrective decision. my main task in adelaide was to find a way to make it easier for the decision to be reversed without too much loss of face. i called and emailed the offices of both the health minister and his department head, and somehow managed to secure a brief interview with dr y that afternoon, perhaps on the basis that he had been well briefed on the health psychology case but had never spoken directly with a community psychologist. i arrived somewhat flushed and dishevelled after walking several long city blocks in warm spring weather, and tried to act cool and composed. dr y was fairly gruff and the meeting was brief, but it was obvious he was across his job and didn’t really need the supporting documents i had brought with me, as much to prompt myself as to persuade him – a letter of support from australian indigenous psychologists association chair pat dudgeon, and an excerpt from the iasc guidelines on mental health and psychosocial support in emergency settings (2007) contexts, which specify a background in community psychology or public health as essential for foreign mental health professionals seeking to work in international disaster settings. i spoke frankly about our main motivation lying not in achieving specialist status per se, but in the certain demise of all community psychology training, and eventually practice, if endorsement was not granted sooner rather than later. ‘we simply don’t have 12 months to spare,’ i explained, with the next community psychology postgraduate intake in victoria due in february 2011, and applications already affected by the endorsement issue – ‘most students don’t know the difference between registration, accreditation, endorsement, aps membership… but they will hear “nonendorsed” and think “don’t go there”’. i think this was one point he hadn’t fully grasped until now, believing that universities usually have internal reasons for closing down programs. i didn’t mention that the victoria university program had managed to douse one such internal bushfire less than two years earlier, but i did point to the wa program’s bid for reaccreditation in mid-2010, which had been put on hold by the university in the wake of the ministerial decision in april. but rather than pushing a case that he mostly understood very well, and risk annoying him further than he clearly already was by the stridency of ‘the psychology lobby’, i sought his advice on where we should direct our energies at this point – to the ministers or their advisers? should it be en masse and in public, or carefully targeted behind the scenes? he was quick to suggest targeting the ministers themselves, possibly to deflect the barrage away from himself and his staff, but his advice extended to which ministers were likely to be most influential (one was about to face an election and could not participate while in caretaker mode; another would need some convincing; another was already on side, as we knew). time was up – the meeting had lasted no more than 10 minutes, yet i felt i had had a respectful hearing and said most of what i had wanted to say – and more importantly, i had come away with some very helpful advice that enabled us to narrow down our campaign strategy for the run home. faqs for a blackberry: just-in-time policy advocacy in queensland julie dean as a member of the aps college of community psychologists in queensland, i was asked if i could represent their voice to the queensland health minister prior to the critical ministerial advisers’ meeting on october 29. whilst my previous history of activism has included joining rallies, writing letters of concern to decision-makers and being arrested alongside 500 others for refusing to leave an unwanted uranium mine site, face-to-face presentation of complex arguments to government policy makers was a first for me. in short, it was a little daunting. global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 my initial task was to understand the complexities of the issues. i was greatly assisted by some timely telephone coaching from the ever-supportive heather gridley in victoria. the next step was to contact the minister to request a meeting. i first picked the brains of a colleague at my work who also happened to be a member of the ruling labor party in the state. one his key tips was to emphasise any funding implications (or lack of) for the government regarding the decision to endorse community psychology. our meeting was scheduled for the afternoon before the all-important ministerial advisers’ meeting – not much time for things to go wrong! on the morning of the meeting i participated in my second coaching session; a senior member of the psychologists registration board of queensland firmly advised me to practise my spiel several times with colleagues before doing the real thing. thunder and rain poured down as i caught the bus to the city for the meeting. arriving in good time and huddling under shelter, i realised five minutes before the meeting that i was at the wrong government building! the sprint three blocks to the correct address meant i arrived flustered and wet. i was ushered in to meet three policy advisers, none of whom was the health minister, although at least one held a senior government role. i was told that a policy adviser unable to be there that day was in fact a psychologist. there was an atmosphere of reserved friendliness in the air. my effort to comprehend the dimensions of the issues and practise communicating them was now ‘gold’. i firstly explained why i was there and what i wanted. after my five-minute pitch they let me know that they required very brief answers to several specific questions – some i could not even begin to answer. this faq style material would inform the ministerial adviser at the conference first thing the next morning. critically the answers needed to be brief so they could be quickly understood by reading them on the screen of his blackberry. i dashed back to work, emailing and leaving messages with as many members of the college of community psychologists as i could. thankfully heather returned my call immediately and we began the task of answering the specified questions: • what do community psychologists do? • how many community psychologists are working in australia? • how many community psychologists are in training? • are community psychologists registered in the uk? • key issues requiring urgent consideration throughout the evening and late into the night emails came in from victoria and western australia from the national community psychology team helping to refine the shape of the all important faqs. the information was duly sent, and the next day i received an encouraging message from the senior policy adviser “great work – i have sent it to [the director-general of queensland health]”. and so, the faqs made it to the blackberry! on november 13, 2011, we discovered the results of our long campaign. the ministerial advisers had made a positive recommendation, and the ministers had subsequently agreed to endorse community psychology and health psychology under the national registration scheme in australia. a flurry of emails across the country between members of the national committee and well wishers both nationally and internationally were shared, as were a number of bottles of champagne! on a longer term basis, we have found that our membership has increased by over 25% since this period, with the total number of members of the college of community psychologists now being 107. moreover, as a direct result of the decision to endorse community psychology, the wa academic program was reinstated and will take initial enrolments in the first semester of 2013. what helped? this was a collaborative, interactive, multilevel, iterative process, which demanded continued action over a lengthy period of time, shown by the various points made by members and friends of the national committee of the aps college of community psychologists. the points made below in table 1 are a bald summary of protracted processes that succeeded in convincing state and federal health ministers with respect to the case for endorsement of community psychology as an area of psychological practice. we have provided them also as a reminder that collective, integrated and focussed political lobbying is an important aspect of community psychology practice itself. global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 table 1 strategies used in the campaign _________________________________________________________________________________ member action: • writing letters and emails to local members of parliament and health bureaucrats. • signing and promoting petitions. • active participation in icap community psychology sessions. • communicating with college committee and aps national office about responses received. • college national committee action: • convening the initial meeting to develop strategy and identify resources such as personal contacts with politicians, bureaucrats, ngo staff etc. tasks were allocated, and then regular meetings were held afterward by telephone conference and group email. • letters and emails to identify key people to lobby and influence; listing of contacts, replies received regularly updated. • letter sent to the ministerial council (after many discussions and drafts over a number of weeks). • attendance at “how to lobby me” politician workshop. • developed, maintained and distributed information kit and letter templates for members to use and adapt for own personal communications. • developed and distributed national and state level petitions. • instigated and attended meetings with identified key politicians, bureaucrats and ngo staff across states. • developed questions to be asked in parliament by key politicians. • ensured that our state message was supportive and consistent with the aps college of health psychologists through their state section chair. • state level support: south australia, tasmania, queensland, esp. wa and victoria as they have or had recent community psychology programs. • support for current students of community psychology by liaising with them and encouraging them to lobby politicians, psychology board of australia, aps. • general information gathering and development of deep understanding of political and bureaucratic processes involved, including need to have a ministerial champion to support our case from within the ministerial committee. college chair action: • communication to members – regular updates via bulk email. • letters, emails and visits to key politicians and bureaucrats challenging misconceptions. • elicited support from cp ‘champions’ around australia and internationally. • strategy co-ordination and ongoing monitoring of current state of affairs. • ensured that our message was supportive and consistent with the aps college of health psychologists through their national chair. • external support from allied professional organisations and non-government organisations: • letters of support from bps, apa, cps (canadian), norwegian colleagues etc; icap international keynotes. • letters of support from key ngos, such as the wa chamber of mines and energy. _________________________________________________________________________________ note. this table is provided to assist others who may welcome proven strategies for lobbying, and outlines the varied processes that were used by the aps college of community psychologists to obtain area of practice endorsement under national registration. they are presented as a collection of strategies which were found to be useful and will hopefully assist others in their future endeavours. the examples are provided under major headings which reflect the action taken by a particular group. we investigated an external political lobbyist but it was not seen to be cost-effective, as we had established enough high level personal contacts through members not to require their services. similarly, we decided not to pursue a media strategy to publicise our concerns, but rather to make extensive use of letter writing, lobbying and persuasion. final reflections this paper, and indeed the writing of it, revealed the interplay of many skill sets and perspectives global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 that typify the breadth and diversity of community psychology itself. the process of writing this paper has been collaborative and interactive, as were the processes underlying the successful campaign for endorsement of the areas of community and health psychology in australia. the breadth and diversity of the accounts reported in the paper indicate that the degrees of separation to the powers that be can be very small; the stories of basketball mums, daughters working for parliamentarians, ministers strolling by, and ratepayers associations demonstrate that effective process is as much informal as formal. community psychology in australia has now been formalised to a greater degree than anywhere else in the world (fisher, gridley, thomas, & bishop, 2008), not only within the aps but now to the extent of area of practice endorsement within the national registration (licensing) system. the ongoing tension between our often uncomfortable fit with bodies such as these, and our dependence on these same structures for survival, is apparent in the comments of our narrators. foundation member stephen fyson (1992, cited in gridley & breen, 2007) summed up the dilemma in compromising the original vision for the sake of professional/organisational survival: when we started the board [now college], we hoped the emphasis would be on interdisciplinary exchange, as well as a common meeting ground for psychologists who wanted to think more broadly it was thus a tension when it became 'professionalised' (in the sarason sense of limiting access to knowledge and recognition) as a college… the 'professional' recognition is important, but it has greatly limited the original attempts at the broader aims... (p.135) meanwhile the people with whom we like to think we have most in common – community development workers, social planners, indigenous mental health workers, political activists, epidemiologists, community artists, and so on – are excluded from ‘the club’, and/or are mostly unaware of our existence (gridley & breen, 2007). the energy expended in responding to and complying with burgeoning administrative demands and regulatory practices has often restricted the field to an inward ‘maintenance’ focus, instead of a more transformative, outward engagement with australian society at large. we were thrilled when the number of signatories to our online petition reached 3000 – but somewhat shamed when it was noted that fewer than 1000 australians had signed a petition for the restoration of the racial discrimination act in the northern territory. within mainstream psychology community psychologists might feel like minnows, but we still have more power to ‘work the system’ than many of the communities we work with. in the midst of our euphoria, we can find ourselves concurring with our uk colleagues (burton, boyle, harris & kagan, 2007) with … a permeating notion of liberatory practice, any debate about who is really doing cp, and about how to organise to do it, perhaps fades away as only of interest to careerist professionals. (p.232) references burton, m., boyle, s., harris, c., & kagan, c. (2007). community psychology in britain, chapter 10 in s. reich, m. reimer, i. prilleltensky, & m. montero (eds.), international community psychology: history and theories, nj.: kluwer/springer pp.219237. isbn 978 0 387 49499 9. fisher, a., gridley, h., thomas, dr., & bishop, b. (2008). community psychology in australia and aotearoa/new zealand. journal of community psychology 36, 649-660. gridley, h. & breen, l. (2007). so far and yet so near: twenty-five years of community psychology in australia, chapter 5 in s. reich, m. reimer, i. prilleltensky, & m. montero (eds.), international community psychology: history and theories, nj.: kluwer/springer pp.119-139. isbn 978 0 387 49499 9. inter-agency standing committee (iasc) (2007). iasc guidelines on mental health and psychosocial support in emergency settings. geneva: iasc. national health and hospitals reform commission (2009). a healthier future for all australians final report of the national health and hospitals reform commission. canberra: commonwealth of australia. psychology board of australia. (2012). connections, 4, march. http://www.psychologyboard.gov.au/news/ne wsletters.aspx accessed 5 april 2012. microsoft word 2009-0016-final 20110516.docx   global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  1           the community narration (cn) approach: understanding a group’s identity and cognitive constructs through personal and community narratives bradley d. olson, phd community psychology, national-louis university, chicago, il, usa leonard a. jason, phd director for the center for community research, depaul university, chicago, il, usa key words: narrative, participatory, substance abuse, recovery homes, oxford house brad olson is assistant professor of psychology at national-louis university in chicago and co-director of the community psychology doctoral program. he is a community and social psychologist, and can be reached at bradley.olson@nl.edu. leonard jason, ph.d. is the director of the center for community research at depaul university. acknowledgements: we appreciate the support of paul molloy and leon venable and the many oxford house members who have collaborated with our team. the authors are grateful for financial support provided by the national institute on alcohol abuse and alcoholism (niaaa grant numbers aa12218 and aa16973), the national institute on drug abuse (nida grant numbers da13231 and da19935) and the national center on minority health and health disparities (grant md002748). recommended citation: olson, b.d., & jason, l.a. (2011). the community narration (cn) approach: understanding a group’s identity and cognitive constructs through personal and community narratives. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(1), 1-7. retrieved <date>, from http://www.gjcpp.org/. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1   june  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2     the community narration (cn) approach: understanding a group’s identity and cognitive constructs through personal and community narratives bradley d. olson1, leonard a. jason2 1 national-louis university, 2center for community research, depaul university abstract community program evaluations, visioning and assessments must always endeavor to attain useful information in the most sensitive way. most community-based organizations form, grow and continue on their own without the help of outside experts. participatory approaches should respect the historical evolution of these groups and understand the positive factors that underlie their organizational beliefs. a group’s mission, values and identity should inform any community program evaluation, consulting project, and the design of any research study. narrative methods have been used with mutual-help groups and many other organizations to good effect (harré, bullen, & olson, 2006; rappaport, 2000). such methods have great potential to avoid hierarchical and unidirectional forms of evaluation, encouraging the group’s collective psychology and identity-based constructs to emerge. we developed a participatory, narrative technique called community narration (cn), which is described here. the technique utilizes personal stories and community narratives as an entry into the evaluation process or other work involved in understanding an organization. the community’s participants were able to use the technique successfully, found it enriching, and the constructs obtained have led to many discussions and memberguided research related to the organization. community-based techniques such as empowerment evaluation, attempt to reduce hierarchies between the “consultant” and the organization (fetterman, kaftarian, & wandersman, 1996; fetterman & wandersman, 2005). whether the goal involves visioning with another organization, creating a needs assessment, or evaluation, there is a need to move toward less rigid methods in order to discover an organization or community’s identity, its collective goals, and implicit aspects of its mission. the organizational identity is often built on a collection of personal beliefs and experiences shared by those who make up the community. personal identities are structured around stories (mcadams, 2009; mcadams & olson, 2010). community narratives, made up of personally stories, are equally the foundation of a group’s or community’s identity (harré, bullen, & olson, 2006; rappaport, 2000). rappaport (2000) distinguishes between personal stories and community narratives, associating the story to the individual and the narrative to the community, noting that stories and narratives are intimately tied with one another. each community has a unique set of narratives that are a source of growth, and a way for a community to creatively find its alternative narratives, which are contrasted with other dominant narratives in society. the contexts and cognitive constructs associated with such alternative and dominant narratives are critical to understanding the relationship or fit between an individual and the larger organization or community (rappaport, 2000). these understandings can also be instrumental in the recovery path for a group and its members. the formation of these stories, the community narratives, and the constructs that describe them, are most often implicit and remain unidentified. community psychology can contribute to helping these collective beliefs emerge or become more explicit, a state which may offer great value toward understanding a community and helping that community better understand itself. from a social as well as a methodological perspective, qualitative approaches have participatory and strengths-based advantages. telling stories is an enjoyable and enriching experience and community members often report that it feels like a more authentic way of becoming understood from the outside (harré et al., 2006). qualitative information also produces rich data that can be looked at as a whole, or coded, and/or combined with quantitative data. working with groups in a concerted fashion to understand personal and community narratives in concrete terms can help all stakeholders better understand the organization’s community and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1   june  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3     individual narratives. it is often a good starting point to working with an organization. unfortunately, qualitative methods in research enterprises can be time and labor intensive (patton, 2000). for these reasons, we developed the current community narration (cn) approach. the method uses, in part, george kelly’s (1955) cognitive-based clinical-personality model. the goal of kelly’s personal constructs theory is to reduce the personal and community narratives down to shorter and more discussable constructs. the personal construct, the basic unit in george kelly’s (1955) personal construct theory, is represented by dichotomous indicators, most often about other people: "good vs. bad", for example, or "liberal vs. conservative." the contrasts of the bipolar construct add more information than a single term alone. for instance, when discussing food, the bipolar constructs of "hotmild" and "hot-medium" connote a spicy or peppery hot. but "hot-warm" and "hot-cold" connote temperature differences (maher, 1969). according to kelly’s theory, personal bipolar constructs are the means by which people construe events in the world. in this use, personal construct theory also helps, in the form of manageable dichotomies, bring out the alternative vs. dominant community narratives as described by rappaport (2000). a key component of kelly's (1955) personal construct theory is the “commonality corollary.” the corollary suggests that when two or more people employ similar constructions of their experiences, the psychological processes involved are also similar. commonalities are fundamental to community narration and in its goal to derive a group’s dichotomous constructs. these bipolar constructs have been used in other, different and more individualistic personality and social role methods of assessment. the procedure of the current community narration is described in the methods section, but, briefly, dichotomies are obtained from group members initially through personal stories, and taken further to uncover central, common community constructs. community narration is useful in helping an organization/community and other stakeholders think about and analyze more implicit aspects of its mission, identity, or what some might call the “culture” of a community or setting (maton, 2000; sarason, 1971). such a method could benefit the group’s functioning, its sense of community. individual members of that setting could better understand their place within that culture, issues of agreement, and the diversity of values of the community. the method is also, therefore, of interest to researchers, evaluators, consultants and other stakeholders. in the current community the method was on, we hypothesized that constructs would emerge regarding substance use vs. non-use, since this was a group currently in recovery. and “freedom vs. institutionalization”, since the model allowed participants to make their own democratic decisions in the mutual-help tradition (alternative or recovery narratives), contrasted to “treatment” options (i.e., more dominant, treatment, or institutional narratives). method participants, organization, and setting while the method works for any organization or community, the group of present interest is based on 12-step principles. there is a long tradition in the community narrative field to examine mutual-help, and particularly 12-step groups (humphreys, 2000). oxford house, a member-run mutual help, residential setting, focuses on recovery from alcohol and drug problems. neither professionals nor mental health practitioners are directly involved in the operations of the program. it involves communal living. there are over a 1,400 oxford houses in the u.s., canada and australia. each house is independent. yet through a chapter system, houses are connected to the primary organization in the d.c. area. the authors of this paper are part of a university-based research entity. we are organizationally independent of oxford house, although our relationship with the group, its houses, and individual members organization can often be considered involved and intense (jason, davis, ferrari, & bishop, 2001; olson, jason, ferrari, & hutcheson, 2005). we do not consider ourselves “consultants” for the organization. the method was first used and tested with a group of approximately 100 oxford house residents at the oxford house world convention in washington d.c., a conference where hundreds of oxford house participants from the u.s., canada and other nations meet. these conventions include a mix of older and newer residents. procedure the community narrative (cn) program began with members of the research team. we introduced the session as a town-hall style approach to understanding themes of oxford house community narratives. the following seven phases describe the whole process: global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1   june  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4     phase 1-introduction. the session started with describing the program as a town hall-style meeting, and emphasizing the importance of stories in discovering aspects of individuals and communities. the goal of the session was stated to “…determine common community constructs and to learn, through discussion and storytelling.” the goal, in this case of oxford house residents, was to discover how they construe or perceive their past experiences of having lived in an oxford house. phase 2-gathering in subgroups. attendees sat in chairs in a ballroom style convention hall. we asked the attendees to randomly join groups of 4-6 people, and for those small groups to form circles with their chairs. subgroup members were asked to introduce themselves. phase 3-sharing stories. the groups were asked to take roughly five to seven minutes each to share a key personal story that reflected the “high point” (mcadams, 2009), or their most significant experience, in oxford house. this was to be the single episode that that best defined for them “life in oxford house”. participants were asked to describe in the story any other characters who had been part of the experience, the participant’s own feelings during the event, and why the event was personally important. sufficient time was given in case some members took longer than seven minutes. the presenters walked around, listening to the discussions, and answering questions if any arose. eventually group discussions were encouraged to wind down and finish. phase 4-finding commonalities. the next stage involved finding “commonalities” across the stories within each groups. group members were asked to collectively identify in the stories a commonality, and to describe that commonality in a single word or two. reducing the group stories to constructs in this way was somewhat like coding in qualitative analyses, as it involved turning a great deal of verbal text, across participants, into a more manageable whole. again, the idea behind getting at commonalities, consistent with kelly’s theory, was to obtain fundamental community constructs from the personal constructs. participants had little trouble identifying these commonalities. when all groups had identified the one or two word terms, they wre asked to announce them out loud to the whole room, and the presenters wrote each term down on the left side of a board, leaving room on the opposite side (on the right side) for where the opposite pole on the bipolar construct would be written. when constructs from different groups appeared were too similar to one another, the constructs were clustered. for instance, one group’s commonality term “close friends” and another group’s “social connections” were clustered under "support". other minor clustering occurred. through this process, the groups generated eighteen primary construct issues. phase 5-choosing constructs. at this point, presenters directed all attendees to add, collectively across all groups, the contrast terms of the bipolar construct that were, in their minds, the opposite of each of the commonalities the subgroups had developed. these contrasts were written on the right side of the board, forming the second side of the bipolar construct. a “vs.” was placed in between the two sets of bipolar terms. as a larger group, the participants had little trouble naming contrast items. there was much certainty, enthusiasm and signs of agreement from multiple participants, seeming to suggest the opposite terms for each main construct were good ones. eventually, all bipolar constructs were on the sheets standing before the participants. phase 6-voting. all participants were asked to vote as individuals on the constructs they believed best reflected the most significant psychological meaning behind their oxford house experience. participants were given time to look over all the constructs, and then told they could vote. it also works to allow participants to vote on their top two constructs, rather than on just one. each bipolar construct was named by the presenter, and hands were counted. the votes were all collected, and then tallied. based on the votes received, the bipolar constructs were given a rank from the top to the bottom. this was largely a time-saving measure for the subsequent group discussion phase, where the top constructs would be discussed first. phase 7-group discussion. open group discussion was then encouraged around the meaning and relevance of each of the bipolar constructs, starting with the one that received the most votes. the open discussion was important for the whole group to reflect on the rank-ordering, the dichotomies themselves, and their meanings. discussions around the constructs and their relation to the oxford house philosophy emerged. much conversation tended to be around house interactions from first entering the house to personally becoming more stabilized within it. the stories that originally brought about the constructs were re-narrated and new examples were added in. ultimately, the top ranked constructs were little more than a focal-point for deeper conversations around the oxford house experience. since time permitted, global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1   june  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5     even those bipolar constructs with the lowest votes ended up getting some discussion, and led to equally interesting ideas, often in how they were similar or different from the top-rated constructs. results for the purpose of space, the results will focus on the top four constructs and the interpretations provided by the participants, expanded upon through our own experiences of the group. as seen in table 1, the most voted for construct was growth vs. stagnation (or regression), which received 21% of the vote. according to the participants, growth vs. stagnation (or regression) referred specifically to an increased feeling of social connectedness, a greater personal sense of community, and a new tolerance for others different from oneself. this discussion in fact helped us become interested in how oxford house may reduce various prejudices in residents, leading to study on the topic (see olson, jason, davidson, & ferrari, 2009). one of our hypothesized constructs “sobriety vs. using” came in only eighth place. therefore we were somewhat surprised for this primary outcome-related topic like abstinence or the ability to stop using drugs to stand so far behind this personal and interpersonal form of “growth” that emerged as the most central oxford house process. the second top bipolar construct is accountability vs. irresponsibility, which received 19% of the vote. despite the communal, liberating, non-institutional nature of oxford house, no house is a loosely run, laissez-faire setting. it is a place of accountability. through the rules and structure of the house, there is an internal, organizational structure is about mutual accountability for non-drug use or behavior that can put it at risk. irresponsibility in this case is not about treatment settings, but life while using drugs and alcohol. the lower voted bipolar construct of structure vs. chaos provides a similar message. the next two bipolar constructs, numbers 3 and 4, are interesting in the paradox they reveal. surrender vs. self-will (#3) received 16% of the vote, and empowerment vs. powerlessness (#4) 12%. if we look at the foreground of the two sets of bipolar narratives, “surrender” seems almost the opposite of “empowerment” as does the contrast of “self-will” (mastery or power over one’s actions) seem opposite of “powerlessness.” do the community constructs contradict one another? no, given the 12-step background of the community, surrendering to a high power and letting go of one’s individual ego is in every way consistent with empowerment. self-will may appear to scientists and professionals as the primary goal for individuals to achieve when overcoming addiction, but that is, in rappaport’s terms, the dominant narrative. the recovery table 1. community narrative method dichotomies listed in rank-order by vote. oxford house (recovery /alternative) opposite (dominant) growth vs. stagnation accountability vs. irresponsibility surrender vs. self-will empowerment vs. powerlessness behavior modification vs. same old hope vs. despair self-worth vs. low self-esteem sobriety vs. using support vs. no support family vs. isolation self-sufficiency vs. despair secure home vs. homeless democracy vs. dictatorship gratitude vs. ungrateful diversity vs. uniform unconditional love vs. no love peer pressure vs. independence structure vs. chaos narrative in this case is that self-will, in the form of egotistical self-control, is more equivalent to powerlessness. surrendering “to a higher power” and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1   june  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6     empowerment are both high on the list of bipolar constructs underlying recovery narratives. part of the interpretive process of using the community narration technique is comparing across the bipolar constructs and discussing such paradoxes with community members to get a richer understanding of the community’s identity. the interpretations of all the subsequent constructs are valuable. we just want to provide a sample here. just one more is #9, support vs. no support. at one point we as researchers believed social support was the primary beneficial impact of the oxford house model and we hypothesized support as impacting #8, sobriety vs. using. we still believe these relationships are vital to understand, but from using the participatory framework of the cn method, there is much else happening as well. discussion the goal of community narration is to understand the identity or identities of an organization or community. the group’s identity, signified by the bipolar constructs, is the lens through which the members see significant parts of their world, reflecting how the community narrates its shared story. the results from the cn confirm the match between kelly's (1955) personal construct theory and rappaport’s ideas behind community narratives. this synergy of personal construct and community narrative theories is most evident in the ways the underlying nature of bipolar constructs (opposing contrasts) to the dichotomy of alternative vs. dominant community narratives. consistently with the oxford house community narration, the left side of the bipolar construct represented the alternative narrative associated with the recovery setting. the other end represented the prior life, the dominant narrative, institutionalized treatment or a life of drug use, both of which have since been rejected by those who participated. in the first instance, “growth” reflects the alternative narrative. the dominant narrative is reflected by “stagnation (or regression).” the right side, the dominant narrative construct adds an extra understanding of “growth” here. growth was evidently a psychological moving forward, contrasted to being stuck or pulled back by life. this pattern fit across all bipolar constructs identified. several of the bipolar constructs referenced life in other treatment centers as the dominant community narrative pole. one was democracy vs. dictatorship. in two related instances, “despair” represented the dominant narrative, once opposed to the alternative narrative of hope and once to self-sufficiency. according to the participants, despair reflected their emotions and experiences as they revolved inside and out of various treatment centers. community narration expands on the relationship between kelly's and rappaport’s theories in other ways. kelly believed all people are scientists living their lives testing hypotheses about the world in each new situation they encounter. people use these constructs, he believed, to reconstruct past experiences and interpret current interactions. kelly also placed great emphasis on construals of the world through bipolar constructs as a way to anticipate future events. to the extent that community narration can help decipher how organizations and communities anticipate their next steps, practical uses present themselves. this includes working with a community to decide whether its mission is taking the group where it wants to go. some organizations may be surprised about their own bipolar constructs that emerge, particularly if they reflect more dominant narratives, compared to the alternative narratives they might envisioned when the community first formed. kelly (1955) believed knowledge about bipolar construals could create more efficient organizational structures for the self; and the same is true of communities. community narration makes bipolar constructs more explicit to participants, helping them better articulate the psychological characteristics of their group, and may be used to help them better understand and build on the group’s strengths. change does not come easily for all people and all groups. kelly (1955) believed that individuals (and organizations/communities in this case) had greater or lesser abilities to change productively depending on their ability (or relatively inability) to incorporate new constructs into their cognitive system. some psychological systems were, as kelly named them, more or less "permeable", or flexible and open to adaptation. the permeability of a group’s psychological structure may help a community become more open to new ideas or directions; or, in cases of greater impermeability, a more difficult time. community narrative constructs where the dominant (as opposed to the alternative) element is at the fore is likely in greater need of permeability. one may take the dichotomy found here of diversity vs. uniform. diversity reflects broad openness of a healthy system compared to an inflexible, institutional setting. communal recovery, the case for oxford house, compared to other traditional global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1   june  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7     treatment facilities, allows for greater permeability in a less rigid and dogmatic system. this may reflect ways in which the oxford house structure helps bring about growth, both as an organization and in the residents themselves. community narration can also act as an aide to participatory action research. it helped us learn about how residents of a unique living model construed its benefits, more specifically, how we could better understand the process of growth through residents’ greater social connectedness and tolerance for other ethnic and socioeconomic groups (olson et al., 2009). community narration also helps us understand the group’s perception of its own priorities. while the constructs are effective primarily as a focal-point for discussion, they can be returned to continually as organization progresses. the possible variations on this method are endless. in summary, they help to identify a community’s primary interests, and creative ideas toward improved group functioning. community narration can be used to uncover primary interests, detect problems and strengths, and determine subsequent steps toward action. broadly defined, community narration is about understanding the “culture” of a setting or group, that is, its belief systems, values, social norms, and practices (maton, 2000; sarason, 1971). community narration is a starting point for exploring a group’s personal and community values, and— through identity, cognition, and the empowering nature of narratives—to help bring about change. references fetterman, d. m., kafterian, s. j., & wandersman, a. (1996). empowerment evaluation: knowledge and tools for self-assessment and accountability. thousand oaks, ca: sage. fetterman, d.m. & wandersman, a. (eds.) (2005). empowerment evaluation: principles and practice. n.y.: guilford. harré, n, bullen, p., & olson, b. (2006). storytelling: a workshop for inspiring group action. in r. mcnair (ed.) working for peace: a handbook of practical psychology and other tools. atascadero, ca: impact publishers. humphreys, k. (2000). community narratives and personal stories in alcoholics anonymous. journal of community psychology, 28, 495-506. jason, l. a., davis, m. i., ferrari, j. r., bishop, p. d. (2001). oxford house: a review of research and implications for substance abuse recovery and community research. journal of drug education, 31(1), 1-27. kelly, g. a. (1955). the psychology of personal constructs (2 vols.). new york: w.w. norton. kalekin-fishman, d. & walker, b. (eds.) (1996). the construction of group realities: culture, society, and personal construct theory (pp. 309-322). melbourne, fl: krieger. maher, b. (1969). (ed.). clinical psychology and personality: the selected papers of george kelly. new york: john wiley. maton, k. i. (2000). making a difference: the social ecology of social transformation. american journal of community psychology, 28, 25-57. mcadams, d. p. (2009). the person: an introduction to the science of personality psychology (5th ed.). wiley. mcadams, d. p., & olson, b. d. (2009). personality development: continuity and change over the life course. annual review of psychology, 61, 5.1-5.26. olson, b. d., jason, l. a., davidson, m., & ferrari, j. r. (2009). increases in tolerance within naturalistic, intentional communities: a randomized, longitudinal examination. american journal of community psychology, 44, 188-195. olson, b. d., jason, l. a., ferrari, j. r., & hutcheson, t. d. (2005). bridging professional and mutual-help: an application of the transtheoretical model to the mutual-help organization. applied and preventive psychology, 11, 167-178. patton, m.q. (2002). qualitative research and evaluation methods. ca: sage. rappaport, j. (2000). community narratives: tales of terror and joy. american journal of community psychology, 28(1), 1-24. sarason, s. b. (1971). the culture of the school and the problem of change. boston: allyn & bacon. microsoft word henwood 2014-si06-20140501_updatd 5-23-14.docx introducing housing first in a rural service system: a multistakeholder perspective benjamin f. henwood university of southern california kelly melekis university of vermont ana stefancic pathways to housing, inc. author notes: benjamin f. henwood, phd, msw is an assistant professor at the university of southern california school of social work in los angeles, ca, usa. email: bhenwood@usc.edu kelly melekis, msw, phd, is an assistant professor at the university of vermont department of social work in burlington, vt, usa. email: kelly.melekis@uvm.edu ana stefancic, ma, is the director of research at pathways to housing, inc. in new york, ny, usa. email: stafancica@aol.com keywords: homelessness, mental illness, housing first, institutional logics, neoinstitutional theory recommended citation: henwood, b.f., melekis, k., & sefancic, a. (2014). introducing housing first in a rural service system: a multistakeholder perspective. global journal of community psychology practice, 5(1), 1-13. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 introducing housing first in a rural service system: a multistakeholder perspective abstract housing first (hf) represents a fundamental shift in thinking about how to address chronic homelessness that has taken place during the past two decades. whether and how the logic of hf fits in rural systems of care has not been previously explored in the research literature. using a case study approach and thematic analysis of accounts from 20 key stakeholders, this study investigated whether and how the introduction of hf into a small, rural state in the northeastearn united states affected the dominant institutional logic. the overall account by multiple stakeholders remained largely consistent: the introduction of an outside hf program brought new resources and expertise, which resulted in a previously underserved population being effectively engaged in services. the extent to which the introduction of an outside provider with a specific, well-defined hf philosophy fit within the existing social services system was complicated by existing providers’ limited knowledge about or input during the grant submission that provided funding for the hf program. numerous social forces and concerns regarding limited resources also influenced stakeholder perceptions. the impact of hf on existing institutional logics was not always clearly identified by stakeholders, yet hf’s emphasis on providing service options and allowing for client choice, as well as the demonstrated effectiveness of the approach, emerged as influential. features of local environments (including systems of care but also funding, political, and cultural contexts) and their potential for triggering transformative change may influence the relative merits of implementing hf services by an outside provider with known expertise or supporting an existing provider to develop the infrastructure and foster a service philosophy based on an hf logic. keywords: homelessness, mental illness, housing first, institutional logics, neoinstitutional theory the notion that chronic homelessness can be ended rather than merely managed (gladwell, 2006) represents a fundamental shift in thinking that has taken place during the past two decades. this shift occurred due to a reimagined approach to homelessness services known as housing first (hf; tsemberis, 2010; tsemberis, gulcur, & nakae, 2004). developed in new york city at an agency called pathways to housing, hf is an evidence-based program model (national registry of evidence-based programs and practices, 2007) that assists individuals with serious mental illness who have experienced homelessness, incarceration, and hospitalization to obtain permanent housing and move forward in recovery. hf refers to the provision of immediate access to permanent housing with ongoing consumer-driven support services, in contrast to a traditional provider-driven staircase approach that requires temporary or transitional housing and treatment placements before accessing permanent housing (padgett, gulcur, & tsemberis, 2006). although a full and sufficient complement of community housing programs did not materialize that was part of the traditional approach, a combination of factors also hindered consumers’ progress towards independent housing, including provider beliefs regarding the necessity for continued supervised and structured living, the paucity of options for more independent living, and individuals’ reluctance or inability to comply with program mandates. developed during a time of mental health systems transformation based on a recovery model (anthony, 1993; president’s new freedom commission on mental health, 2003), hf represents a new logic to homelessness services designed to be strengths-based, recovery-oriented, and focused on human rights (byrne & culhane, 2011; tsemberis, 2010). this stands in contrast to a logic that has been described as paternalistic, using a housingreadiness criterion that is primarily rooted in providers’ beliefs that the ability of individuals with severe mental illness to maintain permanent, independent housing is predicated on achieving clinical stability and adhering to treatment. in some instances, particularly with respect to populations diagnosed with substance abuse, there are underlying questions of moral worthiness, creating systems that rely on practices that require individuals to earn housing by demonstrating abstinence (dordick, 2002; kertesz, crouch, milby, cusimano, & schumacher, 2009), a view that is embedded in u.s. social welfare policies (henwood, derejko, couture, & padgett, 2014). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 institutional logics, or the material practices and symbolic constructions that constitute a field’s organizing principles (greenwood, díaz, li, & lorente, 2010), can be difficult to change. introducing an hf program with its own logic into the larger landscape of homelessness services represents a change within existing systems but does not necessarily imply systems transformation and the establishment of a new logic. yet as nelson (2010) stated, “there is a need to challenge assumptions and build a vision and values that are consistent with the housing first approach” (pp. 137–138). neoinstitutional theory, traditionally used to explain systems change at a macro level, has been increasingly applied to systems transformation efforts at the meso level (macfarlane, barton-sweeney, woodard, & greenhalgh, 2013) and can be used to help explain how the introduction of an hf approach could result in transformative change. the theory identifies three main social forces that can contribute to changing fundamental institutional logics: regulative forces (mandates about how to address homelessness), normative forces (assumptions and expectations about how to address homelessness), and cultural–cognitive forces (taken-for-granted scripts and mental models about how to address homelessness; scott, ruef, mendel, & caronna, 2000). ameliorative change can involve any of these forces alone, yet establishing a new institutional logic that represents transformative change (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010)—rather than simply implementing new services—will most likely involve all three. rates of homelessness and institutional logics of homelessness service systems are affected by larger political and economic forces. as such, the challenge of ending chronic homelessness nationally requires addressing some of the fundamental conditions that have exacerbated rates of homelessness overall, including decades of government disinvestment in the development and subsidizing of affordable housing (grant, gracy, goldsmith, shapiro, & redlener, 2013). although larger policy shifts would be required to address the overarching affordable housing crisis, in terms of effective program models or interventions, hf has been recognized as the clear solution to chronic homelessness by the united states federal government (u.s. interagency council on homelessness [usich], 2010). supported by more than a decade of research (collins, malone, & clifasefi, 2013; mares & rosenheck, 2007; pearson, montgomery, & locke, 2009; tsemberis & eisenberg, 2000; tsemberis et al., 2004), hf has become increasingly disseminated in the united states and internationally (busch-geertsema, 2011; goering et al., 2011; greenwood, stefancic, tsemberis, & busch-geertsema, 2013; keller et al., 2013). clearly, the dominant institutional logic of homelessness services has been shifting toward hf (see greenwood, stefancic, & tsemberis, 2013; johnson, parkinson, & parsell, 2012; nelson, 2013; stanhope & dunn, 2012; usich, 2013). widespread governmentsupported plans and programs to end homelessness that acknowledge the need for harm reduction and question the legitimacy of housing-readiness assessments represent this new institutional logic. nevertheless, at various points and in different locations, local providers and stakeholders have questioned the logic of hf. resistance to or divergence from hf principles and practices has been driven by a combination of factors: (1) programs adopting the hf label but not significantly changing existing practices, which include continued reliance on housing readiness and prioritizing provider determinations over consumer choice (in many cases clinical stability has remained a prerequisite for independent housing); (2) misinterpretation of many of the key principles that the model seeks to implement; (3) skepticism regarding program effectiveness; and (4) moral judgments regarding the worthiness of various populations for housing (greenwood, stefancic, & tsemberis, 2013). using an ethnographic approach, felton (2003) found that when an hf model was first introduced into a suburban setting (stefancic & tsemberis, 2007), protests by local service providers were motivated by job protectionism and a clash of institutional logics that most clearly differed in terms of the sequencing of housing and services; existing providers regarded their current practice as consumer driven and disagreed that hf introduced this as a new approach. these findings demonstrated multiple, competing, and even conflicting logics of homelessness services. to date, whether and how the logic of hf fits within rural systems of care has not been explored in the research literature. previous research has suggested that hf can be implemented in a rural setting with some program modification (stefancic et al., 2013). yet the description of rural homelessness as “different, unrecognised and unresearched” (kenna, 2002, p. 919) is largely accurate and may account for why hf remains predominantly an urban intervention. estimates that approximately 9% percent of homeless people live in rural areas (robertson, harris, fritz, noftsinger, & fischer, 2007) may be taken to imply that rural homelessness is a minor issue, resulting in limited infrastructure compared to urban settings in terms of both service and housing options to address this complex social problem (nooe & patterson, 2010). however, these numbers are underestimations (edwards, torgerson, & sattem, 2009). limited infrastructure to address homelessness also means limited capacity to assess homelessness, because pointin-time estimates largely rely on existing service global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 providers to count unsheltered adults. further, point-intime estimates conducted at night fail to account for unsheltered people who remain out of sight during those times (hopper, shinn, laska, meisner, & wanderling, 2008), an issue that is particularly pertinent in rural areas because many adults sleep in the woods, campgrounds, cars, or other largely hidden places not intended for habitation. reports that rates of rural homelessness have been increasing in recent years by more than 50% (u.s. department of housing and urban development [hud], 2010)—whether due to increased investment in point-in-time estimates or increased numbers of visibly homeless individuals— may result in increased attention to how rural areas address homelessness. pressure to revise the institutional logic of homelessness services in rural contexts to provide additional resources in a manner consistent with an hf approach may become increasingly powerful. rural mental health care systems have certain characteristics that both shape service delivery and create contexts that set the potential for transformative change, particularly when it comes to interventions such as hf that emphasize consumer-driven, mobile, and multidisciplinary services. barriers in rural areas such as low population density, large geographic distances, lack of public transportation infrastructure, and more limited access to multidisciplinary specialists result in reduced intensity and comprehensiveness of mental health services. in a study of rural mental health systems, topping and calloway (2000) concluded that certain characteristics of rural areas result in the development of “a system of care that is providerdriven and crisis-oriented” (p. 394). mental health treatment options in rural areas are likely to be more limited overall, which can result in “the public mental health center being the only game in town” (calloway, fried, johnsen, & morrissey, 1999, p. 305). despite barriers to integrated services, rural mental health agencies may also be more interdependent, given shortages in specialties and the need to coordinate services, resulting in greater communication (calloway et al., 1999), particularly in close-knit communities with more informal means of information sharing. using a case-study approach and thematic analysis of multiple stakeholder perspectives, this study investigated whether and how the introduction of hf into a small, rural state in the northeastern united states affected the dominant institutional logic. prior to the introduction of hf, the state was reported to have approximately 1,200 homeless adults with roughly 12% unsheltered. approximately 300 subsidized supportive housing beds were offered through a patchwork of mental health community providers across the state (hud, 2010), yet there could only be one provider in a designated geographic area. the introduction of hf into this context was made possible through federal funding from the u.s. substance abuse and mental health services administration and was accomplished, as was the case in felton’s (2003) study, by introducing an outside provider with expertise in hf into the existing system. in this instance, however, an outside agency that is nationally known for its expertise in hf hired new staff members from the rural state that included existing local providers. in addition, during the decade since felton’s (2003) study, hf has gained legitimacy as a competing or potentially dominant institutional logic. in this study, we considered the possibility of transformative change in a rural homelessness service system. specific research questions included: (1) to what extent did the introduction of hf fit with the existing institutional logic? (2) what influential factors or social forces (i.e., regulative, normative, or cultural– cognitive) facilitated or inhibited an hf institutional logic? (3) how did the introduction of hf affect the existing institutional logic? methods sample and recruitment using a case-study approach to understand whether and how the introduction of hf affected the dominant institutional logic, purposive sampling was used to recruit stakeholders across multiple sectors related to homelessness services for adults with serious mental illnesses. case studies are a preferred strategy when asking how or why questions about a contemporary set of events over which the investigator has little control (yin, 2014). this case study employed a constructivist methodology, utilizing stakeholders as observers and interpreters of the implementation and impact of hf (guba & lincoln, 1989). in-depth semistructured individual interviews were conducted between 2012– 2013 with 20 key stakeholders: policy decision makers (n = 4), social service administrators (n = 12), and front-line service providers throughout the state (n = 4), including individuals from homelessness drop-in centers and shelters, mental health programs, law enforcement and criminal justice systems, housing authorities, youth services, hospitals, and veterans affairs. procedures respondents were asked to describe their job as it relates to homelessness services for adults with mental health conditions, whether this population has been well served, how and why the system has changed over time, and what can be done to improve the system. these questions were open ended and developed and implemented prior to the application of the neoinstitutional framework used during the analysis global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 phase. an affiliated institutional review board approved all study protocols. after discussing the introduction of hf, in particular, respondents were asked to nominate any other key stakeholders or informants who could provide an additional perspective. interviews typically lasted between 35 to 55 minutes. sixteen of the interviews were recorded and transcribed for analysis. although four of the interviews were not recorded because they were conducted for purposes of confirming saturation of the data and the validity of emergent themes, detailed notes were taken. analysis approach thematic content analysis was used to systematically categorize and ascertain patterns and themes in the data (padgett, 2012). during this process, both manifest and latent content was independently coded by three investigators, which allowed for the categorization of the data as well as the development of a deeper understanding of the phenomena (saldaña, 2013). initial inductive analysis was employed to establish themes through investigator consensus, followed by a deductive process using sensitizing concepts from neoinstitutional theory to organize the findings (patton, 2002). the use of this theoretical framework was based on our overarching aim to understand whether and how system change took place. strategies of rigor related to qualitative methods that were employed during this study included independent thematic development, team debriefing, and consensus-driven findings (padgett, 2012). in addition, after preliminary analysis was complete, additional interviews were used to establish saturation and completeness of the findings (charmaz, 2006). results the 20 individuals who shared their accounts regarding the introduction of hf into a rural state system each had a unique perspective, yet the overall narrative remained largely consistent: the introduction of an outside hf program brought with it new resources and expertise, which resulted in a previously underserved population being effectively engaged in services. the extent to which the introduction of an outside provider with a specific, well-defined hf philosophy fit within the existing social services system was complicated by existing providers reporting that they had limited knowledge about or input into the grant submission that provided funding for the hf program. numerous social forces as well as concerns regarding limited resources also influenced stakeholder perceptions. social forces included: norms regarding a right to housing, fairness, and community welfare; a cultural–cognitive understanding of the terms client choice and consumer driven; and regulatory restrictions on funding. limited resources meant that hf was regarded as competition for existing programs. the impact of the introduction of hf on existing institutional logics was not always clearly identified by stakeholders, yet hf’s emphasis on providing service options and allowing for client choice emerged as influential, especially given a rural context with fewer resources that typically only had one provider option for clients. demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach also proved to be influential and supported hf’s client-choice approach. the larger narrative described later is depicted in figure 1. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 figure 1. introduction of hf into a rural system existing institutional logic and the introduction of housing first with the exception of the state’s largest city, which had multiple shelter options, most areas of the rural state where this study took place had only one homeless shelter. community mental health services were also limited to one designated organization for each area, meaning that there were limited service options available for individuals with mental illness experiencing homelessness. in this system, stakeholders unanimously acknowledged the existence of an underserved population, with one person characterizing the overall attitude as, “‘we have no clue what to do with these folks.’ you know, they either burn their bridge or decided they don’t want to bridge any more with mental health.” the vast majority of stakeholders, therefore, expressed support for additional housing and service options. expressing a common sentiment, one stakeholder stated: if you don’t have stable housing, nothing else that we want to do for you, whether it’s mental health treatment or whether it’s a reach out program or anything else, is going to work. stable housing is foundational. in fact, what i hear from people in the community including people with mental illness is that lack of housing or a threat of losing your housing can actually put you in a crisis and cause you to have a psychiatric crisis. so, housing is absolutely fundamental. stakeholders agreed that the provision of housing was an essential resource that would help address a myriad of other social problems. despite these attitudes, the introduction of hf by a new, outside provider agency resulted in “suspicion about another nonprofit being created.” lack of transparency regarding the grant development process was a main contributing factor to this sentiment, particularly because several of existing providers had been involved in previous unsuccessful grant applications. several stakeholders described feeling unsettled regarding the new program’s introduction, with one person expressing: i think there was a certain amount of cautiousness and concern like, “what? who are these people? how is this going to work exactly? what do they do that’s different then us? what are they serving that’s the same or different than us?” the introduction of an outside player in a system with established providers and interagency relationships was • limited  infrastructure   of  rural  setting   • relatively  static   services,  providers,  and   communication  styles   • underserved   population   • need  for  housing  and   service  options   existing  institutional   logic   • introduction  of  a  new   service  provider   • belief  in  right  to  housing   • values  of  fairness  and   community  welfare   • misunderstandings  about   client  choice  and   consumer  driven   • concerns  about  resource   allocation   forces  ineluencing   implementation  of  hf   logic   • new  possibilities  for   client  choice   • shift  in  practice  and   promotion  of  client   choice   • value  of   demonstration  of   effectiveness   impact  of  hf  on   existing  logic   global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 also acknowledged as difficult because, as one respondent noted, “a lot of people have been in their jobs for 25, 30 years so it’s—not an ol’ girls’/boys’ club … but there’s something about it that’s just hard to break in [to].” limited employment opportunities and stagnant wages that are typical of rural areas likely contributed to low staff turnover and longevity of relationships. although the program was consistently supported by a few key players that requested the program grant funding, one stakeholder expressed a typical response: “i think [the hf program] needs to be more collaborative. … whether that’s their instinct or not, if they can become part of the system, they’ve got to be.” in fact, stakeholders frequently expressed concerns that the new hf program had violated expectations regarding communication and collaboration. one stakeholder noted, “i’m glad [the hf program] is here. i think it’s a really neat thing. i would just love to feel more integrated with them or in touch with them in some way.” some stakeholders, however, identified a deeper resentment. as one person explained: what i heard was … “they shouldn’t just come in here without talking to us.” and i felt like a lot of people were like, “well, if they just come in here, and think they’re going to set something up, they, they really need to be talking to the people who are already the movers and the shakers in that community and say, ‘what do you, what do you think’s working? do you, what do you need? where are your gaps? could you use a program like us?’” concerns that the hf program did not appreciate the difference between working anonymously in a large urban area versus in small rural communities were also mentioned despite the program hiring new staff members from within the rural state that included employees of existing local providers. such negative reactions to the new hf program seemed to have less to do with the approach and more to do with the way in which an outside program was introduced. forces influencing the implementation of an hf logic stakeholders acknowledged that the hf program had a significant impact and was able to effectively engage adults with mental health conditions who had a long history of homelessness—something acknowledged as missing in the existing system. respondents frequently described that the hf program “has been good for this community,” largely because “they house some people who are pretty hard to house.” as one respondent noted, “they’re serving a lot of folks in the community that we’ve been worried [about] or struggling to work with for a long time.” beliefs about a right to housing represented a normative force that was regarded as important to the success of the hf program. i think that housing is a right. and so, yeah. get people housed. and then deal with these issues if we need to. and so right now we’re talking about [the hf program] being for mental health, but i think we should have housing first for everybody. norms regarding fairness, however, were occasionally invoked regarding hf’s focus on a specific target population, with some participants questioning what it meant for other vulnerable groups: my problem is, you’ve got slots for that particular population, [but] you haven’t done anything for anybody else. you know, there’s this whole spectrum of homelessness and where, where is the state stepping up to help all those people that are not so severely in need? they’re not. concerns about the welfare of the larger community were also sometimes invoked as being at odds with an hf philosophy: [an hf] philosophy is fine but you have to think beyond—your philosophy is totally focused on the individual. … you need to pay some attention to how this person’s behavior is affecting their neighbors and others in the property and you need to pay attention if they’re not paying their rent and trashing their unit because the consequences are not going to be good. although there was an overall convergence of support for a hf logic, some identified ways in which it was perceived to be problematic given existing norms. the perception that the hf logic was sometimes at odds with existing norms appeared connected to the cultural– cognitive understanding of certain key concepts such as client choice and consumer driven. several existing stakeholders misunderstood this to imply a hands-off approach, and expressed concern that “there needs to be some responsibility on the part of the individual who’s moving into the housing to really engage. and i think that’s where most of the rub comes from with the community.” one stakeholder explained the difference: i think there are ways in which our philosophies are similar and ways in which we seem to have rubbed up against … this whole housing first model and that there really are no strings attached kind of, you don’t have to agree to do anything and what the client says is what they go with. we’re all for meeting the clients where they are and that kind global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 of thing, but we do have, for instance … we have some level of responsibility. despite recognizing the success of the approach, some stakeholders misinterpreted the notion of consumer choice to mean that “they [hf providers] sort of let them crash and burn and then help them [clients] along,” adding, “we’re not comfortable with the idea of that.” even with misinterpreted ideas of what consumer choice implied, under increasing financial pressure to find community alternatives to social problems such as homelessness, institutionalization, and incarceration, most stakeholders embraced hf. in addition to the state’s department of mental health, the department of corrections found collaborating with the hf program to be beneficial because otherwise “we were stuck dealing with landlords and we were housing people kind of without any supervision.” regulatory restrictions on sources of funding, however, raised concerns about how people would remain in housing once their involvement with the criminal justice system ended. when discussing how to sustain hf services, however, most stakeholders identified concerns about limited resources, not just regulatory restrictions regarding funding streams. in fact, the introduction of hf into the state or community was perceived by some providers as “direct competition” and met with some resistance due to concerns about funding and resource allocation. a few respondents expressed concern that “with [the new hf provider] you’re just adding one more layer to the complexity of service delivery” and “now they’re going to be fighting for the same mental health dollars or substance abuse dollars that are currently going to the designated agencies.” minimizing the difference between the existing institutional logic and that of hf, a minority of stakeholders expressed the sentiment that “we could have done this” and that there was not a need for an outside agency to provide what some perceived as “duplicative” services. in this case, stakeholders described their philosophy or that of their organization as closely aligned with the hf philosophy, indicating that “some of the differences and philosophies have been subtle.” as one person explained: i respect they feel really passionate about their philosophy, which is wonderful, but i feel like … well, you have a different philosophy ... and i don’t think ours is that far off. as a social worker i definitely don’t think we’re that far off of clientcentered work. although there may have been some convergence of perspectives, it was unclear whether these stakeholders did not perceive the previously mentioned differences between their approach and an hf logic as significant or were motivated to obscure these distinctions when discussing resource allocation. impact of housing first on existing institutional logic the vast majority of stakeholders acknowledged that hf represents a different approach to business as usual and that “there are a lot of people who are stably housed, who were not before [the hf provider] got here.” these results were viewed as having affected the way in which the overall system responded to issues related to homelessness, with one person explaining, “it’s a different model. it’s just a very different model. and i do believe that [the hf provider] has pushed the [our] model of service.” stakeholders referenced a shift in practice toward increasing consumer choice and respecting selfdetermination, with one person stating, “we try to be less prescriptive now.” referring to a recent shift at a local agency that was influenced by the introduction and logic of hf, one stakeholder reported: what we’ve done, over time i would say, to be as close to housing first as possible … try to leave it as open as possible for the [consumer] to only engage as much as is somewhat necessary for him to remain system eligible … and self-determination is there as much as can be … while engaging with us. so it’s sort of like trying to bring it as close as possible, without it, i think, being truly housing first. overall … it also had an impact on how we talk about this issue. … we got in a big debate two years ago about requiring people who got a voucher to take services, and i pushed back and i said, no, that won’t work. the very people you’re trying to reach are going to refuse to take the voucher if you insist that they accept services. you have to make it voluntary. and this was all part of working with [the hf provider]. most stakeholders recognized that the introduction of the hf program provided a possibility of client choice that did not previously exist. one person explained the scenario prior to the introduction of hf: the challenge … is because we have a system of care that is based on a single door that you can walk through if you have serious persistent mental illness, that it’s a community mental health and it’s one designated agency. so if you’ve had trouble with that designated agency or if that designated agency was involved in any way forcibly hospitalizing you or any kind of involuntary treatment, if you’ve shut the door, you don’t have any other options. so … choice of services is not available for people. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 with the implementation of hf, there was increasing recognition of the importance of a service system that promotes an hf philosophy of client choice: i think it’s also nice that there is an option. it might not even be a burned bridge, it would just be like, “i really like the way they work,” or “i feel comfortable with them” or “it’s nice to know i don’t have to go through [the] community mental health center or wherever.” like, here’s another game in town and it’s nice, it’s refreshing. yet it was not simply having another choice that was viewed as important, but having a different kind of choice and service model. referring to communitybased care, one stakeholder explained: this is a plus for [hf] compared to [the local community mental health center], a very deskcentered operation … where your interaction with your client is by appointment in your office. we feel very strongly that effective service delivery needs, to some degree, happen in the home because when you’re in the home, you’ll have a much better sense of what’s going on. although the discourse about whether the current system needed to change preceded the introduction of hf, the logic of hf had become central to the discussion of how to change the existing system, with one stakeholder noting, “it’s really interesting to me that that’s [hf] finally catching on. … i think there is a general movement.” several stakeholders attributed hf’s impact on the existing system to its demonstrated effectiveness and outcomes as much as to its underlying philosophy. some noted, however, that “i think people forget there’s somebody who’s been on the streets for years and then suddenly they’re not there and they don’t know that they’ve been housed.” having success stories more so than outcomes appeared to be part of the existing but changing institutional logic. in discussing the effectiveness of the hf approach, one stakeholder admitted, “we have been in operation for [more than 30] years and really haven’t done some exploration as to whether our approach is effective or not.” to this end, one stakeholder explained, “i think they’ve been a breath of fresh air, i think they’ve been creative, i think they’ve been incredibly person centered, and they’ve got the results to show it. and i think the rest of the service system can learn a lot from them.” discussion corrigan and boyle (2003) contended that transformative change can occur through evolution or revolution. the former refers to a consensus-driven process that often is slow, whereas the latter is more quickly realized through an imposed vision (sylvestre, in press). the findings from this case study suggest that that these two processes are not mutually exclusive. although stakeholders noted that institutional actors had remained relatively static for an extended period of time, and that the service community had developed implicit expectations regarding collaboration and community-based services, there was overwhelming consensus that the existing system could not accommodate a vulnerable group that were referred to as “hard to house.” this awareness reflects an evolutionary process that primed the system for change. yet the decision by state officials to bring in an outside provider with expertise in hf to implement a new logic of homelessness services, rather than giving the responsibility to existing providers to implement the new approach, was described as a revolutionary process. it is not entirely clear whether transformative change at the systems level has taken place in this case study. changes in an existing service system have been described as either ameliorative or transformative (watzlawick, weakland, & fisch, 1974, as cited in nelson, 2010). to the extent that hf not only represents a different structure of services but also a different philosophy that cannot be easily reconciled in a traditional service model (henwood, shinn, tsemberis, & padgett, 2013; henwood, stanhope, & padgett, 2011), its implementation likely represents some degree of transformative change. yet in this case the introduction of hf did not simply replace the existing system. even among the vast majority of stakeholders who were supportive of the hf approach, some described a tension between the hf logic and existing norms of community welfare and notions of what it means to provide consumer-driven services. it was not clear whether these tensions were based on real or perceived differences between hf and existing logics, especially given that existing providers reported limited communication or collaboration with the new hf program. further, concerned about limited resources, some providers who acknowledged the value of bringing in an outside provider with hf expertise nevertheless felt that “we could have done this,” yet it is not clear from this case study why these providers had not previously attempted an hf approach. this is consistent with previous findings that job protectionism can motivate objections to change (felton, 2003) and highlights a fundamental premise of institutional theory—that institutions become self-preservationist, making change more difficult (scott et al., 2000). to the extent that transformative change is taking place in this rural system (i.e., the state is now considering how to implement hf statewide), outcomes that included success stories were one of the most powerful global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 5, issue 1 june 2014 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 forces influencing agreement with the logic of an hf approach. the salience of these outcomes also reflects regulatory, normative, and cultural–cognitive forces emphasizing data-driven systems. given widespread momentum toward an hf logic, limited resources and increasing expectations to do more with less will likely result in the increased adoption of hf principles and practices in mental health and homelessness service systems. yet as seen in this case study, systems barriers including funding structures, as much as individual values and beliefs, can make achieving systems change difficult. trying to integrate a new approach in an existing system can make transformative change more difficult due to systems barriers and resistance from established social forces; nevertheless, the findings from this study suggest that in traditional service systems there is a variation in attitudes and that transformative change can be facilitated by both internal and external forces. consistent with previous literature, we found that in this rural system there were long-standing relationships and a close-knit provider community with expectations of ongoing formal and informal information sharing (calloway et al., 1999). these characteristics of a rural system, which may be due in part to a scarcity of concentrated resources, can also inhibit competition, innovation, and change. indeed, the introduction of hf brought with it an alternative for homeless adults who had not been previously well served; this alternative was regarded by some as competition for limited resources. in this case, hf was an alternative approach with a research base that had established effectiveness. although this study took place in the context of a rural system, some of the aforementioned observations would likely apply to an urban service context. different expectations of what it means for mental heath services to promote community integration, however, may differ based on a rural versus urban environment. research has predominantly considered the notion of community integration in the context of an urban environment, which may represent an increasingly important gap in the literature as hf continues to become more widely adopted. it is important to note that this case study was based on accounts from multiple key stakeholders from a range of organizations and who held different positions, but did not include participants enrolled in the hf program who could have provided an important perspective on systems change. to protect the confidentiality of participants, the analysis did not attempt to differentiate between multiple institutional logics in the existing system and instead presented the findings as a comparison between existing and hf logics. because a focus on institutional logics assumes that “people in organizations have little choice but to adhere to these institutional scripts, it overlooks those actors’ multiple and local meanings, which also shape their practices” (binder, 2007, p. 550). this study cannot address whether actual practices or service delivery reflected the discourse or underlying logic expressed by stakeholders interviewed for this study. conclusion introducing hf can bring reform to existing homeless and mental health services that more closely aligns with consumer-driven care, but requires strategically considering issues of implementation in the context of an existing service system. the features of local environments (including systems of care but also funding, political, and cultural contexts) and their potential for triggering transformative change may influence the relative merits of implementing hf services by an outside provider with known expertise or supporting an existing provider to develop the infrastructure and foster a service philosophy based on an hf logic. regardless, given that hf is based on a philosophy consistent with a recovery orientation and basic human rights that is aligned with larger transformation efforts, it will likely become a more prominent institutional logic. epilogue two key events occurred after the study’s completion which further inform the potential for housing first to effect long-term transformative change. the state legislature had considered the formation of a housing first study committee that would explore the potential effectiveness of housing first statewide. a general consensus emerged quickly, however, that housing first was a well-established practice with a proven evidence base, obviating the need for such an exploratory committee. most significantly, after several high-profile public comment and hearing periods, the department of mental health announced that the housing first agency was being given conditional designation as a specialized agency. because the federal grant funds were ending, this status allows the agency to sustain housing first services statewide through direct contracting with the department of mental health. the department’s announcement stated that the housing first agency, “presents a housing and treatment option that is different from what the designated mental health agencies provide.” this was the first time in approximately 20 years that such a status was granted within the state’s adult mental healthcare system.   references anthony, w. a. 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(2014). case study research: design and methods (5th ed). thousand oaks, ca: sage. kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 enlazando experiencias comunitarias importantes a la formación académica en psicología social eduardo almeida acosta keywords: experiencias comunitarias, formación academica, vivencias de solidaridad, tejido de esperanza, community experiences, academic training, experiences of solidarity, fabric of hope author biographies: eduardo almeida acosta fue profesor de la universidada nacional autónoma de méxico, de la benemérita universidad autónoma de puebla y actualmente es profesor-investigador en la universidad iberoamericana puebla. posee un doctorado en psicología social de cornell university donde también obtuvo un post doctorado con una beca fulbright. es miembro del sistema nacional de investigadores, nivel 2. dentro de su obra publicada se encuentran ocho libros, numerosos capítulos de libros y artículos en revistas científicas. en 2010 fue el organizador de la 3a. conferencia internacional de psicología comunitaria en la universidad iberoamericana de puebla, que contó con participantes de 40 países. eduardo trabajó y vivió, con su esposa y su hijo, durante 13 años en una comunidad indígena en la sierra norte de puebla. en 2005 recibió el internacional humanitarian award de la apa (american psychological association) y en el 2017 la sociedad mexicana de psicología le otorgó un reconocimiento por su trayectoria. global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 enlazando experiencias comunitarias importantes a la formación académica en psicología social resumen es un privilegio para un psicólogo comunitario haber estado involucrado durante una larga trayectoria académica (50 años) a ambos el entrenamiento de psicólogos y 3 experiencias mexicanas importantes de solidaridad: el entrenamiento de maestros rurales, una experiencia comunitaria de 15 años viviendo con una población indígena, y participando en algunas acciones de la rebeldía zapatista. esto me permitió ser consiente de las limitaciones reales de las aproximaciones académicas profesionales tratando de resolver problemas reales del mundo, aún con investigación multidisciplinaria y programas de intervención esto también me hizo interesarme en el enriquecimiento de fructíferas iniciativas acerca del compromiso y dedicación de gente capaz y valerosa participando en tareas sociales de tejer esperanza. el propósito de esta presentación oral es comunicar los aprendizajes que yo he reunido a lo largo de mis días cómo académico y como activista. he sido un maestro y un profesor. estuve trabajando durante mis actividades profesionales tempranas como un maestro de escuela. me preparé para ello en escuelas normales de formación de maestros. completé mis estudios pedagógicos estudiando psicología en la universidad nacional autónoma de méxico y la especialidad de psicología social y personal en la universidad cornell en ithaca, nueva york. vida y trabajo me fueron llevando de la psicología social a la psicología comunitaria y a actividades interdisciplinarias en entornos comunitarios. el destino y opciones vitales orientaron mi compromiso para ir más allá de los límites de la academia y tratar de enfrentar la necesidad de considerar las realidades sociales de méxico, mi país, una región clave en el mundo que sufre las situaciones más difíciles de un mundo perturbado: las injusticias políticas, económicas, sociales y culturales de los tiempos y lugares donde la humanidad confronta su futuro. he estado trabajando en las fronteras entre el mundo académico y experiencias de solidaridad tratando de tejer esperanza y ligando sabiduría, humildad y confianza. global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 abstract it is a privilege for a community psychologist to have been involved for a long academic career (50 years) in both the training of psychologists and 3 important mexican experiences of solidarity: the training of rural teachers, a community experience of 15 years living with an indigenous population , and participating in some actions of the zapatista rebellion. this allowed me to be aware of the real limitations of professional academic approaches trying to solve real world problems, even with multidisciplinary research and intervention programs. it also made me interested in the enrichment of fruitful initiatives about the commitment and dedication of capable people and courageous participating in social tasks of weaving hope. the purpose of this oral presentation is to communicate the learnings that i have gathered throughout my days as an academic and as an activist. i have been a teacher and a professor. i was working during my early professional activities as a school teacher. i prepared for it in teacher training normal schools. i completed my pedagogical studies studying psychology at the national autonomous university of mexico and specializing in social and personal psychology at cornell university in ithaca, new york. life and work took me from social psychology to community psychology and interdisciplinary activities in community settings. fate and vital choices guided my commitment to go beyond the limits of the academy and try to face the need to consider the social realities of mexico, my country, a key region in the world that suffers the most difficult situations in a world disturbed: the political, economic, social and cultural injustices of the times and places where humanity confronts its future. i have been working on the borders between the academic world and experiences of solidarity trying to weave hope and linking wisdom, humility and trust. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnyiqxj5m3m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnyiqxj5m3m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnyiqxj5m3m original research   participatory research into community psychology within a local context caterina arcidiacono, department of relational sciences, university of naples federico ii, naples, italy caterina.arcidiacono@unina.it fortuna procentese, department of relational sciences, university of naples federico ii, naples, italy. fortuna.procentese@unina.it key words: participatory action research, ecological approach, citizen narratives, grounded theory methodologies recommended citation: arcidiacono, c., & procentese, f. (2010). participatory research into community psychology within a local context. global journal of community psychology practice, 1(2), xx-xx. retrieved <date>, from http://www.gjcpp.org/.   global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/   page 1 of 10      mailto:caterina.arcidiacono@unina.it mailto:fortuna.procentese@unina.it global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 2  september 2010    global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/   page 2 of 10    participatory research into community psychology within a local context caterina arcidiacono, fortuna procentese university of naples federico ii, naples, italy abstract the aim is to present a series of participatory action research studies focused on town development and inhabitants’ needs. the paper discusses how to construct a field investigation that pays attention to people’s narratives, as well as how to elaborate a substantive theory, which is inductively derived from the study of the phenomenon. the assessment of the trustworthiness of the intervention is also examined. for a better understanding of how to conduct an intervention in a local community, this paper deals with methodological questions concerning triangulation of sources and sampling strategies. research instruments such as narratives, community profiles, and swot (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats ) analysis are discussed as regards their use within grounded theory methodologies and participatory action research. introduction intervention within local communities requires specific instruments and methods in order to find out about the social, relational and economic dimensions existing in the area. “because there is very little guidance with regard to methodologies that promote social transformation…” (montero, 2009, p.75): as maritza montero points out, social action calls for specific professional attitudes and this article will present our own expertise and research strategies. community psychology is the discipline that gives voice to the experience of inhabitants and favors communication between all the different social and political forces which promote various interventions of social transformation. within this discipline, the ecological model emerges as crucial for explaining the interaction between the different factors and levels (micro, meso and macro) that constitute the social situation and that create a dialogue between the different factors that interact within it. in fact the ecological approach allows us to identify the connections between the individual and the collective, as well as the objective and subjective dimensions, and to carefully examine these interactions (prilleltensky, 2008; christens & perkins, 2008). this perspective effectively analyses the various different structural, relational, cultural and socio-economic viewpoints, focusing on the need for considering all these different aspects together and thereby allowing us to understand how events and facts are “situated” in the mind of the observer. furthermore, the ecological model assumes that community integration is the adaptive result of direct influences from the community context, social connections, networks , personal and group characteristics. this paper intends to focus on implicit factors which represent the strong points of a qualitative approach to the study of social contexts. they are the basic elements in the training of the researcher who wants to operate within urban contexts in a participatory way. within this framework special importance is attributed to the narratives produced at the individual and group level, and to the restitution and collective discussion of their perspectives and representations. our research team paid attention to both the contextual reality of the research participants and to the identification of methodologies allowing us to investigate the meanings attributed by participants to their experiences in relation to their life contexts (arcidiacono & procentese 2005; arcidiacono, procentese & di napoli, 2007; arcidiacono, procentese & baldi 2010; arcidiacono & di napoli 2009; procentese, di napoli, & iuliano, 2007). these issues have a significant effect on the implementation of an intervention, and with this in mind the following criteria are analyzed: 1) contact strategies, 2) the definition and analysis of context, 3) building the research team, 4) sample building, 5) the choice of investigative tools used and their construction, 6) data analysis, and 7) the restitution and the definition of future interventions. global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 2  september 2010    global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/   page 3 of 10    the preliminary framework the method we followed required the establishment of a research context that would belong to the researchers, to the social and health workers involved, to the participants in the study, and to the final target population. therefore, the researchers had first to define: • the construction of the relationship of the researchers with the first contacts within the local context; • the analysis of needs and resources; • the best composition of the research group; • the best composition of the steering committee; • the research design; • the tools and instruments to be used. the contact in all our activities at a local level, the first phase of the participative research project was the contact between the researchers, the citizens and the stakeholders. through listening and mutual knowledge, a relationship of mutual trust was built up between the participants in the research project. intermediary figures trusted by the host community arranged preliminary contacts for meetings to be held with people known to be the most authoritative in the research context. the literature (hanlin et al., 2008; nelson & prilleltensky, 2005) shows the need for prolonged preliminary contact, but if there is already a strong contact with some reference figures in the territory it may not be necessary to wait long before starting the research. in our experience, the presence of bridging figures between the group of researchers and people within the context being investigated was a necessary pre-requisite and it was accompanied by the research of experts, scholars, social workers, members of associations and researchers who, in their various different capacities, are familiar with the territory studied and with the topic being investigated. they are involved in relational, professional, family, political and cultural contexts, and they facilitate the comprehension of local problems while favoring contact with various entities, institutions, associations and individuals, as well as permitting access to local information. for example, in order to establish a study with the muslim immigrants of san marcellino, we initially referred to a student of our university who was highly respected in the context of the local organizations. he therefore allowed us to build up a relationship of trust with the community within which the research was conducted and he facilitated relationships with the citizens and key people of the area (arcidiacono & procentese 2010). analysis of the needs and relationship with the participants in any study it is essential to listen to the needs and motivations of local people that lead to the construction of a joint objective and a shared agenda with the inhabitants and the entire community. a commitment from the community towards putting data emerging from the research to good use is a further prerequisite for an intervention with a transformative aim. if this is not present, it is the task of the researcher to arrange initiatives of sensitization aimed at its activation. to this end we established appointments for meeting the local contacts, acting as mediators of our requests to the citizens, and we then arranged meetings for sharing and discussing ideas with them. these meetings were held both in the initial phase of the participatory research and at subsequent moments, in order to redefine the aims of the intervention to be implemented. in the latter meetings we set up special exhibitions by the citizens, allowing us to have a picture of the ideas that were emerging and to redefine these ideas together with the various social protagonists. we will give specific examples of this later on. the research team in our action research activity we focused on the idea that the research team would preferably consist of researchers who, in addition to their scientific competence, should have experience in the local context, and would therefore allow the whole group to understand the values and the life-styles of the local culture, thereby facilitating connections and relationships with people, as well as with local institutions. in the research conducted in the old town-center of naples, for example, we relied on the connections of some team members who lived in the area or nearby and who had significant social contacts and relations with people committed to the promotion of the district and its livability (arcidiacono & procentese, 2005). we also met a local shop-owner who mediated our relations with the people who frequented the area we investigated but who were not actually residents. the research team was also integrated and supported by senior researchers with experience in data coding and categorization. the research group aimed to encourage the expression of reflection in its members with regard to their attitudes and expectations, as well global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 2  september 2010    global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/   page 4 of 10    as obtaining their feedback on the information and knowledge acquired. the steering committee another distinctive element was the constitution of a mixed steering committee (sc) that included some of the research group members and some reference people from the community investigated (nelson & prilleltensky, 2005). this group guided the research process, established and verified the objectives, made decisions and defined strategies. in some cases, an ethical communication code is established so as to recognize the role of inhabitants in the research decisions and to define the empowering function that the research must have for the community, while taking its values and principles fully into consideration. we had in mind nelson and prilleltensky’s suggestion (2005) that the cooperation should take place with mutual respect and consultation, such that, while no partner can veto the dissemination of results, those who disagree with the interpretation of the data can express their point of view in oral or written form and propose that the materials collected should not be distributed if they do not contain specific reference to the partners’ differing positions, but that any party in disagreement cannot actually prevent the release of the results. the steering committee (sc) distinguishes a participatory action research study from a research project with a transformative aim in a professional and academic environment (arcidiacono, 2008). the construction of a sc is a priority, although it represents a challenge to the traditional scientific power and authority that the researchers see themselves invested with. we may consider, for example, a research project (arcidiacono & procentese 2010) within a community of immigrants in the campania region that has the local mosque as its main reference point. already in the first meetings for setting up a sc, consisting of the local imam and members of associations for migrant rights, spurred our research group towards a participative management of the research. we received prompt information from them on the main problems deriving from immigration policies and on the wider context of the interviewees, on the typology of the sample, on the way local people established mutual relationships, on the right methods for establishing local contacts, on the dissemination of the results and also various considerations regarding the aim of the project as a whole. furthermore, in order to increase their knowledge of the local context (nelson & prilleltensky 2005, p.271), researchers were invited to gather observational data and field notes of two kinds: a) descriptive field notes about what they observed (including direct quotes) and b) analytical or reflexive field notes in which they recorded their impressions, feelings, intuitions and insights. the community diagnosis: community profiles and swot analyses in all our activities data was collected in order to carry out the community analysis through the acquisition of knowledge related to socioenvironmental, demographic, institutional, anthropological and employment characteristics, according to the methodology of community profiles. community profiling allows local inhabitants to understand the particular problems and strengths that characterise their community. martini and sequi’s (1988) approach was improved by francescato and tomai (2005), so that now this method of analysis consists of eight profiles (territorial, demographic, economic, service, institutional, anthropological, psychological and future). it proved a useful tool for us for diagnosing and formulating the priorities of community intervention and action. in our research undertaken in naples in 1999, a careful analysis of the profile led us to identify the importance of unemployment and of young people’s strategies for dealing with this (arcidiacono, sommantico & procentese 2001). we then conducted a swot analysis as a strategic planning tool used to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats investigated by means of community profiling. it allows the researcher to specify the final objective of the project and identify the various internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieving that objective. it is elaborated by means of a critical reading of the community profiles of naples by the research group and with the help of focus groups consisting of local residents. in order to conduct a complete analysis of the community we preliminary ask ourselves how the data and information collected through the profiles represent points of strength or weakness of the local context and its inhabitants (arcidiacono, 1999). the research design in our participative study with inhabitants and communities, a key issue was, as previously mentioned, the sharing of decisions (within the sc), the restitution of results to the community and the reflexive attitude of the researchers. the grounded global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 2  september 2010    global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/   page 5 of 10    theory methodology (gtm) (corbin, & strauss, 2008) is a leading method which, thanks to the categorization and coding of data and the attribution of meaning, makes it possible to appreciate the attitudes and opinions of various different research partners. one of our goals was therefore to use the gt approach in order to investigate the meanings of all the social interactions we encountered. our challenge was to improve participatory processes in the research and to have a more critical perspective, while encouraging social change. our action research consisted of creating new forms of comprehension among local inhabitants and the researchers, so that their actions should not be blind, without reflection or comprehension, or like a theory without action and therefore devoid of meaning. in a wider sense, the theories that contribute to the development of the community lead to new forms of social interaction, and supply an important guide for community action (reason & bradbury, 2008, p.4). according to the simple slogan of nelson, ochocka, griffin, and lord. (1998) “nothing about me without me” we defined the methods as well as the objectives of the research in a participatory way. the sharing of aims and procedures, the identity of the researchers and protagonists of the study, and the joint decision regarding the subject of the research were all especially relevant topics. the procedure and the method the entire process of the research had a cyclical structure involving the redefinition and revision of what had occurred during previous phases. the phases that followed each other consisted of: • sampling • gathering of data: citizen narratives • coding procedure and data analysis • assessment, communication and dissemination sampling much time was dedicated by the research group and the steering committee to deciding and defining which were the most important experiences to be recorded. in order to get to know a context, the basic criterion is to identify the stakeholders and key people. in this case, it is interesting to illustrate how we used martini and sequi’s model (1988) for identifying the key people to be interviewed according to the criteria of “theoretical sampling”. we took into account the participation of citizens who, due to their variety of interests, were representative social protagonists in the local context. they were chosen both from among the leaders of the so-called in community which refers to politicians with local administrative powers and the representatives of social or cultural services, business and commerce, and from the out community, involving powerless social minorities, people who help out in informal ways, and minority or opposition politicians. in large urban contexts a valid evaluation must also take account of people belonging to different working categories, and institutional, political or cultural bodies that are active in the area being investigated. we then had to specifically select information-rich participants (patton, 2002). much time was dedicated to identifying people who would have a function of supplying information relevant to the research aims. defining the key people was a job for both the research team and the steering committee. the latter proved to be especially useful in finding participants with the right characteristics. citizen narratives the story of places and events is also the story of how those places and the relationships established within those places are seen, as such, it is not a search for an a priori truth, but for what the interviewee holds to be true. our interviews therefore examine the places and the lives of the people who inhabit them through their own subjective perceptions. in this context legewie (2006) proposed the narrative interview, an instrument that combines maximum opportunities for the spontaneous individual expression of the interviewee with the advantages of a grid that consent the expressive qualities of different individuals. it is therefore a very open and yet rigorous form of interview. in labov’s interview procedure (1981) the narrators were invited to explicitly reconstruct their situation and experiences as they saw them at that specific moment. schütze (1983) clarified that the interview begins with narration as the starting point, and following this explanatory questions relating to that narrative are asked. for legewie, schütze’s contributions remain important. in habermas view, an assessment of the following conditions must be carried out: • ability of the parties to communicate (language, cognitive and relational ability) • a shared social environment • voluntary participation and a reflexive and aware attitude • mutual esteem global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 2  september 2010    global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/   page 6 of 10    • motivation to participate in the interview • willingness to cooperate the validity of the interview depends on the way it is conducted. in accordance with the theory of the communicative act, for legewie the interview must be understandable and must express objectivity (in the reading of the phenomenon), authenticity (in the expression of the interviewee), and correctness (in the relationship between the interviewee and the interviewer). it is also clear that the interview should not be maneuvered or guided. its relevance consists “in its openness to the subjective constructions and complexities of the experiences of the interviewees” (legewie, 2006, p. 79) . in our experience with local and organizational contexts, we always adopt a compromise between a post-positivist approach and a constructivist approach. our research interviews and the analysis of the data are performed in a post-positivist way. when drawing up a community profile, performing organizational analysis, identifying stakeholders and defining key people we emphasize the existing socioenvironmental dimensions. thus the careful preparation of the protocols for individual and group interviews and the triangulation of sources allow the qualitative instrument to determine the truth. the intention to understand the experience narrated and the meanings attributed to it in social, historical, political, cultural, relational and qualitative contexts is an integral part of the constructivist paradigm. our approach thus moves between the socioenvironmental and relational data of a context and the way in which its inhabitants make sense of it. nelson and prilleltensky (2005, p.431) are concerned with deviance and empowerment narratives. in our experience with local and organizational contexts, we deal with individual and community narratives. with the aim of recognising the forms of social interactions between the inhabitants of a community and/or the members of an association of a group involved with it, the stories of the events and of individual and collective experiences allowed us to understand the needs and the resources of the social protagonists, as well as those of the context and also allowed us to identify problem areas and strong points, in addition to intervention strategies and aggregation strategies (hanlin et al, 2008). individual and group interviews. according to hiles and čermák’s definition, “narrative interviews combine a situated occasioned action perspective, together with a view of the individual” (2008, p.151). when intervening in the local contexts, rather than using an open question along the lines of “tell me about your city, or your experience at school…” or similar, we preferred to use individual and group interviews that rather than being a biographical interview, are topic-focused . these interviews were carried out by expert interviewers or trained, who are able to sustain a conversation in which the interviewee feels at ease in expressing their own thoughts relating to the area investigated the interviewers are assisted by an interview protocol summarising all of the areas to be discussed. according to patton (2002), it should be a guide to the interview, containing a number of stimuli and questions, all of which are not necessarily asked. the interviewers are therefore provided with a protocol, to which they refer if the interviewees try to bring up another topic, or gives only a brief description. it is clear that the preliminary work of the research group and the steering committee aims to illuminate the specific areas and issues to be explored. to exemplify this, we may consider the interview protocol used for investigating the relationship between belonging and planning in a group of young people from the province of naples (arcidiacono & di napoli, 2009). in this case the interviews were recorded in their entirety and later transcribed. they include: 1) personal biography of interviewees, memories and feelings connected with their place of belonging; 2) representation and perception of the urban space; 3) sense of belonging and integration; 4) connectedness and emotional ties; 5) representation of the place and investigation of its real strengths and weakness; 6) opinions regarding the neighbourhood (these questions aim to explore the level of commitment of young people towards their own community and to what extent they feel responsible for it); 7) plans and personal outlooks (here the focus is on the interaction between the interviewees’ personal future and their sense of belonging within the community); 8) outlooks and plans for the town/neighbourhood (this section analyses possible changes occurring in the community, so as to explore how young people perceive these changes, how they participate in them and what obstacles and resources there may be); 9) their wishes for their city, town or village in relation to their own future plans; and finally 10) a suggestion for a motto, a film, a book or a story that would best represent the distinctiveness of their town and its citizens. both the group interviews (focus group) and the individual interviews were only conducted following previous contact with the interviewees during which global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 2  september 2010    global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/   page 7 of 10    they expressed their willingness to take part in the research by means of the interview and to participate in the “giving back” meetings. in order to collect the opinions of the interviewees regarding the topic being studied, an interview protocol was elaborated with the aim of facilitating the expression of the interviewees, taking into account the cognitive, emotional, and symbolic dimensions of their frame of reference. to this end, the interviews consisted of introductory questions in order to promote conversation, followed by more in-depth questions allowing for a greater range of expression, exploratory questions on the specific area investigated, transitional questions for passing from one area of investigation to another, and closing questions. it is worth pointing out that each single interview was the responsibility of the researchers, but that the study entrusted the sc with the task of discussing and identifying the specific areas to be examined and planning further additions, changes, or substantial modifications. data analysis the coding is the core procedure of the research group, which discusses and shares procedural decisions. the process of codification, as defined by grounded theory, is a cyclical process, in the sense that in the open, axial codification phase the researcher reverts from the raw data back to the concepts, and then returns to the data in the selective codification phase. in the first phase of interpreting the textual material, after reading and codifying only a few interviews, each researcher formulated his/her own suggestion for codification in the form of a memo. then the research team discussed together the preliminary codifications and reformulated them in such a way that the collected data should help them better understand the situation of the interviewees. criteria of trustworthiness. the quality of research depended on the sampling criteria, the recruitment strategy, the skills of the interviewers (they were all trained in interview techniques), careful procedures of data categorisation, and the reflexivity of interviewers and the coding team. it is also interesting to reflect upon the criteria of validity of the qualitative research, especially in view of triangulation of sources and reflexivity. in fact the studies were organised in such a way as to ensure triangulation of the sources, procedures, investigators, etc, and the cross-checking of the validity of the collected data. in order to achieve trustworthiness and dependability (lincoln & guba 1985), an important validation criterion is credibility, ascertained by focusing on the triangulation of sources and methods, and ensured by prolonged engagement. in a more ecological perspective (flick, 2004), differences between researchers (regarding their geographical contexts of belonging, and personal motivation) were carefully considered in order to establish the validity of the data. time and resources were necessary for setting up meetings and productive interactions, and mediating between different components. access to the various contexts and to the people active in them was the result of the considerable energy and specific know-how invested to this end. catherine stein and eric mankowski (2004) speak of developing the procedures of reflexivity. this is the process by which the researchers reflect on the impact of their personal history, their set of values, and their social and relational status to the participants. the researcher’s subjectivity cannot be ignored. in this sense, reflexivity is the opposite of what in traditional basic research is referred to as objectivity. it is however evident that our adherence to the constructivist approach, due to the situational interpretation of the data collected and the importance attributed to reflexivity, were accompanied by the naturalistic criteria for trustworthiness: triangulation of sources, detailed description of procedures for transferability, and external verifications of results (rappaport, 1990). assessment, communication and dissemination restitution and civic exhibition. discussing the findings developed through both group research and the steering committee is an intrinsic part of our approach. an important stage of this approach, which distinguishes it in both method and aims, is to return the findings that the collection of narrative materials and discourses has produced to the inhabitants, who are the protagonists in the social process. the discussion of information with the protagonists of the local context and the authorities is one of the criteria for evaluating the quality of the research. richards (2005) calls this stage member checking. it is important both in the postpositivist approach, in which it has the function of external validity, and in the constructivist approach, which allows for the expression of the reflexivity of the researcher and the situativity of the participants. global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 2  september 2010    global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/   page 8 of 10    although this is easy from the organizational point of view, determining the significance of the findings is more complex. the researcher must consider how the data can become an instrument of social action and how it can influence decision-makers. at the local level, on the basis of what was revealed through the process of “giving back”, a group study was carried out to propose a possible intervention based on what was discussed. in this case politicians, traders, shop-keepers and members of associations from the territory were asked to identify the resources for the management of the future planning and possible further partners. the citizens’ exhibition is another means for reaching these goals (legewie, 2003; see also arcidiacono, & legewie, 2006; arcidiacono, legewie, mordini, & dienel, 2006; arcidiacono & legewie, 2010). the evaluation of the research process. the evaluation-meetings constituted an important moment of the research. they aimed to encourage reflection on what emerged from the analysis of the context and from the first meetings with the inhabitants, in order to identify further elements that did not emerge, or that were disputed. in this case, there was a final evaluation followed two years later, which investigated the activation of individual and collective empowerment and of the difficulties in the interaction of various social components of the community (procentese, 2006). research carried out in area of campi flegrei, which ended with an exhibition presenting the interviews and photos taken by the inhabitants, in which local authorities and citizens re-examined the data collected regarding critical local zones and possible interventions, was supplemented by follow-up interviews with the research participants two years later. these interviews identified significant issues that had prevented the implementation of a process of change. it was evident that processes of change require suitable and sufficient timescales (they cannot occur in a short period) and that it is necessary for the local population to be supported by specific interventions. it was also highlighted that a concrete implementation of the projects requires the active and attentive involvement of politicians and administrators. final considerations the current study encourages reflection upon the methodological aspects implicit in research work in and with local communities and upon how it is necessary to understand the multiple aspects which constitute the civic system in order to activate change processes. in order to enter into relationships with local people and motivate them to undertake the study in collaboration with the researcher, it is necessary to understand their local cultures. in addition to this aspect, the epistemological constructivist perspective imposes the need to identify tools aimed at revealing the construction of meanings attributed to the individual and collective situation within these living contexts. at the same time, the scientific community required us to examine to the criteria of validity of the work carried out. the constructive nature of the knowledge requires us to recognize that the results of the researcher’s work are not only objective, but that they require interpretation in order to give meaning to the perspectives of the study participants. therefore, the research process illustrated above, although identifying the phases of the work, also involves the coexistence of the two processes of knowledge and intervention. according to a constructivist perspective, knowledge of the research is not neutral, but this knowledge leads to the construction of meanings that can trigger off processes of social transformation. in that sense the tenor or idiom with which the research is described is fundamental, as there is a risk that it might lead to reductive labeling and can therefore prejudice the whole research process by creating a strong bias. this explains our careful attention to the narrations in discussions through which the interactions and the processes are built. this issue is particularly significant in a process of participative research. references arcidiacono, c. 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(1983). biographieforschung und narratives interview. neue praxis,3: 283-293. stein, c., & mankowski, e. (2004). asking, witnessing, interpreting, knowing: conducting qualitative research in community psychology. american journal of community psychology, 33, 21 35.   http://psydok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2006/756 http://psydok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2006/756 microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 345 countercurrent subject (human actor) and community pedro trigo, s. j. 1 centro gumilla, caracas, venezuela. invited keynote address at the iii international congress of community psychology puebla, mexico, june 3, 2010                                                                                                                           1 trigo@gumilla.org.ve 346 countercurrent subject (human actor) and community abstract the first part of the conference tries to show how the constitution of qualitatively human social actors and of humanizing communities are processes that implicate each other and that these processes cannot happen in the dominant direction of this historic figure. therefore, the title does not express one of the ways of being a human social actor and of creating a community; it expresses the only one possible. the second part analyzes the way in which the inhabitants of latin american popular neighborhoods become human social actors. it characterizes their way of being as being-in-between: in-between the rural and the urban, in-between the popular neighborhood and the city and in-between the heterogeneities of the popular neighborhood. the being-in-between those coordinates gives place to various human types, some better at impersonating subjectuality than others. this is born of the obsession we characterize as agonic conatus for a dignified life. in considering conviviality as the mode of relation of the inhabitants of the popular neighborhood, we ask ourselves how to pass from it onto community, given that community is not in the history or pre-history of the popular neighborhood. the community would be a contemporary construction. in clarifying the factors that contribute to the formation of communities, we weigh the religious organizations and study the role of the church base communities (ceb’s in spanish) which are the humus of liberation pastoral work. we give importance to the external factor that catalyzes the process, demonstrating its risks and the need to overcome the illustrated modernity relationship. keywords: being-in-between, obsession, conviviality, cebs (church based communities) 347 sujeto y comunidad a contracorriente resumen la primera parte trata de mostrar cómo la constitución de sujetos cualitativamente humanos y de comunidades humanizadores son procesos que se implican y que estos procesos no pueden acontecer en la dirección dominante de esta figura histórica. por tanto, el título no expresa uno de los modos de ser sujeto y de vivir en comunidad, sino el único posible. la segunda parte analiza el modo como se hacen sujetos los habitantes de los barrios de américa latina. caracteriza su modo de ser como estar-entre: entre el campo y la ciudad, entre el barrio y la ciudad y entre las heterogeneidades del barrio. el estar entre esas coordenadas da lugar a diversos tipos humanos, unos mejores conductores que otros de la subjetualidad. ésta nace de la obsesión que caracterizamos como conato agónico por la vida digna. al considerar a la convivialidad como el modo de relación de los habitantes de barrio, nos preguntamos cómo pasar de ella a la comunidad, ya que ella no está ni en la historia ni en la prehistoria del barrio. la comunidad sería una construcción contemporánea. al precisar los factores que coadyuvan a que se formen comunidades, valoramos las organizaciones religiosas y estudiamos el papel de las comunidades eclesiales de base (cebs) que son el humus de la pastoral de la liberación. damos importancia al factor externo que catalice el proceso, haciendo ver, sin embargo, sus riesgos y la necesidad de superar la relación ilustrada. palabras clave: estar-entre, obsesión, convivialidad, cebs (comunidades eclesiales de base) 348 1. today every human (subject) actor and every community are built countercurrent to the dominant direction. human actors (subjects), personalized communities and genuinely democratic and open societies are directly proportional. we begin by manifesting our conviction in that human beings always have the possibility of constituting themselves as qualitatively human actors and living in personalized communities. the conditionings of the actors or the environment, or, moreover the combination of both, can enhance or hinder this constituting process; in the negative case it can even hinder it greatly, but never cancel it. the possibility of becoming a person is always in the hands of the person, accepting the life received from others as a gift and being a gift to others, in an open manner; as well as it is in his or her hands to live in personalizing communities, meaning, in relationships with a name and face, horizontal, mutual and open. from the start, we are establishing the equivalence between the truly human actor and the person (ellacuría, 1991: 265-311; moltmann, 1986; masiá clavel, 2004: 77-167; ladaria, 1995: 79-93; gevaert, 2003: 43-62, 139-141; díaz, 2002; forte, 2000: 89-105; comblin, 1985: 59-75; masiá clavel, 2005)1 and we characterize the community as one of the fields that people create and in which people develop as such. the other field is society. both fields from the point of view of the persons’ constitution are equally relevant and directly proportional, given that people are such due to the relationships (levinas, 1993:23; de la torre, 205: 263-306; masiá clavel, 2005: 263-306; alfaro, 1988: 219-238; trigo, 2008c; gergen, 1992: 204, 183-219; zubiri, 2006: 210)2 they establish and these relationships are precisely the ones that constitute communities and society, as we have characterized them. society is not an inevitable decadence of community, that would be understood then as what is really humanizing, nor the necessary and desirable traditional communitarianism, that with its fixism prevented the development of the individual’s virtuosities. in society the actors join their assets to form social bodies inhibiting their owness; whilst in the community they do not inhibit it but rather they enter with their own name and face (ellacuría, 1991: 189-194, 303-311). in society it is indispensable that each actor inhibit his owness because if not a truly ecumenical social body is not formed. for example, if a bureaucrat treats each one as such a specific person and not as a citizen who has the right to that service, he or she would prefer the 349 people of his or her own environment or those with whom he or she has an affinity or interest and would relegate those with whom he or she has nothing to do with or those that militate on a different side. what personalizes the performance of a bureaucrat is his or her relative unpersonalization to concentrate all his or her energies and interest in seeing to the one that legitimately requests his or her services. what depersonalizes is, on the contrary, not inhibiting particularities that connect him or her directly or inversely with the users, when they all have the same right. in the community, on the contrary, what is demanded is that each one accept the other, each one with his or her owness, that recognizes them and that interacts from the somehow transcendental elements that constitute the community. for example, in a family two brothers can dislike each other; but as long as each of them acts from their common origin that binds them, they will truly care for each other, and they will recognize themselves in the most genuine manner and each will seek the other’s wellbeing. so then, when speaking from here on of community, we are always assuming the correlation of society, without which the community actually closes in on itself, it becomes corporative, and in this way it depersonalizes its members. (barcellona, 1992: 121-126)3. individualistic individuals and corporatized communities are at the same time a reaction and product of corporatized and globalized business. this note is essential in our historical figure, in which the threat of depersonalization is so widespread and is occurring so closely that people tend to take refuge in corporatized communities, without realizing that the massive threat comes, mainly, from globalized corporations. opposing the family or other community, experienced as a corporation, to the global corporatized business means strengthening the existing corporatism that makes it impossible for it to constitute itself as a human actor to which it is folded until it defines itself by its logic. thus, communities that are not built up with the constitution of truly free and democratic societies are not personalizing communities. we talk about the constitution because no current society is, and because it is not dependent only on its institutions but on the actions undertaken in 350 that direction by these human actors. just as the existence of human actors will depend on the type of repeated actions. from what has been said it appears that the existence of qualitatively human actors and humanizing communities is seriously threatened by environmental individualism (goizueta, 2009: 85-100)4, which is mainly the product of global corporations, meaning that it is ultimately threatened by the global corporatized companies. but in turn these companies would not have achieved so much power if there had been a critical mass of qualitatively human actors and humanizing communities. incompatibility between global corporations and human actors, personalized communities and democratic and free societies. a direct struggle is thus posed between these corporatized and globalized companies and the individuals who revolve in their orbit, on the one hand, and qualitative human actors and the communities that are defined by free, mutual, open relationships and the truly democratic and free societies, on the other. but the struggle takes place with different weapons: corporatized companies are based on seduction and imposition, from the latest technology in the service of money and power. individual actors and communities and societies, in turn, encourage freedom, a freedom that takes place in symbiotic relationships, both in coming out of themselves and giving themselves out to other people in the communities, as in pooling assets to build ecumenical and dynamic social bodies, that become the field of personalizing communities and qualitatively human actors. however, the actors, communities and societies that we have characterized spend most of their energies not in overcoming market totalitarianism but in exercising from their own principles and their own logic with such poise that were able to perform, relatively unaffected and independent from the dominant direction of this historical figure, yet not outside it, but just acting their civilizational and cultural assets (namely the culture of democracy (trigo, 2007: 4963), that of human rights (barcellona, 1992: 105-109) and life), many of which have no place nor full development in the dominant direction of the totalitarian market (barcellona, 1992: 127137)5. 351 so, to them combat is not to destroy the globalized firms but only to de-corporatize them, returning them, from the culture of democracy and from politics, to the fluidity of history that they are determined to remove to function in their present, designed and controlled by them and projected indefinitely (de sebastián, 1999; barcellona, 1992: 132)6 . today there is only the possibility of countercurrent individuals actors and communities. if individualism and corporatism are the two axes around which the dominant direction of this historical figure is structured, it is clear that both human actors and communities can only come to constitute a countercurrent (touraine, 2006: 297-301; 2009: 143-207). thus the title that has been proposed to me, as an actor and community in countercurrent, does not express, in my opinion, one of the classes of potential actors, that of those who go countercurrent to the dominant direction of this historical figure, but the only possible condition in this situation, of all qualitatively human actors and all non-corporatized community (morin, 2010)7. indeed, the fact that human beings understand themselves as beings aspiring to be born of themselves, that are unaware of constituent bonds (and therefore communities) and simply establish relationships for pleasure or convenience is the condition of possibility for corporations to prevail without counterweight turning them into addicts of merchandise through advertising and subjecting them to the wage relation, reduced to a private contract. the introduction of individualism entails that the only organizations that understand themselves of themselves, in themselves and for themselves, are the globalized corporate enterprises (bauman, 2005; 2010). this is so because of the abstract legal universalism in which politics lie, that in reality are a product of it, is the way to protect, making them invisible, the existing power relations in which the globalized corporations prevail, that are ultimately controlling policy. (barcellona, 2005; 2010). these companies could not reign without counterweight, if they were facing not isolated individuals but actors freely released that are able to resist temptations and pressures, who are capable of an authentic experience of reality, who are strongly oriented to life, to live, let live, to live together and give life; that recognize others, especially absolute others that are the poor and cultures considered as inferior by their own, because they are so free that they sacrifice themselves for what goes beyond their interests. with such actors companies cannot scientifically 352 plan what they sell because they are not influenced by advertising campaigns but they consume only what they need and what empowers them humanely, without any compulsion to consume more than that. these individuals live in a culture of democracy and are therefore able to fight steadily not for a spectacular policy but one that is genuinely deliberative and democratic, which limits corporations, preventing the market from unfolding with a totalitarian logic (barcellona, 1992: 26-28)8. in fact individualistic individuals and corporatized companies are the two poles of the same horizon because those who do not want to be seen as mere members of sets, corporatized sets, exacerbate their individuality, without realizing that when they believe that they live from themselves, they are choosing from the menu offered by corporations. in turn, the perception of the frightening banality that induces this scheme governed by the totalitarianism of the market leads to a growing number of people who enroll in fundamentalist organizations that include some kind of communalism, or meaning of corporate community, in which relationships follow pre-established guidelines made by the leadership in a nondeliberative manner. the reason is that the threat of human wreckage is so direct that many think that the deliberate use of personal freedom is a luxury we have no right to have. when the enemy does not act with any regard, one cannot be in a plan of maximums. it seems more expedient to enroll in an organization with clear approaches, not governed by the guidelines of the market, and to follow their own guidelines. overcoming this scheme, that equally ignores the qualitatively human actor and the humanizing community, must include a genuinely democratic type of politics that is not restricted, as proposed by current liberalism, to safeguard individuals but that includes some form of sharing of the partner’s' assets. however, that type of polices will never come to pass if there is no real critical mass of human actors involved in non-fundamentalist communities and in free associations that promote life and the recognition of others, especially of those who are different and above all the poor, and that are able to make sacrifices for that which transcends their individual interests. it is therefore an illusion to think that you can be an authentic human actor and live in personalizing communities within the established order. the installation in the society of risk or the state of welfare requires in the best of cases, the acceptance of a degree of insensitivity for others so frightening, especially those who cannot become established or that are outside, which 353 is the negation of qualitative humanity, that includes positive effective recognition of others and sacrifice for what is beyond their individual and corporate interests. that is in the best case, because the common thing is that, whether one tells oneself or not, one actually participates in oppression and exclusion, both at work and in political options. we believe that the attempt to preserve oneself in existence, that spinoza theorized as the first and only principle of positive virtuality (spinoza, 1980: 91), expresses the principle that drives the lives of those who benefit from the dominant direction of this totalitarian global market (levinas, 1993: 10; horkheimer and adorno, 1994: 82)9. he expresses the radical individualism that many fail to recognize in themselves, but from where they in fact operate. staying in existence above all involves the struggle of all against all for the better position and which allows for the less scrupled to prevail. this priority, which necessarily becomes adversarial, prevents the formation of qualitatively human actors. being a qualitatively human actor in many environments becomes a venture so countercurrent that is ultimately heroic. it is not ideal that human actors and humanizing communities have to build themselves on a countercurrent. it rather expresses an anomaly: the failure of the dominant direction of this historical figure. the current direction is so inhuman that for it to prevail it is not enough to keep up the continuous exercise of compulsion and fear and, of course, seduction. a constant mass idealization is essential so that its true degree of distortion is not perceived, the abysmal degree to which the established order oppresses reality, the frightening degree of dehumanization in which there are those who, seduced and / or fearful, fold into it and, above all, their abettors. so we have to fight relentlessly so that within this historical figure another direction prevails in which its civilizational and cultural assets are expressed and developed and, for that matter, it becomes a good conduit of human actors and personalized communities and even promotes them. we believe that there are minorities working from alternative logics so that they don't only resist but seek to overcome the existing order. the alternative is easy to see, not only in their way of living and thinking but in that they volunteer to do it not for sheer moral reasons, but for the joy of giving and sharing in life. however, we want to note, that while it is true that it is undesirable for individual actors and communities to have to build themselves on a countercurrent, we must also recognize that 354 those who manage to build themselves under such adverse circumstances do it with an excellence that they would not have achieved otherwise. 2. actors human (subjects) and communities in the popular neighborhoods of latin america this horizon that we have briefly outlined provides a framework for the understanding of a sustained experience over more than three decades, especially in popular neighborhoods of latin american cities and groups in solidarity with them, from my membership with the historical trend known as liberation theology (trigo, 2004)10 and from the platform of a research and social action center that we jesuits run in venezuela called gumilla center (gumilla, 2004: 163171)11. what i have found is that, unlike the attempt to remain in existence, which spinoza theorized and that according to horkheimer and adorno constitutes the ethos and the pathos of the west, the attempt which is the source of the suburban culture is the dying attempt for a dignified life, whose core expressions are home (home and family) and the infrastructure of the popular neighborhood, their habitat interactions and that result in conviviality and the assumption or, indeed, the creation of a character as a way of becoming a person (trigo b, 2008). then we will develop this proposal. popular neighborhood culture and subculture of poverty. first we must distinguish between the culture of the popular neighborhood and the subculture of poverty. the latter is in fact not a culture as it requires not only the constitutional reference to the others but also to itself and neither is it guided by the transcendent claim of becoming qualitatively human. in this situation all sense of process has been lost and one only lives to satisfy the most basic needs and drives. by analogy it can be called culture because this way of life, or more properly stated, of survival generates automation, we can even say that some habits on one hand, achieve a certain stability, in other words the fact of survival, but that on the other hand, make it extremely difficult to induce a proactive change. 355 the breakdown of families and habitats and more generally of conviviality that characterizes the atmosphere of the popular neighborhood, because of the violence spread by the lack of productive work and expectations, lead to an internal breakdown in which the individual abandons himself, no longer relates to himself and therefore loses ties with others. this phenomenon is increased by the abandonment of the state and city, a growing neglect in many latin american cities. the subculture of poverty is the cancer of the culture of popular neighborhoods and unfortunately for quite many citizens of the capital it is what characterizes neighborhoods. being-between as the characterization of a popular neighborhood resident. types that result. more generally many still believe that in the popular neighborhoods there is no culture because its inhabitants ceased to be farmers and have not fully embraced the city. because of this condition of uncertainty which they attribute to the residents of popular neighborhoods, many people considered them dangerous because they are unstable. i would like to stress that, indeed, the inhabitants of popular neighborhoods aren't characterized by their rooting, such as the indians or peasant farmers or urban dwellers of traditional families, but a vital position that we characterize as being-between. the popular neighborhood resident is between rural and urban, because when he moves he isn't thinking of the neighborhood but of the city. this situation gives rise to three human types: the stranger, if he emigrated because there were no means of making a living, but still valued his way of life. the outcast, if he emigrated to the city because the peasant way of life became narrow and humiliating for him and yet he did not become assimilated into the city to which he aspired. his desire is to be in the city and he demonstrated with his attitude that he is in the neighborhood because he has no means of leaving, yet he does not live it but rather suffers it. additionally the location between the farmland and the city cannot be marked by one of the two extremes, but by the creation of an actor between them, such as the popular neighborhood is a place between the two. this is, by excellence, the creator of the culture of the popular neighborhood and while he establishes himself he creates it. 356 so, the culture of the popular neighborhood is obviously a contemporary culture, as is western globalized culture, on the other end of the spectrum of latin american culture, and as the indigenous, afro-latin, traditional urban or rural cultures are not, those who think that culture is something settled throughout many generations that is received and assimilated. this perception of culture explains that those in the traditional culture cannot understand that the popular neighborhood-dwellers, who are new people, may have their own culture. the popular neighborhood resident is also between the neighborhood and the city, as he is settled in the popular neighborhood and works in the city. every morning he commutes to the city and returns at dusk. this situation gives rise to two types of humans. the intermediary, when his loyalty is with the city organization that he represents in the neighborhood and the mediator, when he belongs to both sides and mediates between them and above all in himself. the intermediary has an extensive presence in the popular neighborhood, an ambivalent, if not negative position. the city, on the one hand, does not know the culture of the popular neighborhood, but on the other, does not want the neighborhood to be constituted from itself but rather pretends to control it. this attitude is shared by charity institutions that typify the popular neighborhood merely by the shortcomings that they attempt to remedy, to promote organizations that attempt to become the paradigm to which those in the neighborhood have to come to, or political organizations, which come to the popular neighborhood promising realizations in exchange for votes, and from there to the state that gives, in exchange for loyalty, that which they are required to give the citizens in any case being that they are subject to their rights. this is why all these organizations operate with internal, as well as with external agents, with intermediaries from neighborhoods: people shaped by the logic of these institutions that therefore despise their neighbors and place their identity into learning the institutional proposals that they represent. these are asymmetric relations, both theirs in regard to the institutions, which are of subordinate participation, and in regard to the popular neighborhood, which are aimed at obtaining favors in return for status or other benefits. the characteristic of the mediator is the symmetric mediation for loyalty, both to the neighborhood as well as to the city. his relations with the city are not subordinate but symmetrical: he is a self-aware citizen, dignified and productive and therefore the city is happy with his performance and his person, he, as one of them, may also appear before them as one from the popular neighborhood and defend the neighborhood against the city giving them a 357 genuine understanding of the neighborhood. but in the popular neighborhood he does not act as a representative of the city but as a popular neighbor aware of the dignity of the neighborhood, who struggles to make it worthy all the way from the condition of actors of the neighborhood to the respectful and qualified concourse of the city. nor does he shun his rural roots and the countryside, as one of them, he defends the popular neighborhood and has a genuine vision of the city and in turn the popular neighborhood and city present the reality of the country with its abandonment by the state and its potentialities. from my point of view the status of mediator is the highest possibility of human fulfillment (trigo, 2001: 85-128)12. there is a third manifestation of being-between that characterizes people of the popular neighborhoods: to be between the heterogeneities of the neighborhood. first it should be noted that the city somehow homogenizes its inhabitants, with the result that cultural diversity is expressed primarily in private life or corporate partnerships. everyone in the popular neighborhood tends to manifest himself as he is, even if it represents drawbacks. first of all because the popular neighborhood is not a refined mold that decants whoever enters it. that is a traditional and living city, for example, in venezuela, maracaibo. by contrast, the neighborhood is a contemporary creation to which everyone contributes from what he is and has. moreover, in the popular neighborhood there is barely any place for privacy in the sense of the city, because for starters the virtual absence of public spaces and the proximity and small size of family spaces leaves almost no room for privacy. in addition, the typical neighborhood environment is conviviality. thus, in the neighborhood, heterogeneities are easily apparent. it is normal for them to give rise to misunderstandings, friction and animosity, but that, as coexistence is a matter of life or death, there is awareness that we must try to overcome the negative and relate positively. this all of a sudden complicates life, which is already too complex, as we said, for the residents of popular neighborhoods. if everyone is looking for his life from his origin and expectations, this task becomes more difficult when perceiving in the daily friction very different ways of dealing with reality. even though the inextricable diversity also sharpens the drive to each find his own identity and consistency. there are some who accept this diversity as an asset and take it into account in their relationships. but for most part, at best, this is a point of arrival. many, waving to everyone and expressing benevolence, starting with their relatives or acquaintances, their countrymen or co-workers or those for whom they have political, religious or sports affinities. also, obviously, they seek to relate positively to their immediate neighbors. 358 this variable also results in different types of individuals, from the bully, the one that maintains a low profile, seeking not to bother nor be bothered, to the one that manages to treat everyone well, although without delving into the relation or the one that regularly fosters neighborly relations opening up to diversity, enriched by it and enriching others with their contribution. the agonistic attempt for a dignified life, source of popular neighborhood culture. however, all these types, with their different self-awareness, are faced both with the fact that there is no place for them in the city and a state that increasingly abandons them to their fate, and therefore having to face the challenge that they will not live, if their life is not born from within themselves. and these people, so distinct from one another, accept this challenge, a daunting challenge that wears them out and that is about to make them insane, but that also constructs them as intense and dense human actors, because they are always under tension, but ordinarily are able to live naturally, and because their lifestyle requires them to be versatile. indeed, they have to make their homes, set up the neighborhood's infrastructure, find a job in the city and have the ability to move in it, to establish popular neighborhood relationships, acquire a trade, build a family. and they must do everything at once, because without all these elements human life is not possible and they aspire to a truly human life. therefore the efforts of the people in the popular neighborhoods are actually alterative. they have to learn everything and do everything. and everything takes place within a countercurrent. the state does not even provide security, much less adequate infrastructure, quality education or social security. they really have no rights. that is, neither the state nor the city recognizes them. therefore their effort for life is agonistic: a commitment to live when there are no conditions in which to live, especially when death lurks. the inhabitants of the city, especially the middle and rich class can take life for granted and the pursuit to qualify it. the goal of neighborhood resident is living, because life cannot be taken for granted. violence, malnutrition, diseases of the poor, lack of stable work and the neglect and contempt felt, threaten life. and the popular neighborhood residents strive to live tenaciously, as if it were an obsession. 359 in one hundred years of solitude it is stated that "they learned that dominant obsessions prevail against death" (garcía márquez, 1968: 346). this quote is the key to the book and in the novel it is referred to as the obsession of love. in the novel the carriers of the constructive obsession that makes life possible are women, who are not carried away by illusions and settle in daily life. also in the neighborhood love as the source of life, not the love of the telenovela and the bolero but the love lived every day without almost naming it or only being named when it symbolizes this everyday waste of life or when it helps to live in a very tight trance, it is what explains this obsession from which flows the culture that constitutes them into human and humanizing areas. and it is also true that women in the neighborhood are the more qualified and consistent carriers of the constructive engagement from which their culture flows. when, overcoming the customary neglect of the state and the lack of productive work, as well as the constant tension to manage to live where there are no conditions for it, the person that reaches this constructive engagement becomes an extremely qualitative human actor. it is obvious that not all popular neighborhood residents achieve these levels of humanity. to live upstream, as we have characterized, wears terribly, requires a constant tension that not everyone can afford. and not a few turn primal until they become beast-like, returned to their drives; others become threatened wild beasts that spread terror in the popular neighborhood; others who are convinced of the futility of the effort, remain at a critical minimum. others, specially male, handicapped by reliance on the figure of the mother who keeps them from becoming actors and because of a macho subculture that imposes on them teenage parameters, leaving everything to start over, each time with an increasing human precariousness. others mimic as citizens and subordinate themselves to any organization in the city, trying unsuccessfully to climb or at least believe that they are someone. but others, in the midst of their weaknesses and disadvantages, that make them think again and again that they are overstretched and cannot cope any more, they manage, however, to edify themselves as eminent human actors in the endless process of raising their home and family and of building the neighborhood. these are, above all, those who we said created a place and an identity between town and country, mediators between the popular neighborhood and the city (and also the country) and those who came to accept as their own asset the heterogeneities of the neighborhood, interacting constructively with them. 360 the characteristic of the popular neighborhood is the conviviality, not the communities. faced with the idea that more than a few city people tend to have neighborhoods and areas of dense communality, we have to say that in popular neighborhoods there are hardly any remains of traditional communality and therefore its communities have to be of contemporary creation, including the family. moreover, most of its inhabitants never lived as in a community. we could say that the ancient inhabitants of the highlands, from mexico and guatemala to ecuador, peru and bolivia, and perhaps some provinces of northwestern argentina, such as areas of high cultures in indo america, that in the colony, reduced to villages, continued to live as indigenous communities, although subject to the "encomenderos" (land trustees), and the mestizo people that originated from them, still preserve community structures, although they were not recognized by the liberal governments of the nineteenth century. however, many of their members, perhaps the most capable, as was the case in the european lower middle ages, leaving their communities and moving to the cities, and to the popular neighborhoods, because they felt that the narrowness of these ancient structures, more conducive to preserving than to engaging in dynamic processes, drowned their personal development. the rest of latin america did not resist the cultural clash with the europeans and, despite the protection of the missions, that at least prevented their destruction and made possible some cultural mixing and technological transmission, as spanish villages settled in its territory and they were left in their peripheries, becoming their proletariat until they disappeared as communities. in the prehistory of the neighborhood people, at least since the nineteenth century and in many cases before, there is the hacienda (a large estate), where camaraderie reigned, but where community was absent and emphasized the individuality of some laborers from the mass of men that felt they were the landowner's men. those with most developed individuality, that did not resist the subordination and abuse, would go to tame virgin soil and settle on their own. to mention the prototype case, much of colombia has been settled that way and therefore the bitterness of the peasants whom the guerrillas and paramilitaries in particular have driven from their land, so dearly their own, without the state coming out in their defense. 361 as we have seen, in the case of origin of plateaus as elsewhere, to the neighborhood come individuals to find not only livelihoods but to become themselves. in no way are they the outcasts who think only of survival. in them there is a clear establishment purpose. while it is to be acknowledged that in the neighborhoods of andean origin there is a certain propensity to build communities under a new egalitarian basis. perhaps we can say the same of the cities of the highlands of mexico and guatemala. but generally speaking, the characteristic of the popular neighborhood is the conviviality and not the community: peers are willing to help each other and live together. conviviality and communality. what distinguishes this way of living, of the community? it differs in that conviviality, even though the interface is continuous and deep, is between individuals who remain as such and do not constitute a we, which is what characterizes the community. the form of relation of conviviality is adjustment: "i want to relate to you and you to me. while we do well, we continue the relationship, but if it does not suit any of us anymore, we part. " that is why so many do not marry. to marry means to constitute a we .while that way of being is not conceived (the us that constitutes the couple and then the family), it makes no sense to take that step, because those who adjust always have to be validating this relationship; while when getting married, they no longer feel that freely contracted obligation .that is why men say that if they marry, the woman gets spoiled. i think they are right and should not marry until they change their horizon. the absence of traditional communality is another indication that the culture of the neighborhood is a contemporary culture. now, that convivial individuality is also not the modern individualism that upset the organic medieval society, nor that which prevails today in latin american cities. convivality expresses, obviously, desire, liking and decision to live in an open way. living as a way of living and finding fulfillment. but additionally insisting that those who cohabit are people with a highly developed sense of their own individuality. the step from conviviality to the community requires an external component. 362 is it easy to move from conviviality to community? is it ever achieved in a meaningful way in our neighborhoods? first we must establish that to form communities means to exceed the scheme of conviviality. the impetus for a dignified life, that upstream effort which we have characterized as obsession, provides energy and willingness to do so and being-between is a source of possibilities. but in any case to move from the initial state it is necessary that the neighborhood inhabitants have been able to perceive the community’s proposal or that they may have known the experiences of specific communities. it is customary to combine the actions of these people informed and taught, with the presence in the neighborhood of people from the city to make the proposal and catalyze the process. in both ways we have established the need, usually, of an external element, either the proposal or the reference communities, or people outside the neighborhood who come to it. for example, a neighborhood resident who maintains symmetric relations with the city has been able to perceive the nuclear family model in colleagues he esteems or people he admires and respects, and has been able to conclude that he too could eventually form such a family in the neighborhood. sometimes a proposal comes, for example, from a christian family movement, through counseling priest or any of the participants. thus emerging in neighborhoods real family communities that for their symmetrical nature, egalitarian and reduced surpass, both the traditional patriarchal family, which still occurs in some people from traditional villages, for example, in venezuela, from the andes and is characterized by its asymmetrical nature, by the division of roles (the mother in the house and the father at work and on the street) and by its stability, as the matricentric (moreno, 2007), the predominant one, in which relationships are of mother and child, non-authoritarian relationships that allow a great flow, but in essence dependency relations that greatly hinder the stable formation of the couple. we have given this example because out of experience we are convinced that the family community is the mother of all communities. therefore, those living in nuclear egalitarian and participatory families are communitarizing agents in the neighborhood , but that only happens, if the family is not for them, as for more than a few in the city, a compensatory community for the dehumanization that induces surrender without reservations to the logic of the totalitarian market and therefore closed, corporatized. the problem of external agents. 363 regarding the action of external agents, there are currently two problems. the first is that more than a few of them promote corporatized and even fundamentalist communities .most political associations are corporate because they seek, not to promote that society is oriented in a certain direction and in that sense support certain public policies, but to obtain benefits, privatizing policy management. so they function as true cliques that manage power illegitimately. on their part, many christian communities, especially free churches, but also some catholic movements, are decidedly fundamentalist. however, much of their fundamentalism is not compensatory but alternative and for this reason they achieve some important advances, both in overcoming serious disorders as well as in adopting constructive and integrating habits. but, with these initial gains stabilized, the narrowness of the fundamentalist approach brings as a result that the process stalls or becomes depersonalizing. the second problem with external agents is that most of them act in the neighborhood from an illustrated scheme. this is the horizon of the agents of modernization of both the first and the second illustration. in neighborhoods promotion proposals abound and left advocacy groups move, and both believe that those in the neighborhood are disadvantaged or oppressed. in both cases they recognize that they are not to blame for their condition, but still are merely recipients of their action, because they lack the civilizational and cultural assets typical of a contemporary human being. they are not human actors and to become one they must accept the paradigm that is proposed to them. therefore they have to stop being themselves: to become alienated. naturally, these agents do not believe that those promoted or sensitized are alienated; on the contrary they believe them to be the mirror in which all residents should look at themselves. but that is so because the illustrated believe, even though sometimes they might not be aware of it, that humans as such are only they who have come to a systematic use of critical, analytical and practical reasoning. it is obvious that whatever results of that action will be groups of the institutionalized sponsoring or of the promoting or consciousness-raising agents, but never communities. because personalizing communities are composed of genuine human actors, not of imposed actors. difficulty of overcoming the illustrated modernity scheme. 364 it is very difficult to overcome the illustrated modernity scheme (trigo, 2008: 104-213) because it is so connatural with the agent, that it is maintained even if is contrary to his ideology. for example, in the seventies and eighties the left mythicized the people, proclaiming that it was never wrong and that "the people united will never be defeated. “however, those who enthusiastically proclaimed it, in practice tutored the people. the same happened to the pastoral agents of the catholic church, even in the first period, with quite a few that included themselves within the theology of liberation, when they said, for example, that they were in the discipleship of the people. (dussel, 1973: 116-122, 168-172) indeed, it was easier to change contents than mindsets, and harder still, of sensitivity patterns. only those who managed to engage in truly reciprocal and horizontal relations with the villagers and were able to see and get their input, managed to overcome the ideological captivity of liberal or socialist modernity and engage in intercultural relations, to ensure that the neighborhood residents were true cultural and social actors. this happened sometimes in the daily side by side activity through an almost imperceptible sequence of discoveries of the consistency of popular people who appeared as real authors of their lives; but it happened, above all, when helped effectively in times of crisis, because they received their contributions at a personal level, they who had come to give and generously deliver themselves. these people certainly managed to cooperate effectively to establish communities because they also wanted and needed them and thus participated in them not just as promoters and managers but rather as another member, even though being of diverse culture and therefore with specific contributions. thus, the external agent may not help constitute personalized communities when the membership to the community is as vital and relevant to them as to the members of the neighborhood or, better, even more. to put it in a personal example: my belonging to community-bases is not relevant to my ministry, that is to my professional work but to my spirituality, that is to my constitution as a human being from the paradigm of jesus of nazareth. i would not know how to be christian otherwise. therefore, as the external element considers himself an agent, which is the way of being characteristic of modernity, he cannot help communities to emerge. he must overcome the paradigm and relate as a concrete human being and therefore through mutual and horizontal relations, to make it possible. 365 in general we can say that in neighborhoods where for a long time organizations and groups have acted in a truly participatory way, either by organizing an intercultural dialogue, or entering the house of the people, that is, their culture, ultimately the emergence of a social fabric enucleated about those who we said that provided for a place, both as a human habitat as a way of being human between the field in the city, around those we characterized as mediators and those who we said moved in an open way between the complexities of the neighborhood is normal. these people embody the neighborhood's "we" and around them move many others who make up this group which is usually referred to generically as the community of that area. the ignored fact of the predominance of religious communities. i would like to note a fact that conflicts with the general state of opinion. for example, today in venezuela in research on popular participation the fact that participation in religious communities and associations, in this case christian, almost equal to other ways of participation stands out 13. yet the same respondents believe that what sets the tone in the country is political participation. and it is obviously so. more than that, i would stress that much, among the most dynamic and constructive, community councils and other organizations that are in the process being conducted by the present government, are of christian origin and more specifically in the orbit of the theology of liberation. those are who live the most genuine process, that is, more proactive and less reliant on the guidelines of state and on the leader's speech. i think the media that shapes public opinion and academia are reluctant to take on this phenomenon. but the surprising thing is that neither catholic organization involved in these phenomena of participation are aware of this, although we cannot say the same of the free christian churches, whose intellectuals, by their nature corporatized themselves are likely to display statistics. thus, contrary to popular belief, most neighborhood communities are religious and not a few groups and organizations that are truly democratic and open are animated by them. church based communities. in this environment, the christian based communities (trigo, 2008a: 139-229), the core generator of praxis that is at the core of liberation theology, which are neither fundamentalist 366 nor proselytizing and do not interfere with the neighborhood associations but instead foster and encourage them, but not as communities but by the action of its members, constitute themselves in the ferment of this neighborhood culture, to counter the so-called culture of poverty, which is the cancer of suburban culture, and to promote that in conviviality the community fabric is incubated. in this process i have rediscovered the importance of cultivating the communality of the family. however, also of the ecclesial based communities it can be said that not a few have been set, especially in the early days, as cells of the left: a committee of theologians or pastoral work groups, the equivalent of the central party committee, drew up the guidelines and materials, and consultants and delegates took them "down to the base." in this case, as in the others we were reviewing, members advanced in many aspects and promoted effective action, but they were not truly communities because their members were not the source of what they had in mind but were rather acting a script written by others, even though they were the elite of the organization and therefore insiders in the movement. one element on which i think there is no clarity and that is crucial for the establishment and stable and dynamic maintenance of communities is the number of its members. i think that if they are not expressions of traditional communality but contemporary creations, it cannot be under forty or fifty and the top would be around a hundred and fifty. if the number turns between ten and twenty, which is what we usually have in mind, you usually will not be a base but it likely depends on a coordinator. to stably and creatively fulfill all its functions there have to be many members because, if the whole load is carried by two or three, the community becomes one-dimensional and routinized and results unstable. we have already insisted that neighborhood residents have to do everything themselves and all at once. assistance to the community is another burden, but is assumed freely and gladly. so if there are not many and the loads are not distributed, the community ends up not being liberating but a weight that is carried because it seems to make sense and one has committed. it should also be taken into account that a true community is not a party with its internal discipline, but a very heterogeneous group with a varying degree of involvement of its members. if it is a true community, it cannot force accession or require commitments. everyone does it from himself as of his convictions and possibilities. as the "we" it is born freely of themselves and becomes denser with the exercise, one must be very careful to give it time and not to induce it. 367 but even people who identify with the community's "we", have many other commitments, primarily family and work, and as the community cannot be totalitarian, respects them, knowing that they are not excuses and everyone does what they can and as they can. personalized communities are not countercurrent to the popular neighborhood, although they transcend it by qualifying and safeguarding it. in what ways are popular neighborhood communities countercurrents? let us consider the question as from the neighborhood itself and from the dominant direction of the city. regarding the neighborhood they are not countercurrent to the culture of the neighborhood but rather outstanding expressions of it, but transcending it, and thus effectively helping it to give out and safeguarding it from its harmful germs. we already said that the community is not an ingredient of that culture, hence, the need for external intervention to emerge. although we insist that this intervention, even well-intentioned, often prevents these communities to properly being base communities; and if they are, or are not communities but groups of the agent or cells of an organization, or are not personalized but corporatized or fundamentalist communities. so, it is not easily for personalized communities to arise. sometimes, we say, the problem is merely of conception: it is thought of as small groups that are only capable of sustaining a traditional communality and not be expressions of this era. a typical example of traditional communality is that of the groups of the legion of mary when the ordinary meetings are not attended by a priest. if the priest attends it might also be that he is part of that culture and therefore may not be an obstacle or he might be clerical, as is usual, and then he keeps the group from being a community and transforms it into a church group. if they do everything themselves, their limit is that they rigidly follow a manual, but the advantage is that they dominate this code and can act with competence and above all plan actions from their knowledge of the neighborhood and run them in a personalized way. these people do not make the neighborhood advance, but they help to maintain its human qualities as they undertake it and carry out through relationships impregnated with respect and affection and are able to effectively help their neighbors. 368 personalized communities as a contemporary fact (the most prominent example is the church based communities) are distinguished from the healthy traditional ones in that they take into account daily life, but not least in its historical character. it is posed then that living in community does not abstract the situation, but takes it into account explicitly, analyzing it and taking action on it. for example, they take into account gang violence and ritualized teen violence, the state services and how they affect the popular neighborhood, the relationship with municipality and the initiatives there are for it, just as the country's situation with the opportunities and drawbacks. the most characteristic trait is not the meetings for formal analysis but that these are taken into account and come to light to treat specific situations and when treating them specifically. thus, what they have in hand, for example in the case under consideration of the church based communities, is that what god asks or the following of jesus, does not belong to a specific segment of reality, in the example considered, the religious realm, but it is realized in the framework of all reality and is based on a way of being human with the two harmonics of deep trust and deep solidarity. so when in community with god, for example by reading the gospels, they process all life. in doing so, these people learn to look deep into problems, become aware of their responsibility and ability, they gain self-mastery. each person responds to what god asks, an inside knowledge of the other is acquired and a sacred commitment that is the source of fraternity is fostered. these people become sisters of their popular neighbors. people know that they can count on them and that they can expect to receive some assistance. therefore when there are initiatives and there are people in the community there tends to be trust in that there will be consistency and transparent work. as a result of all that the community is people with respect for their neighbors. from what we have said it is easy to see how the lives of communities promotes and qualifies conviviality. it also safeguards it. the culture of the popular neighborhood, due to its condition of agony, is very unstable: it is constantly remaking itself because it struggles for life, so disproportionate to its possibilities and in such unfavorable conditions, it steadily erodes it. 369 the culture of the popular neighborhood lies in the constant actions in pursuit of a dignified life. it depends at all times on a critical mass to appear of such actions, so that the constructive part of that culture overcomes its anomic trends. that is why it helps greatly that there are personalized communities that are a constant source of such actions, stable platforms of a shared dignified life. being a whole and a stable platform, the community can dialogue with troublemaking elements. it can dialogue because it does not exclude them, because it does not render them impossible, because it treats them with respect. that is why they, to preserve their esteem, which they need to maintain despite all the awareness of their dignity, are able to change behaviors or at least limit themselves giving up some space and time to their neighbors. personalized communities are indeed running countercurrent to the dominant direction of this historical figure. they are a part of the overcoming alternative. above all, they contain its civilizational and cultural assets. let's start with the civilizational ones, which may seem a paradoxical statement. do the neighborhood people, have the civilizational assets of this historical figure? young people from the neighborhood have them in a modest amount that is to say to the extent to which city professionals have them. we tend to forget that suburban culture is a contemporary culture. that is why it has an inclination towards them and their sense more than the traditional people of the city. besides, they actually do have some of these assets, for example, computers and all types of phones and they make them perform much more than most. if pathology is a symptom of psychology, that in the popular neighborhood someone may be murdered to grab a last generation cell phone and this expresses the deep appreciation that there is for them, the same applies to the theft of computers in schools. regarding cultural property and the agonic attempt for a dignified life that characterizes suburban culture, it is active in the face of everything the tenacious, methodical and constructive effort which is boasted of by western culture. more than to it, this effort applies to life, first and foremost so that there is, because, as we insist, there are no conditions for it, it cannot be taken for granted, as happens in the city. but also to their human qualities, which include not only dignity but also the symbolic capacity, the joy for life that becomes evident in the conviviality and the party. 370   notes 1. for a notion of person who retains the essence of self of modernity and who also incorporates the structural respectability and thus the relationships, see ellacuría, filosofía de la realidad histórica. trotta, madrid 1991: 265-311. moltmann, el hombre, sígueme, salamanca 1986; masiá, fragilidad en esperanza. ddb, bilbao 2004: 77-167. ladaria, antropología teológica. evd, estella, 1996: 79-93; gevaert, el problema del hombre. sígueme, salamanca 2003: 43-62, 139-141. díaz, ¿qué es el personalismo comunitario? fundación emmanuel mounier, madrid 2002. forte, la eternidad en el tiempo. sígueme, salamanca 2000: 89-105. comblin, antropología cristiana. paulinas, madrid 1985: 59-75. masiá (ed.), ser humano, persona y dignidad. ddb, bilbao 2005. 2. “that which is human is only offered to a relationship which is not a power” (levinas, entre nosotros. pre-textos, valencia 1993: 23); torre, significancia intercultural e interreligiosa del concepto relacional de persona. en masiá (ed.) 2005: 263-306; alfaro, de la cuestión del hombre a la cuestión de dios. sígueme, salamanca 1988: 219-238; trigo, relaciones de fe. iter humanitas 12 (2008). in a sense different from ours, because for him what has been operated is the shift of the romantic and modern individual to the postmodern relationship, says gergen, also something that we hold, "it can be said that relations precede the self and are fundamental” (el yo saturado. paidós, barcelona 1992: 204). from our perspective inclusive and not adversarial, because for us personalizing relationships are only those that are established from the genuineness, its findings are very encouraging (1992: 183219). for zubiri relations are not the basics: "just because reality is respectively open, just for that might there be a connection” respectividad de lo real. en escritos menores. alianza, madrid 2006: 210) 3. this distinction between the community with preset structures in which participants are not subjects but merely deliberative community members and as a community of free subjects based on mutual recognition, be it family, a neighborhood community or any organized group and the emphasis, therefore on the fact that it is not nostalgia but a communalist leap forward as developed by barcellona in postmodernity and community. trotta, madrid 1992: 121… 371 4. goizueta writes about us liberal individualism in en caminemos con jesús. convivium press, miami 2009: 85-100. 5. the need to overcome the market environment and imagine other manners of attending to the needs and desires from the concrete individuals and the cooperation ties of cooperation that are freely entered into , an effort made possible by the enormous development of the productive forces that can lead to other manners of reaching the social product purchase and sale. as underlined by barcellona, 1992: 127-137 6. de sebastián, el rey desnudo/cuatro verdades sobre el mercado. trotta, madrid 1999. for barcellona democracy is the “antidote against the emergence of technological de-politization that seems to dominate the current phase in the systemic order and is the only obstacle to the economic theology of success and unlimited growth” 1992: 132. 7. morin insists on the point although he also emphasizes the cultural and civilizational that make it possible and even foster this possibility in a truly countercurrent manner. ¿hacia el abismo? paidós, barcelona 2010. 8. barcellona speaks of “systemic monism”, 1992: 26-28. 9. this is the way it was expressed by levinas in entre nosotros (pre-textos, valencia 1993: 10 and it is what is sustained by horkheimer and adorno in la dialéctica de la ilustración. trotta, madrid 1994: 82. 10. my last publication on the theology of liberation is titled: ¿ha muerto la teología de la liberación? mensajero, bilbao 2004. 11. see for example, horizonte del centro gumilla. sic 664 (may 2004:163-171) and the web page at: www.gumilla.org.ve 12. for me, jesus of nazareth, paradigm, prototype and archetype is the classical mediator. see trigo, jesús, paradigma absoluto de humanidad. in jesucristo, prototipo de humanidad en américa latina. obra nacional de la buena prensa, méxico 2001: 85-128 13. the type of group they claim to belong to or to have belonged to is in the first place to religious groups (37%) and in second place to sports groups (17%), with values below 10% actually belonging to co-operatives (5,6%), to community councils (5,4%), parents associations and representatives (6,7%), neighborhood associations (8%) and political parties (5,9%) (la participación social en venezuela. una aproximación cuantitativa. caracas, april 2009. universidad católica andrés bello. instituto de investigaciones económicas y sociales). 372 references alfaro, j. (1988). de la cuestión del hombre a la cuestión de dios. [from man’s problem to god’s problem]. (pp. 219-238). salamanca: sígueme. barcellona, p. (1992). postmodernidad y comunidad [postmodernity and community]. (pp. 121126, 99-101, 26-28). madrid: trotta. bauman, z. (2005). vidas desperdiciadas. [wasted lives]. barcelona: paidós. centro gumilla (2004). horizonte del centro gumilla. [gumilla’s center horizon]. sic 664: 163-171. www.gumilla.org.ve comblin, j. (1985). antropología cristiana [christian anthropology]. (pp. 59-75). madrid: paulinas. de la torre, l. (2005). significancia intercultural e interreligiosa del concepto relacional de persona. in masiá clavel, j. (ed.) ser humano, persona y dignidad [human being, person and dignity]. (pp. 263-306). bilbao: ddb. de sebastián, l. (1999). el rey desnudo. cuatro verdades sobre el mercado [naked king. four truths about the market]. madrid: trotta. díaz, c. (2002). ¿qué es el personalismo comunitario? [what is communitarian personalism?]. madrid: fundación emmanuel mounier. dussel, e. (1973). para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana, vol. ii [towards a latin american liberation ethics]. (pp. 116-122, 168-172). buenos aires: siglo xxi. ellacuría, i. (1991). filosofía de la realidad histórica. [philosophy of the historic reality]. (pp. 189-194, 265-311, 303-311). madrid: trotta. forte, b. (2000). la eternidad en el tiempo. [eternity in time]. (pp. 89-105). salamanca: sígueme. garcía márquez, g. (1968). cien años de soledad [one hundred years of solitude]. (pp. 346). buenos aires: sudamericana. gergen, k. (1992). el yo saturado [saturated self]. (pp. 204, 183-219). barcelona: paidós. gevaert, j. (2003). el problema del hombre. [man’s problem]. (pp. 43-62, 139-141). salamanca: sígueme. goizueta, r. (2009). caminemos con jesús [let’s walk with jesus]. (pp. 85-100). miami: convivium press. 373 horkheimer, m. y adorno, t. 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(1980). etica iv, xxii, corol. [ethics]. méxico: fce. touraine, a. (2006). ¿podremos vivir juntos? [could we live together?]. (pp. 297-301). barcelona: paidós. touraine, a. (2009). la mirada social [social outlook]. (pp. 143-247). barcelona: paidós. trigo, p. (2001). jesús, paradigma absoluto de humanidad [jesus, absolute paradigm of humanity]. in jesucristo, prototipo de humanidad en américa latina. [jesus christ, prototype of humanity in latin america]. (pp. 85-128). méxico: buena prensa. trigo, p. (2004). ¿ha muerto la teología de la liberación? [is theology of liberation dead?]. bilbao: mensajero. trigo, p. (2005). dar y ganar la vida: [giving and wining life]. bilbao: mensajero. trigo, p. (2007). cultura de la democracia. expresión situada del reino de dios. [democratic culture. situated expression of god’s kingdom]. iter humanitas jul-dic. 49-63. trigo, p. (2008a). el cristianismo como comunidad y las comunidades cristianas [christianism as community and the christian communities]. (pp. 194-213, 139-229). miami: convivium press. 374 trigo, p. (2008b). la cultura del barrio. [city wards culture]. caracas: gumilla. trigo, p. (2008c). relaciones de fe [faith’s relations]. iter humanitas. 12. zubiri, x. (2006). respectividad de lo real (210). [respectivity of reality]. in escritos menores. [minor writings]. madrid: alianza. microsoft word 2012-003-final-20120521.docx global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 30 developing alliances: commentary on lobbying for endorsement of community psychology in australia james r. cook university of north carolina at charlotte this article provides a good example of community psychology in action, mobilizing resources, organizing constituents, utilizing allies and partners, and working political systems to effect change (or, more specifically, to prevent an adverse change). knowing your enemy, using social networks, tailoring your message to the values of your audience, and working to “convince the organ grinder, rather than the monkey” are all important aspects of good community change efforts. yet, the fact that there is a need to continually fight battles to convince policy makers and educational administrators of the “difference, specialness and contributions of community psychology” suggests that we are not collectively doing the work needed to advance the discipline and maximize our impact on the communities where we work. because most of us identify as psychologists, we tend to rely, perhaps too heavily, on “psychology” to “endorse” us or otherwise recognize our value. because mainstream psychology, at least in the united states, but i suspect elsewhere, tends to act as if clinical psychology is psychology, we have to (1) continuously remind mainstream psychology (in the us, that means the american psychological association; apa) that there are other areas of study, research and practice in psychology; and (2) develop stronger alliances with other professions and organizations that have similar goals, values and methods. while much of mainstream psychology seems to be dominated by a focus on narrow “guild” issues (e.g., licensure, reimbursement), i believe that the popularity of psychology as a discipline/field of study and the resources of mainstream psychology are assets we should capitalize on, despite the disconnect in values and practice. dealing with mainstream psychology is always going to feel like an uphill battle, given the relative numbers of clinical versus community psychologists and the degree to which clinicians are willing to bankroll mainstream psychology to further their financial interests. however, major psychological organizations (e.g., apa, aps) provide important information about psychology and specializations within psychology, but we need to ensure that the information provided is accurate. for example, the web page where apa describes the society for community research and action, (scra) the community psychology division, is out of date and minimally informative; on the aps web page for the college of community psychologists, there is a broken link to “learn more about what community psychologists do” (as of 5/28/2012). we need to better use the resources that mainstream psychology provides to help people (other psychologists and others who are using the web sites to learn about psychology) understand what community psychologists do. scra has recently begun efforts to place more community psychologists on committees, task forces, and other groups within apa. we hope that this will increase our visibility and our influence, but we have yet to make significant inroads. in sum, we need to become a greater presence within mainstream psychology, despite our relatively small numbers. the authors point out that community psychology is formalized in australia “to a greater degree than anywhere else in the world”, existing as a college within aps and endorsed within the country’s licensing system. yet, “the people with whom we like to think we have most in common – community development workers, social planners, indigenous mental health workers, political activists…” have limited interactions with and understanding of community psychology. unfortunately, this seems to be all too common in other places as well. for example, when attending meetings of the community campus partnerships for health (ccph), where there is a strong emphasis on community based participatory research and social justice, i’ve seen only a handful of community psychologists. similarly, at the international living knowledge conferences, supporting community-based research that empowers people in local communities, i’ve encountered only one other community psychologist; furthermore, community psychologists seem to have no knowledge of this organization. the authors point to the need for “a more transformative, outward engagement” for the discipline; connecting with organizational partners who share our interests and goals, and who, ultimately, will work with us to effect community change and value what we bring to the table. we need to do have better visibility among these types of groups. global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 31 critical to our partnering with other organizations is to engage them as community psychologists. i suspect that, when community psychologists attend meetings of program evaluators, they often become program evaluators while there, rather than community psychologists who conduct program evaluation. we need to help our partners better understand how “what we do” is a function of our disciplinary training, and to clearly label what we do as part of the practice of community psychology (for example, a group of community psychologists have created a “community psychology interest group” within the american evaluation association, to highlight how training in community psychology contributes to the practice of program evaluation and evaluative research). this will then help advance the discipline and potentially reduce the cyclical need for selfjustification. if our partners value us as community psychologists (not just as good, competent individuals), this will help them to value the discipline and therefore support community psychology as a discipline. the effort needs to be made at multiple levels, targeting individuals from other disciplines (or subdisciplines of psychology); programs that train community psychologists; and organizations such as scra or the aps college of community psychologists. we need to make clear and concerted efforts to help others understand “what we do”, which is part of who we are as community psychologists. to the extent that our partners value community psychology and community psychologists, we could then expect that they would help promote the discipline when under threat. microsoft word wbn-sh-final.docx   creating  a  sustainable  “healing  culture”  throughout  a  healthcare  system:   using  community  psychology  principles  as  a  guide   william  d.  neigher,  ph.d.  1  and  sharon  marie  hakim,  m.a.  1,2   1atlantic  health  system  [nj],  2wichita  state  university   june  17,  2011   key words: sustainability, healing culture, community psychology practice running head: healing culture recommended citation: neigher, w. d. & hakim, s. m. (2012). creating a sustainable “healing culture” throughout a healthcare system: using community psychology principles as a guide. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(3), 1-25. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2  of  25   creating a sustainable “healing culture” throughout a healthcare system: using community psychology principles as a guide william d. neigher, ph.d. 1 and sharon marie hakim, m.a. 1,2 1atlantic health system [nj], 2wichita state university abstract this presentation describes foundational initiatives to create a sustainable “healing culture” within a large, multi-hospital healthcare system, the atlantic health system [ahs] in northern new jersey. we will describe our guiding principles, implementation process, barriers and facilitators, progress to date, and next steps. introduction perhaps you are puzzled already: “isn’t a hospital system by definition a healing culture?” of course it is. however these two words, “healing culture,” have meaning together beyond their distinct definitions, and each brings challenges and opportunity in our current operating environment. u.s. hospitals are facing extraordinary pressures to balance “mission with margin.” decreasing reimbursement from commercial and federal payers [medicaid and medicare], competition from physician-owned facilities, the shift from inpatient to outpatient care, tighter staffing ratios, focused efforts to reduce mortality and infection rates, the skyrocketing cost of new technologies, the shortage of primary care doctors in many areas, information system mandates, and upkeep on aging physical plants are among the challenges. all of which contribute to the uncertainties of expected changes under new healthcare reform legislation [patient protection and affordable care act, pl 111-148, 2010]. however a healthcare system today is more than just an acute inpatient setting. ahs includes in its continuum of care: emergency and trauma, post-acute and rehabilitation; same day surgery, ambulatory care [outpatient], and home health and hospice services. yet the hospital setting may present the greatest challenge for creating a healing culture. when we ask who in an audience has ever been a patient in a hospital for an illness or injury, most raise their hands. when asked “for how many of you was it among the best experiences of your life?” there is usually not a single hand [having a baby is usually a great exception]. the corollary, in contrast, evokes nervous laughter and many hands raised: “for how many of your was your hospital experience among the worst experiences of your life?” our ahs workplace has a legacy of over a century of community service; like other hospitals it has never closed-even for a minute, even in the worst disaster. and it is emotional place for patients, families, visitors, medical staff and employees: every day here life begins, life ends, lives are saved, and everything else in-between. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3  of  25   “above all, do no harm, cure whenever possible, treat appropriately, and heal always.” these guiding principles of medicine and healthcare are familiar and profound; if we try our best to follow them why do we need a special effort to create a healing culture? for the most part we only begin the healing process. we say that about 15% of healing takes place within our walls; the rest is up to the patient and a host of other factors within and outside of their control. our patients can face sudden and life-changing events for themselves and their families. their recovery can take months or even years, and their return to pre-illness or injury levels of functioning is not always certain. how can a healthcare system prepare our patients better for the challenges of recovery—whether they are physical, psychological, social or economic? in other words, how can we make them more “adaptable?” that is one major challenge in creating a “healing culture,” and the topic of our presentation. to get started we will take a look at how we define and express our healing culture in the context of our healthcare system’s mission, vision and values, and how the principles of community psychology inform the process. introducing atlantic health introducing atlantic health system 3 mission -­‐ •deliver  high  quality,  safe,  affordable  patient  care   within  a  healing  culture •educate,  in  an  exemplary  manner,  present  and   future  health  care  professionals •innovate  through  leadership •improve  the  health  status  of  the  communities  we   serve vision  – demonstrate  quality  performance   comparable  to  the  nation’s  best  health  care   systems* shared  values  -­‐ professionalism,  respect,   involvement,  dignity,  excellence *institute of medicine definition – safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable, patient centered atlantic health, #54 in the 2010 fortune’s “100 best companies to work for”, is a multi provider health care system serving northern nj. in addition to three acute care facilities with global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4  of  25   more than 1,200 beds, the system includes the second largest cardiovascular program in the ny metropolitan area, a children’s hospital, neuroscience and rehabilitation institutes, and comprehensive cancer centers. founded in 1892, morristown medical center has evolved from a community hospital into a state-designated, five-county tertiary care referral and trauma center. founded in 1906, overlook medical center, located in summit, nj, serves a diverse population in essex, morris and union counties. overlook hospital provides comprehensive global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5  of  25   acute and emergency care, and offers a full range of specialty services including oncology, surgery, cardiology, and a regional neuroscience institute. founded in 1932, newton medical center is a short-term, fully accredited, 148-bed acute care, not-for-profit hospital serving more than 250,000 people in warren and sussex counties in new jersey, pike county in pennsylvania and southern orange county in new york what we promise § mission statement • deliver high-quality, safe, affordable patient care within a healing culture • educate, in an exemplary manner, present and future health care professionals • innovate through leadership • improve the health status of the communities we serve § 2011 goal: build foundational initiatives to enable a sustainable, system-wide healing culture. 1 global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6  of  25   atlantic health system sets a high bar for its vision statement; “demonstrate quality performance comparable to the nation’s best healthcare systems.” within that definition of quality, we adopt the institute of medicine definition – safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable patient centered. in november of 2009, we added four new words to the first part of our mission statement: “…within a healing culture.” the four elements of our mission statement are described below. • deliver high quality, safe, affordable patient care within a healing culture • educate, in an exemplary manner, present and future health care professionals • innovate through leadership • improve the health status of the communities we serve healing culture defined § a culture that recognizes the multi-faceted nature of patient well-being (including physical, emotional, spiritual, social, environmental and community levels), and whose staff work in partnership with patients and their families for healing. § healing is defined as more than recovery from illness or injury; it is allowing a patient to reach his or her optimal health, with a focus on prevention and health promotion. 1 healing culture defined what do we mean by a “healing culture?” for ahs it is a culture that recognizes the multi-faceted nature of patient well-being (including physical, emotional, spiritual, social, environmental and community levels), and whose staff work in partnership with patients and their families for healing. healing is defined as more than recovery from illness or injury; it is allowing a patient to reach his or her optimal health, with a focus on prevention and health promotion. we amplify below: global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7  of  25   enabling our healing culture § the expression of our mission and values is enabled through a healing culture in which we: • share responsibility with patients, families, and the community; • demonstrate respect for diversity through cultural competence; • embrace synergies among physical, emotional and spiritual healing connections; • recognize optimal well-being, prevention and health promotion as integral parts of the healing process. 1 the ahs stakeholders shared a pragmatic, organizational tenant that we need to create sustainable, second-order change. in order to do so, we set a goal for 2011 to build foundational initiatives to enable a sustainable, system-wide healing culture. as you would imagine for a hospital system where its individual institutions have served their communities for more than a century, there are not only cultures that are unique to these hospital and their elements of care, but also within each hospital are centers of excellence and programs that have their own unique leadership, champions, values, behaviors, and rewards systems. more specifically some of these challenges which cut across our institutional cultures are also some of the most difficult issues for healthcare systems to face. these include end of life care, integrative medicine, pastoral care, community health, delivering a uniform patient experience, and engaging more than 2,000 members of the medical staff and consistently delivered patient centered care. if “culture” can also be defined “values in action,” we needed a clear set of values, instantly understandable to a workforce of more than 15,000 that includes physicians and allied health professionals, support personnel and management, volunteers, and advisory board members. our goals was to create “line of sight” understanding between every individual, their workgroup and job description, and the vision, mission, values in strategies of the organization. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8  of  25   diffusion of expectations pride •demonstrate  quality  performance   comparable  to  the  nation’s  best   healthcare  systems •service •performance •openness •teamwork •empowerment •service  and  quality   •commitment  to  coworkers •appearance   •attitude   •call  bells •customer  information/education   •customer  waiting   •elevator  etiquette •privacy  and  confidentiality •safety  awareness •sense  of  ownership •telephone  etiquette •deliver  high-­‐quality,  safe,  affordable   patient  care  within  a  healing  culture   •educate,  in  an  exemplary  manner,   present  and  future   health  care  professionals   •innovate  through  leadership   •improve  the  health  status   of  the  communities  we  serve   •share  responsibility  with  patients, families  and  the  community •demonstrate  respect  for  diversity   through  cultural  competence •embrace  synergies  among  physical,   emotional  and  spiritual  healing  connections •recognize  optimal  well-­‐being,   prevention  and  health  promotion   as  integral  parts  of  the  healing  process diffusion of expectations like many large, multi dimensional organizations, both within healthcare and outside, we had three dozen expectations for behavior among our employees, medical staff and volunteers. this diffusion made it difficult for us to forge one set of expectations for our staff and our patients. working through a group process, we distilled these into a new set five “shared-values” using “pride” as a pneumonic acronym. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9  of  25   pride professionalism: deliver exceptional service, build a positive team spirit respect: treat others as they would like to be treated involvement: share responsibility for healing with physicians, peers, patients and families dignity: be compassionate, empathetic and supportive excellence: pursue greatness with passion and commitment name  of  presentation  in  all  caps  (insert  in  footer)1 we’ll conclude our presentation with a discussion on implementation challenges and the roadmap we built to achieve our goal of building sustainable system-wide initiatives to serve as the foundation for a healing culture. we turn to healthcare reform next, however, because it provided with a context and opportunity for change. this “burning platform” of legislative, regulatory and reimbursement reform brought with it a need to exam everything from the business model under which we practice to the community psychology values and guiding principles we discussed earlier. with the patient protection and affordable care act [pl 111148, 2010], comes the most sweeping change in federal healthcare policy in 50 years. with the change from incentives based upon volume of care to the value the care based on efficacy and efficiency, healthcare systems have both opportunity and challenge. healthcare reform and community psychology healthcare reform presents a unique opportunity for community psychologists to make an impact at the national, local and state levels. various actions stipulated by the bill align with the priorities of our field and require application of our core competencies. although the typical community psychologist may not identify as part of the “healthcare system,” we argue that the field has a necessary contribution to make. on the national level, healthcare reform creates a “consumer” for prevention and health promotion. the new business model now incentivizes government, businesses, and insurance companies to keep people healthy. the bill establishes a national fund for prevention and public health programs, including incentives for prevention of chronic disease in medicaid recipients. community psychologists should be in possession of the skill set needed to see these actions through. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  10  of  25   in addition to prevention, health care reform aims to address the health disparities that prevail in our country and provide training for providers in cultural competence, two areas that community psychologists have long worked in, and can add value. further, there will be a national task force created to review the effectiveness of community interventions to ensure that money is being spent effectively and efficiently and that community members are getting the services they need. opportunities also exist for community psychologists at the state and local level. states will now be required to conduct needs assessments for communities with high-risk populations and a prevalence of other social problems (e.g. poverty, low high school graduation rates, etc.). community transformation grants, recognizing the importance of evidence-based local programming, will be available for the implementation, evaluation and dissemination of activities to promote health within our communities. continuing into the center of the ecological model, all of these new efforts will be enhanced by the complete coverage of preventative health services (including inoculations and annual wellness visits) to individuals. optimizing health through a healing culture beyond discharge because at atlantic health our goal is not simply fixing the illness or injury patients present with, it’s restoring them to optimal health, we recognize that we cannot do it alone. healthcare systems, doctors, nurses and medicines are just one part of the healing process. the average length of stay in an atlantic health facility is 4.5 (according to the centers for disease control, it is 4.8 days nationwide). clearly, what happens on the other 360.5 days of the year has a great impact on one’s health status. we cannot optimize health alone… …we  need  to  utilize  community  connections,   resources  and  patients  themselves… global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  11  of  25   in order to help patients optimize health even when they are outside of our facilities we need to better utilize community partners and resources, as well as patients themselves, in the healing process. working on the strength and breadth of our community connections is the first step. community partners with aligned interests include social services, government agencies and the faith based community. these agencies have traditionally partnered with hospitals. in order to truly promote population-based health, we need to expand the potential partners to include the whole community wheel. businesses, the media law enforcement and education entities all have a vested interest in the health of the community, as well as that of their own employees and customers– what new programs, resources, and perspectives can they bring if invited to the “health table”? we cannot control the environment that our patients live, work and play in; what we can do is help enable community partners to create environments that support health in recognition of the fact that optimal community health will only be achieved by threesixty degree partnerships with the community. … and draw on external resources and community partners. further, crediting the individual for his or her own role in the healing process is important. although patients have long looked to us as the “source” of healing, most of the responsibility for health relies on them – properly administering medicines, choosing healthy behaviors, monitoring their conditions, etc. if the healthcare industry can stress how much of the responsibilities lay on the patient him or herself, we can begin to empower patients to embrace this role. recognizing new models of helping embracing the role of the patient and the community in health requires recognizing new models of helping. the traditional medical model dictates that individuals do not become global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  12  of  25   “patients” until they become ill. from that point forward they leave their home and come to the hospital for treatment. … recognize new models of helping… new models of helping start with healthcare initiatives leaving the hospital and going into the community. although hospitals have long conducted community health programs (e.g. screenings or lectures), the opportunity arises to do them in a more strategic and proactive manner. further, viewing the individual as an empowered partner in their own health and wellness program means creating a relationship with him or her before an illness or injury begins. preventative care is and should be a foundational element of the healthcare equation. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  13  of  25   healing before during after atlantic health partnership for life cultures to culture throughout our system, many of the elements which we posit make up a “healing culture” already existed. from integrative medicine and pastoral care to palliative medicine and community health, from our hospitals to our out-patient facilities, the ingredients were there. the challenge was taking these disparate, segmented, and often isolated cultures related to specific departments or locations and integrating them into one unified, system-wide healing culture. a healing culture that is present throughout the organization will not only help to ensure a uniform standard of care and deliver the atlantic health brand promise, but it will enhance our mission, galvanizing resources and staff energy behind it. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  14  of  25   creating a system-wide healing culture change management planning and system development increasing healing by increasing adaptability our mission change ushered in not only attempts to change the culture of the organization, but also a parallel process aimed at increasing the adaptability of our patients. we are re-framing the goal of our healthcare delivery system – instead of fixing your illness or injury, what we want to do is discharge more adaptable patients. we want patients to leave our doors not only healthier, but better equipped to deal with the challenges of recovery and healthy living (i.e, albee, 1982). adaptability is the ability to change with and deal with a changing environment. operationally, we define it as the ratio of resilience to vulnerability. by defining it this way, we are recognizing the individual nature of health and healing. while we can’t always decrease an individual’s vulnerability to illness, we can help them load the top of the equation, increasing their resilience and in turn their adaptability, by connecting them to resources, teaching them coping skills, otherwise intervening along the continuum of care to promote healing. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  15  of  25   “it  is  not  the  strongest  of   the  species  that  survives,   nor  the  most  intelligent,   but  rather  the  one  most   adaptable  to  change.” charles  darwin   and here is our analogy to healthcare: “in  the  u.s.,  patients  that  make  the   best  recovery  from  illness  or  injury  are   neither  those  with  the  most  doctors  or   those  that  get  the  most  health  care,   but  rather  those  most  adaptable  to   change.” neigher’s health  care  corollary global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  16  of  25   atlantic health system – “adaptability”2 conceptual model1 cognitive affective behavioral c oping family  &  friends community  connections online  social  networks social  services s ocial   connectedness a    = adaptability r resilience v vulnerability x + +access geographic temporal financial cultural psychological   physical 1  building  on  albee,  1982 3  pride  =  professionalism,  respect,  involvement,  dignity,  excellence2  culture  =  values  in  action build foundational initiatives to enable a sustainable, system-wide healing culture vision mission shared  values3 genetic biological environmental behavioral r isk  factors (health) + diagnosis treatment rehabilitation stressor (acute) [ physical psychological economic stressors (chronic) [ unpacking the adaptability equation here is our working “taxonomy” that informs the terms in the adaptability model, in their most concise narrative: adaptability: the ability to respond to continuing challenges to health status. resilience: the ability to bounce back from injury, illness, or adversity. vulnerability: combined present or future risk of adverse change to physical, psychological, environmental or social status. positive coping: managing the physical and emotional challenges that accompany an illness or injury and their progression over time. social connectedness: the characteristics of social relationships (quantity, quality, diversity and strength) and their perceived or potential social support. access: the ability to get timely, appropriate, patient-centered services across the continuum of care. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  17  of  25   health risk factors: elements that increase an individual's vulnerability to poor health or outcomes during treatment or recovery. stressor (acute): the physiological or psychological factors that define an individual's current health status. stressors (chronic): the "baggage" a patient is dealing with over and above threats to his/her current health status, including but not limited to coping with other physical, economic, psychological or social conditions. in broader context however, it is also important to place these elements in their research domains to be most inclusive of a bigger picture. this consideration is in the table below: adaptability the ability to successfully adapt to change. operationally defined as the ratio of resilience to vulnerability. resilience the ability to “bounce back” from, or have positive outcomes “in the face of” adversity; successful adaptation to illness, injury or hardship. (connor & davidson, 2003; curtis & cicchetti, 2003; luthar, cicchetti & becker, 2000; masten, 2001; zautra, hall & murray, 2008) positive coping managing the physical and emotional changes that accompany an illness or injury and its respective treatment in a way that is active and helpful in the long term. social connectedness the number, diversity and strength of connections that a person has with others.; the quality and quantity of relationships (mitchinson, kim, geisser, rosenberg & hinshaw, 2008). coupled with this measure of social integration comes a measure of perceived social support – what resources can an individual gather from his or her social network (cohen, 1985, 2004). access the ability to get appropriate and prompt care when needed; traditionally defined in terms of insurance coverage and “usual” access to care, expanded definitions of access to care include geographic, temporal, and cultural dimensions (bacus, 2008; hall, lemak, steingraber & shaffer, 2008). atlantic health adds in psychological and physical to this definition. vulnerability overall risk of poor physical, psychological and/or social health (aday, 1994). framed in the community psychology, this concept can be understood as overall risk factors. vulnerability comes with an increased risk of morbidity and mortality (shi & stevens, 2010) global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  18  of  25   health risk factors conditions that increase an individual’s vulnerability to poor health or suboptimal outcomes during treatment and recovery. risk factors can be genetic, biological, environmental, behavioral or psychological in origin (world health organization, 2009). stressor (acute) incidents that are threatening or disruptive in the immediate situation. under our healthcare framework, we are talking about the reason a patient comes to the hospital – his or her presenting complaint. stressors (chronic) more than the “hassles” of day to day life, these are the are negative forces whether at work, in the home environment, within relationships, or inside one’s own body that cause a person to be constantly stressed (in a state of heightened arousal). chronic activation of the sympathetic nervous system can leave us overrun, put us at higher risk for certain medical conditions, and impair our immune system’s ability to function. our goal is to be able to assess individuals on each one of these elements before we begin an intervention, ideally at the assessment (diagnostic) phase. their “adaptability index” score will give us an idea of the whole patient in ecological context, and thus better understand how they might interact with treatment recommendations. the initiative at hand is to create a measure with predictive validity (related to patient outcomes) so that we can risk-stratify our patients, giving necessary attention to potential high-risk patients and thus the ability to maximize their chance for the best outcome with lowest cost [value]. the conceptual model places our three elements—adaptability as a function of resilience and vulnerability—in dynamic proximity; a formula from the healthcare provider’s vantage point in our case. as community psychologists we recognize the importance of other ecological perspectives, and the graphic below looks at adaptability in community context. here we identify examples of both measures and resources that can address sources of community support, a critical buffer for many patients and their families. in addition to offering help with recover from illness or injury, these factors can increase resilience and reduce vulnerability when conditions recur, or when co-morbidities present new challenge. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  19  of  25   vision mission shared values3 atlantic health system – “community level adaptability”2 conceptual model1 resources social  capital town  history town  spirit  of  cooperation coping civic  and  religious  organizations “sense  of  community” social  capital neighboring social   connectedness a    = adaptability r resilience v vulnerability x + + access geographic  location public  transportation technology  available local  medical  practices medical  transport ambulatory  care  centers local  policies 1  building  on  albee,  1982 3  pride  =  professionalism,  respect,  involvement,  dignity,  excellence 2  culture  =  values  in  action build foundational initiatives to enable a sustainable, system-wide healing culture median  income environmental   pollutants industry food   availability built   environment population  age risk  factors (health) + event rebuild/repair stressor (acute) [ social   determinants  of   health stressors (chronic) [ first steps on a long journey no one ever said that making sustainable, second order change was easy in any organizational setting, let alone health care settings. with “eyes wide open” to wanted to align support for change by taking a number of critical baby steps. the first was to change the mission statement, adding those four foundational words: “…within a healing culture.” adopted with the approval of a ten year vision and strategic plan to get there, it had the unanimous vote of atlantic health system’s board of trustees. what these four words would mean in practice on the other hand was somewhat of a leap of faith. to manage the change process we had the active support of two important trustees, the chair, karen kessler, and another trustee, anne rooke who chaired the community advisory committee of one of our hospitals. she became our board “champion,” co-lead the process, came to every meeting, and could focus the attention of senior management because of her position and passion for this project. [in 2011 the new jersey hospital association recognized anne rooke, rn, msn as hospital trustee of the year]. supporting the process was the system president and ceo, and the chief administrative officer. establishing a sustainable healing culture was one of the system’s annual strategic initiatives, and many in middle and senior management were evaluated and financially incented to a degree on achieving its objectives. [it may also be worth noting the both the president and ceo, joseph a. trunfio, ph.d., and the senior author [wdn] are community psychologists.] global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  20  of  25   the table below was our “roadmap” for the 2011 initiatives that created the foundation for the healing culture programs. we share this format because the journey was a challenging one, and because the sequence of our “roll out” needed to be done in a thoughtful manner. we adopted a cascade model which we leveraged training and education, the launch of our new shared values [pride], a video contest involving staff and units to illustrate their involvement in the pride initiative, and activities involving community resources. healing culture roadmap at the end of the day, all the support in the world from trustees and senior management will not sustain meaningful change in an organization, especially in hospitals where an inpatient may see from 95 to 135 different care providers during a typical four day admission. while most are our ahs employees, attending members of the medical staff are not for the most part, and their impact on patients and their families is obviously crucial. but so are line staff. these are the people in any organization who are the thought and opinion leaders, have the passion to lead and sustain change, and are often the role models that influence others. we needed those people. in the words of our president and ceo we simply had to find them— everyone would know who they were—and empower them to make change. in the letter below from our board chair, karen kessler, we put out a call for those people: global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  21  of  25   this initial gathering has a focus on both implementation and planning. we ask you to think about, and write about these 2 questions: 1) what actions could we implement tomorrow morning that could immediately and meaningfully help enable our healing culture; and 2) what longer term initiatives or policies should we begin planning for tomorrow morning? speaking as chair of the atlantic health board of trustees for our board members, and for dr. joe trunfio as president and ceo, we are excited by this opportunity to build foundational initiatives to enable a sustainable, system-wide healing culture. sincerely, karen j. kessler chair, atlantic health, board of trustees dear colleague, with this letter of appointment to the atlantic health healing culture council, we invite your leadership. as you know, atlantic health added four important new words to its mission statement: “…within a healing culture.” the expression of our mission and values is enabled through a healing culture in which we: • share responsibility with patients, families and the community; • demonstrate respect for diversity through cultural competence; • embrace synergies among physical, emotional and spiritual healing connections; • recognize optimal well-being, prevention and health promotion as integral parts of the healing process. moving from words to deeds we have both challenge and opportunity ahead. we can have a positive impact on our patients and their families, on the health status of the communities we serve, and on the members of our own atlantic health families– employees, medical staff, volunteers, board members, and our community partners. an invitation to craft our healing culture we  want  to  get  the  best  thinking  from  all  levels  of  the  organization,  and  to  tap  into  the   energies  of  those  in  the  atlantic  family  who  have  a  passion  for  a  healing  culture,  we  ask   that  you  invite  a  partner,  preferably  someone  in  a  line  staff  or  patient  contact  position to  collaborate  on  your  recommendations  and  to  join  us  at  this  event. we  will  meet   monthly  through  the  rest  of  2011  at  a  time  and  place  most  accommodating  to  the   majority  of  our  members. this initial gathering has a focus on both implementation and planning. we ask you to think about, and write about these 2 questions: 1) what actions could we implement tomorrow morning that could immediately and meaningfully help enable our healing culture; and 2) what longer term initiatives or policies should we begin planning for tomorrow morning? speaking as chair of the atlantic health board of trustees for our board members, and for dr. joe trunfio as president and ceo, we are excited by this opportunity to build foundational initiatives to enable a sustainable, system-wide healing culture. sincerely, karen j. kessler chair, atlantic health, board of trustees now for the empowerment part: before the initial meeting of healing culture council we solicited ideas that could help us move forward. at the first session they were presented on slides without attribution—some were from a hospital president, some from a nursing assistant, others from non-clinical staff. our “a” vote was for initiatives that we “could just do it;” it had merit, a burning platform, did not need tons of resources or permissions, and was consistent with our healing culture attributes. in fact, we could “just do it” monday morning, the first day of national hospital week. [the “b” ranking category was for initiatives that may need more time and resources to complete, and the “c” category was for those cases where raters were unsure of the concept or didn’t think it matched our criteria.] using audience response transmitters [turning point technologies] we had our rankings after each item in under a minute each. the table below gives the rankings for those “a” votes getting more than a majority [50%], in descending order. it also categorized the vote percentages for those on council who were bedside caregivers and those in support or administrative positions. the final column aligned the initiative with the corresponding pride shared value. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  22  of  25   1         overall   'a'   vote  %   'a'  vote  %  by   group       initiatives   rank   non-­‐care   giver   care   giver   pride   introduce  yourself  (by  name)  to  every  patient,  every   encounter   1   92.7%   100.0%   94.1%   p     reach  out  to  distressed  patients  or  staff  every  day   2   92.3%   93.8%   90.9%   d   eye  contact  at  eye  level  with  every  patient  encounter   3   83.9%   93.8%   80.0%   r   health  educational  programs  on  patient’s  tv     4   82.4%   73.3%   90.3%   i   expanding  pet  therapy  access   5   80.0%   87.5%   77.1%   r   discussing  the  continuing,  healing  process  directly  with   patients  (where  appropriate)     6   78.9%   81.3%   80.6%   i     empower  every  employee  with  knowledge  and   authority    for  service  recovery  at  the  point  of  contact   7   78.4%   81.3%   74.2%   e     offer  integrative  medicine  services  when  appropriate   8   72.7%   75.0%   70.6%   p   distribute  cleveland  clinic  article  describing  empathy   and  behavioral  respect   9   72.4%   68.8%   73.0%   r     offer  massage  to  care  givers  for  minimal  fee…..   10   71.4%   71.4%   70.0%   p       what can we do tomorrow morning? implementation guiding principles and next steps take aways § game changers § get the board on board § champion and zealots § alignment § just do it 1 thank  you.   this process is a journey as much as it is a destination. if we do not create sustainable second order change in our culture none of these initiatives will endure for very long. and there is much global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  23  of  25   in the organizational development literature to guide us. the five bullet points above capture our strategy: 1. go for initiatives that can make major change quickly, consistent with the organization’s mission, vision, values and strategies; 2. secure support from the board of trustees; they and other stakeholders must demand change and accountability for results; 3. pick a champion who has the respect of the organization, and find those with the passion and leadership skills to make it happen; 4. everyone needs to sing from the same hymnal; from the board to senior management to line staff. insure “line of sight” understanding for everyone of how this fits into my job, my work group, and #1 above; and 5. identify consensus initiatives, demonstrate early success, remove the barriers, empower those who can get it done, and “just do it.” our year two effort focuses on keeping our initiatives “evergreen”—sticking with those priorities that made the cut, celebrating small gains, providing immediate resources to make things happen, removing bureaucratic obstacles, and involving key stakeholders trustees and senior management in supporting the process and the individuals who are our champions. our strategic initiatives as a healthcare system include partnerships with technology and software innovation leaders. an emerging discipline which we call “predictive assistance” is at the intersection of mobile health and telemedicine. it connects devices such as smart phones with real-time biometrics monitored by computer algorithms or oversight by clinicians. the difference between what largely exists today, the identification of symptomatic conditions, and the promise of predictive assistance is exciting: the ability to anticipate clinically meaningful biometry before the person experiences the symptoms, and to have the capability of early intervention [primary prevention]. we are also measuring process and early outcomes, trialing some initiatives at one of the three hospitals before system-wide implementation. mid-course corrections are appropriate many times, but for others it is a “stay the course” bearing because it is simply “the right thing to do.” a good place to end is with a paraphrase of margaret meade’s famous admonition: all it takes to change an organization’s culture is a few committed individuals; in fact it has never happened any other way. references albee, g.w. (1982). preventing psychopathology and promoting human potential. american psychologist, 37, 1043-1050. aday, l. (1994). health status of vulnerable populations. annual review of public health, 15, 487-509. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  24  of  25   baucus, m. (2008). call to action: health reform 2009. retrieved from: www.finance.senate.gov cohen, s. (2004). social relationships and health. american psychologist, 59, 676-684. cohen, s., mermelstein, r., kamarack, t., and hoberman, h. n. (1985). measuring the functional components of social support. in i. sarason, and b. sarason (eds.), social support: theory, research and applications. dordrecht, the netherlands: martinus nijhoff. connor, k. & davison, r. (2003). development of a new resilience scale: the connordavidson resilience scale. depression and anxiety, 18, 76-83. curtis, w.j. & cicchetti, d. (2003). moving research on resilience into the 21st century: theoretical and methodological considerations in examining the biological contributors to resilience. development and psychopathology, 15, 773-810. darwin, charles robert. the origin of species. vol. xi. the harvard classics. new york: p.f. collier & son, 1909–14; bartleby.com, 2001. www.bartleby.com/11/. hall, a., lemak, c., steingraber, h & shaffer, s. (2003). expanding the definition of access: it isn’t just about health insurance. journal of health care for the poor and underserved, 19, 625637. luthar, s., cicchetti, d. & becker, b. (2000). the construct of resilience: a critical evaluation and guidelines for future work. child development, 71(2), 543-562. masten, a. (2001). ordinary magic: resilience processes in development. american psychologist, 56(3), 227-238. mitchinson, a., kim, h., geisser, m., rosenberg, j. & hinshaw, d. (2008). social connectedness and patient recovery after major operations. american college of surgeons, 206(2), 292-300. patient protection and affordable care act, pl 111-148, march 23, 2010. http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgibin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_public_laws&docid=f:publ148.111.pdf shi, l. & stevens, g. (2010). vulnerable populations in the united states. 2nd ed. san fransisco: josey-bass world health organization (2009). global health risks: mortality and burden of disease attributable to selected major risks. who library. retrieved from http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/globalhealthrisks_report_full.pdf global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  25  of  25   zautra, a., hall, j. & murray, k. (2008). resilience: a new integrative approach to health and mental health research. health psychology review, 2(1), 41-64. kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 building strategic alliances james r. cook keywords: editorial, alliances, community psychology practice, gjcpp author biographies: dr cook is a professor at the university of north carolina at charlotte, and president of the society for community research and action. global journal of community psychology practice volume 3, issue 3 august 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 building strategic alliances i recently returned from the 5th living knowledge conference in bonn, germany. living knowledge is the network of “science shops” which are common in europe and growing in number worldwide. people from around the world attended the conference, examining ways that universities, and science more specifically, can serve communities. if you look at the living knowledge website, you can see the overlap between their agenda and that of community psychology (http://www.livingknowledge. org/livingknowledge/). in sum: “the international living knowledge network (lk) aims at giving citizens access to scientific research. the network is for people interested in building partnerships for public access to research. members of the network exchange information, documentation, ideas, experiences and expertise on community-based research and science and society relations in general.” science shops are: “not “shops” in the traditional sense of the word. they are small entities that carry out scientific research in a wide range of disciplines – usually free of charge and – on behalf of citizens and local civil society. the fact that science shops respond to civil society’s needs for expertise and knowledge is a key element that distinguish them from other knowledge transfer mechanisms. science shops are often, but not always, linked to or based in universities, where research is done by students as part of their curricula – under the supervision of the science shop and other associated (university) staff.” thus, science shops help empower local groups through applied research, often involving students in service learning endeavors. this was the third living knowledge conference i’ve attended, and i have found each to be energizing, because they involve people throughout the world from a wide array of disciplines who engage in community based participatory research. there were over 200 people there, from 34 different countries. yet, only 2 people affiliated with community psychology were there (joanna ochocka and myself). and most people there never heard of community psychology, let alone ever involved a community psychologist in their science shops. in addition, when i’ve asked community psychologists in europe about science shops, i’ve yet to find one who had ever heard of them. this disconnection between community psychology and other groups with similar values and goals, and who could be potential allies in our efforts to effect community and system change seems to be all too common. i can think of a number of similar examples: • years ago, an official at the department of housing and urban development, who managed the community outreach partnership program (providing support for universities to help organize and address the needs of low-income communities), stated that she had never global journal of community psychology practice volume 3, issue 3 august 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 heard of a psychologist doing community organizing and had never previously funded one to do so. • i’ve regularly attended “systems of care” conferences, which are designed to help change communities to create mental health systems respond to the needs of families, empower them to change their communities, focus on strengths (instead of just pathology), help families engage with their communities (rather than just professional service providers). yet, i’ve seen very few community psychologists in attendance (although in recent years more community psychologists have become involved). • i’ve attended several conferences of the community-campus partnerships for health, which focuses on partnerships that address health in communities, community-based participatory research, and more recently has explicitly emphasized social justice. yet, i’ve seen only a handful of community psychologists at these meetings. so why are we not present, as part of these broader, multidisciplinary efforts to address the needs of communities? if we, as a discipline, hope to have an impact on our communities and on society more generally, we must do so as part of collaborative efforts with other like-minded groups. we need to do more outreach to these multidisciplinary groups. we have important skills and approaches to contribute, and we should have have people who not only participate with these groups, but who serve as active “ambassadors”, creating linkages between community psychology and them. we’ve come to recognize the importance of connecting with community psychologists from around the globe, but it is past time for us to become less insular and more interdisciplinary. we should all work to be better “ambassadors” for community psychology at interdisciplinary groups we are part of. one good example is the recent creation of a community psychology topical interest group at the american evaluation association. serena seifer, the executive director of ccph, recently reached out to explore ways to build more formal relationships between ccph and the society for community research and action (scra). john lochman, presidentelect of apa’s division 37 (society for child and family policy and practice) and a scra member noticed the workshop on “doing policy work as a psychologist” sponsored by scra at the 2012 apa, and has reached out to explore ways to collaborate on policy work. other groups with whom we’ve had discussions about collaborations include the society for the psychological study of social issues (spssi) and the american orthopsychiatric association. i’d urge community psychologists to look for more opportunities, respond to the opportunities we are presented, and do more collaborative work with people from other disciplines. scra and other community psychology organizations should also help provide the organizational support to create a stronger presence for community psychology and community psychologists among groups who have similar interests, values and agendas. community psychologists will always be a small minority among psychologists, so it behooves us to develop partnerships among these groups to increase the impact that we can have. global journal of community psychology practice volume 3, issue 3 august 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 for more information about the lk conference, see the youtube conference video (this is a conference tradition, to video tape during the conference and provide a conference summary at the closing): http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddhcehv-mps. you can also download a copy of the latest edition of the living knowledge magazine at: http://www.livingknowledge.org/ livingknowledge/wp-content/ uploads/2012/04/lk10-journal-may12.pdf and subscribe to this publication. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddhcehv-mps. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddhcehv-mps. http://www.livingknowledge.org/livingknowledge/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/lk10-journal-may12.pdf http://www.livingknowledge.org/livingknowledge/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/lk10-journal-may12.pdf http://www.livingknowledge.org/livingknowledge/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/lk10-journal-may12.pdf microsoft word v2i3-0016-ms final.docx global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  1  of  13   conducting participatory action research with canadian indigenous communities: a methodological reflection heather schmidt heather_schmidt@cbu.ca dr. heather schmidt, ph.d., is an assistant professor of psychology at cape breton university in sydney, nova scotia, canada. key words: participatory action research, evaluation, indigenous, power differences running head: conducting participatory action research recommended citation: schmidt, h. (2012). conducting participatory action research with canadian indigenous communities: a methodological reflection. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(3), 1-12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2  of  13   conducting participatory action research with canadian indigenous communities: a methodological reflection heather schmidt abstract a central challenge with participatory action research (par) pertains to discrepancies between principles and practice. what sounds simple in theory (e.g., establishing a respectful collaboration) is often much more complex in real community settings. the challenges, lessons learned, and successes of par were examined within the context of a large national research project that involved 8 first nation communities and academics. to engage in the process of reflective examination, two methodological approaches were utilized: (1) a qualitative interview study with 19 project members about their experiences within the project, and (2) a secondary qualitative analysis of the author’s own experiences and observations (as recorded in research journals). this paper summarizes some of the barriers to conducting par with indigenous communities (i.e., themes of distrust/personal safety concerns, community readiness, waning motivation, financial stress, power differences, and differing norms/expectations) , as well as some of the lessons that were learned about how to overcome these challenges and cultivate strong, healthy research relationships. because of the long history of euroamerican colonialism and paternalism toward first nations, the issue of conducting research with indigenous communities has evolved into a rather delicate situation (mihesuah, 1998). robinson (1997) discusses the unusual paradox that while many first nations people feel they have been “researched to death”, they also complain that there has not been enough of the “right kind” of research. the former refers to the fact that, for years, academics, government researchers and corporations have been collecting immense amounts of data from indigenous peoples with very little of it ever benefiting the oppressed and impoverished first nations, in spite of initial promises. on the other hand, many indigenous communities are now engaged in revitalizing endeavours to regain selfdetermination and, in this context, many see the value in research methods that can help them to bring about desperately-needed social change and community healing. participation action research (par) is a promising alternative in which a new brand of respectful research relationship may be nurtured. yet, par presents challenges in translating principles into practice. it is not enough for non-native academics simply to have good intentions or to try to “show respect” and collaborate, as too often, this manifests as paternalism in a new guise (menzies, 2001). ermine, sinclair and jeffery (2004) describe the need to negotiate an “ethical space”: an equal and inclusive common-ground between worldviews. privileged members of society are challenged to acknowledge their unquestioned assumptions and social relativity before humbly entering into the ‘negotiation’. research, like schooling, once the tool of colonization and oppression, is very gradually coming to be seen as a potential means to reclaim languages, histories, and knowledge, to find solutions to the negative impacts of colonialism and to give voice to global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3  of  13   an alternative way of knowing and of being. (smith, 2005, p. 91) understanding the strengths of indigenous communities (usic) project, 2000-2008: in 2000, a small group of academics led by dr. schmidt at cape breton university collaborated with a steering committee of prominent canadian indigenous individuals to design an optimistic vision for a parbased project. the group’s goal was to use par to identify and study successes in a diversity of first nations so that they in turn could serve as role models and/or sources of inspiration for other indigenous communities. a focus on the positive was selected specifically to counter the predominantly negative news-stories (typically featuring child protective services, addiction, suicide, violence, and poverty) that are too often are the only images portrayed of first nations in the media. rather than further perpetuating the atmosphere of hopelessness and despair, as chataway (1998) stated: a focus on strengths lends power to those strengths, and creates energy to produce more. science can illuminate the beauty in people’s lives, help to clarify their values and goals, and provide resources for their journey toward these goals. (p. 18) eight diverse indigenous communities from different regions of canada agreed to participate and 5 remained in collaboration with the project through to its conclusion in 2008. it should be clearly stated that these were not the “most successful” first nations in canada, but rather: (a) they were nominated as being highly successful in 1 or more specific area (e.g., revival of traditional language, and/or economic development, and/or governance, and/or physical health, etc.), and (b) their local leaders agreed that the project was of interest as well as something that they could accommodate at that particular point in time. others who initially expressed interest eventually concluded that they were too busy with other commitments. thus, timing and availability played a significant role in determining which first nations were chosen to participate. after permission was granted by the local chief and council, a small group of community members from each of the participating first nations was hired, trained in research methods by usic academics, and provided with on-going support via email, telephone, and occasional in-person visits. a local advisory committee was established to assist the researchers, and one person was hired as researcher supervisor for each community. those selected to receive research training tended to be young mothers or unemployed / underemployed individuals, who could accommodate the unusual hours (i.e., whenever people are available) associated with community research. a triangulated methodology was utilized which included: (1) focus groups that explored the question “what are the strengths of your first nation?”, (2) case studies to explore the development/history of each community’s core strengths (including how challenges were overcome), and (3) a survey which asked individuals to rate their first nation on a wide variety of topics such as governance, housing, culture, mental and physical health, etc. how successful was usic in par theory versus practice? as the project progressed, it became evident that although words such as “collaboration” and “empowerment” were frequently used by the academics, many community-level researchers did not feel like their voices were being heard. dissatisfaction was most commonly expressed through subtle means global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4  of  13   such as whispered side-comments and facial expressions, withdrawing from contact / absences from scheduled phone meetings, and privately through one-on-one conversations. many community-level researchers did not feel comfortable voicing their critiques during group meetings, especially with high-powered individuals present such as professors, chiefs, and members of the steering committee. thus, pre-existing power differences and social inequalities continued to affect decisionmaking and the course of the project, in spite of the positive-sounding rhetoric. too often, silence was misinterpreted as signifying group consensus, as opposed to disempowerment of the most marginalized group members. rather than ignoring this discrepancy between principle and practice, an additional research project was designed to evaluate the usic project in terms of its successes, as well as other things that, in retrospect, really should have been approached differently from the start. a central objective of this reflective step was to provide the community-level researchers with an outlet in which they would feel safe voicing all of their ideas, questions, and criticisms of the project that had previously gone unheard. our hope was that others may benefit from the entire group’s collective learnings about how to conduct successful par with indigenous communities. thus, in spite of some short-comings, the usic research project was concluded in an optimistic and respectful manner. method participants: nineteen usic collaborators participated in this reflective evaluation of the usic project. the group consisted of 10 community-level researchers, 6 communitylevel research supervisors, 2 usic administrators/academics, and 1 communitylevel advisor. in terms of ethnicity, 14 were first nations individuals (from 6 different first nation cultures: anishinaabek, coast salish, cree, mi’kmaw, and tlingit), and 5 participants were non-native. in terms of gender, the sample consisted of 11 women and 6 men. qualitative data-collection process: one focus group and a series of semi-structured interviews were conducted. individuals were asked to reflect upon their experiences within the usic project, which included (a) the challenges they faced, (b) solutions for handling said challenges, (c) their perceptions about the quality of the data collected (i.e., was it representative? were people being honest?), (d) things that should have been done differently in retrospect, (e) things that were done correctly, (f) surprises encountered, and (g) advice for future researchers contemplating similar par projects with indigenous communities. the focus group and interviews were conducted in-person whenever possible, however, given the geographical distances between communities and personal preferences of some participants, one phone interview and five email interviews (i.e., typed responses to a set of questions) were also included. following transcription of the taped interviews and focus group, a grounded theory analysis was conducted to identify common themes that emerged from the participants’ collective contributions. additional analysis of research journals: the author of this study (a non-native female academic who worked in various capacities in usic while completing graduate school) also chose to conduct a qualitative analysis of her research journals. this was done in order to integrate some additional observations into the scope of the main research inquiry (albeit from the perspective of a non-native who frequently global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5  of  13   worked one-on-one with community-level researchers to complete data analyses and written reports). this final qualitative analysis was completed following the interview/focus group study. results a. six challenge themes: four reoccurring themes about barriers to research emerged from the interviews and focus group with usic collaborators, while another two themes were found in a qualitative analysis of the author’s own research journals. theme 1: distrust and safety concerns. given how long first nations people have been marginalized in north america, it is understandable why several of the barriers to par related to issues of distrust and personal safety. these included distrust of: (i) academic researchers: one interviewee stated that it was difficult “getting people to accept research as a good word, not an evil one.” all participating first nations had previous experiences with researchers who had broken promises: following data collection, many researchers never again returned having earned their degree or secured their publication. they did not share reports, ask the community to check for accuracy, or respect the community’s ownership of the information provided. such negative experiences bred distrust and suspicion with regard to all research. as such, enticing community members to participate in research presented a challenge. one researcher stated that some people in her community simply “don’t do surveys”. it was also not uncommon for people to agree to participate but then to back out or not show up to scheduled appointments. many people were hesitant and uncertain about participating. “the most frequent exclamation or comment was: “not another survey?! […] what was the result of the last survey we did??” – community researcher #2 (ii) local collaborators: due to their easy accessibility, distrust for academics was often displaced onto the community members who were known to be their collaborators. community researchers talked about the barrage of questions and comments they received from their fellow community members. citizens also asked the researchers repeatedly when the final reports would be available. while positive that people seemed eager to see results, the researchers talked about the pressure this made them feel to deliver on usic’s promises and remain accountable. they also stated that it required immense patience to respond politely to the same issues over and over again. “there’s always some sort of a barrier or somebody questioning “why?” you know? i feel that there’s no trust.” – community supervisor #1 (iii) government: the project’s largest financial contributor was a national academic board, but supplementary funding also came from the department of indian and northern affairs canada (inac). interviewees noted that this branch of the government has had a very detrimental effect on the lives of many first nations people. levels of distrust varied from both community to community and from person to person. while community leaders gave consent for a ‘hands-off’ level of inac involvement, there remained individuals who were still uncomfortable with the arrangement. “some communities have been through some really negative processes with dia and inac. […] if you’ve been done to the backdoor by inac, it’s gonna be hard to bring that relationship into a positive mode.” – community researcher #1 (iv) privacy: concerns also emerged as a result of hiring local community global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6  of  13   members to collect the data. although few first nations people will share private information with complete strangers, gossip can be a major problem in small communities. as such, it was essential that community members trusted the local people hired as researchers to maintain confidentiality. additional responsibilities were also placed on local researchers to protect information that was not meant to be shared outside the community. “privacy rights are an issue and people have often mentioned this to me. there are things that are shared locally; however, there are personal things that are not meant to be shared.” – community researcher #9 (v) emotional safety: participants stated that a few survey questions were upsetting for individuals struggling with depression and other unresolved emotional issues. as a safeguard, each research team had created a list of their local counselling resources. in one instance, however, survey distribution triggered near community-wide hysteria because elders in this community had never discussed their residential school trauma. as a result, a few questions (that had not caused problems in the other communities) set off an intense reaction and the project came to a halt. researchers spoke of feeling deeply shaken by the pain they had inadvertently triggered. fortunately, a local group was contacted that helped the elders begin to participate in healing circles. after much discussion, the elders granted permission to resume distribution of the survey. “a lot of people are still hurting. a lot of people have a lot of old pent-up memories and stuff. there’s just a lack of trust.” – community researcher #4 theme 2: community readiness to engage. just because a chief and council gave permission for a project like usic to commence, it did not mean that ideal conditions for par were present, nor that the community was genuinely ready. i. council support: research tended to progress most smoothly when the chief and council members publically endorsed the project, acting as advocates and advisors. in contrast, other researchers described the challenge of working with a “hands-off” council that did not appear to be as actively interested in the research. in these situations, access to the leaders was limited to monthly council meetings which at times impeded progress. one community even withdrew after the chief and council discovered that negativity toward the leadership was being expressed in the focus groups: “the people that were criticized didn’t take it well and pretty much shut down the project. the community needed some of those big problems dealt with before they could think about the strengths of their community.” – academic administrator #1 ii. political stability: in some first nations when a local election occurred, the same group of people was re-elected and the research continued unencumbered. in other communities, local elections were contentious and all research came to a halt; the level of community distrust rose sharply and many citizens no longer felt comfortable disclosing personal opinions. researchers felt this presented a challenge in patience because there was nothing to do but wait for the environment to normalize. one community withdrew from the project following an election because the new chief and council opted not to continue the research partnership. iii. varying abilities of the supervisors: the community-level supervisors had very different levels of experience, self-confidence, and access to resources. some were novices who felt intimidated by the many responsibilities global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7  of  13   they were given. and whereas some supervisors took to the research methods very quickly, others needed more time and support to gain proficiency. some individuals were able to clearly articulate their needs, while others became avoidant in the face of problems. missed deadlines and phone meetings were sometimes a signal that something was not right and needed attention. it was not safe to assume that because things went well in one community, the same type of support would be sufficient in another. theme 3: maintaining motivation and productivity: usic was very ambitious in its aim to complete multi-method research in 8 first nations, and the lengthy project strained motivation, resources and relationships. at the outset, motivation was high, but as difficulties emerged and as the newness of the endeavour wore off, fatigue and loss of enthusiasm became increasingly problematic. i. nature of participatory work: interviewees cited the time-consuming nature of the project as a major challenge. the process of first convincing people to participate was lengthy. then collecting, analyzing, and writing-up data often turned out to be much more work than was originally expected. in community research, things rarely go exactly according to plan, and activities that sound simple, in theory, often prove otherwise. “just the runningaround stuff… like people call you when the survey’s done: “can you come pick it up?” so i go [to] pick it up and they won’t be home. […] like i’d have to get a ride down there and meet them at certain times and then they wouldn’t show up. or they’d have the survey but it wouldn’t be done and i’d have to go through it and say, “well, okay, you didn’t answer this and here’s one you didn’t answer…” – community researcher #4 ii. researcher turn-over: supervisors and academics spent a significant amount of time training community members to conduct the research according to usic methods and standards. it proved a test of their patience to then watch as people quit the project – thus, facilitating a need to hire and train others to take their place. people quit the project for a variety of reasons: to attend university, for better paying jobs, etc. others couldn’t balance the demands of the job with family obligations. some felt that the financial compensation wasn’t adequate, or they discovered research wasn’t something they enjoyed. “it’s tiring. it may be too much to ask of young, mostly female community members. it’s a lot to ask when they’re trying to learn how to do research at the same time and raise their families and sometimes go to school.” – academic administrator #1 theme 4: financial stresses. as stated above, low wages paid by the usic project resulted in community-level researchers leaving when other jobs presented themselves. when usic was designed, it proposed to pay typical postsecondary student wages to communitylevel researchers. thus, wages were low and, as opposed to an hourly wage, researchers received payment for completing tasks such as interviewing, transcribing and delivering reports. although it sometimes took many days to get one person to complete a survey, only a modest sum of money was received for each survey. while this inspired some researchers to work harder (so that it became worth their while financially), others became frustrated. postsecondary students accept low wages because they may have additional financial support, and they know that the work experience will help them to earn their global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8  of  13   degree. non-students, who are living far below the poverty line with families to support, in contrast, do not have the same luxury. researchers often could not afford to cover expenses such as gas mileage, even with later reimbursement. the slow-pace of compensation through a university’s financial department also became problematic. forms needed to be completed in full, signed by multiple parties, faxed in, and processed on the university’s biweekly payment schedule before any wages were deposited. some community-level supervisors revealed that they had paid researchers out of their own personal savings to avoid losing them. in other cases, local supervisors simply did not have the financial means to do so, and as a result, trained researchers were lost to better paying jobs. a lack of realistic financial planning in the beginning stages of the project meant that supplementary fundraising became an ever-increasing challenge for project administrators as the project went on. “ensure funding. funding, funding, funding is big one. if you can’t, they’ll stop. you’ll lose some of the very best people you have. people can only sacrifice so much.” – community supervisor #3 theme 5: pre-existing power differences. as stated in the introduction, the author began to observe throughout the course of the usic project that unequal power relations were affecting whose voices were heard (versus not) when project decisions were made. professors, chiefs and other high-ranking indigenous officials were accustomed to asserting their opinions and public-speaking, but many community-level researchers initially lacked this level of confidence and experience. they felt intimidated, self-doubting and disempowered. when speaking with such people individually, however, it became evident that they were self-censoring and not voicing valid concerns, questions, and suggestions to the larger group. often they would wait until for a private conversation with a visiting academic, along with an informal setting in which to talk confidentially – at which point, they would proceed to disclose their frustrations. theme 6: differing norms, expectations and priorities: i. the communities’ pace versus deadlines: first nations research requires working at the pace as set by the community, so that for example, if a community member passes away, everyone may stop work for several days to show respect and observe local practices. this has to be patiently respected, regardless of research deadlines. other times, the research shut down during council elections, or when the community returned to the land to hunt and fish. a pull between project deadlines and working at the communities’ pace, sometimes created a tension that was felt by all members of the project. researchers worried that their communities weren’t being respected and that the quality of data would suffer, if there was too much pressure regarding deadlines. they warned that their councils would withdraw support for the project if academics became pushy and demanding. on the other hand, the academics who had negotiated deals with funding agencies (in return for delivering products by certain dates) felt pressure to meet the deadlines in order to keep the project afloat financially. one academic administrator commented: “funders need timelines and papers need timelines and people you work with, but it sometimes just isn’t [possible]. that was really frustrating.” ii. “indian time” versus “academic time”: academics who work with first nations sometimes describe the challenges of global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9  of  13   “indian time” (i.e., working with people who prioritize family above career, and who operate more spontaneously than with advance scheduling). indeed, the project’s academics wished at times that the data collection would progress at a faster pace. a related challenge for the first nations occurred, however, when professors and students operated on “academic time” (i.e., according to their own autonomous schedules). the communities often expressed frustration over the slow pace of data analysis, writing and editing. delayed final reports made the first nations nervous because of the precedent set by previous unscrupulous academics. b. solutions to address core challenges: 1. strategies for building trust and accommodating community readiness i. cultivate respectful relationships: academics learned that trust can be gradually earned if one disproves negative stereotypes (about outsiders, academics, “the white man”, etc.) via one’s own actions. rather than getting upset or defensive (i.e., escalating tensions), it was a much better strategy to accept that these negative stereotypes exist due to historical precedent and then go out of your way to prove yourself different (i.e., humble, kind, openminded, respectful, trustworthy, etc.) through your own actions. respect and trust needed to be patiently earned, rather than expected or demanded, even if it required a lengthier stage of informal planning and getting to know the community before datacollection commenced. ii. the ocap principles: ownership, control, accessibility, possession (schnarch, 2004): open and transparent disclosure was another way of easing of concerns about the trustworthiness of the supporting academics. controversial funding sources were discussed immediately rather than downplayed. academics also learned the importance of notifying community supervisors ahead of time if they planned to share preliminary results (even positive comments about community strengths) at conferences, because this allowed the communities to retain control over what information was shared and with whom. the researchers also signed a confidentiality agreement with each participant, thus teaching citizens about participant rights and ethical research practices. and rather than waiting to submit a final report, draft summaries of preliminary findings (as data collection was still progressing) were welcomed with interest and appreciation by community leaders. the drafts gave community members a chance to provide feedback about language clarity and other issues, thus giving them a hand in cocreating final documents and enhancing the research’s usefulness to the community. iii. hire well-liked local researchers who genuinely care about the project: interviewees stated that hiring citizens who are well-liked and respected within the community was a key factor in establishing trust. it also helped to hire people who genuinely believed in the value of the project because, as the “face of the project”, enthusiasm seemed to spread when the researchers were highly motivated and excited about the project. hiring individuals from one (or more) large extended family also helped: “most people knew people in my family like my great-grandfather and certain other family members. like: “oh, that was your grandma? oh, gee! come on in!”[…] as soon as they figured out who i was and who i knew and where i came from, they opened up.” community researcher #4 iv. provide support based on community preferences: community global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  10  of  13   readiness cannot be forced, and as such, it may be helpful for academics to anticipate that challenges and delays will occur at all stages of research. one can then be ready to help generate ‘back-up plans’, while remaining positive, patient, flexible and persistent. it was important to listen to the preferences of each community and then provide suggestions and support in ways that respected those unique needs and inclinations. always “asking rather than assuming” helped to accommodate the immense diversity among first nations. as one administrator stated: “it’s not a cookie cutter approach or it’s not just top-down, where you come in and say “well, this is what works.” you still have to have some flexibility.” 2. strategies for maintaining motivation and productivity i. collaborate on research design and cultivate ownership: the importance of involving community-level researchers during the research design stage was one thing learned in retrospect. even though academics worked with the community researchers to compile a list of detailed responses that they could give to frequentlyasked-questions, researchers stated that they still grew frustrated trying to explain and defend research methods that a professor at a distant university had designed. data quality sometimes suffered when researchers were unable to convince individuals why they needed to respond to all questions, or when questions had not been adequately adapted to each community. ideally, academics should have presented the proposed research tools to the researchers in each community at the outset and asked for suggestions on how they could be improved. as well as heightening the quality of the research tools and delivery, this would have helped to cultivate a stronger sense of project ownership within the researchers, thus assisting with their motivation and making it easier for them respond to community members’ questions and concerns. ii. progressive training as research skills develop: in retrospect, several participants noted that the community researchers could have benefited from more on-going training (especially in data analysis techniques) as they gained proficiency with the methods. although requiring an investment of energy from supervisors and/or supporting academics, it may have helped the researchers’ motivation, empowerment and sense of ownership over the research. “that would have helped because once they really had their feet planted in what the research was about and had experienced what their own strengths and weaknesses were, they would have been able to be much more active learners in the training.” – academic administrator #1 iii. sufficient wages for low ses individuals: ideally, consideration of this issue should begin when completing initial funding applications. wages that are typically-paid to post-secondary students for research-assistant work are not sufficient (even as part-time employment) for individuals who may be living far below the poverty line and struggling to secure the basics. it is not at all empowering to feel unheard, and/or taken advantage of due to low wages and delays in receiving payment. iv. on-going communication and encouragement: community supervisors often took responsibility for lifting researchers’ spirits because on-going communication proved the best way to combat dwindling motivation. monthly conference calls also provided a chance for researchers to share their triumphs and frustrations (albeit only for those who were global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  11  of  13   comfortable sharing with the group). when one team was experiencing difficulty, other teams shared what had worked for them. when they could be afforded, national project meetings and community visits from supporting-academics also boosted spirits and energy. a project website with a private online chat-room were created to enhance communication, however, the majority of community-researchers could not afford regular internet access. with rapid advances in technology, the internet may now be a more viable way for collaborators to keep in touch. 3. strategies for breaking down power differences a. living on-reserve: the author of this article resorted to arranging room-andboard situations with families on-reserve as a form of cost-savings, however, it quickly became clear that living in the community with a family came with additional benefits. trusting relationships were established much more quickly. this in turn allowed the visiting academic to get a better understanding of community dynamics, and to tailor support to best meet local needs. power differences, distrust, and shyness were reduced when the privileged outsider put herself in the somewhat vulnerable position of depending on community members for rides, for access to meals, and for general entry into the community. i also tried my best to fit in with my host families and be a good houseguest, which entailed helping out with household chores, including babysitting. the communities carefully observed throughout this process and in the end deemed me “a good person with a gentle spirit”. once a trusting relationship was established, the research progressed more smoothly. indeed, it was while living on-reserve that a number of community researchers began to disclose their frustrations and concerns about not feeling heard. ii. accessible language: language has the ability to empower and invite individuals into a conversation, just as it also has the power to exclude and intimidate. one administrator theorized that usic succeeded because it was presented to the communities as a “strength-project” (an optimistic term) rather than “research” (a word which can have negative connotations in first nations). while living on-reserve, i began introducing myself as a “student” who goes to “school”. i deliberately avoided using words like university, ph.d., and graduate student on the grounds that everyone has been a “student” at one time in their life. by downplaying my status, conversations were easier to start because it was easier to find commonalities with people. self-deprecating humour was also useful for similar reasons. iii. boosting morale when needed: remaining optimistic and boosting the morale of others who might not be feeling confident can be one of the most important aspects of a supporting academic’s job. sometimes people get discouraged and motivation starts to dwindle if there is no one offering encouragement to keep going. as one researcher commented about her supervisor: “i can always go to him and there is no such thing as a stupid question. he’s always totally encouraged me.” – community researcher #1 researchers also talked about how usic challenged them to complete complex tasks of which they often thought they weren’t capable. but with support and encouragement, many became competent interviewers and focus group facilitators who presented their work at local meetings and academic conferences. “i have also been able to become more comfortable when global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  12  of  13   addressing groups of people. working on this project has given me the opportunity to meet more people and made me extra proud of my first nation.” – community researcher #5 similarly, researchers spoke about how they learned to boost the morale of participants when they were feeling shy and uncertain. in addition to emphasizing repeatedly that there are no right or wrong answers, many also began to employ self-deprecating humour to defuse tension and reassure people from the start that the sharing would take place in a safe and non-judgemental atmosphere. conclusion: usic was a successful par project in many respects. interviewees spoke positively about how the project promoted respect for local knowledge and enhanced community pride. citizens said that they learned new things about their community and became reacquainted with friends and family. by hiring community members, the first nations had ownership over the material they produced and local people took responsibility for safeguarding the collected data. citizens were, in turn, proud to see community members carrying out the research. “people are proud to be a part of the usic project and of being seen as a strong first nation. that in itself was often seen as a great accomplishment.” – community researcher #5 and yet pre-existing power differences, barriers to trust, and other misunderstandings did not resolve themselves simply because par methods were used. mohawk elder and professor dr. marlene brant-castellano warns: “research that reinforces powerlessness is basically harmful to health” (as cited in reading, 2003). ermine et al’s (2004) “ethical space” challenges academics to find ways of facilitating on-going dialogue in which even the most sociallymarginalized parties feel safe, valued and heard. this study confirms that it is always important to ask others for their opinions, rather than assuming you know. references chataway, c. j. (1998). native canada: the promise of research. history and philosophy of psychology bulletin, 10(1), 17-20. ermine, w., sinclair, r., & jeffery, b. (2004). the ethics of research involving indigenous peoples: report of the indigenous peoples’ health research centre to the interagency advisory panel on research ethics. regina, sk: indigenous people’s health research centre. menzies, c. r. (2001). reflections on research with, for, and among indigenous peoples. canadian journal of native education, 25, 19-36. mihesuah, d. a. (1998). natives and academics: researching and writing about american indians. lincoln, nb: university of nebraska press. reading, j. (2003). a global model and national network for aboriginal health research excellence. canadian journal of public health, 94(3), 185-189. robinson, e. (1997). research on mental health issues in native communities: how can it be useful? in c. oblin, l. j. kirmayer, k. gill, & e. robinson (eds.), “widening the circle: collaborative research for mental health promotion in native communities”, (pp. 98-102), proceedings of the conference ‘widening the circle: developing partnerships for aboriginal mental health, montreal, pq. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  13  of  13   schnarch, b. (2004). ownership, control, access, and possession (ocap) or selfdetermination applied to research: a critical analysis of contemporary first nations research and some options for first nations communities. journal of aboriginal health, 80-95. smith, l. t. (2005). on tricky ground: researching the native in the age of uncertainty. in n. k. denzin & y. s. lincoln (eds.), the sage handbook of qualitative research, (3rd edition) (pp. 85-107), thousand oaks, ca: sage. microsoft word 2009-0024-final.docx global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 interpersonal influences in the scale-up of male circumcision services in a traditionally non-circumcising community in rural western kenya alfredo f.x.o. obure, mphil, phd, is a behavioral research scientist at great lakes university of kisumu in kisumu, kenya. erick o. nyambedha, ma, phd is a medical anthropologist and head of department of sociology and anthropology at maseno university in kisumu, kenya. boniface o. oindo, msc, phd, is senior lecturer at school of environment and earth sciences (sees), and chairman of sees graduate studies at maseno university, in kisumu, kenya. authors’ note: please address correspondence to dr. alfredo f.x.o. obure, great lakes university of kisumu, p.o. box 2224, kisumu, kenya: e-mail: afxobure@gmail.com key words: hiv/aids prevention, male circumcision, sub-saharan africa, kenya, interpersonal influences. recommended citation: obure, afxo, nyambedha, eo, & oindo, bo. (2011). interpersonal influences in the scale-up of male circumcision services in a traditionally non-circumcising community in rural western kenya. global journal of community psychology practice, 1(3), 1-­‐11. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 of 11 interpersonal influences in the scale-up of male circumcision services in a traditionally non-circumcising community in rural western kenya alfredo f.x.o. obure great lakes university of kisumu, kisumu, kenya erick o. nyambedha department of sociology and anthropology, maseno university, kisumu, kenya boniface o. oindo school of environment and earth sciences, maseno university, kisumu, kenya abstract promoting male circumcision (mc) is now recognized as an additional, important strategy for the prevention of heterosexually acquired hiv infection in men, and plans are underway to scale-up this intervention especially in non-circumcising communities, with generalized hiv pandemic. this qualitative study identifies and characterizes the role of social and interpersonal factors in the scale-up of mc services in a rural non-circumcising community in western kenya. twenty-four sex-specific focus group discussions were conducted with a purposive sample of luo men and women (15-34 years). peer and youth groups, girlfriends and women, parents, and cultural political, religious, school leaders were identified as key influences in the scale-up of mc services. the study concludes that social and interpersonal forces create opportunities and constraints for scaling up the mc intervention. planners of mc projects should therefore harness the power of informal networks and social structures to enhance community engagement, motivate behaviour change and increase demand for mc services. introduction hiv/aids remains a critical challenge to socioeconomic development of many countries in subsaharan africa (ssa). as more people access the life-saving hiv care and treatment, more hiv infected people survive longer, leading to a slight increase in hiv prevalence, and many more new infections may occur for every additional person started on such treatment (joint united nations programme on hiv/aids [unaids], 2006; kenya aids indicator survey [kais, 2007). integration of evidence-based hiv preventive measures is the only realistic hope for stemming the hiv pandemic (bailey, et al., 2007; morris, 2007). promotion of condom use, reduction in sexual partners, and treatment for other sexually transmitted infections (sti) are some of the main intervention strategies that have been employed by national aids control programs. based on the results of three randomized control trials (auvert et al, 2005; bailey et al., 2007; gray et al., 2007) and other accumulated evidence showing that male circumcision (mc) reduces the risk of hiv acquisition, the world health organization (who) and unaids (2007) concluded that the efficacy of mc in reducing female to male hiv transmission is now proven beyond reasonable doubt, and recommended that mc should be considered as part of a comprehensive hiv prevention package. mc is the surgical removal of the foreskin of the penis and is one of the oldest and most common surgical procedures worldwide, undertaken for religious, cultural, social, and medical reasons. approximately 30% of adult men worldwide are circumcised. in ssa, about two-thirds of men are circumcised (unaids & who, 2007). many ssa countries are scaling medicalized mc services to bring more quality benefits of mc to more people over a wider geographical area more quickly, more equitably, and more lastingly. the need for scaling mc interventions in kenya is more urgent in nyanza province of western kenya than any other region of the country. although kenya’s overall hiv prevalence is estimated at 7.8%, nyanza province leads other regions with a 15.3% hiv prevalence (kais, 2007). the region is mostly inhabited by the luo, one of the largest ethnic groups in the country; there are around 40 indigenous ethnic groups in kenya. compared to other major ethnic global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 of 11 groups, hiv prevalence is highest among the luo at 21% (kenya demographic health survey [kdhs], 2003). unlike majority of other ethnic groups in kenya, the luo do not traditionally circumcise their males; approximately 90% of luo men are uncircumcised (agot, ndinya-achola, kreiss, & weiss, 2004). recent studies in kenya show that non-circumcised males have higher risk of hiv infection compared to circumcised males (agot et al., 2004; kais, 2007; kdhs, 2003). kais (2007) reported that 13% of men who were uncircumcised were hiv infected, compared with three percent of those who were circumcised. its high hiv prevalence, combined with its low mc prevalence make luo inhabited communities appropriate for scaling mc intervention. however, there are a wide range of behavioral, sociocultural, political, economic, and project design issues to consider in the context of scaling mc intervention, especially in traditionally noncircumcising communities (mcleroy et al., 1988; muula, 2007; simmons & shiffman, 2007). there is need to identify how interpersonal contact, informal communication, and social networks and channels of diffusion shape, can be harnessed to achieve faster and socially acceptable adoption (diaz & cabral, 2007; glanz et al., 2002; rollnick et al., 2002). although several previous studies have been conducted on acceptability of mc in traditionally non-circumcising communities in ssa (westercamp & bailey, 2007), most of these studies were done before mc was conclusively recommended as an additional hiv preventive strategy. in the context of scaling up mc intervention, there is need to understand how social forces shape both the demand for and supply of mc services. the purpose of this study was to identify and characterize how interpersonal factors may affect the decisions of males being offered mc in a rural non-circumcising community in western kenya, with high hiv prevalence. methods this study was a descriptive qualitative inquiry that focused on perceptions of youths and young adults of social factors that could shape both the demand for and supply of mc services in their community. this study was conducted in 6 randomly selected villages of nyando division, an impoverished area in rural western kenya. research activities were conducted during february and april of 2008. the research ethics committee of maseno university, kenya approved this study. before data collection, questions regarding procedures were addressed and participants provided written informed consent. participants purposeful sampling was used to recruit participants who were typically out-of-school male and female youths and young adults, ranging in age from 15 to 34 years. those in this age bracket are a sexually active high risk group for hiv infection, and males in this age set are target for projects promoting mc in kenya (gok, 2008). purposeful sampling enabled the researcher to seek out individuals who were able to help answer the research questions (ritchie & lewis, 2003). participants were recruited through local village elders and from established youth groups in the community. data collection and analysis focus group discussions (fgds) were used for data collection (bader & rossi, 1998). an fgd guide was developed and was comprised of a set of open-ended questions that covered three topical areas: knowledge and beliefs regarding mc; how adoption of mc can be enhanced in the community, and groups or individuals who had the greatest influence in community decision-making. the guide was translated from english into luo and back-translated. all discussions with males were moderated by the first author; a native female moderator, a sociologist trained in qualitative research methodology, led all discussions with females. two same-sex research assistants took detailed notes during male and female fgds. participants were given a choice of participating in the indigenous language, dholuo, or in kiswahili, or in english. debriefing sessions were held with research assistants to identify emerging issues and memos were written for further exploration in subsequent fgds. a total of 24 fgds were conducted; each session included 6 to 12 participants. proceedings of each fgd were transcribed immediately after each session and later translated into english. fgd narratives were imported into the atlas.ti (version 5.0), software (scientific software development, 2004) for analysis. the first author reviewed, coded, and analyzed all data. through content analysis, transcripts were first coded for concepts, dominant themes, and variability (charmaz, 2006; ritchie & lewis, 2003). this initial analysis was segmented by target population (male or female fgds); then compared across the target global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 of 11 populations. quotations relevant to each of the categories were identified from the transcripts for qualitative reporting. to establish rigor and manage threats to trustworthiness (ritchie & lewis, 2003), reflexivity and auditing were employed during the initial analysis. peer reviewing and member checks were used to enhance validity of the data (bowen, 2005; ritchie & lewis, 2003). in peer reviewing, the second author, who has expertise in qualitative methods, examined the fgd transcripts, coding sheets (which identified concepts, categories, and themes), and the summary of the findings (bowen, 2005). the peer review identified the analysis as being completed in a logical and systematic manner and the findings were reasonable and accurate based on field data. member checks were conducted by telephoning some of the fgd participants and checking with them the accuracy of our result summaries and observations (ritchie & lewis, 2003). crosschecking with these participants helped the researcher to maintain reflexivity by encouraging self-awareness and self-correction. this process allowed for participant validation of the findings (bowen, 2005). results there were 126 males and 107 females who participated in 24 fgds in the study. the majority had six or more years of education, and worked in petty trade/small business, farming, or reported that they were unemployed. the results for this study are organized according to six main categories that emerged from data analysis. for each theme, several categories that emerged during data analysis are presented, supported by relevant quotations. interpersonal influences in male decision making regarding mc included peers and youth groups, women and girlfriends, parents, community elders and political leaders, church leaders, and the school system, which includes teachers. peer influence discussants described several positive aspects of peer influence in circumcision preference. most of the male discussants spoke positively about the kinds of influence their peers had and how youth group and peer norms could encourage them to seek circumcision. one discussant, who disclosed that he had an appointment to circumcise at the sub-district hospital that day, had this to say: fellow youth role models are best placed to mirror the successes of mc to fellow peers. at the moment i have about 10 of my peers waiting for me to get circumcised. they are all waiting for the outcome of my procedure. i am going to be their role model. they are all saying that if i am successful, then they will follow me. they are all putting a “lets wait and see” attitude. i know once mine is done, they will all want to go for it (male, 27 years old). males in the community, who have already circumcised, were identified as source of influence, and as role models, who could motivate more youth to circumcise. discussants expressed that using already circumcised youth from the community was one way of demystifying mc and disputing negative community beliefs about mc. one discussant observed: there is this saying that “set a thief to catch a thief”. youth can influence themselves… the youth who have been circumcised should be involved to tell us about the benefits of mc and their experiences… or what they have gotten… some of these people like politician may be forcing you with something he himself hasn’t done…and is not even thinking about doing (male, 23 years old). another male discussant observed: if mc is targeting the youth, then let the projects involve the youth. i have seen many cases in this community when youth agendas are hijacked and championed by very old people…and they eat all the money. i think it is a youth issue and we should be involved. we have seen projects here failing because they are run by foreigners or people we cannot identify with. even mc, i think there are youth practitioners who can do this thing [provide mc services]. the youth must be the solution of their problem… that age gap is a barrier [mc promoted by older people]. for it to succeed well, the youth must be involved. there are many youth networks and groups in this community (male, 32 years old). most of the discussants were aware of existing youth groups to which they identified. they observed that these youths must be actively involved in the promotion of mc services in the community. one female discussant observed: i also think that these mc projects must actively involve local youth groups. these groups can organize for some educational sharing sessions that are quite convincing… because it is global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 of 11 interactive…or even similar seminars. in such groups males who have circumcised can share or even show others how a circumcised penis looks like live… just knowing that one of us is circumcised will be a big source of influence… we will then realize that circumcision is thus not such a big deal…it can happen, it can work…it is not something so far from us… it makes it real… for now, circumcision is still just something talked about…but you know there must be a reason to push you to even think of circumcising (female, 21 years old). influence of female sexual partners the role of female sexual partners in motivating for circumcision of males in the community also featured prominently in most of the discussions. there were three main common arguments from both male and female fgds in support of women’s involvement. firstly, the empowerment of women in sexual decision-making process was singled as one of the pillars to the success of condom use for hiv prevention. some discussants observed how they have been denied sex at the “heat of the moment’ because their female partners insisted that condoms had to be used. the following quotations illustrate discussions on the role of women in condom promotions and how they can also influence mc uptake: my friend, if the lady insists that you use a condom … and you are already prepared for sexual intercourse…you may curse not having one in your pockets. it happened to me... these days, i always arm myself with one…just in case. women are good at having what they want at that sexual moment (male, 24 years old). you know like with condoms, if a woman says no condom no sex, then men would look for it anywhere… so if they insist on circumcision, then it could work... mothers would socialize girls to prefer circumcised men… so the girl would not want me if am not circumcised… she first asks if i am sharpened [circumcised]… that is the first qualification for sex (male, 24 years old). the success of condoms for hiv prevention was on the strength of women. women should begin to insist on having sex with circumcised men. you will see men flocking the health facilities because of the influence of women (female, 31 years old). there were several suggestions from female discussants on how to engage male partners in dialogue to motivate them to seek mc services. the most common suggestion among the discussants was a soft persuasive dialogue with male partners and not pressuring them into seeking mc. one of the discussants expressed: to women, men are very easy to deal with… i think we can influence the men even more than their fellow men… you just wait until you are relaxed on the pillow, then you just feed him slowly with words… you don’t scare him or make him feel that he is not satisfying you… or that he is not man enough… you just have him thinking about it over some time… don’t rush him, men will get scared and feel that the woman is now trying to take charge and dictate him (female, 29 years old). secondly, discussants concurred that women in their community have been worst hit by the hiv pandemic and should thus play a central role in its preventive efforts. both male and female discussants acknowledged that women were more vulnerable to hiv infection because of their status in society compared to men and because of the social construction of sexual decisions. it emerged that most women in relationships have less say about when and how they want to have sex, and are not always able to negotiate for monogamy or secure sex practices. female discussants observed that their male counterparts were culturally permitted to have multiple partners and put them at greater risk for hiv. these factors were seen to impact on the actual role of women in hiv prevention. one of the discussants expressed: our men are allowed to marry more than one wife…our culture allows them to have multiple partners. those with more are heroes. but we [women] patiently remain faithful, waiting for them to get hiv elsewhere and as we welcome them back, we receive hiv. you know we are culturally obligated to just give it the man …i mean sex…if mc has been found to prevent them, we want to be involved in speaking to our men to protect u by getting circumcised. if he refuses to use condom…they often do, then there is also the circumcision that can make him not get hiv outside (female, 32 years old). there was consensus among female discussants that if mc has a hiv preventive effect to men, it would equally be protective to them. one of the female discussants observed: i also think that if my partner is circumcised, then my chance of getting hiv is lower when i global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 of 11 sleep with him. if i add this to the use of condoms, then i think i have double protection against aids. this is because they do not use condoms consistently and if you insist on it, then he accuses you of not trusting him (female, 21 years old). however, few male discussants were opposed to involving women in promotion of mc services. their main concern was that it would lead to stigmatization of males who do not circumcise. one discussant had this to say: women will begin to isolate men who do not circumcise… and if the couple gets hiv, an accusation finger will be pointed to the man because he is not circumcised” (male, 32 years old). some female discussants observed that they would face major challenge or even domestic violence were they to suggest mc to their male partners because it was not culturally appropriate for women to suggest sexual options. one discussant expressed: he may perceive you are a prostitute…that you have been unfaithful to him and was experimenting with other men outside… let me tell you…even if you were to ask him to try another sex style, he may ask you where you leaned it from…this makes us passive players in sex…most women have sex to satisfy the man. most of us do not enjoy sex really… the more the man gets his rounds, the more he is satisfied… he does not consider you…so imagine you were to come home and start telling him about the need to get his penis cut… he can give you a hot slap… it is like you have been sexing another man (female, 29 years old). parental influences results of qualitative analysis indicated that parents played a key role in planning and implementing mc projects in the nyando community, especially by motivating and supporting circumcision of male children and adolescents. discussants observed that perceived support or endorsement for mc from male household heads or fathers would be useful to enhance uptake of the service among youth. there were several justifications for this argument. first, most male youth mentioned that they look up to their fathers as role models and would be inclined to circumcise if the male parent suggested it. one discussant observed: ‘i would certainly do it if my father asked me to. i respect his decisions… they [decisions] are meant to protect me” (male, 18 years old). secondly, male discussants observed that moral support and encouragement from their fathers during healing process would be vital to reassure them of having made the correct decision. some observed that on sexual and reproductive matters, they would rely on the support of their fathers so that they don’t feel guilty of making a wrong decision. one of them had this to say: you know when your old man [father] supports you, then you also go for it head-high [motivated, with confidence], and you know that you have made the right decision. if things get worse [adverse effects, complications] then you know he will still encourage and support you. just like i would talk to him when i have an sti… i know he will be mad and i will get a long lecture, but he is a man, he will understand that these things happen (male, 23 years old). thirdly, it emerged from qualitative analysis of fgd data that fathers were considered a major influence in household decision-making process and because of these power dynamics, their support for mc would enhance it uptake among their sons. discussants mentioned that male household heads influenced almost all economic decisions in the household, including distribution of household labour, and determining how household resources are expended. one of the discussants said: for example, our parents should be part of those supporting us in the process, including financial charges that we may not know until after circumcising. again fathers are culturally the main decision makers for households. they can really champion this thing. if your father decides that you are to get circumcised, then it will be done. they are the centers of power in the family … you cannot neglect the father… [they] should be targeted first, as men and as deciders in their families (male, 21 years old). the role of mothers was particularly evident in neonatal/infant circumcision. discussants mentioned that one of the roles of mothers was to care for the health of their children. they were expected to “feed them, care from them, and protect them from diseases” (male discussant, 34 years old). for example, it was expected of mothers to remember vaccination dates of their children and ensure they are taken for vaccinations to prevent diseases. a discussant said: in the same way that mothers made decisions about healthcare needs of their infants, they could also have a major role in making decisions global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 of 11 of whether or not to circumcise their sons (female, 28 years old). one discussant, single mother, described this perception as follows: in fact i have encouraged my boyfriend to go for it. i am even thinking of taking my [3 year old] son for circumcision (female, 23 years old). on the need for parents to be involved in circumcision decision making, one male discussant had the following to say: i think we should also involve parents, especially mothers…let them decide and circumcise infants or pre-school kids…so that they grow up already circumcised and semi-protected…you know since this is not our culture, it can work best if parents decide for us just as they do to protect us when we are young and school us to secure our future…what is that future if you may die because of sexual reasons that can be avoided just by a cut that heals in a matter of days (male, 22 years old). specifically, the involvement of mothers in deciding whether or not to circumcise their infant sons was emphasized in many of the discussions. one discussant observed: when still at the health centre, the mother is counseled and allowed to make decision that will protect the child in future. mothers must protect their children. it is their duty. why wait for the boy to make the decision himself yet this thing is helpful? you know, convincing an adult is very difficult... if the penis is left to grow bigger, the adult male will begin to fear pain because they have learned that circumcision is very painful… the rumours will discourage him. it should be included in the maternal and child health prenatal counseling package… so that mothers can decide (male, 31 years old). influence of community elders and political leaders discussants in all fgds stressed the need to identify local sources of social influence that can effectively facilitate community involvement in planning and implementation of mc projects and ensure cooperation from influential members and make use of them without reinforcing harmful power dynamics or hierarchies. village elders, chiefs, politicians, religious leaders and school teachers were frequently mentioned as opinion influencers, who could facilitate community acceptability and uptake of mc services. some discussants observed that the endorsement of community opinion leaders was important if projects promoting it would have favorable cultural environment to promote it. a discussant observed: you know, the luo are a structured community; we have our elders and leaders, who are like the cultural watchmen. this circumcisions touches on our culture and there is need to talk to the luo council of elders so that they give it a green light. if they oppose it, projects promoting it will have it very difficult even to talk at a baraza [local community meeting]. there is need to begin with and get the blessings of elders. our major politicians should also be talked to so that they support or simply speak something positive about circumcising males (male, 31 years old). another discussant observed: we should have our elders involved in this… just like the luo council of elders… if they are made to be part of this thing, then we will start seeing it as normal… but if they continue criticizing male circumcision for cultural and political reasons, then these projects cannot go anywhere. the elders can be a very big barrier. we need to involve them (male, 32 years old). there was however no consensus from the group discussions that the community elders had to endorse mc for it to be considered a public health intervention. some discussants were emphatic the decision to circumcise was an individual’s personal decision and did not need any endorsement from luo elders. one of the discussants expressed: it is fine to tell elders about health benefits of circumcision. they can talk to males in their communities to consider circumcising. but i think circumcision is an individual’s decision…elders must not decide for me about it…did elders sit and endorse that luos stop the initiation rite of removing their lower teeth? elders cannot decide for me about something that is useful to me personally, and which affects my own body. non-circumcision does not have any cultural significance among the luo. why should we rely on elders’ decisions or community direction about it? circumcision is being introduced for health reasons and not as a cultural practice (male, 34 years old). on the role of local politicians, one respondent had the following to say: let us see them [politicians] supporting this thing [mc scale-up] fully as a special global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 of 11 intervention …even through being involved in organizing mobile mc services… most of these politicians, like our mps [parliamentarians], have a way around with unemployed youth… most of the time when they are in the village, youth flock their homes waiting for ‘gonywa’ [hand-outs] at the end of the day. it is here [these occasions] that they can also convince us and even support us [financial support during healing] to do it… if he tells the youth about the value of this thing [mc] then it could work magic… (male, 20 years old). discussants expressed that local leaders play a persuasive role in influencing circumcision-seeking behaviour among males in their communities. the multiple implications of their influence positive and negative need to be considered when designing mc interventions. influence of religious leaders the role of religious leaders and structures was also emphasized in most fgds. discussants expressed that many people look up to their religious leaders for direction and many young males would most likely trust them. one discussant expressed this perception as follows: the pastors in churches should talk about this thing [mc intervention]. pastors are always considered right... what they say is good and coming from a messenger of god (female, 19 years old). there was also a suggestion from discussants that churches provided a key forum on which the youth and young adults could be reached. must youths go to church, almost all, only very few of us don’t... in church, this thing [mc intervention] can be discussed… religious leaders have a big audience every week, and even those who seek advice from them. they can even set up youth conventions to discuss mc and why it is important…it can help a lot. they can mobilize and influence us [male, 22 years old). another discussant, who introduced himself as a religious leader, said: our church [the catholic] has been opposed to condom use. circumcision is in the bible and jesus himself was circumcised. the church should take a central role in teaching the youth about the benefits of mc. we must be involved as church leaders in hiv prevention efforts… it is our moral duty to protect our people… but this does not mean we promote sex out of wedlock. abstinence and faithfulness among married partners still remain key messages of the church. mc only comes in because the youth have a hot blood [sexually active] and cannot be predicted…anything can happen when a young man meets a woman and their blood get hot. reason will jump through the window…this is where mc can help (male, 33 years old). some participants indicated that their churches have hiv prevention seminars and workshops for their youth, and even older members of the church, and could be a key channel of advocacy. one of the discussants said: in our church, every last sunday of the month, the youth meet after church services to discuss issues relating to sexual health. our pastor attends some of these sessions… i think the role of the church cannot be ignored at all. you know, the church cannot be opposed to circumcision because even jesus [biblical christ] was circumcised (female, 18 years old). one discussant was hesitant about the positive influence of the church, and had this to say: the church could complicate issues. they always talk of morality and abstinence without seeing that abstinence has 99% failure rate. i know if they do not get the information that circumcision is also for personal hygiene and prevention of other diseases, they may begin to shoot it down just like they are doing with condom use. they [the church leaders] need to be targeted with knowledge [sic] about the general health role of circumcision (male, 23 years old). evidently, discussants were of the view that religious leaders and structures are influential entities in their communities with the power to address major social issues that affect their society, including that of hiv pandemic. they also have much potential in shaping people’s attitudes and circumcision seeking behaviors, and should be actively involved as advocates and as channels through which mc messages reach the wider community. influence of local schoolteachers discussants also mentioned that the school system and teachers also had a key influence on youth and could play a role in motivating circumcision seeking behaviour. one of the discussants expressed this perception as follows: i also think teachers should also be in a better position to influence youth… they are in greater global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 of 11 contact to the youth [sic]… most of the time, youth are either school-going or if they are not, they still look up to and interact with their teachers… the relationship between teacher and pupil doesn’t seem to end… teacher imparts the knowledge to the students… if they [teachers] are involved, the youth will have a changed opinion because what the teacher tells me is the right thing. even retired teachers just sitting at home can be involved in talking to the youth who have left school (male, 17 years old). most discussants expressed that teachers provide valuable information to school-going youth about what health issues are important to them. discussants were of the view that schools were an important venue for discussing and providing health messages relating to sexual and reproductive health, and in changing attitudes and beliefs relating to mc. discussion in this study, we found that peer groups and established youth forums play a facilitative role in motivating uptake of mc interventions, and thus the successful implementation of mc projects. these results are consistent with previous studies on the role of peer groups and youth organizations in facilitating uptake of hiv preventive interventions (bianchi et al., 2003; flood, 2003; powers & tiffany, 2006). the results support the social ecological model of health promotion (glanz et al., 2002; mcleroy et al., 1988). active involvement of local youth organizations, and other informal networks would significantly function to motivate demand for mc services and facilitate the successful scale-up of mc services. this study has shown that the role of women in mc scale-up cannot be ignored, and confirm previous findings on the pivotal place of women in hiv prevention through adoption of safe sexual behaviours among men (richard et al., 1996). previous studies have shown that women are likely to play a central role in motivating uptake of mc among their male partners (westercamp & bailey, 2007). women are likely to have an indirect influence, especially because of the male perception that women enjoy sex more with circumcised men (westercamp and bailey, 2007). these results suggest that women in sexual relationships have an influence on how mc is successfully planned and scaled-up as a public health intervention. thus, mc projects should make strategic efforts to target and actively involve women in planning and implementation of programs and activities related to mc advocacy. the influence of women in the mc uptake process may however be subdued by oppressive gender and sexual relations. there is need to create gender-interactive forums for community dialogue between men and women, in which they learn more about mc as a hiv preventive measure and a public health intervention. furthermore, this study has shown that parents have a major role in decision-making relating to circumcision–seeking behavior. these results are in consonance with findings of previous studies which show the importance of parents and families in the prevention of hiv among adolescents and youth (romer et al., 1999). parents are significant role models to their children, support to their developmental trajectories, and direct and shape much of their children’s decisions (henrich et al., 2006). this implies that targeting and involving parents as advocates, deciders and influencers, and motivators of circumcision-seeking behaviour is a priority area for mc scale-up projects in noncircumcising communities. the role of local community opinion leaders in influencing mc scale-up was another key finding of that study. previous studies have also found that community involvement and participation in hiv prevention projects begins with the identification and mapping of popular opinion leaders (romer et al., 1999). major health promotion theories support the thesis that goodwill and support from political and religious leaders in the intervention community is important in facilitating successful planning and implementation of the health intervention (glanz et al, 2002; rollnick et al., 2002). this study finding therefore implies that projects seeking to plan and implement mc interventions must actively seek the involvement and support of community opinion leaders, including religious, political and cultural leaders. the introduction of mc on a scale that would generate population-level health outcomes requires broad societal acceptance (who/unaids, 2008). there is need for enhanced community-wide education and promotional activities that target both proximal and distal factors in the environment that facilitate changes in community-wide beliefs about mc. these promotional activities should not only motivate mc services-seeking behaviours among the target population, but also seek the persuasive support of other interpersonal influences. furthermore, the efforts towards effective mc promotion, education and information should be intensified through all channels such as radio, drama and peer groups. local community theatres, local structures like schools and churches, and local global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 of 11 community gatherings (barazas) are important avenues through which such promotional messages can be passed or in which community dialogue forums can be facilitated. community engagement in such dialogue could be done through the establishment of network of peer groups, village educators and volunteers who are respected people in the local communities. however, key audiences for advocacy should be strategically determined so that messages which directly meet the needs and interests of these audiences are developed, tested and implemented. references agot, k. e., ndinya-achola, j. o., kreiss, j. k., & weiss, n. (2004). risk of hiv-1 in rural kenya: a comparison of circumcised and uncircumcised men. epidemiology, 15(2), 157-163. auvert, b., taljaard, d., lagarde, e., sobngwitambekou, j., sitta r., & puren, a. (2005). randomized, controlled intervention trial of male circumcision for reduction of hiv infection risk: the anrs 1265 trial. plos med, 2 (11), e298 doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020298 bader, g. e., & rossi, c. a. (1998). focus groups: a step by step guide. san diego, ca: the bader group. bailey, r. c., moses, s., parker, c. b., agot, k., maclean, i., krieger, j. n., et al. (2007). male circumcision for hiv prevention in young men in kisumu, kenya: a randomized controlled trial. lancet, 369, 643–656. bailey, r. c., muga, r., poulussen, r., & abicht, h. (2002). the acceptability of male circumcision as a strategy to reduce hiv infections in nyanza province, kenya. aids care, 14(1), 27-40. bianchi, a., bishara, d. & enekwe, p. (2003). friends inviting friends: participant-driven recruitment in an hiv prevention research project. community youth development journal, 4(1), 26-31. bowen, g. l. (2005). preparing a qualitative research-based dissertation: lessons learned. the qualitative report, 10(2), 208-222. retrieved january 5, 2008, from http://www.nova.edu/ssss/qr/qr102/bowen.pdf charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. thousand oaks, ca: sage. diaz, m. & cabral, f. (2007). an innovative educational approach to capacity building and scaling up reproductive health services in latin america. in r. simmons, p. fajans and l. ghiron (eds). scaling up health service delivery: from pilot innovations to policies and programmes. geneva, switzeland: who flood, m. (2003) lads in latex? why young heterosexual men don’t use condoms. impact. trust journal of national aids, 4,10-11. glanz, k., rimer, b. k. & lewis, f. m. (2002). health behavior and education: theory, research, and practice (3rd ed). san francisco, calif: jossey-bass. government of kenya (2008). speech by the rt. hon. raila amolo odinga, prime minister, on release of the kenya aids indicator survey 2007 report. retrieved july 30, 2008, from http://www.communication.go.ke/media gray, r. h., kigozi, g., serwadda, d., makumbi, f., watya, s., nalugoda, f., et al. (2007). male circumcision for hiv prevention in men in rakai, uganda: a randomized trial. lancet, 369, 657–666. henrich c. c., brookmeyer k. a., shrier l. a., & shahar g. (2006). supportive relationships and sexual risk behavior in adolescence: an ecological-transactional approach. journal of pediatric psychology, 31(3), 286 297. kenya aids indicator survey (2007). preliminary results of the 2007 kenya aids indicator survey. nairobi: national aids/stis control program kenya demographic and health survey (2003). the kdhs 2003: key findings. calverton, maryland, usa: cbs, moh & orc macro. mcleroy, k. r., bibeau, d., steckler, a. & glanz, k. (1988). an ecological perspective on health promotion programs. health education quarterly, 15, 351–377. morris, b. j. (2007). why circumcision is a biomedical imperative for the 21st century. bioessays, 29(11), 1147–1158. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 of 11 muula, a. s. (2007). male circumcision to prevent hiv transmission and acquisition: what else do we need to know? aids and behavior, 11, 357-363. powers, j. l. & tiffany, j. s. (2006) engaging youth in participatory research and evaluation. journal of public health management & practice, 12(suppl.6), s79-s87. ritchie, j. & lewis, j. (eds.) (2003). qualitative research practice. a guide to social science students and researchers. london: sage. rollnick, s., mason, p., & butler, c. (2002). health behavior change. new york: churchill livingstone. romer d., stanton b., galbraith j., feigelman s., black m. m., & li x. (1999). parental influence on adolescent sexual behavior in high-poverty settings. archives of pediatric and adolescent medicine, 153(10), 1055 1062. scientific software development. (2004). atlas.ti: the knowledge workbench (version 5.0). berlin: atlas.ti scientific software. simmons, r. & shiffman, j. (2007). scaling up health service innovations: a framework for action. in r. simmons, p. fajans, and l. ghiron (eds). scaling up health service delivery: from pilot innovations to policies and programmes. geneva, switzeland: who unaids & who. (2006). aids epidemic update: december 2006. geneva, switzerland: joint united nations programme on hiv/aids (unaids) and world health organization (who). retrieved october 14, 2007, from http://www.unaids.org/en/knowledgecentre /hivdata/epiupdate/epiupdarchive/2006/ default.asp unaids & who (2007). male circumcision: global trends and determinants of prevalence, safety and acceptability. geneva: unaids westercamp, n., & bailey, r. c. (2007). acceptability of male circumcision for prevention of hiv/aids in sub-saharan africa: a review. aids and behaviour, published online oct 20, 2006. doi:10.1007/s10461-006-9169-4. who / unaids (2007). new data on male circumcision and hiv prevention: policy and program implications. geneva, switzerland: joint united nations programme on hiv/aids (unaids) and world health organization (who). who/unaids (2008). operational guidance for scaling up male circumcision services for hiv prevention. joint united nations programme on hiv/aids (unaids) and world health organization (who). microsoft word 2013-002-minigrant-20130930.docx community and cultural responsivity: climate change research in tuvalu laura kati corlew, east-west center sharon m. johnson-hakim, scra mini-grant team the community mini-grant was founded in 2010 with the intention of supporting small, timesensitive community-based projects that are consistent with scra’s mission, principles, and goals. we are happy to support the great work being done by scra members and their community partners, and even happier to be able to highlight examples of this work and share them with the gjcpp readership. below, dr. laura kati corlew provides us with insight into research on the community and cultural impacts of climate change in tuvalu, as well as a description of the impact that community mini-grant funding had on implementing a culturally responsive research and dissemination process. research overview i first became interested in the cultural impacts of climate change through my interest in social and environmental justice. living on the island of oʻahu, the unique threats of climate change to the communities in the pacific region began to seem more personal. before i began this research, i had no direct connection to tuvalu itself, although the more i read about, thought about, and talked about the country, the more i began to hear about friends of friends and colleagues of colleagues who were from or had been to tuvalu. we say in the pacific that “we are a series of islands connected by the ocean” (as opposed to divided by the ocean). community connections are important, even if one must follow the chain two or three degrees. i had never been to tuvalu and i did not know anyone from tuvalu. regardless, connections were being made and i wanted to learn more. my dissertation research on the cultural impacts of climate change in tuvalu was funded by a series of small grants. the university arts & sciences student research award funded a preliminary research trip, which ensured that i was able to develop a strong dissertation research proposal on site and in collaboration with the community i sought to learn more about (corlew, 2011). the key to this preliminary exploration was that i would be able to ask tuvaluans themselves how to best to study “the cultural impacts of climate change in tuvalu” in a way that made sense in tuvalu and from which the results would be useful to tuvaluans. this was especially important since i was an outsider – any proposal i could develop on my own in another country could not possibly accurately address this research theme. the gartley research award from the university of hawaiʻi’s department of psychology then funded travel and research materials during the major research data-collection period. this funding guaranteed that the research procedures, designed with tuvaluan collaboration, could be carried out as proposed. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 finally, the scra community mini-grant funded several culturally responsive elements that were specifically catered to this research in this community. overview of tuvalu tuvalu is a low-lying island nation in the south pacific (see image 1). its population is about 11,000 people who live on about 15 square miles of land that is divided into nine islands and atolls scattered across an ocean area roughly the size of california, nevada, and oregon combined. the primary language in tuvalu is tuvaluan, a polynesian language closely related to the samoan language, however as a result of colonization by the british, most tuvaluans also speak english fluently. tuvalu is a developing nation, considered a least developed country (ldc) by the united nations (2011). this research project took place on the capitol atoll of funafuti, the most populous atoll, home to about 5,000 people. funafuti is a major destination point for domestic migration because it is the center of government, job opportunities, education (i.e., fetuvalu high school and the university of the south pacific, tuvalu campus), and has access to foreign commerce and travel. funafuti is the site of tuvalu’s major seaport as well as its international airport. image 1. map of tuvalu in the south pacific. (image retrieved from http://www.globalgreenhouse-warming.com/images/tuvalumap.jpg) climate change in tuvalu as a low-lying island nation, tuvalu is projected to become uninhabitable due to sea level rise in the next 50 to 100 years (ipcc, 2007; karl, melillo, & peterson, 2009). the unjust paradox of climate change is that those who are least responsible for causing it are often the most threatened (see image 2). tuvalu and other states with similar levels of development are at the bottom of the list of countries whose emissions are the driving forces behind climate change (ray, 2011). however, many adaptations require access to funds, infrastructure, and physical resources that are not readily available to a small island state, making tuvalu differently vulnerable than the low-lying island of manhattan, for example. tuvalu has been active on the world stage with this inherent justice issue, advocating that wealthy, industrialized nations mitigate climate change global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 with emission reductions and assist small island states and other developing nations with expensive adaptations. image 2. coastal erosion in the funafuti atoll, associated with high tides and sea level rise. (corlew, 2013). the human dimensions of climate change climate change should not be considered solely in terms of the physical sciences, but also with the social sciences. physical upheavals of weather and climate will directly affect social systems and community well-being. for example, many pacific islands are experiencing increases in drought and a simultaneous increase in storms (keener, marra, finucane, spooner, & smith, 2012). heavy rains that interrupt dry periods can be damaging to struggling crops, or cause flood runoff into the ocean rather than replenishing groundwater. freshwater security is therefore a major issue in terms of drinking water, crops and cattle, and island ecosystems that pacific islanders depend upon to survive. food and water insecurity, as well as repeated storms or disaster events, threaten societal structures and the daily community operations. time and resources that could be devoted to daily lives and well-being are instead diverted to survival and recovery. in essence, when environmental stability breaks down so too does societal stability (bender, 2013). the long-term consequences are arguably more severe (and projected to occur on a shorter timeframe) in developing and island nations than wealthy, industrialized, and continental countries. with sea level rise, some coastal communities in the united states may have to shift roads and buildings inland up to a mile or more over the next hundred years. however, a narrow, low-lying atoll nation does not have “inland” space. there is no higher ground. there is no domestic land that will be safe from sea-level rise. if and when these communities are forced to move, they must migrate internationally (see video 1). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 [insert video about here. caption: video 1. tidal flooding in funafuti, high tide at the january full moon. (corlew, 2013).] tuvaluans have lived in tuvalu for thousands of years, and despite a history of colonization, tuvaluans still own every square inch of tuvalu. tuvaluan cultures were developed in their islands. tuvaluan community practices and daily life are based in their islands. their place, their community structures, their cultural practices, and their daily family lives are all highly integrated with each other. therefore the threat of climate change to their place is a threat to cultural, community, and family practices. tuvaluans today, when considering the impacts of climate change, must consider the possibilities of drastic changes within their lifetimes, the lifetimes of their children, and their grandchildren. if the islands do become uninhabitable in the next 50 to 100 years and tuvaluans must move from their place, it will cause a wholesale change to the tuvaluan way of life within the next few generations. the migration of an entire country means, at best, that the entire country must adapt their culture within a new shared space on foreign land. at worst it means many thousands of individuals or families will be scattered across the globe, experiencing their cultural shifts in relative isolation from each other. community and cultural responsivity in the research process beginning with the preliminary research trip to tuvalu, i had the good fortune to be invited to stay with a tuvaluan family. the siones welcomed me into their home and made sure i knew about and attended as many cultural and community events in funafuti as possible (see image 3). my tuvaluan family also took on the role of “key informants,” patiently translating and explaining conversations, events, and cultural meanings to me. my tuvaluan grandfather, sir tomu sione, is a former governor general and was the current minister of health at the time of this first visit. he answered all of my questions and spent countless hours telling me stories about past and present life in tuvalu, and discussing the government’s positions and actions on climate change. my tuvaluan siblings and friends took me around to informal parties and formal celebrations. they told me about their jobs and education and the economic and cultural shifts they have seen in tuvalu during the recent period of development. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 image 3. segali sione prepares the author to attend the niutao island boxing day fatele, or celebration (corlew, 2011). i visited dozens of ngos and government agencies that work with climate change, culture, and community affairs. most people i spoke with offered candid opinions about elements of research and projects that were successful in and beneficial to the community. i was also able to establish a collaboration with the office of community affairs to develop research methods and questions that make sense from a tuvaluan perspective. director lanieta faleasiu has been an invaluable resource for candid feedback as i developed and implemented my dissertation research, and she has been a good friend. this preliminary research trip yielded extensive results in terms of what tuvaluan community leaders and professionals perceived to be useful, beneficial, and culturally responsive from foreign research. these elements were then designed into the research procedures in five major ways. the scra community mini-grant supplemented or funded in full these culturally responsive elements, thereby increasing the research’s cultural validity and potential usefulness to the community. first, despite foreign reports about the certainty of tuvaluan migration in the future (see, e.g. bayer & salzman, 2007) or that it is already in progress (see, e.g., al gore’s documentary, an inconvenient truth, guggenheim, 2006), the official government position is not to negotiate for migration at this time (general environmental briefing, 2010). for now, the tuvaluan global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 government believes it is far more important to keep the pressure on wealthy industrialized nations to reduce their emissions and support adaptations than it is to make a plan for migration in future decades. in fact, they believe the very act of planning for migration will reduce pressure on industrialized nations. if tuvaluans make plans to leave, there is no longer an incentive to save the islands. even higher levels of emissions, temperature increases, and sea level rise may be perceived to be acceptable. however, what is just and what is right is that tuvaluans be able to stay in their homeland. the tuvaluan government intends to pursue this course of action for as long as possible. foreign research should take into account local perspectives on this justice issue, rather than relying entirely on the common perception among foreigners that migration is inevitable and should therefore be the sole pursuit of all tuvaluans. therefore, this research was positioned within the social justice perspective that tuvaluans ought to be able to stay in their homeland, and that migration should not be assumed to be the first, best, or only option available to current or future tuvaluans. specifically, my questions about the future did not assume migration or even mention migration. participants were able to define for themselves “when” the future was, along with which decisions and options they and their families would face. as such, the conversations about tuvalu’s future ranged from near-future (five to ten years) to distant future (the lives of participants’ grandchildren and beyond), and included a wide range of options i would never have thought to ask after. i also learned that projects that are not based within the community and do not engage the collectivist nature of tuvalu’s cultures tend not to succeed. additionally, other cultural contexts of tuvalu must be considered and explored from a paradigm that centers that context within the norm. for example, tuvaluans are the indigenous population of tuvalu, which means that land and community connections are both highly integral to tuvaluan well-being. additionally, there is no one tuvaluan culture. just as different regions of the united states are home to different worldviews and ways of life, tuvalu’s nine islands and atolls are distinct cultural communities. a foreign researcher who is unfamiliar with these cultural norms may either overlook them entirely and proceed from their foreign norms, or may relate these tuvaluan cultural contexts in patronizing ways that highlight their otherness. multiple people i spoke with reported that this is a particular problem with foreign journalists who arrive in tuvalu with a story already in mind, as well as with climate change skeptics and others who seek to discount the tuvaluan experiences of climate change. this research therefore sought to reflect multiple perspectives within tuvalu rather than to document “a tuvaluan perspective.” participants included men and women; young, middle-aged, and elder adults; professionals, government representatives, students, and homemakers; and people who are from or have extensive experience in every island.1 by engaging with diverse community members, i hoped to show more accurately the variety of tuvaluan experiences. with this in mind, i encouraged the people i spoke with to discuss their personal perspectives and how they were similar to or different from the perspectives of other tuvaluans. third, the research was designed to utilize qualitative methods that engage tuvalu’s oral storytelling traditions. interviews were conducted typically in participants’ homes, and often with multiple participants or family members in the room. in most cases, participants would take turns being interviewed rather than speaking as a group, although periodically non-interviewees 1 the population of the island of niulakita is approximately 35, which created a challenge in finding someone from the island who was living in or visiting funafuti during the research period. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 (especially peers or elders) would interrupt with additional points.2 the interviews were audiorecorded, and the transcripts reflect these interactions. the scra community mini-grant funded gifts of food for participants which could then be shared with individuals and families before, during, or after the interview. participants were gifted with food items because it is often appropriate in tuvalu to offer a small gift or foods to people you are visiting. the interviews themselves were semi-structured to include the major themes of the study but also to allow participants to broach topics that were most relevant to them and their own experiences and perceptions of climate change. the conversational style of the interview was in line with talanoa, a tuvaluan conversational style in which people talk in a relaxed manner and tell stories freely as they arise in conversation (see image 4). image 4. talanoa with sir tomu sione in a fale lau. fourth, because tuvalu is a small country in a remote area of the world, many potential audience members to this research may be unfamiliar with the country, the cultures, and the implications of the climate change threat. therefore, this research was designed to include a photographic element in which the participants’ stories and experiences could be augmented with pictures of 2 note that elders would not be interrupted by younger members of the family, and the women who were interviewed in their homes (as opposed to their workplaces) often chose to move to a more private area of the house than the front room or the central outdoor gathering space, fale lau, where the home interviews with men typically occurred. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 land and community structures, events, and cultural items. the scra community mini-grant funded digital cameras for distribution as well as a portable photographic printer and printing paper that allowed the photographs to be developed and printed in real time during the study. the original idea was to use photovoice methodology as part of the interview process (carlson, engebretson, & chamberlain, 2006; foster-fishman, nowell, deacon, nievar, & mccann; nowell, berkowitz, deacon, & foster-fishman, 2006). my tuvaluan collaborators and other tuvaluans i spoke with all agreed that this methodology would be appropriate for tuvaluans and beneficial for relating their stories domestically and abroad. however, in practice, many participants admitted that they did not know what to take pictures of, and many others punctuated their stories with suggestions of places, events, or items which would illustrate perfectly what they were talking about that i could go take pictures of after the interview (see image 5). only one participant took and presented her own pictures. she drove around funafuti and took 78 photographs of important places and examples of both cultural shifts and climatic changes. although photovoice as a methodology was not implemented with clear consistency and success, participants expressed clear and active support of the photographic element to the study, so that people could see what they were talking about even if they had never been to tuvalu. image 5. the newly built preschool in vaiaku village. one participant told the story of the youth group from her island volunteering to build this structure, and suggested i take a photograph of it (corlew, 2012). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 finally, during the preliminary study i heard from multiple community leaders and tuvaluan professionals that tuvalu has had a repeated and consistent experience of foreigners who come to the country to conduct research, take this information with them, but then leave nothing behind. i received a specific request to donate my dissertation to the tuvalu national archives. however, there was a more general encouragement for me to create research based in the community for which the results were beneficial to and accessible by tuvaluans. i therefore sought to make the research as accessible to tuvaluans as possible. much of the dissertation report is written in a narrative fashion, avoiding academic jargon, and including storytelling elements and as much direct reporting of the participants’ words as possible. because it is an academic dissertation, it also includes sections relating to psychological theory. however, those elements are kept separate from the results so that any english-speaking tuvaluan will have access to the tuvaluan knowledge and opinions that i gathered during the research without being hindered by unfamiliar academic vocabulary. the scra community mini-grant then funded the dissemination of the research in the community itself. the dissertation was printed and bound in a nice paperback format through createspace, an online publication service. i ordered sufficient copies to be sent to every participant as well as to community members and leaders who had supported the study. for example, the tuvalu national archives now has multiple copies, as does the tuvalu meteorological office. in addition, my collaborator lanieta faleasiu from the office of community affairs requested additional copies that she could present to each of the schools in tuvalu, to various governmental and non-governmental offices who might be interested in the study, and to each islands’ kaupule, or town council. the grant made it possible for over fifty copies of the dissertation to be printed and shipped to tuvaluans at no cost to tuvaluans. during a return visit earlier this year, then tuvaluan prime minister willy telavi, a friend of sir sione, came by to visit. he and his wife both expressed that they enjoyed reading the book and were glad copies were being distributed in tuvalu. conclusion the scra community mini-grant greatly augmented this research so that it was able to be implemented and disseminated in a manner that was specifically responsive to the needs, preferences, and requests of the focal community. the addition of food gifts during the datacollection period framed the interviews into a culturally responsive dialogue style common in tuvalu. the goal was to create a relaxed and familiar atmosphere in which participant would feel comfortable expressing themselves as they would to friends, as opposed to how they would during a formal or professional interview. although it should be noted that the interviews were indeed conducted in english (tuvalu’s secondary language) by a foreign researcher, the minigrant increased my ability to turn a stodgy interview into a comfortable conversation, thereby encouraging more personal points of view. additionally, the inclusion of the photography supported by the mini-grant allowed for an illustration of participants’ stories and experiences when they are related to each other and to a foreign audience. although the original procedural intent of the photographic research method was not realized in practice, the photography itself continued to be supported by participants when they instructed me as the researcher to take specific pictures to illustrate their words. finally, and arguably most importantly, the scra community mini-grant funded the first wave of research dissemination back into tuvalu. one of the first and most frequent requests i global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 received during all research trips was to make this information available to tuvaluans. with funds from the mini-grant, i was able to disseminate over 50 copies of the research report to participants and interested community members, leaders, and agencies. i recently visited tuvalu and received very positive feedback from those who had read it or heard of it. although such active dissemination is certainly a gesture of goodwill that seems to have been very well received by the community, it is also necessary within the major research paradigm of community psychology to create research that the focal community is able to benefit from. the support i received from the scra community mini-grant allowed me to meet this professional mandate with my dissertation research. applications for the second round of scra community mini-grant funding will be considered starting july 1st, 2013. the maximum award is $1200 and all scra members are invited to apply for funding in conjunction with their community and organizational partners. applications are available on the scra website (www.scra27.org/practice). all project proposals will be considered as long as they are submitted within 2 months of their start date. we especially encourage applications from international scra members. for questions or more information, please email: scracommunitygrants@gmail.com references bayer, j, & salzman, j. (producers and directors). (may 2007). time and tide. wavecrest films. bender, b. (2013). chief of us pacific forces calls climate biggest worry. the boston globe, march 9, 2013. accessed online 4/3/13 from http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2013/03/09/admiral-samuel-locklearcommander-pacific-forces-warns-that-climate-change-topthreat/bhdpvclrwemxre9ixjzchl/story.html. carlson e. d., engebretson, j., & chamberlain, r. m. (2006). photovoice as a social process of critical consciousness. qualitative health research, 16(6), 836-852. corlew, l. k. (2011). creating a collaborative proposal for climate change research in tuvalu. the community psychologist, 44(2), 29-32. foster-fishman, p., nowell, b., deacon, z., nievar, m. a., & mccann, p. (2005). using methods that matter: the impact of reflection, dialogue, and voice. american journal of community psychology, 36(3/4), 275-291. general environment briefing. (2010). government of tuvalu. guggenheim, d. (director). (2006). an inconvenient truth: a global warning [dvd]. hollywood: paramount. intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc). (2007). climate change 2007: synthesis report. contribution of working groups i, ii and iii to the fourth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change . geneva switzerland: ipcc. 104 pp. karl, t. r., melillo, j. m., & peterson, t. c. (eds). (2007). global climate change impacts in the united states. cambridge university press, 2009. keener, v. w., marra, j. j., finucane, m. l., spooner, d., & smith, m. h. (eds). (2012). climate change and pacific islands: indicators and impacts. report for the 2012 pacific islands regional climate assessment. washington, dc: island press. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 nowell, b. l., berkowitz, s. l., deacon, z., & foster-fishman, p. (2006). revealing the cues within community places: stories of identity, history, and possibility. american journal of community psychology, 37(1/2), 29-46. ray, j. (2011). world’s top-emitters no more aware of climate change in 2010. business insider, august 26, 2011. accessed online 3/11/13 from http://articles.businessinsider.com/201108-26/home/29954774_1_climate-change-global-warming-climate-deal. united nations. (2011). world statistics pocketbook 2010: least developed countries. department of economic and social affairs statistics division and office of the high representative for least developed countries, landlocked developing countries and small island developing states, new york. microsoft word v2i3-0011-ms final.docx global journal of community psychology practice volume 2, issue 3 january 2012 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 of 5 the role of health professionals in community based programs. patrizia meringolo meringolo@psico.unifi.it moira chiodini moira.chiodini@unifi.it patrizia meringolo is full professor in community psychology at faculty of psychology university of florence italy moira chiodini is lecture in psychology of social empowerment at faculty of psychology university of florence italy keywords: hiv, hiv prevention, primary and secondary prevention, hiv test, community based program, healthy behavior, perceived control, risky behavior, adult people, role of professionals, health promotion, qualitative study. recommended citation: meringolo, p., & chiodini, m. (2012). the role of health professionals in community based programs. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(3), 1-12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global journal of community psychology practice volume 2, issue 3 january 2012 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 of 5 primary and secondary hiv prevention: the role of health professionals in community based programs. patrizia meringolo, moira chiodini faculty of psychology, university of florence, italy abstract the research is part of a project promoted by the municipality of florence in order to planning a program of hiv prevention and promoting the access to free hiv test. theoretical approaches come from studies about health attitudes, healthy behavior and perceived control on wellbeing (albarracin, kumkale, &johnson,2004; davis, hughes, sloan, tang, & mcmaster, 2009; fishbein,2008), different interventions in health promotion (boone & lefkowitz, 2004; fortenberry, tu, harezlak, katz & orr, 2002; harper, bangi, contreras, pedraza tolliver & vess, 2004), importance of professionals (durantini, albarracin, mitchell, earl, & gillette, 2006; fisher, bryan, & misovich, 2002), particularly general practitioners (schreibman & friedland, 2003). the purpose of the research is to identify useful indications for community based interventions addressed to adult people. our aim is collecting information about professionals’ perception of citizens’ attitude and behavior in order to find strengths and weakness in health promotion activities carried out by public services. the qualitative study was aimed to investigate attitudes towards the primary and secondary prevention, and willingness and motivation to taking hiv test. participants were physicians, psychologists and volunteers, involved in health services addressed both to the whole of population (e.g. professionals working in surgeries and in consulting rooms) and to hiv positive people. instrument was a semi-structured interview for exploring professionals’ perception of patients’ attitudes towards this disease, risky behaviors, preventive behaviors and evaluation about health services practices. findings show a positive evaluation of available health services and their cooperation in facing the problem, despite difficulties in involving all the professionals. prevention follows well-established paths but is not able to reach all citizens. there is a need of a wider information, and prevention involving people as individuals and groups. general practitioners may have a critical and important role, because of their trust relationship with their patients, and can be able to disseminate preventive practices. introduction actually there isn't a comprehensive, effective, and efficient strategy for preventing the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (hiv). the advances in treating aids have showed the necessity to improve the prevention system both primary and secondary. improved treatment is critically important, and efforts should be continued to extend such advances. with better treatment, more people are living with hiv/aids than ever before. however, this creates more opportunities for transmitting the virus and thus a greater need for prevention. despite the successes in hiv prevention over the past decade, there are additional prevention challenges. the populations that need to be reached by prevention interventions have changed considerably. an increasing proportion of new aids cases are now being linked to heterosexual exposure. these new at-risk populations (adult or young-adult, heterosexual) are not being reached for prevention as effectively, or on as large a scale, as at-risk populations have been in the past, and prevention programs tailored to specific social contexts of an earlier period in the epidemic are not proving as effective during the current period. the majority of hiv-infected persons who know their status are in the treatment system and may receive a treatment and information about prevention. however, it is estimated that up to onethird of infected persons do not know their hiv status. efforts should be made to increase the number of infected individuals who are aware of their status. in addition, individuals at risk for hiv infection often come in contact with the health care system for services at a variety of different entry points, and each of these clinical settings could provides opportunities for delivering hiv prevention services. (del rio, 2003) the majority of hiv prevention efforts have focused primarily on preventing hiv acquisition by uninfected persons. however, given that every new infection begins with someone who already is infected, omitting persons with hiv from prevention efforts represents an important missed opportunity for averting new infections. this failure is made even more glaring by the fact that advances in antiretroviral therapy have considerably increased the number of people living with and receiving care for hiv/aids. several theoretical models highlight that adopting protective behaviors depends on information, social norms, attitudes about health / disease and the perception of control over their well-being. this relationship is influenced by other social variables such age, sex, ethnicity. (albarracin, kum kale, & johnson, 2004). instead other studies have highlighted the low relationship between the level of information, awareness about risk, and adoption of preventive behaviors. (davis, hughes, sloan, tang , & mcmaster, 2009). the theory of reasoned action (ajzen & global journal of community psychology practice volume 2, issue 3 january 2012 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 of 5 fishbein, 2005; conner & sparks, 2005; sutton, 2006) is particularly useful in designing interventions for secondary prevention (boone & lefkowitz, 2004; fortenberry, tu, harezlak, katz, & orr, 2002; harper, bangi, contreras, pedraza tolliver & vess, 2004). other studies underline the role of positive attitudes and expectations, perceptions of control and correct information in implementing protective behaviors (albarracin, mcnatt, klein, i, mitchell, & kum kale, 2003). referring to the prevention programs, several studies emphasize the role of physicians in implementing hiv prevention actions, because they are the most trusted source of health information (schreibman & friedland, 2003). method the data to which we refer coming from a research carried out within a project founded by the municipality of florence, aimed to plan a system of prevention both primary and secondary in order to reach the new population at risk: adult and young adult heterosexual not reached by the traditional prevention campaigns. qualitative research, based on interviews, was carried out in order to gather information about professionals’ perception of citizens’ attitude and behavior in order to find strengths and weakness in health promotion activities carried out by public services. participants: the participants interviewed as key informants were: physicians, psychologists and volunteers, involved in health services addressed both to the whole of population (i.e. working in surgeries and in consulting rooms) and to hiv positive people. instruments: schedules of the semi-structured interviews data analysis: the interviews were recorded, transcribed and then underwent a computer-assisted content analysis (atlas.ti software). results of the qualitative research the content analysis of the interviews show that patients present difficulties in talking about sensitive issues like risk behaviors particularly when these behaviors concern sexual intercourses or drug use. professionals refer how pepole seem have difficulty in protect themselves, and this perception is particularly high in young people and heterosexuals. “i think that young people are now fascinated by latest advertising, also for health." “heterosexuals don't think of it...they have difficulties in perceiving the risk of hiv, they are hardly able to perceive themselves at risk of aids”. regarding the relationship between information and behavior professionals seem confirm the low relation between the two characteristics, referring an inconsistency between information and undertaken behaviors “after all, between knowledge and behavior there is a great difference”. “it is impossible that someone doesn't know, e.g. the risk related to drive while intoxicated... so the question is: why there isn't risk perception?" professionals seem to have a clear idea about weakness of prevention and about what have to be done to increase the prevention efficacy. the weakness of the primary prevention programs are: 1. lack of information 2. low attention in mass media 3. lack of suitable prevention campaign both in educational institutions and health services in schools “we talk about migration, we talk about violence against women, we talk about substances, but information about std or hiv is only a part, added to substance abuse”. in health services “we should give some information... but we are unable… it is impossible with a lot of patients asking for medical examinations... we should give them... the family doctor, the general practitioner would be important. but i think that nobody do it” regarding the attitudes towards secondary prevention the actions that can be implemented are the following: 1. taking the test on medical advice “sometimes they complaint when the doctor advises the test, anyway they take it” 2. “... we have to spend a short time for explaining that it’s a good thing to do...” willingness to take the test for being reassured “patients take the test when they are sure they have done something wrong” “… for being reassured. the fear of disease will come later... above all anxiety for being infected…” global journal of community psychology practice volume 2, issue 3 january 2012 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 of 5 however some difficulties in implementing actions can be point out 1. refusal as a defense against the fear of infection "... someone may suspect to be infected, knowing the situation of his/her partner... but anyway doesn’t take the test...” “... they are afraid of discovering it, because it’s difficult to say it to their partner, it’s a great obstacle... fear to be left…" 2. low motivation “... they think there is no need, they think „i do so, i always did so, i am well and so i don’t need the test...” one of the most important risk, according to literature, is the perceived low threat by heterosexual individuals. they have a less perceived harm and more familiar relationships with hiv positive individuals. “we know that survival of hiv positive individuals is now extended... and so they may have, perhaps, a hiv positive friend from 15-20 years... i don’t mean that they have no fear or attach no importance to it, but surely their attention towards risk –unconsciously –is decreasing.” also new therapies are slowing down the disease course and is related to unsafe sexual behavior “in heterosexuals individuals, those with promiscuous sexual behaviors… there is a kind of illusion about possibility of „seeing‟ if someone is infected... ” adult people tend to think about “normal” relationships “they don’t think that it is possible to be infected also by those who –hypothetically –never would be thought as hiv positive” this opinion is based on social construction founded on the first kind of contagion “for a long time hiv was a disease labeled as belonging to drug addicts and homosexuals” referring to the issues that must be improved in health services, professionals and volunteers highlights three different actions: 1. protection of anonymity and privacy for those who make the test hiv “those coming from a town go to another town, and so there ... perhaps there is no hospital there? they all come here... and then, they have to go in their service, for a lot of thing to do... however they have reason, because if they are seen in a ward for infectious disease... someone could think that....” 2. increasing local resources “it would be better a widespread intervention, offering counseling, without –i think – psychological terrorism ... in any case the general practitioner is the person asked for an advice for every think…” 3. integration and coordination among services working on hiv discussion findings show a positive evaluation of health services and collaboration among them, despite difficulties in a full involvement of professionals. there are well-established paths for prevention, although unable to reach the whole of citizens. it would be important a wider dissemination of accurate information, both by mass media and targeted campaigns, and more interventions addressed to individuals and groups. general practitioners may have a basic role, because of their trust relationship with patients, so to spread good preventive practices. hiv testing offers another option for the integration of prevention into the clinical care context. testing plays multiple roles, including identifying people with hiv and those at risk of infection who can receive prevention services, identifying hiv-infected persons so they can receive more intensive clinical care services. references albarracin d., kumkaleg.t., & johnson b.t. (2004). influences of social power and normative support on condom use decisions: a research synthesis. aids care,16, 6: 700-723. boone t. l., & lefkowitz e.s. (2004). safer sex and the health belief model: considering the contributions of peer norms and socialization factors. journal of psychology and human sexuality, 16, 1: 51-68. davis c., hughes l., sloan m., tang c., & mcmaster s. (2009). hiv/aids knowledge, sexual activity, and safer sex practices among female students in hong kong, australia, and the united states. journal of hiv/aids and social services, 8, 4: 414-429. del rio c. (2003). new challenges in hiv care: prevention among hiv-infected patients. topics in hiv medicine, vol. 11 issue 4 july/august 2003: 140-145. durantini m.r., albarracin d., mitchell a.l., earl a.n., & gillette j.c. (2006). conceptualizing the influence of social agents of behavior change: a meta-analysis of the effectiveness global journal of community psychology practice volume 2, issue 3 january 2012 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 of 5 of hiv-prevention interventionists for different groups. psychological bulletin, 132, 2: 212–248. fishbein, m. (2008). a reasoned action approach to health promotion. medical decision making, 28, 834-844. fisher j.d., fisher w.a., bryan a.d., & misovichs.j. (2002). information-motivationbehavioral skills model–based hiv risk behavior change intervention for inner-city high school youth. health psychology, 21, 2: 177-186. fortenberry j., tu w., harezlakj ., katz b.p., & orr d.p. (2002). condom use as a function of time in new and established adolescent sexual relationship. american journal of public health, 92: 211-213. harper g. w., bangi a.k., contreras r., pedraza a., tolliver, m., & vess, l. (2004). diverse phases of collaboration: working together to improve community-based hiv interventions for adolescents. american journal of community psychology,33, 3-4: 193-204. schreibman t. & friedland g. (2003). human immunodeficiency virus infection prevention: strategies for clinicians. clinical infectious diseases, 36: 1171-6. but is it okay? the need to still ask black/african american mothers about violence exposure during the covid-19 worldwide pandemic jennifer m. gómez1,2,3,4 and robert ty partridge5,6 keywords: black mothers; violence, abuse, and trauma; cultural betrayal trauma theory; covid-19 pandemic author biography: jennifer m. gómez, phd is an assistant professor in the school of social work at boston university (bu), faculty affiliate at the center for innovation in social work & health at bu, research affiliate at the center for antiracist research at bu, and chair of the research advisory committee at the center for institutional courage, 501(c)(3). from a black feminist perspective, she created cultural betrayal trauma theory to better understand how the context of intersecting inequalities negatively impacts black and other marginalized survivors of violence. in addition to her book, the cultural betrayal of black women & girls: a black feminist approach to healing from sexual abuse, dr. gómez has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, peer-reviewed book chapters, scholarly writings, pieces for the general public, and professional development documents. robert ty partridge, phd is an associate professor in the department of psychology at wayne state university and the director of the research, design, and analysis unit at wayne state university. dr. partridge has over 20 years of experience in community-based research, public health and prevention interventions, and evaluation research. his research interests include the influence of urban poverty on early childhood development, adolescent risk behaviors, developmental psychobiology, emotion regulation, early childhood literacy, longitudinal methods, complex adaptive systems, and relational developmental systems theory. recommended citation: gómez, j. m., & partridge, r. t. (2023). but is it okay? the need to still ask black/african american mothers about violence exposure during the covid-19 worldwide pandemic. global journal of community psychology practice, 14(3), 1 21. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). 1 boston, university, school of social work 2 boston university, center for innovation in social work & health 3 boston university, center for antiracist research 4 center for institutional courage 5 wayne state university, department of psychology 6 wayne state university, merrill palmer skillman institute for child & family development https://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 corresponding author: jennifer m. gómez, boston university school of social work, 264 bay state road boston, ma 02215. email: gomezjm@bu.edu. website: https://jmgomez.org. orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3580-4634 http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:gomezjm@bu.edu https://jmgomez.org/ https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3580-4634 global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 but is it okay? the need to still ask black/african american mothers about violence exposure during the covid-19 worldwide pandemic abstract black/african american communities endure the double pandemic of covid-19 and policeand civilian-perpetrated anti-black violence, with black/african american mothers at risk for exposure to violence in the home. questions remain about the potential harm in asking about violence exposure, particularly in the current climate. the purpose of the study is to examine black/african american mothers’ reactions to participating in violence research during the covid-19 pandemic in the u.s. participants (n = 127; age: m = 32.46 years, sd = 5.61 years) were black/african american mothers living in an urban, predominantly black city in the midwestern u.s. who completed online measures of exposure to violence before, during, and after shelter-in-place orders, as well as their reactions to participating in violence research. we found that the majority of participants did not find participation more distressing than other day to day experiences, with 100% of those with violence histories reporting such research is important. the current study’s findings can promote inclusion of violence measures in research and healthcare settings, with results guiding trauma-informed care for black/african american mothers. introduction beginning in march 2020, the covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the black/african american community (hooper et al., 2020; laurencin & mcclinton, 2020) resulting in approximately one-third of all cases in the u.s. being black/african americans (centers for disease control and prevention, 2020). additionally, in the u.s., this physical health pandemic has occurred in tandem with the second pandemic of police and civilian-perpetrated anti-black violence, resulting in societal unrest in the forms of rebellions and protests (dreyer, 2020). simultaneously operating under the radar is violence within the home, which has continued and potentially increased for women and mothers during governmental shelter-in-place orders related to covid-19 (american psychological association, 2020; campbell, 2020; evans et al., 2020), particularly in black and other women of color (ruiz et al., 2020). contributing factors include, but are not limited to, structural economic inequality, such as food and housing insecurity restricting black and other women of color’s freedom to leave abusive situations (ruiz et al., 2020). therefore, it remains important for researchers and community practitioners to continue to assess for exposure to violence (e.g., holland et al., 2020) in order to guide efforts. however, there are likely concerns about the psychological safety of inquiring about violence, perhaps especially in a time of such increased stress, societal unrest, sickness, and death. therefore, the purpose of the current study is to examine black/african american mothers’ reactions to participating in violence research during the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic in the u.s. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 figure 1. adapted bronfenbrenner model: anti-black racism & cultural betrayal trauma, reprinted with permission exposure to violence in the black community violence exposure, including physical and sexual abuse, is consistently linked with poor mental health (deprince et al., 2012; gómez et al., 2014). shelter-in-place orders during covid-19 may put women and mothers at increased risk for violence exposure within the home (e.g., campbell, 2020). this is disproportionately true for black and other women of color (ruiz et al., 2020). due to the context of inequality (figure 1), exposure to violence within the black community may include additional layers of harm. according to cultural betrayal trauma theory (cbtt; gómez, 2023), some black people develop (intra)cultural trust, which is black solidarity, in order to survive and thrive amidst the societal trauma of anti-black racism, including police brutality, mass incarceration (e.g., alexander, 2012), and racial discrimination in healthcare (e.g., gómez, 2015; institute of medicine, 2002; snowden & yamada, 2005). therefore, violence happening within the black community is a violation of this (intra)cultural trust—it is a cultural betrayal. these cultural betrayal traumas (also known as within-group violence) are linked with typical abuse outcomes, such as mental health, as well as cultural outcomes, such as internalized prejudice (gómez & gobin, 2020). given sexism against black women, known as misogynoir (bailey, 2016), black women are at risk for physical and sexual violence. research with black and other marginalized emerging adults has found that cultural betrayal traumas are associated with depression, dissociation, anxiety, hallucinations, ptsd, sleep problems, changes to ethnic identity, and internalized prejudice (gómez, 2017, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c, 2019d, 2020a, 2021; gómez & freyd, 2018). therefore, the impact of violence in the black community—particularly for women and mothers—may be further exacerbated by this cultural betrayal that exists as a by-product of anti-black racism (figure 2). figure 2. cultural betrayal trauma theory, reprinted with permission is it okay to ask about violence exposure? though worries about the appropriateness and safety of asking about violence exposure may be heightened in the context of the double pandemic of covid-19 and racism for http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 black/african american mothers, the concern of asking about violence exposure in research is not a new one (e.g., dalenberg, 2013). university institutional review boards often weigh concerns about the harm of asking about violence exposure, including upsetting participants, stigmatizing participants due to their exposure to violence, and conceptualizing survivors of violence as too fragile to participate in violence research (becker-blease & freyd, 2006, 2007; black & black, 2007; griffin et al., 2003). though these concerns come from genuinely wanting to protect participants from being harmed in research, they are misguided in important ways. first, extant research finds that participating in violence research results in mild, transitory distress at worst for most participants, with those who have experienced violence reporting only slightly higher rates of distress (e.g., cook et al. 2011; deprince & chu, 2008; edwards et al., 2009; galea et al., 2005; gómez et al., 2015; yeater et al., 2012). second, participants of violence research themselves report that they believe that violence research is important (cromer et al., 2006; deprince & freyd, 2006; gómez et al., 2015; yeater et al., 2012), with those who have experienced violence reporting increased importance in this research (edwards et al., 2007; gómez et al., 2015; yeater et al., 2012). third, barriers to violence research, such as irbs failing to approve trauma studies (dalenberg, 2013), may actually reinforce stigma related to violence exposure (ahrens, 2006; fontes, 2004) by removing autonomy from research participants (black & black, 2007) through a paternalistic stance that bars selfdetermination and choice of participants to engage in research (becker-blease & freyd, 2006; cook et al., 2015; fontes, 2004; griffin et al., 2003). finally, a question that is asked far less often is: what is the harm of not asking about violence exposure? with one of the primary goals of violence research being promoting social justice (campbell, 2009), one harm of not asking about violence exposure is erasure (gleaves et al., 2007). in not asking, researchers and community practitioners implicitly condone violence through silence (herman, 1997), as violence thrives in secrecy. this may be particularly true in the black community, as cultural mandates for silence stem from misogynoir and racial loyalty to protect black people from racism at the expense of black women and girls who are being abused (e.g., bell & mattis, 2000; bent-goodley, 2001; gómez, 2023; gómez & gobin, 2020; neville & pugh, 1997; tillman et al., 2010; washington, 2001). additionally, given violence exposure’s link with deleterious mental and physical health, the fields of psychology, social work, medicine, and public health are additionally left with incomplete data that can result in erroneous conclusions when violence exposure is excluded from conceptualizations of health (e.g., gómez, becker-blease, et al., 2015). therefore, when we do not ask about violence exposure, we unwittingly contribute to the aforementioned costs of not asking, while missing crucial aspects of our participants’, patients’, clients’, and community members’ lives. in the context of the covid-19 pandemic, this means that key components of harm, health, and healing are excluded from community understanding and policy strategies. purpose of the study the covid-19 worldwide pandemic, along with all the increased stress associated with it, have disproportionately impacted black/african americans in the u.s. (center for disease control & prevention, 2020). unfortunately, exposure to violence in the home is part of the context of the pandemic, potentially putting women and mothers at increased risk (campbell, 2020). such exposure to violence is not inconsequential. the mental health impact of violence generally (e.g., deprince et al., 2012) and within the black community specifically (e.g., http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 bent-goodley, 2001; gómez & gobin, 2020) is impacted by the context of inequality (e.g., cbtt; gómez, 2019a). therefore, inquiring about exposure to violence is even more necessary in the present context. though past research has shown that participating in violence research is not harmful (e.g., gómez et al., 2015), the question for researchers and community practitioners remains: will asking about violence exposure harm black/african american mothers, especially during the double pandemic of covid-19 and anti-black violence in the u.s.? therefore, the purpose of the current study is to examine black/african american mothers’ reactions to participating in violence research during the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic in the u.s. specifically, we hypothesized that the majority of black/african american mothers who participate in violence research in spring-summer 2020 report: h1: distress h1a: low rates of reported distress following participation h1b: survivors of violence would report higher rates of distress h2: importance h2a: high rates of perceived importance of violence research following participation h2b: survivors of violence would report higher rates of perceived importance of violence research h3: support to include violence measures in research h3a: high rates of support to include violence measures in research h3b: survivors of violence would report higher rates of support to include violence measures in research finally, we explored if there were differences in participants’ reactions to participating in violence research based on depression and anxiety symptoms. method participants & procedure participants (n = 127; age: m = 32.46 years, sd = 5.61 years) were black/african american mothers from an urban, predominantly black/african american city in the midwest, who were recruited from three existing participant registries (masked for peer review) and participated in two waves. wave 1 data collection took place between the beginning of april and the middle of june 2020. wave 2 data collection took place in august 2020. for each wave, potential participants received up to four text messages—one initial and three reminders— inviting participation, with participants from one registry additionally receiving a phone call. characteristics of the survey and compensation were the same for each wave: online surveys took approximately 20 minutes to complete, and participants were compensated $10 for their time through a target gift card or money on their clincard. the university institutional review board (irb) approved the current study. demographic characteristics for the study sample are provided in table 1. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 table 1 sociodemographic characteristics of participants at baseline baseline characteristic study sample n % marital status single 41 27.3 married/partnered 34 26.8 divorced/widowed 8 6.2 highest educational level < high school 12 9.5 high school/ged 46 36.2 some college 34 26.8 associates 15 11.8 university or postgraduate degree 18 14.2 employment unemployed 56 44.1 employed part-time 24 18.9 employed full-time 39 30.7 self-employed 21 14.0 measures the current study is part of a larger data collection on the impact of covid-19 on urban parents (e.g., hassoun ayoub et al., 2023), therefore, only some of the measures are reported here. exposure to violence history created by the first author for the current study, wave 1 included two questions about exposure to sexual or physical violence in the home. specifically, participants were asked to report whether or not there had been any occurrences of violence in the home (e.g., hitting, pushing, shoving, yelling, screaming) and any forced sexual activity (e.g., sexual touching without consent). behavioral experiences, such as trauma exposure, are not latent constructs and therefore do not require multiple items to accurately assess. this is especially important in conducting community-based research where measurement brevity is critical. further, we are assessing experiences of violence and forced sexual activity inclusively and differentiating between different specific instances or types (e.g., hitting v. yelling) are not germane to the research questions being posed in this study. responses were dichotomous with yes, no, and prefer not to answer options. participants were asked to respond to these questions in reference to any violence before covid-19 shelter-inplace orders were issued on march 21, 2020 and if these events occurred after the shelterin-place orders were issued. created by the first author for the current study, wave 2 included two items assessing exposure to recent physical and sexual violence during the covid-19 pandemic, with responses of yes, no, prefer not to answer. items: 1) in summer, has there been any violence in the home, such as hitting, pushing, shoving, yelling or screaming?; 2) in summer, has there been any forced sexual activity in the home, such as sexual touching without consent? the aforementioned items from wave 1 and wave 2 were further combined into a dichotomous variable indicating whether the participant had reported any violence exposure or not. with our hypotheses pertaining to any type of violence (e.g., physical, sexual), a single item indicating the occurrence at any level of exposure of any type of violence is sufficient to capture participants’ experiences. scores were coded as 1-any violence exposure reported, or 0no violence exposure reported. finally, respondents who indicated they did not want to reply to these questions were coded as a third category chose not to answer. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 depression & anxiety symptoms depression and anxiety symptoms were assessed using the patient-reported outcomes measurement information system [promis] scales (pilkonis et al., 2011). there were 8 items each for depression and anxiety symptoms, respectively, for a total of 16 items. responses were on a likert scale from 1never to 5always. sample items for depression and anxiety symptoms, respectively, were i felt i had nothing to look forward to and my worries overwhelmed me. internal consistency in this sample were excellent for depression symptoms (α = .950) and anxiety symptoms (α = .953). continuous mean score variables were calculated and used in analyses. both the depression and anxiety scales are scored such that higher scores reflect higher levels of depressive and anxiety symptomology. the promis is a widely used scale with established psychometric properties. it has been shown to have acceptable reliability (α >.9) in ethnically diverse samples, including black americans (teresi et al., 2016). kudel and colleagues (2019) have established the convergent validity of the promis with the respective subscales positively correlating with the beck depression inventory (r =.73, p < .001) and the beck anxiety inventory (r = .52). in a separate study, the promis was found to have strong convergent validity with the depression and anxiety subscales correlating with the mental health components of the sf-12 (r = .60 and r = .64 respectively) and strong discriminant validity (r > .20) with the physical health components of the sf-12 (quach et al., 2016). participant reactions to violence research at the end of the survey, participants answered three items about their research participation (deprince & freyd, 2006). with a likert scale of 1much more distressing and 5much less distressing, the first item was: for the questions that were asked about different experiences you may have had such as exposure to violence, please rate whether you found answering these questions to be more or less distressing than other things you sometimes encounter in day-to-day life. the second item had a likert scale of 1definitely not important to 5definitely important: for the questions that were asked about different experiences you may have had such as exposure to violence, please rate how important you believe it is for researchers to ask about these types of events in order to study the impact of such experiences. the final item assessed support of violence measures in research, from 1very bad to 5very good: for the questions that were asked about different experiences you may have had such as exposure to violence, please consider both your experience answering the questions, and your feelings about how important it is we ask the questions, and then rate how good of an idea it is to include such measures in research. mean scores of each item were created and used in analyses. the items are utilized as single-item measures rather than as indicators of an underlying latent construct or overall scale score. each item is scored such that higher values indicate greater affirmation of the item in question. data analysis plan data will be analyzed using a combination of contingency table analyses and t-tests. to test hypotheses related to violence exposure and reactions to participating in violence research, we will use contingency tables and chi-square tests, including fisher’s exact tests where applicable, given the relatively small cell sizes of some questions. fisher’s exact test is a chi-square distributed test that is most appropriate when there are expected cell counts less than n = 5 (camilli & hopkins, 1978). for all analyses, an a priori alpha level of .05 was used for determination of significant effects. we did not have an established criterion for an a priori effect size given the nature of this study. however, in situating this research from a policy http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 perspective, we would interpret small effect sizes (d < .2) with caution. results preliminary analysis and data screening the descriptive statistics for all study variables are presented in table 2. table 2 descriptive statistics for study variables variable mean(%yes) sd skew kurtosis se corr age 32.46 5.61 0.69 -0.33 1.06 1.00 distress 3.12 1.14 0.02 -0.15 0.16 .198 importance 3.68 1.14 -0.44 -0.46 0.16 .044 .0345 support 3.75 1.00 -0.08 -0.79 0.14 .204 .170 .752 depression (α = .95) 15.80 7.96 1.05 0.44 0.77 .082 -.253 -.072 -.038 anxiety (α = .953) 17.31 8.44 0.70 -0.24 0.81 .047 -.329 -.085 -.003 .846 bsh p. viol (5%) --------------- dsh p. viol (5%) --------------- bsh s. viol (0.9%) --------------- dsh s. viol (0%) --------------- ash p. viol (8%) --------------- ash s viol (0%) --------------- any violence (14%) --------------- bsh: before shelter-in-place dsh: during shelter-in-place ash: after shelter-in-place p. viol: physical violence s. viol: sexual violence missing data on key variables at wave 1 ranged from 4.5% to 9%. the rate of attrition from wave 1 to wave 2 was 53%, however, there was no association between wave 2 attrition and demographic characteristics. importantly, there was no association between rates of physical violence or forced sexual contact experiences and attrition at wave 2. the shapiro-wilk’s test was conducted on the participant reactions to research measures, with none of them meeting the assumption of normality; distress (s-w = .794, p >.001), importance (s-w = .849, p >.001), and support (s-w = .805, p >.001). as a result, these variables will be treated as ordinal data for the purposes of further analyses. descriptive statistics: violence exposure & shelter-in-place we first examined the relationship between violence exposure and shelter in place orders due to the covid-19 pandemic. both the physical and sexual violence items had relatively low rates of occurrence before http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 shelter-in-place orders were issued, after shelter-in-place orders, and during the ensuing 5-months post shelter-in-place orders (see table 2). indeed, only one respondent indicated that they had experienced forced sexual contact before the shelter-in-place and did not report these experiences during the latter two timeperiods. it is important to note, however, that 7 and 9 respondents respectively indicated that they preferred not to answer the violence items. while the low rate of reported occurrence for exposure to violence preclude reliable statistical inferences to be made, there were enough responses to make some descriptive assertions. we did see an increase in the number of participants indicating that they had experienced violence after the shelter-inplace orders were issued (5.1% to 7.9%) but returned to before shelter-in-place levels over the summer (4.6%). however, of those reporting experiences with violence, onethird reported that the abuse got worse after the shelter-in-place orders were issued. figure 3. black mothers’ reactions to participating in violence research hypotheses we next looked at the participant reactions to being asked about violence during the covid19 pandemic. in line with hypotheses 1a, we found that only 16% of respondents reported that they felt the questions were distressing. hypotheses 2a and 3a were partially supported, with moderate, as opposed to high, rates of perceived importance (50%) and support for violence research (49%; figure 3). thus, despite the current context of covid-19 and anti-black violence, approximately half of participants reported importance and support of violence research. moreover, the majority of participants did not find answering these questions overly distressing. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 our second set of hypotheses was that participants who indicated exposure to violence in the home before, during, or after the shelter-in-place orders would have significantly higher rates of distress, perceived importance, and support for violence research. figure 4a-c present the distribution of responses to these three items by group: exposure to violence (yes), exposure to violence (no), and chose not to answer (na). because the number of participants that reported exposure to violence was relatively small, we employed a fisher’s exact test to assess the differences in proportional responses between groups. as predicted in hypothesis 1b, the group that reported exposure to violence was significantly more likely to report distress (p = .043). in support of hypothesis 2b, those exposed to violence had significantly higher rates of perceived importance of violence research (p = .050). finally, contrary to hypothesis 3b, there were no group differences in support of violence research generally (p = .373). figure 4a. black mothers’ distress by exposure to violence history http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 figure 4b. black mothers’ perceived importance of violence research by exposure to violence history figure 4c. black mothers’ support of violence research by exposure to violence history in order to explore the mental health differences in participants’ reactions to research, we conducted independent sample t-tests with bootstrapped standard errors to adjust for the non-normality of the depression and anxiety symptoms distributions. the group that reported higher levels of distress had significantly higher http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 mean levels of depression (t (46) = 2.599, p = .015) and anxiety (t (46) = 3.838, p > .001). however, there were no mental health differences between groups on perceived importance or support for violence research (table 3). table 3 welch’s t-test: promis anxiety and depression means by reactions to trauma questions reaction high low t(42.65) p cohen's d m sd m sd distress anxiety 19.00 8.93 10.50 4.82 4.32 .000 -1.08 depression 17.08 9.16 10.75 6.58 2.60 .015 -0.75 importance anxiety 17.65 8.36 15.74 9.27 0.77 .447 -0.22 depression 16.08 8.70 14.96 9.34 0.43 .667 -0.13 support anxiety 16.62 8.92 16.61 8.91 0.003 .997 0.00 depression 15.72 8.54 15.31 9.46 0.16 .872 -0.05 discussion the covid-19 pandemic combined with the increased awareness of anti-black violence in the u.s. provide the backdrop for black/african american mothers’ exposure to violence in the home in 2020. with all these societal stress, pressures, and deaths, professionals’ desire to not contribute harm is likely strong. though the research to date overwhelmingly shows that participating in violence research is not harmful (e.g., gómez et al., 2015), such research cannot address the current differential context for black/african american mothers. therefore, the purpose of the current study was to examine black/african american mothers’ levels of distress, perceived importance, and perceived support for this work following participating in research that inquired about their exposure to violence before, during, and since shelter-in-place orders. contrary to our expectations, black/african american mothers’ reported rates of violence exposure before, during, and after shelter-inplace were relatively low (14%). the reasons for these reduced rates are unclear. first, it is possible there are indeed low rates of violence in the home during covid-19. however, false negatives—that is, denying violence on the surveys even though it is happening in the home—is also possible due to a host of factors, including cultural mistrust of the researchers who are likely presumed to be white (e.g., lyons et al., 2012). in line with hypothesis 1, over 80% of the total sample reported low levels of distress, with approximately 1 in 3 black/african american mothers with violence exposure indicating distress. though existing research has shown that such distress is typically mild and transitory (e.g., becker-blease & freyd, 20076; black & black, 2007; cook et al., 2011; deprince & chu, 2008; edwards et al., 2009; http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 galea et al., 2005; gómez et al., 2015), the rates of reported distress here do warrant further examination (see limitations & future directions). partially supporting hypothesis 2, half of the total sample indicated that violence research was important, with all black/african american mothers with violence histories (as assessed in the current study) indicating importance of violence research. these findings bolster the existing literature that shows that participants believe in the importance of violence research (e.g., cook et al., 2015; cromer et al., 2006; deprince & freyd, 2006; edwards et al., 2007; gómez et al., 2015; yeater et al., 2012). our findings were also in line with hypothesis 3 regarding support for violence measures in research in the context of weighing the amount of their own distress and perceived importance of the work. though approximately half of the total sample endorsed support for violence research, over 80% of black/african american mothers who reported being exposed to violence indicated such support. though aligned with past research (e.g., yeater et al., 2012), this finding is particularly promising, given the context of the double pandemic of covid-19 and anti-black violence in the u.s. finally, we explored mental health differences in reactions to participation, finding that those who reported higher levels of distress had significantly higher average levels of depression and anxiety symptoms. there were no differences in mental health on perceived importance or support for violence research. these findings, though exploratory, add to the literature in this area by specifically focusing on another factor, mental health, that may contribute to participants’ experiences and perceptions of violence research. implications for community researchers findings from the current study have implications for research with black/african american mother. specifically, questions about violence exposure can and should be asked of black/african american mothers, even amidst the increased stress of covid-19 and anti-black racism. simply put, assessing for exposure to violence can provide avenues for resource access and utilization, as well guiding trauma-informed practices and protocols. excluding queries about violence exposure may be a form of institutional betrayal (e.g., smith & freyd, 2014) by causing harm through omission in our professional roles. instead, each of us can engage in institutional courage (freyd, 2014; freyd & smidt, 2019) by using our roles as researchers, clinicians, and community healthcare practitioners to assess for past and present exposure of violence, which we then use to inform next steps. community researchers, even those whose work does not focus on violence, should consider asking about violence exposure because of the association with mental, physical, and behavioral health. researchers without trauma expertise can utilize state of the art measures (e.g., goldberg & freyd, 2006; gómez & johnson, 2022) to ask behaviorally about violence exposure in order to limit false negatives that come from the use of accurate, but stigmatizing, language, such as rape. furthermore, researchers can assess participants’ reactions to engaging in such research with the three items utilized in the current study (deprince & freyd, 2006). to elicit additional information, researchers could include one or two open-ended qualitative items that can provide richer information on experiences of distress, perceived importance, and support for violence research (deprince & freyd, 2006). doing so not only continually provides information on participants’ experiences across developmental, cultural, and methodological contexts, but also provides http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 evidence for research team members, irbs, and others who are worried about the harm that asking about violence exposure could cause participants. limitations & future directions the current study provides important information about how black/african american mothers emotionally react and appraise violence research following participation during the covid-19 pandemic. nevertheless, future research can build upon the current study’s limitations. the current study operationalized violence history with four items assessing relatively recent physical or sexual violence—before, during, and after shelter-in-place governmental guidelines. therefore, it is unknown how exposure to violence in childhood, adolescence, and years past impact reactions to research participation. therefore, future research can examine a wider range of kinds of violence (e.g., police violence) with culturally congruent methodology, such as the cultural betrayal multidimensional inventory for black american young adults (gómez & johnson, 2022). importantly, research can assess if the current study’s findings are replicated in countries across the black african diaspora. while we have presented statistical tests that are less biased in situations with small cell sizes (e.g., fisher’s exact), these results should still be taken as descriptive in nature and should be confirmed on larger samples with higher proportions of violence exposure. importantly, violence exposure was assessed with self-report responses as part of a larger data collection effort that did not involve a process of building community rapport and earning institutional trust. therefore, our lower rates of violence exposure in this sample may be a function of cultural mistrust. while not overstating risk to participants in informed consent materials (abu-rus et al., 2019), future research can employ a research process that includes steps to earn trust (rahill et al., 2018), as well as using a mixedmethod design with black women interviewers in order determine if cultural trust facilitates increased disclosure of violence, as has been found in prior studies (e.g., lyons et al., 2011). additionally, researchers can qualitatively probe for more information regarding the nature of distress felt by those who experienced violence, as well as longitudinally tracking feelings of distress, as well as post-study behaviors, such as help-seeking. importantly, participants in the current study were not subjected to mandated reporting, which is ensuring participant autonomy and agency over their own experiences (holland et al., 2018). finally, researchers can share the current study’s findings with irbs as evidence that asking about violence history is not unduly distressful (e.g., dalenberg, 2013), even amidst such societal unrest. concluding thoughts the double pandemic of covid-19 and policeand civilian-perpetrated anti-black violence in 2020 continues to harm black/african american communities (e.g., cdc, 2020). within this context, black/african american mothers are also at risk for experiencing violence in the home. an impulse of researchers and community practitioners may be to refrain from inquiring about violence in line with the noble goal of doing no harm (e.g., becker-blease & freyd, 2006, 2007), perhaps particularly to black/african american mothers who are enduring increased hardships due to societal inequality. however, the costs of not asking are profound and include committing institutional betrayal (smith & freyd, 2014) by promoting silence, while not having adequate information to engage in traumainformed research and treatment. fortunately, the current study provides evidence that even in the context of 2020, inquiring about violence is not more distressing than other day to day experiences for the majority of black/african american mothers, including those who have been http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 recently victimized. moreover, our study shows that black/african american mothers, especially those with violence histories, assert that violence research is important and should be included in studies. therefore, even during a time of extreme psychological trauma, sickness, and death, researchers and community practitioners can engage in institutional courage (freyd & smidt, 2019) through incorporating the reality of violence into our work with black/african american mothers. in doing so, we are better equipped to provide trauma-informed and culturally congruent work that can 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(2012). trauma and sex surveys meet minimal risk standards: implications for institutional review boards. psychological science, 23(7), 780787. acknowledgements we would like to thank principal investigator, lucy mcgoron, research team members, julie wargo aikins, john hannigan, steven j. ondersma, stella resko, chris trentacosta, & elizabeth towner, and research assistants, lexi hamlin, kowsar hijazi, toni lewis, and ava palopoli. funding the current study was funded by the merrill palmer skillman institute for child & family development (mpsi) at wayne state university. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://metoomvmt.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/metoofreefrom_covidimpactreport2020.pdf https://metoomvmt.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/metoofreefrom_covidimpactreport2020.pdf https://metoomvmt.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/metoofreefrom_covidimpactreport2020.pdf https://doi.org/10.1177/10778010122183856 https://doi.org/10.1177/10778010122183856 kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 doing ethical research together: a communitarian toolkit for ethical research beyond borders clara calia, corinne reid, cristobal guerra, action amos, joseph burke, abdul-gafar oshodi keywords: global research, ethics, communitarian, cultural context, toolkit author biographies: clara calia is a lecturer in clinical psychology in the school of health in social science and a fellow of the global academy of agriculture and food insecurity and the global health academy at the university of edinburgh. clara is a clinical psychologist who has been working as a researcher and clinician with a wide range of complex clinical problems working in multidisciplinary and international projects and in translational and applied research. clara’s clinical and research work is also characterized by a strong ethical commitment. she is the school deputy director of research ethics & integrity in the school of health in social science. her commitment to ethics brought her to lead this project in order to define and establish the research culture for best practice through a strong process of codesign and partnership in developing an ethics toolkit. corinne reid is deputy vice-chancellor (research) at victoria university. she began working on the global ethics toolkit project whilst on a cahss fellowship at the global health academy at the university of edinburgh. her deep interest in ethics developed through research collaborations with indigenous communities in australia, as part of an international team investigating youth mental health needs in malawi and in her work as a clinical psychologist with marginalised communities. supporting researchers to tackle complex global challenges through developing ethical multidisciplinary teams and strong community partnerships, is her priority. cristobal guerra is a clinical psychologist with a masters in psychology and doctorate in psychotherapy. clinical experience supporting child and adolescents victims of interpersonal trauma in chile between 2001 and 2018. member of the center for studies in childhood, adolescence and family of the ngo paicabi and of the center for research on work, family and citizenship “cielo” of the universidad santo tomas. associate professor of the school of psychology of the universidad santo tomás, chile. research area in trauma, cbt and resilience. global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 action amos is the international bureau of epilepsy vice presidentafrica with 28 affiliates in africa. he is a member of pan african network for persons with psychosocial disabilities (panppd). he is the founding chairperson of the national epilepsy association, epilepsy movers and founding trustee of mental health users and carers association (mehuca) he does possess an mba in leadership and sustainability from uk, a ba in development studies from ireland and a postgraduate diploma in disability and rehabilitation management. currently he is attached to the university of edinburgh flourish research team. action has a special interest in ngos research ethical practice and mental health research focusing on children and young people. action has served in various boards as chairperson and member both locally and internationally. currently action is a board director for african disability alliance (ada). he has contributed globally on issues of mainstreaming and inclusion of persons with disabilities. action has proven experience in the area of human rights, policy analysis, research and technical application. currently, action is a member of un spotlight initiative civil society national reference group. joseph burke is a research fellow at the university of edinburgh’s school of health in social science focusing on global mental health and research ethics. he is also a mental health recovery worker with penumbra. he has over 7 years of experience working in humanitarian response throughout the middle east and africa, working with the irish government and the un. abdul-gafar oshodi holds a phd in social sciences from ku leuven and lectures in the department of political science, lagos state university (lasu). a former journalist at vanguard newspaper, he was a fellow of the social science research council’s (ssrc) next generation of social science in africa programme (2013-2014) and a university of edinburgh’s centre for african studies catalyst fellow and non-residential catalyst fellow (2019-2020). abdul-gafar is a co-founder of conflict research network west africa (corn west africa). he is currently an american council of learned societies african humanities program (acls/ ahp) postdoctoral fellow (2020-2021), working on a book entitled “imageries of mao zedong’s china in ghanaian newspapers, 1957-1976.” global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 doing ethical research together: a communitarian toolkit for ethical research beyond borders global challenges research tackles complex, persistent problems that often require interdisciplinary, cross-sector, international and cross-cultural collaborations and partnerships, at scale and at a distance. projects are often undertaken in contexts with emerging and/or limited research infrastructure, broader resource limitations, and socio-political instability. this complex landscape presents a significant risk exposure for upholding high standards of research conduct and preventing research misconduct that may negatively impact both local communities and researchers, as well as impacting the trustworthiness and translation of research findings. the toolkit for ethical research developed out of a project that focused on strengthening integrity and ethical conduct in grand challenges research. we held 5 roundtable events at the university of edinburgh drawing together more than 200 researchers from 30 countries and more than 60 discipline areas. these conversations highlighted the need for a clarifying worldview to support place-based, community-centred, ethical action at every stage of the research journey. in response, we co-designed accessible and practical material to guide people involved in complex community-based research. this toolkit provides practical guidance and questions to consider at every stage of the research journey, from developing an ethical research question through to being accountable for the legacy of your research long after the project has concluded. a pocket size version is now available in 11 languages. a more detailed website is available in english and spanish (https://www.ethical-global-research.ed.ac.uk/). in 2021, researchers in chile, malawi, nigeria, edinburgh and australia undertook further work with more than 300 global researchers, members of ethics committees and representatives of ngo’s to continue strengthening the toolkit. researchers find the toolkit helpful for supporting cultural contextualisation of research, solidarity amongst researchers and with community partners. it helps researchers to address the complex demand characteristics of international research and of ethical evidencegathering to inform social change. global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 2 august 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 https://youtu.be/lhbsxikilmc microsoft word 2012002-final-20130104.docx exclusion and cultural diversity: a community-based experience with dominican immigrants ruth nina-estrella phd: is a full professor in the university of puerto rico and coordinator of the social-community psychology program, in río piedras, puerto rico. rvnina10@gmail.com carlos rivera-santana m.a.: is a phd research student in the university of queensland in brisbane, but also a phd student in the university of puerto rico in the socialcommunity psychology program. unamuno1017@gmail.com keywords: cultural diversity, intercultural interventions, dominican immigration, intercultural education, community projects. recommended citation: nina-estrella, r., & rivera-santana, c. (2013). exclusion and cultural diversity: a community-based experience with dominican immigrants. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(1), 1-9. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 1 march 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 exclusion and cultural diversity: a community-based experience with dominican immigrants abstract the following article reflects and presents an intercultural experience within the context of puerto rico through the voces con eco (voices with echoes) project. in this work we contextualize our experience within the caribbean and puerto rican domain and the cultural diversity phenomena that impregnates our every day life. then we explain how an intercultural educational intervention is relevant and we present voces con eco and our experience in puerto rico with the dominican republic immigrant community. through this project we indented to promote the value of cultural diversity, rich coexistence and incentive a curiosity towards different cultures. through research, developing intercultural skills, particular educational material to be used in workshops, filmed documentaries and further research across the recipient country (in this case across puerto rico) we think that a very rich intervention was enacted. keywords: cultural diversity, intercultural interventions, dominican immigration, intercultural education, community projects. each day we find increasingly more complex and changing cities. a city is a space lived, felt, valued, and perceived by its inhabitants, who by way of mental and historic representations, as well as individual and collective impressions, sow, shape and establish a city’s character which is able to exert influence over collective behaviors (zarate, 1996). cities are scenarios that show the diversity of its actors, who convoke all of its inhabitants to recognize their rights and responsibilities. they are also the contexts where recent changes in work production and relations may be evidenced. it is in urban spaces where such diversity is concentrated and expressed. in light of the homogenization imposed by the state, most societies have constituted themselves from the multiplicity of cultural and ethnic groups (borja & castell, 1997). cultural differences establish territorial forms of life that reflect diverse patterns of behavior and intercultural conflict. it is for this reason that in the present the notion of city provokes a rethinking of other concepts such as: diversity, solidarity, identity, pluralism, coexistence and multiculturalism. to recognize cultural diversity in our societies is to initiate a long journey that can make visible the invisible, as well as reaffirm citizen identities that are immersed in contexts of social exclusion (eroles, 2006). a multicultural society implies people of diverse cultures living in the same geographic space. in the caribbean this phenomenon is due to the migrations between the islands in the region because of economic, political and historical factors (such is the case in cuba and the dominican republic). it is when we are living together among different ethnic groups that one starts to talk about the other, evidencing attitudes or behaviors that denote racial discrimination, nationality, customs, social class, educational level, and religious practices (chryssochoou, 2004; mahalingam, 2006). identity construction in multicultural societies reflects either rejection or acceptance of the socalled “other” establishing a dichotomy between “we” and the “other”. this lack of understanding the other legitimizes a discourse of intolerance towards what is different or unknown. because of the reasons mentioned above and others, we suggest that intercultural education programs be developed, which may contribute in the processes of integration and social life of immigrant families. why a program of intercultural education? first of all, interculturality must be emphasized because multicultural education does not comprise the “living togetherness” among cultures, but rather their coexistence, stressing more the differences (colectivo amani, 2002). interculturality is different in that it considers the convergence of ties and commonalities that bind ethnic groups, as well as it considers their human rights (paz, 2007; valdillo, 2006). this work presents the experience of one community’s implementation of an educational program grounded on tolerance and cultural diversity in puerto rican society. understanding this approach global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 1 march 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 requires contextualizing the reader on two aspects; the study of migration within social psychology, and the study of the dominican migration in puerto rico. the concept of “convivencia” in the topic of cultural diversity, in the spanish literature particularly, we use the concept of “convivencia” that translating it in a literal manner, means living together. there are referents that can imply something similar to the concept of convivencia such as coexistence, cohabitation, even just living together. however coexistence and cohabitation can’t semantically grasp the signification of convivencia since it connotates a warmer, more significant and interactive form of living together. in latin-american culture, particularly in the caribbean, this warmth, this significance and interactiveness is constitutive to the ways and processes in which one culture may interact and live with each other. therefore in this article we will use coexistence, living togetherness and living together as interchangeable where it can be used semantically and metonymically, but meaning ultimately the spanish concept of convivencia. investigations of migration from the social psychology context according to the united nations 10% of the world populations are immigrants. the international migration report (onu, 2002) concludes that the number of immigrants has doubled since the 70’s and approximately 175 million persons live outside the nation they were born in. this means that one out of ten people in the developed nations are immigrants. the immigration processes raise questions of a need for a redefinition of the nation-state and group identity (castels & miller, 2003; mahallingam, 2006). this suggests a more complex situation that mere statistics can only describe and not explain. the immigrant and immigration are prevalent topics in anthropology, demography, economy, political science and sociology; however there is a lack of research of this nature in psychology. there are many perspectives in immigration studies as a social phenomenon such as: (1) some that gives importance to expectations and motivations of individuals to explain immigrant behavior. it is known that immigrant individuals elaborate a migratory project based mainly in countries job offers and economic reasons. (2) other more complex models try to explain the emigrating behavior based upon an array of factors in conjunction with personality variables (boneva & frieze, 2001). social psychology views the migratory phenomenon from the perspective of the subject’s mechanisms of accommodation to his/her new environment (personal changes), and the subject’s capacity to facilitate social change. immigration is considered to be a transition process that involves facing such problems as a new language, different value systems, different beliefs, inadequate situations of co-existence, and rebuilding a personal support network. all of these situations could increase the vulnerability of the persons in such a way that in time specific disorders could develop, including depression and stress. stress particularly is a response to daily social situations that the immigrant can face such as: racism, xenophobia and marginalization. the lack of social and psychological skills needed to deal with these situations is a variable that could predict the blossoming of these disorders. on the other hand, another characteristic of immigration are the specific changes that occur within the immigrant group in the process of coexisting in the host society. this phenomenon is called acculturation, and the changes refer to their values, beliefs, lifestyles, group identities, etc. it is important to maintain clear that in this process, the host nation-state (which is the dominant group) a way forces the immigrant group to make a higher effort for change, which in turn, creates more inter-group conflicts. berry’s model (2001) tries to explain the acculturation phenomenon, establishing that immigrants confront two vital decisions when they arrive in the host nation-society: (1) decide if their own culture is, in itself, a value to preserve in the new context; and (2) decide if they are going to establish relationships with the members of the receptor society. the combination of these elements gives the possibility of four acculturation strategies: integration, assimilation, separation and marginalization. social cohesion problems between host and immigrant population emerge when acculturation strategies used by the immigrant group, and the desired strategies of the receptor group, differ greatly. especially in terms of religious practices, children’s education, couple relationships, sense of being neighborly, etc. another theoretical approach to immigration processes is the intergroup relation theory, which tries to understand the conflicts between the members of the host social group and the immigrant groups in terms of attitudes, stereotyping and discriminatory conducts. some of these studies include the works of tajfel & tunner, (1979) on social identity, establishing that a process of social comparison global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 1 march 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 generates a conscience of belongingness in the group’s perception. in the community context, to value diversity implies that society must provide the same services and resources to all its members. educational interventions, that address the immigration phenomenon, is important because an intercultural education for peace and co-existence based on equality, non-prejudice and the respect for diversity may possible. particularly important is that these interventions concentrate on the minority group’s strengths, rather than what makes them different. intervention programs directed toward immigrants groups with the goal of improving their social integration through multiple initiatives must have objectives, such as: 1) to identify and conceptualize aspects related with intolerance, such as racism; 2) to stimulate the development of skills, such as improving communication, respecting diversity and dealing with prejudice; 3) promoting empathy with the persons who frequently suffer racism and intolerance. research about the dominican community in puerto rico the 15 independent caribbean nations have one of the highest emigration rates in the world. the largest four sources of migrants to the usa are: cuba, dominican republic, haiti and jamaica; comprising about 75 percent of the 36 million caribbean residents. some 765,000 dominicans have immigrated legally, most since 1985 and most settling in new york city. dominican migration began in 1960, particularly the 1965 u.s. invasion of this country. the dominican republic has about 8 million residents, and the u.s. consulate in dominican republic receives an average of 500 requests for immigrant and tourist visas daily, placing it in third position among visa requests for the u.s., after philippines and mexico. according to a 1997 poll, half of dominicans residents have relatives in the usa and two thirds would have moved there if they could. the biggest and fastest growing group of immigrants in puerto rico comes from the dominican republic. the exact number of dominicans living in the island is unknown, because many of them do not have legal residence status. according to duany, hernández and rey (1995), in the 90’s there were about 60,000 dominican immigrants and the puerto rican government recognized conservatively, more than 200, 0000. the 2010 census shows that the total population of puerto rico is 3,725,789, of which 68,036 are dominican with an average age of 37 years old and 33,860 living in the metropolitan area of san juan. this population group is composed of 719 persons less than five years old, 48,924 are less than 18 years, and 3,463 are 65 years or older. 18, 536 have high school or a higher degree. it is known that most of the dominican community live in the country’s poorest areas (burgos, 2002), therefore the host population does not really know about the dominican culture and as a result of this, they stereotype them. in puerto rico the negative image of the dominicans is typically exposed in ethnic jokes. the ethnic joke is among the first symptoms of hostile co-existence, prejudice and rejection of those whom cross the borders to share a same territory or space (martínez-san miguel, 1998). moreover, duany (2001) presents that immigrants appear as targets of ridicule and rejection, in stories, jokes and sayings, all of these focusing on their accent, physical appearance, cultural ideologies and legal conditions. xenophobic and racist situations can also be observed which can end in conflictive events. the first instance of a migratory movement of the people of dominican republic to the united states occurred in the 70’s as a result of the reform of emigration bills that former president trujillo’s government had (burgos, 2002). if anything can be noted in the dominican migration to puerto rico, it is the marked contrast between both migratory waves: (1) in the 70’s, it was essentially from the medium to high social class sectors, mainly doctors. (2) in the last few years, it became illegal and from the poor social classes. the local rejection comes from the excess of workers in the local market and dominicans are blamed constantly for taking the jobs in this country. they are also blamed for many social problems. duany (1990) proposes that recent migratory wave consisted of illegal persons that arrived to puerto rico in a clandestine manner (in a “yola” or small improvised boat is one of the ways of arriving) and often then moving to new york. in puerto rico the dominican community is mainly concentrated in the metropolitan area, particularly in the poor sectors of santurce and río piedras. research on the dominican emigration in the united states and puerto rico, is found in the works of candelario & lópez (1995), fernández-kelly (1985), grasmuck & pessar (1991), hernández & riverabatiz (1997) hernández angueira (1990), pessar (1995). a wide range of topics are covered, such as work-force and the informal sector, sexuality and family, the use of public assistance, values and roles associated to family. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 1 march 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 also, one can mention studies of social and ethnic relations between the dominican group and the puerto ricans, done by ramos pérez & santiago rivera (1997), duany, hernández & rey (1995). ramos pérez & santiago rivera (1997). these studies generally conclude that in the community of capetillo in río piedras, unequal relations prevail between ethnic groups. also that puerto ricans whom live there assume a xenophobic position, and that dominicans establish support networks with their own ethnic group in order to facilitate their adaptation in the host society-nation. duany, hernández and rey (1995) found that group interaction between puerto ricans and dominicans are filled with social prejudice and stereotypes, and that there are no support networks between them as well. dominicans here also lack a formal social organization to help them face discrimination in their workplaces, in living facilities and in health clinics. research findings also conclude that illegal immigration and the “underground economy” helps explain the difficulty in accounting precisely for the total numbers of immigrants, and for the deplorable working conditions that include poorpaying and less prestigious jobs. duany (2001) concludes that the media is partly responsible for xenophobic attitudes towards immigrants because they promote myths about immigrants that motivate intolerance. these myths are based on the impression that a high proportion of dominicans are in an illegal status, are black or “mulatto” (of mixed race), are from the blue collar workforce class, from the peasant social stratum and primarily women. intolerance towards dominicans in puerto rico grows every day, especially with the increase of illegal persons coming to the island by “yolas” or in other means of transport (iturrondo, 2001). the criminal stigma over the dominicans is very notable in the way some people come to associate their illegal immigration status with illegal behavior, crime and urban community decadence (martinez-san miguel, 1998). strategies of intervention in the context of cultural diversity when families emigrate they are exposed to tensions that may be considered to be an ecological transition (lalueza & crespo, 2005), which implies reorganizing in order to insert into a new society. they must also face the difficulties of cultural change (new rules, loss of support networks, role changes and generational conflicts) and as consequence of migration, reconstructing the sense of belongingness and integrating into the social environment. intervention with immigrants can be done with diverse theoretical frameworks, presupposing integration processes. this limits the understandings of the realities in which these cultural groups are immersed. for this reason is so important to formulate proposals from a cultural diversity ethics in order to develop strategies that promote integration and better coexistence (sánchez & sánchez, 2009). puerto rico lacks public policies that promotes cultural integration, as do all other countries in the caribbean region, which make inexistent any plans or strategies for cultural integration. if one adds to this the increase in unemployment, the increase in illegal immigration (the dominican republic puerto rico corridor, by sea), and the intercultural tensions, one can see how these factors contribute to the immigrant families’ marginalization and isolation. considering the above-mentioned needs in puerto rico we designed an educational intervention program, in which an intercultural education for peace is established, based on tolerance and respect for diversity. the program has the function of sensibilizing people over the topic and to promote social coexistence. voces con eco educational project voces con eco is an educational program that promotes cultural diversity and tolerance that emerges as an initiative that addresses the report presented at the ciudad universitaria project under the name nuestra visión (our vision) regarding the needs of the city of río piedras. in that report a diversity of needs was identified, particularly the problems of citizens living together in the diverse cultural groups that inhabit río piedras. the city of río piedras is an example of multiculturalism in puerto rican society because great cultural diversity may be observed as a result of historical, political and economical factors. a mosaic of nationalities lives jointly in an urban scenario where they live together. amidst this diversity the dominican community predominates in the central part of the city, as a result of the latest wave of immigrants into the country. the dominican community that transits this urban space is defined by the following characteristics: of black race, illiterate, with illegal immigration status, blue-collar workers or service employees who live daily in an environment marked by xenophobia and intolerance. to address this problem the voces con eco project is created with the purpose of developing creative forms of teaching to promote a culture of solidarity, tolerance and social integration in the city of río piedras (nina, 2006). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 1 march 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 learning how to live together implies recognizing social and cultural diversity in the community of río piedras. this situation poses great challenges to education when one desires to promote values that address the problem of coexistence and social integration. among the values that it promotes are: tolerance, respecting the different, valuing diversity, conceiving unity within diversity, cooperation and solidarity. among these values tolerance is especially significant mainly because it refers to accepting and respecting the diversity of cultures, races, sexual preferences, religious beliefs and political ideologies. tolerance is conceived along three premises: accepting diversity, inclusion of pluralism and negotiation of interests. it is for this reason that tolerance has to be taught as an attitude that promotes pluralism. considering what we have said the educational program proposes the utilization of creative forms of teaching (such as the use of video and photographs) that reflect the social reality of the inhabitants of río piedras. voces con eco (voices with echoes) is a program that has the following objectives: • develop an educational experience that promotes a culture of solidarity, tolerance and social integration. • promote the knowledge and valorization of diverse cultures. • cultivate attitudes of respect towards cultural diversity. • help facilitate the improvement of the quality of life of the inhabitants of the city of río piedras. this program requires a participative methodology where the challenge is to involve the community in the process that starts from a reflection on cohabitation, within the context of cultural diversity, continues with the program’s implementation and ends with the consolidation of these diversity concepts. at this moment the project features four components: the first axis is the educational program, vivir es convivir in which the goal is to develop skills that promote living together in the same urban space and developing favorable attitudes for respect and tolerance towards the different forms of understanding life. the program is composed of four educational modules based on a workshop methodology proposed by anderegg (1988), which consists on the pedagogical premise of learning while doing, being also a participative methodology that implies group work. the themes of the workshops were four in total: community identity, cultural diversity, tolerance and social life. the implementation of the vivir es convivir program has worked primarily with the community leaders in the different cultural groups that inhabit the area, including dominicans, arabs and puerto ricans. assistance to the workshops was planned with the participants in terms of their availability of days, schedules and places that the workshop could be held. the workshop was structured to start with the voces con eco visual presentation, in order to motivate a discussion among participants on their seldom discussed topics of cultural diversity and their experiences with it. the workshop then proceeded in sequential fashion. the module was implemented with small groups, with a maximum of twenty people. once this was finalized, a copy of the voces con eco video and educational material was provided so that the community members could further develop this program in their community. the experience as a whole has been successful and was evaluated by the participants as a significant and positive experience. the following is a summary of some of the information obtained from the evaluations of the workshop: • “río piedras is a cosmopolitan sector, where people of many nationalities live together daily, but we must forget about race, religion and nationality”. • in terms of peaceful coexistence, it was established that there is little sense of belonging in the community as well as a great amount of intolerance, discrimination and racial stereotypes. • other problems that affect the community are: drug abuse, stagnant/smelly waters, alcohol abuse, closed-off streets, abandoned buildings, street violence, excessive noise, and excessive garbage. • the majority of participants suggested that many people have left the city and for this reason there are many abandoned homes and immigrants moving in to occupy them. • there are a great number of illegal immigrants living here. • it is a multicultural city, but with a lot of misinformation. very little is known about the cultures and ethnic groups that inhabit it. • the history of the city should be known and documented. the events could be documented in order to emphasize positive tendencies, as well as to identify the common bonds that unify and characterize the population. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 1 march 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 • it is important to work towards integration, taking into account that there are differences in terms of religion, educational level and upbringing. • that living peacefully within diversity is possible and that puerto ricans (the locals) are always considered as good and always willing to receive persons of other cultures. • in terms of racism and discrimination participants remarked racial and nationality stereotypes and concluded that “one must know the person before speaking negatively about him/her. • in terms of solutions to the conflicts of living together they stressed on the following categories: communication, dialogue, education and sharing. the second point of the educational program is the development of educational materials such as posters and an exercise manual to be used as a complement or support material for the workshops. the manual is composed of complementary literature for each one of the themes in the module, individual and group exercises, an evaluation sheet for every workshop, the declaration of human rights, and a letter of commitment with tolerance and annotated references for those interested in the subject. each session entails two hours of work. the third point comprises the production of filmed documentaries. the documentaries are meant to reflect the daily life of the inhabitants of downtown río piedras, including filmed interviews of people from different cultural backgrounds. there have been a total of three educational videos produced in this fashion: (1) voces con eco, ciudad habitada (2005) (30 min.)this documentary consists on images of the daily life of the multicultural residents and merchants of central río piedras who converse on the cultural diversity of the city and the conflicts that they face within this social context; (2) [mi] río piedras (2005) (4 min): comprised of a virtual gallery depicting the construction of the city and of the public and private spaces of its citizens; (3) capetillo núm. 12 (2006) (30 min.): presents how the dominican community lives in a sector called capetillo. among its images are community members sharing a dialogue on their needs, problems and identity with the city of río piedras. the fourth point is the investigation component, which at the present time is being undertaken by a study called: travesías: inmigración, interculturalidad y convivencia social , where intercultural conflicts are analyzed with regard to the dominican community, evident in the recent intolerant attitudes which show an increasing trend by way of racist, discriminatory and xenophobic behavior. the study will comprise four phases: (1) interviews with key informants; (2) focus groups; (3) photographic documentation; and (4) production of a documentary. the communities of río piedras and santurce will be the sectors where the study will be conducted, as they are where the dominican community predominates. upon completion of the study, a publication, a documentary and a photographic exhibit will be presented. we consider that this project has been recognized by the community as helpful towards dealing with the situation of intolerance (above all in the dominican community), a topic rarely discussed in puerto rico. in this process the participants have been able to identify: problems of coexistence or cohabitation, the need to receive support in order to improve their coexistence and also the psychological effects of migration particularly in the fragilities in the singlemother headed a homes case, which predominates in the community. finally, due to the conflicts of coexistence that the inhabitants of río piedras face, it is necessary to continue the educational effort so that the community’s citizens may learn to respect one another and tolerate different forms of understanding life as a result of the cultural diversity. the intervention with dominican immigrants within a cultural diversity framework establishes an effective way of achieving social integration, where a dialogue between “them” and “us” may be made possible and working towards a common goal: to improve coexistence between all people that live in this city. praxis: the community experience voces con eco already has specific experiences that mix the action and the experience of community intervention that we refer as praxis. although the project is far from over we take the time to reflect about the processes occurring revolving around the aforementioned axis of voces con eco. in this part of the article we succinctly present some concrete ongoing work from an intercultural and coexistence perspective. in terms of a specific impression of intercultural relations we found that in general there is “subtle” discrimination from the puerto rican community towards non-puerto rican communities, particularly towards the dominican community. from focal groups and key informant interviews we find an array of stories of discrimination and prejudice. focal groups with youngsters and adults told a plethora of stories of discrimination manifested in discriminatory global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 1 march 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 jokes, discrimination in quotidian social practices such as in the work sphere and even stories of police brutality. interviews with key informants, in this case puerto rican community leaders they do recognize that discrimination and prejudice exists however they feel they do not participate in these discriminatory practices and therefore they feel “distant” (ajeno) from this phenomena. with the collaboration of members of the community there is a latent conclusion that the conditions in which cohabitation or coexistence happens is in the context of these discriminatory practices in which exclusion and conflictive relations constitute the everyday lives of intercultural relationships. to solve this problem the community members agreed that intercultural education and community participation established in collaborative intercultural activities. the educational axis of the project was initiated with photographic workshops for youngsters between the ages of 12-15. this was decided in collaboration with key community members in which puerto rican and dominican community leaders were included. these workshops discussed, additional to discussing photographic techniques and providing materials such as cameras, the topics of cultural diversity, racism and discrimination, social cohabitation or coexistence, citizenship and human rights and intercultural dialogue (diálogo intercultural). after three complete photographic workshops these had as an outcome three photographic expositions called; el lente juvenil (the young lens, 2010), diversidad(es): del concepto a la imagen (diversit(ies): from the word to the image, 2011) and miradas desde capetillo (gazes from capetillo, 2012). these photographic expositions where all presented in the heart of the community (usually in a community center during some day activity) and the young community members actively participated in the expositions. lastly in 2012 an educational tool was produced called ojos que no ven (eyes that can’t see). this is a documentary that addressed the problem of discrimination from the dominican community’s perspective informed by the experiences of people from the academia. this documentary was designed to be used as a tailored tool to reflect on the discriminatory practices that the dominican community in puerto rico face. as said before the project’s praxis is still ongoing and we expect to have more community informed actions to contribute to a better intercultural coexistence. with these community actions we also intend to stimulate that the communities that inhabit the city of río piedras take the protagonist role and they can become the catalyst of transformation to better their conditions of wellbeing. the recognition of dominican communities and all multicultural communities can only happen in the heart of the collectivism of individuals. the community can generate a space of security and of linkages in the fertile ground of the intercultural projects. in the praxis of intercultural projects there is a dialectic relationship in the many elements that constitutes a community that constantly transforms itself while transforming the spaces of them as well. our bet is that community intervention with multicultural groups from an intercultural perspective can achieve a social 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(2001). la seriedad del humor étnico en puerto rico. diálogo, 18-19. duany, j. (1990). los dominicanos en puerto rico: migración en la semiperiferia. san juan: ediciones huracán. duany, j., hernández angueira, l. & rey, c. (1995). el barrio gandul” economía subterránea y migración indocumentada en puerto rico. san juan: universidad sagrado corazón; venezuela: editorial nueva sociedad. eroles, c. (2006). familia(s), estallido, puente y diversidad. una mirada transdisciplinaria de derechos humanos. argentina: editorial espacios. grasmuck, s. & pessar, p. (1991). between two islands: dominican international migration. berkeley: university of california press.. hernández angueira, l. (1990). la migración de mujeres dominicanas hacia puerto rico. en los dominicanos en puerto rico: migración en la semi-periferia. río piedras: editorial huracán. hernández, r. & rivera batiz, f. (1997). dominicans new yorkers: a socioeconomic profile. new york: cuny. ingoldsby, b. & smith, s. (1995). families in multicultural perspectives. new york: guilford press. internacional migration report (2002). department of economic and social affairs, population division [en internet] http://www.un.org/esa/population /publications/ittmig2002/ittmigrep2002. lalueza, j. l. & crespo, i. (2005). la intervención con familias ante la diversidad social y cultural. madrid: ministerio de trabajo y asuntos sociales. mahalingam, r. (2006). cultural psychology of immigrants. new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates publishers. margulis, m. (2003). cultura y discriminación social en la época de la globalización. en bayardo, r., lacarrieu, m. (compiladores). globalización e identidad cultual. argentina: ediciones ciccus. martínez, m. (2006). intervención comunitaria en inmigración desde la perspectiva de la diversidad. en garcía, m, & lópez, t. (eds.) intervención comunitaria. málaga: ediciones aljibe. martínez san miguel,y. (1998). de ilegales a indocumentados: representaciones culturales de la emigración dominicana en puerto rico. revista de ciencias sociales, 4, 147-171. nina, r. (2009). temas de psicología. san juan: publicaciones puertorriqueñas. nina, r. (2006). vivir es convivir: manual de trabajo. proyecto voces con eco. san juan: publicaciones cauce. paz, s. (2007). reflexiones, debates y enfoques sobre interculturalidad. lazos, año2, no. 3, 49-55. pérez serrano, g. (2003). como educar para la democracia. españa: editorial popular. petit, j. (2003). migraciones, vulnerabilidad y políticas públicas. impacto sobre niños familias y sus derechos. chile: celade. pessar, p. (1995). en el hogar y en el trabajo: integración de la mujer inmigrante al discurso feminista. genero y sociedad, 2(3), 128-161. ramos pérez, l. & santiago rivera, m. (1997). las relaciones sociales entre los/as dominicanos/as y su impacto en la solución de problemas comunitarios. tesis de maestría. escuelas de trabajo social, universidad de puerto rico, río piedras. sabin, f. & sánchez, n. (2009). plan local de convivencia de el molar: una experiencia de participación ciudadana en la mancomunidad de servicios sociales vega del guadalix. intervención psicológica 18(1), 57-64. sherif, b. & hamon, r. (2007). cultural diversity and families, london: sage publications. tajfel, h. & tunner, j. (1979). the social identity theory of intergroup conflict. in s. woschel (ed.) psychology of intergroup relations. chicago, il: nelson hall publishers. valdillo, a. (2006). la interculturalidad un desafió para una sociedad democrática, lazos, año 1 no. 2, 6-9. kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 introduction to part ii of the special issue geraldine (geri) palmer, jesica siham fernandez, dominique thomas author biographies: geraldine (geri) palmer, ph.d. is a scholar-activist, practitioner, educator, and writer who uses an interdisciplinary approach of community psychology, social psychology and sociology to understand and work on issues of concern among black, indigenous, people of color (bipoc) including racial justice and anti-blackness practices. she earned her ph.d. from national louis university, chicago. in addition to her position as assistant professor at adler university she is the cofounder and managing director of community wellness institute (cwi). through cwi, dr. palmer and a team of consultants facilitate the f.a.c.e. of justice workshops with topics on anti-racism and anti-blackness practices and social and racial justice, provide consultations with non-profits to help them strengthen their infrastructure, and conducts social research. her teaching, research, and praxis has its foundation in her dissertation study which focused on homelessness particularly among black/african americans, and currently centers on language that often reproduces colonialism ideology, dismantling the code of silence, and historical trauma among black/african americans. jesica siham fernández, ph.d. is an assistant professor in the ethnic studies department at santa clara university. she received her phd in social psychology and latin american & latinx studies from the university of california, santa cruz. grounded in a decolonial feminist praxis, she engages critical par paradigms and approaches to support bipoc communities, especially latinx immigrant families, youth, and student activists in mobilizing to actualize collective conditions of community thriving, sociopolitical wellbeing, and decolonial liberation toward transformative justice. as a teacher-scholar-activist, jesica’s praxis is rooted in a commitment to racial justice and anti-oppression toward decolonial liberation. dominique thomas, ph.d. is editor of the community psychologist. he attained his ba in psychology from morehouse college and his ma and phd in community psychology from georgia state university. he was a scholarship to practice fellow in the national center for institutional diversity at the university of michigan. dr. thomas is interested in the areas of black identity, racial socialization, activism, afrofuturism, and the black radical tradition. he co-edited a special issue of community psychology in global perspective, black lives matter in community psychology and is co-editing a forthcoming special issue in the american journal of community psychology, imperial algorithms: contemporary manifestations of racism and colonialism. global journal of community psychology practice promoting community practice for social benefit global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 october 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 introduction to part ii of the special issue abstract we are appreciative of the voices that are constantly being raised around the world, and the public discourse centered on unsettling systemic racism, anti-blackness practices, discrimination and other related prevailing social issues. we believe that these voices in conversation signal that the stronghold of silencing among activists, abolitionists, and all other allies and co-conspirators in this space is being dismantled as we speak and write. we are also aware that dialogues must move to actions and concrete strategies for justice. we developed this two-part special issue around the themes of anti-racist and racial justice praxis to illuminate actions happening locally, nationally and globally, and how the work of anti-racism/racial justice might be adapted, integrated or used as guides for ongoing racial justice and social progress. these articles represent a call for a participatory, action oriented and decolonial liberatory standpoint rather than a bystander or deficit approach. we are appreciative of the voices that are constantly being raised around the world, and the public discourse centered on unsettling systemic racism, anti-blackness practices, discrimination and other related prevailing social issues. we believe that these voices in conversation signal that the stronghold of silencing among activists, abolitionists, and all other allies and co-conspirators in this space is being dismantled as we speak and write. we are also aware that dialogues must move to actions and concrete strategies for justice. we developed this two-part special issue around the themes of anti-racist and racial justice praxis to illuminate actions happening locally, nationally and globally, and how the work of anti-racism/racial justice might be adapted, integrated or used as guides for ongoing racial justice and social progress. how do we make progress when systemic racism that shows up in police brutality, mass incarceration, and structural violence in america’s education system, as well as the labor market, and more, are deeply embedded in ideologies representative of decades, even centuries of colonialism and coloniality? how do we engage in actions that subvert whiteness in its facets while building antiracist cultures in the academy, practice, and praxis? how do we get descendants of the transatlantic african diaspora to document their lived experiences to engage in how colonization impacted caribbean islands? how do we incite community psychologists in understanding the importance of incorporating an anti-racist and racial justice values into its framework for teaching and practice? these articles have been compiled to address these questions and a myriad of other questions as we continue to rediscover paths used before and at present, and as we seek to forge new ones in a moment in time when this is urgently necessary: our lives depend on it. black lives matter and depend on our commitment to racial justice. the content found here, which is part ii special issue, is an expansion of the work the council on culture, ethic and racial affairs (cera) began four-years ago, including raising our own voices to call attention to our lived experiences encountering racist logics, whiteness and hegemonic practices within the academe and community practice, including our very own disciplinary home. these articles represent a call for a participatory, action oriented and decolonial liberatory global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 october 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 standpoint rather than a bystander or deficit approach. the fifteen total articles in the series and the seven found in part ii reflect those manuscripts that underwent rigorous editorial and peer-review processes, and the multiple revisions by the authors who graciously accepted the feedback and comments. thank you to the editorial team, anonymous peer-reviewers and authors. we readily acknowledge it is your work that makes this two-part special issue a dynamic space and worthy platform supporting our ongoing work in advancing anti-racism and racial justice praxis in community psychology. themes in part ii our lead editor, jesica siham fernandez generously organized the collected articles into themes, which constitute the twopart special issue. in this series, part ii, we featuring seven articles focus on deconstructing and unsettling colonial power, racism, whiteness; reflexive dialogues to challenge oppression; auto-ethnographic methodologies of power and oppression; troubling whiteness/white supremacy and colorism; challenging white structures and systems; and anti-racism in practice. part ii of the special issue begins with mingo, balthazar, and olson’s work on deconstructing colonial authority in community psychology curricula and structures. the authors focus on “the premise of persistence,” a concept described as maintaining white authority found in professional organizations, research, and practice. the key to addressing this is an intentional deconstruction of existing literature, prevalent ideology, and gatekeeping. second, we feature the work of ciann wilson et al. whose collaborative work foregrounds the process of confronting oppression in the academy through archiving and documenting the testimonies and experiences of students marginalized in a community psychology program in canada. following wilson et al., moore et al., offer an empowering narrative on another region outside of the united states focused on concerns that can arise from multicultural identities, which can prohibit most discussions about racism. the article describes the processes involved in a qualitative study seeking to connect the experiences of the participants to bring forth their resilience as a viable method to addressing racism. after moore et al., the issue brings back another discussion by single author rauk, who through an autoethnographic process offers an ethically reflexive piece on the importance of community psychologists’ development an anti-racist practice that interrogates whiteness and white privilege. this article is a response to a call for community psychologists to engage in more personal writings through reflexivity. the author uses their own experience with reflexivity, as a mode of engaging in heart-centered work. staying within the higher education space is the ferreira van leer et al. article focused on graduate students’ resistance to institutional oppression. using an autoethnographic approach, the students show how they addressed overarching themes of racism on campus to challenge higher education institutions in an effort to embrace graduate student activism. collins complements the writings of ferreira van leer et al. and rauk through the development of a theoretical framework that purports that white privilege and related concepts are social constructs that have failed to alter systemic conditions. instead these concepts have perpetuated and reinforced white privilege and bipoc oppression. collins, therefore, offers a systems global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 3 october 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 theoretical approach that could address this concern. following collins, dykstra and storm end this second section of the special issue series with a discussion on their growing awareness of the need for critical-liberatory spaces where white anti-racist cultures can be cultivated. this awareness led seven white therapists and psychologists to strive to disrupt white body supremacy through a concept they refer to as “imaginings.” taken together, these articles illustrate the importance and urgency to make space for bipoc centered scholars and scholarship, as well as white allies and accomplices who are unafraid to challenge whiteness within structures, spaces and institutions, as well as within themselves. we are hopeful that the community psychology community, allies, and co-conspirators find this two-part special issue to be enlightening, prolific, and inspirational. original research kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 remembering the life and legacy of ibrahim makkawi hana masud, asrar kayyal, noor khaled, sahar al najjar author biographies: hana r. masud, ph.d. is a postdoctoral fellow at the university of massachusetts boston. her research focuses on the coloniality of mental health services and its impact on re-colonizing local resistance. masud is the co-chair of decolonial racial justice in praxis, an initiative of psychologists for social responsibility http://psysr.org/. hana aims to build collaborative partnerships with communities in shared efforts to transform conditions of inequity towards wellness and justice; decolonial praxis with marginalized groups locally in chicago, boston, and internationally primarily in occupied palestine. asrar kayyal, m.a. is a psychological intern and researcher in community psychology. she is mainly interested in researching psychological well-being in colonial contexts, and education and violence among the colonized in particular. asrar provides educational-psychological services in east jerusalem. noor khaled, m.a. earned his master’s degree in community psychology from birzeit university occupied palestine. his research focuses on psychological warfare, community organizing, decolonizing imagination, knowledge, and power. khaled is currently working in an elementary school in ramallah as an educational counselor. sahar al najjar, m.a. is a doctoral student in clinical psychology at adler university. she is currently working in the department of psychology as an adjunct faculty at triton college and as a psychiatric clinician at macneal hospital. sahar’s research primarily focuses on trauma, complex ptsd, and healing within refugee populations in occupied palestine and in exile. global journal of community psychology practice promoting community practice for social benefit global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 remembering the life and legacy of ibrahim makkawi abstract as palestinian psychologists, clinicians, researchers, and educators we collectively come together to uplift the liberation narratives and work paved by dr. ibrahim makkawi. we recognize the distance that separates us between barriers and borders on the map. however, we remember our ‘sumud’ (steadfastness) that transcends the weight of exile and occupation both locally and internationally. our love for justice is rooted in our love for the land. we theorize from the flesh of those who touched us with their radical wisdom, such as makkawi, and we further grow like our olive tree branches nourished with the memories and imprints of radical love on our hearts. the following is a memorial; a set of tributes to honor the life and legacy of ibrahim. who are we? as palestinian psychologists, clinicians, researchers, and educators we collectively come together to uplift the liberation narratives and work paved by dr. ibrahim makkawi. we recognize the distance that separates us between barriers and borders on the map. however, we remember our ‘sumud’ (steadfastness) that transcends the weight of exile and occupation both locally and internationally. our love for justice is rooted in our love for the land. we theorize from the flesh of those who touched us with their radical wisdom, such as makkawi, and we further grow like our olive tree branches nourished with the memories and imprints of radical love on our hearts. the following is a memorial; a set of tributes to honor the life and legacy of ibrahim. “i am from there. i am from here. i am not there and i am not here. i have two names, which meet and part, and i have two languages. i forget which of them i dream in.” -mahmoud darwish storytelling as a healing praxis grief is a reaction to loss, and we each experience grief individually. we channel our grief and sadness as a reenactment of our collective resistance. we co-write for collective healing through decolonial methodology. our narratives date back to the west bank 1940 lands, and we continue to remember dr. makkawi and our lands by harvesting new seeds of radical hope and radical community love through our narrative stories. dr. ibrahim makkawi emphasized to students, “we don’t have to be in palestine to do work for palestine.” from the diaspora and exile to our siblings living under occupation, we come together by creating pathways for future generations and future visions of liberation. while the weight of grief is heavily carried, we find hope in our togetherness. yes, grief and gratitude can both coexist as a catalyst towards honoring our indigenous roots through our stories. we understand that we can honor both our grief and gratitude by centering our stories and collective voices. even when palestinains are made to feel inferior, our stories of radical love are alive through our collective ability to feel one another and remain steadfast in our focus towards liberation. we uplift dr. makkawis story and commitment to liberation by acknowledging the roots of colonization and superiority that often occupies our native tongues and abilities to narrate as palestinians. after all, it is our stories that global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 allow us to touch one another, feel one another, and heal collectively. “superiority? inferiority? why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?” ~ franz fanon, black skin white masks the story of a revolutionary scholar as a seed ibrahim makkawi was born and raised in tal as-sabea’ in an-naquab desert (negev), southern palestinian lands israeli-colonized in 1948. he completed elementary and high school at an arab local school in his town where the curriculum is due to the israeli educational system. makkawi personally experienced the psychological effects of education within a colonial context, including how dictative learning and alienating content, damages creative thinking and impacts identity. this experience may be what made him attracted to thinkers and theorists such as paulo freire and frantz fanon. coming from a small bedouin village to the space of a large israeli campus, makkawi refused to be swallowed into its colonial ways. activism became a way of life, and since the 1980s, makkawi had to work very hard in order to able to cover the expenses of seeking higher education at a university[1]. in the late 1980s, makkawi entered the ben-gurion university to study behavioral science, where he joined the “nationalist progressive movement,” [2] the student arm of the palestinian “abnaa’ albalad” political movement (sons of the village according to the hebrew inaccurate translation of the name). abnaa’ albalad is a palestinian leftist progressive political movement that believes in the right of the palestinian people to determine their own destination on the colonized palestinian land from the sea to the river (historical palestine) towards a democratic secular state. makkawi was a comrade of a leftist movement that faced many political challenges, whether imposed by the colonial zionist state, or internal ones. many comrades of this movement lacked an internal or theoretical\ ideological compass, have changed their minds, or backed off. makkawi, however, insisted not only on the necessity to continue his struggle for justice and dignity against the colonial capitalist entity, but also to contribute to society from his own knowledge in community, educational, and liberation psychology. he sought to make the ideology clearer for his comrades and people, and to motivate them not to give up their own rights in the face of unjust capitalist systems erasing the indigenous natives from the land[3]. the seed that grew from defeat (استدخال الهزيمة) according to paolo freire, from his text “pedagogy of the oppressed”, alienation produces psychological inferiority. dr. makkawi experienced alienation from oppressive systems, and learned the importance of activism and liberation as part of a global movement. he analyzed the psychological importance of practicing the collective identity, and years later he described the reality of palestinian parties who are choosing to merge in the knesset, as “internalizing the defeat”. this analysis accompanies psychoanalyst mustafa hijazi’s description of the reality of psychological interactions among the colonized and the persecuted. he spoke about the phenomenon of collective “learned helplessness” and “internalizing inferiority” against a reality of injustice, persecution, and inferiority; all practices of colonization that attempt to maintain an internal colonized collective psyche-self.[4] global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 ibrahim makkawi sculpted and defined “internalizing the defeat,”[5] within the palestinian context as. here are some of his words: a psychological process whose result is that the human being [individuals or communities or both] reaches a self-conviction that the injustice and oppression that befell him is nothing but a natural and inevitable thing, and he only has to convince himself and the others around him that this is the given status of things, and accordingly to whom internalized the defeat devises new methods of work and thinking. makkawi touched on this phenomenon, describing the situation of the palestinian political parties that internalized defeat, adopted it, designed themselves, and built or reconstructed their vision according to the defeat left by the oslo accords and the “solution”, referring to the concessions and divisions, proposed by the treaty. this internalization of the defeat has necessitated the adoption of the "palestinian state" and the “jewish state” project, with the benefit it brings to a small party of the palestinian people, depending on the salvation that this provides for this group, regardless of the fate of the rest of the people. according to makkawi, looking at collective salvation and adopting it as a path is a matter of great significance that is greater than the capacity of those who internalized helplessness and defeat. whether directly or indirectly (by influencing other comrades and people) makkawi has affected the abnna’ albalad movement’s decision to join the knesset. the movement continued to oppose running in knesset elections and actively engaged in boycotting these elections[6]. the movement believes it is necessary to establish a parliament of palestinians, to be elected directly by the palestinians living in the lands colonized in 1948 (israel), gaza, wb, refugee camps and the diaspora. the blossoming praxis of liberation rooted in cooperative learning makkawi wrote on cooperative learning[7] as a recommended way of learning. cooperative learning is a process through which a conversation and a common research driven by a group motivates interaction and group curiosity. according to makkawi this way of learning allows all of the participants to express themselves, where they are each equally respected, and where they get to experience themselves as productive contributors to the group of learners. makkawi brought this way of learning and implemented it within the youth political camps of the abnaa’ albalad movement till the year 2017. dr. makkawi drew on the concept of community as a responsibility and not only as a resource[8], where members of the group learn their responsibility each step within a collaborative effort, involving each member to be proactive and reflective learners. this allowed everyone the ability to contribute to a more conscious way of learning and discovering through community engagement. makkawi had always encouraged his peers, especially youth, to dream and to visualize the future of liberation. the flower that grew through academia & activism “dr. ibrahim makkawi’s research interests include community social work, policy change, promotion of legislation, corporate social responsibility, and leadership and empowerment within the community.” during his experience of establishing and directing the “community psychology” global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 program at birzeit university, he had written an article[9] on “the rise and fall of academic community psychology in palestine and the way forward”. the article examines the inception of a decolonised community psychology programme in the palestinian colonial context and its subsequent decline and setback. dr. makkawi wrote about the “theoretical inspiration for the programme by the shortlived experience of grassroots organising during the first palestinian intifada is illustrated. specific pedagogical and research activities, marked by the influence of the latin american liberation psychology model, are presented and discussed. these include a focus on praxis, dialogical education, conscientisation and community participatory action research. i consider the influence of the south african experience on the programme principally in reference to steve biko’s notion of black consciousness. this translated to palestinian collective-national identity, as well as relevance in psychological knowledge. dr. makkawi appraised the setback of the programme in light of administrative and epistemological debates with related disciplines that shifted from psychological individualistic reductionism to social-cultural reductionism. harvesting narratives of liberation & radical love within a global context السياق العالمي؟ what is liberation in a global context? dr. ibrahim makkawi emphasized that unless we focus on anti-colonial praxis towards liberation, a decolonized global psychology has minimal chances of surviving. this was a critical reflection i learned from makkawi’s work while obtaining my community counseling master’s degree in the diaspora. ibrahim makkawis article, “the rise and fall of academic community psychology in palestine and the way forward”, was an important reading as a graduate student that allowed me to understand the importance of national identity, collective community engagement, and liberation in psychological contexts. shortly after graduating with my master’s degree and being accepted into a clinical psychology doctorate, i still found myself reading the work of palestinian scholars in palestine who have contributed to a decolonized psychology. i was grateful to cross paths with dr. hana masud, who is a community psychologist and revolutionary feminist scholar in the u.s. having taught a community psychology course, she often reminded me that we’re doing this work for palestine and that despite the deeply rooted colonial challenges of doctoral training in the diaspora, this program is merely a checkpoint to pass. she continually reminded me to be unafraid, to take up space, and to speak up in my spaces. shortly after her radical pedagogy in this course, we learned about the passing of dr. ibrahim makkawi. i recently learned that he was an important figure in her life at birzeit university, as a former professor, mentor, friend, and chosen family to her. it did not take much time to reflect more intentionally on makkawi ‘s work, and truly see the impact he had on masud like the reflection of a heart in the mirror. makkawi’s mentorship, research, and legacy are deeply rooted into hana’s praxis in community psychology as a decolonizer, anti-colonial educator, and liberation fighter for palestine in exile. i recollect hana sharing heartfelt reflections with me about dr. makkawi’s unshakeable solidarity with female students regarding the complexities he knew women faced due to patriarchal systems. with an open heart, she shared with me how he dedicated his life to his two children, and as a single father, he wholeheartedly felt with women and the daily struggles they face. in deep conversation, we reflected on revolutionaries in our field and beyond, such as ghassan kanafani, mahmoud darwish, edward said, etc. we began to talk global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 about the impact of these revolutionaries to society and questioned the impact of revolutionary souls such as makkawi who have impacted many hearts both locally and internationally. masud continued to share that the revolutionary voices that our society places on a pedestal are sometimes inaccessible, however, dr. makkawi made himself accessible and available to students. hana recollected sitting and having coffee with him, and that’s the kind of revolutionary scholar that society doesn’t often hear about. makkawi made significant contributions to global community psychology, however, he still made the time to be there for students, to listen to students, and embodied the humility that transcends titles and pedestals that come from being a prestigious academic. dr. ibrahim makkawi’s scholarship and humanistic approaches decolonized psychology for students in palestine and in the diaspora. franz fanon, another important figure in decolonial liberation psychology stated, “an authentic national liberation exists only in the precise degree to which the individual has irreversibly begun his own liberation.” dr. ibrahim makkawi challenged colonialism with his own pen, a pen that will never run out of ink. how powerful it is to learn about his work in the diaspora oceans away from home. how powerful it is to witness his scholarship embedded in the decolonial praxis of those who he taught such as dr. masud. as a clinical psychologist in training, i am doing this work for palestine, for our people, for our children, focusing on our livability and future. from dr. ibrahim makkawi to dr. hana masud, this work is because of all radicals who remind us that we are a family of the (watan/وطن) meaning homeland. dr. masuds words engrained in my heart; “we have become a family of radical palestinian fighters, living in a village together, a village that exists in the future, our descendants will surely run into us in the streets.” in honor and celebration of dr. makkawis radical scholarship, life, and soul – we will continue to build for our homeland, for our villages, for our people, and for our future in palestine and beyond borders. in his work, there is a revolution towards global liberation that we have a duty to carry on – with steadfast radical love. understanding activisms roots in decolonial framework if we study any socio-political experience regardless of its size and impact, we find individuals who were instrumental in steering social change and empowerment, and they don’t necessarily have to engage in actions on the ground. i was an active member of a social-cultural movement led by graduate students, and not many people knew that dr. ibrahim makkawi was one of our emergent strategists and mentors. in 2014, i co-founded the grassroot collective based in ramallah city, in the occupied territories of the west bank. our purpose was generating and promoting anticolonial practices, embodying democracy, and centering the people on the margins, especially women. ibrahim has always emphasized the need to learn from our own experience and not abandon the fight against politicians but be critical to not replicate their dominant structures. guided by fanon’s teachings on accompaniment and a reorientation of subjectivity “what we want is to walk in the company of man, every man, night and day, for all times”. he argued for a new start, a new beginning, and never adopted old tools in the process of creating new settings and structures, in pedagogical responses to coloniality of body, mind, and spirit. before his death, fanon wrote that “we need a model, schemas, and examples” different from the ones we have inherited from europe and america, models that will allow us to join in “projects and collaboration with others on tasks that strengthen man’s totality”. global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 our actions were guided by these dialectical and dialogical interactions to develop a praxis where it does not entertain the settler's future. it does not re-center racism. our work cannot graft onto pre-existing discourses and frameworks, even if they are critical and justice-oriented frameworks. harvesting new seeds of decolonial justice at the beginning of establishing our group, we wanted to counter the “cultural invasion” (freire, 2000) of internal colonialism, in the community organizing and mobilizing, that involves modes of control, silencing, and minoritization of women. ibrahim offered us an analysis of decoloniality, identifying and clarifying the different layers, moments, and areas involved in our production of liberated spaces and relationalities. in one of our conversations, he pointed out the need to observe the cultivation of decolonial thought, in contexts where coloniality can perpetuate itself through multiple forms of deceptions and confusion. makkawi questioned the role of women in our collective, and how women should have not only equal opportunities to the opposition, but rather a significant role in our liberation due to their historical exclusion in society. throughout his mentoring, makkawi modeled the need to shed off the professionalized role of expertism, and the need to deviate from our mainstream pathways to walk with those on the margins, to be with them, and be present on our journey as we construct and generate liberating knowledge. this was a prime example of how dr. ibrahim makkawi was invisible to the grassroots collective in body, but his decolonial analyses represented a crucial step in our plans for a better future. despite his bottomless service to the academy, organizing conferences, panels, and publications, he was committed to push us forward, protecting our rights to create our praxis, and continued to support our different modes of knowledge production. سالم لروحك ايها المعلم concluding remarks to shift away from the coloniality of being, and established meanings of sensing, feeling, and rejection of modern/colonial human experiences requires different containers. ibrahim created containers grounded in love and understanding, as key elements of a decolonial attitude designed to generate authentic forms of interpretation and action. according to adrienne maree brown; “when we are engaged in acts of love, we humans are at our best and most resilient, the kind of love that makes us better people, the love of community that makes us work tirelessly with broken hearts.” dr. makkawi walked, talked, and engaged in radical pedagogy built on the foundations of love. in spite of the profound wound he carried after losing his wife to cancer, and raising his kids alone as a single father, he continued to navigate all of his spaces with radical love towards everyone he encountered. these expressions of love in teaching and mentoring were seen as enactments of resistance, and affirmations of decolonial attitudes. his practices had a profound impact on his students, and the community psychologist movement he started in palestine. the strength of his movement is in the strength of our collective relationships, which can only be measured by their depth. we have emerged as questioners, writers, and thinkers, from the wisdom that he has passed down to all of us. through our tribute, we come together to uplift the story of dr. ibrahim makkawi that has no ending in our hearts. in our collectiveness, we are creating possibilities of return, journeying back home together, as we envision a future of liberation and wholeness. in his passing, global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 we center our grief and gratitude by honoring our interconnectedness through our radical and complex vulnerability of weeping, navigating our feelings, and further seeking a road of continued love and liberation from these very feelings. the roadmap that dr. makkawi’s imprint left on us is one that allows us to continue working towards growth and commitment to live, honor, and continue his legacy beyond each border on the map drawn to separate us. rest in ‘noor’ (light), ibrahim “o allah, o mother earth, o ancestors, place light in his heart, and on his words light, and in my grave light, above him light, and below him light, and to his right light, and to his left light, and before him light and behind him light. place in his soul light. magnify for him light. make him light, and make him light. o allah, o mother earth, o ancestors grant light in his grave and in his bones. grant him noor upon noor notes [1] according to his comrade and student in bengurion university back then, suhail saleibi. [2] rohana, n. & sbbagh-khoury, a. (2018) “the palestinian is israel: reading in history, politics and society”. mada al-carmel, vol. 2 p-p 149-174. [3] makkawi, ibraheem. “the discourse of the defeat phase has reached its own end” january 2004, aljeel aljadeed (the new generation), vol. 10 p 8-9. (arabic) [4] hijazi, m. (1985). social retardation: introduction to the psychology of the oppressed. the arab cultural center. beirut, lebanon مكاوي، إبراهيم. "مواقف في النقاش مع الفكر الذي استدخال [5] الهزيمة". مجلة إنتلجنسيا الرقمية. تم استرجاعه شباط 2016 [6] ibraheem, makkawi. “academic boycott in the context of resisting normalization with the zionist entity” august 18, 2004 (arabic) [7] makkawi, ibraheem. “cooperative learning is small groups”. aljeel aljadeed, issue 13. may 2003, p 50-52. (arabic) .الجيل الجديد، العدد 13. ص5052 ،2003 مّكاوي، إبراهيم. التعلّم التعاوني في المجموعات الصغيرة. أيار [8] nowell, branda; boyd, neil, “viewing community as responsibility as well as resource: deconstructing the theoretical roots of psychological sense of community,” journal of community psychology 38, no. 7 (september 2010), 828–841. [9] makkawi, ibraheem. (2017). “the rise and fall of academic community psychology in palestine and the way forward” south african journal of psychology, vol. 47(4) 482–492. references hijazi, m. (1985). social retardation: introduction to the psychology of the oppressed. the arab cultural center. beirut, lebanon makkawi, ibraheem. “the discourse of the defeat phase has reached its own end” january 2004, aljeel aljadeed (the new generation), vol. 10 p 8-9. (arabic) makkawi, ibraheem. “when are we going to understand that the zionist parliament is not ours” november 2011 (arabic) makkawi, ibraheem. “academic boycott in the context of resisting normalization with global journal of community psychology practice volume 13, issue 1 may 2022 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 the zionist entity” august 18, 2004 (arabic) makkawi, ibraheem. “cooperative learning is in small groups”. aljeel aljadeed, issue 13. may 2003, p 50-52. (arabic) مّكاوي، إبراهيم. التعلّم التعاوني في المجموعات الصغيرة. أيار 2003، الجيل الجديد، العدد 13. ص -50 52 makkawi, ibraheem. (2017). “the rise and fall of academic community psychology in palestine and the way forward” south african journal of psychology, vol. 47(4) 482–492. nowell, branda; boyd, neil, “viewing community as responsibility as well as resource: deconstructing the theoretical roots of psychological sense of community,” journal of community psychology 38, no. 7 (september 2010), 828–841. original research kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 welcome to this issue on the australia community psychology experience tom wolff and vince francisco keywords: community psychology practice, gjcpp author biographies: tom wolff is senior associate editor of the gjcpp, and a practicing clinical and community psychologist in amherst massachusetts, usa. vince francisco is editor of the gjcpp, and an associate professor at the university of north carolina at greensboro with broad community psychology practice experience. global journal of community psychology practice volume 3, issue 2 june 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 welcome to this issue on the australia community psychology experience many of us followed the battle for survival of community psychology in australia when official bodies decide to eliminate community psychology as an endorsed field of psychology, knowing that we all face some version of this saga in our own countries. australian community psychologists mobilized, organized and fought back and emerged victorious! the gjcpp is honored to have a group of australian community psychologists tell their story in the lead article in this issue: “lobbying for endorsement of community psychology in australia” by lynne cohen, julie dean, heather gridley, rebecca hogea, ken robinson, emma sampson, anne sibbel, and colleen turner. in reading their story it seemed to us that many of the underlying themes in the struggle have international implications. so we asked a group of prestigious community psychologists from around the globe to comment on the australian experience. our questions: • could this struggle also happen in your country? • what does it say about whether or not community psychology has to be connected to organized psychology – advantages, disadvantages? • how does the invisibility of community psychology can work to our disadvantage? the responses from our international colleagues were absolutely fascinating and well beyond our hopes for depth and thoughtfulness. this indeed emerged as a profound discussion about the future of community psychology around the world. please enjoy reading the article, and the commentaries from: maritza montero (venezuela), wolfgang stark (germany), neville robinson (new zealand), donata francescato (italy), francine lavoie (quebec) , sylvie taylor & gregor sarkisian (usa), jim cook (usa), caterina arcidiacono (italy). some of the issues raised were echoing the experience of our australian colleagues, but others were quite unique and equally challenging. we will learn from maritza montero that the experience of community psychology across latin america varied greatly with individuals, not being based on broader programs. we learn from our colleagues in quebec that formal recognition is a two-edged sword, in that it can raise quality, but then reduce the number of programs and diversity in training experience for students. similarly in europe, we see that the opportunities for making a difference (the need of communities) is increasing, but the training opportunities are decreasing relative to programs and positions open for other types of psychologists. in the usa, the challenges faced are significant, but have more to do with competencies taught and with increasing the visibility of community psychology relative to other disciplines (such as public health). in new zealand, the challenges of hegemony, of the competing roles of clinical/mental health, and relatively low visibility predominate. there is a lot to be learned from our colleagues across the globe. we hope you will value this issue of the global journal. tom wolff senior associate editor vince francisco editor microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 32 introduccion la primera conferencia internacional de psicología comunitaria realizada en la universidad de puerto rico, campus río piedras, en junio de 2006, fue una iniciativa audaz diseñada para congregar por primera vez a los psicólogos comunitarios de todo el mundo. el tema general fue “agendas compartidas en la diversidad”. la conferencia fue exitosa al desplegar la diversidad de agendas de la psicología comunitaria y al ofrecer la oportunidad de intercambiar la gran variedad de experiencias en las que se encontraban involucrados los psicólogos comunitarios. la segunda conferencia tuvo lugar en junio de 2008 en lisboa, portugal. esta vez fue el instituto superior de psicología aplicada el encargado de convocar. el tema escogido fue “construir comunidades participativas, potenciadoras y diversas: visualizar la psicología comunitaria desde una perspectiva mundial.” esta vez el propósito de la reunión internacional fue alentar a los psicólogos comunitarios para construir comunidades caracterizadas por la participación y el empoderamiento, aprendiendo de la diversidad de investigaciones e intervenciones de los participantes. esta conferencia fue un segundo acontecimiento destacado, conformando y confirmando el estatus internacional de la psicología comunitaria. la tercera conferencia, celebrada en junio de 2010 en la universidad iberoamericana puebla, en méxico, tuvo como tema general “aproximaciones comunitarias a los problemas sociales contemporáneos”. buscó contribuir al estatus científico y profesional de la psicología comunitaria como un aporte internacional desde la perspectiva del contexto histórico y sociocultural de los problemas sociales actuales, y como una “ciencia enlace” multidisciplinaria capaz de ofrecer una contribución necesaria y original para enfrentarlos. la psicología comunitaria ha sido relevante en relación a los asuntos psicosociales clave confrontados por psicólogos comunitarios en países ricos y países en desventaja, desde la mitad de los años cincuenta del siglo pasado. tres fuentes importantes recientes de la psicología comunitaria internacional proporcionan la información para conformar esta revisión general: international community psychology: history and theories (reich et al., 2007); international community psycholgy: shared agendas in diversity (vázquez rivera et al., 2009); e historias de la psicología 33 comunitaria en américa latina. participación y transformación (montero y serrano-garcía, 2011). en los cincuentas y sesentas los problemas psicosociales importantes fueron: cómo atender a las necesidades de salud y de salud mental de la población mundial (bennett, sarason, pichón rivière, moffat, cueli); y cómo aportar contribuciones psicológicas relevantes para resolver problemas del desarrollo (fals borda, seaman, escovar). en los años setenta las preocupaciones de psicólogos comprometidos se orientaron a responder a las necesidades de los pobres, de las minorías y de los ancianos. (bronfrenbrener, almeida, rappaport, kelly); y a cómo desarrollar estrategias sociopolíticas alternativas en las naciones en desventaja para terminar con la colonización y para mejorar la condición humana psicológica y material (freire, fanon, maurer lane, duncan). en los ochentas las exigencias fueron cómo responder a las demandas de igualdad de género y a las necesidades de los discapacitados (c. kagan, burton, francescato, bristo, ornelas); y cómo enfrentar las dificultades psicológicas para el proceso mundial de democratización (martín-baró, montero rivas, seidman, psicólogos maoris, teología de la liberación). en los noventas el mundo tuvo que preguntarse cómo tratar las nuevas epidemias (vihsida y otras) y la expansión de la adicción a las drogas (serrano-garcía, pérez jiménez, medina mora, natera, orford); y también acerca de cómo enfrentar los impactos psicológicos de las imposiciones del mundo de las finanzas (zapatistas, dobles, bader sawaiia, freitas, fryer). en los años 2000 nuevas amenazas tuvieron que ser consideradas: cómo combatir la degradación de los sistemas naturales del mundo y cómo tratar las consecuencias psicosociales de la nuevas tecnologías (mercado, montero y l. l., legewie, wiesenfeld, malvezzi, stark, v. francisco, voorhees, blanchard, obst); y cómo luchar por políticas públicas benéficas para el bienestar de cada ser humano y no sólo para las élites (l. t. smith, e. sánchez, sánchez vidal, sixsmith, sasao, zambrano, miranda, aubry). en los años que van de esta década (los 2010) el mundo busca estrategias para dar respuestas a los problemas que generan las migraciones y la recesión económica en todas partes (papineau, nafstad, botchway, garcía ramírez, lundburg, wolff); y para enfrentar las realidades psicosociales de dominación, discriminación, exclusión y violencia generadas por la poderosa 34 tendencia capitalista de dar prioridad absoluta al lucro financiero a costa del bienestar de la humanidad (trigo, moreno, sonn, vargas moniz, bauman, sacipa). los temas mencionados con anterioridad son sin duda algunas de las principales inquietudes psicosociales de las décadas históricas recientes. esta visión de conjunto da razón de lo que motivó la adopción del tema principal para la tercera conferencia: aproximaciones comunitarias a los problemas sociales contemporáneos. este tema se enfocó a partir de cuatro ejes temáticos: polarización económica, interculturalidad, nuevas tecnologías, y violencia. la conferencia se diseñó para contribuir al estudio de esos grandes asuntos. en este primer volumen de las memorias el lector encontrará los textos de los 16 conferencistas invitados, y en un segundo volumen aparecerán artículos escogidos de participantes. dada la importancia de las relaciones comunitarias, de interacciones cognitivas y emocionales en situaciones colectivas vitales, como un asunto vigente, estas memorias se vuelven tanto más significativas por ofrecer fundamento adicional para esta emergente psicología comunitaria internacional en tanto “ciencia enlace”. hay que reconocer que la psicología comunitaria ha sido hasta ahora poderosa en experiencias, diversa en agendas, limitada en teorización y en institucionalización académica, y escasa en la comunicación de sus logros. también ha sido relevante el esfuerzo honesto por desenmascarar algunos de los mitos en voga y de las deformaciones acerca de lo que es la comunidad y la psicología comunitaria. el asunto principal de las ciencias sociales desde la perspectiva de la psicología comunitaria no es solamente la relación entre el individuo y la sociedad, sino la relación entre individuo, comunidad y sociedad. la psicología comunitaria, en tanto “ciencia enlace”, reconociendo la diversidad de sus agendas locales y regionales, puede ayudar a estudiar y a entender problemas sociales desde las realidades humanas relacionales subyacentes. puede también contribuir al conocimiento y a la comprensión de situaciones individuales objetivas y subjetivas ligadas a comportamientos sanos y patológicos y a condiciones mentales. esto quiere decir que el concepto y realidad de comunidad implica no sólo un papel mediador en los intercambios entre individuo y sociedad, sino que se vuelve en cierto sentido un tercer elemento importante en la explicación y el entendimiento del estatus y de la dinámica de la condición humana: relacionalidad, comunicación, conversación. 35 cuando hablamos de comunidad en esta introducción nos referimos a una forma de relación grupal sustentada en una interacción dinámica pero relativamente estable, que contiene estrategias de gestión de conflicto, y niveles variables de compartición de utopías. en otras palabras, tenemos en mente un proceso colectivo de un sistema en evolución de relaciones estabilizadas, de una red dinámica de comunicación, de un tejido de conversaciones concurrentes entre individuos, en los que se pueden encontrar mutualidad, afecto e identidad. la comunidad como relacionalidad adopta diferentes estructuras comunitarias según sus lugares y circunstancias, históricas y culturales. la tercera conferencia internacional de psicología comunitaria se diseñó para construir conocimiento sobre la forma como diversas estructuras y experiencias comunitarias abordan y enfrentan las cuatro preocupaciones sociales principales de nuestro tiempo. cuatro conjuntos de artículos los contenidos de este libro aparecen ubicados en cuatro conjuntos de textos organizados según los temas abordados por los autores: visión crítica de la psicología comunitaria; salud como desafío comunitario; violencia como atentado a la vida comunitaria; culturas y comunidades. a) visión crítica de la psicología comunitaria cuatro textos plantean cuestionamientos al desarrollo logrado por la psicología comunitaria. -­‐ en “desde la complejidad y la justicia social hasta la conciencia: ideas que han construido la psicología comunitaria” maritza montero intenta construir un sistema teórico para la psicología comunitaria por medio del análisis de las ideas que han contribuido a conformarla, como una forma de estudiar y aportar soluciones a los problemas sociales que afectan a las comunidades con el fin de colaborar en la construcción de un mundo mejor. este texto, que fue la conferencia inaugural, es una 36 invitación a acompañar a la autora en el inacabado y descuidado esfuerzo de aportar mejores y más sólidos fundamentos teóricos a nuestra ciencia emergente. -­‐ maría de fátima quintal de freitas desarrolla un modelo de análisis en su artículo “psicología comunitaria como educación política y concientización: resistencias y posibilidades en la vida cotidiana” cuyo propósito es ofrecer un abordaje para hacer posible el paradigma de liberación. se dan por existentes en programas comunitarios la participación comprometida en la transformación social y la concientización incrementada, sin tomar en cuenta los desafíos y dilemas planteados por los contextos actuales de globalización y exclusión. ¿cómo asegurar caminos de cambio social fortaleciendo pequeñas redes de solidaridad? ¿cómo involucrar? ¿cómo mantener la involucración? -­‐ “pensamiento crítico acerca de la teoría y la práctica de la psicología comunitaria” es el artículo de esther wiesenfeld en el que presenta una agenda exigente para los años venideros. según wiesenfeld puede considerarse a la psicología social comunitaria latinoamericana como una disciplina psicológica que ha tenido un desarrollo autónomo en la región. comprende programas académicos y de aplicaciones en campo, múltiples áreas de intervención, procesos, campos de acción, poblaciones, actividades. la disciplina ha crecido incesantemente. sin embargo, muchos cuestionamientos deben plantearse, en términos de valores y expectativas formulados inicialmente al poner en marcha la disciplina. es necesario revisar su adaptación a los rápidos cambios sociales que están sucediendo, su utilidad teórica y metodológica, nuevos dilemas y desafíos, mitos comunitarios, formación universitaria, relevancia en el combate a la pobreza. -­‐ wolfgang stark ofrece una propuesta para ampliar esta ciencia en su artículo “psicología comunitaria como una ciencia enlace. potenciales y desafíos para competencias transdisciplinarias”. la psicología comunitaria debe ir más allá de sus inquietudes tradicionales y de su enfoque en comunidades locales. la idea comprende lograr una mayor colaboración con otras disciplinas, otras instituciones sociales, 37 empresas de negocios; aprender de valores culturales diferentes a los propios; enfocar asuntos macro y micro en el análisis de la comunidad y en la construcción comunitaria; desarrollar la identidad de la psicología comunitaria como ciencia enlace. el mensaje para la psicología comunitaria de estas cuatro contribuciones es sobre la necesidad de incrementar la actividad teórica de la disciplina, de desarrollar habilidades analíticas y prácticas, de mantener vivo y alerta el ojo crítico, y de ampliar el alcance de sus inquietudes en tanto punto de convergencia científico. en la conferencia inaugural maritza montero desarrolla la idea clave de relacionalidad, de la que se derivan las nociones de sentido de comunidad y de identidad comunitaria. fatima quintal de freitas contribuye a esta posición cuando relaciona el cambio social con la involucración individual creando pequeñas redes de solidaridad. esther wiesenfeld expone en su artículo la inquietud acerca de la inadecuación de la psicología comunitaria, tal como es entendida y practicada, en relación a los rápidos cambios de nuestras sociedades inmersas en una cosmovisión dominada por tendencias individualistas. wolfgang stark propone la necesidad de que la psicología comunitaria desarrolle su identidad como ciencia enlace, enfocando a la comunidad como un catalizador de asuntos sociales de nivel macro y micro. b) la salud como desafío comunitario temas recurrentes, importantes para la psicología comunitaria, son las dificultades experimentadas por las personas que tratan de proveer servicios apropiados de salud comunitaria y por la gente sufriente que recibe esos servicios. estas dificultades se presentan en los siguientes trabajos que insisten en tres temas: el primero es el bienestar de gente en situación de vulnerabilidad: personas que viven con padecimientos neurológicos de larga duración; familias y comunidades afectadas por adicciones; mujeres indígenas con una pareja alcohólica; gente sin casa y sin hogar en un país del primer mundo. otro tema es la importancia de tomar en cuenta los 38 aspectos culturales y circunstanciales de los afectados. el tercero es la necesidad del trabajo colaborativo entre disciplinas. -­‐ en “servicios de bienestar para personas que sufren condiciones neurológicas de larga duración: involucración de co-investigadores en investigación y en diseño y desarrollo del servicio” judith sixsmith afirma que los servicios comunitarios de salud pueden favorecer el bienestar de la gente y no sólo atender a sus necesidades de salud y cuidado. este capítulo subraya las estrategias de involucración en los servicios otorgados a gente con padecimientos neurológicos de larga duración, reenfocando las perspectivas de los proveedores de servicios que sólo ven a estas personas como necesitadas, o como problemas por ser resueltos, en vez de distinguirlos como seres humanos cuyo bienestar puede mejorarse con la ayuda de profesionales. el estudio incluye capacitación de co-investigadores. presenta reflexiones sobre el proceso de involucración en diseño y práctica durante el servicio. -­‐ un desafío enorme para la salud y el bienestar de familias y comunidades es el que se origina en millones de gente cuyas vidas son negativamente afectadas por ingesta de alcohol y por adicción a drogas. tener que enfrentar esto constituye una fuerte experiencia estresante. en “reempoderando miembros de familias desempoderadas por las adicciones: ¿apoyo para individuos o acción colectiva?” jim orford presenta un programa de investigación que ha explorado en detalle la naturaleza de las experiencias de miembros familiares afectados y que ofrece un método para ayudar a estas personas. la investigación realizada en cuatro países sugiere la existencia de un conjunto común de experiencias de desempoderamiento, junto con algunas variaciones transculturales. el método de apoyo hace hincapié en las historias familiares, provee información relevante, elabora sobre dilemas de enfrentamiento y sobre construcción de apoyo social. -­‐ guillermina natera tiene la experiencia de que es sumamente difícil modificar esquemas de consumo de alcohol en familias y comunidades indígenas. sin embargo, 39 estas familias viven en pobreza y sufren de las consecuencias del abuso de alcohol por parte de uno de sus miembros. habitualmente no cuentan con ningún apoyo. “los itinerarios mentales de la vidas cotidianas de mujeres ligadas a sus parejas de consumidores de alcohol en exceso” describe un proyecto de investigación que estudió cómo sufren las mujeres con este problema en una cultura patriarcal: se les dificulta hablar con otros acerca del problema de su pareja. se adoptó un modelo breve de intervención para ayudar a estas familias: escuchar respetuosamente acerca del malestar emocional de estas mujeres permitió a los investigadores descubrir los itinerarios mentales de estas personas y diseñar novedosas estrategias de enfrentamiento que lograron una reducción substancial de síntomas psicológicos, depresivos y de salud. -­‐ la carencia de casa y hogar es un gran problema de salud pública social que afecta a gente en todo el mundo. afecta también a países desarrollados. se define como una situación vital en la que individuos y familias carecen de vivienda permanente como consecuencia de la pobreza y de la falta de apoyos adecuados. en el artículo “investigación realizada sobre los sin casa y sin hogar en canadá desde una perspectiva de psicología comunitaria” tim aubry se refiere a proyectos de investigación que se realizaron en ottawa sobre carencia de casa y hogar: un estudio longitudinal que acompañó a un grupo de gente sin techo durante dos años; y un proyecto para la elaboración y divulgación de tarjetas de informe sobre carencia de casa y hogar. algunos aprendizajes logrados fueron la necesidad de expandir esfuerzos de investigación y respaldo sobre el tema, la necesidad de hacerlo en colaboración con la comunidad, y la necesidad de hacer inversiones significativas para la divulgación de hallazgos de la investigación. estas cuatro presentaciones ofrecen nuevas luces (insights) al tratar problemas de salud comunitaria. una finalidad importante de la psicología comunitaria de la salud es procurar el bienestar de la gente, más allá de sus padecimientos. perturbaciones de salud afectan no sólo a los individuos sino también y significativamente a las vidas de los colectivos en los que viven. obstáculos patriarcales y otras limitaciones culturales pueden superarse diseñando estrategias 40 comunitarias innovadoras. problemas sociales de salud pública son globales, los esfuerzos de investigación para atenderlos deben ser objeto de políticas públicas locales. judith sixsmith insiste en la importancia de tratar los asuntos de discapacidades neurológicas de largo alcance no sólo como un problema social o como un deterioro individual, sino como una necesidad colectiva de bienestar. jim orford y guillermina natera enfocan sus trabajos de la misma manera señalando los problemas de adicción no como una plaga social general o como una limitación individual, sino como una fuente de apuro y miseria para la familia y la comunidad. el trabajo de tim aubry acerca de los sin casa y sin hogar se ha orientado a tratar, no un problema social abstracto o a una situación individual, sino a un desafío comunitario para ser abordado localmente a través de adecuadas políticas públicas sociales. c) violencia, atentados a la vida comunitaria. esta sección incluye participaciones en un simposio y en una conferencia magistral que buscaron suscitar debate crítico en relación a la violencia. la cuestión fue cómo entender la violencia desde el punto de vista de la psicología comunitaria y cómo puede incrementarse su entendimiento y las formas de enfrentarla. los siguientes cuatro artículos hablan, desde las diferentes posiciones de los autores, acerca de su trabajo sobre la violencia: violencia socioestructural, política, xenofóbica y racial. -­‐ en “la guerra sin balas: violencia socioestructural desde un punto de vista crítico” un psicólogo comunitario, david fryer, y una activista comunitaria, cathy mccormack, hablan de su trabajo conjunto. esa sinergia ha sido estimulante para entender y confrontar colaborativamente la violencia socio-estructural. ellos apuntaron críticamente a las interconexiones entre pobreza, desigualdad, desempleo y destrucción psicosocial. la activista comunitaria caracterizó a estas interconexiones como manifestaciones de una “guerra sin balas” establecida contra gente oprimida. ella ha promovido la concientización de la población. el psicólogo comunitario por su parte ha tratado de desarrollar la noción de “guerra sin balas” para dotarla de 41 legitimidad teórica. el capítulo ofrece el marco de referencia discursivo. colaboración de largo tiempo entre activismo comunitario y psicología comunitaria se proponen como forma de lograr pensamiento y acción efectivos. -­‐ stella sacipa rodríguez es la autora de “construyendo culturas de paz en la vida comunitaria, frente a una violencia política que se intensifica en colombia”. el propósito del capítulo es reflexionar y crear culturas de paz en relación a los desafíos planteados en un país como colombia inmerso en violencia política, desde la psicología comunitaria y desde la psicología política. la autora estudia experiencias provenientes de tres fuentes: informes de organizaciones religiosas; comunicaciones del “grupo de investigación sobre lazos sociales y culturas de paz”; e informes de investigadores de disciplinas no psicológicas estudiando problemas de violencia. la autora señala la fascinación que hay por la violencia en colombia, las acciones represivas que ejerce diariamente el gobierno, y el sistema político, como obstáculos para lograr una cultura de paz. -­‐ el artículo de norman duncan “cosechando el torbellino: violencia xenofóbica en sudáfrica” informa que este tipo de violencia no desapareció cuando se superó el apartheid. el país fue azotado por olas de ataques violentos contra extranjeros, muchos de ellos personas de color y la mayoría pobres. más de 70 murieron y 120,000 fueron desplazados. la intensidad y la motivación aparente para esta violencia constituyó una sorpresa para muchos. este capítulo examina las causas de esta violencia. el texto explora posibles contribuciones de la psicología comunitaria para enfrentar la violencia xenofóbica. -­‐ en su conferencia magistral christopher sonn explora los desafíos, tensiones y posibilidades para la pedagogía y la investigación comunitaria en contextos en los que las relaciones se caracterizan por dinámicas de dominación y subyugación en australia. en “investigación y práctica en la zona de contacto: elaborando recursos para desafiar a la exclusión por raza”, el autor se basa en tres áreas de investigación y práctica en las que ha participado, examinando reacciones en relaciones 42 intergrupales enfocadas a construcción de identidad. el autor se ha aventurado más allá de las fronteras de la psicología comunitaria para identificar las formas como se mantiene la opresión racializada. se discuten algunos recursos conceptuales y metodológicos que han ayudado a visibilizar formas simbólicas que mantienen relaciones intergrupales caracterizadas por poder y privilegios relacionados con la raza. considerando los múltiples rostros de la violencia manifestados en las décadas recientes, los cuatro capítulos de la tercera sección exponen con claridad la utilidad de visualizar y confrontar estas facetas de agresividad inhumana enfocándolas desde una aproximación comunitaria. la “guerra sin balas”, es decir, la violencia socio-estructural sufrida por la mayoría de la población en el mundo puede ser combatida, según david fryer y cathy mccormack, por medio de educación popular y de apoyo académico a programas de nivel local comunitario. la violencia política experimentada en colombia desde la mitad de los años cincuenta del siglo pasado y agravada en años recientes, ha sido estudiada y enfrentada por experiencias locales creadas por organizaciones religiosas y por equipos interdisciplinarios. stella sacipa rodríguez informa acerca de su trabajo como psicóloga comunitaria miembro de un equipo que diseña objetivos de pacificación a nivel comunitario. la violencia política es estructural y se sustenta en acciones de líderes individuales, pero una aproximación de intervención comunitaria ha demostrado ser una estrategia efectiva. a veces se piensa que la violencia xenofóbica parece haber sido descartada cuando todo un país ha derrotado una realidad de discriminación generalizada como la del apartheid. sin embargo, norman duncan hace notar en su artículo que el problema no puede solucionarse si no se desenraizan culturalmente las semillas de xenofobia en las comunidades locales. la conferencia magistral de christopher sonn hace explícito que la opresión y la violencia de tipo racial no pueden ser realmente enfrentadas y superadas hasta que se evidencien formas colectivas simbólicas de relaciones racializadas intergrupales. hay muchas caras de la violencia. en este libro se exploran cuatro de ellas: violencia relacionada con la pobreza generada por las estructuras sociales; con la violencia desencadenada por guerras interminables; con una cultura de violencia que se perpetúa una vez que parece haber 43 desaparecido el colonialismo; y con formas sutiles de mantener opresión racializada. la psicología comunitaria puede contribuir a hacer patentes las causas psicológicas de la violencia, a construir culturas de paz, a reconocer las profundas semillas de violencia depositadas por un colonialismo de muchos años, y a estar alerta para no reproducir, hasta con buenas intenciones, opresión racializada. d) culturas y comunidades la psicología comunitaria toma en cuenta la diversidad cultural de los escenarios en los que se realizan investigaciones, intervenciones, reflexión y acción. cuatro artículos se refieren a esta heterogeneidad de aproximaciones comunitarias en experiencias diferentes: un nuevo programa nacional de atención primaria de salud, el modelo de enfermera y médico familiar, que toma en serio las relaciones cultura-salud; el desarrollo de la psicología comunitaria en un país caracterizado por fuertes raíces culturales indígenas; las posibilidades de vida comunitaria en una cultura contemporánea dependiente de los aparatos (gadgets); el necesario cambio del paradigma cultural de nuestros tiempos, de uno individualístico a uno de solidaridad, como la única posibilidad para el desarrollo de sujetos y la creación de comunidad. -­‐ alicia martínez tena presenta una aproximación multidisciplinaria para comprender los factores sociales y culturales ligados a situaciones saludables y no saludables y para describir las características del modelo de cultura-salud de atención primaria desarrollado en cuba. diferencias culturales regionales se toman en cuenta para entender la forma de vida del paciente, sus prácticas culturales y sus lazos con miembros de la familia y con otros actores sociales de su comunidad. el artículo “factores culturales y atención primara de salud en cuba. una visión desde la práctica comunitaria” insiste en la necesidad de desarrollar un proceso de comunicación cultural que incluya la práctica de escuchar atentamente al paciente, de reconocer sus patrones culturales de comportamiento, y la negociación con él de las recomendaciones terapéuticas. 44 -­‐ en “psicología comunitaria y problemas sociales en méxico” eduardo almeida afirma que las culturas indígenas son la columna vertebral de la vida comunitaria en méxico. años y siglos de tratar de hacer desaparecer las formas de vida mesoamericanas de la población mexicana han fracasado. la psicología comunitaria como una ciencia social emergente en méxico no se puede entender sin estos antecedentes. psicología psicoanalítica, conductista, clínica, social y laboral han sido utilizadas como psicología comunitaria para estudiar e intervenir en poblaciones mexicanas diversas. la disciplina en méxico ha evolucionado informalmente a través de prácticas y reflexiones de psicólogos mexicanos confrontados por problemas sociales acuciantes. -­‐ la cultura individualística que campea en los países industrializados, y que gradualmente se vuelve el modelo de vida en todas partes, no favorece la vida comunitaria. sigmar malvezzi insiste en este punto en “la sintaxis de la sociedad actual y la construcción de vida comunitaria”. la gente está aprendiendo a depender de los aparatos (gadgets) más que de los demás. esta cultura valora y hace dependiente a la gente de sus sensaciones. otro rasgo actual es el culto de la urgencia, tiempo y espacio se están achicando y las personas dependen de flujos y de coyunturas. estas condiciones favorecen la sedentarización social y la individualización. sin embargo, la vida comunitaria es la condición humana. en ella los seres humanos encuentran mutualidad, afecto e identidad. en la guerra que los seres humanos llevamos con la propia conciencia, las armas más poderosas son la reflexión y el afecto, recursos que se encuentran, no en los aparatos (gadgets), sino en la vida comunitaria. -­‐ “sujeto y comunidad a contracorriente”, la conferencia magistral de pedro trigo, ofreció un programa radical para la psicología comunitaria. sujetos humanos y comunidades humanizadoras no pueden florecer, afirma trigo, en una cultura de individualismo y corporativismo, la tendencia que predomina en nuestro tiempo. para superar esta poderosa cultura se requiere una masa crítica de auténticos sujetos humanos inmersos en comunidades no fundamentalistas y en asociaciones libres que 45 promuevan la vida y el reconocimiento de los otros, particularmente de los pobres. una experiencia de más de tres décadas viviendo en barrios pobres de ciudades latinoamericanas hizo consciente al autor de este capítulo, de que la cultura suburbana de estas poblaciones se caracteriza por el conato agónico (la lucha) por una vida digna, totalmente diferente del conato (la lucha) individualístico de mantenerse uno mismo en la vida. gente pobre que vive en suburbios urbanos decadentes son capaces de superar gobiernos negligentes, falta de empleos productivos, y condiciones negativas de vida. haciendo esto se constituyen en sujetos humanos extraordinarios. las comunidades eclesiales de base favorecen esta cultura de convivialidad desde la que puede crearse un tejido comunitario. los capítulos anteriores contribuyen a explicitar la cara cultural del concepto de comunidad. alicia martínez tena describe el programa cubano de salud como una forma nueva de buscar el bienestar de la población, mirando a los problemas sociales de salud no como asuntos nacionales o como malestares individuales. eduardo almeida insiste en la importancia de la psicología comunitaria, como una perspectiva científica no aprovechada para atender los problemas psicosociales de méxico. la vida comunitaria fue, ha sido y seguirá siendo un rasgo cultural de identidad. las raíces de esta afirmación pueden encontrarse en el hecho empírico de la influencia de las culturas indígenas en todas las facetas de la vida nacional. el artículo de sigmar malvezzi hace patentes las causas de gran parte de los problemas sociales de nuestro tiempo señalando que la gente de las naciones ricas, y cada vez más la de los países pobres está insatisfecha con sus sociedades. y otorgan su confianza existencial más a “gadgets” (aparatos) que a personas. pedro trigo ofrece la propuesta más radical en términos de lograr una sociedad humana integrada por seres humanos fraternales en tanto sujetos. los cuatro últimos capítulos de este libro ofrecen la posibilidad de ver, desde perspectivas diferentes, las diversidades culturales de estudios e intervenciones realizadas por la psicología comunitaria: los efectos benéficos de considerar factores culturales en un programa nacional de salud; la riqueza y fecundidad de recurrir a viejas y vulnerables tradiciones culturales para entender mejor situaciones y dificultades comunitarias actuales; la conciencia de que la cultura prevaleciente de aparatos (gadgets) promovida por el uso acrítico de nuevas tecnologías está 46 dañando a la gente, y que existe la promesa de una vida más humana promoviendo una cultura comunitaria de mutualidad, afecto e identidad; y, finalmente, la propuesta de realizar un cambio radical de una cultura individualista a una cultura convivial capaz de crear comunidades de vida digna para todos y cada uno. los talleres pre-conferencia tras esta presentación de las 16 ponencias invitadas, queremos reconocer el trabajo desarrollado por los 10 talleres pre-conferencia que fueron dirigidos por 14 expertos invitados. dolores miranda y maría montero expusieron las principales características teóricas y metodológicas de la psicología comunitaria a los participantes que tomaron el taller “formación de psicólogos comunitarios”. dolores y maría intentaron desarrollar en los talleristas competencias en análisis crítico, en propuestas de solución a problemas comunitarios específicos y en evaluación de posibles intervenciones. irma serrano-garcía y david pérez jiménez ofrecieron conocimiento y habilidades de evaluación a gente involucrada en organizaciones comunitarias. el taller “evaluación de proyectos comunitarios” incluyó conferencias y actividades interactivas con los participantes. el taller “abordaje de las cuestiones éticas en la acción comunitaria”, impartido por alipio sánchez vidal, se diseño para crear habilidades para enfrentar implicaciones éticas al trabajar con problemas sociales difíciles durante intervenciones comunitarias. los participantes manifestaron un gran interés en el taller “la violencia en las relaciones afectivas de pareja” dirigido por leonor cantera. muchas de ellas y ellos ya estaban comprometidos en programas de prevención y solución de problemas en relación a estas situaciones de violencia. serdar degirmencioglu de turquía, y jorge basaldúa de méxico discutieron con los participantes cómo crear condiciones favorables para lograr la participación de jóvenes en decisiones comunitarias. el título del taller fue “acción comunitaria y juventud”. jorge gonzález y josé amozurrutia estudiaron con los participantes nuevas tecnologías en el taller “comunidades emergentes de conocimiento local” empleando cibercultura para crear grupos de cognición distribuida. 47 en el taller de tom wolff sobre “coaliciones comunitarias” se trabajó sobre la manera de lograr comunidades saludables, desarrollando el poder de soluciones colaborativas a favor de la justicia social. “perfiles comunitarios, redes y análisis organizacional: instrumentos para empoderar mujeres y grupos minoritarios”, un taller dirigido por donata francescato, criticó ideologías políticas de dominación social y enfocó procesos de empoderamiento para mujeres y minorías. los participantes experimentaron instrumentos creativos tales como novelas, películas, chistes y narrativas para explorar dimensiones afectivas. jaime alfaro insunza y alba zambrano enfocaron su trabajo a prácticas comunitarias de intervención en programas de políticas sociales. el taller “políticas públicas y psicología comunitaria” estudió tres comunidades españolas autonómicas y tres localidades chilenas en la región de araucania. los movimientos sociales de resistencia civil, una estrategia clave para enfrentar nuestros problemas contemporáneos fue el tema del taller “cultura y no-violencia activa”. pietro ameglio presentó el programa gandhiano del “swaraj” (auto-gobierno) y de la “satyagraha” (el poder de la verdad) como una aproximación oportuna para un movimiento de paz con justicia y dignidad. homenajes la tercera conferencia internacional de psicología comunitaria organizó una sesión de homenaje para honrar a dos psicólogos extraordinarios y a una comprometida activista comunitaria. isaac prilleltensky presentó la vida y logros de seymur b. sarason, un psicólogo norteamericano cuyo trabajo fundacional sobre escenarios sociales y su influencia en problemas individuales ayudó a establecer la psicología comunitaria en los estados unidos. sigmar malvezzi hizo un recordatorio de silvia tatiana maurer lane, una psicóloga brasileña que propició una psicología social transformadora capaz de enfrentar las situaciones de colonización y explotación violenta en américa latina. para abordar este desafío silvia propuso a la psicología comunitaria. eva gálvez, miembro de una ong que trabaja con poblaciones oprimidas, recordó la vida comprometida de alberta cariño, su compañera en la lucha por la emancipación de la gente en 48 una región indígena, y que fue asesinada cuando llevaba víveres a un poblado controlado por sicarios al servicio de los intereses políticos de un corrupto gobernador del estado de oaxaca. reflexiones finales la tercera conferencia internacional de psicología comunitaria ha aportado su modesta pero relevante contribución al desarrollo de nuestra disciplina. aunque tal vez es cierto que “no hay nada nuevo bajo el sol” en relación a la condición humana, particularmente ante la irracionalidad, las patologías, la violencia y la discriminación, hay por lo menos cuatro problemas en la situación del mundo contemporáneo que lo impactan y que difieren en magnitud y complejidad a los de antaño. estos problemas fueron abordados por la 3ª conferencia: los efectos negativos de la “globalización” como polarización económica entre ricos y pobres; la desigual distribución de las nuevas tecnologías y sus graves consecuencias de sedentarización y solipsismo; las asimetrías en las relaciones interculturales incrementadas e intensificadas por los procesos migratorios; y el casi increíble despliegue de violencia en todo el mundo. la realización de la 3ª conferencia en puebla fue un desafío temible. pero ha sido la aventura de un logro comunitario. esperamos que este primer volumen de las memorias, junto al segundo, ahora en preparación en puerto rico, pueda dar testimonio del avance de la psicología comunitaria internacional como un servicio que contribuye a enaltecer y a dignificar la vida de cada ser humano. permítanme recordar al final de esta introducción palabras de fernando pessoa que expresaron la animada atmósfera vital de esta 3ª conferencia: “de todo quedaron tres cosas: la certeza de que estamos siempre comenzando. la certeza de que había que seguir. la certeza de que seríamos interrumpidos antes de terminar. hacer de la interrupción un camino nuevo, 49 hacer de la caída un paso de danza, del miedo, una escalera, del sueño, un puente, de la búsqueda… un encuentro. eduardo almeida acosta editor octubre de 2011 referencias montero, m. y serrano-garcía, i. (comps.). (2011). historias de la psicología comunitaria en américa latina. participación y transformación. buenos aires: paidós. 447 pags. reich, s. m., riemer, m., prilleltensky, i., montero, m. (eds.). (2007). international community psychology: history and theories. new york: springer. 443 pags. vázquez rivera, c., pérez jiménez, d., figueroa rodríguez, m., pacheco bou, w. y restoolivo, j. (eds.). (2009). psicología comunitaria internacional: agendas compartidas en la diversidad. san juan, puerto rico: programa de investigación y refortalecimiento comunitario, instituto filius, universidad de puerto rico. 591 pags. microsoft word 2012-006-final-20130502.docx the evolution and growth of the eco-community psychology conferences samantha flores, leonard a. jason, samuel b. adeoye, meredyth evans, abigail brown, olya belyaev-glantsman depaul university author notes: requests for reprints should be sent to samantha flores. depaul university, center for community research, 990 w. fullerton ave. suite 3100 chicago, il 60614 keywords: ecological community psychology conference, student leadership conference, mutually beneficial support system, network building recommended citation: flores, s., jason, l.a., adeoye, s.b., evans, m., brown, a., & belyaev-glantsman, o. (2013). the evolution and growth of the eco-community psychology conferences. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(2), 1-8. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   may  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2   the evolution and growth of the eco-community psychology conferences abstract in the 1960s and 1970s, community psychologists argued for shifting traditional approaches of treating mental illness (e.g. institutionalization, psychotherapy, etc.) toward prevention and more active involvement through community interventions (bennett et al., 1966). in light of these events, researchers and students committed to the emergent field of community psychology developed several channels to exchange resources and provide support among one another over the past decades. this paper describes the annual ecological community psychology conference (eco), which was created by professors and students in 1978, as a vehicle to promote exchanges of ideas and support among community psychology graduate students, community activists, and academics. introduction the 1965 swampscott conference (bennet, anderson, cooper, hasson, klein, & rosenblum, 1996) and the 1975 austin conference (iscoe, bloom, & spielberger, 1977) focused discussions on the role of community psychologists, specifically on the basic training and skills required to become community change agents. it was a critical time for community psychology researchers and students to develop a distinct identity from the dominating clinical psychology discipline. in developing the identity of the community psychology field, community psychologists required a mechanism to continue dialogue specific to their community interests and training across programs (sarason, 1972, p. 1). as students developed interests in the field, it was important to create a setting that would foster student involvement and contact with other community-minded individuals. the creation of the first community psychology network in the united states began shortly after the swampscott and austin conferences, in 1978 and was known as the midwest ecological community psychology conference (eco). this article chronicles the evolution and expansion of the eco conferences over the past 34 years. before the beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a small interest group of young faculty and politically active graduate students against the war in vietnam and other social problems such as the civil rights struggle, who were seeking ways to engage in political activism through their work. upon meeting other like-minded individuals at the annual midwestern psychological association conference (mpa), they informally discussed political problems as well as issues within the field of psychology. to them, mpa was only capturing a narrow view of psychology at its annual conferences by including mostly theoretical presentations instead of applied research. they wanted to see changes made to mpa so that it was more socially relevant and inclusive of the emerging ideas of the time (christopher keys, ph.d., personal communication, october 22, 2011). following the austin conference this group of likeminded psychology professors and students recognized the need to build a sense of community among researchers and applied professionals in the field. ed zolik was the catalyst behind creating a shared meeting space for those who diverged from traditional psychology at the mpa conferences. as psychology department chair at depaul university in chicago, illinois, zolik used his own brand of persuasion in his advocacy for community research. for instance, depaul university is a catholic institution, and as department chair, zolik would often show up to the rectory of the depaul priests’ with a bottle of scotch to drink to share with top administrators while negotiating department affairs and securing resources for the psychology department. this effective technique was used later at mpa when zolik brought bottles of liquor to the annual mpa executive parties, and during late night discussions with several influential officials, requested a separate space for community psychologists to meet and share ideas during the next year mpa conference. zolik was given a room beginning in 1976 and his informal meetings (each lasting about an hour, with one or two moderators) to discuss a variety of topics became known as the ecological community psychology interest group. this was also the time when a network of regional coordinators for division 27 was developing to help spur community functions and activities (jason et al., 1985). zolik’s sentiments about a space for discourse and collaboration among community psychologists was echoed by howard markman at a later 1978 global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   may  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3   interest group meeting at mpa, where he and others addressed the need for increased contact and training opportunities among community-minded individuals. following markman’s symposium, students and professors began talking about the need to exchange resources and provide support for one another (davis & jason, 1982). the interest group agreed that the field required an outlet to develop a sense of community by way of individuals sharing their experiences, learning about what other graduate programs offered, and learning about research projects that peers were undertaking. to create this web of community-minded individuals, they decided it would be best to move away from the traditional conference model of formal presentations and to create an informal setting encouraging casual discussions on topics of their choosing. in the fall of 1978 the midwest ecological community psychology conference (eco) became the first graduate-student conference in the united states dedicated to community psychology and community-minded individuals, with interests in social justice and policy. eco became the conference that incorporated the changes that this group wanted to see in mpa. the beginning of a tradition the first midwest eco meeting, dedicated to the division 27 interest group, took place at michigan state university in 1978, when a group of community psychologists invited other community-oriented individuals to east lansing, michigan for a weekend of community psychology and barbeque (mcdonald & beyer, 2003). the first eco conference was successful, hosting community-minded psychologists from eight universities and community-minded practitioners from four local human service agencies in the midwest region (davis & jason, 1982). graduate students and faculty members in the east lansing area opened their homes to host attending members from out of town, making lodging free for all attendees. this became part of the tradition of eco for years to come. at the conference, attendees kicked off the weekend by generating a list of discussion topics that interested them. then each topic was assigned a location around campus and members were welcome to join any conversation that was most appealing to them. this free-form lack of structure facilitated a comfortable setting that encouraged participation from everyone willing to share their experiences and ideas on the topic. the keynote speaker gave the only formal presentation and at the end of the weekend, everyone went to a barbeque hosted at george fairweather’s home. the first informal meeting was so well received that the second conference took place just five months later in the spring at indiana university in bloomington. continuing with the tradition, all lodging was free to attending members and the discussion topics for the weekend were decided upon by the group at the beginning of the meeting. word quickly spread about the relaxed atmosphere and innovative structure of the new community psychology conferences and more people wanted to participate. with each conference, attendance increased and invitations extended beyond local regions. the third conference hosted by the university of tennessee was held in the smoky mountains at camp montvale in 1979—the first conference to move away from the university setting. this time, the cost of lodging was included in the conference registration fee, which was about $40 (gregory meissen, ph.d., personal communication, december 14, 2011). the organizing committee members from the university of tennessee were influenced by ideas stemming from behavior-setting theory, which describes how environmental characteristics (i.e. physical and social) can influence individuals’ behavior (barker, 1968). therefore, they intentionally created a conference setting they believed would maximize interpersonal connections. the retreat to a rural location in the smoky mountains provided opportunities for eco members to spend more informal time with one another and to create deeper personal and professional relationships. organizers from the university of tennessee invited a large range of people throughout the country, hosting representatives from as far north as east lansing, michigan, as far south as tampa, florida, as far east as new york, and as far west as austin, texas. this conference helped spread awareness about community psychology in other regions throughout the midwest, facilitating growth of the community psychology support network. as the number of participating members increased and expanded beyond the locality of the midwest, the influence of midwest eco conferences spread to other regions within the united states. for example, by the fifth midwest conference, there were enough attending representatives from the southeast region that they were able to branch off the following year, in 1982, to form the southeast eco conference, hosted by vanderbilt university and peabody university in tennessee. likewise, the university of new haven in connecticut hosted the first northeastern eco conference in 1984. the northwest was the last region to host its own conference beginning in 2006 when university of washington global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   may  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4   and portland state university co-hosted their first eco. table 1 lists the hosting schools for each region over the history of eco. table 1. timeline of schools that hosted eco conferences over 34-years across four regions in the united states year northwest midwest southeast east 2012 lewis and clark graduate school of education and counseling michigan state university north carolina central university 2011 lewis and clark graduate school of education and counseling depaul university georgia state university 2010 portland state university university of illinois at champaign university of north carolina 2009 university of washington at bothell university of illinois at chicago university of south carolina 2008 portland state university & university of washington at bothell michigan state university north carolina state university 2007 university of washington & portland state university depaul university georgia state university 2006 university of washington & portland state university university of illinois at champaign vanderbilt university 2005 wayne state university university of south carolina 2004 michigan state university cancelled due to hurricane ivan 2003 depaul university georgia state university 2002 university of illinois at chicago vanderbilt university 2001 wayne state university 2000 michigan state university georgia state university 1999 depaul university university of south carolina 1998 loyola university georgia state university 1997 university of illinois at chicago north carolina state university 1996 university of illinois at champaign 1995 michigan state university university of virginia 1994 bowling green state university university of north carolina new york university 1993 depaul university georgia state university 1992 university of illinois at champaign north carolina state university 1991 loyola university university of south carolina 1990 michigan state university & university of michigan virginia commonwealth university burlington, vermont 1989 bowling green state university university of virginia 1988 depaul university & illinois institute of technology north carolina state university new york, new york 1987 indiana university georgia state university 1986 michigan state university north carolina state university 1985 depaul university university of south carolina new brunswick, new jersey 1984 university of illinois at champaign georgia state university university of new haven 1983 bowling green state university 1982 university of tennessee vanderbilt university & peabody university 1981 university of illinois at chicago 1980 bowling green state university 1979 (fall) university of tennessee 1979 (spring) indiana university 1978 michigan state university global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   may  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5   student leadership model over the past 35 years, graduate students, with the support of faculty, plan and organize eco with the purpose of having an informal exchange of information and resources between communityoriented students, faculty and applied professionals. usually on the last day of eco, members decide which school will organize next year’s conference. therefore every eco planning committee is a made up of a new group of students. at the beginning, professors planned and organized the informal interest group meetings, but by 1980, the students adopted responsibility for organizing the subsequent conferences. leonard jason recalls the events leading to the transition of power. he and his colleagues were in a room discussing who would host next year’s eco, when a graduate student in the room spoke up suggesting that because eco was meant for graduate students then the students should be planning and organizing them (personal communication, october 22, 2011). following this suggestion, students from the university of illinois chicago began the longstanding tradition of eco conferences being studentrun. christopher keys remembers advising his students from university of illinois chicago, while they organized and planned the first student-run eco in 1981. “it’s really impressive how eco conferences have kept going since then, with student leadership. that’s what helped keep it informal,” (personal communication, october 22, 2011). a network building conference the central idea for the community psychology interest group was to develop a professional support network, in which like-minded individuals could make connections and collaborate with other professionals. eco certainly facilitated that from the very early days. one particular story demonstrates how early social networks formed at eco can eventually lead to later professional relationships. during the early 80’s, steve fawcett was a professor of behavioral science at the university of kansas with very strong interests in community development. at the time, he was developing the community concerns report which is a method that considers community members’ perspectives while assessing strengths and problems in their community in order to develop ideas for improvement (schriner & fawcett, 1988). jason recognized the interest overlap with community psychology, and he invited fawcett to bring his students to the 1983 midwest eco hosted by bowling green state university at yellow springs, ohio. fawcett rented the university van and traveled nearly 700 miles with about eight students. this was the first time anyone from kansas attended an eco and most of the students riding with fawcett did not even know what community psychology was. fabricio balcazar and yolanda suarez-balcazar were two of the students that came with fawcett’s group. both of these graduate students knew that when they graduated, they wanted to be involved in community work, but they did not yet know about the developing community psychology field. at the conference, they started connecting with many people that had similar community interests and they had long informal conversations with fellow eco members. keys remembers attending fawcett’s session and meeting his graduate students. when keys had an opening at the university of illinois chicago in the department of disability and human development, balcazar was the first person he called to see if he was interested in coming to chicago. this relationship resulted in a 20-year collaboration between keys and balcazar. this is just one example of the types of connections that were made at informal eco conferences, and this informal type of networking for jobs continues to this day. another example of purposeful behavior-settings is illustrated best with a story by susan mcmahon, who at the time was a graduate student. she remembers in the early 1990s, going to the eco conference held in dowagiac, michigan. for her, everything about eco was fun, but her favorite part of the day would be the two hours in the afternoon that were scheduled for free time. there were plenty of outdoor activities to do at the dowagiac campsite. she remembers ropes courses in the field, paddle boats in the lake, and trust building games in the woods, but her time spent at the volleyball net gave her a distinct impression of eco. as a student it is important to network with other professionals to gain insight on career paths. for mcmahon, her networking skills were still emerging, and meeting with professionals was a stress-provoking task, as it is for many students. one afternoon at eco, she played a couple friendly competitive rounds of volleyball with christopher keys and joe durlak. these volleyball games were an opportunity to meet and speak with graduate students and faculty members at other academic settings that were doing interesting work and also to talk to them about things beyond their work. the friendly volleyball game gave her an outlet to get to know two professionals on a personal level, which made conversations with these two faculty members less awkward or stressful. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   may  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6   maintenance of an informal conference setting the early midwest eco conferences were held at different campsites (e.g. yellow springs, oh; bradford woods, in; dowagiac, mi; saugatuck, mi, etc.) the first retreat conference in 1979 at camp montvale embodied all of the original elements of eco, including: informal interactions among students, professors, and practitioners; the development of professional and social support networks; and discourse on community psychology. in the mountains, attendees of the 1979 tennessee eco conference had an opportunity to interact in a unique way. students and professors who attended these types of conferences speak fondly about the “golden days” with nostalgia. when greg meissen reminisced about his role in organizing the tennessee eco, he remembers why his cohort chose camp montvale. when we picked the site, we were very intentional about getting away from the university. we were reading all this stuff about behavior-settings and ecological-psychology and thought, ‘we should be applying these things.’ we knew that if we got everyone far enough away from society with nowhere else to go, there would be more opportunities and more time to bond and interact—not just professors catching up with their old buddies, or students getting to know the other members at their school, but for students to interact with students from other schools and for students from other universities to interact with faculty from other schools. (greg meissen, ph.d., personal communication, december 14, 2011) in 1979, eco was buzzing with ideas on how to become better change agents through the use of new research models, such as behavior-setting theory. the environmental change to the retreat setting was able to break down hierarchical barriers between students and professors. professors, students, and community professionals were dressed casually for eco and the retreat setting was a supportive environment for a relaxed discussion format and it allowed for the natural building of professional networks. eco conferences moved away from the traditional structures and tried to promote more interpersonal interactions. for example, the first couple of conferences generated a list of possible discussion topics on site and assigned the topics to separate areas around the meeting space, whether it was at the university or at a retreat setting. there were hardly any formal presentations with the exception of the keynote speaker. at the first eco, there was no official schedule distributed to the attendees prior to the meeting. however, at the 1981 eco—the first student-run conference at the university of illinois at chicago—people submitted proposals and were given a small book of presentations (christopher keys, ph.d., personal communication, october 22, 2011). the change to a more structured conference was frustrating for some original eco participants. for instance, at the volo, illinois conference in 1981, hosted by the university of illinois at chicago, one attendee became so enraged that the conference strayed from its original informal nature that he commented that it had “lost its spirit!” (christopher keys, personal communication, october 22, 2011.). while some felt that the conference had lost its innovative and unique atmosphere, others saw this as a natural progression that was necessary for accommodating the increasing number of attendees each year. as eco became more inclusive, with more members submitting proposals, more structure was necessary to provide everyone the opportunity to share their research and ideas. though the eco conference model had to shift the focus from lack of structure to more formal organization, some of the original elements remain constant (e.g., semi-formal dress code and occasionally non-traditional conference setting, etc.) other challenges the student planning committees try to sustain the primary elements of the early eco conferences (i.e. informally making personal and professional connections, inclusiveness of all community-minded people, and student leadership in the planning and organization of eco conferences), and have faced a number of challenges over the past three decades. in allowing students to have a fair amount of time in formal presentations, it does take time away from the more unstructured informal networking. however, planning committees try to accommodate for the time lost by hosting a saturday night social networking event. todd bottom, the chair of the 2011 midwest eco-conference planning committee and graduate student at depaul university says he found the social networking event at wise old fools pub in lincoln park, chicago, illinois to be a great outlet to connect with other graduate students and compare their experiences at different programs, with different mentors, and to normalize the challenging parts of being a graduate student (personal communication, march 28, 2012). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   may  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7   another challenge for the planning committee is maintaining student interest and attendance at the conference. in the past, planning committees were concerned by the declining attendance (mcdonald & beyer, 2003; kroll, 1990; martino, 1987). one year the planning committee attributed it to the cost of the conference, and they decreased registration fees (kroll, 1990). students on the 2002 midwest eco planning committee delegated the work among members and each personally contacted universities, departments and individuals to generate more interest. they were successful in doubling the number of attendees from the previous year’s conference (mcdonald & beyer, 2003). there is an issue of sustainability with planning methods and a loss of communication between planning committees from year to year. an example of this can be seen in the 1990 community network newsletter which addressed the problem of finding a hosting school for the following year with a cartoon of a woman blocking the conference room door saying, “no one leaves until we have a conference host for next year!!” today, in the midwest, there is a rotation of settings. the northwest region has a plan of keeping the host school consistent. at first, portland state university and the university of washington-bothell hosted the first five conferences, but now lewis and clark graduate school of education and counseling has taken over this responsibility. the southeast eco conferences have been hosted mostly by georgia state university (n=8), but have shared the hosting responsibilities with the university of north carolina (n=5), university of south carolina (n=5) and other southeast universities. conclusion the community-minded pioneers of eco were eager to try something innovative in their field that would allow people to come together in a comfortable setting to discuss ways that they can engage in social justice. there are a number of benefits that came from the development of eco. for instance, eco has been student generated for over three decades. this is a tradition that has been passed down to different schools and a different cohort of graduate students each year, and has managed to sustain 34 years. not only has it lasted over three decades, but other regions also recognized the uniqueness and value of such a conference, that three other regions in the u.s. started their own eco conferences. the eco conferences blend together the right elements to create a mutually beneficial support system among attendees. this description of the eco conferences is very u.s.focused, with little information about international issues. we are not aware of eco conferences that have occurred outside the u.s., but there is now a larger international community psychology meeting that occurs every two years. it is possible that students and professors either have more informal meetings such as eco, or they may consider beginning them, and possibly the lessons learned in the u.s. can be instructive to others. certainly, it is our experience that keeping the conferences specific to particular regions is helpful in both reducing costs to attendees as well as promoting a sense of community among those individuals who attend. similar features might be considered by sites outside the u.s. though the eco conference model have shifted the focus to a more formal organization (such a submitting proposals prior to the conference), some of the original elements remain constant (e.g. building informal networks, providing support for students, semi-formal dress code, and occasionally non-traditional conference setting). current conferences are still successful at facilitating informal networking among students and faculty. there continues to be discussion about the issue of how formal or informal the sessions should be, and each year, this issue is debated. certainly, from comments in this article, there does appear to be several merits in moving back towards more discussion-based or interactive formats. regarding the future of eco conferences, there might be ways of using the internet to broadcast or podcast proceedings to those that are not able to attend. using new media for disseminating the rich interactions is something that might be considered for those increasingly technology savvy graduate students. possibly developing a manual that can be given to succeeding eco planners might help also capture the rich program development process that often seems to be re-developed each year. finally, community practitioners have almost always attended these eco conferences. their real world experiences have been vital educational forums for helping graduate students consider their future roles. finding ways to include these critical voices in the actual planning of the conferences might be worth considering for future conferences. references barker, r. g. (1968). ecological psychology: concepts and methods for studying the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  4,  issue  2   may  2013     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8   environment of human behavior. palto alto, ca: standford university press. benjamin, l. t. (1979). the midwestern psychological association: a history of the organization and its antecedents, 19021978. american psychologist, 34(3), 201-213. bennet, c. c., anderson, s. l., cooper, s., hasson, l. klein, d. c., & rosenblum, g. (1996). community psychology: a report on the boston conference on the education of psychologists for community mental health. boston, ma: boston university. bogat, a. g. (2010). society for community research and action. in the corsini encyclopedia of psychology 1. retrieved from http://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ 9780470479216.corpsy0903/pdf davis, d. d., & jason, l. a. (1982). developing a support network of community psychologists. journal of community psychology, 10, 15-22. iscoe, i., bloom, b. l., & spielberger, c. d. (1977). community psychology in transition: proceedings of the national conference on training in community psychology. washington: hemisphere. jason, l. a., moritsugu, j. n., albino, j., abbott, m., anderson, j., cameron, l., dalton, j., davis, d., durlak, j., gilius, t., gillespie, j., hass, l., ritchie, p. l. j., serrano-garcia, i., tefft, b., thomas, d., vassaf, g., weissberg, r., wong, h., & zarit, j. (1985). facilitating social support among community psychologists. journal of community psychology, 13, 83-89. kroll, j. (1990, fall). dwindling student interest revisited. community network newsletter, 2. martino, s. (1987, fall). student interest in eco conference dwindling? community network newsletter, 2. mcdonald, k. e., & beyer, r. (2003, summer). a spirit building conference: reflections on the 2002 midwestern ecological-community psychology conference. the community psychologist, 36(3), 50-52. nelson, g. & prillenltensky, i. (2005). community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and wellbeing. new york. ny: palgrave macmillan. sarason, s.b. (1972). the creation of settings and the future societies. san francisco: josseybass. schriner, k. f. & fawcett, s. b. (1988). development and validation of community concerns report method. journal of community psychology, 16(3), 306-316. kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 review: community psychology and social policies (english translation) loreto leiva, phd author biographies: dr loreto leiva has a phd in psychology, and is affiliated with the departamento de psicología, facultad de ciencias sociales, universidad de chile. global journal of community psychology practice volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 community psychology and social policies (english translation) title: community psychology and social policies (english translation) author(s) : jaime alfaro, alipio sanchez and alba zambrano reviewed by loreto leiva, phd this book confronts one of the challenges for those who work from a community approach: establishing a new dialogue between institutions, people and community (martinez, 2006). those who labor in the field of community psychology know that the aim of this discipline is to promote the active participation of community members. consequently, we want an active community and not just a group of spectators receiving the benefits of community without working for them. we expect the community to be an active agent with voice, vote and veto (montero, 2004), allowing the development of strengths and capabilities rather than a focus on weaknesses and deficiencies. from the above description, you can guess that social change is present in most of the definitions of community psychology, which gives it a political character in the sense that those who work in community psychology develop interventions to achieve community empowerment and change. to this is added an interest in the scientific side of our field, with an applied research emphasis, as mentioned by rappaport (1977). arriving at a definition of the field is not easy, especially one that includes the questions, uncertainties and tensions to which those who work in this area are exposed. if we start from an ecological perspective, which tells us that the individual is embedded in a family, a neighborhood, a region, a country, and a continent, we recognize the impact of these in the different areas of the individual’s life. thus every approach must consider the context in its broadest sense, and this includes community psychology and social policies. this book shows how community psychology (at least for those of us in latin america) has been based on social and economic demands, interacting with and facing unique social policy issues. policy reflects (in many cases) the state in action, and these actions affect the community. as noted in the chapter “possibilities and tensions in the relationship between community psychology and social policy,” community psychology is increasingly involved in integration processes in social policy programs. this involves analytical, technical and conceptual approaches, and -in some cases -tension and disagreement between the orientations of social policies and those of programs that result from community psychology. however, there are portions of the book that offer specific strategies to address and enrich intervention and programmatic approaches to social policy, providing visible areas in which our discipline of psychology can contribute. the book discusses the tensions, proposals and meetings we use as strategies to resolve the complex historical relationship established between community psychology and social policies. through intervention experiences and practices, the authors refer to global journal of community psychology practice volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 this relationship and its tensions, and confront us with questions that reveal the limits and potential of this relationship in terms of working models and strategies. the book is divided into three large sections where different authors describe complex projects in the exercise of joint community psychology and social policies. the first section of this book “thinking about the relationship between community psychology and social policy: history and possibilities”, provides a critical view of the role of social policies, as these have been implemented--by whom and for whom. this allows reflection on the dynamics of power and participation processes. but it also highlights and reinforces the necessary connection between community psychology and social policies. do not forget that these social policies, although in some cases difficult to implement in the community, can become a great ally when working with communities. the challenge is precisely in the articulation of each, while recalling that the focus is on working with communities, and not on us as individuals. in this sense, social policies should transform into social action - involving actors who allow the community to identify their resources and recognize and use their power. it is important for communities to develop new skills that allow them to strengthen their internal self-management processes, as noted in the chapter “community psychology and public policy: a possible and necessary partnership.” in the second section, titled “experiences and intervention practices,” the focus is on the practical experiences of intervention, presenting different experiences of community in latin america, but also in other communities in other regions. this is particularly interesting for those of us who are dedicated to the teaching of community psychology. this section will definitely be useful, with examples and explanations that community work is not merely intuitive, but has solid theoretical foundations that support the actions taken. this section also shows us how community psychology is further developed and carried out in different contexts. it helps us recognize the specificity and uniqueness of each experience, as well as providing common elements that allow us to reflect more broadly about the discipline. in the third and final section, the authors discuss the training and organizational challenges of community psychology, the field’s relationship to social policy, and the role of the community psychologist. in other words, we come to see how this approach contributes to the understanding of the impact that programs have on their recipients. the approach advocated in this book is not easy -we face more challenges than we would like -to design policies that are not always consistent with our values in implementation. one of the biggest challenges for social policies is commonly called “the fall”. traditionally, social policies ignore the importance of social evidence, being developed without considering (or poorly considering) the opinion and values of the people who “will benefit” from such policies. thus, effective implementation becomes a challenge. moreover, in this book we observe a socially responsive community psychology, defined in its foundations from working together with global journal of community psychology practice volume 4, issue 2 june 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 people and the community. thus, issues such as social change and primary prevention are well addressed. the question that comes to mind for me is “how is it possible to imagine the meeting spaces for social policy and community psychology?” to put it another way, how do we promote intellectual spaces that are often disturbed by tensions in the underlying paradigms and ontological and epistemological differences? fortunately, the reflections and experiences recounted in the book “community psychology and social policy” allow us to not only visualize these tensions, but also know how they have been addressed and successfully resolved. this book represents an effort to support and extend community psychology by exploring links with other perspectives, without becoming overly indulgent about our importance as community psychologists. the authors also emphasize the importance of a text done in latin america that gives account of the local and situational experiences of this region. the authors share experiences and provide reflections on the work of community psychology and the challenges that it faces. i invite you all to dive into this book, hoping that the community psychology principles presented will seduce you, and become a part of your work in the coming years. references rappaport, j. (1977). community psychology: values, research and action. editorial holt: nueva york. martínez, v. (2006). el enfoque comunitario. el desafío de incorporar a la comunidad en las intervenciones sociales. universidad de chile: santiago de chile. montero, m. (2004). introducción a la psicología comunitaria. desarrollo, conceptos y procesos. editorial paidós: buenos aires. argentina. the use of creative podcasting in combating ethno-racial health disparities in primary care education: a brief report stacy ogbeide keywords: podcasting, adult learning, health disparities, primary care author biographies: stacy ogbeide, is a board-certified clinical health psychologist and a board-certified specialist in obesity and weight management. dr. ogbeide is the director of behavioral health education in the family medicine residency, the primary care track coordinator for the clinical psychology internship, and an associate professor/clinical in the department of family & community medicine. dr. ogbeide also has a joint appointment in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. she has been a faculty member in the department of family & community medicine since 2015. most recently, dr. ogbeide serves as assistant dean for faculty in the office for faculty within the long school of medicine at ut health san antonio. dr. ogbeide’s professional areas of interest include: the primary care behavioral health (pcbh) consultation model, behavioral medicine/health psychology, faculty development and mentorship for those who are underrepresented within academic medicine, and primary care workforce development. dr. ogbeide’s work has been featured on texas public radio, in the san antonio express-news, and in other news media outlets. recommended citation: ogbeide, s. (2023). the use of creative podcasting in combating ethno-racial health disparities in primary care education: a brief report. global journal of community psychology practice, 14(2), 1 8. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: stacy ogbeide. associate professor, department of family & community medicine, department of psychiatry & behavioral sciences, ut health san antonia. email: stacy.ogbeide@gmail.com https://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:stacy.ogbeide@gmail.com global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 the use of creative podcasting in combating ethno-racial health disparities in primary care education: a brief report abstract racially and ethnically diverse populations are more likely than non-hispanic whites to report experiencing poorer quality patient-provider interactions as well as perceived discrimination from the primary care team. an approach to address discrimination in primary care is through alterations in primary care workforce development. this paper will focus on how the use of trainee-generated content (tgc) through creative podcasting can be used as a teaching aid to help trainees address implicit bias and discrimination in clinical practice. doctoral-level health service psychology trainees in an integrated primary care course engaged in creative podcasting to promote deep learning related to racial and ethnic health disparities during the spring 2021 semester. overall, trainees reported a positive experience with creative podcasting, reporting a strong connection with the material discussed in the podcast and improved self-reflection on biases related to racial/ethnic health disparities. tgc through creative podcasting appears to be an appropriate teaching approach to improve trainee engagement related to topics of implicit bias and discrimination as well as allowing trainees, especially trainees from racially/ethnically marginalized groups, a more equitable learning experience between the trainee and educator. many racially and ethnically diverse communities have higher mortality rates from chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease than non-hispanic whites (edgoose et al., 2018). according to the kaiser family foundation, 32% of hispanic/latinos, 22% of african americans, 19% of asian americans and 30% of american indians are uninsured compared to 14% of non-hispanic whites (edgoose et al., 2018). the impact of these statistics has been documented in the primary care setting, with african americans, asian americans, and hispanic/latinos less likely than nonhispanic whites to have a personal primary care provider (edgoose et al., 2018). racial and ethnically diverse populations are also more likely than non-hispanic whites to report experiencing poorer quality patientprovider interactions as well as perceived discrimination from the health care team (edgoose et al., 2018). more than one approach will be needed to address health disparities and systemic racism in health care in order to achieve health equity an approach to achieving health equity is through alterations in primary care workforce and curriculum development – more specifically, the use of technology in clinical training (davidson et al., 2019; evans, 2008; ho, girgis, rustad, noordsy, & stern, 2019; pegrum, bartle, & longnecker, 2015; hurst, 2016; riddell, robins, sherbino, brown, & ilgen, 2021). when focusing on the development of the primary care adult learner, going beyond a pedagogical approach is needed (mezirow, 2009; snowball & mckenna, 2017). typically, a pedagogical approach is educator centric. when infusing technology into a curriculum in which the adult learner can infuse their experiences into the content of the course and directly apply to their professional life, this becomes andragogy, and is superior to pedagogy for the adult learner (mcnamara & drew, 2019; http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 mezirom, 2009). the increased use and popularity of web-based learning platforms and e-learning have provided educators (and learners) additional opportunities to present and comprehend information. the covid19 pandemic also facilitated the rise of virtual learning, pushing educators to use, possibly for the first time, online learning platforms and approaches that are not solely lecture-based. examples of web-based educational tools include blogs, vlogs, wikis, e-portfolios, digital stories, and podcasts (kim, long, zhao, zhou, & alexander, 2021; snowball & mckenna, 2017). websites like youtube and wikipedia allow users to generate their own content. translating this approach into education allows for “trainee generated content” (tgc) in which trainees are the producers and consumers (i.e., “prosumers”) of knowledge and content (snowball & mckenna, 2017). past studies have found that tgc is associated with greater trainee engagement in the course, improved retention, deep learning, reflective learning, and creating “high quality work” that is enjoyable (pegrum, bartle, & longnecker, 2015; miesner, lyons, & mcloughlin, 2017; snowball & mckenna, 2017, p. 607; yilmaz & keser, 2016). tgc is also consistent with other pedagogical approaches that are trainee centered and encourage partnership between the learner and educator, in which shared learning can take place (snowball & mckenna, 2017). learners are able to combine their pre-existing knowledge and life experiences with new knowledge to engage in the critical analysis that is called for in deep learning (pegrum, bartle, & longnecker, 2015). rather than relying heavily on the educator-to-learner transmission of knowledge, learners are empowered to have a more active role in their learning. learners can develop their own insights based not only on the knowledge they consume, but also on their life context, challenging the assumption that the learner is passive in the process and the educator is the ‘giver of knowledge’ (kim et al., 2021; snowball & mckenna, 2017). podcasting has been used in higher education in a variety of ways: 1) substitutional podcasting: audio recordings of class lectures; 2) supplementary podcasting: audio recordings to supplement the material discussed in class; and 3) creative podcasting: students creating their own podcasts to develop an understanding of a certain topic (luna & cullen, 2011; pegrum, bartle, & longnecker, 2015). in order to address health equity downstream, the goal of this project was to examine trainee experiences with tgc through creative podcasting in the context of understanding racial/ethnic health disparities as well as facilitate the trainee’s understanding of the connection between implicit bias and discrimination. methods our lady of the lake university is a small, catholic, private university. the university houses an apa-accredited health service psychology/counseling psychology, doctor of psychology (psyd) program. each cohort in this program has 6 8 psyd students. six doctoral-level health service psychology trainees were enrolled in a 16-week, integrated primary care course. the course covered topics such as the context of primary care, common concerns that patients present with in primary care, and the role of psychology in primary care. students were given an overview of the different models of integrating behavioral health into primary care, with a specific focus on the primary care behavioral health (pcbh) model. due to the covid-19 pandemic, the course was http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 completely virtual. the course consisted of live lectures by the instructor and/or guest speakers weekly, weekly readings from the course texts, and online resources (e.g., journal articles, websites, webinars) to augment the weekly lectures. formative assessment included weekly in-class discussions and course quizzes throughout the semester. summative assessment included an end of the semester final paper focused on a fictional, primary care patient and applying the 5as model of care as if the student was a behavioral health consultant treating the patient in primary care alongside the primary care team. students also provided a presentation of their fictional patient care at the end of the semester. students completed a book reflection project in which they were presented with three texts that focused specifically on racial/ethnic health disparities in medical settings and engaged in a creative podcasting assignment to promote deep learning related to racial and ethnic health disparities. students were given specific directions on how to complete the 10-15minute podcast (e.g., web platforms to use to complete the podcast), what to include (e.g., the book review itself, a discussion of implicit biases, and their opinions of the book content), and the rubric for the assignment at the beginning of the semester (appendix a). students were encouraged to ask questions and discuss ideas with the course instructor to help manage initial anxiety with using a new platform. students were also encouraged to listen to different podcasts prior to starting the assignment if they were not familiar with podcasts. at the end of the semester, trainees were given the option of completing an online survey to provide feedback (i.e., qualitative and quantitative) regarding their experiences completing the assignment. of the six trainees enrolled, five completed the online survey. this project had irb approval and students were granted extra credit for voluntarily completing the survey. results demographic information of the 5 trainees are listed in table 1. data on student perceptions of the value of tgc through creative podcasting were collected as part of the course evaluation administered near the end of the semester. quantitative and qualitative feedback was collected. the purpose of the qualitative feedback was to give the trainee an opportunity to expand on their experiences with podcast creation. trainees positively rated creative podcasting as enhancing their learning in racial/ethnic health disparities (40% (n=2) “agree” and 60% (n=3) “strongly agree). additionally, 80% (n=4) of trainees selected either “agree” or “strongly agree” regarding creative podcasting enhancing their selfawareness of racial/ethnic biases. responses to the open-ended questions were sorted into positive and negative experiences. when asked if this assignment changed their view of podcasts, one trainee answered, i never listened to podcasts relating to psychology because i thought they would be gimmicky. but after completing this assignment and realizing the rigor it takes to accurately and honestly report information, i decided to give podcasts on psychology a chance. since then i’ve really enjoyed listening to apa’s podcast speaking of psychology and aamft’s podcast. when asked about what was most enjoyed about completing the creative podcasting http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 assignment, trainees reported enjoying the content (racial/ethnic health disparities), the ability to engage in self-reflection, and the challenge of using a technology medium not used previously. one trainee answered, “the relationship you develop with the material. i learned that i had to really know the material before i spoke about it and that created a richer learning experience.” another trainee answered, “i enjoyed learning how to use technology to create the podcast and the ability to reflect on my own biases.” when asked about what improvement could be made to the creative podcasting assignment, trainees reported more training on editing podcasts as well as more flexibility with podcast content (e.g., interviewing a person and discussing the book versus the podcaster reviewing the book alone). one trainee answered, i think it's a great assignment to keep in the syllabus! i would really like to hear what others did but would be nervous for people to hear what i did. i think it would be cool to upload a link to hear people's podcast if they chose to share it. table 1 trainee demographics characteristics (n=5) result n (%) gender female 5 (100.0) age, mean (sd) 32.0 (5.9) race/ethnicity hispanic/latinx 4 (80.0) multiracial 1 (20.0) years in the program 1st year doctoral student 1 (20.0) 2nd year doctoral student 3 (60.0) other 1 (20.0) technology for course laptop computer 4 (80.0) tablet 2 (40.0) smartphone 3 (60.0) podcast listening before course personal enjoyment 5 (100.0) professional development 2 (40.0) created digital content in past course yes, in psychology course 2 (40.0) no 3 (60.0) technology to complete podcast laptop computer 4 (80.0) smartphone 1 (20.0) audio voice recorder 2 (40.0) microphone 2 (40.0) time (hours) involved in, mean (sd) create interview/podcast guide 7.5 (4.3) record the podcast 5.0 (2.8) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 edit the podcast 1.3 (0.4) engagement in podcast after course listen for personal enjoyment 4 (80.0) listen for professional development 3 (60.0) create for personal enjoyment 2 (40.0) create for professional development 3 (60.0) given that primary care patients will continue to become more racially/ethnically diverse, it is important to address racial/ethnic health disparities in primary care education so trainees are aware of these health disparities and can take steps to address and close the disparity gaps and improve health equity as they begin clinical practice. finding ways for trainees to be more engaged in the course content is imperative. approaches like creative podcasting can also validate and acknowledge students from minoritized sociocultural backgrounds by giving them a voice within the course content, which in traditional learning settings, may be ignored or invalidated (dames, 2019; mason, mcdougle, & jones, 2019). data from the evaluations showed that many of the trainees felt that the process of creating a podcast was beneficial for their overall learning (pegrum, bartle, & longnecker, 2015). as found by benedict and pence (2012), pegrum, bartle, and longnecker (2015), and snowball and mckenna (2017), trainees also enjoyed, and showed considerable proficiency in using new technologies as well as creativity to facilitate their learning. although none of the trainees had prior experience with creating and editing podcasts prior to this course, 80% of the trainees indicated preexisting knowledge of how to find podcasts or listed to podcasts prior to completing this assignment. this may have also impacted the trainees having a positive experience with creating podcasts. this is consistent with past research stating digital literacy facilitates the use of e-learning for learners (mohammadyari & singh, 2014). given the size of this sample and the cross-sectional nature of this project, future studies should examine larger samples as well as other learner groups who are part of the primary care team such as medical students, nursing students, and family medicine/pediatric/internal medicine residents. additionally, it would be important for future research to examine the longitudinal impact of projects like this in the trainee’s clinical practice, specific to actively addressing racial/ethnic health disparities, implicit bias, and improving health equity in their patient populations and communities. overall, these findings could suggest that a transformative learning approach for teaching and learning using online tools like tgc through creative podcasting could be necessary for trainees to not just consume content but also to produce it. references benedict, l., & pence, h, (2012). teaching chemistry using student-created videos and photo blogs accessed with smartphones and two-dimensional barcodes. journal of chemical education, 89, 492–496. https://doi.org/10.1021/ed2005399 http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1021/ed2005399 global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 dames, g. e. (2019). a dangerous pedagogy of discomfort: redressing racism in theology education. hts teologiese studies/theological studies 75(4), a5060. https://doi.org/10.4102 /hts.v75i4.5060 davidson, s., grunau, z., marcovitz, d., gerdner, o., stoklosa, j., & vestal, h. (2019). narrative podcasts as a teaching tool in psychiatry. academic psychiatry, 43, 275-279. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40596-01901062-6 edgoose, j., davis, s., et. al. (2018). a guidebook to the health equity curricular toolkit. parkway leawood, ks: health equity team for family medicine for america’s health. retrieved from https://www.aafp.org/dam/aafp/do cuments/patient_care/everyone_proje ct/health-equity-toolkit/hops19-heguidebook.pdf evans, c. (2008). the effectiveness of mlearning in the form of podcast revision lectures in higher education. computers & education, 50, 491498. doi: 0.1016/j.compedu.2007.09.016 ho, p., girgis, c., rustad, j., noordsy, d., & stern, t. 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(2019) teaching social justice in nonprofit management education: a critical pedagogy and practical strategies, administrative theory & praxis, 41(4), 405-423. doi: 10.1080/10841806.2019.1643615 mezirow, j. (2009). an overview on transformative learning. in k. illeris (ed.),contemporary theories of learning: learning theorists in their own words (pp. 90–105). london and new york: routledge. miesner, a., lyons, w., & mcloughlin, a. (2017). educating medical residents through podcasts developed by pharmd students. currents in pharmacy teaching and learning, 9, 683-688. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.aafp.org/dam/aafp/documents/patient_care/everyone_project/health-equity-toolkit/hops19-he-guidebook.pdf https://www.aafp.org/dam/aafp/documents/patient_care/everyone_project/health-equity-toolkit/hops19-he-guidebook.pdf https://www.aafp.org/dam/aafp/documents/patient_care/everyone_project/health-equity-toolkit/hops19-he-guidebook.pdf https://www.aafp.org/dam/aafp/documents/patient_care/everyone_project/health-equity-toolkit/hops19-he-guidebook.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.104040 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.104040 https://doi.org/10.1080/10841806.2019.1643615 global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cptl.2017. 03.003 mohammadyari, s., & singh, h. (2014). understanding the effect of elearning on individual performance: the role of digital literacy. computers & education, 82, 11-25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu. 2014.10.025 pegrum, m., bartle, e. and longnecker, n. (2015), creative podcasting. british journal of educational technology, 46, 142152. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.121 33 riddell, j., robins, l., sherbino, j., brown, a., ilgen, j. (2021). residents’ perceptions of effective features of educational podcasts. western journal of emergency medicine: integrating emergency care with population health, 22(1). doi: 10.5811/westjem.2020.10.49135 snowball, j. d., & mckenna, s. (2017) student-generated content: an approach to harnessing the power of diversity in higher education. teaching in higher education, 22(5), 604-618. doi: 10.1080/13562517.2016.127320 5 yilmaz, f., & keser, h. (2016). the impact of reflective thinking activities in elearning: a critical review of the empirical research. computers & education, 95, 163-173. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu. 2016.01.006 http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12133 https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12133 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1273205 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1273205 kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 introduction to part i of the special issue jesica siham fernandez, geraldine (geri) palmer, dominique thomas author biographies: jesica siham fernández, ph.d. is an assistant professor in the ethnic studies department at santa clara university. she received her phd in social psychology and latin american & latinx studies from the university of california, santa cruz. grounded in a decolonial feminist praxis, she engages critical par paradigms and approaches to support bipoc communities, especially latinx immigrant families, youth, and student activists in mobilizing to actualize collective conditions of community thriving, sociopolitical wellbeing, and decolonial liberation toward transformative justice. as a teacher-scholaractivist, jesica’s praxis is rooted in a commitment to racial justice and anti-oppression toward decolonial liberation. geraldine (geri) palmer, ph.d. is a scholar-activist, practitioner, educator, and writer who uses an interdisciplinary approach of community psychology, social psychology and sociology to understand and work on issues of concern among black, indigenous, people of color (bipoc) including racial justice and anti-blackness practices. she earned her ph.d. from national louis university, chicago. in addition to her position as assistant professor at adler university she is the cofounder and managing director of community wellness institute (cwi). through cwi, dr. palmer and a team of consultants facilitate the f.a.c.e. of justice workshops with topics on anti-racism and anti-blackness practices and social and racial justice, provide consultations with non-profits to help them strengthen their infrastructure, and conducts social research. her teaching, research, and praxis has its foundation in her dissertation study which focused on homelessness particularly among black/african americans, and currently centers on language that often reproduces colonialism ideology, dismantling the code of silence, and historical trauma among black/ african americans. dominique thomas, ph.d. is editor of the community psychologist. he attained his ba in psychology from morehouse college and his ma and phd in community psychology from georgia state university. he was a scholarship to practice fellow in the national center for institutional diversity at the university of michigan. dr. thomas is interested in the areas of black identity, racial socialization, activism, afrofuturism, and the black radical tradition. he co-edited a special issue of community psychology in global perspective, black lives matter in community psychology and is co-editing a forthcoming special issue in the american journal of community psychology, imperial algorithms: contemporary manifestations of racism and colonialism. global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 introduction to part i of the special issue abstract the proliferation of racially charged incidents in the united states, europe, australia and across the world (dastagir, 2017; harris & bogel-burroughs; politi, 2016), along with surmounting hate crimes against women, immigrants, lgbtq+ identified people, and ethnoreligious populations, such as muslim and jewish communities (potok, 2017), have brought an insurgence of activism. the activism, along with the persistence of local, national and transnational community organizing efforts, grassroots mobilization, coalitional emergent strategies, and waves of social movements, have all been aimed at disrupting institutionalized racism and the assemblages of racialized colonial violence. the jaws of colonial power -as well as colonialism and coloniality that manifest as anti-black racism, nativism, and intersecting forms of oppression implicated in racialized violence -must be disrupted and dismantled! the proliferation of racially charged incidents in the united states, europe, australia and across the world (dastagir, 2017; harris & bogel-burroughs; politi, 2016), along with surmounting hate crimes against women, immigrants, lgbtq+ identified people, and ethnoreligious populations, such as muslim and jewish communities (potok, 2017), have brought an insurgence of activism. the activism, along with the persistence of local, national and transnational community organizing efforts, grassroots mobilization, coalitional emergent strategies, and waves of social movements, have all been aimed at disrupting institutionalized racism and the assemblages of racialized colonial violence. the jaws of colonial power -as well as colonialism and coloniality that manifest as anti-black racism, nativism, and intersecting forms of oppression implicated in racialized violence -must be disrupted and dismantled! as co-editors and co-chairs on the council for cultural, ethnic and racial affairs (cera) we refuse to be bystanders and passive spectators of what we have continuously witnessed as hegemonic, oppressive and dehumanizing. as comrades, geri, dominique and i (jesica), with support from gjcpp editor dr. nicole freund, we no longer could remain on the sidelines of what we observed as institutional racism, colorblindness, whiteness and antiblackness, both within and outside our discipline, including scra as an organization. the two-part installation of this special issue in the gjcpp on anti-racism and racial justice practice has been in the making since may 2019. it has taken at least two years to see this project come to fruition! the circumstances that animated this special issue in the first place were grounded and informed by our experiences and identities with various intersecting positionalities, yet united by our embodied subjectivities and experience as critical community psychologists of color. we cannot and will not deny that our racialized experiences within the discipline have been wounding; yet we, among many other bipoc community psychologists, refuse to be seen as victims, silent and disempowered. we have crafted this special issue out of a deep commitment that is guided by the love, dignity and respect we hold for ourselves, our communities, and the community psychologists of color and others with intersecting identities at present and who came before us -and who we know contributed to shaping the discipline, global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 even though we may not see their work or voices featured in the community psychology cannon. thus, this special issue is a manifesto (of sorts) to affirm, uplift and honor bipoc community psychologists, practitioners and allied scholars, educators, professionals, healers, activists and artists, who have given so much to the discipline in their own ways. it is also intended to recognize that the work of racial justice and liberation cannot be done alone; we need allies, white allies and coconspirators to build coalitions of resistance, refusal and radical hope. this is what we have set out to do with these two special issues. we humbly offer them as a mirror to validate experiences of struggle and possibility, as well as a compass to guide those seriously committed to racial freedom in action, not just in words, gestures and performativities. since our conversations on the special issue began in may 2019, so much has happened that has further reinforced our commitment to this project. we need not name the persistence of racial violence that has assembled time and time again through the carceral state, police brutality, antiimmigration policies, and gun violence, and of course in the context of covid-19. indeed, we cannot remain ignorant nor indifferent to the assemblages of violence reproduced through racial capitalism, heteronormativity, patriarchy and modes of power, privilege and oppression. we are human, and because of our shared humanity we cannot allow hegemonic discourses, racial regimes and oppressive practices to continue. the persistence of violence that dehumanizes is antithetical to our shared collective oneness with all beings. these are the values underscoring and emanating from the special issue that we have set out to illustrate via the fifteen papers that we feature. our efforts, goals and intentions with leading this special issue on anti-racism and racial justice practice is to underscore, animate and provoke continued dialogues, reflections and actions committed to deconstructing systems of racialized oppression at the crux of hegemonic power that maintains the status quo, including whiteness and white supremacy. in striving toward an anti-racist, decolonial/ decolonizing (kendi, 2019; maldonado-torres, 2017) and liberatory praxis (martin-baro, 1994; fanon, 1963; camp, 2004), several theories and frameworks have informed the development of theory, research, pedagogy and practice oriented toward racial justice at the intersections of health, environmental and social justice. we recognize that some of these have emerged from within our discipline; however, we also note that some have emerged through multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, indigenous, decolonial and feminist epistemologies, often rooted in community struggles for sovereignty and liberation in the majority world. encouraged by these movements and efforts to reclaim ways of knowing, being, and relationship building, as well as dignity, rights, land, and agency, communities here and there continue to resist and deconstruct white supremacy, thereby creating space or apertures to pause, reflect and unlearn/relearn and engage in actions. the special issue is a contribution to this process, and an exercise that invites readers to consider and engage with the following questions, as the contributing authors in this special issue have done: 1. what is racial justice and what does it look like within (and outside of) community psychology? 2. how is racial justice engaged and practiced among our communities? global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 3. to what extent, and in what ways, has the discipline advanced racial justice and for whom? with these questions as our guide, we underscore the importance of racial justice and anti-racist work. we describe the implications of anti-blackness, colorism and colorblindness within community psychology, and how the inability to engage and address these concepts and their manifestations question the integrity and values of the discipline, and compromises the humanity and dignity of communities whose bodies are read in racialized intersectional ways. themes in part i in part i of the special issue we therefore feature the work of practitioners, emerging scholars, and scholar-activists of color, as well as those whose institutional affiliations and positions are often under-represented in the field, such as hbcu’s, hsi’s and community colleges, as well as at institutional spaces outside the university and the academy. our objectives and goals were threefold: 1) to feature examples of community psychology practice that demonstrate racial justice and anti-racist work within and beyond the us context; 2) to highlight research, specifically studies that have participatory action research (par) approaches, photovoice and other methodologies that are inclusive of, with and for systematically marginalized and indigenous communities, and that has been used to inform academia and practice; and 3) to expand and build upon, or even trouble, community psychology theories by integrating and making space for critical race theories, intersectionality, decoloniality, and perspectives outside of the cannon that attend to the racial formations, and racialized structures of power and oppression. all eight contributing papers to part i of this special issue have engaged these goals, often tracing the roots of racism entrenched in coloniality and colonialism, as beals and colleagues have done, through an interrogation of the western-eurocentrism in community psychology. similarly, silva and las gatas through the use of autoethnography disrupt the coloniality of power, and in doing so they honor their individual and collective stories as they strive to transform their high school conditions. in alignment with struggles for and of resistance to colonial power and structural violence, agung-igusti and sonn, in collaboration with colour between the lines, describe the importance of self and relational determination in creating and transforming settings toward liberation. indeed, it is the struggle for freedom and liberation from racialized violence, which similarly guided the work of collins and her collective of students within a hbcu classroom where undergraduate students’ sociopolitical agency and critical consciousness of racialized power was facilitated. relatedly emphasizing the use of qualitative research, such as community-based research and participatory action research in particular, guishard and colleagues reflect upon the lessons learned, the mistepts and successes, from the community engaged research academy, a multimethod project in the bronx. while the first few papers are situated within the united states context, with the exception of beals et al in both the us and canada, and agungigusti and sonn in australia, the contributions of miranda make explicit how racialization and racism has no borders or boundaries as roma communities in spain forge spaces to heal and experience health justice. across the world there is an urgency to heal from the global journal of community psychology practice volume 12, issue 2 june 2021 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 sociohistorical and contemporary legacies and entrenchments of colonial power and racialized violence, and harden and deligio bring us back to the united states through their work on addressing the importance of state sponsored violence, specifically in relation to policing. part i of this special issue therefore ends with a dose of radical hope and storying that is offered by sommerville’s contributions on the value and imperativeness of intergenerational messaging to affirm humanity, and fundamentally that black lives matter. closing remarks we invite and encourage all who come across our special issue to consider the guiding questions and objectives that animated this special issue. specifically to consider these writings in relation to their own embodied subjectivities, positionalities, academic or professional training, and their practice - the praxis of every day resisting/existing. the sociopolitical contexts and hegemonic discourses, characterized by a rise in systemic violence rooted in white supremacy and racism, as well as heightened racist nativism at the intersections of power and difference, compel us as community psychologists to engage with the present moment. as scholars, practitioners, educators and organizers, within and outside academe and, to a degree, community psychology, we question the presence of institutionalized racism and whiteness within the spaces and places wherein we engage our praxis, and where our communities are located, as well as where knowledge is co-constructed and produced. we are turning the lens inward and outward to consider and truly describe what antiracism and racial justice is, and must be in community psychology. it is our deep humbling hope that this twopart special issue will be received with a curiosity to reflect, learn and feel what is moved or unsettled; that it fosters the critical compassion necessary for us to bridge and engage in difficult dialogues about whiteness, white supremacy, racialized violence and colonial power not just within our respective institutions, community settings, and spaces of practice, but most of all within ourselves, the discipline and scra; and, that it creates -that it “cracks the fortress,” as pillay (2017) writes, so that psychology can “start laying the foundation for a new enterprise altogether, one not complicit in varieties of violence” (p. 137). original research microsoft word 2009-0009-final.docx global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 a practical framework for navigating ethical challenges in collaborative community research contact author: joyce hunter, d.s.w. research scientist/assistant professor, hiv center for clinical and behavioral studies new york state psychiatric institute and columbia university 1051 riverside drive, unit 15, new york, ny 10032 phone: (212) 543-5969; fax: (212) 543-6003; e-mail: jhuntlghlt@aol.com co-authors: david lounsbury, ph.d. assistant professor, department of epidemiology and population health division of community collaboration and dissemination science albert einstein college of medicine bruce rapkin, ph.d. professor, department of epidemiology and population health director, division of community collaboration and dissemination science albert einstein college of medicine robert remien, ph.d. professor of clinical psychology (in psychaitry) hiv center for clinical and behavioral studies new york state psychiatric institute and columbia university acknowledgements/support: raymond a. smith, ph.d., hiv center for clinical and behavioral studies; william stackhouse, ph.d., men’s health institute, gay men’s health crisis; and members of the community collaboration core, hiv center for clinical and behavioral studies: for their contributions to the process of instrument development. key words: research ethics; academic-community partnerships; community-based participatory research methods; collaboration recommended citation: hunter, j., lounsbury, d., rapkin, b., & remien, r. (2011). a practical framework for navigating ethical challenges in collaborative community research. global journal for community psychology practice, 1(2). 12-22. retrieved <date>, from http://www.gjcpp.org/. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 a practical framework for navigating ethical challenges in collaborative community research joyce hunter, david lounsbury, bruce rapkin, and robert remien abstract to effectively mobilize community-based organizations (cbos) and international non-governmental organizations (ngos) in research, important ethical issues must be addressed. a memorandum of understanding (mou) approach, providing a framework and a tool to be used for establishing effective community-research partnerships, was developed by the community collaboration core (ccc) of the hiv center for clinical and behavioral studies. aims of the ccc include: (1) initiating and sustaining successful partnerships in hiv prevention research in areas of sexuality, gender, mental health, and of mutual benefit to communities; (2) advancing the science of collaboration among researchers, practitioners, and government in hiv prevention. developed and assessed over a two-year period by researchers, cbo/ngo and public health representatives, this mou can be used by potential research and community partners to address the most important issues early in a collaborative research project. clarifying essential roles, responsibilities, and relationships, establishing trust and transparency in that process, can guide collaborators in planning the important steps for beginning and sustaining an ethical and successful research project. introduction in order to effectively mobilize communities and settings such as public hospitals, clinics, churches, civic groups, and other community-based organizations and non-governmental organizations (cbos/ngos) for full participation in scientific projects, a mutual understanding of the purpose and aims of the research and an explicit agreement to work collaboratively is essential. failure to do so threatens the delicate balance between the need to achieve beneficial outcomes in research and the need to preserve valued social norms and characteristics of local communities (berger & neuhaus, 1996; rapkin et al., 2006; ribisl & humphreys, 1998). achieving and maintaining such a balance is extremely challenging, as evidenced by the experiences of a growing number of investigators who have attempted to apply community-focused, collaborative methods in their epidemiological, clinical, behavioral, and health services research (chung & lounsbury, 2006; green, 2001; israel, schulz, parker, & becker, 1998; lasker & weiss, 2003; schensul, 1999; n. wallerstein, 1999). this challenge is clearly evidenced in the global aids crisis, where strategies in the fight against aids must be continually reexamined and improved. many assert that further progress in reducing the burden of hiv can only be achieved through collaborative, community-based interventions (trickett, 2005). methods that use participatory and action-oriented research designs are a promising way to address the social, economic, cultural, and religious factors often associated with disparities in hiv prevention, treatment and care (minkler & wallerstein, 2003; wallerstein et al., 2003). many well-conceived community-based hiv studies and interventions have fallen short of their aims (fosterfishman, berkowitz, lounsbury, jacobson, & allen, 2001). researchers and community partners alike have noted many ethical challenges in creating and sustaining productive relationships, pointing to inherently divergent professional mandates and an inequitable distribution of power and control over the research process as the main culprits to achieving stated project outcomes (berger & neuhaus, 1996; bond & keys, 1993; fawcett et al., 1995; kahn, 1982; riger, 2002; sarason, 1978; zimmerman, 1995). one problem concerns the lack of understanding on the part of the researcher of the composition of the “community.” likewise, social and political realities brought to the partnership, including the constraints faced by community partners, can all lead to diminished effectiveness in collaboratively developed and implemented research processes, beginning with the development of the research questions (green & mercer, 2001; stoecker, 2005; trickett & pequegnat, 2005). unresolved problems serve to compromise the project’s potential to create new knowledge and foster sustainable community change, an outcome that many have declared to be ethically unacceptable (boser, 2006; currie et al., 2005; khanlou & peter, 2005). to the degree that collaborative approaches are needed to global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 effectively combat hiv, our failure to work together unjustly compromises the health and well-being of entire communities. as new partnerships are being formed to address the aids crisis, there is an urgent need to forge a working understanding of roles, responsibilities, and relationships among collaborators in projects (davis, olson, jason, alvarez, & ferrari, 2006; mckay, 2001; rapkin et al., 2006). for example: • community-based service providers have reported that they still play too limited a role in helping to conduct basic science projects, such as studies of hiv and immunity, vaccine development, new medical treatments (koniakgriffin, nyamathi, tallen, gonzalez-figueroa, & dominick, 2007; trussler, perchal, & barker, 2000). • public health authorities have been criticized as being unable or unwilling to implement datasharing agreements with health service providers and their research partners, who need such information for programming planning and research proposal development (grazier, hegedus, carli, neal, & reynolds, 2003). • community concerns regarding research ethics are often neither adequately documented by researchers nor properly investigated by institutional review boards (mcclure, delorio, schmidt, chiodo, & gorman, 2007; schuppli & fraser, 2007); and • a research bias for funding treatment and supportive care services relative to much needed primary prevention has exacerbated the impact of hiv in many high prevalence communities (holtgrave & kates, 2007). a deep understanding and appreciation of the inherent conflicts of agenda and perspective between researchers and their community partners, and the broader community affected by the project, must be emphasized (el ansari, phillips, & hammick, 2001; foster-fishman et al., 2001; weiss, anderson, & lasker, 2002). the process of developing successful collaborative community research projects takes time, but building trust and respect and fostering transparency are essential (davis et al., 2006; el ansari, phillips, & zwi (2002); public health, 2002). joint decision making, including a continuous process of review and reassessment, and if need be, modification of the project, must be instituted (boser, 2006). within this process, there must be a provision for dealing with change, whether it be from changes in funding levels, staff turnover, or other unforeseen problems that are bound to occur (stoecker, 2005). an important ethical concern is the effect of the researcher and the research project on the community. public health professionals addressing an epidemic such as hiv/aids have faced challenges in bringing about changes in sexual behaviors and reproductive health. sometimes the interventions initiated are in conflict with a group’s values and norms and, as a result, will not be sustained (schensul, 2005). further, positive changes brought about today may lead to unintended consequences in the future. for example, unintended consequences may involve reallocation of resources that negatively affect one community group relative to another (kelly, azelton, burzette, & mock, 1994). while communities are more often thought of as in need of education and assistance to enable them to participate as partners in research, academic researchers are at least as much in need of education and support in identifying community partners and establishing successful and equitable collaborations (shoultz et al., 2006). with this need in mind, the community collaboration core (ccc) of the hiv center for clinical and behavioral studies was established in 2003. its primary purpose was to study and promote effective community-research partnerships. the ccc, of which the authors were active members, included representatives from several academic/research agencies, communitybased organizations, and government agencies from the new york city metropolitan area. the specific aims of the ccc included: (1) to initiate and sustain successful partnerships to conduct hiv prevention and treatment research and program activities that are related to key priorities of the hiv center, such as sexuality, gender, and mental health and that are of mutual interest and benefit to communities; and, (2) to advance the science of collaborative process in the field of hiv prevention and treatment by developing and disseminating theoretical models and methods that may then be applied to other areas of health research behavior. one of the products of the ccc was a tool, a memorandum of understanding, for developing effective community research partnerships. this framework was informed by ccc members’ professional experiences, including insights gained from a series of community outreach initiatives organized and facilitated by core members over a two-year period (2004-2005). this tool serves as a tool for initiating an open dialogue among prospective research and community partners about global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 the purpose, context, methods, and outcomes of a proposed community-based research project. it is intended to facilitate open communication and thoughtful planning among all potential project partners, helping to affirm each partner’s readiness to begin and shaping the project’s activities toward starting and sustaining a successful project. developing the framework for establishing community research partnerships over the course of two years, the ccc facilitated a series of activities at various events that served to foster the development and assessment of the framework. these activities are briefly described in chronological order, below: exploratory focus groups. in order to begin to identify the content of the framework, two focus groups were conducted. these groups were organized as part of ccc’s first annual community partnership conference, held in october 2004. the one-day conference entitled “building partnerships for hiv research and evaluation with the community” attracted approximately 80 participants (34% from aids service organizations; 17% from state and local public health agencies; and 49% researchers from the hiv center and other academic institutions in new york city). participants of the first focus group included representatives of six well-established communitybased hiv service organizations in new york city. participants of the second group included eight senior social and behavioral scientists, the majority of whom had appointments at the hiv center. a ‘fishbowl’ design for the groups was used, so that each group had a turn participating while the other group observed. the following questions were posed to the focus group of community representatives: what are the benefits to community-based organizations of participating in research? what challenges do community-based organizations face when they participate in research? what do researchers need to bring to the table? what kind of guarantee would you want before signing on to a collaborative research project? what would need to be established in order to allow your staff to work directly with researchers? similarly, to work directly with your clients? what tensions does the prospect of collaborating in research conjure among your organization’s leadership, staff, and clients? what are your impressions of researchers? what are their values and beliefs regarding participatory projects? what is your definition of a ‘culturally competent’ researcher? do researchers share your concept of time? what are possible negative outcomes that could happen to an agency that becomes involved in a research project? and, finally; if you were to draft a written agreement, or memorandum of understanding, with a research partner, what would be your single most important point to include? a similar set of questions was posed to the group of researchers: why involve the community in your research? from your perspective as a researcher, what is appealing about community-research partnerships? how does working with the community serve your research? (i.e., does it improve the quality of your data? can the community help validate results?) for what parts of the research project do you actually involve a community partner in your research? how do you adopt a research project to unanticipated or changing situations within the cbo? (e.g., staff changes? cbo priorities?); how do you manage the fidelity of the design or implementation of the intervention? how can researchers adjust to work within the shorter timeframe accustomed to community-based service organizations? do you believe that community agencies have the perception that researchers are powerful? how do you communicate all the financial constraints that researchers face? how do you define ‘community’? when you see a problem within a partner organization, when and how do you intervene? when wouldn’t you intervene? how do you anticipate, or plan for, the end of the research partnership or relationship at the beginning? if you were to draft a written agreement, or memorandum of understanding, with a community partner, what would be your single most important point to include? the responses offered by participants of both groups in turn and the general discussion held with all conference attendees that followed served to identify important issues in managing the quality of collaborative social and behavioral research in hiv/aids. it also prompted a discussion of alternative models for gauging the capacity of community settings for undertaking various research and service collaborations. conference participants also recommended that the hiv center and the ccc articulate the scientific issues that affect standards for planning, implementing, and evaluating research projects done in partnership with communities. postconference, ccc members coded and summarized the material generated by the focus group participants. results were used to draft an outline of what would become the memorandum of understanding, a framework for establishing global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 community research partnerships, as presented in table 1. this tool is most useful when implemented as early as possible in the collaborative research process, prior to formulation of the research design. table 1 – framework for establishing effective community research partnerships entré review and define the social, economic, language, and cultural characteristics of the community involved in the research. identify key stakeholders (i.e., researchers, community leaders, cbos/ngos, government agencies) who need to be involved in the research to effectively define the problem (e.g., health care, education, employment, etc.). develop strategies that foster the involvement of stakeholders. ensure ways of appreciating the context of the community that will shape problem definition. make use of pre-existing relationships or networks among stakeholders that can facilitate entrée. goals & expectations identify the goals and expectations of each potential partner. discuss the pros and cons of working together, giving special attention to completed or on-going joint projects. define principles that promote transparency and mutual exchange of information. logistics foster a critical understanding of each partner’s limitations to contributing to the research, with particular attention paid to competing priorities. work to elicit concerns about the collaborative process, giving careful attention to issues of partners’ readiness to participate. assess potential partners’ capacity to engage in the research project including their time demands, available work space and staffing. identify important administrative functions and activities to facilitate the research project. negotiate timelines that meet specific aims of the research. risks, benefits, and privacy rights researchers and their partners must discuss the matter of privacy rights and ensure confidentiality of participants’ data. benefits and risks to participating partners and their clients must be communicated in a culturally sensitive manner and clearly understood in the language of targeted communities. in addition, researchers must work with representatives of participating cbos/ngos and other stakeholders to protect from ‘pathologizing’ members of targeted groups or communities, or from damaging the reputation of participating organizations. ownership as thoroughly as possible, researchers and community partners must agree about who will own specific products, including data, instruments, manuals, and intervention materials. in addition, policies regarding authorship on manuscripts and other presentations must also be addressed. discuss the potential for dissemination of research products, including research findings, program curricula, or other materials among new as well as current partners. deliverables researchers and community partners should clarify their respective roles and responsibilities within the context of the research project. specific work plans and contracts should be established during project startup. flexibility/ adaptation a mechanism must be created to allow for modification when unanticipated events impact the research project. to the extent possible, researchers and community partners should have alternates to key positions in the project team (i.e., establish co-chairs). remedies for problems feedback mechanisms for monitoring of project activities to ensure quality and address problems as they arise should be devised. contingency plans, with consequences for nondelivery or delays, should be established. “escape” clause a provision should be available to end the collaboration, when and if needed. confirmatory workshops. at an international hiv/aids research conference in april 2005, the authors conducted workshops for researchers and community representatives interested in community research partnerships. these workshops began with a general presentation of the framework as a tool for establishing effective community research partnerships. next, multiple break-out groups of from 6-12 persons were organized, each with a mix of participants from research/academia, communitybased organizations or non-governmental organizations (cbo/ngo), and government/policyglobal  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 makers. one member of each group was selected to facilitate discussion about the framework and its relevance to their own work in their own country. another group member was chosen to take notes and report about the full group at the end of the break-out session. a series of questions were to be discussed by each group, as follows: is the partnership framework adaptable to your needs? how would you apply this framework to the project(s) you are involved with in your region or community? what perceptions do you have of each other? (i.e., as researchers, community members, government agents, people living with hiv); what values guide your work? what is a ‘culturally competent’ research partnership? what do you think could be the most troublesome outcomes of a research partnership? if you were to use our framework to draft a written agreement with a partner to develop a research project, what would be your single most important point to include? a general discussion (25 minutes) followed the break-out group discussions, during which a number of observations and comments were offered by workshop participants about research partnerships and about the utility of the framework. observations provided by participants about the challenges of participating in a community research partnership, based on their own professional experiences in the field, were diverse. the most daunting challenges reported were issues raised by cbo/ngo representatives, the most frequent issue relating to the difficulties they have had in finding the time and resources necessary to develop the relationships and the trust needed for a successful collaboration. many cbo/ngo participants also voiced frustrations about unequal distribution of power and control over the research process in previous partnership experiences. (in one project, for example, researchers ran out of funds and left without completing the work and without plans or resources to continue the program.) several individuals stated that if a framework of this type had been used to develop the project collaboratively, their experience might have been better. the escape clause at the end of the document was seen as an important tool allowing agencies to disengage from the research project if need be. there was agreement among the cbo/ngo participants that this model would be a valuable tool to help develop research partnerships. recognizing that researchers do bring knowledge and experience to the community, they are usually valued and welcomed. however, researchers have not always been open or sharing with their community partners. cbo/ngo representatives also noted that researchers need to inform themselves better about the communities they plan to work in. they should be aware of and deal with broader issues of concern to a community, not just their research questions. it was also noted that although researchers are skilled at data analysis, they do not always take care to give meaningful or timely feedback to their community partners. many participants also questioned the utility of the high volume of research being carried out in some locations but not in others. also, it was strongly felt that community partners need tangible compensation, either monetary or in-kind, and opportunities to develop skills that will help them as frontline providers develop, grow, and succeed. what it means to be part of a research partnership network was discussed at length. before reaching consensus, the group, both the researchers and the cbo/ngo representatives, engaged in a long discussion about what is community and who are the new community members affected by hiv/aids. the group discussed ways to share power and resources, including ways to bring in needed funding and in-kind resources for research. in addition, cbos/ngos expressed a need for researchers to be in partnership with them as they plan and implement new services and programs. researchers present, affirming cbo/ngo representatives’ concerns, agreed that they need to become more culturally competent about new communities and must spend time building relationships with its stakeholders before initiating a research project. building trusting relationships requires spending the time needed to develop the working relationship, including time to discuss and plan the research agenda fully. they also agreed that communities are complex, and such a partnership should include issues of concern to the community as well as those of the researcher, including power issues that must be addressed. both cbo/ngo representatives and researchers noted that research outcomes could reveal a message that no one wants to hear and that could stigmatize a community. for example, one researcher in the group pointed to how the u.s. congress used results of some early behavioral studies in hiv to curtail funding for prevention. however, group members noted that the pros outweigh the cons in conducting such studies. these studies were important for the development of tailored prevention programs for diverse communities, such as men who have sex with men in communities of color. problems can arise based on how results are presented to politicians, who have their own priorities and agendas, some of which may contradict the purposes and values of the researchers and their community partners. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 the question for many cbo/ngo participants was: are these studies necessary? also of concern to them was the practice of implementing models developed in the west by western researchers in different cultural contexts. both cbos/ngos and researchers have been experiencing frequent cuts in funding, resulting in diminished research efforts and prevention of the dissemination of interventions that have been developed, and, in many cases, resulted in termination of a project and the partnership. in summary, the workshop helped valid the usefulness of this collaborative framework for international as well as u.s.-based research partnerships. field testing: memorandum of understanding. based on the information and validation gathered at the international workshops, this framework was further assesses in its utility as a tool for promoting collaborative research projects. in july 2005, the ccc held its second annual conference, “working together: partnerships to address the impact of hiv on families,” in new york city. this conference was held in conjunction with the national institute of mental health’s (nimh) international research conference on the role of families in preventing and adapting to hiv/aids. working with representatives of the new york community trust, the ny state department of health’s aids institute, the ny city department of health and mental hygiene, the health resources and services administration (hrsa), the ny city champ program in the bronx, and other community agencies, a day of speakers and working groups focused on the challenges and rewards of joint research, community, and government collaborations. a total of 113 people from 63 different organizations in the new york city metropolitan area participated. more than half represented community-based organizations (42%) or hospital/clinic (12%), followed by hiv/aids researchers (32%) and public health practitioners, policy-makers, or other government representatives (14%). after a morning of presentations and discussions about the current challenges in the fight against hiv and the need for community-focused interventions in prevention and treatment, the remainder of the day was dedicated to building on information collected in a pre-conference survey of participants, an assessment of previous experience with and interest in a wide range of hiv-related topics. eight separate workgroups were each organized around a chosen hiv-related topic of interest and were given the task of planning a community research project in their common areas of interest, using the mou. as in the workshops, each group included a mix of participants with ties to community, research, government, and clinical settings (average group size of 15). cofacilitators, responsible for guiding the group’s activities, were post-graduate fellows from the hiv center, ccc core members, and volunteers from nyc champ. facilitators were trained by drs. hunter and lounsbury. data from a pre-conference survey indicated that participants had most experience with programs that helped reduce risky sexual behaviors and that assisted plwha with medication management. however, participants had highest interest in developing new programs to address hiv-related stigma and discrimination, promote mental health issues in treatment and care, as well as programs that help persons reduce risky sexual behavior. survey data also indicated that participants’ had substantive experience conducting hiv research. they reported most experience in research about hiv prevention, followed by studies of stigma and discrimination among people living with hiv and aids (plwha), and about assessing hiv-related knowledge, attitudes and beliefs. participants had highest interest in designing new studies to address matters of disclosure, promote medication management, and teach communication skills. these data determined the final topic areas addressed by the workgroups (see table 2). table 2 – workgroup research topics group 1 primary and secondary prevention/intervention with adolescents group 2 primary and secondary prevention with adults group 3 mental health issues in prevention and care, including stigma and dealing with disclosure group 4 women’s hiv health issues: prevention and treatment group 5 women over 50: prevention and treatment group 6 hiv vaccines and hiv testing issues group 7 family issues in treatment and care, including special needs of youth and adolescents group 8 living long-term: mental health and treatment issues, including adherence, harm reduction/substance use global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 each workgroup was instructed to envision itself as a ‘real world’ collaborative research partnership. workgroups were directed to identify priority issues regarding their topic areas; identify a researchable issue or project that could be undertaken by a community-partnership; begin to develop a work plan that included research aims, critical partners, organizational tasks, and capacity-building and funding needs. in addition, workgroups members were asked to assess foreseeable challenges and rewards to implementing their envisioned partnership. to guide this effort, the framework for community research partnership was applied. while the workgroups identified many, specific pressing issues in hiv prevention and care, the process of developing a research question of interest to all group members proved to be most challenging. each workgroup engaged in intense discussion (sharing concerns, ideas, and visions) before identifying one or more researchable questions. feedback from conference participants indicated that research about developmental changes and hiv, prevention among persons over 50, as well as mental health of long-term survivors were among the most compelling topics for future investigation, as indicated by a sample of the research questions that were shaped by the workgroups: “among adolescents who are living with hiv, what is the role of the caretaker over time?” [group 1]; “how can mental health practitioners engage adolescents and their caretakers in care?” [group 1]; “how effective is a peer education testing promotion among women over 50?” [group 5]; “how are health providers meeting the long-term mental health needs of hiv positive individuals and their families?” [group 8]). important challenges and rewards to partnerships, as identified by the workgroups, were also identified (see table 3). in general, an evaluation of the afternoon workgroup sessions indicated that this framework was very useful to participants in these hypothetical research teams. table 3 – important challenges and rewards to research partnerships challenges to partnerships: 1. lack of meaningful feedback 2. lack of time 3. power issues (ego; ownership of data and other products; cultural dynamics) 4. unclear goals / rewards to partnerships: 1. generating new knowledge/learning new things 2. improving outcomes for the community 3. gaining access to new resources 4. sharing unclear priorities 5. bureaucracy (irbs and state and local governments) 6. commitment and follow through 7. building relationship with large groups 8. community buy-in 9. lack of funding 10. lack of support/ resources for participation resources/sharing the burden 5. building new alliances/helping each other 6. improving resources and programs for communities 7. improving our understanding of the community 8. making new friends summary we believe the process behind the development of this framework for establishing effective community research partnerships demonstrates its utility. using this framework, potential research partners can identify and address the most important matters concerning their collective capacity to collaborate on a given research project. after carefully reviewing all the points in our framework, the partnership should be able to ask the following questions, and answer them to its satisfaction: 1. does each partner affirm a feeling of mutual trust and transparency, or shared values and open communication among members, in moving forward with the research project? 2. are each partner’s roles, responsibilities, and expectations sufficiently complementary and compatible for the research project? are they agreed to and do they reflect individual and shared interests of members. 3. collectively, do we (partners) have the skills and resources to meet the aims of the research project? 4. have we (partners) identified a means for managing contingencies that may impact the success of the partnership? 5. have we (partners) identified and agreed upon strategies for quality assurance of the research design and its potential for positive contributions to the community? the importance of careful reflection on these questions is supported by boser (2006), who notes that community partnerships for research must explicitly seek to establish a working group that understands both the science and the social context of global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 the project to be conducted. we concur with boser that questions such as those included in this framework should be raised periodically over the course of the research partnership. revisiting is a strategy to anticipate, to the greatest extent possible, the ways in which partners and other stakeholders may be impacted, either adversely or beneficially. the objective is to ensure that a process for ethical review is integrated into each stage of the research partnership, beginning at start-up and continuing through its completed implementation. conclusion both researchers and community members must be involved in all aspects of forming a communityresearch partnership. government and private funders must also be made aware of the importance of and the time and resources involved in laying the groundwork for ethical community research practices. the mou approach presented here is a strategy to address new rules of engagement between researchers and community partners that incorporates the principle that all partners are partially accountable and responsible for the integrity of the research project. this framework for community research partnership development, through ethical principles and practical discussion points, can promote effective collaboration, allowing collaborating stakeholders to anticipate, to the greatest extent possible, the ways in which individuals, groups, and communities could participate in and be affected by a research process, both in terms of potential benefits, and, necessarily, adverse consequences as well. references berger, p., & neuhaus, j. 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(2006). finding solutions to challenges faced in community-based participatory research between academic and community organizations. journal of interprofessional care, 20(2), 133-144. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 1, issue 3 january 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 stoecker, r. (2005). research methods for community change. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. trickett, e., j. (2005). community interventions and hiv/aids: affecting the community context. in e. trickett, j. & w. pequegnat (eds.), community interventions and aids (pp. 3-27). new york, ny: oxford university press. trussler, t., perchal, p., & barker, a. (2000). between what is said and what is done: cultural constructs and young gay men's hiv vulnerability. psychology, health & medicine, 5(3), 295-306. wallerstein, n. (1999). power between evaluator and community: research relationships within new mexico's healthier communities. social science & medicine, 49, 39-53. wallerstein, n., duran, b. m., aguilar, j., joe, l., loretto, f., toya, a., et al. (2003). jemez pueblo: built and social-cultural environments and health within a rural american indian community in the southwest. american journal of public health, 93(9), 1517-1518. weiss, e. s., anderson, r. m., & lasker, r. d. (2002). making the most of collaboration: exploring the relationship between partnership synergy and partnership functioning. health education & behavior, 29(6), 683-698. zimmerman, m. a. (1995). psychological empowerment: issues and illustrations. american journal of community psychology, 23(5), 581600. microsoft word v2i3-0009-ms final.docx the role of ethnic identity in interventions to promote positive adolescent development jean l. hill new mexico highlands university gishawn a. mance american university riana elyse anderson university of virginia emilie p. smith the pennsylvania state university author note: this article is based upon a symposium presented at the 13th biennial conference of the society for community research and action, june 16-19, 2011, chicago illinois. keywords: adolescent development, ethnic identity recommended citation: hill, j. l., mance, g. a., anderson, r. e., & smith, e. p. (2012). the role of ethnic identity in interventions to promote positive adolescent development. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(3), 1-12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3  of  12   the role of ethnic identity in interventions to promote positive adolescent development jean l. hill, gishawn a. mance, riana elyse anderson, emilie p. smith abstract this paper addresses the role of ethnic identity in child development. we report on two school-based interventions with a focus on strengthening the ethnic identity of girls, one with a hispanic population and one with an african american population. we also report on a study investigating whether parental ethnic identity plays a mediating role in african american parenting styles. the results of each study were non-significant in relation to their specific hypotheses regarding ethnic identity. we discuss the implications of these non-significant findings, particularly given that the two interventions were conducted in minority-majority communities. introduction interviewer: “what makes being hispanic different from being african-american or anglo or any of those other groups to you?” participant: “i’m not sure but i think it’s because everybody, mostly everybody i know, they’re hispanic. like all my family and all my friends and everything.” interviewer: “what makes being hispanic different from being another race and culture?” participant: “i think you fit in more.” interviewer: “fit in more? in this school or…” participant: “everywhere.” interviewer: “everywhere, okay.” participant: “except for texas.” the quote is from a 5th grade girl in a school district in rural county in northern new mexico where 77% of the population identifies as hispanic (us census bureau, 2010). her response reflects the fact that she was born and raised in a minority-majority community; a community in which her ethnic identity is a visible, celebrated part of community life. for adolescents of color, the successful transition to healthy functioning in adulthood requires the achievement of a secure sense of their ethnic or racial identity in light of stereotypical images of their group, cultural differences and conflicts, and restricted opportunities (phinney & kohatsu, 1997). the role of one’s ethnic group status is deemed to be pivotal within understanding and defining the adolescent’s process of ethnic identity. in this paper we will present three studies that focused partially and in various ways on the role of ethnic identity in child and adolescent functioning. all of them were conducted with populations who lived in minoritymajority communities; a circumstance that we believe had a significant impact on our findings. the past several decades have seen the generation of a great deal of research on the development of ethnic identity and its role in positive functioning. models of ethnic identity development tend to mirror marcia’s stages of identity development, particularly his concepts of identity diffusion and identity achievement (marcia, 1996). models of ethnic identity development include the concepts of immersion (a period of intensive involvement with one’s own racial/ethnic group) and ultimately transformed relations with the mainstream culture. as with all models incorporating stage concepts, they have the limitation (recognized by their developers) that not everyone goes through each stage or in the specified order. research on the role of ethnic identity has yielded varying results. it seems clear that experiences with discrimination and negative stereotypes are damaging for members of minority cultures (sellers & shelton, 2003; williams & williams-morris, 2000). a strong, positive ethnic identity has been found to correlate with various aspects of adaptive functioning, including self-esteem, drug use, commitment to education, less aggression, more pro-social behaviors (caldwell, kohn-wood, schmeelk-cone, chavous, & zimmerman, 2004; mcmahon & watts, 2002). relatedly, many studies have found that a strong, positive ethnic identity and sense of belonging is beneficial, and may serve as a protective factor when discrimination and prejudice are encountered (sellers, caldwell, schmeelk-cone, & zimmerman 2003; caldwell et al., 2004). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3  of  12   in addition, several studies have generated findings suggesting that a negative attitude toward the majority culture is associated with negative effects, such as lowered commitment to educational goals and less pro-social behavior. oppositional identity refers to an ethnic identity that is distrustful of and includes negative perceptions of the dominant culture (fordham & ogbu, 1986). some research has found a correlation between an oppositional identity and negative attitudes toward school, fewer prosocial behaviors, alcohol and marijuana use (resnicow, baranowski, ahluwahlia, & braithwaite, 1999; irving & hudley, 2008). these findings are in no way universal, with some research finding them true for some minority ethnic groups but not others, or one gender but not the other. overall, the basic conclusion of this research is that a positive view of one’s own racial/ethnic group, including a sense of inclusion and belonging, coupled with a positive view of the majority culture, supports adaptive functioning and has protective effects. these findings have lead to research on how to strengthen ethnic identity in young minority group members. two potential avenues for doing this are through planned interventions and through parental ethnicracial socialization practices. research has demonstrated that both of these avenues can be effective ways of supporting positive ethnic identity development (belgrave, chase-vaughn, gray, addison, & cherry, 2000; hughes et al., 2006). study one, “cuentos from my childhood”: the use of culturally relevant folktales to support the healthy development of hispanic girls the term hispanic is used to describe a broad array of cultures in the united states, each with different histories, cultural traditions, and immigration patterns. the hispanic population in northern new mexico consider themselves to be an indigenous hispanic community, in that the community existed in this region before the area became part of the united states. the first spanish settlers came to the area in the 17th century and many families still describe their ethnicity as spanish. the most commonly used ethnic descriptor is hispanic, with latino/a and chicano/a used only rarely. the term mexican or mexican american is used specifically in cases where the individual or one of his or her immediate ancestors immigrated to the united states from mexico. hispanic culture, identity, and the spanish language (particularly the regional variation) are all of central importance to the communities in the area. concerns about losing that identity are frequently expressed and many community initiatives focus on supporting and celebrating that hispanic cultural identity. this study reports on an intervention that was designed to support the development of healthy selfesteem and interpersonal relationships among 5th grade girls through participation in an activity group based upon the reading and interpretation of folktales, particularly a collection of hispanic folktales. the analysis presented in this paper will focus on interview responses from the girls regarding their conception of their ethnic identity. method the project was conducted over a two-year period. for the purposes of this analysis we will be comparing girls who participated in a story group (the intervention curriculum) with girls who participated in an arts and crafts group (the control group). altogether 38 girls participated in the story group (of whom 33 completed interviews) and 32 girls participated in the arts and crafts group (of whom 27 completed interviews). twenty-eight (85%) of the girls in the story group self-identified as hispanic (85%), along with 22 (82%) of the girls in the arts and crafts group. all the girls were in the 5th grade. the intervention was held once a week for thirteen weeks during the regular school day. the story group curriculum was based upon feminist theories regarding the central role of relationships to self-esteem among women and girls, and theories regarding the use of narratives (stories), particularly cultural narratives, as a means of supporting personal growth. each girl received a copy of the book “cuentos from my childhood: legends and folktales of northern new mexico” by paulette atencio (1991), as well as copy of fairy tales by the brothers grimm. “cuentos from my childhood” is a bilingual book, with each story presented in both english and spanish. all the girls completed a self-report measure of selfesteem (the multidimensional self concept scale; bracken, 1992) before and after participating in the groups. results and discussion data from the multidimensional self concept scale indicated that the intervention had no measurable global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4  of  12   effect on self-esteem (for additional details regarding this analysis please contact the first author). data from interviews suggest that the groups did have a positive effect on interpersonal relationships among the girls, particularly a decrease in bullying, a finding which was supported by the observations of the teachers. however, this result was found for the girls participating in the arts and crafts group as well as in the story group. in addition, there was little support in the interviews for any change in the girls’ perceptions of their ethnic identity, even though this was an explicit focus of the story group curriculum. the analysis conducted for this paper was an attempt to further understand the girls’ perceptions of their ethnic identity. the analysis will focus specifically on the following four questions from the interview: 1. how would you describe yourself? 2. different people consider themselves members of different groups. for instance people might consider themselves hispanic, latino, mexican, anglo, african american, or native american. do you consider yourself a member of any of those groups? 3. what does being ____ mean to you? 4. what makes being ____ different from being a member of another group? throughout the two years of the project not a single girl spontaneously included her ethnicity in her response to the question “how would you describe yourself?” in the second year of the project we changed the order of the questions and asked the questions “how are you like your friends?” and “how are you like your family?” after the initial question about describing yourself. with this order two girls mentioned ethnicity when describing how they were like their families, but neither were hispanic. several of the girls were resistant to identifying themselves with a particular ethnic group, giving responses such as “i’m just a person” or “i don’t think it really matters.” when asked what being hispanic means to them, or what makes being hispanic different from being a member of another group many of the girls responded “nothing” or “i don’t know.” but the majority response was that being hispanic meant speaking both spanish and english. a typical response was “being hispanic means speaking spanish good. i was raised with a spanish family but i don’t really speak it that much. i just speak english more than spanish.” the girls clearly identified speaking two languages as a positive thing, and something not everyone can do. “that i know two different languages. spanish and english. not all people can speak spanish.” there were clear indications in the answers that the girls tended to think of being hispanic/spanish as being bilingual. they did not associate that ethnic identity with being monolingual spanish speaking. there was a clear differential between the terms spanish and mexican, with spanish implying bilingual. “like some half hispanic and half mexican. because i’m spanish and mexican. i like that i speak spanish and i speak english.” while we did not ask the girls specifically about role models, two girls did spontaneously mention women they admired, one when she was talking about her idea of the ideal girl and the other when discussing her intended career. both of the women mentioned were hispanic, but neither girl mentioned that when discussing the women. not a single girl, from any ethnic group, mentioned a negative perception of her ethnic group or experiences of discrimination or prejudice. several girls who identified as hispanic, like the girl quoted at the beginning of this article, mentioned that being hispanic meant you were like everyone else, that you were part of an in-group. “i just like the religions and the celebrations. it makes me feel like i’m in.” the girls from ethnic groups that are a minority in the region also expressed positive feelings about their ethnic group, but they tended to feel that it was cool to be different. “because a lot of people aren’t that kind of culture. and i think it kind of makes me kind of special because its from a different culture and a lot of people don’t know about that culture so that’s kind of cool.” as with the quantitative measure, there were no identifiable differences in the interview responses between the girls in the story group and those in the arts and crafts group. there were also no identifiable differences in their responses before and after participating in the groups. it seems quite clear from their responses that the girls in the story group had no idea that a goal of the group was to strengthen hispanic ethnic identity. when asked what they thought the goal of the group was the response was universal – to improve relationships among the girls. when asked if they thought that goal had been met they all believed it global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5  of  12   had. they believed that they got along better and that there was more respect, less fighting, more friendships, and less bullying among the girls. this belief was echoed by their teachers, who stated that they saw improved relationships among the girls who participated in both the story and the arts and crafts groups. this was true even though group leaders reported that the cultural aspect of the intervention was salient in the story group. the cultural relevance of some of the stories was specifically discussed and the girls shared versions of the folktales as they were told in their families. the concepts of biculturality and bicultural competence seem to be reflected in the girls’ responses. the majority of the girls in this study expressed a clear ethnic identity and had a positive interpretation of that identity. but the characteristic that most clearly defined their culture for them was being bilingual, an aspect of bicultural competence. for them, in a sense, being hispanic means being bicultural. both of these findings, the existence of a strong positive ethnic identity among the majority of the girls and the conceptualization of hispanic identity as bicultural, are probably the result of the unique nature of northern new mexico hispanic culture. these girls grew up in communities where their culture has been the dominant culture for hundreds of years. their culture has always been presented to them as something to be proud of, and it is unlikely, at this stage of their lives, that they have ever directly experienced discrimination because of their ethnicity. given this, it seems reasonable to assume that they girls did not take note of the cultural nature of the story group because a focus on hispanic culture is a normal part of their lives, including their education. this would also be a reasonable explanation for why there was no evidence of the intervention having an effect on ethnic identity. in contrast, the girls in both groups were very aware of the gendered nature of the groups and believed that was related to their purpose. study two, beautiful butterflies: considerations for culturally-relevant community interventions for african american girls the second study presented in this paper was also an evaluation of a school-based intervention, project butterfly. project butterfly was an 8-week african centered intervention, designed to enhance african cultural values, ethnic identity, and psychological well-being among 6th to 8th grade african-american girls. the project was conducted in two elementary schools in chicago, illinois. both schools were located in chicago’s inner city. at least 98% of the students in both schools were eligible for a federallyfunded lunch program and thus labeled low-income (chicago public schools annual report, 2003). the schools were 100% african american with daily attendance rates at 92% and the truancy rates at 1% (chicago public schools annual report, 2003). thus, as with the intervention in new mexico, the girls were from a minority-majority community. unlike the project in new mexico, the evaluation of project butterfly included specific quantitative measures of racial/cultural values and ethnicity. project butterfly had a strong focus on directly teaching africentric values to the participants. research illustrates that africentric values are related to psychological well being among african american youth (belgrave et al, 2002). this finding is separate from the well-supported finding that racial/ethnic identity is related to psychological outcomes (arbona, jackson, mccoy, & blakely, 1999; caldwell et al., 2002; mccreary, slavin, & berry, 1996; romero & roberts, 1998). for that reason a measure of cultural values and attitudes (the african cultural values scale; nobles & goddard, 1992) as well as a measure of racial/ethnic identity were used in the study. research on african american youth focuses on racial identity rather than ethnic identity (caldwell et al., 2002). one’s ethnic identity entails not only identification based on physical traits, but also basic feelings, beliefs, and attitudes about one’s ethnic group that are consistent with one’s cultural values. understanding race is particularly important for african americans given their historical experiences in the u.s. therefore, a measure that was specifically developed for african american youth, which incorporates elements of both ethnic and racial identity, the multi-construct of african american identity questionnaire (mcaiq; smith & brookins, 1997), was used in this study. the mcaiq was developed to examine ethnic identity, which the authors defined as racial orientation. racial orientation refers to attitudes toward african americans as a group (smith & brookins, 1997). this measure was designed to identify components of a positive ethnic identity specifically for early adolescent african americans. method global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6  of  12   a sample of 93 african american 6th – 8th grade adolescent girls attending two elementary schools in chicago, illinois completed both preand post-test measures for the study. one school served as the intervention school, while the other served as the comparison school. interested 6th, 7th and 8th grade were invited to participate in the study and received a research packet, which consisted of a research introduction letter, student consent forms and parental consent forms. girls in the intervention school also received an intervention flyer, describing project butterfly. of the sample, 51% (n = 47) of the girls comprised the intervention group, while the remaining 49% (n = 46) constituted the comparison group. participants ranged from 11 to 15 years of age with a mean of 12.5 years (sd = .95). there were no demographic differences between the groups except for a significant difference according to grade, t(93) = 12.37, p < .001. participants from the control school tended to be in a higher grade (m = 7.1, sd = .83) compared to intervention participants (m = 6.5, sd = .50). the 8-week project butterfly intervention sessions were conducted during the weekly non-instructional period, which was a 45-minute “free/study” period where the students did not receive a structured activity (e.g., art, music, physical education, and computer). six classrooms participated in the intervention; therefore, there were six groups that met weekly during their individual “free periods” for 45 minutes during the eight-week intervention period. demographic characteristics were collected from each participant, including race/ethnicity, age, grade, number of siblings, primary caregiver, and parental level of education. psychological well-being was assessed using the youth self-report (ysr) of the achenbach behavior checklist (achenbach, 1991). cultural values and attitudes were assessed using the african cultural values scale (acvs; nobles & goddard, 1992). the multi-construct of african american identity questionnaire (mcaiq; smith & brookins, 1997) was used to assess participants’ racial/ethnic identity. the complete protocol was administered in a group format based on grade. the questionnaire administration took approximately 1 hour to complete at preand post-test. additionally, a focus group with ten project butterfly participants was conducted to gather more detailed information on female african american adolescent identity. results and discussion an ancova was conducted to test the effects of project butterfly on the main study variables. pre-test scores of each dependent variable were controlled for in analyses. project butterfly was found to have a significant main effect on african cultural values, f(2, 89) = 10.97, p <.01). intervention participants had stronger cultural values at post-test (m = 42.23; sd = 4.05) than control participants (m = 40.45; sd = 4.52). the second ancova was conducted to determine if there was a difference between the intervention and control groups on ethnic identity after the intervention took place, while controlling for ethnic identity at pre-test. no significant difference was found on ethnic identity between girls participating in project butterfly and those who did not, f(1, 91) = .54, ns. a hierarchical regression showed that stronger african cultural values predicted a stronger ethnic identity at post-test, f(2, 90) = 19.47, β = .30, p <.01. similarly, african cultural values at pre-test predicted stronger ethnic identity at post-test, f(2,89) = 19.12, β = .23, p <.01. ethnic identity did not predict psychological wellbeing at post-test, while controlling for well-being at pre-test, f(2, 90) = 25.00, β = -.02, ns. an additional regression revealed that ethnic identity at pre-test did not predict psychological well-being at post-test, f(2,89) = 26.97, β = .14, ns. (for additional details regarding this analysis please contact the second author). to gain more clarity to the quantitative results, a subset of 10 project butterfly participants completed a focus group to further explore ethnic identity. participants responded to two questions. when asked, “what does it mean to be black/african american?” the girls commented that it was hard, but also expressed pride in their culture, as in this answer, “sometimes hard, sometimes alright because everyone wants to be like us.” another girl related the difficulties of being african american to conflict within the community, conflict that is supported by the majority culture. “it’s hard because they [majority culture] don’t want us to be together. one nation. ‘cause i know, i noticed they are all together; they have their own schools, hospitals, buses, and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  7  of  12   everything. but you see black people, they split up and always fighting. you don’t see them talking bad to each other.” when asked, “how do you feel about being an african american girl?” the girls reported pride, and anger at the way the they are viewed by the majority culture. “sometimes we are seen as statistics, but i don’t let those statistics have control over me. it makes me mad…see bad and think we all bad.” interestingly, girls participating in project butterfly did not report a stronger sense of ethnic identity after the intervention. in this study, racial/ethnic identity was measured by the extent one rejected negative stereotypes, appreciated the physical characteristics of african americans, and interacted with one’s ethnic group. it is possible that the participants in the study had a healthy sense of identity prior to the intervention and exposure to project butterfly did not significantly affect their overall sense of identity. participants attended schools and lived in neighborhoods that were 100% african american. it is highly probable that the participants received many positive cultural messages prior to the intervention. thus, exposure to the curriculum may have reiterated cultural messages already relayed within the community rather than introduce concepts. therefore, exposure to project butterfly may not have impacted these components of ethnic identity. additionally, the intervention focused on a number of concepts that may not have strongly impacted one’s acceptance or rejection of stereotypical portrayals of african americans, which may have also impacted the current findings related to ethnic identity. project butterfly was designed to specifically address the cultural and gendered experiences of african american girls. however, the emphasis on genderrelated material may have been more salient than ethnicity for participants. given that african american females are recipients of both gender and racial bias (dubois, 2002), a program designed with a gender-specific component may have spoken more to the girls’ gendered experiences rather than their ethnic experiences. study 3 black parenting power: an exploratory analysis of the impact of ethnic identification on low-income african american parenting style and child outcome parenting style has been widely evaluated with respect to child outcome (jones et al., 2008). authoritative techniques have been heralded as best (baumrind, larzelere, & owens, 2010), while authoritarian and permissive, among others, have been deemed detrimental to child development (granic & patterson, 2006). african american mothers have been particularly criticized in early literature regarding their authoritarian, or overreactive, parenting behaviors, replete with great demand and little warmth (iruka, 2009). although more current literature recognizes the strengths of varying parenting styles in differing environments, research indicates that african american children still have more successful school performance, selfreliance, psychological distress, and delinquency outcomes with parents who are authoritative, that is, firm, accepting, and democratic (steinberg et al., 1991). prior research indicates that urban environments elicit more overreactive parenting techniques (mcloyd, 1990), and, given that the majority of african americans reside in urban locations, context in addition to race may provide the impetus for parenting techniques relevant to external factors. race is an important variable, however, since there are specific practices unique to in-group members. racial socialization is concerned with the messages passed from parent to child about the surrounding environment (hughes et al., 2006). while various ethnicities have experienced different forms of oppression in the united states, african americans share a unique history that promotes messages of both resilience and preparation (stevenson, davis, & abdul-kabir, 2001). various demographic and contextual factors explain the ways parents prepare children for the world around them, and parental ethnic identification is a significant predictor for the socialization of african american children (thomas & speight, 1999). although racial socialization has been used as a moderator of child outcome and parental characteristics, e.g. poverty (wilson, foster, anderson, & mance, 2009) and mental health and discipline (rodriguez, mckay, & bannon, jr., 2008), less is known of the capacity of ethnic identification to impact characteristics of the parent. ethnic identification has been described as a factor impacting parenting style in african american families, though studies tend to focus on the relationship of the child’s ethnic identity with racial socialization (sanders thompson, 1994). furthermore, studies have looked at demographic characteristics explaining the relationship between global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  8  of  12   parenting and child outcome (fox, platz, & bentley, 1995), yet few investigate ethnic identity as a rationale for parenting techniques and subsequent child effects. through this exploratory analysis, parental ethnic identification was examined with respect to its ability to mediate the relationship between parenting style and child outcome. method the current study is a secondary analysis of data from the early steps project which consists of 731 families recruited from the waiting areas of women, infants and children (wic) centers in 2002 and 2003. screening guidelines required a child aged 2133 months old, and who was at-risk for child behavioral problems due to risk factors pertaining to socioeconomic status, family, and the child. this study consists of 171 african american primary caregivers of 5-year-old children. 97.7% (n= 167) of the caregivers were female and ranged in age from 19-72 years (m=29.92, sd=7.90). the mean educational level of the caregivers was a high school degree. the mean gross family annual income was $15,000–19,999, such that 56.4% of the sample lived below the federal poverty threshold in 2006 (federal register, 2006). a research team conducted assessments of caregivers during the annual 3-hour home visit. caregivers were asked to perform interactive tasks with their 5-year-old, complete additional questionnaires, and were compensated $100 for their participation. caregivers were asked to complete the parenting scale (ps; arnold, o'leary, wolff, & acker, 1993) a measure created to assess dysfunctional discipline overreactivity, verbosity, and laxness within parenting practices; the multigroup ethnic identity measure (meim; phinney, 1992), 21 items assessing positive ethnic attitudes and belongingness, exploration of ethnic identity, and ethnic practices; and the child behavior checklist (cbcl; achenbach & rescorla, 2001). the cbcl is a 112-item measure assessing child internalizing and externalizing, based on gender and age groups. results and discussion variables were evaluated for normality, and all were within acceptable limits for skewness and kurtosis. tests of mediation were conducted to see whether ethnic identification mediated the association between parental overreactivity and child externalization and internalization through a sobel test (as cited in borders & liang, 2011). the requirements for mediation were not met for either of the dependent variables: overreactivity significantly predicted child externalizing (p<.001) and internalizing (p<.001) behaviors, and overreactivity significantly predicted ethnic identification (p=.025), but ethnic identification did not mediate the relationship between overreactivity and child externalizing or internalizing behaviors (p’s>.05). (for additional details regarding this analysis please contact the third author.) this study investigated whether ethnic identification statistically mediated the relationship between parental overreactivity and child behavioral and psychological outcomes. significant correlations were found between parental overreactivity and child externalizing and internalizing, as well as between parental overreactivity and ethnic identification. significant mediation was not found, however, indicating that ethnic identification did not explain the relationship between parenting and child behaviors. in an effort to explore the impact of ethnic identification on parenting style, various other statistical tests should be employed. ethnic identification and racial socialization have been used in several prior studies as a moderator of the relationship between parenting and child outcomes (wilson et al., 2009; rodriguez et al., 2008). future research could test whether the association between overreactive parenting styles and child outcome varies with parental ethnic identification. additionally, ethnic identification may be used as a predictor of child outcome, while parental overreactivity may be used as a mediator. in relation, a regression could determine the percentage of variance in child outcomes explained by parenting style and ethnic identification. several limitations may have impacted the findings of this study. the age of the children was 5-years-old, while the norm reference populations for the cbcl is 6-16 (achenbach & rescorla, 2004). in line with this issue, parents typically utilize racial socialization when the child increases in age (hughes et al., 2006). although parental ethnic identification was measured in this study, the impact of racial conversations and personal experiences may impact the psychological and behavioral outcomes of children as they grow in age. finally, low socioeconomic status may be a limiting factor in the scores of ethnic identification reported by african american caregivers, global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  9  of  12   considering prior research shows that lower income and less educated african americans perceive less discrimination and prejudice than their counterparts (williams, 1999). the current study reveals a positive significant correlation between parenting overreactivity and ethnic identification. considering literature notes the benefits of authoritative parenting, even within african american populations, interventions should be mindful of cultural and contextual factors that may steer caregiver behaviors. while praising components of an overreactive parenting style, such as firmness and demandingness, interventions can also address the capacity of caregivers to provide more warmth to their children in order to strive for a more balanced parenting style (jones et al., 2008). caregivers with strong ethnic identification can receive specific training to increase their warmth, which tends to lower child aggression (jones et al., 2008). interventions with foci on characteristics unique to the african american experience may improve outcomes for parental behaviors and child outcomes. summary and concluding discussion while the positive correlates of a strong, positive ethnic/racial identity are clear in the research, the studies reported here point out the difficulties involved in translating that information into a mechanism for supporting positive youth development. neither of the interventions demonstrated evidence of any effect on ethnic identity and the parenting study did not find that parental ethnic identity played a mediating role in parenting style or child behavior. there are several possible reasons for this. first, the two communities that received the interventions were both minority/majority communities, ones where the girls had probably received positive messages about their ethnic identity for all of their lives. it seems that the girls entered the interventions with a strong ethnic identity already in place, so there was little for the groups to effect. second, as stated in the introduction, there is widespread agreement that the establishment of ethnic identity is a developmental process. since they grew up in minority majority communities these girls may never have had any reason to question their ethnic identity, but that does not mean they will not do so in the future. this point may be especially important for the northern new mexico hispanic girls, who seemed to have no experience with discrimination based upon ethnicity, and little awareness that the majority culture may hold negative stereotypes regarding hispanics. it is possible that while the ethnic and cultural themes of the story group were not salient for them as 5th graders, they may become much more important to them as they learn more about the role of hispanic citizens in american culture. in addition, adolescence has long been considered to be an important time period for identity development. both groups of girls may find interventions focused on ethnic identity more meaningful during that developmental stage. the developmental aspect of ethnic identity is equally, if not more important in the parenting study. many of the studies showing positive effects of authoritarian parenting styles with african american children are conducted with adolescents. it may be that parental ethnic identity can play a mediating role in parenting as adolescents come to consciously interpret their parents’ interactions with them in terms of ethnic identity. it is interesting that in both interventions the gendered aspect of the groups seemed to have a greater effect than the cultural aspects. since we know that gender is one of the earliest aspects of identity to clearly develop and stabilize, it makes sense developmentally that this aspect might be more salient for latency aged girls than is ethnic or racial identity. the findings regarding biculturality and bicultural competence are also interesting. there is little research on the specific effects of growing up in a well established minority majority community in the united states. the suggestions from this study that those communities may be supporting the development of a bicultural identity and bicultural competence in their children are worthy of further investigation. finally, it is important to note that while the two interventions reported in this paper did not demonstrate an effect on ethnic identity, there is a great deal of evidence in the literature that culturally anchored interventions demonstrated increased effectiveness. at the very least there are ethical and pragmatic reasons for insuring that interventions match with the cultural values of the communities in which they are presented. references global  journal  of 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(2008). oppositional identity and academic achievement among global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  11  of  12   african american males. in j. ogbu (ed.), minority status, oppositional culture, and schooling, pp. 374-394. new york: routledge. jones, d. j., forehand, r., rakow, a., colletti, c. j. m., mckee, l., & zalot, a. (2008). the specificity of maternal parenting behavior and child adjustment difficulties: a study of inner-city african american families. journal of family psychology, 22, 181-192. marcia, j. e. (1996). development and validation of ego identity status. journal of personality and social psychology, 3, 551558. mccreary, m.l., slavin, l.a., & berry, e.j. (1996). predicting problem behavior and self-esteem among african american adolescents. journal of adolescent research, 11, 216-234. mcmahon, s. & watts, r. 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(1999). cultural sensitivity in pubic health: defined and demystified. ethnicity and disease, 9, 1021. rodriguez, j., mckay, m. m., & bannon, w. m., jr. (2008). the role of racial socialization in relation to parenting practices and youth behavior: an exploratory analysis. social work in mental health, 6, 30-54. romero, a. & roberts, r. (1998). perception of discrimination and ethno-cultural variables in a diverse group of adolescents. journal of adolescence, 21, 641-656. sanders thompson, v. l. (1994). socialization to race and its relationship to racial identification among african americans. journal of black psychology, 20, 175-188. sellers, r. m., caldwell, c. h. schmeelk-cone, k. h., & zimmeman, m. a. (2003). racial identity, racial discrimination, perceived stress, and psychological distress among african american young adults. journal of health and social behavior, 44, 302-317. sellers, r.m. & shelton, j. n. (2003). the role of racial identity in perceived racial discrimination. journal of personality and social psychology, 84, 1079-1092. smith, e.p. & brookins. (1997). toward the development of an ethnic identity measure for african american youth. journal of black psychology, 23, 358-377. steinberg, l., mounts, n. s., lamborn, s. d., & dornbusch, s. m. (1991). authoritative parenting and adolescent adjustment across varied ecological niches. journal of research on adolescence, 1, 19-36. stevenson, h. c., davis, g., & abdul-kabir, s. (2001). stickin’ to, watchin’ over, and gettin’ with: an african american parent’s guide to discipline. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. thomas, a. j. & speight, s. l. (1999). racial identity and racial socialization attitudes of african american parents. journal of black psychology, 25, 152-170. williams, d. r. (1999). race, socioeconomic status, and health: the added effects of racism and discrimination. in n.e.adler, m. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  12  of  12   marmot, b. s. mcewen, & j. stewart (eds.), socioeconomic status and health in industrial nations: social, psychological, and biological pathways (pp. 173-188). new york, ny, us: new york academy of sciences. williams, d. r. & williams-morris, r. (2000). racism and mental health: the africanamerican experience. ethnicity and health, 5, 243-268. wilson, d., foster, j., anderson, s., & mance, g. (2009). racial socialization's moderating effect between poverty stress and psychological symptoms for african american youth. journal of black psychology, 35, 102-124. microsoft word 2009-0026-final-20100827.docx   global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  41   rites of passage as a framework for community interventions with youth dr. david g. blumenkrantz is the executive director of the center for the advancement of youth, family & community services in glastonbury, ct, usa (thecenter@rope.org) dr. marc b. goldstein is a professor of psychology at central connecticut state university, new britain, ct, usa (goldsteinm@ccsu.edu) key words: rites of passage, adolescent development, youth development, primary prevention recommended citation: blumenkrantz, dg., & goldstein, mb. (2010). rites of passage as a framework for community interventions with youth. global journal of community psychology practice, 1(2), 41-50. retrieved <date>, from http://www.gjcpp.org/. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  2   september  2010     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  42   rites of passage as a framework for community interventions with youth david g. blumenkrantz,1 marc b. goldstein2 the center for the advancement of youth, family & community services,1 central connecticut state university2 abstract this article discusses the potential value of adopting a rites of passage framework for developing community interventions for youth and suggests principles for its application. we propose a contemporary working definition of the concept, how it could reshape the way we approach community and youth development, and 20 core components of a rites of passage process developed from our work experience spanning over 40 years. introduction the terms “rite of passage” have become ubiquitous in contemporary society, being applied to as a diverse set of experiences as college student’s binge drinking (casa, 1994), a first kiss or sexual experience (carpenter, 2005), tattooing (gillespie, 2009), and a president’s first war (apple, 1989). these, and literally thousands of similar examples may represent a “first” or otherwise special experience for the individual, a moment with meaning, but they are not necessarily rites of passage. we believe that a rites of passage youth and community development strategy represent one of the most powerful ecological tools available to community psychologists, but that contemporary use of this term has obscured its true meaning and value. our goal here is to describe what is meant by a community-based rite of passage and how it might be usefully applied by those who work in the community. while our focus will be on the application of rites of passage with youth, the principles can be applied to other key life transitions. our definition of rites of passage as well as our specification of the structural elements that compose them comes from the lead author's experience spanning over 40 years of practice in creating effective rites of passage experiences that are grounded in the community. these experiences led to the creation of the center for the advancement of youth, family & community services, inc. in 1990, a non-profit institute focused on “promoting positive youth development and [to] assist[ing] children in the transition through adolescence to becoming healthy adults connected to their communities. we accomplish this by creating effective school and community-based strategies in partnership with parents, teachers, counselors, and community leaders” (rope, n.d.). the center has created rope© a multi-year intervention with communities that has been used throughout the us, canada and europe with an estimated 100,000 youth over the past 30 years. for more information on the center, rope©, and other related experiences, please visit www.rope.org. what do we mean by a rite of passage? belgian anthropologist arnold van gennep coined the term rite of passage in his seminal study (1909/1960) of patterns of behavior and customs that various cultures engaged in during times of major life transition. what van gennep described as rites of passage were community-created and communitydirected experiences that transmit cultural values and knowledge to an individual (or individuals). the rite of passage process not only guides the individual’s transition to a new status, but, equally important, it created public events that celebrated the transition and reaffirmed these community values, which inform and guide expectations for behaviors essential for the group’s survival. the historical record shows that rites of passage have been present, in various manifestations, in all cultures for thousands of years. we would argue this suggests the strong “evolutionary validity” of these processes, which have remained an important part of community and cultural health promotion during the major transitions of birth, marriage and death. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  2   september  2010     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  43   what happens without meaningful rites of passage? it could be argued that cultural rituals and secular strategies in modern american society do not effectively assist in our children’s transition to adulthood. the lack of clearly established rites of passage in america is partly due to the ambiguity about when and how one becomes an adult in contemporary society (arnett, 2000, 2004). the ages at which youth receive certain adult privileges (e.g., right to drive, right to vote, right to drink, etc.) are rather arbitrary and are not related to any actual competencies or maturity on the part of the individuals who gain those privileges. the developmental psychology literature provides considerable evidence (see blos, 1979; elkind, 1984; scott, 1998) that adolescents desperately seek public markers and community approbation to verify their entry into adult status. in the absence of meaningful community-based rituals, youth will define and create their own marker events based on peer or media values, many of which may be destructive both individually and communally. indeed, this is how binge drinking, drug use, teen pregnancy and other similar behaviors have become elevated to rites of passage reflecting adult status, e.g., casa (1994). so what is a real rite of passage? we propose the following definition: “a modern day rite of passage is achieved when parents and the community create and participate in experiences which are perceived to be transformative by youth and, in fact, offer them increased status within the community and facilitate their healthy transition through adolescence” (blumenkrantz, 1996, p. 21). van gennep (1909/1960) identified three common features in the various phenomena he labeled as rites of passage: separation, transition (liminality) and incorporation. separation referred to a change from the normal routine of daily life. historically, in the case of youth, it was often a biological marker, i.e., the onset of puberty. within the family and community this was interpreted as a significant signal that tells a child, “from this point on you must be on a journey to adulthood. you must leave (separate from) this place of childhood behind, separate from childish things and move into adulthood for the health and benefit of yourself, your family and community.” during this time of transition there will be a great deal of uncertainty and mystery that causes much anxiety. it is a place of liminality where social status becomes lost or unclear while the initiate undergoes precise training in values and ethics that inform and guide behavior. there are periods of extreme stress or “ordeals” that help to compel the child to experience the full range of human emotions and potential. from these compelling experiences, embodied in a community sanctioned rite of passage, the child grows and matures and moves into the third phase, incorporation. it is at this point that he or she incorporates these lessons into their life; they serve to guide and inform him or her of the community’s expectation for living well and affirm them as an emerging adult ready to be integrated into the healthy functioning of community almost all the examples of rites of passage from the anthropology literature are highly prescriptive. they were intended to initiate youth in small, highly homogeneous communities, where consensus about community values and appropriate behaviors can be easily established, into a rather limited number of adult roles. it should be noted that certain culturally defined rites of passage for youth still exist in western culture. such events as bar and bat mitzvahs for observant jews and la quinceanera for latinos are practiced by a small percentage of the population. the significance of such events for development has been noted (see schoenfeld 1994; stewart, 2005). but these are the exceptions. indeed, in today’s pluralistic societies where there are multiple possibilities for values and ethics that inform and guide expectations for behavior, one could reasonably ask: can meaningful rites of passage be developed? we believe they can. the challenge for community psychologists is to help the communities articulate their shared values and develop processes and rituals that effectively impart these values to youth. the next section of this paper lays out some of the key structural elements, derived from over 40 years of practice, which can create effective rites of passage experiences that are grounded in the community. characteristics of rites of passage we have identified twenty elements that contribute to an effective, contemporary community-based rite of passage (see table 1). a more thorough description of all the elements can be found in a forthcoming publication (blumenkrantz, in preparation. also see www.rope.org). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  2   september  2010     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  44   table 1. twenty elements of rites of passage. component definition 1. paradigm shift adolescent development is connected to a community development process rather than being seen solely as an intra-psychic phenomenon. interventions are ecological rather than individually oriented. 2. community values and ethics   the hallmark of a community-based rite of passage strategy is the creation of intentional, inclusive community dialogues to address what are the values and expectations that youth must carry forward to insure the future success of the community. there must be deliberate structures that allow these community discussions to occur so that some consensus about essential expectations for behavior and values emerge. this process must precede the creation of experiences that foster youths’ understanding, appreciation and commitment to these expectations. 3. program success relies on relationships   meaningful outcomes ultimately depend upon the quality of the relationships between youth and adults, and between the adults and the “program.” positive outcomes only occur when people within a setting are intimately connected to the creation and/or adaptation of a strategy. it is only then that a strategy can be implemented with sufficient commitment and creativity to make it a success. 4. you can only bring someone as far as you have been yourself. if relationships are key, then those who are initiators of youth’s coming of age need training and professional development to build their personal awareness and resources. individuals need to undergo their own initiatory experience and rite of passage to aid his or her transition to maturity to be an effective initiator of youth. 5. it must happen in the home community.   children grow up, by and large, in communities that are defined by geographic boundaries and real live interpersonal interactions. connection to an actual geographic place, especially when there is deep contact with nature and a psychological sense of community is critical to a sense of self and security for children. effective rites of passage establish a safe place for intentional conversations to occur between citizens of the community, youth and adults. 6. rites of passage create expectations for socially appropriate behaviors coming of age in a rites of passage experience involves creating and supporting intentional environments that transmit essential values and ethics that guide and inform expectations for socially appropriate behaviors. 7.  rituals   rituals represent a detailed sequence of actions that are regularly followed. ritual, as part of the rites of passage experience can set a tone and impact climate in ways that help to create a productive context for learning. 8.  adversity  or  personal  challenge   experiences that challenge the individual emotionally and/or physically and which present opportunities to learn new values and/or skills. 9.  silence   children and youth grow up in a cacophony of sound that makes the “call to adventure,” the internal alarm clock awakening them to the coming of age process almost inaudible. silence helps a young person develop an internal dialogue for narrating and making sense of what is going on around them. 10.  stories,  myths  or  legends   stories passed down from previous generations that convey morals or cultural values. 11.  connection  with  nature   experiences that help individuals realize and appreciate their connection and interdependence on the natural environment. 12.  time  alone  for  reflection   time intentionally set aside for a person to reflect on his/her personal values, actions and beliefs. 13.  connection  with  ancestral  roots   the opportunity to learn, value and appreciate one’s connection to those who went before and the values and ethics their heritage embraces. 14.  play   the opportunity to help individuals find their “bliss,” those activities that they can immerse themselves in with great passion, and from which they receive unbridled joy. 15.  giving  away  one’s  previous   attitudes,  behaviors,  etc.   the coming of age process through rites of passage includes the giving up or giving away of some aspect, e.g., behavior, attitude, cherished item, that characterized their former status. this process conveys a reality that change – leaving something dear in the past behind – is an integral part of the transition. 16.  non-­‐ordinary  states  of  reality   the use of sanctioned behaviors such as vision quest, meditation, yoga, movement and dance, play in ‘in the zone’ with sports and hobbies to experience non-ordinary states of reality. 17.  obligation  to  service  to  the  larger   community   through the initiatory process, adolescents are oriented to recognize that service to the community is an essential part of becoming a fully functioning adult in society. 18.  changes  of  appearance  that   express/reflect  new  status   as  recognition  of  their  transition  to  a  new  status,  initiates  may  adorn  themselves  with  some  external   symbol  that  symbolizes  this  attainment.  this  might  include  special  cloths,  adornments,  and  badges   etc.  that  are  awarded  during  public  rites  of  passage.     19.  opportunities  to  demonstrate   new  competencies  &  status   opportunities for participants to demonstrate publically newly acquired kills and status. 20.  celebration  of  status   community celebrations in which the new status of initiates is recognized and acclaimed. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  2   september  2010     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  45   the first conceptual element, paradigm shift (#1), is most fundamental since the only way that rites of passage can be effective is if the process of adolescent development is understood to be intimately connected to a community development process rather than viewed as an intra-psychic phenomenon within the psychology of an individual. interventions are ecological rather than individually oriented. intentional experiences to help adolescents transition to adulthood cannot be seen as the job or responsibility of just one segment of the community such as the educational system or mental health; they must grow from the community and reflect extensive community discussion and reflection on what values are important. implication for practice: rites of passage cannot be seen as “just another program.” it requires rethinking the connection between youth and community development (see blumenkrantz, 2009). the recognition that adolescent development and community development are intimately tied means that the community must meet to agree upon values and ethics (#2) they want to convey to their children. the hallmark of a community-based rite of passage strategy is the creation of intentional, inclusive community dialogues to address these important questions. we have used techniques such as world café (brown & isaacs, 2005) and appreciative inquiry (whitney & trosten-bloom, 2003) to facilitate such dialogues among a diversity of youth and adult citizens. our experience suggests that the golden rule (“do unto others, as you would have others do unto you”) and its variants across all cultures and religions, is a good place to start. there also seems to be a consensus across communities that children and youth are expected to become good students, achieve academically, and have good physical and mental health. clarification of values must precede the creation of experiences that foster youths’ understanding, appreciation and commitment to these expectations. the third element–program success relies on relationships—relates to issues of program replication and innovation transfer (smale, 1993; martinez-brawley, 1995). we believe that the success of all youth development designs ultimately hinge dependent upon the relationships between youth and adults, and between the adults and the “program.” consequently, social science and educational programs cannot be simply transferred, intact, from one community to another. successful innovation transfer only occurs when people within a setting are intimately connected to the creation and/or adaptation of a strategy. implications for practice: first, significant preparatory time must be spent in building relationships and capacity among the participants; and second, contemporary rites of passage will appear different depending upon the culture and context of the community. therefore, they typically lie outside the “evidence-based” program paradigm which calls for a prescriptive set of activities rather than a prescriptive set of guiding principles that inform community and youth development practice. this does not mean that the effectiveness of a particular rites of passage experience developed by a community cannot be examined, but rather, that those set of experiences may only have validity in that community, and cannot be simply transferred to another context with the expectation of similar outcomes. if relationships are key, then those who are to be the initiators of youth’s coming of age (elders) need training and professional development to build their personal awareness and resources, i.e., you can only bring someone as far as you have been yourself (#4). elders must come to peace with their own lives in regard to aspirations achieved and those unattained in order to move on to a place of generativity (erikson, 1968). individuals need to undergo their own initiatory experience and rite of passage to aid his or her transition to maturity and able to become an elder and initiator of youth. implication for practice: staff training is critical! the admonition that “it takes a whole village to raise a child” implies the physical existence of a village (home community) (#5). while modern means of communication have created the “global village” and online communities, the reality is that children grow up, by and large, in communities that are defined by geographic boundaries and real live interpersonal interactions. connection to an actual geographic place, especially when there is deep contact with nature, (louv, 2005) and a psychological sense of community (sarason, 1974) has been widely acknowledged as critical to a sense of self and security for children, (eller 1991; stevenson, 1998). the creation of community-based, culturally and developmentally appropriate rites of passage global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  2   september  2010     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  46   establishes a special (sacred) safe place for intentional conversations to occur between citizens of the community, youth and adults, on questions that come from the heart and have meaning. implication for practice: the creation of settings in which rites of passage occur must pay attention to the smallest details that will impact both conscious and unconscious processes. coming of age in a rites of passage orientation to youth and community development involves creating and supporting intentional environments that transmit essential values and ethics that guide and inform expectations for socially appropriate behaviors (#6). for example, the initiation of scholars,©® portion of a contemporary rite of passage experience©, rope®1 teaches students the essential skills, behaviors and attitudes necessary to achieve academically. it includes a “ceremony of commitment,” where students publicly state their intention to learn well in school and to succeed academically in front of peers, parents and teachers. this public rite strengthens their commitment to prosocial values, i.e., academic achievement and unites the community’s support of an emerging adult to succeed in school. the seventh element–rituals—often has emotionally charged connotations; for many, it is usually associated with ceremony and sacred and religious acts. but the term also refers to a detailed sequence of actions that are regularly followed. indeed, many aspects of school life and secular society are highly ritualized (mclaren, 1997), e.g., the regularity of change of class bells or tones, the systematic organization of classroom seating, and the routinization of the school day represents a ritual that almost all students experience, a ritual that may have unintended consequences on mediating their attention. rituals can play a part in social and emotional learning (mcclaren, 1997) and can set a tone and impact climate in ways that help to create a productive context for learning (sarason, 2004). in rites of passage, the “program” or design elements carefully consider the small details of setting and how the participants begin each activity, separate and change from the previous activity, and how they end                                                                                                                           1  the  rite  of  passage  experience©  ®  -­‐  initiation  of  scholars©®  and   rope®  are  copyrighted  (1991,  1988,  1998,  2008)  and  federally  registered   trademarks  of  david  blumenkrantz  licensed  to  the  center  for  the   advancement  of  youth,  family  and  community  services,  inc.   their time together in more intentional ways that can affect behavior with more potency. sarason (1972) describes at length the importance and necessary ingredients in the creation of settings as a central consideration in a community psychology. the creation of challenging emotional experiences— adversity (8)—deepens life’s lessons and sears them into our lives forever. our new paradigm challenges us to provide “teachable moments” capable of searing into the emerging adult’s mind essential information related to values and ethics that inform and guide expectations for behavior. the essence of resiliency is the body and spirit’s capability of resuming its shape or position after being subjected to stress and capable of rapid recovery from an emotional shock (werner & smith, 1982; benard, 2004). one powerful way to gain a solid identity is to engage in structured ordeals and challenges that test one’s self and from which one can emerge with a greater sense of meaning and purpose. for example, we often give students basic training in orienteering skills and then they must find their way out of the woods without adult assistance. children and youth grow up in a cacophony of sound (music, computer games) and mediated togetherness (cell phones, facebook, etc.) that makes the “call to adventure,” the internal alarm clock awakening them to the coming of age process, almost inaudible. creating opportunities for silence and to spend time alone—the ninth and tenth elements—help a young person develop an internal dialogue for narrating and making sense of what is going on around them. it affords them a place to contemplate and consider the great complexities of the world and how they fit within it. such quiet, alone time could involve periods of mediation or being engaged in some learning, reading, practicing some skill, or other activity where an individual can focus their attention and become absorbed in their own thoughts. in this state of relaxation they can grow to be comfortable with themselves, which contributes to their self-awareness, identity formation and ease at being with others. in each era, there have been stories, myths or legends (#11) that help to lead civilizations and cultures through the mysteries of the universe and to guide daily living practices. today’s stories are largely superficial and portray realities that equate life satisfaction with consumption. this drives contemporary culture, especially adolescents, to look for spiritual salvation at the shopping mall. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  2   september  2010     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  47   as wynee, (1987, p. 482) notes, “if we want to change our lives, we must first change our stories.” at the community level, the story of rites of passage as a framework to inform and guide a new paradigm for youth and community development is rich and steeped in history. it can serve to tie many of the existing theories of youth development together in ways that really speak to both the conscious and unconscious needs of adolescents. when the community creates and enacts a rite of passage story for their children, they are really creating a way to remember what the important ingredients are for a healthy psychological sense of community essential for positive youth development knowing who we are at a deep and meaningful level cannot happen unless we come to know ourselves within the context of nature and the environment (#12). recent research, e.g., lachance (2006); louv (2005), suggests that separation from nature has negative consequences for child and human development. integrated into a meaningful rites of passage experience are opportunities that intentionally reconnect children to the natural environment. implication for practice: intentional activities in the natural world are critical for youth to feel a sense of place. if you don’t know where you are and have no connection with where you have come from how could you know where to go in the future? these questions challenge our youth development work to help connect them to their ancestral roots (#13). what is the culture and religion of “their people” and what does this mean regarding values and ethics? every community has religious and civic organizations that hold the history of their children’s ancestors. cultural identity development is one of the essential building blocks and protective factors of youth development (hill, 2002), especially for youth of color. contemporary application of this element calls for engaging diverse religious and cultural constituencies and institutions within a community. secular rites of passage do not usurp religious or cultural rites; they affirm their importance and help to forge links with our common humanity. contemporary rites of passage engage youth in ways that unveil the potency and importance of play, the fourteenth element. it establishes systematic ways for children to explore and experiment with activities that give them joy and invite transcendence. if you help a child find their “bliss” – something they can immerse themselves in with great passion, from which they receive unbridled joy, you have given them the best “protective factor” (hawkins, catalano & miller, 1992) against mental and physical health problems – for the rest of their life (blumenkrantz, 2000). letting go of something important, whether it is in the symbolic act of giving away (#15) “childish behaviors and attitudes” or some material possession, conveys a reality that change – leaving something dear in the past behind – is an integral part of the shift in consciousness that accompanies a healthy coming of age process. moving to a rites of passage paradigm also involves a “give away” for some members of the community. embracing such an initiatory process may mean giving up the simplistic bromides of educational policy and youth development that routinely come into fashion, e.g., “no child left behind” (testing is the answer), “just say no,” “zero tolerance.” awakening to spirit and non-ordinary reality (#16) is a challenging construct to grapple with in a society and culture that has strict codes of conduct about chemically induced changes in the perception of reality. there are age limits for the use of reality altering beverages (alcohol), and drugs whose primary purpose is to alter consciousness (e.g., marijuana, lsd, ecstasy) are illegal. yet, such substances are highly sought after by teenagers who are innately compelled to experiment with nonordinary states of reality on their pathway to adulthood (weil & rosen, 1983). no matter how misguided and health compromising their efforts to seek non-ordinary states of reality, teenagers engage in risk taking behavior more than any other age group, (lewis & lewis, 1984). this desire points to their need for heightened experience, which for them helps to create meaning in their life. we can either choose to support youth’s innate desire to unveil the mysteries of life through non-ordinary states of reality in health promoting ways, such as, vision quest (foster 1980), meditation, yoga and relaxation (rimer, 2007) movement and dance (michael, 2003), playing in the zone with sports and hobbies (cooper, 1998; jackson & delehanty, 1995) play as promoting transcendence and secular spirituality (blumenkrantz 2000; donaldson, 1993) or continue to suffer the consequences. the way we provide opportunities for youth to engage in meaningful roles and bond to their family, schools and community is critical to a contemporary global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  2   september  2010     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  48   rite of passage. when children are given the skills and opportunities for meaningful involvement with their peers, family, school and community, and reinforced for their pro-social involvement, they are more likely to grow up well (hawkins & weiss, 1985). an obligation to service to the larger community (#17) is one way to help young people find meaning and purpose, while contributing to their sense of identity, as a valued and important member of their expanding world. one way we integrate service into our work is by training high school students to become guides for the community rite of passage process. high school students can conduct lessons and serve as mentors for children entering the initiatory process in the 6th grade. through the initiatory process, adolescents are oriented to recognize that service is an essential part of becoming a fully functioning adult in society. such experiences come to be seen not as work -but as a committed act of conscience and belief in service as an expectation for living. growing up is a natural process accompanied by changes in the body. this physical change is often accompanied by intentional alterations of appearance (#18) to signal this change, e.g., tattoos, piercings and dressing in dramatic ways (murdock, 1983). in traditional cultures and even western culture changes in body and dress through tattoos, piercing and altering clothing is the enactment of this element in a coming of age process. in a contemporary community-based rite of passage, the change of appearance may not be as dramatic as traditional cultures. external symbols might be as subtle as wearing special cloths or adornments that are awarded during public rites of passage. a high school mentor in a community-based rite of passage may wear a special identification badge or special uniform like if they are crossing guards or engaged in any other special function. as a distinct stage of life, adolescence is a relatively recent “invention” in western culture (kett, 1977). in a sense it is a form of suspended animation since the physical process of coming of age puberty lasts about 12 to 18 months, but we essentially ask functional adults, i.e., capable at ages 11-13 of procreation, to “wait” to grow up for another 10 to 15 years. during this ‘waiting period” society must provide a clear gradient of opportunities for youth to demonstrate their new competencies and status (#19) on their way to adulthood. in contemporary rites of passage, youth engage in a process where they can see opportunities for ascending to increased status through meaningful roles. chief among these opportunities is to become responsible for the initiation – rite of passage – of younger students. this can begin by conveying the importance of becoming a good student, achieving academically and engaging with healthy ways to play and recreate. high school students can mentor middle school students, helping them increase their commitment to academic achievement and convey the expectation that they will engage in finding healthy positive leisure time activities. middle school students can then, in turn, support elementary school students to acquire the essential values, ethics and attitudes to inform and guide their development and attachment and bonding to school and the community. following different phases of contemporary rites of passage youth must be publicly recognized and affirmed via celebratory events (#20) for the advances they make towards coming of age. the events are marked by the initiates telling their story about lessons learned, and how they would use these lessons within their family, school and community to grow up well and become a contributing adult. certificates of accomplishment, t-shirts, pins and other displays of recognition are provided that align themselves with the cultural context of the community, and provide for an external “change of appearance.” summary the twenty elements or principles italicized and described above (albeit much too briefly) identify key characteristics useful for mobilizing a community to consider more promising designs for youth and community development. they provide the conceptual framework for communities to construct rites of passage, yet provide enough latitude to allow communities to creatively imagine what their rite of passage would look like. the goal of this article has been to advocate the value of rites of passage as a conceptual framework for positive youth and community development. indeed, we believe that such a framework represents a valuable paradigm shift and supports the adage that “it takes a whole child to raise a village.” references apple, r. w. 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(1998). raising safe villages: cultural-ecological factors that influence the emotional adjustment of adolescents. journal of black psychology, 24(1), 44-59. stewart, h. m. (2005). senoritas and princesses: the quinceanara as a context for female development. dissertation abstracts international, 65 (7), 2770b. (umi no. 319800) van gennep, a. (1960). the rites of passage. (monika b. vizedom & gabrielle l. caffee, trans.). chicago: university of chicago press. (original work published in 1909)   weil, a., & rosen w. (1983). from chocolate to morphine: everything you need to know about mindaltering drugs. boston: houghton mifflin harcourt. werner, e. e., & smith, r. s. (1982). vulnerable, but invincible: a longitudinal study of resilient children and youth. new york: mcgraw-hill. whitney, d. & trosten-bloom, a. (2003). the power of appreciative inquiry: a practice guide to positive change. san francisco: berrett-koehler. wynne, e. (1987). storytelling. in l., c., mahdi, s. foster, and m. little, (eds.), betwixt & between: patterns of masculine and feminine initiation (pp. 482-488). la salle, il: open court.   agency or structure? community and individual level factors impacting recycling behaviors andrew p. camilleri1 and joseph r. ferrari1 keywords: e-waste, recycling, community-level predictors, individual-level predictors, theory of planned behavior, values author biographies: andrew p. camilleri, has a phd in community psychology from depaul university. his research interests span migration, public spaces, and neighborhood attachment. dn. joseph ferrari, phd is st. vincent depaul distinguished professor of psychology at depaul university, chicago, il, and a permanent catholic deacon for the diocese of joliet, il. recommended citation: camilleri, a. p. & ferrari, j.r. (2024). agency or structure? community and individual level factors impacting recycling behaviors. global journal of community psychology practice, 15(2), 1 16. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: andrew p. camilleri, depaul university, department of psychology, 2219 n. kenmore ave, chicago, il 60614. email: acamille@depaul.edu. 1 depaul university https://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:acamille@depaul.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 agency or structure? community and individual level factors impacting recycling behaviors abstract the present study combined ajzen theory of planned behavior (ajzen, 1991) and schwartz’s value theory (1992) with socio-demographic factors to analyze their impact on intention to recycle. the variables were classified into two categories, namely individual level determinants and contextual level determinants and utilized a hierarchical analysis to determine whether greater predictive power was obtained when combining individual level predictors (personal values, perceived behavioral control and attitude) with contextual level predictors (subjective norms and demographics). our findings indicate that socio-demographics, personal values, perceived behavioral control and attitude all predict recycling behavior with significantly greater predictive power obtained when combining individual level and community level predictors of recycling behavior. implications for community psychology are discussed. introduction consumer electronics have become an important mainstay of most modern societies. inevitably, such importance has led to an increase in consumption that has resulted in a previously inconceivable amount of electronic waste (called here, e-waste) with approximately 44 million metric tons being generated every year, and rising (parajuly et al., 2019). recycling such e-waste becomes paramount both for the environmental impacts such as removing safely lead, mercury, cadmium, chlorofluorocarbons and flame retardants but also because it can generate a number of valuable and precious materials such as silver, copper, palladium, iron, aluminum, and gold (aboelmaged, 2021). such resources can provide important sources of revenue and employment in the various countries such where recycling occurs (lundgren, 2012). despite the importance of recycling to avoid environmental harms and to contribute to circular economies (knickmeyer, 2020), many consumers still do not recycle appropriately. psychology plays an important role in ascertaining the determinants of recycling behavior, particularly when looking at different contexts and is an important source of information for policy makers who wish to increase appropriate recycling behaviors. the present study contributed to the literature by combining ajzen’s theory of planned behavior (ajzen, 1991) and schwartz’s value theory (1992) which has not yet been explored. it utilized two levels of determinants: individual and contextual level. this study also utilized a community psychology framework to interpret results. focusing on personal values, subjective norms, attitude, perceived behavioral control and socio-demographics the present study utilized a hierarchical analysis to determine whether combining individual level predictors (personal values, perceived behavioral control and attitude) with contextual level predictors (subjective norm and demographics) provided greater explanatory power. recycling intention an important construct that psychology has used to understand recycling behavior is intention to recycle (ri). intention to recycle http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 primarily refers to the self-commitment an individual adopts to engage in such recycling behavior (park & ha, 2014). predicting recycling intention has resulted in several studies primarily looking at two-factors, namely cognitive and contextual factors. cognitive factors mainly consist of factors at the individual level such as values, perceived control to carry out recycling behaviors, while contextual factors encompass more system level factors such as income, education and distance to recycling centers. understanding the relationship between these factors is key to understanding what motivates persons to recycle and how such motivation can be further stimulated by policy makers. individual level-predictors of recycling intention individual level factors are an important part of pro-environmental behavior (geiger et al., 2019). when persons entertain positive feelings about certain behaviors, they are more likely to engage in such behavior (taufik et al., 2016). similarly, when negative feelings are anticipated inhibition of such behaviors is to be expected (carrus et al., 2008). identifying the factors that motivate or inhibit recycling behavior within individuals has been an important area of research and this research has identified several important factors such as: how people evaluate recycling behavior (ajzen, 1991), the expected costs and benefits of recycling (ajzen, 1996), environmental attitudes or beliefs (steg et al., 2011), knowledge of environmental issues (schultz, 2002), knowledge of how to recycle (schultz et al., 1995), personal values (schwartz, 1992) and the perceived importance of recycling behaviors by significant others (geiger et al., 2019). within this present study two theoretic frameworks informed individual level predictors of recycling behavior theoretical frameworks, namely the theory of planned behavior (ajzen, 1991) and schwartz’s value theory (1992). tpb theories of action an important theory when considering recycling behavior has undoubtedly been the theory of planned behavior (tpb) (ajzen, 1991). the theory of planned behavior posits that intention is the greatest predictor of behavior, however intention requires three other phenomena for it to be formed, namely: attitude (att) which comprises whether an individual evaluates a behavior as positive or negative, perceived behavioral control (pbc) which measures how much control an individual perceives to have over an individual action and whether there are any obstacles to impede such a behavior and, subjective norms (sn) which includes the perceived pressure put on by the social network of the individual to perform such a behavior. tpb has proven a useful tool when predicting recycling behavior and has produced significant interactions between sn, pbc, att and ri in a number of studies (aguilar-luzon et al., 2012; pakpour et al., 2014: mannetti et al., 2004; ramayah et al., 2012; wan, et al., 2012). there have been a number of critiques of the theory and how it has been operationalized in various studies (ma et al., 2021). ma and colleagues (2021) noted that a number of studies found either elements or the entire theory was not statistically significantly predictive of ri (khan, et al., 2019; white & hyde, 2012; davis et al., 2006, botetzagias et. al., 2015; park & ha, 2014, wan, et al., 2014). another critique of tpb that ma et al. (2021) raised lies in the fact that the intention to recycle does not always predict very accurately the actual recycling behavior. while tpb might have strong explanatory power in clarifying the mental processes that lead up to the desire to recycle, other factors http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 may need to be considered to explain the gap between the intention to recycle and the actual behavior (ma et al., 2021). another critique of tpb delves into its methods of measurement. when looking at the subscales of sn, pbc and ri. ma and colleagues (2021) found that in several studies (including our own) ri was measured simply by one-item which fails to capture the nuance of intention to recycle. these authors also argued that pbc was also considered unnuanced in approach with many studies not factoring in perceived control and merely stopping at the perceived level of difficulty indicating that at least more than one dimension was at play in measuring pbc. similarly, with sn the relational source of the norms in question was often considered within several studies as being family and friends (ma et. al, 2021). however, expanding notions of sn to include more communal level factors is more likely to provide greater predictive ability (nduneseokwu, et al., 2017; strydom, 2018; wang et al., 2019) schwartz’s value theory another frequently utilized theory when predicting pro-social behaviors including blood donations (ferrari & leippe, 1992; ferrari & leippe, 1985) as well as recycling intentions and behaviors has been schwartz’s value theory (1992). a number of studies have underscored that when influencing behavior particularly within consumer paradigms (including recycling) personal values play a very important role (bardi & schwartz, 2003; lee & kim, 2016; vermeir & verbeke, 2008). when the consumer behavior encompasses some form of moral or socially responsible behavior personal values become increasingly important (freestone & mcgoldrick, 2008; green, et al., 2016; lee & kim, 2016;) as they are more likely to “increase self‐enhancement, impression management, affiliation with aspirational reference groups, and communication of one’s identity to significant others” (lee & cho, 2019, p 125). values, according to schwartz’s (1992) model, have “psychological, practical and social consequences,” (p.4) which then impact behavior and choices. schwartz (1992) posited that there are 11 broad concepts namely power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, universalism, benevolence, tradition, conformity, spirituality, and security. these values are inter-related (bardi & schwarz, 2003) and have been presented as being in tension with one another on two orthogonal poles with self-enhancement and self-transcendence on two ends and openness to change and conservatism on two other poles (schwartz, 1994). pro-environmental behavior (such as recycling) often activates the selftranscendent and self-enhancing pole, with persons having high self-transcendent values more likely to engage with proenvironmental behaviors such as recycling (cheung et al., 2014). when looking at the two theories that are best posited to explain away individual determinants of recycling behavior, one can observe a significant degree of overlap. when talking about att in tpb, ajzen and driver (1992) suggested that when conceptualizing the construct of attitude, one is in fact referring to the feeling towards the behavior and an evaluation of that behavior. such considerations are highly influenced by another construct entitled moral norm, which includes the perceived recycling benefits and an individual’s moral considerations (chen & tung, 2009, tonglet et al., 2004). moral norm is such an important consideration that chan and bishop (2013) posited that it indeed substitutes att to predict recycling intention. bridging the gap between schwartz’s value theory and tpb, therefore, becomes much easier with moral evaluations of recycling behavior becoming the product of positioning http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 on the orthogonal poles between selfenhancement and self-transcendence. such bridging of the two theories is in line with kollmuss and agyeman’s (2002) findings which determined that personal values can encourage the formation of habits which result in a narrowing of the attitude-tointention behavior gap. we therefore propose a model wherein personal values will stand in for moral norm for the following study while also exploring subjective norm, perceived behavioral control and attitude. contextual factors impacting recycling intention: community psychology contributions despite most of the literature focusing on individual level determinants of recycling behavior, a number of studies have acknowledged that a number of contextual factors play an important role in facilitating or inhibiting recycling behavior (varrotto & spagnolli, 2017). oskamp and colleagues (1991) identified home ownership and type of housing as an important factor in determining recycling behavior with individuals who owned their house and those living in single-family housing being more likely to recycle (see also hage et al., 2009). other factors recognized to impact positively recycling behavior include: the possession of a recycling bin (robertson & walkington, 2009), the presence of recycling facilities in the area lived in (d’amato et al., 2016; pearson et al., 2012). distances between recycling facilities also impacted recycling behavior, with shorter distances promoting more recycling behavior (hage et al., 2009; schultz et al., 1995) as well as the size of the neighborhood with smaller neighborhoods promoting more recycling behavior (derksen & gartrell, 1993). other factors include households’ trust in in local authorities and recycling programs (loan et al., 2017). another important source of variance with regards to recycling behavior lies in sociodemographic characteristics. milovantseva & saphores (2013) identify that traditionally gender, income, education, age, and ethnicity have been used predominantly to identify predictors of recycling behavior. studies have found that persons identifying as women tend be more active recyclers (saphores et al., 2012; barr, 2007) but such a finding has been disputed (do valle et al., 2004; domina & koch, 2002). income and education have also had some success in predicting variance in recycling behaviors with traditionally higher income and more highly educated individuals most likely been linked with more recycling (barr, 2007; clarke & maantay, 2006) yet others have once again disputed such a finding (saphores et al., 2012; meneses & palacio, 2005; do valle et al., 2004). age has also produced contradictory results with some studies finding older people tending to recyle more (barr, 2007; li, 2003) while others found differently (saphores et al., 2012). overall socio-demographic characteristics have provided inconsistent results in predicting recycling behaviors. when contributing to issues of environmental behavior, community psychology has several interesting insights to provide. it is interesting that most of the studies available study very deeply variables related to individuals (vinning & ebrero, 2002) seemingly locating most of the responsibility for change in such a behavior on individuals and seemingly better marketing aimed at individuals. often no mention is often made of the community in which the research is carried out and very little context in terms of history and politics are provided to understand some of the results that emerge from the literature. such an omission perhaps accounts for the reason why sociodemographic variables have produced such inconsistent results, because without sufficient accommodation and customization to unique community experiences sociodemographic variables alone are not sufficiently explanatory without key insights http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 provided by community histories to contextualize such findings. throughout our review of the literature only one study by kurz and colleagues (2007) provided indepth insight into the community history that might justify some of the findings. even contextual factors omit key factors of history, prejudice and structural oppression that can help explain findings better. many of the factors mentioned previously in contexts seem to indicate that privileged (in various senses) neighborhoods and neighbors are more likely to engage in recycling behavior. none of the studies reviewed in the current search however took sufficient time to unpack how the community stories, historic legacies of various forms of discrimination might account for the pro-environmental behavior. kurz and colleagues (2007) urge us to explore the concept of social capital (putnam, 2000) as a factor in explaining proenvironmental behavior. understanding the individual in context is paramount if psychology aims not merely to reproduce the status quo that brings about change in an equitable and sensitive manner (tabernero et al., 2015). the present study adds to the existing literature by combining ajzen’s (1991) theory of planned behavior with schwartz’s value theory (1992). however, unlike previous studies which sought to identify which of the various variables in the two previously mentioned theories held greater explanatory power, the present study grouped the variables into individual level predictors and contextual level predictors. the aim of our investigation was to ascertain whether individual-level predictors, contextual level predictors, or a combination of both had the greatest explanatory power when predicting intention to recycle. such an approach is in line with community psychology framing which eschews overemphasis on individual determinants of behavior but takes an ecological view which embeds individuals into meso and macro structures. contextual level predictors were examined by investigating subjective norms, given that it represented external pressure by the broader community and socio-demographic factors as these were more likely to be good stand-ins for privilege as contextual level-predictors. with regards to individual level factors, personal values namely self-transcendent and self-enhancing values, perceived behavioral control and attitude were used to measure more cognitive individual level predictors. the study examined the following hypotheses: hypothesis 1: demographic variables will not predict intention to recycle hypothesis 2: selftranscendent and selfenhancing values will predict intention to recycle hypothesis 3: perceived behavioral control and attitude will predict intention to recycle hypothesis 4: subjective norms will predict intention to recycle hypothesis 5: individual level-predictors and contextual level-predictors will predict more strongly intention to recycle. methods participants there was a total of 935 study participants of which most identified as men (n = 479). another 456 of participants identified as http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 women. with regards to age, the most numerous category was 65 or older (n = 189), 35-44 (n = 164), followed by 55-64 (n = 158), 25-34 (n = 154), 45-54 (n = 142) and 18-24 (n = 127). most participants were college graduates (n = 318), had some college education (n = 238) and high school or equivalent (n = 170). most participants earned before tax between $50,000 and $74,999 (n = 159), followed by $100,000 or over (n = 155) and $15,000 – $29,999 (n = 148). for more information, please refer to table 1. procedure the data were collected through an online panels sample that was managed by qualtrics. qualtrics handled all the aspects of recruitment, collection of data, and compensation of participants. researcher paid $5 for each of the participants and requested that quality checks such as speeding, and attention failures were noted but not dismissed. 935 complete surveys were gathered which were considered eligible. approval for this study was gained by the university of new mexico’s institutional review board and was provided with the following id 1385229-4. table 1 demographic factors variable % gender men 51.2 women 48.2 other/non-binary 0.4 did not disclose 0.1 level of education high school or equivalent 18.2 trade school 3.1 some college 25.5 college graduate 34.0 advanced college degree 16.1 prefer not to say 0.5 did not disclose 2.6 income before tax under $15,000 12.9 $15,000-$29,999 15.8 $30,000-$39,999 11.0 $40,000-$49,999 8.4 $50,000-74,999 17.0 $75,000-$99,000 12.2 $100,000≤ 16.6 prefer not to say 3.4 did not disclose 2.6 age 18-24 13.6 25-34 16.5 35-44 17.5 45-54 15.3 55-64 16.9 65 or older 20.2 note: n = 935 psychometric measures the self-transcendence scale is a scale developed by stern and colleagues (1998) which measures the importance of certain guiding values corresponding to universalism and benevolence based on schwartz’ value theory (1992). it is a 6-item scale with item responses that ranged from 1 (not at all important) to 7 (extremely important). sample items included “protecting the environment, persevering nature” and “a world at peace, free of war and conflict” (m = 5.61, sd = 1.18, α = .916). the self-enhancing scale is a scale also developed by stern and colleagues (1998) which measures the importance of certain guiding values corresponding to power and achievement in schwartz’ value theory (1992). it is a 3-item scale with item responses that ranged from 1 (not at all http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 important) to 7 (extremely important). sample items included “authority, the right to lead” and “wealth, materials and possessions”. (m = 4.43, sd = 1.51, α = .797) the subjective norm scale measured the impact of social pressure on the desire to recycle. the scale is an adaptation of the scale used by wan and colleagues (2017) based on the theory of planned behavior (ajzen, 1991). the scale has three items namely, “people in my social circle expect me to recycle e-waste.”, “social media and other media sources i pay attention to encourage me to recycle e-waste”, and “people i look up to recycle their e-waste”. responses ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). (m = 4.2, sd = 1.65, α = .913). the perceived behavioral control scale is a scale adapted from the one utilized by milovantseva and saphores (2013) and is based on the theory of planned behavior (ajzen, 1991). the scale has three items namely, “it is mostly up to me whether or not i recycle old electronic devices stored in my home,” “i feel that i could recycle my old electronic devices if i wanted to,” and “i have the means to recycle my old electronic devices if i wanted to.” responses ranged from 1 (completely disagree) to 7 (completely agree) (m = 5.57, sd =1.19, α = .657). the attitude scale is adapted from the scale utilized by milovantseva and saphores (2013) and is based on the theory of planned behavior (ajzen, 1991). this 10-item scale includes items such as: “i would feel guilty if i did not recycle my old electronic devices,” and “i would recycle electronic devices because i derive satisfaction from improving the environment.” responses ranged from 1 (completely disagree) to 7 (completely agree) (m = 5.06, sd = .94, , α = .833). the intention to recycle item is a one item measurement which asked about the likelihood of recycling e-waste in the next 6 months. responses ranged from 1 (very unlikely) to 7 (very likely) (m=4.94, sd=2.0). results proposed analysis a four-block hierarchical multiple regression analysis was carried out for the intention to recycle dependent variable. the first block comprised of demographics (gender, education, income, and age group) to determine whether the intention to recycle was predicted. the second block added selftranscendent values and self-enhancing values. the third block added perceived behavioral control and attitudes. the fourth block added the subjective norm scale. a hierarchical multiple regression determined if the addition of self-transcendent and selfenhancing values, perceived behavioral control and attitude, as well as subjective norm improved the prediction of intention to recycle over and above socio-demographic variables (gender, education, income, and age group: see table 2 for details). linearity was determined by running partial regression plots and a plot of studentized residuals was run against the predicted values. a durbinwatson statistic of 1.917 confirmed independence of residuals. multi-collinearity was assessed by ensuring that no vif value was greater than 10. after the removal of 10 outliers, there were no studentized residuals above +/3 sd. additionally, no values for cook’s distance were detected above 1 and no leverage value was above 0.2. the assumption of normality was assessed by q-q plot and met. the complete model of socio-demographic variables (gender, education, income, and age group), self-transcendent and self-enhancing values, perceived behavioral control and attitude, as well as subjective norm (model 4) was statistically significant r2 = .422, f (22, 775), = 25.71, p < .001, adjusted r2 = .406. the primary model (model 1) with sociohttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 demographic variables (gender, education, income and age group) was a statistically significantly predictor of intention to recycle r2 = .118, f (17,780) = 6.142, p < 0.001. the addition of self-transcendent values and selfenhancing values (model 2) led to a statistically significant increase in r2 = .152, f (2, 778) = 81.12, p < .001. the addition of perceived behavioral control and attitude (model 3) led to a statistically significant increase in r2 = .103, f (2,776) = 63.66 p < 0.001. the addition of subjective norm (model 4) led to a statistically significant increase in r2 = .049, f (1,775) = 66.27, p < .001. table 2 multiple hierarchical regression with socio-demographic variables, individual level factors, and community level factors adjusted r2 r2 change f change p model 1 (gender, education, income, and age group) .099 6.14 <.000 model 2 (self-transcendent and selfenhancing values) .252 .152 81.12 <.000 model 3 (perceived behavioral control and attitude) .356 .103 63.66 <.000 model 4 (subjective norm) .406 .049 66.27 <.000 note: n = 935 discussion the present study ascertained whether the addition of community-level predictors might add explanatory power to intention to recycle, rather than simply individual-level predictors. we hypothesized that demographic variables would not significantly predict intention to recycle (hypothesis 1), while personal values (hypothesis 2), perceived behavioral control and attitude (hypothesis 3), and subjective norms would predict significantly (hypothesis 4) intention to recycle. overall, we predicted that greater explanatory power was to be obtained combining individual level-predictors with community-level predictors (hypothesis 5). the results of this study indicated that contrary to our first hypothesis, some of the demographic variables did predict significantly the intention to recycle (namely education and income). for instance, while gender and age was not significantly predictive of intention to recycle in all models, lower levels of education (trade school and high school or equivalent, negatively and significantly predicted intention to recycle. with regards to income, participants who earned less that $75,000 earned less significantly and negatively predicted intention to recycle. our results vary from the previous literature (saphores et al., 2012; barr, 2007, clarke & maantay, 2006) that found that women, older persons, more highly educated as well as persons with higher salary tending to recycle more. interestingly, more predictive power was obtained by personal values than by variables included in the theory of planned behavior http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 such as attitude and perceived behavioral control. such a finding indicates that values are probably a better way to measure the intention to recycle as opposed to merely attitude or perceived behavioral control. values, are likely to be more nuanced and requiring deliberate intention resulting in a better measure of cognitive factors influencing the intention to recycle than attitude and should likely become an integral part of theories surrounding the reason why people recycle. interestingly, the perception of possibility as measured to perceived behavioral control likely indicates that if a person’s values align with recycling they will likely take significant steps, despite perceived difficulty, to carry out the recycling action. the least increase in predictive power occurred when subjective norm was included in the regression. such a finding is likely due to the fact that we could not significantly account for various communities and their pro or indifferent attitudes towards recycling. consequently, individuals from communities with less social pressure could have been oversampled leading to a distorted baseline that did not allow for accurate measurement of community impact. within this study the second, third and fourth hypotheses, however, were confirmed. personal values, attitude and perceived behavioral control all predicted significantly intention to recycle. the confirmation of our hypotheses led to the confirmation of the fifth hypothesis; namely, greater explanatory power is obtained with intention to recycle if community and individual level predictors are combined. the present study indicated an interesting shift with theories of planned behavior (or parts thereof as explained above) presenting less statistical explanatory power than personal values. a possible reason for this finding might be that environmental concerns have taken such a dominant position in political discourse that there have even been discussions about new forms of anxiety arousing from such discourse (eco-anxiety, ojala et al., 2021). such a shift in cultural and political discourse would mean that personal values would become more salient (and more politicized) than other more mundane actions. we believe that this might account for the shift in greater predictive value offered by schwartz’s (1992) theory of values than ajzen’s (1991) theory of planned behavior. the lesser increase in predictive power in demographics and subjective norm (what we have deemed as community-level predictors) can be explained due to a limitation of the dataset, namely, that it was an online panel with participants responding from all over the country thereby indicating a heterogeneity of communities and contexts. nonetheless the very fact that despite this limitation both socio-demographics and subjective norm aided in increasing the predictive power of the model highlights the need for further nuancing environmental research by introducing nesting communitylevel variables and contextualizing factors. our study, of course, has limitations such that it failed to contextually nuance the findings by talking about the politics and history of the context in which the participants find themselves in. we did not expand on the demographic variables suggested by the results; future studies need to dive deeper into understanding who is likely to recycle including demographic measures such as race, type of household and various measures of ses such as car ownership. additionally, given that such a study utilized archival data, the possibility of adding measures such as sense of community and neighborhood/residential attachment which are staples of community psychology literature could not be added into the analysis. furthermore, our sample was not a representative sample and therefore cannot http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 be perfectly generalized to the entire us population. finally, our study used intention to recycle as a dependent variable, however merely having the intention to recycle is not immediately and automatically equivalent to actually carrying out recycling behavior, which could therefore mean that there is an overestimation of predictors on the actual final behaviors. despite the above limitations, however, our study contributed significantly to community psychology and more broadly social psychology by indicating that community level predictors are important factors that should be accounted for in any future study looking at environmental behaviors such as recycling. future studies might add more measures that are found in much community psychology research such as sense of community, psychological home and neighborhood attachment to verify whether they increase predictive power. additionally carrying out analyses about the relationship between individual 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(2012). the role of self-perceptions in the prediction of household recycling behavior in australia. environment and behavior, 44(6), 785-799. http://www.gjcpp.org/ microsoft word international community psychology i. volume.docx 51       from complexity and social justice to consciousness: ideas that have constructed community psychology maritza montero 1 universidad central de venezuela inaugural conference at the iii international congress of community psychology puebla, mexico, june 3, 2010                                                                                                                           1  mmonteroster@gmail.com     52 from complexity and social justice to consciousness: ideas that have built a community psychology abstract this address focuses on the analysis of ideas that have contributed to build a psychology oriented towards a way to answer social problems affecting a kind of group present in every society: the community. because of their human condition communities have a history, are relational and should be understood in their complexity. community psychology (cp), in its critical orientation, has looked for social transformation as a way to seek that constant goal of humanity: a better world. to do so, cp has assumed the idea of praxis and, consequently, the ideas of engagement and participation, whose links will be presented in their theoretical, methodological and practical aspects. that transformational praxis is also related with the ideas of power and empowerment (fortalecimiento) understood as the joint construction carried out by psychologists (external agents) and community stakeholders (internal agents), that may lead to conscientization and liberation, two ideas introduced by freire. these ideas are presented as a theoretical system in which the ethic and political dimensions, together with complexity, constitute the basis for transformation, balance or, fleeting amelioration. key words: complexity. ethics. politics. praxis. engaged participation. participatory engagement. symmetrical power. conscientización. 53 de la complejidad y la justicia social a la conciencia: ideas que han construido la psicología comunitaria resumen esta conferencia se centra en el análisis de ideas que han contribuido a generar una psicología orientada hacia la construcción de respuestas a problemas sociales que afectan a una forma de grupo presente en todas las sociedades: la comunidad. como todo hecho humano las comunidades tienen una historia, son relacionales y deben ser entendidas en su complejidad. la psicología comunitaria (pc) en su carácter crítico se ha orientado por la idea de la transformación social que la impulsa a contribuir a la más constante búsqueda de la humanidad: un mundo mejor. para ello asumió en su línea crítica la idea de praxis y por consiguiente, las ideas de compromiso y de participación, cuya fusión será presentada en sus aspectos teóricos, metodológicos y prácticos. esa praxis transformadora a su vez se relaciona con las ideas de poder y de fortalecimiento (empowerment, strengthening), entendidas como construcción realizada en la participación conjunta de psicólogos/as (agentes externos) y personas comprometidas en la comunidad (agentes internos), que puede conducir a la concientización y a la liberación, dos ideas de origen freiriano. estas ideas son consideradas desde la perspectiva de un sistema teórico en el cual las dimensiones ética y política constituyen junto con la complejidad la base que puede producir transformación, equilibrio o mejoría pasajera. palabras clave: complejidad. ética. política. praxis. participación comprometida. compromiso participativo. poder simétrico. conscientización. 54 introduction community psychology (cp), in its community social psychology version or just as community psychology, has been concerned with social problems, either from an institutional perspective or from an engaged participatory perspective. nowadays, as it was also in the past, it claims to be a psychology aimed at solving social problems for and with, the communities, contributing to their conscious strengthening (this includes empowerment and fortalecimiento (concept used in latin america), with the purpose of obtaining desired transformations in their life conditions. social transformation, as well as the importance given to prevention, specially manifested in its united states origins, constitutes the foundation for the transforming condition that has characterized community psychology, to the point that the former has been included in one of its definitions2. both in its community social version and in its denomination as cp, this branch of psychology, which has gathered us in the third international congress, has been related to the social problems in the situations within which it is applied, be it from an institutional perspective or from a participatory perspective, prevention always being predominant in it. that is what a quick review of papers published in community psychology journals3 reveal. they also show the need to carry out social changes at the same time that actions are taken to fight and prevent etiological factors and behaviors that need to be eliminated. almost forty years of construction of cp provide enough history as to allow to make a deconstruction of its object, its method, its language, and its objectives. in such a way that i may present, in this address, a paradigmatic vision of this sub-discipline, through the ideas that, from my point of view, have been and still are fundamental for the construction of cp. these are not frozen ideas, converted into petrified statues. they are alive and continue being constructed, sometimes modulated, others transformed, depending on their response to the problems or challenges we have when confronting community praxis.                                                                                                                           2  a  branch  of  psychology  whose  object  is  the  study  of    psychosocial  factors  allowing  the  development,    promotion   and  placement  of    control  and  power  exerted  by  the  people    on  their  individual  and  social  environment,  in  order  to   solve  the  problems  affecting  them  and  achieve  changes  within  their  environment  and  in  the  social  structure   (montero,  2004/1984).     3  ajcp,  jcp,  cwf,  rip’  jcsp,  jpic.  psykhe,  avepso.   55 to this effect i will start from the conception of cp as a social sub-discipline, inserted into each society according to the problems, needs and expectations generated in them; from its engaged participatory condition, and from its practice, produced both from within and without the community. a cp which is political because it affects the public space and concerns power and control of the circumstances upon which it intervenes to achieve transformations. a psychology in which the subject of the psychological action is an active being, participating in an activity that concerns him/her, not a mere passive receptor of services generated, decided and administered from a scientific, professional, institutional, and in any case external pole, presented as organizer and rector of therapeutic or psychosocial relations, decided exclusively by psychologists. these characteristics respond to the initial commitment formally assumed in some countries (i.e. usa during the swampscott conference, 1965), or just implicitly introducing them in practice, as was the case of latin america, where cp did not immediately used the denomination because what the pioneers intended to do was to renovate a social psychology criticized because of its lack of social sensibility, unable to attend to the real needs of the population. in graphic # 1 is presented a synthesis of the ideas that have marked cp as a psychology sub-discipline with a participating, committed, integrating, liberating, critical and conscious character. this graphic serves as a script for this address.                         56 graphic n° 1. main ideas in community psychology   the platform for these ideas resides in the complexity of the knowledge produced by cp. this is a work with neither beginning nor end or time limit. firstly, because there may be multiple responses to the problems or to the satisfaction of a need; furthermore, the subjects with which we work change, go in and out, and at the same time the community remains with its complexity ideas social  justice episteme of relatedness episteme of   otherness symmetrical power totality enhacement analectics active condition    of people historical condition    of communities inclusion empowerment strategic power relations potenciación refortalecimiento shared agency participation engagement participatory methods praxis theory practice ecology critical reflexive consciousness political condition    of    community psychology 57 relationships and does not stop being. the objectives raised, which also may change along the way, are sometimes achieved in excess, sometimes in deficit. we cannot establish rhythms, although we may set goals and ends with participants of the communities. the cognitive subjects are all those that in somehow participate; there are no passive subjects waiting for or following the instructions generated from outside the community. the decisions are taken by collective consensus, and therefore, there are multiple voices. along with the complexity of the object of study and participants, there is an ethical conception equally fundamental: the orientation towards social justice, based on the respect of the other. about this concept the work of fondacaro & weinberg (2002) shows how it has been an implicit participant in cp work over the years, but with little explicit discussion. these authors illustrate their point with the work of prilleltensky & nelson (1997) where “social justice figures as a naturally self-evident premise or guiding principle, for research in community psychology, not as a potentially problematic topic of research in its own right” (2002:486). they propose a program of research that incorporates the ecological principle and opens the possibility to “recast epistemological questions in terms that are amenable to empirical inquiry” (2002:487). they present it as a social ecological epistemology, open to the discussion of ethic, values, principles that are, or should be, the foundation for cp. as those ideas that i consider the pillars for the construction of cp are developed, a connection between them, oriented towards inclusion and equality; as well as to the defense and exercise of social rights and to the compliance with duties towards society and humanity, can be seen. this aspect gives to cp not only an ethic character, but also political, expressed as an exercise of citizenship and as occupation of public space. i will then proceed to briefly discuss these ideas and how they are reflected on the community psychological praxis. the idea of contextual ecology i will start with an idea already prefigured in the previous paragraph, which is related to others that i will be drawing along this conference, and whose parallel emergence indicates that there is a paradigm supporting them which responds to the construction of cp. in its formal statement it corresponds to the line of thought which modeled the construction of cp in the united states and which corresponds to the ecologic-contextual and cultural consideration, 58 typical of the quantum-relativist paradigm which was being developed in the natural sciences during the seventies and the eighties. diverse american authors have constructed the ecological approach. i will mainly mention james g. kelly (1966), a pioneer who, starting from the idea of complexity, understands that to be able to work with communities it must be understood that each one of them is unique; that the epistemological relation between researchers and the researched subjects, in community research and action, is complex, as it generates relationships of mutual influence and a double construction of meanings; besides understanding that the knowledge produced needs continuous revision, reconstruction, and re-elaboration. in this approach, we also find rappaport (1977), whose work complements the ecologic aspect with the recognition of the unavoidable existence of values that need to be explicitly stated, in every relationship. returning to kelly and his proposal, he too refers to epistemological premises, and to the analysis of the “converging and discriminative validity of concepts” (westergaard and kelly, 1992:38), since in doing that one avoids that “the scientific disciplines function with only an implicit knowledge” (kelly, 1992:37), producing the impoverishment of knowledge. that rich, complex, dynamic, systemic, multi-variable, and with multi-leveled character, unpredictable but describable, relation, is a demonstration of the community world complexity constituting our field of study. i cannot close this section without mentioning a notion derived from the idea of contextual ecology, which has influenced cp in such a manner that i dare say that probably the better part of the works published in the english language and also in spanish, in the field of cp, constitute forms of preventive intervention. prevention and intervention are guide words for action. regarding this point, also there is the work of seidman regarding the construction of a theory of intervention (1987/2003). the idea of relatedness latin-american work way of community work is not in or for the community, but with the community (an aspect which is part of the complexity of communities). the way to define what is a community and who are the people constructing it, derives from this aspect. usually, when speaking of community the reference is made to a group with a history, a culture and/or 59 sub-culture; a group whose relationships are characterized by shared social and psychological factors, and occupying a certain space. very frequently, the territory is seen as the main aspect defining the community. that is the reason why territoriality is considered as what shapes the community, or as defining its characteristics. however, it is the relations generated by the people, what determine the community configuration and the limits, if any, of the territory. there may be communities that do not cohabit in the same place and at the same time. territorial communities are such, due to the relationships established within them. in fact, community psychosocial work starts with the relationships established between external and internal agents4, as that work is a form of shared agency. therefore, cp has incorporated a conception of relatedness which started to be developed 40 years ago in freire’s adult literacy; whose systematic construction has been the labor of philosophers of liberation (scannone, 1976, 1990; dussel, 1987, 1998), who have defined an episteme of relatedness in which ontology rejects the dominant idea in western thinking, of individuality as the essence of being. that episteme considers that the being resides in the relatedness in which all of us exist. not because we cease to exist as individuals, but because we can only be individuals within the relations that we construct and that construct us. let us remind the words of freire: “we are beings of relations in a world of relationships” (1976). it is possible in this manner to overcome the autarchic conceptions of the self constructed as opposed to the other, and seeking to possess or suppress that other (levinas, 1977), thus generating forms of exclusion. the basis of this episteme is the enlargement of hegel’s concept of dialectic totality, with the object of including a fourth element (besides thesis, antithesis and synthesis), proceeding from an other that responds neither to thesis nor to antithesis, but that has opinions, knowledge, interests, that will have an influence on the antithesis, and in the elements originally considered as its only sources. often in cp communities are those others, whose otherness has also frequently been negatively defined, relegating them to exclusion. due to its primary mandate of social justice, cp seeks to eliminate all forms of exclusion. for this reason, the episteme of relatedness, indicating that we know by and, within relations, permits to explain the type of participative, inclusive approach of cp regarding the task to be                                                                                                                           4  external  agents  are  those  who  come  to  work,  from  outside,  with  the  communities.  internal  agents  are  the   stakeholders  and  persons  interested  in  achieving  changes  or  solutions  to  problems  inside  the  community.     60 carried out and the manner of deal with it. that episteme leads, as we will later see, to forms of symmetric power, thus avoiding three forms of exclusion (montero, 2002): 1. the exclusion of the other from the universe contained in the totality. 2. the exclusion of the other from the lifeworld controlled by the other. 3. the exclusion of the other denied, dominated, disqualified and constructed as negative, whose independence is refused or suppressed. these forms of exclusion constitute what levinas defines as an “ontology of selfishness” […] “a form par excellence through which the other becomes him/her own self when becoming mine” (1977:70). from the idea of relatedness derive the notions of sense of community and of community identity, which as has been discussed, seem to overlap in cp, as they look as the same subject, which at its core is the network of relations constituting a community and giving sense and ownership to those belonging to it.. the idea of otherness from the episteme of relatedness derives then the need not only of accepting the existence in equality of those who used to be socially constructed as different, as external others, because they are not like us. in this sense much of the work done by cp is directed to fulfill needs or, to obtain equality in reception of public services required by those others, who nevertheless belong to the same society. and as it has been understood that knowledge is not produced through acts in which a type of agent introduces ideas or actions that another passively receives, it is necessary to understand that this other one whom we approach must be part of a relation characterized by equality and respect; by shared responsibility and belonging of the same totality (dussel, 1998; montero, 2002). the notion of other, and what levinas (1977/1995) and moreno (in press), to quote a philosopher whose work has been enlightening and a psychologist, call episteme of otherness, defines this other who is recognized as the subject by definition of the working relation in cp, as: 61 • a social actor with opinions, desires, expectations and a voice, who can make, execute and correct decisions, and over all, has the right and the duty to participate in the activities carried out within the community. • someone pertaining to a culture and having a history. • a producer of knowledge. his/her existence and participation require that plurality in the modes of knowing be considered and that be a part of the action and the reflection on community psychosocial work. • an internal agent participating in the actions, discussions and transformations which take place in her/his community or his/her society. accepting the other in his/her otherness means that the criticism aimed at breaking ideologised and ideologising canons should be applied equally to both the internal and external agents (professionals, technicians, ngos, civil servants). all of them are part of a relation in which all must work and produce and be responsible for the actions and their consequences. transformation of the hegelian dialectic does not preclude the dialectic character in a relationship in which the participants mutually influence each other, when constructing a new knowledge starting from their respective wisdoms. this idea directly leads to other, fundamental for cp: the idea of participation. the idea of engagement-participation it can be said that there is a consensus with regard to participation being a central, if not the most important aspect of cp, whose practice is marked by the active presence of those for whom we work. to participate is a verb which forms part of common and current language, since it describes a form of action characteristic of daily life. but, when we say participation in connection with cp, the term is full of meanings. the first of them is that it does not refer to something that may be performed individually, as this would mean destroying the sense and notion of community itself. from the start cp, both in its form of community social psychology (csp) and as cp, incorporates participation, because it permits to achieve the transformations responding to community expectations and needs. and it is participation that warrants the success when we work with normative needs. 62 however, it is not a simple participation. the participation developed in cp requires something else which cannot be dealt with separately. since the eighties it was acknowledged that the commitment factor plays a fundamental role, as without it participation could be transitory, itinerant, superficial and capricious, which would preclude its capacity of constructing other means of doing and thinking in relation with the community to which one belongs. engagement and commitment are necessary in order to have the kind of participation that may comply with the goal of contributing to social transformation, and to maintain the actions and changes, to generate others that would continue, sustain, modify, or even totally modify those actions and changes, according to the situations,. although neither participation nor engagement, remain forever, their joint presence may furnish the responses to the changes within the community. community praxis has permitted to identify the aspects that provide a base for a theory of binomial participation-engagement in cp. these aspects are: • the direct relation observed in groups and persons (ias and eas) that achieve transformations in their communities. that relation points out that the greater the participation, the greater the commitment, and vice versa: the greater the commitment, the greater the participation. • the dynamic character of the binomial participation-engagement. in practice we have encountered various degrees or levels of engaged-participation, permitting to say that as the engagement is increased there is more participation in the community, thus ratifying the previous point. • there is a tendency which fluctuates in centripetal and centrifuge sense with regard to the nucleus of greater engaged-participation in a community. the ideal would be to obtain more people joining the centre than those leaving it, because community work can be a tiring task, taken time from people’s leisure. knowing that there always are fluctuations in participation, there is not an evaluation of the amount of engagedparticipation. all modes of participation are necessary. • when there is committed participation the links of circumstantial support and sporadic actions are maintained. • engagement is needed both in the internal and in the external agents. in this sense we go further than what was understood by social sciences during the 70’s and 80’s, when it was considered that only the eas should be committed. in our praxis we have found 63 that if the ias are not committed, the results are less effective or the desired knowledge is not obtained. • therefore, the interchange of scientific or specialized knowledge, and popular knowledge, proposed by freire (1970, 1977) and by fals borda (1977, 1985) is obtained through engaged-participation. as proposed by gonçalves de freitas (1977) and gonçalves de freitas & montero (2006) it is necessary to have an interchange of knowledge and modes of knowing including acknowledgment and analysis of what has been done, during community psychology work. from engaged-participation, which we could also mention as participatory-engagement, derive other ideas. the first one, connected at the same time with the ideas of relatedness and of the other and his/her inclusion, is the active character of every human being. no one is so poor, so weak, so ignorant as not being able to participate. adverse conditions, as well as favourable ones, may be modified, and in the community psychosocial perspective, they can be used to produce changes in the people and their environment. another idea derives from the previously mentioned political condition of community action, being generated by engaged-participation, as in doing so it creates a way of action in public space, and simultaneously, a mode of appropriation of that space, as it is a form of civic activity. a third idea is that of the shared agency. community psychological work has a change generating function performed by two types of agents: those of an origin external to the community, already mentioned, and the stakeholders interested people and organized groups inside the community, who are internal agents of such transformations. both agents should work together. participatory methods not exactly an idea, but a very important action derived from the idea of participation, has been the adoption of participatory methods generated and successfully employed by other social sciences (i.e.: sociology, anthropology, ethnomethodology), such as participatory actionresearch; participatory interviews, and participant observation. when adopted by community psychology these methods have been adapted to community work, enhancing their applications. 64 these methods not only provide ways to do, but also promote and strengthen engagedparticipation; simultaneously uniting the activity of eas and ias, strengthening their relation and producing new knowledge. to this should be added that those methods facilitate the engaged-participatory permanence of a greater number of ias. the idea of symmetrical power this idea is generated in cp. it was first developed in practice and then theorized, and has been slow in its dissemination. i must say that its scarce popularity is due in part to the fact that it is an idea that goes against another one that has absolutely reigned since the beginning of the 20th century. one that is so deeply ingrained and naturalized that, for many people, and i do not refer to the common people but to academics and college students, it is the only way possible to refer to power. i refer to the notion of power coined by max weber in 1922. in fact, it is so naturalized that to speak of symmetry in relation to power seems like an oxymoron. weber defined power as “the probability of imposing one’s own will in a social relationship even against every resistance and whatever the basis of that probability is” (weber, 1922/1964: 228). a definition that since then has been paraphrased by innumerable social scientists (dahl, 1969), including a few psychologists (i.e.: fischer, 1992; martín-baró, 1984; jiménez burillo, 2006, amongst others). in that theory the power is always asymmetric; that is, power would always be concentrated in one pole of the relation. such definition condemns to a perpetual situation of unbalance, in which any change would refer only to the holders of the power, not to its distribution in society. when it is accepted that there may be different forms of exercising the power which could break the asymmetry, fair and durable changes will be achieved. serrano-garcía and lópez sánchez have been developing, in the field of psc since the late eighties, a theory which deviates from the weberian line. their work, of which i heard for the first time in costa rica in 1991, was published in a book edited by me in mexico in 1994 (reedited in 2001). these authors introduced the idea that resources, the basis of power, are unequally distributed, but at the same time, as they argue, every person has the capacity to exercise the power. they define power as “a personal, or indirect, daily action, in which people 65 express their social consensus and the ruptures between their experience and their conscience” (serrano-garcía & lópez sánchez, 1994:178). and as other authors had already anticipated (foucault, martín-baró, fischer), they consider that power is a relation. power relations have a historical character and precede interaction, leading to the emergence of conflicts between individuals or groups of interest, as both parts in those conflicts are interested in the resources unequally handled benefitting one part and depriving the other. this relational conception is important because it constructs the relation as being plural. uniqueness does not make a relation, therefore when speaking of relation, the possibility of knowledge, feelings and various actions is being introduced. thus, although a person or a group control all the possible resources in a situation, establishing the norms and the organization of the relation, as well as the behaviour to be observed by those lacking the resources, and wishing to obtain them, they are related with those people in need. the power relation needs them. it is then possible to introduce in the relation other cultural and historical resources generated by desire and necessity, that might affect the certitude that those controlling the resources may have, in relation with their position and role in the relation. at the same time, the controlling ones may be interested in those other unexpected resources. a negotiation could be thus produced, and even more important, a change in the norms and organization of the relation, regarding the use of the desired resources. crozier (1970), introduced the concept of power strategies that can be used to define that intra-relation movement by making possible the contrast between resources, both asymmetrical, in order to balance the relation and gain access to what is desired. these could also generate “zones if incertitude with reference to the constrictive relation that may be exercised” (crozier and frideberg, 1977:86), from a pole of relation to the other. graphic # 2 presents situations of asymmetrical and symmetrical power. graphic 3 shows the dynamic of asymmetrical power. 66 graphic n° 2. conceptions of power graphic n° 3. dynamics of symmetrical power symmetrical  power a b controls resources needed by b has  different resources a  is not interested in   sharing them b  develops those resources a  is interested in   acquiring /avoiding b’s resources those resources may interest a negociation power a resources no rm s asymmetrical situation b a resources a norms b resources b negotiation power  strategies uncertainty symmetrical situation m.montero 2010 67 an idea and two answers: empowerment and fortalecimiento “power is a problem {…} not only when exercised abusively, within a dominant and oppressive frame, but also when its possession is ignored” (montero, 2003:33). this ignorance of the power that may be possessed and exerted in order to transform things or to obtain a better quality of life, is a problem present in the community psychology field. in 1981 julian rappaport introduced the concept of empowerment as a means of tending to the lack of power through the development in individuals and communities, consciousness of their power, or of their capacities. this concept was rapidly converted into an instrument for community work, as it implies processes in which community stakeholders jointly develop capacities and resources to control their living situation, committing themselves to achieve transformations in their environment, and at the same time transforming themselves. in 1984 rappaport defined empowerment as a set of possibilities that go from being a powerful model for social policies directed to community intervention, to being a process whose aims, ways and outcomes are variable and even inconsistent; to be considered both as an internalized attitude and as an observable behaviour that may produce a sense of control and authority over the life of a person. rappaport’s idea has developed a life of its own and is a very successful one considering its high rate of utilization in cp research, intervention and prevention. its heuristic usefulness is very high, as well as its productivity in terms of methodological forms of obtaining that individuals and communities develop control of their potentials and their capacities (see compilation rappaport and hess, 1984; rappaport, 1990). likewise, there has been considerable discussion over the theoretical (see rappaport,1987, for theoretical aspects), as well as critical aspects (serrano-garcía, 1984; fuks, 2006; swift & levin, 1987; vázquez, 2004; orford, 2008). the idea of ignorance of power has provoked another, more recent reaction, to the concept of empowerment: i refer to the critical work of carlos vázquez (2004) in puerto rico, and his concept of refortalecimiento (re-strengthening). this is a concept that may be considered as ecologic in the before mentioned sense given by kelly’s, because vásquez highlights the need for contextualization and, as said, is essentially critical. in refortalecimiento (re-strengthening) weaknesses are considered as strengths; it does not place itself where what is social digs into what is personal making itself part of it, but where “what is 68 social is what is personal” (p. 45); because what is personal is political and the subject is its context. thus, re-strengthening is a paradox that implies rethinking what has been automatically assumed. to me this conception fits in with the idea of conscience, discussed later; with the processes of denaturalization and problematisation moving it, and incorporating the deconstruction about which vazquez refers (2004), and with the symmetric conception of power. the idea of praxis this idea has a long history. in the first place and as its name indicates, it was originated in greece and was created by aristotle (nichomachean ethics), who will never cease to impress us with his enormous capacity of producing knowledge. in that first definition, which he defined as practice, praxis formed part of a triad together with poiesis (creation) and episteme (knowledge). a second aristotelian version of these gnoseologic fields substituted episteme by theory, as the highest limit of what is human, bordering divinity. then, praxis had a long historical period being considered as the lowest expression of knowledge. in the cps developed in latin america the concept of praxis is taken from the version developed in the nineteenth century by karl marx, in which that distance between praxis and theory generated through history is overcome. the marxian version gives praxis a critical practice character considering that practical and theoretical reasons are linked, and that union is such that from practice emerges theory and from theory derives practice. it is in this sense, developed from the marxian criticism of feuerbach theses, and from the experiences in research and action, that the idea of praxis is assumed by cp. the concept has a philosophical origin, but its development is based on action and reflection, as is so well illustrated by researches made according to freirian ideas, and a host of followers all over the world, as well as from post-marxist, neo-marxist, and also nonmarxist perspectives incorporating the concept of praxis. the idea of consciousness 69 this idea was also originated in latin america and proceeds from the freirean popular education (adult literacy) (1970, 1988 /1971, 1977), from vieira pinto (1960), from the critical sociology developed by orlando fals borda (1959, 1978, 1985) from their followers, and also from the theology of liberation and the philosophers of liberation (dussel, 1987; 1998). cp developed in la adopted certain basic concepts and the emphasis in the mobilization of consciousness in order to be able to produce radical transformations in groups and individuals, so engaged-participation and/or participatory-engagement can be up to merit such denomination. that is what has been named conscientization, which is understood as a change in consciousness that enlarges cognition and affectivity, thus obtaining transforming actions. through conscientization, consciousness critically examines situations and facts not previously considered and redefine situations or facts previously considered as natural and unavoidable. conscientization supposes linking the knowledge of the present reality, with all its deficiencies, biases and limitations and the positive or negative conditions it may have, to the knowledge of their causes and effects (acknowledging and recovering their historical character). analyzing one’s individual and collective capacities to carry out transforming actions in the world of personal and community life, and generating new forms of understanding reality and its possibilities of change, are some other possibilities deriving from conscientization. furthermore, conscientization is a way to generate a critical problematizing capacity. this idea has impelled in cp, the construction of methods to foster conscientization (montero, 2009), taking on account the specific situations characteristic of each community. this does not mean establishing a fixed line of action, but trying to respond in a critical manner to negative situations, stimulating analytical reflection. in this sense cp joins to its efforts the idea of liberation, of which it is one of its more assiduous exponents. the relation between ideas and theoretical concepts and social problems. to close an analysis that insists on the situated condition (contextual) and the response to the specific needs, expectations and problems of communities as belonging to cp’s praxis orientation, it is necessary to go further than a declaration of principles. i will not present a listing of the topics and problems with which deals pc’s practice. that would just be a boring 70 gesture, and an insufficient task. social problems are multiple, varied, changing and, few at the same time. i’ll develop the point a little more. a distinction should be made when speaking about social problems, classifying them in two lines that in fact are interwoven. these lines are: • problems of survival and autonomy/liberation. • problems of excellence and autonomy/liberation. this means that unfortunately there are societies within which staying alive is the first daily task of a person. that is why liberation is primordial. autonomy in them may be called liberation. that is, liberation from slavery, oppression, illness, hunger and thirst, and from the inequality and necessity producing those circumstances. and there are societies in which the main task is to achieve the greatest possible wellbeing, by improving the services and opportunities within equal circumstances and with the autonomy derived from the liberation of disqualifying ideologies, alienation and anomy. in the first case, the task of living includes being liberated from situations which make precarious that uncertain life. in the second case, the target is to reach the highest possible degree in quality of life, obtaining at the same time the necessary autonomy to make of that life a sum of satisfactions. in both cases human creativity is present. the fundamental causes of social problems are always the same and i summarize them in graphic nº 4. 71 graphic n° 4: causes of social problems inequality social exclusion poverty marginality social disadvantage restricted citizenship (political exclusion, lack of public services, deprivation of rights) social segregation oppression submission invisibilization of others (marginal, excluded, different) negative construction of the other disqualification ignorance challenges and conclusions what i have briefly described is a construction elaborated from a long experience characterized more by multiple everyday queries and questioning i pose myself than by orderly and clear definition. the reason is apparently simple: cp is in constant movement, every day we learn new things, others are more deeply studied, something is understood, which tomorrow might be problematised anew, because it is a knowledge being constructed at various fronts. i 72 started speaking of the complexity it presents from its birth, as a form of doing science, while being involved in common daily life. now, at the moment of closing this address, i can only do it by enumerating the challenges that as a community psychologist and researcher i see in front of me, but knowing that other people, in other places, are equally perceiving, and probably much more, what i will state as follows: • in the first place the necessity, more urgent time and time again, of conscientisizing the external agents, in all their manifestations: psychology and other branches of science practitioners; technicians; representatives of ngos and also of governmental institutions. the idea of consciousness as the moment of understanding necessary to transform a situation is not something to be reached only by ias, all of us need to be conscientisized regarding what we do and how and for whom we do it. because nobody can conscientisize if before she/he has not developed the necessary consciousness to do it (montero, 2009). • this supposes that eas have to be problematized in order to be able to problematize other persons. and, likewise, they must be sensitized towards the people, locations, situations and relations with which they must work. it is not an easy task, but it is necessary to undertake it, as the current situation frequently is unbalanced with regard to these aspects. the question is not that in the communities they do not understand us, it is a question that many ea do not understand the communities. • other challenge is the necessity of handling with a plurality of methods, developed ad hoc, situations of a very high complexity. we need to avoid the methods in vogue, generating responses that really respond to the situations confronted. • and to finish, even when there must be many other challenges, let us avoid the rigidity of procedures and let us hear, observe, respond and act according to each situation and its peculiarities, remaining faithful in this manner to the paradigm of which cp is part and to whose development cp has contributed. 73 references aristóteles (1952). nichomachean ethics [ética a nicómaco]. chicago: encyclopedia britannicauniversity of chicago press. crozier, m. 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[restrengthening. a debate about empowerment]. revista interamericana de psicología, 38 (1) 41-52. vieira pinto, a. (1960). conciencia e realidade nacional. [conscience and national reality]. rio de janeiro: iseb. weber, m. (1922/1964). economía y sociedad.[economy and society]. méxico city: fce. westergaard, c. k. & kelly, j. (1992). a contextualist epistemology for ecological research. in p. tolan, c. keys, f. chertok & l. jason (eds.) researching community psychology. integrating theories and methodologies (pp. 23-31). washington, d.c.: a.p.a. microsoft word v2i3-0012-ms final.docx self help groups in a city of tuscany: reconstruction of the second generation model of work for professionals and services. petrini, f., vannucchi, s., miraglia raineri a., & meringol, p. university of florence keywords: self help, community psychology, gjcpp petrini, f. phd student, psychology dept., university of florence. (fausto.petrini@unifi.it) vannucchi, s., trainee student, psychology dept., university of florence. miraglia raineri a., trainee student, psychology dept., university of florence. meringolo p., professor of community psychology, psychology dept., university of florence. recommended citation: petrini, f., vannucchi, s., miraglia raineri a., & meringol, p. (2012). self-help groups in a city of tuscany: reconstruction of the second generation model of work for professionals and services. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(3), 1-12. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  2  of  6     self help groups in a city of tuscany: reconstruction of the second generation model of work for professionals and services. petrini, f. phd student, psychology dept., university of florence. (fausto.petrini@unifi.it) vannucchi, s., trainee student, psychology dept., university of florence. miraglia raineri a., trainee student, psychology dept., university of florence. meringolo p., professor of community psychology, psychology dept., university of florence. introduction this study is part of a more extensive project aimed to investigate the effectiveness of self-help group participation in improving quality of life in mental disease. the study is taking place in the tuscany region, in italy. in the first qualitative step of analysis researchers are interested in describing the specific features of the psychiatric self-help movement in tuscany, comparing different realities, networks, kind of groups. therefore, our aim is to collect exhaustive information to describe how self-help system work in different provinces at the present moment. the implementation of groups for psychiatric problems is quite young in italy. because of a lack of specific regulation in the directives of the italian health care system, every local service has implemented groups differently, sometimes enhancing, sometimes dismissing them. prato, near florence, is one of the more interesting context for the birth of psychiatric self-help movement in the region: public health services improved groups since early 90’s, it was one of the first self-help reality linked to services in the entire region. now we are in a “second generation” of professionals, and the original meaning of groups seems to be transformed, sometimes misunderstood. our objectives of study head us toward an in depth analysis of self-help phenomenon in prato. background community psychology has long served as the more suitable context for self-help research and practice. due to its purposes of emancipation and empowerment, the practice of self help in mental health have been acquiring more and more relevance in community research. brown points out how “this special issue builds on community psychology’s historical foundation in community mental health by exploring the burgeoning practice of mental health self-help. since the founding of community psychology, the community mental health system has increasingly come to embrace the values of self-direction and mutual support embodied by mental health self-help initiatives” (brown, shepherd, merkle, wituk & meissen, 2008). empowerment and social support are two of the most important theoretical perspectives that are commonly used to describe the benefits from mental health self-help (helgeson and gottlieb 2000; holter et al. 2004; maton and salem 1995; nelson et al. 2001; segal et al. 1993). the empowerment perspective explains how involvement in organizational leadership can promote recovery, whereas the social support literature explains how social involvement can impact recovery. despite this, how participants benefit from mental health self-help is not fully understood (helgeson and gottlieb 2000). self help groups are a complex phenomenon indeed: it represent a challenge to the researcher seeking to explain their effectiveness. multiple factors seems to be involved in the self help psychological and social process, many researchers tried to find evidences on different levels of their equations (bloch and crouch 1985; kyrouz and humphreys 1996; maton and salem 1995). from another point of view, qualitative methods provide an interesting way to study effectiveness from the participants perspective. a large literature of surveys, qualitative studies, and first-person accounts attests to the subjective benefits of mutual help groups (see, for example borkman, 1999; humphreys, 2000; leavy, 2000). qualitative analysis is also a key element for sited research, best way to deeply describe a specific territorial context. finn, bishop & sparrow (2009) in a qualitative study about grow organization, underline multifactorial processes of change across the individual level, the group level and the program/community level. this is also an useful example of how qualitative research can highlight the historical perspective of participation in self help group. by an ethnographic study laws (2009) shows how the shared values in the group context of self help could even influence the participants perception of therapeutic places. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  3  of  6     finally, the study of salem, reischl & randall (2008) about the partnership between schizophrenics anonymous and mental health association in michigan shows the reciprocal changes in values and practice in an historical perspective. some of the most important findings in this field indicate the uniqueness of self-help/mutual aid groups in the weaving of emotional and practical information and support. overall, it appears that self help groups offer something that cannot be replicated in professional– user relations. therefore, self-help activity is not a substitute for professional services, but rather, it serves a different purpose for members, and the findings suggest that it may lead to more confident and appropriate use of existing services, as well as challenging them. most of the qualitative studies on mutual support groups countries demonstrated a variety of benefits of group participation reported by the group participants, such as increased knowledge about the illness and its treatment, reduced burden and distress, and enhanced coping ability and social support. aims the aim of this contribution is to provide an in depth analysis of the whole self-help reality in a town in tuscany (italy). in particular, we are interested in evaluate different positive aspects depending on kind of group, kind of interviewee, historical changing in the meaning of participation by professionals. method participants the present contribution focus attention on the qualitative data coming from professionals, key informants and patients involved in the 4 groups of the town . twelve patients were interviewed during two focus groups, the six facilitators and 4 key informants, coming from institutional and medical context, were interviewed singularly. three of the four groups in the town are directly linked with the mental health service: facilitators are nurses in their working hours, members are sent by psychiatrist, etc. the last group is consumer-run and it was born in the service too, but it became independent (some years ago). therefore, the four groups were linked one another in their past experience, but they are working in a very different way at the present moment. also the three groups conducted by mental health professionals are very different in number and kind of activity, time for discussion, etc. instruments semi-structured interviews and focus-group aimed to investigate the following focus areas: • relationship between participation in the self-help group and quality of life; • effects of participation on frequency of medical consultations and on objective indicators of health (emergency services, prescribed psychotropic drugs…); • effects of participation on relationship with general practitioner and/or psychiatrist/psychotherapist in charge. data analysis all the sessions were registered and transcribed verbatim. data were analyzed with a qualitative approach inspired by a grounded theory perspective (glaser and strauss, 1967; charmaz, 2003), by means of the atlas.ti software for qualitative analysis. in the first step of analysis, data from facilitators and members (all the people directly involved in group participation) and data from key informants (not directly involved) were analyzed separately. comparison between the two source of data was performed in the second step of analysis to understand how intentions coming from professionals and managers have been translated in practical activities. further interesting data emerge from the comparison between the three groups linked to the mental health service and the independent one. results history: “democratic psychiatry” and the closedown of mental hospital in italy mental hospitals were closed since 1978 by means of a groundbreaking low inspired to community approach to health. this innovation was supported by a large social movement (“antipsychiatric movement”) with supporters also in medical sectors (“democratic psychiatry”). results show how this inspiration is embedded in the values of the groups. moreover, this kind of topics emerge also in the “first generation” of professionals (nurses and key informants) involved in the first group organization, in the late 80’s. democratic approach, empowerment of the patient, clearing of dependence and social advocacy are central categories in the analysis of key informants data: “basaglia…just some word about basaglia’s reform [for the closedown of mental hospitals], which also self help followed: the meaning…well… they put attention on the social aspects of psychiatric problems. therefore, society was considered a sick society, and so society, to heal global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  4  of  6     itself, must gave opportunity to keep conscious to people with problems… “ (nurse, facilitator) most of the interviewees underline the progressive loss of these values in the new generation of professionals, more interested in economic benefits of self-help activities than in social functioning. activities and discussion groups: integrated aspects or misrepresentation? an interesting issue seems to be the organization of activities (artistic activities, as poetry and theater sessions, or sport activity, etc.) to promote greater integration within the local community and to prevent stigma. some groups perceive it as a key element, a more specific way to channel communication by different emotional modality. some facilitators perceive activities as a misrepresentation of self-help methodologies instead: “…at the same time, a series of activities started, in particular from nurses…hence, they ask for a drawing teacher, they hold of a gymnastic teacher… and these things were much more liked, for example nurses like them very much. self help groups could more like to physicians and psychologists, they think to “words groups”, but to the…you know, to practical professionals, activities like more. for example […] the other head physician said “ forget about self help! it is a nuisance!, lets bring them to play sports!” and sure it taken root, i mean…[…] it sounds like: “i’ll give you pills and gymnastic, just to let you metabolize it, instead self help is something different, it has different conditions, cause you have also to revise some mental health elements… “ (key informant, physician and institutional promoter of self help groups) effectiveness as quality of life, or just in terms of economic advantages? both key informants and group members (professionals and patients) perceive advantages in improved quality of life, greater well-being, and mitigation of disease. they also report a lower use of “pills”, fewer hospitalizations, a better socialization, which are thought as basic objectives for self-help groups. “in the beginning there was an involvement of the mental service, and so a training for physicians too. hence we were trying to prompt them to send patients… because… just because the consciousness of their problems could be useful for a better quality of life, and sometimes, why not, to avoid their problems, and it could be useful also for the whole society, because society could improve itself…” (nurse, facilitator) in particular, one of the key element for the selfhelp effectiveness seems to be a positive self redefinition of the patient’s condition: “because there are people that cant’ understand things, than there are people who… you can understand each other, you know? that’s the point. today…everyone have a lot of nervous…a lot of agitation, so… it’s not because they don’t go to the doctor…but…i see them more nervous than me, so…what i’d like to say is… there is people who say it and people who not”. (group member) this can represent an advantage also for services, but sometimes it seems to be perceived just in economic terms by professionals, instead of therapeutic effectiveness. the relationship with services agree positive outcomes for both the service and the patients, about saving financial resources, avoiding unnecessary medical consultations or inappropriate use of psychiatric emergency services. the need for training of professionals in selfhelp culture another relevant issue is the training about selfhelp culture for professionals and volunteers, that appears necessary to consumers for enhance positive outcomes. the first generation of professionals approach to self help meaning by means of specific training, international observation and participation to international conference. same participants don’t perceive the same interest in the new generation of professionals, underlining a future possible weakness of the intervention model. “there is no many new nurses interested to these things… cause training for nurses today has become more technical, generalized… social psychiatry needs a completely different training instead…and it needs also of a different openness, because if you… you know, you must recognize that the psychiatric problem belong also to you, and then you can train yourself in a rewording way, cause you feel you are resolving also a problem of yours” (nurse, facilitator) comparison between independent group and group linked to the service global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  5  of  6     both the professionals and the consumers not coming from the one independent group perceive it as more isolated and static: “…it remains an independent group, but unfortunately not… they have been quite closing e on themselves! namely, this independence have driven them near the aridity, because they don’t look for a relation with us, so…” (nurse, facilitator) in actuality, the born of groups inside the service seems to be the cause of a strong reduction the independent group’s attraction: “we broke away from the service, there is no more agreement now, nurses don’t attend the group any more, that is… also because in the meantime the service set up its own groups, and it was the reason of our…comparing with the first times…it was the reason of our crisis, cause, obviously, no more people were send to us, no more sending happens”. (facilitator of the “independent group”) even if independence from services seems to be an empowering element in literature, more observations in an ecologic perspective are needed. for example, few data try to explain how and why groups could compete for newcomers, seen as a “fuel” for vitality, and how this happens in presence of a selective service contribution. service dependence and model of welfare from the opposite point of view, also other groups show some weaknesses in their link with services. the presence of professional operators, even if trained in self-help practice, set up a risk of dependence, minimizing empowerment possibilities: “ they couldn’t make it by themselves! first of all, because, as i said, these groups were born from our initiative. in other words … users, in every respect… they have already everything in every aspect, in their opinion. almost everyone have… interviewer: in other words, they find it as already existing… yeah, obviously! with low 180 [the low for the closedown of mental hospitals and the beginning to the democratic approach to psychiatry] they have all the facilitations, hence they have nothing to request. so it’s just a proposal of us, which make us saying that they can stay better…” (nurse, facilitator) this element is well known in literature, but italy have a very strong model of welfare, in which dependency culture is sometimes taken for granted. this contextual value can hide risks not only to professionals, but also to consumers. both key informants and patients define groups as “not separatist”, meaning that no requirements is needed, no claim is embedded in the weaving of groups. in our opinion, service organization of groups could enhance the risk of a disempowering model of selfhelp, mitigating part of their value. conclusion obviously, results show great effort to effectiveness perception of group attendance. groups seems effective to improve quality of life and well-being, through a better knowledge of problems and the sharing of experiences. they appear to perform psychological functions, such as perceived social support and increasing coping strategies, through the comparison with other members. participants feel themselves increasing self-esteem and self-fulfillment. far from invalidate these findings, we tried to highlight weaknesses and emergent questions. the comparison with other experiences, taken from different context and thanks to an ecological perspective, could enhance the effectiveness of self help movement in planning new experiences and managing relations with professional services. references bloch, s., & crouch, e. (1985). therapeutic factors in group psychotherapy. oxford: oxford university press. borkman, t. j. (1999). understanding selfhelp/mutual aid: experiential learning in the commons. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. brown, l.d., shepherd, m.d., merkle, e.c., wituk, s.a., & meissen, g. (2008). understanding how participation in a consumer-run organization relates to recovery. american journal of community psychology, 42, 167-168. charmaz, k. (2003). grounded theory. in smith, j. (ed.) qualitative psychology: a practical guide to research methods. london: sage publications. finn, l.d., bishop, b.j., & sparrow, n. (2009). capturing dynamic processes of change in grow mutual help groups for mental health. american journal of community psychology, 44, 305-315. glaser, b. g., & strauss, a. l. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. chicago: aldine. helgeson,v.s.,&gottlieb, b. h. (2000). support groups. ins.cohen,l. g. underwood, & b. h. gottlieb (eds.), social support measurement global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  3   january  2012     global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  6  of  6     and intervention: a guide for health and social scientists (pp. 221–245). oxford, england: oxford university press. holter, m. c., mowbray, c. t., bellamy, c. d., macfarlane, p., & dukarski, j. (2004). critical ingredients of consumer run services: results of a national survey. community mental health journal, 40(1), 47–63. humphreys, k. (2000). community narratives and personal stories in alcoholics anonymous. journal of community psychology, 28, 495-506. kyrouz, e. m., & humphreys, k. (1996). do psychiatrically disabled people benefit from participation in self-help/mutual aid organizations? a research review. community psychologist, 29, 21–25. laws, j. (2009). reworking therapeutic landscapes: the spatiality of an “alternative” self-help group. social science and medicine. 69, 18271833. levy, l. (2000). self-help groups. in j. rappaport & e. seidman (eds.), handbook of community psychology (pp. 591–613). dordrecht, netherlands: kluwer academic publishers. maton, m.i., & salem, d.a. (1995). organizational characteristics of empowering community settings: a multiple case study approach. american journal of community psychology, 23, 631-656. nelson, g., lord, j., & ochocka, j. (2001). shifting the paradigm in community mental health: towards empowerment and community. toronto, canada: university of toronto press. salem, d.a., reischl, t.m., & randall, k. w. (2008). the effect of professional partnership on the development of a mutual-help organization. american journal of community psychology, 42, 179-191. segal, s. p., silverman, c., & temkin, t. (1993). empowerment and self-help agency practice for people with mental disabilities. social work, 38, 705–712. microsoft word 2010-0002-final20110117.docx   global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  23       pathways to empowerment in substance abuse prevention: citizen participation, sense of community, and police responsiveness in an urban u.s. setting n. andrew peterson, associate professor, school of social work, rutgers university, new brunswick, nj, usa paul w. speer, associate professor, department of human & organizational development, vanderbilt university, nashville, tn, usa christina hamme peterson, assistant professor, department of graduate education, leadership, and counseling, rider university, lawrenceville, nj, usa key words: empowerment, sense of community, participation in substance abuse prevention recommended citation: peterson, n.a., speer, p.w., peterson, c.h. (2011). pathways to empowerment in substance abuse prevention: citizen participation, sense of community, and police responsiveness in an urban u.s. setting. global journal of community psychology practice, 1(3), 23-31. retrieved <date>, from http://www.gjcpp.org/. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  3   january  2011     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  24       pathways to empowerment in substance abuse prevention: citizen participation, sense of community, and police responsiveness in an urban u.s. setting n. andrew peterson1, paul w. speer2, christina hamme peterson3 1school of social work, rutgers university, 2department of human & organizational development, vanderbilt university, 3department of graduate education, leadership, and counseling, rider university abstract community-based substance abuse prevention initiatives often rely on the empowerment of community residents. few studies, however, have examined predictors of empowerment in substance abuse prevention contexts. this study tested a path model that included two environment-related variables (i.e., residents’ awareness of community substance abuse problems and perceived incivilities in their community), two variables representing residents’ perceptions of their community (i.e., sense of community and perceived police responsiveness to drug crime) and citizen participation as predictors of the intrapersonal component of psychological empowerment. the model was found to provide a good fit to the data from a random sample of urban residents (n=283) who participated in an evaluation of a national institute of justice community policing initiative in the southwestern united states. findings suggest that empowerment-based interventions aimed at preventing substance abuse and its related harmful consequences should incorporate activities that specifically address sense of community and police responsiveness to drug crime. limitations and directions for future research are discussed. introduction empowerment refers to a process through which individuals, organizations, and communities gain greater control, efficacy, and social justice. one way to promote empowerment among community residents is through active, meaningful participation in groups and activities. participation has been found to promote empowerment and social change in a variety of contexts, such as a community internet project for refugee women in the united kingdom (siddiquee & kagan, 2006), an ecological intervention for people experiencing mental illness in portugal (ornelas, vargas-moniz & duarte, 2010), and health promotion projects of the world health organization’s (who) european healthy cities movement (heritage & dooris, 2009). although planning and decision-making in these contexts may differ, it is clear that community residents can become empowered through the participatory process and may become vested in activities designed to address community needs. few empirical investigations in the substance abuse prevention field, however, have systematically examined those processes that may promote empowerment among community residents (hardina, 2006; hughey, peterson, lowe & oprescu, 2008). this study focuses on the intrapersonal component of psychological empowerment (pe). given the study’s emphasis on pe, it may be useful to provide a brief review of the construct. zimmerman (1995) described a model for pe that included three interrelated components: intrapersonal, interactional, and behavioral. intrapersonal pe was conceptualized as involving concepts such as individual competence, efficacy, and mastery. interactional pe involves an individual’s critical awareness of the sociopolitical environment, while the behavioral component concerns individual actions expected to affect outcomes. based on this framework and the work of zimmerman and zahniser (1991), several subsequent community-based studies (e.g., carballo-dieguez et al, 2005) have emphasized intrapersonal pe and operationalized the construct as residents’ selfperceptions of their skill at organizing a group of people and ability to influence policy decisions in a local community. in this present study, we focused on intrapersonal pe and measured it in a way that was consistent with prior research. figure 1 presents the conceptual framework for the current study. as shown in figure 1, the framework included two environment-related variables (i.e., residents’ awareness of community substance abuse problems and perceived incivilities in the community), two variables representing residents’ perceptions of their community (i.e., sense of global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  3   january  2011     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  25       figure 1. conceptual framework for the study community (soc) and perceived police responsiveness to drug crime) and citizen participation (cp) as antecedents of intrapersonal pe. our study applied this framework to extend prior community-based prevention research by testing a path model predicting intrapersonal pe in a substance abuse prevention context in the united states. one critical link in our framework is between cp and pe. the relationship between these two variables is one of the most empirically supported predictions of empowerment theory. this relationship has been verified with cross-sectional studies (e.g., schulz, israel, zimmerman & checkoway, 1995), longitudinal studies (e.g., itzhaky & york, 2000), and most recently with a cross-lagged panel analysis (christens, peterson & speer, in press) that was conducted to confirm the direction of causality from cp to intrapersonal pe. studies have generally found that, as expected, individuals with greater cp tend to experience higher levels of pe. some researchers, however, have found that the specific route from participation to pe is complex and elements of pe are sometimes difficult to achieve. le bosse et al. (1999), for example, showed how participation might not necessarily lead to empowerment, while itzhaky and schwartz (1998) found that unique elements of participation had differential effects on various facets of pe. another important link in our framework is between residents’ perceptions of their community and their participation in community groups and activities. residents’ soc (foster-fishman, pierce & van egeren, 2009; hughey et al., 2008; long & perkins, 2003; ohmer, 2007) and their perceptions of the responsiveness of local institutions to community problems (speer, jackson & peterson, 2001; speer & peterson, 2000) have been shown to be related to cp as well as pe. speer and peterson (2000), for example, found that community residents who were more engaged with community organizations and who had a stronger soc also tended to perceive local institutions (i.e., police and city government) as more involved in community life and they tended to report higher levels of cp. elsewhere, hughey et al. (2008) showed that soc predicted intrapersonal pe after controlling for a variety of other variables, such as demographics, participation, and the organizational characteristics of the community groups in which people volunteered. our framework also shows the hypothesized effects of environment-related features on residents’ perceptions of their community as well as their levels of cp. one important feature involves community residents’ awareness of neighborhood problems (foster-fishman et al., 2009; peterson & reid, 2003). in a study of a community-building initiative in michigan, foster-fishman et al. (2009) found that, among residents who were not neighborhood leaders, those individuals who perceived neighborhood conditions (e.g., abandoned buildings) as more of a problem tended to report greater participation in community organizations and community action activities. similarly, peterson and reid (2003) showed that residents who were more aware of community problems, such as people selling drugs in their neighborhood, were more likely to report greater participation in substance abuse prevention activities. another key finding of that study was that residents’ awareness of community problems had a paradoxical effect on their cp. residents’ awareness of community problems was found to serve as a catalyst for their participation, although the effect was diminished by way of the negative influence that awareness also had on their neighborhood soc. a second feature of the environment that is included in our framework involves the level of actual and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  3   january  2011     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  26       perceived physical incivilities in a community (e.g., vandalism, litter, and graffiti). incivilities have been shown to influence community residents’ participatory behaviors (perkins, brown & taylor, 1996; perkins, florin, rich, wandersman & chavis, 1990). to better understand the uneven distribution of participation, an ecological framework was developed by perkins et al. (1990) to explain the effects of social and physical factors on residents’ participation in block associations. they found that block demographics, crime-related problems, perceptions and fears were not associated with cp, but rather a combination of “catalysts” (e.g., poorly maintained properties) in the physical environment and “enablers” (e.g., block satisfaction) in the social environment seemed to encourage the participation of community residents in block associations. the present study extends previous community-based prevention research by testing a path model predicting intrapersonal pe. if relationships among the variables are found, it would point to potentially useful intervention targets for community psychologists developing prevention campaigns to address substance abuse. efforts to promote residents’ affective ties to their communities (i.e., a strong soc) and beliefs that institutions are responsive to the problems affecting their lives may be needed to ensure active participation of community residents in interventions designed to change policies and conditions that can ameliorate the harmful consequences of substance abuse in communities. method sample data were collected in the year 2000 as part of a larger community survey designed to evaluate the effects of a national institute of justice (nij) community policing initiative located in a southwestern u.s. urban city. the initiative targeted specific neighborhoods in the city, and a total of 283 randomly selected residents from the target neighborhoods participated in the survey (response rate=64%). the sample was 50.9% female, 45.2% hispanic, 24% caucasian, 18.3% african american, and 7.2% asian. regarding the age of respondents, 21% of the sample was between 18 and 34 years, 24.2% was 35-44 years, 28.8% was 45 to 64 years, and 26% was age 65 or older. forty-five percent of the sample earned less than $20,000 annually, 41.4% earned $20,000 to less than $40,000 annually, and 14% earned more than $40,000 annually. educationally, 26.6% of the sample earned less than a high school diploma, 29.1% had earned a high school diploma or equivalent, 26.6% had some college experience, and 17.7% had earned a college degree. measures eight variables were examined in this study. intrapersonal pe served as the criterion. the main predictors of interest in this study were: (a) awareness of community substance abuse problems; (b) perceived incivilities in the community; (c) soc; (d) perceived police responsiveness to drug crime; and, (e) cp. we also included two demographic variables, education and income, which may be considered proxies for social position and expected to influence participation and pe. all of the measures for the main variables in this study were based on scales used in previous research. except for demographics, scale scores represented the mean of items comprising each measure. criterion. the measure of the intrapersonal component of pe used in this study was an abbreviated version of the sociopolitical control scale (spcs) developed by zimmerman and zahniser (1991). they found support for the construct validity of the measure by demonstrating that it varied in expected ways with cp in three different samples that varied by age, life stage and geographic location. items assessed feelings of political efficacy (e.g., people like me are generally well qualified to participate in the political activity and decision-making in our country) and perceived leadership competence (e.g., i can usually organize people to get things done). included in this study was an eight-item abbreviated version of the measure, which was answered using a five-point likert-type scale. cronbach’s alpha was .66 for the modified spcs in this study. predictors. the measure of awareness of community substance abuse problems was based on the work of peterson and reid (2003). it included five items that asked respondents to indicate, using a four-point scale, how often they saw people engaged activities such as selling illegal drugs, trying to buy drugs, and using drugs in public places. reliability for this measure was .85. the measure of perceived incivilities in the community was based on research conducted by perkins and taylor (1996) and perkins, brown and taylor (1996). six four-point likert-type items were used to ask respondents the extent to which they observed incivilities in their neighborhood (e.g., litter, trash or graffiti). reliability for this was .83. sense of community was assessed using three items from hughey, speer & peterson’s (1999) measure of the construct that referenced global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  3   january  2011     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  27       respondents’ city (e.g., living in (city name) gives me a sense of community; (city name) is a good place for me to live). reliability for this measure was .71. perceived police responsiveness to drug crime was based on the work of speer, jackson & peterson (2001). the scale included three items that asked respondents to indicate, using a five-point likert-type scale, the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with statements concerning police reaction to drug crime in their neighborhood (e.g., the police really work with neighborhood residents to reduce drug crime in my neighborhood). reliability for this measure was .72. the measure of cp was adapted from a measure used in previous research (speer & peterson, 2000). eleven items asked respondents to indicate their frequency of involvement over the past year (i.e., not all involved, 1 time, 2 to 4 times, 5 or more times) in activities related to community-based substance abuse prevention (e.g., attended a meeting where police participated in discussing local crime problems, attended a public meeting to pressure for a policy change). cronbach’s alpha was .88 for the cp scale in the present study. procedures using a telephone directory in electronic format, all residences with phone numbers in the targeted areas were selected as the population to be studied. a simple random sample was then selected. the survey was administered by trained surveyors through telephone interviews typically lasting between 15 and 35 minutes in length. results structural equation modeling (sem) was performed with amos 16.0 (arbuckle, 2007) to test the model that included only observed variables. maximum likelihood estimation was used to analyze the variance-covariance matrix. the fit indices that we used are widely accepted and considered to be robust measures of fit (hoyle, 1995). these included the discrepancy chi-square (x2), the goodness-of-fit index (gfi), the adjusted goodness of fit index (agfi), the comparative fit index (cfi), the tucker-lewis index (tli), and the root mean square of error approximation (rmsea). non-significant x2 values and higher values (i.e., greater than .90) on the gfi, agfi, cfi, and tli indicate acceptable fit, while smaller rmsea values are desirable. according to browne and cudeck (1992), guidelines for interpreting the rmsea include: <.05 = good fit; .05 to .08 = acceptable fit; .08 to .10 = marginal fit; > .10 = poor fit. figure 2 presents the model tested in this study. this model was found to fit well for the sample, x2(16) = 23.60, p=.10; gfi=.98; agfi=.95; cli=.97; tli=.94; rmsea=.04, and accounted for 27% of the variance in intrapersonal pe and 22% of the variance in cp. the path coefficients in figure 2 represent statistically significant standardized beta weights. as can be seen in figure 2, results of the sem indicated that cp in substance abuse prevention was positively and strongly related to pe. individuals who reported greater participation in community groups and activities that were intended to prevent substance abuse and its harmful consequences tended to have higher levels of pe. figure 2 also shows that several of the other predictors had an influence on intrapersonal pe through their effects on cp. specifically, residents’ awareness of community substance abuse problems was directly and positively related to cp. individuals who had greater awareness of substance abuse problems in their community tended to participate more in community groups and activities. awareness of community substance abuse problems also affected cp indirectly through its effect on perceived police responsiveness to drug crime. importantly, however, awareness of community substance abuse problems was negatively related with perceived police responsiveness to drug crime. individuals with greater awareness of substance abuse problems in their community tended to perceive police as being less responsive to drug crime, and individuals who perceived police as being less responsive to drug crime tended to participate less in their community. this negative indirect path resulted in a reduction in the effect of awareness of community substance abuse problems on cp. results shown in figure 2 suggested a similar pattern of effects for perceived incivilities in the community, which had a direct and positive effect on cp. individuals who perceived more incivilities in their community tended to participate more in substance abuse prevention activities. perceived incivility in the community was also negatively related with soc. individuals who perceived more incivilities in their community were more likely to have lower soc. individuals with lower soc were then more likely to perceive police as being less responsive to drug crime, and individuals who perceived police as being less responsive to drug crime tended to participate less in their community. demographics were also found to be related to participation and intrapersonal pe. individuals with higher education tended to report greater levels of participation and pe, while individuals with higher income were more likely to have higher intrapersonal pe. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  3   january  2011     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  28       figure 2. path model predicting psychological empowerment. discussion the purpose of this study was to test a path model that included predictors of individual-level empowerment in a u.s. substance abuse prevention context. community-based prevention initiatives often rely on increasing consciousness, participation, and empowerment among community residents, yet few studies have empirically tested the processes that might facilitate or impede these crucial factors in substance abuse prevention interventions. our study contributes to the prevention literature by examining a path model that included variables that were hypothesized as pathways to intrapersonal pe among community residents. results of our study showed a good fit of the hypothesized model to the data from a sample of randomly selected community residents who participated in an evaluation of an nij-funded community policing initiative. importantly, we found that residents’ awareness of community substance abuse problems and their perceptions of physical incivilities in the community had paradoxical effects on cp in substance abuse prevention and, subsequently, their levels of empowerment. we found that although community residents’ increased awareness and perceptions of incivilities appeared to be a catalyst for cp and empowerment, these positive effects were lessened through the negative indirect effects that these variables also had on residents’ soc and their perceptions of police responsiveness to drug crime in their community. these findings are consistent with previous research (foster-fishman et al., 2009; peterson & reid, 2003) pointing to the critical interplay between awareness of community problems as a call to action and frustration with the lack of community-level resources to adequately intervene. as residents become more conscious of the magnitude of incivilities and the substance use and abuse issues amongst their neighbors, they may begin to feel less of a bond to the neighborhood and a greater sense of disappointment with existing efforts. prevention practitioners, therefore, must consider substance abuse prevention and intervention initiatives within a broader socio-environmental context, recognizing that such problems are inextricably intertwined with other aspects of community life, including the neighborhood physical environment and the actions of public institutions, like the police. initiatives that seek to raise citizen awareness and subsequent action without explicit efforts at also involving formal neighborhood organizations and interconnections may, paradoxically, undermine the full strength of a citizen response. to address this perspective, prevention strategies emphasizing relationships between citizens and community organizations have been proposed (kegler, painter, twiss, aronson, & norton, 2009; ornelas, vargas-moniz, & duarte, 2010) as foundations on which to build successful initiatives. efforts to document or enhance the social validity of existing interventions may be especially useful (francisco & butterfoss, 2007). such efforts may global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  3   january  2011     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  29       elevate soc and, in the case of citizen-police collaborative arrangements, may serve to lessen the negative perceptions of police responsiveness and the ensuing dampening effect on cp. of course, only through the success of these partnerships will a positive impact on citizen soc and confidence in police responsiveness arise. several factors have been identified as critical to the success of community change efforts (fawcett, francisco & schultz, 2004), such as agreement between community residents and institutional leaders on a clear vision and targeted mission. explicit attention should be given to specific community-partnership features that might be modified to increase the likelihood of success and build confidence in police responsiveness as a result. research on empowerment in community organizations (maton, 2008; peterson & zimmerman, 2004) also suggests that intentional investment in intraorganizational (e.g., opportunity role structure) and interorganizational (e.g., access to multiple networks of organizations) characteristics may lead to more positive outcomes. similarly, literature on soc in community organizations (hughey, et al., 2008) and the emotionally intelligent handling of volatile or potentially disturbing issues (wolff, druskat, koman, & messer, 2006) highlights the need to recognize, anticipate, and address possible conflicts in collaborations between community organizations and institutions like the police as they confront crime or substance abuse. although our findings on the indirect link between soc and pe did differ from previous research (e.g. hughey et al., 2008), it should be recognized that our current study included only one subscale which relied on the larger city as a referent rather than an individual’s community organization or neighborhood. regardless, our findings suggest that intentional efforts may be needed to support partnerships, increase the probability of success, and promote confidence in the participating institutions and individuals. a second factor for consideration in initiative building is the leveraging of such police-citizen partnerships to increase the access of both groups to other community resources and organizations (reisig & parks, 2004). this may enhance soc and connectedness and may also allow for the identification and confrontation of substance abuse problems and other incivilities on multiple fronts. although substance abuse problems have clear implications for police work, there are both environmental and psychological aspects that are outside the scope of traditional police endeavors, and, therefore, are more amenable to intervention from other sources. the community-police organization as an intermediary institution places citizens in relationship with those resources crucial to success and enables interventions and endeavors beyond the usual niche breadth of police organizations or customary community policing efforts. this may increase the likelihood of success and certainly expands the possibilities for intervention. for example, speer et al., (2003) described a preventive intervention that began with concern about substance use and expanded to address drug-related crime, violence, limited policing resources, and abandoned housing. the original citizen partnership grew to include the housing authority, community development corporations, banks, the fire department, and elected officials. together, these organizations were able to have far-reaching environmental impacts, reducing abandoned housing, police expenditures and drug-related crime and violence. in addition, speer et al. (2003) found that as the partnerships’ networks increased, the work touched a broader number of potential participants and institutions, and cp increased. furthermore, it seems reasonable to assume that citizens are also weighing the responsiveness of other community institutions. as relationships with those institutions are built within a community intervention context, citizen perceptions of those organizations as interested and involved parties in addressing community problems will likely improve. there are several limitations to this study which should be recognized. one limitation is external validity. the telephone directory procedure has been criticized as being biased against people without telephones and those who opt for the use of mobile phones in lieu of land lines. this may have resulted in the underrepresentation in the sample of participants who differ from land line telephone owners in important ways, such as home ownership, age, and residential stability, which could have critical implications for a study of cp and pe since home owners and long-term residents may be more likely to invest time and energy in their communities than renters or short-term residents. in addition, the neighborhoods from which the sample was drawn had been targeted by a nij award to implement a community policing initiative. such initiatives are based on the systematic use of community police partnerships to engage in problem-solving measures and address issues proactively. the award of this grant may have made the police presence and its responsiveness more salient to community residents and also may have impacted resident participation. this factor may limit the generalizability of the study’s findings to communities without similar global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  1,  issue  3   january  2011     global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  30       initiatives. furthermore, information regarding the sample’s representation of the neighborhoods is lacking. therefore, we are unable to assert the extent to which the sample adequately reflects the diversity within the host neighborhoods. there are also several limitations to the measures used in this study. first, the measures of the variables relied on individual’s self-reports. although self report measures are commonly used in survey research, it has been argued that actual individual behaviors (e.g. participation) may differ from those reported. in addition, the results of studies using objective ratings of neighborhood conditions may be different from those of our study which relied on perceptions of incivilities. the measure of awareness of community substance abuse problems may also be biased by virtue of people not wanting to admit witnessing drug use for fear of being personally implicated in these practices. this measure could also be biased by peoples’ ability/ willingness to actively observe behaviors in their communities. people who are homebound or who do not feel safe engaging in community life may not actually be able to observe drug-related behavior; however, they may believe it occurs, and this may impact their willingness to participate. furthermore, the soc measure used in this study was limited to one dimension and could be confounded with community satisfaction, which should be considered a separate and distinct construct. future work should use a fully validated scale of soc to better test relationships between the variables analyzed in this study. additionally, there were several other demographics (e.g., gender) and aspects of culture that were not considered in this study. the large representation of residents of hispanic origin in our sample, for example, may have influenced our results and have implications for measurement of pe. future research should test the generalizability of our findings with different subgroups and consider a measure that may more adequately capture culturally-based understandings of empowerment. despite its limitations, our study’s findings were reasonably consistent with previous research demonstrating relationships between environmentrelated variables, soc, cp, and pe. the paradoxical effect of the awareness of community problems raising participation directly and reducing participation indirectly suggests that strategies to address resident perception of community agencies and bond to community are critical intervention points for prevention planners. residents’ awareness of substance abuse problems may foster feelings of resentment toward community police officers and negatively affect cp. community policing initiatives should recognize this potential effect and encourage activities that strengthen soc and public perceptions of police responsiveness to crime. references arbuckle, j.l. 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(1991). refinements of sphere-specific measures of perceived control: development of a sociopolitical control scale. journal of community psychology, 19, 189-204. kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 ‘taringenqegcallrat cayarat umyuat-llu’: indigenous understandings in community based participatory research joseph e. trimble (session chair), inna d. rivkin, samuel johnson, ellen d. s. lopez, eliza orr, jim allen, carlotta fok, & david b. henry keywords: scra biennial conference, community psychology practice, gjcpp chair/discussant: joseph e. trimble, western washington university other participants: inna d. rivkin, samuel johnson, ellen d. s. lopez, eliza orr, jim allen (scra member), carlotta fok, university of alaska fairbanks, & david b. henry, university of illinois at chicago global journal of community psychology practice volume 2, issue 3 february 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 ‘taringenqegcallrat cayarat umyuat-llu’: indigenous understandings in community based participatory research culturally resonant methodologies are critical when conducting research with indigenous communities. considerations in such research include getting at culturallybased understanding based on indigenous participants’ ways of living and thinking, translating instruments and findings when concepts lack equivalence across languages, adapting measures in ways that are both culturally resonant and able to detect change resulting from intervention, and addressing lack of comparability or cultural measurement equivalence. this symposium will discuss these challenges and strategies for addressing them, drawing on examples from community based participatory research focused on addressing health disparities in rural alaska native communities. examples from the first presentation will discuss working towards an understanding of local conceptions of stress within the context of cultural change in yup’ik alaska native communities, and the importance of this understanding for informing culturally-resonant intervention addressing community stress. examples from the second presentation will illustrate challenges of translating meaning between yup’ik and english, and strategies to integrate cultural and community knowledge for addressing these challenges within research partnerships with yup’ik communities. the third project recounts the development of a culturally-resonant measure of family functioning for yup’ik youth that proved to be sensitive to change associated with intervention. issues of cultural measurement equivalence will be discussed, including the assumptions in the equivalence concept, the difficulties of true comparability, and the importance of culturally resonant measurement approaches that reflect an ethnocultural group’s unique lifeways and pathways. we will then have a discussion (with audience participation) about the advantages and limitations of approaches, and how lessons learned can inform future research. we will also discuss how the diversity of local contexts and communities can affect methodological challenges and strategies for getting at culturally-based understandings in indigenous community focused research. back to too much? feeling overwhelmed with social inclusion during the covid-19 pandemic devki patel1, verena graupmann1, susan markunas1, allyssa alteri1, & joseph r. ferrari1 keywords: social inclusion, covid-19, overextending contacts, impact on friendships author biographies: verena graupmann, is an associate professor of psychology at depaul university’s college of science and health. she has an m.a. from the university of munich, germany, has received her phd from the university of sussex, uk (2009), and did postdoctoral work at both the university of salzburg, austria, and the university of munich, germany. her teaching and research are in the fields of social and cultural psychology. susan markunas, is senior lecturer in psychology at depaul university. allyssa alteri, earned her ms in research psychology from depaul university in 2023. dn. joseph ferrari, is st. vincent depaul distinguished professor of psychology at depaul university, chicago, il, and a permanent catholic deacon for the diocese of joliet, il. recommended citation: patel, d., graupman, v., markunas, s., alteri, a., & ferrari, j.r. (2024). back to too much? feeling overwhelmed with social inclusion during the covid-19 pandemic. global journal of community psychology practice, 15(2), 1 8. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: devik patel, department of psychology, depaul university, 2219 north kenmore avenue, chicago, il, 60614; email: dpate182@depaul.edu 1 depaul university, chicago il https://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:dpate182@depaul.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 back to too much? feeling overwhelmed with social inclusion during the covid-19 pandemic abstract the covid-19 outbreaks in 2020 caused prolonged periods of social distancing. after mandates were lifted, social calendars filling up with plans felt like a dream come true to many. at the same time, a stark increase in real time interactions and number of social obligations likely experienced as stressful. the shift to in-person socialization may be especially distressing considering an extended period of reduced and controlled ways of gathering. here, we analyzed peoples’ accounts of dealing with a sense of overinclusion in pandemic and post-pandemic socializing. in the varied responses in a qualitative sample of 24 participants, we found a disproportionate amount of post-distancing socializing brought up among recalled interactions deemed as “overwhelming”, than other inclusion interactions. among the “overwhelming” interactions, post-distancing socializing was described as of more negative as positive emotional quality. introduction the onset of covid-19 pandemic prompted stay-at-home mandates to reduce viral transmission. many us americans felt isolated from their social networks, reporting more anxiety and depression, worse sleep quality, and reduced physical activity (sepúlveda-loyola, 2020). feeling included relates to feeling protected while feeling excluded has negative consequences on cognition and behavior (pfundmair et al., 2015a). social distancing was experienced as psychologically similar to being ostracized, suggesting that many people suffered from being included less than usual: social distancing was associated with lower selfesteem, sense of control, belonging, and meaning (i.e., the fundamental psychological needs usually impacted by ostracism) (graupmann & pfundmair, 2022). one study showed how time spent social distancing was associated with stress, that women reported more stress compared to men, and that adaptability to new situations buffered the distancing-stress relationship (zamarripa et al., 2020). while there is a considerable amount of research exploring how social distancing affected psychological and physical health, there is little data on the process of reintroduction to social networks after social distancing. as social distancing mandates ended, some individuals were motivated to re-establish their larger social networks while others faced difficulties with social re-introduction. a study conducted in the u.s. by forbes health reported 29% of participants were nervous about knowing how to interact, 26% were worried about embarrassing themselves, and 16% were worried about saying the wrong thing. fifty-six percent of respondents said they found forming relationships more difficult since the onset of the pandemic. in cultural comparison, people with a more individualistic cultural background have shown less positive outcomes of being included after an exclusion episode, compared to people with a collectivistic cultural background (pfundmair et al., 2015b). taken together, these studies suggest being re-included after a period of reduced socialization is unique from experiences of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 sustained inclusion. very few studies examined individual processes of reintroduction to one’s social network(s) in a context such as a global pandemic that imposed social and behavioral restrictions for an extended period. the present study applies a qualitative approach to understand experiences of inclusion after the lifting of social distancing mandates in 2021. method data for the present study was part of a larger study on overinclusion. participants were recruited from a private university in the midwestern united states and from online sourcing platform prolific. university student participants earned course credit and prolific participants were paid $3 for research participation. the survey was available on qualtrics during summer and fall of 2021. completing the survey took, on average, 20 minutes. after eliminating incomplete responses (<90%), 606 participants completed the survey. participants responded to four psychometric measures and then responded to open-ended questions about instances of overinclusion. participants selfreported demographic information including their age, gender, race, relationship status, and education level. of the 606 participants, 24 mentioned experiences of overinclusion related to the covid-19 pandemic. the present study focused on this subset of participants who discussed instances of inclusion during or after social distancing periods in 2020 and 2021. participants the average age of participants in the present study was 24.1 years old (sd = 9.18). most participants self-identified their gender as female (n = 17, 70.8%), male (n = 6, 25%), and non-binary (n = 1, 4.2%). participants self-reported their race/ethnicity and chose all that applied, identifying as white (n = 18, 75%), asian (n = 6, 25%), black (n = 3, 12.5%), hispanic/latinx (n = 1, 4.2%), and other (n = 1, 4.2%). participants selfidentified as single (n = 17, 70.8%), married or partnered (n = 6, 24.2%), or divorced (n = 1, 4.2%). psychometric scales participants responded to the 10-item need to belong scale, the 10-item rosenberg selfesteem scale, the 10-item desire for control scale, and the 10-item meaningful existence scale for the purpose of the larger research endeavor of this data collection (not analyzed in the present study) (leary, 2013; rosenberg, 1965; berger & cooper, 1979; steger et al. 2006). qualitative questions participants assigned randomly to one of two experimental conditions instructed to write about either experiences: a time in their life where they were included to a greater than usual degree [one condition] or a time in their life where they felt overwhelmed by the degree to which they were included [other condition] this variation of the prompts intended to capture differences between inclusion experiences regarded as more than usual and inclusion experiences that feel overwhelming. the general pattern of the open-ended responses suggests the manipulation was successful: most participants in the ‘greaterthan-usual’ condition wrote about experiences where the inclusion was more than usual, but generally regarded as neutral or positive. on the other hand, most participants in the “overwhelmed” condition wrote about experiences where the inclusion was more than they could handle, occasionally prompting negative affect and socially reclusive behaviors. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 selection of covid-related narratives the two independent raters coded the 606 open-ended responses for as related to covid-19, searching for the following terms: covid, covid-19, pandemic, and quarantine. the present study examined the 24 openended responses that were relevant to the pandemic. observably, very few participants discussed instances of over-inclusion during the pandemic relative to the size of the entire sample. this outcome may be explained partially by individual differences in how much people normalized the circumstances of the pandemic as part of life. therefore, in the events participants described, covid-related aspects were perhaps not salient. in addition, for some, reconnection to close social networks happened soon after mandates were lifted, but for others, reconnecting with even their closest social connections was delayed or contingent on safety measures like vaccination. thus, it is plausible that many participants discussed instances of overinclusion, which occurred before the onset of the pandemic. qualitative coding procedure there were no disagreements between the raters’ initial coding for covid-related responses. raters met to discuss an a priori coding scheme to further analyze the qualitative responses. responses were coded for type of experience (positive, negative, or ambiguous), modality of contact (email, messaging, social media, or in-person), the environment where the interaction took place (school, work, or recreation), and when the interaction took place (during or after the pandemic). after assigning pre-determined codes, two raters discussed and identified emerging themes: prolonged isolation making social interactions stressful or difficult, fear of covid or fear of socializing without vaccination, longing for social interaction, and a perceived rush of communications. disagreements between codes were resolved through discussion. results and discussion foremost, results showed an overrepresentation of participants from the overwhelmed narrative condition. sixteen participants were from the overwhelming inclusion condition, and eight participants were from the greater-than-usual inclusion condition. being randomly assigned to thinking about overwhelming inclusionary experiences might have made people write about experiences related to the pandemic more so than being randomly assigned to thinking about experiences of greater-thanusual inclusion, suggesting a tendency to experience pandemic related socializing as somewhat distressful. themes from the a priori coding scheme and emerging codes are discussed below. pre-established codes positive, negative, or neither. overall, ten participants’ covid-related accounts were coded as describing negative experiences, five were coded as describing positive experiences and nine were coded as ambiguous. interestingly, nine participants in the overwhelmed condition wrote about a negative experience of overinclusion, compared to one from the greater-than-usual condition. on the other hand, only one participant from the overwhelmed condition wrote about a positive experience, compared to four people assigned to the greater-thanusual condition. the ambiguous codes were given to the accounts of six participants in the overwhelmed condition and three in the greater-than-usual condition. ambiguous responses included both positive and negative feelings about inclusion, or the narratives were neutral, with more complex narratives related to comfortability and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 feeling safe after a period of quarantine to socialize. example for a negatively coded experience in response to the overwhelming inclusion prompt: “i would have more people trying to connect with me than i could handle, which was very socially overwhelming” and “eventually, each of my weekends seemed daunting.” finding more negative and ambiguous experiences than positive ones is not surprising, given the overrepresentation of the overwhelmed condition in this covid subset. however, it is noteworthy that a theoretically positive event – being included after a time of isolation – experienced as stressful when recounted as an experience of overwhelming social inclusion. modality and environment of inclusion. table 1 summarizes the modalities of the overinclusion and table 2 summarizes the physical environments where participants experienced over-inclusion. the sense of control online interaction provides is likely the reason for why those interactions were recounted less when asked about overwhelming experiences. in addition, being the norm during the pandemic, the transition to the more spontaneous, less controlled nature of in-person meetings may have been experienced as a contrast in the context of the pandemic. table 1 modality of inclusion modality greater than usual overwhelmed full sample n % n % n % in-person 4 66.7 11 84.6 15 78.9 messaging 1 16.7 1 7.7 2 10.5 social media 0 0 1 7.7 1 5.3 email 1 16.7 0 0 1 5.3 table 2 environment of inclusion environment greater than usual overwhelmed full sample n % n % n % recreation 2 50 6 66.7 8 62.5 college 2 50 3 33.3 5 38.5 work 0 0 0 0 0 0 emerging codes fears of socializing. for six participants in the overwhelmed condition, recalling an instance of overinclusion prompted introspection about their relational preferences. commonly, participants wrote about how the pandemic caused them to feel stressed when re-entering spaces where socializing was expected. several participants wrote they felt stressed about the expectations of in-person social events: “i was stressed about dressing up right, satisfying peoples’ expectations… at a certain point, i http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 even started dreading the events that were supposed to be fun and celebratory” and “during covid when we were all online for school i found myself being overwhelmed, constantly to the point where i stopped socializing.” another participant articulated their outlook on attending a family event: “i felt an overpowering sense of fear and dread knowing my evening would be filled with conversation… i was fearful of not being able to respond, overreacting, losing interest, or finding interesting enough subject matter to withhold a natural conversation.” ten participants’ narratives explicitly included difficulties with socializing, even in situations where they wanted to connect with others. a few participants recalled university experiences, explaining that “we were all online cause of covid” and “meeting people in person after communicating online because of covid” was overwhelming. other participants wrote: “covid exacerbated my social anxiety further… i was still slightly uncomfortable socializing with multiple people at once” and “living through this past year with covid has strained many people’s ability to reconnect socially… i got overwhelmed.” fear and anxiety-related experiences in the context of covid give insight into the difficulties people were having as they were transitioning from a period of reduced social interaction to renewed more in-person social life. this gives support to the idea that postpandemic socializing was likely perceived as overinclusion by many. discomfort with socializing without preventative measures such as if vaccination affected perceptions of inclusion and emerged as another theme. fear of covid-19. only two participants in the overwhelmed condition wrote about how fear of covid-19 contributed to hesitance to socialize, suggesting that preferences for reduced socialization were perhaps strengthened by fear of catching the virus for a select few. one participant wrote: “my friends wanted me to come on a bike ride because it’s outside and i was scared to go because of covid.” on the other hand, another participant wrote that after vaccines were available, they felt more comfortable returning to in-person interactions, suggesting an attenuating effect of feeling physically safe to socialize on one’s feelings towards inclusion, specifically during a pandemic. the participant stated, “now that i am vaccinated, i have been able to relax a lot more and have plans to reconnect with friends.” the accounts of health-related fears point to an experience of overinclusion that appears unique to the pandemic. the awareness of disease transmission became an integral part of how one navigates their social lives. missing social connection and dealing with the rush for four participants, missing or longing for social connection possibly affected perceptions of inclusion. two participants in the overwhelmed condition mentioned longing for connection, while also feeling uncertain about how to go about reconnecting safely: “after a while a lot of my friends starting hanging out a lot but i felt unsafe doing so, i had a fear of missing out so i was really overwhelmed” and “i was very stressed about making new friends… the only way we could socialize was how i presented myself on zoom.” two participants recalled noticeable changes in invitations to socialize, writing, “i have a lot of friends, and suddenly http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 they were all texting me at once and wanting to hang out… i was really happy but overwhelmed” and “coming out of the pandemic, it seemed like people wanted to hang out more than even before the pandemic.” narratives describing one’s own longing for social connection and others’ eagerness to socialize confirm the idea that people wanted to be re-included after social distancing. the mixed emotional reactions that accompanied these experiences of inclusion suggest that different levels of comfort with in-person and online socializing affected how people reacted to rises in social invitation in this subset of data. conclusion studying 24 covid-related narratives highlighted how differently people experienced inclusion after social distancing. while some accounts suggested positive experiences, the overall pattern in our data suggest that (1) people were more likely to think of covid-related inclusion experiences when prompted to think of “overwhelming” inclusion (i.e., inclusion with a negative, stress-related connotation) than when prompted to think of greater-than-usual inclusion, and (2) that social and healthrelated fears greatly affected transition back to in-person social life. considering the importance of social connection for well-being and community building, as well as the negative psychological impact of exclusion (even if it is mandated and does not imply the personalized threat of ostracism), our findings insinuate that some people might benefit from support when navigating shifts from mostly remote, highly controlled social interaction, to more spontaneous, less controlled, in-person interactions (graupmann & pfundmair, 2022). such guidance might consist of raising awareness that rapid changes in socializing norms are real stressors, especially to those already suffering social anxieties. additionally, pacing reintroduction of greater in-person interactions, by allowing people to attend work remotely, for example, might be advantageous to all participants of a drastically changing social life. references burger, j. m., & cooper, h. m. (1979). the desirability of control. motivation and emotion, 3, 381-393. forbes magazine. (2022, july 27). 59% of u.s. adults find it harder to form relationships since covid-19, survey reveals here's how that can harm your health. forbes. retrieved february 17, 2023, from https://www.forbes.com/health/min d/social-anxiety-since-covid-survey/ graupmann, v., & pfundmair, m. (2022). when ostracism is mandated: covid19, social distancing, and psychological needs. the journal of social psychology, 1-13. leary, m. r., kelly, k. m., cottrell, c. a., & schreindorfer, l. s. (2013). construct validity of the need to belong scale: mapping the nomological network. journal of personality assessment, 95(6), 610–624. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223891.2 013.819511 pfundmair, m., graupmann, v., du, h., frey, d., & aydin, n. (2015a). suddenly included: cultural differences in experiencing re‐ inclusion. international journal of psychology, 50(2), 85-92. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.forbes.com/health/mind/social-anxiety-since-covid-survey/ https://www.forbes.com/health/mind/social-anxiety-since-covid-survey/ https://doi.org/10.1080/00223891.2013.819511 https://doi.org/10.1080/00223891.2013.819511 global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 pfundmair, m., aydin, n., du, h., yeung, s., frey, d., & graupmann, v. (2015b). exclude me if you can: cultural effects on the outcomes of social exclusion. journal of cross-cultural psychology, 46(4), 579-596. rosenberg, m. (1965). rosenberg self-esteem scale (rse). acceptance and commitment therapy. measures package, 61(52), 18. sepúlveda-loyola, w., rodríguez-sánchez, i., pérez-rodríguez, p., ganz, f., torralba, r., oliveira, d. v., & rodríguez-mañas, l. (2020). impact of social isolation due to covid-19 on health in older people: mental and physical effects and recommendations. the journal of nutrition, health & aging, 24, 938-947. steger, m. f., frazier, p., oishi, s., & kaler, m. (2006). the meaning in life questionnaire: assessing the presence of and search for meaning in life. journal of counseling psychology, 53(1), 80. zamarripa, j., delgado-herrada, m., morquecho-sánchez, r., baños, r., de la cruz-ortega, m., & duarte-félix, h. (2021). adaptability to social distancing due to covid-19 and its moderating effect on stress by gender. salud mental, 43(6), 273-278. http://www.gjcpp.org/ microsoft word 2009-0007-final 20110516.docx global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1     june  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  18     perceptions of skills needed to engage in collaborative community problem solving: implications for community psychology practice and training david a. julian, phd, the center for learning excellence, the ohio state university, columbus, oh, usa tammy collins, ma, department of human development and family science, ohio state university, columbus, oh, usa key words: community psychology practice, practice skills, community support about the authors: dr. julian is the director of community planning and evaluation at the center for learning excellence, a center in the college of education and human ecology at ohio state university. his interests focus on community practice and collaborative community problem. tammy collins received her m.a. in counseling and b.a. in journalism-public relations from marshall university. she is completing her ph.d. in human development and family science at ohio state university. she has 16 years of experience in planning, administration and evaluation in the fields of substance abuse and criminal justice. recommended citation: julian, d.a., & collins, t. (2011). perceptions of skills needed to engage in collaborative community problem solving: implications for community psychology practice and training. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(1), 18-27. retrieved <date>, from http://www.gjcpp.org. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1     june  2011     global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 perceptions of skills needed to engage in collaborative community problem solving: implications for community psychology practice and training david a. julian, phd, tammy collins, ma 1the center for learning excellence, the ohio state university abstract this paper provides a brief review of the results of a survey of family and children first council coordinators in ohio. sixty-eight (68) local coordinators responded to a survey regarding their perceptions of skills needed to facilitate collaborative community problem solving. the authors argue that council coordinators fill a critical role in the collaborative community problem solving process. they refer to this role as “community support.” analysis of survey data provided an opportunity to consider the skills council coordinators felt were important to their community support roles. in addition, the community support role and its importance are described. the authors also suggest that community psychology practitioners are ideal candidates for assuming such roles. finally, implications for training community psychology practitioners are addressed. introduction this paper summarizes selected results of a survey conducted with individuals responsible for facilitating community collaborations convened to address local youth and family development issues at the county level in ohio. these individuals are referred to as “family and children first council coordinators” and the local collaborations are referred to as “family and children first councils (fcfcs).” family and children first councils exist in all of ohio’s 88 counties as a result of 1993 ohio legislation that states that local fcfcs are required to develop and implement an annual interagency process to evaluate and prioritize services, fill gaps and invent new approaches to achieve better results for families and children (ohio family and children first, 1993). all but one of ohio’s 88 fcfcs also has a council coordinator (or in some instances an individual with another job title) who engages in a variety of professional activities in support of the mission of fcfcs. overview the authors argue that fcfc coordinators fill a critical community problem solving role. this role involves a number of activities that might be referred to as “community support.” in this section, titled “overview,” the authors define community support and suggest that this role is essential to the delivery of coordinated, effective and efficient health and social services interventions. in the remainder of this paper, the authors elaborate on the community support role based on responses to the survey noted above. survey responses provide detailed information about technical and administrative activities thought critical to fcfc functioning. finally, the authors suggest several implications for community psychology practice and training. the community support role and community psychology practice facilitating community collaborations might be described in terms of what wandersman and colleagues (wandersman, duffy, flaspohler, noonan, lubell, stillman, blachman, dunville & saul, 2008) refer to as “prevention support.” they argue that three roles are necessary to provide effective prevention programs. these roles are performed by the “prevention synthesis and translation system,” “prevention delivery system” and “prevention support system.” the prevention synthesis and translation system develops, evaluates and disseminates model programs and other innovations. the prevention delivery system takes actions necessary to implement innovative interventions while the prevention support system focuses on “innovation specific” and “general” capacity building. innovation specific capacity building is provided with the intent of implementing a specific innovation such as an evidence-based program. general capacity building focuses on the infrastructure, available skills and motivation of an organization. the prevention support system and related capacity building efforts are of particular importance to community problem solving efforts. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1     june  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  20     table 1. skills consistent with the community support role. skill scott (2007) julian (2008) wolff (2001, 2010) advocating for change x x using data for assessment purposes/research x x x developing effective organizations x x x communicating/consulting/capacity building in culturally relevant manner x x facilitating large and small groups x x planning and decision making x x intervening to produce results x x x leading problem solving groups x x accessing resources x x mobilizing constituencies x x implementing/sustaining recommendations x x managing the problem solving process x x evaluating the impact of interventions x x x general capacity building as described by wandersman et al. (2008) is similar to what the authors of this paper refer to as community support. the community support role involves an array of actions conducted by or on behalf of the community such as needs assessment, resource acquisition, resource allocation, facilitation and program evaluation. thus the community support role can be conceptualized in terms of the application of tools, procedures and related technical assistance to support communities in conducting activities that support the delivery of direct services. the authors of this paper contend that communities require access to general capacity building or community support on an ongoing basis and innovation specific capacity building on an as-needed basis, for example, when implementing particular evidence based programs. community support and related capacity building activities might also define a conceptual model for community psychology practice. little has appeared in the literature related specifically to skills or competencies necessary to practice community psychology. scott (2007) defined eleven competencies that have generated discussion about specific skills necessary to engage in community psychology practice. julian (2008) compared the skills defined by scott to specific skills taught in a collaborative community problem solving curriculum called “partnerships for success” and found a high level of correspondence. wolff (2001, 2010) has written extensively about coalition building and implies a similar set of skills. a cursory review of these authors’ perspectives suggests some skills that might define the community support role and a model for community psychology practice. skills consistent with those suggested by scott, julian and wolff are highlighted in table 1. importance of the community support role the importance of the community support role cannot be over-emphasized. most definitions of applied community psychology (julian, 2006) revolve around activities consistent with the notion of community support. elias (1994) proposes a professional role for community psychology practitioners focused on conceptualizing and reflecting on change processes within specific settings. this role implies that the community psychology practitioner is an active participant in community settings and is engaged in the process of change. julian, hernandez and hodges (2003) suggest that community practice is composed of four distinct functions: community mobilization, planning, implementation and evaluation. these functions are highly consistent with the community support role as defined above and are major components of many community problem solving efforts. there is growing evidence that suggests that community support type activities are directly related to the effectiveness of coalitions. zakocs and edwards (2006) conducted a comprehensive review of the empirical literature published between 1980 and 2004 related to coalition effectiveness. twenty-six (26) studies met their inclusion criteria. these authors suggested that formalization of processes, leadership style, member participation, member diversity, collaboration and group cohesion were associated with successful community coalitions. other factors related to coalition effectiveness are identified in case studies and the theoretical literature. the systems change global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1     june  2011     global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 literature might also offer a useful perspective. the authors of this paper contend that communities function in much the same way as complex systems. commentary based on case studies and theory suggest that community readiness (feinberg, greenberg & osgood, 2004), participation (fetterman, 2001); leadership capacity (fosterfishman, cantillon, pierce & van egeren, 2007), management (feinberg, greenberg & osgood, 2004); and knowledge of effective practices (weist et al., 2005) are critical factors predicting the success of community collaborations. kreger, brindis, manuel and sassoubre (2007) suggest that community context, involvement of key partners, commitment to evaluation, competent planning, working within and across sectors and leveraging resources are important elements related to successful system change efforts. the current study: coordinators’ perceptions of the community support role the body of evidence summarized above suggests that “community support” functions are critical aspects of successful coalitions and are linked to effective community problem solving. family and children first councils provide a key community support mechanism and are charged with addressing the well-being of youth and families at the local level in ohio. county commissioners in ohio are required to establish fcfcs and may invite representatives of any public or private agency to participate. required membership includes family members and the directors or designees of local alcohol and drug addiction services; mental health; physical health; children’s services; developmental disabilities; school districts; government; and the ohio departments of youth services and jobs and family services. approximately half of ohio’s fcfcs have been trained to use a formal process referred to as “partnerships for success” to facilitate collaborative community problem solving (partnerships for success academy, 2007). some ohio counties have developed other planning processes that effectively meet state requirements and local needs. in any case, fcfcs and council coordinators appear to play important roles in collaborative community problem solving. methods in the spring of 2007, the association of ohio family and children first council coordinators conducted a survey of coordinators across ohio. the survey was designed to identify tasks performed by coordinators and assess the skills they believed necessary to function effectively in the coordinator role. the association’s primary motivation for conducting the survey focused on gaining understanding of common and unique training needs across counties and ultimately to procure relevant training and technical assistance. in addition, results of the survey yielded critical information about the community support role as applied to collaborative community problem solving related to youth and family well-being in ohio. a word or two about the data summarized in this paper are in order. first, it is important to note that these data were not collected as part of a formal research project. rather representatives of the association of ohio family and children first council coordinators collected these data as part of their efforts to develop training and technical assistance for association members. the authors of this paper were part of a university based team housed at the center for learning excellence at ohio state university that historically provided training and technical assistance to fcfc coordinators. the association asked the authors to analyze these data and develop a report regarding training needs as a technical assistance activity. the authors also sought and received institutional review board (irb) approval to review the results of the association’s survey effort and develop this paper because the survey data appeared to provide insight into a critical community problem solving role relevant to community psychology practice. the authors’ review of the survey data was guided by the premise that community problem solving is a critical concern for community psychology practitioners. the primary research questions guiding the review of data summarized in this paper focused on the perceptions of skills necessary to effectively support community problem solving coalitions and the extent to which community psychology practitioners might be positioned to support such problem solving efforts. sample sixty eight (68) out of 87 local fcfc coordinators responded to the survey, representing a response rate of 78.2%. two-thirds of the sample (67.6%) worked full-time while almost a quarter (23.5%) were employed part-time. these data are summarized in table 2. many council coordinators (32.4%) were employed by local county commissioners. other organizational entities that employed fcfc global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1     june  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  22     table 2. employment status of family and children first council coordinators in ohio. work status number percent average hours worked full –time 46 67.6 39.7 part-time 16 23.5 24.4 contracted1 9 13.2 21.5 coordinators included educational services centers2 (13.2%), boards of health (10.3%) and the ohio department of jobs and family services (10.3%). the average years of experience as a fcfc coordinator was 4.9. however, 40% had between 10 and 20 years of related experience. slightly over two-thirds of respondents (66.2%) reported that they supervised other staff members who were engaged in supporting local fcfcs. almost half (44.2%) of fcfc coordinators had master’s degrees (see table 3). one in ten had completed course work beyond the master’s degree. as indicated in table 4, social work was the most frequently cited educational background (30.9%) followed by “other” (29.4%) and psychology (20.6%). “other” included a range of disciplines from family studies to political science to nursing. annual salaries for coordinators ranged from $17,000 to more than $100,000. almost one third of council coordinators reported annual salaries in the $30,000 to $49,000 range. measures the final survey was made available on-line. it consisted of almost 100 forced-choice and several open-ended questions. the survey questions were developed by a small team of coordinators based on their knowledge and experience. the survey was divided into several sections. the first section was designed to assess demographic characteristics of respondents and collect basic employment information. the second section posed a series of questions focused on responsibilities for various work related tasks within four broad domains. these questions asked respondents to identify the person or group responsible for 44 specific tasks. domains included: organizational management (11 questions); services and programming (9 questions); 1 contracted employment encompasses both full and part time employees. 2 educational service centers are part of regional systems in ohio designed to provide services to state and local educational institutions to improve school effectiveness and student achievement. organizational leadership (14 questions); and community development and capacity building (10 questions). response options included “not applicable-council does not do”; “fcf council coordinator/director”; “project director”; “support staff”; “fcf council chairperson”; or “individual/entity not listed above.” questions in the third section of the survey, required respondents to rate 15 challenges associated with the application of various skills thought necessary to engage in the fcfc coordinator role. for example, “project management,” “integrating planning and implementation efforts,” and “facilitation” were potential challenges. challenges were rated on a scale from 1 to 3 where 1 meant “moderately challenging,” 2 meant “very challenging” and 3 meant “extremely challenging.” the fourth section consisted of three open-ended questions concerning professional skills and professional development needs. procedures local coordinators were sent a letter and instructed to complete the survey by march 9, 2007. reminder e-mails were sent to local coordinators periodically through the data collection phase of the project. all data were collected by the association of ohio family and children first council coordinators. staff from the center for learning excellence managed the data tabulation process through the “survey monkey” utility (2007) and generated basic descriptive statistics using spss. formal center for learning excellence data management policies which were developed in accordance with ohio state university human subjects review policies were followed in handling data and data analyses. results results suggested that council coordinators engaged in a number of critical community problem solving roles. for example, fcfc coordinators participated in meetings, authored reports and responded to proposals. such activities appeared to represent dayto-day operations. council coordinators also engaged in highly technical activities such as planning, ensuring service coordination and conducting evaluations. in aggregate these activities represented what the authors of this paper have described as the community support function. roles in local collaborative problem solving table 5 provides a list of activities that occupied the professional time of the majority of fcfc coordinators who responded to the survey. almost all coordinators said they participated in state and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1     june  2011     global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 regional meetings (97.1%); completed and submitted state reports (97.1%); represented fcfc at various meetings (97.1%); carried out the rfp (request for proposal) process (94.1%); collected, interpreted and disseminated data (92.6%) and facilitated strategic planning (92.6%). almost nine out of ten coordinators ensured service coordination (89.7%); conducted and/or reported outcome evaluations (88.2%); wrote and monitored contracts (86.8%); involved themselves in non-council community initiatives (86.8%); secured and administered grants (85.3%); and engaged in social marketing activities (82.3%). these highlights are supplemented by an array of other problem solving activities as indicated in table 5. table 3. educational credentials of family and children first council coordinators in ohio. educational status number percent doctoral/ph.d. 1 1.5 master’s + hours 7 10.3 master’s 22 32.4 bachelor’s + hours 16 23.5 bachelor’s 10 14.7 associate’s 3 4.4 other 3 4.4 working toward degree 2 2.9 none 3 4.4 table 4. concentration of academic study reported by family and children first council coordinators in ohio. concentration number percent social work 21 30.9 other 20 29.4 psychology 14 20.6 business administration 13 19.1 counseling 12 17.7 education 12 17.7 sociology 10 14.7 communications 5 7.4 public policy 5 7.4 corrections 3 4.4 health/public health 1 1.5 major challenges limiting community collaboration table 6 lists the major issues fcfc coordinators identified as challenges. as noted above, the questionnaire divided coordinator work tasks into four categories: 1) organizational management; 2) services and programming; 3) organizational leadership; and 4) community development and capacity building. the challenges identified in table 6 represented challenges identified across these four domains. it is important to note that respondents could identify more than one challenge. slightly more than one-third of coordinators (33.8%) identified recruiting and engaging family members in the community problem solving process as a challenge. exactly one-quarter (25.0%) identified fiscal administration and almost one-fifth (19.1%) identified fund raising. collecting and interpreting data were identified by 14.7% of coordinators as a major challenge and responding to rfps by 14.7% of coordinators. at a later date, center for learning excellence staff invited council coordinators to identify and elaborate on their technical assistance needs via email and/or in face-to-face conversations. this activity occurred after the survey project was completed. suggestions were received from representatives of 59 counties. while this process was rather informal and not part of the project described here, it appeared to corroborated survey results. the most frequently requested types of assistance were in developing and using “logic models” to support community planning; defining meaningful outcomes for programs; collecting and using data to support decision making; and using evaluation as a management tool. other types of global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1     june  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  24     table 5. activities in which most family and children first council coordinators were engaged.3 activity number engaged percent participate in state/regional meetings 66 97.1 complete and submit state reports 66 97.1 represent council at various state/federal meetings 54 97.1 represent council at required meetings 66 97.1 carryout rfp process 64 94.1 collect, interpret and disseminate data 63 92.6 facilitate strategic planning 63 92.6 ensure service coordination 61 89.7 plan state and local meetings 61 89.7 act as liaison to enhance working relationships 61 89.7 conduct and/or report outcome evaluations 60 88.2 write and/or monitor contracts with vendors 59 86.8 pay/approve council invoices 59 86.8 support/be involved in other community initiatives 59 86.8 enhance council networks through personal involvement 58 85.3 avenue of communication for new initiatives 58 85.3 secure and administer grants 58 85.3 prepare council budgets 57 83.8 conduct social marketing about collaboration 56 82.3 serve as catalyst for community efforts 57 83.8 oversee service coordination mechanism 57 83.8 recruit, train and engage family representatives 57 83.8 serve as information clearing house/resource coordinator 56 82.3 conduct social marketing related to awareness of issues 56 82.3 convene and facilitate council meetings 55 80.9 orchestrate/maneuver others in the interest of services 55 80.9 general fiscal administration 54 79.4 maintain relationships with stakeholders 53 77.9 information and referral agent 53 77.9 mobilize the community 52 76.5 facilitate service coordination 52 76.5 identify training needs of council and providers 50 73.5 serve as new program incubator 49 72.1 hire/supervise personnel 48 70.6 administer programming 43 63.2 serve as evidence based practice expert 43 63.2 prepare council purchase orders 45 66.2 provide general administrative support 45 66.2 support parent participants 40 58.8 table 6. area identified as greatest challenges impacting community practice role. challenge number percent recruiting, engage and train family representatives 23 33.8 fiscal administration 17 25.0 fund raising 13 19.1 collecting, interpreting and disseminating data 10 14.7 carry out rfp process for grants 10 14.7 parent advocacy 9 13.2 expert/gatekeeper to support evidence based practices 9 13.2 facilitate service coordination 9 13.2 social marketing to communicate need for collaboration 9 13.2 3 tasks in which less than half of coordinators were involved are not included in table 5. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1     june  2011       global  journal  for  community  psychology  practice,  http://www.gjcpp.org/     page  25     requested assistance focused on identifying effective programming to address specific community needs, information about social marketing techniques and strategies for engaging families in community problem solving. discussion the community support role appears to be a critical component of community problem solving efforts. most fcfc coordinators engaged in administrative and technical activities that might be described as supportive of direct service delivery consistent with the community support role. almost all coordinators said they participated in regional and state meetings, completed and submitted reports, represented their fcfcs at various meetings, secured and administered grants, prepared budgets, provided information and, in general, facilitated the community problem solving process. coordinators also engaged in a variety of technical activities including collecting and interpreting data; facilitating strategic planning; ensuring service coordination; and conducting and reporting outcome evaluations. challenges to effective collaborative problem solving included difficulties in engaging family members, fiscal administration, collecting and interpreting data and acting as the community expert regarding “evidence based” practices. in follow-up conversations, many coordinators indicated the need to develop enhanced technical skills related to the development and use of logic models and program evaluation. the types of administrative and technical activities and barriers perceived by fcfc coordinators provided some insight into the community support function as practiced by coordinators in ohio. this discussion also provides some insight into the more general processes though which effective and efficient interventions might be implemented at the community level. implications for community psychology practice and training collaborative community problem solving provides a formal process through which problems are identified, solutions implemented and progress evaluated. local fcfc coordinators in ohio are charged with facilitating local community collaborations designed to address issues that impact youth and families. it can be argued that fcfc coordinators have adopted key community support roles. such roles may provide viable career options for graduates of community psychology training programs who are interested in the application of skills to identify and solve community problems. many of the fcfc coordinators who participated in the survey project described in this paper were full time employees of local government or social service agencies. they received significant compensation in the form of salaries and benefits and preformed tasks consistent with the community support role. many had advanced degrees and approximately one-fifth had degrees in psychology. family and children first council coordinators often supervised other staff involved in the community support role and many had been engaged in collaborative community problem solving in one form or another for more than 10 years. given fcfc coordinators emphasis on technical skills such as evaluation, it can be argued that advanced training in evaluation and research, group facilitation and community planning will be requisites to the future provision of community support. the community support role would seem to be an ideal fit for community psychology practitioners. most community psychologists are well versed in theories of behavior change and intervention science. community psychologists understand the distinction between prevention and treatment and like public health practitioners are oriented toward large scale, population based, change strategies. such individuals are trained in research methodology and many have considerable knowledge of the program evaluation process. most are well prepared to translate scientific knowledge into a form that might be consumed by community problem solvers. there would appear to be significant opportunities for community psychology practitioners to engage in practice in the form of facilitating local problem solving efforts similar to the roles adopted by fcfc coordinators. given the number of community collaborations convened and operated over the last few decades, one might argue that there are many employment opportunities for well trained individuals able to facilitate such activities. it is equally clear that such roles are consistent with the values of community psychology. the society for community research and action (http://www.scra.27.org/) indicates that community psychologists build collaborative relationships with community members, groups and organizations to solve social problems. in addition, community psychology is described as influencing public policy, oriented toward social action, supporting community strengths and respecting diversity in the interest of promoting well-being. practicing community psychology in a manner consistent with the community support role would appear to be highly consistent with the values of community psychology. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1     june  2011     global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 training for individuals interested in assuming community practice roles might include those skills identified by fcfc coordinators including course work in group processes; facilitation; research and evaluation; planning; budgeting; communications; and social marketing. for the most part, these skills are highly consistent with the skills identified by scott (2007), julian (2008) and wolff (2001, 2010). thus trainees might enter a community psychology training program and gain the skills necessary to support collaborative community problem solving efforts. a graduate of such a program would be prepared to engage community members in the process of assessing needs and conditions; developing and implementing interventions to address identified needs; and evaluating progress toward community goals. experience suggests that facilitating such processes requires a great deal of skill and training. applied across an entire community and in a coordinated manner such efforts might provide the opportunity to eliminate duplication in services; allocate services where most needed; reallocate resources from ineffective programming to more effective programming; and generally provide for more effective and efficient systems to address human needs. community psychology can be in the forefront of the effort to promote social change through the application of community practice skills in support of community problem solving. however, training programs must assure that graduates who choose to be practitioners have access to a curriculum and experiences that provide the opportunity to acquire the community practice skills noted above. acknowledgments the authors would like to thank the ohio family and children first coordinators’ association for their efforts in addressing youth and family development issues in ohio. the association collected the survey data summarized in this article to assist in developing technical assistance plans to support local collaborations. trish frazzini and a team composed of association members authored the survey instrument. references elias, m. j. (1994). capturing excellence in applied settings: a participant conceptualizer and praxis explicator role for community psychologists. american journal of community psychology, 22, 293-318. feinberg, m.e., greenberg, m.t. & osgood, d.w. (2004). readiness, functioning and perceived effectiveness in community prevention coalitions: a study of communities that care. american journal of community psychology, 33 (3/4), 163-175. fetterman, d. (2002). empowerment evaluation, building communities of practice and a culture of learning. american journal of community psychology, 30 (1), 89-102. foster-fishman, p.g., cantillon, d., pierce, s.j. & van egeren, l.a. (2007). building an active citizenry: the role of neighborhood problems, readiness and capacity for change. american journal of community psychology. 39, 91-106. julian, d. a., hernandez, m. & hodges, s. (2006). introduction to exemplars of community practice. american journal of community psychology, 38. julian, d. a. (2006). defining community psychology practice: meeting the needs and realizing the dreams of the community. the community psychologist, 34, 66-70. julian, d. a. (2008). training local practitioners to engage in community practice roles. the community psychologist, 41, 31-34. kreger, m., brindis, c., manuel, d. m. & sassoubre, l. (2007). lessons learned in systems change initiatives: benchmarks and indicators. american journal of community psychology, 39, 301-320. ohio family and children first (1993). ofcf statute, orc 121.37. retrieved november 20, 2007, from http://www.ohiofcf.org/document/orc.pdf. partnerships for success. (2007). partnerships for success training manual. (available from partnerships for success academy, the ohio state university, 807 kinnear road, columbus, oh 43212.) scott, r. (2007). establishing core competencies for students in community psychology training. the community psychologist, 40, 38-41. wandersman, a., duffy, j., flaspohler, p., noonan, r., lubell, k., stillman, l., blachman, m., dunnville, r. & saul, j. (in press). bridging the gap between research and practice: an interactive systems framework for building capacity to disseminate and implement innovations. american journal of community psychology, 41, 171-181. weist, m., sander, m.a., walrath, c., link, b., nabors, l., adelsheim, s., moore, e., jennings, j. & carillo, k. (2005). developing principles for best practices in expanded school mental health. journal of youth and adolescence, 34 (1), 7-13. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume  2,  issue  1     june  2011     global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 27 wolff. (2001). a practitioners guide to successful coalitions. the american journal of community psychology, 29, 173-191. wolff. (2010). the power of collaborative solutions. new york: josey bass/john wiley. zakocs, r. c. & edwards, e. m. (2006). what explains community coalition effectiveness? a review of the literature. american journal of preventive medicine, 30, 351-361. microsoft word 2013-006-final-20131009.docx international perspectives on intimate partner violence susana helm, phd 1,2,3 charlene baker, phd 4 nayda e. morales díaz, ed. d. lpc 5 vivian rodríguez del toro, phd 6 milagros colón-castillo, ed.d 6 author notes: 1, 2 department of psychiatry, john a. burns school of medicine, university of hawai`i at mānoa, 677 ala moana blvd, suite 301, honolulu, hi 96814. helms@dop.hawaii.edu . 3 funding for the helm & baker projects includes the following: state of hawai‘i, department of health, sexual violence prevention program, maternal & child health branch and from the centers for disease control (5u49ce000749-03). 4 department of psychology, university of hawai`i at mānoa, honolulu, hi. 5 departamento de educación de puerto rico, yabucoa, pr. 6 universidad interamericana de puerto rico, recinto metropolitano, pr. keywords: intimate partner violence, teen dating violence, qualitative research, international recommended citation: helm, s., baker, c., morales diaz, n. e., rodriguez del toro, v., colón-castillo, m. (2013). international perspectives on intimate partner violence. global journal of community psychology practice, 4(3), 1-10. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 international perspectives on intimate partner violence abstract intimate partner violence (ipv) is a serious global public health concern. the goal of this paper is to provide, sideby-side, international perspectives on the problem(s) of ipv and solution(s), with a particular emphasis on community psychology research and practice. three perspectives are shared spanning the globe from the pacific (hawai`i) to the atlantic (puerto rico). while one article uses a more traditional focus on violence against women and domestic violence among adults, two articles focus on teen dating violence. this collection of invited articles is based on a prior presentation made at the iva conferencia internacional de psychologia comunitaria held in barcelona 2012. each set of authors has presented their unique study in a separate brief article, while the full paper concludes with a brief summary and implications for international action at the local level. keywords: intimate partner violence, teen dating violence, qualitative research, international introduction – international perspectives intimate partner violence (ipv) is a serious global public health concern. the goal of this paper is to provide international perspectives on the problem(s) of ipv and solution(s), with a particular emphasis on community psychology research and practice. following this brief introduction, three perspectives are shared spanning the globe from the pacific (hawai`i) to the atlantic (puerto rico). while one paper uses a more traditional focus on violence against women and domestic violence among adults, two papers focus on teen dating violence. this collection of invited papers is based on a prior presentation made at the iva conferencia internacional de psychologia comunitaria held in barcelona 2012 (helm, 2012), as well as fruitful conversations with gjcpp editor vincent francisco regarding the importance of international collaboration in community psychology research and practice. we wish to thank the conference co-presenters, as well as the conference organizers for promoting international collaboration and for inspiring this paper. the paper is organized with the adolescent articles first, followed by the adult article, and concluding with a brief summary1. brief article 1: experiencias de violencia en el noviazgo durante la adolescencia de mujeres en puerto rico2. resumen: la violencia contra las mujeres ha sido reconocida como una epidemia mundial. en parejas jóvenes la misma ha ido aumentando, pero escasean estudios relacionados con esta población. en esta presentación se discuten los resultados de una investigación cualitativa descriptiva-exploratoria sobre las experiencias de diez mujeres adultas víctimas de 1 while the papers are presented separately, there is a single reference section. 2 the english title is, “experiences of violence in dating relationships of women in puerto rico during their adolescence” violencia en su relación de noviazgo durante su adolescencia. se expone cómo fue la experiencia de violencia, los tipos y la reacción a la misma por parte de las mujeres. se discute el rol de los sistemas de apoyo: escuela, maestros/as y profesionales de ayuda; rol de la familia, padres, hermanos y familiares; y el de los pares en torno a la violencia en el noviazgo. se presenta además, la visión de las mujeres sobre los roles de género y su perspectiva en torno a la relación de pareja. las participantes hicieron una autoevaluación de su situación y expusieron los aprendizajes derivados de la experiencia de violencia en el noviazgo durante la adolescencia. se discuten recomendaciones de las mujeres que experimentaron las diferentes formas de violencia durante su relación de noviazgo en la adolescencia así como implicaciones y estrategias de prevención para educadores y profesionales de ayuda. introduction intimate partner violence is recognized as an epidemic, in which women are mostly the victims and men the perpetrators (amnesty international, 2011; rodriguez del toro, 2009; logan, walker, jordan & leukefeld, 2006; united nations general assembly, 2006; world health organization, 2006; astbury, 1999). however, dating violence in great measure has been neglected or ignored as a form of violence (montes, 2009; theriot, 2008). in puerto rico, dating violence hardly has been studied, although police statistics (tendenciaspr.com) indicate that young people are increasingly involved in intimate partner violence. therefore, the purpose of the present research is to describe and explore the experiences of violence in dating relationships from the perspective of adult women who were reflecting on their adolescent years. this article concludes with a set of recommendations based on those results and the extant literature. methods: qualitative research design the present study was conducted using a qualitative descriptive exploratory design, approved by the irb of global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 inter american university of puerto rico. the participants were ten women aged 25 to 39 that experienced intimate partner violence during their teenage years in puerto rico. participants were selected through flyers posted in public places such as universities, stores and churches and also using the “snow ball effect” or “chain method” in which participants referred other potential participants. data collection procedure. data collection was performed by qualitative semi-structured audiotaped interviews using pre-established guided questions. interviews were face-to-face and conducted privately with each participant. the research questions that guided this study focused on (1) how violence was experienced, (2) the role of parents, family members, school officials, and peers as a support system, and (3) the identification and description of the gender perspective (ideas and beliefs) of the participants. therefore, the interview questions focused on: the events and types of violence experienced; emotions and feelings associated with these events; the meaning that participants gave to their experiences; the role of the family, school officials and peers in the situation; and the impact of the experiences in the participants’ lives, among other. analysis. for the analysis, the responsive interview model and the technique of content analysis proposed by rubin and rubin (2005) was used. this model involves three stages: recognition, differentiation, and codification. in the recognition stage, the researcher identifies concepts, issues and events related to the phenomenon under investigation; the differentiation stage involves clarifying particular meanings of those components and looking for patterns and links between the concepts and issues surrounding the events; and the codification stage involves grouping together those relevant themes and events that addresses the research questions. relevant quotes are provided in the results section in spanish because interviews were conducted in spanish. the english translation is also provided, though slightly paraphrased. results and discussion results and discussion of these results are presented in tandem, rather than in separate sections. five categories emerged from the content analysis of the participants’ narratives: 1) experiences of violence; 2) reactions to dating violence; 3) role of support systems (family, peers, school officials ); 4) perspectives and gender roles regarding the dating relationship; and 5) selfevaluation and learning from the experiences of dating violence during adolescence. these categories are described below, along with a brief discussion of each. theme 1: experiences of violence. a history of domestic violence was found among half of the participants’ home while growing up, and also in their intimate partner’s home. other studies have shown this link between adolescent dating violence and exposure to domestic violence (johnson, et al., 2005; vézina and hébert, 2007; castro, 2004, among others). the cycle of violence (walker, 2009), which includes three stages, tension building, aggression (acute incident stage), and loving-contrition (reconciliation), was identified to occur in most of these relationships. as commonly reported among women who have experienced dating violence, the participants in the present study also reported all forms of violence: emotional-psychological, verbal, sexual, and physical (güenard & jiménez, 1998; halpern, et al., 2001; johnson, et al., 2005). the presence of drug and alcohol use by the aggressors was found to exacerbate the violence (vézina & hébert, 2007; rivera & rivera, 2006). one important finding was that these aggressors frequently used the car (e.g. speeding), as a form of coercion and restriction of liberty, as has been found in other studies (kreiter, 1999). all participants expressed difficulty in ending the violent relationship because of guilt, fear of reprisals, shame and various irrational beliefs that justified their partner’s violence: “…era una cosa increíble…se me trepaba encima (para lograr intimidad sexual) y era como, ¿y ahora, qué tú vas a hacer?...me marcaba las manos, se quedaban marcas…él me inmovilizaba…cuando yo accedí fue por manipulación de él; no fue voluntario…para mí fue tan traumático, que yo decía: ¿por qué la gente quiere tener relaciones sexuales? (“... it was an awful thing ... he sexually assaulted me and it was like, and now, what are you going to do? … the marks in my hands were obvious, he immobilized me ... when i agreed (to have sex) it was because of his ...manipulation. it was not voluntary ... for me it was so traumatic that i said: why do people want to have sex?”) theme 2: reactions to dating violence. among the effects of violence were low self-esteem, symptoms of depression, and physical and emotional changes. as part of the responses and coping strategies used most, participants tried to adapt and to reduce the violence by becoming submissive, changing lifestyles, lying, using false pretenses, crying, appealing to religion and spirituality for protection, and the use of legal strategies. it was also found that some participants responded with violence against their partners as a form of resistance. however these responses increased the violence from their partners: global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 “mira lo que tuve que inventarme para poder zafarme y que él se fuera…me dio el puño y ahí yo me caí y me hice que me desmayé. me quedé quieta, pensé éste se va a asustar y se va a ir y así pasó y ahí yo me levanté y corrí y él se me fue detrás…yo me metí para un monte, era de noche…” ("look what i had to do to get away from him ... once he punched me in the face and when i fell pretended to faint ... stood still, i thought he would be scared and leave, then i stood up and he appeared again and ran after me ... i went into the woods, it was at night ...") theme 3: role of support systems. regarding the support systems, the narratives of most participants suggested that although most of their parents had known what was happening in their daughters’ relationships, they had not warned, guided, intervened to protect them, nor advised them to break up with the abuser. some parents only got involved when the violence was physical or became a threat to their daughters’ lives. most siblings were perceived to have been supportive, but some became allies of the abusers. in three cases the boyfriends continued visiting the home, as a family friend, even after the dating relationship ended. regarding the role of the schools, as it has been shown elsewhere (montes, 2009; wan & bateman, 2007), it was found that teachers and support staff were not accessible or their intervention with the victims were indirect. that is to say, participants did not recognize school staff as sources of support to deal with these types of problems. they mentioned, among other things, that they felt that counselors and other school professionals were not available to them; that they thought that although some staff suspected violence, they preferred not to intervene, and to accept these events as a natural occurrences among young couples. however, most participants recognized that they underestimated the seriousness of their own situation. in her own words: “yo como que no entendía para qué ir a donde la consejera o la trabajadora social, yo subestimé la situación por la que yo estaba pasando, pero tampoco las profesionales de la escuela eran muy accesibles, me refiero en la información y los servicios que ofreces…yo sabía que estaban ahí, pero no sabía para qué funcionaban…” (i did not know why i would want/need to visit the counselor or social worker, i underestimated my situation, but anyway school staff was not very accessible, i mean regarding the information and services they offered ... i knew they were there but did not know what for ... ") regarding the role of peers, as found in other studies (smith & hill, 2009; toscano, 2007), most participants perceived women peers to have been more supportive than other people among them. however, some admitted to have isolated themselves from friends and peers in order to please their boyfriends. in another study, montes (2009) found a negative impact among adolescent women exposed to their peers’ ipv experiences, as explained by the social learning theory. this data is very critical precisely since peers are one of the primary identified sources of support in the present study. therefore, peers’ capacity to provide effective support is questionable if they themselves are victims of violent behaviors from their intimate partners. theme 4: gender perspective. participants in the present study primarily showed traditional gender role ideas and beliefs, which has been linked to female and male sexual stereotypes that still prevail in many societies (walker, 2009; castro, 2004). for example, some participants claimed responsibility for their victimization because they felt that they allowed the abuse. this type of self-blaming is a reflection of the prevailing social discourse that often blames the victims for choosing the abusive partner and for staying with him after the abuse. one participant words: “…a mí me enseñaron a que yo tenía que llegar señorita (virgen) al matrimonio, que si yo me entregaba a un hombre, pues ya nadie me va a querer, yo tenía ese tipo de mentalidad, este es el hombre con el que me tengo que quedar…” ("... i was taught that i had to be a virgin until marriage, that if i had pre-marital sex with a man, then nobody will want me or love me. i had that kind of mentality…that i have to remain with this man ...") theme 5: self-evaluation and learning. in relation to the emotions and feelings experienced after the break up, most participants reported “happiness and freedom” as prevailing emotions. their recommendations to other women included seeking immediate help and support, and to walk away from the relationship as soon as any form of violence or controlling behaviors from the partner begins. finally, the findings showed that these women learned to take control of their lives and to make their own decisions, including zero tolerance to violence. also, they were able to identify their personal strengths and to set goals for their lives as stated in the following excerpt: “ …aprendí que yo tengo que ser yo misma, me siento contenta de que la vida me premió y pude lograr lo que yo quería y dejé eso atrás y seguí caminando…el trato que me daba él no era el que yo merecía; dejarlo fue la mejor decisión…” global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 ("i learned that i have to be myself. i'm glad that life gave me the opportunity to get where i want to be. i left all what happened behind me and kept walking ... i didn’t deserve to be treated the way that he treated me. leaving him was the best decision i have made....”) clinical and community psychology practice recommendations school officials and professionals working with teens should address dating violence, including gender, ethical, legal and social topics, as part of prevention efforts. moreover, they need to find new strategies to be closer and empathic with students in order to educate them regarding the roles, functions and services they provide so that students feel free to request their assistance when necessary. school psychologists, counselors and other helping professionals need to become active advocates against teen dating violence. screening of dating violence should be a part of all intervention processes with adolescents. in school settings, this type of education should be integrated in academic courses, such as providing various activities to address the important role of peers and friends in the prevention of dating violence among adolescents. it is also recommended to implement programs in elementary school, aimed at prevention of violence, regarding gender equality and to acknowledge and respect differences among people. also such schoolbased interventions may aim to educate children about male and female social attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. in relation to services to parents and caregivers, it is recommended to increase awareness of violence prevention and identification; gender violence; intervention techniques in situations of aggression; the supportive role of siblings and family members as partners in prevention; and effective communication skills, among others. community-based agencies who work with adolescents should pay more attention to teen’s dating violence and risk factors. community-based agencies may contribute to the prevention of this social problem by ensuring the usage of lay language to alert and warn all people, regardless of their educational level or social class. church leaders can hold meetings and offer workshops about dating violence and prevention; integrating statistics and knowledge as part of outreach strategies as well as reviewing laws addressing this form of violence as an extension of the scope on intimate partner’s violence. finally, it is also important that government agencies include a gender perspective in public policies aimed to deal with intimate partner violence. brief article 2: professional development in dating violence prevention in hawai`i background & literature review although often unrecognized and marginalized, intimate partner violence among adolescents in the us goes by several names, for example ‘dating abuse’, ‘dating aggression’ or ‘dating violence’. for the purpose of this article, we will refer to the more commonly used ‘teen dating violence’ (tdv). dating violence among adolescents, like domestic violence among adults is a pattern of violent perpetration and/or victimization which may take a number of forms. these forms encompass 1) physical violence, including 2) sexual violence, and 3) emotional violence, including 4) the use of social electronic media and other forms of monitoring and control (baker & helm, 2010; mulford & giordano, 2008). dating violence among adolescents is a growing concern across many fields, such as community psychology, public health, social work, and counseling because there is consistent evidence that adolescents regularly must deal with this problem at home, school, and in the community. the preceding article by morales diaz (this paper) indicates both multi-setting as well as negative developmental impacts that dating violence during adolescence presents into adulthood. specific prevalence rates vary depending on the type and severity of violence as well as reports of perpetration versus victimization (hickman, jaycox, & aronoff, 2004; mulford & giordano, 2008). for example, in one study, overall prevalence rates of tdv perpetration was found to be 43% among boys and 51% for girls (sears, byers & price, 2007), while another study reported victimization rates of 24% for boys and 22% for girls (o’leary & slep, 2003). prevalence rates of psychological perpetration have been reported to be as high as 59% of boys and 53% of girls admitting to minor psychological aggression perpetration (i.e., do something to spite partner), and 22% of boys and 23% of girls admitting to severe psychological aggression perpetration in their relationship (i.e., destroy partner’s property, scott & straus, 2007). reports of physical and sexual violence perpetration were lower but still significant, ranging from 7% for having used severe sexual coercion (i.e., force partner to have sex by hitting, holding them down, using a weapon) to 28% for having used minor physical violence against a partner (scott & straus, 2007). a similar pattern in victimization rates has been reported by youth in hawai`i, with psychological victimization most prevalent (60%), followed by physical and sexual violence victimization (29% and 21%, respectively; baker & helm, 2011). in addition, global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 hawai`i dating adolescents have reported high rates of monitoring and controlling behaviors via social electronic media (baker & helm, 2011). monitoring and controlling included experiences of both perpetration and victimization regarding partners keeping track of each other, going through their partner’s cell phone to check messages/texts, and going through their partner’s personal website to check on who he/she is communicating with (rates for these experiences ranged from 48-51% for girls and 30-34% for boys; baker & helm, 2011). despite these alarming trends, tdv is not a well recognized form of violence in the united states. to raise awareness and to help move our state toward prevention, we have developed curricula and community-based professional development activities as part of the asian/pacific islander youth violence prevention center at the university of hawai`i. in this article we highlight our 1) research and dissemination activities, including 2) university curricula for undergraduates and graduates that emphasize workshop development, implementation, evaluation, and technical assistance; and 3) community training that emphasizes definitions, risk, protection, consequences, and program & policy implementation & evaluation. methods: hawai`i research and science-to-service impetus. the research overview presented here is based on three hawai`i data sets. the first data set was derived from focus group interviews with a convenience sample of high school aged youth (for details see helm & baker, 2011). the second data set was derived from schoolwide surveys from two high schools regarding youth violence, including tdv (for details see baker & helm, 2011). finally, the third data set was derived from the hawai`i youth risk behavior survey, which is part of a national surveillance effort, and includes a single violence victimization item (for details see zaha, helm, baker, & hayes, 2012). from these data, we have found that psychological dating violence victimization and perpetration is below high school students’ threshold for violence (baker & helm, 2010), despite the fact that it is most prevalent among both girls and boys (baker & helm, 2011). like other forms of violence, statewide data indicate that tdv victimization is linked with substance use, as indicated by increased odds of reporting tdv when also reporting early substance use, marijuana use, and multiple drug use (zaha et al. 2012). furthermore, there is emerging evidence that peer-to-peer violence may be dating-related and tdv likely is peer-influenced (helm, baker, & iskandar, under review). finally, the research is promising in that youth have endorsed schooland community-based dating violence prevention (baker & helm, 2010). however, understanding ethnocultural diversity is critical in decision-making regarding prevention programming, particularly the need for deep structure, culturally-grounded interventions. analyses of narrative data from focus groups among youth in hawai‘i indicated that negative ethnocultural stereotypes and discrimination may be experienced by certain ethnic groups regarding violence (helm & baker, 2011). conceptually, this may result in differential outcomes for those groups when participating in violence prevention programs. stereotyped youths may experience a heightened awareness of these negative generalizations held by others, and respond to the intervention in ways that serve to minimize negative perceptions, for example. as community psychologists, we advocate for ‘giving science away’ (miller, 1969; cited in zimbardo, 2004). as such, we returned to the schools and communities where the data were collected. we presented these findings in high school faculty meetings; ‘ohana nights where parents and families were invited to the school for dinner, presentations, and fellowship; and school health fairs in which we created interactive games for students. at a certain point the demand for these presentations was overwhelming! we needed a scienceto-service strategy. through conversations with our state of hawai`i department of health partners, we secured funding to develop and teach a series of graduate and undergraduate courses in community interventions with a specific focus on tdv. results university curricula and community-based professional development the purpose of the university curricula was to create and disseminate a tdv prevention professional development program for staff in youth-serving organizations across the state of hawai`i (helm, baker, luthy, et al. 2012). to accomplish this, a set of university courses were created. course readings highlighted prevalence of tdv, risk and protective factors, correlates, prevention science, and workshop implementation and evaluation. graduate and undergraduate students enrolled together in a once weekly seminar, where grad students also gained mentoring experience, while undergrads became familiar with graduate level studies. a total of 16 students participated, many of whom participated for more than one semester. the first of four courses was designed for students to draft the contents of a train-the-trainer manual, and accompanying powerpoint slides for a community workshop. students in the second semester refined the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 draft and pilot tested it with managers and project coordinators of youth serving organizations. during the third semester students incorporated pilot test feedback, and co-facilitated one workshop. during the final of four semesters, students provided technical assistance to trained service providers, so that community trainers were able to modify our curriculum and workshop to suit the needs of their own organization and staff, as well as to evaluate their workshops for program improvement purposes. as described above, the community training workshop was designed to train direct service providers in dating violence awareness and prevention by using a train-the-trainer model. given the results indicating a drug use and tdv link, we targeted organizations receiving funds for youth substance use prevention and treatment, and also coordinated professional development credits for substance abuse prevention specialists. in addition to the pilot-test participants, sixty-six community and school-based direct service staff were trained. with travel expenses covered by the hawai`i youth services network and the host community-based organizations, we conducted trainings on the islands of kauai, o`ahu, molokai, and hawai`i. workshop evaluation results indicated that not only were participants very satisfied with the workshop, trainees gained in knowledge from preto postworkshop about prevalence rates in particular, as well as risk and protective factors. conclusion teen dating violence in hawai`i is a serous problem, as it is in puerto rico and elsewhere in the us and globally. with support from our state department of health as well as the centers for disease control and prevention, we have been able to advance our understanding of the extent and nature of this problem. however, current epidemiology of tdv emphasizes prevalence data on the specific acts of violence that teens experience and perpetrate. while several of our studies inform the context in which tdv occurs, this information was based on youths’ perceptions of tdv, as opposed to actual experiences. to fill the science to practice gap, future research will need to examine the context in which tdv occurs according to youth who characterize their prior relationship as having been problematic and possibly abusive (baker, helm, et al, unpublished data; morales diaz, this paper). this additional research will improve our community psychology practice in terms of developing and disseminating efficacious prevention and intervention strategies. brief article 3: experiencias de violencia de parte de sus esposos en mujeres de clase socioeconómica alta en puerto rico3 resumen: la violencia contra las mujeres en relaciones íntimas de pareja es un problema de salud reconocido mundialmente. esta violencia se manifiesta en diversas formas, como verbal, física, psicológica, sexual hasta la más extrema, el feminicidio. estadísticas de p.r. entre el 1995-2009 evidencian un promedio de 20 mil querellas anuales y solicitudes de órdenes de protección mediante la ley 54 de 1989para la prevención e intervención con la violencia doméstica. entre el 84 90 por ciento de estos casos las víctimas son mujeres. en los últimos años han aumentado los feminicidios. la investigación se concentra en estudiar mujeres víctimas pertenecientes a la clase socioeconómica media y baja. el foco de esta presentación es analizar los datos de una investigación fenomenológica conducida con 12 mujeres víctimas de violencia de pareja en matrimonios de clase social alta. los resultados demuestran que estas mujeres se ven forzadas a la secretividad por presión familiar y social para mantener la imagen de familia adinerada en una fachada de civilidad y apariencias, mientras experiencian toda clase de violencia de parte de sus esposos. nuestra presentación enfatiza el rol de los profesionales de ayuda para empoderar a estas mujeres y presentamos estrategias de prevención y educación para promover la equidad de género. brief introduction and literature review the amplitude and multiple forms of violence against women documented around the world together with feminist activism allowed the united nations organization (2006) to declare it as a health problem of epidemic proportions. the un declaration also recognized that violence against women is a global, systemic problem rooted in historical inequities between men and women and structural imbalances of power. in 1993, the un general assembly adopted the elimination of all forms of violence against women as a formal declaration (un general assembly, 2006). this declaration emphasized the settings of occurrence ranging from the family and community, to institutional violence perpetrated or condoned by the states. as a result, this world organization and others (amnesty international, 2011; human rights watch, 2007) recognized violence against women as a human rights issue and requested all nations to develop public 3 the english title is, “experiences of intimate partner violence of women in upscale marriages in puerto rico.” global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 policies and affirmative actions to eradicate this problem. intimate partner violence (ipv) is a consistent definition adopted to describe physical, sexual or psychological harm by a current or former partner or spouse (saltzman, fanslow, mcmahon & shelley, 2002). other terms used in the literature on adults are domestic violence, domestic abuse, and spousal abuse. as stated in the prior two articles (helm & baker, morales diaz, this paper), the types of violence perpetrated range from verbal, emotional/psychological, physical, sexual, to homicide. in puerto rico, yearly statistics between 1995 to 2009 show an average of 20 thousand police reports and orders of protection requested by the victims of ipv (tendenciaspr, 2010). these protections are provided within law 54 domestic violence law of 1989. in the majority (84% to 93%) of those cases, the victims are women. there has been an increase of women victims of homicides associated with ipv in the last decade (tendenciaspr, 2010). consequences of ipv have been associated with a variety of physical and mental health problems among victims (e.g. astbury, 1999; krug et al., 2002; picó alfonso, 2005; rodríguez del toro, 2007; ulla díez et al, 2009). a review of the literature (e.g. johnson & ferraro, 2000; un, 2006; logan, walker, jordan & leukefeld, 2006; weitzman, 2000) showed that research on ipv have studied poor or middle class women. but very few studies have considered this form of violence in women of upper social classes in general, and none in puerto rico. to address this gap, we conducted a qualitative study with the purpose of discovering from among upper class women in their own voices about their experiences of violence from their partners. the following four question domains were established: (1) how participants describe the experiences of violence perpetrated by their partners, (2) what types of violence occurred, (3) what strategies do women victims use to deal with the violence, and (4) what meanings do participants ascribe to their experiences with ipv. this study was approved by the institutional review board (irb) of inter american university in puerto rico to guarantee the protection of human subjects. methodology the methods are described here in brief. a qualitative study was conducted using a phenomenological design to interview 12 women who had experienced ipv in upscale marriages. the women were recruited with the assistance of a commercial newspaper, a public radio program and flyers posted at various facilities, such as medical offices and beauty parlors among the san juan metropolitan area in puerto rico. a “snow ball” or “chain effect” method (participants referred other possible subjects to researchers) also was used. at the time of the interview, all participants had ended the relationship with the abusive partner. semi-structured individual, face-to-face interviews were conducted by each researcher with the aid of guided questions. each interview lasted between 90 minutes to 2 hours, and were later transcribed verbatim. the participants ranged from 41-65 years old; were married between 5-30 years; age at time of marriage ranged 18-37 years old; had 0-5 children with their spouses; all had college level studies, some with graduate degrees including two with doctoral degrees. all spouses were professionals, e.g. lawyers, physicians/dentists, business owners. the technique proposed by wolcott (1994) was used to analyze the content of the women’s narratives and to establish the categories that emerged. this is a three step codification system for qualitative data analyses: description, analyses, and interpretation. description refers to the objective presentation of the narratives including facts, people’s attributes, and behaviors involved in the events. in the second step, analyses, the researcher identifies inter-relations among the various facts, components, attributes and themes within the narratives of all the participants. the purpose is to determine the relationship among the various components interacting to produce the phenomenon under investigation (e.g. ipv). the third step involves searching for the meaning of the phenomenon within the context in which it occurs. results and discussion results and brief discussion of these results are presented in tandem. content analyses performed on the 12 interviews resulted in six categories, which are detailed below: (1) types of violence; (2) cycle of violence; (3) effects of violence; (4) gender roles (5) coping strategies; and (6) meanings and learning experiences. in terms of the first category, it was found that 10 participants were the victims of all forms of violence (verbal, physical; emotional/psychological and sexual). only two participants had not experienced physical or sexual violence in their relationships. emotional and psychological violence included humiliations; threats to take from them their children, money and home; showing a gun or a blade; threats of homicide/suicide; name calling such as whore, crazy, bitch, bad mother; breaking and throwing personal objects; social isolation; restriction of liberty; infidelities; irrational jealousy; false accusations of infidelity; lowering their self esteem; and forbidding them to study or work. physical violence included pushing her around, pulling global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 their hair; biting, punching her body or face; slapping her face; breaking their clothes; squeezing her arms, etc. two of these women required medical attention to deal with their injuries. in these cases where medical attention was required, neither of the participants accused their husband of assault for fear of retaliation, and to avoid damage to the family social image and their children’s social and economic status as an upscale family. the experiences of sexual violence included forced sex while husband was intoxicated; sex without consent; suggesting sex with other people, and other sexual practices that women refused; degrading their body images, calling them frigid or lesbian. regarding the second theme, the repetitive cycle of violence, described in 1979 by walker (2009) was evidenced in the narratives of all 12 cases studied. as described above by morales diaz in the opening article in this paper, this refers to three phases (1) accumulation of tension, (2) aggression, and (3) reconciliation. according to walker, “during the first phase there is a gradual escalation of tension” (p. 91) in which the aggressor shows dissatisfaction and hostility in various discrete forms (e.g. words, mean behaviors) but not in an extreme or explosive manner. in the aggression phase, the acute violent incidents happen, as a result of the accumulation of tension built up during the previous phase. finally, in the third phase the aggressor usually apologizes, tries to find excuses for his behavior often blaming the victim for provoking him; gives her gifts and or behaves in loving and remorseful ways in order to gain the woman’s forgiveness and compliance. in her research with battered women, walker found that these women want to believe the aggressor’s promises of change and renew their hope that the violence is not going to happen again, at least early on in the relationship. one important finding in the present study is that participants explained that these men did not ask forgiveness nor show remorse after the aggression. women indicated that after the violent acts, their spouses typically brought them expensive gifts, invited them to travel, to dance or dinner; bought them a new car, sent expensive flower arrangements, offered to redecorate the house and/or gave them blank checks as a way to gain back their acceptance and compliance. a third theme regarding the effects of ipv emerged in alignment with walker’s battered women syndrome (walker, 2009). among the effects of ipv, it was found that most women showed signs of the battered women syndrome, such as depression; low self esteem; feelings of helplessness and hopelessness; anxiety; panic attacks and various somatic complaints associated with this syndrome (headaches, nervousness; stomach pains; gastro intestinal problems; insomnia, loss of appetite, etc.). also, participants described negative effects in the children of all the cases studied, such as emotional, behavioral and academic problems. the fourth category that emerged, gender roles, showed the presence of traditional beliefs associated with sexual roles of both men and women. women were expected to fulfill the role of wife and mother at the expense of their personal and professional development. eleven of the participants believed their main role was to preserve the family by “saving their marriages at all cost” and to sacrifice for their children’s well being including staying in an unhappy marriage. each of the twelve women also believed in romantic love and that a man provides security. most participants described the man’s main role as provider and head of the family and identified the men as believing in “machismo” (ideology of latin male predominance). regarding the fifth category, coping strategies used by the participants included changing and adapting their behavior to comply with husbands’ demands; protecting social image; seeking professional help; seeking sources of support; starting parallel lives within the marriage. regarding living parallel lives, women gave various examples, such as starting a career of their own; doing voluntary work and/or assuming leadership roles (e.g. president of pta) at their children’s schools; making family trips with their children without their husbands; taking college courses or going for another degree. these coping strategies appear to have opened the door for these women to reclaim their identity and a sense of autonomy necessary to finally free themselves from the abusive relationships. finally, regarding meanings and learning experiences, all participants recognized their capacity to live a happy life on their own. for example several participants expressed, “i don’t need a man to protect me or to be happy.” all participants mentioned having found peace, happiness, and spirituality; and saw their experiences as a learning process. all of them recommended more gender education to youngsters and for women to be more alert to recognize signs of violence in men during the dating period. moreover, several participants used the phrase “women need to watch for red flags” in reference to male behaviors and personal characteristics and beliefs (e.g. machismo) associated with a violent personality. this seemed to be a sense of hindsight they gained in retrospect about their partners and the ipv experienced in their marriages. implications and recommendations the present study contributed to the field of ipv prevention and intervention with evidence to reject the general assumption that ipv does not happen in upper global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 4, issue 3 october 2013 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 scale couples. the fact that these men did not ask forgiveness or show remorse, as is common in male abusers in ipv studies with poor or middle class couples, points to the need for practitioners to use different strategies in working with male offenders and women victims in upscale marriages and intimate relationships. this is the first study of its kind in puerto rico, and perhaps in latin america. as such, it opens the door for further quantitative research with upper scale victims and aggressors. for example, there is a need to study how money, social power, family social image and other related factors interact with the phenomenon of ipv among upscale couples. furthermore, this study supports the concept that socially learned traditional gender ideas/beliefs and patriarchal values are found at the root of the violent behaviors manifested in ipv. as a result it is urgent that parents, teachers and authority figures teach children and adolescents to respect and treat women as equals; strategies for self restraint, and how to effectively deal with their emotions. schools and communities should develop programs and activities that educate youngsters in gender role equality and to eradicate romantic myths regarding love and relationships. for example, the belief that jealousy is a manifestation of love; that a man provides stability and security to a woman’s life, and that it is mainly a woman’s duty and responsibility to make the couple’s relationship work and keep the family together. finally, women victims can become advocates in community psychology social action efforts to address ipv. summary – international perspectives traditionally, intimate partner violence incurs the most harm upon girls and women as victims, as pointed out in both brief articles from puerto rico and unequivocally stated by the united nations. however, the hawai`i article indicates that among adolescents it appears that girls and boys are both victims and perpetrators, at least across certain forms of violence. further international research is warranted to gain a better understanding of gender-based violence. in terms of adolescent ipv, both the hawai`i and the puerto rico articles suggest that schools, families, and peers have the potential to serve as protective factors, but improved efforts are required to help fulfill this role; as ambivalence or worse among schools, parents, and peers represent risk. furthermore, as one of the few studies to explore ipv in upscale marriages, it is important to highlight that violence occurs across all socio-economic strata, but appears to be unique in some respects and these dynamics must be explored more deeply in order to guide future community psychology informed prevention and clinical practice. methodologically, these articles highlight the importance of qualitative approaches when learning about understudied phenomena such as ipv. this is particularly important for building the knowledge base for understudied phenomena as experienced by understudied populations such as adolescents, latinas, pacific peoples, and women in upscale marriages. finally, each of these studies also points to the importance of practice-inspired research and science-toservice models. a global community psychology research and practice perspective can influence both international policy, such as the united nations strong stance against violence against women, as well as local policy in terms of public awareness and the need to invest in prevention and intervention. references amnistía internacional (2011). el estado de los derechos humanos en el mundo. españa: editorial de amnistía internacional. astbury, j. 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(2008). conceptual and methodological considerations for assessment and prevention of adolescent dating violence and stalking at school. children and schools, 30 (4), 223-232. ulla diez, s.,velázquez escutía, c., notario pacheco, b., solera martínez, m., valero caracena, n., & olivares contreras, a. (2009). prevalence of intimate partner violence and its relationship to physical and psychological health indicators. international journal of clinical health psychology, 9 (3), 411-427. united nation general assembly (2006). in-depth study of all forms of violence against women. report of the secretary general. accedido en http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/484e58702.ht ml . vézina, j., & hébert, m. (2007). risk factors for victimization in romantic relationships of young women. trauma, violence, & abuse, 8, 33-66. wan, m. w. & bateman, w. (2007). adolescents and intimate partner violence: evaluating a brief school-based education programme. international journal of health promotion and education, 45(1). accedido en http://www.questia.com/library/1g1159494058/adolescents-and-intimate-partnerviolence-evaluating walker, l. e. a. (2009). the battered woman syndrome. (3rd.ed.). n.y: springer pub. weitzman, s. (2000). not to people like us. n.y: basic books wolcott, h. f. (1994). transforming qualitative data: description, analysis and interpretation. ca: sage publications world health organization (2006). gender and women’s mental health. gender disparities and mental health: the facts. ginebra: division of mental health. zimbardo, p.g. (2004). does psychology make a significant difference in our lives ? american psychologist, 59(5), 339-351. the power of community: the role of community-based organizations in mitigating covid-19-related impacts on well-being among south florida's minoritized populations brittney r. davis1, brittany a. jaso2, ashli s. cleveland3, laura p. kohn-wood4, aaron s. heller5, and kilan c. ashad-bishop6 keywords: covid-19, community-based organizations, community well-being, socioemotional well-being, mixed methods research author biographies: brittney r. davis, is a student-centered, equity-focused community psychologist and education research analyst who operates within a transformative paradigm in service of education systems change. through equitycentered research and evaluation methods, her work supports educators, practitioners, and other stakeholders as they critically question and transform the physical, digital, and social environments in which minoritized students learn to promote academic and socioemotional well-being. brittany a. jaso, is a clinical psychologist and researcher. her work focuses on utilizing digital tools to increase access to evidence-based care in real-world behavioral health settings. ashli s. cleveland, is a pre-med, postbaccalaureate student at the university of texas at arlington. during the term of this research, ashli earned her bachelor of science in education from the school of education and human development at the university of miami. her research interests include child psychology, race relations, and intersectionality. laura p. kohn-wood, is currently a professor and dean of the school of education and human development at the university of miami. dr. kohn-wood’s research program race, ethnicity, culture and promotion of strengths (recaps) focuses on race, ethnicity, and culture in relation to the experience of psychological phenomena among diverse populations, with an emphasis on race-based protective factors and the promotion of positive coping and mental health among african americans. aaron s. heller, is a clinical psychologist and affective neuroscientist. his work integrates neuroimaging, and real-time mobile health (mhealth) methods to track emotion and behavior in humans to better understand the 1 center for education evaluation & research, rti international 2 practice research network, behavioral health department, reliant medical group 3 college of science, university of texas at arlington 4 department of educational & psychological studies, university of miami 5 department of psychology, university of miami 6 sylvester comprehensive cancer center, university of miami global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 bio-behavioral mechanisms that give rise to the development of depression and anxiety. kilan c. ashad-bishop, is a cancer biologist and epidemiologist whose work explores social and systemic determinants of health disparities. during the term of this research, dr. ashad-bishop was a postdoctoral associate in the university of miami school of education and human development and the director of college access for breakthrough miami. recommended citation: davis, b. r., jaso, b. a., cleveland, a. s., kohn-wood, l. p., heller, a. s., & ashad-bishop, k. c. (2023). the power of community: the role of community-based organizations in mitigating covid-19-related impacts on wellbeing among south florida’s minoritized populations. global journal of community psychology practice, 14(2), 1 18. retrieved from, (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: brittney r. davis, rti international, email: brdavis@rti.org. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:brdavis@rti.org global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the power of community: the role of community-based organizations in mitigating covid-19-related impacts on well-being among south florida's minoritized populations abstract the rapid closure of schools and businesses during the covid-19 pandemic has had a significant impact in south florida, highlighting diverse challenges to community wellbeing. community-based organizations (cbos) have served as a source of support for community members, particularly in stressful times. using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, and in collaboration with breakthrough miami, a cbo committed to addressing the educational opportunity gap in miami-dade county, we conducted a study to assess challenges to the well-being of systematically minoritized families during the heart of the covid-19 pandemic. the study included longitudinal survey data collected via ecological momentary assessment and in-depth interviews with breakthrough miami families to gather richer and nuanced data regarding indicators of well-being and cbo engagement. quantitative results indicated that as perceived stress increased over time, so too did emotional and informational support. follow-up qualitative interviews indicated that 100% of families identified breakthrough miami as a source of academic support during the pandemic. additionally, families cited the important role breakthrough miami played beyond their standard academic programs and services in coping with the most significant sources of stress reported through the pandemic: meeting basic needs and threats to socioemotional well-being. implications for cbos are addressed. introduction global crises, such as the emergence and transmission of covid-19, can have a cascading effect on children and their families. the disruption of family rituals, roles, routines, and relationships can directly affect children and the well-being of everyone in the household (denham, 2003; marsh et al., 2020; spagnola & fiese, 2007). communities of color, in particular, experienced disproportionate impacts to health, financial, academic, and career disruptions (gemelas et al., 2021; gray et al., 2020; khazanchi et al., 2020; krouse, 2020; kuhfeld et al., 2022). caregivers and educators also experienced undue stress to adapt to facilitating virtual learning, which may have reduced their ability to model positive leadership (prime et al., 2020) and resulted in negative academic outcomes among children (morganstein & ursano, 2020). the pandemic also affected psychological well-being, potentially increasing the prevalence of or worsening pre-existing psychological conditions such as demoralization, loss of faith, distractibility, decreased perceptions of safety, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors among many others (morganstein & ursano, 2020). negative psychological outcomes may have been further compounded by school closures affecting students’ receipt of school-based mental health services, along with other essential provisions like free and reducedprice lunch programs that help combat food insecurity among many students (golberstein et al., 2020). consequently, understanding systematically minoritized communities’ experiences during the pandemic, including the many physical, social, and psychological consequences of the covid-19 quarantine can help community-based organizations that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 serve these populations better configure their efforts to promote well-being despite the many challenges community members face. the role of community-based organizations in times of crisis community-based organizations are represented at the micro societal level for individuals and communities (bronfenbrenner, 1979) and are thus positioned to possess the unique understanding of local geographic and social context necessary to design and implement interventions and to create community impact (trickett, 2002). community impact is the consequence of multiple intentionally designed processes to create lasting social change in communities, including conducting community assessments, leveraging community and sociocultural contextual knowledge, fostering collaborative relationships between interventionists and the community, and facilitating community empowerment (trickett, 2002). the concept is particularly useful in prevention work, as it honors the resilience and adaptability within communities to confront constant change and capitalizes on community strengths to build capacity to address future challenges (trickett, 2009). in the case of covid-19, the lack of global preparedness highlighted the necessity for creating conditions for community impact, as communities contended with unprecedented challenges and often without necessary resources. community-based organizations already play a pivotal role in meeting the needs of community members, and their work can be leveraged to create community impact. in times of crisis, community-based organizations have historically served as valuable assets for addressing community well-being. according to a study conducted on communities affected by the boston marathon bombings, for example, the presence of community-based organizations in the aftermath was associated with fewer impairments, fears, and worries as the organizations were often allocated resources and support from response initiatives (jose, holman, silver, 2019). in another study that focused on the role of community-based organizations in regard to covid-19 responses in zhejiang, organizations quickly mobilized people and resources and liaised between communities and their local governments, thus allowing efficient distribution of resources that aided in quicker community recovery (cheng, yu, shen, huang, 2020). due to the critical positioning of such organizations that allows them to operate as institutional agents within and between societal power structures, making a commitment to creating conditions for community impact is an essential step toward ensuring communities are better equipped to address future crises. an affiliate of the national breakthrough collaborative, breakthrough miami is a community-based organization that uses a “students-teaching-students” model to enhance post-secondary education outcomes among traditionally underrepresented students. breakthrough miami, which recently celebrated 30 years of service, recruits fifth grade students for a seven-year matriculation in the program that concludes with high school matriculation and college acceptance. through programs such as weekend and summer academic enrichment programming, breakthrough miami serves roughly 1300 south florida students. the current study the current study leverages the communityuniversity partnership existing between the university of miami and breakthrough miami, a community-based academic enrichment organization that serves secondary-level students in south florida who meet at least two of five established risk factors: ethnic/racial minority, free/reduced lunch status, single-family household, first generation to attend college, and first http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 language other than english. the study addresses the following research questions: 1) what were the impacts of covid-19 on the health and well-being of the vulnerable south florida communities that breakthrough miami serve; and 2) what role did breakthrough miami play in mitigating these impacts? the research team utilized a convergent parallel mixed methods design that included a widely distributed longitudinal cellphone based ecological momentary assessment (ema). with the emergence of smartphone technology, emas have been utilized by researchers to better understand the impact of experienced events in individuals’ lives as they occur, such as understanding the direct and negative impacts of watching covid-19 news on same-day and next-day worry and feelings of hopelessness (kellerman et al., 2022). this assessment type was critical in gaining a rapid understanding of community members’ experiences during the early stages of the pandemic. the results of the ema were used to inform qualitative data collection, which included interviews with breakthrough miami families and students. this design enabled an in-depth, nuanced investigation of families’ experiences throughout the covid19 pandemic. method quantitative procedures, measures, and participants procedures. participant cell phone numbers were retrieved from the breakthrough miami consultant. participants who elected to participate in the ema portion of the study provided informed consent before responding to their first survey. participants were then sent sms text messages once in july, once in august, and once in september, approximately 5 weeks apart (figure 1). the text messages contained a brief sentence explaining that this was for the breakthrough miami program asking participants to, “complete the survey below.” the messages were generated using the automated messaging program filemaker pro (filemaker, santa clara, ca). participants were paid $10 for each survey they completed, giving them the opportunity to earn up to $30 total. payment was distributed using amazon gift cards. figure 1. visual depiction of the study timeline note. visual depiction of the study timeline, including important pandemic-related timepoints. recruitment period for participation in breakthrough miami lasted from november 2019 through the end of april 2020. the stay-at-home order was enacted by the cdc in march 2020. ema surveys were distributed once a month to participants in the months of july, august, and september. qualitative interviews were conducted via zoom http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 from august through september 2020. a final check-in with participants in the study occurred in june 2021 where participants offered feedback and comments regarding the results from the study. measures perceived stress. the perceived stress scale10 (cohen & williamson, 1988) is a 10-item adaptation from the original 14-item perceived stress scale (cohen et al., 1983). this survey measures the degree to which situations in one’s life are perceived as stressful. participants are asked to respond to each question using a 5-point likert scale ranging from 0 (never) to 4 (very often) over the past month. total scores range from 0 to 40, with higher scores corresponding to greater perceived stress. this scale demonstrates high internal consistency (cronbach’s alpha = 0.89; roberti et al., 2006). domain-specific life satisfactionfixed form. the domain-specific life satisfactionfixed form is a supplemental measure from the nih emotion toolbox (gershon et al., 2013). it includes 13 self-report items that examine feelings and attitudes about satisfaction across specific domains within one’s life (e.g., health, family, work, self-care, etc.). responses are given using a 5-point likert scale that range from 0 (not at all) to 4 (very much). total scores range from 0 to 52, with higher scores corresponding to greater life satisfaction. this scale demonstrates high internal consistency (cronbach’s alpha = > 0.9; gershon et al., 2013). emotional support. emotional support was measured using the emotional support scale from the nih emotion toolbox (gershon et al., 2013). it is a 4-item self-report measure that examines the perceived presence of emotional support from others. responses are given using a 5-point likert scale that range from 0 (never) to 4 (always). total scores range from 0 to 16, with higher scores corresponding to greater perceived emotional support. this scale demonstrates high internal consistency (cronbach’s alpha = > 0.87; gershon et al., 2013). informational support. informational support was measured using the informational support scale from the nih emotion toolbox (gershon et al., 2013). it is a 4-item selfreport measure that examines the perceived presence of informational support from others (e.g. i get useful advice about important things in life). responses are given using a 5-point likert scale that range from 0 (never) to 4 (always). total scores range from 0 to 16, with higher scores corresponding to greater perceived informational support. this scale demonstrates high internal consistency (cronbach’s alpha = > 0.85; gershon et al., 2013). participants. ema surveys were distributed to all willing participants during each wave of the study. the sample size for each wave decreased over time due to study attrition: wave 1 sample consisted of 98 responses, wave 2 consisted of 54 responses, and wave 3 consisted of 42 responses. participant responses were identified by the phone number used to respond to each ema survey and then assigned a randomized id number. within each wave, some participants were unable to complete the entire survey. we did not identify any factors that distinguished attrition rates. a table depicting attrition and survey completion is shown in table 1. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 table 1 distribution of responses per wave by survey measure total # of response s # repeat responder s (% sample) # responses on perceived stress scale (% sample) # responses on emotional support scale (% sample) # responses on informationa l support scale (% sample) # responses on life satisfaction scale (% sample) wave 1 98 n/a 81 (83%) 77 (79%) 77 (79%) 92 (94%) wave 2 54 37 (69%) 50 (93%) 50 (93%) 50 (93%) 52 (96%) wave 3 42 17 (40%) 38 (90%) 38 (90%) 38 (90%) 38 (90%) qualitative procedures, measures, and participants procedures. per the recommendations of the breakthrough miami consultant to the community-university partnership, families were invited to participate in the qualitative portion of the study, which entailed 60+minute zoom interviews for which participants signed up during available times via a calendly page set up by the last author that automatically synced with the first author’s calendar. the consultant and last author liaised with participants prior to interview times to confirm appointments and introduced the first author to participants at the start of each interview session to establish familiarity. after providing oral and written consent and oral and written assent in instances where a breakthrough miami student participated in the interview, participants completed a 60+-minute interview — specific interview time varied by individual participants. participants were compensated with $10 amazon gift cards after completing the interviews. the interviews were audioand video-recorded and automatically uploaded to the zoom online cloud repository (n = 9); the audio was automatically transcribed via zoom. transcripts and interviewer notes were coded. measures. in response to the quantitative data collected prior to the interviews, the first author designed qualitative interview questions to correspond with the impact of covid-19 on the following measures as defined through collaboration with the research team and breakthrough miami employees who had administered a largescale needs assessment prior to the study: basic needs, socioemotional well-being, and engagement with community-based organizations. basic needs. families were asked how covid-19 impacted their abilities to meet their basic needs, which was defined collaboratively as access to safe housing, food, healthcare, employment, and transportation. in response to initial interviews, this measure was expanded to include access to childcare and wi-fi given the remote nature of work and school during the pandemic. socioemotional well-being. families were asked how covid-19 impacted their http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 socioemotional well-being, which included questions about the state of their social and mental health. this included describing covid-19-related stressors and the coping mechanisms with which families dealt with these challenges. in response to patterns in initial interviews in which interviewees consistently expressed more concern for their children’s socioemotional well-being than their own or their partner’s, the questions were later organized into two categories: the socioemotional well-being of the interviewee and their partner by extension and the socioemotional well-being of their children. this allowed access to a more complete portrait of the impacts on the entire family. community-based organization engagement. to assess and inform the current and future practices of breakthrough miami and relevant community-based organizations serving south florida’s vulnerable communities, families were asked to describe how they engaged with community-based organizations throughout the pandemic. in seeking to understand the role communitybased organizations played in addressing the impacts of covid-19, families were asked specific questions about accessing services and resources that contributed positively to their ability to meet their basic needs and to address negative socioemotional well-being factors. participants. participants included nine adults who were parents of students who participated in the breakthrough miami program, the majority of whom self-identified as female (89%, n = 8) and as people of color (89%, n = 8). breakthrough miami students were also interviewed if they were available during the appointment time; all participants (aged 9-16) identified as male, and the majority self-identified as people of color (black: 50%, n = 2; latino: 25%, n = 1). all student participants had engaged in mandated remote learning in the semester prior to data collection. data analysis plan quantitative analyses. quantitative data were collected and stored using qualtrics (qualtrics, 2019). data were then downloaded, cleaned, and analyzed using r (r core team, 2013). qualitative analyses. qualitative data collection and analyses were conducted by the first author. interviews were conducted and auto transcribed via the zoom online platform, and the auto transcripts were manually verified for accuracy and uploaded into atlas.ti 8 software. a reflexive journal was maintained throughout data collection and analysis, which was iterative and systematic. before the first interview and after each interview, reflection and process memos were written to consider researcher positionality, namely considerations of overlapping identities between the researcher and participants as well as of power and privilege existing as part of the researcher-participant relationship. these memos allowed the researcher opportunities to critically question how such factors might influence data collection and analysis, to consider and maintain flexibility with the interview guide and questioning techniques, and to serve as a reminder to centralize participants’ experiences and perspectives in the research. additionally, an analytic memo was written to note emerging concepts and comparisons between the data collected across interviews, which aided in simultaneous collection and analysis. the memo helped inform changes to the interview guide to ensure emergent concepts were addressed in future interviews in efforts to approach data saturation. interview data and analytic memos were initially coded for the measures resulting in several hundred initial codes regarding the ways in which families were impacted by, adjusted to, and gained access to support from individuals, communities, and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 organizations throughout the covid-19 quarantine. initial codes were then compared to each other and combined into second-level codes when appropriate to capture richness and dimension of shared experiences. the second-level codes were then compared to each other in a similar fashion to create themes that illustrated participants’ experiences. reflection and analytic memos were written after each level of analysis to ensure the analysis maintained fidelity to what participants shared with the researcher. participants’ voices were elevated in the use of direct quotes that label each theme. in seeking to promote data triangulation and study credibility and validity within this mixed methods study (torrance, 2012), the team collaborated to disseminate preliminary qualitative findings to participants during a virtual town hall through which 89% of interviewed families (n = 8) participated in a member checking survey tool. the initial codes were compared and analyzed with the data from the member checking tool and ultimately categorized into five broader themes that were named in accordance with in vivo quotes from the study interviews. results quantitative analyses first, we ran a linear mixed effects model to test whether perceived stress changed over time with participants as a random intercept. there was an overall effect of time f(2,105 )= 528.88, p <0.001. examining the simple effects demonstrated a significant effect for wave 3 compared to wave 1 (b = 32.1, t=230.59, p <0.001; figure 2a). moreover, this effect was larger than the effect for wave 2 compared to wave 1 (b = -0.02, t=-0.02, p = 0.98; figure 2a). second, we ran a linear mixed effects model to test whether emotional support changed over time with participants as a random intercept. there was an overall effect of time f (2,166)= 166.66, p <0.001. examining the simple effects demonstrated a significant effect for wave 3 compared to wave 1 (b = 17.5, t=17.1, p <0.001; figure 2b) and this effect was larger than the difference between wave 2 compared to wave 1 (b = -0.02, t=0.02, p = 0.98; figure 2b). third, we ran a linear mixed effects model to test whether informational support changed over time with participants as a random intercept. again, there was an overall effect of time f(2,113)= 479.09, p <0.001. examining the simple effects demonstrated that the effect for wave 3 compared to wave 1 (b = 31.98, t=29.1, p <0.001; figure 2c) was larger than the effect for wave 2 compared to wave 1 (b = 0.09, t= 0.09, p = 0.93; figure 2c). lastly, we ran a linear mixed effects model to test whether satisfaction with life changed over time with participants as a random intercept. in contrast to the other models, there was not an overall effect of time f(2,71)= 0.59, p=0.56. this was supported by follow up tests, demonstrating that the effect for wave 3 compared to wave 1 (b = 1.3, t=1.1, p =0.29; figure 2d) was not significant, nor was the effect for wave 2 compared to wave 1 (b =0.15, t= 0.16, p = 0.88; figure 2d). overall, quantitative results demonstrated that during the study period, perceived stress increased, but so too did perceived emotional and informational support for our participants. these changes were not part of a broad change as, despite the presence of both increased stress and support, overall satisfaction with life did not change. there are many possible reasons for the lack of change in satisfaction with life over time, namely, this lack of change may have been due to the increasing need for additional support due to stress, which was fulfilled by breakthrough miami, but not exceeded. because this need was not perceived to be met in excess, satisfaction remained at its baseline for the participants. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 qualitative content analysis the results of content analyses are reported below within three broad themes and three subthemes named in accordance with in vivo quotes from the interviews conducted. the themes are illustrative of the experiences of the interviewed families and include decreased food spending, increased household responsibilities, lack of socialization, breakthrough miami’s support throughout the pandemic, and participants’ unmet needs during the pandemic. “i just stay out of the supermarket and try to use up what i have.”: theme 1 barriers to meeting basic needs. according to interview and member checking data, at least 75% of families experienced at least one barrier to meeting their basic needs during the pandemic, and among these, 63% cited insufficient income and/or insufficient savings to cover unexpected costs. it is important to note, however, that 38% of families did not receive sufficient income before covid-19, thus illustrating the exacerbation of a pre-existing stressor. participants described the changing employment landscape during the pandemic, illuminating issues with reductions or losses of income due to layoffs and less available work shifts. additionally, with the increasing costs of children being home full-time — particularly those who were beneficiaries of free or reduced priced lunches at school — parents spoke at length about needing to cut costs to make ends meet, particularly those surrounding food. over 55% of participants implemented food-related cost-saving measures like avoiding eating out, being stricter about sticking to essentials when grocery shopping, or trying to avoid trips to the grocery store altogether to save money. “it’s like everybody expects us to be so strong.”: theme 2 impacts to socioemotional wellbeing. while barriers to meeting basic needs was an often-cited source of stress, 89% of families agreed that covid-19 negatively impacted their socioemotional well-being. at least 75% of these families cited fear and anxiety surrounding catching and spreading the disease to loved ones. the negative implications of this were largely twofold: due to stay-at-home orders, parents reported feeling stressed and frustrated with increased household responsibilities at the same time that opportunities for socialization and receiving peer support were limited for both parents and students. “i don’t know how to be a full-time mom and work full time. it’s really hard.”: subtheme increased household responsibilities. overwhelmingly, parents discussed the challenges of having to balance work and increased responsibilities at home due to the pandemic (n = 8). whether or not these parents worked from home, all mentioned the added stress of monitoring their children’s academic activities along with their work responsibilities. in many cases, parents experienced unexpected frustration associated with students’ diminished engagement and achievement in school during remote learning versus in-person schooling. consequently, parents also discussed the stress involved in helping students to adjust to the new modality by more closely monitoring them during remote learning classes and in creating and enforcing strict schedules for engaging in school activities among other strategies. these additional responsibilities had implications for three parents who worked from home and were unable to complete work assignments with the same speed and efficiency with which they and employers were accustomed, resulting in workplace tension. for parents who worked outside of the home, their fears of transmitting covid-19 from the workplace to their homes and the stresses involved in rigorously sanitizing themselves and their homes so that they could safely engage with their children for social and academic purposes created an emotional toll. in these instances, parents had to contend with having http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 to create social boundaries with their children in their own homes, which was troublesome. coincidingly, stay-at-home orders and fear precluded parents from being able to access their typical support networks to help meet their families’ needs, thus further compounding the stress involved with taking on multiple roles due to mandated remote learning. “there’s just some strength that you get from being with people who support you.”: subtheme lack of peer socialization for adults. at least 63% of parents mentioned that the lack of socialization with other adults during the pandemic negatively impacted their socioemotional well-being. many parents discussed feelings of isolation from coworkers, lamenting the absence of inperson workplace rituals like eating lunch or attending social after-work events with team members. the lack of physical contact with other adults throughout the pandemic was also emphasized, particularly in single-parent households. physical and social distance between parents and friends who would ordinarily provide in-person support and family members who could provide free childcare, prepared foods, or other household support contributed to feelings of isolation and exhaustion. furthermore, stay-at-home orders and fear of transmission also prevented some parents from being able to care for elderly loved ones, which manifested in guilt and worrying. some dealt with feelings of helplessness and grief as they experienced loss of family and friends to covid-19, which was worsened by the inability to visit hospitals or attend funerals. “this is their life, and they don’t get this time back.”: subtheme negative impacts to children’s socialization. while parents struggled with the lack of peer socialization, feelings of sadness, frustration, and disappointment regarding missed opportunities for their children to socialize was emphasized in the interviews. parents felt relatively better equipped than their children to cope with the changes covid-19 brought because they could access their established social network through phone or virtual formats but worried that their children did not have the same opportunities. parents noted the importance of socialization for their children’s development and were saddened by the closures of schools, which many considered the most central component of students’ social lives. one parent noted that her child was particularly vulnerable due to her lack of siblings and was frustrated and worried about the long-term implications of social isolation. moreover, parents and students alike expressed disappointment in missing out on anticipated activities like planned field trips and summer field experiences and celebratory milestone events like graduation and prom. the feeling that children were missing out on valuable portions of their lives was echoed throughout the interviews. overall, the lack of socialization and the inability to rely on loved ones for concrete support acutely impacted parents who had to find other avenues for coping with the myriad feelings covid-19 brought about, such as leaning into spiritual and religious practices for hope and encouragement, engaging in physical activities for stress and anxiety relief, and grounding themselves in gratitude that their very difficult situations were not worse. “whenever you reach out to [breakthrough] and you need something… they always make it happen.”: theme breakthrough miami as critical support. overwhelmingly, despite — or because of — limited access to peer and familial support, parents considered breakthrough miami to be a critical source of support throughout the pandemic. both parents and students expressed gratitude for the ways in which the organization solicited their feedback and implemented programmatic changes to meet the needs of families beyond their traditional menu of services. this included connecting families http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 with information regarding free food drives hosted by other local organizations and providing families with grocery gift cards, both of which 63% of interviewed families took advantage. this was timely in response to the tightening food budgets families were experiencing. breakthrough miami also connected families with local school supply drives that 50% of parents attended to help offset the costs of meeting their students’ academic needs, working as an institutional agent within the nonprofit complex to connect families with other organizations with essential resources that it could not readily provide. parents and students also praised the ways that employees at breakthrough miami rapidly shifted their traditional in-person educational programming to a virtual format, considering the activities more exciting and engaging than what was offered through the public school system (n = 8). parents and students were impressed by employees’ abilities to make enrichment more fun and hands-on for students despite experiencing a lack of motivation to attend virtual classes during the school year. in contrast, parents noted that their students were excited to attend breakthrough miami sessions, and both parents and students appreciated the opportunities the organization provided for students to socialize with peers. finally, the organization also offered nearpeer and adult mentorship to students, which was beneficial for both their academic and social emotional development: 100% of parents and students believed that breakthrough miami provided academic support through enrichment activities, tutoring, and mentoring. perhaps more importantly, 75% believed that the organization contributed to the socioemotional well-being of students as indicated by feelings that an adult cared about them, increased self-confidence, and better emotional regulation. breakthrough miami’s provision of wraparound services was well-received by families, and parents and students considered the support valuable. “it would help me, but we did okay.”: theme 3 participants’ unmet needs during the pandemic. while parents and students overwhelmingly voiced gratitude for breakthrough miami’s support in meeting their needs during the pandemic, parents also voiced additional needs that breakthrough miami or other community-based organizations could meet to further assist households. these included financial assistance for school-related expenses such as uniforms, learning devices, and athletic or physical education fees. it also became clear that younger children had greater needs that parents struggled to meet, and three parents mentioned that programming like that provided by breakthrough miami would have been beneficial for those children. finally, many parents described access issues to the services provided by other community-based organizations due to a lack of marketing or due to limited geographic service areas. parents mentioned that widespread marketing of distribution events would have been useful and added geographic locations of distribution centers would have maximized reach as some found it costly and difficult or impossible to travel long distances to receive additional support. among several other reasons, these unmet needs may have contributed to a lack of change in satisfaction with life over time. overall, qualitative results provided an indepth understanding of the quantitative portion of the study: overwhelmingly, families perceived elevated levels of stress related to meeting their basic needs and to the negative impacts the pandemic had on their socioemotional well-being. however, families also noted the importance of engaging with breakthrough miami as a source of informational, academic, and socioemotional support. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 discussion the goal of the current study was to understand the impacts of covid-19 on the health and well-being of vulnerable families in south florida and the role a communitybased organization played in meeting their needs. the findings show concordance with the emergent literature surrounding covid19 and the various impacts on family and community well-being (golberstein et al., 2020; morganstein & ursano, 2020). both quantitative and qualitative data support that families within this study contended with increasing stress because of the pandemic, and qualitative findings regarding lack of food and financial resources, disruptions to relationships and socialization opportunities, and fear and anxiety regarding transmission were emphasized. however, as the quantitative data revealed and qualitative data confirmed, families reported increased emotional and informational support over time; breakthrough miami provided both types to parents and students through connecting them to local resources to meet basic needs and providing programming that helped foster students’ development. in its rapid response to community needs, breakthrough miami leveraged processes that lead to creating conditions for community impact (trickett, 2002): the organization conducted community assessments, developed programming grounded in the sociocultural needs of community members — including utilizing elements of black cultural ethos such as sociality in academic program delivery (parsons, 2008). further, the organization leveraged a collaborative communityuniversity partnership with the university of miami to deepen understanding of the initial data and to inform future action. in this way, the work described here reflects multiple tenets of community psychology, including the shift of perspective to understand persons in contexts and avoiding what shinn and toohey (2003) label “context minimization error,” which minimizes the importance of the multiple micro, meso, and macro environments within which the study participants must navigate. this work clearly situates participants across ecological levels of relationships and functioning and provides a close reading of how respondents employ varying goals and strategies to function in reciprocally reinforcing ways (rappaport, 1977; maton, 2000). also, the findings importantly decenter the typical voices of authority and recenters the voices of those who are often not considered the authority of their own experiences (riger, 1990). the findings provide a “detailed analysis of complex, dynamic, and meaningful lived experiences across social and cultural contexts (brodsky, et al., 2017). the concepts and tenets of community psychology informed all aspects of the research, from conceptualization to methodology and interpretation of findings. implications for practice there are multiple implications for practice embedded in the findings presented here. as a community-based promotive initiative, additional work is needed to move towards community empowerment and second order change. for example, given the results of this study, efforts by breakthrough miami as well as the participants’ public schools could be directed toward building family and community capacity and resources (chaskin, 2001) and using the findings to advocate for changing roles, rules, and power relationships (linney, 1990). breakthrough miami demonstrated resilience and intentionality in creatively adapting to meet the emerging needs of families. in maintaining close relationships within the south florida community context among families and other organizations with available resources, the organization can work towards capacity-building in the future to effect sustainable community change beyond the reactionary albeit essential measures used to support families. this may http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 mean shifting resources and attention from individual student learning outcomes to broader educational efforts that address the ongoing challenges faced by participant families as well as post-pandemic effects such as mental health and trauma. implications for community psychologists writ large include the emerging recognition that researchers cannot “give” voice to marginalized groups as reinharz (1994) has cautioned. rather, we can develop a knowledge base that is informed by methods we develop to enable us to listen and learn from others and ensure that these voices are embedded as critical expertise to help frame issues and develop informed interventions. further, this work reinforces the need to widen our lenses to incorporate multiple levels of context and the reality that is embodied by individual interactions across and between levels that informs one’s experience, particularly under acute and unforeseen conditions like a major global pandemic. finally, the need to uncover nuances in how individuals interpret and make meaning of their lives should drive the development of interventions even under crisis conditions. limitations the limitations of the study are important considerations in interpreting the findings. the intentionally narrow sampling criteria could limit generalizability to other geographic locations, particularly due to complex racial, cultural, and socioeconomic stratification resulting in residential segregation in miami (kohn-wood et al., 2015). consequently, findings regarding limited accessibility to community-based resources and services may not be applicable in other locales where public transportation is more robust and accessible and where such services may not be concentrated in specific geographical areas. additionally, as study participants were recruited from the breakthrough miami community, findings may not be representative of other vulnerable communities in south florida who do not meet the criteria for participation in such an organization and do not benefit from being entrenched within its established network of support. furthermore, as breakthrough miami participants do not have to meet all five established risk factors, there was considerable variation among participants regarding socioeconomic status, household structure, and language access. there are also limitations regarding the design and implementation of this study. while both quantitative and qualitative data were collected, the sources of data were limited. due to scheduling constraints and wi-fi connectivity issues among other barriers experienced during qualitative data collection, follow-up interviews were not conducted. additionally, interviews with students were conducted simultaneously with parents, which may have influenced students’ ability to truthfully express their experiences and opinions. finally, while attrition in a longitudinal study is expected, another limitation for this study is the low response rate with each subsequent wave of ema surveys (98 responses in wave 1 compared to 42 in wave 3). we did not identify any factors that distinguished attrition rates. while the findings were encouraging, larger samples would be helpful for future analyses to truly understand the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on social, informational, and general well-being. despite these limitations, however, the team’s interpretation of the findings was rigorous in seeking to capture the experiences of the participants within this limited context. conclusions and implications the current study highlights the critical role community-based organizations can play in meeting vulnerable communities’ needs amid external stressors. such needs cannot be met if community-based organizations do not conduct needs assessments consistently and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 especially in response to extraordinary circumstances such as those created or exacerbated by the covid-19 pandemic. insights from such assessments can and should include consideration of community member feedback in rapidly shifting service delivery to creatively address community concerns. community-university partnerships can provide a collaborative means for formatively assessing the effectiveness of new efforts to meet community needs by allowing researchers to evaluate program implementation. these are both essential steps towards creating community impact. future research this research can be extended in multiple ways, particularly in relation to addressing this study’s limitations. exploring the experiences of community members who were not previously enveloped within an organization like breakthrough miami but sought out services and resources during the pandemic would be beneficial for further understanding needs gaps and access channels. additionally, given the variation among study participants, a related study that explores the experiences of community members within the same neighborhood could control for confounding variables impacting community members’ needs and experiences such as socioeconomic status, particularly because the prevalence of covid19 infections within the south florida context has been associated with economic disadvantage (palacio & tamariz, 2021). finally, collecting multiple sources of qualitative and quantitative data throughout the mixed methods design for the purposes of further data triangulation (flick et al., 2012) could provide further insights into community members’ experiences, particularly in instances where considerable variation amongst the sample population exists. as community-engaged scholarship is gaining in popularity, providing more opportunities for community members to provide their perspectives in varying modalities is imperative in capturing their experiences for both community-based organizations and researchers. references brodsky, a., mannarini, t., buckingham, s., & scheibler, j. 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(2009). multilevel community based culturally situated interventions and community impact: an ecological perspective. american journal of community psychology, 43, 257-266. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10464009-9227-y author note we have no known conflict of interest to disclose. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jcop.20207 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jcop.20207 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10464-011-9430-5 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10464-011-9430-5 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1558689812437185 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1558689812437185 http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/a:1019964215050 http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/a:1019964215050 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10464-009-9227-y http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10464-009-9227-y tf_template_word_mac_2011 analysis of the accessibility of perinatal and early childhood services for parents with physical disabilities: a modelled reading of access barriers coralie mercerat1 & thomas saïas2 keywords: parenthood, physical disabilities, accessibility, perinatal services, early childhood services. author biographies: coralie mercerat, is a professor substitute in psychology and mental health at the university teluq. her work is about relationships between individuals (families) and health facilities, parenthood, reproductive justice and physical disability. she's also leading program evaluation projects with community organizations. thomas saïas, is a professor of community psychology at the university of quebec in montreal. he has been working in the field of early childhood prevention for the last 15 years. in france, he developed several public-orientated services of prevention (capedp, panjo, petits pas grands pas) which were the first interventions based on research ever led in the country. in quebec and in france, he’s involved in several research projects aiming to identify the facilitators for the success of public (governmental) preventive interventions. he is currently head of the “epione: public health-community health” research team. recommended citation: mercerat, c., & saïas, t. (2023). analysis of the accessibility of perinatal and early childhood services for parents with physical disabilities : a modelled reading of access barriers. global journal of community psychology practice, 14(2), 1 17. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: coralie mercerat, email: mercerat.coralie@courrier.uqam.ca or coralie.mercerat@teluq.ca, 1-800 665-4333 p. 5006. 1 département sciences humaines, lettres et communication, université teluq 2 psychology department, université du québec à montréal, 100, rue sherbrooke ouest, montréal (qc), h2x 3p2 http://laboepione.ca/ http://laboepione.ca/ https://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:mercerat.coralie@courrier.uqam.ca mailto:coralie.mercerat@teluq.ca global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 analysis of the accessibility of perinatal and early childhood services for parents with physical disabilities: a modelled reading of access barriers abstract perinatal and early childhood services are valuable resources for all new parents, particularly in supporting them as they transition to their new role. however, parents with physical disabilities report several barriers to accessing these services, including difficulty physically accessing services, lack of knowledge or negative attitudes of professionals, and lack of adaptation of services. the objective of this article is to analyse, through the dixon-woods et al. accessibility model, the barriers to accessing perinatal and early childhood services from the perspective of parents with physical disabilities. thirteen semi-structured individual interviews, using the life story approach, were conducted. the results highlight barriers to access to services in all dimensions of the accessibility model. principal barriers reported include non-inclusive criteria for accessing services (taking account both parenthood and disability), lack of knowledge about the services offered and the inadequacy of services in addressing parents’ needs. the sixth dimension (“offers and resistance”) presents a dynamic element, as it relates to the parents’ decision to use – or not – a service to which they are entitled. using this model allowed for a pragmatic and systematic description of the obstacles encountered by parents, as well as the identification of needs and potential directions for action. background in recent decades, more and more people with disabilities have become parents (blackford et al., 2000; office des personnes handicapées du québec [ophq], 2009). this can be explained by the advancement of medical technology, but also by major changes – in the context of quebec province – in the paradigms concerning people with disabilities, with a focus on strengthening their full social and civic participation (e-20.1 act to secure handicapped persons in the exercise of their rights with a view to achieving social, school and workplace integration, 1978; united nations, 2006). for example, in the province of quebec (canada), the establishment of the office des personnes handicapées du québec – an office dedicated to forwarding the rights and civic participation of people with disabilities – and one of its policies from 2009 (ophq, 2009) are actively supporting the full social participation of persons with disabilities, including the right to embrace a parental role (although this is not explicitly detailed in the policy referenced). despite the shift in the perception of disability in quebec, there are still marked differences between people with and without disabilities in terms of family life. indeed, people with disabilities aged 15 to 64 years are more likely to live alone (27.2%) than people without disabilities (11.6%) (camirand, 2010). they are also less likely to be married or in a commonlaw relationship: 54% versus 62% of the non-disabled population (ophq, 2017). there is also still "persistent and systemic" discrimination against them http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 when it comes to parenting (national council on disability, 2012). in the field of perinatal and early childhood in quebec (canada), various medical and psychosocial services and follow-ups are offered to all parents, universally, to support them at different stages of their experience, including pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care (institut national de santé publique du québec, n. d) : pregnancy follow-ups, discussions of a birth plan, breastfeeding support, for instance. these kind of services are valuable resources for parents in preparing for their new role as well as in supporting them as parents (delawarde et al., 2014). easy access to the services in question is an important prerequisite for promoting positive health outcomes – physical and mental health – for both parent and child (lawler et al., 2013; mitra et al., 2015). conversely, barriers in access to services can lead to problems on three levels: 1) service utilization, 2) patient (parent) satisfaction, and 3) inadequate professional practices (lawler et al., 2013). therefore, we might think that facilitating accessibility to services is a major step in promoting equitable care. however, existing literature highlights that, despite the increase in the number of parents with physical disabilities, their access to perinatal and early childhood services (usually services offered when the child is between 0 and 5 years old, depending on the programs) remains impeded at several levels. first, various studies mention significant gaps in the availability of information about the existence of services (begley et al., 2009; lawler et al., 2013; tarasoff, 2015, 2017). second, the literature indicates that access to services is impeded, partially due to: • professionals’ lack of knowledge regarding the parents’ situation (bertschy et al., 2015; boisseau et al., 2016; tarasoff, 2015, 2017); • negative or skeptical attitudes of professionals towards parents with physical disabilities (candilishuisman et al., 2017; kelley et al., 1997; killoran, 1994; mitra et al., 2017; prilleltensky, 2003; walshgallagher et al., 2012); • lack of adaptation or adjustment of services to the needs of current or future parents with physical disabilities (notably in the case of prenatal classes) (blackford et al., 2000) ; • physical access to services (begley et al., 2009; lawler et al., 2013). more specifically, physical access is hindered on two levels: 1) access to the buildings within which the service is provided (begley et al., 2009; bergeron et al., 2012; lawler et al., 2013) and 2) access to pregnancy monitoring equipment or hospital facilities (particularly delivery rooms) (becker et al., 1997; mitra et al., 2016, 2017). for example, several studies (iezzoni et al., 2015; mitra et al., 2016) have shown that some women with physical disabilities did not have access to a complete pregnancy follow-up due to a lack of appropriate equipment (for example, adapted scales or examination tables). these results highlight a major obstacle in pregnancy follow-up that could ultimately be harmful to the health of the baby and the mother. on a related front, the organization of services in silos – having services specialized only in the field of perinatality/parenthood and services specialized only in the field of disability – could also be seen as a barrier to the wellbeing of parents with physical disabilities, who need to be taken care of in a more integrated bio-psycho-social framework of care (grue & lærum, 2002; mitra et al., 2015). for example, as for services specialized only for people with disabilities, the quebec government offers home support services to support them with their activities of daily living (hygiene, household chores), as well as adapted transportation services. the concept of access is a complex one and its definition is not unanimously agreed upon in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 the scientific literature (penchansky & thomas, 1981; ricketts & goldsmith, 2005). for the purpose of this article, we will be using the dixon-woods et al.’ model (dixonwoods et al., 2006), from their review of the literature on access to health services for socio-economically disadvantaged people (dixon-woods et al., 2006). this model is pertinent, as it presents a dynamic definition of access, with an emphasis on the following two characteristics: 1) access to, and eligibility for a service is a negotiation between the individual and the service itself ; 2) access to a service can be conceptualized temporally, where the dimensions of dixonwoods et al. (dixon-woods et al., 2006) can be seen as chronological stages through which individuals must pass (one must first recognize one's need and be able to get to the service before confronting it, claiming it, and dealing with possible professional judgements). this model is composed of six dimensions: (1) identification of candidacy represents the way in which a person’s eligibility for a service is negotiated between the person and the service in question. (2) navigation is defined by a person’s ability to know that the service is available and their ability to get there (namely physically). (3) permeability of services refers to the ease with which a person uses the desired service. it also refers to the flexibility of the service in meeting the person’s needs. (4) appearance at health services involves the person being able to voice their needs in the healthcare setting and claim the services to which they are entitled. (5) adjudications, the fifth dimension of the dixon-woods et al.’s model (dixon-woods et al., 2006), describes the way in which service providers and professionals judge and perceive certain individuals as less eligible of services, potentially impacting their subsequent access. (6) finally, the dimension of offers and resistance refers to individuals’ choice to use – or not to use – a service that is offered to them. there can be various motives for refusing to use a proposed service. the objective of this article is to analyse, through the accessibility model of dixonwoods et al. (dixon-woods et al., 2006), barriers to access to perinatal and early childhood (0-5 years old) services, from the perspective of parents with physical disabilities. the data presented in this paper were part of a larger study about the experiences and needs of parents with physical disabilities with respect to their relationship with perinatal and early childhood services, the results of which are presented in a prior article (mercerat & saïas, 2020). this study focused exclusively on parents with physical disabilities. this choice was made in collaboration with an advisory comity working on the general study and was also supported by the fact that physical disabilities represent the most common disabilities found in the general canadian and quebec population. in quebec and across all age groups, the number of people with disabilities related to mobility (8.5%), agility (8.2%) or pain (7.8%) surpasses the number of people with other types of disabilities (camirand et al., 2010). in addition, a review of the literature shows that people with physical disabilities have been less represented in parenting studies in recent years (vs. people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, for instance). the notion of "barriers" refers to any difficulties shared by the parents participating in this study related to their access to services. the “perinatal and early childhood services” are understood as services offered throughout parenthood, from the decision to have a child (prenatal), until the child is approximatively 5 years old (postnatal). the term “services” in an intentionally broad term, as we wanted to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 allow participants to choose which services surrounding their parenthood they wanted to discuss, and which services were the most significant for them in their parenting role. finally, this paper aims to address the complexity of the notion of accessibility, which is not a dichotomous “on/off” concept, but rather a dynamic, multi-dimensional concept. methods a qualitative methodology based on the life story approach (bertaux & de singly, 2005; burrick, 2010; sanséau, 2005) was selected for the study. indeed, as the transition to parenthood can have a profound impact on a person’s identity (poissant et al., 2014) and can be understood using a temporal perspective, the choice of a life story approach allowed participants to insert parental events, within the context of their broader life experiences (and therefore their experience as persons with disabilities). in-depth individual interviews were conducted with parents – mothers and fathers – with various physical disabilities. the interviews were designed to last between 60 and 90 minutes. interviews were either conducted in person or by phone/videocall. recruitment was carried out with the help of a specialized resource for parents with physical disabilities (a service provided by occupational therapists specifically to parents with physical disabilities, offered in the health and social services system) and through community disability rights organizations. the parents interviewed for this study had to meet the following inclusion criteria: • living with a physical disability; potential participants had to answer positively to one or to both of the following questions from the census of population of canada: "do you have any difficulty walking, climbing stairs, bending or doing other similar activities? " or "does a physical condition or health problem reduce the amount or type of activities you can do at home, at work or at leisure activities? " (camirand, 2010); • having full custody of at least one child aged 0 to 5 years; • being able to participate in a research interview in french, the official language of quebec; • having had contact with any perinatal and early childhood services (medical and psychosocial services, for example). parents who could not complete an interview in french or who had significant intellectual or sensory impairments – as self-assessed – were excluded from the sample. at the outset of each interview, participants were asked to sign a consent form, as approved by a research ethics board (crir : certificate #1216-0217 delivered on april 25th 2017). participants were also provided a sociodemographic questionnaire to complete, which included questions regarding age, education, marital status, and number of children. in the interview, they were invited to talk about their lives in general terms ("can you talk to me about your general life experience, starting when or where you decide, for example, from your birth or your diagnosis? "), and then more specifically about their parenting experience. referring to this experience, the interviewer asked participants to elaborate on the services they had received in relation to their parenting role. more in-depth questions followed, exploring their needs and how the services accommodated them, as exemplified in the following table. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 table 1 research sub-questions based on the six dimensions of dixon-woods et al. (dixon-woods et al., 2006) stages research sub—questions identifying candidacy how does the parent perceive that the service can meet their needs? navigation to what extent is the parent aware of the service and able to attend? permeability of services to what extent does the parent perceive that the service is responsive to their needs? appearance at health services what is the parent’s perception of how their request for the services was received? adjudications what is the nature of their relationship with the professionals they met? offers and resistance to what extent does the parent decide whether or not to use a service offered in the public system? all interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. to ensure the anonymity of the participants, all names or places that could identify the study participants have been removed. pseudonyms were also assigned to participants in order to report and disseminate results while protecting their confidentiality. for data analysis, all interviews were coded using qsr international’s nvivo 12 software, following the six steps of thematic analysis recommended by braun and clarke (braun & clarke, 2006) : 1) familiarizing with the data; 2) generating initial codes; 3) searching for themes; 4) refining the themes; 5) defining and naming the themes; and 6) producing the data report. the relevance of braun and clarke's process-based analysis (braun & clarke, 2006) lies in the fact that this method is highly flexible and is well suited to the analysis of data obtained using the life story method (braun & clarke, 2006). the systematic nature of such a method of analysis also makes it reliable for producing qualitative analysis that can inform and support the development of public policy (braun & clarke, 2006). to ensure reliability in the data analysis process and to obtain inter-evaluator agreement, the two authors worked collaboratively on coding the first three interviews. once the general coding grid defined, the first author coded the remaining interviews. the analysis for this specific paper concentrated specifically on the narrative description of access to services, previously coded with braun and clarke’s method (braun & clarke, 2006). for this specific part of the data, a pre-analysis grid was defined, consisting of the six dimensions of dixonwoods et al. (dixon-woods et al., 2006) presented above. the authors, while following the participants’ narratives as closely as possible, classified the parts of the narratives previously coded as relating to access to services into these different dimensions. sample characteristics the sample in the study consisted of thirteen parents, including 10 mothers and 3 fathers, with various physical disabilities: amputation (n=1), rheumatoid arthritis (juvenile) (n=2), arthrogryposis (n=1), chronic pain (n=1), degenerative neuromuscular disease (for example, multiple sclerosis) (n=3), cerebral palsy (n=2), spina bifida (n=1), tetraplegia or partial paralysis (n=2). the majority of parents were in the 30–39 age group (n=11), while the remainder were aged 40–49 (n=2). most participants had a university degree, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 either undergraduate (n=6) or graduate (n=2). the remainder had either a high school (n=1) or college (n=3) education. in terms of their family situation, two participants were separated or divorced, four were living with a common-law partner – which is common in quebec – and seven were married. finally, the number of children per participant varied. five participants reported having only one child, four participants had two children, three participants had three children, and only one participant reported having four children. interviews were conducted in participants’ homes or by videoconference between july 2017 and march 2018. interviews ranged in length from 30 minutes to two hours. the number of participants was determined based on the principle of data saturation (savoie-zajc, 2007), meaning that as less new information began to emerge from the interviews, participant recruitment was stopped. the results are presented in the following section, according to the dimensions of the dixon-woods et al. (dixon-woods et al., 2006) model, along with supporting excerpts that have been translated from french. as interviews took place in french, a professional translator was in charge of the translation of the quotations presented in this paper. all quotations are provided verbatim from interviews. results presentation of the results following dixon-woods et al. accessibility model identification of candidacy the “identification of candidacy” dimension has two elements: (1) participants’ perception of their eligibility for a service; and (2) their sense that the service can meet their needs. in the interviews, the factors influencing these elements, as reported by parents, relate to the admissibility/eligibility criteria for the services in question. in this regard, the lack of consideration for parenting within services directed at people with disabilities was frequently discussed. several parents reported a lack of support for their right to become, or to be, a parent when they were requesting services (for example, home support hours), even though they themselves considered themselves eligible for the service. in the following excerpts, paul talks about his perception of his own eligibility in his request to obtain more hours of home support (home support services – household chores) and laura about the lack of adapted equipment to take care of her baby and her feeling of being ‘outside the boxes’. based on the law on equality and rights, you have the right to be a parent, but... it’s a right that isn’t supported [by the services already in place]. (paul, living with cerebral palsy) the thing is, if you step outside of the norm or the usual framework, then there’s nothing there. you just fall into the gap. (laura, living with arthrogryposis) in similar contexts, some parents were told that they did not meet criteria for receiving services, due to their level of income (too high) or the lack of consideration of parenthood in the context of disability among the selection criteria for certain services: i was also told that i didn’t fit the criteria because i had a high salary, supposedly i could have afforded whomever i wanted. (mila, living with rheumatoid arthritis) from this discussion, an important theme was raised: the services offered to people http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 with disabilities are often not adapted to their reality as parents. the next two dimensions of the model – navigation and permeability – highlight an ‘inverse’ but intrinsically related problem, namely, that so-called ‘universal’ perinatal and early childhood services sometimes fail to take parents’ physical disability into account. navigation navigation refers to the ability to know what services are available and to be able to get to those services, especially concerning physical travel. navigation refers to the knowledge of the participants (parents) and of the professionals related to pertinent services. issues related to professionals’ knowledge of services and to physical access to services came up repeatedly in the participants’ comments. in this regard, medical staff’s lack of knowledge about programs specifically geared to parents with physical disabilities were mentioned. for example, physicians responsible for pregnancy monitoring would not spontaneously propose specialized services that could meet parents’ needs (for example services providing adapted equipment to take care of the child). in this regard, one participant emphasized that, in her opinion, it should be the physicians’ responsibility to be aware of appropriate and beneficial resources: if you don’t have resources to begin with, and no one tells you about them, you may miss out on something. i think that doctors do have a responsibility to at least know what the resource is. (elisabeth, living with partial paralysis) this same participant also reported that she felt obliged to take the initiative to find out about the service she needed, at the risk of missing out on an advantageous resource. these observations were consistent with other statements by parents who reported not being aware of services that would meet specific needs related to their physical condition, as in the case of emily, a mother living with spina bifida: i know that the service itself [a service for parents with additional needs], […] i don’t think it’s there. the above results highlight the parents’ need to be better supported in finding services that meet their reality. according to the parents in this study, professionals seem to have an important role to play in this support, particularly through their knowledge of the health and social services system. regarding the participants’ ability to physically attend known services, several mothers in the sample noted that maternity wards and examination rooms – particularly with regards to the furniture – were not suitable for them. other mothers complained that prenatal classes or postnatal motherbaby activities were held in locations that were not physically accessible, experienced by victoria: what i actually missed during my maternity leave was… doing social mom activities … being able to go out, do workshops on baby stuff. most of the places weren’t accessible. (victoria, living with a degenerative neuromuscular disorder) permeability of services permeability refers to how the parent perceives the ability of the service to adapt to their needs. on this front, a lack of flexibility or a rigidity in the provision of the services received were reported, which sometimes hindered the assistance being provided. in the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 following excerpt, kate – a mother living with cerebral palsy – shares her experience with paratransit transportation and its rigidity when it comes to transporting her children: technically, officially, paratransit, they don’t want to be responsible for taking the car seat, installing it, … you know. so they just said to me, in about as many words, “well, your daughter, you can bring her, because she can carry her [car seat] by herself, but your little boy, as long as he’s in a big car seat, stage 2, well... we’d much rather that... you don’t bring him.” it was also noted that some professionals practicing in perinatal services were not able to accommodate parents’ needs. for example, alice, a mother living with chronic pain, reported that she did not receive enough help from the local health centre to support her with day care services. this mother did not have a place for her daughter in a day care facility close to her home and the fact that she was living with physical limitations was not taken into account by the service in question. alice shared that no one could help her with this situation. other participants complained about inflexibility on the part of the professionals responsible for their cases, as described below by laura, a mother living with arthrogryposis: people build frameworks to have some form of structure, but... every individual is different. the occupational therapist who was on my case, because she decided not to fight against their structure, to keep her distance and accept the norm, well she felt really disappointed, not being able to help me. the above excerpts thus refer to the needs of parents with physical disabilities for parenting and disability services to be more intersectional, in order to best respond to their realities. appearance at health services different elements of the participants’ narratives related to feeling unwelcome or overlooked when trying to access services. in this regard, difficulties in obtaining the service needed or in following up once the service had been requested were highlighted. some parents mentioned inadequacies in some of the services they received – such as home care support – or the possibility that services would be suspended due to budget cuts. paul, a father living with cerebral palsy, even reported feeling “betrayed by the system” as a result of service cuts. in this context, paul and alice mentioned that they have had to fight to obtain the services to which they thought they were entitled, as stated in the following citations: today, i had to fight. hard. [laughs] ... to get the same thing [as in the first pregnancy] because budgets … have been cut. (paul, living with cerebral palsy) you know, i don’t want to be treated differently, i don’t necessarily want what i’m not entitled to. but i think there are things ... that should have been done in my case, that were not done. did i take everything for granted? no. you know, i knew it wasn’t going to be easy, i knew that all the battles weren’t ... going to be won in advance and all that, but you know i didn’t think i would have to do… to prove some things you know? (alice, living with chronic pain) laura noted that she had to be assertive in declaring her wishes regarding how her http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 general anaesthesia would be managed, in an attempt to regain control over her delivery: and then i asked to meet the anaesthetist. i told her the story [of her first pregnancy]. i told her... how i would like it to happen. i checked with her to see if it could be done that way [to be woken up soon after the general anaesthesia], she said, “no worries.” (laura, living with arthrogryposis) in some instances, parents noted that they were denied services (for example hours for home support with household chores), for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the participant was employed or that the service requested was not directly related to parenting (e.g., home adaptations), even though such services would have helped in the parenting role (for example by allowing them to navigate their home easily in order to attend to their children at night). faced with this lack of assistance, some parents reported that they had to make up for the lack of services financially, for example by purchasing adapted equipment themselves, paying directly for the necessary services, or accessing private health services. adjudications ‘adjudications’ refer to professionals’ perceptions and/or judgments regarding parents’ access to the service. this dimension reinforces the idea that the accessibility of a service is a negotiation between the person seeking for the service and the service itself, including the professionals who work there. parents reported various concerns relating to judgments or decisions made by professionals (health and social professionals) that impacted their subsequent progression through services. some parents brought up remarks or judgements made by professionals, for example in relation to their desire of becoming parents. in this respect, one mother reported an instance in which medical residents doubted her parental ability, leading them to consider calling child protection services: they [the residents] asked me if... they should call the dyp [child protection service] to take care of my children or... help me with this because they thought i couldn’t take care of them on my own. [...] i was very upset because she was my second daughter, so ... for me it’s ... i didn’t understand the reasoning. (sophie, quadriplegic) in connection with this same event, sophie questioned why disabled parents are often treated differently than non-disabled parents: they didn’t call the dyp or anything, but... at the time... you wonder why [they asked], because... i don’t think people who don’t have disabilities get asked that from the outset offers and resistance on some occasions, despite services being offered, parents did not accept them. in some cases, the parents reported having discharged the professional who was doing their followup (for example the medical team or the occupational therapist). the following excerpts highlight the reasons that might have prompted parents to terminate their relationship with professionals. some of these reasons are tied to other dimensions of the model, especially permeability of services and adjudications. she [the midwife] was also another case of frameworkthinking, [...] she says, “since you had a caesarean section for the first baby, you can’t deliver at home.” so, for them, that’s their rule, so that’s the way it is. so ... i let my midwife go, finally, saying: http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 “i feel strong enough to be home alone to give birth.” (laura, living with arthrogryposis) it’s all... it’s little things and then i was frustrated because she [an occupational therapist] wouldn’t listen. and so, i said to her, “you’re making my experience really unpleasant. really, really, really unpleasant. in fact, i don’t even want your help.” (lisa, living with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis) in other instances, parents opted not to ask for help or services, even when they were available. discussion the purpose of this article was to analyse barriers to access to perinatal and early childhood services from the perspective of parents with physical disabilities. to this end, the six dimensions of dixon-woods et al. (2006) served as a framework for creating a data analysis grid specifically for the parts of a greater data corpus related to access to services. since the term ‘services’ was not defined for the participants, the results allowed us to address a very broad understanding of ‘services surrounding parenting’ in the parents’ interviews. indeed, on various occasions parents identified barriers to accessing services that one might not have easily identified as being related to their parenting role at first glance – for example, paratransit or home adaptation services. this finding highlights the fact that services that are seemingly removed from the parental role can undoubtedly enhance the well-being and sense of daily self-efficacy of parents with physical disabilities and help them feel more independent in their parenting role. regarding the more “typical” services targeting the perinatal period and early parenthood, parents outlined several barriers that have also been discussed in other studies, such as staff’s lack of knowledge (lipson & rogers, 2000; longbellil et al., 2017; mitra et al., 2016; schildberger et al., 2017; smeltzer et al., 2017; walsh-gallagher et al., 2012), lack of physically adapted rooms, for example in maternity wards (iezzoni et al., 2015; mitra et al., 2017; tarasoff, 2017; thomas & curtis, 1997) and judgmental attitudes of professionals (blackford et al., 2000; lipson & rogers, 2000; mitra et al., 2017; payne et al., 2014; smeltzer et al., 2017; tarasoff, 2017). parents were also repeatedly disappointed by the lack of consideration for their parental status in the evaluation of their case by medical and psychosocial managers. these observations are consistent with other research that already highlights the ‘silo’ management of individuals with multiple concurrent needs, particularly in the areas of disability and parenting (grue & lærum, 2002; mitra et al., 2015). this observation points to a possible distinction between the experience of an inadequate system (where services simply do not exist) and unresponsive or insufficient implementation of services at the intersection of parenting and disability supports. this study allowed us to highlight that both of these scenarios were at play in the current health and social services system: either services targeting parents with physical disabilities do not exist (with the exception of one in the province of quebec, to our knowledge), or services are available, but the needs assessment grids for parents (in the general population) or for people with physical disabilities (not necessarily parents yet) do not intersect. the results of this study underlined two principal domains where parents are particularly engaged in their access to perinatal and early childhood services : 1) their assertiveness in negotiating access to services designed to meet their needs (which refers to the five first dimensions on the dixon-woods et al.’s model), and 2) their choice to engage – or not – in the appropriate service (which relates to the last dimension – http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 offers and resistance – of the model). being assertive and entering the negotiation the results of this study revealed access barriers in all dimensions of the model. in this regard, the first five dimensions of the dixonwoods et al. (dixon-woods et al., 2006) model remain relatively descriptive and are related specifically to the process of negotiation between the parent and the service: does the parents recognize themselves as eligible for a given service? are they aware of the service? are they able to get there? can the service be adapted to their needs? do they feel judged by the professional? the model remains relevant for describing in a pragmatic and systematic way the access barriers encountered at all stages of accessing a service. the different dimensions of dixon-woods et al. were initially a product of a literature review on socioeconomically disadvantaged people (dixon-woods et al., 2006). however, such a model is relevant for parents with physical disabilities, as they can be seen as "vulnerable" (e.g. facing multiple challenges), and therefore, the model provides a useful construct for analysing the participants' negotiation with the services. the idea of "negotiation" was particularly evident in the participants' interviews, when they discussed situations in which they had to advocate for their rights to parenthood and accessing services. in some cases, parents also struggled to obtain or maintain service access (e.g., paul, a father with cerebral palsy, who struggled to maintain the number of hours of home support during his wife's pregnancy), in the context of social and health services that were under financial stress due to budget cuts in quebec. the experiences of parents with disabilities who at times were advised by medical professionals to avoid parenthood (walshgallagher et al., 2012) and who lacked information about the impact of their disability on pregnancy (mitra et al., 2016, 2017; smeltzer et al., 2017) are highlighted through the dimensions of dixon-woods et al. (dixon-woods et al., 2006). these observations can be characterized by the navigation dimension (participants described a lack of knowledge – on their part and on the part of professionals – about the existence of services as well as difficulties in physically accessing them), the permeability of services dimension (according to the participants, several services did not take into account both their parental role and their disability), and the appearance at services dimension (several parents mentioned that they had to be assertive in order to convey their needs and possibly receive services). the reactions of professionals – including some judgments – are also obstacles that parents must deal with as they navigate life in their new social role. engaging – or not – in appropriate services as in previous scientific literature, the parents reported barriers related to lack of knowledge about the existence of services, lack of physical accessibility of services, and lack of adaptation of services to meet their needs (thomas & curtis, 1997). this last point seems to be particularly significant with respect to parents’ decision to use – or not to use – an offered service. while the five first dimensions of the model were more descriptive in nature, the last dimension reflects a more dynamic process, recognizing the parent’s power and ability to choose, whether it is a real choice or a non-choice (a default choice). in the dixon-woods et al.’s model, although the five first dimensions referred specifically to the notion of negotiation between parents and services, the last dimension is the final step following the negotiation: does the parent choose to engage in the service or not? considering our findings, it is important to note that parents sometimes chose not to engage in services that were intended for them, but which could – in their view – reinforce inequalities or discrimination against them. however, from the perspective of universality of care, this http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 latter dimension may also reflect blatant inequality, making the parents responsible for their own care and for complying with what is expected of them in order to receive a service. this last dimension remains as a question to be explored further in future research, to determine whether alternative care channels might be more beneficial for parents with physical disabilities. our results should be understood with consideration of the limitations that existed in this study. first, the sample of participants does not appear to be representative of the ‘general’ population of persons with disabilities, with a disproportionate number of participants being in couples and having a university education, for example. while seeking ‘representativity’ of a sample is not central to qualitative research (yardley, 2000, 2008), the fact that the majority of participants were married or in a relationship, and had a high level of education may give a more ‘privileged’ perspective of the experiences of parents with physical disabilities. overall, though, it is difficult to conclude whether our sample was representative of the population of parents with disabilities, as we do not have any precise statistics on this subject. second, it appears that the parents we interviewed were more inclined to share obstacles and dissatisfactions regarding the services they encountered, even when this portrayal was not wholly representative of their overall experience. indeed, in a prior, more general study, parents did report positive and satisfying experiences with perinatal services (mercerat & saïas, 2020). however, most results still fell mainly on the negative or unsatisfied side, which led us to frame this article around barriers to access. in this sense, future research can take a more positive approach, with the aim of identifying interventions that could be implemented at various stages to promote service accessibility. finally, interviewing some participants in person, while interviewing others over video-call, as well as the discrepancies between the lengths of the interviews (from 30 min to 120 min) are also limitations of this study. this is because the length of the interview can impact the depth of the information shared by the participants and doing interviews by video-call – in contrast to face-to-face interviews – may impair the relationship between the participant and the researcher. conclusion results of this study highlighted challenges in accessing perinatal and early childhood services for parents with physical disabilities. this article emphasizes the immediate importance of improving the accessibility of perinatal and early childhood services and adapting these services to meet the needs of parents with physical disabilities. strengthening access to high-quality, adapted services is expected to have various positive impacts on maternal and child health, family well-being, quality of life within the family, and prevention of child abuse and neglect. the lessons we can draw from this study, for the practice of community psychology, are that parents with additional needs (in this case, related to their physical disabilities) do not receive the universal perinatal and early childhood services to which they are entitled, and continue to receive judgment from professionals regarding their parenting role. as community psychologists, one of our areas of intervention is the reduction of social inequalities in health, notably by promoting access to health services. in this context, our role is to use our tools (analytical skills, knowledge production) to promote equal access for all, by 1) strengthening a positive relationship between health institutions including the professionals who work in them and service users, and 2) exposing the power dynamics at play. now that we have a better understanding of the barriers to accessible parenting services for parents with physical disabilities, future research should explore the actions that must be taken – or that parents are already taking, as some http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 mentioned in interviews – to overcome these barriers. references becker, h., stuifbergen, a., & tinkle, m. 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(1997). having a baby: some disabled women’s reproductive experiences. midwifery, 13(4), 202– 209. https://doi.org/10.1016/s02666138(97)80007-1 walsh-gallagher, d., sinclair, m., & mc conkey, r. (2012). the ambiguity of disabled women’s experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood: a phenomenological understanding. midwifery, 28(2), 156–162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.midw.2011 .01.003 united nations. (2006). convention relative aux droits des personnes handicapées et protocole facultatif. retrieved from https://www.un.org/disabilities/doc uments/ convention/convoptprotf.pdf yardley, l. (2000). dilemmas in qualitative health research. psychology & health, 15(2), 215–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/088704400 08400302 yardley, l. (2008). demonstrating validity in qualitative psychology. in qualitative psychology: a practical guide to research methods (sage). acknowledgements the authors would like to thank the disability rights organizations who participated in the advisory board of this study for their valuable support. we would also like to thank rachel goldfarb for the english language revision, marion picot for her precise transcription work and to the crujef for their financial support. finally, we would like to express our deep gratitude to the research participants who found the time and courage to open up to our questions. declaration of interests no potential competing interest was reported by the authors. http://www.gjcpp.org/ kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 enhancing cultural competence the community tool box (ctb), is a free, online resource for those working to build healthier communities and bring about social change. ctb is great resource to learn about community assessment, planning, intervention, evaluation, advocacy, and other aspects of community practice. ctb houses over 300 free educational modules, and tools. enhancing cultural competence is one of over dosen toolkits that are available. this toolkits aids in assessing and enhacin cultural competence in your organization or community effort by provided four steps and examples on how to enhance cultural competence. to access this toolkit visit the community tool box. https://ctb.ku.edu/en/enhancing-cultural-competence original research microsoft word 2012-003-final-20120521.docx global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 32 commentary on lobbying for endorsement of community psychology in australia neville robertson, university of waikato school!of!psychology,!university!of!waikato,!pb!3105,!hamilton,!new!zealand.!email! scorpio@waikato.ac.nz in their interesting and highly reflective article, my aussie colleagues have nicely encapsulated some of the dilemmas and challenges which also face community psychologists on this side of the ditch. (for readers unfamiliar with downunder colloquialisms and/or geography, the “ditch” is the 2,000 kilometre-wide tasman sea which separates the east coast of australia from the west coast of aotearoa/new zealand16.) like our cousins, we have often suffered from low visibility, we have had to fight for recognition, and we have had to resist hegemonic models of what constitutes psychology. like them, it has often been our political nous, our networking and our advocacy skills which have carried the day. commentators were asked, could the struggle described by lynne cohen and her colleagues happen here? the short answer is yes. in some ways, it already has, although because of some contextual differences, we chose to pursue a different direction as i will explain below. the statutory arrangements which regulate psychology in aotearoa/new zealand underwent a radical change in 2003 with the enactment of the health practitioners competence assurance act. this established a common framework for the regulation of a wide range of health professions from psychologists, to doctors, nurses, dentists, mid-wives and physiotherapists, each with its own board to oversee it. the purpose of the legislation is “to protect the health and safety of members of the public by providing for mechanisms to ensure that health practitioners are competent and fit to practise their professions” (s.3). one important mechanism is control over the use professional titles. under the act, it is an offence to hold oneself out to be a “health professional” unless one is registered with the relevant board (s.7.1). this means that however we might self-identify, we cannot call ourselves psychologists unless we are registered. 16 the name “new zealand” (after the dutch province of zeeland) was adopted by early colonists. “aotearoa” reflects the earlier tradition of indigenous māori. increasingly, both terms are being used to signal the bi-cultural foundation of the modern nation state. as cohen and her colleagues note, there are some differences between australia and aotearoa/new zealand in the way sub-disciplines are regulated. here we have what is effectively a two-tier system comprising of a general scope (termed “psychologist”) and “vocational” scopes. originally, two vocational scopes were established: “clinical psychologist” and “educational psychologist.” recently, a third scope, “counselling psychologist,” was approved. thus community psychologists are registered in the “psychologist” scope, along with organisational psychologists, health psychologists, sports psychologists, correctional psychologists and others. it is important to appreciate that scopes of practice do not prescribe what one can and cannot do within a particular scope, at least not in any meaningful way. the definitive differences between scopes are the qualifications needed to enter them. that is, scopes limit the use of certain titles by linking them to prescribed qualifications rather than limit areas of practice per se.17 this is hardly surprising: how could one write a definition of, say, clinical psychology, without calling on concepts common in other sub-disciplines (e.g. assessment, intervention). the fragmentation of psychology during the latter part of the last decade, community psychologists discussed but rejected the idea of seeking approval for a vocational scope for community psychology. given the objective of the legislation, we would need to show that a community psychology scope was required to protect the health and safety of the public. while our work rarely poses imminent risks to identifiable individuals, we reasoned that it often carried significant risks for communities and societies. however, we quickly concluded that the effort and cost of administering a vocational scope for such a small number of community psychologists was probably unsustainable. moreover, it did not seem 17 the definitions have very similar wording appearing in all three vocational scopes and, to a lesser degree, in the general scope. see http://www.psychologistsboard.org.nz/scopes-ofpractice2 global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 33 to make much sense to divide psychologists into a series of guilds. interdisciplinarity is a strong feature of community psychology. it would seem counter-productive to create a guild which excluded critical psychologists, kaupapa maori psychologists18, cross-cultural psychologists and applied social psychologists – or forced them to accept our nomenclature. neither would it help build links with, for example, progressive clinical and organisational psychologists who are often important allies.19 in fact, the further fragmentation of professional psychology into numerous guilds is probably in nobody’s interest. cohen et al’s reference to victoria abandoning specialist registration during the 1990s is instructive here. in my view, the availability of a generic psychologist has been an advantage to community psychology in aotearoa/new zealand. the battle for statutory recognition described by lynne cohen and her colleagues has not been necessary. instead, there have been different sorts of battles. principal among these is challenging the clinic-centric thinking which dominates board decision making. this is almost inevitable given the numerical dominance of clinical psychologists within the profession and among psychologist members of the board. it is also closely related to the construction of psychology as a health profession. community psychologists as health professionals there is some ambivalence among community psychologists about being positioned as health 18 kaupapa maori psychology is a term often used to describe a psychology based on maori world views. see levy, m., nikora, l.w., masterawatere, b., rua, m.r., & waitoki, w. (2008). claiming spaces: proceedings of the 2007 national maori and pacific psychologies symposium, 2-24 november, hamilton. hamilton: maori and psychology research unit. 19 good examples within a new zealand context are (a) john read, clinical psychologist who has exposed the role of poverty and abuse in the development of psychosis and (b) stuart carr, an organisational psychologist whose work addresses poverty on a global scale. see for example (a) read, j. (2010). can poverty drive you mad? 'schizophrenia', socio-economic status and the case for primary prevention. new zealand journal of psychology39: 7-19 (b) carr, s.c. & bandawe, c.r. (2011). psychology applied to poverty. in martin, p.r. et al. (eds). international association of applied psychology handbook of applied psychology, 639-662. wiley-blackwell. professionals. while many of us consider ourselves to be in the business of health, broadly defined, we do not feel comfortable with the dominant construction of “health professional”: the assumed rational, dispassionate and objective expert who classifies and treats individuals experiencing illhealth. we feel uncomfortable with the medicalization of poverty, stigma and oppression. we do not see ourselves as treating individual clients. if there is a client, it is more likely to be a community, an organisation or a society than an individual. and the desired solutions to the challenges they face are unlikely to be therapy but conscientization, liberation and progressive economic, social and cultural policies. a recent debate concerning the standards for the accreditation of training programmes exemplifies the need to be vigilant regarding the clinic-centric thinking of the board. originally it was proposed that training programmes would be required to ensure that interns had an on-site supervisor who was a registered psychologist. this may well make sense for clinical psychology interns who are working in clinics providing services to individual clients who may be at imminent risk to themselves or others. it does not make sense for community psychology interns whose work rarely poses an imminent risk to identifiable individuals. moreover, community psychology interns often work in settings in which they are the only psychologist. indeed, for some interns there is no site as such. while it is obviously important that interns are supported and supervised, for community psychology interns, this generally needs to be a responsibility shared between university and other supervisors or mentors external to the setting. after some debate, a guideline was developed that better reflected the diverse realities of internships outside the clinical psychology norm. we are not the only sub-discipline to chafe against the positioning of psychology within this hegemonic version of health practitioner. like community psychologists, organisational psychologists tend to find the clinical-centric policies and practices of the board onerous and not particularly relevant to their work. the same is true for many academic and research psychologists but in addition, many of them cannot legally use the term psychologist because they do not hold one of the professional qualifications accredited by the board. community psychologists as psychologists as lynne cohen and her colleagues note, australian community psychologists have much in global!journal!of!community!psychology!practice! volume!3,!issue!2! june!2012! ! global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 34 common with other people outside the psychology tent: among them, community development workers, social planners, indigenous health workers and political activists. the same can be said of community psychologists in aotearoa/new zealand, although here the list might be extended to include policy analysts, health promotion workers and evaluation researchers. in fact, many people who have been trained in community psychology identify with psychology to only a limited extent. this is reflected in at least two ways. firstly, very few of them carry community psychologist as a job title. secondly, it is reflected in membership of professional organisations. for example, while exact numbers are not available, it is almost as easy to find a community psychologist at a meeting of the aotearoa/new zealand evaluation association as it is at a meeting of the new zealand psychological society. because the psychologists board maintains a public register, it is possible to calculate the number of registered psychologists who have a professional qualification in community psychology. in new zealand, that means a post-graduate diploma in community psychology from the university of waikato, the only accredited professional training programme in community psychology in the country. when i checked the register a couple of years ago, i found only 18 of our graduates listed as having a current practising certificate. at that time, there were approximately 90 graduates of our programme. that is, 4 out of every 5 graduates (approximately) do not hold a current practising certificate. and, as previously mentioned, they cannot legally call themselves a psychologist.20 does this matter? possibly not. there are many settings and roles in which the values, skills and knowledge of community psychology can be put to good effect. if our graduates had been restricted to those roles which accord with the dominant conceptualisation of “psychologist” they would have had made a much reduced contribution to community wellbeing and social justice. on the other hand, because so many of them fly under the official psychology radar, so to speak, it can be argued that they have had a smaller impact on the wider discipline of psychology than might otherwise have been the case. 20 more correctly, they cannot hold themselves out to be practising psychology. one can be on the register without holding a practising certificate. such a person can call heror himself a psychologist but cannot “practise”. the future it would be nice to conclude this commentary with some sound advice about how to avoid the sort of marginalisation that community psychologists in australia had to resist. if the experience thus far in aotearoa/new zealand has anything to offer it is the value of promoting a broad conception of professional psychology. imperfect though it is, the availability of the general psychologist scope has been beneficial to community psychology. however, as our history shows, this is not necessarily to liking of some of our siblings. whether one attributes it to professional snobbery or a concern to protect vulnerable members of the public, it is quite likely that we will see a continued growth in the number of sub-disciplines seeking their own vocational scope. i suspect that we will continue to fight battles for recognition and voice. it could hardly be otherwise. a field which prides itself on having a social conscience and a commitment to social justice will never be warmly welcomed into the ranks of professional elites. nevertheless, there probably is value in fighting for our right to be at the table. at the table, we can engage our colleagues in conversation, even if sometimes we will need to pound the table to be heard. the trick is to never forget why we are there. it is merely a means to an end. to forget that, to become comfortable diners, will make us just another elitist guild, more problem than solution. microsoft word 2011-0001-final-20111104.docx community psychology values-driven pedagogy: the foundation for empowering educational settings sylvie taylor, ph.d. and gregor v. sarkisian, ph.d. antioch university los angeles key words: empowering educational settings, student empowerment, community psychology pedagogy, student mentoring running head: community psychology values: the foundation recommended citation: taylor, s., & sarkisian, gv. (2011). community psychology valuesdriven pedagogy: the foundation for empowering educational settings. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(2), 19-30. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 community psychology values-driven pedagogy: the foundation for empowering educational settings abstract this paper discusses the role of community psychology values-driven pedagogy as the foundation for the enactment of an empowering educational setting for community psychology graduate students. using the applied community psychology specialization at antioch university los angeles as a model, curricular and extracurricular program elements that foster student well-being are identified. a model of an empowering educational setting is presented. explored are intrapersonal, interactional, behavioral, and longitudinal empowerment as they relate to student and faculty roles. student empowerment outcomes and indicators of student learning are highlighted with case examples. the field of community psychology has articulated a series of holistic values intended to support personal, relational, and collective well-being in the programs, practices, and policies we develop in our work with communities (nelson & prilleltensky, 2010). these values in turn create the conditions for the enactment of empowered settings. while it can be argued that we strive to uphold these values in our community work and research, these values are often in direct conflict with the policies and practices employed by colleges and universities educating future community psychologists. this paper explores the relationship between community psychology values-driven pedagogy and empowering educational settings which support students in achieving their full potential as practitioners of community psychology. the applied community psychology specialization at antioch university los angeles will serve as a model. university and program context of the acp specialization antioch university has a long-standing history of social justice centered education and pedagogy. since the inception of antioch college in 1852, the college and subsequently, the university serve as pioneers in values-driven education – predicated on the “belief that scholarship and life experience are strengthened when linked, that diversity in all its manifestations is a fundamental component of excellence in education, and that authentic social and community engagement are vital for those who strive to win victories for humanity” (antioch college, 2010). these values serve as the foundation for the teaching philosophy of antioch university as whole, including the los angeles campus, established in 1972. the applied community psychology specialization the applied community psychology specialization (acp) is a 17-unit, optional course of study within the m.a. psychology (map) program at antioch university los angeles (aula). the map program offers two degrees: the m.a. in clinical psychology (macp) which prepares students eligibility for licensure as marriage and family therapists in the state of california, and the m.a. individualized concentration (mpic), providing psychology education for students not interested in pursuing clinical licensure at the master’s level. acp provides students in both degree programs with opportunities to develop theoretical and practical skills for working in community settings. the greater los angeles area, arguably one of the most culturally and socially diverse in the world, offers a unique training ground for students to hone their skills in community work with a vast range of populations. the acp curriculum consists of a gateway course (community psychology: theories and methods), four core courses (community consultation and collaboration, program development and evaluation, prevention and promotion, and psychoeducational groups and in-service training development), and a field study in applied community psychology. students also have an opportunity to take elective workshops on a wide range of topics (e.g., grant writing, empowerment in community practice, asset-based community development). each of the four acp core courses includes three common course processes: course reading; working directly with representatives from community agencies to address agency (versus exclusively student) identified issues; and supervision both in and out of the classroom. for each core course students prepare oral presentations for the class and host agency. in the community consultation and collaboration, program development and evaluation, and prevention and promotion courses, students work collaboratively in global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 small groups (two to four students) and prepare written technical reports for their host agencies. in the psychoeducational groups and in-service training development course students work independently with a host agency to design a psychoeducational program for clients served by the agency or an in-service for agency staff. in addition, students prepare resource materials to accompany their programs and an informational booklet summarizing program content. psychoeducational groups and in-service trainings are typically delivered to the agency in the subsequent term through acp’s community partnership speakers bureau (cpsb) and are evaluated by program participants, agency directors, and acp faculty. the informational booklets prepared by students are published through the cpsb and made available free of charge through the aula website along with the acp libguide (described in appendix). students in acp are primarily female (75.7%) adult learners (mean age = 38.7) who work in addition to attending school (51.4% full-time, 41.2% part-time) (taylor & sarkisian, 2010). over 60% of acp students self-identify as belonging to an ethnic minority group, with the majority identifying as african-american or black (38%). the majority of acp students enter the specialization with prior community experience (extensive volunteer services and/or work with grassroots organizations or nonprofits). the students express a desire to take the knowledge they acquire in the specialization back into the communities where they live and work. while most students hold undergraduate degrees in the social sciences or the humanities, few have had exposure to the core skill sets presented to them in acp. values driven pedagogy and praxis the pedagogical philosophy of acp is strongly rooted in the tradition of liberation pedagogy as articulated by friere and the tenets of democratic education proposed by dewey. freire (1970) argued that students could not be fully engage in their own learning unless education was linked to praxis. acp employs friere’s “problem-posing” methodology. students in each of the core acp courses are presented with real world “problems” that are identified by community agencies and organizations and challenged to use the theories and methods they learn in the course to address the problem, rather than to merely engage in a theoretical exploration of the issues. as a result, their engagement in the course material is far more meaningful: • as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world with the • world, [students] will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that • challenge. . . their response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new • understandings; and gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed. (freire, 1970, p. 81). this commitment to engagement with the community as part of the acp pedagogical model is at the core of dewey’s (1997) notion of democratic education, in which the process of education should prepare students for democratic citizenship and community engagement. while the pedagogical model employed in acp courses results in commitment and community engagement of our students, we turn to community psychology values to enhance the personal, relational and collective well-being of our students. if the underlying goal of a community psychology program is to train students who will embrace the values of the discipline and apply them in their work, it is essential they experience those values as part of their education. unfortunately, what transpires in the classroom and in the process of completing class assignments linked to the community can only partially achieve this goal. extracurricular program components become vital to fully achieving student well-being. we developed and implemented a professional development model (see appendix) consisting of a series of activities complementing the course work within the specialization. each element provides students with opportunities to develop their professional skills in community psychology practice beyond what is taught in the classroom. at the foundation of this model are the professional relationships developed between students and specialization faculty, and among students, alumni (ambassadors), and community agencies. each component of the acp professional development model is designed to enhance student well-being. based on the work of nelson and prilleltensky (2010), table 1 identifies how personal, relational and collective well-being are defined and the program activities addressing each area. enactment of these values through pedagogy, curricular content, and extracurricular opportunities create the conditions necessary to foster student empowerment, growth and development. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 table 1. applied community psychology specialization values for student well-being (adapted from: nelson & prilleltensky (2010), p. 61) domains personal well-being relational well-being collective well-being values selfdetermination caring and compassion health respect for diversity participation and collaboration support for community structures social justice and accountability objective creation of opportunities to pursue academic and professional goals without excessive frustration expression of care and concern for the wellbeing of students promotion student academic and professional well-being; and promotion of student self-care promotion of respect and appreciation for diverse social identities and for student’s ability to define themselves personally and professionally promotion of fair processes whereby students can have meaningful input into decisions affecting their academic and professional development promotion of program structures and faculty advocacy that facilitate student pursuit of personal, and professional, and community goals promotion of fair and equitable allocation academic, professional and community opportunities for students needs addressed mastery, control, selfefficacy, voice, choice, skills, growth and autonomy attention, empathy, acceptance, positive regard academic, professional, emotional, and physical well-being identity, dignity, selfrespect, selfesteem, acceptance participation, involvement and mutual responsibility sense of community, cohesion, formal support access to vital academic and professional development services program activities (see appendix for full descriptions) • new student conference • faculty mentoring and academic advising • professional development series • community, social justice, and diversity research group • acp pecha-kucha presentation • core course and field study projects • student and ambassador mentoring • acp professional portfolio • core course and field study projects • community partnership speakers bureau • info to know student-empowerment pedagogy and mentoring in the acp specialization the development of our student-empowerment pedagogy and mentoring students in acp is rooted in literature on psychological empowerment theory (zimmerman, 2000; kieffer, 1984) and empowering community settings (maton, 2008; maton & salem, 1995). additionally, our recent efforts in conducting a seven-year program review (taylor & sarkisian, 2010) has greatly informed our understanding of the reflective practice of teaching and transparency as it relates to connections between program goals, activities and student learning outcomes. acp student empowerment in teaching culturally diverse students with an array of professional talents and academic abilities, we are often challenged with balancing course structure and flexibility. for this reason, we developed a definition of acp student empowerment based on maton’s (2008) work which broadly describes the process and outcome aspects of empowerment: global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 • a participatory, developmental, group-based process through which students achieve • their academic goals, advance their professional development in the practice of applied • community psychology, and, acquire valued educational and professional resources to • promote individual, organizational and community well-being. teaching and mentoring at the program level, maton & salom’s (1995) work on organizational characteristics of empowering community settings has influenced how we conceptualize our role in developing meaningful opportunities for students to develop academically, professionally, and personally. figure 1 presents a model illustrating how community psychology values-driven pedagogy promotes the development of an empowering educational setting within the acp specialization. community psychology values serve as the foundation for the enactment of problemsolving pedagogy that engages students: to draw inspiration from the work their courses require them to do in the community; to engage in curricular processes that allow students to identify their own strengths and talents, as well as those of their peers; to foster collaborative relationships where these talents are freely shared; and ultimately, to develop a commitment to using this process in their collaborative work in community settings. this pedagogical model creates conditions which drive the need for holistic program components supporting student well-being and professional growth, both inside and outside of the classroom. many elements of the acp professional development model serve to enhance student well-being. in turn, holistic program components drive the development of student empowerment and foster opportunities for collaboration both within the program (with faculty and students) as well as in the community with organizations and agencies. taken together, each of these components lead to the enactment of community psychology values in students’ work and build a sense of community within acp and our community partners, which in turn, drive the program faculty and students to critically reflect on the continued refinement of the process. in our work with students, zimmerman’s (2000) three dimensional model of psychological empowerment (pe) theory informs our teaching and mentoring. additionally, the role of mentors and supportive peer relationships thought to be critical to the development of participatory competence observed in kieffer’s (1984) research are also roles we work to develop with students. finally, the longitudinal dynamic has been a key ingredient in the attainment of pe and the development of participatory competence in the literature (kieffer, 1984; zimmerman, 2000) and in our work with students. while students complete the acp specialization in one to two years, the longitudinal dynamic is relevant, in that students continue their focus on acp skill development across settings (i.e., course & field), issues, and levels of analysis. table 2 summarizes our student empowerment pedagogy to teaching and mentoring in the acp specialization. the four dimensions of acp student empowerment – intrapersonal, interactional, behavioral, and longitudinal – are presented by student roles, faculty roles, student empowerment outcomes and indicators of student learning. consistent with kieffer (1984) and zimmerman (2000), we conceptualize student empowerment as context-specific. thus, we have defined student empowerment and articulated pedagogical approaches within the programmatic context of the acp specialization. structurally, each of the four acp core courses has been developed to provide an opportunity role structure (maton & salem, 1995) for students to engage in multiple learning domains simultaneously (i.e., skills-based curriculum in acp core courses, multi-level field work, and collaboration) to better prepare them for their work in the community after graduation. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 24 figure 1: community psychology values-driven pedagogy to promote an empowering educational setting. (adapted from: maton & salem, 1995) enactment of cp values-driven pedagogy holistic program components that support student well-being and professional growth community psychology values development of opportunities for collaboration between students, faculty, and community development of opportunities for individual student empowerment enactment of community psychology values in student work empowering educational setting support system: encompassing peer-based sense of community work toward promoting leadership that is: inspirational talented shared committed model & promote group based belief system that: inspires growth strengths-based beyond self actively develop viable opportunity role structure for student professional development: pervasive highly accessible multifunctional critical reflection on program development by faculty, students, and ambassadors global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 25 table 2. student empowerment pedagogy in the applied community psychology specialization (adapted from: kieffer (1984) and zimmerman (2000)) dimensions of acp student empowerment student role faculty role student-empowerment outcomes indicators of student learning intrapersonal develop knowledge of course content theory and associated skill sets develop experience in working effectively and efficiently as a collaborative partner develop experience applying newly learned theory and skills in the community to improve wellbeing respect and encompass diverse talents and ways of learning – accountability and flexibility encourage active learning through class exercises that link student interest in contemporary social issues, course content, and work in the community encourage student-faculty contact to assist students in developing their understanding of course material. confidence in ability to apply cp theory and analyze situations from a cp perspective in conversation. confidence in ability to contribute to individual, organizational, and community well-being through application of cp theory and skills engagement in learning activities inside and outside classroom final project oral presentations feedback from community partners. use of cp skill sets in primary work duties after graduation. interactional critical reflection on and development of personal and professional values, and, on sociopolitical environment related to issues of focus in class projects with community-based organizations. develop understanding of the social-ecological approach and the role of social power in community life through field work. learning about social issues and/or providing assistance to community-based organizations through organizationally and collaboratively determined goals model respect for diversity. teach skills in listening and resolving conflict in respectful and constructive ways support students in engaging in reflective practice and consciousness raising. encourage collaboration teach written and oral communication skills to enhance work with peers/community partners increased capacity for critical reflection and action. competency in applying theories of social ecology and social power to contemporary social issues that impact communities. development in ability to enact value on diversity through work in student groups with community partners. engagement in collaborative partnerships which reflect students’ value on diversity goals to guide collaborative work together are consistently used to manage conflict constructively. self-evaluation papers focused on role of collaborative partnerships with student colleagues and with community based organizations. behavioral goal 1. develop a foundation in theoretical concepts and principles of cp and its applications. goal 2. develop skill sets in cp practice that are applicable to work with community groups, non-profit organizations and social institutions. goal 3. recognize, understand, and respect the complexity of sociocultural diversity. goal 4. use critical and creative thinking, skeptical inquiry and the scientific approach to solve problems. goal 5. develop communication skills necessary to work effectively with colleagues, community groups, non-profit organizations, and social institutions. goal 6. develop research and information competence and ability to use computers and other technology for multiple purposes. expectations of performance and learning activities are clearly communicated (e.g., in syllabus). provision of prompt, constructive, and frequent feedback on all written work. deliver course content. facilitate work in groups. facilitate individual/group work with personnel from host organization. mentor students in community work related and unrelated to coursework or field study. organize ambassador (alumni) retreats and events. strengthened ability to apply cp theories and skills in community settings, successfully collaborate with peers and community partners, and communicate acp activities through oral presentations and in writing. acp specialization-specific student learning outcomes correspond with goals. for example, with goal 2, two of the six student learning outcomes (slo) include: slo 1: engage in consultation and multidisciplinary collaboration with colleagues, community groups, nonprofit organizations, and social institutions. slo2: identify and address ethical issues as they arise in the practice of community psychology. documented incremental improvement in oral and written communication skills: written work technical writing oral presentations projects feedback from community partners final project technical reports from the four core acp courses. longitudinal participation in projects that span more than one quarter (10weeks) and address the same issue. build ecological understanding and skill development in multiple settings and at multiple levels of analysis. develop/facilitate opportunities for students to participate in long-term projects mentor students through longitudinal learning experiences (sometimes after they graduate) developed appreciation for the complexity and duration of community work focused on sustainable change approaches contributions to well-being among individuals and organizations through community practice. acp professional portfolio multiple learning experiences and work products which represent knowledge and skill development development of long-term collaborative relationships in the community to promote well-being as acp ambassadors. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 dimensions of acp student empowerment below, we define each dimension of acp student empowerment and illustrate associated roles, outcomes and indicators through student work in the four acp core courses, field study, elective work, and/or non-curricular (independent of course credit) student activities. intrapersonal dimension. this refers to a student’s belief in their competence to promote individual, organizational and community well-being through their practice of acp and the belief in their ability to influence their professional development and career opportunities. in the four acp core courses and in our mentorship of students, we strive to link student passion to course content in acp to contemporary social issues to work in the community. when students are able to simultaneously immerse themselves in these learning domains, they become more likely to develop confidence in their developing acp skills. we also view peer support, primarily between students who work in groups, and faculty support, primarily through faculty supervision of course projects and mentoring activities, as critical to the development of student confidence in their competence to practice acp and ability to influence their professional development. changes in student confidence are incrementally evident through work on course projects (i.e., supervision, group presentations, written feedback on technical reports) and most visible in student final project presentations highlighting the achievements of their collaborative work. this is especially true when skills developed in previous acp core courses are applied in new acp core courses, or, when students take on new and meaningful roles, or, when students experience multi-level change in their field work. for example, two students in the community consultation and collaboration course collaborated with a non-profit agency working to reunify former prostitute mothers exiting prison with their children in foster care. the students applied a skill-set acquired in the psychoeducational groups and inservice training development course to two psychoeducational groups (one for parents and one for children) to educate them about reunification process. this learning experience provided these students with the opportunity to learn a new set of skills in community consultation and collaboration and supported them in applying and further developing a set of skills learned in a previous course. additionally, the students gained experience in developing an intervention on two ecological levels of analysis – at the meso level in their work with the consultee agency, and at the mico level in their work with the families. finally, confidence in their ability to promote community well-being increased greatly because they were able to develop a set of small group interventions consistent with the personal and relational values for well-being espoused in the cp textbook we use in our theoryfocused course. interactional dimension. increase critical awareness of school, community, and socio-political environments through analysis and reflection on work with peers and organizational partners. each of the four acp core courses includes a field component and a portion of the majority of class sessions is dedicated to the supervision of student work with host organizations. students continuously process new information and link agency practices and acp values, theory and practice within the context of collaborative teamwork with the host organization. while they engage in these multiple learning domains, they raise their consciousness to school, community, and sociopolitical environments and have the opportunity to reflect on these experiences with peers and faculty. as students progress through the core curriculum, their ability to enact their critical awareness into constructive collaborative activities in work groups noticeably matures. one of our recent graduates published a commentary about her experience of learning collaboration. she cited trust and conflict as two major areas she was able to critically reflect on and develop her competency in collaboration (marrero & sarkisian, 2010). class supervision is a primary setting in which we have observed the “ah-hah” moments. this is where students raise their critical awareness upon reflecting on some combination of their experience at an agency setting, their research, and/or their collaborative group work. class supervision also provides learning opportunities for students to connect acp course content to their work in the field and learn about how other groups in the class progress in their work with community partners as well. conflict and confrontation are two common issues that emerge in class supervision which we use as opportunities for students to engage in reflective practice, raising an individual’s consciousness to their role in school, community, and sociopolitical environments. below we provide examples of how conflict can manifest and be addressed in student work groups, and, how the issue of confrontation can global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 27 emerge and be addressed between student work groups and community partners. in the consultation and collaboration, program development and evaluation, and prevention and promotion courses we require students work in groups, develop common goals to promote accountability, and guide their collaborative work (process) together. the goals are periodically refined as students engage in their collaboration and experience obstacles intrinsic to community work. additionally, student groups are periodically required to rate their performance on a likert scale, discuss their ratings, and share what they learned with the class (for a more complete description of this exercise, see marrero & sarkisian, 2010). this exercise provides one structured way to promote student engagement in reflective practice of managing conflict in their collaborative work. within student groups, conflict commonly arises around issues of accountability to the group, due to unclear expectations, or not following through on project related tasks or deliverables. students are quick to raise their awareness of inequity in group work, but are often unprepared to constructively resolve issues of group accountability. when this occurs, our pedagogical question becomes… “how can we encourage students to transform conflict into individual accountability and peer support conducive to successful collaboration?” through student reflection on their goals to guide collaboration, expectations can be clarified and communications can be realigned – sometimes with guidance from faculty, sometimes with guidance from peers, and, sometimes both. as students mature through the program, they tend to move beyond the myth of equal division of labor and begin to practice meaningful ways by which to support each other and hold themselves and others accountable in constructive ways. between student groups and community partners, the issue of confrontation typically arises from the need for the student group to enact their critical awareness through confronting community partners with constructive feedback. this usually begins with some type of situation requiring confrontation which our students often fear initially. for example, students may find information that is evidence-based and contrary to the practice of the organization. the contradictions are sometimes great enough to stimulate constructive action based on students’ awareness. however, moving from critical awareness to constructive action often requires support from faculty during supervision through guided reflection on issues within or across learning domains. in a program development and evaluation class, a group of students worked with the aula student services task force to provide recommendations to further develop policies and programming addressing diversity issues on campus. when the student group became aware of the institutional inconsistencies between mission and practice, they were furious, especially since they are all women of color. their anger,reflected in an early draft of their technical report provided a concrete indicator that they had reached a critical, yet not constructive position. after reflecting on where they were in their process during class supervision, they were able to use their frustration as fuel, transforming their criticism into constructive plans to implement diversity initiatives based on best practices identified in the research literature. in the community consultation and collaboration course, a student group was collaborating with a mentoring program for youth emancipating from the foster care system. through their research, the students became aware of many state standards and resources to assist programs, yet their community partner was not using any of them. they soon learned the program’s staff had little knowledge of foster care or youth who have been in foster care systems for long periods of time. at first, the students were at a loss for how to proceed. through class supervision, the students were able to identify a plan which would educate the director of the mentoring program about the resources available and benefit the further development of the program. in the examples above, maslow’s well known quote…“if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail”… is relevant to student work with community partners as the quote underscores the importance of understanding how others conceptualize their problems and solutions. additionally, it is beneficial for students to reflect on how their conceptualization of potential solutions may be clouded by their own intervention biases. behavioral dimension. development of competencies in acp through engagement in group projects in the four acp core courses, field study, elective, and, extracurricular community work. students develop, practice and refine their skills in acp in a variety of settings, but are observed by faculty primarily through course related work (i.e., supervision, drafts of technical reports, reflection papers, final technical reports, and final presentations) which reflects their interactions with peers and with community partners. at the program level, we have recently revised our program goals through the program review process global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 28 (see table 2). while we recognize student empowerment will vary for each student, we articulate specific program goals so students know the opportunities, expectations, and limitations of the acp specialization. through the use of curriculum mapping, we have developed a method to identify and evaluate the connection between acp specialization goals, coursework, and student learning outcomes. the program review process has also provided us with opportunities for reflection on areas in which we can further develop the acp specialization. for example, we recently underwent the peer review process to further develop the syllabus for our gateway course, community psychology theories and methods (sarkisian & taylor, 2010), and, we plan on repeating the process for our acp core courses to continue the development of our courses and acp specialization. in the classroom, we believe faculty must model the behaviors they wish to see from their students. we achieve this through consistent structure, support and feedback in acp coursework. structurally, syllabi provide students with clear course expectations and rubrics provide specific instructions for individual assignments. faculty support is provided to students through in-class supervision, email, and individual or group office hour meetings outside of class. peer student support typically begins through course related activities and often extends beyond the classroom with students sometimes collaborating on community-related projects not related to course credit after they have worked together on one or more acp core courses. finally, feedback is provided (1) through weekly class supervision, (2) on all written work ranging between three to five drafts for each technical report and (3) immediately following the presentation of their final reports on the last day of class. longitudinal dimension. the longitudinal dimension refers to student academic and professional development of competencies in acp during one’s program of study. ideally, students are exposed to opportunities which build competencies in addressing social issues in a variety of community settings and at multiple levels of ecological analysis. and, through the four acp core courses, field study, and extracurricular community-based work during school and after graduation, students have the opportunity to develop a wealth of experience in a short period of time (1-2 yrs). for example, two students who completed the psychoeducational groups course in the previous quarter, formed a student group and began consulting with a non-profit organization resettling iraqi immigrants. the agency had difficulty in retaining relatives of immigrants who were required by law to act as hosts. the student group applied and developed their knowledge of a skill set learned in a previous course to a new problem – in a new course where they learned a new set of skills. additionally, they continued their work together through their field study the following quarter and developed a manuscript for publication which was accepted shortly before they graduated (gordon, taylor, & sarkisian, 2010). nearly eight months after graduation form the program, they presented the paper at the eastern psychological association conference independently (gordon, taylor, & sarkisian, 2010). while this is an exemplar case, it has pushed the faculty to develop more opportunities for students to engage in similar long-term projects. the specialization now runs the community, social justice, and diversity research group, which serves as the primary vehicle for supporting student research, academic development, and scholarship. a recent addition to our program is our development of criteria included in the acp professional portfolio. the portfolio provides a venue for students to showcase their work in the acp specialization and serves a marketable tool capturing the longitudinal dynamic of acp student empowerment. additionally, several students reported to us how their acp portfolio was instrumental in their success during job interviews. they were able to produce an array of professional documents representing their best work. programmatically, the portfolios serve as documentation of student learning through the acp specialization which benefits our program development and evaluation efforts. conclusion in this paper, we used the acp specialization as a model to discuss how we work and develop an empowering educational setting conducive to graduate students’ empowerment—through the enactment of cp values. values driven pedagogy and student empowerment are critical to the development of practitioners whose work in the community will embrace the values of community psychology. the enactment of this process requires critical reflective practice on the part of community psychology program directors and faculty to ensure that course work and extracurricular supports for their students are consistent with the cp values espoused in the classroom. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 29 references antioch college (2010). mission & history. retrieved from http://antiochcollege.org/about/mission_and_history. html dewey, j. (1997). democracy and education: an introduction to the philosophy of education. new york: the free press. freire, p. (2005). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum. gordon, r. d., taylor, r., & sarkisian, g. v. (2010). psychoeducational workshops as a practical tool to facilitate resettlement with iraqi refugees and anchor relatives. journal of muslim mental health, 5, 82-98. gordon, r., taylor, r., & sarkisian, g.v. (2010, march). psychoeducational workshops as a practical tool to facilitate resettlement with iraqi refugees and anchor relatives. paper presented at the 81st annual meeting of the eastern psychological association conference, new york, ny. kieffer, c. (1984). citizen empowerment: a developmental perspective. prevention in human services, 3, 9-36. marrero, l., & sarkisian, g. v. (2010). learning and teaching collaboration in the applied community psychology (acp) specialization. the community psychologist, 43(4), 15-16. maton, k. i. (2008). empowering community settings: agents of individual development, community betterment, and positive social change. american journal of community psychology, 41, 421. maton, k. i., & salem, d. a. (1995). organizational characteristics of empowering community settings: a multiople case study approach. american journal of community psychology, 23, 631-656. nelson, g., & prilleltensky, i. (2010). community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and well-being. new york: palgrave macmillan. taylor, s., & sarkisian, g. v. (2010). applied community psychology specialization: seven year program review self-study (winter 2002-spring 2009). antioch university, los angeles: authors. sarkisian, g. v., & taylor, s. (2010). psy 545a community psychology: theories and methods (3units). division 2 of the american psychology association, society for the teaching of psychology, office of teaching resources in psychology, project syllabus. http://teachpsych.org/otrp/syllabi/syllabi.php?categor y=community psych zimmerman, m. (2000). empowerment theory: psychological, organizational, and community levels of analysis. in j. rappaport & e. seidman (eds.), handbook of community psychology (p. 43-63). new york: plenum. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 30 appendix applied community psychology specialization professional development model in addition to on-going academic advising and mentoring by program faculty, acp provides students with the following opportunities to enhance their professional development: new student conference students entering acp meet with specialization faculty to discuss their academic and professional goals and community experience. using this information, faculty refer students to specific courses, other students, program alumni and community partners who can serve as resources and/or mentors in the achievement of student goals. professional development series the series provides students with tools and strategies for time management, resume developmentt, professional networking, teaching, and a variety of other professional issues. the specialization provides resource guides for each workshop to ensure that all students have access to the information. community partnership speakers bureau (cpsb) the cpsb provides support and supervision to students designing and implementing psychoeducational programs in the community. students are also encouraged to create psychoeducational resource guides that are published through the cpsb and made available in the public domain through the aula website. community, social justice, and diversity research group the research group supports and supervises student research. faculty work closely with participating students to identify opportunities for them to present their work at conferences and to publish in professional journals. this is the only research group on the aula campus. acp professional portfolio as students near the end of their coursework in the specialization, they prepare a professional portfolio (both hard copy and electronic). the portfolio showcases student achievements and work products prepared in the specialization and the unique skills they have developed. portfolios contain a resume/vita, letters of reference, and final projects from major coursework in the specialization. upon completion of their portfolios, graduating students prepare brief presentations of their work to share with members of the specialization community and incoming students. kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 influencing prevention policy through effective communication with advocates and legislators melissa strompolis, megan branham, whitney tucker, heidi aakjer author biographies: melissa strompolis, phd, is director of research and evaluation at children’s trust of south carolina and is an affiliate investigator at the yvonne & schuyler moore child development research center in the college of education at the university of south carolina.? her evaluation and research focuses on prevention, child well-being and opportunity, and race equity.? specifically, she evaluates programs that prevent child abuse and neglect; researches child well-being, opportunity, and adverse childhood experiences; and collaborates to address these issues and race equity via policy solutions. email: mstrompolis@schildren.org. corresponding address: 1330 lady street, suite 310, colombia, sc 29201. megan branham, lmsw, is director of policy at children’s trust of south carolina. she collaborates with organizations and elected officials statewide to advance child well-being policy that prevents abuse, neglect, and accidental injury and promotes quality early care and education. megan has more than a decade of advocacy and program implementation experience in the fields of teen pregnancy prevention and maternal and child health. whitney tucker, mph, is policy and research associate at children’s trust of south carolina, where she engages external stakeholders in the promotion of public policies that improve the welfare of vulnerable children. she aids in the execution of policy research projects, with special interest in two-generational strategies for reducing poverty and increasing opportunity. she coordinates activities around the south carolina early childhood common agenda with the goal of building smart, comprehensive early childhood systems for children 0–5. heidi aakjer, mpa, leads 13 local coalitions as safe kids south carolina manager at children’s trust of south carolina. she guides statewide efforts to prevent unintentional childhood injuries through education, training, advocacy and public awareness. she serves on the safe kids worldwide advisory committee as well as the south carolina state team for infant mortality within the health resources and services administration’s maternal and child health bureau collaborative improvement and innovation network. her work focuses on preventing the three leading causes of fatal and non-fatal injuries to south carolina´s children: child passenger safety accidents, drownings, and unsafe sleep for infants. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1 march 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 influencing prevention policy through effective communication with advocates and legislators abstract despite being largely preventable, unintentional injuries are the leading cause of pediatric mortality in the state of south carolina, usa. deliberate policy is needed to encourage transformative change in preventing childhood injuries. however, injury prevention advocates across the state have yet to formalize a collective message to effectively engage policymakers regarding injury prevention issues. to address this concern, this study surveyed safe kids south carolina child injury prevention advocates as well as state legislators and legislative staff with the goal of assessing and growing current knowledge of injury prevention and capacity to engage in legislative advocacy. one hundred seventy-four advocates and fifteen state legislators and legislative staff completed a survey of knowledge of injury prevention, perceptions on the importance of various injury prevention issues, organizational capacity to engage in advocacy activities, the impact of advocacy efforts, and legislative action taken as a result of injury prevention advocacy. in addition to the survey, structured interviews of legislators and staff were also conducted, and findings were compiled to inform advocacy and capacity-building activities for safe kids coalition members. activities included a training session on effective advocacy techniques, child passenger safety laws, and legislative talking points for advocates to use during a structured advocacy event at the south carolina statehouse. from those activities, safe kids coalition members received pledges from policymakers to introduce or co-sponsor child passenger safety guidelines. a child’s death or serious injury changes the lives of families and entire communities. but these tragedies do not have to happen. preventable injuries are just that, preventable. more than 1,598 children have died in motor vehicle accidents in south carolina over the past decade (centers for disease control and prevention, 2012). in 2013, 50% of motor vehicle-related deaths involved children under the age of six who were not in a safety seat (south carolina department of public safety, 2013). legislation is needed to adequately address the problem of child passenger safety to see a significant reduction in child injury and death. studies have shown that state child passenger restraint laws result in more children being properly restrained in vehicles (eichelberger, chouinard, & jermakian, 2012; gunn, phillippi, & cooper, 2007; national highway traffic safety administration, 2007; winston, erkoboni, & xie, 2007). in a sample of crashes in 16 states and the district of columbia, winston et al. (2007) found that children ages four to seven were 39% more likely to be reported as using a forward-facing child restraint or booster seat in states with booster seat laws compared with children in other states. in tennessee, booster seat use among children aged four to eight increased from 29% before a booster seat law was implemented to 39% one year after implementation (gunn et al., 2007). among five states -missouri, north carolina, pennsylvania, wisconsin, and wyoming -that increased car or booster seat requirements from age three or four to age seven or eight, car seat and booster seat use tripled, and deaths and serious injuries decreased by 17% (eichelberger et al., 2012). global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1 march 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 children’s trust of south carolina is the only statewide organization in south carolina dedicated to strengthening and supporting public and private prevention efforts that keep south carolina’s children safe. children’s trust works to prevent child abuse, neglect and unintentional injuries so that every child has the opportunity to thrive in a healthy, nurturing environment. children’s trust is home to safe kids south carolina, kids count south carolina, and prevent child abuse south carolina (children’s trust of south carolina, n.d.). safe kids south carolina, one of children’s trust’s signature programs, is an associate of safe kids worldwide. safe kids worldwide is a global organization of more than 600 coalitions and organizations in 23 countries that are dedicated to preventing injuries in children. south carolina is one of a few states that have a state coordinating office. children’s trust employs a safe kids south carolina manager who supports thirteen local safe kids coalitions across the state. safe kids local coalitions lead their communities in reducing child injury through a variety of programmatic activities including education, awareness, and safety device distribution (safe kids worldwidetm, n.d.). in addition, children’s trust employs research and policy staff, including a community psychologist, to improve programmatic activities and changes for successful social impact. safe kids coalitions see firsthand that even though they are effective, local efforts can only reach a small subset of the population. additionally, education, economy, taxes, and employment dominate political conversations in south carolina. children’s trust needs to position the conversation among state legislators so that it is evidenceinformed and one that stresses collective values around protecting children. injury prevention communications need to not only be recognized as an important issue by legislators, but also ignite their support and direct their actions (freudenberg, 1981). additionally, effective communication needs to overcome knowledge deficits or misperceptions about the issue. in this specific context, advocates want to avoid negative stereotypes and misdirected blame on “bad parenting.” instead, advocates want to promote the idea that all children deserve the opportunity to thrive in a healthy, nurturing, and safe environment free from injury. the importance of advocacy effective advocacy work can address knowledge deficits, dispel misconceptions, and guide political will around the issue of injury prevention (balassiano & chandler, 2009). with accurate information on trends and best practices, advocates play a critical role informing legislators to create responsible policy. advocates’ data-driven influence can ignite legislative action that saves the lives of children across south carolina. influence on legislators can be achieved in a myriad of ways (jensen, 2007), consequently making it difficult to determine precisely what actions constitute effective legislative advocacy. evaluation and capacity assessments serve as tools to determine necessary knowledge and skills and appropriate advocacy efforts to influence policy (egbert & hoechstetter, 2006; gerteis, coffman, kim, & martin, 2008; strong & kim, 2012). effective advocacy requires ongoing evaluation to ensure that advocate resources are appropriately allocated in order to global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1 march 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 persuade legislators toward policy decisions that prevent harm and keep children safe. motor vehicle policy motor vehicle accidents are the number one cause of childhood injury fatality for children ages 0-19. in south carolina, more children die on roads than their peers across the united states (a rate of 8.08 per 100,000 versus 4.94 per 100,000 in 2012). with such high numbers and numerous options for targeted intervention efforts, motor vehicle injuries are a top priority for prevention efforts. with the children’s trust legislative focus on improving child safety in motor vehicles, advocates are working to achieve the following: 1. update the current south carolina child passenger restraint law to reflect american academy of pediatrics and national highway traffic safety administration standards (durbin, 2011; national highway traffic safety administration, n.d.), 2. pass legislation to ban texting while driving (safe kids worldwidetm, 2014), and 3. create a stronger graduated driver’s licensing law (safe kids worldwidetm, 2014). in january 2015, the south carolina legislature began the first year of its two-year legislative session. children’s trust worked with legislators to address childhood injury prevention, specifically motor vehicle injury. additionally, children’s trust partnered with members of the safe kids coalition to increase their capacity for policy and advocacy activities. setting the stage: gathering information from safe kids advocates and legislators to improve the chances of effectively passing legislation to reduce unintentional injuries in south carolina, children’s trust gathered survey data from safe kids advocates, legislators, and legislative staff across four domains: 1) knowledge of injury prevention, 2) perceptions of injury prevention, 3) advocacy capacity/impact, and 4) community involvement (gottlieb et al., 2003; radius, galer-unti, & tappe, 2008; rothenbuhler, 1991; whaley & weaver, 2010). gathering information from these four domains allowed children’s trust to assess potential knowledge gaps for safe kids advocates, legislators, and legislative staff; levels of perceived importance of injury prevention for safe kids advocates, legislators, and legislative staff; capacity to engage in advocacy efforts for safe kids advocates; impact of advocacy efforts on legislators and legislative staff; and levels of community involvement for safe kids advocates. children’s trust gathered this information by reviewing relevant academic and research literature (see gottlieb et al., 2003; radius et al., 2008; rothenbuhler, 1991; whaley & weaver, 2010). surveys were then created and pilot tested with staff and key stakeholders. after several revisions, the survey was administered via surveymonkey for advocates and surveymonkey and paper copies for legislators and legislative staff. survey sections regarding knowledge of injury prevention were identical for safe kids advocates, legislators, and legislative staff. a complete copy of the survey can be requested from the lead author. supplemental interview questions were developed from the results of the survey to global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1 march 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 empower coalition members with knowledge about effective communication tactics with legislators. findings from the survey were noted in questions to legislators and legislative staff, who were then solicited for advice to inform advocates moving forward (i.e. district voters were rated as the highest influence for legislators how does that information or influence get to you from voters in your district?). interviews were held individually over a period of one month. safe kids advocate findings safe kids advocates in south carolina were solicited to complete the survey via email. a total of 174 (n = 800, 22%) advocates completed the survey; however, the total number of respondents for each question varied (responses were not required). almost half of the respondents were safety technicians (n = 85, 48.5%) who are nationally certified to install child safety seats in motor vehicles, while 29% were safe kids coalition members (n = 51) who are volunteers or partners of local safe kids coalitions, and 9% were safe kids coalition coordinators (n = 15) who are paid unintentional injury prevention staff for local safe kids agencies. nearly half of the respondents primarily served the midlands region of south carolina (n = 71, 46%) followed by the pee dee (n = 37, 25%), upstate (n = 36, 24%), and the low country (n = 8, 5%). knowledge of injury prevention the survey consisted of 13 injury prevention knowledge questions covering various injury areas (e.g., motor vehicles, all-terrain vehicles, motor boats, safe sleep, and fire arms). the questions also utilized several formats including true/false, multiple choice, and fill-in-the-blank. one hundred and fifteen advocates completed this section of the survey (66%). more than half of the advocates answered incorrectly for four of the knowledge questions. of these, three questions were motor vehicle related and one of the questions was motor boat related. the latter asked about a properly fitting life jacket for a child while the former asked about graduated licensing (69% incorrect), distracted driving (79% incorrect), and car seat safety (52% incorrect). perceptions of injury prevention perceptions of importance were assessed in four areas: general injury prevention, texting/ cell phone use while driving, child passenger restraint law, and graduated driver’s licensing. across all areas, advocates rated these issues as very or extremely important (n = 118-143, 86-99%). child passenger safety and general injury prevention were rated as the most important issues while graduated driver’s licensing was rated as the lowest (although still very high on the importance scale) issue. the majority of the advocates felt they had a clear understanding of the areas, but felt that legislators had a less clear understanding. additionally, responses varied on whether or not advocates felt that legislators would pass legislation to address these domains in the next legislative session. advocacy capacity advocates responded to seven questions regarding advocacy capacity and challenges of their local safe kids coalition. the majority of advocates felt that their coalition had the necessary infrastructure and knowledge to effectively engage in advocacy. additionally, advocates reported that their local safe kids coalitions had plans to engage in a wide variety of advocacy-related activities global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1 march 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 including media/public awareness raising (91%), coalition building/networking (65%), monitoring policy implementation (28%), grassroots organization (23%), issue research (22%), and lobbying (17%). finally, advocates reported advocacy-related challenges facing their coalitions. the most commonly reported challenges included collaboration (e.g., form a better partnership with local agencies), personnel (e.g., enlisting volunteers to help), the general public (e.g., increasing community awareness and support), and time (e.g., time to be involved outside of regular responsibilities). community involvement advocates were asked questions related to processes and approaches to community involvement. process questions included keeping up with the news, having ideas for improvements, getting together with others who keep up with news, and working with others to bring about change. approach questions included attending public meetings, interacting with politicians, signing petitions, joining a protest or demonstration, and participating in religious, sporting, outdoor, neighborhood association, seniors group, or school-related activities. in the last section, advocates were asked about voting status and frequency. the majority of advocates keep up with the news (n = 118, 92%) and have ideas for improvements (n = 102, 80%), while slightly fewer get together with others who keep up with news (n = 99, 77%) or work with others to bring about change (n = 82, 64%). advocates reported participating in a wide range of approaches to community involvement with the highest being religious activities (n = 94, 73%) and the lowest being joining a protest or demonstration (n = 11, 9%). finally, the majority of advocates felt they had an opportunity to vote for a candidate they trusted (n = 109, 87%) and slightly less voted in their last local election (n = 98, 76%). implications for safe kids south carolina while safe kids coalition advocates are expected to be experts in the field of child injury prevention, the survey findings suggest knowledge deficits in the area of child passenger safety. advocates rated child passenger safety as one of the two most important injury prevention issues, but consistently lacked knowledge regarding best practices for ensuring the safety of children in motor vehicles and motor boats. their reported neutrality regarding the potential introduction of legislation in these domains may be related to the knowledge deficit. effective advocacy will require greater expertise in these areas. more information should be gathered from advocates regarding their preferred learning format to ensure that future training in child passenger safety truly yields increased knowledge. advocacy effectiveness could also be increased through more efficient linkages of safe kids coalitions with other nonprofit organizations and the general public. although safe kids advocates reported high levels of individual community involvement (e.g., 74% participation in church and 63% participation in a sports club or league), many noted partnerships between safe kids coalitions and local agencies to be a challenge. training sessions to teach these advocates how to discuss their work in non-traditional settings could allow for greater support from the public and community. additionally, safe kids coordinators are currently employed only part-time, further decreasing the global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1 march 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 capacity of local coalitions to build community relationships. full-time funding for safe kids coordinators could allow for greater emphasis on building relationships with legislators. legislator and legislative staff findings south carolina state legislators and legislative staff (n = 175) were solicited to complete the survey via email and regular mail. a total of 15 legislators and legislative staff (9%) completed the survey. similar to the advocate assessment, responses to each question were not required, leading to a varied number of responses for each question. nearly all of the respondents were state legislators (n = 13, 87%), and 13% were legislative staff (n = 2). knowledge of injury prevention eleven legislators/staff completed the injury prevention knowledge section of the survey (the number of responses to individual questions ranged from 9 to 11). like advocates, legislators/staff had difficulty with five questions, with 46% or fewer answering correctly. four of the questions were motor vehicle related and one of the questions was motor boat related. of the incorrect motor vehicle responses, three of the questions pertained to child passenger safety (50-100% incorrect) and one referenced distracted driving (91% incorrect). the motorboat safety question asked about a properly fitting life jacket for a child. perceptions of injury prevention perceptions of importance were measured in the same four domains used in the advocate assessment: injury prevention in general, texting/cell phone use while driving, child passenger restraint law, and graduated driver’s licensing. legislators/staff felt that all four issue domains were very or extremely important (n = 10-13, 83-100%). as with advocates, child passenger safety and texting/ cell phone use while driving were rated as the most important, while graduated driver’s licensing was rated the lowest. legislators/ staff members felt that they had a slightly clearer understanding of graduated driver’s licensing than advocates, but felt that advocates had a clearer understanding of the other injury prevention areas. additionally, for every domain except texting/cell phone use while driving, legislators/staff felt neutrally or not very confident that they would pass legislation to address these domains in the next legislative session. impact of advocacy legislators/staff responded to 16 questions regarding the impact of advocacy efforts from a variety of sources. questions ascertained the perceived level of influence from each source as well as the importance of that source as a resource for information on injury prevention issues. the majority of respondents reported being influenced most often (e.g., always and often) by colleagues in the legislature (n = 9, 82%), followed by the general public (n = 7, 73%), voters in their district (n = 7, 70%) and leadership of the house and senate (n = 7, 64%). respondents rated voters from their district as their most important source of information on injury prevention, followed by lobbyists and their colleagues in the legislature. even so, nearly 55% of legislators/ staff reported never having been approached from any source regarding legislation focused on injury prevention. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1 march 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 legislative action after advocacy eleven legislators/staff responded to three questions regarding policy action as a result of injury prevention advocacy efforts. the questions asked whether it was difficult for a legislator to distinguish between what advocates want and what is in the best interest of the state, if a legislator can decide how to vote on most issues by asking themselves if the proposed law is fair, and if injury prevention advocates make unreasonable demands on public officials. thirty six-percent of respondents reported difficulty for legislators in distinguishing between what injury prevention advocates want and what is in the best interest for the state of south carolina, while an equal portion of legislators/staff reported no difficulty in that regard. the majority of legislators/staff (n = 8, 73%) believed a legislator could decide how to vote on most issues independently. none of the respondents indicated that injury prevention advocates in general make unreasonable demands on public officials, but most (n = 7, 64%) remained neutral in their response. implications for legislators and legislative staff legislators/staff indicated little knowledge of injury prevention practices promoting motor vehicle safety although they rated legislation in that area most likely to pass during the next legislative session. additional research is necessary to determine whether reported neutrality regarding other areas of potential legislation is the result of true impartiality. if so, future research may yield the opportunity to influence attitudes of legislators/staff in this regard. child passenger safety and texting/cell phone use while driving were the most important issues to this group, but also those in which they were least informed. more than half of the legislators/staff surveyed had never been approached regarding injury prevention legislation, and their lack of information on prominent prevention topics may be the result of inadequate advocacy and lobbying and underdeveloped relationships with injury prevention advocates (lobbyists for nonprofit organizations were not one of the strongest influencers for legislators regarding injury prevention). furthermore, legislators rely heavily on each other for information, and educational campaigns and increased advocacy and lobbying efforts may be effective for ensuring that accurate information is circulated throughout the legislature. integrated findings advocates and legislators both consider advocates to have greater understanding of most injury prevention issues than legislators, but the groups exhibited similar knowledge levels when assessed across prevention areas. they also showed similar priorities, rating child passenger safety as a very important injury prevention area and graduated driver’s licensing as least important (relative to the other areas). despite the attention given to child passenger safety, advocates and legislators both indicated little knowledge of best practices in this area. they were also incorrect in other aspects of motor vehicle safety, with coalition members consistently showing low levels of knowledge in the same areas as legislators and legislative staff. similarities in the lack of knowledge between the groups may be the outcome of ineffective advocate education global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1 march 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 and/or poor communication. additional study is necessary to uncover the root cause of this issue. limitations while the survey provides a new perspective to advocacy efforts by including viewpoints of both advocates and legislators/staff, it did have some limitations. first, advocacy is an ever-changing landscape, including more digital participation now than in the past (fitzgerald & mcnutt, 1999; mcnutt & boland, 1999). questions regarding purely technological forms of advocacy were not included in the survey as most legislative action is the result of active behavior (e.g. personal visits) in conjunction with more passive, digital efforts (mcnutt, 2000; mcnutt & boland, 1999). nonetheless, the survey questions limited the involvement of safe kids advocates to more traditional advocacy activities and therefore provided a narrower perspective of their overall advocacy capacity, which may be inaccurate. second, while the data point to capacity and knowledge barriers to engaging in effective advocacy, the survey did not gather safe kids advocates perceptions of perceived barriers to advocacy efforts. anecdotally, safe kids advocates’ uncertainty as to whether they were allowed by their employer to engage in advocacy and lobbying was an issue noted by the safe kids south carolina manager, but that aspect was not systematically assessed. these limitations, in conjunction with findings from the survey, supported the development of advocacy capacity-building efforts discussed later in this article. finally, although legislators and legislative staff (n = 175) were solicited twice via email and once via regular mail, only 15 legislators and legislative staff completed the survey. responses to the email may have been low as the survey was sent at the end of the legislative session (legislators in south carolina are part-time and the session lasts six months out of the year) and when the legislators were out of session. convenience sampling was then employed due to the lack of response, which may have introduced bias into the survey analysis. legislators and legislative staff who responded to the survey may have been familiar with children’s trust and/or concerned about child safety. responses should be considered in light of the small number of survey respondents. supplemental interviews children’s trust policy staff conducted brief structured interviews with legislators and staff over a period of one month and recorded responses. the policy and research team then reviewed and coded thematic responses; discrepancies were discussed and resolved. questions for the supplemental interviews were crafted in response to survey findings to provide more detailed information from legislators and staff about effective communication strategies. survey findings were noted in each question, which then sought insight from respondents to inform future advocacy activities. potential interview participants were selected among legislators with an existing relationship with children’s trust. these individuals are considered well versed among the legislature on issues of child injury prevention and thus able to provide applicable insights on advocacy efforts in this area. five members of the sc house of representatives, five members of the sc senate, and five members of legislative staff were considered for interviews. of the 15 global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1 march 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 potential interviewees, eight responded to the request for an interview. three respondents serve as members of the sc senate, three serve as members of the sc house of representatives, and two are legislative staff who work for differing committees. findings from the survey were used to develop interview questions to legislators and legislative staff for the purpose of informing future advocacy activities. the interview questions asked about effective strategies for increasing knowledge (e.g., what is the most helpful way to communicate causes and consequences of motor vehicle safety?), altering perceptions (e.g., what would make injury prevention a top priority?), and pathways of influence (e.g., how does influence get to you from voters in your district?). interview responses were consistent across party lines and between legislators and legislative staff. results indicate that policymakers are most receptive to advocacy efforts that emphasize the high incidence and seriousness of child injury, and that campaigns focused around recent fatalities that could have been prevented are likely to produce the greatest impact. furthermore, legislators noted that policy issues presented by advocates receive more attention when they are accompanied by potential solutions crafted by those with expertise in the area. legislators and legislative staff echoed the findings of the survey in their interviews, believing that they often lack the deep subject knowledge held by injury prevention advocates. to address this, they further encourage advocates to utilize mass media to promote knowledge and understanding of injury prevention issues to broader audiences. respondents noted relationship building as an important part of the political process. legislators and legislative staff suggested that advocates strategically petition for support from legislative champions, members who are invested in a certain cause and have the capacity to gain the support of other members of the legislature. when asked, “how could a nonprofit be more effective in their advocacy efforts?” all of the respondents suggested that organizations gain a legislative champion on a committee that is relevant to their main policy issue. advocate community involvement also came into play, as each respondent indicated that voters who are already acquainted with the chosen committee supporter through various community activities within their home district are the best advocates to communicate policy objectives. intervention based on the findings from the survey and responses from the legislative interviews, children’s trust hosted a safe kids advocacy day at the sc state house to provide safe kids coalition members an opportunity to gain experience engaging legislators about injury prevention. the event consisted of a morning training session on effective advocacy techniques and an afternoon trip to the state house to discuss updating child passenger safety regulations with legislators. the advocacy training included a briefing on the survey and interview results as well as a discussion of current child passenger safety laws and the american academy of pediatrics recommendations. these overviews ensured that advocates tailored their message to legislative interests and were comfortable in their knowledge of appropriate child passenger safety regulations. talking points about the issue were distributed to attendees global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1 march 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 along with tips for effective messaging. each advocate was also taught how to complete a form for calling legislators out of session for their meeting. advocates from across the state identified target legislators who sit on influential injury prevention committees and utilized their subject matter expertise to guide conversations around the impact of injury they had witnessed in each legislator’s district. during the two-hour visit to the state house, 35 safe kids coalition members contacted 19 legislators directly and left informative material for an additional eight legislators. as with any advocacy intervention, it is difficult to determine the true influence of legislative action. in what appeared to be a direct response to the advocacy process and respected profile of safe kids among childhood injury prevention programs, four potential legislative champions emerged, pledging to introduce or co-sponsor legislation updating child passenger safety guidelines during the next legislative session. these meetings were the first contact with legislators for many safe kids advocates and built the foundation for future relationships promoting injury prevention. future directions while the safe kids coalitions are powerful in numbers (including nearly 400 trained child passenger safety technicians), they have not historically organized around coordinated advocacy efforts. safe kids advocates have often hesitated to contact their legislators regarding a particular issue and even fewer engage their elected officials at a local level (e.g., inviting them to community safety events). successful advocacy will require safe kids advocates to devote more time to raising their visibility at the state house and building relationships with policymakers (andrews & edwards, 2004; hoefer, 2005). social networks of safe kids advocates are largely under-utilized, and searching these avenues for volunteers and opportunities to increase awareness and partnership would allow for more time to be spent engaging legislators face-to-face. collaboration with other nonprofits would garner greater media attention for safe kids coalitions and would likely increase legislative interest in their advocacy efforts (gillan, 2006; hoefer, 2005). additionally, safe kids advocates will require effective training on injury prevention issues to become better-informed advocates in these areas. legislators and legislative staff consider lobbyists for nonprofit organizations important sources of information, and effective communication of accurate data is essential to maintaining that trust and capitalizing on the strong peer-to-peer support network within the legislature. legislators reported being largely influenced by their colleagues when making policy decisions. many indicated having never been contacted by an injury prevention advocate, however, exposing a clear opportunity for safe kids coalition members to increase their impact in the legislature. by accurately communicating injury prevention issues with only a small number of legislative champions, safe kids advocates can effectively influence the entire legislature toward better outcomes for children in south carolina. broadly, this study indicates that a simple survey and a short training session can increase the capacity of advocates to spur legislative action. educating advocates in any field on policy communication tactics that are informed by their legislators can global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1 march 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 increase the likelihood of passing desired policy regarding a social issue. after only a half-day of advocacy training informed by survey results, and despite having little to no previous legislative contact, safe kids south carolina advocates were able to garner pledges from four policymakers to either introduce or co-sponsor updated legislation. the success of this work clearly reiterates the need for policy and advocacy competencies by community psychologists. community psychologists need not only to know how to build and sustain effective relationships with policy makers (dalton & wolfe, 2012), but also how to develop these capacities in others. acknowledgement we would like to thank the society for community research and action (scra), division 27 of the american psychological association (apa), for the funding to complete this project. we acknowledge that the findings and conclusions presented in this report are those of children’s trust of south carolina and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of scra or apa. references andrews, k. t., & edwards, b. (2004). advocacy organizations in the us political process. annual review of sociology, 30, 479-506. balassiano, k., & chandler, s. m. (2009). the emerging role of nonprofit associations in advocacy and public policy: trends, issues, and prospects. nonprofit and voluntary sector quarterly, 39(5), 946955. centers for disease control and prevention, national center for injury prevention and control (2012). web-based injury statistics query and reporting system (wisqars). retrieved from www.cdc. gov/ncipc/wisqars. children’s trust of south carolina. (n.d.). about us. http://www.scchildren.org/ about_us/. dalton, j., & wolfe, s. (2012). competencies for community psychology practice. the community psychologist, 45(4), 7-14. durbin, d. r. (2011). child passenger safety. pediatrics, 127(4), e1050-e1066. eichelberger, a. h., chouinard, a. o., & jermakian, j. s. (2012). effects of booster seat laws on injury risk among children in crashes. traffic injury prevention, 13(6), 631-639. egbert, m., & hoechstetter, s. (2006). mission possible: evaluating advocacy grants. foundation news and commentary, 47(1), 38. fitzgerald, e., & mcnutt, j. (1999). electronic advocacy in policy practice: a framework for teaching technologically based practice. journal of social work education, 35(3), 331-341. freudenberg, n. (1981). health education for social change: a strategy for public health in the us. international journal of health education, 24(3), 138-145. gerteis, m., coffman, j., kim, j., & marton, k. (2008). advocacy capacity assessment instrument. princeton, nj: mathematica policy research. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1 march 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 gillan, j. s. (2006). legislative advocacy is key to addressing teen driving deaths. injury prevention, 12(suppl 1), i44-i48. gottlieb, n. h., goldstein, a. o., flynn, b. s., cohen, j. e., bauman, k. e., solomon, l. j., ... & mcmorris, l. e. (2003). state legislators’ beliefs about legislation that restricts youth access to tobacco products. health education & behavior, 30(2), 209-224. gunn, v. l., phillippi, r. m., & cooper, w. o. (2007). improvement in booster seat use in tennessee. pediatrics, 119(1), 131-136. hoefer, r. (2005). altering state policy: interest group effectiveness among state-level advocacy groups. social work, 50(3), 219-227. jensen, j. l. (2007). getting one’s way in policy debates: influence tactics used in group decision-making settings. public administration review, 67(2), 216-227. mcnutt, j. g. (2000). coming perspectives in the development of electronic advocacy for social policy practice. critical social work, 1(1). retrieved from http:// www1.uwindsor.ca/criticalsocialwork/ coming-perspectives-in-thedevelopment-of-electronic-advocacyfor-social-policy-practice-0. mcnutt, j. g., & boland, k. m. (1999). electronic advocacy by nonprofit organizations in social welfare policy. nonprofit and voluntary sector quarterly, 28(4), 432-451. national highway traffic safety administration, parents central. (n.d.). car seat recommendations for children. retrieved from http://www.safercar. gov/parents/right-seat-age-and-sizerecommendations.htm. national highway traffic safety administration. (2007). preliminary data indicate that booster seat laws increase child safety seat use. retrieved from http://www.nhtsa.gov/ about+nhtsa/traffic+techs/current/ preliminary+data+indicate+that+boos ter+seat+laws+increase+child+safety +seat+use. radius, s. m., galer-unti, r. a., & tappe, m. k. (2008). educating for advocacy: recommendations for professional preparation and development based on a needs and capacity assessment of health education faculty. health promotion practice, 10(1), 83-91. rothenbuhler, e. w. (1991). the process of community involvement. communications monographs, 58(1), 63-78. safe kids worldwidetm. (n.d.) programs. retrieved from http://www.safekids. org/programs. safe kids worldwidetm. (june 2014). teens in cars. retrieved from https://www. safekids.org/sites/default/files/ documents/researchreports/teen_ driving_2014_study-for_web_v2.pdf. south carolina department of public safety, state traffic collision master file (2013). 2013 preliminary data. retrieved from http://www. buckleupsc.com/safety_seat_fact_sheet. asp. global journal of community psychology practice volume 7, issue 1 march 2016 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 strong, d. a., & kim, j. y. (2012). defining, building, and measuring capacity: findings from an advocacy evaluation. the foundation review, 4(1), 40-53. whaley, d., & weaver, l. (2010). approaches to measuring more community engagement. ontario: tamarack community. retrieved from http:// tamarackcommunity.ca/downloads/ index/measuring_more_community_ engagement.pdf. original research “it’s the closest i can get to meditation sometimes”: volunteering as a surf therapy mentor karl potts1 and jon may1 keywords: self efficacy; self determination; nature; restoration; intervention; qualitative author: biographies: karl potts, is an assistant psychologist with cornwall nhs foundation trust, currently working for the nhs specialist parenting service for parents that have a learning disability. this paper reports research conducted for his msc psychology thesis whilst studying at the university of plymouth. he is now undertaking pre-clinical study for child and adolescent psychotherapist training with the tavistock centre. before this, he had a background of military service, having previously served in both the royal marines and the raf. a keen surfer, he has previously worked as a surf coach, and was drawn to research in this area based upon his own affinity for the water and the joy he experiences in sharing the environment with others. he gained experience in surf therapy as a surf mentor supporting the wave project since 2021. jon may, has been a professor of psychology at the university of plymouth since 2007, and currently researches the role of mental imagery in behaviour change, having published over 140 papers, chapters and books. he is one of the co-authors of the elaborated intrusion theory of desire, and a developer of functional imagery training, which helps people use goal-oriented positive mental imagery to maintain their motivation to engage in healthy behaviours. while he cannot surf, he enjoys kayaking around the south devon coast. recommended citation: potts, k. & may, j. (2024). “it’s the closest i can get to meditation sometimes”: volunteering as a surf therapy mentor. global journal of community psychology practice, 15(2), 1 18. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: professor jon may, school of psychology, university of plymouth, drake circus, plymouth, uk pl4 8aa. e-mail: jon.may@plymouth.ac.uk orcid: 0000-0001-7439-9200 1 school of psychology, faculty of health, university of plymouth https://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:jon.may@plymouth.ac.uk global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 “it’s the closest i can get to meditation sometimes”: volunteering as a surf therapy mentor abstract surf therapy is a novel form of small-group, nature-based mental health intervention that has proliferated globally in recent years. self-reported outcomes indicate that surf therapy can be effective for enhancing mental health and wellbeing, but there is little theoretical understanding into the causal mechanisms of effect and limited strength behind the existing evidence base. this study employed a qualitative approach to explore the personal experiences and observations of volunteer surf mentors’ working with uk-based surf therapy charity the wave project. five surf mentors (3 males and 2 females; mean age = 34.4 years, sd = 7.4, range = 19) were interviewed, data collected that related to first-person experience was analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis, and that related to third-person observations of client experience using thematic analysis. participation in delivery was affectively impactful for mentors. affective experience of surf mentors correlated with past research into client experiences. experiences for both clients and mentors were heavily influenced by environmental and social factors, and these factors interacted. mentors were found to be both influenced-by and integral-to several key mechanisms of therapeutic effect. findings demonstrate the research value of the perspectives of surf therapy facilitators and provide guidance for future research and for general service optimization. introduction surf therapy is a form of small-group mental health and wellbeing intervention that has no standard model of delivery. programmes may either employ surfing as a stand-alone therapeutic approach, or supplement surfing with additional modalities. while surfing is at the core, surf therapy’s structured, activitybased sessions also expose clients to social interaction, exercise, and the natural environment, all of which can be psychologically beneficial (fleischmann et al., 2011). surf therapy programmes have shown effectiveness in targeting: ptsd in military veterans (caddick et al., 2015: crawford, 2016: rogers et al., 2014); mental health in ‘at-risk’ youths and youths with disabilities (colpus & taylor, 2014: drake et al., 2021: godfrey et al., 2015: mckenzie et al., 2021); social wellbeing in autistic children (stuhl & porter, 2015: van der merwe & yarrow, 2020); and major depressive disorder in military personnel (walter et al., 2019a). however, the specific mechanisms that lead to improvements are poorly understood (benninger et al., 2020: moreton et al., 2021). to date, surf therapy research has focused primarily upon programme evaluation and pre-/post intervention testing and has therefore been oriented more towards demonstrating effectiveness than exploring specific mechanisms of effect (benninger et al., 2020: walter et al., 2020). as a result, a consolidated understandling of which variables should be controlled, manipulated, or measured in experimental surf therapy research is lacking. additional qualitative exploration of possible casual mechanisms within surf therapy thus remains essential for guiding future quantitative research. while research into causality within surf therapy is limited, marshall et al.'s (2019: 2020) use of grounded theory contributed towards a preliminary programme theory of therapeutic effect. these studies found that non-judgmental emotional safe-spaces, selfselected challenges, a positive sociallysupportive environment, and the normalisation of failure were all critical in achieving success (marshall et al., 2019: 2020). findings also supported an established belief that surf therapy enhances self-efficacy (see benninger et al., 2020: cavanaugh & http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 rademacher, 2014: crawford, 2016: gibbs et al., 2022: godfrey et al., 2015: fleischmann et al., 2017: rosenberg et al., 2014), while suggesting that positive outcomes could be linked to the satisfaction of basic human needs as defined within ryan and deci’s (2000) self determination theory (sdt) (marshall et al., 2019: 2020). sdt proposes that people require a sense of autonomy, relatedness and competence to be optimally engaged and personally fulfilled, and that a deficit in any of these core areas reduces wellbeing (ryan & deci, 2000). for the ‘relatedness’ aspect of sdt to be satisfied, authentic and receptive relationships with other people are required. marshall et al. (2019; 2020) found this requirement was satisfied within surf therapy through the intimate one-to-one in-water support provided by facilitators or ‘surf mentors’. this finding attributes mentors with a causal role within the intervention. despite their pivotal contribution, research has only touched upon the perspectives of surf mentors (see drake et al., 2021), and the experience of delivering surf therapy from the mentors’ perspectives remains unexplored. charities predominate within surf therapy delivery; therefore mentors are commonly volunteers. volunteering has been shown to enhance subjective wellbeing (anderson et al., 2014: jenkinson et al., 2013: wheeler et al., 1998), although meta-analysis by hui et al., (2020) indicates that this effect is modest, and relates to enhanced eudaimonic wellbeing (i.e. related to meaning and purpose) rather than hedonic wellbeing (i.e. related to pleasure and enjoyment). previous research has also indicated that the act of mentoring itself may increase an individual’s sense of wellbeing and self-satisfaction (allen, poteet & burroughs, 1997; allen 2007). however, no existing research was found that considered the impact of fulfilling the volunteer/mentor role within an activitybased therapeutic intervention, therefore the relevance of previous findings to the present study is unknown. nonetheless, any exploration of the experience of volunteer surf mentors must consider the potential normative personal benefit associated with volunteering/mentoring itself. gibbs et al. (2022) identified that time spent in nature benefitted surf therapy participants, leading them to suggest that attention restoration theory (art; kaplan, 1995) and stress reduction theory (srt; ulrich, 1983) may explain therapeutic outcomes. art proposes that time spent in nature clears the mind, allows depleted mental energy to replenish, and thus restores an individual’s psychological health (kaplan, 1995). srt proposes that humans are evolutionarily optimised for existence in natural environments, and that natural settings therefore induce a lower level of physiological stress than man-made environments (ulrich, 1983). neuro-imaging research supports art/srt’s proposition that natural and urban settings have a qualitatively different impact upon mental activity (norwood et al, 2019), though the empirical and conceptual foundation of both theories remains contested (joyce and dewitte, 2018). nonetheless, it is widely accepted that natural environments ameliorate human wellbeing and cognitive functioning, and evidence suggests that this effect increases in the proximity of water (brereton, clinch & ferreira, 2008; barton & pretty, 2010). given that mentors share the physical environment with clients during delivery, the potential exists for them to also share any environmentally derived benefit. the present study considers the impact of intimate involvement in surf therapy upon surf mentors. both the first-person phenomenological experience, and the thirdperson subjective opinions of volunteer surf mentors are explored in order to investigate causality within surf therapy from a novel perspective. this approach presupposes that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 volunteer surf mentors gain personally from their involvement in delivery, that this gain exceeds that of voluntary work in general, and that the processes that lead to personal benefit may mirror the mechanisms that benefit clients. in exploring these perspectives, the following key research questions will be addressed: 1. are the proposed mechanisms of effect within the existing surf therapy literature reflected in the experience of surf mentors? 2. if these mechanisms are present, what is the relationship between them? 3. what changes do the mentors observe in clients as they undergo surf therapy? research design and methods theoretical framework this study used two complimentary analytical processes: interpretative phenomenological analysis (ipa; smith et al, 2012) and thematic analysis (ta; braun & clarke, 2006). ipa was used for exploring the subjective experiences of surf mentor’s, and ta for their third-person perspectives. where ta was used, a latent inductive approach to coding (braun & clarke, 2006) was employed in order to retain subjective richness of data and maintain a degree of idiographic parity between analytical fields the wave project participants were recruited from the wave project, a uk-based surf therapy provider founded in 2011. the wave project employs stand-alone (i.e. no additional therapeutic approach is used) mentor-facilitated delivery using volunteer surf mentors. courses are provided to youths aged eight to 21 who are experiencing mental health issues, or social difficulties. clients are referred into the programme by a variety of professional bodies, including educational establishments, nhs and social care providers, and mental health charities. courses consist of one twohour session per week for six weeks, and clients are paired with the same mentor for the duration of the course whenever possible. a follow-on surf club is also offered, allowing continued engagement with surfing and surf therapy practices once the formal course finishes. previous research has provided empirical support for wave project programme effectiveness (devine-wright & godfrey, 2020: godfrey et al., 2015), and contributed to the development of a programme theory of therapeutic effect for surf therapy (marshall et al., 2019). participants a purposive sample (patton, 2002) of volunteer surf mentors was used in line with ipa methodology (smith et al., 2012). after obtaining permission from wave project gatekeepers, a passive recruitment strategy was implemented that used untargeted messages distributed within a local wave project volunteer social-media network. qualification criteria for participants included completion of wave project surf mentor training, and involvement in at least one full course (i.e. minimum of six sessions) of surf therapy. five participants were recruited (table 1) to participate in either a face-to-face or an online interview with the researcher. table 1 research participant particulars participant age gender approx. experience as a surf mentor p1 32 male 2 years p2 42 male < 1 year p3 23 female 2 years p4 39 female 10 years p5 36 male 1 year http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 data collection and analysis interviews were conducted by the first author between 27th may and 6th july 2022; mean interview duration was 51 minutes (range = 43 to 67 minutes). interviews were semistructured, opening with a question exploring how participants had come to volunteer as surf mentors, followed by questions tailored to their responses. all interviews were recorded using leereel model lbm-02 bluetooth lavalier microphones, and the voice-memo function on an iphone 12 mini (software version ios 15.5). verbatim transcription was made using otter.ai online transcription software, before being manually cross-checked and corrected by the researcher. analysis was conducted in a three-stage iterative cycle; initial first-stage generation of themes from each interview (completed on each audio recording before subsequent interviews were undertaken), second-stage theory-driven analysis of themes, and thirdstage between-interview comparison of all themes and related theory. termination of data collection was justified by data saturation having been achieved in accordance with guest et al.’s (2006) definition, i.e. the research aims had been satisfied, the core meta-themes had been identified, and the study had reached a stage whereby findings were considered replicable. reflexivity as a surfer, an active surf mentor, and an academic, the first author (who acted as interviewer and analyst) holds both an ‘insider’ and an ‘outsider’ perspective (gair, 2012) in relation to this study. while the insider perspective facilitated free-flowing discourse, critical self-awareness was necessary to prevent the researcher overinvolving themselves in the emerging narrative. critical self-awareness was employed during the interviews in the form of active listening, confirmation of understanding, and participant-led discourse. during coding, separate code-books were maintained for each participant to mitigate against conflation of responses, and themes were created using a ‘signal to noise’ (edwards et at, 2000) approach that formed themes based upon a weight of coding evidence both within and between participant narratives. results summary of themes data themes were grouped into two categories: ‘first-person experience of surf mentoring’ (analysed in accordance with ipa) and ‘third-person perspectives on surf therapy’ (analysed in accordance with ta). primary themes from each category and the participants that these themes related to are shown in table 2. figure 1 shows themes grouped together according to their factors of primary influence: environmental, social or normative. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 table 2 primary data categories and themes category theme expressed by participant first-person experience of surf mentoring environmental grounding (+ reduced rumination*) 1*,2*,3*,4*,5 (ipa) immersion and attentional focus 1,2,3,4,5 fun enjoyment and positive affect 1,2,3,4,5 interpersonal connection (+ reduced social anxiety*) 1,2*,3*,4,5 altruism and obligation 1,2,4,5 increased awareness and community benefit 1,2,3,4,5 third-person perspectives on surf therapy environmentally facilitated changes in behaviour 1,2,3,4,5 (ta) incremental improvements in confidence 1,2,3,4,5 creative expression and autonomy 1,2,3,4,5 figure 1. first-person experience and third-person perspectives: themes grouped by influencing factors. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 first-person experience of surf mentoring environmental grounding and reduced rumination “you can go to the mountains, and you can see the mountains. you can drive through them, but it doesn't have that effect of being in the sea… the sea is just an instant immersion; you're in.” (p5) the ocean/coastal environment was described by all participants as being affectively significant, calming, and immersive, with several stating that the ocean helped them to “silence the brain [from] overthinking” (p2), or that it allowed them to “let go of everything else” (p1). depth of connection was attributed to the immersive nature (physically and mentally) and sensory richness of the environment, be it visual, auditory, or tactile. location of upbringing had no influence upon the depth of this feeling, with participants that were not raised near the sea describing how they found the environment “magic”, and “mind blow[ing]” (p4) on first exposure, or stating how they “had always been drawn to it” (p5) though not necessarily knowing why. the ocean was thus an anchor for participants, a location that imbued a sense of peace and calm, that helped to break cycles of rumination, and planted participants in the present. immersion and attentional focus “i’m totally focused on them. it’s almost like a form of meditation, because i’m not thinking about what i’m doing or how i feel” (p4) the immersive nature of the ocean was complimented by a sense of total attentional immersion during surf therapy sessions. the act of “trying to keep the small person alive in the ocean” (p4) was distracting to the extent that it provided participants respite from rumination. a sense of focus, escapism and distraction during sessions was universally articulated, and this experience facilitated recuperation from stress accumulated through work (p2), from socially induced anxiety (p2: p3) or just “whatever the stresses of life were” (p1). thus, the attentional requirements associated with being a surf mentor became an almost “mindful” (p1), “meditative” (p4) practice that participants considered powerfully distracting and personally beneficial. fun, enjoyment and positive affect “smiling is infectious, and one of those things to be shared, but yeah, especially when it's so, like, such a big smile… when they're beaming from ear to ear? you can't not smile.” (p5) mentors were deliberately and consciously positive, fun, and socially inclusive during sessions in order to create a positive atmosphere for the clients. the positivity that mentors instilled was not artificial, they were already “pretty happy just being in the water with the waves around” and delivering surf therapy added “another layer of happiness” on to the experience (p1). positivity was reflected back when “the kid’s faces, the smiles and the energy that they give back” (p2) had a reciprocal, positive impact upon the mentors. the enjoyment felt during delivery lingered, and mentors reported that they left sessions feeling “really positive and happy” (p3), and never “anything other than ‘better’ from the sessions” (p1). delivering surf therapy was thus an affectively positive experience, with pleasure derived from the physical environment, the social interactions, and through vicarious enjoyment of clients’ positive experiences. interpersonal connection and reduced social anxiety “last week i got a text from [the coordinator] saying that my new girl’s mum had phoned in and said that she only wants to do it, like, if i was there; to make sure that i was going to be http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 there again … so i guess in that example i obviously did something that made her feel sort of safe, or that she wanted to go back to.” (p4) throughout a course, participants felt that a mutual bond developed with their paired client. p4 viewed this as an attunement, or “a little emotional journey” that was completed by both the mentor and the client together. this process put mentors in the position of being “a trusted person that [clients] were happy to open up to” (p5), and seemed to be facilitated by the attentiveness of mentors, and the fact that they responded to clients’ non-verbal cues as well as their explicit statements. the bond that this process created was viewed by participants as important for the intervention’s success, but also as personally rewarding. two participants described how they themselves had previously experienced social anxiety (p2: p3), and each felt that their work as a surf mentor had helped to manage this issue. while difficult moments within the sessions could be ‘anxiety inducing’ (p3) for mentors, the focus was not upon the mentor’s social needs, it was entirely upon the client, and this assisted in overcoming any social discomfort. surf mentors thus attended to clients’ specific needs, cues, and behaviour, and consequently formed close bonds with clients that were personally fulfilling, and in some cases anxiety-reducing. altruism and obligation “the fact that you feel guilty for not giving up two or three hours of your time for free… once you’ve been a part of it, i think everyone would feel the same.” (p1) delivery presented participants with the chance to share ‘the gift’ of surfing and the ocean, and this was both fulfilling, and for some (p2: p4) provided an enhanced sense of purpose. participants also felt a sense of obligation as a result of their involvement in delivery. inability or failure to attend sessions was viewed as antithetical to the bond they had established with clients, as a failure to provide “the opportunities [they] could be creating for a young person” (p1) that forced clients into starting the process of relaxing and bonding all over again (p2). however, the sense of obligation that delivery imbued was not viewed negatively; participants knew that they would feel better for their involvement in sessions, even if they were initially reticent to attend. being a surf mentor was therefore associated with both positive (personal reward) and negative (obligation and a sense of guilt) inducements, but volunteers felt that attending sessions always resulted in a netpositive emotional experience for them. increased awareness and community benefit “they might be doing something that seems quite erratic, but you kind of go ‘i don’t know what’s behind that, so who am i to judge or have any issues with it?” (p1) all participants felt that their awareness of social issues, mental health issues, and the stigma that are associated with each, had improved as a result of their work as a surf mentor. p1 described how he had come to appreciate that “every child is so different, even though they may have the same diagnosis, they have so many different character traits that make them so unique”, indicating that volunteering had helped him to see through the diagnostic label to the person. as a mentor and someone that suffered with a hidden disability, p4 felt that the enhanced interaction and empathy generated within these sessions (and more generally in the community as a result of this style of intervention) was helping to drive a cultural shift towards greater tolerance, understanding and inclusion within the local community. close personal interaction with clients thus helped to overcome participants’ preconceptions of mental and social issues, and contributed to increased acceptance, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 empathy and a greater sense of community with individuals that were experiencing mental ill health or social disadvantage. third-person perspectives on surf therapy environmentally facilitated changes in behaviour “he had had a tantrum on the beach. he was in a world of pain, … when we got into the water…within seconds he was jumping around and…it was the same [boy] from 10 minutes before.” (p5) the ocean environment had a grounding effect upon surf therapy clients that mirrored the mentors’ own experiences. this effect varied depending upon the child, but there was a general sense that “when you get into the water with the kids, they just sort of change completely” (p3). this change was behavioural; whereby being in the water seemed to “break a barrier or something” (p3) allowing shy children to talk more freely with mentors, and emotional; whereby heightened states of emotion (i.e. tantrums) were moderated when the clients entered the water. as well as aiding in the control of negative emotions, immersion in the water produced positive affect in clients. the ocean thus acted as a social facilitator, reducing negative emotion, and increasing positive emotion in clients and mentors alike. incremental improvements in confidence “you see the fear and the withdrawal, like, kind of go over the couple of weeks as they become more confident.” (p2) participants observed incremental increases in clients’ confidence in the water, in social settings, and in their engagement with the ocean environment throughout a course. while mentors were responsible for ensuring clients emotional and physical safety, failure and ‘wiping out’ were a part of the process of surf therapy, and participants saw both direct and vicarious exposure to these experiences as key to fostering growth in the children. while exposure to managed risk was seen as beneficial for the clients, mentors were extremely conscious of the need to ensure that a client’s experience was both safe and positive. during sessions, mentors thus assumed responsibility for dynamically managing risk, keeping the clients safe, and encouraging them to “push their boundaries” (p5) while also protecting them from negative experiences. this process was viewed as instrumental in a process of building “bigger, stronger people” (p2) by fostering enhanced confidence through controlled exposure to appropriate risk. creative expression and autonomy “i guess they get to choose whatever they’re doing, and not be told by someone ‘you’re going to do this now’, like at school … they can do whatever they want to at the beach.” (p3). while sessions were structured around surfing, clients were encouraged to engage in any activity that interested them. children sometimes simply chose to “build some sandcastles, or build a mountain” (p2) in the sand, or jump “in and out of rock pools” (p5), and mentors would facilitate these activities. by encouraging imaginative play, “digging holes, grabbing bits and pieces of seaweed for flags and stones for forts” p2 was still able to be impactful, and clients still benefitted despite the lack of engagement with surfing itself. all participants felt that sessions such as these were “just as [personally] rewarding” (p5) as helping kids to actually surf. understanding what clients wanted to do required adaptability and an open mind; mentors often had to “ask a lot of questions, or give a lot of options … and then see where it [went] from there” (p3). what clients said that they wanted to do and what they actually wanted to do did not always align, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 exemplified by p5’s experience with one child; “his dad had done some surfing, and [he said] that he wanted to be able to do it like dad … and then all behaviour from that point indicated that he didn’t want to”. ‘child led’ therefore did not necessarily mean doing what the clients stated explicitly. it meant attuning to their experience and responding to their levels of interest, engagement and enjoyment. mentors thus facilitated child-led activity on the beach, whether that involved surfing or not, and engagement in any activity fostered both growth in clients, and a sense of reward for mentors. discussion delivering surf therapy had a positive impact upon mentors. while benefit came from the act of volunteering, most was attributable to factors that previous research has associated with therapeutic outcomes in clients. in contrast to hui et al. (2020), participants reported personal benefit as more hedonic than eudaimonic. this finding supports the primary presupposition of this study: that the benefit volunteer surf mentors derive from surf therapy delivery exceeds the normative benefit of volunteer work. mentors’ thirdparty observations provided evidence in support of theories of casual effect proposed in previous research. figure 2. theoretical framework of casual effect for clients and surf mentors participating in surf therapy with the wave project. figure 2 incorporates the findings into a proposed framework of causal effect, highlighting key sources of effect, primary mechanisms of change, therapeutic outcomes (including source of derivation), and the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 theoretical frameworks that support these assertions for both clients and surf mentors. the ocean environment was central to several key themes that emerged and influential within several others (see figure 1). the sense of belonging and calmness that participants felt by the ocean reflected aspects of altman and low’s (1992) place attachment theory (pat), which states that people can form affective bonds with places that confer a sense of belongingness, affiliation, and that eventually become a part of their identity. by establishing positive associations with the ocean during surf therapy, the ocean can become a place of respite for clients. a sense of belonging is an important part of the ‘safe spaces’ concept highlighted as crucial to surf therapy outcomes by marshall et al. (2019). pat emphasizes the contribution of environmental factors within emotional safe spaces, and provides a mechanism within surf therapy for enhanced emotional processing, and for positively updating self-concept and self-identity that future research should explore. mentors considered the ocean a restorative, immersive, and psychologically beneficial environment to be in. the benefit they derived from time in nature mirrored client experiences that gibbs et al. (2022) linked to art (kaplan, 1995) and srt (ulrich, 1983). physical immersion in the water itself also affected the behaviour and emotional state of clients. immersion in cold water leads to an endocrine response and vagal stimulation (tipton et al., 2017). it is possible that these responses contributed to the rapid changes in behaviour and emotional state that mentors observed in clients, however this assertion is speculative. further research is required to understand the effects of physical immersion in water during surf therapy and to explore whether these effects contribute towards therapeutic outcomes. for the physiological and psychological adaptation proposed by art and srt to take effect, the environment has to be perceived as non-threatening, safe, and familiar (kaplan, 1995: ulrich, 1983). anecdotally, this is not the case with many surf therapy clients, and a process of socially-facilitated acclimatisation was required before many appeared sufficiently at-ease in the ocean to derive any benefit (see figure 2). by providing support and encouragement during sessions, mentors moderate the negative consequences of perceived or actual threat, and also mediate between surf therapy clients and the personal growth that the ocean environment can foster. the mediating and moderating role played by surf mentors between clients and the environment is an important aspect of creating a physical safe space within which surf therapy can be delivered (burtscher & britton, 2022: marshall et al., 2019: 2020). therefore, while exposure to nature is a likely to contribute towards therapeutic effect within surf therapy, the effect is socially mediated. supported by the mediating/moderating function provided by mentors, clients were able to make observable improvements in social, emotional, and activity-based confidence that mirrored increases in selfefficacy identified in previous research (crawford, 2016; drake et al., 2021; godfrey et al., 2015; fleischmann et al., 2011; marshall et al., 2019, 2020). mentors unknowingly attributed these improvements to factors that reflect the social induction of self-efficacy beliefs proposed by bandura (1977). future research should explore the relative contribution of different sources of self-efficacy within surf therapy, considering each source or mode of induction as a potential variable and measuring any change in self-efficacy with the general self-efficacy scale (gse; schwarzer & jerusalem, 1995). positive social environments contribute towards achieving the preconditions required http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 for restoration, facilitate place attachment through the generation of positive associations, and provide positive emotional support during efficacy-induction. sociallyderived positive affect thus supports several of the key candidate mechanisms of effect within surf therapy, though positive social experiences have also been found to enhance subjective wellbeing (diener et al., 1991) and undo the after-effects of negative emotional experiences (fredrickson and levenson,1998). fredrickson’s (2001) ‘broaden and build theory’ (b&bt) of psychological development is an expansion of this concept, and suggests that positive emotion has a restorative, attentionally broadening effect that enhances long-term psychological resilience. b&bt implies that the positivity experienced during surf therapy promotes psychological resilience, thereby placing further emphasis upon the importance of positive affect, and by association the importance of safe spaces. further research into the impact of positive experiences upon therapeutic outcomes within surf therapy is required to explore the potential relevance of b&bt. within the positively valanced atmosphere created by sessions, mentors remained conscious of their responsibilities and attentive to the verbal and non-verbal cues that clients displayed. the bond fostered by this attentiveness is central to one of the primary mechanisms of motivation and behaviour change identified within surf therapy; sdt (marshall et al., 2019: 2020). although unaware of sdt, mentors’ accounts indicated that they satisfied all of the preconditions required to elicit behaviour change: they were attentive to clients (relatedness), facilitated child-led exploration (autonomy), and encouraged clients to explore their limitations (competence). relatedness was also personally rewarding for mentors, and contributed to a sense of social-efficacy for those mentors who had previously experienced social anxiety (see figure 2). enhanced relatedness also increased mentors’ understanding of disability and social and mental health issues, and increased their tolerance and acceptance of challenging social behaviours. such attitudinal shifts resemble pettigrew’s intergroup contact theory (1998), whereby involvement in delivery allowed mentors to learn about an ‘outgroup’ and undergo a process of ingroup reappraisal. bonding, relatedness, and enhanced intergroup acceptance and understanding are at the core of the emotional safe spaces identified as key to therapeutic outcomes within surf therapy (burtscher & britton, 2022: marshall et al., 2019: 2020). within the delivery safe space, mentors understood the importance clients feeling heard, valued, and permitted freedom to express themselves without judgement. drake et al. (2021) considered such conditions analogous to core conditions of rogerian (client-centred) counselling, namely; unconditional positive regard, interpersonal congruence, and empathy (rogers, 1959). the present studies finding that mentors perform a mediating and moderating role between the client and environmentally derived therapeutic benefit is comparable to other core conditions within the client-centred paradigm, specifically the requirement for the client to be incongruent within the relationship (i.e. with the environment), and for the therapist (i.e. mentor) to be congruent (rogers, 1959). rogerian counselling relies upon discourse to update self-concept and achieve therapeutic effect, this is lacking within (most) surf therapy. however, having achieved the necessary preconditions for therapeutic benefit defined within the client-centred paradigm, other mechanisms (sdt, efficacy induction, pat) may achieve modification of client self-concept through experience (see also godfrey et al., 2015: matos et al., 2017). future research that explores this notion of modified self-concept in relation to the self in nature, the emotional self, the social self, and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 general self-identity may prove particularly insightful for understanding therapeutic effect within surf therapy. implications this study has identified areas where mentors’ experiences align with those of clients, and has provided potential insight into the underlying mechanisms of effect within surf therapy. by highlighting the potential interaction between environmental and social factors, the results have practical implications for service optimisation in relation to site selection, surf condition go/no-go criteria for sessions, and staff training for surf therapy providers. we suggest that training emphasizing the importance of social facilitation, acceptance, and the creation of emotional and physical safe spaces would be particularly effective for optimizing outcomes. in addition, by identifying potential correlates between therapeutic change in surf therapy and rogerian counselling/b&bt, our findings have broader implications for the general field of small-group nature-based therapeutic interventions and highlight the potential utility of future comparative/transdisciplinary research. this study has also identified how broader community benefit can be achieved through volunteer-assisted mental health interventions, which appear to both enhance the mental wellbeing of their clients and volunteers, and increase the sense of acceptance, inclusion, and community for everyone involved. finally, the current study has highlighted areas for future research, emphasizing the contribution of the environment to therapeutic outcomes, and highlighting the utility of sdt, b&bt and pat as theoretical frameworks to guide further exploration of surf therapy. limitations the design and research sample used within this study were appropriate for achieving the stated research aims. however, as the lead author was the only researcher involved in coding and analysis, the potential influence of individual bias limits the reliability of the results. by focusing purely upon a standalone, mentor-facilitated method of surf therapy delivery, generalizability of the current study’s findings to programs that employ different methodological approaches may be limited. focus upon the experience of surf mentors (who do not spend much time actually surfing during sessions) rather than clients (who tend to surf more) leaves the present study poorly placed to explore the specific contribution that surfing itself makes towards therapeutic outcomes. additionally, while mentors’ third-party perspectives were insightful, it is appreciated that they constituted only anecdotal evidence. while this anecdotal evidence was worth exploring, its strength was limited by the sample size used, which was more suited to a purely ipa study than within a ta framework exploring third-person perspectives, for which a larger sample size would have been desirable (braun & clarke, 2013). the sample was drawn from current mentors, so cannot address any barriers that prevent potential volunteers from becoming mentors. the small sample size and the focus upon a single service provider within a limited geographical area also limits the range of volunteer experiences that are likely to have been captured, and thus limits generalizability of the results. notwithstanding these limitations, considerable homogeneity emerged within the third-party observations of all mentors, and key themes in this data aligned heavily with existing literature. conclusion this study has highlighted the interaction between social and environmental factors within mentor-facilitated surf therapy interventions, and suggests that modification of clients’ self-concept may be key to enhancing psychological wellbeing. by http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 deepening the association between the therapeutic environment of surf therapy and that of client-centered therapy, this work has highlighted importance of the atmosphere that surf therapy takes place within. finally, this study concludes that while surfing is at the core surf therapy interventions, it is not the source of all therapeutic change within the surf therapy paradigm. references allen, t. d. 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partners’ motivations to join and stay engaged in communityresearch partnerships tatiana bustos1, sana simkani1, and calandra reichel1 keywords: community-research partnerships, contexts, engagement, mixed methods, motivations, research involvement author biographies: tatiana elisa bustos, ph.d., is a community psychologist and participatory research scientist whose work intersects public health, systems change, and active strategies to promote inherent capacities and power of communities that are systemically marginalized. she has a ph.d. and master of arts in community psychology with specialization in program evaluation from michigan state university. as a certified implementation support specialist and results based accountability professional, her work aims to build organizational learning capacities of various agencies in transformative approaches. sana simkani, has a bachelor of science in economics from the university of michigan. her research interests lie at the intersection of community engagement, transformative health solutions, and public health. calandra j. reichel, has a master of social work in organizational and community leadership and a graduate certificate in program evaluation from michigan state university. her research interests span housing, the juvenile justice system, public health, and participatory research. recommended citation: bustos, t., simkani, s., & reichel, c. (2025). “we just want to tell the story”: a mixed methods exploration of partners’ motivations to join and stay 1 michigan state university global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 engaged in community-research partnerships. global journal of community psychology practice, 16(1), 1 29. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: tatiana bustos, michigan state university, college of social science. email: tbust002@gmail.com. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:tbust002@gmail.com global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 “we just want to tell the story”: a mixed methods exploration of partners’ motivations to join and stay engaged in communityresearch partnerships abstract community engagement and partnerships are at the core of public health. in order to address long-standing disparities, public health researchers must partner with community members and community-based organizations to co-create health interventions and programs. community-research partnerships (crps)—one model for community partnerships—can increase the capacity and implementation quality of evidence-based and culturally responsive public health practices. while crps have been found to be effective, there is a need to address gaps in understanding perceived motivations and gains among and between partners, particularly in the context of engaging marginalized communities. this mixed methods study explored motivations to join and continue to engage in a crp designed to transform health systems in flint, michigan. using a survey and semi-structured interviews, 25 community and research partner representatives were invited to participate in the study to identify and describe motivating factors and perceived gains driving their engagement. identified motivating factors were categorized as individual, interpersonal, organizational, and community level contexts. findings demonstrate how motivational factors are dynamic and multidimensional with varied contexts, including intrinsic values in individual contexts, social support, relationships, and external organizational resources through interpersonal and organizational contexts, and demonstration of concrete outcomes in community contexts. implications for longer term mutual benefits that equip the capacities of partners are discussed. findings from the study can be used to improve design of crps by attending to factors that motivate marginalized communities to engage with the research process. community engagement and partnerships are at the core of public health (nguyen et al., 2021; robillard et al., 2022). longstanding disparities among marginalized populations have underlined the need for engaging community members most directly impacted by social issues and trusted community-based organizations (cbos) in the development of interventions, programs, and practices. cbos have historical impetus in providing access to resources, responsiveness to community needs, and increasing capacity to facilitate social change in marginalized settings (nguyen et al., 2021). cbos are wellpositioned to serve communities impactfully, given their history, knowledge, and reciprocal relationships with localized communities served (smith et al., 2005; wilson et al., 2012). this was evident throughout the covid-19 epidemic (demeke et al., 2022; pixley et al., 2021; roels et al., 2022; washburn et al., 2022). given the critical role cbos play in mitigating health disparities among marginalized populations, health initiatives across the united states have prioritized community partnerships as a strategy to advance transformative solutions http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 that can address social issues (fleming et al., 2023). community-research partnerships the current study focuses on communityresearch partnerships—one model of a community partnership strategy. we define “community” as localized groups with a shared interest or mission and as the “foundation for relationships built between and among organizations and individuals” (green et al., 2001, p. 20). through community-research partnerships (crps), community members and cbos engage with the research community to increase the capacity and implementation of evidencebased public health practices by developing culturally responsive components that can better meet community needs (brookmanfrazee et al., 2012; drahota et al., 2016; garland & brookman-frazee, 2015; noel et al., 2019; spoth et al., 2007). crps can be powerful mechanisms to address systemic health issues in marginalized communities, including urban and rural settings and lowincome communities (abdulrahim et al., 2010; gilbert et al., 2011; meade & calvo, 2001). crps aim to design research that centers different cultural contexts to enhance utility and meaningfulness of health programs with strong potential to build trust and community capacities. for example, crps created alongside native american communities have focused on generating research with ethically and culturally appropriate strategies to implement evidence-based practices, while also building capacity to participate in the research process by engaging them as co-developers and decisionmakers (gittelsohn et al., 2018; jernigan et al., 2018). the advantages from crps are well documented in terms of its potential impact to promote sustainable public health interventions within community-based settings (spoth et al., 2011). however, the empirical base on motivations and mutual benefits gained among and between partners is limited in the context of researchers engaging with marginalized communities. several motivation theories postulate that different motivational levels exist and may lead to varied outcomes driven by interactive contexts (bandura, 1997; ryan & deci, 2000; deci & ryan, 2012); yet motivation theories have not been applied in understanding engagement within crps. these gaps make it challenging to develop meaningful approaches that foster community engagement. scant evidence on motivations has demonstrated how community partners ground their decision to engage with crps based on perceived value of others’ contributions, benefits that would likely occur through their engagement, considerations of concerns, and opportunities to learn and apply new knowledge or skills for their own settings (behringer et al., 2018; garland & brookman-frazee, 2015; lau et al., 2020; ortega et al., 2018). accordingly, benefits from the perspective of community members in crps have been reported as benefits related to their organization’s increased capacities to use evidence-based practices, increased number of opportunities to work collaboratively with other organizations, and increased abilities to learn about and address health-related issues impacting their communities (butterfoss, 2006; kamuya et al., 2013; lasker et al., 2001; meza et al., 2016; ortega et al., 2018). while mutual benefits from crps are optimal, community and research partners can also experience challenges throughout their participation in crps, such as lacking financial resources, limited time, institutional barriers, conflicting and/or unset expectations, or other limited capacities that prevent them from engaging fully as partners http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 (adsul et al., 2023; bustos et al., 2024a; caron et al., 2015; pinto et al., 2015). prior literature demonstrates that crps tend to benefit research partners more than community partners, potentially limiting access to mutual gains from a partnership and increasing mistrust of research institutions (chupp et al., 2021). these challenges compromise what partners gain from a partnership, even from those that are well intended, underlining the importance of examining motivations and gains for engagement to enhance trust (abdulrahim et al., 2010; bustos et al., 2024a; bustos et al., 2024b; gomez et al., 2018). the current study as the use of crps increases, there is a growing need to better understand community partners’ motivations for initial and sustained engagement (calista et al., 2023; griffith et al., 2010; meza et al., 2016; ortega et al., 2018). bringing prominence to the experiences of community partners from populations that are marginalized is of particular importance, as recruitment and engagement strategies that work well for these populations is unclear and contingent on researchers’ knowledge about their specific individual characteristics (shaghaghi et al., 2011; largent et al., 2018). to build the empirical base on perceived motivations and benefits of community partners, the current study applies an exploratory, mixed methods approach using the model of research community partnership (mrcp) to operationalize and examine key factors shaping engagement throughout the development of a crp in flint, michigan (brookman-frazee et al., 2012, 2016; garland & brookman-frazee, 2015; lau et al., 2020). an adapted version of the mrcp model outlines the development of crps, beginning from initial considerations for engagement phase, formation phase, execution of activities defined by proximal outcomes, and sustainment characterized by distal outcomes (lau et al., 2020). in the adapted model (figure 1), the “engagement” phase highlights initial considerations prior to the formation phase of a crp, emphasizing partners’ perceived motivations and concerns. guided by socio-ecological models of context and given the importance of ensuring mutual benefits for both community and research partners, the study expands on the engagement phase, including community partners’ perceived gains and motivations in initial considerations. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 figure 1. adapted model of research community partnership (lau et al., 2020; brookman-frazee et al., 2012) methods utilizing an instrumental case study, the current study applied a sequential mixed methods research design (quan → qual) to collect the breadth of motivational factors from key partners and the depth of those motivations and benefits to explain and contextualize experiences that are not made explicit through quantitative data. as part of a broader study, the current study focuses only on findings that identified partners’ perceived gains, motivating factors to initially join the crp at time-point 1 (t1) as well as their motivating factors to continue engaging with the crp throughout the covid-19 pandemic at time-point 2 (t2). this component of the study aimed to address the research question: what are partners’ motivating factors to engage with the crp at t1 and t2 and aimed to explore how these motivations may have shifted over time. the design included one data collection phase at timepoint 1 and two data collection phases at time-point 2 during january 2020 and january 2021 (creswell & plano-clark, 2011; ivankova et al., 2006). for time-point 1 (january 2020), only the quantitative phase was carried out due to lack of responses from community partners during the onset of covid-19 in march 2020. at time-point 2 (january 2021), the first phase included quantitative data that were collected and analyzed; in the second phase, qualitative data were collected to expand on the quantitative results. institutional review board (irb) approval was obtained from michigan state university (msu) at timepoint 1 and continuation of the study was approved at time-point 2 (#cr00001249). study setting flint is a majority african american community made up of over 81,000 people, with over 35% of residents who live in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 poverty (bureau usc; carrera et al., 2019). flint is also the largest city and county seat of genesee county, michigan, making it the 12th largest city in the state. once the birthplace of general motors, disinvestment has caused flint to lose over half of its population, leading to less access to services and resources that can meet community needs (hailemariam et al., 2020). in areas of flint, health disparities have been widening due to the continued impacts from the water crisis and were exacerbated by the most recent public health pandemic (johnson, 2021). flint and its surrounding areas in genesee county have faced longstanding and historical events that have compromised its local, social and economic state, facing “racial abandonment, scientific arrogance, government inaction, and direct harm” (carrera et al., 2019, p. 3). the compounded impact of disinvestments and depopulation has resulted in higher rates of mental and physical health disparities, poverty and unemployment, as well as increased distrust in institutions, including academic research institutions, in the community (allgood et al., 2022; carrera et al., 2019, hailemariam et al., 2020). in flint, relationships and collaboration with other sectors has become critical for the longterm success of the city’s resilience and recovery (carrera et al., 2019; hailemariam et al., 2022; hailemariam et al., 2023; reckhow et al., 2019). known for community activism, strength and resilience, flint community members and cbos have been propelled to navigate local crises together to meet their communities’ needs (hailemariam et al., 2020; reckhow et al., 2019). community partnerships, like crps, have been utilized for decades to amplify perspectives from flint community members (carrera et al., 2019; citrin, 2001; key et al., 2019; hailemariam et al., 2020; olabisi et al., 2023; paberzs et al., 2014). ongoing issues from the flint water crisis, for example, came to light through strong research partnerships between community activists, healthcare providers, and researchers that prioritized the concerns of community members (lewis & sadler, 2021). thus, there is a strong potential in fostering crps within these settings that rely on building relationships between researchers and community members to advance health solutions. context of partnership in response to the existing health disparities in flint, a transdisciplinary collaborative research center was created in 2016 to advance sustainable solutions that eliminate disparities by implementing and disseminating community-based interventions that were centered on community needs and co-created through community partnerships (ellington et al., 2022; meghea et al., 2021). funded through the national institutes on minority health and health disparities, the center was designed to implement systems-level interventions partnered with community members and community-based organizations to improve social conditions and policies among underserved ethnic and racial minorities in genesee county (bustos et al., 2022; ellington et al., 2022; johnsonlawrence et al., 2019; injury prevention center, 2023; lewis et al., 2021; meghea et al., 2021). within the center, there were three smaller cores that focused on special topics, including dissemination and implementation, methods, administration, partnerships, and evidence-based interventions (ellington et al., 2022; meghea et al., 2021). among these cores was the partnership consortium core (pcc)—a crp designed to foster and coordinate activities that build trust, minimize duplication of efforts, and mobilize and leverage resources to encourage collaboration among community members and researchers. the leadership structure of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 the pcc was made up of researchers and community leaders who were considered trusted representatives in addressing health disparities for flint residents (bustos et al., 2024a). fostering trust with communities was reflected in how community representatives were included as core leaders involved in shaping the direction of the pcc. quantitative data collection procedures sample. the pcc included 25 agency representatives within genesee county, representing local, state and national agencies involved in public health efforts. all representatives from the pcc were invited to participate in this study. inclusion criteria for the study included: (a) represent an active, participating agency in the crp; (b) read and speak proficiently in english; and (c) be 18 years of age or older. a total of 23 partner representatives (3 academic, 20 community; 85% response rate) completed the quantitative survey at time-point 1 and 16 partner representatives (2 academic, 14 community; 59% response rate) completed the survey at time-point 2. participating community representatives were leaders in public health agencies, representing social services (n = 3), direct health services (n = 7), and non-profit agencies (n = 10) serving flint community members. participating research partner representatives reported roles as faculty (50%), ethics review board administrator (25%) or research specialist (25%) employed at two different universities in the midwest region. partners’ initial involvement with the crp averaged at 23 months (sd = 13.356) with a range of 0 – 40 months (e.g., since the crp began in 2016). continued involvement with the crp averaged 35 months (sd = 13.72) with a range of 12 – 52 months. table 1. table 1 overview of participants t1 t2 sample n (%) duration of time with crp (in months) sample n (%) duration of time with crp (in months) all partners 23 (85) m = 23.43 (sd = 13.35) 16 (64) m = 35.63 (sd = 13.72) research 3 (75) m = 26 (sd=17.32) 2 (50) m = 41.50 (sd =15.78) community 20 (95) m = 23.05 (sd=13.18) 14 (67) m = 34.45 (sd =13.41) measures. decision to participate questionnaire (dpq). the 15-item decision to participate questionnaire (dpq) was used to identify community and research partners’ motivations for participating in the crp (brookman-frazee et al., 2012; meza et al., 2016). for the current project, the dpq was adapted as a multiple-response item that asked participants to select their motivations for joining the crp at time-point 1 and their motivations for continuing their engagement with the crp at time-point 2. an open-ended option was added to allow for additional text responses. other survey items collected details on demographics, such as agency/institutional affiliation, agency role, duration of time involved with crp, and their most important organizational contributions http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 to the crp. the full survey that includes other aspects of the broader study has been published elsewhere (bustos et al., 2022). procedures. to recruit for quantitative data collection, the first author and a research intern (second author) emailed all key partnering representatives of the crp with details on the study purpose, participation incentives, expected data collection activities, and eligibility to participate. the intern was from the research center’s summer scholars program and had established relationships from prior engagements; this was expected to facilitate the recruitment process. once written consent was obtained, participants were provided with a survey link from qualtrics. participants were provided with a $15 gift card once the survey was completed in phase one of time-point 1. given the impacts of covid-19, participant incentives were raised to $50 with approval from the irb. modifications to participant incentives at time-point 2 also offered an alternative option of a $100 charitable donation that, in combination with an option to obtain the $50 gift card, was expected to increase participation from health care leaders (conn et al., 2019; parkinson et al., 2019). quantitative data analysis for each time-point, nominal data from the dpq survey item were analyzed using multiple response frequencies that were aggregated by partner type (e.g., community vs. research). frequencies of motivating factors were then categorized as individual, interpersonal, organizational, and community level contexts. any changes in responses over time were reported as observations of patterns by partner type due to unequal sample sizes. qualitative data collection procedures sample. using purposive sampling, all participants who completed the quantitative survey in the second phase (at time-point 2) were invited to participate in 30-minute individual interviews. a subsample of nine participants were interviewed, including two research partners (50% of all research partners in the crp) and seven community partners (41% of all community partners in the crp). measures. semi-structured interview. quantitative data analysis from time-point 2 was used to develop questions for the semistructured interview protocol. questions were designed to elaborate and expand on survey responses, asking participants to share more about their perspectives on motivations for joining the crp and share what they believed other research and/or community partners had to gain from the collaboration. the questions asked within the interview protocol were grounded on the give-get grid model, which collects community and academic partners’ expected benefits, drawbacks, and contributions (behringer et al., 2018; southerland et al., 2013). these procedures followed a prior study approach that applied the dpq with community providers (meza et al., 2016). procedures. recruitment for interviews began concurrently with recruitment for the surveys, but interviews occurred only after the survey was completed. an additional reminder email was sent to participants to schedule an interview on calendly once they had completed the survey. the email included details on the study's purpose and connection to their previous participation in the quantitative survey to minimize confusion. questions for the interview were also provided in advance to promote transparency. all interviews were completed by the first author who had certified training in qualitative research, conducted on zoom’s http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 hipaa compliant platform, and lasted up to 30 minutes. before starting the interview process, all participants were asked to provide verbal consent after reviewing the consent form again, in addition to their written consent obtained during the survey. immediately after completing interviews, participants were provided with a $50 visa gift card. qualitative data analysis qualitative data were analyzed using directed content analysis, a qualitative research technique that allows for iterative constant comparison approaches with inductive coding procedures (bernard, 2006; hsieh & shannon, 2005; ryan & bernard, 2003; willms et al., 1990). interview data were transcribed using rev, de-identified to assure the confidentiality of participants, and verified for accuracy. a priori coding schema was developed from the research questions and quantitative findings. prior to coding, the coding team (first author and co-authors) completed a training to practice coding procedures and to finalize the coding schema. more detailed information on these procedures is published elsewhere (bustos et al., 2024a). once the coding schema was finalized, pairs of coders independently coded all nine transcripts to ensure transcripts were double coded for reliability. any discrepancies were resolved using consensus discussions. qualitative data saturation was determined when coders agreed that interview data and themes/codes were showing repetition or redundancy. emergent themes were identified by the extent of salience within and across interviews. frequency of codes were quantized to present ever-coded (e.g., the number of transcripts that had the code assigned ever) and frequency counts (e.g., the number of times the code was assigned throughout all of the transcripts), which provided additional data to support the salience of the emergent themes (bernard, 2006; hsieh & shannon, 2005). guided by self determination theory of motivation and ecological models, themes were categorized by different levels of context embedded in motivations: individual, interpersonal, organizational, and community. all interview transcripts were entered, coded, and analyzed in maxqda software. results perception of the partnership an emergent theme was added as perception of the crp, given how initial perceptions can shape engagement. participant insights related to the crp’s identity helped broaden context of their motivations. generally, both community and research partners viewed the partnership as having a unique framework that was indicative of listening to communities and that could be modeled for other partnerships with goals to advance health. i think it's there in a very real way to work on health equity issues in a community, not just on paper, not just on an academic whatever, but to be involving and raising up the people in the community with services that are desperately needed to hopefully achieve equity, or at least advance equity, and looking at issues that are not just identified by academic, but by the people in the community who are dealing with the issues, all in very real ways. (p002, research partner) partners also perceived the crp as a connector, a vehicle designed to bring people together for networking, creating relationships and fostering collaborations, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 information and resources exchange, linking smaller partners with larger partners, and moving collaborative relationships in innovative ways. it is a venue for collaboration of a broad swath of community organizations and community representatives to come together and break down barriers and start to work on developing common approaches to solving the problems that their missions are supposed to be dealing with... it’s that place where folks' agencies can come together and collaborate. (p005, community partner) overview of motivations quantitative and qualitative results were integrated to illustrate breadth and depth of different levels of motivations, focusing on categories related to individual, interpersonal, organizational, and community level contexts. at time-point 1, partners’ motivations to initially engage with the crp were categorized as 61% organizational, 54% interpersonal, 32% community, and 18% individual. when examined by partner type, results show that community and research partners reported motivations primarily in organizational (68%; 66%, respectively) and interpersonal (54.5%; 100%, respectively) levels. at time-point 2, partners’ motivations to continue engaging with the crp were categorized as 55.6% organizational, 48% interpersonal, 29.6% individual, and 22% community. like time-point 1, community and research partners reported motivations primarily in organizational (62%, 100%, respectively) and interpersonal (52%; 100%, respectively) contexts (table 2). table 2 motivational factors by category for all partners and by partner type (t1 and t2) category of motivations crp partners (t1) crp partners (t2) n (%) n (%) individual 5(17.9) 8(29.6) interpersonal 15(53.6) 13(48.1) organizational 17(60.7) 15(55.6) community 9(32.1) 6(22.2) community partners (t1) community partners (t2) n (%) n (%) individual 4(18.2) 7(33) interpersonal 12(54.5) 11(52.4) organizational 15(68.2) 13(61.9) community 7(31.8) 5(23.8) research partners (t1) research partners (t2) n (%) n (%) individual 1(33) 1(50) interpersonal 3(100) 2(100) organizational 2(66) 2(100) community 2(66) 1(50) however, when frequencies of qualitative codes were computed, findings showed that partners tended to discuss more community (33%) and individual (27%) level motivations than organizational (25%) and interpersonal (13%) (figure 2). below, we examine each level of motivation more closely and expand on quantitative responses with qualitative data. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 figure 2. frequencies of qualitative codes across transcripts by type of motivation individual contexts at time-point 1, motivations focused on individual level contexts were the least reported by both partners. however, community partners tended to report a higher variety of individual level motivations than research partners, emphasizing their motivations driven by the opportunity for future training/consultation (15%), participation in other research studies (10%), and time (10%) and fiscal (5%) implications of participation in a collaborative group. research partners, on the other hand, only reported opportunity for future training/consultation (33%). at time-point 2, these patterns in responses shifted, with 50% of research partners reporting five different individual level motivations related to having pressure to implement evidence-based practices, participation in other research studies, fiscal and time implications of participation in a collaborative group, in addition to opportunity for future training/consultation. community partners reported the same types of individual level motivations, with slight shifts toward more opportunities for future training/consultation (28.6%) (table 3). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 april 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 table 3 motivational factors by community and research partner (t1 and t2) category motivations community (t1) community (t2) research (t1) research (t2) n (%) n (%) n (%) n (%) individual participation in other research studies 2(10) 2(9.5) 1(50) fiscal implications of participation in a collaborative group 1(5) 2(9.5) 1(50) time implications of participation in a collaborative group 2(10) 2(9.5) 1(50) opportunity for future training/consultation 3(15) 6(28.6) 1(33.3) 1(50) pressure to implement new evidence-based practices 1(50) interpersonal opportunity for networking with other community providers 12(57.1) 11(52.4) 3(100) 2(100) experiences with other cap members 4(19) 4(19) 1(33.3) 2(100) other: participating with cap members adds richness to my work 1(50) organizational the idea of collaborating with other community agencies fits with my agency’s/program’s philosophy 14(66.7) 13(61.9) 1(33) 2(100) alignment of collaborative principles with agency/program policies 7(33) 5(23.8) 1(33) 1(50) number of studies my agency/program is asked to participate in 1(5) 2(9.5) reputation of cap and/or the research team in the community 2(9.5) 3(14.3) 2(100) administrative support for collaboration in order to develop a systematic process for adopting and using evidence-based practices 4(19) 2(9.5) 1(50) opportunity to use the systematic process that is developed to help adopt and use new evidence-based practices within my agency/program 4(19) 4(19) 1(50) community need for a systematic process for adopting and using new evidence-based practices 7(33.3) 5(23.8) 2(66.7) 1(50) need for adopting and using new evidence-based practices 1(9.5) 2(9.5) 1(33.3) 1(50) other: advance health solutions, add richness to my work 1(4.8) 2(9.5) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 april 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 during qualitative interviews, both community and research partners elaborated on individual level contexts of motivations beyond factors listed in the dpq. both partners discussed how engaging with the crp aligned with their prior work and allowed for a “natural connection” to expand community projects as well as provided opportunities for their professional development. research partners emphasized mutual benefits in gaining opportunities to apply their prior experiences as researchers while also maximizing impact for their community-based research projects. for instance, one partner described the partnership “mutually beneficial for both” and like a “force multiplier” for impacts (p009, research partner). both community and research partners also mentioned how engaging with the crp was in response to their desire to stay connected to the community: “this is really something that i've always wanted to be a part of, something that i was a part of before,” (p002, research partner). another partner reiterated this, emphasizing their personal motivations to “really seek community” (p004, community partner). a majority of community partners described motivations related to their personal commitment to justice, having a personal role to serve, and having excitement about the potential growth opportunities to advance health solutions. one community partner expanded on how their motivations were an extension of their personal values: “equity is the cornerstone of everything that i do and recognizing that public health has the potential of helping entire communities” (p006, community partner). relatedly, other partners were driven by their passions to serve others and a sense of hope to see changes reified in the flint community: "i keep going for the same reasons i got involved in boards...because i am passionate about health equity and i want to see them advance" (p004, community partner). several other partners believed they had a personal mission to take on roles as leaders to identify health solutions for the flint community and/or provide historical knowledge: “as a citizen of the community, i have certain responsibilities that i need to fulfill” (p008, community partner). others were motivated by their obligations to serve underrepresented communities: “we have to make sure that those that are most vulnerable are provided assistance and support,” (p006, community partner). of note, two partners indicated that they were not feeling motivated to stay engaged due to overwhelm, shifts in leadership, or covid-19 impacts. yet, they still wanted to forge ahead: "we've got to somehow get the energy in a community that's already exhausted to forge ahead with more energy" (p006, community partner). interpersonal contexts at time-point 1, interpersonal motivations were the second highest category reported across partners. both community and research partners reported motivations driven by the opportunity for networking with other community partners (57.1%; 100%, respectively) and prior or existing experiences with other crp members (19%; 33.3%, respectively). at time-point 2, patterns of motivation responses changed slightly, with less community and research partners reporting the opportunity for networking with other community partners (52.4%; 100%, respectively). patterns were found to be similar for motivations related to prior or existing experiences with other crp members for community partners (19%), but not research partners (100%) (table 3). this may have been due to not having new partners added to the crp over the period of covid, and thus focusing their engagement on nurturing those relationships in the second year. across interviews, community partners expanded on their motivating factors related http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 to having opportunities of collaborating with other community agencies. overall, partners were motivated to continue engaging with the crp to learn from others, build and strengthen relationships with partners to the point of gaining their trust: “the piece that has been most fulfilling for me is getting to know some of our partners at a level where they're not just community partners, they are cherished friends because that's where you build the trust” (p005, community partner). a similar view was shared from an academic partner: “it is a goal of mine to not only provide support, right?... this is all about building the relationship between [crp] and our partners” (p002, research partner). other partners were motivated to bridge connections between multi-cultural community organizations to expand partnerships beyond the usual players. for instance, one community partner shared, “to help make that connection, bridge those communities, and communicate in between different communities that may not necessarily feel like they're connected with the larger community... that's why i keep coming back” (008, community partner). another partner also felt motivated by the "promise of bringing together various community agencies and stakeholders to improve health in flint" (p005, community partner). organizational contexts across both time-points, organizational motivations were the most frequently reported by both community and research partners. community partners reported 6 different factors related to how the idea of collaborating aligned with their agency’s philosophy (66.7%), the alignment of collaborative principles with agency/program policies (33%), administrative support for collaboration in order to develop a systematic process for adopting and using evidence-based practices (19%), the opportunity to use the systematic process that is developed to help adopt and use new evidence based practices within my agency/program (19%), reputation of the crp and/or research team in the community (9.5%), and the number of studies their agency is typically asked to participate in (5%). research partners reported two factors related to how the idea of collaborating aligned with their agency/program philosophy (33%) and the alignment of collaborative principles with agency/program policies (33%). at timepoint 2, three more factors were reported by research partners but remained the same for community partners. more research partners reported motivations related to reputation of crp and/or the research team in the community (100%), administrative support for collaboration in order to develop a systematic process for adopting and using evidence-based practices (50%), and the opportunity to use the systematic process that is developed to help adopt and use new evidence-based practices within my agency/program (50%). any changes in distribution of responses for community partners were likely affected by the response rate at time-point 2. throughout the interviews, many community partners further described organizational level motivations, emphasizing mission alignment between the crp and their agency/program and the crp’s reputation and infrastructure that offered support to build systematic processes to implement evidence-based practices within community agencies. many partners shared how their respective organizations carried “equity at the forefront” in all efforts, aligning with the work of other crp partners. one partner shared, “[org] has always been one to really work with partners and doing things with an equity lens has always been in the forefront of what we do,” (p001, community partner). another http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 partner elaborated on the alignment with collaborative principles: “the idea of collaborating with community agencies fits with my agency’s philosophy, [cbo] operates on that principle that agencies come together...as a community with other organizations to have one voice when working with other institutional types like public health and academic institutions” (p005, community partner). other partners discussed the crp’s reputation, emphasizing their motivations to engage because of the importance of the crp’s goals to address health disparities as well as the leaders: “the purpose of it has made it worth the while for me,” (p008, community partner). overall, partners believed that this alignment and shared vision, and collaborative principles were important motivating factors to continue to stay engaged throughout the covid-19 pandemic. others described how the crp’s infrastructure facilitated the ability to create a collective voice centered in community priorities that could be propelled into action through the crp, as well as develop good relationships along the way. one partner shared, "the idea that there could be a place that would bring us together, so we move forward together and we're not competitors instead we're collaborators was really attractive to me" (p004, community partner). another partner reiterated this viewpoint, “what has been most gratifying is that we have a structure in place that can stand the winds and waves that come in communities,” (p007, community partner). thus, some felt motivated because they believed the crp infrastructure would help alleviate challenges to collaborating with other community providers by bridging people to move toward a common objective. community contexts community contexts of motivations were the third most frequently reported category in the quantitative survey, but most commonly discussed throughout interviews (figure 2 and figure 3). at time-point 1, community and research partners both reported the community need for a systematic process for adopting and using new evidence-based practices (33%; 66.7%, respectively) and the need for moving those processes into action by adopting and using new evidence-based practices (9.5%, 33%,respectively). at timepoint 2, pattern of responses remained roughly the same, with slight changes observed due to unequal sample sizes. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 april 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 figure 3. terms most frequently used to describe motivations with qualitative interviews, partners were able to expand on examples that connected their motivations to impact the flint community more in depth. all partners described their motivations to eliminate health disparities and advance health in the community, beginning from their initial involvement. one community partner shared, “i know everybody had the idea of advancing the health in flint from the beginning,” (p005, community partner). similarly, another partner extended this view to their continued engagement: “even as i stepped down as [ ], i still have tremendous interest in a community working ahead to advancing health equity... i want to see that happen,” (p004, community partner). research partners were motivated to engage with communities and provide information to improve impact. one partner emphasized that seeing and contributing to real world impact moving toward the elimination of public health disparities in the broader flint community kept them engaged with the crp: “it's this ability to provide [communities] information. that is why i'm still involved,” (p002, research partner). other partners expanded on motivating factors related to having a need for a systematic process for adopting and using new evidence-based practices to move health solutions forward. partners discussed how they felt motivated to leverage collaborations made possible through the crp to inform their processes with evidencebased practices. one partner shared, “the need for systematic process for adopting and using new evidence-based practices, that's really something that has been lacking, particularly when we've been involved in research and it's kind of fallen away after the initial research is done. even when it seems promising, there just wasn't mechanisms in place to actually have those practices sustained,” (p005, community partner). this is worth noting due to the flint community’s historical experiences with research coming and going into flint without any sustainable solutions. the same partner elaborated, “i was very disappointed that there http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 were so many research programs that had been done in flint and after the research program was over, that was pretty much the end. so that's what inspired me to want to do this...” (p005, community partner). others discussed these motivations as tied to shifting the research paradigm in developing evidence-based practices to be community centered and practice-based. one partner shared, “through some of these collaborations, we can shift the paradigm, that we don't have the academic partners coming up with great theories, when they put them into practice, they don't work the way that theory is, there's no two-way communication with practice,” (p007, community partner). perceived gains when asked about what community partners had to gain out of the crp, participants discussed gains related to building capacity in accessing tools and resources, opportunities for collaboration, organizational improvements, personal or professional growth, and opportunities to voice their story. all but one partner discussed gaining access to tools and resources through the crp, such as funding, data management systems, best practices, and leveraging skills and expertise from others. one partner shared, “there are things that the university has that it can bring to the table that as a community partner i don't have" (p006, community partner). other partners emphasized access to grants and funding through the partnership: “i need to partner with groups...because the academic institutions have access to grants, which lead to resources that can make a difference in a community,” (007, community partner). six partners elaborated on gains related to accessing opportunities for collaboration, where cbos and community members can connect and communicate across other agencies. one partner shared, “it makes the nonprofit that i work with more connected to the larger community because of my involvement,” (008, community partner). gains related to organizational improvements were specific to the crp’s impacts on staff and partners’ respective organizational capacity for data driven decision making: “what helped us [org] see is that we weren't able to capture all the data in a way that was translatable so that we could even put it in the system, but we couldn't get it out... having this relationship with the university helped us to see that,” (p007, community partner). sharing skills and expertise through the crp had also offered new learnings, skills, and enhanced understanding of roles partners can play: “our community has learned some, so i think that's hopeful, that really helps,” (004, community partner). most importantly, community partners emphasized their increased abilities to voice their stories reflective of community knowledge and lived experiences while also building capacity to translate these stories into evidence: “as a community rep, we just want to tell the story,” (007, community partner). discussion using mixed methods with a case study design, this study explored initial and ongoing engagement in community-research partnerships by assessing partner motivations and gains. key findings of the present research include: motivations are dynamic and multi-dimensional and require careful consideration for initiating and sustaining engagement; motivations related to individual contexts underline the role of intrinsic drives in engagement; relationships are motivating factors for bridging research with community practice; motivations related to community contexts are cross cutting, intersecting with other dimensions; and mutual benefits can extend into longer term benefits that equip the capacities of partners for sustained impacts. first, results from the study suggest that motivations are dynamic and multi-dimensional, with context playing a role in sustaining engagement in the crp. as aligned with prior literature, intrinsic drive, social support, external organizational resources and demonstration of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 concrete outcomes can all deepen and maintain community partners’ engagement with crps (calista et al., 2023; green et al., 2001; mckay et al., 2012; pinto et al., 2015). this is consistent with motivation theories that have linked intrinsic motivations with intrinsic values and tangible outcomes (ryan & deci, 2000). these findings also highlight some shared motivations among community and research partners with a desire to engage in collaborative research and practice. providing insight on community members’ motivations for joining and engaging in a crp may guide researchers who seek to meaningfully partner with community members. current and future crps are encouraged to start with understanding partners’ motivations and what they want out of a partnership to facilitate mutual understanding early on in the formation phase and ensure mutual benefits and fair participation throughout the process. additionally, findings on individual contexts provided more in-depth understanding on the intrinsic drive behind participation and engagement with crps, particularly those designed to address concerns that matter to marginalized communities. while research partners reported motivations related to opportunities for consultation in the beginning of their participation and having a pressure to implement evidence-based practices, they were able to expand their motivations connected to personal values. during interviews, research partners expanded on their motivations to having sense of community and a personal mission to advance health solutions in the community. this reflects a meaningful shift in motivations, moving from researcher’s motives to benefit immediate research opportunities to benefiting broader community impact. it is important to acknowledge that researchers hold inherent biases embedded in their roles and obligations tied to their respective research institutions that often prioritize motivations to benefit research over communities (israel et al., 1998; wallerstein et al., 2019). the impacts from leaving these biases unaddressed is reflected in the historical harms done to communities from traditional research institutes, perpetuating issues of mis/distrust to date (griffith et al., 2021; wallerstein et al., 2019; reverby, 2012). bringing motivations to light can present opportunities to challenge biases and develop shared values that can foster trust for meaningful engagement. similarly, community partners also emphasized intrinsic drives related to their personal values aligned with social justice, as well as providing expertise from historical engagements with their communities. this is distinct from, yet related to, their mission as an organization and further demonstrates the multidimensional aspects of motivational factors. for instance, when asked about what kept partners motivated to continue engaging with the crp, community partners emphasized wanting to continue moving their personal commitment towards health solutions forward as well as supporting the community along the way, regardless of their formalized roles or affiliations. consistent with prior work, these findings underscore the importance of prioritizing the values, assets, and lasting dedication of community members, particularly from marginalized backgrounds, to achieve common good for their communities (adsul et al., 2024; green et al., 2001; hailemariam et al., 2023; mckay et al., 2012). aligned with motivation theories, these findings indicate how intrinsic drive, such as values, can motivate communities to collaborate with crps (ryan & deci, 2000). community researchers and practitioners are urged to design strategies embedded with the intrinsic motivations of partners to center values and other personal assets that can cultivate inclusive spaces and propel collaborations more deeply. furthermore, community partners viewed their roles as instrumental to bridging connections with other communities and viewed relationships with researchers as critical for bridging research theories with community centered practices. this http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 reflects extrinsic motivations characterized as congruent with one’s values and self-determined actions (ryan & deci, 2000). findings on interpersonal and organizational contexts demonstrated how community partners are motivated to build, nurture, and leverage relationships that are needed for collective action to address health disparities in their communities and for shifting research paradigms. these results are consistent with prior literature that highlight the role of interpersonal factors, such as trust, social support, and good quality of relationships, in driving successful community engaged public health efforts (bustos et al., 2024a; bustos et al., 2024b; gomez et al., 2021; hailemariam et al., 2023; israel et al., 1998; mattessich & monsey, 1992). together, these results point to how relationships are fundamental to crps and can be leveraged for collaborative community research and practice that moves toward improved public health impact. while organizational and interpersonal contexts were most frequently reported in the dpq, community contexts were most often discussed throughout interviews and emphasized in connection to other motivations. community is a cross cutting value that is embedded throughout other contexts. as demonstrated in prior community engaged scholarship, it is clear that flint community partners are motivated to help their community because of their values and historical experiences in changing the community for common good (hailemariam et al., 2020; hailemariam et al., 2022; hailemariam et al., 2023; key et al., 2019; lewis & sadler, 2021; olabisi et al., 2023). when asked about sustaining motivations throughout the covid-19 pandemic, community partners highlighted the community’s need to develop systematic processes that can maximize sustainability of public health interventions to address health disparities specific to the flint community. this is due to community members’ experiences with a lack of sustained efforts from prior research programs (carrera et al., 2019). research partners also shared how they wanted to see the impact of the crp in eliminating health disparities. prior literature has indicated that motivating factors focusing on the mission of public good rather than individual level motivations can lead to better collaboration (varda et al., 2012). other literature has suggested that partners may be more motivated to participate if they believe that their engagement with the crp would lead to tangible outcomes (ansell & gash, 2007; ryan & deci, 2000). studies engaged with marginalized communities, in particular, have also demonstrated how community members can be motivated because they want to be a voice for their community and contribute their knowledge and experiences to influence decisions, and ultimately help address community issues (kamuya et al., 2013; mckay et al., 2012; nicolaidis et al., 2011; ortega et al., 2018). while ultimate impact of the crp is beyond the study’s scope, the findings suggest that partners perceived their efforts as contributing to concrete, sustainable outcomes for the broader flint community. thus, demonstrating how community partners’ efforts can contribute to concrete and incremental change for their communities may be important for ongoing engagement. findings also extend the evidence base of perceived benefits gained from a crp, underlining reciprocity. consistent with prior studies, community partners described various gains through crps that relate to organizational improvements, professional development, accessing tools, resources, and other health expertise that can be leveraged to their benefit, opportunities for collaboration, and increased abilities to voice their knowledge and experiences grounded in the community (butterfoss, 2006; kamuya et al., 2013; lasker et al., 2001; meza et al., 2016; ortega et al., 2018). researchers are encouraged to attend to capacity building more closely when designing crps to incorporate mutual benefits to community partners. these findings may be particularly helpful in considering other incentives for partnership engagement that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 extend into longer term benefits that equip partners to be successful without relying on researchers. by attending to mutual benefits, there are opportunities to prevent exacerbation of issues related to mistrust or in unmet expectations, which has already contributed to harm when working with marginalized communities (abdulrahim et al., 2010). limitations limitations to the study relate to the design, data integration, sample, and instruments. first, using a case study approach may have compromised generalizability to other contexts. however, case studies can be powerful strategies when applied with mixed methods by adding more comprehensiveness to understanding social issues (lalor et al., 2013; yin, 2014). while full integration of data strands at both time-points was not possible, integration at time-point 2 allowed for more context that further elaborated on sustained engagement over time. additionally, purposive sampling may have presented biases and overlooked some perspectives. however, qualitative data saturation was reached during data collection and analysis, consistent with best practices in the field (hennick & kaiser, 2022). lastly, while the dpq does not have established psychometric properties (meza et al., 2016), the survey items were tailored to increase ecological validity by adapting items to the crp’s contexts. implications prior work on community-research partnerships have indicated how individual characteristics (e.g., partner perceptions, motivations) are absent in crp research (calista et al., 2023; meza et al., 2016; ortega et al., 2018; ortiz et al., 2020). the majority of studies reporting on motivations in crps do not apply motivation theories and tend to focus on research-initiated partnerships or predominantly academic research perspectives (behringer et al., 2018; meza et al., 2016; ortega et al., 2018). findings from the current study amplify community partner perceptions alongside research partners. findings offer insights into different types of motivational factors that may be critical for initiating and sustaining partners, particularly throughout challenging circumstances, like the covid-19 pandemic. future studies are encouraged to examine differences between community and research partners more clearly and how different motivating factors can lead to distinct patterns or impact quality of engagement. findings expand on factors included in the mrcp’s initial considerations for engagement. the current study applied the mrcp to examine a crp and organize findings for motivational factors and perceived gains. by collecting information on initial considerations for engagement, the study builds out the evidence base for what partners may be considering in their decisions to participate and continue engaging with a crp. of note, the study emphasizes how motivations and perceived gains should be examined throughout the partnership process and not just at the beginning of the crp to ensure consistency, alignment and expose any reconciliations needed. viewing these individual characteristics as dynamic throughout the crp’s development may emphasize the trust building aspect that needs to be embedded throughout partnerships. conclusion while crps are known to provide several advantages, little is known about the motivational factors of community partners to participate in crps, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds (calista et al., 2023; griffith et al., 2010; ortega et al., 2018). yet, insight into what motivates partners to participate in crps is important to ensure the design of culturally responsive and meaningful partnership strategies (carney et al., 2011). using the mrcp, the study explored community and research partners’ perceived motivations to participate and continue engaging with a crp as well as perceived gains. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 different motivational factors were identified, emphasizing intrinsic drives in individual contexts, the role of social support and external organizational resources through interpersonal and organizational contexts, and demonstration of concrete outcomes in community contexts. researchers and practitioners interested in deepening their community partnerships can use results to design crps that attend to partners’ values and benefits for ongoing partnership engagement that meaningfully encourages marginalized communities to engage with the research process. references abdulrahim, s., el shareef, m., alameddine, m., afifi, r. a., & hammad, s. 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(2024). theater f the oppressed as assisted regeneration: challenging the "expert" and building a psychology from and for the people. global journal of community psychology practice, 15(1), 1 9. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: kristina yarbrough, pacifica graduate institute, depth psychology, specialization in community, liberation, indigenous and eco psychologies private practice in austin, texas centered on counseling, community & liberation arts. email: www.kristinayarbrough.com https://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.kristinayarbrough.com/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 theater of the oppressed as assisted regeneration: challenging the "expert" and building a psychology from and for the people abstract theater of the oppressed inspired a street theater project that began in mexico city with graduate counseling psychology students. the theater provoked a pedagogy of the oppressed, challenging the students and the epistemologies of clinical psychology as the ‘experts’ and giving epistemological and ontological power to the participants. this article argues a depth psychological comprehension of oppressor-oppressed relationalities and integrity to assisted regeneration are necessary for theater of the oppressed projects to have a liberatory function. public, spontaneous dialogue with embodied representations of social issues such as domestic violence has enduring collective healing potentials for the participants and for the facilitators. introduction theater of the oppressed’s creator augusto boal believed that theater could be utilized as a “weapon for liberation” to create fundamental social change (boal, 1985). he believed that theater needed to be “a celebration in which all could participate” where “the barrier between actors and spectators is destroyed” (boal, 1985). for boal, the destruction of barriers in theater of the oppressed is a representation of the destruction between social classes such as the ruling class and the subordinate class. to accomplish this, theater of the oppressed must be flexible, porous, and shaped by the actors and by the spectators and invite a spontaneous narration of cultural and sociopolitical problems and their solutions. in theater of the oppressed, anyone can be an ‘actor’ participating in the meaning making of the theater, and the ‘actors’ are lay people embedded in society, they are not trained actors. this project was inspired by the fundamental goals of liberation in theater of the oppressed, as expressed here by its creator, augusto boal. as emerging mental health professionals in a graduate counseling psychology program in mexico city, it meant leaving our offices, leaving the stringent conceptualizations of mental health and treatment models, and going into the streets. we intended to break the barriers of social and political power between mental health professionals generally or ourselves as graduate students in mental health specifically, and the general population. this project’s exceptional fidelity to the oppressed means that the public who will be called participants here, hold epistemological and ontological power, not the mental health graduate students. that means the participants have the power to define the problems, the belief systems and influencing factors that create and maintain those problems, the solutions, and the steps to reaching those solutions. another way this shift in power may be understood is to recognize the emerging mental health professionals in this project as the bearers of hegemonic scientific knowledges that are not distributed equitably, thus they could contribute to cognitive injustice and an egocentric ‘expertise’ (de sousa santos 2018, p. 189). the students relinquished their ‘expertise’ and their epistemological and ontological power to the participants through theater of the oppressed. the counterhegemony of this project and the modality of healing comes from the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 volume 15, issue 1 epistemological and ontological power of the participants. as knowledge from the participants develops in the theater with the graduate students, the students overcome their ignorance and limitations of knowing created by mainstream psychology (p. 189). this occurs through an epistemological and ontological dialogue with the people in the streets who become the experts on the psychosocial and political issues impacting them and their communities, and the experts on how to heal (p. 189). and the healing process occurs mutually for the participants and the facilitators, or in this case the students. dialogue here refers to both the verbal and non-verbal utterances. many educators and self-identified practitioners of theater of the oppressed have lost the essence of the oppressed in their work, and merely offer theater games under the title “theater of the oppressed”. one purpose of this project is to encourage educators, the field of psychology, mental health professions and all community workers to understand theater of the oppressed as a tool for liberation. liberation requires more than theater, it requires a depth psychological understanding of relationality, an artfully timed responsiveness, and a willingness to be witness. liberation is a process held together by a triad of ontological assumptions intrinsic to the theater component of this project: actors and participants observe themselves and perceive what they are, then they discover what they are not, and finally they imagine what they could become (boal 1995, p. 13). acquired self-knowledge is embodied in the actions of the actor or participant as imaginal variations of possible alternatives (p. 13). facilitators of this theater must be willing to let things happen naturally, to make space for imaginal variations and alternatives. they must not impede an actor nor their own process of observation, imagining, self-knowledge acquisition and embodied action. healing becomes accessible for all involved in the theater through an embodied participation in the meaning-making of problems and an embodied participation of working through to liberation. another purpose of this project is to inspire a de-professionalization and de ideologization of mental health workers, educators, students, and community workers. in addition to the limitations of ‘expertise’ within these professionalized roles that need to be challenged, our offices also need to be challenged. the office may produce constraints on creativity and reproduce individualism and the illusion of separation. going into public spaces reminds us of our interconnectedness and our responsibilities to the people. safety in private offices is an indispensable characteristic intentionally designed for us, for our clients, and for the vulnerable inner work undertaken in these spaces. i am not suggesting the abandonment of private, safe office spaces. in fact, there are ways to successfully implement this technique indoors, and that context will be addressed later. the tool offered in this project is being suggested as an additional practice to shift power and expertise, to deepen connections to others and to our communities, to deepen our connection to ourselves and to understand the issues that we are already entangled in within our ongoing work with others. methodology assisted regeneration this project illustrates an assisted regenerative practice in psychology. fidelity to the participants being the theoretical and practical experts is essential in all areas of the methodology and in all possible applications of the theater. watkins and shulman (2008) http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 define assisted regeneration as the theorizing and practice of a psychology that attempts to “uproot” the “western and universalizing assumptions that include the notion that experts trained in the traditions where these assumptions go unquestioned can be placed in charge of the well-being of others.” (p. 16). the graduate students are uprooted as the ‘expert’, and the experts become the participants who theorize the psychology of both problems and solutions. western and universalizing assumptions are an organizing principle of modern society, so there are ample contexts to implement theater of the oppressed as assisted regeneration. this theater is indicated whenever and wherever there are issues within a system (i.e., a community, a family, a classroom, a city or town or country) that would benefit from an uncensored, contained space to process and collectively work through otherwise unprocessed and unattended to psychological content associated with collective issues. in the modern world today, there is no context where this cannot be found. some examples are a community where fentanyl overdosing is occurring; a family of four living with high conflict and tension where one child is always quiet, and one parent is always the speaker; a classroom of high school students or a group of teachers who fear school shootings or simply have concern about school shootings. the project described here is only a framework for the infinite possibilities. participants the creators of this project were graduate students of a psychology counseling program (marriage and family therapist) with an emphasis on liberation psychologies in mexico city. participants in the theater were any person(s) in a public area outside a busy underground metro station who voluntarily stopped to may 2024 participate with the students and the theater scene. other participants were any witnesses who remained on the periphery of the theater scenes, though did not verbally engage nor had contact with the actors. settings the theater was initially carried out at the glorieta de los insurgentes in mexico city. the glorieta is a heavily trafficked, circular area at the entrance of an underground metro train in the center of mexico city. there are numerous businesses at the glorieta; many people are in motion walking through the glorieta or going in and out of the metro station; and many people relax alone or in the company of others at the glorieta. other applications of this project were carried out after the initial theater at the glorieta. they may be noted for the understanding of this project’s adaptability to other contexts: high school students were participants in a school auditorium in mexico city; participants were the attendees at conferences where this project was presented in conference rooms in both mexico and the u.s.; this theater was implemented as a course for graduate counseling psychology students at a university in mexico city; and this project has been replicated in various locations in the streets of mexico and the u.s. examples of scenes in the streets at the glorieta, the following scenes were chosen by the students to represent the most common issues brought to them by clients in their therapy internships. the students quickly reached a consensus that domestic violence was the most common issue that clients presented to them in sessions. in particular, male to female intimate partner violence, and male violence to children were chosen to challenge the status quo of silence http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 regarding domestic violence in mexico. these scenes were directly applicable to the participants and are not intended to be replicated unless they are applicable to your community. scenes need to be designed using data acquired from challenges the participants are facing. scene one. esposo and esposa. two actors: a married couple whose signs around their necks read “esposo” (male spouse) and “esposa” (female spouse). “esposo” actor stands with his hands on his hips. one foot of esposo is on the back of esposa as he gazes towards esposa. esposa is on her hands and knees on the ground, looking towards a cleaning brush she holds in one hand. scene two. padre, niña. two actors: a father and his female child. the signs around the actor’s necks read “padre” and “niña”. niña has an enlarged, pregnant stomach and is standing with her arms and hand positioned to protect her from padre’s raised arm and hand indicating a physical blow to niña is about to occur. scene three. esposo, esposa, infant. two actors: married couple and their infant (infant is represented by a bundled up white blanket in the arms of the esposa). the couple’s signs read “esposo” and “esposa”. the infant does not have a sign. esposo is lying on the ground flat on his back with eyes closed and an empty glass bottle of alcohol on the ground next to his opened hand. esposa sits the on ground next to esposo cradling the infant and gazing lovingly at the infant. procedure two or three students were selected at random by the principal student organizers of this project. the students were selected from the student’s graduate program by simply asking if they would like to participate in a theater of the oppressed project. these students were not given any additional information. all students planned on a location, time, and day. as stated by the fundamentals of theater of the oppressed, anyone can be an actor, though actors must be willing to be still or frozen in a position until moved by a participant. at the gorieta where the students met, they made a large cardboard sign that read, “como cambiarías esta escena?” (“how would you change this scene?”) on both sides. the sign was set up on the ground a few feet away from where the actors were positioned. the students selfelected their role as an actor and wrote the title of their role (i.e., “esposa”) on the cardboard, then hung the sign around their neck. the actors assumed their positions in the scene and remained frozen. the student who was not an actor stood close to the scene and witnessed the reactions of people who passed by. this student would allow the passersby time and space to interpret and feel their reactions to the scene before approaching the actors. then the student gently approached and initiated a dialogue with the public who were reacting. the dialogue included open ended questions such as, “what do you think of this?”, “have you seen this before?”, “what causes this?”, “what is the solution?”. the dialogue was free of guiding, free of judgement and allowed participants to share safety and uncensored. after allowing the public to dialogue, they were encouraged to approach the frozen actors and “change the scene” to solve the problem. the dialogue continued after the participant changed the scene. the student asked the participant why they made the first change, why they made the second change, and so on. and participants were asked how the new scene they created is a representation of solutions to the issues initially represented by the actors. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 after the participant concluded their participation, the group of students constructed a new scene and repeated the above procedure. after completing several scenes, the group of students debriefed, often at a café, ice cream shop or simply by sitting at the location of the theater and talking. students were asked what it was like to be an actor, what it was like to be in dialogue with the participants and what implications the theater has on their work and the field of psychology in general. other reflections outside of these questions were welcome and explored. changes to this procedure are necessary and welcomed when this project is presented with a predetermined group such as with a group of youths or a family in a therapy session, and when it is carried out indoors. in these instances, scenes relevant to the group are set up inside a room without the participants being present and without the participant’s knowledge of the steps included in this project. the participants enter the room to find the scene with actors frozen with signs hanging around their necks to indicate their roles. no verbal instruction nor direction apart from a sign that reads, “how would you change this scene?” are shared. participants are given the time and space they need to process the scene, to dialogue among themselves, and to eventually take action to change the scene until they appear to have constructed a new scene. after the participants have completed their participation, the actors and/or facilitator initiate a dialogue with the entire group. the group is asked why they made the changes they made to the scene, why the person who physically moved the actors took on that role, and overall, what are the solutions being embodied in the new scene. other reflections are welcomed and bridging the scene to its representations in the larger community or broader contexts outside the room can create a deeper dialogue. this may include, “does this happen in your life anywhere else?”, “do you see this often?”, “have you attempted to make changes before?”, “what prevents you from making changes?”, “are you more willing to make changes if you see this again in your life?”. variations of the methodologies of this theater may arise organically from the participants themselves. the participants may decide to become actors and generate their own scene(s). having extra cardboard, markers and extra yarn for the actor’s signs is imperative in case this occurs. large groups may be divided into small groups to make their own scenes for the others to be participants. and the procedure repeats from there. being flexible and listening to the desires of the participants is fundamental to the procedure of this project, as it creates the conditions for liberation. what isn’t flexible is the element of autonomy of the participants, which must be protected by the ways the actors and facilitators engage. this includes being patient, asking only open-ended questions, being non-judgmental, and compassionate to the participants. other aspects of this project that are not flexible are: the actors need to be completely frozen, signs on the actors are necessary, and a sign that states “how would you change this scene?” are all required forms of non-verbal communication to invite participants into an inquiry with little influence. participants in the streets were given a business card with the student’s university information on it. participants were offered free counseling sessions at the clinic on campus as a gift for their participation, and as an ethical consideration to ensure the participants had psychological support for any impact http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 their participation may have caused. results changing the scene common across all locations and scenes was the participant’s initial removal of the aggressor’s behavior. this meant taking the male spouse’s foot off the back of their female partner, lowering the father’s raised arm and hand from his pregnant daughter, picking up the passed out drunk father. changes after the removal of the aggressor’s act included removal of defensive postures of the aggressed and uniting the actors/family members. the unity was created by moving all actors into a circle, with each member holding hands or with one arm around another family member. some participants changed facial expressions of the actors from distressed to contented or smiling and instructed actors to look directly at the eyes of the other actor. no actor was ever taken completely out of the scene by a participant. occasionally, the participant’s initial reaction was to reverse the roles by changing the target of aggresion into the aggressor. this initial expression of retaliation was always quickly retracted. these participants verbalized an understanding that reactiveness and violence as a solution to violence is not a solution. dialogue participants most frequently named communication as both the cause of the problems and the way toward solutions. participants described the need to increase communication. communication was defined as both active listening and talking openly to others. participants named systemic issues of racism, classism and gender discrimination as contributing factors to the violence depicted in the theater scenes. inequity of resources such as access to counseling, access to a healthy social network and access to safe places for victims were often mentioned. intersecting with communication as described above, participants spoke of a culture of silence regarding the systemic issues and inequity of resources that contribute to domestic violence. participants acknowledged that talking about domestic violence, including exploring their causes and solutions, does not typically occur among friends, family, and peers. intergenerational trauma and intergenerational patterns of violence were named several times by participants. participants believed that healing intergenerational trauma is necessary to prevent domestic violence. empowering women was also frequently mentioned as a solution to domestic violence, though depowering men was never identified directly. lastly, increasing education on healthy relationships, both formal and informal was stated as an answer to domestic violence. discussion the potentials of liberation when facilitating theater of the oppressed may only be realized with a depth psychological understanding of oppressor-oppressed relationships. this means allowing uncensored agency among the participants so they may explore and release otherwise unexpressed psychological content. working with a psychology from and for the people requires that we utilize the results from participants to inform our ways of working. this means implementing the solutions the participants generated in the theater, and prioritizing those solutions over our own assumptions about what people need. this includes non-clinical workers, and anyone implementing this http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 theater in their communities-every person is entangled in the liberation of everyone else. the graduate students in this project adopted the epistemological and ontological frameworks of domestic violence from the participants at the gorieta and applied them to their work with clients suffering from domestic violence. from an embodied participation of witnessing the participants exert complete control and agency, the graduate students acquired a bodily knowing to replicate with their clients in sessions, allowing their clients more control and agency over their own healing. non-clinical workers such as teachers and community workers may receive similar benefits through their participation in this theater. non-clinical workers and participants will break barriers between them that were erected by the model of an ‘expert’. breaking that barrier will increase communication and connection and increase the likelihood of a student or community member reaching out for help in the future. the theater will allow for the flow of information to travel more readily among a system, shifting the epistemological and ontological control to include everyone. this is a system more ready and able to handle difficult situations in with an increase in support and collective responsivity. ethical consideration is encouraged, and the ethics of this theater will change with the context and population involved. facilitators must be willing and able to be with participants as they work through complex issues and possibly their own traumas. participants in the streets engaged in dialogue for an average of 20 minutes. they shared emotional stories of being victims of domestic violence. participants were most often in the company of one or more friend or family member. one healing effect of this project is the opportunity to be witnessed by others, and to be validated and counseled in community. the participants mentioned that the act of dialogue evoked from the theater are unique to them due to a culture of silence on domestic violence. the ongoing dialogue between the participants and their company after participation is one extraordinary effect of this street theater. future applications could follow-up with participants to assess where, when and with whom the participants continued the dialogue, and assess the short and longterm effects of participating in the theater. the graduate students were often surprised at the impact that being an actor or dialoguer had on them. students reported increases in empathy, increases in their connection to others and increased understanding of the impacts of domestic violence. students found their participation invaluable to their work in mental health, reporting an increase in desires to learn from the people and put less emphasis on empirically driven treatment models. the theater offered here blurs the material and psychic lines between the professionalized ‘expert’ and the pathologized, unknowing other. the impacts for all involved are multilayered, dynamic, ongoing and at times ineffable. the methodologies of theater of the oppressed i have presented here can be utilized in education, with mental health professionals and mental health graduate students, and with community workers. these are only examples of other applications; the possibilities of this theater are endless and intended to be relevant in various cultural contexts. as the principal creator of this project, i urge you to consider all aspects of this text and ask yourself, “where might this theater be facilitated in my community?”. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 references boal, a. (1995). the rainbow of desire. routledge. boal, a. (1985). theater of the oppressed. theater communications group, inc. de sousa santos, b. (2014). epistemologies of the south: justice against epistemicide. routledge. watkins, m. & shulman, h. (2008). toward psychologies of liberation. palgrave macmillan. http://www.gjcpp.org/ exploring the impact of natural mentors on sociopolitical stress: implications for educators and youth workers amanda l. davis1, neshat yazdani2, mariah kornbluh3, and samuel d. mcquillin4 keywords: youth mentoring, stress, sociopolitical stress, coping, young adults author biography: amanda l. davis, is a phd candidate in school psychology at the university of south carolina. her research through the youth empowerment in school and systems (yess) lab examines how young people benefit from close, supportive relationships with mentors, with a particular emphasis on informal mentoring relationships between youth and school staff. her work also explores issues related to measuring the quality of these relationships and intervening to enhance their effectiveness across community and school-based settings. through this work, amanda hopes to enhance the capacity of communities and schools to promote safe, stable, and nurturing environments for young people. neshat yazdani, is a phd candidate in applied developmental psychology at fordham university. her research examines various aspects of well-being across the lifespan, with a particular focus on well-being during the transition from adolescence to adulthood (emerging adulthood). drawing on both quantitative and qualitative approaches, she also studies how supportive relationships (e.g., with mentors and peers) can promote positive psychosocial and academic development among youth experiencing stress and adversity. she is interested in leveraging this body of research to improve educational experiences and outcomes for students historically underrepresented in higher education. mariah kornbluh, research focuses on 1) how children and adolescents marginalized or socially excluded surrounding the intersections of race or ethnicity, social class, gender, and other forces develop beliefs, feelings, and actions that challenge systemic inequities (critical consciousness development), and 2) how this critical consciousness empowers marginalized youth to negotiate structural constraints surrounding educational attainment and wellness. dr. kornbluh employs a community-based approach (youthled participatory action research) to her research by not only exploring how systems of power impact development, but also how children and youth can be their own agents of change in reimagining and transforming institutions that have systematically disadvantaged our most vulnerable communities. her research also explores how youth-guided approaches to research can help inform policy and practice, as well as promote accountability to young people among adult leaders and decision-makers. 1 university of south carolina 2 fordham university 3 university of oregon 4 university of south carolina global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 samuel d. mcquillin, studies how schools and communities can work together to promote emotional, behavioral, and academic wellness in children who are environmentally or developmentally at-risk. his work focuses on translating theories of child development to pragmatic prevention and intervention strategies. he is particularly interested in how and why relationships between young people and adult helpers (e.g. mentors) promote positive youth development. recommended citation: davis, a., yazdani, n., kornbluh, m, & mcquillin, s. d. (2023). exploring the impact of natural mentors on sociopolitical stress: implications for educators and youth workers. global journal of community psychology practice, 14(3), 1 23. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: amanda l. davis, department of psychology, university of south carolina, 1512 pendleton st. columbia, sc 29208. email: ald4@email.sc.edu. http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:ald4@email.sc.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 exploring the impact of natural mentors on sociopolitical stress: implications for educators and youth workers abstract aims: this study examines college students’ access to natural mentors during the contentious 2020 u.s. presidential election and considers the role of natural mentors as protective factors in relation to coping and sociopolitical stress. methods: data were collected from 588 students between the ages of 18 and 29 who were enrolled at 10 institutions of higher education across the u.s. at the time of data collection. chi-square tests of independence explored differences in access to mentors. t-tests examined differences in sociopolitical stress and coping between those with and without mentors, and multivariable regressions examined whether relationship characteristics influenced these associations. results: findings indicated significant differences in access to mentors based on gender, religion, and political affiliation. furthermore, results indicated that mentored college students reported higher levels of coping. relationship characteristics did not affect these associations. conclusion: results highlight global implications for community practitioners as they support young adults’ civic engagement in divisive sociopolitical climates, especially as elections become increasingly polarizing on a global scale. introduction young people benefit from relationships with caring non-parental adults (natural mentors; hagler & rhodes, 2018). mentored youth are generally happier, healthier, and more resilient than non-mentored peers (dubois & silverthorn, 2005; hurd & zimmerman, 2010). natural mentors may be a means for college students, especially those from oppressed groups, to cope with the isolation and stress of 2020. the current study explored college students’ access to natural mentors during the fall of 2020, as well as whether mentors promoted coping or protected against sociopolitical stress during a divisive presidential election within the u.s. we aim to better understand how adults support young people’s involvement with social and political systems. by understanding youth’s access to and engagement with natural mentors during contentious sociopolitical climates, community practitioners (youth workers, educators, organizers) may better understand how to tap into these relationships to promote youth civic development during tumultuous times. furthermore, research examining the civic experiences of college students during a divisive election is especially relevant given the field’s recent interest in centering community psychology teaching and research within undergraduate institutions (e.g., lichty et al., 2019). natural mentors traditional perspectives on naturally occurring mentoring relationships (nmrs) focus on mentors from outside of a youth’s close inner circle (weak-tie connection; e.g., teachers, spiritual leaders), but recent http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 perspectives suggest that youth engage in and benefit from nmrs with strong-tie connections, as well (e.g., family members, older peers; granovetter, 1973; hagler & rhodes, 2018). community psychologists posit that positive relationships between youth and adults are critical components of empowerment across contexts (e.g., activism promotion, leadership development; christens, 2012). natural mentors promote growth in their mentees’ lives by providing social support that enhances development across domains (e.g., social, emotional, and identity development; dubois & karcher, 2005; rhodes et al., 2006). mentors often provide emotional support (e.g., empathy), informational support (e.g., advice to support healthy decision-making), or appraisal support (e.g., a context for mentee selfreflection; dubois & karcher, 2005). by supporting mentees across domains, mentors provide opportunities for learning and development (rhodes et al., 2006). these supportive relationships may be particularly beneficial for youth who experience adversity (dubois & karcher, 2005). mentees benefit in numerous ways from nmrs. mentored youth are more civically engaged during adulthood, suggesting that the positive impacts of nmrs are longstanding and cascade into broader social systems (hagler & rhodes, 2018). younger people with nmrs report higher life satisfaction and well-being than nonmentored peers (dubois & silverthorn, 2005). those who have the support and guidance of a mentor also tend to demonstrate more resilience and experience fewer long-term consequences of stress than non-mentored youth (hurd & zimmerman, 2010; hurd et al., 2016). in addition to offering social support that may often buffer the negative effects of stressful life events (wittrup & hurd, 2021), natural mentors often promote enhanced mental health by modeling coping, or by sharing novel resources for healthy coping (hurd et al., 2014; sánchez et al., 2017). rhodes and colleagues’ (2006) model of mentoring highlights several factors that influence relationship effectiveness. per this theory, people benefit most from mentoring when they feel close to and supported by their mentors. additionally, while variables such as contact frequency may not be as important as contact quality when it comes to maximizing benefits, mentees tend to benefit more from long-term mentoring relationships (e.g., more than one year long) than shortterm ones (e.g., several months long; rhodes et al., 2006). as young people in college experience major changes to their social networks, it becomes increasingly important for them to seek support from caring adults (berardi et al., 2020; raposa & hurd, 2021). college students experience increased independence, which results in higher risk that they make harmful decisions (pedrelli et al., 2011), and the demands of college frequently contribute to elevated symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression (ramón-arbués et al., 2020). nmrs can, however, mitigate these psychological risks by promoting emotion regulation and, in turn, reducing common internalizing symptoms (le et al., 2021). further, emerging research in this domain highlights the importance of social support, often provided by natural mentors, in promoting attainment of educational goals (e.g., matriculating on time; pursuing career goals) for historically underrepresented students (wittrup & hurd, 2021). researchers consistently find that youth from marginalized groups (e.g., those from low socio-economic positions; racial/ethnic minorities) have less access to nmrs than more privileged youth (erickson et al., 2009; raposa et al., 2018). this may be because more privileged youth often have increased access to diverse resources and connections (e.g., due to parental positioning; erickson et al., 2009; raposa et al., 2018). this differential access to mentors is problematic, as youth from marginalized backgrounds http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 often benefit more from nmrs than their more privileged peers because of the social capital mentors share (erickson et al., 2009). understanding inequities in access is critical for practitioners in order to coordinate strategic outreach efforts to young people who will benefit the most from these supportive relationships. few studies have examined access to nmrs for youth with different religious and political ideologies. one u.s. study exploring the intersection of mentoring and political/religious ideologies found that adults who identified as classic conservatives believed mentoring programs were less important than those who identified as progressives (hagler et al., 2020). results suggest that religious identity plays a role in adults' attitudes toward mentoring; adults who fell into the "religious outsider" group (i.e., who identified as conservatives but held more liberal policy positions and endorsed higher levels of religiosity) were more likely to support and even volunteer in formal mentoring programs (hagler et al., 2020). while this study only examines american political party affiliations, its findings have implications for how young people across the globe may experience differential access to nmrs based on mentors’ political beliefs. however, little to no research has examined mentoring access based on mentees’ religious and/or political ideologies. such inquiry is critical as unequal access to mentors can exacerbate the impacts of systemic oppression and disadvantage on young people (raposa et al., 2018). sociopolitical stress little is known about how nmrs function with regards to experiences of sociopolitical stress. sociopolitical stress stems from students’ exposure to and potential involvement in political events, like social movements and elections (ballard et al., 2020; ballard et al., 2022). this stress is distinct from, yet often intersects with, traditionally studied forms of stress (e.g., personal, interpersonal, and collective stress; ballard et al., 2020; ballard et al., 2022). examining how young people cope with sociopolitical stress will be critical to community psychologists’ understandings of how they engage with, and are impacted by, social and political systems and movements. provided that nmrs serve as resources to promote coping and stress reduction (hurd et al., 2014; hurd et al., 2016), we posit that these relationships may serve as protective factors for mentees’ experiences of sociopolitical stress, either directly through stress reduction and/or indirectly through the transmission of coping skills. because relationship quality and longevity often influence relationship effectiveness, it is possible that college students who felt connected to long-term mentors during this time coped better with sociopolitical stress than those who felt less connected. nevertheless, examining the utility of close, supportive relationships with adults as buffers against sociopolitical stress will help community practitioners better understand young people’s experiences within social movements and with regards to sociopolitical stress. current study while college students often experience heightened stress and internalizing problems (pedrelli et al., 2011; ramón-arbués et al., 2020), during the fall of 2020 they also faced widespread isolation and loss due to covid19, mass media coverage of violence and hate crimes against minoritized groups, and a highly divisive political climate. research suggests that social/political tension takes a toll on college students’ mental health (ballard et al., 2022; hagan et al., 2020). our study explores three key research questions. first, how did access to mentors differ for students of various demographics (e.g., gender identity, sexual identity, racial/ethnic identity, religious identity, and political affiliation) during an isolating and polarizing http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 sociopolitical climate? second, are there differences in college students’ experiences of sociopolitical stress or election-related coping between those with and without nmrs? lastly, among students in nmrs, do relationship characteristics (e.g., longevity, closeness, etc.) predict sociopolitical stress or coping? with regards to our first research question, we used quantitative methods to examine differences in access to nmrs based on sociodemographic identities. in line with prior research highlighting disparities in access to mentors for disadvantaged youth, we hypothesized that students who occupy systematically oppressed identities (e.g., gender identity, racial/ethnic identity, low sep) would have less access to nmrs than those from more advantaged backgrounds (hypothesis 1). given the nascent research in this domain, we used an exploratory approach to examine access across religious and political identities. for our second research question, informed by literature on the impacts of nmrs on stress and coping (dubois & silverthorn, 2005; hurd & zimmerman, 2010; wittrup & hurd, 2021) we hypothesized that those with mentors would experience lower levels of sociopolitical stress than non-mentored peers (hypothesis 2a). additionally, we hypothesized that mentored youth would report more coping with sociopolitical stress than non-mentored peers (hypothesis 2b). regarding our third research question, in line with rhodes’ (2006) model of mentoring, we hypothesized that relationship characteristics (e.g., longevity, closeness, etc.) would significantly predict college students’ experiences of sociopolitical stress and coping, such that those with higher quality relationships would experience lower levels of stress and more coping than those with lower quality relationships (hypothesis 3). method data collection procedures students across 10 colleges and universities were recruited to participate in an online study through virtual flyers and classroom announcements. we recruited students from public and private institutions on the west coast (california, washington), the midwest (michigan, montana), the northeast (new york), and the southeast (west virginia, north carolina, and south carolina). participants received course credit through sona, an online system used to manage participant pools, for completing one 45minute online survey. the survey was administered during the leadup to the 2020 presidential election (october 5th 18th, 2020). this study was approved by the university of south carolina institutional review board (#1014189). participants six hundred ninety-five college students completed our survey. due to our interest in studying the experiences of typical collegeage students, we restricted our analytic sample to those between the ages of 18 and 29 years old. our analytic sample included a total of 588 students (m age= 19.56 years, sd= 1.83 years). a plurality (72.11%) of our sample identified as women, 27.21% identified as men, 0.68% identified as transgender or gender diverse (tgd). our sample was 80.95% heterosexual and 19.05% identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer (lgbq+). students identified as white (67.63%), hispanic/latinx (10.56%), black/african american (4.26%), asian (11.07%), and other identities (6.48%); one participant did not report their race/ethnicity. participants’ household incomes ranged from less than $40,000 (12.93%), $40-000-$100,000 (27.21%), and greater than $100,000 (35.88%); 141 participants (23.98%) did not report their household income. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 measures participants self-reported their gender identity, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, and sep. due to small sample sizes, we collapsed gender identity into three groups: men, women, and tgd, which includes all other gender identities. we also collapsed sexual orientation into two groups: heterosexual and sexual minority, which includes all other sexual identities, because of small sample sizes for some identities.5 participants also self-reported their religious affiliation by selecting from a list of 12 religions, or selecting “nothing in particular”. for analyses, responses were collapsed into three groups: christian, other religion, and not religious. political party affiliation was indicated by selecting one option from the following: (1) republican, (2) democrat, (3) green party, (4) libertarian, (5) independent, and (6) unaffiliated. participants also selected which candidate they intended to vote for in the 2020 election from a list of the five major party candidates, wrote in another candidate, or indicated that they were “not sure” who they planned to vote for. regarding access to a natural mentor, participants first responded to the question “other than your parent(s) or whoever is raising you, do you have a role model or mentor who you go to for support or guidance?” by selecting “yes” or “no.” those who indicated that they had a natural mentor answered five follow-up questions regarding the characteristics of their mentoring relationship. to measure mentor’s role, participants responded to the question “what role does this mentor play in your life?” by selecting their mentor’s role from a list (“teacher/professor”, “religious/spiritual leader”, or “athletic coach”), or by typing their answer into a text box. we measured the closeness of the mentoring relationship by asking “how close do you feel to your mentor these days?” using a 5-point scale, with responses anchored at “not close at all” and “very close”. to measure the amount of contact students had with their mentors, participants responded to the question “how often do you see your mentor (either virtually or face-to-face)?” using an 8-point likert scale, with scores ranging from “not at all” to “almost every day”. as a measure of mentoring relationship quality, participants responded to the question “how much do you feel that your mentor cares about you?” using a 5-point likert scale, with responses ranging from “not at all” to “very much”. lastly, to measure the longevity of the mentoring relationship, participants responded to the open-ended question “for how many years has this mentor been important in your life?”. these measures were adapted from the national longitudinal study of adolescent to adult health (harris et al., 2019) measures of social support and mentoring. see table 1 for descriptive statistics for mentoring variables. 5 some demographic groups were collapsed due to small sample sizes and limited statistical power. we recognize the limitations of this approach in examining intersectionality, as well as the experiences of those occupying minoritized identities. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 table 1 descriptive information for mentoring variables n % m(sd) range mentoring relationship yes 338 57.48% no 250 42.52% mentor’s role teacher/professor 86 25.44% religious/spiritual leader 50 14.79% athletic coach 38 11.24% otherfamily friend 11 3.25% otherfamily member 85 25.15% otherromantic partner 7 2.07% otherfriends/peers 32 9.47% otheremployer 6 1.78% otherhealthcare professional 10 2.96% otherunspecified 9 2.66% missing 4 1.18% relationship closeness 3.70 (1.02) 1-5 not close at all 5 1.48% only a little close 36 10.65% somewhat close 103 30.47% quite close 105 31.07% very close 89 26.33% frequency of contact 5.68 (1.64) 1-8 not at all 8 2.37% less than once a year 8 2.37% about once a year 13 3.85% every few months 46 13.61% about once a month 55 16.27% about once a week 109 32.25% http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 two to five times a week 48 14.20% almost every day 51 15.09% mentor cares about mentee 4.51 (0.72) 1-5 not at all 2 0.59% very little 1 0.30% somewhat 29 8.58% quite a bit 95 28.11% very much 211 62.43% relationship length (years) 8.88 (7.4) 0.16 29 to measure sociopolitical stress, participants responded to eight questions related to experiences of stress due to the 2020 election (“in the last week, how often have you felt nervous and ‘stressed’ about the 2020 election?”; “in the last week, how often have you found that you could not cope with things related to the 2020 election?”). these questions were adapted from the perceived stress scale (pss; cohen & williamson, 1988). participants responded on a 5-point likert scale, with response options ranging from “never” to “very often” (m= 2.66, sd= 0.72). higher scores reflected higher levels of sociopolitical stress. this scale demonstrated strong internal reliability (α= 0.81). to measure coping, participants were presented with a list of 21 coping strategies and were asked, “please respond to the following items as honestly as possible to reflect how much you use each coping strategy to cope with stress related to the current election”. this measure was partially adapted from wei and colleagues’ (2010) coping with discrimination scale (7 items); the remaining 14 items were created for this study. participants responded on a 5-point scale, with response options ranging from “never” to “very often”. a preliminary examination of responses to this scale indicated that there was little variability in responses to five items which were therefore dropped from subsequent analyses. next, an exploratory factor analysis (efa) was conducted to extract subscales from the remaining 16 items. results from the efa suggested that five unique factors explained a significant proportion of variance in responses (as determined by eigenvalues greater than 1). however, two of the 16 items (both related to drug/alcohol coping) did not load clearly onto one factor and were therefore dropped, resulting in a revised scale comprising 14 items, measuring five different domains of coping. specifically, education/advocacy coping was measured through four items (e.g., “i try to educate people so that they are aware of the importance of the election”; m= 2.60, sd= 1.18; α= 0.92). resistance/action coping was measured through three items (e.g., “i channel my stress into more election action”; m= 2.26, sd= 0.98; α= 0.77). coping through the use of drugs and alcohol was measured with one item (“i use drugs or alcohol to take my mind off the election”; m= 3.57, sd= 1.12). coping through social support (e.g., “i ask others for help or support”; m= 2.55, sd= 1.05, α= 0.79) and self-care (e.g., “i practice ‘self-care’ activities like taking a bath, taking a walk, listening to music”; m= 2.91, sd= 1.15, α= 0.77) were measured with three items each. see ballard et al. (2022) for more details on this measure. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 data analysis an inductive approach was used to analyze mentor roles within text box responses to the mentor role question (creswell & poth, 2016). for more information on the coding process and themes, see appendix a. quantitative analyses were conducted using the stats package in r version 3.6 (r core team, 2019). we conducted chi-square tests of independence to examine differences in access to natural mentors across demographic groups. we then conducted independent samples t-tests to test differences between the average levels of sociopolitical stress and coping for those with and without natural mentors. among the subsample who reported having a mentor, we conducted multivariable regressions to explore how mentoring relationship characteristics predicted sociopolitical stress and coping, while accounting for relevant sociodemographic variables. results we first examined the correlations between sociopolitical stress and the five election coping subscales. sociopolitical stress was moderately correlated with all of the election coping subscales scores (rs ranged from .31 to .53, all ps < .01; see appendix b). the correlations between the election coping subscales were all significant and moderate to large in magnitude (rs ranged from .33 to .73, all ps < .01). next, we examined whether there were differences in access to natural mentors across sociodemographic groups (see table 2). we did not detect any differences in access to mentors by race/ethnicity (not supporting hypothesis 1), but did find that women were more likely than men to report having a mentor (p = .029). regarding differences in access to mentors by religious affiliation, post hoc comparisons with bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons indicated no differences in access to mentors between christian participants and participants who identified with another religion (p = .433), but both christians (p < .001) and those who identified as another religion (p = .006) were more likely to have a mentor than nonreligious participants. there was a significant association between political party affiliation and access to mentors such that republican participants were more likely to have access to mentors than democrats (p = .027) and participants who were unaffiliated with a political party (p = .019). no other differences were identified. table 2 sociodemographic differences in access to mentors n n with mentor n without mentor chi square tests of independence race/ethnicity 𝜒2(1) = 0.82, p = .365 white 397 233 164 non-white 125 71 54 gender identity1 𝜒2(1) = 4.75, p = .029 man 160 81 79 woman 424 257 167 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 socio-economic position 𝜒2(2) = 5.23, p = .073 less than $40,000 76 36 40 $40,001-100,000 160 100 60 more than $100,000 211 115 96 school type 𝜒2(1) = 0.29, p = .590 public 481 274 207 private 107 64 43 religion 𝜒2(2) = 14.21, p < .001 christian 195 128 67 other religion 175 108 67 not religious 178 84 94 sexual orientation 𝜒2(1) = 0.87, p = .352 heterosexual 476 278 198 sexual minority 112 60 52 political party affiliation2 𝜒2(3) = 7.91, p = .048 republican 132 88 44 democrat 258 142 116 independent 42 28 14 unaffiliated 144 76 68 candidate voting for3 𝜒2(2) = 5.54, p = .062 republican party: donald trump 123 77 46 democratic party: joseph biden 335 184 151 not sure 45 32 13 note. 1due to small sample sizes, participants identifying as tgd (n = 4) were excluded from analyses examining differences by gender identity. 2participants affiliated with green party (n = 5) or libertarian party (n = 7) were excluded from analyses examining differences by political party affiliation. 3participants planning to vote for the candidate from the libertarian party (jo jorgensen; n = 14), the green party (howie hawkins; n = 4) and the independent party (brock pierce; n = 2) were excluded from analyses examining differences in access to mentors by the candidate they planned to vote for. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 prior to conducting t-tests, we examined whether the assumption of homogeneity of variances was met using levene’s test. this assumption was met in all cases except for the drug/alcohol coping item; in this case, we report welch’s t-test for unequal variances. ttest results indicated that participants with mentors reported significantly higher scores on all five coping subscales than those without mentors (supporting hypothesis 2b), but there was no significant difference in sociopolitical stress between those with and those without mentors (not supporting hypothesis 2a; see table 3). table 3 independent samples t-test results comparing self-reported sociopolitical stress and coping between participants with and without mentors mentor n = 338 no mentor n = 250 t-test m sd m sd sociopolitical stress 2.67 0.69 2.65 0.75 t(586) = 0.34, p = .732 election coping education/advocacy 2.69 1.14 2.47 1.22 t(586) = 2.20, p = .028 election coping resistance/action 2.33 0.99 2.15 0.95 t(586) = 2.23, p = .026 election coping drug/alcohol 3.66 1.04 3.44 1.22 t(586) = 2.23, p = .026 election coping social support 2.67 1.05 2.38 1.03 t(585) = 3.29, p = .001 election coping self-care 3.05 1.14 2.72 1.16 t(586) = 3.46, p < .001 finally, we used multivariable regression to examine if, among the subsample of participants who reported having a mentor (n = 338), characteristics of the mentoring relationship predicted sociopolitical stress and election coping subscale scores. we were specifically interested in perceived closeness in the mentoring relationship, how much the participant felt that their mentor cared about them, and the duration of the mentoring relationship, as these factors may modulate the effects of mentoring relationships (rhodes et al., 2006). in these regression models, we covaried for participants’ religious affiliations, gender identity, and political party affiliation using dummy coding. these variables were selected as covariates because of the significant differences in mentor access for these groups of people noted in our chi-square tests for independence. although the overall models were significant, results indicated that mentoring relationship characteristics of closeness, care, and duration did not significantly predict how participants coped with election-related stress as measured by education/advocacy coping (f(14, 199) = 4.17, p < .001, r2 = .22), resistance/action coping (f(10, 228) = 4.25, p < .001, r2 = .16), social support coping (f(10, 228) = 3.71, p < http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 .001, r2 = .14), or self-care coping (f(10, 228) = 2.82, p = .003, r2 = .11). these results did not support hypothesis 3. participants’ perceptions of how much their mentor cares for them, however, did predict lower sociopolitical stress (β = -.25, p < .001; f(10, 228) = 6.04, p < .001, r2 = .21), and their perceptions of relationship closeness were associated with greater use of drug/alcohol coping (β = .15, p = 0.48; f(10, 228) = 2.48, p = .008, r2 = .10), partially supporting hypothesis 3. discussion notably, we found no significant differences in access to mentors based on sep or racial/ethnic identity. these findings were contrary to prior research evidence and our first hypothesis that those from disadvantaged groups would report significantly lower access to nmrs than more advantaged peers. prior research in this domain primarily focuses on adolescents, so it is possible that we found no significant differences because college campuses are microsystems that promote increased access to adult mentors (erickson et al., 2009; raposa et al., 2018). alternatively, because there are iniquities in mentoring within college and educational spaces, young people from marginalized backgrounds may have engaged in nmrs outside of the college context (mccoy et al., 2015). it is also possible that young people’s success finding mentors is one factor that relates to their educational successes as college students, or vice versa. this serves as one example of how examining social relationships that span across systems can help foster a better understanding of how broader communities, such as four-year college campuses, function (neal & christens, 2014). however, examining a larger, more inclusive sample will be necessary for more in-depth analyses of college students’ access to mentors. we found that participants who identified as women were more likely to have mentors than those who identified as men. this finding is consistent with prior research examining access based on gender (e.g., liao & sánchez, 2016). perhaps this difference in access is related to gender socialization; while girls are socialized to emphasize interpersonal connections, boys are more often socialized to focus on autonomy (liang et al., 2014). gender stereotypes may also impact help-seeking behaviors (e.g., turning to a mentor to cope; liao & sánchez, 2016). we also found that religiously active participants were more likely to have mentors than those who identified as not religious. this higher level of access might reflect that religious communities serve as networks within which students might find mentors. indeed, several of our participants reported that they viewed a member of their religious community as a mentor. regarding political affiliation, participants affiliated with the republican party were more likely to have mentors than those who affiliated with the democratic party or those who were unaffiliated. interestingly, while previous research suggests that those identifying as older or conservative demonstrate lower levels of support for formal mentoring programs (hagler et al., 2020), our results suggest that younger conservative individuals may nonetheless engage in more informal methods of mentoring. limitations notwithstanding, these results provide novel insight into the differential levels of access that young people have to mentors based on various facets of their identities. this new insight may guide outreach and programming intended to mitigate sociopolitical stress and to promote coping for those who might lack access to social support from mentors. contrary to our second hypothesis (hypothesis 2a), we found that college students with mentors did not have lower levels of sociopolitical stress than those without mentors. this finding suggests that having a nmr during the leadup to the 2020 presidential election did not result in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 significant levels of stress reduction. although we hypothesized that those who benefitted from the social support of a mentor may have experienced reductions in stress compared to those lacking this support, it is possible that the highly stressful and polarizing sociopolitical climate impacted all students, regardless of their mentor status. alternatively, different social support mechanisms outside of nmrs may have contributed to coping with sociopolitical stress. in other words, perhaps college students did not turn to their mentors for support with election-related stress, or mentors might not have felt comfortable initiating conversations about sociopolitical stress with their mentees within the polarizing environment out of fear of familial or community backlash. indeed, emerging research suggests that teachers -who young people commonly consider natural mentors - often avoid engaging in conversations with students about sociopolitical events out of fear of pushback or discomfort (dunn et al., 2019). conversely, these results might also suggest that those who cope better with stress are more likely to seek out social support from mentors during stressful times. these attempts to cope may or may not have been healthy (e.g., drug/alcohol coping), and may have had varying levels of efficacy in reducing sociopolitical stress levels. we found that mentored participants demonstrated significantly higher levels of education/advocacy coping, resistance/action coping, drug/alcohol coping, social support coping, and self-care coping than those without mentors. while we are not able to state with certainty that the presence of a mentor directly caused increases in coping, these findings support our second hypothesis (hypothesis 2b) suggesting that mentors may serve as resources to promote coping during the divisive social and political climate. alternatively, young people who were able to access mentors may possess more coping resources than non mentored peers. however, these observed differences in coping are inconsistent with the overall levels of sociopolitical stress reported by both groups. college students with mentors tried to cope with stress related to the sociopolitical climate in all ways more than those who did not have a mentor, even in ways that might traditionally be described as unhealthy coping (e.g., by using drugs and/or alcohol). it is possible that young people would benefit from leaning into new coping strategies that are more healthy or effective to overcome the stress of divisive sociopolitical climates. further, given that perceived closeness with mentors was positively associated with using drugs/alcohol to cope, these findings may indicate that mentors model both healthy and unhealthy coping strategies to their mentees. with regards to our third research question, we found that closeness, frequency of contact, and relationship longevity did not predict students’ coping (not supporting hypothesis 3). yet, participants who felt that their mentors cared for them experienced lower levels of sociopolitical stress. these findings only partially supported our hypothesis that relationship quality and longevity influences the effectiveness of mentoring relationships. although there was no difference in the sociopolitical stress of mentored and nonmentored students, it is possible that withingroup differences were present. in other words, perhaps simply having a mentor is not enough for stress reduction in the absence of perceived strong support or care. in contrast, students who reported having mentors may have stronger coping skills than non mentored students, regardless of relationship quality. these results may be congruent with more recent scholarship that questions the role of relationship closeness and longevity in the effectiveness of mentoring relationships (e.g., lyons et al., 2019; lyons & mcquillin, 2021). because increased independence is a hallmark of emerging adulthood, it is possible that frequency of contact and relationship longevity were less important to our collegehttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 aged sample, and therefore did not impact stress and coping in the same way as perceived relational closeness (arnett, 2007). with this in mind, perhaps it is more important for future researchers to study the behaviors that occur within the relationships that might contribute to feelings of care and support -or those that promote engagement with diverse worldviews or civic activities - rather than their characteristics. cumulatively, results suggest that, while nmrs may promote coping for their mentees, as prior research suggests (e.g., hurd et al., 2014; sánchez et al., 2017), this does not necessarily imply that all coping behaviors are healthy or effective (e.g., drug/alcohol coping). limitations this study had several limitations. first, data were cross-sectional and the study was not a true experiment which limited our ability to draw causal inferences between nmrs, sociopolitical stress, and coping. future research would benefit from employing experimental methods or exploring longitudinal pathways between these variables to better understand the causal links between these variables. second, due to restricted sample sizes, we lacked statistical power to examine the nuances of college students’ access to mentors; our analyses were sometimes limited to binary groups (e.g., “white vs. non-white”), and we did not investigate intersectionality. future research would benefit from using larger, more diverse samples to explore the unique nuances in access to mentors based on intersecting identities. next, this study was conducted with students attending four-year colleges; although four-year college campuses are becoming increasingly diverse in terms of sep and race/ethnicity (monarrez, & washington, 2020), results from this study may not be generalizable to other young adults. additional research will be needed to better understand the experiences of young people in the workforce, those attending twoyear colleges, or those enrolled in vocational programs. our sample was also nonrepresentative, which may further implicate generalizability of our results. related to measurement, more clear measures of mentoring (e.g., asking students to think of an older adult who functions as a mentor in their life) may have yielded more accurate results regarding college students’ mentorship experiences. further, better measurement of relationship quality or of specific activities within nmrs may have aided in our understanding of how nmrs mitigate sociopolitical stress and promote coping. implications and future directions limitations notwithstanding, our study provides a snapshot of college students’ access to nmrs during a highly stressful and isolating sociopolitical climate. discrepancies in access to mentors highlight new avenues through which we might promote healthy coping by increasing access to mentors; while some religious groups or political parties might more often provide outreach and support to young people, other groups might benefit from increased programming and support during stressful times. additionally, we highlight a new way that young people may benefit from access to natural mentors: increased coping with sociopolitical stress. by promoting positive coping during times of social and political turbulence mentors can support their mentees as they engage with social and political systems. these findings offer several implications for community based practitioners. first, the social networks of young people who attend traditional four-year colleges may often differ from those of young people in the workforce or those who participate in nontraditional educational settings. for example, students who attend traditional four-year colleges may have access to novel social capital and more formal campus resources and supports, whereas young people in the workforce may rely on more informal social support (e.g., http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 from family members or other members of their close inner circles) during tumultuous sociopolitical times (barry et al., 2017; cox, 2021; mitchell & syed, 2015; raaper et al., 2022). community-based organizations or programs are ideal contexts for nontraditional students or young people in the workforce to develop nmrs, as these organizations often provide a context within which young people may spend several hours per week with supportive adults outside of their close inner circles (hamilton et al., 2006). given research findings suggesting that several processes facilitated by nmrs, such as positive identity development, may contribute to the effectiveness of youth development programs, simply spreading awareness of the benefits of nmrs to community practitioners may help organizations maximize the effectiveness of their programs by cultivating supportive relationships within them (hirsch, 2005). additionally, community-based organizations who wish to support young people during stressful sociopolitical times may offer informal social programming to encourage connections between youth in the community and adults who work for their organizations. community-based practitioners might also consider examining which groups of young people within their communities (e.g., youth of certain religious backgrounds, those occupying minoritized identities, etc.) may lack access to supportive adults and target outreach during stressful sociopolitical climates. community-based practitioners may also consider using principles from caregiverand youth-initiated mentoring to identify and recruit mentors ahead of stressful sociopolitical times. these frameworks propose that caregivers and youth may play important roles in facilitating nmrs (schwartz & rhodes, 2016; spencer et al., 2021; weiler et al., 2020). caregiver-initiated mentoring is a framework for mentoring recruitment within which caregivers work together with community-based practitioners to identify their child’s needs and facilitate a nmr between their child and a supportive adult, such as a youth development organization practitioner, a coach, or a religious leader (weiler et al., 2020). similarly, youth-initiated mentoring is an approach to recruitment wherein young people are encouraged to select a supportive adult within their existing social network to serve as their mentor (spencer et al., 2021). preliminary research findings suggest that promoting youth-initiated mentoring within one’s community, or even simply adding on youth-initiated mentoring to pre-existing programming, can be an effective way to promote mentor recruitment and retention (spencer et al., 2018; spencer et al., 2021). engaging in targeted outreach to young people and/or caregivers within the broader community to raise awareness of these methods of facilitating nmrs and/or encourage them to select one of their program staff as their natural mentor can be especially helpful in removing barriers to mentorship for young people who may struggle to identify a supportive adult within their close inner circle (spencer et al., 2021). lastly, given that this increased coping with sociopolitical stress did not necessarily facilitate stress reduction in our sample, community-based organizations may benefit from providing training and ongoing support to community members, teachers, and afterschool care staff to equip them to model and promote young people’s involvement with political and civic activities. this training might include education surrounding sociopolitical processes such as elections, as well as resources for getting involved within the community and/or coping healthily during stressful sociopolitical climates. community psychology researchers can support these efforts by creating and sharing resources that are both empirically supported and accessible, both in terms of content/presentation (e.g., presenting specific examples of how to support healthy youth civic development; no excessive jargon; http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 etc.) and distribution (e.g., not placed behind a paywall; easily available on the internet or social media). researchers may consider exploring recent resources and examples for educators (e.g., dunn, 2021) for examples of how to create useful and accessible resources for supporting young people’s civic involvement during stressful political climates. regardless of whether or not community-based practitioners eventually develop nmrs with young people in their organizations, caring adults who are equipped to help young people navigate turbulent sociopolitical climates can serve as valuable assets for young people’s civic development (schwartz & rhodes, 2016). promoting positive civic development, especially during times of divisive elections, can have benefits that cascade into a young person’s broader community system. references arnett, j. j. 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(2022). http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-010-9325-x https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-010-9325-x %20 %20 https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12504 https://doi.org/10.1177/0044118x16668058 https://doi.org/10.1177/0044118x16668058 https://doi.org/10.1177/0044118x16668058 https://doi.org/10.1177/0044118x16668058 https://doi.org/10.1080/10852352.2019.1625603 https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12283 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-021-09609-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-021-09609-1 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038676 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038676 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038676 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-014-9654-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-014-9654-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-014-9654-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-014-9654-2 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1521-0391.2010.00090.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1521-0391.2010.00090.x global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 student support as social network: exploring non-traditional student experiences of academic and wellbeing support during the covid19 pandemic. educational review, 74(3), 402-421. ramón-arbués, e., gea-caballero, v., granada lópez, j. m., juárez-vela, r., pellicergarcía, b., & antón-solanas, i. 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(2021). the role of trajectories of stress and social support in underrepresented students’ educational outcomes. applied developmental science, 0(0), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2 021.1906677 conflict of interest statement http://www.gjcpp.org/ %20 %20 https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17197001 https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17197001 https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12228 https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12228 https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12228 https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2018.1526635 https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2018.1526635 %20 %20 https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.20124 https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12070 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2018.06.038 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2018.06.038 %20 %20 https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.22514 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10615-019-00723-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10615-019-00723-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10615-019-00723-1 https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2021.1906677 https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2021.1906677 https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2021.1906677 https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2021.1906677 global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 we have no conflicts of interest to disclose. data availability statement email first author for more details about data. author note amanda l. davis, department of psychology, university of south carolina, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7226-0985; neshat yazdani, department of psychology, fordham university, https://orcid.org/00000002-0354-1481; mariah kornbluh, department of psychology, university of oregon, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-69586247; samuel d. mcquillin, department of psychology, university of south carolina, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6880-5871 http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7226-0985 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0354-1481 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0354-1481 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6958-6247 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6958-6247 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6958-6247 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6880-5871 global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 appendix a open text coding procedures and themes an inductive approach was used to analyze mentor roles within the “other” category of the mentor role survey question (creswell & poth, 2016). the first author and two research assistants reviewed all open-ended responses, noting key themes. we met as a group to review identified themes, to select and define codes that captured all themes, and to create a codebook based on the consolidated codes. we then reviewed each response and recorded a “1” or “0” in the data spreadsheet to indicate whether a response fit that code; codes were mutually exclusive. responses were coded twice independently by two research assistants (inter-rater reliability was 80%). the first author and the research assistants then met to review coding inconsistencies; inconsistencies were resolved using a consensus approach. six themes emerged from the responses (see table a1). table a1 mentor role open responses theme definition example quote family friend (11 responses): participants articulated that they look to adults connected to, yet outside of, their family systems for support and guidance. “family friend” “father of a close friend” family member (85 responses): participants expressed that they turned to nonparental adults within their family systems as mentors. “brother” “aunt” romantic partner (7 responses): participants expressed that they turned to their romantic partner for support or guidance. “boyfriend” “my partner” friends/peers (32 responses): participants noted that peers served as sources of support or guidance. “my coworkers” “older friend” employer (6 responses): participants identified that their supervisors-through work or other organizations-served as sources of support or guidance. “former boss” “employer” healthcare professional (10 responses): participants identified that they receive support or guidance from various health professionals. “counselor” “physician” other (9 responses): participants expressed that they receive mentorship from nonparental adults not specified by other categories. “public figures” “life coach” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 23 appendix b table b1 correlations between sociopolitical stress and election coping variables 1 2 3 4 5 1. sociopolitical stress 2. election coping education/advocacy .43 3. election coping resistance/action .53 .73 4. election coping drug/alcohol .31 .67 .56 5. election coping social support .50 .52 .61 .42 6. election coping self-care .43 .33 .44 .33 .59 note. all ps < .01. http://www.gjcpp.org/ a pragmatic delphi exploring barriers and facilitators to emergency responder/healthcare workers' participation in the blue light surf club therapy intervention jamie marshall1, philip b. ward2, russell martindale1 , and brendon ferrier 1 keywords: mental health, emergency services, qualitative research, first responders, intervention design, delphi author biographies: jamie marshall, research fellow at edinburgh napier university. he has published and researched extensively around community approaches to supporting mental health, with a specific interest in surf therapy and blue health. his background is that of a practitioner having founded and managed the wave project surf therapy programme in scotland. phil ward, clinical neuroscientist and unsw sydney professor of psychiatry who has always loved body surfing. phil is a passionate advocate for building the evidence base for surf therapy and is inspired by the positive vibe that surrounds surf therapy and the people who support it. he is a founding partner of the international surf therapy organisation, and a board director of the waves of wellness foundation. russell martindale, professor in sport psychology and talent development at edinburgh napier university in scotland. he has published and worked extensively in the area of talent development. russell is particularly interested in understanding how people can fulfil their potential and successfully progress through challenges in life. brendon ferrier, lecturer in the school of applied sciences at edinburgh napier university, and academic lead for edinburgh napier universities surf lab in partnership with lost shore surf resort. brendon currently lectures sport and exercise science students in the fields of functional anatomy, assessment and conditioning for sports performance, biomechanics, and the biological and cognitive effects of maturation in the development of children. recommended citation: marshall, j., ward, p. b., martindale, r., & ferrier, b. (2024). a pragmatic delphi exploring barriers and facilitators to emergency responder/healthcare workers' participation in the blue light surf club therapy intervention. global journal of community psychology practice, 15(1), 1 19. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). 1 the surf lab, school of applied sciences, edinburgh napier university, edinburgh, scotland 2 school of psychiatry, unsw sydney, australia https://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 corresponding author: jamie marshall, school of applied sciences, 9 sighthill ct, edinburgh eh11 4bn, uk j.marshall4@napier.ac.uk. http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:j.marshall4@napier.ac.uk global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 a pragmatic delphi exploring barriers and facilitators to emergency responder/healthcare workers' participation in the blue light surf club therapy intervention abstract emergency responders/healthcare workers face significant mental health burdens associated with their integral roles within society. alongside the need for more mental health support, a major contributing factor to this burden are barriers to accessing suitable support. the aim of this study was to build consensus on the barriers/facilitators to a proposed surf therapy intervention supporting this population, the blue light surf club (blsc). where possible the study also explored pragmatic solutions from the perspectives of potential participants. given the primary aim of building consensus, a delphi method was utilised alongside 18 emergency responders/healthcare workers from a range of different roles in central scotland (7 males and 11 females; mean age = 38.2 years; standard deviation = 11 years; range 19-54). participants were surveyed about their perceptions of barriers/facilitators to accessing the proposed blsc surf therapy programme. four rounds of questions were required before a priori defined consensus was reached across all generated items. the outcome of the research was a set of recommendations for the implementation of the blsc grouped around three themes: intervention access, intervention delivery and intervention structure. these recommendations offer insight and practical suggestions for overcoming established barriers to accessing mental health support for this population. the findings of this study have direct implications for the design stage of the blsc surf therapy intervention while also supporting a wide range of similar interventions aimed at the emergency responder/healthcare population. these pragmatic recommendations are of value both in terms of their contribution to academic discussion around supporting this population, and the direct support they offer to comparable community-based organisations. introduction emergency service/healthcare personnel in the united kingdom experience considerably more mental health problems then the general workforce and are twice as likely to identify challenges at work as the main cause for these problems (mind, 2015). for the purposes of this study, we have defined emergency service/healthcare workers as individuals who directly respond to potentially life threating emergencies within both community and healthcare settings. examples of such workers in a uk context would include police, fire service, ambulance staff, emergency call handlers, royal national lifeboat association (rnli) crew and lifeguards, uk coastguard teams, accident and emergency staff, intensive care staff and neonatal unit staff, though this list is not exhaustive. all such roles have unique challenges in their delivery and are associated with poor mental health such as police officers in the uk who experience prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) at a rate four times higher than that of the general population (bell and eki, 2015) while half of police have taken mental health related leave in a previous five-year period (edwards and kotera, 2020). this poor mental health correlates with negative coping strategies; one in four police officers screened for hazardous drinking in a recent global review (syed et al., 2020). similarly, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 ambulance staff experience ptsd at a much higher prevalence than the general population (petrie et al., 2018) with one third of ambulance workers reporting some form of psychiatric morbidity (alexander and klein, 2001). prevalence is not the only challenge for emergency service mental health, severity of symptoms can also be intensified as demonstrated by research into fire service personnel (wagner et al., 2010). this prevalence of mental health challenges also translates to emergency healthcare workers with nurses from multiple specialisations reporting high levels of stress impacting on their well-being (kirkcaldy and martin, 2000). this stress has been associated with tragic consequences; in the uk nurse suicide rates are 23% higher than the general population (windsor-shellard, 2017). the prevalence of poor mental health amongst emergency services and emergency healthcare workers has been further exacerbated by their frontline roles in responding to the covid-19 pandemic. amongst emergency service workers, 69% have reported their mental health deteriorating since the start of the pandemic (mind, 2021). the number of uk healthcare workers reporting very high symptoms of anxiety or depression has more than quadrupled since pre-covid-19 levels (gilleen et al. 2021). the prevalence and severity of negative mental health amongst emergency service and emergency healthcare workers, alongside its exacerbation by the covid-19 pandemic highlight the need for evidence-based interventions to support this population. one emergent form of intervention that is increasingly being used to support mental is surf therapy, defined as “the use of surfing as a vehicle for delivering intentional, inclusive, population-specific, and evidenced-based therapeutic structures to promote psychological, physical, and psychosocial well-being.” (international surf therapy organization, 2023). surf therapy has been utilised to support a range of populations, especially around mental health with positive impact identified within scoping review (benninger et al., 2020). while examples of surf therapy for emergency service/healthcare populations do exist, there is currently no peer reviewed research exploring the effectiveness of surf therapy specifically for this population. promising results can be seen within programme evaluations such as by tourky et al. (2021), which identified significant associated positive changes to well-being alongside positive impacts on confidence, self-efficacy, and development/retention of coping skills. research into surf therapy working alongside military veterans has shown surf therapy is associated with significantly reduced ptsd, depression, and anxiety symptoms (glassman et al., 2021; otis et al., 2020; walter et al., 2019). while military veterans and emergency service/healthcare workers remain separate populations, it is plausible surf therapy would have a similar effect given comparable prevalence of similar diagnoses such as ptsd and/or anxiety. theoretical mediators such as provision of safe spaces, respite from negative symptoms, and positive social support have been identified within research on surf therapy for a mixed sample of emergency service workers and military veterans (caddick, smith et al., 2015, marshall et al., 2020). research has also identified mechanisms within surf therapy in other populations that may have operational relevance for the emergency service/healthcare context such as surfing as a dynamic learning environment for coping skills and emotional regulation, avoiding negative clinical stigma around mental health, physical rehabilitation, and sensory grounding (denneman et al., 2024, fleischmann et al., 2011, marshall et al., 2023 moreton et al., 2021). such mediators would appear to directly target priority areas that have been shown to be associated with poor mental health amongst emergency service/healthcare workers, including poor social support, maladaptive coping, lack of opportunities for processing, and burnout (mildenhall, 2019; sharp et al., 2020; syed et al., 2020) further supporting the potential of surf therapy for this population. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 while surf therapy could offer a plausible form of intervention to support the mental health of emergency service/healthcare, as noted by the isto definition surf therapy needs to be both intentional and population specific. to achieve this any prospective intervention must be aware of the significant practical barriers this population faces in accessing mental health support; the majority of uk emergency service personnel are not aware of how to access such support, and those who are aware believe the quality of support to be poor (mind, 2016). stigma is one of the primary barriers to accessing mental health support for emergency service/healthcare workers (haugen et al., 2017). this stigma was largely tied to worries around confidentiality loss in mental health disclosure and the potential this has for negative career impact. notably stigma around mental health in the police has been highlighted as prevalent both as personal ‘self-stigma’ and as team or institutional stigma (edwards and kotera, 2020). current research highlights other barriers to accessing mental health support for this population including, a culture of selfreliance, lack of time to participate, lack of knowledge of referral pathways and transportation challenges (edwards and kotera, 2020; haugen et al., 2017; hernandez et al., 2014; johnson et al., 2019). the importance of understanding the context and needs of participants is foundational for impactful intervention design, including for surf therapy. study aim the aim of this study was to consult with frontline emergency service/healthcare workers as representatives of potential future participants of a proposed community-based surf therapy intervention, the blue light surf club (https://bluelightsurfclub.co.uk/). the consultation explored explore consensus on the barriers/facilitators to taking part and where possible, the study also sought to build consensus on pragmatic solutions to overcoming these barriers. the results of the study provided recommendations for the blsc intervention’s pilot at the artificial surf lake, lost shore surf resort in 2024 (https://www.lostshore.com/). method given building consensus between stakeholders was the primary aim of the study, a classical delphi framework was deemed most appropriate to gain insight. the delphi technique was developed at the outset of the cold war to predict the impact of technology on warfare (custer, scarcella, and stewart, 1999). the development of the delphi technique was guided by the premise that combined individual anonymous predictions were stronger than unstructured group predictions (kaplan, skogstad, and girshick, 1950). the process is used to build consensus around a topic through the systematic surveying of a panel of experts. a delphi panel consists of a group of subject experts who can offer insight, and in this study work towards consensus of recommendations for intervention design. the number of participants required for a delphi panel is not set, though a minimum between 10-18 has been previously suggested (paliwoda, 1983). the panel receive, and respond to multiple rounds of questionnaires, the responses of which are analysed, consolidated, and presented back to the panel for further feedback. this is often done through presenting back statements for participants to rate their agreement on. this process continues until a, usually predefined, consensus is reached. the first stage of any delphi process is recruitment of an expert panel on the topic in question. panel selection to best address the aims of this study initial purposive sampling was carried out with direct contact being made with gatekeepers (senior or management staff) to access potential participants (emergency service/healthcare workers) alongside open http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://bluelightsurfclub.co.uk/ https://www.lostshore.com/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 advertising via social media and in strategic locations. snowball sampling was also encouraged and accounted for around half of study participants. current frontline emergency service/healthcare staff were deemed the experts required for this study as they could provide the most contextual insight as to the barriers/facilitators around taking part in the blsc or similar interventions. alongside current emergency service/healthcare status, the other primary exclusion criteria were ensuring participants were not currently receiving work related mental health support. this was done to minimise the risk of study involvement proving detrimental to participants mental health and/or distracting from ongoing support plans. the study recruited across multiple emergency service/healthcare domains to ensure sufficient variety of roles required to explore differing opinions/perspectives and facilitate a robust consensus building process. a breakdown of the job roles sampled can be viewed in table i. a total of 18 participants registered to take part in the study, the average age was 38.2 (sd = 11) while 39% of the sample was male and 61% were female. table 1 breakdown of emergency service/healthcare roles sampled emergency service healthcare role fire service 4 police officers 2 paramedics 1 ambulance technician 2 advanced critical care practitioner 1 neonatal staff nurse 1 mental health staff nurse 1 adult nurse 1 rnli crew 2 hm coastguard 1 rnli lifeguards 2 procedures during recruitment and prior to every round, participants were given an information sheet outlining the proposed blsc intervention. the sheet outlined in brief, key intervention components, its location and a provisional timeline while also linking to a recent news report featuring a comparable intervention. this information sheet aimed to offer context for the questionnaires throughout the remainder of the process. prior to any rounds of questionnaires, it was important to define delphi consensus a priori (diamond et al., 2014). for this study, a suitable consensus was defined as 80% of participants scoring 4 or 5 (agree/strongly agree) on a 5-point likert scale (diamond et al., 2014). this likert scale offered multiple levels to differentiate strength of view for agreement and disagreement while also offering a neutral opinion. the length of time each round was open for was set a priori at two weeks, though one period was extended to account for public holiday disruption. a further priority throughout the whole process was the anonymisation of participants at all stages. this was deemed especially important not only as part of established delphi processes, but also so participants felt they could respond freely. as already highlighted, fear of breach of confidentiality contributes to stigma around mental health for emergency service/healthcare workers (haugen et al. 2017). an online questionnaire process (the qualtrics platform) was deemed most appropriate to maintain anonymity, to minimise disruption for participants and to accommodate covid-19 protocols around not meeting in person. in total four rounds of questionnaires were carried out before consensus was reached on all items. response rates were high throughout the study (round 1:83%, round 2: 94%, round 3: 89%, round 4: 94%). ethical approval was granted by the edinburgh napier school of applied sciences ethics committee on 15/02/2021 (reference code: 2706662). this process involved indepth discussion of research protocols with a committee independent of the study and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 piloting of questions and processes. the chief ethical priority, as already highlighted, was always maintaining participant anonymity. round 1 question development. an initial round of open-ended questions was developed in line with classical delphi procedures. these initial questions were based upon a review of limited literature exploring theoretical mediators for surf therapy with this population (caddick, smith et al., 2015, marshall et al., 2020), alongside wider literature exploring barriers to accessing mental health for emergency service/healthcare workers (edwards and kotera, 2020; haugen et al., 2017; hernandez et al., 2014; johnson et al., 2019). during the recruitment phase the developed questions were informally piloted with 2 emergency service workers external to the study, to check for meaning, clarity, and understanding. feedback at this stage ensured the questions were appropriately worded prior to round 1 commencement. the initial round 1 open ended questions are available within appendix a. initial analysis and statement development responses to open ended questions in round 1 were initially explored through process coding, before codes were mapped, categorised, and tabulated to explore key themes from within the data (saldaña, 2021). these themes provided the basis for initial statements presented back to participants from round 2 to explore consensus. in subsequent rounds (2, 3, 4), participants received feedback around responses from the previous round and were given the opportunity to offer further comment or make modifications to statements. qualitative feedback was coded and analysed within the same framework as round 1 (process coding, mapping, categorisation, and tabulation). this process led to new or modified statements in the subsequent rounds. at the culmination of round 4, consensus had been reached around all items resulting in a list of recommendations for future intervention design and implementation. the full research process has been surmised and visualised within figure 1. figure 1. delphi research process http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 results round 1 the initial round of open-ended questions generated textual data from 15 participants who responded within the predefined response period. the data were coded and analysed to generate statements to explore consensus in later rounds. there was variation in themes that emerged with some applying more generally to intervention implementation (e.g. “building an open nonjudgemental culture around the intervention.”) while others tended towards very specific guidance for intervention delivery (e.g. “maintaining confidentiality at all times.”). this variation and the depth of responses provided good insight to potential adaptations required for blsc surf therapy as well as potential barriers to access. from the analysis, 27 statements were generated and taken into round 2 of the delphi study, and these can be viewed within table ii. an example of this analytical process would be statement 1: ‘the intervention should maintain a safe space for all participants, free from judgment,’ which was generated from multiple codes from question 1: appearing weak or not strong enough for the job, fearing being signed off from work, challenging stiff upper lip mentality, and question 2: prioritising an open non-judgemental culture, holding a safe space throughout all activities. round 2 the second round of the study consisted of participants rating their agreement with the generated statements. table ii shows percentage agreement for all statements. statements that reached predefined consensus (agree or strongly agree >80%) were adopted directly into intervention recommendations that are the primary output of this research. from the 17 respondents who responded in this round predefined agreement was reached for 23 statements. four items did not reach consensus (italicised within table ii) and further feedback on why they did not reach consensus was sought in round 3 of the delphi study. table 2 statements generated in round 1 and percentage agreement from round 2 no statement % agreement 1 the intervention should maintain a safe space for all participants, free from judgment 100% 2 perceptions around maintaining a 'stiff upper lip' or 'toughening up' should be challenged at the intervention. 94% 3 the intervention should be structured completely independently of any workplace. 76% 4 the intervention should promote evidence-based/scientifically proven coping mechanisms. 88% 5 the intervention should support participants in not isolating themselves. 94% 6 the intervention should provide information and support about accessing other services, if required. 94% 7 anonymity should be maintained at all times around intervention. 82% 8 positive examples and case studies would be helpful in promoting coping strategies. 88% 9 the intervention should not promise things it cannot deliver on. 100% 10 the intervention should recognise and provide recognition around the work carried out by emergency service and healthcare workers. 76% http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 11 promoting a healthy lifestyle would be a positive element to the intervention. 94% 12 the intervention's setting outside of an office/classroom setting is a positive element to the intervention. 100% 13 self-referral is a preferable form of referral to the intervention. 53% 14 the referral process would be easiest on an online platform 94% 15 the referral process should be as simple and transparent as possible. 100% 16 the intervention should consider how to promote appropriate use of the service, in contrast to just accessing free surf lessons, within referral process design. 100% 17 the intervention should be advertised as broadly as possible both within workplace and primary healthcare settings. 100% 18 a work-place team referral option would be beneficial within the intervention. 82% 19 it would be beneficial if the intervention avoided putting co-workers on the same course, outside of team referrals. 35% 20 the intervention should stress at recruitment it is accessible to all levels of fitness. 94% 21 the intervention should be aware and as flexible as possible with regards to attending around shift-based work. 94% 22 it would be beneficial for the intervention to occur regularly over a long period to make up for missed sessions due to scheduling. 88% 23 the intervention should be explicit about there being no judgment over missed sessions. 100% 24 attending the intervention in my spare time would not be a problem. 82% 25 the intervention should provide plenty of advance notice as to the intervention dates and times. 100% 26 good public transport links would be beneficial for the intervention. 82% 27 given the intervention is edinburgh based, avoiding rush hour times would be preferable. 82% round 3 within round 3 participants were presented back statements that did not meet the predefined threshold for consensus and asked for further feedback. sixteen participants provided data within this round of the study. this feedback was thematically analysed to help generate modified or completely reformulated statements for round 4. statement 3 (the intervention should be structured completely independently of any workplace), nearly reached consensus level (76%) with many participants highlighting the importance of separation and workplace within round 3 feedback. the key theme that emerged was around the wish to not exclude any kind of workplace collaboration through this separation. participants recognised the possibility of positive collaborations with the intervention such as team referrals or organisational workshops. an addition was made to the statement ensuring such workplace collaborations would not be excluded by the otherwise separate nature of the intervention. the revised statement was: ‘the intervention should be structured completely independently of the workplace to protect anonymity and prevent stigma. however, this should not exclude possible collaborations such as team or organisational group referrals/workshops). statement 10 (the intervention should recognise and provide recognition around the work carried out by emergency service and healthcare workers), was also very close to consensus (76%) and the main theme within http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 feedback was fears around either disingenuity or risk of flashbacks associated with recognition of work. based on this analysis an addition to the statement was made ensuring recognition would not include any of these negative elements and the revised statement was: ‘the intervention should positively acknowledge the nature of the work carried out by emergency service and healthcare workers. this acknowledgment should be structured to not be disingenuous, not reinforce any negative stereotypes and not risk any kind of flashback trigger. self-referral came up as a clear theme within round 1 analysis but only 53% of participants agreed with it being the preferable form of referral to the intervention in statement 13 (self-referral is a preferable form of referral to the intervention). analysis of the round 3 feedback on this statement provided no clear single referral method which emerged as preferable, however there was a clear focus on making the process as easy as possible for potential participants. as such, a new statement highlighting making referral pathways as easy and accessible as possible was drawn up. the reformulated statement also included a list of possible referral pathways that were referenced by study participants, with the revised statement being: ‘the intervention should offer multiple referral pathways to make the process as easy as possible for potential participants. these pathways could include but are not limited to self-referral, occupational health referral, other workplace referral and/or healthcarebased referrals. statement 19 (it would be beneficial if the intervention avoided putting co-workers on the same course, outside of team referrals), received the lowest agreement rating of any statement (35%) despite the negative aspects of attending with individuals from the same workplace being a clear theme within round 1. in contrast within round 3 analysis of the benefits of attending with individuals from the same workplace also emerged. the feedback clarified the key concern from earlier data was about first finding out that someone from the same workplace was on the same course on the day of delivery. this could lead to worries around confidentiality or anonymity that may be a preference for individual participants as highlighted within both the literature and other statements. these concerns could in turn contribute to participants dropping off the course or a negative experience. to best address this, the statement was reformulated to state the intervention should check preferences prior to including individuals from the same workplace on the same course. the new statement was: ‘where co-workers may be referred onto the same course (outside of team referrals), the intervention should check and accommodate participants preferences prior to course commencement.’ this solution was generated from participant suggestions within feedback provided. these modified or reformulated statements were presented back to participants to explore consensus within round 4. round 4 the fourth and final of the study consisted of 17 participants rating their agreement with the modified or reformulated statements. table iii shows percentage agreement for these statements. predefined consensus (agree or strongly agree >80%) was reached on all statements and were consequently adopted directly into intervention recommendations. as consensus had been reached on all items the study was deemed complete. the primary output of this research was a list of recommendations for the design and implementation of the blsc surf therapy intervention working with the emergency responder/healthcare population. an infographic of the finalised practical recommendations that have informed the development of the blsc at lost shore surf resort is available – appendix b. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 table 3 modified statements from round 3 and percentage agreement from round 4 no modified or reformulated statement % agreement 3 the intervention should be structured completely independently of the workplace to protect anonymity and prevent stigma. however, this should not exclude possible collaborations such as team or organisational group referrals/workshops. 88% 10 the intervention should positively acknowledge the nature of the work carried out by emergency service and healthcare workers. this acknowledgment should be structured so as to not be disingenuous, not reinforce any negative stereotypes and not risk any kind of flashback trigger. 94% 13 the intervention should offer multiple referral pathways to make the process as easy as possible for potential participants. these pathways could include but are not limited to self-referral, occupational health referral, other workplace referral and/or healthcare-based referrals. 94% 19 where co-workers may be referred onto the same course (outside of team referrals), the intervention should check and accommodate participants preferences prior to course commencement. 100% discussion and implications this study aimed to build a list of practical recommendations for the implementation of a novel community-based surf therapy intervention for emergency service and healthcare workers in central scotland. the finalised recommendations refer to the access, delivery and structural components of the intervention. the study also identified and provided solutions to pragmatic barriers to participation for the emergency responder/healthcare population. the first implementation recommendation (1) (all numbers refer to recommendations within table iii) within the results directly aligned with a key mechanism identified within prior surf therapy literature (caddick, smith and phoenix 2015; marshall et al., 2020) and wider mental health literature (bryant, tibbs and clark, 2011; walker, hart and hanna, 2017) in prioritising a safe space, free from judgment, to achieve positive impact on mental health. multiple other recommendations produced by the delphi process expanded upon how this safe space could be implemented specifically for this population. for example, recommendations 21, 22 and 23 recommend methods of maintaining this safe space despite potential missed sessions due the prevalence of shift work for potential participants. the delphi process recommended flexibility (21), regular and long-term delivery (22) and explicitly removing any sense of judgement over missed sessions (23) to ensure the challenges of shift-based work do not undermine the safe space that is integral to intervention implementation and thereby undermine continued participation. this recognition of the shift work and its impact on availability as a potential barrier to intervention participation aligns with previous literature (haugen et al., 2017; hernandez et al., 2014; johnson et al., 2019) and the generated recommendations offer a plausible means to overcome this barrier. this potential threat to the intervention’s safe space highlights the importance of considering population specific barriers to accessing interventions and the potential solutions generated within the delphi could be utilised within the planning of similar mental health support for emergency service and healthcare workers. the recommended flexible and nonjudgemental approach has been adopted as a priority for blsc design and implementation. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 another contextually specific set of recommendations related to safe spaces centred on the prevention of population specific stigma (2, 3, 7, 12, 19), specifically concerns around needing to remain silent around mental health due to the negative impact it could have on participants’ careers. this form of stigma is, again, a welldocumented barrier to accessing mental health support for this population in wider literature (edwards and kotera, 2020; haugen et al., 2017). the delphi recommendations highlighted how the surf therapy intervention was well placed to separate itself from any workplace structure or hierarchy and maintain professional anonymity throughout implementation, though this is by no means unique to surfing based interventions. this provides reassurance to participants that accessing the service would have no negative impact on their future careers (3, 7, 12) alongside specific recommendations such as checking with participants as to their comfort about having colleagues from the same workplace on their intervention cycle (19). the radically different environment offered by a surfingbased intervention seems to be a positive for participants in the clear separation/distinction it offers from the workplace (marshall et al., 2023), and thus assisting in avoiding stigma identified as prevalent within wider emergency service/healthcare worker literature. as already mentioned, this by no means unique to a surfing-based approach, but the findings from this study highlight how such separation should be a clear and intentional priority for intervention development alongside this population. the importance of social support is well established within literature exploring the mental health of this population (mitani et al., 2006), physical activity-based interventions (mason and holt, 2012) and specifically in surf therapy (caddick, smith and phoenix 2015; marshall et al., 2020). the importance of this mediator was recognised within the delphi recommendations (5), specifically around explicitly supporting participants to break cycles of isolation. this recommendation speaks to the importance of intentionally targeted surf therapy design such as icebreakers to help participants get to know each other and activities that promote teamwork or communication. such activities have been prioritised within blsc curriculum development. it is noteworthy there were significantly less delphi recommendations around this mediator than safe spaces though when reviewing previous literature this is unsurprising. social components have been identified as both contingent on (marshall et al., 2020) and/or mediated by (coalter, 2013) successful safe space provision in previous research. for this reason, while not many recommendations directly addressed social mediators, the extensive recommendations around safe spaces indirectly contribute to the pragmatic delivery of social components within programme theory for the blsc. alongside safe spaces and positive socialisation, the delphi highlighted the interest of participants to explore and learn about coping strategies within the blsc intervention. the development of individual coping skills and mental health tools is not new for this population and has been successfully delivered in the past (sharp et al., 2020). it was notable that respondents were very focused on the evidence-based nature of any delivered coping strategies (4) which is perhaps unsurprising given the many medical qualifications represented and the mental health training/awareness that will have been delivered to non-medical emergency service workers. this has informed the development of the blsc intervention including core curriculum items. further review of literature, including resources such as the mind’s blue light wellbeing programme (sharp et al., 2020) will ensure and evidence-based approach to curriculum development as was valued by study participants. it was interesting that participants highlighted the importance of positive examples, personal testimony, and case studies around coping skills (8) as this http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 aligns with existing research (oates et al., 2017) and can offer further pragmatic insight as to how to achieve recommendation 8 within the future intervention delivery. this recommendation also speaks to offering participants pathways to becoming future mentors as someone who has been through the intervention could provide in depth and relatable examples of coping strategies delivered. the delphi recommendations around coping skill development offer clear priorities for future interventions and have contribute significantly to the development of an evidence based and population specific curriculum for the blsc. building upon the need for a targeted curriculum, the delphi process also offered specific pragmatic guidance around implementation for the blsc intervention. a portion of these results centred on the referral process to the intervention (13, 14, 15, 16) and focused on making the process as easy as possible for participants but did not specify a preferred route. this is potentially unsurprising given established feelings of hesitancy around accessing mental health within this population due to stigma and a lack of knowledge around referral pathways (edwards and kotera, 2020; haugen et al., 2017). ease of use was the main priority (13, 14, 15) along with ensuring intervention access was targeted for those who needed support (16). these recommendations will inform future consultation around referral pathways. other pragmatic suggestions for the intervention centred on helping participants access further support (6), promotion of a healthy lifestyle (11), timings (24, 25) and transport (26, 27). it is important to note the blsc intervention will not have access to clinical support within the surf therapy itself. helping participants access referral pathways to clinical support where appropriate will help address recognised lack of awareness on this topic (edwards and kotera, 2020; hernandez et al., 2014), while peer support within the intervention may help overcome stigma related to accessing treatment (edwards and kotera, 2020; haugen et al., 2017). this aligns with wider literature highlighting the need for community-based interventions to improve mental health literacy (castillo et al., 2019) and integrate with clinical care streamlining referrals where appropriate. the importance of finding appropriate times for the intervention (24, 25) and minimising transport difficulties (26, 27) address barriers already established in wider literature for this population (haugen et al., 2017; hernandez et al., 2014; johnson et al., 2019). these pragmatic recommendations, again not inherently tied to the delivery of a surf therapy intervention, could provide valuable learnings for other physical activity interventions with this population, or even interventions that use a completely different vehicle for supporting the mental health of emergency service and healthcare workers. they have also directly influenced the operational structure of the blsc in terms of making it as accessible as possible for participants. limitations the key limitation of this study was that, despite offering some useful recommendations (13, 14, 15, 16) the delphi process did not build clear consensus on a specific referral pathway for the intervention. this should be a priority for future research. what the study did do is highlight the importance of an easy and accessible process that ensures the people who most need the intervention can access it. the delphi also highlighted that this process needs separation from the workplace and a degree of anonymity to overcome associated stigma around mental health for this population. while consultation with potential participants led to these recommendations, further consultation with other stakeholders such as workplace occupational health, primary and secondary healthcare providers, and mental health support charities that work extensively with this population could help to generate a specific referral pathway that fits with participant described priorities. consultation http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 with these stakeholders could also offer insight into the optimisation of the growing social prescribing paradigm for this population (gottlieb et al., 2018). the study was also not able to explore implementation recommendations around the surfing component of the blsc intervention, and indeed the majority of recommendations were quite broadly applicable to non-surfing-based interventions as well. this could be down to the initial questions not connecting participants with surf therapy sufficiently, though every round of questions was grounded within the context of the blsc intervention. it could also be attributed to consulting with potential participants with no experience of surfing, and no strong beliefs around barriers or facilitators to surfing components. the lack of surf therapy specific feedback highlights the need for robust ongoing process and impact evaluation to ensure that surfing components are optimised and adapted appropriately as a vehicle for the delivery of mental health support to emergency service and healthcare workers. one further limitation that should be noted was that while study participants represented a good variety of different roles within the emergency service/healthcare workforce, the study was very regionally focused within the south of scotland. different contexts may have very different demands or focuses for emergency service/healthcare workers which could in turn impact on perceived barriers and facilitators to accessing an intervention like the blsc. while the sample was appropriate for the targeted aim of the study, generalising the study’s findings more broadly should be done with caution especially outside of a scottish context. conclusion the aim of this study was to consult with emergency service/healthcare workers on the barriers/facilitators to taking part in the proposed a blsc surf therapy intervention. a delphi style consultation offered insight into how best to adapt the blsc intervention for this population, especially in terms of holding a safe space for participants in the face of work associated stigma around mental health, promoting positive social relationships, developing an evidence based coping skill curriculum and other pragmatic solutions to population specific barriers to participation. these delphi recommendations also extend to informing wider interventions working with the emergency service and healthcare worker population that may utilise delivery vehicles other than surfing. finally, the recommendations from the delphi study provide the foundation for direct impact in terms of a theoretically informed and population specific community-based surf therapy intervention in the form of the blsc. references alexander, d.a. and klein, s. 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(2015). blue light scoping survey. https://www.mind.org.uk/mediaa/4857/scoping-survey.pdf [accessed 01/09/2021] mind. (2020). behind the mask. how the coronavirus pandemic impacted the mental health of emergency responders. https://www.mind.org.uk/media/7246 /blue-light-behind-the-mask-reporten-2021.pdf [accessed 01/09/2021] mitani, s., fujita, m., nakata, k. and shirakawa, t. (2006). impact of post-traumatic stress disorder and job-related stress on burnout: a study of fire service workers. the journal of emergency medicine, 31(1), pp.7-11. oates, j., drey, n. and jones, j. (2017). ‘your experiences were your tools’. how personal experience of mental health problems informs mental health nursing practice. journal of psychiatric and mental health nursing, 24(7), pp.471-479.. otis, n.p., walter, k.h., glassman, l.h., ray, t.n., michalewicz-kragh, b. and thomsen, c.j. (2020). effects of ptsd and mdd comorbidity on psychological changes during surf therapy sessions for active duty service members. glob. j. community psychol. pract, 11, pp.1-23. paliwoda, s.j. (1983). predicting the future using delphi. management decision. petrie, k., milligan-saville, j., gayed, a., deady, m., phelps, a., dell, l., forbes, d., bryant, r.a., calvo, r.a., glozier, n. and harvey, s.b. (2018). prevalence of ptsd and common mental disorders amongst ambulance personnel: a systematic review and metaanalysis. social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 53(9), pp.897-909. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://intlsurftherapy.org/ https://www.mind.org.uk/media-a/4857/scoping-survey.pdf https://www.mind.org.uk/media-a/4857/scoping-survey.pdf https://www.mind.org.uk/media/7246/blue-light-behind-the-mask-report-en-2021.pdf https://www.mind.org.uk/media/7246/blue-light-behind-the-mask-report-en-2021.pdf https://www.mind.org.uk/media/7246/blue-light-behind-the-mask-report-en-2021.pdf global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 saldaña, j., 2021. the coding manual for qualitative researchers. sage. sharp, m.l., harrison, v., solomon, n., fear, n., king, h. and pike, g. (2020). assessing the mental health and wellbeing of the emergency responder community in the uk. open university and kings college london, london. http://oro.open.ac.uk/71993/1/emer gency%20responders%20report%2 02020%20v5.pdf [accessed 10/09/2021] syed, s., ashwick, r., schlosser, m., jones, r., rowe, s. and billings, j. (2020). global prevalence and risk factors for mental health problems in police personnel: a systematic review and metaanalysis. occupational and environmental medicine, 77(11), pp.737-747. tourky, m., harvey, w. and badger, l. (2021). quick wins to long-term outcomes. an evaluation of surfwell for promoting the health and wellbeing of police officers. university of exeter https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/b itstream/handle/10871/125398/surf well%20report%20%28march%2c% 202021%29.pdf?sequence=1andisall owed=y [accessed 01/07/2021] wagner, s.l., mcfee, j.a. and martin, c.a. (2010). mental health implications of fire service membership. traumatology, 16(2), pp.26-32. walker, c., hart, a. and hanna, p. (2017). building a new community psychology of mental health. palgrave macmillan uk. walter, k.h., otis, n.p., ray, t.n., glassman, l.h., michalewicz-kragh, b., powell, a.l. and thomsen, c.j. (2019). breaking the surface: psychological outcomes among us active duty service members following a surf therapy program. psychology of sport and exercise, 45, p.101551. windsor-shellard, b. (2017). suicide by occupation, england: 2011 to 2015. office for national statistics, 4, p.2020. funding this research was conducted as part of a phd funded by edinburgh napier university and lost shore surf resort. author note we have no known conflict of interest to disclose. • dr jamie marshall orcid.org/00000002-4977-2656 • dr phillip b. ward orcid.org/00000002-5779-7722 • dr russell martindale orcid.org/0000-0002-3905-3738 • dr brendon ferrier orcid.org/00000001-5471-4162 http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://oro.open.ac.uk/71993/1/emergency%20responders%20report%202020%20v5.pdf http://oro.open.ac.uk/71993/1/emergency%20responders%20report%202020%20v5.pdf http://oro.open.ac.uk/71993/1/emergency%20responders%20report%202020%20v5.pdf https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/125398/surfwell%20report%20%28march%2c%202021%29.pdf?sequence=1andisallowed=y https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/125398/surfwell%20report%20%28march%2c%202021%29.pdf?sequence=1andisallowed=y https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/125398/surfwell%20report%20%28march%2c%202021%29.pdf?sequence=1andisallowed=y https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/125398/surfwell%20report%20%28march%2c%202021%29.pdf?sequence=1andisallowed=y https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/125398/surfwell%20report%20%28march%2c%202021%29.pdf?sequence=1andisallowed=y file:///c:/users/jamie/appdata/roaming/microsoft/word/orcid.org/0000-0002-4977-2656 file:///c:/users/jamie/appdata/roaming/microsoft/word/orcid.org/0000-0002-4977-2656 file:///c:/users/jamie/appdata/roaming/microsoft/word/orcid.org/0000-0002-5779-7722 file:///c:/users/jamie/appdata/roaming/microsoft/word/orcid.org/0000-0002-5779-7722 file:///c:/users/jamie/appdata/roaming/microsoft/word/orcid.org/0000-0002-3905-3738 file:///c:/users/jamie/appdata/roaming/microsoft/word/orcid.org/0000-0001-5471-4162 file:///c:/users/jamie/appdata/roaming/microsoft/word/orcid.org/0000-0001-5471-4162 global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 appendix a delphi round 1 open ended questions initial questions developed as through literature review around barriers and facilitators to accessing mental health support for emergency responder/healthcare workers. • please describe your perceptions of stigma for first responders and emergency healthcare workers in accessing mental health support. • please describe your current knowledge/awareness around pathways to mental health support. • please describe any steps you have experienced, or you believe would help to overcome stigma in relation to accessing mental health support by first responders and emergency healthcare workers. • please describe any concerns you may have to participating in the group setting of the proposed intervention. • please describe your ideal referral pathway for accessing mental health support such as the proposed intervention. some examples of referral pathways would include place of work referral, self-referral, gp referral or online referral. please explain the reasons behind your preferred choice. • please describe any challenges you anticipate having around participation in the proposed intervention due to a lack of time or coordinating with work shifts. • please also describe any potential ideas/solutions you may have around timing challenges to participation. • please describe any concerns (if at all) you may have about the implications participation in the proposed intervention might have on your career. • please describe any challenges you anticipate having around participation in the proposed intervention due access to transport to the site. please also describe any potential ideas/solutions you may have around transportation challenges to participation. • please describe how open you would be to learning about evidence-based coping skills within the proposed intervention. • please add any further comments you may have about the proposed intervention in the space provided below. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 may 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 appendix b http://www.gjcpp.org/ kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 welcome to the special issue for the 2011 scra biennial conference gjcpp editorial board keywords: scra biennial conference, community psychology practice, gjcpp gjcpp editorial board management team vincent francisco, university of north carolina at greensboro (editor) tom wolff, tom wolff and associates (senior associate editor) victoria chien, university of south carolina (managing editor) dyana valentine, dyanavalentine.com (associate editor) liesette brunson, université du québec à montréal (associate editor) david julian, ohio state university (associate editor) maria vargas moniz, instituto superior de psicologia aplicada (associate editor) editorial advisory board wolfgang stark, university of duisburg-essen (germany) josé h. ornelas, instituto superior de psicologia aplicada (lisboa portugal) neville robertson, waikato university (new zealand) brian bishop, curtin university (australia) toshi sasao, international christian university in tokyo donata francescato; university of rome cheryl ramos, university of hawai’i at hilo bill neigher, atlantic health greg meissen, wichita state university thomas saïas, l’association française de psychologie communautaire eduardo almeida, la universidad iberoamericana puebla global journal of community psychology practice volume 2, issue 3 february 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 welcome to the special issue for the 2011 scra biennial conference we are very pleased to offer this special issue of the gjcpp for the 2011 scra biennial conference. all of the papers, presentations and materials in this special issue were peer reviewed, or contributed by special invitation of the conference organizers. this is a very rich issue, with video, narrated slide presentations, posters, and other materials from the conference. we also have several of the invited addresses from award winners. we hope that you will learn from all the materials presented. please do not hesitate to contact the authors, or leave comments at the end of each submission. microsoft word 2010-0005-final-20111104.docx global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 1 and then what? four community psychologists reflect on their careers ten years after graduation sherri van de hoef, purnima sundar, stephanie austin and theresa dostaler keywords: community psychology practice, graduates, careers, training running head: and then what? author note correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to sherri van de hoef, 389 place pauline charron, ottawa, ontario, canada, k1l 8l6. email: sjvandehoef@hotmail.com recommended citation: van de hoef, s., sundar, p., austin, s., & dostaler, t. (2011). and then what? four community psychologists reflect on their careers ten years after graduation. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(2), 1-8. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 and then what? four community psychologists reflect on their careers ten years after graduation abstract according to a recent survey of north american community psychology (cp) graduate programs, over half of cp graduates find employment in community practice (dziadkowiec & jimenez, 2009). that trend has been on the rise over the last few decades. in canada, nelson and lavoie (2010) concluded that, compared to 25 years ago, “there is now a sizable number of community psychologists who are primarily practitioners and applied researchers” (p. 84). in this paper, we provide a glimpse into the career paths of 4 canadian cp graduates, and describe how our cp training prepared us for our lives after graduation. we completed our master’s degrees in cp at wilfrid laurier university (wlu) (ontario, canada) approximately ten years ago. two of us went on to obtain phds while the other two went straight into the workforce. we represent diverse professions: research/evaluation consultant in a hospital setting, government policy analyst, independent researcher/consultant, and canadian diplomat. although several of us have worked in academia, we are now primarily community practitioners. we are also mothers and active members of our communities. we will explore what attracted us to the cp program and how we have applied cp values and skills in our respective careers. by providing real-life accounts of what cp graduates do after their training, we hope to demonstrate the value that the program has had in our professional and personal lives, as well as to contribute to the ongoing discussion on building relevant cp programs. although there are a number of definitions of cp, there is a general consensus about its underlying values (such as social justice, collaboration, citizen participation, emphasis on individual and community strengths, empirical grounding, and prevention) (aubry, sylvestre & ecker, 2010; goldstein, 1998; perkins, 2009). ratcliffe and neigher (2010) offer the following definition of cp: “community psychology is a distinctive approach to understanding and solving community, organizational, and societal problems….what makes cps distinctive is that we apply well-established psychological principles and techniques, tested and proven in practice, to improve well-being and effectiveness at individual, organizational, and community levels. we do so with an explicit concern for social justice, inclusiveness and participation, the value of diversity, collaboration, and a focus on strengths.” (p.1) there is active dialogue among community psychologists about how we define cp, what it means to be a community psychologist, and how best to train the cp practitioners of the future (fayter, adamson, beaulac & macé, 2010; lavoie & brunson, 2010; perkins, 2010; wolff, 2009). it is not surprising to hear that over half of recent cp graduates are working as community practitioners, outside of academia (dziadkowiec & jimenez, 2009), and in fact a canadian survey by nelson and lavoie (2010) concluded that compared to 25 years ago “there is now a sizable number of community psychologists who are primarily practitioners and applied researchers” (p. 84). many community psychologists have voiced their concern that current cp training programs are not adequately preparing graduates for non-academic roles (jimenez, 2009; kuperminc, 2009; meissen, 2009; wolff, 2009). the link between cp training programs and career paths for graduates is a topic of great interest to the field as evidenced by the creation of the society for community research and action (scra) practice group and its ongoing discussions with the council on education programs (dalton & julian, 2009). these discussions culminated recently in a special edition of the community psychologist (fall 2009) that included commentary on the changing trend in cp careers and the need to align cp programs to meet that trend. the education-career link was also the subject of a special section of canadian psychology (2010) in which the authors looked at the broad areas in which cp graduates work, as well as current and future training needs. both journals identified a lack of information about cp practitioners in the field, particularly those who do not publish or present in cp forums. this lacuna is perhaps felt most strongly by graduate hopefuls, as they weigh their professional options. this dearth of information also makes it difficult for the field as a whole to track the contributions of practitioners in non-traditional cp settings (fayter, adamson, beaulac, & mace, 2010; lavoie & brunson, 2010; nelson & aubry, 2010). finally, without knowing where graduates apply their skills and competencies, the field cannot properly assess whether cp training adequately prepares graduates global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 for practitioner roles. in order to determine where to go next, we need to take stock of where cp graduates are currently applying their cp values, competencies and skill sets (jimenez, 2009; wolff, 2009). in this article, we hope to contribute to the literature by describing our career paths as four cp graduates working in different practitioner roles in canada a decade after completing our master’s degrees. we will share first-hand accounts of how our cp training has translated into cp practice, and how we are applying our cp values, competencies and skill sets. for the purposes of this article, we will adopt dalton & julian’s (2009) view of what constitutes cp practice: “wherever they work…(cp) graduates engage in community practice whenever they are involved in community research, intervention, advocacy, or collaboration with community organizations” (p. 9). we will focus on commonly accepted cp skills and competencies itemized by dziadkowiec & jimenez (2009) for the 2008 survey of cp graduate programs and further refined by chun (2009). we will demonstrate that our cp training has provided practitioner skills that are transferable across a variety of community settings. we graduated from the cp master’s program at wlu approximately ten years ago. two of us continued on an academic track before moving into practitioner roles and two headed directly into community practice. sherri worked as an independent researcher/consultant after graduation and then joined the canadian foreign service based in ottawa. she is currently director of a community renewal unit at the department of foreign affairs and international trade canada (dfait) in ottawa (ontario). purnima obtained her phd in social work at wlu, worked in a university setting for a few years, and is now an evaluation and research consultant at the ontario centre of excellence for child and youth mental health in ottawa. stephanie obtained a phd in psychology at york university in toronto, ontario followed by a post-doctoral research fellowship at the ontario breast cancer community research initiative based in toronto. she is currently working as a senior policy analyst at health canada in ottawa. theresa began her career in mental health and homelessness, was employed by two school districts as a research and evaluation officer, and is now an independent research and evaluation consultant in madoc, ontario, a few hours west of ottawa. narratives sherri van de hoef i discovered community psychology in my final year of undergraduate studies at wlu. my parents had just moved from the prairies onto my grandparents’ farm in southern ontario. at the time big business farm operations were buying up land from what had been modest family farms for generations. i was curious to know more about how the shift from smallto large-scale farming was impacting rural communities. an undergraduate community psychology elective offered the skills, value base and opportunity to explore this topic. i was hooked! i enrolled in the cp masters program and continued my exploration of agrarian community health, particularly the perspectives of women. i began my research by experiencing it. i learned conventional farming techniques like cutting straw with a combine and bringing in hay for the winter. i explored ecological methods by interning on an organic community farm and working with a local herbalist. my thesis captures those years of discovery and the beauty in our rural communities through a series of coloured photos and narratives of women who work the land ecologically. the cp program provided me with the tools and value base to conduct my research in a respectful and creative way. when i finished my thesis i had visions of starting my own community farm. but i was heavily in debt and i lacked the management skills that i needed to run a business. i applied for jobs that i thought would enhance my business acumen. i was offered a management and consular officer (mco) position in the canadian foreign service. as a graduate student i had developed a healthy scepticism of the government and was concerned that i would not be able to apply my cp values and skills in such a bureaucratic and political environment. on the other hand, i saw the public service as a unique and promising setting for an idealistic cp. the mco position offered an opportunity to develop management skills, learn canada’s second official language, and explore other cultures while promoting canadian values. my curiosity and idealism won; i took the job. as an mco i ensure that canadians overseas have access to government support when they need it. over 3 million canadians rely on the government for assistance abroad during natural disasters, civil unrest, personal crises, or to access government services. i am also responsible for the management of canadian offices overseas so that canada can deliver its international activities in safe and effective working environments. over a ten-year career i have lived in côte d’ivoire, india, singapore and canada. my cp skills were invaluable, in particular global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 collaboration, critical analysis, evidence-based decision making, and action research. for example, shortly after i began my first assignment in côte d'ivoire, civil war broke out. the international media portrayed the conflict as an internal one. i used analytical skills to dig below the surface in order to determine what level of threat existed for canadians in the country. i monitored local media, tracked incidents in the country, and consulted with colleagues to get a broader sense of the political and cultural context. the results of that analysis confirmed a strong undercurrent of anticolonialism directed at french citizens. because french is a second official language in canada, many of the canadians in the country were indistinguishable from french nationals, which meant that our citizens were also at risk. we used this information to advise canadians on their safety and to evacuate them from rebel-held territory. i have led several task forces in canada during international crises. in that role, i collaborate with other government departments and service providers to coordinate a whole of government response to affected canadians. for example, following the earthquake in haiti (2010) i worked closely with the royal canadian mounted police (rcmp), other government departments, provincial social services, our officers in port-au-prince, and funeral service providers. by coordinating our efforts we were able to find and identify canadians who had lost their lives. we also ensured that families had support during the logistical and emotional challenges of bringing their loved ones home after such a largescale international disaster. in my current role as director of the mco renewal team i promote community development for my peers whom i have grown to respect and admire. the mco workload is notoriously broad, demanding and complex. for historical and political reasons the mco community is not sufficiently equipped to fulfill its mandates. the community has suffered from a chronic lack of recruitment, a lack of targeted training, and the absence of a well-defined community mandate and vision. my team was created to help address these issues. i have made extensive use of evidence based decision-making and action research skills to help us achieve our mandate. for example, in order to identify needs, strengths and key stakeholders, we held interviews and town halls, conducted surveys, and read all the historical material we could find about the community. we used this research to target several key projects, and then we began to implement them. we established governing and consulting bodies to represent management and employee interests and worked with partners in human resources to come up with an hr plan. we led a group of peer-elected mco representatives to develop a draft of their community vision and mission statement. we have created and delivered training courses customized for mcos, and are moving forward a classification project that has been idling for nearly twenty years. until recently, i hesitated to tell my cp colleagues that i am a canadian diplomat. i left the cp program with the impression that practitioner work was less valued than academic work, and that work with mainstream communities was less valued than work with at-risk or marginalized communities. i rarely saw published information in the field that was relevant to the work i do and so i disengaged from the cp field. last year a cp colleague encouraged me to take another look. i was pleasantly surprised to find a growing body of literature on practitioner work including testimonies of cps in government and politics. reconciling my cp values with a career in government is a daily struggle. i credit my ability to navigate these last ten years to the foundation that i gained from my cp training. what keeps me motivated in government is knowing that the cp skills and values that i employ have a positive impact on the lives of canadians, one project at a time. purnima sundar it is hard to believe that i began my undergrad 17 years ago. i entered the psychology program in 1993 at mcmaster university in hamilton, ontario and at the time i was not fully aware of its experimental focus and its intense emphasis on brain and behaviour. although i enjoyed learning about a number of aspects related to animal and undergraduate behaviour, for some reason the program never felt comfortable. i could not see its relevance to people’s everyday lives. i tried to salvage my four years (with some resistance from administration) by carving out a thesis project with a clinical psychologist and researcher in child and youth mental health. his work focused on the role of school based conflict resolution and peer mediation programs in reducing aggressive behaviours in children. i found this work enjoyable and learned a lot, but still was not sure what i wanted to do next. i took a year off to explore my options. i looked at a number of different graduate programs, but the one that seemed most interesting was the cp program at wlu. while i was not entirely sure what global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 “community psychology” was, it felt more in line with my interests than the rat studies of my undergraduate years. after only one week in the program i was elated; i felt like i could “breathe” for the first time. my values were in sync with the program and the material i was learning about. while we came from very different backgrounds, i felt a real kinship with my new colleagues with whom i shared interests in health, community mental health, sustainability, diversity and equity, and a commitment to promoting social justice. i learned how to put words to things that had always just felt right (or not-so-right) at a gut level regarding inequity and marginalization. equally important, i learned that although we all shared the goal of pushing forward a social justice agenda, it can sometimes be difficult to live our values, as these do not always line up with the conditions and constraints of real life. after graduating from the cp program i took a job with an independent, non-profit organization that does program evaluation and research in the human services (centre for community-based research). here, i was able to link my cp values to what i felt was important work with people who had been marginalized based on their gender, race, mental health and/or socioeconomic status. in graduate school, i had learned about the theory and goals of a participatory, action-oriented approach to evaluation and research, and at this organization i was now able to put these ideas into practice in a number of topic areas (e.g., immigration/settlement, family support, mental health). i honed my skills in a range of methods, and enjoyed taking part in several projects. after doing this work for two years, i was ready to play a more active role in the conceptualization of projects so i began to explore doctoral programs. at the time, there were no english language cp doctoral programs in canada and so i made the decision to pursue a phd in the faculty of social work at wlu. the community development/social planning stream available in this program overlapped well with cp values and concepts, and it was a good fit with my interests and experiences. my interest in race equity issues and their influence on mental health culminated in my dissertation that explored how second-generation south asian canadian youth view themselves, both as members of canadian mainstream and of a particular racial/ethnic group, and how these identities influence their mental health. the social work phd program allowed me to learn in practical terms how to use evaluation and research as a tool for social change. i started to teach and publish, and began to explore a future in academia. during this time, my personal circumstances were changing. my partner and i had moved from southern to eastern ontario, and our first daughter was born. juggling motherhood, completing a dissertation and adjusting to life in a new city was both exciting and exhausting. despite this, i took on my next challenge: an academic position at one of the local universities. i loved teaching and was starting to develop an interesting program of research, but the department in which i worked was unhealthy. i found that despite an explicit commitment to addressing racism, sexism and classism, some of my colleagues’ behaviours were inconsistent with these values. i struggled with the knowledge that people who appeared to be interested in promoting social justice values were not able to demonstrate these values on a daily basis with their co-workers and students. i tried to stay grounded, however, by connecting with likeminded colleagues and friends, and through community volunteer work. when my term was ending at the university, i began to explore options outside of academia, specifically in the area of program evaluation, as i feel strongly that the process of research/evaluation is critical in facilitating social change. in 2008, i joined the ontario centre of excellence for child and youth mental health at the children’s hospital of eastern ontario as an evaluation and research consultant. we are funded by the ministry of children and youth services, and work to bring people and knowledge together in order to promote the best mental health for children, youth and their families. my work is varied: i consult with child and youth mental health service organizations to support them in using evaluation and research to make their services more useful and relevant to their users; i train service providers and managers working in the field to promote the uptake and evaluation of evidenceinformed practices; as well, i maintain a small program of research looking at how we might make services and supports more appropriate for racially/ethnically diverse young people with mental health challenges and their families. in all of these activities, my emphasis is on equity, health promotion, prevention and social justice, all of which contribute to the overall mental health of children and youth. my time in the community psychology program provided me with a strong foundation in critical thinking as well as practical training in evaluation and research, teaching and facilitation. these skills have allowed me to work in a number of positions: researcher, teacher, and consultant. moreover, it global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 helped me to see the importance of striving to link my values to the work that i do every day. with these tools and values, i hope to make a positive contribution to the mental health and well-being of families in our communities and the practitioners who support them. stephanie austin i spent my undergraduate years trying to find a sense of deeper significance in the discipline of psychology. i was unable and unwilling to accept that theories of learning, for example, were limited to behavioural notions of stimulus/response alone. i was insatiably curious for more and unsatisfied with the conventional approaches to psychological theory, methods and practices. the cp program at wlu was the beginning of an important reclaiming of the discipline of psychology for me. in my two years in cp, i connected with the values of equity and social justice and the methodologies of community engagement and mobilization. this approach to psychology gave me a framework for understanding the world and our role as agents of change. i had the pleasure of working with one of cp’s great contemporary thinkers, isaac prilleltensky. working with isaac also introduced me to critical psychology and allowed me to nurture my passion for inspiring change in a discipline that seemed to be neglecting its moral and political underpinnings thereby making it less socially engaged and useful. i continued my doctoral studies in critical psychology in a department that had a small history and theory of psychology stream. i then went back to doing more applied research in communities when i did my postdoctoral research fellowship with the ontario breast cancer community research initiative (obccri). interestingly, many cp graduates from the wlu program already worked at the obccri when i arrived. i was thrilled to work with likeminded colleagues to better understand and meet the needs of marginalized groups of women living with breast cancer. after 8 years away, i moved back to ottawa to be closer to my family, friends, and the beautiful natural environment of the gatineau hills of québec. i was caught totally by surprise with an offer to do a contract at the bureau of women’s health and gender analysis at health canada. i have been there, on and off, for 6 years. i have also had two children during this time and have had the pleasure of spending a year at home with each of them. since starting to work for the government, i have been fortunate to do work that is guided by the strategic objective of reducing health inequalities and inequities in canada. while this is a vast objective that often feels quite out of reach, it is one that allows me to sleep deeply at night and jump up with excitement in the morning. it is valuable and meaningful work that is perfectly aligned with my cp values and training. the skills i acquired in the cp program were primarily reading, writing, analysis, and critical thinking, and i apply these every day in my work. for example, i sat on the editorial board for a publication called the human face of mental health and mental illness in canada, 2006. we wanted to make sure that the information contained in this report was sex and gender sensitive and also touched on other important contextual elements that impact the experience of mental health and mental illness in canada – income, ethnicity, aboriginal status, etc. working to ensure a balance of “just the facts” at a very broad national level and “deep analysis” that connects with the intimate lives of individuals, families and communities who are affected by these health issues required significant critical thinking and analysis. i was also involved in a project related to developing appropriate measures of health in order to better understand health inequalities and evaluate what interventions can reduce them. this work was specifically related to developing more gender and diversity sensitive health indicators that could tell researchers, community workers or policy makers more about the true picture of health in the population as a whole, but also within and between subpopulations of particular interest. i have worked extensively in the area of knowledge translation; that is, translating the results and language of academic researchers into relevant, timely and enlightening information that can affect policy making. advancing issues of women’s health or equity in health in the government often takes on a community development nature. my work requires navigating many stages of trust building, communicating across different organizational cultures, and gentle, respectful awareness-raising to show how thinking about equity issues upfront, makes for better policy in the end. our emphasis in cp on working with vulnerable communities continues to play an important role in my work. for example, our office has worked closely with partners across health canada to develop guidance for industry on the inclusion of women in clinical trials that determine the safety and effectiveness of therapeutic products. although historically the male norm in research was considered applicable to women, pharmaceutical tragedies such global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 as diethylstilbestrol (des) and thalidomide have demonstrated otherwise. the health canada guidance document on the inclusion of women in clinical trials was developed in 1997 to encourage the inclusion of all female subjects in all stages of drug development. to update the document we have organized international conferences with scientists, researchers and regulators, we have commissioned a synthesis of current research, policy and regulatory work on the subject, and we have chaired a working group that has begun the revisions and updates. the equity issue that circles back to my cp training is the value of ensuring that both the risks and benefits of research on the safety and effectiveness of therapeutic products are equally shared by the populations who will eventually be using the products. sometimes, with good intentions, we try to protect vulnerable populations. what we learn in cp, and what we need to continually learn in our working lives, is that we need to remain vigilant and critical in how we think about vulnerability because the context is always changing. theresa dostaler from early on i knew that my self-concept and what makes me feel right with the world is intertwined with my involvement in my community. that being said, when i left my rural ontario town to attend university i had no aspirations to study community psychology; i had never even heard of it! my formal journey into cp began in my last year of undergraduate studies; this also was the beginning of a continuous struggle between my cp ideals and practice in the real world. i have learned a lot throughout my cp journey. first, i have learned that relationships are important in a community psychologist’s career. by relationships, i am referring to the meaningful interactions we have with others in all academic and professional settings. for example, it was because of my undergraduate advisor that i began to volunteer with the canadian mental health association on a project working with individuals who were homeless and living in shelters. through this project, i met others who offered me opportunities that supported my application to the cp master’s program at wlu and eventually helped me obtain my first paid employment as a graduate. once i entered the cp program at wlu, i became engaged in reflection and collaboration with a small group of people who had the same values as i did, and were willing to think critically about the world around us. this environment helped me solidify concepts and constructs, and gather practical tools that have been useful ever since. when it came time to complete my ma thesis, i moved back to ottawa where i completed a participatory process and outcomes evaluation with the youth services bureau’s young women’s emergency shelter. the real challenges began for me after i graduated. i had learned through my studies about the deinstitutionalization process in mental health and was well versed in the paradigm shift to community integration/empowerment. feeling a little rebellious and with a desire to fight the system from within, i took a position as a research assistant at the royal ottawa hospital in the schizophrenia clinic. i wanted to understand the current state in traditional institutions, and how practice fit with my community psychology values. having discovered that my values did not fit in that institution at that time, i left to become a community consultant with the canadian mental health association where i worked as a project coordinator on homelessness and supportive housing projects. during this time i was a strong advocate for issues such as the rights of consumers of mental health services and the use of psychotropic medications and electroshock therapy. at the same time, i had a family member who had been a long time consumer of mental health services and whose treatments of choice were pretty much everything i had grown to be sceptical of. this became a pivotal time for reflection in my life, where black and white suddenly all blurred into gray. as a cp student i had attended a support group for families of consumer survivors where parents were adamant about their rights to have a family member unwillingly committed for psychiatric treatment. i remember feeling outraged at the possibility of consumers having their rights taken away. i thought of that meeting years later when my own family member was at risk of hurting herself or others, and my family made the tough decision to keep her safe by committing her to hospital. at work, i felt like a hypocrite. unable to reconcile my values with the hard reality, i left research and evaluation in mental health and worked for the city of ottawa as a training coordinator in the social housing branch where i was again faced with reconciling my ideals with the reality around me. this internal conflict was impacting my own mental health and my professional identity. i had time to think about my career path when i went on maternity leave for my first of three children. during my year off i considered professions where i could live out my values. given my experience with action research and program evaluation, i pursued a position as research and evaluation officer at the global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 ottawa catholic district school board. the ease with which i transferred from working in mental health and homelessness to education reaffirmed my belief that the knowledge and skills obtained in cp programs are transferable to other disciplines. i spent the next seven years working in education, eventually transferring to the algonquin and lakeshore catholic district school board in order to be closer to my family. my main roles included facilitating knowledge mobilization and knowledge transfer of evidence informed decision making with senior administrators and teachers. i used my networking skills to help found the first ottawa region research network and i joined the association of educational researchers of ontario, where i served as vice president until 2009. during this tenure, the importance of evaluation skills was affirmed. community psychologists are required in many fields to help build the capacity of those professionals who want to better understand the effectiveness of their programs. after having my third child, my husband and i were forced to reflect on both of our careers. as a newly appointed school principal there would be higher demands on his time. working an hour away from home and travelling frequently for training and conferences was no longer feasible for me. our kids were affected by our schedules, and we were burnt out. on top of that, i found that i had no time to contribute to my community. though i had always felt that as an independent consultant i would be selling out on my community psychology values, i left my full-time permanent job in 2009 to become an independent consultant. this most recent transition has led to my final learning, “you can live your community values anywhere!” i started my own business, completing most of my contracts from home so i can spend more time with my children while taking on diverse projects that align with my values. in less than a year, i have worked with the congress of aboriginals national youth council to support aboriginal youth staying in school, coordinated a collaborative project with two local universities and nine school boards, worked with the eastern ontario catholic curriculum cooperative to evaluate an initiative to help teachers improve understanding and awareness of aboriginal culture, and continued to work with school boards to help build capacity for using data for evidence informed decision making. most importantly, i have had more time to be involved in my community. i have started coaching figure skating again, and am a member of the “friends of centre hastings” board of directors, a not for profit run by community members to raise money for the local high school. i sit on numerous local boards and committees, all aimed at improving the community in which we live. finally, being a hockey mom myself, and motivated by curiosity and fun, i decided to test the ability of social media to create a community across canada. so, using my cp skills, i founded a virtual community of hockey moms in canada. we now have over 6,000 moms, the largest such community in the world. though i no longer have an “official sounding” title, and no one covers my expenses for conferences and training, i have never felt that my skills and my values have been more useful. by doing what i am doing, choosing projects that mean something to me, and making a difference in my community, i feel that i am making more of an impact than ever before. conclusion meissen (2009) has said that cp attracts individuals with strong values who are passionate about their communities. we agree. we each identified a strong value fit with cp, and have fond memories of our cp training, where we articulated our values and gained skills that we could apply in different types of employment. as well, we have all experienced the challenge of reconciling our values with our jobs in the “real world”. our unique career paths also demonstrate that “training in cp opens doors to many and diverse career trajectories” (kuperminc, 2009, p. 19). our narratives show that cp practice is as much about a community psychologist’s own passions, interests and life experiences as it is about the discipline. overall we feel that our cp program provided us with transferable skills and experiences that led us to meaningful employment opportunities in line with our interests, even if the jobs did not initially appear to be a natural cp fit. our respective professional experiences illustrate perkins’ (2009) view that “cp is not only a professional and scientific discipline. it is also an intellectual/value orientation that is applicable to virtually any field or profession.” (p.2). of the cp competencies and skills itemized by dziadkowiec & jimenez (2009) and chun (2009), we have found the following useful in our own career paths: action research, advocacy, capacity building, collaboration/consultation, communication, community development, critical thinking/analysis, evidence based decision-making, facilitation, implementation of community projects and grants, organizational assessment/development, prevention and intervention techniques and strategies, global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 professional judgement, program evaluation, policy development, relationship building, report writing, research, strategic planning, teaching/training, leadership/supervisory skills, resource development, and service delivery/planning/management. graduate cp programs would do well to continue to reinforce the intellectual/value orientation that underlies cp. they can do this by demonstrating what these values are in tangible terms. for example, providing experiences to students that demonstrate experientially what it means to value diversity and to promote social justice, how and why we do collaborative work, and how to engage citizens in their community change. in addition to the program development and research skills typically emphasized in cp programs, our experiences show that collaboration, consultation, knowledge translation, and advocacy are key skills in practitioner work. cp training should continue to promote these skills by showcasing how the skills are being used in less traditional cp settings, for example, by having cp guest lecturers speak about their work in diverse practice settings, by including practica in diverse cp practice settings, and by supporting cp faculty and students to do research that promotes cp innovation in non-traditional practice settings. finally, cp programs would benefit from additional research on the diverse settings in which graduates apply their skills, competencies and values. the findings of such research should be linked back to training programs to ensure that the latter are dynamic, relevant, and well suited to the needs of students, communities, and organisations. properly equipped, cp graduates will continue to make meaningful contributions toward social justice in their professional lives and in their communities, wherever they may be. references aubry, t., sylvestre, j. & ecker, j. (2010). community psychology training in canada in the new millenium. canadian psychology, 51 (2), 8995. chun, m., (2009). a rewarding community psychology practice in state government. global journal of community psychology practice, 1(1), 1320. retrieved 08 march 2010 from www.gjcpp.org. dalton, j. & julian, d. (2009). infusing community practice into graduate training: broadening the conversation. editor’s introduction, the community psychologist, 42 (4), 9-10. dziadkowiec, o., & jimenez, t. (2009). educating community psychologist for community practice: a survey of graduate training programs. the community psychologist, 42 (4), 10-17. fayter, r., adamson, k., beaulac, j., macé, c. (2010). collaboratively envisioning the future of community psychology in canada: from talk to action. canadian psychology, 51 (2), 106-116. goldstein, m. (1998). community psychology: the career for champions. eye on psi chi. retrieved september 3, 2010 from https://www.ccsu.edu. jimenez, t. (2009). community psychology practice training: reflections from a developing community psychologist. the community psychologist, 42 (4), 22-23. kuperminc, g. (2009). commentary on educating community psychologists for community practice: a cautionary note and some directions forward. the community psychologist, 42 (4), 18-19. lavoie, f. & brunson, l. (2010). la pratique de la psychologie communautaire. canadian psychology, 51 (2), 96-105. meissen, g. (2009). being intentional about community psychology practice education. the community psychologist, 42 (4), 23. nelson, g. & aubry, t. (2010). introduction to community psychology in canada : past, present, and future, canadian psychology, 52 (2), 77-78. nelson, g. & lavoie, f. (2010). contributions of canadian community psychology. canadian psychology, 51 (2), 79-88. perkins, d. d. (2009). an introduction to community psychology. retrieved september 3, 2010 from http://vivepsicologia.org/clases/2009/lecturas_1_files /01_intro.pdf perkins, d.d. (2010). commentary: reflections on community psychology’s voyage. in g. nelson & i. prilleltensky (eds.), community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and well-being (2nd edition; pp. 530-532). hampshire, uk: palgrave macmillan. ratcliffe, a., & neigher, b. (2010). introducing community psychology. retrieved september 3, 2010 from http://www.scra27.org/practice/blogs/communitypsyc hologyvalueproposition wolff, t. (2009). a time for action: how to move forward based on the survey results. the community psychologist, 42 (4), 17-18. “there was a need in the community”: practitioners’ motivations to providing mental health services to forced migrants jordan d. snyder1, elizabeth mangini2, samantha uehlin,2 summer hunt,2 and sara l. buckingham2 keywords: forced migrants, refugees, asylees, mental health practitioners, training. author biographies: jordan d. snyder, psyd, is an assistant professor of psychology in the psychology, professional counseling, and neuroscience department at the university of wisconsin, parkside. in this role, he teaches undergraduate students in psychology and masters students in clinical mental health counseling. additionally, he directs the global community wellness lab, which seeks to serve, empower, and equip individuals and communities to answer their questions, meet their objectives, and transform their lives and communities using community-based mixed methods psychological research. he is particularly interested in working with communities traditionally underserved by clinical psychology, and in particular, communities affected by conflict. students also participate in the lab, and he enjoys the opportunity to mentor students in the research process. additionally, jordan is a licensed psychologist in the state of wisconsin. when not working, jordan enjoys reading, running, exploring the outdoors, photography, eating delicious food, and spending time with his family including his dog, winni, and rabbit, nelson. elizabeth mangini, background is in community mental health counseling, clinical psychology, and qualitative and quantitative research. another part of liz’s professional profile is her military service. currently, she holds the rank of lieutenant 1 university of wisconsin, parkside 2 university of alaska anchorage global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 colonel in the air force reserves and is the equal opportunity director for the 477th fighter group at joint base, elmendorf-richardson. liz joined the center for alaska native health research and helped establish the military health and readiness consortium to further understand and address suicide among military service members in alaska and beyond. her role at canhr is to help the consortium develop, implement, and assess an effective suicide prevention program for service members assigned to rural and remote areas. currently, the consortium is partnering with members of the alaska defense community to develop pilot interventions for leadership to take a primary prevention approach to reduce suicide risk and other harmful behaviors while increasing the unit’s ability to perform their primary mission. in addition to her role with the mihrc, she is in her 4th year of the clinical psychology doctoral program at fielding graduate university. additionally, she is a behavioral health consultant at southcentral foundation where her team integrates culturally congruent behavioral health into primary care, ensuring that customer-owners receive comprehensive care that addresses their mental, physical, emotional and spiritual needs. liz is grateful to live in eagle river, alaska with her husband, will, and their three daughters. samantha uehlin, ma, is a licensed professional counselor currently practicing at a group practice in portland, oregon. she holds a master’s degree in clinical psychology from the university of alaska anchorage (uaa). samantha has three years of experience working in a rural alaskan community, where she developed a strong understanding of diverse mental health needs. in her current role, she serves a broad range of community members, including first and second generation immigrants, with a focus on providing culturally sensitive and inclusive care. samantha is dedicated to fostering a welcoming environment for her clients and is passionate about addressing the unique challenges faced by marginalized communities. she is honored to live and work on the ancestral lands of the multnomah, wasco, cowlitz, kathlamet, clackamas, bands of chinook, tualatin kalapuya, and molalla tribes. outside of her professional pursuits, samantha enjoys reading and exploring the beautiful landscapes of the pacific http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 northwest with her two dogs. summer hunt, is a zealous and passionate provider with over five years of experience providing community mental health services. currently serving as a training and development specialist at the arizona department of economic security, summer crafts and presents a comprehensive training curriculum to enhance employee skills and maximize performance initiatives. throughout her career, she has specialized in providing comprehensive services in various healthcare settings. conducting clinical assessments, developing individualized treatment plans, creating informative presentations at conferences, and facilitating therapeutic groups are some services summer has mastered. her expertise includes serving diverse populations and collaborating with multidisciplinary teams to ensure the implementation of holistic clientcentered care in every setting. as a research assistant with working alongside refugees in mental health (warm) at the university of alaska anchorage (uaa), summer contributed to the mission of investigating forced migrants’ access to mental health resources and barriers providers face in serving this population. she continues to prioritize her commitment to mental health advocacy by spending her free time volunteering as a lead presenter for the ending the silence program at the national alliance on mental illness (nami.) there, she delivers evidence-based presentations addressing mental health stigma to middle and high school students. summer has a bachelor of science degree in psychology from uaa, where she was recognized on both the chancellor's and dean's lists. outside of her professional endeavors, she enjoys practicing yoga with her cats and cooking korean american fusion cuisine with her partner. sara buckingham, phd, is an associate professor of psychology and codirector of the center for community engagement and learning at the university of alaska anchorage (uaa), which facilitates community-engaged research, creative activities, teaching, and service through reciprocal partnerships between the university and the communities in which it is embedded. she is core faculty in a clinicalcommunity psychology phd program, where she teaches, mentors students, and leads the crossroads research collective, a community-engaged research-action team that http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 partners with communities to answer critical questions of interest to them to catalyze action. broadly, our work centers on how communities and their members shape acculturation, resilience, sense of community, and well-being among newcomer and indigenous community members. sara is a licensed psychologist and has a small private practice through which she provides culturally responsive assessment and intervention services for forced migrant community members, including asylum-seekers and refugees. nationally, she serves as the representative of the society for community research and action to the legislative body of the american psychological association and is the early career psychologist on its council leadership team. sara also serves on the board of directors of the global alliance for behavioral health and social justice. sara is thankful to live on dena’ina lands in alaska and when not working, she can most often be found outside playing in the mountains with her husband and dogs. recommended citation: snyder, j. d., mangini, e., uehlin, s., hunt, s., & buckingham, s. l. (2025). “there was a need in the community”: practitioners’ motivations to providing mental health services to forced migrants. global journal of community psychology practice, 16(1), 1 21. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: jordan d. snyder, email: snyderj@uwp.edu; 900 wood road, kenosha, wi 53141-2000, phone: (262) 595-2480. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:snyderj@uwp.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 “there was a need in the community”: practitioners’ motivations to providing mental health services to forced migrants abstract millions of individuals around the globe have been displaced from their countries due to disasters, including persecution, war, disease, famine, and weather events. many forced migrants (fms) experience mental health concerns that warrant treatment but often face significant barriers to care, including a limited pool of mental health practitioners (mhps) who are competent, willing, and able to serve them. in alaska, the working alongside refugees in mental health (warm) program was developed to address this need. after conducting the first warm workshop, our team sought to understand how mhps in alaska are recruited and retained in working with forced migrants to further develop and maintain our program. we examined mhps’ motivations to work with fms through 13 qualitative semi-structured interviews with mhps who engage in such work. experiences with fms and awareness of fms in their communities, competence, and connections with other practitioners increased mhps’ motivation and led to service delivery. community psychology is well positioned to enhance services for fms through both practitioner-level interventions and systemic interventions. strategies for increasing and sustaining mhps’ motivations to work with fms include: forming connections with other mhps and trusted individuals and organizations, increasing competence to work with fms via specialized training networks, integrating experiences working with fms into training programs, and engaging in advocacy to address systems-level barriers to care. in 2018, a group of researchers, students, and practitioners came together to form working alongside refugees in mental health (warm). via an innovative practitioner network, warm seeks to increase the availability of linguistically appropriate, culturally sensitive, and evidence-based mental healthcare for forced migrants across the state of alaska (snyder et al., 2019). warm began through a community-academic partnership between refugee assistance and immigration services (rais) and the university of alaska anchorage. while forced migration had been continuously growing in alaska for decades and is associated with a myriad of mental health ramifications (alaska office for refugees, 2024; blackmore et al., 2020), there was a dearth of quality mental health services for forced migrants (fms; robinson, 2015). mental health practitioners (mhps) in the area had previously reported not feeling competent and confident in their ability to serve fms (robinson, 2015). forced migration and mental health fms are people who have been forced to flee their countries due to human-caused and natural disasters (united nations high commissioner for refugees [unhcr], 2021). in 2020, approximately 34.4 million people were externally displaced from their countries. among these, 26.4 million were refugees while another 4.1 million are http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 asylum-seekers (unhcr, 2021). often, war is a cause of forced migration. since february 2022, over 6 million individuals have fled ukraine to other places in europe, some of whom who have been admitted to the united states (u.s.; unhcr, 2022). since 1980, the u.s. has resettled between 11,411 and 207,116 refugees each year and has received hundreds of thousands of applications for asylum (unhcr, 2021). fms are exposed to many stressors before, during, and after migration, including war, persecution, lack of basic necessities, daily stressors, and post-migration living challenges (bogic et al., 2015; chen et al., 2017; li et al., 2016). fms also demonstrate considerable resilience, often rooted in cultural assets (e.g., religious beliefs and practices, traditional food and medicine, and sharing and interconnectedness; lightfoot et al., 2016). however, the stressors fms face are related to higher rates of adverse mental health outcomes, including posttraumatic stress, depression, anxiety, and somatic disorders (blackmore et al., 2020; bogic et al., 2015; chen et al., 2017; li et al., 2016). to address these mental health needs, fms need access to high quality evidence-based mental healthcare. despite the need for mental healthcare, fms face many barriers to quality care, including practical, structural, cultural, social, linguistic, and psychological barriers (asgary & segar, 2011; bartolomei et al., 2016; byrow et al., 2020; colucci et al., 2015; priebe et al., 2011; sandhu et al., 2013; satinsky et al., 2019). two of the more common barriers to quality mental healthcare include language barriers (e.g., mhps don’t speak language of fm or there are not adequate interpretation services available; asgary & segar, 2011; byrow et al., 2020; colucci et al., 2015; sandhu et al., 2013) and cultural barriers (e.g., mhps don’t understand cultural background of fm, different views of mental health due to culture; asgary & segar, 2011; byrow et al., 2020; colucci et al., 2015; sandhu et al., 2013). additionally, mhps also report significant barriers to providing services, such as administrative, agency, and personal difficulties, along with limited training and supervision (colucci et al., 2015). likely as a result of these barriers, far too few mhps provide mental healthcare to fms around the united states, including in alaska (american psychological association, 2010; robinson, 2015). to increase the availability of culturally congruent, linguistically appropriate, and evidence-based mental healthcare to fms, warm was developed, modeled after a number of referral networks that serve fms across the united states (e.g., intercultural counseling connection). in its first iteration, warm consisted of psychoeducation and skillbuilding workshops (e.g., understanding the resettlement process, working with interpreters, fundamentals of mental healthcare with fms), practical resources (e.g., funding for interpretation services), and psychosocial and community supports for mhps (e.g., a practitioner network). forced migration in alaska alaska presents a unique context for mental healthcare due to its large land mass, few urban centers, and many remote rural communities that can only be accessed by air or boat. mhps are often located in urban centers, although some travel to rural communities to provide services. the experiences of alaska’s fm population are likely unique, as – at the time this project was developed – the state’s sole refugee resettlement agency was located in anchorage, the largest city (population of roughly 300,000), but resettled refugees all over the state, including in smaller rural http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.interculturalcounseling.org/ https://www.interculturalcounseling.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 communities. with the war in ukraine and uptick in populations served by the federal refugee public-private partnership, refugee resettlement in alaska has since grown. in its first 20 years, catholic social services refugee assistance and immigration services (rais), had resettled over 1,400 refugees to alaska from over 18 countries (refugee processing center, 2022). moreover, people have fled their countries, often but not always from mexico and central america, to seek asylum in alaska. approximately 7.8% of the alaska residents were born in another country, and many meet the definition of fms (united states census bureau, 2021). in 2015, communitybased researchers partnered with rais and conducted a needs assessment with informants from community-based organizations and refugees (robinson, 2015). robinson (2015) identified specific barriers to mental health care in alaska included mhps lack of training to work with refugees, to work cross-culturally, and to work with interpreters. building from a foundation of community partnership and empowering settings (dalton & wolfe, 2012), the warm project sought to support mhps in their work with fms. specifically, we developed and implemented programming (e.g., workshops) and practical and psychosocial resources (e.g., interpretation services, a practitioner network) to increase the availability of culturally congruent, linguistically appropriate, and evidenced based mental health care for fms in alaska. a ‘foundations’ workshop covering the fundamentals of the refugee process (and the process as it pertains to alaska) as well as fundamentals of mental healthcare for refugees was held in january 2019, with mhps from all over the state in attendance. attendees ranged from graduate students to seasoned professionals across fields, including psychology, counseling, and social work. after this first workshop, mhps reported more competence, interest, and confidence in working with forced migrants (snyder et al., 2019). despite these positive outcomes, we did not know how mhps were recruited and retained in working with forced migrants in spite of the barriers they faced. previous literature reported many possible motivating factors for mhps working with forced migrants. some studies had noted that personal experiences with migration and/or fms are important motivating influences for mhps work (baranowski et al., 2018; baranowski & smith, 2018; mishori et al., 2016; schonholz et al., 2020). personal motivations, include interactions that are personally meaningful (mishori et al., 2016), inspiring (schonholz et al., 2020), or valueconsistent, also appeared to sustain mhps’ work (baranowski et al., 2018). finally, past studies illustrated that mhps also report doing this work due to prosocial motivations, including wanting to serve victims of human rights abuses (baranowski et al., 2018) or a duty to serve others (mishori et al., 2016; schonholz et al., 2020). u.s.-based work has focused on students (dussán et al., 2009; schonholz et al., 2020), or practitioners providing evaluations to asylum seekers (baranowski et al., 2018; mishori et al., 2016) and undocumented immigrants (baranowski & smith, 2018). as such, we sought to understand how mhps in alaska were recruited and retained in working with fms to inform how we could best develop and sustain warm. current study to better understand how mhps are recruited and retained in this work, this study sought to understand mhps’ http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 motivations to work with fms in alaska. alaska-based mhps likely have distinct experiences compared to those in other states and countries, given that the u.s. does not have a national healthcare system, many mhps deliver services through private practices, and the geography of alaska (i.e., most mhps are in urban centers while fms can be found throughout alaska, including in smaller rural communities; hamp et al., 2016). our qualitative study sought to answer the question: what motivates mhps to initially seek to provide mental healthcare to fms and what sustains them in this work? method an email invitation was sent to mental health listservs in alaska asking for interested individuals to contact the first author. to participate in this study, mhps needed to meet the following inclusion criteria: 1) self-identify as an mhp, 2) be over age 18, 3) be proficient in english, and 4) have experience providing mental healthcare to at least one fm. thirteen mhps participated (see table 1). of these, 77% (n=10) were female, 77% (n=10) were white, and 92% (n= 12) had a least a master’s degree. only 58% (n=7) of participants disclosed their age; of these, the average age was 36.1 years (sd = 7.5 years). mhps reported serving between one and over 200 fms throughout their careers; the median number of refugees served by mhps was 40. the semi-structured interviews each lasted 25 to 40 minutes (m = 34.62 minutes, sd =7.78 minutes) and were completed during june and july of 2019 via zoom. interviewers obtained informed consent, discussed incentives (a $25 gift card), and answered questions mhps had before beginning the interview. mhps chose pseudonyms for confidentiality. interviews were audio recorded, transcribed verbatim, and checked for accuracy. identifying information was removed. this study was deemed exempt from review by the university of alaska anchorage institutional review board. table 1 demographic characteristics (n = 13) n (%) gender identity female 10 (76.9%) male 3 (23.1%) race and/or ethnicity white 10 (76.9%) asian/asian american 1 (7.7%) latinx 1 (7.7%) mixed ethnicity 1 (7.7%) highest level of education attained phd/psyd 5 (38.5%) ma/ms/mft/msw 7 (53.8%) ba/bs/bsw 1 (7.7%) occupation psychologist 5 (38.5%) therapist 5 (38.5%) student 3 (23.1%) measure an interview guide consisting of openended questions about mhps’ experiences providing mental health services to fms was developed by the research team and guided the interviews. topics included how mhps had worked with fms in the past, challenges and successes they experienced in the work, and what practitioners would like from future warm trainings. for example, mhps were asked, “what interests you in working clinically with fms, like refugees, asylees, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 and asylum-seekers?” the semi-structured protocol allowed interviewers to ask clarifying questions, probe for more information, and follow up on emerging patterns from previous interviews. memberchecking was conducted during the interviews, with the interviewer stating back what they understood for confirmation or clarification. participants were asked direct questions about their demographic characteristics at the end of the interview. analysis data were analyzed via team-based thematic analysis with an inductive research strategy in which themes were identified, analyzed, organized, described, and reported from the data without a priori hypotheses about what may be discovered (braun & clarke, 2006; brodsky et al., 2016; nowell et al., 2017). the research team conducted open coding to generate thematic categories from the data. consensus on codes and definitions was built through a team approach and a codebook was generated with names of codes, definitions, and examples of code application. the resulting framework was applied to all transcripts, with focused coding completed by the first and second author independently for each transcript. the last author then reviewed and compared independent coding and determined the appropriate code(s) based on the codebook and in consultation with the coders in the few cases in which coding diverged (brodsky et al., 2016). once all transcripts were coded, the research team analyzed the codes to begin to develop themes according to patterns that arose from the data. after broad themes were developed from the data by consensus from the full research team, they were expounded upon by members of the research team through continued analysis of the relevant coded transcripts. saturation was determined by no new codes arising and when interviews did not extend, modify, or generate new findings. saturation was reached at the ninth interview and themes were robust across interviews (see table 2). results despite barriers they faced to providing quality services and engaging fm clients in treatment, all mhps described strong motivations to serve fms. mhps highlighted the importance of experiences in cultivating awareness of fms, their needs, and barriers they faced to mental health care as well as knowledge of evidenced-based treatment care healthcare systems. these, in turn, cultivated extrinsic, prosocial, and intrinsic motivations, which appeared to facilitate mhps’ actions to serve fms. mhps highlighted the mutual influence of connections with other mhps and people across disciplines on their experiences as well as on their awareness and knowledge. finally, their narratives revealed that the more experience they had working with fms, the more awareness, competence, and motivation they developed. we discuss these themes below. table 2 themes, subthemes, and cases theme subtheme cases (n=13) connections 9 with other mhps who serve fms 9 experiences 13 formal training 8 community experiences 5 lived experiences 3 awareness 13 of barriers to mental health care for fms 13 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 of fm population in community 8 of mental health care needs of fms 10 motivations 13 intrinsic 7 extrinsic 5 prosocial 8 competence 13 synchronous education opportunities and trainings 13 asynchronous knowledge resources 7 practical experience providing mental health services 13 supervision 6 connections connections with other mhps, healthcare professionals, and people in other fields were often explained as the primary context for developing and sustaining motivations to serve fms. jenny3 described how connections with other practitioners led her to experiences and a burgeoning awareness of fms in her community: “the director of the [refugee resettlement program] ... came into one of my psychology groups and i was just like ‘oh, wow,’ like, i didn’t even realize [refugees] were here. … [she said] they could use volunteers, so i actually ended up going and volunteering.” catherine noted that one such connection drew out her motivation for working with refugees: 3 this and all names as pseudonyms chosen by the mhps. “about 3 or 4 years into that position [a school counselor], the district created … a position for a refugee liaison for the school district to work with the resettlement agency… i worked really closely with the former refugee liaison and just got to know the refugee families and so then three years ago when she retired i came into that position.” a therapist, alias, described how connections to other mhps provided a collaborative context that helped mhps sustain their motivation and resulted in better care for fms: “[new mhp] is here now and she speaks spanish, which is just a godsend. but in the past, it wasn’t like i could refer to someone else to do the therapy [when i was conducting a psychological evaluation for asylum]. and, that’s just a huge shift. it’s just great to be able to work with [a client] who is seeing a therapist, so you know [mental health treatment] has been taken care of. you are just having a forensic role.” building the connections amongst mhps not only helped serve fms more effectively, but also helped mhps develop awareness and address barriers, as abby noted: “no one person necessarily holds all the answers. so, i think creating a community … that can come together and really think about and try to solve some of these issues. … i am so glad people in our community are curious about [improving mental healthcare access for fms] and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 working on that and trying to address that need.” connections not only often provided mhps their first experiences with fms that cultivated their awareness and developed their competence, but also developed and helped sustain their motivation to provide mental health services to fms. experiences mhps reported a variety of experiences – formal training, community experiences, and shared life experiences – that contributed to them coming to work with fms. formal training often served as an entry into working with fms, as christine explained, “when i was doing my initial practicum in my program through the university setting, i had the opportunity to work with a refugee family.” such training served as a way to build knowledge and skills for those who were previously interested, as abby illustrated, “i didn’t work with fms before internship [where i served fms]. i had interest in working with refugees before coming to alaska because of everything that was going on in the world.” experiences did not have to be directly related to mental health to foster awareness and motivation; rather, they extended to other community experiences. some mhps, such as jenny, worked with fms in community settings, which fostered motivation to serve fms as mhps: “i volunteered [with fms] so you know, help teach english, and job readiness skills.” other mhps noted that some type of lived experience, be it their own or in their family’s history, contributed to their desire to work with fms. alias explained, “my parents were fms, post-world war ii. so, that’s probably where it starts, where my interest starts, my draw to that particular population.” mickey’s shared experiences developed his awareness: “being [an] immigrant…when i came to united states about 10 years ago, i faced similar challenging when i was trying to assimilate to the american culture.” awareness the variety of experiences led to an increased awareness of the presence of fms in their communities as well as a realization of the barriers to mental healthcare they face. jenny came to understand barriers to healthcare access through her volunteering: “i was just like calling agencies to ask about [if] they took medicaid. … to see if they provided interpretation … and there was just not much going on out there. … it was just kind of an experience where i was like holy cow, there is so limited access, like this is a group that could be helped.” ultimately, for jenny this resulted in increased exposure and developing further awareness, “the more … you work with that population, i feel like for me at least, the more you wanted to work with them and help. … there just seemed like there was a need in the community.” developing awareness of the population and needs was a driving force behind mhps’ motivation to serve fms, such as christine, “we have a large need for … [working with fms]. … we are one of the few main resettlement sites. … we have a very diverse population here.” motivations mhps described several types of motivations – intrinsic, extrinsic, and prosocial – that drove them to serve fms. r explained her intrinsic motivation, “[it] made me feel pretty fulfilled. i thought that i was doing a pretty good service to someone http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 that was going through such a cultural shock, and a lot of other things.” abby similarly commented that she gets personal satisfaction from this work: “i really enjoy this kind of work and i feel like it really resonates with me and my values. it can take a lot of energy, it can take using different parts of your brain, or different cognitive skills. i think that it is really important, and it is work that i definitely enjoy.” mhps also reported providing mental healthcare due to extrinsic motivations, often related to training requirements. many students are required to participate in training experiences, and may often see fms clients through these experiences, as jenny noted, “when i was [in graduate school] as a masters level student in their clinic, i saw a congolese refugee there.” supervisors provided a key role in mhps’ extrinsic motivation. r shared: “[my supervisor] was able to help me with just how uncomfortable i was with the interpreter being there, that phone just like sitting there. i was very … anxious the first couple of sessions. … i messed up the first couple of times and [my supervisor] was just very … understanding and really nice about it and encouraging.” although mhps may have been extrinsically motivated at first, working with fms to meet training requirements, these motivators provided experience that help develop experiences and awareness that set the stage for further motivation. finally, prosocial motivation facilitated work with fms. jan explained, “i think it’s really important that we care for people in our community and we care for this population in a very thoughtful, kind supportive manner. we work very hard to do that.” a psychologist, m, noted, “i had interest in working with refugees before coming to alaska because of everything that was going on in the world. i saw terrible things going on in the world and wanted to help in some way.” in sum, diverse motivations set the stage for mhps to become involved mental healthcare for fms. competence motivation alone was not sufficient for mhps to serve fms. building knowledge and skills helped mhps feel better prepared to serve fms. mhps consistently reported that training was critical, with christine’s sentiment of, “[serving fms] aligns with my training,” echoed by many. mickey shared about how training affected his views: “now, when [i work with fms], i feel, even though i don’t speak the same language, i will feel more confident to use the clinical skills that i came in with the last 10 years, to help, to do the best i can, to offer the best services [i can].” competence could come from a variety of sources. resources that promoted knowledge were helpful to many mhps, like r: “[my supervisor] sent me this one website where you could type in the name of a country and it described what was going on in the country at that certain time. … because that is important to know what is happening there, and their families might still be there. … it is semi helpful going into it knowing what to expect when they talk about things.” another critical source of competence was practical training and supervision, mickey http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 explained: “[my supervisor] helped me to find a lot of research [that] talked about, modifying cbt approach to help with this kind of population that comes from different cultural background. as a kind of a newbie, very green in that field, that definitely helped me to be more flexible, helped me to be understand that we should not always follow strictly our dsm-iv-tr, or now the dsm-v, to diagnose their symptoms. sometimes we need to take into effect their cultural background and how to modify the treatment approach.” while many mhps cited competence in knowledge and skills as leading to serving fms, others explained that they need to further develop their competence to work with fms. abby explained, “i am fortunate to have good supervision support around these issues but [i] would love more training for sure.” competence development perpetual for many. jenny remarked: “i would like to [serve fms] once i am licensed because that is an area of interest. i would like to help out the community. … but i think i would be lacking the nuts and bolts of some of that stuff. it would be really nice to have [more training].” discussion mhps described a rich process that led to working with fms, consisting of personal experiences that built their awareness and developed their motivations. echoing past work on practitioners working with fms due to personal experiences (baranowski et al., 2018; baranowski & smith, 2018; mishori et al., 2016; schonholz et al., 2020), mhps noted that their own experiences, personally and professionally, shaped their awareness of fms and their unique challenges. connections with other practitioners facilitated experiences and awareness; such connections have been found to help facilitate medical student involvement in programs that served fms (schonholz et al., 2020) and to help facilitate medical practitioner interest in conducting asylum evaluations (mishori et al., 2016). this web of experiences, connections, and awareness developed motivation for serving fms. mhps described several motivations – intrinsic, extrinsic, and prosocial – for working with fms consistent with extant literature (baranowski et al., 2018; baranowski & smith, 2018; mishori et al., 2016; schonholz et al., 2020). although mhps may have begun working with fms because they were required to by their settings, many reported continuing because their experiences were rewarding personally and because they were able to serve others. mhps frequently spoke to extrinsic motivators present in training but described intrinsic and prosocial motivation sustaining their work. connections with other practitioners served as the context in which many mhps developed their experiences, awareness, motivations, and competence to serve fms. these connections may serve to foster initial experiences with fms, and they may also be critical to shift practitioners’ extrinsic motivations to intrinsic motivations over time while also sustaining mhps in their work with fm. despite this rich process surrounding mhps’ motivations for working with fms, there remain considerable barriers to fms receiving linguistically appropriate, culturally congruent, evidence-based mental healthcare. fms may experience http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 barriers with individual mhps (e.g., practitioner cultural incompetence, linguistic barriers), the healthcare system in general (e.g., cost of care, limited options due to care reimbursement, service language and interpretation), stigma, and systemic-level issues such as discrimination or social exclusion (baranowski et al., 2018; byrow et al., 2020). mhps also experience limitations in their abilities to provide services to fms due to limited training and supervision and limited time to offer reduced-fee or pro-bono care to fms without insurance (apa, 2010; byrow et al., 2020). while not this paper’s focus, indeed, mhps in our sample echoed these challenges; intervention in these areas is critical. understanding mhps’ motivations, including what develops and sustains them, to work with fms may help to address some of the disparities in fms’ mental healthcare utilization and yet larger systemic changes are likely needed to make services fully accessible. implications and applications as the competencies for community psychology practice have guided the foundation and implementation of warm, they are well-suited to guide interventions to increase the availability and utilization of quality mental health care for forced migrants (dalton & wolfe, 2012). for instance, this problem is best viewed from an ecological perspective, with multiple levels of analysis (and thus intervention), including individual mhp (e.g., skills, knowledge, and attitudes) and fm levels (e.g., attitudes towards mental health care). examples of mhp skills and knowledge include knowledge of the various migration pathways and processes, ability to work with interpreters, and skills in culturally adapting evidence-based interventions. mhps’ attitudes include their confidence in abilities to provide services to fms while individual fm level variables could include distrust towards mental health care systems and knowledge related of mental health care. another level could be organizational for mhps (e.g., organizational support for working with forced migrants) and community for fms (e.g., reception context, resources in the community). for instance, mhps’ organizations could provide requisite infrastructure for working with fms like interpretation services and administrative support, while the community-level factors for fms could include discrimination at the community level and availability of community-based support (e.g., school-based mental health programming for fms). finally, there are broader systemic issues for both mhps and fms which include national and state or provincial policy related to fms and provision of mental health care (e.g., insurance reimbursement) as well as the broader systemic attitude towards fms in the host country. interventions should be targeted towards these multiple levels. findings from this study indicate particular ways in which community psychologists could intervene in their own communities to increase the amount of mhps able and willing to work with fms. for instance, community psychologists can work to build diverse coalitions of community members and organizations to empower them in identifying strengths and assets of their own communities (dalton & wolfe, 2012). our findings indicate that connections are critical for recruiting and sustaining mhps in work with forced migrants. psychologists and other mhps play vital roles in creating networks consisting of individuals and organizations across disciplines and roles. for instance, mhps may be able to develop relationships with other professionals who work with fms regularly (e.g., individuals working at the local refugee resettlement http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 agency or state refugee coordinators) to better understand the needs of fms within their communities. psychologists and other mhps seeking to promote fm mental health can start by identifying which organizations and practitioners within their communities conduct refugee health screenings, as they will find medical professionals who routinely work with fms. these connections may also serve to develop awareness of issues for fms and motivation for mhps to work with fms clinically. providing ancillary direct services, such as helping provide transportation for fms to their medical appointments and addressing other practical barriers to care, are vital – and yet often overlooked – ways of supporting mental health (baranowski & smith, 2018). furthermore, integrating mhps into networks that work in close collaboration with trusted organizations and individuals (e.g., cultural navigators, refugee resettlement agencies) may serve to boost fms’ trust in mhps and provide mhps the connections they need to develop experience and awareness (baranowski & smith, 2018). these diverse coalitions could also engage in program development and resource development within their own communities (dalton & wolfe, 2012). for instance, coalitions could provide training programs to mhps in their own communities (e.g., snyder et al., 2019). these specialized networks that can provide training to mhps would also foster connections between mhps (baranowski et al., 2018). these coalitions could also partner with mhp graduate training programs to provide initial experiences to more mhps that can be mental health related (e.g., a clinical practicum) or not directly related to mental health (e.g., helping a fms acclimate to the community), as our results suggest that motivation from a developing awareness and connections can come from a broad array of experiences (baranowski et al., 2018; mishori et al., 2016; schonholz et al., 2020). for example, one program, connecting cultures, offers training and supervision to graduate students in psychology to help them to learn to serve refugees with evidence-based practice and culturally sensitive framework (fondacaro & harder, 2015). these training opportunities may also serve the training program in its ability to train a workforce that is competent to work with diverse, multicultural populations (apa, 2010). another way in which mhps may foster connections is by developing ongoing consultation groups in which practitioners can connect with other practitioners, bring complex clinical cases for discussion, and receive peer consultation from practitioners (baranowski et al., 2018). such groups could serve to enforce skills and knowledge necessary for mhps to provide linguistically-appropriate, culturally-congruent, and evidence-based care to fms. consultation groups may be especially important for mhps practicing in isolation (i.e., private practice; baranowski et al., 2018). interested practitioners could start by reaching out to their professional colleagues within their community to see if they are interested in forming a group centered around fms’ mental health needs. practicing psychologists, for example, could also contact practitioners within their state via their local state or territorial psychological association. state or territorial psychological associations could create fms interest groups that seek to help that specific state or territorial mhps address fms issues. many of these approaches may prove http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 especially beneficial for targeting practitioner or individual-level barriers, but barriers may remain at the organizational or systemic level (e.g., asgary & segar, 2011; baranowski et al., 2018). systemic barriers include medicaid eligibility, language and interpretation services, mental healthcare system navigation, financial difficulties, housing issues, lack of transportation (asgary & segar, 2011; baranowski et al., 2018; baranowski & smith, 2018; byrow et al., 2020). all of these barriers were echoed by mhps in this sample. intervention at an organizational level could include encouraging public and private entities offering funding to mhps who see clients who do not have access to insurance to defray the costs involved in providing mental healthcare (baranowski et al., 2018). intervening at a broader level may be critical to address these serious barriers that fms face to care (apa, 2010). expanding medicaid and increasing access to affordable housing and job opportunities may all be important areas to target for fms (asgary & segar, 2011). mhps could also intervene by advocating at the local, state, and national level to influence systems and policies to enable more socially-just practices with forced migrant communities (baranowski et al., 2018; baranowski & smith, 2018; dalton & wolfe, 2012). limitations given the methods employed, this study is not able to determine causality. the responses of mhps may have been affected by the follow up questions, which varied based upon the specific conversation. however, through our interviews, it seemed as though mhps were offering their honest feedback. study personnel backgrounds may have affected data analysis, although a diverse team with unique perspectives conducted analyses to limit this. this study included both professionals and trainees who have differing levels of training. another limitation of the study is the variability in mhps training and experience serving fms, as mhps who participated had various levels of training which may have resulted in different motivations for working with fms. mhps selfselected to participate, and so those who participated may be especially motivated to work with fms. our study results may also have some limitations of application due to the uniqueness of the context of alaska (i.e., mhps tend to be focused in one urban setting, while fms tend to be spread out across alaska, including in smaller rural areas). finally, the term “forced migrant” encompasses a wide range of cultural groups and experiences, and so future research is needed to understand barriers for specific populations. future directions and conclusion in spite of the significant barriers practitioners face providing mental health care to fms, practitioners make efforts to serve fm clients, citing a diverse set of reasons, motivations, and circumstances that promote and sustain their work. mhps’ experiences appear to bolster their awareness of fms’ mental health issues, which serves to increase motivation to work with fms. connections with other practitioners are essential to fostering these experiences and awareness. further investigation of mhps’ motivations to work with fms may lead to innovative techniques to continue to develop mental health practitioner networks that can work with fms. continued examination of the processes that contribute to motivation in real-time might be considered (e.g., following trainees in their experiences with fms longitudinally) to examine causality and limit the influence of retrospective recall. another potential research avenue http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 could be learning more from mhps who do not currently serve fms, and the barriers they see as preventing them from working with fms. understanding their perceptions of barriers could prove beneficial in developing interventions so that they work with fms in the future. our results are promising, as they suggest that there are diverse ways in which we can develop mhps’ motivations to work with fms to address the dearth of mental health services for this population. additionally, since this study focused on the perspectives of mhps, additional research should look at what fm’s perspectives on quality mental health services. community psychology is a promising approach to address the dearth of mhps able and willing to provide culturally congruent, linguistically appropriate, and evidence-based mental healthcare to fms. warm can serve as a potential communitybased model for training opportunities that capitalize upon the results of this study to address this need. since the initial workshop and this further assessment, warm delivered additional in-person workshops and offered sponsorship to national and international online trainings to respond to the opportunities that arose during the pandemic. specific trainings or workshops that can be valuable to mhps eager to engage in this space include: fundamentals of the resettlement and immigration process and fm mental health, working with interpreters in mental health, and evidence-based therapies directly developed with and for fms like narrative exposure therapy (net). while trainings foster awareness of fm issues and competence in working with fms, these workshops also serve to facilitate connections between mhps and other groups working with fms, which can also be beneficial in recruiting and retaining mhps in this work. additionally, warm has helped to match fms with qualified mhps and, via community grant funding, provide interpretation for the duration of services as needed. this serves to help provide mhps with direct experiences of providing services to fms. by providing these trainings, connections, and experiences working with fms, the warm program also serves to increase mhp motivation to work with fms. recognizing the need for sustaining the work of warm, the alaska office for refugees created a new full-time position for a state refugee mental health manager, with the director of warm serving on its search committee. while all states that participate in refugee resettlement have health coordinators, alaska is unique in having a position dedicated specifically to mental health, especially given its comparably small population. in 20232024, the office held its first echo (extension for community healthcare outcomes), a collaborative tele-mentoring model designed to enhance knowledge sharing and capacity building among practitioners. echo follows a hub-andspoke model where specialists (the hub) provide ongoing guidance, education, and case-based learning with local practitioners (the spokes) through virtual sessions. six sessions were offered in the refugee mental health echo: refugee 101; working with interpreters; common problems, diagnoses, and impacts of covid on refugees; assessment; evidence-based practices and psychopharmacological interventions; and, completing the n648 and oath wavers. as sustaining practitioners is vital – perhaps even more important than bringing new mhps into the network – from there, the team moved to creating a “communities of care” practitioner consultation network in 2024http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 2025. this network includes mhps from the primary clinics that serve fms in anchorage (two integrated primary care clinics that provide refugee health screenings and training clinic associated with the psychology graduate programs at the university of alaska anchorage). warm will continue to be guided by the community psychology practice competencies (dalton & wolfe, 2012) as it seeks to empower mhps to provide linguistically appropriate, culturally sensitive, and evidence-based mental healthcare to fms in alaska. as needs change and resources shift, warm can serve as a model for other communities interested in increasing the number of mhps able to provide linguistically appropriate, culturally sensitive, and evidence-based mental healthcare to fms by addressing awareness, experiences, competence, motivations, and connections of mhps. references alaska office for refugees. 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(2015). alaska refugee needs assessment. university of alaska anchorage. sandhu, s., bjerre, n. v., dauvrin, m., dias, s., gaddini, a., greacen, t., ioannidis, e., kluge, u., jensen, n. k., lamkaddem, m., puigpinós i riera, r., kósa, z., wihlman, u., stankunas, m., straßmayr, c., wahlbeck, k., welbel, m., & priebe, s. (2013). experiences with treating immigrants: a qualitative study in mental health services across 16 european countries. social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 48(1), 105–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127012-0528-3 satinsky, e., fuhr, d. c., woodward, a., sondorp, e., & roberts, b. (2019). mental health care utilisation and access among refugees and asylum seekers in europe: a systematic review. health policy, 123(9), 851– 863. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthp ol.2019.02.007 saunders, b., sim, j., kingstone, t., baker, s., waterfield, j., bartlam, b., burroughs, h., & jinks, c. (2018). saturation in http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1007/s11920-016-0723-0 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11920-016-0723-0 https://doi.org/10.1353/hpu.2016.0023 https://doi.org/10.1353/hpu.2016.0023 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10903-014-0144-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10903-014-0144-2 https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406917733847 https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406917733847 https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-11-187 https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-11-187 http://www.wrapsnet.org/admissions-and-arrivals/ http://www.wrapsnet.org/admissions-and-arrivals/ https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-012-0528-3 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-012-0528-3 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2019.02.007 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2019.02.007 global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 qualitative research: exploring its conceptualization and operationalization. quality and quantity, 52(4), 1893–1907. https://doi.org/10.1007/s1113 5-017-0574-8 schonholz, s. m., edens, m. c., epié, a. y., kligler, s. k., baranowski, k. a., & singer, e. k. (2020). medical student involvement in a human rights program: impact on student development and career vision. annals of global health, 86(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.5334/aogh.294 0 snyder, j., skirko, s., golden, d., gat, n., buckingham, s. l., & spatrisano, i. (2019). working alongside refugees in mental health. the community psychologist, 52(2), 35–37. united nations high commissioner for refugees. (2021). global trends in forced displacement – 2020. https://www.unhcr.org/60b638e3 7/unhcr-global-trends-2020 united states census bureau. (2021). 2020 acs 1-year experimental data tables. https://www.census.gov/programssurveys/acs/data/experimentaldata/1-year.html acknowledgments this research was funded by the university of alaska anchorage’s center for community engagement and learning (ccel) and the college of arts and sciences (cas). we are grateful to the respondents for their willingness to entrust us with their perspectives about working with forced migrants. we hope that the information gleaned from their experiences will help others in serving forced migrants around the world. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-017-0574-8 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-017-0574-8 https://doi.org/10.5334/aogh.2940 https://doi.org/10.5334/aogh.2940 https://www.unhcr.org/60b638e37/unhcr-global-trends-2020 https://www.unhcr.org/60b638e37/unhcr-global-trends-2020 http://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/data/experimental-data/1-year.html http://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/data/experimental-data/1-year.html http://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/data/experimental-data/1-year.html the c.a.r.e. model: dynamical systems theory principles for reintegrating individuals impacted by incarceration precious skinner-osei1 & peter claudius osei1 keywords: dynamic systems theory, recidivism, reentry, incarceration, the c.a..r.e model author biographies: precious skinner-osei, is an associate professor and bsw program coordinator at florida atlantic university’s school of social work. her scholarly work focuses on mass incarceration, reentry, recidivism, trauma, and substance use—particularly within african american communities. dr. skinner-osei is the developer of the c.a.r.e. model, a comprehensive reentry framework grounded in systems theory and designed to support justice-involved individuals as they transition back into their communities. her research agenda is deeply informed by over two decades of professional practice, community engagement, and policy advocacy. she currently serves as a senior research associate at the center for integrated recovery and wellness studies (cirws), where she leads and collaborates on several interdisciplinary projects aimed at improving reentry outcomes and enhancing recovery capital for individuals impacted by incarceration and substance use. her recent publications appear in peer-reviewed journals such as the journal of human behavior in the social environment, journal of african american studies, journal of offender rehabilitation, and journal of urban social work. her 2023 article, “collateral consequences: the impact of incarceration on african american fathers and sons,” has been recognized for its contribution to advancing restorative justice frameworks in 1 florida atlantic university global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 reentry programming. dr. skinner-osei is committed to community-engaged scholarship and the mentorship of emerging social work scholars. her work bridges academic inquiry with practical solutions, advocating for trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and community-based approaches to reducing recidivism and promoting sustainable reintegration. peter claudius osei, is a behavioral neuroscientist whose research explores the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying systems-level behavioral organization. he earned his ph.d. in experimental psychology from florida atlantic university, where his dissertation, emerging neural dynamics in skill acquisition, investigated learning mechanisms using a basal ganglia-inspired neural model. dr. osei’s research extends beyond neural dynamics to examine how dynamical systems theory can illuminate complex interactions in broader social environments. by integrating quantitative and qualitative methodologies, he has contributed to large-scale, interdisciplinary projects that address real-world challenges. his collaborations with faculty in fau’s college of social work have led to the development of the c.a.r.e. model, a systems-based framework for enhancing institutional and interpersonal interactions in domains such as education and public policy. recent work includes research on strengthening father-child relationships through applying the c.a.r.e. model, which has informed grant proposals and coauthored publications in social work and psychology journals. dr. osei’s scholarly contributions appear in developmental review, educational psychology review, and the journal of human behavior in the social environment, among others. he brings a dynamic, systems-oriented approach to understanding behavior and is particularly interested in how behavioral neuroscience can inform community-based interventions and equitable systems change. his ongoing work seeks to deepen the integration of neuroscience with the social sciences, particularly through partnerships with institutes focused on community engagement and translational research. recommended citation: skinner-osei, p., & osei, p.c. (2025). the c.a.r.e. model: dynamical systems theory principles for reintegrating individuals impacted by incarceration. global journal of community psychology practice, 16(1), 1 17. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org). corresponding author: precious skinner-osei, phd, msw, bsw program coordinator and associate professor, phyllis & harvey sandler school of social work, fau college of social work & criminal justice. email: pskinnerosei@fau.edu. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:pskinnerosei@fau.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 the c.a.r.e. model: dynamical systems theory principles for reintegrating individuals impacted by incarceration abstract the process of reintegration into society for individuals impacted by incarceration is intricate and multifaceted. while rehabilitative programs strive to mitigate recidivism through financial and psychological support, many encounter challenges in readjusting to their communities. acknowledging that these individuals are not isolated but embedded within the broader social frameworks of their families, communities, and the workforce is imperative. therefore, understanding the psychological determinants influencing justice-involved individuals is pivotal for aligning their conduct with societal norms, as solely attributing their actions to internal factors neglects the array of external environmental influences beyond their control. given these challenges, we introduce the evidence-based c.a.r.e. model (collaborate, amend, reintegrate, empower) as a strategic approach. this model, extrapolated from a comprehensive re-evaluation of qualitative research, offers a holistic comprehension of the post-release milieu and advocates for reallocating resources to enhance the interactions between justiceinvolved individuals and their communities. this manuscript delineates the c.a.r.e. model as a blueprint for reentry programs, underpinned by the tenets of dynamical systems theory, to enrich these interactions. introduction i got re-arrested in 2009 for sales of marijuana, and it almost caused me 15 years in prison. it wasn’t because of the charge; it was because of my criminal history. you can’t teach the streets. you only learn when you are a part of it. it has to be embedded in a person. it needs to be drilled and drilled into you. now, with me, i had to understand that teaching a person who’s been incarcerated numerous times, he has a reverberating mind. he has the mindset that everything has to be like this over and over. the mind is corrupted already with false images. so, for a person who wants to learn, how do they learn? you can give them answers, and they still may not pick up on it. the reason for that is that their mind is programmed one way, which is crime and getting in trouble using drugs, getting high. that cycle has to be broken (research participant). in the united states, approximately 2 million individuals are currently incarcerated—a staggering 500% increase over the past 40 years (the sentencing project, 2025). this dramatic rise is driven primarily by shifts in sentencing laws and policies rather than changes in crime rates (the sentencing project, 2025). each year, more than 600,000 individuals are released from federal and state prisons, reentering society with limited support and significant challenges (national conference of state legislatures, 2024; office of the assistant secretary for planning and evaluation [a.s.p.e.], 2021). however, the cycle of incarceration persists, as approximately 66% of those released are rearrested within three years, and half ultimately return to prison (a.s.p.e., 2021; skinner-osei & osei, 2020). upon release, individuals encounter significant social challenges that hinder their reintegration into society. these challenges include limited access to employment, housing, and healthcare, as well as strained personal relationships and societal stigma (couloute & kopf, 2018). such obstacles often lead to adverse http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 outcomes, including heightened risks of recidivism and deteriorating mental and physical health (the council of state governments justice center, 2022; keene et al., 2018). the stress of social factors significantly impacts the process of reentry, which has many complex components that are further exacerbated by restrictions imposed after release (skinner-osei & osei, 2020). since 2000, parole violations have led to more recidivism than all individuals sentenced to prison in 1980 (alexander, 2012). most people under correctional control are on probation—2.9 million individuals—far surpassing the 1.9 million people incarcerated (widra, 2024). each year, more than 1 in 10 individuals admitted to state prisons are reimprisoned not for committing new crimes, but for violating conditions of their probation (widra, 2024). these violations often include failing to secure employment within a required timeframe, missing an appointment with a parole officer, missing court or probation meetings, failing to pay fines or restitution, failing drug and alcohol tests, not maintaining employment, incomplete community service, unapproved associations with felons, and crossing state lines (santos, 2024). loic wacquant, as cited in alexander (2012), refers to this cycle as a "closed circuit of perpetual marginality," emphasizing the ongoing phenomenon of individuals cycling in and out of prison. across the nation, incarceration for supervision violations dropped in 2020 and continued to decline in many states in 2021 (council on state governments, 2025). however, despite this reduction—largely attributed to adjustments made during the peak of the covid-19 pandemic—the proportion of the prison population related to community supervision has remained largely stable from 2018 to 2021 (council on state governments, 2025). in 2021, 44 percent of all state prison admissions were individuals who violated the terms of their parole or probation, and on any given day that year, one in four people in state prisons were incarcerated due to violations of their supervision terms (council on state governments, 2025). to combat the complexities associated with incarceration and reentry, it must be noted that individuals are not isolated entities operating within themselves. instead, they are embedded within larger social systems of their families, communities, and workforce. thus, while psychological factors affecting justice-involved individuals must be considered to adapt their behavior to social norms, solely attributing their actions to internal conditions discounts countless environmental factors outside their immediate control (skinner-osei & osei, 2020). considering the implications resulting from the influence of ecological factors post-release, the authors developed the c.a.r.e. model. the model was derived from the reanalysis of qualitative research conducted by skinner-osei & stepteauwatson (2018), which explored incarcerated males' lived experiences pre and post-release. the data identified five themes: trauma, self-identification, reentry, reunification, and recidivism. the themes concurred that current rehabilitative programs do not address all the needs of incarcerated individuals. hence, the model aims to fill the gaps identified in the analysis by addressing the environmental factors out of the immediate control of the individual or rehabilitative organization. furthermore, the model suggests that reentry programs implement four measures (i.e., collaborate, amend, reintegrate, and empower) to successfully reintegrate justice-involved individuals into a highly dynamic and complex environment with multiple interacting elements (vallacher & nowak, 1997). accordingly, skinner-osei & osei (2020) propose that successful integration requires the improvement of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 interactions between justice-involved individuals and their post-release environment. ultimately, reintegrating individuals impacted by incarceration into society presents a complex issue that requires the coordination of diverse elements at both individual and societal levels. the present article offers a guide for reentry programs to improve such interactions within the framework of dynamical systems theory. theoretical framework dynamical systems theory dynamical systems theory was established in the late 19th century by henri poincaré. the theory focuses on the qualitative behavior of selforganizing elements in a complex environment (holmes, 2007). while the mechanisms of dynamical systems theory are rooted in mathematics and physics, its principles are amenable to all levels of organization, including biological, psychological, and social systems (richardson et al., 2014). in this way, biological and social systems are comprised of self-organizing elements that must coordinate their interactions to fulfill a higher-level goal (nowak et al., 2013). nonetheless, gaining insights into complex social interaction is challenging due to the countless external factors (vallacher & nowak, 1997) and extended timescales, often spanning months or years (vallacher et al., 2017). by contrast, many biological interactions occur within seconds (kandel et al., 2000), potentially revealing patterns not easily observed at longer timescales. consequently, biological processes, viewed through the lens of dynamical systems theory, may present a useful prescriptive framework for informing complex social dynamics between individuals impacted by incarceration and the various institutions involved in their reintegration into society, as is the focus of the present article. dynamical systems are characterized by interactions of multiple independent elements adapting to environmental changes while emerging to organize into functional units at higher levels of abstraction (osei & bjorklund, 2024a). for example, the intrapersonal interactions of independent neural processes at the lower biological level converge to produce the justice-involved individual's behavior at the psychological level (grossberg, 2021). similarly, independent perceptual, emotional, and cognitive processes at the psychological level merge to form another dynamic system, which emerges to the behavior displayed during the interpersonal interactions between individuals impacted by incarceration and their community at the higher social level (nowak et al., 2013). notably, while depicted as separate entities, dynamical systems represent a continuous cycle of interconnected networks originating from the molecular level until reaching the highest level of human experiences at the social level (osei & bjorklund, 2024b). synergy describes the efficiency of interconnected elements converging to become functional units executing context-dependent tasks to achieve higher level objectives (kelso, 2012). the level of synergy between the different elements results from frequent coordinated interactions in pursuit of shared goals at the next level of organization (schultze et al., 2021). for example, productive interactions between an individual impacted by incarceration and a social worker might lead to high synergy when their repeated actions produce consistently valued results. on the other hand, interactions http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 between the same two parties indicate a lack of synergy if their interactions repeatedly fail to achieve higher-level social objectives. the products of synergistic functional units emerge toward attractors, which represent higher level goal states, signified by reliable patterns of lowerlevel interactions that frequently produce satisfactory outcomes (vallacher & nowak, 1997). thus, despite continuously changing perceptions, emotions, and cognitions at the biological level, an individual’s behavior generally conforms to stable representations at the psychological level (grossberg, 2021). hence, when facing varying stressful situations, individuals often behave in prototypical ways, depending on the strength of the attractor (sapolsky, 2015). accordingly, certain individuals frequently respond with aggression when anxious, while others resort to physical or mental withdrawal during stressful situations (sapolsky, 2015). nonetheless, higher-level attractors do not control lower-level elements but merely constrain the behavioral options, as all system elements are self-organized without the supervision of a higher-level controller (grossberg, 2021). in addition, the dynamic processes of all systems occur in parallel throughout the individual's lived experience, despite the orderly descriptions outlined above. hence, simultaneously, a person is part of a community at the social level, an individual controlling their perceptual, cognitive, and emotional behavior at the psychological level, and a collection of interacting cells at the biological level (nowak et al., 2013). notably, each independent element at every level of organization represents a nested subsystem, coordinating lower and higher-level dynamics (nowak et al., 2013). therefore, each subsystem must stabilize its own internal activity before coordinating with other subsystems to assemble a functioning network at the next level of organization (grossberg, 2021). failure to coordinate activities in lower-level interactions would introduce instability into higher levels, ultimately leading to system failure (grossberg, 2021). thus, the "goal" of dynamic systems is to maintain functionality throughout all levels of organization while minimizing energy expenditure (friston, 2010). this dynamic systems approach differs significantly from conventional rehabilitative models, such as the riskneed-responsivity (rnr) and well-being development models, by recognizing social systems as networks of selforganizing elements with complex interactions. in contrast, rnr models focus primarily on modifying individual risks, needs, and responsivity (bonta, 2023), which is unlikely to create a functioning social environment without addressing other system elements independent from the individual. similarly, while the well-being development model emphasizes strength-based, holistic, and pro-social interventions to enhance individual wellbeing (pettus et al., 2021), it does not target the interdependent elements shaping outcomes within the broader social system. in this way, social system performance is not contingent on improving the circumstances or the behaviors of individuals impacted by incarceration, but depends on the interactions between system elements, which requires a more holistic approach. ultimately, all system elements selforganize, emerging to become a functioning system through synergistic interactions designed to fulfill a higherlevel social goal (see figure 1.). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 figure 1. dynamical systems conceptual framework the c.a.r.e. model as illustrated in figure 2, the authors' c.a.r.e. model proposes that reentry programs implement four steps (i.e., collaborate, amend, reintegrate, and empower) to successfully reunite justice-involved individuals with their families, communities, and the labor market (skinner-osei & osei, 2020). figure 2. c.a.r.e. model the model emphasizes the hierarchical organization of dynamical systems to promote the integration of individuals impacted by incarceration into their communities. furthermore, it highlights the role of reentry programs in facilitating these social dynamics by mediating the communication between these systems. a description of the model's elements and the functional parallels between the brain's neural system interactions and interpersonal social system interactions follows below. collaborate. collaboration between interdependent elements is essential in any system adapting to a dynamic and unpredictable environment (grossberg, 2021). hence the c.a.r.e. model advocates for reentry programs to divert some attention from transforming individuals impacted by incarceration and their immediate circumstances through mental health, substance use, and education/training (skinner-osei & osei, 2020). of course, these factors along with environmental support, including housing and transportation are essential components of any successful plan to reintegrate justice-involved individuals into their communities and reduce recidivism. nevertheless, while necessary, these components are not sufficient to create a functioning social system, as they mainly address the individual’s psychological level of organization. importantly, the success or failure of reintegrating back into society does not hinge on any individual's circumstances or the resulting impact on their psychological state. instead, successful reintegration is determined by the interactions of all interdependent elements at the broader social level to ensure the individual’s behavior aligns with the higher-level social goal. therefore, reentry programs should redirect some of their resources to improve justice-involved individuals' interactions within their social environment instead of transforming their individual circumstances (skinner-osei & osei, 2020). notably, each element of a dynamic system functions as both an independent system http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 and a component of a larger structure, engaging in lowerand higher-level interactions (richardson et al., 2014). in this way, every whole is a part and every part a whole, depending on the level of organization that is analyzed. for example, cognitive systems must interact with emotional and perceptual systems before generating a functioning psychological system that in turn interacts with other psychological systems to emerge toward the higher-level social system (grossberg, 2021). consequently, it is imperative that reentry programs resolve any psychological issues that would prevent justice-involved individuals from effectively interacting with other elements within the social system. however, for the social system as a whole to fulfill its functional purpose, the individual psychological elements must coordinate their interactions to form a functional unit in service of the higher-level social goal (nowak et al., 2013). thus, while coordinating lower-level psychological elements is necessary before ascending to higher levels of organization, it is not sufficient without addressing their larger context within the social dynamics (vallacher & nowak, 1997). consequently, the successful transition into society requires a systemic transformation of all elements to coordinate lower-level individual interactions to achieve higherlevel societal goals. failing to stabilize interactions within and between these complementary parts will lead to instability and result in the ultimate collapse of the entire system (vallacher et al., 2017). avoiding such a system-wide failure requires bottom-up and top-down interactions between higher and lower levels of organization (grossberg, 2021). however, selforganizing systems must first solve the problem of generating the learning process throughout a hierarchy whose independent elements are oblivious to the entire system’s purpose. direct communication between self-organizing elements would lead to chaos, as lower levels lack an understanding of higherlevel dynamics and vice versa (powers, 1973). consequently, facilitating the bottom-up and top-down processes between hierarchical levels requires a mediator. reentry programs present the ideal mediator at the social level of organization, as they interact with individuals at the lower level and governmental entities, setting the social goal at the higher level (skinner-osei & osei, 2020). thus, their independence from and proximity to both individual and social systems allows reentry programs to gauge the discrepancies between them. in this way, reentry programs can inform individuals about the efficacy of their interpersonal interactions based on higherlevel goals. however, at the biological level of organization, top-down signals from higher levels cannot fully activate downstream networks without corresponding bottom-up inputs to amplify and synchronize signals (grossberg, 2021). thus, the biological model suggests that reentry programs cannot rely on higherlevel instructions from governmental or judicial institutions alone. instead, they must also consult with the individuals at the lower level about their experiences in relation to higher level expectations. ultimately, after comparing lower-level experiences with higher-level goals, reentry programs can improve system interactions by advocating for amendments to governmental restrictions that impact justice-involved individuals' behavioral options (skinnerosei & osei, 2020). amend. amending restrictions can correct system imbalances if lower-level behavior does not match higher-level expectations (grossberg, 2021). currently, higher-level systems attempt to resolve system dysfunctions by altering lower-level http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 interactions of justice-involved individuals through positive punishment (barton & bailey, 2020). consequently, when individuals deviate from social norms, governmental institutions constrain their freedom to interact with political institutions, potential employers, children, or other individuals impacted by incarceration (skinner-osei & osei, 2020). while these political, economic, and social post-conviction penalties are designed to prevent recidivism, they inadvertently preclude justice-involved individuals from engaging with their communities, thereby restricting their behavioral options (skinner-osei & osei, 2020). according to vallacher et al. (2017), strong forms of control maintained through negative reinforcement discourages individuals from internalizing the desired behavior. instead, individuals merely operate according to the relevant reinforcement contingencies to avoid punishment when heavily monitored (vallacher et al., 2017). however, when supervision is minimal or difficult to implement, lower-level interactions will eventually return to their previous attractor state (vallacher et al., 2017). thus, justiceinvolved individuals will eventually return to interacting with those most familiar, despite the desires of governing institutions to restrain such relationships. alternatively, governmental policies should lessen restrictions to allow justice-involved individuals to discover ways to integrate the higher order social dynamics into their psychological attractor states (vallacher et al., 2017). in addition, enforcing strict rules through higher-level control facilitates lower-level dynamics that are inflexible and mandate predetermined behavior in an unpredictable environment. at the social level of organization, this biological strategy supports the notion of implementing less severe constraints to give justice-involved individuals the freedom to control their lower-level interactions. ultimately, government regulations cannot control the interactions of individuals impacted by incarceration. instead, reentry programs should advocate for policies that recognize the interpersonal histories of justiceinvolved individuals while offering a structured framework to support, rather than dictate, their reintegration into the community (skinner-osei & stepteauwatson, 2018). reintegrate. reintegrating justice-involved individuals is ultimately judged by the quality of interactions within their communities. the principles outlined in this section are best captured by the iconic phrase of famous neuroscientist donald hebb remarking: “neurons that fire together, wire together” (munakata & pfaffly, 2004). similarly, likeminded individuals develop strong interpersonal relationships through repeated positive interactions (vallacher et al., 2017) while reducing the likelihood of engaging with individuals of different mindsets. likewise, even when displaying slight initial differences, individuals can assimilate their behavioral tendencies to accommodate those of others in social interactions (nowak et al., 2013). therefore, any attempts to control social relationships of justice-involved individuals to prevent exposure to criminogenic environments must consider their attractors regarding interpersonal communications. accordingly, compelling individuals to alter their typical interpersonal behaviors must proceed gradually to avoid wild oscillations from their attractor states that will inevitably lead to conflict (powers, 1973). ultimately, individuals are most likely to adopt pro social changes to their behavioral characteristics when interacting with similarly minded individuals (vallacher et al., 2017). this point suggests that reentry programs guide interactions with future http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 employers, community leaders, and correctional staff to partially align with attractors of justice-involved individuals. empower. empowering individuals impacted by incarceration allows their psychological systems to synchronize more effectively with higher-level social systems. this way, successfully integrating into the community through repeated positive communication produces stronger connections. similarly, in attempting to repair the damage caused by their past infractions, justice-involved individuals must convey real value when interacting with the community. unfortunately, post-conviction penalties frequently impede attempts to conform to social standards, thereby restricting communication between returning citizens and their communities (skinner-osei & osei, 2020). in neural systems, repeated failure to sufficiently excite postsynaptic cells results in the pruning of their dendrites (kandel et al., 2000). consequently, future signals arriving at postsynaptic cells are essentially disregarded due to insufficient receptors available to accept the message. similarly, repeated failure to communicate effectively at the social level despite the individual’s best efforts ultimately leads to learned helplessness (grossberg, 2021). in such cases, justice-involved individuals stop attempting to meet higher-level expectations, as previous efforts continually resulted in disappointment. hence, reentry programs should advocate for justiceinvolved individuals to regain confidence that their contributions present value at the social level. individuals and communities would benefit from having returning citizens volunteer at social organizations to facilitate repeated favorable interactions (skinner-osei & osei, 2020). however, as with any interaction, success does not depend solely on the sender transferring the information. instead, to effectively communicate a message, recipients must also attend, decipher, and assign meaning to it. comparatively, community members receiving messages from justice-involved individuals might perceive them as inherently negative despite best attempts to convey positive meaning. thus, social stigma frequently impedes renewed efforts of justiceinvolved individuals to improve communication with their social system. ultimately, increasing the number of positive interactions and reducing the stigma associated with individuals impacted by incarceration will improve the chances of successfully reintegrating them into their communities. discussion governmental institutions must recognize that the individuals impacted by incarceration are not separate elements impeding the social system's functionality. instead, justice-involved individuals are an integral part of the larger social system, contributing to their behavior. altering any dysfunctional aspects of their conduct cannot be resolved at the individual level but requires a systemic transformation of all elements involved in the social processes. thus, improving the interactions of the constituent parts is most critical in correcting the current dysfunctional system. the human brain, arguably being the most adaptable and effective selforganizing system on earth, might provide a suitable framework to apply to various societal issues. consequently, reentry programs might benefit from incorporating some of the insights of the brain’s processes to navigate the successful integration of justice-involved individuals into society. for instance, contemporary theories of the brain suggest that the central nervous system does not control or direct the body’s operations but instead is only one of the elements within the larger dynamic system http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 of the individual. hence, rehabilitative programs should collaborate with other regulatory entities to create an environment that gives individuals impacted by incarceration the best chance to avoid recidivism. in this way, reentry programs could advocate for justice-involved individuals to amend policies that prevent them from fully reintegrating into their communities due to political, financial, and social restrictions. importantly, any efforts to improve the experience of justiceinvolved individuals must incorporate those impacted by the policies. thus, individuals impacted by incarceration must join policy discussions to inform regulatory institutions about their struggles to abide by these rules. ultimately, prosocial behavior is most viable when policies align with the lived experiences of justice-involved individuals. additionally, reentry programs should attempt to reduce the stigma associated with individuals impacted by incarceration by promoting frequent positive interactions with their communities through volunteer efforts. gaining exposure to community organizations and potential future employers allows justice-involved individuals to display their skills and reduce concerns about their past infractions. ultimately, improving interactions and reducing the stigma of individuals impacted by incarceration will improve their chances of successfully reintegrating into their families, communities, and workforce. implications for policy, practice, and research the previous insights have significant implications for policy, practice, and research related to the reintegration of justice-involved individuals into their communities and society. policy. despite various criminal justice reform efforts, rising recidivism rates indicate that current policies require further amendments to address the needs of justice-involved individuals. specifically, legislation needs to address employment-related issues restricting justice-involved individuals from participating in the labor market. for example, umez and pirius (2018) argue that “blanket bans” and “good moral character clauses” need to be eliminated to allow formerly incarcerated persons to have equal access to employment opportunities. reforming these labor laws would reduce the likelihood of justice-involved individuals to commit additional crimes to alleviate the financial pressures of parole and probation payments. additionally, it could empower individuals impacted by incarceration to become valued members of their families by allowing them to support their spouses and children financially. in addition to employment-related issues, justice-involved individuals frequently struggle with post-conviction penalties, restricting their freedom to function within the communities they enter upon release. while these policies, such as bans prohibiting justice-involved individuals from interacting with other formerly incarcerated persons, are designed to prevent criminal behaviors, it inadvertently isolates them from their community. as previously discussed, successfully integrating into the community requires justice-involved individuals to participate in community functions to increase the frequency of positive interactions. thus, the efficacy of post-conviction restrictions should be reevaluated to account for the adverse effects of isolation experienced by justice-involved individuals that contribute to their increased recidivism rates. ultimately, law enforcement, judges, and legislators can improve community relations by amending policies to allow http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 justice-involved individuals to display their value to the community through positive interactions. practice. various professionals, including social workers, psychologists, probation officers, and correction officers, interact with justice-involved individuals before, during, and after release. to improve their interactions, professionals could communicate through words and actions that their role is to assist and not surveil individuals impacted by incarceration. thus, instead of monitoring and documenting infractions professionals in the criminal justice system could focus on facilitating positive interactions between justiceinvolved individuals and their communities. in this way, professionals could collaborate with local businesses, community organizations, and churches to allow disenfranchised justice-involved individuals to volunteer and become valued community members (skinner-osei & osei, 2020). ultimately, revising interactions between criminal justice professionals and individuals impacted by incarceration allows them to improve their self-image and overcome the stigma that impedes successful communication with their social environment (skinner-osei & stepteau-watson, 2018). furthermore, practitioners in reentry programs could benefit from applying a more ecological approach to interventions designed to prepare justice-involved individuals for reentry into society postrelease. in this sense, the behavior of justice-involved individuals post-release is not exclusively controlled by them but is influenced by countless environmental factors that reciprocally interact with one another and the individual (skinner-osei & osei, 2020). therefore, individuals who navigate this complex environment must experience these influences to adapt their behavior to the environmental context. consequently, programs could shift certain parts of their behavioral training from pre to post-release programming by taking advantage of the heavily monitored parole and probation period to assist individuals during the challenging post-release period. in this way, justice-involved individuals could report their experiences to trained professionals who can make situational assessments and help improve their interactions with their communities (skinner-osei & osei, 2020). research. research frequently shows that various attempts to reduce crime rates using “commonsense” principles have failed to produce the desired outcome. a prominent failure is the scared straight program which attempts to deter juvenile offenders from engaging in criminal activity by exposing them to the adverse effects of their behavior through jail expeditions (petrosino et al., 2013). criminal justice reform must be based on empirical research to avoid repeating the mistakes of programs such as scared straight. the council on criminal justice identified three critical components in any effort to reform the criminal justice system. first, jails, prisons, and courts must share data to base reform decisions on accurate information. second, research must guide effective intervention strategies. finally, reform efforts must be coordinated with all groups across the criminal justice spectrum (head, 2019). furthermore, researchers must explore external factors that impact the implementation of reform efforts that operate outside the reentry program’s organizational structure but affect outcomes for justiceinvolved individuals. according to watson et al. (2018), complex interventions within large systems and communities involving multiple components that reciprocally interact must consider the external context influencing their processes. watson et al. (2018) also identified several barriers and facilitators that impact program implementation, including (1) professional influences, (2) political support, (3) social climate, (4) local infrastructure, (5) policy and legal climate, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 (6) relational climate, (7) target population, and (8) funding and economic climate. all these constructs interact with one another and constrain organizational implementation without being in the direct control of the reentry program. ultimately, reentry programs could benefit from identifying collaborative opportunities with external entities to improve outcomes for justiceinvolved individuals during the reentry process (skinner-osei & osei, 2020). conclusion individuals impacted by incarceration enter a complex environment upon release, which is currently not structured to integrate these individuals into the social system successfully. thus, despite the best efforts of rehabilitative programs to reduce recidivism through financial assistance and psychological interventions, individuals continue to struggle to reunite with their communities. the c.a.r.e. model proposes that successful integration involves the systemic modification of the entire social structure instead of simply addressing deficiencies at the individual level. consequently, the efficacy of the social dynamics hinges on the interactions within and between individuals impacted by incarceration and social systems. references alexander, m. 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(1997). the emergence of dynamical social psychology. psychological inquiry, 8(2), 73-99. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/human-services/incarceration-reentry-0#%3a~%3atext%3deach%20year%2c%20more%20than%20600%2c000%2crelease%20and%20half%20are%20reincarcerated https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/human-services/incarceration-reentry-0#%3a~%3atext%3deach%20year%2c%20more%20than%20600%2c000%2crelease%20and%20half%20are%20reincarcerated https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2024.101118 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09934-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09934-6 https://doi.org/10.1086/715852 https://prisonprofessors.com/most-common-probation-violations/#:~:text=failure%20to%20follow%20the%20conditions,committing%20a%20new%20crime https://prisonprofessors.com/most-common-probation-violations/#:~:text=failure%20to%20follow%20the%20conditions,committing%20a%20new%20crime https://prisonprofessors.com/most-common-probation-violations/#:~:text=failure%20to%20follow%20the%20conditions,committing%20a%20new%20crime https://prisonprofessors.com/most-common-probation-violations/#:~:text=failure%20to%20follow%20the%20conditions,committing%20a%20new%20crime https://prisonprofessors.com/most-common-probation-violations/#:~:text=failure%20to%20follow%20the%20conditions,committing%20a%20new%20crime https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4109 https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000975 https://doi.org/10.25771/vh5p-9a34 https://doi.org/10.1080/10911359.2017.1402724 https://doi.org/10.1080/10911359.2017.1402724 https://csgjusticecenter.org/ https://www.sentencingproject.org/research/ https://www.sentencingproject.org/research/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli0802_ 1 vallacher, r. r., read, s. j., & nowak, a. (eds.). (2017). computational social psychology. routledge. widra, e. (2024). one size fits none: how ‘standard conditions’ of probation set people up to fail. prison policy initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/prob ation_conditions.html http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli0802_1 https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli0802_1 https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/probation_conditions.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/probation_conditions.html the covid-19 crisis: using the cracks in neoliberalism for social transformation towards a more just society ann marie beals1, margaret douglin1, kimberly jewers-dailley1, sarah ranco1, kai reimer-watts1, rajni sharma1 all members of the just transformation student collective contributed equally to the writing of this paper. keywords: neoliberalism, covid-19, just society, social transformation, decoloniality, intersectionality author biographies: ann marie beals (negmow/them), is a two-spirit indigenousblack l’nuwey – a mixed-blood african nova scotian and first nation mi’kmaq from the territory of mi’kma’ki. ann marie is a graduate student at wilfrid laurier university and a storysharer working on the proclaimingourroots.com project. stories from this project revolve around afro-indigenous identity and relationships with indigenous and black communities. their research explores the health and wellbeing of these communities in looking at the effects of colonial legacies of oppression and violence, and lack of acknowledgement of indigenous-black identity in the settler nation-state known as canada. ann marie shares afro-indigenous voices in uplifting the sacred stories of strength, self-assertion, and consciousness-raising, through the lived experiences and knowledges loudly resonating in indigenous-black communities. margaret douglin, is a first-generation black canadian with caribbean roots. she is a graduate student in the phd program in community psychology at wilfrid laurier university. she spent several years working as a researcher and data analyst in the public and not-for-profit sectors in ontario. most of her work has been in the public education sector where she has worked extensively on research and evaluation initiatives with an equity focus. margaret’s doctoral research is focused on understanding black middle school students’ perceptions and experiences of school belonging. she also has an interest in supportive and affordable housing. margaret brings a critical, anti-racist/anti-oppression, and social justice lens to all of her work. kimberly jewers-dailley, is a phd student in community psychology at wilfrid laurier university. she is a registered drama therapist and registered psychotherapist. kimberly has over 10 years of professional experience in creating trauma informed schools and communities and is the former director of the new haven trauma coalition in connecticut, usa. kimberly's research interests include creating trauma informed communities, building community resilience, and developing innovative approaches to reducing childhood trauma. sarah ranco (she/her), is a doctoral student in the community psychology program at wilfrid laurier 1 just transformation student collective global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 university. her research interests center on developing models of youth-adult partnerships in secondary schools, fostering youth engagement in social justice, and envisioning alternatives to compulsory sexuality. she seeks to ground her work in meaningful, community-based applications, as well as use her research to center youth voice. outside of academia, sarah enjoys bubble tea, crafting, taking way too many photos of her pets, and tending to her ever-expanding plant collection. kai reimerwatts, is a current phd student in community psychology at wilfrid laurier university; holds a masters of climate change; and is director of the feature documentary for climate action beyond crisis, “a story of hope for a rapidly changing world”. kai's research and creative work explores the rich intersections of climate storytelling, the visual arts and grassroots activism, centering on the powerful role of ‘signposts’ in both unifying and mobilizing a collective response to the climate crisis. in partnership with the lead mural artist and many others, kai was the student lead on the "climate is life" mural project and visual ‘signpost’ on laurier's waterloo campus, installed in fall 2019. he is a research fellow with the veris research centre in waterloo, ontario, exploring how to support emergent cultures of sustainability, and an active member of several climate justice groups including 50by30 waterloo region – a grassroots group that in 2021 advocated successfully for waterloo region and all seven area municipalities to adopt a 50% greenhouse gas emissions reduction target by 2030, in line with climate science. taken together, kai’s work explores the power of collective imagination and social organizing in response to crisis to forge a far brighter future. rajni sharma (she/her), canadian-born south asian cis-female living in traditional territory of the attawandaron (neutral), anishnaabeg, and haudenosaunee peoples. her phd research focuses on ways of transforming the psychotherapy practice for racialized communities. specifically, how therapy can address experiences of racial trauma and ways in which processing and healing can occur. she is also a practicing art therapist and psychotherapist. her passion and work are centered around creating healing spaces where people can feel supported and not alone in their mental health journey. rajni has worked with a range of diverse clients and communities in clinical and community spaces. she takes a critical and intersectional position to her clinical work and research and believes that many mental health challenges are connected to larger-systems and structural realities that can lead to racism and oppression. recommended citation: beals, a. m., douglin, m., jewers-dailley, k., ranco, s., reimer-watts, k., & sharma, r. (2021). the covid-19 crisis: using the cracks in neoliberalism for social transformation towards a more just society. global journal of community psychology practice,14(2), 1 27. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: ann marie beals, just transformation student collective, wilfrid laurier university. email: beal0950@mylaurier.ca http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:beal0950@mylaurier.ca global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the covid -19 crisis: using the cracks in neoliberalism for social transformation towards a more just society abstract within the current covid-19 pandemic, cracks observed in neoliberal dominant global economic paradigms reveal how austerity policies have crippled crucial social safety nets, such as health care, with capitalism continuing to adversely impact our climate with ad infinitum extraction of resources for overconsumption. in examining these associations, this collaborative paper critically applies social theories to explore ideas and approaches to creating transformative social change, in an effort to move towards a more just and sustainable society in the context of the covid-19 pandemic and other ongoing systemic crises. the paper presents the pandemic as a social crisis and explores theories of social justice and how they might be applied within the context of neoliberal capitalism, also known as neoliberalism. the authors of this paper argue that to move towards a just society, social transformation is needed, informed by the theories of decoloniality and intersectionality. a conceptual model is presented that demonstrates how these theories can be woven together to inform community psychology action and research, addressing covid-19 specifically. possibilities for transformation in the areas of mental health and climate justice are also presented. finally, recommendations for community psychology researchers seeking social transformation, while navigating this challenging and complex new reality, are shared. preamble in understanding that the first peoples of these lands hold the essence of the ontological knowledge to disrupt the colonial project that is the settler nation-state of canada, we envision a society that collectively cares for all, particularly the most vulnerable and marginalized2. we envision the upholding of human rights and community wellbeing over and above our economies – a society grounded in equity, diversity, and inclusion, where everyone has a fair opportunity for a meaningful, respected, and engaging life, free of oppression and discrimination. we envision a society where all are valued and 2 marginalized populations include those who “experience discrimination and exclusion (social, political and economic) because of unequal power relationships across economic, political, social and cultural dimensions” (national collaborating centre for determinants of health, n.d.). marginalized populations include members of the following groups: indigenous peoples (first nations, métis, inuit), peoples of african descent in the diaspora, racialized persons, nondominant cultural, ethnic, religious, and linguistic communities, immigrants and newcomers, youth, 2slgbtq+ persons, the poor, the mentally ill, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the underhoused, people with disabilities, migrant communities, the current or formerly incarcerated, and persons who are under or unemployed. celebrated, while breaking the toxic ideologies that wrongfully equate human value with financial worth. we envision a society that respects mother earth and all her living and nonliving beings – all our relatives, striving to sustain our interconnected world. we envision a society that empowers all, with self-determination and access to support – not just to survive but to thrive – discarding the harmful politics of neoliberal capitalism, known as neoliberalism, competition and hyperindividualism. we acknowledge that a more just society is not static, but rather a continual process of navigation towards http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 deeper equity and justice in which we are all engaged. introduction in this paper, we, as graduate students learning to critically understand our world, created a conceptual model to assist in discerning how the theoretical perspectives of decoloniality and intersectionality might explain and help us respond to the cracks now revealed in neoliberalism, and what actions we can take in moving toward a more just and equitable society. we needed to do this work, as the concept of ‘crisis’ implies an overwhelming, complex problem unimaginable in scope, potentially demoralizing and limiting a society’s collective imagination of what can be possible in the face of an immediate threat (haiven & khasnabish, 2014). we did not want to feel inertia within a sense of doom in realizing that canada is currently embedded in multiple such crises, including a pandemic caused by the sars-cov-2 virus infection, known as covid-19, and the global climate crisis. where austerity measures were once justified as a means to address economic crises (haiven & khasnabish, 2014), there is now a lack of adequate social welfare, resource equity, and an ever-widening wealth gap, which are contributing to the predicted healthcare and economic collapses (crawley, 2020; kirby, 2020). at the same time, we are witnessing communities coming together to support each other in incredible, lifeaffirming ways, such as in the case of online mutual-aid groups (moscrop, 2020) and community care. these examples of compassionate responses have led us to wonder how we can contribute, as student researchers, to addressing situations created in this pandemic, with eyes turned toward empathy and justice. with these goals in mind, our paper explores how we can critically apply social theories to move towards a more just society in the context of the current covid-19 pandemic. we focus our efforts on the settler nationstate of canada, while recognizing that other societies around the world are also suffering from the impacts of this pandemic and the dominant neoliberal response. after discussing our social positions as researchers, we set the context by sharing what we know about the pandemic, discussing its connections to neoliberalism, and exploring what a more just society could look like. we argue that to move towards a more just society, we need critical social transformation informed by the theories of decoloniality and intersectionality. integrating current literature from critical theorists and scholaractivists, we present a conceptual model that provides a visual demonstration of how these theories interact and can be woven together to inform community psychology (cp) action and research addressing covid-19. acting like a map, we intend for the conceptual model to provide a coherent representation of our inquiry and arguments, as well as provide a visual guide for the change process (shields & tajalli, 2006). the model was developed over several discussions amongst the authors and was approved after several redesigns and faculty feedback to ensure it captured our collective ideas regarding theory interaction, action points, and opportunities. grounding our model in concrete examples based on the work of some of the authors of this paper and others who base their work in decolonial and intersectional theoretical perspectives, we discuss possibilities for transformation in the areas of mental health and climate justice. finally, as all the authors are doctoral students in cp, we conclude with recommendations for cp researchers seeking social transformation while navigating challenging and complex new realities. we start with the important consideration of who we are and why we have come together in this writing. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 our social position as researchers influenced by black feminist thought regarding epistemological underpinnings of how we contemplate social, political, and economic systems in relation to academia and eurocentric thinking (crenshaw, 1989; simien, 2004), we share who we are as we navigate this world within many truths. we are six phd students in ontario, canada in wilfrid laurier university’s (wlu) community psychology program, a critical, applied social science program that promotes social justice and community-participatory research. coming from diverse backgrounds and experiences, we acknowledge our multiple and intersecting social identities with respect to indigeneity, race, gender, age, sexuality, and class. we share different positions on this land with respect to indigenous, settler, and immigration status. as activists, researchers, and front-line service providers, our research and community work are varied, focusing on issues concerning black, indigenous and racialized (bir) communities, climate justice, mental health, and education. these experiences shape our understanding of the pandemic’s impact on people’s lives and how we can best move toward a more just society. setting the context the pandemic the world is in the midst of the inequitable covid-19 pandemic that, to date, has shown very clearly how countries that promote neoliberal, global capitalist agendas of profit over people have benefited a select few (e.g., political and corporate elites), while harming many (mccloskey, 2020; navarro, 2020). as noted by jean shaoul of wsws.org, in september 2021, 3 up-to-date numbers are provided daily by john hopkins university at: as the covid-19 pandemic continues its upward trend across the globe, vaccine inequality grows ever more grotesque. of the world’s 195 countries, just 10 rich countries account for most of the 5.86 billion vaccine doses administered so far. to put this in perspective, this is enough to fully vaccinate 2.8 billion of the world’s 7.8 billion population or 50 percent of those over 15 years of age. instead, only 31.5 percent of the world’s population have been fully vaccinated against the disease. (para. 1-2). at the time of this writing (september 22, 2021), worldwide, 4,712,557 people have died from sars-cov-2 virus infections, with 229,770,555 confirmed cases. canada accounts for 1,594,000 of these cases, with 27,547 deaths3 (center for systems science and engineering (csse), 2021). the effects of this pandemic have worsened existing social and economic injustices, putting more vulnerable populations at heightened health and economic risk (alliance for healthier communities, 2020; morin, 2020; timothy, 2020; wyton, 2020). for example, the unhoused population in canada is more vulnerable to this outbreak, due to underlying health conditions and the frequent inability to follow key strategies for prevention, such as regular handwashing (bains, 2020). exacerbating this, for the past 18 months, spaces which typically provide shelter, such as libraries, community centres, public washrooms, warming centres, and drop-in sites, have been closed (bains, 2020). furthermore, prior to the covid-19 pandemic, first nations peoples on reserves were already exposed to higher rates of infectious diseases, which are linked to housing infrastructure issues, which is linked to inadequate water systems (thompson et https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bd a7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 al., 2020). another disproportionately impacted population is school-aged children affected by school closures, especially children in low-income settings (editorial, 2020) and marginalized communities lacking adequate resources at home to support their learning (alphonso, 2020). reports of violence, including domestic violence and child abuse, are rising during the pandemic (amin, 2020; campbell, 2020; miller, 2020; peterman et al., 2020), further impacting the health and wellbeing of children isolated at home (slaughter, 2020). it is critical that the shock from the pandemic does not deepen inequalities, but is instead used as an opportunity to build a more just society. shock and opportunity shock events, as described by klein (2007) in the shock doctrine, are large-scale, disruptive impacts on society that produce a state of collective disorientation or shock – such as acts of war, terror attacks, natural disasters, financial crises, or a global pandemic. historically, systems of domination and power such as neoliberalism and colonization (liboro, 2015) have taken advantage of shock events to increase profits for a select few, while exacerbating existing wealth gaps and social inequalities (lewis et al., 2009). the covid-19 pandemic is a shock event for the world, and there is a substantial risk that this pattern of exploitation is happening again. the danger of exploitation by power elites in a time of shock underscores the importance of cp practitioners in working effectively with communities in a targeted pushback to ensure a more just response. instead of seeing shock events as leading inevitably to deepening exploitation, we believe these events, through revealing the harms of the current neoliberal economic system, can provide an opening for change towards a newly imagined just society. according to cameron (2011), “the focus for envisaging a just society needs to be on expanding the social economy and building a new economy, not shoring up capitalism through fiscal policy, or trying to rescue an unjust society through better social policy” (p. 1). the center for economic and social rights (n.d.) also notes that we need “... to envision a rights-based economy and catalyze action towards it – taking into account the confluence of political, economic, climate, and health crises we now face” (para. 2). the covid-19 pandemic offers a rare opportunity to ‘reset’ the course of society, choosing a path towards justice, sustainability, and human betterment. history contains many examples of strategic planning post-disaster, such as welfare programs, healthcare, education support, housing, and unemployment insurance to many (harrison, 2020). as billions of dollars in public and private financing are spent, it is critical that these funds are used to dismantle the injustices and harms of the current neoliberal system that creates such crises, building instead towards a more just society that puts people and planet first. neoliberalism since its inception in the 1950s, neoliberalism has gone from a fringe economic theory to the dominant global economic paradigm today (lewis et al., 2009; stanford, 2014). as both a political ideology and economic policy framework, neoliberalism is designed to promote the free market, and has promoted “deregulation, globalization, open markets, free trade, the removal of licence [sic] and quota systems, and the withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision, as solutions to the challenges created or faced by capitalism” (liboro, 2015, pp. 211-212). since the mid-1980s, neoliberalism has become widely adopted as the dominant economic ideology by numerous western societies, including the united states (us), united kingdom, and canada (stanford, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 2014). this ideology has profound implications for how societies perceive themselves and the world, and as a guiding framework for economic policy, it has had massive negative impacts by encouraging the accelerated plundering of mother earth’s resources and increased exploitation of already marginalized people, greatly contributing to the climate, ecological, and social emergencies faced today (monbiot, 2020). the impacts of neoliberalism are severe and include weakening policies that protect workers and consumers, the privatization of public services, and funding cuts to medical and public health services that detrimentally affect the welfare and quality of life of large populations (navarro, 2020). also, by over-emphasizing the role of the private sector while reducing the role of the state, neoliberalism limits the ability of governments to respond effectively to social challenges. one example of this is the challenge of providing sufficient, affordable, dignified housing for those who need it, as federal funding for affordable housing has been reduced or eliminated under many neoliberal regimes since the 1980s, including canada (nelson, 2013). by reducing state responsibility for delivering much-needed public services, neoliberalism greatly constrains the state’s ability to center the wellbeing of people both during ‘normal’ times, and when disasters strike. instead, neoliberal societies promote oversized corporations tasked with delivering these services that are suddenly “too big to fail… vital services cannot be allowed to collapse [so] the state must intervene to support them when disaster threatens. business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk” (monbiot, 2020, p. 38), which then “stops governments from changing social outcomes and delivering social justice” (p. 39). according to monbiot (2020), neoliberalism also results in a politics of disenfranchisement, where the political system and the ideology it embodies become more and more distant from people’s lives – often producing reactionary and destabilizing anti-politic mindsets. given this context, what happens when a global health pandemic and climate crisis hit neoliberal societies that have dramatically reduced the roles of government and social support needed to protect its people, particularly the most vulnerable? as demonstrated above, such situations are playing out in real time, with marginalized populations experiencing heightened health and economic risks. a system that routinely puts private profits above human and environmental welfare makes many communities far more vulnerable to additional stressors and impacts (monbiot, 2020). with many policies designed to privilege the already extremely wealthy (harris, 2019; nelson, 2013), neoliberalism is clearly the antithesis of the system needed to build a more just society; however, it is nevertheless looked to in times of crises by many western countries, including canada, for policy framing and guidance (climenhaga, 2020; maitra, 2020). the harmful ideology of neoliberalism must clearly be challenged, as it currently places a massive restriction on society’s broader political and social imagination, leaving us ill-prepared to imagine and fight for the much-needed alternative systems and values that could result in a far more just, sustainable future (foster, 2015). as neoliberalism has played a clear role in increasing inequities across society, disenfranchising ever-more people from the political system, it is clear we urgently need counter-ideas and counter-paradigms to challenge and help replace the dominance of neoliberal ideology, centering justice. in that vein, we bring forth two critical social theories that can aid in this movement toward a more sustainable and just society: decoloniality and intersectionality. we emphasize these theories as being essential yet overlooked tools in the interlinked http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 struggles for social justice and liberation. we reference tenets of these critical social theories and present them as key pillars for our conceptual model (page 19), starting with decoloniality then followed by intersectionality. decoloniality coloniality is the continuation of colonial forms of power and oppression that were and are produced by colonial structures (grosfoguel, 2007). it is critical to understand how coloniality impacts decisions, policies, rules, and laws; how coloniality affects those most marginalized; and how moving towards decoloniality can disrupt facets of coloniality (adams et al., 2017). according to maldonado-torres (2016), decoloniality “is a direct challenge to the temporal, spatial, and subjective axis of the modern/colonial world and its institutions, including the university and the state” (p. 4). decoloniality aims to delink colonial relations related to knowledge production and framing of identity, while leaning on the collective and historical memory of people impacted by coloniality (carolissen & duckett, 2018; mignolo & hoffman, 2017), to move towards epistemic reconstitution (mignolo & hoffman, 2017). as an example, a practice of decolonial pedagogy is to ‘problematize’ situations rather than pathologize individuals (reyes, 2019). as described by reyes (2019), “problematizing situations systematically moves beyond surface-level observations in order to uncover and understand the root problems that caused the situation in the first place” (pp. 6-7). the practice of problematizing includes “listening, asking questions, and drawing connections to the broader implications of systems of oppression” (reyes, 2019, p. 7). similarly, decoloniality should be a process of “re,” as shared by reyes (2019), “resisting, refusing, rehumanizing, remembering, reminding, restoring, reframing, revisioning, and reimagining” (p. 7). further, adams et al. (2017) described the “denaturalization” approach, which emphasizes that decolonization must be interrogated while working towards local and broader liberation. more specifically, the denaturalization perspective challenges the “coloniality of knowledge and coloniality of being” (adams et al., 2017, p. 7), and confronts epistemic violence, manifested as dehumanization and racialized essentialism (held, 2020) that originates from and operates in spaces of power (adams et al., 2017). thus, denaturalization confronts the oppressor and disrupts spaces of power that hold problematic eurocentric views that reinforce violence and oppression. it is critical that colonial spaces are disrupted to allow for a push towards a reimagined society; as this happens, the voices and experiences of those most impacted by neoliberalism in these unparalleled times of covid-19 need to be centered, which can be achieved by applying an intersectional approach. intersectionality as a critical social theory, intersectionality is a tool for understanding the experiences of those affected by different systems of power as well as informing social action (hill collins, 2019). using an intersectional lens, we are interested in understanding how systems of power impact those with multiple axes of systemic social burden (e.g., race, gender, class) and how social action can be catalyzed to support justice and wellbeing. in a landmark paper on intersectionality, crenshaw (1989) argued that the identities and experiences of marginalized groups cannot be parsed out or limited to a single issue, nor can some identities be privileged to the exclusion of others. instead, the experiences of multiple identities of marginalization should be seen as intimately connected and woven together as a whole (crenshaw, 1989). we posit that since crises within neoliberal contexts worsen and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 further widen the inequalities between those in power and those in need (nelson, 2013), those at the intersections of systemic oppressions are disproportionately impacted by this pandemic, the climate crisis, and other shocks. the implications of decoloniality and intersectionality approaches urge us to focus our attention on the needs and experiences of the most vulnerable groups impacted by covid-19 in multiple and intersecting ways. for example, an intersectional approach highlights the mental health challenges of essential workers, often black and racialized women, who are working in high-risk, lowwage positions during the covid-19 pandemic (damian et al., 2021). intersectionality also highlights how systemically oppressed identities and the discrimination related to these identities interact with each other. for example, black men in the us may face a disproportionate risk of contracting covid-19 because they are overrepresented in the prison system, due to systemic anti-black racism (macmadu et al., 2020; rushovich et al., 2021). black women, on the other hand, are at disproportionate risk of contracting covid-19 because they are overrepresented in public-facing jobs that place them at increased risk of exposure to covid-19 (rushovich et al., 2021). through an intersectional lens, cp practitioners can take action to address and mitigate the impacts of the crisis on those most marginalized. the decoloniality and intersectionality theories are integrated within our conceptual model (page 19) that shows how cracks in the walls of neoliberalism are being actively expanded and opened by the covid-19 crisis, with effort potentially allowing justice-based social transformation to flow through. if we wish to work toward a more sustainable, just society, applying both decoloniality and intersectionality approaches to the urgent crises western societies currently face can be helpful in pushing back against the harmful ideology of neoliberalism. in this time of covid-19, we require steps that build toward justice for all, while also pushing back and moving away from the current oppressive contexts in which we find ourselves. we turn to this next. towards a just society in our view, our current western society is unjust, as it does not provide equitable freedoms, justices, opportunities, and support to all members of the nation-state; elements that prilleltensky (2012) argues are critical for our individual wellbeing and ability to thrive. in this section, we briefly review the social justice theories of political philosopher john rawls, economist and philosopher amartya sen, and community psychologist isaac prilleltensky, which led us to a reimagined vision of a just society. theories of justice john rawls’ (1971) well-known and prominent theory of justice envisions a society where free and equal people work cooperatively to benefit both themselves and the greater good (johnston, 2011; rawls, 1971). rawls proposes, that due to political, social, and economic institutions privileging some members of society over others, that the institutions resultantly cause major inequalities, even in a “just society.” however, according to rawls (1971), “inequalities that do not benefit all members of society are considered unjust” (p. 175). equally influential, amartya sen’s (2011) theory of justice focuses on social justice and what sen referred to as capabilities. sen argues against the idea that economic growth equates to a better life for all, as economic growth theorizing fails to explain how and why some people are deprived in economic positioning (nussbaum, 2003). sen’s perspective addresses the concept of equity, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 by recognizing that individuals require differing levels of resources and have differing abilities in reaching similar capacities of economic and social functioning (nussbaum, 2003). the capabilities approach considers those most vulnerable in our societies and works to integrate the values of respect, dignity, and self-competence into ideas for a just society. however, munger et al. (2016) notes that the capabilities approach “says little about working to address social injustices in communities” (p. 178), or offering opportunities for community psychologists to inform and create justicebased interventions that are more transformative. building on sen’s ideas, prilleltensky (2012) turns our focus to community and defines two main types of justice: distributive and procedural. distributive justice is the equitable allocation of burdens, privileges, rights, and responsibilities. however, we ask, how does society determine what each person is due, especially in the context of historical injustices and current systemic oppressions? merit and need are two potential criteria for considering the distribution of resources (prilleltensky, 2012). if justice were based on merit, people would get what they deserve based on their capability and effort. on the other hand, if justice were based on need, people would get what they need to survive and prosper, an idea which is most compatible with sen’s theory. procedural justice is defined as having fair, informative, and respectful participatory decision-making processes at all levels of society, which supports the idea that social systems (i.e., education, judicial, housing) should treat all people fairly and equitably. of course, this is not currently the case, as many people are excluded from, harmed by, and underserved by social systems intended to 4 we are extremely grateful to our professors who exposed us to scholars, community members, and activists who are our support them (mikkonen & raphael, 2010). this highlights the need for greater dignity, respect, communication, fairness, accountability, and responsibility as the seeds for justice within us, our relationships, and our communities (prilleltensky, 2012). surely, a society that is based on and values all forms of justice would include these essential elements. building on the theories of decoloniality and intersectionality, we conceive of a just society as representing what cameron (2011) refers to as a “legitimate aspiration for human betterment” (p. 1). specifically, we agree with rawls (1971) that the advantages gained in a just society must be to the greatest benefit of its least advantaged, most vulnerable members. marginalized populations are the most disadvantaged in our society today, and so our conception of a just society places these populations and their needs at the center. our conceptual model that builds on the principles of our presented theories is now discussed and visually presented. our conceptual model in this paper, we seek to challenge neoliberal ideology with the intention of moving towards social transformation and a more just society, in facing the shocks of the covid19 pandemic, climate disruption, and other crises. moreover, we want to challenge traditional community psychology and push the field towards more critical, transformative practices, centering justice and equity for all. in theorizing the conceptual model, we realized our own conscientization4 (fanon, 1963; freire, 1996; martín-baró, 1994) in understanding our truths in reflection, theory, and then in action. fanon (1963) and tuhiwai smith (2012) remind us that imperialist oppression is still part-and-parcel of a colonial existence for indigenous, black, and racialized peoples and teachers in myriad ways and who promote critical praxis as learning. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 communities in the settler nation-state of canada. as part of conscientization, and guided by the education of linda tuhiwai smith and sean wilson (2008), we have undergone transformation in epistemological ways of knowing, in asking, “whose knowledge counts?” as students, will those more in authority and esteem respectfully accept and use our knowledges, based on our lived experiences and ways of knowing and being? as a cohort, we have come together in dialogue and understanding, knowing that we co-create knowledge when our stories are shared in respect, reciprocity, and trust (freire, 1996; wilson, 2008). as indigenous storyteller shawn wilson (2008) says, “... it is important for storytellers to impart their own life and experience into the telling” (p. 32). thus, when coming together to understand neoliberalism and its impact within intersectionality and decoloniality theorizing, we cannot neglect our social locations and those of our communities in transformational praxis, as we work to move to a more just society. in our theorizing, we proposed a conceptual model that supports social transformation, guided by our vision for a just society that incorporates decoloniality and intersectionality approaches. intersectionality pushes for a holistic response to the covid-19 pandemic, to address the interwoven experiences of those with multiple identities of systemic marginalization, while decoloniality requires that any transformation includes an intentional effort to center indigenous knowledges and experiences, and to combat the power that coloniality lends to neoliberalism. we hope that this conceptual model promotes critical reflections to ensure that cp practitioners and researchers do not unintentionally uphold oppressive structures of power in our work. figure 1. the conceptual model http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 note. the conceptual model illustrates how the covid-19 pandemic has revealed cracks in neoliberal ideology, potentially allowing critical justice-based social transformation, informed by the critical theories of decoloniality and intersectionality, to break through in reimagining and moving towards a more just western societies. presenting the conceptual model we view our current canadian society as defined and bounded by neoliberalism. while our capacity as authors to imagine possibilities for a more just society extends beyond this scope, we acknowledge that many actions for change are still limited within the confines of neoliberal ideology. however, compounded by pre-existing crises such as increasing social inequities and the climate crisis, the covid-19 pandemic has strained the highly limited neoliberal worldview, pushing it apart at the seams. for some, understanding the oppressive nature and deeply harmful failings of neoliberalism is not new; nonetheless, the ongoing struggle of federal, provincial, and municipal governments and the private sector to cope effectively with the covid-19 crisis is revealed to far more people today, through the negative impacts that neoliberalism has wrought. conversations about neoliberal failures in the face of the pandemic can promote a large-scale critical consciousnessraising process, and foster reimaginings towards collective visions of a more just society. however, neoliberal capitalism has proven time and time again to be extremely adaptable in the face of crises (mavelli, 2017; schmidt & thatcher, 2013), leading us to believe that it will actively try to maintain its current oppressive status quo. to build a more just society, in response to neoliberalism and the current pandemic, we need a multidimensional, transformative strategy. most importantly, we propose that this type of transformation must be informed by decoloniality and intersectionality. these two theories provide critical lenses to better understand structural injustice; inform processes of reimagining just societies; and develop value-driven, equitable processes for community organization efforts. connections to the conceptual model our conceptual model (figure 1) illustrates how the covid-19 crisis can be a vector for massive upheavals in traditional neoliberal practices. when faced with crises, social movements often become locked into reactive responses that risk being short-lived, necessitating proactive conversations for more long-term strategic action (haiven & khasnabish, 2014). the conceptual model illustrates how to use theory to strategically understand and catalyze sustainable change towards a more just society. we also recognize that neoliberalism is deeply linked to colonialism. by prioritizing the needs of global markets over the wellbeing of mother earth, neoliberalism supports ongoing colonialism, the exploitation of labour, and the dispossession of vulnerable communities (liboro, 2015). further, intentional colonial harm of indigenous peoples and other marginalized communities for economic gain has left a society dominated by a rhetoric of violence, profit, and systemic oppression (fanon, 1963; liboro, 2015; tuck & yang, 2012), with few examples of alternative and just social structures. as such, any potential social action must consider the intersectionality of these disenfranchised experiences. to be able to collectively imagine possibilities for a more just society, we need to engage the radical imagination of people (haiven & khasnabish, 2014). using radical imagination in change efforts focuses collective narratives around just societies and provides an end goal for social transformation. as meadows (1997) argues, changing the mindset or paradigm out of which a system arises is the most effective point of leverage for changing a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 system; radical imagination is hence one useful tool to help catalyze such paradigm shifts (haiven & khasnabish, 2014). the following illustrate how the praxis of radical imagination can be applied in a community context. one example of radical imagination is the cocreation of a new collective symbol for climate justice on wlu’s waterloo campus in fall 2019 (wlu, 2019). this mural was created through a participatory process led by community mural artist pamela rojas and proposed by laurier phd student and article co-author (kai reimer-watts). a diverse mural planning committee was convened to help guide the mural creation process, and to consult with community leaders and institutional decision-makers to inform the mural’s final design and placement. aligned with global climate strike week (350.org, 2019), the final cocreation of the mural involved several hundred wlu students, staff, faculty, and community members contributing to painting it together over a 10day period. now finished, the climate is life mural sends a clear, enduring message on the value of mother earth’s life-giving climate systems, while centering social justice, by honouring the diverse intergenerational social movements rising to confront the climate crisis, led by frontline indigenous and racialized communities. the mural’s prominent public placement at the heart of campus allows it to continue to share this message with many thousands of people and provide a gathering place for local climate activism. figure 2. the climate is life mural, wilfrid laurier university (2018-2019) note. painted by artist pamela rojas with the support of several hundred volunteers. as a powerful symbol, the climate is life mural has inspired other climate justicerelated initiatives, including a new research action group, climate justice laurier or cjl (laurier students’ public interest research group, n.d.), and the start of a food justice garden around the mural and throughout the heart of the waterloo campus and surrounding communities. this food justice garden, managed by volunteers through cjl, donates produce grown to food insecure students, within an indigenous worldview of stewardship and protection of the land. planted in front of the mural itself is a garden including the beneficial companion planting of ahsen nikontate’ken:a – onon’onhsera, o’saheta, o’nenste (the three sisters – squash, beans, corn), that are central to haudenosaunee food growing practices and cosmology (delormier et al., 2017). in this way, the climate is life mural and cjl food justice garden have both played a role in reclaiming institutional colonized space, engaging collective radical imagination through both a decolonial and intersectional lens to disrupt dominant narratives and envision a more just society with a safe climate future. as we are learning and transforming within ourselves, one way to engage radical imagination is through critical consciousnesshttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 raising in our communities, which involves individuals in our communities recognizing the systemic structures of oppression and their own importance and engagement in social change (freire, 1996). consequently, as we work with and in our communities, we promote critical consciousness-raising by including, as part of our work, perceptions of power and systems of power, providing insights into systemic oppression which, within the work, promotes active citizen participation (such as participatory action research) (kivell, 2018; nelson et al., 2014; zimmerman & rappaport, 1988). moreover, raising critical consciousness occurs by contrasting a group’s situation with alternatives existing for other groups in that same society (montero, 2007), a process mimicked when fostering radical imagination. in canada, the covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent neoliberal shock response have confirmed that disparities between class, race, gender, ableism, age, etc. are glaringly apparent. we believe that critical consciousness-raising, through community dialogue and storytelling, is a key component needed to interrogate the cracks revealed in our neoliberal society from the pandemic shock. as an example, the proclaiming our roots (por) project raises afro-indigenous critical consciousness by resisting colonial narratives of who belongs on these lands, and the restoring of the histories, geographies, and experiences of mixed-blood black and indigenous peoples on turtle island (beals & wilson, 2020). within intersectionality and decoloniality theoretical perspectives, por fills a gap in historical erasure of indigenousblack communities in settler canada and raises the voices of those oppressed by the nation-state and colonial-minded lateral violence. community members who take part in and contribute to the por project are shredding the complicit silence, as they teach and learn and share knowledge and wisdom around land and power. they learn how to dismantle systems of oppression through community voice, including by increasing equitable access to education, social services, and healthcare (beals & wilson, 2020) – before, during, and after the current pandemic. the hope is (and radical reimaginings are based in hope) that increased awareness of oppression and inequitable power inspires people to commit to transformative social change as they engage with radical imagination to envision and move towards a more just society. thus, we use our conceptual model in sharing knowledge to better understand neoliberal cracks currently happening and how they are impacted by this pandemic. recommendations for how the conceptual model can be applied by cp practitioners and others are now discussed. in canada, many reading this paper will have access to sheltering at home, functional internet, and the ability to work remotely, and enough food and money to eat well and pay the bills each month. however, this is not the case for the vulnerable “public facing” population (corak, 2020, para. 11). these include ‘essential workers’, such as cleaners, servers, personal care workers, sanitation workers, transit workers, and grocery store workers – many of whom are women and primary caregivers. yet, these vulnerable populations are putting their lives on the line during this pandemic crisis to service the more affluent classes (scott, 2020), while often working low-wage, precarious jobs and maintaining less stable housing with families that are less secure (corak, 2020; scott, 2020). corak (2020) argues, in the context of covid-19, “in much of this there is no question of merit and just desert, it’s just bad luck” (para. 16). but is it though? a critical analysis shows how neoliberalism has stripped social safety nets through severe austerity cuts, including social programs that, in the not-so-distant-past, were used to support and protect our society’s most vulnerable, all while the already rich continue http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 to benefit from global markets to ever increase their wealth5 (baker, 2006). as we move towards reimagining an equitable and just society, we choose to envision transformational change beyond the current confines of neoliberalism. here are two concrete possibilities for transformation and their connections to our conceptual model, in the areas of mental health and climate justice. possibilities for transformation: mental health as an example showing how neoliberalism has affected the health equity of marginalized populations, we argue that the covid-19 pandemic has revealed how canada continues to fail in providing adequate mental health care, despite government officials at all levels advised to plan for a surge in the need for mental health support (harris, 2020). marginalized communities were already more at risk and, with pandemic-related stressors (i.e., loss of income, higher-level of risk, poor access to care), these communities are now even more vulnerable (cressy, 2020; harris, 2020). such mental health vulnerabilities can lead to short-term effects such as acute-stress disorder, anxiety and depression, and long-term effects including posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd) (harris, 2020). thus, this current pandemic is not only a physical health crisis, but also a mental health care challenge. based on the gaps in the current mental health system and the pandemic exposing how vulnerable groups will not receive equitable care (bongiorno, 2021; camh, 2020; vaillancourt et al., 2021), this calls attention towards the need for immediate change. all people in canada are experiencing the effects of the pandemic crisis in various ways; however, it has become quite evident that this shock is not the great equalizer, as in everyone is affected by the covid-19 5 “for the first time in human history, the world had more than 3,000 billionaires in 2020 … this amounts to a 13.4 percent increase in billionaires since 2019, currently totaling 3,204 pandemic in the same way. the sars-cov-2 virus greatly impacts marginalized communities differently (government of canada, 2021). considering what has been revealed during this pandemic, we now understand why it was unjust that earlier in the pandemic (march 2020), it was known that canada was not collecting covid-19related race-based health data (osman, 2020). consequently, inequities in mental health care were not addressed, as the liberal “colour-blind” approach to understanding health care disparities did not need to be acknowledged by those in power in setting pandemic mental health care policies and practices (walcott, 2016). yet, it is evident from the data available that the experiences of covid-19 are and will continue to be inequitable for indigenous, black, and racialized communities (sieroka, 2021). moreover, even if the covid-19 pandemic comes to a “successful conclusion” (after all, many of us still and will continue to suffer the consequences of the current climate crisis), there will be inequitable long-term effects. previous studies of the 2003 sars-cov outbreak have shown that a year after the outbreak, the traumatic experience of frontline workers contributed to long-term symptoms of stress, depression, and anxiety (mcalonan et al., 2007). nonetheless, these cracks in our current ideological neoliberal society are opportunities to radically transform how mental health care is delivered. one such example is the radical healing framework by french et al. (2017), developed as a culturally relevant resource of healing for bir communities. the radical healing model centers on conscious healing and proactively considers the relationship between justice and wellness, while resisting racism and oppression (french et al., 2017). furthermore, as community psychologists, individuals, with a median wealth of $1.9 billion. billionaires’ collective wealth swelled to $10 trillion, a 5.7 percent increase from 2019” (austin, 2021; peterson-withorn, 2021). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 we can move towards a decolonial healing space and practice in the realm of mental health research. the unlearning of traditional methods includes moving away from training on being ‘culturally competent,’ while acknowledging that mental health impacts for many bir communities comes from the trauma of oppression and colonization (mullan, as cited by zapata, 2020). we can also challenge racism and xenophobia harming racialized communities, including the stereotyping of people of asian descent who have been unjustly blamed for the spread of covid-19 (neville et al., 2020). jones (2017) describes the dismissal of humanity’s emotional experience as damage done by neoliberalism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy. by taking advantage of the cracks in neoliberalism shown in our conceptual model, community psychologists who work in mental health research can and should demonstrate greater humanity and compassion towards collective suffering, particularly for those most marginalized and vulnerable. possibilities for transformation: climate change and the case for a green new deal if we are going to survive as human beings interconnected with mother earth and all her relatives, it is crucial that our collective response to the covid-19 pandemic must include a longer-term vision that accounts for and addresses the converging crises of inequality, climate change, and biodiversity decline (figueres, 2020; haymarket books, 2020; jones, 2020; tni staff, 2020). the green new deal (gnd) is one such sweeping parliamentary resolution introduced into the canadian federal government, with various iterations introduced in governments in the us, and countries around the world. the gnd is designed to simultaneously address multiple intersecting socioeconomic inequalities and ecological crises – in particular the climate crisis – at both the urgent speed and society-wide scale required (klein, 2019). in canada, the gnd has moved forward as the m-1 motion, introduced in parliament, december 2019 (our time, n.d.). it is broadly described as a 10-year national mobilization to: 1) reach net zero greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions, 2) create millions of secure jobs, 3) invest in sustainable infrastructure and industry, and 4) promote justice and equity for indigenous peoples and all “frontline and vulnerable communities” (our time, n.d.). clearly, a gnd is not a replacement for a coordinated public health response to the current pandemic; however, it does take the long view to ensure we are addressing our multiple, intersecting crises holistically, through a coordinated nation-wide response. to center justice, as we have argued here, the gnd also needs to incorporate critical decoloniality and intersectionality lenses for informing all policy decisions that might emerge under its banner. in the canadian settler nation-state context, we envision that this might include (but not be limited to): centering the voices and demands of indigenous and marginalized communities, with full participation in developing the national framework for a gnd; ensuring indigenous and marginalized communities are empowered with the resources and supports necessary to lead gnd efforts at the community level and ensuring canada’s full implementation of the united nations declaration on the rights for indigenous peoples (undrip). additionally, supporting calls for and due process to implement and respect full indigenous sovereignty where desired by indigenous nations within the colonial state is a necessary requirement. with this framework, and a diverse, bold, and vigilant social movement backing it up, it is possible that a made-in-canada green new deal could begin to meaningfully address multiple large-scale, intersecting crises, building towards a more just society at urgent scale and speed. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 in that vein, community psychologists are well-positioned to play leading roles in advocating at municipal, provincial, and national-level policies for climate justice, including but not limited to a gnd. for example, in this era of climate catastrophes, access to dignified, affordable housing is considered a climate justice solution (rice et al., 2019) and is one that cp practitioners helped move into a nation-wide program in canada through the at home/chez soi housing first initiative (macnaughton et al., 2013). as nelson (2013) argues, when advocating for transformative policy change in the neoliberal era, there are a range of unique roles that community psychologists can and do play, including as policy advisors; allies to progressive social movements; program innovators; public intellectuals; researchers/evaluators; and partnership makers, among other socially-just roles. in an era of enormous change and multiple converging threats to community wellbeing and social justice – core values of the community psychology field – it is crucial for all cp practitioners to engage with these issues and identify meaningful roles to play in advancing progressive, justice-based policy and advocacy in the public sphere. discussion our quest has been to assess how to critically use social theories to move towards a more just society, while revealing how neoliberalism informs and seeks to limit equitable and anti-oppressive responses during the current covid-19 pandemic. to this end, we proposed a conceptual model using theories of decoloniality and intersectionality to inform social transformation towards a more just society; a society where indigenous sovereignty is achieved, and social and economic justice are restored to all who are marginalized in various intersectional ways of being. decoloniality and intersectionality theories are crucial to understanding a socially-just society, as they involve resistance, disruption, and pushing back against colonial systems and hierarchies of knowledge and power. we can incite disruption through critical consciousness-raising and collective radical reimagination to envision possibilities for what could be. in the following sections, we discussed insights learned from engaging with decoloniality and intersectionality theories in the context of the covid-19 pandemic, as we provide recommendations for the community psychology field. unfortunately, we are currently facing not one, but multiple converging large-scale crises, which threaten to exacerbate each other if they are not holistically and urgently addressed, from the accelerating global climate crisis (field, 2014; intergovernmental panel on climate change [ipcc], 2014, 2018); worsening global and localized inequalities (unesco inclusive policy lab, 2018); rapid biodiversity decline (kolbert, 2014; rockström et al., 2009), and now the global covid-19 pandemic. what connects each of these crises is their roots in the planetand people-destroying nature of neoliberalism, upending the stability of our planet and threatening to launch us into a dark new era of cascading, ever-worsening crises (navarro, 2020). in reflecting on practical applications of our conceptual model, it is clear there is an urgent need to use the revealed cracks in neoliberalism to push visionary, societal-level and global transformations that put mother earth and all her relatives at the forefront of a just society. one of the many lessons from the pandemic is that when society decides a threat is urgent enough to address, our economies can retool, revise, and change at astonishing speed (galbraith & otto, 2020; jones, 2020). this approximates the speed and scale of change needed to address other major crises, including increasing social inequalities (unesco inequality report, 2018) and the global climate crisis (ipcc, 2018). as a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 society, we need to conceptualize solutions that are more than simply reactionary, but also visionary, addressing the present crises we face with urgency, while building towards a far more just, livable, thriving, and compassionate future. recommendations for community psychology while recognizing the immense body of work in the areas of decoloniality, intersectionality, and social transformation theories such as reimagination, we seek to build upon critical theorizing in the context of the current pandemic by presenting the following recommendations for cp scholars: 1) referencing the conceptual model, in particular its integration of decoloniality and intersectionality theories, within social transformation work during this pandemic and in the face of other multiple, ongoing crises, 2) in responding to crisis situations, cp practitioners should continue to develop and tangibly support pre-existing grassroots social movements, which have been continually addressing the inequities exacerbated by covid-19, and 3) increase working connections amongst researchers nationally and internationally, to reduce the more us-centric focus in the field. to further expand on each of the above points, firstly, our conceptual model supports and builds upon prilleltensky’s (2014) position of transformative change as a multifaceted continuum. as doctoral student authors who continue to learn about the necessity of critical engagement for real transformation in our communities, we hope that cp researchers will choose to place their work on the critical edge of this continuum. it is crucial that research with communities is aimed towards disrupting structural spaces of power that are rooted in neoliberalism and coloniality by taking an intersectional lens, which can then lead to more justice-based transformative change. secondly, in response to crises, researchers and practitioners can assist with developing and supporting existing community initiatives that center the narratives of marginalized communities, especially those who continue to be oppressed by the system of neoliberalism. cp scholars can assist with developing a vision or reinforcing an existing vision of justice-based transformative change, through social organizing and movements. this means working alongside social movements advocating for social justice, while disrupting spaces that hold structural power. we feel that it is our moral obligation as scholars and human beings to respond compassionately during a time of crisis, and to strongly emphasize during these times both what is unjust and what can be done to move towards a more just society. lastly, we believe that community psychology can do a better job of working together as a collective. great work and research are being done in the field, which unfortunately at times can be left unnoticed or difficult to sustain over longer periods of time. arguably, this may be a strategic response from institutions that hold power (e.g., which projects get funded), to ensure that activism is done at a distance and does not have the opportunity to overhaul colonial systems. organizing ourselves as scholar-activists will not only strengthen the work with and in our communities but will also demonstrate that many of us are working towards similar goals and outcomes – just societies. there are opportunities to cultivate our individual passions by finding the points of intersections and working together as a collective, which will only strengthen our voices and visions towards real, transformative systems change. we challenge the cp field in canada by asking, “in the face of multiple intersecting urgent crises, how can we better work together towards a collective vision of a more just, sustainable society?” conclusion http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 covid-19 has forced us into a constantly shifting landscape exposing how the neoliberal system is failing us. now more than ever, in the face of these crises, we need critical social transformation. our current neoliberal economic and governance system is strained, and people are becoming disillusioned and noticing the cracks. we stand on the precipice of global shock events that could be the gateway to major societal upheaval, that with proper guidance, could lead towards a far more just society. however, we need to act soon. neoliberalism is nothing if not adaptable and shifty, and those who currently benefit from this system can and often do use their power to reshape the dominant narrative of how we understand and respond to crisis. moreover, the dominant narrative is shifting in pace with the covid-19 pandemic, so without a significant, concerted push for transformation soon, our chance to significantly weaken the walls of neoliberalism and break out of this oppressive system may close once again. if neoliberalism is given the chance to right itself and establish homeostasis, it will come at the expense of the marginalized, the systemically oppressed and mother earth. hence, we argue that justice-based social transformation, informed by critical equitybased social theories, is 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her primary research agenda focuses on the biopsychosocial impact of trauma-informed, group interventions. sarah has partnered with various community-based organizations that provide mental health care to adults and children who have been exposed to traumatic events. dr. beranbaum conducted the present study as a clinical psychology doctoral student at the new school. nicole a. kouri, is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at wayne state university and intern at new york-presbyterian/ columbia university irving medical center. she is interested in the intersection between interpersonal violence, posttraumatic stress, and dissociation, and how systems, whether institutional or familial, promote potentially maladaptive coping strategies. for her dissertation, nicole is examining how symptoms of post-traumatic stress and dissociation influence interpersonal development and functioning during adolescence. nicci van der merwe, holds a masters degree in programme evaluation (university of cape town) and a master of arts degree in criminology (university of south africa). she has over 10 years of quantitative and qualitative research experience in the development sector, which includes programme monitoring, evaluation and learning. her criminology and psychology background, coupled with her work experience in community development and community-based mental health, have refined her passion for and understanding of mental health prevention and promotion interventions for children and youth who live in chronic adversity. wendy d'andrea, is an associate professor of psychology at the new school and chief science officer for the trauma research foundation. dr. d'andrea's work focuses on complex trauma, and aims to a) examine the psychobiological adaptations associated with chronic trauma and environmental adversity, and b) to understand the ways in which we can support trauma healing, through using psychobiological tools to understand the impact of interventions, including psychotherapy and community supports. 1 the new school for social research, 80 5th avenue, ny, 10011, usa 2 wayne state university, 42 w warren avenue, detroit, mi, 48202, usa 3 waves for change, 23 beach road, muizenberg, cape town,7950, south africa global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 recommended citation: beranbaum, s., kouri, n., van der merwe, n., & andrea, w. d. (2024). the impact of surf therapy on risk-taking and interpersonal closeness among violence-exposed youth. global journal of community psychology practice, 15(2), 1 19. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: sarah beranbaum, the new school of social research, 80 5th avenue, ny, 10011. email: beras564@newschool.edu. global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the impact of surf therapy on risk-taking and interpersonal closeness among violence-exposed youth abstract objective: the impacts of the sport-based, psycho-social intervention, surf therapy, have thus far yielded promising results based on self-reported and qualitative assessments. the purpose of this study is to use a multi-method evaluation to investigate the effects of waves for change’s surf therapy program for at-risk youth according to the primary intervention aims. method: two-hundred thirty-three violence-exposed youth from south africa participated in a multi-method program evaluation of waves for change’s surf therapy program. participants who were either enrolled in surf therapy or in the waitlist comparison group completed self-report assessments of perceived stress, sensation-seeking, and interpersonal closeness, as well as behavioral measures of risk-taking and self-esteem. data were collected at two time points, six months apart. findings: participation in surf therapy among participants, each of whom endorsed exposure to violence, led to significant reductions in risk-taking behaviors and sensation seeking. data also suggests that waves for change’s surf-therapy increased participants’ sense of interpersonal closeness. there were no significant changes observed in participant stress or self-esteem, which were both assessed with measures that yielded low internal consistency. conclusion: findings suggest that waves for change’s surf therapy program is an efficacious, traumainformed intervention for violence-exposed youth. the intervention has been found to strengthen interpersonal connectivity and reduce impulsivity. introduction even if you have never surfed, you likely know that riding a wave takes bravery, perseverance, focus, and an optimistic outlook. such skills are beneficial in many sports and translate to the rest of life. physical activity is consistently found to benefit physical, psychological, and social health (e.g., biddle & mutrie 2008; reed & buck, 2009). one such sport-based intervention is surf therapy. surf therapy is defined by the international surf therapy organization (2019) as an intervention that combines surf instruction and activities that promote psychological, physical, and psychosocial wellness, conducted individually or as a group. in addition to surf instruction, programs often incorporate mentoring, social skills development, psycho-social education, global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 and group discussion, fostered in a safe interpersonal environment. surf therapy is well situated to deliver these intervention elements in part because participants can practice learned coping skills in response to in-the-moment physiological and emotional stressors (e.g. a wipe out). furthermore, in order to stay safe while on the beach and in the ocean, a culture of caring for one another and speaking up for oneself is cultivated (marshall et al., 2020). in a recent review of the academic literature on surf therapy, benninger et al., (2020) found consistent evidence that surf therapy increases self-concept, emotional regulation and social competency skills, engagement with school, and reductions in behavioral problems among youth in need of social and emotional support (colpus & taylor, 2014; hignett et al., 2018; matos et al., 2017). through surf therapy, participants also have the opportunity to be outdoors. evidence demonstrates the psychological benefits of combining physical activity and being in natural environments (eigenschenk et al., 2019; mitchell, 2013), which builds on knowledge that being in nature nurtures well-being (hansen-ketchum & halpenny, 2011). one such context where surf therapy is provided is south africa, which at present, is faced with social, health, and economic inequity, with over half of south africa’s children living in conditions of poverty (unicef, 2020). widespread poverty and unemployment are two social factors that support violence (seedat et al., 2009) and despite widespread exposure to adverse social and environmental influences, government-wide programs and psychosocial interventions are limited (marshall et al., 2020; van der merwe & yarrow, 2020). instead, non-governmental organizations have been the primary leaders in developing psycho-social programming to safeguard against violence and support those who have been victimized (seedat et al., 2009). a non-governmental organization that provides much needed services in the form of surf therapy to youth is waves for change (w4c; https://waves-for-change.org/). built on trauma-informed principles and a childfriendly approach, w4c founder, tim conibear, describes surf therapy as providing participants with: 1) a safe space and caring adults (i.e. social connection); 2) the challenging and interesting activity of surfing (i.e. confidence building); and 3) psychoeducation (i.e. emotion-regulation skills). by incorporating these elements, w4c aims to improve self-regulation, increase children’s ability to form meaningful and protective relationships among people of similar and different identifies (e.g. gender, race), and strengthen their positive outlook on the future (personal communication, march 16, 2021). existing research on w4c suggests that participants perceive the program to be a trauma-informed physical activity. as a community-based intervention based in a community with insufficient access to highly qualified professionals such as psychotherapists (world health organization, 2022), w4c’s surf therapy sessions are facilitated by non-specialist workers who have less extensive training so as to increase access to mental health care (patel, 2009). within w4c “surf coaches” or “coaches” implement the intervention. surf coaches are young adults who come from the same township communities as the youth participants and may have previously participated in surf therapy themselves. surf coaches receive training in a wide variety of topics that include trauma-informed care and water safety prior to facilitating surf therapy and receive regular training and supervisory team meetings throughout programming. global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 south african participants reported w4c to be a safe space where youth can establish social connections and support through psycho-social education about coping, and pro-social communication, and participate in a fun activity collectively (marshall et al., 2020). youth participants’ reports of w4c surf therapy are aligned with elements of trauma-informed care. darroch et al. (2020) define trauma-informed physical activity as an appealing and accessible program that includes: safety, collaborative and clear communication, caring instructors trained in trauma-informed care, emotion-awareness, and regulation exercises. according to regular internal evaluations, w4c surf therapy has been associated with positive self-esteem and self-regulation among participants. furthermore, a qualitative study from w4c’s program in liberia revealed that surf therapy produced a supportive, familial environment of physical and emotional safety, fostered new positive social connections, and cultivated coping skills (marshall et al., 2020). a randomized controlled trial, conducted as part of a master’s project on the impact of w4c’s surf therapy, however, found no statistically significant changes in self-reported psychosocial well-being (snelling, 2016). while quantitative self-report measures have thus far not revealed statistically significant change, qualitative research by marshall et al., (2020) demonstrated surf therapy benefits. qualitative findings revealed that surf therapy cultivated emotional and physical safety, which was attributed by participants to their caring coaches who assumed a nonjudgemental stance. their study also revealed increased awareness of emotion states and willingness to communicate such feelings and needs by participants. given the discordance between promising qualitative outcomes and insignificant qualitative findings the question of how to measure and interpret change throughout surf therapy is raised. accordingly, w4c commissioned an external program evaluation, which incorporated self-report measures and objective behavioral measures that were matched to their intended program outcomes. the current study presents the findings from such evaluation. to develop the evaluation, the study’s authors considered w4c’s program aims and consulted with w4c personnel. the intervention intends to combat social exclusion by helping young people from communities with high rates of violence develop a skill set necessary to better regulate their emotions, identify and maintain positive life choices, and create meaningful relationships. as such, the evaluation sought to examine changes in participants’ perceived stress, self-regulation and risk-taking, selfesteem, and social cohesion. the evaluation implemented a multimodal method of data collection. self-report measures for child participants, although time and cost efficient, have significant limitations, that include inconsistent reports of well-being due to developing abstract thinking and memory recall (going et al., 1999) and frequent underreporting of “bad” behaviors (e.g., risk taking) and feelings (e.g., stress) and overreporting of “good” behaviors (e.g., exercise) and emotions (e.g., happiness) to please adults (camerini, 2017). as such, the evaluation incorporated behavioral and self-report measures the present study builds off of existing surftherapy research, including the baseline findings of the present evaluation (beranbaum et al., 2022), by assessing the impacts of surf-therapy using a multi-method evaluation that incorporates self-report and behavioral measures. exposure to violence, sensation seeking, stress, self-esteem, interpersonal closeness, and risk taking tendencies were examined over the course of w4c’s surf-therapy program among child global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 participants who speak different languages and come from various subcultures within cape town, south africa. the evaluation aims to assess the impact of w4c surf therapy using a multi-method assessment and methodologically investigate the benefits and drawbacks of various assessment approaches for youth psychosocial programming. a secondary aim of the present study was to determine the feasibility and utility of behavioral and self-reported measures administered in a naturalistic setting. method program characteristics the present study evaluated the surf-therapy intervention conducted by w4c, which is designed to provide violence and traumaexposed children and adolescents with social support and skills to strengthen their emotion regulation and positive self-esteem. through surfing paired with psychosocialeducation and a coping skills curriculum, within a supportive social environment, w4c aims for youth participants to build confidence, strengthen their self-regulation, and develop hopeful views of the future. the 10-month long curriculum is distributed weekly sessions by surf coaches held at local beaches. w4c picks up children from their township communities by bus and drives them to the beach where they receive a nutritious meal, participate in surfing, psycho-social education, and community building activities, and then are brought back home. study design a multi-method program evaluation was conducted between 2018 and 2019 that 4 south african townships are communities developed to identify ‘non-white’ neighborhoods during apartheid. they were established in the peripheries of cities as part included a comparison group of children who were on the w4c waitlist. participants’ exposure to surf therapy varied widely; some participants had not yet begun surf therapy whereas others had already participated in 33 weeks of the surf therapy curriculum. all intervention and comparison participants were assessed at two time points (i.e., “baseline” and “endline”), 6 months apart. data collection occurred in participants’ schools or in w4c facilities. participant recruitment and characteristics south african youth (n = 233, 57.5% female), aged 9-17 years old (m = 11.26) from ocean view, khayelitsha, lavender hill, and hangberg townships4 participated in the evaluation. participants were referred to w4c by school personnel based on perceived vulnerability to anxiety, depression, attention deficits, and aggression, as well as known exposure to traumatic events or loss. referred participants needed to meet inclusion criteria: age criteria, interest in joining surf therapy, available during times of data collection, and parents consented to research and surf therapy participation. measures self-report measures and behavioral task instructions were translated and backtranslated into xhosa and afrikaans from english by multi-lingual w4c staff. trauma and stress violence exposure. exposure to violence was evaluated with the 25-item community experiences questionnaire (ceq; schwartz & proctor, 2000). participants rated on a scale of the segregationist doctrine that aimed to minimize interactions between people of different skin colors (jürgens et al., 2013) global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 from 1 (never) to 4 (lots of times) how often they had witnessed or directly experienced violence. the ceq has subscales that assess exposure to violence through witnessing and direct victimization. stress. the perceived stress scale for children (pss; white, 2014) was administered to assess self-reported stress during the past week on a scale of 0 (never) to 3 (a lot). items are summed with the highest possible score being 39. the scale had poor consistency determined by cronbach’s alpha of .58. self-concept self-esteem. self-esteem was measured with a seven-block implicit association test (iat; greenwald et al., 1998). for the self-esteem iat (greenwald et al., 2002), participants were presented with alternating positive and negative words or images (i.e. attributes) alongside first or second person pronouns (i.e. categories of “self” or “other”). faster performance is expected when highly associated concepts and attributes share the same response computer key. thus, positive self-esteem is inferred if a child more quickly associated themselves with something positive than negative, whereas negative scores on the iat indicate associating the self with negative attributes, suggesting poor selfesteem. due to child-level literacy and limited familiarity with a computer keyboard, certain elements of the task were modified: 1) positive or negative emojis, or simple pictures, replaced positive and negative attribute words; 2) color-coded stickers were placed on the two keyboard keys participants were instructed to press to minimize reaction time, unrelated to the measured construct. the outcome variable is the iat summary ‘d’ score, which includes practice and test trials. positive values are indicative of positive associations with the self and negative values indicate negative associations with the self. interpersonal closeness. the inclusion of other in the self (ios; aron et al., 1992) questionnaire was administered to assess participants’ closeness with others. see appendix a for scale imagery. participants selected the picture that best depicts their relationship from a series of circular diagrams that represent degrees of overlap between two circles. a couple of items were modified to address perception of closeness within the context of surf therapy programming: “the people in your surf group” and “your surf coach.” additionally, questions were modified to assess changes in perceived closeness with individuals identified to be within the same or different social group, namely someone of the same or different gender or race: “friends who are boys (or girls),” and “a person with the same (or different) skin color as you.” the scale measured closeness and connection at an individual item level to examine specific changes in relationships and had acceptable internal consistency of .74. riskand sensation-seeking risk taking. risk-taking propensity was assessed with the balloon analogue risk task for youth (bart-y; lejuez et al., 2007). participants were asked to inflate a computer-generated balloon to earn an unspecified prize. with each pump of the balloon, participants earn a point and can choose to stop pumping the balloon and transfer the points to a permanent prize meter. if the balloon explodes when it is pumped, all of the points for that balloon are lost. there is a set number of balloons, and participants are presented with a new balloon after a prize transfer or balloon explosion. based on prior research demonstrating nearly identical results using the first 10 balloons compared to 30 balloons (lejuez et al., 2003), the present study set the number of balloons at 15 due to time constraints of collecting data in a naturalistic global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 environment. for each non-popped balloon, the number of pumps is recorded and averaged into the typical outcome variable, adjusted average pump count. larger values are suggestive of higher risk-taking. sensation seeking. the brief sensation seeking scale for children (bsss-c; jensen et al., 2011) was used to measure propensity toward risk taking and sensation seeking behaviors. two sensation seeking items were eliminated due to lack of relevance and replaced by the items: “i would like to surf big waves even if there are sharks” and “i would like to surf at night.” items on the scale are averaged with the highest possible score being 4. cronbach’s alpha was acceptable (.68), though was significantly lower than the internal validity (a = .82) found in jensen and colleagues’ (2011) development paper. procedure psychologists at the new school for social research with expertise in program evaluation were recruited to design and conduct a program evaluation for waves for change in order to understand the target population needs and program effects. as the program evaluation aimed to use a datadriven assessment to examine w4c’s surf therapy to inform and improve upon its practices, irb approval was not required. the new school’s irb approval affirmed this understanding at the outset of the project. after data were analyzed and appeared to be of larger interest, the new school’s irb was consulted. it determined that use of the present data for publication were exempt from irb approval as they were de-identified, archival program evaluation data. parents or guardians of child participants provided consent to participate in assessment and evaluation as part of the consent to participate in surf-therapy. participants verbally assented in english, xhosa, or afrikaans to participate in the evaluation at the start of the evaluation session. as part of the consent, youth participants were informed that they could discontinue the assessment at any time and that all information would be kept private, including from parents and teachers. participants completed data collection at two timepoints: at the start of the w4c surf therapy curriculum and after six months, at the end of the curriculum. in groups of eight to ten, physically spaced to ensure privacy, participants completed the self-report. data were collected by w4c staff and peer youth researchers who were w4c surf coaches who had exhibited strong interpersonal skills and interest in research. peer youth researchers were trained in the theoretical concepts being assessed (e.g. risk, social closeness), task administration, and data organization, deidentification, and security. these research assistants read questions aloud in english, xhosa, and or afrikaans depending on participants’ preferred language and participants answered questionnaires on paper surveys. after the self-report questionnaires, participants, facilitated by a research assistant, completed the behavioral tasks on windows 8 tablets using the inquisit lab 5 software. physiological data were collected but there was not enough data of interpretable quality to observe physiological change. analysis plan and accounting for ecological circumstances of data collection it was envisaged that data would be collected from participants from various neighborhoods in the w4c program, at three time points (baseline, midand post-surf therapy) and from a comparison group, at two time points. data collection time points were planned to be at least two months apart. various factors created challenges for the team to collect data at the exact times and intervals envisaged. as such, baseline data for global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 some participants would have been before the participants came to their first surf therapy session, while baseline data for other participants would have been after they have been to four surf therapy sessions already. while the w4c program builds up slowly during the first month of the program, technically the baseline data for some participants could not be considered ‘true baseline’ data. similarly, time point two data for some participants would have been at a significantly different time than time point two data for participants in the same cohort. to account for the complicated ecological circumstances of data collection, the evaluation’s analyses required an atypical approach. ibm spss statistics version 24 was used for all statistical analyses. independent and paired-samples t-tests were used to examine differences in self-report and behavioral data collected at baseline and endline between participants who were new to surf therapy and participants who had already been enrolled in surf therapy for at least seven weeks. seven weeks was determined based on the w4c curriculum and the participant sample size. repeated measures anovas were conducted to examine change in self-report and behavioral data from the first and second data collection periods. participant interactions between w4c participants and comparison were also assessed. changes in participants’ perceived closeness with surf coaches, community, family, people of the same and different race, and people of the same and different gender were assessed using an item analysis of ios items. aligned with the w4c surf therapy aim to cultivate a supportive community for participants of different identities, analysis of ios items were examined across all participants and between female and male. results trauma and stress trauma. participants endorsed high rates of exposure to violence, such that 100% of participants had witnessed violence and all but two participants (98.2%) had directly experienced violence. for endorsed direct violence experiences see table 1 and for witnessed violence experiences see table 2. table 1 community experiences questionnaire, experienced violence direct violence type never once a few times lots of times somebody broke in/tried to force their way into your home 68.8% (n = 75) 25.7% (n = 28) 4.6% (n = 5) .9% (n = 1) somebody threatened to hurt you really badly 55% (n = 60) 31.2% (n = 34) 8.3% (n = 9) 5.5% (n = 6) you have been chased by gangs, other kids, or adults 65.7% (n = 71) 18.5% (n = 20) 9.3% (n = 10) 6.5% (n = 7) somebody hit, punched or slapped you 26.4% (n = 28) 42.5 (n = 45) 19.8% (n = 21) 11.3% (n = 12) somebody stole something from you using 67.9% 20.2% 6.4% 5.5% global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 violence (n = 74) (n =22) (n = 7) (n = 6) somebody fired a gun at you or at your home 85.3% (n = 93) 10.1% (n = 11) 3.7% (n = 4) .9% (n = 1) somebody tried to hurt you with a knife or other sharp object 78.9% (n = 86) 11% (n = 12) 5.5% (n = 6) 4.6% (n = 5) somebody tried to hurt you by hitting you with a stick, bat, pole or club 61.1% (n = 66) 26.9% (n = 29) 5.6% (n = 6) 6.5% (n = 7) somebody threw a bottle, rock or other object at you 28.3% (n = 30) 26.8% (n = 39) 16% (n = 17) 18.9% (n = 20) somebody tried to use violence or threats to get you to do something that you didn't want to do 61.8% (n = 68) 22.7% (n = 25) 10% (n = 11) 5.5% (n = 6) you have been arrested or taken away by the police 91.7% (n = 100) 5.5% (n = 6) 2% (n = 1.8) .9% (n = 1) table 2 community experiences questionnaire, witnessed violence witnessed violence type never once a few times lots of times you have seen or heard somebody else get threatened 21.5% (n = 23) 34.6% (n = 37) 19.6% (n = 21) 24.3% (n = 26) you have seen somebody else get chased by gangs other kids or adults 24% (n = 25) 28.8% (n = 30) 25% (n = 26) 22.1% (n = 23) you have seen somebody trying to break in or force their way into somebody else's home 43.4% (n = 46) 24.5% (n = 26) 19.8% (n = 21) 12.3% (n = 13) you have seen somebody else get hit, punched, or slapped 10.1% (n = 11) 18.3% (n = 20) 38.5% (n = 42) 33% (n = 36) you have seen somebody get robbed or have something stolen from them by force 33.9% (n = 37) 22% (n = 24) 25.7% (n =28) 18.3% (n = 20) you have seen somebody carrying a gun or other weapon (besides police, etc) 31.8% (n = 34) 32.7% (n = 35) 15% (n = 16) 20.6% (n = 22) you have seen or heard gunshots 13% (n = 14) 17.6% (n = 19) 24.1% (n = 26) 45.4% (n = 49) you have seen someone try to hurt another 33% 24.5% 19.8% 22.6% global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 person with a knife or other sharp object (n = 35) (n = 26) (n = 21) (n = 24) you have seen somebody get hit with a stick, bat, pole or club 34.9% (n = 38) 27.5% (n = 30) 23.9% (n = 26) 13.8% (n = 15) you have seen somebody have a bottle rock or other hard object thrown at them 24.5% (n = 27) 30.9% (n = 34) 28.2% (n = 31) 16.4% (n = 18) you have seen somebody get arrested or taken away by the police 14.7% (n = 16) 33.9% (n = 37) 19.3% (n = 21) 32.1% (n = 35) you have seen a dead body (besides funerals, etc) 42.2% (n = 46) 22.9% (n = 25) 16.5% (n = 18) 18.3% (n = 20) you have seen or heard somebody trying to use force or threats to get another person to do something they didn't want to do 41.3% (n = 45) 27.5% (n = 30) 14.7% (n = 16) 16.5% (n = 18) you have seen somebody get killed 56.9% (n = 62) 19.3% (n = 21) 13.8% (n = 15) 10.1% (n = 11) stress. examining self-report data collected at baseline reveal that length of time in surftherapy and perceived stress were not significantly correlated, r (93) = .03, p = .760. a repeated measures anova was performed with measurement timepoints as the within subjects’ factor and participant type as the between subjects’ factor. there was not a significant main effect of time on pss, f (105) = .18, p = .676, such that there was no significant difference in reported stress depending on the time of data collection. furthermore, no main effect of participant type on pss was found, f (105) = .001, p = .977, such that w4c and comparison participants did not differ in their experience of stress. self-concept self-esteem. to assess self-esteem, participants were administered the selfesteem iat, which yielded inconclusive data due to high inaccuracy rates (i.e., 58% of participants pressed the incorrect key at least 75% of the time). qualitative testimonials from w4c staff indicated that participants had difficulty understanding the task. these accounts are consistent with iat data produced. independent t-tests reveal there was no significant difference in self-esteem among w4c participants who were new to surf therapy and those who had participated in at least seven weeks of programming according to the iat summary ‘d’ score, t (147) = .88, p = .384. participant gender did not predict iat responses, r (149) = -.035, p = .669, nor iat change from baseline to endline data collection, r (67) = -.07, p = .558. repeated measures anova also yielded no significant within-subjects interaction, f (102) = .20, p = .656, nor between-subjects interaction, f (102) = .008 p = .930, such that that there was no change in self-esteem from baseline to endline data collection periods and there were no differences in w4c and comparison participants’ self-esteem. global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 interpersonal closeness. a paired-samples ttest reveals that participants felt significantly closer with people in their lives at endline compared to baseline data collection, t(94) = 6.20, p < .001. to assess for gender-based differences in perceived interpersonal closeness, including connectedness with female and male friends, the ios was analyzed according to participant gender. female participants reported feeling significantly closer to a friend, t(54) = -3.46, p = .040 and to her closest family member, t(54) = -.35, p = .001. male participants reported feeling significantly closer with people who hold similar identities, namely with friends who are boys, t (36) = 2.08, p <=.045, and people who are from the same racial background, t(32) = 2.46, p = .019. riskand sensation-seeking risk-taking. an independent t-test examining differences in bart-y scores between participants at baseline collection who had just begun surf-therapy and participants who had been enrolled for at least seven weeks demonstrates significant differences in risktaking. participants who had experienced at least seven weeks in the program exhibited significantly lower risk-taking behavior (m = 18.31, sd = 10.09) than participants who were new to the program (m = 24.38, sd = 11.39) t (84) = -3.14, p = .002. participants’ performance on the bart-y differed according to participant gender over the course of surf therapy, such that scores were negatively correlated with length of time in surf-therapy among female w4c participants, r (86) = -.22, p = .039, whereas male participants’ bart-y scores were not significantly correlated with length of time in surf-therapy, r (60) = -.04, p = .755. due to the small sample size of w4c participants who completed the bart-y at both timepoints (n = 57), repeated measures anova was not separated by participant gender. a repeated measures anova was performed with measurement timepoint as the within subjects factor and participant type as the between subjects factor. there was not a significant main effect of time on bart-y, f (91) = 1.10, p = .298, and no main effect of participant type on bart-y, indicating that there were no significant changes in bart-y scores between baseline and endline data collection and w4c participant data did not differ significantly from comparison participants. sensation seeking. a repeated measures anova with measurement timepoints as the within subjects’ factor and participant type as the between subjects’ factor yielded a significant main effect of time on sensation seeking, f (135) = 5.15 p = .025, such that there was a significant reduction in reported sensation seeking at endline compared to baseline. no main effect was found of participant type on sensation seeking, f (135) = .003 p = .960, meaning that comparison and w4c participants did not differ in their sensation seeking. among w4c participants assessed at the initial data collection period, there were no significant differences in sensation seeking according to length of time in surf therapy, t (162) = -.19, p = .849. an item analysis assessed how different types of sensation seeking could be either adaptive or maladaptive. impulsivity and seeking dangerous experiences may be understood as maladaptive whereas bravery to try new or challenging activities could be adaptive. a paired-samples t-test from baseline to endline data collection reveals that male participants reported significantly less interest in high-risk activities, such as wanting to “surf at night,” t (37) = 2.37, p = .023. by contrast, male participants also exhibited increased confidence as assessed by the item, “i’m the first one of my friends to try new things,” t (38) = -2.41, p = .022. both male and female participants reported less interest in risky relationships with friends global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 who “break the rules,” t (91) = 4.25, p < .001. participants’ interest in relationships with others who “do what they want” and “break the rules” is related to participants’ sense of closeness with others. at baseline, preference towards friends who break the rules was negatively correlated with participants’ sense of closeness with “a friend” on the ios, r (159) = -.21, p = .007, and closeness with “a family member,” r (157) = -.26, p = .001. discussion results from the present program evaluation indicate that w4c’s surf-therapy program is an effective, sport-based intervention for trauma-exposed children and adolescents with specific impacts on risk and interpersonal connection. w4c’s careful balance of psycho-social education, social support, and emotion regulation skillbuilding within the outdoor context of surfing strengthens participants’ interpersonal closeness and cohesion as well as reduces participants’ risk-taking tendencies while encouraging self-confidence and bravery. there were clear connections between w4c’s intended goals and some key findings of the present evaluation. the program aims to foster supportive relationships, which was corroborated with qualitative data by marshall and colleagues in 2020. one way that interpersonal skills and relationships are fostered by w4c is through surf coaches encouraging participants to check in with their peers to gauge one another’s sense of safety and to provide support to their friends while in and out of the water. in addition to cultivating capacity to take care of peers and attend to their own needs, participants received social support from adults trained in trauma-informed care in settings that help youth develop a sense of belonging. study findings are reflective of w4c’s purposeful process that builds social support as a way to help foster participants’ bravery to go in the water and cultivates emotional awareness and regulation. this study suggests participation in surf therapy is associated with increased perceived closeness in meaningful relationships (i.e., friends and family) and decreased interest in relationships with people who do not support the cohesion of the group (i.e., friends who do what they want and break the rules). beyond attending to participants’ supportive relationships and safety, w4c’s surf therapy aims to strengthen participants’ emotion regulation capabilities and positive life choices through group-based exercises. a qualitative study by marshall et al., (2020), indicated that w4c participants’ learn regulation skills. this is supported by the current evaluation’s quantitative findings, which suggest that participation in surf therapy does strengthen self-regulation. youth enrolled in surf therapy for at least seven weeks exhibited less behavioral risk taking and after six months displayed less self-reported sensation seeking. at the same time, male participants reported increased bravery and willingness to try new things. findings indicate that participation in surf therapy improves self-regulation and encourages positive life choices by strengthening participant inhibition and fostering their bravery and willingness to explore. surf therapy is a challenging and interesting activity, which gambone and abreton (1997) identified as an important element in youth programming. the challenging nature of surfing, facilitated in a trauma-informed manner by caring adults appears to foster participant bravery and agency while also having positive effects on strengthening participant inhibition. outcomes elucidated in the present evaluation indicate that w4c’s surf therapy strengthens safe relationships and selfregulation among violence-exposed youth, which are both widely recognized as fundamental aims in trauma-informed global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 psychiatric interventions (ford & blaustein, 2013). w4c’s surf therapy program operates within a low-resource context that is shaped by social inequality and community violence. as such, all the participants who took part in the program evaluation had experienced violence directly or had witnessed violence. in response to the extraordinarily high rates of interpersonal violence and social inequities that shape many children’s lives, w4c fosters a trauma-informed environment where its youth participants can learn and practice surfing with caring mentors who come from the same communities as the participants. w4c’s surf therapy is facilitated by nonclinical community members, which enables program scalability, and may foster the intervention’s cultural-specificity. informed by w4c’s approach to surf therapy implementation, the program evaluation also utilized a community member-facilitated, trauma-informed method. the evaluation approach included training surf coaches, who were already trained in trauma-informed care as part of training to be coaches, in data collection methodology. w4c mentors assumed the leadership role of research assistants and collected participants’ data so that the participants would feel more comfortable compared to data collection with an unknown adult, particularly of a different culture. examining the methodological feasibility and utility of administering behavioral and selfreported measures in a low-resourced context with layperson research assistants was a secondary aim of the evaluation. participants and program staff reported positive feedback on the bart-y. in addition to providing reliable data, the bart-y was also experienced by participants as enjoyable and game-like, which increased participant engagement. findings suggest that the self-report stress assessment, pss, did not reliably measure participants’ experienced stress. the scale, which was developed and normed in the united states, may not have been culturally relevant to the south african participants of the present study. the behavioral self-esteem measure, iat, also yielded unreliable data, although the measure has been successfully administered in various countries with youth (e.g. bos et al., 2010; yamaguchi et al., 2007). according to testimonials from on-theground surf coaches, the self-esteem iat was confusing for participants and subsequently produced low accuracy rates, which limited the task’s interpretability. limited computer literacy and the use of emoji faces in place of positive or negative attribute words may have contributed to the task’s difficulty among participants. these findings illustrate the importance of administering assessments that are culturally specific rather than relying on a euroamerican centric approach to conceptualizing mental health. numerous complications emerge when measures are administered in a context where they were not normed, including translational issues of grammatical differences and idioms of distress, and ensuring the validity of measures (bhui et al., 2003). considering psychiatric symptom experiences are culturally embedded systems of meaning making (kirmayer, 2005), the use of psychometric instruments that incorporate local idioms of distress and wellness may better capture individuals’ well-being (jayawickreme et al., 2012). for example, one such cultural idiom of resilience in south africa is acceptance, or ukwamukela (kim et al., 2019), which was not assessed for in the present evaluation. limitations in addition to the discussed limitations of the perceived stress and self-esteem measures, the study was limited by a highly variable global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 baseline data collection point. some participants’ baseline data collected before surf therapy began whereas other participants had already been enrolled in surf therapy for up to 33 weeks. as such, the data required analyses to be conducted on the baseline data as well as comparing baseline to endline data, which also varied significantly in weeks of program completed among participants. because of the inconsistency of participants’ time spent in surf therapy at baseline and endline, which was further complicated by not collecting attendance data, the present data may not fully depict the impact of surf therapy on participants’ risktaking, self-esteem, and social cohesion. furthermore, complicated ecological factors created challenges for the team to collect data at the exact times and intervals as envisaged. for example, the data collection schedule did not always match school terms and data collection would fall during exam times or school holidays, which meant access to participants was limited during those times. future directions given the social and political stressors within south africa, future research ought to further investigate the social environment’s impact on participants and the mediating role of w4c’s surf therapy program. such contextual events that may impact participants’ perceived stress, interpersonal closeness, risk-taking, and self-esteem, as well as their ability to engage in surf therapy, include political unrest, unexpected and prolonged school closures, or environmental disaster. consideration of the interaction between participants’ social contexts and their engagement in surf therapy, as assessed through attendance, may help to better elucidate the impact of intervention. future evaluations may also benefit from collecting follow up data to examine how change observed from start to end of surf therapy may unfold after the conclusion of the intervention. furthermore, future research is needed to determine mechanisms that contribute to surf therapy’s impact. surf therapy is comprised of a number of elements, which include being in nature, immersion in water, surfing, psychoeducation, and being in community. elucidating the role of each element may help to further bolster surf therapy program efficacy. conclusions the results of the program evaluation highlight how w4c’s surf therapy can be an effective psycho-social-educational intervention in a high-stress environment for children and adolescents exposed to violence. findings suggest that w4c provides a community-based intervention that strengthens self-regulation and social cohesion in an under-resourced setting. references anne-linda camerini, p. j. s. 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(2009). violence and injuries in south africa: prioritising an agenda for prevention. the lancet, 374(9694), 1011–1022. https://doi.org/10.1016/s01406736(09)60948-x snelling, m. (2016). breaking cycles of violence, one wave at a time : a formative evaluation of the waves for change surf therapy programme [university of cape town]. https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/2 0657 van der merwe, n., & yarrow, p. (2020). more than surfing: inclusive surf therapy informed by the voices of south african children with autism spectrum disorder. global journal of community psychology practice, 11(2). https://www.gjcpp.org/pdfs/van%20d er%20merwe_yarrow-final.pdf white, b. p. (2014). the perceived stress scale for children: a pilot study in a sample of 153 children. international journal of pediatrics and child health, 2(2), 45–52. https://www.academia.edu/download/ 58524774/perceived_stress_scale_for_c hildren.pdf yamaguchi, s., greenwald, a. g., banaji, m. r., murakami, f., chen, d., shiomura, k., kobayashi, c., cai, h., & krendl, a. (2007). apparent universality of positive implicit self-esteem. psychological science, 18(6), 498–500. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14679280.2007.01928.x conflict of interest the authors declare no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article. global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 funding this work was supported by the laureus sport for good foundation and trauma research foundation. a brief introduction to post traumatic growth judah viola keywords: posttraumatic growth, post-traumatic growth, ptg, resilience, community psychology author biography: judah viola, is a community psychologist and professor of psychology at national louis university (nlu) in chicago, illinois where he teaches in nlu’s phd program in community psychology and previously served as dean of the college of professional studies and advancement. judah currently serves as the publications committee chair for the society for community research and action. he is a member of the scientific advisory panel for boulder crest institute for post traumatic growth. he also manages an independent consulting practice specializing in program evaluation, needs assessment, community building, and collaborative community research. his community research and advocacy interests involve neighborhood revitalization, disability rights, affordable housing, access to healthcare and healthy food, community police relations, posttraumatic growth and violence prevention and intervention. some recent publications include: case studies in community psychology practice: a global lens. rebus community pressbooks, community psychologists: who we are. in jason & glantsman, o’brien, & ramian (eds.) introduction to community psychology: becoming an agent of change. rebus pressbooks, foundations for relational ethics: introducing a continuum of community psychology praxis. global journal of community psychology practice. 13(3). and diverse careers in community psychology. oxford university press. recommended citation: viola, j. (2023). a brief introduction to post traumatic growth. global journal of community psychology practice, 14(3), 1 7. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: judah viola, national louis university. email: judah.viola@nl.edu. https://nl.edu/ https://nl.edu/college-of-psychology-and-behavioral-sciences/programs/phd-in-community-psychology/ https://scra27.org/who-we-are/leadership/executive-committee/ https://scra27.org/ https://bouldercrest.org/research-resources/what-is-posttraumatic-growth-ptg/ https://bouldercrest.org/research-resources/what-is-posttraumatic-growth-ptg/ https://press.rebus.community/communitypsychologypractice/ https://press.rebus.community/communitypsychologypractice/ https://press.rebus.community/introductiontocommunitypsychology/chapter/who-we-are/ https://press.rebus.community/introductiontocommunitypsychology/chapter/who-we-are/ file:///d:/gjcpp%20-%20current%20projects/2022%20-%202023%20submissions/september%202023%20-%20vol14%20issue%203/2023-002%20(sub-01-19-23)/foundations%20for%20relational%20ethics:%20introducing%20a%20continuum%20of%20community%20psychology%20praxis.%20global%20journal%20of%20community%20psychology%20practice.%2013(3) https://global.oup.com/academic/product/diverse-careers-in-community-psychology-9780190457938?cc=us&lang=en& https://global.oup.com/academic/product/diverse-careers-in-community-psychology-9780190457938?cc=us&lang=en& mailto:judah.viola@nl.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 a brief introduction to post traumatic growth the concept of posttraumatic growth is centuries old, but only recently has it been introduced into the fields of psychology and psychiatry as a scientifically based construct. the term was first discussed in the literature in 1995 by psychologists richard tedeschi and lawrence calhoun. through their work with bereaved parents, they noted that many parents developed positive changes as a result of their psychological struggle following the loss of their children. over several decades of research, it became evident that many individuals who suffer various types of trauma experience psychological growth. the term posttraumatic growth is often used interchangeably with psychological resilience. although there are some similarities, the two are separate and distinct psychological processes. individuals who are labelled as “resilient” tend to be relatively unaffected by the effects of trauma, at least to a significant degree. in fact, resilient individuals tend to bounce back quickly when faced with adversity. the process and outcome of posttraumatic growth is generally seen in people who are not resilient, but rather struggle psychologically following the aftermath of their trauma. in essence, they are trying to survive and not be overtaken by the negative effects of trauma. as individuals begin to reconstruct their beliefs about life, themselves, and others, they come to appreciate the fact that they have become stronger, developed a greater capacity for relating to others, experience immense gratitude, acknowledge new possibilities, and experience spiritual and/or existential growth. in recent years, the wars in iraq and afghanistan have brought greater focus to the formal psychiatric disorder of posttraumatic stress disorder or ptsd. first recognized as a formal psychiatric condition following the vietnam war, ptsd is generally viewed as the consequence of single or repeated traumatic events. indeed, acknowledging ptsd as a possible outcome of trauma is important, however, the reality is that being overly focused on ptsd can blind us to the fact that many trauma survivors also experience posttraumatic growth. the same difficult experiences that lead to ptsd set the stage for psychological growth. our beliefs about ourselves, others, and how life is supposed to work no longer seem to resonate. in fact, many people experience symptoms of ptsd and posttraumatic growth at the same time. it is the notion that from loss there can be gain, which is one of the paradoxes of posttraumatic growth. just like ptsd, posttraumatic growth is not reserved exclusively for combat veterans. those who have endured natural disasters, sexual violence, motor vehicle accidents, domestic violence, and many other types of trauma also experience posttraumatic growth. the best examples of posttraumatic growth are those individuals who have faced adversity of all sorts, developed new perspectives about life, and shared the lessons they have learned with others. these are what we often refer to as “everyday heroes”. they are men and women who have faced incredible adversity and go on to help others learn to grow from their struggles as well. research support for ptg a recent comprehensive review of the literature was done by tedeschi, shakespeare-finch, taku, and calhoun (2018), which revealed hundreds of published studies on posttraumatic growth in http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the psychological and psychiatric literature, as well as many more within the fields of sociology, religion, and others. much of the literature within psychology utilized the posttraumatic growth inventory (ptgi; tedeschi & calhoun, 1996; tedeschi, taku, senol-durak, & calhoun, 2017) as a measure of the construct. the ptgi has been translated into more than twenty languages (tedeschi, et al., 2018), which supports the idea that posttraumatic growth has universal presence. there are five domains of ptg that have been established through factor analyses and replicated in dozens of studies through the use of the ptgi (tedeschi & calhoun, 1996; brunet, mcdonough, hadd, crocker, & sabiston, 2010; lee, luxton, reger, & gahm, 2010; linley, andrews, & joseph, 2007; taku, cann, calhoun, & tedeschi, 2008). these domains include: 1) relationship with others; 2) personal strength; 3) new possibilities; 4) appreciation of life; and 5) spiritual and existential change. it is important to note that people often experience growth in multiple areas. relationship with others in this domain of ptg, people report that their relationships have a deeper emotional quality. they are more open to others and willing to disclose information about themselves. they are also more respectful and compassionate toward others. often these changes arise as a result of the person disclosing about their trauma. this is generally not disclosure that takes place in a formal therapeutic relationship, but rather through natural discourse with friends, family members, clergy, or other trauma survivors. personal strength people are often surprised by their strength as they struggle with unthinkable tragedy. they start out with the goal of surviving, but find an inner fortitude that they were unaware existed. it is important to note, however, that people do not set out to experience growth following tragedy. it develops over time. as they learn to manage their distress and reconstruct their core belief system, they are more confident in their abilities to handle new adversities that may come their way. new possibilities trauma involves loss of some kind. it may be the loss of a relationship, a sense of belonging, a particular physical ability, or one’s belief about what their future will look like. in the place of losses such as these, people find other ways to live that are fulfilling. these possibilities are often ones that would have never been considered before the trauma. appreciation of life trauma often causes a person to consider their mortality, which can lead to an appreciation for the delicateness and fleetingness of life. after experiencing a trauma, small things in life take on new meaning and provide a sense of satisfaction that was not there before. spiritual and existential change trauma leads to many questions, often questions of a religious and/or existential nature. questions about purpose and meaning take on new importance. in cases where interpersonal transgressions (infidelity, physical harm, betrayal, etc.) are associated with the trauma, ptg is often related to forgiveness, religiosity, and spirituality (schultz, tallman, & altmaier, 2010). the current process model of ptg is found in tedeschi, et.al, (2018), and can be briefly summarized. this model begins with the idea that people develop an assumptive world (janoff-bulman, 1992) or core belief system http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 that is culturally influenced and individualized. life events are potentially disruptive to this set of core beliefs, and can act as psychologically seismic events that create emotional distress due to the inability to clearly understand or find meaning in what has occurred. trauma therefore is defined according to the disruption of the core belief system. on the other hand, people whose core belief system provides understanding and meaning in the face of these events are resilient, and maintain their belief system, showing no ptg. in an attempt to rebuild the core belief system, people find themselves engaged in intrusive rumination and attempts to mitigate the emotional distress caused by the events and the inability to grasp them. finding ways to manage emotional distress is important as a prerequisite to a more constructive form of thinking about their experiences. as people disclose to others and analyze their experiences, they open themselves to schema change through a more reflective, deliberate rumination process. this type of rumination ultimately yields a reconceptualization of the events themselves as well as the underlying core belief system. the revised core belief system may incorporate concepts offered by supportive others, and socio-cultural based understandings and meanings of trauma. a revised core belief system includes some or all of the five domains of ptg. these domains allow people experiencing trauma to perceive that their distress was a price that was paid for positive changes that are highly personal, perceived as deeply understood, and not merely intellectualizations. however, in most cases, the distress remains a factor in the story of the experience. another way to think about the ptg that emerges from trauma is in narrative and existential change, or wisdom. wisdom is related to processing life challenges in an exploratory fashion that focuses on meaning and growth (weststrate & gluck, 2017). reconstruction of the life narrative provides more than a new understanding of events, but produces meaning and purpose that guides future choices and life paths (neimeyer, 2006). using quantitative measures, the importance of core belief challenge, event-related rumination, and self-disclosure in the process sequence of ptg has been supported. core belief challenge and deliberate event-related rumination have been found to have a strong relationship with ptg (triplett, tedeschi, cann, calhoun, & reeve, 2012; morris & shakespeare-finch, 2011). social support and disclosure have also been shown to be related to ptg (dong, gong, jiang, deng, & liu, 2015; sattler, boyd, & kirsch, 2014). these major variables, core belief challenge, rumination, and social support/disclosure all appear to have substantial empirical support for their role in the ptg process. in addition, centrality of events is also implicated in the ptg process (brooks, graham-kevan, lowe & robinson, 2017). this is because events that have a direct bearing on people’s sense of identity and the course of their lives are likely to be more relevant to the core belief system and therefore, ptg. the process of ptg occurs over a period of time after traumatic events, and researchers have begun to assess the stability or change in ptg in longitudinal studies. it appears that specific levels of ptg are fairly stable over time, while a small percentage of people posttrauma show increases or decreases in ptg over time. for example, danhauer and colleagues (2013, 2015) studied cancer patients and found six trajectories that indicated stable or increasing levels of ptg over two years. tsai and colleagues (2016) reported on a large sample of military veterans over two years, and found five groups of ptg trajectories with stable, increasing and declining ptg scores. the majority of veterans reporting moderate or higher ptg were stable in their scores over two years. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 posttraumatic growth is usually experienced without the help of psychologists or other mental health professionals. just as the symptoms of ptsd are naturally occurring reactions to the dire threats of trauma, and often diminish without the help of psychiatric professionals, posttraumatic growth is a naturally occurring process of healing and growth in the aftermath of trauma. both are natural responses of the mind and body to the injury of trauma. informal support from people who listen well, wish to learn about a trauma survivor’s experience and see the possibilities for growth can help people see a path toward posttraumatic growth. references brooks, m., graham, k. n., lowe, m., & robinson, s. 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(2011). rumination, post-traumatic growth, and distress: structural equation http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1111/bjc.12138 https://doi.org/10.1002/pon.1640 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10880-012-9304-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10880-012-9304-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12160-015-9696-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12160-015-9696-1 https://doi.org/10.1080/13548506.2014.913795 https://doi.org/10.1080/13548506.2014.913795 https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.20692 https://doi.org/10.1080/15325020601162823 https://doi.org/10.1080/15325020601162823 global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 modelling with cancer survivors. psycho-oncology, 20(11), 1176–1183. https://doi.org/10.1002/pon.1827 neimeyer, r. a. (2006). re-storying loss: fostering growth in the posttraumatic narrative. in l. g. calhoun & r. g. tedeschi (eds.), handbook of posttraumatic growth: research & practice. (pp. 68–80). lawrence erlbaum associates publishers. sattler, d. n., boyd, b., & kirsch, j. (2014). trauma‐exposed firefighters: relationships among posttraumatic growth, posttraumatic stress, resource availability, coping and critical incident stress debriefing experience. stress and health: journal of the international society for the investigation of stress, 30(5), 356– 365. https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.2608 schultz, j. m., tallman, b. a., & altmaier, e. m. (2010). pathways to posttraumatic growth: the contributions of forgiveness and importance of religion and spirituality. psychology of religion and spirituality, 2(2), 104–114. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018454 taku, k., cann, a., calhoun, l. g., & tedeschi, r. g. (2008). the factor structure of the posttraumatic growth inventory: a comparison of five models using confirmatory factor analysis. journal of traumatic stress, 21(2), 158–164. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.20305 tedeschi, r. g., & calhoun, l. g. (1996). the posttraumatic growth inventory: measuring the positive legacy of trauma. journal of traumatic stress, 9(3), 455–472. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.2490090 305 tedeschi, r. g., cann, a., taku, k., senol, d. e., & calhoun, l. g. (2017). the posttraumatic growth inventory: a revision integrating existential and spiritual change. journal of traumatic stress, 30(1), 11–18. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.22155 tedeschi, r. g., shakespeare-finch, j., taku, k., & calhoun, l.g. (2018). posttraumatic growth: theory, research, and applications. new york: routledge. triplett, k. n., tedeschi, r. g., cann, a., calhoun, l. g., & reeve, c. l. (2012). posttraumatic growth, meaning in life, and life satisfaction in response to trauma. psychological trauma: theory, research, practice, and policy, 4(4), 400–410. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024204 tsai, j., sippel, l. m., mota, n., southwick, s. m., & pietrzak, r. h. (2016). longitudinal course of posttraumatic growth among us military veterans: results from the national health and resilience in veterans study. depression and anxiety, 33(1), 9–18. https://doi.org/10.1002/da.22371 weststrate, n. m., & glück, j. (2017). hard earned wisdom: exploratory processing of difficult life experience is positively associated with wisdom. developmental psychology, 53(4), 800–814. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev000028 6 author note special thanks to bret moore and richard tedeschi for their support in the development of this manuscript. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://doi.org/10.1002/pon.1827 https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.2608 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018454 https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.20305 https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.2490090305 https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.2490090305 https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.22155 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024204 https://doi.org/10.1002/da.22371 https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000286 https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000286 global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 to learn more about ptg see the ptg resources center webpage http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://bouldercrest.org/ptg-resource-center/ https://bouldercrest.org/ptg-resource-center/ the community psychologist as facilitator: a rewarding community psychology practice in state government maria b.j. chun, ph.d., chc associate specialist associate chair, administration and finance uhm department of surgery 1356 lusitana street, 6th floor honolulu, hi 96813 phone: (808) 586-2925 fax: (808) 586-3022 dr. chun is an associate specialist and the associate chair of administration and finance in the department of surgery at the university of hawaii at manoa. she is also the editor of the community psychologist and has spent her entire career in public service. key words: community psychology practice, practice competencies, training, career development recommended citation: chun, m. (2009). a rewarding community psychology practice in state government. global journal of community psychology practice, 1(1), 13-20. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 a rewarding community psychology practice in state government abstract finding employment as a community psychologist outside of academia or “in practice,” has remained an elusive goal for many community psychology graduates. this is not, however due to a lack of opportunities. many employers would welcome the skills of a community psychologist, but both applicant and recruiter may not realize this initially. one of the most promising employment venues is state government service. unfortunately, state jobs are often viewed in a pejorative fashion because of their stereotypic link to mundane, paper-pushing civil service positions. the following article counters this misperception by describing how i was able to find a number of rewarding state government positions that allowed me to utilize virtually all of my community psychology training (e.g., advocacy, organizational assessment, collaboration/consultation, communication, research, resource development, service delivery, planning, and management). although i was never specifically hired with the job title “community psychologist,” all of my employers came to appreciate the benefits of my community psychology training. in chronological order, i present my employment history, a description of the position, and how my community psychology training was utilized in the position. it is my hope that this article will provide potential employment ideas and options for recent community psychology graduates and those looking for a career change. introduction recent community psychology graduates and current ones seeking a career change continue to struggle with identifying non-academic work settings that can utilize their diverse and unique skill set. outside of an academic setting, and possibly in community health or mental health organizations, there is no clear cut job listing for community psychologists. community psychologists are still attempting to identify their identities, which makes it difficult for employers to understand how a community psychologist can contribute to their organizations. therefore, it is important for both the community psychologist and the employer to keep an open mind. in this article, i describe my personal journey through various state government positions. none of my employers hired me for my community psychology degree (only my current employer bothered to even notice or understand that i even had such a degree), but were enlightened enough to appreciate that my diverse training could be beneficial to their organizations. in chronological order, i present a description of each position and how my community psychology background contributed to my job success. i graduated in august 1996 from the university of hawaii at manoa with a ph.d. in community psychology (i.e. community and cultural concentration). one of my mentors had offered to assist me with locating an academic position, but i declined. i wanted to actively practice what i learned in graduate school. although i maintained my connection to community psychology through my membership in its professional society, i viewed myself as an “accidental community psychologist.” i felt strongly about this because i had not been working in a community setting or in an advocacy role (i.e., i was a state government worker who just happened to have a community psychology degree and only informally or “accidentally” used those skills). through my graduate school practicum requirement, i selected public policy as my area of interest since i always wanted to work in a government setting. this eventually led to an entire career spent in state government positions as a budget analyst, auditor/analyst, regulatory reform director, and a university departmental administrator. coworkers in all my past work settings would often ask and wonder when i would be able to “practice.” some had remarked that getting a doctorate in community psychology must have been a complete waste of time since i did not have the opportunity to use it. little did i realize how key my graduate training was in helping me to navigate the various positions i had occupied. in all cases, the positions were by nature ambiguous and no one type of professional/field/specialty could dominate global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 (although they tried). for example, although normally pegged for those with a business degree, the budget analyst positions were occupied by people from a variety of backgrounds (e.g., psychology, political science, history, law). the case was similar with the performance auditor/analyst positions, which were typically not held by certified public accountants. because performance audits review the management of government programs, including the efficiency and effectiveness of operations, this went beyond the scope of just looking at numbers. usually an attorney would hold a regulatory reform position. and, for my current position, there also is no cookie cutter training or experience that would make a person successful. in fact, given the diversity of tasks involved, a generalist background is most helpful. therefore, i always started out as a novice or blank slate, having to immerse myself in the culture and language of the places where i worked. my first step was always collecting all of the policy and procedures manuals and other directives, both formal and informal, verbal and written. after i did my “homework,” i would meet with my colleagues as well as staff from other departments and offices to learn about their jobs and how they related to my responsibilities. frankly, only until recently was i able to clearly articulate and even directly link these skills to my community psychology training, although i knew that much of it was gained as a result of that training. what has been helpful to me are the recent attempts by various groups within community psychology to forge a more solid identity for the profession. there is now some consistency and common understanding with regard to these skills. most applicable are the community psychology practice (cpp) skills that were reported in the fall 2009 issue of the community psychologist (dziadkowiec and jimenez, 2009). the list was derived from a 2008 survey instrument by hazel that was sent to community psychology graduate programs. i edited the list and made the descriptors more generic and removed terms such as “community setting.” i understand the term “community” to exemplify various types of groups, but utilization of the term may unintentionally narrow the scope and location for which a community psychologist can practice. following is a list of the thirteen competencies: advocacy -establishing relationships and communicating with policy makers and leaders, includes lobbying; assessment/program evaluation – analyzing problems and identifying strengths via a systematic process; organizational assessment – conducting systematic reviews of organizations and assisting with capacity building; capacity building – assisting with leadership development and self-sufficiency; collaboration/consultation – developing and maintaining relationships with clients, communities, and organizations, as well as negotiating and mediating between different stakeholder groups; communication – sharing information effectively with diverse groups through conversation, social marketing, public speaking, and writing; group processes – providing conflict analysis and facilitating meetings among a diverse group of decision-makers; research – performing qualitative and quantitative research, including the design and implementation of surveys, community participatory based research; interventions – designing and implementing interventions, including the facilitating strategic planning efforts; leadership, supervisory, and mentoring skills – directing, organizing, and managing services, facilitating organizational decision making, and motivating and managing supervisees; resource development – identifying and pursuing fundraising and extramural funding opportunities; professional judgment – reflecting on current processes and, as necessary, evaluating alternatives; engaging in innovative decisionmaking when unanticipated situations arise; and service delivery, planning, and management – assisting with risk assessment and oversight of operations, including a basic understanding of human resource and financial management. program budget analyst – hawaii state legislature (1993 and 1994 sessions) global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 job description my first full-time job was a temporary position with the hawaii state legislature. i was required to participate in a practicum and internship as part of my graduate program requirements. because of my interest in public policy and desire to work in government service, i went to the university career services center and found a posting for legislative job opportunities. these included positions as legislative aides, bill researchers, and as budget analysts. other than a part-time job at sears, roebuck, and co. in an accounting office and serving in teaching and research assistant positions, i did not have much work experience. therefore, i was rather surprised that i was hired by the senate committee on ways and means as a program budget analyst. my duties included reviewing and evaluating the operating budget requests and programs of the department of human services, executive office on aging, and the office of children and youth. i also worked in close consultation with branch and program administrators, fiscal officers, and budget staff. i almost sabotaged myself when i was asked to interview for the budget analyst position because i had actually applied for a position as a bill researcher. i did not have a business degree and was not fond of accounting or numbers, despite having worked as a part-time account/audit clerk for five years. when i was called for an interview, i openly shared this concern and tried to convince my future supervisor that i would be more appropriately qualified as a bill researcher. he explained that my resume was selected not because of my accounting experience, but because i was pursuing a ph.d. in psychology. in his mind, this meant that i had the capacity to understand the bigger picture of budget requests; i would not just be reviewing them from a fiscal standpoint. each request for a staff person or piece of equipment would be viewed within the context of the department’s mission, its relation to other state departments, and the overall state budget. i was purposely assigned to review the department of human services’ budget because of its size and complexity. there were numerous federal and state funded programs within the department that had submitted requests for current and new initiatives, such as a jobs program to help those on public assistance with training and finding employment; a managed health care section 1115 medicaid waiver program; and decisions on how much to set aside for funding for foster care, aid to families with dependent children/temporary assistance for needy families, and other types of federal/state assistance. community psychology skills utilized i utilized a number of community psychology skills, particularly with regard to communicating and working with diverse groups in order to understand and balance everyone’s needs. i was required to understand and appreciate the points of views of the executive branch (e.g., governor, department heads, program staff), legislative branch (e.g., money and subject matter committees), advocacy groups, and the clients themselves. therefore, the skills utilized were collaboration/consultation, communication, and group processes. it is critical, however, to note that this was not conducted from an advocacy standpoint. i was required to review and make recommendations on each request objectively and consider everyone’s viewpoints. i was not the decision-maker, but responsible for providing the decision-makers (i.e. legislators) with information. because i had to gain an understanding of each program and present that information to the committee verbally and in writing, i utilized my research skills. this was not done in a traditional sense with scientific study design, but reading through voluminous materials, locating informational resources, and pulling seemingly unrelated matters together. since the department of human services is tied to the mammoth federal department of health and human services, an understanding of federal funding mechanisms (e.g., block and categorical grants) and the related mandates tied to receiving that funding was also important. additionally, state health-related services and funding fall under a separate entity – the state of hawaii department of health – therefore, consideration of any need for coordination or possible duplication of effort, was critical. professional judgment and service delivery, planning, and management were also critical community psychology skills that i had utilized. as a budget analyst, i needed to understand each request, identify any possible alternatives, and have a good basic understanding of human resources and fiscal management. i could have global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 been characterized as a consultant to the legislative committee on these matters. associate analyst, analyst, senior analyst – office of the auditor (1994 to 1999); administrative deputy auditor, deputy auditor – office of the auditor (2001 to 2006) job duties i enjoyed my work at the legislature so much that i decided to find full-time employment while working on my dissertation. after i had survived my comprehensive exams and was abd, there was an opportunity to work as analytical staff at the legislative auditor’s office (i.e., office of the auditor). although the office reports to the legislature, it is an independent body and has been considered the state version of congress’ investigational arm, the government accountability office (gao). all states in the united states have a version of this type of office, many at county levels as well. the staff of these offices can be referred to as auditors, analysts, and evaluators. what led the recruiter to consider me for an interview was my pursuit of a ph.d. in psychology. she felt that this training helped to develop my analytical skills, particularly with regard to having the ability to view issues within a context of systems and levels (i.e., big picture). as an analytical staff, i conducted performance/management audits and analyses of state organizations; special studies and projects involving complex and substantial issues; and program reviews, analyses, and evaluations of large and complex programs. i coordinated, reviewed, and evaluated the work of lower level analysts to ensure conformance with office standards and practices, completion of project objectives and work plan steps, and adequacy and quality of work performed. i also monitored the conduct of fieldwork to ensure standards were adhered to, and project deadlines met. i ensured that report drafts met office standards and office style. although the office oversees traditional financial audits, which are contracted out to certified public accounting firms, the bulk of the work and what i was involved in was what are referred to as performance/management audits. the range of audit topics is extremely diverse and often do not have a clearly defined scope if requested by an outside party. the office can initiate audits, but often are based on legislative requests. once, the office had been tasked with auditing an entire state department. given that an audit cycle lasts approximately six months, it requires a great deal of skill to gain enough of an understanding of an organization or topic to identify and assess key areas of concern. community psychology skills utilized i was able to utilize the same skills as my prior position as a budget analyst because the office’s role was to provide the legislature (and the general public) with objective analysis on a topic. these skills included organizational assessment, collaboration/consultation, communication, group processes, research, professional judgment, service delivery, planning, and management. once again, my work had to be conducted in an objective fashion and not from an advocacy standpoint. this could not even be done from a consultative standpoint because of a potential conflict of interest/element of bias if i was to audit or review a program for which i had made recommendations. i served as a team member of two projects and was then tasked with serving as the lead on a number of complex projects, usually in the areas of health, human services, and education because of my social science background. an example of some the audits i led are: management and financial audit of the foster board payment program; follow-up report on study of the moa for coordinating mental health services to children; management and fiscal audit of the hawaii state hospital; audit of the quest demonstration project; management audit of the department of human services; assessment of the state’s efforts to comply with the felix consent decree; audit of the hawaii school-towork opportunities system; audit of the temporary and emergency staffing of state agencies; joint senate-house felix investigative committee; audit of the school-based behavioral health program. as i moved into management positions within the organization, i continued to oversee staff on projects, but became more involved with the office’s operations. therefore, i can include leadership, supervisory, and mentoring skills. when i was the administrative deputy auditor, i served as the auditor when both the auditor and deputy auditor were absent. i assisted them with managing office operations and bringing projects to their timely conclusion. when i became the deputy auditor, i was the second in command and assisted the auditor in managing office operations and in bringing global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 projects to their timely conclusion. i chaired the quality assurance committee and directed the implementation of quality assurance policies. i also served as the training coordinator for the office, and performed duties as directed by the auditor. i assisted in recruitment and hiring. and, i continued to supervise and coordinate audits and other projects. in 1999, i drew a link between my work in this office and community psychology training through a presentation at a biennial conference. attendees expressed interest and had indicated they would follow up, but i have not received any inquiries. given that there are similar opportunities in every state, i would think that this would be an avenue that at least some community psychologists may want to consider. director, slice waste and tape (swat) regulatory reform project -office of the lieutenant governor (1999 to 2001) job duties seeking an opportunity to work for the executive branch, i left the office of the auditor for two years. i was recruited to serve as the director of lieutenant governor mazie hirono’s regulatory reform project called slice waste and tape or swat. the project was designed to reduce the administrative burden of government, with a focus on streamlining the voluminous set of administrative rules through revision, consolidation and, in some cases, elimination. my job duties were comprised of providing leadership and management in planning, organizing, directing, and coordinating the mission, goals, and objectives of the swat project, ensuring participation of all executive branch agencies, maintaining positive relations with various constituency groups in the private sector and community, coordinating swat legislation, and developing swat-related materials and events to promote the project. i reported to both the chief of staff and lieutenant governor regarding policy issues that affected the project. i also managed professional, technical, and clerical employees who had duties related to the swat project and the processing and filing of administrative rules. community psychology skills utilized for the first time in my career, i was expected to utilize advocacy skills since i was involved in actively promoting a government initiative. i also had direct clients through my contacts in the various state agencies and out in the community. the success of this project relied on a close and positive working relationship between a state agency that had a regulatory function and those professions and groups that were regulated. this included a number of community groups. therefore, in addition to those skills utilized in prior positions, this job included elements of assessment/program evaluation, capacity building, group processes, and interventions. my role was to serve as the facilitator/liaison between the parties. one example of a successful partnership was between the department of commerce and consumer affairs’ real estate commission and the real estate professionals. the two groups collaborated on a project to review all of the administrative rules relevant to this area and streamlined them so that the rules were easier to understand and less burdensome. unfortunately, due to political and economic factors, funding for the program was eliminated. i had, however, been recruited back to my old office in a high level management position. after several years there, i left a rather highprofile and stable position as the deputy auditor because i missed actually developing and implementing programs as opposed to reviewing and critiquing them. although i thoroughly enjoyed my work as an auditor/analyst, i wanted to be more actively involved in program development. associate specialist and associate chair, administration and finance – university of hawaii at manoa, department of surgery (2006 to present) job duties in april 2006, i started in a newly created administrative faculty position on a three-year limited term basis. i was non-tenure track and hired to directly assist the chair of surgery with the development and oversight of the department’s administrative and fiscal matters. the chair was interested in developing the administrative infrastructure for our department’s participation in the medical school’s faculty practice plan and for research and grants administration. i was also tasked to assist him with the development of a method to assess and evaluate professionalism with regard to surgical residents. in july 2007, due to a clause in the faculty collective bargaining agreement, my position was converted to tenure track, which required a shifting of my duties to global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 more “scholarly activities” (aka publish or perish). since i had for the most part left academia completely when i graduated from the community psychology doctoral program ten years ago, i was somewhat at a loss on how i would handle this sudden job transition. trying to link my topic to professionalism, which was the research interest of my chair, i fell back on my area of focus during my graduate studies, cross-cultural psychology. in graduate medical education, cultural competency falls under professionalism – one of the six competencies the accreditation council for graduate medical education (acgme) expects residents to learn during their training. specifically, i had an interest in multicultural education, so although i had 11 years of literature to catch up on, i was at least familiar with the basic concepts and theories. initially, i had difficulty applying my knowledge to the field of medicine since i was unfamiliar with the “medical culture.” therefore, my chair recommended that i familiarize myself with both medical and graduate medical education as a start. in january 2008, i met with the director of the office of medical education (ome) to learn about the medical school’s cultural competency initiatives. although cultural diversity is included as part of the school’s mission, there were few explicit examples of cultural training. most of the cultural competency initiatives were integrated into coursework. additionally, an inventory or catalog of cultural activities did not exist. the only formal acknowledgement of culture was through the department of native hawaiian health (dnhh) who was the lead on all cultural competency activities at the school. they held workshops and native hawaiian cultural immersion programs for medical students, residents, and physicians. the ome director was kind enough to introduce me to the lead faculty member in that department. she was extremely kind and generous with her time and knowledge and invited me to join her cultural competency committee. this then led to an introduction to other native hawaiian physicians as well as a cultural anthropologist in the department of family medicine and community health. as a means to help me learn about the cultural competency activities at the school, i asked the ome director if it would help if i put together a resource guide. he agreed that this would be helpful since the medical school was undergoing accreditation and the liaison committee for medical education (lcme) has explicit requirements regarding cultural competency. the resource guide would help with identifying what each department, office, or program has done in this area. he suggested that i do this in partnership with his office and with the dnhh. after obtaining approval, my research assistant and i sent emails to all the department chairs and directors requesting interviews and/or documents regarding their cultural competency efforts (on a strictly voluntary basis). through this endeavor, i realized that there were many pockets of cultural competency but little communication or collaboration. after i was done conducting interviews and collecting data, i thought it might be a good idea for us to meet. the ome director said he would host a half-day, mini-conference on cultural competency and invite those who participated in the resource guide or their designees. the purpose of the meeting was to learn what others were working on to identify opportunities for collaboration. it was meant to be very informal and no one had a set idea of where the meeting would lead. i emphasized to everyone that i was not the leader, but the facilitator because of my administrative skills (e.g., i didn’t mind setting up meetings, making copies, buying food for the meetings). i did have a “scientific” contribution, which was a project i was working on with my chair – the adaptation of a validated tool to measure resident preparedness to provide crosscultural care. in addition to me, there were representatives from the departments of family medicine, geriatric medicine, native hawaiian health, public health, and health and library sciences. after the initial meeting in september 2008, we had developed an interest in a possible faculty development project in cultural competency. future meetings varied in attendance and the membership of the group changed over time. we were even unsure how to refer to the group. since the dnhh already had a cultural competency committee, we did not want to use that name. and, the cultural anthropologist preferred the use of the term cultural humility as opposed to cultural competency. therefore, i suggested “cross-cultural health care interest group.” at one point, it appeared that we were stuck since we had difficulty coming to consensus regarding what type of faculty global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 development project should be pursued. frankly, i thought the group would die, but it suddenly became revitalized accidentally when another interdisciplinary collaboration collided with the group. as i had been drafting the cultural competency resource guide draft report, i realized how my lack of knowledge of medical education was hampering my understanding. with my chair’s permission, i signed up for a nine-month ome fellowship so that i could learn in depth about medical education. i was the only ph.d. in a group of six m.d.s. also, what made it interesting was that i was an administrative faculty with a psychology background, who happened to be working for the department of surgery. the group was comprised of faculty from the departments of family medicine, internal medicine, geriatric medicine, psychiatry, and pathology. research and teaching partnerships grew from that faculty development experience. some of the projects we are working on currently include validating standardized tools to assess resident preparedness in graduate medical education, and the impact of cultural training on medical professionals in general. we are also planning a cross-cultural health care conference that is a partnership/collaboration between the fields of medicine, psychology, and public health. our cross-cultural health care interest group still exists after one year and meets on a quarterly basis. community psychology skills utilized my current position allows me to utilize all of the previously described community psychology skills. because of the eclectic nature of my job and the diversity of projects and groups that i interact with, i am involved with advocacy, assessment/program evaluation, organizational assessment, capacity building, collaboration/consultation, communication, group processes, research, interventions, leadership, supervisory, and mentoring skills, resource development, professional judgment, and service delivery, planning, and management. although this position could technically be considered academic since it is located in a university setting, my job responsibilities are different from a typical instructional faculty. my official position title is associate specialist and is similar to an educational or curriculum specialist. specialist faculty at the university of hawaii provide expertise in specific subject areas – for me, i was essentially hired for my administrative and fiscal background, but my community psychology training was viewed as an important part of my marketability. conclusion a wide variety of employment opportunities await community psychologists. one particularly relevant and accessible venue is that of state government service. given the vast and diverse types of services state agencies are expected to provide the general public, a community psychologist can contribute in a number of ways. the level of involvement with the traditional definition of “community” may vary depending on the position, but if one views the term “community” broadly as any organization or group of individuals, then any job in state government will allow us to use our community psychology training. all government workers have the general public as their ultimate stakeholders and “community.” although my job history may seem atypical and in some ways a crooked path, it has resulted in very rewarding experiences that led me to finally understand that i have actually been practicing community psychology throughout my entire career. references dziadkowiec, o. & jimenez, t. (2009). educating community psychologists for community practice: a survey of graduate training programs. the community psychologist, 42(4), 10-17. microsoft word 2011-0002-final-20111104.docx creating and sharing critical community psychology curriculum for the 21st century: an invitation mary watkins and nuria ciofalo pacifica graduate institute mary watkins, ph.d. and nuria ciofalo, ph.d. co-direct the community psychology, liberation psychology, and ecopsychology specialization of the m.a./ph.d. depth psychology program at pacifica graduate institute in carpinteria, ca. we welcome your responses to this article: mwatkins@pacifica.edu and nciofalo@pacifica.edu keywords: critical community psychology, ecopsychology, liberation psychology, negative workers, collective trauma, fieldwork, indigenous psychology, cultural workers, interdisciplinary curriculum, depth psychology, transformative education running head: creating and sharing curriculum recommended citation: watkins, m., & ciofalo, n. (2011). creating and sharing critical community psychology curriculum for the 21st century: an invitation. global journal of community psychology practice, 2(2), 9-18. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 creating and sharing critical community psychology curriculum for the 21st century: an invitation abstract authors invite dialogue on critical community psychology graduate curriculum, sharing an approach that draws from depth psychologies, liberation psychologies, ecopsychology, and indigenous psychologies. grounded in a participatory action model of research and ethics, students, alumni, and faculty pursue collaborative community and ecological fieldwork and research, crafting a postmodern critical community psychology for the 21st century. authors call for reflection on the issues that mitigate against individual and community well-being that must be addressed in community psychology programs, and the concomitant theories, capabilities, and sensibilities to address them that need to be nurtured in students and educators. they call for us to engage students through transformative learning approaches and critical pedagogy in emancipatory community and ecological fieldwork and research. too often we create and teach curricula while failing to be in sufficient dialogue with peers in other institutions to share our visions, priorities, pedagogical approaches, and course content, and to invite support and critical feedback. as we work to craft critical community psychology curricula that are responsive to the challenges we face in our communities and nations, it is important that we initiate and sustain dialogue about the structure, content, and teloi of the curricula we are advocating. we need to communicate and be transparent about our definitions of the field, theoretical formulations, and pedagogical strategies, and to invite critique and elaboration. to enter this dialogue, and to invite others to contribute, we will begin by sharing the learning and reflections that went into creating a specialization in community psychology, liberation psychology, and ecopsychology within a depth psychology masters and doctoral program at pacifica graduate institute (see www.pacifica.edu/depth_psychology_combined.aspx) . this specialization is a bold attempt to forge interdisciplinary transformative approaches to personal, community, cultural, and ecological challenges of our time (see table for curriculum). while grounding students in psychoanalytic, jungian, archetypal, and phenomenological lineages of depth psychology, euroamerican depth psychological theories and practices are placed in dynamic dialogue with ecopsychology, cultural studies, critical community psychology, and indigenous and liberation psychologies from diverse cultural settings. our hope is that this sharing can initiate deepened reflection on programs in community psychology, helping us to meet the challenge advanced by ignacio martín-baró (1994) to turn a critical eye toward our own efforts in psychology. psychology as a discipline has shown itself to be quite susceptible to reflecting rather than interrogating and contesting cultural ideologies. to the degree that these ideologies contribute to psychological and community suffering, psychology has too often worked at cross-purposes to its aims of understanding and healing. as faculty, critical pedagogues, popular educators, and cultural workers (freire, 1985), we have asked ourselves, students, and community members what are the issues that mitigate against individual and community well-being that must be addressed in our program? what are the frameworks we need to draw upon? what are the goals of our work? how do our assessments of the difficulties to be faced and the goals to be aimed at determine the capabilities and sensibilities that need to be nurtured in our students and in us as educators? how are we to engage students through transformative learning approaches and critical pedagogy in emancipatory community and ecological fieldwork and research that prepare them for transformative individual and cultural work? where do we start? from what do we suffer? as we craft psychology curricula for the 21st century, we need to step back and enunciate the key issues upon which psychological and community well-being depend. paulo freire (1989) taught us to ask what shapes the epoch in which we live, and to inquire into the generative themes that lead us to formulate work in our communities. he proposed that domination characterized his epoch. sadly, it still needs to be at the top of our list. while colonialism has morphed into pernicious forms of globalization, the erosion of life’s potentialities through domination and excessive greed persist, resulting in widespread violence and gross social, cultural, political, and economic inequities. community psychologies must address the causes and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 the effects of collective traumas as diverse as racism, sexism, homophobia, forced migration, severe economic, cultural, political, and health/well-being disparities, environmental pollution and degradation, natural disasters, violence (including domestic violence, torture, war, and genocide), and assaults on human rights. it must learn to nourish the sources of community restoration through participatory praxis, empowerment, and libratory arts. what theoretical frameworks do we need to draw from? it is now tragically clear that the victims of oppression, of unbridled greed and exploitation, are not only human but extend to other forms of animal life, plant life, and to the very air, water, and earth on which we all depend. critical community psychologies must also be liberation psychologies and ecopsychologies. to examine the intrapsychic dynamics of oppression and to address psychological restoration in the face of collective trauma, they must also draw on depth psychologies. finally, to help insure that psychology does not contribute to further colonizing efforts and to draw on and respect the multiplicity of approaches to understanding human misery and flourishing, critical community psychology must focus on indigenous approaches. critical community psychologies. we believe community psychology needs to be approached critically and to be imagined in the plural—critical community psychologies—because varying approaches are needed by communities and groups that comprise differing social, cultural, and geographical locations at different historical moments. critical community psychologies embrace values of social justice, emancipatory praxis, empowerment, and inclusion of people who have been marginalized by hegemonic structures in society. it challenges epistemologies, ideologies, and worldviews—including those of mainstream psychology--to reflect on how these perpetuate conditions of injustice and oppression (nelson and prilleltensky, 2010; prilleltensky, 1997). critical community psychologists work with communities to legitimize popular knowledge, generate new, inclusive knowledge, develop innovative paradigms, and envision and undertake radical transformative praxis. in authentic collaboration with local people and the places they inhabit, critical community psychologists co-construct knowledge, imagine new possibilities, and work to implement and evaluate transformations to promote social change, policy development, and individual and community health. critical community psychology is, of necessity, multi-disciplinary. its practice is based on critical reflection and action that transforms the structures and policies that reproduce inequity, rather than purely ameliorative actions. liberation psychologies. martín-baró, a spanish born jesuit and social psychologist working in el salvador, first articulated liberation psychology as such in the 1980’s. martín-baró envisioned a psychology that would acknowledge the psychological and community wounding caused by war, racism, poverty, and violence; a psychology that would support historical memory and critical reflection; and a psychology that would aid the emergence of the sorts of subjectivity through which people felt they could creatively make sense of and respond to the world. martín-baró argued that by considering psychological problems as primarily individual, “psychology has often contributed to obscuring the relationship between personal estrangement and social oppression, presenting the pathology of persons as if it were something removed from history and society, and behavioral disorders as if they played themselves out entirely in the individual plane” (p. 27). instead, liberation psychology should illuminate the links between an individual’s psychological suffering and well-being and the social, cultural, economic, political, and ecological contexts in which he or she lives. while liberation psychology is most strongly established in latin america, martín-baró’s work has become a rallying call to psychologists and cultural workers on all continents to place into conversation their theories and libratory practices. to study community and ecopsychology in the light of liberation psychology is to commit to the exploration of the profound effects of injustice, violence, and the exploitation of others and nature on psychological, communal, and ecological well-being. it is a commitment to create paths to dynamic peace and reconciliation, justice, and sustainability. ecopsychology. in 1992 theodore roszak coined the term “ecopsychology” in his book the voice of the earth. two of ecopsychology’s central goals are to heal the alienation of people from the natural environment and to examine and transform human modes of thinking and behaving that lead to the imperilment of ecosystems. ecopsychology has also served as a corrective to psychology’s relative neglect of the impact of built and natural environments on the human psyche and on communities. it strives to understand the interdependence between humans and built and natural environments. since the well-being of humans and the natural world are inextricably connected, ecopsychologists are critically needed to heal human/nature divides, creating pathways for human/nature/animal relations, as well as working to create the increased awareness that is a necessary step global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 to the restoration of habitats and the creation of built and natural environments that are sustainable. depth psychologies. while community psychology often works at the group level, it must continually rely on subtle and nuanced understandings of intrapsychic dynamics. depth psychologies provide a language to describe the psychological dynamics of oppression and liberation. the dedication of some schools of depth psychology, such as jungian and archetypal, to valuing the imaginal–as it appears through image, dream, symbol, story, myth, and ritual—reminds us of our potential as human beings to create in the face of the limitations that are imposed on us. transformative change toward restorative justice, embodied democracy, peacebuilding, and environmental sustainability requires engagement with a range of understandings that extend from intrapsychic dynamics to policy creation and implementation. when depth psychology is put into the service of critical community psychology, its individualistic bias is seen through, while its nuanced articulation of intrapsychic and interpersonal dynamics can be useful. many depth psychological concepts--such as projection, shadow, projective identification, counterprojective identification, cultural unconscious, percepticide, psychic numbing—can help to illumine individual and community dynamics. indigenous psychologies. psychological knowledge with scientific ambitions has primarily emerged in the western world. new movements around the world are seeking to create ownership and legitimacy of psychological and cultural knowledge in diverse cultural settings as a means of liberation from centuries of intellectual imposition. rather than teach only euroamerican psychologies in places such as the philippines, mexico, or australia, some have attempted to bracket the westernized training they have received to learn from indigenous approaches to education, healing, and forms of communal life that foster wellbeing for individuals, group, and ecosystem (deloria, 2009; denzin, lincoln & smith, 2008; enriquez, 1992; esteva & prakash, 1998; kim et al, 2006; smith, 1999). as a result, indigenous knowledge is contributing to critical community psychology, as well as raising our awareness of the cultural invasion into indigenous communities by euroamerican psychological theories and methods, and the often tragic undermining of indigenous approaches to healing and resilience that occurs in the wake of these intrusions. indigenous psychologies have integrated diverse disciplines, perspectives and voices, and have developed ethno-cultural methodologies, ethnosemantics, and ethno-epistemologies that address cultural transformation to heal globally, through unity in diversity. indigenous psychologies have been applied in diverse cultural settings, integrating disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, political science, environmental sciences, cultural studies, religion, mythology, and philosophy (kim et al., 2006; marsella, 1998). because indigenous psychologies embrace knowledge generated in diverse cultures, this term is used in the plural, emphasizing interdependence and interdisciplinary interactions that are necessary to meaningfully address the psychological, social, cultural, economical, political, and ecological challenges we face. we need a paradigm where the other (human and other-than-human) is as important a term as the self, where the liberation of self is codependent on the liberation of others. once we begin to understand that psychological well-being and suffering are intimately related to familial, community, intercommunity, cultural, and ecological well-being and suffering, we can begin to forge interdisciplinary efforts of inclusive and creative restoration at multiple levels of analysis (see www.online.pacifica.edu/depthfieldwork for examples of the varied community, cultural, and ecological work that is currently being improvised in the community and ecological fieldwork and research portion of the m.a./ph.d. depth psychology program at pacifica graduate institute, carpinteria, ca). what are our goals? martín-baró developed a radical proposal: to transform and humanize repressive or failing human institutions, all of the people who participate in them must also be transformed and humanized through participatory dialogue and creative imagination about alternatives of action for social transformation; based on social justice, global peace, and sustainability. what we reach for, according to martín-baró, “is an opening—an opening against all closure, flexibility against everything fixed, elasticity against rigidity, a readiness to act against all stagnation” (p. 183). who we are in the present contains a kernel of something ideal in the future: “hunger for change, affirmation of what is new, life in hope” (p. 183). future community psychologists should be able to support this opening and to learn from those who are already doing so. martín-baró (1994) proposes that the goals of a liberation psychology be “healthy, free, and creative minds” in a “free, dynamic, and just social body,” where “people have sown enough seeds of life to be able to trust in the possibility of a tomorrow” (p. 121). he sees the construction of a more just society as a “mental health problem,” requiring us to “work hard to find theoretical models and methods of intervention that allow us, as a community and as individuals, to break with the culture of vitiated social relations and global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 put other, more humanizing relations in their place” (p. 20). such praxis requires the creating and supporting of social spaces, what mary belenky (belenky, bond, weinstock, 1997; belenky, 1996) calls public homeplaces, that nurture the recovery of historical memory, critical insight into present suffering, visioning the world we most deeply desire, and pursuing action together to birth communities that are more just, more engaged in peace building, increasingly sustainable, and supportive of all that is life affirming and enhancing. we want to create together what freire described as “a world in which it will be easier to love” (freire, 1989, p. 24). our hope is that by linking depth psychology, indigenous psychologies, critical community psychology, ecopsychology, and liberation psychology that we will be able to develop the insights, competencies, and skills to help create such a world. how do the teaching, research, and practice of critical community and liberation psychologies position us in our work differently from mainstream psychologies? the educator teaching this approach must also model it, allowing the classroom learning community to experience the power of thinking critically together, hearing into differences, honoring the knowledge and experience that each person brings, and fostering a spirit of co-creating knowledge, vision, and action for individual and social transformation. teachers and students continuously navigate the path between reflection and praxis, the critical application of knowledge, carefully negotiating the ethical issues that community work is rife with. we are aware that psychology can be used in culturally invasive and disrespectful manners, reducing others’ experiences to terms derived from our own cultural location and theoretical perspectives. instead, we want to learn alongside others and through dialogue. while we share what we know that potentially could be of use, we are interested in and respect what others know, their own popular knowledge, the kind of knowledge and wisdom that allows for individual and collective transformative learning; mutually trusting the process of conscientization or awareness raising that occurs when sharing and exchanging diverse sources of information. we desire our scholarship and research to be accomplished with others and to be used first for the benefit of the community we are working with. a study of indigenous approaches to psychological issues and research cautions us about the harm that has been perpetrated when we are not as open to our models being questioned and critiqued as we should be (smith, 1999). radical critics of education have provided a variety of tools to challenge traditional educational ideology (giroux & mclaren, 1989; mclaren, 2001). critical pedagogy has emphasized the importance of raising awareness to uncover the hidden curriculum under which academic knowledge is a representation of hegemonic culture. teachers as cultural mentors, critical pedagogues, and popular educators can develop and implement empowering pedagogical practices. central to this view is the need to look at how teachers, students, and community members give meaning to their own lives through the complex historical, cultural, economic, and political forms they both embody and produce. academia needs to build community partnerships that invite community members to become participants in the transformative learning process. pedagogy of student and community participant experience must also be linked to the notion of emancipatory learning and acting. curriculum practices must be developed that draw upon the students’ and community participants’ experiences as both narrative for agency and a referent for critique. curriculum policies and modes of pedagogy need to critically engage the knowledge and experiences through which students and community participants authorize and legitimize their voices and identities. if the purpose of education is liberation (i.e., knowledge generation and application of knowledge into the psychosocial realm), educators need to select methods, tools, and strategies that promote critical popular knowledge-as a counterpedagogy to eliminate hegemonic narrativesand to implement transformative actions for social change (ciofalo, 1996). the role of the community psychologist may be that of a convener, a witness, a co-participant, a mirror, and a holder of faith for a process through which those who have unlistened to may build upon their own capacities for historical memory, critical analysis, utopian imagination, and transformative social action. the community psychologist may bring to the table theories and histories that have been developed in the past, but they will be relativized and critiqued in each local arena where they may or may not apply. they need to bring indigenous knowledge at the center, legitimizing diverse epistemologies and methodologies as a means of transformative praxis. truth in this new epistemology is democratized, and science is demystified. each participant evolves a sense of meaningful voice; a way of making sense of the world that is both valued and provisional within the larger context of multicultural community listening and discernment. the psychologically-minded relinquish their role as authorities and experts who have the final global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 word, and develop instead new capacities for listening, questioning, and facilitation of collaborative group processes. (watkins & shulman, 2008). the research portion of our program is based on the foundation of participatory action research (par) and the careful attention to relational ethics that this approach requires (see “ethical guidelines for community/ecological fieldwork and research,” www.pacifica.edu/gems/ethicalguidelinescommunity. pdf). from the first class on research students negotiate how to put the theory and method of participatory research into use, serving the interests of various community groups in further understanding issues that are important to them. par is a process that simultaneously includes adult education, scientific research, and political action. this process of mutual learning encompasses critical analysis of the social reality and collaborative actions between researchers and community members to address social change. following fals-borda and rahman (1991), the application of the par approach to inquiry requires that the researchers interact with community members to create transformative, social change. a fundamental attitude of par researchers is the rupture of subordinate forms of human relations. knowledge has to be created in a reciprocal relationship between the community and the researcher, continuously forging academic-community partnerships in the transformative learning process (ciofalo, 1992). indigenous critiques of mainstream psychological research, as well as their re-visioning of the kinds of inquiry and praxis that are useful for their communities are carefully considered. community-based evaluation skills are taught to increase program effectiveness in collaborative, reflexive, and culturally compatible ways. students and faculty in the program cycle between classroom learning and engaged community and ecological fieldwork and research. the idea of vocation, of being called to do particular work, has been central to the design of the community and ecological fieldwork and research portion of our program. each of our autobiographies predisposes us to sensitivity around particular issues. through engaged fieldwork each student can find and follow his or her niche of interest and create meaningful ways of promoting psychological, community, and ecological well-being that stand alongside clinical approaches but do not proceed from individualistic or disease-based paradigms. each student has a fieldwork mentor and a pod of fellow students with whom the proposal for fieldwork, the entrance to the community, the process of partnership development, the ethical issues, the actual work, and the write-up and dissemination of the work can be discussed. particular attention is given to dissemination of work. this includes not only scholarly writing, but also oral approaches, artistic presentations, and community accessible writing with and for the community one is working with. this requires the application of popular education approaches that include multiple modes of learning based on multiple intelligence models (i.e., cognitive, emotional, aesthetic, relational, and creative) to stimulate ownership of the learning process. this strategy aims to empower students and community members in applying knowledge for personal and social transformation. each of the issues a student takes on has a history, approaches that have already been tried, scholarship and praxis surrounding it, and the need for creative and informed approaches in the present. the student uses his or her intimate connection to the issue to fuel their exploration of these facets, to liaison with others who have common interest, to find groups or communities that are working around the issue, or to begin what we have called a convened community to do so. from the beginning we have sought to see through and reject “missionary-like” approaches, approaches that determine the problem and the answer in advance of immersion in a community and dialogue with those who constitute it. through community and ecological fieldwork and research, students work in the area of their calling, while deepening their ethical discernment, reflecting on their own positionality, widening their repertoire of dialogue and arts-based approaches, and gathering the theoretical insight and practical skills to conduct participatory action research and community and organizational program evaluation. examples of student fieldwork and research can be found online at www.online.pacifica.edu/depthfieldwork. each quarter students are introduced to a way of working with small and large groups. building from council and circle practice, to appreciative inquiry, and then to methods that help groups navigate deep differences, such as public conversations, and complex and contested histories. from these experientialdidactic immersions, students build a repertoire of approaches. expressive and creative modalities flowing from community dreamwork and visioning to augusto boal’s theater of the oppressed enable students to work with a broad range of issues and groups. these approaches help participants bring forward their knowledge, understandings, desires, and creative imaginations, and then to place them into dialogue with each other. the curriculum of this specialization is based on an interdisciplinary, participatory, community-action research curriculum. these critical pedagogical approaches allow for curriculum integration, acquiring global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 critical knowledge through the investigation of a specific, vocational theme that is described, designed, and planned in the fieldwork proposal during the first two years, and in the dissertation proposal in the last years of education. in addition, this integrative and inter-disciplinary curriculum highlights the importance of social learning that is primarily based on vygotsky’s social development theory. for vygotsky (1978) social interaction is a critical component of learning. vygotsky called attention to the reciprocal learning process that is ignited in the interaction between mentors and apprentices. the former are those learners who have mastered a specific theme and who are able to move the latter--the apprentice-to a “zone of proximal development,” or to the space where the apprentice becomes the mentor by means of working with more capable peers. in this way, opportunities for teaching and learning from others are equally distributed. this process helps to promote the building of an empowered and sustainable learning community (ciofalo, 1997). our students come with diverse backgrounds–i.e., in hospice and healthcare, restorative justice, arts-based community work, education, creative aging, spiritual direction, peacebuilding and reconciliation, community agriculture, environmental conservation, and urban planning. entrance requirements focus on previous academic success, commitment to community and/or ecological work, capacity for scholarly writing, and interest and exposure to varied psychological approaches to community and ecological work. our unusual residential format of three residential days a month, with classes throughout each of these days, allows students to maintain their work and family commitments in their hometowns and cities, traveling to pacifica once a month. this is not an online program. between residential sessions students are involved in intense reading preparation and scholarly writing, community work, and collaborative reflection. our new student cohort each year ranges between 18 to 25 students. this larger group is broken down into smaller pods for reflection on community and ecological fieldwork and research, as well as for dissertation concept development prior to the initiation of the dissertation. these smaller groupings allow for more intense reciprocal learning processes based on mentor-apprentice exchanges and interactions. in this way, students learn to value diverse ways of learning and become more adept at co-constructing knowledge through inclusive dialogue and praxis. this specialization developed out of fifteen years of experience with the umbrella m.a./ph.d. depth psychology program that included many of the same features of the specialization: community and ecological fieldwork and research, liberation psychology, indigenous psychology, participatory action research and ethics, ecopsychology, and social psychoanalytic, jungian, and archetypal psychology approaches. during this fifteen year period, we have celebrated approximately 150 doctoral. increasing financial aid is one of our top priorities. although it is presently limited, we are pleased to have initiated the herman warsh community-based scholarship fund that gives needs-based support to students working in the areas of education, social justice, reconciliation, ecology, and diversity who are from groups historically under-represented in the study of depth psychology. more psychologists need to embrace our vocation as “negative workers” (scheper-hughes, 1995). the radical italian psychiatrist, franco basaglia, described “negative workers” as professionals who give their allegiance not to bourgeois institutions but to those who most need their help. conceiving of ourselves as negative workers entails committed work with those suffering economic disadvantage and devoted partnerships with cultural workers (freire, 1985). it means a focus on cascading models of training where participants gain the knowledge and skills to teach what they have learned in their own communities, eliminating the need for outsiders to do so. these shifts will require embracing more collaborative forms of practice with lay people, and dis-identification with expertism. they require an acute awareness of the disempowerment to others that can flow from our identification with being the expert. it also requires increased mindfulness about professional psychology’s relations to affluence, an affluence that has often been cultivated and preserved in a world that is sickened by sharp income divides. lastly, a curriculum based on critical pedagogy requires confrontation and awareness raising of the meaning and impact of white privilege on maintaining the status quo, and of the ways in which alternative, inclusive, and polyvocal scenarios may contribute to transformative social, economical, political, cultural, and psychological change. coda and challenges over the last 15 years we have been working at the confluence of depth psychologies, community psychology, liberation psychologies, and ecopsychology to craft a graduate program specialization where students can develop the critical insight, selfawareness, and dialogical and participatory skills to help address some of the pressing psychological, social, economic, and environmental problems of our time. we want to place our efforts into dialogue with psychologists and others working in an interdisciplinary manner from other programs that are working on graduate education that helps to prepare students for work in the areas of social and economic justice, peacebuilding, policy development, and sustainability. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 our first move was to differentiate from clinical psychology training models that are largely dyadic in focus and based in individualistically oriented paradigms of psychopathology. at the same time, we have sought to discern the key ideas, practices, and sensibilities from depth psychologies that could be useful in community based approaches. we were committed to teaching the foundations and history of depth psychology in historical and cultural context. rather than extend the reach of individual therapy, we sought models and examples of community and group based work that was transformative. such a social constructionist approach to depth psychologies has helped us to track those aspects of theory and practice that collude with dominant cultural forces, helping us to conceive alternate possibilities. it has also helped us to see theories and practices as arising in response to local conditions, not as universally applicable. we have oriented toward, acknowledged, and continue to learn from the libratory community work that is happening throughout the world. students and teachers of critical community psychology can learn from cultural workers about community and individual empowerment and healing. from sustained attention to the varieties of this work—from freirean influenced base communities in latin america, to sarvodaya selfhelp groups in sri lanka, to restorative justice traditions in parts of africa—we have been tutored in how to shift our research approaches to participatory action research models. we are heartened that many of our students and alumni now teach themselves in formal and informal learning environments. the approach we have outlined above has sprouted curriculum in high schools, community colleges, liberal arts colleges, universities, retreat centers, prisons, alternative learning centers, youth programs, medical and nursing education, workshops, adult education centers, in organizational trainings, and in a graduate liberation arts program. many of our alumni and students have successfully published their writing in a wide variety of venues. they are involved in diversity training, prison reform and restorative justice initiatives, arts-based community building, trauma healing, advocacy and grassroots coalitions, housing access issues, projects around the restoration of cultural memory, organizational development and transformation, peacebuilding and community dialogue, health services (including hospice), spiritual direction, ngo’s (nongovernmental organizations), human rights work, evaluation and envisioning, urban planning, land preservation, peak oil planning and sustainability issues, local food initiatives, community gardens, permaculture, intentional communities, philanthropy, microlending and alternative economics. we understand that it is necessary to continuously struggle with how our presence as highly educated professionals can be disempowering to others even when we see ourselves with humility. we also know that our students have been granted opportunities to do transformative work by virtue of their education, training, and graduate degrees. some of the work students are drawn to is –in prilleltensky’s (1997) words—“ameliorative” rather than transformative of the causes of the various miseries they confront. through mentorship we challenge students and ourselves with this distinction so that we can continually aim for work that radically shifts the causes of suffering. the roots of our program specialization draw from the springs of approaches to life that deem it sacred, from the psychic energy of the symbolic and the imaginal, from dialogue, myth, story, ritual, and art as they give form to memory and desire for transformative praxis. we study these through the taproots of depth psychologies, indigenous psychologies, community psychology, liberation psychology, and ecopsychology. we are challenged to appreciate and nourish diversity of life in each person and community, ensuring that a focus on transformative learning will help to create a new cadre of students who will feel empowered to contribute to the creation of a socially just, peaceful sustainable, creative, and inclusive world. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 courses are divided into four main domains: traditions, legacies, and frontiers of depth psychology this portion of the curriculum grounds students in the psychoanalytic, jungian, archetypal, and phenomenological lineages of depth psychology, as well as in the contemporary flowering of these traditions that aid cultural, community, and ecological understanding and transformation. particular attention is given to theorists who have used depth psychological concepts and theories to illumine the intrapsychic dimensions of oppression and liberation, such as memmi, fanon, anzaldúa, freire, fromm, sandoval, griffin, and oliver. the courses include introduction to depth psychology, psychoanalytic tradition: social psychoanalysis, jungian psychology, post-jungian psychology: jungian approaches to culture and ecology, archetypal psychology, hermeneutic and phenomenological traditions, post-freudian psychology: ethnopsychoanalysis, depth psychology and the sacred: the experience of the sacred, depth psychology and the mythic tradition: mythic dimensions of communal life, frontiers of depth psychology. critical community psychology, liberation psychology, ecopsychology these courses enlist us to create a depth psychologically informed critical community and ecopsychology for the 21st century. community psychology, liberation psychologies, and ecopsychology are placed in conversation with depth psychology to explore the interface between psyche, culture, and nature, as we seek to create paths for psychological, community, cultural, and environmental well-being. courses include introduction to critical community psychology, psychologies of liberation, indigenous psychologies, community building and empowerment, individual and collective trauma, depth psychology of violence and its prevention, ecopsychology i: the ethics of place, ecopsychology ii: engaged deep ecology, phenomenology of depth psychological cultural and ecological work, reconciliation and peacebuilding, frontiers of liberation psychologies, liberatory pedagogy. approaches to group and community practice these didactic-experiential classes introduce students to a wide variety of dialogical, arts, and image based approaches to community and organizational issues and dynamics. courses include council practice, appreciative inquiries, community theater, community dreamwork, restorative justice, public conversation, somatic approaches to trauma healing, social network analysis, depth transformative practices. participatory fieldwork and research through participatory and dialogical fieldwork and research, students learn how to apprentice to community groups and issues, to be a witness to the ongoing work of such groups, to work collaboratively toward mutually desired transformations and actions, and to evaluate to what extent these goals have been reached. research approaches—such as hermeneutic, phenomenological, critical, participatory action, and feminist—enable students to deeply engage a group’s questions and concerns, while deepening ethical discernment around issues of power and privilege. courses include foundations for research in depth psychology: participatory qualitative research, community/ecological fieldwork & research practicum i, ii, orientation to scholarly and community publication, community and organizational career skill building, community counseling and advocacy, community program & organization evaluation, imaginal ways of knowing, participatory research practicum: creating an interpretive community, dissertation development i, ii, research writing: conceiving the dissertation, dissertation writing. global  journal  of  community  psychology  practice   volume 2, issue 2 december 2011 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 references belenky, m. (1996). “public homeplaces: nurturing the development of people, families, and communities.” in n. goldberger, j. tarule, & b. clinchy (eds), knowledge, difference, and power: essays inspired by women’s ways of knowing (pp. 393–430). new york: basic books. belenky, m., bond, l.a., & weinstock, j.s. (1997). a tradition that has no name: nurturing the development of people, families, and communities. new york: basic books. ciofalo, n. (1997). youth development project: an interdisciplinary, participatory, community actionresearch curriculum. honolulu, hi: social science research institute, university of hawaii. ciofalo, n. (1996). community development initiated by the youth: an intergenerational and multicultural approach to community based quality of life (doctoral dissertation). available from umi dissertation services. (umi # 9713939). ciofalo, n. (1992). empowerment, popular power, and contra-power: evidences in a mexican indigenous community. (master’s thesis). available from umi dissertation services. (umi # 1351196). deloria, v, jr. (2009). c.g. jung and the sioux traditions. new orleans, la: springer journal books (pp. 1-63) denzin, n., lincoln, y., and tuhiwai-smith, l. (2008). handbook of critical indigenous methodologies. los angeles, ca: sage. (pp. 31-41; 61-80 ). enriquez, v. (1992). from colonial to liberation psychology: the philippine experience. quezon city, philippines: university of the philippines press. esteva, g. & prakash, s. (1998). grassroots postmodernism: remaking the soil of cultures. london: zed books. fals-borda, o., & rahman, a. m. (eds.). (1991). action and knowledge: breaking the monopoly with participatory action-research. new york, ny: the apex press. freire, p. (1970/1989). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: seabury. freire. p. (1985). the politics of education, culture, power, and liberation. south hadley, ma: bergin & garvey. giroux, h.a., and mclaren, p. (eds.) (1998). critical pedagogy, the state, and cultural struggle. albany, ny: state university of new york press. kim, u., yang, k-s., & hwang, k.k. (2006). indigenous and cultural psychology: understanding people in context. new york, ny: springer science + business media llc. marsella, a. (1998). towards a “global community psychology”: meeting the needs of a changing world. american psychologist,53, 12821291. martín-baró, i. (1994). writings for a liberation psychology. cambridge: harvard university press. mclaren, p. (2001). che guevara, paulo freire, and the politics of hope: reclaiming critical pedagogy. cultural studies and critical methodologies, 1, 108131. montero, m., & sonn, c. (eds.) (2009). psychology of liberation: theory and applications. ny: springer. nelson, g, and prilleltensky, i., (eds.). (2010). community psychology: in pursuit of liberation and well-being. new york: palgrave macmillan. prilleltensky, i. & fox, d. (1997). critical psychology: an introduction. thousand oaks, ca: sage roszak, t. (ed.) (1992). the voice of the earth. grand rapids, mi: phanes press. scheper-hughes, n. (1995). “the primacy of the ethical: propositions for a militant anthropology.” current anthropology, 36, 3, 409–40. smith, l. t. (1999). decolonizing methodologies, research, and indigenous peoples. london: zed books. vygotsky, l.s. (1978. mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. watkins, m. & shulman, h. (2008). toward psychologies of liberation. new york: palgrave macmillan. kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 welcome to volume 3 issue 3! vincent t francisco keywords: editorial, community psychology practice, gjcpp author biographies: dr francisco is an associate professor at the university of north carolina at greensboro, and is editor of the global journal of community psychology practice. global journal of community psychology practice volume 3, issue 3 august 2012 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 welcome to volume 3 issue 3! we are pleased to provide another wonderful issue of the global journal. in this issue, you will find several outstanding items of interest. in this issue, the tools of the trade focuses on a manual provided by jessica collura and shepherd zeldin on planning for the involvement of youth and adults in community partnerships. there is a very interesting video about a housing program for persons experiencing ongoing mental health issues in lisbon, provided by our colleagues in ispa and the housing first program team. we have a very interesting set of peer-reviewed articles including: • an article from italy on the empowering effects of social capitol in communities experiencing crisis; • an article from the us describing a bicultural bilingual substance abuse recovery home that is self-run by latinos; • an article discussing issues associated with graduate students and community participatory research; • a discussion of communty leadership and social change. we also have a book review provided by judah viola covering a book about psychology and social change. finally, we have a guest editorial from jim cook on building strategic alliances as community psychologists. we hope that you will enjoy this issue of the global journal as much as we enjoy providing it to you. sincerely, vincent t francisco, and the entire gjcpp management team a qualitative insight on stereotypes and prejudices toward mental disorders in burkina faso: the interaction of shame and fear as underlying influences of stigma émilie pigeon-gagné, thomas delaware-saias, maurice yaogo, ghayda hassan, and djeneba ouedraogo keywords: stigma, sub-saharan africa, global mental health, burkina faso, stereotypes, anti-stigma programs, cultural sensitivity. author biographies: émilie pigeon-gagné, is a clinical and community psychologist, and assistant professor at the school of psychology, university of ottawa (canada). her work focuses on three themes: 1) processes of stigmatization, marginalization and social invisibilization, 2) sociocultural representations of mental health, and 3) precarious and irregular migration in canada. she works with a range of qualitative, ethnographic and participatory methodologies, from a liberation approach in community psychology. thomas delaware-saias, is a researcher and full professor in the department of psychology at the université du québec à montréal (canada), and director of the epione laboratory. his expertise lies at the crossroads between perinatal care/parenting, social and gender inequalities in early childhood, and program evaluation. he works in the field of critical community psychology and is interested in the development of feminist and anti-oppressive public policies in the field of perinatal care and early childhood. maurice yaogo, is a socio-anthropologist and professor at the université de i’afrique de i’ouest (burkina faso). for some thirty years, he has been carrying out socio-anthropological studies in the west african region, and more specifically in burkina faso. his work focuses on social representations of disease, therapeutic itineraries and healthcare utilization, the valorization of traditional knowledge and medicines, and the development of public policies in the field of communicable and non global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 communicable diseases. he is currently coordinating the stop-ncd project in burkina faso. ghayda hassan, is a clinical psychologist and full professor in the department of psychology at the université du québec à montréal (canada), and director of the canadian practitioners network for the prevention of violent extremism (cpn-prev). her expertise is in transcultural psychology; her clinical and research involvement is in the prevention of violent radicalization. her work aims to support practice settings in their interventions and the implementation of prevention programs, as well as decisionmakers in the development of public policies promoting social inclusion and the reduction of social inequalities and their impact on violent extremism. djeneba ouedraogo, is a sociologist with some twenty years' research experience. she has taken part in dozens of socio-anthropological surveys and specializes in qualitative data collection and analysis, as well as interpreting from a perspective rooted in traditional knowledge. her involvement with the centre de recherche africsanté, among others, has led her to collaborate on numerous projects and refine her field approach. recommended citation: pigeon-gagné, e., thomas, s., yaogo, m., hassan, g., & ouedraogo, d. (2025). a qualitative insight on stereotypes and prejudices toward mental disorders in burkina faso: the interaction of shame and fear as underlying influences of stigma. global journal of community psychology practice, 16(1), 1 22. retrieved day/month/year, from (http://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: émilie pigeon-gagné, university of ottawa, email: epigeong@uottawa.ca. http://www.gjcpp.org/ http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:epigeong@uottawa.ca global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 a qualitative insight on stereotypes and prejudices toward mental disorders in burkina faso: the interaction of shame and fear as underlying influences of stigma abstract background: worldwide, stigma is recognized as a barrier limiting access to psychiatric care. the scope of stigma varies across cultural contexts and contributes to the social inequalities in health observed in many lowand middle-income countries. aim and methods: in this paper, we explore the way mental disorders are stigmatized in bobo-dioulasso (burkina faso). we conducted seven focus groups and 25 individual interviews with patients, family members, caregivers, and key informants. interviews focused on stereotypes and attitudes toward individuals identified with mental disorders. results: a set of stereotypes is socially conveyed about people with mental disorders. the perceptions that these individuals are fragile, useless, dangerous, marginal, and adopt strange behaviors are common. these stereotypes could be related to emotional reactions, such as sadness, compassion, indifference, fear, disgust, and shame, that justify, in some cases, discrimination and unequal treatment. discussion: this study suggests that affective reactions are crucial to understanding stigma in burkina faso. the notion of shame seems to be rooted in a set of cultural norms and values, and fear seems to be related to structural stigma. our results offer some insights for future anti-stigma programs in a context where resources are limited and where cultural characteristics must be considered. introduction according to the latest epidemiological data, more than one billion people worldwide suffer from a mental health disorder, and approximately one in four people are personally affected at some point in their lives (who, 2016; rehm & shield, 2019). the morbidity of these disorders has been steadily increasing over the past 30 years, largely due to social inequalities and lifestyle changes brought about by urbanization (ahmed & hossain, 2018; who, 2017). in addition to coping with their symptoms, many individuals living with mental health disorders must deal with the issue of stigma. people with severe and persistent mental disorders are particularly affected by this issue (amsalem et al., 2021; angermeyer & dietrich, 2006). although the so-called common disorders (anxious and depressive disorders) are less stigmatized, these conditions are still the target of significant stigma; this is particularly true when it comes to chronic difficulties (alonso et al., 2008). stigma has important consequences on http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 quality of life, self-esteem, and symptomatology, as well as on employability and social inclusion (valery & prouteau, 2020; sharac et al., 2010). stigma is also considered a social determinant of health limiting helpseeking and may, therefore, be associated with a deterioration of the person's physical and mental health (clement et al., 2015; henderson, evans-lacko, & thornicroft, 2013). stigma has been documented globally but shows significant variations across regions of the world (javed et al., 2021; krendl & pescosolido, 2020). people with severe mental health disorders are more stigmatized in lowand middle-income countries than in high-income countries (alonso et al., 2008; seeman et al., 2016). in these countries, it is estimated that between 76% and 99% of people with a severe mental health disorder do not consult available resources and that one of the important factors negatively influencing help-seeking is social stigma (kenejad et al., 2018). little is known about the specific mechanisms explaining this phenomenon in resource-limited settings, as almost all research is conducted in western countries (clement et al., 2015; heim et al., 2020). existing cross-cultural studies highlighted that stigma is more prevalent in certain communities and that it manifests itself differently depending on socio-cultural contexts (krendl & pescosolido, 2020; yang et al., 2014). more specifically, it seems that the expression of stigma is shaped by social codes and cultural norms. in sub-saharan africa, the issue of stigma has been highlighted by humanitarian organizations. poor living conditions, social exclusion, and abuse of people with mental disorders have been identified as key priorities for the movement for global mental health (kleinman, 2009; semrau et al., 2015). although this phenomenon is very visible, very little research has been conducted in that regard. existing studies identify the salience of stigmatizing attitudes in the general population, among health professionals, and among family members (benedicto et al., 2016; hanlon et al., 2014; koschorke et al., 2021; reta et al., 2016; salifu yendork et al., 2016; shah et al., 2017). since most are descriptive and quantitative, these studies do not identify the dynamics underlying the phenomenon in these contexts. over the past few decades, social psychology literature has suggested that the study of stigma benefits from exploring the cognitive and affective components underlying observable discriminatory behaviors (corrigan, 2004, 2018; fox et al., 2018; link & phelan, 1999; major & o'brien, 2005; thornicroft et al., 2007). in other words, discrimination experienced by people with mental disorders cannot be understood without lifting the veil on the stereotypes and prejudices from which it takes root. this literature also identifies a structural dimension to the phenomenon, referring to the influence of institutions and social structures contributing to the propagation of stigmatizing messages (corrigan et al., 2004; hatzenbuehler, 2016). while research clearly identifies that addressing stigma requires looking at all cognitive, affective, and structural dimensions, most anti-stigma programs in sub-saharan africa are based on the premise that discrimination and abuse of people with mental disorders are due to a lack of mental health literacy (ganasen et al., 2008; naslund & deng, 2021; heim et al., 2020). in burkina faso, where this research takes place, no study has previously been carried out on the issue of stigma, thus limiting the possibility of developing adapted interventions. it is in this context, where very little information is available, that our study was conducted. it http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 aims at identifying stereotypes and attitudes associated with mental health disorders in burkina faso. the underlying objective is to guide the development of culturally adapted anti-stigma programs. context burkina faso is a country in west africa with a population of 20 million people from about 60 ethnic groups. according to the latest estimates, only 28.7% of the population is urban, mainly living in the cities of ouagadougou and bobo-dioulasso. the proportion of the population living below the poverty line is 40.1%, ranking the country among the most vulnerable in the world. facing many socioeconomic and public health challenges, very little attention is paid to mental health in burkina faso. the lack of political commitment to mental health is mainly reflected in 1) the absence of a national budget for mental health, 2) the insufficient number of health structures and mental healthcare professionals, and 3) the absence of a legal framework protecting the rights of people with mental disorders. in urban areas, such as the city of bobodioulasso, these people often find themselves wandering. they have little access to mental health care, especially since this is associated with an out-of-pocket payment that they often cannot afford. methods this study is part of a socio-anthropological research documenting the full range of components of social stigma. to do so, an ethnographic field investigation was conducted between the months of april and august 2015 and january and may 2017. as part of this investigation, the principal researcher engaged in participatory and nonparticipatory observations in different care settings in the city of bobo-dioulasso (psychiatric services, traditional healing systems, charitable associations) which allowed for the development of interview grids addressing the use of mental health care, social representations of mental disorders, as well as the stigmatized facets of these disorders (stereotypes, attitudes). the results presented in this article focus only on the latter. the interview grids were developed by the principal researcher and validated by the co-researchers and the field collaborators. they were then pre-tested with a relative of a co-researcher, which led to modifications in the way we asked the questions to be congruent with local expressions. in this research, an emic and inductive posture was adopted to unveil popular conceptions of mental health (pigeon-gagné et al., 2023) rather than using biomedical entities from western psychiatry, which is why the term "mental disorder" was used rather than a more specific terminology. the objective was to provide a space for participants to identify the components of stigmatization. a total of 7 focus groups (fg) and 25 individual interviews (ii) were conducted (table 1). table 1. sociodemographic characteristics of participants individual interview s focus group discussion s gender men 20 40 women 5 29 age 20 2 4 20 – 30 5 12 30 40 5 21 40 50 6 16 50 60 5 9 60+ 2 7 ethnic group http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 mossi 14 22 bisa 2 9 bobo 5 7 samo 0 7 dioula 0 6 gourounsi 0 5 dagara 3 4 peul 1 3 other 0 6 education primary 7 21 secondary 11 17 university 6 15 none 3 16 socioeconomi c situation informal sector 15 41 formal sector 7 16 no income 3 12 in the first fieldwork, 15 individual interviews were conducted with patients of the psychiatric service (n=4), relatives of patients (n=2), caregivers (n=4) and key informants (n=5). these interviews were conducted by the principal investigator in locations chosen by the participants, but where their words could remain confidential. the participants were people with whom the researcher had developed a trust relationship through her regular presence in the care settings. in addition, 7 focus groups were held with community members (n=4), patients (n=2) and caregivers (n=1). the groups were formed so that men and women were met separately, people in authority were not included, and they were held in the language of the majority (dioula or french). in these interviews, participants were asked open-ended questions about stereotypes related to mental health difficulties and endorsed attitudes. the questions asked in this regard were, "what comes to mind when you think of a person with a mental disorder?", "what characterizes these people?" "how do you feel when you meet them?", "how should they be treated?". the discussion was fueled by follow-up questions. in a second phase, participants were asked more specifically about specific stigmatizing attitudes: "would you be willing to eat/befriend/marry a person with a mental disorder?". they were also invited to discuss concrete examples and personal experiences. after being transcribed, the data was subjected to thematic analysis (paillé & muchielli, 2016). several readings took place as a phase of immersion with the data allowing certain observations, impressions, feelings, and questioning to emerge. this was then discussed among co-researchers, which led to the identification of the main themes. the data was then reviewed by the principal investigator and a research assistant to code the excerpts inductively using nvivo software. once the coding was done from the material obtained in the focus groups, the individual interviews were analyzed: the codes were integrated with the previous ones. this stepby-step process allowed for the identification of recurrences and salient discursive elements. once the thematic groupings had been constructed, the material was analyzed deductively with a descriptive posture to identify the affective components of the stigma. a second fieldwork took place in 2017, when 10 interviews were conducted with caregivers (6) and key informants (4) to further our understanding of stigma dynamics. participants were identified based on their experiences and knowledge of exclusion dynamics. the interviews conducted were then informal but were guided by the researcher's preliminary understanding. these interviews allowed us to refine our understanding of certain themes. the data was then transcribed and subjected to the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 same analytical process, leading to a thematic reorganization. ethical approval was obtained from the ethics committee of the université du québec à montréal and from the ministry of health of burkina faso. results in the interviews, participants provided a wide range of emotional responses that they spontaneously associated with stereotypes of mental disorders (table 2). six different emotional responses were reported: sadness, indifference, disgust, fear, aggressiveness, and shame. table 2. participants' attitudes toward people identified as having a mental health disorder affective reactions stereotypes sadness fragile people vulnerable people victims of certain situations indifference useless people disturbing people nuisance disgust marginal behaviors (dirtiness) fear aggressive behaviors permanent condition contagious condition psychiatric consultation psychiatric label aggressiveness people who are responsible for their condition shame marginal behaviors (nudity) aggressive behaviors *reactions in bold are those reported by all respondents. sadness for most respondents, the first response given when asked to talk about how they felt about individuals with a mental disorder was sorrow: "it hurts", "it's a great pain", "our hearts are breaking", "we feel sorry" and "it makes us tired". participants explained that they felt sorrow and pity when they observed the daily living conditions of people with mental illness and when they realized their distress. many people expressed helplessness when faced with the wandering patients, not knowing how to help them, and thinking of their family’s suffering: i: when meet a person with a mental disorder on the street, what comes to mind? what do you think about? m1: it makes you tired, it makes you sad. you would like to treat him, but you can't. he eats unhealthy things, it hurts because you can't do anything for him... m2: crazy people are pitiful. when i see them, it makes me tired, it makes me sad because i think of their parents. we have children like them, that's why it hurts. if god makes it like that, it hurts us. so, you ask, "god! you have to save him, you have to help him, and you have to spare me from this too." that's what we ask when we see them. m3: your heart breaks because childbirth is difficult, you think of his mother. (fg with community members, men) participants explained that the sadness they felt was directly related to their perception of the person's degree of responsibility. they felt sorrow especially towards women who were http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 ill, because they were victims of difficult situations or exclusion. participants also reported examples of young men who were very studious or had a prosperous business and had been the object of jealousy and became ill because of an act of witchcraft for which they were not responsible: i: whose fault, is it? w1: the witchcraft (tears in the eyes). they have done nothing, but we envy him and we spoil him... we put a spell on him out of jealousy (trembling voice) w2: it was a man who put the spell on him, god doesn't give diseases to people. if you see that someone is sick, it's our fault. if you see that a person is doing fine, tomorrow someone puts a spell on him. bad people make him crazy and then it's over. they don’t have anyone's help... w3: there are also some people that we see with notebooks in the street. you'll find out that he was a very bright student that someone put a spell to spoil his studies. and so, he only sees his papers, but he can't do anything with them. it hurts us, it gives pain. (fg with community members, women) indifference participants also expressed a form of indifference, especially when people wander around the city. these individuals were generally perceived as being a nuisance since they were not engaging in income-generating activities nor in household chores. they were therefore seen as a burden to families, but also as potentially a burden to the neighborhood and the community at large. participants said things like "when you see them, you just go on your way", "when you're a crazy person, no one cares about you", "it's as if you were dead", "we don't need them", "they're a burden for all of us". health professionals frequently referred to this phenomenon of indifference that they observed and that they associated to a form of disempowerment: m1: there is a total indifference towards them. there is a generalized lack of responsibility. people have so many problems, if the patient is not aggressive, as long as he or she does not disturb their traffic or their peace of mind at home, they don't care. because they say to themselves: "we don't know him, it's not our problem". they don't try to understand. they don't care... m2: a lot of these patients, when they go to a place where there's food, they stay there. you see him one morning he's sitting outside your door. you don't know where he's from, you don't know his village, you don't know his family... you can't just chase him away. but there is indifference towards him. only what you have to do is maybe to keep him away from your door, that's all. and that's common, very common. (fg, mental health professionals, men) disgust wandering people, described as people who engage in marginal, disturbing, and even immoral behaviors, evoked disgust. when talking about poor personal hygiene and nudity, several expressions of disgust were explicitly put forward. in addition to the unhygienic and bodily state, participants also http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 named that their disgust stemmed from the fact that these individuals were “not of the same nature”. they were sometimes considered as a dog or as a thing: the excluded ones in general are the crazy ones. the madman walks around naked... he is dirty. a madman is like a dog... his saliva is contaminated, he is dirty, he smells bad, he is disgusting. he is not like us! that's why we leave him in his corner. (ii, man, merchant, 27 years) distrust and fear the most common reactions were distrust, suspicion, and fear. these reactions referred both to a mistrust induced by the patients and by the psychiatric institution. the aggressive and violent nature of people with mental disorders was the most frequently cited reason for suspicion and fear. according to respondents, the mentally ill are threatening because they can hit, kick, punch, assault, abuse, and insult for no apparent reason. the impossibility of foreseeing and predicting moments of aggressiveness and danger justified the participants' distrust. this precaution allowed them to avoid being the victim of an attack or an aggression; a concern that was discussed more by the women than by the men, the latter being afraid of being attacked without being able to defend themselves. since most respondents considered these disorders to be permanent and incurable, mistrust had to be maintained even for people who had not had symptoms for several years: a cured madman does remain mad. we'll say a former madman. he remains somewhere a madman; we are suspicious of him forever. i would not like to sleep with him, i would not sleep in peace. i tell myself that at any moment it can come back and then, he is capable of anything, so there is always this suspicion. i don't want to be unaware of a man or a woman like that who has had moments when he was attacking, trying to kill people and he was arrested. even if he is cured, for us he is more dangerous than an hiv-positive person. oh yes! because the seropositive, by touching him there is nothing, by sleeping with him by getting up in the morning there is nothing. but with a madman or someone who tends to become mad, it is unpredictable. you don't know what he can do at any moment. you can't prevent it, he can't prevent it, nobody can prevent it. and so you have to be careful no matter what. (fg with community members, housewife, 37 years) since some participants felt that people with mental health problems could be contagious, they mentioned that they were afraid to encounter them. in this regard, health professionals explain that certain widely held traditional beliefs contribute to mistrust of people with mental disorders: p1: people think that these people are inhabited by spirits. if you are not careful, these same spirits can fall on you or come into you. p2: but there is also the fact that the patient is aggressive. in his crisis, he bites, he hits. if you get a blow from the patient, if he bites you or spits on you, you also become mentally ill. that's why people are suspicious of them. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 p3: people believe that some mental illnesses can be transmitted like malaria. some people come here and say, "the patient bit me, i'm going to go crazy! these are traditional concepts. it's not easy to get them out of their heads... (fg with mental health professionals, men) participants also said they were very suspicious of the psychiatric ward that they considered to be a place where patients came out looking strange. they also identified certain physical stigmas that were easily recognizable and disabling for people receiving this treatment: in the psychiatric hospital, they have sedatives to weaken the madness. the day they are going to inject him, you will see his saliva will flow, it flows like a two-monthold baby. he's walking down the street, right away you know he's crazy... the person is weird, he walks like a truck. it's like a living dead person! it's the effect of the injection that weakens him, that makes him weird. and we distrust him, he even scares us. (ii, man, merchant, 27 years) they stressed the need to be suspicious of anyone going there, regardless of whether the person was engaging in disruptive behavior. participants also emphasized the need to be wary of health care staff working in psychiatry because they were seen as strange, out of the ordinary and different. some participants explicitly stated that they considered the caregivers in this facility “being crazy themselves”, which is why they did not trust them. this was also reported by health care workers who said that they were distrusted by those around them: we, as caregivers in psychiatry, are indexed and pointed at. people say, " anyone who cares for a crazy person is a crazy person," so as soon as we behave in a way that is a little strange to them, they say, "that's it, because he's in psychiatry, he's a crazy person". even when they don't see any signs of different behavior, when you have your normal character, your normal character becomes abnormal for them. (ii, mental health professional, man, 45 years) another characteristic associated with psychiatric care was the label that came with medical consultation, a label that people would seek to avoid or would hide. they emphasized the importance of the neighborhood not knowing if a person was attending this place; the mere mention of the names of mental illnesses made people afraid: my niece had a difficult event in her life, her husband betrayed her... it shocked her, she could not eat, sleep, she did not do anything anymore. that's when she went to psychiatry and the doctors there helped her a lot, they gave her products and everything. then they told her that it was depression that she had. as time went on, she got better. in the meantime, her girlfriend was telling anyone, «my girlfriend is crazy! when she heard this, she asked her friend, "are you saying that about me? you know it's not madness; it's depression. and you know why i had this depression.’’ she said: "depression http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 is in french, for us in africa, depression is madness". for her friend, as here we don't say depression, for her the diagnosis is madness, and here in africa, the madman is the most dangerous of all! once we say that you have a depression, people are afraid of you and will not want to approach you anymore. (ii, man, photograph, 51 years) aggressiveness in contrast to the sadness felt towards some, others were more likely to provoke aggressive reactions since they were considered to be responsible for their condition. people we met mentioned that they felt like punching them when they thought that a person had used psychoactive substances or had committed reprehensible acts. the people considered responsible for their condition were men, in almost all the cases since drug use was associated with a male practice: m1: the crazy people we see, a lot of them are drug addicts. they're on drugs and they're mostly boys. and that makes you want to beat them up... m2: that's true, those who have taken drugs, when you see them, you want to hit them! when i see them, i recognize them.... those people, i just have to go on my way, i don't want to do anything for them. they just had to stay on the right path, that's all. (fg with community members, men) shame participants identified disruptive behaviors and easily visible features of mental illness (wandering, nudity, dirtiness, and aggressivity) as shameful. shame was reported by all but was particularly discussed by people who were caregivers themselves or by people who had been in close contact with a patient in the past. participants recalled shameful situations that they said they could not talk about to those around them. it was difficult to get them to address these reactions compared to other spontaneously reported reactions (e.g., fear). two shameful behaviors were reported by family members: aggression and nudity: b: when her illness starts, everybody can tell because she comes out of our yard, she talks, she goes on the road, she goes into every yard she knows. she doesn't walk past the door without going into the yard and she’ll do all kinds of things in people's houses. it makes us feel ashamed, that's why i don't let her out. d: she goes to people's houses, she spoils things, she breaks everything, she yells, she runs around the neighborhood, it makes me feel ashamed... b: when she is sick like that, her children are ashamed, because she insults everyone. everything we can't think of, she insults us like that. it makes us feel ashamed... (ii, daughter and brother of a psychiatric patient, 17 and 42 years) i have a friend who has a little sister like that, she must be 27-28 years old. the parents don't let her go out, when she goes out, they quickly pick her up and bring her home. since she doesn't know http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 anything about what she does. it is shameful for the family. if you say to her: "take off your clothes, i want to see", she will do it and say: "here are my breasts". you say, "touch your breasts," she will do it. she says: "touch again? " if you say yes, she will do it, she doesn't know what she is doing… what a shame. (ii, research assistant, woman. 36 years) discussion in this qualitative study, we interviewed 94 people in bobo-dioulasso where stigma had not been researched before. our study aimed to provide a portrait of the attitudes endorsed towards people with mental disorders in a context where psychiatric patients are socially excluded. we met with patients, family members, friends, neighbors, community members, health professionals, and traditional healers to better understand the affective responses justifying discriminatory behaviors. in this exploratory study, we were able to identify a variety of affective reactions, but two (fear and shame) were reported by all participants. these reactions were associated with stereotypes related to: 1) specific behaviors (aggressivity, nudity, dirtiness), 2) perceived intrinsic characteristics (disturbing, useless, harmful), 3) perceived characteristics of mental disorders (permanent, transmissible), and 4) the psychiatric institution. our results are consistent with scientific literature in social psychology. previous empirical studies reveal that the most widely held stereotype is that of dangerousness (angermeyer & matschinger, 2005; corrigan et al., 2005a; mestdagh & hansen, 2014; seeman et al., 2016). participants in these studies report that people with mental health disorders are dangerous, unpredictable, and potentially violent individuals. in our study, as in previous ones in sub-saharan africa, these stereotypes were associated with distrust and fear (adewuya & makanjuola, 2005, 2008; gureje et al., 2006; okpalauwaekwe et al., 2017). research findings unequivocally identify fear as the most frequently reported emotion justifying social distance (corrigan 2005, 2018; lien & kao, 2019; link & phelan, 1999; major & o'brien, 2005; stuart et al., 2012). beyond these similarities with the scientific literature, some of the attitudes documented in our study deserve further reflection and interpretation, as they seem to reveal specific aspects of stigma in bobo-dioulasso. indeed, it seems that in addition to the perception of dangerousness, the dynamics of stigmatization are strongly based on 1) shame, which is linked to specific symptoms, and 2) mistrust, which is associated with social representations of psychiatry. shame seems to be an important reaction to consider to better understand the nature of the stigma in the west african urban context. in our study, we note that shame is unanimously reported by participants and is linked to a desire by relatives to hide their loved one who adopts disturbing and marginal behaviors. research in western contexts generally addresses shame as a consequence of internalization of social stigma by people with mental health difficulties (buchman-wildbaum et al., 2020; williamson et al., 2020), rather than as a vector leading to their stigmatization. aside from a few studies that have outlined the effects of vicarious stigma on family members and shame experienced by significant others (corrigan & miller, 2004; larson & corrigan, 2008; moses, 2014; reupert & maybery, 2015; sheehan et al., 2017), this dimension of social stigma remains under-researched limiting the possibility of relying on this literature to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 interpret our findings. moreover, this may reflect a fundamental difference in the expression of stigma in western societies in comparison to its expression in other societies. in our study, the direct entourage that constitutes the informal care system seems to carry a form of shame and dishonor related to the moral status of the person they care for. the shame experienced by relatives refers to the concept of courtesy stigma (goffman, 1963). this concept describes the phenomenon of the propagation of the stigma that individuals carry to their proximal social networks, which in turn carry it. the influence of courtesy stigma has been documented in asian cultures where shame acts as a structuring element of social organizations and where communities associate psychological distress with moral weakness (abdullah & brown, 2011; burnard et al., 2006; chong et al. 2007; krendl & pescosolido, 2020; kleinman 1977; lam et al. 2010; lauber & rössler 2007; yang et al. 2014; zhang et al. 2020). these studies suggest that to avoid experiencing shame or humiliation, families may delay help-seeking to formal systems as much as possible. it also appears that once begun, this help-seeking process may be hidden or stopped prematurely by family members to avoid being stigmatized by their community. few studies in the sub-saharan region on courtesy stigma could be identified (dakogyeke & asumang, 2013; girma et al., 2014; shibre et al., 2001; quinn, 2007). although courtesy stigma is not well documented in traditional african contexts, it appears that this phenomenon is exacerbated in these societies (where families act as the basic social unit and where interactions with extended community members represent a pillar in social organization) compared to western societies in which individuals act as the basic unit to social functioning. as previously discussed, in bobo-dioulasso, it appears that the endorsement of stigmatizing attitudes is intimately linked to the notion of transgression and the perception of the degree of responsibility of individuals (pigeon-gagné et al., 2023). in this context, it is possible to believe that it is shameful for family members to be associated with reprehensible and socially sanctioned actions. it would be to avoid being the target of marginalization and exclusion within their community that family members would hide their transgressive behaviors (quinn, 2007). shame may also fulfill a protective function for people experiencing mental disorders. their relatives may tend to hide them from social interactions to protect them from the social consequences that may result from the adoption of transgressive behaviors (read et al., 2009). although this study does not specifically address the structural components of stigma, they have emerged through the analysis process. since the literature makes it clear that affective reactions and stigmatizing attitudes are highly shaped by social structures, it is essential to focus on these structural dimensions. the insidious effects of media treatment as well as the way rights are (or are not) protected by legal markers, and the way institutional policies promote (or limit) access to services have been documented in western contexts (corrigan et al., 2005a, 2015b; hatzenbuehler, 2016; van beveren et al., 2020). according to this literature, social structures highly contribute to perpetuating unfavorable power dynamics and reinforcing stigmatization. more specifically, the way in which the psychiatric institution contributes to the phenomenon of stigma has been documented with respect to the influence of diagnoses on help-seeking. it is known that individuals avoid seeking professional help despite the perceived http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 accessibility and effectiveness to avoid being labeled (clement et al., 2015; corrigan, 2004; corrigan et al., 2014; fox et al., 2018; henderson et al., 2013; mestdagh & hansen, 2014; schnyder et al., 2017). in our study, we observed that the psychiatric institution conveys a structural stigma that goes far beyond the negative influence of diagnoses on help-seeking. it seems that the institution itself carries a stigma and, therefore, generates reactions of distrust and fear in the community. a few studies in subsaharan africa have identified the extent of authoritarian and punitive attitudes toward psychiatric patients in different urban or semi-urban settings (adewuya & makanjuola, 2005; egbe et al., 2014; kapungwe et al., 2010; nortje & seedat, 2013; ssebunnya et al., 2009). these studies, however, do not provide insight into the constituent elements of this phenomenon, which appear to be particularly pronounced in the sub-saharan region. to understand the stigmatizing nature of psychiatry in the specific context of the city of bobo-dioulasso, it seems particularly important to highlight some factors. first, psychiatry was introduced in burkina faso at the end of the colonial period. it is, therefore, a practice instituted by the french colonial power and responding to the logic of western medicine; a medicine that was foreign to the cultural worldviews at the time. the lack of familiarity and the lack of understanding of the communities concerning the underlying logic of healing can, in part, explain reticence and mistrust. secondly, our results illustrate that psychiatric professionals are also perceived negatively. the lack of legitimacy of these caregivers cannot be understood without considering the current conditions of psychiatric practice in burkina faso. government funding is limited, health structures are poorly maintained, there are not enough professionals to meet the population’s needs, and the ruptures in the supply of essential medicines remain recurrent problems. the poor quality of care provided (low efficiency of first-generation antipsychotics, stigmatizing side effects of available medication), explained by these structural problems, necessarily contributes to the negative social representations conveyed about the psychiatric institution, but also about the people who experience mental health challenges (asher et al., 2018; nyame et al., 2021; read, 2012). finally, since it is not located in the same location as the other medical specialties, psychiatry is dissociated from the hospital center which is recognized as a place of care by the population. this contributes to the lack of interaction between health professionals and seems to feed the stereotypes that are held about psychiatric care. implications for intervention and research most anti-stigma programs in sub-saharan africa focus on sharing scientifically validated information with populations to improve their knowledge of psychiatric diagnoses and factors associated with the onset of these disorders (mascayano et al., 2015; lauber and sartorius, 2007). however, scientific literature demonstrates that to understand the dynamics of stigma, it is essential to consider the affective reactions at play in the development of interventions rather than relying solely on the provision of information. literacy-based programs tend to improve knowledge about mental disorders, which rarely translate into behavior changes and reduction of discrimination (evans-lacko et al., 2014; sampogna et al., 2017; thornicroft et al., 2016). to be effective, anti-stigma interventions must address literacy concerns as well as legislative issues, the health system’s capacity, and barriers to access care (javed et al., 2021). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 this study provides an opportunity to critically reflect on anti-stigma program development in west africa. our results suggest that the affective reactions reported have little to do with a lack of mental health knowledge. on the contrary, we found that affective reactions (shame and fear) appear to explain the adoption of exclusionary behaviors, rather than a lack of knowledge. the affective reactions are, in some cases, related to cultural values (e.g., the importance of transgression in social organization), but seem to be mostly associated with structural factors (e.g., underfunding in mental health). it is, therefore, essential that these components be taken into consideration in developing programs aimed at reducing stigma. in this sense, it is unlikely that a program aimed at increasing mental health literacy will have any effect on the cultural and structural factors that our results reveal. furthermore, in this study, we found that the first reaction reported by many people is sadness and compassion, which could be used as a lever for intervention in a stigma reduction program. to develop contextually appropriate interventions, further research is needed to 1) deepen the understanding of the mechanisms underlying shame, 2) explore the meaning of specific cultural codes and values at stake, and 3) develop an understanding of the differential influence of gender on the way people with mental disorders are perceived and treated. it would also be highly relevant to develop a quantitative study with a broader spectrum of participants to document the extent of stereotyping and affective reactions that we have identified in the general population. in this context, we see the role of community psychologists (especially research teams from outside the contexts under study) restating the importance of a systemic, nuanced and critical analysis of stigma and social exclusion. both stigma research and anti-stigma program development in sub-saharan africa seem to be largely guided by evidence-based approaches and diagnostic categories derived from western psychiatry. this has important repercussions not only on the provision of services, but also on the symbolic and epistemic realms, which can cause great harm to communities especially when colonial dynamics are at play. we therefore call on our community psychology colleagues to join the critical voices of the global mental health movement, and to promote intervention approaches that are culturally sensitive, socially grounded and, above all, adopted in collaboration with a diversity of stakeholders, not just researchers and health professionals, but also traditional healers, community gate keepers, and people with lived-experienced. limitations this study has some limitations. it is an exploratory study in which a limited number of people were interviewed. the results of our study cannot be generalized but should rather be read as an initial understanding of the problem of stigmatization as it unfolds in bobo-dioulasso. the findings are closely linked to the context in which the study was carried out, more specifically to the relationship between the research team and the field. in this sense, it is possible that divergent points of view may be documented in the future. these results reveal the subjective views and perspectives of the people encountered at a particular time and should be read and interpreted as such. as the principal researcher herself does not speak dioula, it is possible that some nuances were lost in the translation process and thus escaped the analytical process. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 conclusion in bobo-dioulasso, as in other west african settings, mental disorders are stigmatized. in our study, we note that the main affective reactions underlying stigma are fear and shame, which may be associated with cultural codes, but also with structural issues. further research is needed to better understand the dynamics of exclusion and the components of stigmatization. this research would lay the groundwork for the development of culturally sensitive anti-stigma programs. references abdullah, t., et brown, t. l. 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(2015). stigma and discrimination related to mental illness in low-and middleincome countries. epidemiology and psychiatric sciences, 24(5), 382-394. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 21 shah, a., wheeler, l., sessions, k., kuule, y., agaba, e., et merry, s. p. (2017). community perceptions of mental illness in rural uganda: an analysis of existing challenges facing the bwindi mental health programme. african journal of primary health care & family medicine, 9(1), 1-9. sampogna, g., bakolis, i., evans-lacko, s., robinson, e., thornicroft, g., & henderson, c. (2017). the impact of social marketing campaigns on reducing mental health stigma: results from the 2009–2014 time to change programme. european psychiatry, 40, 116-122. sharac, j., mccrone, p., clement, s., & thornicroft, g. (2010). the economic impact of mental health stigma and discrimination: a systematic review. epidemiology and psychiatric sciences, 19(3), 223-232. sheehan, l., nieweglowski, k., et corrigan, p. w. (2017). structures and types of stigma. dans gaebel, w., rössler, w., et sartorius, n. (dir.), the stigma of mental illness-end of the story? (pp. 43-66). springer. shibre, t., negash, a., kullgren, g., kebede, d., alem, a., fekadu, a., ... et jacobsson, l. (2001). perception of stigma among family members of individuals with schizophrenia and major affective disorders in rural ethiopia. social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 36(6), 299303.ssebunnya et al., 2009 stuart, h., arboleda-flórez, j., et sartorius, n. (2012). paradigms lost: fighting stigma and the lessons learned. oxford university press. thornicroft, g., rose, d., kassam, a., et sartorius, n. (2007). stigma: ignorance, prejudice or discrimination?. the british journal of psychiatry, 190(3), 192-193. thornicroft, g., mehta, n., clement, s., evans lacko, s., doherty, m., rose, d., ... & henderson, c. (2016). evidence for effective interventions to reduce mental-health-related stigma and discrimination. the lancet, 387(10023), 1123-1132. valery, k. m., & prouteau, a. (2020). schizophrenia stigma in mental health professionals and associated factors: a systematic review. psychiatry research, 290, 113068. van beveren, l., rutten, k., hensing, g., spyridoula, n., schønning, v., axelsson, m., ... & vandamme, j. (2020). a critical perspective on mental health news in six european countries: how are “mental health/illness” and “mental health literacy” rhetorically constructed?. qualitative health research, 30(9), 1362-1378. williamson, t. j., ostroff, j. s., haque, n., martin, c. m., hamann, h. a., banerjee, s. c., & shen, m. j. (2020). dispositional shame and guilt as predictors of depressive symptoms and anxiety among adults with lung cancer: the mediational role of internalized stigma. stigma and health, 5(4), 425. world health organization (2016). world health statistics. http://www.who.int/gho/publication s/world_health_statistics/fr_whs201 6_full.pdf http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 16, issue 1 may 2025 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 22 world health organization (2017). depression and other common mental disorders: global health estimates. https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/h andle/10665/ 254610/who-msdmer-2017.2-eng.pdf yang, l. h., thornicroft, g., alvarado, r., vega, e., & link, b. g. (2014). recent advances in cross-cultural measurement in psychiatric epidemiology: utilizing ‘what matters most’to identify culture-specific aspects of stigma. international journal of epidemiology, 43(2), 494510. yang, l. h., purdie-vaughns, v., kotabe, h., link, b. g., saw, a., wong, g., et phelan, j. c. (2014). culture, threat, and mental illness stigma: identifying culture-specific threat among chineseamerican groups. social science & medicine, 88, 56-67. zhang, z., sun, k., jatchavala, c., koh, j., chia, y., bose, j., ... et wang, j. (2020). overview of stigma against psychiatric illnesses and advancements of antistigma activities in six asian societies. international journal of environmental research and public health, 17(1), 280. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/%20254610/who-msd-mer-2017.2-eng.pdf https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/%20254610/who-msd-mer-2017.2-eng.pdf https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/%20254610/who-msd-mer-2017.2-eng.pdf is marketing an adverse childhood experience? practical implications and suggestions for community psychologists stephen j. almada and gina panozzo keywords: adverse childhood experience, positive childhood experiences, marketing, economy of disease, community psychology. author biographies: stephen j almada, is a health psychologist practitioner and independent researcher. he has written public and peer-reviewed articles pertaining to psychological aspects of public health and is the author of exercise, life, & love: the making of a sedentary society. dr. almada is a graduate of the university of utah and completed three-years of post-doctoral training in epidemiology at the northwestern university medical school. gina panozzo, is the ceo of gp academy llc, which provides educational and consulting services to assist nurses, nursing programs, and healthcare organizations. her business is most well known for assisting nursing faculty prepare for the certified nurse educator exam and psychiatric nurses prepare for the psychiatric-mental health board certification exam, as well as providing workshops and accreditation assistance to nursing programs and consulting to improve readmissions for healthcare organizations. she obtained a doctorate in nursing practice (executive leadership), from rush university, in chicago, il. she has been a registered nurse since 2005. dr. panozzo teaches at all nursing academic program levels (adn, bsn, rn to bsn, msn, and dnp). she is the founder of nurse educators united, which is a monthly synchronous platform to assist nursing faculty in areas of teaching, service, and scholarship. she assists the il apna board with educational conferences and reviews of proposals and research studies for grants/scholarships. gina has published on various topics such as home health outcomes, schizophrenia and therapeutic relationships, and faculty caring. recommended citation: almada, s. j., & panozzo, g. (2023). is marketing an adverse childhood experience? practical implications and suggestions for community psychologists. global journal of community psychology practice, 14(3), 1 24. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: stephen j. almada, ed.d., health & sports institute of chicago, 2509 w. harrison street, #4 chicago, il 60612. email: salmada@hsichicago.org https://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:salmada@hsichicago.org global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 is marketing an adverse childhood experience? practical implications and suggestions for community psychologists abstract adverse childhood experiences (aces) have negative health effects on children that last a lifetime, heighten risks of premature mortality, and are likely to be passed on to subsequent generations. the causes of aces are both domestic and community-based. marketing of the western lifestyle and diet is an unrecognized but ubiquitous community cause of aces. the potential for aces is inherent in marketing designed to maximize gains that serve the self-interest of economic actors by exploiting children’s vulnerability. using classical conditioning, marketing produces a consumer placebo effect that develops into a lasting belief in consumerism as a means to feeling healthy and happy. despite public health policies to protect children from the aces of marketing and promote positive childhood experiences, political opposition to mandating these policies prevails and the governments’ duty to protect the health rights of children goes unfulfilled. the combination of unregulated neoliberal economic power and government inaction renews the call for a public health revolution to protect and promote the health of children, families, communities, humanity, and the planet. the psychosocial demands of organizing and implementing this public health revolution make community psychologists ideal candidates to lead the way in this important endeavor. adverse childhood experiences adverse childhood experiences (aces) increase the risks of lifetime and intergenerational illnesses, as well as premature mortality (carroll et al., 2013; lin et al., 2021; grummitt et al., 2021; slomski, 2021; wade et al., 2016). aces meet the substance abuse and mental health services administration definition of trauma in that they harm children emotionally and physically (samhsa, n.d.). the causes of aces range from those that occur in homes to those that arise within the community (cronholm et al., 2015). marketing the western lifestyle and diet to children has lasting effects on children’s beliefs, attitudes, and values (elliot, 2011, 2017) that manifest in lifetime mental, physical, and social disorders (bosworth, 2021; clay, 2017; goris et al., 2010; kieling et al., 2011; kling, 2021; kopp, 2019; o’neil et al., 2014; timimi, 2005). consequently, children are exposed to more than 40,000 commercials per year (kunkel et al., 2004), which suggests the trauma associated with marketing western ways of living constitutes an unrecognized but ubiquitous cause of aces. however, unlike war, community violence, physical and sexual abuse, or other more familiar adverse experiences, the global commercialization and commodification of childhood (linn, 2010; timimi, 2010) is condoned by governments and socially accepted. political sanctioning and social acceptance of marketing unhealthy ways of living to children is the product of economic power and the self-interest imperative of neoliberalism. teaching children to devalue health is essential to neoliberal actors driven to maximize gains and spur economic growth. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 to avoid culpability, neoliberal actors blame parents for being irresponsible for the marketer’s exploitation of their children’s vulnerabilities. over the past century neoliberalism has built an economy of disease (eod) that emotionally harms children, makes them indifferent about the unhealthy products being sold to them and consequently has spawned a global syndemic (swinburn et al., 2019). it is not enough to oppose the aces of marketing any more than a person can stop the spread of cancer by opposing it. neoliberal ideology is a contagion of consciousness that has become a social cancer of anthropocentric superiority and entitlement that is destroying humanity and its children as it works its way from inside the mind out to the body and the planet (crist, 2018). the development of healthy children requires environments built to cultivate and promote positive childhood experiences (pces) (fry et al., 2012; hughes et al., 2017; ortiz, 2021; shervington et al., 2018). however, when government inaction sabotages opportunities for pces, and the neoliberal power behind the aces of marketing goes unchecked, a public health revolution is the only choice society has. the broad psychosocial approach needed to catalyze a community-wide collaboration to stop the public health crisis caused by the aces of marketing makes the community psychologists the ideal candidates to lead the way in this new public health revolution. aces in a globalized economy of disease globalizing the western lifestyle is part of an economy built on expectations and promises of greater vitality, progress, and prosperity for all. enticed by the promise of prosperity, many lowerand middle-income countries (lmics) (e.g., chile, argentina, greece, spain, and african countries) have enthusiastically welcomed western industries. however, instead of a boon, many lmics are experiencing higher healthcare costs caused by hasty industrialization, dangerous work environments, nominal risk mitigation strategies, and increasing levels of environmental pollution (beck, 2016; karagiannis, 2020; saval, 2017). similarly, the expectations of fun, happiness, and empowerment associated with marketing to children belies evidence showing neoliberal consumerism is associated with mental health problems (clay, 2017; o’neil et al., 2014) and non-communicable diseases (ncds) (bosworth, 2021; kling, 2021; kopp, 2019). furthermore, the western way of life is unique from non-western lifestyles in that it is the stock-in-trade of neoliberalism to produce, market, and profit from the lifestyle diseases it causes and treats. thus, effectively marketing diseased ways of living requires advertisements that take possession of public consciousness and instill the belief that the social value of being indifferent about health is more important than being healthy. at the same time, when lifestyle diseases manifest, the self-interest imperative of neoliberal actors compels them to figure out a way to profit from them. and if profitable, the next neoliberal question is how to make the disease a sustainable profitable business. the importance of disease as an enduring profitable business was apparent when a financial analyst for a pharmaceutical company questioned the value of a drug that cured a disease (kim, 2018). ironically, although health has little value for an eod, marketing the illusion that neoliberal actors care about health is a highly profitable strategy. the lucre of neoliberal caring is manifest in the $54.3 billion u.s. childcare market (market analysis report, 2020) and the global $1.9 billion parenting advice markets (darius & hanine, 2020), including cookbooks for parents to “trick your kids into eating healthy” (elliott, 2011). additionally, there is the $450 billion self-care market (iri worldwide report, 2018) and the $832.8 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 billion global eldercare market (business wire, 2021a). under the guise of caring, the eod also creates markets for products and programs to ameliorate or treat the health problems associated with living in an environment where people have no choice about the polluted air they breathe, unhealthy foods they eat, and the lack of time to be active. for instance, there is the market for diets and weight loss programs ($192 billion) (vig & deshmukh, 2021), dietary supplements ($136 billion) (markets and markets, 2021), wearable fitness and well-being technology ($41 billion) (grand review research, 2021), smoking cessation ($23 million) (market research, 2021), addiction recovery ($42 billion) (larosa, 2020), and pain management ($74 billion) (business wire, 2021b) programs. however, despite the marketing promise of health and happiness inherent to commercial caring, if growth of the eod is to continue, then these diets, supplements and programs must fail and diseases must become chronic, incurable, treatable, and costly. as chronic disorders increase, their treatments create profitable markets for prescription drugs, disability devices (e.g., canes, electric shopping carts, wheelchairs), and surgeries, which contribute to the $7.6 (2016) to $7.8 (2017) trillion increase in healthcare costs (who, 2019). between 2000 and 2017, healthcare spending increased by 3.9%, outpacing increases in most people’s income as overall economic growth only increased by 3.0% (who, 2019). the situation was worse in middleand lowincome countries, where healthcare spending during the same 17-year period increased by 6.3% and 7.8%, respectively (who, 2019). overall, trying to keep up with increasing healthcare costs adds to the lifetime burden the western lifestyle imposes on individuals. nonetheless, efforts to grow the eod continue as many western corporations are targeting children as part of their “cradle to grave” marketing approach (kasser, 2003; linn, 2005). the lifetime value of children as consumers has resulted in the expansion of the western diet to lmics, where approximately 90% of the world’s children live (suchdev et al., 2018). unfortunately, neoliberal indifference toward health and children comes with globalization, as does the increased mental health problems among children in lmics (kieling et al., 2011). neoliberal pedophilia whether it is marketers or pausanias, the pedophile in plato’s symposium (edman, 1928), the exploitation of children by adults takes an emotional, mental, and physical toll on children. historically, children have been easy targets of economic exploitation (history, 2020), and thus, marketers targeting children (shah, 2010) can be viewed as a continuation of the exploitation of children working in sweatshops (moulds, 2017) or as slave laborers (mcdougall, 2007). similarly, the expectations of becoming wiser and more powerful that marketers build up in children (acuff, 2010) is a common flattering strategy used by adults to exploit children (timimi, 2010). marketers are highly educated and sophisticated adults who know how to flatter naïve and inexperienced children, gain their trust, and make them feel special and understood, with concepts like “kids foods” (elliott, 2011). gaining children’s trust is essential to conditioning them to be consumers. the conditioning process begins with marketers heightening children’s expectations of pleasure (sixsmith & furnham, 2010), fun (cairns et al., 2013), happiness (montaña blasco & jiménezmorales, 2020), athletic ability (folta et al., 2006), and instant gratification (witkowski, 2007). the saliency of pleasure expectations http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 is reinforced and magnified by the way “kids foods” are processed. like cocaine and other addictive drugs, foods are processed to maximally stimulate the pleasure centers of children’s brains (gearhardt et al., 2011; ifland et al., 2009; moss, 2013). moreover, marketers intensify children’s desire for pleasure with the pain of social comparison (takahashi et al., 2009). described as “advertising at its best,” the pain of social comparison is intended to make children “feel like a complete loser” without the advertised product (mediasmarts, n.d.). considering children view more than 40,000 commercials each year (kunkel et al., 2004), the daily pain of “feeling like a big loser” devalues their self-worth and exponentiates the emotional trauma and potential aces of marketing. similarly, marketing strategies known as “pester power” or the “nag factor” also contribute to the aces of marketing by straining the relationships between children and their parents (henry & borzekowski, 2011; xu, 2020). thus, whether it is the false promises of pleasure, gaining children’s trust to manipulate them, making children feel inadequate, or undermining children’s relationships with their parents, it is the emotional abuse underlying these strategies that is central to the aces of marketing. conditioning, consumer placebo effect, and beliefs the build-up of expectations is essential for conditioning children to experience a consumer placebo effect (thompson, 2010). the consumer placebo effect is similar to a medical placebo in that both begin with pain accompanied by a heightened desire to feel healthy. however, feeling healthy is more than the absence of feeling sick. following bohm’s (2005) analysis, people strive to experience health as feelings of being vital, whole, and happy. the primacy of “feeling healthy” was expressed by nietzsche (1967) when he noted that there is no health without the feeling of being healthy. the feeling of being healthy emerges from many opposing processes (e.g., anabolism and catabolism, consumption and production) that work together to maintain an optimal balance based on the demands of the whole body. the density of a mutual commitment to working together to achieve “one health” manifests in the whole of individuals, communities, humanity, earth, and all biological life (who, 2017). the neoliberal consumer placebo effect is not a function of working together and thus dislocates the feeling of being healthy (e.g., happy, powerful, energized, and full of life) from the density of health; it is a counterfeit having no vitality or wholeness value. thus, although the build-up of expectations and promises of pleasure will produce a consumer placebo effect in children, the superficiality of the effect will inevitably result in disappointment and disease. when repeatedly exposed to the cycle of a consumer high followed by disappointment, children inevitably develop a sense of powerlessness that affects their mental health. even when children become adolescents and know they are being exploited by marketers and deceived by the advertising promises of the “kids foods” they have been consuming, it is too late (elliott, 2017). the trauma caused by the aces of marketing is manifest; these adolescents identify as consumers, are aware of the persuasive intent of advertising, have become cynical of marketing, and feel helpless about changing it (elliott, 2017; twenge et al., 2004). despite adolescents’ awareness of the exploitation, they believe there is no alternative (queiroz, 2017), accept the abuse inherent to the marketing environment, and yet believe in the placebo of consumerism (hayes, 2021). as these adolescents become adults and parents, the belief in the consumer placebo effect and their inability to do http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 anything about it endures and thus puts subsequent generations at risk of socially inheriting the mental and physical neoliberal diseases of despair (beyazit & güneş, 2021). from the consumer placebo effect to belief in consumerism schafer et al. (2015) have shown that repeatedly experiencing a placebo effect generates a belief that preserves the placebo’s analgesic or feel-good effect even after learning the placebo is a sham. accordingly, children are conditioned to believe the act of consuming, and not the product per se, is an effective way of maintaining self-worth and social dignity in a consumer culture (pugh, 2009). stronger than truth, beliefs in consumerism make children lifetime consumers in the eod. parents trying to provide healthy food choices also often feel powerless against the inescapable marketing environment that undermines their efforts to protect their children from the unhealthy food (driessen et al., 2022). much of the powerlessness experienced by parents and children likely stems from the lack of awareness and understanding of how they are being manipulated by the marketer’s use of classical pavlovian conditioning without their consent. few parents know how the stimulus of pleasing advertisements strengthens receptor signals to the brain (allman, 1999), heightens sensitivity to the marketing environment, and increases receptivity to marketer’s promises of pleasure. moreover, children and parents are unaware of how susceptible the marketing environment makes them to being deceived since neither receptors nor the brain can distinguish whether the product advertised is a sham, scam, hoax, or a genuinely nourishing product. thus, the fact that children are being conditioned to be consumers, experience its consumer placebo effect, and believe in the false promise of consumerism without the informed consent of parents highlights the ethical problem inherent to the marketing science of exploiting children (reddy et al., 2020). human conduct and the history of marketing the history of marketing is primarily the study of how to surreptitiously influence the conduct, tastes, and preferences of children and adults (packard, 1981). through expectations and the conditioning process marketers can transform a meaningless product into a socially meaningful symbolic stimulus for pleasure (dimofte & yalch, 2011), make a wine taste better or worse as its price goes up (plassmann et al., 2008) or down (shiv et al., 2005), respectively; alter memories of a negative experience such that it is recalled favorably (braun, 1999); change how food (i.e., yogurt) taste by labeling it either “low fat” (unfavorable) versus “full fat” (favorable) (wardle & solomons, 1994); and repress the body’s physiological mechanisms for regulating food consumption (crum et al., 2011). the marketing effectiveness of classical conditioning is without dispute but it is being augmented by the science of neuromarketing (bočková et al., 2021). neuromarketing provides insights into unconscious factors that influence choices and behaviors and thus gives the marketer greater influential power over human conduct (bočková et al., 2021). based on neuroimaging, marketers and food companies learn to process and market “kids foods” in ways that will target and maximally stimulate the pleasure center of the brain. neuromarketing has made the processing of “kids foods” similar to that of addictive drugs (gearhardt et al., 2011; infland et al., 2009; schulte et al., 2015). however, unlike cocaine, tobacco, alcohol, and opioids, the addictive threat posed by “kids foods” is particularly salient because they are legally marketed to children. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 young children lack the experience and cognitive ability to recognize the pain of social comparison hidden in the commercials targeting them. they cannot distinguish whether the caring and understanding of marketers is genuine or disingenuous (rozendaal et al., 2019). advertisements never inform parents of the self-interest, maximizing profit intent of the marketers and other neoliberal actors. it thus defies neoliberal logic that parents, let alone children, are supposed to be responsible for their consumer conduct when they are uninformed that they are being manipulated at a subconscious level. however, children know the emptiness and dissatisfaction they feel after the consumer placebo effect dissipates (twenge et al., 2004), and parents know the strain marketing causes on their relationship with their children (driessen et al., 2022). the aces of marketing and mental health disorders the ncds and mental health problems associated with the western lifestyle were once considered diseases of adulthood. now, both are afflictions of childhood and adolescence, and reflect the history of unkept neoliberal promises. scitovsky (1976), lane (2000), and case and deaton (2020) chronicle 50-years of an economy that has produced unhappiness, dissatisfaction with life, mental health problems, opioid addiction, and suicides among adults. all of these problems now manifest in children and adolescents. the aces of marketing is supported by a direct relationship between globalization and the global escalation of mental health disorders (kieling et al., 2011; timini, 2005) and disempowerment among young people (twenge et al., 2004). moreover, in the u.s., where advertising to children is unregulated, the covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the already high pre-pandemic rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide, creating a national mental health emergency for children and adolescents (american academy of pediatrics, 2021). similarly, marketing to children living in lmic who already experience mental health problems arising from wars, infectious diseases, illness, and parents’ deaths has brought western afflictions and treatments. the rise of attention deficit hyperactivity disorders, depression, autism, and other western mental health disorders has also fueled the growth of western psychotropic drugs for children (wong et al., 2004). compounding the aces of marketing to children in lmic is the neoliberal focus on individualism, freedom, and consumerism as a means to children’s happiness. this western ideology conflicts with the nonwestern focus on family, cultural, and societal factors essential to defining a healthy childhood (timimi, 2005). consequently, the mental health benefits of a family-centered view of children are being lost to the neoliberal version of childhood. moreover, the neoliberal self-interest imperative and its indifference toward health inevitably creates inequalities that permeate societies regardless of their gross domestic product. consequently, if people cannot afford the cost of neoliberal caring, and governments are impotent when it comes to helping the citizens they represent, then segments of society will be marginalized, neglected, and unjustly deprived of vital services. underserved children living in lmic and high-income countries are particularly vulnerable to the severity of mental health problems associated with the aces of marketing. facing greater mental health challenges compared to children living in more financially secure settings, the healthcare resources available to children in underserved populations are underfunded and woefully scarce. consequently, although marginalized children are less likely to receive western treatment for mental health http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 challenges and though their afflictions worsen, (kieling et al., 2011; patel, 2007) they may be spared from becoming further ensnarled in the eod. underserved children in lmics may be forced to receive the curative treatment of community care. it is the genuine care of adults that protects children from the aces of marketing and promotes their healthy development through pces. it is from this foundation of a community of caring adults that children learn how to care about the one health that holds their body, family, community, humanity, and all of life together. cultivating pces preventing aces does not teach children how to make themselves feel and be healthy and happy. through pces children learn how to live life as vital participants, maintaining and enhancing the wholeness of health in all its ecological dimensions (ortiz, 2021). cultivating pces is thus a moral duty shared by families, education, public health, religions, governments, and economies to culture children into a socioecological system (timimi, 2005). beginning with the empathic discourse between children and adults, pces sets children on a lifetime trajectory of meaningful and responsible participation in the wholeness that defines the life of humanity (ortiz, 2021). sound nutrition and regular exercise are pces essential to the healthy development of children and their desire to participate in more challenging positive experiences. furthermore, they build up children’s mental health and thus make them more resilient to the deleterious effects of adversities (bernstein & mcnally, 2018; puterman et al., 2017). these benefits have important implications for marginalized and underserved populations where the risks of aces are high, and resources for treating the mental health problems are low (kieling et al., 2011; patel, 2007; souza et al., 2021). school-based exercise programs have been shown to be inexpensive (cradock et al., 2017) to implement and the mental health benefits associated with exercise justify the costs. from clinical to healthy populations, exercise’s mental health benefits include effectively treating anxiety (deboer et al., 2012) and depression (nebiker et al., 2018), developing greater self-esteem (zamani sani et al., 2016), and coping self-efficacy (e.g., coping under stress, problem-solving, and planning skills) (bernstein & mcnally, 2018; puterman et al., 2017). the construction of a supportive (dhabhar, 2018), positive, and caring exercise environment appears to potentiate the physical, mental, and overall well-being effects of exercise on children and adolescents from all sociodemographic backgrounds (bonhauser et al., 2005; fry et al., 2012; hogue et al., 2019; whooten et al., 2018). the research by fry et al. (2012) showed the psychological well-being of children from underserved populations participating in a sports camp improved with their perceptions of adult trainers/educators who genuinely cared about them. specifically, working with and learning from caring adults developed and strengthened the emotional efficacy (e.g., the ability to regulate positive and negative emotions) of children (fry et al., 2012). thus, pces have a scaling health effect that stands in direct contrasts to the scaling of mental and physical health problems arising from the disingenuousness and deceptive caring that makes marketing emotionally abusive. educators and public health specialists have crafted policies to protect children from the aces of marketing unhealthy foods (goris et al., 2010; kelly et al., 2019; lavriša et al., 2020; montaña blasco & jiménez-morales, 2020), and surmount the barriers to http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 implementing school-based exercise programs (carlson et al., 2013; gelius et al., 2020; jenkinson & benson, 2010; sofo & asola, 2016). nonetheless, these policies have been ineffective because inactivity and the aces of marketing unhealthy foods to children lack political legitimacy as public health crises. consequently, the governments’ duty to protect the health rights of children goes unfulfilled. leadership manqué the research of bhat and dar (2020), suggests that the globalization of the western eod, and the rapid increase in aces and ncds associated with them, lack the government-mandated policies that would make them legitimate public health crises. the global economic exploitation of children, including the aces of marketing, thus joins other public health crises (e.g., inactivity, climate change, and wars) marginalized by government inaction. it is government neglect that condones neoliberal indifference towards public health (garrett, 2003), the exploitation of children, and the scapegoating of parents. the responsibility of governments to protect children from all types of exploitation, including economic, is explicitly stated in articles 32 and 36 of the united nations convention on the rights of the child (united nations, 1989). socially irresponsible, governments undermine parents, educators, and public health specialists working to protect the wellbeing of children (vallgårda, 2018; peck & tickell, 2017) while unjustly blaming parents when the aces of marketing manifest in their children. however, as one economist argued, it is neither children nor parents who should be judged but rather the government policy of inaction that condones neoliberal abuse, exploitation, deception, and corruption of children, families, and communities (knight, 1947). practical implications and suggestions for the community psychologist in the midst of a global syndemic (swinburn et al., 2019) humanity is on the precipice of extinction (barnosky et al., 2011; ceballos et al., 2020). up against the overwhelming power of neoliberalism and its globalized divisiveness and inequality, as well as government reluctance to regulate the commercial markets, stop the aces of marketing, and protect the health rights of children, families, and the planet, an ideological change is needed restore community and thus the health of humanity. although the power to enact policies to regulate unethical marketing to children rests with the politicians, they have been reluctant to use those powers (swinburn, 2019). consequently, a new public health revolution is needed and more than any other health profession, the psychosocial demands of organizing this revolution make the community psychologist the candidate of choice to lead this critical public health endeavor. etiological analysis and assessment unlike the public health revolution hermann biggs led more than 100 years ago (garrett, 2003), the etiology of today’s “war on consumption” is the globalized contagion of the espoused values, beliefs, and attitudes of neoliberal ideology. ironically, the contagions of biggs’ time were transmitted by people being in close proximity to one another but today’s contagion of consciousness thrives in environments where people are increasingly isolated and divided from one another. whereas mosquitos, contaminated water, and microbial pathogens were the vector of the contagions biggs was up against, the primary vector of today's contagion is the tyranny of media technology in the hands of neoliberal self-interest. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 media technology makes it easy to emotionally exploit naive and inexperienced children with lovable characters, the superficiality of commercial caring, false promises, and blatant deception. since the covid pandemic began, media has become a constant companion for many children with counterfeit friendships and social interactions. just as a microscope was needed to identify the microbial contagions of bigg’s time, the psychosocial scope of the community psychologist is needed to analyze and assess the multifaceted etiological links between neoliberalism, the aces of marketing, and the threat it poses to humanity. putting unity back into community beginning with the “consumer revolution”, without which there would not have been an industrial revolution (campbell, 2018), a conflict between the self-interest of business and the health interest of a community has existed. throughout the long history of this conflict, economic power has been used to develop and implement policies to acquire more economic power for their own selfinterest and take power away from citizens. in so doing, the growth of unregulated economic power has strategically fostered divisiveness and dissatisfaction among the citizens they need as subordinates, consumers to keep the life of the economy going. as in bigg’s time, today’s public health revolution is necessitated by the products of unregulated economic power; political corruption, racism, gross wealth disparities, and social inequalities like inaccessibility to health services, unavailability of healthy foods, unsafe neighborhoods, and inadequate funding for schools. although the children of bigg’s time were suffering and dying from microbial contagions, it is a psychological contagion that children are exposed to today that has made mental health problems and suicides among children and adolescents a national emergency. the public health revolution needs the community psychologist to strategically confront the ethical problem underlying the use of economic power to make children targets of advertisements, many of which are emotionally abusive, is how marketing contributes to the demise of children’s mental health. the success of bigg’s public health revolution was largely due to the restoring, unifying, and empowering the middle-class as effective agents of public health. the complexity of living life in these times of major social-ecological challenges, call for the scope and skills of community psychologists to bring parents, teachers, civic leaders, politicians, and other members of the community together as active participants in this new public health revolution of the 21st century. indeed, to unravel the divisive threads neoliberal ideology has woven into the political, educational, scientific, and familial fabric of society has prompted calls for a collaborative effort by economists and others (karagiannis, 2020; knight, 1947; peck & tickell, 2017). of particular relevance to the success of this public health endeavor, is that the collaborative efforts must begin at the community level (peck & tickell, 2017). as in bigg’s time, when communities work together it empowers the citizens. the community psychologist is thus a catalyst to empowerment by bringing parents, educators, pediatricians, public health specialists, politicians, and other local leaders together as a community galvanized by their opposition to the unethical conduct of an economy that is emotionally abusive to their children, corrupts their minds, and undermines the unity of families (driessen et al., 2022). education and the ethical problem inherent to the aces of marketing children are born into an environment that surrounds them with media, all of its http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 technology, and its influencers. living in an environment of good and bad media influencers has prompted the development of media literacy programs (kunkel et al., 2004; turner et al., 2017) to serve as substitutes for government action to regulate marketing children (buckingham, 2007). designed to teach children how to decipher the intent of the influencers to which they are exposed, the success of these programs has been limited (harris et al., 2009). a likely reason underlying the limited success of these programs is the fact that the aces of marketing do not arise from a child’s conscious cognitive ability to decipher the intent of advertisements. rather, the aces of marketing arise from the subconscious emotional response to the false promises of fun, happiness, coolness, and other positive feelings that are part of the marketing strategy. in this regard, the community psychologist can shed light on the ethical problems inherent to the emotional abuse underlying the conditioning process, its consumer placebo effect, and the long-term belief in consumerism. specifically, the community psychologists can expose the psychopathology inherent to the disingenuous care of marketers intentional exploitation children’s vulnerabilities (bakan et al., 2003) in an effort to “own children” (kasser, 2003, p. 91). given most neoliberal actors will unabashedly acknowledge their motivation in building trusting relationships with people is strictly about maximizing profits, the community psychologist can inform parents of the hidden dangers posed to children by the disingenuous commercial caring of savvy marketers (elliott, 2011). among these dangers is the erosion of a child’s ability to trust and the lifetime implications this has for the child. in this regard, the community psychologist can draw parents’ attention to the fact that trust is the foundation on which strong relationships are built, and trust is the only relationship building asset young children possess since they lack experience and the capacity for rational thinking. pces: repossessing the feeling of being healthy pces are key to promoting and protecting children's emotional, mental, and physical well-being (fry et al., 2012; ortiz, 2021). community commitment and caring for children has been instrumental in protecting and empowering children, parents, and other adults in war-torn countries (betancourt & khan, 2008; slone & shoshani, 2017) and communities beleaguered by poverty and social inequality (shervington et al., 2018). thus, community psychologists can provide educational tools for parents and the community to promote pces and provide examples of how the genuine commitment and caring of adults serve as a gateway to pces (fry et al., 2012). additionally, community psychologists can work with community leaders to solve the problems of securing funding and resources needed to provide safe environments (swinburn, 2019) for children to participate in activities (e.g., art, dance, and other social activities) that have high pces potential. among these activities, healthy school nutrition programs and school-based physical activity (kehm et al., 2015) should be a priority. these programs are essential to experiencing the feeling of being healthy in the present moment and children’s continued healthy development into the future. tackling the policy problem parents are no match for the $4.3 billion of marketing power used to influence their children (marketing charts, 2019) and thus need the clout of government policies to protect the health rights of their children. the need for government policy mandates to protect children from aces and implement community-based programs to promote pces http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 has been expressed in the guidelines of nongovernment organizations (menschner & maul, 2016; shervington et al., 2018) and supported by research (betancourt & khan, 2008; slone & shoshani, 2017). meeting the challenge posed by government’s policy of inactions, the community psychologist can create an aces of marketing task force and provide it with evidence showing how the well-being of children, families, and the community are jeopardized by the indifference inequality, and divisiveness that are the products of neoliberal self-interest (arjoon, 2010; goodwin, 2014; meier, 2007; queiroz, 2017; wrenn & waller, 2018). moreover, the community psychologist can arm the task force with information showing the contradictions hidden in arguments to justify marketing unhealthy foods and products to children. whether it is protecting jobs (shah, 2010), imperfect scientific knowledge (brownell & warner, 2009), or protecting the rights of individuals to consume unhealthy foods (brownell et al., 2010), these justifications are neoliberal indifference masquerading as care because it serves to “maximize profits”. for instance, when it is in the self-interest of businesses, plants have been closed, and thousands have been left unemployed (beck, 2016; case & deaton, 2020). similarly, hiding behind the inadequate knowledge argument is the history of deceit and indifference of neoliberal actors who knew that a car’s gas tank was likely to explode (the center for auto safety, n.d.); the faulty ignition of a car could be fatal (beech et al., 2014); an antiinflammatory drug damaged the heart (krumholz et al., 2007); or lead was in the baby powder (starr, 2019). collectively, the community psychologist can show these ploys are meant to distract parents, children, and the whole community away from the many injustices and indignities (including the aces of marketing), and demand politicians legislate policies to protect the health of children. similarly, by analyzing “personal responsibility,” “laissez-faire,” “rugged individualism,” and “individual freedom,” the community psychologist can show how these terms lack conceptual value and only serve neoliberal self-interest. for instance, developing personal responsibility logically needs a community of socially responsible adults including neoliberal actors; and that laissez-faire translates to more neoliberal power and greater powerlessness among young people (twenge et al., 2004) and parents (driessen et al., 2022). furthermore, power is needed to exercise one’s “individual freedom”; thus, as neoliberal actors acquire power, individuals in the community have less freedom (knight, 1947) and as the imbalance of power and freedom widens, everyone, even rugged individuals are likely to become subordinates to neoliberal selfinterest. by bringing people together, the community psychologist can facilitate the restoration of a community committed to working together and demanding that the government fulfill its duty to protect the health rights of their children and the one health that is the wholeness of their families, communities, humanity, and this planet. conclusion daunting as the challenges are, the complexity and multifarious nature of the crises neoliberalism imposes on humanity must be stopped, and stopping the aces of marketing is foremost among these challenges. the scope of the community psychologist’s expertise is needed to bring an increasingly divided world together, one community at a time, to diplomatically build coalitions of multiple stakeholders on multiple fronts, and orchestrate a unified effort to protect the health rights of children and thereby ensure that they will have a life worth living and humanity will have a healthy future. as the catalyst of children becoming http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 assertive, active participants in maintaining the web of life built from person to person, family to community, and humanity to the whole of life on this planet, community psychologists are right where the demands of the time needs them: at the center of a global one health revolution. references acuff, d. 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(2016). physical activity and self-esteem: testing direct and indirect relationships associated with psychological and physical mechanisms. neuropsychiatric disease and treatment, 12, 2617–2625. https://doi.org/10.2147/ndt.s116811 acknowledgements: the authors wish to acknowledge ms. carly joy gielarowski, b.a. for her assistance with editing the article. funding the authors received no funding. competing interest the authors have no competing interests. http://www.gjcpp.org/ about:blank about:blank about:blank about:blank about:blank the pathways to success project ray legler1 keywords: university-community collaboration, college readiness, system-level change author biography: ray legler, is an assistant professor of psychology in the school of psychology and behavioral sciences at national louis university in chicago, il. dr. legler earned his ph.d. in ecological/community psychology from michigan state university and has been working on urban youth and education issues in the chicago area for over 20 years. prior to joining the faculty at national louis, he served as director of research and evaluation at after school matters in chicago. dr. legler’s current research interests focus on community-based approaches to addressing and preventing urban poverty by building partnerships between high schools, post-secondary institutions, and businesses. he has published research and policy work on school-to-work transition, academic achievement gaps, and educator quality. in addition, dr. legler has led program evaluations of educational technology and after-school programs, as well as leading school-community partnership programs in the roseland, brighton park and bronzeville neighborhoods of chicago. recommended citation: legler, r. (2023). the pathways to success project. global journal of community psychology practice, 14(3), 1 12. retrieved from day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). 1 college of psychology and behavioral sciences, national louis university https://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 corresponding author: ray legler. national louis university. email: rlegler@nl.edu. http://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:rlegler@nl.edu global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 the pathways to success project abstract this paper describes the pathways to success project (psp), which was designed to help students in a low-income community in chicago more easily navigate the transition from high school to postsecondary education. statistics from chicago public schools show that only about two-thirds of high school graduates enroll in postsecondary education. this can leave many students ill equipped to succeed in our skillsbased economy, and contribute to the ongoing problems of unemployment and poverty. programs that provide support for students as they work to enroll in a college, university, or career/technical school can be effective at facilitating this transition and helping students gain the skills they need to compete in the 21st century workforce. in addition, collaboration that builds connections between the k-12 system, colleges and universities, and local businesses and organizations, can create a system of support for such programs and further ease for students the process of transition from school to employment. the pilot intervention described here built on existing college and career activities in 3 local high schools and engaged an existing community-based collaborative (the bronzeville community action council) to help address these issues. during the project, 202 students participated in 10 interactive visits to two local universities and two large, international corporations. successes and challenges to implementing system-level change with high schools are discussed. chicago public schools (cps) students face serious barriers in their efforts to obtain a k12 education. with a student population that comes largely from low-income households, many families struggle with economic challenges that can limit parents’ involvement in the education process. according to data from the chicago public schools web site, 76.4% of students are from economically disadvantaged families (cps, 2021). in addition, the violence that has become welldocumented in chicago can make the journey to school a challenge for students and lead to adverse childhood experiences (aces) that further interfere with student learning (mersky, topitzes & reynold, 2013). a number of other factors affect student, family and community development negatively. in particular, these issues affect the rates at which chicago public school students graduate and attend college. a report by the consortium on chicago school research at the university of chicago found that 74.8% of students graduate within four years (allensworth, et al, 2016). however, only 44% of 2015 cps graduates enrolled in college (allensworth, et al, 2016). we know that some kind of post-secondary education – university, college, or trade/technical school – is essential for people to compete in a 21st century economy oriented around high-level skills and technology (carnevale, smith, & strohl, 2015). one approach to addressing this issue would be to provide extensive support for high schools and their students as they navigate the process of applying to college or other post-secondary training. this paper describes a community-based pilot program that was designed to address structural challenges that impair the ability of many students to navigate successfully the transition from high school to some type of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 post-secondary education or training. the pathways to success project was implemented in collaboration with three high schools and a community-based organization in chicago in an effort to test the premise that a system of community support for high schools could create opportunities for students to explore post-secondary options and transition successfully into postsecondary education or training. more broadly, such an strategy – if successful – could provide an approach to education and training that leads to increased employment and reduced problems often associated with poverty. the transition from school to work, and the process of facilitating this transition, has been an issue of study for a number of years (legler & reischl, 2003). in particular, the transition from high school to post-secondary training or education can be a leverage point for addressing the perpetual cycle of unemployment and poverty in our lowincome communities. this paper describes one approach to helping students in these communities think about and plan for college/vocational programs in ways that are realistic and sustainable. as the u.s. economy continues to transition from one primarily based on manufacturing to one based more on technology, the importance of advanced education and training for young people is becoming clearer. multiple studies have documented the benefits of college education, including higher lifetime earnings and lower rates of unemployment (oreopoulis & petronijevic, 2013). ma, pender, and welch (2016) found that a college degree is associated with lower rates of poverty and usage of public assistance, and higher earnings. these authors also noted that higher rates of income lead to higher amounts of taxes paid, suggesting additional, societal-level benefits of higher education. for some groups of students, the path to college or other post-secondary education can be especially challenging. in particular, examination of data from the national center for education statistics (2018) shows that students of color and low-income continue to be under-represented in college compared to their white and more affluent peers. research has also shown that students from lowincome and single parent families face unique challenges in navigating from high school to college (horn & carroll, 1997). students whose parents had not completed college were much less likely to attend college (47%) than students whose parents had college degrees (85%) (engle, 2007). most research on the path from high school to college has focused at the individual, family, and program levels. for example, nagaoka, et. al (2013) explored individual-level variables related to student academic mindset, perseverance, social skills, and learning strategies. others have focused on the college selection process (cabrera, 2000), the role of parents (leonard, 2013), student support (karp & hughes, 2008), and programs such as gear up (engle, 2007). however, less attention has been paid to a system-level analysis of the issue of helping students move from high school to college. improving the process of transition from high school post-secondary education and training the need is becoming apparent for a new paradigm for the process of helping students, especially students of color and low-income, transition from high school to post-secondary education. symonds, et. al (2011) suggested that the long-time approach of ‘college for all’ that ignores career-oriented programs is doomed to fail. in addition, conley (2005) argued that high school and college are mostly disconnected and not aligned, and advocated for a restructured k-16 system http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 that reduces the distinction between high school and college. an examination of the k-16 education system reveals several flaws, and suggests areas where better alignment and other improvement could be beneficial for students. karp and hughes (2008) stressed that collaboration and communication across the secondary and post-secondary would be helpful. other experts have suggested that better links between career-focused paths, community colleges, and four-year institutions would lead to greater student success (symonds, et. al, 2011), and that “higher education will need to expand its collaborative activities with k-12 education to better prepare students” (hurtado, 1997, p. 66). part of a new approach to education may involve a reexamination of the popular conception that all students should go to college. in particular, a more effective approach may be to acknowledge that all students need some kind of post-secondary education or training that will allow them to acquire a marketable skill. for some students, this may be a traditional, four-year college degree. for others, it may be vocational training. regardless, our approach to education requires system-level change that acknowledges both career and college tracks (mulroy, 2011). better tailoring of educational strategies to student needs and talents could serve to address on-going, system-level challenges like high drop-out rates – particularly in urban school systems. by better matching post-secondary education and career plans to student needs and interests, students are likely to be more engaged in the educational process and less likely to drop out of high school before graduating (symonds, et al., 2011). on the other side of the educational equation, business and industry have recognized an “ever-worsening skills gap” between the skills of those in the labor pool and those required by business (tyszko, sheets, & fuller, 2014, p. 4). in particular, the private sector has advocated for system-level change that will better allow our education and workforce development systems to meet the needs of the developing economy, and advocated for the involvement of the business community in helping to address the skills gap (tyszko, sheets, & fuller, 2014). there are several models of how to support students in their transitions from high school to post-secondary education. in the 1990s, a model called college access was developed to help students of color and low income navigate the college entrance process (bornstein, 2007). this model focused on supporting students in their efforts to complete college applications, personal statements, and applications for financial aid and scholarships. another model, the meyerhoff scholars program (legler, 2004), was designed to support students of color, once they entered college, through peer support and intensive academic support. evaluations of both the college access model (ironbridge systems, 2010) and the myerhoff scholars program (maton, et al., 2008; maton, et al., 2009) found that they were effective at helping students enter college, and succeed once there, respectively. in addition to the research on college readiness programs, this project drew on a primary paradigm of community psychology – that of action research. with its historical roots in the work of kurt lewin, “action research involves the idea of testing theories and methods by putting them into practice, evaluating their impact, and using the results to refine future theory, method, and practice” (dalton, elias, & wandersman, 2001, p. 313). a related concept, experimental social innovation (esi), involves the dissemination http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 and evaluation of new social programs and policies in various contexts, and has been applied to a variety of social problems including substance abuse, youth violence, and others (mayer & davidson, 2000). in particular, oxley (2000) has documented the substantial involvement of community psychologists’ use of the esi approach in the school reform movement. finally, systemlevel approaches to social problem solving (foster-fishman & watson, 2012) are designed to facilitate long-term, sustainable (second-order) change. the current project the pilot project described here focused on facilitating the transition from high school to post-secondary education or training and was designed to provide students (particularly students from disenfranchised neighborhoods and students of color) postsecondary experiences and knowledge. in addition, the initial model included components designed to: provide students with the knowledge and support they need to navigate issues such as choosing colleges or training programs to which to apply; how to complete applications for post-secondary education and financial aid and make wise decisions about student loans; and how to effectively complete the enrollment process (see figure 1). student activities – college path short-term outcomes college visits increased rates of college discussions with college acceptance students increased rates of college assistance with applications graduation assistance with financial aid and scholarships long-term results increased employment reduced poverty reduced social problems student activities – career/technical school path short-term outcomes visits to career and technical increased rates of participation schools in skills training visits to businesses internships/apprenticeships increased rates of skill assistance with applications acquisition assistance with financial aid and scholarships figure1. logic model for pathways to success http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 as detailed above, some of the proposed activities focused on students, while others focused on creating connections between high schools, post-secondary institutions, and businesses. these kinds of connections can be facilitated by community-based coalitions such as community action councils (cacs). chicago public schools supports community action councils as a way to allow parents and community members to provide input to and participation in the school improvement process. composed of parents, teachers, and representatives of community-based organizations and businesses, community action councils represent a powerful vehicle for school and community improvement. this pilot project began through work with the bronzeville community action council (bcac) and built on the successes of the bcac by leveraging the connections it had developed. the bronzeville cac included most of the main community-based organizations in the neighborhood as well as several businesses. the psp built on these relationships to increase the number of connections between 3 high schools in the bronzeville area and organizations and businesses in the city. it also worked to provide opportunities for students to visit college campuses in the area, meet and talk with college students, and learn about the important step to enrolling in post-secondary education such as completing applications for colleges, financial aid, and scholarships. these initial efforts relied primarily on staff at the high schools and colleges, college student and community volunteers, and youth peer leaders. when the psp began, the project worked in collaboration with the executive committee of the bcac to select two chicago public high schools for involvement in the project. after the first year, one of the schools withdrew from the project and was replaced by another local public high school. the psp employed a community psychology model of communitybased collaboration that applies knowledge about building system-level connections to address a social problem – in this case, the problem that too many students do not make the transition successfully from high school to employment. this multidisciplinary approach synthesized information across the fields of education, economics, and community psychology. the psp is innovative in that it builds on previous approaches to the issue of access to post-secondary education by adding a career and technical component to previous models of college readiness. by including career and technical education, in addition to college readiness, the project was more inclusive of high school graduates and addresses the needs of many students who are either unwilling or unable to attend a college or university. in addition, the project included system-level intervention that worked to build relationships between multiple stakeholders – with the goals of permanent change and long-term sustainability (see figure 2). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 figure 2. pathways to success system-level connections the psp took a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to building on and strengthening an existing community partnership (the bronzeville cac). this, in turn, was intended to facilitate a comprehensive response to the critical policy issues of unemployment and poverty. in summary, the pathways to success project involved intervention at two different levels – the program level and the community/system level. at the program level, the project involved high school staff, college staff, college students, and community volunteers in assisting high school students with the process of applying to post-secondary educational opportunities. this assistance involved support for students with completing applications to schools, personal statements, applications for financial aid, and other requirements related to post-secondary education. the program also involved exposing students to various post-secondary educational opportunities by facilitating visits to college campuses, career and technical training schools, and businesses. at the community level, the author worked with cps staff and members of the bronzeville community action council to build relationships between the business and nonprofit sector, colleges and technical schools, community members, and three high schools in bronzeville. the goals of building and strengthening connections between employers, post-secondary educational institutions, and the local high schools were to increase opportunities for students and create a sustainable system of support for http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 their transition from high school to postsecondary education and/or career training. as this was a pilot project, no systematic data collection was conducted for the purposes of evaluation. informal feedback was collected from student participants and school staff about their experiences in the project, and their suggestions for improvement. ultimately, the project’s primary goal was to improve long-term outcomes such as high school graduation rates, college application and acceptance rates, and employment rates. a total of 10 trips involving 202 bronzeville students took place, including visits to two local universities and two large corporations in chicago. the feedback from students about these visits was consistently positive. the quotes below are examples of typical student comments regarding their visit to a local corporation: “i liked the trip because i learned different things i never knew about. i got an understanding about different things that each coworker does. also i would enjoy coming back and doing something similar.” “i felt that the trip was helpful for me because all the information that they gave me, i took to mind. i really believe that i would come back again because this would be somewhere to do an internship.” students who visited a local university had similar positive comments: “this experience has been great, they informed me on a lot about college life and being flexible with school, home and work. and the different ways to pay. also the culture of the school in students.” “i like it. it was a great visit at ___ today. i really love the presentation which was not about coming to ___ but what would we do after high school. also the most interesting part is the class size, and the opportunity of scholarships. i am (interested) to come to their school and be happy.” successes as mentioned, 10 total student visits involving 202 students took place. these trips involved more than simply providing tours and information. during visits to universities, students not only participated in a tour but also had the opportunity to engage with some college students. these conversations over lunch allowed an informal time for the high school students to ask the college students questions about their college selection and enrollment process, and also about other important issues such as obtaining financial aid, housing, and related issues. in addition, the college students typically reflected the diversity and socioeconomic backgrounds of the visiting high school students. this helped create a situation where the high school students could feel comfortable and envision themselves as college students. also, the project facilitated partnerships between high schools and businesses. in the short term, these relationships lead to the arrangement of visits by groups of high school students to the businesses. similar to their experience during the college visits, the visits to the businesses allowed opportunities for the young people to engage with company staff about the work of the company, the education required to work in various positions, and the range of compensation that was available. challenges the main challenge in the implementation of this project was building a foundation of trust and collaboration that would allow for attempts at creating community connections and fostering system-level change. the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 author spent about a year attending bronzeville community action council monthly meetings and executive committee meetings in order to build relationships. the process of selecting the schools was a collaborative one that involved bcac executive committee members. once the schools were selected, executive committee members and the author met together with the school principals. unfortunately, changes in leadership at the schools and the bcac undermined much of the progress that had been made during the first year. another challenge for the schools was organizational capacity and resources. most chicago public high schools have one or two postsecondary counselors. these dedicated staff members already have their hands full in trying to make sure that all graduating seniors have completed a financial aid application and applied to at least one college. the effort that is required to build and maintain relationships with local colleges and businesses is frequently more than school staff is able to handle. future efforts to replicate this project will need to address this issue. one idea that arose during this pilot was that parent volunteers or community members, possibly supported with small stipends, could provide support for these kinds of efforts. the implementation of the pathways to success project was guided by many of the practice competencies advocated for by the society for community research and action (scra). the fundamental model of the project, illustrated in figure 2, reflects the ecological model put forth by bronfenbrenner (1979). the primary goal of the project was to empower students to navigate successfully the transition from high school to postsecondary education, and secondarily to empower school staff to build and maintain systems of support for these transitions. the partnership with the bronzeville community action council allowed for collaboration on project development and management, with the hope that better access to education and employment for students would help prevent poverty and related social problems. lastly, capacity building was exemplified by creating connections between schools, universities, and businesses, and the emphasis on collaboration and coalition development was intended to facilitate community and social change. the description of the pilot project presented here provides initial evidence for its fundamental premise – that efforts to build connections with local colleges and businesses can contribute to a system of support for students as they transition out of high school. in addition to efforts that focus on individual students, such as support for completing financial aid and college applications, students need to have opportunities to engage with college students and business staff in order to have a better understanding of the opportunities that await them after high school. these system-level connections, if supported and nurtured, can create powerful opportunities for students to explore their career interests, and make clearer the connections between what they are studying in high school and their future success. references allensworth, e.m., healey, k., gwynne, j.a., & crespin, r. (2016). high school graduation rates through two decades of district change: the influence of policies, data records, and demographic shifts. chicago, il: university of chicago consortium on school research. bronfenbrenner, u. (1979). the ecology of human development: experiments by nature and design. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 3 october 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 bornstein, d. (2004). how to change the world: social entrepreneurs and the power of new ideas. chapter 13 (pp. 159-176). new york: oxford university press. cabrera, a. and la nasa, s. (2000). understanding the college-choice process. in a. cabrera & s. lanasa (eds.), understanding the college choice of disadvantaged students. san francisco: jossey-bass. carnevale, a. p., stroh, j., & gulish, a. 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(2007). postsecondary access and success for first-generation college students. american academic, 3(1), 25-48. foster-fishman, p. g., & watson, e. r. (2012). the able change framework: a conceptual and methodological tool for promoting systems change. american journal of community psychology, 49(3-4), 503516. horn, l. & carroll, c. (1997). confronting the odds: students at risk and the pipeline to higher education. washington, d.c.: national center for education statistics, u.s. department of education, u.s. government printing office. hurtado, s., kurotsuchi inkelas, k., briggs, c., & rhee, b. s. (1997). differences in college access and choice among racial/ethnic groups: identifying continuing barriers. research in higher education, 38, 43-75. ironbridge systems (2010). an evaluation of college summit outcomes. author. karp, m. & hughes, k. 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(2013). making college worth it: a review of research on the returns to higher education. future of children, 23(1), 41-65. oxley, d. (2000). the school reform movement: opportunities for community psychology. in rapoport, j. & seidman, e., handbook of community psychology. new york, ny: symonds, c. w., schwartz, b. r., & ferguson r. (2011, february). pathways to prosperity: meeting the challenge of preparing young americans for the 21st century. report issued by the pathways to prosperity project, harvard graduate school of education. tyszko, j., sheets, r., & fuller, j. (2014). managing the talent pipeline: a new approach to closing the skills gap. washington, dc: u.s. chamber of commerce. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global cp online journal empowering students, teachers, non-teaching staff and parents in a ‘troubled high school’ through strategies of cp multidimensional interventions donata francescato is professor of community psychology at the university la sapienza. she is author of 22 books on community psychology and gender issues and has published many papers on the evaluation of the efficacy of online graduate training and personal, group, organisational and community empowerment. postal address: facoltà di psicologia 1, via dei marsi 78, 00185 rome italy. donata.francescato@uniroma1.it minou ella mebane is a teaching assistant at the university la sapienza, and has a postgraduate qualification in online tutoring from bocconi university, milan and the institute of education, university of london. she received a phd in social psychology at university la sapienza of rome. she is working on evaluation of the efficacy of online affective education and on social capital in political psychology. postal address: facoltà di psicologia 2, via dei marsi, 78, 00185, roma, italy. minou.mebane@uniroma1.it maura benedetti has a master degree in community psychology and a doctoral degree in psychology. she has been research assistant at the university la sapienza, and has carried out many interventions in educational settings, social services, volunteer organisations and multiethnic communities. maura.benedetti@uniroma1.it veronica rosa has a master degree in community psychology and a doctoral degree in psychology. she is psychotherapist and has worked as a clinical and community psychologist in educational settings. in particular, she is currently studying lives together processes in social, organizational and educational environments. postal address: facoltà di psicologia 1, via dei marsi, 78, 00185 roma, italy. veronica.rosa@uniroma1.it andrea solimeno has a master degree in community psychology and a doctoral degree in psychology. he is a research assistant at the university la sapienza of rome, studying group dynamics in online settings. postal address: facoltà di psicologia 2, via dei marsi, 78, 00185, roma, italy. andrea.solimeno@uniroma1.it manuela tomai is assistant professor in clinical psychology, at the university la sapienza in rome. she is psychotherapist and has worked as a clinical and community psychologist in health and educational settings. she is studying group dynamics in online and face-to-face settings, focusing on conflict formation and resolution. postal address: facoltà di psicologia 1, via dei marsi, 78, 00185 roma, italy. manuela.tomai@uniroma1.it key words: organizational empowerment, action research, participatory intervention techniques, affective education recommended citation: francescato, d., mebane, m., benedetti, m., veronica, r., solimeno, a., & tomai, m. (2010). empowering students, teachers, non-teaching staff and parents in a ‘troubled high school’ through strategies of cp multidimensional interventions. global journal of community psychology practice, 1(1), 1-12. retrieved <date>, from http://www.gjcpp.org/. mailto:donata.francescato@uniroma1.it mailto:minou.mebane@uniroma1.it mailto:maura.benedetti@uniroma1.it mailto:veronica.rosa@uniroma1.it mailto:andrea.solimeno@uniroma1.it mailto:manuela.tomai@uniroma1.it global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 of 12 empowering students, teachers, non-teaching staff and parents in a ‘troubled high school’ through strategies of cp multidimensional interventions donata francescato, minou mebane, maura benedetti, rosa veronica, andrea solimeno, manuela tomai university of rome la sapienza abstract in this paper, we outline some of the main principles underlying the intervention strategies that have been used in a project aimed at empowering students, staff, teachers and parents. this project reduced dropout, truancy, failure and bullying rates in a very disadvantaged italian region. introduction elsewhere (francescato & tomai, 2001; francescato, et al. 2007; francescato, 2007; francescato, 2008), we have described how european community psychologists have tried to develop some theoretical principles that should guide community psychology practice, and discussed several theoretically driven intervention strategies, such as community profiling, multidimensional organizational analysis (moa), small group skills and personal empowerment training labs, which may promote “amelioration” and “transformation” kinds of changes at the local community, organizational, small groups and individual levels. in this paper, we will describe the theoretical guiding principles behind some intervention strategies; used in a problem-ridden high school in a disadvantaged italian region, and attempt to evaluate to what degree we were able “to put theory into practice.” theoretical guiding principles cp interventions should try to have the following characteristics: • encourage pluralistic interpretations of social problems that integrate objective and subjective knowledge, and broaden the viewpoints from which a given situation can be considered. • examine the historical roots of social problems and the unequal distribution of power and access to resources in the social context. • give voice to minority narratives, and promote the production of new metaphors or new narratives that help “imagine” new scripts and roles for individuals and social groups. • create ties among people who share a problem. • identify the points of strengths to obtain a change. • spread psychological knowledge and competencies. the “social problem” we were asked to help solve the european commission has funded several programs to diminish the number of students who either drop out of high school, or repeat grades or have negative school experiences that affect both their performance and their wellbeing. italy has been a strong recipient of funding since it has a very high rate (19%) of students who either drop out, or take two to three years longer to complete their high school education. in some regions of italy this percentage reaches 40% of students attending professional or technical high schools. the ample international literature has documented that several factors concur in increasing school failures rates: individual variables: low self-esteem, low expectations, poor study habits, learning difficulties etc.; b) relational aspects: primarily negative interactions with peers and teachers; c) organizational characteristics: worn-down school buildings, burn-out or unqualified teachers, rigid or disorganized teaching models, etc.; d) family variables such parents’ low educational achievement, low parental supervision on homework, few books at home, global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 of 12 parent-teacher conflicts; and e) community aspects: location in deprived areas, isolation, etc. most projects aimed at reducing drop-out and school failures have been trying to reduce these risks factors, but few have tackled more than one or two groups of variables; generally working more with students and or teachers, but much less often with organizational, family and community aspects (anderson-butcher 2008, doll & hess 2001) for instance, some interesting projects such as the seattle development project (hawking et al., 1992) worked with both parents and teachers of children attending elementary schools to successfully prevent drug abuse and delinquency. however they neglected to work directly with children, or on organizational and community aspects, and perhaps these limits contributed to lack of differences between experimental and control groups in their attitudes toward drugs and moral values. another interesting intervention was conducted in montreal and focused only on parents and students (under 14) who were offered training labs to acquire new social skills; the program was successful in decreasing antisocial behaviors in the experimental group. these experiments were done in primary schools where dropout rates are very low compared to high school and so they could be relatively successful involving only some components of the school community. most school interventions programs also in italy focus mostly on students or teachers or parents, almost never on school administrative staff or other organizational variables (de piccoli & lavanco 2003). our research team had also successfully used specific interventions techniques in projects with limited aims such as to increase high school student’s empowerment, or parenting skills of parents of junior high pupils or primary school teacher’s skills in affective education (francescato, tomai, mebane 2004). however the high school that we worked with, obtained funds from the european commission to make an experimental intervention, because it was a ‘multi-problem school’ in a deprived area of southern italy. schools authorities wanted to decrease its 40% drop-out and failure rates, lower bullying, vandalism and stealing among students, diminish burn-out among teachers and alienation of many parents who avoided contacts with teachers and stop the decrease in students enrollment we therefore thought that to attempt to tackle such a variety of problems we had to use a systemic approach to promote organizational change and consider intervention strategies which involved all the school stakeholders. proposals were sent in by various institutions and work groups and our project based on the integration of principles and intervention techniques from community psychology and affective education was awarded the grant. we aimed to achieve the project goals by enabling the different components of the school community to use tools such as multidimensional organizational analysis, community profiling, small group facilitation, and affective education techniques in dealing with negative emotions to promote both individual and institutional empowerment. we hypothesized that using these different tools would enable stakeholders to diagnose strong and weak points in their school, work better in small groups to design effective change programs, create stronger affective bonds, improve problem solving and conflict resolution, and therefore decrease risk factors and increase protective factors which have been found to affect drop-out and failure rates. first phase: assessing strong and weak points of the school as perceived by different stakeholders through multidimensional organizational analysis (moa) learning about moa in small core groups (five weeks) the high school we worked with had 1,500 pupils, of which 55% had repeated at least one year, 60 non-teaching staff, and 230 teachers and educational experts. we first met with a core group, which included the principal and representatives of parents, teachers, students and non-teaching staff such as administrative personnel and janitors. we global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 of 12 explained that from a community psychology framework, we considered them the “experts" of their school community and we would suggest only modalities through which we could together gather their viewpoints on strengths and weaknesses of their school. we then explained how moa works and we agreed to form nine core groups, each composed from 15-20 participants; “three groups consisted of students of varying age, one group consisted of only parents, one group consisted only of teachers, one only staff including office clerks and janitors, and three were mixed including members of all school stakeholders. in each of the nine groups we held five weekly three hours meetings, in which trained community psychologists facilitated the moa process, which begins with a brainstorming, called preliminary analysis. members of the groups list strengths and problems, and then classify them as belonging primarily to one of the four organizational dimensions: structural-strategic, functional, psycho-environmental and psychodynamic-cultural. these four dimensions follow a continuum that varies from dealing with “hard” structural and functional “objective variables” (adequacy of school facilities, increase or decrease of number of students, failure rates, drop out percentages, age and educational level of staff, levels of staff turnover) to “soft” cultural, psychodynamic subjective perceptions (emotional climate, problem-solving styles, attitudes toward power, inter-group conflicts, level of satisfaction, etc. moa follows some of the most important theoretical guiding principles, which require community psychologists’ interventions to encourage pluralistic interpretations of social problems that integrate subjective (soft dimensions and objective knowledge (hard dimensions), and examine the historical roots of problems as perceived by the different stakeholders giving voice to people who are less powerful (in our school students and janitors). one result emerged clearly: each stakeholder group was primarily blaming another group for most of the school problems. teachers thought students were not interested in learning and had non-supportive parents. students blamed teacher’s unfairness in grading them and their hostile and humiliating behaviors; non-teaching staff underlined high teachers’ turnover and burnout; and parents thought one main weakness lay in the teachers unfriendly and blaming attitudes towards parents, who “scared parents away.” the summaries from the preliminary analysis were hung up in the corridors of the schools, so that between meetings all members of the school community could view what each different group considered problems and strengths. another flip chart outlining convergences and disagreements was compiled by a small task force including members of all the nine groups and also hung for general viewing. in the second weekly meeting, we explored the structural-strategic dimension: the oldest member narrated the strategic history of the school, when it was born, what goals and visions it had, how strategic goals had changed in time. then they did a “positioning exercise” in which they choose criteria with which to evaluate their organization’s performance in the recent past. then taking into consideration legal, economic and other structural limits, each group defined strategic objectives for the immediate future and for next five years, and the weak and strong points of this dimension. then the functional dimension was examined, outlining tasks to be accomplished to meet the goals, and weak and strong points identified. all nine groups agreed that the main structural problems were lack of a cafeteria, double schools shifts (one groups of students working mornings and another afternoons for lack of sufficient space), an inadequate gym and poor heating facilities. more disparities appeared for the functional dimension: for instance only non-teaching staff complained about teachers ‘unplanned absences, and underutilized labs and library, only students mentioned the lack of parking spaces for their motorbikes which caused daily quarrelling among students, only the parents mentioned the presence of drug dealers near the school. then each group examined the cultural or psychodynamic dimension using a variety of tools drawn from cultural psychology, cultural anthropology and socio-analysis. this dimension explores group and individual emotional global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 of 12 variables that are often not consciously discussed, basically using group drawing, recurrent jokes, favorite anecdotes and things hung on walls to assess prevailing affective and power relations. to capture crucial emotional attitudes toward problems and problem solving, we used also the movie script technique (francescato 2008). the members of each subgroup make up a movie script about their school, choosing genre (drama, documentary, science fiction, comedy, thriller, etc.) main characters and main episodes of the plot. they can choose to narrate or perform by acting some significant scenes. then all participants discuss which prevailing positive and negative emotions emerge from their script and the problem solving styles adopted. the three students’ scripts had titles that described very poignantly their pessimistic view of their school. one chose a verse of dante on hell: “leave any hope, you who enter here”, another which had among its members several “likely to drop out students” chose “alcatraz” as their title and the third group “titanic”. their plots reflected coherently emotions of anger, despair, and hopelessness, but their acting showed sense of humor and vitality. two groups, non-teaching staff and parents, chose science fiction stories or fairy tales in which problems of strong conflict among groups were sometimes solved, but always by the intervention of some extraordinary personage who came from another world. discussing their movies, they agreed that changing their school seems to be a task for superman. the only teachers group titled their film: “the beach of last resort” and described an isolated and polluted beach where people who lost their houses or jobs came “because they had nowhere else to go” and spent their days on the beach fighting for any scrap of food. the movie script technique is used to put into practice the theoretical principle of giving voice to minority narratives. finally, each of the nine groups explored the psycho environmental dimension, which basically measures the fit between individuals’ expectations and organizational pressures. generally, we use tools taken from organizational psychology to measure perceived leadership styles, communication and conflict resolution patterns. after weaknesses and strengths have been identified by the various organizational actors, and the connections among the various dimensions have been explored, participants formulate different narratives and preferred visions of the future. we used these techniques that correspond to the theoretical principle to promote the production of new metaphors that help “imagine” new scripts and new roles for social groups. members of nine groups made numerous proposals for possible changes, but they felt that for these to be implemented, it was necessary to involve more people in the decision-making processes. since the school did not have enough time or money to have everybody participate in small groups, they came up with the idea to create four questionnaires: one each for students, parents, non-teaching staff and teachers. all questionnaires should contain questions pertaining to all the four dimensions explored in their small groups, but should also have wider sections, examining in depth issues concerning each type of stakeholder. building, distributing and analyzing questionnaires (two months) two trained community psychologists, experts in building questionnaires, met three times with core groups of students, parents, teachers and non-teaching staff and helped them build the four questionnaires that asked respondent opinions about problems and strengths emerged in the core groups: for example, the adequacy of school facilities, the way courses were taught, attitudes toward schooling, relations between students, teachers and non-teaching staff, including the principal, relations between parents and children, causes of school failures, affective and emotional school climate and proposals for change. teachers decided to give their questionnaires to all their 230 colleagues, (only 39%) responded. also non-teaching staff decided to poll their entire population of 60, (44% filled the questionnaires). students and parents distributed their questionnaire to random representative samples of their population: 467 students and 459 families. of these, 75% of students and 41% of parents took part in the survey. global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 of 12 results showed a high amount of agreement with the diagnoses made during moa process, but some interesting new proposals were formulated for each problem in each of the four dimensions. for instance, we learned that 22% of students worked to help families in financial crisis, and therefore some truancy was due to their skipping school to help families, so it was proposed to that the school act as go between for public agencies to give financial aid to families, which often did not know which public office to contact. most students and parents felt school’s programs were not preparing students adequately for jobs, so in addition to program changes they proposed practicum and stages in local firms to be organized by the school. to reduce the authoritarian and hostile confrontational style of many teachers it was suggested to offer them training courses on adolescence and affective education. to help students who had low scholastic achievements some asked to provide teachers more training in evaluating academic weaknesses in the different subjects and providing effective remedial tutoring. to lower school’s disorganization it was suggested to improve the running of staff meetings to increase communication among teachers and non-teaching staff, and to develop the ability to work in teams and networks. in general, most proposals dealt with finding ways to motivate and empower students, and to lower interpersonal conflict among the different constituent groups. most respondents felt that the quality of relationship among students, between teachers and students, parents and teachers was poor and needed improvement. choosing priority problems and adopting proposals for change points of strengths, problems and proposals for change discussed in the nine core groups and emerging from the four questionnaires were presented in a general school meeting in which all four stakeholder groups were present and several decisions were taken. the authors used the questionnaire technique and the public discussion of results of moa as a technique that corresponds to the theoretical principle that community intervention should identity points of strengths to obtain feasible changes. the first was to create work groups to deal with some of the structural and functional problems identified: 14 such groups were formed. since teamwork had been problematic in the several existing committees, several teachers and nonteaching staff felt these new work groups could not be productive if people did not improve their group skills. it was then decided that the same community psychologists who had facilitated organizational analysis, would periodically supervise these work groups for the first six months of their functioning. to help students who had strong learning deficits, a large group of teachers (about 85) obtained the use of remaining european funds to finance a three-month course on individualized evaluation of students’ academic deficits and strengths, providing an individualized teaching methodology for high-risk students. experts in evaluation and teaching of high-risk students were called in to implement this course. to ameliorate emotional and relationship problems it was decided to use some remaining funds to empower burnout teachers, students and parents. some of the same community psychologists involved in the moa process took part in the three projects, which we will briefly describe. phase two: implementing specific empowering projects aimed at students, teachers and parents teachers’ empowerment training focusing on affective aspects of education through two-day workshops over a two months, with online supervision for the following six-months. as “ the beach of last resort” title of their movie script revealed, most teachers felt unhappy to be in this high school, seen as a place, as one teacher put it, in which “the most difficult students and the most burnt out teachers are gathered in a run-down building in a disadvantaged neighborhood abandoned by all!” more than half of the teachers, after the moa process, joined one or more of the work groups established to deal with structural and functional problems that they had identified as factors contributing to their dissatisfaction. about 80 global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 of 12 teachers recognized that they needed to improve their didactic skills; in fact, and chose to take part in the individualized didactic training project that was started after the moa process, which aimed to increase their competencies in analyzing students’ study methods, and in evaluating students’ logical, mathematical and linguistic skills. about a third of all teachers however, felt competent in their teaching skills, able to live with functional and structural weak points, but unwilling or not able to cope with hostile, unmotivated, unruly, and disrespectful students together with uncaring, indifferent or hostile parents. they felt isolated, unable to gain or give support to colleagues in dealing with difficult students. “we mostly end up fighting or feeling powerless and misunderstood,” said one teacher discussing this issue. to empower this group of teachers, we followed the theoretical principle of spreading psychological knowledge and competencies. we used a methodology we have developed, which integrates community psychology and affective education components, whose efficacy has been evaluated in many schools from kindergarten to high schools (francescato, tomai &mebane, 2004). in recent years affective education proponents have gained more attention since several theories have recognized that emotions are at the core of the process of self-construction and definition. moreover, as levels of violent and antisocial behaviors have increased in many schools, more educators have been concerned with exploring how children and adolescents learn to deal more positively with interpersonal conflicts and strong negative emotions. among the tools developed by socio-affective education that favor the creation of social capital, the most well known is the “circle time” where students sit in circle facing one another and discuss topics of their choice. the regular use of circle time has been found to promote prosocial behaviors, better peer relations and self-esteem, to reduce exclusion, to foster mutual aid and awareness of others’ feelings (karpinnen, et al. 2005, lang, et al. 1998). in our integrated methodology, we modified the circle time method by placing some participants in turn, outside the circle, as observers of the group process. observers use a facilitation functions schema first proposed by johnson and johnson (1975) and readapted by francescato and ghirelli (1988). four main group variables are observed: 1) structural (the number of members, recruitment procedures, degree of hierarchy, place and time, etc.) 2) task variables such as productivity, participation, decision making norms etc. 3) process variables such as collaboration or conflict, risk propensity, emotional climate, phases of group development, etc. 4) individually related variables such as manifest emotional states, communication styles, etc. observers, at end of each meeting, have ten minutes to provide data on how the group worked in the meeting, pointing out weak and strong points of group functioning from the four view points and how the facilitator helped or hindered group work. we have been using this schema for many years to evaluate graduate students group skills acquired both through face to face or online workshops (mebane, porcelli, iannone, attanasio, & francescato, 2008). discussing topics chosen by participants in a circle time allows people to share experiences and feelings, to create a mutual help atmosphere, to increase social capital and to experience how emotions impact on learning experiences. using the observers’ data to learn about small group dynamics empowers group members by making them more capable of understanding the weak and strong points of the different groups to which they belong. we wanted to empower teachers by fostering their capacity to facilitate circle time with their students, and also become better members and facilitators in their work groups. we also aimed at improving their communication and motivation skills in dealing with at risk students at the individual level and at reducing conflicts between parents and teachers, exploring how changes in family and work patterns in the last decades have created new burdens for both parents and teachers. this type of empowerment training starts with an exploration of personal and collective histories, to understand ‘our emotional capital’, that is what negative and positive emotions we have accumulated, especially in our early global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 of 12 experiences, that may still influence us today and help or hinder us in fostering personal and social change. to understand their personal past, the seventy teachers who chose to participate, were encouraged to recall: a) their positive and negative school experiences as pupils in elementary, junior and senior high school and b) how their teachers dealt with negative emotions such as anger, shame, envy, jealousy, sadness etc. they also explored their “work novels”: their triumphs and failures as teachers, and outlined similarities and differences between themselves as adolescents and those they met in their classrooms. then they discussed how education, work and family had changed in the last decades to see the connections between personal and social changes. they also simulated dealing with situations they found hardest to handle such as giving negative feedback to students in empowering ways and receiving negative feedback, and controlling their anger or disappointment. teachers took turns in facilitating discussion, observing group processes and making written reports. specific problem solving, brainstorming, conflict mediation and active listening techniques to help particularly needy students on an individual basis were also presented. trained teachers started using their modified circle time techniques in their classroom for one hour once a week, assisted by an untrained colleague, so about 140 teachers were directly or indirectly involved in this training processes. online supervision was offered to teachers in the one-month interval between the two training workshops and selfhelp group meetings among teachers were encouraged. teachers learnt some planning and evaluation procedures that they applied in the 14 work groups, that were trying to implement specific functional and structural changes. community psychologists supervised these groups for about six months. empowering parents to raise children in the “risk society” to raise children in the ‘risk society’ has become a difficult task for parents, as families have undergone dramatic changes. the mass entries of women in the labor market and the women’s liberation movement have initiated a process of individual liberation from traditional sex roles. while these changes have given more opportunities for many individuals to live less constricted lives, and offered the opportunity to men and women to play more equal roles in parenting and in family life, it has also increased the difficulties of maintaining satisfying longterm relationships. the rate of separation and divorce has risen in all western countries; many children and adolescents have to cope with their parents’ separation and remarriages, sometimes with second or third divorces. many young boys grow up in families where there is no adult male, and they construct a vague idea of what masculinity is, modeling themselves on what they see in videogames, tv shows and movies. the lack of male models at home is compounded by the decrease of male presence in schools. the increase in bullying and violence has been attributed by several authors (pittman, 1993; andolfi, 2001) to the need of boys, uncertain of their own masculinity to prove their maleness by acting violently and attempting to dominate others. in the last decades, furthermore, globalization processes have changed work conditions: fewer people are hired for a lifetime position; more people fear to lose their jobs and have to live with great occupational uncertainty. international competition has lowered salaries for unskilled positions, forcing men and women to take second jobs to make ends meet. working hard or being unemployed makes it less likely for parents to have the mental and physical energy to be able to be effective parents. parents of the adolescents who attended our high school had often both troubled marriages and work problems. dealing with emotional breakup, drug and alcohol abuse, and unemployment or low paying jobs, they were often not able to act as competent and caring parents. so we decided to implement a pilot empowering workshop for parents. the workshop, which lasted three months, with 12 two hours meetings, was attended by 22 parents, of which 16 were women. we only did one workshop because we had very limited funds for working with parents. this was a major financial global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 of 12 limit that prevented us from reaching many parents, but we trained some teachers to be able to hold such parent’s workshops the following years. the aims of the empowerment workshop, were to offer opportunities for parents: a) to understand how changes in family and work patterns in the last decades have created new burdens for both parents and teachers, b) to increase couple and parental efficacy, c) to foster the development of parents self-help groups and d) to encourage parents to join the works groups created to tackle the structural and functional problems found in the moa process. to lessen the “blame the parent or teacher syndrome” the workshop promoted the sociopolitical awareness that the difficulties parents and teachers experience in dealing with adolescents were not the problems of single individuals, but had different roots, which required a pluralistic interpretation. to this end we introduced family, school and work “novels”: we asked workshop members to tell the story of their grandparents, how they liked or disliked school, what kind of work they chose or were forced to do, how sex roles were handled, and how negative emotions were expressed. then we encouraged them to talk about their parents and then about themselves, and to see the connections between social, economic and political changes and the evolution of education, work and sex roles in their families. these specific methodologies try to apply the theoretical principles of examining the historical roots of present problems. many parents had undergone bad school experiences themselves and had dropped out. most had parents who did not have good school experiences and transmitted to their children their attitudes of dislike and diffidence about schooling. moreover for many parents as for their grandparents it was impossible to find the job they liked, they had to settle for what they could find. most participants consciously desired for their children to finish high school and find a good job, but they became aware that they had ambivalent feelings regarding work and family requests, and that often they did not use the emotional energy to concretely support positive school involvement by their children. as one parent admitted, “i scream at him one day, but the next day i am so busy or worried about my problems with his father that i do not control if he goes to school or not.” parents stated that school personnel and teachers did not offer any concrete help on how to handle resentful, angry, or withdrawn adolescents, who were doing poorly at school and many felt embarrassed or fearful when meeting teachers. circle time techniques were very helpful in allowing parents a space to vent negative feelings like anger and guilt. moreover, strong affective bonds were created among some parents, which enabled them to find ways to help themselves and their children. about half of the parents promoted two self-help groups, and about one third joined some of the work groups set up to solve transportation and cafeteria problems. these techniques were used to apply the theoretical principles on the importance of fostering the development of affective ties among people who share a problem. empowering students by increasing their ability to evaluate themselves and their communities among the problems signaled by students during the multidimensional organizational analysis, two were most frequently selected, the desire for a less hierarchical and conflicting relation with teachers and the need to make more friends among classmates. several had mentioned that some students had left school without telling anything to their classmates or the teachers, others had emphasized some students were isolated, did not help one another, saw no relation between their studies and their future lives. we designed a 40-hour, one-week workshop for ten classes, with 20 to 30 students that had a high membership of at risk students, in which two trained community psychologists provided opportunities for students: a) to understand the historical roots of their attitudes toward education and work by using the “work, school, and family novel” technique already described in the teachers’ and parents’ workshops; global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 of 12 b) to examine their preferred media and how their values and desires were shaped by mass media; c) to evaluate their weakness and strengths in the study habits and leaning styles; d) to learn group skills to evaluate weak and strong points of their class groups and to use problem solving and creativity techniques to promote desired changes in the class room, using the same integrated methodology to promote teamwork described in the teachers ‘s training; e) to learn a short version of moa to understand the problems areas and strengths of their school. for instance, they explored the psycho environmental dimension that measures the fit between individuals’ expectations and organizational opportunities and constraints. students in groups of two or three might decide to interview teachers, janitors, the principal and other students. students made up the content of the interviews, simulated the interview in small groups in which they played the different roles, under the supervision of the two community psychologists. after conducting the different interviews, they used group discussions to integrate the various results to diagnose strong and weak points of this organizational dimension of their school. f) to find jobs or other opportunities for themselves and to identify resources in the local community that could network with their school. to achieve this particular aim a short version of profile analysis, a technique, which examines a local community from eight viewpoints, was presented (martini and sequi 1988). in a classroom of 24 students, for instance, they formed eight groups, each of them focused on examining one profile: territorial, demographic, economic, institutional, services, psychological, anthropological, and future, using the appropriate data gathering technique. then they gathered together and confronted their data and made proposals: for instance they identified the community institutions or groups the school might network with or what job opportunities the community could provide. the methodologies we used with students followed the theoretical principles of broadening the viewpoints from which a given situation can be considered, examining the historical roots, giving voice to minority narratives, creating ties among people who share problems and identifying points of strength to obtained desired changes. evaluation procedures; strengths and limits of the project a complex variety of evaluation procedures was used to assess whether the intervention strategies had helped achieved the stated goals. we had postulated that following the theoretical principles described at the onset of this paper, in designing and implementing intervention processes, and having students, teachers, parents and non-teaching staff learn to use specific community psychology intervention techniques would produce desired results and produce personal, group, and institutional empowerment. institutional empowerment was operationally defined as the ability ‘of stakeholders to evaluate the school strengths and weakness from multiple viewpoints and to take different kinds of actions to increase the school’s efficacy to retain its students, to lower their failure rates and reduced truancy and bullying. at the end the intervention that lasted a whole school year, from october till june, the dropout rate had diminished. in the previous year out of a student body of 1700 students, 521 students had left school (30.6%); after our intervention, out of 1500 students enrolled only 298 left (19.9%). the failure rate (the number of students who flunk and had to repeat the year) decreased 15%. six hundred eighty students out of 1700 (40%) flunked in the year previous to the intervention, and 372 out of 1500 (24.8%) afterwards. good results were obtained in the reduction of episodes of vandalism and bullying. four hundred such episodes were reported the year before the intervention compared with less 300 the following year. the combination of the various initiatives promoted desired changes; however a limitation of this project is that we do not know which specific intervention was most related to global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 of 12 the reduction of each type of problem. further research should address this issue. we had also hypothesized that all the stakeholders would increase their personal and group empowerment by increasing their ability to evaluate their strengths and limits as individuals, but especially their capacity to “read” the surroundings in which they live, be it a small group like a class, work group, or a school committee. increase the ability to evaluate one’s own strengths and abilities teachers, parents and students, which participated in the empowerment training, wrote personal statements about their participation in the course, and community psychology trainers took daily notes. analysis of these data or records showed that 85% of the comments referenced positive personal changes. one common feature was an increase in the understanding how one’s own attitudes about work or school were shaped by personal and social history and the recognition that events had multiple explanations. we also asked students to write a detailed movie script in the morning of the first day and in the afternoon of the last days, and in the second movie scripts students changed the way problems were faced, moving from a fatalist framework from a more active role in determining the lives of the protagonists. this project was so well liked that we received many requests to implement it in other troubled high schools. we found however that for very problematic teachers, parents and students our intervention was too limited and they would have also benefited from individual or family counseling, which our project did not provide. learning group skills teachers’ ability to handle teamwork was evaluated by gauging how they facilitated circle time discussions with students in their classroom and or how they performed as facilitators and observers in one of the 14 workgroups formed after the initial moa. two community psychologists performed the evaluations based on direct observation during meetings and on note taking by the observers in each group. students' competence was evaluated directly by the two community psychologists who led the workshop when students participated in the different groups that conducted the profiles analyses and the multidimensional organizational analysis. in both groups participants performed more adequately in finding strong and weak points of group functioning than in facilitating. the best performers were teachers who participated in one of the nine moa original diagnostic groups, in the teachers training and also were included in the 65% of teachers who applied the circle time methodology in their classroom after training. how much were we able to put guiding theoretical principle into practice? we did encourage pluralistic interpretations of school’s problems through the moa process and the broad range of interventions. especially through ‘work, school, and family novels’ we did examine the historical roots of personal and social problems, and gave voice to minority narratives of non-teaching staff and students, who have generally less power in schools in identifying problems and solutions. affective education tools helped create emotional ties and lessen the isolation that parents and teachers had denounced as prevailing in the individualistic and conflictridden school culture. the two self-help groups created by parents give evidence of this process. we did identify points of strengths to favor change and did spread some psychological knowledge and competence. a follow-up carried out one year after the end of the project showed that drop out and failures remained lower than before the intervention. however, networking between schools and community organizations improved only slightly, and only half of the 14 workgroups were able to continue to have productive and well-facilitated meetings. the principal and some prominent teachers, who had become fairly competent in all the skills proposed during the intervention nonetheless suggested we should have extended our supervision for longer periods, demonstrating how hard it is to go from theory to practice when global journal of community psychology practice  volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal for community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 of 12 it comes to “giving psychology away” and making our presence obsolete! references anderson-butcher, d. 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(2004), psicologia di comunità per la scuola, l’orientamento e la formazione. esperienze faccia a faccia e online, bologna, il mulino. also in spanish edition: francescato, d., tomai, m., mebane m.e. (2006) psicologia comunitaria en la ensenanza y la orientacion, madrid, narcea. francescato, d., arcidiacono, c., albanesi, c. & mannarini, t. (2007). community psychology in italy: past developments and future perspectives. in reich, s., riemer, m., prilleltensky, i. & montero m. history and theories in community psychology. an international perspective. kluwer/sprinter, 263-281. francescato, d. (2008). to give psychology away takes a lot of theoretical and practical training, the community psychologist,41, 4144. hawkins, j,d.catalano, r;f;; morrison, d,m, o ‘donnel, j. abbott, r.d. & day, l. e: (1992) the seattle social development project in j.mccord & r.e. tremblay (eds) preventing antisocial behavior: interventions from birth through adolescence, new york, guilford press. johnson, d. w. & johnson, f. p. (1975). joining together: group theory and group skills. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. karppinen, s., katz, y. & neill, s. (eds). theory and practice in affective education: essays in honor of arja puurula. helsinki: university of helsinki press. lang, p., katz, y., & menezes, i. (1998). affective education. a comparative view. london and new york: cassell. mebane, m. e., porcelli, r., iannone, a., attanasio, c., & francescato, d. (2008). evaluation of the efficacy of affective education online training in promoting academic and professional learning and social capital. international journal of human-computer interaction, 2, 263-281. pittman, p. (1993). man enough. fathers, sons and the research for masculinity. new york: simon and schuster. tremblay, r. e., vitaro f., bertrand, l., le blanc, m., beachesne, h. boileau, h.,& david, l. (1992) parent and child training to prevent early onset of delinquency. the montreal longitudinal experimental study, in j. mccord & r.r. tremblay (eds), preventing antisocial behavior: interventions from birth to adolescence, new york, guilford press. evaluating the benefits of a novel community-based social engagement organization for improving mental health and reducing clinical visits barbara lee vanhorssen1, travis andrews2, and gloria k. lee3 keywords: social engagement, social rehabilitation, community-based, financial analysis, momentum center author: biographies: barbara lee vanhorssen, is the founder and experi-mentor of the momentum center. the momentum center is creating a community where every person is fully visible and connected. the momentum center was awarded the designation of hometown health hero by the state of michigan in 2024. she is an ordained interfaith minister and holds an mba in leadership studies and a bachelor’s degree in public administration. she is the author of two books and an international speaker. she leads international cultural immersion experiences to china, tibet, kenya, honduras, egypt, and morocco. barbara serves of the ottawa county department of health and human services board. she was recently inducted into her high school’s hall of fame for academic and career accomplishments. she has also been recognized with the spirit of community award from the grand haven area chamber of commerce. travis andrews, lifelong love of nature led to the discovery that many complex systems, including human wellbeing, share similar patterns of change. he founded thenatlas analytics to pursue this research and help nonprofits better understand their data. gloria k. lee, is a professor of rehabilitation psychology and the director of the doctoral program in counselor education and supervision and the master’s program in clinical mental health counseling program at michigan state university. she is a certified rehabilitation counselor. her research focuses on understanding the reciprocal effect of caregiving among caregivers and individuals with a chronic and persistent illnesses, particularly the psychosocial factors that affect the wellbeing of both groups. she also focuses on the implementation of evidence-based strategies in addressing identified psychosocial barriers in promoting holistic rehabilitation and clinical outcomes (e.g., mental wellbeing, quality of life, functioning, community integration, employment). the clinical populations that she has focused on include neurodevelopment disabilities (e.g., autism, intellectual disabilities), mental illness, multiple sclerosis), veterans and across the lifespan. recommended citation: vanhorssen, b. l., andrews, t., & lee, g. k. (2024). evaluating the benefits of a novel community-based social engagement organization 1 momentum center for social engagement, grand haven, michigan 2 thenatlas analytics, spring lake, michigan 3 department of counseling, educational psychology, and special education, michigan state university global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 for improving mental health and reducing clinical visits. global journal of community psychology practice, 15(2), 1 12. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: travis andrews, thenatlas analytics, llc., spring lake, mi 49456. email: travis@thenatlas.org. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:travis@thenatlas.org global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 evaluating the benefits of a novel community-based social engagement organization for improving mental health and reducing clinical visits abstract cost-effective community engagement is needed to address causes of mental illness related to social issues (i.e., isolation, stigma and lack of purpose) that are typically outside the scope of healthcare. this pilot study evaluated the relationship between clinical healthcare resources and a community-based social engagement organization in a medium-sized community in the midwestern united states. analyses were based on a retrospective longitudinal comparison of clinical visit frequency from two cohorts that joined the momentum center for social engagement (mc) and either frequently participated (engaged; n = 9) or had extenuating circumstances limiting participation (non-engaged; n = 3). the frequency of >1800 visits to the member’s primary mental healthcare provider were compared during the period from november 2016 to may 2021. engaged mc members reduced frequency of regular visits to their primary mental healthcare provider by 50%, while non-engaged mc members maintained clinical visit frequency. the financial value of reduced healthcare visits and associated wellbeing improvements was estimated to be $1.0 million, 95% ci: [$0.6-1.4 million], or roughly four times the budget received by the mc from the healthcare provider. thus, the mc appears to be a valuable approach to improving mental health in conjunction with existing community healthcare services. clinical implications include considering the unique mc-style community-based support as a component of practice. community-based social engagement programs that aid recovery from mental illness have grown in popularity (davies et al., 2020), but the value for clinical mental health providers remains unclear (jacobson & greenley, 2001; stanley et al., 2019). social programs have been shown to reduce isolation, build resilience, end stigma, and help end-users find purpose (e.g., baumeister & leary, 1995; pyne & baumeister, 2017) in ways that should complement and reduce the need for clinical visits (davidson et al., 2005; jacobson & greenley, 2001). as the global mental health crisis grows, social programs may offer cost relief (pinals, 2020). depression and anxiety alone were estimated to cost the global economy of us $1 trillion annually (brunier & mayhew, 2016). in the us, clinical utilization is largely overwhelmed (hellebuyck et al., 2019) even though more than 50% of people with a known mental disorder never seek help (national alliance of mental illness, 2020). for those who receive long-term treatment, improvement is just as common as progressive deterioration (davidson, 2009). unmet social needs and stigma are thought to be major obstacles to improvement (link & cullen, 1983; perlick et al., 2001). the social drivers and consequences of mental health challenges, including isolation and stigma are well known, yet remain difficult to address (stanley et al., 2019). for many, recovery from mental illness, including successfully living with mental illness, requires a social process that involves restoring relationships, sharing experiences, and becoming part of a community (jacobson & greenley, 2001). in-person social support networks, including, peer support services (fortuna et al., 2022; shalaby & agyapong, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 2020), drop-in clubhouse (mckay et al., 2018), living room model (heyland et al., 2013), and men’s sheds (kelly et al., 2021), have been demonstrated to fill part of this gap; however, each model fulfills different goals, and has its own strengths and limitations. for example, the drop-in clubhouse model provides group activities, but typically requires a mental illness diagnosis and program rules can limit autonomy of choice (mckay et al., 2018). overall, social support networks remain relatively infrequently utilized in the us, likely due to questions of cost effectiveness (park et al., 2013). they also typically do not directly confront community-scale stigma that is experienced by those with mental illness. to address social stigma, an alternative approach to support mental health recovery was created. in this paper, we review the effectiveness of a novel grassroots community-based mental health model that brings people together for social and recreational experiences, to grow interests, and to pursue the shared goal of reducing stigma in the broader region where members live. the momentum center for social engagement (mc) was opened on april 20, 2017, in a midsized community in western michigan (ottawa county, est. population: 286,383), usa where 17% of adults reported depressive disorder and 15% reported an anxiety disorder (hill, 2017). while clinical treatment options exist, local stakeholders identified lack of programs, services, funding, and continued stigma as the realities that prevent some people from seeking and receiving needed treatment. philosophy of the momentum center for social engagement the mc acts as a complement to clinical and therapeutic services to improve the quality of life of people who struggle with mental illness, addictions, and other disabilities. the mc creates a safe place for these marginalized populations by creating human connection for people at risk of isolation, through social integration as a means of reducing stigma, and by acting as a platform for anti-stigma outreach and understanding. the mc integrates individuals with their communities to create positive social networks, improve personal resilience, and reduce feelings of stigma. to define and establish needed programs, the mc used a three-step process: 1) identify community-specific gaps in mental health services using a modified social labstype approach (hassan, 2014); 2) create grassroots, entrepreneurial support for solutions; and 3) implement social programming and evaluate effectiveness in terms of personal wellbeing metrics and innovative program characteristics. importantly, steps have been taken to define and replicate this framework in other communities. unlike other predefined social programs, the mc relies on grassroots support to be flexible and responsive to the needs of each community. anyone can join the mc as a member or participate in mc events (e.g., a monthly town hall discussion on racism in schools). most members have mental illness and/or a disability; however, no clinical diagnosis or referral is required to join. membership costs $1 annually. additional details regarding the mc model can be found on their website (momentumcentergh.org). study design and purpose of study a retrospective cohort study was conducted using longitudinal patient health information (phi) from a community mental health services agency (cmhs) for the period 2016 – 2021. the purpose of this study was to explore if the social engagement program offered by the mc improves wellbeing for members and adds value to cmhs. we compared two small cohorts of members with mental illness before and after joining the mc. the “engaged” cohort represented those who http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 were highly engaged after joining the mc while the “non-engaged” cohort joined the mc but were less engaged, similar to an experimental control group. to understand if engaging with the mc helped improve wellbeing, we validated the assumption that healthier clients go to the doctor less (lin et al., 2010) by comparing cmhs’s overall wellbeing metric, the adult needs and strengths assessment (ansa; with lower scores being better; ansa manual, 1999) to cmhs visit frequency. then we used cmhs visit data before and after joining the mc to infer changes in wellbeing associated with the mc intervention. for cmhs, visits represent their commitment and ability to help clients. thus, reduced frequency of clinical visits of regular clients could indicate improved wellbeing, greater availability of resources for others and a direct step toward cmhs achieving their mission of improving lives. in contrast, participants with difficult or worsening mental conditions that were stabilized by frequent cmhs treatments would be expected to maintain or increase their frequency of visits over time. the total value of cmhs’s mission was considered to be its annual budget. the financial value of reduced visits was considered to be greater than total cost of visits because the change indicates lives were improved, and instead was valued as a percent of cmhs’s annual budget. methods institutional review approval study participants signed a consent form allowing this collaborative cmhs and mc partnership to securely share and analyze phi in compliance with hipaa privacy rule and state of michigan statutes regulating the disclosure, use, or reporting of confidential health care information. as part of mc’s program quality improvement, an application was submitted to the third author’s institutional review board’s exemption determination, study id: study00006689. it was determined that the program data comparison was not considered to be research under hipaa or institutional review board irb. in addition, all mc members have provided consent to their inclusion in member population-related reporting and summaries. procedure no new data were collected through human participants as all data were archival and all analyses were based on these existing data. study participants at the time of this study, approximately a third of mc members were clients of cmhs where they visited healthcare professionals and specialty facilities for treatment and monitoring. cmhs treats a wide range of patients, including those with mental illness and substance use disorders. between march and april 2021 staff at the mc provided information about this study to adult members that visited the mc. twelve adults (>18 years old) who were long-term cmhs clients (i.e., with more than five months of regular cmhs visits before and after joining the mc) participated in this study. participants represent a semi-random sample of all mc members. the participants were predominantly described as non-hispanic white (table 1). seven participants identified as male and five as female. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 table 1 demographics of study participants cohort factor total engaged nonengaged n 12 9 3 gender male 58.3% 66.7% 33.3% female 41.7% 33.3% 66.7% race white, nonhispanic 66.7% 66.7% 66.7% unknown 33.3% 33.3% 33.3% cohorts participants were split into two cohorts, engaged (n = 9) and non-engaged (n = 3) based on guidance provided by the mc chief operations officer (coo). the coo has monitored member engagement on-site since the mc opened. prior to the start of this study the coo ranked all members on a scale from 1 (less-engaged) to 3 (more-engaged) and provided notes on why some members were challenged to engage (e.g., lack of transportation, other health difficulties). participants with a score of 3 without any noted challenges to engagement were grouped into the engaged cohort. all other participants were grouped into the nonengaged cohort. measures wellbeing the wellbeing of long-term consistent cmhs clients was represented by their frequency of visits to cmhs. this relationship was validated by comparing visit frequency to a longitudinal measure of wellbeing, ansa. ansa was assessed by cmhs staff for 6 study participants, infrequently, starting in 2018. most study participants had already joined the mc prior to their initial ansa. however, trends in ansa scores should well represent the overall trend of each client’s wellbeing and thus should be comparable to changes in visit frequency pre/post mc intervention, which also represent an overall long-term change. cmhs’s digital records were available from october 2016 – may 2021. most participants were already cmhs clients prior to the start of the digital records. cmhs visit data included participant name, date, and visit type: appointment, clubhouse, crisis contact or initial. appointments were most common. clients were expected to receive the best care available tailored to their needs, and thus each visit type was considered equally important for mental health. visit frequency was calculated as the mean number of days between cmhs visits for the full available period before joining the mc (pre-mc) and the period after joining the mc (post-mc) until the start of the pandemic or the end of the record (as explained further below), totalling over 1800 visits. for two participants, a total of three record gaps (i.e., when several regular [e.g., weekly] visits were missed for unknown reasons), were removed from visit frequency averages. the date of joining the mc varied by participant (ranging from march 2017 – november 2020). pre-pandemic data were used for 9 of the 12 study participants. the start of the covid pandemic disrupted in-person visits to the mc (e.g., mc temporarily ended in-person visitation on 3/15/2020) and the switch to virtual was highly successful for some and difficult for many others. the differential response to going virtual was beyond the scope of this study. three members (one nonengaged and 2 engaged) who joined the mc after the start of the pandemic were included in the study because they continued to have regular cmhs visits and they did not http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 experience the disruptive, temporary suspension of in-person mc visits. there were no other exclusion criteria. members had no further responsibilities or interaction with the study procedure. data analysis analyses were performed using r statistical software version 4.0.2. percent change in ansa per year was based on the first and last ansa record divided by the number of years between. a pearson correlation was used to understand the relationship between percent change in ansa and percent change in visit frequency. for analyses, visit frequency was converted to visits/year and percent change for ease of interpretation. percent change in visit frequency was expected to show a more consistent effect across the wide range of annual visit frequencies and thus it was used to bootstrap a 95% confidence interval (10,000 iterations). the mean percent change in visit frequency of the engaged cohort and the associated confidence interval were used to calculate the total reduction in visits expected for all engaged mc members who were cmhs clients. the total change in number of visits annually by engaged mc members with confidence intervals was compared to the total annual cmhs visits. the percent difference in visits associated with the mc was multiplied by the cmhs budget to estimate value. due to overwhelming demand for cmhs, the mc effect was not expected to reduce the total annual visits at cmhs. instead, value calculations assume cmhs was able to successfully treat more people and achieve a step toward their mission with the same budget and same number of annual visits. results relationship between wellbeing and visit frequency changes in cmhs visit frequencies before and after joining the mc were strongly and positively correlated with change in ansa scores, r(4) = 0.88, p = 0.018, for both engaged and non-engaged participants (n = 6; figure 1). those with worsening wellbeing (higher ansa) had more frequent cmhs visits, while those with improved wellbeing (lower ansa) had less frequent cmhs visits. note, ansa data were not available for half of the study participants and scores were too infrequent for comparison with mc intervention timing. further, the timing of ansa change and visit change did not fully overlap for all participants, thus the trends of each were correlated but the exact relationship between variables was not determined. figure 1. comparison of changes in wellbeing (ansa) and cmhs visit frequencies. note: percent change in ansa scores per year compared to percent change in annual visits to cmhs before and after joining the mc for engaged mc members (n = 3; blue circles) and nonengaged members (n = 3; gray squares). a significant correlation (r(4) = 0.88, p = 0.018) indicates a reduced ansa score (indicating http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 greater wellbeing) was associated with reduced visit frequency. changes in cmhs visit frequency prior to joining the mc, both cohorts on average, had 40 to 50 cmhs visits per year (engaged = 41.8 visits, n = 9; non-engaged = 49.7 visits, n = 3). after joining the mc, engaged member’s visit frequency to cmhs declined 50% to 20.7 visits per year. all engaged members had reduced visit frequency (range: 10% to 84% reduction). non-engaged members maintained a similar frequency of visits, on average after joining the mc (mean: 50.4 visits/year) a +1% increase. two of the three non-engaged participants increased visit frequency and one decreased. participants generally used the same types of visits at cmhs before and after joining the mc, with the exception of the cmhs clubhouse, which had relatively less use by two participants. to estimate the full effect of the mc on cmhs services we considered the total number of mc members who were similar to the engaged cohort. of the 200+ active mc members, at the time of this study, 80 had a high level of engagement. of these highlyengaged mc members, 30 were long-term cmhs clients (including the 9 from this study) who we expect would have experienced similar wellbeing improvements and have an associated reduction in cmhs visits over time. thus extrapolating 50% fewer visits by 30 mc members would account for 633 fewer visits annually, 95% ci: [360 – 864], or 2.3% of all cmhs visits, 95% ci: [1.3% – 3.2%]. economic value in this study, visits represent cmhs’s primary tool to achieve their mission and improve the quality of life of patients with mental illness. the 2019 cmhs budget (~$44 million) allowed for more than 25,000 client visits. the number of reduced visits by engaged mc members were equivalent to 2.3% of all cmhs visits. because this reduction in visits was attributed to wellbeing improvement, we can say the mc moved cmhs 2.3% closer to achieving their mission of improving lives. with a budget of ~$44 million annually, 2.3% equates to the mc contributing a value of $1.0 million annually, 95% ci: [$0.6 – $1.4 million]. this value represents the combined efforts of cmhs with the mc and does not take into account the mc budget received from cmhs (~$240,000), nor the value of cmhs appointments now available to others. discussion mental health has a growing importance as clinical resources remain overwhelmed in the us and major obstacles to improvement include unmet social needs and stigma. many types of social support networks and recreational programs for adults with mental illness, addictions, and disabilities may supplement the care provided by existing health systems; however, it remains important to understand their anticipated effects, associated value and limitations. since 2017, the mc has developed the only known model of community-scale engagement that utilizes a unique combination of programming, integration, and outreach to reduce stigma, increase social connection, and improve clinical outcomes to raise the quality of life for its members. the mc serves members with a wide range of mental health needs. this pilot study focused on mc members who were long-term, regular clients of a public mental healthcare provider. being a regular clinical client prior to joining the mc indicated that ongoing treatments were able to stabilize but not allow full recovery from a condition. cmhs uses visits to connect with their clients, apply treatments, and achieve their mission of improved client wellbeing. clients with http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 improving mental health, as measured by percent change in ansa scores (figure 1) required less frequent clinical visits, while worsening conditions required more frequent visits. ansa was collected infrequently by cmhs staff for only some of the study participants. visits were the most common type of clinical data, thus change in clinical visit frequency was used to infer change in client wellbeing. members of the mc are free to participate as they please and for this study they were categorized as either highly engaged or nonengaged. for social connection, we assumed greater engagement at the mc would have the largest effect. the engaged cohort had a significant decrease in clinical visit frequency, on average, while the non-engaged cohort had minimal change. every participant in the engaged cohort had reduced clinical visits. in contrast, the non-engaged cohort had varied responses and the role of the mc for less engaged members could be highly nuanced. for example, infrequent visits can still have a profound value to members who report the importance of “knowing there is a resource.” the non-engaged cohort was exceptionally small (n = 3) but they well represented hypothetical individuals who maintain mental health through regular clinical visits but would benefit from a social component of recovery. they joined the mc for social connection but due to extenuating circumstances, were unable to fully engage. the engaged cohort (n = 9) was expected to represent approximately 15% of all mc members (n = 30) who also are highly engaged and cmhs clients. to understand the full effect of the mc on cmhs, the cohort results were extrapolated to the larger group. the estimated reduction in clinical visits and associated improved wellbeing was considered a step towards achieving cmhs’s mission. importantly however, due to overwhelming demand and a limited budget, reduced visits should not be considered a cost-savings for cmhs. instead, the results indicate that cmhs + mc added $1.0 million of value in community wellbeing more than cmhs would have achieved alone. the value of the mc to cmhs was four times the mc budget received from cmhs. all extrapolated values were estimated for reference only and should be interpreted with caution. not represented in this study are mc members who utilize other mental healthcare providers, who are inconsistent clients, or who avoid mental healthcare. by providing support and knowledge, internal reporting suggested that the mc may help some members become more comfortable and consistent with clinical visits. for these members, the mc could be responsible for creating mental healthcare clients and/or increasing visit frequency. assuming a healthier connection to clinical care results in improved wellbeing, then, once again the mc helps cmhs achieve their mission of improving the quality of life. this value to the community was not assessed in this study but it underscores how the mc can be costeffective without being a cost-savings. limitations this pilot study solely intended to identify the existence of a potential benefit of the mc for quality improvement purposes. because of the unique intervention and small sample size, findings are not intended to be generalized. however, the study still provides valuable insights. the sample represents a unique or hard-to-reach population. insights gained from this group can be particularly informative and may not be easily replicated in larger, more generalized studies. by identifying key variables and potential outcomes, we provide a foundation upon which larger studies can build. the small number of participants also precluded the use of more complex analyses and the influence of demographics could not be assessed. mean visit frequencies, before and after joining the http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 mc, likely underestimated both the wellbeing improvement that was attributable to cmhs (pre-mc) and the long-term mc effects (postmc). the study assumed both effects were underestimated equally. all engaged mc members had reduced visit frequency; however, two of the three largest changes were from individuals who reduced use of the cmhs clubhouse after joining the mc. while the cmhs clubhouse may have lower operating costs than other visit types, we have included clubhouse visits the following reasons: 1) cmhs includes clubhouse visits in their overall metric of client visits; 2) values derived in this study were based on improved wellbeing rather than cost savings; 3) we assumed each cmhs visit type could be equally valuable to a client’s mental health; 4) members who chose the mc over the clubhouse represent direct evidence that the mc was more effective than the clubhouse for those members. this study expects the cmhs visit frequency of engaged members would stay constant if they had not engaged with the mc (similar to the non-engaged cohort). changes to cmhs treatments and a multitude of other factors likely impacted members’ mental health (for better or worse) over the course of the study period. however, by applying the effort to engage with the mc, the engaged members showed they felt the mc intervention was helpful. other than engagement with the mc and cmhs, there were no other anticipated similarities among the engaged members that could have accounted for their consistent improvements in wellbeing. finally, the mc has several other valuable roles that could not be quantified within the scope of this study that include but are not limited to: 1) social engagement for members who use other local mental healthcare providers or are infrequent clients of cmhs; 2) prevention for those without a mental illness; 3) connection to those with mental illness who are unwilling to seek clinical treatment; 4). community outreach and integration; and 5) guidance to those seeking help but unsure where to go. future directions the use of social engagement for the improvement of mental health is complex. here we provide the community of practice an example of a successful intervention for engaged participants and a methodology to value the effectiveness of other mental health interventions for individuals with a consistent, long term record of clinical visits. ongoing qualitative research at the mc intends to understand why members feel the mc benefits them. finding common themes among successful social interventions may help expand these programs. the benefits of the mc could be limited for those who were not capable of engaging socially. in this study the non-engaged cohort had higher cmhs visit frequencies overall, which may indicate more severe mental illness that could have hindered deeper engagement. while the mc was designed to connect with isolated individuals, there are inevitably many who are difficult to reach. it is likely that a larger cohort of non-engaged members would have also included individuals who were non-engaged because they found other engaging activities (e.g., employment) that could improve their mental health. this limitation did not reduce the effect of those who successfully engaged with the mc, thus, future work should focus on characteristics of those who do and do not engage with the mc in order to understand how to best serve the largest population. conclusions mc cost-effectiveness may derive from how it operates differently than other social groups. no mental illness diagnosis is required to join, allowing the mc to bring together those http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 avoiding medical help with those receiving care. the common desire for socialization means members do not need to “out themselves” by participating. the mc provides a safe space for socialization, activities and community integration that allows often-disenfranchised individuals to engage in positive activities, moving out of isolation and into productive interactions in their community. members are given autonomy of choice (i.e., activities are optional and the cafe area is always available during operating hours). while there are no requirements to become a member, the mc is oriented toward and seems to most benefit, individuals with mental illness and/or disability who would like to have greater purpose in their lives through socialization, shared experiences, and being part of something bigger than themselves by using the mc as a platform to end stigma in the broader community. references baumeister, r. & leary, m. 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(2013). examining the cost effectiveness of interventions to promote the physical health of people with mental health problems: a systematic review. bmc public health 13, 787. perlick, d., rosenheck, r., clarkin, j., sirey, j., salahi, j., struening, e., et al. (2001). stigma as a barrier to recovery: adverse effects of perceived stigma on social adaptation of persons diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder. psychiatric services, 52(12), 1627-1632. pinals d. (2020). crisis services: meeting needs, saving lives. alexandria, va: national association of state mental health program directors. pyne, j. & baumeister, r. (2017). social belonging and its relation to social identity, self-esteem, and well-being. in handbook of self and identity (pp. 242257). guilford publications. funding this project is funded by the mc through a grant from the grand haven area community foundation and through an in-kind donation by community mental health of ottawa county. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.nami.org/learn-more/mental-health-by-the-numbers https://www.nami.org/learn-more/mental-health-by-the-numbers a systematic review of universities’ institutional policies addressing first peoples transformative change or reproduction of colonialism? kai handfield1 and thomas delawarde-saïas1 keywords: policies, action plans, institutional change, universities, equity, diversity and inclusion, indigenization, decolonization author biographies: kai handfield, is a phd student in community psychology at university of quebec in montreal. in recognition of their position as a white settler (descendant of irish and english settlers in the 1800s), living on the stolen lands of tiohtiá:ke, they seek to offer their research skills in support of anticolonial and environmental struggles. they are primarily interested in studying how to foster social change, and to use their position of power to raise awareness about privilege and white supremacy. their work questions how different levels of actions (individual, interpersonal, institutional) can – or cannot– contribute to wider social change (ex. university policies , awareness-raising workshops). their thesis focuses on raising awareness about colonialism in the french-speaking quebec context. their project is a response to the needs of mikana, an indigenous organization raising awareness about colonialism. in collaboration, they evaluate the impact of mikana’s workshops on non-indigenous participants and delve into the experience of indigenous youth facilitating these workshops. their research seeks to better understand how to foster critical consciousness in a context of high resistance, and its potential negative impacts, on the marginalized people giving the workshops, and the privileged members receiving it. thomas delawarde-saïas, is a community psychology teacher at university of quebec in montreal, since 2015. he is the 1 department of community psychology, university du quebec à montreal global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 research director of the epione research team, which focuses on understanding and reducing social inequalities, through various themes, such as public services, systemic racism and gender-based violence. epione also offer evaluation services for public services, the community sector and various institutions seeking to reflect and improve their services. he is passionate about the field of perinatal care and early childhood and has led multiple research projects on the implementation and effects of public interventions in that field. recommended citation: handfield, k. & delawardesaïas, t. (2024). a systematic review of universities’ institutional policies addressing first peoples transformative change or reproduction of colonialism? global journal of community psychology practice, 15(2), 1 24. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: correspondence for this article should be addressed to: kai handfield https://orcid.org/0009-0009-2220-8818. email: handfield.kai@courrier.uqam.ca author presentation: i am a white settler occupying the unceded lands of tiohtià:ke/montréal, inhabited by many nations and guarded by the kanien’kehá:ka. recognition of my settler identity, the stolen lands i occupy and the ongoing impacts of colonialism i benefit from requires a redistribution of my privileges and resources. it is in that spirit that i offered my academic and research skills to the circle of first nations in my university, who gave me this research question (what are the policies in universities in “quebec’’ addressing first peoples). http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/ https://orcid.org/0009-0009-2220-8818 mailto:handfield.kai@courrier.uqam.ca global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 a systematic review of universities’ institutional policies addressing first peoples transformative change or reproduction of colonialism? abstract the rise of edi and indigenizing institutional initiatives in settler universities like socalled canada 2 could suggest significant transformations and reduction of colonial violences. yet, inadequate university policies can cause multiple negative effects: performative approaches, assimilation dynamics, co-optation, added burdens and microaggressions on first peoples. the few studies that include ‘’quebec’’ show major flaws in institutional actions towards first peoples. only one report focuses on ‘’quebec’’ but merely states the presence of university institutional actions. therefore, a critical analysis of university policies addressing first peoples in ‘’quebec’’ is necessary. method: a systematic review of the policies of all universities (18) in ‘’quebec’’ was achieved. the results were analyzed with the wholistic indigenous framework. results: no university in ‘’quebec’’ has an institutional policy addressing first peoples. only 28% of universities have an action plan specific to first peoples, while 56% have equity, diversity and inclusion action plans. only 1 of those 5 universities with an action plan specific to first peoples presents the necessary conditions for respectful, responsible, relevant and reciprocal institutional actions. in other words, only 1 out of 18 (6%) universities has adequate institutional actions towards first peoples. conclusion: the wholistic indigenous framework suggests that the action plans engage in tokenism with a checklist approach without a real transformation of power. the results reveal major gaps in higher education to address ongoing colonialism. the rise of edi (equity, diversity and inclusion) and reconciliation discourses in universities could lead us to believe that significant changes are happening in settler colonial countries like so-called canada to end social inequalities towards first peoples (ahmed, 2007a, 2007b; hussain, 2023; munroe, 2021; tamtik & guenter, 2019). but is it really the case? canadian and international literature reveal numerous problems with universities’ policies addressing first peoples. their 2 the terms so-called canada and “quebec’’ in quotation marks are used to highlight that they are colonial names and settler-colonial establishments, see for example alook, a., eaton, e., gray-donald, d., laforest, j., lameman, c., & tucker, b. (2023). the end of this world: climate justice in so-called canada. between the lines., or for an explanation https://medium.com/@waterwatchers/whats-up-with-socalled-so-called canada-ba9e085ec9d2 creation and application often reproduce a colonial approach (kermoal, 2018; kidman, 2020; kuokkanen, 2008, 2011; terry wotherspoon & emily milne, 2020) and present major flaws (e.g., lack of designated positions and power) (gunstone, 2008, 2020; kairos, 2018; pidgeon, 2008, 2014, 2016; pio, tipuna, rasheed, & parker, 2014). as such, university policies tend to have a performative approach focusing on reconciliation rather than addressing ongoing colonialism (gaudry & lorenz, 2018). these http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 approaches focused on inclusion tend to reproduce colonialism and neoliberalism where the main effect is making the institution seem ‘’inclusive’’ (ahmed, 2020; lloyd & wolfe, 2016; steinman & scoggins, 2020; tamtik & guenter, 2019). iatrogenic effect of performative and assimilative approaches these assimilative and performative approaches create iatrogenic effects – by reproducing colonial and racist norms and harming or placing added burdens on first peoples (ahmed, 2007a, 2007b; bishop, 2021; mcguire-adams, 2021; yee & wagner, 2013). for example, increasing the number of indigenous peoples in university (tamtik & guenter, 2019) without raising awareness about colonialism and recognizing indigenous paradigms and worldviews risks exposing them to racism, colonialism and microaggressions (eizadirad & campbell, 2021; jones et al., 2023; locke et al., 2023; mcguire-adams, 2021; page, 2018; settles et al., 2019; walters et al., 2019; yahia, 2016). furthermore, being exposed to racism in universities presenting themselves as ‘’inclusive’’ can be even more violent as you expect better in these environments (brunette-debassige, 2021; hunter new england health aboriginal & torres strait islander strategic leadership committee, 2012; steinman & kovats sánchez, 2021). these iatrogenic effects even apply to indigenous peoples hired to implement indigenizing policies, leading to their exclusion, silencing or quitting (1 out of 3) (brunette-debassige, 2021; lavallee, 2020; steinman & kovats sánchez, 2021; thunig & jones, 2021). in addition to facing daily triggers, dismissals and backlash (brunettedebassige, 2021; jones et al., 2023; kerr et al., 2022; locke et al., 2023; pitawanakwat & pedri-spade, 2022; steinman & kovats sánchez, 2021; steinman & scoggins, 2020), inadequate policies tend to increase the workload on indigenous peoples, involving invisible labor (supporting students, sitting on equity committees) (louie, 2019; mcallister et al., 2019; mohamed & beagan, 2019; pidgeon, 2014; povey et al., 2022; thunig & jones, 2021; walters et al., 2019). for instance, indigenous people are expected to represent and respond to all indigenousrelated issues (staniland et al., 2021; steinman & scoggins, 2020), conform to eurocentric norms, not to challenge policies or decisions by people in power, and do all this without recognition of the systemic barriers they experience (almeida, 2015; brunette-debassige, 2021; greenwood et al., 2008; jones et al., 2023; locke et al., 2023; pitawanakwat & pedri-spade, 2022; povey et al., 2022; steinman & scoggins, 2020; walters et al., 2019). these dynamics are worst when they are the only indigenous person in the institution, as universities are failing to correct underrepresentation because of settlercolonial recruitment norms, leading to a lack of proper indigenous leadership (brunettedebassige, 2021; brunette-debassige et al., 2022; kerr et al., 2022; locke et al., 2023; povey et al., 2022; steinman & scoggins, 2020; walters et al., 2019). this demonstrates how, even when indigenous policies are enacted and indigenous peoples hired, settler colonialism can remain intact if it is not done correctly (brunette-debassige, 2021; povey et al., 2022; steinman & scoggins, 2020). in short, institutions tend to tokenize and coopt first peoples (lavallee, 2020; locke et al., 2023; naepi et al., 2017; walters et al., 2019) and documents like action plans promoting ‘’diversity’’ or ‘’inclusivity’’ without doing the work (ahmed, 2007a, 2016; jones et al., 2023; kidman, 2020). this gives an illusion of http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 change without systemic transformation (henry et al., 2017; povey et al., 2022) and puts the burden on first peoples individuals compensating for the system (steinman & scoggins, 2020). institutional change must seek a deep deconstruction of white/colonial norms to avoid superficial and iatrogenic actions (kermoal, 2018; sylvestre et al., 2019; wilson et al., 2021). so, how do we ensure first peoples are not confined to a box to tick (kidman, 2020) or an exotic puppet (lavallee, 2020) within institutions? what do policies need to support real transformative change? necessary conditions of the policies to achieve transformative change, real participation of first peoples, involving power beyond tokenism, specificity and accountability and the engagement of adequate resources are necessary conditions (pidgeon, 2016; settles, buchanan, & dotson, 2019). institution-wide policies, with material resources, authority and power to indigenous collective sovereignty, with several indigenous senior leadership are much stronger and can prevent co-optation of indigenous initiatives (brunette-debassige, 2021; hassen et al., 2021; kermoal & gareau, 2019; pete, 2016; pidgeon, 2008, 2016; pitawanakwat & pedri-spade, 2022). specificity and accountability policies are more likely to be conducive to change if they contain clear, measurable objectives (e.g., hiring 5 people by 2025) and accountability (e.g., designating someone in charge) (eckel & kezar, 2003; hassen et al., 2021; paradies et al., 2009; trenerry, franklin, & paradies, 2012). real participation the participation of indigenous peoples, implying power beyond tokenism, is necessary for the development of relevant policy (kezar & eckel, 2002b; pidgeon, 2016; settles, buchanan, & dotson, 2019; steinman & scoggins, 2020). tokenism takes many forms in universities, which stem from being a minority and having little/no power, while being hyper-visibilized to prove the university's "diversity" (eizadirad & campbell, 2021; robinson, 2013; settles et al., 2019). a common example is inviting an indigenous person to various committees to ensure an indigenous presence, without any consideration of their contributions (lavallee, 2020; mohamed & beagan, 2019). engagement of resources to involve first peoples, positions, including at the highest levels (e.g. provost, senior executives) must be created (boldo, 2022; hassen et al., 2021; tamtik & guenter, 2019) and sufficient human and financial resources given to carry out the suggested actions (hassen et al., 2021; hussain, 2023; kezar & eckel, 2002; olle, 2018; pete, 2016; pitawanakwat & pedri-spade, 2022; raffoul et al., 2022; santa-ramirez et al., 2020). the most important obstacle, even when indigenous administrators are hired is the absence of sufficient authority, personnel and budgets to support indigenization initiatives (brunette-debassige, 2021; brunettedebassige et al., 2022; pidgeon, 2008, 2016; povey et al., 2022; raffoul et al., 2022). limit of the literature although there is a rising number of studies examining university policies addressing first peoples in so-called canada (brunettedebassige, 2021; brunette-debassige et al., 2022; hussain, 2023; mullen, 2020; pidgeon, 2014, 2016; pitawanakwat & pedri-spade, 2022; povey et al., 2022; webb & mashfordhttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 pringle, 2022) few include ‘’quebec’’ (kairos, 2018; tamtik & guenter, 2019; wotherspoon & milne, 2020). from these, ‘’quebec’’ stands out as the worst province in their policies addressing first peoples, especially due to a lack of indigenous participation and lack of resources (kairos, 2018; wotherspoon & milne, 2020) or by their lack of policies (lefevre-radelli & dufour, 2016; lefevre-radelli & jérôme, 2017). only one report focuses on university policies and institutional actions in quebec (jean, 2020). however, it simply reports the presence of indigenizing initiatives, without information about the processes, such as participation and accountability, which are essential to assess their relevance (harper & hurtado, 2007; pidgeon, 2016). considering the rise of university policies and the risk of iatrogenic effects, a critical analysis of universities’ policies seems necessary to guide us towards transformative change (iverson, 2007). furthermore, the reproduction of white supremacy and colonialism through policies often operate in invisible in common-sense ways (ahmed, 2020; brunette-debassige, 2021; smith et al., 2021), adding to the necessity of a critical analysis. therefore, this study seeks to (1) document policies addressing first peoples implemented by universities in “quebec” and their impact, and (2) analyze if they represent a respectful, relevant, reciprocal and responsible basis to guide the transformation of colonial universities (pidgeon, 2016). method the objective was to identify policies concerning first peoples in all universities in “quebec” (18) and, if applicable, their content and impact. policies refer to university-wide policies (the term institutional policy will be used to convey that aspect) such as policies for international students which most, if not all, universities have. procedure keywords were identified for english and french universities that referred to indigenous identities (“indigenous”, “first peoples”, “first nations”, “inuit”, ‘’métis”/ “autochtone”, “premiers peuples”, “premières nations”, “métis”, “inuit”). these keywords were researched with the research toolbar on each of the 18 universities’ websites. the first 50 results were consulted. the results nonspecific to first peoples were consulted according to the apparition of the keywords (e.g., for a policy on sexism, the keywords were researched in the document and only those parts were read). documents and pages specific to first peoples were read entirely, as well as each reference or link in them. the keyword “action plan” was searched at the end to ensure no results were missed. first peoples are one of the four designated groups in equity, diversity and inclusion (edi) initiatives (women, disabled people, racialized people and indigenous peoples) so all edi content was consulted. to avoid biases due to the quality of the search engines on the universities’ websites, the keywords were also researched in google, with the name of the university. this also allowed for a doublecheck that nothing was missed. data collection was from april 2021 to june 2021. an email was sent to each university in june 2021 presenting the research and asking if they had a policy concerning first peoples. the emails were addressed to the person responsible for the first peoples action plan or, in their absence, the edi action plan. the following 8 universities confirmed the absence of policy concerning first peoples : uqat, teluq, uqar, uqam, university of sherbrooke, university laval, school of superior technology (ets), concordia. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 wholistic indigenous framework the wholistic indigenous framework was used, developed by pidgeon (2014, 2016), a scholar of mi’kmaq ancestry working in the “canadian” context. this framework analyzes institutional actions and responses to indigenization, from an indigenous perspective, centering the 4rs of respect, relevance, reciprocity and responsibility developed by kirkness and barnhardt (1991). these principles serve to distinguish between a check-list approach and a real integration and appreciation of first peoples, as well as indigenous knowledges. in other words, do the actions allow real transformation of the institution or do they continue to push the burden of assimilation on first peoples (lefevre-radelli & jérôme, 2017b)? the criteria and conditions presented in table 1 (p.12) were based on the integration, in an operational manner, of the two analyses of “canadian” universities conducted with the wholistic indigenous framework (pidgeon, 2014, 2016). the embodiment of responsible institutional actions through respect, relevance and reciprocity can be observed through multiple criteria, which have indicators (see table 1, p.12). recognizing the necessity to consider the local experiences, the criteria identified, based on englishspeaking provinces in so-called canada, also correspond to criteria identified in universities in ‘’quebec’’ (lefevre-radelli & jérôme, 2017a; pidgeon, 2016). beyond these criteria, the transformation of institutions requires the recognition of our responsibilities towards first peoples and accountability around those responsibilities (pidgeon, 2014). participation, specificity and accountability and the engagement of resources are conditions for any meaningful institutional action that is responsible, respectful, reciprocal and relevant. the criteria mentioned summarize the content of the action plans (types of actions), which will be analyzed according to the three conditions (pidgeon, 2014, 2016): 1. level of participation (number and power) 2. specificity (what, how, dates, results, objective) and accountability (measurable indicators and monitoring). 3. resources engaged (human, financial, long term). 1. level of participation is evaluated by the number of first peoples involved, and clear indication of their level of power in decision-making. the threshold to go beyond tokenism and into real participation, involving power over decisions and governance is level 6, according to arnstein’s (1969) ladder (maximum 8), see figure 1 below. level 6 reflects a parity in the number of first peoples and non-indigenous and some influence, without having the power to ensure their decisions are respected. level 7 and 8 imply a majority of first peoples, with delegation of power (7) and total power over the process (8) (arnstein, 1969). the level of participation is especially important for the creation of the policies but is also considered in the specificity and accountability of the actions (e.g.: specify an indigenous person will be responsible for indigenizing the curriculums), as well as the engagement of resources (e.g.: hiring first peoples). 2. the actions must be specific (what, how, dates, results, objective) to be accountable and indicate who is responsible. for example, “ explore various strategies to retain indigenous students as staff, such as internships and short term contracts” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 (udem, 2020, p. 13) is not specific enough to allow accountability, whereas “initiate a cluster hire, directed by the provost and vice principal to hire, in the next 3 years, 10 new tenure-track faculty members with lived experiences and expertise in indigenous knowledges, worldviews, methodologies, history, languages, traditions, justice or governance. these positions cannot be concentrated in one faculty” (provost's task force on indigenous studies and indigenous education, 2017, p. 18) is a great example of specificity. it indicates clear goals, measurables outcomes, who is responsible and even anticipates pitfalls. 3. the engagement of resources requires that policies indicate clearly that financial and human resources will be attributed to realize the actions. for example, stating that indigenous knowledges and languages will be incorporated, without specifying the hiring and resources to do so would not meet this criterion. figure 1. arnstein’s ladder of participation http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 note. the levels 1 to 3 of arnstein’s ladder correspond to non-participation. as these levels did not apply to this study, they were excluded from the figure to simplify the visual. results result 1: policies addressing first peoples none of the 18 universities in ‘’quebec’’ have an institutional policy addressing first peoples. although first peoples are sometimes included in the designated groups (e.g. sexual violence in universities), there are no policy specific to first peoples and no policy addresses the specificity of first peoples (e.g. no mention of colonialism and racism towards first peoples in policies related to discrimination). one university (sherbrooke) has a policy for admission of first peoples in the law bachelors. however, this is restricted to one program in one faculty and not university wide. result 2: equity, diversity and inclusion (edi) action plans first peoples were mostly mentioned in equity, diversity and inclusion (edi) action plans or action plans specific to first peoples. 72% (13 out of 18) of the universities have no action plans specific to first peoples. 17%% (3/18) have neither edi nor first peoples action plans (enap, polytechnique, teluq). one of them (polytechnique) is currently developing an edi action plan. in short, 56% (10/18) of universities only mention first peoples in edi action plans, while another 17% (3/18) have no mention of first peoples in any institutional policy. while first peoples are amongst the 4 designated groups of edi action plans, none of the universities include specific and accountable actions addressing first peoples. in other words, none of the universities address first peoples adequately (participation, specificity and accountability and engagement of resources) within their edi actions plan. result 3: action plans specific to first peoples only 5 universities (28%) have action plans specific to first peoples and were included in the table 1. one (sherbrooke university) is currently developing an action plan specific to first peoples. having a check in the table does not mean that the action is achieved, but only that it was mentioned in the action plan. the ability of this mention to lead to real transformative change (words to action) depends on the respect of the three conditions. conditions for meaningful institutional action participation three universities reach a level of participation beyond tokenism (level 6/8, partnership): laval university, uqat and concordia, the latter presenting the highest level of indigenous participation (arnstein, 1969). university of montréal and mcgill are at level 4/8 and 5/8, due to lack of indication of attributing first peoples positions of power or governance (university of montréal) or the number of first peoples (mcgill). university of montréal’s action plan indicates that first peoples were only included after an initial diagnostic from the university, followed by parity consultations to identify calls to action. there is no mention of first peoples being further involved in the later steps or having power. in addition, official instances were designated as responsible for the actions. yet, the same action plan http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 highlights the absence of first peoples in those positions. so, the level of participation appears to be at 4, consultation, which stays in the realm of tokenism (below 6) (arnstein, 1969). uqat’s action plan is similar to mcgill’s: the list of members is available, but there is no indication of their identity or the composition (parity or majority). the level of participation for the creation of the plan is at least 4/8, but a higher level of participation (6, partnership) was clear for implementation, with designated positions of governance. university laval’s action plan was written by a reflection committee, co-presided by the director of kiuna (an indigenous college). there was parity in the committee, both at the participants and the governance level, without full delegation of power, which implies a partnership (level 6/8). http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 table 1 conditions and criteria for respectful, relevant, reciprocal and responsible institutional action http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 concordia’s action plan was directed, created, and written by the indigenous directions leadership group, composed of almost exclusively first peoples. the action plan clearly indicates first peoples’ participation with power, through the creation of positions and structure of governance (ex: “a permanent, university-wide indigenous directions leadership council that reports directly to the provost and includes primarily members of indigenous communities” (group, 2019, p. 10)). therefore, concordia’s level of participation is at 7/8, with a majority of first peoples and delegation of power, without full control. specificity and accountability out of the 5 universities, only concordia meets all the criteria of specificity and accountability. two action plans (university of montreal, uqat) are specific only around the actions but lack indicators of accountability (how, measurable outcomes and goals). university of montreal specifies deadlines and who is responsible for the actions (what, when, who). however, there are no clear objectives around measurable outcomes that would allow accountability. uqat’s action plan presents concrete actions, with the anticipated objectives. co-governance, followup, and accountability, involving high levels of participation by first peoples are often included in the action plan. for example, “add, in all the documents on creating, evaluating and revising programs, questions on how indigenous realities are considered and included” (p.5). however, the action plan presents no measurable outcomes or indicators of success for the actions, except when the actions are the creation of a position or instance. the dates and who is responsible for the specific actions are not indicated either. two action plans (laval and mcgill) are specific only around accountability, meaning they lack specificity in the actions but have a governing structure. laval university’s action plan lacks specificity around how the objectives will be attained, when and what results are expected. although the action plan specifies the creation of a governing structure to implement the action plan, it does not meet the criteria for specificity, which impedes accountability (without clear goals, it is impossible to evaluate if they were met). mcgill’s accountability appears in-between partial and high. most actions do not indicate who is responsible for them, but the call to create an indigenous initiatives office appears to be the central mechanism of accountability and follow-up. similarly, while some actions do not present measurable outcomes, it might be due to their innovative nature, e.g. “take concrete steps towards the provision of waivers of tuition and mandatory fees for all indigenous students enrolled at mcgill (medium term)” (p.8). resources only two universities specify the engagement of resources in their action plans (concordia and mcgill), including the creating of new positions, their budget and support team to ensure the actions can be realized. criteria as mentioned, the conditions are more important to consider than the criteria: where the criteria represent types of actions, the conditions dictate the probability of those words becoming action. considering only the criteria (the checkmarks) in the table compared to when we consider if the conditions are respected (green) paints quite a different picture (see table 1). for example, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 university of montréal checks 23/32 of the criteria, the content of the action plans including a lot of favourable actions. however, the absence of fulfilment of the conditions (participation, specificity and accountability and resources) means those actions are less likely to be implemented in a relevant, respectful, reciprocal, and responsible way. this contrast highlights the purpose of the wholistic indigenous framework: analyzing transformative policies beyond check-list approaches. types of actions the creation of designated positions, which involves the engagement of resources in the long term, appears to be a general flaw of most action plans, as they are the least implemented. for instance, all action plans mention the importance of relationships, especially in research with first peoples. however, only 2 designate positions to ensure that work is done (concordia and uqat), and none mention giving a position of power to a member of the community. similarly, all universities mention the integration of indigenous knowledges in the curriculum and the revitalization of indigenous languages, but only 2 designate a position for it (concordia and uqat). on the contrary, some actions are readily considered by universities. for instance, all indigenous action plans seek to increase the recruitment and retention of indigenous students, hire support agents, and mention multiple forms of support (academic, financial, etc.). all universities mention incorporating indigenous content or classes concerning indigenous peoples in various programs (some mandatory) and mention workshops and training of teachers and students. discussion edi: the invisibilization of racism and colonialism none of the universities in “quebec’’ have policies addressing first peoples. the vast majority of universities (78%) did not have any institutional action (e.g. action plan) specific to first peoples (14/18). 56% have an edi action plan, which mentions first peoples as part of the 4 designated groups. however, none of these edi plans have specific and imputable actions towards first peoples. this corresponds to ahmed (2007a, 2007b) critiques of the still-current increase of edi initiatives in universities in north america, which seem designed to create a positive image more than a real effort to address social inequities. these general terms can reproduce inequalities, as the most oppressed groups will be the least represented, with actions that fail to address their realities and needs, further increasing the gap (ahmed, 2007a). as suggested, canadian universities report a notable absence of indigenous people in leadership or positions of power (henry et al., 2017), their numbers often being so low they cannot be reported (smith, 2019). when they are present, they lack power, are underfunded and overworked (povey et al., 2022; raffoul et al., 2022). accordingly, indigenous initiatives are often led by a white woman, as they are the most represented edi group (brunette-debassige, 2021), and do not face the same obstacles to access senior roles in academia as indigenous peoples (johnson & howsam, 2020). indeed, women’s representation is consistently increasing, remaining the highest amongst the 4 groups (canada, 2019; johnson & howsam, 2020), while first peoples’ representation is actually decreasing despite http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 their increased availability, suggesting systemic racism and colonialism as a main cause (commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse, 2020; uqam, 2020). as such, edi action plans seem inadequate to reduce inequalities concerning first peoples. this highlights the need for institutional policies specific to first peoples and revising current policies for their proper consideration throughout (e.g. policies for students that are parents). for now, consideration of first peoples appears as an afterthought rather than a clear commitment throughout the institution: for non-specific documents most mentions of first peoples were in the annexes or simply defining them as part of the edi groups. indeed, edi initiatives can lead to the invisibilization of first peoples by general terms (zinga & styres, 2019) that fail to recognize and confront settler colonialism (mcallister et al., 2019; muehlmann, 2009; raffoul et al., 2022). only two universities mentioned colonialism (concordia and mcgill) in their action plans, meaning that most did not mention colonialism, even in action plans that are supposed to address its impacts. this lack of recognition also means failure to take accountability and reparations for past and ongoing colonial violence, like involvement in residential schools, medical and scientific violences, and theft of land (daigle, 2019; pitawanakwat & pedri-spade, 2022; steinman & scoggins, 2020; thunig & jones, 2021). in addition, not recognizing colonialism as the cause of inequalities constructs indigenous peoples as responsible (e.g. underperforming rather than systemically disadvantaged) (bishop, 2021; brunette-debassige, 2021; hogarth, 2015, 2017; kidman, 2020; mullen, 2020; taylor, 2004; wotherspoon & milne, 2020). this creates a deficit-oriented approach, by focusing on gaps and deficiencies. this could have important negative impacts, as this discourse of helping indigenous peoples resonates with stereotypes of first peoples as dependent and having too many problems (morrison et al., 2008; morrison et al., 2014; saïas et al., 2020). in accordance, the great majority (89%, or 16 out of 18) of action plans addressing first peoples —all of them for edi plans— are deficit-oriented as they: focus on underrepresentation, aim to increase the presence of “diverse” people and do not recognize colonialism and racism nor center the institution’s role and responsibilities (wotherspoon & milne, 2020). furthermore, none of the universities in “quebec” have specific policies or strategies against individual or institutional racism. in consequence, university policies are overwhelmingly failing to address whiteness and white supremacy underlying the on-going settler-colonial power dynamics (daigle, 2019; dar, 2019; kerr et al., 2022; mcallister et al., 2019; naepi et al., 2017; parasram, 2019), where even racism is barely recognized (jones et al., 2023), leading to an absence of policies and accountability for racist and colonial incidents (locke et al., 2023). yet, these first peoples or edi action plans can be used to deflect criticisms of racism or inaction (naepi, 2019), leading to a deeper normalization of colonial norms (daigle, 2019). in other words, inadequate indigenous policies can further colonialism and harm first peoples under the disguise of equity (pitawanakwat & pedri-spade, 2022; steinman & kovats sánchez, 2021). through their lack of antiracist language, naming colonialism and mechanisms and policies to denounce racism and colonialism (hassen et http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 al., 2021; pete, 2016; pitawanakwat & pedrispade, 2022), universities in ‘’quebec’’ are failing to address – and take responsibility for – racism and colonialism (gunstone, 2008, 2020; moore, 1995; pidgeon, 2014, 2016). conditional inclusion, not decolonization results show that actions around “inclusion” or services to facilitate the adaptation of first peoples (e.g., support agents) to universities are more readily implemented than actions around changing the institution (e.g., indigenize content), which echoes dynamics of assimilation (ahmed, 2020; kuokkanen, 2011; lefevre-radelli, 2019; lloyd & wolfe, 2016; steinman & scoggins, 2020; tamtik & guenter, 2019). consequently, current actions by universities in “quebec” focus on the incorporation of indigenous peoples and content, rather than question and decolonize the institution. this corresponds to findings that universities in so-called canada still show resistance to the recognition and centering of indigenous worldviews and knowledges beyond epistemic colonialism (pio et al., 2014; raffoul et al., 2022; wotherspoon & milne, 2020). this type of isolated change, without addressing prejudice and racism, is an adjustment (eckel & kezar, 2003) which prevents the root causes from being addressed (henry et al., 2017; yee & wagner, 2013). this represents settler colonial conditional inclusion (stein, 2019) or indigenization as inclusion (gaudry & lorenz, 2018) where no substantial systemic changes are made, and the burden of change is imposed on indigenous peoples while maintaining the status quo. do the universities respect the conditions for transformative change? amongst universities in “quebec”, concordia’s first people’s action plan contained the most criteria (28/32), followed by mcgill (25/32), university of montreal (23/32), uqat (20/32) and laval university (14/32). yet only concordia respects the three conditions for respectful, relevant, reciprocal and responsible institutional action. this means that, although universities mention a lot of actions in their documents, these mentions are unlikely to go beyond intentions. besides concordia, a level of participation beyond tokenism, involving majority of first peoples, power, and governance, is a major flaw of the action plans. as illustrated, lack of these conditions, and lack of sufficient financial and human resources, can create iatrogenic effects on the indigenous peoples doing the work, through exploitative, tokenistic and marginalizing dynamics (brunette-debassige et al., 2022; locke et al., 2023; raffoul et al., 2022; steinman & scoggins, 2020; thunig & jones, 2021). most universities did not meet the condition for specificity and accountability, which corresponds to pidgeon's (2016) findings that unclear formulation often stands in the way of transformative action. this deficiency in monitoring and transparent reporting from universities corresponds to previous literature where indigenous peoples have noted the self-congratulating tendencies of universities representing institutional actions positively in their reports (brunettedebassige, 2021; mcallister et al., 2019; steinman & kovats sánchez, 2021). these results indicate a major gap between the content of action plans and the participation, specificity, accountability and engagement of resources they require. therefore, according to the wholistic indigenous framework (pidgeon, 2014, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 2016), institutional actions by quebec universities, through action plans (and the absence of one specific to first peoples) appear to reproduce tokenism with a checking-the-box approach, without real transformation of power and colonial dynamics. comparison with canada and international settler-colonial countries already highlighted in 2016 (lefevre-radelli & dufour), the gaps between quebec and other canadian provinces and between english and french speaking universities persist. english-speaking universities (concordia and mcgill) are overrepresented amongst the universities with an indigenous action plan (40%), while they only represent 3 out of the 18 universities (17%). while 85% of canadian university had a strategic plan including indigenization and 63% had an indigenization plan by 2020 (raffoul et al., 2022), this study shows that quebec universities are still far behind (respectively 53% and 26%). for example, by 2020, 77% of canadian universities had hired 1 person for an indigenous-focused education development position (raffoul et al., 2022) and gave them annual funds (brunettedebassige et al., 2022), while in 2021, only 10% of universities in “quebec” are planning to hire 1 person. despite international and canadian universities being 5-10 years in advance in decolonizing work and their calls to do better (jones et al., 2023; mcallister et al., 2019; naepi et al., 2020), quebec seems to be reproducing an approach focused on inclusion and failing to enact structural change (brunette-debassige, 2021; gaudry & lorenz, 2018; raffoul et al., 2022; steinman & scoggins, 2020; tamtik & guenter, 2019). comparison with literature the inadequacies of ‘’quebec’’ universities correspond to previous literature: policies and institutional rules are the least implemented actions (jean, 2020). despite multiple publications highlighting the need for policies addressing first peoples, the situation remains unchanged (jean, 2020; lefevre-radelli, 2019; lefevre-radelli & dufour, 2016; lefevre-radelli & jérôme, 2017a). however, this analysis contradicts the 2019 report, which stated that more than 2/3 (67%) universities consider first peoples within their strategic planning, including specific actions (jean, 2020). as that report was conducted with universities, it is possible that they had access to more information. however, their information seems based on what the universities say about themselves: 13 of the universities that replied stated that their strategic planning mentions first peoples, including specific actions (jean, 2020, p. 20). this contrast reflects the gap between what universities say about themselves and the extent of their institutional actions, which highlights the purpose of the wholistic indigenous framework (pidgeon, 2016). indeed, the lack of such a framework can portray universities in a more positive light, allowing adaptations to seem transformative (eckel & kezar, 2003; pidgeon, 2016). limitations this study, based on action plans and official documents, is incomplete. first, actions and initiatives could be present without being mentioned in action plans. similarly, the level of participation and resources engaged might be higher than estimated if they were not stated in the action plans. then again, a http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 condition for good institutional actions is precisely accountability, which requires transparency and specificity (eckel & kezar, 2003; pidgeon, 2016). in this case, lack of clarity and lack of indigenous policies could be seen as a lack of commitment of the universities towards first peoples (daigle, 2019; eizadirad & campbell, 2021; gunstone, 2008). on the other hand, focusing on policies and institutional initiatives can be dismissive of indigenous practices that cannot be expressed in operative goals, for example (steinman & kovats sánchez, 2021). this presents the risk of invisibilizing the work and resistance of first peoples: these policies are built on decades of indigenous activism (kerr et al., 2022; steinman & kovats sánchez, 2021; steinman & scoggins, 2020), the requirement for edi policies themselves is the result of individuals calling out canadian universities’ sexism, ableism, racism, and colonialism (side & robbins, 2007). second, the formulation of the criteria and conditions, although based on pidgeon’s work, were written by a settler and might not reflect properly the wholistic indigenous framework (pidgeon, 2014, 2016). by definition, the framework requires a wholistic approach, centring the experiences, feelings and well-being of the people addressed by the policies. this analysis might not reflect the lived experiences of first peoples within their university, which is the key factor. accordingly, a university which has not met the criteria and conditions in theory might meet them in reality. for example, uqat is cited as an example of decolonization and indigenization, despite not meeting the conditions on paper (capres, 2018). their email response stated that uqat has implemented multiple practices, services and includes first peoples in decision-making (administrative council, research ethics committee, programs council, etc.), which they consider as more appropriate and relevant than establishing policies. conclusion this article shows that despite seemingly increasing recognition of first peoples, they are still completely absent from institutional policies in universities in quebec. the invisibilization of first peoples within policies appears as a reflection of, as well as a mechanism (e.g., lack of indigenous mentors) that maintains the absence of first peoples within universities. out of 18 universities in “quebec”, only one (6%) has an action plan specific to first peoples which meets the three conditions of participation, specificity and accountability and engagement of resources (pidgeon, 2016). therefore, universities’ actions towards first people in quebec seem performative and to reproduce colonialism. a little over half of universities have edi action plans, which represent a lower level of authority than policies, and, although they theoretically include first peoples, they are failing to consider them adequately. this concords with previous literature highlighting how universities can express a commitment to diversity while simultaneously working against it (naepi, 2019; steinman & kovats sánchez, 2021). indeed, they are reproducing inadequate equity-focused institutional actions that do not address structural racism, colonialism, and the underlying white supremacy (hussain, 2023; maclachlan, 2017; parasram, 2019; raffoul et al., 2022) beyond action plans, institutional policies are necessary for wholistic approaches and http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 strategies throughout the whole university, with sustainable and ongoing resources permitting concerted actions and recourse if the policies are not respected (axworthy et al., 2016; louie, 2019; provost's task force on indigenous studies and indigenous education, 2017). quebec universities are producing non-applicable diversity commitments by failing to resource their implementation and give power to first peoples (ahenakew & naepi, 2015; ahmed, 2016, 2020; pitawanakwat & pedri-spade, 2022; raffoul et al., 2022; steinman & scoggins, 2020). policies will continue to fail at anything close to decolonization if power stays in the hand of an overwhelmingly majority of white settlers, who control what forms of ‘’diversity’’ or indigeneity are welcomed or not (kerr et al., 2022; locke et al., 2023; pitawanakwat & pedri-spade, 2022; tamtik & guenter, 2019). inspiration should be taken from indigenouslead institutions such as kiuna and first nations university: “as institutions across socalled canada are working to indigenize and offer supports to indigenous students, first nations university has always been an indigenized university” (bighead, 2019, p.16). indeed, there is an overwhelming lack of real, bold changes, such as making it possible for first peoples to study in their languages in higher education (hussain, 2023), fostering and enacting indigenous governances (povey et al., 2022; raffoul et al., 2022), upholding relationality and accountability through community involvement, including elders and local indigenous protocols (brunettedebassige, 2021; cote-meek, 2020; kirkness & barnhardt, 1991; pete, 2016; pidgeon, 2008; pitawanakwat & pedri-spade, 2022; raffoul et al., 2022; steinman & scoggins, 2020) and ceasing to occupy stolen lands (daigle, 2019). this does not mean institutional policies have had no effect or are not worthwhile (kerr et al., 2022; povey et al., 2022), but rather that we need to create the conditions to ensure they are not done on the back or at the cost of first peoples as it has been happening (brunette-debassige, 2021; 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(2013). is antioppression teaching in canadian social work classrooms a form of neoliberalism? social work education, 32(3), 331-348. http://www.gjcpp.org/ une revue systématique des politiques universitaires concernant les premiers peuple changements transformateurs ou reproduction du colonialisme? kai handfield1 et thomas delawarde-saïas1 mots-clés: politiques, plans d’action, université, équité, diversité et inclusion, autochtonisation, décolonisation, changement institutionnel biographies: kai handfield, est étudiant au doctorat en psychologie communautaire à l’université du québec à montréal. en reconnaissance de sa posture de descendant de colons (colons irlandais et anglais en 1800), habitant les territoires volés de tiohtiá:ke, iel vise à offrir des compétences en recherche en support aux luttes anticoloniales. iel est principalement intéressé à comment favoriser le changement social et mobiliser les personnes privilégiées. son travail interroge comment différents niveaux d’actions (individuel, interpersonnel, institutionnel) peuvent – ou ne peuvent pas – contribuer à des changements sociaux plus large (ex. politiques universitaires, formations de sensibilisation). sa thèse est en partenariat avec, et en réponse au besoin de mikana, une organisation autochtone qui fait des formations de sensibilisation au colonialisme. l’étude s’intéresse au vécu des personnes autochtones qui donnent les formations et aux effets de l’intervention sur les allochtones. leur projet est une réflexion critique sur comment conscientiser dans un contexte de résistance, et les effets iatrogènes potentiels, sur les autochtones qui donnent la formation, et les allochtones qui la suivent. thomas delawarde-saïas, est un professeur de psychologie communautaire à l’université du québec à montréal depuis 2015. il est le directeur de recherche du 1 département de psychologie communautaire, université du quebec à montreal global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 laboratoire de recherche épione, qui vise à comprendre et réduire les inégalités sociales, en s’intéressant à plusieurs sujets, tel que les services publics, le racisme systémique et les violences basées sur le genre. épione offre aussi des services d’évaluation pour les services publics, le secteur communautaires et de nombreuses institutions qui cherchent à réfléchir et améliorer leurs services. il est passionné par le champ des soins périnataux et de la petite enfance et il a dirigé plusieurs projets de recherche sur l’implantation et les effets d’interventions publiques dans ce secteur. citation recommandée: handfield, k. & delawardesaïas, t. (2024). a systematic review of universities’ institutional policies addressing first peoples transformative change or reproduction of colonialism? global journal of community psychology practice, 15(2), 1 24. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). correspondance: les correspondances pour cet article devraient être envoyées à: kai handfield https://orcid.org/0009-0009-2220-8818. email : handfield.kai@courrier.uqam.ca présentation de l’auteur: je suis une personne blanche descendante de colons, qui occupe les territoires non cédées de tiohtià:ke/montréal, habités par de nombreuses nations et gardés par les kanien'kehá:ka. la reconnaissance de mon identité de colon, des terres volées que j'occupe et des impacts continus du colonialisme dont je bénéficie exige une redistribution de mes privilèges et de mes ressources. c'est dans cet esprit que j'ai offert mes compétences académiques et de recherche au cercle des premières nations de mon université, qui m'a donné cette question de recherche (quelles sont les politiques dans les universités du « québec » qui s'adressent aux premiers peuples). http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/ https://orcid.org/0009-0009-2220-8818 mailto:handfield.kai@courrier.uqam.ca global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 une revue systématique des politiques universitaires concernant les premiers peuple changements transformateurs ou reproduction du colonialisme? résumé la montée des initiatives edi et d’autochtonisation dans les universités de colonies de peuplement telles que le canada 2 pourrait suggérer des transformations significatives et une réduction des violences coloniales. pourtant, des politiques universitaires inadéquates peuvent avoir de multiples effets négatifs : approches performatives, dynamiques d'assimilation, cooptation, fardeaux supplémentaires et microagressions envers les premiers peuples. les quelques études qui incluent le « québec » montrent des lacunes importantes dans les actions institutionnelles envers les premiers peuples. un seul rapport se concentre sur le « québec », mais se contente d'indiquer la présence d'actions institutionnelles. par conséquent, une analyse critique des politiques universitaires concernant les premiers peuples au « québec » est nécessaire. méthode : une revue systématique des politiques de toutes les universités (18) du « québec » a été réalisée. les résultats ont été analysés à l'aide du cadre holistique autochtone. résultats : aucune université du québec n'a de politique institutionnelle concernant les premiers peuples. seulement 28% des universités ont un plan d'action spécifique aux premiers peuples, alors que 56% ont un plan d'action sur l'équité, la diversité et l'inclusion. seule 1 de ces 5 universités ayant un plan d'action spécifique aux premiers peuples présente les conditions nécessaires pour une action respectueuse, responsable, pertinente et réciproque. en d'autres termes, seule 1 université sur 18 (6 %) mène des actions institutionnelles adéquates à l'égard des premiers peuples. conclusion : le cadre hollistique autochtone suggère que les plans d'action s'engagent dans une approche performative de type « cocher la case » sans réelle transformation du pouvoir. la montée des discours sur l’edi (équité, diversité et inclusion) et de réconciliation dans les universités pourrait nous faire croire que des changements significatifs se produisent dans les pays coloniaux comme le soi-disant canada pour mettre fin aux inégalités sociales envers les premiers peuples (ahmed, 2007a, 2007b ; hussain, 2023 ; munroe, 2021 ; tamtik & guenter, 2019). mais est-ce vraiment le cas ? la littérature canadienne et internationale révèle de nombreux problèmes liés aux politiques universitaires concernant les 2 les guillements autour de québec et canada sont utilisés pour souligner leur caractère colonial, voire par example : alook, a., eaton, e., gray-donald, d., laforest, j., lameman, c., & tucker, b. (2023). the end of this world: climate justice in so-called canada. between the lines. premiers peuples. leur création et leur application reproduisent souvent une approche coloniale (kermoal, 2018 ; kidman, 2020 ; kuokkanen, 2008, 2011 ; terry wotherspoon & emily milne, 2020) et présentent des lacunes importantes (p. ex. absence de postes et de pouvoirs désignés) (gunstone, 2008, 2020 ; kairos, 2018 ; pidgeon, 2008, 2014, 2016 ; pio, tipuna, rasheed, & parker, 2014). ainsi, les politiques universitaires ont tendance à adopter une approche performative axée sur la réconciliation plutôt http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 que sur la lutte contre le colonialisme continu (gaudry & lorenz, 2018). ces approches axées sur l'inclusion tendent à reproduire le colonialisme et le néolibéralisme, avec comme effet principal de faire paraître l'institution « inclusive » (ahmed, 2020 ; lloyd & wolfe, 2016 ; steinman & scoggins, 2020 ; tamtik & guenter, 2019). effets iatrogènes des approches performatives et assimilatrices ces approches assimilatrices et performatives créent des effets iatrogènes en reproduisant des normes coloniales et racistes et en nuisant aux premiers peuples ou en leur imposant un fardeau supplémentaire (ahmed, 2007a, 2007b ; bishop, 2021 ; mcguireadams, 2021 ; yee & wagner, 2013). par exemple, l'augmentation du nombre de personnes autochtones à l'université (tamtik & guenter, 2019) sans sensibilisation au colonialisme et sans reconnaissance des paradigmes et des visions du monde autochtones risque de les exposer au racisme, au colonialisme et aux microagressions (eizadirad & campbell, 2021 ; jones et al., 2023 ; locke et al., 2023 ; mcguire-adams, 2021 ; page, 2018 ; settles et al., 2019 ; walters et al., 2019 ; yahia, 2016). en outre, être exposé au racisme dans des universités se présentant comme ''inclusives'' peut être encore plus violent car on s'attend à mieux dans ces environnements (brunettedebassige, 2021 ; hunter new england health aboriginal & torres strait islander strategic leadership committee, 2012 ; steinman & kovats sánchez, 2021). ces effets iatrogènes s'appliquent même aux personnes autochtones embauchées pour mettre en œuvre les politiques d’autochtonisation, ce qui mène à leur exclusion, leur silence ou leur démission (1 sur 3) (brunette-debassige, 2021 ; lavallee, 2020 ; steinman & kovats sánchez, 2021 ; thunig & jones, 2021). en plus d'être confrontés à des microagressions quotidiennes, à des invalidations et des résistances (brunette-debassige, 2021 ; jones et al, 2023 ; pitawanakwat & pedri-spade, 2022 ; steinman & kovats sánchez, 2021 ; steinman & scoggins, 2020), les politiques inadéquates augmentent la charge de travail des personnes autochtones, impliquant un travail invisible (soutien aux étudiants, participation aux comités d'équité) (louie, 2019 ; mcallister et al, 2019 ; mohamed & beagan, 2019 ; pidgeon, 2014 ; povey et al., 2022 ; thunig & jones, 2021 ; walters et al., 2019). par exemple, il est attendu que les personnes autochtones représentent et répondent à toutes questions liées aux premiers peuples (staniland et al., 2021 ; steinman & scoggins, 2020), se conforment aux normes eurocentriques, sans contester les politiques ou les décisions des personnes au pouvoir, et ce, sans reconnaissance des obstacles systémiques qu'elles rencontrent (almeida, 2015 ; brunette-debassige, 2021 ; greenwood et al, 2008 ; jones et al., 2023 ; locke et al., 2023 ; pitawanakwat & pedrispade, 2022 ; povey et al., 2022 ; steinman & scoggins, 2020 ; walters et al., 2019). cette dynamique est pire lorsqu'il n’y a qu’une seule personne autochtone dans l'établissement, ce qui arrive fréquemment en raison des normes de recrutement coloniales, qui entraîne un manque de leadership autochtone approprié (brunette-debassige, 2021 ; brunette-debassige et al., 2022 ; kerr et al., 2022 ; locke et al., 2023 ; povey et al., 2022 ; steinman & scoggins, 2020 ; walters et al., 2019). cela démontre que, même lorsque des politiques d’autochtonisation sont adoptées et que des personnes autochtones sont embauchés, le colonialisme peut rester intact si cela n'est pas fait correctement (brunette-debassige, 2021 ; povey et al., 2022 ; steinman & scoggins, 2020). en bref, les institutions ont tendance à tokéniser et à coopter les premiers peuples (lavallee, 2020 ; locke et al., 2023 ; naepi et al., 2017 ; walters et al., 2019) et les http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 documents tels que les plans d'action promouvant la « diversité » ou l’ « inclusivité » sans faire le travail nécessaire (ahmed, 2007a, 2016 ; jones et al., 2023 ; kidman, 2020). cela donne une illusion de changement sans transformation systémique (henry et al., 2017 ; povey et al., 2022) et laisse le fardeau sur les premiers peuples des individus qui doivent compenser pour tout un système (steinman & scoggins, 2020). les changements institutionnels requièrent une déconstruction profonde des normes blanches/coloniales pour éviter les actions superficielles et iatrogènes (kermoal, 2018 ; sylvestre et al., 2019 ; wilson et al., 2021). alors, comment s’assurer que les premiers peuples ne soient pas confinés à une case à cocher (kidman, 2020) ou à une marionnette exotique (lavallee, 2020) au sein des institutions ? de quoi les politiques ont-elles besoin pour soutenir un véritable changement transformateur ? conditions nécessaires aux politiques pour parvenir à un changement transformateur, la participation réelle des premiers peuples, impliquant du pouvoir audelà du tokénisme, la spécificité et l’imputabilité, et l'engagement de ressources adéquates sont des conditions nécessaires (pidgeon, 2016 ; settles, buchanan, & dotson, 2019). des politiques à l'échelle de l'institution, avec des ressources matérielles, de l'autorité et du pouvoir attribués à une souveraineté collective autochtone, avec plusieurs hauts dirigeants autochtones sont plus solides et peuvent empêcher la cooptation des initiatives autochtones (brunette-debassige, 2021 ; hassen et al., 2021 ; kermoal & gareau, 2019 ; pete, 2016 ; pidgeon, 2008, 2016 ; pitawanakwat & pedrispade, 2022). specificité et imputabilité les politiques sont plus susceptibles de favoriser le changement si elles contiennent des objectifs clairs et mesurables (ex. embaucher 5 personnes d'ici 2025) et de l’imputabilité (ex. désigner une personne responsable) (eckel & kezar, 2003 ; hassen et al., 2021 ; paradies et al., 2009 ; trenerry, franklin, & paradies, 2012). participation réelle la participation des peuples autochtones, qui implique un pouvoir allant au-delà du tokénisme, est nécessaire à l'élaboration de politiques pertinentes (kezar et eckel, 2002b ; pidgeon, 2016 ; settles, buchanan et dotson, 2019 ; steinman et scoggins, 2020). le tokénisme prend de nombreuses formes dans les universités, qui découlent du fait d'être une minorité et d'avoir peu ou pas de pouvoir, tout en étant hyper-visibilisé pour prouver la « diversité » de l'université (eizadirad & campbell, 2021 ; robinson, 2013 ; settles et al., 2019). un exemple courant est d’inviter une personne autochtone à divers comités pour assurer une présence autochtone, sans aucune considération de ses contributions et opinions (lavallee, 2020 ; mohamed & beagan, 2019). ressources humaines et financières engagées pour impliquer les premiers peuples, il faut créer des postes, y compris aux plus hauts niveaux (ex. provost, cadres supérieurs) (boldo, 2022 ; hassen et al., 2021 ; tamtik & guenter, 2019) et donner des ressources humaines et financières suffisantes pour mener les actions suggérées (hassen et al, 2021 ; hussain, 2023 ; kezar & eckel, 2002 ; olle, 2018 ; pete, 2016 ; pitawanakwat & pedri-spade, 2022 ; raffoul et al., 2022 ; santa-ramirez et al., 2020). l'obstacle le plus important, même lorsque des administrataires autochtones sont recruté.e.s, est l'absence de pouvoirs, de personnel et de budgets suffisants pour soutenir les initiatives d'indigénisation (brunettehttp://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 debassige, 2021 ; brunette-debassige et al., 2022 ; pidgeon, 2008, 2016 ; povey et al., 2022 ; raffoul et al., 2022). limites de la littérature bien qu'il y ait un nombre croissant d'études examinant les politiques universitaires concernant les premiers peuples au « canada » (brunette-debassige, 2021 ; brunette-debassige et al, 2022 ; hussain, 2023 ; mullen, 2020 ; pidgeon, 2014, 2016 ; pitawanakwat & pedri-spade, 2022 ; povey et al., 2022 ; webb & mashford-pringle, 2022), peu d'études portent sur le « québec » (kairos, 2018 ; tamtik & guenter, 2019 ; wotherspoon & milne, 2020). parmi celles-ci, le « québec » se distingue comme la province ayant les pires scores concernant ses politiques autochtones en éducation, notamment en raison d'un manque de participation autochtone et de ressources (kairos, 2018 ; wotherspoon & milne, 2020) ou de l'absence de politiques (lefevre-radelli & dufour, 2016 ; lefevre-radelli & jérôme, 2017). un seul rapport s'intéresse spécifiquement aux politiques universitaires et aux actions institutionnelles au « québec » (jean, 2020). cependant, il se contente de signaler la présence d'initiatives concernant les premiers peuples, sans donner d'informations sur les processus, tel que la participation et la responsabilité, qui sont essentiels pour évaluer leur pertinence (harper & hurtado, 2007 ; pidgeon, 2016). compte tenu de l’augmentation croissante des politiques universitaires et du risque d'effets iatrogènes, une analyse critique des politiques universitaires semble nécessaire (iverson, 2007). de plus, la reproduction de la suprématie blanche et du colonialisme par le biais des politiques s'opère souvent de manière invisible et dissimulée par des pratiques qui semblent relever du sens commun (ahmed, 2020 ; brunette-debassige, 2021 ; smith et al., 2021), ce qui ajoute à la nécessité d'une analyse critique. par conséquent, cette étude vise à (1) documenter les politiques relatives aux premiers peuples mises en œuvre par les universités du « québec » et leur impact, et (2) analyser si elles représentent une base respectueuse, pertinente, réciproque et responsable pour guider la transformation des universités coloniales (pidgeon, 2016). méthode l'objectif était d'identifier les politiques concernant les premiers peuples dans toutes les universités du « québec » (18) et, le cas échéant, leur contenu et leur impact. par politiques, on entend les politiques à l'échelle de l'université (le terme politique institutionnelle sera utilisé pour rendre compte de cet aspect), telles que les politiques relatives aux étudiants internationaux dont disposent la plupart, sinon la totalité, des universités. procédure des mots-clés ont été identifiés pour les universités anglophones et francophones faisant référence aux identités autochtones (« indigenous », « first peoples », « first nations », « inuit », « métis »/« autochtone », « premiers peuples », « premières nations », « métis », « inuit »). ces mots-clés ont été recherchés à l'aide des outils de recherche sur chacun des sites web des 18 universités. les 50 premiers résultats ont été consultés. les résultats non spécifiques aux premiers peuples ont été consultés en fonction de l'apparition des mots-clés (par exemple, pour une politique sur le sexisme, les mots-clés ont été recherchés dans le document et seules ces parties ont été lues). les documents et pages spécifiques aux premiers peuples ont été lus entièrement, ainsi que chaque référence ou lien qu'ils contiennent. le mot-clé « plan d'action » a été recherché à la fin du document pour s'assurer qu'aucun résultat n'avait été omis. les premiers peuples sont l'un des quatre groupes désignés dans les http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 initiatives d'équité, de diversité et d'inclusion (edi) (femmes, personnes handicapées, personnes racialisées et peuples autochtones) ; tout le contenu de l'edi a donc été consulté. pour éviter les biais dus à la qualité des moteurs de recherche des sites web des universités, les mots clés ont également été recherchés sur google, avec le nom de l'université. cela a également permis de vérifier que rien n'avait été oublié. un courriel a été envoyé à chaque université pour présenter la recherche et demander si elle avait une politique concernant les premiers peuples. les courriels étaient adressés à la personne responsable du plan d'action pour les premiers peuples ou, en son absence, du plan d'action pour l'edi. la collecte des données s'est déroulée d'avril 2021 à juin 2021 et les courriels ont été envoyés en juin 2021. les 8 universités suivantes ont répondu au courriel et confirmél’absence de politique concernant les premiers peuples: uqat, teluq, uqar, uqam, université de sherbrooke, université laval, école de technologie supérieure (ets), concordia. cadre hollistique autochtone le cadre hollistique autochtone a été utilisé, élaboré par pidgeon (2014, 2016), une chercheure mi'kmaq travaillant dans le contexte « canadien ». ce cadre analyse les actions et les réponses institutionnelles à l'autochtonisation, d'un point de vue autochtone, en se concentrant sur les 4r (respect, pertinence, réciprocité et responsabilité) développés par kirkness et barnhardt (1991). ces principes permettent de faire la distinction entre une approche de type « cocher la case » et une véritable intégration et appréciation des premiers peuples et des savoirs et paradigmes autochtones. en d'autres termes, les actions permettent-elles une réelle transformation de l'institution ou continuent-elles à faire peser le poids de l'assimilation sur les premiers peuples (lefevre-radelli & jérôme, 2017b) ? les critères et conditions présentés dans le tableau 1 (p.12) sont issus de l'intégration, de manière opérationnelle, des deux analyses des universités « canadiennes » réalisées avec le cadre hollistique autochtone (pidgeon, 2014, 2016). l'incarnation d'actions institutionnelles responsables à travers le respect, la pertinence et la réciprocité peut être observée à travers de multiples critères, qui ont des indicateurs (voir tableau 1, p.12). reconnaissant la nécessité de prendre en compte les expériences locales, les critères identifiés, basés sur les provinces anglophones du « canada », correspondent également aux critères identifiés dans les universités du « québec » (lefevre-radelli & jérôme, 2017a ; pidgeon, 2016). au-delà de ces critères, la transformation des institutions passe par la reconnaissance de nos responsabilités envers les premiers peuples et la reddition de comptes autour de ces responsabilités (pidgeon, 2014). la participation, la spécificité et l’imputabilité des actions et l'engagement des ressources sont les conditions de toute action institutionnelle significative, responsable, respectueuse, réciproque et pertinente. les critères mentionnés résument le contenu des plans d'action (types d'actions), qui seront analysés selon les trois conditions (pidgeon, 2014, 2016) : 1. niveau de participation (nombre et pouvoir) 2. spécificité (quoi, comment, dates, résultats, objectif) et imputabilité (indicateurs mesurables et suivi). 3. ressources engagées (humaines, financières, à long terme). 1. le niveau de participation est évalué par le nombre de membres des premiers peuples impliqués et par une indication claire de leur niveau de pouvoir dans la prise de décision. le seuil à franchir pour aller au-delà du tokénisme et passer à une véritable participation, impliquant un pouvoir http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 sur les décisions et la gouvernance, est le niveau 6, selon l'échelle d'arnstein (1969) (maximum 8), voir la figure 1 ci-dessous. le niveau 6 correspond à une parité entre les premiers peuples et les allochtones et à une certaine influence, sans avoir le pouvoir de faire respecter leurs décisions. les niveaux 7 et 8 impliquent une majorité de premiers peuples, avec une délégation de pouvoir (7) et un pouvoir total sur le processus (8) (arnstein, 1969). le niveau de participation est particulièrement important pour la création des politiques, mais il est également pris en compte dans la spécificité et la responsabilité des actions (ex : spécifier qu'une personne autochtone sera responsable de l'autochtonisation des programmes d'études), ainsi que dans l'engagement des ressources (ex : embaucher des personnes autochtones). 2. les actions doivent être spécifiques (quoi, comment, dates, résultats, objectif visé) pour être imputables et indiquer qui est responsable. par exemple, « explorer diverses stratégies pour retenir les étudiants autochtones dans le personnel, comme les stages et les contrats à court terme » (udem, 2020, p. 13) n'est pas assez précis pour permettre la reddition de comptes, alors que « lancer un recrutement par cohorte, dirigé par le vice-recteur et le viceproviseur pour embaucher, au cours des trois prochaines années, 10 nouveaux membres du corps professoral menant à la permanence ayant des expériences vécues et une expertise dans les savoirs, les visions du monde, les méthodologies, l'histoire, les langues, les traditions, la justice ou les gouvernances autochtones. ces postes ne peuvent pas être concentrés dans une seule faculté » (provost's task force on indigenous studies and indigenous education, 2017, p. 18) est un excellent exemple de spécificité. il indique des objectifs clairs, des résultats mesurables, des responsables et anticipe des écueils potentiels. 3. l'engagement des ressources exige que les politiques indiquent clairement l’attribution de ressources financières et humaines pour réaliser les actions. par exemple, affirmer que les connaissances et les langues autochtones seront intégrées, sans préciser le recrutement et les ressources nécessaires pour le faire, ne répond pas à ce critère. résultats résultat 1: politiques concernant les premiers peuples aucune des 18 universités du « québec » n'a de politique institutionnelle concernant les premiers peuples. bien que les premiers peuples soient parfois inclus dans les groupes désignés (ex : violence sexuelle dans les universités), il n'y a pas de politique spécifique aux premiers peuples et aucune politique n'aborde la spécificité des premiers peuples (ex : aucune mention du colonialisme et du racisme envers les premiers peuples dans les politiques relatives à la discrimination). une université (sherbrooke) dispose d'une politique d'admission des premiers peuples au baccalauréat en droit. cependant, cette politique est limitée à un programme dans une faculté et ne s'applique pas à l'ensemble de l'université. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 figure 1. échelle de participation de arnstein note. les niveaux 1 à 3 de l’échelle de arnstein correspondent à la non-participation. comme ces niveaux ne s’appliquent à aucun des plans d’actions à l’étude, ils ont été exclus pour simplifier la figure. résultat 2: plan d’action équité, diversité et inclusion (édi) les premiers peuples sont surtout mentionnés dans les plans d'action sur l'équité, la diversité et l'inclusion (édi) ou dans les plans d'action spécifiques aux premiers peuples. 72% (13 sur 18) des universités n'ont pas de plan d'action spécifique aux premiers peuples. 17% (3/18) n'ont ni plan d'action en matière d'édi ni plan d'action concernant les premiers peuples (enap, polytechnique, teluq). l'une d'entre elles (polytechnique) est en train d'élaborer un plan d'action sur l'édi. en résumé, 56% (10/18) des universités ne mentionnent les premiers peuples que dans les plans d'action édi, tandis que 17% (3/18) ne mentionnent les premiers peuples dans aucune politique institutionnelle. bien que les premiers peuples fassent partie des quatre groupes désignés dans les plans d'action édi, aucune des universités ne prévoit d'actions spécifiques et responsables concernant les premiers peuples. en d'autres termes, aucune université n'aborde les premiers peuples de manière adéquate (participation, spécificité et imputabilité des actions et engagement des ressources) dans son plan d'action édi. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 résultat 3: plan d’action premiers peuples seules 5 universités (28%) ont des plans d'action spécifiques aux premiers peuples et ont été incluses dans le tableau 1. l'une d'entre elles (université de sherbrooke) est en train d'élaborer un plan d'action spécifique aux premiers peuples. cocher une case dans le tableau ne signifie pas que l'action est réalisée, mais seulement qu'elle a été mentionnée dans le plan d'action. la capacité de cette mention à mener à un réel changement transformateur (de la parole à l'action) dépend du respect des trois conditions. conditions pour une action institutionnelle significative participation trois universités atteignent un niveau de participation supérieur au tokénisme (niveau 6/8, partenariat) : l'université laval, l'uqat et concordia, cette dernière présentant le plus haut niveau de participation autochtone (arnstein, 1969). l'université de montréal et mcgill se situent aux niveaux 4/8 et 5/8, en raison de l'absence d'indications sur l'attribution aux premiers peuples de postes de pouvoir ou de gouvernance (université de montréal) ou sur le nombre de premiers peuples (mcgill). le plan d'action de l'université de montréal indique que les premiers peuples n'ont été inclus qu'après un diagnostic initial de l'université, suivi de consultations paritaires pour identifier les appels à l'action. l'implication des premiers peuples dans les étapes ultérieures ou dans des positions de pouvoir n’est pas mentionné. en outre, les instances officielles ont été désignées comme responsables des actions. pourtant, le même plan d'action souligne l'absence des premiers peuples à ces postes. ainsi, le niveau de participation semble être de 4, consultation, ce qui reste dans le domaine du tokénisme(inférieur à 6) (arnstein, 1969). le plan d'action de mcgill fait preuve d'une grande transparence, énumérant tous les membres du groupe et les détails du processus, indiquant que la consultation des premiers peuples (à l'intérieur et à l'extérieur de l'université) était obligatoire. les rapports et les recommandations de chaque groupe sont également inclus. bien qu'il soit possible d'identifier les premiers peuples à partir de la liste des membres (ex : ainé en résidence), le document n'indique pas la composition (majorité ou parité de premiers peuples et d’allochtones), ni le pouvoir ou la gouvernance. il n'est donc pas possible d'affirmer que le niveau de participation de mcgill était supérieur à 5/8 (placation) (arnstein, 1969). le plan d'action de l'uqat est similaire à celui de mcgill : la liste des membres est disponible, mais il n'y a aucune indication de leur identité ou de la composition (parité ou majorité). le niveau de participation pour la création du plan est d'au moins 4/8, mais un niveau de participation plus élevé (6, partenariat) était évident pour la mise en œuvre, avec des postes de gouvernance désignés. le plan d'action de l'université laval a été rédigé par un comité de réflexion, coprésidé par la directrice de kiuna (un collège autochtone). le comité était paritaire, tant au niveau des participants que de la gouvernance, sans délégation complète de pouvoir, ce qui implique un partenariat (niveau 6/8). le plan d'action de concordia a été dirigé, créé et rédigé par le indigenous directions leadership group, composé presque exclusivement de membres des premières nations. le plan d'action indique clairement la participation des premiers peuples au pouvoir, par la création de postes et d'une http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 structure de gouvernance (ex. : « un conseil permanent de leadership des directions autochtones à l'échelle de l'université qui relève directement du vice-recteur et qui comprend principalement des membres des communautés autochtones » (groupe, 2019, p. 10)). par conséquent, le niveau de participation de concordia se situe à 7/8, avec une majorité de membres des premiers peuples et une délégation de pouvoir, sans contrôle total. spécificité et imputabilité sur les cinq universités, seule concordia répond à tous les critères de spécificité et de responsabilité. deux plans d'action (université de montréal, uqat) ne sont spécifiques qu'au niveau des actions, mais manquent d’imputabilité (comment, résultats mesurables et objectifs). l'université de montréal précise les échéances et les responsables des actions (quoi, quand, qui). cependant, il n'y a pas d'objectifs clairs et de résultats mesurables qui permettraient de rendre des comptes. le plan d'action de l'uqat présente des actions concrètes, avec les objectifs prévus. la cogouvernance, le suivi et l'obligation de rendre compte, qui impliquent une forte participation des premiers peuples, sont souvent inclus dans le plan d'action. par exemple, « ajouter, dans tous les documents sur la création, l'évaluation et la révision des programmes, des questions sur la façon dont les réalités autochtones sont considérées et incluses » (p.5). cependant, le plan d'action ne présente pas de résultats mesurables ou d'indicateurs de succès pour les actions, sauf lorsque les actions sont la création d'un poste ou d'une instance. les dates et les responsables des actions ne sont pas indiqués non plus. deux plans d'action (université laval et l'université mcgill) ne sont spécifiques qu'en matière d’imputabilité (structure de gouvernance) mais manquent de spécificité dans les actions. le plan d'action de l'université laval manque de précision quant à la manière dont les objectifs seront atteints, quand ils le seront et aux résultats attendus. bien que le plan d'action spécifie la création d'une structure de gouvernance pour le mettre en œuvre, il ne répond pas aux critères de spécificité, ce qui entrave l’imputabilité (sans objectifs clairs, il est impossible d'évaluer s'ils ont été atteints). l’imputabilité de mcgill semble se situer entre un niveau partiel et élevé. la plupart des actions n'indiquent pas de responsable, mais l'appel à la création d'un bureau des initiatives autochtones semble être le mécanisme central d’imputabilité et de suivi. de même, si certaines actions ne présentent pas de résultats mesurables, c'est peut-être en raison de leur caractère novateur, par exemple « prendre des mesures concrètes pour que tou.te.s les étudiants autochtones inscrits à mcgill soient dispensés des droits de scolarité (à moyen terme) » (p.8). ressources seules deux universités précisent engager des ressources dans leurs plans d'action (concordia et mcgill), y compris la création de nouveaux postes, leur budget et une équipe de soutien pour assurer la réalisation des actions. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 tableau 1 conditions et critères pour une action institutionnelle respectueuse, pertinente, réciproque et responsable université laval université de montréal université concordia université mcgill uqat conditions indicateurs score score score score score participation nombre (minoritaire, parité, majoritaire) et pouvoir niveau 6 (paritaire sans délégation pouvoir) niveau 4 (consultation paritaire, sans pouvoir) niveau 7 (majoritaire et gouvernance sans contrôle total) niveau 5 (placation ) niveau 4-6 (consultationpartenariat) spécificité et imputabilité action spécifique et imputable (comment, date, résultats, indicateurs mesurables, suivi) insuffisant (manque de spécifité mais structure de gouvernance) insuffisant (spécificité générale mais absence d'imputabilité) élevé moyen (variable entre très et pas spécifique, structure de gouvernance) insuffisant (spécifique en général, sauf indicateurs et imputabilité) ressources engagées humaines, financières, à long terme moyen insuffisant élevé élevé moyen critères indicateurs mention mention mention mention mention général, mentions de relations x x x x x long terme x x x x x recherche x x x x x proximité x x x x position de pouvoir poste x x intégration des savoirs autochtones x x x x x revitalisation des langues autochtones x x x x x poste désigné x x adaptation des bibliothèques x x adapter les conditions x x x auto-identification possible x x x places réservées ou représentativité x faciliter l'accès, recrutement x x x x agent.e.s de soutien/ employé.e.s x x x x x hébergement adapté x x x x accompagnement académique, financier, etc. x x x x x paiement par un tiers possible x lieu de rencontre (local) x x x autochtonisation des espaces physiques x x x x ↑ recrutement et rétention (corps étudiant) x x x x x ↑ recrutement et rétention (corps professoral) x x x x programmes de transitions x programmes adaptés aux réalités autochtones x x x x protocoles culturels x x x reconnaissance du territoire x x attribution de promotion et permanence adaptée x x x présence d’un conseil consultatif autochtone x x x position formelle pour implantation plan action x x x formation (réalités autochtones, éthique, etc.) x x x x x cours (contenu autochtone) x x x x x nombre d'indicateurs mentionnés par le plan 14/32 23/32 28/32 25/32 20/32 soutien hollistique (physique, financier, académique, social et culturel) est-ce que les universités du "québec" engagent les conditions et actions nécessaires pour une réelle transformation? sensibilisation corps étudiant et professoral relations responsables et gouvernance relations curriculum et pratiques pédagogiques processus d'admission culturellement pertinent pertinence et réciprocité http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 14 critères tel que mentionné, les conditions sont plus importantes à considérer que les critères : alors que les critères représentent des types d'actions, les conditions dictent la probabilité que ces mots deviennent des actions. considérer uniquement les critères (les cases cochées) dans le tableau crée un portrait très différent de si l'on considère le respect des conditions (en vert) (voir tableau 1). par exemple, l'université de montréal coche 23/32 des critères, le contenu des plans d'action comprenant un grand nombre d'actions favorables. cependant, l'absence de conditions (participation, spécificité et imputabilité des actions et ressources) signifie que ces actions sont moins susceptibles d'être mises en œuvre de manière pertinente, respectueuse, réciproque et responsable. ce contraste met en évidence l'objectif du cadre hollistique autochtone : analyser les politiques transformatives audelà des approches de type « cocher la case ». types d’actions la création de postes désignés, qui impliquent l'engagement de ressources à long terme, est une lacune majeure des plans d'action, car c’est l’action qui est la moins appliquée. par exemple, tous les plans d'action mentionnent l'importance des relations avec les premiers peuples, en particulier dans la recherche. cependant, seules deux universités (concordia et uqat) désignent des postes pour veiller à ce que ce travail soit effectué, et aucune ne mentionne l'attribution d'un poste de pouvoir à un membre de la communauté. de même, toutes les universités mentionnent l'intégration des savoirs autochtones dans les programmes d'études et la revitalisation des langues autochtones, mais seules deux d'entre elles désignent un poste à cet effet (concordia et uqat). au contraire, certaines actions sont facilement envisagées par les universités. par exemple, tous les plans d'action autochtone visent l’augmentation du recrutement et de la rétention des étudiants autochtones, l’embauche d’agents de soutien et l’offre de plusieurs formes de soutien (académique, financier, etc.). toutes les universités mentionnent l'intégration de contenu autochtone ou de cours concernant les peuples autochtones dans divers programmes (certains obligatoires) et mentionnent des ateliers et de la formation pour les enseignantes et les étudiantes. discussion edi: l’invisibilisation du racisme et du colonialisme aucune des universités du « québec » n'a de politique concernant les premiers peuples. la grande majorité des universités (78%) n'ont pas d'action institutionnelle (ex. plan d'action) spécifique aux premiers peuples (14/18). 56 % ont un plan d'action édi qui mentionne les premiers peuples comme faisant partie des quatre groupes désignés. cependant, aucun de ces plans édi ne comporte d'actions spécifiques et imputables envers les premiers peuples. ceci correspond aux critiques d'ahmed (2007a, 2007b) sur l'augmentation, toujours d’actualités, des initiatives d'édi dans les universités en amérique du nord, qui semblent créer une image positive des universités plutôt qu'un réel effort pour aborder les inégalités sociales. ces termes généraux peuvent reproduire les inégalités, car les groupes les plus opprimés sont les moins représentés, avec des actions qui ne tiennent pas compte de leurs réalités et de leurs besoins, ce qui ne fait qu'accroître l'écart (ahmed, 2007a). comme suggéré, les universités canadiennes font état d'une absence notable de personnes autochtones dans les postes de direction ou de pouvoir http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 15 (henry et al., 2017), leur nombre étant souvent si faible qu'il n'est pas possible de les rapporter (smith, 2019). lorsqu'elles sont présentes, elles manquent de pouvoir, sont sous-financées et surchargées de travail (povey et al., 2022 ; raffoul et al., 2022). par conséquent, les initiatives autochtones sont souvent dirigées par une femme blanche, puisqu’elles sont le groupe édi le plus représenté (brunette-debassige, 2021), et elles ne sont pas confrontées aux mêmes obstacles que les premiers peuples pour accéder à des postes de direction dans le milieu universitaire (johnson & howsam, 2020). en effet, la représentation des femmes augmente constamment et reste la plus élevée parmi les quatre groupes (canada, 2019 ; johnson & howsam, 2020), tandis que la représentation des premiers peuples diminue malgré leur disponibilité accrue, ce qui suggère le racisme systémique et le colonialisme comme cause principale (commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse, 2020 ; uqam, 2020). ainsi, les plans d'action édi semblent inadéquats pour réduire les inégalités envers les premiers peuples. cela souligne la nécessité de mettre en place des politiques institutionnelles spécifiques aux premiers peuples et de réviser les politiques actuelles pour considération adéquatement les premiers peuples dans l'ensemble de l'institution (ex. les politiques pour les étudiants qui sont parents). pour l'instant, la prise en compte des premiers peuples semble être une réflexion après coup plutôt qu'un engagement clair de l'institution : pour les documents non spécifiques, la plupart des mentions des premiers peuples se trouvaient dans les annexes ou les définissaient simplement comme faisant partie des groupes désignés par l’édi. en effet, les initiatives édi peuvent invisibiliser les premiers peuples par des termes généraux (zinga & styres, 2019) qui ne reconnaissent pas et ne confrontent pas le colonialisme de peuplement (mcallister et al., 2019 ; muehlmann, 2009 ; raffoul et al., 2022). seules deux universités ont mentionné le colonialisme (concordia et mcgill) dans leurs plans d'action, ce qui signifie que la plupart n'ont pas mentionné le colonialisme, dans un plan d'action qui est censés adresser les impacts du colonialisme. ce manque de reconnaissance signifie également qu'il n'y a pas de responsabilisation et de réparation pour les violences coloniales passées et présentes, comme l’implication dans les pensionnats, les violences médicales et scientifiques et le vol des terres (daigle, 2019 ; pitawanakwat et pedri-spade, 2022 ; steinman et scoggins, 2020 ; thunig et jones, 2021). en outre, le fait de ne pas reconnaître le colonialisme comme la cause des inégalités représente les personnes autochtones comme responsables (ex. sous-performantes plutôt que vivant des oppressions) (bishop, 2021 ; brunette-debassige, 2021 ; hogarth, 2015, 2017 ; kidman, 2020 ; mullen, 2020 ; taylor, 2004 ; wotherspoon & milne, 2020). cela crée une approche axée sur les déficits, en mettant l'accent sur les lacunes et les déficiences. ceci pourrait avoir d'importantes répercussions négatives, car ce discours « d'aide » plutôt que de prise de responsabilité résonne avec les représentations des premiers peuples comme dépendants et ayant trop de problèmes (morrison et al., 2008 ; morrison et al., 2014 ; saïas et al., 2020). en conséquence, la grande majorité (89 %, soit 16 sur 18) des plans d'action concernant les premiers peuples tous pour les plans édi sont axés sur les déficits car : ils se concentrent sur la sous-représentation, visent à accroître la présence de personnes « diverses », ne reconnaissent pas le colonialisme et le racisme et ne centrent pas le rôle et les responsabilités de l'institution (wotherspoon & milne, 2020). en outre, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 16 aucune des universités du québec ne dispose de politiques ou de stratégies spécifiques contre le racisme. par conséquent, les politiques universitaires échouent à adresser les normes de blancheur et la suprématie blanche qui sous-tendent les dynamiques de pouvoir continues du colonialisme (daigle, 2019 ; dar, 2019 ; kerr et al., 2022 ; mcallister et al., 2019 ; naepi et al., 2017 ; parasram, 2019). au contraire, le racisme est à peine reconnu (jones et al., 2023), ce qui entraîne l'absence de politiques et de responsabilité pour les incidents racistes et coloniaux (locke et al., 2023). pourtant, ces plans d'action premiers peuples et édi peuvent être utilisés pour détourner les critiques de racisme ou d'inaction (naepi, 2019), avec un effet pervers de reconduire les normes coloniales (daigle, 2019). en d'autres termes, des politiques autochtones inadéquates peuvent renforcer le colonialisme et nuire aux premiers peuples sous le couvert de l'équité (pitawanakwat & pedri-spade, 2022 ; steinman & kovats sánchez, 2021). par leur absence de langage antiraciste, de désignation du colonialisme et de mécanismes et politiques de dénonciation du racisme et du colonialisme (hassen et al., 2021 ; pete, 2016 ; pitawanakwat & pedrispade, 2022), les universités du « québec » ne s'attaquent pas au racisme et au colonialisme et n'en assument pas la responsabilité (gunstone, 2008, 2020 ; moore, 1995 ; pidgeon, 2014, 2016). inclusion conditionnelle, pas de décolonisation les résultats montrent que les actions autour de « l’inclusion » ou des services visant à faciliter l'adaptation des premiers peuples (ex. agent.e.s de soutien) aux universités sont plus facilement mises en œuvre que les actions permettant de changer l'institution (ex. autochtoniser le contenu), ce qui fait écho aux dynamiques d'assimilation (ahmed, 2020 ; kuokkanen, 2011 ; lefevre-radelli, 2019 ; lloyd & wolfe, 2016 ; steinman & scoggins, 2020 ; tamtik & guenter, 2019). par conséquent, les actions actuelles des universités du « québec » se concentrent sur l'intégration des peuples et des contenus autochtones, plutôt que sur la remise en question et la décolonisation de l'institution. cela correspond aux conclusions que les universités au « canada » résistent encore à la reconnaissance et à la centralisation des visions du monde et des savoirs autochtones au-delà du colonialisme épistémique (pio et al., 2014 ; raffoul et al., 2022 ; wotherspoon & milne, 2020). ce type de changement isolé, sans aborder les préjugés et le racisme, est un ajustement (eckel & kezar, 2003) qui empêche de s'attaquer aux causes profondes (henry et al., 2017 ; yee & wagner, 2013). il s'agit d'une inclusion conditionnelle coloniale (stein, 2019) ou d'une autochtonisation en tant qu'inclusion (gaudry & lorenz, 2018) où aucun changement systémique substantiel n'est apporté et où le fardeau du changement est imposé aux peuples autochtones tout en maintenant le statu quo. est-ce que les universités respectent les conditions pour un changement transformateur? parmi les universités du « québec », le plan d'action premiers peuples de concordia contient le plus de critères (28/32), suivi de mcgill (25/32), de l'université de montréal (23/32), de l'uqat (20/32) et de l'université laval (14/32). cependant, seule concordia respecte les trois conditions d'une action institutionnelle respectueuse, pertinente, réciproque et responsable. cela signifie que, bien que les universités mentionnent de nombreuses actions dans leurs documents, il est peu probable que ces mentions aillent audelà des intentions. http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 17 en dehors de concordia, un niveau de participation dépassant le tokénisme, impliquant une majorité de premiers peuples, avec du pouvoir et leur gouvernance sur le plan d’action, est un défaut majeur des plans d'action. tel que présenté en introduction, l'absence de ces conditions et le manque de ressources financières et humaines suffisantes peuvent avoir des effets iatrogènes sur les personnes autochtones qui effectuent le travail, créant des dynamiques d'exploitation, de tokénisme et de marginalisation (brunette-debassige et al., 2022 ; locke et al., 2023 ; raffoul et al., 2022 ; steinman & scoggins, 2020 ; thunig & jones, 2021). la plupart des universités n'ont pas rempli les conditions de spécificité et d’imputabilité des actions, ce qui correspond aux conclusions de pidgeon (2016) selon lesquelles une formulation peu claire fait souvent obstacle à l'action transformatrice. cette lacune dans le suivi et la transparence des rapports des universités correspond à la littérature où les premiers peuples ont noté les tendances des universités à s’autoféliciter et représenter leurs actions institutionnelles de manière positive dans leurs rapports (brunette-debassige, 2021 ; mcallister et al., 2019 ; steinman & kovats sánchez, 2021). ces résultats indiquent un écart important entre le contenu des plans d'action et la participation, la spécificité, l’imputabilité et l'engagement des ressources qu'ils requièrent. par conséquent, selon le cadre hollistique autochtone (pidgeon, 2014, 2016), les actions institutionnelles des universités « québécoises », par le biais de plans d'action (et l'absence d'un plan spécifique aux premiers peuples) semblent reproduire le tokénisme avec une approche « cocher la case », sans réelle transformation du pouvoir et des dynamiques coloniales. comparaison avec le « canada » et d’autres colonies de peuplement déjà soulignés en 2016 (lefevre-radelli & dufour), les écarts entre le « québec » et les autres provinces « canadiennes » et entre les universités anglophones et francophones persistent. les universités anglophones sont surreprésentées parmi les universités ayant un plan d'action autochtone (40%, concordia et mcgill), alors qu'elles ne représentent que 3 des 18 universités (17%). alors que 85% des universités « canadiennes » avaient un plan d’action incluant l'autochtonisation et que 63% avaient un plan d'autochtonisation en 2020 (raffoul et al., 2022), cette étude montre que les universités « québécoises » sont encore loin derrière (respectivement 53% et 26%). par exemple, en date de 2020, 77% des universités « canadiennes » avaient embauché une personne pour un poste spécifique à l’éducation en lien avec les premiers peuples (raffoul et al., 2022) et lui avaient accordé des fonds annuels (brunettedebassige et al., 2022), alors qu’en 2021, seulement 10% des universités « québécoises » prévoient embaucher une personne. alors que les universités internationales et « canadiennes » sont de 5 à 10 ans d’avance dans le travail de décolonisation et malgré leurs appels à faire mieux (jones et al., 2023 ; mcallister et al., 2019 ; naepi et al., 2020), le québec semble reproduire une approche axée sur l'inclusion et le tokénisme, n'arrivant pas à promouvoir des changements structurels (brunette-debassige, 2021 ; gaudry & lorenz, 2018 ; raffoul et al., 2022 ; steinman & scoggins, 2020 ; tamtik & guenter, 2019). comparaison avec la littérature les insuffisances des universités « québécoises » correspondent à la littérature antérieure : les politiques et les règles http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 18 institutionnelles sont les actions les moins mises en œuvre (jean, 2020). malgré de multiples publications soulignant la nécessité de politiques concernant les premiers peuples, la situation reste inchangée (jean, 2020 ; lefevre-radelli, 2019 ; lefevre-radelli & dufour, 2016 ; lefevre-radelli & jérôme, 2017a). cependant, cette analyse contredit le rapport de 2019, selon lequel plus des 2/3 (67 %) des universités prennent en compte les premiers peuples dans leur planification stratégique, avec des actions spécifiques (jean, 2020). ce rapport ayant été réalisé avec des universités, il est possible qu'ils aient eu accès à plus d'informations. cependant, leurs informations semblent basées sur ce que les universités disent d'elles-mêmes : 13 des universités qui ont répondu ont déclaré que leur planification stratégique mentionne les premiers peuples, y compris des actions spécifiques (jean, 2020, p. 20). ce contraste reflète l'écart entre ce que les universités disent d'elles-mêmes et l'étendue de leurs actions institutionnelles, ce qui souligne l'objectif du cadre hollistique autochtone (pidgeon, 2016). en effet, l'absence d'un tel cadre peut donner une image plus positive des universités, permettant aux adaptations de sembler transformatrices (eckel & kezar, 2003 ; pidgeon, 2016). limites cette étude, basée sur les plans d'action et les documents officiels, est incomplète. tout d'abord, des actions et des initiatives peuvent être présentes sans être mentionnées dans les plans d'action. de même, le niveau de participation et les ressources engagées pourraient être plus élevés qu'estimés s'ils n'étaient pas mentionnés dans les plans d'action. d'autre part, une condition pour de bonnes actions institutionnelles est précisément l’imputabilité, qui exige transparence et spécificité (eckel & kezar, 2003 ; pidgeon, 2016). dans ce cas, le manque de clarté et l'absence de politiques autochtones pourraient être considérés comme un manque d'engagement des universités envers les premiers peuples (daigle, 2019 ; eizadirad & campbell, 2021 ; gunstone, 2008). d'autre part, le fait de se concentrer sur les politiques et les initiatives institutionnelles peut être réducteur de pratiques autochtones qui ne peuvent pas être exprimées dans des objectifs opérationnels, par exemple (steinman & kovats sánchez, 2021). cela présente le risque d'invisibiliser le travail et les résistances des premiers peuples : ces politiques sont le fruit de décennies d'activisme autochtone (kerr et al., 2022 ; steinman & kovats sánchez, 2021 ; steinman & scoggins, 2020), l'exigence des politiques édi elles-mêmes sont le résultat de dénonciations et de poursuite contre le sexisme, le capacitisme, le racisme et le colonialisme des universités « canadiennes » (side & robbins, 2007). deuxièmement, la formulation des critères et des conditions, bien que basée sur les travaux de pidgeon, a été rédigée par un colon et pourrait ne pas refléter correctement le cadre hollistique autochtone (pidgeon, 2014, 2016). par définition, ce cadre exige une approche holistique, centrée sur les expériences, les sentiments et le bien-être des personnes concernées par les politiques. cette analyse peut ne pas refléter les expériences vécues par les premiers peuples au sein de leur université, ce qui est le facteur central. par conséquent, une université qui ne remplit pas les critères et les conditions en théorie peut les remplir en réalité. par exemple, l'uqat est citée ailleurs comme un exemple de décolonisation et d'autochtonisation, bien qu'elle ne remplisse pas les conditions sur papier (capres, 2018). d’ailleurs, leur réponse par courriel indique que l'uqat a mis en place de multiples pratiques, services http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 19 et inclut les premiers peuples dans la prise de décision (conseil d'administration, comité d'éthique de la recherche, conseil des programmes, etc.), ce qu'ils considèrent comme plus approprié et pertinent que l'établissement de politiques. conclusion cet article démontre que malgré l’apparence d’une reconnaissance croissante des premiers peuples, ceux-ci sont toujours complètement absents des politiques institutionnelles dans les universités du « québec ». l'invisibilisation des premiers peuples dans les politiques apparaît comme un reflet, ainsi qu'un mécanisme (ex. le manque de mentors autochtones) qui maintient l'absence des premiers peuples dans les universités. sur les 18 universités du « québec », une seule (6 %) dispose d'un plan d'action spécifique aux premiers peuples qui répond aux trois conditions de participation, de spécificité et d'imputabilité des actions et d'engagement des ressources (pidgeon, 2016). par conséquent, les actions des universités envers les premiers peuples au « québec » semblent performatives et reproduire le colonialisme. un peu plus de la moitié des universités ont des plans d'action édi, qui représentent un niveau d'autorité inférieur à celui des politiques, et, bien qu'ils incluent théoriquement les premiers peuples, ils ne les prennent pas en compte de manière adéquate. cela concorde avec la littérature soulignant que les universités peuvent exprimer un engagement envers la diversité tout en travaillant contre elle (naepi, 2019 ; steinman & kovats sánchez, 2021). en effet, elles reproduisent des actions institutionnelles inadéquates axées sur l'équité qui ne s'attaquent pas au racisme structurel, au colonialisme et à la suprématie blanche sous-jacente (hussain, 2023 ; maclachlan, 2017 ; parasram, 2019 ; raffoul et al., 2022) au-delà des plans d'action, les politiques institutionnelles sont nécessaires pour des approches et des stratégies holistiques dans l'ensemble de l'université, avec des ressources durables et continues permettant des actions concertées et des recours si les politiques ne sont pas respectées (axworthy et al., 2016 ; louie, 2019 ; provost's task force on indigenous studies and indigenous education, 2017). les universités « québécoises » prennent des engagements inapplicables en matière de diversité en omettant de prévoir des ressources pour leur mise en œuvre et de donner du pouvoir aux premiers peuples (ahenakew et naepi, 2015 ; ahmed, 2016, 2020 ; pitawanakwat et pedrispade, 2022 ; raffoul et al., 2022 ; steinman et scoggins, 2020). les politiques continueront d'échouer à adresser le colonialisme si le pouvoir reste entre les mains d'une majorité de personnes blanches descendantes de colons, qui contrôlent les formes d'identités et savoirs autochtones qui sont accueillies ou non (kerr et al., 2022 ; locke et al., 2023 ; pitawanakwat & pedri-spade, 2022 ; tamtik & guenter, 2019). les universités devraient s'inspirer des institutions dirigées par des premiers peuples, telles que kiuna et l'université des premières nations : « alors que les établissements du « canada » tentent de s’autochtoniser et d'offrir un soutien aux étudiants autochtones, l'université des premières nations a toujours été une université autochtonisée » (bighead, 2019, p.16). les universités allochtones font preuve d’un manque de changements réels et audacieux, tels que la possibilité pour les premiers peuples d'étudier dans leur langue à l’université (hussain, 2023), la promotion et la mise en œuvre de gouvernances autochtones (povey et al., 2022 ; raffoul et al., 2022), s’engager dans la relationnalité et la responsabilité grâce à la participation de communautés autochtones, tel que l’implication d’ainé.e.s et des protocoles autochtones locaux (brunette-debassige, http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 20 2021 ; cote-meek, 2020 ; kirkness & barnhardt, 1991 ; pete, 2016 ; pidgeon, 2008 ; pitawanakwat & pedri-spade, 2022 ; raffoul et al., 2022 ; steinman & scoggins, 2020) et la cessation de l'occupation des terres volées (daigle, 2019). cela ne signifie pas que les politiques institutionnelles n'ont eu aucun effet ou ne sont pas utiles (kerr et al., 2022 ; povey et al., 2022), mais plutôt que nous devons assurer les conditions nécessaires pour qu'elles ne se fassent pas au détriment ni au coût des premiers peuples, comme cela a été le cas jusqu’à maintenant (brunette-debassige, 2021 ; povey et al., 2022 ; steinman & kovats sánchez, 2021). références ahenakew, c., & naepi, s. 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(2020). what do indigenous education policy frameworks reveal about commitments to reconciliation in canadian school systems? the http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://uofaawa.wordpress.com/awadiversity-gap-campaign/ https://uofaawa.wordpress.com/awadiversity-gap-campaign/ https://www.umontreal.ca/public/www/images/autochtones/udem_plandaction_premierspeuples_final.pdf https://www.umontreal.ca/public/www/images/autochtones/udem_plandaction_premierspeuples_final.pdf https://www.umontreal.ca/public/www/images/autochtones/udem_plandaction_premierspeuples_final.pdf https://doi.org/10.7202/1086427ar global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 2 august 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 26 international indigenous policy journal, 11(1), 1-29. yahia, l. (2016). voices of racialized and indigenous leaders in canadian universities thompson rivers university]. yee, j. y., & wagner, a. e. (2013). is antioppression teaching in canadian social work classrooms a form of neoliberalism? social work education, 32(3), 331-348. http://www.gjcpp.org/ kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 serving others to inspire community change around the globe: an interview with balbir mathur emily a. grant b.a. interviewee: balbir mathur, founder and president of trees for life international describes how his need to serve others and his love for our world has led him on an incredible journey, impacting millions of people across the globe. interviewer: emily a. grant b.a. is a graduate student in the wichita state university department of community psychology. global journal of community psychology practice volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 serving others to inspire community change around the globe: an interview with balbir mathur the work of trees for life (tfl) international started in the early 1980’s with teaching villagers in india to plant and care for fruit trees. this initiative rapidly spread to many countries throughout the world. since then, millions of lives around the globe have been touched by trees for life. their challenge is to create and demonstrate models that, if successful, may inspire others to solve their own problems. their focus is on developing and providing the tools of empowerment to local community leaders who create hope among others. balbir mathur, founder and president of trees for life, took some time to answer some questions about how trees for life came to be, the philosophies it holds and tools that others can use to mobilize communities globally. what need were you trying to address when trees for life was first created? first of all, i was not trying to create something. trees for life emerged as a byproduct; it was not the goal. in our society, often people believe there is something wrong with the world and that they can fix it. i come from a different point of view. i cannot even change the color of one hair on my head, so the idea of changing the world is something i don’t comprehend. the “need” was within me. i needed to find a way to serve others. just like a candle can only fulfill its purpose by burning. that is how it is designed. i had an internal need to express my love for the universe. when i give my wife a flower, it is not because i think she needs it, or that something is lacking. i do it to express my love. trees for life grew out of my desire to express myself and my love. when i started doing that, it attracted other people who resonated with it. these people don’t come saying, “i’m here because the world needs something.” there is a big difference between a lover giving a flower to their beloved, and a shopkeeper saying, “people need flowers, so i will sell flowers to them.” the flower is the same, but it means something very different. so, serving as an expression of your love, not because you think someone else needs it, is what the whole movement of tfl has been built around. can you tell me about some pivotal moments in tfl history which have made it what it is today? when i first started, i had to give up a very successful business. i still needed to maintain my family and pay the bills, so i looked for a job where i could fulfill what was driving me from inside. but i could not find anything that really fit, so i took the risk and decided to do what i am designed to do – to serve people. my wife and i not only went through all the family savings, but we also went deep into debt. however, the urge or drive was so strong that there was no way i could give it up. then volunteers started coming, because they were attracted to the idea and were not after money. after a couple years, david (the current executive director) showed up and started volunteering. one day, i realized he had quit his job and was at tfl all day, even though we had no money to pay him. he was going through the same cycle that i had gone through. there are very few places for people like us. global journal of community psychology practice volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 this event brought a major shift in my thinking. it dawned on me that my purpose was to create a platform for others to do their dance. my journey got defined: i was to create a platform so that these angels could dance. another pivotal moment took place in india. someone gave us 40 acres of barren land to create a training center. i went there and did 5 days of fasting, prayer and silence. it was very hot during that time, ranging from 118 to 125 degrees. but i had to get permission from the land to serve it. after that, everything we did there was very successful. a movement started immediately. we had a community of people involved within 15-20 days. each week, a couple hundred people would come to see us. all of a sudden, for them i was a holy person. the riddle of how this happened was solved when i went out for a walk on one of those hot nights. it was about 10:00. i saw two people talking. when they saw me, one asked the other, “who is this guy?” the other said, “he is an american.” the first exclaimed with amazement, “an american?!” he could not imagine an american leaving the comforts of an air conditioned home and all the luxury to be there in such primitive conditions and intense heat. i realized that people who inspire others to action are those who make sacrifices for the betterment of their community. these people are considered to be holy. sacrifice and sacredness are two sides of the same coin. this was an “ah-ha” moment for me. i did not have to become a holy person myself—i needed to become a servant of such holy people who are already serving their communities. i am a servant of those who are making sacrifices for their people. that is fundamentally what trees for life does. please tell me about the philosophies of trees for life we spend a lot of time introspecting. we are constantly examining why we are doing what we do. we see that our society spends enormous time and resources serving immediate needs and responding to emergencies – disaster relief efforts, etc. that is very good and the right thing to do. but we also need a few people focused on the long term. we fill that role. how do we do that? to turn a huge ship, you have to move a small “trim tab,” which turns the rudder, which then turns the ship. so we believe that even a small group of people can make a major paradigm change if we can think long-term. if our society were a tree, different groups or communities might be the flowers, the leaves, the branches, etc. we (tfl) would be roots. flowers and fruits advertise themselves to the world, but the roots are deep down in the dark. people fertilize a tree to get more fruits, not for the roots. but the roots are working underground so that the fruits may blossom and grow. we made a conscious decision to become roots, working unseen and unrecognized for the health of the tree. long-term things, like turning a great ship, are not done by one person alone, but by a community. such a community has to be made of people with a common purpose, but not people who are all the same. they need to come with different backgrounds, talents, global journal of community psychology practice volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 disciplines, and ways of thinking. one can be a singer, one an artist, another a scientist — each playing a different part. this diversity means we need to go beyond mere tolerance – we need to work on understanding those who are different from us. that means examining our concepts of “good” and “bad.” what is bad for me is not necessarily bad for the next person. in a community, we have to make our lines of good and bad very soft and pliable so that they do not create barriers between us. that is the most difficult concept, because we are constantly bombarded with other people’s ideas of what is good and bad. and in that we get stuck. to illustrate these concepts, we often draw three diagrams with circles. the first one is a big circle with many small circles inside it. we call it the “chocolate chip cookie.” this illustrates the wide variety of people in the community, and thus the need for understanding of other people and their different perspectives. second, we draw a big circle with a line down the middle, cutting it in half. this signifies that for any one idea or perspective, the exact opposite is just as valid. for our type of community to survive, i cannot be an extremist about my perspective of good and bad. the third image is of a small circle with two lines branching off of it to two other circles. these circles each branch off to two others, and so on. this signifies teaching and learning, freely sharing knowledge with other people, and asking them to share it with others. i think everything is enveloped by our belief in responsibility. i am writing the story of my life, and i am responsible for what i write. no one else is writing my story. i make my own decisions. thus, i can no longer be a victim. i cannot say that the devil made me do it, or my political party, or my religion, or anything or anyone else. i have to say, “i chose to do it. i made a decision. i am responsible.” for us, this simple belief is a paradigm change. it encompasses everything we do. from your experiences what can people do to help mobilize others for community change? i cannot suggest that anyone else will be successful if they do what we have done. i can only speak of my experience and my limited perspective. but here are some tools they can use: 1. whatever they are doing has to be more than just an activity—it has to be sacred for them. remember, sacredness comes from sacrifice. a child is sacred because you make sacrifices from the time they are conceived. things you will not do for anyone else, you will do for your child. there must be sacrifice on a daily basis, at every single moment, not just a one-time thing. but if it is truly sacred to you, you do not think of it as a sacrifice, it is just natural. 2. although a community you are serving has a life of its own, and grows on its own, still you have to manage it for a long time. again, it’s just like raising a child. you have to teach a child how to eat, dress, study, swim, etc. you work at it on a daily basis. 3. you also must realize when the child becomes an adult. you have to know when to cut the apron strings so they can make decisions on their own. global journal of community psychology practice volume 1, issue 1 january 2010 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 4. to be an effective leader, more important than knowing how to do things is understanding who you are, what you are doing and why you are doing it. the most important thing is understanding who you are. you must answer that question on a daily basis, because the community changes, and so does the leader. if you understand who you are, the fundamental relationship with the community remains the same through all these changes. the community itself must understand two things: 1) who they are—the aspect of their being that doesn’t change, and permeates everything; and 2) what direction they are going. understanding these things will keep a community on track through all the changes, all the storms and upheavals that are bound to come. a community is not a static creation. it is a living body. you must understand how things emerge, come into being, and transform. community change is like a journey. if you are traveling from here to new york, your direction does not change. but if you are traveling by car, you may get a flat tire and have to transfer to another car, or take a bus or a train. all other things can change, but if the direction remains the same then you will make the journey. for information on tfl and how you can get involved, please visit http://www.treesforlife. org/. http://www.treesforlife.org/ http://www.treesforlife.org/ kansas journal of medicine, volume 11 issue 1 thank you! gjcpp management team keywords: gjcpp, thank you, community psychology practice the gjcpp management team includes: vincent francisco, university of north carolina at greensboro (editor) tom wolff, tom wolff and associates (senior associate editor) victoria chien, university of south carolina (managing editor) dyana valentine, dyanavalentine.com (associate editor) liesette brunson, université du québec à montréal (associate editor) david julian, the ohio state university (associate editor) maria vargas moniz, instituto superior de psicologia aplicada (associate editor) global journal of community psychology practice volume 2, issue 1 june 2011 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 thank you! a generous thank you to everyone that helped make the three issues of volume 1 a success! reviewers for the first three issues: • cameron norman • yolanda suarez de balcazar • scott evans • francine lavoie • fabricio balcazar • colleen loomis • charlene baker • john moritsugu • oli dzidkowiec • tiffany jimenz • bill berkowitz • rachel smolowitz • jason katz • brad olson • susan wolfe • kelly hazel • al ratcliff • richard roberts • cheryl ramos • david julian • bill neigher • jerry schultz • greg meissen • ashlee keele-lien • brett kloos • sara mijares • fran butterfoss • twanda greer • brad smith • stergios roussos • sasha bliss • susan wolfe • duncan myers • paul flaspoler • robert aronson • louis graham • david lounsbury • renee lavinghouze • sharon rosen • robert strack • dan bibeau • tracy nichols • sharon morrison • gary harper • warner mcgee • holly sienkiewicz • virginia brown • dennis embry • abigail ortiz • adrienne paine-andrews • isaac prilleltensky • christopher sonn • chris keys • julian rappaport • geoff nelson international editorial board: • wolfgang stark, university of duisburgessen (germany) • josé h. ornelas, instituto superior de psicologia aplicada (lisboa portugal) • neville robertson, waikato university (new zealand) • brian bishop, curtin university (australia) • toshi sasao, international christian university in tokyo • donata francescato; university of rome • cheryl ramos, university of hawai’i at hilo • david julian, ohio state university • bill neigher, atlantic health • greg meissen, wichita state university • thomas saïas, l’association française de psychologie communautaire • eduardo almeida, la universidad iberoamericana puebla global journal of community psychology practice volume 2, issue 1 june 2011 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 donors and funders: • bill neigher and atlantic health • the society for community research and action • greg meissen • vincent t francisco • chris corbett • tom wolff • allen ratcliffe • david chavis • gloria levin • maria vargas moniz and jose ornelas finally, a tremendous thanks to holly sienkiewicz for all her help with creating page layouts, pdf versions of the articles, and getting our email version together. thank you to our web experts at gray’s web design (http://www.grayswebdesign.com/) for the journal infrastructure. thank you also to dr fabricio balcazar and scra for being the financial managers of this effort, and for keeping our books straight! we very much look forward to volume 2 and all the issues we will publish in the future. peer support groups and peer mentoring in refugee adolescents and young adults: a literature review filippos barbaresos1, nelly georgiou1, fotis vasilopoulos1, chrysovalantis papathanasiou1 keywords: peer support groups, peer mentoring, community-based interventions, adolescents, young adults, refugees author biographies: recommended citation: barbaresos, f., georgiou, n., vasilopoulos, f., & papathanasiou, c. (2023). peer support groups and peer mentoring in refugee adolescents and adults: a literature review. global journal of community psychology practice,14(2), 1 -18. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: chrysovalantis papathanasiou, association for regional development and mental health (epapsy), salaminos 36, gr15124, marousi attica, greece. tel.: 0030 6948374913. email: ch.papathanasiou@epapsy.gr 1 association for regional development and mental health (epapsy), greece global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 peer support groups and peer mentoring in refugee adolescents and young adults: a literature review abstract peer support and peer mentoring have been used in various contexts as interventions to improve mental health and help people cope with life difficulties. this literature review explores the application of these methods for adolescent refugees. it also attempts to determine the effectiveness of these interventions, the methodology of assessment of their effectiveness and the specific settings where they have been used. we conducted a review of studies that included peer support and peer mentoring interventions for adolescent refugees/asylum seekers. we searched google scholar, pubmed and scopus, for the period from 2011 to september 2021. the review identified only five studies that met our criteria in terms of demographic characteristics and type of intervention. four of the five studies used only qualitative methods for their assessment. only one of them used quantitative methods to determine the intervention’s effectiveness. the settings included schools, universities, and other general community spaces. the refugee status varied between asylum seekers and refugee status. there is a need for more rigorous and methodologically consistent research, using more quantitative methods to enable clearer comparison of evidence-based results. the usefulness of peer mentoring and peer support should also be explored in more contexts, such as in reception and identification centers for asylum seekers. despite these shortcomings of the current literature, all the reviewed papers outline a positive impact of the interventions on young refugees’ lives in terms of mental health benefits, coping with life difficulties, or gaining access to valuable resources. according to the united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr, 2010), a refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or violence and has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. an asylum seeker is a person that has applied for protection in another country for some of the aforementioned reasons, but whose claim has not yet been assessed and therefore have not been granted the protection status of “refugee” (unhcr, 2021). introduction these definitions imply pressures that refugees/asylum seekers undergo in three separate times and places (block et al., 2018). the first one refers to pressing conditions in their countries of origin, such as war, political instability, persecution of their beliefs, sexual orientation, religion, and generally conditions that put them at risk of severe physical or psychological harm (cole & blythe, 2010). when they flee their country and during the ensuing journey, they may be exposed to adverse living conditions, perilous situations (e.g., travel at sea), the death of others and the fear for their own lives, as well as abuse or exploitation from smuggling networks or even local state authorities (unhcr, 2017). lastly, when they arrive at the hosting country, they are immediately faced with new global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 challenges, such as having to learn a new language, facing the uncertainty of asylum procedures, discrimination, and financial uncertainty (carswell et al., 2011). as a result of these subsequent, often traumatizing events, many refugees and asylum seekers exhibit multiple distressing physical and psychological symptoms associated with the stressful events they have encountered (wells et al., 2016). this fact often leads researchers and practitioners to focus on the trauma that refugees have endured and implement intervention programs that focus on symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) (obradovic et al., 2013). nevertheless, it is important to not label all refugees as suffering from some type of pathology, simply because they face extraordinary hardship, but to take into account that people who face forced displacement often develop strengths that help them remain resilient in the face of adversity. in this instance, resilience refers to a positive adaptation, or the ability to maintain or regain mental health, despite experiencing adversity (wald et al., 2006). peer support peer support can be defined as a system of giving and receiving help based on the key principles of respect, shared responsibility, and mutual agreement of what is helpful. understanding between the peers is not derived from scientific paradigms such as psychiatric models or diagnostic systems but is constructed by empathically using their shared experiences and psychological pain (mead et al., 2001). a basic belief of peer support is that people who have similar experiences and share key background characteristics can better relate, understand the needs of people dealing with similar challenges, and offer more authentic empathy and validation (mead & macneil, 2004). the peer support approach has been utilized for childhood trauma (mccormack & katalinic, 2016, addiction (boisvert et al., 2008, cancer (yaskowich & stam, 2003, hiv (berg et al., 2021, stroke (christensen et al., 2019, and mental health services (davidson et al., 2006; its application has demonstrated positive outcomes for diverse target groups, including refugees (paloma et al., 2019; schechter, 2004). many benefits have been noted for the participants of peer support groups. regarding the benefits for the participants, it’s reported that members of peer support groups, compared to users of mainstream mental health services, have the same amount or less hospitalizations and they tend to remain in the community for longer before their first psychiatric hospitalization (clarke et al., 2000). also, they have reported that they are feeling more empowered by the adoption of new ways to think and behave (resnick & rosenheck, 2008) and they have an increased sense of independence and self-confidence (ochocka et al., 2006). another benefit for them is that they feel that they gain control of their symptoms, and, consequently become more involved in their treatment, leaving behind the passive role of “patient” (ochocka et al., 2006). another significant benefit of peer support practices is the promotion of social support and the development of new support networks, which for people with mental health challenges or people experiencing adverse living conditions tend to be limited or fragile (mead et al., 2001). additionally, the fact that peer support group members connect through personal experience gives participants the sense that their personal challenges are genuinely understood and accepted (coatsworth-puspokey et al., 2006). these components of peer support groups help participants in altering their attitude towards mental illness and therefore in breaking down the stigma global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 and fostering hope in the peers they work with (sokol & fisher, 2016). additionally, peers can act as positive role models, as people who have successfully navigated their own traumatic experiences (shaw, 2014). for people providing support to peers, studies report benefits such as enhanced confidence and self-esteem, deriving from the feeling that the help they provide is appreciated and impactful (ratzlaff et al., 2006). bracke and colleagues (2008) even found that providing peer support was more beneficial for the participants of the study than receiving it, in terms of its impact on self-esteem and empowerment. possible reasons for this finding could be the importance of employment status and the identity shift from consumer to provider (hutchinson et al., 2006). apart from the people individually receiving help, the peer support model can positively impact the mental health services system on a macroscopic level, in terms of cost effectiveness, reach and accessibility. the fact that peer support making use of non-professionals to provide mental health support can lead to an overall decreased cost of mental health services. furthermore, peer support has been shown to decrease hospitalization time, both for peers receiving support and those providing support to others (solomon, 2004). peer support being facilitated by peers of people in need of mental health support instead of professionals, means that it can better permeate groups and reach people that conventional health services fail to engage due to demographic (e.g., socioeconomic status) and culturalenvironmental (e.g., social network) challenges (sokol, 2016). people that have associated traditional mental health services with negative experiences might also find peer support more acceptable. however, there are also some challenges mentioned in the literature. some of the challenges identified are the difficulty to maintain boundaries and the difficulty for peer support members to remain within their role in the group (solomon, 2004). although this is considered as a challenge sometimes, mead and colleagues (2001) disagree, as they consider that there is an opportunity for both peers and peer support providers to grow and create meaningful and reciprocal relationships beyond their strict roles as provider and receiver. another challenge has to do with power imbalances that can develop when peer support providers are offered payment, training, and the title of the facilitator (mead et al., 2001). the power imbalances are especially dangerous when they are not recognized or worked through(fisk et al., 2000). in addition, chinman and colleagues (2006) found that peer support workers are sometimes exposed to stress that exceeds their ability to regulate it and this can prove obstructive to their own healing process. it is significant for these challenges to be recognized and processed through supervision practices. peer mentoring peer mentoring can be considered a more specific type of peer support. however, there is no agreed-upon definition of peer mentoring in contemporary literature. peer mentoring is usually applied in educational settings, for school and university students. in the educational setting, peer mentoring refers to the relationship of a more experienced or older student who helps a less experienced student in various ways, including sharing useful information, providing motivation and guidance, assisting in the learning process, building a social network, and advocating for them (colvin & ashman, 2010). andrews and clark (2011) global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 recognize different types of peer mentoring depending on the form in which it is provided. one type entails one-to-one sessions from a mentor to a mentee and another is group peer mentoring, in which one mentor provides assistance to a group of mentees. these two forms may be applied as brief or long-term interventions. other types of peer mentoring, mentioned by andrews and clark (2011) are the "partnership-led" peer mentoring, in which two peer mentors lead a small group of mentees and the mutual support group where a group of students specifically placed together, help each other with the difficulties they go through. although there are many types of peer mentoring, the most common is one-to-one peer mentoring in which more experienced students mentor their less experienced peers or mentoring peers at the same level (andrews & clark, 2011). peer support and peer mentoring in refugee communities research shows that group and community interventions are more efficient than the traditional one-to-one mental health services to the refugee populations, as long as it addresses the need for community healing (bass et al., 2013; im & rosenberg, 2016). given that many refugees belong to collectivistic cultures in which healing takes place within the community, individual psychotherapy can be considered as incompatible with their own cultural values (block et al., 2018). additionally, because refugees in many occasions have been through similar experiences and they have been exposed to cumulative trauma, may face challenges to their community and social identity, in addition to their personal identity. community based interventions, including peer support groups, can provide a safe and empathetic place for them to process their experiences and improve their self-esteem (kira et al., 2011). regarding the acculturation process, researchers suggest that having others from their country of origin welcome them and acclimate them to their new surroundings helps in easing the transition to a new location (kaslow, 2014). additionally, because refugees are less likely to use traditional mental health services, the peer support model provides a suitable and effective alternative for refugee’s social and emotional support (cole & blythe, 2010). among other initiatives, there have been applied and assessed as efficient intervention formats such as mutual learning and advocacy (hess et al., 2014), peer‐led community health workshops (im, 2018), peer‐support programs (badali et al., 2017), and community gardens (hartwig & mason, 2016). research suggests that after social support interventions, refugees reported increased social integration, decreased loneliness, and healthier coping skills (stewart et al., 2012). recovery model and peer support approach the recovery model is the main therapeutic approach in community psychiatry. this model is based on a biopsychosocial approach of mental health treatment as opposed to a biomedical one. as far as the definition of recovery is concerned, in the 90’s recovery had been described as “the guiding vision of the mental health service system”. according to antony (2002, p. 527): recovery is described as a deeply personal unique process of changing one’s attitude, values, feelings and goals, skills, and/or roles. it is a way of living a satisfying, hopeful, and contributing life even with the limitations caused by illness. recovery involves the global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 development of new meaning and purpose in one’s life. deegan (1988) clarifies very important aspects of the concept of recovery. persons are not passive recipients of rehabilitation services. rather, they experience themselves as recovering a new sense of self and of purpose within and beyond the limits of their vulnerability. active engagement and relationships within the community require a mutual appreciation for the potential of people, refugees or natives. the process of engagement and consequent recovery is strongly linked to social inclusion. a key role for mental health and social services is to support people to regain their place in their communities, to take part in mainstream activities and to utilize opportunities for growth (stylianidis et al., 2014). there is growing evidence that supports the contention that taking part in social, educational, training, volunteering and employment opportunities can support the process of individual recovery (jacob, 2015). people in vulnerability need to be supported to create their own recovery plans, set their own goals, map their processes, identify their strengths and weaknesses, recognize the roadblocks and facilitate good practice, which keeps them well (jacob, 2015). the recovery process-based model aims to minimize the role of the mental health professional in the user’s life over time and to strengthen the role of friends, family, neighbors, and other members of the community. mentors help individuals activate their support networks by developing new links and strengthening existing ones (antony, 1993). having a safe space to talk and share a common or more subjective experience, increases the sense of belonging into a community, especially as a protective and promoting mental health resilience factor (borraccino et al., 2020). the goal of the current study is to explore the existing literature of mentoring interventions that are addressed to young and adolescent refugees. given the established benefits of peer to peer services and their appropriateness for the refugee context that have been mentioned so far, we believe that a review of similar interventions for younger populations may enhance our confidence in implementing them going forward. we are interested to see which benefits persist for younger populations, what specific peer to peer schemes have been implemented so far, what challenges have occurred and how they have been met. we will also be highlighting some methodological qualities of the existing literature, in hopes of determining how safely they support our assumptions of peer to peer intervention benefits. gaps in research will also be explored in terms of population, demographic characteristics, intervention styles, environmental contexts and methodological limitations, in hopes of creating a clearer image of the research that should be conducted going forward. method search protocol the electronic databases that were used for the search of the published literature were scopus, pubmed and google scholar, for the period from 2011 to september 2021 with the search terms: “peer support groups” or “peer mentoring” and “adolescents” or “youth” or “young people” or “teenagers” and “refugees” or “asylum seekers”. paper inclusion and exclusion criteria the inclusion criteria were: (1) written in english, (2) described and evaluated global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 a specific intervention for peer support groups or peer mentoring, (3) the intervention to have been applied to adolescent refugees or asylum seekers, (4) were available on the internet, and (5) the research to have been published in peer reviewed articles. the exclusion criteria were: (1) did not describe a specific peer support program, (2) focused on adults,(3) were published before 2011, and (4) did not mention the age group of the participants. the selection of the papers followed a three stages process and is presented in figure 1 below. in the first place, the findings examined for their applicability through their title and the most of them were excluded. then, the abstract of the included papers was reviewed and some of them were considered as eligible. in this stage the duplications and the papers that did not describe specific types of intervention were excluded. in the final phase of the process, the entire texts were thoroughly reviewed and the 5 final papers that are included in the review were chosen. figure 1. process of paper selection results a brief description of the studies: setting and goals the trauma healing club intervention initially was designed as an implementation of the cognitive behavioral intervention for trauma in schools (cbits), which was culturally adapted using feedback from participants and their families. the pyramid mentoring component of the intervention, which is included in the publication, was an impromptu addition to the original design, after a number of “graduates” expressed interest in continuing their participation as mentors. in the elswick et al. (2021) research publication, the intervention is assessed for its effectiveness. the raithelhuber (2019) publication is a qualitative exploratory investigation that attempts to give a picture of how refugees, specifically unaccompanied refugee minors perceive mentoring, and the relationships with their mentors. it was applied to a population of urms in austria, that had participated in the "godparenthoods for urms" pilot paper selection review global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 program, which assigned adult volunteers as mentors with a general purpose of supporting and enabling mentees to deal and cope with complex personal issues. the study explores in what ways this goal materialized, through the eyes of the mentees and their understanding of their relationships with the mentors. peer mentoring and intercultural understanding: support for refugeebackground and immigrant students beginning university study. it is an exploration of the impact of the equity buddies program, an initiative which was launched in 2012 at western sydney university. the program adopts an intercultural approach to mentoring, pairing older student mentors with younger, refugee-background students entering university. some of the goals of the program included imparting knowledge on practical and institutional matters concerning campus life, both typical and atypical skills required to succeed in university and acting as mediators between the mentees and campus social life and expanding their social networks. the present study focuses on the impact of mentoring on the mentors themselves, in terms of the betterment of their intercultural understanding through their prolonged interaction with their mentees, and the potential for establishing more supportive social environments for refugee-background students. the messiou and azaola (2018) study assesses the benefits of a peer mentoring program, implemented among students of three secondary english schools. during a period of five months, mentors and mentees held meetings at least weekly, where mentors guided the mentees through their interaction, to an extent, asking about their needs, their interests and feelings about school life. the study assesses the benefits and challenges of the peer mentoring scheme, using data collected through a series of structured interviews carried out with mentors, mentees, and coordinators of the project. bridging distances (valtonen, 2014) aims to explore the ways in which peer support impacts unaccompanied minor asylum seekers. it is an ethnographic study, in the sense that data was collected mostly through participatory observation, with some additional data gathered from interviews and group discussions. the study takes place in the safety net project, which provided peer support visits to two group homes for unaccompanied minor asylum seekers in the helsinki area of finland. differences in the demographic characteristics of participants despite papers being screened for demographic factors, there seems to still be significant differentiation in the demographic characteristics of the studies, particularly in terms of the specific refugee status of the participants. trauma healing club (elswick et al., 2021) and bridging distances (valtonen, 2014) were some of the few that matched peers with mentors of the same lived experience, that spoke the same language and had a shared experience of psychological and emotional pain. raithelhuber (2019) on the other hand paired mentees with adult volunteer mentors from the local community. messiou and azaola (2018) mentors and mentees were both adolescents, belonging to the same age group and both had an immigrant background. however, the study chose participants with an “immigrant” status requirement, without differentiating between different immigration statuses (e.g., economic immigrant, refugee, asylum seeker). a different immigration status could potentially create heterogenous participant profiles, such as different experiences of immigration, different relationships with immigration services and legislations and different vulnerabilities. vicker's global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 research (2017), while it is addressed toward refugee background students, focuses its assessment on the experience of the mentors. mentors were non-refugee university students. mentors’ experiences and benefits most of the studies reported findings on benefits for the mentors themselves. a “greater understanding” was reported by both vickers' (2017) and messiou & azaola (2018). the first study reported on this parameter in an intercultural context. mentors were found to be more culturally understanding and to have questioned cultural stereotypes. the second study reported on the mentors developing higher empathy in a broader sense. another common benefit for the mentors appears to be the broadening of their social circles and the development of interpersonal skills. “bridging distances” (valtonen, 2014) participants acquired through the program a new supportive network and relationships, and vickers' (2017) and messiou & azaola’s (2018) participants expanded their social networks along with their mentees. a final benefit that is common between studies is the expansion of the mentors’ problem-solving capacities. it is interesting that the papers report diverse ways in which the mentors perceive this to happen. vickers’ (2017) and “bridging distances” (valtonen, 2014) mentors did so by gaining new supportive networks, either through expanding their social networks, or through group meetings with fellow mentors, where they shared problems and solutions. on the other hand, messiou & azaola’s (2018) participants seem to have developed personal problem-solving capacities. the process of listening to their mentees’ problems and having to find solutions together, helped them to be more confident and seek alternative resources to solve problems they couldn’t solve themselves. valtonen (2014) discusses the role of mentors as role models. mentors who have experience as refugees themselves, but are at a different stage in their lives, can be role models of successful integration in their destination countries. they give mentees a tangible goal, they can visualize positive outcomes for their situation themselves and become more hopeful. they also acquire positive behaviors and means to adapt, in order to pursue more positive outcomes for themselves. mentors themselves feel empowered to be able to offer positive role models for younger mentees, as they often hoped they had such examples to follow themselves when they had first arrived (valtonen, 2014). benefits for mentees apart from the vickers (2017) study, which focused more on the experience of the mentors themselves, all publications reported building new relationships as a clear benefit of peer mentoring for the mentees. these relationships might take various forms, depending on the nature of the setting. mentees reported developing close relationships with their mentors, oftentimes leading into friendship, or an approximation to a parental bond, in cases of adolescents pairing up with adult mentors. in different settings, the mentorship was a catalyst for mentees to expand their social circle, having an easier time making friends, getting acquainted with new people and discovering paths towards integration with local communities. another benefit for the mentees, which is prevalent in all the reviewed literature, was the emotional support they received, and the existence of an emotional component in the mentoring programs. this, again, might take various forms, from general support in global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 talking through difficulties and problems (messiou & azaola, 2018; valtonen, 2014) general psychological support (raithelhuber, 2019), or emotional support in making difficult transitions (raithelhuber, 2019). it is worth noting that the aforementioned publications have qualitative research designs, and mostly recount through interviews or logbooks the general perception of the participants, about the ways emotion and emotional support are experienced in peer mentoring. while emotional support clearly stands out as a principal component of the mentoring programs, which most participants perceived and found helpful, it is hard to discern between the different kinds of support and the emotions worked through, as the results are not quantifiable or comparable. in this regard, elswick and colleagues’ (2021) research stands out, as it uses preexisting psychometric measures to determine the specific effect of the intervention. specifically, the subjective units of distress scales (suds) or feelings thermometer assessment was administered throughout the intervention, which was used to measure the participants’ ability to regulate emotions through communication. while this skill is much narrower compared to other publications’ approach to the emotional components of the interventions, it gave a tangible measure of improvement throughout the intervention. methodological review and concerns most of the papers included in this review use qualitative research designs and methods of measurement. these might include semi-structured interviews (messiou & azaola, 2018; raithelhuber, 2019; valtonen, 2014) and written accounts of the participants such as written reflections or logbooks (vickers, 2017). thematic or contentanalysis was utilized to cluster the main results. these methods are useful in evoking the participants’ original thoughts and giving a more thorough and authentic account of their personal experiences. this is particularly important, when the researchers try to discover how components of peer mentoring interventions are perceived by the participants, in their own words and understanding (e.g., valtonen, 2014). however qualitative methods do have some limitations regarding their validation, and the generalization of their results. particularly within the body of research that was eligible for this review, the interventions reviewed are very varied in terms of settings, demographic characteristics of the participants and the nature of the interventions. this allows the presentation of the person experiences of the participants, that are better depicted through the narrative qualities of qualitative research, but do not give us statistically relevant information on what works and what does not. two of the research processes also included participatory elements, where they held common activities with the participants (raithelhuber, 2019; vickers, 2017), which introduces greater observational bias and observer interference to the design. furthermore, some of the studies present accounts only from the participants and do not attempt to triangulate results from various sources of information, in order to obtain a slightly less personalized interpretation of the mentoring experiences (vickers, 2017) through comparative data. some of the qualitative studies included, had methodological qualities that offset inherent methodological drawbacks and increased trustworthiness. vickers (2017), collected data through selfreporting journals, minimizing researcher bias and data was collected at two separate time points. it is however worth noting that data was not triangulated in terms of location and data collection methods. valtonen (2014) extracted data through observation group discussions and global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 11 interviews. it is worth noting though, that in this process, the analysis of the data collected through observation and the content of the interviews and discussions mutually informed each other as opposed to being independent of each other, thus minimizing the trustworthiness effect of triangulation, especially since observer bias was not mitigated by the existence of independent researchers or peer debriefing. research took place over four months of frequent contact with participants, but it is not specified whether that meant data was collected at separate time points from the same participants, with the same collection method. raithelhuber (2019) conducted interviews with mentees from separate locations, but only two focus groups were held and focus groups with the same mentees were not repeated. finally, messiou (2018) collected data from three separate locations, by two researchers that worked both together and independently, by conducting interviews and focus groups, therefore employing data, environmental and researcher triangulation practices. the sole study that used a quantitative research design to measure the effects of mentoring was the elswick and colleagues (2021) publication. this research design quantified the assessment of its positive impact on the participants ability to regulate emotions and trauma symptomatology. both variables were measured using validated, preexisting psychometric tools, namely the child ptsd symptom scale (cpss) and the subjective units of distress scales (suds) or “feelings thermometer” respectively. this quantitative approach gave the researchers a clear indication of the progress of the participants, as they were assessed through the course of the intervention, as well as a tangible representation on the aspects of their experience it affected. however, this approach also leaves many areas of potential impact unexplored, due to the limited scope of the variables measured, that depict only a small part of the mentoring experience, through the prism of tangible symptomatology outcomes. it does not explore mentoring effects on other areas that qualitative studies did, such as creating relationships, network building, perception, and identity shifts, which may have broader, secondary positive effects on wellbeing. furthermore, the use of a measure for posttraumatic measures assumes that participants, and refugee background populations in general, present a pathological symptomatology. this presumption might be problematic, both in the sense that it might not always apply to people going through hardship, and it generally does not shed light on the personal strengths they might develop naturally in the process of overcoming those hardships. this is in fact a common trend in research and intervention programs about refugee populations, that might create a skewed and stigmatizing representation of them (i.e., ptsd) (obradovic et al., 2013). impact of the interventions on setting and local communities: perceptions and integration in some cases, the research programs explored the impact of the assessed interventions on the local populations or on the settings where they took place. for instance, trauma healing club intervention’s participants reported that after the intervention, people in their environment, such as teachers and student peers, seemed more supportive of their participation in the program (elswick et al., 2021). the bridging distances intervention does not specifically give accounts of changes in the stances of the local populations. however, the mentors did act as cultural ambassadors, introducing their mentees to tools and information, to help their smooth integration into finnish society (valtonen, 2014). similarly, raithelhuber’s (2019) participants learned the local language global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 12 and were helped along in their contact with the local populations. in messiou’s (2018) intervention, student mentees seemed not only to improve academically, but as a result to alleviate some of the burden from teachers in the school. the mentors were easier for them to access than teachers, and there was a general sense that the received help made the entire system a bit more functional. in vickers’ (2017) research, mentors challenged stereotypes and changed their perceptions of refugee background students. this was not contained to their relationships with their mentees, but they also reported that they would be more likely to pursue and sustain relationships with people different than themselves. however, it should be noted that for the most part this data refers to personal accounts of the participants about how they understand their own improved abilities after the interventions, and less so on actual observation or measurement of their interactions with local populations. discussion refugees have to overcome many stressors and cope with many adversities simultaneously: the memories of the experiences they had back in their countries, the difficulties of their journey and the challenges in the hosting country (carswell et al., 2011). adolescent refugees are in an even more challenging position, since they also have to cope with other developmental issues regarding adolescence (lustig et al., 2003). although there are many mental health services provided to this population, there is still a high number of refugee adolescents and young people, especially single men, that are not prone to accept the services and they are facing symptoms of distress (zetter et al., 2006). given this barrier, research has focused on group therapy and community interventions for refugee populations, since these forms of interventions are closer to their collective cultural values and can help them address their common experiences and their social identity (bass et al., 2013; im & rosenberg, 2016; kira et al., 2011). peer support and peer mentoring have been considered as an effective kind of complimentary support for adult refugees in decreasing feelings of isolation, building community networks, empowering the community, and increasing participants’ resilience (block et al., 2018; paloma et al., 2020). despite many attempts to implement peer support and peer mentoring models in adult refugee populations, there are no well-known similar studies for adolescent and young refugees. because of this gap in literature and because of the possible benefits that peer support interventions may have in adolescent refugees, this literature review focused on the specific subject. research gaps and proposals it is clear from the small amount of research included in this review, that the topic of peer mentoring for adolescent refugee populations remains largely unexplored. four of the five studies included used qualitative research designs. all of them discovered positive effects of the mentoring interventions. however, the amount of research, both qualitative and quantitative, that has been conducted on the topic is very limited. at the same time, differences in the demographic characteristics, research designs and most importantly types of mentoring interventions do not allow us to draw any concrete conclusions, although they do offer encouraging indications about interventions employing a mentoring model in general (messiou, 2018; raithelhuber, 2019; valtonen, 2014). therefore, there needs to be further research on the issue, and better quantification of results. measured constructs need to be clearly global journal of community psychology practice volume 14, issue 2 april 2023 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 13 conceptualized and possibly be assessed by existing, validated psychometric tools, so they can also be comparable with previous peer mentoring research on other populations (adult refugees, nonrefugee populations). along with this, there need to be longitudinal studies. refugee populations and especially children and adolescents on the move are often at risk of sudden relocation and have little control over their lives (zetter et al., 2006). in such conditions, follow-up research becomes very difficult, but also very valuable, as it is important to discover to what extent benefits from peer mentoring interventions might persist through the passage of time and further hardships. finally, refugee children are accommodated at various places, depending on what part of their journey they are at. these settings need to be evaluated in terms of the suitability and effectiveness of peer mentoring intervention in their unique conditions, such as for example the conditions in a refugee camp, or ric (reception and identification). it is worth noting that none of the research was conducted in a camp or reception and identification center and even thought this review was conducted with focus on young refugees, the specific immigration status of the participants (e.g., refugee or immigrant) was not disclosed in many cases. despite the aforementioned difficulties and limitations, there are some initial indications that peer-support and peermentoring models are effective for refugee adolescent populations. specifically, it was determined that through these interventions, ptsd and distress symptoms are reduced (elswick et al., 2021), social support is enhanced, new relationships are pursued and sustained (messiou & azaola, 2018) and guidance through practical difficulties is consistently achieved (raithelhuber, 2021). nevertheless, for these results to be verified, further research and use of complementary research techniques is required. references andrews, j., & clark, r. 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(2017). peer mentoring and intercultural understanding: support for refugee-background and immigrant students beginning university study. international journal of intercultural relations, 60, 198 gratitude journaling experiences of adults who participated in a 20-day clinical intervention to mitigate stress, anxiety and depression in the covid-19 pandemic era in zimbabwe tanyaradzwa dianah mutseura1, julia mutambara2, and tobias magadure3 keywords: gratitude, journaling, healthy habits, appreciation author biographies: tanyaradzwa dianah mutseura, registered community psychologist in zimbabwe. she holds an msc in community psychology from midlands state university and a bsc in psychology from midlands state university. her research interests include primary and secondary prevention interventions for children’s mental well-being, social justice, and qualitative research. she is a full member of the zimbabwe psychological association. she founded a community book club for children called read for your life to reduce and eliminate initiation into substance abuse for children at risk. the program won an ember spark award from ember mental health, shm, uk in 2022. the program is also supported by the international book project and is part of the books as bridges program by the international book project, usa. julia mutambara, ph.d. is a behavioural scientist and senior lecturer in the department of psychiatry. she holds a doctor of philosophy (phd) from the university of limpopo (sa) and an msc in clinical psychology from uz. she is the outgoing chairperson of the department of psychiatry – a post she has held for 10 years. she has experience in qualitative research and has published more than thirty peer-reviewed research papers. her research interests are in implementation science, children`s mental health, and indigenous knowledge systems in mental health. dr mutambara is the principal investigator for the drug and substance abuse prevention in primary schools, program (dass) a literacy program that is being run at two primary schools in mkoba, gweru. she has experience in consultancy and has done projects with undp, friendship bench, petra, and chip program (university of zimbabwe) and the mental health literacy program (psychology department at the university of limpopo). julia is an executive member of the pan african psychology union (papu) a body that has oversight on the training of psychologists in africa. tobias magadure, has a bsc in psychology from midlands state university, in gweru zimbabwe. his research interests include qualitative research, positive psychology, and community mental health engagements. tobias has volunteered with a number of organizations in spreading awareness of mental health. recommended citation: mutseura, t. d., mutambara, j., magadure, t. (2024). gratitude journaling experiences of adults who participated in a 20-day clinical intervention to mitigate stress, anxiety and depression in the covid-19 pandemic era 1 centre for positive living and resilience building 2 midlands state university, department of behavioural sciences 3 midlands state university, department of psychology global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 march 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 2 in zimbabwe. global journal of community psychology practice, 15(1), 1 10. retrieved day/month/year, from (https://www.gjcpp.org/). corresponding author: tanyaradzwa dianah mutseura, community psychologist (zimbabwe), centre for positive living and resilience building, 23 school avenue, zimta co-operative house. gweru, midlands. zimbabwe. email: tmutseura88@gmail.com. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.gjcpp.org/ mailto:tmutseura88@gmail.com global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 march 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 3 gratitude journaling experiences of adults who participated in a 20-day clinical intervention to mitigate stress, anxiety and depression in the covid-19 pandemic era in zimbabwe abstract the covid-19 pandemic which was first reported in 2019 in wuhan, china brought about devastating conditions and eventually ballooned into a global pandemic. some of the devastating consequences of covid-19 included loss of lives, closure of businesses, job cuts coupled with on-going daily life challenges. in this dark hour brought about by covid-19, the health of people became top priority and their mental health a cause for concern. this study sought to investigate the experiences of a zimbabwean sample that participated in a 20-day gratitude journaling intervention with a clinical psychologist to mitigate stress, anxiety and depression in the covid-19 pandemic era. a purposive sampling of forty-two men and women (age range 20 to 40) who at one point requested the services of a clinical psychologist was done. participant selection was not necessarily based on diagnosis. qualitative questionnaires, in-depth interviews and whatsapp group discussions were used to collect data. data were grouped into themes and analysed using content analysis. participants reported improved sleep, positive coping, reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression, strengthening of social relationships, improved physical health and, psychological health, heightened empathy, and an increase in happiness and creativity. gratitude journalizing is an important intervention for people grappling with a myriad of psychological problems and/or uncertainties brought about by the covid-19 pandemic. introduction covid-19 remains one of the world’s most challenging pandemics. prevention was key in halting the spread. guided by the world health organisation, measures to prevent the spread of covid-19 include lockdowns, compulsion wearing of face masks in public places, social distancing and voluntary vaccination. though these drastic changes and adjustments to normal life were informed by science the majority of people the world over lived in fear and were reluctant to voluntarily implement them. in addition, unfounded information about covid-19 vaccines and their effects triggered stress and symptoms of anxiety and depression among people. mental health care became imperative given the psychological challenges brought about by the pandemic. interventions like gratitude journaling were found to help foster positive mental outlook and helped people to anticipate positive outcomes. hart (2013) notes that gratitude has the ability to cause a shift in one’s mind-set and energy that attract positive experiences into one’s life. therefore, gratitude can help an individual to adopt a fresh perspective in life. gratitude is an emotion preceded by the perception that one has benefitted from the efforts of another (emmons & mishra, 2011). an expanding body of research associates gratitude journaling with physical and psychological health benefits (wood et al., 2010). some researchers regard gratitude as a habit, an attitude or a coping response (allen, 2018; sansone & sansone, 2010). according to research gratitude is stable and directed towards others, god, nature, etc (allen, 2018; mccullough et al., 2008; mccullough, emmons & tsang, 2002; rosenberg, 1998). there has been increased interest among mental health researchers to investigate health benefits of gratitude journaling (bono, emmons & mccullough, 2012). one http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 march 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 4 longitudinal study conducted by malin et al. (2017) found a small but significant relationship between gratitude and a sense of purpose, suggesting that gratitude may play a role in developing purpose. another study conducted by shoshani and steinmetz (2014) which lasted for a year revealed significant decreases in symptoms of distress, anxiety, and depression occurring among participants in the experimental gratitude group as compared to increasing symptoms among participants in the control group. a further study conducted by harbaugh and vasey (2014) indicated that counting blessings mitigated symptoms of depression, and increased positive affect, among participants who had reported high levels of depressive symptoms. similarly, lo et al. (2017) found that gratitude had a significant moderating effect on suicidal ideation, suggesting the importance of including elements of gratitude in preventive and clinical interventions. a meta-analysis that analysed the results of 38 gratitude studies concluded that gratitude interventions can have positive benefits for people in terms of their wellbeing, happiness, life satisfaction, grateful mood, grateful disposition, and positive affect, and can also result in decreases in depressive symptoms (dickens, 2017). salvadorferrer (2017) concluded that gratitude significantly predicts life satisfaction, psychological and physical well-being. therefore, gratitude can help an individual to adopt a fresh perspective in life. other contemporary studies have shown that grateful people sleep better, have improved self-esteem and can cope better with the stress (hofman & serlachiu, 2020). gratitude studies have also provided evidence that gratitude journaling is associated with adjustment to university life, life satisfaction and positive affect (isik & erguner-tekinalp, 2017). schnitker and richardson (2019) have investigated gratitude within religion and concluded that gratitude is commonly practiced in prayer and sometimes yields positive outcomes. in a study conducted by flinchbaugh, moore, chang and may (2000) in turkey, students who practiced gratitude journaling showed a heightened understanding of the meaning of learning and engaged well in the classroom. the aim of the current study was to explore gratitude journaling experiences of 42 adults who participated in a 20-day online intervention to mitigate stress, anxiety and depression in the covid-19 pandemic era in zimbabwe. findings might advance and/or inform future applications of gratitude journaling in clinical settings especially in resource constrained environments. materials and methods the study sought to foster an attitude of gratitude during the lockdown period and restrictions brought about by the covid-19 pandemic and thereby adopt a positive, hopeful outlook in life leading to a decrease in depression, anxiety and fear. all ethical procedures were observed, participant consent was granted and the research was approved by the ethics committee at midlands state university in gweru, zimbabwe. data collection procedures the intervention consisted of a daily gratitude journaling activity, wherein participants were asked to list at least three things for which they were grateful in a journal provided by the researcher. the intervention lasted for 20 days and was administered daily by the researcher online. the participants were required to complete a journal entry during each session. twice weekly, on tuesdays and thursdays participants were given the opportunity to share online what they had written with the researcher or with their colleagues if they wished. when the intervention concluded, the participants were asked to complete a self-report qualitative questionnaire adopted and modified from the gratitude questionnaire (gq-6) which was prepared by mccullough et al. (2002) twice, first after every session and then after 20 days. each questionnaire could be completed in 5 minutes. interviews were carried out at the end of the exercise to also gather the experiences of the participants. the length http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 march 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 5 of each interview was about 20-30 minutes. questions on both questionnaire and the interview guide were constructed in english then translated to shona (one of the major local languages) and back translated to english by a language expert. sampling the research made use of purposive sampling to reach the required target. these were individuals who at one point requested the services of a clinical psychologist. however, their diagnosis was not the major reason for their selection. from the available register participants were then randomly selected. purposive sampling technique was used because it gave a sample that can be logically assumed to be representative of the population. results characteristics of research participants preand postqualitative questionnaires, interviews and whatsapp discussions were conducted with 38 females and 4 males that took part in the 20-day gratitude journaling. participants were within the 20-40 age range. twenty-three participants had tertiary level training and in full employment. forty participants were black while two were white. each participant was affiliated to his/her own religion. themes from the interviews with the participants and the survey questions the following themes emerged, that showed how gratitude journaling was helping them cope despite the uncertainties brought about by the covid-19 pandemic improved psychological wellbeing; improved healthy habits; enhanced appreciation and awareness and stronger faith and hope. the main themes and sub-themes are shown in table 1 below; table 1 themes theme sub-theme improved psychological well-being handling stressful events happiness coping with loss improved healthy habits exercise eating well improved sleep habits appreciation and awareness pausing to reflect appreciating others self-reflection benefits and faith faith and religion hope and restoration counting one’s blessings theme one: improved psychological wellbeing from the research, participants reported that the gratitude journaling enabled them to handle the stressful events and cope with loss which created happiness in their lives. for example, participant a said: “i’m now an old woman, and i deal with a lot of stressful situations and have been through a lot. i now have high blood pressure. however, this exercise has totally changed my outlook in life, it lifted a heavy burden from my shoulders i can now deal with stressful situations knowing that this too shall pass.” another participant said, “it has helped me not to get stressed as each day is important, not to carry yesterday’s stressful moments into the next day and get all worked up.” on coping with the loss of loved ones during the covid-19 pandemic, one of the participants also noted that; “… when we were doing this exercise, i think on day 8 or 9, my father passed on and it was really difficult to be grateful of something in those difficult moments. but at the end of it all, i was grateful for the time that we had with our father he was an old man and had lived a long life.” http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 march 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 6 this might even suggest that in very stressful situations like death, one is capable of finding the positive aspects. gratitude journaling helped the participants to realize that there is more to life than the by focusing on the positive. it helped rewire the brain to evoke positive emotions and thus made individuals happy. from the responses of the participants the exercise brought them happiness. one participant said; “the exercise brought so much joy. i am happy and i have a lot to give, a lot was also given to me.” another responded; “i could clear my mind, focus on the positive. i am a negative person and spend most of my time thinking about the bad situations that can happen and as a result i fail to enjoy the moment. the exercise made me rethink and i find myself thinking about happy thoughts.” one of the participants also noted that, “it’s been great reading the stories of others and getting to realise what you have, for me i gained much psychologically.” on top of the journaling the daily pictures that were sent helped the participant’s value and appreciate themselves. self-love and self-care have been known to help people cope and bring about feelings of happiness from within. one of the participants said; “i now take care of my health more than i used to, i watch what i eat, and exercise regularly. i distract myself from negative news and try to find things that make me happy like the gratitude journaling exercise”. from the responses it showed that gratitude journaling did help with improving the psychological wellbeing of the participants. theme two: improved healthy habits one of the gratitude exercises involved participants taking a walk, or a bike ride whilst appreciating the beauty of nature or reporting on the physical exercise they had conducted. when asked how the exercise helped them improve or enhance their physical wellbeing, the participants responded; “today even after the exercise i was motivated to take a walk in my garden. i have arthritis and i haven’t been sleeping well of late, it just then dawned upon me, if it was during the exercise a reminder would have come to my phone to let me know i should take time to breathe, pause, reflect and take a walk. as i was walking in the garden i couldn’t help it but smile at the sprouting garlic i had planted a few days back. i was grateful, the soil doesn’t know about covid, germination is still occurring isn’t it something to be grateful about?” participants noted that there was need to put our mind at rest, as the constant thinking would eventually wear off the body. another participant said; “on the day we did a walk, i was really happy. it allowed me to exercise my legs especially now that the covid-19 pandemic is here i have to always stay fit and i eat healthy foods.” the importance of gratitude certainly goes a long way and its benefits were evident. some individuals reported that their sleeping pattern improved because of the gratitude journaling exercises. one participant said, “i have come to a point where i have come to peace with everything and now i can sleep well, i am grateful for what i have and this gives me peace of mind, i can sleep for more than eight hours now compared to the four hours i used to sleep.” theme three: appreciation and awareness the gratitude journaling exercise was not only for the participants to write things they http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 march 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 7 were grateful for each day, daily motivating messages and reminders were sent. participants indicated that the exercises helped them to pause and reflect as reflected in the extract below, “i really did not take note of the sunrise or sunset and how we have been blessed with warm nights and beautiful summer days here in zimbabwe. the exercise helped me turn my attention into these seemingly unimportant things and i really enjoyed it.” another participant said,“ohhh sunset how beautiful it is, i enjoyed watching the sun set, thinking about nothing but just observing and saying i am lucky, i am fortunate to see this someone never got to see this.” one more participant remarked; “it has really helped me realise who i am, to stop and pause and reflect my actions. to retrace my steps and realise this is actually a moment worth of being grateful.” these responses indicated that most times people do not really know what it entails to be grateful and that most of the time good things are overlooked or taken for granted. clearly given the socio-economic environment and the covid-19 pandemic it was difficult to find something to smile about let alone to be grateful for, but the exercise made the participants realise that even in the midst of it all there was something that could bring hope. due to the pandemic restrictions some relationships got strained at some point. however, for some participants connectedness as indicated in the extracts below, “i can now communicate well with others and can talk with my other colleagues because i realised that i should not get overworked by events in life so much that i lose out on the good things no matter how small they might seem.” one participant noted, “i appreciate those around me and value their presence it was an eye-opener, the exercise was very helpful it showed me that i should make the most of it.” another also responded saying, “i now can go back to my colleagues and say thank you for what they would have done for me, previously i could not say thank you no matter how big the thing that would have been done for me.” self-reflection was also noted as one of the benefits of participating in the journaling exercise, “the daily gratitude journaling has helped me self-introspect and to be more empathetic i closely look at the person i am and what i want to become.” theme four: beliefs and faith from the responses of the participants it was evident that beliefs or religion have played an important role in helping them cope during this period of the covid-19 pandemic. all of the participants were affiliated to a certain religion. beliefs and faith have played a central role in making people more grateful or appreciate the concept of gratitude. as well as having a greater dispositional effect of gratitude. one participant said; ”i really enjoyed diarising, i thank god for everything and appreciating the exercise, it took me time to really understand what this was all about, but once i started to pay attention i started to enjoy and looked forward to the daily messages and journaling.” on beliefs and faith, another participant also said; “it was helpful, so helpful. i thank god, the covid-19 pandemic seems not to be going away and the news everyday gives us statistics on the number of deaths it’s really http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 march 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 8 frightening, i fail to find a reason to wake up, let alone to be grateful for anything. god has been my source of strength. this gratitude exercise showed me another angle… i have drank tea in the morning, my kids are alive, i am grateful.” one of the participants said; “it is beyond us all, we believe god will hear our prayers and one day we will hear no more of covid-19, our hope lies in god and in god alone.” faith and belief became the hope of many and a coping mechanism during this time. many of the participants noted that the gratitude journaling exercise helped them count their blessings and not to focus on that which they had lost. one participant said; “i see now that every day is a blessing, the little things that we ignore are blessings, i cannot count them all, god has been faithful, yes covid is here but i can also count the good in my life, i am grateful.” the benefits of gratitude journaling surely have come a long way in helping people cope with the myriad of stressors brought about by the novel corona virus. discussion the results from the research showed that being grateful could become a coping mechanism in times of stressful events. similarly, other studies that have been carried out with different participants particularly students have also shown that students who practiced gratitude journaling showed a heightened level of understanding the learning process and engagement in the classroom (flinchbaugh, moore, chang and may, 2000). in addition, the findings from this research revealed that gratitude journaling allows one to concentrate on the positive aspect trying to find out exactly what it is they are grateful for. wilson (2016) also affirms that gratitude journaling helped lessen stressful events and quelled anxieties. another study by hart (2013) also revealed that gratitude journaling shifts a person’s thinking and that this shift in thinking is good for health. therefore, gratitude journaling does help in relieving stress by shifting one’s mind-set enabling him/her to concentrate on the positives. as reported in this research, researchers have acknowledged that gratitude journaling and grateful contemplation can be used to enhance long-term well-being (rash, matsuba & prkachin, 2011). gratitude journaling facilitates the development of healthy habits which results in benefits like improved sleep quality. hofman and serlachiu (2020) called for more research on the efficacy of gratitude interventions on improving health outcomes with particular attention to sleep. despite this, salvadorferrer (2017) noted that gratitude significantly improves overall life satisfaction which enhances psychological and physical well-being. enhanced ability to cope with stress and uncertainty was reported by individuals who took part in gratitude journaling. this echoes the findings of a study that was conducted by isik and ergunertekinalp (2017) in which students in the experimental group that kept a gratitude journal for 3 weeks had significantly higher post-test scores on gratitude, adjustment to university life, life satisfaction, and positive affect than their counterparts in the control group. though growing evidence suggests that gratitude journaling can be effective (boehm, lyubomirsky & sheldon, 2011), noted that one needs to regularly engage in this activity to reap desired benefits. however, engaging in gratitude journaling requires discipline and dedication. the findings from the research showed that all of the participants were affiliated to a certain religion. this could have helped them to be more forthcoming and appreciate the practise of gratitude as it is valued by most religions. research suggests that belief in god and religion were http://www.gjcpp.org/ global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 march 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 9 important dispositional traits in fostering gratitude. it is important to find out whether the same benefits of gratitude could be reported by individuals who are not affiliated to any religion. fostering social relationships is another finding that was drawn from the research. gratitude enables one to become appreciative of the people they live or work with. people with a grateful disposition tend to experience gratitude more frequently, more intensely, toward more people, and for more things in their life at any given moment (mccullough, emmons & tsang, 2002). like in the research conducted by kaczmarek et al. (2013) the majority of participants in current research were women. the possible explanation for women wanting to participate in gratitude journaling research is that they are eager to share their experiences and view the gratitude journaling exercise as useful. future research studies on gratitude journaling could include more male participants. conclusion gratitude journaling has been seen to help reduce negative affect and promote people`s wellbeing during difficult situations. the study has implications for mental health experts providing interventions during periods of mass disasters and pandemics. the reported intervention is important in that it allows for the participation of large groups of people rather than focusing on individuals. in addition, group online interventions are suitable for low resource settings where therapy may be expensive or unavailable. references flinchbaugh, c. l., moore, w. g., chang, y. k., and may, d. r. (2011). student wellbeing interventions: the effects of stress management techniques and gratitude journaling in the management education classroom. journal of management education, 36(2)191–219. bertocci, p. a., & millard, r. m. (1963). personality and the good: psychological and ethical perspectives. new york: mckay. boehm, j. k., lyubomirsky, s., and sheldon, k. m. (2011). a longitudinal experimental study comparing the effectiveness of happiness enhancing strategies in angloamericans and asian americans. cognition & emotion, 25, 1263-1272. bono, g., emmons, r and mccullough, m. (2012). gratitude in practice and the practice of gratitude. 10.1002/9780470939338.ch29 bono, g., emmons, r. a., & mccullough, m. e. (2004). gratitude in practice and the practice of gratitude. in p. a. linley & s. joseph (eds.), positive psychology in practice (pp.464–481). emmons, r. a. (2004). the psychology of gratitude: an introduction. in r. a. emmons & m. e. mccullough (eds.), the psychology of gratitude (pp. 3–16). oxford university press. hart, j. (2013). practicing gratitude linked to better health: a discussion with robert emmons, phd. jane hart. published online: 23 dec 2013. alternative and contemporary therapies, vol 19, no 6. hofman, p. l. and serlachiu, a. s. (2020). a systematic review of gratitude interventions: effects on physical health and health behaviours. journal of psychosomatic research, 135. isik, s. and erguner-tekinalp, b. (2017). the effects of gratitude journaling on turkish first year college students’ college adjustment, life satisfaction and positive affect. int journal of adv counselling, 39, 164-175. http://www.gjcpp.org/ https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/act.2013.19609 global journal of community psychology practice volume 15, issue 1 march 2024 global journal of community psychology practice, http://www.gjcpp.org/ page 10 o’ leary, k. (2013) gratitude works! a twenty-one-day program for creating emotional prosperity, the journal of positive psychology, 8:4, 361-3. rash, j., matsuba, k., and prkachin, k. (2011). gratitude and well-being: who benefits the most from a gratitude intervention? applied psychology health and well-being. 3, 350-369. salvador-ferrer, c. (2017). the relationship between gratitude and life satisfaction in a sample of spanish university student. the moderation of role of gender. anales de psicologia, 33 (1), pp114-119. sansone, r. a., & sansone, l. a. (2010). gratitude and well-being: the benefits of appreciation. psychiatry, 7, 11, 18-22. seligman, m. e. p. (2002). authentic happiness: using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfilment. new york: free press. seligman, m., steen, t., park, n. and peterson, c. (2005). positive psychology progress: empirical validation of interventions. the american psychologist. 60. schnitker, s. a., and richardson, k. l. (2019). framing gratitude journaling as prayer amplifies its hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, but not health, benefits, the journal of positive psychology, 14:4, 427439. wilson, j.t. (2016). brightening the mind: the impact of practising gratitude on focus and resilience in learning. journal of scholarship of teaching and learning. vol 16, (4), pp1-13. http://www.gjcpp.org/ building participative, empowering & diverse communities note from editors the ii international conference on community psychology in 2008 has had as main aim to contribute towards the advancement of an international movement inspired in the principles and values of community psychology. the presence of delegates from 36 different countries and the support of international organizations such as scra (society for the community research and action), ecpa (european community psychology association), and the community psychology colleges of the iberoamerican and australian psychology association, was for us an honor, and also we have had representatives from national associations from new zealand, japan, italy, france, germany, united kingdom, and portugal, providing to this event a globalized dimension. community psychology is a field for research and practice for over 40 years, but it is still possible to observe some theoretical, geographical and ideological group separations, which may have worked as catalysts towards a strengthened episteme with implications in community practice, but it is now time to focus our investments in the consolidation of a common ground. the challenge is to transform the incommensurable number of ideas, studies and practices and enhance the connections and partnerships of universities, communities and international platforms. the volume now finally presented is composed of 79 contributions representing different geographic areas around the globe, and myriad of topics, on research results and practice or project reports, focusing on themes related with interventions, migrants and multicultural issues, children, youth and families, alternative health and care providing, specific groups with increased vulnerabilities. the papers presented are also related with key-concepts for community psychology like empowerment, sense of community, social and community participation, mutual help, and enhance methods such as action or collaborative research and as well as studies combining multi-method approaches. some contributions are narrative and theoretical insights on the role of community psychology towards human and context development. a word of appreciation is due to vicent francisco editor of the global journal of community psychology practice for his patience, persistence and support to make public these contributions. to the contributors who waited a time beyond what would be expected to see their efforts to write and document their research and practice visible. josé ornelas & maria vargas-moniz 1 building participative, empowering & diverse communities contents note from editors 1 patients’ expectations and satisfaction with their health providers 9 a. afkhamebrahimi, m. nasr esfehani empowerment – a relational challenge 12 joão aguiar o sonho – a comprehensive intervention building on poverty fighting 17 j. aguiar, f. cardoso, p. paz, a. martins, b. lopes migration and situated contexts: natives and maghrebian habitants of san marcellino (south italy) 20 caterina arcidiacono, fortuna procentese, immacolata di napoli el trabajo multidisciplinario para el estudio de la vejez en el medio rural 31 maríavirginia mateu armand, catalina cervantes ortega, marcela rosas nexticapa, idalia illescas nájera youth in a multicultural setting 43 tomas bons making the psychological political – challenges for community psychology 50 mark burton, carolyn kagan, paul duckett engaging community leadership: the intersecting of global dialogue and systems change (adaptive and engaging leadership with a purpose in a shifting world) 64 james r. calvin nuevas metodologías en investigación y prevención de la violencia en la pareja 76 leonor cantera, vanesa gamero safety planning for abused children; using a multidisciplinary approach 87 thomas f. carr the experience of overcoming the stigma associated to hiv/aids: a call for collaboration with community psychology. 96 carlos roberto de castro-silva risky behaviors and substance use in youth leisure time 106 p. meringolo; m. chiodini, e. moscardi, a. morandi risk behaviours in adolescence: risk and protective factors 112 valentina c. chitas 2 building participative, empowering & diverse communities sense of community in adolescence 127 elvira cicognani, bruna zani, cinzia albanesi community critical psychologies: ideological convergence despite geographical dispersion 137 joaquim coimbra, paul duckett, david fryer, ibrahim makkawi, isabel menezes, ilana mountian, mohamed seedat, carl walker, there’s foreigner and foreigner: xenophobic reasoning and anti-immigrant discourse 143 monica colombo, paolo cherubini, lorenzo montali, laura marando the bio-psychosocial impact of forced migration: a participatory approach amongst refugees and asylum seekers in malta 155 marika podda connor parent education programs: (co)construction with parents 170 anabela duarte costa, ana cabrita, luana cunha ferreira, paula encarnação, patrícia navalho, isabel narciso, guida mendes, nelson agapito, joão nogueira standing against the coloniality of power: claiming the right to democratic participation in the globalized neoliberal state 180 mariolga reyes cruz compreendendo os processos de risco e resiliência em adolescentes que vivem em situações de vulnerabilidade social no brasil 192 débora dalbosco dell’aglio simbolismo do corpo e intervenção comunitária: contribuições feministas para a investigação-ação participativa. 202 aline domício, conceição nogueira el uso de la imagen en el trabajo comunitario. 210 leonor m. cantera espinosa, carmen rodrigues tatsch community-based fire preparedness practice in high density area 213 husnul fitri, istiqomah wibowo program of support and attention to families who live socio environmental vulnerabilities in the south of brazil 223 narjara mendes garcia, adriana matos de carvalho mendes, andré lemes da silva, camila dorneles de vargas, angela torma pietro, simone de biazzi ávila batista da silveira; maria angela mattar yunes social cohesion, perceived safety and immigration in a run-down district in reggio emilia 234 dino giovannini, barbara ferrari, andrea pintus, loris vezzali the role of leadership on child protective services 244 ana margarida graça, ana passos 3 building participative, empowering & diverse communities training service users to become community researchers for effective engagement within a participatory action research framework 249 jo hobbs parejas mixtas e inmigración: análisis del apoyo social 255 mª isabel hombrados mendieta, gianluigi mosca/o espacio técnico de la psicología comunitaria en el contexto del sistema de servicios sociales españoles: sondeo exploratorio de tres servicios sociales generales 265 jaime alfaro inzunza shifting borders exploring the relationship between women’s mobility and place belonging 277 barbara iuliano adaptive and engaging leadership with purpose in a shifting world 284 james r. calvin, ph.d. games for participation and conscientisation 286 carolyn kagan and karen duggan intergenerational work, social capital and wellbeing 294 carolyn kagan, anne-marie micallef, asiya siddiquee, iyabo fatimilehin, amira hassan, carla de santis, reheela ali, tunde zack williams, geoff bunn on the spirit of community psychology: one personal story 308 james g. kelly homeless and community-less: an action-research 313 gioacchino lavanco, floriana romano, carolina messina experiencias colaborativas de movilización hacia la responsabilidad social universitaria 319 teresita castillo león, rebelín echeverría echeverría, maría luisa rojas bolaños análisis de competencias. una propuesta metodológica de selección de promotores comunitarios 328 teresita castillo león, irene carolina cauich chávez, nancy marine evia alamilla entre la felicidad y la disciplina: dimensiones conceptuales del bienestar de personas con padecimientos crónicos 336 teresa m. torres lópez, carolina aranda beltrán, manuel pando moreno, josé gpe. salazar estrada la residencia universitaria flora tristán como parte del motor de cambio de una zona con necesidades de transformación social 347 v. martínez lozano, a. blázquez muñoz, j. blanco lópez prevalência, significações e prevenção da violência nas relações juvenis de intimidade: um projecto integrado de investigação 353 carla machado, cláudia coelho, rosa saavedra, sónia caridade, sónia martins, helena grangeia & ana rita dias 4 building participative, empowering & diverse communities empowerment as the determinants of citizen-participation for environmental management plan 362 hiroe maeda, yukio hirose psychology of the oppressed: encounters with community psychology in palestine 368 ibrahim makkawi the psychology of resilience among palestinian female students 372 ibrahim makkawi acculturation across life domains and perceived social support: a research in a suburban community of the city of genova (italy) 377 mara manetti, laura migliorini, laura frattini psychological sense of community: contributions toward a new understanding 390 clelia anna mannino and mark snyder o impacto de um programa de prevenção dos abusos sexuais de crianças em: crianças, pais e professores 396 susana maria, josé ornelas cambio organizacional para disminución del estrés en profesionales de enfermería hospitalaria 410 albar marín, mª jesús y morano báez, rocío. school climate perception and adolescent adjustment 418 migliorini l., manetti m., rania n. homelessness lifetime prevalence and attitudes to homeless in portugal 430 marta miguel, josé ornelas, maria vargas-moniz community-clinical psychology in venezuela: looking ahead 437 maritza montero, maribel gonçalves de freitas refugee families in a multicultural setting 448 eva nyberg enfoque teórico metodológico para el estudio de la vida cotidiana 460 maricela perera community and place identity in change: a discursive approach to local participation 466 piccoli norma, rollero chiara, greganti katiuscia narratives and health: fostering prosocial communities among recent immigrants to toronto 478 wade e. pickren, cynthia shih, nina vitopoulos, julia stanislavskaia, andrea andreii 5 building participative, empowering & diverse communities disclosure of sexual abuse in school environment: intervention with teachers 486 angela torma pietro, maria angela mattar yunes competencias profesionales en estudiantes de psicología 497 susana ruiz pimentel, sara e. ruiz vallejo, maría josé garcía oramas social exclusion paradox in poland 510 przemysław piotrowski, małgorzata wysocka-pleczyk , piotr passowicz construction of a portuguese online forum for mutual help 515 marta sofia pita de la opresión al bienestar. explorando poder, opresión y bienestar entre inmigrantes marroquíes en españa 517 sonia hernández-plaza*, manuel garcía-ramírez, isabel m. herrera sánchez, violeta luque-ribelles, y virginia paloma. places of fear and attachment. how azoreans perceive seismic and volcanic risk. 530 isabel estrela rego, ana moura arroz disasters and social participation in a nahuat community from mexico 538 maria eugenia sánchez y díaz de rivera, f. h. eduardo almeida acosta, antonio vázquez carreón , francisco sánchez conde, beatriz acevedo calderón discutindo o conceito de comunidade na psicologia para além da perspectiva identitária 550 tatiana gomes da rocha ¿por dónde se asoma la comunidad? un camino desde los adolescentes y la familia.programa de atención integral para padres y adolescentes en dos comunidades urbano-marginales en el municipio de durango 558 rocío guzmán benavente, rebeca treviño montemayor marginalisation and rurality 577 dr caroline rouncefield supportive houses for persons diagnosed with serious mental disorders as sociocultural sceneries: a methodological and theoretical proposal from the sociocultural psychology. 586 javier saavedra interactive patterns between professional and patient in supportive houses for serious mental ill 591 javier saavedra 6 building participative, empowering & diverse communities does the “broken window” theory work? how incivilities affect sense of insecurity in italian university students 596 luca scacchi, mariagrazia monaci, ennio cavedon judicial environment and poor families: risk or protection for relationships? 602 simone de biazzi ávila batista silveira & maria angela mattar yunes desenvolvimento local e processos de educação formal e não formal – relações realçadas pela avaliação de projectos 615 manuela terrasêca, alexandra sá costa, joão caramelo construyamos juntos una comunidad educativa libre de violencia 625 sara e. ruiz vallejo, susana ruiz pimentel, maría josé garcía oramas sesgo endogrupal, metaestereotipos y emociones hacia el exogrupo entre inmigrantes en españa 640 dr. josé juan vázquez, anabel díaz aberasturi, dra. sonia panadero prejuicio hacia los inmigrantes entre los jóvenes de guadalajara (españa) 650 dr. josé juan vázquez, anabel díaz aberasturi, dra. sonia panadero sentido de comunidad y bienestar en usuarios de asociaciones sociales de salud 660 mª teresa vega, mª augusta pereira leisure, information needs and social participation of outskirts young people in murcia (spain) 667 juan j. vera, jose. a. lopez-pina & gabriel navarro hemophilia: promoting health in children 684 maría josé baqueiro victorín & nancy marine evia alamilla strategies to promote resilience in families of low income exposed to social and environmental risks 694 maria angela mattar yunes sense of community in the work context. a study on members of a co-operative enterprise 708 bruna zani, elvira cicognani empowerment evaluation for the participation and leadership of people with experience of mental illness. 719 maria fátima jorge-monteiro, josé ornelas 7 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 8 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 9 building participative, empowering & diverse communities patients’ expectations and satisfaction with their health providers a. afkhamebrahimi1* m. nasr esfehani iran university of medical science,tehran psychiatrc institute,mental health research centre the growing amount of research into patients’ expectations of medical consultations reflects the view of the patient as an active consumer rather than a passive recipient of care. patients’ care often diverges from their expectations in important respects. patients tend to receive more prescription and less information. the fulfillment of certain expectations has been related to satisfaction with the consultation that in turn would improve compliance. patient satisfaction is also correlated with the patient’s reported intention to change physician. the higher the perceived fulfillment of the expectation is, the higher the satisfaction is. when fulfillment is lower than the expectation, the greater the gap and the lower the satisfaction. today patient satisfaction is considered a key measure of quality of care and patients reporting higher satisfaction were more likely to have a higher quality of life. method 375 patients ( 220 women and 155 men) who were attending various internal/surgery clinics(expect for pediatrics clinic) at a large teaching hospital and consented to participate in the study, were selected. the patients aged 18 to 79 with a mean age of 42.5 years old. the patients filled the following questionnaires: a one page demographic information questionnaire, the 28-item patients requests form which measures three forms of expectations: explanation and reassurance, emotional support and investigation and treatment. each item was rated on a 3 point scale (agree, uncertain and disagree) for “how much it applies to your visit today”, a satisfaction questionnaire which measures the patients’ satisfaction with their health providers on a three point scale of seven different aspects of satisfaction ( including overall satisfaction and intention to change physician). the data transferred to spss for further analysis. results table 1, shows the comparison of the three expectations of the patients with anova method. significant differences were found in “emotional support” and “ investigation and treatment” expectations among patients. the post hoc analysis of the table 1 results showed that the patients of neurology and psychiatry clinics expected more emotional support from their treating physicians than the ophthalmology patients and the differences were significant. also the patients of internal clinics expected more investigation and treatment than ophthalmology clinic patients, and the differences were significant. table 2, shows the correlation between patients’ total satisfaction with adherance to therapeutic recommendations and intention to change doctor. there is a significant and positive correlation between patients’ satisfaction and therapeutic adherence and a significant negative correlation between satisfaction and intention to change doctor. 1 afkhami@iums.ac.ir tel: +989121597189 mailto:afkhami@iums.ac.ir 10 building participative, empowering & diverse communities table 1 the comparison of patients’ expectations in twelve clinics v sos df mos f sig explaination bg 55.28 11 5.02 wg 1459.66 363 4.02 1.25 .25 emotional support bg 165.47 11 15.04 wg 2625.47 363 7.02 2.08 .02* investigation & treatment bg 100.94 11 9.17 wg 1689.20 363 4.65 1.97 .03* table 2 correlation of satisfaction with therapeutic adherence and intention to change doctor correlation satisfaction adherence change satisfaction 1 .216 .410 adherence .216 1 -.318 change -.410 -.318 1 discussion this investigation expands our understanding of patients’ unmet expectations for medical care. patients with wide variety of medical complaints may have common and different expectations of their health care visits, and are less satisfied with their medical visits when they do not receive such care. the common and most immediate post visit expectation for care of all the patients studied, was “ explanation and receiving information” which are consistent with other studies. need for information should be added to the health belief model originally formulated to explain preventive health behavior. it is not always enough to order and prescribe. diagnosis and treatments must be explained, options presented and management plans negotiated. our study and other studies have demonstrated the importance of providing information to patients. education may facilitate the technical aspects of the patients’ care as well as enhance the patients’ sense of personal control and social support. the results of this study suggest that the influence of others, a neglected element of the health belief model is worth further investigation. patients who desired and received certain elements of nontechnical care ( counseling and emotional support) had higher visit satisfaction. our study and a number of other studies have found a significant relationship between patient satisfaction and the socioemotional aspects of the physician’s behavior, such as their ability to express caring and concern for their patients. the significantly higher expectation for emotional support in patients of neurology and psychiatry clinics compared to other patients, reflects the affective nature of those conditions. patients’ perceptions about receiving examinations, tests, medications or nondrug treatments were minimally associated with levels of satisfaction with physicians. 11 building participative, empowering & diverse communities patients of internal medicine clinic based their opinion about health providers on the technical rather than the nontechnical aspects of care, because they regarded the nontechnical types of intervention as more personal. dissatisfaction demands a change, such as a change of physician. patients who had recently changed physicians because of dissatisfaction with their care, were most likely to complain that their physician was too busy to talk with them and didn’t appear interested in them as people. patients were less likely to leave their physician because of concerns about the technical quality of the care that they were receiving. this study highlights the importance of teaching active-listening skills to general practice physicians. the doctors need to study and adjust their consultation styles to communicate better with their patients. it is entirely plausible that the results of this study might have been different if the patients had more serious illness or different types of settings were selected. laboratory tests and medications might have a greater impact on patient satisfaction in more seriously ill patients. this study emphasizes the potential importance of understanding patients’ expectations for maintaining patient satisfaction and controlling health care costs. false positively and cost-effectiveness patients are demanding diagnostic tests and therapeutic interventions that may not always be in their own interests, and society’s. if supported by larger studies, these findings suggest that more training in the elicitation and negotiation of patients’ expectations would be a worthwhile addition to the medical curriculum. 12 building participative, empowering & diverse communities empowerment – a relational challenge aguiar, joão contact details: jfaguiar@netcabo.pt abstract empowerment promotion is a major challenge for community psychology. practitioners’ understanding of change processes and relationship building capacity are crucial elements for this. we reflect on some methodological and theoretical frames. we consider that the naturalistic paradigm and method can be applied to empowerment promotion, particularly if it is focused on creating change based on people’s voice, participation and actions (aguiar & moniz, 2006). besides, it helps to understand elements, boundaries and timings of change process. so, it can be a very useful method for action research. we believe that empowerment promotion is a relational challenge and that community development paths are based on relationship building, from the group to the community levels. it is a major challenge to promote empowerment, because to listen to voices of people, to understand their strengths, and to work with them in a cooperative way implies from the practitioners an understanding of empowering aspects of change processes and assuming a role of facilitator. the challenge practitioners face of combining top-down and bottom-up approaches is also an important aspect that have impact on individual, relational, organizational and community levels of empowerment promotion, where creativity play a special role. key words: empowerment; community empowerment this paper aims to bring together some basic and crucial elements for empowerment processes, linking individuals and groups towards community empowerment and community capacity. we discuss the relevance of relationships and the crucial role they play in integrative and empowerment promoting processes. this work is also a reflection of a community intervention on a small rural village that aimed to promote community change. we present some theoretical basis for the development of individual, group and community empowerment. empowerment promotion is a major challenge for community psychology. practitioners’ understanding of change processes and relationship building capacity are crucial elements for this. this work is based on a community intervention on a small rural village that aimed to promote community change. this project was built to promote free time activities for the village children (top-down approach) and to bring together the children, parents, schools, local administration and local organization so that together they could find out what they wanted to do for the lack of free time activities in the local area (bottom-up approach). we were able to conduct the research in such a way that we could deepen the understanding of community empowerment and its paradoxes and challenges and that empowerment promotion is a relational challenge and that community development paths are mailto:jfaguiar@netcabo.pt 13 building participative, empowering & diverse communities based on relationship building, from the group to the community levels. we share some of our findings. zimmerman (2000a) refers to 3 basic aspects of empowerment: participation, control and critical awareness. participation is the individual’s actions that contribute to community contexts and processes; control is the effective or the perception of ability to influence decisions; and critical awareness is the ability to analyze and understand the social and political environment. these three aspects are crucial to understand empowerment’s theory and practice. those who participate in decision making and meaningful activities are likely to be empowered (chavis & wandersman, 1990; rappaport, 1981, 1987; wandersman & florin, 2000; zimmerman, 1990; zimmerman & rappaport, 1988), although simple participation is not a condition to develop psychological empowerment. edelstein e wandersman (1987; cit. in rich et al., 1995) stated that participation can promote empowerment, depending on the nature and the result of the experience. so, participation, according to eklund (1999), can be “marginal” (when people have none or little influence in the process), “substantial” (when people are involved in defining priorities and activities execution) or structural (when it is a comprehensive component of the project and an ideological basis for all activities). control comes with participation in collective processes and is the effective or perception of the ability to influence decisions, mobilize resources and solve problems, building an effective personal and group participation. control enables the participation process to be gradual and coherent to people’s critical awareness. this implies a redistribution of power (cf. riger, 1993), so the process can be meaningful and real, and participation can boost an empowerment process. critical awareness allows, trough participation and control, people to understand power structures, decision making processes, and how to influence decisions and mobilize resources (zimmerman, 2000a). these three aspects are crucial for constructive intern dialog and praxis, which are crucial elements for empowerment process (kieffer, 1984). constructive intern dialog means the internal contradictions that people should feel to respond, in their paradoxical learning process. praxis is a dynamic cycle of practice and reflection, at the core of empowerment, through which people find new understandings and action, making empowerment a transformative process through action (kieffer, 1984) – and an active process to structure identity. so, social relationships and formal and informal social support can play a determinant role for social integration to be as collaborative as possible, building individual freedom for action coherent to meaningful social relation and bondings, and consequently opening people’s minds to diversity. kieffer (1984) states that empowerment is a gradual process that takes different stages or “eras” towards participation and commitment, from entry – the initial exploration of authority and social norms; to progress – where peers and mentor support are important to develop critical awareness; incorporation – where organizational and political competencies and confrontation with activity takes place and where proactivity is developed; and commitment – where social action are brought to individual’s daily life structure. this means that empowerment is a gradual process that goes from marginal, to substantial and structural participation. therefore these stages are essential so that active participation can lead to continual community involvement and proactive leadership, building a future for them selves and to community. 14 building participative, empowering & diverse communities during this process, skills and competencies are developed, so one’s contribute can also be gradually more effective and structural. kieffer (1984) stands that empowerment is not about competencies, but it is about participatory competencies, which are a convergence of the practice of all aspects of competence. that means that empowerment is about proactivity and adequate participatory practices in community, which represents a major relational challenge: social interactions through collaborative relationships. community psychologists have stated that community contexts should promote interdependence and diversity (kelly, azelton, burzette & mock, 1994) as well as empowerment (maton e salem, 1995). maton and salem found 4 aspects in community contexts that promote empowerment: (1) a belief system that promotes growth, based on strengths and focused in something beyond the individual; (2) an opportunity to play a structural role that can be integrative, accessible and multifunctional; (c) a support system that can be inclusive, peer-based and that allows sense of community; and (4) a leadership that is inspired, talented, shared and committed to the context and its members. kelly, azelton, burzette & mock (1994) consider other aspects like experience interdependence, informal interaction, keep communication channels open, and space to reflection and integration. these contexts should also include face-to-face interaction that promotes the context, opportunity to apply skills that promote cooperation, social norms where contribute is explicit (beyond he implicit), and valuing the group process. this perspective on individual, relationships and contexts are crucial for community psychologists. besides being facilitators for community change, community psychologists can be active players for relationships building – linking individuals and communities – and context building, promoting context’s dynamics, functions and meanings. this way, community change can be a consequence of community building. empowerment can be viewed at individual, organizational and community level (perkins & zimmerman, 1995; zimmerman, 2000a, 2000b). these levels are interdependent and in each one empowerment can be viewed as a process and as a result (zimmerman, 2000a). aguiar and moniz (2006) state a paradox of empowerment, particularly at collective level. the emphasis on problem solving and action can lead to faster results, although it can imply marginal participation of members – the focus is on results and it can lead to small wins, which are important to mobilize people in the long run, but it can decrease the opportunities for process ownership by members. on the other hand, the emphasis on people’s involvement can boost structural participation – the focus is on process, which can facilitate the ownership, although the risk can be the slower capacity to act, that can undermine involvement. empowerment interventions should embrace its paradoxical elements (rappaport, 1981). so, the challenge is to act and involve people and that requires a relational perspective and continual attention. so, collectively, there should be two parallel and complementary tracks, combining top-down and bottom-up approaches laverack & labonte (2000). maton (2000) states that these two approaches have advantages and disadvantages and that its combination allows long term change. all these aspects should be considered along the community empowerment continnum (rissel, 1994): from individuals, to small groups, community organizations, coalitions and political action – so that social movements can contribute to community empowerment and capacity, with the purpose of act collectively actions to address community issues and to build healthier 15 building participative, empowering & diverse communities and more prosperous communities. references chavis, d. & wandersman, a. (1990). sense of community in the urban environment: a catalyst for participation and community development. american journal of community psychology, vol.18, 1, 55-81. eklund, l. (1999). from citizen participation towards community empowerment: an analysis on health promotion from citizen perspective. dissertação académica apresentada à faculty of medicine of the university of tampere, tampere. kelly, j., azelton, l., burzette, r. & mock, l. (1994). creating social settings for diversity: an ecological thesis. in edison j. trickett, roderick j. watts e dina birman (eds.) human diversity: perspectives on people in context (pp.424-451). san francisco: jossey-bass. kieffer, c. (1984). citizen empowerment: a developmental perspective. in julian rappaport e robert hess (eds.) studies in empowerment (pp. 9-36). new york: the haworth press. laverack, g. & labonte, r. (2000) a planning framework for community empowerment goals within health promotion. health, policy and planning, 15 (3), 255-262. maton, k. (2000). making a diference: the social ecology of social transformation. american journal of community psychology, vol. 28, 1, 25-57. maton, k., & salem, d. (1995) organizational characteristics of empowering community settings: a multiple case study approach. american journal of community psychology, vol. 23, 5, 631-656. perkins, d. & zimmerman, m. (1995). empowerment theory, research, and application. american journal of community psychology, vol. 23, 5, 569-579. rappaport, j. (1981). in praise of paradox: a social policy os empowerment over prevention. american journal of community psychology, vol. 9, 1, 1-25. rappaport, j. (1987). terms of empowerment/exemplars of prevention: toward a theory for community psychology. american journal of community psychology, vol.15, 2, 121-147. rich, r., edelstein, m., hallman, w. & wandersman, a. (1995). citizen participation and empowerment: the case of local environmental hazards. american journal of community psychology, vol. 23, 5, 657-675. riger, s. (1993). what’s wrong with empowerment. american journal of community psychology, vol. 21, 3, 279-292. rissel, c. (1994). empowerment the holy grail of health promotion. health promotion international, vol. 9, 1, 39-47. wandersman, a. & florin, p. (2000). citizen participation and community organizations. in julian rappaport & edward seidman (eds.), handbook of community psychology (pp.247-271). new york: plenum publishers. zimmerman, m. (1990). taking aim on empowerment research: on the distintion between individual and psychological conceptions. american journal of community psychology, vol.18, 1, 169-177. zimmerman, marc a. (2000a). empowerment and community participation: a review for the next millennium. in josé ornelas (ed.) ii congresso europeu de psicologia aplicada (pp. 17-42). lisboa: 16 building participative, empowering & diverse communities instituto superior de psicologia aplicada. zimmerman, m. a. (2000b) empowerment theory: psychological, organizational and community levels of analysis. in jullian rappaport and edward seidman (eds.) handbook of community psychology (pp. 43-59). new york: kluwer academic/plenum publishers. zimmerman, m. & rappaport, j. (1988). citizen participation, perceived control and psychological empowerment. american journal of community psychology, vol. 16, 5, 725-750. 17 building participative, empowering & diverse communities o sonho – a comprehensive intervention building on poverty fighting aguiar, j.; cardoso, f.; paz, p.; martins, a.; lopes, b. contact details: jfaguiar@netcabo.pt abstract “o sonho” (the dream) is a portuguese ngo that works in setúbal – a city 45 km from lisbon. since 2005 “o sonho” has been expanding its participation in community settings. in october 2007 “o sonho” made a protocol with the portuguese social security system, to work for a national poverty ending program – rendimento social de inserção (social integration income), aiming to promote labor, social and community integration of low income population. this program intends to build with families new tracks for their development, on employment, education, housing, health and civil rights and duties. intending to build a comprehensive intervention, we have been growing in the areas of microcrédit – building a coalition to give credit to promote self-employment; training – doing and promoting training on health promotion and prevention; food supplies and clothes – building coalitions in order to address serious hunger and poverty situations; and housing – promoting and developing mutualist solutions with families for access to houses. we stand for the crucial proactive role of individuals, families and communities in their own development, so we assume as core principles for intervention the trust relationship building; and the family’s capacity and autonomy in their integration process – promoting families’ participation and empowerment –, we base our efforts on finding ways to support people on creating new opportunities for using their strengths to grow out of poverty. we assume an active role on poverty ending and community development, focusing on social entrepreneurship and serving people in its most important development issues. we believe that this way of creating new supporting structures for and with the community helps to promote community development and systems change. key words: empowerment; community empowerment; this paper intends to describe the growing strategies and the work that a portuguese non government organization (ngo) – “o sonho” (the dream) – has been doing in setúbal, a city 28 miles (45 km) from lisbon. dedicated to children activities, particularly to pre-school and free-time activities for children, and inside poor neighbourhoods and close to rural communities in the boundaries of setúbal, this local organization started an entrepreneurial process aiming to promote development. we describe their community intervention growth process in this paper. since 2005 “o sonho” has been expanding its participation in community settings – it is representing part of the ngo’s from setúbal in the local council for social work (rede social), and also being part of its 18 building participative, empowering & diverse communities executive group. in october 2007 “o sonho” signed a protocol with the portuguese social security, to work for a national poverty ending program (“social integration income”), aiming to satisfy basic needs and to promote labor, social and community integration of low income population. its intervention was defined on a specific area, including urban area, social neighbourhoods, and rural area. they started with a (team with 10 members) 10 members team and with the responsibility for 230 families and 720 people (responsible for 230 families witch means 720 people). this program intends to work with families helping them to build new tracks for their development, on employment, education, housing, health and civil rights and duties. the professional’s role is to negotiate integration process in these areas and to support and followup the families. that implies to do joint work with other community organizations, for instance schools, recreation activities organizations, rsi partners, educational system (like schools), health system, social security services, the employment and professional training local institute and local administration services. that implies that professionals must be aware of empowerment processes so the opportunities created can be matched with people’s voice and integration process. in so, this program aims to promote family’s autonomy not only at social integration level but also at economic level. “o sonho” stands for the crucial proactive role of individuals, families and communities in their own development, so assumes as core principles for intervention the trust relationship building; and the family’s capacity and autonomy in their integration process – promoting families’ participation and empowerment –, and bases efforts on finding ways to support people on creating new opportunities for using their strengths to grow out of poverty. for these strategies to be effective, the join work must be oriented to a community approach. that means that the professional’s role must be focused on a deepen knowledge of the community, and the crossing of resources and integration opportunities with people’s qualifications, needs and voices. working closely to families made the professionals realize that there were fewer opportunities for integration that were suspected. that fact boosted the organization to start an entrepreneurial process aimed to bring development opportunities to local area residents. the main difficulties found in facilitating integration processes were: lack of food supplies, personal belongings and assets (clothes, electric appliances, furniture, etc.), credit to start new businesses, educational opportunities. the main strategy used to create opportunities for local people were based on the establishment of strategic partnerships, as partnerships as are a good strategy to (berkowitz & wolff; cit. in wolff, 2001) partnerships were created to bring food supplies (with the “programa comunitário de ajuda alimentar a carenciados”); personal belongings and assets (with fundação portuguesa “a comunidade contra a sida”); for micro credit (with andc – associação nacional de direito ao crédito); for entrepreneurship training, it training, educational and professional training and education programs (fdti – fundação para o desenvolvimento das tecnologias de informação); and for basic literacy programs (education system services). about the results of such initiatives, they are expected to be more concrete in the beginning 19 building participative, empowering & diverse communities of next year. when the activities are expected to be in motion. nevertheless, this is a new reality for the organization and for its community, since this kind of resources and opportunities usually are not available in this particular geographic area. this local organization assumes an active role on poverty ending and community development, focusing on social entrepreneurship and serving people in its most important development issues. this model for intervention creates new opportunities at the local level, which is crucial to put in practice the social policies and social programs, and to allow new development perspectives for these communities. this is a vision for poverty alleviation through community development. nevertheless, resident involvement in agency is also important to create more lasting community change (association for the study and community development, 2007; fosterfishman et al., 2006; kubisch et al., 2002). therefore, there must be a deeper relation to residents, which means that those activities have to take place and time, to sustain its capacity, as well as new strategies adopted to promote other groups initiatives to build a more capable community – building community capacity for change. references association for the study and community development (2007). scope, scale and sustainability; what it takes to create lasting community change. association for the study and community development. available at http://www.communityscience.com/pubs/scope%20scale%20 and%20sustainability%20report%20final.pdf foster-fishman, p., fitzgerald, k., brandell, c., nowell, b., chavis, d. & van egeren, l. (2006). mobilizing residents for action: the role of small wins and strategic supports. american journal of community psychology, vol. 38, 3/4, 143-152. kubisch, a., auspos, p., brown, p., chaskin, r., fullbright-anderson, k. & hamilton, r. (2002). voices from the field ii: reflections on comprehensive community change. the aspen institute. roundtable on comprehensive community initiatives for children and families. consultado em 27 de novembro de 2005 através de http://www.aspeninstitute.org/atf/cf/{deb6f227-659b-4ec88f84-8df23ca704f5}/voicesiibook.pdfmattessich, p & monsey, b. (2004). community building: what makes it work – a review of factors influencing successful community building. saint paul, mn: amhers h. wilder foundation. wolff, t (2001). community coalition building – contemporary practice and research: introduction. american journal of community psychology, vol.29, 2, pp. 165-172. 20 building participative, empowering & diverse communities migration and situated contexts: natives and maghrebian habitants of san marcellino (south italy) caterina arcidiacono, fortuna procentese, immacolata di napoli department of relational sciences, university federico ii, naples. caterina.arcidiacono@unina.it abstract literatures on ethnic identity and acculturation strategies integration, assimilation, separation or marginalization (berry,1997) have shown how host populations perceive migrants and that migrant populations may be viewed very differently by the majority group or the larger society. we could understand the complex interaction between individual factors, the individual’s belonging to a group, the intragroup and intergroup dynamics, while bearing in mind that at the same time the dimensions we have mentioned interact reciprocally within the group and with external groups. for this reason, we have conducted semi-structured interviews with inhabitants – natives and maghrebian – in an area in the territory surrounding naples where there is a mosque and which has a high density of various kinds of migrants. this self-descriptive tool of the interview aims at collecting information ranging from a description of oneself to a description of others and of the context. with relation to the aforementioned objectives, the participants were selected on the basis of a theoretical sampling: natives and maghrebian migrants with various characteristics and social roles, with and without reciprocal contacts. the interviews and the textual materials gathered were audio-recorded. they were transcribed and underwent qualitative analysis by means of the methodology of grounded theory.this is a “substantive theory”, which is derived via an inductive method from the study of a phenomenon, an explanation, an interpretation of a specific phenomenon which is particular because it is built by means of a theory (corbin & strauss, 2008). this study thus intends to identify classification systems which support the representation of the self and of others in terms of belonging or extraneousness in relation to contexts which imply various levels of sharing, participation and trust in order to promote forms of interconnection and planning involving the different cultures simultaneously present in a given territorial community. in this regard, recognising the reciprocal classifications enables us to investigate the elements which are supposed to be the basis of processes of integration. keywords: qualitative research, acculturation, contact hypothesis, intergroup relations, social categorization. literature on ethnic identity and inter group relations focuses on integration as the best strategy of acculturation in terms of well-being in the process of migrants’ adjustment to a new context. it increases social cohesion; avoids the development of racist attitudes in the receiving population; promotes symmetrical intergroup relationships (berry, 1997). we have learned that the perception of acceptance that migrants have of the hosting community is among the factors that promote the processes of integration (berry, 1997). a further factor consists in the mailto:caterina.arcidiacono@unina.it 21 building participative, empowering & diverse communities realistic expectations that favor integration, differently from excessive expectations, which generate an adaptation that is not adequate. finally, the social support received is of fundamental importance. the peculiarity of this approach is that it takes the hosting community into account in terms of reception and support, but it does not take into account the dimensions of reciprocity between natives and migrants and considers the latter to be figures who need help and not people able to offer knowledge and resources. we could, in fact, understand the complex interaction among individual factors, the individual’s belonging to a group and the intragroup and intergroup dynamics, while bearing in mind at the same time that these dimensions interact reciprocally within the group and with external groups. we have thus further developed berry’s acculturation model in the perspective of the mutual dynamic process between two groups, the foreigner and the host, considering the interpersonal and intergroup relations according to the model developed in the investigations by bourhis r.y., moïse l.c., & perrault s. (1997), barrette & bourhis, (2004). the dovidio, gaertner and saguy presentation and discussion of investigations of the common ingroup identity model show us the evolving nature of intergroup bias, illustrating the complexity of “we” in social attitudes and social changes (2008). within this frame of reference, recognising the reciprocal classifications enables us to investigate the elements which are supposed to be the basis of integration and difference. in these pathways the feeling of collective identity favors the building of a system of feelings of rapport which are functional in the sharing of a common situation and in a common opportunity for change. migration is conceptualized as an ecological transition that involves vast changes in contexts of interaction, in both values and social rules. this also has an effect on the status and social relations between natives and newcomers (martinez, garcia-ramirez & maya,2002). more recently, mantovani has emphasized (2008) that the study of reciprocal representations within a context, if it is carried out while maintaining the differentiated perspective ( the “we’s” and the “they’s”) necessarily leads to bringing elements of differentiation into focus. the research must thus be rooted in a common dimension to which the interviewed subjects can make reference and in which they can recognize themselves. in this direction studying migrant and native experiences in a shared and situated context becomes relevant. furthermore, within an ecological approach, we need to define research criteria and procedures which take into account the dimensions of relationship and of interaction among people who share the same community, and which consider the bureaucratic and material dimensions that have great relevance in the processes of acculturation. in this sense the process of integration into the local community is also the result of the influence of the context, of the social networks and of personal and group characteristics, in addition to the real relational and material resources which can be utilized by people who are part of a community (nelson & prilleltensky, 2005). our research goals also included the exploration of the ways in which these dimensions influence the processes of acculturation in a specific context. in particular, attention was placed on communication interactions among various actors of the same context for a mutual recognition and to create common spaces in order to identify strategies of integration. 22 building participative, empowering & diverse communities we then investigated intercultural experience in relation to italian and migrant contexts at micro meso macro levels (prilleltensky, 2008), namely: context characteristics interactions neighborhooding joint group shared events shared value actions using this perspective we have carried out a study directed towards understanding the dynamics of reciprocal recognition between residents and migrants on the northern shore of the mediterranean, within a community in an area in which there is the presence of migrants and of associative contexts within which interaction is possible between natives and foreigners. in order to understand the orientation towards reciprocal recognition and thus integrative action, this work has thus examined the aspects that contribute to perpetuating the difficulties and the dimensions that in specific contexts of social and political life are obstacles or resources in the process of interaction between italians and migrants. objectives the project deals with the predictive factors of social cohesion in multicultural contexts and the factors that promote the integration of newcomers into the community. this study thus intends to identify classification systems which support the representation of the self and of others in terms of belonging or extraneousness in relation to contexts which imply various levels of sharing, participation and trust, in order to single out forms of interconnection and planning involving the different cultures simultaneously present in the given territorial community. in this regard, recognising the reciprocal classifications enables us to investigate the elements which are supposed to be the basis of pathways of integration and difference. in these pathways the feeling of collective identity favors the building of a system of feelings of rapport which are functional in the sharing of a common situation and in a common opportunity for change. context: san marcellino for the research we chose a context where we had previous significant contacts with people strongly involved in the local context and where there are associations that intend to use the results of our investigation. in san marcellino the research team have contacts, connections and interaction with key people of the area, associations, schools, and the local mosque active in the area. san marcellino is a municipality of about 11,000 inhabitants situated in an area that was originally dedicated to agricultural activities (strawberry, peach, and tomato crops), and today it is engaged in expansion of its service industries and the development of small businesses, in a territory that is difficult because of the presence of organized crime in control of the markets of labor and of contracts, as local newspaper reports demonstrate. it is an area that has a low cost of living: rents and the prices of consumer goods are lower than in the neighboring towns (errichiello, 2007). 23 building participative, empowering & diverse communities participants with relation to the aforementioned objectives, the participants were selected on the basis of a theoretical (intentional) sampling (corbin, strauss, 2008). as we were looking at an urban context, we followed martini and sequi’s model (1988) to identify the key people to interview. in fact, we paid particular attention to the choice of people to involve in the research process and to the specific citizens to contact. such criteria (arcidiacono, procentese 2008) allowed us to take into account the participation of citizens who, due to their variety of interests, were representative of the social actors in the local context. they were first of all chosen among the leaders of the so-called in community: politicians who manage power and representatives of social or cultural services, business and commerce; and from among the out community, such as powerless social minorities, people who offer assistance in informal ways, and minority or opposition politicians. the issue is then to purposefully select information-rich participants (patton,2002). the specific participants were the following: 13 key people in the context: 2 parish priests, the mayor, 2 key people in the islamic community (the imam and a labor consultant), 1 general practitioner, 2 school teachers, 1 psychologist from the social and health family center, 2 cultural mediators, 1 volunteer from the local parish and 2 volunteers from the associations. 9 italian residents of the town and its surroundings with and without contact with migrants, aged between 23 and 57 years, differentiated with respect to educational level, profession, and political and social participation. among those: 1 tobacconist, 2 shop assistants, 2 bartenders, and 4 people with no contact with migrants living in san marcellino. 8 migrants, with and without stay permits, who have migrated recently and not recently (at least 5 years), males and females of various ages (range from 21-55), various conditions of marital status, of schooling and number of children; involved in associations, in mosque activity, and with no social activity. strategies of contact the first phase of the participative research project was the contact between the researchers, natives and migrants, a significant opportunity for the establishment of the coconstructed research environment. through listening and mutual knowledge, a relationship of mutual trust was built among the participants in the research project. in this sense, preliminary meetings took place through intermediary figures that enjoy the trust of the host community. these figures prepared the terrain for the preliminary meetings with other people known to be the most authoritative in the research context. the literature (hanlin, bess, conway, evans, cown et al., 2008; nelson & prillentensky, 2005) shows the need for prolonged preliminary contact, but if strong contact already exists with the key people in the territory, it may not be necessary to spend long periods of time in the research context. in our experience, the presence of bridging figures between the group of researchers and the area or context investigated, was a preliminary aim, almost a pre-requisite. this was accompanied by the search for experts, scholars and researchers who in various capacities were familiar with the territory studied and with the topic being investigated. thus, in building up the research team we preferred people involved in the local context, i.e., local researchers. in order to introduce the university team into san marcellino we invited the imam to the university and all the university researchers joined in the cultural parties 24 building participative, empowering & diverse communities and training initiatives in the local context. instruments a socio demographic form and semi-structured interviews ( legewie, 2006). in that research, the narrators were invited to explicitly reconstruct the situation and the experience as they saw them in the moment. for schütze (1983), the interview begins with narration as the starting point, and only following this are explanatory questions relating to that narrative asked. for legewie, schütze’s contributions are important, but it is of greater necessity for the interview to respond to the criteria of the communicative act set out by habermas (1981). the interview must be the expression of reciprocal consensus between the parties, and it must occur by virtue of an agreement of cooperation between the interviewer and the interviewee; for its success, the motivation and the cooperation of both are essential. therefore, for the success of the interview, the structural and personal preconditions that make mutual understanding possible are important. this self-descriptive tool of the interview aims at collecting information ranging from a description of oneself to a description of others and of the context. in order to learn about the different identities and the intergroup relations within a multicultural society, and in order to find out key factors of the process of integration of migrants and natives from a participative and situated perspective, the methodology of research explored the following particular processes: for the italians: the presence of migrants in the town (origin and characteristics), contact (occasional, cohabitation, work, school), the forms of interaction of the italians with the migrants (laws, norms and local customs) and of the migrants with the italians (adaptation, interaction, integration), reciprocal representations, common and/or shared experiences. for the migrants: the process of migration: the arrival in italy and the reason for coming, the processes and the experiences of arrival; the present situation; the contacts and the forms of interaction with the place, the institutions, the inhabitants; sharing of contexts and their perception; reciprocal representations, common and/or shared experiences in associations, with neighbours, in the workplace. for both groups, in the interviews drafted after the discussion and coding of the first interviews gathered, the focus was placed on the characteristics and particularities of san marcellino, on the modalities of life of its inhabitants and on the future prospects for individuals and for the community. the interviews and the textual materials gathered were audio-recorded, transcribed and underwent a qualitative analysis by means of the methodology of grounded theory. this is a theory which is set up by the researchers in the course of field research and on the basis of elements emerging during the carrying out of qualitative analysis. when we talk about theory we do not intend formal theories but a “substantive theory”, a theory which is derived via an inductive method from the study of a phenomenon, an explanation, an interpretation of a specific phenomenon which is particular because it is built by means of a theory. data analysis the process of codification, as defined by grounded theory, is a cyclical process, in that in the open, axial codification phase the researcher reverts from the raw data back to the concepts, to 25 building participative, empowering & diverse communities return again to the data in the selective codification phase. the coding is the core procedure of the group of researchers, who request discussion and share procedural decisions. as an example of a completed project, we cite the following procedural steps: first, three senior researchers and four junior researchers analyzed the textual material obtained from the individual interviews. in this first phase of interpreting the textual material, after reading and codifying only a few interviews, every researcher formulated their own suggestion for codification in the form of a memo. the first codifications thus obtained were discussed by the whole working group, which identified some shared codes to be attributed to all the textual material; the team then defined some theoretical macro-categories, concepts with which to analyze the general text. results in order to analyze the processes of inter-relationship between italians and migrants and with the purpose of overcoming stereotypes and generalized representations, and of identifying shared processes and reciprocal inter-relationships, we chose as the context for inquiry a specific territory (the municipality of san marcellino in the agro aversano area) and a community (the maghreb muslims) that has a mosque in that territory. the mosque is a center which delivers services (emergency reception at night, hairdresser/barber, sale of foodstuffs, labor consultant), a place for entertainment (hall with tables and a refrigerator for cold drinks; speaker systems for parties) and for study (classes with desks and blackboard). it thus constitutes a place of visibility, also for the hosting community, which has received the mosque without any problems. the whole research project, the modalities of construction of local relationships, the organization of the research and the description of the modalities of the work, as well as the vicissitudes that accompanied the activities have been described in conferences (arcidiacono, procentese, bocchino 2008; arcidiacono, procentese natale, mahboubi, canfora 2008) and are the object of an article that is in press (arcidiacono, procentese, 2009). in this paper we limit ourselves to the description of some initial considerations, beginning from the interviews and the contacts we initiated in order to make them. expectations about italy: the opportunity to work from a first coding emerges, on the part of the migrants, a motivational dimension based on decisions that are not only individual but also family decisions, which induces one to think about the type of expectation of the migrants interviewed. in fact, they hope not only to be able to work and have better living conditions than those they had in their countries of origin, but they expect also to be able to support their families economically. as regards the territorial community in which they reside, the choice is linked to the presence of an informal organized network that favors the settling of new arrivals. in the case of the town of san marcellino, the community seems to have been chosen because it is perceived as being welcoming, similar to their culture, and because it offers opportunities to work. with regard to the ecological point of view, these expectations are a good beginning for assuming “non down” positions with respect to the local people. even if there is a paradox given by the illegality in which the migrants live, since many do not have a stay permit, 26 building participative, empowering & diverse communities and work without declaring it. this places them in a condition of asymmetry with respect to the local population and above all, they cannot make use of some rights, nor can they contribute to the improvement of social conditions. “it was a territory with almost no controls and with great tolerance and ignorance towards immigration, and then it became a place where it was easy to settle without any problems.” (the mayor of san marcellino). in fact, the imam states: “ with every legal directive for regulating the black market workers there is a turnover of the people present: many move towards the north of italy, which offers opportunities for legal work and thus the conditions to improve earnings and be able to have family members come to italy”. attitude of the local people towards maghrebian migrants from the interviews emerges a general negative stereotype of migrants, which is inserted in a double representation of them that alternates between seeing them as a danger (they get drunk, they steal, they are in organized crime) and as a resource (they are good workers and do the jobs that italians don’t want to do any more). the negative attributes refer mainly to migrants from eastern europe. in the descriptions the maghreb people do not have any particular attributes, and in the interviews of italians they are perceived as serious workers, even if socially it is as if they were invisible. as for the arab women who are housewives, but university graduates, a strong prejudice emerges about them: “when i talked with my neighbours, they used to say, ‘but did you go to school?’ and i said, ‘excuse me, i’m a university graduate!’ ‘but why are you a university graduate? a graduate?’ they don’t believe it, they find it strange, but why?” in coding the texts, the creation of categories seems to turn on the dimension of clean/ dirty: “they come to your house and look at how clean it is, how orderly it is, they understand that we are people, too.” (interview a 3a, a muslim woman with a university degree in italy for 9 years with three children). “there are so many differences: city, country, … there is the difference between rich and poor … if you put them together, they cannot get along … they can never be friends … they say that one is dirty, that other one steals, one of them says that the other one has ‘got money’.” … the category of clean as social desirability and of dirty as a negative attribute is often mentioned in the interviews, and the cultural meanings attributed to this double characterization should be studied more in depth. conditions of life and relationships with respect to their cultures, both the migrants and the natives interviewed have strong cultural identities that are expressed through traditions and religion. certainly a characterizing aspect of the family organization, which becomes an indirectly relevant aspect in the modality with which the foreign women approach the natives, is the supremacy of male decision power. with regard to the migrants, maintaining their culture of origin takes place through encounters with other fellow countrymen and above all through the mediation of the mosque present in the town of san marcellino. 27 building participative, empowering & diverse communities sometimes the italians participate in the activities organized by the community of migrants, but they remain suspicious in the reception of food-related and other customs. certainly the knowledge given by constant encounters with migrants favors a process of reciprocal knowledge and understanding even of respective customs. isolation and closed minds in general the relationships are characterized by reciprocal isolation (along the main street of san marcellino, on saturday italians and arabs go walking but do not say hello to each other and almost do not see each other) and distrust: “i would like to know them. but i think that they, too, are really afraid of us.” (male, 35 years old, aeronautics company, volunteer with caritas, interview 1i). for the most part “the only contacts that exist are imposed by circumstances” (woman, italian, inhabitant of a neighboring town). the asymmetry of relationships from the interviews carried out with italian social service workers emerges an attention on their part towards the migrants, oriented towards giving support in the areas of health, labor and bureaucracy. this on the one hand constitutes an important resource, but it seems to maintain a relationship of asymmetry between natives and migrants, as different groups in that no initiatives are thought of in which to favour reciprocal knowledge. as for the italians, it is clear from the interviews that they have shown themselves to be receptive in a dimension of offering help to migrants, but they do not seem to be interested in their culture. a first way that the migrants interviewed approach the natives is through the request for help; over time, through continuous contacts with some local people, relationships of reciprocal knowledge are created, which allows the migrants to make their culture known, as well. reciprocity in particular on the part of the migrant women, a meeting in the home is reported as the moment of reciprocal recognition. for men, the bar is equally the place for meeting and the way of measuring interaction; being invited to drink coffee together is something which, when it occurs, is welcomed with great pleasure and which in the north happens much less often, and is given as an example of how relationships with local people are good and of why many migrants prefer to stay in san marcellino rather than emigrate to northern italy. “in this little town the relationship is one of esteem and respect. there is perfect integration, i repeat, also because the parish priest has known how to work with the imam, establishing a relationship of perfect esteem. just think, last year the priest had an accident and almost lost his life and the imam together with a group of muslim immigrants went to visit him. and they prayed for him on the day of ramadan.” (int. 3, 1, woman who does volunteer work in the parish, member of the centerright wing party “polo della libertà”) insecurity, conflicts and negotiation in the face of the stereotyped vision of migrants as carriers of social insecurity, the migrants 28 building participative, empowering & diverse communities describe their insecurity in the local situation, in particular when they go outside the circuits of separation and of work. it emerges, for example, from the stories of italians and migrants that it is dangerous to walk in the evening, because there is the risk of being beaten or hit by a car. one of our students explains, however, that walking is almost a factor which indicates social vulnerability; a person who can will use a car always and in any situation; for this reason the migrants on foot or on bicycles, risk being the object of “jokes” (of being bothered and/or beaten up). a young man 18 years old who was used to spending time with the local young people tells why the territory is not safe for migrants: “you can never know what will happen. for example, one evening, during a walk with friends they say for fun: ‘oh, shall we burn this one up?’ and then they go and beat him up. it has happened to me lots of times! i used to go out with italians, they saw other italians and said, ‘let’s see if we can manage to beat them up’.” in another interview the imam told about when the local boys used to throw rocks into the mosque and the community photographed the guilty parties; later the parish priest contacted the families of the boys and without the intervention of the law (the police), the families of the local people went to the mosque to apologize, thus putting into action inter-institutional strategies for overcoming local conflicts through the intervention of social mediation. final remarks the muslim community presents itself as “low-key”. social invisibility as a group seems to be a strategy pursued with the local population. this could be considered as a strategy of integration, a sort of decategorization strategy for the reduction of inter-group bias, as some authors suggest (dovidio et al., 2000,2005; miller 2002). such a style of relationship is adapted, in any case, to the lifestyle of the local context, which is very closed in private life, characterized by the saying repeated again and again: fatti i fatti tuoi e campi cent’anni, “mind your own business and you will live a hundred years”. for that matter, as has been asserted by luque-ribelles, herrera, garcia-ramírez, hernándezplaza, paloma et al, (2008), when migrants live in asymmetrical social conditions, separation is the acculturative strategy to achieve well-being. if separation is a defensive strategy in a territory that is considered hostile, in the agro aversano territory it could be said to be an element that migrants and natives have in common in their common perception of the local territory. finally, it is interesting to note that, when faced with the high level of interest of the national and local press in this time period in the events linked to crime in these territories because of the presence of groups involved in organized crime (the casalesi clan), in our interviews of italians and migrants, this subject is up to the present almost completely absent. sometimes it is hinted at or referred to, because it is recognized as having a function in the supply of labor and in protection against petty crime. at the same time, the territory shows, instead, a strong social life: the mosque acts as a social center, there are volunteer associations with deep roots, and the inter-institutional relationships are very active. the imam, the parish priest and the mayor act in synergy to solve problems; scholastic projects are realized within national projects that favor intercultural dialogue, the parish and the mosque co-operate with the municipal government for the realization of the festa della repubblica (republic day) in an inter-ethnic dimension. some strategies for resolution of conflicts already mentioned are emblematic as strategies of reconciliation put into action on a 29 building participative, empowering & diverse communities local level. a common superordinated identity which could act as a unifying element, does not seem to emerge, ,and there is evidence of a common social context in which both migrants and local people interact, that is a social space in which the aggregations take place by virtue of shared values. the new parish priest asserts, “i do not see racism towards the migrants, but i see instead forms of intolerance and lack of respect that are generalized in our context. the fact that san marcellino is full of migrants means that the people are receptive and willing… in these three months that i have been here, i have noticed many problems, but certainly not because of the migrants or the muslims!” from the analysis of the territory examined there seems to emerge in the context a multi-dimensional set of strategies for relating and acculturation: separation, social invisibility, mediation/negotiation, sharing of spaces and times (public holidays). from the interviews the activities of sharing are shown to be full of meaning in the politics of small daily events (coffee offered at the bar, the invitation to one’s home, the common group of friends), more than in organized local events (encounters at school, public festivities). the strategies of social mediation show the immediate effects of inclusive policies put into action by the local key people; these seem to be the most fruitful in the creation of integration and good living conditions at a local level. to conclude with the words of the mayor: “they tend to live all together. in this way they protect themselves from the outside world, which is us, because they have not been accepted yet. thus, here it is: we have gone beyond tolerance, we are experiencing successful hosting; but integration is still to come. these are key passages in order to have what i believe to be the future which must inevitably belong to us.” references arcidiacono c., procentese f.;(2008) grounded theory and citizen narratives in proceedings, in 7th international conference on social science methodology, 1-5 september, naples 2008. arcidiacono c., & procentese f.(2009) dialogo interculturale e approccio ecologico. in: aa.vv. (in press) barrette g. & bourhis r.y, personnaz m.,& personnaz b.(2004) acculturation orientations of french and north undergraduates in paris,international journal of intercultural relations,28,415-438. berry j.w. (1997) immigration, acculturation, and adaptation. applied psychology: an international review,46, 5-34. bourhis r.y., moïse l.c., & perrault s. (1997) towards an interactive acculturation model: a social psychological approach. international journal of psychology, 32, 369-386. brewer, m.b. (2000). “superordinate goals versus superordinate identity as bases of intergroup cooperation”, in d. capozza, r. brown (eds.). social identity processes. london: sage. corbin j., strauss a. (2008) basics of qualitative research, 3e, sage, los angeles, london. dovidio j.,gaertner s., & saguy t.(2009) commonality and the complexity of “we”: social attitudes and social change, personality and social psychology review, vol. 13, no. 1, 3-20 (2009) dovidio j. f., gaertner, s. l., hodson, g., houlette, m., & johnson, k. (2005). “social inclusion and exchlusion: recategorization and the perception of integroup boundaries”, in d. abrams, m. a. 30 building participative, empowering & diverse communities hogg, & j. m. marques, the social psychology of inclusion and exclusion. new york: psychology press. dovidio j. f., gaertner, s. l., & kafati, g. (2000), “group identity and intergroup relations: the common in-group identity model”. in s. r. thye, e. j. lawler, m. w. macy, & h. a. walker, advances in group processes. stamford, gt: jai press, vol. 17, pp. 1-34. errichiello g. (2007) il ruolo della moschea in immigrazione. ricerca di campo nel casertano. studi emigrazione, emigration studies xliv, n.168, p. 907-926. habermas j. (1981) theorie des kommunikativen handelns. (2bd) surkamp, frankfurt/m. hanlin c.e., bess k., conway p., evans s.d., mccown d., prillentensky i, perkins d.d (2008) community psychology in: c. willig & s.r wendy (eds), the sagehandbook of qualitative research in psychology, 524-540, sage, london. legewie h. (2006) teoria e validità dell’intervista in: psicologia di comunità n.1 vol 2,79-94. luque-ribelles,v., herrera i., garcia-ramírez m., hernández-plata s., paloma v., manzano v., camacho c., (2008), immigrant psychological well-being in oppressive local conditions: tension between integration and separation. international congress, of community psychology 4th -6th june, lisboa. mantovani g.(2008) intercultura e mediazione. teorie ed esperienze.carocci, roma. martinez, m., garcia ramirez m., & maya i.,(2002), social support and locus of control as predictor of psychosocial wellbeing in moroccan and peruvian immigrant women, international journal of intercultural relationship, 26 (3),287-310. martini r. sequi r. (1988) il lavoro nella comunità, nis, roma. miller n.(2002) personalization and the promise of contact theory, journal of social issues,58,387-410. nelson g., prilleltensky i. (2005) community psychology in pursuit of liberation and well-being , new-york: palgrave. patton m.q (2002) qualitative research and evaluation methods. sage, ca: thousand oaks. prilleltensky, i. (2008). the role of power in wellness, oppression, and liberation: the promise of psychopolitical validity, journal of community psychology vol.36,issue 2, pp.116-136.. schütze f., (1983) biographieforschung und narratives interview. neue praxis,3: 283-293. turner, j. c. (1982). “toward a cognitive redefinition of the social group”, in h. tajfel, social identity and intergroup relations. cambridge: cambridge university press. turner, j. c. (1987). rediscovering the social group. oxford: basil blackwell. 31 building participative, empowering & diverse communities el trabajo multidisciplinario para el estudio de la vejez en el medio rural maríavirginia mateu armand1 catalina cervantes ortega1 marcela rosas nexticapa idalia illescas nájera2 resumen el presente artículo describe el trabajo de un grupo de docentes e investigadores de diferentes áreas del conocimiento, que comparten el interés por estudiar la problemática de la vejez y el envejecimiento en las zonas rurales del estado de veracruz, méxico. el documento, reporta el proceso de conformación del equipo de trabajo denominado grupo operativo gestor multidisciplinario (gogm), así como las características que lo describen, el cual está basado en la teoría de grupos de pichón rivieré y el concepto multidisciplinariedad, grupo que se presenta como estrategia para el trabajo de campo. la investigación está basada en la metodología cualitativa, enlazada con la investigación acción participativa y el método etnográfico. introducción actualmente por la manifiesta transición demográfica que vive méxico, presente en los ámbitos urbanos y rurales, los comportamientos sociales ante el envejecimiento poblacional, así como el de los individuos que protagonizan este proceso, requieren que los estudios sobre la vejez, se revitalicen y adquieran nuevos vínculos, en un contexto caracterizado por la imposición de modelos de desarrollo económico, que no toman en cuenta las particularidades y singularidades de los grupos sociales que tejen y construyen sus identidades. el modelo económico neoliberal que el gobierno mexicano comenzó a adoptar en los ochentas, ha tenido un impacto negativo en la calidad de vida de los campesinos, ejidatarios y en la comercialización de los principales productos agrícolas que originaron la reducción de sus ingresos, lo que a la vez se expresa en una disminución del nivel de vida. más del 75% de las familias campesinas carece de cualquier clase de prestaciones sociales. las inversiones en infraestructura rural, disminuyeron en más del 80% entre los años 1982 a 1999, lo cual ha implicado mayor pobreza y menor producción agropecuaria y obviamente, mayor dependencia alimenticia. como consecuencia, en los ejidos y comunidades agrarias, se observan bajos niveles de bienestar, de los 2.5 millones de viviendas particulares habitadas, apenas el 46% cuenta con agua entubada, 16.5% con drenaje, 65.9% con energía eléctrica, 17.6% con techos de lámina de cartón, de estas, más del 50% cuenta con piso de tierra y un 59% de las familias vive en dos cuartos o menos. (inegi 2005) 1 facultad de nutrición, zona xalapa. médicos y odontólogos s/n. 91100, xalapa, ver., tel y fax (228) 8153421. correo electrónico: cervantes_caty@yahoo.com.mx, vmateu@uv.mx, 2 facultad de medicina, zona xalapa,. médicos y odontólogos s/n. 91100, xalapa, ver., tel y fax (228) 8153443. correo electrónico: idaliaillescas@hotmail.com. integrantes del cuerpo académico “nutrición, salud y educación”. facultad de nutrición zona xalapa. universidad veracruzana. mailto:cervantes_caty@yahoo.com.mx mailto:vmateu@uv.mx mailto:idaliaillescas@hotmail.com 32 building participative, empowering & diverse communities en méxico, la dispersión de la población rural continúa siendo una característica de su distribución territorial. en el año 2000, 1.4 millones de personas, que corresponde al 19.8% de la población, habitaban en 20,197 localidades con menos de 500 habitantes. la mayoría de los casos, se trata de asentamientos de difícil acceso que representan un desafío para la dotación de infraestructura, servicios y equipamiento básico. según datos del inegi, la población rural supera el millón de habitantes en sólo nueve entidades federativas, que en conjunto concentran el 63.0% de la población rural del país. al estado de veracruz, le corresponden 2.8 millones de habitantes o sea el 15.0% de la región del golfo. esto quiere decir que el 60 por ciento de la población rural, podría concentrarse en el año 2030 en tan sólo ocho entidades federativas, como son, chiapas, veracruz, oaxaca, puebla, guanajuato, estado de méxico, guerrero y michoacán. según reyes g., (2006), el estado de veracruz, ocupa el tercer lugar en población envejecida en méxico, después de chiapas y el estado de méxico, ya que cuenta aproximadamente con 600 mil personas mayores de 60 años y como se señala anteriormente, el segundo lugar en población rural, con 4 de cada 10 veracruzanos que habitan en éstas zonas, en localidades con menos de 2,500 habitantes. según las proyecciones del inegi, para el año 2050, veracruz verá incrementar su población anciana con más de dos millones, por lo tanto, se calcula que el porcentaje de ancianos será de 31%, es decir, uno de cada tres veracruzanos será anciano. los problemas asociados al proceso de envejecimiento en el medio rural y la percepción de apoyo y de bienestar por parte de los ancianos y ancianas, están relacionados con las condiciones de la pobreza, soledad y abandono que agudizan su estado de salud. así tenemos, que al panorama demográfico y económico, se le agregan las condiciones de salud y de la calidad de vida de esta población. el concepto de calidad de vida, alude a un sentimiento de bienestar psicofísico y socioeconómico, y para su evaluación, deben tenerse en cuenta los factores personales como; satisfacción con la vida e independencia, factores socioambientales, redes de apoyo, participación social, servicios sociales y de salud. en relación a la salud, 40 de cada 100 veracruzanos son derechohabientes de servicios médicos otorgados por instituciones públicas o privadas. así mismo, se reconoce que el 75% de los ancianos carece de pensión, 30% son analfabetos y una cuarta parte trabaja en la economía informal. en el ámbito laboral, los ancianos que todavía trabajan obtienen ingresos menores a un salario mínimo. sólo el 1.4% realiza trabajos o empleos de muy baja productividad, generalmente en la agricultura y dentro del sector terciario, se afirma que más de la mitad de los ejidatarios, el 59% supera los 50 años y un 28% tiene más de 65 años, entre los cuales hay una proporción mayor de mujeres, 61% de ellas rebasa los 50 años de edad y 27.7% tiene más de 65. por otro lado, alrededor de un 45% de ejidatarios se ven en la necesidad de emigrar hacia las ciudades cercanas, al norte del país, a estados unidos y canadá, conformando el sector de servicios y del ejército de jornaleros agrícolas, respectivamente. (vázquez, f. 2003). méxico como otros países en desarrollo que presentan cambios demográficos hacia el envejecimiento poblacional, se enfrenta a la problemática de la insolvencia e incapacidad dentro de sus sistemas sociales, económicos, de salud y seguridad social, para atender la creciente población de adultos mayores. lo anterior, significa que estos sistemas tendrán un tiempo menor para la planeación de la construcción de los procesos, espacios e infraestructuras para hacer frente a una nueva realidad en las demandas sociales, que junto con los problemas no resueltos relacionados principalmente con el subdesarrollo, pueden llevar a nuestro país a una crisis 33 building participative, empowering & diverse communities sociodemográfica. después de analizar el contexto que envuelve a la vejez y el envejecimiento, podemos vislumbrar que en méxico y particularmente en el estado de veracruz, se requiere de la participación de instituciones y organizaciones en los diferentes ámbitos sociales dedicados a la atención de este sector poblacional, ya que la complejidad de las contradicciones y problemas sociales, exige la búsqueda de otras alternativas donde las ciencias y disciplinas del conocimiento, de igual forma aporten sus enfoques para encontrar las soluciones. por lo anterior y para los fines de la investigación “calidad de vida de los adultos mayores en una zona rural del estado de veracruz”, se propone la formación de un grupo multidisciplinario como una estrategia para el estudio de la vejez y el envejecimiento en el medio rural, que podrá resolver las problemáticas que resulten del diagnostico participativo, así como conjuntar acciones, métodos y recursos en un tiempo y espacio determinados. metodología la presente investigación se propone de carácter cualitativo, apoyada en la investigación acción participativa (iap) y el método etnográfico. de hecho, esta concepción metodológica, no se trata de una opción epistemológica, una teoría, una metodología o una técnica particular. empíricamente observamos que profesionales de ciencias y técnicas variadas, participan de forma habitual en el abordaje de problemáticas con un enfoque multidisciplinario, pero sus resultados son parciales, principalmente en la práctica profesional, esto hace que en la mayoría de las investigaciones no se logre el éxito propuesto. la estrategia metodológica, será el grupo operativo gestor multidisciplinario (gogm en lo sucesivo), dado las características de sus integrantes, el cual se origina a partir de las particularidades del grupo operativo gestor de pichón rivieré y de la multidisciplinariedad. la característica de este, es el concepto “multidisciplinariedad”, que plantea una relación que puede estar dada por aportes o préstamos de métodos y conocimientos de una disciplina a otra, por la subordinación o por la suma de conocimientos enunciados a partir de una y otra disciplina (lo que algunos llaman relación de disciplinas). cada especialista por separado, precisa sus áreas de estudio e intervención así como sus métodos de trabajo, atendiendo a criterios disciplinarios, posteriormente se comunican unos a otros sus avances y resultados. en el mejor de los casos, se definen en común metodologías generales para tratar un tema o problema y luego cada disciplina por separado, procede a precisar el momento de su intervención (castro, m. 1999), así como la sistematización de cada una de las experiencias disciplinarias, que darán como resultado la formación de nuevas teorías y metodologías con el fin de beneficiar al grupo poblacional. precisamente y como han puesto de manifiesto los historiadores de la ciencia, una de las características de cada disciplina científica es su actitud imperialista, hegemónica y tradicional hacia otras disciplinas que surgen por necesidades o por carencias formativas y epistemológicas, lo cual conduce en último término a situaciones de conflicto interdisciplinar, antes que a la supuesta colaboración multidisciplinar. es decir, no ha existido una interacción creativa entre las disciplinas, sino un intento desde cada una de ellas por separado, por abarcar todos aquéllos aspectos ajenos que pudieran parecer de interés, para ofrecer un corpus más acabado de la propia disciplina denominado especialización. los integrantes de un gogm, deben estar asociados a un ejercicio profesional que resulta 34 building participative, empowering & diverse communities de un acercamiento comprometido a la realidad particular de nuestro país, lo cual ha hecho posible encontrar en la historia y la singularidad de cada contexto, la ubicación y obligación profesional. su práctica, no se concreta simplemente al diagnóstico del fenómeno ni tampoco a sus causas. cada uno de ellos está obligado a no detenerse en la fase diagnóstica; antes bien, a partir de esta, se debe avanzar hacia el diseño e instrumentación de un cuerpo de medidas tendientes a reducir las consecuencias negativas, que para el individuo, el grupo, las instituciones, la comunidad o la sociedad en su conjunto tengan el hecho constatado y eliminar su presencia futura. los vínculos con otras ciencias, hacen que se perfeccione el trabajo. el planteamiento de esta investigación parte de las siguientes preguntas: ¿las diferentes disciplinas aceptan el enfoque de la multidisciplinariedad?, ¿debemos ocuparnos o no de la multidisciplinariedad como estrategia en los grupos de trabajo?, ¿la multidisciplinariedad daría mejores resultados en la atención de problemáticas relacionadas con la vejez?, ¿la vejez en el medio rural requiere del trabajo multidisciplinario?, ¿el medio rural es campo para los estudios multidisciplinarios?, ¿la multidisciplinariedad como estrategia permitirá conocer la calidad de vida de los adultos mayores?. creemos conveniente comprobar si un grupo multidisciplinario es pertinente para abordar el estudio de la vejez y el envejecimiento, así como su calidad de vida y específicamente en el medio rural. consecuentemente, si a partir de este enfoque se obtienen mejores resultados, se podrá demostrar que los estudios multidisciplinarios son una estrategia para adquirir conocimientos más profundos no sólo sobre la vejez y el envejecimiento en el medio rural, sino de cualquier otra problemática social detectada. el estudio de la vejez hasta estos momentos, se ha abordado desde diferentes disciplinas sin que se haya propuesto estudiarla y atenderla tal como se requiere, ya que es un problema multidimensional que avanza y rebasa las posibilidades para la atención social, porque las necesidades de nuestra población envejecida demandan de la atención y la concientización de profesionales congruentes con nuestra realidad social. el trabajo de investigación, se inició a partir de una serie de tareas previas y específicas, ya que éste se desarrolló tomando en cuenta intereses comunes y problemáticas sociales emergentes observadas, como lo es el envejecimiento. una de las tareas más importantes dentro de la iap, es la formación de los grupos de los investigadores y de los investigados. un concepto de grupo puede ser, cualquier clase de asociación en la que los miembros se reúnen con el fin de llevar a cabo una acción para el mejoramiento de las condiciones de vida en el medio, o se constituyen porque deciden reunirse en torno a una acción y a su correspondiente investigación, este concepto junto con la participación comunitaria, son el punto medular de la investigación-acción-participativa. en este escenario, un grupo multidisciplinario facilita y posibilita reordenar, sistematizar y aportar un conjunto de criterios, presupuestos y enfoques que contribuyen al estudio de la vejez y su contexto, análisis e interpretación de las nuevas realidades, para transformarlas mediante sus propuestas de alternativas conceptuales y metodológicas. uno de sus objetivos, es la construcción de la teoría a través de la praxis o desde la construcción de la praxis, la teoría. el estudio, trata de conocer las características que definen la calidad de vida de los adultos mayores en el medio rural veracruzano. la estructura propuesta para el desarrollo del proyecto es la siguiente: 1) la formación del grupo operativo gestor multidisciplinario, 2) etnografía de la comunidad a estudiar, 3) reconocimiento de redes sociales y familiares, 4) diagnóstico participativo, 5) programas, 6) implementación de acciones, 7) gestiones, 8) sistematización como 35 building participative, empowering & diverse communities proceso y fin, 9) resultados y 10) sustentabilidad. en este artículo lo que se reporta, es la formación del grupo operativo gestor multidisciplinario como estrategia para el trabajo de campo, el cuál se define como grupo de aprendizaje o como personas que se reúnen alrededor de un objetivo común. está conformado por profesionales de diferentes disciplinas: a) antropólogo social; b) psicóloga comunitaria; c) nutrióloga; d) médico cirujano; e) cirujano dentista; f ) ingeniero bioquímico en alimentos; g) enfermera; h) ingeniero agrónomo y i) químico clínico. se tomaron en cuenta los siguientes aspectos: disciplina de origen y experiencia profesional interés profesional y personal para desarrollar trabajos relacionados con la vejez y el envejecimiento afinidad para realizar trabajos comunitarios, con los miembros del equipo y/o con otros profesionales que simpaticen con el tema a tratar. disposición para realizar trabajo social. el gogm, propone la posibilidad de colaboración y cooperación en un sentido estrictamente metodológico y teórico, para luego concentrarse en un aspecto más pragmático, con el fin de obtener una institucionalización de los esfuerzos de cada uno de los integrantes. también concensuar que ningún conocimiento es superior en valor a otro, permitir una interpretación más clara de la acción social, apoyada por la participación comunitaria, considerada como un medio no como un fin. la participación comunitaria, tenderá a ser mayor en la medida en que el proyecto de desarrollo resuelva necesidades directas básicas de la comunidad y será menor o nula, si el proyecto apunta hacia menores prioridades o hacia fines exógenos a la misma comunidad. (illescas, i. 2004). para el desarrollo del trabajo de campo, se consideró crear espacios de reflexión individual y grupal semanalmente, con el fin de analizar la información obtenida, de mantener la cohesión y evitar el conflicto en el trabajo grupal, ya que este representa un alto grado de complejidad en su alcance teórico, en sus características organizativas, sus dinámicas y técnicas que impactan en la formación y capacidad de servicio de quienes quieren o desean, participar en tareas de carácter comunitario. al final de cada etapa planteada en la investigación, cada integrante presentará un informe de actividades y de resultados, se autoevaluará de acuerdo a los criterios previamente acordados y presentará propuestas para mejorar su participación, de esta manera se retroalimentará el grupo, lo que elevará la calidad en el desempeño multidisciplinario. la idea es entonces, trabajar con y para la comunidad de adultos mayores, lo que significa redefinir el objeto y el método, revisar la teoría y de acuerdo a las necesidades de desarrollo del proyecto, el rol de los profesionales dentro del grupo multidisciplinario irá variando según sean las habilidades y creatividad de los investigadores. en todo grupo hay miembros de diverso status, unos de rango superior y otros de rango inferior y a cada status corresponde un rol, es decir, un determinado comportamiento en presencia de otros. el rol de cada uno de los profesionales de un grupo investigativo debe ir variando, ya que depende del proceso de aprendizaje continuo y reciproco, mismo que beneficia a la comunidad e implica responsabilidad de investigar, analizar y reflexionar para transformarse así mismos y a la realidad a través de la construcción del conocimiento, que es originado por la identificación de 36 building participative, empowering & diverse communities problemáticas. en el gogm, el estatus y el rol está determinado de acuerdo a la disciplina y tarea a desarrollar, es decir, varía según las etapas de avance de la investigación, cada integrante al cambiar su rol, se convierte en un colaborador efectivo que también puede desarrollar habilidades que hasta ese momento le eran desconocidas al descubrir que su rol, se puede concebir como el de un practicante reflexivo-generativo, lo cual es una combinación del practicante reflexivo y del teórico generativo. el primero, es un interventor que intenta contribuir al bienestar humano a través del intercambio entre el uso y la generación del conocimiento, visto en una relación transaccional; el segundo, se propone a través del desarrollo teórico, contribuir al bienestar humano guiado por un conjunto de valores. si el investigador no desempeña su rol de la forma esperada, se corre el riesgo de afectar el desarrollo y resultado de la investigación. este rol, es acorde a la estrategia de la investigación-acción, la cual es un ciclo generador de conocimiento que comienza y culmina con la práctica, y que a lo largo del proceso emplea de manera sistemática la investigación y la reflexión. este tipo de grupos puede ser tan diferente, como diferentes sean las disciplinas que lo conformen. de acuerdo a los resultados de la etapa de diagnóstico participativo, es probable que se incorporen investigadores de otras disciplinas necesarias para atender nuevas problemáticas. como la investigación propone la acción, esta se puede reforzar con investigadores externos según sean las necesidades del proyecto. lo anterior, es una de las ventajas de emplear la investigación acción participativa. esto nos permitirá conocer y analizar la problemática de la calidad de vida en los adultos mayores del medio rural veracruzano, desde diferentes perspectivas profesionales que nos aportaran los diversos aspectos tanto objetivos como subjetivos a partir de sus historias de vida, sus hábitos y costumbres alimenticias, sus procesos de salud y enfermedad, la percepción de su medio ambiente, la participación social y el manejo de sus recursos para alimentar su vida y reproducir su cultura. lo anterior apunta asumir que para el estudio de la vejez, debe contemplarse a la comunidad como una totalidad, sin lo cual sería difícil no sólo el análisis de esta problemática, sino también conocer los antecedentes históricos de los individuos y grupos sociales, al focalizar el tema objeto de indagación. en esta concepción metodológica, se revela también la dinámica que se establece entre lo general (comunidad) y lo particular (adultos mayores). a la par de elaborar una concepción acerca de cuáles han de ser las dimensiones y variables para el conocimiento de la realidad como totalidad, esta investigación ha de contemplar los paradigmas, enfoques, perspectivas metodológicas y métodos que sostendrán, el estudio de su objeto de investigación desde la multidisciplinariedad y emplear aquellas herramientas, que le faciliten una mejor comprensión de los fenómenos sociales. contexto o población el trabajo científico se desarrolla en el municipio de naolinco de victoria, veracruz, ubicado en la zona centro montañosa del estado, en las estribaciones de la sierra de chiconquiaco. está regado por el río naolinco, tributario del río actopan. su clima es templado-húmedo-regular con una temperatura promedio de 16° c. de acuerdo a los resultados que presenta el ii conteo de población y vivienda del 2005, el municipio cuenta con un total de 18,885 habitantes. el 37 building participative, empowering & diverse communities espinal, es una de las 42 comunidades rurales que pertenecen a este municipio, en esta viven aproximadamente 1,866 habitantes, dedicados en su mayoría a las actividades relacionadas con el campo. la producción agrícola esta basada históricamente en la siembra y cosecha del café y el maíz, últimamente a consecuencia de su bajo valor en el mercado y a la cercanía al ingenio de la concepción, ha hecho que sean sustituidos por la caña. muy pocos pobladores se dedican a la ganadería en pequeño, ya que los productos son consumidos en el mismo poblado. como en muchas de las localidades rurales del estado, en esta población existe la migración, varios jóvenes (hombres y mujeres) han salido de sus hogares dejando a sus padres o cónyuges al cuidado de los hijos, algunos han regresado, pero en su conjunto dejan sus familias, costumbres y cultura. en el espinal, se observa un incremento en las personas mayores de sesenta años que alcanza un 22.66% de la población total, en su mayoría son campesinos dedicados al cuidado de sus tierras, pocos son pensionados de instituciones gubernamentales, las mujeres se dedican principalmente, a las labores del hogar y al cuidado de sus descendientes, su contribución al gasto diario es por medio de la venta de animales de granja y comida regional. el 100% de la población de el espinal, profesa la religión católica, tanto hombres como mujeres, en sus ratos libres colaboran y participan en actos religiosos y en la práctica del culto. últimamente, se formó el grupo de adultos mayores de el espinal con el fin de recibir beneficios, información y capacitación para esta etapa de la vida, está integrado por 73 ancianos, de los cuales 65 son mujeres y 8 hombres, entre los 60 y 83 años de edad. este grupo poblacional presenta carencias palpables de atención, ejemplo de la problemática que esta viviendo actualmente nuestro país. por lo tanto, las investigaciones dedicadas al estudio de la vejez y el envejecimiento, requieren de un grupo multidisciplinario de académicos e investigadores interesados en estudiar sus necesidades y problemáticas, ya que esta etapa de la vida necesita de la participación y conocimiento de las diferentes especialidades dedicadas a este tema. resultados de acuerdo a la definición de castro sobre la multidisciplinariedad, en nuestra experiencia podemos puntualizar, que el gogm utilizado como estrategia, favorece metodológicamente a la investigación, ya que las diferentes disciplinas que participan en este grupo establecen vínculos epistemológicos, heurísticos y axiológicos, desde los cuales se originan nuevas propuestas que pueden ayudar a conocer la complejidad de la vejez y el envejecimiento. en este ejercicio, pudimos comprobar que con la participación de profesionales de diferentes disciplinas aplicadas para el estudio del envejecimiento se visualiza y se amplía la posibilidad de encontrar mejores resultados desde diferentes enfoques. al gogm lo caracterizan las trayectorias académicas, las experiencias profesionales, así como las historias de vida a nivel personal, el interés de cada uno de ellos esta marcado por la experiencia personal, en la convivencia y cuidado con los adultos mayores, lo que le otorga su identidad. este equipo de trabajo se origina dentro de una entidad educativa de nivel superior, ya que quiénes participan son investigadores y académicos de la universidad veracruzana de diferentes áreas del conocimiento, con apoyo de alumnos en formación, de los niveles de licenciatura y maestría, que acordaron trabajar conjuntamente en la temática del envejecimiento en el medio rural. las reglas y las normas definidas para el equipo, se establecieron de acuerdo a 38 building participative, empowering & diverse communities los aspectos axiológicos de las diversas disciplinas que participan y a la legislación universitaria vigente, con el fin de obtener mejores resultados. los integrantes del gogm, acordaron realizar una dinámica de integración en donde se identificaron y aportaron las características que se deben tener: interés ética participación cohesión pertenencia identidad liderazgo habilidad responsabilidad iniciativa creatividad conciencia del trabajo y alcances compromiso con el proyecto compromiso social capacidad transformadora otra aportación útil del trabajo como gogm es que: se obtienen puntos de vista más completos se pueden confrontar realmente los análisis y las estrategias de acción se diversifican las acciones y se amplia la cobertura de la población se protege y refuerza de cierta manera la investigación hay mayor coordinación entre las disciplinas se motiva la participación interna y externa se propician la enseñanza y el aprendizaje se actúa como miembro de una comunidad científica, pues la investigación forma parte de un proyecto de investigación académica. los investigadores son gestores ante la comunidad estudiada en la búsqueda de recursos para desarrollar la investigación, pero también son iniciadores de estudios probables en otros campos. permite la integración de estudiantes en formación de diversas disciplinas. busca la validez ante la comunidad científica ya que por lo general, los trabajos comunitarios no son legitimados por la academia y mucho menos financiados. se obtiene una actitud consciente ante lo que se aprende. se desarrolla una posición reflexiva. se construyen destrezas y habilidades. se favorece la vinculación con diversas instituciones gubernamentales y no gubernamentales. mientras más grande y complejo sean la problemática a estudiar y el contexto donde se desarrolle la investigación, más importante será contar con un grupo multidisciplinario que trabaje la investigación-acción, esto favorece la colaboración en conjunto, también depende 39 building participative, empowering & diverse communities de los medios tanto económicos como técnicos y del tiempo disponible para el desarrollo de la misma, pues cabe la posibilidad de que surjan situaciones de riesgo que influyan en la obtención de resultados. los riesgos del gogm pueden ser: el autoritarismo la manipulación el poder la dominación la intolerancia la indiferencia la deserción la rivalidad la competencia negativa por medio de espacios de reflexión y de dinámicas grupales, los integrantes del equipo analizaron el desarrollo del gogm para evitar los riesgos arriba mencionados y tomaron decisiones que fueron favorables tanto en lo individual como en lo grupal. en estas reuniones los investigadores, docentes, técnicos y/o promotores que participaron en esta etapa del proyecto, aportaron su capacidad teórica y metodológica, sus habilidades y creatividad para la realización del trabajo, en estas, se llevó a cabo la sistematización de las experiencias y se analizaron desde un enfoque multidisciplinario de tal forma, que los resultados en cada etapa son consensuados y revisados. la comunicación para el gogm y el desarrollo de la investigación, se convirtió en un proceso dinámico de interrelación a diferentes niveles: grupal e interpersonal, siendo algo importante e indispensable, independientemente de las diversas disciplinas de origen de los integrantes del grupo, pues se unificaron criterios epistemológicos y metodológicos, así como fue necesario utilizar diferentes canales y medios para la misma, ya que como cada uno de los integrantes labora en espacios físicos diferentes, fue necesario establecer estrategias de tiempo y forma para establecer contactos más frecuentes. esto es, se realizaron sesiones de trabajo presenciales y electrónicas; intercomunicación vía telefónica y de mensajería. comentarios la formación de un grupo operativo gestor multidisciplinario (gogm), facilita el trabajo y desarrollo de una investigación, ya que su característica principal es que los integrantes representan una disciplina diferente que puede contemplar en su quehacer profesional el estudio de las problemáticas poblacionales, además que personalmente su interés se inclina a conocer, analizar y crear teorías que respondan a las necesidades de una sociedad por compleja que esta sea. el trabajo multidisciplinario, además de ser un ejercicio poco frecuente en una investigación, permite que los perfiles así como el rol que cada uno de los profesionistas tiene en las etapas de la misma, se destaquen y jueguen un papel muy importante. evidentemente sus habilidades, destrezas y especialidades son significativas para el desarrollo de las diferentes tareas. en la planeación y organización de las diversas actividades, el grupo debe conocer específicamente en que fase de la investigación se necesita la colaboración de cada una de las especialidades, esto con el fin de que los resultados vayan lográndose en los tiempos programados. de esta manera en 40 building participative, empowering & diverse communities los espacios de reflexión, el grupo investigador se fortalece al observar que se van alcanzando los objetivos en tiempo y forma, lo que permite mantener la pertenencia, la cohesión y la identidad del grupo para alcanzar las metas y los objetivos establecidos. para la investigación “calidad de vida de los adultos mayores en una zona rural del estado de veracruz”, el grupo operativo gestor multidisciplinario, ha sido una práctica enriquecedora, en lo profesional y en lo personal como lo han manifestado sus integrantes, ya que se comprueba que la suma de conocimientos, experiencias e intercambios metodológicos de una y de otra disciplina, benefician el trabajo grupal y el científico. bibliografía astorga, alfredo y van der. bart. manual de diagnóstico participativo, editorial humanitas-cedepo. 2ª. edición. buenos aires, argentina. 1991. ayales ivannia., chaverri, paulina, chávez alma irene, rosa aminta ferrufino, y otros. haciendo camino al andar. guía metodológica para la acción comunitaria. ed. oef internacional. washington, d.c. 1991. ayestardan, s. el grupo como construcción social. ed. plural. barcelona. 1996. bar-tl., d. las creencias grupales como expresión de la identidad social. morales j. francisco. (coordinador), psicología social. segunda edición. ed. macgraw hill. 1996. brandao, carlos. estructuras sociales de reproducción del saber popular, edición oea-crefal, paztcuaro, michoacán. 1986. calventus s. j. “participación comunitaria en salud: un estudio etnográfico en el sector villa o’higgins de la florida” (santiago de chile). en maritza montero. coordinadora. universidad central de venezuela. 1997. castro, m. c. la psicología, los procesos comunitarios y la interdisciplinariedad. ed. universidad de guadalajara. 1999. crefal. (centro regional de educación fundamental para américa latina). “la sistematización”. páztcuaro, michoacán, méxico. 1990. daltabuit, m., mejía j, y r. álvarez. calidad de vida, salud y ambiente. ed. unam.crim.ini. méxico. 2000 freire paulo. pedagogía del oprimido. méxico, ed. siglo xxi. 1974 garcía ramírez josé carlos. 2003. “la vejez”. el grito de los olvidados. ed. plaza y valdez. méxico. ham chande roberto. “el envejecimiento en méxico: el siguiente reto de la transición demográfica”. ed. colegio de la frontera norte. miguel ángel porrúa. méxico. 2003 ham chande roberto. “ocupación y empleo en la población de edades mayores”. en: el envejecimiento en méxico: el siguiente reto de la transición demográfica. el colegio de la frontera norte, 1ª. ed. méxico. 2003. hammersley, a. etnografía: metodología de investigación. ed. páidos. buenos aires. 1994. inegi. ii conteo de población y vivienda. 2005. illescas, i. tesis para obtener el grado de doctor en ciencias sociológicas y desarrollo comunitario. “la participación y el liderazgo en una comunidad veracruzana desde la perspectiva del desarrollo 41 building participative, empowering & diverse communities comunitario y la psicología comunitaria”. material inédito. 2004 illescas, idalia, ruiz, sara. y alicia, martínez, “concepción metodológica para el estudio de la participación”. enseñanza e investigación en psicología. cneip. num. 2. julio-diciembre. vol. 9, xalapa, ver., 2004. pp. 367-388. lópez, de ceballos paloma. “un método para la investigación-acción-participativa”. tercera edición. ed. popular. españa. 1998. mercado, martínez francisco javier y teresa margarita torres lópez. compiladores. “análisis cualitativo en salud. teoría, métodos y práctica”. universidad de guadalajara. ed. plaza y valdés. 2000. pp. 267-281 pichon rivieré. “el proceso grupal”. ed. nueva visión. b a, argentina. 1980. rodríguez, g. gil, j. y e. garcía. metodología de la investigación cualitativa. impreso en prograf, santiago de cuba. cuba. 2002. ruiz o., j. metodología de la investigación cualitativa, serie ciencias sociales, vol. 15, universidad de deusto, 2ª. edición. bilbao. 1999. robles, silva leticia, vázquez, palacios felipe, reyes, gómez laureano y orozco, mares imelda. “miradas sobre la vejez”. un enfoque antropológico. ed. plaza y valdez y colegio de méxico. méxico. 2006. vázquez, palacios felipe. “contando nuestros días. un estudio antropológico sobre la vejez”, ed. casa chata. méxico. 2003. vázquez, palacios felipe. “envejecer entre los cultivos del campo veracruzano”. en hernández, e. (compilador). tópicos selectos de la salud publica. instituto de salud pública. universidad veracruzana. xalapa, ver., 2006. pp 127-145. web-grafía http//: ww.paho.org. organización panamericana de la salud. perfiles de país. méxico. situación general de la salud y sus tendencias. 1995. http//www.136. 142, 158. 105/lasa mcs. lourdes pérez montalvo. proyectos comunitarios, cultura y participación. 2001. http//www.ifad.org.2002. fondo internacional de desarrollo agrícola. programa fida méxico. revisado, octubre 2006. http//www.fundominkachorlavi.org. luís gonzález. sistematización de las experiencias acciones creativas. http//www.conapo.gob.mx/micros/anciano/adultmay.xls.-consejo nacional de población. conapo. en: índices demográficos para adultos mayores. revisado, octubre, 2006. http/www.inegi.gob.mx.estadísticas a propósito del día internacional de las personas de edad. méxico, d.f.1° de octubre de 2003. revisado octubre 2006. http://www.conapo.gob.mx/micros/anciano/adultmay.xls.42 building participative, empowering & diverse communities para los científicos sociales la comunidad se le presenta como un espacio donde fluyen todas las relaciones sociales, donde los procesos históricos y culturales se presentan como ejes para la interpretación de su devenir y para el pleno conocimiento de las actuaciones de los actores sociales. desde este enfoque, la relación individuo-comunidad se presenta ante las diferentes ciencias como núcleo metodológico, mediante la cual se pueden dimensionar la subjetividad y la identidad de los individuos y grupos; por lo que es pertinente considerar esta relación como premisa para el trabajo teórico y práctico para cualquiera de las ciencias. la relación individuo-comunidad, no sustituye la concepción que viene desarrollando cada una de las ciencias individuo-sociedad, de lo que se trata es de incorporar una visión diferente en el establecimiento de otras relaciones en el contexto de la comunidad lo cual esclarece con más precisión los límites del campo de acción de cada una de ellas. 43 building participative, empowering & diverse communities youth in a multicultural setting tomas bons fou-södertörn römossevägen 25 s-146 31 tullinge sweden tomas.bons@fou-sodertorn.se abstract the following is a presentation of how young people (age 17-20) perceive and interpret their position in society according to their immigrant background in the swedish majority society, subjective integration. from the conclusions of a master thesis where many of the youths expressed a sense of not belonging to the majority they presented strategies how to handle this situation. one possibility is when education is regarded as a way of self-realisation or as a mean to make it possible to move on to a life in another country. on the other hand they presented a strategy of starting an own company as an opposition to the swedish society. this in order to create an own controlled unit within the society. i will also give a practical example how a social service-project in a multicultural suburb can tackle the problem with youths who neither attend school and nor work. a situation that is connected to their lack of integration in the majority society. the project worked with young persons in a form of individual coaching in order to create a personal relation with them to motivate them for either education and/or seeking employment. the youths did simply get a form of attention that they did not get from schools and employment offices, which seemed to be successful. key words: youth, ethnicity, integration youth in a multicultural setting the following presentation is a summary of an interview survey with 14 young people which all were 17-18 years at age and all living in a multicultural environment, in suburbs surrounding stockholm. the persons interviewed have an immigrant or refugee background, were either they themselves or their parents have migrated to sweden. exclusion/inclusion is the theme for this set of seminars and it is appropriate for my presentation since one of the major findings in my work is the constant reflection concerning the relationship between minority-majority, swedish culture-one’s own culture, these young people do. in this presentation i will try to summarize this study, which is my master thesis. i will outline my presentation in the following aspects: first i will give a rough presentation of the suburbs were they lives in order to give an orientation of the specific context. secondly i will describe how they perceive the relation between their immigrant background and the swedish majority society, which i have labelled a dimension of ethnicity. mailto:tomas.bons@fou-sodertorn.se 44 building participative, empowering & diverse communities for the third i will present youth centre, a social service project concerning education and work practise for persons that neither attend school and nor have any work. and for the fourth and last i will present how they reason about their expectations of their future in terms of studies and occupations. in this section i will present two different strategies that they express, which i have named towards higher education and towards independence.1 the suburbs they all live in suburbs that were built during the 1960-70-ties. during the 1960-ties there was a great lack of housing in sweden, especially in the major cities. in order to create new housing the government started a huge programme called the million programme, which aimed at during 10-15 years time create a million new apartments. the million programme can be described as a large scale housing project were totally new suburbs at the edges of the big cities were created. in earlier periods of more larger scale housing projects in the stockholm area you can say that these project took more consideration to the environmental surroundings in so fort as the new houses were aimed to fit in the natural surroundings of woods, hills etc. one can possibly consider these earlier periods as a way of a more natural growth of the city area. because of the large amount of new housing in the million programme this was not possible. in order to fulfil the aim of the programme the buildings had to be very large-scale blocks of apartments. but one also had a vision to create something new as arnstberg (2000) states: that during the first period of the million programme the inhabitants where selected. in the suburb the new man should live, he who was neither bourgeoisie nor proletarian, not rural and nor city people. the suburb became a symbol for swedish modernity and future. one researcher, bergström (1996), is of that opinion that the physical environment effects the social life in these areas: in the living areas of the million programme there are large spaces of land that does not signal what they are meant for or who is in charge of them or who can use them. my hypothesis is that the anonymous spaces of land, the weak sense of belonging has a negative effect on the development oft the social life. the suburb lacks social life since there is no flow of people and it is mainly a living area and, even as this special suburb flemingsberg that most of the persons i have interviewed comes from, has lot of work-places, the people who work in the area never comes in contact with people actually living there because it is architecturally separated. the suburb has a lack of meetingplaces which strengthens the effect of anonymity and as bergström (a.a) states (concerning a similar suburb in gothenburg): like most structures of modern city environments the structure can only be perceived from the air or from a map. the purpose of the ground must be searched for in the city plan. the high degree of abstraction hinders the understanding of the place and makes it unintelligible. the young people i have interviewed all states that after a certain age, round 15, there is a constant lack of meeting places. the suburb is also a segregated area with a high degree of immigrants and people living on social subsidiaries. many people look upon these suburbs as hardly belonging to the swedish society, and this even occurs in state papers as in one report by the swedish national agency for education 1 all quotations’ in this paper are my own translation from swedish. 45 building participative, empowering & diverse communities leon (2001) quote and states: in this report the schools that has been studied is defined as being in a areas with a “non-existent participation in the swedish society”. in my opinion this statement is difficult to understand since these areas demonstrably is located in sweden and has got an infra-structure that is a part of the swedish society. but this is also a complex and paradox orientation as we shall see when i go over and talk about the ethnic dimension, which i strongly connected to the place itself. the ethnic dimension bateson states that it is necessary to have two things “in order to create a difference” and in this sense it is absurd to talk about one isolated ethnic group because ethnicity occurs when cultural differences are made relevant through interaction. the suburb is a place both of security and belonging but also of a tough and sometimes brutal environment. as one express it: i don’t like flemingsberg; it’s boring i can tell you. but i got my roots there. it’s like having bad parents but they still are you’re parents. that’s the way with flemingsberg, it’s bad but it’s still my place…you dislike flemingsberg but still likes it. this is a quite mature metaphor of a complex situation. another person expresses the difficulty of attaining school because of his friends and surroundings that does not put education in the fore front. i asked him; you said you would like to leave flemingsberg when you have finished school? no, but during the time i attend school. so you would like to leave now? yes, but not after school, then i would move back! the life in the suburb offers a security to be among friends of the same ethnic origin but also other non-swedish neighbours consist in a sense of security, a sense of mutual understanding of both being non-swedish. it seems as almost all of the persons i interviewed feel a sense of fellowship in being immigrants and not-swedish. as one expresses it: i would feel awkward living in a “swedish environment” with only swedish people living there. i am used to living with immigrants, which feel normal for me. borgström (1998) describes among immigrant adolescents of not feeling at home in a “swedish” context because you are very “visible” there, you sort of stick out. in your own area you are just one in the crowd. integration is in this sense a very subjective feeling. to be integrated means you have to have a feeling of belonging and comfort in the society, which many of the young people i have interviewed seem to lack. one of my interviewees gives a clear example of this lack of trust when she says the following. it’s like if you have a problem at home. i have a cousin who is 11. he got a note from school stating that if there is trouble at home and you need someone to talk with, you can phone this number. i mean, this is sick. she develops her statement even further as if this number could lead to authorities will come to take a child in custody. this is a very dramatic statement and needs a bit of explaining. the telephone number she is referring to is probably the number to bris, which could be translated as 46 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the children’s right in society. this is voluntary organisation which helps children in crisis and is not connected with any authority and is a well known ngo that support children with counselling etc. the point here is not what authorities can do to a single person but what a person think the authorities can do to you. this girl lack a basic trust for society and in that way interprets this telephone number. and this lack of basic trust is damaging to her identity. as ahmadi (2000) puts it: integration is rather a feeling, a subjective condition, which is connected to the subjective experience of belonging. this could be good to keep in mind for the final section of my presentation. before i come to the concluding episode of the future expectations i will say something about the project at the youth centre. youth centre, a social service project in my abstract i have said that i also should give some practical examples from a social service project, a youth centre (gustafsson, 2007). that in a small scale, but in a rather successful way, have managed young people, who neither attended school and nor worked, to motivate them for education and work practise. first i will briefly say something about what the informants in my own study expressed about their school situation. they all come from similar multicultural backgrounds as the youngsters who are attending the youth centre and it is possible to relate those experiences to be more or less valid. their main experiences, which are here very shortly described, can be summarized in a problem dealing with ethnicity and cultural factors. my informants describe the situation that meetings between different cultures in school never take place. my informants do not interact in a substantial way with fellow students of “swedish background”. and many of them lack a confidence for their teachers, whom they say does not try to understand their points of view. they say that the teachers come to their school, a multicultural context, they teach and then they leave for their “swedish” context. my informants express that no dialogue takes place. the swedish teachers and the pupils of different cultural backgrounds do not interact. what could, and i state should, lead to an intercultural meeting, in which school must be considered to be an ideal place and also an obligation to be, does not occur. what could become a multicultural meeting-place stays mono-cultural, on behalf of the teachers position in being persons in control of the educational situation. well, the project at the youth centre, where 5 young people aged 17-18 attended. the staff in the project consisted of two coaches, 1 teacher and 1 social worker, whose first task was to crate a functional group of these youngsters. this was the first problem to solve since they did not function in a group context, due to different reasons. it was also quite heterogeneous groups were some of them had problems with reading and writing. some of them had a pressure from their families to get jobs and they tested the limits of the coaches like; what can you offer? you don’t give me money! they all had a small subsidiary for attaining the program, which was more or less a symbolic sum, definitely nothing you could live upon. so the first period of the project were very loud and messy. so the coaches realized that they had to change plans. instead of working in a group context they started with individual teaching and a larger amount of practise at different 47 building participative, empowering & diverse communities work places. this the youngsters did approve of. they got support in both education and in the practice at work places. a support they were not used in getting. you can look upon the project as the opposite of their former experiences from a negative school context. the coaches managed to listen to and interpret their needs of support. the youngsters describes the coaches in terms of: “not like teachers and social workers but more of a supportive family”. so by quite simple means this project established a platform for these youngsters for further individual growth. something that school had failed in doing. future expectations i have in this concluding section, that summarizes this study, identified two different strategies for the choice of future education and occupation. strategies that are based on their experiences from school, the majority society that i have described earlier. towards higher education two girls, agnes and beata, both strive for academic studies but from two different viewpoints. agnes is a girl which could symbolize a traditional high regard for education. she is a very reflexive person and also interested in politics, which no other of the persons interviewed have expressed. she looks upon knowledge as a way for personal growth, to widen ones mind. she is born in sweden but both her parents are from chile, fled during pinochet which can account for her political interest. but she also thinks a lot about her multicultural environment and background and especially round the negative attitudes of the public consensus towards the suburb as a place. she says that she was very affected by these negative opinions earlier but that she now has liberated herself from that. she thinks she has gained from growing up in this multicultural environment. she is very determined of her plans for the future and says she also would like to go abroad, preferably spain, for further studies as a means for increasing her experience with new ideas. beata on the other hand have one dream for the future and that is to become a dentist. she seems quite confident with these plans but she is not so successful in school as agnes. her educational results needs improvement to fulfil her goals to be able to make an application for dental school. much of her wishes to become at dentist refer to her longing back to turkey. both of her parents are from turkey but she is born and raised in sweden. she expresses that if she had a choice she would prefer to go and live in turkey and mentions her grandparents as important persons in her life. but in order to do so she must have an education and a high status profession. becoming a dentist must be an excellent choice under these circumstances. if she does not succeed in this she will not leave for turkey. she is quite critical concerning the living conditions in flemingsberg. she says that living there has become tougher with more violence and drugs. she is critical to how swedish parents educate their children. she thinks that there is not enough responsibility, one let children stay out late at night. if agnes´ longs to leave sweden for studies, in order to get new impressions and experiences you can say that beata does the opposite. beata sees education as a way of rather returning to something, to her picture of turkey. 48 building participative, empowering & diverse communities towards independence this is a voluntary vague category. what i want to express is the ambivalence of this concept. independence is both a form of personal independence but also independence in relation to the surrounding society. in this case from both the majority, the swedish society, but also from the adult society, represented by their parents. one can actually state that the majority society in a sense forces this orientation. the persons in this category are all males adam, bruno and carl and have different reasons for their plans of starting an own company, a small business, mainly a restaurant. adam attends the individual programme at upper secondary school. this is a programme specially designed for students that does not have the adequate grades for attending a regular programme. the individual programme also includes practical training at a working place a couple of days in the week. the aim of this programme is that the student after one year shall be qualifies for the different regular programmes. adam does his job practice in his father’s restaurant, which is a bit odd i presume. i asked him if the restaurant business was something he planned to continue with after school. he says that he has thought about that but his main interest is further studies in becoming a recreation instructor. he has previous experience from different sports clubs. you can trace a conflict in opinion with what is adam’s interest and what are his fathers. adam describes the relationship with his parents as good they listen to and respect each others. but adam also states: as long as you live in your parent’s house you shall respect and obey their will and desire. the way i interpret his wishes and plans for becoming a recreation instructor is that there is going to be a conflict between this and his fathers more or less explicit demands of him taking over the restaurant business. bruno on the other hand attends a social science programme and his father has constantly urged and motivated him to study. he considers himself ambitious in school and he also works extra in his brother’s restaurant at his spare time. he talks a lot about the relationships between swedes and immigrants and he thinks of it as two separated or divided worlds. he says: immigrants stick to immigrants and swedes with swedes. it has always been like that, i really don’t know why. i do know a lot of swedes and we hang out, but actually it’s nothing i do each day. he sees his career opportunities as becoming a lawyer or economist but is not fully convinced with his own plans and say: but it is still something that does not fit. i think i end up starting a small business, with my brother or so. in bruno’s case, the plans for starting a small business, is based one a feeling that he does not fit in the swedish context. he still wants to have an education but more of a way to broaden his possibilities and, not least, it is a good base for running a company. finally carl, who came to sweden 7 years ago from turkey, and says he is not aware of why his family moved to sweden. he has asked his father several times but he says he is too young to know. as in the case of bruno, his father emphasizes the value of education. he himself worked as a dentist for 20 years in turkey. now he works as a taxi driver. carl means that it is because his father has trouble with learning swedish. carl says that his grades are quite moderate and that he 49 building participative, empowering & diverse communities from time to time has lived in a rather turbulent way. but his father has all the time urged him to study: you better get hold of yourself before it is too late! carl has got a number of offers from relatives to work in their restaurants but his parents have rejected these offers. they want him to continue studying. when i ask him want he wants he says he wants to become a flight mechanic. but at the same time he hesitates and says he will not apply for a technical education. i want to study. i will create my own occupation. i don’t want to work for anyone else. then he again talks about having a restaurant. it is an easy job. it is a good job and it is better to work for your own benefit than for somebody else. you can see that adam, carl and bruno all have an orientation towards starting a small business and that they have different reasons for doing so. they all have that in common that they see starting an own company is one possibility for a future career since they feel it’s difficult to fit in the “swedish” society and the educational system. a concluding summary the young people must tackle the demands and expectations from their parents and the society. according to the informants this situation is further complicated due to their immigrant background, a fact that can both limit or widen their opportunities. in this sense the youth take different strategies in coping with their plans for the future. they develop a kind of strategy, which in some way is in contrast with the “swedish” and the swedish majority society. one possibility, as described in the section towards a higher education, education is regarded as a way of self-realisation or as a mean to make it possible to move on to a life in another country. or, as described in towards independence, the strategy of starting an own company as an opposition to the swedish society. this in order to create an own controlled unit within the society. references ahmadi, n ”kulturell identitet i gungning”. i allwood, c m & franzén, e c (eds.) (2000) tvärkulturella möten. grundbok för psykologer och socialarbetare. bokförlaget natur och kultur, stockholm. arnstberg, k-o (2000) miljonprogrammet. carlssons bokförlag, stockholm. bergström, i (1996) rummet och människans rörelser. doktorsavhandling. chalmers tekniska högskola, göteborg. borgström, m (1998) att vara mitt emellan. hur spanskamerikanska ungdomar kan uppfatta villkoren för sin sociokulturella identitetsutveckling. doktorsavhandling. pedagogiska institutionen, stockholms universitet. gustafsson, h (2007) skoltrötta ungdomar. om projektet ”studie och arbetscoachning för unga”. fousödertörns skriftserie nr 60/07, tullinge. leòn, r. ”på väg mot en diversifierad normalitet”. i bigestans, a & sjögren, a (ed.) (2001) lyssna –interkulturella perspektiv på multietniska skolmiljöer. mångkulturellt centrum, botkyrka. 50 building participative, empowering & diverse communities making the psychological political – challenges for community psychology mark burton, carolyn kagan and paul duckett research institute for health and social change, manchester metropolitan university abstract community psychology deals with the life of groups of people in context and is therefore inevitably concerned with their struggles, successes, projects and dreams. sooner or later, because these contexts are constructed economically, politically and historically, engagement with the political is inevitable as all social groups encounter social and economic interests that differ from their own. on a global scale these conflicts include competition for resources, the dynamics of profit maximisation, and the use of violence to maintain and extend economic and political domination. in britain community orientated psychologists have become increasingly aware of these political questions and at least some are more ready than in the past to commit to political engagement both at the local level and on national and international questions. some of these developments will be traced, exploring some of the following questions:what are the connections with other attempts to develop a politically engaged psychology? what are the prospects for such engagement and how best can community psychologists contribute to wider struggles and campaigns? why is this engagement increasing now? what constraints are there to such action and do community psychologists self-constrain their political effectiveness? what does this mean for the definition and focus of community and other related psychologies? in exploring these questions it will be assumed that while professional ideology and practice has a historical specificity there is a universality of human needs and that this entails the transformation of community psychology in response to new challenges from global capital. key words: psychology, politics, alternatives, organising, community psychology, activism 51 building participative, empowering & diverse communities introduction community psychology’s main business is concerned with the life of groups of people in context, with their struggles, dreams, projects, successes and setbacks, in a variety of collaborative roles. sooner or later this means an engagement with the political since groups encounter political and economic interests different from their own. that is to say conflict is intrinsic to human life and to that of people in context, a context that is constructed economically, politically and historically. community psychology then is inevitably political – unless it seeks escapism in other pursuits. to give some focus to the argument it will be worth providing some examples of conflict situations that affect communities worldwide and that have impacted on the work of community psychologists in from the uk to latin america, from australasia to palestine: a social housing provider sells housing to a property developer to develop private housing. a government ban on hunting foxes threatens the livelihood of groups of rural workers. government subsidy for public transport is reduced, isolating poor families. a transnational corporation transfers production to a location with cheaper labour or less regulation, removing employment and impoverishing a community. with state support a transnational corporation displaces a farming community in order to extract minerals from the underlying earth. a health centre and its primary care and preventative services is closed following the introduction of user co-payments imposed by the world bank. people are displaced to make way for a prestige project in a capital city. such conflicts have a number of root causes:competition for resources profit maximisation deficits in democracy and in the representation of marginalised interests the use of violence to maintain and extend economic and political hegemony. the continuing consequences (economic, behavioural, cultural, economic, political) of previous historical impacts of these factors. at its worst, the liberal-philanthropic paradigm that includes much of community psychology can act as a mask for some of this. to the extent that its aspirations and practice are ameliorative rather than transformative, it can defuse social movements rather than fortify them. ngos, where community psychologists and similar workers frequently work, are often part of capital’s strategic toolkit (petras & veltmeyer, 2005). participation, so often emphasised by community psychology can be no more than co-optation sapping autonomous organising (cooke & kothari, 2001; kagan, 2006; kagan, castile, & stewart, 2005). however, there is a tendency in community psychology (whether or not it claims that title) that increasingly seeks to face up to the political saturation of community and community action, and there are signs of an increasing willingness to commit to political engagement both at local level and on national and international questions. the rest of this article explores some aspects of these developments. some examples and issues it needs to be made clear that this increasing politicisation is not entirely new, but we 52 building participative, empowering & diverse communities will look at the recent growth of interest in political engagement in its present context. some of these recent examples include: opposition to the psychologisation and medicalisation of misery. opposition to war and the involvement of psychologists in the war apparatus. work with marginalised groups, using an explicit political analysis – e.g. asylum and racism. work on minority and human rights. work with communities that are being or have been dispossessed. however, this engagement with a more politicised set of issues is new territory for many community psychologists (although not all, burton, 2004; burton & kagan, 2005). i shall use the experience of some members of the network of community psychologists in the uk to highlight some critical dimensions of this unaccustomed engagement with the political. three recent initiatives from the uk that highlight this relative inexperience will be reviewed. 1) the birmingham manifesto this statement was produced by a group that met in birmingham in april 2007. at the great yarmouth community psychology conference in september 2006 it had been proposed that there should be an interim event, before the 2006 september 2007 conference in york. this event should aim to produce practical, meaningful outcomes and address relevant issues such as “war” or “the environment”. before the event, consultation took place with the members of the uk community psychology listserve. these consultations were also facilitated by the west midlands community and critical psychology interest group which organized the meeting. this process clarified the topics to be addressed at the event and the manner in which the day was to be organised. the topics identified were “war and torture” and “globalisation”. speakers were identified to provide orientating statements on these, after which participants had the opportunity to work in groups towards practical outcomes to address the issues raised by the presentations and the subsequent discussions. the day was remarkable for the consensus that was readily established within a broadly marxian orientation to understanding the wider global context as it impinges on people and communities and on the construction of psychology itself. the manifesto takes the form of four linked statements on the priority areas of: war and imperialism sites of counter-system resistance action on global warming/environment public services/privatisation of the national health service. the manifesto1 was circulated to the network of uk community psychologists, but there was little immediate reaction. nevertheless a workshop based on it at the york conference in september 2007 was well attended and led to a more specific statement on poverty. 2) the york statement on poverty this statement was produced at the annual uk community psychology conference in a large workshop session (about 30 people) organised by some of those who had produced the birmingham manifesto. the specific focus on poverty was influenced by the presence at the 1 available at http://www.compsy.org.uk/the%20birmingham%20manifesto.pdf 53 building participative, empowering & diverse communities conference of a keynote speaker richard wilkinson (an epidemiologist, see wilkinson, 2005; wilkinson, 2007) who had presented evidence on the link between social and economic inequality in a society and measures of wellbeing (he was not involved in the production of the statement). it was also influenced by the conference setting – york was an important setting for the seminal work of the liberal reformer seebohm rowntree who documented the effects of poverty around york, and by the presence of the joseph rowntree foundation at the conference with a keynote speech on the foundation’s anti-poverty programmes of social action. the statement was brief and focused on the role of psychology in relation to poverty. as community and critical psychologists we believe that psychologists have a fundamental responsibility to join with others to end both poverty and societal inequality independent of absolute wealth, which we believe are personally, collectively and socially destructive. we believe mainstream psychology to be complicit with the prevailing psychologically toxic neo-liberal economic order and believe psychology has allowed itself to be used to hide systemic effects of poverty and inequality and instead position poverty as a consequence of individual psychological dysfunction. we call for the radical transformation of psychology so that it has the resources necessary to expose the personally, collectively and socially destructive effects of poverty and inequality and the proactive deployment, with allies, of this transformed psychology to end poverty and societal inequality and the exploitation, exclusion, oppression, distress and illness which result from them.” …on behalf of the uk community psychology network however, having produced this, the network didn’t seem to either know what to do with it, or to have the organisational capacity to take it into a relevant public arena. the point was made that doing this would be best linked to a relevant news story, but when subsequently the labour government faced an internal revolt as a result of removing he first, low, band of income tax, leaving many on low incomes less well off, we community psychologists were nowhere to be seen or heard. similarly a possible submission to a scottish parliament enquiry into child poverty was identified as a possible opportunity for intervention but again nobody was able to commit the necessary time and effort to this and the deadline passed. to be fair, the york statement was more a way of talking to ourselves, affirming an orientation to a major social problem rather than a programme for action as such, but nine months on there has been a seemingly complete failure to do anything more with it in any organised collective way. 3) changing politicians’ minds about changing our minds on 10 october 2007 the uk government announced a £170 million expansion of psychological therapies “to provide better support for people with mental health problems such as anxiety and depression”2. this was to emphasize cognitive behaviour therapies which were said to be more effective than drug therapies (which it later emerged were themselves generally no more effective than placebo). members of the community psychology network had serious reservations about this, a) because of the exaggerated evidence for the effectiveness of these approaches and b) because of the neglect of the social and economic causes of distress, and c) because of the psychologising and individualising of social problems inherent in this kind of discourse and policy prescription. an email discussion on the ukcp listserve3 led to agreement of 2 see http://nds.coi.gov.uk/environment/fulldetail.asp?releaseid=321341&newsareaid=2 3 http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/communitypsychuk.html 54 building participative, empowering & diverse communities a press release4 on the matter, the summary statement of which follows. “cognitive behaviour therapy and associated approaches are comprehensively problematic. primary prevention is the only way to substantially reduce socially, economically and materially caused distress. to be effective primary prevention must involve social rather than cognitive change. reducing income inequality in our society would be one of the most effective ways to reduce psychological distress and ill health”, the uk community psychology network. this was released to all national news outlets of any quality and standing and to the specialist press on 16 october 2007 – quite a feat of organisation for a headless coalition. unfortunately there was no follow up from any mainstream press agency. we know that press releases need follow up by those issuing them (monbiot, 2001), but again our lack of organisational capacity (or just organisation) was insufficient. moreover, we probably allowed our reluctance to use titles and positions on the statement to weaken its impact. had we said it was issued by four professors of psychology and a number of other senior professionals and academics maybe it would have registered as a controversy for the press to explore. nevertheless the statement has remained a useful point of reference for uk community psychology network members, being returned to in various debates. it was also read out at a large event at a british psychological society conference with lord layard present. he is the economist credited with the government’s policy on making psychological therapies and especially cbt more widely avaialble: he apparently said he agreed with it. 4) seroxat the seroxat ssri user group (sug) is an action group on the ssri antidepressant seroxat. it offers support to those who have been harmed by taking ssris, providing information and advice on how to seek legal redress against the pharmaceutical industry and on how to cope with and withdraw from ssris. it has also been campaigning to hold the following to account: a) glaxosmithkline (gsk) for withholding on commercial grounds, clinical trial data that showed seroxat lacked efficacy and was unsafe b) gsk in particular and the pharmaceutical industry in general for the social harm caused by the over-medicalisation of social problems and for putting drug profit before public health c) the government for failing to implement the recommendations of the house of commons health committee report into the influence of the pharmaceutical industry (2005). among other things, the report recommended that the pharmaceutical industry in the uk be more tightly regulated. d) the medical and allied professions for not ensuring that their members are adequately trained to recognise adverse drug reactions in patients, properly judge clinical trial data on drug efficacy and safety so that they are not duped by drug company marketing 4 available at http://www.compsy.org.uk/changing%20minds.pdf 55 building participative, empowering & diverse communities practices, deal with drug company professionals in a way commensurate with protecting public health. they also want coroners made aware and make use of clinical data that shows the risk of death from taking ssri medication. one of those who had been involved in the birmingham manifesto and subesequent activity posted a suggestion on the uk community psychology mailing list (on thursday 22 nov 2007 at the end of the working day): i am asking as a matter of urgency (before 28th nov [ i.e. the following wednesday]) whether our community psychology network could offer support and solidarity to sug by endorsing the organisation (at the very least) or coming up with a short statement of solidarity/support (at the very most). sug have a meeting with prime minister gordon brown next week to put their case forward. to have a statement of support from a collective of psychologists and users of psychological services might help them. there was a good response from list members and a collectively edited statement was agreed: cpuk sug statement “the community psychology uk network (cpuk) supports the work of the seroxat & ssri user group (sug) in their efforts to protect public health from any inadvertent harm caused by the pharmaceutical industry and the medical and allied professions [the use of the term inadvertent was perhaps unfortunate.] cpuk support sug’s aims to ensure uk health regulatory bodies have sufficient remit, responsibility and resource to guarantee public health and to ensure that those harmed by the products of psychopharmacy are given the support they need to seek justice and get well.” statement from the community psychology uk network (cpuk), november 2007 cpuk is a broad coalition of over 150 professionals and paraprofessionals that includes, among others, psychiatrists, psychologists, users of psychological services and members of the public. cpuk is committed to work that promotes health and well-being through securing social justice for those marginalised by society’s economic, social and political institutions. the initiator of the statement provided the following feedback to the list: sug asked the prime minister (gordon brown [gb]) three things: 1) why had the medicine and healthcare products regulatory agency not, after four years, concluded its criminal investigation of glaxosmithkline? gb answer: can’t comment on an ongoing criminal investigation blah blah blah (standard reply, sug didn’t expect much else, it was enough to see if gb could keep a straight face when explaining why the criminal investigation has so far taken 4 years). 2) why were doctors not better informed about the dangers of ssri before they prescribe them and better trained to scrutinise clinical drug data? gb answer: he will write to the british medical assocation and suggest sug meet to talk with them about this 3) will the government support sug or help the group identify where support might be found (sug has 10,000 personal testimonies of people who have been harmed by seroxat and sug have no resources to analyse those nor the resources to provide support to the people who have been harmed). gb didn’t answer because he had to run off to the commons for a vote. meeting lasted about 15mins and was on a bad day for the pm (criminal investigation into 56 building participative, empowering & diverse communities labour party funding had been announced that day). that aside, sug came away with something a letter of introduction to the bma from the pm the leverage of having had the pm consider sug’s concerns were serious enough to merit a meeting to discuss it, and the opportunity to keep a dialogue going with the pm’s office [made possible] by [the fact that] the meeting was interrupted and the third question was not answered. the cpuk statement of support was handed directly to the pm. sug found it of considerable help for the meeting. however there has been no follow up from the network. when early in 2008 research hit the press (bbc, 2008; university of hull, 2008) showing seroxat to be no more effective than placebo (kirsch et al., 2008), there was a suggestion that the network carried out an action about this but after some debate the idea disappeared. the political voice of community psychologists was again, collectively, and inconspicuously absent. these case studies of attempts to intervene in a more explicitly political way can now be briefly explored to try to identify some of the wider issues that arise when community psychologists try to overtly politicise concerns that although linked to their legitimised practice and roles involve stepping over a boundary that can be both implicit and explicit. evalluating the four initiatives. strengths the three initiatives were a new departure of uk community psychology into the political realm and as such they were a step forward. they, made explicit that there was a distinctive community psychology position on social and political questions. helped community psychologists to commit to a politically progressive orientation. led to some political education among the community psychology community. made legitimate the idea of politically explicit, public and collective intervention. added leverage to a community based campaigning group in their campaign for justice. weaknesses sustainability (and organisation). we can see from these examples that at least in these uk examples, community psychologists were not able to build effectively on the initiatives they promoted. this reflects their general lack of organisation, a feature of community psychology in britain where there is as yet no formal organisation. in other countries with small relative numbers of community psychologists this is also likely to be the case. we saw that the three more outward-facing initiatives were not properly followed up it was as if it was enough to make the statement. ideological purity versus pragmatism. a misplaced ideological purity may also have impeded the effectiveness of these initiatives. an understandable suspicion of hierarchy and elites and fear of reproducing such features in our initiatives meant that the cbt initiative, for example, was less effective than it might have been who were we that people should take any notice? in our view this reflects a misunderstanding of the processes of social reproduction, committing a category error in confusing the generative socioeconomic processes that create and sustain elites and power relations with the necessary roles of leadership that are required in any effective political movement. the former would not be changed by a narodnik eschewing of ‘elite’ labels and identities, while the latter rather depended on it. as a result the need to be effective was 57 building participative, empowering & diverse communities traded for the politics of the gesture. political incoherence. one problem with a loose group of community orientated psychologists from across the country trying to organise together politically is the diversity of their outlook as well as varying levels of political development. a related problem is that most (british) psychologists have not been political activists so there is not much practical know-how in terms of organising campaigns, nor of the familiar debates on the dilemmas of organisation . psychological isolationism. perhaps the biggest problem though relates to the question of psychologists organising as a group. in some of the background work for the birmingham manifesto the point was made that community psychologists have three potential roles within which political commitment can be discharged: citizens we are all citizens and it is fundamentally in this role that we should be organising and participating in counter-systemic struggles, whether on burning excessive hydrocarbons, opposing more wars, solidarity with progressive social movements and so on. experts as psychologists we have some legitimacy and expertise. we know and can say with authority that commercialisation is poisoning childhood. we know and can say with authority that restrictions on abortion harm women. we know and can say with authority that britain’s asylum laws destroy family life. we don’t have to be pompous about it, just claim the expertise we can for the good of the cause. workers we are workers who sell our labour power, some are only one or more pay cheques away from destitution. we should defend the interests of ourselves and of other workers world-wide using the vehicle developed for this, the trade unions. from the birmingham manifesto available at http://www.compsy.org.uk/the%20 birmingham%20manifesto.pdf but in negotiating these roles there is scope for confusion. there are at least two potential problems: the denial of specific position based expertise and influence (a stance touched on above) in a false effort to assume the undifferentiated role of activist in circumstances where that would be better served by assuming a more specific and expert role (quintal de freitas, 1994), and the failure to make appropriate and effective alliances with those who are not psychologists. this was noticeable in the case of a ‘psychologists against facism’ group set up to campaign against far right political groups. the group in question was reluctant to even ally with other allied professions and as a result was so small that it failed to acquire an effective critical mass. these two opposing tendencies seem almost symbiotic the failure to understand one’s specific role contributes to a denial of it that then leaves many psychologists feeling exposed and retreating to the security of the psychological community after all. there are, however, examples of radical psychology networks that have been more effective in forging effective alliances (burton, 2004). in the uk psychology, politics, resistance for example has emphasised work with survivors of the mental health system and taken action on issues such as electroconvulsive treatment. questions we now turn to a discussion of the wider implications of a political turn in community 58 building participative, empowering & diverse communities psychology, considering what it means for other politically orientated psychologies and for community psychology itself, together with its prospects for making any kind of a contribution to human wellbeing on a wider terrain. what are the connections with other attempts to develop a politically engaged psychology? there are some connections with other attempts to develop a more politically engaged psychology – some participants in the above initiatives have had involvement in the mental health system survivors’ movement for example while others have been involved with more theoretically orientated variants of critical psychology. some network members have also carried out work on the war of terror, torture and psychological complicity (burton & kagan, 2007 in press; duckett, 2005; harper, 2004, 2007). some have been involved with community-based struggles through their community psychology roles. however in general the developments described here are largely independent of other radical/political psychologies. this is both a strength and a weakness: most previous attempts to develop more politically engaged psychology have had little effect (parker & spears, 1996) and a fresh approach starting from today’s context could perhaps be more successful. but many issues are likely to be predictable, dealing with the same relations between economy, society and the life-worlds of people, so access to already existing conceptualisation is likely to be helpful, particularly given the general academic and professional isolation of psychology from other fields of social science, so long as this does not mean a retreat into the restricted codes of academic theoretical discourse. what are the prospects for such engagement and how best can community psychologists contribute to wider struggles and campaigns? it is difficult to assess the prospects for such engagement – this will depend on both internal and external contexts, and if we know anything it is that prediction is difficult. but the key question here is, “how best can community psychologists contribute to wider struggles and campaigns?” the birmingham workshop identified the three roles of citizen, expert and worker and we want to suggest that while conceptually distinct they do necessarily overlap in practice. for example in campaigning against a hospital closure we might be potential users, experts on the impact of such closure on access by marginalised sections of the community, and health service workers affected by the changes. sometimes our interests in these roles will be in conflict but often, as in this example they will not be and the key uniting factor is to question and combat the neoliberal models of efficiency and marketisation (lister, 2005) that underpin such policies. campaigning groups will rarely say: “let’s invite a community psychologist to work with us and advise us” (although there are exceptions kagan, lawthom, knowles, & burton, 2000; sánchez, cronick, & wiesenfeld, 1988). indeed there is understandable suspicion as to what psychological expertise could contribute. so it is often necessary to approach struggles and campaigns in those other roles of citizen and worker, not making a big thing of the psychological role. in other cases the campaign emerges while the community psychologist is already engaged in a community based project and here the task may be to renegotiate the role. examples of the areas where community psychology has relevant expertise include,: group organisation and dynamics – really important when small groups are engaged in difficult campaigns. 59 building participative, empowering & diverse communities communication and propaganda. understanding and documenting community impacts. the caution to observe in all of this is that while we have a certain expertise, if we are truthful it isn’t all that great, or at least the seduction of applying it across contexts can lead to error. why is this engagement increasing now? this heading rather begs the question that political engagement is increasing, and this could be no more than wishful thinking in the context of declining political activism as the conduct of politics becomes the privilege of professional politicians, marketing and media machines, themselves obligated to dominant economic interests. however, taking the claim at face value, we could attribute it to the ever increasing domination of capital and its servant the state. the reshaping of capitalist strategy in the form now called neoliberalism continues to influence community life in many ways. it also affects the work lives of psychologists as neoliberal restructuring (marketisation, facilitation of capital entry) reaches welfare services, educational establishments, urban planning and non-governmental organizations, while the impacts of the state’s military adventures and internal security provisions are felt in communities, particularly poor or dissident ones. this brings the dominant political-economic forces home to community psychologists and occasions this more activist-engaged stance. we should therefore expect more such political engagement from community psychologists as neoliberal strategy both intensifies and exhausts itself. what constraints are there to such action and do community psychologists self-constrain their political effectiveness? there are constraints of various kinds to such action. it is important to be aware that the space for committed political action in (all?) societies is conditional – the implicit contract being “yes you can organise and lobby, but only so long as you don’t try to fundamentally change the system” (petras & veltmeyer, 2001). this is why ultimately this kind of activity must be part of a broader political strategy and coalition. however, there are some things that seem to potentially constrain the current effectiveness of community psychologists seeking to engage politically: psychologists are mostly dependent on the state for their income and position power, and can be constrained in taking on a more open political role. indeed in some circumstances it will be dangerous for one’s employment. psychology is not traditionally political in orientation – its very construction has been that of the science of the general individual, abstracted from anything but the most proximal social context (danziger, 1990; sève, 1975). so political analysis and activity does not come easily to psychologists, nor in many cases does the formation of alliances with others (as discussed above). community psychology is in many ways the counterfactual case, but we should not underestimate the extent to which it carries the traits of its parent. what does this mean for the definition and focus of community and other related psychologies? the growth points mentioned so far are small and tender and may not become anything at all viable. but if they do it is possible that they will give new definition to the central concern (or perhaps contradiction) of community psychology 60 building participative, empowering & diverse communities it is ‘community’ psychology because it emphasises a level of analysis and intervention other than the individual and their immediate interpersonal context. it is community ‘psychology’ because it is nevertheless concerned with how people feel, think, experience and act as they work together, resisting oppression and struggling to create a better world. (burton, boyle, harris, & kagan, 2007) that is to say community psychology could renew its orientation to transformation through a recognition that its mission is ultimately political and the redesign of its practices to that end. conclusion community psychology is a construction – historically and societally bounded. this determines its politics. to the extent that the battle of ideas steps up, so will the contradictions that affect community psychology and its practitioners. one response would be quietist distraction (for example the study of the community as object) while at the other extreme would be naïve attempts at activism. the latter have to be encouraged since this is how learning takes place, overcoming naïveté through praxis, but this is only likely to yield much if community psychologists are able to step outside the isolation of being psychologists. appendix – the 4 core statements from the birmingham manifesto 1) war and imperialism we believe that the war and occupation of afghanistan and iraq is immoral, illegal and irresponsible. as community psychologists we have seen how these wars have created suspicion, fractured trust, intensified racism, and damaged community cohesion both within and between countries. these wars and occupations are not about promoting democracy. rather, they have restricted freedom of thought and freedom of movement. there is a psychological cost both for civilians and soldiers, creating a rip in the global social fabric between individuals, families, communities and our social institutions. furthermore, we believe that these acts of war are based on the interests of angloamerican capital and as such constitute an act of imperial aggression. 2) sites of counter-system resistance the community psychology network will support any individuals, groups, organisations or movements, at area, national or international level, which are working to oppose inequality and disempowerment. amongst allies we would therefore expect to offer our support to some of the following: professionals and professional groups dedicated to the provision of public services based on the principle of equity and those campaigning to preserve and extend such services; campaigns, such as feminist, lesbian, gay and bisexual, and anti-racist campaigns, which support the rights of groups who may be disempowered because of prejudice and discrimination; campaigns of support for countries and peoples affected by past and current forms of imperialism; those promoting open access, non-capitalistic, forms of communication such as the internet, use of open access software, and development of non-commercial forms of publication; and any faith group, political party, trade union, or individual writer or broadcaster which/who represents a 61 building participative, empowering & diverse communities ‘site of resistance’ to inequality or disempowerment. at the same time we recognise the need, in parallel, to develop the cp network itself as an effective site of resistance; by providing mutual support, building on the start made at the birmingham meeting, and by combating the isolation of a group largely composed of psychologists. 3) action on global warming/environment we believe that as psychologists we have a responsibility to contribute to government and community action to protect the environment. ecological damage and climate change currently threaten continuing life on the planet. the immediate consequences of global warming particularly threaten the poorest and least resourced people in the world (and those least responsible for the problem). as psychologists, we should be contributing our knowledge and skills to support and help to progress the work of environmental scientists, campaigners and activists in areas such as energy stewardship, investment in public transport and encouraging sustainable consumption. psychological theory and practice can help to: understand and counter processes of denial expose and critique powerful vested interests understand processes of participation, persuasion and decision-making encourage and enable people to work together toward sustainable futures. if we are to survive and thrive, people and societies need to make change happen: as psychologists, we must play our part. 4) public services/privatisation of the nhs5 it is the duty of government to govern in the interests of its citizens, promoting their well being through positive policies and by ensuring protection from threats. this includes a duty to address inequalities through a coherent policy framework that includes effective public services. the uk network of community psychologists commends important aspects of the track record of the labour government 1997-2007 in promoting the health and well being of the population. in particular there have been significant advances on child poverty and early intervention, the increased real expenditure on the nhs and joined up strategies to improve local population health and well being, for example through local strategic partnerships. however, we believe that these developments are lacking in ambition for social justice and they are compromised and threatened by other government policies that favour the private sector and especially big business. examples of this inadequacy are: failure to reintroduce progressive redistributive taxation of incomes and to reduce indirect taxation that hits the poor. the creeping privatisation of the nhs that is leading to fragmentation, demoralisation 5 the national health service in the uk, established by the 1948 labour government with the following founding principles: comprehensiveness a service covering and meeting all kinds of health care needs from infancy to old age, not just for physical illness (mental health and wellness), preventative and curative. universality a service of uniform quality for all on the basis of citizenship rather than either ability to pay or insurance scheme parameters. free of charge it would be paid for by the state (on the basis of redistributive taxation – a principle since eroded). equality those with more resources (educational, money, etc) would get no better a service than those who were less advantaged since people do not have equal health care needs, the point is to have access on the basis of need and not any factor irrelevant to need (see www.dhrsa.org.uk). 62 building participative, empowering & diverse communities and inefficiency this last being inevitable since private enterprise has to make a return to shareholders. the failure to effectively manage and constrain those business interests that threaten community health and well-being, including the drinks and gambling industries industries targeting children the car and airline industries speculative finance capital whose impacts on job security and community life can be devastating large retail concerns that are driving small local enterprises out of business and threatening institutions (such as the milk delivery and corner shop) that are critical to a neighbourhood based community. we believe psychologists are well placed to comment on the impacts on health and well being of the current policy mix and we will contribute to the development of a positive alternative people-oriented policy framework, contributing experience, skills, knowledge and evidence to the efforts of groups campaigning for an effective, adequate public policy framework that places people ahead of profit, recognises the value of publicly owned resources and services and that fearlessly tackles vested interest for a better society. references bbc. (2008). anti-depressants’ ‘little effect’ 26 february 2008 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7263494. stm accessed 28 8 2008. burton, m. (2004). radical psychology networks: a review and guide. journal of community & applied social psychology, 14, 119-130. burton, m., boyle, s. m., harris, c., & kagan, c. (2007). community psychology in britain. in m. montero (ed.), international community psychology: springer. burton, m., & kagan, c. (2005). liberation social psychology: learning from latin america. journal of community and applied social psychology, 15(1), 63-78. burton, m., & kagan, c. (2007 in press). psychologists and torture: more than a question of interrogation. the psychologist. cooke, b., & kothari, u. (eds.). (2001). participation. the new tyranny? london, uk: zed books. danziger, k. (1990). constructing the subject: historical origins of psychological research. cambridge: cambridge university press. duckett, p. (2005). globalised violence, community psychology and the bombing and occupation of afghanistan and iraq. journal of community and applied social psychology, 15, 414-423. harper, d. (2004). psychology and the ‘war on terror’. journal of critical psychology, counselling and psychotherapy, 4(1), 1-10. harper, d. (2007). the complicity of psychology in the security state. in r. roberts (ed.), just war: psychology and terrorism. ross-on-wye. kagan, c. (2006). making a difference: participation and wellbeing renew intelligence report. liverpool: 63 building participative, empowering & diverse communities renew north west. kagan, c., castile, s., & stewart, a. (2005). participation: are some more equal than others? clinical psychology, no volume no(153), 30-34. kagan, c., lawthom, r., knowles, k., & burton, m. (2000, september 2000). community activism, participation and social capital on a peripheral housing estate. paper presented at the european community psychology conference, bergen, norway. kirsch, i., deacon, b. j., huedo-medina, t. b., scoboria, a., moore, t. j., & johnson, b. t. (2008). initial severity and antidepressant benefits: a meta-analysis of data submitted to the food and drug administration. plos medicine, 5(2), e45. lister, j. (2005). health policy reform: driving the wrong way? a critical guide to the global “health reform” industry. enfield: middlesex university press. monbiot, g. (2001). an activist’s guide to exploiting the media. london: bookmarks publications. parker, i., & spears, r. (1996). psychology and society. london: pluto press. petras, j., & veltmeyer, h. (2001). globalization unmasked: imperialism in the 21st century. london: zed books. petras, j., & veltmeyer, h. (2005). social movements and state power. london: pluto press. quintal de freitas, m. d. f. (1994). prácticas en comunidad y psicología comunitaria. in m. montero (ed.), psicología social comunitaria: teoría, método y experiencia. guadalajara: universidad de guadalajara. sánchez, e., cronick, k., & wiesenfeld, e. (1988). psychosocial variables and participation: a case study. in d. canter, m. kramping & d. stea (eds.), new directions in environmental participation (vol. 3). aldershot: avebury. sève, l. (1975). marxism and the theory of human personality. london: lawrence and wishart. university of hull. (2008). antidepressants are ineffective for most patients, study finds (press release) 26th february 2008 http://www.hull.ac.uk/news/feb08/antidepressants.html accessed 28 8 2008. wilkinson, r. g. (2005). the impact of inequality: how to make sick societies healthier. london: routledge. wilkinson, r. g. (2007). dysfunctional societies: why even small differences in inequality matters (vol. 2008, pp. summary of talk): policy network. 64 building participative, empowering & diverse communities engaging community leadership: the intersecting of global dialogue and systems change (adaptive and engaging leadership with a purpose in a shifting world) james r. calvin, ph.d. associate professor of management department of management carey business school the johns hopkins university abstract it has been said that living life is living history in the making. in the classic historically based book, a tale of two cities, the author charles dickens writes in the classic book that “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” the dickens saga was set in the years leading up to the french revolution when globalization appeared different than it does now. the field of community development is expansive given the divergence of theories, concepts, training and approaches in institutes, colleges and universities. around the world the changing and shifting circumstances of nations, cultural regions and communities presents significant challenges as well as opportunities at this point in time in the globalization journey. globalization is also a driving factor and force in emerging trends toward community development research, theory, practice and potential outcomes and strategies. in our current time there are compelling events that have shaped and are shaping these times as we all go into the future amidst the swirling array of human dynamics, the quest for freedom, diverse groups of people and their leaders, human crises and needs, commerce and innovation, north and south perceptions and realities, and a changing global climate among other factors at play. consequently, it is the view of this author that it is important to promote dialogue exchange as the pace, rate and reach of global systems change, human orchestrated and natural, continues full speed ahead. in this vein, the cacophony of regional and world events and forums for strategic contemplation, thought and action includes annual g7 or g8 summits, the world economic forum that is held in davos, united nations convening and other global implication summits and settings for years to come. still, there are naturally ascendant conditions that are challenging the knowledge transfer competencies that crosses at will all country and community boundaries to threaten diverse people in places, regions and countries that are aligning and realigning along racial, ethnic and cultural divisions and groups. in some ways it’s people coming together in the pursuits of freedom and livelihood at times around conflicting views of reality. the intent in this exploration of ideas about community talking and eventual actions is to present and comment on some of the critical and key interrelated factors that are driving adaptive leadership strategies as communities confront and contend with a multiplicity of circumstances and situations that are interwoven that involves business, economic and social arrangements and strategies to manage affairs with a focus and eye toward the near future given the possibility that situations and other situations are still to arise. moreover, all of these factors with complex connections also involve the need for people and groups who are engaged in the contextual play between systems and freedom in all aspects of community life and livelihood 65 building participative, empowering & diverse communities introduction as one considers the organizing theme, the visioning of community systems leadership development in a worldwide perspective i offer for consideration thomas friedman writing in the world is flat (2006) where he states that globalization 3.0 is different than globalization 1.0 or 2.0 that he suggests briefly are two periods of european discovery in the world and the rise and expansion of transnational commercial organizations that are in some ways more connected in partnership with diverse communities. it is important to note that discovery is a two-way process and situation albeit the clarification is not always evident in the reporting of discovery when it involves city-states and nation states. friedman offers that globalization 3.0 is going to be more and more driven not only by individuals but also by a much more diverse-non-western, non white group of individuals because individuals from every corner of the flat world are being empowered, a new leveling of the playing field according to friedman. globalization 3.0 makes it possible for so many more people to plug and play, and you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part. i also offer that the current globalization reality and trend is being aided by the flow of migrating knowledge workers whose competencies and skills are needed by the european union, the americas, organization for economic co-operation and development (oecd) countries, and in asia. the early data from what appears to be a strengthening movement is beginning to provide links between migration and development i also think about the key factor of general systems theory as developed by ludwig von bartalanffy and jay forrester among others. systems theory and its multiple applications and critical nuances in the realm of community development involving community leadership is important for unpacking, describing and understanding some of the major factors involved in community development such as connecting passion, interest and leadership, power and influence, intergroup relationships, development planning activities, asset mapping and measurement and other components of process and action. clearly, the reality of community development when it is connected to or combined with community leadership engagement strategies is a complex human set of activity. i return again to the discussion of freedom as emotional intelligence and as a mindset for building participative, empowering and diverse communities within and across societies. the view held by friedman and the view held by george soros on freedom are not so different as i reiterate that it is important to both think and act on the importance of freedom in these times. in a very short historical snapshot of the world the notion and meaning of freedom over the previous twenty centuries was experienced by fewer people for a host of reasons and situations. a single nation debate generally about the united states is being discussed more widely in the world as suggested by christopher hitchens as freedom for nations is coming more into question geopolitically. i will also in this paper refer to expressed voices to illuminate the picture that i seek to present. one of the voices is amartya sen the economist who in rationality and freedom (2002) poses the dual questions of what is the place and process of perceived and actual freedom for individuals and communities; and what is freedom when referring to human welfare and economic progress by again linking freedom to opportunity and process? amartya sen in describing the place and process of freedom refers to t.h. green who wrote in 1881 “that freedom, rightly understood, is the greatest of blessings; that its attainment is the end of all our effort as citizens. sen further states, whether or not we “all” agree with so exacting a claim, it is hard to deny that ideas of freedom influence us deeply. we have reason to value our own 66 building participative, empowering & diverse communities freedom, and it is difficult to think of the excellence or the limitations of a society, or the rightness or wrongness of social arrangement, without invoking—in one way or another—freedoms of various kinds and their fulfillment and violation in the societies under scrutiny. clearly mahatma ghandi, martin luther king, jr., and most recently nelson mandela each had a vision of freedom as well as a voice for freedom to engage local and large communities. it is also important to recognize that freedom is impacted by economic, social and governing factors at a time when four of the world’s five biggest economies including the u.s., the eurozone, japan and the u.k. are in decline with only china and india experiencing strong growth in the world into the coming year and the next year to follow (the wall street journal, friday, august 15, 2008). the authors of megacommunities (2008) discuss and describe a deliberate equilibrium because the new complexities are a natural consequence of a world made smaller by greater integration and interdependency. again, economic freedom impacts economic potential, and social and education realities as i am also reminded of hearing the voices of middle school youth some years ago and more recently as many youth still are looking to find freedom to grow and to explore their knowledge and economic potential because the educational experience they were receiving was not adequate to meet their desires and needs. there are other expressed voices to consider as well ronald heifetz & marty linsky in leadership on the line (2002), niall ferguson in the war of the world (twentieth century conflict and the descent of the west, 2006), frances hesselbein & marshall goldsmith in the leader of the future (visions, strategies, and practices for the new era, 2006) among other voices participating in the emergence of viable community building and engagement that encourages future thinking about managing multiple options for multi-cultural human groups and societies who are seeking practical ways for grasping and introducing adaptive, cultural and collaborative leader prospects and perspectives in the pursuit of community investment for renewal in coming years. as the world turns, the world shifts in this paper some of the ideas and themes are meant to foster as well as support community dialogue transitions is taken from three international association for community development (iacd) region centric declarations where the strategic thinking outcomes were developed in partnership with participants in diverse stakeholders, partners, and communities around the world. these are the hong kong declaration in 2007, the yaounde declaration in 2005, and the budapest declaration in 2004. additionally, there will be reference to other ongoing efforts regarding strategic options and strategic thinking when the need is to focus on identifying, engaging and building linkages within and across communities where proactive engagement becomes a foundation for adaptive capable future leadership as facilitative methodology within a given community during uncertain shifting times now and for all time to come. in brief, the introduction, advancement, and constructing of future community dialogues to establish shared community outcomes provides ample opportunity for broadening inter community leadership involvement that is fundamental to discovering, seeing, and developing inventive ways to work with others for goals in common. to do so involves human intuition, knowledge and flexibility for solution making across divergent systems that might include social agencies, ngos, indigenous leaders, local and national government representatives, funders, business leaders, citizens and others who have stated interests for working together to achieve and sustain community based and community driven success—and the caveat that i add is that 67 building participative, empowering & diverse communities local decision making and local ownership remain important in such a process. one example is the recent report in the washington post in the united states that reported cape verde is rising to take its place in the world because of its freedom to embrace democratic values along with local and national will that are factors in expanding political and economic stability. this reemergence of cape verde is now being aided by a special partnership that was signed with the european union in november 2007 that is focused on trade and security to which i add is gaining freedom. the cape verde partnership has lots of upside potential for that community for a long time to come. cape verde also receives investments from the millennium challenge corporation (mcc), a u.s. government entity that aggressively seeks to reduce poverty through rural economic expansion and infrastructure development. the world bank is also a partner in this wide community and economic development partnership—to which i will add that in cameroon a paper and meetings with local citizens at the 2005 iacd africa focused conference helped in the decision making process to invest in infrastructure development. cape verde prime minister jose maria perenia neves who is quoted as saying the partnership is thriving because of local credibility. meanwhile, the minister of finance and public administration christina duarte a former citibank vice president for angola has been implementing policies that engender investments into the nation states general budget rather than a project aid modality where the community and country has little local control. as you are aware, there is also the building of a port in cape verde and a port in burkina faso as the process goes forward. it is important to state clearly and strongly that this representation is not a formula rather it is recognition that the structures and conditions through which local results are achieved or made at the community level is often a long-term scenario, proposition and situation. an example of systems non-convergence and systems not coming together is reflected in some non-harmonious locations around the world including efforts in several american communities with local nonprofits that work with ex offenders, low skilled youth, and a host of city, state and national agencies and foundation partners to create opportunity for economic advancement of young men and young women. these ongoing efforts involve shared interests and multiple levels of dialogue and constant action. still, much of what is being accomplished while intense and purposeful is further influenced and impacted by increasing resource competitiveness, the ongoing public policy debate and direction, and the role of effective dialogue that is critical for getting to, getting through, and getting beyond the complexities of managing racial, ethnic or gender group held attitudes within a given society as well as the complexity of building sustaining mutual relationships. dialogue is essential to a community generated and owned process of interacting and deepening involvement with a community that wants to or needs to come together to act together in community to embrace a mission as a group to strive for a common ideal, need or goal. in a given community within global society the needs will vary and for example there has been a recent request made to secure the participation of 5,000 african american adult males to serve as mentors to younger african american males to stem a major public and community crisis concerning the numbers of young african american men who do not graduate from high school nor are those young men participating in the labor force in baltimore city or the region this long standing trend has further family and health consequences for the entire community and region. the need for new approaches and ways and structures to engage and manage social, economic, and environmental change also helped foster the united nations global compact 68 building participative, empowering & diverse communities (gc) that was initially launched in the year 2000. in 2007, the global compact achieved broad international signatory support and adoption and the gc involves more than 3,000 companies from more than 100 countries including portugal. at the setubal conference the first lady of portugal, senhora d. maria jose ritta delivered a speech in support of responsible corporate citizenship to also involve communities. richard howitt, european union parliament rapporteur on ethical business was quoted to say that europe strongly supports csr. a footnote here is that there is no universally accepted definition of csr and it must be viewed with a given context. howitt went on to say that he welcomed the presence of the global compact at the setubal conference, in the portuguese context; and also the development of a global compact network in portugal was encouraged (united nations global compact, 2003). here and in other places is strategic potential for global extension to asia, africa and the americas as spiraling activities will in time impact and further encounter diverse communities in reaching for new potential. additionally, there are more than 700 civil society and international labor organizations and academic institutions all engaged in the initiative to ensure that business is part of the solution to the challenges of globalization. in this way the private sector in partnership with other social actors can help realize a more sustainable and inclusive global economy (the united nations global compact, 2007). also critical to the efforts that are being mounted by the global compact is the community strengthening and connecting potential of dialogue. by dialogue i mean it as expressed by peter senge author of the fifth discipline who offers a meaning for dialogue as community expressed in native american indian cultures, “you talk and talk until the talk starts.” senge then refers to the dialogue approach as presented by william isaacs (dialogue and the art of thinking together, 1999) who defines dialogue as being about shared inquiry, a way of thinking and reflecting together. it is not something you do to another person. it is something you do with people.” thus, dialogue matters greatly in recognizing a challenge and then deciding to take concerted action such as the challenge as is now the case in baltimore. as such, i offer that it is critically important for citizens and community groups to be able to distinguish between technical challenges and adaptive challenges that are most often bound together. ronald a. heifetz and marty linsky (2002) make the delineation clear by posing the question what’s the work and for this experience it is engaging and involving community? the illumination they offer is that the technical involves applying current know-how while the adaptive is learning new ways and for the learning i add extending learning to doing, then to envision, and then moving an action or process forward. at a parallel level the distinction between technical and adaptive is who does the work? the illumination for this is when being technical it’s the authorities or officials, and when being adaptive it’s the people who have the problem and i add that it the people or group who can create a solution together. in doing so, there is the possibility of erecting new scaffolding as a necessary foundation for building new community enterprise frameworks and doing so does require thinking to arrive at workable processes for devising effective strategies to meet desired needs in time and over given time. this i think is crucial for beginning to gauge the impact of challenges that are further influenced by extrinsic factors and intrinsic factors when individuals and groups of people seek to grasp as well as adapt to managing change in a shifting environment. the question now becomes how to bring together those whose preference is being risk adverse with others who are risk taking because understanding the importance of different mindsets is also acting on the criticality of awareness of self and environment. furthermore, it is 69 building participative, empowering & diverse communities recognizing that adaptive learning is an essential tool and technique for developing individual and group adaptive leadership strategy and practice through which authentic engagement takes place. there is still another parallel idea to be considered and the idea is that there is no real way to escape politics in life in addition to what is perception and what is reality. in discussing and exploring the issues of technical and adaptive challenges side by side with perception and reality the current and previous classes of harry and jeanette weinberg foundation fellows began to say what was on their minds. i think that the weinberg foundation fellows are becoming a learning community in a multi-step process to becoming a more effective network community that will hopefully be more empowered to engage citizens in local communities because they are engaged in knowledge building that is meant to add to skills and current capacity to enhance the functionality and capability of their organizations to perform better, to promote future capacity building in the sector, to explore resource sharing, and networking as strategic outcomes that can be measured. the technical challenge for the fellows as i have observed is 1) flexibility and becoming comfortable with the need to manage perceptions, reality and expectations, 2) becoming comfortable with the need or desire to learn new methods and ways to lead, follow and do, and 3) how to manage close and also distant relationships with board chairs, board members and existing and new relationships with donor agencies, funders, and social entrepreneurs during a time of diminishing financial resources and investments from national foundations. as i have talked and exchanged thoughts with the fellows, and we will do so again in the coming months, there are two or three interrelated ideas that we will continue to explore in-depth. the first idea is that dynamic complexity matters—that is that all of the variables need to be accounted for when seeking to position as well as unravel a problem or challenge faced even when that problem situation appears to be small (and listening, observation, perspective and personal paradigms matter). the second idea is that the building, shaping, and applying of a community-oriented and based remedy requires anticipation strategy planning, proactive partnering, and keeping an eye on improvement, authentication and lasting impact for the organization and the community that is being engaged and served. i also think that the ideas that i am advancing are similar to an idea that has recently been put forth by charles handy (2006), a highly regarded and recognized management thinker whose work is interdisciplinary with wide implications. handy refers to the time in which we are living being a prime space and time for ‘philosopher leaders.’ handy’s idea stems from plato’s seminal text the republic and the notion is that philosopher leaders shape a perspective, seek understanding, and have discernment capacity to make decisions that affect fellow citizens. as was previously mentioned, there is always going to be politics as a part of life along with the simultaneity or difference between perception and reality. these are important variables found in all cultures and not necessarily with the same or similar meaning. globescan, a toronto, canada based global public opinion and stakeholder research organization is one of a number of organizations that sheds light on perception and meaning—and there is more to mention a short time later in this paper. it is my further thinking that modern philosopher leadership is then transcendent in practical use and in resulting behaviors that are manifested because of contextual factors and situations. the point being made is that one person or a group or a community of people might or might not profess to a way of life while at the same time subscribing to or following a particular way of life in a given culture. 70 building participative, empowering & diverse communities a brief time ago in this paper i mentioned globescan (2008) an organization whose research suggests that people living in the north and south halves and regions of the world have different priorities about the world’s problems—and the south is more heavily populated than the north. briefly, the south sees wars, conflicts, and terrorism as one set of problems among many problems. all together only 15 percent of the respondents to the poll in the south say that war, conflicts and terrorism related and as connected problems are the world’s most important problem, while 4 in 10 respondents in the south say its economic challenges. meanwhile, in the north, one in three people interviewed or surveyed mentioned wars, conflicts, and terrorism as the most important problem. it is important to mention this dichotomy because globescan collects and analyzes data annually on 55,000 people from around the world in formulating the research opinions, conclusions, and positions that are taken by subscribing organizations and governments. adaptive leadership futures for changing times: futures can be made once more in these times there is challenge as well as opportunity for promoting community engagement because communities are places where needs, desires, and interests overlap for thinking, building and constructing practical and viable solutions arrived at by shared visioning and a congealing of voices that explore, share and communicate practical and useful engagement processes and tools. by intent and other factors people centered activity with a deliberate aim of advancing, recognizing, replenishing and sustaining individual and group efforts in a community can lead to culturally sensitive efforts to come because there is greater potential to facilitate the depth of shared effort and work in diverse communities as a concerted leadership strategy, and these efforts have the potential to be sustained. in doing so, i will discuss first hand or second hand ideas, and offer trends and practices that are emerging in africa, europe, asia, canada and the united states through the work of the international association of community development (iacd), the world bank, the united nations and other associations and bodies doing work and supporting work in communities. the hong kong declaration—in late june 2007 more than 250 community development workers, academics, researchers, donors, policy-makers and representatives from government, civil society organizations and community groups came together in hong kong at an international conference partnership for people-centered development: challenges and responses in a globalising world in total 30 countries were represented with the majority of countries from the asia-pacific region. what emerged is that community development is viewed as a way of promoting active civil society, sustaining peace based justice, and creating democratic life by prioritizing the decisions and actions of people, their communities, and their perspectives in the development of social, economic and environmental policy. it is both a process and a goal. further, the delegates requested regional bodies and national and local governments, to commit themselves to work in genuine partnership, in building socially and economically inclusive, diverse, environmentally sustainable, gender-responsive and just societies. the expressed goals and resolve is to pursue opportunities and strategies to achieve a wide range of goals and future outcomes. the yaounde declaration—in june 2005 almost 400 delegates from across africa and other parts of the world met at a international conference in yaounde, cameroon with the theme 71 building participative, empowering & diverse communities building civil society through community development. a total of 25 african countries from all areas of the continent were represented in the deliberations. it was stated that that the practice of community development in africa must also reflect and respect the african experience and culture – for example the existence of strong family, tribal and community roots. furthermore, the requirement calls for both an african understanding of the meaning of “development” at a community level that also respects and recognizes basic human rights for all. second, that infrastructure and rapid urbanization in the continent has placed great strains on both urban and rural communities and that rural development policies should be strengthened with a view of slowing rates of movement from rural to urban areas. at the conference it was firmly asserted that solutions to africa’s problems must lie firmly and democratically in the hands of the african people themselves. finally, the african union should encourage more effective interaction between different levels of government, ngos and also local and international groups within africa the budapest declaration—in late march 2004 one hundred thirty participants from 33 countries across the european union (eu) and from other countries in the world met at a international conference focused on building civil society in europe through community development. the partner sponsors were iacd, the combined european bureau for social development, and the hungarian association for community development under the patronage of the president of hungary. the delegates in attendance acknowledged the priority that was and is being given by the european union to strengthen civil society and emphasize the important role that which community development can play in supporting that process and protecting the rights of all. the delegates requested the eu, national, regional, and local governments as appropriateto commit themselves actively to build a socially and economically inclusive, diverse, environmentally sustainable and socially just society, and to ensure the structures, policies and mechanisms are in place to support dialogue between the eu and member states on the one hand and civil society on the other. this will require both moral and practical support for community participation, and appropriate legal, institutional and material conditions, but with specific support for community development itself. over the past six years the world-wide engagement by iacd with a wide number of community development groups, partners, governments, ngos and others has been vital to the future direction of community development. once more, there are many challenges and an equal number if not greater number of opportunities for advancing community development across the world. an expanded role for business: global social responsibility as previously mentioned the question of what is the role of business in society and with communities is high on the agenda of business schools, a growing number of businesses who have joined together with the united nations. the question was also addressed in 2006 by the boston college center for corporate citizenship (bcccc). the boston college center in a report said that it is no longer a widely held view that social responsibility is simply a business increasing their profits, rather it is forging positive relationships with society that gives a firm identify while “defining who we are.” i think that the evidence of defining is going to take a lot of time to assemble as present conditions will change in future years to come. thus, i offer that many more business organizations and ngos are increasingly finding and moving to common ground under the 72 building participative, empowering & diverse communities umbrella of the green economy. if future business interests and community interests are going to be joined together in searching for sustainable and renewable natural resources then green enterprise can become an opportunity as jack welch, former ceo of general electric (ge) would sometimes allude to the need for ge to know “who we are” in referring to the shifting influence of having the capacity to identify and meet opportunity. ge in 2008 is leading the way to green commerce and community investment under the leadership of current ceo jeffrey immelt is striving to become a trend setter and world leader in shaping the expanding green economy while also gearing up to build and fulfill orders for innovation laced locomotives that will be used to further transform the industrial capability of china to meet growing national demands and growth. the surge by ge and a growing number of leading business organizations toward a green economy in a competitive global environment is a complex situation that signals more change to come this year and in succeeding years to follow. concerning the question of the role of business in society and local communities, the exxon-mobil company in the united states had sales of $404 billion dollars in 2007 and this figure is greater that the gdp of more than 120 countries. there is a intensifying call by shareholders and the general public for exxon-mobil to be more community supportive as the role of oil in the global economy is itself shifting with worldwide production having peaked in the years 20002001. china, japan and india need more oil and gas to fuel growth as does the united states and europe to sustain high quality life styles as do other areas and regions of the world. this is important to consider because brazil and russia appear to be successfully transforming their economies tata motors in india will soon introduce an automobile that will sell for $2,500 in us dollars in india and other countries in asia and potentially africa. toyota is locked in a global battle with general motors (gm) for primacy as the world’s largest auto manufacturer. china is on schedule in the year 2008 to surpass germany to become the number one exporting nation in the world. the growth and expansion of large cities continues and lagos, nigeria followed closely by dhaka, sri lanka is currently the world’s fastest growing city adding 58 new residents per hour. the unfolding scenario that is unleashed is an emerging reality of rising competition driven by an aging industrial model that by many estimates is not sustainable economically, socially, governmentally or practically in the world. chris moore refers to what harvard professor samuel huntington has coined “ the davos culture” which is a select group of globally based business, political leaders and social activists who meet in switzerland each year to deliberate on business and social policy directions and decisions that have major implication on the social and economic conditions around the whole world. however, it is becoming increasingly clear that the role of globally competent and facile leadership will be vital in this unfolding scenario. a question that is raised is what is the language and lexicon that is enabling of finding meaning, mutual agreement, and understanding in the community. chris moore a writer and researcher suggests that globalization is a philosophical quandary because globalization in his view calls for a consolidating of the world’s resources, combines aspects of co-mingling cultures, makes a point to display the imbalances that exist between fledgling economies and nations who must compete with a very small group of nations whose economic and political power is clear in all dimensions. community leadership and management innovation: then, now and future it is generally agreed that the formal study of leadership and management in organizations 73 building participative, empowering & diverse communities became an organized field of study and research activity early in the twentieth century with henri fayol. the noted twentieth century economist joseph a. schumpeter offered and linked two important economic based theories together around entrepreneurship and innovation. in schumpeter’s view innovation and technology stems from entrepreneurs. second, that the movers of innovation in a national economy are the big companies. it was the late peter f. drucker who often implied business cannot stand apart from society nor benefit communities and larger society by only existing and operating for profit. yes, there are many factors and influencers that converge on work, family, neighborhood and city sized communities. the rate and scale of systems change that includes work, technology, cultures, organization, and family and community that is the simultaneity of intersecting systems that will continue during advancing globalization. the community driven philosophy of robert k. greenleaf who as a early proponent the servant-leader is servant first recognized the societal need for dialogue driven leadership and followership that supports citizen and community owned responsibility for owning the process. there is promise to be further realized in cape verde, brazil, china, india, and in baltimore and in portugal because i think that the action will be the result of local initiative that can benefit from external supports in seeking to balance power dynamics. the global issues of drinkable water, available food to feed a growing population, renewable energy sources, healthy and thriving oceans, and a changing global climate cast major challenges for now and the immediate future for all countries. the economic historian niall ferguson (2006) refers to the twentieth century and the more than 100 year trajectory of the western world as being a reorientation of industrial prominence from the west to the east. ferguson’s view is that the global shift that is underway is unstoppable, has involved and does involve conflict, and it is a comingling of cultures and all that comes with the journey. once more, the direction of engagement is equally forceful north to south. it is the further interpretation of this author that the globalization shift is in full force and that the intensity of what human systems are facing is a constant shaking and stretching of life support systems and work systems that will severely test and overcome some models and approaches that cannot be adapted in the production of goods, services, and human commerce and livelihood around the world. i stress that this assumption is not an end of the world declaration rather it is a call to take exploratory approaches and in some cases revolutionary thinking and action will more than likely be required to present risk taking ideas for finding the critical and needed solutions in which leadership and management practices are contributing factors for navigating change. a closing thought: building adaptive community going forward into the future gary hamel asks an important question in the future of management (2007), why does leadership and management seem stuck in a time warp? hamel’s answer begins with “we’ve reached the end of management—in the sense that frances fukuyama argues we.ve reached the end of history.” hamel goes on to refer to stuart kauffman an evolutionary biologist who has a notion of a “fitness landscape” in describing evolutionary progress that eventually reaches the summit of a local peak. i hope that the ideas that i want to convey indicate that communities can befall local peaks. also at this time the insight and concept of reaching a local peak put forth by kauffman i think is similar to continuing to push forward leadership and management ideas and processes against strong headwinds that are blowing from the direction of the future. i am in agreement with hamel and the other voices regarding 74 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the plight of communities and community leaders and followers who as partners need supports and investment to build and maintain community focused processes for engaging in dialogue and actions that influence the responsiveness of external systems that ultimately affect expressed freedom to manage local circumstances as community systems and structures both locally and in a global context. it is also my view that what is needed is innovative efforts stemming from ideas and approaches to leadership and management practices that are future possible and future driven by engaging in open dialogue that results in active participation at community level as evidence that building community processes can lead to community resilience and increased community participation and healthier outcomes internally for improved systems that are vibrant and ongoing as favorable and unfavorable conditions come and go over time. references bergmann, f. (1977). on being free. notre dame, indiana: university of notre dame press. calvin, j. (2007). building organizations and leadership: knowledge transfers in competitive environments. in hopes and visions for the 21st century. bethesda, maryland: world future society. ferguson, n. (2006). the war of the world (twentieth century conflict and the descent of the west). new york, new york: penguin press. forrester, j.w. (1968). principles of systems. cambridge, massachusetts: mit press. friedman, t.l. (2005). the world is flat (a brief history of the twenty-first century). new york, new york: farrar, straus and giroux. gerencser, m., van lee, r., napolitano, f., kelly, c. (2008). megacommunities (how leaders of government, business and non-profits can tackle today’s global challenges together)... new york, new york: palgrave macmillan. goleman, d. (2000). working with emotional intelligence. new york, new york: bantam books. googins, b.f. (2008, may). confronting the global crunch. boston, massachusetts: boston college center for corporate citizenship. hamel, g, breen, b. (2007). the future of management. boston, massachusetts: harvard business school press. heifetz, r.a., linsky, m. (2002). leadership on the line (staying alive through the dangers of leading). boston, massachusetts: harvard business school publishing. hesselbein, f., goldsmith, m. (2006). the leader of the future (visions, strategies, and practices for the new era). san francisco, california: jossey-bass a wiley imprint. hitchens, c. (2008, september/october). the case for humanitarian intervention. in foreign affairs. new york, new york. iacd. (2007, 2005, 2004). the hong kong declaration; the yaounde declaration; the budapest declaration. isaacs, w. (1999). dialogue and the art of thinking together. new york, new york doubleday business lahart, j.,macdonald, a.,walker, m. (2008, august 15). world economy shows new strain (european 75 building participative, empowering & diverse communities output shrinks, u.s. inflation jumps; fresh worries in developing nations). new york, new york: the wall street journal. lynch, d.j. (2008, may 13). man who would be a philosopher king (soros sees obscure economic theory as his life’s work. arlington, virginia: usa today. powell, l. (2008, march 12). cape verde takes its place in the world. washington, dc: the washington post. sen, a. (2002). rationality and freedom. boston, massachusetts: belknap press at harvard university. soros, g. (2008). the new paradigm for financial markets (the credit crisis of 2008 and what it means). new york, new york: public affairs/perseus books group. united nations global compact. (2003, may 13). global compact introduced to portugal. new york, new york: the global compact. von bertalanffy, l. (1968). general systems theory. new york, new york: george brazilier 76 building participative, empowering & diverse communities nuevas metodologías en investigación y prevención de la violencia en la pareja1 leonor cantera vanesa gamero departamento de psicología social universidad autónoma de barcelona edificio b. 8193 bellaterra-barcelona e-mail: leonor.cantera@uab.es vanessa.gamero@uab.es resumen el presente trabajo enfoca la relación de los estereotipos de género con la violencia percibida por la gente común en las relaciones de pareja (hetero u homosexual). la investigación se desarrolla en diversos países iberoamericanos. entre los instrumentos utilizados en el estudio figuran un iat (implicit association test), un cuestionario (que incluye series de ítems cerrados y de preguntas abiertas) y ejercicios de fotointervención. un primer avance de los resultados de la parte de la investigación realizada en españa y en puerto rico pone de manifiesto el alto nivel de arraigo de los estereotipos de género y especialmente de los relacionados con los agentes y víctimas percibidos de la violencia en todo tipo de pareja. ello tiene diversas implicaciones teóricas y prácticas en el ámbito de la prevención de la violencia en la pareja. palabras clave: estereotipos, género, violencia, pareja. introducción la perspectiva de género viene orientando, a lo largo de los últimos lustros, la investigación y la intervención sobre la violencia en la pareja (comisión europea, 2000, corsi, 2003, ferreira, 1992, osborne, 2001, walker, 1980), hasta el punto en que la misma ley orgánica (2004) de medidas de protección integral contra la violencia en la pareja se presenta como la ley contra la violencia de género. al igual que el sexo, el género ha sido pensado y hablado tradicionalmente en un lenguaje dicotómico: “los estudios sobre el género ponen de manifiesto que, tras la división sexual del trabajo, se esconden los estereotipos culturales del género: el varón se realiza masculinamente como productor y proveedor, cumpliendo el rol agéntico (deaux, 1985), esto es, vertebrando su identidad y su actividad en la dimensión pública, centrada en el desempeño laboral del rol profesional (job model, dex, 1988) y en la generación de valores de cambio. la hembra humana hace lo propio femeninamente como reproductora y cuidadora, desempeñando su rol comunal (deaux, 1985), desarrollándose como mujer en el ámbito privado, ejerciendo el rol doméstico (gender model, dex, 1988) y en la producción de valores de uso” (blanch, 2003, pág. 56). este enfoque basado en la dualidad de género define los criterios para una lectura teórica 1 el presente estudio se inscribe en el marco de un proyecto de investigación del plan i+d+i 20042007. ministerio de trabajo y asuntos sociales. instituto de la mujer sobre violencia de género. nuevos desafíos para la investigación y la intervención (cantera, 2006). mailto:leonor.cantera@uab.es mailto:vanesa.gamero@uab.es 77 building participative, empowering & diverse communities y para la prevención práctica de la relevante problemática social de la violencia en la pareja, que se caracteriza además por un marcado énfasis heterocentrista e implícitamente homofóbico que induce a centrar de modo casi exclusivo la atención en la violencia que se da en seno de una pareja “normal”, en la dirección de hombre a mujer, lo que equivale al escenario socialmente correcto de un modelo “patriarcal” de familia (cantera, 2005, 2004). cuando sólo se tiene en cuenta aquel marco explicativo, resulta casi impensable e invisible la violencia que se da también en parejas homosexuales, ya sean de tipo lésbico o gay (island & letellier, 1991, leventhal & lundy, 1999, renzetti & harvey, 1996, ristock, 2002). aún así, diferentes publicaciones afirman que el índice de violencia dentro de una pareja homosexual, bien sea esta gay o bien sea lésbica, es igual o superior que la violencia que uno puede encontrar dentro del seno de parejas heterosexuales (patrick c. mckenry, julianne m. serovich, tina l. mason and katie mosack, 2006; brown, c. 2008). diversos estudios muestran como la percepción de la violencia en el seno de una pareja varía en función de si ésta es heterosexual u homosexual (carvalho, a. 2002; paustian, m. 2007). por ejemplo, las víctimas son vistas como más responsables de la violencia ocurrida cuando el agresor es de su mismo sexo (paustian, m. 2007). la presente investigación parte de la sospecha de que el pensamiento políticamente correcto sobre la violencia de género puede inducir, por un lado, a una especie de conspiración de silencio y ocultación de la violencia en parejas homosexuales, lésbicas y gay y, por otro, a cierta idealización de la pareja homosexual como una especie de oasis exento de los problemas de violencia que se dan en la pareja “normal”. así mismo se traduce en el mantenimiento de una serie de estereotipos heterosexistas y homofóbicos, que dificultan la imaginación de que en tales parejas se pueda dar algún grado significativo de violencia. entre tales estereotipos, destacamos los siguientes: “sólo las mujeres heterosexuales pueden ser agredidas por su pareja”, “no existe violencia propiamente dicha en parejas lésbicas, porque es impropia de su género”, “la violencia doméstica en las parejas gay tiene su “lógica” (los hombres son propensos a la violencia), pero en lesbianas no (porque las mujeres no lo son)”, “en las gay, puede haberla, pero de baja intensidad, porque se da entre ´iguales´”, “al ser la pareja del mismo sexo, el maltrato es mutuo y, en cierto modo, simétrico”, “el maltrato en parejas del mismo sexo no es tan cruel, severo y duro como cuando una mujer es maltratada por un hombre”, “en parejas homosexuales, sólo se da propiamente como práctica ´sadomasoquista´”, “en una pareja, sólo maltrata la persona más fuerte, corpulenta, celosa y posesiva”, etc. (cantera, 2006). en la medida en que tales estereotipos estén anclados en la sociedad y en las mentalidades de los diversos tipos de profesionales (del ámbito social, jurídico, policial, médico, psicológico, etc.) implicados en la atención a las víctimas de la violencia en la pareja -incluidas las que se dan en relaciones homosexuales-, puede quedar negativamente afectada la calidad de la atención a estas víctimas. un primer paso para progresar en el conocimiento de esta problemática consiste en evaluar el grado de arraigo de estos estereotipos en la sociedad y en los sectores profesionales más directamente implicados en la atención a estas “otras” víctimas de la violencia en la pareja. este estudio apunta hacia esta dirección a un doble nivel: (a) metodológico, con la puesta a punto de un conjunto de instrumentos de recogida de información empírica adecuado a un objeto complejo y por tanto difícil de captar directamente, como son los estereotipos sociales sobre género y violencia y (b) empírico, con una primera colecta de información preliminar en esta área en españa y puerto rico. y parte de una doble hipótesis: 78 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 1. los estereotipos específicos sobre violencia de género (en la línea hombre – violento, mujer – pacífica) tienen un notable grado de arraigo social, tanto en hombres como en mujeres. 2. la violencia en la dirección hombre – mujer en el seno de una pareja heterosexual tiene más visibilidad psicológica y social que la que se da en la otra dirección y en cualquier otra modalidad de pareja. método participantes en la fase piloto, una muestra de conveniencia (estratificada con criterios de género, generación y orientación sexual declarada) integrada por 155 personas, residentes en las ciudades de barcelona y de málaga. después de la puesta a punto de las herramientas de investigación, posteriormente, se realiza el estudio sobre otra muestra de 185 personas de barcelona, de edad comprendida entre 18 y 60 años, un 71% de las cuales son mujeres y el otro 29 % hombres. una cuarta parte de este colectivo estudiado declara orientación homosexual y el resto corresponde a la mayoría numérica heterosexual. también participan en esta fase 33 personas de puerto rico (80 % mujeres y un 20 % hombres). todas las personas participantes en este estudio se autocategorizan como jóvenes (<de 30 años), heterosexuales y con estudios superiores. instrumentos para el estudio se han utilizado tres instrumentos: un iat, un cuestionario y la fotointervención. iat el implicit association test (greenwald, mcghee, & schwartz, 1998) es una técnica que mide la fuerza asociativa entre conceptos y es muy utilizada para registrar actitudes implícitas. tradicionalmente, para el estudio empírico de prejuicios y estereotipos han sido utilizadas las más diversas “técnicas explícitas”, como tests proyectivos, entrevistas en profundidad, diferencial semántico, escalas de actitudes y encuestas, cuyo uso conlleva ciertos problemas de control de variables como las “estrategias de auto presentación” o la tendencia a expresarse de acuerdo con el “pensamiento políticamente correcto”. en este punto, el iat es presentada como una innovación metodológica (nosek, greenwald & banaji, 2005). entre las ventajas del uso de esta técnica de medida de “actitudes implícitas”, destacan la simplicidad de su diseño, la facilidad y rapidez de su uso, su aplicación por ordenador, su aplicabilidad a grupos y su adaptabilidad a múltiples campos temáticos, entre los que destacan los de actitudes y estereotipos (ortiz y ruiz, 2004, aberson & beeney, 2007). los diseñadores del iat asumen que asociaciones fuertes (compatibles) entre pares de concepto diana – atributo (dimensión evaluativa) son más fáciles de clasificar juntas que asociaciones débiles (incompatibles) entre los mismos (banaji y greenwald, 1995). un ejemplo convencional de asociación fuerte (compatible) aportado por greenwald et al (1998) es el de flor-agradable vs. insecto-desagradable. por el contrario la conjunción flor-desagradable vs. insecto-agradable constituye un ejemplo de asociación débil o incompatible. esta fase incompatible conlleva una mayor demanda cognitiva a la hora de clasificar los diferentes estímulos que irán apareciendo en la pantalla del ordenador. los resultados del iat se miden a través de los tiempos de respuesta, medidos en milisegundos, y de los errores en las categorizaciones. en general, cuando una persona se sitúa una situación incompatible (flor-desagradable vs. insecto-agradable), tarda más en 79 building participative, empowering & diverse communities clasificar palabras como amapola o mosca. en tales casos, se espera un mayor tiempo de respuesta y también una más elevada tasa de errores. siguiendo con el ejemplo, el efecto iat se manifiesta en una actitud general más positiva hacia las flores que hacia los insectos. la aplicación del iat pone empíricamente de relieve lo que ocurre cuando se sustituye el binomio flores e insectos por otros psicológica o socialmente más relevantes, como los de jóvenes y viejos, blancos y negros, hombres y mujeres, etc. en la presente investigación se ha utilizado tres iat, que tienen respectivamente por conceptos-diana los de hombre-mujer, hetero-gay y hetero-lesbiana y como atributo violenciapaz. cuestionario una sus secciones consiste en una serie de 48 ítems referidos a “actividades” como conversar, cuidar, dañar, dialogar, dominar, escuchar, golpear, hablar, humillar, insultar, pegar, proteger, tolerar, torturar, etc. que la persona debe categorizar numéricamente en una escala de 1 a 7 con formato de diferencial semántico en cuyos polos figuran “de hombre” y “de mujer”. otra invita a puntuar, también en una escala de 1 a 7, en qué medida se dan unos determinados atributos -como confianza, seguridad, sensibilidad, tolerancia, agresión, bondad, etc. en diferentes modalidades de relación de pareja: heterosexual (hombre – mujer), lésbica (mujer – mujer) o gay (hombre – hombre). una serie de preguntas abiertas recogen la opinión acerca de diversos aspectos de la violencia en la pareja: la cantidad de violencia física (golpes, empujones, etc.) y psicológica (humillaciones, insultos, amenazas o intimidaciones verbales, chantaje emocional, etc.) que se da en diferentes tipos de pareja: (a) heterosexual, de hombre a mujer, (b) heterosexual, de mujer a hombre, (c) homosexual (gay), de hombre a hombre y (d) homosexual (lésbica), de mujer a mujer. la explicación de tales formas de violencia física y psicológica en tales tipos de relaciones de pareja. la distribución de la violencia física y psicológica según se trate de relaciones de pareja gay, lésbica o heterosexual. la atribución de las eventuales diferencias con respecto a esta distribución. fotointervención la fotografía es una herramienta que se utiliza en investigación en disciplinas como la sociología, la pedagogía o la psicología. siguiendo el protocolo del proyecto (cantera, 2006), se pide individualmente que las personas hagan uso de una cámara fotográfica para tomar un número determinado de fotografías relacionadas con el concepto que tengan de violencia. posteriormente, se genera unos grupos de discusión a través de los cuales se potencia el diálogo y la reflexión con relación al concepto de violencia y sus conexiones. el material obtenido en estas sesiones permite, por un lado, evaluar el impacto de los estereotipos de género y la percepción de la violencia en los diferentes grupos y, por otro, generar en los participantes una actitud de participación y acción involucrada en el proceso. procedimiento en la fase piloto del iat, se valida la serie de verbos elegidos como estímulos. un grupo de discusión trabaja asimismo en el control de una serie de características de los términos (como la tipicidad, la familiaridad o la frecuencia de uso) que podrían repercutir en el tiempo de reacción. 80 building participative, empowering & diverse communities finalmente, ortiz y ruiz (2007) ponen a punto la versión definitiva del iat. para el cálculo del iat d effect, se aplica el procedimiento algorítmico que tiene en cuenta la latencia de las respuestas correctas y los errores, que se calculan sumando 600 milisegundos a la media de las correctas del bloque correspondiente (greenwald, nosek & banaji, 2003). cada iat consta de una fase compatible y de una incompatible con 60 ensayos cada una ellas. la cantidad de estímulos por categoría es de cinco en el caso de violencia (abusar, humillar, dañar, imponer, insultar) – paz (pactar, escuchar, respetar, dialogar, conversar) y de uno en el caso de hombre – mujer, hetero – gay, hetero – lesbiana, siendo este estímulo la misma categoría diana. las palabras – estímulo, elegidas en la fase piloto atendiendo a criterios como los de su frecuencia de uso en español y su longitud silábica, se repiten aleatoriamente a lo largo de los 60 ensayos practicados de cada fase. la figura 1 (inspirada en ortiz y ruiz, 2004) esquematiza las fases del iat, simulando la pantalla del ordenador. figura 1 fases del primero de los iat diseñados para la presente investigación para el análisis de los datos obtenidos mediante la aplicación del cuestionario se ha utilizado el programa spss (14.0) en el caso de los numéricos y la técnica del análisis de contenido en el de los textuales. resultados en cuanto a la información obtenida de la aplicación del iat, una vez procesados los datos, identificados los tiempos de respuesta y los errores acumulados en las condiciones compatible e incompatible y efectuada la transformación algorítmica que determina el iat d mean effect para cada uno de los tres iat, se muestra las medias y las desviaciones para cada uno de los tres iat en las dos condiciones de aplicación en la siguiente tabla. 81 building participative, empowering & diverse communities tabla 1 iat 1 iat 2 iat 3 condición 1 .421 .34 .085 .22 .208 .27 condición 2 .487 .33 -.094 .34 .018 .31 total .459 .34 -.018 .31 .099 .30 las tres variables iat 1, iat 2 y iat 3 siguen una distribución normal (z kolmogorovsmirnov = .570, .227 y .995 respectivamente). el análisis de la variancia intersujetos mediante oneway anova revela diferencias estadísticamente significativas entre las dos condiciones para los iat 2 y 3 (p<.001 en ambos casos); lo cual denota un efecto de la presentación que no se da en el iat 1 (p=.235). la media total del iat 1 (.459) indica un alto nivel de anclaje del estereotipo de violencia de género (hombre violento vs. mujer pacífica) en ambos sexos y en todas las orientaciones sexuales. sólo un 11% de los individuos obtiene puntuaciones negativas en este iat. el análisis de la variancia revela diferencias estadísticamente significativas al respecto en cuanto el sexo (p<.001). la media de los hombres es de .26 y la de las mujeres de .55, lo cual indica a su vez que las mujeres perciben mayor asociación de hombre-violencia y mujer-paz que los hombres. en las dos condiciones del iat 2, las medias (.085 y -.094) tienen valores próximos a cero, notándose un cambio de signo de una condición a otra. asimismo, en la condición 1 del iat 3, la media (.208) refleja una doble asociación: pareja heterosexual violencia vs. pareja lésbica – paz; lo cual no aparece en la condición 2, donde la media (.018) es muy próxima a cero. las puntuaciones máximas obtenidas en la condición 1 y 2 han sido .87 y .73 y las mínimas -.40 y -.67 respectivamente. atendiendo a las respuestas al cuestionario, una comparación de medias indica que una serie de actividades de género aparecen significativamente diferenciadas por sexo, de modo que las mujeres tienden a puntuarlas de modo significativamente más polarizado que los hombres en el siguiente sentido: las mujeres valoran como propias de ellas algunas actividades características del rol de género femenino, asignándoles puntuaciones significativamente más próximas al 7 (polo “de mujer”) que las que les dan los hombres (p <.05). casualmente, estas actividades (atender, colaborar, complacer, confiar, cooperar, escuchar y tolerar) están revestidas de connotaciones socialmente positivas. asimismo, y en contrapartida, las mujeres valoran como propias de los hombres algunas actividades características del rol de género masculino, asignándoles puntuaciones más próximas al 1 (polo “de hombre”) que las que les dan los hombres (p <.05). también casualmente, estas actividades tienen connotaciones socialmente negativas (humillar, maltratar y oprimir). por otra parte, y acaso como contrapeso, los hombres puntúan el mentir como algo más característico de aquéllas, asignando a esta actividad puntuaciones significativamente más próximas al 7 (polo “de mujer”) que las que le dan las mujeres (p <.05) también aparecen diferencias significativas (p <.05) en cuanto a orientación sexual: las personas heterosexuales piensan que agredir y golpear es más de hombre que las personas homosexuales. además, éstas creen menos que aquéllas que compartir y provocar sean actividades más relacionadas con la mujer que con los hombres. asimismo, las personas que en el momento de contestar el cuestionario no tienen pareja 82 building participative, empowering & diverse communities están más convencidas que las que la tienen (p <.05) de que abusar e intimidar es más propio de hombre que de mujer. por lo que respecta a la pregunta del cuestionario donde la persona puntúa la cantidad de violencia física o psicológica que percibe en una pareja heterosexual (en todas las direcciones, de hombre a mujer y de mujer a hombre), así como en una pareja homosexual (de hombre a hombre y de mujer a mujer), las medias más altas asignadas de violencia tienen como protagonista agente al hombre y como sujeto paciente a la mujer, por lo que, obviamente la dirección principal de la violencia en la pareja es la que va de hombre a mujer: en este marco, en la escala de 1 a 7, el hombre recibe una puntuación media de 4.01 en cuanto a violencia psicológica de hombre a mujer y de 3.93 en lo que se refiere a violencia física de hombre a mujer. en contrapartida, las puntuaciones medias más bajas corresponden a la asignada a la violencia física de mujer a hombre (2.18), seguida de la violencia física de mujer a mujer (2.23). en relación con las respuestas textuales a las preguntas abiertas se hallan ciertas similitudes entre españa y puerto rico. las variables o categorías muy destacadas en ambos países son las siguientes: falta de respeto, inseguridad agresor, conducta aprendida, aspectos culturales y roles, así como el escribir no me lo explico o no tiene justificación como respuesta a la pregunta cómo te explicas la violencia física que se da en algunas relaciones de pareja. el grupo de puerto rico tiende a explicar la violencia en una relación de pareja invocando principalmente variables como el desamor, el déficit de autocontrol y la incapacidad de manejar las propias emociones. el de españa en cambio remite mayormente a “problemas externos”(económicos, familiares, laborales, etc.). con respecto a los factores percibidos de la violencia psicológica, se destaca en ambos países la inseguridad y la baja autoestima de uno o de ambos miembros de la pareja, así como la tendencia personal a controlar, manipular, humillar, dominar, manejar el poder y sentirse superior. el grupo de puerto rico señala que esta forma de “conducta aprendida “duele más que la física”. el de españa subraya la estrecha relación percibida entre la violencia psicológica y el lenguaje verbal (insultos, palabras hirientes, amenazas, etc.) que suele acompañar y a veces preceder o seguir a la violencia física. se identifica muchas veces la violencia psicológica con la violencia verbal que ocurre en un momento puntual de estrés o de discusión en la pareja, por ejemplo, un desahogo en una discusión con gritos e insultos. con relación a la pregunta acerca de si hay o no diferencias en cuanto a los niveles de violencia entre parejas de tipo heterosexual, gay o lésbica, una de las respuestas más características en la muestra de puerto rico es la del caso siguiente: creo que no hay tanta diferencia entre las parejas gay o lésbica y las heterosexuales porque estos otros tipos de pareja repiten y asumen los mismos roles y actitudes de aquellas parejas heterosexuales (puerto rico 30.029). no se percibe diferencias entre la violencia que se puede dar en parejas heterosexuales o en las homosexuales porque se considera que en estas últimas se dan roles diferenciados, como en las heterosexuales. en cambio, en la muestra española casi no aparece este tipo de explicación basada en la hipótesis de dicotomía de roles. y cuando en esta muestra se percibe alguna diferencia, se presupone que hay menos violencia en relaciones homosexuales atribuible a la igualdad de sexo. un ejemplo típico de esta clase de respuesta es el siguiente: creo que la diferencia de sexo influye de alguna forma, y que se da menos violencia en las parejas del mismo sexo, quizá por las diferencias físicas y de fuerza, que son menos acentuadas normalmente que en las parejas heterosexuales (españa 83 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 6.025). otra de las razones invocadas para explicar la presunta menor intensidad de la violencia en relaciones homosexuales se basa en la suposición de que las personas homosexuales son más sensibles, menos violentas, más abiertas de mente, y por lo tanto, más tolerantes y menos celosas, etc. que las heterosexuales. este tipo de explicación no se encontró en ningún caso en las respuestas obtenidas puerto rico. en cuanto a los resultados aportados por la fotointervención, se observa que la muestra española tiende a fotografiar imágenes obtenidas a través de diferentes medios de la prensa escrita y audiovisual, de carátulas de videojuegos de diferentes videoconsolas (playstation, nintendo wii, etc.) y de películas. muchas de las fotografías presentadas son de tipo simbólico y alegórico. algunas de ellas tratan de circunstancias de riesgo de producción de violencia en la pareja, como las derivadas del contexto laboral. en cuanto a temas de violencia social, en españa suele tematizarse el al terrorismo, mientras que en puerto rico se trata más de maras y de bandas de delincuencia. en ambos países se presentan fotos relativas al entorno residencial, presentando unas veces fenómenos como los graffiti y los daños causados a elementos públicos, papeleras, señales de tráfico, etc. otras veces los temas aparecen diferenciados: en españa, se alude a (la violencia que representa) la especulación en el ámbito de la vivienda. en puerto rico, en cambio, se fotografían casas con rejas y vallas, que sirven de protección de la violencia que supuestamente viene del exterior. entre otros conceptos reiteradamente fotografiados en españa figuran los relativos a la alimentación (como transgénicos), a la naturaleza (biocombustibles, agua, energías contaminantes) y a determinados modelos de belleza femenina impuestos por la publicidad convencional. discusión en conjunto, la información aportada por la aplicación de los tres instrumentos se refuerza mutuamente. la media total del iat 1 (.459) indica un alto nivel de anclaje social del estereotipo de violencia de género (hombre violento vs. mujer pacífica), aportando evidencia confirmatoria de la hipótesis 1. en consonancia con ello, las respuestas al cuestionario asocian, por un lado, golpear, agredir, pegar y acosar a actividades características del hombre, muy relacionadas con la violencia, atributo del “cazador” y, por otro, acariciar, conversar, escuchar y cuidar a la mujer, tópicamente “pacífica” y, en último término, “cuidadora”. a ese respecto, en el iat 1, las mujeres muestran esta creencia más marcadamente que los hombres, al asociar más fuertemente que ellos (.000) el binomio hombre-violencia. este dato aparece corroborado además por las respuestas al cuestionario, en las que las mujeres tienden a polarizar más sus respuestas que los hombres, acentuando las puntuaciones de las actividades estereotípicamente asociadas a cada uno de los géneros. esta diferencia indica o bien una tendencia de las mujeres a maximizar ciertas características negativas del otro género o bien la tendencia de los hombres a minimizarlas (por la necesidad psicológica de autoevaluarse positivamente o menos negativamente al respecto) o bien por la interacción de ambas tendencias. los resultados del iat 2 no muestran diferencias significativas entre la violencia atribuida a parejas heterosexuales y la que se percibe en parejas gay, mientras que los del iat 3 aportan indicios de una débil mayor asociación de la violencia con la relación heterosexual que con la lesbiana. estos datos apuntan levemente en la línea de la hipótesis 2. la comparación de medias de las respuestas dadas a las preguntas del cuestionario relativas a la cantidad de violencia física percibida en los distintos tipos de pareja indica que la 84 building participative, empowering & diverse communities violencia de los hombres es valorada en función del tipo de relación (homo versus heterosexual), de modo que el hombre heterosexual aparece como más violento que el homosexual. pero si la violencia en la pareja por parte de un hombre es puntuada en función de su orientación sexual, la violencia ejercida por una mujer en una pareja es valorada en función del tipo de violencia: una mujer aparece como violenta psicológicamente, pero no físicamente, con independencia del tipo de relación que mantenga. en suma, los resultados reflejan el juego cruzado de estereotipos sobre género, violencia y orientación sexual, corroborando en las muestras española y portorriqueña unos sesgos y tendencias ya parcialmente detectados con anterioridad en otros entornos y reflejados en la literatura científica, básicamente anglosajona, a lo largo de los últimos lustros (island & letellier, 1991, leventhal & lundy, 1999, renzetti & harvey, 1996, ristock, 2002). conclusión en el presente estudio se ha investigado el grado de arraigo social de los estereotipos sobre violencia de género en la pareja en españa y puerto rico. los resultados expuestos muestran que la percepción social de la violencia en la pareja se fundamenta en los estereotipos de género (hombre-proveedor, mujer-cuidadora), está filtrada por el paradigma de violencia de género (hombre-violento, mujer-pacífica) y presenta un carácter marcadamente heterocentrista, que induce a minimizar la violencia potencial en parejas homosexuales (gay y lésbicas). esta constatación tiene implicaciones teóricas y sociales, al tiempo que conlleva desafíos para la investigación: por una parte, este punto de vista generalizado contribuye a la invisibilización de la violencia en la pareja cometida por agentes que no encajan con el estereotipo hombreviolento en una relación de pareja heterosexual. una persona maltratadora que no encarne el estereotipo que define dicha categoría será más difícilmente identificable y denunciable y su víctima tendrá aún más dificultades para ser reconocida y atendida como 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(2005) violencia en la pareja: fenómenos, procesos y teorías (55-94). in t. sánchez (coord.). maltrato de género, infantil y de ancianos. salamanca: publicaciones universidad pontificia de salamanca. cantera, l. (2004). aproximación empírica a la agenda oculta en el campo de la violencia en la pareja. 85 building participative, empowering & diverse communities intervención psicosocial. revista sobre igualdad y calidad de vida, vol. 13, nº 2. págs. 219-230. carvalho, a. (2006) gay men’s and lesbian’s perceptions of intimate partner abuse in same-sex and oppositesex relationships. a dissertation submitted of the requirement for the degree of doctor of psychology. virginia consortium program in clinical psychology. comisión europea (2000). romper el silencio. campaña europea contra la violencia doméstica. luxembourg: oficina de publicaciones oficiales de las comunidades europeas. corsi, j. (2003). maltrato y abuso en el ámbito doméstico. fundamentos teóricos para el estudio de la violencia familiar en las relaciones familiares. barcelona: paidós. deaux, k. (1985). “sex and gender”. annual review of psychology. 36, 49-81. dex, s. (1988). women’s attitudes towards work. london. macmillan. ferreira, g. (1992). hombres violentos. mujeres maltratadas. aportes a la investigación y tratamiento de un problema social. buenos aires: sudamericana. greenwald, a. g., mcghee, d. e., & schwartz, j. l. k. (1998). measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: the implicit association test. journal of personality and social psychology, 74, 1464 – 1480. greenwald, a. g., nosek, b. a. & banaji, m. r. (2003). understanding and using the implicit association test: i. an improved scoring algorithm. journal of personality and social psychology, 85, 197 216. island, d. & letellier, p. (1991). men who beat the men who love them. new york: routledge. leventhal, b. & lundy, s. (eds.). (1999). same-sex domestic violence. strategies for change. newbury park, cal: sage. ley orgánica (2004) ley orgánica de medidas de protección integral contra la violencia de género. madrid: jefatura del estado. ley orgánica 1/2004 de 28 de diciembre. nosek, b.a., greenwald, a.g. & banaji, m.r. (2005) understanding and using the implicit association test: ii. method variables and construct validity. personality and social psychology bulletin. vol 31 nº 2. febrero 2005, 166-180. ortiz, m. y ruiz, m. (2004). áreas de aplicación del iat. revista de psicología social aplicada. vol. 14, nº 2, pág. 31-48. ortiz, m. y ruiz, m. (2007). facilitando la aplicación del “implicit association test” (iat): una demostración práctica en estudios sobre violencia y género. (paper enviado al x congreso nacional de psicología social: “un encuentro de perspectivas”, 26 – 28 septiembre, cádiz). osborne, r. (ed.). (2001). la violencia contra las mujeres. realidad social y políticas públicas. madrid: uned. patrick c. mckenry, julianne m. serovich, tina l. mason and katie mosack, (2006) perpetration of gay and lesbian partner violence: a disempowerment perspective volume 21, number 4 / mayo de 2006 journal of family violence. paustian, m. (2007) perceptions of intimate partner violence in heterosexual and same-sex relationships. a dissertation submitted of the requeriments for the degree of octor of philosophy. fairleigh dickinson university. renzetti, c. & harvey, c. (eds.). (1996). violence in gay and lesbian domestic partnerships. new york: http://www.springerlink.com/content/vp4p1811053l/?p=e34b9f01db67478bb1401071504549ac&pi=0 http://www.springerlink.com/content/vp4p1811053l/?p=e34b9f01db67478bb1401071504549ac&pi=0 86 building participative, empowering & diverse communities harrington park. ristock, j. (2002). no more secrets. violence in lesbian relationship. new york: routledge. walker, l. (1980). the battered woman. new york: harper perennial. 87 building participative, empowering & diverse communities safety planning for abused children; using a multidisciplinary approach thomas f. carr, m.a., lmft, lmhc, lcsw thomas f. carr & associates inc. 9 kinsman place natick, massachusetts 01760-2732 united states of america 01-508-650-1811 fax 01-508-650-3621 tfcarrlmft@aol.com www.thomascarrlmft.com www.pastoralresponse.org abstract safety plans are formal arrangements, most often drafted for child abuse and neglect cases that are court involved, in which a guardian ad litem [gal] is appointed by the court to monitor . these plans may enable contact, even placement, of a child with a parent who may have been found or suspected to have perpetrated some form of abuse to the child, or may pose a risk to the child for some other reason(s). in a variety of these cases, where the violence or trauma is of known or unknown origin or merely suspected; (including sexual abuse, shaken baby syndrome and munchausen’s [syndrome] by proxy) safety plans can be developed, using a multidisciplinary approach to consider safety issues, assessment of risk and deployment and implementation of services, key words: safety plan, multidisciplinary team, guardian ad litem [gal], child abuse, domestic violence, dependency cases, trauma while child abuse appears to be rising at record proportions, resources to address the issue seem to be declining. whether this is more a lack of resolve or a lack of resources is unclear. statistics of the children’s bureau, administration of children, youth and families, of the u.s. department of health and human services show that over 906,000 children in the united states are reported having been abused and neglected annually. of these reports, 63% involved neglect issues, 18% physical abuse allegations, 10% sexual abuse charges and 5% of the children reported are victims of emotional maltreatment1. when these cases rise to the level of court involvement and a child is placed outside of the home, they become among the most difficult and challenging for everyone involved; including the children and families themselves. frequently, juvenile and family court judges and protective service agencies are called upon to make decisions about when and if children can be returned home; often without assurances about the efficacy of the plan for their return. “safety plans” are formal arrangements that are developed using a specific process, in which 1 susan orr, ph.d. associate commissioner 15th national child abuse conference, boston, ma april 2005 mailto:tfcarrlmft@aol.com http://www.pastoralresponse.org 88 building participative, empowering & diverse communities foreseeable dangers, threats, services and providers are identified, and protocols established to manage safety concerns, while corrective services are implemented. originally formed for use in domestic violence and sexual assault cases, safety plans can effectively be used in for child abuse and neglect cases that are court involved (dependency cases2) or with families involved with protective service agencies, with the chance of court intervention. safety plans can enable contact and even placement of a child with a parent who may have been found (or suspected) to have perpetrated some form of abuse to the child, or may pose a risk to the child for some other reason(s). safety plans are developed with an assessment and understanding of risks and supports, as well as strengths and weakness, as they exist within a family. safety plans depend on a “team” approach to servicing a family, with the family itself being a part of the team. as the safety plan is defined for the specific case, all those involved begin developing a sense of shared responsibility allowing for both the providers and family members to learn from their mistakes and develop their strengths. safety planning has its origins in the field of domestic violence (davies et.al. 1999). utilizing specific tools such as the danger assessment instrument (campbell 1995), and taking into consideration case specific factors, such as the cognitive state of individuals as well as mental health issues (hardesty.& campbell 2004), safety planning has now become an important tool in the treatment of child abuse and neglect. at the very heart of many of these cases is the issue of trauma. too often, however, there is an assumption that trauma comes from one place, when in fact it comes from someplace else, or is or is a result of something else. as a result of this false assumption, a safety plan can potentially put the child at even more risk. for example, it may be believed that a child’s behavior is the manifestation of the child being sexually abused by his/her father. in fact, if the sexual abuse was perpetrated by someone else or the child was not sexually abused ,but is suffering from some other emotional difficulty. sometime a clinician fails to consider alternative theories as to where a symptom originates. sometimes an allegation itself is prompted by something else (a contentious divorce or other motivation). as a result , any plan put in place to simply eliminate a suspected father’s contact, is not only going to fail to treat the issue , but may add to the trauma. unfortunately, as we consider the variety of violence or trauma perpetrated on children by their parents in these cases, there are times when the origin of trauma is merely “suspected” or unknown. this becomes a crucial issue in the development of safety plans. the underpinning of a safety plan is that a “contingency plan” of sorts, which can be developed so, as much as possible, we can consider conditions or scenarios that might pose a “risk” to an individual child or family. as a result of what is learned, a plan is developed to mitigate or eliminate the risk. for example, a risk may be posed by a single source; the perpetrator’s presence. therefore, knowing where the perpetrator is at all times then may mitigate or eliminate the risk. drugs or alcohol use is another important factor that, in many cases, is not the primary 2 a dependency action is started by filing a petition (written request) in juvenile court. the petition must allege that the child is “dependent.” a “dependent child” is a child who: a) has been abandoned by his or her parent, guardian, or other custodian; b) has been abused or neglected by a person legally responsible for care of the child; c) has no parent, guardian or custodian capable of adequately caring for the child such that there is a danger of substantial damage to the child’s psychological or physical development; or d) has a developmental disability which requires services that cannot be provided at home. 89 building participative, empowering & diverse communities concern, but clearly exacerbates risk. therefore, assuring that there is abstinence may minimize or eliminate that issue, and lower the risk. key to each and every safety plan is • employing open communication • consideration of case history • adoption of a philosophy in which the child is visible to a wide variety of individuals, especially professionals who are aware of the past abuse and/or safety issues • a method of identifying specific supports • locating primary provider, and furnishing the pertinent information, as well as • additional safeguards, (employment of any needed court orders and releases). the utilization of ‘multidisciplinary teams” has also been a growing phenomenon in the fields of child abuse and neglect (bross 1988). more and more, professionals, from a range of discipline are not only are willing to work with and rely upon the expertise of colleagues in other disciplines towards problem solving and servicing the most complex cases. the multidisciplinary team, this group of professionals from diverse disciplines, comes together on behalf of a child and family. in child abuse cases, the disciplines typically represent the broad spectrum of services that may already be involved with families before the court, and include: protective services, criminal justice system, health and social services, and mental health services. some teams include specialists in domestic violence, child advocates, substance abuse experts, and/or providers of comprehensive assessments and consultation services. the family is also part of the team. family problems that brought about the need for the formulation of the multidisciplinary team may include; economic difficulties, mental illness, and substance abuse, parenting deficits rooted in the parent’s own early trauma, homelessness, and domestic violence. when these problems rise to a level that puts their children in danger, it is mandated that the state child protective system and often the family or courts intervene to protect them. few families welcome this intervention and scrutiny by the “system” and often view this intrusion with suspicion and hostility. with the devilment and implementation of a multidisciplinary team designed to develop a cooperative plan, this suspicion and hostility can evolve to a sense of trust and a feeling of calm and willingness to engage. central to the formulation of these multidisciplinary teams is the notion that there needs to be involvement of key providers of services to be particular family being serviced; although they can encompass a wide range of sources or services who ultimately can provide not only a wide range of information, but different points of view. although the players may change from case to case there are certain disciplines typically represented in child abuse and neglect or “protective cases”. many teams include “permanent representatives” from domestic violence advocacy groups, substance abuse specialists, providers of comprehensive assessment and consultation services. often it is the court appointed guardian ad litem [gal] the person appointed by the court to look out for the “best interests” of the child, during the pendency of legal proceedings, that becomes the person who manages the formulation and implementation of the safety plan and the multidisciplinary team.. the gal becomes a driving force behind the movement towards the achievement of the goal. the gal becomes responsible, in essence “the ball carrier”, for directing with the “team” towards ultimate goals. 90 building participative, empowering & diverse communities because of the broad scope of the typical gal’s role within these complex cases and the necessity to work across disciplines gal’s are often picked to take on the role of “monitor” if not manager in these cases. in many states in the united states, including the commonwealth of massachusetts, the state has an affirmative responsibility to make efforts towards keeping families together or making efforts for reunification, while at the same time keeping children safe. some pioneering judges in massachusetts have become innovative in responding to these matters and have utilized gal’s to assist in investigating and evaluating the most highly sensitive of family matters so that a disposition can be reached; which serves the interests of the children who are subjects of the court action, and to develop and monitor safety plans for children. historically, the role of the gal is determined by judges using their broad “discretion” under the equity powers dictated by state statute, although with recent budget cuts, that too has become limited. in the commonwealth of massachusetts, the state’s supreme judicial court had described the function of the gal as an individual who “acts for the ward and determines what should be done for the best interest and welfare of the ward.” in his treatise on juvenile law (ireland, 1993), massachusetts supreme judicial court justice roderick ireland wrote, “as an exercise of judicial discretion the judge may authorize a guardian ad litem to take a particular type of action in order that the guardian ad litem’s function will be optimally effective in the circumstances of the case”. to that end, judges clearly have the authority to fashion such appointments based on the specific conditions present in each case, whether they chose to assert that authority is another matter. increasingly in child abuse and neglect cases, as judges, attorney’s, social workers, and mental health practitioners consider what should come about as the result of the court’s intervention, there has been a growing realization that collaboration is essential. there has, at the same time, been growing awareness of the fact that there are different professional languages; a jargon that meant to be used and understood by the profession using it and not necessarily by all those involved in the case. the idea of collaboration may be, for many, a new way of assessing these situations, leading to the development to a new interventions or collaboration among service providers. the gal/multidisciplinary team leader is instrumental in directing the team in a purposeful and meaningful direction. the creation and utilization of multidisciplinary teams has served an important role in resolving these cases. while their primary purpose is typically to help team members resolve difficult cases, teams may fulfill a variety of additional functions. some of these functions include: promoting coordination between agencies; providing checks and balances; ensuring that mechanisms are in place so that the interests and rights of all concerned parties are addressed; and identify service gaps and breakdowns in coordination or communication between agencies or individuals. the multidisciplinary teams have also had another indirect effect on the system as a whole. participation in these teams has often served to enhance the professional skills and knowledge of individual team members by providing a forum for learning more about the strategies, resources and approaches used by various disciplines. many jurisdictions utilize only attorneys as gal’s, while others utilize individuals with 91 building participative, empowering & diverse communities clinical backgrounds; psychologists, social workers, counselors and marriage and family therapists. in either case, gal’s often come to their work with a diverse background, varied training and experiences. the success or failure of the multidisciplinary team leader, whether appointed as a gal or not, is highly dependent on how the role is defined by the court and the authority given. however, it is also clearly contingent on the leader’s ability to overcome obstacles inherent in an imperfect system or related to the various players and their respective agenda. to that end the gal/team leader is called upon to use his or her skills in negotiation, mediation, clinical expertise, and simple common sense. by doing so, the leader earns the trust and respect of all parties. this trust evolves out of the leader’s willingness to avoid imposing values, respect and understanding of cultural and gender issues, ability to consider the positions of each of the parties and capacity to reach conclusions based on the facts or evidence and the leader’s best clinical judgment. wearing many hats can pose challenges to some multidisciplinary team leaders who seek clear definition and delineation of duties and responsibilities. however, the reality is that the implementation of a safety plan, that everyone can embrace and develop a sense of accountability for, may require a more flexible role for the team leader. the team leader must be able to effectively triage, stabilize, investigate and evaluate issues related to custody and visitation in families where there has been a history of abuse. safety planning can also work in the most difficult of situations that come before a court including but not limited to: violence, sexual abuse, shaken baby syndrome and or munchausen [syndrome] by proxy. while there may be some nuances to a particular kind of case, munchausen by proxy cases for example, that warrant the use of a specific protocol (kinscherff 2000), the fact is that it is imperative to focus in, most importantly, on identifying and mitigating the recognized concerns of a particular case, rather than trying to insulate the child or attempt to eliminate all or any of perceived danger, and as a result rapidly losing focus and/or depleting resources. protocols that have been set up in munchhausen by proxy cases are also the best example of how a safety plan can be best utilized not only to provide safety for the child but be extremely helpful in making the diagnosis itself. primary too, to the design of any safety plan, is giving careful consideration to the case history. often decisions are made using existing, second hand, unreliable or limited information without making efforts to get all of the needed information or going to the primary source. it is important to always remember the saying init pergamentum exit pergamentum, “garbage in garbage out”. in generating a good safety plan a philosophy must also be adopted which makes the child visible to a wide variety of individuals, especially professionals who are aware of the past abuse and or issues. this is especially true the younger the child is, or the more physically isolated the family may be from the community. supports must also be identified specific to the needs of the family, including locating primary providers and furnishing the pertinent information while insuring that additional safeguards, including legal avenues (such as employment of court orders, stipulations and voluntary releases). responsibilities must be clearly defined, with the multidisciplinary team leader/gal monitoring the flow of activity. in another words; “who is carrying the ball?” 92 building participative, empowering & diverse communities as noted, the development of a safety plan involves the gathering of historical information in terms of the family’s involvement with medical providers, protective services, a review of records including any and all psychological evaluations, parenting assessments and interviews with professionals and family members and anyone who knows the family well. school personnel are especially important. in this process of assembling the data key questionsbecome focus. other key questions include; “what is the capacity of the parents or caretakers to utilize services?”; and “what is the level of insight derived from the implementation the services?”. presuming a realistic or reasonable safety plan is developed, the goal of reunification becomes a reality as the safety plan is implemented. at the least, there is closure given to the family as the implementation takes its course. concurrent planning remains an option so that time is not wasted from the child’s perspective if a reunification cannot be successfully accomplished, because the crucial questions are being answered one way or the other. in formulating any safety plan other specific dynamics need to be considered. these may be considered “risk factors” for example the involve the age or stage of development of the child, or “strengths” that may exist such as the existence of support system; which will be available and a crisis plan in the case of relapse. the adult caregiver’s capacity to parent, their cognitive ability, the vocational skills they posses and the capacity to empathize with the child are just a few of the factors considered. a chief element of the safety plan is the parent’s willingness to continue services for their child or children. one important goal is to develop a partnership with the parent(s) based on mutual respect trust and the expectation that there will be stumbling blocks. through the successful collaboration of efforts, crisis is neutralized and new strategies are established to address the new issues or issues that resurface. at collateral meetings, the mission (goals) of the plan are clearly discussed and new objectives established. benchmarks for measuring success are defined and the service providers often overlap so that cross training occurs. these collateral meetings enable communication to be enhanced, tension reduced, leadership is shared, and as gains are made the plan is revised so that the progress will not be lost. again, the family itself is has membership in the team. upon completion of the initial investigation/evaluation/assessment a multidisciplinary team comes together in accordance with the order of the court , protocol, interagency agreement or charter that may apply, to actually develop and begin implementation of a formal written safety plan, which may be presented to the court for approval. the safety plan is developed trying to perceive problems and solutions from many different points of view. ultimately, the plans are based on maximizing the strengths of the individual family members and the family as a unit and working to minimize or collaboratively problem solve around areas of deficiency. the gal or multidisciplinary team leader as the monitor of safety planning, has great advantages and significant drawbacks. as is true in any effective clinical practice, maintaining boundaries and clearly defining roles is critical. furthermore, maintaining accurate and detailed records insures that that good clinical practice occurs, and important to safety planning. when the team leader is in a position to wear many hats, however, their role can become complicated, especially if they are a clinician. if a court has predetermined the role, defining it in either a broad or more narrow manner, there still is room for ambiguity; even when the court has seemingly defined the agenda and objectives. 93 building participative, empowering & diverse communities of course, the gal must also remain aware of personal biases and societal influences and avoid even the appearance of discriminatory practice. additionally, at the outset, non-confidentiality warnings are administered and repeated in every contact making it clear that what is said is not confidential or private, but will be provided to the court and could be used to aid the court in rendering a decision. by being clear in defining one’s role and the focus, the foundation is established for trust. by reinforcing one’s role and the focus, trust is maintained. this reinforcement and need to be clear is paramount if the team leader is to be effective in implementing the safety plan. for over a century, with the growth and development of the juvenile courts in the united states, efforts have been made to insure that those charged with addressing these complex cases have the skills needed to understand the dynamics and the wisdom to render decisions, which bring about positive change. increasingly, states across the country are striving to establish specialty courts equipped to address in a legally sound manner and a clinically sensitive manner these highly personal issues. in massachusetts, this effort had come to fruition in the form of county based juvenile courts staffed by judiciary who are skilled at understanding the complexities of the issues facing these children and families. this evolution has meant that these courts have gone from simply being umpires between family members and the state, to proactive problem solvers dispensing a kind of therapeutic justice. in fashioning the appointments of the gal or multidisciplinary team leader, the judiciary is doing so in the hopes of bringing together a partnership with the family to develop safety plans, so that the children can develop in a healthy fashion and be provided with the protection that many take for granted. in the family and juvenile courts in the united states, there is no other use of the judge’s discretion where the impact is so far reaching. usually, the state agency charged with insuring the child’s well being, also has the power to make placement decisions, as well as judgments with regard to the child’s day to day care, medical treatment and visitation with parents and or siblings. these are very important discretionary determinations, which ultimately could result in the severing of all ties between the child and his or her birth family as occurs in the termination cases. in some situations, the court can only intervene where there is a finding that the state agency has abused its discretion, in dealing with a child or family, by acting in an arbitrary and or capricious manner. the court too may abuse its discretion by allowing the state agency to make decisions which exceed its mandate. at the same time, even in a nomocracy, where the state relies upon the rule of law; neither the state child welfare department nor the court can predict every eventuality in a given situation. a corner stone in these cases therefore is use of judicial and professional discretion, that is the exercise of sound reasonable judgment based on the facts of a case and the law, policy, clinical knowledge and measures as they apply. child abuse and neglect cases are among the most challenging and complex. frequently, these family situations tax those servicing them in a way which can be haunting; leading to many sleepless nights. the use of a safety plan allows for collaboration to occur which can allow all 94 building participative, empowering & diverse communities involved to rest easy with their decisions. at the same time, these safety plans address the highest of risk situations in a comprehensive manner. the efficacy of safety plan is dependent upon a number of factors not least of which are the client’s motivation to utilize services; as well as their capacity to make the necessary changes in their life. the willingness of a family to be candid about how the individuals are functioning is also fundamental to success. the safety plan in essence creates a village to support the family. ideally, through the process of implementing the services the family is able to utilize the village created in the transition process and beyond so that the change will be integrated into the being of the family, thereby avoiding recidivism. the safety plan very much is a grass roots effort designed to empower needy families, enlighten some and educate others in recreating what many of the adults were lacking in their own lives. through its implementation, those involved in the implementation of the safety plan learn to anticipate stumbling blocks through a collaborative effort and develop or propose strategies to overcome these same stumbling blocks. in each case the multidisciplinary team works on the development and implementation of a viable, safe plan, in which each member engages in a way that is reasonable, professional and clinically appropriate. it is important to remember when developing a safety plan that it is important to set it up it in a way which generally be unique to each family because each family is unique. optimally, safety plans should not be seen in and of themselves as solutions to problems but a mechanism for treatment as well as further examination. typically multidisciplinary team meetings are set up by courts or protective service agencies to streamline services to families and to resolve cases in an expeditious way. we can go on and on to discuss the specifics on how a multidisciplinary team can affect an individual family. at the end of the day and central to the success of the multidisciplinary team is the fact that there is always the opportunity for collaboration so that things can be done, that should be done. more, importantly however, these teams can be pivotal in bringing to bear the power and expertise for things that must be done to provide for the care and protection of children and families. references administration for children and families u.s. department of health and human services, children’s bureau, administration on children, youth and families, susan orr, ph.d. associate commissioner. american psychological association, guidelines for child custody in divorce proceedings, july 2004 bross dc et al. (eds). the new child protection team handbook. new york, ny: garland publishing co., 1988 campbell, j., assessing dangerousness. newbury park: sage, 1995 davies, jill m.; lyon, eleanor & monti-catania, diane safety planning with battered women: complex lives/difficult choices (sage series on violence against women) newbury park: sage, 1999 family and conciliation courts rev. 297, emotional distress in children of high conflict divorce the http://www.alibris.com/booksearch.detail?invid=9679085448&author=davies%2c+jill&browse=1&qwork=11021500&qsort=&page=1 http://www.alibris.com/booksearch.detail?invid=9679085448&author=davies%2c+jill&browse=1&qwork=11021500&qsort=&page=1 95 building participative, empowering & diverse communities impact of marital conflict and violence, 1999. hardesty, jennifer l. & campbell, jacquelyn c. safety planning for abused women and their children in protecting children from domestic violence: strategies for community intervention guilford press new york. 2004 ireland roderick l., juvenile law ,massachusetts practice, volume 44, , west publishing co. 1993 jaffe, peter, g.; baker, kinda g, & cunningham, alison j. protecting children from domestic violence: strategies for community intervention guilford press new york. 2004 kinscherff, r. & ayoub c.. legal issues in munchausen by proxy. in reece, r. (ed.). the treatment of child abuse. baltimore, md: the johns hopkins university press, 2000 http://www.amazon.com/protecting-children-domestic-violence-intervention/dp/157230992x/ref=sr_1_2?ie=utf8&s=books&qid=1230482611&sr=1-2 http://www.amazon.com/protecting-children-domestic-violence-intervention/dp/157230992x/ref=sr_1_2?ie=utf8&s=books&qid=1230482611&sr=1-2 http://www.amazon.com/protecting-children-domestic-violence-intervention/dp/157230992x/ref=sr_1_2?ie=utf8&s=books&qid=1230482611&sr=1-2 96 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the experience of overcoming the stigma associated to hiv/aids: a call for collaboration with community psychology. carlos roberto de castro-silva abstract after more than 20 years of the hiv/aids epidemic, it is noticed an intense connection with different forms of discrimination. the evolution of the epidemic has revealed that it stressed other forms of prejudice related to sexual orientation, to gender, race and social class. in brazil, where the social inequality is very severe, the social exclusion is even a more important feature, once it exposes a bigger number of people to the infection by the virus and other sexual transmitted diseases. this situation generates an intense suffering, inhibiting emancipatory actions to face the stigma for a better quality of life of people who live with hiv/aids. by the practice of the community psychology at cruzeiro do sul university, in a non-governmental organization (ngo), with poor communities in the periphery of são paulo, it was intended to strengthen the psychological aspects of these people as an instrument for constructing more active citizens in the communities. the procedures were: 1 – community and institutional diagnosis, by means of interviews and participative observation; 2group work, focusing on the exchange of experience between soropositive and soronegative women; 3elaboration and discussion of the group meetings, registered in weekly reports over a 10-month-period. the results have demonstrated that the suffering, resulting from a little tolerant society and culture, can be transformed by group practices focused on the strengthening of intersubjective exchanges which 1 – discuss the living experience of stigmatization and discrimination as a result of the articulation of subjective experiences with cultural background and social, political and economical aspects; 2promote healthy mental aspects (affective and cognitive) related to the ability of noticing, in spite of the difficulties, the public space of an ngo as place for overcoming the stigma; 3stimulate the strengthening of friendship between the participants and the social nets for support. key words: community social psychology, hiv/aids, non-governamental organizations (ngo), stigma, social exclusion, strengthening communities. introduction the process of globalization of the capitalism is quite complex and unequal. in countries such as brazil the consequences are related to: the increase in social inequality; the increasing concentration of income; the increment of structural unemployment; flexibilization of the social rights and increase of the feeling of insecurity in work and life; the weaken of the old identity and solidarity of social class; the growth of international migratory current; the uncontrolled consumption geographically expanded; increased the scope and global environmental degradation; the reactive fundamentalism affirmation of identities of the non – included people (mancebo, 2003). in this context, psychology has been requested, as well as other areas of knowledge, to contribute to change that social reality. throughout its history, we can see different political 97 building participative, empowering & diverse communities positions. at some stages the psychology underwrote a more conservative position, for example, developing technical and interventions that sough a passive adaptation of the subject to the social environment; in other times, has taken a more critical position, looking for instrumental to understand the subject as complex beings resulting from the interaction between psychological, biological and social factors. (lane, 1984; bock, 2003). among some of the theoretical and practical approaches, we highlight the community social psychology, which has as a scope the construction of the most active subjects in their social environment, and for which citizenship and autonomy are guiding parameters of actions that promote the development and changes of the communities(campos, 1996; montero, 2003). in this direction the community social psychology which guided many of the discussions of the psychology community course taken by the students of the fifth year of psychology at cruzeiro do sul university, we bring some of the results achieved over approximately 10 years with the non-governmental organizations (ngos) that act in the aids field in eastern and central são paulo. these areas have high social vulnerability and they have few public resources available to people. in this way aids-ngos concentrate many of the demands of this population, resulting from social exclusion of basic rights, such as education, health and work. this kind of intervention in communities is guided by action search, according to montero (2007), it is a method based on ethics and committed as well with the production of knowledge and social change. the main steps of this method consist of: get familiar with the community; identification of needs (held with the community); meeting with leaders and members of the community and the development of collective actions. therefore this article builds itself by the documentation of everything that we could learn (supervisor and students) with the experience of the process of an intervention through the training in community psychology. emphasizing the politization of the people involved and their social links, i.e. of the people that are living with hiv/aids (pha) and are engaged in activities of ngos/aids, mainly in reference to coping with the psychosocial consequences of the disease, highlighting the stigma and discrimination. the praxis of community intervention: some of the psychosocial aspects of social exclusion. according to gomes & pereira (2005), the term social exclusion includes temporal and spatial meanings: a social group is excluded according to specific geographical area or in relation to the economic and social structure of the country. in brazil, this term is mainly related to poverty, since the people in this condition are groups in social exclusion, because they are at personal and social risk, i.e. excluded from social policies (work, education, health, housing, food). poverty cannot be defined in a single way, but it is clearly a part of the population that is not capable of generating enough income to have sustainable access to basic features that ensure a decent life. in her turn, for sawaia (2002), the social exclusion is a complex and multi-faceted process, a setting of material, political, relational and subjective dimensions. it is a subtle and dialectical process, because it exists only in relation to its contrary part, i.e. the inclusion. it is not a thing or a state, but a process that involves the human and its relations with the other. it does not have a single form neither it means a system failure nor, and it should not be defeated as something that disturbs the social order, on the contrary it is the product of the system. 98 building participative, empowering & diverse communities in addition, sawaia (2002) discusses the process of social exclusion based on affectivity, in particular by the suffering arising from unfair living conditions, which is called suffering of ethicalpolitical. the manipulation of the affection is an important factor in the understanding of the maintenance of authoritarian and undervalued relations of the potential citizen of the people. for this author to question about suffering and happiness in the study of social exclusion is to overcome the view that only worry of the poor people is solely the survival, and there is no explanation to deal with the emotion when going through hunger. epistemologically, this means to put the idea of humanity in the center of the discussion about social exclusion. this way, to talk about social exclusion, means talking about desire, temporality and affectivity, at the same time of power, economy and social rights. also the author speak of potency of action and explains that, from its research carried out with residents of street, she could know different ways of thinking, feeling and actions caused by social exclusion. the potency of action of an individual shows when he/she copes with the exclusion. for montero (2003), to review the origin of the community psychology, in latin america, as well as in the united states and canada, we will see that, although there are trends oriented at paternalism, there is an attention focused on the organization of the members in the community and its development, supporting the positive qualities of these people, so that they achieve by themselves changes that improve their quality of life and access to goods and services of their community. according to the same author (2003) the definition of community psychology includes to develop, to promote, to maintain the control and the power in people that form a community, and this control and power should keep focused in the community and not be taken as something from outside. thus, activity, control, participation and decision are important conducts to achieve fundamental changes, and for that reason they require strengthening processes. in addition montero (2003), taking into consideration several other authors, sets this strengthening process as a strategy by which the members of a community together develop capabilities and resources to control their lives, acting in a critical, conscious and committed way to achieve the social and collective transformation, according to their needs and aspirations, at the same time transforming themselves. in this way the institutions are privileged places for community actions and for the development of the most active subject in society. from the point of view of the community social psychology the institutions can be used as means of access to communities. campos (1996) defines institutions as everything that is recognized by all as being part of a broad social system. in general, we can say that everything that became established, accepted as having materialized existence in social life is considered an institution. campos (1996) stresses the importance of the institution as the access way to the community, since the communities are studied as organized elements functionally in a system of intricate interdependence and continuously changing. the institution presents itself as a space of mediation between what is from the nature of the social and what is from nature of the individual. in this context, bleger (1984) emphasizes that the institutional psychology inserts itself both in a history of social needs, as in the history of psychology and, in this last one, it does not 99 building participative, empowering & diverse communities only deal with one field of application of psychology, but fundamentally, with a field of research, highlighting that the institutional psychology is not a field of the applied psychology, which can mean in itself an extraordinary advance on the investigation and on the development of psychology as a profession. to the author, institutional psychology covers, then, the set of the physical existence of the organizations that has a certain degree of permanence in any field or specific sector of the activity of the human life, in order to study in all of them the human phenomena as a result of the relation with dynamic, structure, functions and objectives of the institution. thus, these theoretical and political approaches contribute to a broader and contextualized understanding of the work in community social psychology with groups in the situation of social exclusion, specifically those who are living with hiv/aids and that are engaged in ngos/aids. human rights and hiv/aidsrelated stigma-reduction approaches on the very beginning of the aids epidemic, stigma and discrimination have been associated with pha (unaids, 2005). based on goffman’s stigma (1988), parker and aggleton (2001) interpretation the stigmatization is an underestimate of social and cultural relations. moreover, these authors suggest that we must understand stigmatization and social discrimination within the context of power relations and domination. thus, the more obvious manifestation of stigma associated with hiv/aids may reveal masked social and cultural relationships. in addition, the stigma associated with hiv/aids often can be to overcome beginning with a much deeper social transformation. therefore it represents just the top of the iceberg revealing a small fraction of the visible elements of a culture deeply rooted in conservative moral values, expressed through a lack of solidarity and a progressive increase in individualism. indeed, the stigma and discrimination associated with hiv/aids, and its resulting social exclusion, have a long history. it is connected with other social exclusion mechanisms that affect pha, such as poverty, gender discrimination, sexuality, race, and ethnicity (parker & aggleton, 2002). this social discrimination and stigmatization leads to several consequences for pha, including: unemployment, the disintegration of social relationships, and negative public labeling. from this exclusionary framework, it becomes clear that social vulnerability is one factor that may expose far too many people to hiv. at the same time, it may also suggest some viable pathways to confront it. (ayres et al. 1999; gostin & tarantola,1999). for instance the strengthening of the human and civil rights becomes an important strategy in the reduction of the stigma and discrimination connected with hiv/aids. the fight to achieve and retain human rights contributes for the pha to comprehend their citizenship; that is, they strive to exist with dignity, autonomy and better quality of life. to illustrate some actions that are working to reduce hiv/aids stigma we may consider some information from a recent unaids report. this report presents a number of case studies illustrating approaches to stigma reduction. the report’s authors present three points that are relevant in appreciating the relationship between stigma, discrimination, and human rights: “preventing stigma; challenging discrimination when it occurs, and promoting and protecting human rights, including monitoring and readdressing human rights violations.” (unaids, 2005, 100 building participative, empowering & diverse communities p.13) these approaches have been in various degrees of development in africa, latin america, and asia. according to the report activities relating to the reduction of stigma it suggests multiple strategies for prevention and treatment. these initiatives aim to achieve these goals through improving the quality of life for pha through integrated care, including home-based care; mobilizing religious leaders to foster respect and compassion for people living with hiv; addressing broader inequalities through participatory education; creating a supportive and confidential space for the discussion of sensitive topics; providing comprehensive hiv treatment and hiv/aids care, including access to antiretroviral therapy; empowering people living with hiv to take the lead in diverse support and advocacy activities; mobilizing community leaders to encourage greater openness around sexuality and hiv-related issues within communities by building on positive social norms; and raising awareness. in addition, the report asserts that the implementation of these programs is a vital element in proactively addressing discrimination and developing laws and policies that defend pha. the development and effectiveness of these approaches rely upon a number of factors including volunteer training, enrollment of community and pha, and establishing partnerships between the government and the civil society. the shanga metta project in thailand, for example developed activities from buddhist doctrine to raise awareness and compassion among monks, nuns, and novices enrolled within this project. one of the factors that contributed to the effectiveness of this action was related to the recognition of the attitudes and cultural values of the local population. furthermore, these monks, working as a bridge between pha and their communities, increased the willingness of that community to get involved with pha. for example, hiv positive children that were previously denied admission to school are now admitted in brazil, the hiv-aids movement originated from the context of a broader social movement. on the 1980s, the social movement has worked as a setting where people may fight for improvements in their lives, such as, urban infrastructure, and sharing situations of social oppression, mainly gender, race and sexuality (sader, 1995). in this way the ngo setting promotes personal development and enhances citizenship. since the beginning of hiv/aids epidemic aids-ngos have been playing important role in giving material and social-emotional support to pha. as such, providing concrete assistance to hiv-aids patients and their families, these groups have focused on building and strengthening the rights of patients; including their rights of citizenship. (parker, 1994; altman, 1995) in this way, the aids-ngos may create new meanings for the suffering shared by pha, and emphasize the psychosocial dimensions related to the stigmatization and discrimination process. these institutions provide support to people who identify with social oppression; and through their political participation, the construction of a common identity becomes far stronger. therefore, the comprehension of political participation may help pha to develop and consolidate changes that started from grassroots movements, ngos and related social actions. through such approaches we may consider, from the relationship between actions taken and report outcomes, that there have been significant changes, which may have resulted from the implementation of these projects. these changes are, in fact, improvements in policies relating to hiv/aids, which emphasizes both the social and cultural aspects of the disease. 101 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the building of a method: step by step of a community intervention from above theoretical-practical and political statements we developed the following steps of intervention in the community, including the process of institutional / communitarian diagnosis and the practice with pha groups at aids/ngo: 1. analysis of official documents, in order to know the status, mission of the institution, its resources, among other information about infrastructure and its social role. 2. interviews with the coordination of the institution to get acquainted with the history and work done. at that time, also visits were carried out to the institution, in the participant observation model, to better understand its dynamic and activities. 3. individual semistructured interviews with the pha that are users, and in many cases, participants of the institution, in order to deeply know the demand, including personal data, socio–economic conditions, and the coping with hiv/ aids. 4. creation of the intervention proposal, which referred mainly to programming the pha group activities to happen in meetings of two hours per week, in order to provide a space for the exchange of the experience of living with hiv/aids and their relationship with the social context in which they are inserted, on their lives and relationships. the method used were group dynamics, texts readings and thematic phrases for group reflection, free drawing, and themes brought by the participants. 5. the registering of the weekly meetings happened through transcription and discussion, each in supervision. and these reports, delivered weekly, were made of the following parts: description of the meetings, in-depth analysis, highlighting the main points and a preliminary summary, which sought to develop the theoretical and practical hypothesis that guided the interventions. the description of a psychosocial intervention: the process of coping with the experience of living with hiv/aids-related stigma and discrimination the development means the beginning of the group activities with the participants who went through the sorting process, highlighting that such process, including visits to the institution and interviews, privileged an important rapport important for the beginning of activities. the description of this experience wants to highlight some aspects that were important in the course of this type of intervention which targeted the strengthening psychological and community capacity for pha. the task (with a view of working group led by pichon-riviere) was to create an area of conversation, drafting and actions that help the pha to deal with the new condition of living with hiv soropositive. in that sense we highlight three aspects, from a psychosocial point of view, which contributed to the development of this intervention: 1 the recovery of history and path of life beyond the living with hiv / aids the history of most of these pha suffers a great transformation with the news of hivpositive. the impact of this news in our days, takes the experiences of imminent death and deep anguish. the situation becomes more difficult when the life of these people is beginning to be negatively affected, because when required a change in their routine to go frequently to treatments at reference centers of hiv/aids (crt/aids) and diet changes, among other requests. 102 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the personal and working routine are drastically changed. moreover, because many of these people discover the disease from a symptom, sometimes from a serious illness as pneumonia or tuberculosis (so-called opportunistic diseases). the effects on the people of their everyday living are unpredictable, accenting in the family and at work, but generally in these two settings reproaches and charges are harder. the pha feel abandoned and betrayed by the people who were mostly close to them. the search for an ngo/aids happens at this moment of intense solitude and many doubts about the disease and treatment, besides administration of the antiretroviral drugs varies widely from person to person even because of their emotional susceptibility from that moment on, the participation in ngo activitiesfrom self-help group, passing through income-generating activities until participation in actions of political pressure towards the governmentallow people to broaden their understanding of the disease, i.e. understand hiv/aids linked to their social economic and cultural dimensions. this process helps to reduce the feelings of guilt and shame in the light of the perception of themselves as a subject in interaction and influenced by the social environment that imprint an individualistic understanding of the pha . however the ability to tackle the stigma and discrimination varies according to the intensity of the psychosocial impact of hiv/aids in their lives, in most of these cases added by other forms of oppression already in progress. this situation generates deep sequel, conducting the person to hopelessness, social isolation and difficulties to reorganize their lives. in this context the setting of the group contributed for the rescue of their life histories with achievements and expectations that have been obfuscated or stifled by psychosocial negative repercussions of the disease. on the group activities were encouraged to facilitate the reporting of life histories which showed other aspects of identity of these pha. many of these stories were about personal achievements, such as migrants telling about the effort and struggle to arrive in a big city as são paulo, or women who tackle the oppression of the family and their husbands to fulfill their professional wants. thus to contribute for the new meaning of these life histories triggers other potential that were blocked by hiv/aids-related to stigma and discrimination, causing divisions that increase feelings of powerlessness and unhappiness. 2 the focus on healthy psychosocial aspects from the perspective to make the group a place of conversations about stories and experiences of life, new meanings and unique strategies to manage their lives have been started. the recovery of psychological healthy aspects refers to the prospect that in the middle of feelings of helplessness, expressed many times by symptoms of depression, preserved emotional resources are valued, as for example, desire of changes and build of new friendships, among others. in this sense we are promoting the empowerment of these pha by building a therapeutic space that not focuses on only on the symptom, on the contrary the impact of living with hiv / aids would generate more resistance and defenses reaffirming feelings of guilt and shame. the empowermwent acquired is part of a dialectical process where the institutional setting serves as connection with the community and the construction of citizenship. through which 103 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the feelings of empowerment increase in a context of welcoming and respect. it is important to highlight the role of the group coordinator as the one who facilitate the exchange and preserves the welcoming feeling in the group. moreover, the coordinator contributes to a greater engagement of pha with the institution. this as a setting that promotes alternative life projects associated with the enhancement of public space and coexistence. the friendships built in this institutional setting act as an important affective support giving pha new life dimension. this kind of support generates opportunities to develop group cohesion and consequently more chances of this group to continue. 3 – the politization of new friendships in public space in this work of following up the activities of ngos/aids, the affective aspect is a main factor in the quality of the relationship bond and tackling of hiv/ aids-related to stigma and discrimination. it is through the welcoming and an attentive listing and without prejudices that the pha can diminish the anguishes and feelings of guilt and solitude. the possibility of building a friendship in this public space (ngo) brings a great potential of the disease politization. the concept of friendship seen as a political exercise, for instance, experimenting with new forms of sociability and community (arendt, 2003 and ortega, 2000), helps us to understand this type of public space that is not restricted to the area of family intimacy. friendship promotes meetings that instigate changes, and the friend, in this line of thought, is not a mirror in which we search a reproduction of our image. nietzsche (apud ortega, 2000) was the first to break with this tradition of the friendship concept in which the proximity, equality and agreement, place the friend not as an unconditional adhesion, but like the one that encourages and challenges us to transform ourselves. to bring out the moments of asymmetry and emotional non-reciprocity provides a space where the heterogeneity and otherness in relation to the other is preserved (ortega, 2000). nevertheless, we are not thereby enhancing the disagreements and conflicts, but mainly put ourselves away from the consensus. the care of another implies certain detachment, because, when it is possible, the affection can help, otherwise, suffocate. this prospective of friendship helps us to understand the relationship that ngos can promote, i.e. type of relationships that strengthens identification among equals, protecting themselves from a common enemy promoting coping and emancipation. friendship would preserves a filed of distinction in which a subject keeps his/her singularity. it is necessary the maintenance of certain distance, in order to preserve some solitude inherent to human existence. an excessive intimacy leads to feelings of possession and lack of differentiation between people. therefore, the ngo setting can express the possibility of sharing and giving new dimension through symbolic elaboration of the life experience of pha. at some point of their personal struggle against hiv/aids, the pha perceive that their suffering, concern and indignation can be giving new meanings by the interactions that were built from the engagement with the ngo (castro-silva, 2004). spink (1996) reminds us that the institution is nothing but permanent expression of the various actions of people. then to link the impact of hiv/aids in the life of pha and the dilemmas of their participation in an ngo/aids can contribute to the strengthening of the solidarism and citizenship of social networks. 104 building participative, empowering & diverse communities final considerations we consider that the psychology can be an important tool for psychological and community strengthening of subjects that repeatedly suffer with the consequences of social exclusion. it can contribute for the transformation of reality shown and this is possible through a look that gives privilege to a subject in bio-psycho-social dimensions and capable to transform their social environment, i.e. more than dealing with symptoms, often triggered by unfair social situations that lead to feelings and perceptions of low self-esteem, humiliation, shame and other feelings constructed and reinforced by prejudices. therefore, the community social psychology proposes a more comprehensive intervention with a differentiated work in favor of communities (montero, 2003; sawaia, 2002). references altman, d. 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(2004). a politização da dor e da indignação de pessoas que vivem ou convivem com o hiv/aids: a participação política em uma ong como forma de fortalecimento psicossocial. tese de doutorado, instituto de psicologia, universidade de são paulo, são paulo. campos, r. h. f.(1996). a instituição como via de acesso à comunidade in campos, r. h. f. psicologia social comunitária: da solidariedade à autonomia. petrópolis: vozes. goffman, e. (1988). estigmanotas sobre a manipulação da identidade deteriorada. 4. ltc. gomes m. a. e pereira, m. l. d. (2005). famílias em situação de vulnerabilidade social: uma questão de políticas públicas. ciência & saúde coletiva, vol.10, nº 2. rio de janeiro, abr/jun, 357-363. gostin, l., & mann, j. (1999). toward the development of a human rights impact assessment for the formulation and evaluation of public health policies. in j. mann et al., health and human rights: a reader, 55-71. lane, s. (1984). psicologia socialo homem em movimento. são paulo; brasiliense, mancebo, d.(2003). contemporaneidade e efeitos de subjetivação. in: bock, a (org.). psicologia e o compromisso social. são paulo: cortez. montero, m. (2007). hacer para transformar: el método en la psicologia comunitária. 1ª ed. buenos aires: paidós. ___________. (2003).teoria y prática de la psicología comunitária: la tensión entre comunidad y sociedad. 1ª ed. buenos aires: paidós. 105 building participative, empowering & diverse communities ortega, f. (2000). para uma política da amizade: arendt, derrida, foucault. rio de janeiro: reluemdumará. parker, r. (org.) (2002). solidariedade e cidadania: princípios possíveis para as respostas ao hiv/aids?. aprimorando o debate: respostas sociais frente à aids. rio de janeiro: associação brasileira interdisciplinar de aids (anais). __________; aggleton, p. (2001). estigma, discriminação e aids. coleção abia_ cidadania e direitos, n. 1, rio de janeiro, abia. parker, r. a (1994). a construção solidariedade: aids, sexualidade e política no brasil. rio de janeiro: abia/ ims/uerj-relumedumará. sader, e. (1995). quando novos personagens entram em cena: experiências e lutas dos trabalhadores da grande são paulo 1970-1980 (2a ed.). são paulo: paz e terra. sawaia, b. b. (2002). as artimanhas da exclusão: uma análise ético-psicossocial (4a ed.). são paulo: vozes. spink, p. k. (1996). a organização como fenômeno psicossocial: notas para uma redefinição da psicologia do trabalho. psicologia e sociedade: revista da abrapso, são paulo, vol 8, n. 1, jan.-jul, 174-192. united nations programme on hiv/aids (unaids). (2005). hiv-related stigma, discrimination and human rights violations: case studies of successful programmes. geneva: unaids. 106 building participative, empowering & diverse communities risky behaviors and substance use in youth leisure time meringolo, p faculty of psychology university of florence chiodini, m. faculty of psychology university of florence moscardi, e. faculty of psychology university of florence, phd student morandi, a. department of psychology university of florence, phd student contact details: meringolo@psico.unifi.it abstract this research is related to a wider program promoted in italy by european union, whose participants are public institutions, no profit enterprises and faculty of psychology of university of florence. the program is aimed to improve health promotion in young people leisure time by means of community based interventions. theoretical approaches come from studies about risky behavior, legal and illegal substances use, outreach work in leisure time for promoting healthy behaviors. the aim of this step of the research is to obtain quantitative data about youth lifestyle and about risky behaviors, particularly drug use, during entertainment events. participants are 1283 subjects, male (51,4%) and female, aged 18-30 years, living in different italian regions. instrument: a specifically adapted questionnaire to collect biographical data and information about life style, spending leisure time, risky behaviors and patterns of substance use. results highlighted in young people importance of peer group in spending leisure time, patterns of undertaking risky behaviors as legal and illegal substances use, particularly party drugs use, careless and drunken driving coming back from discos, concerts or raves. results moreover show behaviors change in leisure time, problems in recreational drug use, gender differences, experiences in harm reduction and in health promotion programs. key words: risky behaviors, young people lifestyle, leisure time, community based programs. introduction this research is related to a wider program equal (2008), promoted by europe union, whose participants are public institutions, no profit enterprises and faculty of psychology of florence. the program is aimed to improve health promotion in leisure time, promoting young people enterprises and committing them in planning events safeness, for young participants and for local communities. theoretical approaches come from studies about risky behavior, legal and illegal substances use, outreach work in leisure situations (for instance in great musical events) for promoting healthy mailto:meringolo@psico.unifi.it 107 building participative, empowering & diverse communities behaviors (ostazewski, zimmerman, 2006; white, degenhardt, breen, bruno, newman, proudfoot, 2006; eiserman, diamond, schensul, 2005; ter bogt, engels, 2005; mair,2006; meringolo, chiodini, 2005; sweeting, west, 2003). they come also from systemic approach in system change (hirsch, levine, miller, 2007; tseng, seidman 2007; kelly, 2007; foster-fishman, nowell, yang, 2007). particular attention was paid to analyze experiences in prevention of risky behaviors that happen frequently during events, as drug dealing and drug use, car accidents, driving while intoxicated, aggressive behaviors, difficulties in relationship with local communities and with inhabitants. aim the aim of this step of the research is to obtain quantitative data about youth lifestyle and about risky behaviors, particularly drug use, during entertainment events in order to better promote community based interventions in leisure sites. method participants are 1283 subjects; male (51,4%) and female; aged 18-30 years (mean 22,7). instrument: a specifically adapted questionnaire to collect biographical data and information about life style, spending leisure time, risky behaviors and patterns of substance use. the questionnaire form was preceded by depth interviews carried out in the previous qualitative research. results demographics: participants were students (35,3%), employed (25,1%), students/employed (22,6%) and subjects looking for first employment (16,2%); they live usually with their families (73%), and for the most part of them (59%) in a small town, that is sometimes perceived (33%) lacking of leisure opportunities. they come from different italian regions (north of italy, center, south and isles). results highlighted in young people importance of peer group in spending leisure time, patterns of undertaking risky behaviors as legal and illegal substances use, and particularly “party drugs” use, careless driving and drunken driving coming back from discos, concerts or raves. results moreover show behaviors change in leisure time, gender differences, experiences in harm reduction and in health promotion programs. particularly: young people usually spend their leisure time prevailingly alone, at home, then with significant others (as family, partner, friends), or outside, without a planned activity, or playing sport, or in discos and musical events. cultural activities seem less attended. there are significant gender differences: for instance girls seem more interested in activities carried out at home or with a small group, and less in sport and in going anywhere. we can see nevertheless that staying alone and at home is negatively related to satisfaction in spending leisure time, that is more relevant when they stay with their peer group, or when they go outside for a walk, or in a pub. preferred meeting places are pub, town squares, and also home. less chosen seem associations as recreational clubs or parish groups. few participants state that they are often attending gyms. there is a strong correlation between closeness to substances and some everyday activities. closeness to substances is a variable that we have built on answers to these items: “to know some people who are using substances, to be present while other people are using, to receive a proposal 108 building participative, empowering & diverse communities for using, to use”. musical events are strongly related to closeness to substances, as we could foresee, but also staying alone at home and going outside anywhere appear as predictive factor for substance use. on the contrary, spending time with significant others or groups seems to be a protective factor. anova shows significant differences between means, and particularly it reveals that closeness to substances increases with different kind of meeting places: recreational clubs and pubs are at the top, followed by town squares and home (also in this case staying at home doesn’t appear a protection against drug use), and finally by gyms and parish groups. choosing an entertainment: what kind of criterion? friends presence seem to be the most important reason for choosing an event. there are significant differences between male and female participants: the last ones seem to be more worried for price, engagements for the day after and return time. about substance use: we have asked what kind of substance young people prefer, in a scale from never to rarely, 1-3 times a month, 1-3 times a week, nearly everyday. the prevalence is for alcohol abuse1, that concerns youth at least several time a month, then cannabis use and at last, with low prevalence, cocaine, lsd, heroin. from the interviews we say, nevertheless, that incidence of cocaine is increasing and also heroine is now rising, particularly in younger participants. gender differences are lower than in past generations, for all kinds of substances, and in both male and female seems to prevail use of recreational drugs (alcohol and cannabis). fig. 1 the results show significant gender differences (*= p<0,05 and **= p<0,001) in way of substance use. for all the substances the use in female participants seems to be generally less frequent (fig. 1), and it seems to concern only few of them. however a very high use, that is the habit of consuming nearly every day concerns, for instance use of cannabis, more 1 for alcohol we considered “abuse”, and not use, according to literature, particularly in italy when alcohol use is a social habit. 109 building participative, empowering & diverse communities then 20% of males and more then 10% of female. we suppose, according with literature and with evidence based interventions, that the use of recreational drugs, that’s cannabis, is now an “usual” practice for young people, that probably need prevention and health promotion based on youth commitment, on all behaviors in every day life and on harm reduction, rather then on undiscriminating prohibition. perception of prevention in leisure places: we asked participants about their perception of street outreach work that is usually carried out in leisure places in italy. youth that experiences risky behavior (as closeness to substances and substance use, driving while intoxicated, alcohol abuse, unsafe sex and aggressive behaviors) knows this work, even though they don’t pay a great attention to it. the matter is that they don’t think that this intervention may be addressed to them, with a sort of unrealistic optimism. what’s more, the higher are undertaken risky behaviors the less is perceived importance of prevention. we have identified then three cluster, based on importance of experienced risks. low risk cluster concerns about 43% of participants, medium risk cluster 39% and high risk cluster 18%. female participants are decidedly more present in low risk cluster, while male participants prevail in the medium risk cluster and above all in high risk cluster. low risk cluster experiences less risky behaviors, but results show increasing means for alcohol abuse and aggressive behaviors. medium risk cluster undertakes several risky behaviors, and particularly dangerous driving, closeness to substances, unsafe sex, and alcohol abuse. these results may indicate need of prevention also for youth that appears as “normal” population. for high risk cluster, more experienced behaviors seem to be drive while intoxicated and substance use, but we can also observe unsafe sex, aggressive behaviors and dangerous driving. we can think that driving while intoxicated together with careless and dangerous driving lead to the great number of accidents that usually happens in the week end on italian roads. participants were asked about their perception of motivation for substance use. they stated different motivations, and above all curiosity and emotions seeking. results show (fig. 2) that as well that the higher is the experienced risk level, the less are perceived “problematical” motivations, as being agreeable to friends, escaping difficulties, problems at home, loneliness or lack of values. 110 building participative, empowering & diverse communities fig. 2 particularly for high substance users (from 1/3 times a week to nearly everyday) curiosity and emotions seeking reach the highest values. high users (18% for alcohol abuse and 26% for cannabis use) are participants recruited prevalently in large towns (for instance rome). this group will require paying attention in future researches and above all in future interventions for health promotion, analyzing also other psychological variables and personality features. conclusions results highlighted in young people everyday activities a gap between what they are used to do (staying alone and at home) and what they wish to do (staying with significant others). importance of peer group in spending leisure time is often pointed out. we have reached besides a better knowledge about present patterns of undertaking risky behaviors, particularly legal and illegal substances use, quite different if compared with what happened only few years ago, and quite different in high use for males and females. other behaviors, as dangerous and drunken driving coming back from discos, concerts or raves, ask for planning specific prevention programs in the future. results show as well difficulties in participation in health promotion interventions, and lack of motivation in protecting themselves. young people seem to think that perhaps outreach work in this field would be important, but not for them. it’s possible that only individual prevention or school site prevention is not enough to change this kind of risk perception, while community based programs, being able to commit young people and especially the whole peer groups, would be a better practice to improve healthy behaviors. 111 building participative, empowering & diverse communities references equal(2008). fse equal ii, 2.2 “social entertainment service”, ps: it-g2-tos-032 and “azienda notte”, ps: it-s2-mdl-189. final report. foster-fishman, p.g., nowell, b., yang, h. (2007). putting the system back into systems change: a framework for understanding and changing organizational and community systems. american journal of community psychology, 39, 197-215. hirsch, g.b., levine, r., miller, r.l. (2007). using system dynamics modelling to understand the impact of social change initiatives. american journal of community psychology, 39, 239-253. kelly, j.g. (2007). the system concept and systemic change: implications for community psychology. american journal of community psychology, 39, 415-418. mair, h.(2006).the potential of interdisciplinarity for leisure research. leisure sciences. vol 28(2) mar-apr, 197-202. meringolo, p., chiodini, m. (2005). giovani protagonisti degli eventi di tempo libero. esperienze di peer education. il seme e l’albero, aprile, 89-96. ostazewski, k; zimmerman, m.a. (2006). the effects of cumulative risks and promotive factors in urban adolescent alcohol and other drug use: a longitudinal study on resiliency. american journal of community psychology, 38, sept.2006, 237-249. sweeting, h.; west, p. (2003). young people’s leisure and risk taking behaviours: changes in gender patterning in the west of scotland during the 1990s. journal of youth studies. vol 6(4) dec 2003, 391-412. white, b.; degenhardt, l.; breen, c.; bruno, r.; newman, j.; proudfoot, p. (2006). risk and benefit perceptions of party drug use. addictive behaviors. vol 31(1) jan 2006, 137-142. eiserman, j.m, diamond, s., schensul, j.j. (2005).”rollin’ on e”: a qualitative analysis of ecstasy use among inner city adolescents and young adults. journal of ethnicity in substance abuse. vol 4(2) 2005, 9-38. ter bogt, t.f., engels, r.c. (2005).”partying” hard: party style, motives for and effects of mdma use at rave parties. substance use and misuse. vol. 40(9-10) 2005, 1479-1502. tseng, v., seidman, e. (2007). a systems framework for understanding social settings. american journal of community psychology, 39, 217-228. 112 building participative, empowering & diverse communities risk behaviours in adolescence: risk and protective factors valentina c. chitas programa de doutoramento em comportamento desviante / faculdade de psicologia e de ciências da educação / universidade do porto vchitas@netcabo.pt abstract this presentation put forward the preliminary results of a study undertaken in the context of a phd dissertation on risk and protective factors linked to deviant behaviour in adolescence. the study employs a sample of 1042 adolescents (mean age 16 years), drawing from elementary and high schools of lisbon’s suburban area. measures of deviant behaviour include drug use (alcohol, tobacco and marijuana) and antisocial behaviour (physical and verbal violence, crimes against propriety and indiscipline). independent measures assess individual, interpersonal and contextual factors: expectations about drug use, self control, motivation and academic achievement, parenting, peers’ relations, social control and social support from neighbourhood. a summary of epidemiological local data is presented and the risk factors for each one of the categories of deviant behaviour are examined through a regression analysis. statistically significant associations were found for most of the factors considered. peer relations and expectations about drug, and sensation seeking appear to be the strongest predictors for drug use and antisocial behaviour. parental monitoring and positive bounding to school are negatively related to both drug use and antisocial behaviour. key words: drug use, antisocial behaviour, risk factors, protective factors adolescence is often a period of vulnerability for risk behaviours. when facing the combined psychological and physiological changes that affect this period of the lifecycle, it has been estimated that one quarter to one half of us youths experience, at some point, a tumultuous route. this vulnerability may be amplified by the influences of the social, economic and cultural changes that marked the last decades, which have affected particularly youths from urban areas where the phenomena’s of poverty, social exclusion, and social isolation are combined with a culture of consumption, and magic passports to pleasure, success and happiness. the worsening of these problems has fostered several research endeavours aimed at explaining the etiology of these phenomena. a large part of this knowledge comes from the field of epidemiology and revolves around the concept of risk. risk factors are those conditions or variables that are associated with an augmented likelihood of negative or undesirable outcomes – morbidity or mortality in classical usage, or more recently, behaviours that may compromise health, well being, or social performance (jessor et al., 1995). the research on risk factors has become more complex in recent years, evolving from studies focused on a single variable, in a single domain to multivariate analysis which tries to map both social and personal influences over time. the interest of studying not only the conditions that may contribute to the increase of risk behaviours but also the possible factors that may protect the rise of these behaviours 113 building participative, empowering & diverse communities brings the concept of protective factors to the fore of the research. protective factors are being used in two different ways in the literature. sometimes as the opposite of risk factors – promotive factors (sameroff, 1999), or as buffering factors that mediate or moderate the effect of exposure to risk. according to sameroff (1999), when protective factors are regarded as the opposite of risk factors its effects manifest both in low risk populations as well as in high risk populations. when protective factors are taken as moderated variables, their effect may be null or residual in low risk populations but it is expected to be amplified in high risk populations. the methodological distinction between promotive factors and buffering factors demands a joint analysis of high and low risk samples. hawkins, catalano, and miller (1992), classified risk factors in two main categories: contextual factors and individual and interpersonal factors. concerning contextual factors, the authors listed: factors related with laws and norms favourable toward drug use; availability of drugs; economic deprivation and neighbourhood disorganisation. concerning individual and interpersonal factors, the authors mentioned: physiological factors (biochemical and genetic influences); family addiction; poor and inconsistent family management practices; family conflict; low bonding to family; early and persistent problem behaviours, academic failure; low degree of commitment to school; peer rejection in elementary grades; association to deviant peers; alienation and rebelliousness; attitudes favourable to drug use; early onset of drug use. in the field of delinquency, losel, bliesener, and kofert (1989, cit. in kaplan, 1999) refer that since 1950 several longitudinal and cross-sectional studies have pointed to a set of common factors that are associated with delinquency: parental criminality; poor parental supervision; cruel attitudes passive or neglectfully attitudes from parents; erratic or harsh discipline mutual; conflict; large family size; socioeconomic disadvantages. purpose of the study. taking these concepts as guidelines and the major findings in empirical research, this study aims to examine risk and protective factors that are linked at an individual, interpersonal and contextual level to drug consumption and antisocial behaviour. method procedure the data used in this study was collected through self completion questionnaires, mostly in a school setting and only a few cases were gathered from dwellings of social disadvantaged neighbourhoods. participants considering the methodological guidelines presented in the literature, specifically the need of comparing populations of higher and lower levels of risk as a way of examining the interplay between risk and protective factors, this study employs a combined sampling strategy, using probabilistic sampling and purposive sampling (heterogeneity sampling) (sadish, cook & cambpell, 2002). three samples were drawn. the larger one provides local epidemiological information about risk behaviours from the suburban area of lisbon – vila franca de xira – and consisted of a representative sample of 9th to 12th grade students of that region. the second sample is composed by 214 students enrolled in special teaching classes (students with low academic achievement and high prevalence of risk behaviours) and the third sample included 104 youths from disadvantaged neighbourhoods. the total sample comprises 1042 adolescents 114 building participative, empowering & diverse communities (age mean 16 years old, dp = 1.62). 92.4% are caucasian, 6.3% are african and 1.3% belong to other ethnic groups. measures dependent variables the questionnaire included a variety of items designed to examine adolescent’s risk behaviour in the areas of substance use, antisocial behaviour and sexual activity. three indicators of drug use (alcohol, tobacco and cannabis) were constructed based on the combination of information about prevalence (once in a lifetime, last year and last month) and frequencies of tobacco, alcohol and cannabis use. antisocial behaviour is measured also by three indicators (indiscipline, crimes against propriety and violence) resulting from the combination of data from the prevalence and frequency of the behaviours considered. the indicator of risky sexual behaviour results from the combination of number of partners, age at first sexual intercourse, and pregnancy. independent variables demographic variables age, sex, ethnicity, parents’ educational level, and parents’ occupational status were the most relevant demographic variables used in this study. personality variables sensation seeking. the questionnaire included a reduced form containing 8 items of the sensation seeking scale (zukerman, 2004) motivation for drug use (alcohol, tobacco and marijuana). three scales adapted from the source scales of wills, sandy, and shinar (1999) holding 21 items were used to examine the motivations for the consumption of a particular substance. indicators of motivations for tobacco, alcohol and marijuana consumption were constructed based on a factor analysis of the scale items. self control. in order to assess self control (considering this concept as multidimensional), the questionnaire include 5 scales of good control (calm, planning, good delay of gratification, behavioural coping and cognitive coping) and 4 scales of bad self control (impulsivity, low level of delay of gratification, coping anger, coping tension) used in a number of studies by wills and collaborators. interpersonal factors (relationship with family, peers, school and neighbourhood) relationship with school. a scale with 21 items which included 14 items from the scale of scholl climate (negreiros, 1996) and 7 items from the scale of motivation and academic achievement of bryan and zimmerman (2002) was used to examine several dimensions of the relationship with school. parenting. the measures of parenting included 6 scales adapted from the following source scales: parental support (galambos, barker & almeida, 2003) responsiveness (paulson, 1996); demandigness (paulson, 1996) parental involvement (paulson, 1996); parental monitoring (small, 1993). psychological control (barber, olson & sahgle, 2001). peer support and conflict. the questionnaire contains 4 items related to the perception of acceptance, support and conflict with peers. affiliation with peers. a 19-item scale about the perceptions of antisocial and pro-social behaviour of friends was used to examine the affiliation of deviant and not deviant peers. 115 building participative, empowering & diverse communities contextual influences (school and neighbourhood). three scales containing items related to antisocial and pro-social behaviour of peers belonging to the same neighbourhood and school, were used to evaluate the broader influence of peers in this domain, 5 items adapted from a sample of items used in a study by nash and bowen (1999) were also included in the questionnaire in order to evaluate social support and social control from the neighbourhood. results prevalence’s of risk behaviour in the representative sample the results reveal that the substance with higher prevalence of consumption was alcohol, with 57.9% of adolescents reporting the use of this substance in the last 30 days, and 29.2% reporting drunkenness at least once in the previous year. distilled drinks were the most consumed in the last 30 days, 26.2% of adolescents reported the use of tobacco in the past 30 days, and for marijuana the levels of use are considerable lower with 12.2% of adolescents reporting the use of this substance at least once in a lifetime, 8.1% in the last 12 months, and 4.5% in the last 30 days. statistically significant gender differences were found in the levels of substance use. boys reported a higher level of alcohol and marijuana use and girls reported higher levels of tobacco use. antisocial behaviour was assessed through a combination of items drawn from several major studies of adolescent’s problematic behaviour. three dimensions has been considered: misbehaviour in school (school suspension or expulsion, bullying, and teacher’s physical or verbal offences); violence (verbal offences, fist fights, gang fights, causing injury to another person who required medical treatment, and use of weapons to threaten or harm another person), property crimes and involvement in other illegal activities (robering, breaking and entering in private houses and stores, car theft, fire setting, and drugs selling). gender differences were also found, with significantly higher prevalence of antisocial behaviours in males. youths with school adjustment problems were significantly more vulnerable to drug use and anti-social behaviour, and presented a higher risk of pregnancy. associations among problems behaviour table 1 depicts pearson’s correlation coefficients between pair of indicators of various risk behaviours. at a first glance, it becomes salient that statistically significant associations were found among all pairs of the behaviours considered. it is worth of note the correlation between tobacco and marijuana consumption and indiscipline and also the correlations among the various antisocial behaviours (indiscipline, violence, and crimes against property). these results align with a number of previous studies (e.g., donovan & jessor, 1985; negreiros, 2001) and as such contribute to reinforce the belief that risky behaviours cluster together. table 1 – pearson’s correlation coefficients between risk behaviours (n=1042) tobacco consumption alcohol consumption marijuana consumption indiscipline violence crimes against property alcohol consumption .39** marijuana consumption .53** .31** indiscipline .34** .25** .32** violence .25** .22** .22** .65** crimes against property .24** .17** .27** .57** .70** sexual risk behaviours .12* .07 .04 .28** .31** .25** 116 building participative, empowering & diverse communities associations between variables (independent and dependent variables) table 2 and 3 show pearson’s correlation coefficients between response variables (at the following levels: individual, family, school and peer relationships) and indicators of tobacco, alcohol and marijuana consumption, indiscipline, violence and crimes against property. only statistically significant correlations (0.1% significance level) whose coefficients are equal or greater than .10 were reported. table 2 – pearson’s correlation coefficients between independent variables and indicators of tobacco , alcohol and marijuana consumption tobacco alcohol marijuana ethnicity -.10 family problems mother addiction .11 father alcoholism mother depression .11 .10 parenting monitoring -.23 .19 -.22 support -.12 school involvement -.17 achievement values -.10 parent attitudes toward drug use .28 .23 psychological control .12 personality and social behaviour sensation seeking .25 .30 .21 playfulness -.14 .18 -.13 good delay of gratification -.19 .14 -.15 behavioural coping -.12 tension coping -.12 calm -.15 cognitive coping -.10 impulsivity .19 .15 .15 anger/tension .16 .12 anger/violence .20 .16 .12 school relation scholl failure .22 .12 .13 academic achievement -.22 -.14 -.17 scholl motivation -.15 -.13 peer relations youths from the same school with drug use .15 .16 .12 friends with consumption of alcohol and tobacco .46 .44 .43 friends with indiscipline and delinquent behaviour .21 .13 .14 117 building participative, empowering & diverse communities tobacco alcohol marijuana youths from the same neighbourhood with delinquent behaviours and use of illegal drugs .14 .11 youths from the same neighbourhood that use tobacco and alcohol .29 .29 .24 friends with pro-social behaviour -.19 .12 youths from the same neighbourhood with pro-social behaviour -.12 neighbourhood relation social support -.11 tobacco use motives emotion regulation/self enhancement .12 achievement .40 socialization .11 alcohol use motives emotion regulation/self enhancement / socialization .38 achievement .18 borrow relief -.12 marijuana use motives emotion regulation .21 achievement and health .20 self enhancement / socialization .15 several statistically significant correlations emerged, ranging from .10 to .46. stronger values were found for associations involving peers’ deviant behaviour, expectations towards tobacco, alcohol and marijuana consumption, sensation seeking, academic achievement and parental monitoring practices. table 3 – pearson’s correlation coefficients between independent variables and indicators of indiscipline, violence and crimes against property indiscipline violence crimes against ethnicity .14 family problems parental divorce .10 father addiction .11 .15 .11 father alcoholism .12 .11 parenting monitoring -.29 -.24 -.16 support -.16 -.14 school involvement -.16 -.11 achievement values -.16 -.12 parent attitudes toward drug use .11 .10 118 building participative, empowering & diverse communities indiscipline violence crimes against parent attitudes toward delinquent behaviour .10 .10 psychological control .15 .15 .12 behavioural control -.10 -.11 -.12 personality and social behaviour sensation seeking .30 .25 .19 playfulness -.16 good delay of gratification -.17 -.12 -.10 behavioural coping -.10 impulsivity .27 .21 .15 anger/tension .13 .15 anger/violence .34 .31 .23 school relation academic achievement -.32 -.26 -.21 scholl motivation -.11 teacher’s and school support -.13 -.09 -.11 peer relations peer support -.11 acceptance from peers .10 .15 .12 youths from the same school with drug use .11 .16 .17 friends with consumption of alcohol and tobacco .26 .22 .16 friends with indiscipline and delinquent behaviour .45 .51 .38 youths from the same neighbourhood with delinquent behaviours and use of illegal drugs .19 .24 .16 youths from the same neighbourhood that use tobacco and alcohol .15 friends with pro-social behaviour -.30 -.25 -.18 youths from the same neighbourhood with pro-social behaviour -.14 -.10 neighbourhood relation social support -.16 -.14 social control -.10 -.11 -.12 hierarchical regression analysis drawing on the previous results and in order to disclose the causal direction between variables, hierarchical regression analysis was carried out for each one of the response variables (tobacco, alcohol and marijuana consumption, indiscipline, violence and crimes against property), taking only those indicators flagged as the strongest correlations as explanatory variables. in the first step, the variables with a more remote influence on risk behaviours were selected (personality structure, family issues, parental practices). in the second step, only possible intervening variables between the first set of variables and the risk behaviours, that is to say, social skills were considered. in the third step, the variables believed to impact more directly on drug consumption and anti-social behaviour (expectations toward consumptions, peers’ influence and academic 119 building participative, empowering & diverse communities achievement) were further added to the model the results of the abovementioned regression analysis can be found on tables a1 to a5 (see appendix). taken altogether, 19 to 38% of the variability of response variables on the sample is explained by the explanatory variables. variables included on step one and step three of the regression analysis show strong predictable power. conclusions a first conclusion we can draw from the results of this study, concerns the fact that the different forms of risk behaviours are strongly associated, assumption confirmed in different studies on this subject (donovan & jessor, 1985; negreiros, 2001). a second conclusion, concerns the existence of different risk and protection factors at a individual, family and social levels, common to the different risk behaviour considered, conclusion that once again aligns in the direction of the results found in the field of research carried out on this matter. this conclusion leads to the need of privileging an intervention targeting the risk in adolescence issue, in a comprehensive, integrated way, able to take into account the cumulative effect of risk (bartko, baldwin, baldwin & seifer, 1999), since partial interventions targeted at a particular risk factor, by itself, may not lead to expected results. this integrated approach does not invalidate, however, the need of taking into account the specificity of the factors identified at each level of analysis as assuming greater predictive power of the different risk behaviours. among these factors, and taking into account the variables that were the subject of this study, it can be referred, at the individual level, the tendency of young people with risk behaviours to seek strong sensations. sensation seeking (need to experience new and exciting experiences, situations of danger and adventure; zukerman, 1978), is one of the factors noted in various studies as a predictor of drug use (tarter, moss & vanyukov, 1995; zucker, 1994; wills, vaccaro & mcnamara, 1992). at the level of individual variables, it is also pointed out in the field of social and academic skills the fact that risk behaviours are associated with the lack of social skills, namely, poor self-control (impulsive behaviour, anger and difficulty to delay gratification), poor academic achievement and low commitment to school. note that these skills are more correlated with antisocial behaviour than with the consumption of drugs. also in the field of individual factors, and more specifically in terms of expectations towards drug use, young people who consume more tobacco, alcohol and marijuana are the ones holding the most positive expectations regarding the consequences of consumption of these substances. the expectations towards the effects of drug use are one of the variables that present higher correlation with the consumption behaviour. this result converges with the findings of other studies that came into account with this predictor (wills, sandy, & shin, 1999; wills, sandy, & yaeger, 2002). among these positive expectations it is pointed out the possibility of drugs playing a positive role in the regulation of emotions (reduction of the malaise associated with the psychological states of anxiety, anger, sadness and induction of states of relaxation), self enhancement and self confidence and finally, the function of consumption of these substances in facilitating the socialization and relationship with the other. conversely, young people who have more negative expectations about the consumption of tobacco, alcohol and marijuana are those with lower levels of consumption of these substances. of note, only for the consumption of tobacco, 120 building participative, empowering & diverse communities negative expectations assume greater predictive weight for consumption of this substance, than positive expectations (this result does not concern, however, the effects of the consumption in physical health but as regarding the possibility of tobacco to constrain the achievement of future goals). therefore it seems that both the young consumers and non-consumers have similar beliefs about the consequences of smoking to physical health. regarding the consumption of alcohol, positive expectations are more determinants than negative expectations on the distinction between consumers and non consumers and, in the consumption of marijuana, the weights of negative and positive expectations become more proximal. with regard to family factors, we found some positive correlations, though reduced, among certain family problems and young people’s risk behaviour, being the mother’s depression more critical for drug use and drug addiction and alcoholism of father more critical for anti-social behaviour and the separation of parents to the sexual risk behaviour. in the domain of parenting, monitoring practices appear to be the factor with greater weight in the protection of risk behaviour, then comes involvement of parents in school tasks and expectations and values of achievement towards school and, finally, is the acceptance and support of parents (this negative associations are stronger for anti-social behaviour). in the opposite direction, practices characterized by withdrawal of love as a form of punishment and permissiveness, are positively associated with risk behaviour, particularly with regard to anti-social behaviour (indiscipline, violence, crimes against property). regarding peers relationship, the results of this study point out to the fact that the association to friends with deviant behaviour and the perception of school and neighbourhood environments marked by young people with deviant behaviour are strongly associated with the consumption of drugs and anti-social behaviour of young people. the influence of peers, appears therefore to constitute itself as one of the factors, in addition to the expectations towards drug use, more decisive in the explanation of deviant behaviour (these results align themselves once more with the findings of other studies that included this factor among the set of predictive variables; wills, sandy & yaeger, 2002; wills, sandy & shin, 1999). of note, that most of the more distal factors, at the level of parental attitudes and practices, problematic in families, also appear correlated with the tendency of young people to be associated with deviant peers. the association with deviant peers may therefore play a mediator role of the effects of these more distal factors in behaviour. finally, and with regard to socio-demographic factors analyzed in this study, we are highlighting the significant differences found in levels of consumption of tobacco, alcohol and marijuana and antisocial behaviour associated with gender. girls presented higher prevalence of tobacco use and boys higher levels of consumption of alcohol and marijuana. boys also show considerably more anti-social behaviour than girls. also to emphasize the influence of ethnic group regarding the consumption of marijuana, and for violence and sexual risk behaviour. noting that african youths consume less marijuana than caucasian, but they tend to engage in more anti-social behaviours, particularly physical violence and to engage themselves in sexual risk behaviour. 121 building participative, empowering & diverse communities references barber, b. k.; olson, j. e. & shagle, s. c. (1994). associations between parental psychology and behavioural control and youth internalized and externalized behaviors. child development, 65, 1120-1136 [pp. 1125]. bryant, a. l. & zimmerman, m.a. (2002). examining the effects of academic beliefs and behaviours on changes in substances use among urban adolescents. journal of educational psychology, 94(3), 621-637 [pp.626 donovan, j. e., & jessor, r. (1985). structure of problem behavior in adolescence and young adulthood. journal of consulting an clinical psychology, 53, 890-904. galambos, n. l.; barker, e. t. & almeida, d. m. (2003). parents to matter: trajectories of change in externalizing and internalizing problems in early adolescence. child development, 74, 578-594 hawkins, j. d., catalano, r. f, & miller, j. y. 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(2003). family communication and religiosity to substance use and sexual behavior in early adolescences: a test for pathways through self-control and prototype perceptions. psychology of addictive behaviors, 17, 312-323. wills, t. a., windle, m., & cleary, s. d. (1998). temperament and novelty-seeking in adolescent substance use: convergence of dimensions of temperament with constructs from cloninger’s theory. journal of personality and social psychology, 74, 387-406. 122 building participative, empowering & diverse communities appendix table a1 – tobacco consumption in function of parenting, sensation seeking, self control peer relations, school relation drug use motives: hierarchical regression analysis (n = 1042) predictor r coefficients beta and probabilities multiple correlation r2 changestep 1 step 2 step 3 β p β p β p step1 r= .42 p=.000 r2= .18 r2 ajust= .18 r2 change= .18 p< .000 mather depression .11 .07 .012 .06 .024 .05 .040 parental attitudes toward drug use .28 .26 .000 .26 .000 .10 .000 monitoring -.23 -.15 .000 -.10 .002 -.07 .029 school involvement -.17 -.10 .001 -.09 .003 -.03 .250 sensation seeking .25 .18 .000 .14 .000 .04 .131 step 2 r= .45 p=.000 r2= .20 r2 ajust= .19 r2 change= .02 p< .000 good delay of gratification -.19 -.04 .171 .02 .487 calm -.14 -.06 .072 -.04 .166 impulsivity .19 .06 .050 .06 .037 anger/tension .16 .03 .333 .01 .780 anger/violence .20 .05 .133 .08 .006 step 3 r= .60 p=.000 r2= .36 r2 ajust= .35 r2 change= .16 p< .000 positive motivation to tobacco use /achievement) .40 .27 .000 school achievement -.22 -.07 .012 school motivation -.14 -.05 .070 friends with alcohol an tobacco use .46 .24 .000 youths from the same neighborhood that use alcohol and tobacco .29 .06 .055 friends with pro-social behavior -.19 -.02 .535 123 building participative, empowering & diverse communities table a2 – alcohol consumption in function of parenting, sensation seeking, self control peer relations, school relation, drug use motives: regression analysis (n = 1042) predictor r coefficients beta and probabilities multiple correlation r2 changestep 1 step 2 step 3 β p β p β p step1 r= .44 p=.000 r2= .20 r2 ajust= .19 r2 change= .20 p< .000 mather depression .10 .06 .031 .06 .042 .04 .121 parental attitudes toward drug use .33 .30 .000 .29 .000 .14 .000 monitoring -.19 -.13 .000 -.11 .001 -.05 .075 sensation seeking .30 .24 .000 .22 .000 .11 .000 step 2 r= .45 p=.10 r2= .20 r2 ajust= .20 r2 change= .01 p< .000 good delay of gratification -.14 -.04 .152 .00 .887 impulsivity .15 .02 .477 .03 .344 anger/tension .16 .00 .908 .01 .825 anger/violence .12 .05 .154 .02 .543 step 3 r= .57 p=.000 r2= .32 r2 ajust= .32 r2 change= .12 p< .000 positive motives to alcohol use (emotion regulation/ self enhancement/ socialization) .38 .22 .000 positive motives to alcohol use/ achievement .18 .10 .000 school achievement -.14 -.02 .449 youths from the same school with drug use .16 -.01 .698 friends with alcohol an tobacco use .44 .23 .000 youths from the same neighborhood that use alcohol and tobacco .29 .07 .031 124 building participative, empowering & diverse communities table a3 – marijuana consumption as a function of parenting, sensation seeking, self control, peer relations, school relation, drug use motives: regression analysis (n = 1042) predictor r coefficients beta and probabilities multiple correlation r2 changestep1 step 2 step 3 β p β p β p step 1 r= .35 p=.000 r2= .12 r2 ajust= .12 r2 change= .12 p< .000 mather addiction .11 .21 .009 .07 .013 .083 .002 monitoring -.22 .20 .000 -.15 .000 -.082 .014 parents attitudes toward drug use .23 -.17 .000 .21 .000 .076 .010 parent’s achievement values -.10 .43 .644 -.01 .842 -.031 .318 sensation seeking .21 .24 .000 .13 .000 .047 .134 step 2 r= .36 p=.186 r2= .13 r2 ajust= .12 r2 change= .01 p< .000 playfulness -.13 -.02 .553 -.011 .753 good delay of gratification -.15 -.04 .332 .006 .877 impulsivity .15 .05 .138 .037 .222 anger/tension .12 -.01 .800 -.031 .329 step 3 r= .51 p=.000 r2= .26 r2 ajust= .25 r2 change= .13 p< .000 positive motivation to alcohol use (emotion regulation) .21 .104 .000 positive motivation to alcohol use (achievement and health) .20 .130 .000 scholl achievement -.17 -.066 .034 friends with alcohol an tobacco use .43 .322 .000 youths from the same neighborhood that use alcohol and tobacco .24 .030 .341 friends with pro-social behavior -.11 .059 .052 table a4 – indiscipline as a function of parenting, sensation seeking, self control, peer relations, school 125 building participative, empowering & diverse communities relation: regression analysis (n = 1042) predictor r coefficients beta and probabilities multiple correlation r2 changestep1 step2 step 3 β p β p β p step 1 r= .42 p=.000 r2= .18 r2 ajust= .17 r2 change= .18 p< .000 father addiction .11 -.32 .051 .047 .104 .03 .203 father alcoholism .12 .16 .008 .083 .004 .07 .009 monitoring -.29 .45 .000 -.140 .000 -.04 .307 parental support -.16 .26 .005 .102 .013 .04 .337 parental school involvement -.16 .19 .055 -.063 .063 -.02 .633 psychological control .15 .15 .006 .010 .752 .01 .860 parent’s achievement values -.16 -.30 .009 -.070 .040 -.01 .813 sensation seeking .30 .24 .000 .146 .000 .09 .002 teacher support -.13 -.32 .000 -.103 .000 -.08 .003 step 2 r= .47 p=.000 r2= .22 r2 ajust= .21 r2 change= .05 p< .000 playfulness -.16 -.012 .735 -.02 .520 good delay of gratification -.17 .000 1.000 .05 .152 impulsivity .27 .094 .003 .09 .004 anger / violence .34 .165 .000 .11 .001 step 3 r= .58 p=.000 r2= .33 r2 ajust= .32 r2 change= .11 p< .000 academic achievement -.32 -.15 .000 youths from the same school with indiscipline and delinquent behaviour .16 -.04 .230 friends with indiscipline and delinquent behaviour .45 .25 .000 friends with alcohol an tobacco use .26 .03 .431 friends with pro-social behavior -.30 -.08 .011 school failure .24 .07 .013 table a5 – violence as a function of parenting, sensation seeking, self control peer relations, school relation: regression analysis (n = 1042 126 building participative, empowering & diverse communities predictor r coefficients beta and probabilities multiple correlation r2 changestep 1 step 2 step 3 β p β p β p step 1 r= .37 p=.000 r2= .14 r2 ajust= .13 r2 change= .14 p< .000 father alcoholism .11 .05 .121 .05 .071 .03 .266 father addiction .15 .11 .000 .10 .001 .09 .002 ethnicity .14 .12 .000 .11 .000 .03 .262 monitoring -.24 -.17 .000 -.13 .001 -.01 .775 parental support -.13 .06 .110 .05 .159 .00 .895 psychological control .15 .10 .001 .04 .224 .03 .341 parent’s achievement values -.12 -.04 .275 -.02 .625 .03 .286 sensation seeking .25 .20 .000 .13 .000 .06 .058 step 2 r= .41 p=.000 r2= .17 r2 ajust= .16 r2 change= .03 p< .000 good delay of gratification -.12 -.01 .789 .04 .210 impulsivity .21 .07 .040 .04 .183 anger/tension .15 .02 .616 .00 .870 anger / violence .31 .18 .000 .10 .002 step 3 r= .57 p=.000 r2= .32 r2 ajust= .31 r2 change= .15 p< .000 school failure .22 .07 .010 academic achievement -.26 -.09 .002 youths from the same school with indiscipline and delinquent behavior .14 -.09 .002 friends with indiscipline and delinquent behavior .51 .39 .000 friends with alcohol an tobacco use .22 .01 .783 youths from the same neighborhood with delinquent behavior .24 .05 .076 friends pro/social behaviour -.25 -.04 .153 127 building participative, empowering & diverse communities sense of community in adolescence elvira cicognani, bruna zani, cinzia albanesi department of sciences of education “g.m.bertin” university of bologna e-mail: elvira.cicognani@unibo.it abstract in adolescence, sense of community (soc) grows thanks to positive experiences with peers and significant adults in different settings (e.g., neighbourhoods, schools) and contributes to the development of personal and social identity and to positive developmental outcomes. in order to study soc during this developmental period, it is important to develop instruments that adequately capture adolescents’ feelings and experiences within the community. this paper describes the process of construction of an instrument to measure sense of community among adolescents. a series of qualitative and quantitative studies lead to the identification of five dimensions of soc, consistent with mcmillan & chavis (1986) model, that are relevant for this age group: sense of belonging, support and emotional connection with the community, support and emotional connection with peers, satisfaction of needs and opportunities for involvement, opportunities for influence. the scale, both in its complete (36 items) and short (20 items) version, demonstrated good psychometric properties, and positively correlates with perceived social support and well being. soc referred to the hometown decreases across the adolescent years. results of research conducted using this instrument indicated the important role of soc in enhancing social participation during adolescence, and its contributing role in increasing social well being. key words: sense of community, measurement, adolescence, social participation introduction belonging to a community where people feel connected, supported and influential has to do with a “fundamental human phenomenon of collective experience” (peterson, speer, & mcmillan, 2008, 62). collective experiences are the basis for the development of sense of community. in adolescence, in particular, sense of community (soc) grows thanks to positive experiences with peers and significant adults in different settings (e.g., neighbourhoods, schools) and can give important contributions to the development of personal and social identity and to positive developmental outcomes. given such relevance, it is important to develop instruments to capture adolescents’ feelings and experiences within the community. in this context we will briefly illustrate the development of an instrument for measuring sense of community in adolescence and some lines of research we conduced to investigate soc in this developmental period. 128 building participative, empowering & diverse communities how to measure sense of community in adolescence research studies on sense of community in adolescence have mainly used adult scales (e.g., sci; cf. pretty, andrews, & collett, 1994; pretty, conroy, dugay, fowler, & williams, 1996) or ad hoc scales developed through content analysis of interviews (e.g., chipuer, pretty, delorey, miller, powers, rumstein, et al., 1999). it was unclear whether the adult scales adequately represent the nature and the experience of community for adolescents. studies conducted on italian adolescents using the italian scale of sense of community for adults (prezza, costantini, chiarolanza, & di marco, 1999) confirmed that instruments developed for adults are not well suited for younger populations, both in terms of item formulation and differences in factor structure (e.g., zani, cicognani, & albanesi, 2001; albanesi, zani, & cicognani, 2004). for such reasons, a research programme was initiated, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, with the aim to develop a scale which could be suitable for young people. a qualitative study, using focus group interviews, was conducted in order to investigate young people’s meanings and understanding of community and sense of community (albanesi, cicognani, & zani, 2005) and verify whether mcmillan & chavis’s (1986) dimensions of soc were appropriate to conceptualize soc also during adolescence. three leading questions drove our study: which kinds (local, virtual or relational) of communities are relevant in adolescents’ experience? what are their feelings and their experiences about community? is influence a relevant dimension of adolescents’ soc ? to collect data we asked young people to tell us what “community” meant to them, which were the required characteristics in order to talk about community, and, if any, to which kind of community they felt they belonged. we asked them to indicate the reasons for their belonging to a particular community, what could endanger their bond with the community, and what could reinforce it. moreover we discussed with youngsters what they did in practice in order to affirm that they belonged to their community, and if having power or influence was important in order to feel part of a community. finally, we asked them if being part of a community is always positive or if it can have negative (dark) sides (e.g., feeling of being trapped, impotence). data collected were analysed following a grounded theory approach. the analysis produced two groups of hierarchical descriptive categories, one referred to the term “community” and the other referring to “sense of community” (see figure 1 and figure 2). 129 building participative, empowering & diverse communities figure 1 categories about “community” emerged from focus group discussions c o m m u n i t y categories community concept terms related to community examples of community collectivity (vs community) borders – dimensions place important characteristics negative aspects for a community differences between different kind of community virtual community forced community spontaneous community neighbourhood local community collectivity strenghts weaknesses aims and objectives community one belongs to kind strenghts figure 2 categories about “sense of community” emerged from focus group discussions s o c categories changes and development belonging belonging to local community what effects sense of belonging primary needs familiarity primary group belonging and sense of responsibility influence and power opportunities to influence community belonging and influence how community influences individuals needs youths’ needs emotional connection youths’ feelings adult influence (reciprocal) lack of trust toward politics distrust toward local administration social cohesion relationships, bonds, ties results indicated that the term “community” is associated with words related to bonding (sharing, brotherhood, acceptance, support) in the context of specific relationships (friendship, family). young people experience difficulties to conceive a community without a direct (face to face) contact among members and without a place allowing such interactions. the local community for adolescents is: a) a place for experimenting feelings of belonging; this requires familiarity and experiences with the context; 130 building participative, empowering & diverse communities b) a place “not chosen”, allowing the satisfaction of material needs (cf., obst & white, 2007 on differences in levels of soc between self selected and “not chosen communities”). the peer group is the context for satisfying relational needs (a nested community within the local community, cf. brodsky & marx, 2001). influence refers to the opportunity to participate and to contribute to the life of the community through vote, individual and collective action, and it is fundamental for experiencing feelings of membership; however, contexts allowing to experience it are limited and previous experiences of influence have been unsatisfactory. according to these results a new scale was developed, including both items drawn from previous instruments (the italian scale of sense of community by prezza et al., 1999; the nyi by chipuer et al., 1999; the sci by perkins et al., 1990) and new items taking into account the results of the focus group interviews, in the effort to measure soc according to the needs and experiences of this developmental phase. the new scale was meant to measure soc referred to the local community (country or city), considering it both as a geographical context and a locus of meaningful social relations for adolescents (puddifoot, 1996). more specifically, the process of scale construction involved the following steps: 1) selection of items from pre-existing scales: in particular, we excluded items referred to specific past experiences of influence because they were not relevant for adolescents (relevant experience of influence reported during focus group discussions referred mainly to school or religious groups and not to local community); we included items measuring shared emotional connection with the community as a whole (people in this place support each others; people in my town work together to improve things, many people in this town are willing to help each others). 2) adaptation of some items: in order to have the possibility to use the scale for the assessment of soc with reference to different territorial contexts, we formulated the items using specific terms (e.g., this place, which could be easily replace by the name of the town, or this/my town, etc.) and we included specific instructions for its completion. 3) reframing of some items: items measuring influence and needs satisfaction were modified by using a language closer to adolescents’ experiences (e.g., if only we had the opportunity, we (youngsters) could organize something good for this town; in this place there are many situations and initiatives which are able to involve young people like me). moreover, since youths’ lack of commitment in their community was a core topic of discussion in all focus groups, we included an item assessing perceived opportunities to exert influence on the local community with respect to the improvement of quality of life (honestly i feel that, if we engage more, we would be able to improve things for young people in this town). 4) inclusion of new items referred to support and emotional connection with peers (i like to stay with other adolescents of this town) and with the local community (in this town people look for each others and want to stay together). the final version of the instrument, emerging from the validation study (cicognani, albanesi, & zani, 2006), includes 5 subscales, for a total of 36 items (response alternatives ranging from 0 = not at all true to 4 = completely true) (see figure 3). 131 building participative, empowering & diverse communities figure 3 the sense of community scale for adolescents satisfaction of needs and opportunities for involvement (α .82) in this place there are enough initiatives for young people in this place it’s easy to find information about things that interest young people in this place young people can find many opportunities to amuse themselves this place gives me opportunities to do many different things there are many activities that young people can do in my town in this place there are many situations and initiatives which are able to involve young people like me in this place there are enough opportunities to meet other boys and girls support and emotional connection with peers (α .90) i spend a lot of time with other adolescents that live in this place many of my real friends are young people that live in this town i like to stay with other adolescents that live in this town in this place, i feel i can share experiences and interests with other young people i think i have a lot in common with other young people that live here in this place there are people able to stay beside me if i need it if i need a little help, i can ask for it to someone who lives in my town . if i feel like talking i can generally find someone in my town to chat to there are people here that represent an important source of moral support for me in this place it’s not difficult to find someone that can give some advice, if i have to take some decisions support and emotional connection in the community (α .81) people in my town collaborate together. people in this place support each others people in my town work together to improve things. many people in this town are willing to help each others in my town people look for each other and get along well. people in my town are willing to share things. sense of belonging (α .85) i think this is a good place to live in this is a pretty town i feel like i belong to this town i feel safe here as compared to others, my town has many advantages some of our local holidays and celebrations attract many people because they are very nice and well organized during local holidays and celebrations, i’ feel proud to live here i like to notice that when some local events are organized many people participate and get involved in this town there are many places loved and appreciated by all inhabitants opportunities for influence (α .71) honestly i feel that, if we engage more, we would be able to improve things for young people in this town if only we had the opportunity, i think that we could be able to organize something special for our town. if the people here were to organize they would have good chance of reaching their desired goals i think that people who live here could change things that are not properly working for the community 132 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the instrument showed good psychometric properties, good stability over time (r = .88) and good construct validity. it correlates positively with life satisfaction and perceived support from friends and the family. more recently, attempts to develop a shorter version of the scale (20 items) have also been made (cf. cicognani, menezes, nata, & marcon, 2007). results of the validation study indicate that the short version has good psychometric properties (cicognani & chiessi, 2009). sense of community and its relationship with adolescent social and political participation and well being results of studies conducted using this instrument indicated the following. scores on sense of community are higher in the dimensions opportunities for influence, and sense of belonging, and lower for support and emotional connection in the community, suggesting that opportunities for adolescents to exert influence over their community are a critical aspect in the development of sense of belonging. this result is consistent with evans (2007, 704): “soc for these teens is incomplete without the experience of power (…) power comes from developing capacity, experiencing voice and reasonance, and having opportunities to play meaningful roles in the context of caring adult support and challenge”. moreover, for adolescents the dimension support and emotional connection with peers scores higher than support and emotional connection in the community, confirming that at this age, the peer group is a more significant context for social interaction (a “nested community” within the territorial community). as regards age differences, results indicate that soc decreases with age, and particularly the dimensions satisfaction of needs and opportunities for involvement and support and emotional connection in the community: this result suggests that as adolescents grow, they find their town as less adequate in satisfying their changing needs (cf. also cicognani, albanesi, & zani, 2008; cicognani, zani, & albanesi, submitted). as stated by evans (2007, 706): “evidence shows that young people’s global soc decreases as they move through high school – no doubt due in large part to the mismatch between their increasing need to exert influence and the lack of meaningful roles afforded by them”. in fact, “as teen age, they congregate in areas away from neighbourhood and thus feel less connected and have less opportunities to influence the neighbourhood” (695696). as regards gender, results are not consistent: some studies did not find differences (cicognani et al., 2006; albanesi, cicognani, & zani, 2007) but others indicated higher scores for males (cicognani, albanesi, & zani, 2008; zani & cicognani, 2008; cf. also albanesi et al., 2004). gender differences in adolescent’ soc should be further examined: it is still unclear to what extent they are an effect of different experiences of specific communities (with males having more opportunities to explore different ways of belonging, receiving more support from adult members of the community and having the opportunity to belong to a wider range of communities) or an effect of different perceptions of the community. colarossi and eccles (2003), provided different explanations of gender differences in social support involving both gender role-related behaviours and beliefs about communality: even if the authors did not clarify the causal path that lead males to receive more support from adults compared to females, their findings could be an interesting starting point in order to verify and understand gender differences in soc. 133 building participative, empowering & diverse communities as regards the size of the town, adolescents living in small towns score higher on soc, particularly on satisfaction of needs and opportunities for involvement, support and emotional connection with peers and support and emotional connection in the community (albanesi et al., 2007). this result is consistent with studies on adult population (prezza et al., 1999). as regards group membership, scores in soc are higher among adolescents who belong to a formal group than among those who do not belong to any group. this results holds particularly for religious groups and sports groups, and differences concern mostly sense of belonging, satisfaction of needs and opportunities for involvement, support and emotional connection with peers, support and emotional connection in the community and, in case of religious groups, opportunities for influence. as regard participation we found that soc has positive correlations with both protest oriented and prosocial-oriented civic engagement (albanesi et al., 2007): this result is consistent with our previous studies that showed that adolescents and young people who participate more to local community life have higher soc compared to less involved youth (zani, cicognani, & albanesi, 2004) and with a general recognition of the relevance of participation in order to increase adolescent’ soc (pretty, 2002; evans, 2007). other studies (flanagan, cumsille, gill, & gallay, 2007; foster-fishman et al., 2007) have shown that “sense of community connectedness” is a significant predictor of civic commitment and that it reinforces individuals’ willingness to engage for the benefit of their neighbourhoods. overall, these studies emphasise the need to deserve particular attention to the relationships between soc, social and political participation: in fact, soc can play a significant role in the development of attitudes toward politics and in willingness to be involved in political processes (boeckmann & tyler 2002). these issues are very important, notably nowadays, a period characterized by a constant decline in political participation, particularly among the younger generations. a result that is consistent through all our studies is the significant role of soc in influencing young people’s social well being (zani et al., 2004): soc increases social well being directly when studied in deprived context (cicognani et al., in press), and mediates the relation between group membership and social well being when we studied it in connection with civic engagement (albanesi et al., 2007). soc exerts its positive effect increasing the adoption of active coping strategies, especially among female adolescents. these results are consistent with a bulk of literature that emphasizes the protective effect of family, school and community relationship against adolescent loneliness (pretty et al., 1994), depression and anxiety (mcgraw, moore, fuller, & bates, 2008) and their importance in determining wellbeing (evans & prilleltensky, 2007). however, they also suggest that the way contexts are perceived (and not only their objective characteristics) is relevant in order to understand contextual effects on stress, coping and wellbeing. on the relationship between soc and residential stress our results suggested that at least in some circumstances, a stronger emotional investment in the community might lead to a more critical attitude towards what happens within it, and may possible become a source of stress when ones’ expectations are not met (cicognani et al., 2008). however this topic should be further examined: in a different research (cicognani et al., in press) we found that when using the global 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(2008). forms of civic engagement among adolescents: why youngsters decide to participate?, paper presented at the eara conference (turin, 7-10 may). zani, b., cicognani, e., & albanesi, c. (2001). adolescents’ sense of community and feeling of unsafety in the urban environment. journal of community & applied social psychology, 11(6), 475-189. zani b., cicognani e., & albanesi c. (2004). quale comunità per adolescenti e giovani. linee di ricerca su partecipazione, appartenenza e benessere sociale [which community for adolescents and young adults. lines of research on participation, belonging and social well being]. in n. de piccoli, g.p. quaglino (eds.), psicologia sociale in dialogo (pp. 247–263). milano: unicopli. 137 building participative, empowering & diverse communities community critical psychologies: ideological convergence despite geographical dispersion joaquim coimbra1, paul duckett2, david fryer3, ibrahim makkawi4, isabel menezes5, ilana mountian6, mohamed seedat7, carl walker8, at first sight there appear to be, internationally, many diverse, radical, manifestations of ‘community psychology’ but we share a belief that international community psychology has gradually become decreasingly diverse and decreasingly radical the more it has become academically and professionally established and evangelised and is now endangered as a critical alternative to the disciplinary ideologies, theories, procedures and practices of mainstream psychology. as a consequence, in our view, the interests of people whose lives are most characterised by immiseration, suffering, social injustice and oppression are increasingly blighted and increasingly threatened. however, we believe that these reactionary developments were and are not inevitable and can be reversed by those collectively committed to community critical psychology. in this paper, despite many differences in our constituting contexts, approaches and work, we come together in solidarity as community critical psychologists to emphasise our common commitment to the development and enactment of community critical psychologies, and our common opposition to the dominant community (acritical) psychologies. the ordering of terms is significant here. we are committed to the wider spectrum of critical psychologies which expose and contest community injustice and misery rather than to the subset of community psychologies which are critical in standpoint. we are critical in relation to oppressive and unjust societal arrangements but also critical in relation to community psychologies, and other manifestations of ‘psy’, which collude with or actually construct and maintain oppression and injustice. although the concept of community is central to community critical psychology, we believe it is remarkable how seldom and how superficially the notion of community has been subjected to critical i.e. historical, political and ideological critique by community psychologists who use the term. in dominant discourses “community” is usually positioned either as a ‘safe’, ‘warm’, ‘friendly’ ‘place’ or community is positioned as marginal, amoral, anomic or foreboding, forbidding and frightening. because the uncritical construction of community can lead to a justification for processes of ‘othering’, exclusion and apartheid-construction through boundary drawing, we believe that we have an obligation as community critical psychologists to critically reflect on the concept of community, to clarify to which community we refer when we use the term ‘community’, 1 oporto university, portugal 2 manchester metropolitan university, england 3 charles sturt university, new south wales, australia, dafryer@csu.edu.au to whom communications about this paper should be addressed 4 birzeit university, palestine 5 oporto university, portugal 6 manchester metropolitan university, england 7 university of south africa 8 university of brighton, england mailto:dafryer@csu.edu.au 138 building participative, empowering & diverse communities to consider who is being ‘othered’ by being placed outside of ‘community’, through our talk, thought and action, and to theorise how the concept has been constructed historically and is reconstructed and deployed today. this is especially the case when community is positioned as a place of familiarity (shared interests, shared space, shared identity and so on) and othering is achieved through positioning in terms of alien exteriority. the concept of community has been transformed and employed by various interest groups for varying political and economic purposes and is rooted in regulation. for example, historically, the concept of community was tied to the management of workers under colonial direct rule in east africa where ‘community’ was constructed to classify and regulate south asian immigrant skilled manual workers. the construct ‘tribe’ had been used to administer the african workforce but this was regarded as inappropriate for south asian workers so a new concept had to be created. during the dramatic social upheavals of the english industrial revolution, community was reconstructed to transfer the regulation of society from regulation by nature (agriculture and artisanship) i.e. to the regulation of society through bureaucratic social administration and the mechanisation of working practices (agribusiness, commerce and industry). more recently, in the uk, community was incorporated in ‘third-way politics’ – transferring responsibility away from social institutions to ‘communities’ with the consequence that ‘community’ has become the site of a political project which mediates between the individual and social institutions. it is therefore essential for community critical psychologists to undertake critical analyses of “community” because it is important to understand the constitutive material, social, socioeconomic, cultural, ideological and discursive contexts within which attempts are made to anchor its meaning, the ideological purposes for which it is invoked and the types of subordination it creates. this larger context, within which the objects of study and intervention of community psychology are in contemporary times inevitably immersed, is in perpetual socio-economic, cultural, political, ideological and historical flux. we believe that contemporary ‘hyper-’, ‘late-’, ‘post-’, ‘liquid-’ or ‘modern-’ societies are impossible to comprehend on the basis of single organizing principles, as at least appeared to be the case in the past when traditional societal organizations seemed more stable, rigid and simple, i.e. less complex, and more predictable. contemporary societies have become increasingly characterised by: paradox and contradiction; developmental trends working in divergent and sometimes opposite directions; accelerating social change, unremitting scientific and technological innovation; rampant ubiquitous consumerism; elimination of common cultural/collective reference points; the gradual disappearance of successive grand meta-narratives and the emergence of individualising, life narratives. relations between traditional societies and contemporary ones have, in other words, been ruptured. we believe these changes have cumulatively changed the means through which personal existence can be rendered meaningful and as a consequence: people have found it increasingly difficult to construct a sufficiently coherent understanding of themselves and the social world in which they live; isolated and victimised persons have been blamed for their own social exclusion, unemployment or having been ‘othered’ in myriad ways; and governmentality has been increasingly achieved through uniquely subtle modes of control in which psychology has been central because both constructing ‘known’ psychological dimensions of ‘reality’ and itself being a manifestation of the psychologised-therapeutic cultures which it has played a part in constructing. 139 building participative, empowering & diverse communities ‘community’ is an ambiguous concept which has, in diverse lay and expert discourses, a wide variety of sometimes contradictory meanings, serving the interests of a wide variety of ideologically distinct interest groups. the growing individualisation and privatisation of life has been paralleled by a mythologizing of ‘community’ which has ignored the often inegalitarian and unfair aspects of communities and refrained from consideration of the problematic specificities of particular communities in their socio-historical context i.e. power imbalances associated with ethnocentrism, classism, heterosexism, ageism, sexism, embodied diversity and, especially, patriarchy and colonisation. we believe that colonialist practices constitute one of the most important causes of community mental health problems. there are a number of examples of colonialist practices to be drawn upon. however, here, we focus upon problematic uncritical western funded projects misleadingly referred to as “civil society” organizations, often ngos (non government organizations) which have come to constitute an encompassing network recently imported and now operating widely in the third world. during the first two decades of resistance to the israeli occupation, the palestinian people in the west bank and gaza strip managed to establish an extraordinary network of grassroots organisations and community level committees, including student unions, women’s groups, workers’ groups and a wide variety of professional organisations. underlying this sense of community and collective responsibility was spectacular participation in volunteering and contribution to the public good. when the first intifada erupted in 1987, these grassroots community groups engaged in sustained resistance to oppression and provided much needed social and psychological support to victims of political and military violence. when the second intifada erupted in 2000 the situation was quite different. the palestinian community in the west bank and gaza was less prepared to sustain collective struggle and provide the level of social and psychological support it did before because indigenous, grassroots, and community based voluntary organisations had been disabled by an invasion by a plethora of western non government organizations providing individualized, depoliticized, psychosocial training-cum-mental health care services to a broad variety of groups including women, children and victims of military violence. not only were these projects sporadic, overlapping, ill defined, seldom properly evaluated and generally unrelated to any strategic plan or a clearly defined movement to enhance the mental health of oppressed palestinian communities but they were constrained by the economic and political agendas of the funders and contributed to the construction of demoralised, depoliticised and pacified communities through psychologising, medicalising and individualising collective injustice and oppression stemming from brutal repression and military violence perpetrated through the occupation. the work of these non government organizations was anything but praxis towards liberation and social justice for the communities they purport to serve. within this oppressive context mental health research and practice became part of the problem rather than part of the solution. we call for the development of community critical psychologies up to the task of understanding and contesting the constructed consequence of prolonged colonialist oppression and profound social injustice recently reproduced in recent reactionary, so-called, ‘innovations’ in mental health social policy and practice in western europe which fail to address the most basic social, political and economic issues and, paradoxically, contribute to the creation of oppression, 140 building participative, empowering & diverse communities injustice and suffering. take the example of the uk which currently has one of the highest rates of child poverty in europe, although the relevance of this – even at a time when the discourse of ‘evidence-based practice’ is dominant tends to be underplayed or actually ignored. the us and the uk in the 1970s and 1980s exemplified the political, economic and social changes that came to be known as neoliberalism which encouraged a right of centre focus on the supply side of the economy. corporate interests were placed at the heart of the political agenda and in country after country, markets were deregulated, state planning and power dismantled, welfare cut and/or criminalized and full employment policies abandoned. these changes were directly responsible for grossly inflating the number of people living in poverty, growing social inequality, decreasing occupational security, work intensification and homelessness. regarding mental health, the overwhelming focus of inquiry has been on the individual. individual discourses of suffering have been promoted in medicine, the media and politics. this is exemplified by richard layard, who, in his work in the economics of happiness and in his affiliation with the blair government, became a prominent spokesperson and influential lobbyist for individualistic interventions in relation to mental health. layard contended that 10,000 extra therapists and 5,000 clinical psychologists needed to be trained over a short time and the consequent ‘improving access to psychological therapies programme’ was the uk government’s solution to the mental health crisis. the aims of the programme included providing psychological therapy to help people stay in work and improve their well-being. more recently the uk government announced plans to provide cbt to people made redundant. all the while the uk government, in conjunction with a business community with growing influence over social and economic policy, and bolstered largely by uncritical, compliant or even collusive institutionalised psychology, has continued to collude with damaging economic and labour market practices that contribute to increasing social distress. we believe that social science relevant to health and community is characterised by four broad forms of intellectual labour and knowledge production operating alongside each other, sometimes in synergy and sometimes in uneasy co-existence. these synergies and tensions speak to the ambiguities and challenges inherent in the broader quest to advance liberatory forms of scholarship and praxis in community psychology and other social and human sciences. the first form of labour, ‘knowledge brokering’, is characterised by utilization of a range of mathematical and statistical techniques and formulae to make meaning of what was assumed to be objective, measurable phenomena. such meaning and understanding, in the form of empirically produced data are used as instruments to construct and legitimate pronouncements and recommendations. the second form of labour, evidence-led model development, is characterised by the promotion of various models of service delivery guided by the principles of community psychology and emphasises partnership, equity, prevention, positive mental health, appreciation of context, experimental efforts dedicated to developing replicable, cost-effective, and culturally appropriate modes of psychosocial services. the third form of labour, rebellion, is characterised by recognition of community members as authentic and vibrant intellectual agents and attempts to synergize particular analytical and methodological skills with project participants’ investigative and dissemination skills such as 141 building participative, empowering & diverse communities story-telling and narrative exposition. like any innovation this form of labour produces new and unexpected tensions and questions about how to restrict the dominance of certain forms of knowledge creation within and outside of science and how best to foster egalitarian relations when science meets society. the fourth form of labour, critical introspection, is characterised by introspective critique of the production and re-production of material and discursive inequalities in the system of knowledge-creation. whilst there is diversity in our respective community critical psychology standpoints and practices, we have here tried to draw out some characteristics of the standpoints and practices which we share. thus we tend to: draw upon subjugated literatures and conceptual frames of reference from outside the mainstream anglo-saxon psychological disciplinary tradition; problematise: individualism, the psychological and ‘the community’ as modes of conceptualisation and bases for intervention; critique mainstream psychologies as disciplinary practices; emphasise that capitalist neo-liberal globalisation, colonialism and patriarchy are fundamental causes of misery and ill health in contemporary societies; emphasise the importance of developing and enacting politically progressive community critical psychologies as contributions to the task of collectively transforming social reality to promote health, well-being and social justice; recognise the obligation to reflexively turn the critical gaze not only on the disciplinary ideologies, theories, procedures and practices of mainstream psychology but also on those of acritical community psychologies; urge the reconstruction, root and branch, of the interconnected conceptualisations, practices, procedures, technologies and ideologies which constitute both elite ‘psychology’ and popular ‘psy’. further reading bauman, z. (2001). community: seeking safety in an insecure world. oxford: blackwell publishing inc. coimbra, j. l. & menezes, i. (in press). society of individuals or community strength: community psychology at risk in at-risk societies. special issue of the journal of critical psychology, counselling and psychotherapy duckett, p.s. & schinkel, m. (2008) community psychology and injustice in the criminal justice system. journal of community and applied social psychology, 18, 5, 518-526. duckett p.s. (2005). globalised violence, community psychology and the bombing and occupation of afghanistan and iraq. journal of community and applied social psychology, 15, 5, 414-423. fryer, d. (in press). international manifestations of community critical psychology. guest editorial in a special issue of the journal of critical psychology, counselling and psychotherapy fryer, d. and laing, a. (2008). community psychologies: what are they? what could they be? why does it matter? a critical community psychology approach. australian community psychologist, 20, 2, 7-15. 142 building participative, empowering & diverse communities makkawi, i. (in press). towards an emerging paradigm of critical community psychology in palestine. special issue of the journal of critical psychology, counselling and psychotherapy mountian, i. (2005). images of women and drugs, p.8195. in zavos, a. et al (ed.), special issue: “feminisms and activisms”. annual review of critical psychology. issue 4 seedat, m. (2008). professor what do you do? manifestations of community psychology in south africa? paper presented at second international community psychology conference, lisbon. seedat, m. (in press). manifestations of community psychology in primary care special issue of the journal of critical psychology, counselling and psychotherapy walker, c. (in press). the improving access to psychological therapies programme, globalisation and the credit crunch: is this how we put politics into depression? special issue of the journal of critical psychology, counselling and psychotherapy 143 building participative, empowering & diverse communities there’s foreigner and foreigner: xenophobic reasoning and antiimmigrant discourse monica colombo, paolo cherubini, lorenzo montali, laura marando university of milano-bicocca correspondence to: monica.colombo@unimib.it dipartimento di psicologia ed. u6 piazza ateneo nuovo, 1 20100 milano (italy) abstract this research aims at analysing the expression of both overt and covert forms of xenophobia in native citizens’ discourse by adopting an integrated analytical approach that combines discourse and cognitive analysis. in particular, we are interested in detecting those discursive strategies that appear to be of crucial importance to the expression of xenophobic thinking and in examining the role exerted in concrete social contexts by cognitive mechanisms in shaping the inner “logic” of xenophobic discourse. to this purpose, 20 in-depth interviews were administered to adult residents from two districts in milan. verbatim transcripts are analysed in 3steps: a) computer-aided quantitative and qualitative data analysis; b) discourse analysis; c) cognitive analysis. keywords: xenophobia, discourse analysis, cognitive analysis, threat introduction the spread of explicit and implicit forms of xenophobia is being more and more documented in international research studies with regard to the emergence of social and political movements which support an anti-immigration position and to the cross-national diffusion of such a position in european public opinion (see rydgren, 2003, 2004; van der valk, 2002; eumc 2001a, 2001b, 2002). as zick, pettigrew and wagner (2008) show, prejudice and discrimination directed at immigrants are a widespread phenomena across europe and several cross-european surveys support this conclusion. european public opinion has responded to immigration flows in diverse ways ranging from full acceptance to prejudice, discrimination, and violence (pettigrew, 1998a, 1998b; pettigrew et al., 1998). immigration has generally been framed as a problem and it has often been perceived as a threat by the native population. theories of prejudice and discrimination attempt to uncover the psychological mechanisms that explain individual readiness to feel threatened by and to exclude ethnic groups. one major research tradition focuses on blatant and subtle prejudice (pettigrew & meertens, 1985); threat is regarded here as one of the two components that explain blatant prejudice. research shows that it is the perceived and not the actual proportion of immigrants that is the critical predictor of threat and anti-immigrant opinions (see, semyonov, raijman, tov, & schmidt, 2004). according to the integrated threat theory of prejudice (stephan, ybarra & bachman, 1999; stephan, ybarra, martinez, schwarzwald, & tur kaspa, 1998), four types of threat (realistic, symbolic, intergroup mailto:monica.colombo@unimib.it 144 building participative, empowering & diverse communities anxiety, and negative stereotypes) cause prejudice. realistic threats consist of threats to the very existence of the in-group, threats to the political and economic power of the in-group, and threats to the physical well-being of the in-group or its members. it is important to emphasize that it is the subjectively perceived threats posed by the other group that are the most relevant to causing prejudice. symbolic threats arise because of perceived group differences in morals, values, norms, standards, beliefs, and attitudes. symbolic threats are threats to the in-group’s worldview. out-groups that adhere to different worldviews threaten the in-group’s worldview and often are disliked as a consequence. people often feel threatened during interactions with out-group members because they are worried about being rejected, embarrassed, ridiculed, or exploited (stephan & stephan, 1985). the anxiety elicited by these feelings of threat can lead in-group members to dislike out-group members. several studies have shown that intergroup anxiety is related to prejudice (britt, bonecki,vescio, biernat & brown, 1996; islam & hewstone, 1993; stephan et al., 1999). negative stereotypes are implied threats to the in-group. 2. theoretical background as van dijk (2000) points out, discourse plays a crucial role in the reproduction and legitimation of prejudice, xenophobia, ethnic dominance and exclusion. there is a rich selection of studies describing the structure and function of xenophobic discourse (van dijk, 1984; wetherell & potter, 1992; reisigl & wodak, 2001), its diffusion through the mass media (van dijk, 1991; wodak & matoucheck, 1993; jäger & link, 1993) and its semantic organization in political discourse (van dijk, 1997; van der valk, 2002, 2003). discourse about ‘foreigners’ can be regarded as a symbolic resource which is used in group identity negotiation (gotsbachner, 2001). ‘others’ (i.e. foreigners) are viewed as ‘different’ and, in many cases, as ‘outsiders’ or even as ‘enemies’ (savic, 2005; colombo & senatore, 2003). xenophobia implies a sense of menace, fear, danger, unsafety and the perception of risk both at the individual level and for the in-group. our aim is to analyse how xenophobia is expressed in discourse: are all immigrants talked about as dangerous? or else, only some of them are talked about as dangerous? is any distinction established among different ethnic groups? is any distinction established among different contexts where intergroup contacts takes place? which sort of risks are referred to? how do people argue in support of these risks? in order to answer these questions we attempt at developing an integrated approach that combines discourse analysis and cognitive analysis. the major assumption of discourse analysis is that the phenomena of interest in social and psychological research are constituted in and through discourse. in this framework, xenophobia and prejudice can be regarded as a discourse objects; these objects are intersubjectively constructed in order to lend meaning to social experience. the term “intersubjective” refers here to the idea that subjectivity is socially elaborated: this means that interpretative resources are already available in culture and organised linguistically. in this perspective, xenophobic discourse can be regarded as a means to position oneself within the context in relation to all the other agents and to construct different forms of social relation. discourse provides with conceptual repertoires with which we can represent ourselves and others. different linguistic procedures are used to construct a “we-group” through particular acts of reference that simultaneously imply a distancing from the “other”. the accomplishment and negotiation of prejudiced/unprejudiced 145 building participative, empowering & diverse communities identities has been documented through several studies (see, edwards, 2003; rapley, 2001) as well as the processes through which those designated as ‘others’ are represented in discourse (augoustinous, tuffin e rapley, 1999; tileaga, 2006; verkuyten, 1998a, 1998b, 2001; wetherell e potter, 1992; wodak e matouscheck, 1993). in talk about ‘foreigners’, the concept of community is rethorically used to refer to national identity in order to make problematic the out-group identity when integration and acculturation are at issue (tileaga, 2006). discourse-oriented studies focus on the semantic organization of xenophobic discourse and on relevant discursive strategies such as selfand other presentation and social actors description. we focus here on how these strategies are performed in order to discursively construct a sense of menace when talking about ethnic groups and intergroup relations in different contexts. in order to analyse how people attain internal coherence, and get convinced of the correctness of their arguments we combine discourse and cognitive analysis. a few studies (see, rydgren, 2004) deal with the inner logic of xenophobic beliefs and the role exerted by sampling biases in information gathering (e.g., illusory correlations), common fallacious thinking tendencies (e.g., analogisms or similarity–based heuristic thinking, confirmation biases, deductive use of inductive schemata). a cognitive analysis of xenophobia would take into account: 1) illusory correlations, that is perceiving associations between variables that are not associated. for example: “most immigrants i heard of were dangerous people; hence, being an immigrant is a symptom for dangerousness”. in this example the fallacy is two-fold. first, a sampling bias: i heard only about some immigrants, and, because in my group there was some reason to speak about them and no reason to speak about many others, it is likely that they were not a random sample from their population. second, a pseudodiagnosticity bias: that is, the tendency to consider diagnostic for dangerousness the rate of dangerous immigrant, without comparing it to the rate of dangerous non-immigrant (see, cheng e holyoak, 1995; cheng e novick, 1990; holyoak, koh, nisbett, 1989; holland, holyoak, nisbett, thagard, 1986; mandel e lehman, 1998; hamilton, dugan, trolier, 1985; fiedler, 2000); 2) some analogical strategies, according to which properties of an individual are generalized to a different individual bearing some resemblance to the former. for example: “jules is an immigrant, and he’s a criminal; jim is an immigrant, then he’s likely to be a criminal, too” (see, cherubini, 2005); 3) some fallacious logical schemata, like the “affirmation of the consequent”: for example, “people with low intelligence get unqualified jobs; immigrants get unqualified jobs; therefore, immigrants have low intelligence” (see, cherubini, 2005); 4) various “confirmation biases”, a family of thinking strategies that bias individuals toward a systematic confirmation of their opinions in the face of contrary or ambiguous evidence (see, cherubini, castelvecchio, & cherubini, 2005; nickerson, 1998; poletiek, 1996; snyder & gangestad, s. 1981; snyder & campbell, 1980); 3. procedure 20 in-depth interviews were administered to residents from two districts in milan [high vs low presence of foreign immigrants]. the interview addressed the issue of immigration and inter-ethnic relationships at 3 different levels implying growing distance between the interviewee and the object of the 146 building participative, empowering & diverse communities question: micro. questions about the school, the immigrant schoolmates of the subject’s siblings, and their parents: the interviewee is at a short distance from the object of the question, she/he should have more precise experiential and direct information; meso. questions about inter-ethnic relationships in the neighborhood: most knowledge is grounded on accidental encounters and indirect evidence, hence causing an intermediate distance between the interviewee and the object of the question; macro. questions about immigration in italy in general: the interviewee is more distant from the object of the question and have little and sparse direct knowledge. verbatim transcripts were analysed in 3 steps: a) computer-aided content analysis; b) discourse analysis (semantic strategies, selfand other presentation, social actors description, rhetorical devices); c) cognitive analysis. main results are summarized in the next section. 4. results 4.1. content analysis a computer-aided content analysis was conducted with a recently developed software called t-lab. this software analyzes the internal structure of a text through a series of statistical tools thus allowing for both a concise and global view of the corpus. the software automatically identifies and selects the units to be analyzed (lemmas in lexical correspondence analysis; lemmas and sentences in cluster analysis), cluster analysis identifies significant clusters, each of which: a) is composed of a set of sentences; b) sentences included in each cluster are similar with regard to the co-occurrences of lemmas; c) each sentence is indexed by the extra textual variable (i.e. the district). by performing cluster analysis we aimed at uncovering the lexical composition and the semantic organization of interviewees’ discourse. three clusters were identified (see graph 1 in the appendix) the main factor allows for a distinction between cluster 2 that concerns the topic of interethnic relation at school [to the right of the origin] and those containing lemmas referring to the neighbourhood (cluster 3) and cultural identity (cluster 1). a sense of menace emerge both in cluster 1 and cluster 3, while no reference to any perceived risk is reported in cluster 2 (see the appendix for a list of the most significant lemmas included in each cluster). the main semantic dimension emerging from the lexicon of cluster 1 refer to the macrolevel and to cultural identity (“group”, “culture”, identity”, “keep”, “value”). the out-group is portrayed as threatening the cultural identity of the in-group (symbolic menace). lemmas included in cluster 2 mainly refer to the school, that is to a microlevel context where inter-ethnic relations may occur (“children”, teacher”, classroom”). inter-ethnic relations are described as supportive (“help”, trust”, support”). the most common term for the outgroup is “foreigner”. other terms for the out-group refer to ethnic groups (e.g. “indians”, “arab”, “southamericans”). from the analysis of lemmas and sentences included in this cluster, it emerge that at this level (micro) the out-group is not represented as threatening. at the same time, the term “integration” clearly refers here to the idea of cultural assimilation. 147 building participative, empowering & diverse communities lemmas included in the cluster 3 refer to inter-ethnic relations at the meso-level, that is in the neighbourhood (“street”, “house”, “live”). the presence of immigrants is associated to the idea of negative changes in quality of life in the neighbourhoods and to the perception of individual unsafety. (“dirt”, degrade”, “damage”). immigrants are categorized through a coherent set of oppositions: legal vs illegal, integrated vs non-integrated, male vs female immigrants. two coherent sets of terms characterze this cluster: the first concerns the problem of control and regulation of immigration flows, the second concerns the feelings of general unsafety associated to illegal immigration and the increasing risk of crime. the lemmas “country”, “we”, our” refer to the opposition between the in-group and the out-group. immigrants are associated here to “crime” and “delinquency” (realistic menace) and, consequently, the need for control is invoked. 4.2. referential and predicational strategies as in previous studies (see, van dijk, 2000), it was found that the overall semantic strategy underlying interviewees’ discourse is characterized by a positive selfpresentation and a negative other-presentation strategy. referential strategies are used to naming social actors (individuals and groups), to construct and represent them in discourse through social membership. predicational strategies are used to labelling social actors more or less positively or negatively. in interviewees’ discourse the opposition in-group-out-group is emphasized and immigrants are frequently associated with problematic social phenomena, especially crime and delinquency. the most common terms for the out-group are “immigrants” and “foreigners”. the pronoun ‘we’ is used to refer to the italian people, especially when the focus is on nationality. italian citizens are specified and differentiated in the toponymical characterization ‘italy’ and/or the ethnonymical designation ‘the italians’. nation-related references such as ‘the people’, ‘the country’, ‘our country’, frequently occur (cluster 1 and 3). collective identity is invoked here as the “other” is perceived as threatening the cultural identity of the ingroup. the objective category of legal status is used to establish a fundamental division inside the general category “immigrants” between the legal residents and illegal ones, thus giving objective reasons for a rejection of the out-group. this group representation reinforces evaluations in terms of the opposition between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ immigrants; the latter are attributed negative traits and are explicitly associated to individual unsafety. 4.3. inferential structures as an illustration of cognitive analysis, we report here the analysis of one excerpt from the first interview that – in its brevity – highlights a variety of cognitive mechanisms that build up the “logic” of that person’s attitude toward immigrants. it is an example of argumentation at the meso-level. spontaneous misreading of clues, integrated with some commonsense general premises and with a fallacious deductive step, build up a case for immigrants’ dangerousness subjectively compelling, but lacking any conclusive evidence. excerpt 1, subj1: i mean…i was never personally mistreated, or involved in arguments. what you see is broken bottles scattered all around the neighborhood, and drunk people wandering around. this excerpt gives a glimpse of the many complex, yet fast and spontaneous, inferential passages that build up the background opinions that this person is reporting. we might assume 148 building participative, empowering & diverse communities that she begins with a useful, and true, general rule from previous knowledge: 1. drunk people are dangerous in the excerpt she mentions perceptually salient environmental clues, “broken bottles”. why does she associate them to immigrants? what is spontaneous is associating salient, distinctive, features with other salient, distinctive, features: the accumulating broken bottles are perceptively salient, and that immigrants tend to leave them around relatively more (but not absolutely more) than italians is also perceptively salient: the resulting thought is, that if there’s a broken bottle around, it has been probably left by an immigrant: this is a typical illusory correlation. on the grounds of this “perception” (but, as we saw, it is an inference, not a direct perception) subject 1 inductively concludes: immigrants drink a lot of bottles this is likely true, if we speak of the immigrants as a group: simply because the group is numerous (we previously estimated it at 4% of the population). but it hides a fallacy in the following – and rather spontaneous step, known in logic as “distribution fallacy”. it consists in applying a property of an aggregate entity to each component of the aggregate entity (example: americans are a rich people; uncle tom is an american; therefore, uncle tom is rich). in this context the fallacy allows the invalid conclusion: each immigrant drinks a lot of bottles. (or its probabilistic equivalent: it is highly probable that an immigrant drinks a lot of bottles). the following ring in the logical chain is retrieving another true general rule from previous knowledge: 4. whoever drinks a lot gets drunk from 3 and 4 she derives the conjecture, convergent with the social representation of immigrants: 5. immigrants are drunkards. she does not specify that they involve immigrants, but presumably she tacitly implies it. this inductive evidence for 5 is an example of what is commonly known as “positive control”, a very strong tendency in human explicit hypotheses testing. when hypothesizing that x (“being an immigrant”) is associated to y (“drinking a lot”), positive testing consists in focusing on x cases (immigrants), in order to detect those who are y (drunk). if it detects a reasonable amount of x&y cases (drunk immigrants) it concludes that the hypothesis is confirmed, without comparing them to x&not-y cases (sober immigrants), and almost totally neglecting not-x cases (that is, the rate of drunkenness in non-immigrants). that is, positive control means focusing on x&y confirmatory instances and not looking for, or underestimating, not-x & y, x & not-y, and not-x & not-y instances. of course, 1 and 5 entails the valid conclusion (remember: valid does not mean true; it means true if all the premises were also true): 6. immigrants are dangerous conclusion 6 is the “background knowledge”, or default general rule, backing all her following arguments. “immigrant are dangerous” is also a topos, a frequent feature of the social representation of immigrants. 149 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 5. discussion the analysis shows that not all immigrants are talked about as dangerous and that different kinds of risks are invoked depending on the context. arguments concerning individual unsafety are offered when talking about the presence of foreign immigrants in the neighbourhoods (mesolevel) while threats for the in-group emerge when inter-ethnic relations are regarded at a macrolevel. people strive to build subjectively coherent arguments in order to support their xenophobic feelings. many of these arguments are rooted on known cognitive tendencies – potentially fallacious when dealing with social realities. accordingly, those arguments are subjectively rational and selfpersuading, conjuring up a subjective world where immigrants are an actual, objective threat. xenophobic feelings reflect only in part – if at all – objective risks conveyed by massive immigration; at the individual level, most of them spring from the interaction between the boundaries of the social environment and the constraints of human cognitive processes, and are diffused, reproduced and strengthened by shared discursive practices. 6. conclusions the distinction between “foreigners and foreigners” outlined by the analysis of content in the first part can be seen, from cognitive perspective, as the macroscopic result of the different domains of application of the two human inferential systems: the explicit one, dealing with limited information and uncertain environments, and the implicit, experiential one, gathering and systematically processing, in an automatic way, pieces of evidence from well-known, limited, relatively stable environments (see, de neys, 2006; sloman, 1996, 2002; stanovich & west, 2000). in this section we will see some examples of their microscopic workings. the question in the interviews were of two categories, depending on the “distance” of the interviewed from the target of the question: questions about the school, the immigrant schoolmates of the subject’s siblings, and their parents: the interviewed is at a short distance from the object of the question, she/he should have more precise experiential, direct information, and should recur less to explicit thinking strategies; questions about the immigrants in the neighbourhood, eventual problems connected to them, immigration in italy in general, the importance of cultural identity, and the importance of inter-group contacts: the subjects are more distant from the objects of the questions and have little and sparse direct knowledge about them; furthermore, the objects of the questions are rapidly changing realities, likely not allowing the fine-tuning of the experiential system to them; accordingly, many answers to these questions should recruit explicit thinking strategies, including some erroneous or imprecise ones. the neatest boundary between the categories of immigrants that our subjects depicted coincides with the different domains of application of the two human inferential systems. indeed, a majority of subjects, with different degrees of intensity, arrived at or described some xenophobic conclusions concerning immigrants when responding to questions concerning their neighbourhood or immigration in italy in general: questions whose answers mostly hinged on explicit thinking. by contrast, most of them described positively (again, with different degrees of intensity) the restricted and better known domain of their siblings’ immigrant classmates, and of 150 building participative, empowering & diverse communities their parents. they rarely used argumentation at all in doing this: mostly, they simply reported their positive impressions, and impressions are the direct results of implicit thinking processes applied to a familiar environment. moreover, our results suggest that when intergroup contact is not conceived as a generic and anonymous intersection of different ethnic groups in a neighbourhood, but as a structured relationship in a bounded social and physical space (the school) between members of different groups pursuing the same goal (an acceptable school for their children), it can foster a reciprocal knowledge based on a vast amount of direct experiences; 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(2008). ethnic prejudice and discrimination in europe. journal of social issues, 64, 2, pp. 233-251. 153 building participative, empowering & diverse communities appendix graph1. distribution of clusters in the cartesian plot cluster: n° 1 ----------------------------------------------------cat lemmas chi2 lem keep 1688,948 lem identity 1420,324 lem characteristic 941,538 lem important 746,597 lem cultural 411,937 lem exclude 286,596 lem group 234,301 lem contact 143,532 lem necessary 138,003 lem culture 30,488 lem believe 29,378 lem value 8,215 lem different 7,819 lem origin 4,409 lem structure 4,228 154 building participative, empowering & diverse communities cluster: n° 2 ------------------------------------------------cat lemmas chi2 lem child 433,23 lem classroom 210,85 lem son 116,99 lem parent 84,53 lem compagno 59,37 lem attend 58,41 lem foreign 57,94 lem primari 52,02 lem relationship 50,57 lem language 49,63 lem teacher 46,88 lem chinese 45,73 lem mother 45,18 lem friendship 33,87 lem family 27,45 lem school 27,19 lem italian 26,33 lem play 24,07 lem support 20,59 lem group 19,34 lem together 18,91 lem friend 17,23 lem egyptian 13,91 lem el_salvador 12,47 lem learning 12,45 lem program 10,38 lem origin 8,20 lem integrate 6,55 lem sri_lanka 5,46 lem arab 4,78 lem skin 4,72 lem indian 4,50 cluster: n° 3 -----------------------------------------------cat lemmas chi2 lem person 70,97 lem people 61,27 lem rule 42,71 lem live 41,92 lem reside 40,47 lem situation 37,59 lem neighbourhood 37,13 lem street 35,75 lem respect 35,27 lem zone 34,11 lem need 31,50 lem control 30,89 lem we 29,97 lem our 28,92 lem respect 22,42 lem police 21,40 lem country 19,00 lem delinquency 18,88 lem entry 18,86 lem law 17,62 lem life 14,35 lem change 13,50 lem right 13,39 lem immigration 13,26 lem illegal 12,58 lem steel 12,16 lem dirty 12,16 lem urban decay 11,33 lem discomfort 10,20 lem evening 9,31 lem increase 9,26 lem bother 8,57 lem bad 8,38 lem delinquency 7,26 155 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the bio-psychosocial impact of forced migration: a participatory approach amongst refugees and asylum seekers in malta marika podda connor, msc, bsc (hons), rn, school of health and social sciences, middlesex university, london abstract objectives: to explore the bio-psychosocial impact of forced migration on asylum seekers/refugees in malta. this paper focuses on the complex processes of interaction between asylum seekers/refugees and their physical, psychological, social and cultural environments, in their search for meaning. the author’s concern prior to the study was how the participants make sense out of their lives following forced migration whilst encompassing complex challenges, affecting their health (physically and psychologically) and their social well-being. design: a participatory qualitative study of subjects’ experience of forced migration was chosen for this study. semi-structured focus group interviews were used as the main instrument to collect data. additionally, a body outline figure was used to direct participants into the context of the study and to generate further discussion. two research assistants who assisted with the recruiting of the sample, data collection and analysis were trained by the researcher and conducted the focus group interviews in the amharic and tigrinya languages. subjects: 14 eritrean/ethiopian adults 7 males and 7 females who were released from the detention centre six months prior to this study. results: four themes emerged from the findings of this study. the first refers to the effects of detention over a very long period of time which contributed to feelings of helplessness, psychological distress and suicidal urges. the second theme revealed that negative attitudes and poor communication with health professionals and front desk personnel led to the inaccessibility of health care services. moreover, according to the participants, their dark skin is the cause for avoidance and lack of social support, unemployment and hostility from the dominant culture which greatly affects their integration within the maltese society as described in the third theme in the fourth theme participants were found to have high expectations of a third country resettlement which was perceived as a means towards better working conditions and economic prospects. conclusion: this study illustrates how assessing and meeting the needs of vulnerable individuals such as asylum seekers/refugees represents a challenge for health and social care. it highlights the need for implementing cultural competence training for professionals in this sphere, (see leaflet) if the needs of asylum seekers/refugees are to be addressed holistically. furthermore, while mainstream facilities should be a basic component of the refugee experience in a resettlement country, culturally sensitive programs may contribute to facilitate acculturation keywords: forced migration, health, participatory research, psychosocial distress, cultural competence 156 building participative, empowering & diverse communities introduction in this paper i will present some reflections on participatory qualitative research among a population in search of meaning. it draws upon the methodology used to explore the biopsychosocial impact of forced migration and how it is perceived by asylum seekers and refugees in malta (podda connor, 2007). irregular immigrants, who flee their homeland for security are constantly trying to make sense of their lives; bridging gaps by moving across time and space. the term asylum seekers/refugees will be used throughout this paper. the difference between these terms in the context of malta is that asylum seekers refers to irregular immigrants who are either in detention waiting for the outcome of their application for refugee status or those who have been granted humanitarian protection. refugees are individuals who have been granted refugee status. the latter have the right for a work permit, education, health and social security benefits. the significance of the study it is hoped that this study enables individuals on the forefront of public services, especially nurses, doctors, social workers, military and law enforcement personnel, to connect and come to know the vulnerable asylum seeking person and to challenge their availability for social action. this study also aims to empower asylum seekers and refugees to exercise individual choice and take effective action, and make their existence known to the dominant culture. asylum seekers are fleeing misery, hunger, deprivation, war, persecution and torture. what forced migrants have in common is the limited choice available to them and the pressured decision they are compelled to make as they leave their homes in an effort to ensure their own, and their family’s survival (grove and zwi, 2006). the journey the arrival in malta is often accidental: the boats are normally heading for the italian islands of lampedusa and sicily, which offer direct access to the rest of italy and mainland europe (moorehead, 2005). however, many of them run out of fuel or are hit by bad weather and seek a haven in malta which is a signatory of the geneva convention 1951. according to a study by pugh (2000) up to 4,000 forced migrants drown every year, half of whom in the mediterranean, as they flee persecution and poverty. these figures were derived from interviews with refugees, records of bodies washed on shores, wrecks and government statistics. the vessels used by human traffickers and asylum seekers are often old and not sea worthy. they have unreliable engines and steering, and little by way of safety equipment. to risk one’s life in long and dangerous journeys across deserts and the sea in sub-human conditions shows desperation. asylum seekers suffer tremendous losses, giving up everything familiar and facing severe difficulties en route as well as when they arrive in the host country (blackwell, 2005). following such perilous crossings, those who survive the journey encounter other complex challenges in the host society: an indefinite period in detention, a different language, adapting to a country which is composed of structures and systems unlike those in some underdeveloped countries and problems of acculturation in a diverse culture. they often prove to be very resourceful and resilient and it is these strengths which may enable them to flee to a different country and face the associated challenges, including health. 157 building participative, empowering & diverse communities during the period they spend in the detention centre (which is often excessively lengthy) asylum seekers manifest high levels of psychological distress due to the uncertainty about the outcome of their applications for refugee status; they may be exposed to respiratory infections including tuberculosis as a result of the poor, cramped and unhygienic living conditions and suicidal urges due to fear of deportation. severe health consequences can result from past traumatic experiences and torture, as well as other epidemics of infectious diseases due to the crowded living conditions of most 1detention centres/ 2open centres. these attributes were also reported in an australian based research which allowed broad comparisons between asylum seekers/refugees held in detention centres with those in a community group (silove et al. 2001). once out of the detention centre, many refugees are often unemployed, live in deprived neighbourhoods, and have an increased risk of ethnic and social vulnerability that influences their health negatively. failure to examine potential indirect effects of unemployment prospects on mental health may also explain the depth of marginalisation in which asylum seekers and refugees dwell the study this paper considers the situation of eritrean and ethiopian asylum seekers/refugees and the impact of forced migration on their bio-psychosocial components of health employing a participatory qualitative approach. a qualitative approach was considered appropriate for this study as it uncovers new meanings by allowing for the expression of a full range of beliefs, feelings and behaviours. the role of the researcher in this study was to walk “a mile in the other person’s shoe understanding the person’s point of view from an empathic rather than a sympathetic position” (maykut and morehouse, 1994 p.29). participatory research was indicated for this study because of its involvement with extended communities that are vulnerable to the control or oppression of a dominant group or culture, such as asylum seekers and refugees (polit and beck, 2004). it involves participatory problem definition, visioning and building a shared agenda for action. the aim of participatory research is not only to produce knowledge, but action and consciousness-raising as well. reflexivity prior to commencing this study the author acknowledged and recognized a certain degree of personal reflexivity by acknowledging factors which otherwise may have influenced this study. personal reflexivity involves reflecting upon the ways in which one’s own values, experiences, interests, beliefs, political commitments, wider aims in life and social identities have shaped the research. at the outset of the present study the researcher adopted a reflexive approach which was exercised in a previous study (papadopoulos, 2000) to regard the research process meticulously 1 detention centers: confinement within a narrowly bounded or restricted location, where freedom of movement is substantially curtailed which accommodates asylum seekers who are awaiting the outcome of their application for refugee status. this period of time is not less than 4 months but not longer than 18 months 2 open centers: this term generally refers to government supported accommodation centers to house groups of individuals who have been granted refugee status or humanitarian protection. 158 building participative, empowering & diverse communities and rigorously, suspending personal belief and past professional experiences, eliminating biases and prejudices (leininger, 1991). an overview of the participants’ ethnohistory was an important aspect of this study in order to understand the socio-geo-political baggage of eritreans and ethiopians who are forced to migrate from their country of origin. this population was chosen as the target group for this study due to the unrest between these two countries where unremitting attacks on democratic institutions and civil society, the arrests of political opponents, destruction of the private press, and the incarceration of anyone thought to challenge the government’s policies (world report, 2007) led to the involuntary migration of the participants in this study. although the two countries where the participants came from were currently at war during the time this research was conducted, the group agreed to take part in this study affirming that they are friends and find the support they need away from home in each other. they all reasoned that it is their governments who are at war, leading them to flee their homeland. hence in this study there were no ethical issues in having a group mix of participants coming from two countries at war with each other. the objectives of the study: to explore the perceptions of asylum seekers/refugees’ physical and psychological impact of their experience of forced migration. to describe perceptions of asylum seekers/refugees regarding adaptation to their new environment. to examine the factors and challenges which forced migrants encounter in their search for meaning. recruitment of research assistants at the beginning of the study, the researcher consulted with community stakeholders (the director of the jesuits refugee services, malta and other ngos) through whom two eritrean/ ethiopian key individuals (1 ertirean male and 1 ethiopian female both fluent in amharic and tigrinya languages), who play an important role in the everyday lives of asylum seekers/refugees, were appointed as research assistants for this present study. the importance of the study was discussed with the potential research assistants who agreed to participate in the research process. they were trained by the researcher to assist throughout the different stages of the research process. recruiting research assistants from the same ethnic background of the population under study may represent unique logistic and analytic challenges as the latter may hold different values, concepts and beliefs from those of the researcher because of socioeconomic status, immigration history and other factors (tsai, et al. 2004). their training was aimed at enhancing the importance of the study, discussing the questions for the focus group prepared by the researcher, eliciting relevant information by appropriate probing, listening attentively to meanings behind what was being said and looking out for discernible non-verbal gestures which convey meanings. furthermore, they became skilled at conducting focus groups, obtaining demographic data through brief individual interviews, using and checking equipment used during interviews, recording interviews, and taking notes. the training was held over three afternoon sessions. 159 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the study sample the purposive sample consisted of 6 eritreans (2 males and 4 females) and 8 ethiopians (5 males and 3 females) adult asylum seekers and refugees from all open centres (group accommodation) in malta and others living in rented accommodation. the research assistants attempted to recruit two groups comprising of eight eritrean/ ethiopian females and eight eritrean/ethiopian males through a purposive sampling technique. an equal number of eritrean/ethiopian men and women over eighteen years of age was aimed for. mays and pope (2000) claim that in order to provide for a wide range of opinions, it is crucial to employ a sampling technique that will provide an accurate representation of the population under study into the focus groups. inclusion criteria eritrean/ethiopian men and women over the age of eighteen who had been released from detention for six months or more prior to taking part in this study this would mean that asylum seekers/refugees would have had sufficient experience within the maltese society. furthermore, persons to be chosen needed to have experience with the maltese health system. exclusion criteria non-eritrean/ethiopian individuals, unaccompanied minors and children. the involvement of asylum seekers/refugee children in research warrants a completely different approach due to their vulnerable age and situation. informed consent the participants were provided with an information sheet which was also read in the amharic and the tigrinya languages. while amharic is the official language of ethiopia and tigrinya that of eritrea, the latter is also widely spoken in ethiopia. informed consent enabled the participants to consent to or decline participation voluntarily. this was followed by answering any questions the participants wished to ask or clarify prior to signing the consent form. reassuring all participants that their involvement in the study would not adversely affect anything to which they are normally entitled may have increased participation. permission was granted by the participants to audiotape record the interviews for better transcription. the research assistants were asked to inform the group that on completion of the study, the tapes would be discarded. the research tool focus groups were the chosen instrument by which the main data was to be obtained. additionally, a brief demographic interview of each participant took place prior to the focus group interviews, and a body outline figure was utilized to direct the informants into the context of this study. fourteen individuals turned up for the two focus group interviews which were held on two different days. the female focus groups consisted of 4 eritreans and 3 ethiopians, and 2 eritreans and 5 ethiopians participated in the male focus group interviews. 160 building participative, empowering & diverse communities socio-demographic data at the start of the meeting the research assistants collected general socio-demographic information regarding the participants through brief individual interviews. the purpose of these short questions prior to the main data collection was to depict a collective image of the participants without identifying them. the respondents’ age, gender, nationality, educational achievement and employment experiences at the time the research study was being carried out were used to investigate whether differences in acculturation and integration outcomes exists due to these variables. in the introductory comments, an attempt was made to encourage the group to maintain confidentiality in that ‘what is heard in the group, remains in the group’ (jackson, 1998). a promise of confidentiality is a pledge that any information participants provide will not be publicly reported in a manner that identifies them and will not be made accessible to others (polit et al. 2001). focus groups the questions for the two focus groups were carefully selected and phrased in advance by the researcher. a dialogic approach was aimed for; therefore a checklist of semi-structured prompting questions was used to make sure that the domains within it were covered at some stage by all subjects. subsequently, the questions were reviewed together with the research assistants during one of the research assistant training sessions. according to the research assistants some questions regarding mental health problems were considered to be inappropriate and of a highly personal nature for the eritrean/ethiopian community to discuss in a group, due to the stigma involved. therefore it was decided that questions relating directly to this issue were to be omitted as the researcher has a duty to respect the norms and values of the informants in the study. the semi-structured focus group questions were designed to unfold an understanding of the culturally relevant aspects of eritrean/ethiopian asylum seekers and refugees’ perceptions of bio-psychosocial effects of forced migration. although no pilot study was carried out, the questions were carefully selected and phrased in advance together with the research assistants, to elicit maximum responses by all participants. the framework of the questions was designed to maintain a focus directed at relevant areas for both male and female focus groups. amharic and tigrinya languages were used during the interviews and for this reason a third research assistant was recruited, who later on in the study back-translated the transcript of the audiotapes, and assured the quality of the translation. to enable the research assistants to maximize the accuracy of the data, the discussions were audiotape recorded after permission from the participants was granted. this recorded data may have enhanced the potential validity of the data analysis. notetaking was minimal as the respective research assistants were advised to take into consideration any non-verbal cues or gestures which convey may a meaning. since the focus groups interviews were carried out in amharic and tigrinya, the researcher who was present during the interviews, was not able to handle any problems that may have arisen; such as checking behaviours against attitudes, challenging and drawing out respondents with opposite views and looking for the emotional component of the responses (steward and shamdasani, 1990). however, throughout the discussion, in collaboration with the research assistants, the researcher encouraged debate, explored inconsistencies and sought to clarify the 161 building participative, empowering & diverse communities participants’ ideas (kingry et al. 1990; krueger, 1994; kitzinger, 1996). the body outline figure another form of data collection was obtained by distributing to the participants a figure of two body outlines: one male (for the male participants) and one female (for female participants). the informants were asked to mark on the figure the body part which was mostly affected as a result of forced migration. this idea arose during the training of research assistants when they both remarked on the need to put at rest the mind of the asylum seekers/refugees participating in the study as they might be sceptical about the purpose of the study. the body outline figure was developed to save the participants any unnecessary anxiety, and to prevent biased responses and gain their trust. moreover, the researcher developed the body outline figure to direct the focus and plunge directly on their experiences of health and social issues at the outset of data collection. this image elicitation method proved to be thought provoking and generated further discussion. figure 1 gaining trust under these circumstances was difficult and therefore, an effort to build professional relationships with communities was crucial. as an ‘uninvited professional stranger’ within the eritrean/ethiopian community the researcher needed to ensure that the data collection instrument is not informed by eurocentric perspectives. the two focus group interviews (male and female groups) lasted 1.5 hours and each took place within the same week with a 3 day interval in between. they were held in a quiet setting in one of the open centres on the island, with chairs arranged in a closed circle where all members, research assistants and the researcher could see each other. access to use the premises was granted by obtaining permission from the open centre coordinator. the researcher attempted to set up a non-threatening environment conducive to expression of perceptions. after each of the two meetings tea, coffee and cake prepared by the researcher were offered to the participants and an honorarium was presented to each of the participants as an appreciation. 162 building participative, empowering & diverse communities data analysis soon after the interviews, the research assistants were asked to transcribe and translate the interviews from amharic/tigrinya into english. following this a randomly selected transcript from the two groups was back-translated into the original languages by a third research assistant. in this way the quality of the translations was assured. the scripts were read several times to ensure identification of categories. relevant words, phrases and descriptive terms were highlighted and extracts from the data were identified. although it was initially intended to use the software programme (nudist) as part of data analysis during the planning of this study, due to the researcher’s unfamiliarity with this programme, manual content analysis was ultimately the chosen approach to analyse the data. the research assistants were asked to document what they regarded to be important issues and themes, and to discuss these with the researcher. all data was reviewed by the researcher after taking into account all the themes and emerging issues which were grouped, coded and sorted with the research assistants. the reviewed data showed a process of evolving consensus and debate, where assertions were qualified and challenged by the researcher team. this helped to clarify any differing conceptual meanings and allowed the researcher and the research assistants to cluster and retrieve segments of related data (miles and huberman, 1984). these explanatory codes served to group the data into meaningful units of analysis. verification of the analysis and findings in a qualitative research the researcher is an involved participant rather than an objective observer (avis, 1998; bhatti, 1995). hence, this inclusive role played by the researcher placed more emphasis on the credibility of the researcher as a central component to the success of the study. strengths and weaknesses the explicit use of group interaction differentiates focus groups from other types of data generation interview (robinson, 1999). indeed according to some, the interaction between participants may reveal information that would be difficult to obtain in an individual interview (kingry et al. 1990). despite its content value, the range of information obtained in focus group interviews is limited. furthermore, a purposive sampling techniques are employed, cannot represent the wider population. while bristol and fern, (1996) suggest that there is little empirical evidence to support the view that focus groups are superior to other methods, asbury (1995) argues that they produce data rich in detail that are difficult to achieve with other research methods. the use of multiple methods (triangulation), to gather information would have rendered the study more credible and permitted the checking of data as the true picture of the study at hand. however this was not possible in this present study due to time constraints. permission and access permission to carry out the study was sought from the ethics committee of hssc middlesex university in london and from the research ethics committee and the data protection board in malta. further permission to have access to asylum seekers/refugees in open centres was sought 163 building participative, empowering & diverse communities officially from the coordinators of the premises. informed consent and respect for autonomy research assistants who purposively chose the participants for the present study were advised to select with fairness and respect. participants have the right for informed consent (burnard and morrison, 1992). therefore individuals participating in the study were presented with an information letter informing them about the aims and process of the study. after making a rational decision they were asked to sign an informed consent form (treece and treece, 1986). participation in research was voluntary according to the principle of autonomy (beauchamp and childress, 2001). participants were informed that they were at liberty to abstain from participation at any time. they were provided with adequate information regarding research, and the power of free choice, enabled them to consent voluntarily to participate in the research or decline participation (polit et al. 2001). confidentiality the major ethical issue to be dealt with in this study was confidentiality, given the vulnerable status of the participants. this was assured in the following manner: no participant was to be identified by name in any report or publication associated with the study; the recorded information was kept within the parameters of the researcher and the respective research assistants during data analysis. the audio-recorded tapes which were used during the interviews were discarded immediately following data anaylsis and no names were carried forward in the write-up of the report. anonymity could not be maintained due to the chosen method of data collection. beneficence and non-maleficence it is imperative that if disclosures relating to personal or traumatic events were to be made during data collection, or at any other stage in the study, the researcher would have been willing to provide to the participants effective support with appropriate and accessible sources of help (papadopoulos et al. 2002). this is particularly relevant when dealing with vulnerable people. however the questions during the focus groups did not elicit any traumatic past experiences. the responsibility not to harm the respondents in any way was crucial to this study findings and discussion this study affirms that an asylum seeker/refugee is a successful individual temporarily without funds and opportunities. the participants of this study shared problems which are common to marginalized and deprived groups in general. although the initial questions during the focus group interviews aimed to explore the impact of forced migration on the participants’ health, very little information regarding this issue was mentioned during the focus groups. nevertheless, symptoms associated with mental distress, such as headaches, memory loss, somatisation and high anxiety levels were mentioned throughout the discussions and also marked as highly influencing factors on the body outline figure where the majority of the markings showing parts of the body mostly affected by migration were around the head as shown in figure 1 164 building participative, empowering & diverse communities their main preoccupations were related to factors interweaved in the four major themes which emerged from the findings. these were mainly related to their extensively long experience at the detention centres upon arrival, the negative attitudes of health care professionals/reception staff towards them, the avoidance of society which was perceived to be due to their skin colour and their high expectations of finding better economic prospects when/if they were to resettle in a third country. on becoming detainees it is often said that a society’s moral strength is measured by how humanely it deals with the most vulnerable individuals living within its domain (silove et al. 2001). most of the participants in this study have spent long periods (12 to 18 months) in detention centers, awaiting the outcome of their refugee claims. during this time the participants manifested high levels of depression, lived in poor cramped and unhygienic conditions where suicidal urges, due to boredom and fear of deportation, were also reported. i suffered in different ways in detention: worrying, thinking a lot, stomach problems, feeling tired although not doing anything. i had loss of appetite and the food we used to eat in the detention centre was giving me more stomach problems. there are a lot of discomforts that could not be explained. the fact that i was in detention used to make me feel bad, sometimes i wanted to die. thoughts about home, the family i left behind, it was all too much. participant 2: male during this dismal period decisions regarding the participants’ health were taken by the military personnel who approved or disapproved whether the asylum seeker really needed medical attention. furthermore, whenever he or she was referred to a health centre or to hospital he/she was handcuffed throughout the whole journey. this humiliating strategy contributes to the psychosocial distress of asylum seekers, as locals looked down on them as if they were criminals as a female participant stated; before they released us from the detention centre they took us to hospital to take an x-ray. i was pregnant then and they (the soldiers) handcuffed me to 3 other girls. then we were expected to climb at the back of a military truck. i approached the women soldiers and told them that i cannot possibly go up the truck handcuffed and pregnant, so she freed me until i went up on the truck. participant 5: female instead of providing special care for the most traumatised individuals fleeing persecution, western countries may be subjecting them to the very conditions that are likely to hinder psychosocial recovery (silove et al. 2001). attitudes of health care professionals and health care utilization the findings in this study show that encounters with health care professionals and front 165 building participative, empowering & diverse communities desk personnel were found to be major barriers for asylum seekers to access health care services. these findings are consistent with those of other studies where doctors, nurses and reception staff had no formal training in coping with asylum seekers and refugees (van ryn and burke, 2000) perceived persons of low socio-economic status to be less intelligent persons with negative personality characteristics (karmi, 1992) and exhibited less non-verbal attitudes, empathy, courtesy and information giving (roter et al. 1997) as reported by one of the female participants: none of the nurses or doctors show any interest in our background or ask us if we prefer to be seen by a female doctor. it is very embarrassing for us to be examined by a man. in the end i started to miss appointments as the majority of doctors are men. they (the staff) expect us to change our values and beliefs overnight. when i first came out from detention, i did not understand anything about the maltese system. i did not know that i needed a prescription to buy medicine or what to do when i go to a health centre. by time i learnt, but these things take time. i feel sorry for those people who are yet to come out of detention, as they will feel lost at first. participant 2: female i already suffered from stomach ulcers back home, but now it has become much worse. together with all the worrying about my family back home i have encountered difficulties in the health system. i once went to the emergency department because i was very sick and vomiting blood. i was there at 9am. i understand that all over the world there is a priority for emergency cases, but in this case there were people coming from outside and getting in to be seen. when i approached the receptionist the person was very rude and unsympathetic. i was made me to feel like i should not be there and that she has a personal grudge against black people. participant 6: male the skin colour phenomenon. the maltese population is not used to interacting with ethnic societies. according to a eurobarometer study which explored discrimination in the eu (ameen, 2007) it was found that only 32% of maltese citizens said they believe that ethnicity enriches local culture. the participants perceived that certain behaviours of host nationals, have scarred their spirit more then any physical condition or illness resulting from forced migration. they felt that this is due to their skin colour as stated by these two participants the maltese invite us to parties organised by the company where i work at christmas, but we are never on the inside of things. they always maintain a certain distance. there seems to be a line between us and it is very difficult to break that line, because our faces (black) are not very common here. participant 5: male it takes some time before you can call someone your friend. they (the maltese) are not very happy with us at first, in fact they are shocked when they see that they will 166 building participative, empowering & diverse communities be working with us but then after a long time they start to ask you where you come from, your religion and only after they made a certain judgement about you they become your friends and accept you. but their first impression is that they are shocked to see a black man. participant1: male according to herring (2002) skin colour has an impact on occupational attainments and in identifying baseline differences in who gets what. although some of the informants received secondary and tertiary education in their homeland, most of these were employed in the construction industry as labourers in malta. according to beiser, (1999) refugees tend to work at menial jobs which are shunned by the locals and where the attainment of educational qualifications makes little difference. it must be understood that it often happens that employers do not recognize the immigrants’ work experience and qualifications (polidano, 2005). employers do not recognize our ability. i can prove that i can do it but they will always send someone to supervise me, someone to watch that i am doing it right, even if this person is less qualified than me. it sometimes bothers them that a black man is able to do certain things. participant 5: male it is very difficult to find a job here. they do not respect our qualifications or that we can learn as fast as others, especially when there were only few of us in the beginning. due to our nationality they give us a position where we are less paid than others doing the same job. no one gives us any information about unions and rights. participant 3: male although refugees have the right to have a working permit in malta, the majority of irregular immigrants have a humanitarian protection status only. it is this group of individuals who are highly exploited by employers as they do not have any rights and therefore cannot defend themselves in the case of abuse by their employers. these issues regarding the skin colour of refugees and difficulties with employment may have influenced the future hopes of the participants in this study, the majority of whom are yearning to resettle in a third country as they believe that it will provide them with better economic prospects: maybe if i was in a large country like england or france, they (the natives) would treat me better because they have more experience with black migrants in these countries. in malta if i had a british background i would be treated much better and my qualifications will be taken into consideration. there are also may eastern europeans where i work, but they do not have the problems we have. so it all boils down to skin colour. participant 4: male 167 building participative, empowering & diverse communities their expectations of work opportunities and a better life may be far fetched as problems of employment and integration encountered in malta are also found in other studies abroad (rudgren, 2004; valtonen, 1999; papadopoulos et al. 2002; papadopoulos, 2006) limitations of the study the participants of this study were from eritrea and ethiopia therefore the findings cannot be generalized to all asylum seekers/refugees in malta. the involvement of ‘insiders’ (research assistants) who were familiar to all participants may have influenced the participation of some and the refusal of others. moreover, most of the participants knew each other, therefore they may have been hesitant to elaborate in certain aspects of the discussion. conclusion this study has raised issues around the impact of the asylum seekers’/refugees’ experience of forced migration. the comprehension of this experience tinged by shades of humiliation and despair and leading to severe psychological distress, necessitates the profound understanding of trained personnel in cultural competence, especially those who work in the various areas of the public sector who have the opportunity to exercise and implement harmonization within diversity. for this reason a leaflet was devised by the author to promote an awareness regarding the significance of meeting the biopsychosocial needs of asylum seekers and refugees amongst health care professionals using the papadopoulos, tilki and taylor model for the development of cultural competence (papadopoulos et al. 1998). moreover, while mainstream facilities should be a basic component of the refugee experience in a resettlement country, culturally sensitive programmes and educating the public 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(2000). ‘the effect of race and socioeconomic status on physician’s perceptions of patient’s. social science and medicine, 50, p.813-828. world report (2007). eritrea/ethiopia. events 2006 http://hrw.org/englishwr2k7/docs/2007/01/11/ eritre14698.htm (accessed january 2007) http://hrw.org/englishwr2k7/docs/2007/01/11/eritre14698.htm http://hrw.org/englishwr2k7/docs/2007/01/11/eritre14698.htm 170 building participative, empowering & diverse communities parent education programs: (co)construction with parents anabela duarte costa(a)(b), ana cabrita(a)1, luana cunha ferreira(a)(b), paula encarnação(a), patrícia navalho(a), isabel narciso(a)(b), guida mendes(a)(b), nelson agapito(a)(c) & joão nogueira(a) (a) nós-cafap family support and parental counselling centre of nós, barreiro, portugal (b) fpceul faculty of psychology and educational sciences, university of lisbon, portugal (c) ispa higher institute of applied psychology, lisbon, portugal abstract the parent education / training programs that have been developed for the last two years at the family support and parental counselling centre of nós were developed for and with parents of children and youth at risk as a strategy to prevent and reduce child abuse and neglect. the weekly multi focused 3 hours sessions specifically target the parent’s response to the child or youth’s needs previously evaluated according to the framework assessment of children in need and their families (department of health, 2000). as so, each program is unique and its duration depends on the group’s characteristics. parents chose several themes like “child development and discipline”, “family-school relationship”, “children protection and safety” and “children and domestic violence”, which are developed with a multidisciplinary team that includes psychologists, a social worker, an attorney and a social-cultural animator. through a developmental perspective and a strong ecological and systems approach, these collaborative programs are designed to respond to the needs of the participants, fathers and mothers, aiming to enhance their knowledge, skills, resources and strategies, promoting a safe and stimulating healthy environment for the children and youth, through positive parenting practices. the strategies of intervention and preliminary qualitative data about the programs are discussed, as well as the future orientations. keywords: parent education / training, children / youth at risk for abuse or neglect, ecosystemic approach, cafap introduction the social welfare service known in portugal as cafap – centro de apoio familiar e aconselhamento parental – in english “family support and parental counseling centre – has been recently implemented in several portuguese non-governmental organizations (ngos). nós – associação de pais e técnicos para a integração do deficiente, an ngo that works with the population of two counties of the metropolitan area of lisbon, barreiro and moita, has its own cafap since 2006. this cafap’s main goal is to prevent and reduce risk or danger of maltreatment for children/youth and their families within their environment by promoting their well-being. we here define child abuse or maltreatment as “all forms of physical and/or emotional ill-treatment, sexual abuse, neglect or negligent treatment or commercial or other exploitation, resulting in 1 corresponding author address: r. lavoisier, 2, 2830-142 barreiro, portugal telephone: +351212412990 / +351936621385 fax: +351212072091 email: nos.cafap@mail.telepac.pt mailto:nos.cafap@mail.telepac.pt 171 building participative, empowering & diverse communities actual or potential harm to the child’s health, survival, development or dignity in the context of a relationship of responsibility, trust or power” (world health organization, 1999). cafap’s ultimate purpose is to prevent children from being removed from their homes. therefore, the emphasis is on families as the primary social context for children to develop, one of the fundamental principles according to minuchin, colapinto and minuchin (2007) to work with families and service systems. its conceptual framework is based on belsky’s (1980, quoted in scannapieco & connell-carrick, 2005) adaptation of bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory of human development (1979, qtd. in scannapieco & connell-carrick, 2005) to child maltreatment. as underlined by minuchin et al., it’s more effective to plan and implement services once understood the context were people live, the involvement of others and the resources available within the family’s informal and formal social network. the guiding principles “family centered”, “strengths-based” and “cultural responsiveness” (scannapieco & connell-carrick, 2005) are integrated into the ecosystemic assessment and intervention inspired in the framework assessment of children in need and their families (department of health, 2000). assessing the needs, as well as the strengths and difficulties, is a core assignment of cafap’s ecological team (i.e., psychologists, a social worker, an attorney, a social-cultural animator and volunteers) and it’s local community partners (e.g., social welfare service, child protection service, schools) to determine with the family whether a child is in need and how that child and family might be better helped. assessment should take account of three domains: (1) the child’s developmental needs; (2) the parents’ or caregivers’ capacities to respond appropriately; (3) the wider family and community factors (department of health, 2000). once established whether or not a child is in need, an intervention plan is designed with the family. besides individual and family intervention, cafap may invite the parents to participate in a parent education program (see figure 1). this multilevel and integrated approach is fundamental to many of these families who in their path to a better parenting encounter several services that instead of being perceived by the family as community resources (e.g., child protection services), are perceived as a source of family stress. it is therefore fundamental to search for a systemic “services delivery” equilibrium (alarcão, 2002). at cafap’s programs, these families, defined by alarcão (2008) as challenged families, have the opportunity, in an initial interview, to express their expectations and their suggestions. 172 building participative, empowering & diverse communities figure 1: from case reporting to parent’s participation in a parent education program. each program described in this paper is guided by the “good enough” (winnicott, n.d.) parenting principle is a “non-fit them all” solution addressing multiple risk factors (shwartz, 2002), valuing each parent idiosyncrasies, thus enhancing parent’s motivation to participate in the program by making them co-authors of the program’s design. parent’s participation maybe formalized in the shape of a written agreement with the local child protection service (i.e., comissão de protecção de crianças e jovens) and/or with the local social welfare service as part of the social insertion plan, to whom is given frequent feedback about parent’s attendance, participation and parenting competencies development. this paper main goal is to unveil what works through the evaluation of the programs’ execution along with the perceived impact of the parent education programs, thus exploring its characteristics and outcomes. method the development of document content analysis of all the materials of the three groups of the parent education programs developed by cafap between 2006 and 2008 allowed the gathering and crossing of the information about its implementation. this analysis was based on the programs files and archives, containing planning documents, schedules, session’s resources, individual evaluations and attendance sheets (see table 1), regarding the participation of 40 parents/caregivers (38 mothers, one father and one grandfather). cafap’s third parent education program was more thoroughly evaluated by ferreira (2008), as part of an integrated master thesis. following a qualitative approach which also contained a quantitative section, this study was carried through the guiding principles of grounded theory (glaser & strauss, 1967) and appreciative inquiry (cooperrider, whitney & stavros, 2003), with a major focus on strengths and skills. twelve parents participated in this study (ferreira, 2008) – all who completed the program – and the participant’s sample illustrated the general characteristics of the population served 173 building participative, empowering & diverse communities by cafap. there was also a professional sample, composed of the cafap’s team members who participated in the program sessions. the data was collected through two major strategies: 1) appreciative interviews, before and after the program, both to team members and to program participants, which accessed the positive expectations about parenting and about the program, focusing on strengths and positive change, that results on a transformational inquiry and 2) the portuguese version (pedro, carapito, & ribeiro, 2008) of the parenting styles and dimensions questionnaire (psdq) developed by robinson, mandleco, olsen and hart (1995, 2001), which accesses three parenting factors: authoritative, authoritarian and permissive. results as a result of the document content analysis, table 1 illustrates the comparison of three groups of parents that participated in the programs, regarding attendance, evaluation strategies and session themes. the typical weekly session lasted 3 hours, with a 30 minutes pause, and had the following organization: 1) short motivational activity; 2) introduction to the theme; 3) processing the information (e.g., brainstorming, written exercises, role-play and games); 4) applying the information to known and to new situations. the content analysis of the final evaluation questionnaires and interviews provided information about the participant’s most important gains, including personal and professional development, improved self-esteem as a parent and empowerment of their social network. concerning the cumulative weight of each of the focus areas referred in the framework for the children in need and their families (department of health, 2000), some differences between the three parent education groups are revealed (see table 1). while the number of sessions focusing on the child development needs is stable across all groups, on the third group there was a marked increase on the focus on community and family resources. on all three groups, more sessions were focused on the caregiver than on any other area. the best practices of the programs, also gathered from this analysis, encompassed a focus on a variety of child maltreatment risk factors, a professional’s depowerment that brought out parents expertise, and a smaller group format which allowed increased sharing. preliminary results of the third group evaluation indicate that through the program the parents showed major changes in child’s behaviour management strategies, social support, parenting skills and emotional management, while the professionals referred mainly the positive development of the in-group leadership and social support (see ferreira, 2008, for complete data). 174 building participative, empowering & diverse communities table 1: comparative analysis of the groups / programs group i group ii group iii participants ntotal 14 12 14 nattendance average 7 5 7 drop out 4 4 3 evaluation initial interviews   final interviews  psychological assessment instruments parenting educative styles scale parenting styles and dimensions questionnaire weekly individual evaluation  final evaluation questionnaire   session theme fo cu s on ch ild child development 2 4 2 nutrition 1 1 1 child safety 1 2 1 health 1 1 2 children and domestic violence 1 1 1 n 6 9 7 ca re gi ve r creativity and imagination / playing 2 1 house and financial management 1 1 1 parental stress and parenting models 1 1 child behaviour management / discipline 2 3 2 self-awareness 2 1 1 life story 2 4 1 personnal projects and development 2 2 n 9 12 9 fa m ily & c om m un ity family rituals 1 1 1 family and school relatioships 1 1 1 child day-care and alternative education solutions for youth 1 child protection system 1 social insertion income and other social benefits 1 employment 1 n 2 2 6 program organizations and evaluation 2 4 4 sessions ntotal 19 27 26 175 building participative, empowering & diverse communities discussion what is the best the discovery of what is a “good practice” in parent education programs, one of the aims of this study, is only possible through evaluation. programs have been “delivered” in different ways (bolen, mcwey & schlee, 2008) by several formal and informal groups but it remains urgent to adopt systematic evaluation practices (long, 1997). as stated by dufour and chamberland (2003), program evaluation contributes to a better decision making in the process of adapting the programs to the target population. building on cafap’s evaluation practices, there has been a considerable evolution in our programs since 2006. we have moved from a service “delivery” posture to a more collaborative one, involving caregivers and other community resources in the construction and implementation of the programs. this evolution through evaluation is illustrated in this study by the marked increase on the focus on community and family resources present on the third group. this change surely contributed to a visible increase in autonomy and empowerment as elicited through the interviews. as an example, it was important to capacitate parents for job searching through activating community resources, thereby raising their autonomy level, while also preventing against child maltreatment, which is strongly correlated with poverty (unicef, 2007). what is a best practice one of the most remarkable features in the last cafap’s parent education group was the focus on the promotion of in-group management and leadership, which valued each parent’s competence by sharing new strategies for, as an example, dealing with child behaviour management situations. this professionals’ depowerment posture that elicits participants’ competence is also referred by shannon (n.d.), as a main practice on parent education programs aimed at preventing child abuse, and by nelson and prilleltensky (2005) as one of the best practices in working in community. the reflexive evaluation of our third program by ferreira (2008) also revealed that many of these families are well aware of their own capacities and skills, even when they get contrary information from professionals that still carry a deficit-based attitude. also, bolen, mcwey and schlee (2008) argued that more attention should be given to the parent perception of what is a good parenting practice. this may be a strategy to overcome the contextual factors that impair the notion of “good enough” parenting (winnicot, n.d.). in our third program, these perceptions, along with the motivations and suggestions, captured by the initial interviews, allowed us to adapt the implementation to the group’s needs and characteristics (ferreira, 2008). the raw information gathered through the weekly sessions posed as a reality check for our systematic program review and adaptation (allowed by the program’s flexible length), functioning as a calibration procedure for the integration of participants’ and professionals’ perceptions. this process allowed an increased flexibility in procedures, such as the referred focus on superior ecological levels activating social and personal resources, and the connection with community partners (as an example, inviting job centre speakers). this major focus on a larger ecological view is an urgent need in all community actions, instead of a limited focus on the less comprehensive ecological levels (peirson, 2005). however, narrowing our focus to these levels has its importance 176 building participative, empowering & diverse communities due to individual and family risk factors. as an example, there was an investment in the caregivers’ realistic expectations about child developmental milestones, improving their notion of “good enough” parenting (winnicot, n.d.) and preventing child maltreatment (scannapieco & connelcarrick, 2005). the final document analysis of the weakly individual evaluations sheets – which also allowed the programs’ permanent flexibility – as well as the final interviews results (ferreira, 20008), showed that the most important gains were outcomes that are referred by shannon (n.d.) as best practices in programs aiming at preventing child abuse, namely improved self esteem and emotional management of caregivers through a constant sharing, personal and professional development and empowerment of their social networks. based on the systematic reflection on the evaluation results (ferreira, 2008), the main intervention clues for future programs started to unveil. these clues included: 1) a focus on the co-construction of the program which comprised both professionals and parents; 2) enhancing the self-management and leadership of the parent group through the professionals’ posture of depowerment (nelson & prilleltensky, 2005); 3) a more structured continuity of the sessions through the construction of shared projects and objectives in order to increase participation; 4) a deeper investment on male parenthood participation, starting as soon as the initial family assessment and also in the adaptation of the session’s activities and tasks; 5) an increased focus on promoting the informal social support and networks of the parents; 6) a renewed approach to the parents’ emotional management strategies; 7) prioritizing practical and hands-on tasks activities during sessions; 8) a higher connection and exchange with community resources; 9) the promotion of significant rewards per session and 10) creating a major emphasis on the sharing strategy between parents, especially regarding child behaviour management. limitations and challenges due to the target population day to day reality, to our programs characteristics and its implementation procedures, we also faced some challenges and limitations which we tried to overcome with new strategies, thereby introducing feedback to better (co)construct future parent education programs. some of the most important constraints in the program’s implementation are also known limitations of other intervention strategies like home visiting, namely poor maternal mental health (e.g., depression), maternal substance use and partner violence (duggan, caldera, rodriguez, burrell, rohde & crowne, 2007), thus reinforcing the need to promote a multilevel and multimethod strategy to work with these families. parents’ mandatory participation is also one of the constant limitations, however the focus on the previous engagement with cafap’s intervention (i.e., parents are invited to participate and get involved on the program’s design) and activities resulted on a non compulsory posture in many parents. another important way to overcome family resistance is to make the sessions fun and comfortable to parents (e.g., social gatherings, relaxation exercises, outside activities, etc.), as well as promoting personal competence and valuing parents’ aspirations and perceptions. the low involvement of male caregivers represented another limitation and this may be related to the well known female majority (sousa, 2005) in multi-challenged contexts. another program’s implementation challenge was the fact that the schedule was mainly 177 building participative, empowering & diverse communities accessible to unemployed parents, which narrowed our population, and the low attendance especially of parents with financial strain (e.g., occasionally had no money to buy a bus ticket) and single parenthood (e.g., lack of support in case of child sickness). however, on the first program we managed to provide some bus tickets, on the second we frequently gave a lift to some parents with a bus from nós, and on the third program, we had a babysitting service. through the evaluation process the small samples resulting of the above limitations led to a limited generalization of the results. adding to this idea, the absence of an external evaluative commission may result in some evaluator bias in the results analysis. new directions when ralph p. bridgman presented the future directions of parent education programs almost 80 years ago, these programs were by then “a toddling movement” (bridgman, 1930). although much has been accomplished in the last decades it remains actual his urge to scientifically study the programs’ effectiveness, to share what works (and what doesn’t work) with whom and how. the evaluation and exposure of parent’s education programs might contribute to develop best practices guidelines for future programs. nonetheless, the prevailing focus should not be on the “one size fits all” attitude, since it limits the matching between child-family needs and intervention, thereby reducing the intervention spectrum (schwartz, 2002). therefore, it is our intention to diversify our strategies (e.g., more quantitative evaluation instruments, using video interaction guidance strategies), to develop a follow up study and a meta-analysis to compare these programs with others. moreover, we need to identify the specific contribution of different variables to the program’s implementation and outcomes, like the characteristics of both professionals and caregivers. furthermore, as it may overcome the reduced number of portuguese investigations (coutinho, 2004), it must be emphasized the positive initiative that several universities and the portuguese welfare system are developing regarding a comparative study of parent education programs with a national sample (almeida, pinto, gaspar, brandão & ribeiro, 2008). it may also be positive to design specific programs with parents of younger children. that is, in a primary prevention perspective, parents could be engaged in this kind of programs from pregnancy and the program focus could be, as suggested by geeraert, van den noortgate, grietens and onghena (2004), on child’s development and on the development of the infantparent dyad. acknowledgements the authors acknowledge the participants for their vivid contribution to this research and for the ongoing collaboration of some of them with cafap. we also wish to thank a priceless outsider’s eye, provided by marcos vidal. references alarcão, m. (2002). (des)equilíbrios familiares (2nd ed.). coimbra: quarteto. alarcão, m. (january, 2008). oral communication presented at the seminar “os nossos primeiros passos: percursos de estágio iluminados pela sistémica. faculdade de psicologia e ciências da educação, universidade de lisboa. 178 building participative, empowering & diverse communities almeida, a. t., pinto, i. m., gaspar, f., brandão, t. & ribeiro, m. (2008, november). educação parental em portugal. oral communication presented at the seminar novas abordagens das políticas e medidas no âmbito da parentalidade positiva. bolen, m. g., mcwey, l. m. & schlee, b. m. (2008). are at-risk parents getting what they need? perspectives of parents involved with child protective services. clinical social work journal, 36(4), 341-354. bridgman, r. p. (1930). ten years progress in parent’s education. the annals of the american academy of political and social science, 151, 32-45. cooperrider, d. l., whitney, d. & stavros, j. m. (2003). appreciative inquiry handbook: the first in a series of ai workbooks for leaders of change. cleveland, oh: lakeshore communications. department of health (2000). framework for the assessment of children in need and their families. retrieved july, 4, 2006, from http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/publicationsandstatistics/publications/ publicationspolicyandguidance/dh_4003256 dufour, s. & chamberland, c. (2003). the effectiveness of child welfare interventions: a systematic review. montreal, qc: centre of excellence for child welfare. duggan, a., caldera, d., rodriguez, k., burrell, l., rohde, c. & crowne, s. s. (2007). impact of a statewide home visiting program to prevent child abuse. child abuse & neglect, 31 (8), 801–827. ferreira, l. c. (2008). co-contruir o tempo: avaliação de um curso de formação parental e parentalidade masculina em contexto de risco. integrated master thesis, faculdade de psicologia e ciências da educação, universidade de lisboa, portugal. geeraert, l., van den noortgate, w., grietens, h. & onghena, p. (2004). the effects of early prevention programs for families with young children at risk for physical child abuse and neglect: a metaanalysis. child maltreatment, 9 (3), 277-291. glaser, b. g. & strauss, a. l. (1967). discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. chicago: aldine. long, n. (2007). parent education/training in the usa: current status and future trends. clinical child psychology and psychiatry, 2, 501-515. minuchin, p., colapinto, j, & minuchin, s. (2007). working with the families of the poor (2nd ed.). new york: guilford press. nelson, g. & prilleltensky, i. (2005). community pschology: in pursuit of liberation and well-being. new york: palgrave macmillan. pedro, m., carapito, e., & ribeiro, m. t. (2008, march). from couple relationship to positive parenting: a study with portuguese families. oral communication presented at the xvi world family therapy congress of the international family therapy association. peirson, l. (2005). disadvantaged children and families. in g. nelson & i. prilleltensky (eds.), community pschology: in pursuit of liberation and well-being (pp. 448-467). new york: palgrave macmillan. robinson, c. c., mandleco, b. olsen, s. f., hart, c. h. (1995). authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive parenting practices: development of a new measure. psychological reports, 77, 819-830. robinson, c., mandleco, b. olsen, s., hart, c. (2001). the parenting styles and dimenstions questionaire (psdq). in b. f. perlmutter, j. touliatos & g. w. holden (eds.), handbook of family measurement techniques. vol. 3. intruments & index (pp.319-321). thousand oaks: sage. http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/publicationsandstatistics/publications/publicationspolicyandguidance/dh_4003256 http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/publicationsandstatistics/publications/publicationspolicyandguidance/dh_4003256 179 building participative, empowering & diverse communities scannapieco, m. & connell-carrick, k. (2005). understanding child maltreatment: an ecological and developmental perspective. new york: oxford university press. shannon, l. c. (n.d.). best practices for parent education programs seeking to prevent child abuse. north carolina state university cooperative extension service. retrieved from www. npen.org/pdfs/ bestpra.pdf on january 16th, 2008. schwartz, j. p. (2003). family resilience and pragmatic parent education. the journal of individual psychology, 58, 250-262. sousa, l. (2005). famílias multiproblemáticas. coimbra: quarteto. unicef (2007). child povertry in perspective: an overview of child well-being in rich countries. florence: innocenti research centre. world health organization (1999). definition of child abuse. retrieved december, 11, 2008, from www. ispcan.org/members/defofchildabuse.htm http://www.ispcan.org/members/defofchildabuse.htm http://www.ispcan.org/members/defofchildabuse.htm 180 building participative, empowering & diverse communities standing against the coloniality of power: claiming the right to democratic participation in the globalized neoliberal state1 mariolga reyes cruz, ph.d. instituto de investigaciones interdisciplinarias universidad de puerto rico en cayey abstract public schools are spaces where multiple local and global struggles are played out. racism and xenophobia, for instance, are not simply manifestations of local hierarchies of oppression; these are key elements of the coloniality of power, the living legacy of colonialism around the globe. this legacy is reproduced and contested in the struggle for meaningful public education for marginalized groups. the globalization of neoliberal education policies geared towards the decentralization of public school systems has resulted in increased transfer of responsibility for the administration and academic outcomes to marginalized school communities while control over the content of education, the power structure and funding remains out of their hands (fine, 1993; spring, 1993). it is in this context where thousands of disenfranchised communities strive to transform their public schools reclaiming public education as a social right and a public good, a place for alternative political and democratic socialization (flape, 2007; peschard, 2006). in this paper i look through the conceptual lenses of colonialiity of power (e.g., quijano, mignolo), social, cultural and political capital (e.g., bourdieu, chronic poverty research centre) to examine ethnographic material from an action research project that aims to promote collective participation on education policy matters at a historically marginalized black and immigrant community in puerto rico. keywords: coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge, social capital, cultural capital, political capital, political culture, power, public education, citizen participation, ethnography have you heard that slogan “think globally, act locally”, the one that began to catch the imagination of environmentalist and other activists in the united states and elsewhere in the late ‘60’s. the slogan signals the importance of engaging immediate social concerns within a global framework, suggesting the uniquely transformative meaning local actions can have when they depart from a critical understanding of the connections between local struggles and world-wide realities. i thought about that slogan as i was mulling over how to articulate the interconnectedness between concepts rarely put together in community psychology research literature, that is, power, political culture, cultural capital and coloniality. if placing power at the center of our praxis has proven challenging, seeing sociopolitical dynamics in their complexity and interrelatedness 1 paper presented at the ii international conference on community psychology, lisbon, portugal, june 4-6, 2008. correspondence concerning this paper should be addressed to dr. mariolga reyes cruz, 1700 calle violeta, urb. san francisco, san juan, puerto rico 00927; email mreyescruz@gmail.com mailto:mreyescruz@gmail.com 181 building participative, empowering & diverse communities is even harder (epistemologically, ontologically and methodologically speaking). however, the dynamics of most interest to us are by nature complex and experientially indivisible. for several years i have been developing strategies to integrate critical ethnography (e.g., trueba & mclaren, 2000) with community action (e.g., alinsky, freirre), becoming a witness/ actor of ground-up social change processes as they unfold. this transdisciplinary weaving is useful for crafting stories of oppression and liberation highlighting lived complexities and possibilities. in this paper i attempt to connect multiple levels of analysis to expose how politics and power manifest in ways that reproduce and contest the hegemonic political culture which maintains cultural capital under the control of the beneficiaries of colonial arrangements. the paper is written in four sections. the first, lays the conceptual ground for understanding politics and power from a shared global history of coloniality. the following two sections narrate how coloniality is manifested in four school meeting two in a small school district in the united states where mexican immigrants collectively advocate for school changes; and other two in puerto rico, one of the oldest colonies, where a group of community residents are working to reclaim their neighborhood public school. at the end i point out the contributions transdiscplinary multi-level approaches could make to an emerging critical community psychology that is long overdue. coloniality, cultural capital, political culture and power: crossing disciplinary boundaries to grapple with oppression and liberation in everyday life although we are yet to agree on what we mean by power and what impact does it have in our field, it is clear that community psychologists have argued for placing power at the center of our theories and actions for decades (rappaport, 1977; serrano garcía, 1994; fisher & sonn, 2008; smail, 1994, 2001). recent special issues on power in the journal of community psychology (2008) and the journal of community & applied social psychology (2007) attest to our continuing struggle to collectively integrate our social values with our theories and practice. rappaport (2000, as cited by smail, 2001) has reasoned this problem in terms of the field’s “attachment to individualistic psychological concepts and victim-blaming practices.” fisher, sonn and evans (2007) argue that it’s the hegemonic scientist-practitioner model itself that “emphasizes individualistic, internal states and objective, value-free empirical research.” i want to argue here that part of the difficulty in giving power its rightful place in community psychology (or as fisher and colleagues, 2007, call it the field’s raison d’être), comes from our collective institutionalized incapacity to deal squarely with the coloniality of power and knowledge. social scientists and humanists like linda tuhiwai smith, anibal quijano, edgardo lander, edward said, would advise us to place analysis of power within a deeper understanding of the continuing legacy of colonization. the ways in which power is leveraged to maintain racialized conditions of inequality, oppression and exploitation is part of a global political culture that has been in the making since the invasion and conquest of the americas. quijano (2007), a peruvian sociologist, explains the continuing legacy of colonialism (or what he terms “coloniality”) in this way: with the conquest of the societies and the cultures which inhabit what today is called latin america, began the constitution of a new world order culminating, five hundred years later, in a global power covering the whole planet. this process implied a violent concentration of the world’s resources under the control and for the benefit of 182 building participative, empowering & diverse communities a small european minority – and above all, of its ruling classes… 2 this domination is known as a specific eurocentered colonialism… this colonial domination has been defeated in the large majority of the cases… its successor, western imperialism, is an association of social interests between the dominant groups (‘social classes’ and/or ‘ethnies’) of countries with unequally articulated power, rather than an imposition from the outside… however, that specific colonial structure of power produced the specific social discriminations which later were codified as ‘racial’, ‘ethnic’, ‘anthropological’, or ‘national’, according to the times, agents, and populations involved. these intersubjective constructions, product of eurocentered colonial domination were even assumed to be ‘objective’, ‘scientific’, categories… that is, as natural phenomena, [rather than] referring to the history of power. this power structure was, and still is, the framework within which operate the other social relations of classes or estates. the colonizers also imposed a mystified image of their own patterns of producing knowledge and meaning. at first, they placed these patterns far out of reach of the dominated. later, they taught them in a partial and selective way, in order to coopt some of the dominated into their own power institutions. then european culture was made seductive: it gave access to power. after all, beyond repression, the main instrument of all power is its seduction. cultural europeanisation was transformed into an aspiration. it was a way of participating and later to reach the same material benefits and the same power as europeans” (p. 168-169). although in this excerpt quijano narrates the history of coloniality in past tense, the point is that the coloniality of power has persisted colonial rule and it is being enacted over and over again in contemporary life. nandy (1989), as cited in smith (1999/2005) … discusses the different phases of colonization, from ‘rapacious bandit-kings’ intent on exploitation, to ‘well-meaning middle class liberals’ intent on salvation as a legitimation of different forms of colonization… nandy … describe colonization as a ‘shared culture’ for those who have been colonized and for those who have colonized.’ (p. 44-45) in separate works, edgardo lander and linda tuhiwai smith both show how this shared culture was built upon multiple separations and naturalization processes: separation of humans from nature in ways that justify its exploitation, and naturalization of certain euro-centered worldviews. today many around the planet continue struggling to stand against the coloniality of power, as suspicious euro-centered and imperialist ideas of what constitute development, modernity, good government, good science, “ethnic culture” and so on continue to be imposed as the criteria for evaluating what is accepted, funded, published, marketed (think about the impact that funding programs from, let’s say, the world bank, the international monetary fund, u.s. aid or nimh have on how struggling communities define and address their problems). the concept of cultural capital, developed by the french sociologist pierre bourdieu, is rather useful for linking macro and micro-levels of analysis. cultural capital encompasses the ways of knowing, knowledge and practices of the dominant classes who are capable of imposing their norms as the criteria for evaluation (lareau & weininger, 2003). implied here is that those norms 2 see eduardo galeano (1971) las venas abiertas de américa latina to learn about how europe benefited from the colonization of the americas 183 building participative, empowering & diverse communities are not fixed or “good” in an essentialist way but rather serve the interest of the dominant classes and thus, can and do continuously change (e.g., what does it take to “make it” in the u.s. economy now vs. 30 years, 50 years ago). let’s now return to our field’s concern with power. from this recognition/understanding of the coloniality of power, it seems to me that rather than focusing on a decontextualized and interpersonal approach to power as, for instance, prilleltensky (2008) does (see fryer; fisher & sonn; reich, pinkard & davidson in the same special issue), we need to confront (and deconstruct) how coloniality is inscribed in societal structures of domination/exploitation/oppression (see quijano, 2000). or as fryer (2008) puts it rather than seeking to engage with power as such… we should be engaging with the way societal hierarchies are set up and maintained through wealth, class, labor market position, ethnic dominance (majority/minority status), gender, etc., and the way societal structures impact on people both objectively and through their subjective understanding of them (p. 242). fryer (2008) argues that “the apparent ‘power of individuals’ is better understood as subjective manifestations of the societal distribution of power.” an understanding of the coloniality of power challenges us to think beyond narrow/ localized ways in which unequal distributions of power and cultural capital create “individual” and/ or “community”3 suffering, and move us towards questions about politics and political culture. analyses of power devoid of a critical understanding of politics run the risk of decontextualizing and essentializing social dynamics as issues of poor/rich, black/white, immigrant/non-immigrant. montero (2001) defines politics as matters about how public life is organized and the ways in which power4 is claimed to define “lines of action”5. political culture here refers to shared (and contested) meanings of politics that guide how people understand/engage/act upon how power is organized in a society (traditions, institutions, relations, structures). leticia heras gómez (2004), a mexican political scientist, explains the challenges latin american countries face towards achieving democratic6 societies from an analysis of the coloniality of our political cultures. she points out latin america’s colonial history is much longer than its “democratic” history and it is that colonial history that has shaped our political cultures. she sees this legacy in the ways in which, for example, the hegemonic political culture in latin american societies places more importance on the figure of the politician (who is he/she, how one 3 the concept of “community” should be interrogated as it has and is used by the state and its institutions to regulate the poor and marginalized in an effort to quiet discontent. 4 i disagree with notions of power that suggest some have it and other do not, but rather see power as a means and a medium for domination/exploitation/oppression/resistance/liberation. if we think about the struggles to resist the coloniality of power and knowledge we can also think that what is at stake is a profound deconstruction (or questioning) of hegemonic political culture, not power as an essentialized/ reified entity. 5 it would be important to introduce here some of the issues raised by dussel in 20 tesis de política 6 although it is beyond the scope of this paper, the notions of “democratic government” and “democracy” also need to be subjected to critical reflection. for instance, 1) the terms refer to ideals that emerged from rather problematic social arrangements (not all living in the polis were considered legitimate actors in so called democratic processes); 2) there are other ways of conceptualizing political arrangements other than democratic governments as we know them that could lead to socially just and sustainable societies (see for example, françois houtart (2006) un socialismo para el siglo 21); and 3) it has been argued that contemporary notions of democracy are sociopolitical ideals not quite fulfilled yet by any society (just as with socialism and communism). 184 building participative, empowering & diverse communities may access him/her, what he/she can give me/us) than on the institutions of the state, a dynamic present since spanish colonial rule where the figure of the virray was absolute and the laws of the crown “mandated but were not obeyed” by the local authorities. she also locates the largely impermeability of the racial/class social hierarchy to the way social relations were organized by the spanish rulers.7 heras gómez sustains that without acknowledging and challenging the ways in which we understand political life, attempts at deepening our democracies will undoubtedly fail. in sum, the question that i’m posing is whether we can work8 towards balancing power without boldly challenging the enduring legacy of coloniality in our political culture? as aníbal quijano (2000) points out, the history of colonization is the history of power as we know it: how domination/oppression/exploitation and liberation are enacted is very much linked to our shared colonial legacy. as smith carefully argues, what we claim as valid knowledge for public policy purposes or within academic circles is tied to that shared colonial history. regardless of whether we figure out if/how to deal with power explicitly, the enduring legacy of our colonial history will continue to shape politics and power in the public sphere. unless we joint other efforts to not just redistribute the cake or teach people how to eat it, but come up with a different kind of flour. one meeting and five hundred years of coloniality of power and knowledge for the last seven years i have joined neighborhood-based efforts to promote democratic participation in school politics and reclaim public schools as a public matter. as a beginner critical ethnographer and ally, i first worked four years with mexican immigrant in the u.s. vying to make their schools accountable to them (reyes cruz, 2008). later i returned to my country, puerto rico, where i have been engaged in similar efforts for over a year, this time working with other puerto ricans to reclaim a neighborhood elementary school as a vital piece in a larger community development project. although there are substantial differences between the two settings some things seemed quite familiar; the way politics and power were enacted revealed the continuing legacy of colonization. public schools galvanize multiple stakeholders toward actions that reflect common, collective, and conflictive interest. thus, schools cannot be understood without grappling with politics and power. here i scenes from ethnographic work in illinois to show the ways in which the coloniality of power and knowledge is manifested in the exercise of cultural capital. the first is a meeting between laura, a light-skinned mexican immigrant mother, and school staff. she had summon the principal, her daughter’s teacher (both white u.s. americans), the bilingual teacher (a light-skinned woman of mexican descent) and myself (the brown puerto rican allytranslator) to discuss some of her concerns regarding her child’s schooling. the school was located in a predominately poor and african american neighborhood. its students were mostly african americans and immigrants from latin america. at a school meeting organized by laura to discuss her daughter’s performance, the regular classroom teacher started by cheerfully declaring, “your daughter has made a lot of progress!” he showed laura the child’s scores in a district-wide math and vocabulary test. the child had gone from a score of 1-20 on a previous test to a 7 what the author describes for latin america rings true for other ex-colonies like the united states, at least for those who suffer the brunt of this hegemonic cultural system. 8 by “we” and “work” i mean a work that has to be done by necessity collectively. 185 building participative, empowering & diverse communities score of 40-60. laura asked, “what’s the maximum score they could get?” the teacher responded, “a 100.” [laura stared at him.] … the child was showing signs of improvement on test scores. but compared to the standard laura’s daughter was measured against, the teacher was portraying a distorted image of the student’s academic progress. hers was not the kind of achievement associated with college-bound students. what parents like laura really wanted to know was if their children were making the kind of academic progress that would lead them to a college education. [laura then] expressed her concerned with what she described as “lack of respect in the school,” [specifically] between teachers and students, and among students. she had seen staff mistreating children, particularly african american students. her child was also being mistreated by other children and the adults were not intervening. the regular classroom teacher responded, “the staff works very hard at encouraging respect among students. look at the messages about respect posted on the classroom walls. the school pledge, recited every morning, also speaks about respect. children are told all the time they have to keep their hands to them selves.” the principal explained that not all parents had the same vision as laura, they were not interested in getting involved in the school or what their children do, they didn’t teach their children respect, and that was what the school had to deal with. laura insisted the issue was a school-wide problem. she suggested that the staff work on the staff end and she could work with other parents to try to get parents involved on this issue. no one from the staff said anything about it. the principal broke the silence, “you should encourage your daughter to come to the staff when others are bothering her and we will deal with the situation.” laura responded that her daughter, “no les tiene confianza,” which i translated as “her daughter does not trust you.” the esl teacher corrected me saying that what laura said was that her daughter “didn’t feel comfortable” talking with them about her troubles. i replied that “confiar” was not the same as “sentirse cómoda.” the teacher then asked laura in spanish what she meant and laura responded her daughter didn’t trust the staff would actually listen to her. on our way out of the room …laura said to me, “no pueden ver más allá (they can’t see beyond their noses), they do not want to address the issue of respect at the school level, they want to make it about my child.”9 coloniality is working at different levels here: from the racialized/ethnicized way in which cultural capital is enacted (who has the power to decide what counts as valid knowledge claims), to the ways in which the school staff promote child-center individualistic parent participation separating the personal from the collective/public and quieting potential claims of collective discontent. these notions, as the uruguayan writer eduardo galeano would say, are 500 years on the making. the second scene narrates a moment in which the coloniality of power and knowledge was crystallized at a public meeting when the group of mexican parents mobilizing for school change confronted head the limits of their “democratic participation” in school-decision making. 9 reyes cruz (2008) 186 building participative, empowering & diverse communities during their first year [the group] recruited and collaborated with bilingual/ bicultural latinos (including myself)34 who had access to information and resources… with the support of their allies the parents organized and facilitated meetings with district staff, including the superintendent himself, to address concerns and monitor progress; participated in the hiring of bilingual staff; influenced the creation of new positions and changes in current positions; pressed for the establishment of the most effective program for second language learners; and influenced the removal of staff. one of the areas of contention during committee meetings was the structure of programs for spanish speakers learning english. the coordinator and the bilingual staff were adamant about the benefits of bilingual education. the coordinator wanted to make sure parents had an understanding of the theory and research that supported bilingual education, hoping this would bring parents and staff to a shared under standing of the importance of the program and its needs. the district indicated they wanted parent input on what types of programs would be implemented in the upcoming years and the coordinator wanted to make sure parents made informed decisions. for several meetings district staff described different models and their effectiveness… to the parents. during the discussions it became evident that parents understood some programs were better than others… and that the district was offering the program shown to be less effective… lucero [one of the mexican mothers] highlighted how [her preferred program] would facilitate the students’ bilingualism, support parent-child relationships by strength ening the children’s knowledge of the home language, and equalize the academic-racial hierarchy of the schools. when parents and staff finally met to decide what program they wanted implemented at dubois, district staff presented models that had not been discussed before and not the models presented as the most effective. a mother asked … “what do you know about the effectiveness of these program options?” the district staff replied those were the options other districts were implementing; although they did not know how effective the programs were they believed it would be better than what the schools currently had. 10 two days and a year standing against the coloniality of power to reclaim a public school for its public when i left illinois, the advocacy group formed by the mexican parents was dissolving. it seemed like much was accomplished and things were still the same. moreover, the group was struggling with different “needs and wants” that greatly reflected the same separations inherited from our colonial history: personal/individual vs. common/public interests, power in numbers vs. the power of ethics. for the last year i have been engaged in education organizing efforts with community residents and their organizations to rescue one of their schools. after decades of administrative negligence, blatant corruption and generalized disaffection river elementary school was slowly dying before everyone’s eyes. this neighborhood elementary school with its hundred students is comfortably nestled in a historically black and poor community of puerto ricans and dominicans, 10 reyes cruz (2008) 187 building participative, empowering & diverse communities right next door to puerto rico’s financial district. the school is just one of the many serving eight communities engaged in an unprecedented development project. with the first commonwealth of the land those communities aim to revitalize their neighborhoods and protect themselves from gentrification. early in 2007, concerned staff, local residents, their organizations and allies decided to mobilize to rescue river school. concerns included dwindling registration, dilapidated infrastructure, lack of educational materials, administrative inefficiency and neglect, low academic achievement, racism, xenophobia, misappropriation and fraud (from getting paid for hours that were not worked, stealing food from the school’s cafeteria to manipulating standardized academic achievement tests). the river school committee held multiple school meetings that generated interest from dozens of parents and local officials. after a year of mobilizing and advocacy activities, the committee’s most resounding achievement was the removal of the principal who had been at river for over a decade. in the process the committee had been advocating for a democratic selection process to hire the new principal that would work collaboratively with all sectors of the school community. the department of education’s first response was to send and interim principal whose idea of community participation was to ask them for resources when she needed them. after taking our concerns directly to the secretary of education, again, his office ended up inviting us to attend the interview process for the new principal and present our concerns to the candidates. actually, we did not know what that meeting was about or what role we were expected to play until we arrived to the meeting place. the meeting was at one in the afternoon. it was real hot, we were running late, and we had no idea where the regional office of the department of education was. esperanza, a long time community resident and leader, received a last minute call from the secretary of education11’s office asking the river school committee to attend today’s meeting. unknown to us, it was going to be the first time in the regional office’s history that a group of community advocates would be present during the evaluation of candidates for their school’s principal. after informal greetings and small talk, the representative of the secretary of education welcomed everyone saying, “the secretary is deeply committed to river school and the community development process taking place there. he wants to hire a school principal that will work in close alliance with the community leaders and their organizations to develop an integrated educational project”. the chair of the evaluation committee added “this is an unusual meeting. for the first time in this office’s history we have a community group attending the interview process. the group was instrumental in opening the principal’s position at river school. they will present to you their concerns regarding the school and listen to what you have to say. the task of the evaluation committee is only to make recommendations to the secretary. this should be clear to everybody: although we make recommendations, it is the secretary who has the last word”. 11 puerto rico has a local department of education. a significant amount of its funding comes from the unites states department of education. 188 building participative, empowering & diverse communities this introduction did not get lost on us the “outsiders”. after all, as most people in the room knew, the committee had been holding meetings with school staff, parents, other neighborhood residents, the secretary of education himself, his assistants, the local district representative to the legislature, and the governor’s advisor on education issues. the goal was to address the problems identified by the school community, including changing the principal. without such high profile advocacy effort we would not have been invited to that meeting in the first place. the committee was building public accountability for the school and it seemed to be working. but the administrators’ opening words were not lost on the candidates either. one by one, they turned around to face us directly and addressed esperanza, marcos, carmen and i as if it all depended on getting on our good side. one of the candidates seemed to have all going for her. she was a long time river teacher who participated actively in the committee in its beginning. one of her close coworkers was there seating at the evaluators side. and, as we were later told, she had access to the interview questions before hand. however, to everyone’s surprise, during her interview the woman choked. i was writing away taking note of the question and answer session when all of a sudden i felt that i had to look up. there was a question in the air and the woman could not speak. she mumbled a couple of things without addressing the question. the chair challenged her to respond from her knowledge and experience at the school. she could only gasp and look at esperanza and me with trembling eyes. the next day the secretary of education brought his staff to river where school staff, the interim principal, a few mothers and the river school committee awaited. the secretary thanked the principal for bringing the school up to speed administratively and making some needed infrastructural changes. he said that the interview process for a new principal was in progress. “the new principal has to have the approval of the community and his or her performance should be evaluated at the end of the first year by the community and my office. if things are not working out we’ll look for another person.” one of the teachers said that they all agreed the interim principal had done a great job and proposed that her contract be extended. the secretary simply said it could not be done. she had retired and could not be hired officially as the full time principal. then the teacher began raising questions about the emphasis on community participation. he argued that most parents didn’t care about what was happening at the school. “most don’t work and never respond when we call on them to attend to issues with their children”. the teacher beside him nodded. (never mind that the school has 100 students and in a period of three months 45 five parents attended the meetings coordinated by the river school development committee). the next day esperanza told me that rumors of a challenge to the validity of the selection process for the new principal were spreading wild. some school staff (which included community residents and the interim principal) were upset about the presence of community representatives at the interviews and were challenging the process. (never mind two strong candidates were being considered for recommendation and 189 building participative, empowering & diverse communities it was apparent that the evaluation team had reached consensus about who was best qualified. only the river teacher on the evaluators’ side did not agree. she was adamant about her coworker being the best candidate despite evidence to the contrary.) gubernatorial elections are six months away. the secretary of education is nominated by the governor. the current governor has been indicted for corruption charges by the federal government. the committee knew we had to call the secretary and let him know the process to select the new principal was being challenged. the struggle had barely begun. undoubtedly there are substantial differences between the experiences of the mexican immigrants group and the river school committee. for example, unlike the mexican immigrants who were legitimate but not legal residents, the people engaged in the education organizing effort in puerto rico are all legal historical residents of the island. the river school community (including staff and parents) is mostly black puerto rican and dominican while mexicans constitute a racialized minority in the united states. and while the mexican parent group was numerically larger, the river committee had a multisectorial effort in community development giving them legitimizing their authority vis-à-vis the school staff and the department of education, having a share of political and cultural capital. on the other hand, puerto rico is a territory of the united states where people can vote for their favorite candidate in a presidential primary but cannot vote in the presidential election. our economy is also suffering the effects of the recession but we have little room to make decisions about which country or multinational we buy gasoline or rice from, who or how much we pay to import and export goods. however, in illinois and san juan school districts are bounded by u.s. federal education policies that call for parent and community participation in school decision making. such policies have been part of the world bank’s strategies for decentralizing public education systems for over a decade, placing increasing responsibility for school outcomes on their historically disadvantaged immediate communities. however, as anderson (1998), fine (1993), sarasson (1996) and fullan and watson (2000) have shown, hegemonic school culture is contrary to authentic democratic participation. marginalized communities without the “right” cultural and political capital stand to fail in their efforts to secure more autonomy over their schools. some notes from/for the resistance i depart from the premise that in order to enact critical community psychology for social justice we have to deal squarely with the coloniality of power and knowledge. this praxis must lead to collectively crafting explicit analyses of the dominant political culture integrating micro and macro levels of analyses of domination/oppression/ exploitation in every day life and how that is challenged from the ground-up. as an applied social science discipline, a critical community psychology has a distinct contribution to make to scientific understandings of politics and power as we work on “the ground” with social actors engaged in both social reproduction and contestation. perhaps different from other ethically akin fields and disciplines, we can be simultaneously engaged in developing deeper understandings of complex social relationships and processes while working towards a just and sustainable world. we have a lot to learn from multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary academic activist (like 190 building participative, empowering & diverse communities those who have joined efforts to see social forums happen across the planet). we have much to do and learn about participatory action research and other forms of critical research such as discourse analyses, political surveys, and critical ethnography that could open our range of action and levels of understanding. but more immediately, we have a long and hopeful road to travel together to battle the negative impact of what some have termed academic capitalism and create the institutional spaces for graduate students and non-tenured-yet academics doing trabajo de frontera, who take great risks in precarious institutional circumstances. we need creative ways of supporting each other and our work to secure the field’s relevance and survival by fostering the critical mass necessary for a transformative praxis. references anderson, g. l. (1998). toward authentic participation: deconstructing the discourses of participatory reforms in education. american educational research journal, 35(4), 571-603. fine, m. (1993). [ap]parent involvement: reflections on parents, power, and urban public schools. teachers college record, 94(4), 682-710. fisher, a. t. & sonn, c. c. (2008). psychopolitical validity: power, culture, and wellness. journal of community psychology, 36(2), 261-268. fisher, a. t., sonn, c. c. & evans, s. d. (2008). the place and function of power in community psychology: philosophical and practical issues. journal of community and applied social psychology, 17, 258267. fryer, d. (2008). power from the people? critical reflection on a conceptualization of power. journal of community psychology, 36 (2),238-245. fullan, m. & watson, n. (2000). school-based management: reconceptualizing to improve learning outcomes. school effectiveness and school improvement, 11(4), 453-473. galeano, e. (1971/2004). las venas abiertas de américa latina. madrid: spain. siglo xxi. heras gómez, l. (2004). cultura política y democratización en américa latina. ciencias sociales, (103104), 23-37. houtart, f. (2006). un socialismo para el siglo 21: marco sintético de reflexión. revista pasos, 128. lareau, a. & weininger, e. b. (2003). cultural capital in education research: a critical assessment. theory and society, 32, 567-606. montero, m. (2001). ética y política en psicología: las dimensiones no reconocidas. atenea digital, abril(0), 1-10. prilleltensky, i. (2008). the role of power in wellness, oppression, and liberation: the promise of psychopolitical validity. journal of community psychology, 36(2), 116-136. quijano, a. (2007). coloniality and modernity/rationality. cultural studies 21(2-3), 168-178. quijano, a. (2000). colonialidad del poder y clasificación social. journal of world-systems research, 6(2), 342-386. rappaport, j. (1977). community psychology: values, research, and action. new york: holt, rinehart and winston. 191 building participative, empowering & diverse communities reich, s. m., pinkard, t. & davidson, h. (2008). including history in the study of psychological and political power. journal of community psychology, 36 (2), 173-186. reyes cruz, m. (2008). mexican immigrant parents advocating for school reform. new york, ny: lfb scholarly. sarason, s. b. (1996). revisiting “the culture of the school and the problem of change”. new york: teachers college press. serrano-garcía, i. (1994). the ethics of the powerful and the power of ethics. american journal of community psychology, 22(1), 1-20. smail, d. (1994). community psychology and politics. journal of community and applied social psychology, 42, 3-10. smail, d. (2001). de-psychologizing community psychology. journal of community and applied social psychology, 11, 159-165. smith, l. (1999/2005). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. london: zed books. trueba, e. t., & mclaren, p. (2000). critical ethnography for the study of immigrants. in e. t. trueba & l. i. bartolomé (eds.), immigrant voices: in search of educational equity (pp. 37-73). new york: rowman & littlefield. 192 building participative, empowering & diverse communities compreendendo os processos de risco e resiliência em adolescentes que vivem em situações de vulnerabilidade social no brasil débora dalbosco dell’aglio ufrgs (brasil) dalbosco@cpovo.net abstract this work presents researches developed at the center for studies and research in adolescence, at the federal university of rio grande do sul, brazil, with adolescents who live in situations of social vulnerability. risk and protection factors in the development of adolescents that live away from their families, in the streets and/ or institutionalized in shelters, are discussed. based on the framework of the bio-ecological approach for human development and the positive psychology, the methodology that has been used in these studies, mainly qualitative and with the ecological engagement of the researchers in different contexts is presented. the instruments used have been adapted to the needs of a chronological approach study which investigates the past, present and future of the adolescents, aiming to detect time changes and its influence along their development. the studies have allowed characterizing the social and physical contexts where the adolescents are engaged and the risk and protective factors that permeate their stories. we can observe, on one hand, the transitoriness and precariousness in the life of these adolescents, and on the other hand, the emotional relationships established in the new context of development that bring a sense of positive adaptation leading to resilience processes. thus, it is discussed the importance of new affective relationships, the role of the social and emotional support network, the adolescent’s future plans, their engagement in their own community spaces and other actions that might help them overcome the vulnerable situation. key-words: adolescents, vulnerability, risk, resilience. este trabalho tem por objetivo apresentar resultados de pesquisas, desenvolvidas junto ao núcleo de estudos e pesquisas em adolescência (nepa), da universidade federal do rio grande do sul, brasil. têm sido desenvolvidos estudos junto a jovens que vivem em situação de rua e/ ou em instituições de abrigo, afastados de suas famílias, por motivos tais como violência ou abandono. o desenvolvimento de crianças e adolescentes em situação de vulnerabilidade social tem despertado o interesse de inúmeros pesquisadores (koller & lisboa, 2007; masten & garmezy, 1985; rutter, 1987), que estão preocupados em compreender os processos psicológicos frente ao risco e suas repercussões no desenvolvimento cognitivo, emocional e social. assim, são apresentadas e discutidas neste trabalho as abordagens teóricas e metodológicas utilizadas nos estudos desenvolvidos e os resultados de alguns estudos desenvolvidos pelo nepa com adolescentes em situação de vulnerabilidade no sul do brasil. abordagens teóricas mailto:dalbosco@cpovo.net 193 building participative, empowering & diverse communities os trabalhos desenvolvidos no nepa têm utilizado mais especificamente as perspectivas teóricas da psicologia positiva (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000; sheldon & king, 2001) e a abordagem bioecológica de bronfenbrenner (bronfenbrenner, 1979/1996; 1999; 2004), que é um sistema teórico para o estudo científico do desenvolvimento humano no ambiente natural, através do tempo. no modelo de bronfenbrenner, o desenvolvimento é definido como um fenômeno de continuidade e mudança (qualitativa e quantitativa) nas características biopsicológicas do ser humano como indivíduo e como grupo. o fenômeno estende-se a todo o curso da vida, através de sucessivas gerações e do tempo histórico passado e presente (bronfenbrenner, 2004). o modelo bioecológico entende o ser humano como um ser em relação, dentro de um ambiente em constante mutação, sendo, por definição, um modelo contextualista e sistêmico. bronfenbrenner (1979/1996; 1999; 2004) propõe que, para se compreender a pessoa em desenvolvimento, é preciso ir além dela própria e das relações mais próximas que ela estabelece. é preciso examinar toda a ecologia do desenvolvimento – o padrão de interação dentro da família e as influências da cultura mais ampla – a partir de sistemas que interagem em relações recíprocas, destacando quatro aspectos: o processo, a pessoa, o contexto e o tempo (modelo ppct). no processo, bronfenbrenner (1999) trabalha em dois sentidos: o que se refere aos mecanismos constantes e não lineares de ligação entre os níveis ambiental e da pessoa; e o relacionado à forma como a pessoa se desenvolve, através de atividades diárias, papéis e interrelações. pessoa refere-se às características psicológicas e físicas que orientam o indivíduo em relação ao seu ambiente. o contexto é a configuração ecológica das características e relações existentes nos níveis ambientais, aos quais a pessoa está exposta e é composto por quatro sistemas: microssistema (conjunto de atividades, papéis e relações interpessoais experenciadas pela pessoa); mesossistema (constituído pelas inter-relações ocorridas nos microssistemas); exossistema (composto pelos ambientes nos quais a pessoa não está presente, mas cujos eventos influenciam diretamente seu desenvolvimento); e macrossistema (conjunto compartilhado de crenças, ideologias e valores que perpassam as formas de organização social). o tempo é estudado a partir de um ponto de vista histórico-evolutivo, importando tanto o processo proximal, que determina o desenvolvimento ao longo do tempo, quanto o processo histórico, que envolve a pessoa e o ambiente. as alterações deste modelo ppct levaram ao modelo bioecológico de desenvolvimento humano e, atualmente, à teoria bioecológica do desenvolvimento humano (tbdh), que se mostra útil para o estudo e para a compreensão do construto da resiliência, uma vez que procura integrar aspectos individuais e ambientais, contemplando os fatores relacionados com o fenômeno a ser investigado. deste modo, se constitui em uma abordagem através da qual se pode compreender o desenvolvimento em situações atípicas, privilegiando aspectos de resiliência, vulnerabilidade, risco e proteção (cecconello, 2003). a psicologia positiva, por sua vez, é uma perspectiva teórica contemporânea que busca compreender o indivíduo e o seu comportamento a partir dos recursos saudáveis presentes no mesmo. para sheldon e king (2001), psicologia positiva é o estudo científico das virtudes e das forças do homem comum, chamando a atenção para a natureza do funcionamento do ser humano que, de forma eficaz, faz uso de suas habilidades e recursos adaptativos. nessa perspectiva, a resiliência caracteriza indivíduos que conseguiram combater ou restabelecer-se de adversidades, sendo um processo relacionado às respostas da pessoa ao seu contexto frente a situações de 194 building participative, empowering & diverse communities risco ao desenvolvimento (zimmerman & arunkumar, 1994). para yunes e szymanski (2001), a resiliência não pode ser considerada um atributo individual, fixo e imutável, o qual uns indivíduos possuem e outros não, podendo se manifestar em determinados momentos. segundo as autoras, a resiliência é o produto final da combinação e acúmulo dos fatores de proteção. por outro lado, a vulnerabilidade é uma predisposição para o desenvolvimento de disfunções psicológicas ou de respostas pouco adequadas à situação, frente a fatores de risco (zimmerman & arunkumar, 1994). no entanto, para rutter (1987), risco não se apresenta de forma estática, se constituindo em processos ativos, expressos com dinamicidade nos contextos, cultura, história e características pessoais, que juntos ou isolados podem provocar resultados disfuncionais. assim, os fatores de risco não são condições negativas determinadas a priori no desenvolvimento, mas que, quando associadas à percepção de precariedade, ausência de possibilidades e esperança em superar desafios, podem dificultar o acionamento de processos de resiliência e agravar a vulnerabilidade (koller & lisboa, 2007). os fatores de risco, portanto, são definidos como condições ou variáveis que estão associadas a uma alta possibilidade de ocorrência de resultados negativos ou não desejáveis e os fatores de proteção, pelo contrário, são mecanismos ou processos que reduzem o impacto do risco e exercem efeitos positivos na saúde mental do indivíduo (rutter, 1987). entretanto, deve-se compreender o conceito de fatores de proteção enfatizando-se uma abordagem de processos, através dos quais diferentes fatores interagem entre si e alteram a trajetória da pessoa, podendo produzir uma experiência estressora ou protetora em seus efeitos (morais & koller, 2004). dessa forma, pesce, assis, santos e oliveira (2004) constataram que a vivência de eventos negativos, ou de fatores de risco, não estava associada ao desenvolvimento da resiliência, mas, por outro lado, os fatores de proteção, como boa auto-estima, apoio social e gênero, atuaram como facilitadores no processo individual de perceber e enfrentar o risco. estratégias de pesquisa para a realização dos estudos com adolescentes em situações de vulnerabilidade social tem sido necessário desenvolver estratégias de pesquisa e novas metodologias que possibilitem o acesso a estes adolescentes que vivem em contextos diferenciados. são estratégias metodológicas que permitem conhecer suas histórias de vida e suas percepções, de forma que seu mundo possa ser compreendido. elementos objetivos e subjetivos dirigem o curso do desenvolvimento humano, e por isso, é necessário dar voz aos participantes, colher suas histórias através de entrevistas, além de ter uma observação cuidadosa do ambiente que os envolve. para santos (2006), é preciso captar aquilo que é vivenciado no interior da pessoa e ao seu redor, na convivência e interação com seus amigos, sua história de vida e as pessoas, objetos e símbolos presentes em seu cotidiano. para que o pesquisador possa acessar a estes contextos é importante uma metodologia que permita um mergulho no ambiente ecológico no qual os participantes das pesquisas vivem, com o objetivo de conhecer a sua realidade, investigar a rotina institucional e os fatores de risco e proteção, entre outros. nesse sentido, a inserção ecológica, desenvolvida por cecconello e koller (2003), se constitui num importante processo metodológico de coleta de dados, que consiste na operacionalização do modelo científico bioecológico, que inclui visitas, observações, conversas informais e entrevistas, de forma que os pesquisadores se tornam parte do ambiente ecológico. assim, a inserção ecológica está apoiada nos preceitos da tbdh, postulada por bronfenbrenner 195 building participative, empowering & diverse communities (1979/1996), que repercute nos objetivos dos pesquisadores. de acordo com prati, couto, moura, poletto e koller (2007), o envolvimento com o contexto por parte de todos os membros da equipe de pesquisa é condição prévia à inserção ecológica. há uma busca pela compreensão dos espaços estudados e os pesquisadores observam e investigam as interações que acontecem entre os diversos sujeitos, símbolos e objetos do contexto e que possibilitarão a validade ecológica dos achados, entendendo o processo, a pessoa, o contexto e o tempo no desenvolvimento humano. para as autoras, esta inserção precisa abarcar a complexização da interação e o rigor dos dados colhidos e registrados sistematicamente. a partir da proposta metodológica da inserção ecológica, diversos instrumentos para a coleta de dados têm sido criados e utilizados: diário de campo, entrevistas semi-estruturadas, desenhos, confecção de cartazes, adaptação de instrumentos padronizados, entre outros (dalbem, 2005; santos, 2006; siqueira, betts, & dell’aglio, 2006). esses instrumentos têm sido adaptados às necessidades de uma abordagem temporal, que investiga o passado, presente e futuro destes adolescentes, tentando-se, assim, captar as mudanças ao longo do tempo. os estudos têm permitido a caracterização dos ambientes físicos e sociais onde os adolescentes se inserem, suas histórias de vida, a presença de fatores de proteção e de risco permeando suas histórias e os contextos dos quais elas emergem. pesquisas sobre a institucionalização de crianças e adolescentes diversos núcleos de pesquisadores no brasil têm desenvolvido estudos com crianças e adolescentes que vivem afastados de suas famílias, contribuindo para um maior conhecimento desta realidade e podendo subsidiar programas de intervenção junto a esta população. um levantamento nacional sobre a situação dos abrigos para crianças e adolescentes apontou que cerca de 20 mil crianças e adolescentes vivem em 589 abrigos no brasil, sendo na maioria entre sete e 15 anos, negros e pobres (silva, 2004). os dados também apontaram que 87% das crianças e adolescentes que viviam nestes abrigos tinham família, sendo que 58% mantinham vínculo com seus familiares. a institucionalização de crianças e adolescentes encontra-se relacionada à vulnerabilidade das famílias brasileiras em situação de pobreza. fatores presentes entre estas famílias, tais como a pobreza, a monoparentalidade, o desemprego, a baixa escolaridade dos cuidadores, presença de doença física e/ou mental, família numerosa, entre outros fatores associados, dificultam a tarefa de cuidar dos filhos, colocando em risco o desenvolvimento e o bem-estar de suas crianças e adolescentes (masten & garmezy, 1985; siqueira & dell’aglio, 2007). para saraiva (2002), a falta de recursos materiais básicos, situação presente em famílias com precárias condições, tem como um de seus resultados a negligência em relação à educação dos filhos ou ao seu abandono. conforme o estatuto da criança e do adolescente (eca, 1990), que é uma lei federal, a institucionalização é uma medida protetora, excepcional e provisória, que visa retirar a criança ou adolescente da situação de risco em que se encontra, seja por maus-tratos, negligência ou algum outro tipo de violência. as instituições de abrigo têm a função de proporcionar atenção às diferentes necessidades da pessoa em desenvolvimento. no entanto, este contexto deve ser transitório, até que a família do jovem esteja organizada para recebê-lo novamente o que sua inserção em outro lugar seja autorizada judicialmente. os motivos para a institucionalização têm sido relacionados a tráfico de drogas, problemas de saúde física dos pais, dependência química dos pais ou dos 196 building participative, empowering & diverse communities próprios filhos, prisão dos pais, enfermidade mental, pobreza e violência doméstica. as medidas de proteção incluem abrigos para crianças e adolescentes entre zero e 18 anos, geralmente em centros de atenção governamentais e não-governamentais. em relação aos jovens que vivem em situação de institucionalização, muitos estudos apontam que o ambiente institucional não se constitui no melhor ambiente de desenvolvimento, enquanto para outros, em casos de situações ainda mais adversas na família, a instituição pode se constituir num contexto que proporciona condições favoráveis e de proteção (dell’aglio, 2000). uma análise das publicações sobre esta temática indicou uma mudança na perspectiva do entendimento do contexto institucional: estudos mais antigos apontavam predominantemente os prejuízos no desenvolvimento de crianças e adolescentes, enquanto estudos mais atuais indicam uma percepção positiva quanto a esta vivência e à qualidade da assistência dos abrigos. essa mudança parece estar relacionada aos métodos mais qualitativos de investigação, partindo do ponto de vista dos abrigados; às teorias-base que destacam a importância do contexto para o desenvolvimento; e à influência advinda do eca (1990) nas políticas públicas de atendimento a esta população no brasil (siqueira & dell’aglio, 2006). dell’aglio (2000) investigou o desenvolvimento de crianças e adolescentes que viviam em instituições de abrigo e que viviam com a família, não tendo encontrado diferenças consistentes entre os grupos. as análises apontaram resultados semelhantes no nível intelectual, desempenho escolar, estratégias de coping e estilo atribucional, tendo sido encontrada diferença somente nos índices de depressão, que foram mais altos entre as meninas institucionalizadas. no entanto, conforme dell’aglio (2000), este resultado não pode ser interpretado como indicação de que haja alguma relação causal entre institucionalização e depressão. na maioria dos casos a institucionalização se deu em conseqüência de eventos traumáticos na família (abandono, violência doméstica, negligência), podendo ter sido este o principal fator de risco para a depressão. outro estudo (dell’aglio, borges, & santos, 2004) também investigou eventos estressores e depressão em adolescentes do sexo feminino, inseridas em diferentes contextos (família, abrigos de proteção e abrigos para cumprimento de medidas sócio-educativas). o abandono mostrou-se o motivo mais freqüente da institucionalização das adolescentes nos abrigos de proteção, seguido por violência física e abuso sexual. foram observadas médias mais altas no número de eventos estressores e nos escores de depressão entre as adolescentes institucionalizadas, demonstrando que nestes casos a família não exerceu seu papel protetivo. dalbem (2005) investigou características da representação do apego em adolescentes institucionalizadas por medidas de proteção. os resultados indicaram que o contexto institucional, vivenciado pelas adolescentes participantes, possibilitou a formação de novas relações afetivas, tanto com os adultos cuidadores quanto com pares, que contribuíram para uma representação de apego mais positiva e para o desenvolvimento de competências. além disso, houve um grande destaque à importância dos monitores, cuidadores dos abrigados, o que reforça o indiscutível papel destes adultos no desenvolvimento dos adolescentes abrigados. outro estudo, que também enfocou a rede de apoio social e afetivo de adolescentes institucionalizados indicou que os diretores, técnicos, monitores e voluntários dos abrigos são os principais fornecedores de apoio afetivo e emocional (siqueira, betts, & dell’aglio, 2006). o abrigo foi identificado como um espaço que proporciona segurança, proteção e formação de novos vínculos afetivos. entretanto, os resultados apontam para a existência de vínculos ainda fortes 197 building participative, empowering & diverse communities entre esses adolescentes e suas famílias. estas são apontadas, no estudo, como a principal fonte de apoio, seguida pelos técnicos, monitores e funcionários do abrigo. a repercussão dos eventos negativos de vida foi estudada por wathier e dell’aglio (2008), que investigaram a manifestação de sintomas depressivos e a freqüência e o impacto de eventos estressores em crianças e adolescentes institucionalizados e não-institucionalizados. foram encontradas médias mais altas de sintomas depressivos e no número de eventos estressores no grupo institucionalizado. o estudo aponta que os jovens abrigados apresentaram maior exposição a situações potenciais de risco, o que pode estar relacionado à maior manifestação de sintomas depressivos. também foram observados indícios de vulnerabilidade e risco, como a precoce experimentação de drogas, alto índice de repetência, baixa escolaridade e desempenho escolar, além da presença de eventos estressores relacionados à família, escola, pares e violência. a institucionalização pode se constituir em uma alternativa de proteção e saúde para muitas crianças e adolescentes em risco, operando como um fator de proteção ao seu desenvolvimento. mas por outro lado, a separação da família e o ingresso em um ambiente novo e estranho podem atuar como mais uma violência para estes. pesquisas relacionadas à recuperação de crianças que sofreram violência apontaram fatores facilitadores para que elas se transpusessem à experiência adversa. tais fatores de proteção podem ser desenvolvidos e estimulados em quaisquer contextos, como nas instituições de abrigo. nos trabalhos de dalbem (2005) e siqueira e dell’aglio (2007) são encontrados exemplos de situações em que o abrigo cumpriu a função protetiva e serviu de referência para que os jovens se sentissem seguros e com condições para continuar seu desenvolvimento. assim, pode-se observar que adolescentes institucionalizados podem apresentar processos de resiliência, através da constituição de uma rede de apoio efetiva, de possibilidades de atividades construtivas e de vínculos afetivos positivos no ambiente da instituição, que atuam na promoção de saúde. pesquisas com adolescentes em situação de rua o estudo sobre o desenvolvimento de adolescentes que vivem em situação de rua no brasil tem se justificado pela constatação de que estes jovens trazem uma história de resistência e enfrentamento às adversidades, pela qual rompem com um padrão social-familiar e criam novas formas de ajuste psicossocial – rompimento que os expõe a alguns riscos, mas os retira de outros e lhes ensina, diariamente, estratégias de sobrevivência (santos, 2006). para definir a população de adolescentes em situação de rua, têm sido utilizados os cinco critérios propostos por neiva-silva e koller (2002): vínculo familiar, atividade (lícitas e ilícitas), aparência pessoal (aspectos externos, como vestimenta suja e falta de higiene), local em que se encontram e ausência de um adulto responsável. tal ausência tem reflexos visíveis na aparência da criança e/ou do adolescente e torna-os também, e acima de tudo, vulneráveis aos mais variados riscos de seu meio. a criança e o adolescente que deixam a sua casa para morar na rua instigam os pesquisadores. alguns estudos apontam para problemas derivados de uma vida nas ruas: déficit de crescimento físico, baixa auto-estima, retardo na escola, depressão, abuso de drogas, entre outros (ribeiro & ciampone, 2001). no entanto, panter-brick (2002) pondera que muitos resultados de estudos que enfatizam os aspectos destruidores da vida nas ruas vêm de amostras pequenas, mal definidas e/ou não representativas dessa população. outros estudos descrevem também o cotidiano dessa população, seus contatos sociais e as oportunidades de interação com objetos e 198 building participative, empowering & diverse communities símbolos (alves et al., 2002; koller & hutz, 1996; martins, 1996; tyler & tyler, 1991). segundo alguns estudos (tyler & tyler, 1991), as crianças e os adolescentes acham que suas condições de vida nas ruas são melhores que em casa. ao se afastarem de uma série de circunstâncias negativas que encontravam em casa, as crianças e os adolescentes mostram habilidade de reorganizar suas vidas, de forma produtiva e por conta própria (koller & hutz, 1996). assim, o importante seria focar a atenção das pesquisas nas variações encontradas dentro da própria população de rua e entender por que algumas crianças e adolescentes exibem uma série de problemas de saúde mental, enquanto outros sobrevivem mais favoravelmente (panter-brick, 2002). os estudos de alves et al. (2002) e koller e hutz (1996) revelam o ambiente da rua como um microssistema efetivo para os que nele se encontram, podendo ser identificados componentes fundamentais ao processo de desenvolvimento, como as atividades, o contato social e a continuidade temporal. paludo e koller (2004) apontam que a rua não deve ser percebida, apenas, como uma ameaça ao desenvolvimento dos meninos e meninas que se utilizam dela, e que se torna importante e necessário compreender a vivência da rua na sua interação entre risco e saúde, valorizando e analisando em sua totalidade as experiências, as emoções e as habilidades desenvolvidas nesse contexto. assim, a rua emerge como uma paisagem complexa, cheia de contrastes e multideterminada por fatores micro, meso e macrossistêmicos. santos (2006) desenvolveu um estudo, através da inserção ecológica, com adolescentes em situação de rua na cidade de salvador, bahia, no brasil. para isso, foram desenvolvidos e adaptados diversos instrumentos para coleta de dados, que permitiram uma inserção profunda no contexto de vida de alguns adolescentes em situação de rua. foi observado que os adolescentes tentam construir habitats, mesmo frágeis, nas ruas. procuram, assim, imprimir suas marcas pessoais nos lugares para reconhecerem-se e se fazerem reconhecer, tentando resgatar, no espaço, a história de suas vidas no tempo, convivendo com riscos e proteção, possibilidades e desafios. a análise dos casos escolhidos permitiu a caracterização dos ambientes físicos e sociais onde transitavam os adolescentes. ao longo do estudo, foi observado que as diversas moradas eram constituídas (e destituídas) na rua e na família de origem, em um processo de apropriação de espaço, linguagem e redes de apoio. no entanto, os inúmeros riscos presentes na rua não são eliminados por este processo, o que torna esse habitat sempre, e inevitavelmente, precário, tendendo a se esvair, ao não cumprir as funções de segurança e proteção também necessárias à sua constituição. só a partir da análise das histórias, através dos tempos passado, presente e futuro, foi possível identificar respostas adaptativas ao risco. considerar diferentes instrumentos de análise permite, de acordo com santos (2006), abarcar e vislumbrar a complexidade da problemática dos meninos de rua, em sua fluidez de vida e busca por fixação, pois é necessária a contextualização de suas vivências, a fim de perseguir suas possíveis particularidades. em termos metodológicos, a utilização de diferentes instrumentos possibilitou o acesso a expectativas, crenças e valores dos adolescentes com relação a diferentes momentos do tempo. no entanto, destaca-se, ainda, que novos estudos são necessários para que se compreenda melhor processos tão complexos como a constituição do habitat e da resiliência. deve-se destacar a importância de estudos qualitativos e longitudinais, que possam abarcar os micro-processos e as mudanças ao longo do tempo. assim, pessoa, processos, contexto e tempo, intrinsecamente relacionados, permitirão uma análise ainda mais complexa dos fenômenos a 199 building participative, empowering & diverse communities serem investigados. considerações finais os estudos acerca de situações de vulnerabilidade em que se encontram muitos adolescentes no brasil, tanto em instituições de proteção como em situação de rua, demonstram conseqüências conjunturais de inúmeros fatores sociais, econômicos e familiares. assim, esta realidade não pode ser ignorada pela sociedade e pelo meio científico, especialmente entre os profissionais que trabalham com populações em situação de risco. desta forma, discutese a necessidade de promover propostas de intervenção que incluam ações direcionadas a estes profissionais, capacitando-os para o trabalho junto a crianças e adolescentes, sejam as que vivem em instituições como as que se encontram em situação de rua. também é necessária uma conscientização sobre a importância dos abrigos de proteção como espaço de desenvolvimento, sem perder seu caráter de medida provisória e temporária, conforme previsto no eca (1990). além disso, destaca-se também a necessidade de reformulação das políticas públicas voltadas a crianças, adolescentes e famílias em situação de risco no brasil. outro aspecto que deve ser ressaltado é a questão das escolhas metodológicas para a pesquisa com populações em situação de vulnerabilidade. para o estudo dos processos de risco e resiliência é importante que o pesquisador possa optar por estratégias metodológicas que permitam a inserção nos contextos estudados e uma investigação das percepções dos próprios adolescentes, para que seja possível uma compreensão mais qualitativa desses processos de superação frente à vulnerabilidade. é necessário que possam ser observados os fatores de proteção presentes, tais como o estabelecimento de relações afetivas nos novos contextos de desenvolvimento, a presença de uma rede de apoio social e afetivo e a inserção destes adolescentes nos espaços de sua comunidade, que 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(1994). resiliency research: implications for schools and policy. social policy report: society for research in child development, 8(4), 1-18. 202 building participative, empowering & diverse communities simbolismo do corpo e intervenção comunitária: contribuições feministas para a investigação-ação participativa. aline domício1 e conceição nogueira2. nosso trabalho é resultado da atuação em comunidades no município de banabuiu, nordeste brasileiro, com mulheres vítimas de violência doméstica, considerando a interseção da psicologia social crítica e metodologias feministas. o objetivo é demonstrar a compreensão da tessitura social a partir da investigaçãoação participativa com ênfase na simbologia do corpo. realizamos ações em parceria com o poder público para levantamento de informações sobre os equipamentos sociais, formas de organização e modos de vida, além de promover a participação das famílias na discussão sobre a violência, através do fortalecimento do grupo de mulheres localmente estruturado. ao utilizar o método de vivência e análise da atividade comunitária, os resultados sugerem a importância do olhar feminista para a mudança dos mecanismos da opressão patriarcal que não estão limitados à condição sócio-econômica, mas encontra no corpo campo fértil para perpetuação desde o ponto de vista intergeracional. palavras-chave: investigação-ação participativa, simbolismo do corpo e feminismo. i introdução as ações relatadas neste trabalho científico fazem parte da atuação da equipe do centro de referência especializada da assistência social (creas) do município de banabuiu (nordeste brasileiro). para o início das atividades foi realizado um processo de diagnóstico-ação (góis, c. 1995: p.43), cujo objetivo foi o conhecimento dos aspectos físicos, sócio-históricos e econômicos da comunidade. esta ação encontrou ressonância no delineamento do perfil das mulheres atendidas no creas, que foi realizado a partir do estudo dos prontuários familiares, tornando possível a definição das estratégias de atuação da equipe em campo. a intervenção proposta teve a investigação-ação participativa (iap) como eixo estratégico para “popularizar las técnicas de investigación incorporando a las personas de las comunidades en la práctica de las mismas” (montero, m. 2006: p.138). tal metodologia contesta a noção positivista que dominou as ciências durante longos anos, assim como o caráter de neutralidade e pretensa objetividade, demonstrando claramente que a maneira como os/as investigadores/ as delimitam suas experiências na realidade, encontram-se circunscritas nas suas ideologias e expectativas culturais. disto resulta a “utilização de múltiplas e variadas metodologias de análises na investigação dos fenômenos sociais de forma a evitar leituras simplistas” (nogueira, c. & neves, s.; 2004: p.1249). isto nos levou a compreender as vozes do sofrimento físico e/ou psíquico das mulheres, vítimas de violência, não somente do ponto de vista individual, mas coletivo, cujo foco assumiu 1 aluna do doutoramento em psicologia social do instituto de educação e psicologia da universidade do minho, portugal. docente da faculdade católica rainha do sertão, quixadá, brasil. contato: alinedomicio@fcrs.edu.br 2 doutora em psicologia social e docente do instituto de educação e psicologia da universidade do minho, portugal. contato: cnog@iep.uminho.pt mailto:alinedomicio@fcrs.edu.br mailto:cnog@iep.uminho.pt 203 building participative, empowering & diverse communities um papel de crítica à sociedade, desafiando a ordem social e os códigos culturais (marques, c; macedo, e; canotilho, p. 2003: p.111) para transformação das relações no domínio da investigação científica. aqui estão reflexões críticas realizada por mulheres nordestinas, compreendo a importância da mediação da simbologia corporal como forma de resgate dos processos de conscientização. sendo esta uma linguagem teórica e metodológica que foi gerada no seio da emotividade e da vivência plural dos feminismos que deve abrir-se para a ligação íntima com os aspectos sociais e comunitários configurados na pós-modernidade, sobretudo, na américa latina. ii – compreendendo o trabalho com grupos de mulheres iniciamos nossa atuação no ano 2005 a partir do estabelecimento de parceria com o poder público municipal em banabuiu, nordeste brasileiro, objetivando implantar uma rede sócioassistencial de combate à violência. através da secretaria da assistência social foram contratados profissionais na área da psicologia social, pedagogia e serviço social que iniciaram o mapeamento das situações de risco para a violência doméstica nas principais regiões comunitárias da zona urbana e rural do município. para tanto, foi estabelecida parceria entre prefeitura e núcleo de extensão e pesquisa em psicologia social (nepuc) da faculdade católica rainha do sertão, que contribuiu com a fase de diagnóstico-ação das comunidades. foram realizadas visitas domiciliares em parceria com agentes de saúde, reuniões com várias associações de moradores e cooperativas rurais sobre as questões de gênero e violência entre casais, incluindo ações intergeracionais, acompanhamento individual e familiar dos casos encaminhados ao projeto sentinela3, palestras e ações educativas nas escolas, entrevistas com mulheres vítimas de violência e assistência especializada para acompanhamento das crianças vitimadas. disto resultou o mapeamento do município, nos indicando as áreas de maior incidência e prevalência da violência doméstica. no ano 2006, realizamos várias oficinas comunitárias com objetivo de apresentar os dados aos munícipes e construir coletivamente um plano de atuação contando, ainda, com o apoio do poder público municipal, ações no âmbito estadual e co-financiamento federal, através da lei orgânica da assistência social (1993: p.14) que preconiza as diretrizes do sistema único da assistência social (2005: p.27) no brasil. ao final, foram definidas três áreas de atuação: a comunidade de pedras brancas, localizada na zona rural, e as comunidades do alto alegre e do conjunto esperança, situadas na zona urbana. neste mesmo ano, tivemos contato com a comunidade rural, tendo realizado cadastro das mulheres vítimas de violência doméstica e o início da atuação em parceria com a associação dos moradores4 que se configurou através da realização do primeiro grupo de vivência feminina. em 2007, as ações foram intensificadas com vistas ao fortalecimento do grupo de mulheres estruturado no ano anterior. durante este trabalho em campo foi utilizado o método de vivência e análise da atividade comunitária5 (góis, c.; 2004: p.83) para compreender o modo de vida 3 nome dado ao início das ações contra a violência doméstica em todo o brasil nos anos de 2005 e 2006. 4 o contato com as comunidades urbanas foi iniciado no ano seguinte. 5 durante os encontros privilegiamos uma abordagem vivencial com a estruturação de várias oficinas de arte-identidade e exercícios de biodança que possibilitaram às mulheres a compreensão vivencial dos melindres da exploração masculina no cotidiano. trata-se da proposição de vivências e reflexões para o favorecimento da expressão criativa da corporeidade feminina, com objetivo de utilizar os sistemas simbólicos que edificam a violência doméstica como potencial de reinterpretação das práticas sociais 204 building participative, empowering & diverse communities do lugar, além da forma como os moradores das principais regiões do município sobrevivem concreta e simbolicamente, imersos no cotidiano da violência, especialmente como se estruturam as relações de poder face à ordem social dominante, enfatizando a análise das práticas sociais daí resultantes sob o ponto de vista feminista6. já no ano 2008 foram promovidas atividades para a geração de emprego e renda com a parceria do poder local para que as mulheres vitimadas pudessem alcançar níveis de autonomia econômica com vistas à manutenção e sobrevivência familiar, sendo esta uma forma de romper com o círculo vicioso da violência doméstica. além disto, foi dada continuidade as demais ações mencionadas e ampliada a participação do programa na zona urbana. perspectiva também planejada para o ano 2009, onde ocorrerá mudança de gestão do poder público local devido o resultado das eleições no brasil. iii centro de referência especializada da assistência social e a violência de gênero do ponto de vista feminista de acordo com o guia de orientação do ministério de desenvolvimento social no brasil (mds, 2007: p.04), a proteção social especializada é realizada pelos creas que presta acolhimento e atenção sócio-assistencial às famílias com objetivo de possibilitar a reconstrução dos vínculos sociais e graus de autonomia dos indivíduos, defendendo a dignidade e os direitos humanos básicos. desse modo, o creas caracteriza-se como uma unidade pública estadual, com atuação municipal, com a missão de prestação de serviços continuados às famílias que possuem seus direitos violados, além da articulação com estratégias de proteção básica e especial, estruturadas localmente. isto se realiza a partir da formação de uma equipe multiprofissional composta por assistente social, psicólogo/a e mobilizador/a social que realizam as seguintes ações: visitas domiciliares, atendimento psicossocial individual e/ou grupal, referenciamento e encaminhamento7 das situações graves de violação de direitos, vitimizações e agressões às demais instituições existentes no território, acolhida/escuta individual, atendimento sócio-familiar8. as estratégias de atuação específicas do psicólogo referem-se ao estabelecimento de parcerias com lideranças para identificação dos casos, visitas domiciliares, realização de entrevistas individuais, descrição e análise do contexto psicossocial para pertinência dos temas nos grupos, fortalecimento do contato com as famílias, contribuindo para a redução das situações de agressão e violência intergeracional. nestes termos, acreditamos que conhecer o conceito de gênero e sua interface com a violência ajuda a equipe creas, especialmente ao/a psicólogo/a social, a perceber que não existem aspectos deterministas que implique na idéia dos indivíduos nascerem homens ou mulheres, pelo contrário, esta noção vai se formando a partir das relações sociais, ao lado de valores, opiniões e crenças que desde o contexto familiar moldam as atitudes e comportamentos da vida cotidiana que serve por sua vez para comparações entre realidades diferentes ou similares, mas não únicas, nem mesmo verdadeiras. (domício, a. & fernandes, j; 2007: p.23). 6 fato importante nesse ano foi à adequação do município às exigências dos governos estadual e federal, passando as ações já descritas a integrarem as estratégias de atuação do creas. 7 trabalho em parceria com a promotoria de justiça e conselho tutelar. 8 além do monitoramento do trabalho infantil (negligência, abuso e exploração sexual). 205 building participative, empowering & diverse communities para gebara, i. (2000: p.47) gênero “condiciona um modo de ser educado/a e um modo de ser percebido/a que condiciona o ser e o agir de cada um diferente do fato de ser homem ou mulher”. assim, falamos da diferença entre marcadores geracionais, ou seja, diferença que se institui não somente entre homens e mulheres, mas também entre várias mulheres e outras mulheres, entre homens e outros homens; quer dizer, uma diferença de multiplicidades baseada na aquisição e desempenho de papéis sociais. nos argumentos da autora sarti, c. (2004: p.41) encontramos a idéia de que a contestação deste panorama encontra no desenvolvimento do movimento feminista ares de resposta às questões colocadas pela análise das relações de gênero. sobre isto, o feminismo questionou, já na década de 70, “as relações de poder no mundo naturalizado das relações entre homens e mulheres, assim como questionou o papel da mulher em todos os âmbitos da sociedade”. em meio a conquistas e inúmeros impasses, concordamos com as autoras alves, b. m. & pitanguy, j. (2003: p.70) quando dizem que: “(...) talvez a força maior, mais importante e menos aparente do movimento feminista esteja na semente de questionamento e de reivindicação que surge na consciência das mulheres que, vivendo anonimamente no seu cotidiano, vêm tentando transformá-lo e recriar a sua relação com o mundo, com os companheiros, com os filhos, consegue mesmo”. implicando que o estudo científico ora apresentado concatena a idéia de que o fenômeno da violência doméstica é modulável, passando pela questão corporal, a partir da noção de gênero. sendo assim, tal violência é uma ação cotidiana expressa nas atividades psíquicas que por sua vez “inclina-se ao corpo estabelecendo lógicas sociais e culturais que nele se propagam” (le breton, d; 2006: p.98). isto ocorrendo porque “o corpo está exposto ao risco da emoção, da ferida, do sofrimento, por vezes da morte (...) ele está apto a adquirir disposições que constituem elas mesmas abertura ao mundo” e as estruturas sociais que compõem elas mesmas a própria simbologia corporal. iv – simbolismo do corpo e intervenção comunitária sabemos que uma verdadeira explosão de estudos sobre o corpo tem invadido as ciências humanas e sociais nas últimas décadas com objetivo de envolver as pesquisas em novos temas. importantes autores (jacques, 1998; almeida, 1996; rey, 2004; thompson, 1995) compreendem que a subjetividade está localizada no corpo que por sua vez não estaria limitado a refletir somente temas da sociedade. quando se fala em corpo encontramos também diversas posições teóricas que o coloca como matéria-prima “que a cultura molda e inscreve de modo a criar diferenças sociais” (almeida, m., 1996: p.04). isto implica dificilmente o encontrarmos no seu estado natural ou biológico propriamente dito, mas sempre em relação interpessoal ou social. assim, a ordem social conforma marcas no corpo que refletem o modo como cada indivíduo se defronta com o ambiente cotidiano. trata-se de uma ferramenta que auxilia os homens a moldarem sua história, assim como é o cenário onde os homens percebem seu mundo de maneira concreta e apreciam seus mapeamentos sócio-culturais, inscrita, também, no tempo e no espaço. talvez por isso almeida, m. apud giddens, a. (idem, ibidem) afirma que: “o corpo é um terreno privilegiado das disputas em torno quer de novas 206 building participative, empowering & diverse communities identidades pessoais, quer da preservação de identidades históricas, da assunção de híbridos culturais ou das recontextualizações locais de tendências globais”. como temos visto, a compreensão da corporeidade humana envolve aspectos cotidianos no sentido das representações e motivos simbólicos que levam os indivíduos a vivenciarem sua existência corporal como fenômeno social e cultural. até porque toda existência, antes de qualquer coisa, é corporal. através da materialidade do corpo os homens transmitem aos demais aquilo que são em essência, as ações que realizam no dia-a-dia, suas necessidades, seus desejos e seus limites. transmitem, ainda, uma série de valores, crenças, ideologias e tradições que podem ser compartilhadas com a coletividade (le breton, d. 2006: p.24). porém, cada gesto, cada sensação ou maneira de expressar os sentimentos do ponto de vista corporal, são moldadas socialmente, mesmo quando são vividos de modo individual. não há nada na gênese corporal que não seja influenciado pela sociedade, ou seja, aprendemos uma determinada forma de expressão do corpo através do contato com as pessoas como um fator de individuação corporal. quando se fala do corpo nestes termos, dizemos também que toda existência e expressão corporal são aprendidas. sendo o corpo alguma espécie de matéria-prima que vai moldando as ações humanas, e mais, lhes dá sentido e significados ao mesmo tempo em que é capaz de limitar a experiência física como construtora do psiquismo humano. porém, as preocupações sobre o corpo não são recentes no desenvolvimento da ciência. existem registros históricos, muitos vinculados às concepções religiosas através dos tempos, que vão desde a concepção do corpo como invólucro imediato da alma, até uma variável fonte de interpretações culturais conforme as eras de desenvolvimento da humanidade. nos dias atuais, pitanguy, j. & alves, b. (2003: p.60) afirmam que: “o movimento feminista denuncia a manifestação do corpo da mulher e a violência a que é submetido tanto àquela que se atualiza na agressão física, como a que o coisifica enquanto objeto de desejo e de consumo”. de tudo isto resulta elementos etnológicos que nos auxilia na compreensão das formas de exploração do corpo feminino, posto que o corpo seja uma realidade mutante que se depara com valores simbólicos da sociedade, muitas vezes sem distinção entre o corpo-mercadoria e o corpo-humano. daí vem o estigma de posse das mulheres que ao permitirem a agressão ou não impedirem que seus filhos sejam vitimados no ambiente familiar, contribuem para a perpetuação da mesma lógica patriarcal que na verdade as oprime. percebe-se a importância do tema família na perspectiva da violência de gênero que segundo amaral, c. (2001: p.28) não pode se furtar de incluir análises sobre a condição da mulher e as relações incutidas no trabalho doméstico e na vida cotidiana. é justamente este enfoque que sedimentam as bases teóricas do nosso estudo e trazem revelações importantes sobre a reinterpretação do cotidiano das mulheres vítimas de violência física no contexto familiar. estas, ao sofrerem a violência, a reproduzem na relação com seus filhos, ou são omissas diante da agressão dos pais/padrastos muitas vezes de modo mais intenso. há, sobretudo, um significado sociológico de co-dependência que indica o modo como cada pessoa depende de certa “alteridade” no contato com o outro para sentir autoconfiança, ou seja, a ligação viciada do ponto de vista afetivo faz com que o sentido existencial de um dependa 207 building participative, empowering & diverse communities quase exclusivamente da satisfação das necessidades do outro. para giddens, a. (1993: p.121) tal circunstância ocorre na expressão da idéia que existem “pais tóxicos” que abdicaram da responsabilidade para com seus filhos/as. esta questão nos permite compreender que existem interconexões entre o cotidiano das mulheres e o significado que as mesmas atribuem as suas experiências no âmbito da esfera privada. tornando, com isto, a intimidade da família uma revelação de emoções e ações impróprias que estão na realidade voltadas para a insegurança na constituição das relações de gênero. assim, a co-dependência afeta a vida das crianças devido o “estabelecimento de uma relação desigual no primeiro momento de desenvolvimento da sua identidade” (dalka, c. & vecina, t. 2002: p.31), não havendo meios de distanciamento destas circunstâncias viciadas, a família claramente falha no seu papel de protetora da prole e transmissora dos valores sócioculturais do grupo no qual se encontra inserida. nesses casos, estabelecemos um olhar sobre as questões relacionadas à violência contra crianças e adolescentes do ponto de vista do desequilíbrio na relação entre os pais que não raro encontra-se também no desenvolvimento da sexualidade. muitas vezes os filhos e filhas são envolvidos no cenário da violência estando a serviço, por assim dizer, das patologias do vínculo parental. o que torna grave a situação de vitimização, posto que seja fundamental a posição e mudanças de atitudes do adulto na família para que a violência tenha fim. o trabalho da equipe de profissionais do creas é de fato fortalecer a visão crítica de que as situações de vulnerabilidade e violação dos direitos são fenômenos que adquirem uma complexidade histórica, embora gerados e/ou ampliados no seio da família são respaldadas no contexto social e comunitário. disto resulta que cada família atendida passa pela definição de planos de trabalho contendo as “estratégias de atendimento às mulheres, suas famílias, seus membros e indivíduos, os pactos de responsabilidades, os compromissos assumidos, os recursos a serem mobilizados para responder às necessidades e para desenvolver potencialidades e capacidades” (mds, 2007: p.13). considera-se, esta, uma estratégia central e local para a resolução de conflitos e a transparência requerida na investigação-ação participativa que deseja uma mudança de paradigmas para a integração do conhecimento de base intelectual com as necessidades e potencialidades das populações alvo da investigação (montero, m.; 2006: p.138) em um processo de contínua aprendizagem entre investigadores-profissionais da equipe creas e as próprias famílias, sobretudo, porque o desafio é enfocado a partir do corpo e das simbologias possíveis no eixo comunitário. vi – considerações finais após quatro anos de atuação em campo, nosso trabalho tem a particularidade de assumir as desigualdades de gênero como parâmetro para construir um modelo de ação comunitária baseado nas propostas feministas no interior da psicologia social crítica. daí, nosso posicionamento que implica questionar as formas de conhecimento (teórico) consideradas “verdadeiras”. implica, ainda, a compreensão das especificidades sociais e históricas, além de culturais e econômicas, da população parceira do nosso trabalho. a utilização da investigação-ação participativa possuiu o objetivo de captar a maneira 208 building participative, empowering & diverse communities como as mulheres reinterpretam seu cotidiano, bem como os aspectos corporais que elas assumem na teia de submissão e resignação diante do poder patriarcal. sendo também possível um resgate da identidade e auto-estima dos seus filhos/filhas. para isto, a visão plural dos feminismos ocupa um lugar decisivo posto que esteja a serviço das mudanças sociais necessárias para romper o círculo vicioso da violência doméstica no nordeste do brasil, que além do sofrimento corporal, traz a fome e a miséria como meio de sobrevivência emocional para milhares de homens e mulheres sertanejas. referências bibliográficas almeida, m. corpo presente: treze reflexões antropológicas sobre o corpo. oeiras, pt: edições celta, 1996. alves, b. & pitanguy, j. o que é o feminismo. 8ª ed., coleção primeiros passos, n.44. são paulo, sp: brasiliense, 2003. amaral, c. família às avessas: gênero nas relações familiares dos adolescentes. fortaleza, ce: edufc, 2001. bourdieu, p. meditações pascalianas. trad. sérgio miceli. rio de janeiro: bertrand brasil, 2001. brasil, presidência da república. lei orgânica da assistência social loas. lei nº 8.742, de 7 de dezembro de 1993, publicada no dou de 8 de dezembro de 1993. brasil, ministério do desenvolvimento social e combate à fome, secretaria de comunicação. sistema único da assistência social suas. brasília, julho de 2005. brasil, ministério do desenvolvimento social e combate à fome. centro de referência especializado da assistência social. guia de orientação n.º 01, secretaria nacional de assistência social, 2007. dalka, c. & vecina, s. o fim do silêncio na violência familiar: teoria e prática. são paulo, sp: agora, 2002. domício, a. & fernandes, j. reinterpretação do cotidiano das mulheres vítimas de violência física no contexto familiar. anais do iii encontro de pesquisa e extensão da faculdade católica rainha do sertão: quixadá, ceará, 2007 [on-line]. gebara, i. rompendo o silêncio: uma fenomenologia feminista do mal. 2 ed., petrópolis, rj: vozes, 2000. giddens, a. a transformação da intimidade: sexualidade, amor e erotismo nas sociedades modernas. tradução magda lopes. são paulo, sp: editora unesp, 1993. góis, c. noções de psicologia comunitária. fortaleza, ce: editora viver, 1994. _______. vivência: caminho à identidade. fortaleza: editora viver, 1995. jacques, m. identidade. in: strey, m. n. psicologia social contemporânea. petrópolis, rj: vozes, 1998. le breton, d. a sociologia do corpo. petrópolis, rj: vozes, 2006. marques, c.; macedo, e. & canotilho, p. da tecitura complexificadora entre feminismos e pósmodernidade: uma relação de interpelação crítica. in: marques, c. & nogueira, c. (org) um olhar sobre os feminismos: pensar a democracia no mundo da vida. porto, pt: editora umar, 2003. montero, m. hacer para transformar: el método en la psicologia comunitária. buenos aires: paidós, 2006. 209 building participative, empowering & diverse communities nogueira, c. & neves, s. metodologias feministas na psicologia social crítica: a ciência ao serviço da mudança social. ex-aequo, revista da associação portuguesa de estudos sobre as mulheres. volume 11 (2004) páginas 123-138. rey, f. o social na psicologia e a psicologia social: a emergência do sujeito. tradução vera lúcia mello. coleção psicologia social. petrópolis, rj: vozes, 2004. sarti, c. o feminismo brasileiro desde os anos 1970: revisitando uma trajetória. revista estudos feministas [on-line]. 2004. vol. 12, n. 02 [citado 2006-12-24] pp. 35-50. 210 building participative, empowering & diverse communities el uso de la imagen en el trabajo comunitario. leonor m. cantera espinosa universidad autónoma de barcelona departamento de psicología social leonor.cantera@uab.es carmen rodrigues tatsch universidade veiga de almeida departamento de psicología carmenrodriguest@yahoo.com.br resumen uno de los desafíos permanentes de la psicología comunitaria es el de facilitar el proceso de toma de conciencia de determinadas problemáticas sociales y el afrontamiento de las acciones encaminadas a la prevención o a la resolución de las mismas. esta tarea de visibilización de los problemas resulta especialmente difícil en aquéllos ante los que se han construido resistencias sociales al reconocimiento de los mismos o a hablar espontánea y abiertamente de ellos. en este trabajo resumimos el proceso y los resultados de dos experiencias en el uso de la imagen una herramienta para facilitar estos procesos de visibilización, señalamiento y expresión social de problemáticas y necesidades que permanecen latentes en determinadas comunidades que, por ello mismo, tardan en ser afrontadas activamente. en una de ellas, se utiliza la técnica del video antropológico como herramienta de investigación – intervención en el ámbito de la salud mental aplicada en comunidades de río de janeiro. en la otra, la imagen es utilizada en la fotointervención, que proporciona una base para la reflexión sobre las miradas y posturas que las personas pueden adoptar ante determinadas situaciones. esta experiencia se desarrolla en el ámbito de la formación universitaria en la uab de barcelona. palabras clave: imagen, video antropológico, fotointervención, sensibilización, empoderamiento. introducción entre los objetivos de la intervención comunitaria figura la concienciación de los problemas sociales y el empoderamiento de las personas y los grupos afectados por los mismos (montero, 2000, sánchez, 2007). y, entre los de la formación de profesionales de la intervención en este ámbito, la sensibilización y toma de conciencia de los problemas sociales como condición previa para un trabajo orientado al cambio social. el objetivo del presente trabajo consiste en la exposición y la ejemplificación mediante dos experiencias desarrolladas en brasil y en españa del uso de la imagen como herramienta facilitadora de procesos de sensibilización y de empoderamiento. un trabajo de sensibilización comunitaria en brasil el trabajo comunitario en brasil fue realizado en una comunidad descendiente de esclavos 211 building participative, empowering & diverse communities africanos en la región de rasa del municipio de armação dos búzios del estado de rio de janeiro. esta participación en la comunidad fue, al inicio, parte de una investigación que articulaba la escuela de comunicación de la universidad federal do rio de janeiro con el apoyo de la fundação de amparo à pesquisa do estado do rio de janeiro. el objetivo inicial era promover la salud mental y el bienestar de la comunidad enfocando principalmente la autoestima de sus integrantes, la valoración de la cultura local y la reelaboración de las identidades. nuestra hipótesis era la de que si se trabajaba con las expresiones singulares de cada cultura esto funcionaria como un sistema informal de promoción de la salud, que a su vez contribuiría a la identificación propia con características particulares alejadas de una mirada masificadora dominante. de manera que al facilitar la visibilidad de culturas minoritarias estaríamos promoviendo la salud mental de sus integrantes. en suma, la salud mental entendida como la reafirmación de la vida y la búsqueda de cambios que faciliten el ser y el estar. la metodología utilizada fue el vídeo antropológico para realizar un estudio etnográfico (canevacci, 1990, tatsch, 1997). el procedimiento seguido consistió en la realización de videos de la comunidad en su vida cotidiana por sus propios integrantes. para facilitarlo, se les dio apoyo en el uso de la cámara. fueron tomadas escenas diversas como debates en asambleas realizadas por la comunidad, situaciones cotidianas de vida en la calle, entrevistas con agentes-líderes de la comunidad, etc. la comunidad fue invitada a asistir a las proyecciones de los videos y a las discusiones sobre los mismos. dicha actividad contribuía a visualizar aspectos varios como, por ejemplo, sus canciones, sus preocupaciones, los recursos que utilizaban para lograr sus metas, etc. todo ello contribuyó a que entre 2005 y 2007 el proyecto de investigación denominado derecho al trabajo y desarrollo humano y social contribuyera a preservar las características particulares de la comunidad aportando elementos positivos a la memoria de la calidad de vida de sus integrantes y promoviendo la solidaridad e integración grupal. la investigación mostró que era imposible mejorar la calidad de vida de esta población si no se tenía en cuenta la herencia cultural de los nativos de búzio y no se incorporaba esa memoria, hasta ahora excluida, en el mercado de trabajo de ese municipio. este reconocimiento y respeto de esta identidad iba a favorecer la autoestima colectiva y la motivación a ganar su sustento con dignidad. entre los resultados de la investigación-acción en la comunidad se constató que cuando se comenzó a convivir con otros miembros de la comunidad desde ese respeto y reconocimiento, se comenzó a articular un proyecto de turismo histórico-antropológico-ecológico que reúne a varios participantes pertenecientes a diversas asociaciones de la región como artesanos, pequeños agricultores, lideratos ligados a la ecología y preservación del medio ambiente, pescadores, etc. la propuesta es un turismo alternativo que permita la valorización de la historia y la cultura y a través de ello la revalorización e inclusión de la sociedad buziana como forma de solidaridad y afirmación identitaria. la comunidad de rasa, aún cuando mantenía formas auténticas de expresión (fruto de sus raíces históricas) y de su diversidad cultural, no mantenía la conciencia de las mismas ni la de su importancia para una sociedad plural. tendía a ocultarlas, producto de años de invisibilización y ocultación por parte de la cultura dominante. sus habitantes se encontraban excluidos de la vida social, cultural y económica reinante en el municipio y en fase de una desintegración cultural y de su historia. se logró modificar las relaciones de poder existentes dando paso a deliberaciones políticas más participativas. con la experiencia descrita se avanzo hacia la conciencia y el 212 building participative, empowering & diverse communities empoderamiento de las personas integrantes de dicha comunidad. experiencia en la formación universitaria en españa en el marco de un master sobre y de una asignatura de grado sobre técnicas de evaluación e intervención psicosocial, se desarrolló una experiencia de fotointervención en la universidad autónoma de barcelona, con el objetivo de facilitar, a través del uso de nuevas tecnologías, la observación del entorno cotidiano y un ejercicio de reflexión y crítica sobre los fenómenos y procesos analizados. la técnica utilizada para ello fue la fotointervención que consiste en una herramienta de análisis y de acción psicosocial que articula la fotografía como medio de visibilización de realidades sociales problemáticas con los principios de investigación e intervención de la psicología social comunitaria comprometida con el cambio de estas realidades (cantera, 2009). el resumen esquemático del protocolo de aplicación de esta técnica incluye los siguientes pasos principales: entrega de una cámara fotográfica a las personas participantes en la experiencia, realización individual de fotos de acuerdo con las instrucciones recibidas, revelado de las fotos y presentación de las mismas ante el grupo, explicación individual y discusión grupal de los significados de los materiales fotográficos expuestos y de sus implicaciones, reflexión y debate sobre estrategias de afrontamiento y de acción ante las realidades observadas y criticadas (cantera y ávila, 2009). entre los resultados del proceso destacan la visualización y el cuestionamiento de situaciones problemáticas que habitualmente resultan invisibles e invisibilizadas, ignoradas y desatendidas; la concienciación individual y colectiva de los procesos de naturalización y de normalización a que las mismas han sido sometidas por el pensamiento socialmente dominante y la posible articulación de los niveles individual, interindividual y grupal de análisis de estas realidades y de actuación ante ellas. a continuación mostramos algunas imágenes de la comunidad en brasil donde se llevó a cabo el proyecto y algunas imágenes tomadas por el estudiantado del master sobre violencia en la pareja y a nivel de grado; como ejemplos del trabajo de identificación a través de las imágenes. bibliografía canevacci, m. (1990). antropologia da comunicação visual. são paulo: ed. brasiliense cantera, l. (2009). la fotointervención como técnica de concienciación de la violencia de género. in m. neves (coord.). género e saúde. porto alegre: edipucrs. cantera, l. y ávila, r. (2009). la fotointervención como herramienta docente. repte (revista de enseñanza de la psicología: teoría y experiencia). montero, m. (2000). construcción, desconstrucción y crítica: teoria y sentido de la psicologia social comunitária em américa latina. in: r.h.f.campos & p.a.guareschi (orgs). paradigmas em psicologia social. a perspectiva latino-americana. petrópolis: vozes. tatsch, c. (1997). formas expressivas e discursos de uma comunidade urbana do rio de janeiro: um uso do teatro e do vídeo antropológicos. tese de doutorado rio de janeiro, br: programa em pósgraduação em psiquiatria e saúde mental do ipub ufrj. sanchez, a. (2007). manual de psicología comunitaria. madrid: pirámide. 213 building participative, empowering & diverse communities community-based fire preparedness practice in high density area*) husnul fitri dki jakarta house of representatives, indonesia email: rum1328@yahoo.com;hufi50@ui.edu istiqomah wibowo applied psychology-social intervention department, faculty of psychology, university of indonesia email:isitqomahwibowo@yahoo.com abstract fire is one of the common disasters in indonesia especially in many big cities including capital city of indonesia, jakarta. although it is considered as human error factor and happened incidentally but fire has become a disaster because its effect to many aspect of community life. it also usually happens in high density area with low social-economic status. thus, this intervention intends to empower vulnerable community against fire hazard. research focuses at the aspect of preparedness based on social-cognitive model (paton, 2006). it is used to elaborate the factors of intention to prepare including critical awareness, sense of community, action coping, and outcome expectancy of the community as the basic to design an intervention in order to develop a proper form of risk communication that match with local community need. then, vulnerability and capacity assessment technique is used to obtain the whole picture about community’s vulnerabilities and capacities. intervention strategy was directed to organize community preparedness through local organization and enhance community capacity against fire hazard. results from this intervention indicate that fire preparedness can be an effective way to improve community capacity. the results also show that intervention succeed to : 1) improve community knowledge about fire preparedness; 2) improve community outcome expectancy through specific behavior change; 3) build local community alertness team ; 4) form nonformal information sharing about fire preparedness within community. these results strengthen previous research stating that the success of community-based fire preparedness intervention program need to pay attention to locality aspect and the participation of community as primary source of support. keyword : fire hazards, preparedness, intention to prepare, risk communication introduction jakarta has the highest occurrence of fire disaster in indonesia (suharso, 1999). it can be seen from the stable frequencies of fire disaster in jakarta in the last 10 years which are very high. 214 building participative, empowering & diverse communities figure 1. frequency of fire disaster occurrence in the last 10 years source: jakarta fire department (2006) the occurrence of fire disaster in jakarta is spread almost evenly in all of its municipalities. according to kristantio (2006), density affects the potential of fire occurrence, i.e., the higher the density of a given area, the higher the potential of fire occurrence in that area. this factor made community living in a high-density area susceptible to the danger of fire disaster. fire disaster can be classified into several of classifications according to the types of burnt object. according to the jakarta fire department this classification can be divided into residential building, public building, industrial building, and vehicle. however, for the purpose of this intervention program, the focus is restricted to residential buildings especially those in the high-density area. based on the frequency of fire occurrence (an area is classified as fire-hazard spot if there were five cases or more of fire in that area), there are generally 53 fire-hazard spots in jakarta. besides being determined by the frequency of fire occurrence, the fire-hazard spot are also determined by other characteristics of those areas such as the high density, simple and flammable building or housing material, insufficient access to housing alley and the scarce of water supply (kompas, 25 may 2005; suharso, 1999). even though incidents are often considered to have been caused by negligence, the impact and the complexity of fire problem has made it a form of society disaster. in responding to the high rate of fire disaster in jakarta, the government of the city of jakarta through jakarta fire department had done numerous attempts in order to resolve the occurrence of disaster. however, due to high rate of fire occurrence, the key in the process of preventing fire occurrence lies in the hand of the community. in order to get people to participate in this process, jakarta fire department has made a couple community-based programs like the forming sistem ketahanan lingkungan terhadap bahaya kebakaran (sklk or the community’s resistance system against fire hazard), the training of balakar (barisan sukarela kebakaran or the front of volunteer against fire), and direct elucidation (in kristantio, 2006). even so, the effectiveness of above programs needs to be examined. until now there is no evaluation of the above mentioned programs and there is no master plan made about the continuance of the programs that are already implemented (kristantio, 2006). as a result, the sustainability and community-enhancement aspects are still regarded inefficient for the long215 building participative, empowering & diverse communities term target, such as the stability of the community’s resistance against fire, has not been reached yet. strother & buchbinder (1980) stated that public educational programs preventing fire will work if they were planned by taking into account two aspects. first, when the program is constructed, attention should be given to problems existed in that area. second, the community living in the area must be involved both in the planning and in the implementation phase. it means that active involvement of the community is prerequisite in order to create an effective program. based on the study by kristantio (2006) on the role of the community in fire prevention, it can be concluded that active participation of the society is an important aspect to make the program successful. thus, community-based programs are one of the solutions that need to be a priority in solving the problems of fire disaster in jakarta. therefore, the focus and the priority of the program must be chosen by paying attention to the complexities and the localities of the problems. the complexity of the problems is also affected by the vulnerabilities of the community. fire problem could not be seen only as a behavioral problem, but it is also related to the physical, economical, and social aspect of the community. behavior change toward safety behavior and environments cannot be induced directly without the support of other aspects, like economical and social aspects. many previous studies on fire prevention programs in the united states (among them are those from fahy & norton, 1989; gunther, 1981; karter & donner, 1978; munson, 1976 in mcconnel, dwyer & leeming, 1996) showed that communities with low social economical status have higher risk to be hit by the fire disaster. this is due to the fact that those communities have insufficient facility to prevent fire and other resources needed in changing their behavior. the localities of the problem are also needed to be taken into consideration in the planning of an intervention program. stother & buchbinder’s study (1980) on numerous educational programs in the united states concluded that solving of fire problem needed to focus on specific local problems, and the community in that area must be involved in the planning process. this showed that there is no single formula that can work in every situation for every class of the society. a workable intervention program is one that is suitable to the condition of the community that becomes the target of the intervention. in respect to the above mentioned issues, we can assume that there are no strategy and program that can produce instant change. therefore, the authors decided to focus on the preparedness aspect of the community in order to face fire-hazard situation. it is based on the thought that, in order to reduce the fire risk in an area, one of the ways that can be done is by increasing the preparedness of the community to face the hazard. the prevention and mitigation against fire require basic changes in the behavioral, economical, and physical aspects of the community, but since fire disaster can happen at any time, a short-term program can be done by preparing the community against fire. preparedness refers to any activity done in order to stop and to avoid the effect of a disaster that are dangerous to the community (carter, 1991). according to smith (1996) this process is a form of an adaptation that human has towards the danger that threatens his life. activity in this level includes all acts aimed to reduce the loss that caused by the disaster by adapting the human to it. 216 building participative, empowering & diverse communities according to patton (2003), preparedness against hazard and disaster is important to reduce the risk of losing something. preparedness can also facilitate the ability to cope in emergency when the disaster happens. this can shape the resiliency level of an individual against certain hazard. smith (1996) said that preparedness can be increased by giving information and knowledge about the hazard to the community. however, in reality, this effort showed that it have not done any good to increase the preparedness level of the community against hazard (ballantyne et al, 2000; duval & mullis, 1999; lindel & whitney, 2000; mcclure et al, 1999 in paton, 2003; hurnen & mcclure, 1997). paton (2003) then developed a theoretical model to explain the factors that influence preparedness. according to patton this model can be implemented to create risk-reducing strategy. paton et al (2006) then tried that hypothesis towards fire-hazard problem. by using factors in the social-cognitive model about preparedness, they found that in fire-hazard, factors such as; critical awareness, outcome expectancy, sense of community, and action coping are significant predictors to the intention to prepare. factors which were not significant predictors are self-efficacy and the perception of risk. based on that finding, it can be concluded that critical awareness, outcome expectancy, sense of community, and action coping are the factors needed to be elaborated related to this study. by upgrading these factors, it can be expected that the community’s intention to do the act of preparedness can also be increased. in addition to this preparedness program, this intervention used capacity enhancement (cce) strategy and the risk communication as approach to community. community capacity enhancement is a strategy focusing on the effort to mobilize the community’s asset in order to solve the problem in the community or to enhance the capacity of the community (delgado, 2000). the authors used cce to find community’s assets that can be used to increase community capacity to solve the fire problem. one of these assets is social organizations found in the community. other technique is risk communication, which is a social process in order to give information about hazard and to influence the community to perform behavioral change and to participate in the issue mentioned above (rohrmann, 2000). risk communication is essential in designing and evaluating the spread of information of a certain hazard. the success of the risk communication is not only determined by the content and the context of the message, but also by the psychosocial factors which play a more significant role in the process of behavioral change. objectives the objective of this research-based intervention is to give the community knowledge to emerge first aid and to prevent the spread of fire, if fire occurs in community. the local social organizations must be involved in empowerment strategy to spread the knowledge to the community. those organizations are not only expected to react effectively when the fire disaster happen, but in the long term becomes a rich resources in developing fire prevention plans via activities reducing the susceptibility in the community. building local preparedness also has its own obstacles. according to paton, kelly, burglet, & doherty (2006) preparedness against fire depended highly to the intention to prepare. through increasing or reinforcing these factors of intention, it is expected that the community can in turn increased their preparedness. 217 building participative, empowering & diverse communities methods time and location of the intervention for this research, the authors has chosen manggarai district, to be exact at rw (rukun warga, sub district) 04 as the research location. rw 04 in the manggarai district consists of 16 rts (neighborhood units) with a population of more than 3727 people under 1031 head-of-family/ households (according to rw 04 statistic data, dated august 2006). according to the central bureau of statistics of the south jakarta municipality office, rw 04 has a wide slum area (54 hectare) in comparison with other rws in manggarai. beside that, 2296 of the people from 669 households live in slum area, which make it more than 50% of the community living in the slum area. most of the people living there are traders and laborers. rw 04 has experienced several fire disasters (3 times between the years 1980-1986 and 4 times between the years 2003-2006). in the 2003 fire disaster, 800 households lost their houses. here is the information about the fire disasters happened in the years 2003-2006. table 1. fire disasters happened in the next-to-lowest administrative unit number 04 between the years 20032006 date of incidents source of fire lost estimation/victims burned area july 14th, 2005 short circuit 2 million rupiahs 6 m2 may 6th, 2005 short circuit 10 million rupiahs 24.5 m2 july 28th, 2003 cigarette bud 35 households lost its house 3,500 m2 march 6th, 2003 candle from child’s play 875 households lost its house 800 house, 1 mosque, and 1 prayer house burned down 10 people injured 80,000 m2 source: south jakarta fire department (2003-2006) target participants target participants of this study are members of the tim peduli lingkungan (tpl, care for the neighborhood team) which represent the community of rw 04 in manggarai district and have the capacity in doing various social activities. tpl is a non-formal organization which was formed by several of the community’s significant figures and by representatives of the rts in rw 04. initially, tpl was formed to solve various conflicts among the people and among the rts which often occurred in rw 04. but as time went by, tpl was often involved to represent rw 04 in numerous social activities. therefore, tpl has grown into a significantly important organization in rw 04. currently there are 20 active members in tpl. intervention procedure 1. baseline study the baseline to assess community intervention was created using the vulnerabilities and capacities assessment (vca). it used to help the researchers to comprehend the community’s vulnerability to disaster. by apprehending the real condition, the program can be arranged according to what the community really needs in order to decrease the level of the vulnerability. 218 building participative, empowering & diverse communities several techniques of data gathering were used based on the participatory rural/urban appraisal activities, including: secondary data gathering (november 2006 to february 2007) semi-structured interview (december 2006 to march 2007) with 24 members of the society, including the head of community, community’s public figures, and the staffs of the south jakarta fire department. hazard mapping to the area rw 04 of the manggarai district which are highly firehazardous. this process was done simultaneously with focus group discussion. focus group discussion. the discussion was divided into 2 groups according to gender. the first group was the male member of the tpl (discussion held in april 15th, 2007) and the second group involving female group from pkk organization (pendidikan kesejahteraan keluarga/women association for the education of family welfare, held in april 18th, 2007). the reason for dividing the groups according to gender found from the interview. the researchers discovered that there were difference in the knowledge, perception, and the strategy to overcome fire disaster between the two groups. females have lower knowledge to handle fire disaster when compared to males. this lack of knowledge often made female members of the community more emotional in handling fire disaster. the main topics of the discussion were the vulnerability of the community towards fire and the community’s intention to form community preparedness in handling fire. important findings from this discussion (besides the vulnerability aspects which will be explained in the next section) were the identification of factors which affect the intention of the community member to form community preparedness. there were some problems which causes delay the assessment process, caused by flood that swiped the manggarai district in february 2007. the intervention program was arranged by analyzing the problem and making an objective tree in logical framework analysis (lfa). by giving attention to the cause factor of the problems and transfer it into objective tree, the researcher then focusing intervention program to the community’s awareness about preparedness of the community against fire, by increasing the community’s knowledge and skill needed in preventing and handling fire disaster, changing the outcome expectancy, and increasing the intensity of community’s preparedness against fire. the pre-intervention indicators which served as a reference on the change in the intervention process can be seen in table 2. table 2. pre-intervention indicators aspects pre-intervention indicators the intention towards the community’s fire preparedness still no interest to form fire preparedness team lack of specific preparation in order to face fire disaster knowledge about fire preparedness lack of knowledge and skill about how to face fire disaster outcome expectancy toward community-based preparedness against fire lack of knowledge about the benefit of the community’s fire preparedness having no information about preparedness based on the baseline result, the risk communication strategy that needed to be concerned are efforts to increase: 219 building participative, empowering & diverse communities knowledge on handling a disaster information on the benefits of community’s preparedness against fire through training and practice on planning process. 2. implementation and evaluation of the intervention program the phases of the intervention program are: assessment and approach towards the community which was started from november 2006 to april 2007. community meeting/fgd held in april 29th, 2007 fire preparedness training and extension working together with the south jakarta fire department and indonesian red crescent chapter central jakarta, in may 27th and 2nd and 9th of june 2007. community-based workshop about fire preparedness in cooperation with the indonesian red cross chapter south jakarta in june 3rd, 2007. activity-planning guide in the 9th, the 23rd, and the 27th of june 2007. results the results of the intervention program are: the formation of the fire preparedness team in the community as a new function of the tpl. the increase in the community’s knowledge about fire preparedness is indicated by the mean differences in t-tests from the pre-test and the post-test. the result of the t-test of pairedsample from pre-test and post-test indicated that the mean differences of 40.5263 (pre-test’s mean = 51.05; post-test mean = 91.57). based on this result, the score is significance with the value of t = -18.205 (df = 18; level of confidence 95%). therefore, it can be concluded that the extension was quite effective in the increasing of the participant’s knowledge. 2. the change in the outcome expectancy and the intention toward preparedness shown through the specific change in the attitude to prepare during postintervention. facts were noted from questionnaires given before and after the workshop. the questionnaires contained statements of specific matters on what the individual is going to do in preparing him/herself when facing fire disaster (table 3) table 3. items of preparedness behavior behavior before after having wet towel/sack in the kitchen ready in use to extinguish fire 17% 94% drawing up emergency plan to be brought by the family in case a fire occur 17% 94% have first-aid medicines 94% 94% training fire extinguishing skills 0% 82% to have special water supply serving only one purpose which is to extinguish fire 11% 47% n = 17 3. the spread nonformal information about fire hazards awareness and fire preparedness 220 building participative, empowering & diverse communities through stickers. discussion the very high-rate of fire occurrences in jakarta is a problem which is need a comprehensive intervention. placing the problem in the incidental category is no longer relevant knowing that, although there is no seasonal pattern of when it will happen there is a vulnerability pattern that can be identified. looking at how big the loss it can inflict, the danger it produce, the vulnerability level, and the impact it causes to the lives of the society, fire disaster must be categorized as the disaster in the society. this resulted in an opportunity to resolve the fire disaster problem more comprehensively. community-based program is a strategy that has long been developed in countries with high frequency of fire disaster. it is proven to be an effective intervention in reducing fire occurrence frequency (appy & campton, 2003). according to strother & buchbinder (1980) choosing program which is appropriate with the needs of the community as well as enhancing their active participation is an important thing to do. the success of community-based program in reducing the occurrence of fire was proven by the kristantio (2006) in his study in galur district, central jakarta. according to kristantio (2006) galur now has become a relatively save area from fire seen from the reduced frequency of the occurrence of fire disaster. in his study, kristantio (2006) found that one of the main factors of the change in galur is in the high participation of the community in handling the high frequency of fire. this showed that community-based program is an activity that needs to get further development and empowerment because it has been shown to be an effective program to solve fire problem. on the other hand, based on the study by kristantio (2006), perception is an important aspect in handling fire disaster. but speaking in terms of preparedness, the perception of the risk alone cannot be a strong predictor to the community’s mobility to do the act of preparedness. according to paton et al (2006) preparedness was determined by other factors, including, outcome expectancy, sense of community, and action coping. this can be seen in the community of rw 04 manggarai district. according to the baseline, the community members of the rw 04 already have high critical awareness and the perception of risk. but those factors are not strong enough to initiate specific preparedness activity in facing fire disaster. the absence of comprehensive study about the role of intentional factors within the society maybe become one of the cause of why the community-based programs against fire held by jakarta fire department did not run optimally. in the study of galur, participation and perception maybe become the dominant factors because those aspects are the ones being studied by kristantio (2006). the programs usually executed without an extensive studies about the community being intervened although it was essentially important because the right model of risk communication can be determined only after we have a full understanding of the community. the use of social-cognitive model towards preparedness also needs further much deeper investigation. in the intervention process of rw 04 manggarai district, this model is used to elaborate intentional factors in the community. the assumption is, by activating the intentional factors which concluded as still weak, the intention to do preparedness acts will become more factual. however, the authors still have not found studies which used social-cognitive methods in community in indonesia. therefore, the use of this model will be better if preceded by quantitative 221 building participative, empowering & diverse communities study to predict factors which are relevant in the study as well as in the community. basically, social-cognition is needed to help plan the suitable risk communication for the society. in rw 04 manggarai district, risk communication is focused on the development of preparedness against hazard and to the management needed to build local preparedness team. in a wider context, a country which is highly vulnerable to disaster such as indonesia really needed a suitable risk communication design so the intervention programs can work effectively. finding an effective program is important regarding the limited fund available for the education about disaster. the building of local preparedness team is an initial step from other activity needed to create a fire-disaster-free community. this team then needs to plan further activity for the prevention of disaster as well as for the continuation of the team. therefore, in the future, the team is expected to be able to plan the preparedness management in the community, for example, creating the procedure of alarm-system for disaster and evacuation training. other intervention programs which were focused on structural change as in the physical and economical aspects are also needed to reduce the vulnerability level. example of such program is the use of micro-hydro powered electricity to be the substitute of the electricity from the state electricity enterprise. the use of this technology can help in reducing financial expenses for the use of electricity and to prevent the unsafe and illegal use of electricity. but, the implementation of the programs also has to consider the acceptance of the society and the readiness of the technology requirement. appy & compton (2003) mentioned the “five e-s” as the main and comprehensive strategy in creating community involvement to handle fire problem. according to appy & compton (2003), fire problem can only be resolved comprehensively if it involves these five elements, education, empowerment, environment enhancement, enactment of the development of security standard by the maintenance of law, and evaluation with behavioral research. the integration of the five elements will give effective result in handling fire problems. comprehensive understanding also means that fire problems are not only the responsibility of the society and the fire department, but also the responsibility of the policy makers, academic scholars and interventionist to determine the appropriate program and behavioral target. it means that optimal result from intervention program needs planning of a long-term program through many deeper studies which was involved comprehensive studies. references appy, meri-k, & compton, d. (2003). fire and life safety education: a measure of fire department excellence. in arthur e. cote, et al (editor). fire protection handbook (9th ed.). massachussetts : nfpa canter, d., donald, i., & chalk, j. (1992). pedestrian behavior during emergencies underground: the psychology of crowd control under life threatening circumstances. carter, n. (1991). disaster management: a disaster manager’s handbook. manila: adb de dios, h.b. (2002). participatory vulnerabilities and capacities assessment: finding the link between disasters and development. quezon city: oxfam 222 building participative, empowering & diverse communities delgado, m. (2000). community social work practice in an urban context: the potential of a capacityenhancement perspective. new york: oxford university press dinas pemadam kebakaran dki jakarta. (2005). penanggulangan kebakaran dan bencana di lingkungan padat hunian. jakarta : dinas pemadam kebakaran dki jakarta hall, j.r., & cote, a.e. (2003). an overview of the fire problem and the protection. in arthur e. cote, et al. (editor). fire protection handbook (9th ed.). massachusetts: nfpa hurnen, f., & mcclure, j. (1997). the effect of increased earthquake knowledge on perceived preventability of earthquake damage. the australasian journal of disaster and trauma studies, 3. retrieve june 1st, 2007 from http://www.massey.ac.nz jalannya saja sempit-sempit, bagaimana api bisa cepat padam ? (24 juli 2004). kompas. retrieve november 28th, 2006 from http://www.kompas.com/kompas-cetak/0407/27/metro/1169771. htm kristantio, r. (2006). kajian persepsi dan tingkat partisipasi masyarakat dalam penanggulangan kebakaran : studi kasus kelurahan galur. tesis : program studi magister manajemen institut pertanian bogor. mcconnell, c.f., dwyer, w.o., & leeming, f.c. (1996). a behavioral approach to reducing fires in public housing. journal of community psychology, 24, 201 – 212 paton, d., smith, l., & johnston, d.m. (2000, december). volcanic hazards: risk perception and preparedness. new zealand journal of psychology, 29, 86 – 91. retrieve march 1st, 2007 from .proquest psychology journal paton, d. (2003). disaster preparedness: a social-cognitive perspective. disaster prevention and management, 12, 210 216 paton, d., kelly, g., burgelt, p.t., & doherty, m. (2006). preparing for bushfire: understanding intentions. disaster prevention and management, 15, 566 575 rohrmann, b. (1999). community-based fire preparedness programmes: an empirical evaluation. the australasian journal of disaster and trauma studies, 1. retrieve november 14th, 2006 from http:// www.massey.ac.nz/~trauma/issues/1999-1/rohrmann.htm rohrmann, b. (2000). a socio-psychological model for analyzing risk communication process. the australasian journal of disaster and trauma studies,2. retrieve november 14th, 2006 from http:// www.massey.ac.nz/~trauma/issues/2000-2/rohrmann.htm strother, r.r., & buchbinder, l.b. (1980). communication strategies for fire loss reduction. in david canter (editor). fire and human behaviors. chichester: john wiley & sons suharso. (1999). tantangan penanggulangan kebakaran di wilayah dki jakarta. in heru sri naryanto, lilik kurniawan, iwan tejakusuma, & bambang setiadi (editor). prosiding workshop pengelolaan lingkungan dan mitigasi bencana di jakarta. jakarta : bppt smith, k. (1996). environmental hazards: assessing risk and reducing disaster. london: routledge technomic. (1984). fire deaths: causes and strategies for control. lancaster: technomic publishing company thygerson, a.l. (1977). accidents and disasters: causes and countermeasures. new jersey: prentice-hall http://www.massey.ac.nz http://www.kompas.com/kompas-cetak/0407/27/metro/1169771.htm http://www.kompas.com/kompas-cetak/0407/27/metro/1169771.htm http://www.massey.ac.nz/~trauma/issues/1999-1/rohrmann.htm http://www.massey.ac.nz/~trauma/issues/1999-1/rohrmann.htm http://www.massey.ac.nz http://www.massey.ac.nz 223 building participative, empowering & diverse communities program of support and attention to families who live socio environmental vulnerabilities in the south of brazil narjara mendes garcia, adriana matos de carvalho mendes, andré lemes da silva, camila dorneles de vargas, angela torma pietro, simone de biazzi ávila batista da silveira; maria angela mattar yunes instituto de ciências humanas e da informação, universidade federal do rio grande/furg, rio grande, rs, brasil e-mail: mamyunes@yahoo.com.br abstract this program has its origin in the partnership of the center for the studies of at-risk populations (cep-rua) and the center for children and adolescents’attention (caic) of the fundação universidade federal do rio grande. both centers joined efforts to potentialize actions towards interventions in order to better understand and assist families who live poverty in the surround areas of the federal university, in the extreme south of brazil. the program has been developing psychoeducational and social activities aiming to attend children, adolescents and their families as well as the social agents who work for the services in the social support network such as, teachers, community health agents, social youth counselors and community leaders of the neighborhoods. the families receive attention through different resources planned to assist either individuals or groups: organized and systematic meetings with health and educational professionals; projects to qualify individuals’ abilities to types of work that improve family income; actions to prevent child abuse and domestic violence and still proposals to increase opportunities to discuss and participate in the political decisions of each community. all these activities are guided by the principles of the ecologic engagement methodology. this strategy mainly allows the participation and involvement of the researchers and families who attend the program. some of the projects are: socio and environmental diagnostic of the areas to map the special needs of the neighborhoods; dialogic educational meetings with parents in their own places and systematic training seminars for the social agents. the results have shown that the interventions have been interfering positively in the belief systems of the participants that include the university researchers, the social agents and the families and community. the communicability of these two contexts, university and communities, offers the chance of opening discussion to search common proposals to empower either the population at risk and the professionals who feel freer to collaborate to public policies. key words: psychoeducational programs; at risk families; family psychosocialeducation 224 building participative, empowering & diverse communities o presente trabalho tem por objetivo apresentar a seqüência de ações realizadas no âmbito de um programa de atenção às famílias em situação de vulnerabilidade socioambiental no extremo sul do brasil1. as propostas do projeto visavam a melhoria da qualidade de vida e a consolidação dos espaços de cidadania das comunidades. este programa se estabeleceu a partir da parceria firmada entre o centro de estudos psicológicos sobre meninos e meninas de rua (ceprua) e o centro de atenção integral à criança e ao adolescente (caic), ambos pertencentes à universidade federal do rio grande (furg).o cep–rua/ furg é um centro consolidado desde 1996. este centro atua em diferentes contextos com propostas de trabalhos que visam o esclarecimento, discussão, intervenção e prevenção das situações de risco sob as quais vivem muitas famílias no município de rio grande, rio grande do sul. um dos núcleos vinculado ao referido centro, o neaf (núcleo de estudos e atenção às famílias em situação de risco), oferece consultoria, assessoria e orientação conforme demandas das comunidades, subsidiando as ações dos órgãos e instituições que atendem as famílias. o caic/ furg é um centro de atenção integral à criança e adolescente, que ao longo dos seus quatorze anos de funcionamento se constituiu num importante espaço de construção de saberes e fazeres envoltos em preceitos que primam pelo respeito à vivência de uma cidadania coletiva, bem como de mecanismos articuladores da consciência e prática democrática e participativa. este centro atende necessidades de educação (funciona como uma escola de ensino fundamental) e saúde (abriga projetos de saúde) dos bairros e vilas circunvizinhos à universidade. sabe-se através de diferentes estudos, que as contingências econômicas e sociais que castigam a maioria das famílias brasileiras podem por si só afetar de forma adversa o desenvolvimento de crianças, adultos e grupos. entretanto, isso não pode ser considerado regra sem exceção já que muitas comunidades de baixa renda desenvolvem processos e mecanismos que garantem sua sobrevivência, não só física, mas perpetuam os valores de sua identidade cultural, e tornam-se o contexto essencial para o desenvolvimento saudável de seus membros (yunes, 2001). diante da multiplicidade de formas de organizações familiares encontradas na atualidade, das diferenças culturais e das forças de macro-variáveis que determinam as relações e dinâmica das famílias, os programas de atenção integral às famílias devem considerar as particularidades e especificidades das famílias vividas (szymanski, 1998). ou seja, a vida real das famílias deve ser priorizada no atendimento das necessidades destes grupos. nesse sentido, o programa de atenção às famílias em situação de vulnerabilidade socioambiental buscou o desenvolvimento de ações que promovessem o atendimento psicossocial e educativo de crianças, adolescentes e seus familiares, bem como dos trabalhadores constituintes da rede de apoio social (acadêmicos, professores, agentes comunitários de saúde, conselheiros tutelares, lideranças comunitárias), com vistas ao apoio, atendimento integral e desenvolvimento das famílias. a promoção e atenção de educação e saúde, geração de trabalho e renda, combate aos abusos e exploração sexual, bem como a participação cidadã de crianças, adolescentes e seus familiares foram as metas coadjuvantes dos trabalhos. 1 o termo vulnerabilidade socioambiental (loureiro, 1997) faz referência a condicionantes sociais e ambientais que podem significar predisposições ao risco ou a desordem para determinados indivíduos ou grupos. o autor caracteriza como vulnerabilidade socioambiental a situação de grupos específicos que se encontram : “(1)em maior grau de dependência direta dos recursos naturais para produzir, trabalhar e melhorar as condições objetivas de vida; (2) excluídos do acesso aos bens públicos socialmente produzidos, (3) ausentes de participação legítima em processos decisórios no que se refere à definição de políticas públicas que interferem na qualidade do ambiente em que se vive”.(p.48) 225 building participative, empowering & diverse communities este programa teve ainda o sentido de potencializar os projetos existentes, bem como a formulação de novas ações, na busca da compreensão/ intervenção e mudança da situação de vulnerabilidade socioambiental à qual estão submetidas as comunidades e bairros vizinhos ao caic/ furg. com desenvolvimento das ações buscou-se ainda ampliar a atenção integral às famílias, fortalecendo as ações de ensino, pesquisa e extensão da furg, no sentido de estreitar os vínculos entre universidade e/ comunidade. foram ampliadas as ações de formação/ capacitação da rede de apoio social, na busca de uma ação conjunta, interdisciplinar, que possibilitasse a emancipação cidadã dos sujeitos envolvidos no processo. buscou-se fazer ainda com que os participantes se sentissem integrantes dos espaços de discussão e formulação de políticas públicas que visavam atender suas demandas. ações desenvolvidas pelo programa de atenção às famílias o encaminhamento metodológico do programa atenção às famílias em situação de vulnerabilidade socioambiental foi organizado na forma de projetos e subprojetos com diferentes temáticas. cada projeto possuia estratégias metodológicas apropriadas às suas particularidades. entretanto, todas as ações desenvolvidas utilizaram-se dos princípios das metodologias qualitativas e participativas para proporcionar o envolvimento de todos os atores sociais nas atividades. a seguir serão relatados os principais projetos: 1. diagnóstico socioambiental das comunidades as primeiras ações desenvolvidas pelo programa partiram da realização de um diagnóstico socioambiental das comunidades atendidas pelo caic. o objetivo foi mapear e diagnosticar as condições de infra-estrutura e serviços existentes nos bairros do entorno da universidade este diagnóstico foi planejado para identificar as condições sociais de vida (trabalho, renda, escolaridade, configurações familiares, etc.) das famílias a serem atendidas pelo programa. a proposta utilizou diferentes estratégias metodológicas para coleta de dados: a) inserção ecológica (cecconello & koller, 2003): partiu-se desta metodologia que propõe a imersão dos pesquisadores no contexto a ser pesquisado com a elaboração de um diário de campo através de um olhar cuidadoso dirigido para as pessoas, para os processos, para os ambientes em dimensão temporal. a base teórica desta metodologia é a abordagem bioecológica de desenvolvimento humano de urie bronfenbrenner (1979/1996, 2005). os bairros foram caracterizados a partir de alguns indicativos identificados pelos pesquisadores sobre as condições de vida nos bairros: 1) aspectos gerais (do tipo pavimentação, iluminação, postos policiais, telefones públicos, etc,); 2) ensino (creches, escolas, creches clandestinas, ensino fundamental e médio); 3) transporte e 4) infra-estrutura. os locais foram sendo detalhados a partir de visitas freqüentes e de dados de relatórios cedidos pelo ibge (instituto brasileiro de geografia e estatística) do censo de 2000 e da secretaria municipal de saúde realizado em 2007. além disso, foram mapeadas as associações, organizações e/ ou serviços de apoio social existentes nos quatro bairros eleitos durante as visitas e conversas informais com os moradores e representantes comunitários. anotações significativas foram feitas durante as visitas e conversas informais com diferentes membros da comunidade. b) foram realizadas entrevistas individuais gravadas e transcritas na íntegra com os presidentes dos bairros selecionados para a pesquisa. outras entrevistas individuais com os 226 building participative, empowering & diverse communities agentes sociais e com as famílias história de vida foram realizadas na modalidade reflexiva (szymanski, 2001, yunes & szymanski, 2005). conforme os relatórios de área do programa saúde da família da cidade de rio grande e do ibge, 9064 famílias constituídas por 31568 pessoas, compõe as comunidades pesquisadas, com 6372 crianças de 0 a 9 anos (20,19%) e 6334 adolescentes de 10 a 19 anos (20,07%). os resultados apreendidos pela combinação destas metodologias evidenciaram que as comunidades se diferenciam entre ocupações e loteamentos. além da luta pela estabilidade de moradia, foi detectada a luta pela busca de geração alternativa de renda. na maioria das famílias, os adultos apresentam baixa escolaridade. quanto ao funcionamento da rede, fica evidente a carência de escolas de ensino médio. os moradores que formam essas comunidades consistem basicamente famílias de baixa renda que vivem com parcos recursos e de forma bastante precária. as formas de emprego distribuem-se entre empregos formais e não formais. os empregos informais são diversos, pelos quais pode-se citar: os vendedores de peixes, laranjas, os pedreiros, serventes, mas além desses existe uma maioria os catadores de lixos (aproximadamente 70%), que em alguns casos fazem seus trabalhos com o auxilio de carroças e outros a pé. além disso, a maioria dos presidentes de bairros (65%) sublinhou sua preocupação quanto ao excesso de tempo livre dos adolescentes e alta probabilidade de uso de drogas para consumo e como alternativa de renda. as lideranças comunitárias anseiam por políticas públicas que atendam as necessidades das populações jovens, com foco para a implementação das condições de infra-estrutura desses bairros. nessas temáticas que envolvem a adolescência, percebeu-se que os moradores são conscientes e críticos quanto às necessidades de um trabalho voltado para estes jovens e suas famílias. isso sugere a necessidade de um trabalho psicossocial através de criação de um espaço educativo e específico para esta população. em relação à rede de apoio, as lideranças entrevistadas identificaram os seguintes serviços nas suas comunidades: escola, posto de saúde e creches. para esses representantes esses serviços atuam de forma precária e são especialmente ineficientes em suas relações com as famílias.este fato é percebido na relação existente entre a maneira de atuação e funcionamento tanto dos agentes sociais, como dos serviços prestados a esses bairros. essa dificuldade é demonstrada quando algumas mães, que necessitam trabalhar para aumentar a renda familiar, tem filhos pequenos e não tem com quem contar, o que denuncia a inexistência de um serviço de apoio a essas famílias que acabam deixando essas crianças na responsabilidade de outras crianças um pouco maiores. além disso, outro fator importante percebido neste diagnóstico é que as redes de apoio das comunidades não atuam de forma integrada entre elas, mas operam de formas independentes. ademais, pode-se dizer que os resultados deste subprojeto do programa trouxeram o conhecimento e a compreensão das crenças e teorias implícitas que permeiam o trabalho dos lideres comunitários no que se refere às suas relações com as famílias de baixa renda dos bairros. ficou claro o impacto destas crenças no desenvolvimento do trabalho social e comunitário dos agentes sociais, o que tem sido identificado em outras pesquisas desenvolvidas pelo grupo do cep-rua/furg (yunes, garcia & albuquerque, 2007) 2. encontros dialógicos e reflexivos com famílias em situação de vulnerabilidade socioambiental 227 building participative, empowering & diverse communities a partir do contato e estudo das comunidades, surgiu a necessidade de promover encontros com vistas à atenção e orientação psicossocial e educacional de famílias. em primeira instancia, buscou-se identificar as necessidades e prioridades destes grupos, bem como possibilitar o espaço para a discussão de práticas parentais, através de plantões para atendimento e grupos de diálogo com os familiares. as famílias atendidas foram indicadas pelos agentes comunitários de saúde, conselhos tutelares e escolas públicas do município. encontros sistemáticos foram realizados com pais ou responsáveis pelo cuidado infantil no ambiente familiar (com avós, irmãos mais velhos, tios, etc). foram atendidas 32 famílias de diferentes configurações familiares, sendo destas 25% nucleares, 31,25% reconstituídas e 43,75% monoparentais. a maioria das famílias relatou conflitos na relação entre pais e filhos e dificuldades no cuidado e educação de crianças e adolescentes, principalmente em relação aos limites na infância e a drogadição na fase da adolescência. estes resultados apontam para a relevância do atendimento psicoeducacional como um direito que deve ser garantido às famílias em situação de risco e do estabelecimento de parcerias que efetivamente atuem como uma rede de apoio social em busca de políticas públicas que assegurem a educação parental e o fortalecimento dos grupos para a resolução dos conflitos familiares. 3. cursos de formação para os agentes da rede de apoio social foram realizados reuniões e cursos para promover a ação-reflexão das práticas de profissionais que fazem parte da rede de apoio social das famílias. participaram: agentes comunitários de saúde, conselheiros tutelares, lideranças comunitárias e professores. o trabalho destes profissionais na atenção e educação das famílias de baixa-renda foi discutido de forma reflexiva e crítica com vistas à melhoria da qualidade do trabalho desses profissionais e da vida da população atendida. a) conselheiros tutelares2: um dos primeiros cursos de formação para rede de apoio social se dirigiu aos conselheiros tutelares e teve como tema: “as políticas públicas de atendimento à população em situação de risco: ressignificando as ações e interações socioambientais dos conselheiros tutelares”. esse curso foi realizado no período de 8 dias consecutivos, totalizando 40h distribuídas em palestras, momentos de debate e discussões sobre temáticas relacionadas ao papel e a atuação dos conselheiros tutelares (antigos – já no cargo e novos – a serem empossados) na garantia dos direitos de crianças, adolescentes e suas famílias. nestes encontros surgiram discussões relevantes que revelaram as posturas, por vezes assistencialistas e autoritárias dos conselheiros no atendimento à população. em relação à postura e papel dos conselheiros tutelares, os antigos se mostravam mais pessimistas quanto às possibilidades de superação das dificuldades vivenciadas pelas famílias atendidas e limitavam suas formas de intervenção, culpando a falta de infra-estrutura dos conselhos e a pouca colaboração de outros serviços de apoio. no entanto, os trabalhadores “novos” no cargo, demonstraram ciência das dificuldades e da necessidade de buscar alternativas para melhorar o atendimento da população. nesse sentido, estes “novos” conselheiros pareceram mais otimistas para assumir as adversidades advindas do trabalho. em geral, os conselheiros tutelares antigos e novos, demonstraram dificuldades em compreender a função da rede de apoio social e não se 2 o conselho tutelar é um órgão permanente e autônomo, encarregado pela sociedade de zelar pelo cumprimento dos direitos da criança e do adolescente (estatuto da criança e do adolescente eca, 1990). 228 building participative, empowering & diverse communities percebiam parte desta rede. b) lideranças comunitárias: o outro curso de formação foi dirigido às lideranças comunitárias: “curso de formação/ reflexão para lideranças comunitárias: discutindo realidades”.foi realizada uma primeira reunião com os membros da união riograndina das associações de bairros (urab), oportunidade na qual os presidentes das associações foram convidados a relatar assuntos de seu interesse para serem discutidos durante a formação. além disso, os participantes foram solicitados a preencher um questionário sobre as preferências de data, local e horários para a realização deste curso. a proposta teve como objetivo promover a reflexão e capacitação de lideranças comunitárias para o atendimento às famílias em situação de vulnerabilidade socioambiental com foco na relevância do papel destes trabalhadores e representantes comunitários na rede de apoio social. a escolha das temáticas para este curso de formação foi fundamentada nas discussões e entrevistas realizadas junto a lideranças comunitárias, bem como nos resultados do diagnóstico socioambiental das comunidades citado acima (projeto 1 deste programa). participaram dos encontros: lideranças comunitárias (presidentes e vice-presidentes de bairros, agentes comunitárias de saúde, presidente da urab, integrantes da equipe do cep-rua e caic/furg). foram realizadas discussões sobre as situações de vulnerabilidade vivenciadas em diferentes bairros do município, o papel do líder comunitário, o atendimento às famílias e o fortalecimento das ações coletivas comunitárias. diante das considerações dos líderes participantes dos encontros, ficaram evidentes as dificuldades enfrentadas na atuação desses agentes, como a ausência de participação comunitária, a falta de infra-estrutura dos bairros e a ineficiência de alguns serviços que fazem parte da rede de apoio social. c) professores: projetos de formação continuada para os professores do centro de atenção integral à criança e ao adolescente (caic), foram realizados para discutir sobre a contribuição do papel deste profissional na relação família-escola e a formação de acadêmicos e profissionais para atuarem junto às famílias em situação de vulnerabilidade socioambiental, através de uma jornada de estudos do cep-rua e de um congresso do caic/ furg. um outro projeto mais específico, ainda para professores, intitulou-se: projeto de intervenção psicoeducacional com professores do ensino fundamental: construindo estratégias para denúncias de abuso sexual contra crianças e adolescentes (pietro, 2008) e propõe uma intervenção que proteja as crianças, adolescentes, famílias e oriente os educadores em casos de abuso sexual e maltratos em geral. participaram deste projeto 11 professores(as) sendo duas da educação infantil e nove professoras das segundas, terceiras e quartas séries do ensino fundamental. o trabalho foi dividido em dois momentos: no primeiro momento foi realizada a capacitação dos acadêmicos para o trabalho com as crianças, já que estes iriam substituir os docentes para que os mesmos pudessem participar da capacitação. o segundo momento consistiu na aplicação do programa de intervenção que teve como foco orientar os educadores para a construção de estratégias de denúncia de abuso sexual que legitimassem o papel protetor do professor e da escola. os temas foram apresentados na seguinte ordem: módulo 1 – análise do filme “canto de cicatriz”; módulo 2 abuso sexual: definições, sinais e vitimização da criança/adolescente; módulo 3 – leituras direcionadas sobre o tema; módulo 4 família e violência: fatores determinantes; módulo 5 aspectos legais e a denúncia; módulo 6 responsabilidade do educador e estudos de caso; 229 building participative, empowering & diverse communities módulo 7 – avaliação e encaminhamentos. desde o princípio da intervenção, os docentes se mostraram motivados a estudar o tema solicitando bibliografia e estudos para um melhor acompanhamento. foram utilizados como instrumentos de pesquisa: questionários, jogo de sentenças incompletas e relatos livres. todos os encontros foram gravados e transcritos. os dados coletados estão sendo analisados pela equipe de pesquisa e serão publicados a posteriori. d) agentes sociais da rede ampliada: atualmente, os cursos de formação para os agentes da rede de apoio social estão sendo realizados através de encontros com a “rede ampliada” (representantes dos serviços e órgãos governamentais e não-governamentais) de atendimento de crianças, adolescentes e famílias em situação de risco. estes encontros estão contribuindo para o planejamento de cursos de formação com a “rede de apoio local” (serviços existentes nas comunidades). estes encontros são denominados de “encontros de educação permanente da rede ampliada de atendimento e apoio social”, e tem como participantes os representantes e profissionais que atuam diretamente no atendimento e em serviços de apoio às crianças, adolescentes e famílias em situação de risco no município do rio grande. contudo, esses encontros apresentam-se como estratégia necessária para a aproximação e comunicação entre os serviços e profissionais que fazem parte da rede ampliada de atendimento e apoio social. pretende-se continuar realizando estes encontros mensais com a rede ampliada e, paralelamente, realizar cursos de formação que atendam as especificidades das áreas de atuação dos profissionais que atuam diretamente com famílias em situação de risco. 4. oficinas de geração de trabalho e renda a) o projeto “oficina permanente de artesanato” recebeu 08 participantes advindos das comunidades atendidas pelo programa, organizados em 01 turma, com carga horária de 06 horas semanais (dividida em dois encontros). os participantes desta oficina eram familiares de alunos do caic, que estavam em busca de novos conhecimentos, técnicas no trabalho de artesanato e qualificação profissional. no primeiro semestre foram realizados trabalhos de corte e costura (reforma e reutilização de peças de vestuário e confecção de peças pequenas, como cintos e bolsas de sobras de jeans e novelos de lã, almofadas de fuxico e retalhos de tecidos, aplicação de bordados para customizar peças de roupas e acessórios). peças maiores como colchas, mantas e roupas de lã, casacos, sapatinhos e meias de lã para as crianças também foram temas de trabalhos manuais. o projeto contribuiu de forma efetiva para a construção de novos saberes, no que se refere à aprendizagem específica de técnicas de artesanato, a confecção de moldes, de peças de vestuário, a reforma e customização de roupas para promover a reciclagem de peças e também a possibilidade de utilização por mais tempo de uma peça de roupa. além disso, deve-se ressaltar a importância da convivência em grupo, das relações entre os participantes e a possibilidade de aprendizagem conjunta. b) o projeto “a informática como espaço de profissionalização e de inclusão digital” contou com a participação de 03 turmas (42 alunos) de 5ª a 8ª séries da escola cidade do rio grande, além de outras 02 turmas, com 28 participantes de pessoas da comunidade. para estas cinco turmas, foi desenvolvido um curso de nível básico, partindo de noções gerais ligadas à informática, tais como o manejo com as máquinas e atividades nas seguintes abordagens: curso de windows xp; 230 building participative, empowering & diverse communities microsoft word e internet. já no segundo semestre foram organizadas 03 novas turmas (42 de alunos) bem como 02 novas turmas de nível básico para a comunidade (com 28 participantes). estas turmas tiveram o mesmo curso de nível básico que foi desenvolvido no primeiro semestre. além disso, foi organizada mais 01 turma, com 14 participantes que já haviam concluído o curso de nível básico no primeiro semestre e tiveram interesse em aprofundar seus conhecimentos na área da informática. no curso de nível intermediário foram aprofundados os conhecimentos do curso básico, especialmente em microsoft powerpoint, microsoft excel, microsoft movie maker e internet. o processo de inclusão na cultura digital busca proporcionar condições de modificação de realidade, através da aquisição de conhecimentos na área de informática, bem como de interação com os colegas na construção de uma nova linguagem que favorece a resolução de situações cotidianas e contribui na busca de novas oportunidades de emprego e renda. c) o projeto “curso preparatório para garçons, garçonetes e atendentes” atendeu 12 pessoas da comunidade, que realizaram curso de qualificação profissional. as atividades buscaram favorecer a confiança, o respeito e a convivência em grupo através de 08 encontros mensais. as temáticas dos encontros iniciaram-se com temas genéricos tais como: cuidados com a aparência, asseio, organização, responsabilidade e, posteriormente foram sendo incorporadas os aspectos mais técnicos, como a aprendizagem de etiqueta e boas maneiras, serviço de recepção, postura corporal do atendente, tipos de mesas, tipos de serviço, manuseio de talheres, manuseio de bandejas, etc. entende-se que este projeto é muito importante, pois favorece a formação e a qualificação profissional de pessoas da comunidade, além de colaborar como alternativa para inserção no mercado de trabalho. 5. projetos culturais e educativos para crianças e adolescentes a) o projeto “a dança como expressão da arte-educação” teve dois públicos-alvo distintos: funcionários do centro/acadêmicos da furg e alunos da comunidade escolar. as aulas de dança de salão foram ministradas por um acadêmico da furg, que se disponibilizou a ampliar esta atividade que já era oferecida apenas para os alunos de cursos de graduação da universidade. assim, foi possível promover um espaço de convivência, para os profissionais que atuam no caic (professores, técnicos, acadêmicos, bolsistas, voluntários, funcionários de empresas terceirizadas e demais participantes da comunidade). nestes encontros semanais com duração de 02 horas/ aula, foram trabalhados passos básicos de ritmos musicais como o forró, salsa, samba, vanera, bolero, calipso, chamamé, dentre outros. esta proposta não buscou em nenhum momento criar um grupo de dançarinos, mas mantinha o prazer de dançar, integração e incentivo à alegria da convivência grupal. b) a segunda atividade foi: “street dance” destinada aos alunos do caic. nesta atividade os alunos participantes foram construindo, em conjunto com a professora as coreografias e os ritmos das apresentações. este projeto contribuiu de forma efetiva para a construção de novos saberes junto aos alunos do caic, oportunizando uma aprendizagem criadora que desenvolveu a capacidade de pensar, refletir, analisar, sentir e reagir artisticamente, percebendo o corpo e os princípios gerais do movimento como arte e como educação. c) o projeto “a arte-reciclagem como espaço de aprendizagem e de produção de novas culturas socioambientais” teve como objetivos: propiciar o desenvolvimento artístico, cultural e ecológico; instrumentalizar os participantes com os conhecimentos básicos que permitissem criar 231 building participative, empowering & diverse communities conteúdos referentes às artes e as ciências ambientais; ajudar a expressar a criatividade, preservar o meio ambiente e recuperar os valores humanos. durante o período de execução foi possível atender todas as turmas de educação infantil e anos iniciais da escola cidade do rio grande, totalizando 487 alunos subdivididos em 24 turmas. cada turma participou de 04 encontros, realizados em horário de aula e que foram estruturados e planejados conjuntamente entre o responsável pela atividade, professores e coordenação pedagógica da escola cidade do rio grande. nesta atividade que passou a integrar o currículo da educação infantil e dos anos iniciais do ensino fundamental, os pequenos participantes puderam realizar a sua primeira experiência com relação à reciclagem de papel, oportunidade na qual fizeram muitos questionamentos e tiraram dúvidas, assim como realizaram trabalhos em sala de aula sobre reciclagem de diferentes materiais como papel, plástico e alimentos.além desta atividade com as turmas de educação infantil e anos iniciais, tivemos a participação de uma turma fixa com 10 alunos de 5ª a 8ª séries. nos encontros semanais, realizados em horário oposto ao das aulas, com 02 horas de duração, os alunos desenvolveram relações de convivência saudável, respeito, solidariedade e cooperação, realizaram discussões sobre educação ambiental, problematizações acerca do modelo atual de sociedade, além de promover o domínio de técnicas de reciclagem de papel. esta turma colaborou na produção de papel para os certificados de cursos e projetos, cadernos e blocos de anotações para os participantes dos demais projetos. d) o projeto “a musicalização como forma de expressão artística e cultural” que nos anos anteriores era desenvolvida somente com as aulas de canto coral, foi enriquecido com uma nova atividade de aulas de violão, que atendeu alunos das escolas municipais da vizinhança. a oficina de violão, buscou o ensino das técnicas específicas de violão e a expansão da musicalidade para crianças e adolescentes a partir da quinta série do ensino fundamental.consideramos que a educação musical é possível a todos por ser um aspecto natural do ser humano e indissociável a formação plena do indivíduo bem como fundamental para o desenvolvimento pedagógico. entende-se que a música é uma das expressões mais humanas, uma das muitas linguagens utilizadas pelo homem para falar de si, do seu grupo social e de suas impressões sobre o mundo. assim, a música não existe por si mesma, mas inserida num contexto sociocultural. e) o projeto “o hip hop como manifestação da cultura comunitária local” buscou valorizar as suas diferentes manifestações, como o canto (mc), dança (street dance e b-boy) e também o grafitti (grafiteiro). as ações foram desenvolvidas em horário oposto ao das aulas com encontros semanais de 03 horas/aula de duração. houve 12 alunos participantes com idade a partir de 14 anos. nas aulas de grafitti, os adolescentes realizaram a confecção de moldes e apreenderam técnicas de desenho e do stencil. realizaram a grafitagem de painéis, confeccionaram portifólios e também a pintura, com a técnica do stencil e do muro de uma residência nas proximidades da escola. esta atividade ocorreu com o intuito de favorecer a valorização da cultura hip hop, promover um espaço e envolver os participantes em discussões pertinentes a sua realidade, contribuindo para a capacidade de aprendizagem dos alunos e de suas relações sociais. f ) o projeto “oficina de teatro” teve suas atividades realizadas durante todo o ano letivo, com encontros semanais com duração de 03 horas/aula, em horário oposto ao das atividades escolares. participaram 12 adolescentes das 5ª a 8ª séries. que obtiveram o conhecimento sobre as técnicas básicas do teatro através da expressão corporal e do conhecimento das escolas teatrais. estas atividades foram realizadas no intuito de ampliar da capacidade de organização 232 building participative, empowering & diverse communities e auto-gestão dos participantes, favorecer o respeito mútuo e a convivência em grupo além da manutenção de um grupo teatral permanente. 6. projeto direito solidário o projeto direito solidário surgiu com a proposta de acadêmicos do curso de direito da furg, cujos anseios eram de trabalhar com as comunidades periféricas da cidade do rio grande no âmbito jurídico. foram atendidas famílias residentes no entorno da universidade que buscavam orientações jurídicas. os processos foram encaminhados e estão sendo acompanhados pelo serviço de assistência judiciária da furg. este atendimento deu maior efetividade à prestação do serviço e contribuiu para a formação social de futuros operadores do direito para o contato e compreensão da realidade destas populações. os atendimentos judiciais ou extrajudiciais foram realizados pelos alunos envolvidos com o projeto, com o acompanhamento e orientação direta dos professores responsáveis e feitos de conformidade com a demanda surgida no decorrer das interações realizadas junto a comunidade. o atendimento judicial e extrajudicial visava a atender as demandas jurídicas surgidas na comunidade atendida e, de outra sorte, visam ainda a iniciar o aluno de direito no contato com a realidade com a qual irá se defrontar no decorrer da carreira. diante dos resultados apresentados, foi possível perceber a necessidade efetiva de intervenções diretas e pontuais dos profissionais do direito junto à comunidade, para alcançar o atendimento às demandas judiciais bem como acompanhar os conflitos e possibilitar o enfrentamento sadio dos mesmos pela população alvo do projeto. assim, a dinâmica inicialmente pensada para a execução do projeto, tornou-se incompatível com a estrutura ainda pequena do mesmo, o que revelou a necessidade de que a mesma fosse repensada. atualmente, o projeto direito solidário está sendo reformulado e direcionado para o atendimento à comunidade pobre, para esclarecer seus direitos e atuar na condução dos conflitos existentes nas mais diversas áreas do conhecimento jurídico. o referido projeto tem em sua pauta a idéia da transformação na forma de atuação dos acadêmicos do curso de direito, tendo em vista sua participação ativa nas comunidades e o foco na mudança de atitudes não somente na condução dos conflitos, mas, sobretudo, na trajetória pessoal dos acadêmicos que contam com a possibilidade efetiva de participar de atividades humanizantes. nas palavras de bronfenbrenner (1979/1996), estas experiências de cuidado relacionadas aos ambientes educativos são fundamentais para a formação de qualquer pessoa. as atividades sociais para o pesquisador e o extensionista são extremamente relevantes para seu próprio desenvolvimento como ser humano. aproximar o acadêmico dos sonhos desta comunidade, suas pretensões, suas batalhas diárias, sua alegria, sua maneira própria de enfrentamento de todas as dificuldades têm sido a tônica desta proposta. sabe-se que tão somente “ensinar procedimentos” sobre o atendimento, não é tão eficaz como possibilitar que os próprios acadêmicos sintam, visualizem e empenhem-se na busca de alternativas para cada caso. este envolvimento proporciona ao aluno uma visão ecológica dos problemas jurídicos ao mesmo tempo em que propicia ao mesmo a experiência da solidariedade, atributo com importância fundamental na vida de todos os profissionais. considerações finais tendo em vista as ações que foram e estão sendo desenvolvidas pelo programa de atenção às famílias em situação de vulnerabilidade socioambiental, pode-se afirma que os 233 building participative, empowering & diverse communities projetos têm buscado oportunizar a ampliação dos processos de educação e saúde, e que se pretende em última instância propor aos sujeitos participantes desse projetos, a possibilidade de vislumbrar sua situação existencial, concreta, presente/passada e futura. olhar os problemas e dificuldades como desafios possíveis de serem enfrentados têm sido um dos lemas de construção das ações em pauta, para os participantes e executores das propostas. a integração dos diversos projetos com ações e intervenções sociais de ensino e aprendizagens, têm gerado a reciclagem de conceitos, preconceitos e formado “tomadores de decisões” que aprimoram conhecimentos e favorecem o domínio de técnicas de “viver – bem”. todos os projetos e subprojetos buscam desta forma, desenvolver a consciência social, política e ecológica, aprofundando o interesse por si mesmo e pelo outro como ser humano e parceiro/companheiro em seus diferentes ambientes. incentiva-se ainda a vontade de participar ativamente na melhoria pessoal e coletiva, na proteção das comunidades e de suas identidades. nesse sentido, entende-se que um programa desta dimensão e com as características descritas pode contribuir para a melhoria da qualidade de vida e para a consolidação de espaços de convivência gentil e solidária entre comunidades diversas. referências bronfenbrenner, u. (1996). a ecologia do desenvolvimento humano: experimentos naturais e planejados. porto alegre: artes médicas. bronfenbrenner, u. (1979). the ecology of human development. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. bronfenbrenner, u. & morris, p. (1998). the ecology of developmental processes. in w. damon (org.), handbook of child psychology, v.1 (pp. 993-1027). new york, ny: john wiley & sons. pietro, a. t. (2008). a denúncia de abuso sexual no ambiente escolar: o estudo de uma proposta de intervenção para professores do ensino fundamental. dissertação de mestrado em educação ambiental do programa de pós graduação em educação ambiental, universidade federal do rio grande, rio grande. szymanski, h.(1995). teoria e “teorias” de famílias. in: m. c. b. carvalho (org.). a família contemporânea em debate. (pp. 23-27) são paulo: educ. szymanski, h. (2001). a entrevista reflexiva. revista psicologia da educação, 10/11, 193-215. szymanski, h. (1998). significados de família. in:,g.m. loch & m. a. m. yunes (orgs.). a família que se pensa e a família que se vive. (pp 9-17).rio grande: editora da furg. yunes, m. a. m. & szymanski, h. (2005). entrevista reflexiva e grounded-theory: estratégias metodológicas para compreensão da resiliência em famílias. revista interamericana de psicologia, 39 (3), 439431. yunes, m.a. m. (2001). a questão triplamente controvertida da resiliência em famílias de baixa renda. tese de doutorado apresentada na pontifícia universidade católica de são paulo. yunes, m. a. m, garcia, n. m. & albuquerque, b. (2007). monoparentalidade, pobreza e resiliência: entre as crenças dos profissionais e as possibilidades da convivência familiar. revista psicologia: reflexão & crítica, 20 (3), 444-453. 234 building participative, empowering & diverse communities social cohesion, perceived safety and immigration in a run-down district in reggio emilia dino giovannini, barbara ferrari, andrea pintus e loris vezzali rimi lab research center (research and intervention in interethnic multicultural relations and immigration) university of modena and reggio emilia (italy) dgiovannini@unimore.it abstract the aim of this study is to analyze the representations and perceptions of people living in five streets of districts 6 and 7 of reggio emilia (italy), in terms of perceived safety and specific problems related to the immigration process and to intergroup relations. in this part of the city, called “railway station zone”, about 70% of the residents are foreigners. reggio emilia is the italian city included in the 12 intercultural cities program of the european commission project on immigration and best practices. particularly, we put our attention on: 1) the attitudes expressed by people living and/or working in the two districts as well as by other involved actors: italians and immigrants, shopkeepers, public administrators, police force, cultural associations, labour union representatives, civic committees, voluntary associations, religious groups; 2) the specific problems of both italian and immigrant residents; 3) the existent intercultural and intergroup dynamics; 4) the quality of the relationships between italians and foreigners. key words: immigration, perceived safety, social cohesion, intergroup relations, shared cohabitation rules. 1. the sense of safety many psycho-sociological studies examined the concepts of sense of safety related to concerns for crime and of social cohesion. the common feeling is that the perception of safety among the italian citizens decreases constantly, due to increasing levels of crime, and characterizes more and more their experience of the urban environment. in the last years, the crime rate has brought the institutions to pay more and more attention to the problem of safety. this crime rate is connected, at least in the common perception, to the increasing number of immigrants, above all non regulars. the initial psychosocial studies concerning safety perceptions started around the sixties. in many of them, safety was studied as a product of real crimes (see, for instance, block & long, 1973). in such studies, the central idea was that the sense of safety depended on the objective characteristics of the society, and not on the subjective perceptions of the individuals. subsequently, since various studies showed that the crime rates were poorly associated to the sense of safety, the latter has been investigated as a consequence of psychosocial factors. furstenberg (1971) proposed that the concept of sense of safety is multi-determined. in particular, the author distinguished two aspects: on the one hand “fear of crime”, that is fear to be victim of crimes, and on the other hand “worry”, defined as the perception of the degree in which mailto:dgiovannini@unimore.it 235 building participative, empowering & diverse communities crime represents a problem for one’s own country. the idea that fear of crime is a multidimensional concept is shared by many authors (e.g., garofalo, 1981; ferraro & lagrange, 1987). starting from the multidimensional nature of the concept of sense of safety, some authors prefer to analyze separately its various dimensions. in particular, some researches distinguished among “personal safety” and “community safety”. considering these two dimensions as distinct, in fact, allows to distinguish among them the factors that determine the various aspects of safety perceptions and their consequences. the concepts of sense of safety and of fear of crime were considered by many authors as synonymous. nevertheless, the two concepts are theoretically and empirically distinct. we will now review some among the most relevant determinants and consequences of the sense of safety, that are analyzed by the psychosocial literature. 1.1. antecedents of the sense of safety besides the socio-demographic factors, the psychological literature identified a number of potential antecedents of the sense of safety. some of them mainly refer to personal characteristics. van der wurff, van staalduinen, and stringer (1989), for instance, tested a model with four antecedents of fear of crime, measured as the degree of perceived danger imagining to be in some hypothetical dangerous situations: a) attraction (intended as the degree in which one perceives himself/herself and his/her own goods as potential target for criminals); b) power (sense of control on the potential dangerous situations); c) attribution of criminal intentions to other individuals or groups; d) degree of prudence in avoiding potential dangerous situations. another factor that can potentially determine the sense of safety is the personal level of prejudice. prejudice and negative stereotypes toward members of other groups could increase negative expectations and exaggerate the potential risks of being victim of criminal actions by outgroup members (see vander ven, 1998). a very important predictor of sense of safety is represented by sense of community or, in other terms, by social cohesion. this variable will be considered below. victimization, that is the perception of being a potential victim of a crime, is another factor much studied in literature that can influence the sense of safety (garofalo, 1979). intuitively, the factors that make more or less probable the perception of being victim of crimes influence, indirectly, also the sense of safety. such factors can be defined as contextual, rather than individual, since they refer to aspects associated to the environment and not to personal characteristics. some of these contextual variables are connected to daily activities and to the personal situation (rountree & land, 1996). some variables are related to the context (for instance, the district) in which people live. also factors that underline the urban decay, consequent to the incivilities, might reduce the sense of safety (e.g., lewis & salem, 1981; rountree & land, 1996). in general, it is possible to say that also the information provided by the mass media represent a contextual factor that can potentially influence the sense of safety. it was found, for instance, that news concerning serious local crimes brought by media decreased the perceived safety (e.g., liska & baccaglini, 1990). 1.2. consequences of the sense of safety 236 building participative, empowering & diverse communities one of the most remarkable consequences of the sense of safety is the quality of the perceived life, that can be defined as a general concept referred to personal comfort and satisfaction for one’s own existence, derived from positive experiences in one’s own environment. few studies considered the relationship between perceived safety and quality of life. in one of these studies, michalos and zumbo (2000) examined a sample of adults in canada and found that measures referred to perceived safety were associated to measures of happiness, variation in the satisfaction for one’s own life and quality of life. fear of crime and anticipation of the risk of being victim of crimes can involve notable costs for people. doland and peasgood (2006) distinguish the costs related to the health from those not linked to it; for both such categories it is possible to distinguish the quantifiable from the nonquantifiable costs. the amount of costs that are not associated to health can be of several types. they include, for instance, the costs concerning the increase of safety measures (like alarms). the reduction of the quality of life represents a clear example of non-quantifiable cost not (at least not directly) associated to health. the non-quantifiable costs not associated to health include, for example, the stress and the anxiety provoked by a low sense of safety. in certain cases, high levels of fear of crime could worsen, at least indirectly, the psychophysical state of people and their mental health and reduce the behaviours directed to lower the risks for health (e.g., dowdell & santucci, 2003). other costs associated to the sense of safety include worse psychophysical conditions derived from repeated exposure to threatening stimuli (ross & mirowski, 2001), reduced physical activity (kilgour, 2003), reduced participation to social activities (kennelly, o’shea, & garvey, 2003). finally, the quantifiable costs associated to health can be, for example, those for medical expenses as a consequence of feelings of lack of safety. the sense of safety was showed to have a consistent influence on people’s behaviour. the effects on the behaviour can be positive or negative. some behaviours, in fact, can be facilitated, others inhibited. the individuals can, for example, try to avoid risk situations or adopt measures that reduce victimization. the relationship between fear of crime and behaviours of precaution was found in numerous studies carried out in different contexts, as, for instance, the scholastic one (wilcox, jordan, & pritchard, 2007). the behaviours aimed to increase the sense of safety also include active participation to social activities, as for example groups aimed to improve the safety of the area of residence (e.g., hope & steven, 2001). 2. the role of social cohesion social cohesion is often associated, in the studies related to its effects on the urban environment, to sense of community. the sense of community refers to the processes that make a group of individuals members of a community, and consists in the perception of similarity and interdependence with respect to other members, the idea of belonging to a reliable group (sarason, 1974). mcmillan and chavis (1986) elaborated a very influential model of the sense of community, according to which this sense is composed by four dimensions: a) membership, constituted by possibility of emotional attachment, identification with one’s own group, personal investment in material or symbolic terms, shared symbols; b) influence, exerted by the individual toward 237 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the community and, vice versa, the influence that the community has toward the individual; c) fulfilment of both personal and collective needs; d) shared emotional connection, when the interactions among members, the shared history and the investments of people in their own community are taken into consideration. social cohesion can likewise be defined as the resultant of the attraction forces that tie a number of people as members of a group and not as single individuals (turner, 1987). there are various aspects, connected to social cohesion, that influence the reduction of people’s lack of safety. a fundamental role is played, for instance, by perceived social support. this factor can be associated to the community in general, but also to specific people. in general, the strength of social ties reduces the vulnerability perceived by individuals, who do not need to face singularly the risks related to criminality (delisi & regoli, 2000). another variable associated to the perception of social support, that attracted the attention of scholars, is represented by social bonds with one’s own neighbours. generally, the spatial proximity, by increasing the occasions of meeting, allows the development of positive and cooperative relationships among neighbours that, independently from their intensity, reduce the feelings of lack of safety (kennedy & silverman, 1985). 3. content analysis of the in-depth interviews with key witnesses twelve privileged witnesses were interviewed. they were institutional subjects, social workers and representatives of non-profit associations and of social centres that operate in the 6th and 7th districts of the city. the interviews were de-recorded and the content was analyzed applying the grounded theory method. the most relevant aspects emerged during the interviews are presented below. 3.1. the railway station zone there is a general agreement on the fact that the district was born as residential area. the proximity to the historical town centre, to the railway station and to several facilities contributed to increase its value and to characterize its destination for buyers of the middle-upper class. during the nineties, due to the arrival of more and more immigrants, things began to change. at present the zone, above all turri street, is characterized by an overcrowding of immigrants belonging to different ethnic groups, such to determine a completely different social context. the “reggiani” (people born and still living in reggio emilia) are for the most part elderly people, together with few families with young components that decided to remain. the change concerns also the attachment to the district, that is no longer felt as an element of identification, because the reggiani feel foreigners at home. 3.2. immigrants and italian residents the shared perception is of a thick presence of immigrants, especially in turri street, that determines conditions of low quality of life. this is due first of all to the overcrowding in the apartments, the precarious economic conditions in which the immigrants are and the lack of recognition of the cultural habits and the rights of the immigrants. the interviewed emphasize that many immigrants do not have a regular residence permission and therefore it is likely that they have illegal activities and that they are non regular sublessees . 238 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the interviews put in evidence that the italian residents do not accept the situations in which the rules of cohabitation are not respected. they also feel a resentment that is translated into a progressive loss of attachment to the district of residence. the interviewed have the perception that the presence of italian residents is limited to elderly people and few families that still live in the zone. after the arrival of the immigrants, many italians sold their apartments below price. many of those people who are still owners tried to take advantage of the situation, subleasing without regard for the living conditions of the immigrants, and this contributed to determine the current situation and condition of uneasiness, described in the preceding paragraph. 3.3. the sense of safety and integration among groups according to interviewed people, integration among the groups who live in the zone seems still distant. there is a sort of appropriation of the housing, commercial and recreational spaces, perceived above all as an invasion of the different ethnic groups. each immigrant has primarily social relations inside his/her own ethnic group. nevertheless, there are many attempts to realize meetings among the residents, as well as moments and spaces that allow mutual knowledge. the scarce sense of safety is not perceived in relation to real criminal actions, that seem to constitute sporadic events and are emphasized by the media to give more importance to some news; moreover, there is no media communication about the positive events organized in the district. the lack of shared common rules both in the condominiums and in the public places and the lack of mutual knowledge are the background of the perception of insecurity. the feeling of fear seems also to increase in virtue of the media news, that give a distorted vision of the events, in particular for what concerns turri street: it appears as if all negative events happen in that zone. interviewed people, on the contrary, say that the railway station zone presents crime levels similar to those in other parts of reggio emilia. the activities developed to face the negative situations in the zone are aimed at the improvement of the quality of life and of the cohabitation, in the attempt, above all, to manage the emergent conflicts and the irregularities. the citizenry takes part into different events, for instance the feasts of the district, that are an occasion of mutual knowledge. even if various groups and organizations exist on the territory, the experience of the last years did not satisfy the needs of the zone. to answer to these needs and to the present problem list, many of the interviewed people expressed the intent to improve the level of dialogue as a means of aggregation. these claims are related to the reconstruction and to the search for a sense of affiliation and of emotional connection, through which it is possible to satisfy and to integrate the needs of the people. 4. in-depth interviews with native residents through 14 in-depth interviews with key witnesses living in five streets of the railway station zone we wanted to take into account the point of view of the “reggiani”. the interviews were de-recorded and the analysis of the thematic contents allowed us to individualize some cross categories. particularly, these interviews show some aspects connected to the feeling of the reggiani to be “ghettoized”, their representations of the immigration and the intergroup conflicts. moreover, the most representative problems of the district and the lack of respect of the 239 building participative, empowering & diverse communities cohabitation rules emerge, together with the feelings about a multiethnic district characterized by a low level of integration. 4.1. feeling to be in a “ghetto” the first aspect emerging from the interviews is connected to the minority condition of the reggiani in comparison to the foreigners, both resident in the railway station zone. interviewed people perceive that zone as a ghetto-zone in comparison to the rest of the city and as populated by an indistinct mass of foreigners. the feeling is that the real ghettoized are the reggiani themselves, who are in numerical disadvantage. the interviews show the perceived uneasiness of those who have to interact with an “other” and strongly variegated majority. the social transformations, that have characterized and deeply modified this zone, are perceived by the residents with feelings of discomfort and extraneousness. 4.2. social categorization and representation of immigrants interviews show a sense of affiliation to a cultural group, “us, the reggiani”, which is very different from other groups, “them, the foreigners.” the resident reggiani almost always refer to the foreigners as a shapeless mass, “them”, and when they talk about known people they use the ethnic affiliation to define them, not their name, clearly defining them as a chinese, moroccan, ghaneese. in general, the opinion is that the foreigners submerge the country and are taking the overhand. the chinese are seen as little ants, hunting dogs, an enigma, invaders, strategists who buy everything, but also ill people. in other cases, they are perceived as “mafiosi” and very dangerous because nobody knows what they do. nevertheless, the shared opinion is that they do not disturb, they are busy workers well caring their children. the north africans are perceived as the worst ones, pestiferous people, quarrelsome, uncivil, drug distributors and drunkards. moreover they are felt to be the dominant group. the muslims are seen as touchy people, who are sensible to the offenses and aggressive. people from ghana, senegal and nigeria are considered by almost the majority of the interviewed as good, busy workers, with a high education level, who really take care of their children. moreover they have the tendency to defend their territory. 4.3. the problems of cohabitation and the lack of respect of the rules focussing on the hierarchy of problems of the railway station zone emerged during the interviews, drug-dealing and cohabitation in the condominiums seem to be the most important ones. dealing is perceived as a problem of degrade and safety by many people in the district, nevertheless, many recognize that this phenomenon can be observed also in other zones of the city and, therefore, does not characterize the railway station zone in particular. for what concerns the problems related to the condominium, people consider two different situations. first, many difficulties of coexistence emerge and the attitudes of the immigrants are often described as respectless of the basic rules of daily life. uncivil behaviours are associated to the foreign residents as well as precarious hygienic conditions inside the lodgings and hardly tolerable lifestyles like the overcrowding of the lodgings, the bivouacs in the staircases 240 building participative, empowering & diverse communities and troublesome noises up to late night. this description gives an idea of the real difficulties that flow in situations of discomfort and serious uneasiness in daily cohabitation, more accentuated as the number of foreign residents in a condominium is large. for these reasons every condominium has its own history and different problems. these difficulties seem to explain the representations that the resident reggiani have of the immigrants. it is obvious that living in such exasperated situations leads to stereotypes, prejudices and attitudes of intolerance. all the opinions of the interviewed about the principal problems of the district concern the lack of respect of the fundamental rules of civil cohabitation, rather than themes related to safety, intended as the fear to be victims of a crime. 4.4. mediatic stigmatization and place-identity interviews highlight the topic of mediatic instrumetalization, that leads to a negative image that stigmatizes the railway station zone. nevertheless, a disarming ambivalence emerges: in fact, many residents believe that on the one hand the attention of the media is necessary to report the degrade of the district, on the other hand, it should be avoided in order to build a new, positive and attractive image. the determinants of this ambivalence must be sought both in the uneasiness that the residents experience and that forces them to ask for help and attention, and in the need to protect their own image. an important relationship exists between the individual and the place; there are several concepts that specifically define this identity. twigger-rooss, and uzzell (1996) refer to two concepts to explain the connection between place and identity. the first one is place identification and it refers to the identification expressed by a person to a place. in this sense it is considered a social category, therefore it is subject to the same rules that govern social identification according to the classical theory of social identity. therefore place identification is a kind of social identification that derives from a feeling of affiliation to a well delineated physical space. the second concept refers to place-identity (proshansky, fabian, & kaminoff, 1983) and it underlines how the physical environment contributes to the formation of the most complex personal identity. the place plays an important role in the satisfaction of the biological, psychological, social and cultural needs and, therefore, it contributes to the definition of the identity. starting from these assumptions the consequences related to self-esteem and to the evaluation of oneselves of those persons who live in devalued and stigmatized contexts. moreover, the mediatic propaganda makes the district seem dangerous to those who do not live in it: a place where anything can happen. this increments the prejudice against immigrants. at the same time the fears of those who live in the railway station zone are confirmed: residents feel less safe. 4.5. the real estate devaluation the real estate devaluation represents a recurrent theme in the interviews. the resident reggiani of the railway station zone have feelings of regret toward their own investments, the apartments are devalued, and it is hard to find buyers willing to purchase them, in fact, walking down the streets of the zone you can see “for sale” on many houses. it is difficult not to understand the resentment of these people, many of whom have invested the savings of a life in the purchase of their own house, and it is possible to hypothesize 241 building participative, empowering & diverse communities that this factor affects the perception and the construction of stereotypes and prejudices. some interviewed do not directly attribute the degrade of the district to the presence of the foreigners, but to a careless and myopic local policy, incapable to govern the migratory phenomenon that has interested the area. nevertheless, they recognize that something today is changing and that finally the municipality is present with proposals and concrete actions. 5. some comment as conclusions acculturation is a process of social change that involves both the immigrant and the local society. to move to a new environment implicates important changes in the life of a person that leaves consolidated habits and family environments and has to deal with new values, rules and lifestyles. on the other hand also the members of the local society have to deal with the novelties brought by the new residents and to get used to their different practices and beliefs, to new ways to dress, to eat and to behave. for these reasons also their environment becomes “not familiar” (chryssochoou, 2006), and cultural and social control conflicts can emerge. to perceive someone as “foreigner”, other and contrasted, from one’s own group is fruit of a process of social categorization (tajfel, 1971), through which the social world is simplified. this process allows to build a net of similarities and differences that reduces the multiform variety of the experience and helps accentuating the negative characters of those who are out of the group. as they feel this difference and do not really know the “others”, the reggiani tend to depict them using these social categories that sometimes have not human or ontological characteristics, as shown by he affirmations characterized in terms of prejudice, as the terms uncivil, without culture, beasts, little ants, hunting dogs used to represent and define foreign people. when the minorities are associated to the nature, they are also considered out of the borders of civilization and in an intermediary condition between men and animals. on the other hand, to perceive the “others” as a threat can lead to such extreme reactions. when the own vision of the world is put again in discussion, identity is upset and problems related to justice rise, people can perceive fear and insecurity. dialogue and cooperation are the most emphasized needs highlighted by the interviewed key witnesses. the mostly underlined proposals can be summarized in the possibility to be involved in best practice projects that let people be active participants for a common job with a time perspective. this kind of actions would help resident people of the railway station zone to develop a sense of affiliation, through which the personal and social wellbeing would be increased, in contradiction to the sense of loneliness and isolation that addresses people toward purely personal purposes. for the interviewed it is important to activate a force of associationism that has the purpose to take care of places and relationships and to promote cultural activities for all residents. such a proposal leans on the need to share interests and purposes with other citizens, and to develop a sense of affiliation and therefore a sense of safety toward the territorial community, through the exploitation of the history that characterizes this community. 242 building participative, empowering & diverse communities references block, m. s., & long, g. 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(1998). fear of victimization and the interactional construction of harassment in a latino neighborhood. journal of contemporary ethnography, 27, 374-398. wilcox, p., jordan, c. e., & pritchard, a. j. (2007). a multidimensional examination of campus safety: victimization, perceptions of danger, worry about crime, and precautionary behavior among college women in the post-clery era. crime and delinquency, 53, 219-254. 244 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the role of leadership on child protective services ana margarida graça & ana passos graca.anamargarida@gmail.com abstract recent research shows that team’s reflexivity upon their objectives, strategies and processes enhances team effectiveness. however, the role that leaders play in this process needs to be clarified. the present study aims to investigate the mediation role of leadership in the relationship between team reflexivity and perceived performance in child protection teams. in child and youth protection commissions (cpcj), their presidents’ legal competencies are defined in law, but not their specific leadership competencies. cpcj have functional autonomy to apply promotion and protection actions for children and young in danger, which demands a manifest complexity and they can also have a strong impact in child’s life projects. participants consisted of 593 elements of 109 cpcj teams, from the total of the 282 cpcj existents in continental portugal and islands. members answered a survey designed for this purpose. individual survey answers were aggregated to the team level for analyses. results from hierarchical regression analyses show that leadership total mediates the relationship between team reflexivity and perceived performance. practical implications for child and youth services will be discussed, giving special attention to the role of team leaders. keywords: team leadership, reflexivity, performance, cpcj. a liderança constitui uma área de investigação muito vasta, existindo vários modelos teóricos e estudos empíricos sobre o tema. jago (1982) procurou sistematizar os modelos existentes na literatura, propondo uma tipologia que agrupa os estudos sobre a liderança em conjuntos, constituindo cada um, uma fase distinta no estudo científico da liderança. subjacente a este agrupamento insere-se a necessidade de avaliar cada tipo de liderança pelos resultados que proporciona, em termos de eficácia organizacional. em menor número são os estudos e modelos conceptuais que se focam especificamente na liderança de equipas. de facto, apesar do conhecimento que a liderança influencia o desempenho das equipas, e apesar da quantidade de estudos tanto sobre liderança, como sobre as dinâmicas das equipas, pouco se sabe sobre como os líderes criam e gerem equipas eficazes (zaccaro, rittman, & marks, 2001). de acordo com hackman & walton (1986), é pertinente analisar a liderança a partir de uma perspectiva funcional, isto é, a partir das funções dos líderes para promover a eficácia da equipa. para tal, será necessário identificar quais as condições críticas para o desempenho eficaz de um grupo numa organização e integrar quais as funções dos líderes que podem melhorar estas condições (hackman & wageman, 2005). para a eficácia do trabalho em equipa, o contexto e o tipo de tarefa são factores críticos; a perspectiva funcional reconhece a relevância do líder para as equipas mas não especifica as condições críticas para o desempenho eficaz, nem as relaciona com o tipo de tarefas da equipa. a maioria das teorias anteriores de liderança tendem a focar-se na forma como os líderes 245 building participative, empowering & diverse communities influenciam os subordinados, sem atender a como os líderes podem promover os processos da equipa (zaccaro et al., 2001). além disso, focam-se na estrutura e não no processo de liderança, e são predominantemente estáticas (kozlowski, watola, kim & botero, no prelo). é no intuito de contribuir para colmatar estas insuficiências que se pretende nesta dissertação estudar o papel da liderança na eficácia e desempenho das equipas, tendo em conta os processos e dinâmicas inerentes às equipas. outro contributo deste estudo é ser conduzido num contexto específico, nomeadamente, de equipas de intervenção com crianças e jovens em risco. a protecção das crianças e jovens em risco é fundamental para garantir os direitos deste público-alvo. a eficácia das equipas que intervêm com estas problemáticas, mais propriamente, as equipas das comissões de protecção das crianças e jovens (cpcj), tem impacto a nível das crianças, famílias e sociedade em geral, motivo pelo qual é pertinente analisar o funcionamento e os processos inerentes a estas equipas, numa procura de melhoria da sua intervenção. no que respeita à liderança, as competências dos presidentes destas instituições estão definidas na lei. não obstante, as competências de liderança essenciais para qualquer gestão de uma equipa devem ser também consideradas quando se analisa este cargo. as equipas das cpcj têm uma composição multidisciplinar, a maioria dos seus membros não exerce funções a tempo inteiro nestas organizações e, principalmente, lidam com casos cuja decisão pode alterar completamente a vida das crianças, pais, instituições e famílias de acolhimento e a comunidade em geral. o número de estudos publicados acerca destas equipas específicas e/ou dos seus presidentes é praticamente inexistente. este estudo procurou assim, colmatar o número reduzido de estudos empíricos na literatura acerca do papel da liderança de equipas para o desempenho das mesmas, tendo em conta os seus processos. o processo de equipa estudado consistiu na reflexividade da equipa, definida por west (1996) como “quanto os membros da equipa reflectem colectivamente sobre os objectivos, estratégias e processos da equipa, e os adaptam às circunstâncias endógenas ou ambientais, actuais ou previstas” (p. 559).” foram utilizadas como amostra as equipas das cpcj, que estão distribuídas a nível nacional. no que respeita à liderança, os presidentes das cpcj são eleitos pelo plenário da comissão alargada de entre todos os seus membros1. compete ao presidente2: representar a cpcj; presidir às reuniões da comissão alargada e da comissão restrita e orientar e coordenar as suas actividades; promover a execução das deliberações da cpcj; elaborar o relatório anual de actividades e avaliação e submetê-lo à aprovação da comissão alargada; autorizar a consulta dos processos de promoção dos direitos e de protecção; proceder às comunicações (a outras entidades) previstas na lei. verificamos que o papel do presidente das cpcj caracteriza-se por ser formal e burocrático e as suas competências de liderança não estão especificadas. por não existirem critérios de selecção definidos para o presidente, ele é representante de uma entidade, tal como todos os outros membros da cpcj, o que poderá potenciar uma indefinição do papel de líder do presidente, ocorrendo uma separação entre o papel do presidente e o reconhecimento como líder. partindo destas questões e da especificidade das equipas das cpcj, propomos um modelo alternativo àqueles encontrados na literatura, nos quais a liderança influencia o desempenho da equipa através da reflexividade. devido a não ser claro que o presidente tenha um papel de 1 cf. n.º 1 do art.º 23º da lei nº 147/99, de 1 de setembro lpp. 2 cf. art.º 24º da lei nº 147/99, de 1 de setembro lpp. 246 building participative, empowering & diverse communities liderança, sugerimos que a própria equipa no seu conjunto, e não somente o seu presidente, estimula a reflexividade da equipa, que por sua vez terá impacto no desempenho. assim, poderá ser o facto de os membros da equipa reflectirem sobre os seus objectivos e métodos de trabalho que estimula as competências de liderança, que por sua vez aumentam o desempenho da equipa. a hipótese 1 do estudo foi: a reflexividade está positivamente relacionada com o desempenho. a hipótese 2 foi: a liderança medeia a relação entre a reflexividade e o desempenho. para medir as variáveis deste estudo correlacional, foram utilizadas escalas adaptadas de wageman, hackman, & lehrman (2005) para a liderança, de west (1994) para a reflexividade e de passos & caetano (2005) para o desempenho. os resultados forneceram suporte para as nossas hipóteses nos três tipos de desempenho encontrados, confirmando as nossas propostas para um novo modelo de liderança de equipas. no que respeita à hipótese 1, verificou-se que a reflexividade teve efeitos significativos no desempenho. este resultado sugere que as equipas reflexivas têm maior probabilidade de questionar as suas estratégias e processos e de responder aos desafios do ambiente, e por isso, as suas acções baseadas na reflexão conduzem a um melhor desempenho (west, 1996). o mesmo resultado é consistente com estudos anteriores (hirst et al., 2004; hoegl & parboteah, 2006; schippers et al., 2007). relativamente à hipótese 2, a liderança mediou a relação entre a reflexividade e o desempenho, sendo que foi encontrada uma mediação parcial para o desempenho da gestão e eficácia e mediações totais para o desempenho da relação com outras entidades e o desempenho dos princípios de intervenção. estes constructos não são referidos na literatura anterior, sendo que desconhecemos a existência de estudos realizados com estas equipas específicas. uma possível explicação para este resultado pode ser o facto de a gestão e critérios de eficácia não serem actividades da total responsabilidade das cpcj, e possam assim existir outros factores para além da liderança que influenciam este tipo de desempenho. quanto às mediações totais, é notório o papel do líder para a influência da reflexividade nos outros dois tipos de desempenho. o desempenho da relação com outras entidades poderá caracterizar o papel mais formal do presidente das cpcj, de representação destas equipas perante outras entidades. o desempenho dos princípios de intervenção pode ser explicado pelo facto do presidente ter de promover execuções das deliberações sobre as medidas de protecção a aplicar às crianças e jovens, e portanto, ser muitas vezes ele/a que toma a decisão final, quando não exista unanimidade ou maioria de votos. estas são apenas explicações alternativas possíveis, por isso futuros estudos poderão analisar estas questões, relativamente a estas equipas de modo a chegarem a resultados que nos permitam perceber melhor o papel deste tipo de presidente, tendo em conta o seu contexto e funções específicas. os resultados deste estudo sugerem que a investigação sobre liderança de equipas deverá ter em consideração certos aspectos. de facto, propomos um modelo cujo papel da liderança contradiz os modelos anteriores e deriva do contexto específico no qual as equipas estudadas operam. na maioria dos modelos de liderança de equipas propostos, o papel da liderança é de input 247 building participative, empowering & diverse communities da reflexividade e do desempenho da equipa (hirst et al., 2004; schippers et al., 2007; zaccaro et al., 2001) ou de moderadora entre os inputs e processos e os processos e o desempenho (hackman & walton, 1986). em geral, os autores adoptam uma perspectiva sem se preocuparem em estudar as razões pelas quais se verificam estas discrepâncias. como já referido, neste estudo propomos que o contexto possa diferenciar estes papéis e inclusive sugerir um novo. de facto, o conceito de liderança tem pouca utilidade teórica e prática se não for aplicado a determinados contextos (kozlowski et al., 1996). devido à especificidade das equipas das cpcj, e ao papel mais formal do líder, sugerimos que a própria equipa fomenta a reflexividade, e esta reflexão sobre os processos de trabalho em equipa, conduzirá a uma maior preocupação com a coordenação e liderança da equipa. outra característica da forma de organização das cpcj poderá espelhar estes resultados: a rotatividade dos membros. de facto, os membros das cpcj estão em constante rotação, o que faz com que o presidente também esteja. segundo kozlowski et al. (no prelo), o ciclo de vida da equipa pode ser fortemente afectado se o líder for alvo de mudança. contudo, à medida que as equipas se desenvolvem, o conhecimento institucional da equipa não permanece apenas com o líder mas com os membros da equipa nos seus modelos mentais partilhados. o sucesso da relação líderequipa pode consistir na capacidade da equipa orientar o líder para o grupo, na mesma medida que um líder socializaria um novo membro. sugerimos assim, que em futuros estudos com estas variáveis, os investigadores tenham em consideração o contexto onde as equipas operam, no sentido de uma formulação mais cuidada de modelos teóricos e propostas acerca do papel do líder em relação aos processos e desempenhos da equipa. este estudo de natureza correlacional procurou ter em consideração o contexto das equipas estudadas. por isso, os instrumentos incluíram alguns itens adaptados especificamente para aquele contexto. verificámos por exemplo que apesar dos itens de liderança se referirem a competências diferenciadas de liderança do presidente, a análise em componentes principais só extraiu uma componente. este facto poderá estar relacionado com a falta de compreensão de alguns itens ou a sua falta de adequação ao contexto. os instrumentos utilizados na maioria dos estudos são compostos por itens de carácter mais geral, por isso seria importante validar escalas que se referem a tipos de equipas específicas para permitir uma melhor compreensão dos seus itens. no sentido de aprofundar a percepção de reflexividade, liderança e desempenho destas equipas, poderia utilizar-se uma triangulação metodológica com recurso a métodos quantitativos (questionários), mas também a métodos qualitativos, como realização de entrevistas e estudos de caso, de modo a compreender melhor as dinâmicas e os comportamentos de liderança nestas equipas. já foi referida a importância do contexto atribuída neste estudo para identificar o papel da liderança na eficácia do trabalho em equipa. neste estudo, foi tido em consideração apenas um contexto e tipo de equipas. futuros estudos poderão analisar o papel da liderança comparando-o em contextos distintos, de modo a verificar se existem diferentes influências da liderança nos modelos input-processo-ouput de desempenho. este estudo transmitiu a importância da reflexividade da equipa em aumentar as competências de liderança e promover o desempenho em equipas muito específicas. 248 building participative, empowering & diverse communities a eficácia das cpcj, devido às suas características, e como já referido, tem um forte impacto a nível das crianças, jovens, famílias com quem intervêm, assim como as entidades e instituições que dela fazem parte e que nela estão representadas. por isso, é de extrema importância repensar no papel do presidente destas organizações. os presidentes das cpcj nem sempre estão a tempo inteiro e são representantes de outras entidades, tal como todos os restantes elementos, não existindo critérios de selecção para o cargo. em simultâneo, as sessões de formação acerca da liderança para coordenar estas equipas são em número reduzido. assim, para além das competências formais já designadas e a regulamentação acerca da lei de protecção, os comportamentos e competências de liderança devem ser considerados tanto na selecção do presidente, como em futuras sessões de formação. os resultados do estudo sugerem também que a reflexividade está relacionada positivamente com o desempenho da equipa, o que é interessante para os líderes e membros de equipas. contudo, a falta de momentos de reflexão de muitas equipas e a ênfase na acção em muitas organizações fazem com que as equipas não tenham tempo para reflectir e aprender a partir das actividades passadas. será necessário apostar na formação para as equipas criarem hábitos e fomentarem práticas reflexivas. esta reflexividade reproduzir-se-á na procura da melhoria do comportamento dos líderes e consequentemente no desempenho mais eficaz da equipa. 249 building participative, empowering & diverse communities training service users to become community researchers for effective engagement within a participatory action research (par) framework jo hobbs the paper is a work in progress, presented by jo hobbs on behalf of all the people who participated and are involved in the project. when the paper goes to publication all those who participated will be formally acknowledged as co-authors. this presentation will highlight: facilitating collaborative working and community capacity building whilst simultaneously empowering and encouraging greater participation and employment of community researchers. this paper seeks to contribute to the wider remit around engaging service user researchers within health and social care services by focusing on detailing the delivery of high quality context specific as well as broad based training for a group of community researchers recruited by manchester metropolitan university. in addition this paper will draw together the significance of inclusive interagency collaboration, recognising how this strengthens the relationship between university researchers and community researchers and facilitates the synthesis of a collaborative network of researchers working towards creating innovative approaches to research within community research agendas. participatory action research is a method of research in which creating positive social change is the predominant driving force. par grew out of social and educational research and exists today as one of the few research methods which embrace’s principles of participation and reflection, and empowerment and emancipation of groups seeking to improve their social situation. kurt lewin is credited with the creation of action research (ar) ‘participatory action research: getting the job done ‘( seymour-rolls & hughes, 1995, p.10) participatory action research stresses the ‘political aspects of knowledge production’ (reason, 1998, p. 268), as orientated towards understanding concerns for power and control, and powerlessness associated with the role, production and ownership of knowledge. it values the knowledge gained through people’s lived experiences and aims to empower them, through a process of true collaboration, to co-construct knowledge to produce further knowledge and action that will benefit them directly (reason, 1994). service user involvement is recognised as integral to useful health research, particularly as an activity that can have positive outcomes for individuals, research and service provision. providing research training is fundamental and a key principle of successful involvement ensuring that community researchers are encouraged and supported to gain the specific skills, knowledge and understanding that will enable them to be actively involved and work effectively within the par process. i am a researcher working on a project titled ‘the impact of changing services for people with long term neurological conditions’. this research is primarily concerned with gauging the impact of current service delivery in terms of the health and wellbeing of people who have a brain 250 building participative, empowering & diverse communities or spine condition, which ranges from epilepsy to parkinson’s disease. it was always part of the project’s agenda to involve users of services throughout the research processes and par represents an approach which effectively supports the development of inter-professional working between academic researchers, health and social care professionals, service providers and service users as community researchers. the research engagement principles we sought to work with in this respect were: equality of all stakeholders within the process open communication on all aspects of the research commitment to social justice for all development of a partnership with shared vision and expectations a willingness by all concerned to allow the par process to facilitate change both in themselves and in service delivery. to ensure users of services played a full and active role in the research process from beginning to end, my first action was to bring on board 3 users of services as co researchers and co advisors. the project steering group agreed that it would be pertinent to expand the numbers of service users involved as there were times when the existing co researchers were either too ill to contribute, attending hospital appointments or unable to commit themselves . in order for the project to deliver within a par framework, it was important that service users should be enabled to use effectively the skills gained in this collaboration to work on other projects therefore it was proposed that those brought on board would be assisted to organise themselves into an association of co-researchers and advisors and given appropriate training. it was agreed that funding for the training would be provided by manchester city council, manchester primary care trust and manchester metropolitan university as a collaborative venture which would lay the foundations for establishing a network of multi-agency researchers who would then be available to contribute to future university and community based projects, particularly in the areas of environmental change, health and social care research. this would encourage the growth and development of more community led research projects within the context of knowledge and skills transfer. contact was made and established with 2 service users who have neurological condition’s and 2 community campaigners working with local urban regeneration contexts as it was felt this would strengthen the breadth and depth of experiences and perspectives. electronic communication with those brought on board identified the need for them to meet to foster and encourage a team spirit and to put together an agenda for their professional development thus an open day was organised at manchester metropolitan university. at the open day introductions were made and those in attendance to spoke briefly about why they were interested in becoming involved in research projects. there were many different reasons but they grouped around an interest in research as a means of engendering change, remaining active, being involved in society, making a positive impact on services and living environment and remaining personally motivated. all participants felt that this was an opportunity for them to: widen their experiences and understanding of the world around them widen their experiences and understanding of the formulation of policies present opportunities for them to meet different people 251 building participative, empowering & diverse communities present opportunities to get involved with different ventures provide them with opportunities to broaden their knowledge and that of the people they met. this seemed particularly pertinent as the 2 community campaigners working within the regeneration field expressed themselves as feeling dispirited and alienated from service involvement whilst those from the physical disability and neurological service field felt confident and optimistic about their involvement and contribution to service delivery. the opportunity to form an association of cross disciplinary researchers and advisors was seen as a great opportunity for information and knowledge exchange. to facilitate their ability to work within a par framework it was formally agreed that they would need to access suitable training. training requirements were identified and it was felt that two half days of training should be attended solely by the users of services partly because the community activists were reluctant to work alongside professionals and that two half days of training should be attended jointly by themselves and health and social care professionals. the joint training days will focus on an agenda around challenging the barriers which impede service user’s engagement , the inherent power differential and inclusive interagency collaborative working. the open day ended with a discussion around how the group would like their roles to be referred to, eventually they resolved to refer to themselves as community researchers and advisors, which they considered to be an empowering term of reference and hence the use of this term throughout this presentation and in all subsequent papers. prior to training taking place, i consulted with the community researchers and read widely around service user’s involvement in research projects, from their input and my reading i established those principles which would guide the training sessions. the training agenda recognises the importance of empowering community researchers through encouraging their participation within research and also in providing a level of training which builds confidence and capacity to conduct research successfully and which are fundamental to the par agenda. these are: 1) that the trainer is well-informed and aware of service user involvement within research 2) that they well versed with service user participation and what it entails. 3) that the service users involved are consulted with regard to planning the training agenda and the means of its delivery. 4) that the learning environment allows trainees to feel relaxed and equipped to gain the requisite knowledge 5) that the training methods employed ensure trainees take on board factual information and hands on practical research skills. 6) ensuring that the training environment provides trainees with informal learning opportunities and the time and space for people to share their experiences with each other 7) that training is tailored to the roles that the trainees will be undertaking upon completion of training 8) that the language used during training is unambiguous, uncomplicated, and jargon free. 252 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 9) that the trainees are aware of and agree with the aims and objectives of the training programme. 10) that the training schedule should help generate a cooperative learning forum that encourages personal and professional development, seeks to enhance confidence and self-esteem, build up critical thinking and reflective practice. aims and objectives of the training session aims: 1) to establish an association of community researchers and advisors and assist them to build a rapport amongst themselves. 2) to empower them as individuals and build community capacity 3) to equip them with the necessary research skills to be able to work alongside university and practitioner researchers on diverse projects. objectives: 1) to generate greater understanding about the role of research in bringing about changes in the provision of services. 2) to highlight the role of community researchers in the context of research and community advisors as members of steering committees which oversee research projects. 3) to generate greater communication about the different understandings and experiences that community researchers and advisors can bring to existing research practices and procedures. reflections community researcher reflections on the training sessions was highly positive bringing on board a trainer from mental health, a service industry area at the fore front in conducting needs-led, user-controlled services involvement in redesigning services was a positive factor in the success of the training sessions. “i really enjoyed the training sessions. a (the trainer) can take the credit for that. he wasn’t patronising, know it all or boring, his own experience i found were very valuable to the sessions and to us the trainees and i learned a lot.” the trainer had himself been a user of mental health services and thus had an appreciation of the problems that users of services from other areas may have experienced and thus could talk with knowledge and awareness of issues within user involvement around power differential, input into changing services and challenging health and social care professionals. “since taking part in the training sessions i’ve questioned my own little prejudices which previously i wasn’t aware of, prejudices that relate to gender and or disability. it’s raised my awareness of how part of me has been ‘closed off’ and that i’m not as open minded as i thought i was. it’s certainly been a learning curve for me and made me aware of the need for my own self development. i am please to be part of – however smallthis project and hope to develop the skills needed to become a community researcher.” informal and formal communication with the community researchers and advisors with regard to evaluating the usefulness of the training sessions 253 building participative, empowering & diverse communities has identified that the training enabled people to: work closely together allowed them all the opportunity to share their experiences enable them to consider their positioning within a broader research context enable them to think beyond their previous horizons enable them to share aspects of their understandings and experiences. began the process whereby they learnt to appreciate the listening skills required by researchers encourage an acceptance of and sensitivity towards other people’s views. community researchers and advisors also began to appreciate the fundamental aspect of par, which is being able to learn through personal reflection as well as in discussion with other co-researchers. they felt this had helped them to derive insights for future development both as a people and as members of the association of community researchers and advisors. as the association progresses, the extent to which personal, social and professional development encourages a mutually co-operative and understanding environment will be assessed as part of group development activity. it is to be hoped that the experience and understanding they have gained as a user of services will be acknowledged as a strength that they bring to the research process. conclusion training community researchers for effective engagement within a par framework requires us as training providers, commissioners and consultants who are likely to be working alongside those recipients of the training to be more aware of and to draw up training agendas that strive to implement research which tends more towards needs-led, user-controlled services. in order to address the problem of bringing on board people from hard to reach and diverse backgrounds the training agenda needs to acknowledge that trainee’s knowledge may differ from other forms of knowledge acquisition being based as it is on lived experience rather than research findings and is likely to have been amassed through informal exchanges of ideas. training must also take into account the potentially diverse nature of trainee’s capabilities in terms of levels of awareness, understanding, familiarity with research agenda’s, and must also take into consideration age, ethnicity, culture, sexuality, class, gender, disability, etc. the training process therefore needs to be inclusive and take into account access requirements which ensure that training engages and reaches out to those people who services might otherwise fail to take account of. in this way the research process will endeavour to explore future opportunities for their assimilation and involvement within service re-design and facilitate collaborative working and capacity building within both the research community and service provision. whilst service users may feel confident that they are experts on their own experiences, and that what they know is equally valid as professional knowledge, if they are placed in a research situation for which they are ill-equipped by training they are likely to become disengaged from the process. when considering the training requirements of users of services we need to be more aware of and use methods which will encourage and inspire more needs-led user-controlled services. in order for service provision to incorporate community researcher’s experiences and understandings 254 building participative, empowering & diverse communities into service planning, their knowledge must be given the accord which professionals accord their own knowledge. this process needs to be inclusive and take account those requirements which will ensure it reaches and engages as many of the hard to reach users of services as possible. these measures should help to strengthen the relationship between university, practitioner and community researchers and facilitate the synthesis of a collaborative network of researchers working towards creating innovative approaches to research within community research agendas. 255 building participative, empowering & diverse communities parejas mixtas e inmigración: análisis del apoyo social mª isabel hombrados mendieta y gianluigi mosca/o universidad de málaga abstract uno de los fenómenos más relevantes por su dimensión, complejidad y actualidad, causado principalmente por los procesos migratorios, es el que se denomina matrimonio mixto. en el presente estudio entendemos por pareja mixta, aquella unión entre individuos que pertenecen a contextos culturales, nacionales, y/o religiosos diferentes. nos planteamos analizar las características psicosociales de las parejas mixtas y la percepción de apoyo social como un elemento fundamental para facilitar la integración social de las familias multiculturales. participaron en este estudio 102 sujetos elegidos entre los extranjeros que conviven o están casados con españoles. los resultados del trabajo nos permiten analizar las características psicosociales de esta población, y arrojan interesantes datos sobre las redes de apoyo y la percepción de apoyo respecto a la pareja, las redes de amigos y las instituciones. palabras clave: parejas mixtas, inmigración y apoyo social. definición de parejas interculturales. en la literatura revisada en este estudio se considera una unión como “mixta” de manera muy variada, según el prisma de observación utilizado. cada etiqueta se puede referir a distintas características de la pareja más o menos objetivas y observables, así que se habla de matrimonios interraciales cuando se hace referencia a las características biológicas y fenotípicas; matrimonios interetnicos cuando se toma en consideración la identidad étnica, considerada como la conciencia de cada individuo de pertenecer a un determinado grupo étnico y la importancia que a ella se atribuye (tajfel, 1981). matrimonio interreligioso cuando el matrimonio sigue a cultos religiosos diferentes, matrimonios binacionales (o internacionales) en el caso de los matrimonios donde individuos proceden de distintas naciones, o simplemente matrimonios interculturales donde los cónyuges comparten distintas culturas. considerando la cultura, según los distintos autores citados por valenzuela (2007), como la totalidad de los conocimientos y significados aprendidos y mantenidos por el ser humano, o como continúa la autora, como el conjunto de ideales, creencias, habilidades, vestimenta e instituciones. otros autores amplían el concepto de cultura, considerando también como elementos culturales las normas, los valores y artificios que se trasmiten de generación en generación (hoult, 1974), incluyendo la historia, las tradiciones, las actitudes y los comportamientos (fu, tora, kendall, 2001). en el presente estudio entendemos por pareja mixta, de manera más general, aquella unión entre individuos que pertenecen a contextos culturales, nacionales, y/o religiosos diferentes (waldman y rubalcaba, 2005). de acuerdo con tognetti (1996) ampliamos la definición de parejas mixtas considerando también las diferencias en los patrones de socialización, los diferentes 256 building participative, empowering & diverse communities modelos de atribución de roles, las diferentes concepciones de la familia y la pertenencia a distintos grupos sociales significativamente diferentes. pero sobre todo, como en el presente trabajo, un requisito fundamental para definir dichas uniones como mixtas es la implicación de uno de los miembros de la pareja en el proceso migratorio. en el presente trabajo se utilizará sobre todo el termino matrimonio mixto (o parejas mixtas), muy común en la literatura europea, o matrimonio/pareja intercultural teniendo en cuenta que en la mayoría de las uniones consideradas en la presente investigación coinciden varias características de internacionalización (sociales, culturales, religiosas, etc.). pareja mixta: un fenómeno en continua evolución el creciente y constante flujo de inmigrantes que llegan en españa y su progresiva estabilización, conjuntamente a otros factores (mayor interacción entre extranjeros y autóctonos, reducción de la distancia social entre grupos raciales, menor peso de las familias sobre la elección de la pareja, diminución del prejuicio racial, etc.), ha permitido crear aquellas condiciones que facilitan a los individuos de distintas nacionalidades decidir formar una familia. que convencionalmente hemos llamado “mixtas”. en el caso de este estudio se tendrán en consideración aquellas uniones mixtas donde uno de los dos se enfrentó en primera persona a la experiencia migratoria. entre los motivos implicados en la constitución de las parejas interculturales, y probablemente menos relacionado con la migración está, según milk (2000), internet, que a través de su desarrollo ha facilitado el crecimiento del negocio a nivel internacional y ha contribuido al incremento de los matrimonios transnacionales. en relación a los datos estadísticos respecto al fenómeno migratorio y a las parejas mixtas, se ha comprobado que con el aumento de la inmigración se está produciendo un crecimiento exponencial de los matrimonios interculturales. hecho que nos lleva a considerar que existe una intima conexión entre los dos fenómenos. analizando los datos relativos a los matrimonios mixtos, considerando solo los matrimonios entre españoles y extranjeros, se puede apreciar un progresivo aumento. en el 1996 estas bodas internacionales representaban solo el 4,3% del total de las bodas, mientras 10 años más tarde (2006) representaban ya el 11,5% del total de los matrimonios. ese dato debería hacernos reflexionar sobre la dimensión que tiene este fenómeno, especialmente si no consideramos las convivencias entre españoles y extranjeros, ni los matrimonios mixtos entre extranjeros de distintas nacionalidades, especialmente si pensamos que los estudios realizados sobre este fenómeno no son proporcionales a su crecimiento. especialmente en relación con las convivencias, resulta interesante comentar que en un estudio realizado en italia (país de reciente inmigración igual que españa y con el mismo aumento del “fenómeno” parejas mixtas”) a partir de los datos relativos al censo de la población del 1991, se ha comprobado que las uniones informales representan el 15% del total de las uniones mixtas, dato bastante elevado si se piensa que en el mismo año las convivencias entre italianos rondaba el 1%. (maffioli, 1996). en el grafico n.1 se puede notar la progresión del fenómeno desde el 1996 al 2006, donde se han considerado solo los matrimonios entre españoles y extranjeros. en los gráficos n.2 y n.3 se puede observar, siempre respecto a la misma década, respectivamente la progresión de los matrimonios entre españoles y mujeres extranjeras y entre hombres extranjeros y mujeres españolas. 257 building participative, empowering & diverse communities grafico 1. total de matrimonios entre españoles y extranjeros. grafico 2: matrimonios entre españoles y mujeres extranjeras grafico 3: matrimonios entre mujeres españolas y extranjeros apoyo social a partir aproximadamente de los años 70 hay un gran interés por estudiar las redes sociales y los sistemas de apoyo social, especialmente en las personas que sufren problemas psicosociales. son muchos los estudios que han demostrado la efectividad del apoyo social a la hora de afrontar los problemas y conflictos de la vida cotidiana. de acuerdo con lin, dean y ensel (1986), el apoyo social se define como provisiones instrumentales y/o expresivas, reales y percibidas, aportadas por la comunidad, redes sociales y amigos íntimos. el apoyo social, francescato y ghirelli (1997) lo endienten como una ayuda interpersonal, emotiva, informativa e intercambiable a través de las redes sociales. 258 building participative, empowering & diverse communities han sido demostrados los efectos positivos del apoyo social sobre la salud y el bienestar, aunque, según barrón (1996), no se ha demostrado plenamente cuales son los mecanismos específicos de esta relación. han sido postulados dos formas de funcionamiento de apoyo: efecto directo y efecto indirecto o amortiguador. el primero tiene un efecto directo sobre el bienestar independientemente del nivel de estrés. a mayor apoyo corresponde mayor bienestar psicológico (y a menor apoyo más incidencia de trastornos). según el efecto indirecto, el apoyo social funciona como moderador de los eventos que inciden sobre el bienestar; por ejemplo, sobre los acontecimientos estresantes. según este paradigma el efecto indirecto es un factor de protección que puede intervenir en dos puntos: a) durante la evolución de los eventos estresantes, ayudando la persona a redefinir la percepción del estrés, y b) puede intervenir entre la experiencia de estrés y el comienzo del resultado patológico, reduciendo los efectos del estrés. en los estudios sobre apoyo social se suelen distinguir tres principales perspectivas: perspectiva estructural: esa perspectiva analiza las condiciones objetivas y la estructura de las relaciones sociales, es decir, las redes de apoyos utilizadas y el tipo de red que proporciona apoyo. el tamaño de la red (número de personas que la componen), la densidad de la misma (interconexión entre los miembros), y su homogeneidad (red formada principalmente por familiares, amigos, etc.). perspectiva funcional: esa perspectiva se refiere sobre todo a los aspectos cualitativos del apoyo. aquí se suelen destacar 3 grandes funciones que tiene el apoyo social: a) el apoyo emocional que comprende la empatía, el cuidado, el amor, la confianza, etc., y asume particular importancia la experiencia de sentirse amado y aceptado. b) el apoyo material, se trata de acciones o materiales proporcionado por otra persona que directamente ayudan a quien lo necesita. por ejemplo cuidados de niños, prestar dinero, acompañar al médico, ayudar en un trabajo etc. c) apoyo informacional, nos referimos en este caso a la información que se ofrece a otras personas para que estas puedan usarla para hacer frente a las situaciones problemáticas. por ejemplo dar consejos e informaciones útiles para el sujeto que las recibe. se diferencia del apoyo instrumental porque la información o el consejo no es la solución, sino que permite a la persona que la recibe ayudarse a sí mismo. perspectiva contextual: aquí se tiene en cuenta el contexto socioambiental en que el apoyo social es percibido, aportado y/o recibido. según la perspectiva contextual es importante tener en consideración aspectos como el momento en que se da el apoyo, su fuente, la duración, etc. enfatizando la relevancia del apoyo social, bruna zani (1996) afirma que este asume una importancia estratégica en cuanto es el interfaz entre el individuo y el social, evidenciando la relación existente entre la persona y sus comunidades (p.81). en relación al proceso migratorio, hay que subrayar los importantes cambios que un inmigrante padece: cambios geográficos, normas, culturales, lingüístico, de estatus social y económico, condiciones de vida en general, padeciendo también una perdida, y en un segundo momento, una trasformación y reestructuración de las redes interpersonales en el país acogedor. un importante apoyo social deriva de las redes que un inmigrante va formando. las redes (formales y informales) proporcionan apoyo muy importante para la supervivencia (ayuda en la búsqueda de un trabajo, de la vivienda, informaciones sobre servicios legales, sanitarios, educativo, etc.). podemos razonablemente afirmar que la reestructuración de aquel sistema de redes sociales e interpersonales, en general, juega un papel importante como fuente de recurso psicosocial para 259 building participative, empowering & diverse communities el inmigrante (hernández, pozo, alonso y martos; 2005). en este proceso de restablecimiento de las redes de apoyo dentro del nuevo tejido social, cabe la posibilidad de contraer matrimonio con un autóctono dando vida, así, a la formación de una pareja intercultural, y consecuentemente a todos los beneficios y/o obstaculos que pueden brotar en esta relación. muchas investigaciones han comprobado los efectos positivos del apoyo social en el contexto migratorio, sobre el bienestar y la salud mental de los extranjeros. la pareja intercultural, probablemente más que la autóctona, necesita mayor apoyo por parte de la red social, así, como mayor apoyo institucional. esta reflexión está motivada por las características propias de la pareja mixta, que está obligada a mediar constantemente las diferencias culturales en relación a la educación de los hijos, la religión, la gestión económica, la alimentación, tipo de comunicación familiar, etc., tanto en su interior como con las familias de origen (que pueden obstaculizar la relación, especialmente cuando la pareja se constituye), como por la comunidad de acogida (a causa de los prejuicios y de las discriminaciones, que por su naturaleza interracial o interreligiosa, estas familias padecen. la familia mixta es parte integrante de la sociedad y se encuentra en continua interrelación con las familias de origen, con las redes de amigos y con las instituciones (escuelas, centros culturales, familiares, sociales, sanitarios, etc.). el bienestar de cada conyugue, la satisfacción con la relación de pareja y la estabilidad del matrimonio dependen de manera importante del grado de apoyo que tanto las familias de origen como las redes sociales y las instituciones pueden proporcionar. a propósito de apoyo social en las familias interétnica, tognetti (1996) afirma que el apoyo asume una importancia central en estas parejas, explicando que a veces estas parejas se rompen porque la red de apoyo está menos presente. método objetivos generales. en esta investigación pretendemos explorar un fenómeno que está directamente relacionado con la emigración. en concreto consideramos la formación de familias interculturales como un importante fenómeno de cambio social y como un factor de integración para los extranjeros que componen estas uniones. por ello en nuestro estudio han participado solamente los extranjeros que son integrantes de las familias interculturales, ya que nos interesa conocer sus necesidades, sus redes de apoyo social y su percepción con el mismo. los extranjeros participantes son sujetos que, voluntariamente o involuntariamente, y por distintos motivos han decidido emprender un camino migratorio que muchas veces es sin retorno, abandonando su país, su familia, sus amigos y su cultura. por tanto en este estudio nos planteamos analizar las características psicosociales de las parejas mixtas y la percepción de apoyo social como un elemento fundamental para facilitar la integración social de las familias multiculturales. participantes participaron en este estudio 102 sujetos elegidos entre los extranjeros que conviven o están casados con españoles. la muestra está compuesta por un 52% de mujeres y un 48% por hombres, de los cuales el 54,9% están casados y el 45,1% conviven. la edad media de los sujetos 260 building participative, empowering & diverse communities es de 36,6 años. considerando los rangos de edad, se ha detectado que el 48% de los extranjeros entrevistados tienen una edad comprendida entre 23 y 33 años, y que el 70,6% de la muestra está compuesto por sujetos entre 19 y 40 años. instrumentos cuestionario sociodemografico: este cuestionario se ha utilizado para explorar algunos datos relativos al extranjero entrevistado y a su pareja. dándonos, de esa manera, la posibilidad de comparar algunos de estos datos interesantes en relación a los aspectos relativos con la formación de las parejas interculturales. estos datos nos ayudan a comprender por ejemplo algunos de los factores sociológicos relativos a la elección de la pareja (edad, instrucción, diferencia étnica). en particular se preguntó en este apartado los siguientes datos relativos al sujeto y a su pareja: género, edad, estudios terminados, tipo de trabajo y religión.……………………………. estos datos se integraron con: la nacionalidad del sujeto, la ciudad de residencia de la pareja, el estado civil, los años de estancia en españa, los años de relación con la actual pareja, donde se han conocido (en españa o antes de venir a españa) y en que circunstancia, la presencia de hijos y su respectiva edad. este cuestionario se completó con tres preguntas relativas a la red social: a) tamaño de la red familiar presente en la ciudad de residencia; b) presencia de amigos españoles; c) presencia de amigos extranjeros (de la misma nacionalidad u otros extranjeros). . cuestionario de apoyo social (a.s.o.r.p.e.), elaborado por garcía y hombrados (2003), en su versión original, tiene en cuenta los aspectos relativos a la función que cumple el apoyo social, así como la satisfacción percibida por el mismo. el instrumento analiza 3 tipos de apoyo: apoyo emocional, instrumental e informacional el cuestionario utiliza una escala tipo likert de 1 a 5 puntos, tanto para la frecuencia de apoyo recibido (1 = rara vez y 5 = siempre que lo necesito), así como para medir el grado de satisfacción con el mismo apoyo (1 = insatisfecho y 5 = muy satisfecho). el índice de consistencia interna es (α = .90). cuestionario de apoyo institucional, el planteamiento general durante la construcción del instrumento ha sido, por un lado poder medir el grado de apoyo institucional percibido por la familia intercultural, y por otra la satisfacción con el mismo. la escala explica el 52,9% del total de la varianza y discrimina con claridad los dos factores. para el análisis factorial se utilizó el método de rotación varimax con kaiser. el factor sobre apoyo institucional consta de 7 ítems (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) y tiene una consistencia interna (α = .90), mientras el factor satisfacción tiene una fiabilidad interna de α = .74. la modalidad de respuesta de la escala es de tipo likert a 5 puntos (1 = muy en desacuerdo y 5 = muy de acuerdo). el cuestionario sobre detección de necesidades y mejora socio-familiar: este cuestionario se emplea para detectar los posibles ámbitos de intervención social y comunitaria que según el entrevistado pudieran aportar elementos de mejoras a las familias y/o parejas interculturales. el cuestionario está integrado por 7 ítems que indagan la opinión del sujeto en relación a algunas de las principales áreas de interés para las familias interculturales, en particular los programas de mediación familiar y religiosos, asesoramiento jurídico, servicios de prestación social en general, reducción de la burocracia (que puede obstaculizar la relación), programas de sensibilización sobre prejuicios y discriminación, y finalmente la promoción de programas de mediación intercultural en las escuelas. así como en el anterior cuestionario, se dio 261 building participative, empowering & diverse communities a los entrevistados la posibilidad de añadir otros 2 posibles ámbitos de mejoras que considerasen necesarios. procedimiento se utilizó la técnica snow ball (bola de nieve) para muestreo de los sujetos. se trata de un muestreo no probabilístico ya que no es posible establecer a priori la probabilidad que tienen los miembros del universo de ser seleccionados como parte de la muestra. los criterios utilizados para la selección de la muestra han sido: a) extranjeros casados o que conviven con ciudadanos españoles con al menos un año de convivencia; b) extranjeros nacidos fuera de españa y posteriormente emigrados en el territorio español y c)residentes en el territorio español se contó con la colaboración de asociaciones de inmigrantes, del hospital clínico y se crearon dos foros en internet. resultados a partir de los primeros análisis descriptivos emerge que el nivel de estudio de los entrevistados es más bien alto, especialmente si lo comparamos con los estudios terminados por el miembro español de la pareja. en particular, el 50% de los extranjeros tiene una licenciatura en contra del 38,2% de sus parejas españolas, apoyando en este caso, la hipótesis de que la variable instrucción puede ser un factor mitigador de la diferencia étnica. respecto a los años de relación con la actual pareja, hay una tendencia similar al aumento del fenómeno a nivel nacional (que en los 6 últimos años ha crecido un 172%), en efecto el 63,7% de las parejas lleva entre 1 y 6 años de relación, con una media de 9,9 años. respecto a la religión, la cristiana es la más representada (65,7%), seguida por la islámica (20,6%) y la ortodoxa (6,9%). mientras las parejas interreligiosas alcanzan el 34,3% del total de la muestra. se ha detectado que, respecto al tamaño de la red familiar, la media de familiares presentes en la misma ciudad es de 2,7. este dato es algo inferior al tamaño de la red de apoyo detectada por martínez y colbs. (1996) entre los inmigrantes africanos residentes en andalucía que ha sido de 3,75 sujetos. pero si nos centramos sobre la frecuencia de familiares presente en la misma ciudad, resalta que el 44,1% de los entrevistados no tiene ningún familiar presente en su ciudad de residencia, el 15,7% declara tener solo un familiar, y el 10,8% declara tener dos. también respecto a la percepción del tamaño de la red social compuesta por los amigos resulta ser más bien escasa. el 31,4% de nuestros sujetos afirman tener bastantes amigos españoles, mientras el 40,2% declara tener pocos o muy pocos amigos autóctonos. la misma tendencia se verifica respecto a los amigos de su país u otros extranjeros. cuando se les pregunta a estos representantes de la familia intercultural, que es lo que deberían de mejorar los políticos para que su familia alcanzase una mayor integración sociofamiliar, se revelan algunos ámbitos muy cruciales que se indican a continuación: 262 building participative, empowering & diverse communities ámbitos de actuación para la mejora socio-familiar elementos de mejora de acuerdo muy de acuerdo total programas de sensibilización sobre prejuicio y discriminación 31,70% 44,10% 75,80% programas de mediación intercultural en las escuelas 40,20% 32,40% 72,60% reducir la burocracia (visados, reagrupación familiar, etc.) 26,50% 46,10% 72,6% asesoramiento jurídico 37,30% 27,50% 64,80% servicios de prestación social 48% 16,70% 64,7% programas de mediación familiar especializados 38,20% 22,50% 60,70% programas de mediación en temas religiosos 26,50% 21,60% 48,10% la frecuencia de apoyo emocional recibido por la pareja es mayor en los hombres (media= 4,57) que en las mujeres (media= 3,88). así encontramos diferencias significativas en la frecuencia de apoyo emocional recibido por hombres y mujeres, siendo los hombres lo que reciben más apoyo emocional que las mujeres, f= 8,05, p< .005. en cuanto a la satisfacción con el apoyo recibido encontramos diferencias significativas en la satisfacción con el apoyo emocional recibido por la pareja atendiendo a la variable sexo. siendo los hombres (media=4,61) los que en general están más satisfechos que las mujeres (media=3,83) en la recepción de apoyo emocional, f=8,32, p<.005. también hemos encontrado diferencias significativas en la satisfacción con el apoyo instrumental, siendo los hombres (media=4,61) los que muestran mas satisfacción que las mujeres (media=3,90), f= 11,8), p<.001. los hombres (media=4)se sienten significativamente más satisfechos que las mujeres (media=3,39) en la recepción de apoyo instrumental, f=3,7, p< .005. en cuanto a la frecuencia y satisfacción del apoyo recibido de los amigos compatriotas y autóctonos hemos encontrado diferencias significativas para la satisfacción con el apoyo recibido tanto de los amigos autóctonos y compatriotas en las mujeres latinas, ya que muestran las puntuaciones más altas tanto en la satisfacción del apoyo instrumental (media=4), f=2,25, p<.13 como emocional (media=3,93) f=2,58, p<.08) por parte de los amigos compatriotas. también es mayor la satisfacción del apoyo emocional de los amigos españoles en las mujeres latinas (media=4), f=2,63, p<.07. en cuanto al apoyo institucional hemos encontrado que los latinoamericanos son los que muestran mayores diferencias respecto al apoyo social (media=3,22), f=3,23, p<.044, en el sentido de que son los que perciben más apoyo institucional. discusión y conclusiones el fenómeno de las uniones interculturales es bastante reciente en españa, y existe un vacío importante de estudios sobre este tipo de familia, por ello hemos considerado necesario investigar algunos de los principales factores psicosociales relacionados con dicha unión intercultural con el fin de proporcionar un marco general del fenómeno y contribuir a ampliar los conocimientos respecto a este tipo de configuración familiar que está en constante crecimiento. 263 building participative, empowering & diverse communities en nuestro estudio hemos comprobado que la formación de las uniones interculturales es un fenómeno que está creciendo en los últimos años, tratándose en particular de uniones constituidas recientemente, en efecto el 63,7% de las uniones lleva entre 1 y 6 años de relación (coherentemente con el crecimiento de la población inmigrante en la última década), y se trata de una población bastante joven, si consideramos que casi la mitad (48%) tiene una edad comprendida entre 23 y 33 años. respecto al grado de instrucción, que se considera como un equilibrador de la diferencia étnica (streiff-fenart, 1998 y 1999; maffioli, 1996), hemos comprobado que los extranjeros entrevistados tienen generalmente un grado de instrucción más alto que su pareja española, en particular el 50% declara tener una licenciatura en contra del 38,2% de sus parejas españolas. apoyando, así, los datos que señalan que la variable instrucción puede ser un factor mitigador de la diferencia étnica. los sujetos entrevistados se caracterizan por tener una escasa red familiar, potencialmente proveedora de apoyo, comprobando que la presencia de familiares es de 2,7, siendo más baja respecto a otro estudio realizado con inmigrantes en andalucía, que en este caso rondaba los 3.75 familiares (martínez et al. 1996). cabe destacar que el 44,1% no tiene ningún familiar en la ciudad donde vive, subrayando la dificultad de recibir apoyo por sus familiares. en relación al apoyo social se ha comprobado que generalmente el hombre percibe más apoyo social que la mujer. hemos encontrado, también en este caso, que generalmente son los varones los que perciben más apoyo social, sobre todo apoyo emocional. los varones también se encuentran más satisfechos que las mujeres con el apoyo instrumental. también cuando la fuente de apoyo es la familia de origen, son los hombres los que se siguen sintiendo más satisfechos con el apoyo instrumental. lo mismo se manifiesta cuando la fuente de apoyo instrumental son los amigos compatriotas. respecto a la percepción de apoyo en el ámbito comunitario son los latinoamericanos los que perciben más apoyo institucional. probablemente este colectivo se identifica más con las instituciones españolas o es el idioma el que juega un papel importante a la hora de considerar el apoyo institucional. a modo de conclusión, consideramos necesario subrayar que las parejas interculturales son un interesante laboratorio donde se experimenta una nueva manera de ser familia, donde el encuentro de distintos valores, idiomas, religiones, tradiciones y cultura en general, obliga a estas parejas a reflexionar más que las autóctonas sobre su configuración familiar y sobre las expectativas que la misma unión intercultural genera. referencias bibliográficas barrón, a. (1996). apoyo social. aspectos teóricos y aplicaciones. madrid, siglo xxi, francescato, d., y ghirelli, g. (1997). fondamenti de psicologia di comunitá . roma, carocci editore. fu x., tora j. y kendall h. (2001). marital happiness and inter-racial marriage: a study in a multi-ethnic community in hawaii. journal of comparative family studies. 32 (1) pp. 47-61. garcía, m. a. y hombrados, m. i. (2003). la participación social en los consejos municipales de menores. http://0-proquest.umi.com.jabega.uma.es/pqdweb?rqt=318&pmid=21888&ts=1183922601&clientid=48745&vtype=pqd&vname=pqd&vinst=prod 264 building participative, empowering & diverse communities encuentro en psicología social. 1 (3), 187-190. hernández, s.; pozo, c.; alonso, e. y martos, m.j. (2005). estructura y funciones del apoyo social en un colectivo de inmigrantes magrebíes. anales de psicología, 21(2), 304-315. lin, n., dean, a. y ensel, w. (1986) social support, life events, and depression, nueva york: academic press. en barrón lópez de roda, a., sánchez moreno, e. (2001) estructura social, apoyo social y salud mental. psicothema. 13 (1), pp. 17-23 maffioli, d. (1996), i comportamenti demografici delle coppie miste. en tognetti bordogna, m. legami familiari e immigrazione: i matrimoni misti, 49-76. torino, l’harmattan italia. martínez, m.f., garcía, m., maya, i., rodríguez, s. y checa, f. (1996). la integración social de los inmigrantes africanos en andalucía. necesidades y recursos. sevilla. junta de andalucía. milk, l. (2000, july). when harris met seema [electronic version]. washingtonian, 23, 68-71, 99. streiff-fenart, j. (1989). les couples franco-maghrébins en france, paris, ed. l’harmattan. streiff-fenart, j. (1988). les jeunes immigrées et le mariage mixte, peuples méditerranéens, juliodiciembre 44-45, pp. 137-154. tajfel, h. (1981). grupos humanos y categorías sociales. (1984). barcelona: herder. tognetti bordogna, m. (1996). legami familiari e immigrazione: i matrimoni misti, torino: ed. l’harmattan italia. valenzuela, e. (2007). influencia de la cultura y las diferencias culturales n la medición psicológica. logos, 3, 1. waldman, k., rubalcava, l. (2005). psychotherapy with intercultural couples: a contemporary psychodynamic approach. american journal of psychotherapy. 59 (3) pp. 227-246. zani, b. (1996). strumenti concettuali e metodi di ricerca. en: zani, b. y palmonari, a. (1996). manuale di psicologia di comunitá. 65-116. bologna: il mulino. file:///d:/congresso2008/actas/proceedings%20ii%20iccp%20%2008/javascript:void(0); file:///d:/congresso2008/actas/proceedings%20ii%20iccp%20%2008/javascript:void(0); http://0-proquest.umi.com.jabega.uma.es/pqdweb?rqt=318&pmid=12495&ts=1150968269&clientid=48745&vtype=pqd&vname=pqd&vinst=prod 265 building participative, empowering & diverse communities espacio técnico de la psicología comunitaria en el contexto del sistema de servicios sociales españoles: sondeo exploratorio de tres servicios sociales generales jaime alfaro inzunza escuela de psicología. universidad de valparaíso, chile. departamento psicología social. e-mail: alfaro.inzunza@gmail.com resumen este estudio, en curso, tiene como antecedentes : 1) la participación de psicólogos en políticas sociales es un hecho nuevo, de gran relevancia para la construcción de los diversos campos de intervención social desarrollados en psicología (psicología comunitaria, psicología de la intervención social, intervención psicosocial, psicología social aplicada); 2) la escasa literatura disponible muestra la presencia de importantes grados de tensión y desencuentro, entre las orientaciones técnicas y paradigmáticas de las distintas especialidades de la psicología relacionadas, y las estrategias de las políticas sociales; 3) los estudios disponibles utilizan básicamente perspectivas conceptuales “etic” o normativo-externas a estos desempeños, siendo relevante la realización de investigaciones basadas en una perspectiva “emic”. se establece como problema de estudio el describir el campo técnico potencial que tiene el quehacer de los psicólogos comunitarios en los sistemas de políticas sociales, definiendo específicamente como pregunta de investigación: ¿cuál es la presencia y potencial aporte de las estrategias de intervención comunitaria que hacen parte de la psicología comunitaria y cuáles son los factores condicionantes que permiten comprender su estructuración en el contexto de tres servicios sociales generales españoles? el diseño metodológico es de base cualitativa (grounded theory) / estudio de casos. los resultados preliminares de este estudio señalan que: 1) en los servicios sociales generales observados, la intervención comunitaria está presente como estrategia de trabajo, aunque de manera acotada. siendo entendida ésta como intervención en relaciones y procesos comunitarios (la comunidad como objeto de intervención), no considerando necesariamente procesos de participación comunitaria; 2) en la interfase asociada a la presencia o no de la estrategia comunitaria en los servicios sociales tendrían importancia los esquemas referenciales que poseen los equipos técnicos de nivel intermedio y/o de nivel local. así como también la presencia, aumento o reducción de la estrategia comunitaria no tendría que ver directamente con los marcos normativos legales o de financiamiento de nivel estatal central, o de nivel autonómico; 3) la contribución de la psicología comunitaria y de las estrategias comunitarias en general, tienen un espacio potencial en relación con el énfasis que ponen los servicios en una estrategia de desarrollo de potencialidades, de fomento de autonomía, y de evitación de relaciones asistenciales; 4) la relación entre servicios sociales generales y psicología va más allá de sólo la psicología comunitaria y se extiende a otras áreas de especialidad profesional de la psicología, tales como la psicología de la intervención social, psicología de los grupos, entre otras. de igual forma, el campo técnico ocupado por los psicólogos(as) en los servicios sociales generales observados se relaciona con diversas áreas de competencias y de especialidad profesional de la psicología, tales como gestión de programas, evaluación de necesidades y de programas, intervención grupal, intervención en redes, entre otras; 5) la intervención en los servicios sociales es transversalmente mailto:alfaro.inzunza@gmail.com 266 building participative, empowering & diverse communities interdisciplinaria, en cada uno de los niveles en que se implementa, siendo el equipo interprofesional basado en una perspectiva interdisciplinar la principal referencia técnica de las intervenciones. palabras clave: psicología comunitaria; políticas sociales; servicios sociales; psicología de la intervención social. antecedentes del problema de estudio la inserción y participación de psicólogos en programas sociales derivados de políticas sociales se constituye como hecho nuevo y de relevancia para el desarrollo profesional de la psicología. desde la década de los años setenta se han generado cambios en las lógicas que organizan las políticas sociales, en relación a que adquieren importancia, tanto social como técnica, las dimensiones subjetivas y psicosociales en las estrategias de desarrollo social y en la comprensión y abordaje de los problemas sociales (lópez-cabanas y chacón, 1997; casas, 1996), como resultado y efecto del desarrollo de nuevas problemáticas sociales y nuevas nociones para entenderlas y conceptualizarlas (galende, 1990. 1998; musitu y castillo, 1992; casas, 2006). en relación a ello, durante los últimos veinte años el quehacer de los psicólogos en el ámbito de programas derivados de políticas sociales ha adquirido relevancia tanto cualitativa como cuantitativa, en cuanto campo de ejercicio profesional, así como también como área de interés académico (técnico y conceptual) derivado de lo anterior. ello en españa (luque, 1988; musitu y castillo, 1992; lópez-cabanas y chacón, 1997; huerta, 1998; casas, 2006; sánchez, 2007), así como también en otras realidades nacionales, contándose con antecedentes de ello en estados unidos (prilleltensky, 2006), brasil (scaparo y guareschi, 2007), argentina (lapalma, 2006), venezuela (montero, 2006) chile (krause, 1998; alfaro, 2000) uruguay (correa, 2006; giménez, 2006). se inicia, de esta manera, el desarrollo de un nuevo ámbito de actuación especializada de los psicólogos, en españa hacia fines de los años ochenta (luque, 1988; casas y beltri, 1989; berdullas, chacón, lopéz-cabanas & sanz, 1989; rubio & plumed, 1995; lópez-cabanas & chacón, 1997; hernández, 1998), en donde ha ocupado un cuarto lugar como campo de desempeño laboral de los psicólogos (quintanilla & díaz, 1992). ello integrado con los avances que produjo la psicología comunitaria desde su surgimiento durante los años sesenta, junto al despliegue del interés aplicado de la psicología social en los setenta (hernández & valera, 2001). unido, además, a los desarrollos conceptuales de la psicología social en las últimas décadas, han sido la base técnica y conceptual para el reconocimiento y legitimación de la psicología de la intervención social (rueda, 1991; garau & rubio, 1994), o también llamada genéricamente intervención psicosocial (casas, 1996, 2006; sánchez & morales, 2002). en españa, la demanda social por la incorporación intensiva de profesionales psicólogos en programas derivados desde políticas sociales se vincula a cambios en el sistema público de bienestar social, ocurridos durante la década de los años ochenta y que generan una red de servicios sociales como instrumentos básicos para la atención personalizada y la realización de actuaciones de carácter comunitario, de prevención y promoción social, los llamados servicios sociales generales, y servicios sociales especializados (berdullas, chacón, lópez-cabañas & sanz, 1989; rubio & plumed, 1995; lópez-cabanas & chacón, 1997). 267 building participative, empowering & diverse communities las políticas sociales establecen marcos técnicos e institucionales que generan límites y posibilidades, particulares y distintivos, para las actuaciones posibles de desarrollar en su contexto, relevantes de tener en cuenta para comprender la forma y alternativas de acción de los psicólogos en estos escenarios. de un modo genérico, podemos señalar que las políticas sociales siempre se inscriben en un paradigma de desarrollo particular, desde donde se definen la formas de concebir los horizontes hacia los que se debe conducir la sociedad para mejorar las condiciones de vida de las personas y el rol esperado de los actores técnicos en esta tarea y los mecanismos o estrategias que debieran emplearse para lograr este propósito. dando cuenta, de esta manera, necesariamente de relaciones y equilibrios de poder propios de un período histórico particular. de tal manera que una política social no es un acto aislado, aleatorio, sino que existe en un marco general al que se integra ese acto, con un contenido particular expresado en un programa y, aunque este no esté definido explícitamente, es posible develar una articulación con una estructura de orientación o referencia que forma un denominador común con: el sector de intervención, el problema tratado y la orientación normativa del decidor en sus opciones técnicas (meny & thoening, 1992; aguilar, 1993). así, la intervención social realizada en el marco de un programa social se conforma y despliega vinculada estrechamente a la producción de nuevos problemas o demandas, surgidos y vinculados con prácticas profesionales (saberes, instituciones y técnicas) situados en el marco de las formas de organización de una sociedad en un determinado momento histórico-social, no siendo ello un mero “telón de fondo” para entender los desarrollos y posibilidades de estas intervenciones, sino que más bien siendo un plano que establece las condiciones de posibilidad, tendencias y proyecciones de crecimiento de las prácticas interventivas (galende, 1990). a su vez, los sistemas de protección social derivados desde estas políticas sociales, en donde se insertan los psicólogos, están directamente relacionados con los tipos de estados de bienestar en que se sustenten, los cuales en la actualidad se pueden diferenciar en tres tipos, como nos señala esping-andersen (1993): los liberales o residuales, socialdemócratas y conservador o corporativo, según la clasificación ya clásica de este autor. de tal manera como podemos suponer, en cuanto los sistemas de protección social surgen frente a las inseguridades y riesgos que sufren las personas a lo largo del ciclo vital, el identificar cuáles son estos riesgos y precisar su grado previsible de ocurrencia permite reconocer las vulnerabilidades que existen y detectar a los sectores sociales que las experimentan, requiriendo de acuerdos y consensos políticos y sociales que den soporte a una estructura institucional, y entregue las bases o plataformas a la definición de derechos que se aplican, cómo se garantizan y cómo se viabilizan estos, lo que supone instituciones, normas, programas y recursos, pero también delimitar los roles del estado, del mercado, de las personas y las familias (esping-andersen, 1993). los antecedentes disponibles muestran la presencia en distintos contextos nacionales de tensión (obstáculos, “ruidos”) y desencuentro entre las orientaciones de estrategia valoradas desde la genérica psicología de la intervención social y las orientaciones que siguen las actuaciones profesionales en el marco de los programas de políticas sociales. los cuerpos técnicos y académicos muestran preocupación y reflexión crítica respecto de los énfasis que tendrían las actuaciones que realizan los profesionales, básicamente en relación a los ejes de: intervención curativa-preventiva; intervención asistencial-promocional; intervención 268 building participative, empowering & diverse communities individual-colectiva; intervención participativa-dirigida. en el proceso español el análisis de estos nuevos desempeños ha sido abordado en relación al rol profesional (luque, 1988; rueda, 1991; quintanilla & díaz, 1992; garau & rubio, 1994; garau, 1995). desde donde los estudios en los servicios sociales españoles, hacia fines de los años 80, han puesto de manifiesto la ausencia de una clarificación conceptual y operativa de las funciones y desempeños de rol del profesional psicólogo que hace parte de los equipo de trabajo (navarro, peiro & luque, 1989). de tal forma, que en el marco interdisciplinario que supone un programa de esta naturaleza, no se logra complementariedad de tareas, si no más bien, cierta confusión conceptual y solapamiento en los desempeños de rol de los profesionales que intervienen (navarro, peiro & luque, 1989). de igual forma, a mediado de los años noventa, como señalan garau y rubio (1994), seguiría existiendo desconocimiento sobre las tareas, actividades y funciones que puede desempeñar el psicólogo en la intervención social, tanto de parte de las instituciones relacionadas, como de los equipos profesionales que trabajan en los servicios sociales, lo que tendría importantes efectos sobre la valoración de la imagen profesional del psicólogo, y sobre el perfil de demandas y de posibilidades de desempeño que éste encuentra en esos contextos. como señalan lópez-cabanas, barriga, camarero, casas, chacon, gallegos, et al. (1993) en un texto fruto del trabajo del comité técnico el área de psicología y servicios sociales del ii congreso del colegio de psicólogos español (por tanto de gran representatividad en cuanto recoge la contribución de un panel de especialistas de gran amplitud), se produciría una gran dificultad para la plena incorporación del psicólogo en estos nuevos escenarios debido a la escasa clarificación conceptual y metodológica de las funciones que el psicólogo debe asumir y que interactúa con una falta de definición de los objetivos de trabajo de los servicios sociales. se señala en este informe que uno de los obstáculos que enfrenta la inserción de los psicólogos en los nuevos sistemas sería el predominio del trabajo sobre el caso individual desde una estrategia en donde el énfasis está puesto, como señala el texto, en “un funcionamiento tradicional basado en la intervención clínica y un modelo asistencial pasivo”, alejado de un encuadre metodológico de cambio social y de la participación comunitaria. esto tendría importante repercusión para los programas de acción social y la incorporación de psicólogos a este ámbito, según observa huerta y porta (1992), en cuanto se generarían formas restringidas y asistenciales de entender las necesidades que motivan la acción de los servicios, entendidas estas básicamente como privación o escasez de medios, convirtiéndolas en necesidades de diferentes tipos de prestaciones, ayudas y subvenciones, alejándose de esta manera de una comprensión de las necesidades como partes o sólo componentes de una compleja malla de relaciones entre la persona y su entorno –orientación ecológica-, las cuales deben ser intervenidas de manera preventiva dando mayores competencias al sujeto, considerándolo como ente activo, superando de esta manera el énfasis en la carencia y aportando habilidades y estrategias a las personas o grupos para que sean capaces de responder a las exigencias que les plantea su entorno. en ese sentido también señalan musitu y castillo (1992) es que las políticas debieran orientarse hacia la provisión de servicios básicos sólo en un primer momento, paliando las carencias más agobiantes y básicas, para luego avanzar hacia procesos de mejora de calidad de vida de forma más integral, considerando el conjunto de dimensiones, económicas, materiales 269 building participative, empowering & diverse communities y socio afectivas relacionadas con ello, de manera de no circunscribirse, tal cual ocurre, a la provisión de servicios y acceso a los recursos, olvidando la acción destinada a producir cambio en dimensiones sociales y relacionales, en procesos de potenciación de capacidades y desarrollo humano desde aproximaciones participativas. esta misma observación la hace huerta (1993) quien señala que para hacer efectivo el desarrollo de sistemas de atención desde los servicios sociales generales, que superen los modelos benéficos asistenciales, tal cual está en la base de su constitución y estrategia, se requiere un giro y una flexibilización en la estructura de estos servicios y también de los profesionales, que modifique una actitud de espera frente a la peticiones o demandas que les formulan los usuarios, orientando el enfoque hacia un trabajo con los recursos de la comunidad y con las potencialidades de las personas, evitando de esta manera reducir los servicios sociales a un sistema de prestaciones orientado sólo a compensar estados de necesidad. de manera que, según plantea este autor, en ese período, 1993, sigue vigente la necesidad de orientar los sistemas de atención hacia una estrategia que: 1) permita una atención integral basada en el refuerzo de la autodeterminación y potenciación de los propios recursos y los del entorno familiar y comunitario; 2) que permita la implicación de la participación de la población en el conocimiento y resolución de sus problemas; 3) que requiere generar sistemas de coordinación de los servicios y recursos de un área determinada, de manera que permitan asegurar bienestar social y que sean alternativa a la institucionalización de la atención y elemento de integración comunitaria. por su parte valera (1996) señala que las orientaciones de políticas sociales son demandadas por una imperiosa necesidad de resolver situaciones de precariedad y conflicto, lo cual lleva a valorar como estrategia adecuada la atención hacia aspectos negativos, más que hacia la optimización de los positivos, restringiendo y limitando las potencialidades y posibilidades de uso efectivo y operacional de nociones como la de calidad de vida. la incorporación del discurso de la calidad de vida, según señala casas (2006), permitiría: 1) la incorporación de una perspectiva claramente positiva en un campo profesional lleno de nociones negativas referidas a los problemas y carencias; 2) permitiría mejorar los grados de clarificación de las posibles y necesarias aportaciones de los profesionales psicólogos, en cuanto esta noción tiene un claro raigambre psicosocial; 3) permitiría sacar a los profesionales desde nociones pesimistas que pueden ser transmitidas a los destinatarios de las acciones, evitando con ello el riesgo de que estos organicen defensas ante los profesionales; 4) permite la articulación y vinculación de los aspectos psicológicos y sociales que integran las dimensiones psicosociales en el bienestar psicológico; y 5) en cuanto se sitúa claramente en el campo de la promoción y la prevención en su sentido más amplio, permitiría también un abordaje de los fenómenos desde una perspectiva comunitaria y desde un encuadre interdisciplinario. así, en términos de síntesis, como plantea sánchez (2007), se puede señalar que el proceso de institucionalización de las prácticas de intervención psicosocial y comunitarias en contextos de políticas sociales, ha generado dificultades en la necesaria compatibilidad que debe haber entre las lógicas interventivas implicadas, sin que se olviden las bases éticas y políticas ineludibles al ejercicio colectivo de una praxis con poder de influir a la gente y transformar ciertas dinámicas y realidades sociales. ello hace necesario, según señala sánchez (2007), el desarrollo de una teoría de la acción social que incorpore las dimensiones o lógicas propias del trabajo comunitario, que 270 building participative, empowering & diverse communities ponga énfasis por tanto en los procesos locales y considere una estrategia de trabajo que parta “desde abajo”, junto con –y no sustituyendo alas dimensiones técnicas y estratégicas centrales en la acción interventiva. una puntualización que no podemos dejar de hacer es que las observaciones respecto del proceso español de inserción de psicólogos en servicios sociales, que esta revisión considera y a los cuales le ha sido posible acceder, han sido formuladas hace ya más de una década, sobre todo aquellas que consideran evidencias empíricas, dejando dudas sobre la situación actual, ya pasada la mitad de los años 2000, y además ésta está referida básicamente a los servicios generales, y no contempla, explícitamente al menos, a los servicios especializados. a modo de complementar esta revisión centrada en españa es relevante tener en cuenta lo producido respecto de esto en otras realidades nacionales. según señala prilleltensky (2006), mirando la situación de las prácticas interventivas en estados unidos desde la psicología comunitaria, que en la actualidad, especialmente desde los años noventa en adelante, se habría generado una tensión a raíz del apoyo que entrega el estado a las líneas de intervención centradas en la promoción de la salud, física y mental, básicamente a través del desarrollo de destrezas individuales, desde métodos no participativos, de carácter asistencial con centro en el daño y que no se basan en análisis ecológicos que conecta los problemas y sus intervenciones con los orígenes de estos en las condiciones sociales. generándose así distanciamiento respecto de valores como empoderamiento, participación, auto-determinación, colaboración, inclusividad, y apoyo social que consideran simultáneamente el cambio en los niveles del bienestar personal, interpersonal, grupal, organizativo, comunitario y social. el debate que en america latina se da respecto de la relación entre la intervención social desde la psicología (específicamente desde la psicología comunitaria) y políticas sociales nos señala, por una parte, que las políticas sociales en la medida que crecientemente han ido valorando dimensiones relativas a la subjetividad (tales como capital humano, capital social, empoderamiento, relaciones interpersonales y sociales) para entender problemas sociales como son la pobreza, la infancia en riesgo, los problemas de juventud, entre otros, ha permitido, sobre todo desde los años noventa en adelante, el desarrollo y fortalecimiento de una rama profesional de la psicología comunitaria, en la medida que estas nuevas políticas han permitido ampliar los espacios laborales y las demandas técnicas hechas a los profesionales de la psicología (zambrano & alfaro, 2006; giménez, 2006). así también los trabajos latinoamericanos generados desde venezuela (montero, 2006), brasil (scaparo & guareschi, 2007), uruguay (correa, 2006) y chile (alfaro, zambrano, sandoval & pérez-luco, 2007) nos muestran que el ámbito al que mayor importancia asignan tanto técnicos como académicos y en donde más atención se pone, tiene que ver con los aportes potenciales que tendría la psicología comunitaria en el desarrollo de programas sociales con énfasis en procesos de participación de los actores afectados y vinculados, así como también énfasis en estrategias centradas en procesos colectivos y de nivel comunitario. así, un tema que transversalmente se aborda es la crítica de aquellos programas que tienden a desarrollarse en los marcos de políticas sociales, centrados predominantemente en dinámicas de nivel individual, familiar y en menor medida, en algunos casos, en procesos grupales, postergando o no resaltando el foco de intervención en dinámicas colectivas y desde estrategias participativas. 271 building participative, empowering & diverse communities pregunta de investigación desde los antecedentes expuestos se fundamenta como problema de estudio el describir el campo técnico potencial que tiene el quehacer de los psicólogos comunitarios en los sistemas de políticas sociales, definiendo específicamente como pregunta de investigación: ¿cuál es la presencia y potencial aporte de las estrategias de intervención comunitaria que hacen parte de la psicología comunitaria y cuáles son los factores condicionantes que permiten comprender su estructuración en el contexto de tres servicios sociales generales españoles? objetivos objetivo general: describir la presencia y potencial aporte de las estrategias de intervención comunitaria que hacen parte de la psicología comunitaria y los factores condicionantes que permiten comprender su estructuración en el contexto de tres servicios sociales generales españoles. objetivos específicos: 1) describir el aporte potencial de las estrategias de intervención comunitaria en las orientaciones técnicas que presentan las prácticas de intervención social que realizan los profesionales psicólogos en el marco de tres servicios sociales generales pertenecientes a tres distintas comunidades autónomas españolas. 2) describir los factores condicionantes que afectan el uso de estrategias de intervención comunitaria en los contextos situacionales de tres servicios sociales generales españoles. metodología el enfoque metodológico es la grounded theory (strauss y corbin, 2002). entendiendo por ello un encuadre sistemático de base epistemológica post positivista, de carácter inductivo y recursivo que guía la exploración, codificación, síntesis, análisis y conceptualización de datos cualitativos, orientado al desarrollo teorías y modelos que permitan la comprensión y explicación objetiva, fiable y contextualizada de los fenómenos de investigación (lópez & scandroglio. 2007). el diseño metodológico es del tipo cualitativo ideográfico, y específicamente estudio de casos múltiples multidimensional (stake, 2000; coller, 2000; sandoval, 2002). la definición del caso siguiendo la clasificación propuesta por coller (2000), es de tipo genérico – típico, del de tipo casos múltiples – similares, en cuanto al número de casos. la estrategia muestral siguió el procedimiento de muestreo teóricamente guiado (strauss & corbin, 2002), siendo la muestra de arranque 3 servicios sociales generales de tres autonomías diferentes (cataluña; comunidad valenciana; andalucía) según criterio de variabilidad. los sujetos de la muestra en cada uno de los casos fueron: psicólogos (as) de ssg; miembro del equipo profesional (trabajador(a) social y educador(a) social); encargado (a) programa; responsables a nivel de ayuntamiento. responsables nivel intermedio. para la recogida de datos se utilizará la técnica entrevista en profundidad no estructurada (riba, 2007). el instrumento de producción de datos fue un guión temático, referido a cada uno de los aspectos centrales que definen la pregunta de investigación y los objetivos, que siguiendo las orientaciones descritas por el modelo de la grounded theory que se fue precisando y focalizando gradualmente en las fases consecutivas de análisis y producción. 272 building participative, empowering & diverse communities el modelo y plan de análisis siguió el procedimiento de método comparativo constante propuesto por la grounded theory que integra a su vez los procedimientos específicos de: 1) niveles de codificación (codificación abierta, codificación axial, codificación selectiva); 2) paradigma de codificación; 3) muestreo teórico. se utiliza este procedimiento analítico como método adecuado de análisis para ser utilizado en los estudios de caso, según indica coller (2000). finalmente, para la implementación del análisis y de sus distintas fases de codificación se utilizará el software de análisis cualitativo atlas ti., en su versión 5.0 criterios de calidad del conocimiento generado: para efectos de asegurar la calidad del conocimiento generado desde este estudio, y específicamente para aumentar los grados de validez, se siguió el procedimiento de triangulación (flick, 2004; sandoval, 2002), específicamente triangulación de fuente. de igual forma, para efectos de asegurar niveles adecuados de confiabilidad, se siguió el procedimiento de validación comunicativa y de auditorías, distinguidos por flick (2004). por último, se tuvieron en consideración permanente resguardos éticos (sánchez, 1999), en la forma de consentimiento informado. resultados preliminares en los servicios sociales generales observados la intervención comunitaria está presente como estrategia de trabajo, aunque de manera acotada. el trabajo de nivel comunitario, entendido como intervención en colectivos, está presente en la estrategia utilizada en los servicios sociales generales observados. en estos casos el énfasis está puesto en la valoración e intervención en relaciones y procesos comunitarios (la comunidad como objeto de intervención), no considerando necesariamente proceso de participación comunitaria. durante el proceso de desarrollo del sistema de servicios sociales en los tres casos, el nivel y la estrategia de intervención comunitario ha tenido fases o períodos en que ha ocupado mayor relevancia. reportándose períodos en que esta estrategia ha sido predominante. en la actualidad, el nivel de intervención predominante es el individual, habiendo realidades locales y autonómicas (regionales) en donde el nivel individual se combina, con énfasis distintos, con el nivel grupal y con el nivel comunitario. en una de las realidades regionales (casos) observadas se están iniciando una nueva línea de servicios sociales especializados en intervención en desarrollo comunitario. siempre se observa que lo comunitario tiene más presencia a nivel de la declaración de principios y orientaciones, que a nivel de las prácticas de implementación concreta y operacional. la interfase relacionada o asociada a la presencia o no de la estrategia comunitaria en los servicios sociales tendría importancia los esquemas referenciales que poseen los equipos técnicos de nivel intermedio y/o de nivel local. la presencia, aumento o reducción de la estrategia comunitaria, no tendría que ver directamente con los marcos normativos legales o de financiamiento de nivel estatal central o de nivel autonómico expresado en el plan concertado de financiación, ni con los contenidos declarados en las correspondientes leyes de servicios sociales que regulan los programas. existiendo un marco de financiamiento común y compartido por las diferentes autonomías (regiones) y leyes autonómicas que de distintas formas consideran en términos generales, niveles 273 building participative, empowering & diverse communities de intervención diferentes que incluyen estrategias comunitarias, las diferentes realidades locales / regionales han implementado estrategias relativamente similares, con énfasis en los modelos comunitarios. se observa que las opciones técnicas y políticas que hacen los agentes / actores institucionales, a nivel de ayuntamiento o de autonomía, operarían como un factor importante que condiciona la presencia o no de este nivel de intervención o de esta estrategia. también se observa como un factor relevante en la presencia de estrategias comunitarias las opciones técnicas, de trayectoria formativa y de alianzas que tenga y haga el profesional psicólogo. en esto último, las referencias, orientaciones y apoyos que presten las asociaciones gremiales, así como los referentes académicos y universitarios, parecieran ser un factor que influye en que el psicólogo busque y se esfuerce en implementar estrategias comunitarias y que éstas sean reconocidas institucionalmente. la contribución de la psicología comunitaria y de las estrategias comunitarias, en general, tiene un espacio potencial en relación con el énfasis que ponen los servicios en una estrategia de desarrollo de potencialidades, de fomento de autonomía, y de evitación de relaciones asistenciales. desde la observación de las prácticas, pareciera que en materia de la estrategia y en particular en relación a la superación del asistencialismo y el desarrollo de autonomía, los servicios sociales tienen un propósito permanente y que supone constante preocupación institucional y técnica. la psicología comunitaria tendría un valioso aporte que entregar en esta materia a partir de sus desarrollos en empoderamiento (personal, grupal y comunitario) así como también en su larga experiencia y acumulado en materia de desarrollo / activación de capacidades propias, el desarrollo de sentido de comunidad. respecto de estos marcos técnicos es posible visualizar un área de gran relevancia en el aporte potencial que podría realizar la psicología comunitaria a las estrategias de trabajo desarrolladas desde los servicios sociales estudiados y en particular respecto el abordaje eficaz y eficiente de los fenómenos/problemas sociales. no se observa un puente vigente y fluido de relación entre psicología comunitaria y las orientaciones técnicas de los servicios. los desarrollos en psicología comunitaria parecieran no tener presencia en los debates y análisis de las estrategias de trabajo en servicios sociales. la relación entre servicios sociales generales (atención primaria) y psicología va más allá de sólo la psicología comunitaria y se extiende a otras áreas de especialidad profesional de la psicología relativas a la gestión de programas. el campo técnico ocupado por los psicólogos(as) en los servicios sociales generales observados se relaciona con diversas áreas de competencias y de especialidad profesional de la psicología, tales como gestión de programas, evaluación de necesidades y de programas, intervención grupal, intervención en redes, entre otras. el quehacer de los psicólogos (as) se relaciona muy estrechamente con campos como los de la psicología de la intervención social en general, la intervención grupal, la psicología de la interculturalidad, la salud mental, además de la psicología de la salud, la psicología jurídica, e incluso la psicología clínica, entre otras. 274 building participative, empowering & diverse communities la figura del psicólogo se vincula no sólo a la de interventor, si no que contiene como un ámbito de competencia muy importante tareas de asesoría en procesos de intervención social en general, en donde la evaluación/diseño de intervenciones y el análisis de relaciones/interacciones entre interventor/intervenido ocupan un lugar central. la contribución que hacen los psicólogos a la intervención social en servicios sociales, tiene una base, se sostiene y se ha visto incrementada en buena medida, en el aporte que ellos hacen a la gestión y asesoría a los procesos de intervención (análisis e intervención en el sistema interviniente), y al diseño y evaluación de acciones. la intervención en los servicios sociales es transversalmente interdisciplinaria, en cada uno de los niveles en que se implementa, siendo el equipo interprofesional basado en una perspectiva interdisciplinar la principal referencia técnica de las intervenciones. la razón de fondo que justifica y fundamenta la incorporación de los psicólogos (as) a los programas de intervención en problemas sociales tiene que ver con la complejidad y multidimensionalidad que caracteriza a los problemas sociales contemporáneos (algunos de ellos emergentes) y la necesidad de comprenderlos e intervenirlos interdisciplinariamente. de esta manera, en las estrategias de intervención comunitarias son convocados y participan distintas y diferentes especialidades profesionales en general y también distintas ramas de especialidad profesional de la psicología. podemos suponer que la inserción que tienen los psicólogos en general y los psicólogos comunitarios en particular tiene que ver con la valoración y uso que se hace desde los encuadres técnicos de los servicios, de perspectivas de análisis y de intervención interdisciplinarias, valoradas como formas imprescindibles y necesarias para el abordaje de las complejidades propias de las problemáticas sociales contemporáneas que se deben intervenir. ello requiere la definición precisa y sustantiva de la contribución de la psicología comunitaria y la visibilización de los ámbitos, estrategias y nociones en donde se hace más relevante, y en donde el aporte de ésta tiene mayor potencialidad de contribución a las estrategias de las actuales políticas sociales. referencias aguilar, l. f. 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(2006). bienestar y calidad de vida. in m. i. hombrados, m. garcia & t. lópez (eds.) intervención 275 building participative, empowering & diverse communities social y comunitaria (pp. 27-44). málaga: aljibe. casas, f., & beltri, f. (1989). reflexiones sobre el psicólogo y los servicios sociales. papeles del psicólogo, 41 y 42. casas, f. (1996). bienestar social. una introducción psicosociologica. barcelona: ppu. coller, x. (2000). estudio de casos. madrid: cuadernos metodológicos. centro de investigaciones sociológicas. correa, a. (2006). empoderamiento y conquista de ciudadanía. de beneficiarios a sujetos de derecho. la psicología en el campo de las políticas públicas. nuevas voces, nuevos desafíos... montevideouruguay. escuela de psicología. universidad de la republica. esping-andersen, g. (1993). los tres mundos del estado del bienestar. españa: edicions alfons el magnànim. flick, u. (2004). introducción a la investigación cualitativa. madrid: morata. galende, e. 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(1997). intervención psicosocial y servicios sociales: un enfoque participativo. madrid: síntesis. luque, o. (1988). intervención psicosocial en servicios sociales. españa: nau llibres. 276 building participative, empowering & diverse communities meny, j., & thoenig, i. (1992). las políticas públicas. españa: ariel. montero, m. (2006). el enfoque comunitario y las políticas sociales. coloquio: la psicología en el campo de las políticas públicas. nuevas voces, nuevos desafíos... montevideo-uruguay. escuela de psicología. universidad de la republica. musitu, g., & castillo, r. (1992). problemas sociales y política de acción social: algunas contribuciones de la psicología social. intervención psicosocial, 1(1), 7-26. navarro, r., pereiro, j. m., & luque, o. (1989). el rol del psicólogo en los equipos de atención primaria de servicios sociales: las actividades que los conforman. papeles del psicólogo, 41 y 42. prilleltensky, i. 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(2004). psicología social aplicada: teoría, método y práctica. españa: prentice hall. sánchez, a. (2007). la psicología comunitaria chilena en la hora de la institucionalización: eclecticismo teórico, compromiso práctico y cuestiones éticas. in a. zambrano, g. rozas, i. magaña & d. asún (eds.) psicología comunitaria en chile: evolución, perspectivas y proyecciones (pp. 23-54). chile: ril. sánchez, a., & morales, j. (2002). acción psicológica e intervención psicosocial. acción psicológica, 1, 11-24. sandoval, c. (2002). investigación cualitativa. programas de especialización en teoría, método y técnicas de investigación social. colombia: instituto colombiano para el fomento de la investigación social (icfes). scaparo, h., & guareschi, n. (2007). psicologia social comunitária e formação profissional. psicologia & sociedade, 19(2), 100-108. stake, r. (2000). investigación con estudio de casos. madrid: morata. strauss, a., & corbin, j. (2002). bases de la investigación cualitativa. técnicas y procedimientos para desarrollar la teoría fundamentada. colombia: universidad de antioquia. valera, s. (1996). algunas consideraciones acerca del uso de indicadores en relación con los conceptos de calidad de vida y bienestar. intervención psicosocial, 5(13), 31-38. zambrano, a., & alfaro, j. (2006). desarrollo y estado actual de la psicología comunitaria en chile: trayectorias, tensiones y perspectivas. revista de psicología universidad de valparaíso, 3, 11-22. 277 building participative, empowering & diverse communities shifting borders exploring the relationship between women’s mobility and place belonging barbara iuliano federico ii university of naples italy abstract the complex relationship between homeland and host-society reveals new forms of belonging and selfrepresentation, which are related to migrant’s uncertain conditions of existence and multiple interconnections (iuliano, 2007). the present work aims to preliminary explore the dynamics of place attachment and identity redefinition among foreign women in italy. the research has been carried out combining complementary methods: documentary research, observation, in-depth interviews and narrative accounts. the main part of the fieldwork took place in naples, italy by means of in-depth interviews with women from latin america, eastern-europe, balkans and africa. as revealed by content and thematic analysis of the verbatim transcripts, variables such as time of permanence in the site and geo-cultural context of origin, connote in different ways the emerging of a transitional space of belonging and of an ‘in-between identity’ (bhabha, 1994). keywords : gender migration identity place belonging introduction “what is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to […] focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. these ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood singular or communal that initiate new signs of identity”. h.k. bhabha since the first 90s, castles and miller identified the feminisation of international flows as one of the key trends of the new “age of migration”. in this context, women migrate increasingly on their own, and on their own initiative. in line with feminist approach, the gendered space of transnational mobility affects the migrant’s identity within everyday practices and migration becomes a production of a subjective space of power. migration and dislocation have been used, in temporal and spatial narratives of modernity, to naturalise the construction of space-time in terms of dichotomous notions of “host-society” versus “homeland” (moallem, 2000). the ways in which belonging may involve both attachment and movement, as well as the puncturing and the reshaping of boundaries is one of the approaches that we are going to take into account to develop this work. from a theoretical perspective, attachment represents a positive connection or bond between a person and a particular place (giuliani and feldman, 1993; williams and patterson, 1999). 278 building participative, empowering & diverse communities close to this construct, we find the concept of “place-identity”, which refers to the symbolic importance of a place as a repository for emotions and relationships that give meaning and purpose to life (williams and roggenbuck, 1989; giuliani and feldman, 1993). adopting a general and inclusive definition, proshansky et al. describe place-identity as a “pot-pourri of memories, conceptions, interpretations, ideas and related feelings about specific physical settings as well as types of settings” (1983, p. 60). as a distinctive substructure of the self, they argue, place-identity might function to underwrite personal identities, render actions or activities intelligible, express tastes and preferences and mediate efforts to change environments. as such, place identity enhances self-esteem (korpela, 1989) increases feelings of belonging to one’s community (tuan, 1980), and is an important component of communications about environmental values and policies (cantrill, 1998). place-identity is not necessarily a direct result of any particular experience with the place (proshansky et al. 1983), though it generally involves a psychological investment with the place that tends to develop over time (giuliani and feldman, 1993). the importance of belonging to the processes of self-definition has been stressed by researchers working in crosscultural research, confirming korpela’s claim that it is a central feature of place-identity (see e.g. cuba & hummon, 1993 ; tuan, 1980). on this basis (within the wider context of my phd research project), i’ve explored the different dimensions which could influence migrants’ rootedness into destination countries. aim this paper attempts to preliminarily explore the dynamics of place attachment and identity redefinition among foreign skilled women in italy through a narrative approach. it pays particular attention to skilled women, who are usually marginalised in migration research, but who are central actors in the ongoing migrations to mediterranean countries1. participants 12 skilled female migrants, between 25 and 40, coming from latin america, africa, eastern europe, balkans engaged in social development projects and linguistic mediation. in order to guarantee that they have had time to build some form of attachment, migrants with more than 2 years residing in the host site have been preferably interviewed. participants have been recruited through their own institutions (associations, social cooperatives, governmental services). a snowball approach has been used to meet other migrants such as professionals and social entrepreneurs. 1 see kofman, e “the invisibility of female skilled migrants and gender relations in studies of skilled migration in europe” international journal of population geography 2000, 6(1)45-59. “the choice of research agendas has played a major part in rendering women invisible. the emphasis has generally been on transnational corporations, which, especially in their higher ranks, remain resolutely male-dominated. the presence of migrants in welfare sectors (i.e. education, health and social services), which are strongly feminised, has been ignored. feminist research has also tended to obscure the role of skilled migrants in its emphasis on the unskilled. theoretical and methodological developments in studies of migration have also made few inroads into our understanding of skilled migration”. 279 building participative, empowering & diverse communities tab.1 – participants approach and methodology the research has been carried out developing a qualitative approach that combines different as well as complementary methods (triangulation): documentary research, observation, in-depth interviews and narrative accounts of migrants. the fieldwork took place in naples, italy. the data collected through documentary research and interviews have been complemented by an ethnographic study realized by means of observation, that took place in migrants’ workplace. qualitative data collected through generative questions helped to elicit personal narratives of migration and rootedness from each participant. data gathered from the interviews have been analyzed using thematic narrative analysis. the interviews have been transcribed and coded, line by line, under the major themes. a content analysis has been realized extracting 5 key dimensions related to the themes. the information and findings obtained with the above methods has been constantly tested against each other in order to ensure more reliable and valid results. narrative accounts in order to clarify the changing contours of the relationships between gender, mobility and shifting identity, the research employed women’s personal narratives. these accounts illuminate the spatial processes of migration as essential for the repositioning of self into networks of family, workplace, local and global relationships. by examining the production of narratives of the self, both some of the processes involved in taking up different subject positions and the impact on the sense of the self became accessible. place and autobiography are effortlessly united through language. a discursive approach, as danziger (1997) has explained, entails a psychology that shifts individual mental processes from inside the head into ̀ the interpersonal space of the conversation’. it thereby reconstitutes place-identity as something that people create together through talk: a social construction that allows them to make sense of their connectivity to place and to guide their actions and projects accordingly. one advantage of this approach is that it recovers the irreducibly social origins of place identification. not only does it acknowledge the relevance of 280 building participative, empowering & diverse communities places to their collective senses of self, but it also highlights the collective practices through which specific place identities are formed, reproduced and modified. language becomes the force that binds people to places (cf. tuan, 1991). it is through language that the everyday experiences of self-in-place form and mutate. in this theoretical framework, in-depth interviews were conducted, through a main ‘generative question’, related to their job. this approach permits to explore their life-histories in a no compelling way and to gain access to the following areas: personal dimension social dimension spatial / temporal dimension with specific regard to migration interconnectedness of the dimensions data analysis in order to carry out a content and thematic analysis, the set of texts has been explored with the atlas.ti software, a linguistic and statistical instrument for text analysis. this software provides different kinds of tools for the analysis of narratives: develops hypertext to perform complex model building; manages data; combines narratives and observations into a hermeneutic unit; explicates conceptual constructs from linked relationships, facilitate the development of conceptual frameworks. preliminary results narrative themes the texts analysis has defined tree main narrative themes related to migration topic: a) the future is here “i bought a car, i have a good contract …, i’m going to apply for citizenship. (int. b) b) the return myth “ i spend a lot of time thinking in coming back … (int. a) “ i hope to come back, meanwhile, i work in italy (int. f) c) between two sides “ i’m always happy to come back home. sometimes i ask myself: why have i decided to migrate? but when i’m there, in my birth country, after few days, i feel me uncomfortable. my life is here, now (int. c). the main part of the foregoing extracts might be seen as reflecting a dis-location of identity brought about by a relocation. from this perspective, the sense of loss that they express is not only a loss of place but also, more profoundly, a loss of self. for as krupat (1983) insists : “the concept of place-identity makes explicit the key role that a person’s relationship to the environment plays not simply in terms of a context for action or in facilitating certain forms of behaviour, but in becoming ``part of the person’’, of being incorporated into one’s concept of self “ (p. 343). a wide literature describes the first two narrative subjects, while the third lacks in a psychological theoretical synthesis. according to clifford anthropological approach to contemporary culture, we are specifically interested in the emerging of the third narrative theme, 281 building participative, empowering & diverse communities which is strictly connected (in the accounts) with the self: migration and relocation can generate the perception of an “in between” space of presence (bhabha, 1994). “when i’m there, i’d like to come back. and vice versa […] my heart always lays on the wrong side of the border” (int. m) key dimensions identified the content analysis of the verbatim transcripts reveals the emerging of 5 key dimensions that imply at different level the type of place attachment: 1) geo-cultural context of origin; 2) time of permanence; 3) social/familiar network; 4) second generation; 5) gender dimension . with regard to the gender dimension, the most interesting findings are related to the role played by women both into the original and the new context. in short, we identify a potential range between gender emancipation and regression. as detailed in tab. 2, an emancipator role played by women in the destination country determines a sense of self-efficacy. “ a new life gave me the opportunity to start a lot of positive changes” (int. g) “... after my arrival in italy, i’ve experienced some troubles with my husband. as a consequence, we have been separated since 2001. i’ve found the courage to revolt at him, because in my culture it is very hard to leave the husband. i gave valour to my clients, finding it in myself. we have done so much, with all the courage of the life” (int. b) self-efficacy is correlated with a better integration. “ i think to grow professionally, not just like mediator, but also like professional trainer. to improve my skills, to learn more. here, in my new city” (int. d) “in my country i had a well defined job, because i was mechanical engineer. completely different from my ongoing work! i came in italy following my husband” (int. a) both integration and self-efficacy promote the emerging of a place attachment. tab. 2 282 building participative, empowering & diverse communities open answers according with per gustafson (2001), we don’t consider place attachment and mobility as opposite and mutually exclusive phenomena. the preliminary findings from this qualitative study suggest that women may regard place attachment and mobility, and the reflections between them on the self, in several different ways. this approach tries to highlight a dimension of selfdefinition often neglected by social psychologists, the dimension of location. it also implies a gendered vision of place attachment. the restrictions of a situated and ecological approach to research, do not permit to generalize the first outcomes, specifically related to the “in-between identity”. this concept displaces the researchers’ attention from a static vision of the location of the self (in terms of homeland vs destination place) to a dynamic interaction between the subject and his/her environment. in order to develop a productive implication for the practice, we still need to answer to a number of open questions, first of all, related to: differences between female and male in place belonging; cultural variables (e.g. ethnicity, religion); trans-national families and place attachment; belonging and ultra traditional gender roles. basic references anthias f. 2000, metaphors of home: gendering new migrations to southern europe in anthias f. and lazaridis g. eds., gender and migration in southern europe: women on the move, pp. 15-47. new york, berg, oxford boyd m. and grieco e. 2003, women and migration: incorporating gender into international migration theory http://www.migrationinformation.org/feature/print.cfm?id=106 bhabha h.k. 1994, the location of culture. london-new york, routledge bonnes m., & secchiaroli g. 1995, environmental psychology : a psychosocial introduction. london, sage bruner j. 1986, actual minds, possible words. cambridge, harvard university press giuliani m.v. and r. feldman. 1993. place attachment in a developmental and cultural context. journal of environmental psychology n. 13, pp. 267–274 gustafson p. 2001, roots and routes: exploring the relationship between place attachment and mobility. environment and behavior 33: 667-686 iuliano b. 2006, abitare i confini in “borderlanders. un approccio narrativo a prostituzione migrante e tratta”. phd dissertation (unpublished), pp 4-7 iuliano b. 2007, il corpo delle altre. vittime di tratta, sex workers, prostitute migranti in la camera blu rivista di studi di genere n. 2 (pp. 89-96). napoli, filema kaplan, c. 1996, questions of travel. postmodern discourses of displacements. durham and london, duke university press kofman, e. and parvati r. 2006, gender and global labour migrations: incorporating skilled workers. http://www.migrationinformation.org/feature/print.cfm?id=106 283 building participative, empowering & diverse communities antipode, 38, n. 2, 282-303 korpela k. m. 1989, place-identity as a product of environmental self-regulation. journal of environmental psychology, 9, 241-256. moallem m. 2000, genealogies of belonging in the diaspora space, paper presented at the ensc nanistova e. 1998. the dimensions of the attachment to birthplace and their verification after the 40 years following forced relocation. sociologica n. 30 pp. 337–394 proshansky h. m. 1976, comment on social and environmental psychology. personality and social psychology bulletin, 2, 359-363 proshansky h., fabian a. k.,& kaminoff r. 1983, place-identity : physical world socialization of the self. journal of environmental psychology, 3, 57-83 rose g. 1996, place and identity : a sense of place. in d. massey & p. jess (eds.), a place in the world ? (pp. 87-132). oxford, oxford university press sayad, a. 2002 trad. it la doppia assenza, raffaello cortina editore, milano tuan y.f. 1977, space and place: the perspective of experience. univ. of minnesota press, minneapolis tuan y.f. 1980, rootedness versus sense of place. landscape n. 241, 3–8 284 building participative, empowering & diverse communities adaptive and engaging leadership with purpose in a shifting world james r. calvin, ph.d. associate professor of management department of management carey business school the johns hopkins university abstract the uncertainty of changing times will lead to new global realities for all communities during the present era and globalization journey that will continue as will the shifting and changing of national leaders, human crises, the ups and downs of commerce and innovation, and community and public desires for solutions and outcomes that are both found and missed as time comes and time moves on forward. in this vein, there is the daily reality of survival in many communities while considering how and why and when to engage the state of what already is and the factors to consider for what is possible to happen locally, regionally and because of the rapid and far reaching influence of world events that will undoubtedly present challenges from which there will also rise opportunity as evidenced by informal and formal gatherings such as the world economic forum, united nations activities, european union activities and other forums in future years to come. as such, the current time provides context and background for several coexisting trends that are impacting everybody living on the planet directly through the advent of raging human crises, sovereign wealth funds now pouring into the united states to offer financial stability to linked world markets that are being shaken by collateralized debt obligations (cdo’s) that are fueling a global credit and financial crisis. at the same time there is the continued rise money remittances, a further expansion of hip-hop as culture exchange and business that began in the united states continues to go global into many lands and across many cultures from new york, atlanta and los angeles to buenos aires, mumbai, shanghai, moscow and paris. moreover, the trend to transportable knowledge and skills continues to heighten as education and knowledge parity between east and west is becoming more common and practical. still, there are serious conflicts with some conflict situations being cataclysmic in scope in a growing number of places and regions in the world in africa, the middle east, eastern europe and other places as countries, racial, ethnic and cultural groups are engaged in deadly conflict. moreover, the interrelated questions of adaptive leadership in finding and pursuing purpose in communities that are newly adapting to arising life circumstances and situations spanning business, economic and social infrastructures and networks to manage into the future given the aforementioned situations and others still to arise. thus, the expressed voices of amartya sen in rationality and freedom (2002) percy miller also known as master p in guaranteed success, 2007, alan greenspan in the age of turbulence (2007), ronald heifetz & marty linsky in leadership on the line (2002), niall ferguson in the war of the world (twentieth century conflict and the descent of the west, 2006), frances hesselbein & marshall goldsmith in the leader of the future (visions, strategies, and practices for the new era, 2006) among others have been brought together as foundation building elements and thought resources for this view that seeks to encourage future thinking and the engaging of multiple options for multi-cultural human groups and societies that can grasp 285 building participative, empowering & diverse communities and apply adaptive, cultural and leader and follower ideation for shaping individual and group engagement perspectives toward community level pursuits and future attainment in the years to come. in doing so this author will further draw on the hong kong declaration, the yaounde declaration and the budapest declaration from iacd to provide further illumination on the overarching question and utility of identifying, growing and supporting adaptive and engaging leadership with a purpose during shifting times. in brief, the introduction, advancement, and seeing future community through new eyes is to spur leadership involvement and growth in order to collaborate is fundamental to discovering and seeing inventive ways to work with others as the pace of human systems and natural systems adaptation, conflict, and change continues to intensify, is driven by increasing global competitiveness and the complexities of managing the complexities of life by being able to distinguish and meet technical challenges and adaptive challenges. secondly, there is the possibility of erecting scaffolding and the building of new frameworks to begin to gauge the impact and potential of extrinsic factors and intrinsic factors when managing change in a shifting natural environment, overcoming being risk adverse, taking active positions on change, understanding the importance of different mindsets, acting on the criticality of awareness of self and environment, and recognizing that learning is an essential tool and technique for developing a personal adaptive leadership strategy and practice through which others can be engaged in renewable strategies, approaches and ways involving family and community as a system, and diverse business and organization environments around the globe. again, the challenges and opportunity for promoting new future-oriented adaptive and engagement behaviors as sustainable practice at the community level and extending and connecting to other levels and in the places where community desires, interest and goals overlap and interconnect is arriving constantly in the view of this author through the coming together of voices that choose to share and communicate practical and useful globally adaptive engagement processes and tools as resources for advancing, recognizing, replenishing and sustaining individual and collective future efforts to come. this leadership and community development researcher and practitioner will discuss first hand ideas, exchange and share approaches, and suggest trends and practices that are emerging in africa, europe, asia, canada and the united states through the work of the international association of community development (iacd), the world bank, the united nations and other groups, associations and bodies doing work and supporting essential adaptive leadership and transformative work in communities. 286 building participative, empowering & diverse communities games for participation and conscientisation carolyn kagan and karen duggan research institute for health and social change manchester metropolitan university hathersage road, manchester, uk c.kagan@mmu.ac.uk abstract information sharing and group processes are dominated by words spoken and written words. this session will explore how different kinds of games can be used to stimulate ideas, encourage participation and discussion and lead to awareness. we will offer session participants the opportunity to take part in 2 games and share experiences about their strengths and weaknesses for community engagement and conscientisation. each game has been developed by the community psychology team at manchester metropolitan university from collaborative projects on community cohesion and health inequalities. the games can be played by 4-10 players. they are not simulations and will not require role playing, although they will be fun and participative! key words: urban regeneration; community cohesion; participatory games; conscientisation introduction the interest in university-community engagement is growing worldwide (gaffakin and morrisey, 2008; watson, 2007). the higher education funding council for england (hefce) funded a four-university collaborative project exploring community engagement by universities in the context of urban regeneration and across four themes: community cohesion, crime, health and wellbeing, and enterprise. each university was responsible for one theme and supported projects which: • combined academics from two or more of the universities; • were developed with a community partner; • driven by the needs of the community partner; • were interdisciplinary; • had clear outputs and provided value for money. we, at manchester metropolitan university, were responsible for projects supported under the community cohesion theme. within this theme, there was a focus on projects reflecting community psychology, sport and physical activity and urban education. in total 17 projects received funding and these included development, training and research projects (kagan 2008), working with residents associations, community groups, development trusts, schools, voluntary associations and cooperatives. what is community cohesion? community cohesion is a policy platform which originated in civic disturbances in northern 287 building participative, empowering & diverse communities towns in england in 2001(home office, 2005). these disturbances were largely between different ethnic groups with low life opportunities. the delivery plan of the overall project suggested a role for universities in developing community cohesion (urmad, 2006:8): partnership working between the he sector and their public and voluntary sector partners will encourage a sense of identity and belonging through participation in education, work and social activities, and through mutual understanding of cultural difference. our understanding of community cohesion is somewhat broader (duggan and kagan, 2007). we go along with the definition of a cohesive community as one,that is in a state of wellbeing, harmony and stability. (idea 2006, www.idea-knowledge.gov.uk ) the local government association (lga, 2004:7) considered, in its guidance to local authorities for how to support the development of cohesive communities, the following characteristics of a cohesive community: a cohesive community is one where: • there is a common vision and a sense of belonging for all communities; • the diversity of people’s different backgrounds and circumstances is appreciated and positively valued; • those from different backgrounds have similar life opportunities; and • strong and positive relationships are being developed between people from different backgrounds and circumstances in the workplace, in schools and within neighbourhoods they go on to describe what is involved in creating community cohesion: promoting community cohesion involves addressing fractures, removing barriers and encouraging positive interaction between groups. community cohesion is closely linked to integration as it aims to build communities where people feel confident that they belong and are comfortable mixing and interacting with others, particularly people from different racial backgrounds or people of a different faith. diversity is, then at the heart of community cohesion, and schisms can occur in and between any areas of diversity, fracturing cohesion. the audit commission (2006) identified 10 areas of diversity in communities, of relevance to community cohesion. these include: • age equality: older people • age equality: young people • community engagement • customer focus • disability • gender • human rights • race • religion • sexual orientation all of the projects worked in conjunction with community groups and they also explored 288 building participative, empowering & diverse communities different ways of engaging communities. the methods used ranged from ethnographic research with migrant groups; the use of creative methods such as film and magazine making; website development; narrative workshops; film and other creative methods; training workshop; more conventional qualitative research methods (such as interviewing – including the training of community researchers in interviewing so they collected and analysed their own data); video diaries; and world cafe discussion events. as community psychology was one of the themes of the overall project, we, as project managers, took a community psychological perspective on the dynamics of project development and implementation (duggan and kagan, (2007). one of the things that emerged at a meta level from all the projects was the need for awareness raising – of professionals, students, community residents – about the antecedents and consequences of fractures in community cohesion as well as quality of life and wellbeing in areas of urban regeneration. the furtherance of critical consciousness, or ‘conscientisation’ ( see freire and faundez, 1989) is one of the central strategies of community psychological interventions at mmu (kagan and burton, 2001). as they say (p. 11): community psychologists can work to develop dialogic relationships, which enable group conscientization and possibilities for change. they must be prepared to share their ‘expert’ voice and remain open to learning. through dialogic practice, the learner assumes the role of knowing subject in dialogue with the educator, so reality is demythologised: those who have been submerged in oppressive social relations begin to understand these relations and the ideology that hides them (burton and kagan, 2001). how best to achieve critical consciousness is one of the dilemmas facing community psychologists and a number of strategies have been advanced, including those based on creativity and games of different sorts. games as a process for the development of critical consciousness. simulations and games have been used in training and development activities in a number of different arenas, including the development of interpersonal skills, youth work and community development, policy development. they are an important means of not only raising self and group awareness but also of developing skills and vary in terms of their duration and active involvement (see saunders and severn, 1999). large scale simulations employ role play and scenario building to enable participants to become involved and learn through doing and experiencing. similarly, experiential learning techniques encourage, through different means, the integration of experience with learning. board games and small group games do not involve role play and are not meant to mimic the real world. they do, instead, use culturally familiar formats to pose questions and identify issues of importance as well as encourage discussion and the identification of strategies for change. eisenack (2006) identifies a number of factors contributing to the effectiveness of board games that are well facilitated, including enhanced motivation, increased interest,, opening up dynamic participation, lessening resistance to accepting novel ideas and supporting group discussion. although there is less evidence for this, he also suggests they can be useful for enhancing declarative knowledge, and are particularly useful for 289 building participative, empowering & diverse communities interdisciplinary learning. we were interested in seeing if we could develop some board games to encourage reflection, discussion, knowledge and emotional learning about issues to do with urban regeneration, community cohesion and inequality of opportunity – themes arising from the community engagement projects. we were also interested in testing out the extent to which these board games might have relevance beyond england, where they originated, and if it were possible to devise games of international relevance. the games we facilitated an innovation session wherein each participant could experience two different games. three games were used in total. building social capital, community cohesion and health this game follows a route around a board familiar to players of monopoly. however property is not traded: social capital credits are. all participants in the workshop played this game. the game aimed to address knowledge and understanding, values, insight into stakeholder perspectives and conflicts and contradictions in social policies. community psychological solutions to problems this game was based on simple matching card games, wherein players identified community psychological solutions to real life dilemmas and discussed their relevance. half the participants played this game. the game aimed to address knowledge and understanding, values, insight into stakeholder perspectives, and problem solving. moving towards cohesive communities this game was also a card game wherein explanations for the events presented in different real life scenarios were scored for their appropriateness, following group discussion. half the participants played this game. the game aimed to address knowledge and understanding, attitudes and values, and problem solving. each game gave opportunities for discussion and manipulated ‘scoring’ and winning’ in order to highlight the ease with which progressive stances can be distorted. each game was accompanied by a set of ‘rules’ and discussion points addressing commun9ity psychological themes, although the workshop was not long enough for these to be fully explored. feedback from workshop participants participants came from a number of different countries, covering each continent. they were invited to complete written feedback and to give the facilitators verbal feedback as well. overall, participants enjoyed the session, which stimulated interaction, although over time the intensity of engagement changed. this session was great – congratulations. (portugal) great interaction from the social capital game. very interesting and focused game. thank you for the good time (italy) 290 building participative, empowering & diverse communities it was stimulating to explore causes and find solutions. noise levels were high and the game got more intense in the middle. (germany, england, portugal, usa) some found the experiences stimulating ideas and reflection at different levels: i found the game with e-cards and solutions stimulating because it invited to bring in several solutions at different stages and levels of the problem. (norway) encourages discussion and reflection – makes you think outside the box. (germany, england, portugal, usa) they were thought to be less useful for those already working together on an issue, but good for general use: i thought the games were great for stimulating reflection and conversation. but i thought they were a little too general for people that are already working on a topic or a group that has been working together solving some particular issue. … however these are great for students and professionals that want to reflect and discuss about such broad topics. (chile) participants adapted the games as they played them, introducing additional complexity. we used the teams to come up with their own solutions when we found that solutions offered were not ‘adequate ‘ enough. some participants did not like some of the features, particularly of the one in which social capital could be gained (sometimes at other people’s expense) not fair to gain social capital if someone else gives it up. we should have been able to gain more credits for better explorations (germany, portugal, england, usa) this might illustrate the limits to which a game can be stretched to fit real world experiences, although could point to some amendments needed. the impact of the games depended inpart on their timing and group dynamics. interesting games. the one like monopoly (the beans game) – better to start with a group because if it’s more similar to traditional games. (italy) experiences of the games reflected the dynamics of the group – some groups changed rules. they also raised issues of competition and cooperation. (germany, england, portugal, usa) how might they be improved? perhaps some more detailed instructions for how the experience/solution game worked. (portugal) 291 building participative, empowering & diverse communities maintain some flexibility in the games’ rules. (chile, portugal) i would like to know a little bit more about the principles behind the objectives of the games. i think if you put it in the instructions cards it would help more to access to the objectives because i think people playing take too much time in trying to understand why you put in these rules. since the target population is professionals and activists, it can be done. (mexico) process (experiences/solutions) games is difficult to follow. content is good but hard to know what we are trying to do. (australia) solutions game: encourage people to discuss a solution each and then decide the best one, or how different solutions might be interwoven? (australia) you could use pictures or symbols on the cards. (norway) very time-focused – in place and time. may date quickly? (australia) i think that it would be a good idea to make them about some specific topics as well – e.g. education, health (like the board game), adolescence, elderly, neighbourhoods and so on. (chile) follow on – some participants offered further support in developing the games in anticipation of their utility. if you need any help to think about how to make them a little more generic for other countries and realities, i would be more than glad to help (chile) i would like to buy the games.. and i would like to try in mexico the one about solutions. (mexico) discussion the experiences, then of a workshop made up of participants from different countries and with different experiences within community practice and with community psychological ideas was encouraging. the games did, indeed offer interest, and stimulation and provide conditions for interaction, fun and reflection. the extent to which they increased declarative knowledge or influenced values and attitudes was less clear, but this is not surprising, given the nature of the participants. it did seem as if participants gained in understanding the perspectives of different stakeholders, and that the complexity of understanding social dilemmas and of problem solving from a community psychological stance was examined. thus the potential of the games for raising awareness and understanding was suggested. further work will now be carried out to refine the games for use with students and with community residents and professionals beyond community psychology. 292 building participative, empowering & diverse communities giroux (1981:118), in the context of radical pedagogy in schools, argues that the concept of the dialectic could be useful insofar as it links critical reasoning with a critical intervention in the world; is a process of critique and praxis that under different historical conditions takes different forms ; necessitates human agents acting collectively to transform the world in which they live; links historical and critical sensibilities as modes of reasoning that inform and enrich each other; not value free but rests on interests that opposes oppression in all its forms. this perspective resonates with the aspirations of community psychology and the games clearly make a contribution towards such a position. reflection is the core to critical praxis as has been argued elsewhere (kagan, 2007). freire (1972:131) in an early work suggested that real criticality arises from praxis: that is if their action encompasses a critical reflection which increasingly organises their thinking and thus leads them to move from a purely naive knowledge of reality to a higher level, one which enables them to perceive the causes of reality. it is possible that the games help people move towards this kind of criticality, although there are different degrees of reflectivity. yip (2006:398) identifies four levels of reflective practice: level 0 – absence of reflectivity level1: basic practical reflectivity in which the worker begins to be conscious of his or her performance in the process of intervention; level 2: reflectivity in action where the worker begins to be conscious of his or her performance in the process of intervention; level 3: critical practical reflectivity in which{there is} a highly multidimensional, critical interact[ion] [between the] worker’s own beliefs and background [and that of the] client’s own needs and background. bristow builds on this scheme to suggest a distinction between “practical” and “political”reflectivity, wherein critical political reflectivity is required for conscientisation, and critical practical reflectivity for perspective transformation. it is too early to say whether or not the games contribute to both conscientisation and perspective transformation, but the potential is clearly there. perhaps the most useful dynamic within the games is that of awareness through interaction rather than through information giving. leonard (1975:59) puts this well: ..radical change can only come from consciousness developed as a result of exchange rather than imposition . references audit commission (2006). knowing your communities: improving user focus and diversity for councils. london, audit commission. bristow, k. (2008). challenging the official approach to health care through reflective practice: a case study of a community health ngo in bolivia. reflective practice, 9, 1,53-67. duggan, k. and kagan, c. (2007). ‘we don’t believe you want a genuine partnership’. universities’ work with communities. manchester, rihsc. 293 building participative, empowering & diverse communities eisenack, k. (2006). a board game for interdisciplinary training and dialogue. http://web.fu.berlin.de/ ffu/akumwelt/bc2006/papers/eisenack_boardgame accessed 8.12.08 freire, p. (1972). pedagogy o f the oppressed. harmondsworth, penguin. freire, p. and faundez, a. (1089). learning to question: a pedagogy of liberation. geneva, world council of churches. gaffakin, f. and morrisey, m. (2008). a new synergy for universities. redefining academy as an ‘engaged institution’ education, citizenship and social justice, vol. 3, no. 1, 97-116 (2008) giroux, h. a. (1981). ideology, culture and the process of schooling. lodnon, falmer press. home office (2005). improving opportunity, strengthening society. london, home office. kagan, c. (2008). what have universities got to do with community cohesion? keynote paper, conference of the research institute for health and social change, manchester metropolitan university (. kagan, c. (2007) interpersonal skill and reflection as the core of transformational change in regeneration? public money and management, 27, (3) 169-174 . kagan, c. and burton, m. (2001) critical community psychology praxis for the 21st century. manchester, rihsc. leonard, p. (1975). towards a paradigm for radical practice. in m. bailey and m. brake (eds) radical social work. london, edward arnold. lga (2004). community cohesion: an action guide for local authorities. london, local government association saunders, d. and severn, j. (1999). international simulation and gaming yearbook: volume 7: simulation and games for policy, strategy planning. london, routledge urmad (2006). urban regeneration: making a difference. delivery plan for hefce. london, hefce. watson, d. (2007). managing civic and community engagement. maidenhead, open university press. yip, k.(2006). developing social work students’ reflectivity in cultural indigenization of mental health practice. reflective practice, 7, 393-408. http://web.fu.berlin.de/ffu/akumwelt/bc2006/papers/eisenack_boardgame http://web.fu.berlin.de/ffu/akumwelt/bc2006/papers/eisenack_boardgame 294 building participative, empowering & diverse communities intergenerational work, social capital and wellbeing carolyn kagan, anne-marie micallef, asiya siddiquee, iyabo fatimilehin, amira hassan, carla de santis, reheela ali, tunde zack williams, geoff bunn. (variously of manchester metropolitan university, building bridges, uclan). introduction we will report on two intergenerational projects . the first is a school based project, wherein older people work as volunteers in primary and secondary schools in three different localities of the outer city of manchester. the second is a project with families in the community, involving older and younger men within families of somali and yemeni communities in the inner city (liverpool). for the schools project we were asked to evaluate a project that had been going for some time. however, the families project was a piece of action research which involved implementing intergenerational activities and researching their impact on the participants. we were interested in examining the projects with a view to exploring their impact on participants in terms of wellbeing, as well the contribution they made to social capital and community cohesion. intergenerational work an international, comparative research programme about intergenerational initiatives adopted the following definition of intergenerational programmes: intergenerational programmes are vehicles for the purposeful and ongoing exchange of resources and learning among older and younger generations bostrum, hatton-yeo, ohsako, and sawano, (2000:3) drawing together experience across different countries, bostrum et al. argue that intergenerational programmes can act as instruments for: • uniting separated generations • recapturing and reassessing the transmission of traditional culture • encouraging active cross-generational working and social life • sharing resources across generations • challenging social problems cross-generationally and contributing to lifelong learning. furthermore, hatton-yeo . klerq, oshako and newman (2000) suggest that intergenerational programmes have an impact on: the economy and employment; society; on lifelong learning; and health. extending these benefits, rain (2005: 5) highlights the important role that intergenerational relations play in identity , with implications for community cohesion. “intergenerational relations are a part of our social identity. they have material effects on the experiences and quality of life of older and young people in particular 295 building participative, empowering & diverse communities settings, and important implications for community cohesion”. indeed, patel (2007) suggests that intergenerational tensions created schisms at the heart of community cohesion, not just within families but more generally. community cohesion community cohesion in english social policy is closely linked to inter-racial disturbances in the northern towns in 2001, and the government’s strategy is to focus on addressing the crossgovernment (targets) aimed at reducing race inequality and building community cohesion (home office, 2005) a broader understanding of community cohesion, though, is needed for consideration of both intergenerational projects. duggan and kagan (2007) have argued for a definition of a cohesive community as one, that is in a state of wellbeing, harmony and stability. (idea 2006, www.idea-knowledge.gov.uk ) the local government association (lga, 2004:7), offered guidance to local authorities for how to support the development of cohesive communities. they suggested that a cohesive community is one where: • there is a common vision and a sense of belonging for all communities; • the diversity of people’s different backgrounds and circumstances is appreciated and positively valued; • those from different backgrounds have similar life opportunities; and • strong and positive relationships are being developed between people from different backgrounds and circumstances in the workplace, in schools and within neighbourhoods…………. they went on to describe what is involved in creating community cohesion: promoting community cohesion involves addressing fractures, removing barriers and encouraging positive interaction between groups. community cohesion is closely linked to integration as it aims to build communities where people feel confident that they belong and are comfortable mixing and interacting with others, particularly people from different racial backgrounds or people of a different faith. diversity is, then at the heart of community cohesion, and schisms can occur in and between any areas of diversity, fracturing cohesion. the audit commission (2007) sees community cohesion as key to sustainable communities, beyond race and faith, and identified 10 areas of diversity in communities, of relevance to community cohesion. these include: • age equality: older people • age equality: young people • community engagement • customer focus http://www.idea-knowledge.gov.uk 296 building participative, empowering & diverse communities • disability • gender • human rights • race • religion • sexual orientation the families project includes a number of dimensions relevant to cohesion, including faith, ethnic identity and the experience of migrancy, as well as age. the schools project, however, focuses more on age as the salient dimension of cohesion. both, however, are concerned with facilitating social capital across the generations and with enhancing the wellbeing of both older and younger people. social capital it is the work of putnam (1993, 1995) that has underpinned most discussion of social capital in the uk. putnam (1995: 67) describes social capital thus: by analogy with physical capital and human capital tools and training that enhance individual productivity “social capital” refers to features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate co-ordination and co-operation for mutual benefit.....such networks facilitate coordination and communication, amplify reputations and thus allow dilemmas of collective action to be resolved...(such) dense networks of interaction probably broaden the participants’ sense of self, developing the “i” into the “we”... the main elements of social capital, then, from putnam’s perspective are trust and cooperation and social networks based on norms of reciprocity. jack and jordan, 1999, spell it out further: social capital consists of cultural practices, norms, networks, links, knowhow and tradition, through which people conduct informal interactions of all kinds. for instance, social capital is the trust that enables people to make contracts, rather than the contracts themselves; the teamwork that makes groups function effectively, rather than the roles and structures of the groups; the culture through which citizens understand and participate in politics, rather then the processes of government or elections; and the expectations that people will be friendly and reciprocal towards their neighbours, rather than the physical buildings and spaces they inhabit. ...(jack and jordan, 1999 p. 243) they go on to outline who might benefit from strong social capital, and to issue a warning that it may not necessarily work for the common good. 297 building participative, empowering & diverse communities social capital is produced through specific human interactions, and thus available only to members who share in certain ways of life (jordan 1998a) and is freely available for the benefit of all members who take part in the community’s interactions.... the beneficial effects of norms, traditions and networks of trust and co-operation are as accessible to rogues and confidence tricksters, fraudsters and felons, as they are to the sociable, active or altruistic members of that society whose interactions sustain it. (jack and jordan, 1999 p.243) a distinction is often made between bonding and bridging social capital (putnam, 1995). bonding refers to homogeneous horizontal ties with actors who share overlapping boundaries and similar moral values. such networks enhance cohesion through a strong community-based environment and frequent face-to-face communication which enables social support to flourish. bridging refers to open networks characterised by ‘extra community’ links across diverse social cleavages, facilitating inter-group understanding and relations. the more recent concept of linking social capital refers to those external resources that can be harnessed in support of strengthening bridging and bonding capital, and is central to health and wellbeing (putnam, 2004). the existence of social capital within a neighbourhood is one way in which families are regulated and sanctions applied to family members if they transgress local norms. migrant families are particularly at risk of what coleman (2000) describes as failing to achieve ‘intergenerational closure’, resulting in family conflict. similarly in areas of rapidly increasing diversity i.e. both the localities of these projects), social capital and thereby social trust is threatened (putnam, 2007) weakening community cohesion and threatening health. stores of social capital are said to enhance not only community cohesion but also health and wellbeing. wellbeing kilroy (2005:7) draws on ryff and singer’s work (1998) to suggest that well-being is best described as the “presence of wellness, it is what it means to flourish and is about having a sense of purpose and direction in life, good quality relationships with others and opportunities to realise ones potential” ‘by wellbeing, then, we mean more than satisfaction with life. shah and peck (2005:2) remind us: .. people also want to be leading rich and fulfilling lives developing their capabilities and fulfilling their potential. for shah and peck, then , eudemonic wellbeing (personal development and fulfilment) is as important as hedonic wellbeing (satisfaction and happiness). indeed this two dimensional approach to personal wellbeing forms the core of an influential wellbeing manifesto for a flourishing society (shah and marks, 2004). hedonic and eudemonic well being of people who live in urban areas are inseparable from 298 building participative, empowering & diverse communities historical factors as well as people’s economic positions, the environmental conditions in which they live and the political and ideological messages that define their life stages whilst enjoining them to break free and be active in their own lives. for both older people and young people, social responsibilities are closely linked to relevant social institutions (schools, pensions, public services etc). in other words, well-being in and of communities must be viewed in terms of human systems, not just as individual responses to circumstances. community wellbeing the concept of well-being in the community, and of the community is multifaceted (kagan and kilroy 2007). it variously includes those environmental factors that contribute to good standards of living, such as clean water, clean air and so on; demographic issues such as population decline or changes in divorce rates; economic issues such as poverty, loss of employment or income, or rapid social change leading to the development of new jobs; the provision and/or retrenchment of public services; educational opportunities and achievements; levels of crime and fear of crime; alcohol and drug use; significant life events; diet, food poverty and levels of obesity; perceived happiness, depression, stress and sense of fun. it is also closely linked to stigma and discrimination for our purposes this might be due to skin colour, faith, migrant status, senior citizen or child status (modood, 1997; modood et al., 1997). the projects school project this project deploys older volunteers into schools to undertake a variety of different activities. a school based co-ordinator works in close liaison with community based volunteer co-ordinators in the same locality who in turn recruits and supports volunteers. one community co-ordinator will work with a clutch of schools primary and secondaryin the locality. volunteers in the schools take part in academic activities (hearing children read, helping with maths) as well as extra curricular activities (such as teaching new skills, running clubs) and other things in school (such as taking a school assembly). the benefits are top the pupils, the schools, the volunteers, the teachers, the school culture and to the schools’ public engagement targets. families project the families project arose out of previous work with families under stress and conflicts between african muslim men and their sons was an emergent concern. father and sons were brought together over a meal to take part in narrative workshops (somali and yemeni communities separately). following this, the men and the boys identified further actions which included parenting workshops for fathers and the making of a magazine and a dvd for the sons. the benefits were anticipated to be for participating fathers and sons, as well as wider family and community members. in addition, community workers took part and it was expected that they too would benefit form participating. evaluation each project underwent a mixed method qualitative evaluations, and details of the methods are available on request from the first author. illustrations from interviews and focus 299 building participative, empowering & diverse communities group discussions, as well as summaries of groupwork, undertaken as part of the evaluations form the basis of the extracts presented below. 300 building participative, empowering & diverse communities findings family project bonding social capital: “i felt sad...it is hard for fathers” (s,flipchart content, concern narrative) “the cultural and psychological effects struck me – i felt sympathetic and frustrated listening to sons story and how difficult his life was. it is painful to hear, i felt touched not realising how much the children suffer.” (f, yemeni narrative workshop) bridging social capital “we could visit the ‘gap year’ model – committing organisations to work with funding opportunities (maybe british council) to send a group of young people to yemen so they can contribute to yemeni culture and learn from it” (fathers, yemeni narrative workshop). “the lesson for me was that its encouraging to see young people not having these problems, are enabled to pass on this information to other young people. conferences like these are like a mentor. those people might not be here but young people can affect them with this information, this awareness” (son, yemeni workshop). “(organising a) forum for fathers and sons ....if it does go well, we would like to follow up (around) the uk maybe even in the eu” (sons, somali workshop) “we are actually thinking of going to visit other somali boys and somali communities in sheffield, cardiff, and london and tell them what we’ve done!” (sons during magazine group meeting) “the idea of organising an awareness day for the social services is a good idea” (son, somali workshop) “sons prefer class sessions with mainstream to learn arabic in local areas rather to be segregated in arabic school” (father, yemeni workshop). linking social capital: “thank you for inviting me in this conference. i hope there will be many more including other cultures who are here (living in the uk)as well”. “it is an advantage to live in liverpool – culture, history, it is an important city.” (yemeni workshop) 301 building participative, empowering & diverse communities in helping ‘younger’ generation to understand somali culture, lots of work could be done.” (son, narrative workshop) “just as adults refer to their friends, so can young people refer to their friends when they have problems”. (son, yemeni narrative workshop) eudemonic well being “sons educated in uk a valuable resource to yemen” (father, yemeni narrative workshop) “.....what tools fathers use (are) important..but maybe there is not enough education: ....a father may be pushing his son using the wrong tools.” (f, flipchart content, concern narrative) “(it is) important to follow up those ideas.we (would) be disappointed if these ideas (are) not implement(ed)” (sons, somali narrative workshop) “this story is for a man who has been in the uk for 20 years but even people who have been here longer say 50 years can identify with it. the stories are very important for us as they highlight the values/challenges that fathers face. we hope that this is not the first or the last meeting” (father, yemeni narrative workshop). “parents have a duty in bring up their children& offer them different possibilities........as i listened, i thought: am i an ideal father/parent?” (father, yemeni narrative workshop) “there is a lot to do....to build on today (visibly very emotional)” (father, yemeni narrative workshop) “it was very useful to learn and to take this forward.” (father, narrative yemeni workshop) hedonic well being “recognition from our sons for our hard work makes us feel appreciated” (f, flipchart content, concern narrative) “it......brings hope because children understand us and respects and value what we are trying to do”(f, flipchart contents, solution focused narrative) schools project bonding social capital time with the volunteers gives children the opportunity to get on with and talk with their 302 building participative, empowering & diverse communities friends as well as to get to know other children from other classes. just getting to know other people as well because sometimes different people come from different classes so it’s nice to sit down and talk to them as well. because it’s a quiet activity so then it’s good to talk to different people as well so you feel more friendly. js c also you get on with your friends because you can’t argue in front of her or argue who’s done the best cross stitch, so you can get on with your friends without having a row about who won and who didn’t win and stuff. js c volunteers enjoyed being recognised outside school. seeing children out of school (is good). very often you see them giving you a big beaming smile as they’re going past. v they benefited from the relationships more generally. i think you gain an awful lot, you’re contributing. you’re making little friends you’re making some big friends. v i would say the social interaction with the children. they like the children, they like going, it gets them out of the house, they feel as they’re useful and we’ve never heard anybody who’s said ‘don’t like it i’m not doing it’ (volunteer coordinator talking of benefits to volunteers) bridging capital breaking stereotypes children were able to tell how they changed their minds about older people as a result of their time with intergen volunteers. i changed my mind [about older people] because i normally see old people very old so i didn’t think of old people as mrs x and mrs y. but when i saw them i changed my mind. isc i changed my mind because when i came to school and i saw them [the volunteers] i thought that if they’re nice every old person could be nice and i changed my mind about [older people]. isc children were also to see things from older people’s perspectives. i think they (volunteers) feel like they’re on holiday and they just come here because everybody has to be very nice to them, not nice to the teachers, but sometimes they are. but every single time we are nice to them and i think they feel happy. isc (volunteers) are very happy because they have a smile on their face…excited 303 building participative, empowering & diverse communities because they like working with us…we’re really kind to them isc volunteers would continue, the children said, ‘because they want to continue having fun with us’ and ‘we make them happy’. teachers gained from the links and connections. it helps them (teachers) i think they feel they’re not alone,. they’re getting help from outside they’re getting some support that encourages them., sc they’re so stressed. i think the teachers are so stressed with all the different things they’ve got to do, apart from teaching its the form filling and all this lot. sometimes if they’ve got somebody to day ‘come on you’ll be alright’. we mother them! v. volunteers also brought in resources for schools to use (linking capital). the teacher’s always so very busy that if you’ve time to spend with one child. i mean sometimes i’ve spent nearly half a day with one child. we had a little ghanaian boy and he couldn’t speak a word of english and so i spent the whole afternoon with pictures and telling him what they were. v they haven’t got the time to listen to the children read they’ve asked us to step in and do reading, like you do. v eudeamonic wellbeing when asked what kept her going this volunteer talked of the challenge and being needed as well as the satisfaction gained. i think now the kids need me and i don’t want to let them down. it is a challenge you give something, it cost something but you get so much back and you just think its right to take part and contribute. the more you do, i do the week by week, you understand it more why you’re there what you’re doing and why its happening. v infant’s school children, when asked about what they had learnt, generally referred directly to the activity such as ‘how to make cakes and how to weigh’; how to weave and how to knit’.. however some children also understood the broader implications of what they were being taught. when asked why the volunteers carried out their activities the following responses were obtained: to help us make things. because they might want to make us learn or making stuff. they might want to be fun. to make us get a bit more clever. to make us know how you do things when you get older. how? when you get older you have to do stuff like that. like what? 304 building participative, empowering & diverse communities like to cook and you might you have different things that are broken like my teddy got broken. junior school children identified a number of things they had learnt from their time with volunteers, including: communication; how to cross stitch; help with maths; cooking; in addition to general satisfaction, volunteers learn and sometimes this can be transformative. you get satisfaction and so much change. i’ve come out even after an hour or half and hour and i’ve come out and i’ve been a different person than when i went it. its almost sort of a bit of a challenge really. because we get old and cynical, you do change. v we forget the child that’s inside us sometimes. you know the honesty and the innocence and the straightforwardness and that sort of point of view. v volunteers learn new skills and new insights into their own capabilities, as one volunteer said, in relation to helping with class work: the children like having me, i love having them. i love being with them. i’ve learnt an awful lot how to teach children numeracy. i did a’level maths but i couldn’t ever remember how i first learnt any number work which changed anyway. so now i know lots of different ways of helping and teaching children. v hedonic wellbeing infants’ school children enjoyed the activities with the intergen volunteers, which included baking cakes, making chocolate crispies, bookmarks and friendship bracelets, doing sewing and holding a tea party. what do you like best about things she does with you? a: the thing i like the best is when they made like fairy cakes and crispy cakes with you and we had tea parties. i like everything about them! b: fun stuff. c: every single things! d: the crispy cakes and the butterfly cakes because i like cakes! furthermore the infant’s school children said that they would feel ‘sad’, ‘miserable’, ‘bored’, ‘lonely’, ‘unexcited’, ‘angry’ if the volunteers were not in their classroom. when asked why they would feel like this, they said: a: i would feel sad because you’d have to do work all day in stead of doing really fun things on tuesdays and mrs – has lots of nice things like baking and cakes. b: because they were really helpful and nice to us. 305 building participative, empowering & diverse communities c: because i like working with them. d: because you can’t make interesting stuff [if they’re not in our class]. secondary age children also gained a sense of pride and satisfaction in their achievements with the older volunteers. you can do it for you parents if their birthday or its mothers’ day…because when you finish it you feel really proud and you want to tell everybody. js c volunteers were thought to have gained in enjoyment and satisfaction according to a volunteer co-ordinator. i imagine all i would say is probably now,[there are] seventeen or eighteen happier, more contented, sounds a bit corny really, older people. who are now doing things they didn’t think they could do and they really enjoy it. vc1 let’s look at the volunteers. i mean definitely an impact on their wellbeing. … there was a volunteer who said, she wasn’t in my area but she said to me because i met her socially, i said to her ‘i hear that your working for [the p[roject] now as a volunteer’ and she said ‘yes, it’s the best day of the week, i just love going in and helping with these young children’… there’s no doubt that … the impact … on volunteers is very, very positive. vc3 how do intergenerational projects enhance community cohesion with social capital and wellbeing in both projects wellbeing and social capital was enhanced. it is clear though, that the particular intergenerational activities had a specific part to play in generating both social capital and wellbeing. the activities enabled participants to gain insight. insight, that is, into self , the ‘other’ and self in relation to the other. we suggest a process through which wellbeing and social capital are both generated and linked together by insight into self and the other (see figure 1). it is the intergenerational activities that have stimulated insight: without this insight there would be nothing to link wellbeing and social capital, and no clear indication that the intergenerational work had contributed to cohesion. figure 1: intergenerational work and the stimulation of wellbeing, social capital and community cohesion 306 building participative, empowering & diverse communities references audit commission (2007) response to the commission on integration and cohesion. london, audit commission. bostrum, a-k., hatton-yeo, a., ohsako, t. and sawano, y. 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(2000) pu7bloic policy and research recommendations: an international perspective. in hatton-yeo, a. and ohsako, t. intergenerational programmes: public policy and research implications an international perspective. hamburg and stoke on trent, unesco institute for education and beth johnson foundation. home office (2005) improving opportunity, strengthening society: the government’s strategy to increase race equality, london: home office jack, g.and jordan, b. (1999) social capital and child welfare children and society, 13, 242-256 kagan, c. and kilroy, a. (2007) community psychology and well-being. in j. haworth and g. hart (eds) wellbeing: individual, community and social perspectives. london, palgrave macmillan. kilroy, a. (2006) planning the invest to save: arts and health evaluation project. manchester, manchester metropolitan university, arts for health. www.mmu.ac.uk/miriad lga (2004). community cohesion: an action guide for local authorities. london, local government association modood, t. (1997) `difference, cultural racism and anti-racism’, in p. werbner and t. modood (eds) debating cultural identity. london: zed books. (reproduced in m. boxill (ed) [2000] racism: a reader, oxford university press.) modood, t., berthoud, r., lakey, j., nazroo, j., smith, p., virdee, s. and beishon, s. (1997) ethnic minorities in britain: diversity and disadvantage. london: policy studies institute. pain, r. 2005 intergenerational relations and practice in the development of sustainable communities durham, icrrds. patel., k (2007) delivering community cohesion. inaugural honorary doctoral lecture, mmu. manchester, mmu. putnam, r.d. (1993) making democracy work: civic traditions in modern italy princeton nj, princeton university press putnam, r.d. (1995) ‘bowling alone’: america’s declining social capital journal of democracy, 6, (1) 6578 http://www.mmu.ac.uk/miriad 307 building participative, empowering & diverse communities putnam, r.d. (2004) commentary: ‘health by association’: some comments international journal of epidemiology 33(4):667-671 robert d. putnam (2007) e pluribus unum: diversity and community in the twenty-first century the 2006 johan skytte prize lecture. scandinavian political studies 30 (2) , 137–174 shah, h., & marks, n. (2004). a well-being manifesto for a flourishing society. london: new economics foundation. http://www.neweconomics.org retrieved 12 january 2006. shah, h., & peck, j. (2005). well-being and the environment: achieving one planet living and quality of life. london: new economics foundation. ryff, c. and singer, b.h. (1998). the contours of positive human health. psychological inquiry, 9, 1-28. 308 building participative, empowering & diverse communities on the spirit of community psychology: one personal story james g. kelly university of california davis i believe there is some value in thinking about how to create emotional and intellectual resources to anchor, enhance and evolve our spirit when doing the work of community psychology. when beginning our careers our families, social networks, mentors and senior colleagues often are sources of strength, support and feedback that are fundamental for us to keep our spirits. when we begin our newly created professional roles, to make our way, it is largely up to us to create our own support systems to sustain our spirit. our family and social networks, colleagues and students may be at our side but it is ourselves who are challenged to experience personally the places in which we work. to the extent that being a community psychologist is a marginal activity within the larger profession of psychology there maybe fewer opportunities to receive validation and the respect we appreciate from colleagues. creating personal resources for myself has been pivotal to my own efforts to maintain and enlarge my spirit. these five people through their words and deeds helped me to continue on my search for what i believed was my emerging career. they inspired me to keep at it. they still do. personal resources and constraints within your own communities maybe quite different from mine. so, i am very pleased that there will be contemporary voices contributing to this discussion. first, something of the context of my graduate education. when i was in graduate school at the university of texas in the mid 1950’s, most faculty, both explicitly and implicitly, communicated that the good and true psychologist did experiments and basic research and did not do applied investigations or work directly with citizens as equal participants. there were some notable exceptions like ira iscoe, lou moran and wayne holtzman who told me that a psychologist did not need to restrict oneself to be only the detached observer. i could be accepted among psychologists when i worked directly with citizens as co investigators. as i thought of myself as a different psychologist i did not begin this developmental process with much clarity or self-confidence. i had a silent angst that i would be perceived as incorrect, second-class, deviant or an embarrassment to my self or my former teachers. this process of identifying personal resources became a life long expedition. these five persons’ writings and presence made a substantial impact on my spirit. they are a psychiatrist, anthropologist, psychologist, philosopher, and a poet. i have had the very good fortune to meet some of these persons. others i know only from their writings. erich lindemann, psychiatrist (1900-1974) in 1958 i began a post-doctoral fellowship with erich lindemann of harvard medical school. ten years before he had created a multidisciplinary mental health clinic in the town of 309 building participative, empowering & diverse communities wellesley massachusetts which became a pioneering preventive service, fourteen years before the national community mental health movement. both the model and erich’s own informal style and personality of being creative without being pompous and being a great listener and supportive person encouraged me to believe that i could develop a career as a psychologist working in the community. the presence of active people from different professions in wellesley and boston excited me about the prospects of working collaboratively with citizens. i was fortunate to have this watershed experience immediately after receiving the phd. those two years were essential years for i discovered a new paradigm in public health with its preventive and community based traditions. my spirit was soaring. i found an intellectual home that was far beyond the niches of psychology at the time. it is not only erich alone but also the settings he created in wellesley and the medical school that congealed my identity. i was at the right place at the right time and had the rare privilege of being mentored by a creative and supportive person who encouraged me to create my own ideas. 30 years later in talking with his widow i learned of the political and personal costs he suffered within his medical and psychiatric community because of his steadfast values to work collaboratively with social scientists and citizens. at the time to do this was heresy. this knowledge endeared him even more. _____________________________ lindemann, e. (1979). the wellesley project. in lindemann, e. in beyond grief: new york: jason aronson, 113-135. lindemann, e. (1956). the nature of mental health work as a professional pursuit. in strother, c.r. (ed). psychology and mental health. washington, d.c. american psychological association, 136-150. satin, d.g. (1982). erich lindemann: the humanist and the era of community mental health. proceedings of the american philosophical society, 126,327-346. ed wellin, anthropologist (1917-) in the spring of 1960, during the second post-doctoral year at the harvard school of public health i enrolled in a course taught by the anthropologist ben paul (1911-2005). we read “ water boiling in a peruvian town” a report of a two-year research project by the anthropologist ed wellin published in 1955. wellin presented a beautiful example of how it was necessary for wellin and a rural hygiene worker to immerse themselves into the village to understand the complexities of the social fabric of this small community of 200 households. he wanted to understand why certain persons took the health-engendering step to boil water to lower the incidence of typhoid fever while others did not. wellin was an active listener and intrepid participant in the cultures of the smaller sub communities within this already small community. one of his findings was that in this peruvian town children were the most frequent water carriers from the nearest stream. males and females of courtship age and married men did not carry water according to local norms and traditions. wellin also learned that the acceptable times to boil water was after breakfast and after the noon meal; another ecological constraint. i learned that, there was a complexity within small communities that could not be understood if one was pre-occupied with being an objective, detached, uninvolved scientist. 310 building participative, empowering & diverse communities understanding class and heritage was learned after respect from the various sub communities was obtained. the improvised methods employed by wellin were inspiring. he revealed the nascent quality of the town. my spirit was up lifted when i read about the insights of wellin’s immersion and the processes of his building trust. one of his major findings was that when stimulating an innovation in a community it is essential to create cordial and trusting personal relationships between the researcher and the community. this was essential! today, this is a truism but back then it was a very provocative and even radical insight. the significance of wellin’s work was that although the efforts to have citizens boil water had limited success it was the elegant analysis of the villagers and their various contexts that helped explain the determinants of their behavior. wellin grappled directly to understand the everyday issues of people. _____________________________ wellin, e. (1955). water boiling in a peruvian town. in b.d. paul & w.b. miller (eds). health, culture and community (pp.71-103). new york: sage wellin, e. (1998). exemplars of community psychology (video) chicago: university of illinois at chicago. kelly, j.g. (2000). wellness as an ecological enterprise. in d.cicchetti, j. rappaport, i. sandler & r.p. weissberg (eds) the promotion of wellness in children and adolescents. washington d.c.cwla press, 101131. roger barker, psychologist (1903-1990) barker spent his entire career (1947-1972) documenting the social settings of a small kansas town, oskaloosa by name. what he did was document the places where the residents spent their lives. he discovered that places taken for granted and not thought about much were in fact the primary ways in which the town was a viable social system. settings like “household auction sale” and “high school boys basketball game”, “restaurants & diners”, “drugstores” & “garages” defined the town. he and his colleagues’ convictions and ingenuity to create methods to document these settings plus his unyielding courage to document places, not people alone, had an inspiring impact. i hoped that i too could move beyond the psychopathology of persons. one of his later achievements was to conduct a comparative study of the public settings of oskaloosa and a comparative town in north yorkshire england ten years apart. one of the stimulating findings was that over the ten-year period oskaloosa was expanding the number of settings for adolescents; oskaloosa was more involved in generating activities for adolescents. in yordale, in contrast, settings were found to be often on the streets and sidewalks. this type of analysis encouraged me to think about the qualities of settings and their influence on community life. barker was not one to publish discrete studies but waited until he had a grasp of the complexities of the town of then some 1,000 people. he lived in the town. no doubt he and his wife’s presence as residents helped his research to be accepted and added to the clarity of his interpretations of the richness of the settings. 311 building participative, empowering & diverse communities barker’s work was a compelling example of actually studying places and raising the then novel idea that not only qualities of individuals but qualities of places gave insights and knowledge not thought about before. _____________________________ barker, r.g. (1965) explorations in ecological psychology. american psychologist, 20,1-14. barker, r.g. & schoggen, p. (1973). qualities of community life: methods of measuring environment and behavior applied to an american and an english town. san francisco: jossey bass. schoggen, p. (1989). behavior settings. stanford california, stanford university press. ludwig wittgenstein (1889-1951) the writings of wittgenstein were like finding a soul mate. he had written a book in the trenches of world war i that was quickly revered by the newly forming logical positivists. logical positivists had much influence on psychology especially during the 1920’s through 1950’s. their premise was that if a concept could not be empirically verified it did not exist. as soon as wittgenstein was going to be greeted as an intellectual leader for the group he rejected their tribute and refuted his earlier work. he then went on a constant journey throughout his life to develop another perspective that questioned his own prior work. the content of his ideas and his intellectual toughness, courage and conscience impressed me. i also liked his way of living. he did not accept his part of the family fortune and was not enamored by professional philosophy. i liked the creative independence of his ideas and his spirit. a remark that he made when referring to someone who was notably generous or kind or honest was “he is a human being”. i noted that he could whistle long passages of music from memory. i aspired to do that. he designed a house for his sister down to the doorknobs. i could not do that. he believed that the meaning of concepts was due to the forms of life in which they were embedded. an ecological premise. he also believed that a result of philosophical thinking was: not a truth discovered but a confusion dissolved. he was a fresh voice that encouraged my hope to create my own work and not be trapped by tradition or custom or the dominant paradigm. he fueled my hopes to continue on my own journey to break new ground. he became a favorite invisible uncle. on my home page i have a wittgenstein quote: “we feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched”. _____________________________ malcolm, n. (1958). ludwig wittgenstein: a memoir. new york: oxford university press. monk, r. (1990). ludwig wittgenstein: the duty of genius, new york: the free press. wittgenstein, l. (1922). tractatus logico-phiolosophicus, london: rutledge. william stafford (1914-1993) when i was at the university of oregon in the mid 1970’s i went to a meeting of professors 312 building participative, empowering & diverse communities advocating more community involvement. the poet william stafford was there. he did not speak except a few words at the very end when he wondered out loud if it was not also important to stay at home and be with family and kin. i was surprised. he then read a poem. after the meeting i told him that it was a wonderful poem. could i have a copy? he handed me the hand written lines as a gift. i was stunned. it was then that i began to learn about this poet laureate of oregon who was on the faculty of lewis and clark college in portland. he was a conscientious objector during world war ii. he wrote over fifteen books in his poetry career. he said “ i think you create a good poem by revising your life.” i will read the first four lines of one of his poems: “a ritual to read to each other”. it was included in his first published book of poems “west of your city” in 1960 when he was 46 years old. “if you don’t know the kind of person i am and i don’t know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star”. those four lines anchored my search for a collaborative research style especially for the ten years of work with african american community leaders in chicago in the 1990’s. that poem affirmed my inchoate conviction to listen, learn and try to understand the concerns and hopes of these leaders .i was sustained by the commitment of the community leaders and retained in my memory stafford’s poem. _____________________________ kitchen, judith (1989). understanding william stafford. columbia south carolina. university of south carolina press. stafford, william (1960). west of your city. los gatos, ca. talisman press. stafford, william. (1993). ” the art of poetry lxvii”. the paris review, 129,51-78. conclusion these five persons were mighty sources for my spirit. through their work, their persistence, their courage and their willingness to go beyond tradition inspired my own efforts to set out in my own direction. they each were persons who made a big difference in how i thought and how i proceeded and how i then made my way. they are specific of course to my being born and coming of age when i did. they helped me in my varied settings and in my travails to keep exploring my ideas and testing them when there was often small support for them until later in my career. without these people and others like them it is uncertain if i could have continued my work with élan and if my spirit could have been buoyant enough to carry through what has become a most satisfying series of expeditions in community psychology. i very much look forward to hear from others on your efforts to contain and enhance your own spirit for community psychology. 313 building participative, empowering & diverse communities homeless and community-less: an action-research gioacchino lavanco, floriana romano, carolina messina department of psychology, university of palermo, italy. abstract the major reasons and causes for homelessness as documented by many reports and studies (main, 1998; acosta, toro, 2000) include: lack of affordable housing; substance abuse and lack of needed services; mental illness and lack of needed services; domestic violence; poverty, caused by many factors; prison release and re-entry into society; lack of affordable healthcare; natural disaster. the project “la strada non è sola via” (the street is not the only way) realized one comprehensive system to manage the services for the homeless, their benefits, and their reintegration in to society. we recommend move towards a fully integrated system which would make delivering benefits and getting people off the streets more cost effective. it has been reported that the types of assistance homeless adults felt they needed most were help finding a job, help finding affordable housing, and help paying for housing. however, the main types of assistance they usually received were clothing, transportation and help with public benefits. most people become homeless specifically because they are having a housing crisis, even though they may have other needs for services and increased incomes. it’s important to realize that their needs are best met once the family is in permanent housing not while they are in transitional housing or shelters. housing must be first if they are expected to develop a sustainable, healthy lifestyle. key words: homelessness, street, intervention, empowerment. 1. introduction there are several terms used in literature nowadays to indicate people without house and living on the street, such as tramp, clochard, homeless; these terms that even if referring to the same subject, spread however a different meaning. the difference between the english expressions houseless and homeless is also interesting. with the term “houseless”, we usually refer to the lack of a house; with “homeless” instead we refer not only to the lack of a house but also to the lack of an environment of life, a shelter and the subsequent development of the self and own affective relationships. an interesting result comes out from different researches (bates, toro, 1999; dunlap, fogel, 1998): homelessness is a mainly urban phenomenon. in fact, while in the country the stronger presence of solidarity networks and social control diminishes the emergence of kinds of anomy and deviance, the city itself causes poverty and the losing of social relationships (augè, 1992; barnao, 2004). in particular, as in the italian context, most of homeless are in the big cities of the centre and northern italy, while in the small and medium centres of southern italy, they would be few. general traits of such phenomenon, measured on an international dimension and those 314 building participative, empowering & diverse communities more specific relevant to the italian case are: a general tendency to the subject’s self-isolation with particular regard to the primary social network; a strong correlation among the lack of a home, unemployment and the impact of chronic-degenerative diseases; a progressive departure from productive reality, a widespread marginality (bonadonna, 2005; caritas ambrosiana, 1996). in the homeless’ perception we can find an alteration both the time and the space. regarding the time, the daily time seems a fight, a continuous struggle to obtain the minimum necessary conditions for survival. maybe this can be explained because in the homeless’ life the day is the only temporal scanning; for all of us, on the contrary, there are working hours, weekly timetables, yearly deadlines, spare time, and so on. time in the street is made up of boredom, apathy, empty moments or long waitings (waiting for the dormitory to open, waiting for a bench to be free, waiting to gather something to eat). for this reason, boundaries between past and present fade away, memories mix with present experiences, and without a chronological order, the sense of own history is lost. as regards the space, instead the urban space is mapped according to the distribution of supplies, so creates itineraries that will be walked down cyclically every day. further more, these people act in public places as in a private one, showing a total lack of decency. the reality of interventions in italy can be summarized into three kinds of services (guidicini, pieretti, bergamaschi, 2000; lavanco, romano, messina, croce, 2007). a first typology of services concerns the satisfaction of primary needs such as food or a shelter for the night. a second typology is oriented to the homeless’ mental health, with the intent to provide a pharmacological therapy. a third type of services intends to offer both help for primary needs and a psychiatric treatment; the aim is to contribute both improving the homeless’ mental health and favoring the social integration in a general project of social rehabilitation. 2. the street is not the only way the project “the street is not the only way” was realized in palermo in the years 20042007 by some social private associations. the project originates from an experience of nightly community service, of relief aid for homeless people; this experience, born to satisfy primary needs in the coldest months, offered to welcomed people meaningful relationships with operators and the possibility to suppose together with them some ways of change. considering the homeless ones don’t use to go to the community services, because they have many difficulties linked to a lack of information or to mistrust, we supposed and testify a project of “street psychology” addressed to homeless people with mental disorders. to carry out this project, operators used to go to the train-stations and to the streets where they could have met potential users. the project develops towards the building of a street-unit, which is the expression of the effort of going towards users and not just waiting for their arrival. it was also possible to realize a descriptive research to understand the needs of homeless people, to develop a systematic list of needs. 315 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 3. participants during the project operators met 126 homeless people. 15 were women, 38 were immigrants (11 of them were found without residence permits). the period of “contact” ranged from 3 days to 14 months, with obvious differences both in collecting information and in the real configuration of needs. for this reason we decided to use the information about only 66 individuals, whose period of contact was included between 3 and 14 months. the average age of the involved group is about 47 with a standard deviation of 8,3 years. the 21,1% are single, 65,4% are married, 4,5% are separated or divorced, 4,5% are widows; for the remaining 4,5% it wasn’t possible to gather precise information. 44 of them declared to have children. as regards the educational level, only 13 gave indications on the primary school course, 8 gave indications on the lower middle school course, 4 gave indications about the completion of upper secondary school, 1 stated he had got a degree in philosophy (as confirmed by the family); 51 stated they had done some jobs even if they didn’t always have a working contract. 4. results and conclusions the project mapped the different approaches to help homeless, to move of refuges for the homeless: outdoors: on the ground or in a sleeping bag, tent, or improvised shelter, such as a large cardboard box, in a park or vacant lot; shantytowns: ad hoc campsites of improvised shelters and shacks, usually near rail yards; derelict structures: abandoned or condemned houses or buildings, abandoned cars, and beached boats, generally referred to as squatting; vehicles: cars or trucks are used as a temporary or sometimes long-term living refuge; public places: parks, bus or train stations, airports, public transportation vehicles, hospital lobbies or waiting areas, college campuses, and 24-hour businesses such as coffee shops; city run homeless shelters such as emergency cold-weather shelters opened by churches or community agencies. a psychological health care for the homeless is topic of project with integrate system outdoor and indoor. the researcher attempts to make a distinction between: 1) why homelessness exists, in general, and 2) who is at-risk of homelessness, in specific. homelessness has always existed since urbanization and industrialization. various assertive outreach approaches, including a mental health treatment approach known as community treatment, have shown promise in the prevention of homelessness among people with serious mental illness. table 1 briefly describes the users’ typology. 316 building participative, empowering & diverse communities table 1 – users’ tipology. tipology nr of subjects requests resistances users with records of documented psycho-pathologic troubles. 16 food-clothes-pharmacological help. spend the night in the centre; telling one’s own story. users with records of self-ascribed psychopathological troubles. 5 food-clothes spend the night in the centre give indications on one’s availability. users with alcohol addiction 14 food-clothes-liqueursmoney to buy them comply with the request of abstinence if they sleep in the centre. users with tobacco addiction. 41 food-cigarettesmoney to buy them. fix periodical meetings. users with no family –units. 49 foodclotheslooking after spend the night in the centre; fix periodical meetings. users with records of drug addiction. 7 foodpharmacological help fix periodical meetings; telling one’s own story. users with alternation of admission to hospital 45 food-clothes-help during admission to hospital.pharmacological help. none users with records of detention and crimes against the person. 9 food-money-help fix periodical meetings. users with unused domicile. 6 food-clothesto be left on the street. give indications on one’s availability. users with no domicile entrusted to social services. 36 food-clothesbeing accompanied to services-pharmacological help. none migrant users with no fixed abode because sent away from their birthplace.. 22 f ood clothes not to be sent to their birthplace. spend the night in the centretelling their own story. users meeting family members occasionally. 10 being able to wash and dress before the meetingfood have a space where they can meet them. give indications on one’s availability. users refusing to meet their family. 35 food-clothes-to be left aloneno mortification of the familyno organization of meetings. spend the night in the centresocialization telling one’s own story. users living in the railway station or thereabouts. 20 food-clothes-cartons confrontation with others refusal of involving their fellow creatures. users living in the street, far from the railway-station. 37 food-clothes ( particularly shoes )-possibility of temporary admission. fix periodical meetingsgive indications on one’s availability. users living in public parks. 6 foodsecond-hand clothes a warm place during particularly cold nights. spend the night in the centretelling one’s own story. users living together with others with no fixed abode. 4 foodpharmacological help telling one’s own story requests often regard food, clothes, and other material things. while, as regards resistances, participants show resistances to give indications about their availability, to meet their family, to talk about themselves, socialization. in the future it will be better to investigate further these variables in order to plan useful strategies of intervention. 317 building participative, empowering & diverse communities we conclude with a summarizing outline of suggestions which came out of the actionresearch. to better understand homeless needs, we asked themselves operative indications. consistently to previous results, as the table 2 shows, the main demands concerned the distribution of medicine and clothes, but also psychological help, such as more occasions to be listened, talking about own history. the highest percentage regards more help on the street; this result shows that the intervention on the street is the best one to diminish the distance between services and homeless people. table 2 operative indications emerged from the research-intervention1 indications of improvement % enhancement of personal story 18 more information 13,5 more help on the street 40,5 greater presence during cold nights 4,5 more numerous collection and help-points 9 shorter distance between the centre and some areas 4,5 more distribution of clothes 13,5 more distribution of medicines 36 more numerous occasions of listening 18 a first step towards homeless’ empowerment (zimmerman, 1990) confirmed by our contribution should be to avoid labelling homeless people using a negative term like homeless and so to understand that the loss of the house is an experience attributing common traits to these individuals. the improving of empowerment in these individuals doesn’t mean to persuade them to change completely their life (tsemberis, 1999; friedman, levine-holdowsky, (1997); they could rather continue to stay on the street, but to increase their own personal power and their possibility of being “nomadic people” within shared spaces. references acosta, o., & toro, p. a. (2000). let’s ask the homeless people themselves: a needs assessment based on a probability sample of adults. american journal of community psychology, 28, 343-366. augè, m. (1992). non luoghi. introduzione a una antropologia della surmodernità. trad. it., milano: elèuthera, 1993. barnao, c. (2004). sopravvivere in strada. elementi di sociologia della persona senza dimora. milano: francoangeli. bates, d., & toro, p. a. (1999). developing measures to assess social support among homeless and poor people. journal of community psychology, 27, 137-156. bearsley, c., & cummins, r. a. (1999). no place called home: life quality and purpose of homeless youths. journal of social distress and the homeless, 8 (4), 207-226. 1 it was possible to give more answers. 318 building participative, empowering & diverse communities bonadonna, f. (2005). il nome del barbone. vite di strada e povertà estreme in italia. roma: deriveapprodi. caritas ambrosiana (ed.). (1996). barboni: per amore o per forza? senza dimora, esclusione sociale, povertà estreme. torino: edizioni gruppo abele. davey, t. l., & neff, j. a. (2001). a shelter-based stress-reduction group intervention targeting selfesteem, social competence, and behavior problems among homeless. journal of social distress and the homeless, 10 (3), 279-291. dunlap, k. m., & fogel, s. j. (1998). a preliminary analysis of research on recovery from homelessness. journal of social distress and the homeless, 7 (3), 175-188. fio.psd (2006). grave emarginazione e interventi di rete. strategie e opportunità di cambiamento. milano: francoangeli. lavanco, g., romano, f., messina, c., & croce, m. (2007). senza fissa dimora e senza comunità: l’intervento di psicologia di comunità. il seme e l’albero, 2, 48-69. kelly, k., & caputo, t. (2007). health and street/homeless youth. journal of health psychology, 12 (5), 726-736. guidicini, p., pieretti, g., & bergamaschi, m. (eds.). (2000). l’urbano, le povertà. quale welfare. milano: francoangeli. friedman, b. d., & levine-holdowsky, m. (1997). overcoming barriers to homeless delivery services: a community response. journal of social distress and the homeless, 6 (1), 13-28. main, t. (1998). how to think about homelessness: balancing structural and individual causes. journal of social distress and the homeless, 7 (1), 41-54. morris, j. m. (1997). chronic homelessness among working-age adults: personal problems and public assistance. journal of social distress and the homeless, 6 (1), 57-69. rosen, m. i., mcmahon, t. j., & rosenheck, r. a. (2007). homeless people whose self-reported ssi/di status is inconsistent with social security administration records. social security bulletin, 67 (1), 53-62. toro, p. a., & warren, m. g. (1999). homelessness in the united states: policy considerations. journal of community psychology, 27 (2), 119-136. tsemberis, s. (1999). from streets to homes: an innovative approach to supported housing for homeless adults with psychiatric disabilities. journal of community psychology, 27, 225-241. zimmerman, m. a. (1990). taking aim on empowerment research. on the distinctions between individuals and psychology conceptions. american journal of community psychology, 18 (1), 169-177. 319 building participative, empowering & diverse communities experiencias colaborativas de movilización hacia la responsabilidad social universitaria teresita castillo león* rebelín echeverría echeverría maría luisa rojas bolaños universidad autónoma de yucatán *cleon@uady.mx resumen la realidad social contemporánea evidencia la necesidad de desarrollar propuestas teórico-metodológicas que contribuyan a resolver problemáticas sociales y promocionen bienestar. particularmente, las universidades requieren estrategias para el trabajo con grupos rurales y urbanos mediante programas promotores de nuevos profesionales que funjan como facilitadores del desarrollo social. el objetivo del presente trabajo es presentar una experiencia colaborativa e interdisciplinaria de coordinadores de las unidades universitarias de inserción social (uuis) de la universidad autónoma de yucatán (uady), para construir un modelo de trabajo en comunidad. ello deriva de un proyecto de investigación acción participativa enfocado a construir una propuesta teórico-metodológica para el trabajo de las uuis. los resultados evidencian que el trabajo interdisciplinario construye espacios para compartir experiencias, discutir las fortalezas/debilidades y el potencial e impacto social de la universidad, establece necesidades de capacitación, así como acciones y estrategias de difusión en cumplimiento de la integración de las funciones sustantivas universitarias. palabras clave: interdisciplina, trabajo colaborativo, praxis comunitaria introducción la realidad social contemporánea evidencia la necesidad de desarrollar propuestas teórico-metodológicas que contribuyan a la resolución de problemáticas sociales y la promoción del bienestar. en este contexto, el papel de las universidades y los profesionales que en ellas laboran cobra gran importancia para el logro de la formación integral de futuros profesionales, la generación y aplicación del conocimiento pertinente socialmente y el cumplimiento de la responsabilidad social universitaria. así, el carácter profesional de la educación implica un proceso formativo que incorpore el avance y actualización a través de la generación y validación de nuevos conocimientos y su aplicación a los campos profesionales en evolución continua. el carácter abierto a todos los campos del conocimiento y a todos los sectores de la sociedad implica la complementariedad y la dilución de fronteras entre profesiones y la expansión de la oferta educativa, así como la necesidad de cubrir el horizonte social en la aplicación del propio conocimiento. esto debido a que el desarrollo equitativo de la sociedad requiere del concurso de todas las profesiones y su dirección prioritaria hacia los sectores menos favorecidos. por otra parte, los programas y proyectos de praxis comunitaria pueden representar mailto:*cleon@uady.mx 320 building participative, empowering & diverse communities espacios en los que los diversos actores universitarios pueden establecer diversas modalidades de interacción con actores sociales extra universitarios. en estas interacciones se incide en dos dimensiones del hacer universitario: en primer término, la cobertura de sus funciones rebasa sus fronteras físicas y sociales, definiendo y ocupando escenarios reales en la ejecución de sus tareas académicas. en segundo lugar, promueve desarrollo con acciones sociales específicas de las que derivan, además de aprendizajes y productos académicos, diagnósticos, proyectos y actividades comunitarias con grupos en situación de vulnerabilidad. por añadidura, las interacciones sociales que se desarrollan en los programas y proyectos de praxis comunitaria pueden constituir demostraciones vivas de la pertinencia de los programas y de la universidad misma, en la definición de necesidades de grupos sociales claramente identificados, en el diseño y ejecución de acciones de intervención y evaluación de programas sociales. en este sentido y en respuesta a estas necesidades, la ley orgánica de la universidad autónoma de yucatán [uady] (01/09/84, título 2, art. 5, título 4, art. 15, fracc. iii) establece que su finalidad es educar formando profesionales, investigadores y maestros universitarios de acuerdo con las necesidades económicas, sociales y políticas de la entidad, región y nación. también debe generar conocimiento mediante el fomento y la realización de investigación científica y humanística y difundir cultura mediante la extensión de los beneficios de la cultura a la sociedad. dentro de este marco institucional, existe la preocupación universitaria de contribuir a elaborar e implementar propuestas alternativas de desarrollo humano sustentable, con metas de largo plazo, para lo cual concibe a la educación dentro de un modelo de desarrollo sustentable que implica garantizar la calidad de sus procesos y productos, respetar la diversidad cultural, establecer nuevas relaciones del hombre con la naturaleza y tener sensibilidad a los problemas de pobreza (material, intelectual y ética). para ello, no puede pensarse en la formación académica como algo puramente profesional; es preciso proporcionar una formación integral y humanista que debe balancear aprendizajes que permitan el desarrollo individual, social, económico y ecológico. es así que la uady tiene un reto: ha de enfrentar su responsabilidad social como universidad pública mediante acciones universitarias de calidad: pertinentes (que exista relación entre el proceso formativo y las necesidades y demandas de grupos sociales definidos), eficientes y encaminadas a lograr el impacto educativo (formación integral) y la trascendencia de la institución (desarrollo humano sustentable). para tener éxito en este expresa académica como universidad pública ha desarrollado una estrategia: las unidades universitarias de inserción social (uuis) ubicadas en diferentes puntos del estado de yucatán, que buscan contribuir a dicha labor mediante el trabajo en sustentabilidad, educación y salud con grupos comunitarios, rurales y urbanos, en situación de vulnerabilidad y que en un principio han sido definidas por una comisión del colegio de directores de la universidad como: “escenarios reales de aprendizaje para el desarrollo de competencias profesionales y personales que permitan la operacionalización del modelo educativo y académico en ambientes que propicien el análisis interdisciplinario y se realice investigación participativa en torno a las necesidades sociales”. a la fecha existe la necesidad de desarrollar acciones que promuevan y faciliten el trabajo de dichos espacios, de manera que su labor verdaderamente impacte y contribuya al desarrollo sustentable de la región. como parte de este proceso de desarrollo se ha trabajado en un proyecto de investigación aplicada, bajo un enfoque de investigación acción participativa (ander-egg, 1990; 321 building participative, empowering & diverse communities balcazar, taylor, kielhofner, tamley, benzinger, carlin & johnson, 2006) denominado propuesta metodológica para el desarrollo de las unidades universitarias de inserción social, que tiene como objetivos específicos construir un concepto colectivo y plural de las uuis, establecer las consideraciones operativas, las características académico-administrativas, así como los recursos existentes y necesarios para el desarrollo de las uuis. su primera fase consistió en la elaboración del diagnóstico situacional de cinco uuis y dos de los principales programas de praxis comunitaria que desarrolla la uady; todo ello con la finalidad de que a partir de la experiencia existente se conceptualice de manera colectiva y plural lo que deben ser las uuis con el propósito último de construir una propuesta metodológica para su desarrollo como una opción para contribuir a la formación integral y promover la responsabilidad social universitaria. son algunos de los resultados obtenidos en la fase diagnóstica los que se presentan en el presente trabajo. método así, de manera particular, este trabajo tiene como objetivo presentar parte de la experiencia de investigación diagnóstica consistente en la realización del diagnóstico comunitario participativo con coordinadores de las uuis y de los programas de praxis comunitaria y discutir su experiencia de trabajo colaborativo interdisciplinario, desarrollado con la finalidad de construir un modelo de trabajo colaborativo promotor de la responsabilidad social y la formación integral. de acción y propuestas de trabajo colectivas. de manera general, en la fase diagnóstica se utilizaron técnicas como entrevistas semiestructuradas, visitas in situ, grupos focales, análisis documentales y talleres participativos, siendo particularmente de éstos últimos de los cuales derivan los resultados aquí presentados. de manera específica, este tipo de talleres pretenden la reflexión de un tema de manera sencilla, simple y entretenida (cedepo, 1996). se realizan mediante actividades con grupos pequeños en las cuales se posibilita que las personas participantes expresen sus opiniones y/o formas de sentir respecto a la temática abordada, en un clima relajado, divertido y libre de evaluación. esto significa partir de lo que la gente sabe, vive y siente, procurando conocer situaciones de su vida que ejemplifiquen lo compartido. es un proceso sistemático y progresivo que va al ritmo de los participantes y en el que lo que más se valora es la participación, la habilidad para negociar y resolver problemas de la mejor manera y con el menor riesgo de pérdida de la estabilidad emocional. el proceso permite teorizar sobre las prácticas con la idea de poder regresar a ella para mejorarla (cedepo, 1996). es importante recordar que este tipo de técnica no es una herramienta de uso aislado, que se aplican mecánicamente pues de hacerlo así es posible que se generen conflictos entre los participantes, o que se vuelva un espacio de mera diversión, no logrando así los objetivos propuestos (vargas vargas y bustillos, 1997). es por ello que se procura su uso como un todo integrado a partir de un eje rector que permita darle coherencia; además, suele acompañarse con técnicas adicionales como la entrevista y el análisis documental, como fue en el caso del presente proyecto. en un primer taller participativo se utilizaron técnicas como el mapeo (cómo conciben su escenario actual de praxis), priorizadora (principales preocupaciones y problemas en el trabajo cotidiano por importancia y frecuencia), telaraña (fortalezas y debilidades) y la elaboración de la uuis ideal (caracterización ideal de un programa de praxis comunitaria). los siguientes talleres estuvieron constituidos por sesiones colectivas de trabajo donde se elaboró un foda (fortalezas, oportunidades, debilidades y amenazas) común, delimitación de líneas de acción y ejes de 322 building participative, empowering & diverse communities trabajo conjunto. el objetivo general del trabajo colaborativo fue analizar y discutir las líneas teóricas-metodológicas de cada uui con la finalidad de construir un modelo de trabajo común, integrado, universitario, con líneas de acción que faciliten el avance de todas ellas, aprovechando las fortalezas y las experiencias de cada programa; así como operacionalizar acciones que permitan el cumplimiento e integración de las funciones sustantivas en diferentes escenarios, con impacto social a nivel estatal. la metodología empleada permitió desarrollar un trabajo colectivoparticipativo continuo que ha favorecido el reconocimiento, la identidad y compromiso grupal, el compartir saberes generados en las comunidades, así como plantear líneas de acción y propuestas de trabajo colectivas. resultados los principales resultados descritos a continuación apuntan a que si bien los y las participantes han tenido experiencias de praxis comunitaria distintas espacial y temporalmente, comparten diversos elementos y circunstancias sobre los cuales es preciso trabajar de manera consciente ya sea para fortalecerlas o modificarlas, según sea el caso, sobre todo considerando la existencia de un genuino interés por el trabajo colaborativo. en cuanto a la forma como conciben su escenario actual de praxis, el mapeo reportó que los diferentes programas cuentan con espacios muy diversos. unos cuentan con dos escenarios para su desempeño; esto es, un lugar para la planeación y otro, en comunidades, donde se realiza el trabajo de acción. estos están, en su mayoría, ubicados en zonas del interior del estado o en poblaciones con características que presentan pobreza o cierto grado de marginación. otros programas, en cambio, cuentan con escenarios que tienen las dos funciones: de planeación y de intervención; es decir, es en el mismo sitio donde se llevan a cabo ambas actividades. respecto a los espacios de trabajo la mayoría de los programas señalaron que la infraestructura con la que cuentan y los recursos materiales y físicos que tienen son en mínimo suficientes para llevar a cabo las actividades de planeación, retroalimentación y evaluación del programa. sin embargo, en el escenario de acción esto varía, pues algunos cuentan con espacios definidos para trabajar; es decir, tienen el lugar, los recursos y los espacios necesarios para realizar sus actividades. sin embargo, para otros los espacios son muy variables dada la misma naturaleza de sus actividades o las características propias de las comunidades donde se insertan. es importante señalar que todos los programas señalaron la existencia de espacios significativos que les permiten interacción, intercambio y convivencia entre estudiantes de diversas disciplinas, docentes y la misma comunidad. estos espacios son aquellos lugares formales de reunión tales como las salas de junta y salas de organización y los espacios informales como los parques, pasillos y la cocina del lugar donde tienen su base de trabajo. explicaron que son significativos debido a que consideran que son espacios en donde se comparten las experiencias de trabajo, se intercambian opiniones, se discuten y analizan propuestas, se toman decisiones, se da retroalimentación o simplemente se mantienen conversaciones informales que también son sumamente productivas pues repercuten en aspectos de trabajo o en la integración social del grupo. las principales preocupaciones y problemas en el trabajo cotidiano (por importancia y frecuencia) fue posible averiguarlas mediante la herramienta priorizadora. en términos generales destacaron como necesidades más severas el lograr contar con planes de estudio para diferentes disciplinas que realmente incluyan aspectos de trabajo comunitario pues éste se presenta de 323 building participative, empowering & diverse communities manera muy incipiente en los contenidos académicos. de este modo, no existe una congruencia entre la formación en el aula y lo que requieren aplicar los y las estudiantes en el contexto de trabajo comunitario. además, la estructura académica de enseñanza es muy disciplinar por lo que el trabajo interdisciplinario se dificulta y son pocos los espacios para que los y las estudiantes puedan reflexionar y analizar de manera compartida los aprendizajes y experiencias que están adquiriendo de la comunidad de modo que puedan construir un trabajo colaborativo. otro problema importante es la falta de involucramiento y reconocimiento institucional que deriva en que la institución se mantenga al margen del trabajo realizado y se tiene poca comunicación con las facultades. todo esto deriva en el poco interés de los y las docentes y estudiantes en cuanto al trabajo comunitario pues tiene poca o nula retribución académica. por otro lado, entre los problemas más frecuentes destacan la insuficiencia de personal para el trabajo comunitario y se tienen pocos asesores académicos que supervisen o retroalimenten el trabajo realizado en campo. se requiere mayor capacitación para el personal existente. además, existe la falta de tiempo para realizar acciones de vinculación intra e interinstitucional del programa, es poca la difusión de los programas, los recursos económicos para financiar estudiantes son escasos, y éstos estudiantes carecen de tiempo para realizar las actividades en escenarios reales dadas las características de currícula poco flexibles que obstaculizan la posibilidad del trabajo in situ. la telaraña y el análisis foda evidenciaron que las fortalezas comunes a todos los programas son fundamentalmente el conocimiento que tienen de las comunidades, el compromiso y la experiencia por parte de los equipos de trabajo. sin embargo, se evidencian diferencias en cuanto a otras fortalezas. así, existen programas que cuentan con un modelo teórico-metodológico de trabajo, capacitación continua, infraestructura, equipamiento, liderazgo regional, vinculación y reconocimiento nacional e internacional, mientras que otros todavía tienen que trabajar al respecto. en cuanto a las debilidades, la más frecuente y común ha sido la falta de personal o la inestabilidad laboral del mismo, además de la falta de un trabajo conjunto y comunicación entre los diferentes programas, así como la falta de difusión de sus resultados. por otro lado, la falta de sistematización de los programas es una debilidad común que se produce ante el desconocimiento de cómo llevar a cabo esta tarea y la falta de asesoría para desarrollar el trabajo. otras de las debilidades que han impactado el trabajo de praxis comunitaria realizada por algunos de los programas ha sido la falta de recursos económicos para el mantenimiento de equipos y el desarrollo de actividades, la falta de mecanismos de evaluación, así como la falta de capacitaciones administrativas y programas sistematizados de actividades. con toda la información generada mediante la telaraña, análisis foda y priorizadora, se concentraron las fortalezas y debilidades en las siguientes áreas: equipo de trabajo, capacitación, funciones sustantivas, desarrollo de competencias profesionales, gestión y vinculación, infraestructura, estructura organizacional, evaluación y sistematización e impacto en el desarrollo comunitario, cuyo resumen se presenta en la tabla 1 324 building participative, empowering & diverse communities tabla 1. fortalezas y debilidades por área fortalezas debilidades equipo de trabajo equipo coordinador con experiencia en el área. equipo interdisciplinario comprometido y satisfecho. participación de estudiantes a través de diversas modalidades. insuficiente personal, inestabilidad laboral, exceso de trabajo y falta de reconocimiento institucional. falta de asesores-académicos comprometidos y capacitados. dificultades para el trabajo interdisciplinario. falta de perfiles profesionales para el trabajo comunitario. capacitación personal capaz de generar procesos de capacitación en: iap, planeación estratégica, desarrollo comunitario, entre otros. limitaciones en la comunicación con las comunidades, al no hablar maya. faltan programas de inducción y capacitación . falta información acerca del modelo educativo y académico. funciones sustantivas se realizan actividades de docencia y de extensión. no se dan las condiciones políticas académicasadministrativas para integrar las tres funciones sustantivas (docencia-investigación-extensión) desarrollo de competencias profesionales es un escenario propicio para nuevos aprendizajes y el desarrollo de habilidades específicas. baja participación de los estudiantes. incompatibilidad entre los horarios escolares, programas y comunidades. gestión y vinculación capacidad de gestión y vinculación. vínculos con licenciaturas y otras instituciones educativas. experiencia exitosa en premios y financiamientos externos. falta de tiempo para realizar actividades de difusión y vinculación. dificultades para la vinculación con algunas facultades. infraestructura espacios, instalaciones amplias, equipo y materiales propios. se requiere de mayor financiamiento. los recursos y espacios físicos son inadecuados e insuficientes. estructura organizacional falta de un programa de trabajo a mediano y largo plazo. falta de organización interna-externa para la realización de las actividades. falta redefinir los perfiles de puesto. falta socialización, interacción y comunicación entre los equipos. impacto en el desarrollo comunitario se realiza una atención integral multidisciplinaria, basada en los diagnósticos de salud, a bajo costo. los participantes establecen relaciones positivas con el equipo. el tiempo de trabajo de campo es insuficiente para generar un impacto más allá de lo familiar. la demanda del servicio rebasa la formación universitaria. la comunidad percibe que el trabajo realizado es para ciertos grupos y no con toda la comunidad. evaluación y sistematización se cuenta con procesos formales de sistematización. no se han realizado procesos formales de evaluación. 325 building participative, empowering & diverse communities en cuanto a la elaboración de la uuis ideal, cada programa planteó su propuesta. a pesar de la diversidad de opciones presentadas, entre ellas comparten que las uuis deben ser espacios donde se logre la integración de las funciones universitarias de docencia, investigación y extensión, que sean reconocidas institucionalmente, que cuenten con un modelo teorícometodológico general que facilite el intercambio de experiencias entre las diversas unidades, que cuente con personal que cumpla el perfil y que sea constantemente capacitado, que se tenga la infraestructura física y el equipo necesario así como sistemas de seguimiento, evaluación y sistematización del trabajo realizado. sobre las líneas de acción y estrategias para poder lograr la implementación de este tipo de escenarios con las características propuestas, señalaron contar con una coordinación general de todas las uuis, elaborar el marco teórico-metodológico que aborde aspectos como globalización, cultura de colaboración, participación ciudadana, redefinición del poder, ética para la sustentabilidad, interdisciplina, investigación acción participativa, sustentabilidad, desarrollo local, interculturalidad, perspectiva de género, desarrollo humano y capacidades comunitarias, entre otros aspectos. así también, se propuso realizar una planeación estratégica, contar con un grupo asesor técnico/operativo y un cuerpo académico que favorezca la integración de funciones, establecer un fondo patrimonial, mecanismos de reconocimiento institucional, estrategias de difusión, sistemas de comunicación, programas de capacitación, diversas formas de inserción en comunidad, redes interinstitucionales y trabajo multisectorial que promuevan el desarrollo local sustentable, así como revisar los planes de estudios de las diversas licenciaturas que se imparte en la universidad, el desarrollo de investigación participativa y aplicada, maximizar recursos, involucrar a docentes y contar con promotores comunitarios. finalmente, a partir de todo lo anteriormente mencionado, este grupo de coordinadores de uuis y programas de praxis comunitaria han continuado su trabajo colaborativo y para ello han establecido los siguientes ejes de trabajo, con tareas a corto mediano y largo plazo. así a corto plazo están trabajando en la identificación de necesidades de capacitación. al momento se ha identificado una falta de conocimiento en políticas institucionales y del modelo educativo y académico de la uady, así como de mecanismos de procuración de fondos, y de sistemas de sistematización y evaluación, especialmente de impacto. para resolver esta necesidad han establecido una serie de talleres que están siendo realizados mediante dos mecanismos: por un lado, los capacitadores surgen de entre ellos mismos si cuentan con la experiencia previa en su trabajo cotidiano, o bien se ubica a personas que puedan servir de capacitadores por su conocimiento del tema en caso de que ninguno de ellos pueda hacerlo. estos espacios de capacitación se consideran también como una estrategia para disminuir el trabajo aislado que ha caracterizado la labor de las uuis, que han tenido poca comunicación entre ellas. a corto plazo están trabajando también en el establecimiento de mecanismos de difusión de las uuis (seminarios, foros y otros eventos curriculares y extracurriculares), la definición de los recursos humanos, materiales y financieros que realmente se necesitan y en el establecimiento de una infraestructura común y mecanismos formales de relación que permita mayor trabajo colaborativo entre ellos y la mayor participación de académicos y estudiantes. preparan una presentación para los directivos con el fin de promover la revaloración institucional del trabajo en el área de desarrollo comunitario y están diseñando diferentes acciones que permitan incrementar la relación con los cuerpos académicos y con las líneas de investigación ya establecidas 326 building participative, empowering & diverse communities institucionalmente a mediano plazo se trabaja en diseñar mecanismos que permitan garantizar la estabilidad laboral del personal que cumpla con los requisitos de trabajo en las uuis, de modo que con ello se contribuya a disminuir la rotación de personal existente. para ello se está haciendo una revisión del perfil idóneo del personal y se están elaborando propuestas específicas para los tabuladores de ingreso y promoción del reglamento del personal académico y del reglamento de estímulos académicos que permitan reconocer el trabajo de las uuis. también se trabaja en la procuración de fondos tanto de manera interna como externa que garantice la continuidad de los programas y que permita realizar las actividades de manera adecuada. así a nivel interno se trabaja en conseguir financiamiento que permita contar con un presupuesto para alojamiento y equipamiento básico, profesores adscritos a las facultades que funjan como asesores y/o supervisores y financiamiento base para el trabajo operativo. de manera externa se requiere trabajar en la búsqueda de financiamientos de organismos nacionales e internacionales que permitan apoyar a proyectos específicos especialmente en cuanto a becas para estudiantes, equipo, transporte y viáticos. finalmente, a mediano/largo plazo se están estableciendo mecanismos para favorecer la revisión de los planes d estudio de modo que las licenciaturas preparen a sus estudiantes para el trabajo comunitario con asignaturas obligatorias y optativas. se busca también incorporar a las uuis al trabajo institucional de manera que favorezca la integración de funciones, por ejemplo mediante el diseño y elaboración de modelos teóricos-metodológicos y el trabajo en el desarrollo de propuestas de políticas públicas que pudieran tener mayor impacto en la sociedad. discusión los resultados evidencian cómo el trabajo en equipo interdisciplinario logrado permitió construir un espacio para compartir las experiencias de trabajo comunitario y la socialización de experiencias particulares lo cual constituye un proceso de beneficio colectivo que genera espacios de reflexión que permiten que los programas de praxis comunitaria se contextualicen desde perspectivas diferentes. pero también se evidencia la necesidad de contar con un marco teórico metodológico que sustente el trabajo colectivo e interdisciplinario, así como tener una planeación estratégica, una estructura organizacional redefinida que incluya una coordinación general de las uuis, procesos de evaluación y sistematización de las experiencias, mayor difusión, más relaciones interinstitucionales e intersectoriales, capacitación en diversas áreas que permita tener recursos humanos que cumplan un perfil adecuado, mejores sistemas de comunicación que permitan el intercambio entre los diferentes actores, ser autosustentables y lograr la revalorización del significado del servicio social a nivel institucional, así como lograr mayor compromiso institucional y de las dependencias universitarias, entre otros. se requiere aprovechar las experiencias de las uuis y los programas de praxis comunitaria existentes para construir un modelo compartido que integre las funciones sustantivas universitarias y en esta labor es indispensable recrear el papel de las estructuras universitarias y las relaciones de poder imperantes, de tal manera que se logre el respaldo, reconocimiento y apoyo económico por parte de las autoridades universitarias. por otra parte, consideramos esta experiencia como un ejemplo de la integración de conocimientos de diversas áreas de la psicología con un fin práctico. es común que los psicólogos consideren que ejercicio en un área de la psicología requiere de competencias desarrolladas en específico de modo que los conocimientos y habilidades adquiridas o propias de otras áreas son 327 building participative, empowering & diverse communities distantes, ajenas incluso inservibles. en esta experiencia hemos requerido de todos los recursos con los que contábamos en competencias de investigación, psicología organizacional, psicología educativa, psicología comunitaria e incluso de otras áreas disciplinares al tener un peso tan importante aspectos como la sustentabilidad, la interculturalidad, entre otros. hemos podido comprobar nuevamente la importancia de desarrollar procesos de consulta participativos, en los que se compartan y reflexionen experiencias como estrategia para poder desarrollar grandes proyectos. además, trabajar de esta manera permite cumplir con varios objetivos a la vez: generar propuestas diversas y creativas, socializar información, generar involucramiento y compromiso, entre otros. por último, vemos la importancia de realizar experiencias colectivas de este tipo que favorezcan el diseño de nuevas opciones de praxis comunitaria que impacten de manera favorable en diversos sectores de la sociedad como una forma de contribuir a la formación integral y la responsabilidad social y con ello lograr su pertinencia y trascendencia social como universidad. finalmente, la propuesta completa sobre el desarrollo de las uuis deberá continuar con su proceso de análisis, reflexión y retroalimentación mediante la devolución de información analizada a los y las participantes con la finalidad de que la propuesta sea enriquecida para posteriormente trabajar en la socialización de los resultados finales a toda la comunidad universitaria. el fin último es generar una propuesta viable de ser implementada y apropiada por parte de la universidad, como institución pero también por parte de sus diversos actores, de modo que contribuya al desarrollo del bienestar social en nuestro estado y región en cumplimiento de la pertinencia, responsabilidad y trascendencia social que nos corresponde como universitarios. referencias ander egg, e. (1990). repensando la investigación acción participativa. comentarios, críticas y sugerencias. méxico: el ateneo. balcazar, f.e.,taylor, r.r., kielhofner, g.w., tamley, k., benzinger, t., carlin, n. & johnson, s. (2006). participatory action research. general principles and a study with chronic health condition. in: jason, l.a., keys, c.b., suárez-balcazar, y., taylor, r.r. & davis, m.i. (2006). participatory community research (pp. 17-35). washington d.c.: american psychological association. cedepo (1996). técnicas participativas para la educación popular. buenos aires: lumen humanitas. majul zamudio, j. (2003). métodos de aproximación al futuro y su horizonte temporal méxico: inp/ ciecas. universidad autónoma de yucatán [uady] (1984). ley orgánica. mérida, yuc., méxico: autor. vargas vargas, l. y bustillos, g. (1997). técnicas participativas para la educación popular. tomo ii. buenos aires: lumen humanitas. 328 building participative, empowering & diverse communities análisis de competencias. una propuesta metodológica de selección de promotores comunitarios teresita castillo león* irene carolina cauich chávez nancy marine evia alamilla universidad autónoma de yucatán *cleon@uady.mx resumen el programa sistemas agroforestales escolares y comunitarios (psafec) tiene como propósito la conservación de la biodiversidad empleando técnicas agroecológicas, con la finalidad de favorecer la seguridad alimentaria de seis comunidades rurales en yucatán, méxico. para alcanzar sus objetivos realiza diversas acciones como el desarrollo de solares escolares en secundarias técnicas agropecuarias. para ésta y otras acciones el programa requiere contar con la participación de diversos actores. los(as) promotores(as) comunitarios(as) tienen un rol crítico para lograr los objetivos del programa pues deben ser capaces de trabajar en conjunto con todos los y las participantes para promover el programa, así como difundir los conocimientos y habilidades relacionados con prácticas agroecológicas en beneficio de la comunidad. este trabajo presenta una propuesta metodológica para la definición y elección de promotores(as) comunitarios(as), a partir del desarrollo de un perfil de puesto considerando las competencias pertinentes que posibiliten un reclutamiento y una selección adecuada al puesto. palabras clave: perfil de puesto, promotor comunitario, procesos de reclutamiento y selección introducción los procesos de modernización y desarrollo actualmente imperantes han hecho que el sistema campesino mexicano se encuentre hoy día en crisis. esta situación que ha traído como consecuencia el desuso de prácticas agrícolas tradicionales como la milpa y el traspatio o solar como ejemplos de sistemas tradicionales de producción de alimentos en la península de yucatán, en méxico. en esta zona, y durante muchos años, la producción de alimentos en el traspatio fue complementaria a la milpa, siendo base de la economía de las familias campesinas. sin embargo, actualmente existe una pérdida del conocimiento de las prácticas tradicionales de aprovechamiento de los recursos naturales disponibles, ante la llegada de sistemas de producción basados en el libre mercado, lo que implica, adicionalmente, el olvido de rasgos sociales de gran significado cultural, como son la cohesión familiar y comunitaria, el enriqueciendo y difusión del conocimiento sobre fenómenos biológicos y las prácticas culturales asociadas a ellos (guerramokul 2005). esta situación es lamentable dado que el empleo de estas prácticas resultaba pertinente, pues por ejemplo, la producción de traspatio es idónea por la diversidad biológica que en mailto:*cleon@uady.mx 329 building participative, empowering & diverse communities él se maneja. además, gliessman (1990, 1998) señala que el uso del traspatio o solar como agroecosistema tradicional, sirve como un modelo de sostenibilidad por lo que resulta importante su conservación. es dentro de este contexto que el psafec propone la recuperación del uso de estrategias alternativas para el manejo, producción y conservación de los recursos naturales mediante la promoción del empleo de técnicas de producción tradicionales y agroecológicas como el ka’anché, la composta, la cría de especies animales locales y la producción de especies vegetales propias de la región. la finalidad del programa es impactar en la seguridad alimentaria de las comunidades participantes y actualmente se trabaja en seis comunidades del interior del estado de yucatán pero próximamente se incorporarán cinco comunidades más. en ellas se está trabajando en el desarrollo de solares escolares que sirvan como laboratorios vivos para los y las estudiantes de manera que luego extiendan estos conocimientos a sus familias y otros habitantes de la comunidad de modo que se incremente el uso de solares o traspatio en los hogares de la región. en este tipo de acciones que realiza el psafec se requiere la participación comunitaria, donde el/la promotor(a) local es pieza clave en el proceso para alcanzar los objetivos. sin embargo, un problema constante ha sido el ineficiente desempeño de algunos promotores comunitarios, lo que impactaba en dificultades con la continuidad del programa y el logro de sus objetivos. las personas que dirigen el programa han reconocido en su equipo la falta de experiencia y de conocimientos teórico – metodológicos para intervenir en este problema. de ahí que se dieron a la tarea de buscar una solución encontrándose que existen pocas propuestas con un enfoque teórico – metodológica adecuado que indiquen cómo elegir promotores locales en zonas rurales que cuenten con las características idóneas para este trabajo. es a partir de la necesidad anterior que surge el proyecto de desarrollar una propuesta metodológica para definir el perfil del promotor comunitario para el trabajo en el manejo y conservación de recursos naturales mediante el empleo de técnicas agroecológicas, así como las estrategias para su reclutamiento y selección. son los resultados de dicho esfuerzo los que presentan en el presente trabajo. metodo la propuesta metodológica se trabajó desde un enfoque de investigación acción participativa (iap) (ander egg, 1990; balcazar, taylor, kielhofner, tamley, benzinger, carlin & johnson, 2006). la investigación la entendemos como un proceso sistemático y crítico que busca comprender algún aspecto de la realidad con una expresa finalidad práctica. la acción, asume la forma de realizar el estudio como un modo de intervención pues es una investigación orientada a la acción. la participación implica un proceso de construcción social en el cual están involucrados tanto los y las investigadoras como la gente destinataria del proyecto como personas activas que conocen y son capaces de transformar su realidad. el trabajo ha incluido las tres fases de este tipo de investigación: el diagnóstico, la intervención y la evaluación. en la fase diagnóstica se utilizaron técnicas como la entrevista semi estructuada, cuestionarios, talleres comunitarios participativos, mesas de discusión y revisión documental, con la participación del equipo responsable del programa, personal directivo y docente de cada una de las escuelas secundarias técnicas participantes, promotores(as) comunitarios(as) que colaboran y habitantes de la comunidad, teniendo un total de 100 participantes durante el 330 building participative, empowering & diverse communities diagnostico. resultados a continuación presentamos los principales resultados en cada una de las fases de la iap realizada. el diagnóstico. entre otros aspectos se trabajó en la identificación del significado de la participación social y comunitaria para los y las participantes. para todas las personas involucradas la participación social implica, básicamente, la reunión y el involucramiento por parte de los diferentes grupos sociales en un proyecto o trabajo, con un fin o propósito común, el cual lleve consigo una serie de resultados y productos. sin embargo, la mayoría de los y las participantes señalan que a través del tiempo, la participación social se ha visto envuelta en problemáticas de diferentes tipos: unas asociadas a las estrategias utilizadas por parte del gobierno y los partidos políticos para promover la participación social de sus pobladores y otras relacionadas con la diversidad de intereses personales y la supremacía de éstos en detrimento de los intereses colectivos; otras más asociadas a características de sus poblaciones y pobladores. otro aspecto fundamental que fue abordado en la fase de diagnóstico fue el concepto de líder o promotor comunitario. al respecto, algunos participantes señalaron que existen diferencias entre lo que es ser líder y ser promotor. en primer lugar, se relaciona líder con el que ordena, hace grilla o mala política mientras que el promotor procura involucrar a los diversos participantes y siempre trabaja en la solución de los problemas buscando el bienestar colectivo: “un líder es el que dice las cosas sin tomar en cuenta a los demás, el promotor es el que tiene idea pero lo pone a los demás, qué se va a hacer, qué se puede hacer y opiniones de los demás”. “…[promotor es] el que va a involucrar a todos los integrantes, los va motivar hacia un fin común, él que trata de manejar para bien alguna situación; es el que representa, solucionador de problemas, es aquel que tiene la facilidad de palabra, es aquel que trae programas sin interés, y que los desarrolla y que tienen su beneficio, el líder comunitario es aquel que le dan para dar y el otro es el que trae para mejorar, toma la opinión de los demás y tiene el don de convencer a la gente”. otros entrevistados consideraron que un promotor es alguien que puede mover gente, dirigirla, que puede convencer y tiene seguidores, pone el ejemplo, trabaja con la verdad y que orienta a partir de su experiencia. involucra a todos los integrantes en las actividades pues los motiva y guía hacia un fin común, se preocupa por promover y organizar actividades que deriven en beneficios para la comunidad. en cuanto a las funciones y actividades del promotor, señalaron que la función principal del promotor debe ser el trabajo con las familias, promoviendo el proyecto del cual son promotores. otra función sería la de orientación y asesoría. también debería ser alguien que no solo ejecute sino que intervenga en el desarrollo del proyecto y que sea el principal difusor del mismo en la comunidad. particularmente dentro del psafec, la mayoría enfatiza la importancia de la vinculación del trabajo realizado en la escuela con la comunidad que incluye actividades como las visitas domiciliarias, concretizar a la gente, tomar su opinión, planear actividades y organizar los grupos para realizarlas, darles seguimiento, apoyar cuando algo esté fallando, vender productos del solar, animar la participación de las personas de la comunidad y proporcionar informes del trabajo 331 building participative, empowering & diverse communities realizado, como señala un participante: “pues, el papel de doña nelly, es que siga siendo promotora, no abandonarlos, constantemente, o cada mes digamos, mínimo cada mes, que reúna a los padres de familia y que les pregunte más o menos cómo sigue el proyecto, cómo están sus animales como estos.” para poder cumplir adecuadamente con sus funciones el promotor o promotora comunitario(a) debe poseer ciertas características consideradas como deseables. al respecto, los y las participantes señalaron diversas características que idealmente debe tener un promotor comunitario para poder cumplir con sus funciones y actividades. al organizarlas es posible categorizarlas de la siguiente manera: personales entre las principales características personales mencionadas por los y las participantes se destacan vivir en el sitio donde se desarrolla el proyecto del cual va a ser promotor, seguir sus costumbres, que sea conocido y bien visto por la comunidad, con buenas relaciones con diferentes personas. debe ser alguien sin vicios, con buena conducta y que de un buen ejemplo. se sugiere que no pertenezca a ningún partido político y que tenga disponibilidad de tiempo. no es determinante el que sea hombre o mujer, ni la edad, siempre y cuando tenga las actitudes, habilidades y conocimientos necesarios para desempeñar su labor. por último, señalaron la importancia de hablar el idioma comúnmente hablado en la comunidad, en este caso la maya. actitudes ser participativo, activo, dinámico, positivo, bueno, honesto, confiable, conciliador, sensible, paciente, comprensivo, amable, independiente, creativo, extrovertido (sociable), accesible, abierto, con buen carácter, ánimo e iniciativa y con ideales y don de servicio. debe tomar en serio lo que se le está encomendando, querer hacerlo, ser responsable, comprometido, correcto, puntual, que no tienda a favorecer solo a algunas personas (equitativo) y con interés en el proyecto del cual forma parte. habilidades debe ser hábil para manejar diversas situaciones, conflictos y resolución de problemas, capacidad de mando y manejo de grupos, buena comunicación (facilidad de palabra) y capacidad de relacionarse con los demás. poder mover gente, convencer a los demás e involucrarlos, saber escuchar, con tacto para tratar a la gente, capaz de establecer confianza con otros, organizado, capaz de trabajar en equipo, así como poder transmitir conocimientos y ser capaz de pedir ayudar. conocimientos debe tener un perfil mínimo de conocimientos sobre el proyecto al que se incorpora, saber leer, escribir y sacar cuentas. tener conocimiento de su comunidad, en términos de los que tienen y lo que hace falta. en el caso particular del psafec es importante el conocimiento en técnicas agroecológicas. finalmente, como parte del diagnóstico, fueron identificadas algunas problemáticas especialmente importantes respecto de los diferentes actores del programa. por un lado, fue evidente que los(as) promotores(as) actuales desconocen los objetivos del programa, desconocen algunas de sus funciones y reportan poco seguimiento y asesoría para desempeñar su trabajo. en cuanto al personal de las escuelas, éste conoce de manera parcial los objetivos y alcances del programa, desconocen sus funciones en el programa y manifiesta no entender cómo el promotor 332 building participative, empowering & diverse communities debe trabajar en vinculación con la escuela y la comunidad. por último, los responsables del programa asignan funciones y actividades que no corresponden a los promotores y carecen de estrategias adecuadas para el reclutamiento y selección de promotores comunitarios. la intervención. el diagnóstico permitió conocer las características necesarias que debe tener el promotor(a) comunitario(a) para trabajar eficientemente en el manejo y conservación de recursos naturales dentro del psafec. a partir de lo anterior se elaboró la propuesta metodológica para el reclutamiento y selección de un promotor(a) comunitario(a). esta incluye un perfil de competencias, definidas como los indicios generales de aptitudes, rasgos de personalidad y conocimientos adquiridos que son observables en la vida cotidiana e igualmente en situaciones de evaluación (claude levyleboyer, 1992, en alles, 2004). así, el perfil de puesto por competencias es entendido como un modelo conciso, fiable y válido para predecir el éxito en un puesto y consiste en una descripción de los conocimientos, habilidades y actitudes que debe poseer el candidato(a) a ocupar un puesto y que son necesarios para cumplir adecuadamente con las actividades y lograr los resultados que le son requeridos. asimismo, se diseñó el descriptivo de puesto del promotor(a) comunitaria en el que se plantean las tareas y obligaciones a realizar en el trabajo. todo ello permite reclutar y seleccionar de mejor manera a las y los futuros promotores, evaluar su desempeño y detectar necesidades de capacitación relacionadas con el puesto. el proceso de intervención se desarrolló en cinco pasos: 1.desarrollo del perfil y el descriptivo de puesto por competencias como primera tarea se definieron las funciones más importantes que debe realizar un(a) promotor(a) dentro del psafec. las sesiones de discusión en grupo permitieron determinar que las funciones esenciales son: promoción y coordinación de la participación: facilitar las condiciones que permitan a los habitantes y distintos grupos (de la escuela y de la comunidad) involucrarse y participar en las distintas actividades a realizar dentro del psafec, así como coordinar dicha participación. asesoría y seguimiento: ofrecer orientación y retroalimentación a las personas y grupos involucrados en el psafec en relación a las actividades que realicen dentro del mismo. difusión: colaborar en diversas actividades para la transmisión de información que permita dar a conocer los objetivos, alcances y avances del psafec. vinculación y gestión: promover y establecer apoyos y estrategias de trabajo conjunto con instituciones de la comunidad y autoridades municipales que favorezcan el mantenimiento y uso eficiente de los recursos dentro del psafec. 2.establecimiento de las competencias necesarias para el puesto y definirlas de todas las características deseables anteriormente mencionadas se escogieron aquellas más directamente relacionadas con las funciones que finalmente se consideraron como las más pertinentes en el trabajo de un(a) promotor(a) comunitario(a) 3.diseño del perfil de puesto del promotor este se elaboró mediante la clasificación de las características deseables escogidas en el paso anterior en términos de conocimientos, habilidades y actitudes, quedando de la siguiente manera: 333 building participative, empowering & diverse communities perfil de puesto del promotor(a) comunitario(a) requisitos en… a. conocimientos conocimiento de la comunidad conocimientos básicos en técnicas agroecológicas y tecnológicas. sacar cuentas hablar maya y español (lectura y escritura). b. habilidades planificación y organización creativo – práctico innovador liderazgo (conciliador, comunicación, sensibilidad interpersonal) c. actitudes responsabilidad confianza en sí mismo – iniciativa flexibilidad – adaptabilidad para cada una de estas competencias se elaboró una descripción de su contenido específico. por ejemplo, para liderazgo, esta habilidad fue descrita como la capacidad de orientar la acción de los grupos humanos en una dirección determinada, fijando objetivos, inspirando adhesión, compromiso y fidelidad para seguirlos y anticipando escenarios de desarrollo de la acción de ese grupo. además, puede escuchar atentamente, comprende y hace preguntas, integrando la opinión de los otros, expresando conceptos claramente, exponiendo aspectos positivos y negativos. es capaz de dirigir o manejar una discusión utilizando técnicas ganar – ganar proponiendo alternativas para negociar los mejores acuerdos, centrándose en el problema y no en la persona. finalmente, puede establecer y mantener un ambiente propicio para relaciones cordiales, recíprocas, cálidas y de colaboración con distintas personas, preocupándose por su bienestar personal, con el fin de lograr compromisos duraderos que fortalezcan la relación. 4.diseño de la entrevista por competencias para promotores el objetivo de este tipo de entrevista (alles, 1999) es conocer los conocimientos, las habilidades y las actitudes que posee la persona con relación al puesto. se realizó mediante una guía de preguntas que indagaban sobre comportamientos e incidentes críticos en el pasado de una persona que evidencien las competencias que poseen de modo que sirvieran como predictores del desempeño actual o futuro para el puesto en específico. 5.reclutamiento y valoración de candidatos: posteriormente, con base en este perfil se reclutó y seleccionó a promotores en tres comunidades de las comunidades participantes que no contaban con un promotor en ese momento. particularmente, el reclutamiento consistió en realizar un conjunto de procedimientos que estuvieron encaminados a atraer un número suficiente de candidatos(as) potencialmente cualificado y capaz para ocupar los puestos vacantes. en este programa utilizamos el voceo, los carteles en lugares públicos y las circulares escolares. para la selección se utilizó primero una entrevista inicial para elegir a aquellos(as) candidatos(as) más idóneos para continuar con el proceso. a estos últimos se les aplicó la entrevista 334 building participative, empowering & diverse communities por competencias diseñada. para cada una de las competencias se valoró a cada candidato en términos si era elegible, con potencial o no elegible. la valoración consistió en interpretar la información, sopesando los diversos factores relacionados con el individuo, el puesto y la organización. en cuanto a las características del candidato(a) se debieron equilibrar los méritos y deficiencias frente a las demandas del puesto; además, las necesidades de la organización y las del candidato(a) tienen que compararse. finalmente, el bienestar y la satisfacción probables de ambos deben determinarse con base en las contribuciones totales que cada uno hace al otro (richino, 2000). la presentación de esta información se realizó mediante la redacción de un informe de cada candidato(a) que contaba con el potencial o era elegible para desempeñar el puesto y de ahí se procedió a sesiones grupales por comunidad para decidir quién era el candidato o candidata más viable. la evaluación. el trabajo del promotor(a) comunitario(a) se considera central para la ejecución y éxito del psafec. dada la multiplicidad de sus funciones y tareas, resulta necesario generar estrategias de seguimiento y la evaluación (aguilar y ander egg, 1992; alles, 2002, 2003, 2004) que garanticen su participación eficiente y eficaz. la finalidad del seguimiento y la evaluación del trabajo del/la promotor(a) comunitario(a) se fundamenta, de manera directa, en la importancia de evidenciar los principales logros y avances, detectar las necesidades de capacitación de las y los promotores, así como en la identificación y reconocimiento de sus principales fortalezas en el trabajo cotidiano dentro del psafec. de manera indirecta permite conocer las dudas e inquietudes del/la promotor(a) respecto de su labor, así como identificar problemas que se presenten en el ejercicio de su trabajo (p.ej. problemas de comunicación, uso de recursos, de ejecución del proyecto o relacionados con la comunidad). además, es una fuente de información para determinar el impacto de la implementación de la propuesta metodológica para la selección de promotores(as) comunitarios(as), entre otros aspectos. este proceso se encuentra actualmente en proceso de diseño e implementación. considera el seguimiento continuo de la labor del promotor(a) mediante la elaboración de planes semestrales de trabajo con un seguimiento mensual de las actividades realizadas mediante la elaboración de diarios de campo. incluye también evaluaciones semestrales en las cuales participan diversos actores a través de entrevistas sobre las competencias del promotor y sesiones grupales sobre las actividades realizadas. comentarios finales el trabajo realizado evidencia la importancia de que en el contexto del trabajo comunitario de cuenten con procesos de acción tanto informales como formales y que las metodologías desarrolladas sean adecuadas a las características de la población. esta experiencia de trabajo interdisciplinario en diferentes comunidades rurales ha funcionado exitosamente pues el trabajo colaborativo entre los actores sociales permitió el desarrollo de esta propuesta metodológica que puede extenderse como un modelo de abordaje en proyectos similares. a partir de esta experiencia corroboramos nuevamente la necesidad fundamental de promover nuevas formas de participación social en las que no se promueva el paternalismo y por el contrario se favorezca el reconocimiento de la responsabilidad y participación social. en este sentido es fundamental que los gobiernos y los partidos políticos desarrollen acciones participativas 335 building participative, empowering & diverse communities verdaderamente comprometidas con las diversas realidades sociales, generando mecanismos que favorezcan el bienestar social mediante procesos de facilitación y seguimiento. dentro de las formas de participación social que se promuevan resulta importante la persona encargada de dirigir las actividades programadas dentro de un proyecto. se evidencia el importante papel que puede tener un(a) promotor(a) comunitario(a) al ser percibido como diferente de un líder. así, se enfatiza la necesidad de trabajar más en lograr involucrar y guiar a los y las participantes que en ordenar o dirigir verticalmente. esto difícilmente se logra si no se conoce a la comunidad y su gente y si no se tienen características y habilidades que posibiliten el trabajo en equipo. considerar lo anterior significa concebir al promotor(a) como un gestor, pero también como alguien en contacto continuo con la gente, capaz de convencer y ser verdaderamente el enlace entre los proyectos desarrollados y la comunidades pudiendo ser incluso considerado como un agente de cambio dado que debe ser más que un mero difusor o reproductor de acciones. debe tener un papel importante en la toma de decisiones del desarrollo del proyecto de manera que las acciones realizadas sean de beneficio y contribuyan al desarrollo social de la comunidad. referencias bibiliográficas aguilar, m. j. y ander-egg, e. (1992). evaluación de servicios y programas sociales. madrid: siglo veintiuno. alles, m. (1999). la entrevista laboral. 287 buenas respuestas a todas las preguntas laborales. buenos aires: granica. alles, m. (2002). desempeño por competencias. evaluación de 360°. buenos aires: granica. alles, m. (2003). diccionario de preguntas. gestión por competencias. buenos aires: granica. alles, (2004). gestión por competencias. el diccionario. buenos aires: granica. ander egg, e. (1990). repensando la investigación acción participativa. comentarios, críticas y sugerencias. méxico: el ateneo. balcazar, f.e.,taylor, r.r., kielhofner, g.w., tamley, k., benzinger, t., carlin, n. & johnson, s. (2006). participatory action research. general principles and a study with chronic health condition. in: jason, l.a., keys, c.b., suárez-balcazar, y., taylor, r.r. & davis, m.i. (2006). participatory community research (pp. 17-35). washington d.c.: american psychological association. gliessman, s. (1990). understanding the basis of sustainability for agriculture in the tropics: experiences in latin america. in c. a. edwards, r. lal, p. madden, r. m. miller & g. hause (ed.). sustainable agricultural systems. soil and water conservation. iowa, usa: ankey society. gliessman, s. r. (1998). agroecology: ecological processes in sustainable agriculture. ann arbor, mi., usa: ann arbor press. guerra mukul, r. r. (2005). factores sociales y económicos que definen el sistema de producción de traspatio en una comunidad de yucatán, méxico. tesis de maestría no publicada. cinvestav. mérida, yucatán, méxico. richino, s. (2000). selección de personal. cuaderno de evaluación psicológica. buenos aires: paidós. 336 building participative, empowering & diverse communities entre la felicidad y la disciplina: dimensiones conceptuales del bienestar de personas con padecimientos crónicos teresa m. torres lópez* carolina aranda beltrán* manuel pando moreno* josé gpe. salazar estrada* * centro universitario de ciencias de la salud. universidad de guadalajara e-mail: ttorres@cencar.udg.mx, ttorres@cucs.udg.mx resumen objetivo. explorar las dimensiones conceptuales del bienestar de personas con padecimientos crónicos de la ciudad de guadalajara, méxico, a fin de generar propuestas de intervención educativa en salud en materia de enfermedades crónicas. metodología. estudio transversal exploratorio realizado entre marzo y mayo de 2006 con 40 personas con diabetes mellitus e hipertensión arterial que participan en grupos de apoyo en centros de salud de la ciudad de guadalajara, méxico, seleccionadas por muestreo propositivo. se aplicaron entrevistas semiestructuradas mediante técnicas de listados libres y sorteo de montones. se indagaron términos asociados al concepto de bienestar y grupos de dimensiones conceptuales. se aplicó análisis de consenso mediante factorización de componentes principales y análisis dimensional, mediante conglomerados jerárquicos y escalas multidimensionales. resultados. el modelo de consenso mostró alta homogeneidad en las concepciones del bienestar (valor de 8.22). las dimensiones comunes en las concepciones fueron: ser responsable, la felicidad (con las subdimensiones de tranquilidad, tener fe y tener salud), la disciplina (subdimensiones: desarrollo y mantenimiento así como prolongar la vida) y el vivir a gusto (valor de verosimilitud: stress<0.28). conclusiones. las personas participantes mostraron en dichas dimensiones una visión holística del concepto de bienestar. las dimensiones de responsabilidad y disciplina hacen referencia decisiones voluntarias de tipo más bien personal, donde la familia y el aspecto comunitario no son incluidos. la segunda dimensión es sobre elementos de tipo mental y social donde se incluyó a la felicidad y el vivir a gusto. ello implica la práctica de acciones y cuidados de la salud mental, la vida espiritual y social. se encontró además asociación del concepto de bienestar con el de salud mental. palabras clave: bienestar, enfermedad crónica, concepciones culturales introduccion en informe sobre la salud en el mundo 2002 se calculó que 7,1 millones de defunciones en el mundo se podían atribuir a la hipertensión arterial, 4,4 millones a la hipercolesterolemia y 2,6 millones al exceso de peso. de acuerdo con el banco mundial la diabetes mellitus está aumentando en todas partes, habiendo alcanzado una prevalencia de 5,1% en 2003; la prevalencia es mayor en mailto:ttorres@cencar.udg.mx mailto:ttorres@cucs.udg.mx 337 building participative, empowering & diverse communities países de ingreso alto, donde alcanza 7,8%, y en países en desarrollo fluctúa desde 2,4 en áfrica al sur del sahara en su extremo más bajo, a una cifra máxima de 7,6% en europa oriental y asia central. a pesar de que la prevalencia de esta enfermedad es más alta en los países de ingreso alto, la mayor parte de la carga de morbilidad (que es más de 70%), se encuentra en las regiones en desarrollo debido a su mayor población (1). en méxico las afecciones crónico-degenerativas han cobrado creciente importancia no sólo como causa de muerte sino también, de manera muy importante, de discapacidad. los padecimientos que han recibido mayor atención son los de origen cardiovascular y metabólico: la ateroesclerosis y la diabetes. sin embargo, la artrosis, la enfermedad pulmonar obstructiva crónica y las afecciones que comprometen la salud mental merecen atención particular, pues contribuyen también al deterioro funcional y a la merma de la calidad de vida de manera muy significativa. la inequidad en el ingreso económico también influye en la prevalencia de estas afecciones (2). las enfermedades cardiovasculares ocuparon el primer lugar como causa de muerte (71 x 100 mil habitantes) de la población adulta en el año 2000, mientras que la diabetes mellitus ocupó el segundo lugar (47 x 100 mil habitantes) (3). en el estado de jalisco la hipertensión arterial tiene el 7º lugar en la frecuencia de enfermedades mientras que la diabetes mellitus ocupa el 9º lugar en el mismo estado (4). con estas cifras se visualiza a las enfermedades crónicas como un problema de salud en el mundo. esta visión epidemiológica sin embargo, no puede dar cuenta en forma integral de la problemática que implica el tener este padecimiento crónico, como tampoco lo proporciona sólo el aspecto médico del tratamiento y control de la enfermedad. los diversos estudios sobre las enfermedades crónicas pueden agruparse en dos grandes perspectivas: el punto de vista tradicional o etic; y el de los sujetos enfermos o emic1. el segundo punto de vista es el que resalta la vivencia del padecimiento, el de la persona como actor, que tiene que vérselas todos los días de su vida con la dolencia y su atención. el partir de las concepciones culturales propias del las personas con padecimientos crónicos permiten un acercamiento de mayor calidad por parte de los profesionales de la salud hacia éstas personas. un estudio que consideró el punto de vista de los directamente implicados en la situación de las enfermedades crónicas tuvo como objetivo identificar la construcción de la identidad como enfermo crónico. se encontró que las personas que ya se han identificado con una forma de vida donde aceptan su padecimiento, destacan la integración del conocimiento que se deriva de las diversas fuentes de información a las que tiene acceso, incluyendo el ello la experiencia propia. en el cual, se encuentra involucrado el desarrollo de nuevas formas de concebir su bienestar, entre las cuales se destaca la tranquilidad emocional y la vida espiritual (6). también desde el enfoque de la psicología positiva se ha criticado el hecho de que ha habido un énfasis en el estudio de la enfermedad, mientras que se han descuidado aspectos positivos, tales como el bienestar, la satisfacción, el optimismo y la felicidad entre otros, ignorándose los beneficios que éstos presentan para las personas (7). en particular el concepto de bienestar ha sido objeto de estudio desde diversas perspectivas 1 en el campo de la antropología la diferenciación de los conceptos emic y etic hace referencia al punto de vista del investigador, en la visión emic o visión desde dentro. permite acceder a información que se encuentra más allá de las apariencias que presentan las pautas de interacción, las costumbres y las creencias, lo cual permite entender el sentido que éstas pueden tener para la gente que las vive. en contraste, el término etic que designa la visión desde afuera (5). 338 building participative, empowering & diverse communities teóricas, ya que ha sido identificado como bienestar psicológico, bienestar subjetivo, equilibrio emocional y como uno de los principales componentes de la calidad de vida y de la salud mental positiva. el bienestar subjetivo esta compuesto de aspectos afectivo-emocionales (referidos a los estados de ánimo del sujeto) y otra centrada en los aspectos cognitivo valorativos (referidos a la evaluación de satisfacción que el sujeto hace de su propia vida). se incluye también a la felicidad como otro componente del bienestar donde la vida espiritual tiene un lugar importante (7). en las concepciones de salud integral se hace énfasis en el refuerzo de las evaluaciones positivas del entorno por parte del sujeto, que le permitan una participación activa con una alta cuota de bienestar subjetivo. así, existen determinantes macro sociales y micro sociales del bienestar subjetivo. entre los primeros se destaca el factor económico y la influencia de vivir en contextos individualistas o colectivistas. en lo micro social se incluye el estado civil, la satisfacción de la necesidades personales, los éxitos profesionales y personales, el apoyo y la participación sociales. esto último es un fuerte predictor de bienestar entre las personas jubiladas, mientras que la satisfacción en el trabajo los es entre los que se encuentran en edad laboral (8). los estudios empíricos en torno al concepto de bienestar han sido abordados principalmente con el uso de escalas diseñadas para su medición los cuales parten de diversas modalidades de la elaborada por denier (9,10,11) la cual mide las dimensiones de satisfacción global de vida, satisfacción con diversos dominios como es el trabajo, el afecto positivo y afecto negativo. la afectividad positiva está asociada a medidas de motivación de logro y de dominación social, a indicadores de conducta social, incluyendo la frecuencia de contactos, la satisfacción con amigos y las relaciones familiares, la implicación en organizaciones sociales y el establecimiento de relaciones nuevas (12). un estudio sobre bienestar subjetivo y salud con personas mayores de edad de la ciudad de la habana, cuba, fue realizado por fernández et al. (13), donde se encontró que una percepción positiva de la salud se relacionó con niveles más altos de satisfacción con la vida y de bienestar. sin embargo, podemos reconocer que al igual del concepto de salud mental, el de bienestar es un término ambiguo ya que no es ajeno al sistema de creencias y valores sociales, así como a su construcción simbólica a través del lenguaje. por ello se planteo partir las conceptualizaciones culturales propias de las personas con padecimientos crónicos a fin de conocer su punto de vista sobre este tema. el objetivo de este estudio fue explorar las dimensiones conceptuales del bienestar de personas con padecimientos crónicos de la ciudad de guadalajara, méxico, a fin de generar propuestas de intervención educativa en salud en materia de enfermedades crónicas. metodologia el estudio se realizó en la ciudad de guadalajara, méxico con dos grupos de personas con diabetes mellitus e hipertensión arterial que participan en grupos de apoyo de dos centros de salud de la secretaría de salud, ubicados en dos colonias populares del oriente de la ciudad, cuya población tiene un nivel socioeconómico medio bajo. la atención que se proporciona en estos centros a las personas con éstos padecimientos crónicos es de dos tipos: una en forma de consulta para llevar el control de la enfermedad y otra con la participación en un grupo de apoyo. en éstos últimos se llevan a cabo actividades físicas una vez por semana, pláticas educativas, talleres de 339 building participative, empowering & diverse communities cocina para preparar alimentos especiales para su dieta y otras actividades de tipo recreativo y cultural como son paseos, fiestas, etc. la prevalencia de éstas enfermedades en la ciudad de guadalajara para junio de 2006 era de 257 casos de personas con diabetes tipo i (106 hombres y 151 mujeres), 5 389 con diabetes mellitus (2145 hombres y 3244 mujeres) y 7 900 con hipertensión arterial (2640 hombres y 5260 mujeres). mientras que para ese mismo mes y año se registraron en el estado de jalisco 440 casos con diabetes tipo i, 16 720 con diabetes mellitus y 24 007 con hipertensión arterial (14) se realizó un trabajo de recolección sistemática de datos bajo el enfoque de la antropología cognitiva que estudia cómo los sujetos de diferentes culturas adquieren información y la procesan para generar decisiones y actuar de acuerdo a los valores normativos de su entorno (15). el diseño del estudio fue transversal exploratorio con niveles de análisis descriptivo y correlacional. en una primera etapa de entrevistas se aplicó la técnica de listados libres, a fin de obtener un repertorio de términos con los cuales se habilitó, posteriormente, la aplicación de las técnicas de sorteo de montones, a fin describir la organización de las distintas dimensiones conceptuales que los informantes elaboran en torno al término bienestar. el trabajo tuvo dos recolecciones sucesivas de datos, entre marzo y mayo de 2006: una con la técnica de listados libres y otra con las técnicas de sorteo de montones. en ambas recolecciones se entrevistaron 20 informantes, siendo un total de 40. el tamaño de la muestra en cada contexto se basó en el supuesto del modelo de consenso cultural de romney et al. (16) para el estudio de patrones culturales. el supuesto plantea que, en estudios de descripción cultural, el tamaño de muestra no debe ser grande, debido a que la correlación promedio entre informantes tiende a ser alta (0.5 ó más). en ese sentido, weller y romney (17) sugieren un tamaño mínimo de 17 informantes para clasificar el 95% de las preguntas correctamente, bajo un promedio de competencia cultural esperada (concordancia entre las respuestas individuales y el patrón estimado de respuestas correctas del grupo) de 0.5 y un nivel de confianza de 0.95. la estrategia de muestreo para la selección de entrevistados fue no probabilística propositiva (18), orientada a encontrar cierta variación en algunas características de los informantes: sexo, edad y diferentes enfermedades crónicas en todas las localidades las entrevistas se efectuaron en el centro de salud, durante o después de las actividades cotidianas del grupo. antes de cada entrevista se explicaron los objetivos del estudio y se obtuvo el consentimiento informado verbal, garantizándose a los informantes la confidencialidad y anonimato en la recolección y el análisis de la información. la participación de los entrevistados se sujetó a su aceptación voluntaria. las técnicas de recolección de datos se orientaron a la descripción del dominio cultural del concepto de bienestar. en la antropología cognitiva se entiende por dominio cultural al conjunto organizado de palabras o frases que, en distintos niveles cognitivos, hacen referencia a una esfera conceptual específica (19). en ese sentido, en la primera fase del estudio se aplicó la técnica de listados libres. esta técnica consiste en pedir a los informantes un listado escrito de términos o frases relacionados con una esfera conceptual particular en este caso la palabra: bienestar. luego de obtenidas las listas de palabras, se tabularon los términos por frecuencia de mención, lo que permitió escoger 18 términos de cada listado, a fin de generar instrumentos de recolección de sorteo de montones que se aplicaron en la segunda fase del estudio. esta técnica consiste en elaborar tarjetas para cada término y pedir a los informantes que formen grupos de cartas que 340 building participative, empowering & diverse communities contengan los términos más parecidos, sin importar el número de grupos generados. después se les pide que etiqueten a cada montón con una palabra que identifique el conjunto de las tarjetas seleccionadas. los datos generados en las dos fases de recolección fueron tabulados en matrices de palabra por palabra y sus valores fueron transformados a proporciones de similaridades. las matrices resultantes fueron analizadas por separado para los valores agregados y los valores individuales. en el caso de los valores agregados, las matrices fueron analizadas mediante conglomerados jerárquicos. este método asigna palabras a dimensiones conceptuales de acuerdo a la similaridad percibida por los informantes. el grado de similaridad entre palabras se expresó en una gráfica de diagrama de árbol con niveles de correlación. en forma complementaria, se hizo la representación espacial en dos dimensiones de las similaridades de las palabras representadas en los árboles de conglomerados, mediante escalas multidimensionales no métricas. con esta técnica se calculó el valor de stress como medida de bondad de ajuste de la representación de los conglomerados. esta medida se define como la suma de correspondencias entre pares de objetos dentro de la representación espacial. en el trabajo se siguió la propuesta de sturrock y rocha (20), quienes sugieren para una representación de 20 términos un valor de corte de stress menor a 0.28 y para 15 términos un valor menor de 0.23. en el caso de los valores individuales, las matrices fueron analizadas mediante un modelo de consenso cultural ajustado a respuestas ordinales (21). este modelo estima la verosimilitud de que un sistema homogéneo de conocimientos predomine en una cultura, a partir de la correspondencia entre los conocimientos del grupo y los del individuo. para el efecto, se corrieron análisis factoriales de componentes principales que agrupan a los individuos en función de sus respuestas. el criterio de bondad de ajuste para la obtención del consenso en los modelos implica que el primer factor alcance una razón tres veces mayor a la del segundo factor, lo cual significaría que hay una alta concordancia en las respuestas de los informantes. los distintos análisis se procesaron con el paquete anthropac v. 4.1. resultados características de los informantes en la fase de listados libres se entrevistó a 20 informantes, 19 del sexo femenino y uno de masculino, sus edades fluctuaban de 31 a 80 años (promedio 56.5 años), todos ellos con hipertensión arterial, dicho padecimiento tenía un periodo de evolución de uno a 20 años (promedio de 5.7 años). y en la segunda de sorteo de montones a 20 informantes, 15 del sexo femenino y 5 del masculino, sus edades fluctuaban de 37 a 74 años (promedio de 61 años), todas ellas con padecimientos crónicos predominando la diabetes mellitus y la hipertensión arterial, padecían dichas enfermedades desde uno a 25 años (en promedio 11.15 años). listados libres las palabras mencionadas por los informantes con mayor frecuencia en la aplicación de los listados libres se clasificaron en tres categorías: elementos descriptivos del concepto de bienestar (a su vez clasificados en léxico = sinónimos del término, composición = elementos que conforman el concepto de bienestar y vecindad = otras palabras relacionadas), prácticas (clasificadas en acciones y funciones del bienestar) y atributos (adjetivos o calificativos), y se describen en el cuadro 1. 341 building participative, empowering & diverse communities cuadro no. 1 palabras de mayor frecuencia obtenidas en los listados libres sobre el concepto de bienestar clasificación de términos bienestar descriptivos léxico composición vecindad salud energía paz estar activo estar contento estar bien espiritual, mental y moralmente no enojarse no estar nerviosa (o) no tener dolor no tener vicios buena alimentación tener dinero sin problemas familiares dormir bien practicas acciones funciones aceptar lo que le pasa controlar presión y azúcar convivir con amigos cuidarse hacer ejercicio escuchar música evitar excesos tomar agua tomar medicamentos trabajar tranquilidad estar satisfecho con lo que hace estar libre de culpa fuente: listados libres se presentaron igual número de términos en los elementos descriptivos y en prácticas, mientras que no hubo términos clasificados como atributos. los términos ubicados en léxico o sinónimos de bienestar fueron: salud (una de las mujeres participantes indicó:”tratando de estar bien de salud se puede estar en bienestar, es vivir saludable”), energía (un hombre dijo:” se siente uno lleno de vitalidad”) y paz. los ubicados en composición son estados que involucran un proceso permanente de cuidados para la salud no sólo en lo físico sino también en lo mental y emocional: estar activo, contento, no enojarse, no estar nerviosa (o), no tener dolor, no tener vicios y estar bien en lo espiritual, mental y moral. otras palabras asociadas son las de: tener dinero, buena alimentación, sin problemas familiares y dormir bien. en cuanto a las prácticas referidas a las acciones se ubican los términos relacionados con formas de cuidado a la salud (controlar presión y azúcar, tomar medicamentos, cuidarse, hacer ejercicio, evitar excesos) otras hacia el logro de un estado de bienestar mental (aceptar lo que pasa, convivir con los amigos, escuchar música) así como una actividad productiva como lo es el trabajar. en cuanto a las funciones del bienestar se encuentran la tranquilidad, estar satisfecho con lo que se hace y estar libre de culpa. 342 building participative, empowering & diverse communities dimensiones conceptuales del bienestar en la figura 1 se muestran las dimensiones conceptuales encontradas mediante análisis de conglomerados fueron ser responsable, la felicidad (con las subdimensiones de tranquilidad, tener fe, tener salud), la disciplina (subdimensiones: desarrollo y mantenimiento y prolongar la vida) y el vivir a gusto. en la dimensión de ser responsable se encuentran los términos tener dinero (“no se siente presionado si no tiene estos problemas, no hay preocupaciones”, “los que le rodean pueden estar bien”) y trabajar (los participantes comentaron: “se distrae y le permite estar activo”, “lo activa”,”le da vigor”). en la dimensión de felicidad que incluye la subdimensiones de tranquilidad, la cual se compone de las palabras no estresarse (una mujer dijo:” no estresarse para que los problemas no le afecten mucho”), estar tranquilo (otra mujer comentó: “si está tranquilo no se le sube la presión”) y no enojarse (ya que enojarse “puede ocasionarse problemas mas graves”). otra subdimensión de la felicidad es tener fe la cual incluye tener salud y apoyarse en dios (una mujer mayor indicó:” debe uno encomendarse a dios para que todo el día esté bien”). y por último la subdimensión tener salud incluyo términos relacionados con la salud mental, como son convivir con los amigos (ya que ello “mejora su autoestima”, “le da alegría”, “lo pone alegre”), no tener problemas familiares (ya que “con la familia unida uno se siente mejor”, “da tranquilidad y apoyo”) y aceptar lo que pasa (en esto se mencionó: “aceptar su enfermedad” y “no alterarse demasiado con lo que pasa”). en la dimensión de disciplina se incluyeron las subdimensiones: desarrollo y mantenimiento, además de prolongar la vida. en la primera se consideró el hacer ejercicio (“le permite al cuerpo estar bien, “se relaja y le da buen humor”, “le da tranquilidad física y mental” y “le da salud al controlar su 343 building participative, empowering & diverse communities enfermedad”), tener buena alimentación (“no va a tener otras enfermedades”,”la buena alimentación da salud” “uno puede salir adelante sin enfermarse”) y cuidarse (“ir al médico, si no se cuida uno es malo”). en prolongar la vida se incluyó a tomar el medicamento y controlar la presión arterial o los niveles de azúcar. finalmente la dimensión vivir a gusto incluyo el dormir bien (“no hay como dormir bien para estar bien y de buenas”, “cuando uno duerme bien no amanece nervioso”), no tener dolor (“si no te aflige nada puedes estar bien”,”se pueden hacer las cosas con facilidad”) y tener energía. las dimensiones descritas por los árboles de conglomerados tuvieron valores de bondad de ajuste adecuados (stress < 0.28 al obtener 0.213), en el análisis de escala multidimensional no métrica. consenso cultural sobre la concepción del bienestar la organización conceptual de las distintas dimensiones del bienestar tuvo consenso cultural. alcanzó un nivel de razón = 8.221. como ya se mencionó antes la regla es que este factor debe calificar más de tres veces la varianza del segundo factor, lo cual sucedió en este caso (fue 16.36 veces mayor). el porcentaje acumulado de la varianza para el factor ratio 1 fue mayor a 70% y la media de la competencia cultural individual fue mayor a 0.6, confirmando esos valores el consenso cultural. los valores mayores a 0.3 en la medida de acuerdo grupal describen homogeneidad en la organización conceptual de las dimensiones y validan también el consenso. cuadro no. 2 nivel de consenso cultural del concepto de bienestar (expresado en razones factoriales y varianza acumulada de factores, promedio de competencias culturales y concordancia grupal), mayo de 2006 personas participantes razón del factor 1 (f1) varianza acumulada % razón del factor 2 (f2) varianza acumulada % razón f1:f2 competencia cultural* media de concordancia grupal** (n = 20) 8.221 90.1 0.502 95.6 16.36 0.62 0.15 0.38 de: desviación estándar ** competencia cultural: media aritmética grupal del grado de acuerdo individual con las respuestas promedio. ** concordancia grupal: promedio de competencia cultural elevado al cuadrado fuente: análisis de consenso del sorteo de montones discusion el objetivo planteado para este estudio de explorar las dimensiones conceptuales del bienestar de personas con padecimientos crónicos de la ciudad de guadalajara, méxico, fue cubierto. en dichas dimensiones las personas participantes mostraron una visión holística del concepto de bienestar. ello se encuentra en concordancia con estudios anteriores referidos a las representaciones sociales de la diabetes y de la salud en general (22), donde las personas con padecimientos crónicos consideran una multiplicidad de factores en la conceptualización de sus padecimientos donde se manifestó una perspectiva global del mismo. así se presenta en su idea de bienestar la implicación de la totalidad de su ser como persona, de sus relaciones familiares, laborales y sociales, y no exclusivamente en lo físico o fisiológico. las dos grandes dimensiones que conforman el concepto de bienestar tienen que ver por 344 building participative, empowering & diverse communities un lado con la responsabilidad y la disciplina, es decir, con la atención de aspectos de tipo físico y mental, lo cual llevaría al desarrollo y mantenimiento del cuerpo así como a prolongar la vida. las dimensiones conceptuales implicadas en esta parte hacen referencia a decisiones voluntarias de tipo más bien personal, donde la familia y el aspecto comunitario no son incluidos. con ello se resalta el carácter de autocontrol de la propia conducta en detrimento de la participación social como sería el apoyo social que pidieran proporcionar las redes sociales. la segunda dimensión es sobre elementos de tipo mental y social donde se incluyó a la felicidad y el vivir a gusto. ello implica la práctica de acciones y cuidados de la salud mental, la vida espiritual y social. esto se encuentra en estrecha relación con lo encontrado por alcántara (23) en personas que participan en forma frecuente con los grupos de autoayuda para personas con enfermedades crónicas de los centros de salud, ya que éstos favorecen en los participantes el fomento de su salud mental. lo mismo fue encontrado por díaz (24) y fernández et al. (25) donde la participación grupal es considerada como una fuente de satisfacción. así una de las aportaciones más relevante radica en la asociación del concepto de bienestar con el de salud mental. los resultados obtenidos permiten generar propuestas de intervención educativa en salud en materia de enfermedades crónicas con mayor fundamento. dichas propuestas se presentan enfocadas tanto a las personas con dichos padecimientos, a sus familias, a los profesionales de a salud, las instituciones del sector salud y a la población en general. en cuanto a los profesionales de salud y las instituciones de salud señalar que la atención de estas enfermedades debería ser en forma integral, ya que esta es la visión que manifiestan los participantes, en lo cual se incluye el respeto y apoyo de creencias religiosas, formas de control emocional, cuidados generales, satisfacción de necesidades materiales, además de la atención médica. así de identificar el desarrollo de nuevas formas de concebir su bienestar. en el caso de los enfermos y sus familias, se debe reforzar los elementos de tipo cognoscitivo. al parecer las formas de atención y cuidado de salud en el nivel informativo es suficiente y muestra un consenso aceptable, ello tiene implicaciones en la actitud positiva que se toma hacia diferentes formas de vivir con dichos padecimientos, la aceptación de su situación de salud y en la construcción de la identidad como enfermo crónico. cabe mencionar que esto se presenta en personas que participan en grupos de autoayuda, queda pendiente explorar estos conocimientos en el caso de las personas que no acuden a este tipo de servicios. sin embargo, el nivel informativo no es suficiente ya que los elementos comunitarios no han sido considerados por las personas con padecimientos crónicos, o al menos no fueron enunciados en este estudio. ello implica fomentar en las personas que les rodean, su participación en el fomento de los cuidados y en la disciplina que ha sido identificada como una obligación que sólo concierne al enfermo. la involucración de la familia en las actividades de los grupos de autoayuda y en otras actividades para llevar a la toma de conciencia sobre la situación de sus familiares podría ser un buen apoyo. los medios de comunicación masiva también tendrían que ser implicados en este proceso. ya que la difusión de medidas de prevención secundaria y terciaria favorecería una mejor calidad de vida para las personas con padecimientos crónicos, máxime cuando éstos se encuentra en constante aumento. este trabajo muestra las limitaciones propias sobre los estudios del enfoque cognitivo 345 building participative, empowering & diverse communities donde se enfatiza los elementos cognoscitivos, mientras que los niveles de análisis grupal, las prácticas y los procesos participativos no son considerados, con lo cual se limita la participación de la comunidad en el apoyo que pudiera existir entre personas con padecimientos crónicos, con sus familiares y cuidadores. por ello anterior se surgen las siguientes preguntas: ¿cuáles son las prácticas de apoyo social que existe hacia la población con padecimientos crónicos? ¿cuál es la participación de la familia en el mantenimiento y fomento del estado de bienestar de las dichas personas? ¿cuáles son las prácticas que la población con padecimientos crónicos lleva a cabo para desarrollar su estado de bienestar? estas y otras más podrían responderse en estudios posteriores. agradecimientos: nuestro más profundo agradecimiento a las personas que participaron en este estudio compartiendo su tiempo y experiencias con sus enfermedades. referencias bibliográficas: 1. banco internacional de reconstrucción y fomento/banco mundial, 2006. las prioridades del salud, washington, banco mundial. accesible en http://files.dcp2.org/pdf/pih/pihspanish.pdf. último acceso 21/11/1006. 2. organización panamericana de la salud 2005. salud y bienestar del adulto mayor en la ciudad de méxico. sabe, 2005. accesible en http//:publications.paho.org/spanish/moreinfo.cfm?product_ id=84. último acceso 31/10/1006. 3. organización panamericana de la salud 2002. country health profiles: united mexican states. accesible en http://www.paho.org/spanish/dd/ais/cp_484.htm. ultimo acceso 26/09/2006. 4. secretaría de salud del estado de jalisco 2006. boletín epidemiológico. jalisco. semana 25. accesible en http://ssj.jalisco.gob.mx/index.html. ultimo acceso 26/07/2006. 5. rossi, i. y e. o’higgins 1981 teorías de la cultura y métodos antropológicos. editorial anagrama. 6. torres, t.m., j.d. castañeda, f. chong 2005. tener una enfermedad crónica o ser un enfermo crónico: el caso de la diabetes mellitus. investigación en salud. vol. vii no.1:42-49. 7. cuadra, h. y r. florezcano 2003. el bienestar subjetivo: hacia una psicología positiva. revista de psicología de la universidad de chile. vol. xii no.1:83-96. 8. díaz, g. 2000. el bienestar subjetivo. actualidad y perspectivas. revista cubana de medicina geriátrica integral. vol. 17 no. 6: 572-9. 9. diener e., e. suh y sh. oishi 1997. recent findings on subjective well-being. indian journal of clinical psychology, march. 10. diener, e. 2000. subjective well-being. american psycgologist. vol. 55 no.1:34-43. 11. salazar a. y b. torres 2004. desenvolvimento de uma escala de bem-estar subjetivo. psicologia: teoria e pesquisa. vol. 20 no. 2: 153-164. 12. paéz d., j.a. adrián y n. basabe 1992. balanza de afectos, dimensiones de la afectividad y emocionales: una aproximación socio psicológica a la salud mental. en álvaro jl y cols. influencias sociales y http://files.dcp2.org/pdf/pih/pihspanish.pdf http://www.paho.org/spanish/dd/ais/cp_484.htm. ultimo acceso 26/09/2006 http://ssj.jalisco.gob.mx/index.html 346 building participative, empowering & diverse communities psicológicas en la salud mental. editorial siglo xxi 200pp. 13. fernández n., a.m. clúa, r.m báez, m. ramírez y v. prieto 2000. estilos de vida, bienestar subjetivo y salud de los ancianos. revista cubana de medicina geriátrica integral. vol. 16 no. 1: 6-12. 14. secretaría de salud del estado de jalisco, op. cit. 15. bernard, h.r. 1994. research methods in anthropology. qualitative and quantitative approaches. sage editorial. 16. romney a., w.h. batchelder y s.c. weller 1987. recent applications of consensus theory. am. behav. sci .vol. 31:163-177. 17. weller, s.c. y a.k. romney 1988. systematic data collection. sage editorial. 18. kuzel, a.j. 1992. sampling in qualitative inquiry. en: b.g. crabtree y w.l. miller. doing qualitative research. sage editorial 31-44 pp. 19. bernard, h.r., op. cit. 20. sturrock, k. y j. rocha 2000. a multidimensional scaling stress evaluation table. field methods. vol. 12: 49-60. 21. weller, s.c. y n.c. mann 1997. assesing rater performance without a gold standard using consensus theory. med. decis. making. vol. 17:71-9. 22. torres, t.m., m. sandoval y m. pando 2004. sangre y azúcar: representaciones sobre la diabetes de enfermos crónicos de un barrio de guadalajara, méxico. cad. saúde pública. vol. 21 no.1:101110. 23. alcántara, e. 2003. perspectiva de las personas con enfermedad crónica. las intervenciones educativas en los servicios de salud. tesis para obtener el grado de maestro en ciencias de la salud pública. universidad de guadalajara. 24. díaz, op. cit. 25. fernández et al. op. cit. 347 building participative, empowering & diverse communities la residencia universitaria flora tristán como parte del motor de cambio de una zona con necesidades de transformación social. martínez lozano, v; blázquez muñoz, a.; blanco lópez, j. universidad pablo de olavide, sevilla, españa1 resumen en esta presentación se pretende dar a conocer una iniciativa nacida en el seno de la universidad pablo de olavide por contribuir al cambio y a la transformación de una de las zonas más deprimidas de la ciudad de sevilla. la residencia universitaria flora tristán surge como un proyecto social que pretende ser parte del motor de cambio de una comunidad. el edificio se ubica en el polígono sur, barrio identificado como zona con necesidades de transformación social. entre los objetivos del proyecto está modificar las percepciones de los propios vecinos del barrio, insertando en él a una población diferente que hasta ahora no había formado parte de él. otro de los objetivos es colaborar en el plan integral de transformación del barrio mediante la colaboración y el trabajo de los estudiantes en diferentes entidades y asociaciones que trabajan en el barrio. al mismo tiempo se pretende que estas colaboraciones, que realizan los estudiantes en forma de becas, sean parte fundamental de su formación universitaria en valores y en la generación de conciencia de ciudadanía. con estos objetivos se pretende ser parte de una transformación social que abarca, no sólo al propio barrio y a la autoconciencia que los vecinos tienen de él como zona deprimida, sino que además ofrece a los estudiantes la posibilidad de convivir con realidades en la mayoría de los casos diferentes a las suyas, siendo parte activa en esta labor de transformación. palabras clave: residencia universitaria flora tristán, polígono sur, transformación social, conciencia social. según refleja el artículo nº 3 de los estatutos de la universidad pablo de olavide: “… como espacio educativo de formación superior, la universidad pablo de olavide está al servicio de la sociedad y se define como un lugar de reflexión y pensamiento crítico comprometido con la contribución al progreso, con la enseñanza del respeto a los derechos fundamentales y libertades públicas, con el fomento de la solidaridad y los valores humanos y con la respuesta a las necesidades y problemas de la sociedad contemporánea. la universidad procurará la más amplia proyección social de sus actividades, estableciendo al efecto cauces de colaboración y asistencia a la sociedad para contribuir y apoyar el progreso social, económico y cultural”. tomando este artículo como punto de partida, el proyecto de la universidad ha consistido en ubicar una residencia para estudiantes en una de las áreas metropolitanas más problemáticas de la ciudad de sevilla, el polígono sur, más conocido peyorativamente como “las tres mil viviendas”. esta parte de la ciudad está considerada una zona con grandes necesidades de reestructuración y de transformación social, donde encontramos uno de los mayores focos de población marginal de toda la ciudad. 1 dirección postal: carretera de utrera, km. 1, 41013, sevilla, españa. 348 building participative, empowering & diverse communities es en este escenario donde se decide iniciar un trabajo cuyo principal objetivo es doble. por una parte, apoyar al cambio de una comunidad deprimida y con necesidades especiales y, por otra, ofrecer a los estudiantes que en ella residen la posibilidad de aprender de la realidad con la que conviven, alentándolos a implicarse con el vecindario y haciéndolos partícipes del proceso de cambio social que se está llevando a cabo. a continuación trazaremos una breve descripción del polígono sur con el objeto de situarnos en la zona en la que desarrollamos este trabajo. seguidamente presentaremos los procesos de transformación que se están dando en el barrio, y con mayor detalle la labor desarrollada desde la residencia universitaria flora tristán. una breve descripción del barrio el polígono sur es un barrio ubicado al sur de la ciudad de sevilla. este barrio está compuesto por 6 barriadas, de las cuales 2 son consideradas zonas de alta vulnerabilidad social debido a las características especiales de su población. en estas barriadas se encuentran los mercados de drogas y armas más importantes de la ciudad de sevilla. la población del polígono sur es de aproximadamente 50.000 personas, aunque únicamente se encuentran censadas las dos terceras partes. es en este barrio donde se localiza el nivel de paro más elevado de sevilla, alcanzando en algunas barriadas al 40% de la población, que mantiene su economía debido al mercado negro de drogas y armas. en este barrio nos encontramos además con un 62% de población sin estudios; con una elevada tasa de analfabetismo del 5,71%; y con únicamente el 7% de titulados profesionales o universitarios. a todo esto se añade que el índice de absentismo escolar supera en algunas zonas el 30% del total del alumnado. sumados a estos indicadores nos encontramos también con otros índices de vulnerabilidad social y marginalidad que empeoran el panorama, como el índice de mortalidad, que supera con creces el del conjunto de la ciudad, destacando especialmente los casos de muerte con sida. igualmente el número de embarazos adolecentes es superior al del conjunto de la ciudad. a estas características, que ya de por sí definen al barrio como zona marginal y de aislamiento social, se unen una serie de fronteras físicas que lo delimitan territorialmente, contribuyendo aún más a la condición de “isla” marginal de la ciudad de sevilla. el barrio se encuentra flanqueado por la vía de tren, que lo separa de otra barriada de sevilla; al sur limita con solares degradados y por la autovía; al noreste nos encontramos un polígono industrial; y cerrando el contorno, se encuentra un parque urbano y la única barriada que linda con la parte más normalizada del barrio. estas barreras se unen a los grandes espacios deteriorados, la falta de mantenimiento de las pocas zonas verdes que existen, la invasión de los espacios públicos por edificaciones ilegales de algunos vecinos, así como al deterioro y las malas condiciones de algunos de los edificios. todo esto hace que el barrio sea considerado como una de las zonas con mayor necesidad de transformación social de la ciudad de sevilla. y es en esta zona donde se ubica la residencia universitaria flora tristán. el proceso de transformación del barrio. el comisionado para el polígono sur. antes de presentar las labores que está desempeñando la residencia universitaria en el polígono sur, vamos a referirnos a un hecho clave que ha marcado el principio de este proceso de transformación del barrio. 349 building participative, empowering & diverse communities en 2003, la junta de andalucía crea la figura del comisionado para el polígono sur como una iniciativa para integrar todas las actuaciones que se estaban llevando a cabo en el barrio por parte de las diferentes administraciones públicas –central, autonómica y local-. el comisionado se compromete con el encargo único y exclusivo de la elaboración, puesta en marcha y seguimiento de un plan integral para el barrio que permita atajar los problemas de marginalidad, seguridad, empleo, vivienda, educación, salud… y que además permita la normalización y la convivencia ciudadana en una zona con grandes problemas de exclusión social. el plan integral supone un compromiso de las administraciones públicas con el polígono sur con el que se pretende transformar las áreas de mayor vulnerabilidad, tratando de responder a las necesidades del vecindario, y manteniendo el objetivo de abrir el barrio al resto de la ciudad. en el plan integral nos encontramos con cuatro grandes áreas de intervención: urbanismo y convivencia; inserción sociolaboral y promoción de la iniciativa económica; salud comunitaria e intervención socioeducativa y familiar. estas áreas trabajan por comisiones en las que se integran tanto los profesionales que están trabajando con el comisionado, como los vecinos y vecinas del barrio que tengan interés por trabajar y aportar soluciones. se trata de que la comunidad se haga cargo de sus problemas y se organice para resolverlos, guiándolos al principio, pero con el objetivo final de conseguir una autonomía cada vez mayor, que les permita desarrollar sus propios recursos y potencialidades. en definitiva, y como señala montero (2004), se pretende una intervención para la transformación social que facilite y fortalezca los procesos psicosociales que posibiliten el desarrollo de comunidades autogestoras para la solución de sus propios problemas. y es en este escenario en el que se desarrolla la vida de la residencia universitaria flora tristán, donde los residentes participan de muy diferentes maneras. por una parte participando y colaborando como vecinos en estos procesos de transformación del barrio; y por otro, mediante colaboraciones específicas con entidades y asociaciones vecinales, a las que más adelante nos referiremos. el papel de la residencia universitaria flora tristán en el polígono sur partiendo de la idea de que las sociedades pueden ser transformadas por efecto de las acciones de los individuos que en ellas participan, la universidad pablo de olavide, y más concretamente desde la residencia desde flora tristán, nos planteamos la intervención a nivel local con el objeto de cambiar realidades con un alto nivel de vulnerabilidad. entre uno de los planteamientos de base que sostienen el proyecto de la residencia flora tristán se encuentra el de modificar las percepciones que se tienen sobre el barrio, tanto las que posee la gente de fuera de él, como las que el propio vecindario tiene de su propia comunidad. la entrada de la universidad en el barrio, y más concretamente de estudiantes universitarios, de una población de 205 jóvenes que poco o nada tiene que ver con los que actualmente se encuentran residiendo en el barrio -el porcentaje de jóvenes que acceden a la universidad procedentes de los centros de secundaria de este barrio es prácticamente inexistenteestá suponiendo un aire nuevo al vecindario. a esto se une el interés de la propia universidad por realizar actos académicos en el barrio, igualmente se realizan colaboraciones con diferentes servicios universitarios, como es el servicio de deportes o el vicerrectorado de participación social, que realizan charlas o actividades en la zona, así como organizan cursos y conferencias en las instalaciones de la propia universidad para 350 building participative, empowering & diverse communities vecinos del polígono sur. a esto se añaden también los recursos que ofrece la propia residencia al barrio, como son zonas comunes para reuniones, salas de informática, biblioteca, salas de exposiciones, salón de actos y salas de usos múltiples. todo esto ofrece una idea del interés de la universidad por acercar el barrio a la universidad y la universidad al barrio, por romper y desterrar los estigmas con los que el polígono sur está cargado, intentando que no destaquen únicamente los aspectos desfavorecedores, sino que se cambien las percepciones y se comience a hablar de la normalización del mismo. este aporte de población y actividades universitarias en el vecindario constituye una forma de fortalecimiento de la comunidad, que ornelas (2008) destaca como uno de los valores fundamentales de la psicología comunitaria, y por ende, de la intervención en comunidades. por otro lado, la acción más señalada que realizamos en el barrio es la colaboración activa en diferentes entidades y asociaciones del barrio. para ello contamos con una subvención de la consejería de igualdad y bienestar social, unida a otra de cáritas diocesana, que nos permite ofrecer 52 becas de alojamiento a los estudiantes a cambio de participar en estas colaboraciones durante todo el curso académico. con estas colaboraciones perseguimos varios objetivos. por una parte apoyar el trabajo que se viene realizando en el polígono sur desde hace algunos años, trabajando en coordinación con el comisionado y apoyando en las diferentes áreas de trabajo del plan integral; colaborando con pequeñas asociaciones y entidades vecinales que necesitan apoyos para seguir adelante. por otra parte complementar la formación universitaria de los estudiantes en valores, aspectos sociales, cívicos y de conciencia ciudadana. las colaboraciones y el desarrollo de una conciencia social. las becas de la consejería nos permiten ofertar becas de alojamiento a los y las estudiantes que deseen colaborar con el trabajo en el barrio. estas becas les cubren la totalidad de la renta a cambio de 8 horas de colaboración semanales. los y las estudiantes eligen sus ámbitos de colaboración, generalmente acordes con los estudios universitarios que están realizando. así podemos encontrarnos colaboraciones de estudiantes de ciencias ambientales en huertos escolares, estudiantes de relaciones laborales en asesorías de empleo, estudiantes de ciencias del deporte organizando eventos deportivos para el barrio, o futuros educadores sociales o trabajadores sociales colaborando en trabajos comunitarios. de entre las colaboraciones tienen especial relevancia las realizadas en el área educativa. en ella es de enorme importancia el apoyo que estamos prestando con el alumnado de los centros de primaria, especialmente por el alto índice de absentismo que tienen lugar en ellos, con las lógicas consecuencias que esto desencadena como problemas de aprendizaje, problemas de lectoescritura, importantes lagunas de conocimiento... además, estamos apoyando iniciativas educativas novedosas puestas en marcha en uno de los colegios de la zona con mayor población gitana, el trabajo en comunidades de aprendizaje. es igualmente destacable la colaboración con centros de secundaria, donde estamos poniendo en marcha talleres de mediación de conflictos, así como grupos de apoyo a los pocos estudiantes de bachillerato que alcanzan este nivel, a los que se asignan tutores de entre los estudiantes universitarios de la residencia. las colaboraciones con el centro de educación de personas adultas es altamente valorada por las propias alumnas, ya que es aquí donde se han puesto en marcha algunas de las iniciativas más exitosas, como ha sido el grupo de teatro “no nos duele ná”, o los grupos de tertulias musicales y tertulias literarias 351 building participative, empowering & diverse communities dialógicas, que han tenido un éxito tal que en este mes de noviembre se han celebrado aquí en el barrio las v jornadas nacionales de tertulias literarias dialógicas. igualmente colaboramos con otras entidades, como el grupo juvenil boom, ubicado en la parte más marginal de todo el barrio, donde casi el total de la población es gitana y procedente de asentamientos chabolistas; o las colaboraciones en otras asociaciones gitanas, asociaciones vecinales, asociaciones de mujeres… la colaboración con entidades que trabajan en intervención comunitaria, o con la parroquia, en asesoramiento laboral a parados e inmigrantes, que cada vez son más numerosos en la zona, o las colaboraciones con asociaciones deportivas, organizando torneos y equipos de futbol o baloncesto, también se encuentran entre las labores que realizan los estudiantes de la residencia. por último, desde la residencia también colaboramos en todas aquellas actividades que se organizan en el barrio y que abogan por el estrechamiento de las redes sociales y la formación de una conciencia colectiva de comunidad. sin embargo, y como hemos apuntado anteriormente, las acciones encaminadas a la transformación del barrio no suponen el único objetivo que nos planteamos desde la residencia. otro de los fines que buscamos es que estas experiencias se conviertan en un aprendizaje fundamental en el proceso formativo universitario. una formación universitaria alejada de las aulas y de los conocimientos disciplinares, en muchos casos ajenos a la realidad. esto es, una formación en valores, una generación de conciencia de ciudadanía. en este sentido, y como aclara montero (1984), la acción transformadora que se está poniendo en marcha en el barrio está actuando en varios sentidos, teniendo lugar una “relación dialéctica de transformaciones mutuas”. esto implica que tanto la comunidad como los intervinientes están sujetos a cambios relacionados con la participación en el proceso, desarrollándose en los individuos participantes un crecimiento personal que se desarrolla positivamente (montero, 1996), además del crecimiento que supone para aquéllos que reciben la participación, e incluso para la sociedad, ya que como efecto político forma ciudadanía, desarrolla y fortalece la sociedad civil, a la vez que aumenta la responsabilidad social (clary y snider, 2002). así, y a modo de conclusión, podemos exponer que en la residencia estamos interviniendo a varios niveles. por una parte, trabajando en el barrio como comunidad, formando parte de su tejido social y colaborando puntualmente en diversos ámbitos; participando en el proceso de transformación social que está permitiendo modificar las condiciones de vida de los vecinos, así como transformando las percepciones y colaborando en la eliminación de los estigmas que tanto marcan al polígono sur. por otra parte, poniendo nuestro aporte en la conformación de una conciencia social en los estudiantes que pasan por la residencia, ofreciendo experiencias de convivencia muy diferentes a las que suelen estar acostumbrados, fomentando el análisis objetivo de las diferentes realidades de la zona, permitiéndoles plantear iniciativas de cambio que los impliquen activamente en la labor de transformación del barrio, y en definitiva, tratando de que crezcan como ciudadanos, comprometidos con los demás y con la sociedad. referencias bibliográficas clary, e.g. y snider, m. (2002). community involvement: opportunities and challenges in socializing adults to participate in society. journal of social issue, 58 (3), 581-592. 352 building participative, empowering & diverse communities montero, m. (1996). la participación. significado, alcances y límites, en e. hernández (coord.), participación. ámbitos, retos y perspectivas, caracas: cesap, 7-20. ornelas, j. (2008). psicologia comunitária. lisboa: fim de século-ediçoes. montero, m. (2004). introducción a la psicología comunitaria. buenos aires: paidós. 353 building participative, empowering & diverse communities prevalência, significações e prevenção da violência nas relações juvenis de intimidade: um projecto integrado de investigação1 carla machado, cláudia coelho, rosa saavedra, sónia caridade, sónia martins, helena grangeia & ana rita dias instituto de educação e psicologia, universidade do minho, portugal e-mail: cmachado@iep.uminho.pt resumo o interesse social e científico pelo problema da violência nas relações juvenis de intimidade é muito recente em portugal, ainda que a informação disponível indique que os adolescentes frequentemente perpetram e sofrem comportamentos violentos nestas relações, à semelhança do que ocorre em casais adultos. os estudos atitudinais conduzidos junto de jovens evidenciam ainda que, apesar da aceitação da violência em contextos de intimidade ser reduzida, muitos adolescentes subscrevem mitos que legitimam a violência. estes resultados estimularam um interesse mais aprofundado na implementação de esforços preventivos em portugal pelo que, recentemente, diversos investigadores e instituições desenvolveram e implementaram programas de prevenção da violência nas relações de intimidade direccionados à população juvenil. neste artigo iremos apresentar os principais resultados de um projecto de investigação em curso sobre a violência nas relações juvenis de intimidade. começaremos por caracterizar os comportamentos, atitudes e discursos dos jovens que motivaram o desenvolvimento destes esforços preventivos, apresentando de seguida os resultados de uma pesquisa sobre os programas de prevenção conduzidos pelas principais instituições operativas na área da violência na intimidade. serão apresentadas sugestões com o intuito de aperfeiçoar estes esforços preventivos, bem como um programa de prevenção que procura ultrapassar alguns dos problemas previamente identificados. palavras-chave: adolescentes; relações de intimidade; namoro; violência; prevenção. 1. introdução os estudos subordinados ao tema da violência nas relações de intimidade têm privilegiado o casamento/união de facto enquanto objecto de investigação e negligenciado relações de namoro e ocasionais, bem como casais homossexuais. apenas recentemente se tem verificado um maior investimento na compreensão das prevalências e dinâmicas violentas subjacentes a estes relacionamentos sendo que, desde a década de 80, houve um aumento progressivo na quantidade de estudos acerca da violência nas relações juvenis de intimidade (cf. howard, wang, & yan, 2007; jackson, 1999; lewis & fremouw, 2001). este cenário reproduz-se no contexto científico português, onde começam já a surgir estudos sobre a violência nas relações juvenis de intimidade, nomeadamente direccionados 1 este trabalho foi desenvolvido no âmbito do projecto “violência nas relações juvenis de intimidade” (ptdc/psi/65852/2006), financiado pela fundação para a ciência e tecnologia. mailto:cmachado@iep.uminho.pt 354 building participative, empowering & diverse communities à caracterização das prevalências de vitimação e perpetração e variáveis associadas ao comportamento violento (caridade & machado, 2006; lucas, 2005; paiva & figueiredo, 2004), ao conhecimento das consequências da violência (paiva & figueiredo, 2005) e à prevenção desta forma de violência (matos, machado, caridade, & silva, 2006). é neste contexto que surge o projecto “violência nas relações juvenis de intimidade” que se encontra a decorrer na universidade do minho (ptdc/psi/65852/2006) e cujos objectivos consistem na identificação da prevalência da violência nas relações juvenis de intimidade; na caracterização das atitudes, crenças e discursos dos jovens sobre a violência; no levantamento e avaliação crítica dos programas de prevenção da violência na intimidade juvenil conduzidos em portugal; e no desenvolvimento, aplicação e avaliação da eficácia de programas de prevenção neste âmbito. apresentaremos de seguida os principais resultados obtidos até ao momento pelos diferentes estudos desenvolvidos no âmbito deste projecto de investigação. 2. estudos de prevalência embora já outros estudos tivessem sido desenvolvidos no nosso país sobre a prevalência da violência nas relações de intimidade juvenis (lucas, 2005; paiva & figueiredo, 2004), o estudo de caridade (em preparação) foi o primeiro a recorrer a uma amostra que compreende o território nacional e integra jovens de diferentes níveis de ensino. a amostra final deste estudo integrou 4667 jovens com idades compreendidas entre os 13 e os 29 anos, que se encontravam a frequentar o ensino secundário, profissional ou universitário (machado, caridade, & martins, no prelo). embora tenha sido necessário excluir deste estudo uma parte da amostra devido ao preenchimento incompleto do instrumento de avaliação, verificou-se que 25.4% dos jovens envolvidos em relacionamentos amorosos tinham sido vítimas durante o ano anterior ao estudo e 30.6% tinham apresentado comportamentos violentos face ao seu parceiro actual (machado et al., no prelo). resultados semelhantes foram obtidos na avaliação dos comportamentos de violência ocorridos em relações amorosas anteriores, em que 27.3% e 28.0% dos jovens relataram ter sido vítimas e perpetradores de violência, respectivamente (caridade, em preparação). ainda no mesmo estudo, foram avaliados os diferentes tipos de violência perpetrados e sofridos pelos jovens nos seus relacionamentos íntimos, tendo-se verificado que nas relações actuais, 19.5% foram vitimados emocionalmente, 13.4% fisicamente e 6.7% sofreram violência física severa; por outro lado, 22.4% admitiram ter exercido violência emocional sobre os seus parceiros, 18.1% perpetraram violência física e 7.3% violência física severa. constatou-se que, apesar de o nível socioeconómico dos jovens não influenciar os seus comportamentos de vitimação e perpetração, o mesmo não se verificava quando avaliado o efeito das variáveis género, idade e escolaridade. de facto, os elementos do sexo feminino evidenciavam níveis mais elevados de perpetração global, física e emocional, sofrendo, por outro lado, maior vitimação física. eram os grupos etários mais velhos e que frequentavam o ensino superior aqueles que mais perpetravam e eram alvo de violência global e emocional, enquanto a perpetração a nível físico e a vitimação a nível físico e físico severo predominavam entre os jovens do ensino profissional (machado, et al., no prelo). por outro lado, considerando as suas relações passadas, 22.7% dos jovens foram alvo de violência emocional, 15.4% sofreram violência física e 7.5% violência física severa, enquanto 19.3%, 17.0% e 6.2% perpetraram violência emocional, física e física severa, respectivamente. a análise 355 building participative, empowering & diverse communities do efeito das variáveis demográficas neste âmbito assinalou a existência de maior vitimação física e perpetração física severa entre indivíduos do sexo masculino, enquanto as jovens do sexo feminino eram mais vitimadas a nível emocional, perpetrando mais violência global e física. relativamente ao papel da idade, verifica-se a reprodução do padrão existente nas relações actuais, ao que acresce a predominância de perpetração e vitimação física pelos grupos etários mais velhos e de perpetração física severa pelos mais novos. mais uma vez, não existem diferenças relativamente à vitimação e perpetração associadas ao nível socioeconómico dos jovens. por outro lado, a nível global, físico e emocional, os comportamentos de perpetração e vitimação eram mais elevados entre estudantes do ensino profissional, sendo que a perpetração emocional era mais reduzida nos estudantes do ensino secundário, quando comparados com aqueles que frequentam o ensino superior e profissional (caridade, em preparação). com o intuito de aprofundar o conhecimento da violência na intimidade juvenil, verificouse a necessidade de abordar também a dimensão sexual, que no estudo anterior apenas era avaliada de forma superficial. num estudo exploratório sobre o tema, martins e machado (2008), recorrendo a uma amostra de 362 estudantes universitários com idades compreendidas entre os 18 e os 30 anos, constataram que 6.9% foram vitimados sexualmente durante o último ano, sendo que em 7.2% dos casos a vítima conhecia o seu agressor. relativamente à perpetração, 2.2% dos jovens admitiram ter cometido violência sexual, que em 2.8% dos casos teve como alvo pessoas conhecidas do perpetrador. não foram encontradas diferenças de género quanto à vitimação, ao contrário do que ocorreu ao nível da perpetração, que é superior entre elementos do sexo masculino. neste estudo exploratório, não foi ainda possível discriminar as situações em que a violência ocorria em contexto de relações de intimidade, prevendo-se que numa fase posterior da investigação essa informação esteja já disponível. por fim, e considerando a possibilidade de ocorrência de comportamentos intrusivos, ou mesmo violentos, em situações de amor não correspondido e rejeição, grangeia, matos e machado (2008) analisaram uma amostra de 295 estudantes universitários, sendo que destes 72.4% já tinha sido alvo de estratégias relacionais de conquista que surgiam na ausência de uma relação de intimidade ou após a ruptura de uma relação de intimidade. os resultados preliminares indicam que os principais alvos destes comportamentos eram jovens do sexo feminino e que, ainda que a maioria destas estratégias fosse de aproximação/comunicação, verificou-se também o recurso a comportamentos de vigilância/perseguição, intimidação/ invasão, ameaça/coerção e, em menor grau, agressão/violência, estando reunidos os critérios para a definição dos comportamentos como stalking em 7.5% da amostra total. a intimidade juvenil abarca ainda relações de carácter ocasional, que não envolvem durabilidade nem compromisso, bem como relações homossexuais, encontrando-se a decorrer investigações sobre à violência nestes contextos relacionais, no âmbito do projecto “violência nas relações juvenis de intimidade”, cujos resultados não se encontram ainda disponíveis. 3. estudos atitudinais e análise de discursos os estudos abrangidos pelo projecto “violência nas relações juvenis de intimidade” têm também procurado investigar as atitudes dos jovens acerca desta temática, tendo-se constatado uma tendência geral para a reprovação da violência física, emocional e sexual em contextos de intimidade (machado et al., no prelo; martins & machado, 2008). 356 building participative, empowering & diverse communities não obstante, no que concerne à violência física e emocional, verifica-se uma maior tolerância por parte dos elementos do sexo masculino, de faixas etárias mais jovens, com menor escolaridade, de níveis socioeconómicos mais desfavorecidos e com menos experiências a nível romântico (machado et al., no prelo). ao nível das atitudes acerca da violência sexual verifica-se um padrão semelhante, com os jovens do sexo masculino e com menor escolaridade a evidenciarem uma maior legitimação dos comportamentos sexualmente abusivos (martins & machado, 2008). com o intuito de aprofundar as significações dos jovens acerca da violência em relações de intimidade, procedeu-se ainda a diversos estudos de carácter qualitativo no âmbito do projecto que temos vindo a descrever, quer através de focus-group, quer de entrevistas individuais. assim, foram realizados nove focus-group com jovens, três em cada nível de formação em análise (ensino secundário, profissional e superior). em cada nível de ensino, um grupo era exclusivamente masculino, outro exclusivamente feminino e o outro misto. em termos gerais, os discursos dos jovens revelaram-se congruentes com as suas atitudes, exprimindo a condenação dos diferentes tipos de violência e considerando esta problemática relevante na medida em que os comportamentos violentos no namoro são avaliados como comuns e precursores da violência em relações de intimidade futuras (caridade, em preparação). no entanto, uma análise mais detalhada depara-se com a existência de discrepâncias entre esta posição geral e a consideração da violência como aceitável ou desculpável em certos contextos específicos. assim, verifica-se uma tendência para a avaliação da violência sexual como rara e para a banalização da violência emocional e de alguns actos de violência sexual entendidos como menos graves. acresce que a conceptualização que os jovens fazem do abuso está dependente da intenção do agressor, do contexto da agressão e do impacto causado, procedendo-se a uma maior desculpabilização do comportamento violento quando aquele é atribuído à impulsividade e descontrolo do agressor, quando este manifesta arrependimento, quando o abuso não ocorre em público e quando daí não decorrem consequências físicas graves (caridade, em preparação). apesar de os jovens reconhecerem a existência de padrões de poder genderizados associados à violência, tendem a enfatizar factores familiares, do grupo e do meio (e.g. experienciação e/ou exposição à violência na família, influência do grupo de amigos), e características intrapessoais (e.g. impulsividade, falta de auto-controlo, consumo de substâncias) como causas da violência, prevalecendo também discursos culpabilizadores da vítima em função da sua tolerância à violência ou da precipitação da mesma através de comportamentos actuais e/ ou prévios (e.g. vestuário, infidelidade). considerando a possibilidade de os discursos juvenis sobre a violência na intimidade estarem enquadrados em discursos mais abrangentes sobre o amor, dias (em preparação) procederam à realização de entrevistas individuais sobre as narrativas românticas de 14 jovens (7 rapazes e 7 raparigas), tendo emergido repertórios interpretativos para o amor tipificados pela autora em: “amor romântico”, “amor apaixonado”, “amor companheiro” e “amor desencantado”. em particular, o repertório do “amor romântico”, encontrado maioritariamente entre raparigas e que representa o amor como único, verdadeiro e eterno, promove uma construção relacional da identidade que conduz à dependência emocional e que responsabiliza os elementos do sexo feminino pela qualidade e manutenção da relação. é ainda de salientar que por vezes, e exclusivamente nas raparigas entrevistadas, surge a noção do amor como um factor de transformação e facilitador da resolução de problemas pelo casal, o que poderá fomentar a 357 building participative, empowering & diverse communities tolerância/permanência em relações abusivas com o fundamento de que o amor será um motor de mudança. por outro lado, o repertório do “amor apaixonado” traduz-se numa compreensão do amor como “cego”, sendo comummente utilizado para justificar a permanência em relações violentas. nos rapazes, este discurso está associado à percepção da infidelidade feminina como um motivo legítimo para a violência, enquanto as raparigas consideram os ciúmes uma prova de amor (dias, em preparação). ainda que os repertórios do “amor romântico” e “amor apaixonado” sejam aqueles que mais promovem a vulnerabilidade à violência através da assimetria relacional, defendendo uma maior limitação da vida amorosa feminina, aliada a uma maior passividade/submissão e restrição das emoções negativas nas mulheres, também nos outros repertórios permanecem construções genderizadas do amor. de facto, a associação entre a sexualidade e emocionalidade femininas está presente em todos os repertórios e o maior investimento relacional das mulheres, a par do seu desinvestimento pessoal, apenas não é encontrado no repertório do “amor desencantado” (dias, em preparação). do conjunto destes estudos em desenvolvimento, emerge a constatação de números significativos de violência na intimidade juvenil, aliados à persistência de significações e crenças que perpetuam a genderização do poder e legitimam a violência. desta forma, reforçase a necessidade de desenvolver e avaliar programas de prevenção nesta área, para o que é fundamental conhecer e avaliar os esforços desenvolvidos até ao momento no nosso país. 4. programas de prevenção com o intuito de reunir informação acerca dos programas de prevenção universal existentes em portugal no âmbito da violência em contextos de intimidade, foram contactados (saavedra, em preparação) 83 serviços com actividade desenvolvida na área da violência doméstica e, embora somente 23 tenham fornecido a informação solicitada, da análise dos materiais obtidos concluiu-se que apenas sete poderiam ser considerados como programas de prevenção universal da violência nos relacionamentos íntimos (incluindo ao nível da população juvenil). a maioria destes programas foi financiada por fundos comunitários, decorreu em contexto escolar com jovens com idades compreendidas entre os 14 e os 18 anos, objectivava a sensibilização para o problema da violência em contextos de intimidade e o desenvolvimento de respostas adequadas, recorreu a exposição teórica e dinâmicas de grupo, funcionando geralmente em sessões únicas. em cinco dos sete programas procedeu-se à avaliação dos resultados, sendo que em dois apenas foi contemplada a satisfação dos participantes, genericamente avaliada como positiva, e em três recorreu-se a uma metodologia quasi-experimental com pré-teste, pós-teste e follow-up, tendo-se verificado uma menor legitimação da violência nos momentos de pós-teste e follow-up, quando comparados com os valores obtidos no pré-teste (associação portuguesa de apoio à vítima, 2005; matos et al., 2006). não obstante a relevância destes programas de prevenção, após a sua caracterização genérica torna-se pertinente assinalar alguns aspectos críticos que lhes estão subjacentes, nomeadamente a ausência de financiamento regular que assegure a continuidade destes programas, eventualmente associada à predominância de intervenções de sessão única e ao recurso típico a metodologias teóricas de apresentação de conteúdos. acresce que a maioria dos programas de prevenção implementados não se encontram fundamentados teoricamente 358 building participative, empowering & diverse communities e, ao nível da avaliação, sobrevalorizam a satisfação dos participantes, bem como as atitudes/ conhecimentos em detrimento do impacto comportamental e não recorrem a grupos de controlo (saavedra, em preparação). 4.1. apav 4d – prevenção integrada em contexto escolar durante o ano lectivo de 2008/2009, promovido pela associação portuguesa de apoio à vítima e com apoio científico e técnico do projecto “violência nas relações juvenis de intimidade”, encontra-se em curso a implementação piloto do programa apav 4d – prevenção integrada em contexto escolar, junto de seis turmas do 9.º ano na disciplina de área de projecto. consiste num programa de prevenção universal de comportamentos de risco e promoção de comportamentos saudáveis, traduzido e adaptado do programa the fourth r, elaborado e testado no canadá pela equipa de wolfe, jaffe, crooks, hughes e chiodo (centre for addiction and mental health centre for prevention science, 2008). os jovens constituem a população-alvo deste programa, na medida em que se encontram numa etapa desenvolvimental caracterizada pela procura de informação, apoio e novas experiências, pelo que a nível preventivo não basta definir os comportamentos a evitar, sendo indispensável orientar os jovens para os comportamentos saudáveis pretendidos, assegurando os meios para que estes possam ser colocados em prática. neste âmbito, é sublinhada a importância de agir a um nível holista na redução dos diversos comportamentos de risco dos jovens, tais como o consumo de drogas, os comportamentos sexuais de risco e a violência entre pares, sendo estes os módulos que integram o programa original (wolfe, crooks, hughes, & jaffe, 2008) e aos quais o programa apav 4d adicionou uma unidade relativa à igualdade de género. o programa apav 4d é composto por 24 sessões conduzidas por professores que recebem formação especializada e, apesar de decorrer em contexto escolar, procura envolver também outros elementos da comunidade, promovendo assim a proximidade entre os adolescentes e as múltiplas vertentes do seu meio envolvente e possibilitando a aplicação das novas aprendizagens em contextos diversificados. à semelhança do que defendem wolfe e colaboradores (2008), saavedra e machado (2008), responsáveis pela adaptação do programa, consideram que as principais áreas de acção devem incluir a clarificação de valores, o fornecimento de informação, a tomada de decisão e uma forte componente de desenvolvimento de competências. deste modo, foram delineados os seguintes objectivos gerais: a) ajudar os alunos na clarificação dos seus valores e limites acerca dos seus relacionamentos, sexualidade, substâncias e questões de género; b) fornecer informação necessária para uma tomada de decisão informada; c) ensinar competências de comunicação, negociação, adiamento e recusa para lidar com questões de violência, sexualidade, consumo de substâncias e desigualdade de género; d) fornecer oportunidades para praticar essas competências através de actividades de role-play. sabendo-se que a informação, por si só, não gera modificações comportamentais, considerou-se necessário manter esta componente no programa, ainda que evitando um formato didáctico e sublinhando-se a importância de levar os adolescentes a colocar as suas próprias questões. outro nível de acção consiste no desenvolvimento de competências comportamentais, tais como a assertividade, comunicação e estratégias de resolução de problemas. assumindo que há uma diferença entre saber o que fazer e pôr esse conhecimento em prática, considerou-se indispensável criar, no contexto do programa, oportunidades repetidas para as treinar, através 359 building participative, empowering & diverse communities do recurso ao role-play como participante e observador, o que permite aos jovens explorar estas competências e receber feedback imediato. segundo o racional deste programa, o fornecimento de informação e a aprendizagem de competências, aliados à possibilidade de realizar debates aprofundados e antecipar as consequências dos diversos comportamentos, irão conduzir à clarificação de valores e limites dos jovens, bem como, desejavelmente, a uma maior motivação para a adopção de comportamentos saudáveis. no entanto, é indispensável não descurar aquelas que são entendidas pelos jovens como as consequências positivas dos comportamentos de risco, sendo esta reflexão acerca dos prós e contras das diversas alternativas comportamentais que vai permitir o empowerment e a responsabilização de cada um pelas suas escolhas individuais. a necessidade de assegurar a eficácia, interesse e estruturação do programa conduziu a que a componente interventiva estivesse fortemente aliada à componente avaliativa, pelo que o programa apav 4d prevê dois níveis de avaliação. o primeiro pretende identificar eventuais mudanças ao nível do conhecimento, atitudes e intenção de comportamento dos jovens, recorrendo a três etapas (pré-teste, pós-teste e follow-up), nos grupos experimental e de controlo, sendo esta informação recolhida através de questionários de auto-relato disponíveis online. o segundo nível visa uma avaliação comportamental e ao vivo da aquisição de competências por parte dos participantes, através da sua confrontação programada com actores que os irão pressionar para a realização de comportamentos de risco, sendo a utilização de competências pelos grupos experimental e de controlo cotada por avaliadores “cegos” através de grelhas de avaliação. apesar de o programa ainda estar em aplicação entre nós e de não haver ainda dados disponíveis sobre a sua eficácia, os resultados obtidos pelo programa original implementado no canadá têm comprovado o seu impacto positivo na modificação de atitudes, na aprendizagem de competências, na participação nas actividades propostas e na utilização das competências aprendidas em contextos de avaliação realistas (wolfe et al., 2008). 5. discussão a violência nas relações de intimidade é uma problemática de dimensões preocupantes e efeitos alarmantes, não somente a nível individual mas em toda a esfera social. os estudos empíricos existentes demonstram que as faixas etárias mais jovens não estão imunes a este problema, evidenciando valores significativos de vitimação e perpetração e mantendo crenças legitimadoras deste tipo de violência. como tal, o desenvolvimento de esforços preventivos a nível universal afigura-se como indispensável, devido ao seu potencial transformador sobre comportamentos actuais e futuros. o papel crucial da escola no desenvolvimento dos jovens, enquanto local onde se procede a múltiplas aprendizagens, onde geralmente se formam as primeiras relações de intimidade e, paralelamente, como um contexto em que frequentemente ocorre violência, converte-a num espaço privilegiado de acção junto dos jovens e, indirectamente, junto de diversos elementos da comunidade, tornando os esforços preventivos mais abrangentes e articulados. neste âmbito, os jovens devem ser entendidos não somente como alvos de intervenção passivos, mas sim como agentes activos de mudança, capazes de interiorizar nova informação e desconstruir mitos, de adquirir competências e utilizá-las adequadamente, e de reflectir sobre os 360 building participative, empowering & diverse communities efeitos benéficos ou prejudiciais dos seus comportamentos, tomando assim decisões responsáveis com repercussões em todo o seu mundo relacional. referências associação portuguesa de apoio à vítima (2005). projecto iuno – sensibilização e informação sobre violência doméstica e sexual: relatório final. lisboa: portugal. caridade, s., (em preparação). violência nas relações de intimidade: comportamentos e atitudes dos jovens. tese de doutoramento em psicologia, área de conhecimento em psicologia da justiça. braga: instituto de educação e psicologia da universidade do minho. caridade, s., & machado, c. (2006). violência na intimidade juvenil: da vitimação à perpetração. análise psicológica, 4, xxiv, 485-493. centre for addiction and mental health – centre for prevention science (2008). the fourth r: relationship based violence prevention. acedido em 18 de novembro de 2008, em http://www.thefourthr.ca. dias, a. r. (em preparação). repertórios interpretativos sobre o amor: das narrativas culturais às conjugalidades violentas. tese de doutoramento em psicologia, área de conhecimento em psicologia da justiça. braga: instituto de educação e psicologia da universidade do minho. grangeia, h., matos, m., & machado, c. (2008, junho). do amor não correspondido à violência relacional: um estudo sobre as experiências juvenis. comunicação no congresso feminista, lisboa, portugal. howard, d., wang, m., & yan, f. (2007). psychosocial factors associated with reports of physical dating violence among u.s. adolescent females. adolescence, 42, 166, 312-324. jackson, s. (1999). issues in the dating violence research: a review of the literature. aggression and violent behavior, 4, 2, 233-247. lewis, s., & fremouw, w. (2001). dating violence: a critical review of the literature. clinical psychology review, 21, 1, 105-127. lucas, s. (2002). a agressividade no namoro de adolescentes. dissertação do ii curso de mestrado na especialidade de sexologia. lisboa: universidade lusófona de humanidades e tecnologias. machado, c., caridade, s. & martins, c. (no prelo). violence in juvenile dating relationships: self-reported prevalence and attitudes in a portuguese sample. journal of family violence. martins, s., & machado, c. (2008, maio). perpetración y victimización sexual: estudio con jóvenes universitarios portugueses sobre creencias y prevalencia. comunicação no iv congreso nacional psicología jurídica y forense, múrcia, espanha. matos, m., machado, c., caridade, s., & silva, m. (2006). prevenção da violência nas relações de namoro: intervenção com jovens em contexto escolar. psicologia: teoria e prática, 8, 1, 55-75. paiva, c., & figueiredo, b. (2004). abuso no relacionamento íntimo: estudo de prevalência em jovens adultos portugueses. psychologica, 36, 75-107. paiva, c., & figueiredo, b. (2005). abuso no relacionamento íntimo e estado de saúde em jovens adultos portugueses. international journal of clinical and health psychology, 5, 2, 243-272. saavedra, r. (em preparação). prevenir antes de remediar: investigação-acção na prevenção da violência nos relacionamentos íntimos. tese de doutoramento em psicologia, área de conhecimento em 361 building participative, empowering & diverse communities psicologia da justiça. braga: instituto de educação e psicologia da universidade do minho. saavedra, r., & machado, c. (2008). programa 4d: curriculum de prevenção integrada para o 9.º ano de escolaridade. porto: associação portuguesa de apoio à vítima. wolfe, d. a., crooks, c. c., hughes, r., & jaffe, p. j. (2008). the fourth r: a school-based program to reduce violence and risk behaviors among youth. in d. pepler & w. craig (eds.), understanding and addressing bullying: an international perspective (pp. 184-197). bloomkington, in: authorhouse. 362 building participative, empowering & diverse communities empowerment as the determinants of citizen-participation for environmental management plan hiroe maeda (tokai gakuen university) and yukio hirose (nagoya university) mhiroe1205@yahoo.co.jp abstract the present study explored the determinants of general attitude and behavioral intention of citizen participation (c.p.) for making basic environment plan. the results of our previous study indicate that through the commitment, environmental volunteers enhanced their empowerment expectation and behavioral intention of c.p. for making the environmental plan. the purpose of this study is to examine whether the ordinary citizens would participate in making the environmental plan when they could expect to get empowerment through their participation. a random sampling survey was conducted on 1500 residents in tsushima city, which began to make a basic plan for environmental management by citizen participation. main results of the survey were as follows. firstly, expectation of social benefit (efficacy to change the administration by c.p.; e.g. “c.p. makes administration adopt environmental policies”) was the main determinant of general attitude of c.p. secondly, individual empowerment expectation (competence; e.g. “i will get a broader view by participating in making the plan”) was the main determinants of behavioral intention of c.p. lastly, general attitude of c.p. did not have significant effect on behavioral intention to c.p for making basic environment plan. key words: citizen participation, empowerment, environmental management plan introduction for environmental activities in japan, citizen participation is an important issue. in 1994, the japanese government compiled the first basic plan for the environment, specifying that one of its long-term objectives would be to establish an environmentally sustainable society by means of citizen participation. recently, citizen panel conferences (e.g., consensus conferences and planning cells) have been introduced, and workshops are being held in many cities in order to create environmental management or waste reduction plans. the purpose of our study is to examine why people take part in a collective action like developing an environmental management plan. we focus on ordinary citizens without prior experience in volunteer activities or participation in community planning, and we investigate how they evaluate and take part in developing the plan. research on planning has shown that many people express positive attitudes towards citizen participation, but only a few exercise their behavioral intention to participate in planning activities (maeda, hirose, sugiura, & yagishita, 2008). both regional plans like waste reduction plan or environmental management plan and accomplishments of environmental volunteers’ activities are considered public goods, because every resident can receive benefit by environmental policies based on these plans or activities. therefore, developing a regional plan by means of 363 building participative, empowering & diverse communities citizen participation has been regarded as a social dilemma in supplying public goods (olson, 1965). citizen participation will bring social benefits to all inhabitants of the city, and based on these social benefits, many people evaluate citizen participation positively. on the other hand, people are reluctant to participate, in spite of their positive evaluation. thus the pattern of citizen participation in planning is similar to behavior in social movements and volunteer activities. how to facilitate the participation of ordinary citizens is an important question. recently, a group of randomly sampled people were invited to participate in a citizen panel conference in eu, united states, and japan. the participation rate from random sampling was around 10 to 20% in eu (e.g., in case of karlsruhe: hirose, 2007). but, it was lower in japan (e.g., in case of nagoya: maeda et al., 2008). to increase participation rates, it is necessary to identify what affects people’s evaluations of citizen participation and their behavioral intent to participate. in previous research (maeda & hirose, in press), the main determinants of the general evaluation of citizen participation for making waste reduction plan were direct and spillover social benefits. people who thought citizen participation enabled the plan to provide easyto-follow rules (direct social benefits of citizen participation), and making the plan by citizen participation facilitated other stakeholders’ (e.g., schools or stores) efforts to waste reduction (spillover social benefits), evaluated general evaluation of citizen participation more positively. in addition, inefficiency of citizen participation had negative effect on general evaluation of citizen participation. in contrast, the main determinants of the behavioral intention to participate were expectation of personal empowerment and personal cost. general evaluation of citizen participation didn’t have significant effect on behavioral intention. people who thought they could increase self-efficacy or solidarity by their participation and personal cost would be low, evaluated behavioral intention positively. respondents in maeda and hirose (in press) were people who had experience in participating in community activities as volunteers. in the present study, we asked if this pattern of determinants was the same for people who had no prior experience of participation. the project for waste reduction and environmental management plans in the city of tsushima, japan, was a good case for our purpose. tsushima decided to develop these plans by means of citizen participation. the city first developed a waste reduction plan from 2002 to 2003, followed by an environmental management plan from 2004 to 2006. during the development of the waste reduction plan, tsushima invited citizens to participate by establishing a citizen committee. the committee sponsored many events (e.g., an inspection visit to an advanced region which already accomplished to reduce waste, a citizen forum for waste reduction) and collected various ideas from the public. after completing the waste reduction plan, the citizen committee acted as a leader in implementing the plan. therefore, activities for both making the plan and following up on it involved substantial citizen participation. based on the methods used in creating the waste reduction plan, tsushima again invited citizens to participate in the creation of an environmental management plan. about 60 people participated in a citizen committee that met more than 130 times. the process of developing these plans was highly publicized. therefore, it could be assumed that many people in tsushima would know about citizen participation in making these plans, even if they didn’t participate in the process. it could also be assumed that those who didn’t participate in the process would still be able to evaluate the social benefits of the plan or estimate 364 building participative, empowering & diverse communities their expectation of personal empowerment or cost should they have decided to participate. our research questions are as follows. the first is whether or not ordinary citizens who lack previous volunteer experience would decide to participate in making community plans. the second question is whether a citizen’s general evaluation of the waste reduction plan developed through citizen participation is made on the basis of social benefits and inefficiency of citizen participation. the third question is whether personal empowerment as a selective incentive is a prerequisite for the behavioral intention to participate in developing the environmental management plan. as expected answers to the second and third questions, the following hypotheses are derived from previous studies about determinants of behavioral intention for citizen participation, social movements, and volunteer activities. the first hypothesis is that determinants of general evaluation of the waste reduction plan will be social factors, namely, social benefits as a positive factor and inefficiency of citizen participation as a negative factor (maeda & hirose, in press). the second is that determinants of the behavioral intention to participate in developing the environmental management plan will be personal factors, personal empowerment and personal cost (clary, snyder, ridge, copeland, stukas, haugen, & miene, 1998; klandermans, 1997; maeda & hirose, in press). method sample the city of tsushima in aichi, japan was targeted as the study area. a postal survey was conducted of 1500 tsushima citizens chosen by random sampling in january 2005. at this time, the city had begun to develop its basic environmental management plan by means of citizen participation. measures the questionnaire included several sections that measured behavioral intention to participate, general evaluation of citizen participation, expectation of personal empowerment, expectation of personal cost, social benefits by citizen participation, and inefficiency of citizen participation. we asked behavioral intention and its prerequisites about environmental management plan. but, as general evaluation of citizen participation and its prerequisites, we asked about waste reduction plan. because, these two plans were made one after another, then we thought it was easier for ordinary people to evaluate general evaluation and its prerequisites based on waste reduction plan that made earlier. the main dependent variable was behavioral intention to participate in making the basic environmental management plan. six items were used for behavioral intention (e.g. “becoming a member of the citizen committee”, “attending a forum or symposium to discuss environmental conservation in tsushima”). we asked respondents to choose items as many as they like, and constructed an indicator of behavioral intention by combining these six items. general evaluation of citizen participation in the basic waste reduction plan was measured by two items: “the basic waste reduction plan made by citizen participation is well organized”, and “the basic waste reduction plan made by citizen participation is efficient and good on the whole”. independent variables for behavioral intention were expectation of personal empowerment 365 building participative, empowering & diverse communities and expectation of personal cost. in this study, two forms of empowerment could be expected by citizens participating in plan development. the first form of empowerment was a sense of selfefficacy as participants obtained a variety of useful information from different perspectives. the second form of empowerment was a sense of solidarity from developing personal relationships with officials or other community residents interested in environmental conservation. six items were used to measure expectation of these two forms of personal empowerment: for self efficacy, e.g., “if i participate in making the environmental plan, i would be able to obtain useful information”, “if i participate in making the environmental plan, i would be able to achieve a broader perspective”; and for solidarity, e.g., “if i participate in making the environmental plan, i would be able to create social ties with various people”, “if i participate in making the environmental plan, i would be able to make friends and we can support one another.” two items were used to measure expectation of personal cost: “if i participate in making the environmental plan, i would feel relationships with other participants to be burdens stemming from my participation”, and “if i participate in making the environmental plan, it would take a lot of time and effort.” independent variables for general evaluation of citizen participation in the basic waste reduction plan were social benefits and inefficiency resulting from citizen participation. six items measured social benefits from citizen participation: e.g., “by means of citizen participation, the waste reduction plan provides easy-to-follow rules”, “by means of citizen participation, the waste reduction plan provides easy-to-recycling rules”. two items measured inefficiency of citizen participation: “the waste reduction plan developed by citizen participation makes solid waste disposal more costly than ever”, and “the waste reduction plan developed by citizen participation makes separation of recyclable materials more time-consuming and effortful than ever.” all items except behavioral intention were measured on a 5-point scale from 1 (“do not agree at all”) to 5 (“agree very much”). in order to identify people who had previous experience in citizen participation, respondents were also asked if they had taken part in the citizen participation program that had developed the waste reduction plan. results a total of 661 valid responses were obtained, for a collection rate of 44%. of the 661 questionnaires, 516 responses were provided by people who had not participated in developing the waste management plan. the number of responses from females (54.4%, n=280) and males (45.6%, n=235) was almost the same; the mean age of respondents was 51.35 years. means of number of selected items for behavioral intention was 1.3. “making questionnaire to examine view of citizens about environment in tsushima” was selected by one third of respondents, the largest number in respondents. 366 building participative, empowering & diverse communities inefficiency of c .p. for waste plan expectation of personal em powerm ent by c .p. for environm ental plan social benefits of c .p. for waste plan r 2=.57 g eneral evaluation of c .p. for waste plan r 2=.21 bi of c .p. (m aking environm ental plan) .73 -.08 .32 expectation of personal cost by c .p. for environm ental plan -.20 -.03 .13 -.13 -.10 .43 .07 figure1 result of path analysis of determinants of general evaluation of the waste plan and behavioral intention to participate in creating the environmental plan. figure 1 shows the result of the path analysis. non significant paths from prerequisites to general evaluation of citizen participation or behavioral intention to participate were deleted. the fit indicator values were;χ2(6)=10.8(p=.094)，gfi=.99, agfi=.97, cfi=.99, rmsea=.04. the main predictor of general evaluation of citizen participation in the waste reduction plan was social benefits. expectation of empowerment by citizen participation in the environmental management plan also had a weak positive effect on general evaluation. in contrast, the main predictor of behavioral intention to participate was expectation of personal benefit, i.e., empowerment expectation. personal cost also affected intention negatively. general evaluation of citizen participation in the waste management plan had no direct effect on behavioral intention for citizen participation. discussion and conclusion ordinary citizens, as well as experienced volunteers(maeda & hirose, in press), evaluated citizen participation from the general viewpoint of expected outcomes. they focus on the expected outcomes of social benefits and reach their conclusion based on these social benefits. in contrast, when citizens have to decide whether or not to take part in projects, they are likely to focus attention on the personal benefits and costs. the more people expected empowerment through their participation, the more willing they were to participate in developing the environmental plan. therefore, the more easily they can see the positive personal benefits of citizen participation, the more likely they are to participate. therefore, there are two different processes involved in decision making about citizen participation. we conclude that administrators who want to introduce citizen participation in environmental planning should emphasize social benefits. they should discuss with citizens the necessity of protecting the environment and the importance of citizen participation. they should appeal citizens that if many citizens participate in making environmental plans, the plans would be more effective, and various stakeholders would also increase their efforts. on the other hand, at the stage of eliciting citizen participation, administrators should emphasize expected empowerment, as well as social benefits. the administrators should appeal citizens that if they participate in making environmental plans, they would become confidence, 367 building participative, empowering & diverse communities and get various information, make many friends as support network. however, if citizens have no prior experience of empowerment from a voluntary activity, it may be difficult to get many people to participate. in fact, the means of number of selected items about behavioral intention was low. in future research, we will investigate the kind of actions that can encourage citizen participation. references clary, e. g., snyder, m., ridge, r. d., copeland, j., stukas, a. a., haugen, j., & miene, p. (1998). understanding and assessing the motivations of volunteers: a functional approach. journal of personality and social psychology, 74, 1516-1530. hirose, y. (2007). a normative and empirical research on procedural justice of citizen participation in environmental management planning: a case study of citizen participatory projects in karlsruhe. in ohbuchi, k. (ed.), social justice in japan: concepts, theories and paradigms. pp.264290. melbourne: trans pacific press. klandermans, b. (1997).　the social psychology of protest. cambrige: blackwell. maeda, h., & hirose, y. (in press). expectation of empowerment as a determinant of citizen participation in waste management planning. japanese psychological research, 51(1). maeda, h., hirose, y., sugiura, j., & yagishita, m. (2008). representativeness of randomly selected participants. sociotechnica, 5, 78-87. (in japanese with english abstract) olson, m. (1965). the logic of collective action：public goods and the theory of groups. cambridge, ma：harverd university press. 368 building participative, empowering & diverse communities psychology of the oppressed: encounters with community psychology in palestine ibrahim makkawi birzeit university, palestine e-mail: imakkawi@birzeit.edu abstract in this presentation i explore and discuss the importance and relevance of community psychology as a paradigm in understanding the dialectics of oppression and mental health in occupied palestine, specifically in the occupied west bank and gaza. i survey key historical turning points in the palestinian context and advance an argument for a critical and liberating community psychology. i end by presenting a program of community psychology we are in the process of developing at birzeit university. rather than presenting another review of the international development of community psychology, for the purpose of understanding the specific context of palestine it is suffice to state that community psychology as praxis involves the scientific study of people within their particular socio-political environment while using this knowledge to help improve the mental health of individuals, groups and communities (orford, 1992). community psychology, as a sub-discipline within psychology, emerged when critical psychologists realized that the genesis of mental health disorders among members of the oppressed and marginalized communities are rooted in the objective conditions of oppression, discrimination, injustice and social deprivation within their social environment. similar to paulo freire’s (1970) pedagogy of the oppressed and liberation education, community psychology may as well be perceived as the psychology of liberation of the oppressed. the latin american model of liberation social psychology (burton, 2004) provides an ideal framework to understanding and arguing for the necessity of critical community psychology in occupied palestine. in 1948, the state of israel was established consequential to an ethnic cleansing campaign leading to the mass explosion of more than two thirds of the indigenous palestinian population, leaving a fragile minority behind (morris, 1989). in 1967 the remaining of historical palestine, namely the west bank and gaza strip, were occupied by the israeli invading army. since 1967 the two populations of palestinians in historic palestine have been divided by the virtual “green line” living under two contradictory political conditions; one group as formal israeli citizens and one under military occupation. palestinian refugees in exile account for the remaining half of the palestinian people and they are about five million today spread between refugee camps in neighboring arab countered and in the west. in this paper we discuss community psychology and mental health among the palestinian population in the occupied west bank and gaza strip. during the first two decades of resisting occupation, the palestinian people in the west bank and gaza strip have managed to establish an extraordinary network of grassroots organizations and community level committees, including student unions, women groups, labor unions and a wide variety of professional organizations. in the foundation of this sense of community and collective responsibility was a spectacular drive for volunteerism and contribution to the public good and the national cause. when the first intifada erupted in 1987, it was these grassroots organizations and community groups that carried out and sustained the struggle and provided the needed social and psychological support to victims of political violence. mailto:imakkawi@birzeit.edu 369 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the signing of the “oslo” agreement between the plo and the government of israel in 1993 was a turning point at which the palestinian cohesive community described above was deliberately invaded by funding coming from western capitalist countries. rather than having the opportunity to develop their own social and economical infrastructure, the palestinians were taken hostages by conditional funding which had penetrated the community from the top down, including the palestinian authority itself. with a widespread network of funded non governmental organizations (ngos) operating throughout the palestinian community, the old grassroots voluntary organizations had simply disappeared. in 2004 a total of 57 ngos were identified as providing psycho-social / mental health care services to a wide variety of groups including women, children, people with disabilities and victims of military violence (giacaman, 2004). governmental institutions providing mental health services include the ministry of education, ministry of health and ministry of social affairs. many of these organizations, both governmental and nongovernmental, provide overlapping services sometimes to the same population, all depending on the availability of external funding, which is typically conditional upon the political situation in palestine. despite the fact that they may operate centers within the community, their framework for intervention is individualistic in nature, where they mostly apply individualistic approaches to counseling and psychotherapy. when the second intifada erupted in 2000, the palestinian community was less prepared to sustain the collative struggle and provide the needed social and psychological support like before. contrary to mass demonstrations and community building, which were prevalent during the first intifada, the second intifada was highly militarized with many casualties and victims of military violence. it was within this stressful social milieu that ngo were expected to attend to collective social and psychological suffering of war. the task was way beyond their stated agendas and professional capacities. parallel but unrelated to this expanding network of mental health services, there has been an evidence of growing body of research on the exposure of palestinian children and youth to political violence and trauma. this peculiar “ptsd research industry” encompasses little relevance if any to practitioners who work with palestinian victims of military violence. this body of research suffers from a number of methodological flows (haj-yahia, 2007): first, the overwhelming majority of the studies use the traditional quantitative research methodologies, and there is near absence of qualitative research methodology. second, the majority of the research has been conducted in the gaza strip where political violence and hardship of life conditions are grater than the west bank. third, there is a lack of comparison groups with youth who have not been exposed to the same level of political violence. forth, political violence and traumatic events have been measure on a dichotomous scale (yes/no). finally, all the scales used in these studies were initially developed in english, mainly in north america and western europe and they were merely translated into arabic with no attention to their cultural relevance. the gap between mental health practices carried out by a large number of ngos and the empirical research on political violence and mental health in palestine brings to the fact that the fundamental necessity for critical community psychology, rather than traditional psychological and mental health practices in occupied palestine, is derived from the assumption that the individual’s psychological well being is to a large extent an outcome of the ongoing occupation, oppression, repression, and exploitation. 370 building participative, empowering & diverse communities due to prolonged repression by the israeli occupation, along with the inability of palestinian authority to monitor the various psychological and mental health services provided by a network of ngos in the occupied west-bank and gaza, there is an entrenched phenomenon of “bad practice” embedded in the overlapping and border-crossing practices among the various professions of mental health, including psychology, social work, special education and even sociology. furthermore, we cannot ignore the reductionist and individualistic nature of both research and practice in community mental health as well as the peculiar gap and disconnection between them. we believe opting for a paradigm of critical community psychology with its interdisciplinary emphasis and context specific praxis will provide some answer to this acute situation of community mental health practices. it is essential that we examine how the ongoing occupation, military violence, colonialist separation wall, checkpoint, economical embargo, the rise of poverty, imprisonment and torture, assassination and killing, school closures, and the systematic destruction of palestinian infrastructure; how all of these factors play a significant role in the severity of people’s mental health and the expansion of risk factors. such resulting factors include but not limited to disempowerment, poor community prevention, delinquency, child labor, high-risk behaviors, aggression, domestic violence, school violence, substance abuse and many other mental health issues. while working with groups and communities within this oppressive colonialist context, we strongly emphasize that ultimately the process of community critical conscientization (freire, 1970) is by and in itself a process of psychological liberation and mental health promotion. at birzeit university we envision community psychology as praxis where we strongly emphasis both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies and epistemologies, and conduct community participatory action research about context specific issues within the palestinian socio-political context. our students also participate in a year long practicum in community based organizations, and encouraged to conduct their thesis research in conjunction with this practicum. they are expected to engage in a number of community level intervention projects where they gather data in participatory manner with community members, develop and implement community level intervention programs. topics covered through course in our program include, community psychology (overview and community interventions); qualitative and quantitative research methodologies; culture and mental health in palestinian society; child and adolescent development in war environment; applied social psychology; individual and small group interventions; professional ethics; educational community psychology; psychology and gender differences; and ethno-psychology. references burton, m. (2004). liberating psychology in latin america. the psychologist, 17, 10, 584-587. freire, p. (1970). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum. giacaman, r. (2004). psycho-social / mental health care in occupied palestinian territories: the embryonic system. ramallah: the institute of community & public health haj-yahia, m. (2007). challenges in studying the psychological effects of palestinian children’s exposure 371 building participative, empowering & diverse communities to political violence and their coping with this traumatic experience. child abuse & neglect, 31, 691-697. morris, b. (1989). the birth of the palestinian refugee problem, 1947-1949. uk: cambridge university press. orford, jim. (1992). community psychology: theory and practice. new york: john wiely & sons. 372 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the psychology of resilience among palestinian female students ibrahim makkawi birzeit university, palestine e-mail: imakkawi@birzeit.edu abstract in this paper i present initial findings from a qualitative exploratory study with a small sample of academically resilient palestinian female students in the west bank. participants reported a number of factors that from their personal experiences explain the remarkable academic achievement among palestinian female students including: family support, female segregated schools, supportive female teachers, educational success as a path to the public space, and resilient personal characteristic. theoretical framework there is a plethora of educational literature documenting the ways by which formal educational systems in diverse societies are structured and conducted in manners which hinder the opportunities for academic success and achievement among ethnic minority students, students from the working class and female students (banks, 1994; mclaren, 1994). this corpus of scholarship in the fielded widely known as “multicultural education” focuses mainly on educational theory and practice within the context of heterogeneous western societies (i.e., usa, canada, and australia). earlier paradigm of explaining the low achievement records among minority students was labeled as “the cultural deficit paradigm” which had emphasized a wide range of factors within the cultural background of the students that place them in a category labeled as “at risk students” (pollard, 1989). nonetheless, there are many examples of “at risk students” who are considered “success stories” despite the odds working against them. an alternative paradigm of understanding the educational successful experiences of minority students despite the obstacles in their educational environment is known as the paradigm of “student resilience” (jarret, 1997; pollard, 1989; floyd, 1996). according to scholars working from this worldview “rather than focusing on the children who were casualties of these negative factors, the studies focused instead on those who had not succumbed” (howard, dryden & johnson, 1999, p. 309). what kind of factors in the student’s immediate environment and what personality characters are credited for such accomplishments? furthermore, feminist scholars took an issue with the educational system’s discrimination against female students resulting in a pattern of low achievement among females comparable to their male counterparts (sadker, sadker, & long, 1993). pioneering critical research and theorizing on women’s psychology was inspired by the realization that traditional theories of psychology were, to a large extent, developed by white male scholars and used white male research participants in their earlier stages of theory constructions (gilligan, 1982; josselson, 1987; belenky, mailto:imakkawi@birzeit.edu 373 building participative, empowering & diverse communities clinchy, golberger, & taule, 1997). conventional theories of psychology did not account for women’s psychological experiences and development, and considered male experiences as the norm against which women’s psychological development was examined and evaluated. working initially with kohlberg’s theory of moral development, carol gilligan realized that these critical developments in women’s psychology provided solid theoretical foundations for many scholars of multicultural education who were mostly interested in female students’ education and the ways by which educational systems discriminate against them and obstruct their educational achievements and opportunities for success (sadker & sadker, 1982). however, consistently with the general movement of multicultural education in diverse western societies, the focus of this body of research remains on environmental factors within the classroom, the school, and the students’ cultural background which limit female students’ equal opportunities for academic success, rather than exploring factors that may lead to resilience and “success stories”. research addressing the area of children resilience is broadly conceived as “paradigm shift” (kuhn, 1970) in our understanding of minority and female students academic success despite the factors of risk for failure abundant in their educational and social environment (i.e., poverty, racial discrimination, sexism). resilience is defined as a “set of qualities, or protective mechanisms that give rise to successful adaptation despite the presence of high risk factors during a course of development (howard et.al, 1999, p. 310). in a qualitative study with a group of highly successful african american students, floyd (1996), found two sets of factors that explain these students’ resilience. external factors included support from family members and significant others such as teachers and counselors. internal factors included personality traits such as perseverance, optimism and persistence. it is crucial to identify these positive factors and foster their development in order to increase minority and female students’ opportunities for success. palestinian women under occupation experience multiple levels of oppression where patriarchy, sexism, colonialism and class exploitation are in continuous dialectical interaction with each other producing unbearable degree of adversity (makkawi & jaramillo, 2006). consequently, palestinian female students are exposed to a series of “risk factors” embedded in their educational environment throughout all levels of their education. in addition to conventional concerns of teenager females typically discussed in the psychological and educational literature, palestinian female adolescents face a complicated set of societal restriction, demands and pressures as they enter high school. the phenomenon of academic success among palestinian female students, despite the mounting difficulties and obstacles, indicates a trend of students’ resilience in the face of acute adversity. it is intriguing to explore which factors account for the phenomenon of palestinian female students’ academic achievement when most factors in their environment are hindering rather than encouraging educational achievement. the current study the annual public announcement of the results of the tawjihi exams taken by palestinian students upon their graduation from high school in the west bank and gaza may seem as a conventional cultural practice for the ordinary observer. however, a remarkable piece of data regarding female students’ academic achievements intrigues a great deal of intellectual curiosity in the mind of the interested researcher. out of the first forty distinguished palestinian students who graduated in 2004/05 school year, divided between four categories (arts and sciences in the 374 building participative, empowering & diverse communities west bank and in gaza) an overwhelming majority (37 students) where females. furthermore, an examination of previous years of the tawjihi results reveals a common trend of palestinian female students’ distinguished achievement, something which is most likely to be the case in the near future. this phenomenon, when juxtaposed against the widely documented environmental “risk factors” in the palestinian educational system as well as in the arab-palestinian society as a whole, distinct this group of highly achiever palestinian female students as a group that requires deeper studies of their experience. the purpose of the current study was to explore in depth the “real world” of a cohort of female student high achievers. it focuses on their perceptions and evaluations of both external factors in their environment and internal personality factor that, from their views, led to their resilience and noteworthy success giants the odds. this study used “grounded theory” techniques (glaser & strouss, 1967) as a qualitative methodology in order to explore in depth the experiences, strategies, identities, learning styles, psychological resilience, goals, aspirations, and coping methods among a purposefully selected sample of highly successful palestinian female students. the sample of 15 participants in this inquiry consists of “data rich cases” (patton, 2002) purposefully selected from the graduating cohort of palestinian female high school students during the academic year 2005/06. the main tool for data collection was in-depth open ended interviews lasting approximately from one to one and a half hour for each session. all interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim for qualitative analysis. the transcripts were analyzed for emerging themes using “grounded theory” techniques. initial findings family support and protection: participants indicated a strong, worm and accepting support from their nuclear family during their high school experience. this “safety net” provided by family support and protection has some negative consequences such as limiting their chances for independence and the development of gender awareness. it is very important to them “not to disappoint their family”. female segregated schools: unlike universities where there is full integration, most palestinian high schools are segregated by gender. female schools were perceived by participants as providing a “safe environment” away from cruel competition with male students over achievement and other school activities. supportive female teachers: the majority of the teachers in female schools are women. female teachers view their teaching role as a great career achievement and take it very seriously comparable to their male counterparts in the palestinian educational context. they are personally devoted to the role, and consequently serve as appositive role model to their female students. male teachers on the other hand, take up teaching positions reluctantly due to the limitations of other job opportunities. educational success and the public space: as expressed by participants, palestinian women increase their chances to participate in the “public space” when they are highly successful in their academic work. the alternative is to marry earlier and remain within the family doing mostly domestic work. this perception of educational success as a chance to be involved in the “public space” serves as a challenge to be taken many palestinian female students. male students 375 building participative, empowering & diverse communities on the other hand, don’t have to be academically successful in order for them to be involved in the “public space”. personal characteristic: participants expressed remarkable degrees of self-confidence, internal sense of locus of control, self-esteem and persistence and motivation in their academic work. conclusion resilience studies in education and mental health help identify context specific environmental and personal factors that together facilitate individual’s success and healthy development despite the odds. in education, and particularly education of the oppressed such as the case of palestinian women, policy makers must shift their focus from “fixing the individual” to “fixing the system” where factors of resilience such as the family, peers and teachers, and school environment are utilized to support “at risk” female students who are victims of sexism, oppression, and discrimination. palestinian women have been historically involved as equal participants in the struggle for self determination providing solid bases for their claims of equality. the remarkable success stories of palestinian female students discussed in this paper add another substantiated evidence for these claims and quest for equality and liberation. references banks, j. (1994). multiethnic education: theory and practice. boston: allyn and bacon. belenky, m., clinchy, b., goldberger, n., & tarule, j. (1997). women’s ways of knowing: the development of self, voice, and mind. new york: basic books. floyd, c. (1996). achieving despite the odds: a study of resilience among a group of african american high school seniors. journal of negro education, 65(2), 181-189. gilligan, c. (1982). in a different voice: psychological theory and women’s development. massachusetts: harvard university press. glaser b. & strouss, a. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. new york: aldine de gruyter. howard, s., dryden, j., & johnson, b. (1999). childhood resilience: review and critique of literature. oxford review of education, 25(3), 307-323. jarrett, r. (1997). resilience among low-income african american youth: an ethnographic perspective. ethos, 25(2), 218-229. josselson, r. (1987). finding herself: pathways to identity development in women. san francisco: gessybass. kuhn, t. (1970). the structure of scientific revolutions. chicago: the university of chicago press. makkawi, i. & jaramillo, n. (2006). the dialectic of nationalism and feminism among palestinian women student-activists in israeli universities. mediterranean journal of educational studies, 10(2), 3962.. mclaren, p. (1994). life in schools: an introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education. new york: longman. 376 building participative, empowering & diverse communities patton, m. (2002). qualitative research and evaluation methods. (3rd ed.). thousand oaks: sage publications. pollard, d. (1989). against the odds: a profile of academic achievers from the urban underclass. journal of negro education, 58(3), 297-308. sadker k. & sadker, d. (1982). sex equity handbook for schools. ny: longman. sadker, m., sadker, d., & long, l. (1993). gender and educational equality. in james banks & cherry mcgee banks (eds.). multicultural education: issues and perspective. pp. 111-129. boston: allyn and bacon. 377 building participative, empowering & diverse communities acculturation across life domains and perceived social support: a research in a suburban community of the city of genova (italy) mara manetti, laura migliorini, laura frattini università di genova, department of anthropological sciences, italy e-mail: manetti@disa.unige.it. abstract the concept of acculturation is related to interethnic contacts and describes the psychological and cultural changes that occur as a result of continual relations among peoples belonging to different cultural or ethnic groups (gibson, 2001). the acculturation process can be facilitated or inhibited by cultural aspects, individual skills, forms of support and sense of value (self esteem) that the person experiences and develops in contact with the host culture. over past three decades, social support has been one of the major topics for community psychological investigation and viewed as “one of the basic building blocks of social, psychological and biological integrity” (pierce et al.,1996). migration process gives several implications with reference to the support to reception; the support structure, given to adolescents, is considered as an efficient protecting factor in front of many problematic aspects of the life of subjects belonging to ethnic minorities (zimmermann et al., 2000). self-esteem is commonly considered as an index of well-being and of psychological adjustment of adolescents (benjet, hermandez-guzman, 2001; phinney, 2001). the present study examines the relationships among acculturation strategies across life domains, self esteem and social support of italian, double heritage and immigrant adolescents. participants are 137 italian, 119 immigrant and 92 double heritage adolescents recruited from public schools in genoa (italy). the students fulfilled a questionnaire consisting in socio-cultural data, self-esteem scale (rosemberg, 1965: 10 items), social support from family and from friends (procidano and heller, 1985), psychological acculturation scale (tropp et al., 1999, in a version modified by manetti, frattini, olivieri: 14 items). veçu et santé perçu par l’adolescent vsp-a (simeoni m-c., sapin c., antoniotti s., auquier p., 2001). results show significant relationships, between family support and friend’s support, self esteem and well-being and different acculturation profiles by domains among italian, double heritage and foreigner students. key words: immigrant adolescents, acculturation ,social support, self-esteem, well being. an overview of the current research 1.1. acculturation processes the concept of acculturation is related to interethnic contacts and describes the psychological and cultural changes that occur as a result of continuous contacts among people belonging to different cultural or ethnic groups (gibson, 2001). redfield, linton, & herskovits, 1936 defined acculturation as “ those phenomena which mailto:manetti@disa.unige.it 378 building participative, empowering & diverse communities result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original culture patterns of either or both groups..’’ (, pp. 149–152). graves (1967) introduced the concept of psychological acculturation, and defined it as the set of psychological changes that take place in individuals who are members of cultural groups. berry and kim (1988), when considering how immigrants relate to the host culture, took into account two parameters: the first one is the time running between the decision to leave and enter a new culture and the moment the immigrant establishes a relationship with the host culture. that means that there are phases of pre-contact, contact, conflict, crisis and adaptation. the second parameter examines the degree of behavioral change immigrant persons develop entering into relationship with the host culture; so behaviors range from loss of the original identity (assimilation) to a condition of acceptance of the relationships coexisting with the preservation of their own culture and identity (integration), maintenance of relationships only for certain situations, staying outside the host culture (separation), and, finally, total denial of contacts with the host culture (exclusion). arends-toth j., van de vijver f.j.r. (2004) suggest a specific domain model and argue that relationships with a new culture must be considered in relation to the different areas migrants decide to accept or consider consistent with their point of view, while other existing domains are refused or felt totally unacceptable for their culture. this model is linked to the recent work of ward (2008) who examined ethno-cultural identity conflict as a function of cultural distance. according to the author, this concept operates both individually and at level of group, and her findings converged to indicate that the identity conflict is stronger when migrants originate from countries whose culture, language and ethnic composition differ markedly from the host society. parameters which measure closeness/distance between cultures become crucial. in particular, the author identified three constellations of relevant variables: developmental factors, family values and dynamics, and intergroup factors. the acculturation process is facilitated or inhibited by other aspects of the migrant life such as: family and friend support structures and level of self-esteem. 1.2. family and friend social support over past three decades, social support has been one of the major topics for community psychological investigation. social support has been viewed as “one of the basic building blocks of social, psychological and biological integrity” (pierce et al.,1996). many studies point out how the support parents give their children depends on two features: the first is a care dimension and a second is control or protection (parker and gladstone, 1996). the skills parents exhibit in such areas result in a good level of adjustment of children in adulthood (timko and moos 1996). the parent-children relation needs the re-negotiation of boundaries and the development of progressive independence levels in relation to parental authority, especially during adolescence (steinberg and silk, 2002). this step may be particularly critical to immigrant teens for the following reasons: the acculturation process may follow different timing and arrangement between the first and second generation (kwak, 2003; okagaki & bojczyk, 2002). moreover, different levels of acculturation between parents and children can intensify the challenges and conflicts, normally occurring at this stage of development, compared to what occurs in families in which members 379 building participative, empowering & diverse communities are at similar levels of acculturation. children, generally, have a more rapid level of acculturation than parents. parents have a stronger sense of identity than children and are more linked to the ethnic traditions of the origin country (kwak, 2003). differences in acculturation between parents and children are associated to levels of wellbeing of children (lee & zhan, 1998), to a lower level of satisfaction of life (phinney and ong, 2002), to an increased anxiety and lower self-esteem (farver, narang, and bhadha, 2002), and to higher levels of depression (kim, 2003). however, some literature (zimmermann et al., 2000). stresses as the support structure, given to adolescents, is considered as an efficient protecting factor in front of many problematic aspects of the life of subjects belonging to ethnic minorities. then, parental support assumes an ambivalent function: it can be positive when it helps young people to self integrate into the new culture, or have a function of withdrawal from intercultural relationships when parents feel threatened by the host culture or, extrema ratio, have maladaptive and strongly conflicting features either inside family and inside social context. adolescents may not feel to be helped in the interpretation and negotiation with the host culture, and then the conflicts they have to face concern both the relationships with family and with the host contexts (school, peer group , neighborhood, job, leisure). authors attribute different effects to the social support from family and from friends, with reference to the adjustment process, in various contexts ( roberts et al., 2000). these effects may depend either on the child immigrants culture of origin, or on the time elapsed since the arrival in the host country (y.w. ying, lee p.a, tsai jl (2007). research has shown that when problems with friends exist these tend to be correlated with depressive situations, and that, among late adolescents and university students, the friendship relations have a protective function against stressors greater than those given by parents. these occurrences have to be attributed to the process of separation / individualization typical of the age (mattanah, hancockand brand 2004), but perhaps they depend on the fact that immigrant children recognize to the peer group a cultural know how greater than what they recognize to their parents. they utilize the peer group to comprehend, manage, and find meaning in their lives, and to ward off depressive symptoms (gore and aseltine, 1995; rodriguez, et al 2003). generally, the friend support structures seem to produce positive effects on well–being but may have a negative impact when the request to comply with the community standards are particularly oppressive (caughy et al. 2003; wakefield and poland, 2005). moreover, family and friendly supports are not free from the influence of the context: they seem to be easily affected by economic level and by socioeconomic features of the community (wen et al., 2005). 1.3. self esteem and well being self-esteem is commonly considered as an index of well-being (benjet, hermandezguzman, 2002) and of psychological adjustment of adolescents (phinney, 1991). the classical theory of’ “looking glass self’’ (cooley’s 1956) says that the point of view a person takes, for what is concerned, largely reflects the views of individuals and groups of reference of the individual himself. the migration process forces migrants to face the different views the groups of origin, 380 building participative, empowering & diverse communities people who have dealt with them on the migration and people belonging to the host countries, have. in many cases these views do not correspond each other, and they have to negotiate, from time to time, their own image and their own level of self-esteem. furthermore, the level of selfesteem may vary depending on whether individuals compare themselves with their ethnic group or with people of the majority group. nesdale and mak (2003), referring to the self categorization theory (sct) of turner et al. (1987) report of a level of individual self-esteem and of ethnic self-esteem and / or ethnic identification. in any case, self-esteem and the sense of personal self-worth is widely recognized as a central aspect of psychological functioning and is strongly related to many other variables, including general life satisfaction, psychological health and adjustment competences, even if literature, with reference to the connections between the level of individual and ethnic esteem, is very contradictory (nesdale and mak 2003). however, self esteem is acknowledged to mediate measures of emotional distress. high self-esteem is associated with psychological well-being and health, whereas low self esteem is associated with psychological problems, including depression and anxiety (abe j. a. 2004) mruk, 1995) objectives scope of the research is the collection of structural data of the reference people with particular attention to the migration situations. outlook of the acculturation process of subjects in relation with different life domains. analysis of familiar and friendly social support to check the effects on self-esteem and well-being. investigation of self-esteem and well-being of adolescents and pre-adolescents. evaluation of how these variables affect scholastic outcomes. 3. hypotheses on the basis of the considerations reviewed in foreword, the following hypotheses have been assumed: hypothesis 1acculturation process effectiveness depends on different life domains. hypothesis 2family support is assumed to act differently from friend support. hypothesis 3a relationship is expected between social support and adolescent selfesteem, their well being and their scholastic outcomes. hypothesis 4foreign and double heritage adolescents are assumed to face more difficulties than italian with regard to self-esteem, well-being and. scholastic outcomes. 4. method the project developed a quantitative methodological approach, based on dispensing a structured questionnaire to 348 participants: 137 italian, 119 immigrant and 92 double heritage adolescents, recruited from public schools in genoa (italy). the analysis of quantitative data obtained from the questionnaires was performed by the software package spss.13 (software package for social sciences). 381 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 4.1. participants the sample consisted of 348 students: 39.4% italians, 26.4%. double heritage and 34.2% foreigners. foreign students came from four areas in particular: south america 58%, east europe 25.2%, africa 15.1% and north europe 1.7%. with reference to the educational level, the majority of the interviewed students (56.6%) attended the last two classes of primary school, 30.7% the lower middle school, and the remaining 12.6% the first two years of the upper middle school .the average age for the entire sample was 11.7 (sd 2.2).sample was equally divided on the basis of sex: m 50.3% , f 49.6%. the majority of foreigner and double heritage students (43.8%) lived in italy since their birth; 31.8% between 3 and 6 years; 13.5% between 7 and 10 years; 7.8% between 0 and 2 years and 3.1% between 11 and 15 years. parent mean age was 44 for fathers [( sd 6.07) minimum 22 and maximum 60]; and 40 for mothers [(sd 6.00) minimum 22 and maximum 56]. comparing the educational level of parents we found out that there were no significant differences and that most of parents had a medium-high educational level 61.7% ( tab.1). tab. 1 mothers fathers school level italians (123) double heritage (82) strangers (90) italians (124) double heritage (80) strangers (86) primary and lower middle school 36 27 37 44 25 42 higher middle school and university 64 73 63 56 75 58 total 100 100 100 100 100 100 despite a substantial cultural equivalence among the families of the three groups a marked difference in the type of jobs played by parents was found. most of fathers played intellectual or business activities (entrepreneurs, professionals, employees, teachers) (see tab. 2) especially those of the double heritage group (79.3%). on the contrary, most of mothers played manual or domestic activities, and italian women was the ones mostly employed in intellectual occupations (47.3%). tab.2 fa th er s pr of es si on s italians double heritage foreigners f sig. intellectual and entrepreneurial 53.0 79.3 44.6 13.7 0.000 manual 47.0 20.7 55.4 total 100 100 100 m ot he rs pr of es si on s intellectual and entrepreneurial 47.37 38.20 7.83 27.25 0.000 manual 52.63 61.80 92.17 total 100 100 100 382 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 4.2. instruments following specific tools have been employed: socio-cultural data sheet of adolescent and his family. psychological acculturation scale (tropp et al., 1999, in the version modified by manetti, frattini, olivieri 2005). perceived family and friend social support scales (procidano & heller, 1983). global self esteem scale (rosemberg, 1965). veçù et perception de la santé des adolescentes (simeoni, sapin, antoniotti, auquier, 2001). scholastic outcomes. 4.2.1. socio cultural variables the structured questionnaire for students consisted of open and closed applications and included the following data: age, sex, educational level , country of origin, time of permanence in italy, housing conditions, school outcomes (class failed, assessment of educational skills, level of comprehension, reading and writing italian and parent language), family situation (age, educational level and employment of parents). 4.2.2. acculturation by domains the psychological acculturation scale [pas] (tropp et al., 1999, modified by manetti, frattini, olivieri). consists of 10 items concerning individuals’ psychological responses to differing cultural contexts (language use, cultural foods, music, holiday celebrations, and family celebrations). item responses for the pas were scored on a 7-point likert-type scale, ranging from 1 (only with my ethnic group) to 7 (only with other groups), with a bicultural orientation defining its midpoint. thus, a bicultural orientation (when a person is in a position of equidistance between its own group and other ethnic groups) could be defined as a parallel sense of connection to both cultures (cuellar et al., 1980). 4.2.2. social support the procidano & heller scale (perception of social support from family and friends, 1983) is a 40-item measure of perception of support from family and friends, 20 for family and 20 for friends. participants were asked to respond to each of the statements with a response of ‘‘yes,’’ ‘‘no,’’ or ‘‘don’t know.’’ previous research demonstrates that the scale has excellent validity (cumsille and epstein 1994; procidano and heller, 1983). 4.2.3. self-esteem self-esteem (10 items) was measured with the rosenberg self-esteem scale (1965). the measure assessed adolescents’ global feelings of self worth (e.g. ‘‘at times i think i am no good at all’’). response categories ranged from 1 (strongly agree) to 4 (strongly disagree). this measure was computed as the sum of the 10 items in the scale. five items were reversed scored so that higher scores denoted greater self-esteem. the rosenberg self-esteem scale demonstrated good reliability in the past (cronbach’s alfa :71; 1965). rosenberg self-esteem scale is probably the most used measure of personal self-esteem in ethnic identity and acculturation research (li gong, 383 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 2007). 4.2.4. subjective well-being the scale véçu et santé perçue de adolescent (vsp-a, simeoni, sapin, antoniotti & auquier, 2001) consists of 36 items, inquires various dimensions of the quality of life: vitality, physical and psychological well-being, relationship with teachers, relationship with parents, relationships with friends, school performance, body image and leisure activities. each item was answered on a 5-point likert scale, from 1 “not at all/never” to 5 “very much/always”. the time frame for the measure was the previous 4 weeks. the test is reliable (cronbach alpha 0.74–0.91). content and construct validity are good (sapin, simeoni, el khammar, antoniotti & auquier, 2005). 4.2.5. scholastic outcomes students were asked a personal assessment of the results of the average of their school outcomes, in all the scholastic subjects. responses were evaluated according to the following criteria: (seriously insufficient =3-4 , inadequate = 4-5, sufficient = 6-7, more than enough = 7-8). 5. results 5.1. acculturation by domains. tab. 3 shows the descriptive statistics of the tool for acculturation by domains. mean scores and sd of the different acculturation strategies were calculated for the different ethnic groups. for each domain statistical significance is p>0.00. in relation to domain specificity in acculturation models, considerable research has shown that level of acculturation relates to varied outcomes in different life environment relevant for immigrant adolescents. for all domains of the areas of acculturation appeared evident how the italians have practically exclusive reference to the italians themselves while foreigners are the group most willing to weave relations with other ethnic groups (see tab. 4). tab. 3 acculturation scale by domains italians (137) double heritage (86) strangers (119) f sig. mean sd mean s d mean sd acculturation_tot (alpha .91) 2.33 0.98 3.18 1.28 3.54 1.04 39.2 0.00 culture (alpha .83) 1.92 1.05 2.82 1.38 3.21 1.33 36.2 0.00 comprehension sharing (alpha .91) 2.37 1.21 3.26 1.47 3.47 1,30 25.3 0.00 friendship (alpha 75) 2.82 1.18 3.55 1.38 3.93 1.15 27.1 0.00 384 building participative, empowering & diverse communities tab. 4 5.2. perceived family and friends support. table 5 shows how the whole sample perceived family support as significantly higher than what received by friends, to signify an important and intimate relationship the family offers either as care dimension or control and protection with respect to the external social context. but the perception of support from the family is significantly higher for italians than for both of comparison groups. this may simply depend on different cultural patterns or, rather, on the perception that the double heritage and foreigner families are less competent in helping children to cope with the new contexts. relations with friends, however, put in evidence significant differences for the benefit of foreigner and double heritage adolescents. this figure can be explained by a specific trend of local culture to have a shortage of relationships outside the family. on the contrary, the cultures of immigrants show intense relations with extended families and peer groups. it is significantly higher, however, the score achieved by italians in relation to the perception of a situation of isolation by friends. tab. 5 italians (137) double ethnics heritage (92) strangers (119) f sig. mean sd mean sd mean ds family support (alpha .73) 1.73 0.26 1.62 0.31 1.64 0.29 5.70 0.00 friends support exchange (alpha .58) 0.93 0.24 0.98 0.24 0.99 0.25 2.10 0.12 friends isolation (alpha .43) 1.34 0.43 1.28 0.43 1.21 0.45 2.38 0.09 friends tot. (alpha .47) 1.09 0.17 1.05 0.16 1.12 0.17 5.02 0.00 385 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 5.3. self esteem and well being the three ethnic groups differed significantly with respect to self-esteem: specifically, foreign adolescents reported significantly lower levels of self-esteem than biracial and italian ones (see. tab 6). literature (phinney et al.1997). reports for immigrant adolescents’ lower scores in relation with self-esteem. in fact they are ought to face a plurality of challenges related to the acculturation shock, scholastic fatigue and, sometime, ethnic prejudice. also well-being for foreigners is lower than for italians ( tab 6) tab. 6 italians (137) double heritage (92) strangers (119) mean sd mean sd mean sd f sig. self-esteem alpha .73 3,26 0,49 3,18 0,48 3,05 0,45 6,11 0,00 well being_tot alpha .87 3,09 0,84 2,63 0,51 2,98 0,85 10,26 0,00 school outcomes school adjustment is generally regarded as the primary socio-cultural and developmental task for children and adolescents (mattanah, et al.,2004). in the examined sample, foreign subjects turned out school grades significantly lower than italian and double heritage ones, also maintaining assessment over the sufficiency (see tab. 7). tab. 7 italians double heritage foreigners very unsatisfactory 0,0 1,1 5,1 unsatisfactory 2,9 4,4 12,0 satisfactory 35,0 35,2 45,3 very satisfactory 62,0 59,3 37,6 total 100 100 100 all differences are significant (f 14,532, sig. p>0.000) 5.5. correlation bivariate correlation among all the measures are presented in table 7. the data confirm the correlation between family and friend support, between family support and self-esteem as reported in literature (phinney, et al.2002), between family support and well-being. there is a positive correlation between friend support and self-esteem, as expected, and a negative one between friends and acculturation. this last figure may be explained by the fact that friends, referred to by the foreigners, belonged, mostly, to the same ethnic group (though at school and in other contexts related predominantly with individuals of other groups). as a consequence the relationship between friend support and process of acculturation correlates negatively. instead, self-esteem of all students correlated positively with school performance . 386 building participative, empowering & diverse communities tab. 8 family supp. friends self_esteem family supp. 1 friends **0,19 1 self_esteem **0,21 *0,11 1 well been **0,14 -0,07 0,050 acculturation -0,11 **-0,16 -0,056 scholastics outcomes 0,06 0,04 **0,191 **correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). * correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). discussion and future research in the acculturation scale for domains, italians showed a strong tendency to ethnocentrism, while the need of relationship with the host culture (allocentrism) was a feature of foreigner and double heritage adolescents. data confirm a strong correlation between family and friend support as reported in literature, but family support seems to work in a different way for italians, foreigners and double heritage families. in fact, for these last two groups the family is perceived as less present; this, even if strong signals of relational problems are not obsrved at level of community. that, however, could become meaningful in the near future as an indicator of discomfort needing further investigations. foreigner and double heritage adolescents have problems about: self-esteem and wellbeing and scholastic outcomes., on the contrary italians have higher indexes of perception of isolation from friends. friend support seems to be particularly effective for foreigners and shows a negative correlation with acculturation processes, that points out how a strong sense of belonging to the ethnic group contrasts integration. immigrants are reported to have more difficulties in most of the areas considered, these data indicate problems attributable to the stress for migration, even in the sphere of intimate relationships (lower family support). presented data do not include the processing in relation to gender differences because they have been found not particularly significant. in future research should focus on the different paths of migratory processes; in particular, in relation to the differences between cultures. indeed, the ease / difficulty of a path of acculturation may be a result of the closeness / distance between one culture and another. the conceptual crux of proximity/ distance between cultures currently is not yet been analyzed in the mainstream of research on migration processes, therefore requires further study. 387 building participative, empowering & diverse communities references abe j. a. 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(1999) psychological acculturation: development of a new measure for puerto ricans on the u. s. mainland, educational and psychological measurement, vol. 59, 2, 351-367. 389 building participative, empowering & diverse communities turner, j. c., hogg, m. a., oakes, p. j., reicher, s. d., &wetherell, m. s. (1987). rediscovering the social group: a selfcategorisation theory. oxford: basil blackwell. wakefield, s., & poland, b. (2005). family, friend or foe? critical reflections on the relevance and role of social capital in health promotion and community development. social science & medicine, 60(12), 2819–2832. ward c. (2008) thinking outside the berry boxes: new perspectives on identity, acculturation and intercultural relations in international journal of intercultural relations 32 105–114 wen, m., cagney, k., & christakis, n. 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(2000). a longitudinal study of stressbuffering effects for urban african-american male adolescent problem behaviors and mental health. journal of community psychology, 28, 17–33. 390 building participative, empowering & diverse communities psychological sense of community: contributions toward a new understanding clelia anna mannino and mark snyder university of minnesota (usa) abstract to expand and broaden the conceptualization of community, we advance a psychological notion of community, as a feeling of belonging and connection with a group of people who have shared concerns, and contrast it with community defined in physical terms (i.e., a specific place or geographic location with clear physical boundaries). results of the present study provide evidence that physical and psychological forms of community are distinct constructs and have differential links to social action. psychological sense of community: contributions toward a new understanding volunteerism and other prosocial actions are becoming increasingly common in everyday life. from locally-based initiatives to international organizations such as the peace corps, people are devoting more time to benefit others. much research has examined what motivates individuals to engage in prosocial action; however, little work has probed the important role of community in promoting behavior that enhances society. a notion of benefit to a larger community is implicit in prosocial action and may prove critical for linking desire with action. to the extent that people identify highly with their community and believe that their prosocial efforts will be beneficial, they will likely engage in actions that benefit others and society. current and past research has examined psychological sense of community, a feeling of belonging to and dependence on a larger community. however, community has often been defined by physical or geographical boundaries (i.e., as a specific place or geographic location). to expand and broaden the conceptualization of community, we advance a psychological notion of community, as a feeling of belonging and connection with a group of people who have shared concerns. notions of community place attachment. commonly discussed in the environmental psychology literature, place attachment refers to the connection that people often feel to a place that, for them, elicits an emotion; for example, the place where someone was born, or where he/she now lives and works (knez, 2005). involved in the development and conceptualization of place attachment is a dynamic interplay between emotions, beliefs, and action (kyle, graefe, & manning, 2005). current research in environmental psychology has studied place attachment as it relates to a particular climate or environment (knez, 2005), to recreational settings (kyle et al., 2005; kyle, graefe, manning, & bacon, 2004), and to sacred places and religion (mazumdar & mazumdar, 2004). these studies, and the concept of place attachment itself, reference a specific location 391 building participative, empowering & diverse communities or geographic entity. likewise, notions of physical community involve a particular geographic location with clear physical boundaries, such as a neighborhood, town, or city. kyle, graefe, & manning (2005) and hay (1998), however, suggest that place attachment may include another critical element. in their examination of attachment to the appalachian trail, kyle and colleagues (2005) conclude that the social-bonding and meaningful social relationships that occur in specific settings are an important component of human-place connection. hay (1998) also found that social ties were influential in determining the strength of his participants’ attachment to their rural new zealand community. thus, feelings of connection to others in the community appear to be influential in determining the degree to which individuals feel attached to a particular geographic region. psychological sense of community. a feeling of connectedness with others may also form the basis for a broader sense of community. over the last two decades, community psychology has been interested in community identity and the related psychological sense of community (colombo & senatore, 2005), a concept first introduced by sarason (1974). broadly defined, psychological sense of community refers to a feeling of belonging and being able to depend on a larger community. in the literature, it is commonly thought of as including four components: 1) a sense of membership and belonging, 2) a feeling that an individual makes a difference in the community and that the community is important to its members, 3) a sense that the community can meet the needs of its members, and 4) the presence of a shared emotional connection among members, that they will share experiences and a history together (colombo, mosso, & de piccoli, 2001; kim & kaplan, 2004; peterson, speer, & hughey, 2006; prezza & costantini, 1998; proescholdbell, roosa, & nemeroff, 2006; puddifoot, 2003). psychological sense of community has been explored in numerous studies, some conducted in the u.s. and some internationally (bishop, colquhoun, & johnson, 2006; hill, 1996; kim & kaplan, 2004; puddifoot, 2003; tartaglia, 2006), and has been linked to life satisfaction (prezza & costantini, 1998), social identification (obst & white, 2005), personality traits (lounsbury, loveland, & gibson, 2003), positive and negative outcomes of youth in disadvantaged neighborhoods (cantillona, davidson, & schweitzer, 2003), and the presence of threats to communities (loomis, dockett, & brodsky, 2004). issues of conceptualization the notion that a psychological sense of community exists and that it has wide ranging influences is not in doubt. rather, what current literature must now address is how to broaden the conceptualization that underlies psychological sense of community. many studies examining community approach psychological sense of community as a geographically-bounded construct, such as connected to a neighborhood or town. even the most commonly used measure to assess psychological sense of community, the sense of community index (sci; chavis & pretty, 1999; perkins, florin, rich, wandersman, & chavis, 1990) includes items that reference physical space (e.g., “very few of my neighbors know me”; “i expect to live on this block a long time”; “my neighbors and i want the same things from the block”; and “if there is a problem on this block people who live here can get it solved.”). while some researchers (e.g., brodksy & marx, 2001; puddifoot, 2003; tartaglia, 2006) do advance an expanded notion of psychological sense of community, more work needs to be done. their assessments still involve the idea that community is a geographically-defined region 392 building participative, empowering & diverse communities such as a block or neighborhood. largely absent is the notion that sense of community involves feelings of psychological connectedness with other people who share similar attitudes, values, or experiences, and who may not be in the same physical location. omoto and malsch (2005) and omoto and snyder (2002) echo similar sentiments. they conclude that most literature views community as context, as having and being defined by boundaries. research should instead focus on community as process, shifting community sentiment to a wholly psychological conceptualization and not referring to a geographicallybounded region (omoto & malsch, 2005; omoto & snyder, 2002). based on this theorizing, we developed two working definitions of community. a physical notion of community was defined as a specific place or geographic location with clear physical boundaries. a psychological notion of community was defined as a feeling of belonging and connection with a group of people who have shared concerns. in the present study we examine these two conceptions of community and their involvement in pro-social action. methods participants a total of 111 undergraduate students at a large midwestern u.s. university participated. a majority was female (68.9%, males: 28.3%). participants ranged in age from 18 (20.0%) to 20 (23.8%). procedure participants completed an online survey where they were asked to define community (“when you see or hear the word community, what do you think of?”), to list the communities to which they belonged, and to indicate their interest and likelihood of participating in various volunteer activities. measures community appeals. to examine whether differing notions of community may influence participants’ interest in volunteer activities, two message appeals were created. one emphasized a physical sense of community, and one a psychological sense of community. both appeals began with the stem: “we need your help! the clean-sweep society is looking for volunteers to help clean up the alleys around the city. this is a one-time volunteer activity of only three hours on a saturday afternoon.” the physical appeal ended with: “please join us – it’s a great way to clean-up and beautify the area!” the psychological appeal ended with: “please join us – it’s a great way to connect with people who are also concerned with the environment and be successful in achieving a common goal!” participants were randomly assigned to three conditions: 1) no appeal, 2) appeal emphasizing a physical sense of community, 3) appeal emphasizing a psychological sense of community. volunteer activities. ten items (alpha = .88) assessed participants’ interest in participating in volunteer activities to enhance physical community (e.g., raking leaves on your block) and twentytwo items (alpha = .94) assessed interest in activities that enhance psychological community (e.g., tutoring children). participants rated their interest in each activity using a 7-point scale ranging from 1(not at all interested) to 7(very interested). items of each type (physical and psychological) were combined to form scales and a mean calculated. 393 building participative, empowering & diverse communities results views of community in participants’ open-ended responses, there was evidence that they thought of community in both physical and psychological terms. one participant was clearly physically minded: “i would think of community as an area of town that i live in, the neighbors, stores, restaurants, and the people that i see … also the parks and other green space that is a part of it.” another participant conceptualized community in terms of interpersonal relationships: i think of a community as a group of people who spend a lot of time together sharing ideas and working together to build productive relationships. this group of people probably also works together to better the area that they live in, such as doing clean-up activities, fundraisers, and food drives. yet another participant viewed community in wholly psychological terms: “community means more to me as referring to people rather than place. a community can exist beyond geographical borders as long as people share something in common.” on average, participants listed approximately seven communities to which they belonged (m = 7.30, sd = 4.48). physical communities (m = 2.23, sd = 2.22) seemed to be slightly more salient than psychological ones (m = 2.07, sd = 2.34), although the difference was not statistically significant, t(107) = .56, p > .05. however, when prompted with a definition of psychological community, participants could readily identify the psychological communities to which they belonged, adding significantly more psychological communities (m = 1.23, sd = 1.24) to their initial list than physical ones (m = .38, sd = .70), t(47) = -4.38, p < .01. message appeals as predicted, results suggest that community appeals emphasizing either physical or psychological sense of community do influence the volunteer activities in which participants are interested (see figure 1). participants that were shown an appeal highlighting physical sense of community expressed significantly greater interest in volunteering to benefit physical community, controlling for general interest, f(2, 104) = 4.81, p < .05. similarly, participants shown an appeal emphasizing psychological sense of community indicated significantly higher interest in volunteering to enhance psychological community, f(2, 104) = 3.16, p < .05. discussion our theorizing and research provide support for the proposition that community is salient. participants were able to provide their personal definition of community and readily list the communities to which they belong. importantly, results also emphasize that physical and psychological forms of community are distinct constructs. previous literature in both community and environmental psychology has succeeded in documenting the importance of individuals’ sense of community in many aspects of their lives. however, despite using the term psychological sense of community, researchers have failed to consider it in a wholly psychological light. community is most often assumed to reference a relatively bounded geographic region. more broadly though, psychological sense of community seems to involve feelings of belongingness and connection to others with shared concerns, but not necessarily shared geographic location. not only are physical and psychological notions of community distinct, but they also have identifiable links to social action. participants expressed a higher interest in volunteer activities that matched the type of community highlighted in the message appeal. these results illuminate 394 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the ways in which connections to communities can serve as a motivating force, drawing people into certain types of volunteerism and even sustaining their involvement over time. by broadening current conceptualizations of psychological sense of community, future research will broaden the theoretical perspective within which we view community and action. a broader conceptualization is needed to assess an individual’s sense of community, to fully explore how this sentiment affects his/her involvement in prosocial action and motivations to volunteer, as well as to examine how community can be both a motivating force and a resulting benefit from social engagement. references bishop, b., colquhoun, s., & johnson, g. (2006). psychological sense of community: an australian aboriginal experience. journal of community psychology, 34(1), 1-7. brodksy, a. e., & marx, c. m. (2001). layers of identity: multiple psychological senses of community within a community setting. journal of community psychology, 29(2), 161-178. cantillona, d., davidson, w. s., & schweitzer, j. h. (2003). measuring community social organization: sense of community as a mediator in social disorganization theory. journal of criminal justice, 31(4), 321-339. chavis, d. m., & pretty, g. m. h. (1999). sense of community: advances in measurement and application. journal of community psychology, 27(6), 635-642. colombo, m., mosso, c., & de piccoli, n. (2001). sense of community and participation in urban contexts. journal of community & applied social psychology, 11(6), 457-464. colombo, m., & senatore, a. (2005). the discursive construction of community identity. journal of community & applied social psychology, 15(1), 48-62. hay, r. (1998). sense of place in developmental context. journal of environmental psychology, 18, 5-29. hill, j. l. (1996). psychological sense of community: suggestions for future research. journal of community psychology, 24(4), 431-438. kim, j., & kaplan, r. (2004). physical and psychological factors in sense of community: new urbanist kentlands and nearby orchard village. environment and behavior, 36(3), 313-340. knez, i. (2005). attachment and identity as related to a place and its perceived climate. journal of environmental psychology, 25(2), 207-218. kyle, g., graefe, a., & manning, r. (2005). testing the dimensionality of place attachment in recreational settings. environment and behavior, 37(2), 153-177. kyle, g., graefe, a., manning, r., & bacon, j. (2004). effects of place attachment on users’ perceptions of social and environmental conditions in a natural setting. journal of environmental psychology, 24(2), 213-225. loomis, c., dockett, k. h., & brodsky, a. e. (2004). change in sense of community: an empirical finding. journal of community psychology, 32(1), 1-8. lounsbury, j. w., loveland, j. m., & gibson, l. w. (2003). an investigation of psychological sense of community in relation to big five personality traits. journal of community psychology, 31(5), 531-541. 395 building participative, empowering & diverse communities mazumdar, s., & mazumdar, s. (2004). religion and place attachment: a study of sacred places. journal of environmental psychology, 24(3), 385-397. obst, p. l., & white, k. m. (2005). an exploration of the interplay between psychological sense of community, social identification and salience. journal of community & applied social psychology, 15(2), 127-135. omoto, a. m., & malsch, a. m. (2005). psychological sense of community: conceptual issues and connections to volunteerism-related activism. in a. m. omoto (ed.), processes of community change and social action (pp. 83-103). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. omoto, a. m., & snyder, m. (2002). considerations of community: the context and process of volunteerism. american behavioral scientist, 45(5), 846-867. perkins, d. d., florin, p., rich, r. c., wandersman, a., & chavis, d. m. (1990). participation and the social and physical environment of residential blocks: crime and community context. american journal of community psychology, 18, 83-115. peterson, n. a., speer, p. w., & hughey, j. (2006). measuring sense of community: a methodological interpretation of the factor structure debate. journal of community psychology, 34(4), 453-469. prezza, m., & costantini, s. (1998). sense of community and life satisfaction: investigation in three different territorial contexts. journal of community & applied social psychology, 8, 181-194. proescholdbell, r. j., roosa, m. w., & nemeroff, c. j. (2006). component measures of psychological sense of community among gay men. journal of community psychology, 34(1), 9-24. puddifoot, j. e. (2003). exploring “personal” and “shared” sense of community identity in durham city, england. journal of community psychology, 31(1), 87-106. sarason, s. b. (1974). the psychological sense of community: prospects for a community psychology. san francisco: jossey-bass. tartaglia, s. (2006). a preliminary study for a new model of sense of community. journal of community psychology, 34(1), 25-36. 396 building participative, empowering & diverse communities o impacto de um programa de prevenção dos abusos sexuais de crianças em: crianças, pais e professores susana maria, md. ispa/appepasc smaria@ispa.pt josé ornelas, ph.d. – ispa jornelas@ispa.pt abstract the impact of a children sexual abuse prevention program: children, parents and teachers our aim is to present a research in which the purpose is the analysis of the impact of a children abuse prevention program developed in school, contexts involving: children, their relatives and professionals within the school community (teachers). the goal is to evaluate the impact that the development of this prevention program might have in the participants to whom it is directed in terms of their knowledge, attitudes, and competence towards prevention and intervention in child sexual abuse. after the implementation of the child abuse prevention program in the school context, directed to teachers (and other school professional), parents (and other relatives) and children (from the first to the fourth grade) we introduce the impact evaluations. the instruments (questionnaires and interviews) have been created to allow the analysis of the reported indicators: knowledge, attitudes and competences towards prevention and intervention in child sexual abuse. others studies, with similar goals, and instruments are the basis to the organization or/and adaptation of these tools. the instruments allow the gathering of data about: 1) demographic information, 2) involvement in children sexual abuse prevention, 3) knowledge of child abuse characteristics, 4) attitudes towards the prevention notions taught in prevention programs, 5) beliefs regarding risks and advantages of children sexual abuse prevention programs and who should participate in these programs. the expect outcomes are that the participants in the prevention program demonstrate higher levels in knowledge, attitudes and competences towards prevention and intervention in children sexual abuse. this might allow us to reach the secondary objective: the valorisation of child abuse prevention programs development and their dissemination in different contexts. key words: child sexual abuse, prevention, community o objectivo desta comunicação é apresentar um estudo que procurou analisar o impacto de um programa de prevenção dos abusos sexuais de crianças desenvolvido numa comunidade escolar e que envolve crianças, pais e professores. o objectivo específico é avaliar o impacto que este programa teve no público a quem se dirige em termos dos seus conhecimentos e competências no que se refere à prevenção e intervenção nos abusos sexuais de crianças. mailto:smaria@ispa.pt mailto:jornelas@ispa.pt 397 building participative, empowering & diverse communities até há alguns anos atrás considerado um assunto tabu, o fenómeno dos abusos sexuais de crianças tem vindo a tornar-se um foco de atenção científica por parte de várias áreas disciplinares. embora em portugal não existam ainda estudos relativos à prevalência dos abusos sexuais de crianças de uma forma sistemática e com uma representatividade nacional, podemos depreender que os números não estarão muito afastados daqueles que as estatísticas internacionais nos apontam. nos e.u.a. estima-se que meio milhão de crianças seja abusado sexualmente todos os anos (filkelhor, 1994 cit. por chassan-taber & tabachnich, 1999). contudo kilpatrick (1992 cit. por chassan-taber & tabachnich, 1999) refere que os estudos indicam que 84% dos casos de abusos sexuais não são denunciados. se numa primeira fase de intervenção na área dos abusos sexuais de crianças se deu ênfase, por um lado, à punição dos abusadores e, por outro, ao apoio às/aos sobreviventes e às suas famílias, hoje procura-se realçar a importância de se intervir numa perspectiva de prevenção primária (segundo o modelo tripartido da prevenção). contudo, a importância do desenvolvimento de programas de prevenção primária dos abusos sexuais de crianças com ênfase na comunidade só poderá ser sustentada e reforçada através da avaliação que esses programas, de facto, têm no publico a quem se dirigem. parece-nos, assim, de extrema importância analisarmos, numa perspectiva científica, qual o impacto que os programas de prevenção dos abusos sexuais de crianças têm. como nos é reforçado por jon conte (1984 cit. por finkelhor, 1986) estes estudos devem analisar a mudança de conhecimentos e atitudes mas, também, as competências adquiridas. com este propósito, após a identificação de comunidades escolares disponíveis para colaborarem neste projecto, desenvolvemos o programa de prevenção dos abusos sexuais de crianças, o programa capfocalizado nos pais, professores e crianças. a história do cap remonta a 1978, em columbus no estado norte americano do ohio, numa associação designada women against rape war (mulheres contra a violação), esta associação foi, nessa altura, confrontada com um pedido de ajuda por parte de professores e pais de uma criança que tinha sido abusada sexualmente. assim, apesar de não terem recusado ajudar essa criança, tomaram consciência que deveriam desenvolver conhecimentos próprios de como lidar e prevenir o abuso de crianças e iniciaram um processo de construção de conhecimento e desenvolvimento de estratégias tendo por objectivo a construção de um currículo que visasse a prevenção do abuso de crianças. após alguns anos de trabalho surgiu em 1985 o national assault prevention center tendo já a sua independência da associação war. desde então, o programa tem sido disseminado por vários estados da américa do norte bem como ao nível internacional (holanda, irlanda, alemanha desde 1988, nova zelândia, japão, inglaterra, moldava entre 1994 e 1997). o programa cap considera que as crianças necessitam de ter informação sobre prevenção para se prepararem para reconhecerem uma situação potencialmente perigosa. assim, ensinar às crianças estratégias de prevenção no sentido de reduzir a sua vulnerabilidade aos abusos é tão importante como ensinar às crianças estratégias de prevenção rodoviária (como por exemplo, como atravessar uma rua em segurança). neste sentido um dos objectivos prioritários do projecto cap é dotar as crianças de estratégias de prevenção dos abusos (cooper, 1995). 398 building participative, empowering & diverse communities contudo, sabemos que para que essas estratégias resultem os adultos com quem as crianças podem contar devem ter informações semelhantes de como prevenir os abusos de forma a reforçar as estratégias adquiridas pelas crianças. desta forma, outro dos objectivos do cap é dotar os pais/educadores (ou outros familiares) e professores (e outros profissionais do contexto escolar) de conhecimentos e estratégias para colaborarem na garantia da segurança das crianças com quem contactam (cooper, 1995) e com isto preparar a comunidade em geral. por outro lado, sabemos que muitas vezes as situações de abuso já aconteceram e, como tal, as crianças, bem como os adultos, devem ter conhecimentos de como identificar situações abusivas e de como lidar com elas. consequentemente, outro objectivo deste projecto é dotar os destinatários (crianças, pais/educadores ou outros familiares, e professores e outros profissionais do contexto escolar) de conhecimentos e estratégias de como intervir nas várias situações de abuso (cooper, 1995). desta forma, este programa de prevenção desenvolve-se, na prática, através de workshops com os professores (e outros profissionais do contexto escolar), com os pais (e outros familiares) e com as crianças (no contexto das suas turmas). após a implementação do programa cap procedemos à aplicação dos instrumentos de recolha de dados (questionários) que nos permitiram recolher informação sobre os conhecimentos e competências relativamente às estratégias de prevenção e intervenção nos abusos sexuais de crianças dos vários participantes no programa de prevenção (pais, professores e crianças). os dados que iremos apresentar referem-se ao pré teste deste estudo (que tem previsto o seu desenvolvimento e a realização de estudos paralelos complementares). neste estudo de pré-teste desenvolvemos o programa cap em recolhemos informação junto de duas escolas do 1º ciclo. no que se refere aos participantes deste pré teste, contactamos com 25 pais, 29 professores e 12 crianças. relativamente aos resultados verificamos o seguinte: no que se refere aos pais (76%) dos participantes eram mães a maioria (92%) dos participantes “concorda” ou “concorda totalmente” que as crianças devem ser ensinadas a contar a alguém se forem abusadas sexualmente. sendo este um dos tópicos principais deste programa de prevenção, este resultado demonstra o que estes pais sentem relativamente ao desenvolvimento do programa de prevenção. podemos inferior que sentem que este programa é importante para proteger as crianças. 399 building participative, empowering & diverse communities contudo, os pais demonstram que, alguns deles, não reconhecem que é comum os adultos não acreditarem nas crianças quando elas denunciam uma situação de abuso: 8% não concorda nem discorda, 20% discorda 8% discorda totalmente com a afirmação: “por vezes os adultos não acreditam nas crianças quando elas denunciam uma situação de abusos sexuais.” por outro lado, os pais demonstram que sabem que a maioria dos abusos sexuais é perpetrada por pessoas que as crianças conhecem e não por estranhos, 28% discorda totalmente e 48% discorda que “a maioria dos abusos sexuais seja perpetrada por estranhos”. assim, podemos deduzir que o mito de temer apenas o “estranho” já não é verdadeiro para estes pais. isto é muito importante para que estes pais reforcem junto das suas crianças estratégias de prevenção dirigidas também para as pessoas conhecidas e não apenas para os estranhos. outro mito que parece não existir para este grupo de pais é aquele que refere que “as crianças mentem frequentemente sobre os abusos sexuais” (56% discorda e 24% discorda totalmente desta ideia) e que “as crianças inventam histórias para se vingarem dos adultos” (64% discordam e 8% discordam totalmente). 400 building participative, empowering & diverse communities por outro lado, alguns pais têm a ideia errada que hoje em dia existem mais casos de abusos sexuais que antes. a verdade é que hoje em dia as crianças são mais capazes de denunciar as situações de abuso e as famílias, os amigos, os professores e a comunidade em geral, estão mais alerta. e, alguns destes pais, também acreditam em mitos relativamente às características do abusador, pois alguns deles crêem que os abusadores sexuais têm uma orientação sexual exclusivamente dirigida para as crianças (40% não concorda nem discorda, 8% concorda e 4% concorda totalmente) e, por outro, alguns deles considera que os abusadores são pessoas doentes mentais (24% concorda e 12% concorda totalmente com esta ideia). 401 building participative, empowering & diverse communities finalmente, este grupo de pais parece considerar que os programas de prevenção dos abusos de crianças são importantes para todas as crianças independentemente do seu estatuto socio-económico ou género (52% discorda e 44% discorda totalmente da afirmação “as crianças de estatuto socio-económico médio e elevado não necessitam de participar em programas de prevenção primária dos abusos sexuais”.) estes pais também discordam (48% discordam e 48% discordam totalmente) que apenas as raparigas precisam deste tipo de programas. o que demonstra que este grupo de pais tem informação adequada sobre as potenciais vítimas de abusos sexuais, ou seja, indica que sabem que o único factor de risco associado aos abusos sexuais é a vulnerabilidade das crianças. 402 building participative, empowering & diverse communities quando questionados sobre se já falaram com as suas crianças sobre os abusos sexuais, 72% responderam que não, apenas 28% afirmaram que já tinham conversado com as suas crianças sobre este tema. contudo quando questionados sobre se sabem como agir numa possível situação de denuncia de abuso sexual, a maioria dos pais responderam que sabem como reagir e o que fazer (72% “sim” e 28% “não”). relativamente aos professores, todos os participantes são mulheres (100%). a maioria (57%) das participantes “concorda totalmente” que as crianças devem ser ensinadas a contar a alguém se forem abusadas sexualmente. esta ideia demonstra o que estas professoras pensam sobre os programas de prevenção. podemos inferir que consideram que este programa é muito importante para aumentar a protecção das crianças. as professoras também demonstraram que sabem que a maioria dos abusos sexuais são perpetrados por pessoas que as crianças conhecem e não apenas por estranhos, 24% discorda totalmente e 56% discorda que “a maioria dos abusos sexuais são perpetrados por pessoas estranhas”. 403 building participative, empowering & diverse communities as professoras, tal como os pais, demonstram que sabem que as crianças raramente mentem sobre os abusos sexuais, 56% discorda e 17% discorda totalmente da frase “as crianças mentem frequentemente sobre os abusos sexuais” e da afirmação “as crianças inventam histórias sobre os abusos sexuais para se vingarem dos adultos” (49% discorda e 24% discorda totalmente). por outro lado, algumas professoras não têm informações claras sobre duas ideias acerca dos abusos sexuais: a primeira que “hoje em dia ocorrem mais abusos do que no passado” (42% não concorda nem discorda e 24% concorda com esta afirmação). mas a verdade é que, como já referimos anteriormente, as crianças estão mais capazes de fazer a denúncia de abusos e as famílias, os amigos, os professores e a comunidade em geral estão mais à alerta. e o segundo, que “uma grande percentagem dos abusos sexuais implica violência física contra a criança” (69% concorda e 14% concorda totalmente com esta afirmação). de facto, um dos grandes problemas da invisibilidade dos casos de abusos sexuais deve-se à falta de evidências; quando existe violência física (que corresponde a uma minoria dos casos em que existem abusos sexuais) existem mais evidências e é mais fácil detectar-se os abusos sexuais. 404 building participative, empowering & diverse communities contudo a maioria das professoras questionadas não revelam mitos sobre as características dos abusadores no que se refere à ideia que os abusadores têm uma vida sexual dirigida apenas para as crianças (53% discorda, 10% discorda totalmente e 34% não concorda nem discorda). por outro lado algumas professoras deste grupo (48%) ainda consideram que os abusadores sexuais são pessoas que sofrem de doença mental (27% concorda totalmente e 21% concorda com esta ideia). 405 building participative, empowering & diverse communities finalmente, este grupo de professoras também demonstra considerar que os programas de prevenção dos abusos sexuais são importantes para todas as crianças independentemente do seu estatuto socio-económico ou género (76% discorda totalmente e 24% discorda da frase “as crianças de estatuto sócio económico médio e elevado não precisam de participar nos programas de prevenção primária dos abusos sexuais”. e também discordam (76% discorda totalmente e 24% discorda) que apenas as raparigas necessitam deste tipo de programas. quando questionamos este grupo de professoras sobre se já tinham falado com os/as seus/suas alunos/as sobre os abusos sexuais, 79% responderam que “não”, apenas 21% afirmaram que já tinham desenvolvido alguma discussão acerca deste tema na suas classes. 406 building participative, empowering & diverse communities contudo, quando questionadas sobre se saberiam como reagir a uma possível denúncia de abusos sexuais, a maioria das professoras respondeu que saberiam o como reagir e o que fazer (66% “sim” e 34% “não”). relativamente às crianças, todas as crianças pertencem ao 1º ciclo. todas as crianças (100%) demonstram ter informações correctas sobre os seguintes tópicos: “tens sempre de guardar todos os segredos” (100% responderam que “não”); bom segredo vs mau segredo “se alguém te tocar de uma forma que tu não gostas, deves dizer a alguém em quem tu confies (100% respondeu que “sim”); procurar ajuda “se alguém te tocar de uma forma que tu não gostas, a culpa é tua”; (100% respondeu que “não”) responsabilidade do abuso “se um menino mau da tua escola te mandar fazer alguma coisa, o melhor é fazeres ”; (100% respondeu “não”) ser assertivo/procurar ajuda “está certo receberes abraços dos adultos de quem gostas it’s ok for someone you like to hug you”; (100% responderam “sim”) “muitas crianças gostam de receber um beijinho dos seus pais antes de irem para a cama à noite, para essas crianças, este é um bom toque”; (100% responderam “sim”) “alguns toques começam por saber bem mas depois tornam-se confusos”; (100% responderam “sim”) “se ganhares o concurso de melhor desenho na tua escola e um vizinho que tu gostas te der um abraço de parabéns, isso é um bom toque”; (100% responderam “sim”) bom toque vs mau toque por outro lado as crianças participantes demonstraram ter falta de informação adequada sobre os seguintes tópicos: “os estranhos parecem-se com as outras pessoas”( 83% “não, 17% “sim”) 407 building participative, empowering & diverse communities “se fores a passear na rua com a tua mãe ou o teu pai e ela ou ele começarem a falar com um vizinho que ainda não conheces, é certo falares com ele também” (apenas 50 % responderam que “sim”). “a maioria das pessoas são estranhos e muitos dos estranhos são bons” (66% continuam a considerar que todos os estranhos são perigosos, assim a maioria respondeu que “não” a esta questão) “sabes sempre quem são os estranhos, porque se vê que são maus” (34% deste grupo de crianças ainda pensa que pode reconhecer se uma pessoas é boa ou má pelo seu aspecto). em conclusão, podemos dizer que tanto os pais como os professores sentem que é importante o desenvolvimento deste tipo de programas de prevenção primária com as crianças. 408 building participative, empowering & diverse communities os dois grupos demonstram informações adequadas sobre a realidade dos abusos sexuais, como por exemplo que todas as crianças, independentemente do seu estatuto socioeconómico ou género, devem participar em programas de prevenção primária; consideram ainda que as suas crianças (que pertencem ao 1º ciclo) não são novas demais para participar neste tipo de programas. também demonstram que sabem que as crianças raramente mentem acerca dos abusos sexuais e que a maioria dos abusadores sexuais são pessoas que as crianças conhecem. assim, devem preparar as suas crianças para não temerem apenas os estranhos mas também para identificarem possíveis situações de perigo com pessoas conhecidas. em contraste, tanto os pais como os professores parecem apresentar ideias erradas ou mitos acerca dos abusadores sexuais, como por exemplo, que é uma pessoa doente mental e com uma orientação sexual dirigida apenas para as crianças. estes mitos podem dar a ideia errada de que é fácil identificar quem é abusador sexual e quem não é. assim, relativamente ao programa de prevenção dos abusos sexuais (o programa cap que foi desenvolvido com estes participantes), no futuro, deveremos reforçar estas informações junto dos pais e professores. por outro lado, deveremos enfatizar, também, que a melhor maneira de prevenir os abusos é falar com as crianças acerca dos mesmos. o que podemos observar a partir dos resultados é que ambos (pais e professores) não falam com as suas crianças acerca deste tema, apenas se preocupam com a forma como reagir a uma denuncia de abusos se necessário. no que se refere ao grupo de crianças, podemos concluir que têm boas informações no que se refere a distinguir entre um bom toque e um mau toque” [“está certo que as pessoas de quem gostas te abracem”; “muitas crianças gostam de receber um beijinho dos seus pais antes de irem para a cama à noite, para essas crianças, este é um bom toque”; alguns toques começam por saber bem mas depois tornam-se confusos”; se ganhares o concurso de melhor desenho na tua escola e um vizinho que tu gostas te der um abraço de parabéns, isso é um bom toque”100% respondeu que “sim”], também demonstram que sabem distinguir entre um mau segredo e um bom segredo [“tens sempre de guardar todos os segredos” 100% responderam que “não”]; as crianças demonstraram que sabem que devem pedir ajuda a alguém em quem confiem se alguém lhes tentar tocar de uma forma que os faça sentir desconfortável ou se forem ameaçadas [se alguém te tocar de uma forma que tu não gostas, deves dizer a alguém em quem tu confies 100% respondeu que “sim”]. e, finalmente, as crianças reconhecem que a responsabilidade de um abuso é sempre do abusador [se alguém te tocar de uma forma que tu não gostas, a culpa é tua”100% responderam que “não”]. todas estas informações adequadas são muito importantes para reduzirem a vulnerabilidade das crianças aos abusos, pois a falta de informações correctas sobre os abusos sexuais é um factor de risco determinante. se as crianças reconhecerem potenciais situações de perigo e souberem como actuar ficarão menos indefesas. por outro lado, as crianças participantes demonstram algumas informações incorrectas no que se refere ao perigo e de onde ele poder advir, isto significa que a maioria deste grupo de crianças pensa que os estranhos são mais perigosos do que qualquer pessoas conhecida e que conseguem saber pela aparência quem é perigoso e quem não é. estas ideias poderão colocar as crianças em risco. assim, no que se refere aos programa de prevenção primária dos abusos sexuais, no futuro 409 building participative, empowering & diverse communities deveremos reforçar as informações sobre o perigo que pode partir de pessoas que as crianças conhecem e que é muito difícil vermos pelo aspecto das pessoas quem é bom ou mau. mas, para terminar, podemos concluir que a maioria das informações que foram transmitidas com este programa de prevenção foi absorvido pelos participantes e podemos, assim, inferir que isto ajudará as crianças a estarem mais protegidas dos abusadores sexuais. contudo, para termos a certeza de que os resultados obtidos foram consequência do programa de prevenção vamos realizar um estudo onde poderemos comparar com as respostas de pais, professores e crianças que não participaram no programa. obrigada! fim! referências bibliográficas chassan-taber, l. & tabachnick, j. (1999). evaluation of a child sexual abuse prevention program. sexual abuse: a journal of research and treatment, vol. 11, 4, 279292. cooper, s.j. (1995). new strategies for free children: child abuse prevention for elementary school children. new jersey: icap. finkelhor, d., araji, s., browne, a., peters, s., & wyatt, g. (1986). a sourcebook on child sexual abuse. newbury park, ca: sage. 410 building participative, empowering & diverse communities cambio organizacional para disminución del estrés en profesionales de enfermería hospitalaria albar marín, mª jesús y morano báez, rocío. e-mail: romoba81@gmail.com resumen el estrés ocupacional se presenta mayoritariamente en profesiones que se desarrollan en contacto con personas (i.e. enfermería). numerosos estudios han mostrado las consecuencias negativas de éste sobre el trabajador y la organización, dominando en su explicación teórica la aproximación transaccional, que lo vincula con los factores psicosociales del contexto laboral. con el propósito de superar estas limitaciones, en este trabajo presentamos el desarrollo de una buena práctica comunitaria guiada por los principios de la psicología comunitaria y la metodología de investigación acción participativa (iap). supone una redefinición del problema de estrés ocupacional desde la óptica del poder, que conduce a la puesta en marcha de acciones para el cambio organizacional, resaltando la participación activa de los profesionales. se ilustra con una experiencia llevada a cabo en el hospital universitario virgen macarena, que ha constado de varias fases: 1) el encargo. implicación organizacional; 2) identificación de necesidades; 3) priorización de problemas; y, 4) decisión e implementación de acciones. se ha puesto especial énfasis en la evaluación de necesidades de carácter participativo, la implicación de los diferentes niveles jerárquicos en su desarrollo y, el proceso de incremento de poder necesario para la propuesta y puesta en marcha de acciones. palabras clave: estrés ocupacional, investigación acción participativa, colaboración, empowerment. introducción desde la perspectiva transaccional, el estrés ocupacional se concibe como un estado de tensión o displacer, que se produce cuando se da un desequilibrio entre las demandas del contexto laboral y los recursos del trabajador (brown y o´brien, 1998). estas demandas están relacionadas con características organizacionales (mckay y cooper, 1987) consideradas factores de riesgo para la seguridad y salud del trabajador (peiró, 1999). en enfermería, se concretan en falta de apoyo, de control y de recompensas, presión en el trabajo, sobrecarga laboral, falta de autonomía y autoridad, conflicto de roles y falta de promoción profesional (gil-monte, 2002). el estrés producido por estas características puede afectar a la salud física y mental del trabajador y tener consecuencias a nivel organizacional (moncada, 1998; niedhammer, bugel, golberg, lecrer y gueguen, 1998). desde esta perspectiva, se han desarrollado modelos que tratan de explicar esta relación, destacando los de esfuerzo-recompensa (siegrist, 1996) y demanda-control-apoyo (karasek, 1979; jonson y hall, 1988; karasek y theorell, 1990). a partir de ellos, se han diseñado estrategias de prevención a nivel primario (modificación de características organizacionales), secundario (desarrollo de estrategias de afrontamiento) y terciario (rehabilitación de daños 411 building participative, empowering & diverse communities asociados al estrés). en las organizaciones hospitalarias, han primado estas dos últimas, enfocadas en el nivel individual (cartwright, cooper & murphy, 1996). por tanto, las intervenciones sobre el estrés ocupacional, se han caracterizado por centrarse en los individuos y atender a la reducción de los efectos del estrés, en lugar de reducir la presencia de estresores, y por orientarse a la gestión del estrés (peiró, 1999). por ello, es necesario un análisis crítico del modelo tradicional para prestar más atención a aspectos colectivos, contextuales, culturales e históricos (peiró, 1999). en este trabajo proponemos un modelo de intervención en el estrés ocupacional en enfermeras, que trata de superar las siguientes limitaciones del modelo tradicional: persistencia del problema del estrés al no modificarse las características de la organización, ya que el efecto de la acción individual sobre la gestión del estrés se diluye rápidamente (cartwright et al., 1996). esta limitación puede superarse vinculando el cambio individual (desarrollo de capacidades o habilidades) al organizacional (cambios estructurales). b) utilización exclusiva de metodología de iip, que aunque ha contribuido a avanzar en los tratamientos preventivos, al constituir un proceso de replicación perfecta de la buena práctica basada en la evidencia, tiene las siguientes limitaciones (green, 2001; price, friendland, choi, y caplan, 1998): a) no tiene en cuenta el contexto en el que se dan los problemas; b) no puede afrontar la distancia entre las teorías y su aplicación en los contextos locales; c) excluye el significado y el propósito de las experiencias vitales; y, d) tiene problemas con la fundamentación en valores de los hechos y la naturaleza de la relación entre el investigador y el objeto de estudio (guba & lincoln, 1994). estos problemas pueden ser superados utilizando la iap, con intervenciones que ajusten las acciones a las condiciones sociales y conductuales de los individuos (green, 2001). desde la psicología comunitaria, vincular el cambio individual con el organizacional implica contemplar los problemas desde la óptica del poder, lo que permite una redefinición de los mismos en términos de opresión e intervenir en ellos hacia el logro del bienestar, a través de un proceso transformativo que se denomina liberación (nelson & prilleltensky, 2005). opresión, liberación y bienestar son, por tanto, los conceptos clave de esta perspectiva. la opresión se manifiesta en diferentes niveles, pudiendo observarse en la sociedad en general, en un grupo pequeño o en una organización. en su origen y evolución deben distinguirse dimensiones políticas y psicológicas que coexisten y están mutuamente determinadas. fuerzas externas privan a individuos y grupos del beneficio del bienestar siendo interiorizadas y conduciendo a las personas a actuar como su propio censor (opresión interiorizada, habituación) (moane, 1999; prilleltensky & gonick, 1996). el estrés ocupacional puede ser definido en términos de opresión (ver figura 1). en la enfermería hospitalaria, características organizacionales como la sobrecarga laboral, falta de apoyo en el trabajo, falta de compensaciones y falta de autonomía para tomar decisiones (gil-monte, 2002), son condiciones externas que constituyen la dimensión política de la opresión. además, las enfermeras asumen dichas situaciones como inmutables, interiorizándolas y constituyendo la dimensión psicológica de la opresión. en consecuencia, el afrontamiento del estrés ocupacional debe entenderse como un proceso de liberación tanto individual como organizacional (ver figura 1). el proceso liberación está asociado a la noción de empowerment, lo cual supone en la psicología comunitaria pasar de una actitud paternalista derivada del modelo de déficit propio de la iip, a considerar a los individuos y grupos con suficientes recursos y habilidades (hombrados y domínguez, 2007) para solucionar ellos mismos sus problemas. de este modo, se deja de 412 building participative, empowering & diverse communities trabajar desde un modelo de experto en el cual se desarrollaban las intervenciones para otros, defendiendo una aproximación en la cual los profesionales trabajan con las personas para promover su autodeterminación y control. por ello, las acciones para la liberación, se llevan a la práctica mediante la metodología de iap, que permite el análisis de las condiciones históricas y la estructura social de la comunidad y, el desarrollo de organizaciones políticas y grupos de acción para el cambio (fals-borda, 1985). además, promueve la conciencia sociopolítica, facilita la acción social y otros tipos de cambio sistémico y social (balcázar, 2003) y supone una serie de fases encadenadas que van desde la evaluación de necesidades hasta la acción y el cambio social (balcázar, 2003). para el personal de enfermería hospitalaria, supondrá el incremento de habilidades para analizar críticamente las condiciones laborales que les causan opresión y merman su bienestar. analizarán sus causas y plantearán alternativas a las mismas, dejando de considerar tales situaciones como inmutables. posteriormente a tal análisis será posible el cambio organizacional a través de la acción colectiva, es decir mediante grupos de acción formados por enfermeras que trabajan colaborativamente. este proceso de liberación es el que conduce al bienestar, situación caracterizada por el disfrute del poder, entendido como una combinación de oportunidades (determinantes estructurales y externos) y habilidades (agencia y autodeterminación) para influir en el curso de los eventos (nelson & prilleltensky, 2005), facilitando la satisfacción de las necesidades psicológicas y materiales (boulding, 1989; della porta & diani, 1999). a continuación se describe la experiencia de incremento de poder protagonizada por enfermeras del hospital universitario virgen macarena de sevilla. incremento de poder como afrontamiento del estrés en profesionales de enfermería del hospital universitario virgen macarena de sevilla. fases de la intervención. este trabajo se lleva a cabo con enfermeras y supervisores de cuatro unidades de medicina interna del hospital virgen macarena de sevilla. estos profesionales trabajan en turnos de 7 horas 413 building participative, empowering & diverse communities distribuidos en mañana-tarde-noche o en turnos de 12 horas de mañana-noche. cada unidad tiene 30 pacientes con una media de estancia en las unidades de 7 días. para atenderlos hay 3 enfermeras y 3 auxiliares en el turno de mañana y dos enfermeras y 2 auxiliares en los turnos de tarde y noche y fines de semana. estructuralmente, el hospital tiene habitaciones de tres camas y se caracteriza por ser antiguo y estar en constante renovación, habiendo escasos espacios para la realización de trabajo burocrático de las enfermeras. además el régimen de visitas a los pacientes es abierto, por lo que hay familiares a lo largo de todo el día. el modelo presentado consta de cuatro fases: 1) el encargo; implicación organizacional; 2) identificación de necesidades; 3) priorización de problemas; y, 4) decisión e implementación de acciones (ver figura 2). figura 2. fases de la intervención para reducir la opresión en personal de enfermería el encargo. implicación organizacional el estudio parte de la preocupación de la dirección de enfermería por la elevación del nivel de absentismo en los profesionales de enfermería, que contacta con la unidad de investigación, para su análisis y propuesta de soluciones. desde esta unidad, se redefine el absentismo como un problema de estrés, y se propone intervenir en el mismo desde la perspectiva de la psicología comunitaria a través de la metodología de iap. para ello, es necesario implicar a todos los niveles jerárquicos de la organización. identificación de necesidades se tuvieron en cuenta los criterios de necesidad expresada, normativa y percibida de bradshaw (1972). las necesidades expresadas se midieron con la base de datos gerhonte que recoge la vida laboral de todos los trabajadores del sistema sanitario público de andalucía. de ella se extrajeron los datos de absentismo correspondientes al año anterior al inicio del proyecto. las necesidades normativas de los profesionales fueron medidas con el cuestionario istas-21. se trata de un cuestionario validado en la población española y que recoge datos de 21 dimensiones consideradas factores psicosociales de riesgo relacionados con los modelos teóricos dominantes (esfuerzo-recompensa y demanda-control-apoyo). las necesidades percibidas, por su parte, fueron medidas mediante entrevistas a los supervisores y grupos de discusión con los profesionales. de este modo se identificaron 22 situaciones del contexto hospitalario causantes de estrés para las enfermeras. priorización de problemas 414 building participative, empowering & diverse communities las 22 situaciones detectadas fueron reducidas a 6 por las enfermeras en los grupos de discusión. posteriormente estas 6 situaciones fueron listadas y entregadas a todo el personal para puntuarlas de mayor a menor importancia, quedando reducidas a cuatro: necesidad de un celador para movilización de los pacientes, de controlar el horario y el número de familiares en las habitaciones, de coordinación con el personal médico y de mejora de los registros de actividades de enfermería. decisión e implementación de acciones en esta fase se llevaron a cabo nuevos grupos de discusión en los que se discutieron las posibles soluciones a los problemas detectados y se elaboraron propuestas que fueron transmitidas a dirección de enfermería. la dirección, con ajuste a los recursos disponibles autorizó la puesta en marcha de las mismas. en la tabla 1 aparecen las propuestas y las acciones. tabla 1. propuestas y acciones para el cambio organizacional propuesta acción control del número de familiares elaboración de un tríptico para entregar a los familiares, en el que se recogerían las normas a tener en cuenta durante su estancia en el hospital (e.g. presencia de un solo acompañante por paciente; silenciar los móviles). estas normas serían definidas por el personal. se establecieron grupos de acción en las unidades formados por enfermeras y supervisores, para poner en marcha la propuesta y evaluar su funcionamiento. presencia continua del celador en las unidades incorporar un celador en una de las unidades del estudio, y establecer un registro para medición de sus actividades. se ha incluido el celador, aunque sólo los fines de semana. no obstante, se han medido en todas las unidades las actividades desempeñadas por este grupo profesional. revisión de los registros revisión de los registros de las actividades que realiza enfermería, para unificarlos y evitar repeticiones. se ha creado un grupo de acción en una de las unidades, que está llevando a cabo su revisión y modificación para pilotar su funcionamiento. discusión y conclusiones con esta intervención hemos conseguido una transformación tanto a nivel individual como organizacional. a nivel individual, las enfermeras pasan de un estado en que no ven salida a sus dificultades en el trabajo, hasta otro en que plantean soluciones y ponen en marcha acciones. entre otros autores, prilleltensky (1990) o watts y abdul-adil (1998) han descrito este proceso, en el que se evoluciona desde un estado acrítico hasta el de liberación, en el que se llevan a cabo acciones para el cambio. en este sentido, en relación con el problema del trabajo burocrático que tienen que realizar (registros), las enfermeras pasan de la queja por el excesivo “papeleo”, a la unificación de los diferentes registros para facilitar su trabajo. esta transformación puede ser considerada fruto de un proceso de liberación (incremento de poder) que comienza con la evaluación de necesidades de carácter participativo, el cual fomenta que las personas cuenten su problema haciéndolo visible, ayudándoles a crear una visión de futuro mejor (nelson & prilleltensky, 2005). de esta manera, se ha desarrollado conciencia crítica en las enfermeras que, en los grupos de discusión, han contextualizado las características organizacionales causantes de estrés en el 415 building participative, empowering & diverse communities trabajo, analizando situaciones concretas y debatiendo alternativas de solución a las mismas. en este proceso, las enfermeras han pasado de la normalización de las situaciones de estrés, a su descripción como condiciones sociales injustas, proponiendo opciones para el cambio. a nivel organizacional, las acciones propuestas por las profesionales, han modificado determinados aspectos que afectan al trabajo diario en las unidades. estas acciones han contado con el apoyo de la dirección, lo que pone de manifiesto su voluntad de cambio, aspecto que fallaba en las prevenciones a nivel primario establecidas desde el modelo transaccional (ivancevich, matteson, freedman y phillips, 1990). se han desarrollado relaciones de colaboración entre los diferentes implicados en el problema, tal como plantea la metodología de iap. no obstante, a pesar de haber implicado en todo el proceso a los diferentes niveles jerárquicos (dirección, supervisores, y enfermeras de planta), hay que señalar que su vinculación se ha realizado a través de las investigadoras, por las dificultades para ajustar las agendas de todos los implicados en el problema. en este sentido, se tendría que haber intentado crear una coalición, ya que es la mejor manera de crear relaciones entre diferentes grupos para la solución de un problema común y el logro de un cambio social (berkowitz & wolf, 2000; wolff, 2001; mcmillan, florin, stevenson, kerman y mitchell, 1995). en cuanto a las limitaciones o dificultades encontradas durante el proceso, hay que resaltar las restricciones a las que están sometidas las organizaciones públicas. al respecto, en la literatura se han descrito una serie de características que suponen un desafío para el cambio y el desarrollo organizacional (golembiewski, 1985; mcconkie, 1985), destacando el modelo burocrático que guía la mayoría de las organizaciones públicas. por una parte, es muy difícil llevar a cabo acciones para el cambio, si este no está determinado desde estructuras superiores, debiéndose incorporar estos últimos sin restricciones. por otra, el carácter dinámico de estas organizaciones, hace que se pueda atribuir a la intervención resultados que son debidos a variables no contempladas en la misma, por lo que es necesario estar alerta a todas las posibles modificaciones en el contexto. en nuestro caso, situaciones de movimiento de personal asistencial y supervisores, cambios en el turno de trabajo u obras de mejora en las unidades, han afectado al desarrollo del proceso, obligándonos a hacer múltiples adaptaciones. para futuras actuaciones en este contexto con la metodología de iap, recomendamos establecer un calendario de acciones más preciso, aunque flexible para ajustarse a las demandas de la población. también incorporar a otros grupos profesionales (i.e. médicos, celadores, administrativos) que conviven con los profesionales de enfermería. todos ellos forman parte de la organización compleja que supone el hospital y, de sus relaciones y coordinación depende el buen desempeño de su trabajo. por último, hay que resaltar los logros conseguidos. el apoyo dado por la dirección a las estrategias propuestas por los profesionales, demuestra el impacto que este trabajo ha tenido en la estructura organizacional. además, es previsible que esta iniciativa no constituya sólo una herramienta para la solución de los problemas detectados en este momento, sino que vaya más allá, al haber supuesto en los profesionales la adquisición de unas habilidades (i.e., análisis crítico de los problemas y planteamiento de soluciones) que podrán aplicarse a otros tipos de problemas. así, con este procedimiento se ha inducido un cambio en el funcionamiento de las unidades asistenciales participantes, que supone tanto la movilización de los profesionales de enfermería para reivindicar las mejoras necesarias en su trabajo, partiendo de reflexiones críticas en torno al mismo, como modificaciones en la forma de actuar de la dirección, que estará abierta 416 building participative, empowering & diverse communities a los planteamientos de mejora desde las diferentes unidades. en definitiva, con el desarrollo de esta intervención, se han establecido las bases para la puesta en marcha de acciones ante el estrés ocupacional que vinculen el nivel individual y organizacional y, tengan en cuenta los determinantes contextuales en la definición de este fenómeno. con ello, hemos pretendido favorecer el desarrollo de intervenciones en las organizaciones que tengan como meta el logro del bienestar de los trabajadores, y no sólo la gestión puntual de un problema como el estrés. referencias balcázar, f. 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(2001) a practitioner’s guide to successful coalitions. american journal of community psychology, 29 (2), 173-191. 418 building participative, empowering & diverse communities school climate perception and adolescent adjustment migliorini l., manetti m., rania n. department of anthropological sciences university of genoa, italy laura.migliorini@unige.it ; mara.manetti@unige.it; nadia.rania@unige.it abstract according to theoretical framework of developmental contextualism (goossens, 2006) school context play an important role in the development of adolescent: the variability in adolescent outcomes may be explained by the interaction between contextual factors and adolescent individual differences. most studies have focused on how perceptions of school climate affect adolescent adjustment; in particular researchers evidence that the interpersonal, organizational and instructional climate of school influences students’ adjustment across multiple domains (way, reddy, rhodes, 2007; brand et alt., 2008). the project objective is to analyse the school climate perception and the adolescent adjustment in immigrant, double heritage and italian students. key words: school climate, adolescent adjustment, well-being, identity process. the development contextualism framework describes the different social systems associated with developmental matter or adolescent adjustment. research on the relation between context and adolescent development has been driven by an awareness of increases in problem behaviours during adolescence and an interest in the role of contextal factors that may affect adolescent outcomes (blyth, leffert, 1995). according to ostrom, lerner, freel, (1995) the developmental contextualism is intended to be a basic process of human development dealing with the change of relationship between adolescent and their context. in literature many contributions on this research topic are referred to ecological approach. the ecological perspective assumes that human development is a function of interactional processes between individuals and contexts and happens with progressively complexity in different contexts during significant periods of time or even across the life time. adolescents develop at school with their relationships with peers, teachers and all actors involved in the educative community. the ecology approach is relevant in two areas: school climate and school related stress. the developmental ecology of schools has a marked impact on the academic achievement and adjustment of students (felner & felner, 1989). a lot of aspects of the what moos (1979) has called the “human milieus” or defining features of the social environments of these contexts may contribute to student growth and development. although many of these contribute strongly to the adaptation and performance of students, one of those elements of the school context that has appears to have particular importance for student adaptation is students’ own reports of their experiences of the contexts‘social climate (brand, felner, shim, seitsinger, & dumas, 2003; fraser, 1985; trickett & moos, 1973). school climate mailto:laura.migliorini@unige.it mailto:mara.manetti@unige.it mailto:nadia.rania@unige.it 419 building participative, empowering & diverse communities is a complex and multidimensional construct encompassing the atmosphere, culture, values, resources, social network, and organizational, instructional, interpersonal dimensions (loukas, murphy, 2007). the school climate is a relevant variable that, better than all other data, show the quality of relationships among people at organizational levels. in literature this concept has been analyzed to highlight the direct relation to school performance and well being of students by indirect effects indicates that the perception of parents than the teacher – students affect on the pattern of adjustment in the transition from one level school to another (esposito, 1999). school environment regards environmental, organizational and relational conditions (santinello bertarelli, 2002). school climate is one of the elements that can modify the scholastic performances, the self-efficacy and sense of management in the learning situations (urdan, schoenfelder, 2006). an important component of model “person-environment fit” linking school climate with psychological and behavioural adjustment is the adolescents’ perceptions or experiences of the school environment rather than a more objective account of the school that is most relevant for understanding adolescents’ adjustment and wellbeing (way, reddy, rhodes, 2007). the class can be understood as a community of exchange relating to issues related to knowledge and content but also as regards the well-being/ malaise of subjects, such situations have an impact on learning processes. a positive climate, as repeatedly shown in literature, promotes positive learning and the construction of knowledge shared between the different actors involved, students and teachers. as francescato putton (1995) and celi and scuderi (2004) affirm the teacher is responsible for the existing climate in the classroom, he/she should create the conditions for developing a participatory and collaborative environment that stimulates students to the pleasure of learning. indeed, in the process of learning the emotional aspect is as important as cognitive and reports the classroom is important to maintain a high level of motivation to learn and acquire skills. the class can and must become a place of confrontation of different positions for the talks, dialogue and enable everyone to develop their skills, both cognitive and relational. why this happens play a fundamental role in both the school and teachers who encourage an environment in which to develop a positive climate. hay (1998), moos and tricket (2002) consider that the sense of belonging (membership) to the group and class at school is a particularly significant for the welfare and development of social competence is the ability to experience positive social conditions empathy and various ways of resolving conflicts can improve the quality of emotional development. the same variable interfere in a positive way to overcome the conditions of stress as it is recognized that the quality of education may have the effect of creating or alleviate stressful situations individually (kallestad et al., 1998, torsheim et al. 2001a, torsheimeim et. al. 2001b). it is recognized that the climate and situations are some of the elements that can change aspects of motivation task (urdan, schoenfelder 2006, gilman and anderman 2006, appleton, christenson, kim, reschly 2006) and change, thus positively or impairing the performance school, the sense of autoefficacia and management (mastery) of learning situations. often the motivation is seen as a determined almost exclusively by individual characteristics, this leads to underestimate the influence of that context, 420 building participative, empowering & diverse communities however, may have a significant extent in setting positive attitudes towards learning (manetti, rania, frattini, 2007). students perception of social climate have been found to be consistently associated with their performance on achievement tests and with multiple indices of their academic, behavioural, and social adjustment (brand et al., 2008). school climate has been identified as a key element in young people cognitive and social growth, for immigrated minors school experience is particularly important because it represents one of the main channels of participation and emancipation in the new society. there is no single “normal” adolescent, there is no a singular adolescent experience, but multiple realities that cross a path of complex and variable growth, in relation to different contexts in which adolescents are included (speltini, 2005). adolescence has been recently defined “a challenge rich, at the same time, of opportunities and risks, to be overcome on one side by adolescent, through his own activities and choices, and on the other side by the social contexts, in fast modification, that act as frame to development” (bonino, 2001). the relationship that adolescents establish with their “ecological” life context is central and can influence their chances of an optimal development, because on the one hand it can represent a resource for development and on the other a danger to avoid. well-being is not only depending on physical health or risk behaviour but also on own life satisfaction related to social relationship, self vision and general well-being (santinello et al., 2005). self-esteem is commonly considered a well-being index (benjet, hermandez-guzman, 2001; martinez, dukes, 1997) and adolescent psychological adjustment (phinney, 1991). the multiethnic characterisation, that the italian context is assuming more and more justifies the community psychologists’ attention due to the dynamics through which persons construct and define their shapes of identification, and to the identities derived from the belonging to specific cultural and national ethnic groups. inside this conceptual framework, in last decade, has been more and more stated the construct of ethnic identity as an aspect of self acquaintance depending on the belonging to an ethnical group and to the believes, feelings and perceptions derived from that bond. phinney (1990) assumes the ethnic identity as a complex meaning containing the following parameters: involvement and sense of belonging, positive evaluation, interest, knowledge and involvement in the social activities of the group. inside this conceptual framework, in last decade, has been more and more stated the construct of ethnic identity as a complex construct including a commitment and sense of belonging to the group, positive evaluation of the group, interest in and knowledge about the group, and involvement in social activities of the group (phinney, 1990). in the literature the ethnic identity is considered as an important factor in the processes of well-being and self-esteem of adolescents (blash and unger, 1995; phinney, cantu, kurtz, 1996; smith, walker, fields, brookins, seay, 1999; umana-taylor, 2004). study objectives and hypotheses this study examines the relationship among school environment’s perception, well being and ethnic identity in italian, double heritage and immigrant adolescents in order to analyse the possible differences. the research was conducted in a medium sized city in the northern italy (genoa). 421 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the present work aims to investigate the five hypotheses and research questions presented below. 1) some differences in the school climate’s perception between italian, dual heritages and immigrate adolescents; in particular immigrant adolescents would present more difficulties about academic performances; 2) some differences in well-being among the three groups considered; 3) some differences in ethnic identity among the three groups; 4) a correlation between school environment and well-being; 5) there are effects of school climate perception and ethnic identity on the dependent variable well-being. method procedure the same procedure was adopted for each class. the researcher handed out questionnaires in the classroom with the class teacher present. this helped to ensure uniformity of administration and eliminated the need to train teachers. each student was given one copy of the survey instrument on his or her desk. the researcher read though all the instructions and, if necessary, reformulated the question in simpler terms. students were allowed to ask for clarification about the questions and the researcher (not the teacher) answered such queries. the students were informed that their answers would be confidential; participation was subject to parental consent. measures the questionnaire was composed of the following instruments: socio-demographic information socio-demographic variables included gender, age, school class, ethnicity, place of birth, time of permanence in italy, linguistic competences, academic achievement, information about parents (ethnicity, age, place of birth, levels of education, job…) scholastic situation the scale is composed by 49 items organized in to nine dimensions including schoolmate relationship, teachers’ relationship, school-related well-being, academic interest, method of study, parents’ expectative, structural aspects, academic self-esteem, future employment (student version, qss-sv, santinello, bertarelli, 2002). well-being the scale (vsp-a, vécu et santé perçue de adolescent, simeoni, sapin, antoniotti & auquier, 2001) investigates various dimensions of quality of life: vitality, physical and psychological wellbeing, relations with teachers, relations with parents, relations with friends, school performance, body image and leisure activities. the scale consist of 34 items; each item was answered on a 5-point likert scale, anchored at the ends from 1 (“not at all/never”) to 5 (“very much/always”). the time frame used was the previous 4 weeks. the test is consistent (cronbach alpha 0.74–0.91). content and construct validity are good. (sapin, simeoni, el khammar, antoniotti & auquier, 2005). ethnic identity phinney’s (1992) multigroup ethnic identity measure (meim) scale was used to assess ethnic identity. the measure consists of 20 items organized in to four subscales including sense of 422 building participative, empowering & diverse communities belonging, identity achievement, ethnic behaviours and other orientation. four-point scales were used, anchored with ‘‘strongly disagree’’ and ‘‘strongly agree’’. low scores indicate an unexamined ethnic identity, while high scores indicate an achieved ethnic identity status. scores in the middle range represent exploration ethnic identity status. participants this research is a part of a larger data collection project, demanded from regional politicians, which consisted of other measures with purpose to explore adolescents’ needs with respect to prevention. the participants of the study are 348 subjects equally distributed between boy and girl. about ethnicity: the 26% are double heritage subject, 34% are immigrants and 40% are italians (the italians students are a randomly sample from the larger research that includes a large number of italian students). the ethnic identity category for each parent, as reported by adolescents, was used to determine group membership. the immigrants are from: 19.8% south america, 8.6% east europe, 5.2% africa, 0.6% north europe. most immigrants adolescent living in italy from 3-6 years (41.2%), while most dual heritage adolescents living in italy since birth (75%). the mean age of the sample was 11.66 years. the sample is distributed in three groups regarding to school attendance: 42% of students belong at primary school, 33% at middle school and 25% at high school. results descriptive analyses regarding to academic performance the date show that immigrants have the failed students’ percentage more high (8%), follow double heritage (6.50%), than italian student (3%). on the contrary, there is a significant decrease (f** 14.53) about means in academic performances: italians (3.59), double heritage (3.53) and immigrants (3.15). this date prove that immigrant adolescents present more difficulties about academic performance than italian and dual heritage students even if they have ratings higher than the sufficiency. in table 1 are presented means, medians and standard deviations of the variables measured by the questionnaire. table 1 means, medians, standard deviations, minimum and maximum of scholastic situation (qss-sv), ethnic identity (meim), and well-being (vsp-a). qss-sv meim vsp-a mean 24,47 60,46 103,99 median 24,60 60,00 101 std. deviation 3,17 7,57 18,41 minimum 16,40 40,00 69 maximum 32,20 78,00 166 with regard to the qss-sv scale emerge significant differences among three groups of students (f= 2.80**). the italians perceive a better climate at school, follow the dual heritage and 423 building participative, empowering & diverse communities immigrants students. considered the subscale emerge some relevant date: parents’ expectative and academic self-esteem are more low in immigrants, on the contrary in this group is more high academic interest as show in the figure 1. figure 1 italians, dual heritage and immigrants’ student’s means in qss-sv dimensions. furthermore there is a significant decrease (f=4.81**) in overall dimensions from primary school (m= 25.10) to middle (m= 24.41) and high school (m= 23.65). in particular significant differences regard four dimensions: parents’ expectative (f= 5.86**), teachers’ relationship (f= 4.87**), academic interest (17.88**), structural aspects (f=23.20**). for what concern meim scale there are significant difference (f= 5.61**) in ethnic identification among italians, double heritage and immigrants’ means, in particular the score more low is for double heritage (58.4) while for immigrants is 62.05 and italians group is 60.42. immigrant adolescents have higher ethnic identity, furthermore also dual heritage adolescents have lowest rate in the ethnic identification; the dimensions more critical are: sense of belonging and ethnic behaviour, as show in figure 2. figure 2 italians, dual heritage and immigrants’ student’s means in meim dimensions. with regard to the vsp-a scale, the group that obtains a lower score is double heritage students (97.58) while italians group obtain the higher score (108.02): the difference among three groups are significant (f= 8.40). the four dimensions emerged by factor analysis (individual wellbeing =alpha .83; friendship = alpha .79; parent relationship = alpha .81; teacher relationship = alpha .76) shows significant difference among three group considered to relations with parents 424 building participative, empowering & diverse communities (f= 9.38**), friends (f= 7.44**), and teacher (f= 6.28**), who represent sources of social support, classically considered an important dimension of well-being; in particular double heritage group obtain the lower score in the three dimensions. a comparison between male and female score’ scale does not show any particular differences. the only meaningful result relates to friendship and teacher relationship in both dimensions girls shows higher scores. however, no significant differences were found between males and females with regard to general well-being. on the contrary, there are significant differences (f=40.12**) in overall well-being in primary (m= 113.89), middle (m= 95.91) and high (m= 98.20) school’ means. in particular there is a significant decrease (f=6.79**) in individual well-being dimension from primary school (m=3.51) to high school (m= 3.28); while in the social well-being (parents relationship, f= 48.77**; friendship f= 35.70** and teachers relationship f= 25.32**) the scores are more low in middle school. correlation and regression model generally it can be affirmed that there are correlations between all the instruments used: qss and meim (.233**), qss and vsp-a (.240**). in particular correlations among variables dimensions are presented in table 2. table 2 correlation among school climate dimension and well-being and teacher relationship. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 1. classmate relationship 1 2. teachers relationship (teaching) ,177** 1 3. academic interest ,177** ,505** 1 4. method of study ,079 ,333** ,489** 1 5. parents’ expectative -,020 ,146** ,019 ,226** 1 6. school-related wellbeing ,063 ,283** ,313** ,327** ,320** 1 7. academic self-esteem ,176** ,211** ,272** ,292** ,284** ,344** 1 8. structural aspects ,119* ,416** ,461** ,194** -,020 ,238** ,111* 1 9. future employment ,202** ,244** ,257** ,165** ,081 ,162** ,237** ,034 1 10. individual well-being ,269** ,119* ,138* ,068 ,078 ,290** ,290** ,174** ,084 1 11. teachers relationship ,031 ,129* ,213** ,179** ,094 ,081 ,129* ,139* ,132* ,130* 1 ** p<.01; *p<.05 correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). 425 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the correlation that seem significant for the analysis are the relation between: individual well-being (vsp-a) and classmate relationship (qss-sv; r .269**),• individual well-being and schoolrelated well-being (qss-sv; r .290**),• individual well-being and academic self-esteem (qss-sv; r .290**),• teacher relationship (vsp-a) and academic interest (qss-sv; r. .213**),• teacher relationship and method of study (qss-sv; r. .179**).• table 3 proposes a linear regression model that considers individual well-being as dependent variable. the variables that affect the individual well-being are: school-related wellbeing, schoolmate relationship, academic self-esteem and other orientation. the regression model presented is significant and has a r2 = .40. the school-related well-being is the best predictor of individual well-being (β = .20, p <.001) followed by the schoolmate relationship (β = .19 p <.001), academic self-esteem (β = .16 p <.001), other orientation (β = .13 p <.001), whereas they appear to be more moderate predictors. table 3 linear regression model: individual well-being as dependent variable b st. error beta t r2 step 1: ,27school-related well-being ,195 ,043 ,270 4,518** step 2: ,35school-related well-being ,181 ,042 ,251 4,297** schoolmate relationship ,199 ,049 ,237 4,069** step 3: ,38 school-related well-being ,138 ,045 ,218 3,044** schoolmate relationship ,183 ,049 ,191 3,745** academic self-esteem ,112 ,046 ,153 2,408** step 4: ,40 school-related well-being ,150 ,045 ,208 3,321** schoolmate relationship ,162 ,049 ,193 3,289** academic self-esteem ,119 ,046 ,162 2,578** other orientation ,024 ,011 ,136 2,318** further investigation has revealed as factors predictive of individual and social well-being achievement identity, school-related well-being and parents’ expectative. table 4 propose, in fact, a linear regression model that considers individual and social well-being as dependent variable the regression model presented is significant and has a r2 = .30. the achievement identity is the best predictor of individual and social well-being (β = .23, p <.001) followed by the size schoolrelated well-being (β = .1,7 p <.001) and parents’ expectative whereas they appear to be a more moderate predictors. 426 building participative, empowering & diverse communities table 4 linear regression model: individual and social well-being as dependent variable b st. error beta t r2 step 1: ,18achievement identity 1,143 ,392 ,183 2,915** step 2: ,28achievement identity 1,359 ,389 ,218 3,491** school-related well-being 6,331 1,867 ,211 3,391** step 3: ,30 achievement identity 1,449 ,389 ,232 3,720** school-related well-being 5,138 1,948 ,172 2,638 ** parents’ expectative 3,389 1,688 ,131 2,008** conclusion in summary it’s possible to note that, immigrant adolescents present more difficulties about academic performance and academic self-esteem. furtherers there are differences, as we assume, among three groups considered in school climate’s perceptions. italian students have highest rate in school climate evaluation. immigrant adolescents have lowest rate in parents’ expectative but they have the highest rate in academic interest. the date has showed that italian, dual heritage and immigrant students are different in ethnic identification: immigrant adolescents have higher ethnic identity, furthermore also dual heritage adolescents have lowest rate in the ethnic identification. the dimensions more critical are: sense of belonging and ethnic behaviour. as we assume that there are differences about well-being among three groups considered: double heritage adolescents have lowest rate in well-being scale in particular in relation dimensions (friendship, parents and teacher). in conclusion the results underline that a high ethnic identification is related on a high well-being. this shows a critical situation for dual heritage adolescents. dual heritage students would have identity problems and their ethnic identity would negative affect their well-being (bracey et al., 2004). according to martinez e dukes (1997), native adolescent have more high level of wellbeing but lower score about ethnic identification; these trends would be explained by less stress related on migratory processes and on belonging majority group (superior status). dual heritage adolescents, according to brown (1990), presents a lower level of well-being that we can analyze in order to understand their complex background that influences their ethnic identity. individual psychological well-being is affected by the perception school climate in particular by relationship with schoolmates. furthermore the other orientation is useful to understand intercultural relationship. on the contrary, the individual and social well-being is affected by ethnic achievement as a criterion guide for the social integration. also parents’ expectations contribute to the definition of adolescent. research has suggested that school climate is correlated to student behaviour, academic performance, relational and psychological well-being for students. this issue has become even more pressing as changes in funding have necessitated that schools partner with community based organizations and social service agencies in order to find resources to address student needs and to promote positive youth development. 427 building participative, empowering & diverse communities references appleton j. j., christenson s. l., kim d., reschly a. l. 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(2001, b), “school-related stress, support, and subjective health complaints among early adolescents: a multilevel approach”, journal of adolescence, 24, pp. 701-713. 429 building participative, empowering & diverse communities trickett, e., & moos, r. h. (1973). the social environment of junior high and high school classrooms. journal of educational psychology, 65, 93−102. urdan t., schoenfelder e. (2006), “classroom effects on student motivation: goal structures, social relationships, and competence beliefs”, journal of school psychology, 44, pp. 331-349. way n., reddy r., rhodes j., (2007) students’ perceptions of school climate during the middle school years: association with trajectories of psychological and behavioural adjustment, american journal of community psychology, 40, 194-213. 430 building participative, empowering & diverse communities homelessness lifetime prevalence and attitudes to homeless in portugal marta miguel, josé ornelas, maria vargas-moniz martamiguel@portugalmail.pt; martamiguel.rvcc@gmail.com abstract the present study intended to estimate the prevalence of population that already was in situation of homeless at some moment of its life, and to accede to one specific dimension of public opinion, attitudes, identifying which characteristics can distinguish the population with different attitudes face to the homeless. the estimate of the lifetime homelessness prevalence disclosed a global prevalence of 6.5% and a literal prevalence of 2% it was evident the influence of some demographic characteristics of the respondents on the attitudes factors: gender was a significant effect on general compassion and limit public rights; age on trustworthy; education degree on trustworthy and social isolation; and income add effect on social isolation. key words: homelessness; prevalence; public opinion; attitudes. i will present the results of the first 200 interviews conducted in the study of prevalence and public opinion on homelessness in portugal, which falls in transnational research developed by the research group on homelessness and poverty from wayne state university, already described by professor paul toro. with this study, we intended to calculate the prevalence of portuguese population that was already in a situation of homeless at some point in their lives, and access to a specific dimension of public opinion, attitudes, but also identify the factors that can distinguish the people with more positive representations about the homeless population with those with more negative ones, and identify the differences and / or similarities in terms of prevalence of situation of homeless in portugal, compared to the various countries where the study has been carried out. the instrument – “the public’s perspective on homelessness: portugal survey”was applied by telephone to a randomly selected sample of the portuguese population, composed by a total of 200 people who owned landline telephones. being a transnational study, the method followed the procedures of the studies and the original versions already made in other countries. i will present only de main results. results the prevalence analysis revealed that: 5% of the interviewed say that already gone through a difficult housing situation or were homeless. 44.4% of homeless people slept in parks, streets, buildings or abandoned stations. mailto:martamiguel@portugalmail.pt mailto:martamiguel.rvcc@gmail.com 431 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 44.4% slept at friends or relatives homes. no one slept in shelters or temporary homes. regarding the prevalence of homelessness, we found that: in addition to the 5% of participants who already were in a situation of overall homelessness, plus 1.5% of the participants reported a story of precarious housing along the interview, although they have not responded affirmatively to the question. thus, you get a prevalence of 6.5% of overall lifetime homelessness and 2% of literal lifetime homelessness. regarding the direct causes of homelessness situations, we found that: 1% of literal homelessness due to family problems; 0.5% to emigration; 0.5% to lack of money. 2% of precarious housing due to poverty; 1.5% to decolonization; 0.5% to colonial war; and 0.5% due to natural disaster. the confirmation of the attitudes model (figure1) defined by tompsett et al. (2006) for the united states population showed that this was not in keeping with the quality of our study sample, and there was a need to refine it to obtain acceptable values of quality indicators of adjustment. 432 building participative, empowering & diverse communities fig. 1: original attitudes model (tompsett et al., 2006). the attitudes factors of the model identified in our sample are the same, but are less the items that define it. thus, we have that the attitudes towards the homeless are divided in the following eight factors: 433 building participative, empowering & diverse communities general compassion limit public rights trustworthy social isolation street people housing/services needed economic factors as cause personal factors as cause each of the factors is defined by the response to the instrument items described in the figure 2. fig. 2: final attitudes model. 434 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the results of the attitudes factors shows: general compassion: compassionate attitude towards the homeless. limit public rights: complacent about begging, but not for take old of public spaces for construction of structures for temporary shelter. trustworthy: moderate attitude of trustworthy (ability to work; trust; crime). social isolation: participants tend to see homeless people as socially isolated. street people: consider them, almost unanimously, people from street. housing/services needed: idea of the need for more support of the welfare state, particularly in terms of providing treatment for substance-dependent and mentally ill. economic factors as cause: unemployment is seen by most as a major cause of the existence of homeless people. personal factors as cause: mental illnesses, hospital discharge of people with mental illness and physical disability or illness are considered factors contributing to homelessness. regarding the relationship between demographic characteristics of the participants and their attitudes: participants characteristics who didn’t reveal significant influence over the attitudes factors face to the homeless were: have been panhandler or homeless; county and district of residence; political party; to have homeless family or friends. features that showed significant influence on the attitudes factors were: gender, age groups, education degree and family income. gender had influence over: general compassion: the males tend to have higher values of general compassion. limit public rights: there is also trend to upwards of limitations of public rights in males. age groups had influence over: trustworthy the age range in which the values of trustworthy in homeless people are higher is the 30 to 44 years. as the age increases the trustworthy go decreasing and there is a more marked decline in the elderly. education degree had influence over: trustworthy the level of education that showed lower levels of trustworthy was the lowest, that is, without schooling, curiously followed by the more advanced degree. 435 building participative, empowering & diverse communities what showed greater level of trustworthy was graduation. social isolation the highest level of social isolation occurs in participants that have 1 to 3 years of university frequency, and the lower, without schooling. family income had influence over: social isolation the lowest levels of social isolation there are in the higher household income group, followed by the level of lower income and those who did not respond. conclusion taking into account the values obtained in studies conducted in other countries, it appears that countries with prevalence rates, whether literal as overall, more similar to those obtained by us are france / belgium and germany, which is among the richest and more developed countries of european union. portugal is the country with the lowest prevalence of literal lifetime homeless and the second lowest of overall lifetime homeless, despite being the poorest of the countries mentioned in table 1. table 1: prevalência de sem-abrigo ao longo da vida em diferentes países. e.u.a. frança & bélgica reino unido alemanha itália portugal população (milhões de pessoas) 274.0 69.5 54.5 82.2 57.7 10.4 amostra 435 182 159 250 250 200 conclusão 12/01 4/00 9/00 5/02 10/02 7/06 prevalência global ao longo da vida 12,9% 8,3% 13,2% 5,6% 10,5% 6,5% literal ao longo da vida 6,2% 2,2% 7,6% 2,4% 4,0% 2% still, prevalence rates far exceed the few existing in the country. the results suggest that family relationships play a key role in homelessness (either as leading or as protective). we can suppose that the low prevalence is due mainly to family factors, and that many of the people who could be homeless are living with families. in 1.5% of overall prevalence obtained through stories of precarious housing, while people didn’t considered themselves homeless, they were living with relatives. about half of participants who considered themselves homeless slept at friends or relatives homes during the situation. the fact that we have verified the impact of colonial war, and the subsequent decolonization, in the prevalence of precarious housing, justifies the need to be attentive to the changes and 436 building participative, empowering & diverse communities social phenomena as possible inducers of homelessness situations. emerge then the need of a contextual approach, of demand for integration of all factors that determine the context of life of the person affected by homelessness. the portuguese public opinion proved to be sympathetic towards the problem of homelessness. people tend to considered homeless as street people and as being socially isolated, so it can be deduced that they are considered people excluded from society. there was a high general compassion face to the homeless people, and a sparingly position for limit public rights, but also a moderate trustworthy. gender, age, level of education and family income, emerge as demographic predictors of attitudes, but not always in linear ways. both the personal and the structural factors are considered important as cause of homelessness, but there is a greater consensus about the importance of structural factors, suggesting a possible support to public interventions in a structural level national policies. 437 building participative, empowering & diverse communities community-clinical psychology in venezuela: looking ahead maritza montero1 and maribel gonçalves de freitas2 universidad central de venezuela (ucv) universidad católica “andrés bello” (ucab) abstract in this paper we describe how at the beginning of this century a project to create a graduate course in community clinical psychology started at universidad católica “andrés bello”, with the community psychology area directed by the first author. the initial errors, subsequent corrections and achievements so far produced are analyzed. and the central focus is put on aiming to construct a sub-discipline not for the community or in it, carried out in the usual ways of doing clinical psychology; but a clinical-community psychology taking place within the community, with its participation. the bases sustaining this project are rooted on an integral and situated conception of health; an active and dynamic conception of human beings as daily constructors of their lives, and a conception of the community as an agent of health. the initial and the current objectives are analyzed, as well as the achievements so far obtained, looking ahead for a better future, while developing today the roots for a better future. key words: clinical community psychology. new therapies. community health. mental health. introduction this is the narrative of how two social community psychologists came to teach at a graduate course of community clinical psychology. the catholic university at caracas, venezuela decided to create an interdisciplinary course where that subject was to be taught during three semesters, in order to produce specialists able to deal with the mental health problems in the community. the first author was invited to elaborate the syllabi for three subjects concerning community psychology (cp). those subjects were the theory, the method and the practice (practicum), a term during which the students apply what they have learnt. none of them seemed related to cp, but she decided to accept because the possibility of working with a community psychology approach in clinical problems within communities, certainly was not only necessary and important, but a void in her own community psychology practice. she called two younger colleagues3, who are active community psychologists and, together they began the fascinating adventure of participating in a project to train psychologists used to the couch and individual therapies, to work with communities; especially, communities lacking the services and the means to receive clinical services. the creation of this type of studies was meant to introduce the possibility of training professionals specialized in the larger sector of venezuelan society, which at the same time is the most excluded, and less informed about psychological help and how to find and use it. we 1 addresses: apdo. 80394. caracas, 1080-a. venezuela. e-mail: mmonteroster@gmail.com 2 email: mgoncalves2508@cantv.net 3 ingrid gòmez-celis and maribel gonçalves de freitas, co-author of this paper. mailto:mgoncalves2508@cantv.net 438 building participative, empowering & diverse communities are not clinical psychologists but in our practice many times we had found people needing the help this branch of psychology can provide. and at the same time we became aware that psychotherapy as it is usually practiced has nothing to do with the culture, economic possibilities and language of the people with whom we were working. the world of poor communities in venezuela, as well as in other latin american countries is a totally different ambit. the life-world4 of the poor is very distant from the middle class realm of the people making appointments with a therapist, driving to the consultation office, following professional advice, and spending years in treatment. language also is a major issue, and not because the poor cannot understand what the therapist might say, but because often it is the psychologists the ones who cannot understand what the patient from the slum is saying. and that is because the signs and the symbols come from different life-worlds, different life histories, different education, different life experiences, and different means of living. that was then our point of depart: much clinical ignorance, a poignant view of the circumstances in which we had been working, and some clear goals. our objectives for this initial task were: to insert the community approach into clinical practice, to help in the development of a clinical practice able to deal with the mental health problems of people living in conditions of social and economic exclusion. to achieve that, we had to build a bridge between the community and the clinical foci, and to move the classroom to the community. easier said than done. first, we had to determine the conceptual and theoretical framework for the praxis we wanted to develop; to provide the community psychology tools necessary for our clinical students, and to generate a critical and at the same time sensitive approach to the subject being studied. the first aspect was the definition of health: by that we understand all those aspects concerning the satisfaction of primary needs (nutrition, sports, clothing, medicaments, etc.) and also immaterial aspects of psychological origin (positive emotions, motivations, beliefs, being able to develop one’s creativity), as well as aspects provided by cultural links (social and religious beliefs, historic practices, sense of belonging to a culture, to a country, to a community, to peer groups). therefore, it is necessary for psychologists to know the context of the people s(he) is going to work with, to understand their ways of speaking and their culture, their interest, their patterns of behaviour. with base on this we consider that a clinical community psychology should be based on an integral conception of health and on a corresponding integral and situated conception of mental health, responding to the mental health needs of venezuelan population, with emphasis on those sectors and communities living in precarious situation, in circumstances of poverty. this notion is complemented by a conception of human beings as active, dynamic social actors. this is an important aspect because the people a clinical community psychologist will work with should be able to work along with the therapist, transforming her/himself and transforming his/ her environment, be as a patient or as a member of a patient’s family or circle of peers. a difference with the bio-medical model is made. where the medical model concentrates 4 by lifeworld is understood the region of reality in which one can intervene and can modify while acting within it (schutz & luckmann, 1973). 439 building participative, empowering & diverse communities power, responsibility and knowledge in the therapist, the psychosocial community model distributes it among the person being tended, the multidisciplinary team doing it and other people in the community. the medical model also constructs the illness as a powerful entity, able to mysteriously introduce itself into the helpless body of the victims, its emphasis is put upon sickness and how to protect the besieged or invaded body whereas the psychosocial community emphasis highlights the social support the person may receive. table 1 comparison between conceptions of biomedical and psychosocial community health. bio-medical model clinical community model institutional view of health and illness. health and illness are part of life and their understanding is part of culture. illness is external to the person. it invades and lodges itself inside the person. conception if the invaded helpless body. illness is the outcome of the imbalance between biological, psychological, and spiritual aspects of life (serrano, bravo, rosario, gorrín, 1998). the therapist knows and heals. the therapist knows and heals contextualising the illness. the process happens with the help of members of the community where there is the problem. the healing capacity of the human body and the therapeutic effect of positive human relationships are acknowledged, and there is a cautious and prudent approach concerning the administration of drugs. procedures, techniques and medicaments are generated by a specific field of science, elaborated by a specific industry and, regulated by the therapist. emphasis in social support as a fundamental factor for the promotion and protection of health. the core concepts are illness and the defense against it. considers that healthy people predominates. health prevails over illness. search for health is centred in the therapistpatient relationship. approach to illnesses and disorders is made by multidisciplinary teams with the active participation of the person or group to be treated, as well as their relational context. responsibility and control of the healing process resides in the therapist. responsability and control reside in the multidisciplinary team, in the person sick or in risk, in community groups and networks. power imbalance. power resides in the providers of health services, who exert them on patients and groups. power is exerted with the community and the interested person. m. montero, 2004. we wanted to generate, and train for, a practice that would go from community health to clinical community psychological help. to do that we had to start from a different perspective of health and illness, as well as a different perspective of the roles people and organized groups play in community action. the difference regards the active character of external agents, health workers of all kinds, and also in the internal agents, that is the very people in the communities: stakeholders, interested neighbours, people in need. both types of agents should be working together according to their possibilities and knowledge, in the promotion of health, the prevention of illnesses and in the secondary and tertiary intervention cases. this means going further than 440 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the attention within, and for, the community, reaching the attention by the community. that is, the integration of community participants and social support, jointly with clinical therapy. the community becomes as a collective entity, a co-therapist, providing forms of knowledge that should be explored and then incorporated. that is, popular knowledge that could contribute to preserve and promote health, and help in the healing of diseases. this means that the health agents are both clinical community psychologists and new health agents stemming from the community. social support in clinical community action social support within the community needs the existence of a sense of community and linked to this, intrinsic to that sense, a community identity. that is equivalent to have a community. people know they belong to a specific social network of common history, culture, values and interests. an invisible, but deeply felt network producing specific networks for helping, defending and sharing those who are like we are; those who know what i am referring to. those networks may be affective, collaborative (protecting, strengthening, doing together), and moral (based on judgments and opinions about social issues and modes of doing. and they can help in the social adaptation and protection of people in health risk. initial tools for a clinical community psychology obviously, at the beginning in 1999 we only counted on knowledge coming from usual clinical psychology and that coming from community social psychology, to this we promptly added social support. no one working with communities can leave it aside.. social support is the latch key to community action, and also its sine qua non condition of therapy in which the individual and the collective coexist with respect. participation and engagement make it possible. from paulo freire we incorporated the action-reflection-action model, complemented with the reflection – action – reflection, its inevitable corollary. and of course, and very optimistic, we expected to count in knowledge being produced by cumulative experiences. objectives of clinical community psychology with a community approach. in order to construct a new field of community action, research and therapy, as well as social transformation, we set the following objectives, in the hope to develop a clinical community psychology socially sensible, and able to respond to the mental health needs of the low-income population. the objectives of the clinical community psychology we are constructing are the following: to generate a model of prevention and intervention centred in health and not in illness. to incorporate the communities (organized groups and stakeholders), to the processes of promotion of health; to the prevention of illnesses and to the treatment of mental health disorders. to develop and use of communities’ resources and potentialities in benefice of themselves. to empower communities in order to contribute to the development of a conscious civil 441 building participative, empowering & diverse communities society, able to establish healthy relationships and to promote a predominant state of health within the community. to develop therapies for mental health disorders responding to the needs of communities, incorporating their resources and support, thus strengthening both the person in need and the community. clinical community processes and community participation and commitment community stakeholders, community organized groups and interested participants an important help and support for the clinical community action in promoting healthy habits and practices. there are plenty of examples about this: vaccination programmes, teaching and modeling hygiene practices, implementing programmes of cleaning and ecological disposing of garbage, for example. also in prevention of diseases, like covering water deposits impeding in that way the reproduction of mosquitoes transmitting yellow fever, malaria, and dengue, or taking and teaching measures for avoiding contact in cases of infectious diseases. detection of problems and risk factors is another area where an aware and participant community can be extremely helpful and very accurate. and collaborating in therapy treatments is the one way we are trying to develop and think that could be developed in the near future. concerning this aspect, community resources can be precious in obtaining help in the adhesion to therapy in mental health patients. not only the family but other members of the community can monitor and, most important, they can obtain behaviour changes within the community, towards people with down syndrome, and various mental disorders, thus providing a friendly and helping environment giving safety and support to those in need (caso cundo5). this type of community intervention by the community may produce changes in social relations leading to the acceptation and understanding of the ill person, and at the same time to the social adaptation of that person, helping her/him to become an able person within her/his capacities, and even an asset for the community. modes of therapeutic action developed in community-clinical practice in a country like venezuela where more than 60% of the population is poor or extremely poor, generating ways to do clinical psychology for the communities living in those conditions means that services should be provided for the majority of the population. we are conscious that our efforts may be disproportionate, but nevertheless, we consider that it is urgent to develop modes of intervention that can be provided out of the hospitals, and can reach the people in their own environment. we mean to reach a population that cannot pay for therapy, that most of the time does not have enough money to pay for the bus or metro to go to the consultation, they have neither enough time to wait in order to see some results, nor the culture understanding the peculiar relation between therapist and client. and on top of that, that is a population living in places where violence, abuse, drugs and hunger are part of everyday routine. 5 “cundo” was a man in a community where both authors worked during the first half of the nineties. he was born with mental deficiency and in his childhood was the object of much stigmatization and ill-treatment. the community health committee decided to socialize him at the same time they taught the people how to behave towards cundo. thus the exclusion, insults, as well as the fights stopped, and many neighbours took good care of cundo, who became a most gentle and collaborative person, although he hardly could talk. 442 building participative, empowering & diverse communities our students can practice their psychology skills at the parque social “padre manuel aguirre”, a service provided by universidad católica andrés bello, where it is offered clinical support in prevention and attention regarding mental health needs for people with low incomes from nearby poor communities. but as community psychologists we consider that is not enough, because those services only reach people with means allowing them to go to the parque social. it is a very good service, but it does not include the community, so people have to go back to the very same context where they got sick. therefore we decided to put our students in contact with that kind of situation. the students first detect mental health needs, discussing it with organized groups from those communities. after that they make a project of intervention that should be carried out in eight weeks. projects concern some problematic area pointed out by people in those groups or detected by the students in contact with community people, and they are developed with specific groups needing that intervention. activities have a participatory character and both, the definition of needs as well as the intervention proposal, are discussed with community leaders and with the would-be beneficiaries of the intervention, who also evaluate the process and its results. final reports elaborated by the students are also presented and given to the community as well as to the psychology unit at parque social, and are publicly discussed for evaluation by the second first author. so far 63 students have participated in those projects. interventions have been carried out in three marginal zones of the south-west and north of caracas and in a marginal zone of los teques, a dormitory city near caracas. in this paper we shall focus the interventions made in catuche since 2004, a large community in the process of fragmenting itself due to its growth, where we think advances towards a community-clinical psychology, as previously described (pp. 7-8), have being obtained. community-clinical work in catuche catuche is a low income community placed in the north of caracas, whose organizing level has been internationally acknowledged, receiving financial aid for the development of a variety of projects, as well as the support of an important institution (fé y alegría, faith & happiness). the catuche community-clinical intervention. intervention in this community has been centred in the relationship between two problematic areas: violence and mourning. this relation affects different age groups in the community: children, youngsters and adults, individually and as part of families, and the community in general, since violence is a central problem for this community. the process of developing forms of community-clinical psychology in which the community may participate has, so far, developed two stages and much reflection. these stages are not excluding, although each one emphasizes a particular aspect, while at the same time, keeps elements from the previous stage. thus, when we were approaching the community to assess the needs to be tackled, inevitable we would include community-clinical reflections about processes, and we began to think about alternative ways to develop our work. also, today, even though we have a more complex understanding of those processes, we still discover each time 443 building participative, empowering & diverse communities new aspects in the community, in the needs, and in the type of setting required. first stage: approaching the community this stage begins by entering the community and observing while also getting to know the people, hearing and talking to them about their needs. in catuche we found out that the community already had made a study of their necessities that leaders and stakeholders presented to us. this meant negotiating about which of the manifested needs our students and we could attend. we had to explain to leaders and stakeholders what was the kind of work communityclinical psychologists do, because some of their demands had a psychosocial character (i.e.: problems of people placed in buildings after they had lost their houses during a mudslide, but having to live besides people that have killed a relative). they soon understood, and later they would sort themselves those problems linked to our field. what they were telling us and what we were observing and hearing determined the problem to treat: mourning of people whose children had been murdered, within the community, due to the violence existing in it. as a sideline and because of the insistence of the leaders we began two more interventions concerning mother-children relations and sexual education for adolescents, as well as family violence. the first one, based on dialogue and with a psychoeducational problematizing modality, provided the women participating with a space where they could openly express their problems. regarding family violence, the leaders informed that there was a high number of women victims of that kind of violence, but they feared that direct talk about that subject would scare the women, who would not want to attend it. looking back to that experience we have the impression that the fear was in the leaders, who found aversive that problem, thus creating a sort of protecting shield impeding the issue to be made public. that reluctance and the difficulties derived from it told us that the needs as seen by the leaders were not the same as seen by other members of the community. their mediation was imposing a way to see the community. we still consult them because they have an interesting experience and it is important to know why they consider dangerous or private certain issues, and we do make them part of the reflection; but now the work goes straight to the people in need. and that started by interviewing them in an open way, trying at the same time to think about different therapy strategies. we came to understand the reasons behind interventions that in the past had abruptly stopped: among those reasons were fear to revive the painful situation lived; the time of the day; having other activities to do; the risk of leaving the children alone while going to a therapy group; distrust of other participants, and fear to be denounced for talking about a murder. as can be seen there are to types of impediment. the easier ones are those concerning timetables and work. the more difficult are fear and distrust. mourning was especially complex because the problem did not reside in its individual elaboration but in the jointly lived experience of the loses and in the presence of their mourning in what they call “dying day by day”, meaning what happens to those dear ones who are using drugs. besides, the violence causing the deaths mourned is chain produced: a dead person means new deaths as response to violence and vengeance. silence and door closing are the modes of protection, combined with rituals developed in the idealized community. mourning happens then, in an ambivalent environment providing both social support and threats. and in this dual 444 building participative, empowering & diverse communities antithetical quality mourning becomes chronic. by this is meant the continuous re-editing of the episode lived without being able to reach a resolving stage for the mourning a situation that produces constant feelings of rage, hate, and rancor. we acquired then new knowledge: our intervention could not deal with violence and mourning separately, they have to be treated as related expressions of the same phenomenon. and due to the circumstances it has to be individually worked, although the parque social recommendation was group therapy in order to help more people at the same time; but it does not work in that way. finally gossip and rumor are the cause of violence and silence, because every time something happens (meaning violence). the, rumors begin to run about the community causing fear, and at the same time, people feel that in gossip they are exposed to criticism and to others people curiosity. they feel fear to express their feelings or to speak out loud about a violent fact. and that is the origin of a false silence: nothing is said, but everything is known. this is the communication mode of this community, an aspect we consider we need to study and in which we should intervene, since it could be a key to understand certain community processes and to find healthier ways to communicate. second stage: intervention setting and the production of community-clínical therapy in this stage we began questioning the kind of setting (encuadre in spanish) usually employed. a specific time, a specific space, certain norms concerning participation, were modes of doing that were not working out. from the perspective of some community people, we should combine group therapy with visits to the people homes, talking there to them. this should be complemented with commentaries and observations obtained outside of the therapy space. and this was a challenge for a community-clinical psychology, because this was a setting to be set, adequate to the life-world of community people, with limits generated in the exchanges produced, and where the definition does not come from the practitioner but from the peopleclients, stemming from their reality. an unorthodox practice was created in that way. there was a meeting, and some of the people convoked were not punctual. waiting for the late-comers in the street, the students facilitating the session and some of the participants began talking about the topic they were supposed to discuss, and as they were doing that some neighbours passing by, who also were in mourning, were stopped and included into the discussion. in that way they did carry out the intervention needed, but they did it in a very different way. the community people spoke freely, without feelings of fear, or of invasion or threat. the facilitators called this strategy the toll gate (la alcabala), because they stopped the people passing, “detaining” them in order to talk. another modality is the hearing group. in this group initially created to work on the women’s suffering, the participants would include topics of community interest which did not have relation with their main problem, and the participants would help each other telling their experiences and opinions at their own rhythm. this is a semi-open group, because the participants may include other persons if they consider they would be interested in the discussion. discussion topics are jointly defined by participants and facilitators. all can hear and be heard. 445 building participative, empowering & diverse communities incorporation of recreational and playful aspects in the adults work. this was one of the most useful strategies coming out of this community-clinical intervention perspective. usually, interpretation and reflection about clinical aspects in relation with play is mostly used with children. incorporating games and recreation, in our case offered a possibility for important topics to come forth. those topics were related to personal worries, to aspects producing malaise or referred to the establishment of relationships. this allowed the people to intervene in their own circumstances, in a flexible space of leisure. for the psychologists this strategy provided the opportunity to observe the behaviour and the difficulty nodes in the women’s relation with their children, thus providing feedback. hurdles and difficulties one of the hardest aspects to deal with is the difficulty of most people in the community to integrate positive and negative aspects of the community, polarizing the situation. this has produced two opposite images of the community: one denying anything negative trying to reduce or ignore that, and refusing to reflect about it; another one constructing an ideal image of the community, defining it as organized, successful and with a united identity. those in this group tend to work too much for the community projects in what could be considered as an evading mechanism, and some of them have symptoms of burnout due to the working excess. the same polarization is found in the stereotyping classification of youngsters as “healthy” and “damaged”. in our latest interventions with those teen-agers we find they are neither so good nor so bad. we need then to work both with the lack of opportunities those youngsters have, and with the defense mechanisms being used by many community members, understanding that as a mode of dealing in a very hard environment, and keeping a certain level of psychological wellness. we need to find their modes of resistance and empower the people so they can cope, and at the same time change their life-world. the effects of frustration and uncertainty upon psychologists. most of the graduate students working in this project as part of their training have had previous clinical traditional training. they need to have very clear criteria for diagnosis in order to develop intervention with well defined strategies within a specific setting. most of them have been able to make adjustments to community conditions. a few have not. we understand that the model being developed feels them with dread, because of the volatility of community groups, due to the people’s hardships and lack of a habit to follow a therapy, and also because of their mistrust. they also fear community changes and their effect on people’s behaviour, as well as the possibility of having to redefine the intervention being conducted. to this is necessary to add the relative short time to work (people need and want to see concrete results). when they think that their work might not be useful because of the adversities of life in those communities they tend to feel discouraged. that is to be expected, we all have had those feelings. those who have the clarity to speak and discuss their fears and doubts have been, so far, successful in therapy terms, because they try to adjust their work to the circumstances. but silencing fear, so far has led to cautious superficial interventions. 446 building participative, empowering & diverse communities conclusions what has been presented wants to be a community psychology based clinical psychology aimed to develop a praxis responding to the needs of a population whose mental health needs so far are not being attended. criteria of participation and engagement are in its base; also the situated quality of this perspective. therefore, emphasis is being put in incorporating the people in the community, stakeholders and leaders to a therapy that may be carried out from a barrio dispensary, and from other accessible places (including their homes), so it can reach the people needing the service. the incorporation of people in the community as co-therapists, in the sense of producing a behaviour change conducing to facilitate health and reduce risk is a necessary condition. both those in need and also their close environment need to receive the attention of clinical psychology who should be able to combine a therapeutic approach with community social psychology approach, producing a different mode of community work. this does not mean to abandon all forms of traditional therapy, some of them can be, and should be implemented in the community environment and some people will need the assistance of other practitioners and specialized institutions. training for this type of work needs to be included in the graduate syllabi and we think the future of this conception will produce interesting development and creative interventions and research. we would appreciate very much receiving information about practice of this type in other contexts. references schutz, a. & luckmann, t. (1973) the structures of the life-world. buenos aires, argentina: amorrortu. 447 building participative, empowering & diverse communities tabla xx año intervención estudiantes responsables 2000 apoyo psico-emocional a guías de centro y jóvenes recluidas en el centro de diagnóstico y tratamiento “josé gregorio hernández”inam. antímano corredor, maria alejandra; barreto, maría alejandra; rodríguez, natalí; huizi, daniela; espinal, bárbara; umerez; ana isabel. 2001 detección de necesidades en la comunidad de antímano en relación con el parque social padre manuel aguirre s.j. meneses, maribel; pérez, ana; rodríguez, pedro; westinner, maría del valle. 2002 propuesta para la detección de necesidades de salud mental en la comunidad de antímano. briceño, cavalieri, d sisto-guerrero, guinand, juzgado, keisar. 2003 intervención en la unidad educativa “josé antonio villavicencio” en el marco del proyecto de bienestar psicológico infantil de la unidad de psicología del parque social-ucab balda, beatriz; brusca, daniela; gutierrez, sonia; fernández, elsa; izquiel, carolina; lizárraga, carmen; morillo, geraldine; pérez, cristina 2004 intervención familiar en la comunidad de catuche. maitin, zulaima; salas, pedro. 2004 programa de intervención en el área de la sexualidad en los jóvenes de catuche. díaz, mary francys; quintero, wileima 2004 intervención clínico-comunitaria en violencia familiar con habitantes de la comunidad de catuche. gil, raquel; gómez, gabriela. 2004 plan de intervención psicológica en el ambulatorio “san juan evangelista”, pan de azúcar: una perspectiva clínica comunitaria hernández, virna; santander, laura. 2004 intervención clínico-comunitaria del duelo de muertes violentas en la comunidad de catuche. fernández, barbarita; issa, claudia. 2005 intervención clínico-comunitaria: taller de prevención de violencia en niños de primer y segundo grado que participan en refuerzo escolar dentro de la comunidad de catuche guilbet, liza; ortega, susana. 2005 intervención clínico-comunitaria en prevención de maltrato infantil y violencia dirigida a niños pertenecientes al grupo de refuerzo escolar de la comunidad de catuche. “ayudadores de la vida” trujillo, tatiana y alvarez, yone. 2005 intervención en prevención de violencia y maltrato infantil para un grupo de niños participantes del programa de refuerzo escolar de la comunidad de catuche. vergara, suyim. 2005 intervención clínico-comunitaria del duelo de muertes violentas en la comunidad de catuche. fernández, saioa; larrañaga, carlos. 2005 intervención clínico-comunitaria en situaciones de duelo en jóvenes en la comunidad de catuche. abecasis, andrea; sapene, alejandra. 2005 estudio clínico-comunitario en duelo en situaciones de violencia en la comunidad de catuche. francisco, valentina; morales, ana carolina 2005 intervención clínico-comunitaria para mejorar el funcionamiento familiar en miembros de la comunidad de catuche: taller interactivo-vivencial “disciplina con afecto” dacal, irene; slaimen, gisela 2006 intervención clínico-comunitaria para la prevención de violencia y fortalecimiento de la convivencia en el grupo de niños de refuerzo escolar de la comunidad de catuche duque, zoraida; jaramillo ursula;, konietzny, marlene; uribe, sandra; vázquez maría 2006 sexualidad, feminidad y maternidad en un grupo de mujeres de catuche: una intervención clínica-comunitaria gonçalves, celia; matute, aknatón 2006 la rosa y el ratón muerto: intervención clínico-comunitaria de duelo tras muertes violentas en la comunidad de catuche bernardez, johana; márquez, andrés 2007 catuche: distintas aproximaciones a una comunidad desde la perspectiva de la psicología clínico comunitaria: taller para cuidadores(as) de adolescentes en catuche intervención con los jóvenes y líderes comunitarios del sector portillo en catuche grupo de apoyo y reflexión para líderes y personas que realizan trabajo comunitario documental audiovisual: re-construyendo la memoria e historia de catuche castro, mónica; gallegos, sandra; mongillo, magdalena; morante, maría g.; souto, jhon; tellería, carmen; torres, daniela 448 building participative, empowering & diverse communities refugee families in a multicultural setting eva nyberg research leader research & development unit södertörn, stockholm the multicultural area since about 1960 sweden has received people from other countries, first as workers in our industry (they came mostly from southern europe), from 1970 mainly as refugees from all conflict areas all over the world. 1 of 10 families in sweden, 10%, has ethnic roots in another country. the newcomer´s situation has always been special. around the big cities have, during this 50 years, grown so called multicultural areas where foreign families live. the concentration of foreign families in the multicultural areas around stockholm can be so high as 80 90 %. so if you, as a child from iraque move to stockholm with your family, there is little chance that your neighbours will be swedish families. the chance is so much higher that your neighbours will be other people from iraque, or people from turkey, from old jugoslavia, from somalia and so on. more than 60% or the children with roots in another country than sweden live in a multicultural area. as you already know, this have big consequences for the service in the area, for health care centres, for day care centres, for the schools, for buying food… the professionals in these areas, on the contrary, are usually swedish. the multicultural suburb is also an area with many children, the birth rate in most other areas of stockholm is decreasing, but not in the multicultural suburb. the life in the multicultural area what characterizes life in such surroundings? 1/ some families experience these life conditions as supportive. you share your exclusion from the majority society with all the others. with this experience you have no wish to leave this place. you make it your native place and your children, as grown ups, choose to stay when they marry and have their own children. 2/ or, your experience is that you are deported to these areas as an intentional action from the majority society. this is specially the case when the mix of nationalities means that you have to share the place with people who represent the formerly enemy from the home country. christian and muslim families from countries in the middle east, for example, live in the same house. turkish and kurdish families share the same laundry and their preschool children go to the same group in the daycare centre in the block. 449 building participative, empowering & diverse communities this can become a motive for isolation and bitterness. so, you can have positive or negative feelings, but seldom neutral, about living in such an area. the view on the multicultural area from the majority society: it creates social problems the practical consequences are the same, however, your contact with the majority society is restricted. our view on this way of receiving people from other countries is now that it has not supported integration. from the integration aspect it is a failure . all problems that this kind of area can create, as for example idealising your life in the home country, problems to learn swedish, a hiding place for criminal networks, has contributed to see immigrants as people with problems, or as people that create problems for our society. the swedish research on migration has a problem focus the view on the immigrant as problematic is an important cause to the restricted refugee policy nowadays. i think it also is the reason that the migration research is very much focused on migration as a problem. this research focuses school problems, psychiatric problems and unemployment. a positive perspective, that the migration is a possibility to a better life, or sometimes the only chance to survive, has disappeared. perhaps that is why we don´t know so much more about this life situation today than we did 50 years ago. for example: missing is a theory about the meaning for young people to have roots in more then one culture, with respect to identity and personality development. because some research results tell us about processes that probably are important for the personality development of children and youth. some migration processes within family life the migration process – departure and uprooting one aspect of the migration process important for the life stile in a new country concerns the ties to the family in the home country. in studies as well as in clinical work you can see that families develop their relation to the rest of the extended family in the origin country in different ways. this is the start of a process that i call the emotional uprooting. uprooting is a mental process and it stands for a change in your emotional ties to your extended family in the home country. uprooting starts later than the departure. i have found 3 different patterns in organizing your belonging to your origin family: 450 building participative, empowering & diverse communities i. the definite uprooting this means that you definitely decide never to return to your home country. i see this uprooting pattern mostly among parents who have a personal motive for their migration. you can have the status of refugee in sweden but your motive to move is personal. the personal motive for leaving can have its roots in family problems: you have been ill treated in your family and have sisters or brothers who were your parents´ favourite and you were never anyone´s favourite. or you belong to a nuclear family that have had a bad relationship to the rest of the extended family because your own parents did never get along with any one else. your bad feelings about your native place can be about something else than the family, about how you were treated in school or at work. shortly, you are a violated person and the violation has cost you much pain. it seems as your pain is the push-factor that makes you prepared to leave. i know mabel, a young woman from nigeria, who is a good example of this uprooting pattern. when mabel was 9 years old her parents gave her away to an aunt who could not get children of her own. her aunt treated her very badly, with her parents knowledge, and in spite of their knowledge she was not allowed to come home again. not until she was 16 years, when she went to her grandmothers house and refused to move back to this aunt. mabel tells me that she has dreamed of going far away during all these years of suffering with this cruel woman. when she was 24 years old, mabel met a man who lived in sweden but visited his home country for a short time. she decided to follow him to sweden. by this time mabel was a hairdresser with an own saloon and a few employees. economically she was well-off. mabel left her hairdresser saloon to a cousin and moved to sweden. in stockholm mabel found herself totally dependent on a man she hardly knew. the marriage did not turn out well and to get a possibility to think over her situation she returned to nigeria and her family after about one year in sweden. she took her newborn son with her. back with her family she found that her old conflicts with her parents, and her feelings of being a foreigner in the family, still were the same. once more she left her home town, now with the strong conviction to stay in sweden forever. just now mabel is married for the third time, expecting a new child, and has serious problems with the immigration authorities. she cannot, of course, be accepted as a political refugee. she is unemployed since her arrival. but, she is still convinced to stay in the country. and i am sure she will. you can say that the definite uprooting develops out of disappointment and anger. 451 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the children and the definite uprooting for these parents, the children are a part of your swedish project. your expectations are that they shall adjust to the new surroundings very fast, without problems. but your parent expectations function as an emotional constraint for the children. they try not to show fear, to show that they miss persons in the home country, they try not to show that it is difficult with the language, or with school mates. ii. a resting attachment i find this pattern, a resting attachment, in young families who live in a most involuntary exile. they have a political motive for their migration. the nuclear family in exile leaves behind them strong emotional ties to many people. they loose practical help with the household and emotional support as parents. there is an agreement that the exile will be short and temporary between those family members who leave and those who stay. usually this will not be the case but everybody act as if. for the young family in sweden this agreement is important as a guarantee for still being a part of the family at home. parents in this situation have much to loose but, at the same time, they have an ambition and plans for their future in their new life situation. often they have been active and successful in whatever they did at home. the wish to still belong to the family they have left and to form a new life in the new country is often hard to connect and realize. the projects you start are, in fact, tied to a future in sweden. you can find examples of this pattern of uprooting as i call a resting attachment among many young irakian families that have arrived to sweden during the last years. these families have not been away from home for a long time before they start to think about how they can organize a meeting with the family at home. a visit back home is impossible. 452 building participative, empowering & diverse communities but quite often they manage to arrange a visit for a family member here. the visitor is often a person that earlier has been deeply involved with the children, not seldom a grandmother. however, receiving a visitor from home turns out to be more complicated than you have expected. this visitor has eyes and ears and she tells what she sees. often she finds the situation bad for the young family, she finds them isolated and lonely, they have problems to find an apartment, problems with unemployment. often they have to study many years again, despite a long education in the home country. so the young parents find that they have to defend themselves: it is not so bad, it will be better when we know the language, etc. and, above all, it does not matter because we will come home soon. you welcome the visitor at her arrival but even feel released when she returns home. the visitor is a threat against your own positive but fragile, picture of your struggle in the new life situation. when she leaves you feel free but also abandoned. the resting attachment is an uprooting process followed by a great deal of ambivalence. an illustration of this process is that you keep weak roots in your native country while you at the same time start to plant new roots in the exile country. the children and the resting attachment also in this case you are part of your parents project to stay close to the culture, traditions and persons you have left, and at the same time to look forward to a successful future in sweden. it is not easy to live with both these ambitions. it often results in conflicts between children and parents. the parents find you are too little interested in the home country, or too little ambitious in the swedish school. there often grows a culture conflict at home. iii. the absent uprooting the third pattern of change of the relationship to your origin is no change. practically it means that you try to avoid changes in relation to your extended family. you do that by collecting part of the family around you in the new country. this is known as chain migration. the contacts with family members at home take the form of an invitation, in which you stress the possibilities 453 building participative, empowering & diverse communities of a good life in sweden. as a receiver of family members from home you get a very important role in the family, as an expert on sweden. you become an adviser for the newly arrived family members in all sorts of questions for a new immigrant. the receivers for the receivers, the reunion of part of the family functions as a vaccination against the feeling of change of the relations. you try to rebuild the life stile from the home country. when you try to form the family life as it was at home, you do that through an intense social life, by sharing the daily life with the newcomers. you do not present sweden as something interesting at all. shortly, as an illustration you can say that you try to live with long roots, to keep your roots in the native country and, in fact avoid to fasten any roots at all in the ground of the new country. a chain migration divides the family into two settlements in two different countries. in the long run, that gives the family members special possibilities of moving and travelling between these two settlements. i have not seen any ambition to gather the whole family in one place. we have examples of chain migration among assyrians, people from chile, from turkey and other countries. the newcomers if we, instead, focus on those who arrive: they are dependent of those who already have lived in the new country for some time. as the receivers are quite dominant the arriving families develop a life style that can be called an agreed no-change. this means: with not much of a chance to do otherwise, you agree to try to live as you did at home. you spend much time together with the receivers. you discuss with them every step you take in the new country, and you get a lot of advice how to act and what to say in different meetings with the majority society. the extended family in the new country when you take a close look at the first years of the extended migrant families in the new country, you find some contradictory matters. 1/ it does not seem that a member of the extended family feels any restrictions in his/her contacts with swedes. if you show a deep engagement in your family your seem to be free to see 454 building participative, empowering & diverse communities your school-mates how much you want to, if you are a child, and you are free to have private contacts with swedish colleagues, swedish neighbours and so on, if you are an adult. therefore the private contact with the majority society varies a lot between the members of these families, parents as well as children. some of them never see a swedish person, some have many contacts. 2/ when arriving in sweden, you count upon help from those who arrived earlier. but what kind of help do you get? it has often surprised me that the help is not a practical one, rather it is a verbal support: you get advice, instructions and information. the last arrived can easily understand this so that those who arrived earlier never had any problems, the advicers are so sure how to handle their life. ana gave me a good example of this when her 3 year old son started to go to the daycare centre. ana´s sister-in-law, who had lived in sweden for about two years, adviced her to leave the child there and begin to study swedish at once after the arrival. but the boy cried and did not want to stay in the daycare centre. at home, in the morning, he used to hide his shoes, which forced ana to search for them all over the apartment. with the child´s logic he hoped to be allowed to stay at home if the shoes disappeared. with whom shall i talk about that? ana asked me. i suggested: with your sister-in-law. no, said ana, i can´t. i am the only one in my family with problems with my children here in sweden. there can be different reasons why those who have arrived earlier don´t say anything about their own problems and difficulties to their arriving family members. perhaps a/ they don´t want to frighten them b/ they don´t want to talk about their own earlier difficulties because it is painful, c/ difficulties are normal, they are part of the migrant situation, d/ you can not prepare anyone by talking, it just doesn´t help. 3/ to be successful in the new society seems to be of no importance for your position in the family. the family has its own hierarchy built on history in the old country. for example, a teenager is guaranteed the same love and support, no matter his coping with the demands from the majority society. high grades in school, or serious social problems in the new society, neither matters for your relationships to other members of the family. here you can rely upon the family loyalty. it seems as your position in the family is based more on familyrelated behaviour than on society-related. but: finally, the extended family in a cultural setting were this life style is not the norm, is impossible in the long run. following some such families in sweden over a long time you can see that a fragmentarisation in smaller groups are not rare. the children and the chain migration the chain migration is very much an affair between adults. it is much more important to concentrate on inviting the family than to observe the children in the cultural aspect. perhaps this is a little surprise, but i find children with this uprooting pattern in the family more free, with less personal constraints, than the others. the chain migration allows children to play both with their cousins from home and with the children who are their new neighbours in 455 building participative, empowering & diverse communities sweden. in the normal case. a complication: the concept of honour and shame if the family is an extended family with modern values it is a safe and good situation to have a big family around you. but if the big family import very traditional values that do not suites well the values and life stile in the new country, this can create big trouble for the young people. one such phenomenon is early marriage arrangements. honour and shame is the social control in most home countries for the immigrants together with early marriage arrangements results in complications for young people demands new negotiations between families abroad and families in the home country in some home countries of our refugees, there still is a connection between marriage arrangements and honour and shame, a combination that has brought violence between fathers and daughters to our country. some young women have been murdered by their fathers or brothers lately in sweden. in my study of young womens´ experiences and thoughts about marriage in exile there was much talk about their choice of a husband. if the arranged marriage is the norm in the society, you don´t necessarily have any problem with that. you grow up with the knowledge who is going to be your husband, perhaps it is someone that you have known all your life. or if you do not know the man earlier, but you still want to be married to this man, it is no problem. but if one family moves to another country… but if there is a marriage arrangement between two families and one of them moves abroad, then the young people are brought up under very different conditions. often not even the parents are inclined to hold on to such an old arrangement. they want a son-in-law, daughterin-law, who they know that their son or daughter will be happy with and who suites well to their own family. most parents do not want to force their children into an unhappy marriage. and in that case, i have learned, very interesting things can happen. some stories from young women in the study: fetiye came back to sweden newly married after a summer vacation in turkey with her parents. her new husband came later when he got his permission from the immigrant authorities. fetiye told me that there had existed an origin arrangement with another young man, whose wife she was meant to become. but neither she, nor her parents, wanted him any more in their family. so fetiye´s mother, who was the best negotiator of the family, talked to the young man´s grandfather and asked for a cancelling of the arrangement. this grandfather showed his disapproval at first, fetiye told, but he accepted the cancelling of concern with his grandson. he wished him something better than to marry a girl who did not want him. when zarah came back from a visit in her home city beirut she told that her family had expected to celebrate her engagement with a boy there. her parents had chosen him for her when she was a girl. zarah knew that both families wanted them to become a couple. zarah refused. 456 building participative, empowering & diverse communities “my dad had to accept that”, said zarah. “ i don´t want to marry him. my dad told his dad that i cannot have children. end of story.” “my brother married a girl from our village in pakistan”, told ramisa. “but they didn´t get along well and she cried and her only wish was to return home. her parents took her back. at home her parents told the rest of the family and the neighbours that she never married in sweden.” why are these girls´ stories so interesting? because if you speak to young migrant women you find different ways of handling an old tradition that can complicate the life of the family. but the parents do not seem to be prepared to give it up. so when these parents thrive to show respect to the young man and his family they use a lot of strategies to help out the young couple of the old promise. there are a lot of migrant fathers who negotiate and use, what we call, white lies or innocent lies, to save their daughters from unhappiness. and the most interesting is that these parents, mostly fathers, don´t tell anything about this. if they did, perhaps the strategies would not work. the conclusion is: most parents do not try to force their daughters into unhappy marriages. but the picture of the migrant father in sweden just now is that he is a demonic and aggressive oppressor to women and children. parent support in groups good for young immigrant mothers often the young immigrants who are starting an own family in a new country have a hard time i think. standing between contradictory values. their parents have been more identified with the culture of the home country. we have found that the parent education groups can be very useful for these young people. parent education is offered from mother and child health care centre when you have your first baby, this is a national programme since 30 years. 70% of all swedish parents participate in this parent training program. but fewer parents in the multicultural areas attend this programme. when we tried to intensify this work in one of the big multicultural areas outside stockholm, we found some interesting results in our evaluation. the focus of the parent group activities was: 1/ education about newborn babies, 2/ to make the parent feel more comfortable and secure in the area where they live. evaluation of the parent training programme mothers no fathers first: we managed to get mothers to the groups but not the fathers. one conclusion is that the midwives and the child nurses who are the leaders of the groups must become better in inviting migrant fathers. so we decided to start with the mothers and later on try to develop another strategy with the fathers. contact between the participants in the group in the evaluation interviews i specially focused on the mothers´ experience of the contact with the other participants in the group. 457 building participative, empowering & diverse communities one mother said: “there i was, a christian assyrian from turkey, with three turkey girls beside me, and after a while i didn´t even think about that they are turkish.” the statement is a good illustration of what happened in the groups generally. religion, ethnicity and nationality disappeared. from the general other to the unique person to create group situations in the multicultural area is a chance to transform people from the general other to the unique person for each other. that is what happens when you meet, you transform from being a representative for a group to a unique person. to focus on what the parents have in common some of the women tied this good contact between the participants to what you have in common: the baby, the pregnancy, the delivery, your situation as a foreign parent. if you bring up subjects that belong to the conflict history of the home country – that can arouse problems, the said. when you have you first child you have much in common. a chance to make a small revolution against tradition the young mothers had so many older advisers at home or from phone calls with the family in the home country. many older women in the family were inclined to tell them how to handle their baby. and the swedish midwives and nurses gave their advices. the young women were tired of all advises. they used the group as an arena to discuss this, and for creating strategies to get a chance to make more decisions yourself about family and child matters. the future – the children choose their playmates one aim for the future is that these parents will put less restraints on their children when the children choose their play mates. to learn to know their neighbours will make them more inclined to let the children choose their friends over the boarders of religion and ethnicity. when the migrant family needs help: family group conference as a possibility when social, psychological or relational problems arise in a migrant family around their children or teenagers the majority society has difficulties to help. the traditional methods offered in the social services or in child psychiatry have failed. in one of our municipalities family group conference (fgc) is used and developed during the last decade. fgc is a method to make decisions for a child or a teenager at social and psychological risk. fgc is tired to concepts as empowerment, participation, child focus and social network. the conference is a meeting between the social welfare and other professionals, on one hand, and the private network, the extended family, friends and neighbours on the other. the family group conference process what is a family group conference. it can be described as a process of different phases in a quite formal structure. preparation phase: mobilization of the child´s network the social worker and the family formulates what need to be changed in the child´s situation what questions shall the fgc meeting answer? a coordinator from the fgc-unit is engaged to help the family decide whom to invite to 458 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the fgc the coordinator is the administrator of the whole process. a network map is made to help the family decide whom to invite. the preparations takes about one month. the meeting: the coordinator is the host the meeting has three phases: 1/ information to the family – professionals´ opinions (social worker, teacher, recreation leader, psychologist etc). the professionals give their picture of the situation for the child. the family can put questions. 2/ private session – the (extended) family confer – no professional presence: formulation of the plan for the child. this is what shall come out of the meeting: a written plan. both professionals and family members can have tasks in the plan. 3/ professional and private meet again – the family presents the plan for the social worker (for acceptance). the coordinator is the leader again. the plan is the answer to the initial question: what changes and what support does the child need, and who is responsible for what? follow-up meeting same procedure as first meeting, but with focused on: is the plan put into practice? rewrite the plan if necessary evaluation of fgc the voice of the children we know from evaluations that the adults are satisfied with the method family group conference. they think that their voices are heard about what is appropriate to do with a child with problems in the family. but what about the children themselves? in an observation and interview study we asked 10 teenagers about their experiences of their own fgc:s. a short conclusion is that fgc offers an arena for the child to express himself/herself but he or she is not always content with the decisions. what the teenager shows on the fgc arena is strength and vulnerability, at the same time. so: what do they say in the interviews and how can their reactions be interpreted during the meetings? the main themes from the evaluation about positive changes after the fgc yes, it has become better, but this would have happened with or without the fgc. as in many of our studies: young persons reluctantly admit that anyone else but themselves is important for the change. nobody can help me i myself is responsible for my problems. but after the fgc, with reluctant delight: our relatives call us all the time now, i don´t know why. 459 building participative, empowering & diverse communities about the absent father (more rule than exception for them) bad idea to invite him to the fgc, he will not come anyway. about big fear to become rejected: who wants to come to my fgc? about the fgc structural arrangements was there a plan? perhaps mom has it! the young persons are quite uninterested in fgc as a method for social work. there interest is to be listened to. about their long contact with the social services i hate all these meetings. but during the meeting: why shall i sit here if you don´t listen to me? about being the demon of the family my problems could be much worse! you want to send me to a psychologist! why only me, i am not the only one with problems in my family! about social competence – some examples: no problems to make the practical arrangements themselves with a foster family for a temporary stay, no problems to call the social services and ask for help for the family. about asking for help from the social worker why don´t you call me back? why does it take so long time to get help from you? social workers and young persons´ opinion of what is long and short time differ a lot. about the adults tendencies to start a discussion about youth in general today, it can be about drinking alcohol, about appropriate time to come home at night etc. – the answer to this exclusion is to stay quite, perhaps to take a nap. summing up the evaluation the arrangements around a fgc allow the young person to step forward with his individuality. perhaps that motivates fgc to be called, as it has been, a new paradigm in social work with children and youth. with respect to a child focus we can say: the fgc is the best method we can offer for now. 460 building participative, empowering & diverse communities enfoque teórico metodológico para el estudio de la vida cotidiana dra. maricela perera centro de investigaciones psicológicas y sociológicas, cuba email: maya20cu@yahoo.com si todos tenemos una vida y la vivimos cotidianamente, ¿qué sentido tiene plantearse estudiar algo tan conocido? diversas son las respuestas posibles, en esta presentación deseamos compartir una propuesta desde la mirada analítica de la psicología social. la vida cotidiana se ofrece como lugar privilegiado para el análisis de las relaciones entre procesos macro y microsociales. así, constituye una especie de «espacio bisagra» de las ciencias sociales y humanísticas; por consiguiente, reclama continuar su desarrollo acercándose a las precisiones de un enfoque transdisciplinario. coincidimos con lechner (1990) cuando afirma que las callejuelas de la vida cotidiana son frecuentemente callejones sin salida, pero a veces permiten vislumbrar la cara oculta de las grandes avenidas.1 algunos presupuestos de partida para esta propuesta: reconoce al sujeto como actor protagonista de la construcción y transformación de la realidad social, desde la concepción de sujeto de necesidades la vida cotidiana es un espacio de abordaje, por excelencia, de la relación individuo sociedad a nuestro entender esta relación ha de estar abierta a un permanente, dinámico y dialéctico cuestionamiento que sitúe en su justo lugar la interinfluencia de cualquiera de los polos de la relación. según espacios, tiempos y ritmos particulares, en la vida cotidiana consideramos que la relación no es lineal, ni automática y que lo individual y lo social no son territorios separados sino dimensiones en permanente interpenetración e intercambio donde ambas se «construyen» mutuamente. en el «aquí y ahora», de cada contexto social y en cada uno de sus niveles de organización, (sociedad, comunidades, instituciones, grupos) es esencial el sistema de necesidades actuantes para cada ser humano territorios separados sino dimensiones en permanente interpenetración e intercambio. en ese sistema de interrelaciones se organiza la cotidianidad de cada sujeto y se constituye su subjetividad. en esa vida diaria, que generalmente no cuestionamos ni interpelamos, porque «es la vida misma» , la «única posible», resolvemos nuestras necesidades, enfrentamos tanto lo habitual como lo inesperado, desde los conocimientos que hemos ido aprehendiendo, conformando, al mismo tiempo que vivimos nuestra cotidianidad. de tal modo lo social se integra en lo individual, en un entramado de relaciones sociales donde el sujeto se apropia, mediante el aprendizaje, de todo el sistema de conocimientos, saberes, y comportamientos que le hacen posible su vida en los diferentes ámbitos de la sociedad. para comprender nuestra propuesta comencemos definiendo qué es la vida cotidiana y por qué se torna dilemática la relación del ser humano con su propia cotidianidad. 1 lechner, n. (1990) «los patios interiores de la democracia. subjetividad y política». flacso-chile, p. 15 mailto:maya20cu@yahoo.com 461 building participative, empowering & diverse communities vida cotidiana: es la expresión inmediata en un tiempo, espacio y ritmo concretos (se define la reiteración como esencia de la estructura básica de la vida cotidiana) del conjunto de actividades y relaciones sociales (ellas transcurren en las diferentes esferas de la vida cotidiana y constituyen las vías de acceso a la investigación sobre la producción y reproducción individual y social, en la práctica concreta) que, mediadas por la subjetividad, (son pensadas, sentidas y actuadas, se explican por la interpenetración de lo individual, grupal y social) regulan la vida de la persona (enfatiza la vida misma: lo ordinario y lo extraordinario) en una formación económico-social determinada, es decir, en un contexto histórico social concreto. (análisis del condicionamiento de las necesidades humanas y la subjetividad) la vida cotidiana constituye un sistema en el cual es necesaria la reiteración de un conjunto de acciones vitales en distribuciones constantes de ritmos, espacios y tiempos, para satisfacer las necesidades y demandas de la vida personal y social. así vivimos moviéndonos constantemente, de espacios personales y familiares a espacios de estudio-trabajo y de estos, a otros espacios sociales comunitarios o regresando a los primeros, cerrándose de este modo el circulo de cada día y quedando la sensación de un día diferente o de uno parecido a todos los días. esferas de la vida cotidiana en la vida cotidiana subyacen las relaciones que los seres humanos guardan con sus necesidades en cada organización social. los hechos, objetos, relaciones, actividades, se manifiestan como un conjunto heterogéneo y multitudinario, que se nos presentan como un mundo en movimiento. por tanto, implica reiteración sistemática de acciones vitales, en una distribución diaria de tiempo que integra el conjunto de actividades y relaciones sociales que transcurren en las diferentes esferas de la vida cotidiana. de este modo, constituyen las vías de acceso a la investigación sobre la producción y reproducción individual y social de la vida misma, es decir, a la investigación aplicada en la práctica social concreta. entonces, las esferas de la vida cotidiana son: espacios y tiempos que emergen con sus particularidades y demandan ritmos de acción diferenciados para la satisfacción de determinadas necesidades. léase como particularidades: normas, valores, tareas, tipos de relaciones, tipos de influencias y roles consustanciales a las actividades de cada esfera. tema las esferas: familia, trabajo y tiempo libre, y se plantea que pueden darse entre ellas contradicciones dialécticas de oposición o complementación en lo cotidiano. estructura de la vida cotidiana la estructura básica de la vida cotidiana es, en su elemento esencial, la reiteración y puede aparecer a la vista o se manifiesta como fenómeno en rutinas, hábitos y costumbres. por tal motivo, el modo de vivir puede tornarse en un mecanismo irreflexivo y estereotipado de acción, que conduzca a la monotonía, al conformismo y hasta la infelicidad. sin embargo, lo que existe en la vida cotidiana es la posibilidad de la monotonía, de la enajenación, pero no su necesidad, ya que no son estas cualidades inherentes a la naturaleza de la vida misma. el hecho de que lo cotidiano se repita, de que se presente a diario, le da justamente ese carácter de parecer obvio, autoevidente y natural. esto genera a nivel psicológico un fenómeno de acostumbramiento, de naturalización, reconocido como estado de familiaridad acrítica (quiroga, 1988) que provoca la sensación, por ejemplo, de que la vida, la relación de pareja, con los amigos, 462 building participative, empowering & diverse communities los padres, en el estudio, en el tiempo libre,... no pueden ser de otro modo y que nuestra manera de pensar, sentir y actuar es la única posible. es así como nuestra vida está colmada de obviedades: es obvio, natural, normal que…. en los límites de la vida cotidiana conviven la posibilidad de la rutina, la monotonía, la acriticidad, con la posibilidad de disfrutar de los ritos, de la creatividad y la transformación. la vida cotidiana como proceso dinámico y dialéctico es un sistema que integra la concurrencia de eventos relativos tanto al mantenimiento de la vida (estar vivos, comer, establecer relaciones con otras personas, comunicarnos…) como a la calidad de nuestra vida (ser felices, la forma de preparación y el tipo de alimentos, sentirse realizado/a en los estudios, en la pareja…). es así porque es este escenario donde conviven los eventos cotidianos, reiterativos, ordinarios, que pueden ser productores de la rutina, del conformismo, de la pasividad, simultáneamente con la posibilidad de vivir situaciones especiales por no cotidianas, no reiterativas, extraordinarias (no magnificadas sino fuera de la común y necesaria reiteración). en ambos casos, pueden ser positivos y negativos, vivenciados de uno u otro modo por cada una de la personas en sus diferente esferas, actividades y relaciones desplegadas desde y por lo que acontece en lo personalfamiliar, el estudio-trabajo, el tiempo libre, las cuestiones sociopolíticas, ideológicas y culturales, particularmente organizadas por cada sociedad y momento o lugares histórico concretos. la naturaleza de estos eventos genera, en el primer caso, mecanismos irreflexivos, no conscientes, que devienen obviedades por el proceso de acostumbramiento y naturalización que tiene lugar dado que se vincula a las actividades, relaciones y necesidades imprescindibles para el mantenimiento de la vida (aseo, alimentación, vestir, comunicarse). son eventos que convertimos en obviedades y que se van naturalizando en costumbres, hábitos, rutinas, estereotipos, automatismos. en su origen y esencia reiterativa son necesarios pues se hacen eficientes en la cotidianidad (economía psíquica. por el contrario, en el segundo caso, la naturaleza de esos eventos genera mecanismos reflexivos, conscientes y se abre paso al análisis, precisamente porque pueden ser –y casi siempre lo son– imprevisibles, inesperados e irrepetibles, sin embargo, también es necesario incluirlos, precisamente, porque permiten las actividades, relaciones y necesidades que atañen a la calidad de la vida cotidiana. ellos pueden ser positivos (nacimiento, permutar a una mejor vivienda) y negativos (muerte, suspender un curso escolar). en caso de accidente, por ejemplo, si se afecta la locomoción, aún y siendo adultos que sabemos los movimientos necesarios par caminar, se hace necesario volver a reflexionar, pensar y ser concientes de cada pie antes de moverlos y caminar como automatismo eficiente. entre ambos tipos de eventos es necesario que exista una suerte de equilibrio, el cual es vivenciado por la persona como estabilidad. las contradicciones, conflictos y novedades, tanto de carga positiva como negativa, que producen ya sea tensiones, ansiedades o estados de displacer y frustración, son indicadores de que se ha roto este equilibrio. en ambos casos, se generan estados de placer-displacer que demandan transformaciones que pueden implicar cambios positivos y negativos, reales o aparentes. estas dinámicas abren espacio a la reflexión sobre nuestra propia vida cotidiana, intentando recuperar la estabilidad para restablecer el equilibrio. la ruptura del equilibrio quién le abre la brecha a la reflexión, al análisis de nuestros actos cotidianos. la vivencia de inestabilidad permite interrogarnos acerca de nuestra propia forma de organizarnos la vida, siempre que no sustituyamos la reflexión por la evasión, dándole la espalda 463 building participative, empowering & diverse communities a la contradicción y «taponeando» el conflicto. estamos queriendo decir que existe en la vida cotidiana la posibilidad de que rompamos con la familiaridad acrítica a través de la crítica de la vida cotidiana. en la vida cotidiana se manifiestan y se ocultan las relaciones sociales; entonces, podemos confundirnos y creer que «mi» vida es «la» vida y sólo se puede organizar y vivirla de esta única manera. de ser así nos estaríamos negando la posibilidad del cambio y la transformación. desde esta perspectiva, se puede encaminar el despertar de las personas con quienes van a desarrollar su trabajo; en los límites de su realidad se encuentran también los espacios donde desarrollar la capacidad de transformación activa y creativa del género humano. mecanismos para instalar la cotidianidad como objeto de reflexión: para que lo común, lo obvio, lo cotidiano deje de serlo tanto, es decir, para que se empiece a pensar, a analizar, a cuestionarse, «algo» debe suceder para que la cotidianidad se convierta en objeto de reflexión. ese «algo» tiene que implicar la vivencia de que «mi» vida no es la única forma de vivir «la» vida y, precisamente, esto sucede por al menos dos mecanismos o vías: por el conocimiento de otras cotidianidades es mecanismo dinamizador de la vida cotidiana y permite reflexionar en torno diversas cuestiones; la dimensión en el tiempo; el concepto de espacio; la orientación a la actividad, al ambiente, las personas, la vida y la muerte, etc. al tener conocimiento de otras cotidianidades contemporáneas o históricas, al conocer lo diferente, se rompe la visión monocular del mundo y aparece la contradicción entre la experiencia (el hecho) y la representación social de esa experiencia (subjetividad cotidiana). por el surgimiento de crisis y conflicto: al producirse un conflicto entre el sujeto y el mundo de objetos y relaciones que es la vida cotidiana (ruptura del equilibrio), acontecen cambios, desestructuración de lo obvio y lo natural por las rupturas del ritmo reiterativo y habitual de lo cotidiano, imponiéndose el momento del pensamiento y el análisis. es precisamente la crisis, la situación durante la cual se instalan las mayores posibilidades para que se produzca cualquier tipo de cambios. en una situación de crisis, con independencia del nivel de que se trate –personal, familiar, laboral, social–, ocurre que nuestro equilibrio se rompe, tenemos necesidades que no se pueden satisfacer de la forma habitualmente conocida y socialmente establecida, o sea, que los esquemas referenciales que poseemos no dan cuenta de lo que acontece. las ideas previas que conformaban el pensamiento común con el cual se funcionaba para satisfacer las necesidades cotidianas dejan de ser válidas, pues los esquemas de referencia se tornan inoperantes debido al carácter inédito de la situación y a la rapidez con la que los acontecimientos suceden. se produce una doble ruptura: entre las necesidades y los medios de satisfacción socialmente disponibles y, al mismo tiempo, entre la experiencia y las representaciones, ideas, creencias, que dan cuenta de esa experiencia. la crítica de la vida cotidiana desde la psicología es el análisis objetivo y científico de las condiciones concretas de existencia del sujeto. tiene lugar como crítica de: la crítica del orden social, en tanto análisis del modo en que –en cada formación económico social, o sea, en cada país o sociedad–, se organizan los destinos de la satisfacción y expresión de toda población. la crítica de las organizaciones sociales, entendiendo los grupos formales e informales en los que transcurre la vida de la persona y el análisis del modo en que estos espacios satisfacen 464 building participative, empowering & diverse communities o frustran, potencian u obstaculizan, la realización plena de los seres humanos. la crítica del vínculo, entendido como aquella relación social elemental y primaria en la cual, de forma inmediata, se manifiesta la subjetividad y se actualizan las respuestas socialmente disponibles. la crítica de los roles, prescritos y asumidos por la persona en las diferentes esferas de su vida cotidiana, determina ser cada vez más un mero objeto (marioneta) de las circunstancias o acercarse a su esencia y ser sujeto (activo) de su existencia misma. recorre todos los niveles, desde la sociedad en general, pasando por los grupos y las instituciones, hasta la relación y establecimiento de vínculos con otros y consigo mismos, como espacios más personales de expresión de la subjetividad cotidiana. es develar sus leyes internas, las causas de tales efectos o consecuencias observables en conductas cotidianas. es analizar las formas de pensar, sentir y actuar, aquello que de uno a otro individuo, de uno a otro grupo, o de una a otra sociedad, existe subjetivamente y resulta determinante y determinado de una manera cultural particular. crítica de la vida cotidiana es entonces interpelar a los hechos, interrogarlos, problematizarlos –a lo obvio, a lo natural, que por ser incuestionado pueden ser los más desconocidos–. sería la actitud opuesta a la familiaridad acrítica. implica romper con nuestras obviedades (mitos, estereotipos, prejuicios, automatismos) que encubren, ocultan, invisibilizan siempre otras perspectivas de la realidad, e ir en busca de lo esencial que está en los hechos, en la realidad diversa y no en la representación mental que de esos hechos construimos, es decir, en la representación social –en el pensamiento común y compartido– que naturaliza, ideologiza y mistifica los hechos. entonces, ¿cómo realizar la crítica de la vida cotidiana? se trata de un instrumento de orden práctico, que supone determinadas habilidades función del psicólogo como crítico de la vida cotidiana desde el ejercicio del rol profesional se ha de desentrañar las relaciones establecidas entre obviedades-familiaridad acrítica-crítica de la vida cotidiana, para comprender y modificar la relación del sujeto con la vida cotidiana. este rol supone al profesional desarrollar habilidades que demandan: primero: vivenciar, conocer la realidad. vivir y experimentar la realidad, conocer y ubicar en tiempo y espacio, para cada momento histórico concreto. segundo: observar, develar obviedades. romper con la familiaridad acrítica, con el mito de lo natural y lo autoevidente para poder develar el objeto de la crítica. tercero: problematizar, establecer una distancia reflexiva que nos permita, desde un marco teórico determinado, conceptualizar esa realidad y comprender la situación problémica, en qué medida y cómo entorpece o potencia el desarrollo humano. cuarto: transformar, elaborar viables estrategias de abordaje y/o transformación de esa realidad, en los diferentes niveles de actuación profesional (individual, grupal, institucional, comunitario y social). implica una práctica personal comprometida y responsable para desarrollar la capacidad de lectura del aquí y el ahora de cada realidad, en estrecha vinculación con la historia anterior de la persona o grupo específico. conocer la realidad sobre la cual hemos de desempeñar la crítica es requisito inicial, o 465 building participative, empowering & diverse communities sea, el análisis objetivo y científico de una realidad que experimentamos en su práctica cotidiana actual, que vivenciamos y colocamos en sus determinaciones históricas concretas. precisar desde la experiencia que se trata de: país, ciudad, municipio, barrio, comunidad, instituciones, grupos, personas, año, mes, días de trabajo, de vacaciones, actividades, etc.; vivenciar esa realidad concreta y ubicarla, incluso si se tratara de un tiempo histórico en épocas pasadas (donde este requisito se mantiene y se cumple a través de materiales bibliográficos, prensa, novelas, obras de arte). poco haríamos si creemos que es posible instrumentar la crítica de la vida cotidiana en una realidad. desconocida y mucho menos el despliegue de una labor profesional pertinente para la sociedad. para observar y develar las obviedades, problematizar la realidad y transformar la cotidianidad, contamos con instrumentos y recursos que el psicólogo asume en su rol profesional. por su capacidad esencialmente humana, enriquece tomarlos para sí mismos. diálogo y escucha en positivo no desear una vida sin conflictos contradicciones como oportunidad tolerancia es respeto a diferencias responsables agentes de cambios aplicar a realidad interior y exterior «construir» realidades diferentes la crítica de la vida cotidiana, más que teoría es un enfoque. hacer la critica de la cotidianidad es una manera de captar, indagar, interrogar e interpelar la realidad. por tanto, desde un posicionamiento teórico es imprescindible un conjunto de actitudes, valores y habilidades que son necesarios para el desempeño profesional desde esta perspectiva. implicará entrenar y desarrollar nuestra percepción creativa y científica de la realidad, depurando nuestra mirada de los prejuicios, estereotipos y encartonamientos propios de los esquemas referenciales desde los que funcionamos en el cotidiano de vida. supone dejar que la realidad nos penetre cruda, en toda su desnudez, y no al revés, intentando acomodarla, encasillarla en nuestros esquemas de referencia. el rescate de la curiosidad infantil, de la capacidad de asombro, en muchos casos bloqueadas en nuestro desarrollo por estilos de enseñanza-aprendizaje pasivos, memorísticos, la crítica de la vida cotidiana supone el empleo de aquellos recursos que implican la modificación de todos los actores sociales envueltos, incluyéndonos a nosotros mismos, pues como agentes de cambio social que somos. los recursos propuestos son aplicables a la realidad interior y exterior, a la persona, al grupo, a la comunidad, pero no son ni pretender ser recetas acabadas. 466 building participative, empowering & diverse communities community and place identity in change: a discursive approach to local participation piccoli norma, rollero chiara, greganti katiuscia dipartimento di psicologia, università degli studi di torino1 abstract this study refers to participation and to relationships between individuals and environment. we investigated the perception of the quality of the life in the neighbourhood, the perception and evaluation of social ties and of participation by means of a semi-structured interviews on a sample of 29 active citizens. we ran a content analysis on the interviews and then a co-occurences analysis to emphasize the relationships among the different topics investigated. qualitative data shows both negative and positive features of the quality of life in the neighbourhood and they underline also some critical aspects involved in the process of participation. further considerations are discussed. key words: bottom-up participation, place identity, content analysis this study refers to two important topics: one of which is based on relationship between individuals and environment and involves psychological concepts such as place attachment and place identity, the other refers to participation. when dealing with the relationship with the place we hold in consideration a discursive construction of place identity, in as much as it examines how the narrative positioning of someone who is of a place can connect a speaker to the multiple established meanings and identities of that place (taylor, 2003). this approach also highlights the collective practices through which specific place identities are formed, reproduced and modified (danziger, 1997; dixon & durrheim, 2000). as manzo and perkins (2006) report there is a vast amount of literature covering the relationship that persons have with places and, in particular with their place of abode. this study will not go into the theoretical details of this topic, but will only note, as reported by manzo and perkins (op. cit.), that such a relationship is a critical aspect of people’s involvement in their local community. it is well known that participation is a resource for both individuals and the community alike (chavis & wandersman, 1990); it is broadly considered as a “good practice” of interventions that intend both to use and increase the value of local resources and knowledge; in particular it allows for: a better quality of life perception (berkovitz, 2000); an increase in the perception of being able to participate in decisional processes that directly involve citizens (heller et al., 1984); a development of knowledge and skills, that is empowerment, on both an individual and social level (wandersman & florin, 2000); an improvement of the quality of social ties (kieffer, 1984; chavis & wandersman, 1990; foster-fishman et all. 2007). however, little attention has been paid to the conflict this may trigger. 1 contacts: de piccoli norma, via verdi 10, 10123 torino, italy. tel. ++39 (0)11 670 2024; e-mail: depiccol@ psych.unito.it mailto:depiccol@psych.unito.it mailto:depiccol@psych.unito.it 467 building participative, empowering & diverse communities presentation of the research the present contribution proposes a reflection on the issue of bottom-up participation, to verify if it has reached the theorized aims (see below) and to evidence the psychosocial strategies that have been applied by individuals in an attempt to overcome the conflict and any sense of delusion and/or disempowerment that has arisen. instruments. to this aim, we conducted semi-structured interviews to investigate: participation and residential story; perception and evaluation of the present participation; evaluation of participation; perception of the quality of life in the neighbourhood. the interview took approximately 30 minutes. at the end of the interviews subjects filled in the place attachment scale (italian version by bonaiuto et al., 1999) to identify their level of place attachment and answered some sociodemographical questions. we ran a content analysis on the interviews and then a cooccurrences analysis to emphasize the relationships among the different topics investigated. subjects the present study involved 29 subjects engaged in initiatives undertaken in their local area, such as residents’ associations and/or committees that aim at social and structural improvement of the neighbourhood. they are equally distributed according to gender (m = 14; f = 15); and length of participation (13 “short-lasting” participants less than 7 years -; 16 “long-lasting” participants more than 7 years) and they show high levels of place attachment ( scale ranking 1-7; average = 5.28; sd = .91; min = 3.13; max = 6.38); age: average = 51.76 yrs; sd = 13.34, min = 25, max = 75). method: the thematic and the concomitances analysis. the thematic analysis method has the scope of providing a coherent way of organizing interviews material in relation to specific research questions (twigger-ross & uzzell 1996). the category construction on which the content analysis is based, is, at the same time, both a peculiarity and intrinsic limit of this technique. indeed, the dividing of the text into categories may give rise to fragmentation of the communication content. whilst, it may be important to highlight how the single components link one to the other and what kind of image results from this. although thematic analysis may be the first step at a qualitative level, there is a risk that investigation remains at a descriptive level and shows only the topics and the sub-categories. therefore, in an effort to overcome this limit, we used a method of structural analysis that allows for the highlighting of both associations among categories and a significant configuration of what the study cohort cited the most. this association means a correlation between each of the categories with the others, in groups of two at a time. the statistically significant concomitances are considered for the analysis (p = .10) using the chi square test. we specify that the chi square test is applied within each single cell i.e. for each association between the two categories and not on the table as a whole. the categories the content analysis enables the study to extrapolate representations, perceptions and evaluations expressed by the study cohort. table 1 reports the frequencies that indicate how many subjects used each category and not how often they were used for each subject. we chose the subject as the unit of measure because we are of the opinion that this evidences if each category is an expression of a shared thought, or an evaluation formulated by few persons and, therefore, not representative of a common thought. 468 building participative, empowering & diverse communities a blind categorization was carried out by two independent researchers; any ambiguous classifications were discussed along with a third researcher who had not taken part in the first stage of the codification. if no unanimous agreement were reached as to the phrase, then the categorization was not done. herein we will not present all the categories used for the interview analysis, but rather only the topics in line with the aims of this communication (see table 1). individual empowerment the meaning of empowerment has been well known since rappaport’s definition in 1981. in our categorization the individual empowerment is referred to a development of knowledge (as seen in table 1), of a personal competence achieved through activism (awareness) and to a feeling of being an active subject (feeling active) and protagonist within the context, reinforcing a positive self-image. we placed sentences in which subjects said that through participation they felt satisfied with what they have obtained and they felt more “important” for the neighbourhood and for others into this category. it includes experiences that report having exerted control by participation in decision-making, or problem-solving in one’s immediate environment, which, according to zimmerman, (2000) is an important part of the empowering processes. another aspect of individual empowerment is placed into the category active subject when the subject referred to his/her own personal participation, describing him/herself as a proactive person and as a point of reference for the others. it doesn’t refer to a consequence of the participation, but rather to a characteristic of the subject, that is why it differs from the category feeling active. social empowerment this category refers to various aspects that involve the local community. by collective action individuals develop a common purpose and create new responses to meet the challenges they face (manzo & perkins, 2006). also the research by leavitt and saegert in 1990, demonstrates that the relationship among individuals, groups and the physical communities in which they exist are significant elements of community empowerment. this category includes: social relationships, which are fundamental elements of participation; the concrete acquisition, through a social action, of goods and/or services that are useful for the community (usefulness) and the perception that a co-participation ( by co-participation we mean the references to the importance of acting together as a whole to reach a common aim), constitutes a resource for the community. cottrell (1983) describes a competent community by the extent to which interdependent components of a community work together to identify community needs, develop strategies to address the needs and perform actions to meet those needs. critical aspects of participation this constitutes a central category for the research. it is related to what subjects referred about what happened after their participation, both on an individual and/or an a societal level. negative outcomes refers to any negative consequences that arose out of the participation. evaluation of others’ participation referred to any negative consideration related to participation enacted, or not enacted, by other people. 469 building participative, empowering & diverse communities comparison within and between neighbourhoods as collective identities are typically fashioned through symbolic contrasts between “our” space and “their” space, place identity derives, not only from individuals’ attachment to their environment, but also from their dis-identification with the spaces of others (rose, 1996). as place identity is a social category, it activates comparison processes (see: similarity and differentiation). therefore, for us this category included information as to whether subjects referred to other places they compared their present place of residence with, distinguishing the comparison between his/her neighbourhood with other areas of the city and/or with other areas of the same neighbourhood. temporal comparison we think that the temporal comparison allows for a clarification of the change perception: differences between past and present indicate the presence of a change: is it positive or negative? what topics are involved in this comparison? temporal comparison may be general i.e. it is merely a consideration that there is a difference between past and present without any specification; or the aspects mainly involved by a temporal change are: structures (public places, shops, services); inhabitants (the kind of inhabitants in the area); insecurity (the feeling of insecurity in the neighbourhood). perception of the quality of life in the neighbourhood as participation increases so does the quality of life perception (berkovitz, 2000), we were interested in investigating what dimensions and structures are involved in the definition of the quality of life, both from a positive and negative point of view; these are: environment, services, commerce and insecurity. social ties social ties also contribute to the quality of life, but, as they are of particular interest, we distinguished this topic from the others linked to the quality of life. foster-fishman et al (2007) specify “social ties refers to the type and extent of relational interactions that exist within a neighbourhood, such as the extent to which neighbours socialize with each other or exchange favours or resources (…). social ties within a neighbourhood provide a critical mechanism for connecting residents to their neighbourhood and fostering the social networks needed to engage residents in change efforts and in collective action” (p. 94). we distinguished relationships the subjects live directly with others (relationships between the subject and others) from general relationships (relationships between inhabitants). the social tie category differs from the similar one we named participation consequences: relational, in as much as the former specifies the social ties present in the zone, the latter, refers specifically to social ties developed thanks to participation. inhabitants’ perception we have also specified this category to verify whether there are stereotypes, or prejudices that may interest particular social categories and that may characterize the social ties. 470 building participative, empowering & diverse communities data analysis to identify any association between categories and gender, place attachment and length of participation, we then analysed the data by the chi-square test. there were no statistically significant differences for place attachment (globally high for all participants), or as to the length of participation in the neighbourhood. whilst, there were some statistically significant differences for gender. females say more than males the participation favours a feeling of being active (chi” = 4.144; sig. <.05) and women more than men made references to social ties (chi2 = 6,807; sig. < .01). the content analysis table 1: qualitative data individual empowerment: participation consequences knowledge 12 awareness 18 feeling active 16 active subject 21 social empowerment: participation consequences relationships 22 usefulness for others and for the community 7 co-participation 13 critical aspects of participation evaluations of others’ participation 25 (12 neg.; 4 pos. and 9 ambiguous) participation consequences: negative outcomes 13 comparison within and between neighbourhoods comparison with other neighbourhoods 17 comparison with other areas within the neighbourhood 8 temporal comparison (yesterday vs. today) temporal comparison: general aspects 14 temporal comparison: structures 14 temporal comparison: inhabitants 18 temporal comparison: insecurity 9 perception of the quality of life in neighbourhood positive features: environment 11 positive features: services 13 positive features: commerce 7 negative features: environment 8 471 building participative, empowering & diverse communities negative features: services 10 negative features: insecurity 12 social ties relationships between inhabitants 14 relationships between the subject and others 21 (3 neg.;15 pos. and 3 ambiguous) inhabitants’ perception negative features 8 positive features 4 incivility 12 social category 17 we will present data that refers to the content analysis and some sentences as example of the content for each category, expressed by the subjects. social and individual empowerment is it a consequence of participation? has participation improved social ties? people said that they were more aware of their abilities, skills and social/ political processes related to participation (see: awareness: 18 subjects): “awareness…something in the planning has changed for the better; at first i ran after emergencies, now i try to foresee them, i try to make projects...i ask information”; “i learnt a lot of things …and i got a lot of information…i learnt to speak to politicians who didn’t give a damn…”; participation developed a feeling of being active (16 subjects): “i work with this association so i don’t have the feeling that i’m doing nothing”; “active participation makes me feel well, i get the feeling of keeping in touch with the territory” and developed knowledge; 12 subjects refer to a practical understanding of the neighbourhood: “i had the possibility to get to know places, persons, events and things i ignored before”; “the association allowed us not only to bring up our children properly, but also to see a bit of the territory”. other consequences of participation concern relational aspects (22 subjects): “here now we are all a big family, we are all friends; i met a lot of people and introduced lots of others”; “when you are involved in the neighbourhood, that is with the people, you feel much more at home. i rarely go down the street without meeting someone i know or who knows me”. 7 subjects talked about something they considered useful, which they are able to obtain thanks to their participation, such as cleaner streets in the neighbourhood, or services that did not exist before (usefulness): “this activity, of participation in civil life, is also motivated by the possibility of having a return: you see things are developing they change, it’s not wasting time”; “here there was a big problem, there was no centre for the elderly, there was nothing at all and it only took 4 or 5 of us to get a room for them”. 13 subjects refer to the importance of acting together as a whole to achieve their goals (co-participation): 472 building participative, empowering & diverse communities “acting together makes us stronger”; “here, helping one another and the help that was given to us, to re-qualify the area, was of benefit to all of us”. the evaluation of social ties we have already seen that social relationships develop thanks to participation (22 subjects). now we will consider the perception of social ties, not necessarily referred to participation, but what subjects think about the possibility to have good or bad social relationships with the other inhabitants. the people interviewed expressed a global positive perception of the relationship between the inhabitants (14 subjects); “we all know each other in the building”; “this area is like a big village; nobody is abandoned because this is a very united reality”. we may, therefore, consider social ties to be a central aspect for all the participants, even if some critical aspects come to light. among the 21 subjects referring to social ties: subject/other, 3 persons expressed negative features: “here, nowadays, in this court yard, if they see on the terrace they don’t even say hello”; “they have never really trusted me …a lot of people think i work for the council”; 3 evaluated them both in positive and negative terms: “i know almost everyone who lives in this building and it’s not that everything always turns out nicely” and finally 15 expressed a positive evaluation: “nowadays, if i go out, i always come across someone who stops to chat to me”; “i speak to everyone, even the gypsies ..i meet them on the street and i say hello”. has participation improved the perception of quality of life in the neighbourhood? the subjects report both positive and negative features as to their perception of the quality of life in the neighbourhood. the positive features are: services (13): “now we even have an advisory bureau, so we’ve got more or less everything”; “we have all the public services, the bus, the market, the post office, a hospital nearby…we’ve got everything really. i’ll never go away from here”; environment (11): “it’s peaceful here…little traffic…open spaces…”; “the beauty of the garden. it’s the most beautiful thing ever”; commerce (7): “there are stacks of shops: the commercial places are more than adequate”; “there are a lot of artisans here”. the negative features are: services (10): “there is a shortage of health services and rehabilitation centres…for example if you need an injection, that kind of thing”; “i think we should have a registry office in the area …if we need a document we have to go a long way to get it”; environment (8): “the smog…it’s disgusting …the quality of the air is really terrible”; “we should do something about the traffic it’s till very dangerous, also for cyclists”; 473 building participative, empowering & diverse communities insecurity (12): “sure, there’s a park but it’s horrible; bad people go there, even during the day, it makes you afraid to go there with children;” “we had a safety problem right under our own home, it had become a cove for pushers …”. the presence of services and a pleasant environment are the most important dimensions, while, among negative perceptions, the most critical features are the absence of public services and the feeling of not being safe in the environment. are there any critical aspects about participation? 12 subjects gave a negative evaluations on the participation of others, 9 considered both positive and negative aspects and only 4 expressed a positive evaluation. a positive evaluation is one where the subject considers that people participate easily and that collaboration between inhabitants is possible: “here we’ve got some really important people that come and lend a hand they just come here and give us a bit of their time”; “i’m really pleased when i see that people participate…that evening we were in 800…because we managed to publicise it at the right time…”. on the contrary 12 individuals perceived the participation of others in a negative way: because people tend to delegate others: “i don’t see why i have to be by myself today; because it’s hard work to make other people become active: “action isn’t spontaneous, you always need someone to guide things”; “some just come to a couple of meetings and then disappear”; because of the inhabitants’ opportunistic attitudes: “what makes people come to the meetings is when there’s free grub and booze”. 9 individuals emphasize both positive and negative aspects: “although it’s an active neighbourhood as far as participation is concerned, there are still a lot of others who just do their own thing and simply don’t take part…”; “they are only a few because most people just live in their homes, they wall themselves in …but there is a part of the population that wants to integrate and you only need to give them a chance to do so… a little opening…”. 13 individuals evaluated negatively participation itself. in their opinion, the experience of participation triggered feelings of disenchantment, bitterness, dissatisfaction, fatigue because the commitment is not acknowledged either through the success they hoped for, or by others (co-actors, or inhabitants): “it’s all too easy to go backwards and suddenly, all the efforts are lost, all the time… the hours passed, all the words spent, the whole thing , you risk in first person …”; “we work our arses off”. the thematic concomitances an analysis of the thematic concomitances allowed us to further investigate into the reflections in such a way as to identify any correlations among the categories. we did not formulate any hypothesis on this point, but rather carried out data-centred investigation and not one based on theory. what relationships emerged? the analysis of the thematic concomitances (significant for the p = .10 at the chi square test) led us to further investigate three thematic areas: a) the relationship between some dimensions considered to be critical by the subjects; b) the relevance 474 building participative, empowering & diverse communities of the social ties and lastly c) the comparison between times e.g. yesterday, today and between urban areas. now let’s look at the thematic concomitance involving critical aspects: a) relationship between critical dimensions participation consequences: n = 6 inhabitants’ perceptions: negative outcomes n = 13 negative features n = 8 x2 = 4.07; p <.05 these data mean that, negative outcomes were referred to participation by 13 subjects, 8 perceived negative futures of the inhabitants; among these 6 persons utilized both the categories. in this case the failure of participation seems to be linked to the residents in the area. therefore, one can observe the importance of social ties as a central element when dealing with participation, as is further explained in the following thematic concomitances. b) the relevance (and criticism) of social ties temporal comparison (n = 14) negative features: services (n = 10) (x² = 10,64, p <.005 ) temporal comparison: insecurity (n = 9) active subject (n = 21) (x² = 4.97, p <.05 ) comparison with other neighborhoods (n =17) comparison with other neighborhoods (n =17) co-participation (n = 13) inhabitants’ perception: relational aspects (n = 14) (x² = 11.02, p <.005 ) (x² = 8.19, p <.005 ) n = 9 n = 9 n = 12 n = 12 indeed, it can be observed that the social ties constitute a component that is able to offer both gratification or dissatisfaction. participation is linked to the capacity the inhabitants themselves have to build up positive relationships (see: participation consequences: relational/inhabitants’ perception: relational aspects). also through an analysis of the contents it was observed that one of the principal aspects that participation manages to develop is indeed determined by social ties: people express importance for relationships that have developed thanks to participation and that also influence the quality of coexisting one with the other in the neighbourhood. moreover, the content analysis has shown that positive and negative aspects coexist with one another. data show us other significant concomitances: we can see a cluster of categories referring to social relationships connecting individuals to the social environment. relationship is an element that gratifies the social commitment (see: participation consequences: feeling active/ social ties: subject/other). 475 building participative, empowering & diverse communities however, this does not exclude the finding of some social categories in the territory with whom the relationships does become more difficult and, at times, even one of conflict (see some examples of: inhabitants’ perception: social category; “they’ve even let gypsies come and live here. i think they sent them away twice …then they put in moroccans”; “i don’t deny that there are some integration problems, also on the part of some groups”). c) temporal comparison and comparison with other neighbourhoods nine persons who referred to a general temporal comparison expressed negative concepts about public services, formulating a comparison with a past the is “inevitably” different from the present. therefore, they refer to a generic change (e.g. “things have changed a lot because there has been a tranformation”; “compare to what it was when i arrive the image has changed somewhat”) or to a past that is worst than the present (e.g.: “this neighbourhood has undergone a continuous improvement…it has improved a lot”; “this neighbourhood has gone forward in leaps and bounds”). whilst all the 9 persons that referred to safety, which they perceived as being less pressing nowadays than it once was, also perceive themselves as active subjects. although we cannot affirm that these subjects feel that the context has improved greatly due to their own personal actions, neither can we discard the hypothesis. lastly we can observe the thematic concomitances that involve comparison with other neighbourhoods. if indeed they do indicate place identity, expressing a process of comparison with other places of residence, we then believe it is of interest to show how some of these dimensions are correlated to the category we called co-participation (that is the awareness that acting together is a very important instrument to achieve collective goals). these data are in line with manzo and perkins’ opinions (2006) that “studies in community and environmental psychology on disruptions to place attachment illustrate the importance of place meaning to community members as well as their commitment to, and participation in, neighbourhood processes” (pag. 337). another concomitance is with the category inhabitants’ perception: relational aspects, that demonstrate once more the importance of social ties in contributing to the construction of place identity. discussion we have observed that all the subjects who are active participants and have a high level of place attachment, perceive both negative and positive features of quality of life in their neighbourhood and they underline also some critical aspects involved in the process of participation. a positive consideration of participation may support the motivation to continue the commitment. furthermore, perceiving both a positive outcome of participation and the social expertise may be considered processes of empowerment that both develop and sustain participation. how then is it possible to continue the engagement and, in the same time, perceive some critical aspects? what are the psychological processes that spur the individuals continue to be active? in line with an epistemological perspective like those of the discursive psychology we 476 building participative, empowering & diverse communities consider that the discursive analysis may highlight psychosocial processes. the thematic concomitances analysis allows us to evidence which process drives individuals both to keep a cognitive coherence when faced with conflicting cognition (remembering festinger’s train of thought) and in protecting one’s own identity (in the sense of social identity and place identity): despite some critical aspects, social ties and place attachment remain strong and solid. this is cognitively possible because individuals operate a comparison, both temporal and geographic, one that permits them to maintain a positive image of their neighbours and neighbourhood; today it is better than it was once and this area is better than others. the comparison acts either as a reduction of dissonance, or as maintenance of a cognitive coherence with the aim of protecting identity. one consequence of the participation is also that of reinforcing the individuals’ social identity. they have the perception of being important for others and of being a reference point for the neighbourhood. this aspect is connected to the perception of belonging to a social network, not only as a participant, but also as a citizen. we can also see how some of the people we interviewed place importance on some particular categories, that need special attention (see. social categories) and that are sometimes responsible for difficult and conflicting social situations (14 persons reported on problems of integration and communal life).an important question arises from this reflection. as social ties are a very important factor for social participation, then when and where does the need arise for a top-down participation we must, first of all, activate programmes and projects aimed at the development of a social network, something which in participation is considered an important feature, both for its maintenance and for its enactment. references berkowitz, b. (2000). community and neighbourhood organization, in j. rappaport & e. seidman (eds.), handbook of community psychology, kluwer academic, new york. bonaiuto, m., aiello, a., perugini, m., bonnes, m. & ercolani, a.p. (1999). multidimensional perception of residential environment quality and neighbourhood attachment in the urban environment. journal of environment psychology, 19, pp. 331-352. chavis, d.m. & wandersman, a. (1990). sense of community in the urban environment: a catalyst for participation and community development. american journal of community psychology, 18, 5581. cottrell, l. s. jr. (1983). the competent community. in r. warren & l. lyon (eds.), new perspectives on the american community, pp. 398-432, homewood, il: dorsey. danziger, k. (1997). the varieties of social construction. theory and psychology, 7, 400-416. dixon, j. & durrheim, k. (2000). displacing place-identity: a discursive approach to locating self and other. british journal of social psychology, 39, 27-44. foster-fishman, p.g., cantillon, d., pierce, s.j. & van egeren, l. a. (2007). building an active citizenry: the role of neighbourhood problems, readiness, and capacity for change. american journal of community psychology, 39, 91-106. 477 building participative, empowering & diverse communities heller, k., price, r.h., reinhartz, s., riger, s., wandersman, a. & d’aunno, t.a. (1984). psychology and community change: challenges of the future, monterey: brooks/cole. leavitt, j. & saegert, s. (1990). from abandonment to hope: community household in harlem, new york, columbia university press. manzo l. c. & perkins, d. d. (2006). finding common ground: the importance of place attachment to community participation and planning. journal of planning literature, 20, 4, pp. 335-350. kieffer, c.h. (1984). citizen empowerment: a developmental perspective. prevention in human services, 3, 9-36. rappaport, j. (1981). in praise of paradox: a social policy of empowerment over prevention. american journal of community psychology, 9, 1-25. rose, g. (1996). place and identity: a sense of place. in d. massey & p. jess (eds.). a place in the world? (pp.87-132), oxford: oxford university press. taylor s. (2003). a place for the future? residence and continuity in women’s narratives of their lives. narrative inquiry, 13, 193-215. twiggerross, c. & uzzell, d. l. (1996). place and identity processes. journal of environmental psychology, 16, 205-220. wandersman, a. & florin, p.(2000). citizen participation and community organization, in j. rappaport & e. seidman (eds.), handbook of community psychology, kluwer academic, new york. zimmerman, m.a. (2000). empowerment and community participation: a review for the next millennium, actas ii congresso europeu de psicoogia comunitaria, j. ornelas, lisboa, instituto superior de psicologia aplicada, 9-15. 478 building participative, empowering & diverse communities narratives and health: fostering prosocial communities among recent immigrants to toronto wade e. pickren, cynthia shih, nina vitopoulos, julia stanislavskaia, & andrea andreii ryerson university toronto, on, canada in forrest tyler’s recent book, developing prosocial communities across cultures, he recalls two experiences that he and his wife, sandy, had in colombia and india that illustrate the idea of prosocial communities and a key claim of this paper, which is the importance of listening to people’s own voices as they recount their strengths and their challenges. in the first, forrest recalls the experience he and sandy had in colombia when they were asked to document the experience of colombian street children in the children’s own words. these children were generally despised and marginalized. however, when asked to tell their stories, they told of a sense of themselves and their communities as being resourceful and of having strengths as a community. this was different than what the experts expected. as the tylers experienced, “the experts viewpoints reflected only their own, discipline limited outlooks about the nature and capabilities of these children” (tyler, 2007, p. 2). a few years later, in the second account, the tylers were in india on a fulbright fellowship. sandy sought to work on issues of domestic violence, but was discouraged by the upper caste women indian psychology professors who did not see the lower caste women as suitable to work with. when sandy persisted, she found that the lower caste women were quite aware of the problems of domestic violence and had a good handle on its contingencies and what they may be able to do about it. again, the voices of those usually marginalized are important to hear if we want to develop prosocial communities. in our study, narratives and health: building on cultural strengths of recent immigrants to improve health care, we deliberately sought to hear the voices of these newcomers to toronto, so that they would be empowered and we would have a better grasp of how to work with them to improve their chances of receiving good health care. canada has near-universal health care for its citizens, permanent residents, asylum seekers, and refugees. although the system varies by province, basic health care is everyone’s right, at least by law. in practice it does not always work out equitably for everyone. that is, health care is not necessarily a part of the pro-social framework. let me give an example. canada has a population of just over 30 million, with most of that population in toronto, montreal, and vancouver and almost all the rest within a couple of hundred miles of the united states border. of that 30 plus million, 5 million persons do not have a primary care physician. this problem is particularly acute in toronto, canada’s largest city. there are complex reasons for this, but one is that the provincial government actively discouraged the expansion of medical schools and the settling of physicians in the greater toronto area (gta) in the 1990s. another is that almost insurmountable barriers are in place for physicians who immigrate to canada, with incredible demands placed on them for 479 building participative, empowering & diverse communities re-licensure and punitive restrictions on them for place of practice. an immigrant physician who managea to overcome the paperwork barrier has to agree to practice in the least settled areas of ontario for five years after getting a license—however, there is an inadequate population to support a doctor’s practice in these areas. this is not a prosocial community in action but a profession protecting its turf. much the same situation exists for psychologists who immigrate, except from the united states or england. combine that statistic, 5 million persons without a physician, with the immigration statistics, about 300,000 persons a year coming to canada, mostly to toronto, montreal, and vancouver, and you soon see that the persons most likely to be without a physician are recent immigrants. compounding this is that many of the immigrants since the 1960s and overwhelmingly since the 1990s are persons of color, immigrants from east asia, south asia, and africa. this is the context for our work. project description and rationale our community-based exploratory research was designed to describe, understand and emphasize the strengths inherent in cultural health beliefs and practices of recent immigrants. in this study, we used the definition of health developed by the world health organization: health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. as part of a pilot study, we used narrative interviews to explore the perception and understanding of health beliefs and practices of 20 recent immigrants-10 from a local community center for immigrants in downtown toronto and 10 immigrant university students. our intention was to focus on cultural strengths. we employed a conception of culture that assumes it is dynamic, fluid, and emergent, rather than a static and fixed entity (dorazio-migliore, migliore, & anderson, 2005; hermans & kempen, 1998). our questions were the following: how do immigrants express their understanding of health, illness and their need for health care? how do they relate their understanding to the dominant model of health beliefs and practices found in canada? what are the cultural strengths related to health that immigrants bring with them? how can these strengths be used to facilitate the transition to a new country and improve access to health care and, potentially, improve the delivery of health care services? immigration is typically a stressful experience, even when individuals or families have ample resources. most immigrants, of course, do not have such resources and many come to their destination knowing only a few people, or perhaps, no one at all. immigration is stressful, in part, because of the resultant loss of social support and inadequate financial resources. in many cases, there is a change in profession, often to a lower-paying, lower-status, job (salaff & greve, 2003). (there is a wry joke in toronto that we have the world’s best educated taxi drivers!) in addition, there is often a disruption to family life and prior family roles (ahmad et al, 2004; dossa, 2002; suarez-orozco, c. & suarez-orozco, m. 2001; suarez-orozco, todorova, & louie, 2002). the acculturation process that attends immigration is often stressful, “which manifests itself in health problems” (kirkcaldy et al, 2005, pp., 296; simich, hamilton, & baya, 2006). due to the overall poorer health experienced post-migration (simich et al, 2006), there is an even greater need to increase immigrants’ access to healthcare. health care, both access and utilization, is a major issue with immigrant, especially recent immigrant, populations both in canada and in every major 480 building participative, empowering & diverse communities immigration destination (e.g, groleau & kirmayer, 2004). a significant body of research indicates that immigrants and members of non-majority populations encounter significant barriers to health care, even when there is universal health care (e.g., ismail et al, 2005). recent immigrants are often at a serious disadvantage in their encounters with health-care providers, as providers often fail to understand the cultural context, including health beliefs and practices, of recent immigrants (e.g., chan et al, 2006; yeo et al, 2005). this frequently leads to underutilization of health care resources and the under representation of immigrants in health care research (chun & chesla, 2004; groleau & kirmayer, 2004). the latter may be particularly problematic in the development of appropriate diagnoses and delivery of culturally appropriate services (sue, 1998). evidence also indicates that immigration may be particularly problematic for women’s health (dossa, 2002; george & rail, 2005). many immigrants continue to use health care approaches rooted in their home culture, even after several years in the new host country (ahmad et al, 2004; chappell & lai, 1998; chan et al, 2005; yeo et al, 2005). yet, they also use care grounded in biomedicine (groleau & kirmayer, 2004). in some cases, this may represent a threat to their health status due to interaction effects. in other cases, the reliance on more traditional approaches may be adaptive and helpful (chun et al, 2004; goodman, 2004). however, many health care providers trained in the biomedical approach remain dismissive of such traditional health beliefs and practices. as a result, unnecessary barriers to health care may be erected for immigrants who are rightfully discouraged from revealing their practices or even using the available health care services (yeo et al, 2005). one intention of our research program is to help reduce the misunderstanding and barriers to health care for both providers and immigrant recipients. cultural strengths as serious and important as the problems related to health are for immigrants, little attention has been paid to the resources or cultural strengths that immigrants bring with them. human beings are resilient, even in the face of traumatic experiences (masten, obradovic, & burt, 2006). without minimizing the negative impact of such experiences, it is possible to go beyond them and to seek to understand the core strengths of immigrants. it is our contention that these strengths lie in the cultural foundations of people’s lives. strengths-based approaches have been developed in social work (e.g. saleebey, 1996) and in some areas of american psychology (e.g., seligman, rashid, & parks, 2006). tyler’s work on prosocial communities has been an important positive development within psychology for many years (tyler, 2007). the need to focus on strengths has been particularly stressed in mental health work with racial and ethnic minorities in the united states, an emphasis that began with the black nationalist movement in psychology in the late 1960s (carlton-laney, 2003; stevenson & renard, 1993; white, 1972). the longstanding work of the late psychologist, emory cowen, and his students at the university of rochester on prevention and wellness has had an enduring impact on community psychology (cowen, 2000). psychological research on resilience has also been oriented toward human strengths in dealing with adversity (grotberg, h. e., 2003) or trauma (saul, 2003). yet, little has been written about cultural strengths as resources for immigrants. narratives anthropologists and, increasingly, psychologists argue that storytelling may be universal among humans and may form the foundation of how human beings understand themselves and http://0-search3.scholarsportal.info.innopac.lib.ryerson.ca/ids70/p_search_form.php?field=au&query=obradovic+jelena&log=literal&sid=b759e39207e5d59b2a31e67ce4049c37 http://0-search3.scholarsportal.info.innopac.lib.ryerson.ca/ids70/p_search_form.php?field=au&query=burt+keith+b&log=literal&sid=b759e39207e5d59b2a31e67ce4049c37 481 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the world (bruner, 1990; mcadams, 1993). evidence is emerging that indicates that narrative may be the most useful approach to discover cultural strengths and the human resilience that flows from those strengths (dossa, 2002; mcadams, 1993; skultans, 2000). within the large and growing body of qualitative research with immigrant populations, the use of narratives has emerged as a successful approach. the narrative format allows individuals to tell their stories in ways that are close to their lived experiences (chan et al, 2006; dossa, 2002; groleau & kirmayer, 2004; ismail et al, 2005). narrative is a particularly effective methodology for interpreting the experiences and health beliefs of marginalized peoples, including immigrants, specifically because it does not disengage the speaker from important contextual and linguistic factors (skultans, 2000; tashiro, 2006 ). we sought in our study to give voice to the immigrant narrative, which is not well-represented in the western meta-narrative seen in western cultural media, such as television or film. explanations of health and illness are grounded in a dynamic cultural matrix, as, one could argue, all such health beliefs must be (dorazio-migliore, migliore, & anderson, 2005; greenhalgh, collard, & begum, 2005). when told in their own language, especially, immigrants’ stories provide a rich resource for understanding the role of cultural beliefs and cultural strengths in health and illness. these stories help depathologize the immigrant experience, while helping immigrant communities make sense of their experiences (mcadams, 1993). the potential, then, of using narratives is that not only will such stories reveal problematic aspects of the immigrant experience, but they will also reveal the strengths that immigrants bring, which can then facilitate positive health outcomes (greenhalgh, helman, & chowdhury, 1998). participants and methods the research team is comprised of one university professor and 8 students. a variety of languages and immigrant statuses are represented in the research group, giving us a unique perspective on the immigrant experiences that are the object of our research. the narratives collected in this study were created in an open oral history interview format. oral histories are a window into lives and the cultures where those lives are lived. as one author phrased it, “it is very often when narratives are most personal that they draw upon the deep structures of the cultures to which they belong …” (skultans, 2000, p. 11). participants. we recruited 20 participants for the first phase of our study. [there are actually 12 other participants—all iranian—that we did not include in this report due to the slow pace of translating and transcribing from farsi.] these 20 participants were drawn from two different settings. first, we recruited 10 participants from a well-known immigrant community resource center in downtown toronto. the length of time in canada ranged from 3 months to 12 years. the age range of this group was 24-46, half of them were married. countries of origin included countries of east asia, south asia, south america, and sub-saharan africa. where appropriate, interviews were conducted in the language of the participant, with a translator present. because we considered that age differences may prove important, for example, younger people may be more inclined to use western medicine, we also recruited 10 students from a local university. the age range was 18-28 and one of the students was married. a variety of countries were represented; in addition to the regions noted above, there were also students from the middle east. the duration of each interview was from 40 minutes to an hour and fifteen minutes. surveys were utilized in order to acquire demographic data such as age, country of origin and other to supplement the findings and background information. 482 building participative, empowering & diverse communities analyses. we anticipated that the oral histories will be rich in thematic material, as themes seem to occur “naturally” in stories (e.g. tashiro, 2006). we also anticipated that many of these naturally occurring themes will be core to the person’s identity, that is, they will be epitomizing narratives (dossa, 2002). we coded and analyzed the transcripts manually in order to identify common themes. we used manual coding, rather than using a software designed for this, in order to avoid omissions, restrictive categorizations, or other errors. we established a 70 per cent interrater reliability as an acceptable level. results access & utilization: our results were in agreement with other findings that health care, both access and utilization, is a major issue with recent immigrant populations in canada. we found that recent immigrants were likely to underutilize health care. our results indicated that many immigrants continue to use health care approaches rooted in their home culture, even after several years in canada. yet, they also use biomedical care. one common theme was the immigrants’ experience that many health care providers trained in the biomedical approach were dismissive of traditional health beliefs and practices. our participants, too, reported that the attitudes of health care providers often discouraged them from using their services except in emergencies. several participants indicated that they would only use the canadian health care system as a provider of last resort, as they were so disheartened. a common complaint was the wait time for medical care. most of our participants have not been able to find a primary care physician. as a result, hospital emergency rooms and walkin clinics are the options used when seeking health care. our participants reported wait times ranging from one hour to 18 hours. these wait times were often compounded by impersonal care when the patient was seen. as a result, many of our participants reported very low satisfaction with the health care system. cultural strengths. but, what about our participants cultural strengths, those resources located in their culture of origin that potentially could help them as immigrants in their new country? the results were mixed on this. first, all but one of our participants reported that in their country of origin they learned health practices grounded in the local culture. themes that have emerged so far include reliance on special foods, herbs, or drinks (e.g., teas) as important for restoring and maintaining health. while the particular food or drink varied from culture to culture, it is clear that conceptions of health in many cultures center on eating and drinking the right things. (there were many complaints as well that western food, mcdonald’s was mentioned most frequently, was ruining the health of the home population.) most, but not all, our participants especially relied on traditional home remedies for minor complaints. there was a great deal of variability here, as one of our participants reported strong belief in the power of the evil eye and the power of an enemy to inflict illness through manipulation of the spirit world. for such illness, special teas and foods were important to the remedy, but the key action was to seek the help of a local healer to reverse the spiritual manipulation. experiencing nature through an activity was also a common theme of what it means to be healthy for many of our participants. this could mean rising early to breathe fresh air or hiking through a park or just being outdoors. cross-generational knowledge transmission of health maintenance was also important. 483 building participative, empowering & diverse communities many of our participants reported a family member: mother, grandmother, occasionally a grandfather, who told them how to care for themselves. often, it was a particularly close relationship, e.g., a grandmother, that sensitized the participant to self-care. all of our participants also reported that they relied on allopathic health care, the biomedical model. all of them utilized visits to health care providers with some regularity, but especially for serious health concerns. most, but not all, reported that when they had a personal primary care physician in their home country, it was typically a close relationship. the physician could be counted on to listen to complaints patiently and to provide guidance for many of the affairs of life. finally, and this helps us return to the main topic of our symposium, prosocial communities, many of our participants reported that when they were in their culture of origin, they were embedded in a rich matrix of relationships that informally guided them toward healthy beliefs and actions. that is, they were living in prosocial communities. just so this does not seem pollyannish, a number of our participants had immigrated or become refugees because of strife in their home country. their sense of community back home had been destroyed. one way to interpret our tentative findings is within a prosocial framework. many of our participants left homes and communities where they felt they had belonged and where they were part of longstanding kinship and friendship networks. they left, many of them, because they wanted a better education and more opportunities for their children, or for economic reasons, and a few left because of political reasons. what they have found so far in toronto is a struggle to regain that sense of belonging and of being in a place where they are cared for and can adequately care for their loved ones. we believe from what our participants have told us that they brought with them resources that can help them do so. what we hope to do is elucidate their strengths in ways that will help the host culture be receptive to those strengths. references bruner, j. 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(2005). understanding community beliefs of chinese-australians about cancer: initial insights using an ethnographic approach. psycho-oncology, 14, 174-186. 486 building participative, empowering & diverse communities disclosure of sexual abuse in school environment: intervention with teachers angela torma pietro & maria angela mattar yunes instituto de ciências humanas e da informação, universidade federal do rio grande/furg, rio grande, rs, brasil. e-mails: angela.torma@gmail.com; mamyunes@yahoo.com.br abstract teachers and professionals of education should be prepared to identify and evaluate the signs of intra or extra familial violence. the school environment might be a context where abused children and adolescents feel free to “break” the silence and ask for help. this work aimed to investigate the effects of these situations in a public school located in rio grande/rs, brazil. seven first school years teachers participated in this research and intervention project. the proposal was elaborated under the theoretical basis of the bioecology of human development. the methodology followed two steps: the first consisted of the diagnostic of the school dynamics. the second moment consisted in the application of the intervention program which was organized by the presentations of themes based on the analyses of the diagnostic phase. the program focused on orientating the educators to build strategies to have an attitude of denouncing sexual abuse legitimating the protective role of the teachers and of the school. the program was presented in seven meetings containing different subjects, theories and concepts followed by the discussion on practical cases. the results showed that families stay usually far over the gates of school. most teachers showed a discourse marked by negative characteristics of the families and have little knowledge of the children’s everyday life. concerning the situation of sexual abuse, the educators recognized their difficulties and limited knowledge on the issue. they emphasized the need of having more community network support and reported actions that put the abused children and their families in risk or away from school. the intervention program aimed to fill in the special needs of these populations through offering strategies to deal with sexual abuse in the context of schools. the teachers showed high satisfaction with their participation and suggested the repetition of the program in other schools. key words: sexual abuse, child/ adolescent, denunciation, teachers o abuso sexual contra crianças e adolescentes é uma modalidade de violência que pode deixar marcas profundas no desenvolvimento da criança e do(a) adolescente vitimizado (a), no brasil (e em outros lugares do mundo), não é um fenômeno restrito às camadas populares, mas envolve pessoas de todas as classes sociais, de diversos credos e áreas profissionais (martins, 1998). há quem diga que é um dos “fenômenos humanos mais democráticos” (depoimento no filme canto de cicatriz chaffe, 2005), pois atravessa todas as camadas sociais, etnias, crenças e culturas. pode ser classificado em duas categorias: intrafamiliar e extrafamiliar. o abuso sexual intrafamiliar define-se por ocorrer no ambiente de convívio familiar e é praticado por um membro mailto:angela.torma@gmail.com 487 building participative, empowering & diverse communities da família: pai, mãe, irmão, avô, avó, tio, tia, padrasto e madrasta. santos (1998) afirma que o abuso sexual intrafamiliar, na maioria das vezes, não é um fato isolado que envolve somente o abusador e a criança ou adolescente violado. de forma direta ou indireta inclui todos os outros membros da família, seja pelo ‘silêncio’ compactuado, seja pela participação ativa no abuso ou na organização dos papéis sexuais no contexto familiar. o abuso sexual extrafamiliar ocorre fora do âmbito familiar e é geralmente praticado por pessoas que possuem algum vinculo com a criança: vizinho, amigo mais velho, professor, médico, babá, entre outros. a abrapia associação brasileira multiprofissional de proteção à infância e adolescência, é referência, fundada em 1988 coordenou até 2003 o sistema nacional de combate ao abuso e a exploração sexual infantojuvenil. a associação monitorava e tratava estatisticamente denúncias de abuso e exploração sexual contra crianças e adolescentes em 27 unidades federativas do brasil. o último relatório, disponível via internet, apresenta dados no que diz respeito ao vínculo do agressor com a vítima de abuso sexual: nos casos de violência intrafamiliar, o pai e o padrasto aparecem em primeiro lugar seguidos por namorado(a) da vítima 3,25%, namorado da mãe 2,56%, namorada do pai 0,10%, irmão 4,64%, irmã 0,10%, avó 0,59%, avô 3,16%, mãe 6,60%, padrasto 23,37%, madrasta 0,49%, pai 36,39%, primo 2,76%, prima 0,10%, companheiro(a) 1,08%, tio 9,07%, tia 0,59% , tioavô 0,49%, outros 4,24% e não informado 0,10%. sabemos que o microssistema famíliar é o primeiro contexto experimentado pela criança, no qual ela vai estabelecer seus primeiros vínculos de confiança (de antoni & koller, 2004) e processar os primeiros passos para o seu desenvolvimento. tem como principal função proteger e gerar o bem estar da criança. uma família que expõe a criança à violência pode deixar uma profunda marca na sua trajetória de vida. situações de violência levam a criança a sofrer ainda mais os impactos de novos ambientes, o que fica explícito durante as transições ecológicas (movimentos que caracterizam saídas e entradas em novos ambientes microssistêmicos), sejam elas: a ida para a escola, a retirada da criança da família quando necessário, a ida à delegacia de polícia ou a sede do conselho tutelar, depor na frente do juiz e por fim a institucionalização (yunes, vasconcelos & garcia, no prelo). além das funções de proteger a infância e a juventude e dar iniciação aos valores e preceitos sociais básicos, a família deve preparar a criança e o adolescente para futuras interações com outros microssistemas da sua rede social. colaborar para formar mesossistemas de proteção no mapa social destes seres em desenvolvimento, ou seja, incluir e conhecer as relações com as pessoas da escola, com os vizinhos, com os amigos em geral, com os profissionais do posto de saúde e da igreja (de antoni & koller, 2004) devem ser prioridades para os adultos do grupo familiar. assim, além do provimento dos bens, sustento dos filhos, educação formal e informal é tarefa da família atentar para a transmissão de valores culturais, que serão assimilados pelos filhos, no decorrer da sua trajetória e ciclo de vida. quando os agressores estão na família, fica complicado garantir proteção e segurança, pois os papéis e as funções se confundem, principalmente nos casos de violência sexual, onde o ato é mascarado por cenas de carinho e sedução. os adultos se aproveitam da vulnerabilidade e da imaturidade de uma criança que se sente confusa e passa a viver uma situação conflituosa e traumática, permeada por diferentes sentimentos que se misturam, sejam eles: o medo, a raiva, o prazer, a culpa e o desamparo. neste cenário, o microssistema escolar se apresenta como ambiente ideal para detectar e intervir nas situações de abuso sexual contra a criança. depois da família é o ambiente mais 488 building participative, empowering & diverse communities próximo da criança. as transições ecológicas da família para a escola se fazem em diferentes etapas de acordo com as singularidades das experiências de cada criança e de cada família (bronfenbrenner, 1979/1996). quando a criança procura ajuda por estar sendo abusada, ou quando há desconfiança do professor, este profissional deve estar preparado para identificar e efetuar a denúncia. por isso, é importante conhecer e compreender o tema abuso sexual, seus sinais e principalmente definir caminhos para uma denúncia protetiva e consciente. o contexto escolar como espaço de proteção de crianças e adolescentes vítimas de abuso sexual a escola é um dos principais ambientes responsáveis pela transmissão da cultura e transformação das estruturas sociais. portanto, as propostas pedagógicas devem estar ajustadas às necessidades das crianças, famílias e comunidades. muitos governantes preocupam-se com a apresentação física, com os recursos materiais, com a quantidade de equipamentos e atualização da tecnologia educacional das escolas. fica em segundo plano, a qualidade das relações entre o próprio corpo docente e dos docentes com seus alunos. renomados pesquisadores britânicos publicaram em 1979 os resultados de um criterioso estudo longitudinal que pesquisava os efeitos das experiências escolares, das características das escolas e dos professores no desenvolvimento das crianças e adolescentes (rutter, maughan, mortimore & ouston, 1979). os autores perguntavamse quais fatores de organização e funcionamento dos ambientes escolares seriam relevantes na formação dos alunos. a partir deste estudo ficou demonstrado que não importam as condições físicas ou as modernidades dos prédios escolares, nem a baixa relação entre o número de alunos e professores. o que realmente ficou evidente foi a importância da escola como organização, suas normas e valores sociais. ao mesmo tempo, no brasil, na voz de paulo freire (1987) e seus seguidores se pregava um educador humano, libertário, dialógico, revolucionário que seria o motor de um sistema educacional justo e solidário. diante disso, cabe a nós refletirmos se nos dias de hoje, enquanto organização social, as escolas estão instrumentalizadas para enfrentar as disfunções nas relações de poder e de confiança que se expressam nos casos de abuso sexual contra crianças e adolescentes. embora nas famílias abusivas, o pacto de silêncio consista em “um acordo” entre abusador e a vítima (furniss, 1993), isso pode ser “quebrado” ou rompido na escola, seja através de sinais típicos, ou pela confiança do aluno no professor. tais situações ensejam uma atitude profissional do educador ou dos educadores. assim, “a escola mostra-se como um lugar ideal para a detecção e intervenção em casos de abuso sexual infantil, uma vez que o principal agressor geralmente encontra-se na família” (brino & willians, 2003, p. 1). as pesquisadoras brino e willians (2003) investigaram o universo dos professores de escolas municipais e de educação infantil – emeis – de uma cidade de porte médio do estado de são paulo, abordando: informações sobre o eca, focando a violência doméstica contra crianças; os sintomas apresentados pelas vítimas e os procedimentos e ações adotados perante casos de violência sexual. segundo a pesquisa, apenas 15% dos profissionais participantes têm informações sobre abuso sexual contidas no estatuto, o que evidencia um importante desconhecimento dos aspectos legais. um número significativo de professoras, cerca de 65%, já havia se defrontado com vítimas de violência sexual em suas classes o que reforça a necessidade de atenção para incidência destes casos no ambiente escolar. quando questionadas sobre o dever do professor 489 building participative, empowering & diverse communities ao se deparar com um caso de abuso sexual em sua classe, 60% informaram que seu dever era denunciar, no entanto somente 21% afirmaram que denunciariam o que demonstra um verdadeiro descompasso entre teoria e prática. segundo as autoras, existe uma grande distância entre o “falar” e o “fazer”. constata-se, assim, a importância de estudos que busquem alternativas eficazes para que a denúncia seja devidamente realizada e encaminhada. impasses, dificuldades e possibilidades dos profissionais para identificação e denúncia de abuso sexual quando a criança procura ajuda por estar sendo abusada, ou quando há desconfiança do professor, médico, enfermeiro, etc., este profissional deve estar preparado para identificar os indicadores e efetuar a denúncia. por isso é importante conhecer e compreender o tema, seus sinais e principalmente definir caminhos para uma denúncia protetiva e consciente. porém, não basta denunciar, é preciso denunciar para o órgão e para as pessoas certas. as dificuldades que complicam a análise das causas e conseqüências do abuso sexual contra crianças e adolescentes vão desde questões teóricas e metodológicas, como a escassez de estudos longitudinais, até as impossibilidades de se estabelecer relações entre as variáveis envolvidas em situações plurais de violência. características das vítimas, tais como, sexo, idade, história prévia e recursos de apoio (palácios, jiménez, oliva & saldaña, 1998) devem ser consideradas, pois podem interferir no diagnóstico situacional. os sinais que revelam que crianças ou adolescentes estão sendo vítimas de abuso sexual são inúmeros e inegáveis. podem ocorrer sintomas físicos como: as infecções urinárias (mais freqüentes, no caso das meninas em que aparecem os corrimentos vaginais ou retais), as queixas de dores ao urinar ou cólicas intestinais, a enurese/encoprese (falta de controle para urina ou fezes), o diagnóstico de doenças sexualmente transmissíveis, entre outros sintomas que podem ser encontrados em literatura competente (azevedo & guerra, 1989; santos, 1998; braun, 2002; koller & de antoni, 2005). além disso, indícios psicológicos evidenciam que a criança ou adolescente está sendo vitimizada, como: mudanças súbitas de comportamento, por exemplo, no apetite, chegando a formas de anorexias ou bulimias, conduta agressiva ou rebelde, dificuldades no desempenho escolar, reações defensivas, de alerta, comportamento sexualizado e incompatível com a idade, sinais de promiscuidade sexual e prostituição, fuga do contato físico, sintomas de depressão, entre outros (braun, 2002; koller & de antoni, 2005). a família da criança que sofre abuso sexual também apresenta algumas características que devem ser observadas e investigadas. santos (1998) aponta algumas destas características: cuidado exagerado dos pais, controle nas relações sociais da criança, desconfiança permanente, proibição de namoro em casos de adolescentes, o uso de drogas e bebidas alcoólicas na família, uma sensação de segredo que envolve todos os membros do grupo familiar, mães com atitudes excessivamente submissas ao companheiro, acusações de promiscuidade atribuída às crianças e indícios de que os pais tenham sofrido abuso sexual quando crianças. deve-se ressaltar que este último item citado é tema controverso. não se pode afirmar que toda vítima de violência sexual na infância ou adolescência, invariavelmente será um abusador, pois os dados empíricos não apóiam totalmente esta hipótese. (palácios & cols, 1998). alguns autores encontram taxas de reprodução transgeracional que chegam a 100% (steele & pollock, 1968) enquanto outros situam-se no extremo oposto, como demonstra a taxa de 1% divulgada por widom (1989). no brasil, as mesmas contradições se expressam. autores como 490 building participative, empowering & diverse communities amazarray e koller (1998) destacam a necessidade dos profissionais estarem atentos às causas do ato abusivo e levarem em consideração as “histórias de negligência, abuso físico e sexual na infância de ambos os pais” (amazarray & koller, 1998, p. 13) e concluem que “pais abusadores freqüentemente apresentam histórias de maus-tratos em sua infância e ignorância em relação ao cuidado dos filhos” (p.13). porém, azambuja (2004) argumenta que: “não existem estudos que apresentem evidências sólidas que confirmem esta hipótese de modo definitivo, muito pelo contrário, (...) apenas em 20% e 30% das pessoas que foram maltratadas na infância praticam agressões com seus filhos”. (azambuja, 2004, p. 267) segundo palácios e cols. (1998) a maioria dos investigadores está de acordo que a porcentagem de transmissão de práticas abusivas nas famílias estaria entre 30% e 40%. com estes dados, conclui-se que é importante considerar que a transmissão geracional não é determinante ou inevitável, pois uma boa parcela de pais parece conseguir romper este ciclo. as controvérsias que atravessam as práticas dos profissionais confrontados com sinais de violência sexual em crianças e adolescentes geram outros impasses além da geracionalidade e se apresentam em dimensões mais pessoais. do ponto de vista individual, atender vítimas, abusadores e suas famílias, pode trazer sentimentos de ansiedade e angústia vinculadas à escuta e compreensão profissional da revelação de uma situação abusiva relatada por uma criança. a narrativa e as descrições com detalhes de conotação sexual na voz de crianças ou adolescentes, incapazes de agir em defesa própria, geralmente provocam diversas emoções. além disso, a multiplicidade de inquietudes dos profissionais se remetem às dúvidas sobre as consequências da experiência relatada na vida das crianças/adolescentes e das famílias. vários autores apontam que em casos de violência sexual, a criança é sempre a vítima e jamais deve ser considerada ou apontada como culpada (furniss, 1993; braun, 2002; azevedo & guerra, 1989). sua vulnerabilidade à situação abusiva decorre das próprias características da infância ou adolescência. os sentimentos de confiança e dependência dos adultos, o porte físico que facilita o uso da força ou coação e as impossibilidades cognitivas e emocionais de resistir ou consentir atestam a submissão da criança ou adolescente ao abuso sem que haja o exercício de qualquer forma de liberdade (azevedo & guerra, 1989; braun, 2002). a situação assume proporções ainda mais preocupantes quando se aborda as conseqüências sociais que levam à estigmatização dos envolvidos, os traumas familiares e individuais, a freqüente descrença dos adultos nos relatos da criança em contraposição à negação do abusador e a culpa atribuída à criança pelos inevitáveis danos na estrutura e dinâmica familiar, embora do ponto de vista legal, o culpado seja sempre o abusador. como primeira medida recomendada pelos especialistas em casos de violência sexual doméstica, está “a proteção imediata à vítima quando a estrutura e o funcionamento da família incestogênica indicarem a inexistência de condições capazes de barrar a reiteração do abuso com a mesma vítima ou sua extensão a outras no mesmo lar” (azevedo & guerra,1994, p. 104). priorizar o bem estar da criança, considerando que ela pode estar sob o mesmo teto que o seu agressor, não pressupõe intervenções imediatistas ou individuais, mas sugere a necessidade de uma equipe técnica institucional e de uma rede de apoio preparada para lidar com estes casos. o papel do professor diante de suspeitas de abuso sexual no contexto escolar falar sobre o papel do educador no cotidiano escolar não é tarefa fácil. além de estar voltado para os aspectos relativos à aprendizagem dos conteúdos formais, cabe ao professor 491 building participative, empowering & diverse communities observar e procurar conhecer seus alunos, identificar seus problemas e queixas, e compreender a freqüência e a continuidade das manifestações comportamentais e emocionais (craidy & kaercher, 2001). é muito importante também que o professor esteja atento às condições familiares dos seus alunos de acordo com o eca (brasil, 2003) o professor deve propiciar o desenvolvimento de atitudes, hábitos e habilidades favoráveis à saúde física e mental dos seus alunos e encaminhar para o conselho tutelar as suspeitas de vítimas de violência. portanto, é responsabilidade do professor, investigar situações de maus tratos que possam encobrir outros tipos de violência. identificar os casos de violência contra a criança e o adolescente “são obrigações dos profissionais que trabalham com crianças e adolescentes e, em especial, do professor” (abrapia, 1997, p. 6, citado em camargo & libório, 2005) entretanto, poucas pesquisas reforçam a figura do professor como aquele que interfere nos casos de violência contra a criança. um dos poucos trabalhos no brasil sobre esta temática e já referido neste texto, foi realizado pelas professoras brino e willians (2003). segundo as autoras, em 44 % dos casos de abuso sexual o professor era a primeira pessoa a tomar ciência das condições de abuso sexual. em 52% dos casos, era o professor, o primeiro adulto em quem a criança confiava. isso demonstra a premência de estudos que demonstrem que o papel do professor é fundamental no processo de denúncia de ocorrências de abuso sexual. é ele (a) que pode romper com o círculo de silêncio familiar. camargo e libório (2005) sugerem alguns passos que o professor deveria seguir: “comunicar o fato à direção, que encaminhará um ofício ao conselho tutelar da região ou, na falta deste, ao conselho tutelar que abranja a área domiciliar da criança ou adolescente. em situações mais graves, a escola encaminhará a criança ao hospital ou posto de saúde, e poderá solicitar orientação aos centros de defesa ou programas sos-criança” (camargo e libório, 2005, p.21). porém, o mais importante é que o professor não se sinta só, que ele tenha o apoio da escola e que a denúncia seja institucional e não pessoal, para evitar os riscos de retaliação por parte dos agressores. as escolas necessitam construir uma política institucional para lidar com situações caracterizadas como abuso sexual. mais do que isso, as escolas são importantes nichos ecológicos de prevenção contra esta forma de violência. para tanto, os educadores, isso inclui todos os trabalhadores da escola, devem compreender as leis, os recursos da rede de apoio, os sinais emitidos pelas crianças, as peculiaridades das famílias e as principais questões do desenvolvimento humano. desta forma, pode-se chegar a uma cultura escolar preparada não apenas para “transmitir conteúdos”, mas para proteger ativamente seus estudantes e familiares. é preciso buscar metodologias que sensibilizem os professores e os habilitem para intervir em casos de suspeita ou constatação de abuso sexual. assim, este trabalho buscou desenvolver a idéia de um programa de atendimento aos professores dos primeiros e segundos anos do ensino fundamental, com foco na sua obrigação ético-moral de proteção à criança e ao adolescente. a escola na qual se conduziu o trabalho exploratório e experimental é pública e localiza-se em um bairro da periferia da cidade do rio grande/rs. a proposta foi desenvolvida a partir de contatos com um grupo de docentes e tem por objetivos: suscitar reflexões, analisar e intervir nas práticas educativas escolares que ocorrem diante de situações de abuso sexual contra os alunos. é um projeto que almeja delimitar as funções do professor diante destas condições e promover o diálogo interinstitucional em rede. 492 building participative, empowering & diverse communities programa de intervenção psicoeducacional para professores a presente proposta foi delineada tendo como primeira etapa de elaboração, a inserção ecológica dos pesquisadores (cecconello & koller, 2004) no ambiente escolar que foi previamente escolhido como cenário deste trabalho. a inserção ecológica (cecconello & koller, 2004) prioriza que os investigadores se aproximem do objeto de estudo para familiarizarem-se com as pessoas e suas ações cotidianas. neste caso, o ambiente escolar eleito foi visitado e observado com uma freqüência semanal sistemática (duas vezes por semana em turnos alternados) durante dois meses. pretendeu-se com isso, observar a organização escolar e verificar o que se faz, como se faz, a quem se recorre em casos de abuso. a inserção ecológica buscou ainda analisar os quatro aspectos chave da teoria bioecológica: o processo, a pessoa, o contexto e o tempo (bronfenbrenner, 1979/1996) conforme já referido em seção anterior. este método é utilizado também para dar base à proposta de intervenção e propõe como instrumento prioritário para a coleta de dados, o diário de campo. neste, foram registrados todos os acontecimentos e as percepções dos pesquisadores acerca do funcionamento escolar. a segunda etapa consistiu de um estudo exploratório com observações e entrevistas com alguns professores do ensino fundamental da escola. as falas durante as entrevistas e as observações denotaram a presença das famílias para além dos muros e grades da escola e foram detectados episódios que sugerem o distanciamento relacional entre professores/funcionários e familiares dos alunos. fica evidente que as famílias são tratadas com indiferença, “desde a secretária até a professora de classe”. como de praxe, os profissionais solicitam a presença das famílias na escola somente para a entrega dos boletins. quanto à situação de abuso sexual, os educadores reconheceram suas dificuldades e o desconhecimento do tema. enfatizaram a necessidade de ter apoio da rede de atendimento comunitário e relataram ações que afastam a criança e a família da escola. sabe-se que em famílias onde ocorre violência intrafamiliar existe o pacto de silêncio. quando inquiridas frontalmente, os membros negam o que está ocorrendo, portanto, nestas situações chamar a família pode contribuir para que a criança seja revitimizada. um caso relatado por uma das professoras demonstra que a família de um aluno retirou a criança da escola e mudou-se de bairro logo após ter sido chamada pela diretora para falar da suspeita de abuso sexual contra a criança. o passo seguinte para construção da estratégia de intervenção ou terceira etapa, foi o convite aos professores para um encontro grupal, no qual se usou a técnica do grupo focal (de antoni & cols, 2001) para debater 5 questões relacionadas ao tema da violência sexual contra crianças e adolescentes. este encontro foi realizado com 7 professoras, um mediador e um auxiliar de mediação na própria escola e teve duração de 1 hora e meia. já no primeiro questionamento: “como vocês definem as?” as participantes demonstraram receio e desconhecimento do tema através de respostas vagas como: “molestar, ter alguns tipos de intimidade com uma criança... isso já é considerado um abuso sexual por parte do maior...?” ao mesmo tempo que respondiam o faziam direcionando o olhar interrogativo para o mediador denotando insegurança. após este primeiro momento e a partir da intervenção do mediador, as docentes transpareceram mais convicção e confiança e relataram vários casos de abuso sexual que foram detectados na escola: “... aqui tem vários casos que surgiram...às vezes a família toda fazendo parte” diz uma delas. outra relatou “... surgiu o caso de uma aluna minha que andou faltando aí... “está doente”, “está doente”... aí quando ela veio a mãe veio com essa situação”. e ainda “... eu tenho uma aluna que é a vó que 493 building participative, empowering & diverse communities cria, que traz pra escola, o pai abusô da menina, ele tá preso...”. percebe-se que pela incidência de casos, o ambiente estudado necessita de trabalhos de prevenção e intervenção para cuidados e encaminhamentos aos casos de abuso sexual. quanto questionadas acerca dos indicadores de que uma criança está sendo abusada, as professoras relatam que a criança apresenta mudanças no seu comportamento, dificuldades de aprendizagem, agressividade, medo e dificuldades de relacionamento, o que condiz com dados da literatura. entretanto, a família é para as professoras um sistema distanciado da escola. são famílias adjetivadas genericamente como “desestruturadas”, “perdidas”. as professoras parecem desconhecer a realidade de cada um destes grupos e pouco fazem para aproximar-se deles. a terceira pergunta exploratória para as educadoras focou as leis que protegem crianças e adolescentes da violência. mais uma vez emergiu o sentido do desconhecimento, embora algumas citassem o eca (estatuto da criança e do adolescente). duas das educadoras confundiram legislação com órgãos de proteção e citaram o conselho tutelar. neste momento uma das professoras mostrou sua inquietude e questionou: “o que fazem com este abusador? vão presos, mas voltam para a casa”, demonstrando descontentamento e rigidez quanto à aplicação das leis no brasil. mas foi a quarta pergunta que mais preocupou e fez refletir acerca da prioridade de programas e alternativas de intervenção para estas situações de abuso no âmbito das escolas, sejam elas públicas ou privadas. as respostas desavisadas das professoras à seguinte questão proposta pela mediadora: “o que fazer diante de um caso de abuso sexual?” com respostas do tipo “... colocar para a família a situação...”; “... chamar a mãe de repente...”. estas soluções foram quase unânimes. apenas duas professoras narraram que colocariam o caso para a direção da escola. quando questionadas sobre o conhecimento de casos de violência sexual sofridos por alunos da escola ficou explícito que o ambiente estudado pode beneficiar-se de um trabalho interventivo e de proteção, pois cada professora teve pelo menos um caso de violência sexual sofrido entre seus alunos. como quarto momento deste processo, foi aplicado um jogo de sentenças incompletas (de antoni, yunes, habigzang, & koller, 2006) individualmente com cada professor. os resultados das análises reiteraram o conhecimento superficial das leis de proteção à infância e juventude enfatizando a questão da segurança como principal elemento das leis. quanto aos indicadores das situações de abuso sexual e suas expressões na escola, a maioria das professoras aponta somente indícios comportamentais, destacando agressividade e isolamento. as famílias dos estudantes são mais uma vez percebidas de forma preconceituosa e esteriotipada: “um problema”; “desfavoráveis”; “omissas”; “desinteressadas”. são estes os adjetivos que aparecem na fala da maioria das professoras e nenhuma delas possui algum projeto que aproxime a família da escola. quanto à atribuição de causas da violência sexual, as professoras alegam fatores diversos: drogas, desestrutura, (está palavra aparece como característica para as família); dependência financeira, “falta” de valores; busca do carinho, problemas psicológicos. ao se posicionarem acerca de atitudes em caso de uma suspeita de abuso sexual, somente duas professoras denunciariam e as outras responderam que investigariam, buscariam ajuda de órgãos competentes ou orientação na escola ou no conselho tutelar. quanto aos aspectos da responsabilidade e papel do educador, as professoras parecem estar cientes da importância de suas funções de “educar para a vida”, “fundamental” e que é “importante, pois depois da família, será o professor o seu exemplo, sua segurança”; “muito importante e indispensável”. para as vítimas de abuso ficam narrativas que demonstram pena, 494 building participative, empowering & diverse communities preconceito e estereótipos tais como: “diferentes”, “marginal”, “coitado”, “condenado” e “culpado”, o que em cada um dos possíveis sentidos pode resultar em práticas educativas ineficazes e indequadas para a delicadeza da condição em questão. os sentimentos evidenciados nestes casos são de indignação. durante todas as etapas relatadas acima e que precederam a elaboração da proposta de intervenção propriamente dita, as professoras mostravam muito entusiasmo e desejo em aprender mais profundamente o tema. saber como agir tanto com o aluno quanto com a família era ressaltado pelas educadoras. além dos aspectos apontados que revelaram o despreparo e a escassez de informações na formação de educadores, é preciso incentivar os professores a lidar de forma protetora nestas situações. decidir por fazer uma denúncia que não tenha o sentido popular de “caguetar” o abusador, mas optar por garantir os direitos da criança e do adolescente de viver e ser criado em um contexto de amor, saúde e paz é uma medida educativa que protege o desenvolvimento humano em diferentes situações. entretanto, o que se pode notar no ambiente escolar, é que prevalece o “jogo do empurraempurra” nestas ocasiões, ou seja, caso a criança revele o abuso para o professor, este conta para a orientadora, que conta para a diretora, que ao invés de acreditar na criança e pensar no que fazer para protegê-la, denunciando para o conselho tutelar ou para o serviço sentinela, pode tomar decisões inapropriadas tais como, chamar a família, chamar a polícia, etc. conforme já exemplificado, as famílias abusivas acabam por negar e podem agredir ainda mais a vítima do abuso e retirar a criança/adolescente da escola. a partir das considerações suscitadas pelos resultados destes quatro momentos investigativos no contexto escolar, foi elaborada uma proposta de programa psicoeducacional para ser desenvolvido em 5 reuniões na própria escola e com a participação dos professores do ensino fundamental. os achados descritos acima levaram a propor uma seqüência de temas em forma de módulos a serem trabalhados com grupos de professores na seguinte ordem: módulo 1 abuso sexual: definições, sinais e vitimização da criança/adolescente; módulo 2 família e violência: fatores determinantes; módulo 3 aspectos legais que envolvem o abuso sexual; módulo 4 denúncia e responsabilidade do educador; módulo 5 estudos de caso: neste módulo foram apresentados casos práticos aos professores visando observar quais os seus encaminhamentos. foi elaborada uma apostila que foi entregue para cada participante contendo textos sobre os assuntos abordados e discutidos em cada módulo com as devidas referências. após a aplicação do programa foi realizada uma nova reunião do grupo para feedback sobre a aplicação do programa. esta foi realizada pela equipe com os educadores e com os representantes dos conselhos tutelares, do serviço sentinela e com o promotor da infância e da juventude na intenção de uma denúncia protetiva para as crianças e educadores. a proposta apresentada está longe de ser a solução final para este problema social de tamanha abrangência e complexidade. entretanto, é uma alternativa para promover mudanças nas práticas educativas escolares através de uma intervenção em um contexto que além de ser a porta de entrada para a educação formal, deve preocupar-se com o desenvolvimento integral dos educandos. a escola não pode mais furtar-se às suas responsabilidades sociais de propiciar proteção não apenas às crianças e adolescentes, mas também às famílias de seus alunos. em muitos locais, a escola é o único ponto de apoio afetivo e social da rede e por isso deve estar preparada para interagir com seu público de maneira humana e respeitosa. 495 building participative, empowering & diverse communities almejamos que esta proposta de intervenção venha a fortalecer os vínculos do contexto escolar com os outros segmentos sociais para que o abuso sexual à criança e adolescente deixe de ser negado ou distanciado, mas seja enfrentado por vias que garantam a saúde física, mental e bem estar dos 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(1979). fifteen thousand hours elementary schools and their effects on children, cambridge: harvard university press. santos, b. c., silva, j. a. s., martins, m. r. s., zanchet, o. & pletschet, r. (1998). maus-tratos e abuso sexual contra crianças e adolescentes: uma abordagem multidisciplinar. são leopoldo: série cadernos bertholdo weber. steele, b. f. & pollock, c. b. (1968). a psychatric study of parents who abuse infants and small children. in r. e. helfer & c. h. kempe (eds.) the battered child. chicago: university of chicago press. yunes, m. a. m., vasconcelos, q. a & garcia, n. m. (no prelo). famílias e crianças institucionalizadas: resiliência e rede de apoio social. psicologia e sociedade. widom, c. s. (1989). the cycle of violence. science, 244, 160-166. 497 building participative, empowering & diverse communities competencias profesionales en estudiantes de psicología susana ruiz pimentel surupi04@yahoo.com.mx sara e. ruiz vallejo. saruca_06@yahoo.com.mx maría josé garcía oramas maria_josegarcia@hotmail.com facultad. psicología xalapa universidad veracruzana abstract the accelerated changing nature of our times has without doubt had a great impact on areas of knowledge. education in psychology at undergraduate level is growing rapidly in mexico, in terms of the emergence of numerous university faculties and graduates, who confront the evermore complex demands of a given context when they enter the workplace, and hence competencies such as team work, planning, organization, innovation, flexibility, decision making, among others require greater attention during their professional education. the improvement of such competencies posed a challenge for the authors of the present research document. we proposed that through the development of activities that imply carrying out a macro research project, we could, in a systematic and planned manner, develop professional competencies in a group of undergraduate psychology students who were writing theses or providing social service. for the purposes of our research, competencies are considered to be a set of knowledge, attitudes and skills deemed necessary for professional practice, flexible and autonomous professional problem solving, organizational work tasks, and the ability to collaborate in a professional work environment, i.e., the aptitudes required in order to carry out professional activity in an efficient manner. from a professional point of view, competency is closely linked to the ways in which a person acts, the professional duties a person must carry out, and their characteristics are determined by the way in which a person organizes and utilizes their acquired knowledge, how they integrate them into their practice and interrelate them within a given context, depending on the individual and social peculiarities. the methodology involved a descriptive study that aimed to expose a group of types of behaviour in students and with this make a diagnosis, through research, action and training throughout the process, where quantitative and qualitative procedures were implemented during the diagnosis phase of the research. the improvement of competencies, such as team work, planning and organizational skills, etc. was achieved in participating students. key words: competency, education, psychology students. mailto:surupi04@yahoo.com.mx mailto:saruca_06@yahoo.com.mx mailto:maria_josegarcia@hotmail.com 498 building participative, empowering & diverse communities resumen ante los cambios vertiginosos de nuestra era, sin duda las áreas de conocimiento han tenido un mayor impacto y la carrera de psicología en méxico, aparece con un acelerado crecimiento en cuanto a numero de facultades como de egresados, que se enfrentan a las demandas mas complejas del contexto al incorporase en el ámbito laboral, y es en donde competencias como el trabajo en equipo, la planeación, la organización, innovación, flexibilidad, toma de decisiones, entre otras requieren de mayor atención en su formación profesional. la mejora de tales competencias profesionales represento un desafió para las autoras de la presente investigación que se plantearon que a través del desarrollo de las actividades que implican llevar a cabo un proyecto macro de investigación se podrían de manera sistematizada y planeada formar en un grupo de alumnos prestadores de servicio social y tesistas de la carrera de psicología. para esta investigación se consideró a las competencias como un conjunto de conocimientos, actitudes y habilidades, necesarias para ejercer una profesión, resolver problemas profesionales de forma autónoma, flexible y ser capaz de colaborar en el entorno profesional y en la organización del trabajo, es decir, la capacidad de una persona para realizar una actividad con eficiencia en dependencia de las peculiaridades individuales y sociales. el método empleado fue un estudio descriptivo que intenta dar cuenta de un grupo de comportamientos de los alumnos, para con ello llegar a un diagnostico, a través de la investigación acción y la capacitación sobre la marcha, donde utilizando procedimientos cuantitativos-cualitativos, se obtuvo la mejora de competencias en las siguientes categorías: psicológicas, participativas sociales y técnicas de los alumnos participantes. palabras clave: competencias, formación, estudiantes de psicología i.-introducción. las competencias, están vinculadas a la actividad laboral, en una triada importantísima: el saber, el saber hacer y el hacer. los programas educativos a nivel superior cada día responden mas a fortalecer la práctica y formación profesionales, así como mejorar el desempeño profesional, respondiendo a la premisa de que mientras mejor informado y preparado esté el alumno, más eficiente será su labor como psicólogo. en este contexto, la gestión de las competencias profesionales nos proporciona un marco de referencia para el diseño de acciones formativas. el desarrollo de competencias en este sentido es importante desde una dimensión contextual y especifica de la profesión del psicólogo ya que ello nos ha de permitir identificar, acciones formativas a través de experiencias concretas como lo es la investigación aplicada. ii.-competencias profesionales. la noción de competencias en el ambiente académico, surge precisamente de la necesidad de conjugar los conocimientos académicos, con el trabajo o ejercicio laboral (huerta, pérez y castellanos, 2000; roe, 2003). es decir, que los planes educativos miren hacia el futuro en el que el estudiante deba enfrentarse a condiciones de trabajo en las que deberán desarrollar 499 building participative, empowering & diverse communities competencias para el ejercicio del mismo, pero ¿cómo lograr este desarrollo de las competencias profesionales? las competencias vistas desde esta perspectiva pueden ser consideradas como la capacidad de actuar desde lo que la persona es, con sus valores y actitudes haciendo algo con lo que sabe. sin embargo, para que la formación sea considerada de calidad debe, además, satisfacer las demandas sociales en cuanto a formación profesional, la cual debe incorporar no sólo una mera acumulación de conocimientos, sino que debe ser un proceso de aprendizaje constante que expanda las potencialidades del individuo y que logren en él la flexibilidad cognoscitiva necesaria para su transferencia al complejo entorno cultural, productivo y social que caracteriza a la sociedad actual, checchia y fernández, 2005, en huerta, pérez y castellanos (2000). retomando a (roe, 2002 en roe, 2003), la competencia representa:”una capacidad aprendida para realizar adecuadamente una tarea, funciones o rol”. hay dos rasgos distintivos de la noción de competencia, es decir, que se relaciona con un tipo específico de trabajo para ser realizado en un contexto de trabajo particular y que integra diversos tipos de conocimientos, habilidades y actitudes. 1. los conocimientos pertenecen a las diversas teorías y datos empíricos producidos en los diferentes campos de la psicología. 2. las habilidades se aplican a la comunicación oral o escrita, observación y escucha, análisis de problemas, aplicación de métodos estadísticos, uso de programas de ordenador, etc. 3. las actitudes se relacionan con la precisión, integridad, autocrítica, obligaciones, responsabilidad, respeto y tolerancia con los demás, conciencia ética, orientación al servicio, etc. 4. las subcompetencias son más amplias, en el sentido de que contemplan e integran conocimientos, habilidades y actitudes, pero son también más específicas. se relacionan con el cumplimiento de tales funciones ocupacionales básicas tales como administrar tests, llevar a cabo entrevistas, aplicar técnicas de grupo y buscar documentación. para huerta, pérez y castellanos, (2000), el concepto de competencia otorga un significado de unidad e implica que los elementos del conocimiento tienen sentido sólo en función del conjunto. en efecto, aunque se pueden fragmentar sus componentes, éstos por separado no constituyen la competencia: ser competente implica el dominio de la totalidad de elementos y no sólo de alguna(s) de las partes. un rasgo esencial de las competencias es la relación entre teoría y práctica. en esta dependencia la práctica delimita la teoría necesaria. la relación entre las condiciones y demandas de las situaciones concretas en el trabajo (la práctica) con las necesidades de sistematización del conocimiento (la teoría), es más significativa para el individuo si la teoría cobra sentido a partir de la práctica; es decir, si los conocimientos teóricos se abordan en función de las condiciones concretas del trabajo y si se pueden identificar como situaciones originales, espinet, e. (2004). las competencias profesionales se construyen mediante un proceso formativo del alumno y del accionar diario del profesor de una situación de trabajo a otra. iii.-el desarrollo de las competencias. 3.1.-a través de un currículum que integre conocimientos teóricos con prácticos. 500 building participative, empowering & diverse communities de este modo, un currículum por competencias profesionales integradas que articula conocimientos globales, conocimientos profesionales y experiencias laborales, se propone reconocer las necesidades y problemas de la realidad. tales necesidades y problemas se definen mediante el diagnóstico de las experiencias de la realidad social, de la práctica de las profesiones, del desarrollo de la disciplina y del mercado laboral. esta combinación de elementos permiten identificar las necesidades hacia las cuales se orientará la formación profesional, de donde se desprenderá también la identificación de las competencias profesionales integrales o genéricas, indispensables para el establecimiento del perfil de egreso del futuro profesional, huerta, pérez y castellanos, (2000) el modelo propuesto por estos autores de competencias profesionales integrales establece tres niveles: las competencias básicas, son las capacidades intelectuales indispensables para el aprendizaje de una profesión; en ellas se encuentran las competencias cognitivas, técnicas y metodológicas, muchas de las cuales son adquiridas en los niveles educativos previos (por ejemplo el uso adecuado de los lenguajes oral, escrito y matemático). las genéricas, son la base común de la profesión o se refieren a las situaciones concretas de la práctica profesional que requieren de respuestas complejas. las específicas, son la base particular del ejercicio profesional y están vinculadas a condiciones específicas de ejecución. los planteamientos de formar por competencias se reflejan en la curricula del programa educativo de la licenciatura de psicología de la universidad veracruzana, donde a través de de la integración de los tres elementos mencionados se desarrollan en los estudiantes conocimientos, actitudes y habilidades. 3.2.-a través del diseño del curriculum académico. como parte del modelo arquitectónico de competencias planteado por roe (2003) este exige en su segundo punto: el currículo académico, diseñado de tal forma que sea cubierto adecuadamente el puente entre las demandas del comienzo y del final de los estudios. esto significa que deben tocarse todos los temas y que los métodos educativos empleados proporcionen las necesarias oportunidades de aprendizaje mediante el estudio (por ejemplo, lecturas, demostraciones, ejercicios, trabajos de estudio y elaboración escrita, exámenes), así como aprendiendo por la acción y trabajo colaborativo (por ejemplo, prácticas, trabajos de investigación, trabajo supervisado como estudiante), lópez, m. (2007.) el currículo académico en la educación superior según checchia y fernández, (2005), privilegiará el cumplimiento de la función social, misión, o razón de ser está delimitada legalmente, en la mayoría de los casos, y referida a las funciones de formación de profesionales, dotando a los estudiantes de los medios necesarios para desarrollar competencias profesionales y ofrecer a la sociedad personas capaces de trabajar con “éxito” en el campo de actividades que ellos escojan; teniendo entre otras la función de generar conocimientos a través de actividades de investigación básica, aplicada y de desarrollo, y la función de asesoramiento e interacción social. 501 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 3.3.-a través de la estrategia didáctica: aprendizaje colaborativo. el logro de desarrollo de competencias profesionales requerirá situarlo desde alternativas de enseñanza como el aprendizaje colaborativo que contempla el uso de estrategias para propiciar el desarrollo de habilidades mixtas (aprendizaje y desarrollo personal y social.). en el aprendizaje colaborativo cada miembro del grupo es responsable de su propio aprendizaje, así como el de los restantes miembros del grupo donde en cada sesión el docente-facilitador planta claramente los elementos para cada sesión de trabajo: la interdependencia positiva, “nosotros” en lugar de “yo” responsabilidad y compromiso individual: es la contribución personal para lograr las metas del grupo. la interacción promotora; interacción cara a cara entre con todo el grupo participante el uso de destrezas sociales es importante encauzar en los estudiantes el desarrollo de habilidades y actitudes como el reconocimiento al esfuerzo y logros de los compañeros, la solicitud e intercambio de información, la solicitud y ofrecimiento de apoyo. el procesamiento de grupo: la reflexión sobre el trabajo grupal para describir qué acciones de los participantes fueron positivas y cuales no, y tomar decisiones sobre que acciones continuar para unir esfuerzos y alcanzar metas. para delors (2007), las actividades formativas deben integrar el saber hacer reflexivo al saber hacer y al saber ser un profesional en la ocupación o área de trabajo. estos saberes se expresan o se infieren a partir de los descriptores de la norma de competencia y se vinculan fuertemente con las situaciones problemáticas de la práctica profesional. los procesos de enseñanza y de aprendizaje de competencias articulan práctica-teoría -práctica, partiendo de la reflexión en torno a las acciones de trabajo. las competencias desde esta perspectiva formativa integran: un saber hacer, es decir, como el conjunto de capacidades que permitan a las personas actuar con pertinencia y eficacia en los distintos ámbitos de su vida cotidiana resolviendo situaciones problemáticas reales. la educación basada en competencias tiene dos principios fundamentales: el primero, es que el clima y el medio ambiente del salón de clases deben ser democráticos, activos y participativos; el segundo, los estudiantes deben tener el derecho a recibir una enseñanza estimulante, innovadora, desafiante y de calidad. el desarrollo de las competencias por tanto integra: la práctica reflexiva y la implicación crítica. aprendizaje por modelaje. en la investigación realizada por moreno (2007) en la que compila las opiniones de varios estudiantes de doctorado en educación sobre las formas de actuación de sus profesores, obtiene las siguientes conclusiones, las cuales hacen énfasis en cómo los estudiantes valoran la forma en que se desenvuelven los profesores en diferentes actividades del doctorado, enfocándose ha las cualidades de los profesores como profesionales y personas: 502 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 1) las actuaciones de los formadores son cuidadosamente analizadas por los estudiantes, se refieren a ellas expresando acuerdo o desacuerdo, contrastándolas con los imaginarios que han construido sobre lo que habría de ser el desempeño del formador en este nivel, pero también visualizando a mediano o largo plazo su propia función como investigadores formadores. el aprendizaje vicario resulta ser entonces la principal mediación que apoya la formación de los futuros formadores de investigadores. 2) los estudiantes detectan que los formadores que participan en su programa tienen diversos tipos de motivación para estar allí: encuentran desde profesores y tutores ampliamente comprometidos con la función formadora, hasta casos de atención obligada y con prisa, de los que reciben el mensaje de que la formación puede no ser la función prioritaria de un investigador. 3) el hecho de que los alumnos expresen desaprobación o, en su caso, reconocimiento de las diversas formas de actuación de los formadores, no es suficiente para asumir que sólo aprenderán aquellas que consideraron positivas, pues también se dan cuenta de que el nivel de compromiso (expresado en actitudes, tiempo destinado a los estudiantes y sobren todo en espacio psicológico para atenderlos) tiene que ver no sólo con características personales del formador, sino con sus prioridades de logro, entre las cuales suele tener un peso importante su producción y reconocimiento como investigador, lo que puede traducirse en escaso compromiso con la función de formación. 4) las experiencias de formación vividas por los estudiantes se incorporan de diferente manera a sus esquemas individuales de actuación profesional. algunos ejercen su función tratando de que ésta tenga los rasgos que más valoraron en sus formadores, pero también ocurre que algunos (consciente o inconscientemente) transfieren a sus formas de actuación las experiencias negativas que vivieron como estudiantes. el aprendizaje por modelaje aplicado en el nivel de enseñanza superior se vuelve una un proceso colectivo de planteamiento de problemas, de reflexión sobre los mismos y de formulación de soluciones; donde alumnos, maestros y contexto social interactúan permanentemente. iv.-perspectiva teórica. la presente investigación se basó en el enfoque del socio-constructivismo el cual privilegia que el alumno construye su conocimiento no sólo a partir de las enseñanzas del maestro del curso sino también a partir de las experiencias pasadas y de la relación con su medio (compañeros, recursos bibliográficos, experiencias en trabajos, uso de recursos en internet, pacticas de campo, visitas a comunidades, organizaciones etc..), viau, m. (2007) el socio constructivismo considera que el aprendizaje es un proceso donde el estudiante es resultado de la experiencias individuales mas la del trabajo en grupo. las actividades en grupo son coordinadas por el maestro y dichas actividades son realizadas por los estudiantes que conforman el grupo de trabajo, sus elementos básicos son: las personas es decir el (los) maestros (es) y los estudiantes son los actores principales del proceso de formación y mejora de competencias. el producto implica el conjunto de evidencias que deben realizar los estudiantes. el proceso es el conjunto de actividades colaborativas a realizar por los estudiantes y organizadas por el maestro. 503 building participative, empowering & diverse communities la didáctica que especifica los fundamentos pedagógicos que permitan al estudiante aprender las competencias requeridas de manera colaborativa. los proyectos es la gestión de los recursos que debe de tomar en cuenta los estudiantes para alcanzar con éxito el desarrollo de las competencias. un ambiente de aprendizaje colaborativo es el soporte que permite acceder a los objetos de aprendizaje e interactuar de forma presencial y a distancia con el maestro y sus compañeros de equipo de trabajo. v.metodología investigaciónacción. la investigación acción es un método de investigación usado por docentes para resolver un problema práctico mediante el uso del método científico, combinando el conocimiento teórico y el conocimiento práctico que poseen maestros y alumno. permitiendo aproximarse al fenómeno por estudiar desde diferentes puntos de vista. v.1.-población objeto de estudio. esta investigación considero a un grupo de nueve alumnos prestadores de servicio social y tesistas de la facultad de psicología, con edades promedio entre los 22 y 24 años, con un nivel socioeconómico medio. estos alumnos estaban muy próximos por egresar de su formación como psicólogos en un plan de estudios basado en competencias. y de tres maestras a cargo de la investigación. numero participantes perfil institución 4 prestadores de servicio social educación superior universidad veracruzana 5 tesistas educación superior universidad veracruzana 3 maestras doctoras en psicología universidad veracruzana v.2.-instrumento: para evaluar las competencias profesionales se construyó una escala de likert, que midió principalmente 73 competencias en las siguientes categorías: competencias psicológicas competencias participativa-social competencias técnicas. cuadro 1.competencias profesionales 504 building participative, empowering & diverse communities competencia psicológica competencia participativasocial competencia técnica flexibilidad participación transferencia pensamiento: analítico, sintético, creativo, autónomo, adaptabilidad, negociación disposición a la cooperación, honradez, responsabilidad social, espíritu de grupo, emprendimiento relacionada con la profesión: metodología, estadística, teorías y modelos de evaluación e intervención, psicología de grupos y organizaciones, teorías psicológicas, capacidad para investigar, diagnosticar e intervenir en aspectos básicos del comportamiento humano dinamismo, responsabilidad personal, comunicación oral y escrita capacidad de coordinación, organización, relación, decisión, dirección, trabajo en equipo amplia la profesión: panorámica sobre disciplinas y profesiones afines, manejo de ordenadores, procesadores de textos ,idiomas herramientas de presentación, automóvil se aplico de manera individual y las opciones de respuesta incluían, autoevaluarse en la mejora de cada competencia a través de las actividades de investigación con los niveles de excelente, buena, no desarrollada. v.3..-procedimiento de trabajo: conformación del equipo de investigación por de tres catedráticas de la facultad de psicología con grado de doctoras, una amplia experiencia en investigación y reconocimiento de perfil deseable ante el programa de mejoramiento del profesorado. elaboración de proyecto de investigación: “programa de formación ciudadana con menores veracruzanos en edad reproductiva y en situación escolar para promover una vida familiar y comunitaria libre de violencia.” para presentarlo ante conacyt. acciones de vinculación con la secretaria de educación y cultura de veracruz y con el programa de telebachillerato. que implicaron reuniones repetidas con las autoridades correspondientes y la asignación de colaboradores claves para realizar en trabajo en las diferentes zonas del estado de veracruz. difusión del proyecto en la facultad de psicología –xalapa y poza rica, a fin de que se incorporarán tanto maestros como alumnos de servicio social y tesistas interesados en la temática de investigación. formalización de los equipos alumnos de servicio social y tesistas de la facultad xalapa y pozarica capacitación a estudiantes de servicio social y tesistas con la metodología de investigación acción en los siguientes aspectos metodología cuantitativa y cualitativa 505 building participative, empowering & diverse communities construcción de instrumentos inmersión en las diferentes comunidades de telebachilleratos. diseño y determinación de la muestra piloteo de instrumentos aplicación definitiva de instrumentos elaboración de bases de datos para el análisis con paquetería con el spss. análisis e interpretación de resultados de la fase de diagnostico. elaboración de informes diseño y elaboración de intervenciones pasos implementados de la investigación acción, para el trabajo de cada una de las fases con los estudiantes de servicio social y tesistas paso 1: elección conjunta del problema que se quiere cambiar o solucionar. paso 2: búsqueda y análisis y discusión de la bibliografía pertinente. paso 3: integración y consenso de la acción a realizar. paso 5: determinación de la metodología que se usará para cada acción paso 6: capacitación por parte de las maestras a los estudiantes sobre el como hacer la tarea implicada. paso 7: se organiza la acción con una maestra coordinando a sub grupos de estudiantes. paso 8.se presentan informes y bitácoras, se sacan conclusiones. paso 9: se comparten las conclusiones con los colegas y alumnos. quedando ejemplificado en el esquema de abajo el modelaje de formación de competencias de alumnos participantes en la investigación. esquema de modelaje de las competencias 506 building participative, empowering & diverse communities ix.resultados: se presentan los resultados generales que aporto la escala diseñada para medir como los estudiantes consideraban el desarrollo de las competencias después de un año de trabajo realizando las actividades planeadas de investigación. para lo cual se agrupan los mismo en los datos obtenidos en competencias: psicológicas, participativas sociales y técnicas. fuente base de datos de la investigación 2008 es este apartado el rubro con mayor puntuación es el de la responsabilidad personal, en el que el 89% de los alumnos encuestados respondieron poseer esta competencia desarrollada en grado excelente, mientras que el 11% restante contestó que el desarrollo de esta competencia es bueno. en segundo lugar encontramos la innovación y la creatividad en la cual el 78% de los alumnos consideran emplearla en grado excelente y el 22% calificó como buena. el cuanto a la negociación solo el 22% de los alumnos consideran poseer esa competencia en grado excelente mientras que el 78% cree que su desarrollo es bueno. fuente base de datos de la investigación 2008 507 building participative, empowering & diverse communities en este gráfico sobresalen el trabajo en equipo y la colaboración como las competencias optimizadas en mayor grado durante la investigación. el 89% de los alumnos calificó como excelente el desarrollo de estas dos competencias y el 11% restante como buena. en contraste, el apoyo a los compañeros es la competencia optimizada en menor medida durante el trabajo obteniendo los siguientes porcentajes: excelente 33%, buena 44%, poco desarrollada 22%. fuente base de datos de la investigación 2008 el rubro de panorámica sobre disciplinas y profesiones afines, fue calificado como excelente por el 44% de los alumnos, como bueno por el 44% y el 11% dijo no desarrollarlo. el 56% de los alumnos aseguran que el desarrollo del manejo de procesadores de texto fue excelente en 33%, bueno en un 56% y poco desarrollado en un 11%. la escritura en un idioma extranjero se optimizó en un 11% de forma excelente, 44% de forma buena, 11% se desarrolló poco y el 33% no la desarrollo. algo similar sucedió en la lectura en un idioma extranjero la cual se desarrollo en forma buena por el 56% de los alumnos, para el 22% fue poco desarrollada y para el 22% no se desarrolló dentro de la actividad. x.reflexiones podemos concluir que las competencias psicológicas, desarrolladas en mayor medida a través de la formación con actividades de investigación, son las que corresponden a la vida psicológica de cada uno de los estudiantes, ya que los porcentajes en general en esta categoría se encuentran entre excelente y buena la optimización de las competencias. los jóvenes se considerarían entonces como personas capaces de enfrentar, a través de sus propias capacidades personales, los retos que campo laboral les impongan. en el rubro de competencias participativas-sociales, a pesar de que el trabajo en equipo y la colaboración se encuentran entre las competencias mejor optimizadas, el apoyo a los compañeros 508 building participative, empowering & diverse communities se encuentra entre los rubros más bajos, entrando entonces en la paradoja de trabajar en equipo y colaborar pero en lo necesario, dejando de lado tomar o apoyar en las responsabilidades de otros, la problemática de no asumir la responsabilidad de alguien faltante o con alguna traba o problema, con el fin de apoyar al equipo o a los resultados u objetivos que buscan el mismo. en cuanto a las competencias técnicas los alumnos aseguran que su panorámica sobre disciplinas y profesiones afines, se optimizó a partir de su contacto con al investigación, pero las competencias de escritura y lectura en un idioma extranjero fueron poco optimizadas dentro de su experiencia en la investigación. finalmente podemos concluir que el modelo educativo por competencias profesionales integradas para la educación superior es una opción que busca generar procesos formativos de mayor calidad, pero sin perder de vista las necesidades de la sociedad, de la profesión, del desarrollo disciplinar y del trabajo académico. asumir esta responsabilidad implica que la institución educativa promueva de manera congruente acciones en los ámbitos pedagógico y didáctico que se traduzcan en reales modificaciones de las prácticas docentes; de ahí la importancia de que el maestro también participe de manera continua en las acciones de formación y capacitación que le permitan desarrollar competencias similares a aquellas que se busca formar en los alumnos. referencias checchia beatriz y fernández mariana (2005). análisis en la búsqueda de la calidad de la educación superior. revista circunstancia. año iii. número 8 septiembre 2005. recuperado el 10 de abril de 2008. disponible en: http://www.ortegaygasset.edu/circunstancia/numero8/art9.htm#2. delors, j. (s.f.). la educación encierra un tesoro. recuperado el 7 de junio de 2007, de unesco.org: http:// www.unesco.org/delors/delors_s.pdf. espinet, e. (2004, september). competencias profesionales y uso de la información en el lugar de trabajo. (spanish). el profesional de la información, 13(5), 338-345. retrieved april 10, 2008, from academic search premier database. huerta, j.; pérez, i.; castellanos, a. (2000). desarrollo curricular por competencias profesionales integrales. educar. revista de educación / nueva época. abril-junio. num. 13. recuperado el 7 de abril de 2008. disponible en: http://educar.jalisco.gob.mx/13/13huerta.html. lópez, m. (2007, april). formadores de formadores. (spanish). revista mexicana de investigacion educativa, 12(33), 473-486. retrieved april 10, 2008, from fuente académica database. moreno, m. (2007). experiencias de formación y formadores en programas de doctorado en educación. rmie. vol. 12, num. 33. abril-junio 2007. pp. 561-580. pacheco, e.; vilanova, u.; arias, d.; garrote, j.; leiva, o. (2006) el proceso de desarrollo de la actividad: una mirada desde la formación de competencias profesionales. revista iberoamericana de educación. no. 40/6. pp. 1-6. diciembre 2006. organización de estados iberoamericanos para la educación, la ciencia y la cultura (oei). roe, r. (2003) ¿qué hace competente a un psicólogo? revista papeles del psicólogo, no. 83. diciembre http://www.ortegaygasset.edu/circunstancia/numero8/art9.htm#2 http://www.unesco.org/delors/delors_s.pdf http://www.unesco.org/delors/delors_s.pdf http://educar.jalisco.gob.mx/13/13huerta.html 509 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 2003 recuperado el 10 de abril de 2008. disponible en: http://www.ortegaygasset.edu/ circunstancia/numero8/art9.htm#2. viau, m. (2007, april). la formación de formadores de docentes en francia. (spanish). revista mexicana de investigacion educativa, 12(33), 581-614. retrieved april 10, 2008, from fuente académica database. http://www.ortegaygasset.edu/circunstancia/numero8/art9.htm#2 http://www.ortegaygasset.edu/circunstancia/numero8/art9.htm#2 510 building participative, empowering & diverse communities social exclusion paradox in poland przemysław piotrowski małgorzata wysocka-pleczyk piotr passowicz institute of applied psychology jagiellonian university abstract the process of social exclusion can be described from two perspectives: of the society that stigmatizes and of the stigmatized group. the paper explores the paradox of social exclusion of football hooligans in poland. the authors argue that social exclusion is not necessarily connected with the reduced level of the quality of life. the sense of belonging to a hooligan group becomes the essential source of support. simultaneously it is a foundation for shaping one’s identity. introduction – social exclusion vs. quality of life the current usage of the notion of social exclusion features mainly in the context of social sciences, and predominantly within social politics, encompassing socio-economic, political, and (less frequently) culture-related conditions of existence of social groups. much as it is new, the notion describes to a phenomenon that has a long history. according to szarfenberg (2006) the definitions of social exclusion relate to: problems connected with participation in the life of society or community;• problems of accessing resources, goods within public sphere, institutions or social • systems; problems connected with social laws, which are respected only to some extent or • rejected altogether; poverty and deprivation.• the marginalization and social exclusion are connected with low professional status, poverty and homelessness. significantly it affects various social groups: the mentally disturbed, the physically disabled, the victims of violence, the elderly, adolescents, etc. hilary silver (1994) distinguished 23 such groups. likewise, the national social integration strategy for poland anticipates substantial risk of social exclusion (nsis, 2003) among 24 types of persons: those who have experienced problems with accessing job market or education, or have low professional qualifications. the groups at risk include the handicapped, the addicted, the singles, the crime element, foreigners and refugees, ethnic minorities, religious and cultural minorities, women, children (working children from pathological families), persons with poor housing conditions, those who engage in lifestyle pursuits that are socially inadequate or considered deviant (criminals, substance abusers, quirks, etc.) and persons who display downward mobility. from the psychological perspective a weak network of social support, poorly-established social bonds, and low social capital play a key role in the processes of social exclusion and 511 building participative, empowering & diverse communities marginalization across all of the above-mentioned groups. the society relies on a number of various mechanisms to maintain its status quo, thus ensuring the predictability and control of the social world. the process of social exclusion may vary in the degrees of “acuteness”, ranging from the out-and-out exclusion from social life to the more subtle mechanisms of social exclusion, as in the instances of placing the blame on certain groups, stigmatizing them or enveloping them with silence. by adopting a broader point of view – beyond social politics – we are faced with a situation whereby the social group is perceived as different. the majority of society sets this group apart, and embarks on actions aimed at isolating, discrediting or even discriminating against this group. from the psychological perspective the criterion of “being different” may assume various forms. paradoxically, being a member of the lower register of society entails the risk of social exclusion no less than belonging to the highest ranks of society (see: girard, 2002). notably the risk of social exclusion occurring grows in the time of social unrest. the notion of the quality of life deserves reflection on a number of related issues. the researches are unanimous that it encompasses three dimensions of human functioning – psychological, social and physical. the quality of life evolves dynamically, with a number of factors – external and internal – influencing its level. besides, two aspects of the quality of life may be distinguished: objective and subjective. from psychological standpoint the perceived quality of life hinges on emotional and cognitive processes – pertaining to self-esteem and the assesment of the environment (ryan and deci, 2001; diener et al., 2003) two hidden assumptions it is commonly assumed that being a part of the group that is socially excluded entails a decrease in the quality of life – at individual or group level. this is a consequence of such factors as: a diminished income, a sense of being rejected by the society, aversion shown by others, and a resulting sense of alienation. there are at least two hidden assumptions behind such a reasoning: involuntary character of exclusion – does marginalization or exclusion comprise situations wherein the individual ‘does not want to’ participate in the social life or are narrowed down to situations wherein individual ‘is unable’ to participate; individuals or groups that are subjects of exclusion aspire to belong to society or to middleor upper-middle classes. the authors intend to show that being a member of the socially excluded group does not necessarily entail a decrease the quality of one’s life but quite paradoxically it may even help to improve it. by analyzing the example of football hooligans we intend to show that the group may provide a considerable source of support for the individual, a foundation for moulding one’s identity, whereas the sharing of ideas and professing the same values help alleviate the feeling of loneliness. the group offers its members a set of unambiguous rules of conduct and comprehensible ways of achieving recognition and prestige in community. last but not least and paradoxically the phenomenon of football hooligans may be seen as an attempt of realizing their ideals based on violence and of attracting young people to their cause. 512 building participative, empowering & diverse communities psychological benefits related to the situation of exclusion on the example of soccer hooligans alleviated sense of alienation. deviant behaviours, manifested in groups of sport supporters can be explained as a way of coping with the sense of alienation (piotrowski, 2000, 2006). the rules of social exchange and the values permeating society at large are rejected by the football hooligans who consider the social rules (legal, moral, customary and cultural) as unclear, internally contradictory, and imposed from the outside. moreover, they are convinced that by complying with these rules they will not be able to reach their own goals. the group values and standards are perceived as alternative to the principles inculcated by school and the mass-media, which are regarded as unclear and ineffective in satisfying the needs. the sense of being rooted into the local community and identification with a group of soccer fans is accompanied by a sense of increasing alienation and inability to function in a wider social context. clear-cut ways of career. a group establishes a set of simple rules of conduct alternative to the rules promulgated by the school, the family or the media. the ways for achieving respect and prestige are also clearly defined: aggressive behaviours, commitment and devotion, readiness to support the team during away-from-home matches. provoking brawls with the opponent team’s fans, clashes with the police, acts of vandalism, all serve to reassert or enhance individual status (and group status in the so-called hooligan league). clearly-defined idealistic values. soccer hooligans adhere to the idealistic values that they understand in a specific way – as disregarded by the rest of society. these values include: honour, allegiance to the ideals and emblems of the club, loyalty and commitment to ‘the cause’. courage features prominently among them. one should never back out from a fight even when the opponent group far outnumbers one’s own. fleeing from the “battlefield” is perceived as an utmost betrayal of friends. courage is a prerequisite for loyalty within the group. moreover, in the subculture of soccer hooligans an unwritten rule prohibits launching attacks on women, children, or otherwise uninvolved persons. due to their attachment to these values the soccer hooligans consider themselves to be the elite of sport supporters and the last remaining advocates of the ideals of fair play. a chance to express one’s opinions. significantly, while supporting their favourite football team, participating in various matches away from home, the members of the group are presented with an opportunity to express their opinions freely. often it is a novel opportunity that was beyond their reach earlier, due to young age or inadequate social position. football stadium stands are a prime platform for expressing and publicizing these opinions. the same applies to fanzins – newsletters issued by soccer hooligans. the group provides the individual with support and justification, which does not only facilitate promulgation of socially unacceptable (e.g. racist) ideas, but serves to justify various acts of deviant behaviour. 513 building participative, empowering & diverse communities reinforced group coherence resulting from social exclusion. paradoxically, any attempt on the part of society to stigmatize the members of the group, to exert pressure on them to change their behaviour, or any promulgation of negative opinions on the group does not affect the said behaviour nor change the group affiliation. quite conversely, it only enhances the coherence of such a group. as a result of mechanisms described by social psychology the group or, as in this case, the subculture unites its forces in opposition to a common enemy. solidarity among soccer hooligans irrespective of the club they support is best illustrated by clashes with police. even the rival fan groups unite their forces on such occasions. tainted by pseudo-ideology of soccer hooligans subculture, the image of the policeman is the embodiment of various negative traits: stupidity, cowardness, and also incompetence combined with unjustified brutality. replaced meanings. soccer hooligans are not inclined to passively accept the label imposed on them by the social audience. they attempt to negotiate it. critical opinions on the soccer supporters only reinforce the coherence of their group and in a way may be ‘cherished’ by them. negative labeling (e.g. bandits) may be entertained conversely by the team members and implemented in the process of self labeling as a positive value, which enables the group to stand out from the rest of ‘regular’ society, the representatives of which they despise. what we are observing is a discourse in an attempt at defining the role of the sport supporter in contemporary world. much as the public opinion defines the sports fan mainly as the “consumer” in the sport event, the soccer hooligans emphasize the significance of values such as: loyalty, honour, readiness to incur renunciation for the ‘club colors’ and noncompromised ways of defending them. taking control over exclusion. a group of soccer hooligans consists of individuals alienated from the mainstream of social activities. the experience of relative deprivation is conducive to feelings of resentment and humiliation, which may in turn generate aggression. what emerges is a permanent inclination to perceive the world as hostile, which, by projecting thus generated aggression beyond the group further reinforces the coherence of the group, thus protecting the group from the negative consequences of such aggression. on the other hand, developmentally inherent tendencies of activating defences will transform the feeling of humiliation into a sense of superiority and pride blown out of all proportion. when compounded, these tendencies will affect the experience of relative deprivation. having been excluded themselves, the soccer hooligans try to subject others to exclusion: ‘bad knights’ of the opponent football clubs or their own persecutors (the society at large). in conclusion the paradox rests in the fact that the soccer hooligans capitalize on the stigmatization and exclusion of which they are the subject. by transforming the stigmatization into ‘hallmark of glory’ and the exclusion into ‘a holy anointment’ they consequently create foundations for their prestige and identity. 514 building participative, empowering & diverse communities conclusions we have attempted to show that within the framework of paradox of exclusion pertaining to certain groups (subcultures) such as football supporters, the marginalization does not necessarily involve a decrease of the quality of life (as perceived subjectively by the individual or the group). significantly, the individual is shielded from the perceived sense of the low quality of life that accompanies social exclusion. this occurs as a result of the creation of the group bonds, following a set of comprehensive rules of conduct, adherence to the same values. when a group that had been marked by (or is at risk of ) social exclusion is capable of creating strong internal bonds that lead to the emergence of a subculture, then the social exclusion may only further reinforce the group coherence. both the functioning of subcultures based on aggression and resistance towards the society as well as counteracting them actively (which further strengthens their integration and resistance) are very disadvantageous for society, which subsequently loses control over these subcultures as well as capacity to re-integrate them. such groups pose a threat to society as they may become purveyors of alternative and often destructive values, attracting individuals who perceive themselves as marginalized by the contemporary society. therefore it seems reasonable that apart from implementing repressive measures (stadium entry ban, efficient prosecution immediately after the breach of law, etc.) we should step up efforts to initiate and support preventive measures at a local level. references diener, e., oishi, s. & lucas, r.e. (2003), personality, culture and subjective well-being: emotional and cognitive evaluation of life. annual review of psychology, 54, 403-425. girard, r. (2002), le bouc emmisaire. paris: grasset. narodowa strategia integracji społecznej dla polski (2003), retrieved may 20, 2007 from www.mps.gov. pl/userfiles/file/mps/nsis.pdf. piotrowski, p. (2000), szalikowcy. o zachowaniach dewiacyjnych kibiców sportowych. toruń: wydawnictwo a. marszałek. piotrowski, p. (2006). coping with football-related hooliganism: healing symptoms versus causes prevention. journal of applied social psychology, 36, 3, 629-643. ryan, r.m. & deci, e.l. (2001), on happiness and human potentials: a review of research of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. annual review of psychology, 52, 141-166. silver, h. (1994), social exclusion and social solidarity: three paradigma. international labour review, 133(5-6), 531-578. szarfenberg, r. (2006), marginalizacja i wykluczenie społeczne. wykład monograficzny nr 2: definicje i ujęcia syntetyczne. retrieved june 1, 2007, from http://www.ips.uw.edu.pl/rszarf/wykluczenie/ miws02.pdf. http://www.mps.gov.pl/userfiles/file/mps/nsis.pdf http://www.mps.gov.pl/userfiles/file/mps/nsis.pdf http://www.ips.uw.edu.pl/rszarf/wykluczenie/miws02.pdf http://www.ips.uw.edu.pl/rszarf/wykluczenie/miws02.pdf 515 building participative, empowering & diverse communities construction of a portuguese online forum for mutual help marta sofia pita this presentation is based on a project which the main objective was the construction of a portuguese mutual help on-line forum which the underline subject is mental health. the foremost characteristic of this project is the use of a collaborative research approach. this is important because it gives voice to the community that is being worked on, or should i say work with, and also because of the fact that it is a research-action project, since not only there’s a study occurring, but also a new community is being built. this way of working allows for research (example: to know what occurs during the construction, and in the future what are the outcomes of a online mutual help forum), education (in this case training in the computer science area and deeper knowledge of mutual help and online forums) and last but least action since we are building and changing a community. there are important concepts such as reciprocity which underlines the fact that everyone had something to gain when working together. since reciprocity was the basis of this forum but the facilitator had to be aware and be sensible about each person’s opinions, ideas, feelings, and so on. another important concept is the sense of shared responsibility in the outcomes which in turn will allow for sustainability, because decisions are made together and the project belongs to everyone, it allows for a continuance of the project. to understand the processes that occurred during project “online forum for mutual help” an analysis of the on-going relationships that took place during the construction of the forum was made. the analysis was made through the narratives transmitted by the participants and that emerged from the investigator/ facilitator. the research was implemented in portugal, in the association for the psychosocial study and development (aeips), specifically with 6 elements of the empowerment and mutual help center (ceam). this group was made up by 3 women and 3 men who rotate in their presence during the construction of the forum. some were literate in the computer science from a user’s standpoint (working with word, outlook), others had a deeper knowledge. during this research the data was registered during the project implementation through formal meetings, informal meetings, construction meetings, training, a focus group (future) and facilitator’s personal registry. during the first formal meeting there was a presentation of a research already made in an online forum of mutual help. during which characteristics of mutual help online were stated, as for the advantages and disadvantages of the internet among other charateristics. after this presentation a decision was made on what was going to be done (forum vs chat vs blog vs website). in a second meeting examples of online forums were showed and how and where to construct them. the informal meetings were used to build a closer relationship with the research group members in order to have a thrust basis and facilitate communication. also more practical aspects were decided such as steps for research (timetable), forum’s implementation and decision 516 building participative, empowering & diverse communities making and problem solving (e.g. titles, what was going to be discussed, what could or not be done, and so on). during the forum construction again the main areas approached were decision-making and problem solving, but above all training. the members of the research group had a hands-on approach which meant that they built the forum and the facilitator was there to assist on any doubts or difficulties that might come up (e.g. how to give and take privileges to future forum users). this was done in order to develop autonomy in the group in work with the online forum. focus group will be done where these and other issues will be discussed how do you fell about what was done? changes for the present? now that there is a forum what do you believe it is for? what is expected for the future? (e.g. consequences of the forum) a personal registry was made where my feelings during this whole process were written. these feelings were stress about time management, since this is a study for my master thesis, awareness since attention to conflicts that occurred in the group due to discrepancy of opinions were important. also personal feelings on how to combine study, work and group elements came up. some of preliminary conclusions on collaborative research and the construction process of the forum were possible to be drawn in this phase. collaborative research is an empowerment process where there are active participants. the participants are experts and knowledgeable and gave the community’s standpoint and incorporated the perspectives of the real community on the online community. ideas of how to establish a pre-set plan were proven not to be possible because the methods and decision making that emerged from the research process. also there was the need to be aware of any personal agendas from the participants that may subvert the research-action, since leadership and control over the online forum were some of the issues that rouse. also during the process of construction there some questions that raised to which was given special attention. in all relationships in the group between members are of great importance since they will have impact in how each step of the research will occur. has it was previously referred there was the need to be aware of personal problems and leadership issues which have to be taken into account during the project’s process. also since this research was deeply linked to computer knowledge, an assessment of each member’s capacity was made in order to insure that everyone was grasping/ understanding what was going happening in the forum. one of the most important issues was the proximity to group, there was the need to be near to the group since it made it easier to set appointments/ group meetings, maintain the established timetable and to keep a open communication. when a physical separation occurred the project stagnated. when the investigators/ facilitators steps away from a project, he/she leaves with hope, i hope that the forum will serve to exchange knowledge and experience, raising awareness about other realities (not only in portugal) and most of all friendship for people who have mental health issues, since this is a strong form of support but i do not forget the warning that there are some disadvantages in using the internet that should be prevented. 517 building participative, empowering & diverse communities de la opresión al bienestar. explorando poder, opresión y bienestar entre inmigrantes marroquíes en españa sonia hernández-plaza*, manuel garcía-ramírez, isabel m. herrera sánchez, violeta luqueribelles, y virginia paloma. *universidad de almería &universidad de sevilla splaza@ual.es durante las últimas décadas, millones de personas han llegado a países de la unión europea para mejorar su calidad de vida y la de sus familiares. las diferentes culturas, mercados y servicios que encuentran en europa, fomentan en estos nuevos ciudadanos de la unión europea expectativas de satisfacción de sus necesidades, reconocimiento justo de sus aportaciones. sin embargo, frecuentemente los inmigrantes se incorporan a un mercado laboral precario, que les obliga a asentarse en barrios sin acceso a servicios y recursos sociales, fomentando actitudes de rechazo en los vecinos nativos. la incorporación de los inmigrantes se realiza, por tanto, en condiciones asimétricas, que dificultan sus posibilidades para desarrollar su proyecto migratorio. en este contexto, la adaptación de la comunidad inmigrante se configura como uno de los principales desafíos para el presente y futuro de la unión europea. tradicionalmente, el estudio de la integración de la población inmigrante se ha abordado desde la perspectiva de la psicología transcultural, que vincula el bienestar de la población inmigrante a sus posibilidades de adaptarse culturalmente al contexto receptor. desde este enfoque, diferentes modelos tratan de explicar las experiencias, procesos y resultados asociados a la aculturación (birman, trickett & vinokurov, 2002). berry y sus colegas (berry & annis, 1974; berry, kalin & taylor, 1977) formularon el primer modelo bidimensional de aculturación donde la definen como un proceso dual, de cambio cultural y psicológico, que tiene lugar como resultado del contacto entre dos o más grupos y sus miembros individuales (berry, 1992; 1997; 2005). a partir de este modelo surgieron otros que tratan de expandir y refinar sus principios y propuestas -e.g., el modelo interactivo de aculturación (mia) de bouhris (1997), el propuesto por piontkowski, florack, hoelker y obdrzálek (1999), y el denominado modelo relativo de aculturación extendida (mrae) de navas, garcía, sánchez, rojas, pumares, y fernández (2005). en general, estos modelos adoptan un enfoque centrado en el individuo y asumen que la población inmigrante se adapta al nuevo contexto social en base a las decisiones que toma sobre dos dimensiones: mantener o no su propia identidad y cultura de origen, y establecer o no relaciones con los miembros de la sociedad receptora. estos modelos han supuesto un gran avance en el estudio de la integración, no obstante, a nuestro modo de ver, su limitación fundamental es que todos ellos asumen que los inmigrantes eligen la estrategia de aculturación que adoptan en el contexto receptor sin observar la influencia de las condiciones de opresión, desigualdad y exclusión social en las que toman esta decisión. la situación de la población marroquí en el sur de españa ejemplifica estas circunstancias. se trata de un colectivo eminentemente masculino, que trabaja principalmente en la agricultura intensiva, la mailto:splaza@ual.es 518 building participative, empowering & diverse communities construcción y la hostelería turística, con frecuencia sin documentación, ocupando los puestos que la población nativa rechaza por sus duras condiciones, inestabilidad y bajos salarios. en estas circunstancias se ven obligados a concentrarse en áreas rurales aisladas o en barrios urbanos marginales, con escaso acceso a los recursos y servicios comunitarios básicos (hernández-plaza, pozo & alonso-morillejo, 2004; izquierdo, 2003; martínez, garcía-ramírez, maya, rodríguez & checa, 1996). la espiral de exclusión en la que se ven inmersos fomenta estilos de vida marginal y de segregación que son el caldo de cultivo de un perfil psicosocial que provoca miedo y actitudes racistas entre la población nativa (hernández-plaza, 2003). en suma, al no reconocer que la aculturación se produce en el contexto de relaciones intergrupales asimétricas y no explicitar las dinámicas de poder implicadas, la perspectiva dominante en la investigación sobre integración y aculturación contribuye a mantener el statu quo que sostiene y legitima las condiciones de opresión e inequidad. por otra parte, la perspectiva dominante en la investigación sobre aculturación no responde a esta realidad migratoria porque ignora el papel que tiene la falta de expectativas de futuro en los lugares de asentamiento, donde habitualmente no son bien recibidos ni respetados. por otro lado, la investigación se ha desarrollado básicamente con metodología cuantitativa y no ha abordado estudios contextualizados que permitan conocer la visión que poblaciones específicas tienen de sus procesos de aculturación. por tanto, se hacen necesarios nuevos enfoques teóricos y metodológicos, de investigación-acción, para el análisis y transformación de las condiciones de opresión que viven los inmigrantes. esta nueva aproximación ha de entender las transiciones migratorias como el conjunto de oportunidades y capacidades que permiten a los inmigrantes rentabilizar en cuotas de bienestar individual, familiar y colectivo, los esfuerzos que hacen por adaptarse culturalmente a sus nuevos escenarios de vida. asimismo, ha de servir de base para el desarrollo de acciones comunitarias orientadas a dotar a los inmigrantes de oportunidades para: a) desarrollar sus capacidades y potencialidades en el mercado laboral, b) incorporarse a los vecindarios, vivienda, escuela y establecer relaciones igualitarias con los nativos, c) acceder a profesionales culturalmente competentes, d) desarrollar comunidades étnicas equilibradas, con acceso a los mercados y al tejido empresarial, organizaciones e instituciones, así como puestos de dirección y liderazgo social y político, y e) proporcionar pautas para el desarrollo de identidades que permitan compatibilizar herencia cultural y valores occidentales, especialmente para las segundas generaciones. este nuevo enfoque debe conceder un papel fundamental a la validez psicopolítica de la investigación sobre aculturación, que necesariamente ha de promover la liberación y el bienestar de los colectivos implicados (prilleltensky, 2008). la psicología de la liberación responde a estos desafíos dado que analiza cómo y por qué la población inmigrante sufre y resiste las adversidades que afronta en los países receptores. desde esta perspectiva, se definen los problemas objeto de estudio a partir de las condiciones de opresión existentes, se cuestiona el status quo y se determina el rol que las dinámicas de opresión juegan en la adaptación cultural y el bienestar de la población inmigrante. a nivel metodológico, la metodología cualitativa permite responder a los desafíos planteados por la psicología de la 519 building participative, empowering & diverse communities liberación porque hace posible el estudio de los fenómenos sociales en profundidad, en los contextos naturales donde se desarrollan, y desde el punto de vista de los diferentes colectivos implicados, permitiendo que la recopilación de información esté influenciada por las experiencias y prioridades de los participantes (denzin & lincoln, 2005). de manera particular, el estudio de las narrativas puede ayudar a comprender los vínculos entre las personas y sus contextos. estudiar las narrativas supone recoger y recomponer las historias de vida o de eventos significativos que son experimentados por las personas que los cuentan en circunstancias concretas. su valor reside en cómo estas historias organizan la propia experiencia, dan coherencia y significado a los eventos vitales y proporcionan un sentido de continuidad y progreso (mankowski y rappaport, 2000) además, las narrativas actúan como motivadores, ya que las comunidades comparten unos discursos que les ayudan a explicarse, a ellas mismas y a otras, quiénes son, qué están haciendo y porqué (harper, et al., 2004; rappaport, 2000). partiendo de lo anterior, a continuación se presentan dos estudios en los que se vincula la perspectiva de la psicología transcultural y la psicología de la liberación, para explicar y comprender los procesos de aculturación de la población inmigrante tomando en consideración las narrativas de la población marroquí en el sur de españa, que confieren a descripciones de sus experiencias y vivencias en los contextos de asentamiento y sus perspectivas de futuro en los mismos. los estudios presentados forman parte de una investigación más amplia, actualmente en desarrollo, acerca de los factores que facilitan y/o impiden la integración comunitaria y el bienestar de los marroquíes en andalucía estudio 1: el papel de las condiciones de opresión en la integración de los inmigrantes marroquíes en el sur de españa el estudio que se presenta a continuación examina el papel de la opresión en la integración de los inmigrantes marroquíes en el sur de españa, prestando especial atención al papel del barrio y el entorno laboral como contextos fundamentales de aculturación. para ello, se recurre al análisis de narrativas basadas en entrevistas abiertas a una muestra de seis marroquíes residentes en diferentes contextos de la provincia de almería. el principal propósito de la investigación es analizar la relación percibida entre las oportunidades y barreras presentes en el barrio y el entorno laboral como contextos locales de aculturación, las estrategias individuales de aculturación adoptadas por los marroquíes, y los resultados adaptativos alcanzados en términos de bienestar y satisfacción con el proyecto migratorio. los entrevistados relatan cómo su nueva vida en la provincia de almería comienza en un barrio que se caracteriza por una presencia mayoritaria de inmigrantes. estos barrios, de acuerdo con la tipología de contextos de aculturación de berry (2005), se identifican como barrios de segregación y exclusión. los “barrios de segregación” serían aquellos donde la mayoría de la población es marroquí, y el contacto entre inmigrantes y nativos es extremadamente limitado, a excepción de algunos vínculos sociales, claramente asimétricos, basados en relaciones de poder (p.ej. entre empleador y empleado). estos barrios se identifican principalmente en contextos rurales, cuya economía se basa en la agricultura intensiva de invernadero. “toda la zona de marroquíes excepto la dueña y su hijo, la dueña de la casa” ( m u j e r , contexto rural en el poniente almeriense) 520 building participative, empowering & diverse communities “y si hablamos de la relación que tengo con los vecinos, podemos decir que me l l e v o muy bien con los marroquíes, que son la mayoría del barrio. nos invitamos, nos reunimos de vez en cuando, pero no tenemos ninguna relación con los españoles (…) este barrio no me gusta y no me está facilitando la integración” (mujer, contexto rural en el levante almeriense). estos barrios de segregación cuentan con escasos servicios y recursos, por lo que quienes residen en ellos se ven obligados a desplazarse a otras zonas para el acceso a servicios básicos como los sanitarios, educativos y sociales. “es un barrio que no tiene nada, ni centro de salud ni asociaciones. hay algunas tiendas y cuando queremos hacer compras tenemos que ir al centro donde hay supermercado (día), o al mercadillo. para ir al centro de salud también tenemos que ir hasta el centro de campohermoso” (mujer, contexto rural en el levante almeriense) “van a roquetas para hacer compras o al mercadillo el jueves. suelen ir allí los inmigrantes para comprar. no hay tiendas” (mujer, contexto rural en el poniente almeriense) dada la ausencia de contacto entre marroquíes y nativos, los habitantes de estos barrios perciben un elevado nivel de rechazo y prejuicio, “los españoles aquí son racistas. algunos cuando te acercas a las tiendas ni te miran (…) no nos saludan, no nos miran bien, no se comportan bien” (mujer, contexto rural en el poniente almeriense) o ningún rechazo, ocasionado precisamente por la ausencia de contacto. “no me siento rechazada ni he notado ningún racismo, quizás porque no tengo relación con los españoles” (mujer, contexto rural en el levante almeriense) los “cortijos” en zonas de invernaderos pueden ser considerados “barrios de exclusión”, al describir a la población inmigrante que los habitan como una población invisible que vive en condiciones de extremo aislamiento físico y social. “aquí en almería, el ochenta por ciento de los marroquíes, de mano de obra es marroquí. y estos marroquíes, la mayoría viven en cortijos, fuera. entonces estas personas cómo crees que van a integrarse. por ejemplo, si entra a trabajar a las ocho y sale a las seis, llega y entra a dormir. no estudia, hasta la televisión no la mira. hay quienes no tienen ni agua ni luz. es decir, cómo esta persona va a integrarse” (hombre, contexto urbano) otros habitantes marroquíes describen que en su barrio existe una convivencia entre marroquíes y nativos, aceptándose los unos a los otros como individuos y grupos con diferentes identidades culturales. estos barrios pueden ser categorizados como “barrios multiculturales”. el barrio de pescadería, situado en la capital almeriense, presenta algunas de las condiciones propias de este tipo de barrios, siendo el único de los contextos analizados donde la aculturación puede llegar a ser entendida como un proceso recíproco y bidireccional de ajuste mutuo. “la gente del barrio (pescadería) es popular. es fácil integrarse con ellos. cuanto te integras con 521 building participative, empowering & diverse communities ellos, con el tiempo la persona puede conseguir un trabajo (…). creo que es un lugar adecuado para que haya integración porque en el barrio hay muchos marroquíes. para el español es fácil integrarse con la persona marroquí porque no le resulta extraño” (hombre, contexto urbano) el barrio de “pescadería”, situado en un contexto urbano, ofrece todo tipo de servicios (salud, educación, comercios, etc.), y es habitual encontrar negocios y comercios de los propios marroquíes. “en pescadería hay escuelas, hay colegio, está el hospital de alcazaba también (…). el hospital del barrio está cerca, andando puedes tardar unos diez o quince minutos (…) existen locutorios, eso lo que hay mucho” (hombre, urbano) la elección del barrio está estrechamente relacionada con las características del mercado laboral en el contexto local, y depende en gran medida de las oportunidades que los marroquíes tienen para encontrar trabajo en cada zona. en la provincia de almería, la mayoría de los marroquíes trabajan en la agricultura intensiva y, en consecuencia, la mayor parte de ellos viven en contextos rurales, cerca de las zonas de invernaderos donde habitualmente trabajan. “por razones de trabajo. verdaderamente no fue por voluntad propia. por obligación de trabajo (habla de la decisión de vivir en las norias, zona rural del poniente almeriense)” (hombre, contexto rural en el poniente almeriense) “para los hombres, el primer trabajo es la agricultura, el segundo es la construcción, esto es lo que hay. para las mujeres, la mayoría trabajan en los almacenes (…) hay otros empleos que no puedo encontrar fácilmente (fuera de la agricultura y la construcción)” (hombre, contexto urbano) de acuerdo con la tipología de contextos de aculturación propuesta por berry (2005), en almería, el trabajo en la agricultura intensiva de invernadero actúa fundamentalmente como contexto de segregación y exclusión. en este contexto se cuentan historias en las que la mayor parte de los marroquíes empleados en este sector no poseen contrato laboral, por lo que sus oportunidades para alcanzar una situación legal estable y acceder a mejores condiciones laborales en otros sectores, son extremadamente limitadas “la inmigración se ha ido a otros sitios, barcelona. cuando estás regular, mejor, buscas mucho mejor trabajo y vas a otro sitio. la mayoría de la gente que está trabajando en la agricultura no tiene papeles” (mujer, contexto rural en el poniente almeriense) en la agricultura intensiva, la mayoría de los trabajadores son inmigrantes. en consecuencia, quienes viven y trabajan en zonas de invernaderos comentan cómo se relacionan principalmente con otros inmigrantes, que no suelen hablar castellano, encontrando escasas oportunidades para relacionarse con la población nativa y aprender el idioma. “el trabajo tampoco facilita la integración porque sólo nos encontramos con otros inmigrantes que tampoco hablan el español (rumanos), y tampoco encontramos en el trabajo un lugar donde libremente podamos comunicarnos” (mujer, contexto rural en el levante almeriense) “aquí no tienes tiempo. como está ella, está trabajando en los invernaderos. trabaja muchísimo. 522 building participative, empowering & diverse communities y a veces, últimamente, está trabajando los domingos. últimamente no tiene un día de descanso, depende de las temporadas (…). como sus compañeros son rumanos… han llegado rumanos nuevos que tampoco manejan el español” (mujer, contexto rural en el poniente almeriense) el contexto laboral puede desempeñar también un papel clave como contexto de integración y así es percibido por los marroquíes. se transmite que, en almería, los marroquíes que consiguen trabajos menos precarios fuera de la agricultura intensiva, habitualmente tienen mayores oportunidades para alcanzar una situación legal estable, relacionarse con los españoles, y aprender el idioma. estas condiciones suelen ser más comunes en contextos urbanos, donde las oportunidades para encontrar trabajo en otros sectores son mayores, tal como sucede en el caso del entrevistado residente en el barrio de pescadería. “mi trabajo me facilita mi integración porque me encuentro con mucha gente, gente de varios niveles de pensamiento (…). para mí como soy pintor, me resulta fácil entrar a las casas, hablar con la gente por razones de mi trabajo, es decir, que me facilita integrarme con la gente, hablar con ellos” (hombre, contexto urbano). en conclusión, los resultados obtenidos muestran que, para los marroquíes, vivir y trabajar en contextos multiculturales se asocia con comportamientos y actitudes propios de la integración, y con resultados adaptativos positivos en términos de bienestar y satisfacción con el proyecto migratorio. este es el caso del entrevistado que vive en el barrio de pescadería y trabaja como pintor. “efectivamente, la persona cambia un poco porque aprovecha muchas cosas (…). me siento marroquí, pero como un marroquí que tiene más derechos que un marroquí de allí (…). me siento de aquí porque te llevas cosas que has adquirido aquí, se ve que vives aquí, una vez estoy allí. se te nota, se ve en ti que eres de aquí cuando hablas con la gente, a nivel de comportamiento con la gente, a nivel de muchas cosas (…) como marroquí siempre seguiré como marroquí, sin discusión. pero con el tiempo, cuando uno vivirá aquí muchos años, uno puede sentirse marroquí pero español” (hombre, contexto urbano) “yo un cincuenta por ciento me he integrado, y tengo más amigos españoles que marroquíes por razones de mi trabajo” (hombre, contexto urbano) “(emigrar) fue decisión acertada cien por cien” (hombre, contexto urbano) en cambio, vivir y trabajar en contextos de segregación y exclusión, claramente mayoritarios en la provincia de almería, se asocia con actitudes y comportamientos propios de la separación y la marginalización, y con resultados adaptativos negativos en términos de salud y bienestar. este es el caso de la entrevistada que reside en campohermoso, un contexto rural del levante almeriense, y trabaja principalmente en la agricultura intensiva, y ocasionalmente en la hostelería. “no sé hablar español (…). en cuanto a mis costumbres, no ha cambiado nada, sigo igual que en marruecos, cuidando mis costumbres, mi forma de vestir es la misma, y en cuanto a las comidas, son marroquíes. a mí no me gustan las costumbres de aquí, no me gusta la feria” (mujer, contexto 523 building participative, empowering & diverse communities rural en el levante almeriense) “no tenemos ninguna relación con los españoles (…). yo me siento más integrada con los marroquíes, me llevo perfectamente con ellos” (mujer, contexto rural en el levante almeriense) “no me siento bien, ando con una depresión porque no tengo trabajo ni casa, porque es alquilada y mis hijos no están trabajando” (mujer, contexto rural en el levante almeriense) estudio 2. bienestar psicológico de inmigrantes en condiciones locales opresoras: tensiones entre integración y separación. en este trabajo se describen las experiencias de los inmigrantes marroquíes del sur de españa que adoptan la separación como estrategia de aculturación. estas experiencias relatan vivencias de superación y bienestar cuando perciben que el contexto local le ofrece oportunidades de desarrollo personal y cuando consideran que disponen de capacidades para superar las condiciones de opresión en las que se encuentran inmersos. la separación les permite mantener su cultura original y evitar las interacciones con los miembros de la nueva cultura. para hacerlo, se despliega el mecanismo de la resistencia que evita la marginación o asimilación, protegiéndose de la opresión. para el análisis se utilizan las narrativas de los inmigrantes marroquíes expresadas en situaciones de entrevistas abiertas y grupos focales, que en total constituyeron 16 marroquíes residentes en las provincias de almería, huelva y sevilla. el principal objetivo de este texto es hacer un recorrido, a través de las narrativas de las personas entrevistadas, por las diferentes formas de opresión que identifican de manera particular y sobre las que experimentan mecanismos de resistencia . como criterio de codificación de estas formas de opresión se ha tomado como referencia los mecanismos de opresión y control identificados por moane (2003): explotación laboral, exclusión política, fragmentación, control cultural y violencia. por último, se muestra cómo a través de este proceso de opresión-resistencia los marroquíes pueden manifestar bienestar dentro de una concepción personal y particular. una de las situaciones de opresión experimentadas es la explotación económica. un caso lo encontramos en la vida diaria de una mujer inmigrante que habla de las dificultades que para ella conlleva afrontar las necesidades básicas de vivienda, alimentación, etc.. esta forma de explotación económica también se plantea ante situaciones de explotación laboral donde se incorporan nuevos elementos como consecuencias negativas para la salud y horarios inadecuados. “... en el campo son salarios vamos una miseria que si tú tienes una casa y tienes que pagar alquiler en 400€ de alquiler más el agua la comida,... no te llega” (mujer, contexto rural, huelva, menos de 9 meses de empleo al año). “nadie estaba satisfecho con un sueldo de miseria, pagándonos 800€ aproximadamente por jornada completa sin pagar nada por las horas extraordinarias..., ese trabajo me ha producido una alergia y un fuerte dolor de espalda. he intentado buscar otro trabajo..., y era peor, he estado solo una semana porque las condiciones eran muy malas, se trabajaba incluso de noche por una miseria de dinero” (mujer, contexto rural, almería, indocumentada, menos de 9 meses de empleo al año). ante estas circunstancias la población inmigrante marroquí expresa que tiene las 524 building participative, empowering & diverse communities capacidades y oportunidades para rentabilizar en cuotas de bienestar sus esfuerzos por adaptarse culturalmente al nuevo contexto, que tiene que ver con el desarrollo de conciencia crítica para llevar a cabo acciones de superación a las condiciones de opresión. de manera particular, entre los miembros de los grupos focales se proporcionan ejemplos de cómo los marroquíes crean sus propios negocios, lo cual les permite ser autosuficientes y satisfacer varias de sus necesidades simultáneamente (i.e., mantenimiento de su gastronomía y redes sociales con compatriotas, independencia económica). “a: los marroquíes ..., aunque tienen todas las dificultades, donde se encuentra, mejoran su calidad de vida. van a hacer comercio, hacen sus bazares, hacen sus... es lo que me gusta de los marroquíes. b: es el futuro. a: sí, pero es algo que me gusta de los marroquíes. luchan para tener algo mejor. b: son emprendedores. a: yo lo veo positivo. y da independencia económica” (grupo focal de almería). en el caso de la exclusión política, ésta es definida por aquellas situaciones que conllevan la imposibilidad de participación política, del derecho al voto, del disfrute de derechos sociales básicos, etc. en sus discursos se comentan la relación entre la ausencia de participación política y el no poder hacer oír su voz.. “el inmigrante no tiene derecho a que está reflejado en la ley de extranjería, a los derechos básicos, a los derechos sociales básicos ... el español tiene derecho” (grupo focal de almería). “así el problema está fundamentalmente en el derecho del ciudadano como ciudadano, mientras los inmigrantes no tienen voz ni participación en la vida política, yo creo que al político local, porque hay que empezar por la política localista, municipalista, para abrir vía a la participación comunitaria, porque no existe participación comunitaria, existen individuos en un municipio... cuando lo empezarán los inmigrantes a participar con voz y voto, yo creo que ahí se abrirá la participación comunitaria. no hay participación comunitaria, hay grupos viviendo dentro de una mayoría, donde la mayoría tiene protección del político, frente al otro que en lo tiene. cuando ese se discrimina su derecho, el político ahí, defiende, defiende a un ciudadano más que a otro” (grupo focal de almería). las estrategias de afrontamiento que se expresan ante esta situación tienen que ver con las oportunidades que les brinda el contexto para acceder a las organizaciones, instituciones y a puestos de dirección y liderazgo social y político. la resistencia a las condiciones de opresión se consigue creando asociaciones, implicándose en la comunidad, fortaleciendo las redes sociales con sus compatriotas y presentándose a la población autóctona como un colectivo cohesionado y con fortalezas. “pues es muy importante esta cuestión de las organizaciones, porque son una de las puertas para defender los derechos de los trabajadores y para la igualdad de derechos...” (hombre, contexto rural, almería). “no es fácil para que una mujer marroquí sigue con una asociación adelante. si ... me está 525 building participative, empowering & diverse communities diciendo que tuvo dificultades, yo más dificultades porque no les interesa que una mujer,... que nuestros hijos puedan aprender el idioma para llegar a un alto nivel, no les interesa que tú consigas la colocación de ... de un título alto, porque no les interesa, a parte que eres inmigrantes marroquí... y a parte, como estoy diciendo, como mujer, he encontrado mucha... y por qué estoy todos los días presente en todos los actos, en todos los actos. yo quito mi tiempo de mi trabajo, no quiero ganar dinero, pero esto presente. para que mi voz sea escuchada más, más lejos” (grupo focal, almería). respecto a las situaciones de fragmentación, la población inmigrante marroquí refiere el poco contacto existente entre el colectivo marroquí y la población autóctona y entre aquél y los diferentes grupos étnicos. así, la competencia real entre inmigrantes y autóctonos es casi inexistente, dada la clara segmentación del mercado laboral, que ubica a los trabajadores inmigrantes en los sectores más precarios. puede existir cierta competencia entre inmigrantes de diferentes países, pero incluso en este caso, en ocasiones lo que predomina es la segmentación, a través de la ubicación de trabajadores de diferentes países en distintos sectores del mercado laboral. en almería esto es muy evidente: en hostelería no trabajan los marroquíes ni subsaharianos, relegados casi exclusivamente a la agricultura, pero sí inmigrantes latinoamericanos o europeos del este. “no creo, hay diferentes opiniones, por ejemplo nunca yo ha visto un grupo junto entre marroquíes y españoles, cada uno va por su lado” (hombre, contexto rural, huelva, indocumentado, menos de 9 meses de empleo al año). “últimamente como han venido rumanos y búlgaros, ahora trabajan casi siempre sólo ellos, aunque veo que los marroquíes son muy trabajadores, pero al no tener papeles y no conocer el idioma, no se les contrata” (mujer, contexto rural, almería indocumentada, menos de 9 meses de empleo al año). ante esta situación de opresión la población inmigrante se resiste creando conexiones sociales, delimitando su territorio y creando su red de recursos para satisfacer sus necesidades. “... va construyendo su espacio y los grupos humanos... vamos marcando nuestro terreno. los inmigrantes empiezan a comprar casas, con el esfuerzo, lo que costaba, después de mucho esfuerzo... el inmigrante compra una casa en un bloque..., todos se van, se venden, compran inmigrantes, la tienda se abre del inmigrante. lo que el político decía que no quería, los guetos en su pueblo, al fin y al cabo, se terminaron creando guetos” (grupo focal, almería). “... la relación que tengo con los vecinos... me llevo muy bien con los marroquíes que son la mayoría del barrio, nos invitamos, nos reunimos de vez en cuando, pero no tenemos ninguna relación con los españoles. excepto los saludos, ya que no hablamos español, aunque son buenas personas” (mujer, contexto rural, almería, indocumentada, menos de 9 meses de empleo al año). en lo que se refiere a las situaciones de control cultural, se ejemplifica con situaciones tales como las dificultades para usar su lengua en lugares públicos, practicar su religión libremente, vestir sus ropas, etc. “y el miedo, el miedo al musulmán, porque el marroquí es el musulmán. entonces, para no 526 building participative, empowering & diverse communities decir que ese rechazo es por miedo, o para que esté almería más segura de lo que es el musulmán, entonces es por eso por lo que está haciendo el traer la mano de obra de otros países que no tienen ese miedo religioso” (grupo focal, almería). “yo hablo árabe con mi mujer y mosquea a los españoles, porque, que está hablando este. ¡eso malo, eh! ...” (hombre, sevilla, documentado, trabaja más de 9 meses al año). la población inmigrante reacciona a este control reafirmando sus creencias y hábitos, introduciéndolos en la población autóctona y tratando que ésta se habitúe a ellos. “... tenemos una mezquita en el barrio de la macarena, en principio tuvimos un poco de recelos por parte de los vecinos... cuando vieron la realidad de lo que es la mezquita a mi personalmente me acuden muchísima gente incluso española, ... porque a mi me consideran como si fuese a lo mejor un pastor de ellos, ¿no? un cura” (grupo focal, sevilla). “...se echa de menos,... lo hacemos pero no tan completo. falta muchas cosas para, el ambiente... pero las costumbres no se cambia... sí, sí. las mantengo. las fiestas... eso lo mantengo... claro, por ejemplo cuando voy a una fiesta así marroquí que me acuerdo pues sí, por lo menos tengo, tengo algo. no lo he perdido todo...” (mujer de sevilla, indocumentada, más de 9 meses de empleo al año). la violencia ejercida hacia la población inmigrante es vivenciada a distintos niveles, como agresiones físicas o verbales, como intimidación por parte de las autoridades, instituciones, etc. “hoy en día yo lo veo incluso con las autoridades, estamos marcados como sospechosos, todo el mundo que acude a la mezquita, y hay un control diario a las mezquitas. y algunas veces pues dilatan el punto de acoso de los musulmanes. porque hubo temporadas que se ponían policías en la puerta de la mezquita” (grupo focal, sevilla). “... la gente en la comunidad cristiana solamente quiere entre ellos, entonces a mí la madre no me tragaba para nada, para nada me hizo sufrir, llorar, todo. ... tenía la novia de aquí de moguer y la trataba diferente de a mí,.. se demostraba ella sola que ella era racista, sin decir nada, sin… demostraba ella sola,... y me hacía como si fuera inferior a ella. y yo no soy ni inferior a ella si superior a ella, pero ella me hacía sentirme así. pero como a mí me daba absolutamente igual, yo me pasaba porque a ratos yo me sentía incómoda estar en casa de una persona que no te trate como si fuera… entonces me sentí super rara. y ahí es cuando me sentí que era, que no eres querida, que no era…, y desde ahí ya ...” (mujer, contexto rural, huelva, trabaja menos de 9 meses al año). ante esta situación de violencia los marroquíes en andalucía pueden reaccionar interiorizándola, mostrando indefensión, desesperanza, baja autoestima, etc. sin embargo, cuando se autodefinen con capacidad crítica reaccionan evitando la desesperanza, tratando de explicitar la situación antes quienes ejercen dicha violencia sin generalizar las situaciones y mostrando que en la mayoría de los casos los estereotipos no se cumplen. “y yo evitaba para no enfrentarme porque odio estar siempre a la defensa y al final tuve que echar la broma -pero qué pasa cada semana me ves y me tienes que registrar-. entonces está, y al final 527 building participative, empowering & diverse communities ya dejo de, pero tuve que echarle una broma” (grupo focal, sevilla). “y dar fé de buena conducta diariamente... por eso le digo que hay que luchar en, hay que olvidar de que uno realmente está, porque yo le estaría transmitiendo un sentimiento de mucho, de las personas, de las personas musulmanas que ven que son, que tienen que hacer esa labor diaria de decir que son personas correctas” (grupo focal, sevilla). en suma, se ha observado cómo las condiciones opresoras de los contextos receptores provocan el despliegue de estrategias de resistencia como rechazo hacia la nueva cultura y desconfianza hacia la población anfitriona o el fortalecimiento de las propias redes sociales como refugio de la población inmigrante en su grupo étnico. estas estrategias de resistencia experimentadas y contadas por los inmigrantes marroquíes en situaciones de opresión tienen lugar cuando la comunidad inmigrante tiene las capacidades y oportunidades necesarias, constituyéndose entonces como un proceso de desarrollo psicopolítico (prilleltensky, 2003) que implica el desarrollo de conciencia crítica, creación de redes sociales y puesta en marcha de acciones de transformación. como consecuencia, la población inmigrante se libera de las fuerzas opresoras y alcanza bienestar. bienestar que es entendido por la población en función de tres dimensiones; desarrollo de la espiritualidad, sentido de utilidad social y estado de satisfacción general. la posibilidad de desarrollo espiritual y la práctica de sus hábitos religiosos que les permite tener esperanza en un futuro mejor en el que poder influir y un consuelo ante las dificultades que afrontan. en segundo lugar, como reinterpretación de utilidad social por el que consideran que la población autóctona carecería de los actuales niveles de bienestar si no fuese por su contribución económica al país. y, por último, como estado de satisfacción general donde se valora que el esfuerzo invertido en el proyecto migratorio ha merecido la pena o que, al menos, de manera progresiva se logran objetivos. “yo creo que eso depende también del factor espiritual, yo creo que es el alivio... es el alivio, ¿no? que tiene el musulmán, ¿no? por eso acude, cuando está agobiado, por eso acude, porque espiritualmente a la mezquita, porque proporcione, por lo menos esa esperanza de que pueda cambiar el mundo algún día o cambiar incluso su situación. entonces pues eso el factor religioso es muy, muy, muy importante que hay que anotarlo como parte ¿no?...” (grupo focal de sevilla). “... si no existieran los marroquíes y si no existieran los africanos, su nivel de vida (de los españoles) no estaría alto sin la presencia de los marroquíes. los marroquíes son imprescindibles.” (hombre, contexto rural, almería, documentado, trabaja más de 9 meses al año). “¿ha valido la pena?..., yo creo que sí porque una vez cuando, tú no te das cuenta, cuando alguien te pregunta cuando vuelvas atrás.. yo he luchado mucho, porque aquí no das, no das importancia a lo que haces, porque tú estás trabajando, hacer cosas, y cuando te paras pues…, mereció la pena porque yo he podido” (mujer, sevilla, indocumentada, trabaja menos de 9 meses al año). conclusiones desde la perspectiva de la psicología de la liberación (prilleltensky, 2008), se han presentado dos estudios que analizan las narrativas de un grupo de inmigrantes marroquíes 528 building participative, empowering & diverse communities asentados en el sur de españa que experimentan los procesos de aculturación en contextos específicos de opresión. en el primer estudio, se han analizado diferentes contextos de aculturación que según la tipología propuesta por berry (2005), se han podido categorizar como barrios de segregación, exclusión y multiculturales. mientras que en éstos últimos se manifiestan experiencias de convivencia entre inmigrantes y nativos aceptándose mutuamente y en los que la población inmigrante marroquí obtiene resultados adaptativos positivos en términos de bienestar y satisfacción con el proyecto migratorio; en los barrios predominantes de segregación y exclusión se enfatizan las condiciones de asimetría y las relaciones de poder entre población inmigrante y autóctona,. en estos barrios, relacionados con actitudes y comportamientos propios de la separación y la marginalización, la comunidad inmigrante marroquí muestra resultados adaptativos negativos en términos de salud y bienestar. el segundo estudio se ha centrado en la exploración de aquellas narrativas que en contextos de opresión exponen cómo la separación como estrategia de aculturación y el fortalecimiento de capacidades como resistencia a las condiciones de opresión puede alcanzar cuotas de bienestar. bienestar que es definido en términos de desarrollo de la espiritualidad, sentido de utilidad social y estado de satisfacción general. ante contextos de opresión como la explotación laboral, exclusión política, a la fragmentación, al control cultural y a la violencia (moane, 2003), la población inmigrante marroquí adopta estrategias de separación a la cultura dominante y ofrece mecanismos de resistencia gracias a la participación organizacional y comunitaria, al fortalecimiento de redes sociales y de las creencias y hábitos que les son propios, evitando así la marginación o asimilación. en resumen, se observa que los contextos más idóneos para alcanzar bienestar son los multiculturales. sin embargo, en andalucía predominan los contextos de segregación y exclusión que pueden ocasionar resultados adaptativos negativos en términos de salud y bienestar. no obstante, este modo de entender la propia experiencia de aculturación cambia si en estos contextos la población inmigrante marroquí se identifica como grupo cultural propio frente al de la población autóctona y se define poseedora de capacidades y oportunidades para resistirse a las diferentes condiciones de opresión y para alcanzar bienestar, definido en los términos relevantes para ellos. referencias berry, j.w. (1992). acculturation and adaptation in a new society. international migration, 30, 69-85. berry, j.w. (1997). immigration, acculturation and adaptation. applied psychology, 46, 5-68. berry, j.w. (2005). acculturation: living successfully in two cultures. international journal of intercultural relations, 29, 697-712. berry, j.w. & annis, r.c. (1974). acculturative stress: the rol of ecology, culture and differentiation . journal of cross cultural psychology, 5, 382-406. berry, j.w., kalin, r. & taylor, d.m. (1977). multiculturalism and ethnic attitudes in canada. ottawa: supply and services. birman, d., trickett, e. & vinokurov, a. (2002). acculturation and adaptation of soviet jewish refugee 529 building participative, empowering & diverse communities adolescents: predictors of adjustment across life domains. american journal of community psychology, 30 (5), 585-608 bouhris, r.y. (1997). towards an interactive acculturation model: a social psychological approach. international journal of psychology, 32(6), 369-386. denzin, n.k. & lincoln, y.s. (2005). the sage handbook of qualitative research california, ee.uu.: sage publications. harper, g.w., lardon, c., rappaport, j., bangi, a.k., contreras, r. & pedraza, a. (2004). community narratives: the use of narrative ethnography in participatory community research. en jason, l.a., keys, c.b., suárezbalcázar, y., taylor, r.r. & davis m.i., (eds.), participatory community research: theories and methods in action. united states: apa books. hernández-plaza, s. (2003). la otra cara de la inmigración: necesidades y sistemas de apoyo social. almería, españa: servicio de publicaciones de la universidad de almería. hernández-plaza, s., pozo, c. & alonso-morillejo, e. (2004). the role of informal social support in needs assessment: proposal and application of a model to assess immigrants’ needs in the south of spain. journal of community and applied social psychology, 14, 284-298. izquierdo, a. (2003). inmigración, mercado de trabajo y protección social en españa. madrid, españa: consejo económico y social. izquierdo, a. (2004). la inmigración en españa y las consecuencias de una política restrictiva: 2000-2003. revista asturiana de economía, 30, 53-83. mankowski, e. s. & rappaport, j. (2000). narrative concepts and analysis in spiritually-based communities. journal of community psychology, 28, 5, 479-493. martínez, m.f., garcía-ramírez, m., maya, i., rodríguez, s. & checa, f. (1996) la integración social de los inmigrantes africanos en andalucía. necesidades y recursos. sevilla, españa: junta de andalucía. moane, g. (2003). bridging the personal and the political: practices for a liberation psychology. american journal of community psychology, 31, 151169 montero, m. (2006). hacer para transformar. paidos. navas, m., garcía, m.c., sánchez, j., rojas, a.j., pumares, p. y fernández j.s. (2005). relative acculturation model (raem): new contributions with regard to the study of acculturation. international journal of intercultural relations, 29, 21-37. piontkowski, u., florack, a., hoelker, p. & obdrzálek, p. (1999). predicting acculturation attitudes of dominant and non-dominant groups. international journal of intercultural relations, 24, 1-26. prilleltensky, i. (2008). the role of power in wellness, oppression and liberation. the promise of psychopolitical validity. journal of community psychology, 36 (2), 116-136. prilleltensky, i. (2003). understanding, resisting, and overcoming oppression: towards psychopolitical validity. american journal of community psychology, 31, 195201. prilleltensky, i., perkins, d. & fisher, a. (2003). the role of power in oppression, liberation and wellness. proposal for international collaboration on research and action. recuperado en junio de 2007, en http://powercommunity.blogspot.com. rappaport, j. (2000). community narratives: tales of terror and joy. american journal of community psychology, 28(1), 1-24. 530 building participative, empowering & diverse communities places of fear and attachment. how azoreans perceive seismic and volcanic risk. isabel estrela rego, ana moura arroz education department, university of the azores, ponta delgada, portugal. imcer@uac.pt abstract earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have been regular phenomena in the azores. in spite of the knowledge already gathered by local historians and earth sciences researchers, there are no scientific data on the sociocultural dimensions of volcanic and seismic risks. a research project on risk perception of natural hazards (topoi metus) is now being carried out in order to study the social cosmographies of seismic and volcanic hazard. based on data produced along fourteen in-depth extensive interviews conducted in five of the nine islands of the archipelago, this presentation focuses on preliminary findings of perceptions regarding seismic and volcanic risk profiles, patrimonial and economic vulnerability to those risks, and risk management (i.e. information and actions taken before a crisis, and during the response and recovery phases of a disaster situation). exploratory results show that people living in the most vulnerable areas insist in staying there, even when they are aware of the dangerousness involved in it. to uncover the apparently irrational reasons beneath these options will allow understanding some of the barriers encountered by risk managers engaged in the minimization of destructive impacts of those natural hazards. knowing that people both ‘put themselves in the hands of god’ and highly identify with the patrimonial history of their living place may help to develop knowledge to more fully inform civil protection/defence policies. results may also allow reconceptualising the variable “identification with the local” in the scope of risk perception. key words: seismic risk perception; volcanic risk perception; place attachment; the azores islands; introduction the azores are nine islands of volcanic origin located over the triple junction of the north american, eurasian, and african tectonic plates. these characteristics make phenomena such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions regular natural threats throughout the archipelago’s six centuries of history. some of those were quite expressive natural events with serious impacts in the physical and social environment of the islands. recent events, still in the memory of azoreans (earthquakes of faial island, in 1998, and terceira island, in 1980) have caused deaths, wounded, homeless and mass destruction of buildings in several villages in different islands. the seriousness of the potential impact and the uncertainty of occurrence of seismic and volcanic events in the islands justify the social investment that has been put forward both in their study and in the implementation of civil protection/defence devices. however, in spite of the notion that a successful process of decision making and implementation of complex strategies of risk management depends upon the integration of both people’s perceptions of risk and experts’ risk assessment (bernardo, 1998; brunsdon & king, 2002; renn, 2004; sjöberg, 2000), mailto:imcer@uac.pt 531 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the management of these natural risks has been solely based on experts’ evaluations. in other words, seismic and volcanic risk appraisal and management in the azores have not taken into consideration the analysis of the social and cultural factors which frame people’s perceived risks as well as their perceptions and behaviour towards those risk situations. in addition, there is also a lack of knowledge concerning other elements considered to be crucial for an efficient way of managing natural hazards the communication between all parts involved in the situation, the participation of citizens and stakeholders in decisions, and the trust people hold in persons and institutions responsible for risk governance (renn, 2004). in fact, drawing on a wide and quite comprehensive perspective on risk governance, a framework proposed by irgc – international risk governance council, a central assumption in this study is that governance choices today are believed to call for an interchange between governmental institutions, economic agents, and the civil society (irgc, 2005). if there is to be interplay among them, considering the different stakeholders’ interests and the possibility of eventual conflicts with respect to what is at risk and how severe that risk might be, it would be necessary to understand, develop and integrate different perspectives of risk. earthquakes, like other natural and technological disasters, are random, rare and when they occur there is not time to implement risk control measures. due to these characteristics, they are usually perceived as threatening and fatal – risk as a fatal threat model (irgc, 2005; renn, 04). contrary to technological hazards, which are understood as resulting from reasoned decision, natural events may also be seen as catastrophic events that no one can escape from or, except god, can control. for that reason, such situations, including earthquakes, are often seen as prescribed phenomena – risk as fate model (idem). renn (2004), in his revision of perception models used by society in perceiving and assessing risk, posits that people react to those sources of risk either by moving away from them, when they can afford doing it and when events occur regularly or frequently, or by denying them or their severity, if they are rare and random, as the risks under study in this research. knowing that a high risk perception does not lead necessarily to people moving away from the threat (gaillard, 2008), then what can explain the decision to stay in one’s living place? also, why people who are exposed to seismic/volcanic risk are frequently less equipped to deal with those events than they should be (spitall et al., 2008)? controllability associated to natural hazards such as earthquakes is not related to when they will occur but rather to the strength and the capacity of systems and social structures to manage disasters. thus, can it be expected that having populations better prepared to deal with this source of risk will contribute to both empower them and reduce the denial of the threat they face? studies on public’s perception of earthquake risk concerned with loss reduction strategies identified factors that seem to contribute to the adoption and support of protective measures and behaviour. some of these factors are: recent experience, degree of personal exposure, degree of perceived control over risks, awareness of mitigation options, the availability of resources to address them, trust in the loss-reduction strategies suggested and those who intend to implement them, perception of responsibility for loss reduction actions, the social costs and benefits associated with risks (e.g. gouch, et al., 1995; palm and hodgson, 1992; smith, 1992; referred in wachtendorf & sheng, 2002). other research (brunsdon & king, 2002; shaw, 2003; mileti, 1993) also focusing on risk perception and risk reduction have pointed out the crucial role that education, families 532 building participative, empowering & diverse communities and the community play in contributing for both a culture of preparedness and disaster recovery. place identity and local attachment, which have been studied with a greater emphasis in the fields of community psychology and environmental psychology, can also mediate/moderate practices of preparing for and coping with disasters. a considerable body of literature in those fields has been devoted to explaining the links between people and places. ‘sense of community’ (sarason, 1986; mcmillan & chavis, 1986; chavis & pretty, 1999), ‘place/local identity’ (proshansky, fabián & kaminoff, 1983), and the emotional bond between people and place or ‘place attachment’ (tuan, 1974; cuba & hummon, 1993; mesch & manor, 1998) have been central constructs in research intended to explore and clarify people’s behaviour, perceptions and decisions regarding aspects of their physical and social surroundings. the relationship of those constructs with variables such as the adoption of sustainable habits and behaviours (pol, 2006), the use of natural resources (bonaiuto et al, 2008), land use changes (bonaiuto et al, 2002) or the support of protected areas (carrus et al, 2005) are just a few examples. studies on seismic/volcanic risk perception have focused on issues such as confidence on emergency plans and public officials (barberi, et al, 2008), household adjustment to earthquake hazard (lindell & perry, 2000) or hazard preparedness (ngyuen et al, 2006; spitall et al., 2008) and only some have looked at the relationship of risk perception with people’s sense of community or people’s attachment to their living place (barberi, et al, 2008; gaillard, 2008). to address the above mentioned gap between experts’ risk assessment and people’s risk perceptions, as well as the lack of information on disaster preparedness in the azores, a research project, “topoi metus social cosmographies of danger. risk perception of natural disasters”, is now being carried out by social science researchers in collaboration with geological risk researchers at the university of the azores. this study, along with others focusing on risk perception and communication regarding different hazards, aims at contributing to bring together and to facilitate the communication among all parts involved in a particular risk situation: decision-makers, researchers, citizens and the media. as such, in addition to creating knowledge on the social dimension of risk situations, it is crucial to develop communication assets and devices (videos, web, video games, cartoons, flyers, etc) capable of supporting decision and action intended to mitigate risk sources and/or consequences. thus, the study’s major goals are: 1. to explore personal narratives of natural disaster situations in order to both understand how dangerous and uncontrollable events are interpreted and to obtain information capable of helping in the construction of a questionnaire; 2. to construct a questionnaire, sensitive to the azorean context, the mysticism historically embedded in natural disasters, and the people’s identification and emotional relationship with the place, (1) to study perceptions of risk associated to natural disasters (i.e. the existent knowledge on the agent of risk, the risk profile and the vulnerability of the different systems to the risk; the public evaluation of the social response to these situations; and people’s commitment to a ‘preparedness culture’), and (2) to clarify communication aspects (strategies and means of communication people value the most; public trust; and what functions should risk messages serve); and 3. to validate the questionnaire for stratified samples of the population in different islands of the archipelago. the research was organized in 2 phases: the first was an exploratory study of people’s narratives devoted to uncover their perception of seismic and volcanic risk, and the second was 533 building participative, empowering & diverse communities dedicated to the construction of a questionnaire, based on the information gathered in the exploratory phase, and its validation in the azores. the study is still in progress and is expected to be finished towards the end of 2009. this presentation focuses on the first phase and on preliminary findings emerging from data obtained through the participants’ narratives. method the topoy metus study will be based on thirty in-depth, individual interviews in five of the nine islands of the archipelago (são miguel, santa maria, terceira, faial, and flores). these islands were selected by employing a maximum variation sampling (patton, 1990) and by using as criteria the frequency, time of last occurrence and severity of seismic and volcanic events. this presentation focuses on data produced along fourteen interviews already carried out1, with an average duration of 60 minutes, conducted in three of the nine islands of the archipelago (são miguel, santa maria, terceira) as to participants in the study, in order to obtain a greater diversity, the thirty participants were stratified in terms of age (10 from 18-25 years old group; 10 from 26-55 years old group; 10 from more than 56 years old group) and sex (15 males; 15 females). a set of predetermined open-ended questions were designed to address a system of four dimensions, and 14 sub-dimensions of seismic and volcanic risk perception as well as predictors such as age, sex, place of birth, place of residence, religious orientation, educational level, profession and place attachment– connectedness with the place. given the salience of this last predictor in the present study, it makes sense to present some questions asked to assess it – “how connected are you with this place? how much do you enjoy living here? would you live in another place? knowing the dangers of living in the azores, why do persist in living here? what are the main reasons for you to live here/not moving to another place?” the interview dimensions were: (1) risk source characterization (e.g. “how do you describe an earthquake? and how do you describe a volcano?” “what causes earthquakes/volcanoes in the azores?”); (2) risk profile assessment (e.g. “have all the islands been equally affected by those natural events?” “which events do you think were the most severe?” “do you think that the probability of occurring an earthquake in this island is smaller, equal or larger than the probability of an earthquake to occur in another island? why?” “is there anything we can control in an earthquake or in a volcano? what is it?”); (3) systems’ vulnerability evaluation (e.g. “who has been more affected by earthquakes/ volcanoes? has anyone benefited with those events? who? how?” “in your opinion, which aspects can make a given place more vulnerable than another place?” “what kind of damage can earthquakes and volcanoes cause?”); (4) risk management before, in response to, and recovering from the crisis. (e.g. “what should people do to prepare themselves for earthquakes / volcanoes?” “do you consider that what is being done so far guaranties peoples’ safety? why? what do you think that might be failing regarding prevention? which actions should be carried on to improve the situation? the information you have is sufficient to face the problem? where did you learn what you know about the way of acting in the situation?); and (5) trust – in information processes; in risk management processes (e.g. “how much do you trust the entities involved in crisis management?” “how much do you trust the information that is given to citizens before, during, and recovering from a crisis?” “who, from all persons and entities involved in the management of these phenomena, do you trust most? why?” “who can’t we trust? why”). 1 interviews carried out until the preparation of this presentation in may of 2008. 534 building participative, empowering & diverse communities data are being content analyzed by the three members of the research team, individually at first and jointly later, in order to reach a consensus. the analysis aims are twofold: (1) to identify data ‘regularities’ the participants’ more salient shared perceptions and perspectives regarding the risks under study; and (2) to spot data ‘specificities’ the diversity of participants’ ways of understanding and explaining phenomena. while the former may account for possible trends or tendencies in perceiving the various dimensions of risks and, therefore, may allow for some sort of comparison with findings from other studies, the later would provide the heterogeneity of positions crucial for the empirical oriented construction of the intended seismic and volcanic risk perception questionnaire in a further phase of the study. the findings presented next refer to a preliminary analysis of data from fourteen interviews analyzed up to the present. preliminary data analysis earthquakes were regarded as the most serious (more dangerous; uncontrollable; with more devastating effects on social and physical contexts) natural hazard in the azores. other natural hazards (i.e. small tornados, floods, land sliding) and ‘man-made’ hazards (i.e. “the azores being attacked as a retaliation of cimeira das lajes”a., male 76 yrs. old), were also appointed as significant but, curiously, volcanoes were not mentioned at all. the smaller relevance attributed to volcanoes is somewhat reinforced by the difference in ways of describing the two natural hazards under study: while earthquake descriptions rested on a multiplicity of dimensions sensorial, emotional, physical, and cognitive – (e.g. “earthquakes put everything shaking. you see and feel things trembling. (…) they can have either a tectonic or volcanic nature. (…) they scare me.” m., female, 45 yrs old), volcanoes were described in a much simplistic and typified manner and often portrayed as spectacular events (e.g. “a volcano is when the magma comes out of the earth. (…) peaces of earth in fire projected in the sky” j., male, 19 yrs old). nevertheless, there is a strong connection of emotions with both earthquakes and volcanoes. referring to them, the majority of interviewees, regardless of their age, sex, island of residence or previous experience with this kind of events, expressed fear and anxiety (i.e. fear of dying; fear of loosing a loved one). regarding the perceived severity of events, most participants stated that seismic and volcanic risks varied in the various islands (some islands being very much affected while others having no seismic and volcanic activity and events ranging from quite strong to very weak). as matter of fact, the way people recognize the threat varies with the degree of perceived personal exposure. the interviewees considered that earthquakes cannot be predicted but pointed out that the weather and specifically a certain type of weather (e.g. quiet, muffled, warm, ‘deaf’), was a sign of earthquake announcement. animal (strange, bizarre) behaviour was also appointed as premonitions by many respondents. for some of them this uncontrollability seems to justify their lack of concern in adopting measures to get better prepared for disaster (e.g. “what can we do?! nothing. earthquakes don’t announce themselves! a., female, 23yrs old). others, despite considering those events uncontrollable believe there can be a relative controllability by strengthening the infrastructures resistance and/or by developing an efficient social response and individual preparedness to crisis – (e.g. “little can be done to control the situation except being better prepared to respond during a crisis, for example: to have more resistant houses and buildings in general; knowing what to do during the occurrences” j., male, 23yrs old). in a further and 535 building participative, empowering & diverse communities deeper analysis of these results it would be interesting to see if there is juxtaposition between the prediction of earthquakes and the plausibility of preparedness in the justification people provide for their behaviours and their commitment with a culture of precaution. far from the time when earthquakes and volcanoes were seen as god’ s punishments and/ or signs of discontentment, as described in the 16th through 18th century historical narratives, today’s prevailing explanations are mainly grounded on factual and/or scientific evidence. however, the majority of interviewees think that these events cause losses in the generality of the affected populations: casualties were appointed as the worst consequence, followed by patrimonial losses. with respect to who is more negatively affected by the disaster situation and who benefits with an earthquake, opinions were associated to the ‘seismic experience’ of respondents. those who had never had that experience tended to believe that there were no gains in these situations (e.g.” nobody can gain anything with an earthquake, everybody is affected (…) the poor people is the population segment suffering more with earthquakes” e., female, 75 yrs old). on the other hand, those who had experienced an earthquake reported different points of view: an emphasis on losses suffered by a particular segment of the population (e.g. “the ones that had something [a house, a business] before the earthquake but were not rich are the most affected one; they lose everything they possessed and had worked for throughout their entire lives and then, because of that, they are ‘rewarded’ when they are considered rich and don’t get any support to repair the damages suffered” l., male, 60 yrs old); and, curiously, the belief that everybody, both at a personal and at a community level, gained something with an earthquake (e.g. “everybody gets something out of it. and, in general, the society also benefits because of the reconstruction that gets done in the buildings and everything. j., male, 23yrs old). the inexistence of a culture of precaution becomes more evident with data pertaining to risk management on the pre-occurrence phase of disasters. the majority of interviewees revealed not doing anything in special to get prepared for these kinds of events, and not needing more information in order to be better prepared to respond to such situations. this idea sounds paradoxical taking into consideration the negative evaluations addressed to public entities. the government and civil defence forces are seen as being quite inactive in preparing citizens for a crisis. regarding trust on the various parts involved, the interviewees showed a tendency for trusting others – official and non official entities – regarding both risk/crisis communication and risk/crisis management, although opinions differ with respect to public entities: (i.e. “… if there is a disaster the different entities – military, government and ngos joint themselves and come to rescue and help” – a. female, 40 yrs. old ; “i want to believe them, but i am not sure to what extent they tell us the truth”a., male 76 yrs. old; “no, we cannot trust anybody anymore” l., male, 60 yrs old; or “no, they do not really care to help people” e., female, 75 yrs old). with regard to ‘place attachment’, interviewees reported having a quite strong connection to their living place and that feeling was grounded on both social-emotional reasons birth place, life history, interpersonal relationships, knowing the place, and beauty; as well as material/quality of life reasons owning a house, having facilities near the house. participants who had lived through a seismic and/or volcanic crisis stressed the solidarity among people and the capacity of affected community residents to solve conflicts as the major facts in those situations. although these are preliminary analyses, data suggest interesting paths to explore later. taking into consideration the uncontrollability of events, the strong social and emotional ties with 536 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the place and among people, and a general sense of basic trust our results gain new contours. understanding how these three tendencies, which are positive and functional, conjugate to sustain rationales of avoidance and disinvestment regarding crisis preparation is a challenge that remains open to be addressed next. references barberi, f., davis, m.s., isaia, r., nave, r. & ricci, t. 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(2002). demographics and experiences as factors of earthquake risk perceptions. preliminary paper #322, university of delaware disaster research centre. 538 building participative, empowering & diverse communities disasters and social participation in a nahuat community from mexico maria eugenia sánchez y díaz de rivera iberoamericana university of puebla f. h. eduardo almeida acosta iberoamericana university of puebla antonio vázquez carreón luis félix aguilar francisco sánchez conde animation and development project, civil association. beatriz acevedo calderón rural school rafael ramirez, ayotzinapan, puebla. abstract this article is organized in four sections. the first one introduces to the topics of disasters and community participation. the second section describes a participative paving project of a rural community as means of confronting a disaster in december, 1989. a snowstorm destroyed the region’s coffee plantations dramatically affecting its population. an analysis of the relationships of vulnerability, resilience and community participation is presented. the third section is an account of community’s social participation facing intense rains in october 1999 and the positive effects of the joint action of inhabitants from the community, teachers and university professionals. the fourth section presents the dramatic events caused by the dean hurricane in august-september 2007. this section stresses the importance of preventive actions derived to resilience and community participation. key words: disasters, vulnerability, resilience, community organization and social participation. introduction: the disasters the increasing frequency of destructive events. sustainable development, eco-development, sustainable society are some of the multiple and varied concepts that, especially in the seventies, started to be developed to face socioenvironmental challenges. the report called club of rome: the limits to growth could be signaled as a symbolic date about the growing consciousness of something that had become evident from decades ago, the crescent deterioration of the human’s habitat due to the actions taken by humans. in this context, the topic of disasters and their study started to acquire a prominent place in the scientific realm as well as in public policy, given the increase of the frequency of destructive events in diverse locations of the planet. explanations of disasters have their own history: they went from religious interpretations that considered them to be “god’s punishments”, -a belief widely spread during ancient times as well as the middle agesgoing to the enlightenment 539 building participative, empowering & diverse communities interpretations of disasters that emphasizes an anthropogenic feature. it is now a common place the recognition that the so called “natural disasters” are actually a social product and the result of a human civilizing process which has been taking place during the past two centuries: industrialization, population growth, the “development” and happiness paradigm, all of them modernity’s features in different versions, such as those of western capitalism and that of the socialist bloc. the split society-nature started to take alarming proportions, and current informational capitalism, post-industrial and post-socialist, flexible, global and at the end savage, in the one we are immersed, has not been able to cope nature’s destruction. the issue is not an easy one to face because it involves cultural constructions from long date. the hegemonic cultural trend has been and is still one that promotes lifestyles that imply a high degree of energy and water consumption, and at the same time, a great production of waste. these ways of life have already become unviable for the whole population and they are only possible for a minority of the people. those who live in such lifestyles are not willing to change them, and those who have no access to them, desire to have it. in addition to that, the structural and symbolic frameworks that hold them in place and feed those unviable ways of life are not easy to revert, or at least their transformation includes great social costs in doing it. the environmental summits, environmentalist organizations, the growing debate about global warming, air’s pollution, and scarcity of water and, in general, what has been called climate change has allowed some actions to be taken by some governments and citizens. even though the effects of their actions have had limited results, these are symbolically significant. new phenomenon’s conceptualization from the decade of the eighties, as an answer to the increase in the frequency of the so called disasters, the conceptual frameworks started to grow rapidly through important analytic works (dynes, r. r. 1993, quaratelli, e.l. 2000, maskery, a. 1989, blaikie, 1996, aguirre et al, 1995). this conceptualization includes multiple forms of categories of risk, threat, vulnerability and resilience or resistance capacity; and have been distinguished as calamity, disaster or catastrophe according to their intensity levels. among different conceptions of disaster, one that seems to be relevant is the one which regards it as a natural change, ordinary or extraordinary, that involves damages to human beings. if there is no damage done to human groups, it cannot be regarded, in strict sense, as a disaster. taking this definition as a starting point, it can be said that the disaster’s magnitude –and in consequence the level of risk for the population affected by it-is directly proportional to their vulnerability. the concept of socio-environmental risk has been identified as one of great analytic usefulness and diverse authors define it as the relationship between vulnerability and threat. vulnerability is a population’s fragility, the latter understood as a geographical location, insufficient material infrastructure, precarious housing, public institution’s weaknesses, or social isolation. threat, on the other hand, is a sudden change in the environment. the greater the vulnerability or fragility are, the greater the risk of damage in a given population and as well its difficulty to recover from it. that is why a population living in extreme poverty, located in areas where the impact of climate change is more direct and frequent, is a population in a situation of high risk. 540 building participative, empowering & diverse communities finally, from physics, it has been adopted the concept of resilience, understood as the capacity to resist before destruction and also the capacity to re-construct after a traumatic situation. it is a person’s or group’s capacity to adapt well in the face of tragedy, trauma and threat. indigenous communities and disasters. indigenous communities from mesoamerica, as those from other parts of the world, live in a paradox. on the one hand, their way of living is precarious and they are subjugated to different types of oppression, discrimination and harassment which increase their vulnerability. on the other hand, they have accumulated an extremely important and relevant knowledge regarding their environmental surroundings, that, as it was said by the un secretary general, ban ki-moon “the world is paying increasing attention to the leadership of indigenous populations in environmental matters” (onu, 2007). traditional knowledge has been useful in different situations to diminish the impact of natural disasters. in a recent symposium held at oxford university it was mentioned how indigenous populations “use mangrove swamp areas to absorb the strength of waves and tsunamis, and some others apply genetic diversity in farming to prevent total failure of certain crops. although, it is also evident that many indigenous communities currently have to adapt to new ways of life due to environmental changes. that is the case of saami communities devoted to deer pasturage in sweden who have to face the challenge to find food under a thick layer of ice due to the increase of snowstorms. the andean communities are facing serious problems of food scarcity, which has resulted from extreme climates (onu, 2007). social participation we define social participation as availability of the members of a collectivity to interrupt their daily life to devote time to the production of public goods. disasters, by definition, interrupt daily life, which does not automatically translates into social participation but, without a doubt, promote it. the greater or lesser habit of the affected groups to participate is one of the factors that diminishes or increases its vulnerability. with regard to the response actions to face disasters, ways of participation are varied and in this work we will analyze events that took place in a community in the north-eastern mountains of puebla by three destructive events: a frost in 1989, heavy rains in 1999 and hurricane dean in 2007. a special emphasis will be given to the process that took place during the frost of 1989. a nahuat community and a non governmental organization this work underlines the social participation process to face the consequences of the frost of 1989, and it also analyzes the impact of the relationship between the community and a ngo in the response actions to the disaster. twelve years of intercultural relations in the northern mountains of puebla (sanchez, m.e., 1985) between an indigenous community and an urban team1 led to the constitution of three community approaches of self-development, ethno-development and eco-development. twenty-two years later, in 2007, those approaches seem to be more modest as a consequence of 1 the nahuat community of san miguel tzinacapan and prade group (prade stands for: animation and development project civil association in spanish). 541 building participative, empowering & diverse communities the globalizing changes and environmental catastrophes. instead of self-development, it should be talked about decent survival; instead of ethno-development, cultural coalition; and instead of eco-development, disasters prevention (sanchez, m.e. & e. almeida, 2005). 1989, the year when it snowed, was the starting date for these new utopian horizons. survival, cultures’ coalition and disasters prevention are tightly related to each other as it will be showed in the following parts of this work. the snow storm of 1989 and the community paving project. social communitarian participation has been, in the nahuat community studied here, the central element of its survival, also crossed by its history of external and internal conflicts of diverse intensity (sanchez, m.e. & e. almeida; 2005). the types of participation blended new forms with traditional ones. it gave rise to the kind of the interaction between the peasants and the mestizo group of professionals who established in the community since 1973. towards 1987 participation had been consolidated in four local organizations.2 in december 1989, a snowstorm occurred in the cuetzalan region, in the northeastern mountains of the state of puebla, where is located the community studied in this work (gutierrez, l. & rodriguez, f.j.)3. the economy from this zone depended basically on the coffee plantations that had been established since the end of the xix century, and it had become almost a single crop farming. snow burned almost all coffee crops, leaving the zone -san miguel tzinacapan includedwithout their main means of living. oddly, almost simultaneously, the international agreement that regulated world coffee prices was cut, making its price drop rapidly. the “natural” disaster and the transnational disaster took place at the same time. in puebla state, in the eighties, coffee was grown in 48 out of its 217 counties. coffee production occupied nearly 50,000 hectares. northern mountains from puebla had a production of around 1000.2 kg. per hectare. in this zone 90% of producers were small owners and the rest of them were landowners who took up almost all the stock of the production of peasants. the latter instead of finding the economic support for their needs made richer and richer the caciques (chiefs) who controlled like a monopoly the commercialization of coffee. towards the end of the eighties, coffee occupied the second place in agricultural production in the state of puebla and it was the most important cash crop for export in the country. northern mountains from the state produced 90% of the total production of the state of puebla and it was the main income for its inhabitants. the mexican institution for coffee (inmecafe in spanish) regulated market prices and acquired part of the production while at the same time handled export permissions. between inmecafe and hoarders made peasants remain in a big economic dependency. looking for alternatives to migration as a result of the frosts on december 23th and 24th, 1989 in the northern mountains of puebla, the inhabitants’ survival, particularly that of indigenous population, was in question and 2 the local organizations were: a rural production society, a society of social solidarity, a cooperative for consumption and the ngo of people external to the community. 3 a first version of the description of these events was presented in march of 1991, at the conference of participative research organized by the psychoanalysis seminary a.c. (almeida et al, 1991) 542 building participative, empowering & diverse communities temporary migration became the main alternative for survival. it was urgent to create temporary employment so people from the town were able to have an income which could help them keeping their standard of living and at the same time creating a community improvement. the elaboration of a paving project: participation in cascade. in one of the meetings of the health center “tapajtiloyan”, in january of 1990, the possibility to look for alternatives for subsistence were discussed; not only for san miguel community but for all neighboring towns. the health center coordinator4 and a peasant5 from san miguel –a member of the health committee who also belonged to the research center of prade a.c.thought that a paving project for the community could be a temporary solution. on january 7th, 1990 the idea was presented to the research center of prade, and two other members from this center6 started to collect information to design the project. first, existent potentialities were analyzed: both internal and external to the community and it was found that if it was possible to put them together to work, the project should become a reality. they were aware that the majority of the people from rural communities had knowledge and abilities but the lack of economic resources make it difficult to achieve their objectives. they were also aware of the fact that in order to provide the project with a formal structure they would have to take into account existing opportunities in san miguel due to local independent organizations. these organization would be the platform to create the committee pro paving, which would be in charge of managing financial resources; and to lead, advise and supervise the project. the participating organizations were: a) cepec a society of social solidarity; b) the tzinacapan section of the regional cooperative; c) the animation and development project (prade); and the rural production society from san miguel. the first groups to mobilize were the health center and the prade research center. after them, the cooperative store and cepec coordinated efforts and finally, the society of rural production was integrated to the whole group (almeida, 1999). a first draft of the project was written, in which the main causes why it was being designed were described and its objectives established: 1o. to face the crisis produced by the frost. 2o. create employment in the community to support its inhabitants, regardless their political affiliation. 3o. improve town’s streets, as a community benefit. the aims of the project were: 1o. create a committee which held the project’s’ legal representation. the task was not easy since it had to be agreed amidst political turmoil derived by the close elections for the county auxiliary president from the jurisdiction. 2o. write a list of the needed tools for the project. 3o. convince the town inhabitants to donate the stones for the paving. 4o. determine the places to be paved 5o. define the technique to conduct the paving. it implied to know how many stones would be needed, how to conduct the cobbled paving, the procedure to steam roll and how to 4 blanca rosas (+) prade, a.c. member. 5 luis félix 6 antonio vázquez and eduardo almeida 543 building participative, empowering & diverse communities locate the stones. in order to do this whole process some consults were conducted with the inhabitants of the town who had the local knowledge. in march, the first draft of the project was presented to the board of representatives of the four independent organizations from san miguel. the board approved the project. at the same time, a contract was established with an anthropologist from the national indigenous institute (ini)7, who suggested that the project should be presented to de state delegation of the ministry of budgetary management. local elections and national recognition: social effervescence and institutional support at the same time that the project was being designed under a participatory approach, another two important processes were evolving in a parallel way. on the one hand, since the end of 1989 the four organizations under the leadership of the local cooperative, were conducting an intense political campaign in order to support their candidate for the local presidency. this process ended the 25th of march having as a winner the organizations’ candidate which would become a decisive factor in the implementation of the paving project. on the other hand, “nexos”, a magazine of national circulation, published a call for proposals to apply for the solidarity grant 1989. one of the members of the ngo8 wrote a memory of actions taken by prade, a.c. which was sent to be considered at the contest. on may the 15th the board of advisers from pronasol (national solidarity program) informed prade, a.c. that they had been awarded the 1989 recognition. this recognition included three million pesos cash from the time (around 300,000 current pesos), which were devoted to complete the payment of the land where the store of the local cooperative was established. the recognition was also a main factor in obtaining the resources granted by pronasol in order to implement the cobbled paving project. the procedures: nightmare and lessons learned. towards the end of march, the final document of the project was submitted to the state delegation of the ministry of budgetary management. the document was signed by the secretary general of the group of the four independent organizations from san miguel and the directors of each organization. from march to july the pro-paving committee conducted several negotiations which cannot be described here nor analyze, but which also were part of an important process of training, participation and coordination of the community with external institutions. on may 29th was formally established the committee before the notary from zacapoaxtla. the project finally obtained the approval on july 1st. there was a waiting till october 19th when the local president could pick up in puebla the first part of he deal: 66.580 million of pesos (66,580 current pesos). the project’s implementation: the community as an enthusiastic workplace in october 1990, the inhabitants were anxiously awaiting for the starting of the works. 10 months had already passed from the date of the disaster. discussions about the project that would offer possibilities of employment, income and 7 pedro martínez 8 maria eugenia sanchez 544 building participative, empowering & diverse communities community improvement had been taking place for over six months. a popular assembly had already taken place to organize the work. finally, monday october 22th, 1990 they started working. by then, a big number of head of households had already migrated in search of employment and income. an average of 200 peasants was dedicated to the cobbled paving of the streets of the village. the community became a workplace where enthusiasm was obvious. suddenly, on november 23rd, after the visit of some low-ranking government employees from puebla, the works were suspended. the second delivery of resources was postponed until a financial audit would be conducted. the reality was there were no major irregularities, but it was a signal of bureaucratic and monopolizing jealousy, since the resources had been directly granted by the central government of mexico to the community. all organizations involved and the local presidency took action once again to face this challenge. they were successful in getting the remaining money. on 4th december, the issue was solved in favor of the community. the ministry of finance granted the remaining 266.320 million pesos (266.320). these resources were locally administered and financial reports were presented according to the advancement of works. it had been agreed that each worker would receive a payment of 100 pesos daily, a sum bigger than the minimum salary of that year (1989). works started again on december 5th, 1990 and they continued until september, 1991. the community’s cobbled paving was done at steady pace; people from san miguel tzinacapan and from nearby communities participated in the work regardless their political affiliation. all works were coordinated by the committee and the local presidency. each saturday payments were done and an assembly of all workers took place in order to analyze project’s advancement. the committee reoriented the work, pointed out deficiencies as well as good decisions. it was also a space where workers presented complaints and suggestions to the committee. a strict control of resources was applied and all workers received the same payment. the monies were asked for employment and they were applied on it. the relation among vulnerability, resilience and social participation the structure of participation the project’s idea emerged from both an endogenous actor and an exogenous one in order to face an evident need. from the beginning of the project, some community’s organizations participated in the project’s design. the political campaign was oriented to promote its viability. the traditional indigenous organization from the town –religious assignments supported the project too. the inhabitants’ participation was first mediated by the organization representatives’ action, and then it acquired a complete prominence in the implementation and the benefits obtained by communitarian work. state bureaucratic action within the community was reduced to its minimum expression. there were clear minimum norms both in the organization and the work. it was possible to combat and defeat outsider bureaucratic intervention. the community provided workforce and the material resources and it was well aware that funds granted by pronasol were obtained due to its coordinated organization. the sense of co-responsibility was developed and fostered because no one could claim unilaterally the project’s success: it was not due to a single organization, nor to the local presidency, nor to pronasol, neither to the state. the success was the whole community’s success. 545 building participative, empowering & diverse communities an authentic counterbalanced system facilitated the transparent management of resources. local presidency was permanently supervised by the pro-project committee and this in turn was supervised by the former. in the same way, salaries’ equality impeded the privileged allocation of funds for only some people. weekly assemblies also contributed to the honest management of budget. the memory of participation. ten years later, twenty-one members of the community who had taken part in the paving project were interviewed. interviews were held between may 19th and 25th, 2000. the memory of the process reported by the interviewees is similar with regard to the concrete actions. they all remember the places from where the stones were brought: ahuach, tepeitic and tepetzalan; who donated them and which construction and carve workers participated too. regarding the atmosphere lived during the process, interviewees in 2000 keep many memories about this intense community action. they remember that in it women and men worked hard and also that people from other communities joined them, people from ayotzinapan, xaltipan, yohualichan, tepetzintan, pinahuistan, cuetzalan, acaxiloco, txicuilan and cuahutamazaco. they all emphasize that the success achieved was due to popular participation. the interviews results clearly demonstrate that in people’s minds the paving was a great collective action, carried out by the people and their own authorities. ten years after the disaster and the work done by the people, they still remember those times in which people from the town and the region participated in a collective enterprise. answers are more dispersed and vary widely regarding to having more precise memories about how participation was organized, from where were obtained the funds, who had the initiative to present the project, etc. only three interviewees directly mention that this project was aimed to face the impacts of the snowstorm. risk mitigated by social organization the community of san miguel tzinacapan has a long history of resistance as many indigenous communities have; and this has allowed the village to survive and celebrate despite of its economic and geographic location and the structure of social subordination that has placed it in a high level of risk. the interaction of a group of external professionals who emigrated to san miguel since 1973, let reinforce a collective self-esteem and trigger a new organization process. it allowed diversifying and reinforcing links with institutions from outside the community. it also helped diminishing in an important way, the town’s vulnerability and therefore, the risk of the community. in this way, the disaster caused by the snow, could be faced in a creative way. nevertheless, without the resilience of indigenous cultures that have faced deprivation and uncertainty for centuries, the level of participation achieved in the cobbled paving project, as well as the atmosphere lived during the process, could not be explained. 546 building participative, empowering & diverse communities confronting the intensive rains of 1999: indigenous people, teachers, and university actors. 3.1. an announced disaster: torrential rains in september – october 1999 (acevedo, b. 2002: 115-123) during september and october 1999, exactly between september 29th and october 7th there was sequence of torrential rains in the mountains (fernandez fuentes, a. 1999: 7) which had a strong impact deforesting hills, as well as deteriorating poorly built and roads and houses and public buildings settled in risky locations. the region changed, flooding cut the system of communication, harvest was lost as well as properties and some human lives. popular reaction to these terrible events exceeded by far actions taken by authorities (acevedo, b. 2002). the area is vulnerable and as it has been demonstrated, storms have happened again in subsequent years. preventive actions from authorities have been very limited. although, it has to be said that the population has been learning from these painful experiences and according to their limited resources they have been developing measures to prevent the consequences of possible disasters (fritz, c. e. 1979; toxqui furlong, m.g. 2000). 3.2. san miguel and cuetzalan festivals and the water torrents. during the autumn of 1999, the patron saints’ festivals of san miguel tzinacapan and san francisco cuetzalan were being organized. in san miguel tzinacapan, the festival of september 29th was being awaited as usual, with happiness despite the tensions that had taken place in the previous months. the fear was also the same as usual: that it would rain that day and the procession of the patron saint and the dances would be affected. in fact, this happened; it rained heavily from september 28th till october 1st. during two days rain stopped and it was expected that on october 4th the festival of san francisco in cuetzalan could take place joyfully. unfortunately, on october 3rd at four o’clock in the afternoon started to rain again and it rained as it had never rained before in all the region, from that day till october 6th. the indigenous market from cuetzalan was swept along by rain and the streets became rivers. water came out from the hills as internal cascades exploding. merchants, tourists, and the entire town were in shock. there were roads’ landslides, and parts of some hills fell apart. the region was overflowed, coffee plantations were destroyed, water swept away animals, and many houses were seriously affected as well as some people died. calls asking for help started to be transmitted through the region’s indigenous radio station xectz. it was known through television that the disaster covered a big area from the states of puebla and veracruz. fear was generalized. 3.3. social dynamic and disaster’s evolution. rapidly, help brigades were formed with voluntaries coordinated by the county’s government manager. the municipal auditorium was habilitated as a refuge. on october 5th, a brigade tried without success to help the tozan community, which is located in the margins of the river of the same name. then a group from tzinacapan coordinated by the local president managed to save the seventy adults and children from tozan. they were accommodated in the presidency office. in order to provide help to the inhabitants from xaltepec, the small buildings of the takachiualis commission of human rights, and the nursery of tzinacapan became refuges 547 building participative, empowering & diverse communities too. inexplicably, the president of cuetzalan was absent during all those days. on october 7th and 8th rain stopped, the region was isolated. the roads from cuetzalan to zacapoaxtla, and from ayotoxco to teziutlan were closed. the bridge of buena vista, which was another way of access recently built, was also destroyed. soon stores from cuetzalan started to be empty and hunger started to be felt. groups of exhausted people started to arrive to san miguel from faraway places as putaxcat, plutonichuchut, from huehuetla county. the afternoon of october 9th it rained again. electric shocks damaged the energy plant from mazatepec. there was a shortcut of energy. telephones did not work. the radio xeczn stopped its transmissions. federal and state governments took a long time before showing up in the places affected. there were no works to open the road from zacapoaxtla to cuetzalan as it had been previously announced. 3.4. teachers get organized. given the standstill situation of authorities, some teachers which had taken part in a diploma on “environmental vulnerability” organized by prade a.c. and the iberoamericana university from puebla (zambrano, 1993)started to coordinate teachers from the region in order to take action. monday october 11th teachers from all teaching levels got together in front of the municipal palace of cuetzalan. they coordinated the population to open the road with picks and shovels and invited all communities to join them. the answer was surprising. daily, around 1500 people worked with picks and shovels, stockpiled goods and prepared food for all workers. by the side of ayotoxco people also worked to open the road. civil organizations from puebla, among them the iberoamericana university managed to deliver provisions through buena vista. despite these actions, shortage of supplies kept growing as well as the immobility of authorities. “why is there a total absence of government from all its levels? why not a single helicopter has come down here? why whenever there is a guerrilla somewhere they can land even during the night?” a teacher asked herself. on wednesday 13th a march of protest to puebla started to get organized in order to denounce government’s negligence and indifference. this was not necessary because on october 14th the president of the republic and his “retinue” arrived by helicopter and they could see the inhabitants’ indignation and rage. a whole scenery had been tried to be organized to receive the president, putting pressure on women beneficiaries of the progresa program to pretend the refuge was working properly; that military doctors were providing assistance to the population and giving free medicines. but when he and the governor of puebla entered the county auditorium, there was not a single applause. instead, people were shouting “road, road, road”. both the president of mexico and the governor of puebla had to leave without being able to speak. from october 15th the magic of rebellion, and the presidential visit made it possible to have many helicopters flights with supplies even amidst the rain. the teachers’ organization, especially due to the leadership of those who had been participating in the diploma of environmental vulnerability organized by prade and uia-puebla, played a decisive role in organizing people’s participation, as well as in relevant actions to reestablish normal activities. the confrontation against the authorities make them take their responsibility in confronting the disaster. 548 building participative, empowering & diverse communities iv. the dean hurricane and the festival in 2007 eighteen years after the frost, and eight after the flooding of 1999, the dean hurricane arrived to the northern mountains of puebla with a strength that was unexpected. on august 22nd at the beginning of the afternoon chaos invaded tzinacapan. the elderly people told it had never happened something similar to this. trees were flying, rain was moving horizontally and roofs from many houses were taken away by the wind. the following day after the hurricane passed, it was necessary –although not without a bereavement ritualto finish tearing down the immense age-old tree that guarded the main plaza. pepper trees, one of the main current income resources of the population, were torn down by wind as if it was a crop being weed. the location that was used for the community’s band rehearsals, and where diverse courses took place, became a refuge for those who lost their homes. incessant rain and later, the arrival of the lorenzo hurricane kept causing several damages, leaving their print too. population’s organization and participation were diverse. the support consisted basically providing sheets of steel and cardboard for the reconstruction of roofs of affected houses. bricks and some food supplies were also provided. this help had been sent by federal and state authorities, ngos, universities, rotaries and some others. the intermediaries to deliver the help in the case of tzinacapan have been different organizations from the zone. after the 1989 frost, that ruined the coffee plantations, the zone’s main economic resource, the anxiously asked question of the external professionals was: how was the population going to face the situation? multiple activities had been conducted together by prade, a.c. and the inhabitants of the community since 1973, activities regarding economics, education, health, and organizational issues as well as building links with outside actors. what could be observed after the intensive rains was remarkable. it was remarkable the speed with which domestic groups reorganized to reinforce their productive actions: art crafts elaboration, children’s work as tourists’ guides, young women emigrating to work as domestic workers, young men forming music bands, men and women improving the care given to crops and pepper trees, and creative use of external support. the mental flexibility, the emotional determination, the ability to face uncertainty and deprivationwere all astonishing, as was their capacity to keep celebrating life. this happened once again after the dean hurricane. after the dean hurricane, the festival of the town on september 29th took place with the joy and organization that characterizes it. it is true that there was a need to eliminate festival activities that were held other years, but in no way its essential features were absent. there were seventeen ritual dances: negritos, santiagos, quetzales, voladores, moros, tesoneros, migueles9. there was also a procession through the whole town, basket ball championships, tacos, sweets and ice cream stands, pots and blankets merchants; and the local band played nonstop. many people, women and men of all ages celebrated the festivities wearing embroidered blouses and skirts and sandals. all over the place there were color and life, the religiosity that draws together fright and joy; promises and fears, the talokan and san miguelito. conclusions the interaction process between the tzinacapan community and prade a.c. started in 9 all these names refer to different groups of ritual dances. translator’s note. 549 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 1973. it has gone through all sorts of transformations and vicissitudes. it has meant joint actions in different realms as well as in processes of participative research and investigative participation. it has diminished the community’s vulnerability and increased the ability to confront disasters, as it was shown by the ways in which the different events mentioned in this article have been faced. it also has favored dense levels of social participation. the formative processes of different kinds, the generated networks, the recovery of the oral tradition that served to strengthen the collective spirit, together with the to that inherent cultural capacity of the community to survive with dignity and to celebrate constitute an interesting complex approach in confronting disasters. references acevedo, b. 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(1993). diplomado en formación de dirigentes indígenas. san miguel tzinacapan. psicología social comunitaria. i (1) 32-42. http://www.erc.gr/english/d&scm/murcia-papers/session8/aguirre_viii_revised.pdf 550 building participative, empowering & diverse communities discutindo o conceito de comunidade na psicologia para além da perspectiva identitária tatiana gomes da rocha mestre em psicologia pela universidade federal do rio de janeiro estudante de doutorado do programa de pós-graduação em psicologia da universidade federal do rio de janeiro e-mail: tg.rocha@yahoo.com.br este estudo tem por objetivo discutir o conceito de comunidade no campo da psicologia. na realidade latino americana, as comunidades onde o psicólogo comunitário atua são, na maioria, áreas urbanas ou rurais ameaçadas pela pobreza e pela negação de oportunidades e de direitos sociais iguais. ao buscar conceituar comunidade, observamos que a psicologia comunitária sofre a influência da sociologia tradicional, que a define como uma forma de vivência coletiva perdida com o desenvolvimento da sociedade. a comunidade é compreendida em sua delimitação geográfica e por um modo de associação natural e íntimo entre seus habitantes. ela constitui-se como lugar de afirmação de identidade ao reunir signos linguísticos, crenças, regras, valores e objetivos que são igualmente compartilhados por seus integrantes. a identidade é o eixo que funda a comunidade como um todo orgânico, coerente e unitário. como alternativa a essa perspectiva identitária, neste estudo apontamos uma compreensão sobre a vida em comunidade apoiada no conceito de constituição do comum de antonio negri. palavras-chave: comunidade, identidade, constituição do comum, produção de subjetividade. dado o caráter experimental e clínico que marcou o nascimento da psicologia, sua afetação pelos movimentos comunitários ocorreu tardiamente. segundo bader sawaia (1996), a psicologia passou a problematizar o conceito de comunidade por volta dos anos 70, quando deu-se início ao trabalho envolvendo grupos sociais mais amplos e levando em consideração fenômenos psicossociais. neste estudo, gostaríamos de discutir brevemente como a comunidade foi compreendida no saber e na prática do psicologia, e como na contemporaneidade o entendimento sobre comunidade ganha novas nuances. de uma certa maneira, comunidade parece ser mais um termo de uma lista de conceitos ultrapassados, pela dificuldade de pensá-los atualizadamente. seria ainda possível falar em comunidade, em tempos onde as transformações econômicas, tecnológias, culturais, dentre outras, redesenharam as relações sociais, enfraquecendo laços tradicionais que mantinham conectados os indivíduos, como valores, utopias, a força na crença em grandes projetos coletivos, fossem eles religiosos, políticos? por outro lado, a comunidade tem voltado à tona e sido rediscutida, o que vem revelando a dificuldade de chegar a um entendimento único sobre o que ela seja, sobre como pensá-la hoje. existem diversas perspectivas, que delimitam distintas formas de aproximação e intervenção nos espaços aos quais se faz referência: pequenas cidades, bairros, favelas, associações de vizinhos, comunidades virtuais. em seguida, apresentaremos um breve painel do desenvolvimento do termo comunidade e de sua apropriação pelo campo psicológico. 551 building participative, empowering & diverse communities primeiramente, situamos os discursos sobre a comunidade na conjuntura da revolução francesa. o conceito de comunidade foi hostilizado pelos intelectuais iluministas por se aproximar das estruturas do feudalismo. no lugar da sociedade fundada na terra, nos vínculos sanguíneos e na tradição que eram as marcas da comunialidade, defendia-se a idéia de uma sociedade fundada no contrato entre homens livres, que se associam através de alianças pontuais e reguladas pela racionalidade econômica. sucedeu-se, no entanto, uma reação do pensamento conservador da época no intuito de positivar e resgatar o ideário de comunidade como modelo do paraíso e da boa vida e harmoniosa, preservada dos avanços terríveis da modernização. segundo sawaia, em ambos os casos a idéia de comunidade aponta para uma utopia do passado, despertando sentimentos de nostalgia ou de algo ultrapassado e nocivo. essas concepções continuam alimentando o pensamento sobre o social no século xix, e voltam ao centro de discussão entre os intelectuais sob outras roupagens, agora no contexto formação da sociologia como ciência. ferdinand tönnies é um dos pensadores da comunidade cujas formulações desdobram-se ainda hoje nos estudos da área. de acordo com sawaia, foi no século xx que a “comunidade elevou-se à categoria analítica central do pensamento social, e se estabeleceu a antítese de comunidade e sociedade” (sawaia, 1996, p.39). tönnies diferenciou duas formas de organização social distintas e contrárias em seus valores e princípios. a gemeinschaft se baseia pelo paretesco ou pela vizinhança, pelo trabalho e pela crença comuns e na capacidade de vinculação e identificação solidária entre seus membros, enquanto a gesellschaft é regulada pela lei do mercado e pela divisão entre os homens. gemeinschaft e gesellschaft designam, respectivamente, as diferenças estruturais entre comunidade e sociedade. no século xx, as formulações teóricas sobre a categoria de comunidade prepararam a penetração da administração direta do estado nos espaços populares no período do pós-guerra, colaborando na concretização das propostas liberais-populistas de modernização e progresso que foram observadas no brasil da década de 50. ainda de acordo com sawaia, na época, essa era a concepção de comunidade que norteava as experiências práticas da psicologia comunitária, então comprometidas por uma proposta muito próxima da assistência social: comunidade era entendida como unidade consensual, sujeito único e homogêneo, lugar de gerenciamento de conflito e de mudanças de atitude. sua prática visava a união de esforços entre povo e autoridade governamental para melhorar as condições de vida de comunidades e, através delas, integrar a sociedade nacional, construindo a prosperidade do país. e sua delimitação era espacial/geográfica (sawaia, 1996, p.45). a partir dos anos 80, com o movimento de contestação à psicologia social vigente e o questionamento do papel político do psicólogo, os moradores desses espaços populares passaram a ser mais considerados como agentes ativos de transformação política e social. no entanto, de acordo com sawaia, em meio a essa nova abordagem de trabalho a psicologia ainda se encontra presa no impasse entre uma visão de comunidade como algo uno e homogêneo e uma visão que leve em consideração as particularidades de seus indivíduos. percebemos que, quando se fala em comunidade, mesmo que não se chegue ao consenso, a noção de identidade é o eixo de sustentação que atravessa suas definições pela psicologia, a base de compreensão da mesma. a identidade é o parâmetro para avaliar o nível de consistência comunitária em relação a determinadas variáveis/características: convívio próximo delimitado 552 building participative, empowering & diverse communities num mesmo espaço geográfico, história, cultura, características sociais e psicológicas etc. para cezar wagner góis (2005), o espaço físico-social é um dos pressupostos fundamentais, englobando aí tanto a questão da proximidade física quanto a inclusão numa mesma realidade social. para o autor, ricos e pobres que dividem o mesmo espaço, como observamos frequentemente nas metrópoles, não constituem uma mesma comunidade, pois não possuem uma convivência social próxima. a comunidade coloca-se para a psicologia comunitária como instância de construção coletiva e consciente da realidade, no qual os indivíduos têm espaço assegurado de participação e expressão de suas posições. nesse espaço de intimidade, a pessoa é reconhecida e confirmada em sua identidade e como pertinente à comunidade, que garante a “proteção da individualidade frente à natureza e à sociedade” (góis, 2005, p.61). ela corresponde a “um agrupamento humano que expressa um sentimento claro de unidade e e constitui um todo à parte” (rios apud góis, 2005, p.63). observamos que as tentativas de definição do conceito de comunidade para a psicologia, mesmo que variadas e imprecisas, são construídas a partir de uma compreensão sociológica original, que relacionou comunidade e sociedade como categorias esquadrinhadas por uma regulação social e disciplinar, compartimentada. neste modelo de entendimento da organização social, as relações entre os indivíduos são mediadas por um dispositivo transcendente que é espacializado no entorno da vizinhança – o que esfacela as possibilidades de constituição do comum, como entendido por antonio negri (2005). os dispositivos que fundaram a comunidade nasceram do programa disciplinar do biopoder e que agora na contemporaneidade têm adquirido outras variações em relação ao controle. mesmo quando se enxerga a comunidade como espaço de comunhão e sentimentos puros, tal como propôs tönnies, de acordo com os poderes administrativos o espaço produtivo da comunidade não deixou de ser cooptado como instância intermediária da sociedade. são níveis de mapeamento em linhas concêntricas, onde num extremo tem-se o indivíduo, cuja individualidade está protegida na comunidade, e no outro encontra-se a máquina estatal da administração pública: na obra de hegel (filosofia do direito) [...] o estado é uma “communitas communitatum” e não a agregação de indivíduos pelo contrato como propunha o iluminismo. sua visão de sociedade é concêntrica, formada por círculos interligados de associações como a família, comunidade local, classe social e igreja, cada qual autônoma nos limites de sua abrangência funcional, cada uma delas considerada fonte de afirmação do indivíduo e, todos eles em conjunto, reconhecidos como elemento formativo do verdadeiro estado (nisbet apud sawaia, 1996, p.39). de acordo com essa perspectiva, o próprio espaço aberto e territorial da comunidade foi assumido funcionalmente como uma instituição social, ainda que não tenha funcionado sob a lógica do enclausuramento que caracterizou a sociedade disciplinar. esta análise impede qualquer tipo de entendimento naturalizante da comunidade, como algo que se configura espontaneamente em decorrência da convivência íntima sob um mesmo espaço. nesse sentido, é interessante pensar as formas pelas quais a comunidade está sendo reinvestida na sociedade de controle, onde a delimitação física dos espaços de produção do social é implodida. isso explica porque as políticas que se voltam para o desenvolvimento ou transformação da comunidade empreendem agora uma relação diferente no que diz respeito às formas de aproximação com a 553 building participative, empowering & diverse communities mesma. as comunidades populares obtiveram meios de inserir-se em outros circuitos produtivos da cidade que não são essencialmente espacializados, como as redes que se formam através das novas tecnologias da comunicação e que permitem a partilha de conhecimento e de projetos criativos. no entanto, mesmo que o conceito de comunidade que aqui descrevemos como sociológico-disciplinar esteja ficando para trás, o território urbano concreto que ele buscou cobrir permanece em definitivo. a questão urbana hoje passa necessariamente pela urgência de pensar a realidade das favelas, morros, periferias, comunidades populares, enfim, são várias as formas de referir-se hoje a esse território forjado na margem do regime de produção capitalista. esses lugares crescem e ganham cada vez mais visibilidade, suscitando ora o medo nas classes sociais média e alta, com as quais divide o uso dos espaços urbanos, ora a curiosidade nessas mesmas classes, em relação à criação de novos estilos de vida gerados nas comunidades, e que hoje se vinculam sobretudo à arte e à cultura. assim, acreditamos que, longe de estar esgotada pelo caráter institucional com o qual a comunidade foi investida pelo poder disciplinar (posto que a crise das instituições como a escola, o hospital psiquiátrico etc. são marcas da sociedade de controle), a comunidade popular é hoje um território em constante ebulição de forças micropolíticas, onde encontramos “um ambiente propício para que política e arte revelem-se em sua condição de potências da vida humana – potências de resistência e de invenção, respectivamente” (rolnik, 2003). de acordo com tal perspectiva, o próprio conceito de individualidade que a psicologia comunitária entende (que pra ela se diferencia do individualismo) seria uma produção disciplinar de mapeamento e normalização. será necessário lançar mão de uma gramática diferente se a psicologia comunitária quer repensar a comunidade, deixando de enxergá-la como unitária e totalizada e abrindo o campo para a produção das diferenças. para isso, há de se compreender a distinção entre individualidade e singularidade, bem como abdicar do pensamento identitário. sobre as diferenças entre individualidade e singularidade, guattari (1986) faz uma separação entre os processos de individualização, que modulam indivíduos pela fabricação de blocos serializados de valores, hábitos, crenças e desejos, dos quais os sujeitos seriam consumidores em busca de signos identitários, e processos de singularização, nos quais os indivíduos ou grupos podem inventar modos próprios de relacionar-se com a vida e consigo mesmo. dizer, como góis (2005), que a comunidade não é homogênea porque carrega contradições e conflitos não avança na questão, se a compreensão dessas contradições e conflitos estão todas já codificadas e pertencem à mesma lógica binária da luta pela tomada do poder. esse tipo de antagonismo não é suficiente o bastante para que as concepções de comunidade em psicologia compreendam o funcionamento político das diferenças. certos tipos de conflito na ordem dos interesses comunitários não ativam a produção de diferentes circuitos de efetivação e elevação da potência da comunidade, mas apenas confirmam e preservam as formas engessadas que se chocam entre si, encarnadas nas figuras do opressor e do oprimido. a partir do estudo que simon e silva (2005) empreenderam sobre a diversidade de sentidos de comunidades presentes das concepções e produções bibliográficas da psicologia comunitária, confirma-se que a noção tradicional de comunidade ainda é comum a esses trabalhos, permanecendo circunscrita em termos de homogeneidade e unicidade: o problema central é que muitos trabalhos têm por pressuposto a 554 building participative, empowering & diverse communities comunidade como uma entidade natural igual às comunidades da época do feudalismo, denominadas de “naturais”. desta forma, alguns pensam que os vínculos, os sentimentos de pertença, de compartilhamento de interesses e necessidades, de solidariedade, cooperação, já estão presentes no cotidiano das pessoas e que se revelarão a partir do momento em que colocamos as pessoas juntas sob o critério de semelhança por nós definidos (silva e simon, 2005, p.44). a dinâmica da atividade comunitária por si mesma, compreendendo aqui a dimensão de interação e proximidade física entre os moradores, não garante a unidade e a consistência que a psicologia comunitária insiste em procurar e fortalecer. como comenta arendt (1998) a respeito da emergência de “não-lugares”, que de acordo com marc augé, seriam lugares que não se definem como identitários, relacionais ou históricos, poderíamos ver que: “para os psicólogos e as populações marginalizadas por eles estudadas a noção de comunidade é uma invenção teórica, um princípio de sentido e inteligibilidade, mas também uma ilusão.” (1998, p.4). em resumo, conseguimos extrair e sintetizar através deste percurso algumas formas de abordar o conceito de comunidade que se assentam em dimensões diferentes. como ponto de partida, temos uma noção de comunidade oriunda da sociologia, definida sobretudo pela circunscrição geográfica e por um modo de associação natural e íntimo entre seus habitantes. a concepção de comunidade que prevalesce na psicologia comunitária deriva dessa primeira noção, que engloba aspectos como signos linguísticos, crenças, valores e objetivos em comum, e a identificação dos seus integrantes entre si e em relação ao todo unitário que ela compõe é o que garante sua sustentação. na prática do psicólogo comunitário, as comunidades nas quais ele se insere são, muitas vezes, aquelas áreas urbanas periféricas, que historicamente se constituíram à margem dos circuitos econômicos e das possibilidades de efetivação dos direitos sociais. por outro lado, existem alguns autores que, ao repensarem o conceito de comunidade tal como formulado acima, propõem novas formas de definir as articulações comunitárias, prescindindo da sua delimitação em um mesmo espaço geográfico, como nos apresentam silva e simon (2005): segundo petersen e lupton (2003), as estratégias de trabalhos centradas na idéia de comunidade baseadas na localidade, impõem uma identidade de comunidade que nega outras possibilidades de construções identitárias que transcendam os espaços físicos, principalmente, se pensarmos no avanço tecnológico e as novas formas de comunicação, descritas anteriormente, como a “internet”. por exemplo, as formas identitárias por gênero, classe social, etnia, raça, entre outras. as pessoas não precisam estar no mesmo local para formarem uma comunidade. os autores salientam que a idéia de comunidade é util para aqueles que necessitam dar visibilidade para sua identidade. são grupos, geralmente, que estão em desvantagens ou são marginalizados (silva e simon, 2005, p.45). apesar de proporem novas formas de comunidade, os autores que seguem essa linha de pensamento mantêm em comum com a concepção anterior o papel central da identidade como eixo congregador de comunidades. o espaço comunitário seria, portanto, uma forma de conjunção e sobreposição de identidades entre iguais, funcionando sob o princípio das segmentaridades binárias descritas por deleuze (1998). elas podem dizer respeito a indivíduos: 555 building participative, empowering & diverse communities ser homem ou mulher, criança ou adulto, saudável ou doente, branco ou preto. às vezes, as binarizações proliferam as dualidades, mas a aparição de uma terceira condição não desmancha a dicotomia: se não se é nem branco nem preto, certamente se é pardo, ou amarelo, opções mutuamente excludentes. as oposições também podem dizer respeito a coletividades: existem os proletariados e os burgueses, ou ainda a sociedade civil e o estado etc. é nessa direção que procuramos nos alinhar com autores que se propõe a problematizar a vida em comunidade para além de suas segmentaridades, traçando sobre a comunidade linhas mais flexíveis que não operam divisões identitárias. neste sentido, muitos autores tem falado do comum, que seria um plano das forças que habitam um território, mais que um plano das formas bem definidas e organizadas. compreendemos que o comum e a comunidade, tal como ela é caracterizada nos estudos de psicologia comunitária, não se confundem entre si, pois apresentam disparidades e propõem modos diferentes de aproximação com os processos coletivos. ao mesmo tempo, acreditamos que essas noções podem se encontrar e promover deslocamentos que favoreçam a abertura da psicologia à produção de diferenças e a fragmentação do todo unitário e identitário da comunidade que ela persiste em afirmar. a vida em comum é uma questão cada vez mais presente nas discussões sobre o contemporâneo e as novas formas de sociabilidade que se observam. ao mesmo tempo em que o capitalismo mundial integrado se expande por todos os países e territórios, não reconhecendo mais fronteiras sólidas (hardt e negri, 2003), para bauman (2003) a formação das chamadas comunidades se realiza pela multiplicação de fronteiras, que definem modos de inclusão e exclusão em relação à suposta identidade e unificação das mesmas. como podemos pensar em formas do viver junto que não consistam na negação da alteridade e na reclusão às categorias do mesmo? como articular a singularidade social e cultural dos corpos coletivos com formas não segmentarizadas e antagonizadas de convívio, em meio à máquina capitalística homogeneizante? a noção de constituição do comum (negri, 2005) é uma das formas de tentar escapar das máquinas de estratificação e hieraquização do social, defendendo uma outra maneira de ação comum política que parta do exercício da democracia. essa democracia não se resume, entretanto, à relação dos indivíduos com o estado ou com as organizações partidárias, mas concebe um exercício da biopotência pela formação de redes autônomas, solidárias e cooperativas, onde as singularidades têm condições de produzir e gerenciar o que é comum, apostando na criação de novos coletivos e na potência da invenção. para negri, esse comum é a produção de um terreno compartilhado de expansão da vida, sendo também base para produções futuras: é ao mesmo tempo condição imanente e alvo de construção, produtivo e produzido no conjunto das atividades sociais, econômicas, políticas, culturais etc. assim, o princípio da identidade como articulador da comunidade tem sido diminuído em virtude de outras maneiras de pensar a constituição do comum, que levam em consideração não aqueles elementos de representação de um coletivo, mas como zona de ressonância tecida por um mesmo plano de imanência: aquilo que supostamente se perdeu da “comunidade”, aquela comunhão, unidade, co-pertinência, é essa perda que é precisamente constitutiva da comunidade. em outros termos, e da maneira mais paradoxal, a comunidade só é pensável enquanto negação da fusão, da homogeneidade, da identidade consigo mesma. a comunidade 556 building participative, empowering & diverse communities tem por condição precisamente a heterogeneidade, a pluralidade, a distância. [...] a comunidade, na contramão do sonho fusional, é feita da interrupção, fragmentação, suspense, é feita dos seres singulares e seus encontros. daí porque a própria idéia de laço social que se insinua na reflexão sobre a comunidade é artificiosa, pois elide precisamente esse entre. comunidade como o compartilhamento de uma separação dada pela singularidade (pelbart, 2003, p. 33). negri e hardt (2003) apontam o surgimento de um novo tipo de exploração do capital. para além do apoderamento dos corpos em termos de exploração de sua força material, o novo alvo do capitalismo é a vida no que ela tem de mais inventiva. o trabalhador é exigido em termos de sua capacidade criativa, dinâmica, autônoma, de gestar e operar informações, seu poder de engajamento em redes comunicativas. deste modo, não apenas suas funções intelectivas estão em jogo, mas sua própria dimensão sensível, seus afetos, suas potências de liberdade e de expansividade da vida. para além da organização da sociedade civil em instituições já demarcadas, negri nos traz a noção de multidão como novo coletivo social, dotada de um poder constituinte que não está submisso ao domínio do instituído. multidão é um termo comumente designado de forma pejorativa e negativa, historicamente compreendido pelas ciências políticas como massa irracional e pré-social a ser dominada e adestrada, a fim de tornar-se sociedade. hoje, com a reconfiguração das classes sociais, cujos contornos específicos encontram-se indefinidos em função das novas dinâmicas do trabalho, e com a emergência de um proletariado cada vez mais imaterial, a questão da multidão reaparece. no entanto, ela traz características diferentes: existe hoje uma multidão de cidadãos, mas falar de cidadãos não é suficiente, por que é apenas qualificar em termos teóricos e jurídicos indivíduos que são formalmente livres. seria antes preciso dizer que existe hoje uma multidão de trabalhadores intelectuais. mas isso pouco importa. na verdade, é preciso dizer que existe uma multidão de instrumentos produtivos que foram interiorizados, encarnados nos sujeitos que constituem a sociedade. mas isso ainda é insuficiente: é preciso acrescentar à realidade afetiva, reprodutiva, os desejos de gozo. e hoje multidão é isso – uma multidão que subtrai ao poder toda transcendência possível e que não pode ser dominada senão de forma parasitária, portanto, feroz (negri, 2001, p.31). a potência da multidão reside em seu poder constituinte, que por sua vez é um exercício de resistência na invenção de formas democráticas de participação política. a multidão opõe-se à massa pelo fato de que não vem a constituir-se como unidade nem é homogênea, é plural, centrífuga, ela foge da unidade política, ela não assina pactos com o soberano, ela não delega a ele direitos, ela é resistente à obediência. o povo, ao contrário, converge numa vontade geral, se reflete no soberano ou no estado” (pelbart, 2003, p.115). o poder constituinte da multidão pode firmar acordos e regras, mas que são contingenciadas temporalmente a partir de questionamentos e reavaliações, e redefine a concepção de poder político, não mais reduzido ao seu caráter representativo. a expansão de seu poder se expressa através de atividades empreendedoras que atravessam o território social, político, econômico, por atividades que reorganizam as situações de produção da vida e do social, sem, no entanto tomarem por princípio único as demandas econômicas. 557 building participative, empowering & diverse communities a potência da multidão reside justamente na riqueza de sua heterogeneidade, suas singularidades, que circunstancialmente se agenciam através de esquemas de cooperação, redes autônomas que se cruzam. são dessas formas associativas e solidárias que advém o poder constituinte da multidão, sua capacidade de resistir à racionalidade capitalística e sua capacidade de inventar outras racionalidades que devolvam a potência à vida. é pela biopotência da multidão, produtora de subjetividades abertas à alteridade, estéticas, amorosas e apaixonadas, que o comum tem sido investido, pela multiplicação das conexões e parcerias mais que pelos embates de oposição. a multidão é a realidade onde negri acredita ser possível constituir o comum como atos de solidariedade que não são identitários. referências bibliográficas arendt, r. j. j. psicologia social, comunidade e contemporaneidade. in: psicologia reflexão e crítica, v.11, n.1, p.143-153, porto alegre, 1998. bauman, zygmunt. comunidade: a busca por segurança no mundo atual. rio de janeiro: jorge zahar ed., 2003. deleuze, gilles; parnet, claire. diálogos. são paulo: escuta, 1998. góis, cezar wagner de lima. psicologia comunitária – atividade e consciência. fortaleza: instituto paulo freire de estudos psicossociais, 2005. guattari, félix; rolnik, suely. micropolítica: cartografias do desejo. petrópolis: vozes, 1986. hardt, michael & negri, antonio. império. rio de janeiro: record, 2003. negri, antonio. exílio – seguido de valor e afeto. são paulo: iluminuras, 2001. negri, antonio. a constituição do comum. conferência inaugural do ii seminário internacional capitalismo cognitivo – economia do conhecimento e e a constituição do comum. tradução de fabio malini. rio de janeiro, 2005. pelbart, peter pál. vida capital: ensaios de biopolítica. são paulo: iluminuras, 2003. rolnik, suely. resistência e criação: um triste divórcio. conferência proferida na casa da imagem, galeria de arte contemporânea, em curitiba, 2003. simon, cristiane paulin e silva, rosalina carvalho da. sobre a diversidade de sentidos de comunidade. psico, v.36, n.1, p.39-46, jan./abr., porto alegre, 2005. sawaia, bader burihan. comunidade: a apropriação científica de um conceito tão antigo quanto a humanidade. in: campos, regina helena de freitas (org.). psicologia social comunitária: da solidariedade à autonomia. petrópolis: vozes, 1996. 558 building participative, empowering & diverse communities ¿por dónde se asoma la comunidad? un camino desde los adolescentes y la familia. programa de atención integral para padres y adolescentes en dos comunidades urbano-marginales en el municipio de durango rocío guzmán benavente rebeca treviño montemayor abstract se presentan los avances de la puesta en marcha del programa integral para padres y adolescentes como modelo de intervención psicológica en dos colonias marginadas de durango, dgo. méxico. se rescata la pertinencia de la metodología propuesta por la psicología comunitaria como una estrategia preventiva en la salud mental para padres e hijos adolescentes, en posible situación de riesgo. se intenta, asimismo, generar procesos de autogestión de las condiciones de vida en las comunidades atendidas y la oportunidad de propiciar la conformación de redes de apoyo psicosocial entre los mismos participantes. constituye el primer avance de las posibilidades que representa el trabajo comunitario desarrollado conjuntamente por la universidad juárez del estado de durango e instituciones gubernamentales con el fin de reconocer que la psicología no sólo está comprometida en una lucha contra la patología en los consultorios, sino que debe desarrollar estrategias para la promoción de la salud en la “normalidad”, entendiendo ésta como una dimensión no homogénea que incluye, por sí misma, capacidades y destrezas susceptibles de ser aprendidas por los propios implicados mediante un proceso de adquisición de competencias y habilidades que hagan posible la restauración del bienestar emocional, familiar y social. palabras clave, modelo de intervención, bienestar social, autogestión, investigación-acción introducción si bien la psicología comunitaria tiene ya buen trecho andado en latitudes latinoamericanas y mexicanas, en durango el trabajo y la investigación en este campo está comenzando con el presente milenio. ello se debe sin duda a las propias circunstancias históricas, económicas, educativas e incluso geográficas de nuestro estado1. pero quizá la razón más relevante para explicar el incipiente trabajo académico en torno a la psicología comunitaria se deba a la tardía formación de profesionistas en el área social, algo que recientemente ha empezado a impulsar la universidad pública del estado. la carrera de psicología de hecho se ofertaba, hasta hace muy poco, solo a través de la educación privada. queda todavía por impulsar, desde la universidad pública formaciones de carácter propiamente social. en ese sentido, el programa de atención 1 méxico está dividido por demarcaciones o provincias que denominamos estados. durango es uno de los 32 estados que conforman el país, situado al noroeste de la república, rico en biodiversidad y clima pero rezagado en aspectos económicos y educativos en relación a otros estados más prósperos. cfr. indices de marginación, consejo nacional de población 2005, anzaldo carlos, prado minerva, segob, méxico 2005 559 building participative, empowering & diverse communities integral para padres y adolescentes, nació como una respuesta emergente ante una problemática largamente atendida sólo mediante asistencia social, religiosa y gubernamental, por tanto exenta de ser analizada desde la mirada rigurosa de la investigación formal. las problemáticas que actualmente se desarrollan en la sociedad mexicana, particularmente en el ambiente familiar, donde la violencia de género, intrafamiliar y social, los problemas educativos, la relación cotidiana entre los jóvenes, la cultura mediática y tecnológica, entre los principales factores, están impactando de manera negativa el proceso de formación integral de los adolescentes, lo que representa uno de los grandes retos que debemos atender. el trabajo que se presenta son los resultados parciales de un primer momento en el que el proyecto se llevó a la práctica mediante el apoyo financiero de sedesol2, un organismo institucional que encontró en la propuesta similitudes concretas con lo desarrollado por la asistencia social y el desarrollo comunitario; sin embargo, el trabajo empírico ha permitido el abordaje de una reflexión teórica que se extiende en dos vertientes: i) la urgencia de continuar un trabajo en la línea de la psicología comunitaria a nivel empírico; y, ii) la evidente necesidad de establecer como línea de investigación-acción la psicología comunitaria y sus distintas modalidades en la formación de los psicólogos egresados de nuestra universidad. es por ello que, en el marco de un convenio de colaboración interinstitucional entre la secretaria de desarrollo social a nivel federal, la secretaria de desarrollo social del estado de durango, así como el gobierno del municipio de durango y la universidad juárez del estado de durango, a través de la escuela de psicología y terapia de la comunicación humana, se llevó a cabo el programa de atención integral para padres y adolescente (aipa), en el polígono que comprende las colonias periféricas: ampliación pri y lázaro cárdenas del mismo municipio en el estado de durango, méxico. la propuesta que da sentido al programa (aipa) se ha definido a partir de la construcción de un espacio de análisis y reflexión que tiene la finalidad de lograr una mayor comprensión de la etapa de la adolescencia, vinculada al contexto familiar, al tiempo que el enfoque de la misma soporta la expresión práctica del trabajo en las comunidades referidas. el programa, llevó a cabo un plan sistemático de formación y vivenciación en aspectos de orden psicosocial, psicoemocional, axiológico y comunicacional con los asistentes al mismo. al 2 el programa está dirigido a enfrentar los desafíos de la pobreza urbana mediante la instrumentación de un conjunto de acciones que combinan, entre otros aspectos, el mejoramiento de la infraestructura básica y el equipamiento de las zonas urbanomarginadas, así como el desarrollo comunitario y acciones que favorecen la prestación de servicios sociales en esos mismos ámbitos. pretende asegurar la concurrencia y la integralidad de los esfuerzos dirigidos a apoyar a la población urbana en situación de pobreza patrimonial, de acuerdo con los criterios establecidos por el consejo nacional de evaluación de la política de desarrollo social para la medición de la pobreza (coneval). el programa hábitat se ha definido, desde el ámbito gubernamental como un instrumento que busca: “hacer ciudad”; construir espacios con identidad y valor social; articular los barrios marginados y los asentamientos precarios al desarrollo de la ciudad; favorecer el ejercicio de los derechos de ciudadanía de la población asentada en esos ámbitos territoriales; y elevar la calidad de vida de los moradores de las ciudades y zonas metropolitanas del país. de ahí que ha pretendido que, los esfuerzos sean dirigidos a las ciudades y zonas metropolitanas cuyo tamaño, ubicación y significación económica y social, las convierten en puntos estratégicos para impulsar el desarrollo nacional y regional. 560 building participative, empowering & diverse communities mismo tiempo, el grupo operativo de profesionales en psicología fue capacitando y asesorado por un equipo de académicos e investigadores de la escuela de psicología y terapia de la comunicación humana que participan en el proyecto. planteamiento y definiciones el planteamiento del problema a priori, en el trabajo empírico, consistió fundamentalmente en la construcción de un espacio de análisis y reflexión con el objetivo de lograr una mayor comprensión de la etapa de la adolescencia, vinculada al contexto familiar y comunitario, mediante un plan sistemático de formación y vivenciación con los asistentes al programa de atención integral. por ello, en este trabajo intentamos, en primer término y con sentido heurístico, reconocer las diferencias biopsicosociales de la categoría adolescente; no obstante, en términos empíricos hemos debido asumir una definición “tradicional” según la cual esta significa” tanto fase de transición como categoría demográfica; una sucesión de constantes cambios, así como el producto de una fuerza transformadora; un tiempo cronológico y un tiempo social, inseparables ambos y que se retroalimentan; un enfrentamiento con los demás que alienta y es consecuencia de una lucha interior; una introspección frustrante provocada por búsquedas no satisfechas de identidad o asunción como propias de identidades convenidas; una etapa de conflictos con uno mismo y de problematizaciones inducidas, y un largo etcétera de contradicciones más”. (moraljiménez, 1998:4). sin embargo, tenemos claro que esta propia definición, sin ser explícita, se halla presente en la comunidad en la que se realizó el trabajo empírico; lo cual nos enfrentó con el hecho de asumir problemáticas de antemano construidas, sobre todo en el trabajo con los grupos de adultos, que en tanto el hijo o la hija se hallan en ese grupo de edad daban por sentado estar implicados en “conflictos propios de la edad”. es decir, la comunidad inició por reconocer dificultades pero como parte de una “realidad natural”. por lo tanto, partimos de considerar a la comunidad, sustantivamente, como un lugar y un grupo social que lo puebla, como una unidad social interdependiente y diferenciada frente a otras cuyos miembros desarrollan sentimientos de pertenencia, así como relaciones e interacciones estables. adjetivamente, como elementos y lazos comunes (incluyendo el sentido psicológico de pertenencia, opuesto al de marginación o desarraigo personal), compartidas generalmente y no siempre por razón de vecindad. es decir, como espacio desde donde y por donde pueden construirse lazos y relaciones entre personas (sánchez vidal, s/f ). en este caso la visión compartida de la adolescencia entre los padres, los hijos y la comunidad de partencia. desde esa perspectiva, la psicología comunitaria (pc), como campo de estudio de la relación entre sistemas sociales(comunidades), el comportamiento humano y la intervención para la prevención de problemas de carácter psicosocial, así como del desarrollo humano integral, considera la comprensión de determinantes socioambientales y la posibilidad de una modificación consciente y planificada de un sistema, así como de las relaciones psicosociales en ella establecidas y del propio desarrollo comunitario.. (rappaport,1977 y sánchez vidal 1988, 1989). en tal sentido, la pc viene a ser una respuesta de la ciencia psicológica ante situaciones de inequidad, injusticia, pobreza y marginación que grupos humanos numerosos viven hoy, al tiempo que cuestiona, de la misma forma, la idea según la cual sólo mediante la psicología clínica 561 building participative, empowering & diverse communities pueden resolverse problemas de salud mental. a partir de esta serie de elementos de carácter teórico-conceptual se retroalimenta la propuesta de intervención que define sus pretenciones en congruencia con los objetivos delineados. objetivos general y específicos objetivo general aplicar un programa de formación integral para padres y adolescentes a partir de implementar talleres vivenciales que respondan a las necesidades y características de familias que forman parte del programa hábitat (sedesol) para ofrecer una atención en la prevención de posibles situaciones de riesgo, así como propiciar una red de apoyo psicosocial entre padres de familia, adolescentes y comunidad en general, para promover la pertenencia y cohesión social, al tiempo que se da seguimiento y se evalúa la intervención, a partir de las problemáticas vinculadas con el adolescente. objetivos específicos implementar talleres vivenciales que permitan orientar, prevenir y atender • necesidades de carácter psicosocial y psicoemocional de las familias de dos colonias en el mpio. de durango. propiciar una red de apoyo psicosocial entre padres de familia, adolescentes y • comunidad en general. fomentar un contexto familiar que ofrezca al adolescente el desarrollo de capacidades • y potencialidades para su vida cotidiana y fortalecimiento de su desarrollo psicoemocional, social y cultural en la comunidad a la que pertenece. metodología el programa de atención integral para padres y adolescentes se centró en la construcción de un espacio para dialogar acerca de la educación y fortalecimiento de los lazos familiares, así como la identificación y prevención de situaciones de riesgo como: drogadicción, suicidio, alcoholismo, embarazo no deseado, pandillerismo y enfermedades de transmisión sexual entre los más significativos en la vida de los adolescentes. se trabajó en la idea de establecer una comunidad de padres y adolescentes como red de apoyo psicosocial para propiciar que las experiencias vertidas en los talleres se vieran reflejadas en sus contextos familiares. por otra parte, se llevó a cabo la canalización de algunos casos, particularmente a las clínicas de la escuela de psicología y terapia de la comunicación humana, con la finalidad de que recibieran la atención requerida y el apoyo especializado como alternativas de solución a los problemas detectados. los temas abordados como parte del contenido en los talleres vivenciales respondieron al enfoque interdisciplinar que teóricamente configuró al programa, por lo que, al detectar problemáticas propias de las comunidades atendidas se retomaron aspectos de carácter psicológico, educativo, filosófico, axiológico y comunicacional, con la finalidad de partir de éstas para trabajar aquellas actitudes y formas de proceder de los participantes en los talleres en su calidad de madres e hijos y la percepción que ambos grupos tenían en torno a ellos mismos. el programa se implementó de acuerdo a una perspectiva cualitativa, se empleó un enfoque de corte etnometodológico (harold garfinkel, 1960, 1984), considerando que la etnometodología 562 building participative, empowering & diverse communities parte de comprender que los “etnométodos” no son más que los métodos popularesde los no expertosempleados por la gente para dar sentido a lo que hacen los demás y especialmente a lo que dicen porque son utilizados de forma natural, sin que se les preste atención consciente. permiten conocer lo que las personas dicen detrás de las palabras, al acercarnos al contexto social del que forman parte. (garfinkel en giddens, 2001, 127-128). consecuentemente, el proyecto tomó en cuenta la perspectiva de la investigación acción participativa desde la cual nos interrogamos acerca del sentido de nuestro trabajo, de nuestra vida y, particularmente tratándose de los académicos e investigadores de áreas afines al campo social, para preguntarnos: para qué hacer investigación social, a qué grupos de población sirve nuestro trabajo y finalmente qué sentido tiene lo que hacemos. ello permite crear las condiciones para un análisis que rescate elementos valiosos de la cultura popular, que permita seguir creando formas propias de acción y que expresen sus valores, opciones políticas y de desarrollo (alcocer, 1998, 433-434). en tal sentido, la investigación acción participativa, al promover un sistema continuo y permanente de autogestión de la realidad, nos ha permitido propiciar una reflexión grupal que fomenta la participación de los actores involucrados, a través de una serie de talleres vivenciales y la posibilidad de potenciar el establecimiento de una red de apoyo psicosocial, con el fin de favorecer una visión más clara del lugar que ocupan los jóvenes en la comunidad y el desarrollo de las capacidades y potencialidades de los asistentes al programa para la construcción de espacios de convivencia y desarrollo comunitario. la generación de estos espacios como lugares para la construcción de procesos de autogestión y empoderamiento han pretendido ser una estrategia metodológica desde y con la cual buscamos, a mediano y a largo plazo que, posibilite: “…otorgamiento de poder real de decisión y acceso, de los propios actores sociales, a los recursos necesarios para su realización, así como adquisición y potenciación de las competencias (capacidades) y espacios de acción para su ejercicio efectivo.” en tal dirección, los aportes pueden dirigirse a la conformación de espacios de cultura reflexiva y creativa, donde la participación integral de los actores sociales de los procesos autogestivos a través de comunidades reflexivas puedan: “aprender a pensar y debatir, problematizar, concertar, clarificar, convivir con las diferencias, reconciliar los puntos de vista de acuerdo con principios y valores, negociación de conflictos para lograr consensos desarrolladores, formación de una postura ética de tolerancia, respeto, compromiso y concertación social, promoción de valores humanistas, de solidaridad, honestidad y dignidad humana…” para la autotransformación social en el sentido del desarrollo humano integral emancipatorio (d´angelo hernández, ovidio, s/f ). como se ha mencionado, el enfoque de los talleres vivenciales del programa contempla un plan sistemático de formación en aspectos de orden psicoeducativo, axiológico y comunicacional con la finalidad de fortalecer la visión y necesidad de generar entornos familiares donde se promueva un ambiente saludable y de bienestar familiar que fomenta el crecimiento personal de los adolescentes hacia su reconstitución como personas y como sujetos sociales. al asumir que tales procesos requieren de tiempos y formas, más allá de los simples 563 building participative, empowering & diverse communities deseos, y de la recuperación de experiencias de los asistentes al programa, inicialmente a partir de talleres vivenciales, el proyecto se llevó a cabo de acuerdo a las siguientes fases: promoción y difusión permanente del programa en las comunidades en términos empíricos se realizó un primer acercamiento a la comunidad mediante la promoción del programa, para ello convocamos a los participantes mediante una labor de promoción que se llevó a cabo de manera personal bajo la forma de visitas domiciliarias, con la finalidad de abarcar al mayor sector poblacional posible y fomentando así el interés de los padres con respecto al programa. específicamente, se planteó el abordaje de amas de casa por constituir éstas el principal nexo comunicativo con la familia, así como el miembro que más tiempo está en la vivienda. durante el desarrollo del trabajo de promoción, se extendió la invitación entregándoles volantes con la información pertinente acerca de los talleres a jóvenes que se encontraron en las calles aledañas a la escuela. en lo que respecta al personal directivo y docente de las escuelas visitadas, se puede mencionar que la actitud ante la propuesta de trabajo fue buena y que en todo momento se ofreció plena libertad y apoyo a la labor de promoción. el objetivo fue tener un contacto directo y personalizado y promover la empatía, la calidez, la motivación y la confianza por tratarse de la primera interrelación entre el programa y los asistentes potenciales. asimismo, dicho acercamiento permitió disipar las dudas que, a priori, pudieron surgir en el momento de la invitación. la estrategia de promoción se basó en informarles brevemente el objetivo del programa, es decir, la forma en que se desarrollaría el trabajo en los talleres vivenciales y el abordaje de temáticas diversas a través de pláticas, juegos y narración de experiencias por parte de los propios asistentes. como resultado de dicha estrategia, la aceptación mostrada fue satisfactoria en la mayoría de los grupos, que manifestaron una gran iniciativa a la hora de participar en la dinámica. algunos de los alumnos con los que se tuvo contacto afirmaron estar asistiendo ya a los talleres; otros pidieron más información a las promotoras y prometieron acudir a los lugares de reunión. análisis de la población atendida a partir de acercamiento a las comunidades objetivo para construir el perfil sociodemográfico • de las mismas. el estudio de las interacciones que se dan en los grupos específicos atendidos.• el diseño de las intervenciones pertinentes en cada grupo (de madres y • adolescentes). la reflexión sobre las vivencias recogidas durante el programa por parte del equipo de psicólogos en su carácter de facilitadores de los talleres vivenciales, lo que ha dado pie a: la exploración y valoración de los jóvenes psicólogos integrados profesionalmente a • la psicología comunitaria, partiendo de: la reflexión en torno a la construcción de una profesión más allá del paradigma • de la psicología clínica, precisamente en el trabajo comunitario y la investigación psicológica. la formación profesional de la práctica en la comunidad.• 564 building participative, empowering & diverse communities resultados preliminares metas cualitativas: integración de los facilitadores a la comunidad logro del afianzamiento de la disciplina en niños y adolescentes reforzamiento pedagógico (lecto-escritura en niños y adolescentes) cohesión de los participantes en cada grupo de los talleres interés por participar en actividades culturales y recreativas (festival artístico-cultural/día de reyes) autoreconocimiento de la resiliencia por parte las madres de familia (capacidad de resistir y sobrevivir situaciones adversas y acceder a una vida productiva para sí y para su sociedad) mejor conocimiento de las propias emociones y afectos (en todos los grupos) mayor expresión de emociones y afectos en adolescentes y madres de familia concientización de los riesgos que implican las adicciones (en todos los grupos) canalización de casos clínicos para una atención psicológica individual metas cuantitativas se atendieron 109 hogares se aplicó un cuestionario final para conocer, en cierta mediad, la percepción que los participantes han adquirido a lo largo de 6 meses. se trabajó con 122 personas ( 62 mujeres, 23 hombres y 37 niños)* se llevaron a cabo 60 hrs. de trabajo en talleres vivenciales en las comunidades( 4 hrs. de trabajo durante 18 semana en 5 meses de trabajo intensivo) se trabajaron 34 hrs. de promotoría permanente durante la ejecución del proyecto (2 hrs. semanales durante las 18 semanas que duró la ejecución del mismo). se emplearon 80 horas de asesoría/capacitación para al equipo de psicólogos que llevaron a cabo el trabajo de intervención a través de los talleres vivenciales. incluyo una asesoría metodológico-instrumental, así como una capacitación y supervisión permanente a partir de las intervenciones en los grupos atendidos. la población atendida que permaneció en el programa se ilustra mediante las siguientes gráficas: 565 building participative, empowering & diverse communities estos, entre otros datos, permitieron establecer un perfil sociodemográfico de la población atendida para el que se elaboró un cuestionario que permitió el reconocimiento de las percepciones y sentidos de vida de dichas comunidades en torno a aspectos de su vida cotidianafamiliar, éste se trabajo a partir de los grupos de adolescentes y los grupos de madres de familia. por otra parte, las condiciones de marginalidad y problemas psicoafectivos pudieron establecerse mediante una vinculación metodológica entre el análisis del perfil sociodemográfico y la interpretación del material recogido en el trabajo etnográfico que amerita un ejercicio adicional al presente. tabla que ilustran niveles de marginalidad3: a pesar de que el programa estuvo dirigido a ambos padres, el cuestionario fue contestado sólo por la madres, esto se debió a que fue aplicado ya avanzado el programa y sólo las madres permanecieron en él, quizá encontraron mejores condiciones para encuentros femeninos y que los tres padres que asistieron al principio desistieran conforme avanzaba el programa. la mayoría son durangueñas católicas, con un promedio de edad de 37 años, lo cual nos habla de haber iniciado la gestación y crianza de hijos, alrededor de los 22 años, ya que el promedio de edad de nuestros adolescentes es de 12 años; sin embargo, este dato no puede ser del todo confiable en tanto sólo 11 de ellas son madres de alguno de los adolescentes encuestados. 3 en durango, más del 80% de la población gana menos de $3,000 quincenales (187€), según datos difundidos por el inegi. sin embargo, el nivel de ingresos de 46 de cada 100 personas ocupadas en el estado es de 1 ($50, 3.11€) a 3 salarios mínimos ($150, 9.33€ diarios); pero, todavía un 14% de la población gana un salario mínimo diario o menos (siglo de torreon, 2007, disponible en: http://www. elsiglodetorreon.com.mx/noticia/272946.ganan-duranguenses-menos-de-3-mil-pesos.html). http://www.elsiglodetorreon.com.mx/noticia/272946.ganan-duranguenses-menos-de-3-mil-pesos.html http://www.elsiglodetorreon.com.mx/noticia/272946.ganan-duranguenses-menos-de-3-mil-pesos.html 566 building participative, empowering & diverse communities tenemos 9 casadas y 4 en unión libre, es decir 13 que viven en pareja, no obstante identifican como jefe de familia al padre solo 11, entre las que viven en pareja se consideran, por lo menos 2 como ellas mismas el jefe de familia. este dato es significativo porque nos habla del inicio de un cambio sustantivo. respecto al nivel socio-económico, la mayor parte de las familias ubican su percepción de uno a dos salarios mínimos, esto se confirma con las respuestas sobre indicadores de marginación según el cual el 50 % reporta vivir en vivienda de 2 habitaciones y el 75% con piso de cemento. tenemos un grado importante de familias marginadas, el 30%, reporta tener piso de tierra y el 10 % no contar con los servicios básico de agua potable y luz eléctrica. dentro de estas condiciones económicas adversas podemos inferir que ciertos elementos solidarios compensan tal situación en tanto el 65% dice contar con amigos cercanos y de confianza, tal vez se refieran a las amigas que lograron consolidar durante el proceso del programa. este elemento es importante a considerarse en el trabajo cualitativo. respecto a los datos de salud, encontramos una contradicción al considerarse saludable el 85% de las encuestadas y sin embargo reportan problemas de diverso tipo, entre estomacales, cefaleas, insomnio, problemas dentales, el 100% de ellas, lo cual nos lleva a revisar de qué manera el concepto salud-enfermedad está construido desde la cotidianidad de pensar que enfermedad es algo más que un dolor de cabeza o un dolor de muela. sobresale también que de las 13 que viven en pareja ninguna reporte haber padecido nunca alguna infección vaginal, es posible que los flujos o descargas vaginales entren en el concepto de “normal”. de igual manera se encuestaron a 37 adolescentes, de los cuales la proporción por sexo es de 62% de mujeres, 38% de hombres. de ellos el 70% provienen de familias biparentales, el 25% de familias monoparentales, un 5% dice vivir con los abuelos. no podemos inferir que se trate de familia extensa. el jefe de familia es el padre en 59% de los casos, la madre en el 35% y el 5% alguno de los abuelos. es de notar que este dato se contrasta con el de que 70% de ellos conviven con ambos padres, sin embargo en algunos casos ven a la madre como jefe de familia. es muy probable que a la pregunta sobre la convivencia con ambos padres se le haya atribuido la idea de que el padre asista ocasionalmente o viva fuera de casa, sin embargo los adolescentes lo incluyeron en su vida cotidiana. la ocupación del jefe de familia es, mayoritariamente, empleado, con un 45%, ama de casa con un 24%, el resto se reparte entre obrero y comerciante. del total de los adolescentes encuestados sólo 1 de ellos trabaja formalmente en trabajo remunerado, el resto dice ser solo estudiante, de ellos 1 admite trabajar ocasionalmente. la mayor parte de los adolescentes ubican el ingreso familiar entre 2 y 3 salarios mínimo refieren tener casa propia el 67%, prestada el 21% y rentada el 8%, con 3 o 4 habitaciones en su mayoría (incluyendo el baño), de ellos el 8% dicen no contar con servicios básico de agua y luz y 5 % con piso de tierra. deducimos de estos datos que la mayoría de los encuestados se hallan ubicados en un nivel de marginación medio, no obstante el no saber el tipo de material y piso de la casa es significativo en un 15%, es probable que la marginación sea un poco más allá de lo que consideramos media. respecto a su vida social, 75% dicen contar con al menos un amigo de confianza, 25% dicen no contar con ningún amigo confiable. dicen tener novio/a el 20%. en lo relativo a salud, el 40% refirió padecer gripes frecuentes, el 51% dolores de cabeza, el 35% problemas dentales, dolores menstruales, insomnio y estomacales también fueron mencionados. es probable que se hayan ubicado en varios padecimientos, no obstante; considerarse saludables el 78%; lo cual nos lleva a considerar el mismo problema que con las 567 building participative, empowering & diverse communities madres, la conceptualización de salud y enfermedad que tienen los adolescentes es distinta a la que se tiene según la oms. finalmente detectamos un nivel educativo por debajo del grado escolar que dijeron cursar, aunque dadas las condiciones generales del país y de durango (prueba enlace4). esto no pudo ser contrastado con el nivel educativo de estudiantes en otras áreas menos marginadas5. conclusiones por lo que respecta a la comunidad, al concluir la primera fase de intervención psicológica, hemos apenas sentado las condiciones para que la comunidad comience a reconocer su capacidad autogestiva para la generación de mejores condiciones de vivienda y educación. de ahí que, el trabajo se definió a partir de una acción colectiva entre profesionales y las comunidades participantes ante los riesgos sociales y psicológicos que experimentan las propias personas y familias involucradas con el programa. en cuanto a los hallazgos de la investigación social y psicológica desde la universidad juárez del estado de durango, en su búsqueda por vincularse con las políticas públicas del estado, éstos se inserta en la idea según la cual dichas políticas se hallan en la transición desde lo social definida en función de las necesidades básicas, hacia aquellas que podríamos concebir como derechos ciudadanos básicos. por ello, la investigación encuentra su sentido de vinculación con la comunidad a través de programas y acciones que, no sólo expliquen la condición de los sujetos de riesgo, sino que atiendan esas necesidades en los espacios territoriales definidos como vulnerables. el programa de atención integral para padres y adolescentes se orientó hacia la articulación de profesionales en salud en el campo de la psicología y la propia comunidad atendida. los talleres vivenciales fueron diseñados por profesionales de la psicología para llevarlos a la práctica por parte de los facilitadores, en su mayoría egresados de esta escuela. a partir de la asesoría continua que recibieron los facilitadores, se reconoce el alto nivel de motivación, la conciencia de necesidad y la participación en los grupos, una vez formados, tanto de adolescentes como de madres. la asesoría en este proceso planteó la necesidad de reconocer la ausencia de la figura paterna debido, entre otras cosas, a su trabajo. aunque se reconoce también que es necesario continuar analizando y reflexionando cuáles son las variables de orden sociocultural que están presentes en dicha ausencia. asimismo, se valoró que las personas participantes dieron muestra de gran capacidad de autogestión con vías a afianzar sus redes sociales. el proceso de formación y capacitación por parte del grupo de profesores que incluye a los maestros emma galaviz, cosme f. maldonado, luis fernando ortiz, rebeca treviño y rocío guzmán se enfocó hacia una orientación fundamentalmente centrada en el apoyo de orden 4 la prueba enlace es una evaluación estatal que permite obtener un diagnóstico sistemático para dar seguimiento del avance hacia las metas estratégicas plasmadas en el documento agenda estratégica 2007-2009. es una evaluación de conocimientos y habilidades de español y matemáticas de los estudiantes de 3° a 6° de primaria y de 3° de secundaria (enlace intermedia, 2008, disponible en: www. enlaceintermedia.com.mx). 5 en el municipio de durango, el 93.48% de la población entre 6 y 14 años aiste a la escuela, mientras que el 6.46% no lo hacen, según un estudio sociodemográfico realizado por el inegi en 1995. de la población mayor de 15 años, el 7.37% no acude a la escuela; el 25.88% tiene primaria incompleta; el 23.11% primaria completa; el 21.15% acude a preparatoria y el 22.45% a nivel superior (inegi, 1995, disponible en http://www.inegi.gob.mx). http://www.enlaceintermedia.com.mx http://www.enlaceintermedia.com.mx 568 building participative, empowering & diverse communities teórico-conceptual y práctico en torno a lo que significa la psicología comunitaria y las diferencias que ésta plantea con respecto al trabajo desde una perspectiva psicológico-clínica exclusiva. desde este proceso de asesoramiento permanente se puede recapitular que, las sesiones llevadas a cabo en la operación del programa fueron exitosas tanto para los participantes como para el equipo de asesores interviniente, lo que cosechó una valiosa experiencia con sentido formativo para la profesionalización de los facilitadores, aspecto de suma importancia si tomamos en cuenta el carácter exploratorio e innovador que en nuestro medio representa esta experiencia. respecto al trabajo de carácter metodológico, con miras a fortalecer la investigación y el enfoque académico del programa, este fue determinante en cuanto al diseño del estudio sociodemográfico en torno a las madres y adolescentes participantes, con la finalidad de construir un perfil que nos diera las bases cuantitativas para explicar y comprender al grupo atendido. a partir de los datos pudimos notar las deficiencias en términos de conceptualizaciones que tiene la comunidad en los diversos ámbitos de su vida cotidiana. de manera general, durante el trabajo de campo se pudieron contrastar datos de orden cuantitativo que explican, en gran medida, las condiciones de la población con aquellos de carácter cualitativo. esto significó una posibilidad para avanzar de lo explicativo a lo comprensivo. asimismo, el trabajo de rescate de datos cuantitativos e interpretaciones cualitativas dará lugar a la producción de ensayos académicos con posibilidades de publicación y presentación ante congresos relativos a la disciplina psicológica comunitaria. bibliografía alcocer, martha.(1998).“investigación-acción participativa”, en galindo, cáceres. técnicas de investigación en sociedad, cultura y comunicación. méxico, d.f. berger p, & luckmann t., (1983).la construcción social de la realidad, amorrortu, bs.as. 1986apostel leo, et.al, la interdisciplinariedad y las ciencias humanas. tecnos, unesco, madrid. coleman, james.(1998) sources of “social capital in the creation of human capital” american journal of sociology. key readings s95-s120. costa, miguel y lópez, ernesto(1982) “la psicología comunitaria: un nuevo paradigma”, 1982 revista papeles del psicólogo, num 2, marzo, madrid. d´angelo hernández, ovidio. ¿la autogestión local como vía para la transformación social?. en revista temas no. 37. la habana, cuba. cips, centro de investigaciones psicológicas y sociológicas, la habana, cuba. p. 36. disponible en www: http://168.96.200.17/ar/libros/cuba/angelo10.rtf foucault michel,nietzche, freud, marx.(1970). anagrama, barcelona, l970. geertz clifford(1995) la interpretación de las culturas gedisa, barcelona. giddens a. & turner j.h., la teoría social , hoy (introd.)(1987). alianza ed., méxico 1987. giddens, anthony. (2001) interacción social y vida cotidiana, en sociología. índices del coneval con base en el ii conteo de población y edson vivienda 2005 y la encuesta nacional de ingreso y gasto de los hogares 2005. http://168.96.200.17/ar/libros/cuba/angelo10.rtf 569 building participative, empowering & diverse communities kotliarenco, maría angélica, cáceres, irma y fontecilla, marcelo(1996). estado del arte en resiliencia. centro de estudios del niño y la mujer. ceanim. oficina panamericana de la salud. washington, d.c. morin edgar.(1996). introducción al pensamiento complejo. gedisa, barcelona, 1996. olmedo, jorge. el sol de méxico, organización editorial mexicana, nota periodística, 5 de julio de 2007, pag.1-a mayer foulkes, david, lópez olivo maría fernanda y serván mori(2008). “habilidades cognitivas; transmisión intergeneracional por niveles socioeconómicos”, estudios económicos, vol. 23, núm. 1, enero-junio 2008, páginas 129-156 sánchez, vidal alipio (1989). departamento de psicología social. universidad de barcelona. vizer a., eduardo “metodología de intervención en la práctica comunitaria: investigación-acción, capital y cultivo social”, ciencias sociales, cultura y tecnología. trabajo presentado a las jornadas de cultura 98. instituto gino germani, uba. buenos.aires. disponible en uff.br/mestcii/vizer2. htm 139k winocur, rosalía. (2005). “la computadora e internet como estrategia de inclusión social en el imaginario de los pobres. uam, xochimilco. disponible en www.usal.es/~teoriaeducacion/rev_numero_06/n6_art_winocur_rosalia.htm 48k 577 building participative, empowering & diverse communities marginalisation and rurality dr caroline rouncefield university of cumbria, uk caroline.rouncefield@cumbria.ac.uk abstract this paper adopts a ‘community psychology’ approach to the study of domestic violence in an isolated rural community. it suggests that such a perspective – of ‘the individual in context’ provides important insights both into the character and exegesis of the problem and into possibilities for social change. at the same time the research provides an opportunity for reflection on the character and prospects for community psychology itself, particularly with regard to its impact on policy and practice for work in marginalised communities. key words: community; rurality; marginalisation; domestic violence; domestic violence and the eden valley the research described in this paper highlights the need for generic provision for those escaping domestic violence within a rural area of cumbria in the north of england, the eden valley. at the same time it attempts to address some specific needs presented by this rural area, including a widely dispersed rural community, lack of public transport, limited access to key services and the nature of small village life and points to some of the deficits in knowledge, resources and training that act as barriers to the uptake of services. background eden is one of six districts in the county of cumbria and lies in the eastern part of the county, bordered by south lakeland to the south, carlisle to the north, allerdale to the west and northumberland and yorkshire to the east. extensive, rural and sparsely populated, the focus of the district is the eden valley, which runs broadly north/south through the district. eden is one of the most sparsely populated districts in england and wales and has a population of over 50,000 people scattered in small villages over 830 square miles of land. the population density of the area is approximately 23 persons per km which is in stark contract to the population density of the north west of the uk of 244ppkm. there are four main centres of population in eden, the largest of these is penrith, which has a population of around 15,000, followed by appleby, alston and kirkby stephen. there are currently over 23,000 households in the district. the economy of eden is largely dependent upon tourism and agriculture, and the services that support them. to outsiders eden is an area of outstanding natural beauty, affluence and idyllic lifestyles and as such is not perceived to have the same level of social need as other, more urban, or deprived, areas. certainly, up until relatively recently, little attention has been paid to the possibilities of social exclusion, poverty or crime in the area. however, of late, there have been a number of studies identifying a variety of factors contributing to the deprivation, marginalisation 578 building participative, empowering & diverse communities and exclusion of people in rural areas. for example, in 2000 and 2006, ‘living in the countryside’, a report commissioned by the countryside agency, highlighted a number of day-to-day issues experienced by those living in the countryside that contributed to a ‘poorer quality of life’. most particularly at risk of exclusion, marginalisation or deprivation were those living in extremely isolated areas, those with no transport or jobs, those on low incomes and those with specific needs (e.g. health, education) and factors found to contribute to deprivation included poor geographical access to services such as post office, food shops, g.p. and schools. factors such as those identified by the living in the countryside report clearly have significance for a range of service providers in an area such as eden. certainly, over the years anecdotal accounts from professionals and residents working and living in the area, alongside statistics provided by the police and other front line services, suggest that eden, like other areas of the country, does indeed suffer from a range of social problems but that the nature of the area means that these problems are different and are not as visible or well resourced as those in urban areas. of particularly concern to this paper is the impact rurality has on those experiencing and working with domestic violence. for those working in rural areas there has been little research carried out on domestic violence. instead most work on domestic violence (e.g. assessing incidence) has focused on urban locations rather than the patterning of domestic violence across the rural landscape. of the few studies that have been conducted on rural areas, these have tended to focus on generic social problems rather than specific issues such as domestic violence. however, from the research available a number of potential problems facing those who live in rural and isolated areas and experience domestic violence have been identified. the study ‘living in the countryside’ (2000, 2006) highlighted how problems for those experiencing domestic violence in rural areas might be exacerbated by factors such as lack of transport, isolation from services (particularly health, police and housing). evans (1999), eastman, bunch, williams and caravaan (2007) and eastman and bunch (2007) drew attention to the impact of car ownership, public transport facilities, the problems of re-housing, lack of specialist services and other aspects of rural culture – for example, the responsibility for domestic pets and other animals – all contributing to a tolerance of domestic violence and hurdles facing access of services. anecdotal evidence from workers from a variety of women’s aid projects around the u.k. gives some insight into the difficulties people can have both coping and working with domestic violence in a rural areas and how these factors need to be taken into consideration when planning services. in particular these problems included: the physical, emotional and social isolation that can come with living in an isolated area, small community living, the lack of public transport and difficulties in accessing central services and information. additionally, a number of service providers in eden have identified a further problem that may well be operating in the district. professionals (e.g. the police and the health services) have raised the concerns that the recorded incidence of domestic violence in the area may be significantly under-reported and represents just ‘the tip of the iceberg’. although under-reporting is historically a problem with domestic violence research (e.g. the british crime survey, 2000, estimated that less than one in three (31.1%) of victims of domestic violence report the incidence to the police) it is of particular concern to professionals in eden as it is believed that underreporting may well be below the u.k. average and that there might well be a number of additional 579 building participative, empowering & diverse communities factors are contributing to this under-reporting. for example, workers in the area believe that the lack of awareness around domestic violence issues (both in the community and service providers), lack of specialist services, problems in accessing services and little formal co-ordination or sign posting of servicing all are thought to contribute to the difficulties facing those experiencing domestic violence in the eden area. in order to address the concerns raised above this research, commissioned by eden forum against domestic violence, set out to explore the following areas: • to identify/estimate the present level of domestic violence in the eden area • to identify current provision in the area • to assess use and effectiveness of provision, from both the point of view of provider and user • to make recommendations as to how provision might be improved methodology one important goal of community psychology is to develop collaborative working relationships with people (bond 1990). in this research much attention was given to developing a collaborative research study with a range of stakeholders, including members of the eden forum against domestic violence, service providers and users. however, in view of the various research aims of project it also became necessary to use a range of data collection strategies. in order to build an understanding of the social and economic character of eden, of the incidence of domestic violence and of the availability of specialist services within the area and the national figures for domestic violence and domestic violence provision, primary and secondary data analysis of local, regional and national studies and reports was carried out. the documentation analysed included: local and area statistics and policy documents prepared by the cumbria police, local authority, social services and housing authorities; national statistics produced by the home office; other questionnaire and survey results obtained by the local authority, charitable and voluntary organisations and groups. secondly, to gain an in-depth understanding of local services and the experiences of both those seeking help, and those providing support and advice for those experiencing domestic violence semi-structured questionnaires and interviews were carried out with services providers and survivors. the first stage of the investigation entailed sending out questionnaires to a wide range of agencies and professionals across eden. the ‘agency questionnaire’ was designed to collect information on the following: the agency’s role; experience of domestic violence; services offered by the agency and evaluation of provision; training and policy; awareness of other services; recommendations for improvement. agencies were selected on the basis of their likely contact with domestic violence. research (e.g. dominy & radford, 1996) has shown that after family and friends, the police, health services, housing services and legal services are most commonly approached by those experiencing domestic violence. however, as the research moved on a number of other agencies and professionals were approached because of the information disclosed to the researchers (e.g. the church was mentioned by a number of interviewees as an agency that dealt with domestic violence concerns). agencies and professionals were also invited to participate in a follow-up interview. making contact with people who had experienced domestic violence was a complex and sensitive process and used three routes. firstly, a number of the forum members had professional 580 building participative, empowering & diverse communities caseloads of people who had or were experiencing domestic violence and they collaborated with service users on looking at ways in which they might participate in the research. in preparing for engagement with service users all forum members worked with the researchers in reaching a shared understanding of the research process and developed a protocol for approaching potential interviewees, explaining the research, supporting individuals in filling in the questionnaire or carrying out interviews. secondly, all agencies that were contact in stage 1 of the research were sent additional information about engaging service users in the research. alongside the agency questionnaire, a pack of information about the research (including individual questionnaires and advice to services providers about engaging participants) was sent with a request for agencies to display or, if appropriate, to pass onto potential interviewees. finally, an awareness raising campaign about the research took place. this included posters, leaflets, letters, a website, talks to women’s groups, a radio and t.v. interview, newspaper articles. besides raising awareness of domestic violence, the campaign explained about the research project and its aims and invited people to come forward to either fill in a questionnaire or participate in an interview. on all the questionnaires, letters and information about the project there was an invitation for potential respondents (survivors or professionals) to discuss and negotiate the nature of their participation (including interview, questionnaire, anonymity, confidentiality). raw findings the research team was aware from the outset that there would be a number of limitations with the sampling used and it was very likely that the project would only make contact with those willing and able to participate. previous research shows that there are many reasons why victims of domestic abuse do not disclose their abuse (e.g. willingness, embarrassment, fear, ability – including being literate) and it is very possible that this might impact on this research. similarly, agencies can only provide data on those that they come into contact with, so again the data that they can provide might be distorted by a range of factors (including women who are most in danger, in need, without any other means of support, same individual reporting to a number of agencies) service provision the data gathered showed that there were a number of essential services already available in the area and these were reasonably accessible to those who had transport. for example, the police, health services, social services, legal advice were all represented in the main market towns. however, these services were more likely to be in the business of providing ‘crisis support’ (e.g. police protection, emergency health care, emergency housing) for those seeking help and there was found to be very little specialist support for women in the early stages of help seeking (who might, for example, just want to talk). additionally, many of the services available were centrally located, difficult to access for those in rurally isolated areas and were not well advertised for people experiencing domestic violence. hence these services were difficult to access because of their physical location and because they were not well know about or signposted. both service providers and individuals reported that much was needed to both raise the profile of services, fill in the gaps and meet the particular needs of those living in rural and isolated areas. 581 building participative, empowering & diverse communities rurality and domestic violence the rural nature of eden clearly presented specific and additional difficulties for women who experienced domestic abuse. problems included: accessing services, poor transport systems, keeping services anonymous, breaking into closed communities, changing prevailing attitudes of acceptance and silence. the following raw quotes or vignettes are taken from the questionnaires and interviews carried out with service providers and survivors. they have been chosen to highlight some of the more perspicuous findings of the research: breaking into closed communities: “we know that there are cases of domestic violence in the very rural areas, but people don’t come forward. i’m sure they don’t just find it hard to get here transport wise. to make a specific journey to talk about your marriage just is too much of a hurdle” “the women do not get the opportunity to get support, they are isolated socially as well as geograpically…. without the support of other women in similar situations it very hard to talk about it or change your situation….” physical and social isolation: “in the morning he would check the mileage on the car and unplug the phone. if i had to go out then he would check exactly how far i had driven. he would keep on at me too – where had i gone, why, who had i talked to – so in the end it just wasn’t worth it” “i can think of a family who lived in a huge isolated house with no neighbours, the woman was totally intimidated by her husband who treated her like an animal. i spent so much time trying to build her confidence but she had no transport and he could rule her life.” finding and maintaining support: “i didn’t know who to tell, if i went to penrith i couldn’t keep going, and there’s nothing here”. access to services and transport: “ there isn’t any local police officers any more, they all come from penrith …. a woman could be dead before they even get the call” “it took weeks to sort everything out and get things organised… whereas if you were in penrith you could just sort of drop in and see whoever you wanted” “to get to penrith or carlisle if you don’t have a car and you don’t have any money … you just can’t do it” childcare: “to get to penrith is a real hike.. its not just getting the bus .. but trapesing all the kids and their stuff too…” confidentiality/lack of anonymity: “once you say something round here its round the village in no time” 582 building participative, empowering & diverse communities “…they [the doctors’ receptionists] know all your business, i once took in a sample for a pregnancy test for my neighbour, by the time i got home the women in the shop asked if i was pregnant again.” service providers being part of the community: “i felt i couldn’t tell him (the doctor) because he was a man … he plays cricket with x anyway, so he wouldn’t believe me” “the policeman that came round used to live two doors away, he told us to keep the noise down and sort it out for the kids sake”. difficulties in getting away: “i took out an injunction on him to stay away, the magistrate granted the injunction but allowed him to live in the caravan in the yard. he had access to the house twice a day. the first thing he did was superglue the locks, he had the shotgun in the caravan, i was terrified, i didn’t sleep for weeks. i eventually called the police and moved out when he was chain-sawing through the windows, i held the phone up to the noise for the police to hear, i think they believed me then. roots: “i was born in this village, he was too, we have a business here too, so when i had to move i lost my house, my friends, my family, and my livelihood, he still drinks in the same pub and pays me when he feels like it.” being ‘labelled’ and stigmatised by the community: “whereas here you can’t do anything without somebody else knowing about it, and i’d feel, well when it was happening that everybody was on his side because he was telling everything what the reasons why i had bruises and it just felt as if everybody was closing in on me and talking about me and you couldn’t go anywhere without people sort of talking behind your back” “i couldn’t go to the doctors, i didn’t want anyone to know, i went to carlisle hospital and told them i had fallen, they know though…. when i went to a solicitors i went to carlisle again just in case anyone saw me, daft really everyone knew, i’m sure”. acceptance of violence/macho culture: “there aren’t places to go round here, no women’s things i mean, you are meant to be home baking in the kitchen”. “many people in this area (appleby) would regard a smack from their husbands as normal … not as domestic violence” analysis and discussion whatever the methodological limitations, this empirical study, and the vignettes quoted above, clearly identify experiences and perceptions of domestic violence and of service provision in rural areas, a topic already identified as in need of further investigation (grama, 2000; krishnan et 583 building participative, empowering & diverse communities al., 2001; logan et al., 2001). what these documented experiences suggest is that service providers working with domestic violence victims should especially understand how particular contextual, social and environmental characteristics of rural life can impact on both the phenomena itself and the experiences of victims. this research clearly shows that for women in rural and isolated communities there are additional problems that make their experiences different and service providers need to respond to these differences in developing their services. living in rural and isolated areas creates a number of specific problems faced by those experiencing domestic violence. the psychological isolation that many abused women feel can be heightened when living in sparsely populated areas where there are reduced opportunities for social, community or specialised (confidential) support. the search for help and support can be far more difficult to undertake, particularly if the woman is reliant on public transport or partners and specialist support (such as refuge or women’s aid) is likely to be less accessible. even being able to access a website for specialist advice or information can be impossible in isolated areas where there is no network access. although this research suggested that domestic violence is ‘classless’, it also showed that those who were most economically dependent on their partners who were most disadvantaged by their experiences and were most likely to be excluded and marginalised by their social isolation and dependency. rural communities have longstanding and often intractable characteristics that may exacerbate both domestic violence itself and efforts to seek or provide services. to present a simple example, rural isolation adds to the practical difficulties of providing sufficient and appropriate services. statutory agencies need to rationalise service provision due to their resources, this results, for example, in local offices that are few in number, emergency services response times are affected by the sheer size of the area they have to travel between their home site and the incident they are attending, outreach services have to build in the time and cost of travelling and find ways of servicing an clientele that has specialist needs and a wide geographical area; housing stock is limited in sparsely populated areas this can mean women have to leave their communities in order to be housed safely or, if chose to stay in their community, are housed in close proximity to their abuser; and need to find resources to develop specialised provision. thirdly, many women have roots within the community, e.g. family, support network, employment, schools, which makes it difficult both to report abuse, and to ‘up and leave’. close kinship and community ties create problems for confidentiality and anonymity, while notions of sturdy self-reliance, common in depictions of rural life can act to further reduce the likelihood of reporting abuse. coupled with this it also has to be acknowledged that there are also many perceived benefits of living in rural areas. this study identified key positive features included: a sense of living in relatively secure and friendly community and living in an attractive, peaceful and unpolluted environment that was not perceived to be blighted by poverty, unemployment, crime or ‘traditional’ deprivation that comes with ‘inner city living’. some of these were cited as outweighing the ‘pros’ of leaving an abusive relationship. finally, the traditional beliefs of many small, isolated, rural communities was cited as contributing to the stigmatising and social isolation of women disclosing domestic violence, an ‘unwillingness to believe the victim’, and a tolerance of violent and abusive behaviour both inside and outside the family. reluctance to report abuse is similarly reinforced by a stereotypical “stand by your man” mentality rooted in patriarchal attitudes and beliefs about appropriate gender 584 building participative, empowering & diverse communities roles that are themselves communally derived and reinforced. highlighted in the accounts of women and workers was both a subtle and an explicit ‘patriarchy’ which impacted on the culture, organisation and norms of society in general. in turn these norms and values appeared to trickle down into the local communities and organisations in which these individuals lived and worked. at their worst these attitudes and beliefs led to the ‘condoning’ and normalisation of violence against women. the impact of these norms and values on the socialisation of children (through the media, social institutions such as schools and church, peer group and family) was also apparent. in the research i found evidence of communities and organisations unwilling to acknowledge, name, react to, or condemn domestic violence or those who perpetrated it (e.g. communities, health care services, criminal justice system) and implicitly, and explicitly, ‘blaming’ those who were the recipients of this violence. all these factors suggest that rurality may both increase the reluctance of women disclosing domestic violence and influence the extent and effectiveness of services that can be offered – there is a strong sense that victims risk further victimization as a result of the inadequacy or ineffectiveness of service provision. all these factors must obviously be taken into consideration when developing appropriate, coordinated, community services. this study has a number of important implications for practice and service provision, most notably in highlighting the variety of factors that contribute to domestic violence, the impact of the wider community on people’s experience of and responses to domestic violence, the importance of a multi-disciplinary, multi-agency approach in responding to domestic violence . for the women and children experiencing domestic abuse there needs to be both ameliorative provision, providing, for example, immediate and ongoing support services, helping with women’s immediate emotional and practical needs, and longer term prevention strategies, which work at local, national and international levels. at the widest level strategies have to be transformational and directed to the wider social, cultural, institutional and political contexts, raising awareness, changing attitudes, and informing polices and practice. however, interventions also need to work both within the communities in which women live and the organisations with which they come into contact as there is clearly a need for ‘small-scale’, community based preventative and ameliorative work. actions needed would include, raising awareness of domestic violence in the local community, and the role played by all in contributing (e.g. by recognising policies and practices that contribute to the hiding of domestic violence or poor treatment of women experiencing it) and work on developing inter-agency strategies that tackle the causes of abuse, improve provision and indicate areas of good practice. this research supports arguments as to the complex, multi-causal character of domestic violence (see heise, 1998). however, whereas some of these factors (e.g. attitudes towards women and violence), appeared to be present in all the women’s experiences other factors gave a women’s particular experience a specific quality. the social context in which women lived proved particularly important in this study as the rural environment clearly provided particular nuances to women’s everyday experiences, as did the absence or presence of social support networks. in this research the geographical context impacted on the nature of women’s experiences and on their searches for help. furthermore, although rural, isolated living had a significant impact on all the women’s experience it was those women who were most dependent, economically, physically and/or emotionally, on their partners, families and communities who were the most disadvantaged, excluded and marginalised. 585 building participative, empowering & diverse communities references bond, m a (1990) defining research relationship: maximizing participation in an unequal world. in p. tolan, c keys, f chertock and l jason (eds) researching community psychology: issues of theory and methods washington dc: apa countryside agency (2000) living in the countryside: the needs and aspirations of rural populations. c agency, wetherby g britain countryside agency (2006) living in the countryside: the needs and aspirations of rural populations. c agency, wetherby g britain dominy, n and radford l (1996) domestic violence in surrey: developing an effective inter-agency response, guildford: surrey county council/roehampton institute eastman, b.j, bunch, s.g., williams, a.h. and carawan , l.w (2007) exploring the perceptions of domestic violence service providers in rural localities violence against women, july 1, 2007; 13(7): 700 716. eastman, b.j. and bunch , s.g. (2007) providing services to survivors of domestic violence: a comparison of rural and urban service provider perceptions j interpers violence, april 1, 2007; 22(4): 465 473. evans j (1999) national association of victim support schemes quarterly magazine grama, j. (2000). women forgotten: difficulties faced by rural victims of domestic violence. journal of family law, 14, 173-189. heise, l. l. (1998). violence against women: an integrated ecological framework. violence against women, 4, 262-290. krishnan, s., hilbert, j., & vanleeuwen, d. (2001). domestic violence and help-seeking behaviors among rural women:results from a shelter-based study. family community health, 24, 28-38. logan, t., walker, r., & leukefeld, c. (2001). rural, urban influenced, and urban differences among domestic violence arrestees. journal of intepersonal violence, 16, 266-283. 586 building participative, empowering & diverse communities supportive houses for persons diagnosed with serious mental disorders as sociocultural sceneries: a methodological and theoretical proposal from the sociocultural psychology. javier saavedra universidad de sevilla. dep. psicología experimental fjsaavedra@us.es abstract supportive houses for persons diagnosed with mental serious disorders are essential for a system based on the community mental health. nevertheless, beyond the recognition of the patients’ life quality improve who live in these supportive houses, it has been researched little on the influence of these sceneries in the recovery’s process of the residents. in this sense, it’s especially important the possibility of constructing alternative identities to the "patient" role in these scenery. it’s necessary to define these sceneries in a complex way in order to start investigating how social environments can help to reconstruct the identity of the persons diagnosed with mental serious disorders and contribute to their recovery. the methodological and theoretical contributions of sociocultural psychology can help us in this task. the sociocultural psychology, vigotsky was one of the founders this theory, studies how the cultural, historical and institutional sceneries by means symbolic and material mediators are related dialectically to the cognitive resources of the human beings. concepts which come from of this tradition as "sociocultural sceneries ", "privilegiación", " activity " and " practice" will be used in this paper. a sociocultural analysis of these sceneries needs a description of the following basic dimensions: 1) concrete activities in the scenery 2) interactive daily patterns in the scenery: objective aspects like verbal exchange, space – temporal context, not verbal communication, etc. and also a subjective aspects evaluation, intentions, expectations, values, beliefs, how do the interactions’ participants define the context? 3) institutional: organizational norms and rules. how does the institution define the scenery? key words: recovery, socio-cultural psychology, supportive houses. i this paper belongs to a research in progress about changes in life narratives of patients with schizophrenia who live in special “care homes”. i have worked for eight years at a public foundation which provides special lodging to persons with serious mental problems. concretely i worked in special “care homes”. i’m interested in studying of these “care homes” and in effects of these settings in the patients’ identity construction. in this paper i expose the theoretical approach following of methodological requirements of my research design. programs which provide accommodation for people with mental serious disorders are 587 building participative, empowering & diverse communities fundamental for system of community mental health. basically, these lodgings should supply of basic needs, support active participation in the community and interpersonal relationships of users (dorvil et al, 2005) beneficial effects have been demonstrated in social functioning, quality of life, and hospital admissions, and pathological state of patient, although in this last case the evidence is minor (lopez, lara & laviana, 2004). however, the debate about specific characteristics of these lodgings is open. for example, the temporary or permanent character of lodging, number of residents, characteristics of the professionals who work in these lodgings, model of resource management (public or private) and aims of these programs; only basic needs or the inclusion of systematic rehabilitation programs. the special lodgings, where i worked and where i develop my research, are called “casas hogar”, “care homes”. these lodgings belong to a public foundation called faisem (andalusian foundation for the integration of the mental ill). “care homes” provides accommodation for between 16 and 20 persons with 24 hours of professional attention. these professional don’t have specific academic education. the residents suffer schizophrenia and other psychosis and the most come from other social and health institution, however more and more come from own home or family home. ii the study of changes in life narratives of patients who live in these “care homes” is the key point of my research. these life narratives are related to the construction process of the social identity of patients. we can find more and more contribution which point out that the reconstruction of patients’ identity is a very important phase in recovery. in this sense, our narratives of life are the essential instrument by means we give meanings to our experiences and by means we present ourselves to the community. life narratives are like our visiting card. i think that it’s difficult to understand how a patient can achieve recovery without a coherent and shareable life narrative. in this point a question arises: how a setting as “care homes” can transform, or help to transform life narratives of patients? in order to respond this question is necessary a complex description of these settings. a concept belongs to socio-cultural psychology helps me to understand “care homes” as socio-cultural contexts: “scenery or setting of activity”. before explaining this concept and showing example from my research we are going to expose some ideas of socio-cultural psychology. only three points about socio-cultural psychology. i think that these three ideas are very interesting in order to understand the recovery process of people with schizophrenia. first, this theoretical tradition affirms that the individual psychological developmental is explained from micro-social and macro-social contexts, that is, from interpersonal interactions or institutions where persons participate. in other words, psychological function is explained by participation in cultural activities (vigotsky, 1978). second, signs like all cultural material tools are internalized or appropriated by individuals from a social dimension (vygotski, 1930/1981; wertsch, 1985). these tools, especially the system of signs called language, mediate our cognitive processes. for example, when we achieved to use language to communicate, in this moment, our cognition is being mediated by these signs; when we learnt writing and reading, these new actions transform our psychological functions. 588 building participative, empowering & diverse communities also, when we use new methods to transmit language, for example books and now internet, our psychological functions are transformed. finally, socio-cultural psychology makes emphasis on processes rather products of psychological function (luria y vygotski, 1930/1992). activity settings are defined as very specific socio-cultural contexts where concrete human actions take place (wertsch, 1985). what i think interesting is that the activity settings are explained not only by means space-temporal and objective descriptions, but by means meanings and subjective assumptions of participants in actions. these meanings are necessary in order to recognize the activity setting by participants. we have said that language is an essential cultural tool. therefore, it is normal that speech or discursive genres are fundamental in order to explain activity settings. that is, conversational patterns, stereotyped issues and linguistic uses, which can be observed in activity settings. for example, how “care homes” are defined? next, we see three different definition of “care homes”. excerpt 1 faisem: “a resource aimed at promoting the continuity and active participation in social life” (documento de trabajo nº1. criterios para el desarrollo del programa residencial. faisem, 2000) excerpt 2 monitor: “ […] they are institutionalized and have the experience of being institutionalized but we want to sell that this is not an institution, that is a home. the everyday experience of them is that it's an institution.[…]” (interview to “monitor”. año 2008) excerpt 3 resident : “why must i clean my room? if i did it last week… you earn, because i pay you, because i'm paying here!". (narrative interview to resident. año 2007) first, a definition from an official document, “care homes” is defined as a useful instrument to achieve recovery and integration. in opposite sense, a worker affirms that “we can sell that this is not an institution”, but the residents, their everyday experiences “is that it’s an institution”. institution for this worke(a)r is understood as a closed space separated from society. but, how does a resident define “care homes”? in this last extract we can see how a resident defines “care homes” as a hotel in which the people pay for service. these three definitions interwoven are a fundamental part of this setting of activity. iii with regard to discourse genres, let me show you two excerpts from my interviews: excerpt 4 monitor 1: “and what i personally use are stories, any situation that has 589 building participative, empowering & diverse communities happened to me personally. interviewer: aha m: this morning it has happened to me with my child… he has said to me that… and i tell him something that was not important, but that it belongs to real life and that it’s personal and then automatically they change the chip, at least, momentarily”. excerpt 5 m2: “[…] i've had my problems, for example with this person; because he often confuses something… he tries to consult psychiatric problems to me. so i do not have neither voice nor vote, i don’t understand, you must say it to your psychiatrist, i can’t help you with that”. we observe that a fundamental characteristic in “care homes” is that verbal interventions, utterances, of residents related to some delusive or hallucinatory topic are no accepted. in the first extract, a professional explains us what she does when a resident tell her some delusive story or when the resident suffers a hallucination. this professional sets up against this delusive story “any situation that has happened to me personally”, “something that was not important, but that it belongs to real life and that it’s personal”. in this way “they change the chip, at least, momentarily”. in the second extract, other professional is more radical. faced with some commentary related to delusion or hallucination, he directly sends the resident to the psychiatrist. “i have neither voice nor vote, i don’t understand, you must say it to your psychiatrist, i can’t help you with that”. this meanings and assumptions explain aims and characteristics of the actions that participants develop in the settings. moreover, interpersonal relationships take place in daily activities and residents appropriate discourses and other cultural tools by means interaction with professionals and other residents. in this sense, analyzing daily activities is essential in order to understand deeply “care homes”. the analysis of daily activities needs a historical approach. that is, we need to observe the process and not only the product. in this sense, statistical tools like the instruments that we see in the slide are useful but not sufficient to describe “care homes”. i would like to study changes in the time, therefore i need other designs. for example, we can read in the next extract that a professional tell us the activity of going with the patients to the doctor or to hospital. we discover that, contrary what we can believe at the beginning, these activities are the more adequate for arising personal talks between professionals and residents. excerpt 6 monitor: the activities usually tend to be simple and then it's a time perhaps with more personalized talks with residents. because, well, you spend an hour, an hour and a half with them on the street alone, many conversations arise. small talks, it’s a nice day today! i fancy to go to the beach! or more serious conversations, about what? how have you been these days? […] i have heard that you had a fight with someone, i 590 building participative, empowering & diverse communities have heard that your family came to see you how was it? how are you? iv other methodological requirement is the study of institutional contexts. normally, this task is realized by sociologist and historians. but, as we have seen, macro-social context also affects human actions and psychological functions. therefore, in my opinion institutions is an object of study also for psychology. it’s possible to analyze official documents, minutes of meetings and other documents. in this sense, is fundamental to consider in our analysis, for example, in the case of “care homes belong to faisem, the public funding or the participation of relatives of patient in the institution. for example, in the quality plan program for next years the institution includes an extensive questionnaire about social functioning of residents. it’s significant that the institution decides to establish systematically an individual evaluation and intervention for each patient. in this way the aims of the institution go beyond providing basic needs. that means more systematization of the work in the last years. also it's interesting the inclusion of aspects related to the sexual life of residents in the evaluation. in summary, an activity setting, in this case “care homes” for patients with mental ill, should be analyzed from two focal points. on the one hand, institutional definitions, aims of the institution, institutional history, standards and rules. on the other hand, subjective factors as definitions, meanings and cultural tools that are used by participants. human actions, which we can observe, take place between these two focal points. bibliografía dorvil h, morin p, beaulieu a, y robert d. (2005), housing as a social integration factor for people classified as mentally ill. housing studies, 20(3): 497-519. lopez, m.,laviana, m., portes, f., cubillana de la cruz, p., y lópez, p. (2004). los programas residenciales para personas contrastarnos mental severo. revisión y propuestas. archivos de psiquiatría, 67 (2): 101-128. luria, a.r y vygotski, l.s. (1930/1992). ape, primitive man and child. essays in the history of behaviour. london: harvester wheatsheaf. vygotski, l.s. (1930/1981). “the genesis of higher mental functions”. en: wertsch, j.v. (ed) the concept f activity in soviet psychology. armonk, n.y.: sharpe, 134-143. vigotsky, (1978). mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, ma:havard university press. wertsch, j. (1985). vigotsky and the social formation of mind. cambridge, m.a: harvard university press. 591 building participative, empowering & diverse communities interactive patterns between professional and patient in supportive houses for serious mental ill javier saavedra universidad de sevilla. dep. psicología experimental fjsaavedra@us.es abstract this study belongs to a research in progress about changes in life narratives of persons diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. these persons live in supportive houses in andalusia which belong to a public foundation. in the present study the more important interactions between professionals and patients are described. it was carried out ten semistructured interviews to expert professionals who work in the supportive houses. the interactions face to face between professionals and patients is one of the essential factors that can help us to understand the process of patients’ recovery in these sceneries. the description includes very wide aspects as the special – temporal context, the verbal exchange, the emotional charge, the professional evaluation of the interaction, etc. the episodes that the professionals reported us can be classified in the six interactive formats. key words: social interactions, recovery, supportive houses. i in my second paper i would like to speak about some preliminary results of my research in progress (saavedra, 2006). concretely, i refer to a first approach to types of interactions between professionals who work directly with residents in “care homes” by means interviews to professionals. the aim of this paper is: in-depth description of recurrent interactions between professionals and patients in the context of the "care homes". according to theoretical approach which we are described in my first paper i am interested in subjective experiences of “monitors”: meanings, assumptions, valuations of interactions, emotional states, etc. participants were ten expert professionals, called “monitors”, who work directly with patients in “care homes”. all participants have more than three years of experiences and permanent contract. two of these professionals belong to work council. that is, they have labour union responsibilities. they were four men and six women. four "monitors" have university education; three have secondary education and three have primary education. it’s important to point out that professionals don’t have a specific education in order to develop this job. i have utilized a semi structured interview. we informed to professionals that the well practices were the interview’s focus. this interview consists of a first open question: ¿could you describe me in detail three interactions between you and one o more residents during your work in “care home”? the first interaction a very common interaction, second a usual interaction, and finally a rare interaction. so, we obtain thirty extensive descriptions of interactions. after the first professional’s description, interviewer can ask or holds a dialog about concrete aspects. the 592 building participative, empowering & diverse communities analysis is qualitative and i seek interactive patterns or idiosyncratic formats between the thirty professional descriptions. we call “interactive episode” each one of descriptions of “monitors”. and we call “interactive format” each one of set of interactive episodes that are grouped by criteria such as type of activity, space-time context, and goals for the participants in the interaction, valuations, speech genres, etc. ii we have found six interactive formats. interactive format 1 (if1). related to health problems of residents. 1.1 interactions related to anxiety or delirious state of residents 1.2 coping of compulsions and strange behaviors 1.3 “going with residents to the doctor” if2. demands of residents if3. routines related to daily life in “care homes” if4. interactions in free time activities if5. disruptive behavior if6. mediation between family and resident or explicit request of emotional support first, a big interactive format related to interventions of monitors in residents’ health problems. this format is divided in other three subgroups. one of these are “interactions related to anxiety or delirious state of residents”, other “coping of compulsions and strange behaviors”, and finally “going with residents to the doctor”. the second if is related to concrete demand to monitors of residents. the following if refers to daily life routines, interactions in free time activities, interventions related to disruptive behaviours of patients and finally mediation between family and residents or explicit emotional support. if we score interactions, we obtain frequencies of each if. in the next graphic we see a graphic representation of these frequencies. 3 pts. interactions very common 2 pts. interactions usual 1 pts. interactions rare 593 building participative, empowering & diverse communities as you see the first three if are absolute majority. that is, during the work of these professionals the majority of the interactions with residents in “care homes” are related to problems of health of residents, demands of residents or daily routines. i would like to describe in detail each if, but we don’t have enough time, so i select the three more frequent if in order to expose some significant results. iii within interactive format “health problems of residents”, i consider interesting episodes related to anxiety or delirious state of residents. professionals describe an important number of episodes in which they help residents to control unspecific distress, for example, pain in different places of the body, fear, anxiety, etc. professionals can respond to patients’ requests of help, but also they keep watch residents and ask often them for their state. the professionals express the importance of physical contact in order to moderate anxiety. for example, a professional describes how she clean slowly patient’s eyes when the patient feels anguish and thinks that he becomes blind. how do professionals define or interpret these states of distress? all professionals use the same concept to explain unspecific distress. these patients’ behaviors are described as “demands of attention” by monitors. that is, patients look for personal contact with professionals more or less intentionally by means expressing unspecific distress. what happen when a resident tells a delusive story or comments an auditory hallucination? two monitors tell us how they cope with this situation. first, they listen briefly patients because to deny the reality of the patient’s experiences in the moment of hallucination is absurd. second, they tell to residents very concrete stories with real personages belong to community or order very specific tasks. only, after the acute state, professionals can confront the reality of these experiences or inform about characteristics of illness. iv as you can see in the first excerpt, this interactive format, “demands of residents”, is described as residents' demands of different objects by monitors. for example, money, medicaments, bus card, etc. professionals express their tiredness because of residents are constantly demanding. the valuation of this interactive format is the worst. excerpt 1 monitor 1: […] i came very early every day and we already have antonio waiting. that is my entry every day. he is waiting. when i came, he was waiting at the door (.) and he is saying, medication! the bus card! and money! so i say antonio, good morning […] “ as you can read in the last two excerpts, professionals describe these interactions as “continuous war”, “fight” or “burning”. “e2.m2: […] and that is a continuous war. i believe that we are constantly saying no, not only on the issue of snuff, but with the money " 594 building participative, empowering & diverse communities “e3.m3: […] and that fight is ongoing, right? the truth is that burning a lot every day repeating the same story […] " professionals lose the initiative of interactions and they feel sick and tired for resisting demands. professionals said that they are limited to say no systematically to demands of residents. what is interesting in this interactive format is that the evaluation is worse than other interactive formats, which we can think more difficult to cope with. for example, professionals consider coping with hallucination, disruptive behaviors or emotional problems part logic of their job. however, they have some problems to accept demands of residents as part of job. v the third more frequent interactive format is related to daily activities as awakenings, home tasks, hygiene of residents, etc. the aspect more important of this format is the high affective communications that take place in daily routines. we can say that professionals and residents express in this format intimacy and proximity. professionals describe in interviews affective expressions, smiles, embraces and physical contacts which convey trust and intimacy. this interactive format is appropriate in order to residents can collaborate actively with “monitors” and even to take some minor decisions. regarding to communal tasks, professionals show a wide number of arguments in order to get the collaborations of residents. next slide shows an excerpt in which a professional describes the common tasks activities in the morning. e4.m4: […] just when i open the door of the wardrobe, he laughs a lot. i give to him the towels, that other residents need, and he delivers to others the towels. well, very happy at that time. he laughs a lot to me and he shows much affection, is not it? … i don’t know… there are not well… caresses, but it is physical contact that show that… affection, is not it? the glances… he shows that is… the truth is that i also enjoy, i laugh a lot and i convey him in some way the same feeling… you can see positive valuations of these activities. monitor tells how the resident collaborates and what affective expressions resident shows: for example, “laughs”, “caresses”, “physical contacts”. at the end of the excerpt the professional says “the truth is that i also enjoy, i laugh a lot and i convey him in some way the same thing” vi to conclude i point out some general consideration about results, including interactive format that we don’t have described. firstly, physical contact with residents is recognized by professionals as a useful instrument in order to express intimacy and trust or in order to regulate anxiety state. the use of stories for professionals is an aspect to remark. some stories can help to cope with positive symptoms and are utilized in order to help residents’ elaborations of life narratives. most of residents’ behaviors, which are valuated by professionals as negatives, are explained as “demands of attention”. the concept of “demands of attentions” works as an “explanatory framework”. the “daily routines” are the main contexts for expressing affection and intimacy (sells, 595 building participative, empowering & diverse communities stayner and davidson, 2004; roe y davidson, 2007). the mains interactive formats for elaborating personal stories in dialogue with professionals are “free time activities” and “going with residents to the doctor” interactive format as “disruptive behaviors” and, specially, “demands” involve professional burnout. finally, we can say that “care homes” provide of an important emotional support (lópez et al, 2007). bibliography lopez, m.,laviana, m., portes, f., cubillana de la cruz, p., y lópez, p. (2004). los programas residenciales para personas contrastarnos mental severo. revisión y propuestas. archivos de psiquiatría, 67 (2): 101-128. roe and davidson (2005). self and narrative in schizophrenia: time to author a new story. medical humanities 31: 89-94 saavedra, j. “changes in the life narratives of schizophrenic patients after staying in special boarding houses in andalusia”. [resumen] 15th international congress for the psychotherapy of schizophrenia and other psychoses. acta psychiatrica scandinavica. 2006; 431(114): 40. sells, d., stayner, d., and davidson. l. (2004). recovering the self in schizophrenia: an integrative review of qualitative studies. psychiatric quarterly 75 (1): 87-97. 596 building participative, empowering & diverse communities does the “broken window” theory work? how incivilities affect sense of insecurity in italian university students luca scacchi, mariagrazia monaci, ennio cavedon università della valle d’aosta (italy). l.scacchi@univda.it abstract the aim of this study was to examine the influence of incivilities on sense of insecurity in italy. the “broken window” thesis claims that by reducing signs of disorder, police can make lasting reductions in crime (wilson & kelling, 1982). other studies argue that changes in level of physical decay and social disorder do not lead decreased crime rates (taylor, 2001). however, all these studies, as well as several others, link disorder to insecurity: people who perceive incivilities more are more fearful (lagrange et al., 1992; santinello et al., 1997). moreover, past works have stressed the multidimensional constructs underlying psychological reactions to crime: personal fear of crime, social concern of crime, and perceived risk of crime have different predictors (freudenberg, 1971; van der wuff, 1986; amerio & roccato, 2005). the present study examined the correlates of distinct dimensions of insecurity in a sample of 226 university students in two different social contexts (123 in a mountain region not perceived as insecure by its inhabitants and 103 in a metropolitan city in northern italy). a self-report questionnaire was devised whose main variables were: victimization; personal well-being (masse et al., 1998), perceived social support (zimet et al., 1988), subtle and blatant prejudice (pettigrew & meertens, 1995), perception of social and physical incivilities, perception of territorial markers, and place identity (bonaiuto, bilotta, & fornaia, 2004). the first analyses confirm distinct constructs underlying insecurity. main results reveal significant relationships between fear of crime and social (but not physical) incivilities, gender, depression and negative place identity, whereas concern of crime is linked to blatant prejudice, social support and territorial markers. personal risk of crime is influenced by victimization and gender. further analyses comparing the two different social contexts will be presented. key words: fear fo crime, incivility, markers past works have stressed the multidimensional constructs underlying psychological reactions to crime: personal fear of crime, perceived risk of crime, and social concern about crime (furstenberg, 1971; van der wuff, 1986; amerio & roccato, 2005). fear of crime is defined as the emotional response to the likelihood of becoming the victim of crime; it has possible behavioural consequences and is mainly influenced by individual psychological factors (vulnerability). concern about crime is defined as the evaluation of the seriousness of the crime issue (not specifically in one’s own life environment); it does not seem to have consequences on daily behaviour and seems particularly associated with individual and collective perception of current social and political times (certainty of one’s own socio-economic stability; presence of immigrants; 597 building participative, empowering & diverse communities sudden significant changes in one’s own life environment, etc.). perceived risk of crime is defined as the cognitive evaluation of the likelihood of becoming the victim of a crime and seems to be more greatly affected by previous episodes of direct or indirect victimization and by perception of vulnerability. the differentiation between these three concepts arose from the need to explain several contradictions in the empirical evidence. the fear/victimization paradox (the most fearful social groups, women and the elderly, are the least victimized), the bias between perception and crime (areas with high crime rate and low fear or with high fear and low crime rate); the difference between socio-political attention to insecurity and individuals’ behaviour. the “broken window” thesis claims that by reducing signs of disorder, police can make lasting reductions in crime (wilson & kelling, 1982). the presence of cues of decay or social disorder (graffiti, broken glass, dilapidated buildings, beggars, youth hanging around in the streets, etc.) in the physical and social environment is interpreted as a sign of diminished social control. such lack of control, on the one side, allows and attracts deviant behaviours and criminal acts and, on the other, increases fear of or worry about becoming victims of crime in that territory. other studies argue that changes in level of physical decay and social disorder do not lead to different crime rates: the latter seem mainly associated to socio-economic determinants (taylor, 2002). however, all these studies, as well as several others, link disorder to insecurity: people who perceive incivilities become more fearful (lagrange et al., 1992; santinello et al., 1997). aims the aim of the present research was to examine the “broken window” thesis in the italian context, studying its influence especially on the three constructs of insecurity presented above. another aim was to check whether social and environmental life settings may determine connections between incivility and insecurity. a comparison was made between a small and relatively isolated community, valle d’aosta (a mountain valley of 120,000 inhabitants with few signs of physical and social decay and low crime rate) and a large community, the city of milan (one and a half million inhabitants enclosed in a metropolitan area of about 4 million). method partecipants a sample of 226 university students parteciped to the study, 71 male and 155 female, age ranging from 18 to 32 (mean age 22.1, sd 4.7).. two different social contexts was analyzed: aosta, a little city in a mountain region with low criminality (123 students) and milan, a metropolitan city in northern italy with high criminality (103 students) measures a self-report questionnaire was devised whose main variables were: • fear of crime (foc): a series of five stories, based on van der wuff’s (1986) model, which measures level of fear on a 5-point likert-type scale. the stories illustrate some daily situations with changes in two main dimensions: indoors/outdoors; presence/absence of threat (e.g., you are enjoying one evening at home. it is fairly late. the doorbell rings, but you are not expecting anybody...). 598 building participative, empowering & diverse communities • concern about crime (cac): 3 items to measure evaluation of crime in one’s own area, region, and in italy on a 5-point likert-type scale (decreased/on the increase). a list of 17 problem situations that characterize current society was presented and for each of them social worry was measured on a 5-point likert-type scale (not so worried/very worried). • perceived risk of crime (prc): percentage of likely victimization with regard to the seven main types of crime (bag-snatching/robbery; road accident; burglary; car theft; fighting; sexual assault; fraud). • self-protective behaviours: 2 items (“do you usually check for intruders when you get back home?”; “do you happen to lock your door when you are at home by yourself?”), measured on a 5-point likert-type scale (never/always). • perception of social and physical incivilities (si and pi): perception in one’s own life environment of 10 cues of physical decay (e.g., graffiti, damaged urban fittings, dirty streets), and 8 cues of social decay (e.g., drug addicts, immigrants, youth hanging around) measured on a 5-point likert-type scale (not there/very much there). • perception of social and physical territorial markers (sm and pm): perception in the area where one lives of 5 cues of territorial control (markers; e.g., tidy gardens, smart buildings, etc.) and social control (residents that clean the street in front of their place, friendly neighbours, etc.), measured on a 5-point likert-type scale (not there/very much there). the following were also measured: personal well-being (masse et al.’s scale, 1998; α = .80), perceived social support (zimet et al., 1988; α = .90), subtle and blatant prejudice (pettigrew & meertens, 1995; α = .83 e α = .71), collective self esteem (cse, luthanen & crocker, 1992; α = .82) and perception of the future (3 items, . α = .75). variable reduction an exploratory main-component factor analysis with varimax rotation was conducted on all the items on insecurity and 3 factors emerged: fear of crime (α .86); concern about crime (α .78); and perception of risk (α .75). for each of them an overall index was computed by summing the related items. an exploratory main-component factor analysis with varimax rotation was conducted on all the items on physical and social signs and 4 factors emerged: physical incivility (pi; α = .78); social incivility (si; α = .75); physical markers (pm, α = .73); social markers (sm, α = .63). for each of them an overall index was computed by summing the related items. all scales show good reliabilities. results an 2x2 (context by gender) anova was conducted on fear of crime (foc), concern about crime (cac) and perception of risk (pr) (figure 1). girls are more frightened and report greater likelihood of being victims of crime (f(223,2) = 63.8;. p < .001; f(223,2) =13.2;. p < .001). no significant difference emerged between valle d’aosta and milan youths. girls are also more worried as regards cac (f(223,2) =14.1; p < .001) and a significant interaction is also found: the aosta youths are more worried than the milan youths (f(223,2) = 9.1; p < .001). 599 building participative, empowering & diverse communities aosta milan figure 1: anova context by gender on foc, cac and pr. an 2x2 (context by gender) anova was conducted on markers and incivilities: social incivilities (si), physical incivilities (pi), social markers (sm), and physical markers (pm). (figure 2). no gender differences emerge with respect to environment perception (with the exception of si, where a slight significance is found in favour of girls’ higher perception: f(223,2) = 4.1,. p = .045. as expected, higher perception of social and environmental incivility is recorded in milan (f(223,2) = 8.7; p<.005; f(223,2) = 20.7, p < .001). in marker perception, on the contrary, no significant difference emerges with regard to context or gender. figure 1: anova context by gender on pi, si, pm and sm. correlations correlations, separately for milan and aosta, were examinated for foc, cac and pr with the main determinants considerated (see table 1). in both settings a correlation, albeit weak, emerges between physical/ social signs and insicurity. incivilities (especially environmental ones, 600 building participative, empowering & diverse communities less so the social ones) are associated with fear of crime in aosta and with concern about crime in milan. on the contrary, the markers do not seem to be associated with any of the three insecurities considered, except the environmental ones in aosta. in aosta future expectations do not seem to particularly affect any of the insecurities considered. in milan, too, fear of crime is not associated with the evaluation of one’s own social stability, but a negative significant correlation emerges between the overall evaluation about the future and concern about crime. in addition, in both settings fear of crime is associated with wellbeing, and concern about crime with blatant prejudice towards immigrants. in the metropolitan setting, however, significant correlations also emerge between concern about crime and subtle prejudice and social support. lastly, blatant prejudice is correlated with pr in milan. table 1: correlations of foc, cac and pr with the determinants in two social context discussion our findings confirm the presence of distinct constructs underlying the concept of insecurity. the factor analysis has confirmed a three-dimension structure, one linked to fear and behaviours; one linked to likelihood; and the last one linked to worry about the social issue. the different settings that we have analysed seem to significantly affect perception of insecurity (especially fear of crime and concern about crime), perception of incivilities, and the relation between the two. in milan environmental incivilities correlate with social incivilities, but also negatively with the markers (environmental decay is perceived as contrasting with signs and symbols of territorial control). in such a metropolitan setting, where perception of incivilities is high, fear of crime seems to be particularly connected to individual dimensions (wellbeing and gender), but does not seem to be strongly affected by perception of the environment (incivilities and markers) and by other social variables. on the contrary, concern about crime is significantly associated to perception of incivilities, to evaluation of the future (stability of one’s own condition), to relationship with immigrants. in valle d’aosta (few inhabitants, less crime, more cohesive socio-environmental setting) incivilities and markers do not seem to be associated (decay and territorial control emerge as 601 building participative, empowering & diverse communities unconnected variables). in a reality where the impact of environmental and social decay is lower, its presence seems to be associated to fear of crime rather than to concern about crime. it is only in this setting that a significant influence emerges of territorial control symbols (environmental markers), which are negatively associated to concern about crime. concern about crime does not seem to be as greatly influenced by other social variables as happens in the milan setting: no significant correlation emerges with regard to the future or subtle prejudice, while a significant relation emerges with regard to blatant prejudice. this indicates that intergroup confrontation with immigrants has an important role in concern about crime, regardless of social reference contexts. if our study seems to confirm the relation between insecurity and perception of incivilities, the social reference setting emerges as extremely important in determining which role the former may play in triggering such different responses: in a metropolitan reality, where the incidence of incivilities is higher, decay is associated with increased fear of crime; in a mountain setting with low crime rates, where the perception of incivilities is lower, decay is associated to increased concern about crime. references amerio p. & roccato, m . (2005). a predictive model for psychological reactions to crime in italy: an analysis of fear of crime and concern about crime as a social problem. journal of community & applied social psychology. vol 15(1) 17-28. furstenberg f.j. (1971). public reaction to crime in the street. american scholar, 40, 601-610. lagrange r.l., ferraro k.f. & supancic m (1992). perceived risk and fear of crime : role of social an physical incivilties. journal of research in crime and delinquency, 29, 311-334. luhtanen r, crocker j (1992). a collective self-esteem scale. personality and social psychology bulletin, 18, 302-318. massé, r., poulin, c., dassa, c., lambert, j., belairs. e battaglini, a., (1998) the structure of mental health: higher-order confirmatory factor analyses of psychological distress and well-being measures, in social indicators research, 45: 475-504. pettigrew, t. f. & meertens, r. w. (1995), subtle and blatant prejudice in western europe, in “european journal of social psychology”, 25(1), 57-75. santinello, m., gonzi, p. e scacchi, l. (1998), le paure della criminalità. aspetti psicosociali di comunità, milano, giuffrè. taylor, r.b. (2002), the incivilities or broken thesis, philadelphia, temple university. van der wuff, a., van staalduinen, l. e stringer, p. (1989), fear of crime in residential environments: testing a social psychological model, in “journal of social psychology”, 129, pp. 141-160 wilson q. e kelling g.l. (1982). broken window theory. the police and neighbourhood society, in “the atlantic monthly”, 279, 3, pp. 29-38. zimet, g.l., dahlem, n.w., zimet , s.g. e farley, g.k. (1988), the multidimensional scale of perceived social support, in “journal of personality assessment”, 52, pp. 30-41. 602 building participative, empowering & diverse communities judicial environment and poor families: risk or protection for relationships? simone de biazzi ávila batista silveira & maria angela mattar yunes instituto de ciências humanas e da informação, universidade federal do rio grande/furg, brasil e-mails: simonebiazzi@vetorial.net; mamyunes@yahoo.com.br abstract the quality of family relations has an expressive role over the human existence and may constitute a context for processes of development and learning of competencies. it also contributes to the improvement of social structures. the bioecological approach of human development puts forward the importance of those and other interactions. this study aims to investigate the relational processes and mechanisms operating in the judiciary environment that attend poor families involved in judicial conflicts. the objectives are: to analyze the form of interactions established in the reception of families and to investigate factors which may decrease or increase familiar conflicts, turning into risk or protection conditions. the ecological engagement method was employed. data collection instruments were: field book with in loco observations and interviews with district attorneys, judges, public defenders, social workers and members of the families in judicial conflict. data interpretation followed procedures of textual analysis. results indicate a belief system which involves the professionals and influences the quality of the connections between them and the families. on the other hand, the studied families denoted a distorted perception of the judicial system, which is not recognized as a locus of estate power offered to the population to preserve its interests. the absence of understanding among the people who are involved in the process must be emphasized, since the distance between the population and the professionals is detected by a specific language employed by the judicial system. another finding was the frequency of few and short meetings between both sides, professionals and families. these results point towards a disconnection between the professionals representing the judicial system in cases of family conflicts and the general population which may cause difficulties in the solution of the processes that should be under the protection established by the federal constitution as a duty of the brazilian estate. key-words: family relations, poor families, judicial environment estudiosos de vários campos de conhecimento apontam a família como um dos mais importantes contextos de desenvolvimento humano. este fato reitera a importância de estudos que focalizem os mais variados aspectos desta histórica e humana instituição relacional. o presente texto é um recorte de um estudo que teve como principal objetivo compreender como são processados os conflitos familiares no âmbito dos contextos dos ambientes e espaços judiciais. dentre os vários aspectos que compõe o referido trabalho, a visão dos profissionais do ambiente judiciário sobre as famílias atendidas em especial sobre as famílias pobres, foram focos deste 603 building participative, empowering & diverse communities estudo. alguns elementos de destaque foram a influência que as crenças dos profissionais exercem sobre a condução das lides processuais. assim, partindo de uma análise da família enquanto contexto de desenvolvimento humano e passando pela concepção jurídica da família, o artigo adentra os objetos de pesquisa propriamente ditos, tais quais apresentar os dados obtidos sobre as concepções de família para os operadores jurídicos e as influências destas visões na condução dos conflitos judicializados em casos de famílias pobres que fazem uso de um serviço gratuito. a família como contexto de desenvolvimento humano em situação de pobreza não há sociedade, ao longo da história que tenha vivido à margem de alguma forma de instituição familiar ou de alguma forma de institucionalização das relações entre seus membros. no entanto, há autores que remarcam que “a família não é algo biológico, algo natural ou dado, mas produto de diferentes formas históricas de organização entre os humanos que aos poucos foram sendo institucionalizadas na forma de organizações familiares”. (narvaz, 2005, p. 25). outros pensadores (áries, 1981) trazem a idéia de que a família da atualidade é uma invenção moderna, que deixou de ser apenas uma instituição de direito privado para a transmissão do nome e dos bens, para assumir uma função moral e espiritual, “passando a formar os corpos e as almas”. (p. 277) vale dizer que o conceito de família é polissêmico. no sentido mais restrito, refere-se ao núcleo familiar básico. no mais amplo, ao grupo de indivíduos vinculados entre si por laços consangüíneos, consensuais ou jurídicos e constituem complexas redes de parentesco atualizadas de forma episódica por meio de intercâmbios, cooperação e solidariedade. os limites variam de acordo com cultura, região e classe social. (salles, 1999; 2002, tuirán, 2002) carvalho (2003) afirma que: a família é apontada como elemento-chave não apenas para a "sobrevivência" dos indivíduos, mas também para a proteção e a socialização de seus componentes, transmissão do capital cultural, do capital econômico e da propriedade do grupo, bem como das relações de gênero e de solidariedade entre gerações. representando a forma tradicional de viver e uma instância mediadora entre indivíduo e sociedade, a família operaria como espaço de produção e transmissão de pautas e práticas culturais e como organização responsável pela existência cotidiana de seus integrantes, produzindo, reunindo e distribuindo recursos para a satisfação de suas necessidades básicas. (p. 109) a família é, portanto, um contexto de desenvolvimento humano, no qual se processam interações significativas entre pessoas (bronfrenbrenner, 1996; rodrigo & palacios, 1998). assim, estimular o desenvolvimento saudável das relações familiares significa promover o desenvolvimento positivo dos seres humanos integrantes dessas famílias, bem como relevar sua tarefa socializadora. segundo gomes (1992), “ela faz a primeira inserção da criança no mundo social objetivo, à medida que promove a aprendizagem de elementos culturais mínimos: linguagem, hábitos, usos, costumes, papéis, valores, padrões de comportamento e de atitudes, etc.” (p. 96) rodrigo e palácios (1998) apontam que a família é um cenário de construção de pessoas adultas, de auto-estima e bem-estar psicológico. é um lugar onde se aprende a enfrentar desafios e 604 building participative, empowering & diverse communities assumir responsabilidades e compromissos. representa, outrossim, para os autores mencionados, não apenas um contexto de desenvolvimento e realização pessoal dos adultos, mas é cenário de encontro intergeracional. além de formar uma rede de apoio social para os filhos, a família tem a função de assegurar a sobrevivência dos mesmos, seu crescimento, socialização e proporcionar um clima de afeto que possibilite estímulos para os seus relacionamentos com o ambiente físico e social. a função educacional da família se destaca. a educação é um espaço de descobertas e de invenção de novos gestos, de novas ações. para valadares (1999), “a família foi um lugar inicial de educação e, seja qual for a família, de forma melhor ou pior, ela acolhe e sustenta, ensina continuidades e cortes próprios da vitalidade” (p.26). os aspectos aqui abordados têm especial importância quando se fala das famílias pobres, pois muitas crenças a respeito da pobreza se alimentam da raiz da patologia social, que ameaçam os projetos de vida e de ascensão social das classes médias. de acordo com mello (1995), a família pobre é quase sempre declarada incompetente. a autora reitera: “seus membros adultos são desqualificados culturalmente. suas funções essenciais de socialização são responsáveis pela geração de ‘personalidades deformadas’, ou seja, inaceitáveis, capazes de cometer as mais bárbaras atrocidades” (p. 52). assim, a representação da família, embora compreensível para o senso comum, não é e nem poderia ser idêntica. é preciso saber de qual família estamos falando, em que contexto ela está inserida, situá-la no tempo e identificar os processos pelos quais passou ou está passando, e isso vale também quando falamos de famílias pobres. o avanço no enfrentamento da questão da pobreza mostra que as pessoas não deixam de trabalhar por vontade própria: o sistema produtivo é que é incapaz de absorver a população (valadares, 1991). tais considerações precisam ser feitas e refeitas, pensadas e repensadas, sob pena de não somente culpar as famílias por sua condição de pobreza, mas, sobretudo de não se fornecer a elas, a estrutura social adequada ao seu desenvolvimento. isso nos conduz a dar especial atenção aos estudos sobre a importância da situação familiar dos pobres e o seu desenvolvimento psicossocial. segundo rosemberg (1994), o cuidado no estudo com famílias pobres deve ser acurado no sentido de que, ao orientar o discurso a respeito das mesmas, não se redunde em processos de estigmatização. de acordo com a autora, a ênfase reducionista de grande parte das ações previstas para famílias pobres gira em torno de dois eixos principais: 1. o subdesenvolvimento é homogeneamente idêntico através dos continentes e dentro de um mesmo continente. a américa latina é homogênea e seus pobres são iguais. 2. nesse contexto de pobreza, as famílias pobres praticam excessos que colocam em risco sua prole. nas famílias pobres, as mulheres são vistas, antes de tudo, como reprodutoras descontroladas, que causam a perpetuação da pobreza e colocam em risco a ecologia global. (p. 29) estas crenças são reforçadas diariamente, seja através das políticas que excluem, ao invés de incluir, seja através da maneira como os problemas sociais são enfrentados, principalmente, pela mídia, que tem o poder de fazer crer naquilo que faz ver e ouvir. rosemberg (1994) completa seu raciocínio manifestando sua preocupação de que o imaginário que informa tais imagens da pobreza de famílias pobres seja estigmatizante e reforce os processos de exclusão social, através 605 building participative, empowering & diverse communities de políticas públicas excludentes. o adjetivo estigmatizante pode ser melhor compreendido a partir do conceito de estigma (gofmann, 1988), e é definido como uma atribuição social de desvio, incorporada numa identidade deteriorada atribuída a uma pessoa numa relação que implica desvalorização. o estigma é empregado para produzir e reproduzir relações e desigualdades sociais legitimadas por saberes técnicos. as crenças, assim, transformam diferenças em desigualdades: de classe, de gênero, de idade, de raça ou etnia, de sexualidade ou orientação sexual. o estigma tem sido empregado para dar legitimidade ao status dominante dentro de estruturas de desigualdade social existentes. alguns autores (carvalho & guará, 1994; draibe, 1994) quando se reportam à pauperização de enorme contingente da população brasileira, recomendam que a reforma das políticas e dos programas sociais coloquem a família como eixo e prioridade das ações governamentais nesse campo, propondo, para além do combate a pobreza e exclusão social, a implementação de programas de geração ou complementação de emprego e renda e de uma rede de serviços comunitários. em sociedades como o brasil, onde não se dispõe de um sistema de políticas sociais mais efetivo e abrangente, as condições de subsistência das famílias são determinadas por seu nível de rendimentos (carvalho, 2003). por isso mesmo, as mudanças e os fenômenos assinalados vêm tendo claros e fortes impactos sobre a organização e as condições de vida das famílias brasileiras, e afetam negativamente sua capacidade de atender às necessidades básicas de seus membros e propiciar-lhes efetiva proteção social. estudos recentes (salles, 2002; oliveira & ariza, 2002; goldani, 2002; montali, 2000) têm ressaltado como essas questões afetam também os padrões de organização do grupo familiar. nas classes populares, o homem ainda é considerado e valorizado como chefe e provedor da família, ao passo que as mulheres tendem a perceber o casamento como apoio moral e econômico e, muitas vezes, a oportunidade de deixar de trabalhar, para dedicar-se aos afazeres domésticos e à criação dos filhos. à medida que o desemprego e os baixos níveis de remuneração inviabilizam essa divisão sexual de responsabilidades, o projeto feminino de melhorar de vida pelo casamento é frustrado, enquanto o homem, impossibilitado de cumprir o seu papel, sente-se fracassado, enveredando muitas vezes pelo alcoolismo ou abandonando a família. atingida pelas mudanças assinaladas e por processos sobre os quais não tem controle, a família vem perdendo gradativamente sua capacidade de funcionar como amortecedor da crise e como mecanismo de proteção de seus componentes. a ruptura das possibilidades objetivas de manter o padrão de família culturalmente estabelecido e dominante pode implicar no aumento dos conflitos e parece estar contribuindo para o aumento das separações e das famílias monoparentais, chefiadas sobretudo por mulheres(garcia & yunes, 2006). diversos estudos têm analisado como, na história brasileira, os desafios de combate ao pauperismo e de regulação e controle das desigualdades e das injustiças nunca foram priorizados e efetivamente enfrentados. (carvalho, 2001; mello, 1995; sarti,1996; szymanski, 2004). some-se a tudo isto o fato de que os profissionais sociais que trabalham com essas famílias nos programas de intervenção, principalmente governamentais, têm a sua prática coordenada por crenças nada otimistas em relação ao público alvo. com efeito, investigações realizadas junto a diferentes categorias de trabalhadores sociais brasileiros (yunes, miranda & cuello, 2004) revelaram que suas práticas profissionais com famílias de baixa renda são pautadas por teorias implícitas pessimistas explicadas como “desestrutura”, 606 building participative, empowering & diverse communities “acomodação”, “carência”, “violência” e “drogadição”. foi constatado que tais elementos sublinham apenas as impossibilidades dos grupos pobres e têm considerável impacto no atendimento e nas interações profissionais-famílias. os resultados “indicaram posturas “paralisadas” ou ações assistencialistas que não promovem autonomia e desenvolvimento humano”. (yunes, 2001). tais concepções são importantes para serem observadas e debatidas incansavelmente, vez que, se absorvidas sem crítica ou reação, servem de fundamento, justificativas ou argumentos para a perpetuação de “políticas especiais para a pobreza”. importante ressaltar, no entanto, que tais políticas, longe de servirem como proteção às famílias, apresentam-se como políticas sociais preventivas e de emergência, em detrimento às políticas sociais para todos como reconhecimento da cidadania. para a disposição de políticas sérias de proteção à família, é preciso ressignificá-la a partir de novas atitudes em relação a ela, superando condutas que, para carvalho e guará (1994) são “pautadas na visão de família como incapaz, incompetente, desestruturada ou culpada” (p. 48). a família e o direito a evolução legislativa no brasil apresenta uma mudança bastante significativa nos últimos anos. com efeito, para o código civil de 1916 que regulava a família do início do século passado, a mesma era constituída unicamente pelo matrimônio: impedia a dissolução, fazia distinções entre seus membros e trazia qualificações discriminatórias às pessoas unidas sem casamento e aos filhos dessas relações. as referências feitas aos vínculos extramatrimoniais e aos filhos ilegítimos eram basicamente punitivas e tinham por finalidade a exclusão de direitos. corroborando o conceito, na constituição de 1946, família era “constituída pelo casamento de vínculo indissolúvel e terá direito à proteção do estado” , dispositivo que foi repetido na constituição federal de 1967. até o advento da constituição de 1988, a família somente seria juridicamente reconhecida através do casamento civil. naquela época, validar qualquer outro tipo de união diversa do casamento civil era tarefa bastante árdua. sucessivas alterações legislativas buscavam adequar a lei às situações fáticas que passaram a aparecer com maior freqüência, regulando, dessa forma os direitos dos cônjuges, eliminando a idéia da família como instituição sacralizada. hoje, o conceito constitucional de família é bem mais amplo e acabou por definir, que “a família, base da sociedade, tem especial proteção do estado”, acrescentando que “para efeito de proteção do estado, é reconhecida a união estável entre o homem e a mulher como entidade familiar, devendo a lei facilitar sua conversão em casamento”. no entanto, a abertura necessária para a análise do contexto familiar é pouca ou nenhuma no âmbito legal já que, em grande parte, a doutrina jurídica contempla com a expressão “desorganização familiar” a causa da atual “crise profunda” (cahaly, 2000) pela qual passa a instituição. embora para alguns juristas, essa “crise” seja mais aparente do que real, é bem verdade que, assim mesmo, continuam utilizando o termo para designar o que pode perfeitamente ser entendido como polimorfismo familiar. a doutrina jurídica é firme em apontar que houve uma mutação de conceitos básicos, e, por conseguinte, o enfraquecimento gradativo da disciplina familiar e a desconsideração paulatina do significado do vínculo matrimonial, pelo relaxamento dos costumes, pelas liberdades e concessões de toda ordem como justificativa do descarte de 607 building participative, empowering & diverse communities preconceitos tradicionais. (cahaly, 2000, p. 19) o modelo de família idealizado no imaginário social da contemporaneidade, que é o da “família nuclear burguesa com conotação normativa” (szymanski, 1995, p.26), é visto como a situação ideal dentro da conceituação jurídica, sendo considerada “desorganizada” a família que foge ao padrão de composição mãe, pai e filhos. segundo mello (1995), o caráter marcante desse modelo é o seu isolamento e a ausência de conflitos quer internos, quer externos. o sistema de relações que representa não deve nada ao mundo exterior ou ao ambiente doméstico. trabalho, escola, parentes e amigos, toda a extensa rede de relações que compõe a vida cotidiana não passa de pano de fundo para o que se desenrola no interior da família. o mundo desta família gira em torno de si mesmo. (p. 56) importante ressaltar que tal é a crença que vigora ainda nas varas judiciais especializadas em direito de família, onde as partes são recebidas sempre com reserva, já que “não conseguiram” evitar o conflito ou não optaram por resolvê-los dentro do “âmbito familiar”. nesse sentido, as famílias, principalmente as pobres, já são recebidas sob a égide da “incompetência”.rosemberg (1994) afirma que os pesquisadores e técnicos, ao absorverem e reproduzirem, sem crítica, concepções estigmatizantes sobre as famílias pobres, acabam por oferecer argumentos e justificativas para as políticas especiais para a pobreza. nesse diapasão, o enfoque jurídico, lato sensu, não considera que cada família “circula num modo particular de emocionar-se, criando uma cultura familiar própria, com seus códigos, com uma sintaxe própria para comunicar-se e interpretar comunicações, com suas regras, ritos e jogos” (szymanski, 1995, p. 25). ao contrário, exige uma adequação universalizada aos ditames do modelo monogâmico nuclear, burguês e patriarcal. no entanto, esse “modelo ideal de família” não corresponde às possibilidades reais das famílias que vivem na pobreza, não somente do ponto de vista econômico-financeiro, mas sobretudo, na pobreza de diversos fatores sociais e políticos. de um modo geral, as famílias não estão “desorganizadas”, mas organizadas segundo necessidades que lhes são peculiares. os processos que visam normatizar as famílias segundo o que é considerado o normal, o adequado, estigmatizam, violentam aquelas que fogem ao padrão. a família na visão do profissional do direito: implicações diversas objetivando discutir estas entre outras tantas questões, foi realizado um trabalho de pesquisa e uma das preocupações era saber como o ambiente judiciário recepcionava as famílias pobres cujos conflitos estavam sendo processados. o trabalho foi realizado utilizando-se como instrumento a inserção ecológica (cecconello & koller, 2004), tendo sido realizada a coleta de dados através de diário de campo, onde foram anotadas as observações feitas nos vários locais que compõem o ambiente judiciário – varas de família, salas de audiências, balcões de atendimento, defensoria pública e assistência judiciária da universidade federal do rio grande. foram também realizadas entrevistas semi-estruturadas com os operadores do direito, ora identificados pelas letras “k”, “x”, “y” e “z” e os integrantes de uma família cujo conflito encontrava-se judicializado. a análise dos dados seguiu a análise textual discursiva (moraes, 1999). inicialmente, foi importante compreender o que os integrantes do ambiente judiciário entendiam como família. interessante observar que, embora os conceitos definidores de família 608 building participative, empowering & diverse communities fossem bastante abertos, abrindo espaço para as mais modernas concepções, baseados nas relações afetivas, os comportamentos e as atuações práticas conduziram para conclusão diversa. apenas um dos discursos apontava a família como organização, regras, estrutura: pra mim eu sempre entendi esta questão de família , né, homem e mulher se juntando, enfim, com interesse de prole. aquela história das pessoas se relacionarem sem nenhum tipo de regramento, sempre deu uma confusão muito grande no momento de se estatuirem direitos, por isso houve uma necessidade de formação de família, com prole, descendência, ascendência e sucessão e direitos, que vieram... (x) os demais apontaram a família como ambiente de afeto, convívio, cuidado: neste contexto social, assim... é meio complicado definir família... é a gente com quem a gente conta. família eu acho que é aquela que te oferece recursos afetivos, que promove o bem-estar de seus membros, que tem um papel decisivo na educação formal, informal, é o local onde se desenvolve a solidariedade, onde estamos transmitindo valores, eu acho que o que mais importa são os laços de solidariedade e afetividade. (k) nesse contexto, os discursos sobre a família, na ótica dos profissionais atuantes na justiça familiar, estão afinados com os tempos atuais, com a família contemporânea e com os mais novos posicionamentos sobre o direito “das famílias” (dias, 2005). em sua recente obra, dias (2005) declara que: a entidade familiar, apesar do que muitos dizem, não se mostra em decadência. ao contrário é o resultado das transformações sociais. houve a repersonalização das relações familiares na busca do atendimento aos interesses mais valiosos das pessoas humanas: afeto, solidariedade, lealdade, confiança, respeito e amor. (p. 32) por seu turno, ost (2005) alega que: é preciso render-se à evidência: de instituição garantindo a transmissão de patrimônios e garantindo a ordem simbólica dos lugares, a família transformou-se atualmente em uma ‘rede de relações afetivas e de solidariedades’, da qual o desafio é a construção de identidades pessoais nas trocas intersubjetivas. (p. 362) no entanto, embora atuando na condução do conflito judicializado, os profissionais ainda expressam a idéia de que os conflitos familiares devem permanecer intramuros, não devendo ser discutidos perante outras pessoas: “aquilo que, pra nós, que pra mim, por exemplo eu acho que seria, ninguém tem que ficar sabendo, ninguém tem que ficar discutindo, não”. (y) o discurso deixa bastante claro que a imagem de família desse profissional é a da tradicional família nuclear burguesa, cujos problemas devem ser resolvidos no recesso do lar, longe dos olhares estranhos. e que tais problemas não devem ultrapassar os limites da casa para chegar ao conhecimento alheio, ou seja, os problemas devem ser escondidos, no afã de demonstrar 609 building participative, empowering & diverse communities a harmonia familiar que interessa à sociedade. tal visão de família passou a coexistir em nossa sociedade, a partir do século xvii, a partir de quando começam a aumentar as preocupações dos familiares e a expectativa social com relação à educação e cuidado das crianças (aries, 1981; biasolialves & sigolo, 1992; macedo, 1994). áries (1981) afirma que a família moderna se reorganiza em torno da criança e ergue entre ela mesma e a sociedade o muro da vida privada, devido a uma “necessidade de intimidade”. as famílias passam a representar pequenas sociedades, distribuídas por classes. a família burguesa “retirou-se da vasta sociedade polimorfa para se organizar a parte, num meio homogêneo, entre suas famílias fechadas, em habitações previstas para a intimidade, em bairros novos, protegidos contra toda contaminação popular” (p. 279) ocorre que tal convicção, longe de demonstrar uma forma de manter a privacidade dos integrantes do grupo familiar, pode representar fator de risco para o desenvolvimento humano desse “núcleo” concebido como fechado. sob a égide da privatização absoluta das relações e da manutenção do isolamento dos integrantes naquele núcleo, podem ser cometidos abusos entre os familiares, como os incontáveis casos de violência doméstica. as crenças dos profissionais que lidam com a proteção da família se operam de maneira efetiva na forma como conduzem a intervenção. abusos podem ser desconsiderados por convicções do tipo: “filho tem que ficar com a mãe” ou “em briga de marido e mulher ninguém mete a colher”. ao estabelecer o foco na estrutura e não na qualidade das inter-relações familiares, distancia-se do problema e aceitam-se implicitamente os valores, as regras, crenças e padrões emocionais do modelo nuclear, e se lida com a família idealizada e não com a que está posta na vivência diária. os componentes da família “vivida” (szymanski, 1998) passam a idealizar suas relações no modelo nuclear, aceitando a pecha de “incompletas” e “desestruturadas”, o que gera sentimentos de incompetência entre os membros. toda essa estrutura de crenças conduz ao caminho inverso do que deveria ser percorrido. os conflitos de interesses têm efeito para que ocorra a intervenção do estado, no sentido de coibir abusos e gerar a efetiva proteção estatal, principalmente no que diz respeito à família. é um dos importantes fatores para a organização de uma sociedade equilibrada. pensar nos interesses emocionais somente como algo isolado e próprio de cada indivíduo, fechado em seu casulo, ou em seu pequeno grupamento familiar isolado da sociedade representa um retrocesso, ainda mais quando se trata de famílias em situação de vulnerabilidade socioambiental. ademais, importante ressaltar que o estado, ao intervir nas relações de direito privado, o faz sempre com vistas à proteção não somente do indivíduo, mas fundamentalmente para atender aos interesses da coletividade. por isso, as normas de direito de família, embora estejam inscritas no âmbito de direito privado, são entendidas como normas de interesse e ordem pública, “assim entendidas as regras que tutelam o interesse geral, atendendo mais o interesse da coletividade do que do indivíduo”. (dias, 2005, p.32) cumpre frisar que as crenças e a postura dos profissionais que fazem parte da rede de apoio social apresentam-se como contextos ecológicos de influência das famílias (bronfenbrenner, 1996). estando ligados diretamente às políticas públicas de atendimento às populações em situação de risco, tais profissionais podem atuar como agentes mantenedores das desigualdades existentes ou como agentes potencializadores de mudança e de transformação da realidade das famílias atendidas. não bastassem estas convicções, a pobreza foi um fator apontado como um dos principais 610 building participative, empowering & diverse communities problemas na condução dos conflitos. os profissionais se manifestaram da seguinte maneira: ...não sei se é porque aqui também a gente trabalha com pessoas de baixa renda, eu acho que os problemas surgem muito em função disto... .eu fico com esta visão porque eu estou acostumada a atender estas pessoas, um público em que um dos principais problemas é a falta de dinheiro. (y) este discurso mostra que as convicções dos profissionais são bastante preocupantes e seguem um modelo de discurso que aponta a pobreza como a raiz de grande parte dos problemas familiares. é como se entre as camadas de maior poder aquisitivo não houvesse conflitos nas famílias, ou ocorressem em escala menor. no entanto, a grande distinção existente entre essas populações e as populações pobres é que a última costuma ser atendida pela rede pública, pelos serviços postos a sua disposição, independente de sua simpatia ou confiança na capacidade do profissional que não pode escolher, enquanto que as outras têm atendimento na esfera privada, por profissionais contratados segundo sua escolha e conveniência. e não é outro o entendimento dos profissionais, que, a despeito de culpabilizarem a situação financeira pelos conflitos, entendem que não há para as famílias em questão outra saída: “é diferente atuar com famílias de baixa renda, pois elas chegam ainda muito mais vulnerabilizadas”. (k) nesse sentido, a vulnerabilidade social atinge até mesmo a capacidade da busca pela rede de serviços. feijó e assis (2004), ao falarem do contexto da exclusão social, ressaltam os efeitos da segregação, que “priva o indivíduo de obter escolaridade, que é o instrumento para maiores chances de um emprego com melhor remuneração, assim como de ter acesso a informações que o habilitem a exercer a sua cidadania de forma plena”. aduzem as autoras mencionadas (2004) que a exclusão social é fator de classificação dos indivíduos como “seres inferiores e diferentes, impedindo que usufruam plenamente dos bens de consumo, da escola, de serviços de saúde, alijando-os do convívio sadio e produtivo na comunidade”. e, nesse sentido, os profissionais parecem não perceber que são esses aspectos macrossistêmicos que impõem à população pobre a vulnerabilidade da qual são vítimas: é muito fácil, tu tá desempregado e aí tu não tem o que fazer e o que se diz ainda o chefe de família, não é, então tá desempregado e então bebe, passa o dia bebendo, porque não tem emprego, porque não tem como trazer dinheiro para casa, e chega em casa e bate, enfim...também não sei se foi isto que aumentou de lá pra cá e por isso eu tenho esta sensação de que esses conflitos pioraram ou que se tornaram mais intensos. (y) não se pode prescindir do entendimento de que os conflitos familiares estão ligados a toda uma rede que implica envolvimentos dentro dos microssistemas, mas que são fundamentalmente influenciados por todos os outros sistemas nos quais os indivíduos estão inseridos, inclusive aqueles mais distantes (bronfenbrenner, 1979/1996). nesse sentido, existe o 611 building participative, empowering & diverse communities entendimento dos profissionais, ao menos no que diz respeito ao fato de que as dificuldades financeiras contribuem para a vulnerabilidade social: “essas dificuldades todas assim, porque nós fazemos parte de um mundo essencialmente capitalista, onde realmente o deus é o dinheiro, sem dinheiro não se consegue praticamente nada”. (x) as famílias, por sua vez, se ressentem do fato de que suas relações restam extremamente prejudicadas após o ajuizamento de uma ação. com efeito, foi voz corrente o afastamento dos cônjuges entre si e dos pais com relação aos filhos. as falas do pai entrevistado demonstram que o andamento do processo cria uma barreira que impede a convivência, principalmente com os filhos: agora eu nem vejo mais eles, muito difícil, mas criou uma barreira... eu queria poder ir lá ou eles virem até aqui, eu queria poder cobrar dos meus filhos o estudo, o comportamento, dar um foco neles, sabe, com a concordância da mãe deles. foi observado que existe o bloqueio do diálogo ocasionado pelo andamento de um processo. com efeito, o desgastado discurso “só falo com você na presença do meu advogado” parece não ser parte somente das falas de novelas. as pessoas efetivamente bloqueiam o diálogo tão logo se estabeleça a relação “processual”, que passa a vigir com uma força incrivelmente opressora. as iniciativas de acertos consensuais parecem encontrar terreno tão somente no ambiente judiciário para dar “validade” aos diálogos. a chancela judicial toma uma proporção que vem demonstrar, mais uma vez, que a justiça é vista pela população pobre como a própria lei, que não deve ser desobedecida em hipótese alguma e que, portanto, todo o diálogo deve obedecer ao rito do processo. a prática comum, todavia, era a “comunicação” somente ser estabelecida, se é que se pode falar em comunicação dentro da sala de audiências, principalmente entre as partes. para obter maiores informações sobre as ações, era mantido contato com as pessoas a respeito do motivo de sua presença no foro, e, na grande maioria dos diálogos estabelecidos, a fala mais comum era justamente esta: “depois que a gente acionou a justiça, não conversamos mais”. (fala com variáveis, mas com o mesmo sentido). também com relação aos filhos, não era diferente: “eu não vejo meus filhos há muito tempo, desde que a ação começou”. pode-se creditar boa parte destas dificuldades como conseqüência das interações entre as famílias e os operadores do direito. a falha existente na comunicação entre as partes e seus advogados, entre as partes e os juízes, promotores era evidente. em geral, as pretensões não restavam bastante claras aos profissionais, bem como as determinações, aconselhamentos, pareceres não eram sequer entendidos pelas partes. a reação mais comum observada durante a inserção ecológica era o ar de estranhamento das partes ao saírem das salas de audiências. era corriqueiro ouvir das partes as frases: “não entendi o que aconteceu lá dentro” ou “o que eu faço agora? ficou ou não decidida a questão?” considerações finais diante dos resultados apontados pode-se perceber, em primeiro lugar, que as questões relativas às concepções sobre família na ótica dos profissionais ainda se ressentem de uma abordagem mais contemporânea que contemple a diversidade de configurações familiares no mundo atual tanto pelos trabalhadores do judiciário como pela população atendida. as famílias 612 building participative, empowering & diverse communities são identificadas de forma “naturalizada” e numa perspectiva tradicional nuclear burguesa. a naturalização das relações familiares, que devem estar adequadas ao “modelo” a ser seguido, conduz a discursos normativos que acabam por influenciar não somente a maneira de se conduzir os processos por parte dos profissionais, mas, sobretudo, a aceitação da população atendida. estes fatores parecem representar interferências importantes na condução dos litígios. uma vez que os conflitos não são elaborados de forma saudável por todos os atores envolvidos, poderão representar fatores a se somarem na sensação de incompetência das famílias e contribuírem para a manutenção das teorias que permeiam o imaginário social de desestruturação como causa de aumento dos conflitos familiares. tratando-se de famílias pobres, as “teorias” referidas assumem um caráter ainda mais marcante, ao instante em que a pobreza é percebida por algumas categorias de agentes sociais como uma das grandes causadoras dos conflitos familiares (yunes, 2001) por outro lado, as dificuldades de interação entre as partes conflitantes se devem, em alguma medida, nas barreiras de comunicação existentes entre as mesmas e os operadores do direito, seja pelas teorias implícitas acerca dos modelos idealizados de família, seja pelas dificuldades de comunicação entre as partes e os profissionais. tais questões representam verdadeiros fatores de risco na condução dos conflitos, principalmente se levarmos em conta a importância das intervenções estatais na promoção da saúde e bem estar familiar. referências ariés, p. 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alexandra sá costa joão caramelo abstract with this paper we intend to reflect on the articulation between educational intervention and local development processes. this reflection is based in three evaluations of intervention projects developed by the authors. therefore we’ll: i) discuss the articulation between formal and non-formal educational strategies and local development; ii) characterise sociocultural methodologies of community intervention; iii) appreciate how educational intervention can contribute to emphasize local development strategies. the presentation and discussion of these dimensions will allow to argue about the importance of an educational intervention that articulating formal and non-formal educative strategies may promote local and community development dynamics. key words: local development, project evaluation, formal and non formal education introdução a partir da realização de trabalhos de avaliação externa de três projectos (terrasêca, m; costa, a. s, 2005; caramelo, j, 2004) propomo-nos reflectir sobre modos de articulação entre intervenção educativa e desenvolvimento local. os projectos aqui considerados foram desenvolvidos na zona sul do país pelo ice – instituto das comunidades educativas – uma associação de utilidade pública sem fins lucrativos, que intervém em meio rural e peri-urbano – e incidiram, essencialmente, na qualificação profissional e na prevenção primária da toxicodependência de populações juvenis em situação de desemprego. estes estudos de avaliação permitem destacar modalidades de intervenção educativa que implícita ou explicitamente se articulam com dinâmicas de desenvolvimento local. é a partir destas avaliações, e do que elas ressaltaram, que nos propomos discutir a pertinência de uma intervenção educativa que articule estratégias de educação formal e não formal, enquanto contributos para o aprofundamento de dinâmicas de desenvolvimento local. dos projectos em avaliação à avaliação dos projectos os projectos avaliados, como já foi referido, decorreram sob a égide do ice, uma associação de âmbito nacional que, desde 1992, tem vindo a desenvolver iniciativas e projectos de intervenção, promovendo o envolvimento de agentes diversos e o alicerçar de parcerias, revigorando relações de proximidade e perspectivando os diversos projectos de desenvolvimento como contributos para a recriação das comunidades, pelo “estabelecimento de redes de relações 616 building participative, empowering & diverse communities densas e qualificantes dos indivíduos e das comunidades” (correia, j. a; caramelo, j, 1998). as linhas de força do ice elegem “como objecto privilegiado de intervenção a comunidade local na perspectiva da sua afirmação e desenvolvimento”, trabalham “a dimensão educativa enquanto vertente de um desenvolvimento que só pode ser integrado e sistémico”, entendem “por dimensão educativa os níveis de educação formal, não formal e informal” (sarmento, m. j; oliveira, j. m, 2005:115). o percurso desta associação tem vindo a consubstanciar-se numa intervenção em quatro níveis: a) criação de pólos de desenvolvimento que reconfigurem o local; b) re-animação de recursos que originem, ao nível das comunidades locais, bem-estar e qualidade de vida; c) estruturação de redes de cooperação que promovam a articulação interinstitucional; d) combate à exclusão social. dois dos projectos avaliados inscrevem-se no trabalho desenvolvido pela equipa do ice no concelho da moita. o sentido da intervenção do ice é, neste contexto específico, norteado por alguns pressupostos e princípios orientadores que se procuram traduzir e explicitar a partir das ideias de: • “cidadania “como uma aposta na criação de sentido crítico e da vontade de produção de futuro”; • trabalho de parceria enquanto “aposta na negociação permanente”, articulação com diferentes sujeitos sociais e/ou institucionais”, “de forma flexível e numa geometria variável”; • formação como “oportunidade de questionamento da acção e de reconstrução do pensamento estratégico”; • alternativa procurando traduzir, no campo da intervenção, “formas diferentes de fazer” e “soluções que podem não emanar do sistema” (plano de acção do ice para o concelho da moita 2003/04, pp.2-3). ambos os projectos intervêm no domínio da prevenção primária da toxicodependência, ainda que, do ponto de vista da avaliação da sua intervenção, da abordagem globalizante das suas filosofias/modelos, das suas intenções/objectivos, bem como das acções desenvolvidas e da avaliação interna que realizam, se inscrevem assumidamente no campo mais abrangente da animação comunitária e do desenvolvimento local. estes projectos enfatizam a dimensão social da educação e a dimensão educativa da intervenção social, como é sugerido, nas suas próprias palavras, procurando “produzir respostas educativas adequadas para situações sociais críticas que estão na base da exclusão” e apresentando-se como “estratégia de construção de um processo local e como resposta a uma situação de exclusão” (cf. plano de acção do ice para o concelho da moita 2003/04). o projecto “eu e os outros” tinha como objectivo geral a articulação entre escolas, famílias e instituições locais e envolveu uma diversidade de parceiros institucionais, na expectativa de que o princípio da articulação de diversos actores sociais da comunidade potenciasse naturalmente uma resposta integrada a partir da escola e dos seus intervenientes, numa lógica de intervenção sócio-educativa territorializada. nesse sentido, parece-nos relevante destacar alguns dos princípios estruturantes da concepção de intervenção presente no projecto: a) valorização da especificidade do local; b) investimento na dimensão relacional/afectiva; c) recriação de uma identidade local 617 building participative, empowering & diverse communities (cf. relatório intermédio do projecto “eu e os outros”). do ponto de vista da concretização destes princípios, o projecto desenvolveu, enquanto iniciativas próprias, um conjunto de acções tais como a dinamização de espaços e tempos lectivos e extra-lectivos, conversas em roda, criação de grupos de pais, ateliers de informação/formação, intercâmbios escolares, fórum de associações, actividades no parque josé afonso ou ainda a semana de prevenção em meio escolar, tendo também participado em iniciativas que, sendo promovidas por entidades associadas ao projecto (neste caso, a câmara municipal da moita e o ice) transcenderam o seu âmbito restrito, destacandose o envolvimento numa feira de projectos. o projecto “crescer cool” propôs-se trabalhar fundamentalmente com adolescentes e jovens procurando “agir sobre os jovens em situação de abandono escolar, na perspectiva de os (trans)formar em cidadãos solidários com o território de pertença e em sujeitos de desenvolvimento” (cf. projecto “crescer cool”). tendo definido como potenciais participantes um grupo de alunos do ensino recorrente, houve necessidade de reequacionar quer o grupo com quem o projecto se desenvolveu, quer as acções promovidas, devido à alteração da vinculação dos jovens à escola e dos recursos disponibilizados para a intervenção, mas sobretudo em função da dinâmica de apropriação do projecto por parte dos jovens que redundou na concretização de actividades propostas por estes. alguns destes adolescentes e jovens eram potenciais destinatários de outros projectos presentes no mesmo espaço social (nomeadamente, o programa escolhas), tinham sido anteriormente alvo de medidas tutelares e sinalizados como “em risco” sendo que apenas alguns destes jovens – poucos – mantinham uma ligação ao sistema escolar . da análise dos objectivos constantes do relatório final do projecto podemos inferir que a sua intervenção procurou incidir na transformação das relações dos jovens entre si e, especialmente, com a comunidade envolvente (território, instituições, actores sociais) no sentido do seu empoderamento e da consciencialização do seu papel como agentes de mudança, através do recurso a uma diversidade de metodologias características do campo da animação e, nas palavras do próprio projecto, “adoptando como regra a partilha de saberes e espaços em regime de igualdade de poderes”. esta intervenção procurou “envolver as forças vivas e instituições da comunidade, os parceiros do projecto, e essencialmente a população alvo, na animação de novos espaços sociais reconstruídos” numa lógica de “(re) descoberta de relações comunitárias perdidas, tais como as relações entre o movimento associativo e a escola” (cf. relatório final do projecto “crescer cool”). o terceiro projecto avaliado – o projecto “pró-local – formar desenvolvendo” – surge na sequência de trabalhos que desde há diversos anos o ice tem vindo a promover, no seio de uma intervenção local já enraizada e articulada entre si, na zona do litoral alentejano. este projecto é conceptualizado como uma intervenção de formação e de animação comunitária, no pressuposto de que “projectos assentes na problemática do local e construídos em interacção com a comunidade e os seus agentes educativos induzem um crescente envolvimento e mobilização destes e uma crescente co-responsabilização na construção de soluções sustentadas” (cf. fundamentação do projecto pró local – formar desenvolvendo”). os seus objectivos globais eram: “identificar e promover alternativas de desenvolvimento que recriem a vontade de futuro e dinâmicas de empowerment das comunidades, contribuindo para a construção de novas competitividades, a identificação de direitos e o exercício de cidadania no local; contribuir para a definição de uma política global de desenvolvimento educativo, social e 618 building participative, empowering & diverse communities cultural criando condições de desenvolvimento pessoal e social” (idem). a intervenção neste projecto foi pensada em torno de dois tipos de acções: as acções não-formativas e as acções formativas. as primeiras tinham como destinatária a população das comunidades rurais. estas acções estavam subordinadas a duas intenções, nomeadamente, a “promoção da participação e da acção comunitária” e a “melhoria das competências pessoais e sociais”, no pressuposto de que a intervenção será tanto mais eficaz quanto mais partilhada for pelos actores locais, por aqueles que, no local, identificam os seus problemas e são capazes de construir um conhecimento sobre eles e sobre modos de acção e de transformação social. as acções formativas, organizadas no sentido de possibilitarem, aos técnicos envolvidos no projecto, a reflexão sobre as suas práticas e sobre a acção desenvolvida, consistiram na organização de um curso de animadores/mediadores comunitários para formação de técnicos de desenvolvimento que viriam a operacionalizar o projecto no terreno, e de seminários mensais para a promoção da formação e qualificação de agentes de desenvolvimento para técnicos do ice e das instituições parceiras. o que é de realçar é que, mais do que a coexistência no projecto destes dois tipos de acção – denominadas formativas e não formativas –, ambas com uma intencionalidade educativa mas definindo públicos distintos e formas de estruturação específicas, o que o projecto tem por intenção promover é a sua articulação, por referência à intervenção. esta opção do projecto vai ao encontro de pressupostos defendidos pelo ice no que respeita à articulação entre educação e desenvolvimento local, onde é central a ideia de que não pode ser vista enquanto uma “relação de causalidade linear, em que a qualificação (por via escolar) de recursos humanos constituiria um requisito prévio, necessário e suficiente, para desencadear processos de desenvolvimento.” (canário, r, 1999: 64). os modos de avaliação o ice solicitou às equipas de avaliação dos projectos a realização de uma avaliação externa, induzido pelas suas obrigações face às entidades financiadoras. as avaliações produzidas, no entanto, não correspondem exactamente ao figurino habitualmente definido para a avaliação externa, ainda que possamos identificar alguns traços teórico-metodológicos que lhe são eminentemente próprios: i) são realizadas a pedido da entidade que desenvolve o trabalho educativo e de formação a nível local e que face às equipas de avaliação assume o papel de demandante e principal interlocutor na contratualização da avaliação a realizar; ii) os avaliadores não mantêm uma vinculação institucional ou funcional com a entidade promotora dos projectos em apreciação e o seu estatuto decorre do reconhecimento de competências académicas e profissionais no domínio da avaliação de projectos; iii) o trabalho avaliativo constróise essencialmente a partir de documentos escritos produzidos no âmbito da candidatura e no âmbito do desenvolvimento dos projectos. no entanto, o trabalho destas equipas de avaliação não quis confinar-se exclusivamente aos traços acima apresentados procurando, ainda, dar conta das lógicas subjacentes às acções educativas desenvolvidas, problematizando o sentido dessas intervenções e interpretando os modos como elas ocorreram não como conjuntos de sucessos ou de lacunas, mas enquanto oportunidades de questionamento das práticas e das suas razões fundadoras. as avaliações produzidas incorporam explicitamente uma preocupação com a restituição dos sentidos dos 619 building participative, empowering & diverse communities diferentes actores sobre a acção desenvolvida e em que foram envolvidos, contrapondo-se a uma lógica meramente “verificacionista” face a objectivos previa e exteriormente traçados no que respeita a esses projectos. assim, as avaliações não prescindiram de se constituir em processo formativo, porque problematizador do modo como decorreram os projectos nos seus modos de implementação, e propiciador de aprendizagens estruturadoras dos sentidos de futuras intervenções. estes trabalhos de avaliação, como pensamos ter ficado claro, assumiram intencionalmente não se vincular exclusivamente a modos de avaliação estritos e assumiram a sua hibridez como factor de enriquecimento: a incorporação de características que transcendem a avaliação externa, tais como a preocupação com a dimensão crítica e formativa e a procura de construção de um sentido para a acção avaliada e para a avaliação. a reconhecida dificuldade em estabelecer um consenso teórico sobre a caracterização e fronteiras de alguns dos conceitos que estruturam o campo da avaliação (terrasêca, m, 2002) está bem evidenciada nestes trabalhos de avaliação. com efeito, a existência de uma avaliação que do ponto de vista formal se define como externa (o contrato estabelecido, o momento em que surge o pedido, os tempos disponíveis para a realização da avaliação, a constituição da equipa), mas que do ponto de vista funcional escapou às limitações deste registo, resultou numa hibridez que proporcionou às equipas de avaliação um espaço de autonomia permitindo-lhes transcender a injunção da encomenda e confrontando-as com a necessidade de construírem um sentido para a avaliação que estava em realização (o que lhes permitiu perspectivar a avaliação enquanto uma relação de alteridade). dimensões privilegiadas na avaliação dos projectos no sentido de nos adentrarmos nos projectos, o processo de avaliação iniciou-se com a exploração da documentação existente constituída por documentos com uma estrutura formalizada cuja origem é a sua entidade financiadora e por documentos de reflexão produzidos pelas equipas dos projectos. estes documentos são de natureza diversa, já que se trata de documentos relativos ao acompanhamento interno do projecto, ao registo das dinâmicas desenvolvidas, à avaliação interna e à animação da formação. trata-se de um processo iterativo e correlato da construção do objecto de avaliação e através do qual foi possível identificar dimensões a partir das quais se orienta o olhar avaliativo. é preciso realçar que estas dimensões não são imputáveis a um modelo de avaliação e passíveis de se replicarem noutros processos de avaliação, mas resultam do conhecimento que as equipas avaliadoras vão realizando acerca do projecto a partir da leitura reiterada dos seus documentos. a profunda articulação entre as dimensões relevadas e a natureza dos projectos explica porque é que nos projectos em causa as dimensões são diferentes. no caso do projecto “pró-local – formar desenvolvendo” as dimensões de análise procuraram equacionar: i) a perspectiva de desenvolvimento endógeno subjacente à concepção e ao desenvolvimento do projecto, ii) o desenvolvimento local enquanto campo de práticas de educação de adultos. os projectos “eu e os outros” e “crescer cool”, tendo a prevenção primária da toxicodependência como finalidade comum, partilham também uma mesma perspectiva de intervenção que transcende lógicas de acção individualizada e terapêutica para se pensarem como uma intervenção centrada nas relações que os indivíduos estabelecem entre si e com o território, concebendo-a como uma intervenção promotora de dinamização sócio-comunitária. é 620 building participative, empowering & diverse communities neste sentido que a avaliação destes projectos privilegiou como dimensão de análise a articulação da intervenção com dinâmicas de animação comunitária. articulação entre estratégias de formação formal e não formal e desenvolvimento local realçada pela avaliação a relação entre a intervenção sócio-educativa e o desenvolvimento local é assumida discursivamente pela entidade promotora e dinamizadora dos três projectos avaliados, na medida em que esta intencionalidade se inscreve na sua matriz de pensamento. o trabalho da avaliação consistiu em criar uma espécie de suspensão face a esta ideia programática da entidade promotora já que as avaliações, tal como as pensamos, de pouco préstimo são se obedecerem primordialmente a uma lógica verificacionista. é importante realçar que a avaliação se baseou na análise de documentos; no entanto o facto destes documentos serem de natureza muito diversa e produzidos por actores distintos e desempenhando papéis diferentes na dinamização dos projectos possibilitou que a equipa de avaliação tivesse acesso a pontos de vista heterogéneos, ainda que por vezes uníssonos, acerca da mesma realidade. queremos com isto dizer que o trabalho de análise pode beneficiar da triangulação entre modos de olhar diferentes sobre uma mesma realidade e essa mesma realidade considerada de forma fragmentada ou equacionada a partir de pontos de vista diferentes. deste modo, o dispositivo de avaliação tornou-se mais capaz de evidenciar que a articulação entre a intervenção sócio-educativa e o desenvolvimento local é conseguida, nos projectos, através do investimento na criação e animação de redes de parcerias, na inscrição territorial da acção e na sua sustentabilidade e através de um trabalho que enfatiza a globalização da acção educativa. a) parcerias: entre a rede de parcerias e o trabalho com rede a afirmação da articulação entre intervenção sócio-educativa e desenvolvimento local encontra no estabelecimento e dinamização de parcerias aquele que é, simultaneamente, um dos pontos fortes – no sentido do trabalho investido – e um dos pontos mais frágeis – do ponto de vista dos efeitos desse investimento. todos os projectos aqui em questão assumem discursivamente a intenção de promover o estabelecimento de parcerias, legitimando argumentativamente a sua importância ao associar desenvolvimento integrado e desenvolvimento de um território, enquanto espaço físico, cultural e social, ou seja promovem o envolvimento de diversas instituições e de diversos actores sociais. esta ideia corresponde a uma das dimensões da concepção de desenvolvimento integrado que associa a integração à relação que se estabelece entre diferentes instituições que partilham territórios, interesses e problemas comuns. ora, se a aposta no estabelecimento de parcerias é uma linha de força dos discursos programáticos dos projectos, de facto alguns documentos dão conta de que os designados parceiros terão tido uma passagem efémera pelos projectos, tendo assumido neles funções distintas e especializadas (apoio logístico, legitimação política, representatividade sectorial). o que a avaliação realçou foi a existência de relações intermitentes mais do que propriamente a construção de uma ligação reticular que assegurasse a sua própria sustentabilidade e permitisse a inter-permutabilidade dos papéis dos elementos da rede, de modo a que a eventual fragilidade de um não significasse a desagregação da rede. num dos projectos, perante algumas dificuldades em garantir e manter a adesão dos parceiros, a avaliação destacou, mesmo, a necessidade de reorientar a acção, isto é, de 621 building participative, empowering & diverse communities alterar a estratégia de intervenção, que teria que passar, necessariamente, pelo questionamento do sentido da acção. concordando com a importância das parcerias, não individualmente consideradas, mas na sua estruturação em rede, um dos aspectos que queremos realçar reside no facto de os projectos de desenvolvimento local se constituírem como importantes contributos para a recriação das comunidades, necessitando para tal, de contribuir para o estabelecimento de redes de relações densas que são qualificantes tanto dos indivíduos como das comunidades. a consolidação de hábitos de trabalho em cooperação e de concertação inter-institucional pode ter uma grande importância na promoção de uma “cultura de desenvolvimento” (melo, a, 1994) preocupada com a democraticidade e a deliberação enquanto referentes de legitimação da intervenção. queremos assim salientar que o envolvimento num trabalho em parceria pode constituir-se numa relação mutualista na medida em que a comunidade se recria pelo enriquecimento mútuo que os parceiros promovem uns nos outros pelo facto de interagirem, de se interpelarem e de se reconhecerem na relação solidária. o estabelecimento de parcerias deve ser objecto de uma constante vigilância que passa pela intensa negociação entre parceiros, activando a comunicação entre eles, promovendo a democracia participativa, sob pena de se passar do registo comunicacional da parceria para o registo meramente formal do partenariado. b) inscrição territorial e abordagem política integrada uma outra dimensão que os diferentes estudos de avaliação põem em destaque nos projectos avaliados é a que diz respeito à preocupação que lhes é inerente com a inscrição e sustentabilidade territorial das suas acções, referência que está inscrita na natureza e princípios afirmados pela entidade que os promove. a preocupação com a inscrição dos projectos num território para cuja definição contribuem revela-se, em primeira instância, ainda que ambiguamente, no modo como os projectos definem o “local” em que intervêm. com efeito, esta definição é genericamente marcada pela caracterização e afirmação deste local a partir de um potencial inscrito no território e das dinâmicas relacionais, ainda que “adormecidas”, que aí se desenham e contra um olhar deficitário – reconhecendo recursos potencialmente mobilizáveis pela intervenção, afirmando-se contra uma visão essencialista e estigmatizadora, que associa estritamente a intervenção à existência e ocorrência de problemas sociais e pensando os projectos como dispositivos de construção dos seus próprios recursos – aproximando-se assim do olhar que caracteriza o desenvolvimento endógeno. contudo, tal como a avaliação destacou, o olhar “pelo potencial” é palco de uma certa ambiguidade já que tanto a legitimidade dos projectos face às entidades financiadoras, como o modo como a intervenção por vezes se concretiza revelam uma lógica de “criar”/“pôr em relevo” problemas sobre os quais intervir, emergindo aí uma visão problemática e deficitária dos territórios e dos seus habitantes, construída, no caso de um dos projectos, por referência às suas características sócio-demográficas ou culturais (associadas à entropia do território e a uma visão desvalorizada da tradição) ou, no caso dos outros projectos avaliados, às relações estabelecidas entre indivíduos e instituições sociais, de que o exemplo mais significativo é a escola (a ruptura da relação entre jovens e escola é associada a um acréscimo das possibilidade de “desviância”). a ambiguidade assinalada não obsta a que se acentue que os projectos de intervenção se procuram definir por referência a uma identidade local, existente ou desejada, e por referência à valorização das suas constituintes sócio-culturais, entendidas como 622 building participative, empowering & diverse communities pontos de ancoragem que permitirão a construção de sentido e de pertença por parte daqueles que os projectos envolvem, mesmo se esta referência se assume essencialmente como ponto de partida da negociação identitária dos territórios e seus intervenientes, enquanto envolvidos num processo de desenvolvimento local. neste sentido, nos projectos avaliados encontramos uma intervenção marcada pela intenção de (re)dinamização – que é também (re)criação – de relações comunitárias perdidas, frequentemente articulada com a animação de espaços sociais desvitalizados ou com a criação de novos espaços sociais de sociabilidade suscitados a partir de um trabalho de animação cuja preocupação central é a do desenvolvimento de relações de pertinência entre espaços sociais e seus dinamizadores para que se possam criar condições para a sustentabilidade das iniciativas e, concomitantemente, dos territórios em que se inscrevem. esta lógica de intervenção, tal como a avaliação o apreendeu, integra características comummente associadas ao campo da animação sociocultural, nomeadamente, ao privilegiar iniciativas que assumem um carácter aberto – envolvendo protagonistas diferenciados na idade, sexo, qualificação escolar e estatuto social; protagonistas individuais e colectivos e com uma acção diferenciada ao nível dos territórios em que estão inseridos – protagonizadas de modo voluntário pelos sujeitos, com uma forte ênfase na promoção de relações de proximidade e afectividade e, essencialmente, ao fazer depender estrategicamente a intervenção da intencionalidade de criação de processos de participação. mas se a participação emerge como componente da inscrição territorial da intervenção e da sua sustentabilidade, é igualmente importante relevar a sua articulação com uma outra dimensão destacada pela avaliação: a abordagem política integrada do desenvolvimento local. queremos com isto significar, no prolongamento do que atrás salientámos a propósito da importância conferida às parcerias, que nos vários projectos avaliados nos encontramos perante uma abordagem multidimensional do território, das suas potencialidades e dos seus problemas. esta multidimensionalidade convoca um olhar sistémico quer sobre o modo como se definem os problemas quer sobre o modo como se pensa a intervenção que subentende um envolvimento participativo de diversos protagonistas, singulares ou institucionais, e a potenciação das suas sinergias, dos seus conhecimentos e desconhecimentos das dinâmicas territoriais na construção da intervenção. nos vários projectos avaliados encontramo-nos, portanto, perante o que designamos uma concepção política do território no sentido em que este, para além da sua realidade física, não pré-existe às relações que os actores estabelecem ou podem estabelecer entre si e em que, em consequência, a intervenção educativa toma como condição do seu sucesso a possibilidade de pôr em confronto uma pluralidade, mas essencialmente heterogeneidade, de olhares sobre o local e de interpelar as lógicas segmentadas de actuação para que o território se constitua numa arena pública de discussão política em torno do seu sentido e do seu projecto. c) globalização da acção educativa o modo como se assume o desenvolvimento destes projectos, no terreno, aponta para iniciativas que tendem a valorizar estratégias que permitam a fusão entre educação, formação e processos de desenvolvimento local, ao enfatizarem a dimensão social da educação e a dimensão educativa da intervenção social. a valorização desta estratégia é indiciada, nestes projectos, pela forma como promovem a participação e o protagonismo dos actores locais concebendo-as como oportunidades de aprendizagem colectiva e da sua consciencialização enquanto agentes de 623 building participative, empowering & diverse communities mudança. esta ideia traduziu-se, num dos projectos, através do processo de constituição de uma associação onde os jovens desempenham um papel de co-protagonistas e de responsáveis na definição global dos projectos e, enquanto tal, de agência social no sentido da mudança pessoal, mas igualmente comunitária. noutro dos projectos, o protagonismo dos jovens em acções de produção cultural articula-se claramente com uma transformação da sua relação com a produção cultural, considerada fundamental na transformação da sua relação com o tecido social em que estão inseridos. realce-se que a implementação deste tipo de estratégias para envolver os diversos parceiros em lógicas de intervenção implicada e activa, nem sempre resulta da melhor forma, uma vez que, tal como aconteceu num outro projecto, corre-se o risco dessas intervenções se tornarem em visões estereotipadas e cristalizadas de um local do passado, de um não-território onde dificilmente se podem criar e/ou afirmar espaços cívicos comuns. os laços sociais e a construção de sentidos partilhados para um território, faz-se, também, por este tipo de intervenção se ela tiver como missão projectar o desenvolvimento do território, apelando a uma cultura de participação e ao direito ao exercício de cidadania. assim, o protagonismo dos actores locais, numa intervenção que procure a fusão entre formação e desenvolvimento local enfatiza não só uma lógica de endogeneidade no que concerne aos recursos que mobiliza, como uma lógica participativa que procura equacionar os espaços dos quotidianos em territórios de exercício e afirmação de cidadanias plurais. a presença, nos projectos, de um modo de definir os problemas e de equacionar a intervenção segundo uma lógica sistémica, partindo de distintos “pontos críticos” cuja interacção é realçada, faz ressaltar a intenção de a intervenção promover uma abordagem globalizada da acção educativa, onde a uma diversidade de actores potencialmente educativos e a diferentes níveis de formalização da acção educativa se acrescenta a recriação de uma relação com um território comunitário capaz de realçar as suas possibilidades educogénicas. esta globalização da acção educativa, no que diz respeito às acções desenvolvidas, traduzse, assim, na superação da exclusividade do modo escolar enquanto intervenção educativa. com efeito, as acções desenvolvidas, nos diversos projectos, articularam diferentes níveis de formalização da acção educativa e constituíram-se em oportunidades de participação e protagonismo e, enquanto tal, de construção de saberes, por parte dos seus diversos intervenientes, mobilizando, numa lógica de desenvolvimento endógeno, aqueles que são os recursos mais importantes de uma região: as pessoas. salienta-se, também, o desenvolvimento de dispositivos de formação experiencial e em contexto de trabalho dos agentes educativos, e a potenciação dos espaços de encontro enquanto espaços de reflexão sobre as práticas. educação e dinâmicas de desenvolvimento local as características dos modos de avaliar implementados na avaliação destes projectos, permitiram diluir algumas das características de controlo e de verificação que a avaliação externa frequentemente adopta. deste modo, o trabalho de avaliação destes três projectos, permitiu destacar, nas intervenções previstas e realizadas, uma forte preocupação com uma articulação entre intervenção educativa e desenvolvimento local. esta articulação resulta do modo sistémico como se definem os problemas e a intervenção, assumindo os obstáculos como recursos estratégicos desta última. esta perspectiva, resulta da defesa de um princípio que é definidor do modo de intervenção do ice, e que assenta na defesa 624 building participative, empowering & diverse communities de uma pedagogia do superavit por contraponto à do déficit, promovendo a construção de soluções alicerçadas nos recursos existentes. esta visão contraria “uma representação espacial do social e que se inscrevem num processo de ‘naturalização’ de uma ideologia deficitária, de uma ideologia que tende a dissociar os dramas sociais e os sofrimentos sociais da problemática da desigualdade e da injustiça, para os encararem como uma expressão dos défices de qualificação dos seres sociais e dos espaços que eles habitam.” (correia, 2005: 33). nestes projectos, a articulação entre intervenção educativa e desenvolvimento local não se faz através da sua adição linear, nem da mobilização de recursos humanos qualificados nem exclusivamente a partir do investimento numa maior qualificação das pessoas. nos projectos aqui em consideração, a promoção do desenvolvimento local resulta, sobretudo, de uma articulação densa e intensa entre acções formativas, dinamização de associações locais, estabelecimento e dinamização de parcerias sólidas, da qualificação de recursos humanos e da mobilização emancipatória das pessoas do local e dos saberes que elas sabem. referências bibliográficas canário, r. (1999). educação de adultos. um campo e uma problemática. lisboa: educa. caramelo, j. (2004). relatório de avaliação externa dos projectos “eu e os outros” e “crescer cool” relatório produzido a pedido do ice – instituto das comunidades educativas, 22 p. correia, j. a. & caramelo, j. (1998). linhas gerais para uma reflexão em torno da problemática das relações entre educação e desenvolvimento local. documento policopiado. correia, j. a. (2005). políticas e lógicas da territorialização. contributos para a produção emancipatória do local. fénix. revista pernambucana de educação popular e de educação de adultos, ano 4 – nº 5 – janeiro/junho de 2005, pp. 33-42. d’espiney, r. (2004). perspectivas de uma intervenção em meio rural – estratégias, intencionalidades e pressupostos. in, j. a. correia & r. d’espiney (org.). inovação, cidadania e desenvolvimento local setúbal: cadernos ice, instituto das comunidades educativas, pp. 59-83. melo, a. (1994). educação e formação para o desenvolvimento rural. in: l. lima, (org). (1994). educação de adultos. braga: universidade do minho, 137-149. terrasêca, m. & costa, a. s. (2005). estudo de avaliação externa relativo ao projecto “pró-local – formar desenvolvendo”. relatório produzido a pedido do ice – instituto das comunidades educativas, 32p. 625 building participative, empowering & diverse communities construyamos juntos una comunidad educativa libre de violencia sara e. ruiz vallejo (saruca_06@yahoo.com.mx) susana ruiz pimentel (surupi04@yahoo.com.mx) maría josé garcía oramas (maria_josegarcia@hotmail.com) facultad psicología xalapa, universidad veracruzana abstract let’s build a violence free educational community together, is the slogan of an applied research project working with young men and women between the ages of 14 and 18 years, who are students in the telebachillerato system in the state of veracruz, mexico, due to conclude at the end of 2009. the project is formulated in four stages: 1) inquiry, 2) group intervention, 3) development of support material and 4) formulation of public policies. this research demonstrates the results of the inquiries carried out on violence in communities. key words: educational community, prevention, violence, youth i introduccion los resultados que se presentan en este escrito forman parte del proyecto: programa de formación ciudadana con menores veracruzanos en edad reproductiva y en situación escolar para promover una vida familiar y comunitaria libre de violencia; realizado por la facultad de psicología xalapa de la universidad veracruzana, con apoyo de fomix_ conacyt. el objetivo general del proyecto es: poner en marcha y evaluar un proyecto de investigación aplicada integral, multidisciplinaria e innovadora de formación ciudadana que permita promover una vida familiar y comunitaria libre de violencia con la participación de sus beneficiarios. para cumplir este objetivo se diseñó un proyecto en cuatro etapas: 1) indagación sobre la situación de violencia , 2) intervención con grupos de las comunidades para promover la construcción de estrategias de prevención pertinentes, 3) elaboración de materiales de apoyo para estimular la reflexión grupal en relación a las situaciones, 4) con base en los resultados de las fases anteriores, la formulación de políticas públicas para prevenircombatir la violencia ante las instituciones del estado. la indagación se realizó en 38 planteles de telebachillerato localizados en 38 localidades del estado de veracruz; con cuatro grupos de población: estudiantes, padresmadres de familia, personal docente de las escuelas y personal de los centros de salud; y en relación a cuatro ámbitos significativos en la vida de los estudiantes: familia, escuela, relaciones de pareja y comunidad. los objetivos del presente trabajo son exponer los resultados que aluden los hechos experimentados u observados por estudiantes y padres-madres de familia en los espacios públicos de las comunidades que habitan; las formas en que las personas o los grupos la han enfrentado; así como las implicaciones de las situaciones de violencia en las formas en que la 626 building participative, empowering & diverse communities comunidad ha visto modificada su capacidad para generar los satisfactores de subsistencia, protección y libertad que sus habitantes esperan y a los que tienen derecho. según datos de las naciones unidas, (2005) en américa latina viven 190 millones de niños y adolescentes menores de 18 años y cada año más de seis millones de niños y niñas sufren abuso severo, 80, 000 de los cuales mueren a causa de la violencia doméstica, lo que hace de esta región una de las de mayor índice de violencia en el mundo. dicha violencia existe en una variedad de ámbitos y formas, a menudo arraigada en la violencia estructural de profunda y ancestral desigualdad y en prácticas culturales vistas como naturales, la violencia cruza las fronteras culturales, las diferencias de clase, el origen étnico y edad y se ejerce en todos los espacios de la vida cotidiana aunque es más común en el hogar de parte de personas que forman parte del entorno inmediato de las víctimas, aunque no exclusivamente por ellas. entre las personas que la ejercen se incluyen los padres y la familia ampliada, conocidos de la familia, el novio o novia, el cónyuge o compañero/compañera. también tiene lugar en la escuela y otros entornos educativos así como en espacios públicos como las calles, senderos, parques, canchas de deporte, lugares de diversión. de la violencia en espacios públicos trata este escrito. los resultados que presentamos han de examinarse dentro de varios conceptos clave: la comunidad, concebida como espacio geográfico, grupo social e histórico con el que se comparte membresía e identidad social; el desarrollo a escala humana, como propuesta novedosa que concibe las necesidades humanas como carencia y como potencial; y la violencia desde una concepción integral. el abordaje de las situaciones de violencia dentro de estas perspectivas permitirá visualizar los diferentes factores que las conforman, sus implicaciones sociales, así como las formas en que los grupos las están enfrentando; sin duda alguna, la violencia en cualquier acto concreto que examinemos es un fenómeno multicausado; luego, si es un fenómeno multicausado, las acciones pertinentes para prevenirlo o abatirlo podrán y deberán proceder de sus múltiples actores; si en alguna medida, con sin conciencia de ello, somos corresponsables de los hechos de violencia, podemos ser corresponsables de las soluciones. la violencia concebimos la violencia según johan galtung (2003) porque se trata de un modelo que rebasa la violencia manifiesta y permite la contextualización de los hechos particulares; este autor concibe la violencia como sufrimiento evitable; en este sentido, cualquier dolor, sufrimiento padecido por una persona, un grupo, y que pudiera haberse evitado es violencia; toda acción que coarte, restrinja, limite la realización humana es violencia. la violencia, dice galtung, (1969) es lo que aumenta la distancia entre lo potencial y lo actual, entre lo que podría ser y lo que es. el autor propone un triángulo con tres variantes para explicar la violencia (galtung; 2003) en primer lugar describe la violencia: personal o directa, que puede ser física y/o verbal, visible y observable a través del comportamiento; como violencia manifiesta es la forma más severa y destructiva del poder físico; puede ser utilizada por individuos, grupos de personas, o por el estado; su carácter visible hace posible la identificación de los actores que la protagonizan y la medición de sus resultados: muertos, heridos, mujeres violadas, niños abusados, robos, asaltos, encarcelados, procesados. sin embargo, a pesar de su aparente fuerza la violencia personal o directa no viene de la nada, se produce siempre en un contexto social e histórico que la favorece, la utiliza en determinadas circunstancias y la mantiene por diversos medios; es en este contexto 627 building participative, empowering & diverse communities donde sitúa las otras dos variantes: la estructural y la cultural, lo peculiar de estas variantes es que son invisibles, de manera que sus consecuencias no pueden atribuirse a algún actor específico, no pueden deslindarse las causas que las producen ni las estrategias de manipulación utilizadas por diversas instituciones para evitar que se tome conciencia de ellas. las dos variantes crean y refuerzan la violencia directa. la violencia estructural (cano, cisneros; 1980; galtung 2003) es la injusticia, la desigualdad y la inequitatividad; implícitas, contenidas en el seno de la propia sociedad; es el precio por vivir en una sociedad. para las autoras la estructura de la sociedad tiene una composición heterogénea, lo que significa que algunos individuos, grupos y clases sociales tienen más poder y oportunidad que otros, ventaja que imponen a los que no lo tienen por diferentes medios, incluida la violencia física directa; la violencia estructural alude también a las instituciones de la sociedad: ejército, policía, sistema carcelario, escuela, familia y a sus normas, en las que las se establecen relaciones de poder y que en determinadas circunstancias se pueden tornar en esquemas que crean y mantienen la desigualdad entre los actores sociales. los grados de violencia estructural son los mismos que los de injusticia y desigualdad y en las sociedades modernas la desigualdad puede medirse mediante indicadores estadísticos relativos a los sistemas: económico, político y social; tanto la generación como el examen minucioso de estos indicadores demostrará con datos duros que hay sociedades más violentas que otras; regiones donde la violencia se concentra; períodos en la historia caracterizados por la violencia, grupos sociales excluidos de los beneficios del desarrollo en forma sistemática; desigualdades en educación, salud, empleo, acceso a la justicia, entre otras. la cultura, esa segunda naturaleza como algunos la llaman, tiene el papel de restringir, expandir, configurar lo que la naturaleza nos ha asignado en cuanto humanos; por consiguiente las restricciones construidas e impuestas culturalmente sobre las personas pueden convertirse en violentas y en verse como naturales, sobre todo cuando se dan por hechas, cuando no se cuestionan. la violencia cultural se manifiesta en seis ámbitos (galtung, 1981en torres falcón, 2001) la religión, la ideología, la creación artística, el lenguaje, la ciencia empírica y la ciencia formal. estos seis ámbitos no son violentos en sí mismos; lo son en tanto las, construcciones sociales, creencias, creaciones artísticas, el lenguaje, justifiquen, mantengan o produzcan la desigualdad y la injusticia. a lo largo de la historia, tanto corrientes teóricas como movimientos sociales, modelos educativos han hecho esfuerzos por develar los fines implícitos de los sistemas ideológicos, y de los religiosos que mediante procesos como la naturalización de los usos y costumbres, la sacralización de algunos rituales, la apelación a mitos de creación, la falta de palabras para nombrar los hechos, entre otros; han conseguido perpetuar la exclusión, estigmatización de grupos sociales completos, incluso con la aceptación de los mismos. el gran logro del movimiento feminista ha sido hacer visibles los significados de mitos, leyendas, creencias, expectativas; que las sociedades, las religiones, la ciencia empírica han creado para justificar el sistema patriarcal y con ello la subordinación de las mujeres que se manifiesta de diversas formas según los contextos sociales. las tres variantes propuestas se refuerzan y se vinculan de tal manera que cualquiera de ellas puede ser invocada para justificar y utilizar las otras dos. es necesario hacer una precisión importante en la propuesta de galtung, (2003) y se refiere al malentendido que asegura que la violencia es propia de la naturaleza humana. el autor 628 building participative, empowering & diverse communities agrega que tanto el potencial para la violencia como para el amor son propios de la naturaleza humana, pero son las circunstancias producidas por la violencia estructural y cultural, invisibles pero potentes las que condicionan la realización de dicho potencial; marx, (1845) planteó una explicación en el mismo sentido en la sexta tesis sobre fehuerbach: la esencia humana no es algo abstracto inherente a cada individuo. es, en su realidad el conjunto de las relaciones sociales. en los seres humanos la oposición entre lo biológico y lo social es una falsa dicotomía, los seres humanos no devenimos como tales más que en sociedad. la precisión anterior es hoy más importante que nunca, en tiempos de violencia la tentación de igualar la naturaleza humana a la violencia es una solución simplista, fácil y peligrosa; simplista porque evade la complejidad que hay atrás de cada acto de violencia; fácil porque oculta la responsabilidad del estado y de sus instituciones en la generación de la violencia estructural y peligrosa porque apela casi siempre a soluciones de más violencia focalizada en grupos sociales concretos y que finalmente, no construye una solución para las raíces del problema. con esta aclaración tan significativa, queda delimitada la concepción: el énfasis está dirigido a la posibilidad de realización de las necesidades de las personas, que en situaciones de violencia se ve seriamente afectada, y no a los medios utilizados para ejercerla. violencia familiar y de género en el mundo occidental moderno, la familia es visualizada como un espacio amoroso, armonioso, pacífico, protector; en el que cualquier manifestación de desavenencia, conflicto, lucha; es vista como disfuncional; sin embargo, es en la familia donde se construyen los vínculos humanos más profundos y por consiguiente donde el conflicto es inherente, como lo es en toda clase de relación humana; no obstante esta condición inevitable, no es el conflicto en sí sino las formas de enfrentarlo las que pueden ser lesivas, violentas para quienes toman parte. la resolución violenta del conflicto pretende imponer al que está en desacuerdo una forma de ser y de actuar. con la violencia se pretende eliminar cualquier obstáculo al ejercicio del poder y al control del otro, por lo que necesariamente requiere de personas en relaciones desiguales de poder: un superiorun subordinado, maestroalumno; madrehija, hombremujer, hermano mayorhermana. la ley de acceso de las mujeres a una vida libre de violencia del estado de veracruz, (2007) define la violencia de género como una modalidad de violencia dirigida contra las mujeres: “ cualquier acción u omisión, basada en el género, que les cause a las mujeres de cualquier edad, daño o sufrimiento psicológico, físico, patrimonial, económico, sexual o la muerte tanto en ámbito privado como en el público y que se expresa en amenazas, agravios, maltrato, lesiones y daños asociados a la exclusión, la subordinación, la discriminación y la explotación de las mujeres y que es consustancial a la opresión de género en todas sus modalidades afectando sus derechos humanos. la violencia de género contra las mujeres involucra tanto a las personas como a la sociedad, comunidades, relaciones, prácticas e instituciones sociales, y al estado que la reproduce al no garantizar la igualdad, al perpetuar formas jurídicas, judiciales, políticas androcéntricas y de jerararquía de género y al no dar garantías de seguridad a las mujeres durante todo su ciclo de vida.” la misma ley incluye dentro de las modalidades de violencia contra las mujeres la violencia en el ámbito familiar, la violencia escolar y la violencia comunitaria. 629 building participative, empowering & diverse communities la violencia como restricción de la realización de las necesidades humanas en congruencia con el modelo para explicar la violencia que hemos expuesto; la propuesta de desarrollo a escala humana (deh) nos explica las formas en que la violencia en la sociedad en general y en la comunidad donde se habita se convierte en un obstáculo para la generación de los satisfactores necesarios para la realización de las necesidades humanas, a la vez que genera diferentes tipos de pobreza que afectan a sus habitantes. el deh principia su argumentación con la definición de sus objetivos. el desarrollo, dice su principal autor (max-neff y cols, 1986) se concentra y sustenta en la satisfacción de las necesidades humanas (nh) fundamentales, en las generación de niveles crecientes de autodependencia; en la articulación orgánica de los seres humanos con la naturaleza y la tecnología; de los procesos globales con los comportamientos locales; de lo personal con lo social; de la planificación con la autonomía y de la sociedad civil con el estado. necesidades humanas, autodependencia y articulaciones orgánicas, son los pilares fundamentales que sustentan el deh, pero estos pilares a su vez necesitan apoyarse en una base sólida que se construye a partir del protagonismo real de las personas, como consecuencia de privilegiar tanto la diversidad como la autonomía de espacios en los que el protagonismo sea realmente posible. lograr la transformación de la persona objeto en persona sujeto del desarrollo es, entre otras cosas un problema de escala; porque no hay protagonismo posible en sistemas gigantes organizados jerárquicamente desde arriba hacia abajo. postulados del deh 1. el desarrollo se refiere a personas no a objetos, en el que se debe destacar un indicador más cualitativo que cuantitativo, para lo cual proponen el concepto de calidad de vida, misma que dependerá de las posibilidades que tengan las personas de satisfacer sus necesidades humanas fundamentales. 2. las necesidades humanas son finitas, pocas y clasificables. 3. las necesidades humanas fundamentales son las mismas en todas las culturas y en todos los períodos históricos; lo que cambia, a través del tiempo y de las culturas, es la manera o los medios utilizados para la satisfacción de las necesidades. lo que está culturamente determinado no son las necesidades humanas fundamentales, sino los satisfactores de esas necesidades. 4. cada necesidad se satisface en tres contextos, a) en relación con uno mismo, b) en relación con el grupo social y c) en relación con el medio ambiente. así mismo puede satisfacerse a niveles diferentes y con distinta intensidad; esto dependerá del tiempo, lugar y circunstancia. se ha creído tradicionalmente que las necesidades humanas tienden a ser infinitas, que cambian constantemente, que varían de una cultura a otra, y que son diferentes en cada período histórico. para los autores de la propuesta, estas ideas son producto de un error conceptual que consiste en no hacer explícita la diferencia fundamental entre lo que son propiamente las necesidades y lo que son los satisfactores de esas necesidades. las necesidades humanas pueden desagregarse conforme múltiples criterios. el documento combina dos criterios posibles, según categorías existenciales y según categorías axiológicas. esta combinación permite operar con una clasificación que incluye por una parte, 630 building participative, empowering & diverse communities las necesidades de ser, tener, hacer y estar, y, por otra, las necesidades de subsistencia, proteccion, afecto, entendimiento, participación, ocio, creacion, identidad, libertad. ambas categorías pueden combinarse con la ayuda de una matriz. de la clasificación propuesta se desprende que, por ejemplo, alimentación y abrigo no deben considerarse como necesidades, sino como satisfactores de la necesidad fundamental de subsistencia. del mismo modo, la educación, el estudio, la investigación, la meditación son satisfactores de la necesidad de entendimiento; los sistemas curativos, la prevención y los esquemas de salud en general son satisfactores de la necesidad de protección. no existe correspondencia biunívoca entre necesidades y satisfactores. un satisfactor puede contribuir en forma simultánea a la satisfacción de diversas necesidades o, a la inversa, una necesidad puede requerir diversos satisfactores para ser satisfecha. ni siquiera estas relaciones son fijas, pueden varias según el tiempo, lugar y las circunstancias. cada sistema económico, socio y político adopta diferentes estilos para la satisfacción de las mismas necesidades humanas fundamentales. en cada sistema, éstas se satisfacen (o no se satisfacen) a través de la generación (o no generación ) de diferentes tipos de satisfactores. uno de los aspectos que definen una cultura es su elección de satisfactores. el cambio cultural es entre otras cosas, consecuencia de abandonar satisfactores tradicionales para reemplazarlos por otros nuevos o diferentes. las pobrezas el sistema propuesto por max -neff permite la reinterpretación del concepto de pobreza. el concepto tradicional es economicista, limitado y restringido, puesto que se refiere exclusivamente a la situación de aquellas personas que pueden clasificarse debajo de un determinado umbral de ingreso; para sustituirlo sugiere no hablar de pobreza, sino de pobrezas. de hecho, cualquier necesidad humana fundamental que no sea adecuadamente satisfecha revela una pobreza humana. pero las pobrezas no sólo son pobrezas; cada pobreza, una vez que rebasa límites críticos en intensidad y duración, engendra y revela patologías. las necesidades revelan de la manera más apremiante el ser de las personas, ya que aquél se hace palpable a través de éstas en una doble condición existencial: como carencia y como potencialidad. concebir las necesidades tan sólo como carencia implica restringir su espectro a lo puramente fisiológico, que es precisamente el ámbito en que una necesidad asume con mayor fuerza y claridad la sensación de falta de algo. sin embargo, en la medida en que las necesidades comprometen, motivan y movilizan a las personas; son también potencialidad y, más aún, pueden llegar a ser recursos. la necesidad de participar es potencial de participación, tal como la necesidad de afecto es potencial de afecto. así entendidas las necesidades-como potencia y carenciaresulta impropio hablar de necesidades que se satisfacen o que se colman, ya que como proceso dialéctico, constituyen un movimiento incesante. de allí que quizá sea más apropiado hablar de vivir y de realizar las necesidades, y de vivirlas y realizarlas de manera continua y renovada. la comunidad aunque es difícil estructurar una definición de comunidad que incluya todos sus componentes; montero, (2004) con base en la revisión de varias autores, incluye una lista de aspectos constitutivos del concepto de comunidad; con base en ellos planteamos la acepción 631 building participative, empowering & diverse communities que utilizamos en el presente trabajo. comunidad como un espacio geográfico en el que las personas viven todos los aspectos de su vida; grupo social e histórico que implica membresía o identidad social compartida por los miembros, símbolos comunes, derechos y deberes; influencia, o la capacidad para inducir a otros a actuar de determinadas formas; integración y satisfacción de necesidades, se refiere a los beneficios materiales y psicológicos respeto, prestigio, que las personas pueden recibir por el hecho de pertenecer a esa comunidad; compromisos y lazos emocionales compartidos; pertenecer a una comunidad es compartir valores, fechas, celebraciones, mantener relaciones estrechas cara a cara.(macmillan y chasis,1986 en montero, 2004: 216ss); en el caso que nos ocupa sobre violencia en la comunidad; necesidades fundamentales (max-neef 1986) como: subsistencia, protección y libertad se verían en serias dificultades para generar los satisfactores necesarios para hacer posible un entorno social que favorezca la realización plena de los pobladores, los satisfactores de los que hablamos se describen de manera general en la siguiente matriz: ser tener hacer estar subsistencia salud física, salud mental, adaptabilidad alimentación, trabajo alimentar, procrear entorno vital entorno social proteccion cuidado, adaptabilidad autonomía equilibrio solidaridad seguridad social legislaciones sistema de justicia cooperar prevenir contorno vital contorno social morada libertad autonomía, autoestima, pasión, voluntad, apertura, determinación, audacia, rebeldía, tolerancia igualdad de derechos discrepar, optar, diferenciarse, arriesgar, conocerse, asumirse, desobedecer, meditar plasticidad espacio temporal max-neff, m. y cols. (1986) desarrollo a escala humana. cepaur, chile. ii el contexto la modalidad educativa de telebachillerato en el estado de veracruz tiene su origen en 1980; fue el primer intento por usar tecnologías modernas en educación a distancia, creado para llevar el nivel de bachillerato a bajo costo, a comunidades rurales y semirurales de difícil acceso. el primer experimento se basó en la creación de materiales audiovisuales que se transmitían desde una estación de televisión estatal a las escuelas; en los planteles se contaba con una antena que recibía la señal; las actividades escolares eran coordinadas por un docente en cada salón de clase, quien seguía con el grupo las lecciones y tareas hasta cubrir todos los requisitos del plan de estudios que era de dos años. en la actualidad este primer ensayo ha experimentado muchos cambios, el plan de estudios es ahora de tres años, y las lecciones ya no se transmiten por un canal televisivo; en cada escuela se cuenta con un maestro coordinador por año o sección escolar, con los materiales audiovisuales y escritos elaborados por el sistema, los que se proyectan existenciales axiolologicas 632 building participative, empowering & diverse communities en un televisor. no obstante el modelo general que opera en todos los planteles, las escuelas concretas son heterogéneas; algunas con mejor infraestructura física y tecnológica, otras situadas en entornos mejor comunicados. el sistema ofrece un programa de bachillerato en forma presencial para los estudiantes, quienes acuden a los centros diariamente en una sola jornada: matutina o vespertina. los estudiantes, por su parte proceden en su mayoría de comunidades rurales, que tienen todos los indicadores de pobreza: pocas de fuentes de trabajo, ausencia de servicios básicos de salud, , pocos años de escolaridad ; la ocupaciones principales de los habitantes es la agricultura y los servicios por los que perciben ingresos muy bajos; toda esta situación vivida por décadas más la transformación de la agricultura en el estado, ha configurado en los últimos cinco años, un escenario propicio para la migración; la ola migratoria, de los hombres en su mayoría, se ha dado hacia las zonas urbanas del estado, a otras zonas del país y al extranjero; con estos desplazamientos la economía familiar y la de las localidades ha recibido un respiro, pero la estructura familiar y poblacional se ha visto modificada en muchos sentidos; al interior de las familias las relaciones de poder se han transformado, la situación de las mujeres que se quedan con los hijos en las comunidades está siendo redefinida, con ventajas y desventajas no siempre claras. en el año escolar 2005– 2006 el sistema contaba con 894centros de estudio con 3,143 docentes que atendieron a 79,017 alumnos pertenecientes a 201 municipios de los 212 que tiene el estado, beneficiando a 3,580 comunidades. además existían centros de telebachillerato en nueve centros de readaptación social (instituciones carcelarias para adultos-as) y un centro de observación y adaptación social para niños y niñas en conflicto con la ley penal. (www.secv.gob.) iii metodo en general la metodología del proyecto ha sido planteada como investigación-acción; la primera etapa, en la que situamos los resultados que dan origen a este escrito, fue una indagación, un estudio de campo de tipo descriptivo. el inicio de la primera etapa incluyó varias acciones como la vinculación con las autoridades del sistema de telebachillerato, la inducción al proyecto de investigación con docentes de las escuelas, lapsos de observación directa y participante en planteles y comunidades, entrevistas informales con estudiantes, padres de familia, maestros. los participantes: fueron estudiantes hombres y mujeres, todos inscritos en alguna de las escuelas de telebachillerato del estado de veracruz en el ciclo escolar 2007-2008; tomaron parte en el proyecto 38 escuelas que incluyeron las diferentes regiones; además de padres madres de familia de las mismas comunidades. todo el trabajo de campo fue realizado entre octubrediciembre de 2007. los instrumentos utilizados para recabar la información fueron dos:1) un cuestionario para estudiantes que indagó hechos de violencia experimentados y/o presenciados en un lapso de tiempo determinado y en cuatro ámbitos: familia, escuela, pareja y comunidad que fue administrado en forma grupal en las escuelas; 2) un cuestionario para padres-madres de familia de los mismos estudiantes o de las comunidades; que incluyó situaciones de violencia ( psicológica, física, sexual) experimentadas y/o presenciadas en la familia, escuela, comunidad; este cuestionario se realizó mediante entrevista individual. ambos cuestionarios incluyeron algunas preguntas abiertas sobre situaciones de violencia así como la actuación de las víctimas, 633 building participative, empowering & diverse communities de las personas cercanas y de las autoridades de la localidad ante ellas (oramas, et al 2008). iv-resultados tabla 1 edad y sexo de los estudiantes sexo total 14-15 16-17 18-19 > 19 hombres 492 5.9% 60.4% 26.2% 6.9% mujeres 612 11.1% 58.3% 26.9% 3.4% el 90% de estos estudiantes son solteros y más del 60% vive con sus padres o madre, en condición de dependencia económica los padres de familia que tomaron parte fueron 411; de los cuales 305 fueron mujeres y 106 fueron hombres. a continuación se presentan los resultados comparando cada una de las cuestiones entre los dos grupos, los jóvenes hombres y mujeres y los padres de familia. fuente: base de datos de la investigación 2007 634 building participative, empowering & diverse communities fuente: base de datos de la investigación 2007 fuente: base de datos de la investigación 2007 fuente: base de datos de la investigación 2007 635 building participative, empowering & diverse communities fuente: base de datos de la investigación 2007 fuente: base de datos de la investigación 2007 fuente: base de datos de la investigación 2007 636 building participative, empowering & diverse communities fuente: base de datos de la investigación 2007 fuente: base de datos de la investigación 2007 fuente: base de datos de la investigación 2007 637 building participative, empowering & diverse communities v reflexiones finales plantearemos a continuación una serie de reflexiones y puntualizaciones sobre los tópicos más significativos: en primer lugar el grupo social, los estudiantes, hombres y mujeres; menores en situación escolar y en edad reproductiva, que alude a personas dependientes, vulnerables a diferentes tipos de violencia tal y como se puso en evidencia en la indagación realizada; como menores están expuestos a la violencia de parte de los adultos, de las personas con más poder en la comunidad; es interesante constatar que los hechos experimentados o conocidos se refieren a la violencia psicológica: insultos, gritos, amenazas; ¿ qué implicaciones tiene este hecho? la violencia psicológica se ejerce por mecanismos sutiles, difusos o manifiestos, su objetivo es mantener al otro-a bajo control, negarle la capacidad de ser libre, desplazarse, agruparse, actuar; un insulto es recordarle al otro-a su poco valor, su procedencia indigna, su fealdad, torpeza; es al final de cuentas hacer uso de los estereotipos que la cultura del grupo ha construido para asegurar el dominio, la obediencia y en ocasiones excluir hasta de las actividades más rutinarias a quienes no se consideran personas con derechos; cuando estos procedimientos no surten el efecto esperado de mantener el control y la exclusión las amenazas dan un paso hacia adelante pues ofrecen violencia física, que en las localidades estudiadas es una realidad. como hombres y mujeres en edad reproductiva, la violencia también se refiere a la capacidad de ser hombre o mujer, a los modelos de masculinidad o feminidad; a los atributos sexuales y la violencia en los hombres; a la capacidad de seducción, a la conducta catalogada como libertina, en relación a las mujeres, y por supuesto al acoso y al abuso sexual; este tipo de insultos están ligados a las construcciones de género predominantes en el grupo que son rígidos y opresivos para ambos sexos, al menos a nivel de las creencias. es de particular importancia la poca confianza que los y las jóvenes manifiestan hacia las figuras formales de autoridad como maestros, autoridades civiles y religiosas de la localidad para la solución de los conflictos que subyacen a la violencia y ante este hecho cabrían varias explicaciones, es posible que los jóvenes utilicen patrones culturales que privilegian a las personas adultas de la familia o a los grupos de pares y que la poca recurrencia a las autoridades civiles locales no sea más que la repetición de la situación del país; en méxico la poca credibilidad de las autoridades civiles es un hecho conocido y cotidiano, sin embargo no es el caso de los maestros; la figura del maestro en las comunidades representa no sólo la razón sino la ciencia y si relacionamos esta desconfianza con el modelo de las escuelas de telebachillerato en las que un docente trabaja como coordinador único de un grupo durante un año escolar, la contradicción se hace evidente, sin embargo la existencia de la contradicción no es lo más grave, lo más grave es que la persona que podría plantear la negociación como forma de solución de los conflictos es dejada fuera. este papel marginal de los maestros, en condiciones de ausencia de árbitros objetivos, necesita examinarse con más detalle, sobre todo por parte de los mismos maestros y de las escuelas. la violencia física experimentada u observada por los padres y madres de familia muestra en forma cruda la vulnerabilidad de las personas y la inexistencia de formas de solución pacífica de las controversias, la poca presencia de mecanismos formales para frenar la violencia y la poca seguridad en las comunidades. si retomamos la hipótesis que las necesidades no son sólo carencias sino también potencialidades, motivaciones e incentivos para actuar y buscar soluciones, los resultados nos revelan muy poco en este sentido; la indiferencia y la naturalización de la violencia 638 building participative, empowering & diverse communities apuntan en sentido contrario, a dejar que el miedo llene los espacios que la poca participación más la ausencia de las instituciones civiles y religiosas comunitarias ha dejado vacíos. en relación a las víctimas, los hombres jóvenes y las mujeres jóvenes principalmente, se nos dificulta pensar en ellas en un solo lado de la balanza, quienes han sido objeto de algún acto de violencia, lo más seguro es que ellas mismas en más de una ocasión hayan actuado o respondido de la misma manera; esta suposición se hace más creíble si nos detenemos en la violencia que procede de las personas de la familia y en la ausencia de instituciones o grupos que propicien la resolución no violenta de los conflictos que se suscitan en todas las relacionas humanas; la violencia parece ser una forma cotidiana de relación tanto en la familia como en la comunidad. el instrumento que utilizamos en la indagación no incluyó ninguna pregunta de control con este fin, pero varios de los resultados nos llevan a plantear esta suposición. en resumen el triángulo propuesto por galtung cobra vida cuando analizamos los hechos de violencia en las comunidades estudiadas: la violencia estructural se posiciona como la más poderosa al dejar excluidos de los productos del desarrollo del país y la región a los grandes grupos que las habitan, a esta pobreza material se añade las pobrezas generadas por la falta de seguridad en los entornos físicos y sociales, más la libertad coartada por las amenazas e insultos; la violencia cultural se manifiesta en las construcciones estereotipadas de género, de clase y de etnia utilizadas para rebajar a quien no sea percibido como representante de los grupos privilegiados en ese momento; la violencia directa y manifiesta no es más que la expresión de las otras dos. para finalizar, es necesario referirnos a la comunidad educativa, título del presente trabajo. por comunidad educativa nos referimos a las instituciones ( loureau, 2001) y los actores que intervienen en ella, en este caso en la educación formal: por una parte la escuela con sus estudiantes hombres y mujeres, maestros y maestras, normas oficiales, usos y costumbres; por otra parte las familias de los estudiantes con sus historias y luchas cotidianas y, en tercer lugar, la comunidad. es en estas instituciones tan vitales, tan cercanas donde pueden gestarse parte de las soluciones; por ejemplo, en el caso de la escuela podría empezarse con una serie de interrogantes, con una clase de análisis elemental: ¿cuáles son los usos y costumbres de la escuela en relación a la violencia que llega a ella o la que se produce en ella?, ¿qué normas y procedimientos existen para resolver los conflictos entre estudiantes varones, mujeres, entre estudiantes y maestros-as?, ¿cómo se establecieron, quién impuso estas normas, quién puede revisarlas? ¿se evalúan estas normas de alguna manera, están cumpliendo su papel?, ¿ cómo participan estudiantes y padres de familia?, ¿qué experiencias exitosas ha tenido la escuela frente a la violencia que le llega? el modelo de galtung ha dejado claro que existen diferentes escenarios donde se puede actuar para encarar la violencia, algunos de estos escenarios están a nuestro alcance, es en ellos donde hay que trabajar. el entorno social del que la escuela forma parte activa nos construye, pero también podemos construirlo y esta construcción puede dar inicio de muchas maneras, con pequeñas acciones, con una gran campaña. con esta premisa puede iniciarse una estrategia hacia el respeto y la convivencia pacífica. 639 building participative, empowering & diverse communities bibliografia cano, v y cisneros, m.t. (1980) la dinámica de la violencia en méxico. enep acatlán, méxico. galtung, j (1969). “peace, conflict and violence”. peace research,copenhaguen galtung, j. (2003) violencia, guerra y su impacto http://.www.polylog.org/5 recuperado en septiembre de 2008. garcia oramas, m. j., ruiz pimentel, s y ruiz vallejo, s. (2008), “informe preliminar del proyecto “formación ciudadana con menores veracruzanos en edad reproductiva y en situación escolar para promover una vida familiar y comunitaria libre de violencia”. documento de uso interno, conacyt, facultad de psicología uv. méxico. loureau, r. (2001) el análisis institucional. amorrortu, b.a. marx, k. (1845/, s/f ) tesis sobre fehuerbach. ed. el caballito méxico.. montero, m. (2004). introducción a la psicología comunitaria. paidos, b.a. pimentel, m. (1998) violencia, ¿condición de género? en tiempos de violencia. universidad autónoma metropolitana. méxico. pinheiro, paulo sergio, (2005), acabar con la violencia contra los niños, niñas y adolescentes, estudio del secretario general sobre violencia contra los niños, naciones unidad, onu, nueva york, usa secretaría de educación (2007) telebachillerato de veracruz. recuperado el 19 de noviembre de 2007, http://teba.secver.gob.mx/teba/ torres falcón, m. (2001)a la entrada del laberinto, reflexiones en torno a la violencia masculina, en tramas no. 17 pp 35-50, universidad autónoma metropolitana, méxico. vargas, e. (1998) sobre el control de los vínculos, en tiempos de violencia. universidad autónoma metropolitana. méxico. bibliografía en proceso carrizosa, s y gómez, m. (1998) violencia y educación, en tiempos de violencia. universidad autónoma metropolitana. méxico. cegato, r. (2003). las estructuras elementales de la violencia. universidad nacional de quilmas, b.a. osorio, f. (2006). violencia en las escuelas. ed. noveduc, b.a. godelier, m. (1998). el enigma del don. paidós, b.a. 640 building participative, empowering & diverse communities sesgo endogrupal, metaestereotipos y emociones hacia el exogrupo entre inmigrantes en españa dr. josé juan vázquez (jj.vazquez@uah.es) universidad de alcalá (españa) anabel díaz aberasturi arceo acción y desarrollo social (españa) dra. sonia panadero universidad complutense de madrid (españa) resumen se presentan los datos preliminares de un trabajo realizado en la ciudad de guadalajara (españa) sobre una muestra de inmigrantes procedentes de países con bajos niveles de desarrollo. el trabajo pretende profundizar en los metaestereotipos, el choque cultural y las estrategias de integración de los grupos de inmigrantes más numerosos en la ciudad de guadalajara, concretamente grupos de origen latinoamericano, de europa del este y áfrica. como criterios de inclusión muestral se consideró ser de origen extranjero, proceder de un país con un menor nivel de desarrollo que españa, tener más de 14 años y llevar menos de 10 años de estancia en españa. la muestra inicial se encuentra compuesta por 100 personas inmigrantes procedentes de latinoamérica (55,4%), europa del este (23,8%) y áfrica (20,8%). la muestra presenta una media de edad de 32,02 años y una media de estancia en españa de 4,5 años. la información se recogió mediante una entrevista estructurada de carácter heteroaplicada, dadas las dificultades idiomáticas que presentaba alguno de los entrevistados. los datos preliminares indican la existencia de diferencias entre los tres grupos en lo relativo a los metaestereotipos que consideran tienen los españoles, el choque cultural padecido a su llegada a españa y las estrategias de integración desarrolladas por los diferentes grupos. en el trabajo también se analizan las diferencias existentes en relación a los metaesteroitpos, choque cultural y estrategias de integración en función de variables como la edad, género, tiempo de estancia en españa, nivel educativo, situación de regularidad, situación laboral, ingresos, clase social en el país de origen o ideología política. palabras clave: inmigración, estereotipos, integración, choque cultural. 1. introducción. desde el principio de la historia han existido flujos migratorios, si bien los mismos han tenido características diferentes en función del lugar y momento histórico en que se han producido. actualmente, los flujos migratorios son causados principalmente por las fuertes diferencias económicas y sociales existentes entre los países más desarrollados y aquellos eufemísticamente denominados países en vías de desarrollo. en la actualidad una gran cantidad de personas se trasladan desde los estados menos 641 building participative, empowering & diverse communities desarrollados hacia los que presentan unos mayores niveles de desarrollo con el sueño de alcanzar una vida más digna, encontrar nuevas oportunidades a su desarrollo personal o huir de situaciones políticas difíciles en sus países de origen. en muchas ocasiones se trata de inmigrantes con niveles de educación media o superior, que ocuparán puestos no demandados por la población de acogida, se dedicarán a la economía sumergida y trabajarán con frecuencia en condiciones laborales precarias (moreno y vallejo, 2005). el concepto “inmigrante” hace referencia a toda persona que traslada su residencia para establecerse en un país distinto al de su nacimiento, si bien en nuestro contexto cultural, y trasladado al presente trabajo, cabe hacer una distinción entre extranjero e inmigrante. mientras consideraremos extranjeros a quienes trasladan su residencia a nuestro país procedentes de países desarrollados, en el presente trabajo se considera “inmigrantes” únicamente a quienes proceden de estados con bajos niveles de desarrollo buscando condiciones de vida más dignas. en este marco resultan, de especial interés tanto el estudio de las reacciones de la población de acogida como los mecanismos de adaptación social y psicológica de los individuos que acceden a nuestra sociedad procedentes de culturas en muchas ocasiones sumamente diferentes. la adaptación psicosocial del individuo al nuevo entorno cultural depende de una gran cantidad de factores individuales y grupales, que varían tanto en función de aspectos individuales de la persona que traslada su lugar de residencia como en función de las características de las sociedades de origen y de acogida y de cómo ambas interactúan. con el contacto entre culturas se produce el proceso de aculturación definido, hace ya más de medio siglo, como el fenómeno que tienen lugar cuando grupos de diferentes culturas tienen continuos contactos y, en consecuencia, se producen cambios en los patrones de la cultura original de uno o ambos grupos (redfield, linton y herskovits, 1936). en este proceso de aculturación se experimentan cambios grupales e individuales que se corresponden con el aprendizaje de un nuevo repertorio conductual apropiado al nuevo contexto cultural, al desaprendizaje de algunos aspectos previos que no son adecuados en la cultura de acogida y a los conflictos culturales que puedan surgir. no solo se producen cambios en el grupo que emigra, sino también en el grupo de acogida y, de cómo se produce este proceso de aculturación, va a depender en gran medida el nivel de adaptación del inmigrante, el cual puede variar en un continuo que abarca desde la imposibilidad de permanecer en el nuevo contexto hasta la satisfacción por vivir en el mismo. diversas investigaciones en psicología social se han centrado en describir las consecuencias del proceso de aculturación, con un reflejo directo en el nivel de adaptación. en este proceso puede producirse el denominado “choque cultural”, proceso que hace referencia al estrés y ansiedad procedentes de la pérdida de símbolos y signos familiares de intercambio social que tienen lugar en la exposición a un ambiente extraño (furham, 1984; furham y bochner, 1982; brislin, 1980). este choque cultural supone en el individuo una fuente de estrés intercultural que puede conllevar graves consecuencias psicológicas negativas (moreno y vallejo, 2005). en contradicción con el modelo unidimensional de asimilación de gordon (1964), consideran moreno y vallejo (2005) que el proceso de adaptación no tiene porqué seguir un curso lineal y progresivo, ni ser uniforme en todos los individuos. por el contrario, modelos posteriores indican que en el proceso de adaptación se pueden producir saltos, aceleraciones, retrocesos, etc., que dependerán de un conjunto de características idiosincrásicas en cada individuo. el presente trabajo pretende conocer en la ciudad de guadalajara las dificultades 642 building participative, empowering & diverse communities principales en el proceso de integración y las diferencias existentes al respecto entre diferentes colectivos de población de origen inmigrante, procedentes de latinoamérica, europa del este y áfrica (principalmente del magreb) 2. método 2.1. participantes. a fin de disponer de una muestra que permitiese realizar comparaciones, se decidió incluir en el estudio únicamente inmigrantes que habitasen en la ciudad de guadalajara procedentes de latinoamérica, europa del este y áfrica, por ser los colectivos con mayor presencia en dicha ciudad. como criterio de inclusión se utilizó ser de origen extranjero, mayor de edad y llevar menos de 5 años residiendo en españa. se accedió a los entrevistados mediante diferentes estrategias, entre las que destacaron los contactos con asociaciones de migrantes, las entrevistas en lugares frecuentados por migrantes (especialmente locutorios y grupos religiosos) y entrevistas en la calle y lugares públicos la muestra final se encuentra compuesta por 101 personas inmigrantes, de las que el 41% son varones y el 59% mujeres, con una edad media de 32,02 años (dt = 8,55). 2.2. instrumentos. para la recogida de información se utilizó una entrevista que permitiese su aplicación tanto de forma autoaplicada como heteroaplicada, dado que una gran parte de la población presentaba problemas con el idioma y con la capacidad de lectura, especialmente en español. en el presente trabajo se utilizo el “test de sesgo endogrupal interétnico” (rojas, garcía y navas, 2003), una “escala de emociones hacia los miembros del exogrupo” y un listado de posibles metaestereotipos que los inmigrantes consideran que tiene la población de acogida. el “test de sesgo endogrupal interétnico” presenta una serie de ítems cuyas opciones de respuesta oscilan ente 1 = “muy malos” y 5 = “muy buenos”. las preguntas que realiza el instrumento son las siguientes: piense en la personas españolas, ¿cómo creen que son… 1. sus formas de ser y de ver la vida? 2. sus hábitos y costumbres alimenticias? 3. sus hábitos de higiene y limpieza? 4. sus hábitos de hablar y comunicarse con la gente? 5. sus creencias sobre las relaciones hombre-mujeres? 6. sus creencias y prácticas religiosas? 7. la educación que dan a sus hijos? piense en las personas de su propio país, ¿cómo creen que son… 1. sus formas de ser y de ver la vida? 2. sus hábitos y costumbres alimenticias? 3. sus hábitos de higiene y limpieza? 4. sus hábitos de hablar y comunicarse con la gente? 5. sus creencias sobre las relaciones hombre-mujeres? 643 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 6. sus creencias y prácticas religiosas? 7. la educación que dan a sus hijos? la “escala de emociones hacia los miembros del exogrupo” presenta un grupo de ítems que permiten respuestas que oscilan desde 1 = “nada” hasta 5 = “mucho”. los ítems que componen el instrumento son los siguientes: ¿con qué frecuencia ha sentido usted las siguientes emociones por los españoles? admiración miedo simpatía inquietud desconfianza incomodidad indiferencia para estudiar los metaestereotipos, tras la cuestión “los españoles consideran que las personas de mi país somos…” se proponían a los entrevistado 20 adjetivos, positivos y negativos, seleccionados por los autores (trabajadores, pacíficos, machistas, limpios, emprendedores, sociables, políticamente moderados, ahorradores, racistas, vagos, violentos, cualificados, sucios, moderadamente religiosos, vulnerables/indefensos, educados, raros, peligrosos, solidarios, tenaces/luchadores/resistentes) que permitían opciones de respuesta que oscilaban entre 1 = “muy en desacuerdo” y 5 = “muy de acuerdo” 3. resultados las puntuaciones medias y las desviaciones típicas obtenidas en el “test de sesgo endogrupal” por la muestra de inmigrantes entrevistados en la ciudad de guadalajara se encuentran recogidas en las tablas 1 y 2: tabla 1: puntuaciones medias en el test de sesgo endogrupal interétnico de los inmigrantes en la ciudad de guadalajara piense en españoles ¿cómo cree que son... media (dt) sus formas de ser y ver la vida? 3,71 (0,73) sus hábitos y costumbres alimenticias? 3,79 (0,87) sus hábitos de higiene y limpieza? 3,66 (0,98) sus formas de hablar y comunicarse con las personas? 3,71 (0,82) sus creencias sobre las relaciones hombres-mujeres? 3,42 (0,92) sus creencias y prácticas religiosas? 3,06 (1,04) la educación que dan a sus hijos? 3,42 (0,82) puntuación total exogrupo 24,70 (4,13) 644 building participative, empowering & diverse communities tabla 2: puntuaciones medias en el test de sesgo endogrupal interétnico de los inmigrantes en la ciudad de guadalajara piense en las personas de su propio país ¿cómo cree que son... media (dt) sus formas de ser y ver la vida? 3,62 (0,61) sus hábitos y costumbres alimenticias? 3,64 (0,82) sus hábitos de higiene y limpieza? 3,84 (0,92) sus formas de hablar y comunicarse con las personas? 3,78 (0,84) sus creencias sobre las relaciones hombres-mujeres? 3,39 (0,95) sus creencias y prácticas religiosas? 3,79 (0,87) la educación que dan a sus hijos? 3,86 (0,69) puntuación total endogrupo 25,99 (3,62) de las tablas 1 y 2 se extrae que el “sesgo endogrupal interétnico”, es decir las diferencias entre la puntuación total del endogrupo y la puntuación total del exogrupo, se sitúa en una puntuación media de 1,26 (dt: 5,01). no se observa entre los entrevistados diferencias significativas en el sesgo intergrupal interétnico en función de la zona de origen de los inmigrantes entrevistados: áfrica, latinoamérica y europa del este. figuras 1 y 2: metaestereotipos del grupo mayoritarios percibidos por los inmigrantes en la ciudad de guadalajara. los españoles consideran que las personas de mi país somos... 645 building participative, empowering & diverse communities como se observa en las tablas 1 y 2, los inmigrantes perciben que los españoles en general tienen una buena impresión de ellos. así, por ejemplo, los inmigrantes perciben que los españoles les consideran especialmente “trabajadores”, “ahorradores”, “limpios”, “emprendedores”, “sociables” y “educados”, y en menor medida, “cualificados”, “moderadamente religiosos”, “políticamente moderados” y “pacíficos”. de la misma manera, y en lo relativo a las características negativas, los inmigrantes perciben que los españoles les consideran “machistas”, y en muy escasa medida, “vagos”, “violentos”, “sucios”, “vulnerables”, “raros” o “peligrosos”. cuando se analizan los metaestereotipos percibidos por los inmigrantes de guadalajara en función de su zona de procedencia (latinoamérica, europa del este y áfrica), se observa que no existen diferencias significativas en lo referente a los atributos “pacíficos”, “machistas”, “emprendedores”, “políticamente moderados”, “ahorradores”, “racistas”, “violentos”, “cualificados”, “moderadamente religiosos”, “vulnerables”, “educados” y “raros”. sin embargo, se observa la existencia de diferencias significativas en función del origen de los inmigrantes entrevistados en los atributos “trabajadores”, “limpios”, “emprendedores”, “sociables”, “solidarios”, “tenaces, luchadores...”, “vagos”, “sucios” y “peligrosos”. 646 building participative, empowering & diverse communities figura 3: metaestereotipos positivos percibidos por los inmigrantes en la ciudad de guadalajara en los que se observan diferencias significativas en función del origen. los españoles consideran que las personas de mi país somos... como se observa en la figura 3, son los inmigrantes procedentes de europa del este quienes consideran que los españoles tienen una mejor opinión de ellos, mientras los procedentes de áfrica (en su mayoría procedentes del magreb), son los que perciben que los españoles les atribuyen en menor medida características positivas, especialmente en los referente a los atributos “limpios”, “sociables” y “solidarios”. por su parte, los inmigrantes procedentes de latinoamérica mantienen una percepción de la opinión que de ellos tienen los españoles casi tan positiva como la de los inmigrantes procedentes de europa del este, incluso mejor en el atributo sociabilidad. 647 building participative, empowering & diverse communities figura 4: metaestereotipos negativos percibidos por los inmigrantes en la ciudad de guadalajara en los que se observan diferencias significativas en función del origen. los españoles consideran que las personas de mi país somos... de la figura 4 se desprende que, en lo referente a tres características negativas que los inmigrantes consideran que les atribuyen los españoles (“vagos”, “sucios” y “peligrosos”), los entrevistados procedentes de europa del este se muestran en total desacuerdo con que el exogrupo les considere “vagos”, un ligero acuerdo con que les considere “sucios” y un gran acuerdo con que les considere “peligrosos”. por su parte, los entrevistados procedentes de áfrica muestran un cierto nivel de acuerdo con que los españoles les atribuyen las tres características, mientras los procedentes de latinoamérica tan solo muestran unos niveles de acuerdo muy bajos con que el exogrupo les atribuya ambas características. por otro lado, tras analizar las emociones que los inmigrantes manifiestan haber sentido hacia los miembros del exogrupo (en este caso los españoles), las puntuaciones medias obtenidas en relación a cada una de las emociones aparecen recogidas en la tabla 5. 648 building participative, empowering & diverse communities figura 5: puntuaciones medias en la escala de emociones hacia los españoles de los emigrantes de la ciudad de guadalajara. las puntuaciones oscilan entre 1 (nada) y 5 (mucho) como se desprende de la figura 5, las emociones que los inmigrantes en mayor medida han sentido hacia los españoles han sido “simpatía” y “admiración”. por contra, la emoción que menores puntuaciones ha obtenido es “miedo”, ocupando lugares intermedios las emociones hacia los españoles de “inquietud”, “desconfianza”, “incomodidad” e “indiferencia”. cuando se analizan las puntuaciones medias en la escala de emociones hacia los españoles en función del origen de los inmigrantes entrevistados (latinoamérica, europa del este y áfrica), no se observan diferencias significativas entre en las emociones “admiración”, “simpatía”, “inquietud”, “incomodidad” e “indiferencia”. sin embargo, en dos emociones de carácter negativo (“miedo” y “desconfianza”) si se parecen existir diferencias significativas. así, como se observa en la figura 6, los inmigrantes procedentes de europa del este y áfrica son los que en más ocasiones han sentido “miedo” hacia los españoles, mientras los procedentes de latinoamérica han sido quienes menos han experimentado dicha emoción, si bien en todos los casos se observan puntuaciones relativamente bajas, indicativo de que las emociones sentidas han sido esporádicas. sin embargo, especialmente preocupante son las diferencias en la emoción “desconfianza” hacia los españoles, donde los inmigrantes procedentes de áfrica manifiestan haberla sentido con mucha frecuencia y los europeos del este con bastante frecuencia, mientra los procedentes de latinoamérica solo han experimentado dicha emoción de forma más esporádica. 649 building participative, empowering & diverse communities figura 6: puntuaciones medias en la escala de emociones hacia los españoles de los emigrantes de la ciudad de guadalajara donde se han observado diferencias estadísticamente significativas en función del origen. ¿con qué frecuencia ha sentido por los españoles... las puntuaciones oscilan entre 1 (nada) y 5 (mucho) referencias brislin, r.w. (1980). cross-cultural encounters. oxford: pergamon press. furham, a. (1984). tourism and culture sock. annals of tourism research, 11, 41-57. furham, a. y bochner, s. (1982). social difficulty in a foregein culture: an empirical analysis of culture sock. en s. bochner (ed) culture in contact. oxford: pergamon press gordon, m.m. (1964). assimilation in american life. nueva york: oxford university press. moreno, m.p. y vallejo, m. (2005). estrategias de aculturación en población inmigrante. resultados con el cuestionario eai-2005 (estrategias de aculturación en inmigrantes). en j.m. sabucedo, j. romay y a. lópez-cortón (eds.). psicología política, inmigración y comunicación social. madrid: biblioteca nueva. redfield, r., linton, m.j. y herskovits (1936). memorandum of the study of acculturation. american anthropology, 38, 149-152. rojas, a.j., garcía, m.c. y navas, m.s. (2003). test de sesgo endogrupal interétnico: estudios de fiabilidad y de evidencias de validez. psicothema, 15, 101-108. 650 building participative, empowering & diverse communities prejuicio hacia los inmigrantes entre los jóvenes de guadalajara (españa) dr. josé juan vázquez (jj.vazquez@uah.es) universidad de alcalá (españa) anabel díaz aberasturi arceo acción y desarrollo social (españa) dra. sonia panadero universidad complutense de madrid (españa) resumen en el trabajo se analizan las diferencias en actitudes racistas entre los jóvenes de guadalajara, evaluadas mediante la “escala de racismo moderno” (navas, 1998; garcía, navas, cuadrado y molero, 2003). sobre una población de 16.744 jóvenes de entre 14 y 30 años censados en la ciudad de guadalajara se realizó un muestreo aleatorio estratificado por sexo, edad y área de residencia. a fin de reducir el error de muestreo hasta 0,03, se estableció el tamaño muestral en 1.044 jóvenes. la muestra final se compone por 541 varones (51,8%) y 503 mujeres (48,2%), siendo la media de edad de 22,7 años. de los datos obtenidos se desprende que, en general, los jóvenes de guadalajara muestran un cierto acuerdo con el conjunto de los ítems que componen la escala de racismo moderno, situándose la puntuación media de la muestra en 41, es decir por encima de la puntuación media de la escala (cuya puntuación total oscila entre 10 y 70). las puntuaciones más elevadas en la escala se dan entre los jóvenes con actitudes más conservadoras: de clase media-alta (o media), políticamente de derechas y católicos en materia religiosa, ya fueran o no practicantes. por el contrario, las puntuaciones más bajas en la escala de racismo moderno fueron manifestadas por los jóvenes con actitudes más progresistas: de clase media-baja o baja, “no creyentes” en materia religiosa y políticamente de izquierdas. otras variables relacionadas con las actitudes o creencias racistas fueron el género (los varones tienden a puntuar más alto en la escala que las mujeres) y el nivel educativo. no se observa relación entre racismo en los participantes y su situación o condiciones laborales. palabras clave: prejuicio, inmigración, juventud mailto:jj.vazquez@uah.es 651 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 1. introducción. el presente trabajo tiene como principal objetivo analizar las diferencias en actitudes racistas de los jóvenes de la ciudad de guadalajara (españa), estableciendo la existencia de diferencias a este respecto en función de determinadas características sociodemográficas, su nivel de formación, su situación laboral, sus creencias religiosas y diferentes actitudes políticas. 2. método. 2.1. participantes. sobre una población de 16.744 jóvenes de entre 14 y 30 años censados en guadalajara (ine, 2004) se realizó un muestreo aleatorio estratificado por sexo, edad y área de residencia. la estratificación por edad y sexo se realizó a partir de lo datos aportados por el instituto nacional de estadística (ine) referentes a la ciudad de guadalajara. la estratificación en función del área de residencia se realizó a partir de los datos aportados por la sociedad estatal correos y telégrafos s.a. sobre el número de buzones en viviendas de los diferentes distritos postales de la ciudad de guadalajara. manteniendo una hipótesis conservadora de varianza máxima (p = q = 0,50), para un nivel de confianza del 95%, con un error de muestreo de 0,03 y asumiendo un margen de error del 5% (z = + 2) el número de entrevistas a realizar se determinó en 1.044. para determinar el tamaño muestral se empleó la siguiente fórmula, a partir de los datos aportados por el instituto nacional de estadística (ine, 2004): n = n * k2 * p * (1-p) . (n-1)*e2 + k * p* (1-p) tamaño de la muestra n tamaño del universo n = 16.744 nivel de confianza k = 2 = 0,95 varianza poblacional p = 0,5 error de muestreo e = 0,03 n = 1.044 utilizando unos parámetros habituales (error de muestreo = 0,05), y a partir del diseño de estratificación seleccionado, sería necesario realizar 392 entrevistas. en el presente estudio, con la finalidad de reducir el error de muestreo hasta 0,03, se estableció el tamaño muestral en 1044 jóvenes. la muestra final se encuentra compuesta por 1.044 jóvenes, 541 varones (51,8%) y 503 a mujeres (48,2%). la media de edad de los entrevistados/as es de 22,71 años. el criterio de inclusión en la muestra se determinó de la siguiente manera: jóvenes censados en la ciudad de guadalajara que, en el momento de la entrevista, tenían una edad comprendida entre los 14 y 30 años. se consideraron no aptos/as para ser incluidos en la muestra aquellos/as jóvenes que presentaban un discurso incoherente -derivado de déficits cognitivoso quienes, por encontrarse bajo los efectos del alcohol u otras sustancia psicoactivas, se considerara que no se 652 building participative, empowering & diverse communities encontraban en disposición de aportar datos suficientemente consistentes. 2.2. instrumento. se utilizó una entrevista estructurada de carácter heteroaplicada que incluía todos aquellos aspectos considerados de relevancia. la selección de las variables e ítems se llevó a cabo conforme al siguiente procedimiento: revisión bibliográfica y documentación sobre estudios realizados en el área de la juventud. consideración de los aspectos más relevantes obtenidos en el estudio realizado en guadalajara en el año 1993 contactos con expertos/as en investigación y en el trabajo directo con jóvenes elección inicial, a partir de las diversas fuentes consultadas, de las variables objeto de estudio y determinación inicial de los ítems orientados a evaluar cada una de las áreas seleccionadas. construcción de un instrumento piloto. envío de copias del instrumento piloto a expertos/as, exponiendo el objetivo de la investigación y solicitando que, tras la revisión del instrumento, remitieran su opinión sobre la selección de áreas de contenido, la representatividad de los ítems y su adaptación a la población objeto de estudio. inclusión de los comentarios remitidos por los/as expertos/as y elaboración de un borrador del instrumento final. administración de 50 cuestionarios a población general con el fin de pilotar su funcionamiento. el estudio piloto permitió la corrección de defectos de forma y el entrenamiento de entrevistadote/as y codificadores/as. la entrevista recogía información relativa a los siguientes aspectos relacionados con la problemática, necesidades y demandas de la juventud: “características sociodemográficas”, “residencia y convivencia”, “nivel educativo”, “situación laboral”, “autonomía económica”, “situación económica familiar”, “relaciones sociales”, “empleo de ocio y tiempo libre”, “salud”, “valores”, “opinión política”, “intereses y expectativas”, “movilidad y transporte”, “participación social y asociacionismo”, “necesidades y demandas”, “los jóvenes y la administración municipal”. la duración media de las entrevistas fue de 45 minutos. en el presente trabajo únicamente se utiliza los datos aportados por la “escala de racismo moderno” (garcía, navas, cuadrado y molero, 2003), incluida en el apartado “valores”, si bien los datos obtenidos con la misma se cruzan en función de diferentes variables extraídas de diferentes apartados del cuestionario. la “escala de racismo moderno” ofrece la oportunidad al entrevistado de puntuar cada uno de los 10 ítems recogidos a continuación en una escala que oscila entre 1 = “completamente en desacuerdo” y 7 = “completamente de acuerdo”. los ítems que incluye la escala son: en los últimos años, los inmigrantes han conseguido económicamente más de lo que merecen en los últimos años, el gobierno y los medios de comunicación han mostrado más respeto y consideración por los inmigrantes del que se merecen es comprensible que los inmigrantes que viven aquí estén descontentos los inmigrantes están siendo demasiado exigentes en su lucha por la igualdad de 653 building participative, empowering & diverse communities derechos los inmigrantes tienen más influencia sobre las decisiones de los políticos de la que deberían tener los inmigrantes están ahora mejor de lo que nunca han estado los inmigrantes que reciben ayuda social podrían salir adelante sin ella si lo intentaran de verdad en general, los funcionario públicos dedican más atención a las peticiones y quejas de los inmigrantes que a las de un ciudadano español todos los españoles deberíamos apoyar a los inmigrantes en su lucha contra la discriminación los inmigrantes no deberían estar donde no se les quiere la puntuación total del instrumento se obtiene sumando de las puntuaciones de cada ítem tras invertir las puntuaciones de los ítems 2 y 8. 2.3. procedimiento. se formó un equipo de 15 entrevistadores/as que recibieran entrenamiento específico en la utilización del instrumento y en el trato social con los/as jóvenes. al equipo de entrevistadores/ as se sumaron 8 codificadoras/es, supervisados/as por una coordinadora. una vez estratificada la muestra y determinado el número de entrevistas a realizar en cada grupo de edad, género y área residencial, la selección de cada una de las personas a entrevistar se realizó, igualmente, de forma aleatoria. todas las entrevistas se realizaron de forma anónima, protegiendo la privacidad de los datos. tras seleccionar la persona a entrevistar, el/la entrevistador/a inicia el contacto confirmando los criterios de inclusión en la muestra. tras explicar el objeto de la investigación y la confidencialidad de los datos se solicitó el consentimiento del entrevistado/a para realizar la entrevista. a fin de motivar a los/as jóvenes para participar en la entrevista se les obsequiaba con la posibilidad de participar en el sorteo de un ordenador personal y entradas para conciertos organizados por el excmo. ayuntamiento de guadalajara. cada entrevista realizada fue revisada por la codificadora y la coordinadora a fin de asegurar su correcta cumplimentación y optimizar la fiabilidad y validez de los datos. posteriormente los datos fueron codificados en una base informatizada. para diseñar la base de datos y procesar los mismos se utilizó el sistema de análisis estadístico y de gestión de datos spss (versión 12.0 para windows). en primer lugar, se analizó la representatividad de la muestra respecto a la población estudiada, tras lo que se procedió al análisis descriptivo de las variables consideradas. los análisis de las diferencias entre porcentajes de las variables nominales sexo y edad se realizaron utilizando el estadístico chi cuadrado. en el caso de las variables continuas se aplicaron pruebas “t” de student para medidas independientes. 3. resultados. las puntuaciones medias y las desviaciones típicas de los jóvenes de la ciudad de guadalajara en cada uno de los ítems de la escala de racismo moderno se encuentran recogidas en la tabla 1. 654 building participative, empowering & diverse communities tabla 1. puntuaciones medias en los ítems de la escala de racismo moderno de los jóvenes de guadalajara ítems n media (dt) en los últimos años, los inmigrantes han conseguido económicamente más de lo que merecen 1040 3,90 (2,03) en los últimos años, el gobierno y los medios de comunicación han mostrado más respeto y consideración por los inmigrantes del que se merecen 1038 3,90 (2,03) es comprensible que los inmigrantes que viven aquí estén descontentos 1005 3,10 (1,89) los inmigrantes están siendo demasiado exigentes en su lucha por la igualdad de derechos 1040 4,33 (2,01) los inmigrantes tienen más influencia sobre las decisiones de los políticos de la que deberían tener 1038 4,10 (2,04) los inmigrantes están ahora mejor de lo que nunca han estado 1039 4,77 (1,88) los inmigrantes que reciben ayuda social podrían salir adelante sin ella si lo intentaran de verdad 1040 4,79 (1,96) en general, los funcionario públicos dedican más atención a las peticiones y quejas de los inmigrantes que a las de un ciudadano español 1041 4,04 (2,00) todos los españoles deberíamos apoyar a los inmigrantes en su lucha contra la discriminación 1040 4,47 (2,01) los inmigrantes no deberían estar donde no se les quiere 1039 3,36 (2,15) puntuación total 992 41,53 (14,64) puntuaciones entre 1 (completamente en desacuerdo) y 7 (completamente de acuerdo). de la tabla 1 se desprende que, en general, los jóvenes de guadalajara muestran un cierto acuerdo con el conjunto de los ítems que componen la escala de racismo moderno, pues la gran mayoría de los ítems presentan puntuaciones superiores a 3,5. la puntuación media de la muestra se sitúa en 41,53, es decir por encima de la puntuación media de la escala (cuya puntuación total oscila entre 10 y 70). si nos atenemos a la intencionalidad de la escala cuando fue diseñada por los autores, se puede afirmar que los jóvenes de la ciudad de guadalajara presentan actitudes ligeramente racistas en relación a los inmigrantes. cuando se analizan las puntuaciones medias totales en la escala de racismo moderno en función de determinadas características sociodemográficas de los jóvenes se observa que, si bien no existen diferencias significativas en de su estado civil, si existen diferencias a este respecto en función del sexo y la clase social percibida de los entrevistados. 655 building participative, empowering & diverse communities figura 1: diferencias en las puntuaciones en la “escala de racismo moderno” de los jóvenes de guadalajara en función del sexo. como se observa en la figura 1, los varones obtienen en la escala de racismo moderno puntuaciones medias superiores a las de las mujeres (42,55 para los varones y 40,43 para las mujeres). figura 2: diferencias en las puntuaciones en la “escala de racismo moderno” de los jóvenes de guadalajara en función de la clase social percibida. de la figura 2 se desprende que son los jóvenes que consideran pertenecer a las clases media y media-alta son quienes presentan las puntuaciones medias más elevadas (44,11 y 41,58 respectivamente), en tanto que las puntuaciones medias más bajas aparecen entre quienes se consideran de clase media-baja (35,08) y clase baja (37). los estudiantes que se consideran de clase alta obtienen puntuaciones intermedias (40, 82), si bien por debajo de la media de los jóvenes de guadalajara. por su parte, al analizar las puntuaciones medias totales en la escala de racismo moderno en función de los estudios finalizados por los jóvenes de guadalajara, se observa que no existen diferencias significativas en función de “encontrarse estudiando (o no)”, del “tipo de centro (público, privado, concertado) en que estudiaron la educación primaria” o el “tipo de universidad (pública o privada) en que estudiaron”. sin embargo, si se observa la existencia de diferencias en función de los “estudios finalizados”, “el tipo de centro (público, privado, concertado) en que estudiaron la educación secundaria” los entrevistados. 656 building participative, empowering & diverse communities figura 3: diferencias en las puntuaciones en la “escala de racismo moderno” de los jóvenes de guadalajara en función de los estudios finalizados que poseen. como se observa en la figura 3, únicamente los jóvenes universitarios presentan puntuaciones medias en la escala inferiores a la media (39,05). por su parte, el resto de jóvenes presentan puntuaciones por encima de la media, pareciendo desprenderse de la figura 3 que, a meno nivel de formación de los entrevistados se obtienen puntuaciones medias más elevadas en la escala de racismo moderno. figura 4: diferencias en las puntuaciones en la “escala de racismo moderno” de los jóvenes de guadalajara en función del tipo de centro en que estudiaron la educación secundaria. se observa en la figura 4 que son los jóvenes que cursaron sus estudios de secundaria en colegios “concertados no religiosos”, “privados religiosos” y “públicos” los que presentan las puntuaciones medias más bajas en la escala de racismo moderno (37,28; 40,00 y 40,82 respectivamente). por su parte, los jóvenes que estudiaron la educación secundaria en colegios “privados no religiosos” y, especialmente, quienes la estudiaron en colegios “concertados religiosos”, son quienes muestran unos mayores niveles de racismo hacia los inmigrantes, con puntuaciones medias en la escala de 43,77 y 44,46 respectivamente. cuando se analizan las puntuaciones medias totales en la escala de racismo moderno en función de determinados aspectos laborales de los jóvenes, se observa que no existen diferencias significativas en función de “realizar o no alguna actividad económica remunerada”, del “tipo de contrato” que tienen o la “satisfacción o insatisfacción con los ingresos derivados del trabajo”. si se observan diferencias a este respecto en función de si los entrevistados se encuentra o no “buscando trabajo”. 657 building participative, empowering & diverse communities figura 5: diferencias en las puntuaciones en la “escala de racismo moderno” de los jóvenes de guadalajara en función de se encuentran buscando o no trabajo. de la figura 5 se desprende que, en contra de las expectativas previas de los investigadores, son los jóvenes que se encuentran buscando trabajo quienes presentan en la escala puntuaciones medias muy inferiores a la media (38,03), mientras quienes no buscan trabajo (bien porque se encuentren trabajando, bien porque desarrollen alguna otra actividad) presentan las puntuaciones medias más elevadas (42,43). por su parte, el análisis de las puntuaciones medias totales en la escala de racismo moderno en función de las actitudes políticas de los jóvenes de guadalajara muestra la ausencia de diferencias significativas en lo relativo haber “ejercido (o no) el derecho al voto en las últimas elecciones”, si bien se observan diferencias en función de variables como la “ideología política” manifestada o las “intenciones de voto” en las futuras elecciones municipales, dos variables por otro lado fuertemente asociadas. figura 6: diferencias en las puntuaciones en la “escala de racismo moderno” de los jóvenes de guadalajara en función de la ideología política. figura 7: diferencias en las puntuaciones en la “escala de racismo moderno” de los jóvenes de guadalajara en función de la orientación de voto en unas futuras elecciones municipales. como se observa en la figura 6, conforme más de derecha manifiestan ser los jóvenes entrevistados, mayores son las puntuaciones medias obtenidas en la escala, indicativo de mayores actitudes racistas hacia los inmigrantes. en esta línea, las puntuaciones presentan fuertes oscilaciones, desde 25,37 y 33,75 de quienes se consideran respectivamente de “extrema izquierda” 658 building participative, empowering & diverse communities e “izquierda”, hasta puntuaciones de 55,23 y 52,90 entre quienes manifiestan ser respectivamente de “extrema derecha” y “derecha”. las puntuaciones superiores a la media aparecen a partir de quienes manifiestan ser de “centro derecha” (48,67), presentando quienes se consideran de “centro” y “centro izquierda” unas puntuaciones medias de 40,75 y 35,36 respectivamente. en la misma línea, se observa en la figura 7 que son quienes manifiestan que votarían al partido popular en unas próximas elecciones municipales los que presentan las puntuaciones medias en la escala más elevadas (49,31), presentando las actitudes menos racistas hacia los inmigrantes quienes votarían a izquierda unida (26,58), seguidos los futuros votantes del partido socialista obrero español (32,35), ambos con puntuaciones inferiores a la media. se desprende también de la figura 7 que, mientras quienes votarían en blanco presentan puntuaciones medias superiores a la media (42,25), quienes no votarían o votarían a partidos minoritarios presentan puntuaciones medias en la escala inferiores a la media (39,54 y 36,81 respectivamente). finalmente, cabe señalar que se observan diferencias entre los jóvenes de guadalajara en las puntuaciones medias totales en la escala de racismo moderno en función de la religión que manifiestan profesar, tal como aparece recogido en la tabla 8. figura 8: diferencias en las puntuaciones en la “escala de racismo moderno” de los jóvenes de guadalajara en función de la religión. como se desprende de la tabla 8, quienes manifiestan las puntuaciones medias más elevadas en la escala, siempre por encima de la media, son respectivamente los “católicos no practicantes” (43,53), los “católicos” (43,10) y quienes se consideran religiosamente “indiferentes” (42,63). por contra, los jóvenes que no manifiestan actitudes racistas hacia los inmigrantes son los que se consideran “no creyentes” (38,16) y, muy especialmente, quienes manifiestan ser creyentes de otra religión que no es la católica, con una puntuación media en la escala de 28,40. 4. conclusiones. en general, los jóvenes de guadalajara muestran un cierto acuerdo con el conjunto de los ítems que componen la escala de racismo moderno, situándose la puntuación media de la muestra en 41, es decir por encima de la puntuación media de la escala (cuya puntuación total oscila entre 10 y 70). las puntuaciones más elevadas en la escala se dan entre los jóvenes con actitudes más conservadoras: de clase media-alta (o media), políticamente de derechas y católicos en materia religiosa, ya fueran o no practicantes. por el contrario, las puntuaciones más bajas en la escala de racismo moderno fueron manifestadas por los jóvenes con actitudes más progresistas: de clase media-baja o baja, “no creyentes” en materia religiosa y políticamente de izquierdas. otras variables relacionadas con las actitudes o creencias racistas fueron el género (los 659 building participative, empowering & diverse communities varones tienden a puntuar más alto en la escala que las mujeres) y el nivel educativo. no se observa relación entre racismo en los participantes y su situación o condiciones laborales. referencias garcía, m.c., navas, m.s., cuadrado, i. y molero, a. (2003). inmigración y prejuicio: actitudes de una muestra de adolescentes almerienses. acción psicológica, 2 (2), 137-147. ine (2004). www.ine.es 660 building participative, empowering & diverse communities sentido de comunidad y bienestar en usuarios de asociaciones sociales de salud mª teresa vega (mayteveg@usal.es) universidad de salamanca mª augusta pereira escola superior de saúde. instituto politécnico de bragança resúmen las asociaciones sociales son contextos comunitarios que contribuyen al bienestar de sus usuarios a través de los procesos de influencia social que desarrollan. el objetivo de este estudio es analizar en qué medida las asociaciones, al formar parte de la red de apoyo de los usuarios, contribuyen al desarrollo de un sentido de comunidad en sus miembros y en qué grado éste determina el bienestar psicológico a través de procesos sociocognitivos. la muestra está formada por 113 sujetos afectados por problemas de salud de entre 13 y 80 años que recibían servicios de 22 asociaciones sociales y de salud. se realizó un diseño de investigación cuasi-experimental de tipo transversal. la información se recabó a través de entrevista personal. se midieron tres tipos de variables: de integración social (apoyo social percibido, sentido de comunidad), de potenciación psicológica (autoeficacia de afrontamiento) y de bienestar psicológico (estrés psicosocial y satisfacción vital). los resultados muestran que: 1) el sentido de comunidad influye positiva y directamente en la satisfacción vital y directa y negativamente en el estrés psicosocial. 2) el sentido de comunidad influye indirectamente en el bienestar a través de la autoeficacia de afrontamiento cognitivo y de afrontamiento social, de forma que aquellos usuarios que con el apoyo de la asociación han logrado un mayor sentimiento de pertenencia comunitaria, también han desarrollado mayor potenciación intrapersonal, lo que les lleva a experimentar un incremento en su bienestar psicológico. se discuten las implicaciones prácticas que se derivan de estos resultados. introducción las asociaciones de salud o de ayuda mutua forman parte de la red de apoyo social natural de personas que están pasando por situaciones de salud que les fuerzan a solicitar y recibir ayuda del entorno social. son, por tanto, contextos comunitarios de influencia social que condicionan el estilo de vida de sus usuarios y contribuyen a mejorar su calidad de vida. las personas afectadas pasan por momentos de crisis y de preocupación por lo cual proporcionarles información, consejo, orientación, asistencia o afecto, entre otras atenciones, resultan ser herramientas indispensables para lograr el funcionamiento saludable del individuo. estas asociaciones suelen ofrecer ayudas que complementan, completan o suplen las ofrecidas por los sistemas públicos de salud y sociales. estos últimos constituyen redes de apoyo reglado de baja accesibilidad que ofrecen un limitado abanico de servicios prestados en función de un complejo entramado de normas y burocracias administrativas que limitan la capacidad de actuación de los profesionales ofreciendo una pobre respuesta a las demandas sociales no sólo en el terreno técnico sino también en el de la relación profesional-usuario (gottlieb, 1981). no obstante hay que tener presente que los sistemas informales, las asociaciones de ayuda mutua, 661 building participative, empowering & diverse communities suelen carecer de los medios profesionales y los conocimientos científico-técnicos especializados que se precisan para atender adecuadamente a los usuarios y para hacer frente a circunstancias y tratamientos muy específicos. las personas afectadas acuden a las asociaciones por percibirlas altamente disponibles y accesibles y por suministrar una ayuda más ajustada a las demandas de los usuarios al estar organizadas por iguales. en este contexto, los miembros de la asociación actúan como modelos de rol transmitiendo actitudes, estrategias de afrontamiento, habilidades, afectos y valores que infunden seguridad y confianza. por ello la participación en asociaciones de salud y el soporte que se recibe de ellas, siguiendo a levine y perkins (1987), cumplen la función de promover el sentido psicológico de comunidad, entendido como el sentido de pertenencia grupal y la identificación con los miembros de la comunidad (chavis y wandersman, 1990) y la de normalizar pensamientos, sentimientos y conductas previniendo el aislamiento social y fomentando la integración social. se parte de la idea de que las organizaciones sociales de salud, al representar una fuente de apoyo social, influyen en el bienestar de las personas (lópez-cábanas y chacón, 1997). el apoyo social es definido como proceso de transacciones interpersonales de recursos de tipo emocional, instrumental e informativo dirigido a potenciar, mantener o restituir el bienestar del receptor (martínez y garcía, 1995). el participar en la asociación proporciona una red de relaciones sociales que normaliza pensamientos, sentimientos y conductas previniendo el aislamiento social de afectados y familiares y promoviendo la integración en la comunidad. a su vez la falta de integración social o soledad social (weiss, 1976) se explica como un factor incompatible con el bienestar psicológico, el cual es definido en esta investigación como un bajo nivel de estrés experimentado por la persona con motivo de su problema y un alto grado de satisfacción vital. en las organizaciones de salud las personas, al compartir su experiencia con iguales, al sentirse aceptados y valorados, interpretan que su vivencia es más social que personal, no se perciben como culpables de lo que le pasa, están más dispuestos a compartir sentimientos y a ayudar a los demás, lo que hace que disminuyan las autoevaluaciones negativas, se sientan más autoeficaces, reduzcan su nivel de estrés y aumenten su satisfacción vital (diener, emmons, larsen y griffin, 1985). el que una persona con algún tipo de enfermedad o problema se sienta capaz de realizar aquellas acciones necesarias para mantener o ganar salud y bienestar es indicador de que la persona está psicológicamente capacitada para afrontar su situación-problema. la autoeficacia representa, por tanto, la potenciación psicológica o intrapersonal. la teoría social cognitiva de albert bandura (1987, 1997) define la autoeficacia como el juicio personal sobre la capacidad para abordar los retos cotidianos y las dificultades en momentos críticos. bandura considera que la autoeficacia es un predictor significativo de la conducta del individuo en la medida en que las tareas sean percibidas con cierto grado de dificultad por parte de las personas. ante situaciones valoradas como que no entrañan dificultad la autoeficacia no determina el comportamiento de forma significativa. la experiencia en la asociación de ayuda mutua y el soporte aportado por ella contribuye a generar en los usuarios juicios de autoeficacia en la medida en que la asociación sea considerada una fuente significativa de influencia social. a partir del contacto con otros afectados y familiares las personas adquieren confianza personal para afrontar psicológicamente los requerimientos de su situación y para buscar la ayuda que precisen. ello está relacionado con otra función propia 662 building participative, empowering & diverse communities de las asociaciones de salud que destacan levine y perkins (1987), la de transmitir estrategias efectivas de afrontamiento de los problemas diarios. los recursos que funcionan para algunos usuarios de la asociación pueden llegar a ser adecuados para otros. la autoeficacia hace que las personas tengan sentimientos de control sobre su vida y que interpreten sus dificultades como retos; que ante los diversos obstáculos no se amedrenten y sigan haciendo intentos por superar sus problemas buscando recursos y poniendo en práctica nuevas estrategias para solucionarlos. de esta manera la autoeficacia logra influir positivamente en el bienestar reduciendo o previniendo el estrés y generando satisfacción en la vida objetivos a pesar de que en los últimos años en españa han proliferado este tipo de asociaciones, poco se conoce, desde una perspectiva psicosocial, acerca de su impacto en el bienestar y calidad de vida de los usuarios por tal motivo, en la presente investigación se plantea que (véase la figura 1): a) el apoyo social percibido de la asociación contribuye a generar el sentido de comunidad se entiende que el apoyo social y el sentimiento de comunidad son indicadores del grado de integración social del usuario. b) hay una relación directa entre integración social y bienestar psicológico. c) tanto el apoyo social como el sentimiento de comunidad generan pensamientos de capacidad personal. d) la autoeficacia de afrontamiento (cognitivo y social) actúa de mediador sociocognitivo entre la integración social y el bienestar psicológico de los afectados. se define el bienestar psicológico como un bajo nivel de estrés experimentado por la persona con motivo de su problema y un alto grado de satisfacción vital. metodología muestra la muestra estaba constituida por 113 sujetos afectados por un problema sociosanitario y que recibían servicios de asociaciones de ayuda mutua de la ciudad de salamanca (se trabajó con 22 asociaciones, entre ellas se pueden destacar: asociación salmantina de hemofilia , asociación de ayuda al toxicómano nueva gente , asociación de enfermos de parkinson de salamanca , asociación de afectados por trastornos alimenticios, asociación de padres de niños sordos de salamanca , entre otras). la edad de los sujetos iba de los 13 a los 80 años. la muestra puede ser considerada como representativa ya que a un nivel de confianza del 95% presenta un error de muestreo de ± 0,08. 663 building participative, empowering & diverse communities diseño y procedimiento los datos se recogieron mediante un diseño transversal de tipo cuasi-experimental. se elaboró un cuestionario expresamente elaborado para los fines teóricos-aplicados de la investigación. la obtención de información se realizó mediante dos procedimientos según lo que permitieran los responsables de la asociación: 1) realización de entrevistas semi-estructuradas de carácter individual por entrevistadores formados, 2) aplicación de cuestionarios dejándolos a un representante de la asociación que luego se encargaba de entregarlos a las personas interesadas en colaborar. en el primer procedimiento se solicitaba cita previa con las personas que voluntariamente querían participar. en ella los entrevistadores resaltaban lo importante que era que respondieran con sinceridad puesto que simplemente se les preguntaba por su opinión y experiencia. también se recalcaba el hecho de que los datos recogidos iban a ser tratados de forma confidencial y con rigor científico. en el segundo procedimiento y durante el mes siguiente a la fecha en que se habían dejado los cuestionarios, los investigadores se pasaban cada semana por las asociaciones para recoger los cuestionarios contestados. instrumentos de medida • integración social: • apoyo social percibido (alpha=0,87) apoyo social percibido: grado en que las personas consideran que la asociación les ha ayudado y apoyado proporcionándoles recursos de diversa naturaleza: afectivos, informacionales y materiales. ej., si algo me preocupa hay personas a las que puedo pedir consejo. los items fueron adaptados de la escalas de apoyo social de herrero, gracia y musitu (1996) y de gottlieb (1981). la escala de medida final estaba conformada por 7 items con un patrón de respuesta que iba de 1 a 5 (desacuerdo-acuerdo). • sentido de comunidad (alpha= 0,72): percepción que posee el individuo sobre su posición en un contexto social y comunitario. ej., mis opiniones son bien recibidas por los demás. la escala estaba compuesta por 6 ítems de 1 a 5 grado de desacuerdo-acuerdo, adaptados de la escala de sentido de comunidad de prezza, amici, roberti y tedeschi (2001) y de la escala de integración social de herrero y cols. (1996). • potenciación psicológica (autoeficacia): se utilizaron siete ítems, algunos pertenecientes a la escala de bäbler y schwarzer (1996) y otros a la escala de afrontamiento de diabetes elaborada por las autoras para otra investigación. la escala de respuesta iba de nada capaz a totalmente capaz (0-10). los ítems se distribuían en dos factores: • de afrontamiento cognitivo (alpha=0,78) referida la valoración de su capacidad personal para encontrar y poner en práctica estrategias que funcionen. ej., de item: resistir la tentación de hacer aquellas cosas que pueden perjudicar su bienestar. • de afrontamiento social (alpha= 0,68) referida a la valoración de su capacidad para buscar el apoyo y la ayuda que requiere en personas del entorno cercano y en profesionales. ej: pedir ayuda a amigos o familiares cuando lo necesita. • bienestar psicológico: • estrés psicosocial (alpha= 0,84) estado de desequilibrio real o percibido entre las 664 building participative, empowering & diverse communities demandas recibidas por el sujeto y las capacidades biológicas, psicológicas y sociales (lazarus y folkman, 1986). ej., ha sentido que las dificultades se le amontonaban sin poder solucionarlas. seis ítems pertenecientes a la escala de estrés de herrero, gracia y musitu (1996) referidos a distintos sentimientos y pensamientos experimentados en el último mes constituían la escala de medida. • satisfacción vital (alpha= 0,75) valoración subjetiva con la que el individuo juzga en qué medida las circunstancias por las que ha pasado a lo largo de su vida se consideran valiosas (diener y cols., 1985). se trata de valorar sus experiencias de vida mediante 3 ítems con un patrón de respuesta de 1 a 5. ej: hasta ahora he conseguido las cosas importantes que deseo en la vida. resultados los resultados derivados de los análisis de regresión múltiple realizados para analizar los objetivos de esta investigación se encuentran en la figura 2. en la figura se destacan los coeficientes de regresión estandarizados significativos y se constata que: 1) el apoyo social percibido de la asociación contribuye de forma positiva a que el afectado se sienta integrado en la comunidad (beta=0.41). 2) el sentido de comunidad influye positiva y directamente en la satisfacción vital (beta=0.48)y directa y negativamente en el estrés psicosocial (beta=-0.44). 3) el sentido de comunidad influye indirectamente en el bienestar a través de la autoeficacia de afrontamiento cognitivo y de afrontamiento social de forma que aquellos usuarios que con el apoyo de la asociación han logrado un mayor sentimiento de pertenencia comunitaria, también han desarrollado mayor potenciación intrapersonal, lo que les lleva a experimentar un mayor bienestar psicológico. aunque ambas autoeficacias influyen en el bienestar psicológico de los afectados, la autoeficacia de afrontamiento ejerce un efecto más determinante al aumentar la satisfacción vital y reducir el estrés (beta=-0.38 y 0.35 sobre estrés y satisfacción respectivamente). 4) se constata también la influencia directa y positiva del apoyo social percibido por los usuarios de los grupos de ayuda mutua sobre el bienestar, al determinar la satisfacción vital (beta=0.26), de forma que aquellas personas que perciben que han recibido más apoyo de la asociación son las que experimentan mayor satisfacción en su vida. conclusiones la principal conclusión que se deriva de este estudio es la importancia que tienen los grupos de ayuda mutua de cara a favorecer la integración social de las personas que pasan por dificultades sociosanitarias. también se demuestra que el bienestar se consigue ayudando a las 665 building participative, empowering & diverse communities personas a tener un sentimiento de pertenencia social. el apoyo social de la asociación ha actuado más generando integración en la comunidad que induciendo potenciación psicológica. por consiguiente, las asociaciones de salud con las que hemos trabajado deben de volcarse en normalizar la situación social del afectado proporcionándole ayuda para integrarse. el que los afectados consideren que están integrados en la comunidad es crucial ya que les hace sentirse personas normales y corrientes que piensan, sienten, actúan y se relacionan con los demás como cualquier otra persona. a pesar de lo elemental que es para ellos el sentirse un miembro más de la comunidad se constata su bajo nivel de participación activa en la comunidad. se deduce que en algunos casos la falta de implicación está ocasionada por limitaciones físicas, aunque en otros es el desinterés y la ausencia de motivación lo que lo condiciona. en este sentido las organizaciones de salud deben aumentar sus esfuerzos organizando actividades plenamente integradas en la comunidad y motivando el interés de los afectados en la colaboración y participación activa en estas actividades por tanto las asociaciones deben trabajar el contexto social para así, en último término, inducir cambios en los procesos psicosociales de la persona, lo cual refleja uno de los principios de actuación de la psicología comunitaria (sánchez, 1996, 2007). esta estrategia resulta efectiva si tenemos en cuenta que condiciona positivamente el bienestar de los individuos. otra conclusión que se deriva de este trabajo es que la integración en el entorno social cercano favorece el desarrollo de creencias personales de capacidad para buscar y poner en prácticas estrategias que le permitan resolver sus problemas diarios y aquellas situaciones más difíciles con las que se encuentre. la autoeficacia hace que las personas tengan sentimientos de control sobre su vida y que interpreten sus dificultades como retos; que ante los diversos obstáculos no se amedrenten y sigan haciendo intentos por superar sus problemas buscando recursos y poniendo en práctica nuevas estrategias para solucionarlos. de esta manera la autoeficacia, el hecho de que las personas se sientan potenciadas psicológicamente y con recursos personales, logra influir positivamente en el bienestar reduciendo o previniendo el estrés y generando satisfacción en la vida. por tanto la integración social condiciona el bienestar a través de mecanismos sociocognitivos. dado que el modelo sociocognitivo es capaz de explicar cómo generar el bienestar psicológico en los afectados, ello significa que, prioritariamente, las asociaciones deben trabajar desarrollando actividades que induzcan en sus miembros la valoración personal de capacidad y, en particular, la percepción de capacidad para encontrar y poner en practica estrategias cognitivas efectivas para afrontar los problemas. por ejemplo, se debe enseñar al sujeto habilidades para resistir la tentación de hacer cosas que pueden perjudicar la salud o enseñarles a ser capaces de reducir o evitar las consecuencias que puede provocarle el problema que tiene. 666 building participative, empowering & diverse communities referencias bibliográficas bäbler, j. y schwarzer, r. (1996). measuring generalized self-beliefs: a spanish adaptation of the general self-efficacy scale. ansiedad y estrés, 2(1), 1-18. bandura, a. (1987). pensamiento y acción. fundamentos sociales. barcelona: martínez roca. bandura, a. (1997). self-efficacy: the exercise of control. w.h. freeman and company. chavis, d. y wandersman, a. (1990). sense of community in the urban environment: a catalyst for participation and community development. american journal of community psychology, 18, 55-81. gottlieb, b.h. (1981). social networks and social support (vol. 4). sage: california. herrero, j., gracia, e. y musitu, g. (1996). salud y comunidad. evaluación de recursos y estresores. valencia: conselleria de cultura, educació y ciencia de la generalitat valenciana. lazarus, r. y folkman, s. (1986). estrés y procesos cognitivos. barcelona: martínez roca. levine, m. y perkins, d. (1987). principles of community psychology, perspectives and applications. nueva york: oxford university press. lópez-cábanas, m. y chacón, f. (1997). intervención psicosocial y servicios sociales. un enfoque participativo. madrid: síntesismartínez y garcía, 1995). prezza, m. amici, m, roberti, t. y tedeschi, g. (2001). sense of community referred to the whole town: its relations with neighboring, loneliness, life satisfaction, and area of residence. journal of community psychology, 29 (1), 29-52. sánchez, a. (1996). psicología comunitaria. bases conceptuales y métodos de intervención. barcelona: eub. sánchez, a. (2007). manual de psicología comunitaria. un enfoque integrado. madrid: pirámide. weiss, r.s. (1976). the emocional impact of marital separation. journal of social issues, 32, 135-143 667 building participative, empowering & diverse communities leisure, information needs and social participation of outskirts young people in murcia (spain) vera, juan j.; lopez-pina, jose. a. & (faculty of psychology, univ. murcia) juverama@um.es navarro, gabriel (youth depart., murcia city council) abstract a representative stratified sample (age mean=22.7 years; sex: 50.8% males, 49.2% females) of 626 young people was randomly selected in a group of suburbs and minor rural localities (pedanías) of murcia borough (spain). the outskirts young were interviewed and responded a wide questionnaire including among others a set of items already verified in conventional youth surveys. means comparisons, factorial analysis and logistic regression (spss v. 14) summarize compile data. the aims of study were to explore practices and opinions about weekly and weekend leisure, information needs and problems and opportunities for social participation, in order to improve the action of a youth information centre (informajoven). various and numerous are national studies on youth in spain. a diversity of facets of the young people behaviour and opinion were described in specific literature, but a small number are about non-urban settings and much less information has been compiled on young people in suburbs and rural populations. factor analysis reveals three components in leisure preferences and practices of outskirts young people. moreover interesting results appear in relation to perception of information need and opportunities that influence their difficulties for social participation. similarities and differences regarding other national samples of urban young people are considered. keywords: social survey, participation, mobilisation, leisure, outskirts youth intro some authors affirm that diverse facts in the european countries are manifesting a group of strong social tendencies, which is connected to the new logic of the inequalities, and in those that the youths appear as special main characters and subject with an outstanding potentiality of prominence. (díaz, 2007; tezanos, 2007, p. 119). also, they point out that it creates a new political agenda and arena that of the fights for the citizenship, which is understood as equal, full and universal citizenship (tezanos, o.c.). it is not only spoken of risks of the youths' political alienation in terms of more electoral abstention and high grade of organizational self-exclusion (for crisis of interest and lack of credibility and motivations), but also in the context of the crisis of the social capital that affects the youth more. if a bigger social exclusion (juvenile unemployment, labour precariousness and irregularity, housing access difficulty, delay in the average age for emancipation) spreads to create a bigger political exclusion that is generating a citizenship of second category, more devaluated, 668 building participative, empowering & diverse communities limited and with less power. at the same time is proven in the last years the emergence of new forms of action, protests and mobilization, with a certain capacity of social and cultural impact just as sectorial social movements (feminists, against gender violence, squatters, anti-war of iraq…), express actions (summoned by mobile phone or internet), mobilizations for concrete demands (worthy housing, labour or educational reforms, volunteers in the prestige’ catastrophe). in the social tendencies surveys (v. díaz, o.c.) are observed the progressive lost of importance of perceived power of the unions (although it has stayed stable regarding the political parties) and a vague presence or implication in both types of social organizations. however, more than half of the youth (under 30 years) recognize an increase of the influence of social movements and believes that they will follow having it in next decade. objective there is already a certain extent and tradition of national studies on youth in spain and are numerous the works published on diversity of facets of the young people behaviour and opinion. however in a majority of cases the interviewees come from urban settings and much less information has compiled on young people in suburbs and rural populations. a series of psychosocial variables (e.g. motivations and associative behaviour, perception and valuation of different forms of social participation and action), socio-demographic factors (age, sex, marital status, education, occupation) and locality’s features (distance, population, socioeconomic domain) were interrelated in an wide study about non urban centre young people preferences and difficulties for the social participation and access to the information about juvenile topics and concerns. design & method persons in 28 suburbs and pedanías (minor rural localities) of murcia borough (spain) a representative stratified sample by age (mean=22.7 years, t.d. =4.35) and sex (50.8% males, 49.2% females) of 626 young people was randomly selected. measures they were interviewed and responded a wide questionnaire including among others a set of items already verified in conventional youth studies in spain. data were analyzed by means comparisons, anova, factorial analysis and logistic regression with spss v. 14. see http://www.informajoven.org/info/servicios/necesidades_info.html. results valuation of the utility of the participation forms in a range from 0 (nothing useful) to 10 (very useful) youngsters of the sample expressed their opinion on a series of forms of participation and social action. it is a field of usual content in youth surveys and it can adopt different formats. the alpha coefficient of the valuations of the utility of the participation forms was .84, indicating a high internal consistency (reliability) of the enquired youngsters’ answers. 669 building participative, empowering & diverse communities table 1. perceived utility of the participation forms (means in descending order) all sex m wr to vote in elections 6.51 6.42 6.62 to participate in a strike 6.28 6.29 6.26 to go on a demonstration or concentration 6.16 6.21 6.10 to collaborate/ affiliate to an environmentalist, human rights associations, etc. 5.89 5.71 6.10 to sign a petition, report or support text to something or somebody 5.67 5.52 5.84 to collaborate/ affiliate to a neighbourhood and local associations (* *) 5.65 5.38 5.95 to collaborate/ affiliate to an union 5.46 5.30 5.66 frequently follow the political information in the media 4.79 4.67 4.93 taking part in a boycott (*) 4.63 4.89 4.35 taking over a building 4.51 4.75 4.24 to collaborate/ affiliate to a political party 4.49 4.43 4.56 frequently defend and speak of political topics with other people 4.14 4.11 4.18 try to convince somebody that he/she votes or joins to a party 3.39 3.37 3.41 direct actions that could involve violence 1.61 1.73 1.48 (*) p<.05- (**) p<.01 significance by sex if we observe the average ranking of different forms of social participation-action, we notice that the three first in average are usual and conventional forms of participation within the usual democratic system. all with the shade of being precise actions, the one at the moment of the call (elections, strike, and demonstrations) is done and the later dedication or more extended commitment is unknown or it is not possible to be inferred. one of the four following (with a medium level of average approval of utility) follows the same style as the first three (signing a request…) and it is also identified, nowadays, as a conventional operation although some decades ago it was described as a non-conventional political activity in the studies on new forms of political participation (v. albach, 1989; baker, dalton y hildebrant, 1981; bynner y ashford, 1994; deth, 1990; gibbins, 1989; tarrow, 1988). the other three forms in this position state the membership and collaboration with organisations or participation entities (but not a political party specifically) and imply a more constant commitment, even remaining in the parameters of the conventional social or civic action. below the subjective average score of approval (below 5) there would be forms of commitment or both conventional (belonging to a party, convincing to vote or joining a party) and non conventional (taking part in a boycott, taking over a building, direct action that could involve violence) and the informative or communicative commitment (mental or cognitive activism). activities such as proselytism and specially direct action with the possibility of violence are not approved by respondents. 670 building participative, empowering & diverse communities we can verify that the differences based on sex are only significant in two items: girls more than boys consider more useful belonging and collaborating with local associations. the participation in a boycott is considered more useful by boys than girls. by age groups, differences in the average of utility of the different forms or actions of social participation focus on: • youngsters in the interval of more age (>24 years) stand out in almost all items that are significant, whose averages are ordered in size as the age increases. thus, they emphasise collaboration with a union, voting, following the political information, defending and dealing with political subjects, trying to convince and to affiliate, and collaborating with a party. almost all of them can be fitted in what we consider conventional political behaviour. • the exception to the previous rule occurs in collaborating with local associations where youngsters of intermediate and lower age stand out. however, a different view is shown by the classification by educational level reached in the crossing of categories with the different forms of action or social participation. a relatively wide number of items show significant differences; yet, preferences reflect different directions: • the higher the level of education is, higher utility level perceived in company/signature requests and voting in the elections, but that increasing order up to the highest score of those who have higher education does not occur with equal precision in following political information, defending and talking about politics, convincing and joining a party, collaboratingbelonging to a party. • those who have studied vocational training stand out in collaborating with local associations, and attending a demonstration. • those who have no education or these are the basic one, are before the others (often followed by those who have studied vocational training) in collaborating with a union, participating in a boycott, taking over a building. table 2. perceived utility of the participation forms (means) education primary vocational training secondary university to sign a petition, report or support text to something or somebody (**) 4.93 5.78 5.87 6.29 to collaborate/ affiliate to a neighbourhood and local associations (*) 5.65 6.31 5.02 5.92 to collaborate/ affiliate to an union (**) 5.91 5.81 4.56 5.75 taking part in a boycott (**) 5.63 5.49 3.39 4.24 to go on a demonstration or concentration (**) 6.21 6.70 6.12 5.66 to vote in elections (**) 6.09 6.46 6.61 7.03 taking over a building (**) 5.65 5.33 3.07 4.26 frequently follow the political information in the media (**) 4.57 4.99 4.34 5.56 frequently defend and speak of political topics with other people (**) 4.05 4.40 3.43 4.99 671 building participative, empowering & diverse communities education primary vocational training secondary university try to convince somebody that he/she votes or joins to a party (**) 3.68 3.75 2.47 3.92 to collaborate/ affiliate to a political party (**) 3.77 4.54 4.42 5.48 (*) p<.05 (**) p<.01 following table shows the factorial analysis of main components with varimax rotation that revealed the existence of three basic factors which motivate valuations of the utility of participation forms. from them, new variables are created: table 3. factorial structure of utility of participation forms (varimax rotation. factor analysis) factor i factor ii factor iii to sign a petition, report or support text to something or somebody 0.551 ------to collaborate/ affiliate to a neighbourhood and local associations 0.762 ------to collaborate/ affiliate to an environmentalist, human rights associations, etc. 0.825 ------to collaborate/ affiliate to an union 0.421 0.396 ---taking part in a boycott ---0.897 ---to go on a demonstration or concentration 0.431 0.554 ---to vote in elections 0.415 ---0.428 to participate in a strike ---0.529 ---taking over a building ---0.788 ---frequently follow the political information in the media ------0.732 frequently defend and speak of political topics with other people ------0.810 try to convince somebody that he/she votes or joins to a party ------0.713 to collaborate/ affiliate to a political party ------0.650 direct actions that could involve violence ---------variance explained 32.24 33.87 33.89 guttman-cronbach alpha coefficient .77 .81 .82 o variable util1 (factor i) results from adding the answers given by people to options 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 7 of that question. it includes the perception-valuation of favourable forms of civic action to the collaboration-membership to different types of associations (from local ones to unions), and it also has a certain preference for conventional forms of participation (signing requests, attending a demonstration, voting in elections). o variable util2 (factor ii) results from adding the answers given by people to options 4, 672 building participative, empowering & diverse communities 5, 6, 8 and 9. this factor groups answers that are related to more radical or less conventional cut actions (participating in a boycott, taking over a building, taking part in strikes and demonstrations and collaboratingbelonging to a union). o variable util3 (factor iii) results from adding the answers given by people to options 7, 10, 11, 12 and 13. here, answers related to the partisan political participation are included ( convincing to vote or to join a party, belonging to it, following the political information and defending and talking about these subjects, voting in elections). actions by which the young people would mobilise themselves youngsters are asked about their reasons for mobilisation, and they are allowed to answer one or more of the items. this factor in different formats is usual in youth surveys and is an indirect referent of values or social rights they wish (employment, distribution of wealth, security, equality, protection of the weak ones, environment, peace, etc.). the results show a percentage of those polled have mentioned that item. table 4. actions by which the young people mobilise themselves (% in descending order) all sex m w 1. finding a job 81.5% 52.4% 47.6% 2. housing 53.7% 43.8% 56.3% 3. improving public services (education., health) 53.0% 48.5% 51.5% 4. avoiding delinquency 43.9% 49.5% 50.5% 5. better distribution of the wealth 40.9% 47.3% 52.7% 6. protecting weak ones rights 37.4% 48.3% 51.8% 7. obtaining peace (end of wars) 32.4% 48.3% 51.7% 8. protecting the environment 28.8% 46.7% 53.3% 9. defending spain 25.6% 53.7% 46.3% 10. preserving my right to have fun 21.7% 60.3% 39.7% 11. to do what i feel like, i want 16.8% 55.2% 44.8% 12. to defend my religious and/or moral convictions 16.6% 44.2% 55.8% 13. to prevent the immigrants from taking away our things 15.7% 59.2% 40.8% 14. to improve the situation of the immigrants 08.9% 46.4% 53.6% observation of ranking of expressed reasons shows that: finding a job is, by far, the most widespread preoccupation or motivation. housing and improving public services are equal in proportion. in a third place, relatively close we would find avoiding delinquency and a better distribution of the wealth. more altruistic aspirations are located in central positions of the ranking: protecting the weak ones, obtaining peace, protecting the environment and defending spain. it attracts our attention the low percentage of followthrough of some items that have tendencies and directions of evaluative or social positioning: right to have fun, to do what i want; to prevent the immigrants from taking away our things, and 673 building participative, empowering & diverse communities in another aspect to defend moral and religious convictions and to improve the situation of the immigrants. also, it is possible to carry out a factorial analysis of answers to verify if components or interpretable dimensions in preferences of the enquired youngsters are created. the varimax rotation offers three components that have created new variables in the question regarding motivations for the social mobilisation. o component movil1 (factor i): it groups answers and preferences that in literature on values and social attitudes have been bound to a social universalistic-justice orientation (v. gouveia, 2001, schwartz, 2001, vera 1995, vera, martín, martínez y paterna, 2004) where the others’ well-being is the main concern, together with the environment and to go beyond selfish interests (the own well-being goes together with the social and ecological welfare, it has components of altruistic or post-materialistic ethics). o component movil2 (factor ii): it gathers items that show a more ego and ethnocentric position, the aim is to preserve rights of hedonistic or individualistic type, and to protect the ingroup of external threats. o component movil3 (factor iii): here answers are concentrated that are not polarised in the other ends (neither in the collectivist of universalistic type nor in the defensive individualist), it is about preoccupations and personal interests but which are designed for the social sphere or they need the harmony or well-being in society: housing, job, peace, public services, security. table 5. factor analysis. varimax rotated components matrix component 1 2 3 better distribution of the wealth ,634 ,078 ,051 to improve the situation of the immigrants ,625 ,064 -,030 protecting weak ones rights ,609 -,030 ,194 protecting the environment ,516 ,163 ,411 to defend my religious and/or moral convictions ,511 ,013 ,066 to do what i feel like, i want ,288 ,678 -,148 defending spain -,114 ,646 ,404 preserving my right to have fun ,310 ,613 -,119 to prevent the immigrants from taking away our things -,273 ,557 ,087 housing -,035 -,048 ,632 obtaining peace (end of wars) ,292 ,395 ,549 avoiding delinquency ,161 ,290 ,505 improving public services (education., health) ,232 ,041 ,502 finding a job -,031 -,221 ,446 the contrast of proportions of mention (how many see in the successive items a reason for action) based on sex does not offer significant differences in many of the questions. yet, they do appear in defending right to have fun much more extended among boys than girls (p=.012); and 674 building participative, empowering & diverse communities also in being able to have access to housing where girls surpass boys (p=.000). according to the age groups, the most relevant differences are the following ones: • as the age increases, there exists more motivation to be able to have access to housing. • as the age increases, there exists less motivation to improve for the conditions of the immigrants, to preserve the right to have fun, protection of the environment, to be able to do what you want. • the 20-24 year-old group, followed by >24 years, are more motivated to be able to find a job: (a 88% and 82.6% as opposed to 72.4%) • the youngest group is the one that points out avoidance of delinquency (14 percentage points over: 54.6%), followed by the other two groups almost in the same magnitude (around a 40% of each group) according to the categories of occupation, it is possible to find remarkable differences in the proportion of youngsters of each sub-group that emphasises these motivations for the mobilisation. it seems that: • the two groups that work have more motivation to find a job, being ten percentage points under the other two groups. • the two groups that study make more emphasis in preserving their right to have fun, in protecting the environment, and in a certain way also in improving the conditions of the immigrants and achieving the end of wars (in these reasons the proportion decreases as we go from group 1 to 4). also defending the rights of the weakest and best distribution of the wealth (here the group that studies and works stands out). • in being able to do what they want the group that study and the one that neither works nor studies stand out, being in a lower position the group that works. • the grouping of the people of the sample according to their level of education obtained so far, shows differences in almost all the items in this variable (all but three) regarding the reasons to mobilise themselves. this doesn’t mean that all the differences are equally intense, neither ordered nor proportional. although in general it would be possible to say that there is much motivation for the mobilisation in those who have secondary education in most items, they are the ones who would mobilise more or the second ones in doing so. obstacles that hinder the participation of youngsters (part) the analysis of the obstacles that, in the own perception of the respondents, hinder the social participation of youngsters offers interesting considerations. 675 building participative, empowering & diverse communities table 6. obstacles that hinder participation of youngsters (%) all sex m w pa1 the legal framework that regulates the processes of civic participation 11.3% 60.6% 39.4% pa2 the lack of education and culture for the participation 30.7% 47.9% 52.1% pa3 the demotivation, youngsters don't want to participate, “this is not good for anything” 50.0% 47.6% 52.4% pa4 the institutional inflexibility 14.5% 50.5% 49.5% pa5 lack of spaces, premises and time for the participation 27.8% 46.6% 53.4% pa6 the dominant social values: individualism, competitiveness, consumerism, comfort, conformism 27.8% 44.3% 55.7% pa7 few participation means exist, and they are not well-known or they are not used well 39.0% 49.6% 50.4% pa8 the time that i devote to internet or video games 5.0% 61.3% 38.7% pa9 the institutions don’t favour the participation. i believe that don't exist a clear political will of fomenting it… 14.1% 56.8% 43.2% firstly, (see the table below) it is outstanding the significant role that is attributed to the participative demotivation, apathy or disillusion. half of the sample points out that this obstacle, a difficulty if you want to call it internal, is typical of the section of population that is being surveyed. the other difficulty, purely internal, devotion to the internet or videogames, it is hardly admitted by a 5%. the other outstanding factors of difficulty are of two types, some infrastructural or instrumental, other normative or cultural ones. this way, the lack of means or its ignorance or misuse, almost reaches 40% of the mentions of the respondents, and also the lack of spaces, premises and time is outstanding in 27.8%. the cultural and educative deficiencies and the prevailing values (whereas they promote lack of social commitment) are outstanding in 30.7% and 27.8%. the institutional problems such as the institutional inflexibility, the lack of will or participative facilitation and the legal framework also bring together non despicable percentages (14.5%, 14.1% and 11.3%, respectively). these data can also be read under another classification: • motivacional factors (that include the values or goals socially valid and desirable) and cultural ones (education and culture for the participation), that would have more to do with the participative mentality and conscience. the difficulty would lie in the absence of a construction of participative citizen conscience. • factors for the support or canalization of the participation: means, spaces, institutions that support, norms that facilitate, etc. the difficulty would lie in the deficiencies, bad design or inflexibility in the social infrastructure for the participation. if we take sex into account for the perception of the difficulties, we should point out that the differences are not significant, with the exception of the difficulty regarding the prevailing social values that oppose the social implication and participation. in this case, 31.5% of the girls 676 building participative, empowering & diverse communities stand out this difficulty as opposed to the 24.2% of the boys. the variable age does not offer enough elements of comparison among groups of youngsters based on the difficulty of participation. perhaps we should point out that those over 24 years old internally emphasise a little more than the other groups that precede them the problem of the legal framework (15.8% as opposed to 7.8% and 8.6%) and of the predominant social values (of more or less age the percentages are 33.2%, 24.4% and 23.6%). that the 20-24 –year-old group is the one that less mentions the lack of education and culture of participation (23.3% as opposed to 32.2%, 35.1%). , nevertheless, the youngest (< 20 years) are those that less see the problem of the lack of motivation (38.5% in this group as opposed to 50.8% and 57.1% in the age groups that follow them). it could possibly be said that the older the enquired youngsters are, and not strictly in a linear way, the higher the perceptions of demotivation, unfavourable values, etc. if we consider the level of education, we find a panorama of diversity of intragroup profiles but which does not seem to point at a fixed direction. at most, we can point out some contrasts between the percentages of the two first groups as opposed to the second ones (that is to say, without basic education and vocational training, as contrasted with secondary school and college students). for example, the difficulties with the means of participation are emphasized by the 46% of the youngsters of the two first educational levels, whereas in the two second ones it decreases down to about 32%. it is the other way round with the lack of motivation of youngsters: a 56.6% and a 55.5% of secondary school and college students, respectively, emphasise this factor, whereas in titleholders in vt it decreases to 48.4% and 43.3% in basic education or without education. also the difficulty with predominant social values is relevant in the third and fourth group than in the two first ones (36.4% and 30% as opposed to 22.9% and 21.4%). the contrast of percentages of youngsters who point out a certain factor of difficulty based on their classification by occupation does not offer relevant differences between them. correlations between utility and mobilisation components and perceptions of difficulty for the participation. the correlations matrix that appears below summarises to what extent utility variables and why young people would mobilise themselves are related to each other and with the difficulty to participate. in this sense it is outstanding that: 677 building participative, empowering & diverse communities table 7. correlations util1 util2 util3 movil1 movil2 movil3 util1 pearson corr. 1 sig. (bilateral) util2 pearson corr. ,590(**) 1 sig. (bilateral) ,000 util3 pearson corr. ,564(**) ,310(**) 1 sig. (bilateral) ,000 ,000 movil1 pearson corr. ,191(**) -,052 ,085(*) 1 sig. (bilateral) ,000 ,226 ,046 movil2 pearson corr. -,039 -,073 -,046 ,203(**) 1 sig. (bilateral) ,361 ,090 ,284 ,000 movil3 pearson corr. ,115(**) -,178(**) ,010 ,345(**) ,270(**) sig. (bilateral) ,007 ,000 ,823 ,000 ,000 part pearson corr. ,151(**) ,153(**) ,064 ,258(**) -,009 ,247(**) sig. (bilateral) ,000 ,000 ,134 ,000 ,815 ,000 ** significance to a 0,01 level (bilateral). * significance to a 0,05 level (bilateral). • there exists a significant, positive and moderately high relation among util1 and util2 and util3 (the two other profiles of perception of social utility). that is to say, between the perceptions of utility of the participation related to associations and other conventional and not so conventional forms of participation and social action. this is so because they even share some item in their configuration. nevertheless, the relation between util2 and util3 is positive but lower. there is less correlation between the less conventional style (alternative or not integrated) and the most partisan one (bound to political parties and to the political proselytism). • there exists a significant, positive and more moderate relation among the three components identified in reasons for the mobilisation, which can be considered coherent with the interpretation on social directions, values and attitudes that is usual on the matter. the citizens can consider valid or useful different ways of social participation-action (understood as means of action), even though those means are varied and can involve some kind of complication from the point of view of the more or less conventional democratic participation. what it is not so understandable is that the aims or reasons for that participation (action or reaction) can, in their diverse nature, be compatible, since there can be values and goals or social aspirations to a certain extent incompatible or difficult to harmonise. • therefore, it is logical to some extent that between movil1 and movil3 (that is, for universalistic and personal-social well-being reasons) the highest positive correlation occurs (.345) and that, in addition, it is higher than the rest of correlations, and that there exists a more limited coincidence or correlation (although also positive) with movil2 (respectively .203 and .270) that was related to more hedonists, individualistic and ethnocentric reasons. in the sample studied, however, we notice that the three groups of motivations for the social action are associated positively (there are no negative correlations among them), which can be indicative that some citizens can have a heterogeneous and dependent profile of motivations of different directions 678 building participative, empowering & diverse communities (defending some social interests and simultaneously some privative or protectionist ones), and that there can also be incongruence among such preferences. • much lower and sometimes negative are the correlations between the variables of utility of the participation and the reasons to mobilise. thus, util1 (it values conventional associations and civic actions) is significantly related to movil1 (universalistic and pro-social motivation) and a little less to movil3 (concern about personal interests with social projection). it does not happen (and the tendency is negative) with movil2 (more individualistic or defensive motivations). util2 (valuation of less conventional actions) is negatively related to movil3 (the motivation for the personal and social well-being — social work, housing, peace, security and social services). the valuation of the utility of the partisan political participation (util3) is very slightly related to the motivation for universalistic or pro-social type (movil1). • when affirming the existence of more obstacles that hinder participation (part) the number of youngsters who value more profiles of participation util1 and util2 is outstanding (associative-conventional and less conventional) and also specially those whose answers are grouped in component movil1 (motivations of universalistic-egalitarian type) and movil3 (it gathers motivations of personal and social welfare type: work, housing, peace, security). obstacles that hinder the participation of youngsters according to socio-demographic and social participation-mobilisation variables the table below reflects the profiles of factors that hinder the participation of youngsters in groups (selected from each logistic regression analysis those who obtained statistical meaning to n.s. ≤ .05, r2 nagelkerke non-higher than 220, and global percentage of correct classification of cases around a 70%). table 8. coefficients of logistic regression analysis. sex age util1 util2 util3 movil1 movil2 movil3 pa1 -.792 .044 pa2 .032 -.326 .339 pa3 .065 1.159 .242 pa4 -.239 .635 pa5 -.056 .072 .031 .234 -.248 .292 pa6 .063 -.040 .372 -.418 pa7 -.054 .057 .046 .250 pa8 -.070 .519 pa9 .055 the most outstanding interpretations are: • the first and last difficulty: legal framework that regulates the participation and the institutions does not favour the participation does not allow a fitted and reliable regression equation with the considered covariables (although some of them as util2 seem to have some kind of positive relation with them). • mentioning lack of education and culture for the participation has a more moderate 679 building participative, empowering & diverse communities negative association with movil2 (a more defensive profile of motivations for mobilisation). it is also positively related to movil3 (pro common citizen rights) and very slightly to util2 (it values the less conventional social participation-action). • the difficulty lack of motivation, youngsters do not want to participate, this is useless, has a strong positive association with movil1, that is, it is more mentioned by youngsters who assign to a profile of universalistic right mobilisation pro and of social justice (perhaps as a complaint or reaction for their aspirations) and slighter but also positive with movil3 (mobilisation by usual constitutional rights). the positive relation with the age is hardly remarkable. • inflexibility of public institutions, is remarkably related, in a positive way, to profile movil3 (more emphasized by these respondents) and in a negative way, more moderately, to movil1. • lack of spaces, premises and time for the participation is the difficulty indicator that more relation has with the different covariables, although not all of equal magnitude and importance. thus, in a positive way, it is more mentioned when there is a profile of mobilisation movil3 is had (by more usual rights of well-being) and movil1 (profile social universalistic-justice), and very slightly with util2 and util3 (they value nonconventional or bound to parties participation). negatively, with profile movil2 (more endogrupal defensive) and very scarcely with util1 (valued participation of associations and conventional action). • mentioning that the predominant social values are not favourable to the participation is, in contrast, associated with two profiles of mobilisation. in a positive way with those of movil1 (of a social universalistic-justice orientation that are more critical with these values and mention more often this difficulty). in a negative way with movil2 (more hedonistic and in-group biased) that mentions less, and very scarcely with movil3. • the perception that there are few means of participation, and those that we have are not known or they are not well used is related positively but in a moderate way to movil1, util2 and util3, as well as to the minor size of population, and very slightly in negative with util1 (the inclined ones to the conventional and associative participation notice this difficulty less). • pointing out the time that i devote to the internet or video-games is remarkably related to, and is, to a certain point contradictory, to movil1 (universalistic motivation) and very little, in negative, with util1 (it values the conventional associative and civic participation). weekly and week-end leisure patterns and social mobilisation and participation the factorial analysis identified a three-dimensional structure in the answers of the interviewees relating to activities that they made with their friends during the week, and which they have been transformed into new grouping variables as is specified now: ocio1 (factor i that include/understand items 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12 and 14) that it has to do basically with activities related to the computer, videogames and internet, although also get up activities like watching, go out with friends and to practice sport. ocio2 (factor ii that includes items 9, 11, 13, 15 and 16) relating to activities of cultural 680 building participative, empowering & diverse communities type, such as to go to the cinema, to visit museums, to attend exhibitions and to make trips or excursions. ocio3 (factor iii that includes items 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7) reveals a sedentary pattern of activities where the study is included, and not directly concerning with the computers or internet. table 9. factorial structure of leisure activities realised during week factori factor ii factor iii 1. online chat 0.733 ------2. surfing the net (no chat) 0.708 ------3. listen to radio ------0.566 4. read books, magazines, comics ------0.801 5. study ------0.404 6. listening to cds, audiotapes, etc. 0.426 ---0.518 7. watch tv 0.536 ---0.368 8. play video-console games, etc. 0.650 ------9. visit museums, exhibitions, etc. ---0.502 0.370 10. go to pc games rooms 0.342 ------11. go to live music concerts ---0.678 ---12. go out with friends 0.501 ------13. travel, go on a day trip ---0.627 ---14. practice sport 0.466 ------15. go to disco, pubs, etc. ---0.564 ---16. go to cinema, theatre, etc. ---0.684 ---17. collaborate on associations, ngos ---------variance explained 15.68 13.03 11.37 also, the factorial analysis revealed a two-dimensional structure of leisure on weekend which allows creating two new variables to summarize data: ocio4 (that groups gathered activities in items 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 12, 14 and 15) have to do with computers, videogames and internet, besides to go out with friends, to watch, to go to disco and to practice sport; ocio5 (contains items 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 13 and 16) groups activities that are related to studying, listening to radio and tapes, to visit museums, to go music concerts and go to cinema or theatre. it is possible to consider interrelation between the leisure factors with the factors grouped in participation or social action evaluation and motivations for mobilisation variables. the next table shows correlations between these variables. 681 building participative, empowering & diverse communities table 10. correlations between leisure, mobilisation and participation patterns movil1 movil2 movil3 util1 util2 util3 ocio1 pearson corr. ,021 ,337(**) ,246(**) -,132(*) -,198(**) -,083 sig. (bilateral) ,691 ,000 ,000 ,017 ,000 ,137 ocio2 pearson corr. ,132(*) ,208(**) -,008 ,022 ,023 ,086 sig. (bilateral) ,014 ,000 ,880 ,690 ,682 ,122 ocio3 pearson corr. ,232(**) ,232(**) ,422(**) ,132(*) -,241(**) ,166(**) sig. (bilateral) ,000 ,000 ,000 ,017 ,000 ,002 ocio4 pearson corr. ,016 ,308(**) ,176(**) -,160(**) -,133(*) -,075 sig. (bilateral) ,770 ,000 ,001 ,004 ,016 ,176 ocio5 pearson corr. ,180(**) ,030 ,187(**) ,100 -,202(**) ,224(**) sig. (bilateral) ,001 ,585 ,000 ,072 ,000 ,000 concerning pattern ocio1, a positive relation with movil2 is observed, that is to say, with motivations of endogrupal and hedonistic defensive nature and also with movil3, preoccupation by basic individual rights of well-being. nevertheless, correlation is negative and practically null with factors of valuation of the social participation-action, especially with util2 (less conventional participation) and util1 (associative participation). ocio2 correlates also, although more moderately than the previous one, with movil2 (defensive mobilisation) and hardly with movil1 (universalistic and social justice mobilisation), which indicates that it occurs slightly in both motivacionales profiles; but not in a significant way with the factors of utility of the social participation. the third pattern of weekly leisure (ocio3) is going to correlate with all the factors considered here. in negative with util2 (the valuation of the participation of less conventional court partially is against this scheme of leisure). in positive and outstanding form with movil3 and more slightly with the rest of factors. this can be interpreted, partly, because this pattern of leisure does not reflect a clear differentiation between mobilisation schemes (although is notable on the basic citizen rights oriented one). about leisure on week-ends, ocio4 behaves like ocio1: positive and moderate relation with movil2 and insignificant with movil3 as well negligible and negative correlations with valuation profiles of social participation ways. on the other hand, ocio5 approaches the scheme of ocio3, but generally with less in size and number of correlations. outstanding correlations are: positive with util3 and negative with util2. conclusions the social and political participation of the young people in rural habitats seems to move away of the party conventional forms, to be oriented to more precise or immediate actions and towards a tenuous one and not very extended collaboration with civic associations [as it confirms the data on associativism not analysed in this paper]. the most radical forms of direct action do not receive acceptance either. the motivations and values for the mobilisation that the interviewed young people declare are oriented to reach or to preserve individual rights of well-being and social benefits. minor is the 682 building participative, empowering & diverse communities motivation towards more universalistic aims or of social justice and a more minority group of the sample of young people points at individualistic motivations of hedonistic and defensive type. the main attributions on difficulties for the participation fall to deficiencies of two types: on the one hand, motivations, confidence and participative culture of the young people (and within this one the presence of dominant values opposite to the social commitment), on the other hand, lack of resources, means, spaces, supports, etc., for the participation. the young people recognise their own deficiencies facing the social implication although also they indicate to the society and the institutions like little favourable to participation. the interrelations between factors of mobilisation, utility of different participation forms and the difficulties that the young people find to participate are diverse and complex. the slight relation can be emphasised (but significant) that they have the profiles of perception of utility with some of the participative difficulties, and a more remarkable and clear relation with the motives and orientations for the mobilisation specially the universalistic and social justice orientation, as well as the individual rights and social welfare orientation. references albach, p.g. (ed.) (1989). student political activism: an international reference handbook. greenwood press. baker, k.; dalton r.j. y hildebrant, k. (1981). germany transformed: political culture and the new politics. cambridge: harvard university. bynner, j. y ashford, s. (1994). politics and participation: some antecedents of young people's attitudes to the political system and political activity. european journal of social psychology, 24, 223236; deth, j.w. van (1990). interest in politics. in m.k. jennings; j.w. deth et al. continuities in political action: a longitudinal study of political orientations in three western democracies. berlin/new york: de gruyter. díaz moreno, v. (2007). los jóvenes y las nuevas formas de movilización social y política. sistema, 197/198, 283-295. gibbins j. r. (ed.) (1989). contemporary political culture. politics in a postmodern age. londres: sage. gouveia, v. (2001). el individualismo y el colectivismo normativo: comparación de dos modelos. en m. ros y v. gouveia (coords.). psicologia social de los valores humanos. desarrollos teóricos, metodológicos y aplicados, (pp. 101-125). madrid: biblioteca nueva. schwartz, s.h. (2001). ¿existen aspectos universales en la estructura y contenido de los valores humanos? en m. ros y v. gouveia (coords.). psicologia social de los valores humanos. desarrollos teóricos, metodológicos y aplicados, (pp. 53-77). madrid: biblioteca nueva. tarrow, s. (1988). national politics and collective action: recent theory and research in western europe and united states. annual review of sociology, 14, 421-440. tezanos, j.f. (2007). juventud, ciudadanía y exclusión social. sistema, 197/198, 103-119. vera, j.j. (1995). sistemas de valores y compromiso social de los jóvenes. tesis doctoral. dpto. de 683 building participative, empowering & diverse communities psiquiatría y psicología social. universidad de murcia. servicio de publicaciones: cd-rom "ciencias experimentales"(1997). vera, j.j.; martín, m.p.; martínez, m.c. y paterna, c. (2004). ¿más allá de la generación x? niveles de compromiso social y prioridades en el sistema de valores en universitarios. en a. sánchez, a. zambrano y m. palacín (eds.), psicología comunitaria europea: comunidad, poder, ética y valores (44-59). barcelona: universitat de barcelona. wallace, c., spannring, r. & haerpfer ch. (2003). jóvenes ciudadanos: la integración política y social de la juventud en europa oriental y occidental. en j.benedicto y m.l: morán. aprendiendo a ser ciudadanos. madrid: injuve. 684 building participative, empowering & diverse communities hemophilia: promoting health in children maría josé baqueiro victorín &nancy marine evia alamilla universidad autónoma de yucatán, mexico one of the main goals in childhood is to be independent. it is an ability normally developed by children when they have good conditions. but, when children have a chronic illness such as hemophilia, they have affliction and experience stress especially when they have to be in hospitals and have diagnosis and therapeutic processes that can be aggressive and painful. the reason for this affliction is because they have not developed good coping strategies and, as they grow up, they get more conscious of their illness, and it makes them feel uncertainty. so, children need psychological and social support and it is also important to be well informed about the illness. this paper describes the participatory action research (par) done under the health psychology perspective with four to twelve years old children with hemophilia or who have any relative with that illness. the par first phase detected the principal needs, including the need for knowledge about the hemophilia, and the need to promote healthy behaviors. introducción tradicionalmente, el concepto de salud se le ha definido como la ausencia de enfermedad y ha estado estrechamente vinculado a aspectos biológicos. sin embargo, en 1984, en el congreso de constitución de la organización mundial de la salud (oms), definió un nuevo concepto en salud, en términos del estado de absoluto bienestar físico, mental y social y no la mera ausencia de la enfermedad (oms, 1978). en esta definición se incorporan lo físico, lo psicológico y social dándole en enfoque más integral en el cual no se enfatiza únicamente la relación de la salud con la ausencia de enfermedad, sino que se concentra en la idea de que la salud es un valor en sí mismo, un derecho humano fundamental y una meta social para todo el mundo que resulta ser una condición indispensable para el avance de una nación. por tanto, la salud es entendida en un sentido amplio como el bienestar físico, psicológico y social, que va mucho más allá del esquema biomédico, abarcando la esfera subjetiva y del comportamiento del ser humano. no es la ausencia de alteraciones y de enfermedad, sino un concepto positivo que implica distintos grados de vitalidad y funcionamiento adaptativo (labiano, 2006). los objetivos de la psicología de la salud se pueden dividir en cinco grandes grupos. 1) la promoción y mantenimiento de la salud, que se centra fundamentalmente en la educación sanitaria, el control de variables actitudinales y motivacionales, así como afecto-emocionales, la generación de hábitos y estilos de vida saludables, el aprendizaje de competencias básicas encaminadas a mejorar la salud. 2) la prevención, que se basa fundamentalmente en el control de variables actitudinales y motivacionales de riesgo, en la modificación de conductas y hábitos de riesgo, en la detección e intervención ante problemas y en la disminución de las secuelas o consecuencias de una enfermedad, así como la prevención de las posibles recaídas. 3) la evaluación, tratamiento y rehabilitación de trastornos específicos. 4) el análisis y mejora del sistema y atención sanitaria, la potenciación de la actuación de otros profesionales de la salud, la 685 building participative, empowering & diverse communities mejora de la relación profesional usuario y a mejora de la adherencia a los tratamientos. 5) la formación de los profesionales, paraprofesionales y las tareas de gestión (godoy, 1994 en simón 1999). más ampliamente, la promoción de la salud se define como el conjunto de medios y estrategias encaminadas a procurar la adopción de unos hábitos de vida saludable. este concepto esta íntimamente relacionado con la educación para la salud, que costa y lópez (1996) conciben como “un proceso planificado y sistemático y de enseñanza-aprendizaje orientado a hacer fácil la adquisición, elección y mantenimiento de las prácticas saludables, y hacer difíciles las prácticas de riesgo”. así pues, la educación para la salud es una estrategia inherente a la promoción de la salud. una concepción moderna de la promoción de la salud debe tener como objetivo no sólo conseguir una vida sana, sino también lograr que la enfermedad se afronte adecuadamente y se conviva con ella de manera aceptable. es decir, también es importante una educación para la enfermedad, pues la enfermedad convive interrumpida o ininterrumpidamente con nosotros desde que nacemos o incluso antes. por ello, en el correcto tratamiento y cuidado del enfermo, deben incluirse aquellas medidas que contribuyan a recobrar o mejorar su estado de salud, a prevenir recaídas, y a favorecer su calidad de vida y la de quienes le rodean (gallar, 2006). particularmente, el trabajo realizado en la asociación juntos por la hemofilia de yucatán, cumplen con los objetivos de la psicología de la salud, ya que es una área de la psicología orientada a mejorar la calidad de vida de las personas, a través de programas preventivos que favorezcan el autocontrol y la autorregulación física y psicológica así como a planificar acciones que intentan modificar la probabilidad de ocurrencia de procesos mórbidos (labiano, 2006). la hemofilia es un padecimiento que está presente durante la vida de algunas personas. la frecuencia con la que se presenta es aproximadamente uno en 10,000 nacimientos, el número de personas afectadas a escala mundial se calcula en cerca de 400,000, de los cuales casi todos son hombres (sánchez, s/f ). en méxico existen 3387 personas con hemofilia (federación de hemofilia de la república mexicana, a.c., 2006), de las cuales, de acuerdo a la asociación juntos por la hemofilia de yucatán, se estima que en yucatán hay entre 200 o 250 personas con hemofilia, registrados únicamente 109 personas. este 7.3%, es debido posiblemente en que existen algunas familias que por desconocimiento de la herencia familiar se han casado entre varón con hemofilia y mujer portadora, por lo que los hijos varones nacen casi necesariamente con hemofilia. afirma papalia (1994, en gallar 2006) que, frente a los sanos, los niños enfermos sufren un mayor nivel de angustia y con una mayor frecuencia. los niños experimentan un intenso estrés cuando padecen una enfermedad, y muy especialmente cuando ésta les obliga a una hospitalización a la aplicación de procedimientos diagnósticos y terapéuticos que pueden ser agresivos o dolorosos. la razón de esto radica en que los niños pequeños no han desarrollado aún mecanismos y estrategias de afrontamiento adecuados. pero a medida que van creciendo, la conciencia de enfermedad, incertidumbre y los citados procedimientos, siguen contribuyendo a mantener el estrés y la ansiedad, especialmente si no se ha recibido una educación para la enfermedad en el ámbito escolar y familiar. la hemofilia es una enfermedad hemorrágica, hereditaria con carácter recesivo ligada al cromosoma x (imss, 2006). existen 3 tipos de hemofilia: 1) hemofilia a o clásica), su principal 686 building participative, empowering & diverse communities característica es la deficiencia de la actividad coagulante del factor viii (fviii) del plasma; 2) la hemofilia b o enfermedad de christmas, ésta se caracteriza que da por resultado una deficiencia de la actividad coagulante del factor ix (fic) y 3) enfermedad de von willebrand, en ésta existe reducción de parte de la molécula del factor vii, denominado factor von willebrand o ristocetina, la deficiencia de este factor produce un tiempo de sangrado prolongado debido a que las plaquetas no pueden adherirse a las paredes de los vasos sanguíneos para formar un trombo que detenga el sangrado. desde el aspecto médico – clínico, se han enfocado en el estudio de formas de tratamientos menos dolorosos, alternativas medicamentosas, rehabilitación adecuada, entre otros. sin embargo, los aspectos psicosociales han recibido una menor atención en comparación con su sintomatología clínica. en cuanto a los niños con hemofilia, se enfrentan a este padecimiento y a su tratamiento, por lo que es imprescindible educarlos sobre el desarrollo y manejo del padecimiento con el propósito de ayudarles a mejorar su calidad de vida y el de sus familiares y allegados. sarmiento, carruyo de vizcaino y carrizo (2006), tras una investigación realizada en caracas venezuela, describen el funcionamiento social de los niños con hemofilia. las secuelas físicas debidas al padecimiento de la hemofilia, afectan las actividades diarias de los niños, o son causa de períodos repetidos de hospitalización o visitas ambulatorias frecuentes, además de la necesidad de múltiples cuidados diarios y no poder participar en las actividades con sus compañeros, ocasionando dificultad en su crecimiento y desarrollo integral. se evidenció que la mayoría de los niños con hemofilia estuvieron en las categorías de salud mental patológico o dudoso, resaltando de esta manera, la afirmación de que un porcentaje notable de niños que padecen una enfermedad crónica, se enfrentan a numerosos factores de riesgo psicosociales desde muy pequeños y se hacen vulnerables a los mismos. en yucatán aún no se tienen datos sobre la salud mental en niños con hemofilia, pues apenas se están comenzando a realizar acciones para tener un conocimiento mayor acerca de las personas con hemofilia en el estado, realizando encuestas sobre la sintomatología del padecimiento: qué personas lo padecen, qué tipo de hemofilia, en qué grado. dichas encuestas han estado a cargo de la asociación juntos por la hemofilia de yucatán. la severidad de la enfermedad, el deterioro de las articulaciones y la incapacidad en los niños con hemofilia, son parámetros para definir antecedentes de bienestar tanto físico como mental. en este sentido, al relacionar el grado de severidad de la hemofilia con los estados de salud mental, se observó que en la categoría normal predominaron los casos de hemofilia leve y moderada, mientras que el riesgo de salud mental (patológico y dudoso) se ubicó en los niños con hemofilia moderada y severa. esto pudiera sugerir que el funcionamiento social de los hemofílicos está probablemente relacionado con el grado clínico de intensidad de la hemofilia. sin embargo, en nuestra opinión, al parámetro del grado de severidad que señala sarmiento, carruyo de vizcaino y carrizo (2006), debe agregársele otros como el apoyo social (brindado por la familia y amigos) y las habilidades de afrontamiento a problemas que posee el niño, así como las estrategias que tiene para tomar decisiones que cuiden su salud, para entonces definir antecedentes de bienestar tanto físico como mental. se consideran tres grandes tipos de riesgos psicosociales en el niño con hemofilia: riesgos personales, familiares y socio-educativos. los riesgos personales, son aquellos inherentes al propio comportamiento y personalidad del niño hemofílico. los riesgos familiares, son aquellos 687 building participative, empowering & diverse communities inherentes a las pautas de educación familiar. la sobreprotección, la excesiva permisividad, las normas educativas inconsistentes, el culpabilizar y las excesivas limitaciones, generan vulnerabilidad psicológica, y como consecuencia los niños no adquieren confianza y autolimitan sus posibilidades de exploración y desarrollo. entre los riesgos sociales y educativos, el tener amigos y compartir con ellos juegos y experiencias sociales, es uno de los nutrientes fundamentales que los niños tienen para el desarrollo de su personalidad (sarmiento, carruyo de vizcaino y carrizo, 2006). los niños con hemofilia comparados con otros que no padecen alguna enfermedad crónica, presentan mayores dificultades emocionales, familiares y de conducta, presentando habilidades sociales pobres como la dificultad para comunicar sus necesidades y preocupaciones, dificultad para empezar relaciones con el grupo de iguales y para manejar situaciones de estrés; la mayoría de los niños con hemofilia presentan comportamientos extremos: pasivos o agresivos. sin embargo, se dice que estas dificultades pueden estar más relacionadas con los modelos educativos seguidos que con la hemofilia en sí (sarmiento, carruyo de vizcaino y carrizo, 2006). este padecimiento limita diversos aspectos de la vida “normal” de las familias con un miembro con hemofilia, puesto que conlleva a secuelas físicas debidas al padecimiento, afectan las actividades diarias de los niños, o son causa de períodos repetidos de hospitalización o visitas ambulatorias frecuentes. además de la necesidad de múltiples cuidados diarios y no poder participar en las actividades con sus compañeros, ocasionando dificultad en su crecimiento y desarrollo integral. otro aspecto importante es la presencia de la ansiedad por el riesgo a sangrar, el miedo a infecciones transmitidas por productos sanguíneos y la tendencia a la depresión. que afectan no sólo al niño con hemofilia sino también a sus padres (sarmiento, carruyo de vizcaino y carrizo, 2006). metodología el trabajo realizado con los niños de la asociación juntos por la hemofilia de yucatán, a.c. se llevó a cabo en las instalaciones del centro de investigación educativa y formación docente perteneciente al instituto mexicano del seguro social (imss) donde los miembros de la asociación se reúnen un domingo de cada mes, para tratar temas de interés común y tener sesiones con el equipo de psicología. cabe mencionar, que las sesiones se llevaron a cabo, en un comienzo en dos grupos: adultos y niños, y posteriormente en tres conjuntos: adultos, jóvenes y niños. los niños participantes, padecen hemofilia o tienen algún familiar con dicho padecimiento, y tienen entre 4 y 12 años de edad. los que padecen hemofilia cuentan con diferentes grados de severidad del padecimiento, por tanto, hay niños con hemofilia leve, moderada o severa. en total son 11 niños y 2 niñas, de los cuales 4 niños tienen hemofilia severa (2 con discapacidad física en las piernas), 3 hemofilia moderada, 2 hemofilia leve y 4 no tienen hemofilia (2 niñas y 2 niños), pero tienen algún familiar con el padecimiento. procedimiento el trabajo con estos niños se realizó bajo la metodología de investigación acción participativa (iap). la investigación, es el proceso sistemático y crítico que busca comprender algún aspecto de la realidad con una finalidad práctica, la acción, asume la forma de realizar el estudio como un modo de intervención, en tanto que la investigación está orientada a la acción 688 building participative, empowering & diverse communities y la participación, implica un proceso de construcción social en el que se involucran tanto investigadores del proyecto, como personas activas que conocen y son capaces de transformar su realidad. (ander-egg, 1990). la iap consta de tres etapas o fases, las cuales son: diagnóstico, intervención y evaluación. este trabajo, en su totalidad, se ha desarrollado en 2 etapas. la primera, se realizó entre febrero 2007 y julio 2007, en donde se hizo una diagnóstico, intervención y evaluación de la misma. la segunda etapa, se realizó con los aprendizajes obtenidos en la fase anterior y desarrollando, al igual que en la primera, el diagnóstico, intervención y evaluación. esta última etapa se realizó de febrero a julio de 2008. la primera etapa de diagnóstico se realizó mediante talleres participativos para detectar las necesidades e intereses de los niños con respecto a su padecimiento utilizando diversos materiales: cuadernillo diagnóstico, cuento individual y tablero diagnóstico. en la segunda etapa se utilizó el cartel. todos los materiales de la fase diagnóstica, están descritos en el apartado de materiales. luego de conocer las necesidades e intereses de los niños, se realizó una planeación para poder intervenir en dichas necesidades, esta intervención también se realizó mediante talleres participativos en ambas fases de intervención, utilizando diversas técnicas y materiales psicoeducativos como lo son: los cuentos interactivos, el juego, la canción y el dibujo, también descritos en el siguiente apartado. con respecto a la fase de evaluación se realizaron diversas actividades: evaluaciones escritas, feria de juegos y laberinto, los cuales se describen en el apartado siguiente. al finalizar cada taller, se realizó una evaluación escrita con el cuestionario de evaluación. el tablero, además de utilizarse para el diagnóstico, también se utilizó para evaluar el aprendizaje de los primeros 3 cuentos y mediante preguntas y respuestas orales se atravesó un laberinto para evaluar el aprendizaje de los cuentos 4 y 5. materiales a) cuadernillo diagnóstico. consiste en un cuaderno con 15 hojas donde los niños escriben en primera instancia su nombre y menciona con quien viven. posterior a eso, señalan qué es lo que les gusta de ellos, qué es lo que no les gusta y qué es lo que cambiarían. así también se les pregunta sobre lo que creen que los demás perciben ellos (familia y amigos), y luego sobre lo que ellos mismos perciben de sí mismos en diferentes ámbitos (en la escuela, con los amigos y amigas y con la familia). el cuadernillo diagnóstico, también indaga las situaciones en las que los niños sienten distintas emociones (alegría, enojo, tristeza y miedo), en diferentes ámbitos (en la escuela, con la familia, con los amigos y con el médico). otro aspecto que incluye el cuadernillo, son las cosas que los niños saben que pueden hacer y las que no, así como también, lo que hacen para afrontar algún problema o temor. el objetivo de este cuadernillo diagnóstico es conocer las emociones de los niños, percepción de sí mismos y su entorno, así como su vivencia del padecimiento. b) cuentos individuales. en cuanto a los cuentos individuales, consistieron en unos cuadernillos de hojas en blanco para que los niños realicen un cuento sobre lo que ellos realizan o saben del grupo de hemofilia, y las expectativas que tienen del trabajo de los psicólogos, con el objetivo de evaluar el conocimiento acerca del padecimiento, la asociación y el trabajo del 689 building participative, empowering & diverse communities psicólogo. c) tablero diagnóstico. tablero de 1m. x 1m. con 8 caminos dirigidos hacia una meta. a través de respuestas correctas, cada niño podía avanzar hasta llegar a su meta. las preguntas trataban sobre la hemofilia, sus características y las actividades que los niños con hemofilia pueden o no realizar, con el objetivo de evaluar el conocimiento adquirido sobre las temáticas revisadas y conocer nuevas necesidades. este tablero se utilizó tanto para diagnóstico como para evaluación de los tres primeros cuentos, cuya recompensa última (por llegar a la meta del tablero) fue asistir a la feria de juegos. d) cartel. se realizó un cartel entre todos los niños. para hacerlo, cada niño contestó en una hoja de color con la forma de una patita de perro lo que le gustaría saber de la hemofilia, las actividades que quería hacer y los temas que quería aprender y la pegó en el cartel. e) cuento. cinco cuentos que se presentan a través de proyecciones de diapositivas con la ayuda de un narrador(a). los cuentos tratan sobre las aventuras de un perro llamado manchita y sus amigos, los cuales fueron creados de acuerdo a la característica de los niños que acuden a la asociación y padecen hemofilia. a continuación se describe brevemente los personajes que se crearon para los cuentos: manchita es un perrito de 1 año que vive con su dueño juanito en un vecindario, es muy curioso y preguntón, le gusta aprender cosas nuevas en cada momento, sus amigos dicen es el investigador del grupo y siempre lo acompañan en sus aventuras, además le gusta saber mucho para poder ayudar a juanito. rayas es un gatito que es el mejor amigo de manchita, tiene 7 años y vive en la calle. es inquieto y travieso, le gustan las aventuras con riesgo y es muy descuidado en todo. lolo es un perico que es tan grande que ya se le olvidó su edad y vive con un doctor. lolo es muy sabio y se la sabe de todas, todas. cito es un ratoncito de 6 años que vive con su papá. es muy nervioso, tiene muchos temores y siempre se preocupa por todo, piensa que todas las cosas que hace y le pasan le van a salir mal. enseguida se describe de manera general el contenido de cada cuento: en el cuento 1 titulado “descubriendo un nuevo amigo”, manchita conoce a un gatito llamado rayas y descubre que rayas tiene hemofilia. este cuento proporciona información acerca de la hemofilia. en el cuento 2 titulado “¿y qué puedo hacer?”, manchita y rayas quieren jugar, pero como no saben qué actividades pueden realizar, van a casa de lolo, un perico muy sabio que vive con un médico y él les enseña sobre la hemofilia y los cuidados que se deben tener, así como lo que pueden hacer en caso de algún accidente. el cuento 3 se llama “yo puedo decidir”. en esta ocasión, rayas y manchita se encuentran en la encrucijada de decidir entre jugar en el parque fútbol o nadar en el lago. este cuento proporciona al niño estrategias para la toma de decisiones. en el cuento 4 llamado “tengo miedo”, manchita y rayas conocen a un nuevo amigo llamado cito que es un ratoncito muy miedoso. cito, al igual que rayas tiene hemofilia, pero a diferencia del gatito, cito no quiere jugar a nada por temor a que le suceda algo y posteriormente lo regañe su papá. este cuento se enfoque en las emociones que viven los niños con hemofilia cuando tienen algún problema en el que requieren acudir a un adulto. 690 building participative, empowering & diverse communities en el cuento 5 titulado “puedo ayudarme”, cito se lastima una patita, no se lo dice a ningún adulto y quiere hacer algo por sí mismo para cuidarse después de lastimarse. él junto con manchita y rayas, van a casa de lolo a preguntarle qué es lo que pueden hacer, por lo que lolo, además de recalcarle que siempre debe decir a algún adulto si ocurre un accidente, les enseña sobre el botiquín de primeros auxilios. f ) juegos. a modo de recreación y de muestra de actividades que pueden realizar sin lastimarse, los niños jugaron con lotería, dominó, boliche, burbujas, rompecapezas, memorama y títeres. g) canción. es una recopilación de lo aprendido en los cuentos, nombrando a los personajes y sus características principales; incluyendo sobretodo las temáticas de toma de decisiones, manejo de emociones y cuidados personales. h) el dibujo. los niños colorearon los personajes de los cuentos, en un principio para su familiarización con los mismos y posteriormente para reforzar los conocimientos sobre las características y causas de la hemofilia y para que este conocimiento se reforzara también en casa, ya que los dibujos que los niños realizaban se los llevaban a casa para colocarlo en algún lugar donde lo vean frecuentemente (como puede ser el refrigerador o las paredes de sus recámaras). i) cuestionario de evaluación. este cuestionario consiste en 5 preguntas relacionadas con el equipo de trabajo o facilitador, contenido de temáticas expuestas, convivencia del grupo y materiales de trabajo. ante cada pregunta se puede responder: bien, regular o mal. j) laberinto. laberinto de 1m. x 70cm. pintado con acuarela, que la figura de cito tiene que atravesar con ayuda de las respuestas correctas de los niños, para poder llegar a sus amigos manchita y rayas. resultados existe una gran heterogeneidad en el grupo de niños, esto en cuanto a las edades, niveles de desarrollo, presencia o no de la hemofilia, conocimiento sobre la hemofilia, así como las consecuencias de esta y sobre los cuidados especiales en cuando a dicho padecimiento. se pudo notar que la mayoría de los niños lleva un desarrollo dentro de lo esperado; sin embargo, en otros el padecimiento ha hecho merma de sus capacidades físicas, lo cual ha afectado sus procesos de socialización y desarrollo físico, y en otros las condiciones familiares han sido las que más afectado su autoestima, autoconcepto y socialización. entre las primeras necesidades se encontró la importancia de llevar a todos a un mismo nivel de conocimiento sobre las causas, características y cuidados necesarios de la hemofilia, ya que en este punto nuevamente se observó la presencia de una gran diversidad en dicho nivel, no estando en todos los casos relacionado el conocimiento con la edad, sino que principalmente se relaciona con la preparación de los cuidadores, la comunicación que éstos entablan con el niño y la forma en que dicha comunicación se realiza. este conocimiento es de suma importancia, pues tal como lo menciona gallar (2002) informar al niño sobre su enfermedad y los procedimientos que se le van a aplicar, mediante palabras y argumentos lógicos asequibles a su capacidad de comprensión y razonamiento, hará que el niño sienta que controla la situación y se muestre mucho más colaborador y activo. también, se detectó la necesidad de desarrollar capacidades en los niños en la toma de decisiones, a fin de poder planear y prever las consecuencias de sus acciones antes de 691 building participative, empowering & diverse communities emprenderlas, para que de esa manera puedan protegerse. mediante modelamiento a través del uso de cuento, se enseño a los niños los pasos que pueden seguir ante daños físicos, así como los pasos para tomar decisiones sobre las actividades que impliquen riesgos. aprendiendo entonces a tomar decisiones en cuanto a los juegos que pueden realizar sin riesgo, o decidir por los que implican menor. pero como también es importante que los niños tengan mayores opciones de recreación, mediante juegos, aprendieron a realizar actividades divertidas que pueden disfrutar y que no impliquen riesgo. durante la segunda parte diagnóstica, surgieron necesidades e intereses nuevos. los niños manifiestan que debido a su padecimiento han vivido situaciones en las que las emociones negativas se expresan con mayor frecuencia, realizan conductas de riesgo y ocultan a sus iguales, maestros y conocidos el padecimiento. por tanto, en las actividades, tanto en el cuento 4 como en las actividades realizadas en torno a él, se trabajó en el reconocimiento de las emociones, pero también en las consecuencias de las conductas de riesgo originadas por estas emociones. algo interesante, es que durante esta segunda etapa, los niños recién ingresados al equipo, manifestaron la necesidad de aprender sobre el padecimiento en sí, pero tanto ellos, como los que ya habían estado durante la primera etapa, expresaron su deseo de aprender a cuidarse ante los golpes, cortadas e inflamaciones; lo cual se trabajó mediante actividades y el desarrollo de habilidades para el autocuidado, así como la información acerca de las alternativas para cuidarse. conclusiones las actividades y técnicas utilizadas con los niños, permitieron adaptar la información de las temáticas de forma adecuada al nivel de desarrollo de los niños. lo anterior pudo ser observado cuando los niños respondían adecuadamente a las preguntas realizadas durante y después de dichas actividades. la técnica de cuento permitió que los niños se apropiaran de la información mediante modelamiento a través del cuento, que participaran de forma espontánea y compartieran sus experiencias. esta técnica mostró ser eficaz, aunque requiere de un tiempo considerable para su planeación, diseño y aplicación. además, resulta necesario incluir a un narrador que sea constante y familiar para los niños, pues promueve una mayor participación de los mismos durante la presentación de los cuentos. debido a las características de la población, el juego resultó una estrategia útil para mantener la atención de los niños en las actividades, así como para socializar los contenidos y aplicarlos de forma adecuada. a través de esta misma estrategia se realizaron reflexiones de los contenidos y aportaciones de los niños. en cuanto a la canción, se puede afirmar que ha sido útil para consolidar el aprendizaje de los niños y que, dadas sus características rítmicas y de sencillez, es una estrategia que permite esta consolidación a pesar del tiempo y el lugar en que se encuentren, es decir, los niños recuerdan lo aprendido, sin la necesidad de estar en el espacio que brindan los talleres participativos. durante las sesiones se promueve el intercambio con los niños, facilitando la reflexión de los contenidos, a la vez que compartan, desde su experiencia, cómo viven el padecimiento de la hemofilia, favoreciendo también el crecimiento de su círculo social, favoreciendo entonces a su desarrollo integral, pues tal como menciona craig (1997) la pertenencia a un grupo suele mejorar la autoestima de los niños de las minorías y ajustar y facilitar su ajuste durante la niñez media. 692 building participative, empowering & diverse communities es importante continuar los trabajos realizados con los menores sobre las áreas de comprensión del padecimiento e implicaciones en su desarrollo, habilidades sociales para mejorar sus relaciones con sus pares y para informar de su condición, afrontamiento de situaciones de riesgo y de estrés, mejora de la percepción de la hospitalización y rehabilitación. como menciona gallar (2006), es importante que la persona conozca sobre su enfermedad pero también de las estrategias que pueden mejorar su salud y afrontar la misma. un siguiente paso a realizar es trabajar con toda la familia, es decir, que en ocasiones se realicen sesiones donde adultos y niños estén juntos en familia, para favorecer su convivencia, su comunicación, el desarrollo y el aprendizaje. ya que de esta manera, los padres aprenden junto con los niños y pueden reforzar lo aprendido en casa, al mismo tiempo que se favorece la comprensión de ambas partes. sería recomendable en una siguiente etapa, trabajar con escuelas (maestros y niños), respecto a sensibilización y conocimientos acerca de la hemofilia y promoción de la salud, ya que en la actualidad en estos ámbitos se desconoce acerca de este padecimiento y las formas de manejarlo. esta sensibilización e información se puede trabajar incluso con otros padecimientos frecuentes o no frecuentes, que los niños pueden presentar: diabetes juvenil, cáncer, etc, de tal manera, que quede incluido e implícito el respeto y la aceptación ante la diversidad de todas las personas. esta recomendación se debe a que los niños en estas etapas (niñez temprana e intermedia), pasan la mayor parte del tiempo en la escuela y algo fundamental en sus vidas son los compañeros del colegio. es importante mencionar, que a lo largo de todo el proceso, ha existido una rotación de participantes e inconsistencia en la asistencia, lo cual no ha permitido avanzar en nuevas temáticas, evaluar los últimos talleres realizados, ni realizar una evaluación de impacto de todo el proceso. referencias ander-egg, e. (1990). repensando la investigación-acción-participativa: comentarios, críticas y sugerencias. méxico: ateneo. costa, m. y lópez, e. (1996). educación para la salud. madrid: pirámide. craig, g. (1997). desarrollo psicológico. (3). méxico: prentice-hall hispanoamericana. federación de hemofilia de la república mexicana, a.c. (2006). registro nacional de pacientes con hemofilia. recuperado el 10 de junio de 2008, de http://www.hemofilia.org.mx/estadistica. html gallar, m. (2006). promoción de la salud y apoyo psicológico al paciente. españa: thomson. labiano, m. (2006). introducción a la psicología de la salud. en l.a. oblitas (comp.), psicología de la salud y calidad de vida (pp. 3-19). méxico: thomson. oms (1978). declaración de alma ata. sánchez, j. (s/f ). la herencia genética. recuperado el 10 de junio de 2008 de, http://web.educastur. princast.es/proyectos/biogeo_ov/2bch/pdfs/23mendel.pdf. sarmiento, s., carruyo de vizcaino, c. y carrizo, e. (2006). funcionamiento social en niños hemofílicos: 693 building participative, empowering & diverse communities análisis de encuesta para determinar factores psicopatológicos de riesgo. revista médica de chile, 134(1). recuperado el 19 de junio de 2008 de http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_ arttext&pid=s003498872006000100007&lng=es&nrm=iso simón m.a. (1993). psicología de la salud. aplicaciones clínicas y estrategias de intervención. madrid: pirámide. 694 building participative, empowering & diverse communities strategies to promote resilience in families of low income exposed to social and environmental risks maria angela mattar yunes instituto de ciências humanas e da informação, universidade federal do rio grande/furg, brasil mamyunes@yahoo.com.br abstract the investigations of processes and possibilities of resilience in families who live poverty is an issue related to the positive psychology movement. this discussion is important because it helps to question ideological concepts and build a new professional approach more oriented to healthy aspects of human development rather than the pathological ones. the framework of the key processes for family resilience considers that families can emerge stronger and more resourceful in meeting and coping successfully with challenges. the present work aims to propose strategies to promote the development of resilience in families at risk based on the improvement of the relational quality of the professional’s services who deal with families. qualitative studies on the discourses of brazilian social agents showed that their patterns of interactions with families at risk are focused on pessimistic “implicit theories” about the characteristics of these groups. they are seen as dysfunctional, neglectful parents, passive to their situation of poverty, violent and substance users. these elements emphasize their vulnerabilities and have demonstrated a negative impact on the relationships of families and professionals. it also suggests that professionals do very little but donate supplies to help the families in a concrete manner. this proposal of psycho educational intervention worked with both families and social agents separately. the methodologies were: ecological engagement, reflexive interviews and focal groups. the groups aimed to critically discuss and analyze belief systems, patterns of communication, organization and social practices. the professionals were teachers or educators from public schools or institutions, law and health community agents. the results of intervention showed better communication among the different services of social family support network and there was an improvement in the advocacy’s ability to recognize the real needs and risks lived by the families. all the participants reported more sense of connection in their jobs which offers opportunities of promoting resilience in families with different risk histories. key-words: resilience in families; families in risk situations; intervention with social agents. resiliência é uma palavra utilizada com freqüência na europa, estados unidos e canadá. no brasil, seu uso coloquial ou acadêmico ainda provoca estranhamento principalmente no contexto das ciências humanas e sociais. oriundo da física, o conceito de resiliência refere-se à capacidade de um material absorver energia sem sofrer deformação plástica ou permanente. em psicologia, os estudos datam de cerca de trinta anos e apesar da constante busca dos autores por precisão conceitual, ainda é ampla a diversidade de definições e enfoques. deve-se ressaltar que resiliência é um construto prioritário de investigações dos cientistas adeptos da psicologia positiva, movimento que vem se consolidando há cerca de dez anos. este movimento científico 695 building participative, empowering & diverse communities e acadêmico caracteriza aportes da psicologia contemporânea que buscam compreender os aspectos potencialmente saudáveis dos seres humanos em oposição à psicologia tradicionalmente voltada para a compreensão das psicopatologias. isso não quer dizer que a psicologia deva ignorar as doenças psíquicas e seus sintomas, mas que seja possível construir uma ciência psicológica que estude tanto o sofrimento quanto a felicidade, bem como as interações entre estas duas dimensões humanas (seligman, steen, park & peterson, 2005). resiliência em famílias é um construto mais recente do que a resiliência individual e vem recebendo atenção específica nos últimos doze anos. tanto no brasil, como no exterior, os pesquisadores da resiliência em famílias vêm divulgando com freqüência cada vez maior e mais intensa as suas discussões. os artigos teóricos, metodológicos e intervencionistas (cecconello, 2003; de antoni & koller, 2000; de antoni, barone & koller, 2006; garcia & yunes, 2006; hawley & dehann, 1996; libório, castro & coelho, 2006; mccubbin, thompson, thompson & futrell, 1999; ungar, 2004; walsh, 1996, 1998, 2003, 2005; yunes, 2001, 2003, 2006; yunes & szymanski, 2005, entre outros) refletem que muitos pensadores desta temática julgam necessário revisar o foco das investigações sobre a resiliência no indivíduo e reconsiderar as contribuições da família para o desenvolvimento psicológico da saúde e do bem estar individual e social (mccubbin, thompson, thompson & futrell, 1999; rutter, 1985; werner & smith, 1982; walsh, 1996, 1998; yunes, 2003; yunes & szymanski, 2001). é fato que em diferentes tempos, lugares e culturas os estudos sobre família vêm enfatizando os aspectos deficitários da convivência familiar (walsh, 1993). tais elementos negativos das interações familiares têm sido maximizados pela seqüência de situações veiculadas pela mídia e que envolvem relações abusivas entre pais/madrastas/padrastos e filhos (as) demonstrando que situações de extrema violência podem permear a intimidade do mundo familiar. percebe-se que o que acontece entre “quatro paredes”, muitas vezes coloca crianças, adolescentes e adultos em condições de altíssimo risco. portanto, o interesse pela resiliência no contexto das famílias vem contribuir para flexibilizar as noções de privacidade familiar e focar os aspectos sadios e de sucesso do grupo familiar. no entanto, ainda há muitas facetas deste construto em fases iniciais de investigação. a pesquisa bibliográfica indica que foi ao final dos anos 80 que as questões sobre coping, competência, desafios e adaptação do grupo familiar começaram a ser divulgadas. um dos primeiros trabalhos desta área foi publicado por mccubbin e mccubbin (1988) sobre a "tipologia de famílias resilientes". os autores partiram da definição de que famílias "resilientes" são aquelas que resistem aos problemas decorrentes de mudanças e "adaptam-se" às situações de crise. os autores delinearam a importância dos trabalhos de intervenção com famílias, sem esquecer as relações destas com a comunidade, bem como, referiram-se à importância da formalização de programas públicos de apoio e atenção às famílias. com a evolução desta efervescente discussão teórica, metodológica e política, emergiu mais tarde, sob liderança destes mesmos pesquisadores, novas perspectivas conceituais e metodológicas. os autores referidos acima publicaram uma coletânea de resultados sobre resiliência em famílias que viveram diferentes situações de adversidades (mccubbin, thompson, thompson & futrell, 1999), tais quais: infertilidade (daly, 1999), homossexualidade dos filhos (allen, 1999), membros familiares portadores de doenças do tipo aids (thompson, 1999) ou diabetes (chesla, 1999) e condição familiar pós-divorcio (golby & bretherton, 1999). no que antecede estas notórias publicações, poder-se-ia afirmar que o potencial de 696 building participative, empowering & diverse communities pesquisas e suas idiossincrasias nessa área de conhecimento já haviam sido deflagradas quando pesquisadores como walsh (1996) e hawley e dehann (1996) passaram a preocupar-se em esclarecer, conceituar, definir e propor novas perspectivas teóricas para os estudos sobre resiliência em famílias. pioneira na construção de um modelo teórico, froma walsh (1998, 2003, 2005) propõe que sejam estudados processos-chave da resiliência em famílias, os quais fundamentam a proposta de análise de "funcionamento familiar efetivo". a autora organizou seus conhecimentos na área de forma a propor um panorama conceitual de resiliência em três domínios: sistema de crenças da família, padrões de organização e processos de comunicação (walsh, 1998, 2003, 2005). segundo a autora, estes processos podem estar organizados e expressarem-se de diferentes formas e níveis, pois servem diferentes constelações, valores, recursos e desafios das famílias (walsh, 1998). estas afirmações sugerem a importância do estudo das histórias das famílias como estratégia de análise e compreensão dos processos de interpretações das situações de adversidade, que por sua vez “impelem ou impedem” indivíduos e grupos a buscarem soluções para suas dificuldades (yunes & szymanski, 2005). portanto, resiliência deixa de ser compreendida como uma característica individual para ser conceitualizada como uma qualidade ou mais um elemento sistêmico da unidade familiar (hawley & dehann, 1996). indo mais além, seja no indivíduo ou na família, resiliência é um fenômeno que evidencia expressivos componentes relacionais.vários autores indicaram nos seus estudos, a influência de relações com pessoas significativas e contextos próximas que formaram uma situação de apoio imprescindível para a superação das adversidades da vida (cyrulnik, 2004; rutter, 1987; werner & smith, 1992; werner, 1993; ungar, 2004; yunes, 2001, entre outros). de acordo com walsh (1998), a maioria das pesquisas e teorias sobre resiliência tem abordado esse contexto relacional da resiliência de maneira limitada, considerando apenas a influência de uma única pessoa significativa numa relação diádica. na ótica do desenvolvimento humano e tratando-se de resiliência como importante sistema de adaptação que visa a promover saúde e bem estar (masten, 2001) a teoria bioecológica de desenvolvimento humano de urie bronfenbrenner (bronfenbrenner & morris, 1998) apresenta-se como importante sustentáculo teórico e metodológico para a compreensão e análise destas interações e seus sentidos, pois auxilia a compreender relações que ocorrem em rede. em 1998, urie bronfenbrenner e pámela morris apresentaram um construto-chave denominado processo proximal (bronfenbrenner & morris, 1998) que se define como uma forma particular de interação das pessoas em desenvolvimento com os seus ambientes imediatos. estes processos que operam ao longo do tempo são os primeiros mecanismos que produzem e movem o desenvolvimento humano na dimensão da reciprocidade de influências que ocorrem nos diferentes sistemas contextuais. podem promover competências ou disfunções a depender das formas de interações entre pessoas e outras pessoas, pessoas e objetos ou símbolos que fazem parte dos ambientes de desenvolvimento. portanto, é necessário compreender não apenas as complexidades das interações diádicas – triádicas e intrafamiliares, mas também das pessoas e famílias com os diferentes integrantes e aspectos componentes da rede de apoio social. dante destas considerações surgem as seguintes inquietações: qual o papel desta rede no desenvolvimento dos processos de resiliência em famílias que vivem situações de pobreza e vulnerabilidade social e ambiental? a partir deste questionamento apresentamos algumas reflexões sobre a situação de pobreza e suas vicissitudes para se constituírem contexto de desenvolvimento humano. 697 building participative, empowering & diverse communities pobreza, desigualdade social e suas implicações muitos autores reconhecem que pobreza e miséria são importantes fatores de risco universal (luthar e zigler, 1991; luthar, 1999) e que privação econômica pode constituir-se em uma das principais fontes de risco sociocultural para o desenvolvimento humano (garbarino & abramowitz, 1992, fincham, grych & osborne, 1994). entretanto, é preciso implementar o conhecimento científico sobre os fatores de risco que se apresentam nestes contextos, ou seja, é necessário identificar e compreender as ameaças sociais e as adversidades que permeiam a vida e o cotidiano das comunidades de baixa renda. cabe ressaltar que estes fatores são processuais, dinâmicos e subjetivos, pois o que é risco na condição de pobreza para um indivíduo, grupo familiar ou comunidade, pode ser percebido como desafiador e mobilizador de recursos para outros. mais uma vez, o olhar ecológico sugere a importância de uma análise macrossistêmica e reflexiva sobre as expressões de desigualdade social na sociedade brasileira. talvez uma destas manifestações seja o que alguns autores denominam violência estrutural. de acordo com minayo (1990), a violência estrutural é "aquela que nasce no próprio sistema social, criando as desigualdades e suas conseqüências, como a fome, o desemprego, e todos os problemas sociais com que convive a classe trabalhadora" (p. 290). esta compreensão dos macrossistemas requer o entendimento sistêmico das demais dimensões contextuais de influência no desenvolvimento humano (bronfenbrenner, 1979/1996). muitas formas atuais de expressão de violência se enquadram “nos sistemas econômicos, culturais e políticos abusivos que conduzem à opressão de grupos, classes, nações e indivíduos, aos quais são negadas conquistas da sociedade, tornando-os mais vulneráveis que outros ao sofrimento e à morte” (minayo, 1994, p. 8). isso significa pensar nos valores, nas crenças, nas práticas e nas tradições que reiteram e coíbem oportunidades de bem estar e qualidade de vida a todos aqueles que integram os sistemas sociais numa comunidade. mantendo esta elaboração no patamar do raciocínio ecológico e sistêmico, é possível pensar também, nas expressões de violência estrutural microssistêmica. estas ocorrem através das conseqüências observadas no cotidiano de muitas famílias que são: a obrigação de viver com salários irrisórios, ter que abandonar as crianças pela impossibilidade de sustentá-las, manter crianças fora do ambiente escolar por falta de escolas ou de condições de enviá-las, acesso a cuidados de saúde inadequados ou ausentes, não ter saneamento básico na sua comunidade e perder progressivamente os seus direitos sociais e civis adquiridos (minayo, 1994). autores americanos consideram que estas formas de viver constituem-se em “ambientes socialmente tóxicos” que retratam a privação social e cultural à qual estas populações de baixa renda estão submetidas (garbarino & abramovitz, 1992), muitas vezes por ciclos de gerações. estes autores referem-se à pobreza e aos riscos socioculturais como ameaças ao desenvolvimento de crianças e adolescentes e exemplificados como "falta de comida, de afeto, de professores carinhosos, de boas condições de atendimento médico e de valores coerentes com progresso intelectual e competência social" (p. 35), condições “corriqueiras” em muitas comunidades de várias cidades brasileiras. apesar de todas essas vivências de risco social, muitas famílias pobres dão lições de superação das conseqüências nefastas impostas pelas inegáveis desigualdades de oportunidades. 698 building participative, empowering & diverse communities possibilidades de resiliência em famílias pobres o que se conhece sobre os processos e a dinâmica de funcionamento de famílias brasileiras que vivem situações de pobreza ainda é insuficiente. alguns estudos evidenciam que muitas vezes estes grupos familiares se mostram hábeis na tomada de decisões e na superação de desafios, transparecendo uma unidade familiar e um sistema moral fortalecido diante da proporção das circunstâncias desfavoráveis de suas vidas (mello, 1995; sarti, 1996; szymanski gomes, 1988; yunes & szymanski, 2006). conforme já referido neste texto, não se pode negar que as condições indignas e a precariedade das contingências econômico-sociais castigam a maioria das famílias pobres brasileiras. isso pode afetar de forma adversa o desenvolvimento de crianças, adultos e de suas comunidades. no entanto, não se deve tratar este fato como regra sem exceção, pois muitas vezes estes grupos desenvolvem processos e mecanismos de proteção que garantem sua sobrevivência, não só física, mas dos valores de sua identidade cultural, e conseguem transformarse no contexto essencial de desenvolvimento para os seus membros. diante disso, temos utilizado o vocábulo possibilidades de resiliência -, expressão que sugere potencialidades que todos possuem para enfrentar situações de sofrimento e dor. como exemplo destas possibilidades, temos os resultados obtidos por garcia e yunes (2006) numa pesquisa desenvolvida com famílias monoparentais lideradas por mulheres pobres do extremo sul do brasil. as pesquisadoras constataram fatores de risco vividos pelas “chefes” das famílias (monoparentalidade, moradia/ alimentação inadequada, desemprego, renda indigna e instável, a vivência das perdas afetivas e a falta de uma rede de apoio social eficiente, entre outros). o dinamismo interacional dos riscos na presença de mecanismos de proteção atestaram as habilidades de superação das mulheres diante de situações familiares difíceis, muitas vezes julgadas a partir de (pré) conceitos injustos ou crenças pessimistas dos operadores de serviços sociais acerca de suas saúde psicológica e qualidade de vida. os “fatores de proteção” encontrados na história das famílias referem-se a questões internas da dinâmica familiar retratados pelos seguintes elementos: senso de coesão entre os membros (identificados pela presença de vínculos afetivos e o sentimento de união entre o grupo); o apoio afetivo e financeiro da família extensa; a explícita valorização do estudo e do trabalho por todos os componentes das famílias; o olhar positivo, ou seja, a forte crença na perspectiva de melhoria das condições de vida futura; e, a consciência política dos direitos como cidadãos e a disposição para reivindicação dos mesmos. um outro exemplo nessa mesma perspectiva advém de um estudo de caso realizado por yunes e szymanski (2006) com uma família de baixa renda, moradora de um bairro categorizado como "muito pobre" do extremo sul do brasil. os relatos retrataram as várias experiências de risco vividas pelo grupo, tais como: adoção de ambos os pais na infância, a privação de necessidades básicas (fome, frio, falta de moradia adequada), migração (mudanças de endereço do campo para cidade), desemprego, doenças e presença de alcoolismo na figura paterna por doze anos. a análise dos resultados denotou que dentre os indicadores de "superação de adversidades", o sistema de crenças da família emergiu como eixo norteador dos relatos. a família mostrou que valorizava as relações interpessoais através de interações intra e extrafamiliares formadas em padrões de ajuda, aprendizagem, afeto e solidariedade. os relatos do grupo evidenciaram que diante de crises, a família buscava a compreensão e o sentido das dificuldades, buscando apoio na família extensa e na rede social para manter o controle da situação. ficaram evidentes os sinais de planejamento e de organização para a tomada de decisões, o sentimento de respeito mútuo 699 building participative, empowering & diverse communities e a coesão familiar pautada em uma comunicação aberta e explicita de sentimentos e emoções. assim sendo, o período pós-adversidade era percebido como transformador e benéfico, e o grupo familiar se sentia mais forte e marcado por um sentimento de solidariedade. chamou a atenção na análise desta família, a postura dos membros em relação à vizinhança: atitudes sempre ativas no sentido de promover o bem estar de outras pessoas (vizinhos) que compartilhavam com eles o mesmo endereço social. entretanto, considerando-se a resiliência como um fenômeno relacional, qual é o papel das ações dos trabalhadores sociais em relações às premências das famílias de baixa renda que vivem situações de risco psicossocial? as práticas sociais dos trabalhadores e suas teorias implícitas sobre pobreza as teorias implícitas são representações mentais que formam parte do sistema de conhecimento dos indivíduos com base no acúmulo de experiências pessoais oriundas do contato com práticas culturais e formas de interação social (rodrigo, rodríguez & marrero, 1993). outras terminologias, tais quais sistemas de crenças, esquemas ou ideologias também são usadas para explicar esse conhecimento de natureza social. em geral, todos os termos remetem a um conjunto relativamente homogêneo e racional de idéias, conceitos, imagens, normas, valores e produtos culturais. os indivíduos ou grupos sociais que sustentam determinadas teorias implícitas deixam transparecer a sua relação com a realidade social através de comportamentos orientados pelo conteúdo de suas idéias. com o objetivo de conhecer as crenças e teorias dos agentes sociais que lidam com famílias pobres num município do extremo sul do brasil, uma equipe de pesquisadores do cep-rua da furg, centro de estudos psicológicos sobre meninos e meninas de rua da fundação universidade federal de rio grande, vinculados ao núcleo de estudos e atenção às famílias (neaf/furg) realizou investigações junto às famílias pobres para compreender suas necessidades e prioridades, e entrevistou trabalhadores sociais de diferentes formações para conhecer seus pensamentos e percepções sobre o funcionamento familiar dos que vivem em condição de pobreza. os agentes sociais entrevistados nas pesquisas forneceram informações que subsidiaram as reflexões deste texto e de outros trabalhos publicados pelos núcleos de pesquisa acima referidos (yunes, 2001, 2007; yunes, mendes & albuquerque, 2004, 2005, 2007) a maioria dos participantes era do sexo feminino e trabalhava direta ou indiretamente com famílias pobres. eram cuidadores e dirigentes de instituições de abrigo, agentes comunitários de saúde, diretores e professores do ensino fundamental de bairros da periferia, assistentes sociais e profissionais do ambiente judiciário. as famílias pobres que compõem o cotidiano do trabalho destes profissionais investigados foram descritas na maioria das vezes como acomodadas e submissas à situação de miséria, além de "desestruturadas", não apenas pela sua configuração não-nuclear, mas também pelas apontadas características de violência nas relações intrafamiliares: de abandono, de negligência das crianças e pela incidência do uso de drogas na família. os profissionais acreditam que estas características podem ser transmitidas através das gerações, o que perpetua os mitos familiares de "acomodação" e "desestruturação”. ao serem solicitados para descreverem famílias "que enfrentam as adversidades da pobreza, mas conseguem viver bem", muitos profissionais apresentaram dificuldades em organizar suas idéias, pois parecia difícil fugir da configuração inicial de seus sistemas de crenças 700 building participative, empowering & diverse communities (formados por famílias pobres "acomodadas, carentes, desestruturadas, violentas") que insistiam em aparecer no seu discurso. na opinião destes profissionais, as "famílias que superam" os desafios da pobreza podem encaixar-se em dois modelos não exclusivos categorizados de acordo com a análise de dados qualitativos: relacional e normativo/ organizador. o modelo relacional enfatiza a presença de pessoas significativas na dinâmica interna da família, tais como a mulher, no papel de mães ou avós e outros parentes femininos da família extensa. talvez estas crenças tenham relação com algumas teorias de desenvolvimento feminino e masculino, que reforçam pressupostos tais como: "os valores de cuidado, apego, de interdependência, relacionamentos e atenção aos contextos são primordiais no desenvolvimento feminino. os homens definem-se em termos de trabalho e carreira, e as mulheres tendem a definir-se no contexto das relações humanas e julgam a si mesmas em termos de suas habilidades de cuidar" (mcgoldrick, heiman e carter, 1993, p. 412). estas crenças podem ao mesmo tempo ter suas raízes nas concepções de pobreza e suas relações com chefia feminina nestes contextos. segundo sarti (1996), "as famílias desfeitas são mais pobres, e, num círculo vicioso, as famílias desfazem-se mais facilmente". (p. 45). o papel do homem como provedor na família é o mais afetado na pobreza (montali, 1991). são as mulheres que lideram as famílias, e a experiência das entrevistadas confirma este dado. a vulnerabilidade destas famílias chefiadas por mulheres é reconhecida por alguns pesquisadores (lopes & gottschalk, 1990), mas não o é integralmente por nossos profissionais, que percebem a mulher como "forte e poderosa" na dinâmica familiar monoparental. este fato é confirmado pelos resultados de pesquisas já referidas acima neste mesmo texto (garcia & yunes, 2006; yunes, garcia & albuquerque, 2007). outras questões relacionais apontadas pelos profissionais como indicativas de famílias que "superam" as adversidades são a presença de "mentores" e a afetividade nas interações com as crianças e com o ambiente. o modelo de processos de resiliência em família de walsh (1998, 2003, 2005) e apontados pela autora nas dimensões da importância dos processos de comunicação familiar confirma este achado. o segundo modelo de crenças dos profissionais sociais intitulado normativo/organizador enfocou as prioridades de ocupação e reforçou o papel do estudo, do trabalho e das rotinas de organização e colaboração do grupo familiar. estes aspectos também se alinham com uma outra dimensão do modelo de resiliência em famílias de walsh (1998, 2003, 2005) denominada padrões de organização. se focarmos a questão do trabalho na perspectiva de sarti (1996) tal qual apresentada em seu estudo sobre a moral dos pobres, temos que: "é através do trabalho que os pobres demonstram não serem pobres" (p. 66) e buscam, como trabalhadores, a dimensão positiva de sua identidade e a força moral para "quando caírem no buraco, se levantar" (p. 67). os resultados da análise das entrevistas dos profissionais neste estudo validam esta posição, na medida em que se pode encontrar na perspectiva dos agentes sociais que atendem as famílias, a qualificação do "pobre estudioso e trabalhador" como aquele que "dá certo na vida". mas, demonstra também que os profissionais não reconhecem a perspectiva da exploração na forma como se organiza o trabalho na sociedade capitalista, nem tampouco os mecanismos da intitulada violência estrutural (minayo, 1990). no sistema de crenças das profissionais, o grupo familiar que "vive bem", tem maiores chances se estiver no modelo nuclear tradicional, onde juntos vivem, pai, mãe e filhos. nas concepções estudadas por szymanski gomes (1988) em famílias de baixa renda, a família nuclear é uma expressão da "família pensada" como a "boa", a "natural" e a "certa". podese constatar que tal ideologia não está apenas presente nas representações das próprias famílias 701 building participative, empowering & diverse communities pobres (szymanski gomes, 1988), mas faz também parte do ideário daqueles que atendem profissionalmente estas mesmas famílias de baixa renda e que talvez desqualifiquem aqueles que divergem do que julgam "certo". portanto, a compreensão da experiência dos profissionais entrevistados sugere que a maioria acredita que as famílias pobres têm escassas probabilidades de sucesso diante das adversidades da pobreza. o discurso dos entrevistados postula que sua clientela é formada basicamente por aqueles que "não superam" as adversidades. os profissionais entrevistados revelaram de início suas idéias organizadas com base em preconceitos de pobreza e desvantagem socioeconômica, o que confirma a inspiração ideológica do construto da resiliência (martineau, 1999; yunes & szimanski, 2001) e a "patologização" da pobreza (yunes & szymanski, 2003). tais atitudes não são exclusividades de trabalhadores sociais brasileiros, pois alguns trabalhos americanos mostram que os profissionais da saúde mental apresentam uma visão de pessoas negras e pobres como "desmotivadas", "preguiçosas", "desorganizadas" e impossíveis de serem tratadas (boyd-franklin, 1993). estas reflexões nos fazem pensar no modelo de relações que tem sido adotado por estes agentes sociais no seu dia-a-dia com as famílias pobres. os estudos e as reflexões ora apresentados trazem evidências suficientes sobre a complementação diádica de papéis na linha de "culpabilizar a vítima", o que parece servir para descrever o modelo das interações "agentes sociais e famílias pobres". ao que parece, estes profissionais desconsideram a difícil trajetória política e social destas pessoas ao longo de um caminho de pobreza de oportunidades que vem de gerações anteriores. conforme perguntado anteriormente: qual o resultado desta relação? com toda certeza não tem sido o reconhecimento das reais dificuldades vivenciadas historicamente por estas famílias, nem tampouco a relação empática e genuína capaz de gerar o desenvolvimento de uma identidade positiva e a consciência transformadora nestes grupos. ao contrário, esta atitude negativa e de descrédito dos profissionais em relação às famílias, parece agir no sentido de provocar uma atuação "paralisada" e governada por um sistema de crenças que dita a incompetência das famílias pobres em modificarem suas condições de vida como se tudo dependesse apenas deles! e, a partir desta crença, os profissionais atuam como se não houvesse “o que fazer” por estas populações, cujo sofrimento vem se exacerbando diante de tanta desconsideração política e social.... desta forma, parece que, se depender dos operadores dos serviços sociais, educacionais e de saúde pública, a identidade destes grupos manter-se-á nos personagens da "desestrutura" e "desorganização", e a qualidade de vida e os fatores de risco permanecerão inalterados...quais seriam as alternativas para mudar este cenário? estratégias de intervenção: programas de reflexão junto aos agentes sociais os resultados apresentados neste texto sugerem que é preciso dar uma atenção especial às conseqüências do "conhecimento prático" dos agentes sociais. é preciso investir tempo e dinheiro governamental em programas de educação que possam modificar a compreensão individualística e microssistêmica que os profissionais têm da condição de pobreza. há que se promover o entendimento coletivo do fenômeno da pobreza sob a ótica da realidade vivida, a qual tem usurpado os direitos de muitas famílias à cidadania e à felicidade. os elementos encontrados nas histórias de vida das famílias pobres se contrapõem claramente às crenças pessimistas dos agentes sociais, que, como já se demonstrou, mostram-se reticentes quanto às possibilidades de 702 building participative, empowering & diverse communities superação das adversidades advindas da pobreza nestas populações. conforme argumentado acima, nota-se que as famílias pobres que compõem o cotidiano do trabalho dos agentes são percebidas através de adjetivos que sublinham a vulnerabilidade e a fragilidade das dinâmicas familiares. as percepções otimistas de melhoria de vida e de superação das dificuldades ficam pouco salientes ou sequer são mencionadas por esses profissionais. é relevante citar que os agentes sociais reconhecem que as famílias vivenciam uma diversidade de dificuldades e citam condições de risco tais como: experiência de fome, baixa escolaridade, analfabetismo, diferentes formas de violência, falta de segurança, instabilidade econômica, poucas oportunidades de emprego. entretanto, deve-se ressaltar que estes e outros fatores, como também os mecanismos abstratos, invisíveis e implícitos de exclusão social, são conseqüências da miséria, do desemprego e da carência de condições de moradia e recursos básicos necessários para a sobrevivência digna. portanto, estão distantes do alcance ou controle dessas populações. na maioria das entrevistas, este olhar macrossistêmico (bronfenbrenner, 1979/1996) sobre a pobreza e as dificuldades enfrentadas pelas famílias, acima classificadas como violência estrutural e social, não se fazem presentes na descritiva dos profissionais. a urgência na (re) formulação e (re) construção de programas públicos de educação que visem a auxiliar a (re) elaboração de visões dos agentes sociais e suas práticas educativas fatalistas, deterministas e pessimistas levou o cep-rua da furg e o neaf a proporem encontros de reflexão com as diferentes categorias de profissionais sociais (cuidadores de intituições de abrigo, agentes comunitários de saúde, conselheiros tutelares, profissionais do judiciário e professores do ensino fundamental). o espaço conjunto em seminários, fóruns, jornadas e cursos temáticos foi capaz de garantir momentos de reflexões sobre ações e atitudes do cotidiano relacional não só das díades e tríades representadas por trabalhadores sociais crianças/adolescentes famílias, mas também sobre o funcionamento e a comunicação dos contextos que compõe a rede de apoio social. um exemplo de um evento promovido nesta direção intitula-se “cuidando dos cuidadores”, um curso anual que se originou da constatação que a experiência de institucionalização de crianças e adolescentes pode trazer riscos decorrentes do despreparo dos cuidadores que estão no contato diário com estas populações. as reuniões de reflexão com diretores de abrigo, equipe técnica e cuidadores têm sido realizadas desde 2004 e propiciam trocas de conhecimentos acadêmicos (por parte dos formadores, mediadores e pesquisadores da universidade) e experiências e inquietações (trazidas pelos coordenadores, técnicos e cuidadores em geral). muitos dos profissionais que participam dos encontros buscam informações imediatistas e/ou “receitas” para futuras intervenções em casos extremos e difíceis, como em situações de abuso e violência sexual contra a criança ou adolescente ou presença de uso abusivo de substâncias psicoativas em familiares. apesar de ser dada a devida atenção às inquietudes dos agentes, a estratégia é de usar estes exemplos para ampliar as discussões teóricas e práticas, mostrando que as soluções emergem das elaborações do próprio grupo. os resultados da avaliação destas formações apontam para a criação de mecanismos de inter-relações através das quais a rede humana interna (o corpo de funcionários dos abrigos) está cada vez mais próximo da rede social externa (conselho tutelar, ministério público, secretarias municipais, escolas, etc.) que atende as crianças e adolescentes institucionalizados. uma das instituições participantes das jornadas criou uma “escola para pais” e tem promovido grupos semanais de diálogo com as famílias das crianças e adolescentes abrigadas, o que evidencia 703 building participative, empowering & diverse communities o esforço de aproximação por parte dos profissionais e uma reprodução da metodologia já vivenciada nos cursos de formação. outra instituição flexibilizou os horários de visitação para os pais. em consequência pode-se constatar um maior número de retorno de crianças para as famílias de origem ou reinserções familiares (preservação familiar). entende-se que desta forma, este conjunto de pessoas e de ambientes podem efetivamente oferecer proteção e desenvolvimento humano a todos os participantes. outras categorias de profissionais sociais têm sido convidadas a participar de eventos com planejamentos similares. para os professores de ensino fundamental, os cursos têm seguido o formato de módulos de 6 a 10 encontros temáticos (miranda & yunes, 2007) pois a demanda se caracterizou por solicitações de esclarecimentos de questões ligadas à violência doméstica e atendimento de famílias com suspeita de abuso sexual contra crianças e adolescentes. este programa de intervenção tem sido específico para promoção de atitudes de denúncias que protejam todos os envolvidos: crianças/ adolescentes abusados, familiares e profissionais da educação (miranda & yunes, 2007). as observações, relatos e avaliações pós-cursos apontam para o aumento de sentimentos mútuos de confiança, empatia e reciprocidade nas interações com efeitos expressivos nos processos de vida de algumas famílias acompanhadas por nossos pesquisadores. considerações finais as estratégias de intervenção junto aos profissionais sociais almejaram sumamente resignificar e reconstruir crenças e práticas estereotipadas de atendimento às famílias em situação de risco. buscou-se ainda, redirecionar o foco das ações para os aspectos da saúde e da resiliência dos grupos. é fato que um conjunto harmônico integrado por pessoas que convivem em ambientes interconectados pode oferecer mais oportunidades de educação, aprendizagem e desenvolvimento humano a todos os participantes. conforme juliano (2005), o trabalho social conjunto e cooperativo torna as fronteiras das instituições mais permeáveis. a interação e o trabalho em rede dos atores sociais, certamente possibilita a efetiva proteção da criança e do adolescente conforme prevê o eca (estatuto da criança e do adolescente, 1990). sabemos que apenas isso não basta e que muitas outras ações, intervenções e programas de apoio ainda serão necessários para humanizar o atendimento que tem sido disponibilizado às famílias que vivem diferentes ameaças sociais. parafraseando bronfenbrenner (2005), passamos por um momento histórico, político e social em que é urgente intervir em todos os segmentos das nossas sociedades para formar, informar e tornar mais humanos os seres humanos... 704 building participative, empowering & diverse communities referências allen, k. r. 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(2007). monoparentalidade, pobreza e resiliência: entre as crenças dos profissionais e as possibilidades de convivência familiar, psicologia. reflexão e crítica, 20 (3), 351-360. 708 building participative, empowering & diverse communities sense of community in the work context. a study on members of a co-operative enterprise bruna zani, elvira cicognani department of sciences of education “g.m. bertin” university of bologna (italy) bruna.zani@unibo.it, elvira.cicognani@unibo.it abstract this study investigates the psychological relationship between the individual, the work organization and the community context. in particular, the influence of organizational (organizational sense of community, organizational identification, organizational efficacy, perceived organizational values) and community variables (sense of community referred to the local community) on workers’ psychological well being was assessed, taking into account a particular work context: the co-operative enterprise. a questionnaire was submitted to 805 workers of a large co-operative enterprise with different work status and tenure (67.7% partners and 32,3% employees). results confirmed that partners (vs employees) perceive the cooperative as more committed to its stated core values and acting consistently with them. moreover, partners show a higher level of organizational efficacy, identification with the cooperative and organizational sense of community and a higher sense of community referred to the local community. workers with more than 10 years of tenure perceive the cooperative as more committed to its values and show a higher identification with the cooperative and a higher sense of community compared to younger workers. workers’ psychological well being decreases with length of service and is positively influenced by sense of community referred to the local community; however, organizational variables positively contribute to well being only among partners. key words: organizational sense of community, organizational identification, organizational values, co-operative enterprise, workers’ well being. the work organization as a “community” today individuals often find sources of meaning, identity and support in the workplace since it is where they spend most of their time. from a community psychology perspective, a workplace community is identified both as a geographic locality and as a formal and informal networks of individuals who share a common association (burroughs & eby, 1996; pretty & mccarthy, 1991; lambert & hopkins, 1995). the study presented in this paper addresses the psychological relationship between the individual, the work organization and the community context; in particular the influence of organizational and community variables on workers’ psychological well being was assessed. the work context considered is a co-operative enterprise. 709 building participative, empowering & diverse communities describing the psychological relationship between the individual and the work organization: theoretical constructs the psychological relationship of individuals with the work organisation can be described by different indicators; in this context we focus on organizational sense of community, organizational identification, perceived organizational efficacy and perceived organizational values. organizational sense of community sense of community has been described as the extent to which a person feels part of a readily available, supportive and dependable structure; that one belongs to somewhere. according to mcmillan and chavis (1986), sense of community is “a feeling that members have of belonging and being important to each other, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met by their commitment together” (11). for these authors, sense of community includes four dimensions: belonging, influence, integration and fulfilment of needs, and emotional connection. research studies on sense of community have focused the attention on different types of communities (e.g., town, school, virtual communities). a consistent finding is that soc positively contributes to individuals’ well being (e.g., higher life satisfaction, lower feelings of loneliness) (prezza et al., 2001). moreover, research studies indicated that people who have resided in the community the longest tend to have the highest indicators of sense of community; this may be related to the extent of residents’ current involvement as well as to past memories of their life course. besides residential communities, other contexts are important in individuals’ lives and may be experienced as “communities”; one of these is the workplace. according to burroughs & eby (1998) a psychological sense of community can be created by individuals who choose a referent (e.g., a business organization) to bring structure and meaning to their life. workers with a high sense of community recognise that their organization meets their needs, provides them with enhanced quality of life and expects them to be responsible citizens in the organization and in the society. workers are more likely to experience organizational soc when supervisors are sensitive to their needs, supportive, the organization is fair in allocating promotions, provides challenging jobs, encourages interaction among workers, enables job mastery (lambert & hopkins, 1995). workers with high sense of community recognise the importance and the value of the welfare of the organization for the collective well being, and are less likely to feel isolated and alienated (burroughs & eby, 1998). organizational identification from a social identity perspective (mael & ashforth, 1989), organizational identification may be defined as the extent to which individuals define the self in terms of membership in the organization; the perceived oneness between self and organization. the more individuals identify with an organization, the more organization’s interests are incorporated in the self-concept, and the more likely the individual is to act with the organization’s best interests in mind. employee identification with the organization is thought to have a number of potentially important benefits both for the organization and for employees themselves. employees who identify with their organization are presumed to be more likely to buy in to the organizations’ 710 building participative, empowering & diverse communities goals and activities and to be more motivated to work hard to achieve these goals. organizations with high levels of employee identification can be expected to benefit more from a more cohesive work atmosphere and greater levels of cooperation and altruism, including greater levels of citizens’ organizational behaviour and support for the organization. employees can benefit from positive self esteem and the satisfaction of the human need to belong. in the research literature there is evidence of the role of organizational identification in affecting turnover intentions; limited attention has been devoted to the study of employee outcomes like psychological well being (harris & cameron, 2005). perceived organizational efficacy organizational efficacy (oe) is a generative capacity within an organization to cope effectively with the demands, challenges, stressors, and opportunities it encounters within the business environment. it exists as an aggregated judgement of an organization's individual members about their (1) sense of collective capacities, (2) sense of mission or purpose, and (3) a sense of resilience (borgogna, petitta & steca, 2001). organizational efficacy has been investigated as a product of leadership style (bohn, 2002); we have less information on the impact of oe on jobrelated and worker-related outcomes. perceived organizational values organizational values are beliefs and ideas about what kinds of goals members of an organization should pursue and ideas about the appropriate standards of behavior members should adopt to achieve these goals. organizational values are related to organizational norms, guidelines or expectations that prescribe appropriate kinds of behaviour by employees in particular situations and control the behaviour of organizational members towards one another. a critical issue in understanding the role of values for employee outcomes is the relationship between organizational values and personal values of workers. according to maslach and leiter (2008), personal values are the ideals and motivations that originally attracted people to their jobs, and thus they are the motivating connection between the worker and the workplace, which goes beyond the utilitarian exchange of time for money or advancement. when there is a values conflict on the job (a gap between individual and organizational values) workers will find themselves making a trade-off between work they want to do and work they have to do. conflict in values is related to burnout and decisions to leave the organization; consistency between organizational and personal values is associated with greater professional efficacy. a particular work organization: the co-operative company the co-operative company can be defined as an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise. a cooperative may also be defined as a business owned and controlled equally by the people who use its services or who work at it. cooperatives are based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy and equality. in the tradition of their founders, cooperative members believe in the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility and caring for others. 711 building participative, empowering & diverse communities they are also legal entities with a range of unique social characteristics. membership is open, anyone who satisfies certain non-discriminatory conditions may join (by contributing to its capital). economic benefits are distributed proportionally according to each member's level of participation in the cooperative. the context of the study the cooperative under study (c.) is a limited liability (producer) co-operative company, located in north italy with 918 employees, of whom 585 are partners (e.g. contributed financially to become partners). it is a leader enterprise in promoting and creating important and extensive projects: largescale urban re-planning works; shopping, business centres and those for recreational purposes; logistic centres. it also builds infrastructures, i.e. it deals with the production of prefabricated structures, window and door frames, railway superstructures and office furnishing where it has reached the very top of these sectors, being able to offer high level proposals appreciated in italy and throughout the world. the partners (as co-owners) are the ones who make the basic decisions for the company. each partner is entitled to vote regardless of the company capital he has paid. most of the profits are usually added to the indivisible reserve, to back company developments and create new business opportunities. the assets are handed down from generation to generation, contributing towards the growth of the communities in question. its mission is stated as follows: “promote and implement projects able to improve the quality of people’s life in the cities and places of work. interpret society in its complexity and future, turn built-up areas to account, harmonise the needs of the environment, the social and cultural aspects and the economy”. aims and hypotheses the first aim of the study was to investigate the quality of workers’ relationship with the co-operative (organizational sense of community, organizational identification, perceived organizational efficacy, perceived organizational values). in particular, we wanted to assess the differences between partners and employees and according to tenure (length of service). hypotheses were that organizational variables (organizational sense of community, organizational identification, perceived organizational efficacy, perceived organizational values) should be higher among partners than employees (hyp.1) and should increase with length of service (hyp.2). the second aim was to assess the impact of organizational variables (organizational sense of community, organizational identification, perceived organizational efficacy, perceived organizational values) and sense of community referred to the local community (town) on partners/employees’ psychological well being. hypotheses were that organizational variables should enhance psychological well being only among partners (hyp.3), whereas sense of community referred to the local community should enhance psychological well being both among partners and employees (hyp.4). 712 building participative, empowering & diverse communities method instrument the instrument was a on-line self-administered questionnaire including the following sections. organizational sense of community. it was assessed using 19 items adapted from the psychological sense of community at work scale (burroughs & eby, 1998). responses were given on a 5-point likert scale ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree (α = .87). organizational identification. identification with the co-operative company was measured using an adaptation of the organizational identification scale (mael & ashforth, 1992). its 6 items add up to a single identification index which is strongly focused on the affective/motivational side and less on the cognitive one. responses were given on a 5-point likert scale ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree (α=.82). social identification as a partner. this section of the questionnaire was administered only to co-operative partners and it was based on 6 items adapted from the social identification scale (cameron, 2004). responses were given on a 5-point likert scale ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree (α = .72). perceived organizational efficacy was measured by the perceived collective efficacy scale for producers organizations (borgogni, petitta & steca, 2001), measuring global efficacy and including 7 items. response alternatives are provided on a seven-point scale (1 = completely disagree; 7 = completely agree) (α = .84). perceived organizational values. the perception of the extent to which the co-operative company lives up to its values was assessed by 32 items ad hoc created from the results of a pilot focus group study (e.g., “everybody here can express his/her opinion, regardless of his/her role”, “taking part in decisions is a right of all partners which is expressed by voting”). responses were given on a 5-point likert scale ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. sense of community referred to the local community was assessed by multidimensional scale of sense of community (zampatti, prezza & pacilli, 2007) including 26 items. response alternatives are provided on a five-point scale (1 = completely disagree; 5 = completely agree) (α = .90). psychological well being was measured by ryff & keyes’s (1995) pwb, short version (18 items), measuring positive psychological functioning (response alternatives from 1 = completely disagree, to 6 = completely agree) (α = .80). participants participants included 805 workers (90% of the total population); 67.7% were partners and 32,3% employees. 76.6% were males and 23.4% females. as regards age, 13.3% were less than 30 years old, 28.6% were in the 30-39 years old range, 33.1% were 40-49 years old ‏and 25.0% more than 50 years old.. 45.5% were employed for less than 10 years and 54.5% from more than 10 years (table 1). as regards level of education, the distribution of the sample was the following: primary school 26.8%; secondary school 52.8%; university degree 19.8%. 713 building participative, empowering & diverse communities table 1 participants length of service less than 10 yrs (%) more than 10 yrs (%) total (%) partners (%) 168 (21.1) 372 (46.6) 540 (67.7) employees (%) 195 (24.4) 63 (7.9) 258 (32.3) total (%) 363 (45.5) 435 (54.5) 798 (100) results organizational efficacy, organizational identification, organizational sense of community table 2 shows mean scores and standard deviations in organizational variables. significant differences were found in all the variables according to work status: partners score higher than employees on organizational efficacy, t(800) = -5.725, p = .000, organizational identification, t(801) = -7.905, p = .000, and organizational sense of community, t(799) = -3.270, p = .001. moreover, organizational identification increases with length of service, t(796) = -3.257, p = .001. table 2 organizational efficacy, identification, sense of community: means and sd organizational efficacya organizational identificationb organizational socb partner/employee m sd m sd m sd partners 5.81 0.79 3.93 0.69 3.49 0.52 employees 5.44*** 1.04 3.49*** 0.82 3.35*** 0.60 length of service m sd m sd m sd < 10 yrs. 5.63 0.90 3.70 0.78 3.43 0.57 > 10 yrs. 5.74 0.89 3.87*** 0.73 3.46 0.55 arange 1-7; brange 1-5 *p<.05 **p<.01 ***p<.001 among partners, social identification as a cooperative partner increases with length of service, t(535) = -2.081, p = .038 (table 3). table 3 partner social identification (only partners) partner social identificationa length of service m sd < 10 yrs. 3.78 0.62 > 10 yrs. 3.87 0.59 arange 1-5 714 building participative, empowering & diverse communities perceived organizational values: factor analysis factor analysis conducted on the 32 items lead to the extraction of the following factors: a) cooperative democracy (6 items, α = .75); e.g. “everybody here can express his/her opinion, regardless of his/her role”; b) sustainable development and intergenerationality (6 items, α = .70); e.g. “this cooperative enterprise looks into the future”; c) collective entrepreneurial subject (ces) (5 items, α = .59); e.g. “taking part in decisions is a right of all partners which is expressed by voting”; d) perception of negative elements (4 items); e.g. “as the cooperative grows bigger, it gets harder and harder to be consistent with cooperative values”. this factor will not be considered in further analyses. mean scale scores were calculated for each factor. results are shown in table 4. table 4 perceived organizational values: means and sd organizational valuesa cooperative democracy sustainable development ces partner/employee m sd m sd m sd partners 3.48 0.73 4.28 0.51 3.96 0.59 employees 3.33** 0.75 3.85*** 0.61 3.66*** 0.58 length of service m sd m sd m sd < 10 yrs. 3.44 0.70 4.08 0.57 3.77 0.58 > 10 yrs. 3.43 0.77 4.20** 0.57 3.94*** 0.62 arange 1-5 *p <.05 **p <.01 ***p <.001 significant differences were found in the scores of perceived organizational values according to work status: partners, more than employees, think that the co-operative acts consistently with its values, such as cooperative democracy, t(802) = -2.695, p = .007, sustainable development, t(802) = -10.663, p = .000 and ces, t(802) = -6.757, p = .000. workers with over than 10 years of service, more than others, think that the co-operative adheres to the values of sustainable development, t(797) = -3.108, p = .002 and collective entrepreneurial subject, t(797) = -3.883, p = .000. sense of community mean scores of soc are shown in table 5. results indicate that sense of community referred to the local community is higher among partners, t(796) = -5.020, p = .000, and increases with length of service, t(791) = -3.937, p = .000. 715 building participative, empowering & diverse communities table 5 local sense of community and psychological well being: means and sd sense of community (local community)a psychological well beingb partner/employee m sd m sd partners 3,73 0,51 4,45 0,56 employees 3,52*** 0,59 4,40 0,60 length of service m sd m sd < 10 yrs. 3,58 0,54 4,56 0,60 > 10 yrs. 3,73*** 0,54 4.34*** 0,50 arange 1-5 brange 1-6 *p<.05 **p<.01 ***p<.001 psychological well being as displayed in table 5, psychological well being is quite similar in all the workers (partners and employees), and decreases with length of service, t(784) = 5.458, p = .000. impact of organizational and community factors on individual well-being hierarchical regression analysis was conducted to test the influence of organizational and community variables on well being. analyses were conducted separately for employees (table 6) and partners (table 7). table 6 regression analysis on psychological well being (employees) psychological well being model 1 model 2 model 3 model 4 block 1 length of service -,27*** -,22*** -,22*** -,24*** block 2 cooperative democracy ,11 ,09 ,10 sustainable development ,17* ,16* ,13 ces ,04 ,02 ,00 block 3 organizational efficacy -,03 -,02 organizational identification ,08 ,05 organizational soc ,01 -,11 block 4 soc .31*** r2 .07 .14 .15 .22 f 19,983*** 10,230*** 6,028*** 8,353*** df 1,250 3,247 3,244 1,243 f change 19,983*** 6,537*** ,506 21,144*** *p<.05 **p<.01 ***p<.001 716 building participative, empowering & diverse communities table 7 regression analysis on psychological well being (partners) psychological well being model 1 model 2 model 3 model 4 block 1 length of service -,19*** -,22*** -,22*** -,25*** block 2 cooperative democracy ,10 ,05 ,05 sustainable development ,07 ,07 ,05 ces ,08 ,06 ,05 partner social identification ,26*** ,13* ,09 block 3 organizational efficacy -,04 -,04 organizational identification ,13* ,11* organizational soc ,15* ,08 block 4 soc ,25*** r2 ,03 ,21 ,23 ,27 f 19,136*** 27,736*** 19,475*** 21,794*** df 1,528 4,524 3,521 1,520 f change 19,136*** 28,876*** 4,721** 31,291*** *p<.05 **p<.01 ***p<.001 results show that, among employees, predictors of psychological well being are length of service and sense of community referred to the local community. among partners, significant predictors include also organizational identification. organizational sense of community is no more significant when sense of community referred to the local community is entered into the equation. discussion the first aim of this study, involving the whole worker population of a large co-operative company (both partners and employees) was to test the differences in organizational variables (perceived organizational values, organizational efficacy, organizational identification and organizational sense of community) according to workers’ status and length of service. results confirmed that partners (vs employees) perceive the co-operative as more committed to its stated core values and acting consistently with them. moreover, partners, compared to employees, show a higher level of organizational efficacy, identification with the cooperative and organizational sense of community and a higher sense of community referred to the local community (hyp.1). this finding is consistent with the higher personal involvement and investment (economic, emotional, etc.) of partners into the co-operative and the more “binding” relationship they have with it. 717 building participative, empowering & diverse communities considering differences according to length of service, workers with more (vs less) than 10 years of service perceive the co-operative as more committed to the values “sustainable development” and “collective entrepreneurial subject” and show a higher identification with the cooperative. moreover, workers with more years of service have a higher sense of community referred to the local community (hyp.2). as regards the second aim of the study (to assess the impact of organizational variables on workers’ psychological well being), results show that length of service is an important contributor to well being both for partners and employees: for both groups an increase in the years of work is associated with a reduction in psychological well being. a possible explanation of this finding is that length of service co-varies with workers’ age, and the latter has been found associated with a decrease in scores of psychological functioning (ryff & keyes, 2005). a significant result is that organizational variables are irrelevant for employees’ well being, whereas for partners, social identification with the co-operative positively affects psychological well being (hyp.3). previous research investigating the role of organizational identification on indicators of employee well being indicated that oi had limited impact on general well being (e.g., life satisfaction) (cameron & harris, 2005). this study positively adds to this literature showing that, in this specific kind of organisation, partners’ well being positively benefits from a high-quality relationship with their work organisation. perceived organizational efficacy of the co-operative, even though higher among partners, does not affect their psychological well being. of particular interest is the role of organizational sense of community: organizational soc positively affects psychological well being among partners, but is irrelevant for employees. as regards sense of community referred to the town of residence, results indicate that it is important for both partners and employees, thus confirming existing research literature that indicates that sense of community positively contributes to individual’s well being (prezza et al., 2001). for partners, the introduction of this variable reduces the impact of organizational soc suggesting that, in this group, a more complex relationship between different levels of belonging (town and work organisation) exists, requiring a deeper investigation. for example, it is important to consider the aims of this co-operative enterprise, which explicitly focus of the promotion of quality of life of people within different community contexts (as stated in its mission: promote and implement projects able to improve the quality of people’s life in the cities and places of work), and the attention toward the local community, in its social, cultural and environmental dimensions (e.g., harmonise the needs of the environment, the social and cultural aspects and the economy). all this suggests that this work organisation conceives of itself as strongly embedded into the local community and as a contributor to its growth in a global sense. to conclude, organizational variables influence psychological well being only among partners further supporting the significant role of the ownership (“partnership”) of the cooperative company. the impact of sense of community referred to the town on well being is consistent with expectations and with the literature (cf. prezza et al., 2001). these results emphasise the relevance and usefulness of further investigating the construct of sense of community also in the organizational context (cf. burroughs & eby, 1998; pretty & mccarthy, 1991; lambert & hopkins, 1995). 718 building participative, empowering & diverse communities references bohn, j.g. (2002). the relationship of perceived leadership behaviours to organizational efficacy. the journal of leadership studies, 9, 2. borgogni, l., petitta, l. & steca, p. (2001). efficacia personale e collettiva nei contesti organizzativi. in g.v. caprara (ed.), la valutazione dell’autoefficacia (pp. 157-171). trento: erickson. burroughs, s.m. & eby, l.t. (1996). psychological sense of community at work: a measurement system and explanatory framework. journal of community psychology, 26, 6, 509-532. cameron, j.e. (2004). a three-factor model of social identity. self and identity, 3, 239–262. harris, g.e. & cameron, j.e. (2005). multiple dimensions of organizational identification and commitment as predictors of turnover intentions and psychological well-being. canadian journal of behavioural science, 37, 3, 159-169. lambert, s.j. & hopkins, k. (1995). occupational conditions and workers’ sense of community: variations by gender and race. american journal of community psychology, 23, 2, 151-179. mael, f., & ashforth, b.e. (1992). alumni and their alma mater: a partial test of the reformulated model of organizational identification. journal of organizational behavior, 13, 103-123. maslach, c. & leiter, m.p. (2008). early predictors of job burnout and engagement. journal of applied psychology, 93, 3, 498-512. mcmillan, d. & chavis, d.m. (1986). sense of community: a definition and theory. journal of community psychology, 14, 6-23. pretty, g.l.h. & mccarthy, m. (1991). exploring the psychological sense of community among women and men of the corporation. journal of community psychology, 19, 351-362. prezza, m., amici, m., roberti, t. & tedeschi, c. (2001). sense of community referred to the whole town: its relations with neighbouring, loneliness, life satisfaction and area of residence. journal of community psychology, 29, 29-52. ryff, c. & keyes, c. (1995). the structure of psychological well-being revisited. journal of personality and social psychology, 69, 719-727. zampatti, e., prezza, m. & pacilli, g. (2007). una nuova scala multidimensionale per il senso di comunità territoriale (mtsocs). paper presented at the viii congress of the italian association of social psychology, cesena, 24-26 sept. 719 building participative, empowering & diverse communities empowerment evaluation for the participation and leadership of people with experience of mental illness. maria fátima jorge-monteiro aeipsassociação para o estudo e integração psicossocial josé ornelas ispa-iu the social/community context the purpose of this presentation is to describe how aeips services have used service evaluation as a tool for the empowerment process in a mental health community based organization program. aeips was the first non-governmental organisation in portugal that, in 1987, clearly had oriented its program towards inclusion, and participation in the community of the people with experience of mental illness. notwithstanding other former experiences in the community that attempted to value the experience of people with mental illness from the socio-cultural point of view throughout early 80`s the main supports available to respond to the basic needs of people with mental illness (housing, nourishment, income, productivity, social participation, health, security) were provided by family and friends, and by psychiatric hospitals and public mental health departments through interment services and ambulatory consultations, some rehabilitation services (hospitals day care centres), and from private psychiatric consultations and clinics. also, along with a lack of community based services, until that date, regardless of 20 years experience of organisations of families of children with physical and mental disabilities, there were no family organisations nor of people with mental illness themselves. it was within this national panorama that aeips outlined an intervention program which mission relied in the promotion of the community integration of people with mental illness. therefore, only in the late 80`s and in the course of the 90`s, had emerged the first organizations outside of the public mental health system that created community centres, day care centres, group homes with or without permanent professional supervision which came to inspire, as well as the recommendations of international organisations, then, a still little developed legislative set that defines and frames the new body of community mental health services and supports in portugal. consequently, that there was a strong deficit of power and social participation by the people with mental illness that had to be surpassed. however, the changing process for the inclusion and participation of people with mental illness is only made possible with the effective contribution of people with mental illness to the adequacy of supports to their interests, objectives and needs. according zimmerman, (1998), participatory programs tend to be more relevant and adjusted to the needs of users, and therefore, could be successful in their results. for the current presentation we follow the concept of empowerment viewed as a groupbased, group-member driven, developmental process through which marginalized or oppressed individuals and groups gain greater control over their lives, enhanced access to valued resources, 720 building participative, empowering & diverse communities and reduced societal marginalization (maton, 2008). aeips context: the centre for the empowerment and mutual help (ceam) aiming to unfetter leadership processes, aeips intensified the deepening of empowerment mechanisms of its users through the involvement and participation in the organizational processes. to build this program it was relevant the definition of community leadership presented by the national extension task force on community leadership (langone, 1992) which refers that leadership involves influence, power and intervention in public decision making in one or more areas of activity, that may include an organization, an area of interest, an institution, a city, a place or a region. in the same way other authors (ramsay, k; reed, b.; vandenberg, l. & climb partners, 1998) consider that community leaders are people that participate, have a sense of community, are more empowered and take a very important role in building healthy and competent communities, who have common values and care for each other. aeips having implemented a internal debate in 2001 about the possibilities and conditions of fostering recovery from mental illness, and on the basis of the results of that participative approach, made a restructuring of the services program, introducing new dimensions but one most significant was the implementation of a partnership relation between professionals and users. both parties, due to the advantages, benefits that could render in terms of support, resources and strengthening, considered this mutual collaboration desirable but its implementation implies a considerable effort of approaching to the culture of both groups. therefore, a positive collaboration between professionals and users relies mainly in building trust relationships based on a regular and longitudinal practice, identification of common goals to achieve, flexibility of attitudes before different values and approaches, combined and continued reflection and sharing of responsibilities (jorge-monteiro, 2000). also agreeing with maton & salem (1995), the community organizations (eg. voluntary associations, mutual help groups, neighborhood organizations, churches) may constitute relevant settings where individuals, through active participation in community environments, can attain power and resources and achieve their personal goals. putting in practice this collaborative orientation it led us to implement the study of empowerment with the majority of users of services (aeips, 2001) in order to obtain a first look into user opinion about the services. this research was performed by a team composed of professionals and people with mental illness who carried out the translation and adaptation of the study by rogers, s., chamberlin, j., ellison, m.l., crean, t., 1997) who identified significant empowerment processes to people with mental illness and its implications to the rehabilitation programs and mental health (chamberlin, j.,1997). in our study (aeips, 2001), the crucial results were related with the access to information, possibility to make choices and decisions, have critical awareness, unlimited learning perspectives and changes, among others. the results/ outcomes were, however, medium satisfactory in some scales used in the study. regarding the extent of the power of individual decision, the wide majority of participants revealed a good perception of itself and its skills but the group was divided in half about the 721 building participative, empowering & diverse communities sometimes to feel alone. about the aspects related to the involvement and active participation in the community context, was demonstrated a strong determination to involvement in the group and in the community experiencing however revealing a necessity of development of critical awareness in several processes towards organizational transformative change. in the year 2000, marc zimmerman, made relevant contributions deepening reflexions on empowerment theory and offered an understanding for organizational empowerment, and establish the definitions for empowering and empowering organizations. empowering settings are those that produce empowerment outcomes for individual members as a result of their organizational process, while empowered settings are those that influence the larger system of which they are part (peterson & zimmerman, 2004). in a former study, maton & salem (1995), used an inductive process to synthesize findings from an inductive study identifying organizational characteristics of community settings that appeared to generate member psychological empowerment, the key facets of those empowering setting are the group-based belief systems, opportunity role structures, support systems, and leadership. for aeips empowerment partnership it was rendered concrete by the process of increased involvement of users in all decision-making areas and service delivery and by the creation of a pilot program exclusively controlled by users and dedicated to the promotion of participation and leadership within the organisation as well as in the community which is coordinated by 6 users in order to develop a transformative leadership so this group of users main function will be to put into practice collective action, critical awareness and resource mobilisation according with the conceptual definition of empowerment (rappaport, 1997; zimmerman, 2000). this program became known as ceam – centre for the empowerment and mutual help. this program also came to benefit from the implementation of a collaborative process of assessment throughout the organization based on a support team with the task of facilitating the scale of assessment and support throughout the all process (aeips, 2005). concurrently, participants also had opportunities for training in leadership and citizenship as a result of synergies of partnerships in two projects of this nature and that have integrated and contributed to the purposes of the ongoing evaluation of empowerment. that is, according to fawcett, s.b., paine-andrews, a., francisco, v.t., schultz, j.a., richter, k.p., harris, k.j., williams, e. l., berkley, j. y., lopez, c.m., fisher, j.l. (1996), we have appeal to the empowerment evaluation as a way of capacity building because it aims to legitimize community members’ experiential knowledge, and empower community members. thus, for the first time it was discussed and developed the logical models and measures of outcomes for each of the areas for the entire organization, and the leadership program as well. however, the development and success of the program led to further review of the mission and current goals that will be described in future literature about aeips. we followed peterson & zimmerman (2004) suggestions that a conceptual model of empowered organizations include three score components: i) intraorganizational, ii) interorganizational, and iii) extraorganizational to develop ceam organizational goals and internal structure. the intraorganizational component of organizational empowerment includes characteristics that represent the internal structure and functioning of organizations which provides the infrastructure for members to engage in proactive behaviors. the interorganizational 722 building participative, empowering & diverse communities includes the linkages between organizations and collaborations across organizations. the extraorganizational component of organizational empowerment includes actions by organizations to affect the larger environment. these ceam initial goals were, firstly, to increase the participation and influence of users with mental illness in the organization (ob.1) and, secondly, to obtain greater visibility and participation at community level (ob.2). regarding this first dimension of leadership (ob.1) it took place a systematic debate about the domains where users participation and involvement had a really good expression and areas where there was necessary to innovate and introduce the vision of people with mental illness. this way, it was considered that should be achieved some specific goals, such as: to increase the influence and visibility of the experience of people with mental illness in the organisation to maintain and improve the mutual help actions of between users to broaden the knowledge and information, mainly about the disease, the protection of fundamental rights, organisation and conflict resolution; recovery opportunities and participation in the community, among others for the second major goal, it was settled specific goals oriented (interorganizational and extraorganizational) actions in order to seed the foundations of people´s with mental illness experience empowerment in the community. community empowerment sends us to the socialpolitical dimension and relates to the capacity of a community to respond to the collective problems (rich, 1995). the four facets of empowering settings identified by maton & salem (1995) were also considered important in the development of our program: the presence of a system of values that inspires personal growth, the access to social roles, the existence of a sense of community that provides support and a committed leadership. regarding this dimension of leadership, the one where exists a strong deficit in our national context, there were analysed the empowerment strategies and steps that could unleash a sense of community, through formal and informal connections aiming the implementation of initial structures of community leadership and also to promote the changing of the traditional image of people with mental illness within the community in general. there were also identified some specific goals in this dimension (ob.2): to increase contact of people with mental illness with/in the community to provide information and training about the possibility of recovery from mental illness to the population in general / reduce the social stigma of mental illness to organise the representation of interests and priorities of people with mental illness locally and nationally currently, aeips`s leadership program, is on a full scale of implementation and of progressive goals achievement (ceam, 2006, 2007). nevertheless, aiming to systematise and demonstrate the effectiveness and impact of the program itself throughout these years of execution the group leaders, ought participate in an investigation plan whose guiding lines will be discussed and facilitated by the evaluation support team. however the impact evaluation should be analysed to the level of the empowerment processes (of different levels), sense of community and community participation. yet, we could present one of the bases of this preliminary work that refers to the leaders’ 723 building participative, empowering & diverse communities group vision of their expectations of the program’s results and impact. this joint reflection work was based in three main dimensions, the individual, the organisational and communitarian (aeips, 2006, breda& ornelas, 2006). regarding the individual dimension, the participants think that they achieved a more informed participation about the circumstances related to the illness itself and mainly a political vision of life in society. they also consider to having achieved a sense of personal fulfilment, valorisation and commitment and refer that they acquired more communication skills and widened their net of relationships. the group’s opinion about the impact of the leadership program on the organisation itself has to do mainly with the quality of the relationship between all users through the conveyance of information, shared responsibility and conflict resolution. the leaders group is also a way of user representation and advocacy in the organisation and in the community. in relation to the results identified in the community level, in this first stage, the program: i) allowed to share experiences with people of other organisations; ii) it was a way of people with mental illness being acknowledged in their citizenship by the community; iii) promoted awareness against discrimination of mental illness i want to close this presentation affirming that with this empowerment program we expect to support the aims and wishes of people with mental illness for a better quality of life and presence in community. references aeips (2001). empowerment e reabilitação das pessoas com doença mental: relatório final. lisboa. aeips (2005). relatório de avaliação de serviços. lisboa. aeips (2006). relatório de actividades. lisboa. breda, m. & ornelas, j. (2006). suporte entre pares em pessoas com experiência de doença mental: satisfação, reciprocidade, e liderança. relatório de monografia. ispa:lisboa. ceam (outubro 2006). jornal ajuda inter pares. aeips:lisboa ceam (outubro 2007). jornal ajuda inter pares. aeips:lisboa chamberlim, j. (1997). a working definition of empowerment, psychiatric rehabilitation journal, vol. 20, n.º 4. fawcett, s.b., paine-andrews, a., francisco, v.t., schultz, j.a., richter, k.p., harris, k.j., williams, e. l., berkley, j. y., lopez, c.m., fisher, j.l. (1996). empowering community health initiatives through evaluation. in fetterman, shakeh, wandersman (eds). empowerment evaluation: knowledge and tools for self assessment and accountability, (161-187). newbury park, ca: sage. jorge-monteiro, m. f. (2000). colaboração entre profissionais e grupos de ajuda mútua. actas do ii congresso europeu de psicologia comunitária, pp.177-180. langone, c. a. (1992). building community leadership. journal of extension, vol. 30 (4). maton, k. i. & salem, d. a. (1995). organizational characteristics of empowering community settings: a multiple case study approach. american journal of community psychology, vol 23(5), 631:656. 724 building participative, empowering & diverse communities maton, k. i. (2008). empowering community settings: agents of individual development, community betterment, and positive social change. american journal of community psychology, 41, 4:21. peterson, n. a. & zimmerman, m. (2004). beyond the individual: toward a nomological network of organizational empowerment. american journal of community psychology, vol. 34 (1/2), 129:297. ramsay, k; reed, b.; vandenberg, l. & climb partners (1998). community leadership: a guide for people who want to make a difference. michigan state university extension. rich, r.c., edelstein, m., hallman, w., wandersman, a. (1995). citizen participation and empowerment: the case of local hazards. american journal of community psychology, vol. 23 (5), pp. 657-675. rogers, s., chamberlim, j., ellison, m.l., crean, t. (1997). a consumerconstructed scale to measure empowerment among users of mental health services, psychiatric services, vol. 48 (8), pp. 1042-1047. rappaport, j. (1987). terms of empowerment/exemplars of prevention: toward a theory for community psychology. american journal of community psychology, 15, 121-148. zimmerman (1995). psychology empowerment: issues and illustrations. american journal of community psychology, vol. 23 (5), pp.581-599. zimmerman, (1998a). models of community change: a brief analysis. actas do ii congresso europeu de psicologia comunitária, pp. 9-16. zimmerman, m. (1998b). empowerment and community participation: a review for the next millenium. actas do ii congresso europeu de psicologia comunitária, pp. 17-42. zimmerman, m. (2000). empowerment theory: psychological, organizational and community levels of analysis. in j. rappaport & e. seidman (eds.), handbook of community psychology (pp. 43–63). new york: plenum. 725 building participative, empowering & diverse communities